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ORIGINS
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Containing two new chapters: IDEOLOGY AND TERROR
& REFLECTIONS on THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION
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30
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The Origins of
Totalitarianism
5i|
The Origins of
Totalitarianism
by HANNAH ARENDT
Meridian Books
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
Cleveland and New York
A MERIDIAN BOOK
Published by The World Publishing Company
2231 West llOth Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio
First Meridian printing September 1958
Seventh printing September 1962
Copyright © 1951 by Hannah Arendt; second enlarged edition
copyright © 1958 by Hannah Arendt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without written permission from the publisher,
except for brief passages included in a review appearing in
a newspaper or magazine.
Reprinted by arrangement with Harcourt, Brace and Company
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-11927
Printed in the United States of America v/p962
TO HEINRICH BLUCHER
Weder dent Verpanp;enen anheimfallen noch
dem Zukiinftif^eii. Es komnit darauf an, g,anz
gepemvarli^ zu sein. K A H L JASPERS
Preface to the First Edition
Two WORLD WARS in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted
chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the
vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of
a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment
of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We
no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with
all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents
who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars
and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared.
Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch
the development of the same phenomena — homelessness on an unprece-
dented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
Never has our future been more unpredictable, nevej have we depended
so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of
common sense and self-interest — forces that look like sheer insanity, if
judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had
divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who
think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for
it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience
of their lives.
on the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an
ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations
is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some
parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to
the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Des-
perate^hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events
than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our
time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an
unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless
optimism.
This book has been written against a background of both reckless opti-
mism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress^and Doom are two sides
of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith. It was
vm PRI-FACE TO THl- FIRST EDITION
written out of the conviction that it should be possible to discover the
hidden mechanics by which all traditional elements of our political and
spiritual world were dissolved into a conglomeration where everything
seems to have lost specific value, and has become unrecognizable for human
comprehension, unusable for human purpose. To yield to the mere process
of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because
it has assumed the spurious grandeur of "historical necessity," but also
because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, mean-
ingless, and unreal.
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be compre-
hensible to man can lea3^ to interpreting history by commonplaces. Compre-
hension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented
from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generali-
ties that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer
felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which
our century has placed on us — neither denying its existence nor submitting
meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated,
attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality — whatever it may be.
In this sense, it must be possible to face and understand the outrageous
fact that so small (and, in world politics, so unimportant) a phenomenon as
the Jewish question and antisemitism could become the catalytic agent for
first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment
of death factories. Or, the grotesque disparity between cause and effect
which introduced the era of imperialism, when economic diflficulties led, in
a few decades, to a profound transformation of political conditions all over
the world. Or, the curious contradiction between the totalitarian movements'
avowed cynical "realism" and their conspicuous disdain of the whole texture
of reality. Or, the irritating incompatibility between the actual power of
modern man (greater than ever before, great to the point where he might
challenge the very existence of his own universe) and the impotence of
modern men to live in, and understand the sense of, a world which their
own strength has established.
The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has
been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide
with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to
destroy the essence of man. Yet to turn our backs on the destructive forces
of the century is of little avail.
The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with
the bad that without the imperialists' "expansion for expansion's sake," the
world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie's political
device of "power for power's sake," the extent of human strength might
never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian move-
ments, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our
time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom with-
out ever becoming aware of what has been happening.
And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION IX
appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly
comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never
have known the^ truly radical nature of Evil.
Antisemitism (not merely tTie hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely
conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) — one after the other,
one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity
needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle,
in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the
whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in
and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.
We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and
simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a
dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean
stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the
dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why
all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still
intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.
Summer, 1950
Preface to the Second Enlarged Edition
SINCE 1951, when this book first appeared, only one event happened
that had a direct bearing upon our understanding of totalitarianism
and total domination as a novel form of government. This is not Stalin's
death, nor even the succession crisis in Russia and the satellite countries,
but the Hungarian revolution — the first and yet unique instance of a
people's uprising against total domination. At this moment, hardly two
years after the uprising, no one can tell whether this was only the last
and most desperate flare-up of a spirit which, since 1789, has manifested
itself in the series of European revolutions, or if it contains the germ of
something new which will have consequences of its own. In either case, the
event itself is important enough to require a re-examination of what we
know, or think we know, about totalitarianism. The reader will find in this
new edition a last chapter, in the form of an Epilogue, where I have tried
to bring the older story up to date. However, the reader should bear in
mind that developments of the year 1958 have not been taken into account,
with the result that the partial restalinization in Soviet Russia and the satel-
lite countries is hinted at as a strong probability, but not told and analyzed
as an accomplished fact.
This is not the only addition. As sometimes happens in such matters,
there were certain insights of a more general and theoretical nature which
now appear to me to grow directly out of the analysis of the elements of
total domination in the third part of the book, but which I did not possess
when I finished the original manuscript in 1949. These are now incor-
porated in Chapter XIII, "Ideology and Terror," of the present edition
and they replace the rather inconclusive "Concluding Remarks" that closed
the original edition, some of which, however, have been shifted to other
chapters.
These changes are not revisions. It is true that in the present edition,
even apart from the two new chapters. Part III on Totalitarianism and the
last chapters of Part II on Imperialism (dealing with such pretotalitarian
phenomena as statelessness and the transformation of parties into move-
ments) are considerably enlarged, while Part I on Antisemitism and the
chapters 5 to 8 on Imperialism have remained untouched. But the changes
are technical additions and replacements which do not alter either the
analysis or argument of the original text. They were necessary because
so much documentary and other source material on the Hitler regime
had become accessible years after this book was finished. Thus I knew
the Nuremberg documents only in part and only in English translations,
and many books, pamphlets and magazines published in Germany during
XII PREFACE TO THI- SECOND ENLARGED EDITION
the war were not available in this country. Additions and replacements,
therefore, concern mainly quotations in text and footnotes where I can
now use original instead of secondary sources.
However, what I tried to do for source material, I could not do for the
huge literature of recent years on Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Not
even all of the more important contributions are mentioned. While I sin-
cerely regret this omission, I left out of account, without regret, the rather
voluminous literature of memoirs published by Nazi and other German
functionaries after the end of the war. The dishonesty of this kind of apolo-
getics is obvious and embarrassing but understandable, whereas the lack
of comprehension they display of what actually happened, as well as of the
roles the authors themselves played in the course of events, is truly aston-
ishing.
For kind permission to peruse and quote archival material, I thank the
Hoover Library in Stanford, California, the Centre de Documentation
Juive in Paris, and the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York. Documents
in the Nuremberg Trials are quoted with their Nuremberg File Number;
other documents are referred to with indication of their present location
and archival number.
The two new chapters of this edition appeared before in the Review of
Politics, July 1953, under the title, "Ideology and Terror, a Novel Form
of Government," and in the Journal of Politics, February 1958, under the
title, "Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution."
The additions and enlargements of the present edition, with the excep-
tion of the analysis of the Hungarian revolution, appeared first in the
German edition published in 1955. Therefore they had to be translated and
incorporated into the English edition. TTiis difficult job of editing and
translating was done by Mrs. Therese Pol, to whom I am greatly indebted.
Hannah Arendt
New York, April, 1958
Contents
Preface to the First Edition
Preface to the Second Enlarged Edition
v//
XI
PART onE: ANTISEMITISM
Chapter one: Antisemitism as an Outrage to Common Sense 3
two: The Jews, the Nation-State, and the Birth of
Antisemitism 11
i: The Equivocalities of Emancipation and the Jewish
State Banker 11. ii: Early Antisemitism 28. in: The
First Antisemitic Parties 35. IV : Leftist Antisemitism
42. v: The Golden Age of Security 50.
three: The Jews and Society
i: Between Pariah and Parvenu 56. n: The Potent
Wizard 68. in: Between Vice and Crime 79.
54
four: The Dreyfus Affair
i: The Facts of the Case 89. n: The Third Republic
and French Jewry 95. in: Army and Clergy Against
the Republic. 100. iv: The People and the Mob 106.
v: The Jews and the Dreyfusards 117. vi: The
Pardon and Its Significance 119.
89
PART TWO: IMPERIALISM
five: The Pohtical Emancipation of the Bourgeoisie 123
i: Expansion and the Nation-State 124. ii: Power and
the Bourgeoisie 135. Ill: The Alliance Between Mob
and Capital 147.
XIV
CONTENTS
Six: Race-Thinking Before Racism 158
i: A "Race" of Aristocrats Af;ainst a "Nation" of
Citizens 161. ii: Race Unity as a Substitute for
National Emancipation 165. ill: The New Key to
History 170. iv: The "Rif^hts of Enf>lishmen" vs. the
Rif^hts of Men 175.
seven: Race and Bureaucracy 185
i: The Phantom World of the Dark Continent 186.
II : Gohi and Race 197. iii: The Imperialist
Character 207.
eight: Continental Imperialism: the Pan-Movements 222
i: Tribal Nationalism 111. ii: The Inheritance of
Lawlessness 243. in: Party and Movement 250.
nine: The Decline of the Nation-State and the End
of the Rights of Man 267
i: The "Nation of Minorities" and the Stateless
People 269. ii: The Perplexities of the Rights of
Man 290.
PART THREE: TOTALITARIANISM
ten: a Classless Society 305
i: The Masses 305. ii: The Temporary Alliance
Between the Mob and the Elite 326.
eleven: The Totalitarian Movement 341
i: Totalitarian Propaganda 341. ii: Totalitarian
Organization 364.
twelve: Totalitarianism in Power 389
i: The So-called Totalitarian State 392. ii: The Secret
Police 419. Ill: Total Domination 437.
thirteen: Ideology and Terror:
A Novel Form of Government
460
CONTENTS
fourteen: Epilogue: Reflections on the
Hungarian Revolution
i: Russia after Slalin's Death 483. ii: The Hungarian
Revolution 492. in: The Satellite System 502.
480
Index
511
PART onE
Antisemitism
This is a remarkable century which opened with
the Revolution and ended with the Affaire! Per-
haps it will be called the century of rubbish.
ROGER MARTIN DU CARD
CHAPTER one: Aiitisemitism as an Outrage
to Common Sense
MANY STILL consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around
antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromis-
ingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews.
only the horror of the final catastrophe, and even more the homelessness
and uprootedness of the survivors, made the "Jewish question" so promi-
nent in our everyday political life. What the Nazis themselves claimed to
be their chief discovery — the role of the Jewish people in world politics —
and their chief interest — persecution of Jews all over the world — have
been regarded- by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or
an interesting device of demagogy.
The failure to take seriously what the Nazis themselves said is compre-
hensible enough. There is hardly an aspect of contemporary history more
irritating and mystifying than the fact that of all the great unsolved po-
litical questions of our century, it should have been this, seemingly small
and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting
the whole infernal machine in motion. Such discrepancies between cause
and efifect outrage our common sense, to say nothing of the historian's
sense of balance and harmony. Compared with the events themselves, all
explanations of antisemitism look as if they had been hastily and hazard-
ously contrived, to cover up an issue which so gravely threatens our sense
js£„proportion and our hope for sanity.
one of these hasty explanations has been the identification of antisemi-
tism with rampant nationalism and its xenophobic outbursts. Unfortu-
nately, the fact is that modern antisemitism grew in proportion as tradi-
tional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at the exact moment
when the European system of nation-states and its precarious balance of
power crashed.
It has already been noticed that the Nazis were not simple nationalists.
Their nationaUst propaganda was directed toward their fellow-travelers and
not their convinced members; the latter, on the contrary, were never al-
lowed to lose sight of a consistently supranational approach to politics.
Nazi "nationalism" had more than one aspect in common with the recent
nationalistic propaganda in the Soviet Union, which is also used only to
feed the prejudices of the masses. The Nazis had a genuine and never re-
^ ANTISEMITISM
voked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provinciaHsm of
the nation-state, and they repeated time and again that their "movement,"
international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to
them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific terri-
tory. And not only the Nazis, but fifty years of antiscmitic history, stand
as evidence against the identification of antisemitism with nationalism. The
first antisemitic parties in the last decades of the nineteenth century were
also among the first that banded together internationally. From the very
beginning, they called international congresses and were concerned with a
co-ordination of international, or at least inter-European, activities.
General trends, like the coincident decline of the nation-state and the
growth of antisemitism, can hardly ever be explained satisfactorily by one
reason or by one cause alone. The historian is in most such cases con-
fronted with a very complex historical situation where he is almost at
liberty, and that means at a loss, to isolate one factor as the "spirit of the
time." There are, however, a few helpful general rules. Foremost among
them for our purpose is Tocqueville's great discovery (in L'Ancien Regime et
la Revolution, Book II, chap. 1 ) of the motives for the violent hatred felt
by the French masses for the aristocracy at the outbreak of the Revolution
— a hatred which stimulated Burke to remark that the revolution was more
concerned with "the condition of a gentleman" than with the institution of
a king. According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats
about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, pre-
cisely because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any
considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast
powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When
noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and
oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in
the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploita-
\ tion as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible-'
function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why
Tt'should be tolerated.
Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their
public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their
wealth. When Hitler came to power, the German banks were already
almost judenrein (and it was here that Jews had held key positions for
more than a hundred years) and German Jewry as a whole, after a long
steady growth in social status and numbers, was declining so rapidly that
statisticians predicted its disappearance in a few decades. Statistics, it is
true, do not necessarily point to real historical processes; yet it is note-
worthy that to a statistician Nazi persecution and extermination could look
like a senseless acceleration of a process which would probably have come
about in any case.
The same holds true for nearly all Western European countries. The
Dreyfus Affair exploded not under the Second Empire, when French Jewry
was at the height of its prosperity and influence, but under the Third Re-
ANTISEMITISM AS AN OUTRAGE TO COMMON SENSE 5
public when Jews had all but vanished from important positions (though
not from the political scene). Austrian antisemitism became violent not
under the reign of Metternich and Franz Joseph, but in the postwar Aus-
trian Rep ublic when it was perfectly obvious that hardly any other group
had suffe red the same loss of influence and prestige through the disappeair
ance of the Hapsburg monarchy.
Persecution of powerless or power-losing groups may not be a very
pleasant spectacle, but it does not spring from human meanness alone.
What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate
people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power
has a certain function and is of some general use. Even exploitation and
oppression still make society work and establish some kind of order. only
wealth without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical,
useless, revolting, because such conditions cut all the threads which tie men
together. Wealth which does not exploit lacks even the relationship which
exists between exploiter and exploited; aloofness without policy does not
imply even the minimum concern of the oppressor for the oppressed.
The general decline of Western and Central European Jewry, however,
constitutes merely the atmosphere in which the subsequent events took
place. The decline itself explains them as little as the mere loss of power
by the aristocracy would explain the French Revolution. To be aware of
such general rules is important only in order to refute those recommenda-
tions of common sense which lead us to believe that violent hatred or
sudden rebellion spring necessarily from great power and great abuses, and
that consequently organized hatred of the Jews cannot but be a reaction to
their importance and power.
More serious, because it appeals to much better people, is another com-
mon-sense fallacy: the Jews, because they were an entirely powerless group
caught up in the general and insoluble conflicts of the time, could be blamed
for them and finally be made to appear the hidden authors of all evil. The
best illustration — and the best refutation — of this explanation, dear to the
hearts of many liberals, is in a joke which was told after the first World
War. An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply
was: Yes, the Jews and the bicycHsts. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why
the Jews? asks the other.
The theory that the Jews are always the scapegoat implies that the scape-
joaUttight have been anyone else as well. It upholds the perfect innocence
of the victim, an innocence which insinuates nof only that no evil was done
but that nothing at all was done which might possibly have a connection
jwith the issue at stake. It is true that the scapegoat theory in its purely
ar'bltrary form never appears in print. Whenever, however, its adherents
painstakingly try to explain why a specific scapegoat was so well suited to
his role, they show that they have left the theory behind them and have got
themselves involved in the usual historical research — where nothing is ever
discovered except that history is made by many groups and that for certain
reasons one group was singled out. The so-called scapegoat necessarily
5 ANTISEMITISM
ceases to be the innocent victim whom the world blames for all its sins and
through whom it wishes to escape punishment; it becomes one group of
people among other groups, all of which are involved in the business of this
world. And it does not simply cease to be coresponsible because it became
the victim of the world's injustice and cruelty.
Until recently the inner inconsistency of the scapegoat theory was suffi-
cient reason to discard it as one of many theories which are motivated by
escapism. But the rise of terror as a major weapon of government has lent
it a credibility greater than it ever had before.
A fundamental difference between modem dictatorships and all other
tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to extermi-
nate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people
who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any
preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of
view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror
was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common char-
acteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet
Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are
only too obvious. on the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazi,
never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent
people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy,
it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even
more "advanced" than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is
not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have
long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become
a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate
consequence of rule by terror — namely, that nobody, not even the executors,
can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbi-
trariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they
are objectively innocent, that tiiey are chosen regardless of what they may
or may not have done.
At first glance this may look like a belated confirmation of the old scape-
goat theory, and it is true that the victim of modern terror does show all
the characteristics of the scapegoat: he is objectively and absolutely inno-
cent because nothing he did or omitted to do matters or has any connection
with his fate.
There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which auto-
matically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate
to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter inno-
cence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability
to change his fate. Terror, however, is only in the last instance of its develop-
J ment a mere form of government. In order to establish a totalitarian regime,
f terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology;
and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority,
before terror can be stabilized. The point for the historian is that the Jews,
before becoming the main victims of modem terror, were the center of Nazi
ANTISEMITISM AS AN OUTRAGE TO COMMON SENSE 7
ideology. And an^ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot
choose its victim arbitrarily. In other words, if a patent forgery like tfie"
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is believed by so many people that it can
become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian
is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations
which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the
forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically
speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is forgery.
The scapegoat explanation therefore remains one of the principal at-
tempts to escape the seriousness of antisemitism and the significance of the
fact that the Jews were driven into the storm center of events. Equally wide-
spread is the opposite doctrine of an "eternal antisemitism" in which Jew-
hatred is a normal and natural reaction to which history gives only more
or less opportunity. Outbursts need no special explanation because they are
natural consequences of an eternal problem. That this doctrine was adopted
by professional antisemites is a matter of course; it gives the best possible
alibi for all horrors. If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering
Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and
even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of
argument.
The more surprising aspect of this explanation, the assumption of an
eternal antisemitism, is that it has been adopted by a great many unbiased
historians and by an even greater number of Jews. It is this odd coincidence
which makes the theory so very dangerous and confusing. Its escapist basis
is in both instances the same: just as antisemites understandably desire to
escape responsibility for their deeds, so Jews, attacked and on the defensive,
even more understandably do not wish under any circumstances to discuss
their share of responsibility. In the case of Jewish, and frequently of Chris-
tian, adherents of this doctrine, however, the escapist tendencies of official
apologetics are based upon more important and less rational motives.
The birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by
and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering
away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism. What actually
happened was that great parts of the Jewish people were at the same time
threatened by physical extinction from without and dissolution from within.
In this situation, Jews concerned with the survival of their people would,
in a curious desperate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that anti-
semitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people to-
gether, so that the assumption of eternal antisemitism would even imply an
eternal guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularized
travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Mes-
sianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries
the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a
powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically. The Jews
mistook modern anti-Christian antisemitism for the old religious Jew-hatred
— and this all the more irmocently because their assimilation had by-passed
g ANTISEMITISM
Christianity in its religious and cultural aspect. Confronted with an obvious
symptom of the decline of Christianity, they could therefore imagine in
all ignorance that this was some revival of the so-called "Dark Ages."
Ignorance or misunderstanding of their own past were partly responsible for
their fatal underestimation of the actual and unprecedented dangers which
lay ahead. But one should also bear in mind that lack of political ability
and judgment have been caused by the very nature of Jewish history, the
history'of a people without a government, without a country, and without
a language. Jewish history offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people,
unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept
of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circum-
scribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all
political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political
history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen,
accidental factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled ,
<^from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none. /
In view of the final catastrophe, which brought the Jews so near to com-
plete annihilation, the thesis of eternal antisemitism has become more dan-
gerous than ever. Today it would absolve Jew-haters of crimes greater than
anybody had ever believed possible. Antisemitism, far from being a mys-
terious guarantee of the survival of the Jewish people, has been clearly
revealed as a threat of its extermination. Yet this explanation of antisemitism,
like the scapegoat theory and for similar reasons, has outlived its refutation
by reality. It stresses, after all, with different arguments but equal stub-
bornness, that complete and inhuman innocence which so strikingly char-
acterizes victims of modern terror, and therefore seems confirmed by the
events. It even has the advantage over the scapegoat theory that somehow it
answers the uncomfortable question: Why the Jews of all people? — if only
with the question begging reply: Eternal hostility.
It is quite remarkable that the only two doctrines which at least attempt
to explain the political significance of the antisemitic movement deny all
specific Jewish responsibility and refuse to discuss matters in specific his-
i/ torical terms. In this inherent negation of the significance of human be-
havior, they bear a terrible resemblance to those modern practices and
forms of government which, by means of arbitrary terror, liquidate the very
possibility of human activity. Somehow in the extermination camps Jews
were murdered as if in accordance with the explanation these doctrines
had given of why they were hated: regardless of what they had done or
omitted to do, regardless of vice or virtue. Moreover, the murderers them-
selves, only obeying orders and proud of their passionless efficiency, un-
cannily resembled the "innocent" instruments of an inhuman impersonal
course of events which the doctrine of eternal antisemitism had considered
them to be.
Such common denominators between theory and practice are by them-
selves no indication of historical truth, although they are an indication of
the "timely" character of such opinions and explain why they sound so
ANTISEMITISM AS AN OUTRAGE TO COMMON SENSE 9
plausible to the multitude. The historian is concerned with them only insofar
as they are themselves part of his history and because they stand in the way
of his search for truth. Being a contemporary, he is as likely to succumb to
their persuasive force as anybody else. Caution in handling generally ac-
cepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially
important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has
produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but
are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that
their "universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments" (Phaedrus 261)
had nothing to do with truth but aimed at opinions which by their very
nature are changing, and which are valid only "at the time of the agreement
and as long as the agreement lasts" (Theaetetus 172). He also discovered
the very insecure position of truth in the world, for from "opinions comes
persuasion and not from truth" (Phaedrus 260). The most striking dif-
ference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were
satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth,
whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.
In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the
others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic
were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of
facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its
comprehensibility — based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and there-
fore can be understood by men — is in danger, whenever facts are no longer
held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused
to prove this or that opinion.
There are, to be sure, few guides left through the labyrinth of inarticulate
facts if opinions are discarded and tradition is no longer accepted as un-
questionable. Such perplexities of historiography, however, are very minor
consequences, considering the profound upheavals of our time and their
effect upon the historical structures of Western mankind. Their immediate
result has been to expose all those components of our history which up to
now had been hidden from our view. This does not mean that what came
crashing down in this crisis (perhaps the most profound crisis in Western
history since the downfall of the Roman Empire) was mere fagade, although
many things have been revealed as fagade that only a few decades ago we
thought were indestructible essences.
The simultaneous decline of the European nation-state and growth of
antisemitic movements, the coincident downfall of nationally organized Eu-
rope and the extermination of Jews, which was prepared for by the victory
of antisemitism over all competing isms in the preceding struggle for persua-
sion of public opinion, have to be taken as a serious indication of the source
of antisemitism. Modern antisemitism must be seen in the more general
framework of the development of the nation-state, and at the same time its
source must be found in certain aspects of Jewish history and specifically
Jewish functions during the last centuries. If, in the final stage of disintegra-
10 ANTISEMITISM
tion, antiscmitic slogans proved the most cfTectivc means of inspiring and
organizing great masses of people for imperialist expansion and destruction
of the old forms of government, then the previous history of the relationship
between Jews and the state must contain elementary clues to the growing
hostility between certain groups of society and the Jews. We shall show this
development in the next chapter.
If, furthermore, the steady growth of the modem mob — that is, of the
dcclassi's of all classes — produced leaders who, undisturbed by the question
of whether the Jews were sufficiently important to be made the focus of a
political ideology, repeatedly saw in them the "key to history" and the
central cause of all evils, then the previous history of the relationship be-
tween Jews and society must contain the elementary indications of the
hostile relationship between the mob and the Jews. We shall deal with the
relationship between Jews and society in the third chapter.
The fourth chapter deals with the Dreyfus AfTair, a kind of dress rehearsal
for the performance of our own time. Because of the peculiar opportunity
it offers of seeing, in a brief historical moment, the otherwise hidden po-
tentialities of antisemitism as a major political weapon within the framework
of nineteenth-century politics and its relatively well-balanced sanity, this
case has been treated in full detail.
The following three chapters, to be sure, analyze only the preparatory
elements, which were not fully realized until the decay of the nation-state
and the development of imperialism reached the foreground of the political
scene.
CHAPTER two: THg Jgws, thc Natioii- Statc,
and the Birth of Antisemitism
I: The Equivocalities of Emancipation
and the Jewish State Banker
AT THE height of its development in the nineteenth century, the nation-
1- state granted its Jewish inhabitants equaHty of rights. Deeper, older,
and more fateful contradictions are hidden behind the abstract and palpa-
ble inconsistency that Jews received their citizenship from governments
which in the process of centuries had made nationality a prerequisite for
citizenship and homogeneity of population the outstanding characteristic
of the body politic.
The series of emancipation edicts which slowly and hesitantly followed
the French edict of 1792 had been preceded and were accompanied by
an equivocal attitude toward its Jewish inhabitants on the part of the
nation-state. The breakdown of the feudal order had given rise to the new
revolutionary concept of equality, according to which a "nation within
the nation" could no longer be tolerated. Jewish restrictions and privi-
leges had to be abolished together with all other special rights and liberties.
This growth of equality, however, depended largely upon the growth of an
independent state machine which, either as an enlightened despotism or
as a constitutional government above all classes and parties, could, in
splendid isolation, function, rule, and represent the interests of the nation
as a whole. Therefore, beginning with the late seventeenth century, an un-
precedented need arose for state credit and a new expansion of the state's
sphere of economic and business interest, while no group among the Euro-
pean populations was prepared to grant credit to the state or take an active
part in the development of state business. It was only natural that the Jews,
with their age-old experience as moneylenders and their connections with
European nobility — to whom they frequently owed local protection and for
whom they used to handle financial matters — would be called upon for help;
it was clearly in the interest of the new state business to grant the Jews cer-
tain privileges and to treat them as a separate group. Under no circumstances
could the state afford to see them wholly assimilated into the rest of the
population, which refused credit to the state, was reluctant to enter and to
12 ANTISEMITISM
develop businesses owned by the state, and followed the routine pattern
of private capitalistic enterprise.
Emancipation of the Jews, therefore, as granted by the national state
system in Europe during the nineteenth century, had a double origin and
an ever-present equivocal meaning. on the one hand it was due to the
political and legal structure of a new body politic which could function only
under the conditions of political and legal equality. Governments, for their
own sake, had to iron out the inequalities of the old order as completely and
as quickly as possible. on the other hand, it was the clear result of a gradual
extension of specific Jewish privileges, granted originally only to individuals,
then through them to a small group of well-to-do Jews; only when this
limited group could no longer handle by themselves the ever-growing de-
mands of state business, were these privileges finally extended to the whole
of Western and Central European Jewry.*
Thus, at the same time and in the same countries, emancipation meant
equality and privileges, the destruction of the old Jewish community auton-
omy and the conscious preservation of the Jews as a separate group in
society, the abolition of special restrictions and special rights and the exten-
sion of such rights to a growing group of individuals. Equality of condition
for all nationals had become the premise of the new body politic, and while
this equality had actually been carried out at least to the extent of depriving
the old ruling classes of their privilege to govern and the old oppressed
classes of their right to be protected, the process coincided with the birth
of the class society which again separated the nationals, economically and
socially, as efficiently as the old regime. EquaUty of condition, as the
Jacobins had understood it in the French Revolution, became a reality
only in America, whereas on the European continent it was at once re-
placed by a mere formal equality before the law.
The fundamental contradiction between a political body based on equality
before the law and a society based on the inequality of the class system
prevented the development of functioning republics as well as the birth of
a new poUtical hierarchy. An insurmountable inequality of social condition,
1 To the modern historian rights and Uberties granted the court Jews during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may appear to be only the forerunners of
equality: court Jews could live wherever they liked, they were permitted to travel
freely within the realm of their sovereign, they were allowed to bear arms and had
rights to special protection from local authorities. Actually these court Jews, char-
acteristically called Generalpn'vilegierte Jiidcn in Prussia, not only enjoyed better
living conditions than their fellow Jews who still lived under almost medieval re-
strictions, but they were better off than their non-Jewish neighbors. Their standard
of living was much higher than that of the contemporary middle class, their privi-
leges in most cases were greater than those granted to the nicrch:>nts. Nor did this
situation escape the attention of their contemporaries. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, the
outstanding advocate of Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia, com-
plained of the practice, in force since the time of Frederick William I, which granted
rich Jews "all sorts of favors and support" often "at the expense of, and with
neglect of diligent legal [that is, non-Jewish] citizens." In Denkwurdigkeiten meiner
Zeit, Lemgo, 1814-1819, IV, 487.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 13
the fact that class membership on the continent was bestowed upon the in-
dividual and, up to the first World War, almost guaranteed to him by birth,
could nevertheless exist side by side with political equality. only politically
backward countries, like Germany, had retained a few feudal remnants.
There members of the aristocracy, which on the whole was well on its way
to transforming itself into a class, had a privileged political status, and thus
could preserve as a group a certain special relationship to the state. But
these were remnants. The fully developed class system meant invariably
that the status of the individual was defined by his membership in his own
class and his relationship to another, and not by his position in the state
or within its machinery.
