AMERICA
“America’s battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though nothing doubting, will wish her strength for
it. New Spiritual Pythons, plenty of them, enormous Megatherions, as ugly as were ever born of mud,
loom huge and hideous out of the twilight Future on America; and she will have her own agony, and her
own victory, but on other terms than she is yet quite aware of.”
— CARLYLE
“Will the intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is with the thought of money, reveal all at
once, in face of this danger, dormant moral forces that will lead to the real construction of a State and to
spiritual preparedness to sacrifice possessions and blood to it, instead of regarding war as a means of
gaining wealth, as hitherto?”
— SPENGLER
Introduction
THE POINT has now been reached when the historical-organic method which has been developed in the
foregoing must be applied to the immediate Future. The thought-method has been perfected, it has shown
us our historical position, our affinities, that from which we are forever inwardly dissociated, our
organically-necessary inner imperative. It will now be brought to the material of happening of the
immediate Future. Having answered the what, there remains yet the how. The first step in practical
politics is the assessment of facts. Next is the intuition of possibilities. This is as true of the cheap
practical politics of a self-seeking party-leader as it is of the practical politics of a great statesman like
Pitt, Napoleon, or Bismarck. The facts and possibilities of Western politics in 1948 cannot be arrived at
without a complete understanding of the significance and potentialities of America. Up to now, this has
usually been absent in Europe. The time has come when all policies, ideas, and viewpoints, must be
referred to facts. Prejudices, whims, abstractions, and ideals are out-of-date, and even if they were not
ludicrous, they would still be a luxury, for a straitened, looted, occupied Europe must think clearly if it is
to capture once more the custody of its own Destiny. Up to the Second World War, the mistake and
confusion about America was well-nigh general in Europe. It was greater in some European countries
than in others, but there is no point in separating them, since Europe is a unit for world-historical
purposes, whether this fact is widely appreciated or not. Europe suffers as a unit, it loses in World Wars
as a unit, and when it realizes its own unity, it can also win in World Wars and impose its inner imperative
on the form of the Future. There is only one way this age can understand phenomena, and there is only
one method to which organic units yield up the secrets of their Past and Future— that is the organichistorical
method. The character and potentialities of America are found in its history. The theses of
Cultural Vitalism afford the means of understanding the significance, both to itself, and to the Western
Civilization, of the history of America.
The Origins of America
THE AMERICAN continent was populated by individual migration. The greater number of the immigrants
came from the Northern races of Europe during the period 1500-1890. During the early, the Colonial,
period (1500-1789), the life-conditions under which the incoming settlers lived were rigorous in the
extreme. The hinterland was populated by hostile savages. The secure territory was a narrow strip of
seaboard some 1500 miles long. Beyond that was the vast, unexplored, unknown “frontier.” This word,
an important one in understanding the national souls of the former nations of Europe, had an entirely
opposite significance in America. Instead of a boundary between two power-units, it referred to an area,
vast, dangerous, and almost empty. It needed only to be conquered in order to be incorporated, and in this
process, the greatest enemy was Nature, rather than the savages, for in no case were the latter highly
organized. Thus America did not develop in the early centuries the consciousness of political tension
which arises from a true frontier.
Whether or not a man penetrated into the hinterland to take land there for his own was a matter of his
personal will. These millions of quadrate kilometers were not developed by State action, but by
individual imperialism. This fact also is of the highest importance for subsequent American history. In
the first place, these immigrants had in general the characteristic Gothic urge into the distance which had
given to Western history its unique intensity. Whether they were adventurers or religious refugees,
merchants or soldiers, they nevertheless left their European homes for an unknown and dangerous land of
privation and primitive conditions. The new conditions under which they lived perpetuated and
developed the instincts which had brought them there.
In small groups these early Americans cleared the forests, built forts and homes. The farmers ploughed
the fields with rifles slung over their shoulders. The women worked in the homes with weapons at hand.
The human characteristics encouraged were self-reliance, resourcefulness, bravery, independence.
Cities grew up along the coast— Boston, New York, Philadelphia— and in these cities arose in the 18th
century something resembling society, and even a sort of American Encyclopedism.
The early colonies, thirteen in number, were organized as independent parts of the British Colonial
Empire. The main connection with England was the defense it afforded against the French, whose
colonial empire embraced Canada and part of the hinterland of the colonies. With the defeat and
expulsion of the French armies from Canada, in the 1760’s, the centrifugal forces in the colonies gained in
strength, and French policy aided in every way to separate the colonies from England. Commercial and
political motives were both present in the motivation of the American Revolutionary War, 1775-1783, but
the thing of greatest interest at the present day was the ideology in which the colonial Encyclopedists
formulated their war-aims. Most of the colonial propagandists— Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas
Paine, John Adams, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin— had been in England and
France and had thus absorbed the new Rationalistic Idea which had triumphed in English society, and was
conquering the French State and Culture. The colonials adopted the French form of the Rationalist
doctrines, demanding “The Rights of Man,” rather than the rights of Americans.
It was not the ideologists— as usual— who fought the war. It was the soldiers who did that, and this
war was the most difficult America has ever fought. The entire population of the colonies was only three
million, and these were stretched the entire length of the Atlantic seaboard. Their only common bond was
opposition to England, and hope of mutual independence. The British were stronger on the sea than the
French, who were aiding the colonials, and the British not only enlisted the savages on their side, but also
hired mercenary troops from the European continent for this war. Owing to Prussian and French
assistance, the colonials were finally successful in concluding the war on the basis of complete
independence from England.
The war had been a civil war as well as a war for independence, and the leaders of the Revolution had to
conduct a terror at home against the Loyalist elements of the colonial population. After the War, most of
these emigrated to Canada, which remained British. If the Revolution had been unsuccessful, the colonial
leaders would have all been hanged for treason, but their success meant that they are regarded as the
Founding Fathers in America.
Owing to a small group of patriots and creators— History is always in the custody of a minority— the
thirteen colonies were united into a federal union. The leaders who brought about the union were
principally Washington, John Adams, Franklin, Pinckney, Rutledge— and, above all, Alexander
Hamilton, the greatest statesman ever to appear in America. If this great soul had not there been at work,
the subsequent history of the American continent would have been the history of a series of wars, which
by now would have reached the stage of annihilation wars, and might not yet have united the continent.
The union was on the basis of a federal state, and the allocation of power between it and the component
“States” was sought to be expressed by a written document, a “constitution.” The leading French political
theories of the time had developed an opposition, which exists only in literature, between “the State” and
“the individual.” The American Constitution, and also the various constitutions which were adopted by
each component colony, tried to codify this “opposition” and listed a series of individual rights vis-à-vis
the State.
It has not been noted sufficiently how totally different these developments were from contemporary
phenomena on the home soil of the Culture. In the colonies, there had never been a State except as a
word. Hence, the Constitution represented a beginning, and not a denial of tradition, with the attempt to
replace the old form of the State by a piece of paper. In America there was no tradition. Hamilton
wanted a monarchical State, on European traditionary lines, but Rationalist ideology and propaganda was
too strong to be overcome and these demanded a republic.
The “individual rights” that were set down in the various documents had no analogy to European
conditions. Since there had never been a State in America, and had never been a frontier in the European
sense, there had been only “individuals.” Land could be acquired by claiming it and settling on it. Any
man who wished could at any time take his gun and go into the hinterland, and there live as farmer or
trapper. Thus the talk of “individuals” was nothing new, and furthermore it represented no parallel to
European conditions, since the State was the basis of the life of persons in Europe. It was only because
there was a State in Europe that the “individual” was able to live and prosper. If there had been no
Prussian State, half the population of Europe would have passed into Slavic conditions.
There had been no State in America— the closest thing to a State had been the far-away English
government— and hence the American anti-State ideology was not denying any fact of life, but was
merely affirming the fact of individualism, which had grown out of the empty and vast landscape. State is
a unit of opposition— there were no other States on the North American continent, and thus no American
State could arise.
The American Ideology
THIS organic individualism was formulated in written constitutions and in a literary-political literature.
Typical of the spirit of this literature is the Declaration of Independence. As a piece of Realpolitik, this
manifesto of 1776 is masterly: it points to the Future, and embodies the Spirit of the Age of Rationalism,
which was then ascendant in the Western Culture. But, in the 20th century, the ideological part of this
Declaration is simply fantastic: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” In 1863, the charlatan Lincoln delivered an
address in which he speaks of America as “a nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal.” He then went on to say, referring to the War of Secession, then in
progress, “…we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure.”
This ideology continued right into the middle of the 20th century, and was even, after the First and
Second World Wars, when a totally different and utterly incompatible outlook was in the ascendant,
offered to the home of the Western Civilization as a model to imitate somehow. It was only the entirely
fortuitous material success which attended American arms that enabled this ideology to survive late into a
century which had outgrown it, and, not because it is important as a political outlook, but solely because it
is an effective technique for splitting and disintegrating Europe, must this archaic ideology be examined
here.
The Declaration of Independence is saturated with the thinking of Rousseau and Montesquieu. The
basic idea, as in all Rationalism, is the equating of what ought to be with what will be. Rationalism
begins with confusing the rational with the real, and ends by confusing the real with the rational. This
arsenal of “truths” about equality, inalienable and inherent rights, reflects the emancipated critical spirit,
devoid of respect for facts and tradition. The idea that governments are “instituted” for a utilitarian
purpose, to satisfy a demand of “equal” men, and that these “equal” men give their “consent” to a certain
“form” of “government,” and then abolish it when it no longer serves the purpose— is pure Rationalistic
poetry, and corresponds to no facts that have ever occurred anywhere. The source of government is the
inequality of men— this is the fact.
The nature of the government is a reflection of the Culture, the Nation, and the stage of development of
both. Thus any nation may have one of two forms of government, an efficient or an inefficient
government. An efficient government carries out the Idea of the nation— not the “will of the masses,” for
this latter does not exist if the leadership is capable. Leadership goes down, not when “the people”
rationally decide to abolish it, but when that leadership becomes so decadent as to undermine itself. No
government anywhere is “founded” on “principles.” Governments are the expression of political
instincts, and the difference between the instincts of various populations is the source of differences in
their practice of government. No written “principles” affect the practice of government in the slightest,
and the sole effect they have is to furnish the vocabulary of political struggles.
This is as true of America as it is of every other political unit that has ever existed in five millennia of
the history of High Cultures. Contrary to a certain messianic feeling in America, America is not
completely unique. Its morphology and destiny are readable in the history of other colonies, in our own,
and in previous Cultures.
The reference in the Independence Declaration to government as having the purpose of effecting the
“safety” and “happiness” of the population is more Rationalistic nonsense. Government is the process of
maintaining the population in form for the political task, the expression of the Idea of the Nation.
The quotation from Lincoln still reflects the Age of Rationalism, and his contemporary Europe could
feel and understand such ideology, although, since State, Nation, and Tradition existed still in Europe,
even if weakened, there was always resistance to Rationalist ideologies, whether of the Rousseau,
Lincoln, or Marx variety. No nation was ever “conceived in liberty,” and no nation was ever “dedicated
to a proposition.” Nations are the creations of a High Culture, and in their last essence are mystical Ideas.
Their coming, their individualists, their form, their going, are all reflections of higher Cultural
developments. To say that a nation is “dedicated to a proposition” is to reduce it to an abstraction that can
be put on a blackboard for the instruction of a class in logic. It is a Rationalistic caricature of the Nation Idea.
So to speak of a Nation is to insult and debase it: no one would ever die for a logical proposition. If
such a proposition— which is also claimed to be “self-evident”— is not convincing, armed force will not
make it more so.
The numen “liberty” is one of the main foci of the American ideology. The word can only be defined
negatively, as freedom from some restraint or other. Not even the most rabid American ideologist
advocates total freedom from every form of order, and similarly the strictest tyranny has never wished to
forbid everything. In a country “dedicated” to “liberty” men were taken from their homes, under threat of
prison, pronounced soldiers, and dispatched to the antipodes as a “defense” measure on the part of a
government which did not ask the “consent” of its masses, knowing perfectly well such “consent” would
be refused.
In the practical sense, American freedom means freedom from the State, but it is obvious that this is
mere literature, since there never was a State in America, nor any necessity for one. The word freedom is
thus merely a concept in a materialistic religion, and describes nothing in the world of American facts.
Important also to the American ideology is the written constitution adopted in 1789, as a result of the
labors of Hamilton and Franklin. Their interest in it was practical, their idea being to unite the thirteen
colonies into a unit. Since the union could never have been brought about at that time on any sort of
central basis, the most they were able to bring about was a weak federation, with a central government
that could hardly be described as government at all, but only as a formulated anarchy. The ideas of the
constitution were mostly derived from the writings of Montesquieu. The idea of “separation of powers”
in particular comes from this French theorist. According to this theory, the powers of government are
three, legislative, executive, and judicial. Like all crystal-dear Rationalistic thinking, this is muddy and
confused when applied to Life. These powers can only be separated on paper, in Life they cannot. They
were never actually separated in America, although the theory was retained that they were. With the
onset of an internal crisis in the 30’s of the 20th century, the entire power of the central government was
openly concentrated into the executive, and theories were found to support this fact, still calling it
“separation.”
The various colonies retained most of the power that mattered to them— the power to make their own
laws, keep a militia, and conduct themselves in economic independence of the other colonies. The word
“state” was chosen to describe the components of the union, and this led to further confused ideological
thinking, since European State-forms, where the State was an Idea, were thought to be equivalent to
American “states,” which were primarily territorial-legal-economic units, without sovereignty, aim,
destiny, or purpose.
In the union, there was no sovereignty, that is, not even the legal counterpart of the State-Idea. The
central government was not sovereign, neither was any state government. Sovereignty was represented by
the agreement of two-thirds of the states and the central legislative, or in other words, a complete
abstraction. If there had been fifty or a hundred million Slavs, or even Indians, on America’s borders,
there would have been a different notion of these things. The whole American ideology presupposed the American geopolitical situation. There were no powers, no strong, numerous, or organized hostile
populations, no political dangers— only a vast empty landscape, sparsely populated with savages.
Also important to the American ideology was the feeling— expressed above in Lincoln’s address— of
universality. Although the War of Secession had nothing whatever to do with ideology of any kind— and
in any case, the Southern legalistic rationale of the War was more consequent than the Yankee idea—
Lincoln felt impelled to inject the issue of ideology into the War. The opponent could never be simply a
political rival, bent upon the same power as the Yankee— he had to be a total enemy, intent upon wiping
out the American ideology. This feeling informed all American Wars from that time onward— any
political enemy was regarded ipso facto as an ideological opponent, even though the enemy had no
interest whatever in American ideology.
In the Age of World Wars, this ideologizing of politics was extended to a world-scale. The power that
America chose for enemy was perforce against “freedom,” “democracy,” “liberty,” and all the other
magic, but meaningless, words of that category. This led to strange results— any power fighting against
the power America had gratuitously chosen for enemy became ipso facto a “liberty,” or “freedom” power.
Thus both Romanov Russia and Bolshevik Russia were “freedom” powers.
American ideology led America to claim countries as allies which did not return the compliment, but
American ardor was not thereby dampened. This type of politics can only strike Europe as adolescent,
and in truth, any pretense that 20th century forms and problems can be described in a 19th century
Rationalistic ideology is immature, or to be more blunt, silly.
In the 20th century, when the Rationalist type of ideology had been discarded by the advancing Western
Civilization, the American universalizing of ideology turned into messianism— the idea that America
must save the world. The vehicle of the salvation is to be a materialistic religion with “democracy” taking
the place of God, “Constitution” the place of the Church, “principles of government” the place of
religious dogmas, and the idea of economic freedom the place of God’s Grace. The Technic of salvation is
to embrace the dollar, or failing that, to submit to American high-explosives and bayonets.
The American ideology is a religion, just as was the Rationalism of the French Terror, of Jacobinism, of
Napoleonism. The American ideology is coeval with them, and they are completely dead. Just as
inwardly dead is the American ideology. Its principal use at the present time— 1948— is in splitting
Europe. The European Michel element battens on to any ideology whatever which promises “happiness”
and a life without effort or sternness. American ideology thus serves a negative purpose, and that only.
The Spirit of a bygone Age can give no message to a subsequent age, but can only deny the new age, and
attempt to retard, distort, and warp it from its life-path. American ideology is not an instinct, for it
inspires no one. It is an inorganic system, and when one of its tenets gets in the way, it is promptly
discarded. Thus the religious doctrine of “separation of powers” was dropped from the list of sacred
dogmas in 1933. Before that the holy tenet of Isolation had been put aside in 1917, when America
entered into a Western War which did not concern it in any way. Resurrected after the First World War, it
was again discarded in the Second World War. A political religion that thus switches the changes on its
supernatural doctrines is convincing neither politically nor religiously. The “Doctrine” of Monroe, for
instance, announced early in the 19th century that the entire Western Hemisphere was a sphere of
American imperialistic influence. In the 20th century, this passed into the special status of an esoteric
doctrine, being retained for domestic consumption, while the external dogma was called the “good neighbor
policy.”
The ideology of a people is merely intellectual clothing. It may, or may not, correspond to the instinct
of that people. An ideology may be changed from day to day, but not the character of the people. Once
that is formed, it is definite and influences events far more than they can influence it. The character of the
American People was formed in the Secession War.
The War of Secession, 1861-1865
POLITICS IN AMERICA in the European sense there was none. The American union was formed before
the 19th century style of inner-politics was developed. Political parties in their later form were unknown
to the authors of the Constitution. The word Party described a dangerous thing— factionalism, neartreason.
George Washington in his farewell to public life, counseled his people against “the spirit of
Party.” But ambitious men will always seek to have power, even the limited and irresponsible power
available within the bounds of a loose federation. When tenure of power is limited to a few years (four
years in the American union) the main inner-political problem becomes remaining in power. When the
power is obtained by majorities in elections, the science of “electioneering” develops. Voters must be
organized in order that the leaders may perpetuate themselves in office, and the technique of organization
is the party. Organization takes funds, and it takes ideals. The ideals are for the masses of voters, the
funds make it possible to spread them. The funds are more important because they are difficult to
procure, whereas ideals are plentiful. This dependence of party-organization upon a supply of funds
brought about the situation in which rich men were able to make the party-leaders and party-organizations
run things to please them. Even a party-leader in office was not independent, for the rich man alone could
keep him there. The name given in the books to this type of government is plutocracy, the rule of money.
This was the American form during the whole 19th century, and it continued to the year 1933.
The source of the wealth of the richest men in America during the period 1789-1861 was manufactures
and trade. The richest men were found in the Northern states, the manufacturing and trading places. The
Southern states had a totally non-plutocratic organization. A society arose there on a patriarchal and
hierarchical basis. Half of the population belonged to the African race and was held as slaves by white
land-owners and planters. Slavery was less efficient than industrialism, for capitalistic purposes, because
the slaves enjoyed complete security— protection against illness, unemployment, old age— whereas the
Northern factory-workers were as completely unprotected in these respects. This gave the Northern
industrialist one more advantage over the humanitarian slave-owner. The industrialists’ “cost of
production” were cheaper. Factory-workers who were wiped out by illness or other catastrophe were not
the responsibility of the industrialists— they had only the disadvantages of slavery, whereas the Africans
in the South had its advantages as well.
The South was thus less mobilized economically than the North and consequently desired the cheapest
possible manufactures, which meant, at that time, English imports. Northern industry could not compete
well with English imports, and demanded a high protective tariff. The tariff issue was the focus of a
political struggle for three decades before the War finally broke out.
Once any issue, from whatever sphere of Life it derives, becomes of sufficient intensity to become
political, other motives come in to support it. Thus Yankee ideologists fastened on the idea of slavery
and made it a war-issue for the masses in the Northern states. The financial labor-exploitation of the
Northern capitalists was held up as humanitarianism, and the patriarchal care of the Southern planter was
branded as cruelty, inhumanity, and immorality. The ideological side of this war presaged coming
American war-conduct.
The Secession-War arose on the issue whether the Southern states, comprising a unit based on an
aristocratic-traditional life-feeling, with an economic basis of muscle-energy, could secede from the
union, which had been captured by the Yankee element. The Yankee territory was organized on a
financial-industrial basis, with an economic basis of machine-energy. For three decades, the main
political issue in the union had been the balancing of the number of representatives in the central
government from Northern states against those from the Southern states. The South was on the defensive,
for the North was outstripping it in wealth, power, and control of the central government.
But because of its aristocratic tendency, the South had supplied a disproportionate number of the
officers in the central army, and most of the war-material was in the South at the start of the War. The
anti-financial heroic attitude of the South gave it an immense advantage in the field against the Yankee
armies, who were inoculated with a war propaganda of jealousy of the superior life in the South. The War
was a contest— not the last in Western history— between quality and quantity. The North had all the
war-industries, most of the railroads, and four times the population available for military purposes.
The material weakness of the South was too great to be compensated for by its spiritual superiority on
the field of battle, where its heroic spirit gained victory after victory over superior numbers. The South
could not replace its human losses however, and this the Yankees could do, utilizing German and Irish
immigrants in particular. This War was the largest-scale war in the Western Civilization up to the First
World War. The armies numbered millions, the theater of war embraced more than a million quadrate
kilometers. Railroads and ironclads entered tactics for the first time.
Napoleon had calculated, from his experience on 150 fields, that the ratio in warfare of the spiritual to
the material is as three is to one. Assuming this to be true, the defeat of the South was the result of
Yankee material superiority of more than three times. This war had many lessons for Europe, but was
mostly ignored in the European capitals, which were still in the nationalistic petty-state period, and not
capable of large-space thinking. It showed the enormous military potentiality in America, it showed the
Yankee character, which was thenceforth to be the American spirit, it showed the enormous will-to-power
of the New York plutocracy— it showed, in short, that a base for a world-power had been laid here. The
only European power which noticed it was the only one capable at that time of large-space thinking—
England, and England’s attitude toward the War was throughout one of benevolent neutrality toward the
South, to say the least. England was prevented only by the attitude of Russia from declaring war on the
Yankee government. Southern commerce raiders were fitted out in English ports, and the Alabama was
even manned with English mariners. Yankee strength on the seas meant that the military task would have
been too great for England. This was showed that America had passed the period when it needed to fear
the intervention of any European power in North American or Caribbean affairs. No European power
could afford to ignore the European-Russian situation, and thus could only commit its surplus power, so
to speak, to transatlantic affairs. American power had now become greater than the surplus power of any
possible European combination, considering the situation of the European powers vis-à-vis one another.
This was the beginning of the fact of American isolation. Quite independent of any formulation of it,
America was politically isolated from Europe as a fact, and furthermore it was the only power in a
hemisphere. This fact, coupled with the vast inner landscape of America, developed the possibility of
large-space thinking in America, as contrasted with the petty-stateism of Europe, which considered a
hundred kilometers to be a great distance.
It was, of course, European petty-stateism which permitted the development of America, in the
beginning, and at every subsequent stage. This is more fully treated in the history of American
imperialism.
The American Practice of Government
THE ACTUAL FORM of the government of America was a plutocracy, but the technique through which
this government was maintained was usually taken by superficial thinkers to be the real government. The
great epoch in the history of practice of government in America is 1828. In that year Andrew Jackson
was elected President of the central government, and he immediately announced the new conception of
office-holding as private economics. With his slogan “To the victor belongs the spoils” he dethroned
forever the Federalist idea of a tradition of State-service. Government henceforth was “spoils” for
successful party-politicians. The election of 1828 was the last appearance of the Federalist party in an
election. It retained for itself, however, control of the Federal judiciary until the middle of the 19th
century. Jackson’s election also put an end to the aristocratic “congressional caucus” method of choosing
the presidential candidates. Thenceforth the parties had nominating conventions for this purpose. The
forces of tradition, which had been concentrated in the Federalist party, no longer appeared in inner politics
as an organized group. Their only remaining significance was social. Thus, all during the 19th
century in America, there was no conflict of the European variety between Party and Tradition, between
the Constitution-mongers and the aristocratic forces of Monarchy, State, Army, Church. The
Constitution-idea meant three different things in America, in England, and on the Continent. In America
the Constitution was the symbol of the beginning of the People. In England, the “unwritten” Constitution
represented the organic link of the history of the English national soul binding together Past and Future.
On the Continent, Constitution represented the gathering point of all anti-traditionary forces, the break
with the organic Past, and the attempt to destroy State and Society. In America, there was no tradition,
but only a Constitution; in England Constitution and Tradition were synonymous; on the Continent,
Constitution and Tradition were antitheses.
In America, the practice of government was determined by the great fact that there was no State in
America, and hence only private- and party-politics. In England, the practice of government was slowly
developed over the centuries and the English Constitution merely is the record of this development. On
the Continent, the practice of government, developed through centuries of tradition, was challenged root
and branch by the Rationalistic Idea of substituting quantity for quality, wiping out History and Tradition,
and substituting the rule of a reasonable piece of paper which would guarantee forever the rule of Reason,
Humanity, Justice, and the rest of it. Consequently there were no forces opposed to the Constitution as
such in America, and there are not today, while in Europe the traditional forces were opposed to Constitutionality as such, since it was simply the symbol of anarchy.
Historical thinking is more interested in what is done with a written constitution than what it says, and
the practice of government in America was actually quite independent of the Constitution, even though
that document was constantly invoked by all party-politicians. In the first place, the Constitution did not
recognize Parties, but only individuals. It did not foresee that political businesses would develop which
would coerce the masses through employment of ideals, promises, and money. Nor did the Constitution
recognize universal suffrage, since it was thought quite unnecessary to forbid a thing which was regarded
by everyone at that time as synonymous with anarchy. If the Founding Fathers were to return, they would
demand the abolition of Parties and their coercion of individuals, and forbid group participation in
politics, as well as severely restricting the franchise by property, educational, racial, and social
qualifications, since these restrictions were the actualities whose continuance was assumed by the authors
of the American Constitution.
The first administration in America was the Federalist government of Washington and Hamilton.
Hamilton established already in 1791 the doctrine of “implied powers” in the central government, as a
measure for strengthening the central government. This was, of course, entirely against the letter and
spirit of the Constitution, which “delegated” certain powers to the central government, and reserved all
other powers to the States. Thenceforth, two ideas separated out: the idea of a strong central government,and the “states’ rights” idea. This issue was the focus of secessionist movements, first in the Northern
States, and later in the Southern States, and theoretical formulation of the War between the States, 1861-
1865, was based on the right of a State to secede from the Union.
The Federalist Chief Justice Marshall was the last representative of the Federalist tradition in the government. He established the unique idea in America that laws can be upset by the judicial system, which can declare them “unconstitutional.” This device was to play a large role in American inner politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. More than anything else, the decisions of this Justice strengthened the central government. But the technique he developed was of necessity limited; its efficacy was purely negative. It could unmake laws, but could not make them. This too was entirely against the Constitution, like Parties, conventions, wide suffrage, “implied powers” and the rule of private persons. This judicial usurpation was one more refutation of Rationalistic theories that Life can be planned on a piece of paper and then actualized, for the piece of paper had specified that the judiciary was to be separate from the legislative.
Again, it was not logic, but History, which enabled Marshall to usurp this function of the judicial veto. Far back in colonial history, the idea of “paramount law” had emerged. At that time, it was simply an expression of the centrifugal political tendency in all colonies, for “paramount” law meant domestic law, as opposed to the law of the English King, which was supposed to be personal. The royal governors in the colonies came from Europe, while the judges in the colonies were native-born. Hence “paramount law,” and the establishment of the unique institution of “judicial review.”
A corollary development of this old colonial idea was American legalism. Law in the colonies meant opposition to the Crown, and hence the lawyer became a sort of defender of the public. The Founding Fathers were mostly lawyers; the membership of the Constitutional Convention comprised almost exclusively lawyers. The Constitution was a lawyer’s document, with legal phraseology, and complete absence of political wisdom. Judicial veto of legislation thus seemed quite natural in America and conquered a place for itself. Consequently the strange usage developed of referring all manner of problems to the legal system, to be handled on common law principles. The theory was that political, social, economic, racial, and other problems would thus receive an impartial treatment, free from any human bias.
Law however is the result of politics. Every judiciary is created by a political regime. If the judiciary usurps power which makes it more or less independent, it has become political itself. But in either case, its decisions are the result of politics, cast into legal form. And thus the history of legalism in America, in the form of constitutional law, is simply a reflection of the economic-political history of America. Its first phase was a series of decisions strengthening the central government, an expression of Federalist policy. In the same tradition was the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which reflected the Southern viewpoint on slavery, since the Federalist idea was not abolitionist. After the complete victory of industrialism and Money, 1865, the decisions represent the viewpoint of industrial— and finance— capitalism. The rising capitalism of the labor-unions was continually frustrated by the Supreme Court. No less than 300 times, between 1870 and 1933, it struck down laws made by various States and the central government which were aimed at the plutocracy.
The institution of judicial review could not have developed if there had been a strong central government or a true State. Nor could it have arisen except in a country dominated by economic activity, and lacking any real political issues. Before 1861, there was only one critical political issue, that of the balance of power between North and South. Between 1865 and 1933 there was no true political issue, but only party-politics, which is merely private or group business in the form of inner-politics. The Dred Scott decision would not have been allowed to stand, had not the War of Secession broken out, since the North-South issue was really political, which means that it could not possibly be settled otherwise than by political negotiation or by war, but absolutely not by legalistic ritual. In 1933, a real political issue again took shape, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to solve it by legalistic means.
In that year occurred the fateful Revolution, the seizure of the central power by the Culture-distorting group in America. The new regime did not at once dominate the judiciary, since it has life tenure of office. The judiciary vetoed every one of the principal internal measures of the new regime, until, in 1937, it was intimidated by the threat of creating enough new judges to outvote the opponents of the regime. Grant had successfully done this in 1870 to coerce a hostile Supreme Court, showing that judicial review was merely tolerated by the ruling forces in America so long as it was in their interests.
After 1936 the Court soon passed into the control of the Revolution, and judicial veto of political measures was terminated. It may possibly be used as a slogan, or resurrected as a show, but the forces which the 20th century has let loose do not take legalism seriously. The weapon of judicial review in America possessed some conservative efficacy during the first onslaughts of the Revolution of 1933, but it was a negative defense. Only a creative movement can prevail against a determined Revolution, only politics can defeat politics.
The “separation of powers” theory has worked out in practice to mean either the domination of all branches of the government by the same interests, or else the splitting of the branches between two opposing groups. The authoritarian spirit of the 20th century spells the end of attempts to “separate” the powers of government. Empty theorizing may continue, but this method of politics is dead, in America as well as elsewhere.
