Notes

 

 

INTRODUCTION

1 There is, of course no program without an ideology. This is the reason Whittaker Chambers could write, “The Right has no program. A distaste for communism and socialism is no program.” Cf. Odyssey of a Friend. Whittaker Chambers, Letters to William F. Buckley Jr. Privately printed (1969) p.69. This is certainly the situation in the English-speaking world today. Chambers also insisted that capitalism and conservatism are mutually exclusive. (Ibid., p. 229). He did not profess to be a conservative: “I am a man of the Right. I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version.” (p. 228) Klemens von Klemperer in his Konservative Bewegungen. Zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1961), p. 23, insists that conservatism has different forms of expression, but no doctrine, no tenets. (The American original of this interesting book was published in 1957 by the Princeton University Press under the title Germany’s New Conservatism. Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century.)

2 Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, “De la démocratie en Amérique,” Oeuvres d’Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1864), vol. 3, p. 526.

3 Cf. Foster Rhea Dulles, The Road to Teheran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944) p. 6.

Chapter I

1 Cf. p. 169.

2 Dr. Marcel Eck says in his essay “Propos de la sexualité” (in Qu’estce-que l’homme. Paris: Pierre Horay, 1955, p. 110) that the “hell of homosexuality” lies precisely in the fact that it avoids genuine dialogue and that homosexual love is not in quest of the other but is merely seeking the self.

3 José Ortega y Gasset says in Invertebrate Spain, trs. Mildred Adams (New York: Norton, 1937), pp. 170-171: “Probably the origin of this anti-individual fury lies in the fact that in their innermost hearts the masses feel themselves weak and defenceless in the face of their destiny. On a bitter and terrible page Nietzsche notes how, in primitive societies which were weak when confronted with the difficulties of existence, every individual and original act was a crime, and the man who tried to lead a solitary life was a malefactor. He must in everything comport himself according to the fashion of the tribe.” (Not to be found in the Spanish edition of España invertebrada. Madrid: Calpe, 1922). On the antagonism between liberty and equality, liberalism and democracy, see also Roger G. Williams, Free and Unequal: The Biological Basis of Individual Liberty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953): A. D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), vol. 1, pp. 46, 79: Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte in Neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1933), vol. 2, pp. 97-98: Heinz O. Ziegler, Autoritärer oder totaler Staat (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1932), p. 10: Wilhelm Stählin, “Freiheit und Ordnung,” in Der Mensch und die Freiheit (München: Neues Abendland, 1954), p. 17. Werner Jaeger in his Paideia (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1954, vol. 2., p. 104) emphasises the fact that Athens was democratic, that it laid stress on to íson (equality), but not on personal freedom. Professor Goetz Briefs in his Zwischen Kapitalismus und Syndikalismus (Bern: A. Francke, 1952, p. 75) reminds us that all democratism (which he distinguishes from democracy) must end in despotism since it is opposed to the realities of man and society. Herbert Marcuse, referring to Hegel, came to a very similar conclusion. Cf. his Reason and Revolution, (Boston Press, 1960), pp. 242-243.

4 Cf. Jacob Burckhardt in his letter to Friedrich von Preen dated January 1, 1879: “You are perfectly right: One wants to train people for meetings. Finally, people will start to scream if they don’t form crowds of at least a hundred.” (Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe an seinen Freud Friedrich von Preen 1864-1893 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlaganstalt, 1922), p. 130.

5 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke (Leipzig: Kröner, 1917), vol. 12, p. 140.

6 Witness President Wilson’s declaration shortly before America’s entry into World War I: “Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” (Cf. Harold U. Faulkner, From Versailles to the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950) p. 141.

On the dangers of standardisation see Josiah Royce in Race Questions, p. 74 cited by Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought: An Intellectual History since 1815 (New York: The Ronald Press, 1940), pp. 275-276.

7 Cf. “Monita quibus Stephanus filium Emericum instruxit, ut regnum recte pieque administraret,” Chap. VI, in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, vol. 151, pp. 1240ff.

Chapter II

1 See the excellent contribution of W. H. Hutt, “The Complexities of South Africa” in The African Nettle, Frank S. Meyer, ed. (New York: John Day, 1965), pp. 157ff. Cf. W. H. Hutt, The Economics of the Color Bar (London, André Deutsch, 1964), p. 58ff., and Ray Marshall, The Negro and Organized Labor (Sydney: John Wiley, 1968).

2 The address of Pius XII to the World Federalists condemning virtually the one-man-one-vote system and the worship of numbers received little publicity in the Catholic press--anywhere. For a full text of The New York Times, No. 34,041, April 7, 1951, p. 3 or Acta Apostolicae Sedis, annus et vol. XLIII, 1951, pp. 278ff.

3 As, for instance, John Stuart Mill, so frequently and enthusiastically quoted by our leftists. Equality of vote Mill considered “in principle wrong, because recognising a wrong standard and exercising a bad influence on the voter’s mind. It is not useful but hurtful, that the constitution of a country should declare ignorance to be entitled to as much political power as knowledge.” Cf. his “Considerations on Representative Government” included in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, no. 482 of “Everyman’s Library” (London: Dent, 1910), p. 288.

The criticism of the one-man-one-vote principle is naturally almost universal. See also Rosalind Murray (Mrs. Arnold Toynbee), The Good Pagan’s Failure (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), pp. 137-139: Sir Henry Maine in R. Sellars, The Next Step in Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1916), p. 216: John Adams, Letter to James Madison, June 17, 1817, in The Selected Writings of John and Quincy Adams, A. Koch and W. Peden, eds. (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 202: Jacob Burckhardt, op. cit. p. 200: Charles Péguy, Pensées (Paris: Gallimard, 1934), pp. 21-22: Gabriel Marcel, “Considérations sur l’égalité,” Etudes Carmélitaines, vol. 24-2, pp. 164-165: Letters from Albert Jay Nock (Caldwell: Caxton Printers, 1949), p. 176: D. H. Lawrence as quoted by Witter Bynner, Journey with Genius (New York: John Day, 1951), p. 226: Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, La società e il suo fine, Carlo Brocca, ed. (Milan: Edizioni di Uomo, 1945), pp. 45-46. Recently the attacks of Professor Max Horkheimer against the principle of majority rule (coming from a former supporter of the New Left) created in Europe a minor sensation. Cf. his Zur Kritik der instrumenteilen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967), p. 38.

At present Laborite Great Britain in the humble service of democratism (and a number of African States) is boycotting and blockading Rhodesia because that country, rejecting the democratic one-man-one-vote system, adopted a timocratic (and by no means “racist”) electoral law. It is true that the Rhodesian parliament is elected by a minority but so is the Swiss Diet. Of the entire Swiss population (residing in the country) about 29 percent (before female suffrage on the federal level was introduced two years ago) had the right to vote and between 19 and 20 percent actually vote. Yet nobody so far has thought of organizing an economic warfare against Switzerland, with the possible exception of Stalin in 1945.

4 How low the Soviet birthrate is actually, is open to conjecture since reliable statistics about the USSR do not exist. We know only about the catastrophic decline of the birthrate in the satellite states. In the “German Democratic Republic” it is the French rate. Cf. “Die Ausbeutung der Frau in kommunistischen Osteuropa,” in Neue Züricher Zeitung, February 15, 1970, p. 19.

5 Cf. Friedrich August (von) Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 15.

6 Castes are inherited by birth and are immovable and unchangeable: estate status is usually inherited but is not unchangeable. A nobleman could become a priest or friar, a burgher could be nobilitated, a peasant could receive the “freedom” of a city and thus become a burgher. Contrary to the general notion there were no “higher” or “lower” estates. They just had different functions. (There are higher and lower classes, though).

Chapter III

1 Marchese Vilfredo Pareto’s Trattato de sociologia universale (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1923) also exists in an English translation by Arthur Livingston under the title of Mind and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935). Livingston also translated a part of Gaetano Mosca’s Elemmenti di Scienza Politica (Turin, 1923) and published it as The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939). Robert(o) Michels’ Zur Soziologie des Parteienwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1911) saw many editions.

The thesis that all democracy is in practice always oligarchy has also been defended by Enrique Gil y Robles in his Tratado de Derecho Politico según les principios de la filosofia y el derecho cristianos (Salamanca: Imprenta Salmaticense, 1902), vol. 2, pp. 882ff. This professor of Salamanca University was the father of Don José Maria Gil Robles, founder of the CEDA and Prime Minister of Spain in 1934.

2 Article 21 of the Weimar Constitution insisted that the deputies are only subject to their conscience and not to the desires of their voters. We find the same stipulation in Article 91 of the Swiss constitution. Cf. William F. Rappard, The Government of Switzerland (New York: Van Nostrand, 1936), pp. 59, 64. The contrary (democratic) position had been taken by Hans Kelsen, author of the present Austrian constitution, in his General Theory of Law and State, trsl. A. Wedberg (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1946).

3 Rappard reasoned that Switzerland rejected female suffrage because she is essentially middle class. Only the aristocracy and the proletariat truly accept female equality.

4 The critique of proportional representation (P.R.) was the life work of Professor Ferdinand A. Hermens, formerly of Notre Dame, now of Cologne University.

5 Naturally, in old times, unanimity was the rule and had to be achieved (as today among the jurors in Britain and in the United States). Unanimity was also required for the election of the king in the Polish Rzeczpospolita, only the nobility (the szlachta) voted and a nobleman could not possibly be subject to a man who was not his own choice but somebody else’s. The Golden Bull abolished unanimity in 1356 and in the Imperial Diet (of the Holy Roman Empire) in 1496 decisions were taken by majority vote. Cf. J. Stawski, Le principe de la majorité (Geneva: Officina Boeniningiana, 1920), pp. 29-38, also Carl Ernst Jarcke, “Prinzipienfragen” in Vermischte Schriften (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1854), pp. 175-176.

6 Cf. Herman Melville, Mardi—And a Voyage Tither (Boston: Small, Maynard, n.d.), p. 183. Majoritism seems to have been strongly backed by Marsiglio of Padua, Cf. Felice Battaglia, Marsiglio da Padova e il pensiero politico medievale (Firenze: Sansoni, 1928): Sigmund Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1874), p. 203. Yet Alan Gewirth insists that the purely majoritarian character of the passage in the Defensor Pacis (XII, 3) is the result of mangled manuscripts. Cf. Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of Peace, trsl. and edit. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), vol. 2, p. 45, n 6, Orestes Brownson, the brilliant and original American Catholic thinker rejected majorities in strong terms. Cf. the Collected Works (Detroit: T. Nourse, 1882-1887), vol. 15, pp. 5, 40, quoted by Lawrence Roemer, Brownson on Democracy and the Trend Toward Socialism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), pp. 36-37, 45: Carl Ernst Jarcke, op.cit. pp. 172-173. Most revealing is Herman Finer, a leftist professor who, replying to a F. A. v. Hayek’s question whether the Nazi Reich should be credited with exercising rule of law if Hitler had had a clear majority in the elections said, “The answer is ‘Yes,’ the majority would be right, the Rule of Law would be in operation, if the majority voted him into power. The majority might be unwise, and it might be wicked, but the Rule of Law would prevail. For in a democracy right is what the majority belives it to be.” Cf. The Road to Reaction (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), p. 60. An injunction against the moral dangers of majoritism we already find in II. Moses, XXIII, 11, which can be summed up in the words, “Thou shalt not follow a majority to do evil.”

7 This author is convinced that (contrary to the teaching of St. Thomas) the State (as we basically conceive it) is the result of original sin, i.e., of man’s imperfections, Cf. also Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality (Caldwell, Caxton Printers, 1952), pp. 92-93 or Isdem, Freiheit oder Gleichheit? (Salzburg: Otto Meüller, 1953), pp. 235-237. It is a commonly held view that St. Augustine and Luther saw in the state a result of the Fall. Yet Otto Schilling in his magistral work Die Staats und Soziallehren des hl. Augustinus (Freiburg i Br.: Herder, 1910), pp. 45-63 has proved the contrary and from Luther we have no exact formulation: we can only deduce such a stand. St. Bonaventure, Hugo of St. Victor and Aegydius Romanus, however, blamed the state on original sin. (Exact sources and materials can be found in Freiheit oder Gleichheit?, notes 680-685 on pp. 507-508. Nevertheless, I am convinced that society would have existed under all circumstances, and with society—leadership and arbitration.)

8 The connection between love and service has been well brought out by Franz von Baader, “Vierzig Sätze aus einer religiösen Erotik,” in Gesammelte Schriften, F. Hoffman, ed. (Leipzig: Bethman, 1853), vol. 4, p. 186: Gustave Thibon, “Christianisme et liberté,” in Recherches et Débats (Paris 1952), new series 1, p. 16: Georges Bernanos, La France contre les robots (Paris: Laffont, 1947), p. 87. The relationship between loyalty, law and love was the guiding idea in the defense speech of Sir Roger Casement. Cf. Geoffrey de C. Parmiter. Roger Casement (London, Barker, 1936), pp. 303ff.

9 Is polygamy (unlike polyandry) against the natural law? We doubt it.

10 Cited by Richard Hertz in Chance and Symbol (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 107.

11 Cf. Elliott Roosevelt, As Father Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1946) and Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1952), vol. 5, p. 330.

12 Cf. Peter Wust, Ungewissheit und Wagnis (Salzburg: Anton Pustet, 1937), passim.

13 This distinction between liberalism and democracy we can find among nearly all outstanding political scientists and essayists. Here are just a few authors and works containing references to this piece of semantics: Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership; W. H. Chamberlin, The World’s Iron Age; Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations; Luis Legaz y Lacambra, Introductión a la teoria del Estado Nacionalsindicalista; José Ortega y Gasset, Castilla y sus castillos; Gustav Radbruch, Rechtsphilosophie; Wilhelm Röpke, Die Gesellschaftskrise der Gegenwart; Frank Thiess, Das Reich der Dämonen; Georg Freiherr von Hertling, Recht, Staat und Gesellschaft; Max Weber, Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 111, Abteilung; Franz Schnabel, op.cit.; Heinz O. Ziegler, op.cit.; Winfried Martini, Das Ende aller Sicherheit; Carl Schmitt, “Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus” in Bonner Festausgabe für E. Zittelmann; Hermann Hefele, “Demokratie und Liberalismus,” Hochland XXII; Georges Vedel, Manuel élémentaire de droit constitutionnel; Guido de Ruggiero, Storia del liberalismo europeo; Denis de Rougemont and Charlotte Muret, The Heart of Europe; Bernard Wall, European Notebook; Everett Dean Martin, Liberty; Georges Bernanos, La liberté pour quoi faire?; Nicholas Berdyaev, Novoye sred-novyekovye; Petko Staynov, Kompetentnost i narodovlastie. Probably the best semantic analysis of the terms “liberalism” and “democracy” can be found in Giovanni Sartori, Democrazia e definizioni (Bologna: II Mulino, 1969). The authors dealing with the incompatibility of democracy and freedom, democracy and liberalism are legion. An identification of democracy and freedom can be found, however, in the work of a strictly positivist scholar denying a hierarchy of ethical values—Hans Kelsen in his Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie (Tübingen: J. C. Mohr, 1929), pp. 3-4.

14 Cf. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952). In this book Talmon puts the main emphasis on Gracchus Babeuf. There have been plans during the Terror to put all Frenchmen into a uniform, a “national costume” (p. 245). Similar plans were entertained by Morelly. (See p. 107 of this book.) About the educational theories of the Babouvistes cf. pp. 245-247.

15 Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, op.cit. vol. 3, pp. 517-523.

Chapter IV

1 J. J. Bachofen maintained that matriarchal civilizations generally consider the left side to be superior to the right. Vide his Das Mutterrecht, Basel, 1948, p. 54ff. The Gnostics identified “left” with the lower and “right” with the higher elements of creation. Cf. Francois M. Saguard, La Gnose Valentinienne et le témoignage de St. Irénée (Paris, 1947), pp. 544-545. A very witty analysis of the leftist mind can be found in the small book of Leon Plumyène and Raymond Lasierra, Le complexe de gauche (Paris: Flammarion, 1967). As leitmotif of the leftist mentality the authors see “the murder of the father.”

2 In German the sentence, “The just, saved and judged, were on the right” would sound like this: “Die gerichteten und geretteten Gerechten waren auf der Rechten.” In Spanish and Portuguese the word for “left” is taken from another language, from Basque, (Izquierdo).

3 In the non-Latin Continental languages we distinguish between citizenship, nationality, and race. The first, a legal concept, can easily be changed; the second, of a cultural-linguistic nature, will be difficult to transform; while the third, a biological-material notion, is immutable for the individual. “Nationalism” in the Germanic and Slavic countries, therefore, implies an exaggerated emphasis on language and culture (“way of life”). In the Roman languages the same confusion prevails as in English. The Nazis, naturally, were nationalists as well as racists (and socialists) which shows their identitarian character. A Swiss, for instance, can be a patriot and he might even become a racist but he cannot become a nationalist without seriously questioning the idea of the Swiss state. For the sake of a workable semantics (and respecting etymology) we employ the term nationalism in its original nonlegal connotation throughout the book.

4 Nowhere is this more evident than in the natural sciences, where most visibly one generation learns from the preceding and adds its own discoveries and inventions. Mortimer Adler said quite rightly, “The substitution of one thing for another would leave us going around in a circle, neither advancing nor declining. . . . Progress is conservative, because it is cumulative, not substitutional.” Cf. his essay “God and Modern Man” in The Critic (Oct.-Nov., 1966) p. 19.

5 Cf. Etienne Gilson, L’esprit de la philosophic médiévale (Paris: Vrin, 1944), p. 402.

6 Cf. I. Peter, 11:9, and St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, 1,14. We find the origin of this concept in Exodus XIX:6. The uniqueness of each one of us entails our inequality in the eyes of God. Cf. also E. I. Watkin, A Philosophy of Form (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951), pp. 229-230.

7 Yet what about Russia, Prussia, Italy, and Portugal, the reader might ask. The Romanovs died out in the eighteenth century and were actually replaced by the German House of Holstein-Gottorp. Prussia was ruled by South German Suabians, the Hohenzollern, whose main line remained Catholic. Italy’s crown belonged to the Savoys, who were French. Portugal’s legitimate dynasty was in exile, the “Braganças” ruling there until 1910 in reality were Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.

8 Cf. Chapter 20, Note 45.

Chapter V

1 On Socrates see the excellent article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica by Professor Henry Jackson (in various editions), as well as Werner Jaeger, op.cit. pp. 76ff., 124; A. E. Taylor, Socrates, (Garden City, N.Y.: DoubledayAnchor Books, 1953), p. Ill: Heinrich Maier, Sokrates (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913), pp. 133, 417ff. 419, 470: Tuttu Tarkiainen, Die Athenische Demokratie (Zürich; Artemis, 1966), p. 340.

2 Isocrates had even larger visions of unification transcending the Hellenic-Macedonian frame. Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, “L’Europa come concetto politico presso Isocrate e gli Isocratei,” in Rivista di filologia d’istruzione classica (Turin, 1933), pp. 477ff. Isocrates, besides, was a confirmed monarchist. Cf. his “Nicocles” in Isocrates, trsl. George Norlin, The Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1928), vol. 1. pp. 17-18, 21, 26.

3 Cf. Polybius, Works, trsl. W. R. Paton, The Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann 1923), vol. 3, p. 288 (Book VI, 2-10).

4Cf. Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, Fürst Richard Metternich-Winneburg, ed. (Vienna: Braumüuller, 1881), vol. 3, pp. 236-237. Compare also with Henrich von Treitschke, Politik, Max Cornicelius, ed. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1900), vol. 2, p. 196.

5 On this subject also Cf. Otto Seeck, Geschichte des Underganges der antiken Welt (Berlin: Siemenroth und Troschel, 1879), vol. 1, pp. 11-14.

6 This concept is almost the tenor of the brilliant work of Fritz Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht in früheren Mittelalter. Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Monarchie (Leipzig: Koehler, 1914). There are translations into English and Spanish both, very much to their detriment, radically out.

Similar if not identical concepts also prevailed in Hispanic South America. Cf. F. Javier de Ayala, Ideas politicas de Juan de Solórzano (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1946), pp. 194-195, 203.

7 An “absolutistic” government will not consult its subjects. A totalitarian government, however, will intervene in all domains of life. A government can be absolutistic and totalitarian at the same time—but it is not necessarily so. Monarchies in their internal expansion tend to be absolutistic, democracies totalitarian. The notion of the “politicized” nation is in itself totalitarian. All forms of “populism” lead naturally towards totalitarian extension.

Therefore, a free market economy and free trade might fare better in monarchies—hence the political conservatism of the Physiocrats. Cf. Roberto Michels, Introduzione alla storia delle dottrine economiche e politiche (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1932), pp. 15ff.

