The Gallery (New York Review Books Classics)

by John Horne Burns

Oh, they’ve got quite an ingenious system of government, I grant you. But none of them gives a damn about it except when it gets them into a war. . . . They’ve got less maturity or individuality than any other people in the world. Poetry and music to them—why they’re deaf to anything that isn’t sold by an advertising agency. . . . They don’t know how to treat other human beings. With all their screaming about democracy, none of them has the remotest conception of human dignity. . . . Listen to the sounds that Negro band is making. That’s their American music. Sexual moans and thumps. . . . They don’t know how to make love to a woman, and all their hatreds are between football teams or states of the same Union or for people they don’t understand. Victims of the mob spirit and regimentation. . . . They’ve never really suffered. But when they get the first twinge of toothache of the soul, they start feeling sorry for themselves instead of learning any wisdom from pain.

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 green little island in the midst of a smoking world. Then we can kill all the Negroes and the Jews. Then we’ll start on Russia.