During the whole 19th century— except for the political issue which created the Secession-War— America was a country without true politics. Inner-politics was simply business, and any group could engage in it to further its own economic or ideological interest. In addition to parties, the usage of “lobbies” developed. The lobby is the means of exerting pressure on legislators after election. Private groups send private representatives to the legislature and there they persuade office-holders, by bribes of votes and money, to support, introduce, or oppose, legislation. Agrarian groups, racial groups, economic groups, societies of every description, use this method. By this means the anti-alcohol societies introduced nation-wide prohibition of the manufacture, sale or transportation of alcoholic liquors. This political technique continues. After the defeat of the Federalist party, early in the 19th century, there was a constant trend toward widening the suffrage, supported by all parties, and only opposed by social traditionary forces. Party always wants the widest possible suffrage, since this completely deprives the electorate of power. If ten men decide an election, they all have some power, at least, but if ten million comprise the electorate, the masses deprive the higher elements of any significance. The inner development of America has followed the invariable pattern of Democracy, observable in all Cultures and all States.
Party-politics is tied to commercialism, Rationalism, Materialism, economic activity. With the Spirit of the Age of Resurgence of Authority, party-politics gives way to authoritarian forms, regardless of theories or techniques employed. The power is simply there for an ambitious man or group to take. As the American Revolution of 1933 shows, this group can even be Culturally alien. The actual technique for instituting authoritarian rule in America was instructive: the two established parties, Republican and Democratic had enjoyed, under various names, a monopoly of inner-politics for a century. It was simple for a group determined on the seizure and maintenance of absolute power to penetrate both of these older formations, and so bring under its control the entire means of expression of internal politics. Only two candidates— or, rarely, three— could be nominated for the Presidency. If the same group nominated them all, it was secure against all means of eviction save revolution by force. This was done, and the result was shown by the elections of 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948.
During the 19th century of economic obsession in America, the idea of instilling efficiency into any phase of the public political life occurred to no one. The situation was allowed to develop in which forty eight administrative units, theoretically “sovereign,” are maintained, each making its own laws on all subjects, levying its own taxes, operating its own educational system, judiciary, police, and economic program. Within the continental United States, there were, in 1947, 75,000 units levying taxes. Each unit can create a public debt, and this must be done through the great private banking houses. In 1947, the total public indebtedness of America was a greater figure than the total assessed tax-valuation of the country. This wide distribution of the apparatus of public power has meant that exactly the opportunities of corruption and misrepresentation which inhere in the central government are reproduced in miniature thousands of times over.
The American Revolution of 1933 was not directed toward reorganizing this state of affairs, but was interested primarily in external affairs. The background of the intervention of this regime in world affairs is the history of American external affairs, after which the aims of the regime will be shown in detail.
The people who have supplanted the descendants of these proto-Americans would in that case call them “war criminals,” which is the name they devised for the defeated leaders in a war. For were they not “conspirators against humanity,” “wagers of aggressive war,” and the rest of it? Could not this small band of generals, propagandists, statesmen, ideologues, financiers, have been easily fitted into a courtroom for a year-long “trial” where a pre-determined judgment could have been passed upon them? They had no need, however, to fear any such performance, but they were legally traitors to their sovereign King, and a legal tribunal with actual jurisdiction could have been constituted against them.
The American colonists were successful only because of aid from France and volunteer assistance from military men of high ability, like von Steuben, de Kalb, Lafayette, Pulaski. This foreign aid was decisive. England was involved elsewhere for bigger stakes, and was unable to devote sufficient military attention to the colonial uprising. Further contributing to the American effort was the internal English opposition which favored the colonies. The deliberate inactivity of General Howe is only one manifestation of this obstruction.
This long, hard, war marked the beginning of American political independence. The thirteen colonies stretched snake-like along the Atlantic seaboard. The hinterland was claimed by European powers whose days of empire were numbered in the Western Hemisphere: France and Spain. The political decline of Spain was reflected by the revolutionary figures of Hidalgo, Iturbide, Bolivar, who were bringing about the dissolution of the Spanish empire in the Western hemisphere. France was driven, under Napoleon’s regime, to abandon the idea of a colonial empire which would replace the British empire overseas with a French one— Napoleon’s original idea— and to adopt instead the idea of a European empire, the rebuilding of the Holy Roman Empire, but directed this time from Paris. To this end, the trifle of three million dollars was worth more to Napoleon than the vast Louisiana territory, and its purchase by the American union in 1803 was the most fantastic piece of luck any power has ever had. Frederick the Great had to fight seven heartbreaking years to gain tiny Silesia, and two more wars to hold it; Napoleon fought twenty years against six coalitions to control Western Europe; England paid a son for every square mile of its empire— and so on through the pages of imperial history. But America acquired an area the size of Western Europe for the price of a few ships-of-the-line. The latent Calvinism of the proto-American type regarded this, not as remarkable luck, but as a sign of predestination, of God’s grace.
American boldness and Gothic instincts were shown by the Barbary War. This war demonstrated also that the human material in the colonies could produce the type demanded by successful imperialism: William Bainbridge, William Eaton, Edward Preble, Stephen Decatur.
The War of 1812 was another unbelievable piece of luck. Again Napoleon was fighting for American empire. England, involved to the hilt with the Colossus of the continent, was not even able to exploit its superior military position in America, and in spite of its military defeat, America was the political victor in the treaty of Ghent, 1814. The acquisition of Florida in 1819 was the result of negotiation and not of war. Already at this time, the Austrian maxim could have been paraphrased for America: Bella gerant alii, tu, felix America, eme!
The great Hamilton, at the very beginning of the union, had counseled the annexation of Cuba, and others demanded it during this decade, but it was not to become actual until 1900. But at this time, occurred an event that ranks with the great audacities of History: the manifesto to be known as the Monroe Doctrine was delivered in the year 1823. This manifesto announced that America was preempting an entire half of the globe for itself. This “Doctrine” was supported by the British fleet, as a device to dissolve the Spanish colonial empire. If England had opposed this doctrine, it would have been stillborn, but it served British policy, and enlisted America in the service of England. This remained, however, unknown in America, where it was thought that the bold pronouncement had frightened all the powers of Europe, since none of them challenged it. Furthermore, South America presented an inherently uninteresting field for further imperialistic ventures by the powers, and it thus happened that a tradition of success was slowly established in American foreign policy. The Calvinistic feeling spread that America was predestined to rule whatso it would. Almost a century elapsed before the “doctrine” was challenged, and by that time, the military force was present in America which its maintenance presupposed.
Simultaneously with the outer events, the “inner” imperialism, so to speak, continued unrelentingly. The aboriginal inhabitants of the continent, whose wishes were never consulted either by the European powers or by Americans, whether of the colonies or of the union, resisted unceasingly the steady westward drive of American imperialism. The answer of the Americans to this resistance by the Red Indians was the formula “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” American merchants supplied the Indians with arms, powder, and shot, and thus the Indian wars continued down to the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the money-payments for which European powers had given up vast claims, the Indians relinquished theirs only to superior American force. At that time the American practice and theory were the same: Might makes Right. Treaty after treaty was made with Indian tribes laying down frontiers over which Americans agreed not to pass. Each treaty was violated by the American imperial instinct. Such treaty violations gave rise to the Black Hawk War, the Seminole wars, and to a century long series of wars which only ended with the political annihilation of the Indians.
During the 30’s Americans had infiltrated into the Mexican Empire, and by a successful revolt, they separated the vast area of Texas from Mexico. Less than ten years had gone by before this area was annexed by the union. An area larger than any West-European power had been seized with only small scale fighting. In 1842, by treaty with England, the northwest boundary was extended. Oregon was definitely incorporated in 1846.
But meantime the imperial instinct looked from Texas toward the Pacific, over Mexico. It was decided to deprive Mexico of two-thirds of its territory, and since this could hardly be done by purchase or treaty, a war was planned. Mexico caused the war, by refusing to submit to American imperialistic demands. A short war ended in the dictate of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which stripped Mexico of its power.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 with England specifically referred to an American canal across Central America, and led first of all to the completion of an American railroad there in 1855. Japan was “opened” in 1853, over its feeble military resistance, to the commercial side of American imperialism.
After the War of Secession, the American union smashed the French attempt to add Mexico to its empire, and allowed Maximilian to be shot by a revolutionary firing squad. Also shortly after that War, Alaska was acquired by Yankee imperialism. This territory, of almost a million quadrate kilometers, was purchased by America from Russia for a trivial sum. In the same decade the border with Mexico was again rounded off, this time by a small money payment instead of a war, in the transaction known as the Gadsden Purchase.
American imperialism was everywhere active during the second half of the 19th century: Hawaii, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, China, Japan, Siam, Samoa. The American fleet bombarded foreign ports at will in the colonial areas of the world, and sent landing parties ashore when necessary to secure submission to American commercial-imperialistic or territorial demands.
In 1890 the last Sioux War was ended, and thereafter Indian resistance to American imperialism was scattered and local. Hawaii’s turn had come, and soon a “revolt” prepared Hawaii for American annexation. This was mere preparation for an imperialistic venture on a larger scale than anything yet attempted. In 1898, Spain’s possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific were attacked. As a result of the Spanish-American War, most of Spain’s colonial empire was transferred to America, including the valuable Philippines and Cuba. In passing, the Pacific islands of Tutuila, Guam, Wake, Midway and Samoa had been annexed.
But he was not heard, and the tradition of confidence that had taken root during a century of successful imperialistic ventures without a setback was not to be undermined by a minatory speech. Nor was the opposite aspect of Bryan’s warning heard. What he meant by “self-government” was the habit of class war, constitutionalized civil war, freedom for everyone to gouge and exploit everyone else within the limits of the criminal law. Thus his admonition meant: an imperial nation cannot have internal disorganization and formlessness.
There was no class however in America interested in anything else except self-enrichment, and so no one concerned himself with such questions except a few writers like Homer Lea. Imperial situations are ever-changing, and one must be prepared for reverses. In that case, the home conditions must also be in order if the outer developments are to be mastered. In a country where even the word politics was completely misunderstood, and meant corrupt economics, it could not be expected that the political wisdom would be present that would inform the leadership that empire means war, and war presupposes internal order. In very fact, there was no leadership to tell. Every few years a new group of representatives of private economic interests were installed in the administration of the government, and there was no traditional policy, internal or external. There was no agreement on what was fundamental to America’s interests, what would be casus belli, which powers were natural allies, which naturally inimical. The leaders at any one time were mainly self-interested, obsessed with the grand problem of perpetuating their tenure of office.
But American luck continued. Although isolated in its hemisphere, in the sense that no world power could afford to attack it, nevertheless America was not isolated in the sense that it could not send its gunboats and landing parties all over the colonial world on imperialistic adventures. Furthermore, as the Spanish War showed, America could easily defeat any European power in the Western Hemisphere.
The Spanish-American War marked, what the War of Secession had foreshadowed, the emergence of America as a world-power. This made seven world-powers at that time; the others being England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Japan. Among these, only Russia, Germany, and England were in the first rank. America was excluded solely by reason of its geographical isolation. It could act against a world power in the Eastern hemisphere only with allies, and in a subordinate role. This was the situation at the beginning of the 20th century, the Age of Annihilation-Wars.
For a full century— 1800-1900— America had been engaged in imperialism, in the Caribbean, in South and Central America, all over the Pacific, and in the Far East. The sphere of American military influence was by 1900 larger than that of any other power except England. It had not in any way condensed or formed its empire, because of the purely instinctive nature of American imperialism. Thus Canada, for instance, although defenseless and contiguous to the base for power, had not been politically incorporated into the American Empire. Nor had Mexico. The American instinct was content merely to be stronger within a certain sphere than any other power, so that its economic ascendancy was assured there. Empire building, in the European sense, was not known in America. The idea of a grand power structure was not understood. The American Empire merely grew, through lack of resistance to American imperial instinct.
For its empire, America had fought only one large-scale war. The first war, that of 1775, was for independence, and the War of 1812 is more accurately called the Second War for Independence. The War of Secession extended the Yankee empire southward, removing an emerging power from the North American continent, and this was the sole serious imperial war Yankee America had to undertake in its century of empire-building. For the landing parties all over Central America, the Mexican War, the fighting in Japan, China, and in the Pacific islands, the Spanish War, all had had slight casualties. Never before had an imperial power acquired so much territory and influence for such a trivial price in blood.
Yet this was not understood, either in Europe or in America. Americans were either embarrassed or smug about their empire. Europeans either did not know about it, or thought it was the result of wise and mature political-thinking. Neither Europeans nor Americans wrote or thought much about the new world power, its potentialities, its soul, its imperial abilities.
Other parts of the world understood American imperialism better, and Japan in particular noted the lack of political thinking in America which made it capable of an entirely negative policy, one against its own interests.
Certainly no power in Europe, no government, no person, in 1900 thought that it was within the realm of possibility that within two decades an American army of two millions would be transported across the Atlantic to fight in an intra-European war.
Keen political thinking in America would have seen that American imperialism was furthered by the mutual concern of all the other world-powers with the situation in the other hemisphere. This allowed America to proceed with imperialism in the Western hemisphere without the interference of any other world-power.
Every other power, even England, was helpless to frustrate American actions in the Western Hemisphere. But there was no American ruling class, no Idea, no Nation, no State. American imperialism was not a rationalized, planned effort, but a fortuitous agglomeration resulting from an imperialistic instinct at work against weak opposition, and with a background of luck.
Yankee financiers were not interested in creating a grand political structure which would stretch from Bering Straits to Cape Horn, nor in building any American empire whatever. Their personal interests were not only uppermost, but exclusive with them. The political leaders of America were dependent for their tenure of office on the financiers by 1900, for finance had by that time assumed dominance over industry and transportation. And the greatest financial coups were not to be made in South or Central American affairs, but in West-European affairs.
The old Spanish traditions of cabinet-diplomacy gave their last performance with the Austrian negotiations with Serbia in July, 1914, and then vanished forever from the Western Civilization.
The War was only the political aspect of the transition from one Age into the next, but since Action, and not Thought, is decisive for Life, the War took up into itself the entire significance of the world-epoch. The Cultural aspect of the War was the passing of the 19th century stage into the 20th century stage of the Western Civilization. That meant the demise of the English world-Idea, and the triumph of the Prussian world-Idea, for England had been the Nation inwardly imbued with the Idea of the first phase of the Western Civilization— Rationalism, Materialism, the spirit of economics, parliamentarism, nationalism— and Prussia was the Nation destined to give to the 20th century its appropriate form. This conflict on the cultural plane was independent of any conflict on the political plane. Only one of these Ideas could triumph— only one expressed the Spirit of the New Age. The alternative to the Prussian Idea is chaos. The Prussian Idea could have triumphed on the cultural plane without a war between Prussia and England, in fact they could have been and remained allies for political purposes. The higher development is purely spiritual, and it could only have the result of Prussian victory— or chaos in the entire Western Civilization.
The War was occasioned in a grotesque manner, by a Balkan assassination. Previous incidents, like that at Fashoda, could have occasioned the First World War, and in such case the distribution of powers would have been entirely different, and the results, both spiritual and political, would also. The form it did take— through no necessity whatever— was that of a coalition of all the powers in the world against Prussia-Germany, and its sole ally, Austria-Hungary.
Through connections formed before the War, the American financiers were committed to an English victory, and they were the real force in the American plutocracy. No public “politician” knew anything whatever of external affairs, since they could not relate them to their tenure of office, their sole concern.
It was a fate for America that at this time there was an adventurer at the head of the government. He not only failed to oppose the demands of the bankers for American participation in the War on the side of England, but he had private notions of using the war to further his own unlimited ambition. He and his entourage projected the idea of a “league of nations” of which he would be the head. The English government gladly acquiesced, being in desperate military straits.
Now emerges in full clarity the weakness of American Imperialism. The moment of a European War was obviously a time for American action in its own hemisphere. It was already at war with Mexico, and could have concluded this war without hearing a voice from any other world power. Or, on a higher plane, America could have offered its good offices to terminate a war that all Europe was obviously losing, to the benefit of Asia. America could even have brought the war to a close against the will of the belligerents, for it could have forced England to give up the war.
But America pursued neither self-interest nor the interest of the Western Civilization. Now the population of America was to reap the fruit of America’s century of spiritual isolation, of insulation from History, from the sternness, harshness, cruelty and bitterness of History. Because America had fought only one hard war in its imperial history, because it had never been opposed by a great power, because it had acquired an enormous empire without any cost in blood, it had never developed any political consciousness. The word politics was not understood, nor was the fact of the power-struggle. There was no State, the focus of power. There was no ruling class, the custodian of the State. There was no Tradition, the guiding consciousness of the Nation. There was no Nation, no Idea in whose service the population-stream of the continent lived. There was no Genius in politics, since there was no politics, but only unclean personal struggles for offices and bribes. There was only the group of bankers, and the hapless opportunist Wilson, dreaming of world-rule.
The real, spiritual, significance of the War was known to no public person. Not even the superficial, purely political aspect of the War was understood. The closest thing to realism was found in Boise Penrose’s public demand to enter the war because America had become financially tied to an English victory, which did not seem to be maturing.
If there had been a ruling class— a stratum dedicated by its existence to the actualization and service of the National Idea— America would either have remained out of the War, or have terminated it to save Europe. The atrocity-propaganda, the English monopoly of the news, the systematic efforts of private financial and social groups to bring about American intervention, would not have been allowed. A ruling class tolerates no foreign propaganda or foreign political activity on the home soil.
Naturally the same was true of Germany. Every German ship that was sunk increased the strength of America and Japan, and every German battle-death increased Russian and Asiatic strength vis-à-vis the Western Civilization.
The white Western nations could not afford the losses that Asia and Russia could easily replace. The Western Civilization was outnumbered at that time already five to one by the outer forces. By engaging in an internal war— England versus Germany— Europe was fighting collectively only for the victory of Asia, Russia and America.
None-of this was seen by responsible persons in America. A few thinkers and writers, like Frank Harris and John W. Burgess, saw more deeply into the real issues than any public man. Of these, only William Jennings Bryan opposed effectively for a time the trend toward intervention.
For what had the war to do with American imperialism? What could America gain from the war? Europe was not the enemy of America; both political realities, and the cultural bond prevented that. Asia— Japan and Russia— were not America’s allies, that it was interested in their victory. There was nothing to be gained, from America’s standpoint, by participation on either side of the European War.
This intervention did come about simply because there was no such thing as America. There were only private groups, economically self-interested, a loose government representing the strongest of these, and a prevalent total incomprehension of the world of politics and of the unity and destiny of the West.
This was the weakness of American Imperialism: no plan, no tradition, no policy, no design, no organization.
The English policy against Germany was the same it had used against Napoleon: the “Balance of Power” policy, by which the continent was to be kept divided into two groups of equal power, so that in every war English power would be decisive. Even by 1914, this policy was quite stupid and old fashioned, for the increase of Russian power had superseded it. Those who had looked beneath the thin veneer of Western Culture, by virtue of which alone Russia belonged to the Western State-system, and who had the discernment to assess rightly the snarling Asiatic nihilism under that tenuous crust, knew that the long-range interests of the nations of Western Europe were identical, and that the continuance of petty-statism and intra-European wars would be fatal to Europe’s monopolistic power position in the world, and to each European State.
This sort of thing was utterly unknown, unsuspected, undreamed-of, in economically obsessed America. When the war did come, the populace reacted with a carnival-spirit, as if to a new type of public game or sport.
Nor did America learn anything about politics from the war. Its losses were almost nothing— although, proportionate to the length of front and length of time, they were greater than any European power’s losses— and its concluding idea was that it had won the war. Actually, of course, the war was a defeat for America, since it was not in any way involved in the War. The American situation was neutral, regardless of any intervention policy whatever.
After the war, America collaborated with the powers of Europe, including Germany, in opposing Asiatic Bolshevism in Russia. America dispatched two expeditionary forces, one to Eastern Siberia and one to Northern Russia, to fight the Bolshevism that the European War had unchained against Europe.
Every bit of material, and every life, that America had given to the War was a complete loss from the American standpoint. True, it had emerged from the war with vastly more power than it had entered it, just as had Russia and Japan. But it proceeded to throw this power away at the Versailles Conference and the Washington Naval Conference. Not understanding power, it had remained unconscious of the new world-power distribution resulting from the war. It flung away its new power without knowing it. This ignorance was on a national scale, but was also individual. The ambitious ideal-monger Wilson, who set out to remap the world, had only the most general notions of European geography, ethnography, and history. The balance of Europe’s economy was unknown to him, and he even had no idea of what belonged to the Western Civilization and what did not. He regarded Serbia and Poland, for instance, as Western “nations.”
America learned nothing from the war because it had been, it thought, “victorious,” and this pragmatic test proved the soundness of its policy. By throwing away its new political power, it showed that it did not grasp the fundamental that war is waged to increase power. If any other power had behaved as America did— i.e., fought against its own national interest in a World War— it would have been ruined, and probably partitioned by its neighbors. This could not happen to America because of its isolation in its hemisphere.
It is of secondary importance, but nevertheless must be noticed, that the official propaganda in America was nothing deeper than the slogan that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” It was not found necessary to link up American policy with American interests. This is sufficient testimony to the primitivity of American political thinking. No mention of the crisis in the Western Civilization, of the form of the Future, of any issue whatever. War for war’s sake. It was the same compulsion that Lincoln had had, to inject an ideological issue into wars. Every war must somehow involve “democracy.” If necessary, Tsarist Russia, or Bolshevik Russia, figures as a “democracy.” The only group in America— outside of the few brains who think independently, and who comprise America’s hope for the Future— which was not subject to these idealistic slogans and catchwords was that of the financiers. To them, ideals are commodities which Money can buy. Had they not done it? America could not have lost the First World War in a military sense, just as it could not have won in a political sense. In one word, the American intervention in the First World War was a venture into political Unreality.
The American delegates at the Versailles Conference did not know what the nature of the gathering was. They regarded it as some sort of theologico-judicial tribunal where moral questions were being decided. This collective hallucination, which the European delegates did nothing to disturb, resulted in the strange moralistic terminology of the Versailles Dictate. The vocabulary of this Dictate was American, the provisions were English. The Americans were writing, as they thought, an epilogue to History, a sequel to the last of all wars forever. The English were preparing their initial positions for the next war.
Yet towering over the whole landscape was the great fact: all Europe, and particularly England, had lost the war.
In the new world-picture, there were four powers: Russia, America, Japan, and England. The strongest power, if it had only known it, was America, but, as we have seen, it relinquished most of its new power. The historical fact that had been demonstrated, however— the certainty of complete American ascendancy in any Anglo-American alliance— was not to be withdrawn, and remained there for the political instruction of all Europe.
The result of the European debacle was a powerful negative reaction throughout the American population. The soul of the American people turned with disgust against the European adventure, and no alert politician dared advocate America’s entry into the “league of nations,” or any of its appurtenances. The bankers had won the war, and had no interest in Wilson’s personal world-rule ambitions.
But this-reaction was not to be taken as an abandonment of American imperialism. That cannot be abandoned, coming as it does from the instinct of the People-soul. The War was detested precisely because it had been off the road of imperialism.
The American imperial march continued. American marines and naval forces continued to move about the coasts of the Caribbean and the Pacific, bombarding, and landing troops, just as they had done for the previous century. Chinese ports were attacked, but no longer Japanese ports, for the First World War had made Japan into a Great Power, despite the fact that its war effort was nil.
Nicaragua was attacked and occupied for years by American forces in the 20’s. Hardly had the troops in Nicaragua reached their objectives when America, allied with Japan, attacked China in 1927. The occasion of the war was Chinese resistance to Japanese and American commercial imperialism. Heavy reprisals were administered for the shelling of an American oil plant at Nanking.
While it was engaged in imperialistic fighting, America sponsored the Kellogg Pact. This famous treaty was supposed to do away with war. The mere fact that numerous Western governments signed this elaborate piece of nonsense was a grave sign of the sickness of the Western Civilization. Together with the political defeat of all Europe, a surface-victory had also been gained in the First World War by the 19th century Idea over that of the 20th century. The result was chaos in Western Europe after the First World War— complete disorganization, lack of public comprehension of the new economic, social, spiritual and political problems created by the forward development of the Civilization, and as a result of the debacle of the War.
American commercial imperialism was busy in South and Central America during all this time. For instance, revolutions were brought about in Panama, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and Salvador, all in the year 1931. Another revolution was brought about in Chile the following year. In 1931, private American forces exerted strong influence on the Spanish situation, and helped create the situation which was to result in the Civil War of 1936-1939. Cuba was another country— nominally independent— which felt American imperialism.
American imperialism followed, after as before the First World War, the same double pattern: continual grasping after more power on further horizons on the one hand; complete inability to organize, plan, or intellectualize this conquest, on the other hand. As an example of the confusion, there was the ideology of “non-recognition,” according to which America would not “recognize”— whatever that means— the acquisition by another power of territory by “force of arms.” And yet the entire American empire, including its original base, was acquired as the result of American armed force. This includes the purchases, which were only sold to America because of American military preponderance in its part of the globe. But to touch upon this subject is to arrive at the American Revolution of 1933.
The Nation-Idea immanent in the minds of the creators, led by Hamilton, was the healthy and natural organic ranking of the population from the top down, with a monarch and aristocracy at the top, educated from birth to the idea of service of the National-Idea. They conceived, already at that early stage, the idea of a planned American Imperialism over the hinterland of the continent, and in the Caribbean.
The two ideas continued through the history of America. Class-war is an autopathic Culture-disease which arises with the beginnings of the Civilization-crisis, and is only finally liquidated with the end of that crisis, and the beginning of the second phase of Civilization, the Resurgence of Authority. America’s entire history up to now has been within the first organic phase of Civilization, which set in for the Western Culture about 1750, triumphed in 1800, and is now inwardly accomplished.
Class-war has thus always been looked upon as natural and normal in America, instead of as the expression of a great Culture-crisis with an origin, direction, and end.
The class-war forces, led by Jefferson at the time of the founding of the American union, in 1789, have been in the unique situation in which there was no ideology whatever opposed to them. Since the defeat of the Federalist Party, in 1828, there has been no spiritual, but only crude economic resistance to class war in America. That it has proceeded to lengths of destruction in America to which it never could proceed in Europe is owing, however, not to this alone, but to the presence of extra-Western forces. These forces have intervened in the public life of America, and of necessity have distorted that life and warped it away from its Western origins.
The very nature of a Colony, as has been seen, not only generates centrifugal political tendencies, but also weakens the bond with the mother-soil of the Culture, whence the inner life of the Colony derives. This makes the Colonial area one of low Culture-sensitivity, and low resisting-power to extra-Cultural forces. It is this low resisting power to sub-Cultural and extra-Cultural forces that has brought about the obsession with economics, and has allowed the unparalleled influx of Cultural aliens to take place over the past half century.
At the Constitutional Convention, 1787, Benjamin Franklin sought to have included in the projected Constitution a provision forever excluding the Jews from America. The “humanity” and “equality” ideologists, knowing nothing whatever of what Franklin had in mind, unacquainted completely with the Jew— for there were almost no Jews in America until a century later— rejected Franklin’s advice. His warning that if they did not, their descendants would be working for the Jews within two centuries was not heard. These ideologists only knew of “humanity,” and wished to ignore the vast difference between those human beings within and those without a given world-feeling.
Immigration into America during the 19th century was from all parts of Western Europe, but principally from England, Germany, and Ireland. Toward the end of the century began the Jewish immigration, and shortly thereafter the influx of Balkan Slavs, Russians, and Eastern Mediterranean peoples. Feeble defensive measures were taken, like the Immigration Act of 1890, which put a quota on populations from each European country, calculated so as to favor Northern European immigrants over Slavs and Levantines. None of this, however, affected the Jew, for, stemming from a different Culture, his movements are invisible statistically to Western nations. He came in under the English quota, the German quota, the Irish quota, and every other.
In the outline of Culture-parasitism, the effect of the presence of vast numbers of Negroes, Asiatics, and Indians upon the American life was traced. Added to these numbers are those of the Eastern European populations— excluding the Jews— who, although assimilable, have not been assimilated. The world feeling of Rationalism, which begets Materialism, Money-obsession, decline of authority, and political pluralism, worked against assimilation, and as Culture-distorter's increased in social power and significance, assimilation was deliberately held up in order to keep America in a spiritually dis-articulated, divided, and chaotic condition. Defensive efforts on the part of Americans of nationalistic feelings to restrict or abolish immigration were frustrated by Culture-distortion.
Between 1900 and 1915, fifteen million aliens immigrated into America. Few came from Western Europe. Nearly all were from South-eastern Europe, from Russia, Poland, and Asia Minor. Included in these masses were Jews, whose numbers are estimated in millions. The First World War interrupted the immigration-river, but it was resumed after the War, and was accelerated mightily by the European Revolution of 1933. The Jews who fled or were expelled from Europe went to America en mass.
It is worth noting that the lower Culture-exclusiveness in colonial areas had resulted in Jews being treated for civil purposes the same as Europeans from 1737 onward in the American colonies, whereas a century had to elapse before this Rationalistic policy triumphed completely on the home-soil of the Western Culture. The only reason for it in the colonies was of course the fact that there were no Jews, as a group, but only a few scattered individuals, who were regarded as curiosities.
From 1890 on began the Jewish invasion of America. Within the next fifty years, the number of Jews in America increased from negligible proportions to a number estimated between 8 and 12 millions. New York City became in this period predominantly a Jewish capital. Of this Jewish immigration, approximately 80 per cent were Ashkenazic Jews. American reaction inevitably began against the phenomena which inevitably accompanied the immigration of these vast numbers with their own world feeling, who immediately began to influence the American life in every sphere and on every plane. A clever propaganda making use of the American ideology to serve Jewish purposes was the answer to this reaction. America became a “melting pot,” after the phrase of the Jew Israel Zangwill, and the purely quantitative American ideology lent this picture convincingness in an America still in the money obsession stage.
The word “American” was changed by this same propaganda to mean an immigrant who had improved his personal circumstances by coming to America, and to exclude the native American who was displaced by the immigrant. If the latter showed resentment, he was called “un-American.” Thus native American movements like the second Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1915, as an expression of the reaction of the American organism to the presence of the foreign matter, were more or less successfully called “unAmerican” by the propaganda organs in America, which even by that time had come under strong Culture-distorting influences.
