“‘Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. “‘The people don’t like to be conquered, sir, and so they will not be,’” he explains to Colonel Lanser. Mayor Orden, on the other hand, knows that the invaders will never be able to fully control his town because they haven’t won the faith and support of the townspeople. For example, when Colonel Lanser and his troops (the book’s Nazi equivalents) invade the unnamed town where the story takes place, they fail to understand that brute force won’t guarantee successful conquest. Written with the intention of giving hope to Nazi-occupied European nations toward the end of the Second World War, Steinbeck’s novella suggests that fascist invaders underestimate the power of democratic unity. In The Moon is Down, John Steinbeck celebrates the power of democracy by examining the ways in which a society built upon the principles of equality and fair governmental representation is capable of resisting the power of authoritarianism.
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