The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

II NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE THIRD REICH

“I demand races of orbic bards, with unconditional and uncompromising sway. Come forth, sweet democratic despots of the West! — Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, London, 1888, p. 59. “Fascism is anything but a conservative form.”
— W. H. Chamberlin, Confessions of an Individualist.

TO MAKE generalizations about the Germanies is as hopeless as to make generalizations about a subcontinent like India. What holds the Germanies together are not common denominators (of which there are few) but a persistent sentiment of “belonging together.” In spite of a few common characteristics there is nevertheless a feeling of common tasks, of common duties, of common memories, and the will to form a characteriological mosaic in the heart of Europe. The German lives strongly in the categories of tasks and duties (Aufgaben und Pflichten); in these categories “different” Germans can cooperate. If Germans would try to form a “nation” in the western sense and to become eidetically similar or identical (and National Socialism apes the West with fanatical fervor in this respect as well as in others), the end of Germandom, as we have known it, would be imminent.1 This danger must not be underestimated.

Still there are not a few “generalizes” at large, and every month we see, either in Britain or in the United States, a book published which deals with the “German Jekyll and Hyde,” the “Roots of Nazism,” the “German Question,” or other hopeless attempts to solve the painful riddle. The mistakes in the appraisal of the German character stem from two main sources.

Our authors forget, first of all, that Germandom on account of its geographical position participates in practically all European intellectual currents. If they try to find the roots of the Nazi enigma they forget to look outside the borders of the Reich. They concentrate on persons like General Haushofer, who is the last bogeyman of American journalism because he developed a new science whose principles were bitterly disregarded by National Socialists. But the principles of Geopolitik, shrouded in the mystery of scientific German, which is more difficult than Chinese, created the impression that this aged savant is another professor Moriarty in wickedness. Instead of denouncing geopolitics it would have been wiser to focus the attention on the deeper, moral issues. All these miserable professors at the Sorbonne, in Leyden, in Brussels, in the London School of Economics; all these essayists, pamphleteers, stump orators, editors, and politicians who believed in morals without religion, who wrote in behalf of a humanitarian, anthropocentric philosophy of life, who lectured on progress for progress’s sake, who fulminated against medievalism, broadcasted against the concept of free will, who eulogized and worshiped machinery, praised utilitarianism, ridiculed reverence and piety . . . they all are guilty, guilty, guilty . . . actively, passively, directly, indirectly . . . guilty as Hitler, as Göbbels, as Rosenberg, as Göring, and their docile followers. What are these new masters of Germany doing else than copying Émile Combes, Jeremiah Bentham, John Dewey, Robespierre, the “Imperial Wizzard”; what are they doing else than believing in the tenets of utilitarianism, environmentalism, biologism, the “survival of the fittest,” and the whole catechism of unrestrained modernity. Our “progressivists” are trying out the old trick of denouncing their murderous epigones as “survivals” of a past age, but the trick is beginning to outlive its usefulness.

The second mistake the critics of National Socialism commit in their analysis is to take a certain sector of Germandom under the microscope (or only certain stratifications). Our learned analysts usually have a fairly wide knowledge about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Wagner, Treitschke, and a few other thinkers and writers who undoubtedly had their influence and importance. But how many of the analytic investigators have taken pains to make an honest and objective evaluation of the Junker mind? How many of them are aware of the fact that 45 per cent of Germandom is Catholic?2 How many of them have ever made an attempt to study Catholic Germany, to investigate the influence of the monasteries, to study the Catholic periodicals? What, after all is known to them, about Austria’s share in German culture? The influence of Bohemia and the Habsburgs, the German bishops, the East Prussian Catholics? Conservative Germany is almost totally unknown to them; all they do is hash and rehash their repertoire of Bismarck, Fichte, Treitschke, and Nietzsche (never, never understanding the latter). To “explain” National Socialism with the help of Nietzsche’s philosophy is as futile as to interpret French Canadian culture by means of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” How many of these benighted friends or enemies of the Germanies have ever read Przywara’s analysis of the German mind . . . when it would take at least ten years residence in the country to understand (or rather, intuitively, to guess) the meaning of Przywara’s language? And then there is still the broad question of the relationship between thinkers and culture, writers and masses in co-ordination with the German Scene. Do German philosophies explain the German mind? Does Hobbes, for instance, explain the Anglo-Saxon mind? All these are questions which cannot be easily answered.

We have already stressed the point that Parliamentarism in the classical sense never had a chance to survive in Germany. It is a working proposition in only such countries as have already achieved a great uniformity of thought.

This uniformity of thought has not even now been achieved in Germany. The brutal terror of the present rulers of the Third Reich is a clear indication that they have to cope with the same, age-old German personalism which, if coupled with a little more Zivilcourage,3 courage of civilians in daily life — would be a very dynamic power.

It would be an interesting experiment to quiz all inmates of a large hotel in New York and of another such hotel in “identitarian” Berlin, and then to compare the political opinions of the guests as well as of the employees. There is little doubt that everybody living in the Waldorf-Astoria would declare himself for the Republican form of state and (often without being able to define it) for “democracy” in government and society. Even the Communists would agree in so far as they consider communism to be nothing else but “streamlined democracy” (or “Twentieth-century Americanism”). In a large hotel in Berlin we would find persons who believe in National Socialism and others who don’t, which fact they will confess only on condition that full secrecy is assured them. Some would be Communists, others religious Socialists, others again Catholic “Democrats” or Catholic Monarchists. Some of the latter would see a restoration of the Hohenzollerns and the revival of parlia mentarian liberalism, others again would like to go back to the Habs burgs and the First Reich. One would find adherents to the Weimar Republic, Social Democrats, Independent Socialists, Protestant Liberals of the Bismarckian type, Black Front Supporters, Stalinists, Anarchists and Trotzkyites.

One must not forget that there were about fourteen different parties in the Reichstag before Hitler, representing about four major and ten minor philosophies. On the other hand, one can invite an American Democrat to dine with a Republican, an English Laborite with a Conservative or a Liberal, and be quite sure that they will all agree on the essentials.

Another potent reason for the breakdown of German political ochlocracy is to be found in the hatred of the German bureaucracy for the control of a Parliament, which was after all a control by laymen. Bureaucracy, which consists, or at least should consist exclusively of experts, nourishes a natural contempt for the amateur, a contempt which may turn into violent loathing if the amateur is given controlling power over the expert. We must furthermore keep in mind that only countries with great per capita riches can afford a government by laymen and give them a chance and leisure to experiment. Yet unsuccessful experiments in poor countries can easily turn into national disasters. The German bureaucracy with its very Germanic contempt for the lay masses, was only waiting for the end of popular representation. This liquidation of an obsolete system could only be achieved by a return to monarchy, military dictatorship, or by a sweeping victory of a single party which would not be forced to compromise with other parties in a coalition government. Such a party could even destroy or amend the constitution and give a free hand to the Civil Service, which in turn would be able to increase the popularity of the party by running the country efficiently on utilitarian principles.5

Yet the monarchical sentiments were already too weakened and the efforts of General Schleicher to establish a military dictatorship supported by Civil Service and the trade-unions failed. The wishful dream of the bureaucracy was fulfilled in the least desirable way. By outlawing the Communist Party, the National Socialists gained 51 per cent of all votes, and the Third Reich was established to the great detriment of the Germanies and Europe.

Something similar happened in Russia and Italy where a bureaucracy works under the supervision of a party. In Russia it was obvious that the party would have the upper hand. In Italy and Germany the bureaucratic groups were bitterly disillusioned; they received a free hand in many domains but cultural affairs remained a prerogative of the party officials. And the cultural domain is the most important one in the eyes of Continentals.

All these three states — the Reich, the USSR, and Italy — are not dictatorships in the classic sense. They are one-party states and their dictators have as party bosses a “parliamentarian” past. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini have (unlike Dionysos of Syracuse or Polycrates of Samos) a whole party machinery behind them, not just a police force. If one remembers that the word party comes from the Latin word pars (part), and that the NSDAP, the VKP(b) and the PNF6 pretend to represent the whole nation, the paradoxical and evil aspects of the situation become apparent.

The Great Error of the Century (i.e., to consider nationalism, a Rightist idea) was largely due to the resentment against the destructive idea of Internationalism, prone to trample down every tradition, everything organically grown, eager to transform the world into a dull, uniform place without romantic variations, where everybody between Hammerfest and Capetown would wear long pants, inflammable celluloid collars and speak Esperanto.

Yet the National Socialists themselves established a “German Internationalism” by brutally persecuting all federal and centrifugal forces, by prohibiting the use of the provincial and city flags, by ridiculing local patriotism and branding everybody who dared to criticize centralization as a “separatist traitor.” Gleichschaltung — assimilating unification — is the sacred slogan of the National Socialists who already in their very name display two identitarian ideas. It must be borne in mind that nationalism and internationalism are (like capitalism and socialism — see p. 134), not antagonistic ideas but just one and the same idea, different only in the employment of means. The Internationalist wants identity over the whole world and to crush all “local” differences. The Nationalist similarly is out to eradicate all “local” (tribal, provincial) differences. But the ultimate issue is not between the monolithic nation of the Nationalists and the monolithic world of the Internationalist, because the true Nationalist who is always an expansionist wants to dominate the whole world and his herdist ideal is a world exclusively populated by his own race (after the extermination of all “inferior” races). The uniform world of the Internationalist, populated by a standardized race of mongrels, is only paralleled by the uniform world of the Nationalist populated by a standard race which has assimilated or exterminated all other linguistic or racial units.

There is another issue which needs elucidating: the National Socialist slogan of Blut und Boden (blood and soil). Soil is something personal; where I dwell and live nobody else can dwell; this is also the gist of the physical law that two bodies cannot be in the same place at the same time. But “blood” (nation, race) is something we possess with other people in common.7 Soil has a personalist (romantic) value, blood has predominantly herdist aspects. In theory it is easy to reconcile these two ideals because they belong to two different categories (like “black” and “tall”), but in political practice they may frequently clash. The blood-and-soil dogma was therefore never sincerely accepted by the National Socialists; they were far too urban to look with reverence at the diversity of the soil, and the Boden part of their slogan was discarded as soon as they entered into world politics. After their sensible start with the reform of the laws of agrarian inheritance they immediately betrayed the South Tyrolean peasantry and the Baltic gentry and inaugurated a period of migratory Jewish Ahasverism such as was never witnessed before in Modern European History. Only a completely déraciné urbanite can rejoice in the idea of seeing people who dwelt for 500 years on the same spot being shipped, against their will, to some remote part of the Continent where they have to live as squatters in a world with which they have nothing in common. Baltic noblemen who were put into Polish castles with another family’s crest over the gate felt worse than thieves.

