The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

II WORLD WAR II

“Humanity without Nationality is empty, nationality without humanity is blind.” — Werner Sombart, Vom Menschen.

TODAY every war is a “Holy War.” Engaging a large part of the population it necessarily becomes a crusade. It is possible, of course, that money interest brought the United States into the last war.1 And yet — the thousands of Americans who volunteered for the Allies and those who were conscripted but fought with enthusiasm, believed firmly that they were fighting a crusade for the sacred ideal of “democracy” whose acceptance would be a benefit to every single nation in the world. In spite of this mistake it was nevertheless an idealism of the highest order which prompted these men and boys to offer their lives for the cause. Even if it were true that materialistic reasons were behind the declaration of war by the United States, these reasons were not the ones which fired the nation into action. There is no doubt that our time bred men pretty near to the type of the homo oeconomicus, but this monster exists nevertheless only as an approximation and not as a reality. Nobody wants to risk or to lay down his life for a 10 per cent increase in wages or an additional bonus along with the old-age pension.2

It is only too frequent that we see our historians laboriously engaged in research work trying to find “economic reasons” for the process of history. When John Green, Ph.D., faces the crusades he is aware that he himself would not fight for the Holy Sepulcher. His preoccupation with his salary and unpaid gas bills render him materially minded and therefore he will continue his research until he makes the discovery that a Venetian smith, specialized in swords, was married to a woman whose brother had a mistress whose uncle in turn drank wine with the butler of a Roman Cardinal who undoubtedly persuaded Urban II to start the crusades. His discovery (which makes “sense” of an otherwise senseless chapter of history) will be heralded as sensational and influence his colleagues in continuing their efforts to find the real reasons for the different historical phenomena behind the mask of religious superstition, patriotic hypocrisy, ideological pretense, and dynastic make-believe.

Yet there is an ideological element in every total war (if not for any other reasons, then simply because there are no two nations with exactly the same philosophy of life) and this ideological element is predominant in the present struggle. The economic problems could somehow have been patched up, and it is clear that no responsible statesman plunges a country into a war merely because he owns a few armament shares. Such monsters who readily and consciously sacrifice millions of lives for hard cash exist almost exclusively in the phantasy of Bolsheviks (apart from a few individual cases which can be counted on the fingers.)

It was a very marked concession to the spirit of the twentieth century when Hitler appealed to his nation to fight (amongst other reasons) for raw materials. The reason of this appeal was to create a general impression in the German people that their country was one of the “have-nots” aspiring merely to economic equality. Thus we see clearly that National Socialism has already accepted the Marxian theory of class struggle by which the Proletarian strives to overthrow the rule of the “bourgeois.” In order to achieve this goal, a dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary, a dictatorship made possible by a preceding revolution. The Third Reich, representing a nation of “have-nots” (or rather of “have-less”), enters now into the revolutionary phase which in its national collectivistic form is simply called “war.” The conquest of Europe by Germany is nothing else but the dictatorship of the “proletariat.”

Yet the economic aspirations of the Third Reich — in the very intention of its leaders — are thoroughly subordinated to the idea of power and domination, in short: to the imperialistic aims. The National Socialists only want an economically strong and independent (autarchic) country in order to have political power, military strength and an absolute liberty of action. They do not care in the least whether the individual Herr Schmidt or Frau Krause have butter or margarine on their bread. The economic issue in relation to the individual stomach is therefore purely secondary. Private enterprisers in Germany were not in the least enthusiastic about this war. Economic reasons on the side of the Allies, though weighty, were hardly sufficient to risk the life of practically all of British and French manhood, and womanhood. The Third Reich could have organized the worst export dumping the world over and no British or French Prime Minister would have had the backing of their respective nations to engage in a war on such an issue. Even the total loss of all foreign trade would not have led to the third of September, 1939.

(The homo oeconomicus is certainly not a “progressive” mirage in the evolutionary sense. Only the beast is economical through and through. A dog, a rat, or a hyena come nearest to this conception. They would not fight for anything else but sex, food, and shelter. It is the homo sapiens who dies for ideas and traditions, for religions and philosophies).

