The great hope of leftists and, to be sure, not only of leftists is the United Nations. Here again conservatives err when they reject in principle an organization of this order. In a radically different form (and, perhaps, in another age) it might have been quite useful. Born in 1945 at the Conference of San Francisco (nicknamed “San Fiasco”) this almost stillborn organization suffered right from the beginning from the Russian veto which paralyzed it in its most important functions. Its effectiveness has been impaired by the same debility which besets all parliaments composed of parties belonging to diametrically opposed philosophies and ideologies. As long as the various member nations do not speak the same “language,” as long as they do not have a bloc d’idées incontestables, a common intellectual and spiritual denominator, they cannot have a real dialogue. They cannot really “talk” to each other.1 The Soviet delegate who utters the word “democracy,” the Indian, the American, the Thailandic,2 the Yugoslav, the Mexican, the Swedish delegate each mean something else, something radically different.
One does not even have to use this many-faceted political term as a measuring rod. What about man? The Soviet, the Portuguese, the Cambodian, the Tanzanian representatives cannot possibly mean the same thing when they mention man. To one he is a biological accident in an inexplicable universe, to another a creature created in the image of God, to a third an odd animal tending into nothingness, and so forth.
To make matters worse, we have all over the world a fantastic proliferation of states and “nations” of the most varied importance (which is a lesser problem) but also of the most varied cultural levels which, indeed, should not be overlooked. The democratic dogma, of course, wilfully tried to overlook the difference in quality, in educational levels, in experience and moral values, and relies completely on the volitional element. It can be argued that the Polish representative at the UN represents a government which in no way has a mandate from its people, but it also seems obvious that the Danish delegation to the United Nations can make a more reasoned, sounder contribution than that of the Sudan which massacres its black Christians, or that of Papa Doc in Haiti,3 or of some “emerging nations” where not such a long time ago “long pig,” i.e., human meat was happily digested.
At the present moment the United Nations in no way reflect the lasting values of this globe. Numerically they do only in a very remote way, qualitatively not at all. Their entire record ever since their inception is very poor. They had some successes in very minor issues, but they have failed in all crucial ones (the Korean War, the Hungarian Revolution, the Congo troubles, the many critical phases of the Southeast Asian or the Near East imbroglio, disarmament, etc.). In other words, we have another case of a typical leftist timetable error combined with an idealistic failure in the face of harsh realities. In (a) another time, (b) another form, and (c) another composition, the United Nations might be viable. Of course the argument might be raised that politics is the art of the possible and that, under the present circumstances, the United Nations is better than nothing. He who cannot buy a big, shiny, expensive new car has to content himself with a secondhand one. This argument sounds sensible but becomes questionable when we reflect that a ramshackle vehicle might be a death trap. Under such circumstances it is wiser to walk or go by bus.
Viewing this globe in our times, one often wonders about the cocksureness of so many representatives of “moderate” leftism. As far as we can let our eyes roam, we see nothing but misery and ruin, created by the moderate leftists, the self-styled “progressives” unattached to any party discipline or ideology with a clear profile; or we see the same ruin caused by radically totalitarian philosophies which have thought out their premises to the bitter end, which disdain compromise and prefer to work without a mask. It is difficult to find a single large area where we do not have to say: “Here leftism has caused suffering, mischief, and destruction.” And by leftism we mean that attitude, usually rationalized and systematized into an ideology, which stands on identitarianism, egalitarianism, collectivism, statism, centralization, majoritism, materialism, coercion, and slavery. We mean movements which are antipersonal, antidiversity, antiprivilege, antispiritual, antifederalist and, indeed, antiliberal even if they misuse the liberal label—because the only liberty they are interested in is sensual liberty, which ordinarily means slavery.4 It is true that crimes of commission as well as omission must be attributed to the forces of the great Western tradition: the loquacious bombast of a William II, the bureaucratic lack of imagination of Franz Josef, the melancholic inertia of Nicholas II, the callous sloth of certain Latin American big landowners, the indifference to human values of early capitalism, the stubborness of the old clergy, and the arrogance of the aristocracy, the cynicism of a Ludendorff5 who sent Lenin in a boxcar to Russia, the misplaced liberality of a Louis XVI, the avarice of certain colonial administrators, and so forth, but all these are mere peccadillos in comparison with the disastrous, murderous, and suicidal actions of the left.
