International Relations; In the Age of the Conflict between democracy and dictatorship / by Robert Strausz-Hupe and Stefan T. Possony
- New York McGraw-Hill Book 1950
- 947p.
Democracy departed from the scene heavily armed with candles and sandwiches. The heralded stories burst to pieces, the cheap decorations were pulled down, the bombastic moral strength proved itself foolish weakness.
Finis! With these ironical words, Leon Trotsky, one of the foremost leaders of world Communism, explained the ease of the Bolshevik victory and wrote a contemptuous epitaph on the tombstone of Russian democracy.
The spread of dictatorship in no more than thirty years from a small area of a few square miles to almost two-fifths of the globe and to a dominant po sition on the Eurasian continent; its rise from an obscure heresy to a state religion commanding the observance of half a billion freeborn people; and the transformation of the apostles of this new despotism from inmates of police prisons into organizers of the most powerful and most oppressive police state the modern world has ever known are proof that the business of democ racy has not been conducted with wisdom, circumspection, and diligence.
For more than thirty years the initiative in world affairs has not been in the hands of free, representative, and progressive governments. Nor have the free peoples aroused themselves to the creative effort of adjusting the worn machinery of democracy to the exacting conditions of the air and atomic age. The will to freedom languished amidst the playthings of material self indulgence. The defense of the cause of humanity was mounted along the line of least resistance. Complacency and defeatism assailed whatever will ingness there lingered to make sacrifices for the highest political ideals of mankind.