The only exceptions to this general rule were the Jews. They did not
form a class of their own and they did not belong to any of the classes in
their countries. As a group, they were neither workers, middle-class people,
landholders, nor peasants. Their wealth seemed to make them part of the
middle class, but they did not share in its capitalist development; they were
scarcely represented in industrial enterprise and if, in the last stages of their
history in Europe, they became employers on a large scale, they employed
white-collar personnel and not workers. In other words, although their status
was defined through their being Jews, it was not defined through their rela-
tionship to another class. Their special protection from the state (whether
in the old form of open privileges, or a special emancipation edict which
no other group needed and which frequently had to be reinforced against
the hostility of society) and their special services to the governments pre-
vented their submersion in the class system as well as their own establish-
ment as a class.- Whenever, therefore, they were admitted to and entered
society, they became a well-defined, self-preserving group within one of the
classes, the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie.
There is no doubt that the nation-state's interest in preserving the Jews
as a special group and preventing their assimilation into class society coin-
cided with the Jewish interest in self-preservation and group survival. It is
also more than probable that without this coincidence the governments'
attempts would have been in vain; the powerful trends toward equalization
of all citizens from the side ot the state and incorporation of each individual
into a class from the side of society, both clearly implying complete Jewish
assimilation, could be frustrated only through a combination of government
intervention and voluntary co-operation. Official policies for the Jews were,
after all, not always so consistent and unwavering as we may believe if we
consider only the final results.^ It is indeed surprising to see how consistently
2 Jacob Lestschinsky, in an early discussion of the Jewish problem, pointed out
that Jews did not belong to any social class, and spoke of a "Klasseneinschiebsel"
(in Weltwirtschafts-Archiv, 1929, Band 30, 123 ff.), but saw only the disadvantages
of this situation in Eastern Europe, not its great advantages in Western and Central
European countries.
3 For example, under Frederick 11 after the Seven Years' War, a decided effort
was made in Prussia to incorporate the Jews into a kind of mercantile system. The
J4 ANTISEMITISM
Jews neglected their chances for normal capitalist enterprise and business.*
But without the interests and practices of the governments, the Jews could
hardly have preserved their group identity.
In contrast to all other groups, the Jews were defined and their position
determined by the body politic. Since, however, this body politic had no
other social reality, they were, socially speaking, in the void. Their social
inequality was quite dilTerent from the inequality of the class system; it was
again mainly the result of their relationship to the state, so that, in society,
the very fact of being born a Jew would either mean that one was over-
privileged — under special protection of the government — or underprivileged,
lacking certain rights and opportunities which were withheld from the Jews
in order to prevent their assimilation.
The schematic outline of the simultaneous rise and decline of the Euro-
pean nation-state system and European Jewry unfolds roughly in the fol-
lowing stages:
1. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed the slow develop-
ment of nation-states under the tutelage of absolute monarchs. Individual
Jews everywhere rose out of deep obscurity into the sometimes glamorous,
and always influential, position of court Jews who financed state affairs and
handled the financial transactions of their princes. This development af-
fected the masses who continued to live in a more or less feudal order as
little as it affected the Jewish people as a whole.
2. After the French Revolution, which abruptly changed political condi-
tions on the whole European continent, nation-states in the modern sense
emerged whose business transactions required a considerably larger amount
of capital and credit than the court Jews had ever been asked to place at a
older general Juden-reglement of 1750 was supplanted by a system of regular per-
mits issued only to those inhabitants who invested a considerable part of their for-
tune in new manufacturing enterprises. But here, as everywhere else, such govern-
ment attempts failed completely.
* Felix Priebatsch ("Die Judenpolitik des furstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18.
Jahrhundert," in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der
Neuzeit, 1915) cites a typical example from the early eighteenth century: "When
the mirror factory in Neuhaus, Lower Austria, which was subsidized by the adminis-
tration, did not produce, the Jew Wertheimer gave the Emperor money to buy it.
When asked to take over the factory he refused, stating that his time was taken up
with his financial transactions."
See also Max Kohler, "Beitrage zur neueren judischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Die
Juden in Halbcrstadt und Umgebung," in Studien zur Geschichte der Wirtschaft und
Ceisteskultur, 1927, Band 3.
In this tradition, which kept rich Jews from real positions of power in capitalism,
is the fact that in 1911 the Paris Rothschilds sold their share in the oil wells of Baku
to the Royal Shell group, after having been, with the exception of Rockefeller, the
world's biggest petroleum tycoons. This incident is reported in Richard Lewinsohn,
Wie sie gross und reich wurden, Berlin, 1927.
Andre Sayou's statement ("Les Juifs" in Revue Economique Interruitionale, 1932)
in his polemic against Werner Sombart's identification of Jews with capitalist develop-
ment, may be taken as a general rule: "The Rothschilds and other Israelites who
were almost exclusively engaged in launching state loans and in the international
movement of capital, did not try at all ... to create great industries."
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 15
prince's disposal. only the combined wealth of the wealthier strata of
Western and Central European Jewry, which they entrusted to some promi-
nent Jewish bankers for such purposes, could suffice to meet the new en-
larged governmental needs. This period brought with it the granting of
privileges, which up to then had been necessary only for court Jews, to
the larger wealthy class, which had managed to settle in the more important
urban and financial centers in the eighteenth century. Finally emancipation
was granted in all full-fledged nation-states and withheld only in those coun-
tries where Jews, because of their numbers and the general backwardness
of these regions, had not been able to organize themselves into a special
separate group whose economic function was financial support of their
government.
3. Since this intimate relationship between national government and Jews
had rested on the indifference of the bourgeoisie to politics in general and
state finance in particular, this period came to an end with the rise of im-
perialism at the end of the nineteenth century when capitalist business in
the form of expansion could no longer be carried out without active political
help and intervention by the state. Imperialism, on the other hand, under-
mined the very foundations of the nation-state and introduced into the
European comity of nations the competitive spirit of business concerns.
In the early decades of this development, Jews lost their exclusive position
in state business to imperialistically minded businessmen; they declined in
importance as a group, although individual Jews kept their influence as
financial advisers and as inter-European middlemen. These Jews, however —
in contrast to the nineteenth-century state bankers — had even less need of
the Jewish community at large, notwithstanding its wealth, than the court
Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and therefore they fre-
quently cut themselves off completely from the Jewish community. The
Jewish communities were no longer financially organized, and although in-
dividual Jews in high positions remained representative of Jewry as a whole
in the eyes of the Gentile world, there was little if any material reality be-
hind this.
4. As a group. Western Jewry disintegrated together with the nation-
state during the decades preceding the outbreak of the first World War.
The rapid decline of Europe after the war found them already deprived of
their former power, atomized into a herd of wealthy individuals. In an im-
perialist age, Jewish wealth had become insignificant; to a Europe with no
sense of balance of power between its nations and of inter-European solidar-
ity, the non-national, inter-European Jewish "lement became an object of
universal hatred because of its useless wealth, and of contempt because of
its lack of power.
The first governments to need regular income and secure finances were
the absolute monarchies under which the nation-state came into being.
Feudal princes and kings also had needed money, and even credit, but for
specific purposes and temporary operations only; even in the sixteenth cen-
16 ANTISEMITISM
tury, when the Fuggers put their own credit at the disposal of the state,
they were not yet thinking of establishing a special state credit. The absolute
monarchs at first provided for their financial needs partly through the old
method of war and looting, and partly through the new device of tax
monopoly. This undermined the power and ruined the fortunes of the nobil-
ity without assuaging the growing hostility of the population.
For a long time the absolute monarchies looked about society for a class
upon which to rely as securely as the feudal monarchy had upon the nobility.
In France an incessant struggle between the guilds and the monarchy, which
wanted to incorporate them into the state system, had been going on since
the fifteenth century. The most interesting of these experiments were doubt-
less the rise of mercantilism and the attempts of the absolute state to get
an absolute monopoly over national business and industry. The resulting
disaster, and the bankruptcy brought about by the concerted resistance of
the rising bourgeoisie, are sufficiently well known. ^
Before the emancipation edicts, every princely household and every mon-
arch in Europe already had a court Jew to handle financial business. During
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these court Jews were always single
individuals who had inter-European connections and inter-European credit
at their disposal, but did not form an international financial entity." Char-
* The influence, however, of mercantile experiments on future developments can
hardly be overrated. France was the only country where the mercantile system was
tried consistently and resulted in an early flourishing of manufactures which owed their
existence to state interference; she never quite recovered from the experience.
In the era of free enterprise, her bourgeoisie shunned unprotected investment in
native industries while her bureaucracy, also a product of the mercantile system, sur-
vived its collapse. Despite the fact that the bureaucracy also lost all its productive
functions, it is even today more characteristic of the country and a greater impediment
to her recovery than the bourgeoisie.
" This had been the case in England since Queen Elizabeth's Marrano banker
and the Jewish financiers of Cromwell's armies, until one of the twelve Jewish brokers
admitted to the London Stock Exchange was said to have handled one-quarter of all
government loans of his day (see Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the
Jews, 1937, Vol. II: Jews and Capitalism); in Austria, where in only forty years
(1695-1739), the Jews credited the government with more than 35 million florins
and where the death of Samuel Oppenheimer in 1703 resulted in a grave financial
crisis for both state and Emperor; in Bavaria, where in 1808 80 per cent of all govern-
ment loans were endorsed and negotiated by Jews (see M. Grunwald, Samuel Oppen-
heimer und sein Kreis, 1913); in France, where mercantile conditions were especially
favorable for the Jews, Colbert already praised their great usefulness to the state
(Baron, op. cit., loc. cit.), and where in the middle of the eighteenth century the German
Jew, Licfman Calmer, was made a baron by a grateful king who appreciated services
and loyalty to "Our state and Our person" (Robert Anchel, "Un Baron Juif
Fran^ais au 18e siecle, Licfman Calmer," in Souvenir et Science, I, pp. 52-55); and
also in Prussia where Frederick II's Miinzjuden were titled and where, at the end
of the eighteenth century, 400 Jewish families formed one of the wealthiest groups in
Berlin. (One of the best descriptions of Berlin and the role of the Jews in its society
at the turn of the eighteenth century is to be found in Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Leben
Schleiermachers, 1870, pp. 182 ff.).
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 17
acteristic of these times, when Jewish individuals and the first small wealthy
Jewish communities were more powerful than at any time in the nineteenth
century/ was the frankness with which their privileged status and their
right to it was discussed, and the careful testimony of the authorities to the
importance of their services to the state. There was not the slightest doubt
or ambiguity about the connection between services rendered and privileges
granted. Privileged Jews received noble titles almost as a matter of course
in France, Bavaria, Austria and Prussia, so that even outwardly they were
more than just wealthy men. The fact that the Rothschilds had such a hard
time getting their appHcation for a title approved by the Austrian govern-
ment (they succeeded in 1817), was the signal that a whole period had
come to an end.
By the end of the eighteenth century it had become clear that none of the
estates or classes in the various countries was willing or able to become the
new ruUng class, that is to identify itself with the government as the nobihty
had done for centuries.* The failure of the absolute monarchy ta find a sub- "/
stitute within society led to the full development of the nation-state and its
claim to be above all classes, completely independent of society and its
particular interests, the true and only representative of the nation as a whole.
It resulted, on the other side, in a deepening of the split between state and
society upon which the body politic of the nation rested. Without it, there
would have been no need — or even any possibility — of introducing the
Jews into European history on equal terms.
When all attempts to ally itself with one of the major classes in society
had failed, the state chose to establish itself as a tremendous business con-
cern. This was meant to be for administrative purposes only, to be sure, but
the range of interests, financial and otherwise, and the costs were so great
that one cannot but recognize the existence of a special sphere of state busi-
ness from the eighteenth century on. The independent growth of state busi-
ness was caused by a conflict with the financially powerful forces of the
time, with the bourgeoisie which went the way of private investment, shunned
all state intervention, and refused active financial participation in what ap-
peared to be an "unproductive" enterprise. Thus the Jews were the only
part of the population willing to finance the state's beginnings and to tie
their destinies to its further development. With their credit and international
connections, they were in an excellent position to help the nation-state to
^ Early in the eighteenth century, Austrian Jews succeeded in banishing Eisemenger's
Entdecktes Judentum, 1703, and at the end of it, The Merchant of Venice could be
played in Berlin only with a little prologue apologizing to the (not emancipated) Jew-
ish audience.
8 The only, and irrelevant, exception might be those tax collectors, called fermiers-
generaux, in France, who rented from the state the right to collect taxes by guaran-
teeing a fixed amount to the government. They earned their great wealth from and
depended directly upon the absolute monarchy, but were too small a group and too
isolated a phenomenon to be economically influential by themselves.
18 ANTISEMITISM
establish itself among the biggest enterprises and employers of the time.'
Great privileges, decisive changes in the Jewish condition, were neces-
sarily the price of the fulfillment of such services, and, at the same time, the
reward for great risks. The greatest privilege was equality. When the Miinz-
juden of Frederick of Prussia or the court Jews of the Austrian Emperor
received through "general privileges" and "patents" the same status which
half a century later all Prussian Jews received under the name of emancipa-
tion and equal rights; when, at the end oi' the eighteenth century and at
the height of their wealth, the Berlin Jews managed to prevent an influx
from the Eastern provinces because they did not care to share their "equal-
ity" with poorer brethren whom they did not recognize as equals; when, at
the time of tlie French National Assembly, the Bordeaux and Avignon Jews
protested violently against the French government's granting equality to
Jews of the Eastern provinces — it became clear that at least the Jews were
not thinking in terms of equal rights but of privileges and special liberties.
And it is really not surprising that privileged Je^vs, intimately linked to the
businesses of their governments and quite aware of the nature and conditions
of their status, were reluctant to accept for all Jews this gift of a freedom
which they themselves possessed as the price for services, which they knew
had been calculated as such and therefore could hardly become a right
for all.^o
only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of imperialism,
did the owning classes begin to change their original estimate of the un-
productivity of state business. Imperialist expansion, together with the
growing perfection of the instruments of violence and the state's absolute
monopoly of them, made the state an interesting business proposition. This
meant, of course, that the Jews gradually but automatically lost their ex-
clusive and unique position.
But the good fortune of the Jews, their rise from obscurity to political
significance, would have to come to an even earlier end if they had been
confined to a mere business function in the growing nation-states. By the
middle of the last century some states had won enough confidence to get
8 The urgencies compelling the ties between government business and the Jews
may be gauged by those cases in which decidedly anti-Jewish officials had to carry
out the policies. So Bismarck, in his youth, made a few antisemitic speeches only
to become, as chancellor of the Reich, a close friend of Bleichroeder and a reliable
protector of the Jews against Court Chaplain Stoecker's antisemitic movement in
Berlin. William II, although as Crown Prince and a member of the anti-Jewish
Prussian nobility very sympathetic to all antisemitic movements in the eighties,
changed his antisemitic convictions and deserted his antisemitic proteges overnight
when he inherited the throne.
10 As early as the eighteenth century, wherever whole Jewish groups got wealthy
enough to be useful to the state, they enjoyed collective privileges and were separated
as a group from their less wealthy and useful brethren, even in the same country.
Like the Schutzjitden in Prussia, the Bordeaux and Bayonne Jews in France en-
joyed equality long before the French Revolution and were even invited to present
their complaints and propositions along with the other General Estates in the Convo-
cation des Etats Generaux of 1787.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism J9
along without Jewish backing and financing of government loans. ^^ The
nationals' growing consciousness, moreover, that their private destinies were
becoming more and more dependent upon those of their countries made
them ready to grant the governments more of the necessary credit. Equality
itself was symbolized in the availability to all of government bonds which
were finally even considered the most secure form of capital investment
simply because the state, which could wage national wars, was the only
agency which actually could protect its citizens' properties. From the middle
of the nineteenth century on, the Jews could keep their prominent position
only because they had still another more important and fateful role to play,
a role also intimately linked to their participation in the destinies of the
state. Without territory and without a government of their own, the Jews
had always been an inter-European element; this international status the
nation-state necessarily preserved because the Jews' financial services rested
on it. But even when their economic usefulness had exhausted itself, the
inter-European status of the Jews remained of great national importance in
times of national conflicts and wars.
While the need of the nation-states for Jewish services developed slowly
and logically, growing out of the general context of European history, the
rise of the Jews to political and economic significance was sudden and un-
expected to themselves as well as their neighbors. By the later Middle Ages
the Jewish moneylender had lost all his former importance, and in the
early sixteenth century Jews had already been expelled from cities and
trade centers into villages and countryside, thereby exchanging a more
uniform protection from remote higher authorities for an insecure status
granted by petty local nobles.'- The turning point had been in the seventeenth
century when, during the Thirty Years' War, precisely because of their
dispersion these small, insignificant moneylenders could guarantee the
necessary provisions to the mercenary armies of the war-lords in far-away
lands and with the aid of small peddlers buy victuals in entire provinces.
Since these wars remained half-feudal, more or less private affairs of the
princes, involving no interest of other classes and enlisting no help from
the people, the Jews' gain in status was very limited and hardly visible. But
the number of court Jews increased because now every feudal household
needed the equivalent of the court Jew.
As long as these court Jews served small feudal lords who, as members
" Jean Capefigue (Histoire des grandes operations financieres, Tome III: Banqite,
Bourses, Emprunts, 1855) pretends that during the July Monarchy only the Jews,
and especially the house of Rothschild, prevented a sound state credit based upon the
Banque de France. He also claims that the events of 1848 made the activities of the
Rothschilds superfluous. Raphael Strauss ("The Jews in the Economic Evolution of
Central Europe" in Jewish Social Studies, 111, 1, 1941) also remarks that after 1830
"public credit already became less of a risk so that Christian banks began to handle
this business in increasing measure." Against these interpretations stands the fact
that excellent relations prevailed between the Rothschilds and Napoleon HI, although
there can be no doubt as to the general trend of the time.
'^ See Priebatsch, op. tit.
20 ANTISEMITISM
of the nobility, did not aspire to represent any centralized authority, they
were the servants of only one group in society. The property they handled,
the money they lent, the provisions they bought up, all were considered the
private property of their master, so that such activities could not involve
them in political matters. Hated or favored, Jews could not become a political
issue of any importance.
When, however, the function of the feudal lord changed, when he de-
veloped into a prince or king, the function of his court Jew changed too. The
Jews, being an alien element, without much interest in such changes in their
environment, were usually the last to become aware of their heightened
status. As far as they were concerned, they went on handling private busi-
ness, and their loyalty remained a personal affair unrelated to political con-
siderations. Loyalty meant honesty; it did not mean taking sides in a con-
flict or remaining true for political reasons. To buy up provisions, to clothe
and feed an army, to lend currency for the hiring of mercenaries, meant
simply an interest in the well-being of a business partner.
This kind of relationship between Jews and aristocracy was the only one
that ever tied a Jewish group to another stratum in society. After it dis-
appeared in the early nineteenth century, it was never replaced. Its only
remnant for the Jews was a penchant for aristocratic titles (especially in
Austria and France), and for the non-Jews a brand of liberal antisemitism
which lumped Jews and nobility together and pretended that they were in
some kind of financial alliance against the rising bourgeoisie. Such argu-
mentation, current in Prussia and France, had a certain amount of plausibility
as long as there was no general emancipation of the Jews. The privileges
of the court Jews had indeed an obvious similarity to the rights and liberties
of the nobility, and it was true that the Jews were as much afraid of losing
their privileges and used the same arguments against equality as members of
the aristocracy. The plausibility became even greater in the eighteenth cen-
tury when most privileged Jews were given minor titles, and at the opening
of the nineteenth century when wealthy Jews who had lost their ties with
the Jewish communities looked for new social status and began to model
themselves on the aristocracy. But all this was of little consequence, first
because it was quite obvious that the nobility was on the decline and that
the Jews, on the contrary, were continually gaining in status, and also be-
cause the aristocracy itself, especially in Prussia, happened to become the
first class that produced an antisemitic ideology.
The Jews had been the purveyors in wars and the servants of kings, but
they did not and were not expected to engage in the conflicts themselves.
When these conflicts enlarged into national wars, they still remained an in-
ternational element whose importance and usefulness lay precisely in their
not being bound to any national cause. No longer state bankers and pur-
veyors in wars (the last war financed by a Jew was the Prussian- Austrian
war of 1866, when Bleichroeder helped Bismarck after the latter had been
refused the necessary credits by the Prussian Parliament), the Jews had
become the financial advisers and assistants in peace treaties and, in a less
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 21
organized and more indefinite way, the providers of news. The last peace
treaties drawn up without Jewish assistance were those of the Congress of
Vienna, between the continental powers and France. Bleichroeder's role in
the peace negotiations between Germany and France in 1871 was akeady
more significant than his help in war," and he rendered even more impor-
tant services in the late seventies when, through his connections with the
Rothschilds, he provided Bismarck with an indirect news channel to Ben-
jamin Disraeli. The peace treaties of Versailles were the last in which Jews
played a prominent role as advisers. The last Jew who owed his prominence
on the national scene to his international Jewish connection was Walter
Rathenau, the ill-fated foreign minister of the Weimar Republic. He paid
with his life for having (as one of his colleagues put it after his death)
donated his prestige in the international world of finance and the support
of Jews everywhere in the world ^* to the ministers of the new Republic,
who were completely unknown on the international scene.
That antisemitic governments would not use Jews for the business of war
and peace is obvious. But the elimination of Jews from the international
scene had a more general and deeper significance than antisemitism. Just
because the Jews had been used as a non-national element, they could be
of value in war and peace only as long as during the war everybody tried
consciously to keep the possibilities of peace intact, only as long as every-
body's aim was a peace of compromise and the re-establishment of a modus
Vivendi. As soon as "victory or death" became a determining policy, and
war actually aimed at the complete annihilation of the enemy, the Jews
could no longer be of any use. This policy spelled destruction of their
collective existence in any case, although the disappearance from the political
scene and even extinction of a specific group-life would by no means neces-
sarily have led to their physical extermination. The frequently repeated
argument, however, that the Jews would have become Nazis as easily as their
German fellow-citizens if only they had been permitted to join the move-
ment, just as they had enlisted in Italy's Fascist party before Italian Fascism
introduced race legislation, is only half true. It is true only with respect to
the psychology of individual Jews, which of course did not greatly differ
from the psychology of their environment. It is patently false in a historical
sense. Nazism, even without antisemitism, would have been the deathblow
to the existence of the Jewish people in Europe; to consent to it would have
13 According to an anecdote, faithfully reported by all his biographers, Bismarck
said immediately after the French defeat in 1871: "First of all, Bleichroeder has got
to go to Paris, to get together with his fellow Jews and to talk it (the five billion
francs for reparations) over with the bankers." (See Otto Joehlinger, Bismarck und
die Juden, Berlin, 1921.)
" See Walter Frank, "Walter Rathenau und die blonde Rasse," in Forschungen zur
Judenfrage, Band IV, 1940. Frank, in spite of his official position under the Nazis,
remained somewhat careful about his sources and methods. In this article he quotes
from the obituaries on Rathenau in the Israelitisches Familienblatt (Hamburg, July 6,
1922), Die Zeit, (June, 1922) and Berliner Tageblatt (May 31, 1922).
22 ANTISEMITISM
meant suicide, not necessarily for individuals of Jewish origin, but for the
Jews as a people.
To the first contradiction, which determined the destiny of European
Jewry during the last centuries, that is, the contradiction between equality
and privilege (rather of equality granted in the form and for the purpose
of privilege) must be added a second contradiction: the Jews, the only non-
national European people, were threatened more than any other by the
sudden collapse of the system of nation-states. This situation is less para-
doxical than it may appear at first glance. Representatives of the nation,
whether Jacobins from Robespierre to Clemenceau, or representative^ of
Central European reactionary governments from Metternich to Bismarck,
had one thing in common: they were all sincerely concerned with the "bal-
ance of power" in Europe. They tried, of course, to shift this balance to the
advantage of their respective countries, but they never dreamed of seizing a
monopoly over the continent or of annihilating their neighbors completely.
The Jews could not only be used in the interest of this precarious balance,
they even became a kind of symbol of the common interest of the Euro-
pean nations.
It is therefore more than accidental that the catastrophic defeats of the
peoples of Europe began with the catastrophe of the Jewish people. It was
particularly easy to begin the dissolution of the precarious European balance
of power with the elimination of the Jews, and particularly difficult to under-
stand that more was involved in this elimination than an unusually cruel
nationalism or an ill-timed revival of "old prejudices." When the catastrophe
came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a "special case" whose
history follows exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no
general relevance. This breakdown of European solidarity was at once re-
flected in the breakdown of Jewish solidarity all over Europe. When the
persecution of German Jews began, Jews of other European countries dis-
covered that German Jews constituted an exception whose fate could bear
no resemblance to their own. Similarly, the collapse of German Jewry was
preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and
hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges —
the privilege of having been a veteran of World War I, the child of a veteran,
the proud son of a father killed in action. It looked as though the annihila-
tion of all individuals of Jewish origin was being preceded by the bloodless
destruction and self-dissolution of the Jewish people, as though the Jewish
people had owed its existence exclusively to other peoples and their hatred.
It is still one of the most moving aspects of Jewish history that the Jews'
active entry into European history was caused by their being an inter-
European, non-national element in a world of growing or existing nations.
That this role proved more lasting and more essential than their function as
state bankers is one of the material reasons for the new modern type of
Jewish productivity in the arts and sciences. It is not without historical
justice that their downfall coincided with the ruin of a system and a political
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 23
body which, whatever its other defects, had needed and could tolerate a
purely European element.
The grandeur of this consistently European existence should not be for-
gotten because of the many undoubtedly less attractive aspects of Jewish
history during the last centuries. The few European authors who have been
aware of this aspect of the "Jewish question" had no special sympathies for
the Jews, but an unbiased estimate of the whole European situation. Among
them was Diderot, the only eighteenth-century French philosopher who
was not hostile to the Jews and who recognized in them a useful link be-
tween Europeans of different nationalities; Wilhelm von Humboldt who,
witnessing their emancipation through the French Revolution, remarked
that the Jews would lose their universality when they were changed into
Frenchmen; ^^ and finally Friedrich Nietzsche, who out of disgust with
Bismarck's German Reich coined the word "good European," which made
possible his correct estimate of the significant role of the Jews in European
history, and saved him from falling into the pitfalls of cheap philosemitism
or patronizing "progressive" attitudes.
This evaluation, though quite correct in the description of a surface
phenomenon, overlooks the most serious paradox embodied in the curious
political history of the Jews. Of all European peoples, the Jews had been
the only one without a state of their own and had been, precisely for this
reason, so eager and so suitable for alliances with governments and states
as such, no matter what these governments or states might represent. on
the other hand, the Jews had no political tradition or experience, and were
as little aware of the tension between society and state as they were of the
obvious risks and power-possibilities of their new role. What little knowledge
or traditional practice they brought to politics had its source first in the
Roman Empire, where they had been protected, so to speak, by the Roman
soldier, and later, in the Middle Ages, when they sought and received pro-
tection against the population and the local rulers from remote monarchical
and Church authorities. From these experiences, they had somehow drawn
the conclusion that authority, and especially high authority, was favorable
to them and that lower officials, and especially the common people, were
dangerous. This prejudice, which expressed a definite historical truth but
no longer corresponded to new circumstances, was as deeply rooted in and
as unconsciously shared by the vast majority of Jews as corresponding
prejudices about Jews were commonly accepted by Gentiles.
The history of the relationship between Jews and governments is rich in
examples of how quickly Jewish bankers switched their allegiance from one
15 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Tagebucher, ed. by Leitzmann, Berlin, 1916-1918, I,
475. — The article "Juif" of the Encyclopedic, 1751-1765, Vol. IX, which was prob-
ably written by Diderot: "Thus dispersed in our time . . . [the Jews] have become
instruments of communication between the most distant countries. They are like the
cogs and nails needed in a great building in order to join and hold together all other
parts."
24 ANTISEMITISM
government to the next even after revolutionary changes. It took the French
Rothschilds in 1848 hardly twenty-four hours to transfer their services from
the government of Louis Philippe to the new short-lived French Republic
and again to Napoleon III. The same process repeated itself, at a slightly
slower pace, after the downfall of the Second Empire and the estabhshment
of the Third Republic. In Germany this sudden and easy change was sym-
bolized, after the revolution of 1918, in the financial policies of the War-
burgs on one hand and the shifting political ambitions of Walter Rathenau
on the other.*"
More is involved in this type of behavior than the simple bourgeois pat-
tern which always assumes that nothing succeeds like success.*' Had the
Jews been bourgeois in the ordinary sense of the word, they might have
gauged correctly the tremendous power-possibilities of their new functions,
and at least have tried to play that fictitious role of a secret world power
which makes and unmakes governments, which antisemites assigned to them
anyway. Nothing, however, could be farther from the truth. The Jews,
without knowledge of or interest in power, never thought of exercising
more than mild pressure for minor purposes of self-defense. This lack of
ambition was later sharply resented by the more assimilated sons of Jewish
bankers and businessmen. While some of them dreamed, like Disraeli, of a
secret Jewish society to which they might belong and which never existed,
others, hke Rathenau, who happened to be better informed, indulged in
half-antisemitic tirades against the wealthy traders who had neither power
nor social status.
This innocence has never been quite understood by non- Jewish statesmen
or historians. on the other hand, their detachment from power was so much
taken for granted by Jewish representatives or writers that they hardly ever
mentioned it except to express their surprise at the absurd suspicions leveled
against them. In the memoirs of statesmen of the last century many remarks
occur to the effect that there won't be a war because Rothschild in London
or Paris or Vienna does not want it. Even so sober and reliable a historian
as J. A. Hobson could state as late as 1905: "Does any one seriously sup-
pose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great
state loan subscribed, if the House of Rothschild and its connexions set their
face against it?" ** This misjudgment is as amusing in its naive assumption
16 Walter Rathenau, foreign minister of the Weimar Republic in 1921 and one
of the outstanding representatives of Germany's new will to democracy, had pro-
claimed as late as 1917 his "deep monarchical convictions," according to which only
an "anointed" and no "upstart of a lucky career" should lead a country. See Von
kominenden Dingen, 1917, p. 247.