The words “America” and “American” were stripped of all spiritual-national significance, and were given a purely ideological significance. Anyone who came to America was ipso facto an American, regardless of the facts that he retained his own language, lived in his own racial-national group, nourished his old connections with Russia, South-eastern Europe, or the Eastern Mediterranean, and had a purely economic relationship with America. Americans of native stock however, the representatives before history of the new unit in the Western Civilization called the American People, were not ipso facto Americans. If they nourished any national feelings of exclusiveness whatever, they were “un-American.” This transvaluation of values is an invariable accompaniment of Culture-Distortion, and represents a superpersonal life-necessity of the Culture-distorting element. The values of the host-Culture, or hostcolony, are hostile to the life of the Culture-distorter, and for him to adopt them would be to disappear as a higher unit. Assimilation of the Jews would mean that there would no longer be a Jewish Idea, a Jewish Culture-State-Nation-People-Religion-Race. In fighting against nationalistic feelings in America, the Jewish Idea is fighting for its continued existence against the hostile Western Civilization. It is a tribute to the political skill of the leaders of Jewry that they were able in the 20th century to identify their Jewish Idea with America, and to label the nationalism of America with the term “un-American.”
For the inner history of America, four epochs had great significance: 1789, 1828, 1865, 1933. 1789 marked the formation of the Union of the colonies, through the adoption of the Constitution. 1828 marked the final defeat of the Federalist Party, the sole authoritarian force in the Union. 1865 was the complete financialization of the continent, but also the formation of the specific character of the American People. With 1865, however, the last barrier to economic obsession was removed, and the road was paved that was to eventuate in the utter triumph of the Culture-distorter in 1933. Future Western history will write down this date as the year of the American Revolution— or more accurately as the first phase of the American Revolution— for in that year, Culture-distortion began to penetrate the remaining spheres of American life, government, Army, administration, judiciary.
Yet this epoch passed unnoticed— not only by the great mass of Americans, for that is not surprising— but also by many of the custodians of the American national feeling.
On the surface, the profound meaning of events was not at once disclosed. To the population, and to the outer world, it looked as though there had been a mere change of administration, a substitution of one party-business for another. A gigantic revolution that in a European land would have brought about a war was slyly and invisibly put into effect in a politically-unconscious country.
Considerable opposition was aroused by the new regime from the very start, for it embarked, from inner necessity, on a program hostile to, and in every way destructive of, the American national feelings.
Keen political instincts in the Cultural-aliens had given them a complete mastery of the techniques of American party-contests, and they proceeded to monopolize the opposing party, so that thenceforward elections were mere pageantry, and no longer contained the possibility of a real change of government, but only the substitution of one Culture-distorting party for another.
Early in the Revolution foreign affairs were adapted to the policy of the distorter. Bolshevik Russia was accorded diplomatic recognition by the regime in 1934, and Litvinov-Finkelstein was sent from Russia to congratulate the successful regime in Washington. This was the first step in the formation of the American-Bolshevist coalition against Europe. The regime was still in the process of consolidating its hold on power, and had to proceed with caution, since the possibility still existed in 1936 of a national rebellion in the old, elective form.
Yielding to the popular concern with internal affairs, the distorter conducted the “election” of 1936 on domestic issues. This was to be the last election in American history where even a remote possibility existed of a national revolution through the old voting technique. Thenceforward elections were to be managed in such a way that the Culture-distorting regime could perpetuate itself in power indefinitely by that means.
Culture-distortion in America, as elsewhere in the Western Civilization, was only able to twist, warp, and frustrate the soul of the host. It could neither kill it nor transform it. American autopathic tendencies, arising from the disintegration influence of Rationalism and Materialism, are the source of the possibilities of which the Culture-distorter made use. His technique was to push them ever further in the direction of decadence, but at the same time he could always refer to Rationalistic doctrines, themselves products of the Civilization-crisis, as a semi-religious basis for his disintegration work.
Thus the “equality” rhetoric of the Independence Declaration of 1775, and pious platitudes from Lincoln and other party-politicians, were used as the basis of the “tolerance” propaganda which teaches Americans that they must not in any way, not even in thought, discriminate against the Jew. This propaganda is spread from the highest official places down to the level of home, school, and church.
The Negro-movement is a powerful instrument of Culture-distortion, and was organized as such shortly after the advent to power in 1933. Similarly the numerous groups of recent alien provenance are artificially prevented from assimilating and becoming Americans, since every alien-thinking group in America is serviceable to Culture-distortion. Thus the Polish group, for instance, was very useful in waragitation in the Fall of 1939. The usefulness of these alien groups is easily imaginable when it is realized that in 1947 only 3 /4 of the entire population of America consists of whites born in America, that only 55 per cent of the population had both parents American-born, while more than 20 per cent had one foreign born parent, and almost 15 per cent of the population consisted of foreign-born persons. More than one thousand foreign language newspapers and periodicals appear in America, in forty different foreign languages.
The whole result has been to put the native American completely on the defensive, to confer a privileged position on the Culture-distorter, who embodies at the highest potential the idea of alienness, and to disintegrate progressively the American national feeling. Culture-distortion to this degree would not have been possible in Europe, because of the higher Culture-sensitivity and the higher exclusiveness of Europe, even under democratic-materialistic conditions.
It is necessary to observe precisely the spiritual products of Culture-distortion in America, in every sphere of life, for the America that intervenes in Europe is not the true America, which still existed in 1890, but an empire consisting of a master-stratum with its own culture, and a great mass of subjects, comprising the Americans, and the almost equally numerous alien-thinking groups. The lower strata supply the soldiers who invade Europe, but the brains who decide belong to non-Americans.
A literature, vast and inclusive, has grown up on mechanizing and uniformizing all the problems and situations of life. Books are sold by the million to tell the American “How to Make Friends.” Other books tell him how to write letters, how to behave in public, how to make love, how to play games, how to uniformize his inner life, how many children to have, how to dress, even how to think. The same principle has been extended to higher learning, and the viewpoint is nowhere disputed that every American boy and girl is entitled to a “college-education.” Only in America would it have been possible for a journalist to denounce higher physics because it was creating a type of aristocracy.
A contest was recently held in America to find “Mr. Average Man.” General statistics were employed to find the center of population, marital distribution of the population, family-numbers, rural and urban distribution, and so forth. Finally a man and wife with two children in a medium-sized town were chosen as the “Average Family.” They were then given a trip to New York, were interviewed by the press, feted, solicited to endorse commercial products, and held up for the admiration of all those who fell short in any way of the desirable quality of averageness. Their habits at home, their life-adjustments generally were the subject of investigation, and then of generalizing. Having found the average man from the top down, his ideas and feelings were then generalized as the imperative-average thoughts and feelings.
In the American “universities” husbands and wives attend lecture courses on marriage adjustment. Individualism must not even be countenanced in anything so personal as marriage. In America, the Culture-distorter has laid down one way of doing everything. The men change from felt hats to straw hats on one certain day of the year and on another certain day discard the straw hats. The civilian uniform is as rigorous— for each type of occasion— as the strictest military or liturgical garb. Departures from it are the subject of sneers, or interrogation. The arts have been coordinated into the master-plan. There is in America, with its 140,000,000, not a single continuing opera company, or a single continuous theater. What theater there is produces only “revues,” and journalistic propaganda plays.
For the rest, there is only the cinema, and it is, after all, the strongest single medium of the uniformizing of the American by the upper stratum of Culture-distorter.
In a land which produced West, Stuart, and Copley, there is today not a single painter of public note who continues in the Western tradition. “Abstractions,” pictorial insanity, and preoccupation with ugliness monopolize the pictorial art.
Music is seldom heard in America, having been replaced by the culture less drum-beating of the Negro. As an American “musicologist” put it, “Jazz rhythm, taken from wild tribes, is at the same time refined and elementary and corresponds to the disposition of our modern soul. It incites us without pause, like the primitive drum-beating of the prayer-dancer. But it does not stop there. It must at the same time take account of the excitability of the modern psyche. We thirst for quickly exciting, constantly changing, stimuli. Music has an excellent, time-honored means of excitation, syncopation.”
American literature, which produced Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau and Poe, is today entirely represented by Culture-distorters who make Freudian and Marxist motives into plays and novels.
American family life has been thoroughly disintegrated by the Culture-distorting regime. In the usual American home, the parents actually have less authority than the children. The schools enforce no discipline, nor do the churches. The function of forming the minds of the young has been abdicated by all in favor of the cinema.
Marriage in America has been replaced by Divorce. This is said with no paradoxical intent. In the large cities, statistics show that one of every two marriages ends in divorce. Taking the country as a whole, the figure is one in three. This situation can no longer be described as Marriage, since the essence of Marriage is its permanence. The divorce trade is a large business upon which lawyers, private detectives and other charlatans thrive, and from which the spiritual standards of the nation suffer, as reflected in the emotionally indifferent attitude of American children.
The Western erotic, grounded in the chivalry of Gothic times, with the concomitant honor-imperative of the centuries of Western history, has been driven out. The ideal of Wedekind, the Culture-distorter who preached compulsory Bohemianism in Europe around the turn of the 20th century, has been realized by the Culture-distorting regime in America. Inverted Puritanism has arisen. In this new feeling, the Puritan outlook is retained in sexual matters only to scoff at it in the cinema and in literature. Baudelaire’s thesis “In evil only lies bliss” has been taken over by the distorter, and has resulted in the progressive disintegration of American morality in all spheres. In this effort, jazz music is a useful appurtenance, for this primitive beating is nothing but the expression of lust in the world of sound, a world which is capable of expressing all human emotions, both higher and lower.
A part of this general perversion is the physical-youth-mania that has been spread abroad in America. Both men and women, but especially the latter are inwardly obsessed with the idea of remaining physically young in appearance. Advertising plays upon these fears and commercializes them. The “girl” is the ideal feminine type. The mature woman aspires to be a girl, but not vice versa. A “girl” cult has come into existence, which, together with cinema, revue, jazz, divorce, disintegration of the family, and uniformity, serves the vast purpose of destroying the national feelings of the American.
Together with uniformity is the technique of excitement. The press presents every day new sensations. For the general purpose, it is quite immaterial whether the sensation is a murder, a kidnapping, a government scandal, or a war-scare. But for particular, political purposes, the latter sensations are the most effective, and during the years of preparing the Second World War, the distorter administered every day a new “crisis.” The process increased until the population was ready to welcome the outbreak of war as a relief from the constantly mounting nervous tension. When the War did appear, the distorter immediately called it a “World War” despite the fact that only three political powers were engaged, and the strongest powers were not involved. It was, of course, intended to rule out the possibility in the American mind of any localizing of the War, and to prepare for American intervention.
The straining after excitement, pleasure, and constant motion has created a vast night-life, a crime underworld which staggers the imagination of Europeans, and a hurrying from one thing to another which excludes the possibility of contemplation, or individual culture. Almost one per cent of the entire population makes its living from professional crime. The art of reading has been taken away from the Americans, since the idea is to “do something.” Individual culture is generally strangled under such conditions, and the prevailing mass-ideals impose limitations on the form of such personal culture as is attained. All history, all thought, all events, all examples, are used to prove the soundness of the ideal of mass-life, and of the American ideology.
In the Rationalistic and Materialistic atmosphere of 19th century America, there was only a very weak link with the sublime Western Gothic traditions of the spiritualism meaning of life, but under the Culture distorting regime since 1933, America has been completely disenchanted. On every plane, the ultimate reality of the world and life is materialistic. The aim of life is “happiness.” This must be so, since life itself is only a physico-chemical process, and articles appear which treat as imminent the discovery of a “formula” for life by “scientists.”
The contractual side of the old Puritan religion, which regarded Man and God as keeping accounts with one another, has been pushed to its uttermost limits, and all living is simply changing legal relationships. Patriotism is simply a legal duty to the world-proposition called America, which has been equated with the mission of distorting the entire Western Civilization through a process of “educating” Europe. Heroism in the Western sense is unknown, and the hero whom the population admires is a capitalist en grand who has converted a great part of the public wealth into his private resources, or else a smiling film actor. Such a thing as a great spiritual movement or a national rising is not understood in America, first because it has had nothing of the kind in its history, and secondly, because the distorter has made all such things ridiculous. The American is taught that life is a process of cultivating friendly relations with all, joining as many clubs and secret societies as possible, and confining all his thought and effort to the personal plane.
The “happy-end” is the ideal of life and literature. There is no thought of bearing up under the bitterest and most crushing blows of Fate. These are overcome by avoiding one’s glance. The lucky man, and not the man who has suffered in silence and become stronger, is the central figure in the happy-end literature.
The opposition between the Western idea of Destiny-fulfillment and the Culture-distorter’s disintegrating substitute called “happy-end” is actually the focal idea of the world-outlook that he wishes to force upon the prostrate American nation and its parent Western Civilization. The irreconcilability between these two ideas extends from the personal plane upward through national economy, society, State, religion and ethics.
The great Western Life-feeling is the necessity of being ones self, of preserving that within one which cannot be compromised, which is synonymous with Soul, Destiny, Honor, Race. The distorter’s idea of “happy-end” is opportunistic, weak, degenerate, and revolting to the Western honor-feeling. The empty, smiling, face, the uniform mind, the senseless chasing after noise, movement, and sensation, the obsession with moneymaking and money-spending, the rejection of all spiritual standards of attainment— all this merely reflects the basic interpretation of Life as a seeking for a happy-end. For happiness one will compromise anything, give anything, sell anything. Happiness becomes synonymous with pursuit of economic and sexual motives. It absolutely excludes any profitless struggle against odds, merely in order to be one’s self. Understanding and respect for the tragedy of Life, the magic of Life, the power of the Idea, are precluded by the happy-end feeling.
Any idea of this kind is quite impossible for Europeans in the 20th century, even if they had not seen the horrible catastrophe of the Second World War, in which Europe succumbed to the double-invasion of barbarians and distorters. No great artist, no religionist, no deep thinker, has ever deluded himself that Life has the meaning of “happy-end.” In miserable and crushing times, the Western man trains himself rather to bear whatever blows Fate may have in store for him. He does not talk of either happiness or unhappiness, and he does not try to avoid facts by looking away from them. Looking away is no solution, but only a postponement of a later reckoning. Happy-end has a purely negative significance. It is a denial of Life, an escape from Life. It is thus a deception, and an untruth.
The racial chaos in America, which, deliberately perpetuated by the distorter, delivers the American nation more securely into his hands, is only possible because of the de-nationalizing program for Americans. This program begins with propaganda in the schools to the effect that America was not colonized, cleared, conquered, or built by Americans, but by a great conglomeration of aliens. The contributions of the Jew and the Negro are taught as the decisive formative influences on the “American dream.” In New York State, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is forbidden to be taught in the schools. The promoting of the anti-spiritual and anti-national “happy-end” idea, with its economic and sexual obsession, and its social atomism, is the prerequisite of continuing the whole program of degeneration.
Races and nations express themselves at their highest potential in strong individuals, who embody the prime national characteristics, and acquire immense historical symbolic significance. Therefore, the efforts of the Culture-distorter to strangle American nationalism take the form of an offensive against individualism, not against freakish, insane, individualism, but against the only kind that is historically effective— individualism which concentrates in itself a higher Idea, and is devoted to its service.
Thus the highest social value is “getting along with people.” Strong characteristics of independence or strength must be put aside, and the ideal of mediocrity embraced. The universal spirituality, the same intellectual nourishment for all classes, replaces the natural, organic stratification of society. This nourishment again has only a quantitative measure of value. Just as the best product is the one most advertised, so the best book is the one that has the largest sale. The best newspaper or periodical is the one with the largest circulation. This equation of quantity with quality is the complete expression of the mass-idea, the denial of individuality.
A natural corollary of the happiness-sickness is pacifism. Only intellectual pacifism is meant, for the Culture-distorter knows how to make use of the fighting instincts of the native American type. Intellectual pacifism is war-propaganda. The enemy is identified with the idea of war itself, and to fight him is to fight war.
Naturally Hollywoodism is incapable of rousing a population to sternness, sacrifice, heroism, renunciation. Therefore American armies in the field in the Second World War had to be supplied with a vast, never-ending stream of picture-books, chocolate, soft-drinks, beer, juke-boxes, moving-pictures, and playthings of all sorts.
Fundamentals cannot be evaded, and so it was that despite eight years of preparation by the most intense bombardment of emotional artillery the world has ever seen, through film, press, stage, and radio, there was no war-enthusiasm whatever in the American population, and a negative feeling in the armies which were massed against Europe in the Second World War. Out of 16,000,000 men who were impressed into the armed forces from start to finish of America’s brief military participation in the Second World War, less than 600,000 were volunteers. Almost twice this many volunteers out of half as many people were raised in one year in one European nation in the First World War. A large part of the American volunteers had already been notified of imminent conscription, and volunteered for appearance’s sake.
The Western idea of destiny-fulfillment, with its inner imperative of honor and faithfulness to conviction, means that the vulgar are naturally the enemies of the upright. No higher idea is for everyone, and all creativeness comes from the few. Deeds with a high ethical content cannot be performed by all, and he who is capable of them has no reason to be ashamed, to renounce his spiritual values, and adopt the smiling face, the inner vacuum, and the-ideal of “getting along with people,” even at the cost of his soul.
Even destructiveness and distortion on the scale on which it has been successfully introduced into America is a task for a minority. The American and foreign masses are the mere object of the distortion. The organic unit which regards the disintegration of America as a part of its own life-mission is, at its very widest base, only ten per cent of the population of the American Union. And within this ten per cent, it is a comparatively few brains, and a reliable stratum of leaders who actualize the policy of the Jewish Culture-State-Nation-Religion-People-Race. To these leaders, the great mass of their own people are mere soldier-material in the non-military war against the Western Civilization all over the world. Nor need these brains be regarded as animated by any malice or evil motives. To them the Western Civilization is the repository of the collective evil and hatred of the world, the source of a thousand years of persecution, a cruel and unreasonable monstrosity, a sinister force working against the Jewish Messiah idea.
The population of America only consists now of a bare majority that is indisputably American racially, spiritually, nationally. The other half consists of Negroes, Jews, unassimilated South-eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Levantines, Slavs and Indians. The Slavic groups are assimilable by the American race, but the process has been artificially held up by the intervention of Culture distortion. The mass-ideals of noise, excitement, mental uniformity, and hurrying movement which the Americans share with these unassimilated alien groups do not represent any kind of assimilation, because these traits themselves are anti-national, demoralizing, destructive of individuality, State, People, Race.
The Negro problem is one of the numerous racial dis-junctions which press for solution in America. At the time when, as a result of the War of Secession, the Negroes were deprived of their security and delivered to financial slavery in an industrial civilization with whose problems they could in no way cope, they were a contended, primitive people. They had no dynamism, no mission to destroy. Their numbers at that time were about four and a half million, and they were nearly all in the Southern states, where the social life was adjusted to their presence, and kept the white and Negro races separate in every way. No desire existed on either side to disturb this natural formulation of the relationship.
To a finance-capitalist, however, a Negro merely represents “cheap labor,” or a prospect for a small loan. The Master of Money knows nothing of Nation, People, Race, Culture. He is a “realist,” which means, on the primitive-intellectual level, that he regards everything which is as the sum total of Reality. Actually, of course, that which is represents a stage already passed, an Idea already accomplished. True Reality is the Future at work, for this is the impetus of events. Thus no Money-thinker would ever think two or three generations into the future, for he regards larger conditions as stable, even though he seeks instability in immediate conditions.
After the War of Secession, progressively more Negroes went to the Northern States. This movement was vastly accelerated by the two World Wars, when millions of them went northward to replace conscripted white laborers in the Northern industrial districts. Reinforcing this proletarianizing process, Northern enterprises moved factories into the South to employ Negro “cheap” labor, and make large profits.
The converting of the Negro into a wage slave has demoralized him completely, made him into a discontented proletarian, and created in him a deep racial bitterness. The soul of the Negro remains primitive and childlike in comparison with the nervous and complicated soul of Western man, accustomed to thinking in terms of money and civilization. The result is that the Negro has become a charge of white society.
Marriage is almost unknown among the Negroes, and the women raise the large families. In the large cities, the Negro population supplies approximately ten times as many criminals as its numbers would indicate to be its proportion. Social diseases are general among this race, and the hospitals as well as the penitentiaries deal with highly disproportionate numbers of Negroes. Primitive violence is natural to the Negro, and the sense of social disgrace is lacking in him in connection with crimes. Negro sections of the Northern cities are dangerous to the life of white persons.
Bolshevism and Culture-distortion did not miss the potentialities of the Negro for purposes of inner disintegration and race war. Trials of Negroes for felony in the Southern states are made the object of wide-spread and intense Communist propaganda along the old lines of “equality” and “tolerance.” The Communist party supplies counsel to Negroes accused of crime.
Like all primitive races, the Negro race is fertile, and possessed of strong instincts. His numbers today, including the mulattoes, are approximately 14,000,000 This ten per cent of the total population of America is an adjunct of the program of the Culture-distorter. Politically, this mass is organized as a unit, and supported the Roosevelt regime from the time of its seizure of power in 1933. The Negro has been the focus of much of the revolutionary activity of the Culture-distorting regime. From time to time, the distorter raises a racial issue publicly, in which the white Southerner is made the public enemy, and the Negro is the hero of “democracy.” This results in increasingly serious race-war in the Northern and Southern cities.
The Negro has suffered more than anyone in being thrown into the slavery of finance-exploitation, and then into conscription for the race-war program of the distorter. From the happy, deeply and primitively religious, cotton-picking slave, with complete protection and insulation from the dynamism of Western industrialism, he has been made into a malcontent, diseased, fighter in race-war and class-war. His life has been made into a round of factories, hospitals, public relief offices, jails, and roaming of the streets. The new Negro is a dangerous potentiality, and he has been fitted out by the distorter with a program of demands, an ideology of his own within the Bolshevist framework, and dynamic leadership. A Negro writer has recently said: “Your land? How did it become yours? We were here before the Pilgrims landed. Hither we brought our three gifts and mixed them with yours: the gift of poetry and of song, tender and living melodies into a badly harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and muscle power, to defeat the wilderness and conquer the ground of this wide, rich, country, two hundred years before your weak white hands could have done it; the third gift, the gift of soul. Are these gifts worth nothing? Is this no work and striving? Could America have become America without its Negro folk?” This does not represent merely the thought of one mulatto, for these ideas have been drummed into the heads of the millions of the Negroes in the cities— not to mention the white element of weak instincts, the Liberal element which gives in to race-war and thus encourages it.
The Negro has a will strong enough to push his demands through, and today there are Negroes on all levels of the public life, officers, judges, administrators, labor-leaders, lawyers, doctors, professors.
For America there are two aspects to the Negro problem, the immediate, and the long-range. Immediately, the Negro movement is completely in the service of Culture-distortion, which controls all phases of domestic Bolshevism in America. An inner-crisis in which many issues of American public life will simultaneously present themselves, monstrous in their size and demands, will confront the American people in the near future. When, no one can tell, but it is inevitable, for America is no exception to five millennia of the history of High Cultures and their colonies. The position of the Negro vis-à-vis the organic existence of the American People is quite clear.
The long-range aspect of the problem is shown by the declining birthrate of the native American population, and the rising numbers of the Negro. The old white element is decreasing absolutely in numbers, and this process has been going on for two decades. The immediate relationship is spiritual /political; the more remote problem is spiritual/racial.
America, being a colony, and therefore having lower organic resistance to Culture-disease, has succumbed more deeply to retarding influences than the home-soil of the Western Culture ever could have. In America, these retarding forces are managed and inspired by the larger Culture-illness, Culture distortion, and they are heavily relied on in order to overcome the negative effect which would result from the open appearance of the alien distorter.
The popular world-picture which has been made compulsory for the uniformized American is simply the old, materialistic picture which Europe had already outgrown by the First World War. Thus in the American universities, Darwinism is taught in biology, along with Mechanism.
In sociology, Mill and Spencer are the last word. In history, the naive, linear, Ancient-Medieval Modern scheme is retained, and Buckle and Gibbon represent the perfection of historical method. Carlyle, Lamprecht, Breysig, Meray, Eduard Meyer, Spengler, are entirely unknown. In psychology, the mass idea has triumphed, so that “genius” is equated with high intelligence, and the latter with “college education.” Again— no qualitative differences among persons. The commercial maxim is “You can buy brains.” For the rest, Freudianism is gospel. It is possible for the holder of high academic degrees in America to be entirely unacquainted with the history of the Western Culture, with the significance of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Spengler, of the revolt of the Western Civilization against Democracy and Materialism. His picture of events for the last 75 years in Europe is delineated by a few journalistic catchwords. The widening and deepening of the 20th century world-picture is unknown to him, and leads him to deny the very existence of facts and possibilities which are incommensurable with laboratory materialism.
Culture-retardation as a grotesque reality is illustrated by the fact that America is actually from 30 to 50 years behind the parent Western Civilization in the world of thought. No American university has heard of geopolitics, or anything resembling it. Mahan’s sea-power theories are the last word on grand strategy, and the eventuation of the First and Second World Wars— which Americans are taught to regard as “victories”— only reinforce the sea-power idea, despite the fact that world-shaking events have fundamentally altered the relationship between continental power and sea power. This fundamental misconception in America will bear fruit in the Third World War.
In the theory of economics, the situation is similar. Adam Smith is the great foundation. Abstractions like “world economy” are regarded as concrete realities. List is unknown, although Marx is regarded as an economist. Sombart was put away after the American Revolution of 1933. The currency problem is handled on the basis of the gold-standard theory. The European departure from gold-thinking is regarded as morally wrong. The Classical economic theories of the Manchester school are the focus of belief, rather than historical curiosity. Departures from them are treated as downright wicked, or else as regrettable, temporary necessities. These 19th century doctrines are always described as “the laws of economics.”
This retarded mentality has of course had serious effects in the sphere of action, that is of politics and economics.
Since America developed into a world-power in a part of the world where there was no opposition, it failed to develop a State, or true political consciousness. Consequently, in exception to all other Western powers, economics had always undisputed precedence over politics. Inner politics in the true sense did not exist in America— party-contests were understood by all to be mere business competition between the two party-trusts. True political events in America— dis-junction of opposing groups into friend and enemy— have been only three: the War for Independence, 1775-83, the North-South hostility culminating in the War of Secession, 1861-65, and the Revolution of 1933, when Culture-distortion captured complete control of the American destiny.
This exclusive concern of all levels of the population with economics was responsible for the total ascendancy of the Master of Money over American life, the failure to develop a true Nation consciousness, and the rise to power of Culture-distortion.
The larger cycles of financial fluctuations, with alternating “booms” and “depressions” ruined millions in each swing, and until recent decades these pauperized millions could always claim and settle new land in the West, and begin economic life anew. Political class war was never strong in America until recent years. The prevailing Puritan-Calvinistic sentiment of economic predestination militated against fundamental-political class-war, since each worker thought he might one day be chosen for wealth.
With the disappearance of the “frontier,” however, the masses of industrial laborers, became material for the professional labor-leader to organize. From small beginnings, the labor-movement in America developed into a powerful political organization, which was able to make politicians in industrial areas dependent upon its votes for election. This point was reached by the 80’s of the 19th century. This labor movement embraced anarchists, Marxian Communists, nihilists, and liberal-capitalistic leaders. The political elements never dominated this movement, even after the Revolution of 1933, for the American laboring class thinks and feels economically and capitalistically, not politically and socialistically. “Socialism” in America means even now what it meant in Europe in the 19th century, i.e., capitalism of the lower classes. Of true Socialism, nothing is known or understood in America, since Socialism is not primarily an economic organizing-principle, but a political-ethical-Idea, the Spirit of a Political Age, and politics is not yet understood in America.
Agriculture in America for instance is completely on a money basis. There is no policy of insulating it from the city-economy, or of safeguarding the farmers from financial exploitation. Thus during that part of the cycle when the finance-capitalists are contracting the volume of currency, the farmers are thrown into destitution, and their farms are foreclosed.
There is almost no peasantry in the European sense. The peasant has a spiritual connection with the soil, whereas the American farmer has only a financial relationship with it, and will leave at any time if better economic opportunity presents itself. This purely economic attitude has resulted in ruthless exploitation of the soil, with sharp decrease in its productivity, and even greater decrease in the nutritional value of its products. Farming is nearly all on an extensive basis, and the lack of care of the soil has resulted in devastating losses by erosion.
The exploitation of sub-surface mineral deposits is also on a purely financial basis, and a coal mine or oil well may be abandoned with 80 per cent of the mineral remaining in it. Opening of one well or shaft immediately causes an entire area to be opened up, since ownership of the surface includes ownership of the sub-surface in American law. The resultant waste can only be described as looting of the treasures of the soil, and is in the very sharpest contrast to the 20th century attitude of trusteeship toward the soil and its minerals.
Industrial production is merely a battleground for profits and control between the managers and the labor-leaders. The social damage and economic waste of strikes are regarded as normal in America,whereas the 20th century idea has no room for any inner strife in a political unit. Behind the struggle of the managers whom he appoints, and the laborers whom he hires, the finance-capitalist dominates the economic scene. The outcome of the strike cannot-injure him, for he controls the motive forces of the money economy.
This brings us to the currency of America. Since the War of Secession, 1865, the entire country has, financially speaking, been an empire of ignorant subjects, and the owners of the large banks in New York have been the economic monarchs. The codification of this situation took place in the year 1913, when the Federal Reserve System was created by law. It provided for a system of twelve central banks upon which the central government would be dependent for financing. These banks are privately owned, and issue money against government bonds, which are sold through these banks. Thus the American war effort in the Second World War earned approximately $7,500,000,000 in interest for the owners of this system. The only currency known in America is the private issue of these central banks. This currency is spoken of as “secured by government bonds.” These bonds however are payable only in this currency. The whole system of course is simply a device for private control of the economic life of the country. The volume of currency may be increased or decreased at the will of finance-capitalists, and in a country without a State, this is a technique of domination.
To the 20th century soul of the Western Civilization, the resting of public power in private hands is unthinkable. Equally so is the domination of the economic life of a Nation-State by money-thinking. Thrice abominable to the 20th century is the conferring of any power whatever on the banker-mentality, which regards human beings as a “cost of production,” which looks upon politics as a field for private trickery, and which regards the heroism of soldiers as a useful device for conquering new financial domains abroad.
Finance-capitalism belongs to a past age, the Age of Money. Even in America, it has passed into the second place, and has become a mere technique of the absolute domination of the Culture-distorter. More important as a technique is the control of men’s minds, and an understanding of America and its potentialities for Europe necessitates a knowledge of its propaganda system.
There- are two techniques of leadership, both of which are indispensable: discipline, and persuasion. The first is based on confidence, faith, loyalty, duty-sense, good instincts. The second is addressed to the intellectual side, and adjusts itself to the characteristics of the person or population to whom it is directed. Both techniques use sanctions, whether penal, moral, economic, or social. In a period when the reorganizing and forming of huge masses is the leading action-problem, persuasion, or propaganda, is correspondingly necessary, for only an elite is capable of the highest discipline, and masses must be continually re-convinced.
