Leftism

Chapter XVII

We now know from Lord Moran how gravely ill Churchill was during and after World War II and should view his actions and words with a certain leniency. Cf. his Churchill (London: Constable, 1966). The fact that in the Great Emergency there was nobody else around endowed with manliness, authority, and courage is merely one more proof that the qualities of the pre-World War I generation had not been in our times. Around 1960 we still saw in Europe the rule of septuagenarians and octagenarians. They are now all being succeeded by “small fry.”

As to the Teschen (Cieszyn) area, cf. the letter of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, addressed on July 28, 1920 to the President of the Council of Ambassadors, A. Miller, and quoted by W. Kulski and M. Potulicki in Recueil de textes de droit international (Warsaw, 1939) pp. 278ff.

The lack of enthusiasm was especially strong in the army. Harsch (op. cit., pp. 46-47) said rightly, “Thinking back over a year and a half in wartime Germany, I am impressed by the fact that the most intelligent, the most interesting, the most fair-minded—in fact, in all respects the most honorable—men I met were in the army, serving people they despised to an end in which they did not believe, but welcoming the opportunity to forget their feelings about these men and those ends in what seemed to them a last means of serving their country.” This frightening dichotomy under which the army suffered is highlighted by a conversation which Ernst Jünger had in Russia with Colonel Ravenstein, a man he knew from World War I. “I asked him about the massmurder caves and how he could square their evidence with the honor of arms and the wearing of military decorations. Without entering into the matter he gave me a reply which to me came unexpectedly: ‘For this, perhaps, my youngest daughter will have to pay some day in a Negro brothel.’ ” Cf. his Strahlungen, p. 330.

Another good account of Germany during the war was given by the Swedish journalist Arvid Fredborg in his book Bakom Stålvallen, American edition: Behind the Steel Wall (A Swedish Journalist in Berlin 1941-1943) (New York: The Viking Press, 1944), especially pp. 74-75, 239, 241, 248, 275.

Without the German army assisting Baron Mannerheim’s “White Guard” in 1917-1918, Finnish communism would have won out in the Civil War. The Finnish Communists were famous for their unparalleled cruelty—especially, however, the Red women’s regiments from Tampere (Tammerfors) who tortured their prisoners to death. The Red “General” Antikainen, who had a special dislike for students, apparently had them boiled in large kettles. These delirious horrors of Europe’s most literate nation just show that the beast is always right in us—which should give little comfort to our “humanist” Roussellians.

National Socialism could have been overcome from inside, by a revolution only if a very important opposition had existed among the lower layers, prepared to sacrifice everything to the revolution, to follow the officers, flag-bearers of the revolt. Any other attempt at rebellion would have been considered reactionary by the masses and passionately resisted. . . . There is no revolution of leaders without the people. Yet, for the fact that an ideology favoring an uprising was lacking among the people, the very men should feel responsible who today think they must put the entire blame on the German officer: Also one must assume that they believe it would have been possible for a new revolutionary uprising to mature only then, years after the events of 1933.

Here is the record in the New York Times: Monday, June 23, 1941, p. 2, Finnish Communiqué; Soviet flyers start bombing, A.P.; Clashes not yet recorded, U.P.; Russians violate Finnish territory. P. 3: Finland declared not to be at war. U.P. relates interview of Soviet Minister Orlov in Helsinki: “We are convinced that neither side wants to fight.” Tuesday, June 24, 1941: Gripenberg, Finnish Minister in London, enlightens Eden as to Russian attacks. P. 5: Finland professes neutrality in war. Wednesday, June 25, 1941: p. 2: Continuous aerial bombardments in the entire south of Finland. (Informations of the New York Times correspondent.) Thursday, June 26, 1941, pp. 1 and 2: Associated Press describes the big damages caused by Soviet bombardments. Friday, June 27, 1941: Five days after German attack Finland declared war (on June 26). The declaration is decided upon after a plenary session of the Eduskunta (parliament). Soviets protest against Finnish “Fascist militarism.”