17 This bourgeois pattern, however, should not be forgotten. If it were only a
matter of individual motives and behavior patterns, the methods of the house of
Rothschild certainly did not differ much from those of their Gentile colleagues. For
instance, Napoleon's banker, Ouvrard, after having provided the financial means for
Napoleon's hundred days' war, immediately offered his services to the returning
Bourbons.
18 J. H. Hobson, Imperialism, 1905, p. 57 of unrevised 1938 edition.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 25
that everyone is like oneself, as Mettemich's sincere belief that "the house
of Rothschild played a greater role in France than any foreign government,"
or his confident prediction to the Viennese Rothschilds shortly before the
Austrian revolution in 1848: "If I should go to the dogs, you would go
with me." The truth of that matter was that the Rothschilds had as little
political idea as other Jewish bankers of what they wanted to carry out in
France, to say nothing of a well-defined purpose which would even remotely
suggest a war. on the contrary, like their fellow Jews they never allied
themselves with any specific government, but rather with governments, with
authority as such. If at this time and later they showed a marked preference
for monarchical governments as against republics, it was only because they
rightly suspected that republics were based to a greater extent on the will
of the people, which they instinctively mistrusted.
How deep the Jews' faith in the state was, and how fantastic their ignorance
of actual conditions in Europe, came to light in the last years of the Weimar
Republic when, already reasonably frightened about the future, the Jews
for once tried their hand in politics. With the help of a few non-Jews, they
then founded that middle-class party which they called "State-party"
(Staatspartei) , the very name a contradiction in terms. They were so naively
convinced that their "party," supposedly representing them in political and
social struggle, ought to be the state itself, that the whole relationship of
the party to the state never dawned upon them. If anybody had bothered to
take seriously this party of respectable and bewildered gentlemen, he could
only have concluded that loyalty at any price was a fagade behind which
sinister forces plotted to take over the state.
Just as the Jews ignored completely the growing tension between state and
society, they were also the last to be aware that circumstances had forced
them into the center of the conflict. They therefore never knew how to
evaluate antisemitism, or rather never recognized the moment when social
discrimination changed into a political argument. For more than a hundred
years, antisemitism had slowly and gradually made its way into almost all
social strata in almost all European countries until it emerged suddenly
as the one issue upon which an almost unified opinion could be achieved.
The law according to which this process developed was simple: each class
of society which came into a conflict with the state as such became anti-
semitic because the only social group which seemed to represent the state
were the Jews. And the only class which proved almost immune from anti-
semitic propaganda were the workers who, absorbed in the class struggle
and equipped with a Marxist explanation of history, never came into direct
conflict with the state but only with another class of society, the bourgeoisie,
which the Jews certainly did not represent, and of which they were never a
significant part.
The poUtical emancipation of the Jews at the turn of the eighteenth
century in some countries, and its discussion in the rest of Central and
Western Europe, resulted first of all in a decisive change in their attitude
26 ANTISEMITISM
toward the state, which was somehow symbolized in the rise of the house of
Rothschild, The new policy of these court Jews, who were the first to become
full-fledged state bankers, came to light when they were no longer content
to serve one particular prince or government through their international
relationships with court Jews of other countries, but decided to establish
themselves internationally and serve simultaneously and concurrently the
governments in Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Austria. To a
large extent, this unprecedented course was a reaction of the Rothschilds
to the dangers of real emancipation, which, together with equality, threat-
ened to nationalize the Jewries of the respective countries, and to destroy
the very inter-European advantages on which the position of Jewish bankers
had rested. Old Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the house, must
have recognized that the inter-European status of Jews was no longer secure
and that he had better try to realize this unique international position in his
own family. The establishment of his five sons in the five financial capitals
of Europe — Frankfurt, Paris, London, Naples and Vienna — was his ingeni-
ous way out of the embarrassing emancipation of the Jews."
The Rothschilds had entered upon their spectacular career as the financial
servants of the Kurfurst of Hessen, one of the outstanding moneylenders of
his time, who taught them business practice and provided them with many
of their customers. Their great advantage was that they lived in Frankfurt,
the only great urban center from which Jews had never been expelled and
where they formed nearly 10 per cent of the city's population at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. The Rothschilds started as court Jews without
being under the jurisdiction of either a prince or the Free City, but directly
under the authority of the distant Emperor in Vienna. They thus combined
all the advantages of the Jewish status in the Middle Ages with those of
their own times, and were much less dependent upon nobility or other local
authorities than any of their fellow court Jews. The later financial activities
of the house, the tremendous fortune they amassed, and their even greater
symbolic fame since the early nineteenth century, are sufficiently well known.^"
They entered the scene of big business during the last years of the Napoleonic
wars when — from 1811 to 1816 — almost half the EngUsh subventions to
the Continental powers went through their hands. When after the defeat
of Napoleon the Continent needed great government loans everywhere for
the reorganization of its state machines and the erection of financial struc-
tures on the model of the Bank of England, the Rothschilds enjoyed almost a
monopoly in the handling of state loans. This lasted for three generations
19 How well the Rothschilds knew the sources of their strength is shown in their
early house law according to which daughters and their husbands were eliminated
from the business of the house. The girls were allowed, and after 1871, even en-
couraged, to marry into the non-Jewish aristocracy; the male descendants had to
marry Jewish girls exclusively, and if possible (in the first generation this was gen-
erally the case) members of the family.
20 See especially Egon Cesar Conte Corti, The Rise of the House of Rothschild,
New York, 1927.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 27
during which they succeeded in defeating all Jewish and non-Jewish com-
petitors in the field. "The House of Rothschild became," as Capefigue put
it,-i "the chief treasurer of the Holy Alliance."
The international establishment of the house of Rothschild and its sudden
rise above all other Jewish bankers changed the whole structure of Jewish
state business. Gone was the accidental development, unplanned and un-
organized, when individual Jews shrewd enough to take advantage of a
unique opportunity frequently rose to the heights of great wealth and fell
to the depths of poverty in one man's lifetime; when such a fate hardly
touched the destinies of the Jewish people as a whole except insofar as
such Jews sometimes had acted as protectors and petitioners for distant
communities; when, no matter how numerous the wealthy moneylenders or
how influential the individual court Jews, there was no sign of the develop-
ment of a well-defined Jewish group which collectively enjoyed specific
privileges and rendered specific services. It was precisely the Rothschilds'
monopoly on the issuance of government loans which made it possible and
necessary to draw on Jewish capital at large, to direct a great percentage of
Jewish wealth into the channels of state business, and which thereby pro-
vided the natural basis for a new inter-European cohesiveness of Central
and Western European Jewry. What in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries had been an unorganized connection among individual Jews of
different countries, now became the more systematic disposition of these
scattered opportunities by a single firm, physically present in all important
European capitals, in constant contact with all sections of the Jewish people,
and in complete possession of all pertinent information and all opportunities
for organization.^^
The exclusive position of the house of Rothschild in the Jewish world
replaced to a certain extent the old bonds of religious and spiritual tradition
whose gradual loosening under the impact of Western culture for the first
time threatened the very existence of the Jewish people. To the outer
world, this one family also became a symbol of the working reality of Jew-
ish internationalism in a world of nation-states and nationally organized
peoples. Where, indeed, was there better proof of the fantastic concept of
a Jewish world government than in this one family, nationals of five different
countries, prominent everywhere, in close co-operation with at least three
different governments (the French, the Austrian, and the British), whose
frequent conflicts never for a moment shook the solidarity of interest of
their state bankers? No propaganda could have created a symbol more
effective for political purposes than the reality itself.
The popular notion that the Jews — in contrast to other peoples — were
tied together by the supposedly closer bonds of blood and family ties, was
to a large extent stimulated by the reality of this one family, which virtually
21 Capefigue, op. cit.
22 It has never been possible to ascertain the extent to which the Rothschilds used
Jewish capital for their own business transactions and how far their control of Jew-
ish hankers went. The family has never permitted a scholar to work in its archives.
28 ANTISEMITISM
represented the whole economic and political significance of the Jewish
people. The fateful consequence was that when, for reasons which had
nothing to do with the Jewish question, race problems came to the fore-
ground of the political scene, the Jews at once fitted all ideologies and
doctrines which defined a people by blood ties and family characteristics.
Yet another, less accidental, fact accounts for this image of the Jewish
people. In the preservation of the Jewish people the family had played a far
greater role than in any Western political or social body except the nobility.
Family ties were among the most potent and stubborn elements with which
the Jewish people resisted assimilation and dissolution. Just as declining
European nobility strengthened its marriage and house laws, so Western
Jewry became all the more family-conscious in the centuries of their spiritual
and religious dissolution. Without the old hope for Messianic redemption
and the firm ground of traditional folkways, Western Jewry became over-
conscious of the fact that their survival had been achieved in an alien and
often hostile environment. They began to look upon the inner family circle as
a kind of last fortress and to behave toward members of their own group
as though they were members of a big family. In other words, the anti-
semitic picture of the Jewish people as a family closely knit by blood ties
had something in common with the Jews' own picture of themselves.
This situation was an important factor in the early^ rise and continuous
growth of antisemitism in the nineteenth century. Which group of people
would turn antisemitic in a given country at a given historical moment de-
pended exclusively upon general circumstances which made them ready for
a violent antagonism to their government. But the remarkable similarity of
arguments and images which time and again were spontaneously reproduced
have an intimate relationship with the truth they distort. We find the Jews
always represented as an international trade organization, a world-wide
family concern with identical interests everywhere, a secret force behind
the throne which degrades all visible governments into mere facade, or into
marionettes whose strings are manipulated from behind the scenes. Because
of their close relationship to state sources of power, the Jews were invariably
identified with power, and because of their aloofness from society and con-
centration upon the closed circle of the family, they were invariably sus-
pected of working for the destruction of all social structures.
n: Early Antisemitism
IT IS an obvious, if frequently forgotten, rule that anti-Jewish feeling ac-
quires political relevance only when it can combine with a major political
issue, or when Jewish group interests come into open conflict witfi those
of a major class in society. Modern antisemitism, as we know it from
Central and Western European countries, had political rather than eco-
nomic causes, while complicated class conditions produced the violent
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 29
popular hatred of Jews in Poland and Rumania. There, due to the inability
of the governments to solve the land question and give the nation-state
a minimum of equality through liberation of the peasants, the feudal
aristocracy succeeded not only in maintaining its political dominance but
also in preventing the rise of a normal middle class. The Jews of these
countries, strong in number and weak in every other respect, seemingly
fulfilled some of the functions of the middle class, because they were mostly
shopkeepers and traders and because as a group they stood between the big
landowners and the propertyless classes. Small property holders, however,
can exist as well in a feudal as in a capitalist economy. The Jews, here as
elsewhere, were unable or unwilling to develop along industrial capitalist
lines, so that the net result of their activities was a scattered, inefficient
organization of consumption without an adequate system of production.
The Jewish positions were an obstacle for a normal capitalistic development
because they looked as though they were the only ones from which economic
advancement might be expected without being capable of fulfilling this ex-
pectation. Because of their appearance, Jewish interests were felt to be in
conflict with those sections of the population from which a middle class
could normally have developed. The governments, on the other hand, tried
halfheartedly to encourage a middle class without liquidating the nobility
and big landowners. Their only serious attempt was economic liquidation
of the Jews — partly as a concession to public opinion, and partly because
the Jews were actually still a part of the old feudai order. For centuries
they had been middlemen between the nobility and peasantry; now they
formed a middle class without fulfilling its productive functions and were
indeed one of the elements that stood in the way of industrialization and
capitalization." These Eastern European conditions, however, although
they constituted the essence of the Jewish mass question, are of little im-
portance in our context. Their political significance was limited to backward
countries where the ubiquitous hatred of Jews made it almost useless as a
weapon for specific purposes.
Antisemitism first flared up in Prussia immediately after the defeat by
Napoleon in 1807, when the "Reformers" changed the political structure
so that the nobility lost its privileges and the middle classes won their free-
dom to develop. This reform, a "revolution from above," changed the
half-feudal structure of Prussia's enhghtened despotism into a more or less
modern nation-state whose final stage was the German Reich of 1871.
Although a majority of the Berlin bankers of the time were Jews, the
Prussian reforms did not require any considerable financial help from them.
The outspoken sympathies of the Prussian reformers, their advocacy of
Jewish emancipation, was the consequence of the new equality of all citizens,
the abolition of privilege, and the introduction of free trade. They were not
interested in the preservation of Jews as Jews for special purposes. Their
23 James Parkes, The Emergence of the Jewish Problem, 1878-1939, 1946, discusses
these conditions briefly and without bias in chapters iv and vi.
30 ANTISEMITISM
reply to the argument that under conditions of equaUty "the Jews might
cease to exist" would always have been: "Let them. How does this matter
to a government which asks only that they become good citizens?" -' Emanci-
pation, moreover, was relatively inoffensive, for Prussia had just lost the
eastern provinces which had a large and poor Jewish population. The
emancipation decree of 1812 concerned only those wealthy and useful
Jewish groups who were already privileged with most civic rights and who,
through the general abolition of privileges, would have suffered a severe loss
in civil status. For these groups, emancipation meant not much more than
a general legal affirmation of the status quo.
But the sympathies of the Prussian reformers for the Jews were more than
the logical consequence of their general political aspirations. When, almost
a decade later and in the midst of rising antisemitism, Wilhelm von Hum-
boldt declared: "I love the Jews really only en masse; en detail I rather avoid
them," ^^ he stood of course in open opposition to the prevailing fashion,
which favored individual Jews and despised the Jewish people. A true
democrat, he wanted to liberate an oppressed people and not bestow privi-
leges upon individuals. But this view was also in the tradition of the old
Prussian government officials, whose consistent insistence throughout the
eighteenth century upon better conditions and improved education for
Jews have frequently been recognized. Their support was not motivated by
economic or state reasons alone, but by a natural sympathy for the only
social group that also stood outside the social body and within the sphere
of the state, albeit for entirely different reasons. The education of a civil
service whose loyalty belonged to the state and was independent of change
in government, and which had severed its class ties, was one of the out-
standing achievements of the old Prussian state. These officials were a de-
cisive group in eighteenth-century Prussia, and the actual predecessors of
the Reformers; they remained the backbone of the state machine all through
the nineteenth century, although they lost much of their influence to the
aristocracy after thd Congress of Vienna. ^^
Through the attitude of the Reformers and especially through the emanci-
pation edict of 1812, the special interests of the state in the Jews became
manifest in a curious way. The old frank recognition of their usefulness as
Jews (Frederick II of Prussia exclaimed, when he heard of possible mass-
conversion: "I hope they won't do such a devilish thing!") -^ was gone.
Emancipation was granted in the name of a principle, and any allusion to
2* Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Ober die biirgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, Berlin
and SteUin, 1781, I, 174.
25 Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Brief en, Berlin, 1900, V, 236.
26 For an excellent description of these civil servants who were not essentially
different in different countries, see Henri Pirenne, A History of Europe from the In-
vasions to the XVI Century, London, 1939, pp. 361-362: "Without class prejudices
and hostile to the privileges of the great nobles who despised them, ... it was not
the King who spoke through them, but the anonymous monarchy, superior to all,
subduing all to its power."
2^ See Kleines Jahrbuch des NiitzUchen und Angenehmen fiir Israeliten, 1847,
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 31
special Jewish services would have been sacrilege, according to the mentality
of the time. The special conditions which had led to emancipation, though
well known to everybody concerned, were now hidden as if they were a
great and terrible secret. The edict itself, on the other hand, was conceived
as the last and, in a sense, the most shining achievement of change from a
feudal state into a nation-state and a society where henceforth there would
be no special privileges whatsoever.
Among the naturally bitter reactions of the aristocracy, the class that was
hardest hit, was a sudden and unexpected outburst of antisemitism. Its most
articulate spokesman, Ludwig von der Marwitz (prominent among the
founders of a conservative ideology), submitted a lengthy petition to the
government in which he said that the Jews would now be the only group
enjoying special advantages, and spoke of the "transformation of the old
awe-inspiring Prussian monarchy into a new-fangled Jew-state." The political
attack was accompanied by a social boycott which changed the face of
Berlin society almost overnight. For aristocrats had been among the first
to establish friendly social relationship with Jews and had made famous
those salons of Jewish hostesses at the turn of the century, where a truly
mixed society gathered for a brief time. To a certain extent, it is true, this
lack of prejudice was the result of the services rendered by the Jewish
moneylender who for centuries had been excluded from all greater business
transactions and found his only opportunity in the economically un-
productive and insignificant but socially important loans to people who had
a tendency to live beyond their means. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that
social relationships survived when the absolute monarchies with their greater
financial possibilities had made the private loan business and the individual
small court Jew a thing of the past. A nobleman's natural resentment against
losing a valuable source of help in emergencies made him want to marry
a Jewish girl with a rich father rather than hate the Jewish people.
Nor was the outburst of aristocratic antisemitism the result of a closer
contact between Jews and nobility. on the contrary, they had in common
an instinctive opposition to the new values of the middle classes, and one
that sprang from very similar sources. In Jewish as well as in noble families,
the individual was regarded first of all as a member of a family; his duties
were first of all determined by the family which transcended the life and
importance of the individual. Both were a-national and inter-European,
and each understood the other's way of life in which national allegiance
was secondary to loyalty to a family which more often than not was scattered
all over Europe. They shared a conception that the present is nothing more
than an insignificant link in the chain of past and future generations. Anti-
Jewish liberal writers did not fail to point out this curious similarity of prin-
ciples, and they concluded that perhaps one could get rid of nobility only by
first getting rid of the Jews, and this not because of their financial connections
but because both were considered to be a hindrance to the true development
of that "innate personality," that ideology of self-respect, which the liberal
32 ANTISEMITISM
middle classes employed in their fight against the concepts of birth, family,
and heritage.
These pro-Jewish factors make it all the more significant that the aristo-
crats started the long line of antisemitic political argumentation. Neither
economic ties nor social intimacy carried any weight in a situation where
aristocracy openly opposed the egalitarian nation-state. Socially, the attack
on the state identified the Jews with the government; despite the fact that the
middle classes, economically and socially, reaped the real gains in the
reforms, politically they were hardly blamed and suffered the old contemptu-
ous aloofness.
After the Congress of Vienna, when during the long decades of peaceful
reaction under the Holy Alliance, Prussian nobility had won back much of
its influence on the state and temporarily become even more prominent than
it had ever been in the eighteenth century, aristocratic antisemitism changed
at once into mild discrimination without further poHtical significance.^® At
the same time, with the help of the romantic intellectuals, conservatism
reached its full development as one of the political ideologies which in Ger-
many adopted a very characteristic and ingeniously equivocal attitude toward
the Jews. From then on the nation-state, equipped with conservative argu-
ments, drew a distinct line between Jews who were needed and wanted and
those who were not. Under the pretext of the essential Christian character
of the state — what could have been more alien to the enlightened despots! —
the growing Jewish intelligentsia could be openly discriminated against with-
out harming the affairs of bankers and businessmen. This kind of discrimina-
tion which tried to close the universities to Jews by excluding them from
the civil services had the double advantage of indicating that the nation-state
valued special services higher than equality, and of preventing, or at least
postponing, the birth of a new group of Jews who were of no apparent use
to the state and even likely to be assimilated into society.^^ When, in the
eighties, Bismarck went to considerable trouble to protect the Jews against
Stoecker's antisemitic propaganda, he said expresses verbis that he wanted
to protest only against the attacks upon "moneyed Jewry . . . whose
interests are tied to the conservation of our state institutions" and that his
friend Bleichroeder, the Prussian banker, did not complain about attacks on
Jews in general (which he might have overlooked) but on rich Jews.^°
28 When the Prussian Government submitted a new emancipation law to the
Vereinigte Landtage in 1847, nearly all members of the high aristocracy favored
complete Jewish emancipation, See I. Elbogen, Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland,
Berlin, 1935, p. 244.
29 This was the reason why Prussian kings were so very much concerned with
the strictest conservation of Jewish customs and religious rituals. In 1823 Frederick
William III prohibited "the slightest renovations," and his successor, Frederick Wil-
liam IV, openly declared that "the state must not do anything which could further an
amalgamation between the Jews and the other inhabitants" of his kingdom. Elbogen,
op. cit., pp. 223, 234.
30 In a letter to Kultusminister v. Puttkammer in October, 1880. See also Herbert
von Bismarck's letter of November, 1880, to Tiedemann. Both letters in Walter
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 33
The seeming equivocation with which government officials on the one
hand protested against equality (especially professional equality) for the
Jews, or complained somewhat later about Jewish influence in the press
and yet, on the other, sincerely "wished them well in every respect," ^^ was
much more suited to the interests of the state than the earlier zeal of the
reformer. After all, the Congress of Vienna had returned to Prussia the
provinces in which the poor Jewish masses had lived for centuries, and
nobody but a few intellectuals who dreamed of the French Revolution and
the Rights of Man had ever thought of giving them the same status as their
wealthy brethren — who certainly were the last to clamor for an equality by
which they could only lose.^" They knew as well as anybody else that "every
legal or political measure for the emancipation of the Jews must necessarily
lead to a deterioration of their civic and social situation." ^^ And they knew
better than anybody else how much their power depended upon their posi-
tion and prestige within the Jewish communities. So they could hardly adopt
any other policy but to "endeavor to get more influence for themselves,
and keep their fellow Jews in their national isolation, pretending that this
separation is part of their religion. Why? . . . Because the others should
depend upon them even more, so that they, as unsere Leute, could be used
exclusively by those in power." ** And it did turn out that in the twentieth
century, when emancipation was for the first time an accomplished fact for
the Jewish masses, the power of the privileged Jews had disappeared.
Thus a perfect harmony of interests was established between the powerful
Jews and the state. Rich Jews wanted and obtained control over their fellow
Jews and segregation from non- Jewish society; the state could combine a
policy of benevolence toward rich Jews with legal discrimination against
the Jewish intelligentsia and furtherance of social segregation, as expressed
in the conservative theory of the Christian essence of the state.
While antisemitism among the nobility remained without political conse-
quence and subsided quickly in the decades of the Holy Alliance, liberals
Frank, Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker und die christlich-soziale Bewegung, 1928, pp.
304, 305.
*i August Varnhagen comments on a remark made by Frederick William IV. "The
king was asked what he intended to do with the Jews. He replied: 'I wish them well in
every respect, but I want them to feel that they are Jews.' These words provide
a key to many things." Tagebiicher, Leipzig, 1861, II, 113.
32 That Jewish emancipation would have to be carried out against the desires of
Jewish representatives was common knowledge in the eighteenth century. Mirabeau
argued before the Assemblee Nationale in 1789: "Gentlemen, is it because the Jews
don't want to be citizens that you don't proclaim them citizens? In a government like
the one you now establish, all men must be men; you must expel all those who are
not or who refuse to become men." The attitude of German Jews in the early nine-
teenth century is reported by J. M. Jost, Neuere Geschichte der Israeliten. 1815-1845,
Berlin, 1846, Band 10.
33 Adam Mueller (see Ausgewdhlte Abhandlungen, ed. by J. Baxa, Jena, 1921,
p. 215) in a letter to Metternich in 1815.
3* H. E. G. Paulus, Die jiidische N ationalabsonderung nacfi Ursprung, Folgen und
Besserungsmitteln, 1831.
34 ANTISEMITISM
and radical intellectuals inspired and led a new movement immediately after
the Congress of Vienna. Liberal opposition to Metternich's police regime
on the continent and bitter attaclcs on the reactionary Prussian government
led quickly to antisemitic outbursts and a veritable flood of anti-Jewish
pamphlets. Precisely because they were much less candid and outspoken
in their opposition to the government than the nobleman Marwitz had
been a decade before, they attacked the Jews more than the government.
Concerned mainly with equal opportunity and resenting most of all the re-
vival of aristocratic privileges which limited their admission to the public
services, they introduced into the discussion the distinction between indi-
vidual Jews, "our brethren," and Jewry as a group, a distinction which
from then on was to become the trademark of leftist antisemitism. Although
they did not fully understand why and how the government, in its enforced
independence from society, preserved and protected the Jews as a separate
group, they knew well enough that some political connection existed and
that the Jewish question was more than a problem of individual Jews and
human tolerance. They coined the new nationalist phrases "state within the
state," and "nation within the nation." Certainly wrong in the first instance,
because the Jews had no pohtical ambitions of their own and were merely
the only social group that was unconditionally loyal to the state, they were
half right in the second, because the Jews, taken as a social and not as a
political body, actually did form a separate group within the nation. ^^
In Prussia, though not in Austria or in France, this radical antisemitism
was almost as short-lived and inconsequential as the earlier antisemitism of
nobility. The radicals were more and more absorbed by the liberalism of
the economically rising middle classes, which all over Germany some twenty
years later clamored in their diets for Jewish emancipation and for realiza-
tion of political equahty. It established, however, a certain theoretical and
even literary tradition whose influence can be recognized in the famous anti-
Jewish writings of the young Marx, who so frequently and unjustly has been
accused of antisemitism. That the Jew, Karl Marx, could write the same way
these anti-Jewish radicals did is only proof of how little this kind of anti-
Jewish argument had in common with full-fledged antisemitism. Marx as
an individual Jew was as little embarrassed by these arguments against
"Jewry" as, for instance, Nietzsche was by his arguments against Germany.
Marx, it is true, in his later years never wrote or uttered an opinion on the
Jewish question; but this is hardly due to any fundamental change of mind.
His exclusive preoccupation with class struggle as a phenomenon inside
society, with the problems of capitahst production in which Jews were not
involved as either buyers or sellers of labor, and his utter neglect of political
questions, automatically prevented his further inspection of the state struc-
ture, and thereby of the role of the Jews. The strong influence of Marxism
on the labor movement in Germany is among the chief reasons why German
35 For a clear and reliable account of German antisemitism in the nineteenth
century see Waldemar Gurian, "Antisemitism in Modern Germany," in Essays on
Anti-Semitism, ed. by K. S. Pinson, 1946.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 35
revolutionary movements showed so few signs of an ti- Jewish sentiment. ^^
The Jews were indeed of little or no importance for the social struggles of
the time.
The beginnings of the modem antisemitic movement date back every-
where to the last third of the nineteenth century. In Germany, it began
rather unexpectedly once more among the nobility, whose opposition to
the state was again aroused by the transformation of the Prussian monarchy
into a fell-fledged nation-state after 1871. Bismarck, the actual founder of
the German Reich, had maintained close relations with Jews ever since he
became Prime Minister; now he was denounced for being dependent upon
and accepting bribes from the Jews. His attempt and partial success in
abolishing most feudal remnants in the government inevitably resulted in
conflict with the aristocracy; in their attack on Bismarck they represented
him as either an innocent victim or a paid agent of Bleichroeder. Actually
the relationship was the very opposite; Bleichroeder was undoubtedly a
highly esteemed and well-paid agent of Bismarck.^^
Feudal aristocracy, however, though still powerful enough to influence
public opinion, was in itself neither strong nor important enough to start a
real antisemitic movement like the one that began in the eighties. Their
spokesman, Court Chaplain Stoecker, himself a son of lower middle-class
parents, was a much less gifted representative of conservative interests than
his predecessors, the romantic intellectuals who had formulated the main
tenets of a conservative ideology some fifty years earlier. Moreover, he dis-
covered the usefulness of antisemitic propaganda not through practical or
theoretical considerations but by accident, when he, with the help of a great
demagogic talent, found out it was highly useful for filling otherwise empty
halls. But not only did he fail to understand his own sudden successes; as
court chaplain and employee of both the royal family and the government,
he was hardly in a position to use them properly. His enthusiastic audiences
were composed exclusively of lower middle-class people, small shopkeepers
and tradesmen, artisans and old-fashioned craftsmen. And the anti- Jewish
sentiments of these people were not yet, and certainly not exclusively,
motivated by a conflict with the state.
III: The First Antisemitic Parties
the simultaneous rise of antisemitism as a serious political factor in
Germany, Austria, and France in the last twenty years of the nineteenth cen-
*8The only leftist German antisemite of any importance was E. Duehring who,
in a confused way, invented a naturalistic explanation of a "Jewish race" in his
Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschddlichkeit fiir Existenz, Sitte und Cultur der
Volker mil einer weltgeschichtlichen Antwort, 1880.
37 For antisemitic attacks on Bismarck see Kurt Wawrzinek, Die Entstehung der
deutschen Antisemitenparteien. 1873-1890. Historische Studien, Heft 168, 1927.
j^ ANTISEMITISM
tury was preceded by a scries of financial scandals and fraudulent affairs
whose main source was an overproduction of ready capital. In France a
majority of Parliament members and an incredible number of government
orticials were soon so deeply involved in swindle and bribery that the Third
Republic was never to recover the prestige it lost during the first decades of
its existence; in Austria and Germany the aristocracy was among the most
compromised. In all three countries, Jews acted only as middlemen, and not
a single Jewish house emerged with permanent wealth from the frauds of
the Panama Affair and the Grimdungsschwindel.
However, another group of people besides noblemen, government officials,
and Jews were seriously involved in these fantastic investments whose prom-
ised profits were matched by incredible losses. This group consisted mainly
of the lower middle classes, which now suddenly turned antisemitic. They
had been more seriously hurt than any of the other groups: they had risked
small savings and had been permanently ruined. There were important
reasons for their gullibility. Capitalist expansion on the domestic scene
tended more and more to liquidate small property-holders, to whom it had
become a question of life or death to increase quickly the little they had,
since they were only too likely to lose all. They were becoming aware that
if they did not succeed in climbing upward into the bourgeoisie, they might
sink down into the proletariat. Decades of general prosperity slowed down
this development so considerably (though it did not change its trend) that
their panic appears rather premature. For the time being, however, the
anxiety of the lower middle classes corresponded exactly to Marx's predic-
tion of their rapid dissolution.