8 Cf. Josef Leo Seifert, Die Weltrevolutionäre. Von Bogumil über Hus zu Lenin (Vienna: Amalthea, 1930).

9 A German translation of this query was popular on the Continent and a burgher of Innsbruck nailed it to the door of the Imperial Palace where Maximilian I resided. He was famous for his genealogical mania. The Emperor replied the next day in a German rhyme, “I am not better than any other man but for the honor that God did me.” Maximilian knew perfectly well that, had he been born a hundred yards from the palace, he would be in another position altogether. Yet the great mobmasters of our day, all self-made men, believe that they owe everything to their own genius. Hence their megalomania.

10 Cf. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, Richard Scholz, ed. (Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914), pp. 16-29 (Chapters VIII-XIII).

11 Typical is the gradual disappearance in the arts of Christ the King, of the royal crown in favor of the Crown of Thorns. Frequent in Romanesque art, the triumphant crowned Christ is replaced by the Schmerzensmann, the “Man of Pain,” in the Gothic period.

12 Bishop Tunstall in a letter to Erasmus in 1523 lamented the continuation of Lollard ideas and sentiments in Britain. Cf. also James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation of England (London: Macmillan, 1908), vol. 1, pp. 314-366-367, and J. C. Garrick, Wycliffe and the Lollards (New York: Scribner’s, 1908).

13 In the exegetic works of Josef Schmid, Regensburger Neues Testament (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1954), Vol. 2. p. 196, we find an outline of Christ’s attitude toward the rich.

Did Christ speak about a camel or a rope being unable to pass through the eye of a needle? Not only in Greek but also in Hebrew the words for camel and rope are very similar. The kamilos (rope) interpretation is found for the first time in Origen’s scholion of Wettstein. Cf. also Georg Aicher, “Kamel und Nadelöhr,” Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen (Münster: Aschendorf, 1908), vol. 1, No. 5.

14 Abel Bonnard said very correctly about the ancient monarchy, “The king was father of the people only because every father was king in his family.” Cf. his Le drame du présent, vol. 1. “Les modérés” (Paris: Grasset, 1936), p. 35. All these concepts are ancient. The “pious king” figures in almost all political writings of the Middle Ages, such as, for instance, in De institutione regis ad Pippinum regem of Jonas d’Orléans. See particular chapters II, IV, and VII in Migne, Patres Latini, vol. 106, col. 287, 291, 295-296. Here lies, of course, an innate connection with Christianity. Ida Görres (Coudenhove) has seen very clearly the analogies between physical and transcendental fatherhood (“in a sense more miraculous than motherhood”) pointing to the God who is essentially the Father. Cf. Ida Friederike Görres, Nocturnen (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1949), p. 115. And the rather left French Catholic philosopher Jean Lacroix sees in democracy first the revolt against God, resulting in the revolt against all fatherhood, “One could say that to a large extent the present democratic movement is the murder of the father.” (His emphasis.) Cf. “Paternité et démocratie,” Esprit, vol. 15, no. 133, May 1947, p. 749. He would probably have support from Jerome Frank who said that “modern civilisation demands a mind free of father-governance.” (Cf. his Law and the Modern Mind, Boston: Peter Smith, 1930, p. 252.) Hence also the great American inability to understand monarchy. Mom, or even “Big Brother,” can be more easily understood by the American mind. Uncle Sam is not a father, but essentially a New England bachelor. It is also the thesis of Friedrich Heer, another Catholic with leftist inclinations, that democracy demands brotherhood, not fatherhood. (But do brothers exist without a common parent?) The problem of fatherhood in politics, society, and family is well treated in Alexander Mitscherlich Auf dem Wege zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft (Munich: R. Pieper, 1963).

15 Cf. note 7, this chapter.

16 Cf. Chapter VI, Note 16.

17 Soren Kierkegaard was convinced that the “real royalists” with a homogeneous outlook all lean towards the Catholic faith. See the remark in his diary, dated October 13, 1835, in The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, A Selection, trsl. and edit. Alexander Dru (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 21.

18 Cf. Josef Pekař, Zižka a jého doba (Prague: Vesmir, 1927), vols. 1 and 4, passim.

19 It is precisely in order to set the record straight that Cardinal Roncalli when elected Pope chose the rather odious name of this counter-Pope. Historians now have to cope with two Johns XXIII, a fake one (who was a pirate in his younger years) and a real one.

20 Cf. Chapter IX, Note 3.

21 The term “propaganda” stems from the Papal Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the supreme authority for all the missions.

22 Cf. E. v Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality, pp. 209-217 (Freiheit oder Gleichheit? pp. 325-333).

23 Typical of this total misrepresentation of the Reformer and of the absolute ignorance of modern scholarship is de Rochemont’s American film Martin Luther which Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (March 3, 1954) lambasted bitterly as der amerikanische Luther. The Catholic monthly Herderkorrespondenz (April 1954), under the title “Martin Luther Made in USA,” called the film “an intervention of alien money and an alien spirit,” a film “against whom Adolf von Harnack and Martin Rade would have violently protested,” a “repetition of nineteenth-century platitudes,” a “misdeed prompted by American naiveté” and “after all the Catholic and Evangelical efforts to come to a real understanding of Luther’s personality and the spirit of the Reformation, a truly evil surprise.” (col. 319). Since the Reformation is the terrible wound that divides the German people to this day, it was very much resented that Americans exported a film to Germany which rubbed salt into this wound. “The next time,” a German told me grimly, “we’ll make a film about the American race problem.” The German Evangelicals produced a Luther film, The Obedient Rebel, which was sound in scholarship and thoroughly acceptable to enlightened Catholics.

24 Walter Nigg, himself of the Reformed Church, warned, “Too often we overlook the fact that the Reformation was born in the quiet cell of a monastery.” (Rheinischer Merkur, vol. 11, no. 21, May 25, 1956, p. 3.) On “Monasticism” cf. pp. 104-105 of this book.

25 The real reason for Luther’s break with Zwingli was not so much a different view of the Eucharist as on the salvation of non-Christians. Luther was furious over Zwingli’s Christianae Fidei Expositio ad Christianum Regem in which Zwingli forcefully defended his stand. Cf. Luther’s “Kurz Bekenntnis vom heiligen Sacrament” in Werke, Erlangen Edition (1842), vol. 32, pp. 399-400. We must always bear in mind that Luther was a Gothic man. Cf. Alexander Rüstow, Ortbestimmung der Gegenwart (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1952), vol. 2, pp. 235, 269-270, 299-300, and Vicente Rodriguez Casado, De la monarquía española del barroco (Seville: Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1955), p. 52. On the traumatic importance of Luther’s journey to Rome, cf. Karl August Meissinger, Der katholische Luther (Munich: Leo Lehnen, 1952), pp. 55-57, 272.

Nietzsche saw all this very clearly when he wrote about “that German monk Luther” who went to Rome and hated the Renaissance. Cf. his Der Antichrist no. 61.

Friedrich Heiler saw in Luther’s antipaganism one of the main roots for the reformer’s stand against the Catholic faith. Cf. F. Heiler, “Luthers Bedeutung für die christliche Kirche,” in Luther in ökumenischer Sicht, A. v. Martin, ed. (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1929), pp. 167-168. Compare also with J. A. Möhler, Symbolik (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1832), pp. 49ff. and Konrad Algermissen, Konfessionskunde (Celle: Giesel, 1959), p. 514.

26 We do not like the expression “Protestant,” a term of ridicule and opprobrium invented by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. None of the so-called “Protestant” Churches on the Continent officially uses it. (Needless to say, it had not been derived from the Latin protestave, to bear witness, as it has claimed since the nineteenth century only.) We use the term Evangelical which is official, although it might confuse American readers since Evangelical in the United States has a “low church” implication. In Prussia an order of the King forbade in 1821 the use of the terms “Protestant” and “Protestantism”; only the word Evangelisch was admitted, an adjective which has no noun. Cf. Franz Schnabel, p. cit. vol. 2., p. 263. Nor do we use the frightful term “Catholicism” which never figures in Roman documents. (Encyclicals do not even mention “Catholics,” but only “Christifideles,” “faithful in Christ.”)

27 The highest virtue in the Scholastic traditions are the “theological virtues” (faith, hope, charity), followed by the “intellectual virtues,” while the “moral virtues” are of the lowest order. The lowest of all was temperantia which included chastity. Even fortitude (courage) ranked higher. Unchastity, however, is considered a “cardinal sin” because it is the source of so many other failings.

28 Cf. pp. 104-105.

29 On the Anabaptists in Münster cf. Dr. Heinrich Detmer, Bilder aus den religiösen und sozialen Unruhen in Münster während des 16. Jahrhunderts (Münster: Coppenrathsche Buchhandlung, 1903, 1904), 2 vols.

30 Cf. C. A. Cornelius, Geschichte des Münsterischen Aufruhrs (Leipzig: Weigel, 1855 and 1860), vol. 2, pp. 279ff.

31 Ibid., p. 73.

32 Cf. Ludwig Keller, “Die Anfänge der Reformation und die Ketzerschulen” in Vorträge und Aufsätze der Comenius-Gesellschaft (Berlin: R. Gaertner, n.d.), vol. 4, 1-2; p. 7.

33 The Pilgrim Fathers started with a short communitarian experiment, a kibbutz or kolkhoz, one would be tempted to say. Yet after the starvation period in 1623 Governor Bradford ordered them to abandon the unholy experiment, “That they should set corne every man for his owne particular, and in that regarde trust to themselves.”

34 Max Weber’s work is now known in America and Britain. (The first translations came with World War II.) Still fairly unknown are the writings of Alfred Müller-Armack, professor at the University of Cologne and formerly state secretary of the German Federal Republic’s Ministry of Economics. Most important is his Religion und Wirtschaft (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959), a work of over 600 pages in the Max Weber tradition.

35 Cf. the essay of Paul Kecskeméti in J. P. Mayer, Political Thought: The European Tradition (London: J. M. Dent, 1939).

Chapter VI

1 Even in 1776 a correspondent of Samuel Adams informed him that, with independence gained, America could now choose a monarch from another nation. Cf. William S. Carpenter, The Development of American Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930) p. 35.

2 Let us have a look at the career and the connections of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, first King of the Belgians. Born as the youngest son of the ruling Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, he entered the Russian army at the age of fifteen, but managed the affairs of the Duchy during the absence of his brother. He accompanied Emperor Alexander I on many campaigns, to the Congress of Vienna, and on his visit to London. In 1816 he married the daughter of George IV of England, expecting to become Prince-Consort, and received British citizenship. His young wife, however, died the following year. He also became a British field marshal. Early in 1830 he was offered the crown of Greece which he rejected. In 1831, however, he accepted the crown of Belgium and married the daughter of Louis-Philippe, King of the French. He was the uncle of Queen Victoria and the father-in-law of the Emperor of Mexico, Maximilian I, brother of Franz Joseph.

3 Cf. Chapter IV, Note 7. It is worth remembering that George VI of Britain hardly had a drop of English blood and was almost purely German. But the same is true of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who was born a Greek prince without any Greek ancestry (just as King Constantine II). His real family name is not Mountbatten either, but Sonderburg-Glücksburg-Augustenburg. Theoretically, after the death or abdication of Queen Elizabeth II, the Sonderburg-Glücksburgs would be ruling (though under different dynastic names) in Britain, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps Greece. In 1900 the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas ruled in Saxe-Coburg, Britain, Belgium, Bulgaria and Portugal.

4 Cf. Chester V. Easum, Prince Henry of Prussia, Brother of Frederick the Great (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1942), p. 339.

5 Cf. F. Loraine Petre, Simon Bolivar, “El Libertador” (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910), pp. 300-303, 408-409. The same is borne out by Salvador de Madariaga, Bolivar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, n.d.) The tragedy of decolonialization took place in Africa and Asia at a time even more unfavorable to the monarchical idea than the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Hence the adoption of demo-republican forms of government. Hence the alternation of chaos and dictatorship.

6 Cf. John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943) p. 499.

7 Cf. Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Sources of Political Parties in the United States, edit, by his son (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867), p. 28.

8 Cf. The Works of Alexander Hamilton, H. Cabot Lodge, ed. (New York-London: Putnam, 1885), vol. 1, pp. 353ff., 372, 390, 431.

9 Cf. Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874), p. 257.

10 Cf. p. 73, and Chapter VII, Note 123.

11 Cf. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Paul Lester Ford, ed. (New York: Putnam, 1896), vol. 7, p. 24.

12 Cf. Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1948), p. 133.

13 Cf. Edmund Burke, “Observations on a Late Publication Entitled ‘The Present State of the Nation’” in Burke’s Politics, Ross J. S. Hoffman and Paul Levack, eds. (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1949), pp. 71-72.

14 De Kalb was, no doubt, of humble origin. The titles of nobility in France are spurious to an incredible degree. They have never been duly registered in the past and there exists in France nothing like the Gothaische Genealogische Taschenbücher, Debrett’s or Burke’s. Many French titles have been faked and arbitrarily assumed but used and accepted for centuries. Especially in the 18th century a wave of “self-nobilitations” took place, often on the basis of the purchase of castles and other properties. Cf. Wilhelm Weigand, Der Abbé Galiani (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1948) pp. 199-201.

15 Cf. John C. Miller, op. cit. pp. 190-191, 373-374.

16 Cf. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1938), passim, also quoting Daniel Barber, History of My Own Times (Washington, 1827).

17 Many Americans have observed this. Cf. Dean Willard L. Sperry, Religion in America (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1945), pp. 218-219. and also foreigners, as for instance Evelyn Waugh in his article “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church” (Life, International Edition, Vol. 7, No. 8, October 10, 1949, p. 63) or the unnamed author of “Problèmes et aspects du catholicisme américain” in La Semaine Religieuse de Paris, vol. 97, No. 5025, September 2, 1950, p. 797.

18 In American Catholic colleges one particularly likes to represent St. Robert Bellarmine as a sturdy democrat, but James Brodrick S. J. in The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine S. J., 1572-1621 (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1928), vol. 1, p. 230 tells a different story: “Like his masters, the scholastics, he is a convinced monarchist, and goes out of his way to justify and exalt the monarchical regime.” The relevant passages show St. Robert a true patriarchalist—especially so De Romano Pontifice, lib. 1. c.2. As a matter of fact, the Cardinal was convinced that majority decisions in large communities are bad, because the wicked and the stupid are more numerous than the good and the wise. (De clericis, VII). The basis of the Bellarmine legend in Catholic America is the assumption that Jefferson in writing the Declaration was profoundly influenced by Sir Robert Filmer’s summing up of Bellarmine’s stand in his Patriacha. (There was a pencil mark of uncertain origin in Jefferson’s copy of that book.) This thesis is untenable if we read Jefferson’s letter to Madison dated August 30, 1823, his letter to Henry Lee dated May 8, 1825, and his letter to Dr. James Mease, dated September 26, 1825. (These are to be found in the Monticello Edition of his Works, vol. 15, p. 426 and vol. 16, pp. 118-119 and 123x) Cf. also J. C. Rager, The Political Philosophy of Blessed Cardinal Bellarmine (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1926).

Yet the stand taken by the other great late Scholastic, Suárez, was of a rather different character. It has rightly been said that “in the Suárezian doctrine any form of government other than direct democracy becomes substitutional—a consequence palpably opposed to the whole political doctrine of Aristotle and St. Thomas. Cf. Charles N. R. McCoy, “Note on the Origin of Political Authority,” The Thomist, vol. 16, No. 1 (January 1953), pp. 80-81. Compare also with Gabriel Browe O. P. The Origin of Political Authority (Dublin: Clonmore and Reynolds, 1955), p. 94.

Efforts to “monopolize” democracy have been ridiculed by Maritain in his younger years. He called them “indiscutablement une sanglante absurdité.” Cf. his Trois Réformateurs (Paris: Plon 1925), p. 198.

19 Here one has to read the warning sentence of Erik Peterson in connection with the efforts to establish a “political theology.” Cf. his Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen Theologie im Imperium Romanum (Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1935), pp. 98ff. Vide also footnote 5 in James Brodrick, S. J. p. cit., p. 247. A similar warning—mainly to Catholic leftists—has been given by Professor Hans Maier in his essay “Politische Theologie (Einwämde eines Laien)” in Stimmen der Zeit (Munich), February 1969, pp. 73-91.

20 Gouverneur Morris, naturally, knew about America’s debt to the Bourbons and so did Alexander Hamilton. Cf. the latter’s piece in the Gazette of the United States, signed “Pacificus,” July 13, 1793, in The Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 4, No. 5.

21 Cf. the letter of George Washington to James McHenry, September 30, 1798: “My opinion is . . . that you would as soon scrub the blackamore white as to change the principle of a profest Democrat, and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country.” In The Washington Papers, Saul Padover, ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), p. 389. On the difficulty to reform a once corrupted democracy cf. Rafael Gambra, La Monarquía social y representativa (Madrid: Rialp, 1954), pp. 136-137.

22 Cf. The Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams, p. 129.

23 Cf. The Complete Jefferson, Saul Padover, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1943), p. 1276.

24 Cf. The Works of John Adams, Charles Adams, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851) vol. 6, p. 516.

25 Ibid., p. 520.

26 Cf. John Adams, A Defense of the Constitution of the United States of America, New Edition, (London, 1794), vol. 3, pp. 493-495.

27 Letter, dated 16 July, 1814, in Jefferson’s Collected Writings. Monticello Edition (Washington: 1904) vol. 14, p. 152.

28 Cf. The Works of John Adams, vol. 6, p. 516.

29 Cf. James Madison, Works, Jonathan Elliot, ed., vol. 1, p. 501.

30 Cf. E. M. Burns, James Madison, Philosopher of the Constitution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1938), p. 63.

31 Cf. Madison, Writings, Gaillard Hunt, ed., vol. 5, p. 81.

32 Cf. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), vol. 3, pp. 493-495.

33 Cf. Arthur H. Vandenberg, If Hamilton Were Alive Today (New York: Putnam, 1923), pp. xxlv-xxvi; Ralph Adams Cram, The End of the Democracy (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1937), p. 20: Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, America in Mid-Passage (New York: Macmillan, 1939), vol. 3, pp. 922-923; Andrew Cunningham MacLaughlin, Democracy and Constitution (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series, 1922), p. 310; Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy the State (New York: Morrow, 1935), p. 141n.

34 Where did Hamilton, staunchest conservative among the Founding Fathers, stand “metaphysically?” Were there any religious foundations to his views? His will shows him to be a convinced Christian. Cf. The Basic Ideas of Alexander Hamilton, Richard B. Morris, ed., (New York: Pocket Library, 1957), pp. 449-451.

35 Cf. Mortimer Adler in Philosophy of the State. Fifteenth Annual Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Charles Hart, ed. (Washington, 1939), p. 163. The same view is manifested by James N. Wood in Democracy and the Will to Power (New York: Knopf, 1921), pp. 48-51.

36 Cf. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, P. J. Fort, ed., vol. 10, p. 22 (Letter to DuPont de Nemours, written in 1816): “We in the United States are constitutionally and conscientiously Democrats.” On the other hand, Dr. Benjamin Rush, friend of the Founding Fathers, confessed in a letter to John Adams (July 1789) that he saw in democracy “the Tivil’s (devil’s) government.” Cf. The Letters of Benjamin Rush, L. H. Butterfield, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 523.

37 Cf. Jefferson’s letter dated February 14, 1815, mentioned by SainteBeuve in Premiers Lundis, vol. 2, p. 147, (February 25, 1833).

38 Cf. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, vol. 2, p. 249.

39 Cited by Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Regnery, 1953), p. 130. Compare this with the declaration of one of the great Swiss, J. J. Bachofen, “Because I love liberty, I loathe democracy.” Cf. his “Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen,” Basler Jahrbuch (1917), p. 329.

40 Cf. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, P. L. Ford, ed., vol. 2. p. 249.

41 Cf. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Madison, December 20, 1787 in Works, H. A. Washington, ed. (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), vol. 2, p. 332.

42 Cf. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Lipscomb and Bergh, eds. (Washington D.C., 1903), vol. 5, p. 94. (Letter to John Jay, August, 23, 1785.)

43 Cf. Ibid.

44 Cf. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington D.C.: 1904), vol. 13, pp. 401-402.

45 Ibid., p. 396.

46 Cf. Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy, The State (New York: Morrow, 1935), p. 141n.

47 These confusions—in part at least—have already been exposed by Madison in the Federalist Paper No. 14.

Chapter VII

1 Cf. The Discovery of Europe Philip Rahv, ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1947).

2 Cf. The Basic Ideas of Alexander Hamilton, p. 324.

3 Cf. The Works of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 8, p. 259, Letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, dated May 26, 1792.

4 Cf. Diaries and Letters of Gouverneur Morris, Anne Cary Morris, ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1888), vol. 1, p. 104.