Let us take a map of the world, a brush and a pot of red ink. Then let us paint in the areas where people live in slavery and desperation, where they are less free, less well off materially, more controlled, more curtailed in their expressions and actions, more terrified about their future than 40 to 60 years ago. I do not think that we could even leave out the United States from this blood-colored manifest of unhappiness. Take the average American parent looking over the breakfast table, counting the heads of his children. If he has any degree of intelligence he must realize what frightening menaces are hanging over them—menaces by no means unavoidable at one time. The history of the world since 1917—since America’s entry into the war and the Red October—only seemingly resembles a Greek tragedy that starts with certain words and actions and mounts to its inexorable tragic climax: the situation we are all in now. The historian, the philosopher, the theologian know better. Along the path of this catabasis decisions were taken—or not taken. And these decisions, far more often than not, lay in the hands of the left: the quarter-left, the half-left, the full, thoroughly committed left. And in spite of all their minor or major quarrels, in practice they all banded together, mutually aiding, pushing, and confusing each other. In one of my novels, whose background is the United States during World War II, a Hungarian government emissary confesses: “If you had an inkling of what I know you would have to despair of the logical faculties of those governing us—not only here, but everywhere. These chaps can be compared to drunk criminals who have been hit over the head with a club and now are reeling in darkest night across wooded swamps. Or one might even liken them to madmen who have put the noose around their neck and wait impatiently for an opportunity to jump from the chair.”6
The mischief was done for a variety of reasons. There is a blindness, a danger in any system of thought, a danger which those on the right (and in the right!) also have to face, mindful of the Spanish proverb: “All science is madness if it is not balanced by common sense.”7 Ideological closed-mindedness, however, was always a greater weakness among the left. We remind the reader again of Hegel’s reply to the admonition that the facts contradicted his theories: “All the worse for the facts.” The second factor is the intellectual arrogance of the moderate left which forms everywhere (and in American far more so than anywhere else) a well-organized mutual admiration society enjoying a number of monopolies and therefore is rarely seriously challenged. To be sure, they suffer defeats in the practical order but the Common Man’s memory is no longer than his nose and thus the old follies are rarely reviewed. Cut off from the great traditions of the West, rootless and parochial, ignorant of the big wide world and its cultures, languages, institutions and religions, the American leftist (more than his overseas confrère) has been a babe in the woods, stubborn in his error and unfortunately sustained by a large sector of “public opinion” representing specific trends in, or rather strains from, the American tradition. We should never lose sight of the fact that the American leftist does not hang in midair. The American conservative will one day have to come to grips with certain cherished American notions. (This, by the way, is not only true of America, but of everywhere. The conservative, as we have said before, cannot just underwrite the past8 or the entire tradition of his nation.)9
The moderate leftist is not always aprioristically opposed to liberty. Often he sacrifices it with a sigh. Yet he has no higher reason to cling to it, and his weakness in opposing the radical forms of leftism partly comes from his Roussellian stand and partly from his inferiority complex. He sees in the unabashed totalitarians the wave of the future. They have “done things.” They are carrying out programs he himself has not the courage to advocate openly or, given the opportunity, to execute. He therefore falls into the category of Lenin’s “useful idiots.”