Thus, in America, the country where mass-thinking, mass-ideals, and mass-living dominate the collective life, propaganda is the prime form of dissemination of information. There are no publications in America addressed solely to the intellect; a Culture-distorting regime rests on its invisibility, and independent thinking by strong individuals is ipso facto hostile to such a regime. Nor are there any publications which purvey only facts. Any facts, and any viewpoints, are coordinated, with their presentation, into the ruling propaganda-picture.
The techniques of American propaganda is inclusive of every form of communication. The leading instrument is the cinema. Every week, some 80,000,000 people attend the cinema in America, there to absorb the propaganda message. During the period of war-preparation, 1933-1939, the cinemas produced an endless succession of hate pictures directed against the European Revolution of 1933, and its 20th century outlook and actualization's.
Second in effectiveness is the radio. Every American has in his home one or more wireless receivers, and through them, the mass-picture of events is brought to him again. He has already read the same compulsory viewpoint in the press, seen it in the cinema, and now he hears it. The press, both newspaper and periodical, is third in effectiveness. It should be said that in America, effectiveness of propaganda is measured solely by the numbers which it reaches, since the mass-thinking ideal has triumphed over individuality, quality, and intellectual stratification of the population.
Fourth is the book press. Only such books may be printed as represent or fit into the larger propaganda framework. Thus an edition of the Arabian Nights for children was recently withdrawn in America because some of the contents were said to have the possible effect of prejudicing readers against Jews, and one objectionable illustration showed an unscrupulous merchant with the features of a Jew, in the story about Aladdin and his lamp. During the years 1933-1939, the larger policy of the distorter was entirely unquestioned in any paper, book, or magazine of wide circulation.
Next are the universities and colleges. The mass-idea, as applied to education means that “higher education” is generalized to an extent that the high academic standards of Europe make impossible. America, with only half the population of the Western homeland, has more than 10 times as many institutions granting academic degrees. Actually what is disseminated in these institutions is primarily a slightly more esoteric version of the prevailing ideological and propaganda world-view of the Culture distorting regime.
Last is the stage. Outside of New York City, the spiritual capital of the ruling regime, this hardly exists, but in New York, the journalistic play is an important propaganda-technique. Particularly during the period 1933-1939 did the stage play an important role. A constant stream of hate-plays was produced directed against the world-outlook of the 20th century and its European representatives. Many of these plays were in the Yiddish language, since the leaders in America require uniformity also in their own people.
The propaganda-picture has two aspects, the domestic, and the foreign. The domestic propaganda is a revolutionary one, supporting the American Revolution of 1933. All ideological revolutions, from the French in 1789, through the 19th century ones in Europe, down to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918, have the tendency to take on the form of a cult. In France Reason-worship was the focus of the religious frenzy; in Russia, it was machine-worship, according to the God Marx. The American Revolution of 1933 is no exception. The central-motive of the new cult is “democracy.” In the propaganda-picture, this concept takes the place of God, as the center and ultimate reality. Thus, a Supreme Court Justice, speaking to the graduating class of a Jewish college, said in 1939: “In a larger sense there is something more important than religion, and that is the actualization of the ideals of democracy.”
The word has been endowed with religious force, and has in fact attained to the status of a religion. It has become a numen, and cannot be the subject of critical treatment. Apostasy or heresy bring immediate response in the form of a criminal prosecution for sedition, treason, income tax evasion, or other allegation. The saints of this cult are the “Founding Fathers” of the War for Independence, particularly Jefferson— despite the fact that they uniformly detested the idea of democracy, and were nearly all slave owners— and also Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt. Its prophets are journalists, propagandists, film stars, labor-leaders, and party-politicians. The fact that the word “democracy” cannot be defined is the surest evidence that it has ceased to be descriptive, and has become the object of a mass-faith. All other ideas and dogmas of the propaganda-picture are referred to “democracy” for their ultimate justification.
Immediately below “democracy” in importance is “tolerance.” This is obviously fundamental to a Culturally-alien regime. Tolerance means primarily tolerance of Jews and Negroes, but it can mean the cruelest persecution of Europeans or other persons with a viewpoint differing fundamentally from the prevailing mass-idea. This persecution is social, economic, and, if necessary, legal.
To continue the atomizing of the host-people, class-war is a basic tenet of the total view. It is preached as “labor’s right to organize,” “the right to strike,” and similar slogans. But “capital” also has its rights, since neither side in any contest must gain a decisive victory. Division is, here, as always, the technique of conquest.
Feminism is preached, pursuing the mass-uniformity idea into the realm of the sexes. Instead of the polarity of the sexes, the ideal of the merging of the sexes is promulgated. Women are taught to be the “equal” of men, and the Western recognition of sexual polarity is branded as the “holding down” and “persecution” of women.
Pacifism is preached as a part of the propaganda. This is of course not true pacifism, for that supervenes without anyone preaching it, and often without anyone knowing it, and always without anyone being able to do anything about it. In practice, doctrinaire pacifism is always a form of war-propaganda. Thus, in America, Europe means war, and America means peace. American imperialism is always a crusade for peace. A prominent member of the regime recently spoke of America’s “duty to wage peace around the world.” [Did we take a wrong turn somewhere,I ask my self sitting in the southwest desert at the approaching end of 2017 DC]
“Religious tolerance” is also a part of the propaganda, and it is so interpreted as to mean religious indifference. Dogmas and doctrines of religion are treated as quite secondary. Churches are often merged or separated for purely economic considerations. When religion is not merely a compulsory weekly social amusement, it is a political lecture. Co-operation between the churches is constantly being organized, and always for some utilitarian aim, having nothing to do with religion. What this means is: the subservience of religion to the program of Culture-distortion.
The numen “democracy” is used also in this realm as the essence of reality. A foreign development sought to be brought about is called “spreading democracy”; a development sought to be hindered is “against democracy,” or “fascistic.” “Fascism” is the numen corresponding to evil in theology, and in fact they are directly equated in American propaganda.
The prime enemy in the propaganda picture was always Europe, and especially the Prussian-European spirit which rose with such self-evident force in the European Revolution of 1933 against the negative view of life, with its materialism, money-obsession, and democratic corruption. The more surely it appeared that this Revolution was not a superficial political phenomenon, a mere transfer of one party regime for another, that it was a deep spiritual, total revolution, of a new, vital spirit against a dead spirit, the more violent became the hate propaganda directed against Europe. By 1938, this propaganda had reached an intensity, both in volume and in emotional frenzy, that could not be surpassed. Ceaselessly the American was bombarded with the message that Europe was attacking everything worth-while in the world, “God,” “religion,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “peace,” “America.”
This excessive use of abstractions was itself indicative that there was a lack of concrete realities to use. The failure to arouse excitement, despite the propaganda bombardment, led to the thesis that Europe was planning to invade the United States with fleets and armies. Ideas like these indeed conquered the intellectual side of the American mass-mind, but did not penetrate to the emotional level of rousing genuine apprehension or effective hate.
“Aggressor” was another leading word in the intellectual assault. Again, it did not relate to facts, and was only allowed to work one way as a term of abuse. “International morality” was invented and formulated so that the enemy of the Culture-distorter became ipso facto immoral. If they could not find political reasons for their politics, they were all the more resourceful in creating moral, ideological, economic, and esthetic reasons. Nations were divided into good and bad. Europe as a whole was bad when it was united, and if Culture-distortion was able to secure a foothold in any European land, such land became thereby good. The American propaganda machine reacted with venomous hatred against the European partitioning of Bohemia in 1938. Every European power which had participated in the negotiations was denounced as evil, aggressive, immoral, anti-democratic, and the rest of it.
Fundamental in this political picture was the thesis that politics was a matter of “forms of government, struggling against one another. Not nations or States, but abstractions like “democracy” and “fascism” were the content of the world-struggle. This imposed the necessity of calling the opponent of the momentary situation as “democratic” or “fascistic,” and changing it from month to month, year to year. Serbia, Poland, Japan, Russia, China, Hungary, Romania, and many other units, have been both “fascist” and “democratic,” depending upon precisely what treaty they had made, and with what power.
The division into “democratic” and “fascistic” corresponded exactly with that into treaty-breaking and treaty-observing powers. Supplementing it was the dichotomy: peace-loving nations, and— the other kind. The phrase “international law” was popularized, and it was used to describe something which has never existed, and cannot exist. It had no connection whatever with the real international law of 500 years of Western practice. It was popularized to mean that any change in the international territorial status quo was “forbidden” by “international law.”
Any words whatever that had good connotations were linked with the leading catchwords of the picture. Thus Western Civilization was too impressive to treat as a hostile term, and it was used to describe parliamentarism, class-war, plutocracy, and finally— Bolshevik Russia. It was insisted by the propaganda machine during the time of the battle at Stalingrad in the Fall of 1942 between Europe and Asia that the Asiatic forces represented Western Civilization while the European armies were the enemies of Western Civilization. The fact that Siberian, Turkestani, and Kirghizian regiments were being used by the Bolshevik regime was adduced as proof that Asia had saved Western Civilization.
To Europeans, this sort of thing testifies to two great facts: the total lack of any political or cultural consciousness whatever in the masses of the American population, and the deep, total, and implacable enmity toward Europe of the Culture-distorting regime in America. Japan was also treated in the propaganda picture as an enemy, but not as an irreconcilable enemy, like Europe. The propaganda against Japan was never allowed to take a racial form, lest the racial instincts of the American population be awakened into a storm that would sweep away the distorter. The generally milder tone of the anti Japanese propaganda was owing to the fact that Japan had not experienced, and could not possibly experience, anything like the great European Revolution of 1933.
Because of the primitive intellectualism in a country whose population had been mentally uniformed, this propaganda was able to adopt extremely crude expedients. Thus during the war-preparation, 1933- 1939, the press, cinema, and radio were filled with stories of insults to the American flag abroad, of secret documents accidentally discovered, of conversations heard over tapped wires, of discoveries of arms caches in the possession of American nationalists groups, and the like. “Newsreels” purporting to have been filmed abroad, were actually made in some cases in Hollywood. So fantastic did it all become that when, a year before the Second World War, a wireless program carried an imaginative story of an invasion from Mars, there were symptoms of widespread panic among the propagandized masses.
Because America had never come strongly under the impression of the Spanish cabinet-politics usages which became engrafted on the European spirit, the Culture-distorting regime was able to engage in propaganda attacks of an extremely repulsive and vile kind directed against the private lives and characters of European leaders who represented the 20th century world-outlook. These leaders were represented as having been panders, homosexuals, dope-fiends, and sadists.
The propaganda was entirely free from any cultural basis, and was completely cynical with regard to facts. Precisely as the cinema-factories of Hollywood ground out lying plays and “newsreels,” the propagandists of the press created what “facts” they needed. When the Japanese air forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the Culture-distorters did not know that Europe would take this occasion to retaliate against the undeclared war which the Culture-distorting regime in Washington had been waging against Europe. The regime therefore at once decided to exploit the Japanese attack as a European military measure. To this end, the propaganda organs at once spread the “news” that European planes with European pilots had participated in the attack, and had even led it. Although every capital ship in the base was sunk in this attack, the regime officially announced that only slight damage had been done. These fact-creations were as nothing, however, to the massive, post-war, “concentration-camp” propaganda of the Culture-distorting regime based in Washington.
This propaganda announced that 6,000,000 members of the Jewish Culture-Nation-State-Church People-Race had been killed in European camps, as well as an indeterminate number of other people. The propaganda was on a world-wide scale, and was of a mendacity that was perhaps adapted to a uniformized mass, but was simply disgusting to discriminating Europeans. The propaganda was technically quite complete. “Photographs” were supplied in millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black-markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed, and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically-minded.
We come now to the purpose of this propaganda which the regime gave to its mentally-enslaved masses. From the analysis in the 20th Century Political Outlook, the purpose is seen to be only one: it was designed to create a total war in the spiritual sense, transcending the limits of politics, against the Western Civilization. The American masses, both military and civilian, were given this mental poison in order to inflame them to the point where they would carry out without flinching the post-war annihilation program. In particular: it was designed to support a war after the Second World War, a war of looting, hanging, and starvation against defenseless Europe.
Propaganda is merely an adjunct of policy, however, and we come now to the conduct of foreign affairs by the America-based regime from the time of its seizure of power in 1933.
Historians will be able to trace the appearance of Culture-pathology through American foreign policy from about 1900. The immediate period under consideration however is that since 1933, a year of fate for both America and Europe.
The first positive act of a non-routine nature by the revolutionary regime, after its preliminary consolidation of power, was the diplomatic recognition of Bolshevist Russia. It was explained away to a loudly resentful American public as being merely a routine act, without ideological significance, and quite harmless politically. Actually it was the beginning of a cooperation between the two regimes which continued with only surface interruptions until the Russian and American armies met in the heart of the Western Civilization, and London and Berlin had been thrown into the dust.
In 1936, the Bolshevist revolution and the 20th century Western authoritarian spirit met on the battleground of Spain. The officials of the America-based regime privately expressed their sympathy with Red Spain. The unequivocal opposition of the Catholic Church to American aid for Bolshevist Spain prevented intervention. The Catholic Church in America has twenty million adherents, and the Culture distorting regime had not sufficiently consolidated its power to engage in a domestic conflict of the type that would have resulted. It was about to contest its second national election, and large organized groups were still in the field against it. A blunder in foreign policy could have been fatal at that stage.
The perfection of its election technique continued the regime in office. In October, 1937, the open preparations for a Second World War were begun. It was officially announced that the American government was going “to quarantine aggressors.” The propaganda organs had identified the word “aggressor” with Europe, and the custodians of the European Future. To satisfy nationalist elements, Japan was included in the term, but the regime continued to equip Japan with essential raw materials for its war-industry, while at the same time it refused to sell raw materials to Europe, and boycotted importation into America of European goods originating in areas not dominated by the Culture-distorting regime.
By the fall of 1938, the stage was set for a World War. The propaganda of almost half Europe had been brought under the control of Washington, and the governments of nearly half Europe were its puppets. The incorporation of Bohemia into Europe was the result of the mutual understanding-of four European leaders, making their own decision, and the plans of Washington were completely frustrated, despite careful preparations. The American treasury had been made available to the regime as a “Stabilization Fund,” and it could draw upon its billions without accounting to anyone. The subsidization of its representative propagandists in European countries was increased to such proportions that soon almost half Europe had been made to hate the leaders who had prevented an intra-European war.
But an Eastern border-state was needed for the next incident, since there was no direct possibility of a war in Western Europe, Poland was therefore coordinated into the plans of Washington. The Polish government, ostensibly the custodian of the national interests of Poland, brought about a hopeless war, and that precisely after Russia had publicly agreed to the partitioning of Poland. The government which had arranged the war’s beginning disappeared promptly upon the outbreak of war, and was never heard of again. It had earned its pension. The American domestic propaganda at this time was to the effect that Poland could resist for years.
The war began in earnest in 1940. France and the Low Countries were detached from America in a few weeks. The American regime found its control of Europe severely limited, and a domestic population on its hands not only devoid of war enthusiasm, but hostile to any form of intervention in the war which the Washington dictature had itself created.
The non-intervention movement in America was then taken over by the Culture-distorter, and the propaganda was devised that sending war material abroad was a method of remaining out of the war. In other words, limited participation was nonintervention. American political unconsciousness being what it is in a country with no tradition, no State, and no higher History, this was convincing, and the overwhelming sentiment against intervention was thus brought into the service of the intervention plans of Washington.
The limited participation was ever less limited. A law which nationalist elements had passed long before the War, to prohibit this sort of involvement in wars, was cynically put aside. American expeditionary forces were sent abroad, American naval vessels were ordered to engage European vessels on the high seas, merchant ships of European origin were requisitioned— and all this from a government that had been giving pontifical lessons in International Law to the world.
The widening of the theater of war by the involvement of Bolshevist Russia against the Western Civilization led within a fortnight to the breaking of relations with Europe. But the domestic situation still prevented Washington from direct American involvement, and Europe had failed to react to the undeclared American war on the high seas. The sole remaining American bastion in Europe was the island, and it was only held by political and financial means which could at any moment give way. Direct intervention with the total military potential of America was essential if the war was not to terminate in a Western victory over Asiatic Russia and a general settlement of all old political problems in Western Europe, which would result in the creation of a Culture-Nation-State-People-Race unity of the West with an authoritarian political basis that would be impermeable to Culture-distortion, and would moreover, by its example, inevitably call forth an American nationalist revolution against the Culture-distorting regime.
Since efforts to antagonize Europe by undeclared war had not had the desired results, it was sought to create a Far Eastern war by which it was hoped involvement in the real war against the Western Civilization could also come: about. To this end, an ultimatum was delivered to the Japanese Government in November, 1941. The ultimatum demanded Japanese evacuation of all its conquests since July, 1936. The answer of Japan was to sink the American battle fleet in Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Public and official investigations carried out by nationalist elements after the war proved conclusively that the Washington regime knew this attack was coming, and even the day of it, since it had been reading Japanese diplomatic messages. Nevertheless it took no military precautions, and thus cynically threw away the lives of thousands of American soldiers and sailors. The propaganda machine was already geared to attribute this Japanese attack to the Western Civilization, but the Western war declaration, following in a few days, made this propaganda pointless.
Thenceforward, 80 per cent of the American war-effort was devoted to the war against the hated Western Civilization. Australia and India were ignored except for weak efforts to contain a second Japanese attack-wave which never came. Had it come, the white population in colonial Australia would have passed into subjection to Japan, as a result of the presence in the Western Civilization of a pathological distortion. Europeans should note the significance of the statement of the American commander, precisely in this threatened quarter of the white world, made in the summer of 1942: “The future of civilization rests with the worthy banners of the Russian Army.” From this, it is apparent that uniformity of mind is a prerequisite also to military rank.
The conduct of the American war effort, on the higher level, departed entirely from the principles of honor which have always governed the intercourse of Western nations and leaders. The prime attack against Europe was by bombing planes based on the European island which from 1942 was occupied by American troops. The air-bombardment was directed almost entirely against the civilian population of Europe, even though it was known that no decision could be achieved by this means. The American press spoke blood-thirstily of “block-busters” by which was meant a bomb which could wipe out a city-block of civilian homes, and kill several hundred civilians. Photographs were proudly displayed of the results of this dishonorable type of warfare against families and homes. A propaganda was developed that anyone opposing the armies or ideology of America was a criminal, and subject to a “trial” for his “crimes.”
Europe was already familiar with atrocity propaganda stemming from America. Owing to the primitive intellectual level which Culture-distortion and Culture-Retardation have generalized in America, this sort of thing is taken literally, whereas the responsible minds of Europe recognize it for what it is, a mass propaganda designed to reach marginal brains. Thus during the First World War, the American press circulated stories of atrocities committed— of course— by the opponents of American armies. Belgium was selected as the site of these stories, and it was said that Belgian civilians were crucified by occupying armies. There was much more of the same: hands cut off babies, and the like. So seriously was this taken in America that after the First World War a deputation of American journalists traveled in a group to Belgium to investigate the stories, and then reported to the American public that they had all been found to be untrue.
Thus the thesis that anyone opposing America was ipso facto a criminal was not taken seriously in Europe, but served as a preparation of the American mind for the post-war horrors to be committed in Europe.
A leadership that had been talking about “war crimes” for years, while waging its own warfare against homes and families, armed itself finally in 1945 with a projectile which could be used only against civilians, the “atomic” bomb. Under the tactical conditions then prevailing, this bomb could not be used against military forces, but only against cities, which in war are stripped of men of military age. This bomb was used without demonstration, and without warning, and obliterated hundreds of thousands of civilians in a few seconds.
In the period after the Second World War, American foreign policy retained its continuity. Occupied Europe was treated as an area to be devastated, factories were dismantled of machinery, which was given to Russia, and other installations were blown into the air as part of a deliberate policy of destroying the industrial-potential of Europe. The population was treated as sub-human, and a large-scale starvation policy was introduced, which continues in 1948. Although America was exporting food all over the world, not being under any obligation of honor or morality to do so, nevertheless it refused to send enough food to maintain human life into occupied Europe. Human rations were fixed far below qualitative and quantitative minima for health, and within a short time, malnutrition, skin-ailments, infections, and degenerative diseases began to kill millions. In the first wild exultation of its “victory,” the American army forbade its personnel even to speak to the population. This continued until court martial's became too numerous, and it was discarded while in its place was substituted a violent hate propaganda among the American troops. The population of Europe was treated as totally and essentially inferior to the conquering Americans. It was officially referred to as “the indigenous population.” In public buildings special sanitary facilities were set aside for them, while the superior Americans and Negroes used their own.
Requisitioning of homes was on a mass-scale: American soldiers and civilians were allowed to bring their families from America and to put them into undamaged houses, in which had been living perhaps fifteen or twenty members of “the indigenous population.” The owners of these homes were allowed
usually to take with them only their clothes and their food. No provisions were made for housing the dispossessed, for they were regarded and treated as sub-human. This population was deprived of the physical right of self-defense against Americans. Europeans who struck Americans in reply to a blow were sentenced to imprisonment by American military courts. One European was sentenced to two years imprisonment for a hearsay reference to a Jewish member of the American forces as a “dirty Jew.” The ghastly dishonor attending the American occupation of Europe is sufficient to show the presence of Culture-alien elements, for no Western nation or colony could possibly proceed to this type of conduct. Its very inner constitution, its historical essence, a thousand-year honor tradition, would preclude the possibility. What Western nation would reduce the women of another to the legal status of concubines, and forbid marriage between its members and those of another Western nation? Yet this is what the American command did. It permitted concubinage, and forbade marriage. As a result of this policy, venereal disease assumed plague proportions in occupied Europe. In the presence of this starving, disease-ridden European population, the American armies and their families, guarded by guns and barbed wire, live in the houses which their bombs did not damage, and eat an unrationed diet. The spiritual qualities developed by these conditions are not the highest. In the early phase of the occupation, waste food and clothing were actually burned in the physical presence of the starving and freezing “indigenous population.” When, in the summer of 1947, a food revolt threatened, one of the American governors announced officially that the American people had no duty in fact, in international law, or in morals, to feed its subject population in occupied Europe, and that if a revolt did occur, it would be put down with bayonet and machine gun. That which is here described is only partial, but the pattern of the facts is universal in American-occupied Europe. It continues today, and has a deep and wide influence on European thinking on the most important level.
Upon the conquest of Japan, the utmost friendliness was at once put into effect as the policy of the army toward the Japanese population. The American army officially established brothels with Japanese women for its soldiers. Houses were not requisitioned for the troops, but barracks were built. The diet was adequate to maintain human health. The Emperor retained his rank and position, and his Godhead was not disturbed in the public mind. The Japanese self-respect was maintained by the dignified treatment generally accorded to Japanese civilians. The American policy was to restore the industrial potential of the country, and allow Japanese autonomy. The Japanese Diet, government and administration were maintained. Former political leaders were respectfully told to report for trial for war crimes, for this pettifogging nonsense has become a compulsion wherever American armies penetrate. The only exaction made of the population was the adoption of the American religion of “democracy”-worship. For a population whose national religion already consisted of Confucianism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Emperor-worship, this was no great sacrifice.
The leaders over whom the protracted ritual of war-crime exorcism was practiced were not abused either in the Japanese press or in the American press. They were not photographed endlessly, subjected to Freudian inquisitions, tormented, forced to pick up the cigarette-ends of American soldiers, or systematically degraded as had been the case with the victims of American armies in Europe. Above all, the “war-crime” process was not extended throughout the entire organization of Japanese life, both civilian and military, as was done in Europe, and as continues to be done in 1948.
The difference in policy between these two occupations is quite sufficient to explain by itself the entire formative influence of American foreign policy. The dominating impulse of the occupation-policy in occupied Europe is revenge. As the analysis of politics showed, however, revenge is not a part of politics, but transcends politics. Politics is not carried on for the purpose of humiliating the enemy, nor of exterminating the population of the enemy-unit if it is defeated. Politics has the aim of increasing power, and the American regime has not consulted power-realities at any point in forming and executing its policy in occupied Europe. In an area with an enormous war-potential which it controls and could use for its own power purposes, it systematically destroys plant and machinery. Among a population which could furnish it with millions of the best soldiers in the world, the Americans conduct themselves with a ferocity and an affected superiority calculated to alienate the “indigenous population” forever. Finding themselves captors of the best military leaders in the Western Civilization, to whom they should go to school, they proceed to hang them for the crime of opposing American armies in the field.
In short, instead of increasing American power, the occupation-policy has decreased American power in every way. This shows conclusively that the motivation of this conduct is outside politics. Its motivation is derived from the complete, deep, and total organic irreconcilability between a High Culture and a parasitic organism within it. This relationship is one transcending ordinary international politics. It is somewhat similar to the relationship between the Roman legions and the barbarians of Mithridates and Jugurtha, or to that between the Crusaders and the Saracens, or between Europe and the Turk in the 16th century. It is deeper even than these, because of the revenge-twist introduced into the soul of the parasite through centuries of silent sufferance of the unassailable superiority of the host. When defeated Europe— and in particular, the most vital part of it, the bearer of the grand European Idea of the 20th century— lay at the feet of this-totally alien conqueror from a Culture of the past, no feelings of magnanimity, chivalry, generosity, mercy, were in his exultant soul. There was only there the gall which he had been drinking for a thousand years while he had bided his time under the arrogance of the alien Western peoples whom he had always considered, and still considers, barbarians, goyim. Seen from this standpoint, the American armies were just as completely defeated as the armies from the mother-soil of the Culture. The real victor was the Cultural alien, whose triumph here over the entire Western Civilization marked the highest refulgence of his destiny.
American foreign policy violates every feature of this natural disposition. It allied America to Russia— not against Japan, which could have been understood, but against Europe, which was madness for true American interests. It fought Japan, and proceeded after the conquest to rehabilitate Japan instead of reorganizing it into a permanent part of the American empire. It fought its main ally, Europe, not a mere political ally, but its spiritual parent and total, Cultural ally.
When the fortunes of war gave military victory to American arms it could have redeemed its previous mistakes. Japan could have been incorporated into the American overseas empire. Europe could have been rehabilitated. The exact opposite was done. Europe was looted, starved, and despoiled, while Japan, the natural enemy, was rebuilt for its next war against America.
In short, the foreign policy of America was not American. From its objective acts alone, this appears in a conclusive fashion.
Culture-distortion has exercised in America, since 1933, the supreme power of deciding the issue of war or peace for Americans. From the victorious dispersal of American arms, America gained no power. Japan has been an expense— much of its machinery has been given to Russia, and the burden of making up its food-deficit has been laid on the American people. While Russia has gained enormously in industrial strength by the machinery it has taken from Europe, and from what America has given it from its half of Europe, America has only incurred more expenses. So thoroughly has it devastated its area of occupied Europe that many material needs of its armies have to be brought from America.
American armies have evacuated China and India, North Africa and Persia, giving up the largest empire in the world’s history. At the close of the Second World War, Washington was the capital of a military empire embracing 18/20ths of the surface of the earth, including all the seas as subject to American control.
The policy of the Culture-distorter was thus not at all, as some people said, directed toward world control. This grandiose idea could only arise in a Western stratum. An alien organism in the body of the Western Civilization can only distort the life of the West. The parasite cannot become Western, and world-domination is a Western idea. Nor is it an idea for everyone, but like all formative Western ideas it excludes persons without depth or intensity. This is why America could not hold the great empire it had gathered together. America has not yet had sufficient historical experience, it has not the consciousness of politics, to administer or create an empire. In the mass-mind of the American, the entire Second World War had the one negative aim: destroy the European Idea.
Thus Culture-distortion in America neither followed America’s national interest, nor did it aim at world-conquest, either for itself or for America. As a result, it led America to a political defeat in the Second World War.
This fact is quite patent to Europe. More important is the question of how far this is realized in America. This involves the problems of the form of the Future in America, American nationalism, the prospect of continued Culture-pathology, and the spiritual possibilities of America.
In this Age, the motivation of politics is derived from Culture. The world divides into the Western Civilization, and that outside. A victory of Europe over Russia or India is a victory for America, and a victory of America over Japan or China is also one for Europe. America and Europe together constitute a spiritual unit. The possibility thus is real and organic that America and Europe will once again be politically united. That which shares a common Destiny is actually a political unit, and the continuance of political disunity is artificial and hostile to the Life-interests of the organism. The prime aim of Life is the actualizing of the possible. This is Life. Owing to the frightfully dangerous world-position of the Western Civilization, a condition which will not vanish even with a successful war, the organic tendencies to Reunion of Europe and America are inevitably going to express themselves by impressing the best brains of America and Europe with the necessity of Reunion. The time-span involved in the beginnings of this tendency is not longer than one generation. Whether the tendency will be actualized is unforeseeable, just as the fate of Karnak was unforeseeable to the Ramessids. But its Life-necessity will dictate that this tendency will become the focus of action.
But the organic Idea of Reunion is impossible of realization while the West is suffering from inner Culture-diseases. This poses the question of reaction to Culture-pathology in America.
The original stirrings of the soul of the American People were manifested by the early types of the independent colonial, the pioneer, the militiamen, the explorer, the frontiersman. The characteristics of this type were resourcefulness, fearlessness, technical competence. It was simply the old Gothic urge into the distance once more, and the will to conquer that which lies between. The early American people had a powerful instinct of racial superiority coupled with its spirit of self-reliance. This human material was the basis of the Yankee type created by the War of Secession. That war had the result of engrafting onto this human material the form of the Age of Economics, Money and Materialism. It was a natural result, for the entire Western Civilization was at that time in the grip of the Civilization-Crisis. The soul of the American People was formed in that upheaval. It is a late people, by which is meant, technical, hard, externalized, but devoid of possibilities in the field of culture in the narrower sense. This hardness and externalization, this technical competence will always remain in the American soul, for they are of its essence. The ideological trappings were mere clothing, and they belonged to the Spirit of the Age. The 19th century spirit is quite dead, and America cannot perpetuate its charnel ideas any more than an organism can develop backwards, from age to youth.
The American ideology and world-outlook have no Future; the soul of the American people however has, for this people is an organism. The beating of this people into a thing of mass-ideals, mass-thinking, mass-conduct, mass-living, was a distortion and an exaggeration of the tendencies of the American soul,and of the possibilities of the Age of Materialism. This twisting and warping of the American Destiny was only possible because of the diseases of Culture-Retardation and Culture-distortion. Culture Retardation in America was a reflex of the presence of the same disease in Europe: the Age of Materialism had been fortuitously victorious, on the surface of History, in the First World War, and the actualizing of the Idea of the 20th century in both America and Europe was thereby delayed. Culture distortion in America was the result of the presence in huge masses of a Culturally alien group. The immediate future of America is therefore bound up with Culture-distortion and the American reaction against it. The distribution of power, spiritual and material, must be assessed which will be called into play. First the Culture-distorting group.
