Chapter XIII

1 The late Alexander Rüstow remained curiously unknown in the English-speaking world. Cf. p. 198 and Chapter XI, note 15.

We are referring here to an important minor work of this brilliant scholar, “Das Versagen des Wirtshaftsliberalismus als religionsgeschichtliches Problem,” in Istanbuler Schriften (Istanbul Yazilari), p. 12.

2 Achille Charles Léonce Victor Due de Broglie, French statesman, married to the daughter of Madame de Staël, had his career destroyed by the imperial dictatorship of Napoleon III. He characterized this regime as a government which the “poorer classes desired and the rich deserved.” One might have extended this analysis to the Nazis if one added “and which leftist intellectuals unwittingly had prepared.” Before his death de Broglie said, “I shall die a penitent Christian and an impenitent liberal.” More pronouncedly Catholic and Christian was that other great liberal aristocrat, Montalembert, who could write in retrospect before his death, “People should know that there was at least one old soldier of the Catholic faith and of liberty who, before 1830, has clearly distinguished the Catholic from the royalist cause: who under the July regime has pleaded the cause of the Church’s independence from civilian control: who in 1848 has fought with all his energies against the alleged identity of Christianity and democracy, and who in 1852 has protested the surrender of freedom to brute power under the pretext of religion.” Cf. Montalembert, Emmanuel Mounier, ed. (Paris: Egloff, 1945), pp. 98-99.

3 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, Book II, Ch. 3.

4 Frau Heddy Neumeister is economics editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, visits Mont-Pèlerin Society Meetings, and is the author of Organisierte Menschlichkeit? (Herder-Bücherei, No. 116).

5 Cf. Correspondance du R. P. Lacordaire et de Madame Swetchine, Comte de Falloux, ed. (Paris: Didier, 1880). As to Lacordaire’s political views, he had gone through a demo-republican phase. See Lacordaire, Sa vie par lui-même (Marseilles: Publiroc, 1931), pp. 225-229. His speech upon taking the fauteuil of de Tocqueville in the Academy, cf. ibid. p. 306 ff. About his life in general in a concise form, cf. Marc Escholier, Lacordaire ou Dieu et la liberté (Paris: Fleurus, 1959).

6 Cf. Antoine Redier, Comme disait M. de Tocqueville (Paris: Perrin, 1925), pp. 47-48 (letter in facsimile). See also his letter to Count Leo Thun, dated February 26, 1844, quoted by Christoph Thienen-Adlerflycht, Graf Leo Thun im Vormärz (Graz: Böhlau, 1967), p. 177, in which he deplores all disestablishment of the aristocratic order.

7 As to Alexis de Tocqueville, cf. my Introduction to his Democracy in America (New Rochelle, N. Y.: Arlington House, n.d.) pp. v-xxii. De Tocqueville was also convinced that pre-Revolutionary France was much freer than in the mid-nineteenth century and that in this old freedom the freest and most independent minds could develop. Cf. his “L’Ancien regime,” Oeuvres complétes, J. P. Mayer, ed., Vol. 2. pp. 176-177.

8 Cf. Nicholas Berdyaev, The End of Our Time, D. Atwater, translator (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933), pp. 174-175. Russian original: Novoye srednovyekovye (Paris: S.P.C.K., 1928).

9 One can see the change in Maritain ’s political thinking from his Primauté du spirituel to Christianisme et la démocratie in which he praises the “atheistic Communists of Russia” for having “abolished the profit motive.” Yet it is not likely that the author of Le paysan de la Garonne would subscribe to these ideas today. (All the more so as desperate but sterile efforts are now being made in Eastern Europe to install the profit motive in a socialistic economy.)

10 Cf. Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1933), pp. 304-305.

11 In World War I Thomas Mann wrote a most bellicose, extremely nationalistic book of essays, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen. Asked after World War II whether he did not want to disavow it, he answered with a flat “no,” which surprised everybody.

12 Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, “De la démocratie en Amérique,” in Oeuvres (Paris, 1864), Vol. 3, pp. 516-523. In English: Arlington House edition, Vol. 2, pp. 335 sq.

13 Cf. letter of A. de Tocqueville to Count Gobineau, November 17, 1853, in Revue des Deux Mondes (Paris, 1907), Vol. 40, pp. 62 ff.

14 A scholarly work covering the whole of National Socialist radical thinking and its actual racist policy has yet to be written. The op. cit. of Hedwig Conrad-Martius provides us merely with a historic background. So does Ernst Nolte in his op. cit. (pp. 345-355). The American influence on Nazi thought in this respect was not inconsiderable (Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard). Compare also with Albert Jay Nock, “The Jewish Problem in America,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1941.

15 Staunch Lutherans, like Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, opposed Bismarck and his National Liberals violently. So did the arch-conservative Prussian Kreuz-Zeitung. Gerlach later joined, out of sheer protest, the “Catholic” Center party. Cf. Hans Joachim Schoeps, Das andere Preussen, (Stuttgart: Friedrich Vorwerk, 1952), passim.

16 This was already noted by the English volunteer officer C. F. Henningsen in his Campaña de doce meses en Navarra y las provincias vascongadas con el general Zumalacárregui, R. Oyarzun, translator (San Sebastián: Editorial Española, 1939), originally published in 1836. It was largely the gentry which was Carlist and conservative.

17 The Bavarian aristocracy turned toward the conservative (and royalist) Bayrische Volkspartei (Bavarian People’s party, forerunner of the present C.S.U., the Christlichsoziale Union) only after 1918. In Bavaria, before World War I, a “gentleman” was liberal, not “clerical”!

18 Guglielmo Ferrero rightly considered the House of Savoy to be the “quasilegitimate” rulers of Italy. In Spain and Portugal the liberal branches of the royal families ruled until 1931 and 1910 respectively: in Spain the descendants of Isabel II, in Portugal those of Maria da Gloria. The Carlists and Miguelinos represented the conservative (and truly legitimate) pretenders who in civil wars had vainly tried to make tradition and legality prevail. Britain gave full aid to the liberals and British volunteers had fought in both wars on the side of the liberal lines. Today—in the 1970s—the Carlist line (but not the Carlist tradition) has died out in Spain while true Braganças survive in Portugal, claiming the throne. (The descendants of Maria da Gloria—Maria II—were Saxe-Coburgs.)

19 It was amazing to see even young people disgusted by the word “liberty.” And this was precisely the situation in large parts of Europe prior to World War II. The explanation is the visual impression made by the liberal camp—an agglomeration of petty, frightened mice without positive beliefs. European youth, on the other hand, naively thought that it was strong enough to bear even very heavy chains.

20 When Mussolini fell into the hands of the largely Communist partisans they shouted, “Why have you betrayed Socialism?” The Italian left had never forgotten that Mussolini belonged basically to them. Cf. Paolo Monelli, Mussolini piccolo borghese (Milan: Garzanti, 1959), p. 347. Yet there were, needless to say, many Fascists who after 1944 turned Socialist or Communist as, for instance, Curzio Malaparte (whose real name was Suckert). His last book was on Red China. On his deathbed, however, this erstwhile Lutheran of German extraction became a Catholic.

Among the former Socialists and Communists serving Mussolini we also have to mention Nicola Bombacci, Robert Farinacci, Cesare Rossi, Massimo Rocca, Leandro Arpinati.

21 Cf. Eduard Heimann, “The Rediscovery of Liberalism,” Social Research, Vol. 8. No. 4. (November 1941).

22 Cf. Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Karl Rahner, ed. (Freiburg i. Br.-Barcelona: Herder, 1955), p. 450. The Syllabus can be fully understood only if the individual propositions are read in their full context (Allocutions, Breves, Encyclicals, etc.) and the full context studied in relation with the historic occasion which provoked them. Without such double control the Syllabus (a hasty and misleading compilation in any case) makes no sense at all. When the Syllabus was published, the French public protested violently, but the famous liberal Bishop Dupanloup wrote a very necessary commentary which became a best-seller and earned the author a highly laudatory Breve of Pius IX. Cf. R. P. Lecanuet, Montalembert (Paris: Poussielgue, 1902), pp. 386-389.

23 See the passionate plea of Wilhelm Röpke for Christianity as the last defense against totalitarianism in Civitas Humana, pp. 224-225. (Cf. also pp. 194-198).

24 Walter Eucken was the son of the famous German philosopher Richard Eucken (Nobel prize winner for literature in 1908) and the economics teacher of Dr. Ludwig Erhard, Finance Minister and later Chancellor of the German Federal Republic.

25 See the spirited defense of Christianity by Rüstow and his insistence that Western civilization stands and falls with it, in Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, (First Edition), Vol. 2, pp. 235-236.

His grandfather’s generation consisted of three brothers, all Prussian generals. They were Alexander and Cesar, both killed in Austria in 1866, both military writers of renown, and the very colorful Wilhelm Friedrich, also an officer who wrote a pamphlet against militarism. He was arrested but fled to Switzerland before his trial in 1850. There he lectured on military affairs at the University of Zürich and became a major in the Swiss Army. In 1860 he joined Garibaldi in Sicily where he was made a colonel on the general staff. He was the actual victor of the Volturno battle. After the Italian campaign he returned to Switzerland and in 1870 was elected colonel of the Swiss Army—in peacetime the highest rank. He was the author of numerous military works. Here was a Prussian officer, intellectually and internally active, liberal and adventurous, an antimilitarist and yet a war enthusiast.

26 A large group of German conspirators entrusted the American journalist Louis P. Lochner to inform President Roosevelt of their plan to restore the monarchy under Prince Louis Ferdinand, second son of the former Crown Prince who had spent some time in the United States working in Detroit. Lochner reached the United States only in July 1942 and then failed to be received by President Roosevelt who would not even hear about the German resistance. The President considered such information “highly embarrassing.” Cf. Hans Rothfels, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler (Krefeld, Scherpe, 1949), pp. 166 ff.

Austrian monarchists in 1945, some fresh out of Nazi concentration camps, were often arrested by “His Majesty’s officers” and again thrown into jail. In the State Treaty of 1955, Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union obliged Austria not to restore the Hapsburgs (and, much more amusing, not to possess submarines—in a landlocked Alpine state!). It cannot be doubted that Communism has a vested interest in keeping the Hapsburgs out of Austria. But in what way have America and Britain?

27 In 1955 an enterprising young American, Patrick M. Boarman, director of the Bureau for Cultural Relations of the N.C.W.C. in Germany, organized a meeting between neoliberal and Christian thinkers in Gauting near Munich. The papers read on this occasion can be found in Der Christ und die soziale Marktwirtschaft, P. M. Boarman, ed. (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1955). Cf. also Roland Nitsche, Mehr als Soll und Haben (Vienna: Herder, 1962). Nitsche too is a Catholic economic neoliberal. So is Baron Georg Bernhard Kripp who wrote an excellent thesis: Wirtschaftsfreiheit und katholische Soziallehre (Zürich: Polygraphischer Verlag, 1967). Practically valueless is the work of the Dominican E. E. Nawroth (O.P.) Die Sozial und Wirtschaftphilosophie des Neoliberalismus (Heidelberg-Loẅen, 1961). The author, unfortunately, mistook a membership list of the Mont-Pèlerin Society for a catalog of neoliberals, yet the society contained old as well as new liberals. As a result half of the “authorities” cited are totally irrelevant. Therefore, so is his effort to identify neoliberalism with medieval nominalism.

For a further clarification of the neoliberal ethical stand in the field of economics, cf. particularly Dr. Berthold Kunze “Wirtschaftsethik und Wirtschaftsordnung” in Boarman, op. cit. and Alexander Rüstow, op. cit. See also Alexander Rüstow, “Soziale Marktwirtschaft als Gegenprogramm” in Wirtschaft ohne Wunder, A. Hunold, ed. (Erlenbach-Zürich, 1953), and Alfred Müller-Armack, Diagnose unserer Gegenwart (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1949), pp. 293. sq., and Müller-Armack, “Die Wirtschaftsordnung sozial gesehen,” in Ordo, Vol. 1. (1948).

28 Cf. F. A. v. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 397 ff. Here Hayek expresses his opinion that, contrary to H. Hallam (Constitutional History, 1827), the origin of the political sense of the term “liberal” is not Spanish. Hayek quotes Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, II, 41) on the “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice,” but I think that the term here is still used in the old sense of the liberalitas.

Chapter XIV

1 Cf. Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion (London: Longmans, Green, 1920), p. 7. “They are trying to introduce here the continental Liberalism,” said the great personage. “Now we know what Liberalism means on the continent. It means the abolition of property and religion. Those ideas would not suit this country.” These remarks were exaggerated, but not without substance when we remember how palaeoliberalism had replaced early liberalism. See the critical letter of Bishop Ketteler, “Reply to Professor Bluntschli in Heidelberg,” in Briefe von und an Wilhelm Emmanuel Freihern von Ketteler, Bishop von Mainz, J. M. Raich, ed. (Mainz: Kirchheim, 1879), pp. 439-440. Harsh is also the judgment of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, frequently but falsely accused of being a Nazi precursor, when he writes that “liberalism is the freedom to have no convictions and, at the same time, to maintain that this precisely is a conviction.” Cf. his Das dritte Reich (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941), p. 84. The book was originally published in 1924. The old liberals were obviously too optimistic about human nature. Ludwig von Mises, the great old liberal, wrote in Human Action (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 861: “After having nullified the fable of the anointed kings, the liberals fell prey to no less illusory doctrines, to the irresistible power of reason, to the infallibility of the volonté générale, and to the divine inspiration of majorities.”

2 The expression “sectarian liberals” for narrow-minded, anticlerical old liberals was used by Professor Carlton J. H. Hayes in A Generation of Materialism (New York: Harper, 1941), p. 49. The derivation of the term “liberal” from Spanish sources is vouchsafed by The Oxford English Dictionary, B I, Vol. 6, Part 1, p. 238, and by Román Oyarzún, Historia del cartismo (Bilbao: Ediciones Fe, 1939), p. 12 n.

3 The reactionary truly reacts in a hostile way against the existing order. He is not, in other words, a “sovereign thinker,” but an emotional protester.

4 Cf. Eugene Lyons, The Red Decade (Indianapolis; Bobbs-Merrill, 1941). On the American pilgrims visiting the USSR see pp. 92-95.

5 This goes hand in hand with pedolatry, the worship of youth.

6 So is welfarism and, naturally, so is socialism. Harold Laski, who preached this all the time, made himself rather unpopular among good American democrats without Socialist inclinations—but he was right. (Only an intense tradition of freedom, as we have it in Switzerland, will upset this trend.) Cf. also Harold Laski, Reflections of the Revolution of Our Time (London: Allen and Unwin, 1943), pp. 128 ff. Yet the realization that democracy leads naturally to socialism is fairly widespread. Cf. Ralph Henry Gabriel, op. cit. p. 378: Gonzague de Reynold, La demócratie et la Suisse (Bern: Editions de Chandelier, 1929), p. 298; Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters, G. J. Aubrey, ed. (London, 1927), Vol. 1. p. 84.

7 Cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The American Law Review, Vol. 5 (1871), p. 534.

8 Cf. The Pollock-Holmes Letters, Correspondence of Sir Frederick Pollock and Mr. Justice Holmes 1874-1932, Mark de Wolfe Howe, ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1942), Vol. 2., p. 36.

9 Cf. Richard Hertz, Chance and Symbol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 107.

10 Cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Harry C. Shriver, Book Notices, Uncollected Letters and Papers (New York: Central Book Co., 1936), p. 202.

11 Cf. Felix Morley, in Barron’s Magazine, June 18, 1951.

12 Cf. The Pollock-Holmes Letters, Vol. 2, pp. 238-239. Letter of Holmes to Sir Frederick Pollock, February 5, 1929.

13 Cf. Eduard May, Am Abgrund des Relativismus (Berlin: Lüttke-Verlag, 1941), pp. 136-138.

14 Cf. Hans Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre (Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1934), pp. 15-16.

15 Cf. Lord Percy of Newcastle, The Heresy of Democracy (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954), pp. 32, 61. Also: Reinhard Steiger, “Christliche Politik und die Versuchung zur Gewalttätigkeit,” Hochland, Vol. 52, No. 4. (April 1960), pp. 360-367. Relativism, as these two authors insist, is an essential element in Western democracy. Orestes Brownson believed that democracy was “political atheism.” Cf. Lawrence Roemer, op. cit. p. 44.

16 Cf. Fëdor Stepun, “Die Kirche zwischen Ost und West,” Schweizer Rundschau, Vol. 52, No. 11-12 (February-March 1953), p. 701.

17 Cf. Graf Hermann Keyserling, Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl, 1923), Vol. 1, p. 43.

18 Cf. F. S. Campbell (E.v.Kuehnelt-Leddihn), “The Whiff from an Empty Bottle,” in The Catholic World, October 1945, pp. 20-27. This short story tries to dramatize my thesis.

19 Cf. The New York Times, June 28, 1939, cited by Thomas F. Woodlock in his column “Thinking it Over,” The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 1939.

20 Cf. Teachers College Record, vol. 27, No. 6. (February 1926).

21 Cf. p. 102. Ernst Walter Zeeden in Martin Luther und die Reformation im Urteil des deutschen Luthertums (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1950), vol. 1, p. 379 speaks rightly about the “Protestant bipolarity” by which he means the evolution of the ideas of the Reformation into their opposite.

