" If the totalitarian Powers win,
there will indeed be a new world-order,—it may be in the end, a unification;
but it will be a new order of naked brute Force, repression and
exploitation, and for the people of Asia and Africa a subjection
worse than anything they had experienced before…
You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against
others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has
to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth
that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and
falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind
in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that
have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance.
It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in
which men have freedom and room to think and act according
to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there
will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth
and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions
which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign
of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation
for most of the human race such as people in this country do
not dream of and cannot yet at all realise.
If the other side that has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have
been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to
grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth
for which we stand to establish itself on the earth. Those who
fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the
threatened reign of the Asura.
The victory of the other side (The Asura/Satanic Forces) would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a
race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.
That is the whole question and all other considerations are either
irrelevant or of a minor importance. Let us stick to the real, the central fact, the need to remove the peril of black servitude and revived barbarism threatening
India and the world, and leave for a later time all side-issues and
minor issues or hypothetical problems that would cloud the one
all-important tragic issue before us.
Sri Aurobindo’s decision to give his moral support to the struggle
against Hitler, which was made at the very beginning of the war,
was based like all his actions on his inner view of things and on
intimations from within. It was founded on his consciousness
of the forces at work, of their significance in the Divine’s leading
of the world, of the necessary outer conditions for the spiritual
development in which he sees the real hope of humanity.
It would not serve any purpose to speak here of this view of
things: but some outer considerations of a most material kind
easily understandable by everyone can be put forward which
might help to explain his action to the general mind, although
they do not give the whole meaning of it; it is only these that are
developed here.
The struggle that is going on is not fundamentally a conflict
between two imperialisms—German and English,—one
attacking, the other defending itself. That is only an outward
aspect, and not the whole even of the outward aspect. For the
Germans and Italians believe that they are establishing a new
civilisation and a new world-order. The English believe that they
are defending not only their empire but their very existence as
a free nation and the freedom also of other nations conquered
by Germany or threatened by the push to empire of the Axis
powers; they have made it a condition for making peace that the
nations conquered shall be liberated and the others guaranteed
against farther aggression. They believe also that they are standing
up for the principles of civilisation which a Nazi victory
would destroy. These beliefs have to be taken into consideration
in assessing the significance of the struggle.
It is in fact a clash between two world-forces which are
contending for the control of the whole future of humanity.
One force seeks to destroy the past civilisation and substitute a new
one; but this new civilisation is in substance a reversion to the
old principles of dominant Force and a rigid external order and
denies the established values, social, political, ethical, spiritual,
altogether. Among these values are those which were hitherto
held to be the most precious, the liberty of the individual, the
right to national liberty, freedom of thought; even religious liberty
is to be crushed and replaced by the subjection of religion to
State control. The new ethics contemn and reject all the principles
that can be summed up in the word “humanitarianism”; all
that is to it a falsehood and a weakness. The only ethical values
admitted are those of dominant Force on the one side and, on
the other, of blind obedience and submission, self-effacement
and labour in the service of the State.
Wherever this new idea conquers or can make its power felt, it is this order of things that it seeks to establish; it is not satisfied with setting itself up
in one country or another, it is pushing for world conquest, for
the enforcement of the new order everywhere, securing it,—this
at least Germany, its principal agent, conceives to be the right
method and carries it out with a scientific thoroughness by a
ruthless repression of all opposition and a single iron rule.
The other Force is that of the evolutionary tendencies which
have been directing the course of humanity for some time past
and, till recently, seemed destined to shape its future. Its workings
had their good and bad sides, but among the greater values
it had developed stood the very things against which the new
Force is most aggressive, the liberty of the individual, national
liberty, freedom of thought, political and social freedom with
an increasing bent towards equality, complete religious liberty,
the humanitarian principle with all its consequences and, latterly,
a seeking after a more complete social order, which will
organise the life of the community, but will respect the liberty
of the individual while perfecting his means of life and helping
in every way possible his development. This evolutionary
world-force has not been perfect in its action, its working is still
partial and incomplete: it contains many strong survivals from
the past which have to disappear; it has, on the other hand, lo
or diminished some spiritual elements of a past human culture
which ought to recover or survive. There are still many denials
of national freedom and of the other principles which are yet
admitted as the ideal to be put in practice. In the working of
that force as represented by Britain and other democracies there
may not be anywhere full individual freedom or full national
liberty. But the movement has been more and more towards
a greater development of these things and, if this evolutionary
force still remains dominant, their complete development is
inevitable.
