Karl Jaspers (pronounced “Yaspers”) was born 23 February 1883 in Oldenburg to Carl William and Henriette Jaspers, a respected family within the community. Carl was a lawyer, the local sheriff for a time, and a bank director. Jaspers did well in secondary school, which he atttended from 1892–1901. At graduation he had been accepted to the University of Freiburg law school. About this time, Jaspers was diagnosed with heart problems. Doctors told Jaspers to avoid strenuous activity.  After studying law in Freiburg and Munich for three terms, Jaspers moved to Berlin and began to pursure a medical degree. Jaspers left Berlin for the University of Goettingen, where he studied from 1903 to 1906. Jaspers took the medical exams in 1908.After receiving his initial degree in 1908, Jaspers interned in the psychiatric ward at a hosptial in Heidelberg. In February 1909 he received his M.D. and psychiatric degrees in Heidelberg, Germany. Jaspers’ doctorate thesis was (loosely translated) “Homesickness and Crime.”  Jaspers married Gertrud Mayer, a Jewish woman, in 1910. His marriage and love for his wife would later influence Jaspers’ view of the Third Reich and the German people.

No one who has spent decades in shock, in suffering, in guilt feelings about the course of our time and his country, could ever quite understand how it all happened. The very ones who gave the most methodical thought to the situation and its hazards were taken by surprise.

Today I read in some reviews of my book Die geistige Situation der Zeit - first published in 1931- that I predicted the course of events in startling fashion. I must reply: not at all. I did describe the conditions and motivations of the time, the realities prevailing then and, even more so, today; but I did not predict events, and least of all the fate that overtook us Germans.

If I wrote at the time that fascism and bolshevism were not solutions, just easy ways to escape from the problems of freedom into simple obedience, I was still convinced that National Socialism would never triumph in Germany. Today I do not believe that any nation is proof against giving birth to the same evil, even though in other ways and in a different spirit.

All over the world I dread the self-deception which we have experienced - that this could not happen here. It can happen anywhere. It is improbable only where the broad masses of the population are aware of the possible menace and thus will not be lulled into security; where they know the type of totalitarianism and will recognize it in its rudimentary stages and in each of its manifestations - this Proteus who keeps appearing in ever new masks, who slips eel-like out of our grasp, who does the opposite of what he says, who distorts the meaning of words, who speaks not in order to communicate or tell the truth, but in order to numb, to distract, to hypnotize, to intimidate, to dupe - who will exploit and evoke every fear, and will promise security and utterly wreck it at the same time.

Totalitarianism is neither Communism nor fascism nor National Socialism, but it has appeared in all of these forms. It is the universal, terrible threat of the future of mankind in a mass order. It is a phenomenon of our age, detached from all the politics governed by principles of a historic national existence of constitutional legality. Wherever it comes to power, domestic politics gives way to intrigues and acts of force, and foreign policy, the conduct of relations with other states, is shrouded in a semblance of talk and negotiation, but without being tied to any rules of the game, to any community of human interests.

It is not easy to see through totalitarianism. It is like a machinery that starts itself while its very operators often fail to grasp what they are already putting into effect. It seems like an independent being. To speak in mythical terms, it seems like a soulless, daemonic something which seizes everybody - those who drift into it blindly as well as those who half-knowingly bring it about. Totalitarianism is like a specter which drinks the blood of the living and so achieves reality, while the victims go on existing as a mass of living corpses.

Let us glance briefly at the particular development of German totalitarianism. Despite the greatest volume of propaganda, National Socialism had not achieved a majority even in 1933. Among its voters were the discontented, who simply wanted a change and believed in the fantastic promises.

There were the unthinking, who did not know what they were voting for, the blind, who did not see what human types confronted them in the National Socialist leaders, and finally the hate-mongers of all kinds, hoping to destroy the objects of their hatred. At the time, in view of this situation, it was the consensus of foreign observers, too, that the German people as a whole were far too intelligent and too conscientious for a majority of them to choose madness and iniquity.