22 Cf. Chapter V, note 25. And here we would like to add that the term “Catholicism” (Katholizismus, Catholicisme) neither figures in the old Catholic Encyclopedia, nor in the Dictionnaire apologétique de la fai catholique, the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, or the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche.

The new Der Grosse Herder, vol. 5, p. 286 says clearly: “Catholicism, a term coined in imitation of the word Protestantism, rather describes the social phenomena of the Catholic Church . . . than her inner life.” Pope Pius XII called the term “Catholicism” “neither customary, nor fully adequate” for the Catholic Church. (Allocution at the 10th International Congress of Historical Sciences, reported by The Tablet (London), vol. 206, no. 6018, September 24, 1955, p. 293.)

23 Cf. Chapter VIII, note 4. Josef Lortz in his Einheit her Christenheit, Unfehlbarkeit und lebendige Aussage (Trier: Paulinus Verlag, 1959), p. 43 says that in Reformation theology “not even a hint of relativistic attitude [toward truth] can be found.” W. H. van de Pol in Das reformatorische Christentum in phänomenologischer Betrachtung (Einsiedeln-Cologne: Benziger, 1956), p. 66 berates very severely all those who accuse the Reformation of fostering “private interpretation” or the “free exploration of Scriptures”—among whom he mentions Jaime Balmes (El protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo) and Henry Newman (Lectures on the prophetical office of the Church). Yet José Luís L. Aranguren in his Catolicismo y Protestantismo como formas de existencia (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1957), pp. 44-48 has seen more clearly that Luther’s “subjectivism” is really an existentialism.

24 Cf. Chapter VIII, note 9. The introduction of the vernacular—the second such move in the Latin Rite (after the Vulgate, translation of the Liturgy from Greek to Latin, etc)—was in view of the internationalization of the world, a rather “reactionary” decision. It was a late triumph of nationalism which, in view of the progressive “shrinking” of the globe, will some day have to be revised.

25 Cf. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 6.

26 The term “left-of-center” seems to have been invented—characteristically enough—by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

27 Typical was the reaction of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to Spengler’s The Decline of the West. He wrote to Sir Frederick Pollock on July 18, 1924, “It is long since I have got so much from a book as this, and if I heard that the swine were dead, I should thank God.” In April 1932 he referred to Spengler as “an odious animal which must be read” and on May 15, 1932 he said, “The beast has ideas, many of which I don’t know enough to criticize. I wish he were dead. On the other side that dear delightful Wodehouse whom I read and even reread with guffaws.” (Cf. The Pollock-Holmes Letters, vol. 3, pp. 139, 307, and 309.)

28 W. H. Auden asked me once why I would not like to live permanently in Britain. “It’s the British horror for the absolute,” I said. “How right you are!” he replied. Cf. also (Sir) Compton Mackenzie’s preface to Jane Lane’s King James the Last (London: Dakers, 1942) pp. vii-viii. The rejection of compromise and the juste milieu we find, however, also in the thought of the German religious philosopher Franz von Baader. Cf. his Grundzüge der Societätsphilosophie (Würzenburg: Stähel, 1832), p. 39, where Baader speaks about the “double lie of the juste milieu.”

29 Cf. p. 207 and Chapter XIV, note 12. Interesting is Newman’s reaction to the problem; he thought that the gentleman falls short in many respects of the Christian ideal of a complete man. (Cf. his The Idea of a University. Discourse VIII, chapters 9 and 10.) Karl Löwith in his essay, “Can There Be a Christian Gentleman?” (Theology Today, vol. 5, no. 1, April, 1948, pp. 58-67) also gives a negative reply. Yet the reasoning of Newman and of Löwith are of an entirely different order.

30 Cf. James Burnham, Suicide of the West (New York: John Day, 1964), pp. 40-42.

31 The excuse of the moderate leftist for this inequality is that progressive taxation serves to equalize living standards and wealth to a considerable degree: the radical leftists will say that such an inequality ought to be eliminated by equal incomes. In either case ambition is penalized and laziness amply rewarded. Hence also the backwardness of Socialist countries. Christian sentimentalists might believe that such tamperings with incomes will eliminate the “proletariat.” They should read, however, the address of Pius XII of September 14, 1952, to the Austrian Catholic Congress in Vienna. The Pope insisted that the proletariat in the Western World survives only in isolated instances. Real welfare lies in the cooperation between various social layers. Now the main task of the Church is the “protection of the individual and the family from an all-embracing socialization, a process in whose terminal stage the terrifying vision of the Leviathan State would become a gruesome reality. The Church is going to fight this battle without a letup because the issue here is concerned with final values, the dignity of man and the salvation of souls.” I cannot remember having seen parts of this highly important address in Catholic American papers.

32 Naturally, every state exists for the welfare, the “commonweal” of its citizens. Unfortunately, the term “welfare state” stands today largely for what Hilaire Belloc called the “servile state,” and in German, if we want to be exact, the Versorgungsstaat, the “provider state.” Yet the “provider state” is not inevitably socialistic even if it clearly has totalitarian features. Sweden, for instance, is a provider state—and not a Socialist state since 90 percent of the means of production are privately owned.

33 On American misogyny cf. David L. Cohn, Love in America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943). Cf. also Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (New York: Scribner’s, 1913) and Francis J. Grund, Aristocracy in America, George E. Probst, ed. (New York: The Academy Library-Harper Torchbook, 1959), pp. 39-40. (This book was published originally in London in 1839.) When Dr. Benjamin Rush visited France he was amazed about the mixing of sexes and the high educational and cultural level of French women—quite a variance with the English or American tradition. Cf. The Selected Writings by Benjamin Rush, by D. D. Runes, ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), pp. 379-385. Yet American misogyny is clearly inherited from British patterns. Johanna Schopenhauer, mother of the German philosopher, became aware of it on her trip through the British Isles in 1805. Cf. Johanna Schopenhauer, Reise durch England und Schottland, L. Plakolb, ed. (Stuttgart: Steingrüben-Verlag, 1965), pp. 186-187. The Anglo-American institution of the club is certainly a means to escape women.

34 A proto-Nazi German author was Hans Blüher, who in an early book, Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen, Preface by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (Berlin, 1912), proudly attributed a homosexual character to the Wandervogel movement which in many ways had prepared the Nazi rebellion against the “father.” (We have emphasized the strongly identitarian, egalitarian, homosexual, and “fraternal” character of the leftist movements at the beginning of this book.)

Blüher’s Nazoid views became more distinct in a later book, Die Erhebung Israels gegen die christlichen Güter (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1931), in which he accused the Jews of deriding the homosexual tendencies in non-Jews—tendencies which are essential for the foundation of political units since they rest on Männerbünde, male leagues. The high priest of Nazi doctrine, Alfred Rosenberg, repeated this argument in op. cit, p. 485.

Homosexuality was strong in the early history of Nazism, especially among the S. A. (A high Vienna police official told me in the late 1920s that youthful homosexuals frequently banded together in paramilitary Nazi formations.) The accusations against S. A. Chief Roehm and his friends were well founded.

35 The main reason why the Soviets persecute homosexuals is their tendency to establish small private worlds, little enchanted circles which totalitarianism automatically dislikes. For very similar reasons it dislikes the family, sex, and Eros, an attitude which finds its literary reflection in Orwell’s “Anti-Sex League” in his novel 1984. Vide the revolt of Soviet writers such as Olga Berggolts, Dovzhenko, and Vagarshanian against the official opposition to the literary representation of all forms of love—sexual, erotic, familistic, etc. Cf. E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Contemporary Soviet Literature,” The Critic, vol. 19, No. 1. (August-September 1960), pp. 18, 21.

36 Dr. Benjamin Rush in a letter to Jeremy Belknap (October 13, 1789) expressed his disappointment that capital punishment had been abolished in the Duchy of Tuscany (ruled by a Hapsburg who later became Emperor Leopold II). “How disgraceful for our republics,” he wrote, “that the monarchs of Europe should take the lead of us in extending the empire of reason and humanity in this interesting part of government!” Cf. Letters of Benjamin Rush, L. H. Butterfield, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 526.

37 Yet the murder of the Archduke and the Duchess of Hohenberg received, after the end of World War I, a monument from the Karagjorgjević dynasty to perpetuate the gloriously foul deed in Sarajevo. We do not know whether representatives of Britain, France, and the United States were invited to participate in the unveiling. The cult of the assassins continued until the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1941 when the statue was destroyed by the Croats, who had to suffer Serb rule for twenty-three years. After World War II the murderer was honored by Tito with a museum. (Again we wonder about the presence of Western diplomats at the opening ceremonies.)

There are still people in the West who believe that Austria-Hungary in 1914 delivered a totally unjustified ultimatum to Serbia which was in fact organizing and praising murder. (We should ask ourselves how Teddy Roosevelt would have reacted against the assassination of an American Vice President by an organization whose head was the Vice President, let us say, of Nicaragua. Would he not have demanded at least the admission of plainclothes detectives to investigate the background of the murder?) Yet the first six “political” demands of Austria were not fulfilled and it is significant that, when the Serb answer to the Austrian ultimatum arrived, not a single soldier of the imperial royal army was mobilized. Cf. Freiherr von Musulin, Das Haus am Ballhausplatz (Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1924), pp. 225-226, 241-245.

38 In the twentieth century, the historical period when most monarchies fell and were transformed into republics, not one monarchy went down fighting. Not one monarch ordered the slaughter of his subjects. (And this precisely because monarchy at long last had reached its maturity.) On this subject cf. Louis Rougier, La France à la recherche d’une constitution (Paris: Recueil Sirey, 1952), p. 124.

39 I deduct the moral superiority of the monarchy from the fact that it rests far more than the republic on the theological virtues of faith and charity. It rests on trust and affection. It is, in a wider sense, “erotic” government. Republics, however, rest on suspicion, democracy on envy. Cf. (Lord) Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 1930), pp. 83-84. Montesquieu thought that the monarchy’s outstanding characteristic is clemency, the republic’s virtue. (Nevertheless, it is significant that the expression “the republican virtues” has been dropped from the dictionary of the French Academy.) Louis Philippe said, in exile, when he heard about General Cavaignac’s brutal slaugher of the French workers, “Only democratic regimes can fire at the people because they do it in the name of the people and, in a way, by order of the people.” Cf. René Gillouin, Trois études politiques (Paris: Ecrits de Paris, 1951), p. 30, and Gaetano Mosca, Ciò che la storia potrebbe insegnare (Milan: Giuffrè, 1958), p. 529, note 132.

40 Having been brought up in Europe, I haven’t the slightest personal aversion against African Negroes or American mulattoes. (The latter regularly fail to take roots in Africa. Cf. Harold R. Isaacs, “Back to Africa,” The New Yorker, May 13, 1961, pp. 105-143.) A Negro could be not only his “brother” but also his brother-in-law. And he does not accept the argument that if the population of Europe were 10 percent black, the same problems would arise as in the United States. (Brazil has more than 20 percent people of mixed blood and its color problem—which I have studied—is only a shadow of what it is in the United States.) Yet he is certain that a solution to this painful issue by legislation and laws is as impossible as one by thoughtless social action. The first step in the right direction would be the gradual decrease of the mutual inferiority complexes (they exist on both sides!) and a subsequent meeting of the “races” at the top—not at the bottom. The idea of solving the “Negro problem” by “busing” or by inviting an elevator man to sit down in one’s parlor and offering him a martini is perfectly childish. All real meetings of nations have always been a meeting of elites, not of the masses who tend to be strongly identitarian in sentiment and to hate all manifestations of otherness.

41 Yet during the Spanish Civil War leftists tried to rouse popular passions against the Franquistas by reminding Americans that the wicked Generalissimo fought with the help of evil blackamoors against lily-white democrats.

42 On the guilt as to the outbreak of aerial warfare cf. pp. 297-298. Pilots of the Polish Army in exile played an important part in the Battle of Britain.

43 Originally Lithuania should have fallen under German “influence,” but the too rapid advance of the German Army into Polish territory resulted in a swap by the two aggressors: the Germans got some lands east of the Vistula and the Soviets occupied Lithuania.

44 This aid was military (Poland), economic and moral. The German war news was featured prominently in the Soviet press: that of the Allies got second place.

45 Cf. The City of Man: A Declaration of World Democracy (New York: The Viking Press, 1940), p. 113.

46 I have a letter from Professor Reinhold Niebuhr in which he sincerely regrets the signing of the declaration under circumstances somewhat beyond his control.

47 Cf. the final phrasing of his review of the book in The Thomist, October 1941.

48 Cf. The City of Man, p. 33.

49 Cf. Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: The Ronald Press, 1940), p. 382, “The persistence of the democratic faith in an age of science is a phenomenon of significance. Not one of its doctrines can be proved by any scientific sense.” Also Crane Brinton, Ideas and Men: The Story of Western Thought (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1950), p. 549:

Democracy, in short, is in part a system of judgments inconsistent with what scientists hold to be true. This inconsistency would not create difficulties—or at least would not create some of the difficulties it now creates—were the democratic able to say that his kingdom is not of this world, able to say that his truth is not the kind that is in the least tested by the scientist, any more than the truth of the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is tested by the chemical analysis of the bread and wine. Such a solution of the democrat’s intellectual quandary is not a happy one, but it is not altogether inconceivable. Democracy may become a genuinely transcendental faith, in which belief is not weakened by lack of correspondence between the propositions it lays down and the facts of life on this earth. . . . In short, democracy may be able to take its promised heaven out of this world, and put it in the world of ritual performed, of transcendental belief, or vicarious satisfactions of human wants, may keep it an ideal not too much sullied by the contrast with the spotted reality.

The opinions of H. B. Mayo on democracy are not very different: “So we can say that acts of faith may be demanded . . . but perhaps not in a religious sense, we come in the end to a justification by faith or, as it is sometimes put, to those ultimate beliefs and ideals which we cannot wholly validate by rational means.” Cf. his “How Can We Justify Democracy?” The American Political Science Review, (September 1962), p. 566. Orestes Brownson took a simpler approach and referred merely to the “idiocy of talking about ‘self-government.’ ” Cf. Lawrence Roemer, op. cit., pp. 147-148.

50 Cf. The City of Man, pp. 40, 45.

51 See the condescending and menacing formulations in the proposal.

52 Ibid., pp. 45-46.

53 Ibid., pp. 34-35, 36. All this is quite in keeping with Morelly who in the Code de la Nature provided lifelong imprisonment for all those who conspired against the sacred fundamental laws of his ideal state. Cf. his Legislation, (12, I) in Morelly, op. cit. p. 152.

54 Ibid., p. 36. The total lack of understanding of Christianity’s and Judaism’s nature is simply startling.

55 Ibid., p. 37.

56 Ibid., p. 43.

57 Ibid., p. 46.

58 Ibid., p. 84.

59 Ibid., pp. 81-82.

60 Ibid., p. 85.

61 Since none of the German Catholic bishops followed the Reformation, the apostolic succession was interrupted and the German Lutherans remained without bishops. The situation was different in Scandinavia where the Reformation was largely introduced by collaboration between the rulers and the bishops. Cf. also Georg Schwaiger, Die Reformation in den nordischen Ländern. (Munich: Kösel, 1962).

62 The Bekennende Kirche was formed in Barmen to prevent the perversion of Lutheranism and Calvinism through Nazi ideas. The Deutsche Christen, especially, stood for a “dejudaized” Christianity, a trend theologically not entirely new as it had been promoted (in a very different form) by the school of Evangelical liberal theology—exemplified to a certain extent by Adolf von Harnack’s Marcion. (The translation of Bekennende Kirche as “Confessional Church” can be quite misleading: “Professing Church” would be less equivocal.) Gerhard Ritter in op. cit., p. 116 is quite emphatic on the fact that Evangelical resistance was led by the orthodox wing of the Reformation churches. Obviously, one is far more ready to die for absolutes than for mere guesses or for polite doubt shrouded in a religious cloak.

63 Cf. The City of Man, p. 58. Here we see the old democratic-totalitarian rejection of close family ties and all forms of “familism.”

64 Ibid., p. 72.

65 Ibid., p. 27.

66 Ibid., pp. 30-32.

67 Ibid., p. 33.

68 Ibid., p. 34.

69 Bernard Wall, the editor of Colosseum, a pre-World War II British and Catholic conservative review, once issued a number with the words “Utopias are Opium for the People” printed repetitiously all over the cover.

70 Cf. The City of Man, p. 89. Planning is not at all “implicit” in democracy and this for two reasons: (1) planning requires permanence, a virtual certainty about conditions in the future, whereas democracy rests on change and unpredictability; (2) planning requires expertise; democracy, however, rests not on reason but on volition and subjective preferences.

71 It would be interesting to investigate the rise and the determining role of the concepts “majority” and “minority” in Western thinking, feeling and arguing—and the subtly pejorative meaning attached to “minority.” (“Rhodesia has a minority government.”)

72 Separation of State and Church has been used as a means to weaken the Church more often than to the contrary, but the idea of destroying the Church through excessive cooperation is not too rare either. It is the system in force at present in Czechoslovakia.