5 Ibid., vol. 1. p. 443 and Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris with Selections of His Correspondence (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832), vol. 3, p. 263.

6 Cf. Wyndham Lewis, op. cit. p. 135.

7 Cf. Theodore Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), pp. 240-241.

8 Cf. Elizabeth Brett White, American Opinion of France (New York: Knopf, 1932), p. 24.

9 The first phase of the French Revolution, its preparatory and its initial stage, put the emphasis on liberty rather than on equality. Hence the nobility strongly participated—because of its anarchical temperament and its memories of the Fronde. Excessive sobriety and self-control are bourgeois-puritanical rather than typically aristocratic virtues, spread by English nannies in the households of the nobility on the Continent. This, at least is the opinion of Ida Friederike Görres (née Countess Coudenhove-Kalergi) in op. cit. pp. 33-35.

10 Maximilien de Robespierre belonged to a family of the lower nobility of relatively ancient vintage. But, as Albert Mathiez remarked in his La Révolution Française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1946), vol. 1, p. 3, there existed also an animosity of the lesser nobility toward the big, wealthy families usually centered around the Court. American and British readers are reminded that the de in France—as in the case of Charles de Gaulle—has, as particule, almost always the character of a title. This is also true of the von in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, but not of the van in the Netherlands nor the de or di in Italy and Spain.

11 The eminent role played by the entire nobility in the French Revolution is also underlined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his “L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution” in Oeuvres complètes, J. P. Mayer, ed. (Paris: Gallimard 1952), vol. 2, pp. 68-69, 72. Count Philippe Paul Ségur also commented on this suicidal tendency of the French nobility. Cf. his Mémoires ou souvenirs et anecdotes (Paris: Eymery, 1824), vol. 1, pp. 292, 295. Against masochism in the political sphere, which not only characterized the French nobility prior to 1789 (or a certain part of the American upper crust today) Georges Bernanos spoke in ringing terms. Cf. his La liberté pour quoi faire? (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), p. 129. Albert Mathiez, in op. cit. p. 15, says correctly that “the Revolution could not have come but from above.” See also Louis Villat, La Révolution et l ’Empire (Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1940), vol. 1, pp. ix, 3. Pierre Gaxotte in La Révolution Française (Paris: Fayard, 1947), puts the emphasis very strongly on the ideological character of the French Revolution and discounts all economic aspects. A. de Tocqueville in his “L’Ancien Régime” insists that the mounting wealth of France prepared the Revolution and that the most revolutionary regions were the richest. (Cf. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, pp. 218ff., 222-223).

Nor was it true that the countryside lived in misery. Serfdom survived only in a few isolated spots in the Bourbonnais and in the Jura. The last remnants of serfdom had been abolished by the King in his domains in 1779. About half of the area of France was in the possession of smallholders. (Cf. P. Gaxotte, op. cit. pp. 37-38.) Foreign trade, four times greater than in 1700, reached a value of over a billion francs in 1786, a record until 1848 (Ibid., pp. 32-33). De Tocqueville comments on this in “L’Ancien Régime” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 223).

12 One ought to remember the battlecry of the Polish noblemen:

Cudzych królow gromić a grozić swojemu!

Menace foreign kings, but resist your own!

13 Cf. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilisation in England (New York: Appleton, 1880), vol. 2, p. 614; Augustin Gazier, Histoire générale du Mouvement Janséniste (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1923), vol. 2, p. 137, citing also Siccard, L’Ancien clergé de France; (Sir) Denis W. Brogan, French Personalities and Problems (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1946), p. 70.

14 Cf. Edmund Burke, “Remarks on the Policy of the Allies,” in Works (Boston: Little, Brown, 1869), vol. 4, p. 452.

15 Cf. André Siegfried, “Le Protestantisme cévénol,” in Marc Boegner, André Siegfried et al. Protestantisme Français (Paris: Plon, 1945), p. 43.

16 Cf. G. de Félice, Histoire des Protestants de France (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1856), pp. 577, 603-604.

17 Anglomania on the Continent had and still has all sorts of versions—an aristocratic, a bourgeois, a proletarian-socialist, a Catholic, a “Protestant,” a Jewish one. There exists an Anglophile sportsman and businessman, a feminist and an educationist, a technologist and a male fashion designer, a navy man and a tourist manager. Anglophobia always appeared as a dissenting opinion, as a “heresy,” as a manifestation of bad taste, as a wanton opposition against a prevailing ideal.

18 Cf. Metternich, op. cit. vol. 8, p. 531.

19 Ibid., p. 407.

20 Cf. Alfred Müller-Armack, Das Jahrhundert ohne Gott (Münster: Regensberg, 1948), pp. 57-58.

21 Cf. Charles Seignobos, Histoire sincère de la nation française, (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1946), p. 291.

22 Even in the year 1896 the per capita income of the Swiss was way below that of Britain and France and only slightly above the European average. (Cf. Handbuch der Staatswissenschaften, 1923, p. 767). Hard work and wise investments plus good organization are responsible for the Swiss economic miracle. Tourism, on the other hand, provides Switzerland only with 8 percent of her national income while in 1966 not less than 33 percent of the budget was spent on military expenditures.

23 Cf. Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du général Lafayette, publiés par sa famille (Brussels: Société Belge de Librairie, 1837), vol. 1, pp. 193, 268, 416; vol. 2, pp. 139-140.

24 Cf. Philippe Paul Comte de Ségur, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 321.

25 Cf. la baronne de Staël, Considérations sur les principaux événements de la Révolution Francaise (London: Baldwin, Craddock, Joy, 1818), vol. 1, p. 88.

26 Cf. Madame de Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie Antoinette (Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1823), vol. 1, p. 234.

27 Cf. Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1847), vol. 1, p. 62.

28 Cf. H. Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine (Paris: Hachette, n.d.). vol. 2, p. 66. Taine admits the “infection,” but denies the introduction of an American political pattern in the ideology of the French Revolution. On erroneous European judgments concerning the United States cf. Russell Kirk, op. cit., pp. 425-426 and 427-428. “The European thinks that what Americans brag, they practice,” Kirk concludes wisely (p. 428).

29 Cf. Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe, M. Levaillant, ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 1948), vol. 1, p. 274.

30 Cf. G. E. Fasnacht, Acton’s Political Philosophy (London: Hollis and Carter, 1952), p. 79.

3l Cf. Alexis de Tocqueville, “L’Ancien régime et la révolution,“ in Oeuvres complètes, (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), vol. 2, t. 2, p. 157: “The worst imitators were those who had adopted the abstract principles of the United States Constitution without having felt the necessity to apply them in a conservative way as it was done in America.”

32 Cf. Philippe Sagnac, La fin de l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution Americaine (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1941), pp. 241, 286-300.

33 Cf. his letter “Réponse de M. Jellinek à M. Boutmy: La Déclaration des Droits de l’homme et du Citoyen,” in Revue du Droit publique et de la Science Politique en France et à l’ Entranger. vol. 18, p. 385sq.

34 Cf. Felix Somary, Krise und Zukunft der Demokratie (Zürich-Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1952), pp. 28-30.

35 Cf. Selected writings of John and John Quincy Adams, pp. 159-160.

36 Cf. The Works of John Adams, p. 485.

37 Hanns Johst even became President of the Reichsschrifttumkammer, the supreme Nazi organ for controlling and “guiding” the writers of the Third Reich. Josef Nadler in his Literaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1941), p. 347 calls Thomas Paine “the first political play of the new Germany.”

38 Cf. Dr. Friedrich Schönemann, Amerika und der Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Junker and Dünnhaupt, 1934), pp. 28-29. On p. 31 this author says pointedly, referring to National Socialism, “For our new popular form of government, for this entire system of popular community, there is no better and more beautiful word than ‘democracy’.”

39 Cf. Cornélis de Witt, Jefferson and the American Democracy, trsl. R. S. H. Church (London: Longmans, 1862), originally published in the Revue des Deux Mondes: Johann Georg Hülsemann, Geschichte der Demokratie in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1832) p. xi. This author wrote, “The supremacy of the Democratic Party which started earlier in this century and is daily receiving momentum is for us not only of a sad interest because the hopes which Washington and Alexander Hamilton raised for the future of that country have been dashed. Far more catastrophic is this evolution to us for the reason that the Party of Revolution has thus acquired a sure base from which to operate.” Alexis de Tocqueville commented in his “L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution” that the “worst imitators were those who had copied abstract principles from the Constitution of the United States without ever having felt the necessity of adding certain conservative provisions which were applied in America.” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 157.)

40 Cf. Le chevalier Félix de Bonjour, Aperçu des Etats-Unis au commencement du XIXe siècle (Paris: Michaud et Delaunay, 1814), p. 164.

41 Abel Bonnard, op. cit., p. 218 tells us about Lafayette’s letter to the Princesse d’Hénin in which he mentions the “delicious sensation caused by the smile of the masses.” Cf. also Harold Wade Streeter, “Sainte-Beuve’s Estimate of Lafayette,” The French-American Review (Washington: 1950), vol. 3, no. 2-3, pp. 164-186. In a letter addressed to Madison on January 30, 1787, Jefferson mentioned Lafayette’s “canine appetite for popularity and fame.” Cf. Th. Jefferson, Works, H. A. Washington, ed., vol. 2.

42 Cf. Pierre Gaxotte, op. cit., p. 392, who depicts de Robespierre as a frustrated nobleman.

43 Maurice Heine was a prolific writer. One of his most ghoulish essays was his well-illustrated description of burnt corpses. Cf. his “L’enfer anthropoclasique,” Minotaure (Paris), No. 6.

44 Cf. Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade (Paris: Gallimard-NRF, 1952 and 1957), 2 vols.

45 Cf. Gilbert Lely, op. cit., p. 273.

46 Cf. Paul Boudin, Correspondance inédite du Marquis de Sade, de ses proches et de ses familiers (Paris: Librairie de France, 1929) p. 269.

47 Cf. G. Lely, op. cit., pp. 452-453, letter from Picpus to the Sûreté Générale, December 19, 1793.

48 Cf. G. Lely, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 677-685.

49 Cf. Dr. Eugen Dühren (Iwan Bloch), Le Marquis de Sade et son temps (Paris: Michalon, 1901), pp. 392-393.

50 Cf. Paul Eluard, in La Révolution Surréaliste (Paris) vol. 2, No. 8

51 Cf. Bertrand d’Astorg, Introduction au monde de la terreur (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1945), p. 32.

52 Ibid., p. 33.

53 Cf. Geoffrey Gorer, The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (London: Wisehart, 1934), p. 188.

54 Cf. Dr. Eugen Dühren, op. cit., p. 391.

55 Cf. L’Oeuvre du Marquis de Sade, Guillaume Apollinaire, ed., (Paris: Bibliothèque des Curieux, 1909), p. 227.

56 Ibid., pp. 236ff.

57 Cf. Oswald Spengler, Jahre der Entscheidung (Münich: C. H. Beck, 1933 and 1953), p. 144.

58 These destructive left-of-centrists without well-grounded convictions were the special object of horror of one of the greatest German-American novelists, the late Hermann Borchardt. Cf. his The Conspiracy of the Carpenters, trsl. Barrows Mussey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943).

59 Cf. Louis Althusser, “Despote et monarque,” in Esprit, vol. 26, No. 267, November 1958, pp. 213-214.

60 Cf. Alexander Rüstow, Das Versagen des Wirtschaftsliberalismus (Düsseldorf: Küpper, 1950), p. 82.

61 Cf. Hugo Lang, O.S.B., Der Historiker als Prophet (Nuremberg: Sebaldus-Verlag, 1947), p. 124.

62 Cf. Voltaire, Oeuvres Complètes.

63 Cf. Dictionnaire de philosophie par Voltaire (Paris: Lebigre Frères, 1834), vol. 3, p. 196.

64 Cf. Franz Schnabel, op.cit., vol. 2, p. 186.

65 Montesquieu too was of the same opinion. Cf. Esprit des Lois, Book 8, c. 16. Rousseau repeated these views in the Contrat Social, Book 3, c. 3.

66 Cf. Pierre Gaxotte, op.cit., p. 406.

67 Cf. George D. Herron, Germanism and the American Crusade (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1918), p. 21.

68 Cf. Jacques Maritain, Principes d’ une politique humaniste (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1945), p. 39.

69 Cf. Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), p. 73: “In America and in most of the newer liberal democracies of the Western World, the Jacobin heresy is, though not unchallenged and not universal, the popular and dominant theory in the schools.” On the inherent totalitarian dangers in democracy see also, Friedrich A. v. Hayek, “Die Anschauungen der Mehrheit und die zeitgenössische Demokratie,” Ordo, vol. 15-16 (1965), pp. 19-41.

70 Cf. Walter Lippmann, op. cit., p. 75.

71 Cf. Chapter VII, Note 23.

72 Cf. Dr. A. J. M. Cornelissen, Calvijn en Rousseau (NijmegenUtrecht: H. V. Dekker, 1931), pp. 229-230.

73 Cf. Calvin, Institutiones, I, vii, 5.

74 Cf. Corrado E. Eggers-Lecour, “Calvino y Rousseau o la ambivalencia ginebrina” in Raźon y Fé (Madrid), vol. 165, no. 772 (May 1963), pp. 481-496.

75 The Swiss indeed have done more than invent the cuckoo clock—which, by the way, is a product of the German Black Forest. Take away a city such as Geneva and all Western history, all world history is utterly different.

76 Cf. Georg Jellinek, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 13.

77 Cf. (Baron) Ernest Seillière, Le peril mystique dans l’inspiration des démocraties contemporaines, Rousseau visionnaire et révélateur (Paris: Renaissance de Livre, 1918).

78Cf. Werner Kägi, “Rechtsstaat und Demokratie” in Demokratie und Rechtsstaat, Festgabe für Zaccaria Giacometti (Zürich: Polygraphischer Verlag, 1953), p. 110. A brilliant essay by the most outstanding Swiss political scientist. On the Rechtsstaat (constitutional state of law and order) see also Francisco Elias de Tejada, Las doctrinas politicas en la Cataluña medieval (Barcelona: Aymà, 1950), pp. 196-198.

79 Cf. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Boston-New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1919), p. 345.

80 Ibid., p. 436.

81 Ibid., p. 367.

82 Cf. Werner Kägi, loc. cit., p. 117.

83 Ibid., p. 120.

84 Ibid., pp. 115-116.

85 Ibid., p. 114.

86 Cf. J. J. Rousseau, Contrat Social, Book 1, ch. 7.

87 Ibid., Book. 4, ch. 2.

88 Cf. J. J. Rousseau, “Traité de l’économie politique,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Hachette, n.d.), vol. 2, p. 553.

89 Cf. J. J. Rousseau, Contrat Social, Book 3, ch. 16.

90 Cf. The Living Thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, ed. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1940), p. 62: “The first principle of republicanism . . . to consider the will of the society announced by the majority of the single vote, as sacred as if unanimous, is the first of all lessons in importance, yet the last, which is thoroughly learned.” Jefferson thought that the alternative leads to despotism, yet precisely the sticking to such principles leads almost inevitably to totalitarianism. Cf. Angel López-Arno, El podér politico y la libertad (Madrid: Rialp, 1952), p. 152, and Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du Pouvoir. Histoire naturelle de sa croissance (Geneva: Cheval Ailé, 1945), pp. 25-26.

91 At the sight of a newborn babe one is not particularly struck by the thought that it is exceedingly “free.” Freedom rather seems to be the fruit of constant personal struggles. In medieval parlance freedoms (the “freedom of a city,” for instance) were as much as privileges.

92 Cf. J. J. Rousseau, Contrat Social, Book 7.

93 Cf. Louis Rougier, La France à la recherche d’une constitution (Paris: Sirey, 1952), p. 127.

94 Cf. Note 77. Also: T. E. Utley, “Mandatory Democracy,” Confluence, (Cambridge, Mass.) vol. 1, No. 2. (June 1952), pp. 29-30.

95 Cf. Louis Rougier, op. cit., p. 132.

96 Cf. Georges Vedel, Manuel élémentaire de droit constitutionnel (Paris: Sirey, 1949), p. 196.

97 Ibid.

98 The de Broglie ducal family is one of the most gifted in France. In the last generation there were two brothers (one a prince, the other one the Duke) who were famous physicists (one a Nobel Prize winner), while the sister (Comtesse de Pange) is famous as a writer and historian. These are greatgrandchildren of Madame de Staël whose daughter Hortense married a de Broglie. Originally this family comes from the Piedmont side of the Matterhorn region.

99 Reforms carried out with a strong hand were those of Peter the Great, Frederick William III (through von Stein and Hardenberg), and the Council of Trent.

100 Certainly the recent reforms in the Catholic Church were “mismanaged” insofar as they got out of hand. Hilaire Belloc might have said, “What do you expect from a bunch of clerics in Rome?” (Vide Diana Cooper, Trumpets from the Steps, 1960, p. 268). Actually, misrepresentations were made and thus many confusions were caused by disappointed theologians and, above all, by overidealistic, ambitious Catholic journalists. A short outline of the roots of the present confusion in the Catholic Church can be found in my essay, “The Church in Crisis” special to Pro Ecclesia, vol. 3, no. 6, June 1972.

101 Cf. Athenäumsfragmente, I, 2.

102 In L’Ile des pengouins.

103 He can get them in Dr. A. Cabanès and L. Nass, La névrose révolutionnaire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1924), pp. 88ff., and Gilbert Lely, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 405, n.6.

104 Cf. D. W. Brogan The Free State (New York: Knopf, 1945), p. 2.

105 Cf. Gérard Walter, La guerre de Vendée (Paris: Plon, 1953), pp. 339-341. Louis-Marie Turreau, a monstrous sadist, became a baron under Napoleon. He was French Minister to the United States from 1803 to 1811. One can imagine that he was lionized by “progressives” in the United States as Soviet diplomats would be during the honeymoon of World War II. One can also admire this criminal’s likeness on the east side of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris—not really a fitting decoration for the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid., p. 311. “The big army of useless mouths.” The same noble motive can be found in the Nazi extermination of the insane.

108 Cf. Otto Flake, Marquis de Sade (Stuttgart: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1966), p. 89.

109 Cf. Pierre Gaxotte, op. cit., p. 380.

110 “The Republic needs no scientists.” According to another version Coffinhal said, “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists.”

111 This has also been deplored by John U. Nef in an essay “On the Future of American Civilization,” The Review of Politics, vol. 2, no. 3. Cf. also the unsigned editorial “Untragic America” in Life, December 2, 1946.

112 Cf. Pierre Gaxotte, op. cit., p. 33. In the docks of Nantes seven ships were under construction in 1738, but thirty-three in 1784.

113 Obviously a mounting wealth creates an enthusiasm for a race for riches. In a race, however, there are losers and winners, and it is the bitterness of those left behind which creates part of the unrest.

114 Cf. Chapter VI, Note 14. Actually André Maurois tells us in his Histoire de France that precisely those provinces were most attached to the Ancien Regime where the feudal traditions were strongest. This reminds one of Victor Hugo’s outcry: “Equality, political translation of the word envy!” Cf. his Journal 1830-1848, Henri Guillemin, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 346. Ida F. Görres, op. cit., pp. 53-54, speaks about the mixture of fury and envy which could be observed in the old German Youth Movement when it became evident that somebody had acquired wealth without too much effort. A hundred years earlier a great Lutheran theologian of the conservative school, A. F. C. Vilmar made a similar observation about the younger generation in his time. Cf. his Schulreden über Fragen der Zeit (Marburg: Elswerthsche Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1846), pp. 133ff.

115 Cf. Pierre Gaxotte quoting Le Trosne, op. cit., pp. 41-42.

116 Cf. Burke’s Politics, p. 332, or Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1865-1867), vol. 3, pp. 102-121. (Letter of Edmund Burke to M. Dupont.)

117 Cf. Ibid. This is corroborated by James F. Cooper in The American Democrat (New York: Knopf, 1931), p. 83 (originally published 1838 in Cooperstown, N.Y.).

118 Cf. Gerard Walter, Histoire des Jacobins (Paris: Aimery Somogy, 1946), p. 306.

119 Ibid., p. 268.

120 Oswald Spengler, in his Jahre der Entscheidung (Munich, C. H. Beck, 1933), p. 90, remarked: “In such times we find a certain clerical scum which drags the faith and the dignity of the Church into the dirt of party politics, which allies itself with the powers of destruction and while mouthing the phrases of altruism and protection of the poor helps the underworld to destroy the social order—the order on which the Church irrevocably and fatally rests.” The revolutionary and socialistic character of a large sector of the Russian clergy and especially of the seminaries has been well described by Ernst Benz in Geist und Leben der Ostkirche. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), p. 128. The assassinating “guerrilla-priests” of Latin America were clearly foreseen by Georges Bernanos, who wrote in November 1926: “I believe that our children will see the main body of the troops of the Church on the side of the forces of death. I can see myself being executed by bolshevik priests who carry the Social Contract in their pocket but have a cross dangling from their neck.” Cf. his Correspondance inédite 1904-1934 (Paris: Uöon, 1971), p. 278. Yet Camillo Torres Restrepo was imitated (though less murderously) by Father Nicholas Riddell in St. Louis. Cf. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 19, 1971; October 20, 1971; March 9, 1972.