American public opinion was deeply agitated before the attack on Pearl Harbor by the issue of isolationism versus interventionism; some “isolationists” on the East coast charged that their opponents belonged predominantly to the wealthy classes of old stock and British descent, an accusation which was not entirely without foundation in the section mentioned. Yet if it is true that isolationism was stronger in the lower income brackets one can only be struck by the thoroughly uneconomical, idealistic, and “sentimental” attitude of a nation frequently accused of gross materialism. It must have been evident to the beati possidentes that a war would mean for them an almost disastrous taxation, death of their young men, a stronger hold of the New Deal and more curtailing state intervention in the economic life hitherto largely controlled by them. The “lower” classes, on the other hand, could hope for more employment, bigger wages, and a higher standard of living in case of America being involved in a “foreign” war. But the hatred of the whiggish upper ten for Hitler, the attachment to the land which gave them Milton and Shakespeare and tombstones to their own ancestors made them act against their economic interest while other ties, equally sentimental, and bitter memories influenced equally large layers of the American Nation in the opposite direction.

There is little if any permanent3 sacrifice of these sacred ideological principles in the German World and no greater compromise may be expected from this totally heretical ideology — National Socialism; this is so in spite of the fact that every digression would be “justified” if it would only momentarily benefit the nation. In this unfortunate philosophy we find incorporated the age-old, tragically German Machiavellian spirit as personified by Hagen von Tronje in the Nibelungen Saga. But “what profits the people is right” reminds one strongly of Jeremiah Bentham. The Communists are also convinced Benthamists and each time the Kremlin made a compromise with capitalist concepts, the whole western world considered it as a sure sign that Soviet Russia had given up its “struggle against human nature.” And all these wishful thinkers were each time bitterly disappointed because the Soviet Union made, for each step in their direction, two in the other.

The result of the unholy alliance, at that time, between the German Republic5 and the Soviet Republic has been seen. The similarity of their respective ideologies was not a sure guarantee of such a union. Communism and National Socialism are at the same time too similar (at heart) and too dogmatic not to cause the wrath of their court philosophers who will see in their opponents dangerous heretics. The popes would never have permitted schismatic bishops to reside in the Holy City, yet they hardly objected to the presence of Jewish rabbis. The desire in Berlin and in Moscow was to influence each other and this led to frictions and intrigues. And there was even more explosive material in the non-ideological (i.e., in the geopolitical) sphere. The clash between these two powers could thus be delayed but not avoided.

The ideologies of both Third Empires, arising from ochlocratic democratism, were foreseen with uncanny clearness by Alexis de Tocqueville, the great aristocratic French liberal, 110 years ago. Yet the forms of thought, life, and existence which, reversing the order, now demoniacally menace the West from their strongholds in the East, must be combated by those nations who have attained a certain immunity in this disease. Originally it was England and America (and France) who spread it, but now they know better and begin to see more clearly. These communitarian, herdist ideologies are nothing but gigantic exaggerations and distortions of their teachings, so great that the average citizen of these countries is unable to see the connection and therefore considers them derived from their old bogeys, “reaction” and “medievalism.” This error is, in a way, a very happy one. Otherwise a certain, very misplaced tenderness might arise in these people for their gargantuan, philosophical “grandchildren.” English and a great deal of misguided (and miseducated) American public opinion would be filled with uncertainty and uneasiness should it ever become clear that “communism” has it roots firmly in doctrines preached in this country as well. The Second and Third German and Russian Empires as well as the present, terrible war would not exist if it were not for the preceding progressive excesses of such phenomena as:

1.  The Lutheran and the Petrinian “reform.”

2.  The influence of the French and Industrial Revolutions.

3.  Militarism, Nationalism, Capitalism, Socialism: all derived from No. 2.

4.  The establishment of philosophical, political parties and ideological Parliaments.

5.  The breakdown of the Christian monarchical idea and system.

6.  The rise of the modern, déraciné megalopolis with its herdism.

7.  The pseudo-scientific attitude toward man.

The prophecy of Count de Tocqueville concerning the advent of the identitarian horrors should be read in full. It should have been a warning for all those who have been playing with the dangerous toys — identity and uniformity — ages ago. His warning was never listened to and one can almost hear the mass of hommes médiocres exclaim in unison 107 years before our time: “Vous exagérez! Vous exagérez!” He wrote:

I had remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceive upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made by most of our rulers of the notions, the sentiments, the wants engendered by this same social condition, for the purpose of extending the circle of their power. This led me to think that the nations of Christendom would perhaps eventually undergo some sort of oppression like that which hung over several nations of the ancient world. A more accurate examination of the subject, and five years of further meditations have not diminished my apprehensions, but they have changed the object of them. No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer, by his own agency and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire; none ever attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to strict uniformity of regulation, and personally to tutor and direct every member of the community. No notion of such an undertaking ever occurred to the human mind and if any man had conceived it the want of information, the imperfections of the administrative system and above all the natural obstacles caused by the inequalities of conditions, would speedily have checqued the execution of so vast a design. When the Roman emperors were at the height of their power the different nations of the empire still preserved their manners and customs of great diversity. Although they were subject to the same monarch most of the provinces were separately administered; they abounded in powerful and active municipalities and although the whole government of the empire was centered in the hands of the emperor alone and he always remained, upon occasions, the supreme arbiter in all matters, yet the details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control. The Emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the greater number; it was fixed to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent but its range was limited.