73 In leftist systems the state school becomes the standard avenue of attack against the hated “closed family.” As early as 1537 Capito of Hagenau (Köpphel von Hagenau) in his book, Responsio de missa, matrimonio et iure magistratus in religionem (Strasbourg) demanded state education for children, who “belong rather to the state than to the parents.” Dr. Benjamin Rush had rather totalitarian ideas about education in order to make the Americans a homogeneous people, and in 1791 Robert Coram published a plan for national public schools in which foreign or dead languages as well as religion would be strictly outlawed. Cf. Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. 304. Frances Wright, in the first half of the nineteenth century, propagated state education for all children in the two to sixteen age group, all in uniform and with identical food. Cf. Theodore Maynard, op. cit., pp. 36-37. De Sade made almost identical remarks. Cf. Guillaume Apollinaire, op. cit., p. 228. Hitler raved about the boarding schools, orphanages, and foundling hospitals as ideal means for a nationalistic education. Cf. Dr. Henry Picker, op. cit., p. 293.

Krushchev hoped that by 1980 no less than 90 percent of all youngsters between the ages of six and sixteen would be in state boarding schools. (Today an estimated 9 percent of all Soviet children are educated collectively in boarding schools.)

74 Cf. The City of Man, p. 58.

75 Cf. Friedrich Heer, Grundlagen der europaischen Demokratie der Neuzeit: (Vienna: Frick-Unesco Schriften-Reihe, 1953), pp. 86-87.

76 Democracy as substitute for religion manifests itself often in rather interesting ways. A play Saint of Democracy was printed by Samuel French, a New York theatrical publisher, during World War II. And how totalitarian the concept of democracy can become is shown by a book, Dogs for Democracy (New York: Ackerman, 1944). Here we can read the beautiful sentence on page 32: “It is a story of thousands of sensitive nostrils and straining ears that pierce the night’s darkness to guard unceasingly and untiringly the ramparts of American democracy.”

77 Cf. Chapter I, note 6.

Chapter XV

1 Melville’s political ideas can be found in a number of his novels and epics (especially in Clarel): on Orestes Brownson cf. Lawrence Roemer, op. cit.; on William Graham Sumner cf. W. G. Sumner, Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, A. G. Keller, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), pp. 264, 271, 286.

2 Cf. Thomas Mann, Von Deutscher Republik (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1923), p. 399. On the intrinsic connection between homosexuality and democratic (as well as leftist) trends vide also Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America (New York: Greenberg, 1953), pp. 152, 163, 164. On homosexuality and Nazism cf. Chapter XIV, note 34.

3 Cf. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (London: Walter Scott, 1888), p. 58.

4 Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Scribner’s, 1952), pp. 24-25. In conjunction with this read also the brilliant book of Thomas Molnar, The Two Faces of American Foreign Policy (Indianapolis-New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), pp. 51ff. Compare also with Felix Somary, Krise und Zukunft der Demokratie (Zürich-Wien: Europa Verlag, 1952), p. 66. (Published in America as Democracy at Bay.)

5 Cf. in this connection Vianna Moog, Bandeirantes and Pioneers, trsl. L. I. Barnett (New York: G. Braziller, 1964), p. 263. At the International Conference of Christians and Jews in August, 1948, in Fribourg, Switzerland, the American delegation showed short films to demonstrate how they combated racism in the United States. The tenor of these films shocked the Europeans as they debunked racist prejudices in favor of a flamboyant nationalism under the “We’re Americans All!” slogan. It was nationalism which, more than anything else, even more than racism, had ruined Europe.

6 This is sweetly and very directly expressed in Edgar A. Guest’s poem: “The Best Land” which starts out with the ringing lines:

If I knew a better land on this glorious world of ours,
Where a man gets bigger money and is working shorter hours;
If the Briton or the Frenchman had an easier life than mine,
I’d pack my goods this minute and I’d sail across the brine. . . .

7 This attitude created in the mid-nineteenth century an anti-American literature in Europe. Anti-American utterances were not rare in the works of Heinrich Heine, Gustave de Beaumont, Ferdinand Kürnberger, Nikolaus Lenau, etc.

8 The leyenda negra, the “Black Legend” about Spain always had numerous American devotees, Cf. Julián Juderías, La leyenda negra (Barcelona: Casa Editorial Araluce, n.d.), pp. 315ff. Salvador de Madariaga informs us that the Hispano-American Inquisition, having dealt with over 3,000 cases during centuries of its activities, had passed not more than thirty death sentences and among these fifteen implied the stake. This means that less than one percent were punished with death. English courts dealing with sorcery generally condemned 19 percent of those accused and in the first four years of the rule of James I 41 percent had to face the supreme penalty. During the Hopkins campaign in 1645, nineteen of twenty-nine indicted women were executed. The Scotch courts were far more severe and the last witch in Scotland paid with her life in 1780! Cf. de Madariaga’s El auge del imperio español en América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1959), pp. 220-221.

9 There is a good account of the American press propaganda against Spain at the time of the Cuban crisis in Hudson Strode’s Pageant of Cuba. Little it mattered that the Spaniards were far more tolerant toward Cuba’s colored population than the American “liberators” towards their own. In 1965-1966 we again see the American leftist press rant against Rhodesia, a newly independent country with—in spite of its nearness to the Republic of South Africa—a much more marked “color blindness” than one often finds nearer home. Yet Britain’s Labour government obviously can do no wrong, nor the “progressive” new African nations from Zambia to Ghana, from Nigeria to the Negro-slaughterers from Khartoum. Ideological blindness is certainly the worst of all.

10 It would be worth an investigation to find out why in Germany during World War I the hatred for Britain was far more intensive than any other one. Was it, perhaps, the hatred of disillusioned Anglomaniacs which the Germans decidedly were—and, in a sense, still are?

11 Russia even released war prisoners who were skilled workers: they sometimes made minor fortunes until the Red Revolution broke out. During these years I was a boy, living in Baden bei Wien, the headquarters of A. O. K., the Austro-Hungarian Army. My “Sunday best” was a British sailor suit with a cap bearing the inscription “H. M. S. Renown.” I had, needless to say, a French governess. National hatred was for the mob. The feelings for the Italians were harsher: They had been members of the Triple Alliance but, having unsuccessfully tried to blackmail their Austrian ally in a desperate situation, they had gone over to the enemy. This was, in a sense, unforgivable.

12 Almost without parallel were the cartoons of Louis Raemakers, a Dutchman, famous for his painting of the naked crucified French girl near Suippes. These organized lies, unmasked after World War I, made the accounts of real Nazi atrocities during World War II so unbelievable.

13 The Napoleonic Wars were still highly civilized. When Baron Wintzingerode, a Hanoverian in Russian services, was arrested near Smolensk as a spy, the French officers restrained Napoleon who lost his temper at the insolence of the German. The latter finally ate in the officers’ mess and Napoleon sulked alone in his tent. Cf. Mémoires du Général de Caulaincourt, Jean Hanoteau, ed. (Paris: Plon, 1933), Vol. 2, pp. 100-108. Baron Haugwitz, political advisor to the King of Prussia, told the Abbé Sièyes, French Ambassador to Berlin, confidentially, “Our real interests are those of the monarchy against the republican system . . . between monarchies one will always wage a few wars but one is not going to destroy each other.” Cf. René Gillouin, Aristarchie ou Recherche d’un gouvernement (Geneva: Chevai Ailé, 1946), p. 305. Yet how brutal and stupid was the war propaganda waged in France during World War I we can see from Georges Bernanos, La Grande Peur des Bien-Pensants (Paris: Grasset, 1949), pp. 414-418.

14 Soon after World War I the historians in the United States became divided in their opinion as to the guilt for this horrendous blunder. The spectrum reached all the way from Bernadotte Schmitt (condemning the Germans almost unilaterally) to Harry Elmer Barnes. Charles Callan Tansill leaned toward Barnes and so did Sidney B. Fay, who in his Origins of the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1928), expressed the opinion that a further investigation of Serb documents would tend to strengthen the case for Serbia’s initial guilt. (In this field of research, no doubt, the real weakness of most Western historians lies in their lacking knowledge of Slav languages.)

Fay also warned (Current Events, vol. 6, No. 34, October 1939, p. 241) not to confuse the origins of World War I with those of World War II. As could be expected, a leftist school trying to exonerate Hitler arose in our days. Its most prominent representative in Britain is Professor A. J. P. Taylor, who, significantly enough, has strong leftist inclinations and has been known for his dislike for the Hapsburg Monarchy. Cf. his The Origins of the Second World War (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1963). Yet even in World War II the war guilt was not uniform in the Axis camp. Hungary and Bulgaria had genuine grievances. The outbreak of the war itself, no doubt, is unimaginable without Soviet connivance—just as fascism and Nazism are unthinkable without the Communist inspiration and challenge.

15 Count Bernstorff’s nephew, Count Albrecht Bernstorff, who during World War II served in the German Foreign Office, was a staunch anti-Nazi and was executed in 1944. Franz von Papen’s intelligence is well highlighted by the account of his collaborator in the United States, Rintelen, who gives a glaring description of Papen’s more comic than tragic “underground” activities. Cf. The Dark Invader (Penguin Books).

16 George D. Herron insisted that Wilson’s reelection “was not only opposed by all Germans between Potsdam and San Francisco but also by the Roman Catholic Hierarch.” (La Semaine Littéraire, Geneva, December 19, 1916.)

17 Cf. Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1953), p. 35: “The columnist Jay Franklin gave us a good picture of the fruits of interventionism. Since 1900 under five Republican Presidents no casualties, under three Democratic Presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, versus Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman) ‘0’ versus 1,628,480 casualties.” (Here the casualties under J. F. Kennedy and L. B. Johnson obviously are not yet included.) Naturally, Americans are by nature isolationists—and so are the Russians, if they are not driven by specific ideologies. Felix Somary in his op. cit. discusses this in a brilliant passage and adds the remark, “Americans like to be judges of the world, not its rulers, but do not realize that the former position cannot be achieved without the latter” (p. 101). Viewed from this angle the Republican party is “naturally” the more American party.

18 Ben Hecht in his Erik Dorn referred to Wilson in Paris as a “long-faced virgin trapped in a bawdy house and calling in valiant tones for a glass of lemonade.” Cf. Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America: Ideas on the March, (New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 504. In summing up the three main actors at the Paris Peace Conference, John Maynard Keynes described: “Clemenceau, aesthetically the noblest; the President, morally the most admirable; Lloyd George, intellectually the subtlest. Out of their disparities and weaknesses the Treaty was born, child of the least worthy attributes of its parents, without nobility, without morality, without intellect.” Cf. J. M. Keynes, “David Lloyd George” in Essays and Sketches in Biography (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 180.

19 Woodrow Wilson, to be true, had not only been professor, but even professor of government at a leading American university. A defender of democratic amateurism and a critic of expertise could point this out triumphantly and use it as an argument. Wilson knew neither geography, history, neither sociology nor theology. The humanities (and perhaps not only the humanities) can never be properly understood outside of their wider context. In these domains specialization has always been fatal. On the American professor vide also C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 129ff.

20 Whatever the faults and shortcomings of William II, (and there were indeed many) he never actively prepared World War I. We have this on the authority of several historians, among them G. P. Gooch and Arthur Rosenberg who in 1919 had been charged by the German Social Democratic party to make an investigation of the primary responsibility of the German Emperor for the holocaust. His negative conclusions can be found in his Die Entstehung der deutschen Republic, 1871-1918 (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1930), pp. 66-67. Yet in the American folklore “Kaiser Bill” was the villain, the good boys were the forty-eighters. Hence one should not be surprised that Mr. Walt W. Rostow, one of the professional planners in the State Department, declared on September 9, 1963, that the Federal Republic is the fulfilment of the dream of the men who produced in 1848 the liberal Frankfurt Parliament, though the Revolution was then crushed by the Prussians and the German nationalists. Statements like these are screamingly funny because the liberal Frankfurt Parliament offered a (hitherto inexistent) German crown to the King of Prussia whereas the forty-eighters were the nationalists working for a German national state excluding nationally pluralistic Austria.

21 Cf. Gladstone’s election speech at Edinburgh, March 17, 1880, quoted by Carlton J. H. Hayes, op. cit., p. 38.

22 Cf. Introduction, note 3. Wilson’s misunderstanding of Russia was only part and parcel of his misreading of the European mind. For a Continental Russia is more comprehensible than the United States (even if he prefers the latter to the former). Cf. the admission of Ida F. Görres in Zwischen den Zeiten (Olten and Freiburg i. Br.: Walter, 1961), pp. 429-430.

23 Quoted by Carlos Pereyra, El crimen de Woodrow Wilson, Madrid, 1917.

24 Cf. Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1925), vol. 1, p. 188. Page’s most interesting views on Europe (“In all the humanities, we are a thousand years ahead of any people here, etc.”) can be found in a long letter to Frank N. Doubleday, dated Bournemouth, May 29, 1916.

25 Cf. The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, Charles Seymour, ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1928), vol. 4, pp. 13-14.

26 Cf. Walter H. Peters, The Life of Benedict XV (Milwaukee, Bruce, 1959), pp. 149-151.

27 Fénélon said the “peace treaties are meaningless if you are the stronger one and if you force your neighbor to sign a treaty to avoid greater evil; then he signs in the same way as a person who surrenders his purse to a brigand who points his pistol at his throat.” Cf. Fénélon, “Direction pour la conscience d’un roi,” in Oeuvres (Paris, 1787), vol. 25, t. 3, p. 489.

28 Cf. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1948), vol. 4. (“The American Spirit”), p. 357.

29 The “far south Tyrol,” the Trentino, is Italian by language, but the vast majority of the Trentinese did not want to join Italy. Cf. Chapter XI, note 6. When in 1915 the Italians demanded territories from their embattled Austrian (former) allies, Vienna reluctantly promised them the Trentino after the war. This so embittered a young Italian Reichsrat-deputy hitherto loyal to Austria, that he embraced the Italian cause. He felt betrayed. His name was Alcide de Gasperi. Cf. Dr. Friedrich Funder, Von Gestern ins Heute (Vienna: Herold, 1953), pp. 527-528. In this book de Gasperi is not mentioned by name. The late Dr. Funder informed me about the identity of the deputy who had opened his heart to him.

30 Cf. Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (New York: Macmillan 1944), p. 252.

31 Cf. S. Miles Bouton, Robert Dell and Charles H. Herford, English and American Voices about the German South Tyrol (New York: C. J. Bernard, 1925).

32 Cf. J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), p. 43.

33 Ibid., p. 31n.

34 Cf. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 56.

35 Ibid., pp. 55-56.

36 Lord Lansdowne’s letter was published in the (London) Daily Telegraph on November 29, 1917. Its publication had been refused by the Times. A year earlier it had been sent to the Prime Minister. For the passage cited in the text, cf. Lord Newton, Lord Lansdowne (London: Macmillan, 1929), pp. 482-483. Walter Lippmann has well described the situation in 1917 prior to American intervention: “The existing governments had exhausted their imperium—their authority to bind and their power to command. With their traditional means they were no longer able to carry on their hyperbolic war, yet they were unable to negotiate peace. They had, therefore, to turn to the people. They had to ask still greater exertions and sacrifices. They obtained them by ‘democratising’ the conduct and the aims of the war, by pursuing total victory and by promising total peace.” Cf. op. cit., p. 12. Hence the “Holy War.” André Malraux saw clearly that the French Revolution with its republicanism for export had to end in a bellicose “Islamic” expansion. (La Nouvelle Revue Française, vol. 3, no. 25, p. 18)

37 Wilson was born, to be sure, on the Day of the Innocents, on Childermass. As could be expected, he was hailed by the Calvinists all over Europe as their Savior. Cf. Emile Doumergue, “Calvin et l’entente de Wilson à Calvin.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 25 (September-December, 1918), especially p. 825.

38 Cf. Letters of Franklin Lane, A. W. Lane and L. H. Hall, eds. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1922), p. 297. Professor F. A. Hermens in his book Democracy or Anarchy (Notre Dame: University Press, 1941) claims that Anschluss after the war would have prevented (numerically) the Nazi electoral victories. If, in all-German elections, the Austrians would have voted much like their Bavarian neighbors with whom they are linked by ethnic, racial, religious and cultural ties, the thesis of Professor Hermens seems correct.

39 Cf. Stanley A. Hunter, The Religious Ideals of the President (Allahabad: Mission Press, 1914), p. 8.

40 Cf. E. I. Woodward, Three Studies in European Conservatism (London: Constable, 1929), p. 228: “Je suis leur chef: il faut hien que je les suive.” Naturally we like to see in the statesman that rara avis, the scholarly trained practitioner—or a practically trained scholar. Neither the pure scholar not the uneducated pragmatist will do . . . which is equally true of the great medical men. Cf. the views of the Arab sage, Ibn Khaldun, quoted in Chapter 3 of his “Prolegomena,” in Arab Philosophy, Charles Issawi, ed. (London, 1950), pp. 64-66.

41 Cf. Hugo Münsterberg, American Patriotism and Other Social Studies (New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1913) p. 3.

42 Ibid., pp. 15-16. Also cf. Denis W. Brogan, The American Character (New York: Knopf, 1944), p. 146.

43 Cf. Ernst Bruncken, Die amerikanische Volksseele, quoted by Elias Hurwicz, Die Seelen der Völker, Ihre Eigenarten und Bedeutung im Völkerleben. (Gotha: Andreas Perthes, 1920), pp. 91-92. Joseph de Maistre said that “the prejudices of the nations are like boils, one has to touch them gently so as not to break the tissue.” Cf. Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de lundi, (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1927), vol. 15, p. 80.

44 Cf. Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 76. On the medieval concept of the “Divine Rights of Kings” see particularly Fritz Kern, op. cit., pp. 10-11, 283-284.