121 Ibid., p. 31.

122 Cf. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11 th-12th edition, vol. 17, p. 487. A “definite” work on Malesherbes is Pierre Grosclaude, Malesherbes, témoin et interprète de son temps (Paris: Fischbacher, 1961). The death of Malesherbes was nevertheless inspiring. Ibid., pp. 747-748. He seems to have returned to the faith of his childhood.

Cf. Pierre Gaxotte, op. cit., p. 84. “The perfect type of a liberal who is always afraid to be taken to be a reactionary.” The suicidal tendency of certain aristocrats is well illustrated by the common action of Count Michael Károlyi and (Lord Bertrand) Russell to get the Hungarian Communist Rákosi released from jail (February 1935). He was actually exchanged in 1940. After World War II Rákosi established in Hungary the grimmest Communist tyranny. Cf. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), pp. 314-315.

123 A collège in France is a high-school including college (ages ten to eighteen) run by priests or a religious order. College in Britain is the equivalent of a preparatory school in America. Prep schools in Britain are schools for boys eight to twelve.

124 One of the church spires was actually demolished—in Besseen-Chandesse. (The present spire is new.) The town council of Strasbourg already had decided to tackle the world famous cathedral when Robespierre, luckily, was overthrown.

125 Cf. Clarence Crane Brinton, The Jacobins (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 149.

126 Ibid. The author quotes A. Philippe, La Revolution dans les Vosges, vol. 4, p. 133.

127 Ibid., p. 150. The author quotes F. Heitz, Les sociétés politiques de Strasbourg pendant les années 1790-1795 (Strasbourg, 1863).

128 Ibid.

129 My conviction rests on investigations I made in 1947 among Austrian and German relatives and friends. Cf. p. 312.

130 Did the United States Government, with excellent channels of information, know about the fate of the Jews, without doing anything about it? Arthur D. Morse, author of the book Why Six Millions Died (New York: Random House, 1967) thinks it knew about it.

131 Cf. Louis Blanc and Jacques Crétineau Joly, Les guerres de Vendée, Armel de Wismes, ed. (Paris: Hachette, n.d.), pp. 284-285.

132 Ibid., p. 277.

133 Ibid., p. 275.

134 Ibid., p. 225.

Chapter VIII

1 Cf. Chapter V, Note 16 and Dr. Eduard Zeller, Das theologische System Zwinglis (Tübingen: Fues, 1853), pp. 163-164.

2 Cf. Martin Luther, “Tischreden,” Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar: Böhlau, 1921), vol. 6, p. 143, no. 6718: Ladern, “Predigten über etzliche Kapitel des Evangelisten Matthäi,” Gesammelte Werke (Erlangen, 1850), vol. 44, pp. 156-157. Here also lies a disagreement between Catholic and Calvinistic theological thinking. Cf. Herman Doyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1960), pp. 192-194.

3 Cf. Herbert Schöffler, Die Reformation (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, n.d.), particularly pp. 42-60.

4 Cf. Luther’s outcry: “I do not concede that my teaching can be judged by anyone, not even by the angels.” In Gesammelte Werke (Erlangen Edition), vol. 28, p. 144. Luther went on to say that he who does not accept his doctrine cannot be saved, because his doctrine is God’s and God’s is his: “Enough with all this silly humility!”

5 One of the first authors in modern times to deride the concept of Luther as an “early liberal” was Johann Friedrich Böhmer. Cf. his Briefe und kleinere Schriften (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1868), vol. 2, p. 427. How the whole picture of Luther from a stern disciplinarian to a mild liberal spirit with subjectivist-relativist leanings has been changed and forged through the centuries is well shown by Ernst Walter Zeeden in his Martin Luther und die Reformation im Urteil des deutschen Luthertums (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1950), 2 vols. The research covers the period from Luther’s death (1546) to Goethe, but unfortunately does not go beyond 1832. Cf. also Etienne Gilson, Les idées et les lettres (Paris: Vrin, 1932), p. 174, and Alexander Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 288, where Rüstow insists that Luther’s interpretatio liberalis is long dead among scholars, but survives in the deeper layers of public opinion. Luther’s real stand is the reason for the inherent severity of civilizations fashioned by the Reformation. Cf. Erich Fromm, Die Furcht vor der Freiheit (Zürich: Steinberg, 1945), passim.

6 Hence a country such as Lutheran Prussia is infinitely more disciplinarian than Catholic Austria or Bavaria. Still in the Austro-Prussian struggle over the soul and mind of Germany the “progressive” thinkers of the West sided with Prussia—not only William James but also H. F. Amiel. Cf. his Journal intime de l’annee 1866, Léon Bopp, ed. (Paris: Gallimard-N. R. F. 1959), pp. 328, 376-377.

7 Here I refer the interested reader to my Liberty or Equality, pp. 223-229 or to Freiheit oder Gleichheit? pp. 342-348.

8 Luther’s essay De servo arbitrio, showing quite distinctly his Augustinian heritage, can be found in vol. 18 of the Weimar Kritische Gesamtausgabe.

9 Was Luther a “Lutheran”? He certainly went to confession every week of his life until his death, and we know that once when, in his old age, he spilled a few drops of the consecrated wine, he knelt down and licked up every drop from the floor. Whereupon, as the chronicler tells us, the congregation wept at the sight of such piety in this holy man. And in the preface of his translation of the Mass, the Deutsche Messe (1525) he expressed his conviction that only the Latin Mass could be the uniting bond of all Christians the world over. (Auricular Confession was revived in the German Evangelical Church in 1956. Luther always considered it as a possible sacrament and as such it figures in the Confessio Augustana.) Those who want to know something about the real Luther should read his “Etliche Artikel von den Papisten jetz neulich verfälschet und böslich wider uns Lutherischen gerühmt,” written in 1534 in Sämtliche Werke (Erlangen Edition, 1855), vol. 65, no. 57. Here (p. 96) Luther says: “The Confession is necessary in the churches, and the priest should give Absolution, because in this way the Christians will be consoled, and the simple-minded as well as the ignorant will be taught and instructed in Confession.” In the same essay Luther admits that good works serve as an ornament to faith (p. 97) and that “the intercession of the Saints could not be completely laid aside.” (p. 98)

10 We find a scholarly description of Geneva under Calvin in F. W. Kampschulte’s Johann Calvin, Seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf (Leipzig: Duncker und Himblot, 1869 and 1899), 2 vols. As to Calvin’s political views cf. Hans Baron, Calvins Staatsanschauung und das konfessionelle Zeitalter (Munich-Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1924).

11 The contrary was the case. The antagonisms between Church and State produced a certain strife; now Church and State formed an organic whole. The sovereigns became heads of the Church—even if they were of another faith. Thus, theoretically, Emperor Franz Joseph was the head of the Evangelical Church of Austria, etc. (William II as the head of the Evangelical Church in Prussia even conducted divine services.)

Nor, to be sure, were the Puritans in America true apostles of liberty. They wanted their own freedom but granted none to others. They executed Quakers repeatedly and established a political-social-ecclesiastical monolith reminiscent of the Genevan order. Catholic Maryland and Pennsylvania and not Massachusetts spearheaded religious liberty in North America.

12 On the disciplinary influence of the Irish monks on the Continent cf. Alfred Mirgeler, Rückblick auf das abendländische Christentum (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1961), pp. 79ff.

13 Cf. Alexander Rüstow, Ortsbestimmung der Gegenwart, vol. 2. p. 291.

14 Klaus J. Heinisch in his commentary to Der utopische Staat, Morus: Utopia, Campanella: Sonnenstaat, Bacon: Neu-Atlantis (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1960), p. 226, insists that Campanella died in the “Jacobin” monastery of the Rue St. Honoré, where the Jacobin Club later was located. (So does the Encyclopedia Italiana, 1930, vol. 8, p. 568). In this book we also find a full text of the Civitas Solis. Cf. also J. Kvačala, Thomas Campanella, ein Reformer der ausgehenden Renaissance (Berlin: Trowitzsch, 1909), especially pp. xi, 144ff. and 150. Kvacala rightly discounts Campanella’s influence on the Jesuit reducciones in Paraguay.

On “Monasticism” cf. also my essay “El monasticismo,” Revista de Occidente (Madrid), vol. 3 (2nd series), no. 32, pp. 178-201 and “Der Monastizismus,” Civitas (Lucerne), vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 321-335. Actually, as Monsignor Otto Mauer said, today the Counsels of Perfection are imposed on the majority of the population. (Ida F. Görres, op. cit., p. 152) Yet the real danger of all “monasticisms” lies in the fact that especially in the realm of economics all efforts to expect a moral level, substantially higher than the one actually existing, must provoke a wave of coercions and lies. Cf. Wilhelm Röpke, Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage, (Erlenback-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1958), p. 165.

15 Cf. Morelly, Code de la Nature, introduction by V. P. Volguine (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1953). On pp. 127ff. we find the blueprint for the ideal state and society, the “Model of legislation in conformity with the intentions of nature.” There is in Morelly’s work a tendency to guess a “natural order” and then to impose it by force. The analogy with Rousseau is obvious.

16 In Brazil Comte’s Positivism became the “official theology” of the nascent republic in 1888. Actually the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of the republic was the result of a conspiracy of bitterly disappointed slaveholders who had not forgiven Pedro II for having abolished slavery. They were joined by Comtean Positivists (all leftists) in the army and in the administration. The slogan on the Brazilian flag: “Ordern e Progresso” is taken from Comte.

The pioneer of Positivism in Brazil was Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhaes. About him cf. João Camillo de Oliveira Torres, O Positivismo no Brasil (Petrópolis: Editôra Vozes Limitada, 1943). Also passim in the magistral work of this Brazilian monarchist scholar A Democracia Coroada, Teoria Politica do Império do Brazil (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes Limitada, 1965).

17 As a matter of fact, most manufacturers lived rather spartan lives. The lavish spenders in the large cities were rather the visiting big landowners, not the factory owners or the managers. Even the bankers were thrifty. Thomas Mann lets one of his heroes (in The Buddenbrooks) remark critically that a certain burgher family of Lübeck was living from the interest on their capital and not from the interest on interest. The drive for investments was enormous and laid the foundations for free Europe’s present wealth—and high living standards for everybody.

18 Metternich wrote to Emperor Francis I about the general moral, intellectual and social decay of the Paris proletariat in 1825. He also described the flood of immoral publications sold at half price to young men and women. Metternich remarked: “Here missions as among savages ought to start their work.” (Cf. Metternich, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 164-165.)

19 The Comte de Saint-Simon was a collateral descendant of the Due de Saint-Simon, famous for his rather frivolous autobiography describing court life in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The Socialist Comte de Saint-Simon revolted in a very concrete sense against his class and the traditions of his family.

20 Brissot in his younger years was deeply interested in the emancipation of the Negroes (particularly in the West Indies), became later an ardent Girondist, and was guillotined on October 31, 1793 with a number of other supporters of his faction.

21 Scenes of the downfall of the high and mighty could be seen in most medieval churches over the west entrance. Popes, emperors, kings, friars, bishops, priests, nuns and noblemen went to Hell—yet representatives of these groups could also be found among the saved.

22 This is contradicted by the enormous amount of crime in the Soviet Union. (The crime syndicates of the USSR, far larger than anything of this sort in the United States, extend from coast to coast.) Individual crimes can be mentioned by the press only in exceptional cases. Divorces, suicides and accidents also are taboo. There are no crime statistics available for the Soviet Union and there is good reason to believe that they are not even compiled.

23 Vide Chapter III, Note 7.

24 I am partly repeating here the views of Professor Paul Gaechter, S. J., Professor emeritus of New Testament exegesis at Innsbruck University, author of Maria im Erdenleben (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1954) and Das Matthäus-Evangelium (Innsbruck: Tyrolia 1962). Yet it frequently seems profitable to “church strategists” or Christian “democratists” to maintain that Christianity in its origins was a movement of the poor, the humble and the ignorant. Gioberti obviously liked this thesis. Cf. Vincenzo Gioberti, Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia, Fausto Nicolini, ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1912), vol. 3, p. 7. And Montalembert with great irony described the sudden discovery of French ecclesiastics in 1848 that republicanism took its origin at Golgotha, Cf. Montalembert, Textes choisis, Emmanuel Mounier, ed. (Paris: Egloff, 1945), p. 94. Friedrich Engels had the same notion (i.e. the early Church being formed by proletarian outcasts) and his view is clearly reflected by the Bolshaya Sovyetskaya Entsiklopediya (Moscow 1957), vol. 46, p. 352 sq. For a corrective view cf. Philip Hughes, The History of the Church (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1949), vol. 1, pp. 162-169.

25 Cf. Chapter V, Note 13.

26 Cf. Louis Dupré, “Marx and Religion: An Impossible Marriage.” Commonweal, vol. 88, no. 6, April 26, 1968, pp. 171-176.

27 The dialogue between Christians and Marxists has largely foundered, for external reasons among others, one of them being the fact that up to August 1969, Czechoslovakia largely served as a bridge. The cringing attitude of some of the Christian debaters did not last too long when they became aware of the fact that they were expected to make all the concessions. On the other hand, the more enthusiastic Communists soon were anathematized by their party and expelled, as shown in the case of the French “Communist Humanist” Roger Garaudy.

28 There is most obviously a real contradiction between democracy and socialism; socialism stands for a planned, centralized economy; democracy rests on perpetual change. Socialism could theoretically be combined with absolute monarchy, but not with a political system which carefully registers the “fermentation of the masses” or easily yields to the cry “let’s throw the rascals out.” Still, socialism, including the dictatorship of the proletariat, can be brought about by highly democratic methods, just as suicide (resulting in inaction) can be achieved by action. The connection, however, between political democracy and the desire for equality in all other domains was evident already to Aristotle. Cf. his Politics, V, i, 2. And when Lenin was accused by his enemies that his doctrines contained as integral part the Jacobinism of the “bourgeois” French Revolution, he replied, “What is Marxism if not Jacobinism fused with the working class movement?” Cf. Bertram D. Wolfe, One Hundred Years in the Life of a Doctrine (New York: Dial Press, 1965), p. 164. Yet in the realm of ideas filiation is no safeguard against contradiction. As a matter of fact, without a growing contradiction filiation will hardly take place.

29 Cf. Willmoore Kendall, “John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule,” Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences (1941), vol. 26, no. 2, p. 132.

30 Jan Czyński, a Polish Socialist, in his preface to Fourier’s Théorie de l’Unité Universelle, compared him to Christ.

31 The Socialist-republican equation was not even known to Saint-Simon. Of course the labels attached to forms of government do not always disclose their real character. Professor Adolf Merkl says that an aristocratic republic with limited franchise can be a Rechtsstaat, a constitutional state of law and order, while a parliamentary monarchy with radically democratic franchise may not be. Cf. his essay “Idee und Gestalt der politischen Freiheit,” in Demokratie und Rechtsstaat. Festgabe für Zaccaria Giacometti, p. 176, quoting also Fritz Fleiner. Merkl also insists that the German Third Reich and the USSR are formally and constitutionally republics, (p. 177)

32 Cf. Charles Fourier, Textes choisis, Felix Armand, ed. (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1953), p. 150. (“Theorie de l’unité universelle,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 4. p. 419.)

33 Ibid., p. 148 (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3. p. 254).

34 Ibid., p. 149 (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3. p. 494).

35 Ibid., p. 137 (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3. p. 464).

36 Louis Napoléon himself wrote a book in 1844 entitled L’extinction du pauperisme in which the emperor-to-be attacked capitalism as a source of poverty. Cf. Félix Armand, Les Fourieristes et les luttes révolutionnaires de 1848 à 1851 (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1948).

37 Not far from San Antonio, Texas is the town of New Braunfels, founded by a Prince Solms-Braunfels, a colorful, romantic man who wanted to establish a haven for the European nobility in America, for aristocrats wanting to escape the rising tide of democracy in their homelands.

38 Orestes A. Brownson was also loosely connected with Brook Farm. Like Isaac Hecker he became a Catholic but remained a layman and can be considered one of the most brilliant minds on the Catholic scene in nineteenth-century America. An outstanding conservative, he is now largely ignored by friend and foe. Cf. Doran Whalen, Granite for God’s House (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1941); Theodore Maynard, Orestes Brownson, Yankee, Radical, Catholic (New York: Macmillan, 1943); H. I. Brownson, Orestes Brownson, The Middle Life (Detroit, 1899); Lawrence Roemer, Brownson on Democracy and the Trend Towards Socialism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953). This volume gives us a good synthesis of Brownson’s political thought. His collected works were published toward the end of the nineteenth century in Detroit but have not been reissued since.

39 At the turn of the century Arthur Brisbane was one of the best-known American journalists. He worked for the Hearst press and, even more than Charles A. Dana and James G. Bennett Jr., drove his country into the sterile Cuban adventure. Hudson Strode in his Pageant of Cuba gave a good description of the journalist drive leading to American armed intervention.

40 Cf. Th. G. Masaryk, Zur russischen Geschiehts und Religionsphilosophie (Düsseldorf-Cologne: Eugen Diederichs, 1965. A photographic reproduction of the 1913 edition), p. 315.

41 Ibidem, pp. 335n., 362.

42 The importance of this novel cannot be overestimated. Cf. N. G. Chernyshevski, Shto dyelat’? (Moscow-Leningrad: Dyetgiz, 1950). The preface by N. Bogoslovski keeps close to the party line. Lenin called one of his most important pamphlets also Shto dyelat’! (“What to do?”)

43 The basic inhumanity of leftist thought, of the entire leftist mind, comes from and leads to madness. To view man as a merely gradually differing relative of termites, bedbugs, and earwigs, and to blueprint something as (virtually) dynamic as a society in the form of an arithmetic-geometric pattern inevitably leads to a nightmarish mentality, to insanity. On the pathology of egalitarianism cf. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke (London 1940), vol. 13, p. 134sq.

Chapter IX

1 Cf. Chapter VII, Note 129.

2 The Catholic Staatslexikon of the “Görres-Gesellschaft” (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1931), vol. 4, col. 476 says of him: “His broad intellectual interests, his untiring compassion, his life spent in purity and poverty all manifest the nobility of Proudhon’s character.”

3 Cf. J. P. Proudhon, Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire (Paris, 1849), p. 61. Again and again Proudhon dealt with the problem of God’s existence and hotly defended the Catholic position against Feuerbach. Cf. Daniel Halévy, “Proudhon d’après ses carnets inédits (1843-1847),” Hier et Demain (Paris: Sequana, 1944), no. 9, pp. 26-27.

4Cf. Henri de Lubac, Proudhon et le christianisme (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1945).

5 Cf. Constantin Frantz, Das neue Deutschland (Leipzig: Rossberg’sehe Buchhandlung, 1871), p. 375.

6 Cf. J. P. Proudhon, “Confessions d’un révolutionnaire,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1929), p. 353.

7 Voting by classes on the basis of educational levels, taxes or incomes continued in Europe right into the early twentieth century. Austria, for instance, introduced the one-man-one-vote system only in 1907, but still, earlier than Britain. Independent Rhodesia, timocratic rather than democratic, has two “classes” (“rolls”). Cf. State of Rhodesia, Democracy and the Constitution (Salisbury: Fact Papers, 1966), no. 8. (The new Constitution of 1970 is not basically different). George Bernard Shaw, a Fabian with very bright moments, said, “I do not see any way out of this difficulty as long as our democrats persist in assuming that Mr. Everyman is omniscient as well as ubiquitous, and refuse to consider the suffrage in the light of facts and common sense. How much control of the Government does Mr. Everyman need to protect himself against tyranny? How much is he capable of exercising without ruining himself and wrecking civilization? I think not. . . .” “It is a matter of simple natural history that humans vary widely in political competence. They vary not only from individual to individual but from age to age in the same individual. In the face of this flat fact it is silly to go on pretending that the voice of the people is the voice of God. When Voltaire said that Mr. Everybody was wiser than Mr. Anybody he had never seen adult suffrage at work. It takes all sorts to make a world, and to maintain civilization some of these sorts have to be killed like mad dogs whilst others have to be put in command of the State. Until the differences are classified we cannot have a scientific suffrage, and without a scientific suffrage every attempt at democracy will defeat itself as it has always done.” (Cf. his Everybody’s Political What’s What, London, 1944, pp. 45-46.) While these lines are being written, British socialism, at the behest of African potentates, is still trying to rein Rhodesia economically in order to enforce the one-man-one-vote system. Little it matters that those who will suffer most from the blockade (in which the totalitarian assassins of several continents participate) are precisely the people for whose benefit Rhodesia is being persecuted, the economically weaker element of Rhodesia, the Africans. Leftists almost always are pitiless and will sacrifice everything and everybody to their fixed notions.