It is his Roussellian heritage which tells the quasiliberal that Socialists, anarchists, and Communists are “human beings after all,” that they will one nice day see the “light of reason,” that, faced by harsh reality, they will have to “come to terms” with it, that totalitarian leaders will sooner or later have to “fulfill the aspirations of the masses” which can be expressed in washing machines and in the right to pull levers10 on election day and to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the unexpurgated pocketbook edition for 75 cents. The religion of the moderate leftist is “progressivism” and since its final victory is assured, all roads lead directly or indirectly to it. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ulbricht, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro might be only detours, disagreeable but unavoidable intermediary figures useful for getting obsolete survivals out of the way to establish a better tomorrow.
The situation, however, is not quite so simple, especially in America where the moderate leftist has evolved from the old-fashioned liberal and has not entirely shed certain liberal notions. He would not like to see a Lenin in the United States but has a sneaking suspicion that the contemptuously grinning corpse in Moscow’s Red Square was “good for the Russians,” that these “medievally backward priest-ridden serfs” (who, by the way, had produced Turgenev, Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Tschaikovsky, Metchnikov, Mendeleyev)11 “needed just that sort of reformer.” Our liberal is hardly aware of the fact that he is a fervent nationalist.
Finally we have that most dangerous of all types, the “halfway” man who sees in the Communist utopia the terminal station. He has no real argument against it except the trembling hope that it will come about in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary way: All that America can do is start to subordinate its temporary existence to the eventual coming of the Red Paradise. This is precisely the position of Alger Hiss and all the others like him (whether they actually acted on their convictions or not). It was a mere historic accident (explicable by the preceding evolution of general political thinking) that they did not in any appreciable number fall for the National Socialists.
The havoc wrought by leftism is simply colossal. If humanity had any common sense, had been permanently endowed with reason, knowledge, a sense of history, it would have renounced the leftist gods a long time ago. The left, however, has by far the better catchwords, and man’s brainpower has to be viewed in terms of potentiality, not of actuality. It needs enormous moral and spiritual qualities to mobilize one’s intelligence fully; it just does not work automatically.12 However, an unbiased glance backward and around us reveals an ocean of misery, unmitigated horror, and colossal stupidity: the fiendish massacres perpetrated by the French Revolution, the noyades, the batteries nationales, the blood orgies in the Vendée, the forests of guillotines, the silly and vain risings of 1848, the bestialities of the Paris Commune, with its mass slayings of innocent hostages, the senseless overthrow of the Mexican and Brazilian monarchies13 which alone could have insured an orderly development to these two big Latin American nations. There is the suicidal order of 1919 in Central Europe which provoked World War II, the idiotic transformation of Germany into a republic,14 the ignominious treatment of Hungary and Bulgaria that forced them into the Axis camp; the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the hell of Stalinism culminating in Katyn and the icy inferno of the kontslageri on two Continents; the Nazi Revolution with its countless bestialities, the “Kazetts” and the extermination camps; the “democratic” aerial warfare that burned alive myriads of noncombatants of all ages, the infamous cruelties of the Spanish Loyalists and the Chinese “agrarian reformers”; the sadistic doings of totalitarian police forces in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and Albania; the fiendish tortures applied in North Vietnam and North Korea; the unspeaking depredations of the Mexican, Cuban, Colombian, and Venezuelan “Revolutions”; the nightmares of decolonization in India and the Congo, in Angola and Mozambique, in the Cameroons and the Sudan; the brutalities of Genosse Ulbricht’s repression of the Berlin Rising, of dear old Khrushchev’s quelling of the Hungarian Revolution—not to forget the millions of Kulaks deported, starving and dying; the famines in the Ukraine and in the Kuban Region; the deportation of untold East Germans, Sudeten Germans, East Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Esthonians, Krim-Tartars, Volga-Germans, and even the Communist victims of Stalin caught in their own net. Remember the French massacred by the Communists working within the Résistance, the Italians assassinated by their own Reds, the Yugoslavs victimized by the Partizani. Remember the slaughter of the Domobranci by Tito (surrendered to him by the British), the fate of the Vlassovtsy (surrendered jointly by the Americans and the British), the scenes of terror at Dachau, when the Nazi cremation stoves were hardly cold and the Western Allies packed good Russians into railroad cars to have them shipped as traitors to the Soviet Union—desperate men then tried to commit suicide by biting their arteries. Think of the innocent victims of Red Chinese bands in the jungles of Malaya, of Catholics executed in Mexico, of the Lutheran pastors slain in Riga, of the 256 human roasts in