There seems to exist, however, an old British-Polish incompatibility of character and outlook also affecting the political scene. This mutual incomprehension is partly the result of the confrontation of the Catholic thirst for the Absolute and the post-Protestant delight in justemilieu and compromise. Already Disraeli disliked the Polish refugees and resented their activities. Cf. W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 71. Yet the great “professional” hater of the Poles was Lloyd George, the friend of Hitler, great Franco-baiter and erstwhile protector of Winston Churchill. In all Polish border questions Lloyd George opposed them violently and in the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 the Premier stood solidly on the side of Bolshevism. Cf. Lord Riddell’s Intimate Diary of the Paris Peace Conference 1918-1923 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934), pp. 221-224. When the Poles defeated the Red army Lloyd George (who had danced with joy when he heard in Chequers that the Reds were in the suburbs of Warsaw), was deeply disappointed. (Ibid., p. 233). To him the Poles were mad and arrogant, they were hopeless, they were a menace to the peace of Europe. (Ibid., pp. 191, 227, 198). His hatred for the Poles never abated, Count Kessler heard him (March 24, 1925) rant against the Poles in the House of Commons and was disgusted by the “grotesque sight of an old ham actor demagogically attacking his own work.” Cf. Graf Harry Kessler, Tagebücher 1918-1937 (Frankfurt: Insel-Verlag, 1961), p. 427. The (London) Sunday Express published on September 24, 1939 (!) an article by Lloyd George entitled “What is Stalin up to?” in which the former Premier reviled the “class-ridden” Polish government and “Polish Imperialism” and praised the Soviets for “liberating their kinsmen from the Polish yoke.” Cf. Count Edward Raczyński, In Allied London (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), p. 37. Worse still, on September 27 Lloyd George attacked prostrate Poland in the House of Commons as the “worst feudal system in Europe,” a line which his friend Adolf Hitler took up on October 7 in the Reichstag calling Poland a country “ruled by aristocrats since 1919.” Cf. the New York Times, September 28, 1939, p. 5:6 and October 7, 1939, p. 8:3. The root of this attitude is to be found elsewhere. When Virginia Cowles asked him why he was so anti-Franco while approving of Hitler, he replied with a twinkle, “I always line up on the side against the priests.” Cf. Virginia Cowles, Looking for Trouble (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1941), p. 107.

The way of civilization goes
For humanitarianism
Over nationalism
To beastliness.

“In this respect the non-plus-ultra is a court consisting of murderers and puritans. Then the slaughter knife is given a moral handle.” Cf. his Strahlungen III (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1966), p. 254.

The U. S. army was anything but enthusiastic about the unconditional surrender formula as it had to pay its price in blood. Cf. Captain Harry C. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946), Entry of August 12, 1943. The real beneficiaries were the Nazis and the USSR.

Cf. also George N. Shuster (former President of Hunter College and U. S. Commissioner of Bavaria), “Catholic Resistance in Nazi Germany,” in Thought, vol. 22, no. 84 (March 1947), p. 13, talking about Msgr. Johann Neuhäusler’s book Kreuz und Hakenkreuz: “He goes on to conclude that if the bishops were not afraid to attack euthanasia as a means for disposing of the mentally sick, they most assuredly would have spoken out against the gas ovens of Auschwitz had they known of their existence. With this I am in agreement. The Cardinal of Cologne as well as the late Cardinal of Münster, whose courage none will doubt, assured me that they were without an inkling of the nefarious acts committed during the final years of the Third Reich.”

Pius XII had done his level best to save Jewish lives: he had no concrete knowledge about the extermination camps, but even had he been informed, what could he have done? One has to remember the protest of the Dutch Catholic bishops against the deportation of Jews to an unknown destination. The Nazis retaliated by rounding up Catholics of Jewish descent—and sending them to Auschwitz. In this group the Carmelite nun and philosopher Edith Stein (a disciple of Husserl) perished. The Church (in the words of St. Augustine) is always pauper et inops, poor and helpless . . . and this certainly includes the Middle Ages when the “power” of the Church was also an optical illusion, like the light of the moon which is nothing but reflected sunlight. Not Canossa is the end of the struggle between Henry IV and the Church, but the bitter end of Gregory VII in exile, who, when dying, repeated the words of the Psalm: “Dilexi iustitiam et odi iniquitatem propterea morior in exilio.”

The worst mutual massacres, however, did not take place between Serbs and Croats, but between Albanians and Serbs in the Kossovo Region which had been annexed by Serbia in 1912-1913, but got a “breathing spell” under German occupation. Then the Albanian minority saw the fine opportunity for revenge. In 1944 the Serb Communists took their revenge and slaughtered about 40,000 to 50,000 Albanians, and another massacre took place (this time methodical and organized) in the winter 1955-1956 under the “Stalinist” Minister of the Interior, Ranković. The details of these crimes were only revealed at the session of the Savez Komunista (League of Communists) in 1966 in Priština.