8 Cf. Proudhon’s letter dated April 2, 1852.

9 Cf. Proudhon, “La solution du problème social,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, n.d.), vol. 6, p. 86.

10 Ibid., p. 75.

11 Ibid., p. 75.

12 Ibid., p. 56.

13 Ibid., p. 59

14 Ibid., p. 64.

15 Cf. P. J. Proudhon, “Du princip fédératif,” Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1959), pp. 34-35. Compare with Denis de Rougemont, “Gedanken über den Föderalismus,” Mass und Wert (Zürich), March-April 1940.

16 Cf. Proudhon, “Du principe fédératif,” p. 375.

17 Ibid., p. 334.

18 Ibid., pp. 302-303.

19 Cf. Proudhon, cited by Henri de Lubac, op. cit., p. 58.

20 Cf. letter to Robin, October 12, 1851, cited in Henri de Lubac, op. cit. p. 61n.

21 Cf. letter to A. Marc Dufraisse, cited by Emmanuel Mounier, Liberté sous conditions (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1946) p. 213.

22 Ibid., p. 214.

23 Cf. Proudhon, “Du principe fédératif,” pp. 355-356.

24 Cf. P. J. Proudhon, De la pornocratie ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1875).

25 As an ill man he went into exile to Belgium in 1858 and returned broken in 1862 to die three years later. He was befriended by Prince Joseph Bonaparte who, intellectually very active, was interested in “advanced ideas.”

26 Cf. Daniel Halévy, op. cit., p. 52.

27 Cf. Werner Blumenberg, Karl Marx in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlts Monographiem, 1962), p. 29.

28 Cf. Ernst Kux, Karl Marx—Die Revolutionäre Konfession (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1967), p. 15. The study of this St. Gallen professor is most valuable for the understanding of Marx. “His practice remains theoretical,” Kux adds, “He destroys only realms of ideas, of the spirit, of thought—not in order to replace them with superior constructions, but only for the sake of destruction.” (p. 25)

29 Cf. Heinrich Heine, “Geständnisse” in Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag), vol. 10, p. 180.

In this connection it should be noted that Marx’ criticism of the Hegelian philosophy (from which he borrowed liberally, if one-sidedly) is to a large extent based on the “romanticized” version of Heine’s Hegelian concepts. Cf. Ernst Kux, op. cit., p. 32.

30 Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, D. Ryazanov, ed. (Marx-Engels Institute: Moscow, 1930), vol. 3, p. 120.

31 Ibid., vol. 5, p. 22. “Everybody in whom dwells a Raphael should have a chance to develop” his art. Ibid., p. 372.

32 Ibid., vol. 1, part 1, p. 607. (“Zur Kritik der Hegeischen Rechtsphilosophie.”) The term Entfremdung (“alienation”), on the other hand, has first been used by Adam von Müller. Nietzsche might have been inspired by Marx’ “Superman” notion, while he copied the “God is dead” formula from Hegel.

33 Cf. Ernst Kux, op. cit., p. 127, note 181.

34 This attitude is dictated by an absolute belief in an automation of the historic process which the helpless individual cannot change. “Communism, for us, is not a situation which has to be created, an ideal, which reality will have to take into account. We call Communism a genuine motion which cancels the present state of affairs.” (Marx-Engels, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, p. 25.)

35 Ibid., vol. 5, p. 227. Vide also the preface to Das Kapital (Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1909) p. viii, on which the person’s lacking responsibility within the pattern of society is strongly emphasized.

36 Cf. Ernst Kux, op. cit., p. 85.

37 Cf. Polina Vinogradskaya, “Zhenni Marks,” in Novy Mir (Moscow), vol. 40, no. 3, March 1964, pp. 179ff.

38 Cf. Arnold Ruge Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter, Paul Nerrlich, ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1886), p. 381.

39 Cf. Carl Schurz, Lebenserinnerungen (Bis sum Jahre 1852) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1906), pp. 142-143. Yet this mixture of spite and arrogance is due to a ressentiment, as Eugene Ionesco rightly guessed when he wrote in his Journal en miettes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1967), p. 60. “Marx must have suffered from a secret wound to his pride, as did all those who wanted revolutions. It is this secret wound which he hides, consciously or not.”

40 Vide his essay “Zur Judenfrage” in Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften Siegfried Landshut, ed. (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1953), p. 171sq.

41 Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das kommunistische Manifest, Rosa Luxemberg, ed. (Vienna: Verlag der Arbeiterbuchhandlung, 1921).

42 The German for it is Gespenst which means “ghost,” “spook.” Specter is a much milder expression. The word “bourgeois” in Continental language implies rather the propertied, upper part of the middle class with a somewhat stuffy character. This subtle meaning of the term developed only gradually in the last two hundred years.

43 One ought to remember that Marx believed the proletariat to form the majority of most nations. If this were the case the rule, even the dictatorship, of the proletariat could be considered democratic. Democracy is majority rule.

44 To Marx, especially to the younger Marx, economics serve as an intellectual explanation, his aims and motives, however, always remain emotional. Gustave Thibon remarked rightly that “One should not forget that the totalitarian tyranny is a child of the humanitarian and democratic mystique. The former is not opposed to the latter as the illnesses to their remedies: We are dealing here rather with two successive but basically identical manifestations of the corruption of homo politicus.” Cf. G. Thibon, “Le risque au service de la prudence,” Etudes Carmélitaines, 24 year, vol. 1 (Spring 1939), p. 52n.

45President Roosevelt said that “In the hands of a people’s government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands of political puppets of an economic autocracy such power would provide shackles for the liberties of the people.” Cited by Garet Garrett, The Revolution That Was (Caldwell: Caxton Printers, 1945), p. 35. One really wonders about this logic. As if the American worker does not enjoy a far greater liberty than the “toiler” in the USSR.

If we look for a more extreme but still just formulation of the difference between free enterprise and socialism-communism, then we can say with Wilhelm Röpke that the final sanction in the former is the bailiff and in the latter the hangman. Cf. his Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1948), p. 147. This brilliant book of the late neo-Liberal thinker is still as timely as when it came out for the first time in 1942.

46 However, even “right-wing” countries show a rather obsolete tendency to “carve up” large estates, although it is by now an established fact that the future farming lies in large-scale farms; small ones, unless they are truck farms, are becoming increasingly uneconomic. Under Marshal Costa e Silva Brazil enacted an agrarian reform although no less than 5.5 million square kilometers are Federal Property, an area the size of Europe without the prewar Soviet Union.

47 Cf. Alexander Pauper (pseudonym for a high Austrian government official), “Was ist ein ‘Reicher’ ?” Die Industrie (Vienna), December 23, 1960. This author mentions here the statement of a budget committee of the United States Congress in 1957 to the effect that all income tax in excess of 50 percent yields only 2 percent of the income tax revenue or 1 percent of the total revenue of the United States. The situation in Sweden is not very different. We can read in a pamphlet entitled “The Role of Taxation in the Redistribution of Income in Sweden” (Edited by the Swedish Taxpayer Association, Stockholm, 1963) that only 6 percent of the tax revenue comes from progressivity (p. 5). A maximum rate of 25 percent would yield 80 percent of the present revenues (p. 6.) and only 1 percent of all income is redistributed by progressivity (p. 9). In 1962 the total income of the Swedish state from private persons in all forms was 16 billion crowns (one crown is about twenty U. S. cents): out of this the income tax accounts for 3.45 billion crowns. Less than 10 percent of this sum (315 million crowns) comes from those who are taxed at a rate of 25 to 45 percent, and only 1.5 percent (or 45 million crowns) from those in the top bracket, i.e., 45 to 65 percent (p. 7).

The nature of most tax systems in the Western world is demagogical rather than economical: there is the pressure exercised by the Socialist parties and the general belief that a radical redistribution of wealth would not only remove objects of envy (which it would), but also would improve the living standards of the lower classes (which it would not). Questions of this sort can only be answered by studying all-round statistics with paper and pencil. Were we (taking Alexander Pauper’s statistics into consideration) to confiscate the total income of every Austrian earning more than 1,000 dollars a month after taxation and hand to every Austrian every day his equal share of this, he could get 1.7 U. S. cents a day. Were we to have made in 1956 a somewhat similar regulation in Germany by confiscating everybody’s income above $250.00 a month, every German would have gotten from that jackpot a nickel a day! Cf. Ludwig Reiners Verdienen wir zu wenig? (Baden-Baden: Lutzey, 1957), p. 4. Reviewing the income structure of the United States we see that in 1960 the gross national income was about 100 billion dollars; of this wages and salaries account for about 65 billion, other payments for 10 billion, benefits for 5 billion, self-employed incomes for almost 12 billion (farms for 3.1 billion), the total unearned income moved around 6 percent and Americans of all walks of life shared in this. Cf. The National Industrial Conference, The Economic Almanack 1962 (New York), p. 115. Roughly the same picture emerges from Italy when we study the full page advertisement of the “Confederazione Generale dell’Industria Italiana,” Communication no. 2. in Gente, voi. 8, no. 48. (November 26, 1964). It shows the balance sheets of the thirteen biggest Italian companies. In 1963 these companies paid 44.5 billion lire in dividends but 526 billion lire for labor. Other sums went for taxes and reinvestments. These companies employ 258,000 people but have just over half-a-million shareholders. (Two of the companies paid no dividends.) If, for instance, there are really 5,000 millionaires in Mexico (in pesos of 8 cents, well understood) then the total egalitarian distribution of their wealth would give each Mexican the sum of eighteen U. S. dollars once and for all. Yet Mexico is one of the richest nations in the Latin-American community. Radical “social reforms” further south would have an even lesser effect. It is worthwhile to note that Europe’s leading Catholic sociologist, Father O.von Nell-Breuning, S.J., not at all noted for rightist leanings, has strongly denounced the idea that the masses can be made wealthier by expropriating the rich. (This, he insists, is equally true of the “underdeveloped nations.”) Cf. his “Kritischer Rückblick auf Quadragesimo Anno,” Zur Debatte (Munich, April 1972), vol. 2, no. 4, p. 3.

48 People with larger incomes are thus discouraged from engaging in additional enterprises and, under these circumstances, additional jobs and additional production are thwarted. Progressive taxation, in this way, is opposed to the common good.

49 The needless crisis of the American railroads is largely the result of the impossible labor situation with its excessive featherbedding. In Europe the railroads, in spite of government ownership, are constantly improved.

50 Cf. Karl Marx, Franz Borkenau, ed. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fisher Bücherei, 1956), p. 118. (Point 17 of the “Demands of the Communist Party in German,” published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.)

51 Cf. Louis Dupré, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), p. ix, “Marx’s early works represent one long struggle to detach Hegel’s dialectic method from his idealistic system; without a solid knowledge of both, Marx cannot be understood.”

52 A technological system of mass production will always go through a difficult period in its early stages, but in the world of free enterprise eventually the general levels will be raised. It is interesting to note that while every excuse was made by leftist intellectuals for the terrible sacrifices in connection with the Soviet Five-Year Plans, no such concessions were made for early capitalist enterprises in other parts of the world. “Getting ahead” always demand sacrifices and the question is only this: Are the sacrifices worth it or are they senseless? Will they or won’t they help to establish a way of production which assures a dignified way of life and a modicum of prosperity to all?

53 Curiously enough all big state combines and monopolies in the Soviet Union are officially called trusts (trēst) which, of course, is part of the Soviets’ morbid American fixation. When I told Soviet citizens that trusts in the United States are subject to prosecution, they could hardly believe me.

54 Cf. Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx (Stuttgart, 1902), Vol. 1, pp. 405ff. ; S. M. Dubnow, Die neueste Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920), vol. 2. pp. 508. Engels’ letter addressed to Marx on March 7, 1856 can be found in Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Third Series, Vol. 2, p. 122. Other anti-Jewish remarks of Engels can be found in Vol. 3, p. 192 and of Marx (all in connection with the hated Lassalle) in Vol. 2, pp. 365, 366, 371, in vol. 3, pp. 82, 84, 90, 91. (Lassalle was to Marx a “Jewish nigger.”) See also Arnold Künzli’s monumental karl Marx: Eine Psychographie (Vienna-Frankfort-Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1966).

55 Cf. Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “Do Jews tend towards Communism?” The Catholic World, November 1946, pp. 107-113. A certain trait in the Jewish character perhaps directs the attention of Jews towards all ideas pointing to the future. Ida F. Görres also remarks that Jews are frequently fascinated by the “shape of things to come.” Cf. her Zwischen den Zeiten. Aus meinen Tagebüchern 1951-1959 (Olten: Walter, 1961), p. 439.

56 Cf. Franz Werfel, Between Heaven and Earth, trsl. Maxim Newark (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), p. 202, no. 21.

57 Cf. Nathaniel Weyl, The Jew in American Politics (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1968), passim.

58 Cf. Edmund Silberner, Sozialisten zur Judenfrage, trsl. A. Mandel (Berlin: Colloquim, 1962). This richly documented book is largely a translation of Western European Socialism and the Jewish Problem (1800-1918): A Selective Biography. (Jerusalem, 1955).

59 Cf. Solomon N. Schwarz, “Anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union,” in Commentary (New York), June 1949. See also Samuel Gringauz, “Anti-Semitism in Socialism,” Commentary, (New York), April 1950. It is obvious, however, that the percentage of Jews in Marxist parties will be higher in areas where they are materially or socially depressed or oppressed. In the leadership of the French or Italian Communist Parties Jews were and are exceedingly rare. The same is true of Scandinavia. One ought to remember the fact that Western Europe’s refugee camps after 1945 were crammed with East-European Jews. Nazism was defeated—so why? Because these Jews (who wanted to go to Palestine) dreaded the return to Soviet-dominated areas! While America still enjoyed the Red honeymoon, they knew. It is their refusal to return where they came from (and by no means the specter of a dead Nazism) which “made” the state of Israel.

60 Cf. Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1939), p. 423, where that author mentions a dispatch of Walter Duranty, dated October 10, 1938, to the effect that Stalin up to that time had killed more Jews than Hitler. The North American Newspaper Alliance distributed this news, but the New York Times on October 11, 1938, omitted these lines about the murdered Jews.

61 Two stories are current about Jewish support for the Bolshevik Revolution. One deals with the “financing” of the Soviets by Kuhn, Loeb, and Schiff from New York. Yet why should a “capitalist” Jewish banking house be interested in the overthrow of a democratic republic? Cf. Walter Laqueur, Deutschland und Russland (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1965), pp. 105106. An earlier canard was a forged report, the so-called Sisson-Papers, according to which the German-Jewish banking house Warburg had financed the overthrow of the Kerensky Regime. Cf. George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp. 441sq.

62 Cf. Antonio Machado, Obras completas (México: Edición Seneca, 1940), p. 702.

63 Cf. Karl Marx, Die Frühschriften, p. 201. He sums up his thesis with the words: “The social emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of society from Jewry.” (Marx’ emphasis,) p. 209.

64 Cf. Dr. J. Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi, Fragen und Antworten für den Nationalsocialisten (Munich: Eher, 1932), p. 12. Alfred Rosenberg in one of his purple passages insisted that he who wants to be a National Socialist has indeed to be a Socialist in order to paralyze “international capitalism” and to overcome the narrow concept of private property. Cf. his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderte (München: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1943), p. 538. Hitler considered himself the “executor of Marxism” and repeatedly expressed his admiration for German Socialism whose methods he was ready to copy. Cf. Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler (Zürich-New York: Europa Verlag, 1940), pp. 174ff.

65 Cf. Waldemar Gurian, Der Bolschewismus, Einführunglund Lehre (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 1931), p. 187sq.

66 Cf. Ben Hecht, Erik Dorn (New York: Putnam, 1921), p. 381.

67 Cf. E. F. W. Tomlinson, Criterion (London), no. 46.

68 Nicholas I, Russian Emperor, was profoundly interested in this experiment. The reader is reminded that “social” and “socialistic” are by no means the same. Socialism rests primarily on the ownership of the means of production by “society,” i.e., to all practical purposes by the State. Sir Stafford Cripps, defending the Socialist viewpoint has said correctly in his book Towards Christian Democracy that the injustices men create for themselves can only be removed by the State, which is “in fact, accepted as the nearest we can get to an impartial judge in any matter.” Cf. John Jewkes, Ordeal by Planning (London: Macmillan, 1948), p. 210. This, naturally, is an honestly naive statement by a naive man. The often badly misused term “social” has very aptly been analyzed by Friedrich A. v. Hayek in brilliant and biting essay entitled: “Was ist und was heisst ‘sozial?’ “ in Masse und Demokratie (Erlenback-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch, 1957), pp. 71-84. He quotes approvingly Charles Curran in The Spectator (July 6, 1956, p. 8) who said: “Social Justice is a semantic fraud from the same stable as People’s Democracy.” Yet one must read this essay in its entirety to understand an argument which, at first sight, might shock pious hypocrites.

69 Bakunin’s position was severely shaken by his association with Sergey Nyechayev who had committed murder only to make himself more interesting and important. Since his crime had no strictly political character, he was arrested by the Swiss and extradited to Russia where he received a life sentence. The Nyechayev case was used as a theme by Dostoyevski in The Possessed (Byessy, also called The Demons). On Bakunin and Nyechayev cf. also Edward Hallett Carr, The Romantic Exiles (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1949).

70 According to certain rumors there exists in the vaults of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow an unpublished very anti-Russian manuscript from the pen of Karl Marx. On account of the purges in the 1930s many editors of the Gesamtausgabe have been jailed and killed and thus this still unfinished edition of the Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe underwent considerable difficulties. In Marx’ articles published by the New York (Daily) Tribune (1853-1856) his anti-Russian stand comes out clearly and prophetically.

71 Vide G. K. Chesterton’s outcry: “Aristocrats are always anarchists.” Cf. his Man Who Was Thursday (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1908), p. 190. There is, one should always bear in mind, a certain “anarchical” undercurrent in all genuine “rightist” thought. The French essayist Charles-Albert Cingria, flatly rejecting democracy, called himself “an anarchist of the extreme right.” Cf. Marcel Bisiaux, “C. A. Cingria,” in Arts (Paris), No. 419 (July 10-16, 1953), p. 5. To the Reformers, who were temperamentally disciplinarians and rigorists, the nobility was always a rather odd and unreliable estate. Cf. Luther in his “Table Talks,” Sämtliche Werke (Erlangen Edition), vol. 62, pp. 209-214. (No. 2751-2761). On Calvin and the aristocracy cf. Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1928), vol. 3, pp. 279-280.

72 It was perhaps the real misery conditioned by financial circumstances that caused the death of his only legitimate son, Edward (whom he did not particularly like), at the age of eight.

73 Cf. Werner Blurhenberg, op. cit., pp. 115-117.

74 Cf. Hans Frey er, Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1955), p. 119. Freyer points out that clever ideologies usually anticipate most criticisms and counter them with preventive arguments.

75 Cf. Otto Fürst Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke Petersdorff, ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1923-1935), vol. 15, p. 485, and Prinz Philipp zu Eulenburg, Aus fünfzig Jahren (Berlin: Paetel, 1923), p. 225. When William II once called the German Social Democrats “vaterlandslose Gessellen” (fellows without a fatherland), the outcry was great and the protestations vehement, but the rather undiplomatic words of the Emperor were merely a repetition of Marx’ statement in the “Communist Manifesto.” Cf. p. 132 of this book.

76 The picture of Winston S. Churchill as a leftist radical eager for nationalizations and the introduction of the Provider State in Britain is well drawn by Peter de Mendelssohn in his biography The Age of Churchill, 1874-1911 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), passim.

77 Professor Mark de Wolfe Howe, editing the Holmes-Laski Letters 1916-1935 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941) was forced to admit that Mr. Laski had not always stuck to the factual truth and had engaged in interesting inventions.

78 Hobson makes rather amusing reading. Thus he tells us in his Imperialism (1938 edition, p. 57): “Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European State, or a great State loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?” Similar nonsense can be found in Nazi textbooks. The economic explanation of history is a facile “false but clear” idea.

Chapter X

1 Cf. Edward Crankshaw, “Russia in Europe: The Conflict of Values,” International Affairs (Toronto), vol. 22, no. 4, October 1946, p. 509. A similar observation was made by Bruno Bauer, the ex-friend of Karl Marx in his Russland und das Germanenthum (Charlottenburg: Egbert Bauer, 1835), p. 12, and by Joseph de Maistre in his famous Quatre chapitres inédits sur la Russie, published by his son.