The lower middle classes, or petty bourgeoisie, were the descendants of
the guilds of artisans and tradesmen who for centuries had been protected
against the hazards of life by a closed system which outlawed competition
and was in the last instance under the protection of the state. They conse-
quently blamed their misfortune upon the Manchester system, which had
exposed them to the hardships of a competitive society and deprived them
of all special protection and privileges granted by public authorities. They
were, there/ore, the first to clamor for the "welfare state," which they ex-
pected not only to shield them against emergencies but to keep them in the
professions and callings they had inherited from their families. Since an out-
standing characteristic of the century of free trade was the access of the
Jews to all professions, it was almost a matter of course to think of the
Jews as the representatives of the "applied system of Manchester carried
out to the extreme," ^'* even though nothing was farther from the truth.
This rather derivative resentment, which we find first in certain conserva-
tive writers who occasionally combined an attack on the bourgeoisie with
an attack on Jews, received a great stimulus when those who had hoped
for help from the government or gambled on miracles had to accept the
•■"< Otto Glagau. Der Bankroll des Nalionalliberalismus und die Reaktion, Berlin,
1878. The same author's Der Boersen- und Gruendungsschwindel. 1876, is one of
the most important antisemitic pamphlets of the time.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 37
rather dubious help of bankers. To the small shopkeeper the banker ap-
peared to be the same kind of exploiter as the owner of a big industrial
enterprise was to the worker. But while the European workers, from their
own experience and a Marxist education in economics, knew that the capi-
talist filled the double function of exploiting them and giving them the op-
portunity to produce, the small shopkeeper had found nobody to enlighten
him about his social and economic destiny. His predicament was even worse
than the worker's and on the basis of his experience he considered the
banker a parasite and usurer whom he had to make his silent partner, even
though this banker, in contrast to the manufacturer, had nothing whatsoever
to do with his business. It is not difficult to comprehend that a man who
put his money solely and directly to the use of begetting more money can
be hated more bitterly than the one who gets his profit through a lengthy and
involved process of production. Since at that time nobody asked for credit
if he could possibly help it — certainly not small tradesmen — bankers looked
like the exploiters not of working power and productive capacity, but of
misfortune and misery.
Many of these bankers were Jews and, even more important, the general
figure of the banker bore definite Jewish traits for historical reasons. Thus
the leftist movement of the lower middle class and the entire propaganda
against banking capital turned more or less antisemitic, a development of
little importance in industrial Germany but of great significance in France
and, to a lesser extent, in Austria. For a while it looked as though the Jews
had indeed for the first time come into direct conflict with another class
without interference from the state. Within the framework of the nation-
state, in which the function of the government was more or less defined by
its ruling position above competing classes, such a clash might even have
been a possible, if dangerous, way to normalize the Jewish position.
To this social-economic element, however, another was quickly added
which in the long run proved to be more ominous. The position of the Jews
as bankers depended not upon loans to small people in distress, but pri-
marily on the issuance of state loans. Petty loans were left to the small fel-
lows, who in this way prepared themselves for the more promising careers
of their wealthier and more honorable brethren. The social resentment of
the lower middle classes against the Jews turned into a highly explosive
poUtical element, because these bitterly hated Jews were thought to be well
on their way to political power. Were they not only too well known for
their relationship with the government in other respects? Social and eco-
nomic hatred, on the other hand, reinforced the political argument with that
driving violence which up to then it had lacked completely.
Friedrich Engels once remarked that the protagonists of the antisemitic
movement of his time were noblemen, and its chorus the howling mob of the
petty bourgeoisie. This is true not only for Germany, but also for Austria's
Christian SociaUsm and France's Anti-Dreyfusards. In all these cases, the
aristocracy, in a desperate last struggle, tried to ally itself with the- conserva-
tive forces of the churches — the Catholic Church in Austria and France,
jg ANTISEMITISM
the Protestant Church in Germany — under the pretext of fighting hberalism
with the weapons of Christianity. The mob was only a means to strengthen
their position, to give their voices a greater resonance. Obviously they neither
could nor wanted to organize the mob, and would dismiss it once their aim
was achieved. But they discovered that antisemitic slogans were highly
effective in mobilizing large strata of the population.
The followers of Court Chaplain Stoecker did not organize the first anti-
semitic parties in Germany. once the appeal of antisemitic slogans had been
demonstrated, radical antiscmites at once separated themselves from
Stacker's Berlin movement, went into a full-scale fight against the govern-
ment, and founded parties whose representatives in the Reichstag voted in
all major domestic issues with the greatest opposition party, the Social
Democrats.'" They quickly got rid of the compromising initial aUiance with
the old powers; Boeckcl, the first antisemitic member of Parliament, owed
his seat to votes of the Hessian peasants whom he defended against "Junkers
and Jews," that is against the nobility which owned too much land and
against the Jews upon whose credit the peasants depended.
Small as these first antisemitic parties were, they at once distinguished
themselves from all other parties. They made the original claim that they
were not a party among parties but a party "above all parties." In the class-
and party-ridden nation-state, only the state and the government had ever
claimed to be above all parties and classes, to represent the nation as a
whole. Parties were admittedly groups whose deputies represented the in-
terests of their voters. Even though they fought for power, it was implicitly
understood that it was up to the government to establish a balance between
the conflicting interests and their representatives. The antisemitic parties'
claim to be "above all parties" announced clearly their aspiration to become
the representative of the whole nation, to get exclusive power, to take posses-
sion of the state machinery, to substitute themselves for the state. Since, on
the other hand, they continued to be organized as a party, it was also clear
that they wanted state power as a party, so that their voters would actually
dominate the nation.
The body politic of the nation-state came into existence when no single
group was any longer in a position to wield exclusive political power, so
that the government assumed actual poHtical rule which no longer depended
upon social and economic factors. The revolutionary movements of the
left, which fought for a radical change of social conditions, had never directly
touched this supreme political authority. They had challenged only the
power of the bourgeoisie and its influence upon the state, and were therefore
always ready to submit to government guidance in foreign affairs, where the
interests of an assumedly unified nation were at stake. The numerous
programs of the antisemitic groups, on the other hand, were, from the begin-
ning, chiefly concerned with foreign affairs; their revolutionary impulse was
'" Sec Wawrzinek, op. cit. An instructive account of all these events, especially
with respect to Court Chaplain Stoecker, in Frank, op. cit.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 39
directed against the government rather than a social class, and they actually
aimed to destroy the political pattern of the nation-state by means of a party
organization.
The claim of a party to be beyond all parties had other, more significant,
implications than antisemitism. If it had been only a question of getting rid
of the Jews, Fritsch's proposal, at one of the early antisemitic congresses,^**
not to create a new party but rather to disseminate antisemitism until
finally all existing parties were hostile to Jews, would have brought much
quicker results. As it was, Fritsch's proposal went unheeded because anti-
semitism was then already an instrument for the liquidation not only of the
Jews but of the body politic of the nation-state as well.
Nor was it an accident that the claim of the antisemitic parties coincided
with the early stages of imperialism and found exact counterparts in certain
trends in Great Britain which were free of antisemitism and in the highly
antisemitic pan-movements on the Continent.*^ only in Germany did these
new trends spring directly from antisemitism as such, and antisemitic parties
preceded and survived the formation of purely imperialist groups such as
the AUdeutscher Verband and others, all of which also claimed to be more
than and above party groups.
The fact that similar formations without active antisemitism — which
avoided the charlatan aspect of the antisemitic parties and therefore seemed
at first to have far better chances for final victory — were finally submerged
or liquidated by the antisemitic movement is a good index to the importance
of the issue. The antisemites' belief that their claim to exclusive rule was no
more than what the Jews had in fact achieved, gave them the advantage of a
domestic program, and conditions were such that one had to enter the arena
of social struggle in order to win political power. They could pretend to fight
the Jews exactly as the workers were fighting the bourgeoisie. Their ad-
vantage was that by attacking the Jews, who were believed to be the secret
power behind governments, they could openly attack the state itself, whereas
the imperialist groups, with their mild and secondary antipathy against Jews,
never found the connection with the important social struggles of the times.
The second highly significant characteristic of the new antisemitic parties
was that they started at once a supranational organization of all antisemitic
groups in Europe, in open contrast to, and in defiance of, current nationalistic
slogans. By introducing this supranational element, they clearly indicated
that they aimed not only at political rule over the nation but had already
planned a step further for an inter-European government "above all na-
tions." *2 This second revolutionary element meant the fundamental break
*0This proposition was made in 1886 in Cassel, where the Deutsche Antisemitische
Vereinigung was founded.
*i For an extensive discussion of the "parties above parties" and the pan-movements
see chapter viii.
*2The first international anti-Jewish congress took place in 1882 in Dresden, with
about 3,000 delegates from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia; during the dis-
cussions, Stoecker was defeated by the radical elements who met one year later in
40 ANTISEMITISM
\^ith the status quo; it has been frequently overlooked because the anti-
scmitcs themselves, partly because of traditional habits and partly because
Ihcy consciously lied, used the language of the reactionary parties in their
propaganda.
The intimate relationship between the peculiar conditions of Jewish ex-
istence and the ideology of such groups is even more evident in the organiza-
tion of a group beyond nations than in the creation of a party beyond parties.
The Jews very clearly were the only inter-European element in a nationalized
Europe. It seemed only logical that their enemies had to organize on the
same principle, if they were to fight those who were supposed to be the
secret manipulators of the political destiny of all nations.
While this argument was sure to be convincing as propaganda, the suc-
cess of supranational antisemitism depended upon more general considera-
tions. Even at the end of the last century, and especially since the Franco-
Prussian War, more and more people felt that the national organization of
Europe was antiquated because it could no longer adequately respond to
new economic challenges. This feeling had been a powerful supporting argu-
ment for the international organization of socialism and had, in turn, been
strengthened by it. The conviction that identical interests existed all over
Europe was spreading through the masses.''^ Whereas the international
socialist organizations remained passive and uninterested in all foreign policy
issues (that is in precisely those questions where their internationalism
might have been tested), the antisemites started with problems of foreign
policy and even promised solution of domestic problems on a supranational
basis. To take ideologies less at their face value and to look more closely
at the actual programs of the respective parties is to discover that the
socialists, who were more concerned with domestic issues, fitted much better
into the nation-state than the antisemites.
Of course this does not mean that the socialists' internationalist convic-
tions were not sincere. These were, on the contrary, stronger and, inciden-
tally, much older than the discovery of class interests which cut across the
boundaries of national states. But the very awareness of the all-importance
of class struggle induced them to neglect that heritage which the French
Revolution had bequeathed to the workers' parties and which alone might
have led them to an articulate political theory. The socialists kept implicitly
intact the original concept of a "nation among nations," all of which belong
to the family of mankind, but they never found a device by which to trans-
Chemnitz and founded the Alliance Antijuive Universelle. A good account of these
meetings and congresses, their programs and discussions, is to be found in Wawrzinek,
op. cit.
♦3 The international solidarity of the workers' movements was, as far as it went,
an intcr-European matter. Their indifference to foreign policy was also a kind of
self-protection against both active participation in or struggle against the con-
temporary imperialist policies of their respective countries. As far as economic
interests were concerned, it was all too obvious that everybody in the French or
British or Dutch nation would feel the full impact of the fall of their empires, and
not just capitalists and bankers.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 41
form this idea into a working concept in the world of sovereign states.
Their internationalism, consequently, remained a personal conviction shared
by everybody, and their healthy disinterest in national sovereignty turned
into a quite unhealthy and unrealistic indifference to foreign politics. Since
the parties of the left did not object to nation-states on principle, but only
to the aspect of national sovereignty; since, moreover, their own inarticulate
hopes for federalist structures with eventual integration of all nations on
equal terms somehow presupposed national liberty and independence of all
oppressed peoples, they could operate within the framework of the nation-
state and even emerge, in the time of decay of its social and political struc-
ture, as the only group in the population that did not indulge in expansionist
fantasies and in thoughts of destroying other peoples.
The supranationalism of the antisemites approached the question of in-
ternational organization from exactly the opposite point of view. Their aim
was a dominating superstructure which would destroy all home-grown na-
tional structures alike. They could indulge in hypernationalistic talk even
as they prepared to destroy the body politic of their own nation, because
tribal nationalism, with its immoderate lust for conquest, was one of the
principal powers by which to force open the narrow and modest limits of
the nation-state and its sovereignty.** The more effective the chauvinistic
propaganda, the easier it was to persuade public opinion of the necessity
for a supranational structure which would rule from above and without
national distinctions by a universal monopoly of power and the instruments
of violence.
There is little doubt that the special inter-European condition of the
Jewish people could have served the purposes of socialist federalism at
least as well as it was to serve the sinister plots of supranationalists. But
socialists were so concerned with class struggle and so neglectful of the
political consequences of their own inherited concepts that they became
aware of the existence of the Jews as a political factor only when they were
already confronted with full-blown antisemitism as a serious competitor on
the domestic scene. Then they were not only unprepared to integrate the
Jewish issue into their theories, but actually afraid to touch the question
at all. Here as in other international issues, they left the field to the supra-
nationalists who could then seem to be the only ones who knew the answers
to world problems.
By the turn of the century, the effects of the swindles in the seventies
had run their course and an era of prosperity and general well-being, espe-
cially in Germany, put an end to the premature agitations of the eighties.
Nobody could have predicted that this end was only a temporary respite,
that all unsolved political questions, together with all unappeased political
hatreds, were to redouble in force and violence after the first World War.
The antisemitic parties in Germany, after initial successes, fell back into
insignificance; their leaders, after a brief stirring of public opinion, disap-
*^ Compare chapter viii.
^2 ANTISEMITISM
pcarcd through the back door of history into the darkness of crackpot con-
fuMon and cure-all charlatanry.
IV: Leftist Antisemitism
WERE IT NOT for the frightful consequences of antisemitism in our own time,
wc might have given less attention to its development in Germany. As a
political movement, nineteenth-century antisemitism can be studied best
in France, where for almost a decade it dominated the political scene. As
an ideological force, competing with other more respectable ideologies for
the acceptance of public opinion, it reached its most articulate form in
Austria.
Nowhere had the Jews rendered such great services to the state as in
Austria, whose many nationalities were kept together only by the Dual
Monarchy of the House of Hapsburg, and where the Jewish state banker,
in contrast to all other European countries, survived the downfall of the
monarchy. Just as at the beginning of this development in the early eighteenth
century, Samuel Oppenheimer's credit had been identical with the credit
of the House of Hapsburg, so "in the end Austrian credit was that of the
Creditanstalt" — a Rothschild banking house.^^ Although the Danube mon-
archy had no homogeneous population, the most important prerequisite for
evolution into a nation-state, it could not avoid the transformation of an
enlightened despotism into a constitutional monarchy and the creation of
modern civil services. This meant that it had to adopt certain institutions of
the nation-state. For one thing, the modern class system grew along nation-
ality lines, so that certain nationalities began to be identified with certain
classes or at least professions. The German became the dominating na-
tionality in much the same sense as the bourgeoisie became the dominating
class in the nation-states. The Hungarian landed aristocracy played a role
that was even more pronounced than, but essentially similar to, that played
by the nobility in other countries. The state machinery itself tried its best to
keep the same absolute distance from society, to rule above all nationalities,
as the nation-state with respect to its classes. The result for the Jews was sim-
ply that the Jewish nationality could not merge with the others and could
not become a nationality itself, just as it had not merged with other classes in
the nation-state, or become a class itself. As the Jews in nation-states had
differed from all classes of society through their special relationship to the
state, so they diflfcred from all other nationalities in Austria through their
special relationship to the Hapsburg monarchy. And just as everywhere
else each class that came into open conflict with the state turned antisemitic,
so in Austria each nationality that not only engaged in the all-pervading
struggle of the nationalities but came into open conflict with the monarchy
«* See Paul H. Emden, "The Story of the Vienna Creditanstalt," in Menorah Journal,
XXVIII. 1, 1940.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 43
itself, started its fight with an attack upon the Jews. But there was a marked
difference between these conflicts in Austria, and those in Germany and
France. In Austria they were not only sharper, but at the outbreak of the
first World War every single nationality, and that meant every stratum of
society, was in opposition to the state, so that more than anywhere else in
Western or Central Europe the population was imbued with active anti-
semitism.
Outstanding among these conflicts was the continuously rising state hos-
tility of the German nationality, which accelerated after the foundation of
the Reich and discovered the usefulness of antisemitic slogans after the
financial crash of 1873. The social situation at that moment was practically
the same as in Germany, but the social propaganda to catch the middle-
class vote immediately indulged in a much more violent attack on the state,
and a much more outspoken confession of nonloyalty to the country. More-
over, the German Liberal Party, under the leadership of Schoenerer, was
from the beginning a lower middle-class party without connections or re-
straints from the side of the nobility, and with a decidedly left-wing outlook.
It never achieved a real mass basis, but it was remarkably successful in the
universities during the eighties where it organized the first closely knit
students' organization on the basis of open antisemitism. Schoenerer's anti-
semitism, at first almost exclusively directed against the Rothschilds, won
him the sympathies of the labor movement, which regarded him as a true
radical gone astray." His main advantage was that he could base his anti-
semitic propaganda on demonstrable facts: as a member of the Austrian
Reichsrat he had fought for nationalization of the Austrian railroads, the
major part of which had been in the hands of the Rothschilds since 1836
due to a state license which expired in 1886. Schoenerer succeeded in gather-
ing 40,000 signatures against its renewal, and in placing the Jewish question
in the limelight of public interest. The close connection between the Roth-
schilds and the financial interests of the monarchy became very obvious
when the government tried to extend the license under conditions which
were patently to the disadvantage of the state as well as the public.
Schoenerer's agitation in this matter became the actual beginning of an ar-
ticulate antisemitic movement in Austria.*^ The point is that this movement,
in contrast to the German Stoeckcr agitation, was initiated and led by a
man who was sincere beyond doubt, and therefore did not stop at the use
of antisemitism as a propaganda weapon, but developed quickly that Pan-
German ideology which was to influence Mazism more deeply than any
other German brand of antisemitism.
46 See F. A. Neuschaefer. Georg Ritter von Schoenerer, Hamburg, 1935, and
Eduard Pichl, Georg Schoenerer, 1938, 6 vols. Even in 1912, when the Schoenerer
agitation had long lost all significance, the Viennese Arbeiterzeitung cherished very
affectionate feelings for the man of whom it could think only in the words Bismarck
had once uttered about Lassalle: "And if we exchanged shots, justice would still de-
mand that we admit even during the shooting: He is a man; and the others are old
women." (Neuschaefer, p. 33.)
*^ See Neuschaefer, op. cit., pp. 22 ff., and Pichl, op. cit., I, 236 flf.
44 ANTISEMITISM
riiDugh victorious in the long run. the Schocncrcr movement was tempo-
rarilv defeated hv a second antisemitic party, the Christian-Socials under
the leadership of I.ueizer. While Schoenerer had attacked the Catholic
Church and its considerable inlUience on Austrian politics almost as much
as he had the Jews, the Christian-Socials were a Catholic party who tried
from the outset to ally themselves with those reactionary conservative forces
which had proved so helpful in Germany and France. Since they made more
social concessions, they were more successful than in Germany or in France.
They, together with the Social Democrats, survived the downfall of the
monarchy and became the most influential group in postwar Austria. But
long before the establishment of an Austrian Republic, when, in the nineties,
Lueger had won the Mayoralty of Vienna by an antisemitic campaign, the
Christian-Socials already adopted that typically equivocal attitude toward
the Jews in the nation-state — hostility to the intelligentsia and friendliness
toward the Jewish business class. It was by no means an accident that, after
a bitter and bloody contest for power with the socialist workers' movement,
they took over the state machinery when Austria, reduced to its German
nationality, was established as a nation-state. They turned out to be the
only party which was prepared for exactly this role and, even under the
old monarchy, had won popularity because of their nationalism. Since the
Hapsburgs were a German house and had granted their German subjects
a certain predominance, the Christian-Socials never attacked the monarchy.
Their function was rather to win large parts of the German nationality for
the support of an essentially unpopular government. Their antisemitism
remained without consequence; the decades when Lueger ruled Vienna were
actually a kind of golden age for the Jews. No matter how far their propa-
ganda occasionally went in order to get votes, they never could have pro-
claimed with Schoenerer and the Pan-Germanists that "they regarded anti-
semitism as the mainstay of our national ideology, as the most essential
ｅxpression of genuine popular conviction and thus as the major national
achievement of the century." "* And although they were as much under the
influence of clerical circles as was the antisemitic movement in France, they
were of necessity much more restrained in their attacks on the Jews because
they did not attack the monarchy as the antisemites in France attacked the
Third Republic.
The successes and failures of the two Austrian antisemitic parties show
the scant relevance of social conflicts to the long-range issues of the time.
Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such,
the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
Indeed, the backbone of Schoenerer's movement was in those German-
speaking provinces without any Jewish population at all, where competition
with Jews or hatred of Jewish bankers never existed. The survival of the
Pan-Germanist movement and its violent antisemitism in these provinces,
while it subsided in the urban centers, was merely due to the fact that these
'" Quoted from PichI, op. cit., I, p. 26.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 45
provinces were never reached to the same extent by the universal prosperity
of the pre-war period which reconciled the urban population with the gov-
ernment.
The complete lack of loyalty to their own country and its government,
for which the Pan-Germanists substituted an open loyalty to Bismarck's
Reich, and the resulting concept of nationhood as something independent
of state and territory, led the Schoenerer group to a veritable imperialist
ideology in which lies the clue to its temporary weakness and its final
strength. It is also the reason why the Pan-German party in Germany (the
Alldeutschen), which never overstepped the limits of ordinary chauvinism,
remained so extremely suspicious and reluctant to take the outstretched
hands of their Austrian Germanist brothers. This Austrian movement aimed
at more than rise to power as a party, more than the possession of the state
machinery. It wanted a revolutionary reorganization of Central Europe in
which the Germans of Austria, together with and strengthened by the Ger-
mans of Germany, would become the ruling people, in which all other
peoples of the area would be kept in the same kind of semiservitude as the
Slavonic nationahties in Austria. Because of this close affinity to imperialism
and the fundamental change it brought to the concept of nationhood, we
shall have to postpone the discussion of the Austrian Pan-Germanist move-
ment. It is no longer, at least in its consequences, a mere nineteenth-century
preparatory movement; it belongs, more than any other brand of anti-
semitism, to the course of events of our own century.
The exact opposite is true of French antisemitism. The Dreyfus Affair
brings into the open all other elements of nineteenth-century antisemitism
in its mere ideological and political aspects; it is the culmination of the
antisemitism which grew out of the special conditions of the nation-state. Yet
its violent form foreshadowed future developments, so that the main actors
of the Affair sometimes seem to be staging a huge dress rehearsal for a per-
formance that had to be put off for more than three decades. It drew to-
gether all the open or subterranean, political or social sources which had
brought the Jewish question into a predominant position in the nineteenth
century; its premature outburst, on the other hand, kept it within the frame-
work of a typical nineteenth-century ideology which, although it survived
all French governments and political crises, never quite fitted into twentieth-
century poUtical conditions. When, after the 1940 defeat, French anti-
semitism got its supreme chance under the Vichy government, it had a
definitely antiquated and, for major purposes, rather useless character,
which German Nazi writers never forgot to point out.*'' It had no influence
on the formation of Nazism and remains more significant in itself than as
an active historical factor in the final catastrophe.
The principal reason for these wholesome hmitations was that France's
antisemitic parties, though violent on the domestic scene, had no supra-
*9 See especially Walfried Vemunft, "Die Hintergriinde dcs fraazosischen Anti-
semitismus," in Nationalsozialistische Monaishefte, Juni, 1939.
^5 ANTISEMITISM
national aspirations. They belonged after all to the oldest and most fully
developed nation-state in Europe. None of the antisemites ever tried seriously
to organize a "party above parties" or to seize the state as a party and for
no other purpose but party interests. The few attempted coups d'etat which
might be credited to the alliance between antisemites and higher army
oflicers were ridiculously inadequate and obviously contrived.^" In 1898
some nineteen members of Parliament were elected through antisemitic
campaigns, but this was a peak which was never reached again and from
which the decline was rapid.
It is true, on the other hand, that this was the earliest instance of the
success of antisemitism as a catalytic agent for all other political issues. This
can be attributed to the lack of authority of the Third Republic, which had
been voted in with a very slight majority. In the eyes of the masses, the
state had lost its prestige along with the monarchy, and attacks on the state
were no longer a sacrilege. The early outburst of violence in France bears
a striking resemblance to similar agitation in the Austrian and German
Republics after the first World War. The Nazi dictatorship has been so
frequently connected with so-called "state-worship" that even historians
have become somewhat blind to the truism that the Nazis took advantage
of the complete breakdown of state worship, originally prompted by the
worship of a prince who sits on the throne by the grace of God, and which
hardly ever occurs in a Republic. In France, fifty years before Central
European countries were affected by this universal loss of reverence, state
worship had suffered many defeats. It was much easier to attack the Jews
and the government together there than in Central Europe where the Jews
were attacked in order to attack the government.
French antisemitism, moreover, is as much older than its European coun-
terparts as is French emancipation of the Jews, which dates back to the end
of the eighteenth century. The representatives of the Age of Enlightenment
who prepared the French Revolution despised the Jews as a matter of course;
they saw in them the backward remnants of the Dark Ages, and they hated
them as the financial agents of the aristocracy. The only articulate friends
of the Jews in France were conservative writers who denounced anti-Jewish
attitudes as one of the favorite theses of the eighteenth century." " For
the more liberal or radical writer it had become almost a tradition to warn
against the Jews as barbarians who still lived in the patriarchal form of gov-
ernment and recognized no other state." During and after the French Rev-
olution, the French clergy and French aristocrats added their voices to the
general anti-Jewish sentiment, though for other and more material reasons.
They accused the revolutionary government of having ordered the sale of
clerical property to pay "the Jews and merchants to whom the government
*o Sec Chapter iv.
»i See J. de Maistre, Les Soirees de St. Petersburg, 1821, II, 55.
»2 Charles Fourier, Nouveau Monde Industriel, 1829, Vol. V of his Oeuvres Com-
putes, 1841, p. 421. For Fourier's anti-Jewish doctrines, see also Edmund Silbemer,
"Charles Fourier on the Jewish Question" in Jewish Social Studies, October, 1946.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 47
is indebted." " These old arguments, somehow kept alive through the never-
ending struggle between Church and State in France, supported the general
violence and embitterment which had been touched off by other and more
modern forces at the end of the century.
Mainly because of the strong clerical support of antisemitism, the French
socialist movement finally decided to take a stand against antisemitic propa-
ganda in the Dreyfus Affair. Until then, however, nineteenth-century French
leftist movements had been outspoken in their antipathy to the Jews, They
simply followed the tradition of eighteenth-century enlightenment which
was the source of French hberalism and radicaUsm, and they considered
anti-Jewish attitudes an integral part of anticlericalism. These sentiments on
the left were strengthened first by the fact that the Alsatian Jews continued
to live from lending money to peasants, a practice which had already
prompted Napoleon's decree of 1808. After conditions had changed in
Alsace, leftist antisemitism found a new source of strength in the financial
policies of the house of Rothschild, which played a large part in the financ-
ing of the Bourbons, maintained close connections with Louis Philippe, and
flourished under Napoleon III.
Behind these obvious and rather superficial incentives to anti-Jewish
attitudes there was a deeper cause, which was crucial to the whole struc-
ture of the specifically French brand of radicaUsm, and which almost suc-
ceeded in turning the whole French leftist movement against the Jews.
Bankers were much stronger in the French economy than in other capitalist
countries, and France's industrial development, after a brief rise during the
reign of Napoleon III, lagged so far behind other nations that pre-capitalist
socialist tendencies continued to exert considerable influence. The lower
middle classes which in Germany and Austria became antisemitic only dur-
ing the seventies and eighties, when they were already so desperate that they
could be used for reactionary politics as well as for the new mob policies,
had been antisemitic in France some fifty years earlier, when, with the help
of the working class, they carried the revolution of 1848 to a brief victory.
In the forties, when Toussenel published his Les Juifs, Rois de I'Epoque,
the most important book in a veritable flood of pamphlets against the
Rothschilds, it was enthusiastically received by the entire left-wing press,
which at the time was the organ of the revolutionary lower middle classes.
Their sentiments, as expressed by Toussenel, though less articulate and
less sophisticated, were not very different from those of the young Marx,
and Toussenel's attack on the Rothschilds was only a less gifted and more
elaborate variation of the letters from Paris which Boerne had written
fifteen years before." These Jews, too, mistook the Jewish banker for a
63 See the newspaper Le Patriate Frangais, No. 457, November 8, 1790. Quoted
from Clemens August Hoberg, "Die geistigen Grundlagen des Antisemitismus im
modernen Frankreich," in Forschungen zur Judenjrage, 1940, Vol. IV.
s* Marx's essay on the Jewish question is sufficiently well known not to warrant
quotation. Since Boerne's utterances, because of their merely polemical and un-
theoretical character, are being forgotten today, we quote from the 72nd letter from
4S ANTISEMITISM
central figure in the capitalist system, an error which has exerted a certain
influence on the municipal and lower government bureaucracy in France
up to our own time."
However this outburst of popular anti-Jewish feeling, nourished by an
economic conflict between Jewish bankers and their desperate clientele,
lasted no longer as an important factor in politics than similar outbursts
with purely economic or social causes. The twenty years of Napoleon Ill's
rule over a French Empire were an age of prosperity and security for French
Jewry much like the two decades before the outbreak of the first World War
in Germany and Austria.
The only brand of French antisemitism which actually remained strong,
and outlasted social antisemitism as well as the contemptuous attitudes of
anticlerical intellectuals, was tied up with a general xenophobia. Especially
after the first World War, foreign Jews became the stereotypes for all for-
eigners. A differentiation between native Jews and those who "invaded" the
country from the East has been made in all Western and Central European
countries. Polish and Russian Jews were treated exactly the same way in
Germany and Austria as Rumanian and German Jews were treated in France,
just as Jews from Posen in Germany or from Galicia in Austria were re-
garded with the same snobbish contempt as Jews from Alsace were in
France. But only in France did this difl[erentiation assume such importance
on the domestic scene. And this is probably due to the fact that the Roth-
schilds, who more than anywhere else were the butt of anti- Jewish attacks,
had immigrated into France from Germany, so that up to the outbreak of
the second World War it became natural to suspect the Jews of sympathies
with the national enemy.