The numbers of the Jewish Culture-Nation-State-Race in America are estimated between eight and twelve millions. The numbers are however not of the first importance, for this organic unity has strong racial instincts and a powerful sense of a mission. The numbers do indeed play a part, both in the extent of Culture-distortion and the form and extent of the reaction against it, but the public power of the Culture-distorting group is based on its control of highly focused central organizations.
In propaganda, its control is absolute. This covers the cinema, the radio, the press— newspaper, periodical, book— the universities, and the stage. The radio is controlled by means of the few large nation-wide networks, which control the programs of the member stations, even though these may be privately owned. The newspaper press is dominated by its ownership of the few great news-gathering associations, which control the presentation of the news of the member-newspapers, who are dependent on the associations, even though they may be privately owned, and who may not change anything given them by the associations. Periodicals and books are controlled by means of ownership, in most cases, of the magazines, publishing houses, and printing presses, and social, economic, moral, and legal compulsion for the other cases. The stage is controlled by ownership of the theaters, and the other compulsory means. The universities are dominated by the disproportionate numbers of the Culture distorting group, both in teaching and student personnel, as well as the organized and aggressive activity of these numbers.
Both political parties are controlled by the Culture-distorting group, forcing all the accepted kind of inner-political activity in America into its service. The technique of political control is through a vast bureaucracy, created since 1933, which is dominated and disproportionately staffed with members of the group. This administrative control is extended also over the armed forces.
In the financial world— which completely owns and controls the industrial— the power of this group is heavily disproportionate to its population-percentage. Its hold in this realm goes back to the War of Secession, when a few of the precursors of the invasion of 1890-1950 engaged in the arms traffic between: the Confederate and Federal armies.
The result of all this is a powerful spiritual influence on the American people. This people reads the books which aliens write or edit for it. It sees the plays and cinemas it is allowed to. It thinks the thoughts that are put into its head. It is thrown into wars against American interests, which it can only lose. The issue of war and peace, life and death, is decided for America by the Cultural alien. America has been given a semitic countenance. Americans who hold power hold it in deference to the alien. To oppose him dare no public men. Americans were told that they must be concerned with the partitioning of Arabia, and no national channel existed through which an American could deny fundamentally the world-picture which supported such a policy.
But he who has looked into the essence of History knows that the alien and the proper cannot merge, they can only oppose one another. Disguise, terror, threats, dictatorship, pressure, propaganda— none of these can reach the essence of the relationship. The American people— not yet a nation— has its own soul, and it is only its lack of historical experience, and the stage of development of the Culture which created this people, which have made possible the wide and critical diffusion of Culture pathology throughout this people.
The very fact of Culture-distortion presupposes the existence, in its inner purity, of the soul of the hostpeople. Distortion cannot destroy the host, but can only direct the energy of the host onto false problems, and into the direction of the interests of the parasite.
The result of this war was also a defeat for America, first because the issue was false, and secondly because the exploitation of its military successes was false.
Facts of this magnitude cannot be concealed.
A knowledge of the organic nature of History would tell one that a reaction exists in America, even though he knew none of the, facts concerning it. The facts of the American nationalist reaction are precisely what we would expect. History works through minorities, and the size of these minorities is a direct reflex of the necessity of the historical phenomenon. The nationalist minority in America has at least ten million members. This minority is almost completely unorganized. There are approximately a thousand resistance organizations, but they are ineffectual politically, even though they are strongly symptomatic spiritually.
In 1915 began the nationalist reaction to the invasion of Culturally alien elements, with the founding of the second Ku Klux Klan. This year will be marked in retrospect as the beginning of the second phase of the American Revolution. The figure of ten millions as the strength of these elements is of course an estimate, but it refers to persons whose souls are strongly influenced by the immanent Nation-Idea in America. At less intensity, this feeling is general in the American population. Thus, no one denied ever that the overwhelming desire of the population was to stay out of the Second World War which the Culture-distorting regime in Washington had created in Europe. This was despite the heaviest propaganda barrage ever leveled at any population anywhere.
It is not traceable to true pacifism, for this does not exist in America. It reflects the fact that the soul of this people instinctively distrusted and hated the whole attempt. In 1940, it was given no chance to express its feeling in the “election,” since both candidates for power were committed to intervention. The management of elections has so far frustrated expression of the true American soul.
This nationalism is increasingly radical, even though it has not yet assumed political proportions. Certain American nationalists were held in gaol for having said in 1941 that a military defeat was to be desired for the welfare of America, since a defeat would destroy the hold of the Culture-distorting group. The American nationalist element generally hoped for a defeat of the conscript armies which had been massed out of the unenthusiastic and unwilling American youth. At the same time, it supported the war against Japan, the natural, geopolitical enemy of America.
The principle of individuality, of continuity of soul and character, applies to Peoples as well as to persons, and thus it is known that the Spirit still lives which was effective in such men as Nathaniel Green, Mad Anthony Wayne, Ethan Allen, Nathan Hale, Richard Henry Lee, John Adams, Daniel Morgan, Davy Crockett, the men of the Alamo and San Jacinto, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, William Walker, and Homer Lea. The century of materialism and money-obsession naturally called forth no heroism, but the 20th century will change the spiritual aspect of America as it has changed Europe. The latent heroism of the American People will again be summoned forth by the stern creativeness of the Age of Absolute Politics.
Despite the extent of Culture-distortion and its attempts to render a People permanently into a feckless, uniformized mass, there are millions who have held themselves instinctively aloof. These people are the focus of great historical forces. They fight against gigantic odds, and they fight under enormous handicaps.
American nationalism has no connection with a grand tradition of life, thought, and action. It finds itself charged with a politically revolutionary mission, but the American people is not revolutionary. Its reaction to a Cultural disease is in a crude racial form. It faces a mighty political task, but is unconscious of the necessities of power-thinking. Its intellect is not free from the superannuated ideology of “equality,” born in 1775, and still used by the distorting element for its own purpose.
The hammering of the mass-mind into the American people was at bottom merely a technique, an artifice. Strong individuality was submerged, it is true, but strong individuality cannot be annihilated. The Age of Absolute Politics will wake once more what there is of Genius in the American stock, and a powerful reaction may be expected from the mass-veneer over the American soul in the form of individual leaders upon whom absolute power will be conferred.
America is not a country with creative possibilities in the field of philosophy, and its higher understanding of the great realities of our time will come from its deep, determining connection with the mother-soil of the West.
The elements which will enter into the coming struggle between American nationalism and the Culture pathological element will be numerous. It is probably no longer possible for the American Revolution to take a constitutional form. The perfected parliamentary-electoral techniques of late democratic conditions seem to exclude that possibility. There is left only civil war. In such a war, the race-war between the Negro and the white, the class-war of the unions against the managers, the financial-war of the money dictators against the coming authoritarian nationalism, and the war for survival of the Culture-distorter against the American people, will all step forth for resolution.
Whether this crisis will be sharp and critical in nature, like the Secession-War, or in the form of an uncertain and long-drawn out evolution, like the Thirty-Years’ War, or the struggle between the Spirit of Cromwell and the Restoration, cannot be foreseen. In any case, the struggle is one which is demanded by organic necessity, and only its occurrence can be foretold, but neither the form thereof, nor the date thereof.
These are Imponderables. When the American National Revolution takes political form, its inspiration will come from the same ultimate source as the European Revolution of 1933. Therefore what is written here is also for the true America, even though the effective America of the moment, and of the immediate future is a hostile America, an America of willing, mass-mind tools in the service of the Culture-distorting political and total enemy of the Western Civilization.
The Federalist Chief Justice Marshall was the last representative of the Federalist tradition in the government. He established the unique idea in America that laws can be upset by the judicial system, which can declare them “unconstitutional.” This device was to play a large role in American inner politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. More than anything else, the decisions of this Justice strengthened the central government. But the technique he developed was of necessity limited; its efficacy was purely negative. It could unmake laws, but could not make them. This too was entirely against the Constitution, like Parties, conventions, wide suffrage, “implied powers” and the rule of private persons. This judicial usurpation was one more refutation of Rationalistic theories that Life can be planned on a piece of paper and then actualized, for the piece of paper had specified that the judiciary was to be separate from the legislative.
Again, it was not logic, but History, which enabled Marshall to usurp this function of the judicial veto. Far back in colonial history, the idea of “paramount law” had emerged. At that time, it was simply an expression of the centrifugal political tendency in all colonies, for “paramount” law meant domestic law, as opposed to the law of the English King, which was supposed to be personal. The royal governors in the colonies came from Europe, while the judges in the colonies were native-born. Hence “paramount law,” and the establishment of the unique institution of “judicial review.”
A corollary development of this old colonial idea was American legalism. Law in the colonies meant opposition to the Crown, and hence the lawyer became a sort of defender of the public. The Founding Fathers were mostly lawyers; the membership of the Constitutional Convention comprised almost exclusively lawyers. The Constitution was a lawyer’s document, with legal phraseology, and complete absence of political wisdom. Judicial veto of legislation thus seemed quite natural in America and conquered a place for itself. Consequently the strange usage developed of referring all manner of problems to the legal system, to be handled on common law principles. The theory was that political, social, economic, racial, and other problems would thus receive an impartial treatment, free from any human bias.
Law however is the result of politics. Every judiciary is created by a political regime. If the judiciary usurps power which makes it more or less independent, it has become political itself. But in either case, its decisions are the result of politics, cast into legal form. And thus the history of legalism in America, in the form of constitutional law, is simply a reflection of the economic-political history of America. Its first phase was a series of decisions strengthening the central government, an expression of Federalist policy. In the same tradition was the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which reflected the Southern viewpoint on slavery, since the Federalist idea was not abolitionist. After the complete victory of industrialism and Money, 1865, the decisions represent the viewpoint of industrial— and finance— capitalism. The rising capitalism of the labor-unions was continually frustrated by the Supreme Court. No less than 300 times, between 1870 and 1933, it struck down laws made by various States and the central government which were aimed at the plutocracy.
The institution of judicial review could not have developed if there had been a strong central government or a true State. Nor could it have arisen except in a country dominated by economic activity, and lacking any real political issues. Before 1861, there was only one critical political issue, that of the balance of power between North and South. Between 1865 and 1933 there was no true political issue, but only party-politics, which is merely private or group business in the form of inner-politics. The Dred Scott decision would not have been allowed to stand, had not the War of Secession broken out, since the North-South issue was really political, which means that it could not possibly be settled otherwise than by political negotiation or by war, but absolutely not by legalistic ritual. In 1933, a real political issue again took shape, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to solve it by legalistic means.
In that year occurred the fateful Revolution, the seizure of the central power by the Culture-distorting group in America. The new regime did not at once dominate the judiciary, since it has life tenure of office. The judiciary vetoed every one of the principal internal measures of the new regime, until, in 1937, it was intimidated by the threat of creating enough new judges to outvote the opponents of the regime. Grant had successfully done this in 1870 to coerce a hostile Supreme Court, showing that judicial review was merely tolerated by the ruling forces in America so long as it was in their interests.
After 1936 the Court soon passed into the control of the Revolution, and judicial veto of political measures was terminated. It may possibly be used as a slogan, or resurrected as a show, but the forces which the 20th century has let loose do not take legalism seriously. The weapon of judicial review in America possessed some conservative efficacy during the first onslaughts of the Revolution of 1933, but it was a negative defense. Only a creative movement can prevail against a determined Revolution, only politics can defeat politics.
The “separation of powers” theory has worked out in practice to mean either the domination of all branches of the government by the same interests, or else the splitting of the branches between two opposing groups. The authoritarian spirit of the 20th century spells the end of attempts to “separate” the powers of government. Empty theorizing may continue, but this method of politics is dead, in America as well as elsewhere.
II
During the whole 19th century— except for the political issue which created the Secession-War— America was a country without true politics. Inner-politics was simply business, and any group could engage in it to further its own economic or ideological interest. In addition to parties, the usage of “lobbies” developed. The lobby is the means of exerting pressure on legislators after election. Private groups send private representatives to the legislature and there they persuade office-holders, by bribes of votes and money, to support, introduce, or oppose, legislation. Agrarian groups, racial groups, economic groups, societies of every description, use this method. By this means the anti-alcohol societies introduced nation-wide prohibition of the manufacture, sale or transportation of alcoholic liquors. This political technique continues. After the defeat of the Federalist party, early in the 19th century, there was a constant trend toward widening the suffrage, supported by all parties, and only opposed by social traditionary forces. Party always wants the widest possible suffrage, since this completely deprives the electorate of power. If ten men decide an election, they all have some power, at least, but if ten million comprise the electorate, the masses deprive the higher elements of any significance. The inner development of America has followed the invariable pattern of Democracy, observable in all Cultures and all States.
Party-politics is tied to commercialism, Rationalism, Materialism, economic activity. With the Spirit of the Age of Resurgence of Authority, party-politics gives way to authoritarian forms, regardless of theories or techniques employed. The power is simply there for an ambitious man or group to take. As the American Revolution of 1933 shows, this group can even be Culturally alien. The actual technique for instituting authoritarian rule in America was instructive: the two established parties, Republican and Democratic had enjoyed, under various names, a monopoly of inner-politics for a century. It was simple for a group determined on the seizure and maintenance of absolute power to penetrate both of these older formations, and so bring under its control the entire means of expression of internal politics. Only two candidates— or, rarely, three— could be nominated for the Presidency. If the same group nominated them all, it was secure against all means of eviction save revolution by force. This was done, and the result was shown by the elections of 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948.
During the 19th century of economic obsession in America, the idea of instilling efficiency into any phase of the public political life occurred to no one. The situation was allowed to develop in which forty eight administrative units, theoretically “sovereign,” are maintained, each making its own laws on all subjects, levying its own taxes, operating its own educational system, judiciary, police, and economic program. Within the continental United States, there were, in 1947, 75,000 units levying taxes. Each unit can create a public debt, and this must be done through the great private banking houses. In 1947, the total public indebtedness of America was a greater figure than the total assessed tax-valuation of the country. This wide distribution of the apparatus of public power has meant that exactly the opportunities of corruption and misrepresentation which inhere in the central government are reproduced in miniature thousands of times over.
The American Revolution of 1933 was not directed toward reorganizing this state of affairs, but was interested primarily in external affairs. The background of the intervention of this regime in world affairs is the history of American external affairs, after which the aims of the regime will be shown in detail.
The History of American Imperialism
AMERICA ACQUIRED its far-flung empire with less bloodshed than any previous conquering nation in the
history of the planet. Every other power that has ever held sway over subject peoples has purchased its
position with long and heavy warring. An empire cannot remain at peace. Peace and Empire exclude one
another. The hardest war America ever fought was its first one, from 1775 to 1783. From Lexington to
the Treaty of Paris was a long, bloody road, and one that at any time could have taken the opposite
turning. The American regime of those days was not one of full coffers and vast resources that could join
late in a war on the winning side of a world-wide coalition against one power. It was not in the enviable
position of a gambler who can keep his winnings, but need not pay if he loses. Those leaders actually
risked their lives in that war, and if they had lost a hangman’s noose would have been waiting for them. The people who have supplanted the descendants of these proto-Americans would in that case call them “war criminals,” which is the name they devised for the defeated leaders in a war. For were they not “conspirators against humanity,” “wagers of aggressive war,” and the rest of it? Could not this small band of generals, propagandists, statesmen, ideologues, financiers, have been easily fitted into a courtroom for a year-long “trial” where a pre-determined judgment could have been passed upon them? They had no need, however, to fear any such performance, but they were legally traitors to their sovereign King, and a legal tribunal with actual jurisdiction could have been constituted against them.
The American colonists were successful only because of aid from France and volunteer assistance from military men of high ability, like von Steuben, de Kalb, Lafayette, Pulaski. This foreign aid was decisive. England was involved elsewhere for bigger stakes, and was unable to devote sufficient military attention to the colonial uprising. Further contributing to the American effort was the internal English opposition which favored the colonies. The deliberate inactivity of General Howe is only one manifestation of this obstruction.
This long, hard, war marked the beginning of American political independence. The thirteen colonies stretched snake-like along the Atlantic seaboard. The hinterland was claimed by European powers whose days of empire were numbered in the Western Hemisphere: France and Spain. The political decline of Spain was reflected by the revolutionary figures of Hidalgo, Iturbide, Bolivar, who were bringing about the dissolution of the Spanish empire in the Western hemisphere. France was driven, under Napoleon’s regime, to abandon the idea of a colonial empire which would replace the British empire overseas with a French one— Napoleon’s original idea— and to adopt instead the idea of a European empire, the rebuilding of the Holy Roman Empire, but directed this time from Paris. To this end, the trifle of three million dollars was worth more to Napoleon than the vast Louisiana territory, and its purchase by the American union in 1803 was the most fantastic piece of luck any power has ever had. Frederick the Great had to fight seven heartbreaking years to gain tiny Silesia, and two more wars to hold it; Napoleon fought twenty years against six coalitions to control Western Europe; England paid a son for every square mile of its empire— and so on through the pages of imperial history. But America acquired an area the size of Western Europe for the price of a few ships-of-the-line. The latent Calvinism of the proto-American type regarded this, not as remarkable luck, but as a sign of predestination, of God’s grace.
American boldness and Gothic instincts were shown by the Barbary War. This war demonstrated also that the human material in the colonies could produce the type demanded by successful imperialism: William Bainbridge, William Eaton, Edward Preble, Stephen Decatur.
The War of 1812 was another unbelievable piece of luck. Again Napoleon was fighting for American empire. England, involved to the hilt with the Colossus of the continent, was not even able to exploit its superior military position in America, and in spite of its military defeat, America was the political victor in the treaty of Ghent, 1814. The acquisition of Florida in 1819 was the result of negotiation and not of war. Already at this time, the Austrian maxim could have been paraphrased for America: Bella gerant alii, tu, felix America, eme!
The great Hamilton, at the very beginning of the union, had counseled the annexation of Cuba, and others demanded it during this decade, but it was not to become actual until 1900. But at this time, occurred an event that ranks with the great audacities of History: the manifesto to be known as the Monroe Doctrine was delivered in the year 1823. This manifesto announced that America was preempting an entire half of the globe for itself. This “Doctrine” was supported by the British fleet, as a device to dissolve the Spanish colonial empire. If England had opposed this doctrine, it would have been stillborn, but it served British policy, and enlisted America in the service of England. This remained, however, unknown in America, where it was thought that the bold pronouncement had frightened all the powers of Europe, since none of them challenged it. Furthermore, South America presented an inherently uninteresting field for further imperialistic ventures by the powers, and it thus happened that a tradition of success was slowly established in American foreign policy. The Calvinistic feeling spread that America was predestined to rule whatso it would. Almost a century elapsed before the “doctrine” was challenged, and by that time, the military force was present in America which its maintenance presupposed.
Simultaneously with the outer events, the “inner” imperialism, so to speak, continued unrelentingly. The aboriginal inhabitants of the continent, whose wishes were never consulted either by the European powers or by Americans, whether of the colonies or of the union, resisted unceasingly the steady westward drive of American imperialism. The answer of the Americans to this resistance by the Red Indians was the formula “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” American merchants supplied the Indians with arms, powder, and shot, and thus the Indian wars continued down to the beginning of the 20th century. Despite the money-payments for which European powers had given up vast claims, the Indians relinquished theirs only to superior American force. At that time the American practice and theory were the same: Might makes Right. Treaty after treaty was made with Indian tribes laying down frontiers over which Americans agreed not to pass. Each treaty was violated by the American imperial instinct. Such treaty violations gave rise to the Black Hawk War, the Seminole wars, and to a century long series of wars which only ended with the political annihilation of the Indians.
During the 30’s Americans had infiltrated into the Mexican Empire, and by a successful revolt, they separated the vast area of Texas from Mexico. Less than ten years had gone by before this area was annexed by the union. An area larger than any West-European power had been seized with only small scale fighting. In 1842, by treaty with England, the northwest boundary was extended. Oregon was definitely incorporated in 1846.
But meantime the imperial instinct looked from Texas toward the Pacific, over Mexico. It was decided to deprive Mexico of two-thirds of its territory, and since this could hardly be done by purchase or treaty, a war was planned. Mexico caused the war, by refusing to submit to American imperialistic demands. A short war ended in the dictate of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which stripped Mexico of its power.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 with England specifically referred to an American canal across Central America, and led first of all to the completion of an American railroad there in 1855. Japan was “opened” in 1853, over its feeble military resistance, to the commercial side of American imperialism.
After the War of Secession, the American union smashed the French attempt to add Mexico to its empire, and allowed Maximilian to be shot by a revolutionary firing squad. Also shortly after that War, Alaska was acquired by Yankee imperialism. This territory, of almost a million quadrate kilometers, was purchased by America from Russia for a trivial sum. In the same decade the border with Mexico was again rounded off, this time by a small money payment instead of a war, in the transaction known as the Gadsden Purchase.
American imperialism was everywhere active during the second half of the 19th century: Hawaii, Chile, Cuba, Colombia, China, Japan, Siam, Samoa. The American fleet bombarded foreign ports at will in the colonial areas of the world, and sent landing parties ashore when necessary to secure submission to American commercial-imperialistic or territorial demands.
In 1890 the last Sioux War was ended, and thereafter Indian resistance to American imperialism was scattered and local. Hawaii’s turn had come, and soon a “revolt” prepared Hawaii for American annexation. This was mere preparation for an imperialistic venture on a larger scale than anything yet attempted. In 1898, Spain’s possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific were attacked. As a result of the Spanish-American War, most of Spain’s colonial empire was transferred to America, including the valuable Philippines and Cuba. In passing, the Pacific islands of Tutuila, Guam, Wake, Midway and Samoa had been annexed.
II
In all this, one thing must be noted: American imperialism was purely instinctive. It was neither
intelligent nor intellectualized, like contemporary European imperialism. No public man ever advocated
the building of an American empire, and few even recognized openly what was going on. It would in fact
have been indignantly denied that America was an imperialistic power. It is true that the phrase “Manifest
Destiny” as an apology for imperialism came into use around the turn of the 20th century, but there was
no definite imperial policy or program. The colonies were acquired in a plan-less, purely instinctive
fashion, without regard to position, significance, or economic value. William Jennings Bryan in his
speech on Imperialism, August 8, 1900, did warn America against entering on a career of empire because
it would destroy the American form of government, saying, “We cannot repudiate the principle of self government
in the Philippines without weakening that principle here.”But he was not heard, and the tradition of confidence that had taken root during a century of successful imperialistic ventures without a setback was not to be undermined by a minatory speech. Nor was the opposite aspect of Bryan’s warning heard. What he meant by “self-government” was the habit of class war, constitutionalized civil war, freedom for everyone to gouge and exploit everyone else within the limits of the criminal law. Thus his admonition meant: an imperial nation cannot have internal disorganization and formlessness.
There was no class however in America interested in anything else except self-enrichment, and so no one concerned himself with such questions except a few writers like Homer Lea. Imperial situations are ever-changing, and one must be prepared for reverses. In that case, the home conditions must also be in order if the outer developments are to be mastered. In a country where even the word politics was completely misunderstood, and meant corrupt economics, it could not be expected that the political wisdom would be present that would inform the leadership that empire means war, and war presupposes internal order. In very fact, there was no leadership to tell. Every few years a new group of representatives of private economic interests were installed in the administration of the government, and there was no traditional policy, internal or external. There was no agreement on what was fundamental to America’s interests, what would be casus belli, which powers were natural allies, which naturally inimical. The leaders at any one time were mainly self-interested, obsessed with the grand problem of perpetuating their tenure of office.
But American luck continued. Although isolated in its hemisphere, in the sense that no world power could afford to attack it, nevertheless America was not isolated in the sense that it could not send its gunboats and landing parties all over the colonial world on imperialistic adventures. Furthermore, as the Spanish War showed, America could easily defeat any European power in the Western Hemisphere.
The Spanish-American War marked, what the War of Secession had foreshadowed, the emergence of America as a world-power. This made seven world-powers at that time; the others being England, France, Germany, Austria, Russia, Japan. Among these, only Russia, Germany, and England were in the first rank. America was excluded solely by reason of its geographical isolation. It could act against a world power in the Eastern hemisphere only with allies, and in a subordinate role. This was the situation at the beginning of the 20th century, the Age of Annihilation-Wars.
For a full century— 1800-1900— America had been engaged in imperialism, in the Caribbean, in South and Central America, all over the Pacific, and in the Far East. The sphere of American military influence was by 1900 larger than that of any other power except England. It had not in any way condensed or formed its empire, because of the purely instinctive nature of American imperialism. Thus Canada, for instance, although defenseless and contiguous to the base for power, had not been politically incorporated into the American Empire. Nor had Mexico. The American instinct was content merely to be stronger within a certain sphere than any other power, so that its economic ascendancy was assured there. Empire building, in the European sense, was not known in America. The idea of a grand power structure was not understood. The American Empire merely grew, through lack of resistance to American imperial instinct.
For its empire, America had fought only one large-scale war. The first war, that of 1775, was for independence, and the War of 1812 is more accurately called the Second War for Independence. The War of Secession extended the Yankee empire southward, removing an emerging power from the North American continent, and this was the sole serious imperial war Yankee America had to undertake in its century of empire-building. For the landing parties all over Central America, the Mexican War, the fighting in Japan, China, and in the Pacific islands, the Spanish War, all had had slight casualties. Never before had an imperial power acquired so much territory and influence for such a trivial price in blood.
Yet this was not understood, either in Europe or in America. Americans were either embarrassed or smug about their empire. Europeans either did not know about it, or thought it was the result of wise and mature political-thinking. Neither Europeans nor Americans wrote or thought much about the new world power, its potentialities, its soul, its imperial abilities.
Other parts of the world understood American imperialism better, and Japan in particular noted the lack of political thinking in America which made it capable of an entirely negative policy, one against its own interests.
Certainly no power in Europe, no government, no person, in 1900 thought that it was within the realm of possibility that within two decades an American army of two millions would be transported across the Atlantic to fight in an intra-European war.
Keen political thinking in America would have seen that American imperialism was furthered by the mutual concern of all the other world-powers with the situation in the other hemisphere. This allowed America to proceed with imperialism in the Western hemisphere without the interference of any other world-power.
Every other power, even England, was helpless to frustrate American actions in the Western Hemisphere. But there was no American ruling class, no Idea, no Nation, no State. American imperialism was not a rationalized, planned effort, but a fortuitous agglomeration resulting from an imperialistic instinct at work against weak opposition, and with a background of luck.
Yankee financiers were not interested in creating a grand political structure which would stretch from Bering Straits to Cape Horn, nor in building any American empire whatever. Their personal interests were not only uppermost, but exclusive with them. The political leaders of America were dependent for their tenure of office on the financiers by 1900, for finance had by that time assumed dominance over industry and transportation. And the greatest financial coups were not to be made in South or Central American affairs, but in West-European affairs.
American Imperialism in
the Age of Annihilation-Wars
AT THIS PERIOD, the Western Civilization stood before the great turning-point of the First World War.
This great epoch was to mark the demise of an historical phase, and the beginning of another. The Age of
Rationalism, of Materialism, of Criticism, of Economics, of Democracy and Parliamentarism, in short the
first phase of the Civilization Crisis, was coming to an end, and the Crisis was about to be dissolved in the
new Age, that of Absolute Politics, of Authority, of Historicism. New currents had appeared in all
spheres of Western life, manifesting themselves more in the decadence or collapse of the forms of the
older age, than in the appearance of the new forms. Only one man, the Philosopher of the coming Age,
formulated them in their entirety. While he was preparing his work on the coming Age of Annihilation
Wars, and delineating the form of the Future in all spheres of Life, the materialists were, from one
standpoint or another, denying the possibility of a large-scale war, and even as they spoke, the First World
War broke out, in August, 1914.The old Spanish traditions of cabinet-diplomacy gave their last performance with the Austrian negotiations with Serbia in July, 1914, and then vanished forever from the Western Civilization.
The War was only the political aspect of the transition from one Age into the next, but since Action, and not Thought, is decisive for Life, the War took up into itself the entire significance of the world-epoch. The Cultural aspect of the War was the passing of the 19th century stage into the 20th century stage of the Western Civilization. That meant the demise of the English world-Idea, and the triumph of the Prussian world-Idea, for England had been the Nation inwardly imbued with the Idea of the first phase of the Western Civilization— Rationalism, Materialism, the spirit of economics, parliamentarism, nationalism— and Prussia was the Nation destined to give to the 20th century its appropriate form. This conflict on the cultural plane was independent of any conflict on the political plane. Only one of these Ideas could triumph— only one expressed the Spirit of the New Age. The alternative to the Prussian Idea is chaos. The Prussian Idea could have triumphed on the cultural plane without a war between Prussia and England, in fact they could have been and remained allies for political purposes. The higher development is purely spiritual, and it could only have the result of Prussian victory— or chaos in the entire Western Civilization.
The War was occasioned in a grotesque manner, by a Balkan assassination. Previous incidents, like that at Fashoda, could have occasioned the First World War, and in such case the distribution of powers would have been entirely different, and the results, both spiritual and political, would also. The form it did take— through no necessity whatever— was that of a coalition of all the powers in the world against Prussia-Germany, and its sole ally, Austria-Hungary.
Through connections formed before the War, the American financiers were committed to an English victory, and they were the real force in the American plutocracy. No public “politician” knew anything whatever of external affairs, since they could not relate them to their tenure of office, their sole concern.
It was a fate for America that at this time there was an adventurer at the head of the government. He not only failed to oppose the demands of the bankers for American participation in the War on the side of England, but he had private notions of using the war to further his own unlimited ambition. He and his entourage projected the idea of a “league of nations” of which he would be the head. The English government gladly acquiesced, being in desperate military straits.
Now emerges in full clarity the weakness of American Imperialism. The moment of a European War was obviously a time for American action in its own hemisphere. It was already at war with Mexico, and could have concluded this war without hearing a voice from any other world power. Or, on a higher plane, America could have offered its good offices to terminate a war that all Europe was obviously losing, to the benefit of Asia. America could even have brought the war to a close against the will of the belligerents, for it could have forced England to give up the war.