But it would seem that, if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands, and might interfere more habitually and decidedly within the sphere of private interests, than any sovereigns of the antiquity ever could do. . . .

I think then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate; the thing itself is new; and since I can not name it, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. . . . Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances — what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having successfully taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned them at will the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the network of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize but it compresses, ennervates, extinguishes, and stupifies people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. . . .

The Anglo-Saxon powers thus have to fight an enemy still in the process of transformation. This is certainly an advantage in wartime. And the only real potential ally in the Germanies at a time when the hardships of war are not strongly and generally felt will be exactly the “exceptional” people, those who on account of their intelligence, personality, faith, or tradition could not have been assimilated or leveled. These are a minority and the sooner the belligerents realize that it is not the herdist, the mass man, who suffers in a superdemocratic ochlocracy, but the “outstanding man,” the better for them. It must be kept in mind that it is not the railroad conductor and the employee of the gas works who in a plebiscitarian dictatorship goes slowly to pieces but the philosopher, the writer, the sensitive, creative artist, the educator, the priest, who have to stand the strain, who feel the chains. It is for the better and braver part of these that the present crusade should be waged. The masses are often satisfied if they can eat, work, and sleep. Intellectual freedom has little meaning for them one way or the other.

The question must clearly be faced whether this is an aristocratic or a democratic war; whether one should shoulder arms in order to give freedom to an aristocracy of intellect, conviction, and spirit or whether one has decided to die for the ballot of Herr Kunz or Herr Kraus, who may vote another Hitler into power if they fear for their pocketbook or regular employment. America may be far quicker in understanding these issues than the outsider is ready to believe. It is of little importance that America at present has less of a visible tradition than Europe and a smaller intellectual aristocracy, but in no country in the world is there such furious hunger for cultural and intellectual values, such craving for true personality and the dignity of the human person, such worshipful seeking for the beautiful things of life. America will understand. . . .

This present war is not fought between one group of countries which is “enlightened” and another one which wants to “put the clock back” but between a coalition which stands for Liberty (and Soil) and another one which proclaims Equality-Identity (and Blood). It is a struggle between Patriotism (represented by the United Nations) and Nationalism-Racialism (represented by the Axis).

Such a world-wide issue can nevertheless hardly manifest itself in absolute, unequivocal purity. The Allied Nations in the last war fought against the Central Powers in the name of “Progress” versus “Reaction”; today this chronological order has been reversed. It is Washington and London who represent the conservative trend, it is Berlin which became the synthesis of unbridled and uninhibited technical and biological “modernity.” Where then stands Russia? The USSR stands on exactly the same spot as Imperial Russia in 1914. The Russian Emperor was, in World War I, the ally of the Third French Republic and of Liberal England. No ideological affinity then united the Winter Palace with the Pantheon; and today there is hardly a rainbow bridge between the Kremlin, the Liberty Bell and Buckingham Palace. The war between the Germans and Russians was and is a people’s war; the war between the Axis and the Anglo-Saxons was and is a deep ideological “discussion” fought out by arms. There are not two, but three wars going on: one in the Pacific, one in the Atlantic, and a third one in the Sarmathian Plains.

Yet while it is none too easy to understand the issues at stake in the present war, it is even more difficult to envisage the future if the powers of good will are victors in the struggle. What sort of political order should be established in Europe and especially in Central Europe? And again, what kind of higher political order should be established with the purpose of conferring at least a minimum of peace and comfort on the desperate, confused, bewildered, and misguided peoples of Europe? These are two separate problems, yet they are closely interrelated. The coming order in Central Europe is of the utmost importance to the entire Continent for the very simple reason that it is the heart of the western section of the Old World, of the European peninsula of Eurasia. And as long as we continue to consider the Atlantic rim of Europe as the only true and integral part of Christian civilization, and all countries east of the Rhine merely as an approximation to Asiatic “barbarism,” no lasting and constructive reorientation and reorganization of the war-torn Continent is feasible or possible.