Blut und Boden embraces the same inner antagonism as “liberty and equality” or “patriotism and nationalism.” It is obvious that blood and nationalism on one hand and soil and patriotism on the other go well together. After some reflection we will come to the conclusion that blood-nationalism matches with equality, while soil patriotism matches with liberty. The soil makes free men (the peasant and the landed nobleman are free), but blood is an equalizing and generalizing factor. “The Germans,” “the Jews,” “the Negroes,” each names a species, but a plot of land is personal (property). The monarchical idea can only be reintroduced in connection with soil and patriotism, never with blood and equality which reeks of the French Revolution, of Robespierre, Hitler, Judge Lynch, and the slaughter of the modern mass wars. This whole question is of the utmost importance — not only to Germany but to the world at large. It is a burning problem in the United States where the love for the soil is almost absent among the large urban masses and the label “patriotism” actually denotes nationalism. This very war is one between liberty and soil on one side, as against equality (identity) and blood on the other. If equality and blood win over freedom and land, monotony instead of creative diversity will dominate the world and make life intolerable.

The Austrians of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, incorporated in the Vaterländische Front (Patriotic Front), stood for the idea of Fatherland-Home (Vaterland-Heimat) as against the National Socialist Folk-Nation (Volk-Nation-Rasse). For the supercilious foreign observers it was just one form of “fascism” against another one. They always hoped for an unholy alliance between the “clericals” and the international Socialists against the National Socialists. Yet the events of February, 1934, showed clearly that the international Socialists never hesitated to help their national colleagues by attacking the “clericals” in the most critical moment of self-defense.

Before continuing the analysis of National Socialism it will be necessary to concentrate upon the person of its originator and leader.

Hitler was born and brought up in prewar Austria. His father belonged to the lowest layer of the bourgeoisie. He himself spent his childhood in the smaller towns of the Upper-Austrian plain, one of the very few flat parts of Austria. He never climbed mountains nor did he ever live a truly rural life. He is a purely “urban” type.

As a young man he came to Vienna, at that time a very cosmopolitan and aristocratic city with the best Catholic and European tradition around a German nucleus. This city was the synthesis of East and West. Built on the last extremities of the Hungarian plain, its western suburbs nevertheless touch the foot of the Alps. The inner city with its cathedral and the imperial palace — the Burg — is full of memories from the First Reich. In the Burg were, until recently, the crown and insignias of the Holy Roman Empire. But the boroughs outside the former walls showed eastern monotony; here many Jews, Czechs, Croats, Poles, Magyars, and Italians had their quarters. The castle of Schönbrunn reminds one somehow of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, for although built in the eighteenth century in imitation of Versailles, it is massive, robust, and has definitely something Eastern about it in its heaviness. The Burg was built at a time when the Habsburgs still remembered their having been at one time counts in Switzerland, whereas Schönbrunn distinctly belonged to a monarch who ruled over the melancholy plains of Hungary and Galicia.

Hitler was at least indifferent toward Catholicism; Europe meant for him nothing, he disliked the Habsburgs, hated the Austrian Idea, and loathed Vienna. He never understood the complex soul of the multicolored city. Like all men of a limited knowledge he had a violent, inborn hatred for things or ideas which surpassed his comprehension. He had the same dislike for Austria as all great “Liberals” of his time, and he viewed the dual monarchy in the same negative terms as Gladstone, Wickham Steed, Seton-Watson, and Mazzini, whose great objects of admiration were “enlightened” countries (like Prussia or Rumania). Hitler was shocked by the lack of homogeneity in his fatherland and its capital, and the universal character of the Habsburgs seemed to him a betrayal of the German essence of Austria. These “unpatriotic” monarchs and princes who spoke German, French, Hungarian, and Czech with equal ease, these descendants of the Holy Roman Emperors who regularly married foreigners, could not meet the approval of a young man thoroughly imbued (without knowing it) by the ideas of the French Revolution. The presence of Jews exasperated his sense of uniformity even more; how could he bear the thought that a part of the Viennese population belonged to another race. Their black, shabby coats, their papers printed in Hebrew letters, their strange accent and even stranger features outraged the desire for symmetry and identity of the young, hungry “artist.”

Prior to the outbreak of World War I Hitler gave up his domicile in Vienna and took quarters in Munich. This at least was a city after his own heart. Munich was the residence of the rulers of Bavaria who had been made kings by Napoleon’s grace. This country, though largely Catholic, had often accepted material and financial help from the French who played them up against the Emperor. Yet it must be admitted in all fairness that this treacherous attitude of the court of Munich was a less frequent and less dangerous enterprise than the dubious activities of the Prussians.

Still it must be borne in mind that the virus of National Socialism as a definite political organization came from outside the Second Reich. A Weltanschauung which combines the national with the social as well as with a “religious” outlook only existed in a concrete form in the Taborite wing of Hussitism. This Taborite tradition had always survived in the soul of the Czech people and it was no wonder when a group of Czech Socialists seceded in the last decade of the nineteenth century from the II Internationale because they were unable to share the antinationalistic outlook of that world-wide organization. The group in question called themselves Czech National Socialist Party, and survived until the breakdown of Czechoslovakia. Doctor Edward Beneš is one of its most important exponents. The character of this party is described by Karel Hoch in the following words:

Collectivizing by means of development; surmounting class struggle by national discipline; moral rebirth and democracy as the conditions of socialism; powerful, popular army, etc.10

The Germans of Bohemia and Moravia (the so-called “Sudeten Germans”) started early in the twentieth century a countermovement which was first called Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers Party). It was founded largely by Czech renegades who transplanted the Hussite ideas of anticlericalism, anti-Habsburgism, and “racial” mass sentiment into the Germans of the northwestern borderlands of the Austrian monarchy. Among these were men like Aloysius Cihula, Ferdinand Burschofsky, Proch, Kroy, and Dr. Walter Riehl (who became later leader of the Austrian National Socialists after the Armistice).

The Moravian local groups demanded repeatedly the adoption of the name “German National Socialist Workers Party,” but the Bohemian groups resisted because such a frank adaptation of the name of their Czech “opposite number” seemed too much of a recognition of their lack of originality.11 The political tendency of the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was naturally “liberal” and “democratic.” On their meeting in Trautenau (August 15, 1905) they declared solemnly that they were:

. . . a liberal, nationalistic party which fights with all powers at its disposal against all reactionary movements, against all feudal, clerical, and capitalistic privileges, as well as against all influences with an alien racial background.12

The efforts of the Moravian groups nevertheless bore fruit. The last great congress of the Arbeiterpartei before the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was held on the fifth of May, 1918, in Vienna and thus for the first time outside of Bohemia and Moravia. Then the name Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei was finally adopted and the new formulation of the program showed further steps in the direction which Hitler later on eagerly pursued. It was then decreed that:

. . . the German National Socialist Workers Party is not a party exclusively for laborers; it stands for the interests of every decent and honest enterprise. It is a liberal and strictly racial (völkische) Party fighting against all reactionary efforts, the clerical, feudal, and capitalistic privileges, but before all against the increasing influence of the Jewish commercial mentality which encroaches on public life. . . .

. . . The Party demands the introduction of plebiscites for all important laws. . . . The Party demands the abolition of the rule of Jewish banks over our economical life and the establishment of People’s Banks under democratic control.13

We see here the cant of continental “democracy,” the racialistic appeal, the plebiscitarian tendencies.

The party was naturally rather small in the beginning but it was nevertheless able to score 42,000 votes in the first elections of Czechoslovakia in June, 1919. There was a certain stagnation in the movement which watched the rise of its younger sister organization in Germany with keen interest and enthusiasm. After Hitler’s release from his internment, in December, 1924, the National Socialists of the Czechoslovak Republic accepted the leadership of the numerically superior group in the German Reich. The masters had submitted to their pupils.14

The power and secret of the Third Reich lies exactly in the fact that it was never anything else but an exaggeration of the Second Reich. National Socialism hardly brought any new ideas to the Germanies. There are certain traits in the German character which might be called “eastern,”15 but National Socialism itself is not in the least eastern. It is imposed upon a background which has eastern elements, but the very ideas (not the character)16 of the unfortunate Austrian lowlander, who leads the Germanies, are essentially western. They are a logical concoction of concepts of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, biologism, Richard Wagner, and Amerikanismus.

In order to look them over more clearly we shall analyze in succession their various aspects:

I. The mechanical material conception of the Reich. The Reich, instead of being a spiritual entity with a world mission, becomes an introvert state which, for its existence, has no need of a metaphysical or supranational justification. The only and ultimate reason for its existence is the life of the German people. It feeds, nourishes, protects, and regulates the people. It is no less a utilitarian organization than the Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., or General Motors, Inc. The bigger the Reich, the better for the German people. A bigger Reich means more food, automobiles, railways, elastic garters, and radio sets. To achieve this bigger Reich a military success is necessary. The ideal Reich — the commercial industrial Lebensraum, populated by the German people as well as their metics (Czechs) and helots (Poles) — guarantees the highest living standards in the world. The perfected Third Reich is supposed to be some sort of paradise — rather like the Soviet Millennium17 or the ochlocratic Brave New World where milk and honey flow. Germany must top Europe, Europe the world. Deutschland über Alles, über Alles in der Welt. Germany must become the biggest, widest, cheapest, happiest country in the world. Germany must become another “America.”

II. The Third Reich will be collectivistic. Its perfection will necessitate a terrific collective effort. The person does not count. This collective effort is not only a means but also an end. Collectivism is going to stay for good. “One German is as good as any other German,” is a slogan which can be frequently heard. National Socialism — like Communism in the eyes of the Stalinists — is the most modern form of democracy. When Hitler and Mussolini attack the “western democracies” they insinuate that their “democracy” is not genuine. National Socialism envisages abolishing the difference in wealth, education, intellect, taste, philosophy, and habits by a leveling process which necessitates in turn a total control over the child and the adolescent. Every personal attitude will be branded — after communist pattern — as “bourgeois,” and this in spite of the fact that the bourgeois is the representative of the most herdist class in the world, and that National Socialism is a basically bourgeois movement.