But America pursued neither self-interest nor the interest of the Western Civilization. Now the population of America was to reap the fruit of America’s century of spiritual isolation, of insulation from History, from the sternness, harshness, cruelty and bitterness of History. Because America had fought only one hard war in its imperial history, because it had never been opposed by a great power, because it had acquired an enormous empire without any cost in blood, it had never developed any political consciousness. The word politics was not understood, nor was the fact of the power-struggle. There was no State, the focus of power. There was no ruling class, the custodian of the State. There was no Tradition, the guiding consciousness of the Nation. There was no Nation, no Idea in whose service the population-stream of the continent lived. There was no Genius in politics, since there was no politics, but only unclean personal struggles for offices and bribes. There was only the group of bankers, and the hapless opportunist Wilson, dreaming of world-rule.
The real, spiritual, significance of the War was known to no public person. Not even the superficial, purely political aspect of the War was understood. The closest thing to realism was found in Boise Penrose’s public demand to enter the war because America had become financially tied to an English victory, which did not seem to be maturing.
If there had been a ruling class— a stratum dedicated by its existence to the actualization and service of the National Idea— America would either have remained out of the War, or have terminated it to save Europe. The atrocity-propaganda, the English monopoly of the news, the systematic efforts of private financial and social groups to bring about American intervention, would not have been allowed. A ruling class tolerates no foreign propaganda or foreign political activity on the home soil.
II
The purely political aspect of the War was the struggle between two political powers, Germany and
England. It wore this aspect for the first stage of the War. By 1916, the struggle had changed its nature,
and a Pitt as Prime Minister would have seen it. By that time it was Western Europe against Asia, and in
particular Russia. During the first two years, Russia, and the host of other powers against Germany, were
serving English policy. After that, England had passed into the secondary role, having been surpassed in
power by Asia and America. Every ship that England lost increased the strength of America and Japan.
Every English soldier that was killed increased the strength of Russia, India, China and Japan. England
had arrived at the point where military victory could no longer result in political victory. Its only hope for
emerging unbroken from the War was to conclude peace in 1916.Naturally the same was true of Germany. Every German ship that was sunk increased the strength of America and Japan, and every German battle-death increased Russian and Asiatic strength vis-à-vis the Western Civilization.
The white Western nations could not afford the losses that Asia and Russia could easily replace. The Western Civilization was outnumbered at that time already five to one by the outer forces. By engaging in an internal war— England versus Germany— Europe was fighting collectively only for the victory of Asia, Russia and America.
None-of this was seen by responsible persons in America. A few thinkers and writers, like Frank Harris and John W. Burgess, saw more deeply into the real issues than any public man. Of these, only William Jennings Bryan opposed effectively for a time the trend toward intervention.
For what had the war to do with American imperialism? What could America gain from the war? Europe was not the enemy of America; both political realities, and the cultural bond prevented that. Asia— Japan and Russia— were not America’s allies, that it was interested in their victory. There was nothing to be gained, from America’s standpoint, by participation on either side of the European War.
This intervention did come about simply because there was no such thing as America. There were only private groups, economically self-interested, a loose government representing the strongest of these, and a prevalent total incomprehension of the world of politics and of the unity and destiny of the West.
This was the weakness of American Imperialism: no plan, no tradition, no policy, no design, no organization.
The English policy against Germany was the same it had used against Napoleon: the “Balance of Power” policy, by which the continent was to be kept divided into two groups of equal power, so that in every war English power would be decisive. Even by 1914, this policy was quite stupid and old fashioned, for the increase of Russian power had superseded it. Those who had looked beneath the thin veneer of Western Culture, by virtue of which alone Russia belonged to the Western State-system, and who had the discernment to assess rightly the snarling Asiatic nihilism under that tenuous crust, knew that the long-range interests of the nations of Western Europe were identical, and that the continuance of petty-statism and intra-European wars would be fatal to Europe’s monopolistic power position in the world, and to each European State.
This sort of thing was utterly unknown, unsuspected, undreamed-of, in economically obsessed America. When the war did come, the populace reacted with a carnival-spirit, as if to a new type of public game or sport.
Nor did America learn anything about politics from the war. Its losses were almost nothing— although, proportionate to the length of front and length of time, they were greater than any European power’s losses— and its concluding idea was that it had won the war. Actually, of course, the war was a defeat for America, since it was not in any way involved in the War. The American situation was neutral, regardless of any intervention policy whatever.
After the war, America collaborated with the powers of Europe, including Germany, in opposing Asiatic Bolshevism in Russia. America dispatched two expeditionary forces, one to Eastern Siberia and one to Northern Russia, to fight the Bolshevism that the European War had unchained against Europe.
Every bit of material, and every life, that America had given to the War was a complete loss from the American standpoint. True, it had emerged from the war with vastly more power than it had entered it, just as had Russia and Japan. But it proceeded to throw this power away at the Versailles Conference and the Washington Naval Conference. Not understanding power, it had remained unconscious of the new world-power distribution resulting from the war. It flung away its new power without knowing it. This ignorance was on a national scale, but was also individual. The ambitious ideal-monger Wilson, who set out to remap the world, had only the most general notions of European geography, ethnography, and history. The balance of Europe’s economy was unknown to him, and he even had no idea of what belonged to the Western Civilization and what did not. He regarded Serbia and Poland, for instance, as Western “nations.”
America learned nothing from the war because it had been, it thought, “victorious,” and this pragmatic test proved the soundness of its policy. By throwing away its new political power, it showed that it did not grasp the fundamental that war is waged to increase power. If any other power had behaved as America did— i.e., fought against its own national interest in a World War— it would have been ruined, and probably partitioned by its neighbors. This could not happen to America because of its isolation in its hemisphere.
It is of secondary importance, but nevertheless must be noticed, that the official propaganda in America was nothing deeper than the slogan that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” It was not found necessary to link up American policy with American interests. This is sufficient testimony to the primitivity of American political thinking. No mention of the crisis in the Western Civilization, of the form of the Future, of any issue whatever. War for war’s sake. It was the same compulsion that Lincoln had had, to inject an ideological issue into wars. Every war must somehow involve “democracy.” If necessary, Tsarist Russia, or Bolshevik Russia, figures as a “democracy.” The only group in America— outside of the few brains who think independently, and who comprise America’s hope for the Future— which was not subject to these idealistic slogans and catchwords was that of the financiers. To them, ideals are commodities which Money can buy. Had they not done it? America could not have lost the First World War in a military sense, just as it could not have won in a political sense. In one word, the American intervention in the First World War was a venture into political Unreality.
The American delegates at the Versailles Conference did not know what the nature of the gathering was. They regarded it as some sort of theologico-judicial tribunal where moral questions were being decided. This collective hallucination, which the European delegates did nothing to disturb, resulted in the strange moralistic terminology of the Versailles Dictate. The vocabulary of this Dictate was American, the provisions were English. The Americans were writing, as they thought, an epilogue to History, a sequel to the last of all wars forever. The English were preparing their initial positions for the next war.
III
The net result of the Versailles Conference was a complete failure for Europe. The petty-states retained
their political sovereignty vis-à-vis one another; the transfer of power to areas outside of Europe was thus
confirmed. The ground was laid for a Second World War on the exact lines of the First. To make more
occasions for its outbreak, a host of microscopic “States” were created. Small-space thinking was the
order of the day. Old-fashioned nationalism, which had brought the entire West to a colossal defeat, was
reaffirmed. The stupid ideology of Wilson and his entourage was written into European political
documents. Questions of “guilt” were introduced into politics, along with “international morality,”
“sanctity of treaties,” and similar asininities. Yet towering over the whole landscape was the great fact: all Europe, and particularly England, had lost the war.
In the new world-picture, there were four powers: Russia, America, Japan, and England. The strongest power, if it had only known it, was America, but, as we have seen, it relinquished most of its new power. The historical fact that had been demonstrated, however— the certainty of complete American ascendancy in any Anglo-American alliance— was not to be withdrawn, and remained there for the political instruction of all Europe.
The result of the European debacle was a powerful negative reaction throughout the American population. The soul of the American people turned with disgust against the European adventure, and no alert politician dared advocate America’s entry into the “league of nations,” or any of its appurtenances. The bankers had won the war, and had no interest in Wilson’s personal world-rule ambitions.
But this-reaction was not to be taken as an abandonment of American imperialism. That cannot be abandoned, coming as it does from the instinct of the People-soul. The War was detested precisely because it had been off the road of imperialism.
The American imperial march continued. American marines and naval forces continued to move about the coasts of the Caribbean and the Pacific, bombarding, and landing troops, just as they had done for the previous century. Chinese ports were attacked, but no longer Japanese ports, for the First World War had made Japan into a Great Power, despite the fact that its war effort was nil.
Nicaragua was attacked and occupied for years by American forces in the 20’s. Hardly had the troops in Nicaragua reached their objectives when America, allied with Japan, attacked China in 1927. The occasion of the war was Chinese resistance to Japanese and American commercial imperialism. Heavy reprisals were administered for the shelling of an American oil plant at Nanking.
While it was engaged in imperialistic fighting, America sponsored the Kellogg Pact. This famous treaty was supposed to do away with war. The mere fact that numerous Western governments signed this elaborate piece of nonsense was a grave sign of the sickness of the Western Civilization. Together with the political defeat of all Europe, a surface-victory had also been gained in the First World War by the 19th century Idea over that of the 20th century. The result was chaos in Western Europe after the First World War— complete disorganization, lack of public comprehension of the new economic, social, spiritual and political problems created by the forward development of the Civilization, and as a result of the debacle of the War.
American commercial imperialism was busy in South and Central America during all this time. For instance, revolutions were brought about in Panama, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and Salvador, all in the year 1931. Another revolution was brought about in Chile the following year. In 1931, private American forces exerted strong influence on the Spanish situation, and helped create the situation which was to result in the Civil War of 1936-1939. Cuba was another country— nominally independent— which felt American imperialism.
American imperialism followed, after as before the First World War, the same double pattern: continual grasping after more power on further horizons on the one hand; complete inability to organize, plan, or intellectualize this conquest, on the other hand. As an example of the confusion, there was the ideology of “non-recognition,” according to which America would not “recognize”— whatever that means— the acquisition by another power of territory by “force of arms.” And yet the entire American empire, including its original base, was acquired as the result of American armed force. This includes the purchases, which were only sold to America because of American military preponderance in its part of the globe. But to touch upon this subject is to arrive at the American Revolution of 1933.
The American Revolution of 1933
THE AMERICAN WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE, 1775-1783, was regarded by two different types of
participants in two different aspects. The creative leader-types, like Hamilton, Washington, Franklin,
Rutledge, saw it as an international war, between an American nation, in the formative stage, and
England. This American nation was to them a new Idea, and the various ideological slogans and ideals
which were used as propaganda material were not the essence, but only the temporary clothing of the new
national Idea. For under-types like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, however, the
war was a class war, and the Independence-Idea was only a technique for actualizing the equality ideals
of Rationalistic literature. The implementation of these equality ideals has always taken the form of
jealousy, hatred, and social destruction, in America and in Europe. The class-warriors regarded the war as
a struggle for equality, not a fight for American national independence. They hated monarchy, leadership,
discipline, quality, aristocracy, anything superior and creative. The Nation-Idea immanent in the minds of the creators, led by Hamilton, was the healthy and natural organic ranking of the population from the top down, with a monarch and aristocracy at the top, educated from birth to the idea of service of the National-Idea. They conceived, already at that early stage, the idea of a planned American Imperialism over the hinterland of the continent, and in the Caribbean.
The two ideas continued through the history of America. Class-war is an autopathic Culture-disease which arises with the beginnings of the Civilization-crisis, and is only finally liquidated with the end of that crisis, and the beginning of the second phase of Civilization, the Resurgence of Authority. America’s entire history up to now has been within the first organic phase of Civilization, which set in for the Western Culture about 1750, triumphed in 1800, and is now inwardly accomplished.
Class-war has thus always been looked upon as natural and normal in America, instead of as the expression of a great Culture-crisis with an origin, direction, and end.
The class-war forces, led by Jefferson at the time of the founding of the American union, in 1789, have been in the unique situation in which there was no ideology whatever opposed to them. Since the defeat of the Federalist Party, in 1828, there has been no spiritual, but only crude economic resistance to class war in America. That it has proceeded to lengths of destruction in America to which it never could proceed in Europe is owing, however, not to this alone, but to the presence of extra-Western forces. These forces have intervened in the public life of America, and of necessity have distorted that life and warped it away from its Western origins.
The very nature of a Colony, as has been seen, not only generates centrifugal political tendencies, but also weakens the bond with the mother-soil of the Culture, whence the inner life of the Colony derives. This makes the Colonial area one of low Culture-sensitivity, and low resisting-power to extra-Cultural forces. It is this low resisting power to sub-Cultural and extra-Cultural forces that has brought about the obsession with economics, and has allowed the unparalleled influx of Cultural aliens to take place over the past half century.
At the Constitutional Convention, 1787, Benjamin Franklin sought to have included in the projected Constitution a provision forever excluding the Jews from America. The “humanity” and “equality” ideologists, knowing nothing whatever of what Franklin had in mind, unacquainted completely with the Jew— for there were almost no Jews in America until a century later— rejected Franklin’s advice. His warning that if they did not, their descendants would be working for the Jews within two centuries was not heard. These ideologists only knew of “humanity,” and wished to ignore the vast difference between those human beings within and those without a given world-feeling.
Immigration into America during the 19th century was from all parts of Western Europe, but principally from England, Germany, and Ireland. Toward the end of the century began the Jewish immigration, and shortly thereafter the influx of Balkan Slavs, Russians, and Eastern Mediterranean peoples. Feeble defensive measures were taken, like the Immigration Act of 1890, which put a quota on populations from each European country, calculated so as to favor Northern European immigrants over Slavs and Levantines. None of this, however, affected the Jew, for, stemming from a different Culture, his movements are invisible statistically to Western nations. He came in under the English quota, the German quota, the Irish quota, and every other.
In the outline of Culture-parasitism, the effect of the presence of vast numbers of Negroes, Asiatics, and Indians upon the American life was traced. Added to these numbers are those of the Eastern European populations— excluding the Jews— who, although assimilable, have not been assimilated. The world feeling of Rationalism, which begets Materialism, Money-obsession, decline of authority, and political pluralism, worked against assimilation, and as Culture-distorter's increased in social power and significance, assimilation was deliberately held up in order to keep America in a spiritually dis-articulated, divided, and chaotic condition. Defensive efforts on the part of Americans of nationalistic feelings to restrict or abolish immigration were frustrated by Culture-distortion.
Between 1900 and 1915, fifteen million aliens immigrated into America. Few came from Western Europe. Nearly all were from South-eastern Europe, from Russia, Poland, and Asia Minor. Included in these masses were Jews, whose numbers are estimated in millions. The First World War interrupted the immigration-river, but it was resumed after the War, and was accelerated mightily by the European Revolution of 1933. The Jews who fled or were expelled from Europe went to America en mass.
It is worth noting that the lower Culture-exclusiveness in colonial areas had resulted in Jews being treated for civil purposes the same as Europeans from 1737 onward in the American colonies, whereas a century had to elapse before this Rationalistic policy triumphed completely on the home-soil of the Western Culture. The only reason for it in the colonies was of course the fact that there were no Jews, as a group, but only a few scattered individuals, who were regarded as curiosities.
From 1890 on began the Jewish invasion of America. Within the next fifty years, the number of Jews in America increased from negligible proportions to a number estimated between 8 and 12 millions. New York City became in this period predominantly a Jewish capital. Of this Jewish immigration, approximately 80 per cent were Ashkenazic Jews. American reaction inevitably began against the phenomena which inevitably accompanied the immigration of these vast numbers with their own world feeling, who immediately began to influence the American life in every sphere and on every plane. A clever propaganda making use of the American ideology to serve Jewish purposes was the answer to this reaction. America became a “melting pot,” after the phrase of the Jew Israel Zangwill, and the purely quantitative American ideology lent this picture convincingness in an America still in the money obsession stage.
The word “American” was changed by this same propaganda to mean an immigrant who had improved his personal circumstances by coming to America, and to exclude the native American who was displaced by the immigrant. If the latter showed resentment, he was called “un-American.” Thus native American movements like the second Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1915, as an expression of the reaction of the American organism to the presence of the foreign matter, were more or less successfully called “unAmerican” by the propaganda organs in America, which even by that time had come under strong Culture-distorting influences.
The words “America” and “American” were stripped of all spiritual-national significance, and were given a purely ideological significance. Anyone who came to America was ipso facto an American, regardless of the facts that he retained his own language, lived in his own racial-national group, nourished his old connections with Russia, South-eastern Europe, or the Eastern Mediterranean, and had a purely economic relationship with America. Americans of native stock however, the representatives before history of the new unit in the Western Civilization called the American People, were not ipso facto Americans. If they nourished any national feelings of exclusiveness whatever, they were “un-American.” This transvaluation of values is an invariable accompaniment of Culture-Distortion, and represents a superpersonal life-necessity of the Culture-distorting element. The values of the host-Culture, or hostcolony, are hostile to the life of the Culture-distorter, and for him to adopt them would be to disappear as a higher unit. Assimilation of the Jews would mean that there would no longer be a Jewish Idea, a Jewish Culture-State-Nation-People-Religion-Race. In fighting against nationalistic feelings in America, the Jewish Idea is fighting for its continued existence against the hostile Western Civilization. It is a tribute to the political skill of the leaders of Jewry that they were able in the 20th century to identify their Jewish Idea with America, and to label the nationalism of America with the term “un-American.”
♣II♣
For the inner history of America, four epochs had great significance: 1789, 1828, 1865, 1933. 1789 marked the formation of the Union of the colonies, through the adoption of the Constitution. 1828 marked the final defeat of the Federalist Party, the sole authoritarian force in the Union. 1865 was the complete financialization of the continent, but also the formation of the specific character of the American People. With 1865, however, the last barrier to economic obsession was removed, and the road was paved that was to eventuate in the utter triumph of the Culture-distorter in 1933. Future Western history will write down this date as the year of the American Revolution— or more accurately as the first phase of the American Revolution— for in that year, Culture-distortion began to penetrate the remaining spheres of American life, government, Army, administration, judiciary.
Yet this epoch passed unnoticed— not only by the great mass of Americans, for that is not surprising— but also by many of the custodians of the American national feeling.
On the surface, the profound meaning of events was not at once disclosed. To the population, and to the outer world, it looked as though there had been a mere change of administration, a substitution of one party-business for another. A gigantic revolution that in a European land would have brought about a war was slyly and invisibly put into effect in a politically-unconscious country.
Considerable opposition was aroused by the new regime from the very start, for it embarked, from inner necessity, on a program hostile to, and in every way destructive of, the American national feelings.
Keen political instincts in the Cultural-aliens had given them a complete mastery of the techniques of American party-contests, and they proceeded to monopolize the opposing party, so that thenceforward elections were mere pageantry, and no longer contained the possibility of a real change of government, but only the substitution of one Culture-distorting party for another.
Early in the Revolution foreign affairs were adapted to the policy of the distorter. Bolshevik Russia was accorded diplomatic recognition by the regime in 1934, and Litvinov-Finkelstein was sent from Russia to congratulate the successful regime in Washington. This was the first step in the formation of the American-Bolshevist coalition against Europe. The regime was still in the process of consolidating its hold on power, and had to proceed with caution, since the possibility still existed in 1936 of a national rebellion in the old, elective form.
Yielding to the popular concern with internal affairs, the distorter conducted the “election” of 1936 on domestic issues. This was to be the last election in American history where even a remote possibility existed of a national revolution through the old voting technique. Thenceforward elections were to be managed in such a way that the Culture-distorting regime could perpetuate itself in power indefinitely by that means.
⛋III⛋
Culture-distortion in America, as elsewhere in the Western Civilization, was only able to twist, warp, and frustrate the soul of the host. It could neither kill it nor transform it. American autopathic tendencies, arising from the disintegration influence of Rationalism and Materialism, are the source of the possibilities of which the Culture-distorter made use. His technique was to push them ever further in the direction of decadence, but at the same time he could always refer to Rationalistic doctrines, themselves products of the Civilization-crisis, as a semi-religious basis for his disintegration work.
Thus the “equality” rhetoric of the Independence Declaration of 1775, and pious platitudes from Lincoln and other party-politicians, were used as the basis of the “tolerance” propaganda which teaches Americans that they must not in any way, not even in thought, discriminate against the Jew. This propaganda is spread from the highest official places down to the level of home, school, and church.
The Negro-movement is a powerful instrument of Culture-distortion, and was organized as such shortly after the advent to power in 1933. Similarly the numerous groups of recent alien provenance are artificially prevented from assimilating and becoming Americans, since every alien-thinking group in America is serviceable to Culture-distortion. Thus the Polish group, for instance, was very useful in waragitation in the Fall of 1939. The usefulness of these alien groups is easily imaginable when it is realized that in 1947 only 3 /4 of the entire population of America consists of whites born in America, that only 55 per cent of the population had both parents American-born, while more than 20 per cent had one foreign born parent, and almost 15 per cent of the population consisted of foreign-born persons. More than one thousand foreign language newspapers and periodicals appear in America, in forty different foreign languages.
The whole result has been to put the native American completely on the defensive, to confer a privileged position on the Culture-distorter, who embodies at the highest potential the idea of alienness, and to disintegrate progressively the American national feeling. Culture-distortion to this degree would not have been possible in Europe, because of the higher Culture-sensitivity and the higher exclusiveness of Europe, even under democratic-materialistic conditions.
It is necessary to observe precisely the spiritual products of Culture-distortion in America, in every sphere of life, for the America that intervenes in Europe is not the true America, which still existed in 1890, but an empire consisting of a master-stratum with its own culture, and a great mass of subjects, comprising the Americans, and the almost equally numerous alien-thinking groups. The lower strata supply the soldiers who invade Europe, but the brains who decide belong to non-Americans.
World-Outlook
THE TECHNIQUE for eliminating American resistance to Culture-distortion has been uniformity. Every
American has been made to dress alike, live alike, talk alike, behave alike, and think alike. The principle
of uniformity regards personality as a danger and also as a burden. This great principle has been applied
to every sphere of life. Advertising of a kind and on a scale unknown to Europe is part of the method of
stamping out individualism. Everywhere is seen the same empty, smiling, face. The principle has above
all been applied to the American woman, and in her dress, cosmetics, and behavior, she has been deprived
of all individuality. A literature, vast and inclusive, has grown up on mechanizing and uniformizing all the problems and situations of life. Books are sold by the million to tell the American “How to Make Friends.” Other books tell him how to write letters, how to behave in public, how to make love, how to play games, how to uniformize his inner life, how many children to have, how to dress, even how to think. The same principle has been extended to higher learning, and the viewpoint is nowhere disputed that every American boy and girl is entitled to a “college-education.” Only in America would it have been possible for a journalist to denounce higher physics because it was creating a type of aristocracy.
A contest was recently held in America to find “Mr. Average Man.” General statistics were employed to find the center of population, marital distribution of the population, family-numbers, rural and urban distribution, and so forth. Finally a man and wife with two children in a medium-sized town were chosen as the “Average Family.” They were then given a trip to New York, were interviewed by the press, feted, solicited to endorse commercial products, and held up for the admiration of all those who fell short in any way of the desirable quality of averageness. Their habits at home, their life-adjustments generally were the subject of investigation, and then of generalizing. Having found the average man from the top down, his ideas and feelings were then generalized as the imperative-average thoughts and feelings.
In the American “universities” husbands and wives attend lecture courses on marriage adjustment. Individualism must not even be countenanced in anything so personal as marriage. In America, the Culture-distorter has laid down one way of doing everything. The men change from felt hats to straw hats on one certain day of the year and on another certain day discard the straw hats. The civilian uniform is as rigorous— for each type of occasion— as the strictest military or liturgical garb. Departures from it are the subject of sneers, or interrogation. The arts have been coordinated into the master-plan. There is in America, with its 140,000,000, not a single continuing opera company, or a single continuous theater. What theater there is produces only “revues,” and journalistic propaganda plays.
For the rest, there is only the cinema, and it is, after all, the strongest single medium of the uniformizing of the American by the upper stratum of Culture-distorter.
In a land which produced West, Stuart, and Copley, there is today not a single painter of public note who continues in the Western tradition. “Abstractions,” pictorial insanity, and preoccupation with ugliness monopolize the pictorial art.
Music is seldom heard in America, having been replaced by the culture less drum-beating of the Negro. As an American “musicologist” put it, “Jazz rhythm, taken from wild tribes, is at the same time refined and elementary and corresponds to the disposition of our modern soul. It incites us without pause, like the primitive drum-beating of the prayer-dancer. But it does not stop there. It must at the same time take account of the excitability of the modern psyche. We thirst for quickly exciting, constantly changing, stimuli. Music has an excellent, time-honored means of excitation, syncopation.”
American literature, which produced Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau and Poe, is today entirely represented by Culture-distorters who make Freudian and Marxist motives into plays and novels.
American family life has been thoroughly disintegrated by the Culture-distorting regime. In the usual American home, the parents actually have less authority than the children. The schools enforce no discipline, nor do the churches. The function of forming the minds of the young has been abdicated by all in favor of the cinema.
Marriage in America has been replaced by Divorce. This is said with no paradoxical intent. In the large cities, statistics show that one of every two marriages ends in divorce. Taking the country as a whole, the figure is one in three. This situation can no longer be described as Marriage, since the essence of Marriage is its permanence. The divorce trade is a large business upon which lawyers, private detectives and other charlatans thrive, and from which the spiritual standards of the nation suffer, as reflected in the emotionally indifferent attitude of American children.
The Western erotic, grounded in the chivalry of Gothic times, with the concomitant honor-imperative of the centuries of Western history, has been driven out. The ideal of Wedekind, the Culture-distorter who preached compulsory Bohemianism in Europe around the turn of the 20th century, has been realized by the Culture-distorting regime in America. Inverted Puritanism has arisen. In this new feeling, the Puritan outlook is retained in sexual matters only to scoff at it in the cinema and in literature. Baudelaire’s thesis “In evil only lies bliss” has been taken over by the distorter, and has resulted in the progressive disintegration of American morality in all spheres. In this effort, jazz music is a useful appurtenance, for this primitive beating is nothing but the expression of lust in the world of sound, a world which is capable of expressing all human emotions, both higher and lower.
A part of this general perversion is the physical-youth-mania that has been spread abroad in America. Both men and women, but especially the latter are inwardly obsessed with the idea of remaining physically young in appearance. Advertising plays upon these fears and commercializes them. The “girl” is the ideal feminine type. The mature woman aspires to be a girl, but not vice versa. A “girl” cult has come into existence, which, together with cinema, revue, jazz, divorce, disintegration of the family, and uniformity, serves the vast purpose of destroying the national feelings of the American.
Together with uniformity is the technique of excitement. The press presents every day new sensations. For the general purpose, it is quite immaterial whether the sensation is a murder, a kidnapping, a government scandal, or a war-scare. But for particular, political purposes, the latter sensations are the most effective, and during the years of preparing the Second World War, the distorter administered every day a new “crisis.” The process increased until the population was ready to welcome the outbreak of war as a relief from the constantly mounting nervous tension. When the War did appear, the distorter immediately called it a “World War” despite the fact that only three political powers were engaged, and the strongest powers were not involved. It was, of course, intended to rule out the possibility in the American mind of any localizing of the War, and to prepare for American intervention.
The straining after excitement, pleasure, and constant motion has created a vast night-life, a crime underworld which staggers the imagination of Europeans, and a hurrying from one thing to another which excludes the possibility of contemplation, or individual culture. Almost one per cent of the entire population makes its living from professional crime. The art of reading has been taken away from the Americans, since the idea is to “do something.” Individual culture is generally strangled under such conditions, and the prevailing mass-ideals impose limitations on the form of such personal culture as is attained. All history, all thought, all events, all examples, are used to prove the soundness of the ideal of mass-life, and of the American ideology.
♖II♖
In the Rationalistic and Materialistic atmosphere of 19th century America, there was only a very weak link with the sublime Western Gothic traditions of the spiritualism meaning of life, but under the Culture distorting regime since 1933, America has been completely disenchanted. On every plane, the ultimate reality of the world and life is materialistic. The aim of life is “happiness.” This must be so, since life itself is only a physico-chemical process, and articles appear which treat as imminent the discovery of a “formula” for life by “scientists.”
The contractual side of the old Puritan religion, which regarded Man and God as keeping accounts with one another, has been pushed to its uttermost limits, and all living is simply changing legal relationships. Patriotism is simply a legal duty to the world-proposition called America, which has been equated with the mission of distorting the entire Western Civilization through a process of “educating” Europe. Heroism in the Western sense is unknown, and the hero whom the population admires is a capitalist en grand who has converted a great part of the public wealth into his private resources, or else a smiling film actor. Such a thing as a great spiritual movement or a national rising is not understood in America, first because it has had nothing of the kind in its history, and secondly, because the distorter has made all such things ridiculous. The American is taught that life is a process of cultivating friendly relations with all, joining as many clubs and secret societies as possible, and confining all his thought and effort to the personal plane.
The “happy-end” is the ideal of life and literature. There is no thought of bearing up under the bitterest and most crushing blows of Fate. These are overcome by avoiding one’s glance. The lucky man, and not the man who has suffered in silence and become stronger, is the central figure in the happy-end literature.
The opposition between the Western idea of Destiny-fulfillment and the Culture-distorter’s disintegrating substitute called “happy-end” is actually the focal idea of the world-outlook that he wishes to force upon the prostrate American nation and its parent Western Civilization. The irreconcilability between these two ideas extends from the personal plane upward through national economy, society, State, religion and ethics.
The great Western Life-feeling is the necessity of being ones self, of preserving that within one which cannot be compromised, which is synonymous with Soul, Destiny, Honor, Race. The distorter’s idea of “happy-end” is opportunistic, weak, degenerate, and revolting to the Western honor-feeling. The empty, smiling, face, the uniform mind, the senseless chasing after noise, movement, and sensation, the obsession with moneymaking and money-spending, the rejection of all spiritual standards of attainment— all this merely reflects the basic interpretation of Life as a seeking for a happy-end. For happiness one will compromise anything, give anything, sell anything. Happiness becomes synonymous with pursuit of economic and sexual motives. It absolutely excludes any profitless struggle against odds, merely in order to be one’s self. Understanding and respect for the tragedy of Life, the magic of Life, the power of the Idea, are precluded by the happy-end feeling.
Any idea of this kind is quite impossible for Europeans in the 20th century, even if they had not seen the horrible catastrophe of the Second World War, in which Europe succumbed to the double-invasion of barbarians and distorters. No great artist, no religionist, no deep thinker, has ever deluded himself that Life has the meaning of “happy-end.” In miserable and crushing times, the Western man trains himself rather to bear whatever blows Fate may have in store for him. He does not talk of either happiness or unhappiness, and he does not try to avoid facts by looking away from them. Looking away is no solution, but only a postponement of a later reckoning. Happy-end has a purely negative significance. It is a denial of Life, an escape from Life. It is thus a deception, and an untruth.