The views of the South American political theorists in the colonial period were also directly or indirectly favorable to tyrannicide. Cf. Agustin de Assis, Ideas sociopoliticas de Alonso Polo (el Tostado) in the series “Estudios Hispano-Americanos”, (Seville, 1955), vol. 94, pp. 57-61.

It is interesting to note, however, that Red tyrants in persecuting the Church have repeatedly and hypocritically invoked the example of the United States.

When I protested after the “Declaration” in a letter to the New York Times (signed by my pen-name F. S. Campbell), I was contradicted by the editor of the pro-Communist Austro-American Tribune who pointed out that Austrian ammunition plants worked for the Germans. (And what about the Skoda Works in Czechoslovakia, Schneider-Creuzot in France, and so forth?) These and other criticisms infuriated Cordell Hull to the extent that he became violently anti-Austrian. On this subject matter George Creel had an acrimonious discussion with him. (Verbal communication of the late G. Creel.) Eden was right when he wrote about Hull: “Yet it was impossible to forget the beak and the claws. I could never watch him without recalling the song of his native Tennessee about the Martins and the Coys. I felt that he too could pursue a vendetta to the end.” (The Eden Memoirs, vol. 3. p. 380). His vindictiveness fully centered on Austria.

Also Cf. Harold L. Ickes, “The Lowering Cloud, 1939-1941,” vol. II of The Secret Diaries of Harold L. Ickes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), p. 630: “For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan. . . . And, of course, if we go to war against Japan, it will inevitably lead to a war against Germany.” The sequitur, however, was provided by Hitler who arbitrarily and with no cogent reason declared war against the United States. There might have been, at the same time, two separate wars going on. Actually the Germans hoped that Japan would attack the USSR.

By far the best book on the American efforts to cast the German mind into a leftist pattern is Caspar Schrenck-Notzing’s Die Charakterwäsche (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1965). Here we find a brilliant description of the work of American leftism, partly paralyzed in their home activities by the late Truman and Eisenhower administration but all the more active in the highly malleable German postwar world. The most amusing parts of the book deal with the psychological-ideological tests used by the reeducators, the historically most valuable ones are concerned with the American-sponsored establishment of a leftist German Press which is still highly active. In 1945 and 1946 the American “reeducators” still insisted that Communist journalists be included in the editorial boards of the newly licensed newspapers. It took some time until this delightful regulation was recalled.

In the Napoleonic Wars the Russian armies fought all over Europe. At that time the majority of these soldiers were Christians and illiterate. In 1944 they were largely literate and probably without a religious faith. Friz Reck-Malleczewen speaks about the Christian spirit of Russian soldiers in World War I in his Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten (Stuttgart: Henry Goverts, 1966), pp. 80-81.

Thus the Austrians, who as neighbors of the Communist world knew much better what communism was, finally woke up from the Nazi hell and found themselves in an insane asylum.

Nor were the members of the House of Bourbon spared by the Nazis in their leftist furor. Prince Xavier de Bourbon-Parma was nearly beaten to pulp in the Struthof (Alsace) concentration camp. The notion that the right collaborated while the left resisted is simply not true. Laval, a Radical Socialist, for instance, came distinctly from the left.

The villagers did not seem to have been particularly enthusiastic about their American liberators. They were on the whole “unconcerned,” but some boys were “spitting in the tracks of the Army trucks” and “there were those three blond, husky women strolling down arm in arm, singing and laughing and mocking everyone else.” When the Nazi counterpush came, the inhabitants kissed the German soldiers and removed the American and French flags. “Somehow a few soldiers got back and told the story to the colonel. The colonel suddenly remembered that there were a lot of enemy tanks in the village and told the artillery to pound it to rubble. And so they did.” Killing how many French citizens? Or only the three husky blondes? Cf. Ralph G. Martin, “What Kind of Peace? The Soldiers’ Viewpoint,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 1945, pp. 43-44.

MAURY: I imagined you were broad-minded.

PARAMORE: I am.

MURIEL: Me, too. I believe one religion’s as good as another and everything.

PARAMORE: There’s some good in all religions.

MURIEL: I’m a Catholic but, as I always say, I’m not working at it.

PARAMORE (with a tremendous burst of tolerance): The Catholic religion is a very—a very powerful religion.

Luckily (or unluckily) this is a very widespread illusion—an illusion related to the belief that the Church is a purely dogmatic monolith. Writes a Lutheran theologian: “There is probably no other Church which has the capacity for harboring so many widely divergent theological points of view as the Roman Church. . . . There is a fixed dogmatic limit, but within this limit there is room for divergent and often contradictory opinions.” Cf. F. E. Mayer, The Religious Bodies of America (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, n.d. 2nd ed.), pp. 32, 38.