Hitler in Mein Kampf repeatedly speaks of the “masses” and the “herd” referring to the people. The German people should probably, in his view, remain a mass of identical “individuals” in an enormous sand heap or ant heap, identical even to the color of their shirts, the garment nearest to the body.

III. To achieve even greater identity the tentative effort has been made to identify nation — i.e., the linguistic-cultural nation — with biological race. The Nordic race (less represented among Germans than among Poles if the anthropological measurements and statistics are correct) was singled out to be synonymous with Germandom.18

The emphasis on race was so strong, because it is the only factor that cannot be altered by mere education, coercion, persuasion, or propaganda. A Catholic might become a Protestant, a painter turn into a dictator, a New Dealer into a Republican, but a Negro cannot become a “Caucasian,” a Semite, or a Mongol. There always was at least a certain similarity between the races and racial mixtures within the borders of the Reich, but the Jews were and are “different.” The natural, romantic man, regardless of whether he liked or disliked the Jews, saw in them the representants of an interesting and ancient race, blood brothers of our Lord. Yet the true herdist resented the baptized or unbaptized sons of Abraham violently, and for the identitarian National Socialist, with his latent inferiority complex and his petit bourgeois lack of worldly experience, they were the worst offenders against the sacred law of uniformity. Racial laws, prohibiting the intermarriage between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans” were issued in order to achieve a more uniform breed. But the final solution of the “problem” is only extermination or emigration.

IV. The Third Reich is fundamentally secular. The first steps toward a secularization and despiritualization of modern culture were made by the nineteenth-century “liberals” of the etatistic brand19 who started the downward trend by the institution of the obligatory civil marriage. Thus marriage became primarily a legal affair, a “free” and therefore dissolvable contract between two persons.20 The omnipotent state, which “sanctified” the marital bed with revenue stamps and legal permits, did not stop at that point.21 The modern Leviathan goes even further and investigates the racial and sanitary background of those concerned and then nods approval or raises a prohibiting warning finger.22

V. The Third Reich is not only extremely race conscious but equally health conscious. Mein Kampf deals extensively with health problems and the doctor worshiping spirit of the “men in white” atmosphere thus finds its counterparts in the Germanies. The German “men in white” and “brown sisters” are reinforced by storm troopers, Gestapo, and the entire mighty Arm of the State. The Guillotine — adopted from the older Democracy — the castrating and sterilizing knife, the firing squad in the concentration camps are all busy creating a “New Race” full of health, vigor, and pep. Education weeds out the weaklings, the super-intellectuals, and the romantics with personal ideas. Göring’s Rechte Kerle are nothing but the “regular guys” of America or the “ordinary decent chaps” of England. Needless to say that people like Beethoven with his ear troubles; Schiller and Novalis with pulmonary tuberculosis; Kleist suffering from cyclic melancholia; Heine, Schubert, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche, St. Augustine, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Paul, or Milton would all have come under the knife for reasons of hereditary ailments, race, or “general health.”

The ideal German youth of tomorrow is the beaming boy of the soap advertisements, a young man, healthy, simple, stupid, “decent,” neither good nor bad, the very subject of Ödön von Horvath’s Age of the Fish.

VI. The Third Reich is Machiavellian as well as utilitarian.23 State abortion for the “unfit,” sterilization for eugenic reasons, euthanasia for the hopelessly insane, the entire vocabulary of a progressive world which prefers to spend money on popular cars and howitzers rather than on insane asylums or hospitals for the incurable, characterize National Socialist practice.

Hitler himself has a deep and almost religious respect for science and technical “progress.” In that respect he could match most American professors. In one of his speeches in Nuremberg (September, 1938) he said very clearly:

Der Nationalsozialismus ist keine kultische Religion, sondern eine auf exakter Wissenschaft aufgebaute Volksbewegung. (National socialism is not a religion founded on a cult, but a popular movement based on exact sciences.)24

The very spirit embodied in such magazines as, for instance, Popular Science is embodied in National Socialism. This is backed up by a strong and holy belief that we are in the maelstrom of a steadily faster moving scientific progress and that Germany must lead, in that noble competition, all other states. International statistics are carefully watched in order to keep in step. Every German should therefore not only possess the identical brown shirt and the identical education but also an identical car — the Volkswagen, an identical wireless set, the Volksempfänger, etc. Hitler wants a Germany more progressive than any other country; bigger and better factories, highways, laboratories, steamships, railways, public buildings, bicycles, and airplanes. And Germany really became more progressive and more uniform. To every unprejudiced Leftist the Third Reich must be a paradise; jealousy and envy alone for the achievement of a competing group may dampen his or her enthusiasm or generate an unwarranted dislike.

VII. The Third Reich is majoritarian like every true ochlocracy. The suppression of minorities is illiberal but not undemocratic (in the classical sense). Yet the Third Reich never pretended to be liberal, neither did the Soviet Union. Stalin even took pains to establish a “Finnish Democratic People’s Republic” in Terijoki during the Finnish war. Thousands of Russians died in order to “increase the realm” of this “little democracy.”

VIII. The Third Reich not only stands for an “inner democracy” and identity, but also for material equality with other nations. “The Germanies,” say the National Socialists, “have to keep up with the Joneses” — not referring, of course, to the individuals, but to the inhabitants of the Reich in relation to those of other countries. Hitler repeatedly boasted that the standard of living of the German working class is superior to that of the corresponding class in England. This probably held true for the two first years of his regime. Unemployment, without doubt, was a very grave problem in the Reich, but a mere comparison between British and German industrial areas gave to the impartial observer the impression that the German standards were definitely superior. It may be true that the Germans lived largely on borrowed money, but they lived well and the proletariat was obviously on its way to reach the material level of the bourgeoisie. The middle class, on the other hand, had no reasonable hope of ever reaching or surpassing British middle-class standards. A substantial part of the German peasantry was far better off than the English tenants. The differences were only spectacular in the high income brackets. But income differences in the upper classes merely indicate that the standards of luxuries, and not of necessities, are at variance. Thus, taking the German people as a whole, one can say (if one is permitted to generalize) that it was one of the richest in Europe, second only to the Scandinavians, Dutch, and, perhaps, the English. German standards were incomparably higher than those of France, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, or the Balkans. Yet a mass spirit of collective competition, collective envy, and collective jealousy was whipped up. As if there were not greater values than banking accounts, per-capita consumption of coffee and similar capitalistic criteria!

National Socialism started as a social ideology in the national framework and developed into a socialistic ideology of nations. Today it is a political philosophy demanding a very democratic identity of wealth between the nations, just as communism puts more stress on the uniformity of the living standards of individuals. National Socialism is therefore in a sense even more identitarian than Communism, which clamors for identical ants, whereas National Socialism demands identical ant hills.

IX. But even within the ant heap there is total uniformity. At the present moment there are still privileges and “aristocracies” in existence for the mere reason that uniformity has not yet been fully achieved. If the Jews form an underprivileged (or even outlawed) class and thus interrupt the uniformity, it is only because they are literally a survival from the old “chaotic disorder.” The ideal Third Reich of tomorrow has only Aryans, National Socialists, members of the unified State Church,25 and perhaps, after centuries of eugenic measures, sterilizations and artificial inseminations, only Nordics of the cranial index x, with a light-blue colored iris and fair hair. The proposal to breed Germans like dogs or rabbits in kennels or studs has repeatedly been made before and after Hitler came to power.26 It would certainly be a logical step if the axioms of National Socialism are not going to be questioned or successfully challenged from within. And there is also the problem about the “Revolution in Permanence.” If Nazism should win the present war something must be done in order to keep the masses “occupied.” But similar measures (from a more “eugenic” than racialist type) may be expected in the Soviet Union, or for that sake, in very health conscious, progressive, terroristic ochlocracies without a sound, liberal tradition.27

X. Another typically ochlocratic trait (intrinsically connected with the one mentioned before) is the emphasis on size and the reverence for quantity. Only in a bourgeois-commercial age did countries begin to boast of the number of their inhabitants and the square miles of their surface. It became one of the characteristics of the American Republic to refer continually to the size of the country, yet these references were scanty in comparison with those of the great number worshipers, the Russian Communists, who loved to point out at every occasion that they control “one-sixth of the earth.” Mayakovski’s famous poem-song, 150 Millions, reflects the same arithmetic spirit. No well-bred Englishman, Chinese, or eighteenth-century Spaniard would be permanently conscious of belonging to empires with so and so many millions of inhabitants and square miles. Neither would they use these statistics in recurrent phrases. Yet just this quantitative consciousness has been so deeply inoculated into countless Germans by the National Socialists and their forerunners.

XI. Chesterton was the first to point out the Jewish essence of National Socialism. The overindustrious and indiscriminate reading of books with such a strong nationalistic keynote as the Talmud, has planted many fundamentally Jewish conceptions into the heads of the present masters of Germany. A distortion of the old Jewish racialism is: Recht ist was dem Deutschen Volke nutzt — “Whatever is of advantage to the German people is just and lawful.”28 Dr. Göbbel’s order in November, 1938, not to sell any more goods to the Jews reminds one of the Talmudian law not to sell anything to the Christians during the Jewish feast days. The Nuremberg laws have their parallels in the prescriptions of the Old Testament which strictly prohibited the intermarriage with non-Jews, regardless of their faith. Offspring resulting from the union between Hebrews and the Canaanites (the autochthonous population) was considered to be illegitimate. The Samaritans, who prayed to the same God as the Jews, were practically outcasts and even more despised than the Bââl worshipers because their ancestors had intermarried during the Babylonian captivity with “racially impure” Chaldeans. The conception of the Chosen People (once theologically justified) is of Jewish origin.29 And it is equally true that the “Fall of the Germans” can only be compared with the tragedy of the Fall of the Jews from their exalted position of a “Chosen People” to their Ahasveric existence since the terrible night of Golgotha. Only a very great people, like the Germans or Russians, with an imperial past, can experience such utter degradation. Corruptio optimi pessima. In order to produce a Lenin or a Göbbels, a Cheka or a Gestapo, one must have had a great past with an Albertus Magnus, a Dostoyevski, a Tauler, or a Solovyev. To fall deep and to crush fatally one must have jumped from a tower or a mountain.