It will be absolutely necessary to go back courageously to old, very old, patterns and take at the same time precautions that a process of disintegration and wrong herdist reconstruction, as we have witnessed it in the past 300 years, will be avoided. It is a solid First Reich or something similar to it which must be revived.

Yet there seems to be one school among western “statesmen” which wants to make good the mistakes of 1919 by re-creating the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of old and carving up the Germanies. The dangerous aspect of such an enterprise lies in the fact that this arrangement could easily be carried out once the Third Reich has broken down. There would be then, more than ever, an extreme dislike for the Prussianized Germans in Austria, and German national sentiments would be at a low ebb in Vienna and the Alps. The Germans themselves, after a crushing defeat, would become the victims of one of their typical fits of bitter melancholy, self-denunciation, self-hatred, and apathy. All those who would come under the rule of indigenous princes and princelets would be happy to be at least not under Polish or direct Allied control. Yet what would happen in another twenty or thirty years? We know from experience that no peace arrangement is lasting if it relies on brutal force except, of course, in the case of total extirpation of the conquered race.

The time would come when the individual German rulers — or petty parliaments — would be looked at as servile agents of a hated group of alien enemies; a new wave of hitherto unknown nationalistic ideologies would sweep the Germanies, a new Hitler might arise and unite the separated countries in a new, terrible, centralistic, and herdist concentration. There is little one could do against such a process short of new bloodshed; and the military help granted by the Allies to their helpmates inside the Germanies would change the contempt for the petty monarchs and other representatives of the bad cause to boiling hatred resulting in perpetual tension. A similar situation might even arise in Austria, where some uneasiness for the suffering of the once so hated blood brothers in the divided Germanies would revive the always latent German sentiment.

It would be quite incorrect to attribute German sentiment in Austria to a frantic herdism on account of the common language — which, after all, is also the “uniting bond” between Yorkshire and Liberia. There are undoubtedly such primitive Austrians who base their German feelings on herdist principles only. There are others — equally shortsighted — who oppose this herdism by just another one, emphasizing the “dividing differences” in the cultural and sentimental domain. But there is also a minority — and minorities often are “aristocracies” — which still cultivates the tradition of the First Reich. These do not respect in the Habsburgs the rulers of Austria but the descendants of the emperors, who did not develop that amazing inferiority complex toward the Prussians that some “Little Austrians” have nursed. Nor could it be a difficult task to dominate these fiery, German-speaking Slavs who are such excellent fighters in uniform but such docile subjects in mufti.

The tradition of the First Reich is far older, greater, and nobler than the Imperial Austrian tradition dating back only to 1806, and although not derived from the French Revolution, yet still of the same age if not younger. To compare the First Reich with the Austrian Imperial idea means to compare the dry and worn-out bureaucratism of Francis Joseph with the universality and knightly grandeur of Maximilian I, Charles V, Ferdinand II, or Maria Theresa.

The main argument for a one-sided revival of the Danubian Monarchy, or a South-German “Catholic” solution, is usually based upon a deep mistrust toward the Prussians (who, incidentally, must be re-educated in the European manner and tradition). Uniting Southern Germany with little Austria or even with a greater Austrian empire, leaving the North independent under the leadership of Berlin, a city with less cultural tradition than Baltimore or Charleston, would establish a focus for herdism, an almost purely Protestant platform for the basest phenomena of technicism, nationalism, militarism, or perhaps even an extremely apt steppingstone for a new type of Bolshevism in Central Europe. Yet northeastern Germany must be placed under the benevolent but nevertheless methodical control by the rest of Germany. People in the northeast (and this would include Saxony and Thuringia) must be trained again to enjoy their meager personalities and to value originality above uniformity.

Modern wars end necessarily with some sort of revolution on the side of the defeated; a government which has emphasized over a long period that it was fighting a righteous crusade cannot possibly sit down at the same table with the enemy, who during the hostilities was depicted as the very personification of Satan. It must either abdicate or will be swept away by a revolt — a revolt of the masses, a revolt of the army, or a rebellion of the upper classes, in order to make peace arrangements possible.6 No Nazi and no member of the British parties, as we know them, could ever sit together in conference. Francis Joseph could say in 1859, “I lost a battle and I pay with a province.” Such a “traitorous” attitude would be unthinkable today. Progressive nations have to bleed to death in their wars. Rulers felt that they had to be sparing with the lives of their subjects, but leaders have the marvelous excuse that they are nothing but executors of the general will.

