Leftism

Chapter XIII

We are referring here to an important minor work of this brilliant scholar, “Das Versagen des Wirtshaftsliberalismus als religionsgeschichtliches Problem,” in Istanbuler Schriften (Istanbul Yazilari), p. 12.

10 Cf. Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1933), pp. 304-305.

Among the former Socialists and Communists serving Mussolini we also have to mention Nicola Bombacci, Robert Farinacci, Cesare Rossi, Massimo Rocca, Leandro Arpinati.

His grandfather’s generation consisted of three brothers, all Prussian generals. They were Alexander and Cesar, both killed in Austria in 1866, both military writers of renown, and the very colorful Wilhelm Friedrich, also an officer who wrote a pamphlet against militarism. He was arrested but fled to Switzerland before his trial in 1850. There he lectured on military affairs at the University of Zürich and became a major in the Swiss Army. In 1860 he joined Garibaldi in Sicily where he was made a colonel on the general staff. He was the actual victor of the Volturno battle. After the Italian campaign he returned to Switzerland and in 1870 was elected colonel of the Swiss Army—in peacetime the highest rank. He was the author of numerous military works. Here was a Prussian officer, intellectually and internally active, liberal and adventurous, an antimilitarist and yet a war enthusiast.

Austrian monarchists in 1945, some fresh out of Nazi concentration camps, were often arrested by “His Majesty’s officers” and again thrown into jail. In the State Treaty of 1955, Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union obliged Austria not to restore the Hapsburgs (and, much more amusing, not to possess submarines—in a landlocked Alpine state!). It cannot be doubted that Communism has a vested interest in keeping the Hapsburgs out of Austria. But in what way have America and Britain?

For a further clarification of the neoliberal ethical stand in the field of economics, cf. particularly Dr. Berthold Kunze “Wirtschaftsethik und Wirtschaftsordnung” in Boarman, op. cit. and Alexander Rüstow, op. cit. See also Alexander Rüstow, “Soziale Marktwirtschaft als Gegenprogramm” in Wirtschaft ohne Wunder, A. Hunold, ed. (Erlenbach-Zürich, 1953), and Alfred Müller-Armack, Diagnose unserer Gegenwart (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1949), pp. 293. sq., and Müller-Armack, “Die Wirtschaftsordnung sozial gesehen,” in Ordo, Vol. 1. (1948).

Chapter XIV

17 Cf. Graf Hermann Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl, 1923), Vol. 1, p. 43.

The new Der Grosse Herder, vol. 5, p. 286 says clearly: “Catholicism, a term coined in imitation of the word Protestantism, rather describes the social phenomena of the Catholic Church . . . than her inner life.” Pope Pius XII called the term “Catholicism” “neither customary, nor fully adequate” for the Catholic Church. (Allocution at the 10th International Congress of Historical Sciences, reported by The Tablet (London), vol. 206, no. 6018, September 24, 1955, p. 293.)

Blüher’s Nazoid views became more distinct in a later book, Die Erhebung Israels gegen die christlichen Güter (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1931), in which he accused the Jews of deriding the homosexual tendencies in non-Jews—tendencies which are essential for the foundation of political units since they rest on Männerbünde, male leagues. The high priest of Nazi doctrine, Alfred Rosenberg, repeated this argument in op. cit, p. 485.

Homosexuality was strong in the early history of Nazism, especially among the S. A. (A high Vienna police official told me in the late 1920s that youthful homosexuals frequently banded together in paramilitary Nazi formations.) The accusations against S. A. Chief Roehm and his friends were well founded.

There are still people in the West who believe that Austria-Hungary in 1914 delivered a totally unjustified ultimatum to Serbia which was in fact organizing and praising murder. (We should ask ourselves how Teddy Roosevelt would have reacted against the assassination of an American Vice President by an organization whose head was the Vice President, let us say, of Nicaragua. Would he not have demanded at least the admission of plainclothes detectives to investigate the background of the murder?) Yet the first six “political” demands of Austria were not fulfilled and it is significant that, when the Serb answer to the Austrian ultimatum arrived, not a single soldier of the imperial royal army was mobilized. Cf. Freiherr von Musulin, Das Haus am Ballhausplatz (Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1924), pp. 225-226, 241-245.

Democracy, in short, is in part a system of judgments inconsistent with what scientists hold to be true. This inconsistency would not create difficulties—or at least would not create some of the difficulties it now creates—were the democratic able to say that his kingdom is not of this world, able to say that his truth is not the kind that is in the least tested by the scientist, any more than the truth of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is tested by the chemical analysis of the bread and wine. Such a solution of the democrat’s intellectual quandary is not a happy one, but it is not altogether inconceivable. Democracy may become a genuinely transcendental faith, in which belief is not weakened by lack of correspondence between the propositions it lays down and the facts of life on this earth. . . . In short, democracy may be able to take its promised heaven out of this world, and put it in the world of ritual performed, of transcendental belief, or vicarious satisfactions of human wants, may keep it an ideal not too much sullied by the contrast with the spotted reality.