XII. The Third Reich is furthermore the most modern state of the world.30 Nothing could be more incorrect than to speak about Germany putting the clock back. This mistake has arisen due to the wrong interpretation of nationalism and to the mistreatment of Jews.31 Yet the attitude toward Jews in the Middle Ages sprung from purely religious reasons. Individual conversion completely changed their status which was in any case better than generally assumed. They enjoyed a far-reaching autonomy and very few of them objected to the institution of the Ghetto. There was no desire of the Jews to “assimilate,” and a symbiosis between Jews and Gentiles is impossible for the Orthodox Jew who is not permitted by his religion to live in a Christian (trefen) house. Jews were treated far better than heretics and it was definitely better to be a Jew in Rome than a Jesuit in Elizabethan England.

Intelligent observers who witnessed the annexation of Austria in 1938 were impressed by the fact of a large-scale “modernization” of that country. The French Revolution was suddenly let loose on that part of the First Reich which had so far pretty successfully withstood the onslaught of the philosophy of Rousseau. Racial discrimination of American intensity was ordered by law, divorce was made possible, and civil marriage obligatory, conscription reached its high pitch, local flags were abolished, and mass arrests of members of the nobility set in. The governor of Austria, Herr Bürckel, declared solemnly that he extended a friendly hand to everybody — Socialist, Liberal, Democrat, or Communist — but not to the aristocrats, who never ceased to try to restore the Old Order by intrigues.32 Religious instruction, hitherto obligatory, was made an optional subject approaching Horace Mann’s ideas, monasteries were confiscated, and the general will was ascertained in a plebiscite.33 Students were trained in labor camps for “honest, straight, manual work,” intellectuals were assailed and great care was given to the improvement of communications. Even the very name of Austria was abolished. The feeling was general that a great, popular revolt of the masses against the First and the Second Estate, who had conspired to sell the honest, hardworking people to the internationally minded Habsburgs, had succeeded. The government-regulated press fostered the notion that Austria had barely escaped a sinister fate.

XIII. The people who suffer genuinely in majoritarian dictatorships are “only” minorities. The plebiscitarian dictatorship always favors (or intends to favor) the majorities. If the herdist spirit is strong the minorities will be automatically disliked for the mere fact that they dare to be “different.” The hatred of the democratic masses for the minorities is the driving force and the cement for these “democratic” dictatorships under popular leaders (in Greek: δημαγογός). Such minorities are the members of royal families, capitalists, priests, Jews, aristocrats, intellectuals, artists, highbrows, cripples, nuns, criminals, and lunatics. The persecution of the middle classes in Russia was only possible because this class was small. In Germany this class is strong. It may be educated to hate all “irregular” people without pity.

XIV. There is a very small minority in the Germanies deadly set against the regime. We must first of all realize that ninety-five per cent of modern people have no ideas or convictions of their own. Five per cent have views and convictions but again ninety-five per cent of these do not dare to stand up for them. There are five per cent of five per cent who have courage and convictions. These make history for good or evil. And if we ask ourselves why there is such little evidence of the three to four millions who have convictions without having the determination to stand up for them we must come to the clearcut conclusion that the civilized and cultured Europeans34 of the Northwest have become trembling cowards. We must never underestimate the influence of a whole century of materialism, love of comfort, and determinism which deprived us, almost all of us (Christians and materialists alike), of our personal dignity, our courage, our honor, our élan. We are afraid of death, torture, exile, and concentration camps, but we are even more afraid of the deadliest weapon in the hands of the totalitarian state — loss of employment, poverty, destitution. With a stroke of the pen the totalitarian state can deprive us (mainly the city dwellers) of every possibility to earn our livelihood, the grimmest damnation in urban civilization. The menace of no employment, no salary, no food, and no roof has created in our day a dearth of great saints like Edmund Campion, St. Thomas More, or the Christians of the Arena. Only at the “periphery,” in Macedonia, Spain, Finland, Russia, are things different. Only there do we witness the will to rebellion, self-sacrifice, and freedom from time to time. The “civilized” Europeans are homines oeconomici and the homo oeconomicus is born to be a slave. Only the saints are free. Il n’y qu’une tristesse, c’est de n’être pas des saintes, “There is but one sadness: lack of sanctity,” says Leon Bloy’s Femme pauvre. And that, exactly, is the great calamity of modern society.

For greater convenience we shall put these fourteen points, just listed, and the elementary facts about the Germanies, in a shorter syllabus:

1. Prussia was nourished by France and England for selfish and psychological reasons into greatness. When they wanted to stop her it was too late.

2. Prussia was not a typically feudal country but a bureaucratic middle-class state. Not the Junkers but the Huguenot refugees became the basis of modern commercial and industrial Prussia35

3. Frederick II followed a traitorous, anti-German policy. His education, mind, and ancestry was largely French. Brutal, militaristic, agnostic, and “progressive,” he had a deep admiration for the civilized West.

4. Prussian militarism is not “aristocratic.” Neither is conscription a Prussian invention. Militarism and conscription are phenomena of the French Revolution. Modern militarism is fundamentally connected with nationalism, ochlocracy, and industrialism.

5. The greatest mistake of the century — committed by certain Prussian noblemen, American columnists, and English bankers — was to see in nationalism a Rightist idea.

6. Capitalism is not less “leftish” than socialism. Capitalism as well as socialism accept technical “progress” unreservedly. Between excessive private capitalism and state capitalism there is a relationship as between nationalism and internationalism. This difference is one of intensity but not of essence.

7. The Austrians are Germans and probably the “best” ones. The Germanic character of the Prussians is doubtful. When the Nibelungen Saga was first sung in the Austro-Bavarian dialect the Old Prussians and Pomeranians still worshiped their Slavic and Baltic gods.

8. Even Francis Joseph considered himself to be a “German Prince.” In 1866 he headed a German coalition against Prussians and Italians. The rule of progressive, Protestant Prussia finally affected the German character.

9. National Socialism is the bureaucratic, Germanized version of the French Revolution.36

10. Practically all ideas in National Socialism can be traced back to the following sources:

a) The French Revolution and its immediate offshoots.

b) The Old Testament (misapplied) and the Talmud (part of it).

c) The Industrial Revolution.

e) Karl Marx and Socialism.

f) Biologism (Darwin, Grant, Stoddard, Chamberlain, Gobineau).

g) Richard Wagner.

It lacks though one “modern” influence — whiggish, pre-Manchesterian liberalism.

11. There is no “putting the clock back” in the Third Reich which is the millennium of modernity.

12. World War I was a struggle concerning Austria-Hungary.

13. Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest were not brutal treaties.

14. Germany won the war when Austria-Hungary was dismembered.

17. The leaders of these totalitarian superdemocracies frequently acknowledge the “democratic” character of their governments, but the “Fascists” will seldom confess to be “Leftists.”

18. The German character — outside of urban Prussia — is not in the least herdist by nature. Prussia and Austria alone have a truly military tradition. One must not forget that the Germans still preserved their individualistic separatism and federalism long after all other European nations had been united for some time into centralistic, unilingual states.

19. National Socialism is the fulfillment of Continental “liberalism” which stems largely from Rousseau and the ideas of Adam Smith in a collectivized version. The continental Liberals never were liberals in the English sense; their “liberalism” was nothing else but the struggle against the existing order and the old tradition. Foolishly enough the English Liberals supported their continental “coreligionists,” never being fully aware of the abyss which actually divided them.

The continental Liberals were the most narrow-minded and destructive intriguers between Calais and Constantinople. With their appeal to the upper middle classes they never foresaw the day when the masses would take over their ideas (after having twisted them about to suit their own taste). The great ideas of Nazidom — utilitarianism, anticlericalism, anti-Catholicism, compulsory education, mass production, regimentation — were taken from their catechism. They had fought grimly against the great medieval heritage and they have succeeded in destroying the bulk of it, thus paving the way for the Fascists and National Socialists who did nothing but popularize the continental brand of liberalism, which in turn was nothing else than democratism in disguise.37 The modern Anglo-Saxon type of liberalism, on the other hand, with its relativism in the matters of ideas, philosophies, and religions will hardly ever appeal to the Continental who will never be induced to believe that if A is true and B contrary to A, B nevertheless can represent truth. If Catholicism is right then Protestantism is wrong and vice versa. Things on the Continent are white or black and if they are actually gray they are worse than black because they might cause confusion. There is a grim and inescapable logic in this attitude.

The only people who were liberal in Europe were old-fashioned Conservatives of aristocratic stock with an eighteenth-century mentality. They were not “liberal” but generous. They were far too haughty and self-confident to get excited about the propagation of untruth. They had as little personal grievance about Protestants as Dr. Johnson about Catholics. Yet even their personal generosity did not alter the fact that they considered themselves (in religious as well as political matters) dead right and their opponents dead wrong. It was always the privilege of the bourgeois to invoke the law and the police. It is true that “liberal” governments on the continent, though despotic because of the lack of the old liberal tradition, which countries like England and the United States enjoyed, never went as far as to execute their adversaries (with the exception of the liberal terror in Rumania a generation ago where thousands of peasants were slaughtered). Yet to see an illiberal article in a “liberal” paper, or praise bestowed upon a nonliberal book in a “liberal” literary review, was out of the question. Comparing a “liberal” editor of the nineteenth century with a Roman Cardinal of the eighteenth century it would not have been difficult to point out which of these two could be called a genuine Liberal. The followers of the “liberal” politicians and writers have had finally to drop their farcical name. They are now proud to be Nazis.

One could imagine, of course, one hundred and fifty years ago, an English gentleman in Hampshire talking after dinner with his Prussian guest about the intrinsic wickedness of the French character. Let us assume for argument’s sake that we are writing in the year 1794. Queen Marie Antoinette has just been beheaded and the Terror is at its worst. These two men would suddenly remember all sinister parts of French history; Louis XI, Philip the Handsome and the brutal suppression of the Templars, the Armagnacs, the atrocities of the Albigenses, the Jacquerie and the Secrets of the Bastille, the lettres de cachet and the chambres ardentes, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and the many shady characters in French history. Our friends, in consequence, would now definitely be tempted to attribute the hideous atrocities of the Great “Democratic” Dawn to the inherent wickedness of the French national character.

More outspoken views would have been expressed by the less educated people. The men in the pubs of Southampton and the roadmakers around Dover would have hardly bothered to explain the happenings with ideological or historical explanations. For them the French were a bad lot altogether; nothing but untrustworthy, Popish rabble with grubby faces, loud mouths, and closed purses.

