If we "need a Hitler" to defeat Hitler, we are lost, at this moment, irretrievably, because the _final_ triumph of Hitlerism is to make us need Hitler. The truth is we cannot use a Hitler, we cannot use fascism, we cannot use any form of "total" organization except in the one field where totality has always existed, which is war. So far as war touches the composition of women's stockings or children's ice-cream sodas, we need unified organization in the domestic field; but not "total government". We have to be told (since it is not a matter of individual taste) how many flavors of ice-cream may be manufactured; but the regimentation of people is not required. (The United States Army has officially declared against complete regimentation in one of its own fields; every soldier studies the history of this war and is encouraged to ask questions about it, because "the War Department considers that every American soldier should know clearly why and for what we are fighting.") We cannot use a Hitler because we lack the time. We cannot catch up with Hitler on Hitlerism. We cannot wait ten years to re-condition the people of America, the ten vital years which Hitler spent enslaving the German mind were spent by us in digging the American people out from the ruined economic system which collapsed on them in 1929. We are conditioned by the angry and excited controversy over the New Deal; we are opinionated, variant, prejudiced, individual, argumentative. We cannot be changed over to the German model. Perhaps in a quieter moment we could be captivated (if not captured) by an American-type dictator, a Huey Long; in wartime, when people undergo incalculable changes of habit without a murmur, the old framework and the established forms of life must be scrupulously revered. Otherwise people will be scared; they will not respond to encouragement. That is why we cannot take time to learn how to love a dictator. The alternative is obvious: to re-discover the virtue which Hitler calls a vice, to defeat totality by variety (which is the essential substance of unity). I do not mean five admirals disputing command of one fleet or one assembly line ordered to make three wholly different aeroplane engines. I mean the combination of elements, as they are combined in the food we eat and the water we drink; and as they are combined in the people we are. We have lived by combining a variety of elements; we have always allowed as much freedom to variety as we could, believing that out of this freedom would come a steady progress, a definite betterment of our State; so, we have been taught, the human race has progressed, not by utter uniformity, and not by anarchy, but by an alternation of two things--the standard and the variant. Now we face death--called totality. For us it is death; and we can not avoid it by taking it in homeopathic doses, we can only live by destroying whatever is deadly to us.