The racial chaos in America, which, deliberately perpetuated by the distorter, delivers the American nation more securely into his hands, is only possible because of the de-nationalizing program for Americans. This program begins with propaganda in the schools to the effect that America was not colonized, cleared, conquered, or built by Americans, but by a great conglomeration of aliens. The contributions of the Jew and the Negro are taught as the decisive formative influences on the “American dream.” In New York State, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is forbidden to be taught in the schools. The promoting of the anti-spiritual and anti-national “happy-end” idea, with its economic and sexual obsession, and its social atomism, is the prerequisite of continuing the whole program of degeneration.
Races and nations express themselves at their highest potential in strong individuals, who embody the prime national characteristics, and acquire immense historical symbolic significance. Therefore, the efforts of the Culture-distorter to strangle American nationalism take the form of an offensive against individualism, not against freakish, insane, individualism, but against the only kind that is historically effective— individualism which concentrates in itself a higher Idea, and is devoted to its service.
Thus the highest social value is “getting along with people.” Strong characteristics of independence or strength must be put aside, and the ideal of mediocrity embraced. The universal spirituality, the same intellectual nourishment for all classes, replaces the natural, organic stratification of society. This nourishment again has only a quantitative measure of value. Just as the best product is the one most advertised, so the best book is the one that has the largest sale. The best newspaper or periodical is the one with the largest circulation. This equation of quantity with quality is the complete expression of the mass-idea, the denial of individuality.
A natural corollary of the happiness-sickness is pacifism. Only intellectual pacifism is meant, for the Culture-distorter knows how to make use of the fighting instincts of the native American type. Intellectual pacifism is war-propaganda. The enemy is identified with the idea of war itself, and to fight him is to fight war.
Naturally Hollywoodism is incapable of rousing a population to sternness, sacrifice, heroism, renunciation. Therefore American armies in the field in the Second World War had to be supplied with a vast, never-ending stream of picture-books, chocolate, soft-drinks, beer, juke-boxes, moving-pictures, and playthings of all sorts.
Fundamentals cannot be evaded, and so it was that despite eight years of preparation by the most intense bombardment of emotional artillery the world has ever seen, through film, press, stage, and radio, there was no war-enthusiasm whatever in the American population, and a negative feeling in the armies which were massed against Europe in the Second World War. Out of 16,000,000 men who were impressed into the armed forces from start to finish of America’s brief military participation in the Second World War, less than 600,000 were volunteers. Almost twice this many volunteers out of half as many people were raised in one year in one European nation in the First World War. A large part of the American volunteers had already been notified of imminent conscription, and volunteered for appearance’s sake.
The Western idea of destiny-fulfillment, with its inner imperative of honor and faithfulness to conviction, means that the vulgar are naturally the enemies of the upright. No higher idea is for everyone, and all creativeness comes from the few. Deeds with a high ethical content cannot be performed by all, and he who is capable of them has no reason to be ashamed, to renounce his spiritual values, and adopt the smiling face, the inner vacuum, and the-ideal of “getting along with people,” even at the cost of his soul.
Even destructiveness and distortion on the scale on which it has been successfully introduced into America is a task for a minority. The American and foreign masses are the mere object of the distortion. The organic unit which regards the disintegration of America as a part of its own life-mission is, at its very widest base, only ten per cent of the population of the American Union. And within this ten per cent, it is a comparatively few brains, and a reliable stratum of leaders who actualize the policy of the Jewish Culture-State-Nation-Religion-People-Race. To these leaders, the great mass of their own people are mere soldier-material in the non-military war against the Western Civilization all over the world. Nor need these brains be regarded as animated by any malice or evil motives. To them the Western Civilization is the repository of the collective evil and hatred of the world, the source of a thousand years of persecution, a cruel and unreasonable monstrosity, a sinister force working against the Jewish Messiah idea.
The Negro in America
DEMOCRATIC-MATERIALISTIC CONDITIONS arise during the organically necessary Civilization-crisis, and
are thus autopathic. Culture-distortion comes from the interference in the life of the host of a Culture parasite,
an organic unit which does not participate inwardly in the life of the Culture, but nevertheless
lives in and on the body of the Culture. These two in conjunction increase the intensity of each other, and
America is the clearest example of the multifarious effects these Culture-diseases can have on a people
which cannot successfully resist them at the onset. The population of America only consists now of a bare majority that is indisputably American racially, spiritually, nationally. The other half consists of Negroes, Jews, unassimilated South-eastern Europeans, Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Levantines, Slavs and Indians. The Slavic groups are assimilable by the American race, but the process has been artificially held up by the intervention of Culture distortion. The mass-ideals of noise, excitement, mental uniformity, and hurrying movement which the Americans share with these unassimilated alien groups do not represent any kind of assimilation, because these traits themselves are anti-national, demoralizing, destructive of individuality, State, People, Race.
The Negro problem is one of the numerous racial dis-junctions which press for solution in America. At the time when, as a result of the War of Secession, the Negroes were deprived of their security and delivered to financial slavery in an industrial civilization with whose problems they could in no way cope, they were a contended, primitive people. They had no dynamism, no mission to destroy. Their numbers at that time were about four and a half million, and they were nearly all in the Southern states, where the social life was adjusted to their presence, and kept the white and Negro races separate in every way. No desire existed on either side to disturb this natural formulation of the relationship.
To a finance-capitalist, however, a Negro merely represents “cheap labor,” or a prospect for a small loan. The Master of Money knows nothing of Nation, People, Race, Culture. He is a “realist,” which means, on the primitive-intellectual level, that he regards everything which is as the sum total of Reality. Actually, of course, that which is represents a stage already passed, an Idea already accomplished. True Reality is the Future at work, for this is the impetus of events. Thus no Money-thinker would ever think two or three generations into the future, for he regards larger conditions as stable, even though he seeks instability in immediate conditions.
After the War of Secession, progressively more Negroes went to the Northern States. This movement was vastly accelerated by the two World Wars, when millions of them went northward to replace conscripted white laborers in the Northern industrial districts. Reinforcing this proletarianizing process, Northern enterprises moved factories into the South to employ Negro “cheap” labor, and make large profits.
The converting of the Negro into a wage slave has demoralized him completely, made him into a discontented proletarian, and created in him a deep racial bitterness. The soul of the Negro remains primitive and childlike in comparison with the nervous and complicated soul of Western man, accustomed to thinking in terms of money and civilization. The result is that the Negro has become a charge of white society.
Marriage is almost unknown among the Negroes, and the women raise the large families. In the large cities, the Negro population supplies approximately ten times as many criminals as its numbers would indicate to be its proportion. Social diseases are general among this race, and the hospitals as well as the penitentiaries deal with highly disproportionate numbers of Negroes. Primitive violence is natural to the Negro, and the sense of social disgrace is lacking in him in connection with crimes. Negro sections of the Northern cities are dangerous to the life of white persons.
Bolshevism and Culture-distortion did not miss the potentialities of the Negro for purposes of inner disintegration and race war. Trials of Negroes for felony in the Southern states are made the object of wide-spread and intense Communist propaganda along the old lines of “equality” and “tolerance.” The Communist party supplies counsel to Negroes accused of crime.
Like all primitive races, the Negro race is fertile, and possessed of strong instincts. His numbers today, including the mulattoes, are approximately 14,000,000 This ten per cent of the total population of America is an adjunct of the program of the Culture-distorter. Politically, this mass is organized as a unit, and supported the Roosevelt regime from the time of its seizure of power in 1933. The Negro has been the focus of much of the revolutionary activity of the Culture-distorting regime. From time to time, the distorter raises a racial issue publicly, in which the white Southerner is made the public enemy, and the Negro is the hero of “democracy.” This results in increasingly serious race-war in the Northern and Southern cities.
The Negro has suffered more than anyone in being thrown into the slavery of finance-exploitation, and then into conscription for the race-war program of the distorter. From the happy, deeply and primitively religious, cotton-picking slave, with complete protection and insulation from the dynamism of Western industrialism, he has been made into a malcontent, diseased, fighter in race-war and class-war. His life has been made into a round of factories, hospitals, public relief offices, jails, and roaming of the streets. The new Negro is a dangerous potentiality, and he has been fitted out by the distorter with a program of demands, an ideology of his own within the Bolshevist framework, and dynamic leadership. A Negro writer has recently said: “Your land? How did it become yours? We were here before the Pilgrims landed. Hither we brought our three gifts and mixed them with yours: the gift of poetry and of song, tender and living melodies into a badly harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and muscle power, to defeat the wilderness and conquer the ground of this wide, rich, country, two hundred years before your weak white hands could have done it; the third gift, the gift of soul. Are these gifts worth nothing? Is this no work and striving? Could America have become America without its Negro folk?” This does not represent merely the thought of one mulatto, for these ideas have been drummed into the heads of the millions of the Negroes in the cities— not to mention the white element of weak instincts, the Liberal element which gives in to race-war and thus encourages it.
The Negro has a will strong enough to push his demands through, and today there are Negroes on all levels of the public life, officers, judges, administrators, labor-leaders, lawyers, doctors, professors.
For America there are two aspects to the Negro problem, the immediate, and the long-range. Immediately, the Negro movement is completely in the service of Culture-distortion, which controls all phases of domestic Bolshevism in America. An inner-crisis in which many issues of American public life will simultaneously present themselves, monstrous in their size and demands, will confront the American people in the near future. When, no one can tell, but it is inevitable, for America is no exception to five millennia of the history of High Cultures and their colonies. The position of the Negro vis-à-vis the organic existence of the American People is quite clear.
The long-range aspect of the problem is shown by the declining birthrate of the native American population, and the rising numbers of the Negro. The old white element is decreasing absolutely in numbers, and this process has been going on for two decades. The immediate relationship is spiritual /political; the more remote problem is spiritual/racial.
Culture-Retardation in America
IN ITS ESSENCE, as we have seen, Culture-Retardation is a mere negation of the Future. Destiny is not
deceived, however, but only the minds of those who seek to maintain or restore dead conditions or
ideologies. Only on the surface of History can Culture-retarders gain a victory, and then solely by virtue
of their purely material preponderance. If they do gain such a temporary, surface, victory, it represents
merely the defeat of quality by quantity. America, being a colony, and therefore having lower organic resistance to Culture-disease, has succumbed more deeply to retarding influences than the home-soil of the Western Culture ever could have. In America, these retarding forces are managed and inspired by the larger Culture-illness, Culture distortion, and they are heavily relied on in order to overcome the negative effect which would result from the open appearance of the alien distorter.
The popular world-picture which has been made compulsory for the uniformized American is simply the old, materialistic picture which Europe had already outgrown by the First World War. Thus in the American universities, Darwinism is taught in biology, along with Mechanism.
In sociology, Mill and Spencer are the last word. In history, the naive, linear, Ancient-Medieval Modern scheme is retained, and Buckle and Gibbon represent the perfection of historical method. Carlyle, Lamprecht, Breysig, Meray, Eduard Meyer, Spengler, are entirely unknown. In psychology, the mass idea has triumphed, so that “genius” is equated with high intelligence, and the latter with “college education.” Again— no qualitative differences among persons. The commercial maxim is “You can buy brains.” For the rest, Freudianism is gospel. It is possible for the holder of high academic degrees in America to be entirely unacquainted with the history of the Western Culture, with the significance of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Spengler, of the revolt of the Western Civilization against Democracy and Materialism. His picture of events for the last 75 years in Europe is delineated by a few journalistic catchwords. The widening and deepening of the 20th century world-picture is unknown to him, and leads him to deny the very existence of facts and possibilities which are incommensurable with laboratory materialism.
Culture-retardation as a grotesque reality is illustrated by the fact that America is actually from 30 to 50 years behind the parent Western Civilization in the world of thought. No American university has heard of geopolitics, or anything resembling it. Mahan’s sea-power theories are the last word on grand strategy, and the eventuation of the First and Second World Wars— which Americans are taught to regard as “victories”— only reinforce the sea-power idea, despite the fact that world-shaking events have fundamentally altered the relationship between continental power and sea power. This fundamental misconception in America will bear fruit in the Third World War.
In the theory of economics, the situation is similar. Adam Smith is the great foundation. Abstractions like “world economy” are regarded as concrete realities. List is unknown, although Marx is regarded as an economist. Sombart was put away after the American Revolution of 1933. The currency problem is handled on the basis of the gold-standard theory. The European departure from gold-thinking is regarded as morally wrong. The Classical economic theories of the Manchester school are the focus of belief, rather than historical curiosity. Departures from them are treated as downright wicked, or else as regrettable, temporary necessities. These 19th century doctrines are always described as “the laws of economics.”
This retarded mentality has of course had serious effects in the sphere of action, that is of politics and economics.
Since America developed into a world-power in a part of the world where there was no opposition, it failed to develop a State, or true political consciousness. Consequently, in exception to all other Western powers, economics had always undisputed precedence over politics. Inner politics in the true sense did not exist in America— party-contests were understood by all to be mere business competition between the two party-trusts. True political events in America— dis-junction of opposing groups into friend and enemy— have been only three: the War for Independence, 1775-83, the North-South hostility culminating in the War of Secession, 1861-65, and the Revolution of 1933, when Culture-distortion captured complete control of the American destiny.
This exclusive concern of all levels of the population with economics was responsible for the total ascendancy of the Master of Money over American life, the failure to develop a true Nation consciousness, and the rise to power of Culture-distortion.
The larger cycles of financial fluctuations, with alternating “booms” and “depressions” ruined millions in each swing, and until recent decades these pauperized millions could always claim and settle new land in the West, and begin economic life anew. Political class war was never strong in America until recent years. The prevailing Puritan-Calvinistic sentiment of economic predestination militated against fundamental-political class-war, since each worker thought he might one day be chosen for wealth.
With the disappearance of the “frontier,” however, the masses of industrial laborers, became material for the professional labor-leader to organize. From small beginnings, the labor-movement in America developed into a powerful political organization, which was able to make politicians in industrial areas dependent upon its votes for election. This point was reached by the 80’s of the 19th century. This labor movement embraced anarchists, Marxian Communists, nihilists, and liberal-capitalistic leaders. The political elements never dominated this movement, even after the Revolution of 1933, for the American laboring class thinks and feels economically and capitalistically, not politically and socialistically. “Socialism” in America means even now what it meant in Europe in the 19th century, i.e., capitalism of the lower classes. Of true Socialism, nothing is known or understood in America, since Socialism is not primarily an economic organizing-principle, but a political-ethical-Idea, the Spirit of a Political Age, and politics is not yet understood in America.
⎈II⎈
Generally speaking, the economy of America is still in the capitalistic condition which Europe began to
outgrow fifty years ago, and which was definitely ended for Europe for all time with the European
Revolution of 1933. Agriculture in America for instance is completely on a money basis. There is no policy of insulating it from the city-economy, or of safeguarding the farmers from financial exploitation. Thus during that part of the cycle when the finance-capitalists are contracting the volume of currency, the farmers are thrown into destitution, and their farms are foreclosed.
There is almost no peasantry in the European sense. The peasant has a spiritual connection with the soil, whereas the American farmer has only a financial relationship with it, and will leave at any time if better economic opportunity presents itself. This purely economic attitude has resulted in ruthless exploitation of the soil, with sharp decrease in its productivity, and even greater decrease in the nutritional value of its products. Farming is nearly all on an extensive basis, and the lack of care of the soil has resulted in devastating losses by erosion.
The exploitation of sub-surface mineral deposits is also on a purely financial basis, and a coal mine or oil well may be abandoned with 80 per cent of the mineral remaining in it. Opening of one well or shaft immediately causes an entire area to be opened up, since ownership of the surface includes ownership of the sub-surface in American law. The resultant waste can only be described as looting of the treasures of the soil, and is in the very sharpest contrast to the 20th century attitude of trusteeship toward the soil and its minerals.
Industrial production is merely a battleground for profits and control between the managers and the labor-leaders. The social damage and economic waste of strikes are regarded as normal in America,whereas the 20th century idea has no room for any inner strife in a political unit. Behind the struggle of the managers whom he appoints, and the laborers whom he hires, the finance-capitalist dominates the economic scene. The outcome of the strike cannot-injure him, for he controls the motive forces of the money economy.
This brings us to the currency of America. Since the War of Secession, 1865, the entire country has, financially speaking, been an empire of ignorant subjects, and the owners of the large banks in New York have been the economic monarchs. The codification of this situation took place in the year 1913, when the Federal Reserve System was created by law. It provided for a system of twelve central banks upon which the central government would be dependent for financing. These banks are privately owned, and issue money against government bonds, which are sold through these banks. Thus the American war effort in the Second World War earned approximately $7,500,000,000 in interest for the owners of this system. The only currency known in America is the private issue of these central banks. This currency is spoken of as “secured by government bonds.” These bonds however are payable only in this currency. The whole system of course is simply a device for private control of the economic life of the country. The volume of currency may be increased or decreased at the will of finance-capitalists, and in a country without a State, this is a technique of domination.
To the 20th century soul of the Western Civilization, the resting of public power in private hands is unthinkable. Equally so is the domination of the economic life of a Nation-State by money-thinking. Thrice abominable to the 20th century is the conferring of any power whatever on the banker-mentality, which regards human beings as a “cost of production,” which looks upon politics as a field for private trickery, and which regards the heroism of soldiers as a useful device for conquering new financial domains abroad.
Finance-capitalism belongs to a past age, the Age of Money. Even in America, it has passed into the second place, and has become a mere technique of the absolute domination of the Culture-distorter. More important as a technique is the control of men’s minds, and an understanding of America and its potentialities for Europe necessitates a knowledge of its propaganda system.
Propaganda
IF THE 18th century ideology of “equality” were actually believed in, there would be no such thing as
propaganda, since every man would think quite independently, and would resent any attempt whatever to
form his mind. This ideology however is shown precisely by the example of America, the country in
which it was adopted with religious fervor, to have no correspondence to reality whatever. Spiritual
equality may have more or less obtained in the salons of aristocrats and rationalist intellectuals, whether
in France, Germany, England or America, in the 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century,
when the masses had been mobilized, there was no possibility of any equality, for these masses demanded
leadership by their very existence. The more the mobilization of the masses proceeded, the greater was
the feeling of need for strong leadership. As Nietzsche said: “Finally the insecurity becomes so great that
men fall in the dust before a strong will-power.” There- are two techniques of leadership, both of which are indispensable: discipline, and persuasion. The first is based on confidence, faith, loyalty, duty-sense, good instincts. The second is addressed to the intellectual side, and adjusts itself to the characteristics of the person or population to whom it is directed. Both techniques use sanctions, whether penal, moral, economic, or social. In a period when the reorganizing and forming of huge masses is the leading action-problem, persuasion, or propaganda, is correspondingly necessary, for only an elite is capable of the highest discipline, and masses must be continually re-convinced.
Thus, in America, the country where mass-thinking, mass-ideals, and mass-living dominate the collective life, propaganda is the prime form of dissemination of information. There are no publications in America addressed solely to the intellect; a Culture-distorting regime rests on its invisibility, and independent thinking by strong individuals is ipso facto hostile to such a regime. Nor are there any publications which purvey only facts. Any facts, and any viewpoints, are coordinated, with their presentation, into the ruling propaganda-picture.
The techniques of American propaganda is inclusive of every form of communication. The leading instrument is the cinema. Every week, some 80,000,000 people attend the cinema in America, there to absorb the propaganda message. During the period of war-preparation, 1933-1939, the cinemas produced an endless succession of hate pictures directed against the European Revolution of 1933, and its 20th century outlook and actualization's.
Second in effectiveness is the radio. Every American has in his home one or more wireless receivers, and through them, the mass-picture of events is brought to him again. He has already read the same compulsory viewpoint in the press, seen it in the cinema, and now he hears it. The press, both newspaper and periodical, is third in effectiveness. It should be said that in America, effectiveness of propaganda is measured solely by the numbers which it reaches, since the mass-thinking ideal has triumphed over individuality, quality, and intellectual stratification of the population.
Fourth is the book press. Only such books may be printed as represent or fit into the larger propaganda framework. Thus an edition of the Arabian Nights for children was recently withdrawn in America because some of the contents were said to have the possible effect of prejudicing readers against Jews, and one objectionable illustration showed an unscrupulous merchant with the features of a Jew, in the story about Aladdin and his lamp. During the years 1933-1939, the larger policy of the distorter was entirely unquestioned in any paper, book, or magazine of wide circulation.
Next are the universities and colleges. The mass-idea, as applied to education means that “higher education” is generalized to an extent that the high academic standards of Europe make impossible. America, with only half the population of the Western homeland, has more than 10 times as many institutions granting academic degrees. Actually what is disseminated in these institutions is primarily a slightly more esoteric version of the prevailing ideological and propaganda world-view of the Culture distorting regime.
Last is the stage. Outside of New York City, the spiritual capital of the ruling regime, this hardly exists, but in New York, the journalistic play is an important propaganda-technique. Particularly during the period 1933-1939 did the stage play an important role. A constant stream of hate-plays was produced directed against the world-outlook of the 20th century and its European representatives. Many of these plays were in the Yiddish language, since the leaders in America require uniformity also in their own people.
The propaganda-picture has two aspects, the domestic, and the foreign. The domestic propaganda is a revolutionary one, supporting the American Revolution of 1933. All ideological revolutions, from the French in 1789, through the 19th century ones in Europe, down to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918, have the tendency to take on the form of a cult. In France Reason-worship was the focus of the religious frenzy; in Russia, it was machine-worship, according to the God Marx. The American Revolution of 1933 is no exception. The central-motive of the new cult is “democracy.” In the propaganda-picture, this concept takes the place of God, as the center and ultimate reality. Thus, a Supreme Court Justice, speaking to the graduating class of a Jewish college, said in 1939: “In a larger sense there is something more important than religion, and that is the actualization of the ideals of democracy.”
The word has been endowed with religious force, and has in fact attained to the status of a religion. It has become a numen, and cannot be the subject of critical treatment. Apostasy or heresy bring immediate response in the form of a criminal prosecution for sedition, treason, income tax evasion, or other allegation. The saints of this cult are the “Founding Fathers” of the War for Independence, particularly Jefferson— despite the fact that they uniformly detested the idea of democracy, and were nearly all slave owners— and also Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt. Its prophets are journalists, propagandists, film stars, labor-leaders, and party-politicians. The fact that the word “democracy” cannot be defined is the surest evidence that it has ceased to be descriptive, and has become the object of a mass-faith. All other ideas and dogmas of the propaganda-picture are referred to “democracy” for their ultimate justification.
Immediately below “democracy” in importance is “tolerance.” This is obviously fundamental to a Culturally-alien regime. Tolerance means primarily tolerance of Jews and Negroes, but it can mean the cruelest persecution of Europeans or other persons with a viewpoint differing fundamentally from the prevailing mass-idea. This persecution is social, economic, and, if necessary, legal.
To continue the atomizing of the host-people, class-war is a basic tenet of the total view. It is preached as “labor’s right to organize,” “the right to strike,” and similar slogans. But “capital” also has its rights, since neither side in any contest must gain a decisive victory. Division is, here, as always, the technique of conquest.
Feminism is preached, pursuing the mass-uniformity idea into the realm of the sexes. Instead of the polarity of the sexes, the ideal of the merging of the sexes is promulgated. Women are taught to be the “equal” of men, and the Western recognition of sexual polarity is branded as the “holding down” and “persecution” of women.
Pacifism is preached as a part of the propaganda. This is of course not true pacifism, for that supervenes without anyone preaching it, and often without anyone knowing it, and always without anyone being able to do anything about it. In practice, doctrinaire pacifism is always a form of war-propaganda. Thus, in America, Europe means war, and America means peace. American imperialism is always a crusade for peace. A prominent member of the regime recently spoke of America’s “duty to wage peace around the world.” [Did we take a wrong turn somewhere,I ask my self sitting in the southwest desert at the approaching end of 2017 DC]
“Religious tolerance” is also a part of the propaganda, and it is so interpreted as to mean religious indifference. Dogmas and doctrines of religion are treated as quite secondary. Churches are often merged or separated for purely economic considerations. When religion is not merely a compulsory weekly social amusement, it is a political lecture. Co-operation between the churches is constantly being organized, and always for some utilitarian aim, having nothing to do with religion. What this means is: the subservience of religion to the program of Culture-distortion.
✦II✦
Far more important to Europe than the propaganda about domestic affairs in America is that about
foreign affairs. The numen “democracy” is used also in this realm as the essence of reality. A foreign development sought to be brought about is called “spreading democracy”; a development sought to be hindered is “against democracy,” or “fascistic.” “Fascism” is the numen corresponding to evil in theology, and in fact they are directly equated in American propaganda.
The prime enemy in the propaganda picture was always Europe, and especially the Prussian-European spirit which rose with such self-evident force in the European Revolution of 1933 against the negative view of life, with its materialism, money-obsession, and democratic corruption. The more surely it appeared that this Revolution was not a superficial political phenomenon, a mere transfer of one party regime for another, that it was a deep spiritual, total revolution, of a new, vital spirit against a dead spirit, the more violent became the hate propaganda directed against Europe. By 1938, this propaganda had reached an intensity, both in volume and in emotional frenzy, that could not be surpassed. Ceaselessly the American was bombarded with the message that Europe was attacking everything worth-while in the world, “God,” “religion,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “peace,” “America.”
This excessive use of abstractions was itself indicative that there was a lack of concrete realities to use. The failure to arouse excitement, despite the propaganda bombardment, led to the thesis that Europe was planning to invade the United States with fleets and armies. Ideas like these indeed conquered the intellectual side of the American mass-mind, but did not penetrate to the emotional level of rousing genuine apprehension or effective hate.
“Aggressor” was another leading word in the intellectual assault. Again, it did not relate to facts, and was only allowed to work one way as a term of abuse. “International morality” was invented and formulated so that the enemy of the Culture-distorter became ipso facto immoral. If they could not find political reasons for their politics, they were all the more resourceful in creating moral, ideological, economic, and esthetic reasons. Nations were divided into good and bad. Europe as a whole was bad when it was united, and if Culture-distortion was able to secure a foothold in any European land, such land became thereby good. The American propaganda machine reacted with venomous hatred against the European partitioning of Bohemia in 1938. Every European power which had participated in the negotiations was denounced as evil, aggressive, immoral, anti-democratic, and the rest of it.
Fundamental in this political picture was the thesis that politics was a matter of “forms of government, struggling against one another. Not nations or States, but abstractions like “democracy” and “fascism” were the content of the world-struggle. This imposed the necessity of calling the opponent of the momentary situation as “democratic” or “fascistic,” and changing it from month to month, year to year. Serbia, Poland, Japan, Russia, China, Hungary, Romania, and many other units, have been both “fascist” and “democratic,” depending upon precisely what treaty they had made, and with what power.
The division into “democratic” and “fascistic” corresponded exactly with that into treaty-breaking and treaty-observing powers. Supplementing it was the dichotomy: peace-loving nations, and— the other kind. The phrase “international law” was popularized, and it was used to describe something which has never existed, and cannot exist. It had no connection whatever with the real international law of 500 years of Western practice. It was popularized to mean that any change in the international territorial status quo was “forbidden” by “international law.”
Any words whatever that had good connotations were linked with the leading catchwords of the picture. Thus Western Civilization was too impressive to treat as a hostile term, and it was used to describe parliamentarism, class-war, plutocracy, and finally— Bolshevik Russia. It was insisted by the propaganda machine during the time of the battle at Stalingrad in the Fall of 1942 between Europe and Asia that the Asiatic forces represented Western Civilization while the European armies were the enemies of Western Civilization. The fact that Siberian, Turkestani, and Kirghizian regiments were being used by the Bolshevik regime was adduced as proof that Asia had saved Western Civilization.
To Europeans, this sort of thing testifies to two great facts: the total lack of any political or cultural consciousness whatever in the masses of the American population, and the deep, total, and implacable enmity toward Europe of the Culture-distorting regime in America. Japan was also treated in the propaganda picture as an enemy, but not as an irreconcilable enemy, like Europe. The propaganda against Japan was never allowed to take a racial form, lest the racial instincts of the American population be awakened into a storm that would sweep away the distorter. The generally milder tone of the anti Japanese propaganda was owing to the fact that Japan had not experienced, and could not possibly experience, anything like the great European Revolution of 1933.
Because of the primitive intellectualism in a country whose population had been mentally uniformed, this propaganda was able to adopt extremely crude expedients. Thus during the war-preparation, 1933- 1939, the press, cinema, and radio were filled with stories of insults to the American flag abroad, of secret documents accidentally discovered, of conversations heard over tapped wires, of discoveries of arms caches in the possession of American nationalists groups, and the like. “Newsreels” purporting to have been filmed abroad, were actually made in some cases in Hollywood. So fantastic did it all become that when, a year before the Second World War, a wireless program carried an imaginative story of an invasion from Mars, there were symptoms of widespread panic among the propagandized masses.
Because America had never come strongly under the impression of the Spanish cabinet-politics usages which became engrafted on the European spirit, the Culture-distorting regime was able to engage in propaganda attacks of an extremely repulsive and vile kind directed against the private lives and characters of European leaders who represented the 20th century world-outlook. These leaders were represented as having been panders, homosexuals, dope-fiends, and sadists.
The propaganda was entirely free from any cultural basis, and was completely cynical with regard to facts. Precisely as the cinema-factories of Hollywood ground out lying plays and “newsreels,” the propagandists of the press created what “facts” they needed. When the Japanese air forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the Culture-distorters did not know that Europe would take this occasion to retaliate against the undeclared war which the Culture-distorting regime in Washington had been waging against Europe. The regime therefore at once decided to exploit the Japanese attack as a European military measure. To this end, the propaganda organs at once spread the “news” that European planes with European pilots had participated in the attack, and had even led it. Although every capital ship in the base was sunk in this attack, the regime officially announced that only slight damage had been done. These fact-creations were as nothing, however, to the massive, post-war, “concentration-camp” propaganda of the Culture-distorting regime based in Washington.
This propaganda announced that 6,000,000 members of the Jewish Culture-Nation-State-Church People-Race had been killed in European camps, as well as an indeterminate number of other people. The propaganda was on a world-wide scale, and was of a mendacity that was perhaps adapted to a uniformized mass, but was simply disgusting to discriminating Europeans. The propaganda was technically quite complete. “Photographs” were supplied in millions of copies. Thousands of the people who had been killed published accounts of their experiences in these camps. Hundreds of thousands more made fortunes in post-war black-markets. “Gas-chambers” that did not exist were photographed, and a “gasmobile” was invented to titillate the mechanically-minded.