The upper layer of the English population, however, keeping up contacts with the most cultured émigrés, who often stayed in their houses, would never have arrived at such summary conclusions. We have practically no printed evidence for any fundamentally anti-French turn of mind among educated Europeans. Neither, of course, were books and pamphlets written for the masses. Nor were educated people imbued by nationalism, racialism, or the more modern excesses of anthropology or biology. To fall as low as to make the French character responsible for the excesses or brutalities of the Revolution was almost impossible for any person of culture, education, and savoir-vivre.

 

________________

39 This is exactly the bone of contention with a Franco-American friend of mine who cannot help to deplore the fact that the Germans do not form an “ordinary nation” in the western sense. France of the Bourbons, Bonapartes as well as the Third Republic have done everything to “nationalize” the Germans. But collectivized Germany of 1940 is hardly a more amiable neighbor than the Holy Roman Empire of 1525.

40 Catholicism (and its culture) is in a way a closed world. It is almost impossible for the outsider to appreciate and understate its values in the right proportion and relation. Adults have a certain ability (in varying degrees) to understand children; children can never understand old people. Neither can the fragment understand the total. Continentals can understand Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxons very seldom Continentals; Catholics may understand Protestants, but Protestants in order to understand Catholics (as Catholics) have to cope with an obstacle of 1500 years. This is the reason why Anglo-Saxons have sometimes made quite successful interpretations of Protestant Northern Germany, but one could hardly ever expect a good Protestant monograph on a Catholic subject or person, not even on a Catholic renegade like Hitler. The Catholic world has seven seals of which not even one can be easily broken.

41 It was curiously enough Bismarck who was the first to point out the great lack of Zivilcourage among the Germans.

42 The Catholic Centrists made a mistake similar to that committed by the Jews. They favored republicanism and political ochlocracy in Germany because they (justly) disliked the Hohenzollerns. Yet they forgot the fact that the Catholics of Germany were a minority in the Second Reich and that they could easily be crushed by an overwhelming victory of a party which rallies the majority of the country with an anti-Catholic (or anti-Christian) battle cry. The more intelligent Centrists like Brüning had more “perspective” and finally worked for the return of the monarchy.

43 In the good old days, before he signed the grandiloquent demo-nazi manifesto, the City of Man, Herr Thomas Mann had a less beclouded vision. In his well-known book Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, written under the impact of the First World War (Berlin, 1922, pp. 285–287), he not only recognizes the burning antithesis between lay and expert rule, but he senses also the ochlocratic danger of popular envy and the even greater danger of “democratic” (and postdemocratic) totalitarianism in the form of the “politicized” nation.

44 NSDAP — Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; VKP(b) — Vsyesoyuzni Kommunističeski Part (bol’ševiki) All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks); PNF — Partito Nazionale Fascista. Yet the Vaterländische Front (Patriotic Front) of Austria, and the “Portuguese Legion” (Legiāo Portugueza) are not former parties.

45 God is unique. Souls are unique. Rare things are precious. Hence the twofold meaning of the word common.

46 See the excellent biography Ludwig I, by Caesar Conte Corti.

47 There are the revolutions of 1848 and the rebellions in 1919, 1927, 1934 (February and July), the attempted assassination of Seipel, the assassination of Dollfuss, the murders of 1938, the assassination of Count Stürgkh.

48 See tabulation at the end of his The Political Parties in Czechoslovakia. Čechoslovak Sources and Documents, No. 9. Orbis, Praha, 1936.

49 It is interesting to note that Robert Hohlbaum, a leading National Socialist, in his poetic collection Deutschland, addressed a hymn to Hus whom he considers to be German “in spirit.”

50 A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus, Ertl-Verlag, Wien, 1932, p. 135.

51 Ibid., pp. 141–142.

52 See also Hans Knirsch: Aus der Geschichte der deutschen nationalsozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung Alt-Österreichs und der Tschechoslowakei,” Aussig, 1931, and H. C. Kaesgel, Ein Sudetendeutscher ergibt sich nicht, Karlsbad, 1939, p. 145.

It must be emphasized that an intensive study of national socialistic “prehistory” reveals a curious lack of original thought in Hitler’s concepts; Hitler’s strength consists solely in the clever use of already existing trends, ideas, and situations. It lies in the very nature of mass leaders that they cannot be “original”; the mass leader is necessarily a virtuoso of commonplaces which he may or may not repeat in the guise of a “new discovery.” The modern dictator is not out to contradict but to confirm already existing views (and prejudices). This is another, subtle form of flattery of the masses. Original “controversial” ideas seldom get an immediate mass response. Originality implies the (discourteous) affirmation that opinions held recently on certain subjects are wrong. Mass man (i.e., the inferior man) cannot tolerate being scolded, or laughed at.

53 Brutality and cruelty are not limited to the East. English laws at the beginning of the past century were far more brutal than those in Russia. (Hanging for every theft of 40 shillings and over.) France had in Cayenne an equivalent to the concentration camps of Germany and Russia. The treatment of civilians during the last war (see Aladàr Kuncz’ Black Monastery and E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room, 1922) finds its parallel in the mistreatment of refugees during the present one. (See Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, New York, 1941.)

54 His sticking to friends (Freunderlwirtschaft) is no less typical an Austrian characteristic than this preference of intuition to logic. He remains for North Germany the “magic stranger.”

55 Hitler always repeats that he builds for “the next 1000 years.”

56 The craze which this Nordic mania caused had sometimes the most startling consequences. One saw, for instance, after the Anschluss, boys of the Hitlerjugend discoloring their hair with hydroxide.

57 The continental “liberals” were always strongly etatistic and seldom troubled by the “prejudices” of civil liberties. After having secured the key position in society and state they used the latter to enforce their views, persecuting brutally all nonliberals and specially the “clericals.” The liberal parties of Hungary, France, and Italy had sad records, yet these are widely surpassed by the atrocious horrors of Spanish and Rumanian Liberals. Every ideology becomes on the Continent inevitably a dogmatic, uncompromising philosophy. Professor Carlton Hayes speaks in his A Generation of Materialism (New York, 1941), about “General Liberalism” and “Sectarian Liberalism.”

58 The Church always opposed civil marriage bitterly. The state created willfully, by the introduction of civil marriage, a distorted view about the basically sacramental character of marriage. Often civil marriage is nothing else than a legalized love affair.

59 Even a so-called “conservative” state like Hungary jails a priest if he presides at the sacrament of marriage mutually administered by the contracting parties without the preceding ridiculous ceremony of civil marriage, where a miserable little scribe arrogantly declares a couple to be “husband and wife.” The most intolerable aspect about this act is its intentionally solemn and ceremonial character.

60 The State of New York, for instance, prohibits a priest to assist at the spending of the sacrament of marriage if it does not give to the couple a certificate of health. The Church was very little aware of this fantastic encroachment upon her rights because she was at that time too intensively occupied with the defeat of the Child Labor Amendment Act.

61 The utilitarian inheritance (Jeremiah Bentham) of our culture and civilization is stronger than one may admit. Utilitarianism is the cancer which has destroyed most fundamentals. The man or woman who considers his or her marriage as “inconvenient” flatly breaks the solemn oath of honor and contracts a new one. We find men and women in modern society who have given, three or four times during their lifetime, an oath of “loyalty and fidelity until death do us part” and it is amusing to see the same creatures protesting against Hitler’s serialized breaches of promises. Only a regenerated world will be able to cope successfully with this Great Challenger.

62 This has strongly been re-emphasized by Martin Bormann, Hess’s successor. His much advertised speech against the Churches had all “scientific” arguments one could find in our Leftist Weeklies. See London Tablet, January 27, 1942.

63 The National Socialists not only dislike the two Christian Churches in Germany because they try to escape state control and thwart the totalitarian effort but also because they divide the nation into [two or three] groups.

64 Walter Darré, Minister of Agriculture, proposed such measures seriously in 1923.

65 See Erik and Christiane von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s novel, Moscow 1979.

66 Which, of course, is nothing but the ultimate consequence of the Manchesterian “enlightened self-interest” and the Sacro egoismo of pre-Fascist Italy

67 On pages 349–350, Lewis Mumford drops, in his The Culture of Cities, New York, 1938, the hint that the National Socialists copied their racialism from the Jews. See also Esdras 9:10, and Nehemias 13:23–30.

68 The word modern is today almost a eulogy. Once things old were preferred. Everything old had lasted longer. Chronologically they came nearer to eternity. Old people were nearer to the grave and therefore nearer to God. Today the accent is on Youth.

69 It is almost touching to read the exchange of letters between the Duchess of Brabant and St. Thomas Aquinas. The Duchess inquired whether she would be justified to tax the Jews — justified morally and legally. Our modern “leaders” are less squeamish about these matters.

70The Conservatives were after all the only people who had (a) a political ideology which could not be assimilated on account of its basic hostility to modern ideas, and (b) a definite tradition going back to the First Reich and the hated Middle Ages.

71 There is little doubt that: (a) a real majority voted for Hitler (under considerable pressure); (b) a real majority would also have voted for Schuschnigg if he would have been able to carry out his plebiscite. Only tiny minorities have real convictions.

72 There is little doubt that the most untotalitarian American is not the straphanger of New York (in spite of his ubiquitous “democratic” creed) but the pioneering backwoodsman, the fishers of Cape Cod, or the Indians of the Southwest.

73 As to the middle-class character of the Nazi Party, see F. Neumann, Behemoth, New York, 1942, p. 399.

74 Guglielmo Ferrero in his recent work, The Reconstruction of Europe (New York, 1941), emphasizes the fact (p. 323) that the French Revolution reaped in Italy a full victory only as late as 1922 (Mussolini’s March to Rome!).

75 Similarly continental writers made the mistake of confusing the labels “democratic” and “liberal” entirely. German essayists coined the term “demoliberal” which was used as a label for all sorts of democrats who sailed under the liberal flag. The support given to these continental Liberals by their naive English confreres strengthened the belief on the Continent that half of England was basically “Left” and that most of the English tradition was “Left.” European Conservatives coming to liberal England for the first time were puzzled to find a country far more aristocratic (and undemocratic) than any other European country with the possible exception of Poland, Hungary, and San Marino.

76 Mr. Theodore Kaufman, an American resident, tries to calculate how many doctors and how much time it would take to sterilize all Germans. This idea was eagerly taken up by Mr. Ernest Hemingway who defended it in his preface to Men at War on pp. xxiii-xxiv. (New York, 1942.) Scratch a “democrat” and you always find a Nazi.