45 Absolutism, including monarchical absolutism, is certainly a political aberration which was always rejected by European “conservatives.” C. L. von Haller, to name only one typical representative of Romantic conservatism, (no less than Ludwig von Gerlach) equated royal absolutism with Jacobinism. Cf. Franz von Schnabel, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 175.

46 Cf. Reinhold Niebuhr, op. cit., pp. 77-78. For the rational defense of monarchy cf. also C. Northcote Parkinson, The Evolution of Political Thought (London: University of London Press, 1958) with pertinent quotes from Simón Bolivar (p. 253), Alberdi (p. 259), and others. The arguments of this famous inventor of “Parkinson’s Law” are on pp. 315-316.

47 According to a letter from Walter Lippmann (who knew Herron) addressed to this writer, dated Washington D. C., May 17, 1956.

48 The term “post-Protestant era” figures (as a possibility, not as a certainty) in Paul Tillich’s theological thinking. Cf. his The Protestant Era, trsl. and edit. J. L. Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948). “Post-Protestant” defines a mentality and outlook containing essential characteristics from the Reformation and the post-Reformation period in a secularized form. All great religions have such a “version” wherever they have (or had) great cultural force or cohesion. Yet this is rarely the case with religious bodies in the dispersion where they often try to combine their own “factual” theology with mind patterns of the majority. A Spanish Presbyterian—however fervent—is in a certain way a “Catholic,” and a Danish Catholic a “Lutheran.” And let us also bear in mind that the only Church which officially calls itself Protestant is the Protestant Episcopal Church of America (and it is not too happy about this either). Neither Luther nor Calvin, neither Zwingli nor Melanchthon would have tolerated this label, a term of insult and contempt coined by the Catholic Counter-Reformers. (In Europe the term “Protestant” is officially employed only in the Anglican Coronation Service, but in none of the Continental rituals.)

49 Compton MacKenzie called the League of Nations quite aptly a “typist’s dream of the Holy Roman Empire, for politicians a new hypocrisy, for diplomats a sitting on addled eggs.” Cf. My Religion (New York: Appleton, 1926), p. 52.

50 Cf. Document VII a, of Volume 12 of the Herron Papers. (In Manuscript, Hoover Institute, Stanford, California.) Letter of Herron to Wilson, dated Geneva, March 20, 1919. Calvin, Herron insisted, not Luther, is the father of the Scottish Covenanters and the English Puritans.

51 Reply of Wilson to Herron, Document XIII, Ibid. Letter dated Paris, April 17, 1919. Wilson was delighted with this proposition.

52 Ibid., Document XXVII, vol. 12. Letter dated Geneva, April 17, 1920. There are thirteen larger cardboard boxes with the Herron Papers, most of them retyped. To read them all over the years was a major effort for me.

53 Cf. The Letters of William James, Henry James, ed. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), Vol. 1, p. 139. Sir Charles Petrie, very much to the contrary, called the major tragedy of Central Europe the fact that German unity was not accomplished under the leadership of Austria rather than of Prussia. Cf. his Twenty Years Armistice and After (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1940), p. 126.

54 Cf. Th. G. Masaryk, The Making of a State, Henry Wickham Steed, ed. (New York: Stokes and Co., 1927), pp. 308-309.

55 Ibid., p. 375.

56 Cf. Raymond Aron, Les guerres en chaîne (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), p. 34. Th. G. Masaryk’s son, Jan Masaryk (the later, ill-fated foreign minister murdered by “defenestration”) was captain in an Imperial Royal Regiment until the collapse of the Danubian Monarchy. He had nothing but praise for the old regime. Cf. Indro Montanelli, “La sua insomnia si chiama Gottwald,” Il Nuovo Corriere della Sera, March 11, 1948, p. 1. A very good summing up of the anti-Hapsburg sentiments, disastrous for everybody in their final consequences, has been given by Carl J. Burckhardt in a letter to Hugo von Hoffmansthal. Cf. H. v. Hofmannsthal, Carl J. Burckhardt, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1956) p. 75 (letter dated November, 1921).

57 Cf. Th. G. Masaryk, op. cit., p. 309.

58 Cf. Mitchell Pirie Briggs, George Herron and the European Settlement (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1932), p. 29.

59 The United States first declared war on Germany, then on Austria-Hungary and finally on Turkey. Bulgaria was left out. The Bulgar minister in Washington during World War I tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. (In World War II the United States refused to declare war on Finland, etc.)

Still, George D. Herron in a letter to Hugh R. Wilson, American chargé d’affaires in Berne, urged a declaration of war against Bulgaria, “the worst enemy, after Prussia, of Americanism in Europe.” (Dateline, Geneva, May 25, 1918). Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 9, document I. One truly wonders why “Americanism” was so uniquely incompatible with “Bulgarianism” . . . and how Herron could realize this by “long distance.”

60 Actually, Maximilian of Mexico, who sympathized with every “progressive” cause in Europe, was an extreme liberal. Thus he had “ideological differences” with his brother Franz Joseph who was a moderate liberal. (It is quite possible that Maximilian was a Freemason.) Benito Juarez, on the other hand, played up by the present Mexican regime as a fierce nationalist, was really an agent of the hated Gringos and enjoyed full American support. Popular historiography is at least as confused as politics.

61 The Inquisition, naturally, never operated in Austria. As a matter of fact, a Lutheran in the eighteenth century was much freer in Austria than a Catholic in England.

62 Cf. Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1932), vol. 8, pp. 594-595.

63 Iowa College was founded by Congregationalists in 1847. The town of Grinnell in which the college was located had been named after Josiah Grinnell (1821-1891), a Congregationalist minister who had been a close friend of John Brown of Harper’s Ferry fame.

64 The Rand School of Social Science in New York, which always had a strong socialistic flavor, was founded by this wealthy family.

65 Cf. A Socialist Wedding, Being an Account of a Marriage of George D. Herron and Carrie Rand (New York: Knickerbocker Press, n.d.).

66 Cf. George D. Herron, Ot revolyutsii k revolyutsii, Uroki parizhskoy kommuny 1871 g. (St. Petersburg, O. N. Rutenberg, 1906).

67 Cf. George D. Herron, The Day of Judgment (Chicago: Kerr and Co., 1906), p. 29.

68 Cf. Thomas A. Bailey, op. cit., p. 330. Two days after the German declaration of limitless submarine warfare on February 2, 1917, Wilson declared, “in response to a question as to which side he ‘wished to win,’ that ‘he didn’t wish either side to win.’ ” But was he sincere? Mr. Laughlin who was attaché to the American Embassy to London in 1914 told this writer in 1937 about Wilson’s precipitated offers to aid Britain, offers which Ambassador Page refused to pass on, informing the President that his messages were incompatible with diplomatic usage.

69 Pressure of time prevented me from fully using my research material. In the meantime the Austrian historian, Professor Heinrich Benedikt (Vienna) published salient parts of Herron’s dealings in Die Friedensaktion der Meinl-Gruppe 1917-1918 (Graz-Cologne: Hermann Böhlau, 1962). His book also contains a portrait of Herron, who looks exactly as one would expect him to look.

70 Cf. Herron’s cable to the President after the first news of his illness reached Europe: “Multitudes beyond number rejoice with me in the supreme news of your recovery. You are still the hope of the world. You are the living barrier against universal reaction and dark ages. For the sake of all mankind you must and will get well and fight on.” (Herron Papers, vol. 5, document XXII).

71 Cf. George D. Herron, Germanism and the American Crusade (New York: Kennerley, 1918), Woodrow Wilson and the World’s Peace (New York: Kennerley, 1917): The Menace of Peace (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917).

72 Cf. Wilson’s letter, dated October 1, 1917, in Herron Papers, Vol. 12, Document I.

73 We want here merely to cite a letter of Herron to Hugh R. Wilson, dated July 11, 1918. (Herron Papers, vol. 2. document XXVIII). It deals with Admiral von Hintze whom he had met before the war:

I regard Admiral von Hintze as one of the most sinister figures in the political world of today. Indeed, I am convinced there is no other such dangerous character in any place of great power. He is unqualifiedly a cynic, and his mind is clearly medieval in its constitution and methods; his conception of world politics differs not from the conception that prevailed in the courts of Borgia and Sforza. . . . He is clever to the last degree; and not only Machiavellian, but positively diabolical in both his thinking and acting: and his mental and tactical diabolism are clothed with medieval refinement.

All of which clearly sheds a new light on the Middle Ages and the Devil.

74 According to Walter Lippmann, the main drafter of the Fourteen Points, the original plan of the President foresaw merely a federalization of Austria-Hungary, not its destruction—precisely the plan of Emperor Charles. (Personal information.) Influences and events changed his original plan and thus the foundations of World War II were carefully laid.

75 Cf. Stefan Osuský, George D. Herron, Dôvernik Wilsonov počas vojny (Pressburg: Naklad “Prudov,” 1925), p. 52. This is an invaluable and indispensable book written by the former Czechoslovak minister in Paris. Osuský, a Slovak student at the University of Chicago, knew Herron intimately. Much of the book is dedicated to Herron’s political philosophy.

76 Even stronger were the reactions of Clemenceau and Ribot, the French Foreign Minister, to the Austrian peace action aided by Prince Sixtus of Parma, the brother of Empress Zita. Lansing decried Clemenceau’s action as “a piece of the most outstanding stupidity . . . an unpardonable blunder.” Cf. The War Memoirs of Robert Lansing (Indianapolis-New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1935), p. 265.

77 Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 1. document XXVI, letter to Hugh R. Wilson.

78 Cf. Heinrich Lammasch, Seine Aufzeichnungen, sein Wirken und seine Politik, Marga Lammasch and Hans Sperl, eds. (Vienna: Deuticke, 1922), pp. 99-102.

79 Cf. George D. Herron, Defeat in Victory (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1924), p. 53.

80 Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 12, document XXVII, letter to William A. White, dated April 17, 1920.

81 Cf. letter of G. D. Herron to Stewart E. Bruce, dated November 1, 1923, published in Fight for Light Leaflet (Hamburg: Antikriegsschuldlügenliga, R. I. Orchelle, ed.).

82 Cf. James Kerney, The Political Education of Woodrow Wilson (New York: The Century Company, 1925), p. 476.

83 That so many Jews accept democracy and believe in it with almost religious fervor can only be explained by the fact that they become fascinated with its egalitarian aspect while forgetting democracy’s majoritarian nature . . . and except in Israel they always will be in a minority. An eminent German sociologist, Winfried Martini, has commented upon this paradox in his crucially important work Das Ende aller Sicherheit, Eine Kritik des Westens (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1954), pp. 16-19.

84 Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 13, document IX. Letter to Leo Ragaz, dated April 1, 1919. Naturally, it was Herron’s argument (at that time), that “International Finance” with its center in Paris was dominated by German Jews who acted on Germany’s behalf. Hitler’s argument was that international Jewry was intrinsically and congenitally anti-German.

85 Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 13, documents IX and VII, and vol. 11, document 11. In typical Nazi fashion Herron thought that international Jewish finance was collaborating with the Vatican and that the emissaries of these dark forces met in Fribourg.

86 Ibid., vol. 11, document XVII. Letter dated Geneva, October 15, 1919, addressed to the Socialist leader George Strobell, on the early Socialist contacts of Herron and his second marriage. Cf. also Philip M. Crane, The Democrat’s Dilemma (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), pp. 75-78.

87 Cf. George D. Herron, Umsturz und Aufbau. Der Pariser Friede und die Jugend Europas (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1920). No translator mentioned.

88 Cf. George D. Herron, The Greater War, p. 27.

89 Cf. George D. Herron, Umsturz und Aufbau, p. 7.

90Ibid., pp. 16-17.

91 Cf. Le Capitaine De Gaulle, La discorde chez l’ennemi (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1924), particularly p. vi. The (London) Times in October 1918 also admitted in an editorial that the impending end of the war was in part caused by the effectiveness of Allied propaganda.

92 Cf. Thomas A. Bailey, op. cit., p. 49.

93 Cf. Max Weber in the Frankfurter Zeitung, October 27, 1918.

94 Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 10, document XXV. Letter to Norman Thomas, dated Geneva, April 27, 1920.

95 Cf. Herron Papers, vol. 11, document XVII. Letter to George Strobell, dated Geneva, October 15, 1919.

96 Robert (Roberto) Michels, born in Cologne in 1876, was a German Social Democrat who had migrated finally to Italy where he received a professorship. Together with Gaetano Mosca and Marchese Vilfredo Pareto he became the father of the thesis that every democracy is, in fact, a party oligarchy. Later, like so many other Socialists, he supported fascism. Curiously enough, the original (Fascist) Encyclopedia Italiana omits his name, but he is mentioned in the “Third Supplement” (1961). He died in Rome in 1936. His main work was Zur Soziologie des Parteienwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig: Kröner, 1925). Cf. also his “Studii sulla democrazia e sull’autorità” in Collana di Studi Fascisti (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1923). No. 24-25, and Sozialismus und Faschismus in Italien (Munich-Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1925), 2 vols. (The informations on Robert Michels in Chi è ? Dizionario degli Italiani d’oggi, Rome: Formiggini, 1931, pp. 495-496 are not too revealing.)

97 Cf. George D. Herron, The Revival of Italy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1922), pp. 76-87.

98 Cf. Herron’s letter to Mrs. Charles Berry, dated Geneva, November 10, 1922. To be found in the Hoover Institute, Near East Department, H. 567, pp. 5-6.

Chapter XVI

1 The crucial point of accusation was the “Potsdam Crown Council” on July 5, 1914, in which allegedly the decision was taken to start a world war. This meeting, however, never took place. It figures in Article 231, but it was the merit of G. P. Gooch to have destroyed this evil legend. Yet Lloyd George was at least honest when he declared in all candor on March 3, 1921 that the entire Versailles Treaty rested squarely on the German war guilt. “We want to make it clear,” he said, “that the German responsibility for the war has to be treated by the Allies as a cause jugée.”

2 Cf. Algernon Cecil, Facing Hard Facts in Foreign Policy (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1941), p. 59: “For the scene of their labour the peacemakers fixed upon Paris, which was of all places the least likely to countenance a dispassionate peace, and as a result secured for their chairman an old tiger of a man whose lack of religious opinions assured the absence of any spiritual quality in the settlement. They dictated instead of negotiating peace, which was a blunder if the goodwill of all parties was desired, and they failed to occupy the Rhine frontier, which was a crime if in the alternative they hoped to keep the enemy in permanent subjection. They assumed that a hard peace would produce hard cash, which it never did, and that a confession of guilt extorted by pressure would provoke repentance, which it never has.”

3 Mr. J. O. B. Bland, Herron’s contact man in the British Foreign Office, wrote to Herron on September 10, 1918: “If they want any suggestion what to do with the Germans after the war, they are welcome to my idea, which is that for five years they should only be admitted in civilized countries on taking out a dog license. And that is rough on the dogs.” (Herron Papers, vol. 11, document XVIII.)

4 Cf. The Memoirs of Raymond Poincaré, trsl. Sir George Arthur (London: Heinemann, 1929), vol. 3, pp. 11-12.

5 When I lived in England in 1935-1936 I wrote the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George a letter to the effect that he was widely quoted as saying that Germany could not be carved up since it was a “Protestant country,” while there could be no such qualms about Catholic Austria-Hungary. I asked him to confirm or to deny this rumor. He replied through his secretary (whom he subsequently married) that he was unfortunately too busy to answer my query. This letter, to my regret, was destroyed as a result of the Allied air raids preparing the Russian occupation of Vienna in March 1945. On the general ignorance of Lloyd George see also World Within World; The Autobiography of Stephen Spender (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), pp. 79-80.

6 Cf. Ernst Kornemann, “Von antiken Staat,” Breslauer Universitätsreden (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1927), no. 1, p. 35.

7 Cf. H. A. Macartney, Problems of the Danube Basin (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 98.

8Ibid., p. 71.

9 In 1918 Czech exile politicians concluded in Pittsburgh a treaty with Slovak representatives (some of them American citizens) stipulating that the two ethnic units should form a common state for ten years. When the Slovak professor Vojtěch Tuka in 1928 declared in a newspaper article that there now existed a vacuum iuris, he was promptly tried for high treason and condemned by the Czech authorities. (This was not the end of Tuka’s political career: nearly blind, he left jail when Slovakia became almost independent, was hailed as a national martyr, became prime minister of the Slovak Republic and was executed by the then half-Communist Prague government as a “traitor” in 1947. His tragedy mirrors the calamitous emergency in which an ill-conceived and ill-constructed Central Europe found itself ever since 1918.)

10 The Czech Atlas, Atlas Republiky Ceskoslovenské, Jaroslav Pantofliček, ed. (Prague: Nakladatelstvo Orbis, 1935), refused to distinguish between Czechs and Slovaks. The official language of Czechoslovakia was (and is) “Czechoslovak”—a truly nonexisting language.

11 The official Yugoslav atlases showed no difference between Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and Macedo-Bulgars either. Only Germans, Magyars, Albanians, Rumanians, and Italians figured separately on the ethnic maps—yet even Roosevelt knew better. Robert E. Sherwood tells us that “the President expressed his often repeated opinion that the Croats and Serbs had nothing in common and that it is ridiculous to try to force such antagonistic peoples to live together under one government. Cf. his Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper Brothers, 1948), p. 711.

