Leftism

So much about myself. The purpose of this book is to show the character of leftism and to what extent and in what way the vast majority of the leftist ideologies now dominating or threatening most of the modern world are competitors rather than enemies. This, we think, is an important distinction. Shoe factory A is a competitor of shoe factory B, but a movement promoting the abolition of footwear for the sake of health is the enemy of both.

In the political field today this distinction, unfortunately, is less obvious and largely obscured by a confusion in semantics. This particular situation is bad enough in Europe, but it is even worse in the United States. This state of affairs, in turn, has adversely influenced the foreign policy of the United States which in the past and in the present not only has been determined by what—really or only seemingly—is America’s self-interest, but also by ideological prejudices. Very often these ideological convictions coloring the outlook, the aims, the policies of those Americans responsible for the course of foreign affairs (not only Presidents, cabinet members, or congressmen, but also professors, radio commentators and journalists), have actually run counter to America’s best interest as well as to the very interest of mankind.

Still, it is only in the twentieth century, in our lifetime, that the United States decisively intervened in world affairs and that Europe suddenly found herself on the “receiving end” of American foreign policy. Decisions made in Washington (with or without the advice or the prodding of refugees) affected Central Europe—which I consider my home—deeply and often adversely. The long years which I more or less accidentally spent in the United States made me realize the origins, the reasons, the psychological roots of the Great Euramerican Misunderstanding which, as one might expect, has several aspects: (1) the lacking self-knowledge of America, (paralleled by the nonexistence of self-knowledge of Europe); (2) the American misinformation about Europe (plus the European ignorance of America); and (3) the totally deficient realization of where we all now stand historically, what the big, dynamic ideologies truly represent, and how they are related to each other. And let us not overlook the fact that these three points are all somewhat interconnected, since both America (or, better still, the English-speaking world) and Europe (or, more concretely, the Continent) cannot be properly understood without an excursion into the field of ideology. Even the folklores are deeply affected by “philosophies.” A sentence such as “One man is as good as any other man if not a little bit better” reminds one automatically of a certain sector of American sentiment. It smacks of Sandburgian folkloric romanticism. On the other hand the words suum cuique (to everybody his due) are still inscribed at Innsbruck’s law school. Yet it is equally true that Ulpian’s great legal principle also makes sense to a number of Americans while egalitarian notions today are rampant in Europe. The Atlantic Ocean, no less than the Channel, is shrinking and, slowly but surely, our confusions are fusing. To make matters worse, our respective semantics are still far apart.

The positive and constructive understanding between America and Free Europe is no less necessary than the realization of what political and economic order is good, right, fruitful. Therefore, this book tries to serve a double purpose: the reduction, if not the elimination of the Great Intercontinental Misunderstanding as well as the Quest for Truth which entails an exposé of the multifaced, multiheaded enemy which is leftism.

There are, of course, selfish “European” reasons for my writing this book replete with views often not properly represented or understood in America. It is precisely the unwarranted identification of democracy with liberty which has caused a great many of the recurrent tragedies of American foreign policy (as well as a number of internal American woes!). We have to remember all the wars, all the propaganda, all the pressure campaigns for the cause of democracy, how every hailed and applauded victory of democracy has ended in terrible defeat for personal liberty, the one cause really dear to American hearts.

Yet beyond these obvious failures, besides the brutal and open elimination of liberty and decency, there is also—so clearly foreseen by de Tocqueville—the democratic evolution towards nonviolent slavery due to a turn of mind and outlook basically like the one leading to the more obvious forms of tyranny. One should not be surprised about this, because the roots of the evil are historically-genetically the same all over the Western World. The fatal year is 1789, and the symbol of iniquity is the Jacobin Cap. Its heresy is the denial of personality and of personal liberty. Its concrete realizations are Jacobin mass democracy, all forms of national collectivism and statism, Marxism producing socialism and communism, fascism, and national socialism, leftism in all its modern guises and manifestations to which in America the good term “liberalism,” perversely enough, is being applied. The issue is between man created in the image of God and the termite in a human guise. It is in defense of man and in opposition to the false teachings which want to lower man to the status of an insect that this book has been written.