BY N. D. VARADACHARIAR

Although the Great War was fought for the stated purpose of making the world ‘fit and safe for democracy,’ we find that democracy has been discredited and abandoned nearly all over Europe. Even in the United States of America, the President has been arming himself with dictatorial powers, and spirited protests are being made against this importation of fascist principles. Except in a few states of Europe, all of which remained neutral during the last War, the principles of liberty and toleration are almost universally disregarded, and brute power, in its most naked and violent forms fills the picture.

Dictatorship may be defined as the selfish exercise of unresponsible political authority by a single person or a group of persons over a state. It is rule by a person or persons as opposed to the rule of law. The sanction upon which the dictator relies is his own might, while constitutional government is based on the active acquiescence of the general body of citizenry. The dictator may have popular support, but that is not what he depends on primarily as the source of his authority in the state. The withdrawal of that support would not have the result of dethroning the dictator, because he is where he is owing to far other reserves of strength.

This phenomenon is not new to politics; Aristotle knew of it, and dissected it with rare acumen. His conclusions are as sound today as when he lived. The type is true to his analysis, which shows what little fundamental progress the psychology of the Genus Homo has made during all these centuries.

History shows that a state cannot be sustained by selfish rule for all time. It is bound to collapse by its own excesses and enormities ; the fever heat at which it works may daze its victims for the time, but when the people see its real nature, they kill it. Its dissolution is almost always inglorious, drawing no sympathy, not a tear. It is a passing phase of politics. There is little purpose in resisting dictatorships, because resistance is what they thrive upon. The wisest course is to let them have their run of power. Their authority will wear away when their impossible promises, utopian programs, remain unfulfilled owing to their very nature, and excitement subsides in the state.

But what is really profitable is to study this malady of nations. Why do people, fully aware of the blessings of ordered liberty, permit dictators to overwhelm them?

The reasons are partly psychological and partly in the nature of the problems with which states are confronted at present, problems which call for swift action under a unitary leadership. Many of these problems are indeed incapable of speedy solution, and democracy bore the blame for not solving them. The conflicting counsels of parties, the vacillation of houses of representatives, the wobbling of responsible executives left vast and urgent questions of reconstruction much where they were, and the impatient people turned to the dictator who promised swift relief, unhindered by the slow methods and processes of democratic consultation.

The psychological factor is even more important. After four years of strenuous war, the camp habit overtook peoples. They became accustomed to obedience, the abject and unquestioning obedience of the fighting line. They lost the faculty of private judgment. The result was that when the war did end, the mentality generated by the war persisted, and in this mentality, democracy found its mighty conquering foe.

Dictatorship is thus the natural result of War. Regimentation became inevitable even in the civilian organisation of life to meet the pressure of war. The economic problems which the war gave rise to, stupendous and unprecedented problems, provided the soil for the growth of dictatorships. The delicate and beautiful plant of popular liberty was crushed in consequence.

It remains to be seen whether dictatorships have justified themselves. A certain spectacular success they have achieved, but at terrific cost to popular morale and the peace and quiet of the individual. Whether it is the class dictatorship of Russia or the personal dictatorships of Italy, Germany, Jugoslavia and Poland, they have all equally suppressed the individual, and have set up a terrorism which has destroyed public spirit and healthy public criticism.

The liberal use of police methods, of clever persistent and intimate spying, of ruthless and speedy punishment of all opposition to the ruling power, however righteous, justifiable and bona fide, characterise all these dictatorships. The dictator has to live on excitement, by creating problems which appeal to the imagination, the passions and the prejudices of the people. He stirs up all that is selfish and cruel in the basest elements of society, and from this intoxicating ferment he draws his evanascent nourishment. He is interested in creating more and more danger to the state, for it is his claim that he saves the state from dangers; and no danger, no dictator.

He encourages reactionary elements and an illiberal outlook. In domestic policy, he is the champion of puritanism; in foreign affairs he develops an exaggerated sense of insular nationalism and prestige. In course of time he begins to believe in his own infallibility and righteousness. Like Mussolini, he is God's appointed savior of nations and civilisations.

Aware of all its imperfections, some of the great thinkers of the world still commend dictatorships. George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said: "The real duty of this generation is to study the Russian and Italian constitutions carefully, because to some such type of state we shall have to come in this country if we are not going to smash. We have no government now. It can do nothing. It is the same in the United States." What Shaw wants to point out is that weak government is unsuitable to the modern state which has so many more things to do than the state of old. Dictatorships show only apparent strength, for in the words of Count Carlo Sforza, "Strange that all dictators always mistake an excess of violence for strength. Real strength is quiet, it is never noisy; but dictators–even when they are rich with a beautiful past like Pilsudski–always end in a childish exaggeration of police systems, of coercion even in the moral and intellectual fields." It is not true that democracies are incapable of providing strong governments; if it is assumed that only violence is the foundation upon which the edifice of the state can stand, then democracy is no good, and democratic government must fail. But mankind has developed a moral life. The sanction of a state inhabited by a people possessing a live moral sense is not force; it is an appreciation of the need for co-operative endeavour in pursuit of common ideals. Scrupulous respect for the other fellow is the basic condition of its success. In so far as the thinkers of the world deny the possibility of running a state on these principles, they show how much there is to be done to raise mankind to a more human level.

Nextly, there is a tendency to confuse dictatorships with the government of one man. Pericles was a dictator in his way, but the difference between Pericles and Mussolini is fundamental. The moral ascendency of a man of acknowledged goodness and greatness may give him actual political authority; the motive of those who obey him is not fear but love, respect and consent. Mustapha Kemal appears to be the nearest to that ideal in the present world. His is an involuntary dictatorship, "aiming at making autocrats and dictators impossible in the self-government of a renovated free nation." It is unselfish rule, and as such it is not one of those perverted forms of government described by Aristotle.

Shaw's cry for fascism, for sovietism, is only his way of drawing attention to the need for courageous and active leadership, for a Karma Yogin. He cannot have commended the violeut ruthless and cruel men who glory in the abject surrender or the merciless destruction of those who honestly differ from them, who have no great human ideals to live for and whose main endeavour is to hold the whip over everybody else.

The psychology of dictators has been well studied by Count Carlo Sforza,¹ a true champion of liberty and one of the sanest men in all Europe. His vast experience of politics, as a party leader, as a cabinet minister and as a diplomat of world-wide service, and his acute intellect informed by a careful study of history, give to his mature views quite peculiar authority. Men like Count Sforza, who have combated the disease of dictatorship with courage and at grave risk to their lives, show the kind of heroism which the cause of freedom can breed. It is to the likes of him that the world will ultimately turn for light.