E. M. Forster described the 1930s as a decade when “thousands of people have been killed, robbed, mutilated, insulted, imprisoned… we know that these private miseries may be the prelude to an incalculable catastrophe, in which the whole of western civilization and half oriental may go down. Perhaps history will point to these years as the moment when man’s inventiveness finally outbalanced his moral growth, and toppled him downhill”

“Post-Munich”(1939) in Two Cheers for Democracy.