Nationalistic antisemitism, harmless when compared with modem move-
ments, was never a monopoly of reactionaries and chauvinists in France.
on this point, the writer Jean Giraudoux, the propaganda minister in
Daladier's war cabinet, was in complete agreement ^^ with Retain and the
Paris (January, 1832): "Rothschild kissed the Pope's hand. ... At last the order
has come which God had planned when he created the world. A poor Christian
kisses the Pope's feet, and a rich Jew kisses his hand. If Rothschild had gotten his
Roman loan at 60 per cent, instead of 65, and could have sent the cardinal-chamber-
lain more than ten thousand ducats, they would have allowed him to embrace the
Holy Father. . . . Would it not be the greatest luck for the world if all kings were
deposed and the Rothschild family placed on the throne?" Briefe aus Paris. 1830-1833.
»"* This attitude is well described in the preface by the municipal councilor Paul
Brousse to Cesare Lombroso's famous work on antisemitism (1899). The character-
istic part of the argument is contained in the following: "The small shopkeeper needs
credit, and we know how badly organized and how expensive credit is these days.
Here too the small merchant places the responsibility on the Jewish banker. All the
way down to the worker — i.e. only those workers who have no clear notion of scien-
tific socialism — everybody thinks the revolution is being advanced if the general ex-
propriation of capitalists is preceded by the expropriation of Jewish capitalists, who
are the most typical and whose names are the most familiar to the masses."
" For the surprising continuity in French antisemitic arguments, compare, for
instance, Charles Fourier's picture of the Jew "Iscariote" who arrives in France with
100,000 pounds, establishes himself in a town with six competitors in his field.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 49
Vichy government, which also, no matter how hard it tried to please the
Germans, could not break through the Umitations of this outmoded antip-
athy for Jews. The failure was all the more conspicuous since the French
had produced an outstanding antisemite who realized the full range and
possibilities of the new weapon. That this man should be a prominent novel-
ist is characteristic of conditions in France, where antisemitism in general
had never fallen into the same social and intellectual disrepute as in other
European countries.
Louis Ferdinand Celine had a simple thesis, ingenious and containing
exactly the ideological imagination that the more rational French anti-
semitism had lacked. He claimed that the Jews had prevented the evolution
of Europe into a political entity, had caused all European wars since 843,
and had plotted the ruin of both France and Germany by inciting their
mutual hostihty. Cehne proposed this fantastic explanation of history in
his Ecole des Cadavres, written at the time of the Munich pact and pub-
lished during the first months of the war. An earlier pamphlet on the sub-
ject, Bagatelle pour un Massacre (1938), although it did not include the
new key to European history, was already remarkably modem in its ap-
proach; it avoided all restricting differentiations between native and foreign
Jews, between good and bad ones, and did not bother with elaborate legisla-
tive proposals (a particular characteristic of French antisemitism), but went
straight to the core of the matter and demanded the massacre of all Jews.
Celine's first book was very favorably received by France's leading in-
tellectuals, who were half pleased by the attack on the Jews and half con-
vinced that it was nothing more than an interesting new literary fancy."^
For exactly the same reasons French home-grown Fascists did not take
Celine seriously, despite the fact that the Nazis always knew he was the
only true antisemite in France. The inherent good sense of French poUticians
and their deep-rooted respectabiUty prevented their accepting a charlatan
and crackpot. The result was that even the Germans, who knew better, had
to continue to use such inadequate supporters as Doriot, a follower of Mus-
solini, and Petain, an old French chauvinist with no comprehension what-
ever of modern problems, in their vain efforts to persuade the French people
that extermination of the Jews would be a cure for everything under the
sun. The way this situation developed during the years of French ofl&cial,
crushes all the competing houses, amasses a great fortune, and returns to Germany
(in Theorie des quatre mouvements, 1808, Oeuvres Completes, 88 ff.) with Giraudoux's
picture of 1939: "By an infiltration whose secret I have tried in vain to detect, hun-
dreds of thousands of Ashkenasim, who escaped from the Polish and Rumanian
Ghettos, have entered our country . . . eliminating our fellow citizens and, at the
same time, ruining their professional customs and traditions . . . and defying all in-
vestigations of census, taxes and labor." In Pleins Pouvoirs, 1939.
*^ See especially the critical discussion in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise by Marcel
Arland (February, 1938) who claims that Celine's position is essentially "solide."
Andre Gide (April, 1938) thinks that Celine in depicting only the Jewish "specialite,"
has succeeded in painting not the reality but the very hallucination which reality
provokes.
^Q ANTISEMITISM
and even unofTicial. readiness to co-operate with Nazi Germany, clearly
indicates how inctTcctivc ninctccnth-ccntury antiscmitism was to the new
political purposes of the twentieth, even in a country where it had reached
its fullest development and had survived all other changes in public opinion.
It did not matter that able nineteenth-century journalists Hke Edouard Dru-
mont. and even great contemporary writers Hke Georges Bernanos, con-
tributed to a cause that was much more adequately served by crackpots and
charlatans.
That France, for various reasons, never developed a full-fledged im-
perialist party turned out to be the decisive element. As many French
colonial politicians have pointed out,^''' only a French-German alliance
would have enabled France to compete with England in the division of the
world and to join successfully in the scramble for Africa. Yet France some-
how never let herself be tempted into this competition, despite all her noisy
resentment and hostility against Great Britain. France was and remained —
though declining in importance — the nation par < xcellence on the Continent,
and even her feeble imperialist attempts usually ended with the birth of new
national independence movements. Since, moreover, her antiscmitism had
been nourished principally by the purely national French-German conflict,
the Jewish issue was almost automatically kept from playing much of a
role in imperialist policies, despite the conditions in Algeria, whose mixed
population of native Jews and Arabs would have offered an excellent oppor-
tunity. '''^ The simple and brutal destruction of the French nation-state by
German aggression, the mockery of a German-French alliance on the basis
of German occupation and French defeat, may have proved how little
strength of her own the nation par excellence had carried into our times
from a glorious past; it did not change her essential pohtical structure.
V: The Golden Age of Security
on'LY TWO DECADES Separated the temporary decline of the antisemitic
movements from the outbreak of the first World War. This period has been
adequately described as a "Golden Age of Security" "^ because only a few
who lived in it felt the inherent weakness of an obviously outmoded political
structure which, despite all prophecies of imminent doom, continued to
function in spurious splendor and with inexplicable, monotonous stubborn-
ness. Side by side, and apparently with equal stability, an anachronistic
despotism in Russia, a corrupt bureaucracy in Austria, a stupid militarism
*8 Sec for instance Rene Pinon. France et Alleinagne, 1912.
*» Some aspects of the Jewish question in Algeria are treated in the author's
article. "Why the Cremieux Decree was Abrogated," in Contemporary Jewish Record,
April, 1943.
«°The term is Stefan Zweig's, who thus named the period up to the first World
War in The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography, 1943.
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 51
in Germany and a half-hearted RepubUc in continual crisis in France — all
of them still under the shadow of the world-wide power of the British Em-
pire — managed to carry on. None of these governments was especially
popular, and all faced growing domestic opposition; but nowhere did there
seem to exist an earnest political will for radical change in political condi-
tions. Europe was much too busy expanding economically for any nation
or social stratum to take political questions seriously. Everything could go
on because nobody cared. Or, in the penetrating words of Chesterton, "every-
thing is prolonging its existence by denying that it exists." "^
The enormous growth of industrial and economic capacity produced a
steady weakening of purely political factors, while at the same time economic
forces became dominant in the international play of power. Power was
thought to be synonymous with economic capacity before people discovered
that economic and industrial capacity are only its modern prerequisites. In a
sense, economic power could bring governments to heel because they had
the same faith in economics as the plain businessmen who had somehow
convinced them that the state's means of violence had to be used exclusively
for protection of business interests and national property. For a very brief
time, there was some truth in Walter Rathenau's remark that 300 men, who
all know each other, held the destinies of the world in their hands. This
odd state of affairs lasted exactly until 1914 when, through the very fact of
war, the confidence of the masses in the providential character of economic
expansion fell apart.
The Jews were more deluded by the appearances of the golden age of
security than any other section of the European peoples. Antisemitism seemed
to be a thing of the past; the more the governments lost in power and prestige,
the less attention was paid to the Jews. While the state played an ever nar-
rower and emptier representative role, pohtical representation tended to
become a kind of theatrical performance of varying quality until in Austria
the theater itself became the focus of national life, an institution whose pub-
lic significance was certainly greater than that of Parliament. The theatrical
quality of the political world had become so patent that the theater could
appear as the realm of reality.
The growing influence of big business on the state and the state's de-
clining need for Jewish services threatened the Jewish banker with extinc-
tion and forced certain shifts in Jewish occupations. The first sign of the
'decline of the Jewish banking houses was their loss of prestige and power
within the Jewish communities. They were no longer strong enough to cen-
tralize and, to a certain extent, monopolize the general Jewish wealth. More
and more Jews left state finance for independent business. Out of food and
clothing deliveries to armies and governments grew the Jewish food and
grain commerce, and the garment industries in which they soon acquired a
prominent position in all countries; pawnshops and general stores in small
61 For a wonderful description of the British state of affairs, see G. K. Chesterton,
The Return of Don Quixote, which did not appear until 1927 but was "planned and
partly written before the War."
^2 ANTISEMITISM
country towns were the predecessors of department stores in the cities.
This docs not mean that the relationship between Jews and governments
ceased to exist, but fewer individuals were involved, so that at the end of this
period wc have almost the same picture as at the beginning: a few Jewish
individuals in important financial positions with little or no connection with
the broader strata of the Jewish middle class.
More important than the expansion of the independent Jewish business
class was another shift in the occupational structure. Central and Western
European Jewries had reached a saturation point in wealth and economic
fortune. This might have been the moment for them to show that they
actually wanted money for money's or for power's sake. In the former case,
they might have expanded their businesses and handed them down to their
descendants; in the latter they might have entrenched themselves more
firmly in state business and fought the influence of big business and in-
dustry on governments. But they did neither. on the contrary, the sons of
the well-to-do businessmen and, to a lesser extent, bankers, deserted their
fathers' careers for the liberal professions or purely intellectual pursuits they
had not been able to afford a few generations before. What the nation-state
had once feared so much, the birth of a Jewish intelligentsia, now proceeded
at a fantastic pace. The crowding of Jewish sons of well-to-do parents into
the cultural occupations was especially marked in Germany and Austria,
where a great proportion of cultural institutions, like newspapers, publishing,
music, and theater, became Jewish enterprises.
What had been made possible through the traditional Jewish preference
and respect for intellectual occupations resulted in a real break with tradi-
tion and the intellectual assimilation and nationalization of important strata
of Western and Central European Jewry. Politically, it indicated emancipa-
tion of Jews from state protection, growing consciousness of a common
destiny with their fellow-citizens, and a considerable loosening of the ties
that had made Jews an inter-European element. Socially, the Jewish intel-
lectuals were the first who, as a group, needed and wanted admittance to
non- Jewish society. Social discrimination, a small matter to their fathers
who had not cared for social intercourse with Gentiles, became a paramount
problem for them.
Searching for a road into society, this group was forced to accept social
behavior patterns set by individual Jews who had been admitted into society
during the nineteenth century as exceptions to the rule of discrimination.
They quickly discovered the force that would open all doors, the "radiant
Power of Fame" (Stefan Zweig), which a hundred years' idolatry of genius
had made irresistible. What distinguished the Jewish pursuit of fame from
the general fame idolatry of the time was that Jews were not primarily in-
terested in it for themselves. To hve in the aura of fame was more important
than to become famous; thus they became outstanding reviewers, critics,
collectors, and organizers of what was famous. The "radiant power" was
a very real social force by which the socially homeless were able to estabhsh
a home. The Jewish intellectuals, in other words, tried, and to a certain
THE nation-state; the birth of antisemitism 53
extent succeeded, in becoming the living tie binding famous individuals
into a society of the renowned, an international society by definition, for
spiritual achievement transcends national boundaries. The general weaken-
ing of political factors, for two decades having brought about a situation
in which reality and appearance, poUtical reality and theatrical performance
could easily parody each other, now enabled them to become the repre-
sentatives of a nebulous international society in which national prejudices
no longer seemed valid. And paradoxically enough, this international society
seemed to be the only one that recognized the nationalization and assimila-
tion of its Jewish members; it was far easier for an Austrian Jew to be
accepted as an Austrian in France than in Austria. The spurious world
citizenship of this generation, this fictitious nationality which they claimed
as soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, in part already resembled
those passports which later granted their owner the right to sojourn in
every country except the one that issued it.
By their very nature, these circumstances could not but bring Jews into
prominence just when their activities, their satisfaction and happiness in the
world of appearance, proved that, as a group, they wanted in fact neither
money nor power. While serious statesmen and publicists now bothered with
the Jewish question less than at any time since the emancipation, and while
antisemitism almost entirely disappeared from the open political scene, Jews
became the symbols of Society as such and the objects of hatred for all
those whom society did not accept. Antisemitism, having lost its ground in
the special conditions that had influenced its development during the nine-
teenth century, could be freely elaborated by charlatans and crackpots into
that weird mixture of half-truths and wild superstitions which emerged in
Europe after 1914, the ideology of all frustrated and resentful elements.
Since the Jewish question in its social aspect turned into a catalyst of
social unrest, until finally a disintegrated society recrystallized ideologically
around a possible massacre of Jews, it is necessary to outhne some of the
main traits of the social history of emancipated Jewry in the bourgeois
society of the last century.
CHAl'TER THREE
The Jews and Society
THE jews' political ignorance, which fitted them so well for their special
role and for taking roots in the state's sphere of business, and their
prejudices against the people and in favor of authority, which blinded them
to the political dangers of antiscmitism, caused them to be oversensitive
toward all forms of social discrimination. It was difficult to see the decisive
difference between political argument and mere antipathy when the two
developed side by side. The point, however, is that they grew out of exactly
opposite aspects of emancipation: political antiscmitism developed because
the Jews were a separate body, while social discrimination arose because
of the growing equality of Jews with all other groups.
Equality of condition, though it is certainly a basic requirement for jus-
tice, is nevertheless among the greatest and most uncertain ventures of mod-
ern mankind. The more equal conditions are, the less explanation there is for
the differences that actually exist between people; and thus all the more
unequal do individuals and groups become. This perplexing consequence
came fully to light as soon as equality was no longer seen in terms of an
omnipotent being like God or an unavoidable common destiny like death.
Whenever equality becomes a mundane fact in itself, without any gauge by
which it may be measured or explained, then there is one chance in a hun-
dred that it will be recognized simply as a working principle of a political
organization in which otherwise unequal people have equal rights; there are
ninety-nine chances that it will be mistaken for an innate quality of every
individual, who is "normal" if he is like everybody else and "abnormal" if
he happens to be different. This perversion of equality from a political into
a social concept is all the more dangerous when a society leaves but little
space for special groups and individuals, for then their differences become
all the more conspicuous.
The great challenge to the modern period, and its peculiar danger, has
been that in it man for the first time confronted man without the protection
of differing circumstances and conditions. And it has been precisely this new
concept of equality that has made modem race relations so difficult, for there
we deal with natural differences which by no possible and conceivable
change of conditions can become less conspicuous. It is because equality
demands that I recognize each and every individual as my equal, that the
conflicts between different groups, which for reasons of their own are re-
luctant to grant each other tliis basic equality, take on such terribly cruel
forms.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 55
Hence the more equal the Jewish condition, the more surprising were
Jewish differences. This new awareness led to social resentment against the
Jews and at the same time to a peculiar attraction toward them; the com-
bined reactions determined the social history of Western Jewry. Discrimina-
tion, however, as well as attraction, were politically sterile. They neither
produced a pohtical movement against the Jews nor served in any way to
protect them against their enemies. They did succeed, though, in poisoning
the social atmosphere, in perverting all social intercourse between Jews and
Gentiles, and had a definite effect on Jewish behavior. The formation of a
Jewish type was due to both — to special discrimination and to special favor.
Social antipathy for Jews, with its varying forms of discrimination, did
no great political harm in European countries, for genuine social and eco-
nomic equality was never achieved. To all appearances new classes de-
veloped as groups to which one belonged by birth. There is no doubt that
it was only in such a framework that society could suffer the Jews to establish
themselves as a special clique.
The situation would have been entirely different if, as in the United
States, equality of condition had been taken for granted; if every member of
society — from whatever stratum — had been firmly convinced that by ability
and luck he might become the hero of a success story. In such a society,
discrimination becomes the only means of distinction, a kind of universal
law according to which groups may find themselves outside the sphere of
civic, political, and economic equality. Where discrimination is not tied
up with the Jewish issue only, it can become a crystallization point for a
political movement that wants to solve all the natural difficulties and con-
flicts of a multinational country by violence, mob rule, and the sheer vul-
garity of race concepts. It is one of the most promising and dangerous para-
doxes of the American Republic that it dared to realize equality on the basis
of the most unequal population in the world, physically and historically.
In the United States, social antisemitism may one day become the very
dangerous nucleus for a political movement.^ In Europe, however, it had
little influence on the rise of political antisemitism.
1 Although Jews stood out more than other groups in the homogeneous populations
of European countries, it does not follow that they are more threatened by discrimina-
tion than other groups in America. In fact, up to now, not the Jews but the Negroes —
by nature and history the most unequal among the peoples of America — have borne
the burden of social and economic discrimination.
This could change, however, if a political movement ever grew out of this merely
social discrimination. Then Jews might very suddenly become the principal objects
of hatred for the simple reason that they, alone among all other groups, have them-
selves, within their history and their religion, expressed a well-known principle of
separation. This is not true of the Negroes or Chinese, who are therefore less en-
dangered politically, even though they may differ more from the majority than the
Jews.
5(J ANTISEMITISM
I: Between Pariah and Parvenu
THE PRECARIOUS balance between society and state, upon which the nation-
state rested socially and politically, brought about a peculiar law governing
Jewish admission to society. During the 150 years when Jews truly lived
amidst, and not just in the neighborhood of, Western European peoples,
they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social
insult for political success. Assimilation, in the sense of acceptance by non-
Jewish society, was granted them only as long as they were clearly distin-
guished exceptions from the Jewish masses even though they still shared
the same restricted and humiliating political conditions, or later only when,
after an accomplished emancipation and resulting social isolation, their
political status was already challenged by antisemitic movements. Society,
confronted with political, economic, and legal equality for Jews, made it
quite clear that none of its classes was prepared to grant them social equaUty,
and that only exceptions from the Jewish people would be received. Jews
who heard the strange compliment that they were exceptions, exceptional
Jews, knew quite well that it was this very ambiguity — that they were Jews
and yet presumably not like Jews — which opened the doors of society to
them. If they desired this kind of intercourse, they tried, therefore, "to be
and yet not to be Jews." ^
The seeming paradox had a solid basis in fact. What non-Jewish society
demanded was that the newcomer be as "educated" as itself, and that,
although he not behave like an "ordinary Jew," he be and produce some-
thing out of the ordinary, since, after all, he was a Jew. All advocates of
emancipation called for assimilation, that is, adjustment to and reception by,
society, which they considered either a prehminary condition to Jewish
emancipation or its automatic consequence. In other words, whenever those
who actually tried to improve Jewish conditions attempted to think of the
Jewish question from the point of view of the Jews themselves, they im-
mediately approached it merely in its social aspect. It has been one of the
most unfortunate facts in the history of the Jewish people that only its
enemies, and almost never its friends, understood that the Jewish question
was a political one.
The defenders of emancipation tended to present the problem as one of
"education," a concept which originally applied to Jews as well as non-
Jews.^ It was taken for granted that the vanguard in both camps would con-
*This surprisingly apt observation was made by the liberal Protestant theologian
H. E. G. Paulus in a valuable little pamphlet, Die judische Nationalabsonderung nach
Ursprung, Folgen und Besserungsmitteln, 1831. Paulus, much attacked by Jewish
writers of the time, advocated a gradual individual emancipation on the basis of
assimilation.
8 This auitude is expressed in Wilhelm v. Humboldt's "Expert Opinion" of 1809:
"The state should not exactly teach respect for the Jews, but should abolish an in-
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 57
sist of Specially "educated," tolerant, cultured persons. It followed, of
course, that the particularly tolerant, educated and cultured non-Jews could
be bothered socially only with exceptionally educated Jews. As a matter
of course, the demand, among the educated, for the abolition of prejudice
was very quickly to become a rather one-sided affair, until only the Jews,
finally, were urged to educate themselves.
This, however, is only one side of the matter. Jews were exhorted to be-
come educated enough not to behave like ordinary Jews, but they were, on
the other hand, accepted only because they were Jews, because of their
foreign, exotic appeal. In the eighteenth century, this had its source in the
new humanism which expressly wanted "new specimens of humanity"
(Herder), intercourse with whom would serve as an example of possible
intimacy with all types of mankind. To the enlightened Berlin of Mendels-
sohn's time, the Jews served as living proof that all men are human. For
this generation, friendship with Mendelssohn or Markus Herz was an ever-
renewed demonstration of the dignity of man. And because Jews were a
despised and oppressed people, they were for it an even purer and more
exemplary model of mankind. It was Herder, an outspoken friend of the
Jews, who first used the later misused and misquoted phrase, "strange people
of Asia driven into our regions." * With these words, he and his fellow-
humanists greeted the "new specimens of humanity" for whom the eighteenth
century had "searched the earth," ^ only to find them in their age-old neigh-
bors. Eager to stress the basic unity of mankind, they wanted to show the
origins of the Jewish people as more alien, and hence more exotic, than
they actually were, so that the demonstration of humanity as a universal
principle might be more effective.
For a few decades at the turn of the eighteenth century, when French
Jewry already enjoyed emancipation and German Jewry had almost no
hope or desire for it, Prussia's enUghtened intelligentsia made "Jews all over
the world turn their eyes to the Jewish community in Berlin" ^ (and not in
Paris!). Much of this was due to the success of Lessing's Nathan the Wise,
or to its misinterpretation, which held that the "new specimens of humanity,"
because they had become examples of mankind, must also be more intensely
human individuals.^ Mirabeau was strongly influenced by this idea and used
to cite Mendelssohn as his example.^ Herder hoped that educated Jews would
human and prejudiced way of thinking etc. ..." In Ismar Freiind, Die Emancipation
der Juden in Preussen, Berlin, 1912, II, 270.
* J. G. Herder, "Uber die politische Bekehrung der Juden" in Adrastea und das 18.
Jahrhundert, 1801-03.
5 Herder, Brieje zur Beforderung der Humanitdt (1793-97), 40. Brief.
6 Felix Priebatsch, "Die Judenpolitik des fiirstlichen Absolutismus im 17. und 18.
Jahrhundert," in Forschungen und Versuche zur Geschichte des Mittelalters und der
Neuzeit, 1915, p. 646.
^ Lessing himself had no such illusions. His last letter to Moses Mendelssohn ex-
pressed most clearly what he wanted: "the shortest and safest way to that European
country without either Christians or Jews." For Lessing's attitude toward Jews, see
Franz Mehring, Die Lessinglegende, 1906.
8 See Honore Q. R. de Mirabeau, Sur Moses Mendelssohn, London, 1788.
,jv^, ANTISEMITISM
show a greater freedom from prejudice because "the Jew is free of certain
pohtical judgments which it is very hard or impossible for us to abandon."
Protcstinc against the habit of the time of granting "concessions of new
mercantile advantages," he proposed education as the true road to emancipa-
tion of Jews from Judaism, from "the old and proud national prejudices, . . .
customs that do not belong to our age and constitutions," so that Jews could
become "purely humanized," and of service to "the development of the
sciences and the entire culture of mankind."^ At about the same time,
Goethe wrote in a review of a book of poems that their author, a Polish
Jew. did "not achieve more than a Christian etudiant en belles lettres," and
complained that where he had expected something genuinely new, some
force beyond shallow convention, he had found ordinary mediocrity.^"
one can hardly overestimate the disastrous effect of this exaggerated good
will on the newly Westernized, educated Jews and the impact it had on
their social and psychological position. Not only were they faced with the
demoralizing demand that they be exceptions to their own people, recognize
"the sharp difference between them and the others," and ask that such
"separation ... be also legalized" by the governments; ^^ they were ex-
pected even to become exceptional specimens of humanity. And since this,
and not Heine's conversion, constituted the true "ticket of admission" into
cultured European society, what else could these and future generations of
Jews do but try desperately not to disappoint anybody? "
In the early decades of this entry into society, when assimilation had not
yet become a tradition to follow, but something achieved by few and ex-
ceptionally gifted individuals, it worked very well indeed. While France was
the land of political glory for the Jews, the first to recognize them as citizens,
Prussia seemed on the way to becoming the country of social splendor.
Enlightened Berlin, where Mendelssohn had established close connections
with many famous men of his time, was only a beginning. His connections
with non-Jewish society still had much in common with the scholarly ties
that had bound Jewish and Christian learned men together in nearly all
periods of European history. The new and surprising element was that
8 J. G. Herder. "Ueber die politische Bekehrung der Juden," op. cit.
10 Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe's review of Isachar Falkensohn Behr, Gedichte eines
polnischen Juden, Mietau and Leipzig, 1772, in Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen.
" Fricdrich Schieiermacher, Brief e bei Gelegenheit der politisch theologischen Auf-
gabe und des Sendschreibens jiidischer Hausvdler, 1799, in Werke, 1846, Abt. I, Band
V, 34.
'2 This does not, however, apply to Moses Mendelssohn, who hardly knew the
thoughts of Herder, Goethe, Schieiermacher, and other members of the younger
generation. Mendelssohn was revered for his uniqueness. His firm adherence to his
Jewish religion made it impossible for him to break ultimately with the Jewish people,
which his successors did as a matter of course. He felt he was "a member of an
oppressed people who must beg for the good will and protection of the governing
nation" (see his "Letter to Lavater," 1770, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, Berlin.
1930); that is, he always knew that the extraordinary esteem for his person paralleled
an extraordinary contempt for his people. Since he. unlike Jews of following genera-
tions, did not share this contempt, he did not consider himself an exception.
i
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 59
Mendelssohn's friends used these relationships for nonpersonal, ideological,
or even political purposes. He himself explicitly disavowed all such ulterior
motives and expressed time and again his complete satisfaction with the
conditions under which he had to live, as though he had foreseen that his
exceptional social status and freedom had something to do with the fact
that he still belonged to "the lowliest inhabitants of the (Prussian king's)
domain." ^^
This indifference to political and civil rights survived Mendelssohn's inno-
cent relationships with the learned and enlightened men of his time; it was
carried later into the salons of those Jewish women who gathered together
the most brilliant society Berlin was ever to see. Not until after the Prussian
defeat of 1806, when tiie introduction of Napoleonic legislation into large
regions of Germany put the question of Jewish emancipation on the agenda
of public discussion, did this indifference change into outright fear. Emanci-
pation would liberate the educated Jews, together with the "backward"
Jewish people, and their equality would wipe out that precious distinction,
upon which, as they were very well aware, their social status was based.
When the emancipation finally came to pass, most assimilated Jews escaped
into conversion to Christianity, characteristically finding it bearable and not
dangerous to be Jews before emancipation, but not after.
Most representative of these salons, and the genuinely mixed society they
brought together in Germany, was that of Rahel Varnhagen. Her original,
unspoiled, and unconventional intelligence, combined with an absorbing
interest in people and a truly passionate nature, made her the most brilliant
and the most interesting of these Jewish women. The modest but famous
soirees in Rahel's "garret" brought together "enlightened" aristocrats, mid-
dle-class intellectuals, and actors — that is, all those who, like the Jews, did
not belong to respectable society. Thus Rahel's salon, by definition and
intentionally, was established on the fringe of society, and did not share
any of its conventions or prejudices.
It is amusing to note how closely the assimilation of Jews into society
followed the precepts Goethe had proposed for the education of his Wil-
helm Meister, a novel which was to become the great model of middle-class
education. In this book the young burgher is educated by noblemen and
13 The Prussia which Lessing had described as "Europe's most enslaved country"
was to Mendelssohn "a state in which one of the wisest princes who ever ruled men
has made the arts and sciences flourish, has made national freedom of thought so
general that its beneficent effects reach even the lowliest inhabitants of his domain."
Such humble contentment is touching and surprising if one realizes that the "wisest
prince" had made it very hard for the Jewish philosopher to get permission to sojourn
in Berlin and, at a time when his Miinzjuden enjoyed all privileges, did not even grant
him the regular status of a "protected Jew." Mendelssohn was even aware that he,
the friend of all educated Germany, would be subject to the same tax levied upon
an ox led to the market if ever he decided to visit his friend Lavater in Leipzig, but
no political conclusion regarding the improvement of such conditions ever occurred
to him. (See the "Letter to Lavater," op. cit., and his preface to his translation of
Menasseb Ben Israel in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. Ill, Leipzig, 1843-45.)
^ ANTISEMITISM
actors. SO that he may learn how to present and represent his individuality,
and thereby advance from the modest status of a burgher's son into a noble-
man. For the middle classes and for the Jews, that is, for those who were
actually outside of high aristocratic society, everything depended upon "per-
sonality" and the ability to express it. To know how to play the role of what
one actually was, seemed the most important thing. The pecuUar fact that
in Germany the Jewish question was held to be a question of education was
closely connected with this early start and had its consequence in the educa-
tional Philistinism of both the Jewish and non-Jewish middle classes, and
also in the crowding of Jews into the liberal professions.
The charm of the early Berlin salons was that nothing really mattered
but personality and the uniqueness of character, talent, and ｅxpression.
Such uniqueness, which alone made possible an almost unbounded com-
munication and unrestricted intimacy, could be replaced neither by rank,
money, success, nor literary fame. The brief encounter of true personalities,
which joined a HohenzoUern prince, Louis Ferdinand, to the banker Abra-
ham Mendelssohn; or a political publicist and diplomat, Friedrich Gentz,
to Friedrich Schlegel, a writer of the then ultramodern romantic school —
these were a few of the more famous visitors at Rahel's "garret" — came to
an end in 1806 when, according to their hostess, this unique meeting place
"foundered like a ship containing the highest enjoyment of life." Along
with the aristocrats, the romantic intellectuals became antisemitic, and al-
though this by no means meant that either group gave up all its Jewish
friends, the innocence and splendor were gone.