12 Here we have the tragic realization of Mazzini’s dreams who declared that “the indisputable tendency of our epoch is towards the reconstitution of Europe into a certain number of homogeneous states as nearly as possible equal in population and in extent.” Cf. Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (New York: Crofts, 1921), p. 290. This led, unfortunately, to the artificial coalescence of related, but hostile nations in order to make it possible for them to stand up to their bigger neighbors. These artificial combinations, however, were bound to fail.

13 Cf. William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (London: John Murray, 1929), vol. 1, pp. 998-999.

14 Cf. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, (London: Cassell, 1948), vol. 1, pp. 9, 21-50.

15 Ibid., p. 8.

16 Cf. Winston S. Churchill, op. cit., (1954), vol. 6, p. 640.

17 Cf. H. A. Macartney, Hungary and Her Successors (London: Oxford University Press, 1937).

18 The Croats then had a very substantial amount of autonomy: they ruled over a Serb and a (very small) Italian minority.

19 To my knowledge this is the only monument in honor of a political assassin in Europe—with the exception of statues commemorating Wilhelm Oberdank (Guillermo Oberdan), a neurotic who tried to murder Emperor Franz Joseph but was caught before he could strike. He figures as an Italian national hero.

20 Nothing in history is entirely new. As a precedent we had the French folly, all through the sixteenth, seventeenth and even during the first half of the eighteenth century, to strengthen the power of Brandenburg-Prussia. After 1766 Prussia became politically and morally a British protectorate and also fully enjoyed American sympathies. (Cf. Chapter XV, Note 53). When the news of the Franco-Prussian War reached the House of Representatives in Washington, a spontaneous applause broke out. Cf. Othon Guerlac, “Le suicide de Prévost-Paradol à Washington et 1’ opinion américaine,” Revue de littérature comparée vol. 8, no. 1. (January-March 1928), p. 116.

21 Today the Austrian payment balance is in the black because industrialization and agrarian improvements have made great strides in the last thirty years, and the rather substantial tourist trade acts as an equalizing factor, thus making up for the imports, being still larger than the exports.

22 The Anschluss, the union of Austria with Germany, had not merely identitarian-ethnic motives. Vienna had been the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the “First Reich,” whose insignia remained in Vienna’s Imperial treasury. The Hapsburgs, not the Hohenzollerns were the old German dynasty. When Madame de Staël came to Vienna, she commented that, at least, she had arrived at the capitale de l’Allemagne. Even Franz Joseph called himself in 1908 “a German prince.” Most Austrians today have an independent feeling of statehood but not necessarily of what we over here call “nationality.” Still the best people in Austria opposed the Anschluss in 1938, just as decent people in West Germany oppose reunion with the “German Democratic Republic” under the conditions laid down by the Red Pankow regime.

23 No country called Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, or Rumania existed before 1850. “Rumania” was founded in 1857 (without historic precedence) through the union of Wallachia and Moldavia: Czechoslovakia was established in 1918. “Yugoslavia” was the new official name (1929) for the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” founded in 1918. (Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and Bulgaria, on the other hand, were ancient historic realms.)

24 There was a “Czech Legion,” consisting of ex-prisoners-of-war, in Russia. They fought in the beginning against Austro-Hungarian armies, but later against the Communists. Placed finally in a tight spot in Siberia they “bought” their free passage to Vladivostok by surrendering to the Red Army their foe, the “white” Admiral Koltshak, who was shot. Cf. Generalleutnant Konstantin W. Sakharov, Die verratene Armee (Berlin: Reichel, 1939), pp. 358-361. Another “Czech Legion” was established in Italy, where it was commanded by Colonel Graziani who played such a big (and fatal) role in the Fascist movement, in the Ethiopian War and in Mussolini’s “Italian Social Republic.” The officers taken over from the Austro-Hungarian army were not overly trusted and played secondary roles. (The Austro-Hungarian army, on the other hand, had little ethnic or religious prejudice. The last generalissimo of the Imperial-Royal army was a Transylvanian Lutheran, the last Chief Admiral a Hungarian Calvinist, and the Commander on the Italian front a Greek-Orthodox Serb.)

25 Cf. Professor Caroline Robbins (Bryn Mawr), “The Teaching of European History in the United States,” Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, vol. 2. no. 4 (July, 1944), pp. 1110-1111.

26 I remember that of America’s leading universities in 1937 only Harvard had a minor geography department. (The only university with a reputation in geography was Clark University in Worcester, Mass.) Geography at best eked out a humble existence as a poorly endowed chair in the Department of Geology. On the Continent, however, two hours a week are dedicated to geography, (an obligatory subject) in every high school-college. The same is true of history.

27 Here Jefferson insists that Americans are better than anybody else. “If all the sovereigns of Europe were to set themselves to work to emancipate the minds of their subjects from their present ignorance and prejudice and that as zealously as now they attempt the contrary, a thousand years could not place them on the high ground on which our people are now setting out.” This reminds one sharply of the thousand-year backwardness accredited to Europeans by Walter H. Page. Did Jefferson conceive of a racial superiority of Americans? At least our great democrat advocated harems for the elite to spread their superior qualities. Cf. Lester J. Cappon, The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), vol. 2. pp. 387ff. American nationalism, we should not forget, was stronger in the past than it is today. Clara von Gerstner heard over 120 years ago an orator in Charleston affirming that Americans “possess an intelligence not exceeded by any portion of the world.” Cf. her Beschreibung einer Reise durch dei Vereinigten Staaten in den Jahren 1838 bis 1840 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrich, 1842), p. 295. Lincoln in an address to the New Jersey State Senate in 1861 referred to Americans as the “almost chosen people of God.” Cf. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. 4, p. 236. Today the left (and near left) preach an American masochism, criticizing and denigrating all American values and traditions.

28 Cf. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), pp. 50-51.

29 An American aristocracy? The expression might not be popular but Grund wrote in 1839, “I have heard more talk about aristocracy and family in the United States than during my whole previous life in Europe.” (op. cit., p. 145)

30 “Post-Protestant” civilizations instinctively reject extremes, but the “radical,” as the word implies, wants to “go to the roots.” As I have pointed out in Liberty or Equality? “radicalism” disappears in Europe’s Orbis Reformatus by the eighteenth century—except in denominationally mixed Germany. Yet, significantly enough, one spoke in Germany in jest about Radikalinskis, as if they were Slavs. The Catholic and Eastern Church world never had the cult of the juste milieu (as Herzen and Leontyev remarked). Cf. Chapter XIV, Note 28.

31 An anarchical tendency is not per se a leftist one. Henry Adams called himself quite aptly a “Christian Conservative Anarchist” and I would not be reluctant to use this term for myself. Cf. the letter of Henry Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, in Letters of Henry Adams (1892-1918), W. C. Ford, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938), p. 364. Anarchism pure and simple, after all, is nothing but extreme liberalism and individualism. Political anarchism of the nineteenth and twentieth century, however, had strong leftist implications.

32 There are, as a matter of fact, occasionally women of real genius. I have known three of them in my life.

33 The views and ideas of William E. Dodd will be discussed on pp. 278-280.

34 Ambassador Joseph E. Davies thought that the purge trials in the 1930s were absolutely genuine. Cf. his Mission to Moscow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1941), pp. 155sq. This book was also filmed. As to Stalin, this was Mr. Davies’ opinion: “A child would like to sit in his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.” Cf. Foster Rhea Dulles, op. cit., p. 4.

35 A curiously antihistoric feeling pervades the leftist creeds. Gerrard Winstanley in The Laws of Freedom (1952) not only insisted that science (and not metaphysics) alone should be taught, but also that history should be kept out of the curricula of schools, because history looked “backward” and not “forward.” Cf. Friedrich Heer, op. cit., pp. 46-47. On the other hand, Yves Simon correctly pointed out that there is no proper and fruitful understanding of history without theology. (“Philosophie chrétienne, Notes complémen-taires,” Etudes Carmélitaines, XIX, vol. 1. pp. 114-115.) And Duff Cooper is right when he says, “Perhaps one of the reasons why so little is learned from experience is that the men who conduct the affairs of the nations are always changing and that too few of them read history. This is particularly true of democracy.” Cf. Old Men Forget (London: Hart, Davis, 1953), pp. 193-194.

History irks leftists because, if they do not ignore it altogether, they have to “rewrite” it, which means that they have to forge it. This they have to do since they have a concrete concept of the future and the (artificially adapted) past must appear to be an organic and logical preparation of the “shape of things to come.” Leftists (and this includes the radical democrats) have to be suspicious of history because on their program is the “end of history”—at least of history as we understand the term. Even the perfect global democracy of the convinced “democratist” is utopia, is paradise on earth. As far as history generally is taught in “programmatic democracies,” it assumes the character of an evolution (interspread with revolutions) toward a specific goal: beatitude for the millions. This view is also quite deeply imbedded in American popular feelings. Writes Professor Eugene N. Anderson, “European history in the hundred years after Napoleon has been regarded in the United States as the story of the slow, but certain victory of liberalism over the ancien régime. In writing this history the episodes emphasized have been those in which liberalism clashed with the old order and either overcame it or, unfortunately, was temporarily defeated by it. American historians have assumed that the goal of the century was to establish the ascendancy of the American social and political ideals: they have interpreted European history according to their own wishes, and they have been abetted in this work by the memoirs and biographies of liberal exiles from the Continent and the tendency to translate these works about Continental history which fitted their own theories.” (Social Education, May 1938.) All this optimism, needless to say, is equally applicable to the Asian scene. Today democratism and socialism have replaced the old liberal outlook.

36 Representative Sol Bloom of the Democratic party, to quote an instance, was a warm admirer of Mussolini.

37 William II knew about Dreyfus’ innocence but could not publicly intervene. Had he done it, he would only have aggravated Dreyfus’ position. However, he informed Queen Victoria of the truth. H. B. von Bülow, the German chargé d’affaires in Paris wrote to Chancellor Hohenlohe that the verdict against Dreyfus was a “mixture of vulgarity and cowardice, the surest sign of barbarism,” and that France “has therewith excluded herself from the family of civilized nations.” Cf. Wilhelm Herzog, Der Kampf einer Republik (Zürich, 1933), cited by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 91, n. 6.

38 The Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov demanded that after the assassination of Emperor Alexander II the murderer be handed over to the Holy Synod for religious instruction and spiritual regeneration. Yet this sensible proposal was rejected and the law carried out: for a successful or unsuccessful attempt to murder a member of the Imperial Family Russia had a statutory death sentence (and sometimes for this crime only). Cf. Fëdor Stepun, “Poet—providyets, K stolyetiyu so dnya rozhdyeniay Vladimira Solovyova,” Za Svobodu, 1953, no. 7, p. 7. The highly strung Irish lady who wounded Mussolini was returned for medical attention to the British Isles. Drćil, who failed to kill Dollfuss, got a slight jail sentence, so did Jawurek who gravely wounded the Austrian Chancellor, Monsignor Ignaz Seipel (and thus eventually caused his death). The assassin of Empress Elizabeth was imprisoned for life. Friedrich Adler, who murdered Prime Minister Count Stügkh during World War I, was formally condemned to death but was released from jail a year later. The French, to be true, were more spiteful: Gorgulov, the mentally deranged Russian assassin of President Doumer, was actually executed. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu in op. cit., vol. 2, iv. 7, tells us that during the rule of Alexander II from 1855 to the first months of 1879 only one execution took place in Russia, that of Karakosov, would-be assassin of the Emperor (1866). Nor had the number of murders increased since the days of Nicolas I. Percentagewise they were fewer than either in France or Prussia.

Were Sacco and Vanzetti guilty or not? The best book on this issue is Francis Russell, Tragedy at Dedham, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962). That author is convinced that Sacco either fired the fatal shot or knew who the assassin was, but Vanzetti was probably innocent (p. 466). The book by this leading American conservative writer is based on serious research.

39 This I experienced in connection with the Chessman case, when I wrote for a Catholic American monthly a column merely explaining the psychological reasons for the European reaction. I even carefully avoided taking sides. As a result the editorial staff (mostly female) threatened to walk out if the editor-in-chief were to publish the column. (Chessman had been indicted for rape, not for murder, and received the death sentence for a technicality: he had dragged his victim a few yards from the car. Cases like these highlight, above all, the fact that “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”)

40 One wonders whether much-heralded experiments like those of the humane reformatory camp (in Bolshevo, for instance) did not serve as a smokescreen for less humanitarian “experiments”—further east and further north.

41 One ought to say: something the Communists considered to be “new,” nay, to be “American.” The fascination which the long-distance (and thoroughly distorted) picture of America exercised on Russian communism has so far never been made the subject of serious research. In the writings of Lenin and Stalin we repeatedly encounter expressions of boundless admiration for America and of the sub-conscious feeling that all the United States needed was the elimination of wicked Wall Street—and everything would be all right. To Stalin the “style” of communism consisted in “Russian Revolutionary Dynamism” and in “American Pragmatism” (Dyelovitost’ is best translated this way, but it also might mean sobriety, work-readiness, industriousness). Cf. I. Stalin, Ob osnovakh Lyeninizma, K voprosam lyeninizma (Moscow: Partizdat, WKP-b, 1935), pp. 75-76. Immediately after the Russian Revolution a new artistic and architectural style sprang up, called Chicagizm, and based on the notion of a new city in a new world without a past. Needless to say that Chicagism had no connection with the reality of Chicago.

Yet the Soviets knew how to impress their American visitors with the label “new,” and this in spite of the fact, as I hinted, that the American is not truly a friend of the radically new, but rather of familiar things in a “bigger and better” edition. Nor was or is the USSR anything genuinely modern. It breathes the spirit of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, vide the Moscow subway stations reminding one of great-grandmother’s drawing room. Or look at the railroad station of Sotchi which resembles an oversexed Munich beer-brewer’s dream of an Oriental harem. Still there is a certain type of American or British leftist whose heart beats faster when he sees travel folders inviting him to come to the “New Czechoslovakia,” the “New Egypt,” or the “New Algeria” where he can admire uniformed girls marching with broad smiles and shouldered submachine guns.

42 I was told in Moscow in 1930 by an American woman that never-ever could I see in the United States such fine, modern, clean and streamlined streetcars as in the USSR. I could not prove the contrary as I had not yet been in America, but, I could show her a metal plate in one of the trolley cars indicating that it had been built prior to 1917. Was the good lady a Socialist or a Communist? Probably not. But she suffered from the modern malady of accepting unthinkingly the “axiom” of Socialist inevitability. This has been castigated by Gaetano Mosca in his Elementi di scienza politica (Turin: Fratelli Boccao 1923), p. 319. After all, it seems better to rejoice in the shape of things to come than to deplore them.

43 Cf. Chapter XV, Note 5.

44 In the United States higher female education, public or private, is more markedly leftist than its male counterpart. “Conservative Clubs” in women’s colleges are more frowned upon by the administrations than in men’s colleges. This is not only due to the leftist ressentiment as delineated by Werner Sombart, but to the close links between leftism and militant feminism which are particularly strong in the English-speaking world. There feminism is not unrelated to the misogyny so strongly entrenched in America and Britain. It is naturally impossible to evaluate the position of women in a country by studying its laws. If this were the “key,” one would have to think that women in English-speaking countries have a higher position than in old Russia or in France which is by no means the case. Cf. Randolph Bourne’s letter published in Twice a Year (New York), no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1939), and no. 5-6 (Spring-Summer 1941). Cf. also chapter XIV Note 33.

45 I heard the President’s French only once. It was a unique experience. Still he was certain that he could “charm Stalin.” Without a means of direct communication?

46 According to Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, Roosevelt relied on mere hunches and he rarely read serious books. Cf. her The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Viking, 1946), pp. 34, 352. To William C. Bullitt the President also confessed that he relied primarily on hunches, intuitions. Cf. W. C. Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, International Edition, vol. 5, no. 7 (September 27, 1948), p. 48. Here we read how Roosevelt insisted that Woodrow Wilson’s decisions were also prompted by mere feelings. But “intuitivism” is a worldwide disease particularly frequent in democracies and personal dictatorships, where people without previous training, study or experience achieve dominant positions. Not only FDR and Wilson, but also Beneš and Hitler (with his traumwandlerische Sicherheit, the “inner security of a sleepwalker”) boasted of it—and all failed fatally. There is no substitute for knowledge and experience. In the male sheer intuitivism is always coupled with mediocrity. And this observation is so pertinent for Napoleon, whose intellectual mediocrity startled Léon Bloy. Cf. his Le mendiant ingrat (Journal de l’ auteur 1892-1895) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1946), p. 127.

47 He was actually what psychiatrists call a mythomaniac. Without aiming at personal profit he invented stories, made statements and promises which had no basis in fact.

48 This Nazi enthusiasm for the populist American tradition (the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian trend) has deeper psychological and theological roots which became apparent when one reads Soren Kierkegaard’s violent strictures on democracy and his praise for monarchy, to be found in his diaries. Cf. Die Tagebücher, Hayo Gerdes, trsl. and ed. (Düsseldorf-Köln: Eugen Diederichs, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 218, 220, 245-247, and Christentum und Christenheit, Eva Schlechta, ed. (Munich: Kösel, 1957), pp. 87, 286. Cf. also Chapter VII, Note 30.

49 The Spanish character is aristocratic only in the sense that people are proud and have a sense of spiritual relativity. The beggar might address the passer-by with hermanito, “little brother.” Upper-class arrogance is rare in Spain. Cf. also Salvador de Madariaga, Hernán Cortés (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 40-41, H. F. Brownson, Equality and Democracy (Detroit: H. F. Brownson, 1897), p. 22, or Havelock Ellis, The Soul of Spain (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1909), pp. 12-13.