Chapter XVIII

In Latin America people (as Keyserling had already remarked in his Südamerikanische Meditationen) are pushed by Lust, (inclination, fancy), by gana, and not by a sense of duty or ambition. Cf. also José Gutierrez, De la pseudo-aristocracia a la autenticidad (Bogotá, Tercer Mundo, 1966), p. 85. Compare also with Fredrick B. Pike, The Modern History of Peru (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), p. 122. The Argentine proverb: “El vivo vive del tonto, el tonto vive del trabajo—The intelligent man lives from the stupid man, the stupid man from work,” is not uncharacteristic. The same phenomenon can be found in India. Cf. Jean Gebser, Asienfibel (Ul-steinbuch, No. 650, n.d.), pp. 21-22. There the lack of sense of time renders the situation even more difficult. Dr. J. S. Kanwar from the Indian Council for Agrarian Research in New Delhi has stated that if only two of India’s 16 states were to exploit the soil with intelligence and diligence, all of India could be fed: if, however, this were done in all of India, two-thirds of the agricultural products could be exported. Cf. Kontinente, 3 year, no. 4, August 1968. On the same problem in Russia vide Erwin Sinkó, op. cit., p. 143. Of course, in the USSR the lack of “Protestant work ethics” is made more keenly felt through collectivism, socialism, and the dearth of consumer goods.

Chapter XIX

1. The late capitalist society succeeded, contrary to the prognostications of Marx and Engels, in gaining stability under the conditions of increasing technological perfection.

2. Coexistence with the Communist camp fosters the stabilization of Western society under the banner of forced rearmament.

3. Thanks to their increasing access to consumer goods, the working class, once an enemy of the capitalist system, has today become one of its pillars and has lost all revolutionary potentialities.

4. Without being conscious of it and without rebellion on the part of the victims, a manipulation and instrumentalization of man has taken the place of proletarian misery, brutal terror and sexual repression in a universe without any dialectic opposition.

5. This society is characterized by a one-dimensional conscience, a non-dialectic thinking lacking utopia or transcendence, a positivistic philosophy which is the very negation of philosophy.

6. Since the discontinuation of social change is the most salient feature of modern industrial society, only those individuals, groups, and layers can be agents of fundamental change who are outside of the democratic process: the unemployed and the unemployable, the inmates of jails and lunatic asylums, etc. Obviously all the leftist movements have a purely intellectual leadership and never start from the “grassroots.” This Lenin knew only too well. Cf. his famous pamphlet Shto dyelat’? (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoy lityeratury, 1970), p. 34.

In its artistic aspects we see a decided connection between Dadaism (of the 1918-1922 period) and the New Left. Dadaism, however, was not only an artistic movement but also had deep political and social implications. It was at the same time libertine and antitheistic. Cf. Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada (Hanover, 1920). Here we hear that Dadaism is an international, revolutionary league of all creative persons on the basis of a radical communism, that progressive unemployment should be introduced, that dadaist poems (of a “brutist nature”) ought to be read in churches, that all sexual relations ought to be organized by a sex center, etc. Dadaism, finally, influenced surrealism, and former dadaists acted in that movement (Aragon, Breton, Eluard). A pamphlet of that group issued in May 1931 applauded the burning of churches in Spain and made an appeal to the French to do likewise: “Only the proletariat has the power to sweep God from the surface of the earth.” (Aragon later become a leading Communist.)

Chapter XX

Sand and Folien were typical representatives of early German national liberalism (and not only of national democracy). The National Liberal (Nationalliberale), the protagonists of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, as Karl Buchheim has pointed out, were in so many ways the precursors of National Socialism. Cf. K. Buchheim, “Der Ursprung der deutschen Weltanschauungsparteien,” Hochland, vol. 43, no. 6 (August 1951), p. 550.

These horrors were all “logical,” thanks to the grim philosophic determination of Sade, the grandfather of all leftist currents. Robert Owen who started “formal socialism” was certain that there was no liberty of volition or feeling. There would be no criminals in the new society and those who attacked it would not be treated as criminals, but as “mentally deranged,” a system now quite popular in the USSR. Cf. Thilo Ramm, Die grossen Sozialisten als Rechts und Sozialphilosophen (Stuttgart: Gustav Fischer, 1955), vol. 1. pp. 446, 449.