The opinions of H. B. Mayo on democracy are not very different: “So we can say that acts of faith may be demanded . . . but perhaps not in a religious sense, we come in the end to a justification by faith or, as it is sometimes put, to those ultimate beliefs and ideals which we cannot wholly validate by rational means.” Cf. his “How Can We Justify Democracy?” The American Political Science Review, (September 1962), p. 566. Orestes Brownson took a simpler approach and referred merely to the “idiocy of talking about ‘self-government.’ ” Cf. Lawrence Roemer, op. cit., pp. 147-148.

Krushchev hoped that by 1980 no less than 90 percent of all youngsters between the ages of six and sixteen would be in state boarding schools. (Today an estimated 9 percent of all Soviet children are educated collectively in boarding schools.)

Chapter XV

If I knew a better land on this glorious world of ours,
Where a man gets bigger money and is working shorter hours;
If the Briton or the Frenchman had an easier life than mine,
I’d pack my goods this minute and I’d sail across the brine. . . .

Fay also warned (Current Events, vol. 6, No. 34, October 1939, p. 241) not to confuse the origins of World War I with those of World War II. As could be expected, a leftist school trying to exonerate Hitler arose in our days. Its most prominent representative in Britain is Professor A. J. P. Taylor, who, significantly enough, has strong leftist inclinations and has been known for his dislike for the Hapsburg Monarchy. Cf. his The Origins of the Second World War (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1963). Yet even in World War II the war guilt was not uniform in the Axis camp. Hungary and Bulgaria had genuine grievances. The outbreak of the war itself, no doubt, is unimaginable without Soviet connivance—just as fascism and Nazism are unthinkable without the Communist inspiration and challenge.

Still, George D. Herron in a letter to Hugh R. Wilson, American chargé d’affaires in Berne, urged a declaration of war against Bulgaria, “the worst enemy, after Prussia, of Americanism in Europe.” (Dateline, Geneva, May 25, 1918). Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 9, document I. One truly wonders why “Americanism” was so uniquely incompatible with “Bulgarianism” . . . and how Herron could realize this by “long distance.”

I regard Admiral von Hintze as one of the most sinister figures in the political world of today. Indeed, I am convinced there is no other such dangerous character in any place of great power. He is unqualifiedly a cynic, and his mind is clearly medieval in its constitution and methods; his conception of world politics differs not from the conception that prevailed in the courts of Borgia and Sforza. . . . He is clever to the last degree; and not only Machiavellian, but positively diabolical in both his thinking and acting: and his mental and tactical diabolism are clothed with medieval refinement.

All of which clearly sheds a new light on the Middle Ages and the Devil.

Chapter XVI

History irks leftists because, if they do not ignore it altogether, they have to “rewrite” it, which means that they have to forge it. This they have to do since they have a concrete concept of the future and the (artificially adapted) past must appear to be an organic and logical preparation of the “shape of things to come.” Leftists (and this includes the radical democrats) have to be suspicious of history because on their program is the “end of history”—at least of history as we understand the term. Even the perfect global democracy of the convinced “democratist” is utopia, is paradise on earth. As far as history generally is taught in “programmatic democracies,” it assumes the character of an evolution (interspread with revolutions) toward a specific goal: beatitude for the millions. This view is also quite deeply imbedded in American popular feelings. Writes Professor Eugene N. Anderson, “European history in the hundred years after Napoleon has been regarded in the United States as the story of the slow, but certain victory of liberalism over the ancien régime. In writing this history the episodes emphasized have been those in which liberalism clashed with the old order and either overcame it or, unfortunately, was temporarily defeated by it. American historians have assumed that the goal of the century was to establish the ascendancy of the American social and political ideals: they have interpreted European history according to their own wishes, and they have been abetted in this work by the memoirs and biographies of liberal exiles from the Continent and the tendency to translate these works about Continental history which fitted their own theories.” (Social Education, May 1938.) All this optimism, needless to say, is equally applicable to the Asian scene. Today democratism and socialism have replaced the old liberal outlook.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty or not? The best book on this issue is Francis Russell, Tragedy at Dedham, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962). That author is convinced that Sacco either fired the fatal shot or knew who the assassin was, but Vanzetti was probably innocent (p. 466). The book by this leading American conservative writer is based on serious research.

Yet the Soviets knew how to impress their American visitors with the label “new,” and this in spite of the fact, as I hinted, that the American is not truly a friend of the radically new, but rather of familiar things in a “bigger and better” edition. Nor was or is the USSR anything genuinely modern. It breathes the spirit of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, vide the Moscow subway stations reminding one of great-grandmother’s drawing room. Or look at the railroad station of Sotchi which resembles an oversexed Munich beer-brewer’s dream of an Oriental harem. Still there is a certain type of American or British leftist whose heart beats faster when he sees travel folders inviting him to come to the “New Czechoslovakia,” the “New Egypt,” or the “New Algeria” where he can admire uniformed girls marching with broad smiles and shouldered submachine guns.