We come now to the purpose of this propaganda which the regime gave to its mentally-enslaved masses. From the analysis in the 20th Century Political Outlook, the purpose is seen to be only one: it was designed to create a total war in the spiritual sense, transcending the limits of politics, against the Western Civilization. The American masses, both military and civilian, were given this mental poison in order to inflame them to the point where they would carry out without flinching the post-war annihilation program. In particular: it was designed to support a war after the Second World War, a war of looting, hanging, and starvation against defenseless Europe.
Propaganda is merely an adjunct of policy, however, and we come now to the conduct of foreign affairs by the America-based regime from the time of its seizure of power in 1933.
The Conduct of American
Foreign Affairs from 1933
AS WAS NOTED in the outline of the general thesis of Culture-distortion as a form of Culture-pathology,
the Russian anti-Semitic outbreaks after the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905, brought about a rupture of
diplomatic relations with the United States. Since no other racial, cultural, national, or religious outbreaks
of this kind directed against non-Jewish elements in Russia, or in any other country, had ever caused an
American government to break relations, this can only be explained as an example of Culture-distortion.
The actual inspiration for this startling international move came from certain elements in the entourage of
the then President Theodore Roosevelt, which belonged to the same Culture-State-Nation-People-Race as
the victims of the pogrom. Historians will be able to trace the appearance of Culture-pathology through American foreign policy from about 1900. The immediate period under consideration however is that since 1933, a year of fate for both America and Europe.
The first positive act of a non-routine nature by the revolutionary regime, after its preliminary consolidation of power, was the diplomatic recognition of Bolshevist Russia. It was explained away to a loudly resentful American public as being merely a routine act, without ideological significance, and quite harmless politically. Actually it was the beginning of a cooperation between the two regimes which continued with only surface interruptions until the Russian and American armies met in the heart of the Western Civilization, and London and Berlin had been thrown into the dust.
In 1936, the Bolshevist revolution and the 20th century Western authoritarian spirit met on the battleground of Spain. The officials of the America-based regime privately expressed their sympathy with Red Spain. The unequivocal opposition of the Catholic Church to American aid for Bolshevist Spain prevented intervention. The Catholic Church in America has twenty million adherents, and the Culture distorting regime had not sufficiently consolidated its power to engage in a domestic conflict of the type that would have resulted. It was about to contest its second national election, and large organized groups were still in the field against it. A blunder in foreign policy could have been fatal at that stage.
The perfection of its election technique continued the regime in office. In October, 1937, the open preparations for a Second World War were begun. It was officially announced that the American government was going “to quarantine aggressors.” The propaganda organs had identified the word “aggressor” with Europe, and the custodians of the European Future. To satisfy nationalist elements, Japan was included in the term, but the regime continued to equip Japan with essential raw materials for its war-industry, while at the same time it refused to sell raw materials to Europe, and boycotted importation into America of European goods originating in areas not dominated by the Culture-distorting regime.
By the fall of 1938, the stage was set for a World War. The propaganda of almost half Europe had been brought under the control of Washington, and the governments of nearly half Europe were its puppets. The incorporation of Bohemia into Europe was the result of the mutual understanding-of four European leaders, making their own decision, and the plans of Washington were completely frustrated, despite careful preparations. The American treasury had been made available to the regime as a “Stabilization Fund,” and it could draw upon its billions without accounting to anyone. The subsidization of its representative propagandists in European countries was increased to such proportions that soon almost half Europe had been made to hate the leaders who had prevented an intra-European war.
But an Eastern border-state was needed for the next incident, since there was no direct possibility of a war in Western Europe, Poland was therefore coordinated into the plans of Washington. The Polish government, ostensibly the custodian of the national interests of Poland, brought about a hopeless war, and that precisely after Russia had publicly agreed to the partitioning of Poland. The government which had arranged the war’s beginning disappeared promptly upon the outbreak of war, and was never heard of again. It had earned its pension. The American domestic propaganda at this time was to the effect that Poland could resist for years.
The war began in earnest in 1940. France and the Low Countries were detached from America in a few weeks. The American regime found its control of Europe severely limited, and a domestic population on its hands not only devoid of war enthusiasm, but hostile to any form of intervention in the war which the Washington dictature had itself created.
The non-intervention movement in America was then taken over by the Culture-distorter, and the propaganda was devised that sending war material abroad was a method of remaining out of the war. In other words, limited participation was nonintervention. American political unconsciousness being what it is in a country with no tradition, no State, and no higher History, this was convincing, and the overwhelming sentiment against intervention was thus brought into the service of the intervention plans of Washington.
The limited participation was ever less limited. A law which nationalist elements had passed long before the War, to prohibit this sort of involvement in wars, was cynically put aside. American expeditionary forces were sent abroad, American naval vessels were ordered to engage European vessels on the high seas, merchant ships of European origin were requisitioned— and all this from a government that had been giving pontifical lessons in International Law to the world.
The widening of the theater of war by the involvement of Bolshevist Russia against the Western Civilization led within a fortnight to the breaking of relations with Europe. But the domestic situation still prevented Washington from direct American involvement, and Europe had failed to react to the undeclared American war on the high seas. The sole remaining American bastion in Europe was the island, and it was only held by political and financial means which could at any moment give way. Direct intervention with the total military potential of America was essential if the war was not to terminate in a Western victory over Asiatic Russia and a general settlement of all old political problems in Western Europe, which would result in the creation of a Culture-Nation-State-People-Race unity of the West with an authoritarian political basis that would be impermeable to Culture-distortion, and would moreover, by its example, inevitably call forth an American nationalist revolution against the Culture-distorting regime.
Since efforts to antagonize Europe by undeclared war had not had the desired results, it was sought to create a Far Eastern war by which it was hoped involvement in the real war against the Western Civilization could also come: about. To this end, an ultimatum was delivered to the Japanese Government in November, 1941. The ultimatum demanded Japanese evacuation of all its conquests since July, 1936. The answer of Japan was to sink the American battle fleet in Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Public and official investigations carried out by nationalist elements after the war proved conclusively that the Washington regime knew this attack was coming, and even the day of it, since it had been reading Japanese diplomatic messages. Nevertheless it took no military precautions, and thus cynically threw away the lives of thousands of American soldiers and sailors. The propaganda machine was already geared to attribute this Japanese attack to the Western Civilization, but the Western war declaration, following in a few days, made this propaganda pointless.
Thenceforward, 80 per cent of the American war-effort was devoted to the war against the hated Western Civilization. Australia and India were ignored except for weak efforts to contain a second Japanese attack-wave which never came. Had it come, the white population in colonial Australia would have passed into subjection to Japan, as a result of the presence in the Western Civilization of a pathological distortion. Europeans should note the significance of the statement of the American commander, precisely in this threatened quarter of the white world, made in the summer of 1942: “The future of civilization rests with the worthy banners of the Russian Army.” From this, it is apparent that uniformity of mind is a prerequisite also to military rank.
❂II❂
The conduct of the American war effort, on the higher level, departed entirely from the principles of honor which have always governed the intercourse of Western nations and leaders. The prime attack against Europe was by bombing planes based on the European island which from 1942 was occupied by American troops. The air-bombardment was directed almost entirely against the civilian population of Europe, even though it was known that no decision could be achieved by this means. The American press spoke blood-thirstily of “block-busters” by which was meant a bomb which could wipe out a city-block of civilian homes, and kill several hundred civilians. Photographs were proudly displayed of the results of this dishonorable type of warfare against families and homes. A propaganda was developed that anyone opposing the armies or ideology of America was a criminal, and subject to a “trial” for his “crimes.”
Europe was already familiar with atrocity propaganda stemming from America. Owing to the primitive intellectual level which Culture-distortion and Culture-Retardation have generalized in America, this sort of thing is taken literally, whereas the responsible minds of Europe recognize it for what it is, a mass propaganda designed to reach marginal brains. Thus during the First World War, the American press circulated stories of atrocities committed— of course— by the opponents of American armies. Belgium was selected as the site of these stories, and it was said that Belgian civilians were crucified by occupying armies. There was much more of the same: hands cut off babies, and the like. So seriously was this taken in America that after the First World War a deputation of American journalists traveled in a group to Belgium to investigate the stories, and then reported to the American public that they had all been found to be untrue.
Thus the thesis that anyone opposing America was ipso facto a criminal was not taken seriously in Europe, but served as a preparation of the American mind for the post-war horrors to be committed in Europe.
A leadership that had been talking about “war crimes” for years, while waging its own warfare against homes and families, armed itself finally in 1945 with a projectile which could be used only against civilians, the “atomic” bomb. Under the tactical conditions then prevailing, this bomb could not be used against military forces, but only against cities, which in war are stripped of men of military age. This bomb was used without demonstration, and without warning, and obliterated hundreds of thousands of civilians in a few seconds.
In the period after the Second World War, American foreign policy retained its continuity. Occupied Europe was treated as an area to be devastated, factories were dismantled of machinery, which was given to Russia, and other installations were blown into the air as part of a deliberate policy of destroying the industrial-potential of Europe. The population was treated as sub-human, and a large-scale starvation policy was introduced, which continues in 1948. Although America was exporting food all over the world, not being under any obligation of honor or morality to do so, nevertheless it refused to send enough food to maintain human life into occupied Europe. Human rations were fixed far below qualitative and quantitative minima for health, and within a short time, malnutrition, skin-ailments, infections, and degenerative diseases began to kill millions. In the first wild exultation of its “victory,” the American army forbade its personnel even to speak to the population. This continued until court martial's became too numerous, and it was discarded while in its place was substituted a violent hate propaganda among the American troops. The population of Europe was treated as totally and essentially inferior to the conquering Americans. It was officially referred to as “the indigenous population.” In public buildings special sanitary facilities were set aside for them, while the superior Americans and Negroes used their own.
Requisitioning of homes was on a mass-scale: American soldiers and civilians were allowed to bring their families from America and to put them into undamaged houses, in which had been living perhaps fifteen or twenty members of “the indigenous population.” The owners of these homes were allowed
usually to take with them only their clothes and their food. No provisions were made for housing the dispossessed, for they were regarded and treated as sub-human. This population was deprived of the physical right of self-defense against Americans. Europeans who struck Americans in reply to a blow were sentenced to imprisonment by American military courts. One European was sentenced to two years imprisonment for a hearsay reference to a Jewish member of the American forces as a “dirty Jew.” The ghastly dishonor attending the American occupation of Europe is sufficient to show the presence of Culture-alien elements, for no Western nation or colony could possibly proceed to this type of conduct. Its very inner constitution, its historical essence, a thousand-year honor tradition, would preclude the possibility. What Western nation would reduce the women of another to the legal status of concubines, and forbid marriage between its members and those of another Western nation? Yet this is what the American command did. It permitted concubinage, and forbade marriage. As a result of this policy, venereal disease assumed plague proportions in occupied Europe. In the presence of this starving, disease-ridden European population, the American armies and their families, guarded by guns and barbed wire, live in the houses which their bombs did not damage, and eat an unrationed diet. The spiritual qualities developed by these conditions are not the highest. In the early phase of the occupation, waste food and clothing were actually burned in the physical presence of the starving and freezing “indigenous population.” When, in the summer of 1947, a food revolt threatened, one of the American governors announced officially that the American people had no duty in fact, in international law, or in morals, to feed its subject population in occupied Europe, and that if a revolt did occur, it would be put down with bayonet and machine gun. That which is here described is only partial, but the pattern of the facts is universal in American-occupied Europe. It continues today, and has a deep and wide influence on European thinking on the most important level.
₷III₷
As was revealed in the analysis of the motivation of politics, power-contests in our century derive their
motivation from Cultural phenomena. In the early Western centuries, this motivation often came from the
struggle between Emperor and Pope for universal rule; later it came from religious differences; later still
from dynastic ambition; then from nation-units and from economic-commercial rivalry. Now the main
fact in the world is the spiritual unity of the Western Civilization, just becoming conscious, and the
awakened will-to-destroy of the outer world. In the realm of action it takes the form of a political struggle
between the Western Civilization and its colonies on the one side, and the non-Western forces on the
other. The enmity between America and Japan was therefore natural, and all nationalist elements in
America so regarded it. The distorting elements in America however never regarded this enmity as
important, for there was no anti-semitism in Japan. This throws the necessary light on the American
policy in the occupation of Japan. Upon the conquest of Japan, the utmost friendliness was at once put into effect as the policy of the army toward the Japanese population. The American army officially established brothels with Japanese women for its soldiers. Houses were not requisitioned for the troops, but barracks were built. The diet was adequate to maintain human health. The Emperor retained his rank and position, and his Godhead was not disturbed in the public mind. The Japanese self-respect was maintained by the dignified treatment generally accorded to Japanese civilians. The American policy was to restore the industrial potential of the country, and allow Japanese autonomy. The Japanese Diet, government and administration were maintained. Former political leaders were respectfully told to report for trial for war crimes, for this pettifogging nonsense has become a compulsion wherever American armies penetrate. The only exaction made of the population was the adoption of the American religion of “democracy”-worship. For a population whose national religion already consisted of Confucianism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Emperor-worship, this was no great sacrifice.
The leaders over whom the protracted ritual of war-crime exorcism was practiced were not abused either in the Japanese press or in the American press. They were not photographed endlessly, subjected to Freudian inquisitions, tormented, forced to pick up the cigarette-ends of American soldiers, or systematically degraded as had been the case with the victims of American armies in Europe. Above all, the “war-crime” process was not extended throughout the entire organization of Japanese life, both civilian and military, as was done in Europe, and as continues to be done in 1948.
The difference in policy between these two occupations is quite sufficient to explain by itself the entire formative influence of American foreign policy. The dominating impulse of the occupation-policy in occupied Europe is revenge. As the analysis of politics showed, however, revenge is not a part of politics, but transcends politics. Politics is not carried on for the purpose of humiliating the enemy, nor of exterminating the population of the enemy-unit if it is defeated. Politics has the aim of increasing power, and the American regime has not consulted power-realities at any point in forming and executing its policy in occupied Europe. In an area with an enormous war-potential which it controls and could use for its own power purposes, it systematically destroys plant and machinery. Among a population which could furnish it with millions of the best soldiers in the world, the Americans conduct themselves with a ferocity and an affected superiority calculated to alienate the “indigenous population” forever. Finding themselves captors of the best military leaders in the Western Civilization, to whom they should go to school, they proceed to hang them for the crime of opposing American armies in the field.
In short, instead of increasing American power, the occupation-policy has decreased American power in every way. This shows conclusively that the motivation of this conduct is outside politics. Its motivation is derived from the complete, deep, and total organic irreconcilability between a High Culture and a parasitic organism within it. This relationship is one transcending ordinary international politics. It is somewhat similar to the relationship between the Roman legions and the barbarians of Mithridates and Jugurtha, or to that between the Crusaders and the Saracens, or between Europe and the Turk in the 16th century. It is deeper even than these, because of the revenge-twist introduced into the soul of the parasite through centuries of silent sufferance of the unassailable superiority of the host. When defeated Europe— and in particular, the most vital part of it, the bearer of the grand European Idea of the 20th century— lay at the feet of this-totally alien conqueror from a Culture of the past, no feelings of magnanimity, chivalry, generosity, mercy, were in his exultant soul. There was only there the gall which he had been drinking for a thousand years while he had bided his time under the arrogance of the alien Western peoples whom he had always considered, and still considers, barbarians, goyim. Seen from this standpoint, the American armies were just as completely defeated as the armies from the mother-soil of the Culture. The real victor was the Cultural alien, whose triumph here over the entire Western Civilization marked the highest refulgence of his destiny.
♞IV♞
The ultimate significance of American policy since the American Revolution of 1933 has been negative
as far as America is concerned. America’s natural, geopolitical, national interests lie in Central and South
America, and in the Far East. In a world-struggle for control of the planet between the Western
Civilization and the outer forces, the natural policy of Europe is directed toward Africa, the Near East,
and the vastness of Asiatic Russia. America, being a colony of the Civilization, deriving all its spiritual
nourishment from it, naturally complements this interest, and in no way conflicts with it. What interest
has a nationalist America in Russia, Africa, the Near East? Correspondingly, what political interest has
Europe in Central or South America? Europe and America have no natural, organic, power-convergence.
America and Japan have.American foreign policy violates every feature of this natural disposition. It allied America to Russia— not against Japan, which could have been understood, but against Europe, which was madness for true American interests. It fought Japan, and proceeded after the conquest to rehabilitate Japan instead of reorganizing it into a permanent part of the American empire. It fought its main ally, Europe, not a mere political ally, but its spiritual parent and total, Cultural ally.
When the fortunes of war gave military victory to American arms it could have redeemed its previous mistakes. Japan could have been incorporated into the American overseas empire. Europe could have been rehabilitated. The exact opposite was done. Europe was looted, starved, and despoiled, while Japan, the natural enemy, was rebuilt for its next war against America.
In short, the foreign policy of America was not American. From its objective acts alone, this appears in a conclusive fashion.
Culture-distortion has exercised in America, since 1933, the supreme power of deciding the issue of war or peace for Americans. From the victorious dispersal of American arms, America gained no power. Japan has been an expense— much of its machinery has been given to Russia, and the burden of making up its food-deficit has been laid on the American people. While Russia has gained enormously in industrial strength by the machinery it has taken from Europe, and from what America has given it from its half of Europe, America has only incurred more expenses. So thoroughly has it devastated its area of occupied Europe that many material needs of its armies have to be brought from America.
American armies have evacuated China and India, North Africa and Persia, giving up the largest empire in the world’s history. At the close of the Second World War, Washington was the capital of a military empire embracing 18/20ths of the surface of the earth, including all the seas as subject to American control.
The policy of the Culture-distorter was thus not at all, as some people said, directed toward world control. This grandiose idea could only arise in a Western stratum. An alien organism in the body of the Western Civilization can only distort the life of the West. The parasite cannot become Western, and world-domination is a Western idea. Nor is it an idea for everyone, but like all formative Western ideas it excludes persons without depth or intensity. This is why America could not hold the great empire it had gathered together. America has not yet had sufficient historical experience, it has not the consciousness of politics, to administer or create an empire. In the mass-mind of the American, the entire Second World War had the one negative aim: destroy the European Idea.
Thus Culture-distortion in America neither followed America’s national interest, nor did it aim at world-conquest, either for itself or for America. As a result, it led America to a political defeat in the Second World War.
This fact is quite patent to Europe. More important is the question of how far this is realized in America. This involves the problems of the form of the Future in America, American nationalism, the prospect of continued Culture-pathology, and the spiritual possibilities of America.
The Future of America
THE ORIGIN of America contains its Future. As Leibnitz said, “The Present is loaded with the Past, and
pregnant with the Future.” America originated as a colony of the Western Culture. The organic unity
called a High Culture is tied to its landscape of birth. Here it is born, and here it solves its last and
mightiest problems. In its present stage, the Western Civilization dominates the spiritual orientation of
the whole world. Units like Japan and Russia exist merely as active revolts against the Western
Civilization, as denials of its world-outlook. The Western Civilization has created even its own
opponents; its dynamism has mobilized the outer forces into their present activity. The colonies which
this Culture planted around the world during the period 1600-1800 have maintained their spiritual
relationship with the mother-organism. The leading souls of Argentina, South Africa, Australia, America,
Canada, and the other scattered smaller colonies, reside spiritually in Europe, and from the fructifying and
wider-working creations of the parent Western Civilization, they derive their world-outlook, their plans,
ideas, and inner imperative. These colonies remain the spiritual allies of the Western Civilization. Their
political interests cannot possibly be hostile to those of the West, for they will share with it a common
fate. In this Age, the motivation of politics is derived from Culture. The world divides into the Western Civilization, and that outside. A victory of Europe over Russia or India is a victory for America, and a victory of America over Japan or China is also one for Europe. America and Europe together constitute a spiritual unit. The possibility thus is real and organic that America and Europe will once again be politically united. That which shares a common Destiny is actually a political unit, and the continuance of political disunity is artificial and hostile to the Life-interests of the organism. The prime aim of Life is the actualizing of the possible. This is Life. Owing to the frightfully dangerous world-position of the Western Civilization, a condition which will not vanish even with a successful war, the organic tendencies to Reunion of Europe and America are inevitably going to express themselves by impressing the best brains of America and Europe with the necessity of Reunion. The time-span involved in the beginnings of this tendency is not longer than one generation. Whether the tendency will be actualized is unforeseeable, just as the fate of Karnak was unforeseeable to the Ramessids. But its Life-necessity will dictate that this tendency will become the focus of action.
But the organic Idea of Reunion is impossible of realization while the West is suffering from inner Culture-diseases. This poses the question of reaction to Culture-pathology in America.
The original stirrings of the soul of the American People were manifested by the early types of the independent colonial, the pioneer, the militiamen, the explorer, the frontiersman. The characteristics of this type were resourcefulness, fearlessness, technical competence. It was simply the old Gothic urge into the distance once more, and the will to conquer that which lies between. The early American people had a powerful instinct of racial superiority coupled with its spirit of self-reliance. This human material was the basis of the Yankee type created by the War of Secession. That war had the result of engrafting onto this human material the form of the Age of Economics, Money and Materialism. It was a natural result, for the entire Western Civilization was at that time in the grip of the Civilization-Crisis. The soul of the American People was formed in that upheaval. It is a late people, by which is meant, technical, hard, externalized, but devoid of possibilities in the field of culture in the narrower sense. This hardness and externalization, this technical competence will always remain in the American soul, for they are of its essence. The ideological trappings were mere clothing, and they belonged to the Spirit of the Age. The 19th century spirit is quite dead, and America cannot perpetuate its charnel ideas any more than an organism can develop backwards, from age to youth.
The American ideology and world-outlook have no Future; the soul of the American people however has, for this people is an organism. The beating of this people into a thing of mass-ideals, mass-thinking, mass-conduct, mass-living, was a distortion and an exaggeration of the tendencies of the American soul,and of the possibilities of the Age of Materialism. This twisting and warping of the American Destiny was only possible because of the diseases of Culture-Retardation and Culture-distortion. Culture Retardation in America was a reflex of the presence of the same disease in Europe: the Age of Materialism had been fortuitously victorious, on the surface of History, in the First World War, and the actualizing of the Idea of the 20th century in both America and Europe was thereby delayed. Culture distortion in America was the result of the presence in huge masses of a Culturally alien group. The immediate future of America is therefore bound up with Culture-distortion and the American reaction against it. The distribution of power, spiritual and material, must be assessed which will be called into play. First the Culture-distorting group.
The numbers of the Jewish Culture-Nation-State-Race in America are estimated between eight and twelve millions. The numbers are however not of the first importance, for this organic unity has strong racial instincts and a powerful sense of a mission. The numbers do indeed play a part, both in the extent of Culture-distortion and the form and extent of the reaction against it, but the public power of the Culture-distorting group is based on its control of highly focused central organizations.
In propaganda, its control is absolute. This covers the cinema, the radio, the press— newspaper, periodical, book— the universities, and the stage. The radio is controlled by means of the few large nation-wide networks, which control the programs of the member stations, even though these may be privately owned. The newspaper press is dominated by its ownership of the few great news-gathering associations, which control the presentation of the news of the member-newspapers, who are dependent on the associations, even though they may be privately owned, and who may not change anything given them by the associations. Periodicals and books are controlled by means of ownership, in most cases, of the magazines, publishing houses, and printing presses, and social, economic, moral, and legal compulsion for the other cases. The stage is controlled by ownership of the theaters, and the other compulsory means. The universities are dominated by the disproportionate numbers of the Culture distorting group, both in teaching and student personnel, as well as the organized and aggressive activity of these numbers.
Both political parties are controlled by the Culture-distorting group, forcing all the accepted kind of inner-political activity in America into its service. The technique of political control is through a vast bureaucracy, created since 1933, which is dominated and disproportionately staffed with members of the group. This administrative control is extended also over the armed forces.
In the financial world— which completely owns and controls the industrial— the power of this group is heavily disproportionate to its population-percentage. Its hold in this realm goes back to the War of Secession, when a few of the precursors of the invasion of 1890-1950 engaged in the arms traffic between: the Confederate and Federal armies.
The result of all this is a powerful spiritual influence on the American people. This people reads the books which aliens write or edit for it. It sees the plays and cinemas it is allowed to. It thinks the thoughts that are put into its head. It is thrown into wars against American interests, which it can only lose. The issue of war and peace, life and death, is decided for America by the Cultural alien. America has been given a semitic countenance. Americans who hold power hold it in deference to the alien. To oppose him dare no public men. Americans were told that they must be concerned with the partitioning of Arabia, and no national channel existed through which an American could deny fundamentally the world-picture which supported such a policy.
But he who has looked into the essence of History knows that the alien and the proper cannot merge, they can only oppose one another. Disguise, terror, threats, dictatorship, pressure, propaganda— none of these can reach the essence of the relationship. The American people— not yet a nation— has its own soul, and it is only its lack of historical experience, and the stage of development of the Culture which created this people, which have made possible the wide and critical diffusion of Culture pathology throughout this people.
The very fact of Culture-distortion presupposes the existence, in its inner purity, of the soul of the hostpeople. Distortion cannot destroy the host, but can only direct the energy of the host onto false problems, and into the direction of the interests of the parasite.
২II২
As Europe now knows, the Second World War was a phenomenon of Culture-illness. It was created in
America, skillfully prepared during the years 1933-1939, and it was cleverly cast into the superficial form
of a contest between two European powers of yesterday, although the real world-issue was the uniting of
the West against the threat to its life from the gathering outer forces Russia, China, India, Islam, Africa.
The true form of the war was disclosed to everyone in 1945, when the victors emerged as the Culture distorting
regime in America, and the Mongols in the Kremlin. For the first time in world history, the
world was divided between two powers. Europe had lost the war, and achieved the unity in defeat which
it had not entirely reached in its victories. Europe passed temporarily into the same status that China and
India formerly occupied spoils for powers from without. The result of this war was also a defeat for America, first because the issue was false, and secondly because the exploitation of its military successes was false.
Facts of this magnitude cannot be concealed.
A knowledge of the organic nature of History would tell one that a reaction exists in America, even though he knew none of the, facts concerning it. The facts of the American nationalist reaction are precisely what we would expect. History works through minorities, and the size of these minorities is a direct reflex of the necessity of the historical phenomenon. The nationalist minority in America has at least ten million members. This minority is almost completely unorganized. There are approximately a thousand resistance organizations, but they are ineffectual politically, even though they are strongly symptomatic spiritually.
In 1915 began the nationalist reaction to the invasion of Culturally alien elements, with the founding of the second Ku Klux Klan. This year will be marked in retrospect as the beginning of the second phase of the American Revolution. The figure of ten millions as the strength of these elements is of course an estimate, but it refers to persons whose souls are strongly influenced by the immanent Nation-Idea in America. At less intensity, this feeling is general in the American population. Thus, no one denied ever that the overwhelming desire of the population was to stay out of the Second World War which the Culture-distorting regime in Washington had created in Europe. This was despite the heaviest propaganda barrage ever leveled at any population anywhere.
It is not traceable to true pacifism, for this does not exist in America. It reflects the fact that the soul of this people instinctively distrusted and hated the whole attempt. In 1940, it was given no chance to express its feeling in the “election,” since both candidates for power were committed to intervention. The management of elections has so far frustrated expression of the true American soul.
This nationalism is increasingly radical, even though it has not yet assumed political proportions. Certain American nationalists were held in gaol for having said in 1941 that a military defeat was to be desired for the welfare of America, since a defeat would destroy the hold of the Culture-distorting group. The American nationalist element generally hoped for a defeat of the conscript armies which had been massed out of the unenthusiastic and unwilling American youth. At the same time, it supported the war against Japan, the natural, geopolitical enemy of America.
The principle of individuality, of continuity of soul and character, applies to Peoples as well as to persons, and thus it is known that the Spirit still lives which was effective in such men as Nathaniel Green, Mad Anthony Wayne, Ethan Allen, Nathan Hale, Richard Henry Lee, John Adams, Daniel Morgan, Davy Crockett, the men of the Alamo and San Jacinto, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, William Walker, and Homer Lea. The century of materialism and money-obsession naturally called forth no heroism, but the 20th century will change the spiritual aspect of America as it has changed Europe. The latent heroism of the American People will again be summoned forth by the stern creativeness of the Age of Absolute Politics.
Despite the extent of Culture-distortion and its attempts to render a People permanently into a feckless, uniformized mass, there are millions who have held themselves instinctively aloof. These people are the focus of great historical forces. They fight against gigantic odds, and they fight under enormous handicaps.
American nationalism has no connection with a grand tradition of life, thought, and action. It finds itself charged with a politically revolutionary mission, but the American people is not revolutionary. Its reaction to a Cultural disease is in a crude racial form. It faces a mighty political task, but is unconscious of the necessities of power-thinking. Its intellect is not free from the superannuated ideology of “equality,” born in 1775, and still used by the distorting element for its own purpose.
The hammering of the mass-mind into the American people was at bottom merely a technique, an artifice. Strong individuality was submerged, it is true, but strong individuality cannot be annihilated. The Age of Absolute Politics will wake once more what there is of Genius in the American stock, and a powerful reaction may be expected from the mass-veneer over the American soul in the form of individual leaders upon whom absolute power will be conferred.
America is not a country with creative possibilities in the field of philosophy, and its higher understanding of the great realities of our time will come from its deep, determining connection with the mother-soil of the West.
The elements which will enter into the coming struggle between American nationalism and the Culture pathological element will be numerous. It is probably no longer possible for the American Revolution to take a constitutional form. The perfected parliamentary-electoral techniques of late democratic conditions seem to exclude that possibility. There is left only civil war. In such a war, the race-war between the Negro and the white, the class-war of the unions against the managers, the financial-war of the money dictators against the coming authoritarian nationalism, and the war for survival of the Culture-distorter against the American people, will all step forth for resolution.
Whether this crisis will be sharp and critical in nature, like the Secession-War, or in the form of an uncertain and long-drawn out evolution, like the Thirty-Years’ War, or the struggle between the Spirit of Cromwell and the Restoration, cannot be foreseen. In any case, the struggle is one which is demanded by organic necessity, and only its occurrence can be foretold, but neither the form thereof, nor the date thereof.
These are Imponderables. When the American National Revolution takes political form, its inspiration will come from the same ultimate source as the European Revolution of 1933. Therefore what is written here is also for the true America, even though the effective America of the moment, and of the immediate future is a hostile America, an America of willing, mass-mind tools in the service of the Culture-distorting political and total enemy of the Western Civilization.
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