Knowledge And Decisions

The United States of America is a central battleground for both kinds of dangers to freedom, domestic and international. Militarily, the whole Western world is dependent on American nuclear power. Politically, the power-centralizing forces have advanced much further toward their goals in other Western countries than in America, where a variety of autonomous forces are still able to oppose these trends. Intellectuals have never been as cohesive in the United States as in smaller, more socially homogeneous countries,²⁴² and the public has never been as thoroughly awed by them. One symptom of this is the utter failure of socialist movements to take root in the United States, while they are strong in Western Europe. Socialist movements (and communist movements) have — in every period of history and around the world — been the creation of middle class intellectuals, though the ceaseless reiteration of the “working class” theme in socialist rhetoric may verbally obscure this plain fact. Where socialist intellectuals have allied themselves politically with labor unions — as in the British Labor Party, for example — it is the intellectuals who lead the alliance to the left, with varying degrees of resistance or acquiescence by the working class segment of the alliance. The very same pattern has been attempted at various times in American history, but American workers have historically been far less deferential to their “betters” — whether employers or intellectuals — than European workers. The intellectuals have been more successfully rebuffed here.

Certainly if the trend toward centralization of power — and the corresponding erosion of freedom — can be stopped anywhere, it can be stopped in America. But in a nuclear age, even the momentous question of human freedom must be considered in the light of military realities.

THE MILITARY “BALANCE”

For a brief period at the end of World War II, the United States stood in a military power position perhaps unparalleled in human history. The Roman Empire at its height was not as unchallengeable. In addition to its monopoly of the greatest military weapon in history, the United States alone of the industrial nations had its entire productive capacity intact, unscathed by war, and producing more than all the rest of the world put together.²⁴³ Its people were united behind the government as seldom before or since. In sheer power terms, the United States could have imposed an American empire or at least a modern version of the Pax Britannica that kept Europe and most of the world free of major wars for generations. The point here is not to argue that either of these things should have been done. The point is to show the situation, the possibilities, and to compare these with what in fact happened.

What actually happened was that three-quarters of the total American military force demobilized in one year — 9 million men and women from 1945 to 1946, and the remaining 3 million military personnel were reduced by half again by 1947.²⁴⁴ By 1948 the American military force was smaller than it had been at the time of Pearl Harbor. Nations from which the American army drove the Nazis were forthwith restored to their own sovereignty. The American occupation army that entered Japan in 1945 was ordered to neither take nor even buy food from the Japanese, as that would reduce food badly needed by the Japanese civilian population. For what may have been the first time in history, a conquering army was put on short rations until food arrived from their homeland, so that a conquered people would not be deprived. The humane treatment of conquered enemy nations made Germany and Japan two of the most pro-American nations in the world, both politically and culturally. These actions are noteworthy in themselves, remarkable against the historical background of other conquering nations, incongruous with the image of a “sick” society, and in particular contrast with the record of the Soviet Union.