Part Iv

PART IV THE ISSUE

I

COMMUNISM

Karl Marx	Karl Radek	Largo Caballero
Lasalle	Krassin	I. Prieto
Robert Blum	Zinovyev	Engels
Léon Blum	Kamyenev	Romain Rolland
Plyekhanov	Litvinov	Sir Stafford Cripps
Lenin	Molotov	Yoffe
Trotzki	Dovgalyevski	Karl Liebknecht
Earl Browder	Otto Bauer	Rakovsky
Bukharin	Karl Seitz	Naomi Mitchison
Rykov	Julius Deutsch	Stephen Spender
Béla Kún	Willi Münzenberg	Charles Fourier
Kurt Eisner	Barbusse	Corliss Lamont
Léviné	Malraux
Socialists and Communists of the nobility: (Gentry).
John Strachey	Tukhatchevsky	Bakunin (Anarchist)
Dzerzyński	Chicherin	St. Simon

To be financially secure, to wear the uniform and to have a safe position; this bourgeois idea of the West grew on eastern soil in tropical richness and splendor. A similar evolution could be observed in Hungary where the biztos kis állás (the secure little position) is valued by the bourgeoisie beyond anything else. Count Keyserling in his Europe overrates the aristocratic essence of modern East Central Europe considerably.

This statement is also well illustrated by E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn in an article “We’re All Marxists Now,” Colosseum, April–June, 1939.

Christopher Dawson describes the interrelationship of the modern bourgeois ochlocratic world in his Enquiries Into Religion and Culture with the following unmistakable words: “The Bolshevik philosophy is simply the reductio ad absurdum of the principles implicit in bourgeois culture and consequently it provides no real answer to the weaknesses and deficiencies of the latter. It takes the nadir of the European spiritual development for the zenith of the new order.”

II

WORLD WAR II

Views similar to those expressed by de Tocqueville can be found in Donoso Cortès famous “Discurso” (Jan. 4, 1849, in Oeuvres, I, Paris, 1858).

When the National Socialist danger increased beyond proportion in 1931 and 1932, Dr. Heinrich Brüning himself thought about winning the Left and the Conservatives (who were unfortunately under the leadership of an uncapable industrialist — Dr. Hugenberg) to forestall their victory by a monarchical restoration. The Left with the exception of the Nazis and Communists was quite willing to follow him, but Hindenburg, the great Cunctator hesitated. An excellent account of these intrigues and negotiations can be found in J. Wheeler-Bennett’s Hindenburg, the Wooden Titan, London, 1936, pp. 339, 353–368.

All that is a dangerous walking in circles. The Europeans inside and outside of Germany are fed up with State and Statism, with any manifestation of colossalism and Pan-ism, with private or state capitalism. If German workers hear that the Welsh mines have been nationalized they visualize merely a mining manager in uniform and police support instead of a mining manager in a business suit and a police “connection.” Total nationalization is communism. One wonders whether there is really a group of professors in the London School of Economics which thinks that Dutch saboteurs die with the name of one of the Gollancz books on their lips, whether the Chetniks of General Mihajlović make shrines with pictures of Miss Naomi Mitchison or of Mr. Stephen Spender. I can assure Mr. Smith and Professor Laski that Europeans are not going to die on barricades for 10 per cent increases in salary, for the aggravated evil of State capitalism, for birth control clinics, cheap gadgets or election campaigns. The only form of leftism which will be popular in Europe after the war is Anarchism, total liberty, not a spurious “Total Democracy” which is halfway to total communism. (Cf. “A Conservative’s Reflections on the Future of Europe” by F. S. Campbell, Thought, September, 1942.) These proposals all stem from the same psychological source; the basically erroneous interpretation of Fascism and Nazism by Marxists and Crypto-Marxists deeming it to be a capitalistic, semimedieval aristocratic-clerical conspiracy by non-Marxists ochlocrats. All remedies proposed on the basis of this wrong diagnosis are bound to fail and are going to cost oceans of blood. (See also Professor Laski’s article in the London Observer, July 5, 1942, p. 3.)

“Democracy is nothing more and nothing less than humanism in theocracy and rational theocracy in universal humanism” (p. 33).

“Democracy teaches that everything must be within humanity, nothing against humanity, nothing outside humanity” (p. 34).

“But the fundamental principle is that the democratic concept of freedom can never include the freedom to destroy democracy and freedom. . . . This is — in an interpretation suited to the modern mind —the spirit which Christ called the Holy Ghost” (pp. 34–35).

“The Protestant insurrection overrode all obstacles to the direct communication of the individual with God, thus fundamentally asserting the freedom of man’s spirit” (p. 37) — (within the framework of predestination . . .).

“Jesus, highest of Jewish prophets” (p. 40).

“Democracy, in the catholicity of its language, interprets and justifies the separate creeds as its own vernaculars.”

“It follows then, that none of these vernaculars, however venerable and lovable, and whatever their right to citizenship, can take the place of the universal language which expresses the common belief of man. The latter explains and annexes all dogmas as symbols; the churches, in the fetters of literalism, anathemize as heresy and error the symbolical meaning that is the dogma’s innermost truth” (p. 45).

“A constitutional reform of democracy cannot be founded but on the spirit of a new religion” (p. 80).

“An inquiry into the religious heritage of the western world should try to discover which of its elements are more apt to co-operate with the democratic community and consequently more deserving of protection and help by it, and whether other elements, conversely, are by nature and content so committed to the support of Fascist and other autocratic philosophies and intrinsically so inimical to democracy, or at least so ambiguous, as to become the source of additional danger in the hour of peril” (pp. 81–82).

“Colleges and universities have even developed, almost spontaneously, in their chapel services and exercises a provisional model for an unsectarian liturgy — virtually adequate to a new religion outside the literal fences of each separate faith and embracing the spiritual substance of all” (p. 85).

Walter Farrell, O.P., summed this book up in his extensive review in the Thomist (October, 1941) with the following phrase: “This book represents one of the earliest and most concrete conquests of Hitlerism in America.”

Further reference material:

On the origins of World War I and II:

Professor Sidney Fay, in Events, Vol. 6, No. 34, October, 1939, p. 241.

The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large

I

COMMUNISM

II

WORLD WAR II

III

ODDS AND ENDS