50 Cf. Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, Vida de Don Quijote y Sanco (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1914), pp. 213-214.

51 Salvador de Madariaga in his Spain (New York: Creative Age Press, 1943), p. 332 after describing the 1934 rising, added: “I shall not dwell on atrocities. Both sides flooded Spain and even foreign countries with harrowing tales, both unfortunately true though both possibly exaggerated.” (I knew reliable eye witnesses who had seen carved up priests in the windows of butcheries.) And then Madariaga adds: “The revolt of 1934 is unpardonable. . . . As for the Asturian miners, their revolt was entirely due to doctrinarian and theoretical prepossessions. Had the hungry Andalusian peasants risen in revolt, what could one do but sympathize with their despair? But the Asturian miners were well paid and, in fact, the whole industry, by a collusion between employers and workers, was kept working at an artificial level by state subsidies.” (Here again I want to warn the reader not to put too much sense and reason into history but to remember man’s fallen and irrational nature. He is always a sinner and usually a half-wit. I am amazed about historians, above all Christian historians, who overlook this fact. Who are the staunchest Communists in Sweden? The best-paid workers in all of Europe, the steel workers in Lapland.) Cf. Winfried Martini, Freiheit auf Abruf, Die Lebenserwartung der Bundesrepublik (Cologne-Berlin: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1960), p. 114. Vide also Fredrick B. Pike, “The Modernized Church in Peru: Two Aspects.” The Review of Politics, vol. 26, no. 3 (July 1964), p. 316, where he speaks about the strong Communist domination of the Peruvian stevedores’ trade union, of men who earn between $400.00 and $600.00 a month, a royal wage for Latin America. “Throughout Latin America,” he adds, “it is those members of the middle class who have grown indifferent or hostile to spiritual forces that furnish the most recruits to communism. The Communist promise to bring about the fall of the upper class feeds the envy of the spiritually adrift but often economically securely anchored middle class.” There is nothing more ridiculous than the naive cause-effect school in history which, above all, refuses to consider Grace and Evil.

52 The spirit of the Tercio had been admirably portrayed by the French novelist Pierre MacOrlan in his novel La Bandera, made into a highly successful film in 1935. During the Spanish Civil War I had an opportunity to talk to its founder, General Millan Astray, a real soldier with a hawk face who had only one arm and one eye.

53 The pilot, Juan Antonio Ansaldo, finally wrote a book of recollections, Mémoires d’un monarchiste espagnol, 1931–1952, trsl. J. Viet (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1953). The memoirs are as violently antirepublican as they are anti-Franco.

54 Louis Bolin, who was half-British, became after World War II the organizer of modern Spanish tourism attracting millions, which eventually made Spanish economic reconstruction possible in the late fifties. Without Bolin’s groundwork the Neo-Liberals (mostly Opus Dei members) could never have effected the economic transformation of Spain.

55 The vast majority of Spanish “Protestants” sided with the Republic, the Jews (who knew something about communism elsewhere) supported Franco, whom Hitler considered “a Freemason.” Cf. Dr. Henry Picker, op. cit., p. 49. During the Civil War I had occasion to talk in Seville with Pastor Santos y Molina (today Evangelical Bishop in Madrid) who told me in the presence of a Press and Propaganda official very frankly about the grievances he had against the Nationalist government. About Franco and the Jews cf. pp. 331-332.

56 To the Carlists (and to the serious historian) the monarchy ever since the days of Isabel II belonged to the Liberal order. The Spanish monarchy which fell in 1931 and the Portuguese monarchy which collapsed in 1910, in the eyes of the conservative Iberian, had been usurped by nonlegitimate, leftist-liberal monarchs. While in Portugal the liberal branch had died out with Dom Manuel, the Carlist branch in Spain had come to an end with the accidental death of Don Alfonso de Borbón in Vienna late in 1936.

57 There is a symbolic value in the killing of a Carlist wearing a badge with the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the confused American hero in Hemingway’s (historically valuable) novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

58 Franco had a brilliant record in the Rif-War. He was known to be extremely courageous. Vide the thumbnail sketch of Franco in Arturo Barea’s The Forging of a Rebel, trsl. Ilse Barea (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946). Barea fought in that war with the Tercio and had a chance to see Franco in action. “I’ve seen murderers go white in the face because Franco had looked at them out of the corner of his eye.” (p. 365). Franco’s relationship with the Nazis appears partly in Dr. Picker’s Tischgespräche, partly in the Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik 1918-1945 (Baden-Baden: Imprimerie Nationale, 1951), series D, vol. 3. From these documents it appears that there was no Nazi support of Franco prior to the rebellion (p. 3), that Franco was furious about Italian aerial attacks on Barcelona (p. 552), and that the German Ambassador in Paris (January 8, 1937) was certain that the Spanish Government would show no gratitude for the aid accorded it during the Civil War (pp. 181-182). From the Tischgespräche we learn about Hitler’s contempt for Franco and for Catholic Spain.

59 There is a beautiful Picasso-Museum in Barcelona, right in “Fran-cospain.” Military dictatorship is rarely ideology-ridden.

60 The old influential liberal monthly, Revista de Occidente, founded by José Ortega y Gasset, has been revived three years ago. Its editor-in-chief is Ortega’s son, José Ortega Spottorno.

61 The persecution and massacre of nonorthodox Communists and other leftists is well described by George Orwell in his Homage to Catalonia (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938—Penguin, 1962).

62 Most of the organizers of these “inner-leftist” massacres, men like Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, were later killed in the Stalinist purges. Executions, like those of Nin, were part of the Yezhovshtshina, the bloody rule of Nikolay Ivanovitch Yezhov, who later also perished. (He was substituted by Beriya.) At least half of the men Ilya Ehrenburg knew in Spain became Stalin’s victims—as he later admitted. Others who survived played subsequently infamous roles, like Ernst Gerö, the bloodhound of Budapest. The man, however, who played the role of Stalin’s chief prosecutor (and who knew the truth all the time) was the renegade Pole Andrzej Wyszýnski, who for years represented the USSR at the United Nations in New York. The UN provided no disinfectant to those who, in the line of duty, had to shake hands with him.

63 Cf. Madariaga, op. cit., p. 397. Nin was a relative of Anais Nin, noted American writer.

64 In spite of his violent condemnation of the warfare of the “Nationalists,” Bernanos remained until his death a confirmed right-winger. One of his sons stayed until the very end as a volunteer in the Spanish National Army.

65 Hugh Thomas, a British Labourite, in his The Spanish Civil War (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961) part II, ch. 19, reflects on the many assassinations and executions carried out by the Franco forces, but he tells us nothing about elaborate cruelties committed by the “Nationalists.” The delirious atrocities perpetrated by the forces of enlightenment, progress, and democracy are, however, honestly dealt with in the following chapter and they make very gruesome reading. Ilya Ehrenburg in his mémoirs, “Lyudi, gody, zhinz,’ ” published in the summer 1962 in Novy Mir (Moscow), gives a less detailed picture of the atrocities and attributes them almost exclusively to the Anarchists. But Hugh Thomas is emphatic on the horrors committed by the “Tshekas.”

66 Which reminds one of the desecrations in St. Denis, where the graves of the French Kings can be found. In 1793 a revolutionary mob performed ghoulish acts on the remains of the “sons of St. Louis” . . . a real throwback to the practice of past ages. Hatred always comes from helplessness mixed with envy. Of course, to “punish the dead” is a time-honored pastime, but in the last 200 years it has become a privilege of the left—including the Nazis, who desecrated Jewish cemeteries.

67 I possess a Red Spanish poster celebrating the “Revolution of the 18th of July.”

68 Unfortunately these horrors are not purely Spanish—or German, or Russian. One has to remember Dan Davis of Waco, Texas, a mulatto, shouting from the stake in 1916, “I wish some of you gentlemen would be Christian enough to cut my throat.” (It may well be that some of these gentlemen were already dreaming of hanging Kaiser Bill and of making the world safe for democracy.) One also has to remember the attorney of Colorado County (Texas) who protested against the lynchers being called a mob: “I consider their act an expression of the will of the people.” (But the truth might have been on both sides: the lynchers were a mob who did express majority views.) Cf. Frank Shay, Judge Lynch, His First 100 Years, p. 118. The inhumanities in Spain too, were perpetrated more often than not by large crowds, a fact our Roussellians do not like to face. Here we must recall Reinhold Niebuhr’s statement that it is far more difficult for a group to be ethical than for an individual. Cf. his Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1941), p. xi. (Rivarol put this into simple words: “Le prince absolu peut être un Néron, mais il est quelquefois Titus ou Marc-Aurèle, le people est souvent Néron, et jamais Marc-Aurèle.” Hence the masses are psychologically invited to be against excellence.) Half a century before the discovery of America, revolutionary German peasants congregating in Worms in 1428 voted for a program which they entitled “Postulates of the Common Man.” The most salient points were the abolition of all private property and the exiling or killing of all Jews. These demands were raised again in our progressive century. Cf. Felix Somary, op. cit., p. 80.

69 The United States at least showed gratitude in the beginning. Ségur tells us that after his arrival in the United States during the War of Independence “at all solemn occasions, during all festivities, in all toasts one never forgets to mention the names of Louis XVI and of France.” He adds, “America indeed has always avoided ingratitude of which history has charged almost all republican governments.” Cf. Monsieur le Comte de Ségur, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 446-447.

70 The Spanish Socialists, unlike their Northern brethren, were very orthodox in their Marxism: they were really Bolsheviks rather than Mensheviks. Margarita Nelken, a leading Socialist, said, “We want the Revolution, but the Russian Revolution to us is insufficient. There must be enormous flames which can be seen in the entire world and rivers of blood have to color the seas.” Largo Caballero, another Socialist leader, announced: “If the Popular Front collapses, which we expect, the victory of the proletariat is certain. Then we will establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Cf. Hugh Thomas, op. cit., Book. 1, ch. 11.

71 Cf. Alfonso García Valdecasas, “Los Estados totalitarios y el Estado Español,” in La Revista de Estudios Políticos (January 1942), pp. 5sq. In this article the cofounder of the Falange (and recently Rector of the University of Barcelona) declared (p. 9) that Spain refuses to follow the general political trend in Europe (in 1942!), that the new movements are totalitarian in nature (pp. 20-21), that Spain always believed in immutable moral principles and that the State is to be merely in the service of these values: “These are, for us, as an example, the liberty, the dignity and the integrity of man, and it is the strict duty of the State to respect them and to make them respected.” (p. 27). A more outspoken rejection of Nazi and Fascist ideas can hardly be imagined—and yet these words were written at the height of Nazi victories. Such views, of course, are typically Spanish; hence the leftist dislike for traditional Spain. No wonder Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi “ideologist” chief, told us that “nowhere else in Europe could one find such psychological and intellectual backwardness as in Spain before April 1931.” (Cf. op. cit., p. 186) Such views were shared by most “progressive” people in the West!

72 Cf. Salvador de Madariaga, op. cit., p. 368: “During the Eighth Congress of the Communist International which took place in Moscow in 1935, the ‘Trojan Horse’ policy to be adopted by the Comintern from then on was formulated and expounded by Comrade Dimitrov. This was the policy which led Russia to Geneva, to the International Peace Campaign, and to the Popular Front. The chief agent for the policy in Spain was to be Seńor Alvarez del Vayo, the stronger and more efficient for his remaining officially a Socialist. His trips to Moscow had begun in 1930, a year before the fall of the Spanish Monarchy. In April 1936 a party of over a hundred Spaniards and pseudo-Spaniards who had been living in Moscow passed through Paris and were forwarded to Spain with every possible care and attention by the Spanish Embassy.” It is important to note that Señor Alvarez del Vayo for years handled a foreign policy column in The Nation, a respected “liberal” paper. Cf. also Hugh Thomas, op. cit., book. I, ch. 11, note 18.

73 Cf. Salvador de Madariaga, op. cit., p. 402, note 1, “I believe the first time a Spanish airplane bombed a Spanish town was on July 20th at Toledo, where Don Francisco Caballero had the city bombed at regular intervals for three days in the hope of regaining it from the Rebels.” Guernica still poses a problem to the historian. Was it bombed by the Germans or not? Hugh Thomas is convinced of it, but newer research points in the opposite direction. Cf. Helene Schreiber, “Guernica—Mythos von Malerhand,” Rheinischer Merkur, January 17, 1969, no. 3, p. 32. Harold G. Cardozo, correspondent of the London Times denied the bombardment in the May 5, 1937 issue. Today the Spanish government tries to persuade Picasso to “reclaim” his famous painting Guernica still on loan at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They would like to show it in Madrid’s new Modern Art Museum.

74 Again, was the Church so bad that one had to expect such a dreadful reaction? Again we have to warn—even at the risk of sounding repetitious—against the simple theory that where there is smoke there is fire. Big fires are known to have produced little smoke and vice versa. Among priests the best ones (since they were a major “provocation”) usually suffered more than the bad, lazy, or stupid ones—because, from a Red point of view, they were harmless if they lowered the prestige of the Church. Some people in the West will insist that all these “troubles” could have been avoided if there had been separation between State and Church. Yet strict separation, taking the intrinsic character of the Church and of the modern State into consideration, is not really feasible—something Reinhold Niebuhr well realized. Cf. Jerome G. Kerwin, “The Church and the State,” Commonweal, vol. 62, no. 14, pp. 342-344.

75 Franco tried vainly to embody the synthesis by sporting the blue shirt of the Falangists with the boina roja, the red beret of the Carlists. The synthesis did not work. Today Franco appears either in civilian clothes or in a strictly military uniform.

76 This much he told to his friend the famous Italian journalist Indro Montanelli who published it in January 1948 in the Corriere della Sera. Yet some of the Falangists later drifted into violent opposition against the Franco Government: among them Dionisto Ridruejo, author of the Falangist Hymn Cara al sol. Others, such as Garcia Valdecasas, broke with the Falange whose political importance today is almost nil. Whatever remains of the Falange (especially as far as newspapers go) is in a vague sense republican and leftist. On the (undoubtedly very idealistic) founder of the Falange, cf. Bernd Nellessen, José Antonio Primo de Rivera—der Troubadour der spanischen Falange (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1966).

77 Among them we find Don Gregorio Marañón, medical expert, historian, politician, and writer who took a hand in the abdication of Alfonso XIII, and José Ortega y Gasset. Salvador de Madariaga held out to this day, though his works can again be published in Spain. Pablo Casals also refuses to return, but he is said to have a Spanish passport. Yet what is today the prevailing sentiment in Spain? There has been a general liberalization in the intellectual and artistic domain and an “economic miracle” to boot—but only since the neo-liberals of the Opus Dei liberalized the economy. Careful demoscopie investigations reveal the fact that about two thirds of the population are in favor of the present government. Le Monde, the excellent, but very leftist Paris daily admits that most Spaniards (on the right or on the left) dread democracy far more than “Francoism” since they see the danger of a total anarchy. Cf. Charles Vanhecke, “L’Espagne et la peur du vide,” Le Monde, May 5, 1972.

78 Cf. Salvador de Madariaga, Spain, pp. 376-377, “The fact that the Church was being ruthlessly persecuted by the Revolutionists can only be disputed or contested by ignorant or prejudiced critics. Whether the priests murdered were 16,000 or 1,600 time will tell. But that for months, years perhaps, the mere fact of being a priest was tantamount to a capital sentence, and the fact that no Catholic worship was allowed at all till the end of the War or very nearly, and that churches and cathedrals were used as markets and thoroughfares for animal-driven vehicles cannot be disputed.” (The Basque nationalist attitude Madariaga considered a case of schizophrenia.) A group of non-Catholic clergymen visiting Spain in the winter of 1937 reportedly laconically about the Spanish priests: “Many certainly have been killed . . . unless the parish priest was actively unpopular, he was not killed by his own people.” Cf. Report of a Group of Anglican and Free Churchmen who Visited Spain, January 29 to February 9, 1937 cited by E. Allison Peers, Spain, the Church and the Orders (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1945), p. 254.

79 In large parts of the Basque Provinces the population wanted autonomy and since the Cortes of the Republic voted the Basque Statute, the Basques, led by their priests and ignorant of the persecution of the Church in the rest of Republican Spain, sided with the Republic. Territorially they were cut off from the main area and thus took the stories of the persecution of their Church further south as mere propaganda of the Burgos Government. Yet Basque exiles, later on, fanatically spread the anti-Franco gospel in Catholic circles abroad—and successfully so. It cannot be doubted, however, that the Basques did have a just grievance, and still have it today, against the perennial centralism of the various governments seated in Castile. This is a rather perverse situation as it is normally leftism which stands for centralism and centralization. The fueros (ancient local privileges) of Navarra were not seriously impaired, but in case of a Spanish reform, one can only wish for a restoration of the time-hallowed fueros of the three Basque provinces. It is true, however, that the state as such (and the modern state even more so) is essentially “annexationist” and decentralizes only with the greatest reluctance (and with a minimum of sincerity). Cf. Rafael Gambra, La monarquía social y representativa (Madrid: Rialp, 1954), p. 204. Our democratic age is basically opposed to minorities. Says Winfried Martini, “From the concentration camps and later from the gas chambers which—though unawares—the will of the people had brought on, the frightening yelling screams of our century could be heard: ‘Woe to the minorities!’ ” Cf. Das Ende aller Sicherheit, p. 118.