If and when the Third Reich goes the way of all flesh, it may be that the revolt will be engineered by the upper classes or the army. If the rising comes from the lower classes, then it will be inspired by none of the better known leftist ideologies. It will be a revolution with anarchistic leanings, a revolution for revolution’s sake. Such a situation cannot last forever. There is no such thing as a revolution in permanence. Order will be asked for and we stand under no illusion that a revival of the First Reich will be extremely popular from the outset. The lower classes may even ignore the very meaning of a Sacrum Imperium, yet a country after a defeat, tired of a war, is like wax and it depends largely upon those who enact the great historic return whether they will make a success of the restoration or a failure like the Stuarts and Bourbons.

There is nothing inferior or degrading in “local patriotism,” so much frowned upon or ridiculed by the mammoth nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All these revolutionary changes (revolutionary only for the urban elements and not the peasantry) must be based upon the right answer of the great, fundamental question: “What is man?”

It is also the very order of “consciences” and allegiances which must be reversed in a revolutionary way. (Without this revolution no fundamental reconstruction of the Old World is possible.) Today to belong to a people of eighty millions means “everything”; to be a member of a community, “little”; to be a human being — “nothing.” Our worship of quantity subordinates man to society, state, nation, race, which, after all, must all remain abstractions which may or may not be legitimate.

It cannot be emphasized often enough that the abolition of parliamentary government does not mean that the dignity of man will not be respected any more. Neither can it be maintained that the insipid counting of noses, which degraded the human person to a mere voting animal,8 was a personalist feature of the past one hundred years. A freer atmosphere should liberate the people from the control of their neighbors, and laws will be enacted guaranteeing the civil liberties. The defense of these essential liberties (whose importance for the well-being of a self-respecting nation cannot be overemphasized) should be vested in the person of the monarch who is also the guardian of the constitution. In the religious ceremony of the coronation the monarch will have to promise to watch over the constitution, the civil rights, and liberties under an oath given to God and the nation.

The constitution also provides for an independent judiciary system and for a supreme court. There will be all due liberty of the press, of speech, and organization. Everybody will be free to criticize the political decisions, the legislation, the administration. The intolerance toward criticism is the certain sign of characteriological inferiority.9 It is the masses and the mass man that cannot bear contradiction. (Hitler is a very good example of the monologizing “one way” mobmaster.) The idea of “His Majesty’s most loyal opposition” is as old as monarchy itself. The leader of the opposition in the British parliament does not receive a salary for nothing. The first paid (artificial) opposition were the jesters at the royal courts of Europe. Their cruel criticisms were borne with equanimity. But on the other hand, the laymen, the masses of innocent ignorants, will have to come to terms with the experts. Everybody has a moral right to criticize a house, but the building of a house can nevertheless be trusted only to an architect. And politics are an art as difficult, and as public, as architecture.

Provisions will also have to be taken to prevent the bureaucracy from becoming a soulless, arrogant caste. The officials remain, in spite of the fact that they are not executors of the “general will,” but independent experts, basically servants of the people and advisers of the monarch. The opinionating, corporative parliament which represents naked interests and not parties can protest the cast and proposals of the legislative-administrative officialdom; dependent upon the nature of the protested object, it is either the supreme court or the monarch with his crown council (the government) that are going to act as arbiters and to decide to what extent public opinion or group interests should be taken into consideration or overruled.

The preceding statements seem to betray an extraordinary faith in the Germans.10 Yet all these questions are not questions of faith but of feasibility and expediency. It is a geographical fact that the Germans live in the heart of Europe and there is every indication that they have a “central” character. The Nazi claim that Germany alone can be the point of gravity of Europe is perfectly justified, but it is equally true that their ideology is the very last which could facilitate this mission. It is one of the fausses idées claires that Europe can be united only by conquest and the National Socialists fell for it. Yet it is equally true that Europe cannot “escape” the Germans and the Germans will never and can never give up to formulate a Reichsidee, an imperial idea. If this idea is spiritual, Europe may benefit from it, if the idea is materialistic, Europe will suffer atrociously. One cannot be happy and healthy if one’s heart is diseased.

