In my favorite book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1940), Rebecca West describes her journey with her husband, a London Banker, to Yugoslavia, before World War II, trying to understand the world of that time. Their guide was a Greek journalist and friend, Constantine, whose pro-Nazi German wife, Gerda, was a constant nuisance. After Gerda's departure, there begins, on p. 799, comment (by Rebecca and her husband) about people such as Gerda.

"My husband bought some guelder roses from an Albanian, laid them on the table, contemplated them for some moments, and said:

'Gerda has no sense of process. That is what is the matter with Gerda. She wants the result without doing any of the work that goes to make it. She wants to enjoy the position of a wife without the trouble of making a real marriage, without admiring her husband for his good qualities, without practising loyal discretion about his bad qualities, without repsecting those of his gods which are not hers. She wants to enjoy motherhood without taking care of her children, without training them in good manners or giving them a calm atmosphere. .... As she has no sense of what goes to bring people love or friendship, or distinction, or wealth, it seems to her that the whole world is enjoying undeserved benefits, and in a universe where all is arbitrary it might as just well happen that the injustice was pushed a litte further and that these benefits were taken from other people, leaving them nothing, and transferred to her. givibg her everything. Given the premise that the universe is purely arbitrary, that there is no causality at work anywhere, there is nothing absurd in that proposal.

'This is the conqueror's point of view. It was the Turks' point of view in all their agressive periods. Every body who is not Gerda is to Gerda "a dog of an infidel," to be treated without mercy. If she could get shold of our money by killing us, and would not be punished for it, I think she would do it, not out of cruelty, but out of blankness. Since she denies the reality of process, she would only envisage our death, which would be a great convenience to her, and not our dying, which would be a great inconvenience to us. She has shut herself off from the possibility of feeling mercy, since pain is a process and not a result. This will give her a great advantage in any confliict with more sensitive people, and indeed it is not her only advantage. Her nature gives her a firm foundation for life that many a better woman lacks. Constantine is not less but more devoted as a husband because she is a bad wife to him. All his humility says, "If she thinks so little of me, is there perhaps some lack in me?" All his affection says, "Since she is so desperately hungry, what can I give her?" And, needless to say, her children are devoted to her. It is the impulse of children to do whatever their parents do not. If their parents bend to them, they turn away; if their parents turn away, they bend to them.

'.... To begin with, no one who is not Gerda can believe how bad Gerda is. .... That she invited herself to be our guest and then continously insulted us is not a proposition acceptable to the mind, which rightly sees that there is no hope for humanity if it can bring itself to behave like that. If we established the truth of our story [people] would grasp at excuses for her, would plead that she was an alien in a strange land, that her experience as a young girl in the war [WW I] made her neurotic ....

'These things may be true; but it is also true that to recognize them is dangerous. It weakens the resistance that should be made against Gerda. For there is no way to be safe from her except to treat her as if she were, finally and exclusively, a threat to existence. Look at how she has defeated us. You love Macedonia more than any other country that you have visited. Sveti Naum is to you a place apart; you wanted to take me there. We have made the journey. We have made it in the company of an enemy who who tormented us not only by her atrocious behavior to us but by behaving atrociously to other people whom we liked when she was with us. This has clouded our vision of the country, it has angered us and weakened us. ....

'Gerda, in fact, is irresistible. It is therefore of enormous importance to calculate how many Gerdas there are in the world, and whether they are likely to combine for any purpose. Gerda is, of course, not characteristically German. Think of Gustav and George and Brigitte and the ----s! [West's dashes] They could not, to save their lives, behave as she has done. But you can, perhaps, think of some English people who are like her. ....

'In fact this type appears anywhere and everywhere, though probably much more densely in some areas than others. It seems to me that it appears wherever people are subject to two conditions. The first condition is that they should have lost sight of the sense of process, that they have forgotten that everything that is not natural is artificial and that artifice is painful and difficult; that they should be able to look at a loaf of bread and not realize that miracles of endurance and ingenuity had to be performed before the wheat grew, and the mill ground, and the oven baked. This condition can be brought about by several causes: one is successful imperialism, when the conquering people has the loaf built for it from the wheat ear up by its conquered subjects; another is modern machine civilization, where a small but influential portion of the population lives in towns in such artificial conditions that a loaf of bread comes to them in a cellophane wrapper with its origins as unvisualized as the begetting and birth of a friend's baby. The other condition is that people should have acquired a terror of losing the results of process, which are all they know about; they must be afraid that everything artificial is going to disappear, and they are going to be thrown back upon the natural; they must foresee with a shudder the day when there will be no miraculous loaf born in its virginity of cellophane, and they will have to eat grass.

'Now these conditions obtained when the Turks became nuisances in the Balkan peninsula. .... They had never learned the art of prosperity in peace time, they were not economimcally productive. Neither, oddly enough, is [1937] Germany, in spite of her enormous energy and resources. Gerda is bourgeousie and town-bred. She is proud that her family are all professional men; it is of importance to her that she cannot bake a loaf, she likes to buy her cakes in a shop. Her theory of her own social value depends on her being able to put down money and buy results of processes without being concerned in the processes themselves. And she is enmormously afraid that she will not be able to go on doing this. .... Therefore she wants to take results that belong to other people; she wants to bone everybody else's loaf.

'This condition applies to too many people all over the world to make me regard Gerda as isolated. She is an international phenomenon. ....

'Let us admit it, for a little while all of our world may belong to Gerda. She will snatch it out of hands too well-bred and compassionate and astonished to defend it.What we must remember is that she will not be able to keep it. For her contempt for the process makes her unable to conduct any process. .... You can conquer a country on this principle. .... But you cannot administer a country on this principle. ....

'For this reason I believe that Gerda's empire cannot last long. But while it lasts it will be terrrible. And what it leaves when it passes will also be terrible. .... If Europeans have not the virtues of the Macedonian peasant, our life is lost, and we are the green fly on the rose tree that has been torn up and thrown on the rubbish-heap. All that we are and do means nothing, all that our ancestors were and did means nothing, unless we are naturally the equals of the peasant women on the Skopska Tserna Gora and in Bitolj, whose fingers never forget the pattern that an ancient culture had created as symbols for what it had discovered regarding life and death.'"