(1) Ample work,
(2) Ample wages,
(3) Stable prices,
(4) Recreation and pleasure:

(a) Stimulants and tobacco, ample and cheap.
(b) Ample and cheap films,
(c) Sports and opportunities for betting,

(d) Sexual pleasures, great variety, prior to and during marriage with no restrictions by judges, priests, or any other authority.

Cf. his A Combine of Aggression, Elite and Dictatorship (London: Allen and Unwin, 1942), p. 299. Franz Zweig’s Labour, Life and Poverty, (London: Gollancz, 1948) which contains seventy-five interviews with members of Britain’s laboring class, is a confirmation of Otten’s views. The rule and prevalence of materialistic mediocrity, however, is always fostered by the democratic prelude to totalitarian tyranny. John Stuart Mill emphasized this in his Representative Government, (London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1926), pp. 265-266: “The natural tendency of representative government, as of modern civilization, is toward collective mediocrity, and this tendency is increased by all reductions and extensions of the franchise.” On one hand this might foster the rise of a wealthy party oligarchy with little education and taste. According to a West German statistic, among the Bundestag deputies in Bonn there are twenty-one millionaires, eight belonging to the CDU, seven to the Free Democratic Party and six Socialists. Cf. Die Krone, vol. 12, no. 18 (September 15, 1964). On the other hand we see that materialistic masses are voting for extreme leftist parties without believing in their program or aims—just as means to “frighten” and to blackmail the entrepreneurs. This is the situation in Italy where the Communist vote in the last fifteen years has been rising steadily but party membership and the sale of Communist papers had continuously decreased. In 1954 the PCI had 2,145,000 members and about six million voters; in 1963 there were 1,615,000 members and 7.8 million voters. Cf. Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 14-15, 1964, p. 2. Physical wellbeing, not ideology seems to be increasingly the determining factor. Yet it matters very little whether Communist majorities are due to confused minds or of mere cupidity. The results are equally disastrous.

Sir Ernest Barker is right when he insists that “when the service of the state had been made a science elsewhere, Professor Pollard had remarked, Englishmen still preferred to consider it a task for intelligent amateurs.” Cf. his Traditions of Civility (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1948), p. 149. Sir Ernest thinks that this is a piece of Renaissance inheritance, and even in this he is right. The crisis of amateurism came when the scienda so brutally overtook the scita and when the Renaissance notion of the amateur (who is a “lover”) was replaced with Roussellian optimism and democratic indifference toward truth and knowledge. The amateur also was a student, though not necessarily a systematic one and he was not beset by “beastly earnestness” (tierischer Ernest), the besetting vice of “little men.” The amateur is an aristocrat according to the definition of Michel de St.-Pierre: “Un aristocrate est d’abord celui qui parle avec légèreté des sujets graves.” Cf. Les aristocrates (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1954), p. 202.

American films and comic strips love to feature the successful amateur—the man who never sat in a plane, jumps into the cockpit, almost kills himself but finally gets the Silver Cup and the girl. This sort of hero of the preindustrial and prescientific civilization is really obsolete. His time, most unfortunately, is past.

On the other hand, it is untrue that Luther believed in “private interpretation,” a myth believed widely in Britain and in America. How this myth arose we can read in Albert Hartmann S.J., Toleranz und christlicher Glaube (Frankfurt: J. Knecht, 1955), pp. 11-12, and in W. E. Zeeden, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 20. Luther felt to be inspired and filled with a divine light; however, he did not concede these properties easily to others. His religious outlook was basically authoritarian.

The percentage of persons belonging to another race has little to do with the degree of racism. There are at least twice as many people of part African origin in Brazil than in the United States, yet racist feelings are stronger there than among the Brazilians. (And maybe they are really stronger in Chicago and Detroit than in Charleston and New Orleans.) “Eurasians,” very scarce in China, had a most miserable time, particularly in the universities where their fellow students often persecuted them mercilessly. Moslem racial tolerance is not greater or lesser than that of Christians (where the different denominations have different records). In this age more Negroes have been slaughtered by Arabs (in the Sudan) than by any lily-white group elsewhere. (But Moslem Arabs have been murdered en masse by Negroes in Zanzibar.) Yet “African solidarity” prevents this information from being appropriately dealt with in the press of “emerging” African states. All this should help to dispel the notion of anything like automatic progress. Cf. Juan Valera’s essay “La doctrina del progreso” written in 1859. Cf. Obras Completas de Juan Valera (Madrid: Enrique Prieto, 1913), pp. 63-177.