THE PLOT AGAINST THE PEACE

byMichael Sayers if Albert E. Kahn. '34. DialPress. 258 pp. $2.75.

Sayers and Kahn have given us a work in The Plot Against the Peace which will be of fundamental importance to all Americans if sagaciously analyzed and correctly evaluated. It will do the American soul good to face squarely the callousness, decadence, and barbarism of western civilization which is treated in the book. The authors reveal with clarity how and why democracy was defeated in Germany, but in spite of several very suggestive bits of evidence they are a bit evasive in link- ing international capital with the accession of Hitler to power. Someday we will have an audacious and accurate denunciation of the real criminals who use dictators and totalitar- ian regines for perfectly obvious objectives deleterious to human decency. On the other hand the book gives excellent treatment to the evidence of fascism in America. No intelligent person can with integrity read the chapters "Leipzig in Washington," "War by Words," arid "In the Name of Peace," and remain oblivious to the fact that paradoxically the cancer we have fought to destroy abroad is deeply rooted here at home. Let us not for one instant fall for the already disproved theory that fascism is the fruit of racial pathology. For it is but a weapon used by certain interests to buttress the anachronisms of outdated philosophies in the nation state system of our western world. Unless we have the courage to secure a reconstruction of our economic, political and social philosophies and a reinterpretation of bur religious philosophy to meet the exigencies of a twentieth century world we shall perish by our own sword. How international justice and harmony can be achieved as long as we adhere to the contradictions and paradoxes of our past policies is a dilemma. The facts presented by Sayers and Kahn in this book force us to the realization that it will take all the genius of our Anglo-Saxon constitution fortified by our frontier democracy of yesterday to weather the coming storm in which the ultimate dignity of the human being will triumph over the sinister forces which hide behind fascism.