How, then, did it happen? Not by majority vote, hut by fraud -- a fraud undetected by the population. The goal was reached with constant stress on legality, on absolute adherence to the constitution; for even the National Socialist voters made their consent conditional on this legality.

In fact, however illegality set in as soon as the Communists were unconstitutionally expelled from the Reichstag. Above all, the seizure of power succeeded because one party, the German Nationalists, dreamed of being able to use National Socialism, which they held in contempt, as a means for their own power political ends while retaining control of it. The Reichstag, after the expulsion of the Communists, passed the so-called "enabling act" with the votes of all parties except the Social Democrats. This was tantamount to a repeal of the constitution by legal means, on the peak. of an emotional wave of delusion, impotence, fear, and intoxication. This majority decided to wreck the foundation of all future freedom of choice. Minds were put at rest by Hitler's oral promise to refrain from violating the constitution. That this one irreversible act constituted the suicide of political freedom was not understood.

What mattered was perhaps clearly realized only by the criminals themselves. Knowing what they wanted -- full, uncurbed power - and utterly lacking in scruple, they held the whip hand over all the rest. The rest did not know what they wanted; they debated instead, had misgivings, and evaded the basic issue until their own mindless position plunged them into disaster. The general popular feeling had obliged the criminals to proceed legally, albeit fraudulently. Once in power, however, they wanted the glamour of a revolution to justify the complete overthrow of existing conditions, the so called "renewal" that was to yield their new German man. Now they were interested also in legal proof that they had made a revolution. In the summer of 1933, therefore, a professor of law at a German university came to the explicit conclusion that the National Socialist revolution was marked as such by two unconstitutional acts: by the so-called "flag decree" (i. e., by the party flag's being declared as the Reich's flag, along with the old black, red, and golden one) and secondly, by the Communists' expulsion from the Reichstag. What ignorant feelings of agreement reigned in those months was demonstrated to me by the admiring remarks of otherwise decent, professionally competent, conscientious people, who looked on the Reichstag fire as a sign of the leaders' political skill in staging so grand a deception for the good of all Germany.

One might regard this course of events as an accident. Unforeseeable illegal acts of force combined with incomprehensible blindness had launched a train of events which could then be halted only by a global conflagration leading to the radical overthrow of this regime. The conflagration delivered the world from the menace, and it delivered us Germans at the same time. For events in all totalitarian regimes have taught us that an absolute dictatorship, once in the saddle, can no longer be unseated from within.

But was it only an accident? By no means. To make this accident possible, the German people had first to elect Hindenburg as their president by majority vote-a man with an aureole of wartime leadership, whose fidelity to army and country in bringing the soldiers home after the defeat satisfied it need to admire and to believe that was felt by far too many; a man who seemed to be the one authoritarian pillar in the midst of anarchy, yet whose old age and impolitical past as a general had left him without political judgment. The accident, moreover, presupposed all of the mental attitudes which in this situation meant sheer weakness, such as lack of feeling for the value of a constitution, and a readiness to be swept off one's feet by an emotional nationalism, especially in the form of mass intoxication. Besides, there was the fear of not being in on the establishment of a new state power, the inability to clarify the issue in one's own mind, and the tendency to fool oneself.

If we ask about the origin of these states of mind, we can experiment with further answers. There is the havoc wrought by the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century, whose consequences for the spirit of the population (subjects' fealty, servility) are often said never to have been reversed. There is the education of popular political consciousness in the Reich by the preeminence of the military. There is the fact that this preeminence was due, since Prussia became the Reich's center of gravity, to a geographical position ringed by open borders on all sides, and so forth. Least of all, it will be possible to see the cause in some unchangeable national character.

Historic causality can only be known in the particular. There is no end to the work of tracing causal connections, and no attainable insight into the necessity of events. "It was bound to come" is a phrase used by historians whom the influence of historical philosophy, of Hegelianism and Marxism, has led into in misconceptions of the meaning and the limitations of their science.