the Montagnard Village of Dak-Son, the 4,000-odd Christians slain in Hue, the buried Benedictines of Thien-An. If one were to take paper and pencil to make an estimate of how many people were murdered or killed in battle because of the ideas of the French Revolution in their various stages, guises, and evolutionary forms, because of the ideas of equality, ethnic or racist identity, a “classless society,” a “world safe for democracy,” a “racially pure people,” “true social justice achieved by social engineering”—one would arrive at simply staggering sums. Even the Jewish holocaust offered by the National Socialists with five or six million dead would seem almost a drop in the bucket. There must have been at least 120 or 150 million victims, perhaps even 300 million. The victims of the French Revolution were relatively few, but sadistic bestiality had entered Western Civilization through that door and we have had increasingly “bigger and better” slaughters ever since—as the Western World moves nearer and nearer to the abyss.
However, we have already reached the brink of the abyss—hence the so much talked about “brinkmanship” which is indeed a grim reality. As Spengler said, “Optimism is cowardice.” We are now passing through a phase in history when the forces of the left in conjunction with the technological development have created a situation (the “world we live in”) in which hope based purely on rational grounds can hardly subsist and only Hope as a theological virtue is justified. It is significant that such outstanding Christian thinkers as Romano Guardini and Josef Pieper15 emphasized the legitimacy of a religious pessimism or, let us say, realism in relation to this world.
But let us view the future, given our physical survival, in the light of a continued evolution and revolution in our midst. We are now living in a time when in the realm of art and thought the essentially new no longer appears,16 when basic patterns tend to repeat themselves or merely show new combinations. Science, technology, and techniques create additional factors, but man remains man. Ever since Pandora’s Box of the French Revolution had been opened, ever since Prometheus was replaced by Procrustes, leftism had its sway. Nor should we harbor any illusions: Even in spite of its suicidal tendency leftism is going to stay with us, not necessarily as a dominant power, but certainly as a permanent factor, as a trend, as a constant temptation. It is there to stay, even in the best of systems, up to the very threshold of eternity. This is so because the leftist element, due to its animal-material character, is part and parcel of the human person. And persona means soul and body, personality and numerality, uniqueness and repetitiveness.
Today democracy is still with us, but all observers with a modicum of insight see it drawing to a close. It has been popular (and by no means only among the most primitive) because it did, almost miraculously, enter a synthesis with the liberal principle, but this union, as was clearly foreseen by de Tocqueville, is heading for a divorce. This is perhaps least felt in the United States where political theory in recent decades has become curiously one-sided, moving in one direction, provoking no substantial contradiction.17 Yet Madison was already aware of the liberal essence of democracy18 and he would have been surprised to see that today it is brought into intimate connection with pluralism, a dangerous catchword so generally used and misused.19 As we have always pointed out, democracy needs a maximum of conformity, not variety, in order to work properly and efficiently.20
Nevertheless, we have to look upon the end of democracy with fear and trembling. The evergrowing gap between Scita and Scienda, as well as the swiftness and secrecy so necessary in the domains of foreign policy and military affairs make a change in the long run unavoidable. However, rule from above might herald an Augustean age as well as its very opposite. An authoritarian regime by leftists without any controls would be at least as oppressive as was its initial phase—the French Revolution. In other words, in the coming authoritarian regimes in which diets will be no more than advisory bodies or at best, mere organized pressure lobbies, the real problem will concern the moral and intellectual qualities of the administrators, the experts and those in supreme control. Even if (as it is to be hoped) checks and balances will function in relatively good governments, the quality of the top is of crucial importance.21 It is obvious that the left will try to capture and monopolize the top, and the outcome of these efforts will decide the fate of nations, perhaps even of the globe. The danger is this: that the “conservatives,” that the right, might lose this new opportunity again by default because they will hesitate—if necessary—to use revolutionary means and rather do what they so often have done, i.e., optimistically watch developments, hoping that they will go their way automatically. They constantly forget how perverse history can be, because they have lost the Biblical skepticism as to the nature of man. They must remember what Horkheimer said in his famous interview: that conservatives today are nearer to true revolutionaries than to fascists and that true revolutionaries are nearer to conservatives than to communists. Yet the possibility unfortunately exists that the right people of the right at the right time, the kairós, will just produce another “great book” although—we will borrow this from Marx—the moment approaches when we should not merely philosophize but actually change the world.