In dealing with the political effects of Freemasonry on the Continent one has to be beware of three pitfalls: to underrate them, to overrate them, to fail to distinguish between the various trends, lodges, organizations. The book by Roger Peyrefitte, Les fils de la lumière (Paris: Flammarion, 1961) though not exactly of a scholarly character, gives at least an inkling as to the large variety of Masonic dogmatic positions. On Freemasonry in French politics, cf. also D. W. Brogan, French Personalities and Problems (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), pp. 37-40.

One has to take care not to see in history nothing but a chain of conspiracies. Count Prokesch-Osten remarked that in “Metternich’s heart there lived the ineradicable mania (Gentz called it the Urlüge, the original lie), that all revolutions are the work of secret societies and that Lafayette could have organized the revolt in Poland no less than in Paris.” Cf. Aus den Tagebüchern des Grafen Prokesch von Osten (Vienna: Christoph Reisser, 1909), p. 68, (entry of December 7, 1830).

It was not at all a “strange trick,” but the inability of the well-meaning masses to assay an immensely complex political situation from the Somali Desert to the Bavarian border. Starry-eyed idealism in history has often played a more disastrous role than diabolical malice. For the same good reason that St. Thomas considers the intellectual virtues to be higher than the moral ones, Fouché (though hardly a reader of the Summa) exclaimed when Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder!”

Duff Cooper, so strongly anti-German, was convinced that: “. . . . The half-hearted sanctions that we imposed served only to infuriate Mussolini and drive him into the arms of Hitler. Doing a minimum of harm we incurred a maximum of ill-will.” (Duff Cooper, op. cit., p. 193.) And later he remarks, “I was unhappy about Anthony Eden’s departure. I wrote him to tell him so and to say that I had always found myself in agreement with him, except on this one question of Italy.” There was a true personal enmity between Eden and Mussolini which grew as time went on. Eden himself in his memoirs—The Rt. Hon. Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs, (London: Cassell, 1965), vol. 3, “The Reckoning”—is singularly reticent about his blunder but regrets the Anschluss in several passages. Neville Chamberlain, on the other hand, thought that Halifax (in Eden’s place) could have saved Austria by cooperating with Mussolini more closely. Cf. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, (London: Macmillan, 1946).

This policy was supported by Hitler’s ingrained antimonarchism. He was always grateful to the Social Democrats for having destroyed the German Monarchy. He said verbally about the Republic: “It was a big step ahead. She, above all, prepared our way.” Cf. Hans Frank, op. cit., p. 288, and Albert Speer, op. cit., p. 67. On the other hand he really feared the survival of monarchist feelings in Austria which had been very strong up to November, 1918. Cf. Ludwig A. Windisch-Graetz, Der Kaiser kämpft für die Freiheit (Vienna: Herold, 1957), pp. 86-105.

About the desperate efforts of the Austrian Foreign Minister, Dr. Guido Schmidt, to get British (and French) aid to save Austrian independence, or even to move Sir Robert Vansittart, cf. Hellmut Andics, op. cit., pp. 537-538.

About Beneš’ secret negotiations with the Nazis, cf. the letter of Dr. Stefan Osuský in the New York Times, October 20, 1958. Beněs was ready to accede the Friedland, Rumburg, and Eger districts to Germany.

129 Cf. Louis P. Lochner, What about Germany? (New York, 1942), pp. 48-49. (This happened in March 1938.) Compare this with the account of Beneš’s stubbornness and unpopularity in John de Courcy’s Behind the Battle (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942), p. 241.

This expression of regret I voice in all sincerity, if for no other reason than to remind the British or American reader that what is sensible in one part of the world becomes pointless in another or vice-versa.

At the same time it was true that the Sudeten Germans had a real case. H. N. Brailsford, famous British leftist journalist, already in 1920 pointed out the fact that the more than three million Sudeten Germans, put under Czech rule, against their will, were a serious handicap to world peace. Arnold J. Toynbee in a large article published on July 10, 1937 in The Economist had to admit that “in Czechoslovakia today the methods by which the Czech are keeping the upper hand over the Sudetendeutsch are not democratic.” The Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (W. R. Matthews), in a letter to the Times on June 2, 1938, advocated “Self-Determination” for the Sudeten Germans and protested against the possibility of Britain fighting a war preventing self-determination. The same ideas were expressed by Lord Noel Buxton, a true liberal, in a letter to the Times on March 22, 1938. These facts have to be viewed in relation with Göring’s boast to Sir Neville Henderson that “London had only fourteen antiaircraft guns and nothing to prevent Germany from dropping 1,000 to 2,000 bombs a day on London.” (The Times, November 25, 1940).