Yet our inability to achieve a total knowledge of historic necessity makes it so much more important to know the particulars. They are the means of orientation for the possibilities and probabilities we expect. The clearer they are, the more aware will every individual be of his freedom of choice in any situation. This freedom is irrevocable, although always limited in extent.

In political life, this insight means a self-evident fact which everyone knows but often forgets - that opinions are one of the bases of the formation of the popular will that is expressed at the ballot box. In this case, our conception of events essentially helps to determine the events themselves. There is no conception of events at large outside these events; it always consists in the fact that our very knowledge is here a factor in the things we know. For there is a radical difference between our human knowledge of natural events and of human events. Natural events occur without us. When we influence them technically, on the basis of our knowledge, the foreseeable outcome depends solely upon the accuracy of this knowledge. But the course of human events is changed in its very factors by the way in which we know them, or think we know them. Technical handling of human events is possible in so far as they are subject to cognition like natural events. Where this is not the case, our cognition affects the process itself.

Yet political and sociological knowledge is not arbitrary and accidental. It is not free from such criteria of truth as are brought to methodical consciousness in the sciences. It is our responsibility, therefore, to make true cognition prevail, to reduce the things we can really know to their simplest and most convincing forms, so that on election day, when masses cast their votes, as many as possible will at least be able to know what they want, and what they are doing.

If in our political life-which no human brain can grasp in its entirety-our views of it are factors in its course, every statement and, above all, every interpretation of facts helps to motivate the conduct of those who hear it.

Today the object of sociological knowledge which may be decisive for our fate is totalitarianism. George Orwell, in his fantastic and truthful utopian novel 1984, has described the potentialities of it reality we have already with us, in rudimentary form. Hannah Arendt, in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism has performed the most brilliant, striking, and many-sided of the analyses I know of (the points on which I would differ - her conception of the method of inquiry, and a few evaluations of the facts described - are trivial in comparison with the ones I agree on). Converted Communists also have given us the most valuable experiences from their past. I, for my part, can do no more than try to give brief pointers.

The soil in which totalitarianism thrives is the severance of all ties to substantial contents, and the resulting bewilderment of an existence that will blindly clutch at any support in nothingness, at any order in anarchy. Totalitarianism promotes this severance, in order then to offer itself as salvation. Still more curious is its use as a facade of the broken ties, which remain dear to so many hearts. To dupe them, totalitarianism promises all things to all men.

The severance of ties results all over the world from the transformations of existence by technology. Loyalty to people, to one's country, to the state, to religion, to oneself-each of them grows brittle. There are conflicts of loyalties, possible only because the overall tie to the historic ground of Being yields to the rational certitudes - today still valid - of a morality, a code, a denomination, a formula - or because such utterly undefined totalities as nation, race, or historic necessity are viewed as absolute. Let us take up some examples.

Loyalty to country is blurred while being noisily called for. Am I loyal to my country if I stay loyal to its political rulers when they turn criminal? Or is it loyal, rather, to want such regimes overthrown even by foreign powers, giving my country a chance to save its soul? All the totalitarians claim to stand for the fatherland; all abuse their opponents as unpatriotic traitors. Loyalty to country crumbles in this situation. Such loyalty can last only on the ground of an historically evolved constitution and in the moral substance of a communal life, an inviolate solidarity. But its foundation in such origins call only be maintained in a constant struggle against forces that would destroy it. We maintain it in the millions of small, everyday actions which serve to hold life together, and if these

have made us trustworthy, we maintain it in the great decisions of the moment. In Germany, for instance, such a moment came with the Saar plebiscite of January, 1935. Unlike the plebiscites held in the then area of the Reich, this was a free vote under the control of neutral powers. Without any personal risk to the individual, a small part of Germany could testify by proxy to the thinking of all Germany, and at the same time deal a mortal blow to National Socialism, whose criminal nature was visible to everyone since the murders of June, 1934. And yet, ninety-one per cent voted to "come home into the Reich." The reason given by the bulk - by then, after all, decidedly averse to National Socialism - was that under any circumstances, no matter which regime held sway there, Germany came first. In fact, this was testimony to a lack of any ties. It was a mere dodge to cite a loyalty that would equate the fatherland with its political regime even if this regime uproots the very basis of the ethics of the fatherland.