The real turning point in the social history of German Jews came not in
the year of the Prussian defeat, but two years later, when, in 1808, the
government passed the municipal law giving full civic, though not political,
rights to the Jews. In the peace treaty of 1807, Prussia had lost with her
eastern provinces the majority of her Jewish population; the Jews left within
her territory were "protected Jews" in any event, that is, they already en-
joyed civic rights in the form of individual privileges. The municipal eman-
cipation only legalized these privileges, and outlived the general emancipa-
tion decree of 1812; Prussia, having regained Posen and its Jewish masses
after the defeat of Napoleon, practically rescinded the decree of 1812, which
now would have meant political rights even for poor Jews, but left the mu-
nicipal law intact.
Though of little political importance so far as the actual improvement of
the Jews' status is concerned, these final emancipation decrees together
with the loss of the provinces in which the majority of Prussian Jews lived,
had tremendous social consequences. Before 1807, the protected Jews of
Prussia had numbered only about 20 per cent of the total Jewish population.
By the time the emancipation decree was issued, protected Jews formed the
majority in Prussia, with only 10 per cent of "foreign Jews" left for contrast.
Now the dark poverty and backwardness against which "exception Jews"
of wealth and education had stood out so advantageously was no longer
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 61
there. And this background, so essential as a basis of comparison for social
success and psychological self-respect, never again became what it had been
before Napoleon. When the Polish provinces were regained in 1816, the
formerly "protected Jews" (now registered as Prussian citizens of Jewish
faith) still numbered above 60 per cent,"
Socially speaking, this meant that the remaining Jews in Prussia had lost
the native background against which they had been measured as exceptions.
Now they themselves composed such a background, but a contracted one,
against which the individual had to strain doubly in order to stand out at all.
"Exception Jews" were once again simply Jews, not exceptions from but
representatives of a despised people. Equally bad was the social influence of
governmental interference. Not only the classes antagonistic to the govern-
ment and therefore openly hostile to the Jews, but all strata of society, be-
came more or less aware that Jews of their acquaintance were not so much
individual exceptions as members of a group in whose favor the state was
ready to take exceptional measures. And this was precisely what the "ex-
ception Jews" had always feared.
Berlin society left the Jewish salons with unmatched rapidity, and by
1808 these meeting-places had already been supplanted by the houses of the
titled bureaucracy and the upper middle class. one can see, from any of
the numerous correspondences of the time, that the intellectuals as well as
the aristocrats now began to direct their contempt for the Eastern European
Jews, whom they hardly knew, against the educated Jews of Berlin, whom
they knew very well. The latter would never again achieve the self-respect
that springs from a collective consciousness of being exceptional; henceforth,
each one of them had to prove that although he was a Jew, yet he was not
a Jew. No longer would it suffice to distinguish oneself from a more or less
unknown mass of "backward brethren"; one had to stand out — as an in-
dividual who could be congratulated on being an exception — from "the
Jew," and thus from the people as a whole.
Social discrimination, and not political antisemitism, discovered the phan-
tom of "the Jew." The first author to make the distinction between the
Jewish individual and "the Jew in general, the Jew everywhere and no-
where" was an obscure pubficist who had, in 1 802, written a biting satire on
Jewish society and its hunger for education, the magic wand for general
social acceptance, Jews were depicted as a "principle" of philistine and up-
start society.^^ This rather vulgar piece of literature not only was read with
delight by quite a few prominent members of Rahel's salon, but even indi-
rectly inspired a great romantic poet, Clemens von Brentano, to write a
1* See Heinrich Silbergleit, Die Bevolkerungs- und Berufsverhdltnisse der Juden im
Deutschen Reich, Vol. I, Berlin, 1930.
15 C. W. F. Grattenauer's widely read pamphlet Wider die Juden of 1802 had been
preceded as far back as 1791 by another, Ueber die physische und moralische V erf as-
sung der heutigen Juden in which the growing influence of the Jews in Berlin was
already pointed out. Although the early pamphlet was reviewed in the Allgemeine
Deutsche Bibliothek, 1792, Vol. CXII, almost nobody ever read it.
52 ANTISEMITISM
very witty paper in which again the philistine was identified with the Jew.^«
With the early idyll of a mixed society something disappeared which was
never, in any other country and at any other time, to return. Never again
did any siKial group accept Jews with a free mind and heart. It would be
friendly with Jews either because it was excited by its own daring and "wick-
edness" or as a protest against making pariahs of fellow-citizens. But social
pariahs the Jews did become wherever they had ceased to be political and
civil outcasts.
It is important to bear in mind that assimilation as a group phenomenon
really existed only among Jewish intellectuals. It is no accident that the
first educated Jew, Moses Mendelssohn, was also the first who, despite his
low civic status, was admitted to non-Jewish society. The court Jews and
their successors, the Jewish bankers and businessmen in the West, were
never socially acceptable, nor did they care to leave the very narrow limits
of their invisible ghetto. In the beginning they were proud, like all un-
spoiled upstarts, of the dark background of misery and poverty from which
they had risen; later, when they were attacked from all sides, they had a
vested interest in the poverty and even backwardness of the masses because
it became an argument, a token of their own security. Slowly, and with mis-
givings, they were forced away from the more rigorous demands of Jewish
law — they never left religious traditions altogether — yet demanded all the
more orthodoxy from the Jewish masses.*' The dissolution of Jewish com-
munal autonomy made them that much more eager not only to protect
Jewish communities against the authorities, but also to rule over them with
the help of the state, so that the phrase denoting the "double dependence"
of poor Jews on "both the government and their wealthy brethren" only
reflected reality.**
The Jewish notables (as they were called in the nineteenth century) ruled
"■■ Clemens Brentano's Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte was written
for and read to the so-called Christlicli-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft, a famous club of
writers and patriots, founded in 1808 for the struggle against Napoleon.
1' Thus the Rothschilds in the 1820's withdrew a large donation from their native
community of Frankfurt, in order to counteract the influence of reformers who
wanted Jewish children to receive a general education. See Isaak Markus Jost, Neiiere
Geschichte der Israeliten, 1846, X, 102.
^^ Op. cit., IX, 38. — The court Jews and the rich Jewish bankers who followed in
their footsteps never wanted to leave the Jewish community. They acted as its rep-
resentatives and protectors against public authorities; they were frequently granted
ofTicial power over communities which they ruled from afar so that the old autonomy
of Jewish communities was undermined and destroyed from within long before it
was abolished by the nation-state. The first court Jew with monarchical aspirations in
his own "nation" was a Jew of Prague, a purveyor of supplies to the Elector Maurice
of Saxony in the sixteenth century. He demanded that all rabbis and community
heads be selected from members of his family. (See Bondy-Dworsky, Geschichte der
Jiiden in Boehmen, Maehren und Schlesien, Prague, 1906, II, 727.) The practice of
installing court Jews as dictators in their communities became general in the eighteenth
century and was followed by the rule of "notables" in the nineteenth century.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 63
the Jewish communities, but they did not belong to them socially or even
geographically. They stood, in a sense, as far outside Jewish society as they
did outside Gentile society. Having made brilliant individual careers and
been granted considerable privileges by their masters, they formed a kind
of community of exceptions with extremely Umited social opportunities.
Naturally despised by court society, lacking business connections with the
non- Jewish middle class, their social contacts were as much outside the laws
of society as their economic rise had been independent of contemporary
economic conditions. This isolation and independence frequently gave them
a feeling of power and pride, illustrated by the following anecdote told in
the beginning eighteenth century: "A certain Jew . . . , when gently
reproached by a noble and cultured physician with (the Jewish) pride al-
though they had no princes among them and no part in government . . .
replied with insolence: We are not princes, but we govern them." ^^
Such pride is almost the opposite of class arrogance, which developed
but slowly among the privileged Jews. Ruling as absolute princes among
their own people, they still felt themselves to be primi inter pares. They
were prouder of being a "privileged Rabbi of all Jewry" or a "Prince of the
Holy Land" than of any titles their masters might offer them.^" Until the
middle of the eighteenth century, they would all have agreed with the
Dutch Jew who said: "Neque in toto orbi alicui nationi inservimus," and
neither then nor later would they have understood fully the answer of the
"learned Christian" who replied: "But this means happiness only for a few.
The people considered as a corpo {sic) is hunted everywhere, has no self-
government, is subject to foreign rule, has no power and no dignity, and
wanders all over the world, a stranger everywhere." ^^
Class arrogance came only when business connections were established
among state bankers of different countries; intermarriage between leading
families soon followed, and culminated in a real international caste system,
unknown thus far in Jewish society. This was all the more glaring to non-
Jewish observers, since it took place when the old feudal estates and castes
were rapidly disappearing into new classes. one concluded, very wrongly,
that the Jewish people were a remnant of the Middle Ages and did not see
that this new caste was of quite recent birth. It was completed only in the
nineteenth century and comprised numerically no more than perhaps a
hundred families. But since these were in the limelight, the Jewish people
as a whole came to be regarded as a caste. -^
Great, therefore, as the role of the court Jews had been in political his-
tory and for the birth of antisemitism, social history might easily neglect
isjohann Jacob Schudt, Jiidische Merkwurdigkeiten, Frankfurt a.M., 1715-1717,
IV, Annex, 48.
20 Selma Stern, Jud Suess, Berlin, 1929, pp. 18 f.
21 Schudt, op. cit., I, 19.
22 Christian Friedrich Ruehs defines the whole Jewish people as a "caste of mer-
chants." "Ueber die Anspriiche der Juden an das deutsche Biirgerrecht," in Zeitschrift
fiir die neueste Geschichte, 1815.
. , ANTISEMITISM
them were it not for the fact that they had certain psychological traits and
behavior patterns in common with Jewish intellectuals who were, after all,
usually the sons of businessmen. The Jewish notables wanted to dominate
the Jewish people and therefore had no desire to leave it, while it was char-
acteristic of Jewish intellectuals that they wanted to leave their people and
be admitted to society; they both shared the feeling that they were exceptions,
a feelini: perfectly in harmony with the judgment of their environment. The
"exception Jews" of wealth felt like exceptions from the common destiny
of the Jewish people and were recognized by the governments as exception-
ally useful; the "exception Jews" of education felt themselves exceptions from
the Jewish people and also exceptional human beings, and were recognized
as such by society.
Assimilation, whether carried to the extreme of conversion or not, never
was a real menace to the survival of the Jews.^^ Whether they were welcomed
or rejected, it was because they were Jews, and they were well aware of it.
The first generations of educated Jews still wanted sincerely to lose their
identity as Jews, and Boerne wrote with a great deal of bitterness, "Some
reproach me with being a Jew, some praise me because of it, some pardon
me for it, but all think of it." -* Still brought up on eighteenth-century ideas,
they longed for a country without either Christians or Jews; they had de-
voted themselves to science and the arts, and were greatly hurt when they
found out that governments which would give every privilege and honor to
a Jewish banker, condemned Jewish intellectuals to starvation.'-^ The con-
versions which, in the early nineteenth century, had been prompted by fear
of being lumped together with the Jewish masses, now became a necessity
for daily bread. Such a premium on lack of character forced a whole genera-
tion of Jews into bitter opposition against state and society. The "new
specimens of humanity," if they were worth their salt, all became rebels, and
since the most reactionary governments of the period were supported and
financed by Jewish bankers, their rebellion was especially violent against
the official representatives of their own people. The anti-Jewish denuncia-
tions of Marx and Boerne cannot be properly understood except in the
light of this conflict between rich Jews and Jewish intellectuals.
This conflict, however, existed in full vigor only in Germany and did not
survive the antisemitic movement of the century. In Austria, there was no
Jewish intelligentsia to speak of before the end of the nineteenth century,
23 A remarkable, though little-known, fact is that assimilation as a program led
much more frequently to conversion than to mixed marriage. Unfortunately statistics
cover up rather than reveal this fact because they consider all unions between con-
verted and nonconverted Jewish partners to be mixed marriages. We know, however,
that there were quite a number of families in Germany who had been baptized for
generations and yet remained purely Jewish. That the converted Jew only rarely left
his family and even more rarely left his Jewish surroundings altogether, accounts for
this. The Jewish family, at any rate, proved to be a more conserving force than
Jewish religion.
2* Briefe aus Paris. 74th Letter, February, 1832.
" Ibid., 72nd Letter.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 65
when it felt immediately the whole impact of antisemitic pressure. These
Jews, like their wealthy brethren, preferred to trust themselves to the
Hapsburg monarchy's protection, and became socialist only after the first
World War, when the Social Democratic party came to power. The most
significant, though not the only, exception to this rule was Karl Kraus, the
last representative of the tradition of Heine, Boerne, and Marx. Kraus's
denunciations of Jewish businessmen on one hand, and Jewish journalism
as the organized cult of fame on the other, were perhaps even more bitter
than those of his predecessors because he was so much more isolated in a
country where no Jewish revolutionary tradition existed. In France, where
the emancipation decree had survived all changes of governments and re-
gimes, tfie small number of Jewish intellectuals were neither the forerunners
of a new class nor especially important in intellectual life. Culture as such,
education as a program, did not form Jewish behavior patterns as it did in
Germany.
In no other country had there been anything like the short period of true
assimilation so decisive for the history of German Jews, when the real van-
guard of a people not only accepted Jews, but was even strangely eager to
associate with them. Nor did this attitude ever completely disappear from
German society. To the very end, traces of it could easily be discerned, which
showed, of course, that relations with Jews never came to be taken for
granted. At best it remained a program, at worst a strange and exciting ex-
perience. Bismarck's well-known remark about "German stallions to be
paired off with Jewish mares," is but the most vulgar ｅxpression of a prevalent
point of view.
It is only natural that this social situation, though it made rebels out of
the first educated Jews, would in the long run produce a specific kind of
conformism rather than an effective tradition of rebellion."" Conforming to
a society which discriminated against "ordinary" Jews and in which, at the
same time, it was generally easier for an educated Jew to be admitted to
fashionable circles than for a non-Jew of similar condition, Jews had to
differentiate themselves clearly from the "Jew in general," and just as clearly
to indicate that they were Jews; under no circumstances were they allowed
simply to disappear among their neighbors. In order to rationalize an am-
biguity which they themselves did not fully understand, they might pretend
to "be a man in the street and a Jew at home." -' This actually amounted to
a feeling of being different from other men in the street because they were
Jews, and different from other Jews at home because they were not like
"ordinary Jews."
26 The "conscious pariah" (Bernard Lazare) was the only tradition of rebellion
which established itself, although those who belonged to it were hardly aware of its
existence. See the author's "The Jew as Pariah. A Hidden Tradition," in Jewish Social
Studies, Vol. VI, No. 2 (1944).
27 It is not without irony that this excellent formula, which may serve as a motto
for Western European assimilation, was propounded by a Russian Jew and first pub-
lished in Hebrew. It comes from Judah Leib Gordon's Hebrew poem, Hakitzah ami,
1863. See S. M. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 1918, II, 228 f.
^5 ANTISEMITISM
The behavior patterns of assimilated Jews, determined by this continuous
concentrated effort to distinguish themselves, created a Jewish type that is
recognizable everywhere. Instead of being defined by nationality or religion,
Jews' were being transformed into a social group whose members shared
certain psychological attributes and reactions, the sum total of which was
supposed to constitute "Jewishness." In other words, Judaism became a
psychological quality and the Jewish question became an involved personal
problem for every individual Jew.
In his tragic endeavor to conform through differentiation and distinction,
the new Jewish type had as little in common with the feared "Jew in gen-
eral" as with that abstraction, the "heir of the prophets and eternal pro-
moter of justice on earth," which Jewish apologetics conjured up whenever
a Jewish journalist was being attacked. The Jew of the apologists was en-
dowed with attributes that are indeed the privileges of pariahs, and which
certain Jewish rebels living on the fringe of society did possess — humanity,
kindness, freedom from prejudice, sensitiveness to injustice. The trouble
was that these qualities had nothing to do with the prophets and that, worse
still, these Jews usually belonged neither to Jewish society nor to fashionable
circles of non-Jewish society. In the history of assimilated Jewry, they played
but an insignificant role. The "Jew in general," on the other hand, as de-
scribed by professional Jew-haters, showed those qualities which the par-
venu must acquire if he wants to arrive — inhumanity, greed, insolence,
cringing servility, and determination to push ahead. The trouble in this case
was that these qualities have also nothing to do with national attributes and
that, moreover, these Jewish business-class types showed little inclination
for non-Jewish society and played almost as small a part in Jewish social
history. As long as defamed peoples and classes exist, parvenu- and pariah-
qualities will be produced anew by each generation with incomparable
monotony, in Jewish society and everywhere else.
For the formation of a social history of the Jews within nineteenth-
century European society, it was, however, decisive that to a certain extent
every Jew in every generation had somehow at some time to decide whether
he would remain a pariah and stay out of society altogether, or become a
parvenu, or conform to society on the demoralizing condition that he not so
much hide his- origin as "betray with the secret of his origin the secret of his
people as well." ^^ The latter road was difficult, indeed, as such secrets did
not exist and had to be made up. Since Rahel Vamhagen's unique attempt
to establish a social life outside of official society had failed, the way of the
pariah and the parvenu were equally ways of extreme solitude, and the way
of conformism one of constant regret. The so-called complex psychology of
the average Jew, which in a few favored cases developed into a very modem
sensitiveness, was based on an ambiguous situation. Jews felt simultaneously
the pariah's regret at not having become a parvenu and the parvenu's bad
conscience at having betrayed his people and exchanged equal rights for
"This formulation was made by Karl Kraus around 1912. See Untergang der Welt
duTch schwarze Magie, 1925.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 67
personal privileges. one thing was certain: if one wanted to avoid all am-
biguities of social existence, one had to resign oneself to the fact that to be
a Jew meant to belong either to an overprivileged upper class or to an
underprivileged mass which, in Western and Central Europe, one could be-
long to only through an intellectual and somewhat artificial solidarity.
The social destinies of average Jews were determined by their eternal
lack of decision. And society certainly did not compel them to make up their
minds, for it was precisely this ambiguity of situation and character that
made the relationship with Jews attractive. The majority of assimilated Jews
thus lived in a twilight of favor and misfortune and knew with certainty only
that both success and failure were inextricably connected with the fact that
they were Jews. For them the Jewish question had lost, once and for all, all
political significance; but it haunted their private Uves and influenced their
personal decisions all the more tyrannically. The adage, "a man in the street
and a Jew at home," was bitterly realized: political problems were distorted
to the point of pure perversion when Jews tried to solve them by means of
inner experience and private emotions; private life was poisoned to the point
of inhumanity — for example in the question of mixed marriages — when the
heavy burden of unsolved problems of public significance was crammed
into that private existence which is much better ruled by the unpredictable
laws of passion than by considered policies.
It was by no means easy not to resemble the "Jew in general" and yet re-
main a Jew; to pretend not to be like Jews and still show with sufficient
clarity that one was Jewish. The average Jew, neither a parvenu nor a
"conscious pariah" (Bernard Lazare), could only stress an empty sense of
difference which continued to be interpreted, in all its possible psychological
aspects and variations from innate strangeness to social alienation. As long
as the world was somewhat peaceful, this attitude did not work out badly and
for generations even became a modus vivendi. Concentration on an artifi-
cially complicated inner life helped Jews to respond to the unreasonable
demands of society, to be strange and exciting, to develop a certain imme-
diacy of self-ｅxpression and presentation which were originally the attributes
of the actor and the virtuoso, people whom society has always half denied
and half admired. Assimilated Jews, half proud and half ashamed of their
Jewishness, clearly were in this category.
The process by which bourgeois society developed out of the ruins of its
revolutionary traditions and memories added the black ghost of boredom
to economic saturation and general indifference to political questions. Jews
became people with whom one hoped to while away some time. The less
one thought of them as equals, the more attractive and entertaining they
became. Bourgeois society, in its search for entertainment and its passionate
interest in the individual, insofar as he differed from the norm that is man,
discovered the attraction of everything that could be supposed to be mys-
teriously wicked or secretly vicious. And precisely this feverish preference
opened the doors of society to Jews; for within the framework of this society,
Jewishness, after having been distorted into a psychological quality, could
^ ANTISEMITISM
easily be perverted into a vice. The Enlightenment's genuine tolerance and
curiosity for everything human was being replaced by a morbid lust for the
exotic, abnormal, and different as such. Several types in society, one after
the other, represented the exotic, the anomalous, the different, but none of
them was in the least connected with political questions. Thus only the role of
Jews in this decaying society could assume a stature that transcended the
narrow limits of a society affair.
Before we follow the strange ways which led the "exception Jews," famous
and notorious strangers, into the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain in
fin-de-sii-cle France, we must recall the only great man whom the elaborate
self-deception of the "exception Jews" ever produced. It seems that every
commonplace idea gets one chance in at least one individual to attain what
used to be called historical greatness. The great man of the "exception Jews"
was Benjamin Disraeli.
II : The Potent Wizard "
BENJAMIN DISRAELI, whosc chief interest in life was the career of Lord
Beaconsfield, was distinguished by two things: first, the gift of the gods
which we moderns banally call luck, and which other periods revered as a
goddess named Fortune, and second, more intimately and more wondrously
connected with Fortune than one may be able to explain, the great carefree
innocence of mind and imagination which makes it impossible to classify the
man as a careerist, though he never thought seriously of anything except his
career. His innocence made him recognize how foolish it would be to feel
declasse and how much more exciting it would be for himself and for others,
how much more useful for his career, to accentuate the fact that he was a
Jew "by dressing differently, combing his hair oddly, and by queer manners
of ｅxpression and verbiage." ^° He cared for admission to high and highest
society more passionately and shamelessly than any other Jewish intellectual
did; but he was the only one of them who discovered the secret of how to
preserve luck, that natural miracle of pariahdom, and who knew from the be-
ginning that one never should bow down in order to "move up from high to
higher."
He played the game of politics like an actor in a theatrical performance,
except that he played his part so well that he was convinced by his own
make-believe. His life and his career read like a fairy-tale, in which he ap-
peared as the prince — offering the blue flower of the romantics, now the
primrose of imperialist England, to his princess, the Queen of England.
2> The title phrase is taken from a sketch of Disraeli by Sir John Skleton in 1867.
See W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of
Beaconsfield, New York, 1929, II, 292-93.
'" Morris S. Lazaron, Seed of Abraham, New York, 1930, "Benjamin Disraeli,"
pp. 260 S.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 69
The British colonial enterprise was the fairyland upon which the sun never
sets and its capital the mysterious Asiatic Delhi whence the prince wanted
to escape with his princess from foggy prosaic London. This may have been
foolish and childish; but when a wife writes to her husband as Lady Beacons-
field wrote to hers: "You know you married me for money, and I know
that if you had to do it again you would do it for love," ^^ one is silenced
before a happiness that seemed to be against all the rules. Here was one who
started out to sell his soul to the devil, but the devil did not want the soul
and the gods gave him all the happiness of this earth.
Disraeli came from an entirely assimilated family; his father, an en-
lightened gentleman, baptized the son because he wanted him to have the
opportunities of ordinary mortals. He had few connections with Jewish
society and knew nothing of Jewish religion or customs. Jewishness, from
the beginning, was a fact of origin which he was at liberty to embellish, un-
hindered by actual knowledge. The result was that somehow he looked at
this fact much in the same way as a Gentile would have looked at it. He
realized much more clearly than other Jews that being a Jew could be as
much an opportunity as a handicap. And since, unlike his simple and modest
father, he wanted nothing less than to become an ordinary mortal and
nothing more than "to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries," ^-
he began to shape his "olive complexion and coal-black eyes" until he with
"the mighty dome of his forehead — no Christian temple, to be sure — (was)
unlike any hving creature one has met." " He knew instinctively that every-
thing depended upon the "division between him and mere mortals," upon
an accentuation of his lucky "strangeness."
All this demonstrates a unique understanding of society and its rules.
Significantly, it was Disraeli who said, "What is a crime among the multi-
tude is only a vice among the few" ^* — perhaps the most profound insight
into the very principle by which the slow and insidious decline of nineteenth-
century society into the depth of mob and underworld morality took place.
Since he knew this rule, he knew also that Jews would have no better chances
anywhere than in circles which pretended to be exclusive and to discriminate
against them; for inasmuch as these circles of the few, together with the
multitude, thought of Jewishness as a crime, this "crime" could be trans-
formed at any moment into an attractive "vice." Disraeli's display of exoti-
cism, strangeness, mysteriousness, magic, and power drawn from secret
sources, was aimed correctly at this disposition in society. And it was his
virtuosity at the social game which made him choose the Conservative
Party, won him a seat in Parliament, the post of Prime Minister, and, last
31 Horace B. Samuel, "The Psychology of Disraeli," in Modernities, London, 1914.
32 J. A. Froude thus closes his biography of Lord Beaconsfield, 1890: "The aim
with which he started in life was to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries,
and wild as such an ambition must have appeared, he at last won the stake for which
he played so bravely."
83 Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
3< In his novel Tancred, 1847.
•JQ ANTISEMITISM
but not least, the lasting admiration of society and the friendship of a
Queen.
one of the reasons for his success was the sincerity of his play. The im-
pression he made on his more unbiased contemporaries was a curious mix-
ture of acting and "absolute sincerity and unreserve." ^^ This could only be
achieved by a genuine innocence that was partly due to an upbringing from
which all specific Jewish influence had been excluded. ^^ But Disraeli's good
conscience was also due to his having been born an Englishman. England
did not know Jewish masses and Jewish poverty, as she had admitted them
centuries after their expulsion in the Middle Ages; the Portuguese Jews who
settled in England in the eighteenth century were wealthy and educated.
Not until the end of the nineteenth century, when the pogroms in Russia
initiated the modern Jewish emigrations, did Jewish poverty enter London,
and along with it the difference between the Jewish masses and their well-
to-do brethren. In Disraeli's time the Jewish question, in its Continental
form, was quite unknown, because only Jews welcome to the state lived
in England. In other words, the English "exception Jews" were not so aware
of being exceptions as their Continental brothers were. When Disraeli
scorned the "pernicious doctrine of modern times, the natural equality of
men," *' he consciously followed in the footsteps of Burke who had "pre-
ferred the rights of an Englishman to the Rights of Man," but ignored the
actual situation in which privileges for the few had been substituted for rights
for all. He was so ignorant of the real conditions among the Jewish people,
and so convinced of "the influence of the Jewish race upon modern com-
munities," that he frankly demanded that the Jews "receive all that honour
and favour from the northern and western races, which, in civilized and
refined nations, should be the lot of those who charm the pubhc taste and
elevate the public feeling." ^** Since political influence of Jews in England
centered around the English branch of the Rothschilds, he felt very proud
about the Rothschilds' help in defeating Napoleon and did not see any
reason why he should not be outspoken in his political opinions as a Jew.^"
As a baptized Jew, he was of course never an official spokesman for any
Jewish community, but it remains true that he was the only Jew of his kind
and his century who tried as well as he knew to represent the Jewish people
politically.
Disraeli, who never denied that "the fundamental fact about (him) was
that he was a Jew," *° had an admiration for all things Jewish that was
matched only by his ignorance of them. The mixture of pride and ignorance
•> Sir John Skleton, op. c'lt.
*• Disraeli himself reported: "I was not bred among my race and was nourished
in great prejudice against them." For his family background, see especially Joseph
Caro, "Benjamin Disraeli, Juden und Judentum," in Monatsschrift fur Geschichte und
Wissenschaft des Judentums, 1932, Jahrgang 76.
" Lord George Bentinck. A Political Biography, London, 1852, 496.
*^Ibid.. p. 491.
3» Ibid., pp. 497 ff.
♦0 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 1507.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 71
in these matters, however, was characteristic of all the newly assimilated
Jews. The great difference is that Disraeli knew even a little less of Jewish
past and present and therefore dared to speak out openly what others be-
trayed in the half-conscious twilight of behavior patterns dictated by fear
and arrogance.
The political result of Disraeli's ability to gauge Jewish possibilities by the
political aspirations of a normal people was more serious; he almost auto-
matically produced the entire set of theories about Jewish influence and
organization that we usually find in the more vicious forms of antisemitism.
First of all, he actually thought of himself as the "chosen man of the chosen
race." *^ What better proof was there than his own career: a Jew without
name and riches, helped only by a fev/ Jewish bankers, was carried to the
position of the first man in England; one of the less liked men of Parliament
became Prime Minister and earned genuine popularity among those who for
a long time had "regarded him as a charlatan and treated him as a pariah." ^^
Political success never satisfied him. It was more difficult and more important
to be admitted to London's society than to conquer the House of Commons,
and it was certainly a greater triumph to be elected a member of Grillion's
dining club — "a select coterie of which it has been customary to make rising
politicians of both parties, but from which the socially objectionable are
rigorously excluded" *^ — than to be Her Majesty's Minister. The delightfully
unexpected climax of all these sweet triumphs was the sincere friendship of
the Queen, for if the monarchy in England had lost most of its political
prerogatives in a strictly controlled, constitutional nation-state, it had won
and retained undisputed primacy in English society. In measuring the great-
ness of Disraeli's triumph, one should remember that Lord Robert Cecil,
one of his eminent colleagues in the Conservative Party, could still, around
1850, justify a particularly bitter attack by stating that he was only "plainly
speaking out what every one is saying of Disraeli in private and no one will
say in public." ^* Disraeli's greatest victory was that finally nobody said in
private what would not have flattered and pleased him if it had been said in
public. It was precisely this unique rise to genuine popularity which Disraeli
had achieved through a policy of seeing only the advantages, and preaching
only the privileges, of being born a Jew.