The Germans (like the Jews) are in their ubiquity everywhere in Europe. The thrones of England, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Holland,11 Belgium, Russia,12 Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece, Hungary have been occupied by Germans. Fragments of Germans live as far as Reval and the Alsace, Heligoland and the Lower Volga. One cannot escape them. To omit them in calculations is folly. And to think that they will calm down and become “ordinary people” betrays ignorance. They must have a mission which is not materialistic and a spiritual mission cannot be invented on a green table. It can only be a revival or a continuation from past memories. The Fourth Reich will be the continuation of the First Reich or it will be thoroughly and restlessly diabolic.13

We have to give thanks to the Holy Ghost that the Atlantic Charter did not repeat the Wilsonian nonsense of a world safe for democracy, and that the two aristocrats who met off Newfoundland pledged their countries merely to the defeat of National Socialism and the establishment of forms of government appealing to the nobler sides of human nature. A definite danger lurks in the possibility of the “progressive” elements of England and America increasing unduly their influence mainly at the time of the peace conferences. It will then be the Girondists of London, Washington (and Paris) who will win this war technically, yet a revolutionary war technically won and morally lost is in reality a total defeat and nothing else but a preparation for World War III.

The present war is a revolutionary war, more so than World War I. European history since the French Revolution is largely a series of revolutions, reactions, counterrevolutions, and counterreactions, where naked and veiled ideologies clash in furious attacks. The tragic aspect of the present situation lies in the fact that in spite of the many valuable ideas afloat in Anglo-Saxon countries there is very little of the Catholic and Continental tradition, very little of pure spirituality and conservative mentality. In the Catholic countries themselves the positive tradition is far richer and personal culture more Catholic, but the respective political machineries are either hopelessly pagan or even more hopelessly compromised from the (not yet entirely unimportant) point of view of honor. Catholic government in Europe is confined to the balcão aberto sôbre o infinito14 — Portugal. Franco’s foreign policy has until now kept neutral. Everything else has been crushed, destroyed, wiped out. Thus all the hope rests with a mixture of Canterbury, Wall Street, the London Times, Serbian guerrillas, the foreign office, the Eight Points of the Atlantic Charter, and the Moderator of the Free Churches in Britain. In such a situation the Catholic’s duty is primarily to pray to the Holy Ghost that he may enlighten those who will be responsible for the order in Europe after an Allied victory.

Not only a new order in Central Europe but also a new order in Christendom is necessary. It would be a waste of time to discuss any real order outside of Christendom, because such a thing is genuinely inconceivable. We have spoken already about the defects of the old League of Nations (p. 152 ff.). It is evident that only nations accepting the basic theistic principles can be members. A League of Nations without a common positive creed could never accomplish anything worth while — just like a parliament divided by basic philosophies. The only uniting bond in the old league was the vague philosophizing of “modern man” — the “good pagan” — who dislikes wars because they are expensive and spread death — and death, we must not forget, is the supreme catastrophe for the atheist. A new League of Nations should be a regular congress of the Christian monarchs and heads of nations with their ministers in a place of great and ancient Christian tradition — in Aix-la-Chapelle, in Rome, in Canterbury, in Jerusalem. A league of the very heads of the states will also be more efficient than a league of mere representatives of easily changeable parliamentary governments. The conventions of the kings, the emperor, and the presidents of the few republics would also have a greater symbolic effect upon the nations who will increasingly feel the uniting power of Christendom.

It certainly will not be easy to demand from victorious nations, as well as from those who have suffered at the hands of the Germans in the most ignominious way, that they conclude a peace without material gains and without the element of revenge. When the next peace will have to be signed, the great western cities may lie in ashes and the masses of the people will be imbued with a terrific hatred against a nation which had spread or provoked such horrible destruction.

Yet the demands on the victors unquestionably remain extreme in their nature. The alternatives are either an angelic charity or final doom in World War III. There is no other choice. Situations where a human person can choose only between two extremes sometimes do arise. A crusader caught by the “Assassins” and asked to renounce his faith or to die under the most terrible tortures had of a sudden the sole choice of either becoming a great saint-martyr or else offending God beyond imagination. In such a case there is no medium between mortal sin and supreme sanctity. And if the United Nations win they will be faced by a similar alternative.

There is also the problem of the arrangements to be made outside of the Germanies. It matters very little what the local majorities of the Central and Eastern Europeans think at the present moment or at the time of the termination of the war. Of all fantasmagories ever invented, the “self-determination of nations” is one of the most fatal propositions. “Self-determination” led to National Socialism, “self-determination” was responsible for the most fantastic borders ever conceived in Europe. Plebiscites are, after all, nothing but lay opinions based on mere likes and dislikes. They rarely bring happy solutions.