Another example: loyalty to the governing principle of a state, the freedom which the people have won for themselves, is blurred by an undermining of the letter and the spirit of the constitution which secures this freedom by legality. Such undermining occurs when the aristocratic features of every truly democratic constitution - the features without which democracy itself is lost and will some day be given up to tyranny - have ceased to be alive in the people's hearts. It also occurs if the safety of the individual, which the constitution was designed to protect, is jeopardized - if a stand on constitutional rights would expose him to personal danger or material disadvantage.

A third example: for every free man, the foundation of all other loyalties is his loyalty to himself, on no other ground than his loyalty to Transcendence. But this loyalty to himself is lost if the individual no longer comes to himself - if a mere accident of individuality, of self-will, of defiance, of a passing sensation, has given him the semblance of a self which in the moment of decision proves to be nothing.

There is a form of human chaos, an inner chaos amidst external order, which is not yet clear to the mind but will produce unhappy feelings of total discontent. There, totalitarianism appears as a saviour.

It does not want men who are themselves; it dreads them. It does not call for ties but for total obedience. Instead of humanity, it grants the pleasure of functioning. It affords satisfaction in empty ephemerality. It offers the seemingly absolute firmness of an irresistible power, believed to be shared by everyone who bows to it. It realizes and demands a new existence of man in his entirety. It introduces a new concept of truth - the party line - and a blind faith in the absolute right of the whole, and in its leaders of the day. It introduces a new language. To the sophistical use of paralogisms, Communism adds the sophistical use of turnabout dialectics. It justifies whatever happens to be wanted and commanded at the time, turning black into white, and A into Z. Its arguments are pure make-believe; in fact there is no discussion. Magnificent general principles are proclaimed; if they do not fit the concrete case, there is silence. Attention is distracted as artfully as by a prestidigitator. Totalitarians do not answer, cannot be pinned down, talk of other things instead of answering, They resort to every gesture, whether of sobriety or of pathos. Their tone of voice suggests that whoever does not think and see eye to eye with them must be stupid or vicious.

Totalitarianism is not wedded to any view. It makes use of them all. It fools all men and melts them into its power structure. The thing which all around the world today works like the mythical gaze of the serpent, petrifying so as to devour the petrified, is not Communism; it is the totalitarianism in it, which has taken possession of Communism. It utilizes every demand of the outraged, the discontented, the starving, the slothful, the hatemongers. It allies itself with the uprising of the colored races against the whites, with nationalism against foreigners, with antediluvian reactionary conservatism (from the aborigines to the types of a petty bourgeoisie) and with every mob, with every hopelessness of the oppressed, even with the hatred of modern technology. Confounding the Marxist prediction, it has spread less and less, if at all, among the masses of skilled labor in the free world, neither in America nor in Germany and England; but in the technologically undeveloped areas where it has come to power, it builds up technological production by force, turning men into slave armies. Any rootless humanity that is no longer-or not yet-aware of itself and its freedom, any that blindly clings to outworn forms of life, will become materiel for this machine, in which all lose whatever they had hoped to save or gain. The facades of forces which have ceased to be constructive can still be put to use for destructive ends. This is why the only common feature of the totalitarianisms, aside from the form of their machinery, is their enemy: freedom itself -meaning truth, the universities as places of free research, the new breakthroughs in art and letters, whatever is experimental in the free nature of man, whatever matures in the competition of the spirit, whatever refuses to be led by anyone.