Part of Disraeli's good fortune is the fact that he always fitted his time,
and that consequently his numerous biographers understood him more com-
pletely than is the case with most great men. He was a living embodiment of
ambition, that powerful passion which had developed in a century seemingly
not allowing for any distinctions and differences. Carlyle, at any rate, who
interpreted the whole world's history according to a nineteenth-century
ideal of the hero, was clearly in the wrong when he refused a title from
*i Horace S. Samuel, op. cit.
■*2 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 147.
43 Ibid.
■** Robert Cecil's article appeared in the most authoritative organ of the Tories,
the Quarterly Review. See Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., pp. 19-22.
72 ANTISEMITISM
Disraeli's hands/* No other man among his contemporaries corresponded
to Carlylc's heroes as well as Disraeli, with his concept of greatness as
such, emptied of all specific achievements; no other man fulfilled so exactly
the demands of the late nineteenth century for genius in the flesh as this
charlatan who took his role seriously and acted the great part of the Great
Man with genuine naivete and an overwhelming display of fantastic tricks
and entertaining artistry. Politicians fell in love with the charlatan who trans-
formed boring business transactions into dreams with an oriental flavor;
and when society sensed an aroma of black magic in Disraeli's shrewd
dealings, the "potent wizard" had actually won the heart of his time.
Disraeli's ambition to distinguish himself from other mortals and his
longing for aristocratic society were typical of the middle classes of his time
and country. Neither political reasons nor economic motives, but the im-
petus of his social ambition, made him join the Conservative Party and
follow a policy that would always "select the Whigs for hostility and the
Radicals for alliance." *^ In no European country did the middle classes
ever achieve enough self-respect to reconcile their intelligentsia with their
social status, so that aristocracy could continue to determine the social scale
when it had already lost all political significance. The unhappy German
Philistine discovered his "innate personality" in his desperate struggle against
caste arrogance, which had grown out of the decline of nobility and the
necessity to protect aristocratic titles against bourgeois money. Vague blood
theories and strict control of marriages are rather recent phenomena in the
history of European aristocracy. Disraeli knew much better than the German
Philistines what was required to meet the demands of aristocracy. All at-
tempts of the bourgeoisie to attain social status failed to convince aristo-
cratic arrogance because they reckoned with individuals and lacked the
most important element of caste conceit, the pride in privilege without
individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth. The "innate person-
ality" could never deny that its development demanded education and special
effort of the individual. When Disraeli "summoned up a pride of race to
confront a pride of caste," *'' he knew that the social status of the Jews,
whatever else might be said of it, at least depended solely on the fact of birth
and not on achievement.
Disraeli went even a step further. He knew that the aristocracy, which
year after year had to see quite a number of rich middle-class men buy titles,
was haunted by very serious doubts of its own value. He therefore defeated
them at their game by using his rather trite and popular imagination to
describe fearlessly how the Englishmen "came from a parvenu and hybrid
race, whUe he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe," how
"the life of a British peer (was) mainly regulated by Arabian laws and
♦"This happened as late as 1874. Carlyle is reported to have called Disraeli "a
cursed Jew," "the worst man who ever lived." See Caro, op. cit.
••'Lord Salisbury in an article in the Quarterly Review, 1869.
" E. T. Raymond, Disraeli, The Alien Patriot, London, 1925, p. 1.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 75
Syrian customs," how "a Jewess is the queen of heaven" or that "the flower
of the Jewish race is even now sitting on the right hand of the Lord God of
Sabaoth." ** And when he finally wrote that "there is no longer in fact an
aristocracy in England, for the superiority of the animal man is an essential
quality of aristocracy," " he had in fact touched the weakest point of modern
aristocratic race theories, which were later to be the point of departure for
bourgeois and upstart race opinions.
Judaism, and belonging to the Jewish people, degenerated into a simple
fact of birth only among assimilated Jewry. Originally it had meant a spe-
cific religion, a specific nationality, the sharing of specific memories and
specific hopes, and, even among the privileged Jews, it meant at least still
sharing specific economic advantages. Secularization and assimilation of
the Jewish intelligentsia had changed self-consciousness and self-interpreta-
tion in such a way that nothing was left of the old memories and hopes but
the awareness of belonging to a chosen people. Disraeli, though certainly not
the only "exception Jew" to believe in his own chosenness without believing
in Him who chooses and rejects, was the only one who produced a full-
blown race doctrine out of this empty concept of a historic mission. He was ^
ready to assert that the Semitic principle "represents all that is spiritual in
our nature," that "the vicissitudes of history find their main solution — all is
race," which is "the key to history" regardless of "language and religion,"
for "there is only one thing which makes a race and that is blood" and there
is only one aristocracy, the "aristocracy of nature" which consists of "an
unmixed race of a first-rate organization." ^°
The close relationship of this to more modern race ideologies need noti/
be stressed, and Disraeli's discovery is one more proof of how well theyi
serve to combat feelings of social inferiority. For if race doctrines finally^
served much more sinister and immediately political purposes, it is still
true that much of their plausibility and persuasiveness lay in the fact that
they helped anybody feel himself an aristocrat who had been selected by
birth on the strength of "racial" qualification. That these new selected ones
did not belong to an elite, to a selected few — which, after all, had been in-
herent in the pride of a nobleman — but had to share chosenness with an
ever-growing mob, did no essential harm to the doctrine, for those who did
not belong to the chosen race grew numerically in the same proportion.
Disraeli's race doctrines, however, were as much the result of his extraor-
dinary insight into the rules of society as the outgrowth of the specific
secularization of assimilated Jewry. Not only was the Jewish intelligentsia
caught up in the general secularization process, which in the nineteenth cen-
tury had already lost the revolutionary appeal of the Enlightenment along
with the confidence in an independent, self-reliant humanity and therefore
remained without any protection against transformation of formerly genuine
religious beliefs into superstitions. The Jewish intelligentsia was exposed also
^8 H. B. Samuel, op. cit., Disraeli, Tancred, and Lord George Bentinck, respectively.
*^ In his novel Coningsby, 1844.
^° See Lord George Bentinck and the novels Endymion, 1881, and Coningsby.
J4 ANTISEMITISM
to the Influences of the Jewish reformers who wanted to change a national
religion into a religious denomination. To do so, they had to transform the
two basic elements of Jewish piety — the Messianic hope and the faith in
Israel's chosenness, and they deleted from Jewish prayerbooks the visions of
an ultimate restoration of Zion, along with the pious anticipation of the day
at the end of days when the segregation of the Jewish people from the nations
of the earth would come to an end. Without the Messianic hope, the idea
of chosenness meant eternal segregation; without faith in chosenness, which
charged one specific people with the redemption of the world, Messianic
hope evaporated into the dim cloud of general philanthropy and universalism
which became so characteristic of specifically Jewish political enthusiasm.
The most fateful element in Jewish secularization was that the concept
of chosenness was being separated from the Messianic hope, whereas in
Jewish religion these two elements were two aspects of God's redemptory
plan for mankind. Out of Messianic hope grew that inclination toward final
solutions of political problems which aimed at nothing less than establishing
a paradise on earth. Out of the belief in chosenness by God grew that fan-
tastic delusion, shared by unbelieving Jews and non-Jews alike, that Jews
are by nature more intelligent, better, healthier, more fit for survival — the
motor of history and the salt of the earth. The enthusiastic Jewish intellectual
dreaming of the paradise on earth, so certain of freedom from all national
ties and prejudices, was in fact farther removed from political reality than
his fathers, who had prayed for the coming of Messiah and the return of
the people to Palestine. The assimilationists, on the other hand, who without
any enthusiastic hope had persuaded themselves that they were the salt of
the earth, were more effectively separated from the nations by this unholy
conceit than their fathers had been by the fence of the Law, which, as it was
faithfully believed, separated Israel from the Gentiles but would be de-
stroyed in the days of the Messiah. It was this conceit of the "exception
Jews," who were too "enlightened" to believe in God and, on the grounds
of their exceptional position everywhere, superstitious enough to believe in
themselves, that actually tore down the strong bonds of pious hope which
had tied Israel to the rest of mankind.
Secularization, therefore, finally produced that paradox, so decisive for
the psychology of modern Jews, by which Jewish assimilation — in its liqui-
dation of national consciousness, its transformation of a national religion
into a confessional denomination, and its meeting of the half-hearted and
ambiguous demands of state and society by equally ambiguous devices and
psychological tricks — engendered a very real Jewish chauvinism, if by chau-
vinism we understand the perverted nationalism in which (in the words of
Chesterton) "the individual is himself the thing to be worshipped; the indi-
vidual is his own ideal and even his own idol." From now on, the old
religious concept of chosenness was no longer the essence of Judaism; it
became instead the essence of Jewishness.
This paradox has found its most powerful and charming embodiment in
Disraeli. He was an English imperialist and a Jewish chauvinist; but it is
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 75
not difficult to pardon a chauvinism which was rather a play of imagination
because, after all, "England was the Israel of his imagination"; ^^ and it is
not difficult, either, to pardon his English imperialism, which had so little
in common with the single-minded resoluteness of expansion for expansion's
sake, since he was, after all, "never a thorough Englishman and was proud
of the fact." ^^ All those curious contradictions which indicate so clearly
that the potent wizard never took himself quite seriously and always played
a role to win society and to find popularity, add up to a unique charm, they
introduce into all his utterances an element of charlatan enthusiasm and
day-dreaming which makes him utterly different from his imperialist fol-
lowers. He was lucky enough to do his dreaming and acting in a time when
Manchester and the businessmen had not yet taken over the imperial dream
and were even in sharp and furious opposition to "colonial adventures."
His superstitious belief in blood and race — into which he mixed old ro-
mantic folk credulities about a powerful supranational connection between
gold and blood — carried no suspicion of possible massacres, whether in
Africa, Asia, or Europe proper. He began as a not too gifted writer and
remained an intellectual whom chance made a member of Parliament,
leader of his party, Prime Minister, and a friend of the Queen of England.
Disraeli's notion of the Jews' role in politics dates back to the time when
he was still simply a writer and had not yet begun his political career. His
ideas on the subject were therefore not the result of actual experience, but
he clung to them with remarkable tenacity throughout his later life.
In his first novel, Alroy (1833), Disraeli evolved a plan for a Jewish
Empire in which Jews would rule as a strictly separated class. The novel
shows the influence of current illusions about Jewish power-possibiUties as
well as the young author's ignorance of the actual power conditions of his
time. Eleven years later, political experience in Parliament and intimate
intercourse with prominent men taught Disraeli that "the aims of the Jews,
whatever they may have been before and since, were, in his day, largely
divorced from the assertion of political nationality in any form." ^^ In a new
novel, Coningsby, he abandoned the dream of a Jewish Empire and unfolded
a fantastic scheme according to which Jewish money dominates the rise and
fall of courts and empires and rules supreme in diplomacy. Never in his life
did he give up this second notion of a secret and mysterious influence of the
chosen men of the chosen race, with which he replaced his earlier dream of
an openly constituted, mysterious ruler caste. It became the pivot of his
political philosophy. In contrast to his much-admired Jewish bankers who
granted loans to governments and earned commissions, Disraeli looked at
the whole affair with the outsider's incomprehension that such power-possi-
bilities could be handled day after day by people who were not ambitious for
power. What he could not understand was that a Jewish banker was even
^^ Sir John Skleton, op. cit.
52 Horace B. Samuel, op. cit.
^3 Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit., p. 882.
75 ANTISEMITISM
less interested in politics than his non-Jewish colleagues; to Disraeli, at any
rate, it was a matter of course that Jewish wealth was only a means for
Jewish politics. 1 he more he learned about the Jewish bankers' well-function-
ing organization in business matters and their international exchange of
news and information, the more convinced he became that he was dealing
with something like a secret society which, without anybody knowing it,
had the world's destinies in its hands.
It is well known that the belief in a Jewish conspiracy that was kept to-
gether by a secret society had the greatest propaganda value for antisemitic
publicity, and by far outran all traditional European superstitions about ritual
murder and well-poisoning. It is of great significance that Disraeli, for exactly
opposite purposes and at a time when nobody thought seriously of secret
societies, came to identical conclusions, for it shows clearly to what extent
such fabrications were due to social motives and resentments and how much
more plausibly they explained events or political and economic activities
than the more trivial truth did. In Disraeli's eyes, as in the eyes of many less
well-known and reputable charlatans after him, the whole game of poHtics
was played between secret societies. Not only the Jews, but every other group
whose influence was not politically organized or which was in opposition to
the whole social and political system, became for him powers behind the
scenes. In 1863, he thought he witnessed "a struggle between the secret so-
cieties and the European millionaires; Rothschild hitherto has won." ** But
also "the natural equality of men and the abrogation of property are pro-
claimed by secret societies";" as late as 1870, he could still talk seriously
of forces "beneath the surface" and believe sincerely that "secret societies
and their international energies, the Church of Rome and her claims and
methods, the eternal conflict between science and faith" were at work to
determine the course of human history.^"
Disraeli's unbelievable naivete made him connect all these "secret" forces
with the Jews. "The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian di-
plomacy which so alarms Western Europe is organized and principally
carried on by Jews; that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing
in Germany and which will be in fact a second and greater Reformation . . .
is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews," "men of Jewish race are
found at the head of every one of (communist and socialist groups). The
people of God co-operates with atheists; the most skilful accumulators of
property ally themselves with communists, the peculiar and chosen race
touch the hands of the scum and low castes of Europe! And all this be-
cause they wish to destroy that ungrateful Christendom which owes them
even its name and whose tyranny they can no longer endure." ^^ In Disraeli's
imagination, the world had become Jewish.
»♦ Ibid., p. 73. In a letter to Mrs. Brydges Williams of July 21, 1863.
'* Lord George Benlinck, p. 497.
*« In his novel Lothair, 1870.
*' Lord George Bentinck.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 77
In this singular delusion, even that most ingenious of Hitler's publicity
stunts, the cry of a secret alliance between the Jewish capitalist and the
Jewish socialist, was already anticipated. Nor can it be denied that the whole
scheme, imaginary and fantastic as it was, had a logic of its own. If one
started, as Disraeli did, from the assumption that Jewish millionaires were
makers of Jewish politics, if one took into account the insults Jews had suf-
fered for centuries (which were real enough, but still stupidly exaggerated
by Jewish apologetic propaganda), if one had seen the not infrequent in-
stances when the son of a Jewish millionaire became a leader of the workers'
movement and knew from experience how closely knit Jewish family ties
were as a rule, Disraeli's image of a calculated revenge upon the Christian
peoples was not so far-fetched. The truth was, of course, that the sons of
Jewish millionaires inclined toward leftist movements precisely because their
banker fathers had never come into an open class conflict with workers.
They therefore completely lacked that class consciousness that the son of
any ordinary bourgeois family would have had as a matter of course, while,
on the other side, and for exactly the same reasons, the workers did not
harbor those open or hidden antisemitic sentiments which every other class
showed the Jews as a matter of course. Obviously leftist movements in most
countries offered the only true possibilities for assimilation.
Disraeli's persistent fondness for explaining politics in terms of secret
societies was based on experiences which later convinced many lesser Euro-
pean intellectuals. His basic experience had been that a place in English
society was much more difficult to win than a seat in Parliament. English
society of his time gathered in fashionable clubs which were independent
of party distinctions. The clubs, although they were extremely important
in the formation of a political elite, escaped pubhc control. To an outsider
they must have looked very mysterious indeed. They were secret insofar as
not everybody was admitted to them. They became mysterious only when
members of other classes asked admittance and were either refused or ad-
mitted after a plethora of incalculable, unpredictable, apparently irrational
difficulties. There is no doubt that no political honor could replace the
triumphs that intimate association with the privileged could give. Disraeli's
ambitions, significantly enough, did not suffer even at the end of his life when
he experienced severe political defeats, for he remained "the most com-
manding figure of London society." ^^
In his naive certainty of the paramount importance of secret societies,
Disraeli was a forerunner of those new social strata who, born outside the
s»Monypenny and Buckle, op. cit, p. 1470. This excellent biography gives a correct
evaluation of Disraeli's triumph. After having quoted Tennyson's In Memoriam,
canto 64, it continues as follows: "In one respect Disraeli's success was more striking
and complete than that suggested in Tennyson's lines; he not only scaled, the political
ladder to the topmost rung and 'shaped the whisper of the throne'; he also conquered
Society. He dominated the dinner-tables and what we would call the salons of May-
fair . . . and his social triumph, whatever may be thought by philosophers of its
intrinsic value, was certainly not less difficult of achievement for a despised outsider
than his political, and was perhaps sweeter to his palate" (p. 1506).
Jg ANTISEMITISM
framework of society, could never understand its rules properly. They found
themselves in a state of affairs where the distinctions between society and
politics were constantly blurred and where, despite seemingly chaotic condi-
tions, the same narrow class interest always won. The outsider could not but
conclude that a consciously established institution with definite goals
achieved such remarkable results. And it is true that this whole society game
needed only a resolute political will to transform its half-conscious play of
interests and essentially purposeless machinations into a definite policy. This
is what occurred briefly in France during the Dreyfus Affair, and again in
Germany during the decade preceding Hitler's rise to power.
Disraeli, however, was not only outside of English, he was outside of
Jewish, society as well. He knew little of the mentality of the Jewish bankers
whom he so deeply admired, and he would have been disappointed indeed
had he realized that these "exception Jews," despite exclusion from bour-
geois society (they never really tried to be admitted), shared its foremost
political principle that political activity centers around protection of property
and profits. Disraeli saw, and was impressed by, only a group with no out-
ward political organization, whose members were still connected by a seem-
ing infinity of family and business connections. His imagination went to
work whenever he had to deal with them and found everything "proved" —
when, for instance, the shares of the Suez Canal were offered the English
government through the information of Henry Oppenheim (who had learned
that the Khedive of Egypt was anxious to sell) and the sale was carried
through with the help of a four million sterling loan from Lionel Rothschild.
Disraeli's racial convictions and theories about secret societies sprang,
in the last analysis, from his desire to explain something apparently mysteri-
ous and in fact chimerical. He could not make a political reality out of the
chimerical power of "exception Jews"; but he could, and did, help transform
chimeras into public fears and to entertain a bored society with highly
dangerous fairy-tales.
With the consistency of most race fanatics, DisraeU spoke only with con-
tempt of the "modern newfangled sentimental principle of nationaUty." ^® He
hated the political equality at the basis of the nation-state and he feared for
the survival of the Jews under its conditions. He fancied that race might
give a social as well as political refuge against equalization. Since he knew
the nobility of his time far better than he ever came to know the Jewish
people, it is not surprising that he modeled the race concept after aristocratic
caste concepts.
No doubt these concepts of the socially underprivileged could have gone
far, but they would have had little significance in European politics had they
not met with real political necessities when, after the scramble for Africa,
they could be adapted to political purposes. This willingness to believe on the
part of bourgeois society gave Disraeli, the only Jew of the nineteenth cen-
tury, his share of genuine popularity. In the end, it was not his fault that the
w Ibid., Vol. I, Book 3.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 79
same trend that accounted for his singular great good fortune finally led to
the great catastrophe of his people.
Ill: Between Vice and Crime
PARIS HAS rightly been called la capitale du dixneuvieme siecle (Walter
Benjamin). Full of promise, the nineteenth century had started with the
French Revolution, for more than one hundred years witnessed the vain
struggle against the degeneration of the citoyen into the bourgeois, reached
its nadir in the Dreyfus Affair, and was given another fourteen years of
morbid respite. The first World War could still be won by the Jacobin appeal
of Clemenceau, France's last son of the Revolution, but the glorious century
of the nation par excellence was at an end '^° and Paris was left; without
political significance and social splendor, to the intellectual avant-garde of
all countries. France played a very small part in the twentieth century, which
started, immediately after Disraeli's death, with the scramble for Africa and
the competition for imperialist domination in Europe. Her decline, there-
fore, caused partly by the economic expansion of other nations, and partly
by internal disintegration, could assume forms and follow laws which seemed
inherent in the nation-state.
To a certain extent, what happened in France in the eighties and nineties
happened thirty and forty years later in all European nation-states. Despite
chronological distances, the Weimar and Austrian Republics had much in
common historically with the Third Republic, and certain political and
social patterns in the Germany and Austria of the twenties and thirties
seemed almost consciously to follow the model of France's fin-de-siecle.
Nineteenth-century antisemitism, at any rate, reached its climax in France
and was defeated because it remained a national domestic issue without
contact with imperialist trends, which did not exist there. The main features
of this kind of antisemitism reappeared in Germany and Austria after the
first World War, and its social effect on the respective Jewries was almost
the same, although less sharp, less extreme, and more disturbed by other
influences. "^^
60 Yves Simon, La Grande Crise de la Republique Frangaise, Montreal, 1941, p.
20: "The spirit of the French Revolution survived the defeat of Napoleon for more
than a century. ... It triumphed but only to fade unnoticed on November 11, 1918.
The French Revolution? Its dates must surely be set at 1789-1918."
61 The fact that certain psychological phenomena did not come out as sharply in
German and Austrian Jews, may partly be due to the strong hold of the Zionist move-
ment on Jewish intellectuals in these countries. Zionism in the decade after the first
World War, and even in the decade preceding it, owed its strength not so much to
political insight (and did not produce political convictions), as it did to its critical
analysis of psychological reactions and sociological facts. Its influence was mainly
pedagogical and went far beyond the relatively small circle of actual members of the
Zionist movement.
80 ANTISEMITISM
The chief reason, however, for the choice of the salons of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain as an example of the role of Jews in non-Jewish society is
that nowhere else is there an equally grand society or a more truthful record
of it. When Marcel Proust, himself half Jewish and in emergencies ready to
identify himself as a Jew, set out to search for "things past," he actually
wrote what one of his admiring critics has called an apologia pro vita sua.
The life of this greatest writer of twentieth-century France was spent ex-
clusively in society; all events appeared to him as they are reflected in society
and reconsidered by the individual, so that reflections and reconsiderations
constitute the specific reality and texture of Proust's world.^- Throughout
the Remembrance of Things Past, the individual and his reconsiderations
belong to society, even when he retires into the mute and uncommunicative
solitude in which Proust himself finally disappeared when he had decided
to write his work. There his inner life, which insisted on transforming all
worldly happenings into inner experience, became like a mirror in whose
reflection truth might appear. The contemplator of inner experience re-
sembles the onlooker in society insofar as neither has an immediate approach
to life but perceives reality only if it is reflected. Proust, bom on the fringe
of society, but still rightfully belonging to it though an outsider, enlarged
this inner experience until it included the whole range of aspects as they
appeared to and were reflected by all members of society.
There is no better witness, indeed, of this period when society had eman-
cipated itself completely from public concerns, and when politics itself
was becoming a part of social life. The victory of bourgeois values over the
citizen's sense of responsibility meant the decomposition of political issues
into their dazzling, fascinating reflections in society. It must be added that
Proust himself was a true exponent of this society, for he was involved in
both of its most fashionable "vices," which he, "the greatest witness of
dejudaized Judaism" interconnected in the "darkest comparison which ever
has been made on behalf of Western Judaism": ^^ the "vice" of Jewishness
and the "vice" of homosexuality, and which in their reflection and individual
reconsideration became very much alike indeed.^*
It was Disraeli who had discovered that vice is but the corresponding
reflection of crime in society. Human wickedness, if accepted by society, is
changed from an act of will into an inherent, psychological quality which
man cannot choose or reject but which is imposed upon him from without,
and which rules him as compulsively as the drug rules the addict. In as-
*2 Compare the interesting remarks on this subject by E. Levinas, "L' Autre dans
Proust" in Deucalion, No. 2, 1947.
** J. E. van Praag, "Marcel Proust, Temoin du Judaisme dejudaize" in Revue Juive
de Geneve, 1937, Nos. 48, 49, 50.
A curious coincidence (or is it more than a coincidence?) occurs in the moving-
picture Crossfire which deals with the Jewish question. The story was taken from
Richard Brooks's The Brick Foxhole, in which the murdered Jew of Crossfire was a
homosexual.
«♦ For the following see especially Cities of the Plain, Part I, pp. 20-45.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 81
similating crime and transforming it into vice, society denies all responsibility
and establishes a world of fatalities in which men find themselves entangled.
The moralistic judgment as a crime of every departure from the norm, which
fashionable circles used to consider narrow and philistine, if demonstrative
of inferior psychological understanding, at least showed greater respect for
human dignity. If crime is understood to be a kind of fataUty, natural or
economic, everybody will finally be suspected of some special predestination
to it. "Punishment is the right of the criminal," of which he is deprived if
(in the words of Proust) "judges assume and are more inclined to pardon
murder in inverts and treason in Jews for reasons derived from . . . racial
predestination." It is an attraction to murder and treason which hides behind
such perverted tolerance, for in a moment it can switch to a decision to
liquidate not only all actual criminals but all who are "racially" predestined
to commit certain crimes. Such changes take place whenever the legal and
political machine is not separated from society so that social standards can
penetrate into it and become political and legal rules. The seeming broad-
mindedness that equates crime and vice, if allowed to establish its own code
of law, will invariably prove more cruel and inhuman than laws, no matter
how severe, which respect and recognize man's independent responsibiUty
for his behavior.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain, however, as Proust depicts it, was in the
early stages of this development. It admitted inverts because it felt attracted
by what it judged to be a vice. Proust describes how Monsieur de Charlus,
who had formerly been tolerated, "notwithstanding his vice," for his per-
sonal charm and old name, now rose to social heights. He no longer needed
to lead a double life and hide his dubious acquaintances, but was encouraged
to bring them into the fashionable houses. Topics of conversation which he
formerly would have avoided — love, beauty, jealousy — lest somebody sus-
pect his anomaly, were now welcomed avidly "in view of the experience,
strange, secret, refined and monstrous upon which he founded" his views.®'
Something very similar happened to the Jews. Individual exceptions,
ennobled Jews, had been tolerated and even welcomed in the society of the
Second Empire, but now Jews as such were becoming increasingly popular.
In both cases, society was far from being prompted by a revision of preju-
dices. They did not doubt that homosexuals were "criminals" or that Jews
were "traitors"; they only revised their attitude toward crime and treason.
The trouble with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they
were no longer horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified
by crime. They did not in the least doubt the conventional judgment. The
best-hidden disease of the nineteenth century, its terrible boredom and
general weariness, had burst like an abscess. The outcasts and the pariahs
upon whom society called in its predicament were, whatever else they might
have been, at least not plagued by ennui and, if we are to trust Proust's
judgment, were the only ones in fin-de-siecle society who were still capable
6^ Cities of the Plain, Part 11, chapter iii.
g2 ANTISEMITISM
of passion. Proust leads us through the labyrinth of social connections and
ambitions onlv by the thread of man's capacity for love, which is presented
in the perverted passion of Monsieur de Charlus for Morel, in the devastat-
ing loyaUy of the Jew Swann to his courtesan and in the author's own
desperate jealousy of Albertinc, herself the personification of vice in the
novel. Proust made it very clear that he regarded the outsiders and new-
comers, the inhabitants of "Sodome et Ghomorre." not only as more human
but as more normal.
The ditlerence between the Faubourg Sa nt-Germain, which had suddenly
discovered the attractiveness of Jews and inverts, and the mob which cried
"Death to the Jews" was that the salons had not yet associated themselves
openly with crime. This meant that on the one hand they did not yet want
to participate actively in the killing, and on the other, still professed openly
an antipathy toward Jews and a horror of inverts. This in turn resulted in
that typically equivocal situation in which the new members could not con-
fess their identity openly, and yet could not hide it either. Such were the
conditions from which arose the complicated game of exposure and con-
cealment, of half-confessions and lying distortions, of exaggerated humility
and exaggerated arrogance, all of which were consequences of the fact that
only one's Jewishness (or homosexuality) had opened the doors of the
exclusive salons, while at the same time they made one's position extremely
insecure. In this equivocal situation, Jewishness was for the individual Jew
at once a physical stain and a mysterious personal privilege, both inherent
in a "racial predestination."
Proust describes at great length how society, constantly on the lookout
for the strange, the exotic, the dangerous, finally identifies the refined with
the monstrous and gets ready to admit monstrosities — real or fancied — such
as the strange, unfamiliar "Russian or Japanese play performed by native
actors"; '^''' the "painted, paunchy, tightly buttoned personage [of the invert],
reminding one of a box of exotic and dubious origin from which escapes the
curious odor of fruits the mere thought of tasting which stirs the heart"; "^
the "man of genius" who is supposed to emanate a "sense of the super-
natural" and around whom society will "gather as though around a turning-
table, to learn the secret of the Infinite." ^^ In the atmosphere of this
"necromancy," a Jewish gentleman or a Turkish lady might appear "as if
they really were creatures evoked by the effort of a medium." ^^
Obviously the role of the exotic, the strange, and the monstrous could
not be played by those individual "exception Jews" who, for almost a cen-
tury, had been admitted and tolerated as "foreign upstarts" and on "whose
friendship nobody would ever have dreamed of priding himself." ''° Much
better suited of course were those whom nobody had ever known, who, in
the first stage of their assimilation, were not identified with, and were not
representative of, the Jewish community, for such identification with well-
88 Ibid. 69 itid,
8' Ibid. 70 ihid,
"8 The Guermantes Way, Part I, chapter i.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 83
known bodies would have limited severely society's imagination and ex-
pectations. Those who, like Swann, had an unaccountable flair for society
and taste in general were admitted; but more enthusiastically embraced were
those who, like Bloch, belonged to "a family of little repute, [and J had to
support, as on the floor of the ocean, the incalculable pressure of what was
imposed on him not only by the Christians upon the surface but by all the
intervening layers of Jewish castes superior to his own, each of them crushing
with its contempt the one that was immediately beneath it." Society's will-
ingness to receive the utterly alien and, as it thought, utterly vicious, cut short
that climb of several generations by which newcomers had "to carve their
way through to the open air by raising themselves from Jewish family to
Jewish family." " It was no accident that this happened shortly after native
French Jewry, during the Panama scandal, had given way before the initia-
tive and unscrupulousness of some German Jewish adventurers; the indi-
vidual exceptions, with or without title, who more than ever before sought
the society of antisemitic and monarchist salons where they could dream
of the good old days of the Second Empire, found themselves in the same
category as Jews whom they would never have invited to their houses. If
Jewishness as exceptionalness was the reason for admitting Jews, then those
were preferred who were clearly "a solid troop, homogeneous within itself
and utterly dissimilar to the people who watched them go past," those who
had not yet "reached the same stage of assimilation" as their upstart
brethren."
