Planning and Terror

THE REDEMPTION OF DEMOCRACY--Hermann Rauschning--Alliance ($3).

A deserter from the Nazis is Hermann Rauschning, former East Prussian officer and Junker, former President of the Danzig Senate, former member of Hitler's inner circle. He described the proletarian nature of the Nazi revolution in The Revolution of Nihilism, later revealed Hitler's sinister secret conversations with his inner circle in The Voice of Destruction.

This week Author Rauschning published his third book. The Redemption of Democracy is a groping, fumbling, badly organized, passionately sincere effort to explain what many people say glibly, few understand--that World War II is a social revolution.

The revolution of nihilism, which Rauschning previously treated as a German manifestation, he now calls the last tremor of the 500-year-long revolt of the masses. Formerly the ancien regime, the old order, kept the masses in check. But skeptical humanism has sapped the faith of the masses in the old order while it sapped the faith of the old order in itself. Hitler, himself a man of the masses, had the political genius to perceive that the revolution is everywhere because the masses are everywhere. He did not make the revolution, he used it.

Can the revolution be stopped? Author Rauschning does not know. Perhaps Britain and the U. S. can stop it. England, especially, is a country in which the tradition of human freedom has developed consistently for centuries, free of that doctrinaire theory of the omnipotent state which in the French Revolution bequeathed Europe two of its most pernicious ideas--national planning and the terror. Hence the U. S. and England, thinks Rauschning, may be able to assimilate the essential parts of the revolution without a total surrender of liberties. But he warns that if England and the U. S. try to fight the revolution with revolutionary methods, they will soon find themselves fascist dictatorships. Says he: "Managed currency and concentration camps differ only in degree." A planned economy always includes the secret police who will enforce it.

Sometimes Rauschning's voice sounds like that of a prophet, sometimes like that of a clever Junker. He has little use for forces which most people are used to calling progressive. In a brilliant chapter, The Unseen Revolution, he lights up a paradox: "The true forces of reaction are not to be found . . . in the cliques of a privileged class. . . ." Far more reactionary are the doctrinaires who, in the name of economic security for the masses, have promoted "the idea of rational planning, which has come from the world of technology, where it belongs, to intrude on political and social life." That, says Rauschning, can turn even a genuine democracy to national socialism.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.