Fear is a totalitarian principle. First comes the fear of possible trouble, then the fear of threats, of violence, and eventually of death. A free democracy simply does not know this fear; where it shows up, freedom is already tainted. Individual views and states of mind, competition, the legal pursuit of advantage - in freedom these are not only safeguarded but exist as a matter of course. I am free to say what I think. It is fundamental in a state of freedom that every opinion is tolerated, that its expression is limited only by the penal laws of libel, slander, and such. And when rudimentary totalitarian methods appear in a world that is still free, it is typical that men need fear no evil if they join a totalitarian movement, but do have to fear the consequences of free speech, of positions and associations displeasing to that movement. Hence the ability of such movements to attract so many fellow travelers, so many obedient hangers-on, so many cautious forestallers. They are not moved by a faith, nor by convictions, but by the fears of men who do not believe in anything.

In the period of the fight for power this fear affects only the masses, not the fighters - for the only risk taken by the fighters is that of failing in efforts they can resume at any time, as long as they find financial backers. But after the seizure of power, fear strikes the fighters themselves. Now the vicious circle of tyranny is complete - all are afraid, and all do more than would be necessary for their own protection. The tyrants go farther in terrorism, the subjects in saying and doing what they think is wanted. In the Germany of 1933, the National Socialists marveled at the lengths to which people would go to accommodate and anticipate them.

Fear becomes a tout for totalitarianism. It is fostered by the method of suspicion. In a totalitarian state, any accusation or complaint is almost the same as a conviction, for the objects of prosecution are not legally well-defined acts but states of mind. As once upon a time in witchcraft trials, any remark, any line of conduct as well as its opposite, will be interpreted so as to confirm the suspicion.

In the end, everybody suspects everybody. A totalitarian triumph alters the physiognomy of an entire population. There is no natural cheerfulness any more, only the blank, vacuous expression that seems like a silence of humanity.

In the free world, caution is exercised toward one side only - toward the possible or nascent totalitarianism irrespective of kind. The closer the fear, the more thorough the silence. I saw an example in Germany, in 1950, when I gave some guest lectures with subsequent discussion. Among my topics were Marxism and psychoanalysis. Having asked for questions to be used in the discussion period, I received more than twenty dealing with psychoanalysis, but not one about Marxism. "Is Marxism really so dead here,", I asked a friend, "that people are no longer interested?" The answer: "Of course not. Those who might say something against Marxism think of the risks they would run if the Russians were to march in; the others, who find a positive side to Marxism, are afraid of trouble with the American occupation, like being forbidden to enter the U. S., or worse."

There is an enormous difference between totalitarianism in power and the mere onslaught of totalitarian trends and methods on a state of political freedom. Once the ground is prepared, totalitarian rule comes each time in different fashion - now overnight, now step by step, by detours, outmaneuvering all the defensive forces. The power of total command may make a sudden appearance. By formally legal means, a man supported by cheering and fearful masses may push through decrees which result in the abrogation of the laws, or he may get control of the police of a state and transform it at breakneck speed into an all-pervasive power. (This is why any centralized police force, as distinguished from limited local forces, is so dangerous.) Such decrees and transfers of power can occur at moments of seemingly great need, when men fear for their safety and will suddenly give up their rights, with all concerned persuading each other that this is necessary for the country's welfare, or the nation's, or the world's. Once done, it is irrevocable. Then, in view of the horrors, it is idle comfort to call them transitional steps to the peace and security of a flourishing future, or incidental drawbacks in the course of building that future: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

At this point nothing helps any more. The break is total. A power transforming all existence, penetrating each home, leaving nothing untouched, separates life under the totalitarian dictatorships from life in political freedom.

Life in freedom, however, can imperceptibly foster the growth of attitudes which will some day assist in that totalitarian take-over. Freedom's battle against totalitarianism is twofold: internationally it must be protected from the totalitarian designs for conquest by a firm stand, and by arming against force; domestically, the free must apprehend the

danger in their own totalitarian trends and constantly perform a true purification, by means of freedom itself. Here we are speaking only of the second kind of battle.