Yet whatever the authoritarian character of the top, according to a rightist conception of state and society, in order to save the dignity of man and the freedom of peoples, it will be necessary to create “areas,” “domains,” “little kingdoms” in which man can move freely and decide freely; where not only can he be master but where his judgments are valid because they are based on knowledge and experience. In a Tyrolean village, for instance, where the community council (Gemeinderat) is elected on the basis of universal suffrage, where the mayor as well as every councilor is personally known to everybody, where the problems to be dealt with are within the intellectual grasp of almost everybody (including the councilors and the mayor!), democratic institutions still do make sense. The problem is to secure (and to insure) the autonomy of such a village. Now, a village is a “geographic” unit but there are other well-marked-off domains where a person can find his freedom and face it with a sense of responsibility because right proportions still exist between his knowledge and the affairs of this area. (Codetermination in a factory—as it exists in Federal Germany—also makes sense and should by no means be viewed as a socialistic venture.)22 Yet to confront the average man with issues he is not able to judge, or to force even exceptional men to handle affairs for which they are not competent, is either mocking madness, a crime, or both.
It is quite possible that now constitutions are evolving which may prove to be more promising than our systems. We might look in this respect to despised Latin America23 or to contemptuously treated Spain whose constitutional development in the last twenty years (hardly realized even by the average Spaniard) deserves serious study.24 Peter F. Drucker, certainly not a rightist radical, is very much to the point when he says:
Ultimately we will need new political theory and probably very new constitutional law. We shall need new concepts and new social theory. Whether we shall get these and what they will look like, we cannot know today. But we can know that we are disenchanted with government, primarily because it does not perform. We can say that we need in pluralist society a government that can and does govern. This is not a government that “does”; it is not a government that “administers”; it is a government that governs.25
Such a government might even be a hereditary monarchy and to him who knows world history in its depth and width, this should not be surprising. Marcuse himself admits that the Father always returns and overthrows the association of Brothers in a Thermidorian style.26 Mitscherlich’s views are not dissimilar.27 As a matter of fact, in the broad masses the (largely subconscious) thirst for monarchy and monarchs is amazing—sometimes even a bit nauseating. Bored with and tired of all forms of “modernity,” fed up with technology and its uniformity, disinterested in an abstraction like “government by law,” the masses long for persons and personalities they can look up to, whom they can love, for whom they can have “sympathy” in the original sense of the word. A perusal of lowbrow weeklies in Europe reveals an inordinate fascination with royalty, with their loves, marital troubles, weddings, pregnancies, courtships, friendships, affairs. Obviously, as long as the family as an institution exists, as long as patriarchalism in some (however diluted) form survives, the familistic principle in politics will exercise its magnetic attraction.28 This might be exploited “in parts” by a single person rather than by an entire family. A very recent poll among Italians—who not such a very long time ago have emerged from a one-man dictatorship—has shown that two-thirds of them would be willing to submit to a new dictator with a time limit.29 The dangers possibly (but not inevitably) inherent in such a development also have to be seen in the light of the fact that our present society, devoid of a sense of authority, has not been prepared to cope with power in any sense—neither those subjected to it nor those exercising it.30 This crisis of our time is also a crisis of manliness and true masculinity which the left always suspected as “reactionary.” There is no room today for male aggressiveness except in underdeveloped countries and within the framework of New Left destructivism. The “Father State,”31 the “Provider State” is but a faceless father substitute. The failure of man as a warrior and as a father is now being followed by his resignation as a lover, after the sinister looking shock worker we are getting the long-haired dope addict.32
