The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics)

by John Horne Burns

—Truth is always treasonous, the captain said, clicking his glass with a soft ferocity on the bar. And now these poor dears are involved in a war. This war is simply the largest mass murder in history. Theirs is the only country that has enough food and gasoline and raw materials. So they’re expending these like mad to wipe out the others in the world who’d like a cut of their riches. In order to preserve their standard of living for a few more years, they’ve dreamed up ideologies. Or their big business has. So they’re at war with nearly everybody else in the world. The rest of the world hates Americans because they’re so crude and stupid and unimaginative. . . . They will win this war. They’ll reduce Europe to a state of fifteen hundred years ago. Then their businessmen and their alphabetical bureaucracies will go into the shambles of Milan, Berlin, and Tokyo and open up new plants. . . . International carpetbaggers. . . . Millions of human beings will be dead, and most of the human feelings will be dead forever. . . . Hurray for our side. . . . We’re destroying all the new ideas and all the little men of the world to make way for our mass production and our mass thinking and our mass entertainment. Then we can go back to our United States, that