It is a memorable phenomenon and has deluded many for a long time that although the fight between National Socialists and Communists was waged with murderous ferocity, they were in fact working together as if they were allies. They never were - but both of them saw their joint mortal enemy in the free world.

The masses of the population felt threatened by the state of affairs and more and more insecure; among those, the Communists and National Socialists mutually spread fear of each other. The fear of Communism was a prime motive for business leaders, the middle class, and the officer caste to sympathize with National Socialism, to join it, or at least to use it as a tool. The fear of National Socialism as the capstone of capitalistic exploitation drove the rest into the arms of Communism. The difference in the philosophical facades and material interests sufficed to delude almost everyone about the identity of that structure of totalitarian thought and action which knows no enemy but political and personal freedom. Today we can no longer doubt that in bolshevism, fascism, and National Socialism the totalitarian element holds exclusive sway. Today we know how much Hitler learned from bolshevism and from Stalin. The question remains whether there can be a communism that would not go totalitarian; perhaps, or probably rather, it

could not exist without such consequences. Wherever it shows itself, totalitarianism must be recognized in essence as the one maximal threat, which would obliterate our spiritual life and our moral substance along with our political existence. What matters first of all is not Communism or any other alleged way to salvation; the crux is totalitarianism, and those divers views matter only in so far as they materialize in totalitarian forms.

But one may think that at the outset, when the new views of the world inspired enthusiasm, there was no totalitarianism at all - that there seems to be a break between the policies of Marx and Lenin, on the one hand, and the ones of Stalin on the other; between National Socialism as a confused philosophy, which charmed and enthralled German youth, and National Socialism since the murders of June, 1934. It is only this break, one may feel, that marks the definitive establishment of the totalitarianism which then turned everything, even its own National Socialist views as presented earlier, into mere tools of power as such - a power in whose circle fear reigned so supreme that both the followers and the leader himself were ground into functions by the weight of terror. Yet the break, in retrospect, is more apparent than real. It merely completed the materialization of things foreshadowed at the birth of the movements. From the start, both Marx and Hitler were dominated by the motives of force, motives which in the nature of things will finally grow by themselves and subjugate everything. (This juxtaposition of Marx, a man of genius and a great discoverer, and the undefinable something called Hitler is inappropriate, of course, and permissible only from this one point of view.)

Today we can have an insight that was far from us in the twenties. Max Weber alone may have had a dark notion of it. In 1919, asked what to do if Communism under Liebknecht should come to power in Germany he said, "Then I am no longer interested." What this great patriot and political thinker meant to say was that such an event would be the end of politics; what happened thereafter would be nothing but terrorism, and whether one survived or perished then, a truly human man esteemed some things above the nation and the state. Later, in the Germany of the twenties, others may have had an inkling of the enormity of this possible end - but not the many for whom a nationalist political historian spoke in January, 1933, before Hitler's seizure of power. "Let the Nazis show what they can do," he could say, for all his contemptuous antipathy, in the confusion of ever-repeated elections.

In the world of today it is clearer - though still not clear enough by far - what totalitarianism is, and that wherever, in whichever form, it appears, it is like the virus of a pernicious disease that grows wild and consumes anyone who contracts it. It cannot be worked with, cannot be used as a tool, cannot be kept in bounds. I must expel this poison, or else, if I join with it to get the advantage of other opponents, I must miserably succumb to it in the long run. This virus overpowers its first carriers as well as its subsequent allies.