Neither will it be easy to engineer a lasting restoration, even if it is based on a great tradition. Restorations were singularly unsuccessful in history, yet there is no reason why one should succumb to a historical fatalism. The memory of Hitler will doubtless cause certain difficulties. It is the impending great tragedy written all over his face which partly explains the magnetism of his personality. It would be a dangerous illusion to underestimate his present popularity even among people who heartily detest the system he represents. There is little doubt that the downfall of National Socialism will bring about a low in the Hitler cult, but nevertheless, after his death, his person will be surrounded by the same strange, mystic glory which was spun around the great Corsican. Ignorant people probably will continue to see in him their hero, who was finally betrayed, sold, overpowered by his enemies. Hitler will become another Michael Kohlhaas, a German Pugatshov, the dreamer and schemer surging from the depths of the nation and reaching madly for the sun. . . .

One should certainly not have too many illusions about the results of the changes brought by a new-old order; it will never bring a millennium of perfect human happiness. Human life is always and under all circumstances a march through a valley of tears. Bossuet’s words, “La vie d’un chrétien n’est qu’un pélérinage; notre domicile est ailleurs,” should always be borne in mind. Yet the traditional order may be instrumental in restoring the dignity of the human beings that have suffered so bitterly under all sorts of “progressive” systems, from Robespierre to Dewey. History since the Crucifixion has become predominantly the record of a chain of attacks and defenses against and for human dignity and personality. This human dignity is fundamentally connected with the God-man who suffered the most humiliating death on the martyr-instrument for common criminals, but who rose triumphantly from the grave. Thus the cross became the joyful symbol for man, that image of God. Whosoever attacks the Cross also attacks mankind. The powers of darkness who attack and degrade the human personality and its sacred uniqueness, are also out to deny and to eradicate the Cross.

There are forces engaged in this war which have adopted the diabolical plan to put the docile ant in place of the Image of God possessing free will. These forces must be defeated. Yet the issue and the goal must be clearly before all our eyes. There is not only an external front in this war — a front with trenches, a front in the air, on the sea, in the deserts of Africa, and the jungles of Asia, but also an inner front. We must not forget that for every right-thinking man or woman on the wrong side, there is a wrong-thinking person on this side. Thoughts, ideas, philosophies, religions have no clearly defined geographical borders.

If those with the wrong conceptions already living in a pre-Nazi stage of development will get the upper hand, then the war will be morally lost as a foregone conclusion. If the goal of Britain and America would actually be a conglomeration of “making Europe safe for democracy,” “economical competition,” “decent business dealing,” “more colonies, cash, and a return to Geneva,” then we better all go to bed, switch out the light, and pull the sheets over our heads. Neither with such “democracy” nor with nationalism or any other herdism can we survive. A supranational order with material safeguards must be established. The words of Myerezhkovski, written after the last war, must be constantly remembered:

What is the meaning of the world-wide catastrophe, by which mankind is now affected, the political, economical, social and cultural destruction of Europe? Why are there after the world war no victors and no vanquished? Why is even victory worse than defeat?

Russian Bolshevism and Polish Messianism answers these questions in a seemingly identical way; from the category of nationalistic existence mankind, to save itself, must evolve inevitably into a form of supranational existence. Once the nations lived freely in the national form of their existence and developed their nationality; now they die and suffocate in them. These forms were once diapers, but now they have become shrouds. Mankind will either be buried in them in order to decay or it will throw them off like Lazarus rising from the dead.

 

________________

18 Yet even the argument used by Ferdinand Lundberg in America’s Sixty Families, is not conclusive.

19 As to World War I and its supposedly economic background see Sidney Fay, Origins of the World War, New York, 1938, p. 46.

20 Temporary betrayals of tenets of the National Socialist ideology should surprise nobody; a materialistic (and utilitarian) philosophy has not the same sense of honor as a religion or a metaphysical Weltanschauung. Communism also indulged in compromises like the N.E.P. under Lenin or the Russo-German military alliance against Poland; arrangements ad hoc.

21 Many Russians, among them Dimitri Myerezhkovski, speak about the Third Russian Empire. The First Empire they consider to be the Kievian and early Muscovite Russia (Svyataya Russ); the Second Empire the Westernized, shallow Russia of Peter the Great (Rossiya); and the Third Empire the Soviet Union (Sovyetzkiy Soyuz). The first Empire was (as in Germany) primarily religious, whereas the third one is merely a gross exaggeration of the second one which already had departed from the right way.