Analogous observations had been made about the Spaniards. Elie Faure thought that the Inquisition for them must have been a necessary evil, an “iron belt for this undisciplined people.” (Cf. his essay “L’âme espagnole,” La Grande Revue, vol. 33, no. 12, December 1929, p. 195.) It has been my thesis for a long time that the anarchical and “absolutistic” drives of the Catholic and of the Eastern Church nations make parliamentary democracy in the long run impossible because the latter must rest on a basic conformity. Ideally the various political parties (everywhere) should only be ins and outs. Vide the chapter “The Political Temper of Catholic Nations” in Liberty or Equality, pp. 179ff., Freiheit oder Gleichheit? pp. 285ff. The individualism and absolutism of the non-post-Reformatory nations results automatically in a variety of ideologically incompatible parties and factions without a common denominator. This speedily ruins a democratic republic while it is still bearable in a (constitutional) monarchy where the monarch has definitely the last word and acts as a unifying force. Hence the abortive effort of America and Britain (with their great uniformity and readiness to compromise in the field of political thought) to make the countries of the “Old Church” safe for democracy. This George Washington and Alexander Hamilton knew very well indeed, witness the passage of Washington’s Farewell Address, drafted by Hamilton, in which the great President spoke about the dangers of a strong and violent party spirit leading finally to “the absolute power of an Individual” who, as “the chief of some prevailing faction,” will turn “his disposition to the purpose of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.” Washington concluded this passage with the words, “There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the Administration of the Government and serve to keep alive the Spirit of Liberty. . . . This within certain limits is probably true—and in Governments of a Monarchical cast, Patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of a popular character, in Governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged.” Cf. The Washington Papers, Saul K. Padover, ed. (New York: Harper, 1955), p. 317. For Hamilton’s draft cf. The Basic Ideas of Alexander Hamilton, R. B. Morris, ed., pp. 387-388.

2 Cf. N. S. Timasheff, “On the Russian Revolution,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 4, No. 3, July 1942, also citing Sir Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, London, 1939. Writes Timasheff, “The Russian peasants had received at the time of the liberation of the serfs more than half of the arable soil of Russia, namely 148 million hectares (versus 89 million which remained the property of the landlords and 8 million which were the property of the State). Half a century later, on the eve of World War I, the situation was quite different. Only 44 million hectares were still the property of the landlords, the rest, as well as about 6 million hectares of State land had been bought by the peasants.” (p. 295) It should be mentioned here that one hectare equals about 2.5 acres. The agrarian situation of Russia before the Revolution can also be gleaned from the article on “Russia, the Agrarian Question,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edition, vol. 31, pp. 402-403.

If we compare the agrarian situation of Russia with that of Britain we see that in the 1870s 5207 proprietors of more than 1000 acres owned over 18 million acres or 55 percent of the surface of Britain. Cf. Brockhaus Lexikon, 14th edition, 1898, Vol. 8, p. 493.

The history of the agrarian problem in Southern Italy is characterized by repeated agrarian reforms—under the Bourbons, under Joseph Bonaparte and Murat, under the Bourbon restoration and under the Fascists—and by a renewed concentration after redistribution. Absentee landlords became more numerous when a new urban class started to buy up land. Cf. Vincenzo Ricchioni, Le leggi eversive della feudalità e la storia delle quotizzazioni demaniali nel mezzogiorono (Istituto editoriale del mezzogiorno, n.p.n.d.), pp. 3-4: Romualdo Trifone, Feudi e Demani nell’ Italia meridionale (same publishing house), pp. 12-13.

3 Cf. Many a Gordon, Workers Before and After Lenin (New York: Dutton, 1941), pp. 428-430, and D. M. Odinetz and Paul Novgorodtzev, Russian Schools and Universities in the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929). Of special interest are the statistics on the class structure of the gymnasia (high school-colleges) on pp. 33ff.

4 This is true of the Russian classics of the nineteenth century. A Hungarian Communist who emigrated to Russia in the 1930s was told by a longtime German resident, referring to the Imperial Regime, “There was beastly brutality on the part of the working class, indeed, beastly brutality, but no haughtiness.” Cf. Erwin Sinkó, Roman eines Romans, Moskauer Tagebuch (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1969), p. 122. Cf. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, L’Empire des Tsars et les Russes (Paris: Hachette, 1889), Vol. 1, Chapter VI, 1-4. Ivan Sergeyevitch Aksakov wrote quite rightly that “to the Russian national feeling the contemptuous concept of the Greek demos or of the Latin plebs is entirely alien.” (Cf. the daily Moskva, February 10, 1867.)

5 Cf. Many a Gordon, op. cit. p. 17, mentioning Nisselovitch, Istoriya zavodno-fabritchnego zakonodatel’stva v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1883). Eugene Lyons, Workers’ Paradise Lost (New York: Paperback Library, 1967), p. 86, rightly points out the fact that the annual rates of Russian industrial output between 1885 and 1889 and again between 1907 and 1914 substantially exceeded the corresponding rate of growth during the same period in the United States, Britain, and Germany. Rapid development was a characteristic feature of the whole period from 1861 to 1914. This fact was also stressed by Lenin in his book Capitalism in Russia written in 1899. As to the agricultural domain, peasants owned 82 percent of all cattle and 86 percent of all horses. (p. 89)

6 Cf. Ilya E[h]renburg, “Lyudi, gody, zhizn’,” Novy Mir, Vol. 41, No. 4, April 1965, p. 74.

7 In the years 1945-1946 sugar was still a great rarity in the USSR and people begged the prisoners-of-war for a piece of sugar. The P.O.W.s in many parts of Russia were better fed than the population: they were, after all, potential propagandists for communism in their homelands.

8 Cf. William H. Chamberlin, in Confessions of an Individualist (London, 1940), p. 102, “I have outlived a good many early enthusiasms, but my respect and admiration for the prewar Russian intelligensia grew steadily while I lived in Moscow.” Yet this Russian Intelligentsiya (to which Lenin also belonged) had a truly ascetic, nay, monastic character, which is a good breeding ground for the leftist outlook. Cf. S. I. Frank, “Etika nigilisma” in Vyekhi, 1909, reprinted by Possev Publishers, Frankfurt, 1967.

9 The abbreviation of their party was until a decade ago WKP[b]—All-Union Communist party (bolsheviks). They have dropped the “b” in brackets.

10 The lower nobility (dvoryane) had no formal titles but could be wealthy or poor. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, is descended from a family of rich dvoryane. Cf. his Conclusive Evidence (New York: Putnam, 1967). On the revolutionary tendencies of the nobility, old or new, poor or affluent, cf. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, op. cit. Vol. 1, VI, 2 and VI, 4.

11 Cf. Comte Joseph de Maistre, Quartre chapitres inédits sur la Russie, Comte Rudolphe de Maistre, ed. (Paris: Vaton Frères, 1859), p. 27.

12 Lenin was the son of a high school-college inspector who had received the hereditary title of nobility. In Moscow’s Lenin Museum we find his passport issued by the Police Prefect of Pskov, dated February 28, 1900, in which Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov is described as “hereditary nobleman.” According to Louis Fischer (“Die ungleichen Brüder,” Der Monat, Berlin, Vol. 17, No. 203, August 1965, p. 5). Lenin’s father’s mother was an illiterate Kalmyk. His paternal grandfather, according to Fischer, was a “Great Russian” from Astrakhan, but I think that the name Ulyanov is probably of Mongol-Kalmyk (not of Tartar) origin. According to C. J. Renstedt’s Kalmyk Dictionary (Kalmückisches Wörterbuch) published by the Finnish-Ugrian Society in Helsingfors, 1935, p. 454, ula, ulu means mountain, hill. (In Mongolian ulan means “red”!) The Russian ending for Asian names is quite frequent. Robert Payne in his The Life and Death of Lenin (London: Pan Books, 1967), p. 39, makes the case that the name Ulyanov is frequent among the Chuvash tribe. “He was German, Swedish and Chuvash and there was not a drop of Russian blood in him” (p. 47).

Lenin’s mother was a Lutheran German-Russian, daughter of a Dr. Blank, a physician and fairly wealthy landowner. According to Stefan Possony, Lenin, The Compulsory Revolutionary (Chicago: Regnery, 1964), p. 3, Alexander Dimitriyevitch Blank also belonged to the nobility. From childhood on, Lenin spoke German very fluently with his mother and aunt. Interestingly enough, the Bolshaya Sovyetskaya Entsiklopediya (1956), Vol. 44, p. 216, has half a column about Lenin’s mother but does not give her maiden name. She died in 1916 and it is admitted even in Communist circles that this very distinguished-looking lady did not share her sons’ political views.

Alexander, the eldest, a member of the terroristic Narodnaya Volya, had been executed because of his participation in an abortive attempt to assassinate Alexander III, but Vladimir Ilyitch was a prize pupil in an academy for young noblemen and earned a gold medal. His wife, by the way, was the Socialist daughter of an officer also belonging to the nobility, and he married her in an Orthodox church. Yet while many Soviet artists painted moving scenes from Lenin’s life (as, for instance, his dramatic parting from his “unconverted” mother), nobody so far portrayed his wedding with crowns held over the heads of bride and groom.

Vladimir Ilyitch Ulyanov, who used the pen name Lenin (but never called himself “Nikolai”), was born in Simbirsk, today called Ulyanovsk. This was also the birthplace of Gontcharov who in his novels described the inane life of the Russian gentry, and of Kerensky who went to the gimnaziya where Lenin’s father was principal. Lenin, born in 1870, died in 1924, while Kerensky, born in 1881, died in the early 1970s in the United States.

13 Cf. Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: Dell, 1969), p. 514ff. Here we find a description of the ghastly and ghoulish death of the Emperor and his wife. Michael the first Romanov was elected Czar while staying with his mother at the Ipatiev Monastery near Kostroma. The house in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) where the imperial family was slaughtered belonged to a merchant by the name of Ipatiev.

14 Ibid., p. 457.

15 On Pyotr Arkadyevitch Stolypin cf. M. P. Bok, Vospominaniya o moyem ottsye P. A. Stolypinye (New York: Chekhov Publishers, 1953).

16 Cf. Fëdor Stepun, Vergangenes und Unvergängliches aus meinem Leben 1884-1914 (Munich: Josef Kösel, 1947), pp. 228-229.

17 In Britain (or in America) the phrase “an ambitious young man” is rather laudatory. Un jeune ambitieux in French (or in any Continental language) is devastating.

18 Cf. Fëdor Stepun, op. cit. p. 73. There Stepun asks the pointed question, “How could a liberal regime have any permanence if a man like Maxim Gorki, after a political banquet in 1905, could succeed in making the representatives of the business world and industry donate over a million rubles for the continuation of the Revolution and thereby for their own expropriation?” We, however, know of similar stupidities committed in the Western world by people whom Lenin liked to call “useful idiots.” Such “useful idiots” were very frequent in the Russian clergy and today are to be found in the West as well.

19 Witness the complaint of Styepan Trophimovitch in Chapter 1, 6 about the evolution and change of his original ideas and ideals. This particular novel is unobtainable in the USSR—except as a volume in his collected works. And this is part of the reason why people will wait in line for days to buy the rather limited edition of his collected works, issued once every ten or fifteen years.

20 Dostoyevski, too, belonged to the (newer) hereditary nobility. He was deprived of his rank after receiving his death sentence (and the subsequent jail term), but was reinstated after his return from Siberia. There exists in Moscow’s Dostoyevski Museum a copy of his passport where he figures in a German version as “von Dostoyevski.” The Recollections of a Death House, Dostoyevski’s great classic, depicts a terrible state of affairs, but a book such as Anatoli R. Marchenko’s My Testimony gives with its description of torture and cannibalism an infinitely more frightening picture of post-Stalin prison camps in European Russia. More impressive because on a higher literary level is Alexander Solzhenytsin’s The First Circle in which a comparison is drawn between Soviet and old Russian jails where (with reference to the Recollections of Dostoyevski) the latter are made to appear idyllic. Ilya Ehrenburg told me very interestingly about his experiences in a Russian jail when at the age of 17 he was imprisoned for conspiratorial activities in his gimnazia. “Was it very uncomfortable?” I inquired. “No, not particularly. We all only suffered from a lack of sleep.” “Endless interrogations?” “By no means,” he replied. “But the director was interested in political and philosophical questions, so he brought the samovar to the ‘politicals’ and among endless cups of tea we had interminable discussions until the small hours of the morning.” Leon Trotsky, if we give credence to his memoirs, had an equally charming recollection of his jailers. About the comforts and amenities of Lenin’s exile in Shushenskoye see also Bertram D. Wolfe’s truly excellent Three Who Made a Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 155-157.

21 Cf. Dmitri Myerezhkovski, Tsarstvo Antikhrista (Munich: DreiMasken Verlag, 1919), p. 231.

22 Cf. V. Rozanov, “Apokalipsis nashego vremeni,” Vyersty (Paris, 1927), No. 2.

23 Communism—where everybody gets goods “according to his needs”—is a state of society so unimaginable that we can safely discard this Utopian vision from our speculations. Either needs are desires, or they are “fixed” by our fellowmen who thus become our superiors. This again is the “secularized monastery.” Yet the Communists still have sympathy and admiration for “Utopian socialism,” as witness the articles on Campanella and Morelly in the Bol’shaya Sovyetskaya Entsiklopediya, (1954) Vol. 19, pp. 545-546, and Vol. 28, p. 297.

24 Men such as Lenin, Chicherin, Lunacharsky, Dzerzyński, Tukhachevski, Mayakovski, Plyekhanov, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexandra Kollontay, to name just a few. Without the collaboration of the lesser nobility in the bureaucracy the Communists would hardly have survived their first decade. Cf. Galina Berkenkopf, “Russische Elite als Wegbereiter und Opfer des Oktober” in Ostprobleme, 19 Year, No. 22-23 (Nov. 17, 1967), pp. 609-613.

25 In Finland the “Red General” Antikainen reportedly boiled in a kettle all students serving in the White army who fell into his hands. He had a special dislike for them. The female Red regiments in Finland, operating in the Tammerfors (Tampere) region, were also dreaded for their abysmal cruelty to male prisoners.

26 The Jewish student Kannegiesser murdered the founder of the Tshe-Ka, Moses Uritzki, because he considered him a blot on the Jewish name. The Tshe-Ka was then taken over by the Polish nobleman (szlachcic) Feliks Edmundowicz Dzerzyński, son of a landowner, who later became the head of the Railroad Commissariat. The Tshe-Ka was then renamed G.P.U. (“Governmental Political Administration”).

Fanya Kaplan, who tried to assassinate Lenin, was also Jewish. So was Judas Mironovitch Stern, who tried to kill the German diplomat von Twardowski in Moscow. Stern considered German aid to the Bolsheviks as fatal for Russia. On Fanya Kaplan cf. Stefan Possony, op. cit. p. 289, and Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 599.

27 Stalin also complied with Hitler’s request to hand over a number of leading German Communists who had fled to the Soviet Union. One of them, Heinz Neumann, had been murdered in an earlier purge by the wily Georgian. His widow, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was extradited in early 1940 to the Nazis after she had spent years in Soviet concentration camps. She then landed in Ravensbrück, a Nazi “K.Z” for women (and, to give the Devil his due, far more luxurious than its Eastern counterparts). The account of her sufferings under Red and Brown beasts is one of the great books of our time. Cf. Margarete Buber-Neumann, Als Gefangene by Stalin und Hitler (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1962), originally Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1958.

28 We discount the rather widespread thesis that communism is just another form of “eternal Russian imperialism.” Nor, to be sure, were the Nazis just “successors of Frederick the Great.” Of course, Russian nationalist feelings may not be entirely alien to a Russian Communist, and officers of the Imperial army (Tukhachevski, Shaposhnikov, Brussilov) have fought in the Red Army against “foreign interventionists.”

Chapter XI

1 Cf. Benito Mussolini, Il Trentino veduto da un socialista (Florence: Casa Editrice Italiana, Quaderni della Voce, 1911).

2 Mussolini, aged 21, translated Les paroles d’une révolté of the Anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin. He wrote (as Duce), “Twenty years have passed by, but the Paroles seem quite recent, so alive are they with present-day interests. . . . They overflow with a great love for oppressed mankind.” Cf. Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1951), Vol. 1. p. 50.

3 The most radical of the whole lot—so radical that they were persecuted even by Zižka and his Taborites—were the Adamites who practiced nudism, the community of women and property. Zižka massacred them wholesale in 1421. Cf. also K. V. Adámek, “Adamité na Hlinecku v XIX věku,” Casopis Ceského Musea (Prague, 1897), part 48. Adámek describes here the revival of the Adamites as a result of the Toleration Law of Emperor Joseph II in the eighteenth century, documenting the tenacity of this weird sect. Cf. also Josef Dobrowsky, “Geschichte der böhmischen” Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prague, 1788). The main source for the entire period is Magister Laurentius de Březina (or Březowa). De gestis et variis accidentibus regnis Boemiae 1414-1422 which can be found, edited by Dr. Karl Höfler, in the series “Geschichts-schreiber der hussitischen Bewegung,” Part I in Fontes rerum Austriacarum (Vienna, 1856).

4 Cf. Willy Lorenz, Monolog über Böhmen (Vienna: Herold, 1964), p. 30.

5 Cf. Andreas de Broda, “Tractatus de origine Hussitarum,” Fontes rerum Austriacarum (Vienna), Vol. 6, pp. 343-344.

6 Cf. Louis Leger, Nouvelles Etudes Slaves (Paris: Ernest Lerouex, 1886), p. 159.

7 Cf. Dr. Paul Tóth-Szabó, A cseh-huszita mozgalmak és uralom története Magyarországon (Budapest: Hornyánszky, 1917), p. 50.

8 While the influence of Marsiglio of Padua on Wyclif was considerable. Cf. Note 43.

9 Cf. E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Freiheit oder Gleichheit? p. 328ff.

10 Cf. Josef Pekař, Zižka a jého doba (Prague: Vesmir, 1927), 2 vols. Also Kamil Krofta, Zižka a husitská revoluce (Prague: Laichter, 1936); Th. G. Masaryk, Jan Hus, Naše obrozeni a naše reformáce (Prague: Laichter, 1925); Alois Hajn, Jan Hus a jého vyznam v době přitomně (Prague: Svaz Národniho Osvobozeni, 1925); František Palacký, Dějiny národu českého w Cachach a w Morawě (Prague: Tempský, 1877), Vol. 3.

11 The Los-von-Rom-Bewegung (“Away from Rome Movement”) was a concentrated effort by the Austrian Evangelicals to convert Catholic German-Austrians to the Lutheran faith. This allegedly religious action had a strongly nationalistic flavor and enjoyed the financial support of the “Gustav Adolf Verein” centered in Germany. Georg von Schönerer, Hitler’s mentor, had been intimately connected with the movement, which scored its greatest successes (roughly in the 1895-1910 period) among the Germans of Bohemia and Moravia.

12 Cf. J. Evola, Gli uomini e le rovine (Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ascia, 1953), pp. 106ff. The same view has been expressed by Guglielmo Ferrero in Pouvoir. Les génies invisibles de la cité (New York: Brentano, 1942), p. 297.

13 Cf. Massimo Rocca (Libero Tancredi). Come il fascismo divenne una dittatura (Milan: Edizioni Libraria Italiana, 1952), p. 329. Rocca insists that Mussolini, upon higher orders, was never sent to the front lines, whereas the King always courageously visited the trenches.

14 Cf. Jean-Jacques Chevalier, Les grandes oeuvres politiques de Machiavel à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1949), p. 331.

15 Cf. Giulio Evola, Il fascismo (Rome: Volpe, 1964), pp. 53-54. Most important for a knowledge of fascism and Mussolini’s mind is the Duce’s personal contribution to the Enciclopedia Italiana, i.e., the article “Fascismo.” (Cf. Enciclopedia Italiana de scienze, lettere ed art, 1932, Vol. 14, Part II. Mussolini invokes as “ancestors” of fascism Sorel, Péguy, and Lagardelle, but rejects de Maistre, (pp. 848, 850). Péguy was the great patron saint of the résistance during World War II, but one of his sons publicly adhered to the Pétain regime which shows how arbitrary the interpretation of an original thinker can be.

16 Fascist Italy’s privilege (the diarchy of King and Leader) which Nazi Germany tragically lacked was strongly underlined by Pietro Silva in his Io difendo la monarchia (Rome: Fonseca, 1946), pp. xii ff.

17 Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 303.