How then is the fight to be waged? At the time when this demonic machine appears without ruling as yet, it must be made visible to all men. It enters in the guise of a martyr for better truth. It abuses all the means of the free world, distorting them in order to destroy that world. ("I have beaten them with their own madness," said the triumphant Hitler.) To render it harmless, like an epidemic that is recognized and confined from the outset, the population will have to comprehend totalitarianism in its rudiments. But let us not deceive ourselves; even the statesmen of the world are still far from perceiving the situation at every moment. There may be repetitions of the folly which Hugenberg and his German Nationalists began when they allied themselves with Hitler, and which Hindenburg continued. The Hitler they despised outplayed them all - by the utter unscrupulousness of the totalitarian, which is far superior to mere clever duplicity; by the truly animal cunning of his unfailing instinct for power; then by the gift of shifting his talk and his arguments at will, depending oil the audience and the situation; finally by his sudden, unexpected acts of force. Step by step, carried by hysterically intoxicated masses, he maneuvered his allies, who thought they were controlling him, into less and less favorable power positions, until the survivors had to be grateful for whatever kind of function he deigned to let them perform.

The mass of hangers-on, on whichever side they may travel, think they are following a great philosophy. Possessed by the fear for order and security, they even think they find them. They are deceived - not because there is a deceiver, but because this game turns all participants into deceivers. The masses have long been entangled in fictions when the first camouflaged act of force brings totalitarianism, not some philosophy, to the power which will soon melt everything down.

Clarity about the nature of totalitarianism is our best weapon, if we succeed in spreading it among the population. Indignation, violence, abuse are not good weapons. Totalitarianism vanishes in the pure air of clear vision. But this sort of vision must be shown. The more it is practiced brightly, kindly, relaxedly, the richer its forms of expression, the simpler its special elucidations, the clearer its recital of facts, the more effective it will be. For even one infected with totalitarianism remains a human being and may listen. If we show the totalitarian type in all its consistency, we should still do it so as to regard no individual as utterly lost to it. The type shows to everyone, rather, where at some time he himself had some slight tendencies to totalitarian violence. For six years I have been watching this method of elucidation in Switzerland, and I have marveled to see how exposure, patient repetition, and the disclosure of facts - without any acts of force, without special legislation, without inquisitions, without dismissals from jobs -caused the disappearance of all but an infinitesimal remnant of Communist voters.

The work of throwing light on every form of totalitarianism is hard. It is a fight with weapons of the mind. The simplest, most convincing views of this self-shrouding reality have to be put into words. But in many people something works against such elucidation -- fear, or all urge to excesses, or a delight in enormity. Unmasking the methods of the totalitarians may seem a hopeless endeavor if one hears how cynically frank they themselves are in stating them. They will actually call them indispensable for winning the masses. Everyone hears it; no one will include himself. All share in the victor's triumph, and in his superior ruthlessness.

It is quite another matter to fight directly, not with weapons of the mind, against Communist threats from without - by arming to a strength that can resist force - and internally against espionage and the subversive activities of the Fifth Column. With a speed that is sometimes uncanny, this necessary fight against all of the enemy's tangible powers has led anti-Communists to adopt totalitarian methods. We have seen how this happens in the creation of fear and mutual distrust, in inquisitorial and denunciatory procedures. Yet these are only a start. It is as though the battle against Communism had the devil in it; in the course of this fight, the fighter himself seems to be turning into the type of the adversary. If I combat totalitarianism with totalitarian means, I unwittingly transform my own cause. In fighting the dragon I become a dragon myself. Thus my very victory would mean the loss of the battle, for I myself would have set up the dragon's rule.

We must never forget the meaning of this great struggle against Communism. We are fighting totalitarianism in behalf of freedom. The enemy is neither Communism in itself nor Russia in herself, although today both are embodiments of totalitarianism and, as such, absolute enemies. The fight is a struggle for freedom within the free countries. It would become senseless if we were to lose at home what we are trying to defend from outside attack. The inner struggle for the self-preservation of freedom and its possibilities may well be called a fight for cultural freedom. More and more distinctly it comes to be a showdown with ourselves. We may hope that it will be waged with clear vision and acute intelligence in the concrete situations. It is in this task that our forces meet or split or grow confused on the plain basic issue of our spiritual fate, and of its consequences in political reality.