The Second Empire is a break with the tradition (on account of the petrinian reformation), yet the third one is an almost inevitable consequence of western, identitarian “isms” of which Panslavism was the most spectacular preparation.

22 Germany is officially still a Republic; the Weimar Constitution has, in spite of numerous “amendments,” never been formally abrogated.

23 Guglielmo Ferrero describes the necessity for a revolution as a terminating point of a war in his volume Peace and War, New York, 1933, pp. 60–61.

24 Deutschland und der Föderalismus, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1921, pp. 36–37.

25 The Germans call him Stimmvieh.

26 The greatest mistakes ecclesiastic authorities committed at various times were prompted by a wrong evaluation of the liberty of thought. They naturally never committed the monumental error of “liberal” relativists to despair in the respective existence of truth and untruth; if Catholicism is right Protestantism must be wrong and vice versa. The reason why untruth can ever be tolerated (tolerated, not accepted) must be found in the mysterious laws of thoughts and ideas, not in the relativism of complacent agnostics; neither is Truth able to take care of herself (as some optimists invariably believe) nor does Truth thrive under eternal vigilance, protection, and a system of enforcement. Truth then degenerates to commonplace, it loses its appeal, its inner dynamism, its luster and brilliancy (for which it needs a dark background). Human beings are then finally brought to resent truth and the forbidden fruits of untruth begin to taste sweeter than ever.

Uremy is the result of the degeneration of the glomeruli, tiny agents which transports the poisons of the body to the kidneys whence they are eliminated. Once the glomeruli cease to function the body dies of an inner poisoning. The Middle Ages died from such a uremic process. People remained intra muros through indifference or out of fear, heretical ideas spread because they had the mystical magnetism of the appeal from the tree in paradise. Error has certainly no right to exist; if it is tolerated it should certainly not be for its own sake, but for the sake of its poor bearer and for the sake of Truth which will shine in a light more brilliant if its sinister counterpart has not been meticulously eradicated.

27 It is interesting to see where a consequential belief in “democratic” principles finally led to. Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, an ardent German “democrat,” arrived at an almost complete denial of his own nation, a blank despair about its misdeeds, and a furious denunciation of its recent aberrations. He is today not only an exile from Germany but even a voluntary exile of the German people. No German Conservative, however, anti-Nazi, will share his opinion; for a Christian Conservative, the masses of every country are made up by more or less goodhearted and more or less well-intentioned people without any sense of political responsibility and a total ignorance of political facts. To accuse nations (not leaders or governments) is the hallmark of the demo-nationalist of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it leads to endless hatreds, feelings of revenge, misunderstandings, and frictions. It is the surest guarantee for perpetual mass wars.

28 House of Nassau-Oranje; Princess Juliana’s father was Prince of Mecklenburg.

29 House of Holstein-Gottorp (not Romanov) since the days of Peter III.

30 The relatively soundest proposition of what to do with Germany after the war had been given by Captain Alan Graham, M.P., in After the War (a symposium of peace aims edited by William Teeling, London, 1940). Captain Graham knows at least all the premises, but his deductions are influenced by the fact that he had to reckon with France as a partner on the conference table at the time when he wrote his essay.

31 “The balcony opening on the infinite,” overlooking the sea.

32 Page 33.

33 Page 34.

34 Cf. Gábor de Rónay’s article in the Catholic World, September, 1941.

• 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.
• 8* Cf. Stringfellow Barr’s article “Ourselves Again” in Tomorrow, Oct., 1942. Condensed reprint in the Catholic Digest, Nov., 1942. This essay of the president of St. John’s, Annapolis, not only evaluates democracy correctly, but also gives an outline of Hitler’s democratic background.
• 9* Democratic rights for school children have been postulated by the disciples of John Dewey, while David Lloyd George demanded in all earnestness plebiscites for the Central African jungles (in a public speech on Jan. 5, 1918).
• 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.)
• 18TO 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.*
• 19We 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.
• 20Today democracy is confused with liberalism,* freedom, and prosperity alike.
• 21“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.
• 22We 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.
• 23In 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.
• 24It 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:
• 25While 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.*
• 26We 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.
• 27The 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.
• 28The 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.
• 29It 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.
• 30“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.”
• 31This 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.”
• 32Apparently 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.
• 33Needless 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.
• 34Needless 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.