• 1* See the letter of Mr. William S. Bennet, prominently displayed in the New York Times, Apr. 5, 1942.
• 2* Apart from the fact that we rather borrow our terminology from the Fathers of the Constitution than from radio commentators or the speakers at women’s clubs.
• 3* About its confusion with liberty see the text concerning liberalism.
• 5* Mob democracy is, needless to say, nearest to the concepts of St. Thomas. Thus by a play of circumstances their terminology is more accurate than that of some lowbrow Catholics.
• 6* The expression democracy in the notes, Appendix I, as used by American and foreign authorities, has its classical, standard meaning and is equivalent to the term ochlocracy in the text.
• 7* Military Manual published in 1928 and in use for the succeeding four years. (TM 2000–25)
• 10* About the problem of “democracy” in relation to the popular representation in the United States. See pp. 247–248.
• 11* While man living in the old, traditional form of culture is a dreamer, modern, ochlocratic man is frequently the victim of illusions.
• 12* Cf. Bernard Fay’s excellent Freemasonry and Revolution. (Boston, 1935.)
• 13* By federalism we clearly understand a tendency which is the very opposite of federalism in the American sense. We have to distinguish between centralism, federalism, and separatism; centralism wants the whole concentration of power in a single body, federalism demands a division of power with a marked influence of local administration, separatism recognizes local power only and stands thus clearly for the dissolution of the state into independent parts.
• 14** This idea has been well developed in Josef Leo Seifert’s brilliant work Die Weltrevolutionäre (Von Bogumil über Hus zu Lenin), Vienna, 1930. This work is based on P. Wilhelm Schmidt’s and Gräbner’s Kulturkreislehre. It is also symptomatic that the leaders of the republican movements of Italy, Hungary, and Austria are all titled; Count Sforza, Count Ferdinand Czernin and Count Michael Károlyi. A scion of the princely family Löwenstein represents German republicanism in the United States. (The reader is warned that the terms “First Estate” and “Second Estate” for the Nobility and Clergy are interchangeable as they are not really historical. Only the term “Third Estate” is unequivocal.)
• 15* Montesquieu expressed in his De l’espirit des lots (Livre XI, Ch. IV) the belief that neither the aristocratic nor the democratic form of government are “free” by nature. See also the criticisms of Vilfredo Pareto in his The Mind and Society, §§ 1608, 1609, New York, 1935. The urge for uniformity in his Trattato Della Sociologia is discussed, §§1115–1130.
• 16*It is interesting to note that the Austrian Social Democratic Party used the red flag as their party banner, a practice which was genuinely abhorred by their German colleagues who stuck to the colors of the Weimar Republic—black, red, and gold.
• 17*It very frequently happens in Central and Eastern Europe that “class” means to all practical purposes “national character” just as it may mean “racial character” in the American South where the upper classes are white and the lower classes predominantly colored (apart from the “poor white trash”). The antagonism between a Hungarian burgher and a Slovakian peasant in northern Hungary or that of a Polish squire and a Ukranian servant could now not only be exploited by the socialist agitator but also by the nationalistic malcontent.
• 18*See Chateaubriand’s Mémoirs d’Outretombe, who is very much convinced of Napoleon’s aristocratic background.
• 19*Rather typical is the Polish proverb: “Cudzych królów gromić, a grozić swojemu”—“Subjugate foreign kings and defy your own!” It breathes a thoroughly “whiggish” spirit.
• 20**Frederick II of Prussia refers to Poland in his Political Testament (1768) as a République.
• 21***The years 1917, 1922, 1923 mark the last stages of this drama.
• 22*Guglielmo Ferrero in his The Reconstruction of Europe, New York, 1941, makes a very strong point of this fact.
• 23* The countries of the oldest “national” continuity in Europe are Bulgaria, Croatia, and Hungary. Of these the Hungarians and Croats alone can claim also an unbroken continuity of statehood which is the more interesting because the Hungarians are not Europeans, but of Mongoloid, Finnish-Turkish descent.
• 24* The Slovaks speak a language which is almost identical with Czech but their history, tradition, and character marks them out as a totally different people.
• 25** The Serbs cynically listed in their statistics every Bulgarian as “Yugoslav.” Neither was a difference made in their census between Serb, Croat, and Slovene.
• 26*** Another attempt to create a “linguistic” frontier was made in the case of the new (1940) border between Rumania and Hungary which clearly shows that the National Socialist genius is always able to beat the “democratic” mind in its own game, be that even the noble competition in absolute stupidity.
• 27* The first sign of a change of mind was Philipp Menczel’s book Trügerische Lösungen which was published in the early thirties. Herr Mènczel is a zionistic Jew from Czernowitz in the Bukovina (then under Rumanian rule).
• 28* This resentment is little justified. The German line of the Habsburgs never permitted the Inquisition to work in their hereditary countries and while Protestants did suffer disadvantages (outside of Hungary) these were never of a penal character as for instance those imposed upon British Catholics.
• 29** Theodore Roosevelt, not less than Mr. Wilson, was in favor of a partition of “that survival.” The anti-Habsburgian tradition in the United States dates from the great Kossuth reception in New York. Yet one might doubt whether the American public would have been so overenthusiastic had it known the truth about M. Kossuth’s political views, mainly in regard to national minorities.
• 30*** Aeneas IV, 625.
• 31**** The main pillar of this ludicrous “order” was besides the League of Nation the so-called “Little Entente,” consisting of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, who had replaced the “ramshackle” Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the task of this combination of Ruritanian “democracies” to prevent Germany’s expansion toward the East. The total incongruity of their own power in relation to this task was manifest when we remember that the main activity of this trio consisted in securing their problematic survival. This they could only hope to carry out successfully by preserving the status quo — in Austria and Hungary. Neither country was permitted to restore the Habsburgs to their throne, and Budapest and Vienna were repeatedly warned that such an action would constitute a casus belli. (Hungarian revisionism constituted another “danger.”)
• 32* The treaties of 1919 and 1920 were, significantly enough, the first major pacts between Christian powers which omitted the invocation of the Holy Trinity.
• 33** There is little doubt that: (a) a real majority voted for Hitler (under considerable pressure); (b) a real majority would also have voted for Schuschnigg if he would have been able to carry out his plebiscite. Only tiny minorities have real convictions.
• 34* There is little doubt that the most untotalitarian American is not the straphanger of New York (in spite of his ubiquitous “democratic” creed) but the pioneering backwoodsman, the fishers of Cape Cod, or the Indians of the Southwest.
• 35* As to the middle-class character of the Nazi Party, see F. Neumann, Behemoth, New York, 1942, p. 399.
• 36** Guglielmo Ferrero in his recent work, The Reconstruction of Europe (New York, 1941), emphasizes the fact (p. 323) that the French Revolution reaped in Italy a full victory only as late as 1922 (Mussolini’s March to Rome!).
• 37* Similarly continental writers made the mistake of confusing the labels “democratic” and “liberal” entirely. German essayists coined the term “demoliberal” which was used as a label for all sorts of democrats who sailed under the liberal flag. The support given to these continental Liberals by their naive English confreres strengthened the belief on the Continent that half of England was basically “Left” and that most of the English tradition was “Left.” European Conservatives coming to liberal England for the first time were puzzled to find a country far more aristocratic (and undemocratic) than any other European country with the possible exception of Poland, Hungary, and San Marino.
• 39TO PUT in its right light and scientific context the technical word democracy is naturally our first task. Representative government as established in the United States is not synonymous with democracy. The Founding Fathers established a republic (res publica, politéia), not a democracy. And many of the Founders of the Constitution of this country have repeatedly emphasized this fact in so many words. Some of the best American minds have again and again called attention to this important fact and have protested loudly against the use of the term democracy for the fundamental laws of their country, which they respect and by which they abide.*
• 40We see, then, from the plurality of present-day connotations of democracy that it would be thoroughly unjustified to use the term “democracy” in any other sense than in the classical and universal one.* We may well agree that the mischief started by uneducated popularizers has already reached such proportions that a Hercules is needed to clean this Augian stable of popular misconceptions, false labels, and mispresented ideologies. Even some of the more intelligent writers have become a prey to popular pressure, and as modern intellectuals do not lead the masses any more, but follow them and subordinate their ideas and language to the demands of the market, the confusion has now reached its climax.
• 41Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.
• 42“Democracy” as an ideal of the Founding Fathers is equally denied by W. H. Hamilton and D. Adair in The Power to Govern (New York, 1937, p. 158). It must also be borne in mind that the protest against calling the Constitution democratic comes from historians of all groups, yet while Rightists praise lack of “democracy” in the Constitution, “Leftists” like Charles Beard* and H. Rugg are prone to condemn it outright.
• 43We have said before that it is difficult to find the exact reasons for the growing popularity of the word democracy and democratic taken from a dead language which is thoroughly nonunderstandable to 999 out of 1000 Americans. The decline of classical education in favor of progressive “self-realization” has favored the increased use of wrong labels. It is deplorable that even Catholics have become victims of this chaos in verbiage. They have naturally “their” democracy, the Leftists have “another one,”* and even Conservatives indulge in the worship of a thing called “democracy” with a thoroughly different content. The only way out would be to discard the label completely, restore it brutally to its pristine meaning, and to call the things hitherto covered by the label with their proper names.
• 44In order to denote the classical interpretation of democracy as well as its cultural concomitant we have chosen to use the word ochlocracy and — as its adjective — ochlocratic.* The Greeks used this expression strictly in the sense of mob rule, regardless whether these mobs created majorities or minorities. The selection is not a very happy one, and the reader is reminded that we understand under “mob” not the “lower classes,” but just the vast masses of inferior people which can be found everywhere; these products of a soulless culture and civilization who in their terrifying mediocrity are neither fish nor flesh, have neither face nor expression, neither wisdom nor knowledge, piety nor enthusiasm, faith nor charity, hatred nor love, those who go neither with the angels nor the devils and because of their lukewarmness will be spat out by our Lord on the day of reckoning.
• 45It is almost in the strictly classical sense of the Greek word ochlocracy, to which reference has just been made, that the United States Army Military Manual* defines democracy in Section IX, Lesson 9, on “Representative Government.” Having first described autocracy as resulting in “arbitrariness, tyranny, and oppression,” it goes on to what it considers the opposite extreme:
• 46While many may consider the government established by the Founding Fathers as a constitutional democracy, it is clear that no such idea entered into the mind of those from whom Americans derive their form of government, nor did these men give coloring to such an interpretation by their own actions.*
• 47We must furthermore always bear in mind that equality presupposes the perpetual application of force; equality after all is an unnatural condition — it is just as unnatural as a completely straight line, a geometrical plain, a perfect circle, distilled water, etc. It needs the intervention of human agencies who have to curtail and to stem the natural growth and development sometimes in the most brutal and cynical way. Docteur Guillotin, Procrustes, the mythological Hellenic bandit, and the magistrate of Strasbourg who decided during the French Revolution to demolish the tower of the medieval cathedral because it was higher than the surrounding houses, belong all to the same category. Dostoyevski, in his Possessed, has predicted accurately how an egalitarian superdemocracy would function. The Soviets have fulfilled this prophecy to the letter.