18 In V. Dudintsev’s novel Nye Khlyebom yedinym (“Not by Bread Alone”), published in Novy Mir (Moscow, 1956), Vol. 32, No. 8, 9, 10, the bureaucratic villain, factory director Drozdov, refuses to lead a private life. He has no time. “We have to overtake capitalist America,” is his constant excuse. Posters all over the Soviet Union show the comparative strength and progress of both countries, the USSR and the U.S.A.

19 We find the best description of the tenuous relationship between the Catholic Church and Italian Fascism in Daniel A. Binchy’s Church and State in Fascist Italy (London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).

20 As a young man, Mussolini confessed to his wife that he had been an atheist, yet he affirmed in his last letter to her that he now believed in God. Cf. Gino de Sanctis, “La vedova dell’impero,” L’Europeo, November 30, 1947, p. 9. The Duce also seemed to have a curious respect for the Papacy. To the French journalist Lucien Corpechot, a Maurassien, Mussolini shouted in reference to the headline “Non Possumus” in the Action Française: “Who dares to say non possumus to the Pope? One just does not say non possumus to the Pope!” Cf. Adrien Dansette, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine (Paris: Flammarion, 1951), Vol. 2, p. 595.

21 On the Spanish Falange, cf. Bernd Nellesen, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, der Troubadour der spanischen Falange (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1965). Important, however, are not only the writings of Primo de Rivera (Obras completas, Madrid, 1942) but also those of the Falange’s cofounder Alfonso Garcia Valdecasas. The Rumanian Iron Guard, on the other side, had an essentially religious basis. Its strong anti-Judaism had no racist foundation. An authoritative work on this interesting, partly even fantastic movement, has not yet been written. (Most of the sources could be found only east of the Iron Curtain, though much has been destroyed.) Due to its strongly religious (Eastern Church) outlook, the strain of idealism was stronger than in the other totalitarian movements. Sternly repressed by Carol II, it had many martyrs, but it also produced a brutality all its own.

22 Cf. Victor Serge, “Pages de Journal, 1945-1947,” Les Temps Modernes, Vol. 4, No. 45, July 1949, pp. 78, 79. Ernst Nolte in his Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Pieper, 1963), p. 300 shows very clearly how the aging Mussolini’s Repúbblica Sociale Italiana returned to his old ideals—Mazzini, Garibaldi, republicanism, and socialism.

23 Cf. Massimo Rocca, op. cit. p. 359.

24 Ibid., p. 360.

25 Cf. “Le confessioni di Vittorio Mussolini,” Il Tempo (Rome), Vol. 5. February 23, 1948, p. 2.

26 Cf. Giulio Evola, Il Fascismo, p. 32. The formula used by Abraham Lincoln in terminating the Gettysburg Address is supposedly taken from Wyclif. Carefully going through Wyclif’s writings, I could not find it, though these words somewhat reflect the spirit of Wyclif’s political thinking during a certain phase of his life. They are definitely Marsiglian.

27 Cf. Jules Romains, “Le tapis magique,” Vol. 25 of Les hommes de bonne volonté (Paris: Flammarion, 1946), p. 151. Unfortunately Americans were taught by the press that fascism and Nazism were “aristocratic.” Take, for instance, Harold Rugg in Democracy and the Curriculum (New York: Appleton Century, 1939), p. 524, “Thus the word fascism as currently used is really only a name for the characteristic method of government by the ‘best people’ . . . the leading citizens.” As to the anti-Nazi novels manufactured in Britain and, above all, in the United States, they rarely lack a leading noble Nazi. The names of authors such as Sir Philip Gibbs, Ethel Vance, Louis Bromfield, Kressman Taylor, Ellin Berlin, and Nina Galen come to one’s mind. Lillian Hellman even invented a Nazi Rumanian count(!)—all a hangover from World War I. Professor Helmut Kuhn (Munich) is only too right when he speaks about four groups of victims—the Jews, the Rich, the Nobles, the Priests. Cf. Der Staat (Kösel, Munich, 1967), p. 443. (It was worse for those who belonged into more than one of these categories.) Nazism, F. Reck-Malleczewen, wrote, op.cit. p. 180, was indeed the revolt of postmen and elementary school teachers.

Chapter XII

1 Cf. Ceskoslovenská Vlastivěda, Part 5, “Stat,” Emil Capek, ed. (Prague: Sfinx, 1931), p. 479. Here we read that the National Socialist Czechoslovak Party rests on the religious and social traditions of Hussitism.

2Cf. Masarykův Ottimagev Naučný (Prague, 1925), Vol. 1. p. 1129: See also the article of Karel Slavíček in Ottův slovńik naučný nové doby (Prague: 1936), Vol. 4, p. 437 as well as the earlier edition of the same work, Ottův slovnik naučný (Prague, 1909), Vol. 28, pp. 984-985. Further consult Slovńik národnohospodářsky, sociálni a politický (Prague, 1933), Part iii, pp. 515-516.

3 Czechoslovak Sources and Documents (Prague: Orbis, 1936), No. 9.

4 Cf. Th. G. Masaryk, The Making of a State, Wickham Steed, ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927), p. 439, and Wickham Steed, “A Programme for Peace,” in Edinburgh Review, 1916, (separate reprint).

The anti-Jewish Czech riots in Prague are mentioned by Hermann Münch in Böhmische Tragödie (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1950); and H. Münch, “Panslawismus und Alldeutschtum” Neues Abendland (Munich, July 1950), Vol. 5. No. 7, p. 278. German-speaking Jews in 1945 were forced by the Czechs to exchange their Star of David (enforced by the Nazis) for a Swastika which now became de rigeur for the Sudeten-Germans. Yet while these Jews were “racially Semites” in Nazi eyes, they were now “ethnically German” from a Czech viewpoint—the tragicomedies of an identitarian age!

5 Cf. A. Ciller, Vorläufer des Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Ertl, 1932), p. 135.

6 Cf. Karel Engliš, “Le ‘socialisme allemand’: Programme du parti allemand des Sudètes,” in Sources et Documents Czechoslovaques (Prague: Orbis, 1938), No. 46, p. 59. Further references to that period: Ingenieur Rudolf Jung, Der nationale Sozialismus. Seine Grundlagen, sein Wedegang, sein Ziele (Munich; Deutscher Volksverlag, 1922); Dr. Karl Siegmar Baron von Galéra, Sudetendeutschlands Heimkehr ins Reich (Leipzig: Nationale Verlagsanstalt, 1939); Hans Krebs, Kampf in Böhmen (Berlin: Volk und Reich Verlag, 1936); Hans Krebs, Wir Sudetendeutsche (Berlin: Runge, 1937); Hans Knirsch, Aus der Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung Altösterreichs und der Tschechoslowakei (Aussig, 1931).

Vide also Andrew Gladding Whiteside’s analysis of early National Socialism: “Austrian National Socialism was in essence a radical democratic movement: its official programs and propaganda emphasized social and economic equality, popular sovereignty, opposition to traditional authority, and radical changes in the existing order. Its appeal was to the poor, to the workers in ill-paid jobs, to the underdogs. National Socialism’s first political program had been based on the Linz program, whose principles had by 1900 been accepted by all Austrian German democratic parties” (The Linz program refers to the Social Democratic program). Cf. A. G. Whiteside, Austrian National Socialism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 112.

7 Cf. A. Ciller, op. cit. p. 141. Of interest in this connection are also the revealing memoirs of Franz Langoth, Kampf um Osterreich, Erinnerungen eines Politikers (Wels: Welsermühl, 1951). Langoth was an old Pan-German, republican, anticlerical fighter in the tradition of 1848 who died in his nineties in 1952. In his book we can clearly see the interconnection between nascent National Socialism and the “black-red-gold” heritage of the “forty-eighters” who fought the internationalism of the Hapsburgs, the aristocracy, and the Catholic Church. Langoth became an ardent Nazi in a perfectly logical evolution of his ideas. As Aristotle has pointed out (Politics, III, viii, pp. 2-4) equality and hatred for the extraordinary man, the privileged person is the main postulate of democracy and, therefore, of all leftist thought.

8 Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the Pan-Europe Movement, frequently pointed out in the 1920s that the Jews were rapidly becoming Europe’s new aristocracy, a view not without foundation at that time. Yet at the same time the Jewry of Western Europe was rapidly dwindling owing to the triple losses through conversions, mixed marriages, and low birth rates. Without further immigration from the East the German Jews would have practically disappeared by the end of this century. The Jewish population of Germany in 1930 was only 0.9 percent. Juan Comas in his Racial Myths (Paris: UNESCO, 1951), p. 31, informs us that in Germany between 1921 and 1925 out of every 100 Jewish marriages, 42 had one gentile partner. In 1925 851 all-Jewish and 554 mixed marriages took place in Berlin. The Nazi mass-murders of Jews took place abroad.

9 This speech was published in the form of a leaflet.

10 In the op. cit. of Hans Krebs (Kampf in Böhmen) we find a reproduction of this proclamation. Another facsimile shows a swastika for the first time in the history of National Socialism. Yet the Nazi swastika is the reverse of the Hindu original and thus does not imply luck or success but certain doom. Baron Wilhelm Ketteler, Papen’s secretary in Vienna, pointed this out at a social gathering. (He was promptly murdered after the Anschluss.)

11 Cf. Josef Pfitzner, Das Sudetendeutschtum (Cologne: Scharffstein, 1938), pp. 23-24. Jules Monnerot in his Sociologie du communisme (Paris: Gallimard-N.R.F., 1949) pp. 395-396 affirms that modern tyranny must always combine the social (or socialistic) with the national appeal. Analogies between socialism and nationalism were already fully realized by Nietzsche. He considered both to be “dominated by envy and laziness,” the laziness of the head characterizing the nationalists, the laziness of the hands the socialists. Cf. his “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches,” Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 480.

Joseph Pfitzner was executed in Prague after World War II; Rudolf Jung, who played such a fatal role in the origins of National Socialism, died of starvation in Prague’s Pankrac prison. Cf. Dokuments zur Austreibung der Sudetendeutschen, Dr. Wilhelm Turnwald, ed, published by the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Wahrung sudetendeutscher Interessen,” 1951, p. 50. (Document No. 15) Goebbels called Jung “a fine head. With him one can collaborate.” Cf. Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, 1925-1926, Helmut Heiber, ed. (Stuttgart: Deutscher Verlagsanstalt, 1960) p. 64.

12 Cf. Konrad Heiden, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1933), p. 19.

13 Aussig (in Czech: Usti-nad-Labem) was the center of early National Socialism in Bohemia. Cf. Bei unseren deutschen Brüder in der Tschechoslowakei (Tübingen, 1921), pp. 38-39. (This is the collective report by a group of Tübingen students.)

In Aussig, after the retreat of the German armies, there took place the biggest spontaneous massacre of Germans in history. At least four times as many Germans were killed here by a Czech mob as Czechs by the SS in Lidice. Cf. Londynské Listy (London), Vol. 2, No. 14, July 15, 1948. Decent Czechs (like the publishers and editors of the aforementioned paper) condemned such beastly horrors.

14 About Streicher’s earlier career, cf. R. Billing. N.S.D.A.P. Geschichte eine Bewegung (Munich: Funk, 1931), p. 112.

15 Cf. Professor Dr. Fanz Jetzinger, Hitlers Jugend (Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1956), pp. 25-35; Hans Frank, Im Angesicht des Galgens (Neuhaus bei Schliersee: Brigitte Frank, 1955), pp. 320-321. Frank was the Nazi governor of Poland. He was executed after the Nuremberg Trial. Hitler’s illegitimate birth, however, was openly admitted in the Third Reich. Cf. Die ahnentafel des Führers. Ahnentafeln berühmter Deutscher, III (Leipzig, 1937), p. 39. In the most recent, so far “definitive” biography of Hitler by Werner Maser—cf. his Adolf Hitler (Munich: Bechtle, 1971)—the Führer’s Jewish ancestry is denied without, however, solving the riddle. The grandfather remains unknown and Hitler’s suspicion of his own “non-Aryan” ancestry not really challenged.

16 Hitler’s house of birth, a rather sinister building, now has on its ground floor the very symbol of half-education, a Volksbücherei, a popular library. The largest single professional group in the Nazi party, the elementary school teachers, were the real protagonists of this type of education. In France, however, the teachers traditionally veered towards the “laicist,” “radical socialist,” or Socialistic outlook; on the village level they were the sworn enemies of the priest. This development could clearly be seen in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. Carl Ernst Jarcke foresaw graphically this development. Cf. his op. cit., Vol. 4, p. 229.

17 Chancellor Brüning knew quite well (as he told me) the circumstances of the birth of Hitler’s father, but some other people “in the know” were murdered on and after June 30, 1934 in Bavaria. Of course, besides the reasons given us for Hitler’s hatred for his father there must have been a number of others: Hatred always stems from a feeling of inferiority and/or helplessness. The aged official (who was much older than Adolf and also considerably older than Adolf’s mother, his second wife) must have treated his dreamy, introverted, and odd son not only in a stern way, but must have criticized him frequently and, probably, very much to the point. Yet this is precisely what a person, tortured by an inferiority complex, cannot stand. It is always the truth which really hurts. Hitler fled his father, as he later fled Austria. When Hitler’s Minister Albert Speer saw a house with a memorial tablet in the village of Spital (Lower Austria) where Hitler’s father had been born, Hitler completely lost his balance and furiously demanded the immediate removal of the plaque. “Obviously, there was a reason,” Speer wrote, “why he wanted to eliminate a part of his youth. Today one knows about the lack of clarity concerning his family background which gets lost in the Austrian forest.” Cf. A. Speer, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Propyläen, 1969), p. 12. Hitler died with the conviction that the Germans were “no good” (as Mussolini came to consider the Italians) and he suspected that the English were really superior to them.

18 Cf. August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (Graz: Stocker, 1953). For the true understanding of Hitler this book is invaluable. Not uninteresting are the memoirs of Hitler’s commanding officer in World War I, Captain Fritz Wiedemann’s Der Mann, der Feldherr werden wollte (Velbert und Kettwig: Blick und Bild Verlag, 1964). Wiedemann writes that Hitler was not promoted (he remained a private first class), “because we could not detect in him qualities necessary for a leader.” (p. 26). A misjudgment? Not in the least, because military and political leadership are of an entirely different order. A general does not need to have rhetorical gifts, while demagogues often suffer from neurotic disorders. Masses are often swayed more by hysterical orators than by calm thinkers or soberly calculating managers. Hitler, moreover, as a nonstop talker, was decidedly unpopular with the other soldiers. Still, there are certain legends about Hitler which, thanks to the research of Werner Maser, we have to consider exploded. Hitler suffered material hardships only during a very short period of his life, he was very much a ladies’ man, he was a voracious (though unmethodical) reader, he had a very modest but steady income from his pictures, and never was a corporal, but only a private first class (Gefreiter). Not truly educated, he was nevertheless gifted in many ways. The mutual dislike between him and the General Staff grew even more after the outbreak of the war when he became increasingly a very sick man.

19 On the Continent four to five years of elementary school (the age group is five, six or seven to ten) are followed either by a dead-end school lasting three or four years or by a high school-college lasting eight to nine years and terminating in a bachelor’s degree. This school requires an entrance and a final examination. The universities have no colleges of the American pattern; they are graduate schools and impart no general instruction. The rather common belief that the junior and senior years of American colleges are the equivalent of the first two years of Continental universities is therefore quite erroneous. The Continental high school-colleges (liceo, lycée, Gymnasium, gimnazia, etc.) are of the classic, semiclassic, or scientific type. Hitler tried the scientific type and failed. (Hitler was always “scientific” and “antimetaphysical” in his outlook which reminds one of Morelly’s precept that only the experimental sciences should enjoy freedom in Utopia. Cf. Morelly, op. cit. p. 151, and chapters 4 and 5 of the Lois des Etudes.) It would be interesting to know whether the trend in favor of the Nazi ideology was more marked among those who had a classic rather than a scientific education. The American reeducators considered a classic education as breeding totalitarianism yet all indications point in the opposite direction. Nazism was a “biologism” and the tenor of Nazism distinctly “antimediterranean,” romantic rather than classic.

20 Up to the end of the monarchy there was no “German army.” Bavarians gave an oath of allegiance to the King of Bavaria, Hamburgers to the Senate of the Republic of Hamburg, etc. Some German states had their own postage stamps, and prior to the Third Reich there was no German citizenship except for the natives in the colonies. Diplomatic representatives were exchanged between Bavaria, Saxony, and Prussia until 1933.

21 Foreigners accepted by the civil service of a German state automatically received its citizenship. This is also true of university professors, even today. A Brazilian, for instance, receiving a chair at a German university immediately becomes a German citizen. In Europe multiple citizenship is not uncommon.

22 Hitler’s other fixation was for people whose names began with the letter “H” or one near to it in the alphabet, to wit, G, I, J, or K. Hitler also blindly believed in astrology, a fact known to the Allies. Thus, during the war, they were able to foretell some of his decisions based on the classic rules of astrology. (We are told this by Louis de Wohl who worked in London along these lines.) Hitler and other Nazi leaders surrounded themselves with clairvoyants and soothsayers. One of these, Erik Jan Hanussen, who foretold their victories as well as their final defeat, had to pay with his life for this forecast.

23 Cf. Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1962), p. 265, (originally Munich: Callwey, 1960).

24 This role of the demotic-democratic Führer has been stressed by Gottfried Neesse, Die Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei. Versuch einer Rechtseutung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1935), p. 145, and Max Irlinger, Die Rechte des Führers und Reichskanzlers als Staatsoberhaupt des Deutschen Reichen (Dissertation at Innsbruck University, 1939), p. 71. Cf. also Rodolphe Laun, La démocratie (Paris: Delgrave, 1933); Gerhard Leibholz, “La nature et les formes de la démocratie,” Archives de philosophie du droit et de sociologie juridique, (Vol. 6, (1936), No. 3-4, p. 135; Alfred Weber, Die Krise des moderne Staatsgedankens in Europa (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1925), pp. 139, 151; Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: Alcan-Presses Universitaires, 1939), pp. 93 ff.; Giulio Evola, Il fascismo, pp. 53-54 (on the incompatibility between ducismo, Führertum, and the ideals of the rightist outlook); Karl Thieme, Lixikon der religiösen Zeitaufgaben (Freiburg i. br.: Herderol, 1952) citing Baldur v. Schirach’s poem “Hitler” which sums up quite nicely the concept of the Führer:

You are many thousand people behind me,
And you are I and I am You.
I have never lived a thought
Which has not trembled in your hearts.
And if I form words, I do not know a single one
Which is not fused with your will.

There we have the volonté générale of Rousseau embodied in a single person—identity made flesh.

(German text)

Ihr seid viel tausend hinter mir
und ihr seid ich und ich bin ihr.
Ich habe keinen Gedanken gelebt,
Der nicht in euren Herzen gebebt.
Und forme ich Worte, so weiss ich keine,
die nicht mit euren Wollen eins.

25 Careful research seems to indicate, however, that the Lebensborne combined mating and parturition institutes, did not really exist in the narrow sense of the term. There were, to be true, Lebensborne in the form of maternity homes in which especially unwed mothers producing “purely Aryan” babies were most welcome. Yet the idea of Mutterhöfe, real mating and maternal institutions, really did come up and was proposed to Heinrich Himmler. Cf. Reichsführer! Briefe an und von Himmler, Helmut Heiber, ed. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970), pp. 346-347. What equally existed were stupid, idealistic girls who “donated a child” to the Führer. This nice phrase was also used under other circumstances. A Viennese Nazi in a relatively high position had a neurotic daughter in a private home. She was scheduled to be “liquidated” and the desperate father literally went on his knees before a top Nazi in Berlin to save his daughter. “Nanu,” the ogre exclaimed, “Don’t you want to donate your child to the Führer?”

26 Cf. Dr. Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1942, Pery Schramm, ed. (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1963).

27 Cf. Wilfried Daim, Der Mann, der Hitler die Ideen gab (Munich: Isar Verlag, 1958). This book by a well-known Viennese psychologist is richly documented.

28 On the Vertretertagungen in Salzburg, cf. Erich F. Berendt, Soldaten der Freiheit (Berlin, Etthofer, 1936), especially pp. 181-210.

29 Cf. Deutsche Arbeiter-Presse (Vienna), August 14, 1920.

30 After the Armistice (1918) General Ludendorff fled to Sweden wearing blue spectacles and with papers made out to “Herr Lindström.” Following his return he quarreled violently with Field Marshal von Hindenburg and joined Hitler’s Nazi party. After the abortive Putsch in Munich (November 1923) he fell out with Hitler and with his new wife, a physician, founded a semireligious, semipolitical league, the Tannenbergbund, based on the “cognition of God through the voice of the blood.” In his weekly, Ludendorffs Volkswarte, which saw conspiracies and secret societies everywhere, he accused Nazism of being Christianity in disguise, the swastika a mere mask of the Cross. This paper was suppressed in 1934 and Ludendorff died in 1937. With a mental horizon not transcending Germany he certainly was, if we remember his collaboration with Lenin, one of the gravediggers of Europe.