There is, however, a certain interrelationship between the totalitarian Provider State, Leftism, and atheism. Leftism, obviously, tends in its identitarian, unitarian enthusiasm towards monism and not toward dualism or pluralism. Clemenceau declared in the National Assembly: “The clergy has to learn to give to Caesar that which belongs to Caesar—and everything belongs to Caesar.” Jules Ferry, another leftist Prime Minister of the French Republic said that “we want to organize a humanity which can do without God or kings” and that by “feeling part of humanity” one “will be free from the fear of death.” Fifteen years later Viviani, Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs stated in lyrical terms: “We have extinguished the lights of Heaven and they are not to be lit up again.” Jaurès, in his socialist and democratic fervor, even did one better: “If the idea of God, if God Himself in some visible form were to appear before the multitudes, the first duty of man would be to refuse Him obedience and to consider him as an equal with whom one enters in discussion, not as a master to whom one is subject.”33 Bourgeois leftist laicism and atheism, needless to say, was soon outdone by its socialist-proletarian version.
As one can see, it would be the eminent task of Christianity to fight the leftist temptation in the world and in ourselves, but the untimely crisis of Christianity, not only but above all in the Catholic Church, is the most glaring of all present defaults. Triggered off by a wrong interpretation of Vatican II on the part of the Catholic and secular press, the crisis has a predominantly theological nature, not among the still conservative flock, but among priests, monks, nuns, hierarchs, “intellectuals.” It produced a theology of the beaten dog,34 with resentment-loaded argumentations characterized by purely negative “antipositions.”35 We are here faced with an evil spirit flattering and courting the world;36 the peremptorily demanded concessions to the world are mostly incompatible with the character of a great religion.37 Leftist poisons, the nearly total immersion in “social thought” and in “social action”38 have created an impasse in Christianity depriving it of its magnetism precisely for those who most thirst for the supranatural and the eternal. A leading French Dominican who declared during a lecture in São Paulo that he suspects God to be rather on the side of the Communists than of the capitalists, and that he is not at all unhappy about this state of affairs,39 expresses very much the spineless spirit of a “changing faith in a changing world,” with an unfettered libido for corporate survival which disgusts the faithful and causes contempt among the enemies of Christ.40 Here indeed lies a real responsibility of Christianity, of all Christian faiths toward the rest of the world. By giving up basic positions, by relinquishing their role of defenders of freedom, by becoming prototalitarians, relativists, and drifters, they jeopardize the very center of our culture and civilization, its heart and soul—the Christian minority. Polite doubt or relativism, on the other hand, will neither lead to “progress” nor protect us against the assaults of the organized or unorganized left, old or new.41 Man is willing to die only in the service of genuine convictions, for an exclamation mark, not for a question mark. And since we are touching here upon the “rather dead than Red” formula, we must remember that in history man’s readiness to die for ideas and ideals has always been the most decisive factor.42 There is victory, there is noble failure, and there is also defeat in ignominy. One thing, however, is absolutely certain and this precisely from a Christian point of view: We have no right to offer our throat meekly to the assassin—because we are permitted to tempt neither friend nor foe.43
While the Old Left proposes a false order, the New Left proposes chaos which,44 oddly enough, is nothing but the other side of the same medal. External “reforms,” naturally, will not establish a lasting and right order: All such plans can only be transformed into reality if our hearts and minds are prepared for it, if a metanoia, a change of mind and mentality has taken place. Only then can we be ready and summon the courage to do the right things right and leave the wrongdoing to the eternal left.