Neither of these forces are altogether what we need for
the future. There are ideas and elements in the first which may
have their separate value in a total human movement; but on
the whole, in system and in practice, its gospel is a worship of
Force and its effect is the rule of a brutal and pitiless violence,
the repression of the individual, not only a fierce repression
but a savage extinction of all that opposes or differs from it,
the suppression of all freedom of thought, an interference with
religious belief and freedom of spiritual life and, in an extreme
tendency, the deliberate will to “liquidate” all forms of religion
and spirituality.
On the side of the other more progressive force
there are, often, a limited view, grievous defects of practice, an
undue clinging to the past, a frequent violation of the ideal;
but at the same time the necessary elements and many of the
necessary conditions of progress are there, a tendency towards
an enlargement of the human mind and spirit, towards an increasing
idealism in the relation of men with men and of nation
with nation and a tolerant and humane mentality.
Both are, at present, or have been largely materialistic in their thought, but
the difference is between a materialism that suppresses the spirit
and a materialism that tolerates it and leaves room for its growth
if it can affirm its strength to survive and conquer.
At present the balance in the development of human thought
and action has been turning for some time against the larger
evolutionary force and in favour of a revolutionary reaction
against it. This reaction is now represented by totalitarian governments
and societies, the other tendency by the democracies;
but democracy is on the wane everywhere in Europe, the totalitarian
idea was gaining ground on all sides even before the war.
Now with Hitler as its chief representative, this Force has thrown
itself out for world-domination. Everywhere the results are the
same, the disappearance of individual and national liberty, a
rigid “New Order”, the total suppression of free thought and
speech, a systematic cruelty and intolerance, the persecution
of all opposition, and, wherever the Nazi idea spreads, a violent
racialism denying the human idea; outside Europe what is
promised is the degradation of the coloured peoples to helotry
as an inferior, even a subhuman race.
Hitler, carrying with him everywhere the new idea and the new order,
is now master of almost all Europe minus Great Britain and Russia.
The independence of the peoples of theMiddle East and Central
Asia would disappear as the independence of so many European
nations has disappeared and a deadly and imminent peril would
stand at the gates of India.
All Europe, Africa and Asia would be doomed to domination by
three or four Powers all anti-democratic and all pushing for expansion,
powers with regimes and theories of life which take no
account of liberty of any kind; the surviving democracies would
perish, nor would any free government with free institutions be
any longer possible anywhere.
It is not likely that India poor
and ill-armed would be able to resist forces which had brought
down the great nations of Europe; her chance of gaining the
liberty which is now so close to her would disappear for a long
time to come. On the contrary, if the victory goes to Britain, the
situation will be reversed, the progressive evolutionary forces
will triumph and the field will lie open for the fulfilment of the
tendencies which were making India’s full control of her own
life a certainty of the near future.
It will be well for India, if in spite of the absorption of her
pressing need, she recognises that national egoism is no longer
sufficient. She must claim freedom and equality for herself in
whatever new order is to come or any post-war arrangement,
but recognise also that the international idea and its realisation
are something that is becoming equally insistent, necessary and
inevitable.
If the totalitarian Powers win, there will indeed be
a new world-order,—it may be in the end, a unification; but
it will be a new order of naked brute Force, repression and
exploitation, and for the people of Asia and Africa a subjection
worse than anything they had experienced before…
You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against
others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has
to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth
that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and
falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind
in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that
have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance.
It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in
which men have freedom and room to think and act according
to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there
will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth
and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions
which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign
of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation
for most of the human race such as people in this country do
not dream of and cannot yet at all realise.
If the other side that
has declared itself for the free future of humanity triumphs, this
terrible danger will have been averted and conditions will have
been created in which there will be a chance for the Ideal to
grow, for the Divine Work to be done, for the spiritual Truth
for which we stand to establish itself on the earth. Those who
fight for this cause are fighting for the Divine and against the
threatened reign of the Asura.
The victory of the other side (The Asura) would drag back humanity,
degrade it horribly
and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a
race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished. That
is the whole question and all other considerations are either
irrelevant or of a minor importance.
Let us stick to the real, the central fact, the need to remove
the peril of black servitude and revived barbarism threatening
India and the world, and leave for a later time all side-issues and
minor issues or hypothetical problems that would cloud the one
all-important tragic issue before us.
July 29th, 1942. Sri Aurobindo, On Indian & World events, Autobiographical Notes.
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