• 48The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain. Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society. These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
• 49The confusion about the alleged harmony between modern ochlocracy and Catholicism is largely due to a great deal of wishful thinking, misunderstood patriotism, and the ambiguous elasticity of certain technical terms. Let us take, for instance, the word equality. How frequently do we hear responsible Catholics talking glibly about the equality of human beings! Maritain has warned all about the indiscriminate use of this term and he proposed to use the expression Unité du genre humain. Gustave Thibon has not only taken egalitarianism severely to task but he has also pointed out that the efforts to create equality have engendered at the same time the most violent inequalities. All those who by their free will or their disposition are unable to conform to the prescribed standards of equality — and there will always be such a minority — will after the efforts of leveling stand out more distinctly than in a nonuniform society. These are then usually the “traitors” who do not “play the game” and must be executed, exiled, or weeded out like the aristos under Robespierre, the burzhuys under Lenin, or the Jews under Adolf Hitler.
• 50It must furthermore be borne in mind that equality stands for monotony and not for harmony. A harmonious melody can only be established by different unidentical musical tones. These tones must be assembled and have to follow in a certain sequence; otherwise they will result in chaos and not in melody. Human society presupposes such an inequality and unity. Thibon has seen very clearly this issue which can only be solved in the sign of love.
• 51“It consists in purifying and organizing the inequalities from the point of view of a deeper equality, or, to put it more precisely, in making inequality serve unity. But this unity, what else is it but love and what is love without God.”
• 52This clarification is quite necessary because many a good Christian — and that holds true for most of those living in the Western Hemisphere — has an unclear notion about human equality. The American Declaration of Independence mentions the fact that the human beings are “created equal.”* This is true in the theological sense, and in the theological sense only. Two newly born babes are equal before God whether their parents are white or colored, American or foreign, registered in the Virginia Blue Book or in the rogues gallery. This theological equality continues until the time comes when they commit morally responsible acts. Judas Iscariot and St. John the Evangelist were equally conceived in original sin and free from personal sin, but how different their end! Heaven and hell are not identical. It is actually the privilege of our environmental determinists to discard the terms “saint” and “sinner” and to supplant them by pragmatic expressions like “social-unsocial” or “adapted-unadapted.” Dostoyevski prophesied this moral relativism in his chapter on the Grand Inquisitor (Brothers Karamazov), where he sees humanity declaring through the mouth of its science that there are no trespasses and no sinners but only “hungry people.”
• 53Apparently a great deal of misinterpretation is floating about concerning the interpretation of the American Declaration of Independence. The signers would certainly have been the worst hypocrites had they given to their document the same interpretation that so many give to it today. We can understand their attitude only if we remember the fact that the basis of the American Republic is an aristocratic whiggish one, which largely lacked that deeper “democratic” element in social relations as we find it in southern and eastern Europe, and perhaps in South America.
• 54Needless to say that every successful attack against the concept of free will results in an almost total degradation of human dignity.’ It puts us beyond good and evil and fosters a fantastic quietism or an even more fantastic irresponsibility. It is nevertheless amusing to see determinists of all heretical denominations — Calvinists, Marxists, Behaviorists — flocking to clubs and leagues defending civil liberties. Liberties to be enjoyed without free will! One sees how far the prostitution of logic has led many of us. This great confusion is also apparent in the standing phrase that “democracy stands for equality before the law,” whereas the law is largely interested in iniquities and inequalities. There is, of course, one great excuse for these confused minds and that is that they all have continued in the bottom of their hearts to believe in free will. Determinism is too inhuman and suicidal to be generally and sincerely accepted and the charge which remains is largely that of hypocrisy.
• 55Needless to say that every successful attack against the concept of free will results in an almost total degradation of human dignity.’ It puts us beyond good and evil and fosters a fantastic quietism or an even more fantastic irresponsibility. It is nevertheless amusing to see determinists of all heretical denominations — Calvinists, Marxists, Behaviorists — flocking to clubs and leagues defending civil liberties. Liberties to be enjoyed without free will! One sees how far the prostitution of logic has led many of us. This great confusion is also apparent in the standing phrase that “democracy stands for equality before the law,” whereas the law is largely interested in iniquities and inequalities. There is, of course, one great excuse for these confused minds and that is that they all have continued in the bottom of their hearts to believe in free will. Determinism is too inhuman and suicidal to be generally and sincerely accepted and the charge which remains is largely that of hypocrisy.
• 56The second attack against integral Christendom, gaining momentum right now, comes from the nonuniversal herdists. They put the human beings into watertight hierarchic categories frequently of a racial nature. This new racial determinism, creating racial aristocracies, responsible to a collective “race” but not to a personal God, and racial proletariats with no hope of an earthly salvation, is not less a danger than the classic panherdism. The desire for racial purity in order to achieve the perfectly uniform herd leads to brutal persecution and finally to the strictest imaginable uniformism. The Germanies without the Jews will be an even more monotonous place than the Germanies with persecuted Jews. We will experience in Central Europe the integral boredom which Myerezhkovski considers to be the fatal characteristic of the Realm of the Antichrist.
• 57We should always bear in mind that the Church and ochlocracy cooperated badly in Europe, that the forces inimical to the Church always fostered ochlocratic tendencies. One cannot dismiss the latter fact as purely accidental. Of course there is no incompatibility on dogmatic grounds. The question moves on a plain where in dubiis libertas is written in flaming letters: “In doubtful matters, liberty.” Yet the atmosphere, the parfum of the Church and that of “democracy,” when blended in the political and cultural sphere, emits a bad stench. A parallel reading of the works of our authoritative “democratic” essayists, poets, and other creative writers (from the Leaves of Grass to the City of Man) with the encyclicals of Gregory XVI and Pius IX would give a mortal shock to many “progressive” Catholics who think that the Church ought to come to terms with the spirit of our time . . . (which may, overnight, become the spirit of yesterday). These encyclicals at least express the spirit and policy of the Church in unmistakable directness and clearness.
• 58If there were nothing else than the final and inevitable development of political ochlocracy into the modern party dictatorships it ought to be enough to make the Catholics more skeptical toward this governmental tendency and its ultimate consequences. (We refer here also to the demand of “more democracy!”) It is not a good counterargument to state that everything is evil in a state of exaggeration. Herdism is essentially a “low” sentiment. As nucleus and carrying power of a philosophy of earthly existence it becomes definitely an evil. A real good on the other hand can never be exaggerated enough. There can never be, in human society, enough of the acceptance of the Cross and of charity, never enough loving differentiation and hierarchy, never enough of the spirit of Maundy Thursday when our Lord, the pope, the emperors, kings, and bishops knelt down to wash the feet of twelve Apostles or of twelve beggars. Nor is the custom discontinued in our day. This is hierarchy and charity, order and love.
• 59Yet the great impulse for our modern ochlocracy and democratism comes from France. The French Revolutionaries have tried to copy antique forerunners, but they were not very lucky in their efforts. There is a certain Swiss influence connected with this revolution, yet this element has nothing to do with the democratic peasant spirit of the Original Cantons. It emanates from the eighteenth-century enlightenment which has a strong Swiss, or rather Genevan background. This French town, acquired by the Swiss at a later period of their existence, had already produced its famous two Johns: Jehan Cauvin (from Noyon) and Jean Jacques Rousseau. M. Dunan’s humanitarian Red Cross, the assassination of Empress Elizabeth, the League of Nations, and the socialism of M. Nicole were scheduled to follow.
• 60This pagan geocentrism has changed the very content of our culture. The “happy end” of the cheap, popular novels and the films is nothing but the outcome of the supposition that the human drama finds its ultimate conclusion here on earth. The Calvinists in their materialism took a similar attitude. The more subtle Atheist, of greater experience, has contempt for the “happy end” and substitutes for it a stubborn heroical pessimism which comes pretty near to integral despair. The modern Catholic French writers like Mauriac and Bernanos avoid the happy end in relation to this life. Paul Claudel, in L’Ôtage, expresses his disbelief in earthly justice by punishing the people of good will and rewarding the villains in the last scene of this play. For the Christian the earth is essentially a “vale of tears.”
• 61It is important to remember that Christianity had not abolished slavery. Neither had the Church ever praised this institution, like Calhoun, because the whole relationship of master to slave was not important enough in the light of a life eternal to be combated with furious indignation apart from the fact that even a slave had every protection in a truly Christian society. But now the servant was an “eternal” servant, the master an “eternal” master, and the rich man possibly all through his assumed existence a rich man; thus the hatred of the lower classes now became wide awake. The employees had during the Middle Ages a knowing smile for those in the higher stations of life; they knew it could easily happen that a rich prince might suffer agonies in hell while a leprous beggar sat in the immediate nearness of God’s throne.
• 62Yet the conquest of time and space is only partially a final aim and ultimate goal of a herdist society. Every ideology visualizes a certain end and ochlocracy is no exception of the rule; the end is not as clearly formulated as in communism and one can say that it has been agreed upon by some sort of general consent. But even in spite of the fact that this ultimate aim is not of such a teleological nature as that of the proletarian Millennium of Karl Marx,** it is nonetheless chiliastic; the democratic middle class of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries always believed in some sort of “endless progress.” “Progress” is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudo-religious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells’s, “Of Things to Come,” the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy. This identity of teleological outlooks explains the mutual admiration of certain déraciné Americans and Soviet-Russians for their respective fatherlands.*
