Birthday

Ten years ago last week Hitler went to war against Poland. Four years ago Douglas MacArthur, with a cigarette holder in his mouth, stepped down from an airplane toward the tall grass waving in the south wind at Atsugi airfield, Japan. That was a time of hope.

MacArthur last week proclaimed anew Japan's conversion to democracy. Whenever talk of East Asia congealed with gloom, someone said: "Japan is the hope." And whoever looked at the possibilities of protecting Western Europe said: "The Germans will defend us." Winston Churchill, who used to call the Germans "the dull brute mass," more recently referred to them as "a mighty race without whose effective aid the glory of Europe could not be revived."

"Ironic" was the cheap and easy word for his and the Western world's change of attitude. Ten years after, four years after, was there a better word for the twist that had made the two great enemies of freedom the bulwarks against freedom's newly recognized enemy? Was the word redemption? Had the suffering of the vanquished expiated their guilt?

To those who doubted the regeneration of the Japanese and the Germans, there remained a hope that the Western world had been partly cleansed by World War II. It had clearly brought a recognition of evil back into a world that had been bemused for a hundred years with the idea of automatic, illimitable progress (i.e., heaven by osmosis). The world of 1949 was not one to call forth admiration; but it was no longer a smug world. It had not solved its problems, but it had begun to face them.

Man, it appeared, could go down as well as up. He could go all the way down to Buchenwald, and beyond that to the place where he could say he did not know whether he or another was guilty of Buchenwald. Without World War II's dreadful lesson of evil, Western man would not have been able to recognize Communism's evil, even cloudily.

Ten years after, four years after, the free world could hardly be said to have a new path, a new way of its own. But paths, they say in New England, are made by going around rocks. The Western world had found what it wanted to avoid. In the warlike peace, it had discovered a little of a new pride in its old standards. It had almost learned new humility in which the Germans and the Japanese, for all the evil they had done, might become comrades in the struggle against evil.

There was no safety in this idea. There was, in fact, no safety.

As simple a proposition as that had been all that World War II had argued. Ten years after, the lesson seemed worth the price.

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