80 Leon Trotsky was a Freemason, but neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Khrushchev belong to the Brothers. Any organization not “of the State” is forbidden in the USSR, and thus the religious communities are an anomaly scheduled for liquidation. (Hence also the pressure on Zionism.) For this reason alone any true “liberalization” of genuine communism is unthinkable.

81 Harold Laski wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes on August 6, 1933 that he had spoken to Azaña and that this politician’s “resonant anticlericalism” went to his heart. Cf. Holmes-Laski Letters, 1916-1935, p. 1446. The joint letter of Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov to Largo Caballero, dated December 21, 1936, advising him to use democracy, republicanism and Azaña as a convenient camouflage against the accusation of Communist takeover, can be found in S. de Madariaga, Spain, pp. 472-474.

82 Numerically the Communists in Spain were then relatively not more numerous than the Communists in Russia in 1917, but in Spain, unlike Russia, the Socialists were hardly distinguishable from the Communists. The Russian bolsheviki totally disregarded democratic procedure, whereas the mensheviki still clung to the time-honored notion of legality. On January 23, 1936, Largo Caballero said in Madrid, “When things change, the Right need not ask for our benevolence. We will not respect the lives of our enemies as we did on April 4, 1931, when the Republic came in. If the Right is not defeated at the Polls, we will find other means to beat them: means to obtain the total triumph of the Red flag, because, and I emphasize this, if the Right wins, we shall be forced to turn to civil war.” Cf. Richard Pattee, This is Spain (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1951), p. 177. The chapters of this book dealing with the events leading to the Civil War, are well documented.

83 As we have said before, this was largely due to Basque influences, particularly to the friendship which bound Señor José Antonio Aguirre y Lecube, the former President of the Basque Republic, to Jacques Maritain. And yet an English observer could state unequivocally, “The attack on religion has been more radical in loyalist Spain than anywhere else in the world, even Mexico and Russia. All Roman Catholic churches had been closed down as places of worship and nearly all have been completely destroyed. . . . In loyalist Spain there is nothing left to persecute.” Cf. Arthur Loveday, Spain 1923-1948 (London: Boswell, 1949), p. 119, quoting the liberal Manchester Guardian. Of course some readers might think that the Church in Spain created a boundless envy due to its wealth amidst poverty. Yet prior to the outbreak of the Civil War priests received about eight dollars a month (!), bishops about $1,500 a year. Granted that the purchasing power of these sums ought to be doubled or tripled, the vast majority of the clergy was living evidently on a proletarian level. The situation, in this respect, is not so very much better today.

84 Curiously enough there is no equivalent to the term with this particular meaning in Continental idioms.

85 The Protestant, edited by Kenneth Leslie and published during World War II in New York was an amazing publication. On its editorial board were a number of communists and fellow travelers, among them Mr. Pierre van Paassen. It fought a valiant battle against the Nazis and the Catholic Church (considering them nearly identical) and declared (vol. 5, no. 6, June-July 1942, p. 3) that the two most hated men of our time were not Hitler and Mussolini, but—Franco and Pétain. On the last page of that number an appeal was printed for additional readers because “the Fascists, whichever side wins, plan to win the peace. If the Fascists or the Falangists win the peace, the war will have been fought in vain. Their victory would mean the renewed and intensified persecution of the Jews and of all those who have become in any way identified with the age-old struggle for democracy.” One of the editors of this delightful periodical, Heinz Pol, in a letter published in the New York Times demanded a mass slaughter of “German militarists and junkers,” a demand reiterated by Stalin during the Teheran conference. Yet the main target of the attack of The Protestant was never National Socialism, but “Franco Spain” and Pétain’s régime which was also considered “clerico-Fascist.”

86 There was also a Spanish Catholic who was used by the Republic as an alibi: Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, who served as a representative of Republican Spain in Paris. One of the archbishops opposed Franco more and more in the years to come, Cardinal Segura of Seville. He attacked Franco, the Americans, “Protestants,” the Falangists, modern dances (beginning with the waltz and polka) and, finally, Pius XII. His case was really unique. Luckily he died before he had a chance to hear about the bikinis on the Costa del Sol. He was, however, no danger to the Church. Far more dangerous is the fascination of certain ideologies for the Church—and today, as Bernanos foresaw it clearly, the trap is no longer the throne-and-altar-complex but Leftism. Cf. his Le Chemin de la Croix des Ames (Paris: Gallimard-NRF, 1948), p. 452.

87 In the Germanic and Slavic countries the Socialist parties called themselves “social democratic,” but they were originally pledged to the Marxist program. The Russian Social Democrats were split into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Until 1917 Lenin figures, naturally, as a Social Democrat, a term which sounds harmless to Anglo-American ears. In the Latin countries these parties called themselves always plainly “Socialists.” (Yet the French Radicaux Socialistes were never Socialists, but radical liberals claiming a social outlook: they were very bourgeois, anticlerical middle-of-the-roaders and, in a way, the ideological backbone of the III Republic.) In Austria, after World War II, the Social Democrats reconstituted themselves as “Socialists,” probably in order to emphasize their Marxian heritage vis-à-vis the heavily Sovietsupported Communists. This Marxist heritage can be found even deep down in the heart of the Labour party. We have seen a picture of the late Lord Attlee where his Lordship in “Loyalist Spain” gives the Communist salute with the clenched fist.

88 There is a good and impartial description of these events in the book by Hellmut Andics, Der Staat, den keiner wollte (Vienna: Herder, 1962), pp. 431ff.

89 British journalists on the Continent, needless to say, have similar mental-intellectual handicaps. The abyss, as always, is the Channel, not the Atlantic. Of course, journalism per se has many pitfalls. Michael Clark, a onetime New York Times correspondent, wrote that according to the advice given by a “most experienced” American reporter young journalists should always write what the folks “back home” would like to hear and that their bias should be fully taken into account. In Clark’s particular area (Northwest Africa) these items were scandals involving American air bases and the bad treatment of natives by the French colonialists. Cf. Thomas Molnár, The Decline of the Intellectual (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books. 1961), p. 226n.

90 After the war he was tried in Boston and received a stiff jail sentence.

91 Cf. Heinrich Benedikt, ed. Geschichte der Republik Osterreich (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1954), pp. 10-11: “The First Austrian Republic had been a sovereign state, yet it was so in name only. Subjected to the control of the League of Nations—the typical example of power politics in disguise—Austria’s self-government was only another name for the administration of the country by the Allies. In the Tripartite Conference from March 14 to 17, 1934, and in the Protocols of Rome, Italy took over the role of a tacit agent of the League of Nations and deputy of the Great Powers.” And Benedikt adds, “The Abyssinian venture resulted in the surrendering of Austria to Hitler.” (p. 11). Compare also with Kurt von Schuschnigg, “Neuösterreichische Geschichts-schreibung,” Wissenschaft und Weltbild, vol. 4 (1951).

92 He repeatedly made such and similar declarations. I also have oral informations from Professor von Schuschnigg. Yet in his doctoral thesis published in Paris in 1908 (for the University of Dijon) entitled Le probléme autrichien et la question tchèque, Etude sur les luttes politiques des nationalités slaves en Autriche, Beneš had demanded merely a “federalization” and by no means a destruction of Austria-Hungary. His growing anti-Catholic and anti-Hapsburg bias drove him finally into the arms of Hitler and Stalin at the same time and thus into political suicide. His fanatical anti-Hapsburg stand, preferring the Anschluss to restoration, is also testified to by his admirers. Cf. Jaroslav Papoušek, Eduard Beneš, Třicet let práte v boje pro národ a stàt (Prague: Orbis, 1934), and Louis Eisenmann, Un grand Européen: Edouard Beneš (Paris: Hartmann, 1934), pp. 111-114. Cf. also Sisley Huddleston, The Tragic Years, 1939-1947 (New York: Devin Adair, 1955), p. 12; Jean de Pange, Les meules de Dieu (Paris: Alsatia, 1951), p. 182, Der Hochverratsprozess gegen Dr. Guido Schmidt (Vienna: Osterreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1947), p. 361; Comte de Sainte-Aulaire, François-Joseph (Paris: Fayard, 1945), p. 583. Beneš, unlike Masaryk, was a Freemason, belonging to the lodge Pravda Vitěźi in Prague, whose ideology might have colored his political thinking. Cf. Eugen Lennhoff and Oskar Posner, Internationales Freimaurerlexikon (Vienna: Amalthea, 1932), col. 164-165. (These authors are Masons.) Pravda Vitěźi (as I imagine) would have been connected with the Grand Orient much rather than with the Grande Loge Nationale Indépendante et Regulière pour la France.

In dealing with the political effects of Freemasonry on the Continent one has to be beware of three pitfalls: to underrate them, to overrate them, to fail to distinguish between the various trends, lodges, organizations. The book by Roger Peyrefitte, Les fils de la lumière (Paris: Flammarion, 1961) though not exactly of a scholarly character, gives at least an inkling as to the large variety of Masonic dogmatic positions. On Freemasonry in French politics, cf. also D. W. Brogan, French Personalities and Problems (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), pp. 37-40.

One has to take care not to see in history nothing but a chain of conspiracies. Count Prokesch-Osten remarked that in “Metternich’s heart there lived the ineradicable mania (Gentz called it the Urlüge, the original lie), that all revolutions are the work of secret societies and that Lafayette could have organized the revolt in Poland no less than in Paris.” Cf. Aus den Tagebüchern des Grafen Prokesch von Osten (Vienna: Christoph Reisser, 1909), p. 68, (entry of December 7, 1830).

93 Cf. Edvard Beneš, “The Organization of Post-War Europe” Foreign Affairs, vol. 20, no. 2 (January 1942), p. 231.

94 Cf. Der Hochverratsprozess gegen Dr. Guido Schmidt, pp. 367, 393, 397, 399. Franz von Papen, as we see, fought valiantly on the side of the Little Entente. Professor von Schuschnigg (the former Chancellor) told me of his encounter with the Yugoslav Foreign Minister Boško Jevtić in Geneva, where Jevtić informed him in all candor that Belgrade could never consent to a Hapsburg restoration in Austria because such a change would render the already very difficult Croats totally recalcitrant. A restoration would be a casus belli since it would be a life-and-death question for Yugoslavia.

95 In the mid-1930s Paris considered a Hapsburg restoration as a minor evil, but Britain seemed totally opposed. Cf. Der Hochverratsprozess gegen Dr. Guido Schmidt, pp. 397-399. Edward VIII might have been personally in favor of a restoration, but his reign was short-lived.

96 Cf. Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome-Berlin Axis (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 52, “The remarkable and admirable reaction of the British against the Hoare-Laval plan was all the greater, the Stresa front was dissolved and Hitler unshackled, let loose to advance step by step, from the militarization of the Rhineland to the invasion of Poland. History has perhaps never played a stranger trick upon Man than to allow British indignation against international lawlessness and imperialist and racialist bullying to have smoothed the path of Adolf Hitler. Out of this misconception was born that deformity, the Italo-German alliance, of which Hitler has so long dreamed.”

It was not at all a “strange trick,” but the inability of the well-meaning masses to assay an immensely complex political situation from the Somali Desert to the Bavarian border. Starry-eyed idealism in history has often played a more disastrous role than diabolical malice. For the same good reason that St. Thomas considers the intellectual virtues to be higher than the moral ones, Fouché (though hardly a reader of the Summa) exclaimed when Napoleon ordered the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder!”

97 To this day Abyssinia is one of the most “backward” countries in Africa. (One among six Rhodesians is in school, one out of eight Ghanaians, but only one out of 108 Ethiopians.) The advantage Abyssinia has over the ex-colonies of Africa is a far more stable government.

98 Cf. Herbert L. Matthews, Eyewitness in Abyssinia (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1937), p. 319. “Yesterday I wrote an article about the resources of the country, and what the Italians hope to get out of it. I wish them luck. They have earned the place.” Later Mr. Matthews became an apologist of Republican Spain and, quite naturally, of Castro’s Cuba.

99 According to a reliable estimate the Hoare-Laval Agreement would have left to Ethiopia 200,000 out of 350,000 square miles—the higher, wetter, and better lands.

100 Elizabeth Wiskemann thinks that it was Pertinax and Madame Tabouis “who learnt of the Hoare-Laval Plan from Herriot, but Laval afterwards told Cerutti (the Italian Ambassador in Berlin) that Herriot did not know, and that he (Laval) suspected a Quai d’Orsay official: naturally he himself disclaimed all responsibility for betraying Hoare to the press.” (op. cit., p. 52n.) And the same author tells us later in all candor, “It has often been supposed—and to this the present writer pleads guilty—that Abyssinia, the Rhineland and Spain formed a chain of Nazi-Fascist connivance. This is not true—how untrue in the case of Ethiopia has already been seen. But from the moment the Hoare-Laval Plan existed Ethiopia became a trump card for Hitler, because it had split the Stresa front and freed him from ‘encirclements’.” (p. 53)

Duff Cooper, so strongly anti-German, was convinced that: “. . . . The half-hearted sanctions that we imposed served only to infuriate Mussolini and drive him into the arms of Hitler. Doing a minimum of harm we incurred a maximum of ill-will.” (Duff Cooper, op. cit., p. 193.) And later he remarks, “I was unhappy about Anthony Eden’s departure. I wrote him to tell him so and to say that I had always found myself in agreement with him, except on this one question of Italy.” There was a true personal enmity between Eden and Mussolini which grew as time went on. Eden himself in his memoirs—The Rt. Hon. Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs, (London: Cassell, 1965), vol. 3, “The Reckoning”—is singularly reticent about his blunder but regrets the Anschluss in several passages. Neville Chamberlain, on the other hand, thought that Halifax (in Eden’s place) could have saved Austria by cooperating with Mussolini more closely. Cf. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, (London: Macmillan, 1946).

101 Cf. Erich Kordt, Wahn und Wirklichkeit (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1948), p. 102, n 2.

102 Cf. Gordon Brook-Shephard, Der Anschluss, trsl. G. Coudenhove (Graz: Styria, 1963). This author strongly criticizes the German feelings of the anti-Nazi leaders of independent Austria. Anybody conversant with the history of Austria could hardly expect this to be different. After 1945 an effort was made by the Allied occupation authorities to eradicate all German sentiments. In the school report cards the word “German” could not be mentioned and thus the subject was called Unterrichtssprache, “language of instruction.” Antimilitarism too was written with capital letters, and Austrian public libraries were not even permitted to handle books pertaining to the history of World War I.

103 It was precisely this role of Austria as the “other German State” which created in German Nazi circles the feeling of an “intolerable provocation.” It ran counter to the formula, “One people, one realm, one leader”: Peter F. Drucker in The End of Economic Man (New York: John Day, 1939) well analyzed the value of pre-Anschluss Austria as a “psychological alternative” to many a German.

104 Dr. Karl Renner, A Socialist and first President of the Austrian Republic after World War II, had stated on April 3, 1938, three weeks after the Anschluss, in an interview (Tagblatt, Vienna) that he would vote “yes” for Austria’s inclusion into Germany. Having been Austria’s State Chancellor in 1919 he admitted to feeling a real satisfaction for the humiliations of 1918 and 1919 as well as for the Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain-en-Laye. Cardinal Innitzer (in spite of his courageous protest in November 1938) was “morally dead” after his unfortunate declaration at the plebiscite, while Renner (who also had written to Stalin in 1945 a letter addressing him as “dear comrade”) became President of Austria with the blessing of the Allies. Cf. Hellmut Andics, in Die Presse (Vienna), July 4, 1962, no. 4231, p. 8.

105 Cf. G. E. R. Gedye, Fallen Bastions (London: Gollancz, 1939), p. 235: “Except for the Jews, the aristocracy which remained loyal to the old ruling House met perhaps with the worst treatment of any class from Hitler, Bürckel, and Globočnik: there was not even the brief attempt to flatter and cajole them which the Reds ‘enjoyed.’ ”

This policy was supported by Hitler’s ingrained antimonarchism. He was always grateful to the Social Democrats for having destroyed the German Monarchy. He said verbally about the Republic: “It was a big step ahead. She, above all, prepared our way.” Cf. Hans Frank, op. cit., p. 288, and Albert Speer, op. cit., p. 67. On the other hand he really feared the survival of monarchist feelings in Austria which had been very strong up to November, 1918. Cf. Ludwig A. Windisch-Graetz, Der Kaiser kämpft für die Freiheit (Vienna: Herold, 1957), pp. 86-105.

106 Cordell Hull was born in a hamlet in Tennessee. His higher education consisted of one year in the National Normal University, Lebanon, Ohio—all traces have now been lost of this famous educational institution—and of one year in the Cumberland University Law School in Lebanon, Tennessee. (One could really speak here of a “Lebanese fixation!”) In the same year in which he finished his extensive studies, he was admitted to the bar of Tennessee. This worthy man who, to say the very least, passively contributed to laying the foundations of World War II, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945.

107 Cf. Documents on German Foreign Relations, 1918-1945, series D. I, pp. 604-605.

108 Cf. Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, William E. Dodd Jr. and Martha Dodd, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), Introd. Charles A. Beard.

109 Martha Dodd, years later, fled to Prague to escape arrest by the FBI. She had become an active Communist.

110 Cf. Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, p. 101.

111 Ibid., pp. 309 and 396. Lord Lothian became wartime British Ambassador to Washington. According to Dodd Lothian was thoroughly pro-Nazi (p. 406).