The Bavarian Prime Minister in November 1923, August von Kahr, was murdered in the Reichsmordwoche (1934), a pure act of revenge against an old man who opposed Hitler as much as Cardinal von Faulhaber did. Men such as Prime Minister von Kahr and General von Lossow are indirectly referred to in the lines of the party hymn, the Horst Wessel Lied: “Comrades who have been killed by the Red Front and Reaction are marching invisibly in our ranks.”

31 In Central Europe political delinquents (just like duelists) were jailed under the older dispensation in fortresses or so-called “state prisons.” There they had to be treated as gentlemen, addressed by their full titles, etc. They had the right to receive visitors at any time and their mail was not censored. In a fortress they were supervised by the army, not the police. The food came from the officers’ mess. The famous cartoonist Th. Th. Heine, who lived in Bavaria and published caricatures of William II, the “King of Prussia,” was arrested while making a trip through Prussia and received a six-month sentence for lampooning the Kaiser. He confessed afterward that he had never had such a wonderful opportunity for work. This form of detention naturally no longer exists in a democratic age averse to most forms of privilege. Political offenders now are treated as common criminals. “All criminals are equal.”

32 Cf. E. v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality, after p. 224, German edition after p. 336. The areas least Nazi were Upper Bavaria (with Munich!) and the Cologne-Aachen district. The areas most Nazi were Southern East Prussia, whose population is Polish but Lutheran. These maps are based on the elections of July 31, 1932. They feature the maximum of votes the Nazis received in truly free elections. The elections and plebiscites after Hitler’s ascent to power have little value for our purpose. The results were often “doctored.” Cf. Fritz Reck-Malleczewen, Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten (Stuttgart: Goverts, 1966), p. 183.

33 From this particular map, however, it also becomes evident that the demarcation line between the Soviet Zone and Western Germany was drawn carefully by the Soviets according to the local strength of the Communists in Germany’s last free elections. The Americans and the British, naturally, were not aware of this interesting circumstance.

34 Among non-Catholics regarding Luther as an important spiritual ancestor of National Socialism we find men such as Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Dean Inge, G. P. Gooch, Erich Fromm, Werner Hegemann, Franz Neumann, Karl Otten, et al. Cf. also Critique (Paris), No. 66, November 1952, containing an interesting review of a series of books dealing with the relationship between the Evangelical Church of Germany and National Socialism (pp. 981-996). The resistance of the Church against National Socialism, the dilemmas Christians had to face (in Germany much more so than in the occupied countries) are, in a way, not open to “historical research.” They can only be understood existentially and experimentally. For this very reason the books written by “fact finders” who did not live through this agony are almost worthless. Knowing the anatomy of a human being does not mean in the least knowing his person.

35 Cf. Martin Luther, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar Edition), Vol. 53, pp. 523 ff.

36 Cf. Philadelphia Record, April 30, 1946. Some German Evangelicals, confused by the issues and quite ignorant of the basic tenets of their faith, tried to work out an Evangelical-Nazi synthesis. Typical of these efforts is a book which exists in an English translation, Wilhelm Kraft, Christ versus Hitler? (New York: The Lutheran Press, 1937), particularly pp. 32 and 75. The confusion was even greater in Austria where the Lutherans felt by-passed and ignored by Dollfuss’ Christian-Corporate State of a distinctly Catholic nature and were hostile to the Hapsburg traditions. They often wanted the Anschluss because they preferred the status of a majority to that of a minority. And since they constituted in Austria a progressive (nonconservative), nationalistic, democratic, scientifically minded, “enlightened” element, they fell for Nazism much more easily than their Catholic fellow citizens. They were proud of this evolution as can be seen from two books, Die evangelische Kirche in Osterreich, Dr. Hans Eder, ed. (Berlin: Verlag des Evangelischen Bundes, 1940), and Pfarrer Endesfelder, Evangelische Pfarrer im völkischen Freiheitskampf der Ostmark und des Sudetenlandes (Berlin: Verlag des Evangelischen Bundes, 1939). Interestingly enough, an Italian Fascist, Giuseppe Gangale, in a book entitled Revoluzione Protestante (Turin, 1925) has made the case that fascism could only fruitfully cooperate with “Protestants,” but not with Catholics.

Yet in all fairness it must be said that there were German Lutherans and Calvinists who not only sentimentally, but also “theologically” opposed Nazism, and organized in the Bekenntniskirche (“Professing Church”) opposed the Brown creed no less than the “German Christians,” the traitors within the Evangelical Church. It is important to note, however, that these resisters had almost always a “neo-orthodox,” a conservative or fundamentalist background. The betrayal of Christian values and tenets was rife in the ranks of the modernists and relativists.

Catholics have supported the Fascists, the Pétain regime, Chancellor Dollfuss, or General Franco. There were and there still are Catholic Socialists. There were also Catholics who thought that they could “square” their religion with the milder forms of National Socialism, but there exists no Catholic-Nazi “literature” on this subject.

37 The reader is reminded of the fact that the Weimar Edition of Luther’s Collected Works comprises well over eighty volumes of at least 250,000 words each. I am proud that I have read more than one-fourth of this colossal work.

38 The Low German dialects are spoken north of a line stretching from the Belgian border to Silesia. South of it are the High German dialects. High and Low refer to altitudes above sea level, not to classes. Thanks to Luther’s choosing the idiom used in the Thuringian-Upper Saxon area for his translation of the Bible, this High German dialect became the basis of literary German. Dutch is essentially Low German, English (“Saxon”) is also derived from Low German, and Low German is taught in certain North German schools twice a week. There are also literary works published in Low German.

39 Thus my own record according to the broadcast. The official text, as so often with Hitler’s speeches, shows minor deviations.

40 Cf. John Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg, the Wooden Titan (London: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 353-368. Dr. Brüning confirmed to me the veracity of this account. Churchill too lamented the fall of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs which resulted in the rise of the Nazis. Cf. Winston S. Churchill The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1948), Vol. 1. pp. 21, 49-50.

41 During the War a Hungarian refugee in America wrote a book on Papen called The Devil in Top Hat. Actually, the intellectual acumen of Papen was so minute that people took his lack of intelligence as a ruse, as a guise for shrewdness. His own family considered das Fränzchen their least gifted member to put it mildly. They had indeed no illusions. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Papen’s so-called “intrigue” was entirely in keeping with the Constitution. Giselher Wirsing in “Der Herrenreiter in Morast,” Christ und Welt, Vol. 5, No. 45, November 6, 1952, p. 4, could write without danger of refutation, “It was the irony of history that Hitler’s ascent to power was perfectly legal and that every effort to prevent it, would have been illegal as, for instance, a coup of the army. Had such a move taken place no more than 100 out of 584 deputies would have backed General von Schleicher, and in any case, certainly not the Social Democrats.”

Papen in his own memoirs—Der Wahrheit eine Gasse (Munich: Paul List, 1952)—tries to whitewash himself but the account of the events leading to the fateful January 30, 1933 is basically correct.

Leopold Schwarzschild, a German liberal refugee, warned Americans during the last war about their misconceptions relating to Nazism: “The master-race idea did not originate in the ruling class but was wedded to the democratic tendencies of the period . . . readiness to accept such ideas showed up first in the “people” . . . . It is wrong also to ascribe the growth of the Nazi movement preponderately to the money of the wealthy Hitlerites . . . . The democratic process was not falsified. It actually worked in Hitler’s favor.” Cf. his “Six Delusions about Germany,” New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1944. And socialism worked in the same direction, engendering “semifascist” views. It was socialism, not “Prussianism” that Germany had in common with Russia and Italy. This was strongly emphasized by Friedrich A. von Hayek in his The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), pp. 8-9.

42 As to the helplessness of the German army vis-à-vis a strongly Nazified working class. See Chapter XVII, note 23.

43 Cf. A. Hitler, Offener Brief an Herrn von Papen, dated Coburg, October 16, 1932, which was published in pamphlet form (Berlin, 1932). The phrase “workers of the forehead and the fist” is typical Nazi jargon. One has to remember the full name of the party. “National Socialist German Workers’ party.” The archetype in the Jungian sense was the worker. Only the misfortunes of the war alienated the worker from his party.

44 Cf. Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler (Vienna; Zürich: Europa-Verlag, 1940), pp. 119-120.

45 Ibid., p. 85. The Austrian Socialists inherited this anti-Hapsburg frenzy from the Nazis. But also in other domains they have loyally continued Nazi traditions—in the (German) marriage laws, the prohibition of Austrian titles of nobility, etc. Already in the pre-Anschluss period it was evident that they preferred Hitler to the Hapsburgs, the Anschluss to a Restoration. Cf. Victor Reimann, Innitzer, Kardinal zwischen Hitler und Rom (Vienna: Molden, 1967), pp. 80-81. The tenor of the Socialist leaflets was anticlerical and antimonarchist as those of the Nazis (pp. 46-47). Both parties were suppressed by the Dollfuss regime.

46 Ibid., p. 190.

47 Ibid., p. 174.

48 Ibid. Not only the anti-Hapsburg but also the anti-Catholic bias tied Hitler to the Marxists. Victor Reimann writes about the demonstration on Vienna’s Heldenplatz after the Anschluss where 200,000 people congregated—“Vienna’s anticlerical army consisting of National Socialists, Social Democrats, and Communists” who “celebrated the greatest triumph in their history. Into this mass of fanaticized priest-haters Reichskommissar Bürckel thundered the worst demogogical speech ever uttered on this square.” (V. Reimann, op. cit. p. 194).

49 Cf. Wilhelm Röpke, Civitas Humana (Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch, 1946), p. 268. On the inner connection between socialism and nationalism in Austria prior to 1914, cf. Dr. Paul Molisch, Die deutschen Hochschulen in Osterreich und die politischnationale Entwicklung nach dem Jahre 1948 (Munich: Drei-Masken Verlag, 1922), pp. 143-144. It is important to remember that the great Austrian Socialist leader Viktor Adler started out as a German nationalist, while Dr. Walter Riehl, cofounder of the D.N.S.A.P., was originally a Social Democrat. A biography whose purpose was to extol the merits of Dr. Riehl for the earliest Nazi cause is Alexander Schilling-Schletter’s Dr. Walter Riehl und die Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Leipzig: Forum Verlag, 1933). Here we can read, “Dr. Walter Riehl came to National Socialism over the detour of Social Democracy as so many of our leaders. The two sources of our idea chronologically following each other can be traced in crystal clearness until they flow together and constitute today one big turbulent river destroying everything rotten and decadent.” (p. 9.) Riehl’s program was a socialism free of Romish and Jewish influences. He was the great-grandson of a smith and the grandson of a student who in 1848 had fought on Vienna’s barricades for national democracy. His father was a lawyer like himself and a close friend of another leading Austrian Social Democrat, Engelbert Pernerstorfer, whom he called “uncle.” In November 1918, Riehl became director of the “Interstate National Socialist Chancellery of the German-speaking Territories.” From the Munich leader, Herr Drexler, he received a letter dated March 1, 1920, informing him that “a Herr Adolf Hitler” has been appointed propaganda manager (Webeobmann). Riehl and Hitler were on intimate terms and the leading German Nazi, Hermann Esser, called him even in 1933 a “Saint John of Hitlerism.” Yet Riehl resigned in Salzburg in August 1923, was expelled from the party in 1933 and was incarcerated by the Gestapo for some time after the Anschluss in spring 1938—another piece of jealousy and disloyalty so frequent in the history of leftist movements. Cf. Adam Wandruszka, “Osterreichs politische Struktur” in Geschichte der Republik Osterreich, Dr. Heinrich Benedikt, ed. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1954), pp. 406-408.

The famous Nazi slogan Blut und Boden (blood and soil) stems from the German Social Democrat August Winnig. Cf. his Das Reich als Republik 1918-1928 (Stuttgart and Berlin: Cottao, 1928), p. 3. Here one should not forget that both Marx and Engels were highly enthusiastic about Bismarck, convinced that he really was doing their work. Cf. Marx-Engels Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Series III, Vol. 4, p. 358.

50 Cf. Hermann Rauschning, op. cit. p. 177.

51 Ibid., p. 124. Jacques Ellul, op. cit. p. 290 writes, “Nazism, however, far from being opposed to Marxism, completes it and confirms it. It gives the solution to numerous problems of adaptation. Hitler’s methods stem directly from Lenin’s precepts, and conversely, Stalinism learned certain lessons about technique from the Nazis.” While Erwin Sinkó (op. cit., p. 200), until his death an unregenerated Communist, admits that there is a mutual infection of fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, John Lukács, though opposed to the term “Brown Communism” and “Red Fascism” insists that Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Nasser, Tito, Perón, Sukarno, Mao Tse-tung, etc. were all national socialists. The influence of the national factor on socialism has always been undervalued. Cf. his Historic Consciousness and the Remembered Past. (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 188.

52 Ibid., p. 265.

53 Cf. (Sir) Herbert Read, To Hell with Culture, No. 4 of the series “The Democratic Order” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1941), p. 49. Sir Herbert, born in 1893, was director of a London publishing company and had been professor of Fine Arts.

54 Cf. (Sir) Herbert Read, Politics of an Unpolitical (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul 1943), p. 4.

55 Speech on December 10, 1940, cf. Völkischer Beobachter, December 11, 1940.

56 Speech on November 8, 1938, cf. Völkischer Beobachter, November 10, 1938.

57 Speech on January 30, 1937, cf. Völkischer Beobachter, January 31, 1937.

58 Speech on May 21, 1935, cf. Völkischer Beobachter, May 22, 1935.

59 Cf. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Eher, n.d.), p. 99.

60 Dr. Paul Goebbels, speech on March 19, 1934, Cf. Völkischer Beobachter, March 20, 1934.

61 Dr. Paul Goebbels as quoted by Der Völkischer Beobachter, April 25, 1933.

62 Cf. Gottfried Neesse, op. cit. p. 187.

63 Cf. Michael Oakeshott, The Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1944), p. xvii. The notion that democracy is a form of government favoring only the poor and ignorant is old. St. Thomas Aquinas expressed it in his commentary of Aristotle. Cf. his Politicorum seu de rebus civilibus, Liber 3, Lectio 6. Also: Aristotle, Politics, V, viii, 6-7 and V, ix, 4 where Aristotle deals with the “low-class” character of tyranny and its democratic background.

64 Cf. interview in the Petit Journal (Paris), No. 25729, June 26, 1933.

65 Cf. Dr. Josef Goebbels, Der Nazi-Sozi. Fragen und Antworten für den Nationalsozialisten (Munich: Eher, 1932), p. 10. Goebbels wrote very candidly in his diary on October 23, 1925, “After everything is said and done, I would rather perish with bolshevism than live in the eternal slavery of capitalism.” Cf. Das Tagebuch von Josef Goebbels, p. 10. Not much later he confessed, “The destruction of Russia means that the dream of a National Socialist Germany would have to be buried once and forever.” Cf. Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, (Munich, January 15, 1926.

66 Cf. Der Hochverratsprozess gegen Dr. Guido Schmidt vor dem Volksgericht, Die gerichtlichen Protokolle, (Vienna: Osterreichische Stattsdruckerei, 1947), p. 356.

67 For a background study, cf. Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Utopien der Menschenzüchtung, Der Sozialdarwinismus und seine Folgen (Munich: Kösel, 1955).

68 Sometimes Hitler chanced to adopt this pessimistic view, as we can see in his reply to Speer’s memorandum of March 18, 1945. General Guderian quotes Hitler to the effect that he expected that the best men, not the worst, would be killed in battle. Cf. Der Nationalsozialismus, Dokumente 1933-1945, Walther Hofer, ed. (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer-Bücherei, 1957), p. 260.

69 One of my friends who got into the German Foreign Office during the War belonged to a group of officials trying to persuade the Reichskanzlei to give the Ukraine some autonomy. There was in Berlin ever since 1923 a Ukrainian national committee which considered itself the rightful candidate for a government in the Ukraine. The Foreign Office kept asking that these men be sent to the Ukraine so that they could establish the foundations of a local government. More than a year elapsed without any reaction from Hitler’s Chancellery. At long last the reply came—over the phone. My friend took the call. An unpleasant voice at the other end of the wire, said “We have to nix your plans about those Ukrainians. The Führer on the last roundtrip through the Ukraine was racially not impressed by these people. So the answer is ‘no dice’!” To this one can only add that those whom the gods want to destroy they first deprive of their wits.

70 Cf. Martin Bormann’s strictly confidential circular letter partly reported in Der Nationalsozialismus, Dokumente 1933-1945, pp. 180-181 and in The Tablet (London), (February 28, 1942), Vol. 179, p. 110. Here we see National Socialism clearly as a nineteenth-century synthesis. Cf. also Alfred Müller-Armack, Das Jahrhundert ohn Gott, Zur Kultursoziologie unserer Zeit (Münster: Regensberg, 1948), p. 140.

71 Cf. Gustav Stolper, This Age of Fable (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), p. 328. For more about the fairy tale of the “financing” of the NSDAP by German big industry and finance, cf. among others Otto Kopp, ed. Widerstand und Erneuerung (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1966), Louis P. Lochner, Tycoons and Tyrants (Chicago: Regnery, 1954), and Konrad Heiden, Das Zeitalter der Verantwortungslosigkeit (Zürich, 1936), p. 312. The thesis that victories in free elections depend upon cash investments is highly “undemocratic” and confirms the Nazi view that democracy is plutocracy.

72 Cf. Felix von Papen, Ein von Papen spricht (Nijmwegen, 1939), p. 14. We hear the same from Eugen Kogon in Der-SS-Staat (München: Karl Alber, 1946), p. 209. Yet the Communist-Nazi interplay and cooperation prepared the fall of the Weimar Republic which was keenly felt by such sharp observers as the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker and the German novelist, essayist and historian Frank Thiess. Cf. his Freiheit bis Mitternacht (Vienna; Hamburg: Zsolnay, 1965), pp. 509-510. Yet one should never forget that Hitler always preferred the Communists to the “decadent West” and efforts to establish a closer Brown-Red collaboration were made right until June 1941. Cf. Walter Laqueur, op. cit., pp. 68-77: Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, Linke Leute von rechts (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), pp. 199, 264, 364, 374-376. No wonder that after Hitler’s takeover many Communists tried to enroll in the Storm Trooper formations. Cf. Rudolf Diels, Lucifer anti portas. Zwischen Severing und Heydrich. (Zürich, n.d.), p. 127 sq. We have to ask ourselves whether, after 1945, the opposite process did not take place in East Germany.

73 Cf. Graf E. Reventlow, Völkisch-kommunistische Einigung? (Leipzig: Graphische Werke, 1924), pp. 17-38. On Hitler’s anticapitalist outlook, cf. Dr. Henry Picker, op. cit. p. 203. Hitler wanted to “nationalize” all stockholding companies.

74 Cf. Baron Friedrich von Hügel, “The German Soul and the Great War,” The Quest, Vol. 6, No. 3, April 1915, pp. 6-7.

75 Cf. Ernst Jünger, Strahlungen (Tübingen: Heliopolis Verlag, 1949), p. 562.

76 One of the most destructive leftist reviews published in Paris, totally pro-Communist, but by no means tolerated in the Soviet Union—a real product of Luciferism. Yet not only the “Divine Marquis” was a forerunner of this attitude but also Saint-Just, the alter ego of Robespierre who wrote sexual poetry, made blueprints of totalitarian utopias reminiscent of Morelly’s plans and declared that “a nation regenerated itself only on mountains of corpses. Cf. Albert Ollivier, Saint-Just et la force des choses (Paris: N.R.F. Gallimard, 1954), p. 257.

77 Cf. Nicolas Calas, Foyers d’incendie (Paris: Denoel, 1939).

78 Cf. Translation of extracts in the Partisan Review, Vol. 17, No. 1. January-February 1940, p. 45.

79 Ibid., p. 46.

80 Ibid., pp. 46-47. Calas reminds one of Franz Werfel’s self-accusing outcry, “I have experienced many varieties of arrogance, in myself and in others. But since I myself shared these varieties for a time in my youth, I must confess from personal experience that there is no more consuming, more insolent, more sneering, more diabolical arrogance than that of the artistic advance guard and radical intellectuals who are bursting with a vain mania to be deep and dark and subtle and to inflict pain. Amid the amused and indignant laughter of a few philistines we were the insignificant stokers who preheated the hell in which mankind is now roasting.” Cf. Franz Werfel, p. 250 Between Heaven and Earth, M. Newmark, translator (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), (“Theologoumena,” No. 126).

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