Significantly contributing to the solidarity of the Yugoslav move- ment were the continual misrepresentations to which the Esperantists, particularly at the local level, were subjected, and the usually weak argu- ments used by the authorities to justify the searches of Esperantists' homes or the refusal of requests to found Esperanto groups.i 56 The Yugoslav Esperantists understood that, because the persecutions were not lim- ited to explicitly revolutionary activity through Esperanto, but reflected a general official unease at grass-roots emancipatory tendencies, it was important to stay together and face the opposition down in unison.
As a result, and early on, Yugoslav Esperantists developed an acute sense of the social and political implications of their activities. This self- confidence also spread to other countries—par ticularly after the Yugoslavs, in July 1932, established the largely Esperanto-language journal La Suda Stelo[502] as a platform for the dissemination of their point of view. As early as June 1933, the Yugoslav Esperanto League (JEL) organized, as part of their congress in Belgrade, an international conference on the topic 'The Ideological Problem of Esperantism'.[503] Through this event, whose central idea was later summarized in the sentence: 'We all condemn only one thing: the suppression of free speech!',[504] JEL launched a discussion whose pertinence was confirmed by recent developments in Germany, but for which the international Esperanto movement was evidently little prepared.
Though the enmity of the Nazis toward Esperanto was widely recog- nized, the international movement took several years to realize that such hostility was of a new type, radical in nature—namely that it addressed the fundamental right of Esperanto to exist. At the end of September 1932, so four months before Hitler's victory, a Dutch Esperantist dis- patched a laconic postcard to the International Central Committee of the Esperanto Movement, in which, citing Hitler's opinion on Esperanto in Mein Kampf he asked: 'Can we remain indifferent to a movement [the Nazi movement] that has already declared war on us?' In its political shortsightedness the reply was the equivalent of a tranquilizer:
The quotation is very interesting. It only goes to prove the inferiority of the author, who arrogates to himself the right to force on others a point of view acceptable only to people of very limited horizons. [...] It seems to us superfluous to waste our time tilting at windmills that will eventually stop turning because they lack the right wind. Of course we are following these developments.[505]
When in 1933 the journal Esperanto received letters from readers pro- testing the earliest acts of terror perpetrated by the Nazis, the editors refused to publish them, admonishing their writers with the follow- ing words: 'Dont complain in the name of an Esperantist organization about political events that we cannot prevent.' Although UEA pointed to the principle of neutrality regarding religion, nationality or politics, the Association explicitly agreed that this principle could be ignored when circumstances required: 'In countries with a nationalist/authoritar- ian regime, the national Esperantist society can do nothing other than arrange its affairs in accordance with required conditions.'[506] This line of argument served also to justify the organization of congresses in dictato- rial states, as for example, the World Congress in Cologne in 1933.
In 1934 UEA was able to dodge a test of its resistance to outside pres- sure. When NDEB issued an ultimatum requiring that the office in Geneva cease publishing the names of Jewish delegates in the section enti- tled 'Germany', the problem was solved when the delegates in question voluntarily (?) resigned.[507] In the same year, the UEA journal provided a strange demonstration of neutrality. The December issue, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the birth of Zamenhof, contained an article describing the Nazi point of view on the race problem, with quotations from Hitler and Wilhelm Frick,[508] while the same issue, as if to provide balance, offered a passionate denunciation by Lidia Zamenhof of the chauvinism sweeping the world.[509] After the Congress in Cologne, there was no lack of voices in the neutral movement calling for a reorientation of 'the essential character and ideology of Esperantism' if the movement really found it useful to organize congresses in the Third Reich 'when the best friends of the green flag are rotting and suffering in prisons and con- centration camps'. Resignations followed in protest at the display of the
Nazi flag next to the green star of Esperanto in the congress venue.[510] But UEA and Heroldo de Esperanto showed no understanding of the undi- vided enmity toward Esperanto exhibited by Nazism and accordingly had no idea how to redefine its position to confront the danger threatening the entire movement.
In truth, there was no precedent in the history of the Esperanto move- ment for a threat of this scale. In the past, it was always possible to con- tinue activities under unfavorable political conditions if at the same time, by pointing to the principle of neutrality, the movement kept its distance from those Esperantists who used Esperanto for goals unfavorable to the regime in question: people could always retreat to the relatively secure position of harmless language hobbyists. Even a more or less emphatic emphasis on the 'internal idea', by which the movement claimed that its character was not purely linguistic, but generally supportive of fraternity and peace, did not necessarily provoke the opposition of governments. Indeed, it is important to consider that the 'internal idea' often served the members of neutral groups not only as an internal unifying factor but also as a kind of protection against the involvement of Esperanto in the battle of ideologies and classes as long as it resisted any effort to give it concrete form—in other words to politicize the 'internal idea' and thereby impede the principle of neutrality.
Neutrality undoubtedly helped the movement to resist external oppo- sition. But at the same time it led to a fatal misunderstanding, namely a failure to distinguish between friends and enemies, or between (on the one hand) governments or ideologies characterized by tendencies that could be reconciled with the humanist basis of Esperanto, or could at least tolerate it, and (on the other) political movements whose program was unalterably opposed to the international way of thinking and whose dominance reduced or even erased any ground for fruitful activity on behalf of Esperanto. In reaction to insults against the 'Jewish universal language', the leading functionaries of the neutral movement tended sim- ply to add the point 'Esperanto and Jewishness' to its list of prejudices to be countered. Thus, Heroldo de Esperanto attempted to refute such arguments by suggesting that, by the same logic that the anti-Semites employed to attack Esperanto, they 'should also reject Salvarsan, the anti- dote to syphilis, because it was invented by [Paul] Ehrlich, a Jew'.[511]
The apologists were of course correct to emphasize the universality and not just the Jewish character of the language, but, chiefly because of the blinders of neutrality, they failed to appreciate that there was no sense in trying to convince people who could not be convinced, namely those who condemned something simply on the grounds of its Jewishness. For a movement desirous of contributing to the goodwill of all people, those suffering from such prejudices could only constitute a dangerous impedi- ment; it was absurd to try to recruit anti-Semites to support an interna- tional language. It should be noted that at no assembly of Esperantists in the early years of the Hitler regime did any leader of the neutral move- ment make a declaration to the effect that Jews constituted an element of humankind as valuable as the members of all other races and religions.[512]The leaders were blind to the danger that confronted the Esperanto movement, along with all human civilization as it faced an implacable enemy. This blindness derived in part from the distraction of the long debates on the reorganization of the movement that they allowed to go on in the 1930s. These internal conflicts came to a head in 1936, when the neutral movement split into two competing organizations, UEA and the newly founded International Esperanto League (IEL). From this point forward, UEA no longer played an essential role: the majority of indi- vidual members of UEA shifted their allegiance to IEL, which served at the same time as a federation of national Esperanto societies.[513] To some degree, the schism was a consequence of the growing demand by national Esperanto societies for a share in UEA's decision-making, but it would be an exaggeration to interpret the founding of IEL, which sought to har- monize individual membership with the federation of national societies, as a break with UEA's supranational tradition.i 69 A primary contribu- tor to the split was the poor financial management of UEA, rather than principled opposition to any supranational ideal. In any event, we have to recognize the fact that such organizational matters so occupied the attention of the functionaries in the neutral movement that they failed to recognize the full dimensions of the danger from outside.