• 63Yet the conquest of time and space is only partially a final aim and ultimate goal of a herdist society. Every ideology visualizes a certain end and ochlocracy is no exception of the rule; the end is not as clearly formulated as in communism and one can say that it has been agreed upon by some sort of general consent. But even in spite of the fact that this ultimate aim is not of such a teleological nature as that of the proletarian Millennium of Karl Marx,** it is nonetheless chiliastic; the democratic middle class of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries always believed in some sort of “endless progress.” “Progress” is for the convinced ochlocrats a consoling Utopia of madly increased comfort and technicism. This charming but dull vision was always the pseudo-religious consolation of millions of ecstatic believers in ochlocracy and in the relative perfection and wisdom of Mr. and Mrs. Averageman Utopias in general are surrogates for heaven; they give a meager solace to the individual that his sufferings and endeavors may enable future generations to enter the chiliastic paradise. Communism works in a similar way. Its millennium is almost the same as that of ochlocracy. The Millennium of Lenin, the Millennium of Bellamy, the Millennium as represented in H. G. Wells’s, “Of Things to Come,” the Millennium of Adolf Hitler and Henry Ford — they are all basically the same; they often differ in their means to attain it but they all agree in the point of technical perfection and the classless or at least totally homogeneous society without grudge or envy. This identity of teleological outlooks explains the mutual admiration of certain déraciné Americans and Soviet-Russians for their respective fatherlands.*
• 64Yet while civilization is basically lack of friction, smoothness, comfort, and material enjoyment we have to look at traditional Christianity — with its violent opposition to euthanasia, abortion, contraception, pacifism, and individualism — as being something “uncomfortable.” Christianity is after all the only great religion which does not content itself with preaching indifference toward suffering, like the Stoa or Buddhism, but actually sees in suffering, sustained in the right spirit, a positive value. And just because Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, are neither keen on mere “beauty” or “comfort” but stand for magnificence (Grandeur, Grossartigkeit) they reject naked aestheticism or civilization if not in the letter at least in the spirit. It is difficult to project into the frame of a comfortistic civilization* the picture of Christ, hanging on the cross with a body convulsed by pain, the palms torn to shreds by the heavy nails, the hairs glued to the scalp by sweat and coagulated blood. It ought to be repeated again that culture is always “magnificent.” Pure, uprooted l’art pour l’art civilization, on the other side, is always practical and utilitarian and thus is bound to enter into conflict with integral Christianity and every true culture, because neither culture nor the Church are ever “practical”; they are — in a bourgeois, not a cosmic sense — highly unpractical. No wonder therefore that integral Christianity is more at home in those parts of the world where culture is predominant and civilization at a low ebb. Southern India is thus a more favorable soil for the Church than Pittsburgh or Detroit. Civilization is geocentric comfort. But culture, which must be bought by bitter suffering (there is neither art nor sanctity without suffering), points always toward heaven. And the ochlocratic millennium hell bent upon avoiding suffering will turn its back toward heaven.
• 65Yet ochlocrats who never tired of accusing conservatives and Catholics of superstition, illogical traditionalism, and “unscientific” procedure make an act of faith in the inner illumination of the individual and the infallibility of numerical majorities. Phrases like “forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong” display, nevertheless, a gross misunderstanding of logic; never in history has there been a more farcical and insipid amalgamation of Lutheran and Rousseauan confusion than in the interpretations underlying elections and the general franchise. Luther already was certain that everybody ought to be his own Pope by making use of his own wits in a private interpretation of the bible after dispensing with expert theological judgment; every interpretation was more or less right and had to be tolerated provided it did not conflict with the general line of the Reformers’ intention, and provided — last not least — that it did not lead back to Rome. The ochlocratic “liberal” is indeed in a difficult position toward the followers of terroristic heresies and his belief that “truth stands by itself” has often proved to be suicidal. He is therefore inclined to abandon his liberalism and to turn ochlocracy into a brutal totalitarianism. Luther with his ducal and baronial disciples was followed by terrorists of the type of Calvin, Thomas Münzer or Jan van Leyden, just as Robespierre succeeded Mirabeau and Noailles.
• 66But still, the political franchise is not given to minors and there is little doubt that by this fact the democratic principles are already violated. The Utopia runs into troubled waters. If neither knowledge, nor work, experience, sex, or taxes make any difference, why then, we ask ourselves, should age be taken so seriously? One could imagine that a European university student at the age of nineteen is more intelligent than a street cleaner at the age of thirty, or that a wounded young soldier at the age of twenty has merited more of his country than a prostitute at the age of forty-five. Even if one lowers the age limit there will always be some who are younger and who will complain that they are tyrannized over by a gerontocracy, a rule of old men.* Pure “democracy” is for this and other reasons a political impossiblity and we have to ask ourselves whether it is prudent to adopt such a form of political existence which defies all efforts to make it work without a tremendous amount of alloys. Utopias never mature over a certain transitory stage in which they insure their survival by endless compromising. “Democracy” under present conditions is bound to compromise with political elements taken from aristocratic and monarchical forms of government. A parliament is always a compromise with the former and a president a compromise with the latter political ideology. Aristocracy and monarchy — both taken in a literal, not a traditional sense — are essential and indispensable political elements; there is even “government” in the case of the population being entirely passive. We have to face the bitter fact that the (inner) consent of those governed is under modern conditions rather an accidental than an essential of government. There may be even a good government without popularity and a bad government enthusiastically supported by the “howling mob.” Not even the moral question is solved by the presence or absence of support, and there will be few political casuists who will argue that the people have an inherent right to wickedness which may be enforced against a good but unpopular government.*
• 67It is certain that worship of quantity is one of the most important characteristics of modern democratism, a characteristic which finds its living expression in the increasing interest for the comparison of physical units in the form of statistics. This ochlocratic quantitativism fosters also the belief that the mathematically larger part of the nation has the right to transform its theories into practice. There is nevertheless another element which ought not be overlooked; the element of compromise. The voter in every country has first to make a compromise between his own views and those of the local candidate, who in turn has to compromise with his party. In countries without the two-party system the compromise is extended to one between the parties for the sake of coalitions. The coalitions in their turn compromise with “reality.”
• 68It is certain that worship of quantity is one of the most important characteristics of modern democratism, a characteristic which finds its living expression in the increasing interest for the comparison of physical units in the form of statistics. This ochlocratic quantitativism fosters also the belief that the mathematically larger part of the nation has the right to transform its theories into practice. There is nevertheless another element which ought not be overlooked; the element of compromise. The voter in every country has first to make a compromise between his own views and those of the local candidate, who in turn has to compromise with his party. In countries without the two-party system the compromise is extended to one between the parties for the sake of coalitions. The coalitions in their turn compromise with “reality.”
• 69Yet the question may be raised whether “democratic” states are not far more conscious of civil liberties as regards private or public opinion. It must be remembered in that connection that liberty and democracy are not synonymous in spite of the fact that these two terms are frequently confounded in “democracies” with an aristocratic-liberal historical background. Numerical majorities are not necessarily keen to preserve civil liberties; the demand for civil liberties (and privileges) always arose from select minorities. Genuinely “democratic” societies can be brutally cruel to those who dare to be “different” in an unconventional way.
• 70Yet the question may be raised whether “democratic” states are not far more conscious of civil liberties as regards private or public opinion. It must be remembered in that connection that liberty and democracy are not synonymous in spite of the fact that these two terms are frequently confounded in “democracies” with an aristocratic-liberal historical background. Numerical majorities are not necessarily keen to preserve civil liberties; the demand for civil liberties (and privileges) always arose from select minorities. Genuinely “democratic” societies can be brutally cruel to those who dare to be “different” in an unconventional way.
• 71Certain ideas and ideologies can never be successfully represented by parties. We know the history of the endless failures of conservative parties. It was Spengler who first pointed out that there is no such thing as a successful conservative party. A party is a political body built specially for the purpose of fitting into the structure of a nineteenth century parliament. A conservative “party” is just as miserable as a third “estate.”
• 72Certain ideas and ideologies can never be successfully represented by parties. We know the history of the endless failures of conservative parties. It was Spengler who first pointed out that there is no such thing as a successful conservative party. A party is a political body built specially for the purpose of fitting into the structure of a nineteenth century parliament. A conservative “party” is just as miserable as a third “estate.”
• 73The older Arragonese or Castilian aristocracy showed hardly a lesser spirit of independence than the Spanish cities which were so proud of their ancient privileges, the fueros. The rigid absolutism encouraged by the Reformation infected finally even the rulers of the Iberic Peninsula and the Basque privileges were the only ones that survived till the Carlist wars and after.
• 74There is no doubt that a republic is the ideal form of government for an aristocracy. An aristocracy which wants to rule directly (instead of serving a ruler) has practically only the choice between an ephemeral monarchy of the English type or a downright republic after the pattern of Venice, Genoa, or early Florence. Monarchy was historically always the best protection against any sort of obligarchical rule and it was the historic role of monarchs to side with the lower classes against the nobility. (This “system” had the unfortunate consequence, of weakening federalism* and of strengthening centralism, with its ultimate herdist excesses.) The existence of a powerful Second Estate completed the quadrangle of heterogeneous factors which made a balance of powers and a mutual check possible which was the very foundation of medieval liberty.
• 75It must be stated again in all candor that equality presupposes force on account of its unnaturalness. Force is the end of liberty as well as of fraternity. In order to level a landscape full of mountains and valleys one needs dynamite, tractors, picks, and shovels. By filling the valleys with the mountaintops a level with a uniform altitude could be established. Thus there is only liberty or equality. The fact that the ochlocratic utopia of the year A.D. 3000 contains both elements is hardly able to contradict this truism effectively. Yet the more sinister aspect of the problem lies in the circumstance that democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty.*
• 76THERE was, of course, a bourgeoisie all through the greater part of the Middle Ages, yet in spite of the urban forms of life egalitarianism hardly made itself felt. The personal pride was still strong; Bürgerstolz and Bürgerehre prevailed, and the religious atmosphere, in a concentrated form, rendered an earthly craving for equality and identity superfluous and ridiculous. The bourgeoisie and the nobility lived practically each in another world. They had their sanguinary fights and their bitter intrigues, yet they seldom saw each other face to face. But an increased sense of ambition, the coming into existence of an urban, aulic nobility, and the decay of religious life added to the friction and the desire to be “equal.” Egalitarianism starts from a feeling of inferiority, and the hatred against the urban aristocracy played a certain role in the fostering of this sentiment. An even more potent agent in this increase of envy was the mounting grudge against the Second Estate, the clergy.