112 Ibid., p. 119.

113 Ibid., p. 360.

114 Talking to a professor of a big American university, a specialist in modern German history, I once passed the remark that Hitler was a demagogue like Cleon. “Cleon?” “Yes, Cleon of Athens.” “Ah, that’s antiquity. It’s none of my business.” This phenomenon of specialization is by no means restricted to the United States; it is beginning to be worldwide and now invades all areas of study and knowledge as a new form of docta ignorantia.

115 Cf. Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, p. 413.

116 Cf. his The Black Record (London, 1940).

117 The geographical-historical confusions created by journalists would be worth a separate study. Remember the Near East which in World War II mysteriously became the Middle East. (The Far East, some time earlier, had become the “Orient.”) Hitler’s “West Wall” suddenly was named the Siegfried Line by a reporter who remembered the Siegfried-Linie (“Victorious Peace Line”) of mere trenches across Northern France in World War I. Thus a new mixup took place. The Blitz (“Blitzkrieg”) refers to the rapid advance of the (German) motorized units. The term had nothing to do with air attacks on more or less defenseless cities. (The German word Blitz, lightning, metaphorically refers to speed, not to a blow from the skies.) And Hitler never was a corporal, only a private first class, called in England “lance corporal.” Hence another confusion.

118 William E. Dodd tells (op. cit., p. 422) about a conversation between the British Ambassador in Berlin, Henderson, and a high Austrian official. “The British Ambassador said Austria, being Nazi, must be annexed to Germany. This was at once reported to Schuschnigg, the Chancellor of Austria, and that led to immediate telegraphic inquiries in London. Schuschnigg was satisfied by denials from Eden.” There can be little doubt that Henderson profoundly sympathized with the Nazi incorporation plans. Cf. The Eden Memoirs, vol. 3. p. 8.

About the desperate efforts of the Austrian Foreign Minister, Dr. Guido Schmidt, to get British (and French) aid to save Austrian independence, or even to move Sir Robert Vansittart, cf. Hellmut Andics, op. cit., pp. 537-538.

119 Jacques Bainville had already ridiculed in 1918 (Action Française, February 14) the idea that the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy would mean “any progress.” It rather would result in endless German ethnic revindications. And in his Conséquences politiques de la paix (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1920), pp. 119-120 he said about the successor states: “They are not at all disposed to make themselves instruments of the too simple and really naive system imagined by the designers of the peace. These people wake up and reexamine the situation. They feel, they know that their States are fragile, that they are, in a way, amorphous, that they will immediately be shattered if they clash with a power stronger than themselves. They will assume a prudent neutrality and will take great pains to avoid a conflict with Germany.” Only Yugoslavia was imprudent and paid dearly for it (though it saved Moscow by delaying the German attack against Russia). And, as Bainville clearly foresaw, none of the successor states lifted a little finger for France in her hour of distress. The poor French taxpayers had again been gypped in vain.

120 Cf. Roger Peyrefitte, Les Ambassades (Paris: Flammarion), pp. 237-238.

About Beneš’ secret negotiations with the Nazis, cf. the letter of Dr. Stefan Osuský in the New York Times, October 20, 1958. Beněs was ready to accede the Friedland, Rumburg, and Eger districts to Germany.

121 An Austrian Socialist deputy, Dr. Robert Danneberg, who tried to flee the Nazis after the Anschluss, was extradited to the German authorities who first brought him to Dachau and then to the gas chambers in Poland. Cf. Neue Volkszeitung, New York, April 10, 1943. Naturally, there were many other similar cases as a result of Dr. Beneš’s efforts to ingratiate himself with the Nazis.

122 Cf. Beneš’s speech before the foreign affairs committee of the Czechoslovak Parliament. Vide Sources et documents tchecoslovaques, no. 24, pp. 49, 51. See also Louis Eisenmann, op. cit., p. 111. In early 1932, while working for an influential Hungarian newspaper, I tried through the aid of the Czech Minister in Vienna, Hugo Vavrečka, to get an interview from Dr. Beneš for my paper with the purpose to achieve a détente between the two countries. The Nazi danger in Germany, at that time, was mounting. The answer from Prague was negative, and Vavrečka told me frankly that it was the policy of his country to bring Hungary economically down to her knees: the “democratic” Hungarian peasant should march on Budapest and destroy the “feudal government” which aimed at the revision of the revision of the iniquitous peace treaty. Vavrečka at the same time acknowledged the Nazi danger, but fully defended the stubbornness and ideological blindness of his country. Even at the ripe old age of twenty-three years I was aghast at the sight of so much stupidity and hatred.

123 Cf. Dr. Edvard Beneš, My War Memoires, trsl. P. Selver (London: Allen and Unwin, 1928), p. 258.

124 A certain Czech propaganda in the West always urged that the Czechs (who had the relatively largest Communist party in free Europe prior to 1930) were “born democrats” because they had no aristocracy. Their old nobility allegedly had all been exterminated after the Battle of the White Mountain. This is totally untrue. A large part of the Bohemia-Moravian nobility was either Czech in origin or sentiment. Families of German extraction had powerfully aided the revival of the Czech language. A Czech “Almanack de Gotha” was published by Z. R. Kinský, U nàs, Leopold Novák, ed. (Chlumec: Knihtiskarna V. Klemens, 1933). As a matter of fact, the Bohemian-Moravian nobility was always much richer and more influential than the more indigent aristocracy of Alpine Austria. (The old Slovak upper crust, on the other hand, really had become magyarized.) The concept of the “nonaristocratic Czechs” is an integral part of the twentieth-century mythology.

125 Cf. László V. Taubinger, “Beneschs Vermächtnis,” Neues Abendland (Munich), vol. 9, 11 (February 1954), p. 91 quoting Count Carlo Sforza’s The Totalitarian War and After (London; Allen and Unnin, 1942).

126 Cf. Fritz Weil, Das Werden eines Volkes und der Weg eines Mannes: Eduard Beneš (Dresden: Reissner, 1930), p. 132.

127 Cf. Kurt von Schuschnigg, Austrian Requiem, trsl. Franz v. Hildebrand (New York: Putnam, 1946), pp. 153, 195.

128 He was also the clever man who apparently passed on the Gestapo-fabricated documents “proving” the treason of Tukhachevski to Stalin. (Cf. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 225n.) Yet to get a real grasp of the man’s ignorance one has to read his Democracy Today and Tomorrow (New York: Macmillan, 1939). On p. 8 we read that Alexander Hamilton and John Adams were “pioneers of democracy”—and so forth.

129 Cf. Louis P. Lochner, What about Germany? (New York, 1942), pp. 48-49. (This happened in March 1938.) Compare this with the account of Beneš’s stubbornness and unpopularity in John de Courcy’s Behind the Battle (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1942), p. 241.

130 Cf. Edvard Beneš, “The Organization of Post-War Europe,” p. 242.

131 Cf. Edvard Beneš, Democracy Today and Tomorrow, p. 182.

132 Cf. Edvard Beneš, “The Organization of Post-War Europe,” pp. 237-238.

133 Cf. Edvard Beneš, “Toward Peace in Central and Eastern Europe,” in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Philadelphia), March 1944, pp. 165-166. Here we see how one National Socialism was learning from another one.

134 Jan Masaryk told Halifax on May 2, 1938, that his father had not wanted to include the Sudeten Germans in the new republic, but Lloyd George insisted on it. Cf. Documents on British Foreign Policy, III, 1, p. 237.

135 Cf. Francis Deák, Hungary at the Paris Peace Conference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), p. 531. The murder of Germanspeaking Bohemians and Moravians in armed attacks during the transition period (1918-1919) shook world opinion as little as the large-scale massacres in 1945.

136 The late Wenzel Jaksch, former leader of the Social Democratic Party of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, wrote that during the mobilization in 1921 only 30 percent of the Czech population followed the call to arms when an invasion of Hungary was planned to foil the attempted restoration of Emperor-King Charles. He was an ocular witness of this failure of a brandnew “loyalty.” Cf. his Europas Weg nach Postdam (Cologne: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Politik, n.d.), p. 528.

137 Cf. Daniel Seligman, “The Collapse of Czech Democracy,” The American Mercury, March 1948, p. 313.

138 Yet Beneš’s popularity was great only in Western leftist circles; at home he was unpopular and he knew it: “Don’t you realize that I am the most unpopular man in Czechoslovakia?” he asked a Swiss journalist. Cf. Robert de Traz, “M. Masaryk et M. Beneš,” La Revue de Paris, vol. 37, no. 5. (March 1, 1930), p. 58.

139 Douglas Woodruff tells in his column in The Tablet (London, December 20, 1947, p. 394) about Stanley Baldwin: “He was, it must be admitted, intensely insular: I recall this, for instance: ‘That was the first thing, I said on packing up my traps and leaving Downing Street, now I never need speak to another foreigner again!’ ” And about the nomination of Eden, Baldwin had remarked, “Nobody else knew all the foreigners about whom it was necessary to be informed, and there was no time for anyone else to get to know them.” Churchill also spoke about the “marked ignorance of Europe and aversions from its problems in Mr. Baldwin.” (The Second World War, vol. 1. p. 69).

140 Cf. A. P. report, dated London, September 21, 1936, in the New York Herald Tribune, September 22, 1936. When Lloyd George returned to his hotel in Berchtesgaden, his daughter greeted him facetiously with “Heil Hitler!” The old gentleman became very serious and replied earnestly and with gravity, “Yes, indeed, Heil Hitler, this is what I say myself, because he is, in fact, a great man.” Cf. Dr. Paul Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer Bühne, 1923-1945. (Vienna: Ullstein Verlag, 1953), p. 346.

141 Cf. Chapter XVI, Note 23.

142 Viscount Templewood (Sir Samuel Hoare) informed us that in October 1938 the British air force had 100 fighter planes against 1,000 German bombers, Cf. his Nine Troubled Years, (London: Collins, 1954), p. 333, Ian McLeod says that in October 1938 Britain only had two, in September 1939 five fully armed divisions. Cf. his Neville Chamberlain, (London: Atheneum, 1962), p. 264. In October 1938 Britain had only one-tenth of the necessary antiaircraft guns and only 1,430 searchlights; in London there were only sixty fire engines. (Ibid., p. 266.) These were the bitter fruits of the pacifism of the preceding Labourite government eager to antagonize Hitler but not to rearm.

143 On the “democratic,” mass-character of the dictatorships born in the first half of this century cf. Emil Lederer, State of the Masses: The Threat of the Classless Society. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), pp. 98, 110, and Gyula Szekfü, Három nemzedék és ami utana következik (Budapest: Egyetemi nyomda, 1934), p. 497. Also Frank Thiess, Freiheit bis Mitternacht (Zsolnay: Vienna-Hamburg, 1965), p. 474sq.

144 Cf. end of note 117 of this chapter. “Der böhmische Gefreite” is the German version.

145 The Nazis had tried to frame General von Fritsch with a homosexual agent provocateur, an effort which failed. Baron Fritsch was killed during the seige of Warsaw in September 1939. Fritsch’s removal was necessary in order to eliminate a generalissimo (Oberbefehlshaber der Wehrmacht) opposing armed German intervention in Austria. At this juncture the German General Staff should have acted—and did not. If only Germany had had a “political army” as most Latin American republics have, ready to intervene if things go from bad to worse!

This expression of regret I voice in all sincerity, if for no other reason than to remind the British or American reader that what is sensible in one part of the world becomes pointless in another or vice-versa.

146 After the abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 three German army regulations were changed: instead of saluting the military way, soldiers and officers had to use the deutscher Gruss, i.e., to say Heil Hitler; it became permissible that non-Christians (Gottgläubige, mere theists) be made commissioned officers; soldiers in the Wehrmacht no longer had to deposit their party membership card with the NSDAP before entering military service. In other words, no active party member, before July 1944, could be a soldier in the German army. This dualism Army-Party has to be understood in the light of the anti-Nazi sentiment of the bulk of the officers’ corps, of the socalled “Junkers and Militarists.”

147 Cf. Eberhard Zeller, Geist der Freiheit. Der Zwanzigste Juli (Munich: Hermann Rinn, 1954), p. 37; Gerhard Ritter, Carl Goerdeler und die deutsche Widerstandsbewegung (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1964), pp. 195-196; Franklin L. Ford, “The Twentieth of July in the History of the German Resistance,” The American Historical Review, vol. 51, July 1946, pp. 616-617; Allen Welsh Dulles, “Le complot qui eu fait échouer Munich,” France-Illustration, no. 110 (November 8, 1947), pp. 415-419. Ewald von Kleist (later executed) had too gone to London and at that time Mr. Churchill showed himself still very cooperative. Kleist informed Churchill that the aim of the conspiracy was peace and the restoration of the monarchy. (G. Ritter, op. cit., p. 188.) By now the literature about this tragic chapter in the history of the German resistance is colossal. What we have cited is only a small fraction.

148 (Sir) Ivone Kirkpatrick told me in July 1939 about the Godesberg meeting at which he had been present in his capacity as a British diplomat accredited in Berlin. Hitler ranted and shouted, spoke about the German spirit embodied in Marienburg Castle in Prussia, invoked philosophers, theologians, kings and generals. Dr. Paul Schmidt, official German interpreter, questioned Kirkpatrick with his eyes, asking whether he should translate this rot. All the time Neville Chamberlain looked like a little boy expecting to be given a nasty medicine. There was not the slightest meeting of minds. (Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick became British High Commissioner in Germany after the war.)

At the same time it was true that the Sudeten Germans had a real case. H. N. Brailsford, famous British leftist journalist, already in 1920 pointed out the fact that the more than three million Sudeten Germans, put under Czech rule, against their will, were a serious handicap to world peace. Arnold J. Toynbee in a large article published on July 10, 1937 in The Economist had to admit that “in Czechoslovakia today the methods by which the Czech are keeping the upper hand over the Sudetendeutsch are not democratic.” The Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral (W. R. Matthews), in a letter to the Times on June 2, 1938, advocated “Self-Determination” for the Sudeten Germans and protested against the possibility of Britain fighting a war preventing self-determination. The same ideas were expressed by Lord Noel Buxton, a true liberal, in a letter to the Times on March 22, 1938. These facts have to be viewed in relation with Göring’s boast to Sir Neville Henderson that “London had only fourteen antiaircraft guns and nothing to prevent Germany from dropping 1,000 to 2,000 bombs a day on London.” (The Times, November 25, 1940).

149 To get some of the more sinister or ironical aspects of the peace treaties of 1919 the reader should turn to Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) H. W. V. Temperley, A History of the Peace Conference of Paris (London: H. Frowde, 1920-1924, 6 vols.), André P. Tardieu, La Paix (Paris: Payot, 1933), Francesco Notti, La Pace (Turin: P. Gobetti, 1925), and Henri Pozzi, Les coupables (Paris: Editions Européennes, 1935) (not always reliable, but with valuable details) and La guerre revient (Paris: P. Berger, 1933). Hatred, prejudice, and ignorance found here a new synthesis. Often the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) is mentioned as a proof that the Central Powers, had they won the war, would not have been more lenient and prudent. John Wheeler-Bennett (The Forgotten Peace, New York, 1948) had made this point. But one forgets that the Central Powers in 1918 were not prepared to hand over a maximum of territory to Red tyranny and that in 1920 Lenin had offered additional territory to Poland. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk left to Soviet Russia and to the Ukraine (unjustly, to be sure) more than the Russian share of all three partitions of Poland.

150 Almost all of these Americans of Slovak origin belonged to the (pro-Czech) Lutheran minority. Of course, Czechoslovaks exist no more than “Bulgaroserbs.” Henri Pozzi tells that Wilson, not so surprisingly, confused the Slovaks with the Slovenes (and Silesia with Cilicia). Not only do Slovaks and Slovenes exist, but also Slovyaks, Slavs, Slavonians, and Slovintsians. Also there is Old Slavonic, a dead, liturgical language (which has nothing to do with Slavonia).

151 Cf Franklin D. Roosevelt: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloane, Pearce, 1950), vol. 2. p. 818. Letter of the President to Ambassador William Phillips in Rome, dated October 17, 1938. The President expressed his satisfaction in letters to the Canadian Prime Minister. Cf. Ibid., p. 816. Sumner Welles was also in favor of the Munich Agreement. Cf. the New York Times, October 4, 1938. (The New York Times itself in an editorial on September 30, 1938 made a few reservations but, by and large, accepted the pact.)

152 Cf. Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase (London: Constable 1934), p. 204. Mr. Bevin, later Foreign Minister (1945), then a TUC leader, went so far as to threaten a general strike were the British Government to assist Poland “directly or indirectly.”

153 Of Churchill’s political meandering in his earlier years cf. Peter de Mendelssohn, The Age of Churchill 1874-1911 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), passim. Churchill’s religious practice was unnoticeable. Cf. Randolph S. Churchill, Winston Spencer Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1966), Vol. 1, pp. 157-158.

154 If one remembers that Churchill demonstrated to Stalin, with the help of three matches, how Poland could easily be “moved” westward at the expense of Germany (vol. 5 of his Second World War) one wonders about his words in the famous Fulton speech (March 5, 1946), “I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade Marshal Stalin. . . . The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed of are taking place.” (The mass deportations, however, had been agreed upon in Potsdam!)

155 Cf. Winston S. Churchill, “The Truth about Hitler,” Strand Magazine (London), November 1935, pp. 19-20.

156 Cf. Winston S. Churchill, Step by Step (New York, 1939), pp. 143-144. This was written in 1937.