Although Benjamin Disraeli was still one of those Jews who were ad-
mitted to society because they were exceptions, his secularized self-represen-
tation as a "chosen man of the chosen race" foreshadowed and outlined the
lines along which Jewish self-interpretation was to take place. If this, fantastic
and crude as it was, had not been so oddly similar to what society expected
of Jews, Jews would never have been able to play their dubious role. Not,
of course, that they consciously adopted Disraeli's convictions or purposely
elaborated the first timid, perverted self-interpretation of their Prussian
predecessors of the beginning of the century; most of them were blissfully
ignorant of all Jewish history. But wherever Jews were educated, secularized,
and assimilated under the ambiguous conditions of society and state in
Western and Central Europe, they lost that measure of political responsi-
bility which their origin implied and which the Jewish notables had still felt,
albeit in the form of privilege and rulership. Jewish origin, without religious
and political connotation, became everywhere a psychological quaUty, was
changed into "Jewishness," and from then on could be considered only in
the categories of virtue or vice. If it is true that "Jewishness" could not have
been perverted into an interesting vice without a prejudice which considered
it a crime, it is also true that such perversion was made possible by those
Jews who considered it an innate virtue.
-♦-
^1 Within a Budding Grove, Part II, "Placenames: The Place."
" Ibid.
S4 ANTISEMITISM
Assimilated Jewry has been reproached with aHenation from Judaism, and
the final catastrophe brought upon it is frequently thought to have been a
suffering as senseless as it was horrible, since it had lost the old value of
martyrdom. This argument overlooks the fact that as far as the old ways of
faith and life are concerned, "alienation" was equally apparent in Eastern
European countries. But the usual notion of the Jews of Western Europe
as "dejudaized" is misleading for another reason. Proust's picture, in con-
trast to the all too obviously interested utterances of official Judaism, shows
that never did the fact of Jewish birth play such a decisive role in private
life and everyday existence as among the assimilated Jews. The Jewish re-
former who changed a national religion into a religious denomination with
the understanding that religion is a private affair, the Jewish revolutionary
who pretended to be a world citizen in order to rid himself of Jewish na-
tionality, the educated Jew, "a man in the street and a Jew at home" — each
one of these succeeded in converting a national quality into a private affair.
The result was that their private lives, their decisions and sentiments, be-
came the very center of their "Jewishness." And the more the fact of Jewish
birth lost its religious, national, and social-economic significance, the more
obsessive Jewishness became; Jews were obsessed by it as one may be by a
physical defect or advantage, and addicted to it as one may be to a vice.
Proust's "innate disposition" is nothing but this personal, private obses-
sion, which was so greatly justified by a society where success and failure
depended upon the fact of Jewish birth. Proust mistook it for "racial pre-
destination," because he saw and depicted only its social aspect and indi-
vidual reconsiderations. And it is true that to the recording onlooker the
behavior of the Jewish clique showed the same obsession as the behavior
patterns followed by inverts. Both felt either superior or inferior, but in any
case proudly different from other normal beings; both believed their dif-
ference to be a natural fact acquired by birth; both were constantly justifying,
not what they did, but what they were; and both, finally, always wavered
between such apologetic attitudes and sudden, provocative claims that they
were an elite. As though their social position were forever frozen by nature,
neither could move from one clique into another. The need to belong existed
in other members of society too — "the question is not as for Hamlet, to be
or not to be, but to belong or not to belong" " — but not to the same extent.
A society disintegrating into cliques and no longer tolerating outsiders,
Jews or inverts, as individuals but because of the special circumstances of
their admission, looked like the embodiment of this clannishness.
Each society demands of its members a certain amount of acting, the
ability to present, represent, and act what one actually is. When society dis-
integrates into cliques such demands are no longer made of the individual
but of members of cliques. Behavior then is controlled by silent demands
and not by individual capacities, exactly as an actor's performance must fit
'^ Cities of the Plain. Part II, chapter iii.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 85
into the ensemble of all other roles in the play. The salons of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain consisted of such an ensemble of cliques, each of which pre-
sented an extreme behavior pattern. The role of the inverts was to show
their abnormality, of the Jews to represent black magic ("necromancy"),
of the artists to manifest another form of supranatural and superhuman con-
tact, of the aristocrats to show that they were not like ordinary ("bourgeois")
people. Despite their clannishness, it is true, as Proust observed, that "save
on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as
the Jews rallied round Dreyfus," all these newcomers shunned intercourse
with their own kind. The reason was that all marks of distinction were de-
termined only by the ensemble of the cliques, so that Jews or inverts felt
that they would lose their distinctive character in a society of Jews or inverts,
where Jewishness or homosexuality would be the most natural, the most
uninteresting, and the most banal thing in the world. The same, however,
held true of their hosts who also needed an ensemble of counterparts before
whom they could be different, nonaristocrats who would admire aristocrats
as these admired the Jews or the homosexuals.
Although these cliques had no consistency in themselves and dissolved as
soon as no members of other cliques were around, their members used a
mysterious sign-language as though they needed something strange by which
to recognize each other. Proust reports at length the importance of such
signs, especially for newcomers. While, however, the inverts, masters at sign-
language, had at least a real secret, the Jews used this language only to
create the expected atmosphere of mystery. Their signs mysteriously and
ridiculously indicated something universally known: that in the corner of
the salon of the Princess So-and-So sat another Jew who was not allowed
openly to admit his identity but who without this meaningless quality would
never have been able to climb into that corner.
It is noteworthy that the new mixed society at the end of the nineteenth
century, like the first Jewish salons in Berlin, again centered around nobility.
Aristocracy by now had all but lost its eagerness for culture and its curiosity
about "new specimens of humanity," but it retained its old scorn of bourgeois
society. An urge for social distinction was its answer to political equality and
the loss of political position and privilege which had been affirmed with the
establishment of the Third Republic. After a short and artificial rise during
the Second Empire, French aristocracy maintained itself only by social clan-
nishness and half-hearted attempts to reserve the higher positions in the
army for its sons. Much stronger than political ambition was an aggressive
contempt for middle-class standards, which undoubtedly was one of the
strongest motives for the admission of individuals and whole groups of
people who had belonged to socially unacceptable classes. The same motive
that had enabled Prussian aristocrats to meet socially with actors and Jews
finally led in France to the social prestige of inverts. The middle classes, on
the other hand, had not acquired social self-respect, although they had in
the meantime risen to wealth and power. The absence of a political hierarchy
Sa ANTISEMITISM
in the nation-state and the victory of equality rendered "society secretly
more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic." ''* Since the
principle of hierarchy was embodied in the exclusive social circles of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain, each society in France "reproduced the character-
istics more or less modified, more or less in caricature of the society of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain which it sometimes pretended ... to hold in
contempt, no matter what status or what political ideas its members might
hold." Aristocratic society was a thing of the past in appearance only;
actually it pervaded the whole social body (and not only of the people of
France) by imposing "the key and the grammar of fashionable social life." "
When Proust felt the need for an apologia pro vita sua and reconsidered his
own life spent in aristocratic circles, he gave an analysis of society as such.
The main point about the role of Jews in this fin-de-siecle society is that
it was the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair which opened society's doors
to Jews, and that it was the end of the Affair, or rather the discovery of
Dreyfus' innocence, that put an end to their social glory. ^^ In other words,
no matter what the Jews thought of themselves or of Dreyfus, they could
play the role society had assigned them only as long as this same society was
convinced that they belonged to a race of traitors. When the traitor was dis-
covered to be the rather stupid victim of an ordinary frame-up, and the inno-
cence of the Jews was established, social interest in Jews subsided as quickly
as did political antisemitism. Jews were again looked upon as ordinary
mortals and fell into the insignificance from which the supposed crime of
one of their own had raised them temporarily.
It was essentially the same kind of social glory that the Jews of Germany
and Austria enjoyed under much more severe circumstances immediately
after the first World War. Their supposed crime then was that they had been
guilty of the war, a crime which, no longer identified with a single act of a
single individual, could not be refuted, so that the mob's evaluation of Jew-
ishness as a crime remained undisturbed and society could continue to be
delighted and fascinated by its Jews up to the very end. If there is any psy-
chological truth in the scapegoat theory, it is as the effect of this social atti-
tude toward Jews; for when antisemitic legislation forced society to oust the
Jews, these "philosemites" felt as though they had to purge themselves of
secret viciousness, to cleanse themselves of a stigma which they had mys-
teriously and wickedly loved. This psychology, to be sure, hardly explains
why these "admirers" of Jews finally became their murderers, and it may
''* The Guermantes Way, Part II, chapter ii.
^» Ramon Fernandez, "La vie sociale dans I'oeuvre de Marcel Proust," in Les Cahiers
Marcel Proust, No. 2, 1927.
'« "But this was the moment when from the effects of the Dreyfus case there had
arisen an antisemitic movement parallel to a more abundant movement towards the
penetration of society by Israelites. The politicians had not been wrong in thinking
that the discovery of the judicial error would deal a fatal blow to antisemitism. But
provisionally at least a social antisemitism was on the contrary enhanced and
exacerbated by it." See The Sweet Cheat Gone, chapter ii.
THE JEWS AND SOCIETY 87
even be doubted that they were prominent among those who ran the death
factories, ahhough the percentage of the so-called educated classes among
the actual killers is amazing. But it does explain the incredible disloyalty of
precisely those strata of society which had known Jews most intimately and
had been most delighted and charmed by Jewish friends.
As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of
Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the
extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from
Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment;
a vice can only be exterminated. The interpretation given by society to the
fact of Jewish birth and the role played by Jews in the framework of social
life are intimately connected with the catastrophic thoroughness with which
antisemitic devices could be put to work. The Nazi brand of antisemitism
had its roots in these social conditions as well as in political circumstances.
And though the concept of race had other and more immediately political
purposes and functions, its application to the Jewish question in its most
sinister aspect owed much of its success to social phenomena and convictions
which virtually constituted a consent by public opinion.
The deciding forces in the Jews' fateful journey to the storm center of
events were without doubt political; but the reactions of society to anti-
semitism and the psychological reflections of the Jewish question in the
individual had something to do with the specific cruelty, the organized and
calculated assault upon every single individual of Jewish origin, that was
already characteristic of the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair. This pas-
sion-driven hunt of the "Jew in general," the "Jew everywhere and nowhere,"
cannot be understood if one considers the history of antisemitism as an
entity in itself, as a mere political movement. Social factors, unaccounted
for in political or economic history, hidden under the surface of events, never
perceived by the historian and recorded only by the more penetrating and
passionate force of poets or novelists (men whom society had driven into
the desperate solitude and loneliness of the apologia pro vita sua) changed
the course that mere political antisemitism would have taken if left to
itself, and which might have resulted in anti-Jewish legislation and even
mass expulsion but hardly in wholesale extermination.
Ever since the Dreyfus Affair and its political threat to the rights of
French Jewry had produced a social situation in which Jews enjoyed an
ambiguous glory, antisemitism appeared in Europe as an insoluble mixture
of political motives and social elements. Society always reacted first to a
strong antisemitic movement with marked preference for Jews, so that
Disraeli's remark that "there is no race at this present . . . that so much
delights and fascinates and elevates and ennobles Europe as the Jewish,"
became particularly true in times of danger. Social "philosemitism" always
ended by adding to political antisemitism that mysterious fanaticism with-
out which antisemitism could hardly have become the best slogan for or-
ganizing the masses. All the declasses of capitaUst society were finally ready
88 ANTISEMITISM
to unite and establish mob organizations of their own; their propaganda and
their attraction rested on the assumption that a society which had shown its
willingness to incorporate crime in the form of vice into its very structure
would by now be ready to cleanse itself of viciousness by openly admitting
criminals and by publicly committing crimes.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Dreyfus Affair
i: The Facts of the Case
IT HAPPENED in France at the end of the year 1894. Alfred Dreyfus, a
Jewish officer of the French General Staff, was accused and convicted
of espionage for Germany. The verdict, lifelong deportation to Devil's
Island, was unanimously adopted. The trial took place behind closed doors.
Out of an allegedly voluminous dossier of the prosecution, only the so-called
"bordereau" was shown. This was a letter, supposedly in Dreyfus' hand-
writing, addressed to the German military attache, Schwartzkoppen. In July,
1895, Colonel Picquard became head of the Information Division of the
General Staff. In May, 1896, he told the chief of the General Staff, Boisdeffre,
that he had convinced himself of Dreyfus' innocence and of the guilt of an-
other officer, Major Walsin-Esterhazy. Six months later, Picquard was re-
moved to a dangerous post in Tunisia. At the same time, Bernard Lazare, on
behalf of Dreyfus' brothers, published the first pamphlet of the Affair: Une
erreur judiciaire; la verite sur I'affaire Dreyfus. In June, 1897, Picquard in-
formed Scheurer-Kesten, Vice-President of the Senate, of the facts of the
trials and of Dreyfus' innocence. In November, 1897, Clemenceau started
his fight for re-examination of the case. Four weeks later Zola joined the
ranks of the Dreyfusards. J' Accuse was published by Clemenceau's news-
paper in January, 1898. At the same time, Picquard was arrested. Zola, tried
for calumny of the army, was convicted by both the ordinary tribunal and
the Court of Appeal. In August, 1898, Esterhazy was dishonorably dis-
charged because of embezzlement. He at once hurried to a British journalist
and told him that he — and not Dreyfus — was the author of the "bordereau,"
which he had forged in Dreyfus' handwriting on orders from Colonel Sand-
herr, his superior and former chief of the counterespionage division. A few
days later Colonel Henry, another member of the same department, con-
fessed forgeries of several other pieces of the secret Dreyfus dossier and com-
mitted suicide. Thereupon the Court of Appeal ordered an investigation of
the Dreyfus case.
In June, 1899, the Court of Appeal annulled the original sentence against
Dreyfus of 1894. The revision trial took place in Rennes in August. The
sentence was made ten years' imprisonment because of "alleviating circum-
stances." A week later Dreyfus was pardoned by the President of the Repub-
lic. The World Exposition opened in Paris in April, 1900. In May, when the
success of the Exposition was guaranteed, the Chamber of Deputies, with
gg ANTISEMITISM
overwhelming majority, voted against any further revision of the Dreyfus
case. In December of the same year all trials and lawsuits comiected with the
affair were liquidated through a general amnesty.
In 1903 Dreyfus asked for a new revision. His petition was neglected
until 1906, when Clcmenccau had become Prime Minister. In July, 1906,
the Court of Appeal annulled the sentence of Rennes and acquitted Dreyfus
of all charges. The Court of Appeal, however, had no authority to acquit;
it should have ordered a new trial. Another revision before a military
tribunal would, in all probability and despite the overwhelming evidence in
favor of Dreyfus, have led to a new conviction. Dreyfus, therefore, was never
acquitted in accordance with the law,^ and the Dreyfus case was never really
settled. The reinstatement of the accused was never recognized by the French
people, and the passions that were originally aroused never entirely subsided.
As late as 1908, nine years after the pardon and two years after Dreyfus
was cleared, when, at Clemenceau's instance, the body of Emile Zola was
transferred to the Pantheon, Alfred Dreyfus was openly attacked in the
street. A Paris court acquitted his assailant and indicated that it "dissented"
from the decision which had cleared Dreyfus.
Even stranger is the fact that neither the first nor the second World War
has been able to bury the affair in oblivion. At the behest of the Action
Frangaise, the Precis de I' Affaire Dreyfus ^ was republished in 1924 and has
since been the standard reference manual of the Anti-Dreyfusards. At the
premiere of L' Affaire Dreyfus (a play written by Rehfisch and Wilhelm
Herzog under the pseudonym of Rene Kestner) in 1931, the atmosphere of
the nineties still prevailed with quarrels in the auditorium, stink-bombs in the
stalls, the shock troops of the Action Fran^aise standing around to strike
terror into actors, audience and bystanders. Nor did the government —
Laval's government — act in any way differently than its predecessors some
thirty years before: it gladly admitted it was unable to guarantee a single
undisturbed performance, thereby providing a new late triumph for the Anti-
Dreyfusards. The play had to be suspended. When Dreyfus died in 1935,
the general press was afraid to touch the issue ^ while the leftist papers
still spoke in the old terms of Dreyfus' innocence and the right wing of
Dreyfus' guilt. Even today, though to a lesser extent, the Dreyfus Affair is
still a kind of shibboleth in French politics. When Petain was condemned
the influential provincial newspaper Voix du Nord (of Lille) linked the
> The most extensive and still indispensable work on the subject is that of Joseph
Reinach, L' Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1903-11, 7 vols. The most detailed among recent
studies, written from a socialist viewpoint, is by Wilhelm Herzog, Der Kampf einer
Republik, Ziirich, 1933. Its exhaustive chronological tables are very valuable. The
best political and historical evaluation of the affair is to be found in D. W. Brogan,
The Development of Modern France, 1940, Books VI and VII. Brief and reliable is
G. Charcnsol, L' Affaire Dreyfus el la Troisienie Republique, 1930.
2 Written by two officers and published under the pseudonym Henri Dutrait-Crozon.
»The Action Frangaise (July 19, 1935) praised the restraint of the French press
while voicing the opinion that "the famous champions of justice and truth of forty
years ago have left no disciples."
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 91
Petain case to the Dreyfus case and maintained that "the country remains
divided as it was after the Dreyfus case," because the verdict of the court
could not settle a political conflict and "bring to all the French peace of
mind or of heart." *
While the Dreyfus Affair in its broader political aspects belongs to the
twentieth century, the Dreyfus case, the various trials of the Jewish Captain
Alfred Dreyfus, are quite typical of the nineteenth century, when men fol-
lowed legal proceedings so keenly because each instance afforded a test of
the century's greatest achievement, the complete impartiaUty of the law.
It is characteristic of the period that a miscarriage of justice could arouse
such political passions and inspire such an endless succession of trials and
retrials, not to speak of duels and fisticuffs. The doctrine of equality before
the law was still so firmly implanted in the conscience of the civilized world
that a single miscarriage of justice could provoke public indignation from
Moscow to New York. Nor was anyone, except in France itself, so "modern"
as to associate the matter with pohtical issues.^ The wrong done to a single
Jewish officer in France was able to draw from the rest of the world a more
vehement and united reaction than all the persecutions of German Jews a
generation later. Even Czarist Russia could accuse France of barbarism
while in Germany members of the Kaiser's entourage would openly express
an indignation matched only by the radical press of the 1930's.^
The dramatis personae of the case might have stepped out of the pages
of Balzac: on the one hand, the class-conscious generals frantically covering
up for the members of their own clique and, on the other, their antagonist,
Picquard, with his calm, clear-eyed and slightly ironical honesty. Beside
them stand the nondescript crowd of the men in Parliament, each terrified
of what his neighbor might know; the President of the Republic, notorious
patron of the Paris brothels, and the examining magistrates, living solely
for the sake of social contacts. Then there is Dreyfus himself, actually a
parvenu, continually boasting to his colleagues of his family fortune which
he spent on women; his brothers, pathetically offering their entire fortune,
and then reducing the offer to 150,000 francs, for the release of their kins-
man, never quite sure whether they wished to make a sacrifice or simply to
suborn the General Staff; and the lawyer Demange, really convinced of his
* See G. H. Archambault in New York Times, August 18, 1945, p. 5.
5 The sole exceptions, tlie Catholic journals most of which agitated in all countries
against Dreyfus, will be discussed below. American public opinion was such that in
addition to protests an organized boycott of the Paris World Exposition scheduled for
1900 was begun. on the effect of this threat see below. For a comprehensive study
see the master's essay on file at Columbia University by Rose A. Halperin, "The
American Reaction to the Dreyfus Case," 1941. The author wishes to thank Professor
S. W. Baron for his kindness in placing this study at her disposal.
6 Thus, for example, H. B. von Buelow, the German charge d'affaires at Paris, wrote
to Reichchancellor Hohenlohe that the verdict at Rennes was a "mixture of vulgarity
and cowardice, the surest signs of barbarism," and that France "has therewith shut
herself out of the family of civilized nations," cited by Herzog, op. cit., under date of
September 12, 1899. In the opinion of von Buelow the Affaire was the "shibboleth" of
German liberalism; see his DenkwUrdigkeiten, Berlin, 1930-31, I, 428.
92 ANTISEMITISM
client's innocence but basing the defense on an issue of doubt so as to save
himself from attacks and injury to his personal interests. Lastly, there is the
adventurer Estcrhazy, he of the ancient escutcheon, so utterly bored by this
bourgeois world as to seek relief equally in heroism and knavery. An erst-
while second lieutenant of the Foreign Legion, he impressed his colleagues
greatly by his superior boldness and impudence. Always in trouble, he lived
by serving as duelist's second to Jewish officers and by blackmailing their
wealthy coreligionists. Indeed, he would avail himself of the good offices of
the chief rabbi himself in order to obtain the requisite introductions. Even in
his ultimate downfall he remained true to the Balzac tradition. Not treason
nor wild dreams of a great orgy in which a hundred thousand besotted
Prussian Uhlans would run berserk through Paris ^ but a paltry embezzle-
ment of a relative's cash sent him to his doom. And what shall we say of
Zola, with his impassioned moral fervor, his somewhat empty pathos, and
his melodramatic declaration, on the eve of his flight to London, that he
had heard the voice of Dreyfus begging him to bring this sacrifice? ^
All this belongs typically to the nineteenth century and by itself would
never have survived two World Wars. The old-time enthusiasm of the mob
for Esterhazy, like its hatred of Zola, have long since died down to embers,
but so too has that fiery passion against aristocracy and clergy which had
once inflamed Jaures and which had alone secured the final release of Drey-
fus. As the Cagoulard affair was to show, officers of the General Staff no
longer had to fear the wrath of the people when they hatched their plots for
a coup d'etat. Since the separation of Church and State, France, though cer-
tainly no longer clerical-minded, had lost a great deal of her anticlerical
feeling, just as the CathoHc Church had itself lost much of its political aspira-
tion. Petain's attempt to convert the republic into a Catholic state was
blocked by the utter indifference of the people and by the lower clergy's
hostility to clerico-fascism.
The Dreyfus Affair in its political implications could survive because two
of its elements grew in importance during the twentieth century. The first is
hatred of the Jews; the second, suspicion of the republic itself, of ParUament,
and the state machine. The larger section of the public could still go on think-
ing the latter, rightly or wrongly, under the influence of the Jews and the
power of the banks. Down to our times the term Anti-Dreyfusard can still
serve as a recognized name for all that is antirepublican, antidemocratic, and
antisemitic. A few years ago it still comprised everything, from the monarch-
ism of the Action Frangaise to the National Bolshevism of Doriot and the
social Fascism of Deat. It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numer-
ically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse.
on the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was
never so shght as at the moment when the collapse actually took place.
' Theodore Reinach, Histoire sommaire de I'Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1924, p. 96.
* Reported by Joseph Reinach, as cited by Herzog, op. cU., under date of June 18,
1898.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 93
What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards,
no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could
any longer be defended or realized under the republic.® At long last the
republic fell like overripe fruit into the lap of that old Anti-Dreyfusard
clique ^° which had always formed the kernel of her army, and this at a
time when she had few enemies but almost no friends. How little the Petain
clique was a product of German Fascism was shown clearly by its slavish
adherence to the old formulas of forty years before.
While Germany shrewdly truncated her and ruined her entire economy
through the demarcation line, France's leaders in Vichy tinkered with the
old Barres formula of "autonomous provinces," thereby crippling her all
the more. They introduced anti-Jewish legislation more promptly than any
Quisling, boasting all the while that they had no need to import antisemitism
from Germany and that their law governing the Jews differed in essential
points from that of the Reich. ^^ They sought to mobilize the Catholic clergy
against the Jews, only to give proof that the priests have not only lost their
political influence but are not actually antisemites. on the contrary, it was
the very bishops and synods which the Vichy regime wanted to turn once
more into political powers who voiced the most emphastic protest against
the persecution of the Jews.
Not the Dreyfus case with its trials but the Dreyfus Affair in its entirety
offers a foregleam of the twentieth century. As Bernanos pointed out in
J932 ij "Xhe Dreyfus affair aheady belongs to that tragic era which cer-
tainly was not ended by the last war. The affair reveals the same inhuman
character, preserving amid the welter of unbridled passions and the flames
of hate an inconceivably cold and callous heart." Certainly it was not in
France that the true sequel to the affair was to be found, but the reason why
France fell an easy prey to Nazi aggression is not far to seek. Hitler's propa-
» That even Clemenceau no longer believed in it toward the end of his life is shown
clearly by the remark quoted in Rene Benjamin, Clemenceau dans la retraite, Paris,
1930, p. 249: "Hope? Impossible! How can I go on hoping when I no longer believe
in that which roused me, namely, democracy?"
10 Weygand, a known adherent of the Action Frangaise, was in his youth an Anti-
Dreyfusard. He was one of the subscribers to the "Henry Memorial" established by
the Libre Parole in honor of the unfortunate Colonel Henry, who paid with suicide
for his forgeries while on the General Staff. The list of subscribers was later published
by Quillard, one of the editors of L'Aurore (Clemenceau's paper), under the title of
Le Monument Henry, Paris, 1899. As for Petain, he was on the general staff of the
military government of Paris from 1895 to 1899, at a time when nobody but a proven
anti-Dreyfusard would have been tolerated. See Contamine de Latour, "Le Marechal
Petain," in Revue de Paris, I, 57-69. D. W. Brogan, op. cit., p. 382, pertinently ob-
serves that of the five World War I marshals, four (Foch, Petain, Lyautey, and Fa-
yolle) were bad republicans, while the fifth, Joffre, had well-known clerical leanings.
11 The myth that Petain's anti-Jewish legislation was forced upon him by the Reich,
which took in almost the whole of French Jewry, has been exploded on the French
side itself. See especially Yves Simon, La Grande crise de la Republique Frangaise:
observations sur la vie politique des frangais de 1918 a 1938, Montreal, 1941.
12 Cf. Georges Bernanos, La grande peur des bien-pensants, Edouard Drumont,
Paris, 1931, p. 262.
94 ANTISEMITISM
ganda spoke a language long familiar and never quite forgotten. That the
"Caesarism" '* of the Action Franqaise and the nihilistic nationalism of
Barres and Maurras never succeeded in their original form is due to a variety
of causes, all of them negative. They lacked social vision and were unable
to translate into popular terms those mental phantasmagoria which their con-
tempt for the intellect had engendered.
We are here concerned essentially with the political bearings of the Drey-
fus Affair and not with the legal aspects of the case. Sharply outlined in it
arc a number of traits characteristic of the twentieth century. Faint and
barely distinguishable during the early decades of the century, they have at
last emerged into full daylight and stand revealed as belonging to the main
trends of modern times. After thirty years of a mild, purely social form of
anti-Jewish discrimination, it had become a little difficult to remember that
the cry, "Death to the Jews," had echoed through the length and breadth of
a modern state once before when its domestic policy was crystallized in the
issue of antisemitism. For thirty years the old legends of world conspiracy
had been no more than the conventional stand-by of the tabloid press and the
dime novel and the world did not easily remember that not long ago, but
at a time when the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were still unknown, a
whole nation had been racking its brains trying to determine whether
"secret Rome" or "secret Judah" held the reins of world politics.^*
Similarly, the vehement and nihihstic philosophy of spiritual self-hatred ^^
suffered something of an eclipse when a world at temporary peace with
itself yielded no crop of outstanding criminals to justify the exaltation of
brutality and unscrupulousness. The Jules Guerins had to wait nearly forty
years before the atmosphere was ripe again for quasi-military storm troops.
The declasses, produced through nineteenth-century economy, had to grow
numerically until they were strong minorities of the nations, before that
coup d'etat, which had remained but a grotesque plot ^^ in France, could
achieve reality in Germany almost without effort. The prelude to Nazism
was played over the entire European stage. The Dreyfus case, therefore, is
" Waldemar Gurian, Der integrate Nationalismus in Frankreich: Charles Maurras
und die Action Frangaise, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1931, p. 92, makes a sharp distinction
between the monarchist movement and other reactionary tendencies. The same author
discusses the Dreyfus case in his Die politischen und sozialen Ideen des franzosischen
Katholizismus. M. Gladbach, 1929.
>* For the creation of such myths on both sides, Daniel Halevy, "Apologie pour
notre passe," in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Series XL, No. 10, 1910.
>s A distinctly modern note is struck in Zola's Letter to France of 1898: "We hear
on all sides that the concept of liberty has gone bankrupt. When the Dreyfus business
cropped up, this prevalent hatred of liberty found a golden opportunity. . . . Don't
you see that the only reason why Scheurer-Kestner has been attacked with such fury
is that he belongs to a generation which believed in liberty and worked for it? Today
one shrugs one's shoulders at such things . . . 'Old greybeards,' one laughs, 'outmoded
greathearts.' " Hcrzog, op. cit., under date of January 6, 1898.
>o The farcical nature of the various attempts made in the nineties to stage a coup
d'etat was clearly analyzed by Rosa Luxemburg in her article, "Die soziale Krise in
Frankreich," in Die Neue Zeit, Vol. \, 1901.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 95
more than a bizarre, imperfectly solved "crime," ^^ an affair of staff officers
disguised by false beards and dark glasses, peddling their stupid forgeries
by night in the streets of Paris. Its hero is not Dreyfus but Clemenceau and
it begins not with the arrest of a Jewish staff officer but with the Panama
scandal.
II: The Third Republic and French Jewry
BETWEEN 1880 and 1888 the Panama Company, under the leadership of
de Lesseps, who had constructed the Suez Canal, was able to make but
little practical progress. Nevertheless, within France itself it succeeded dur-
ing this period in raising no less than 1,335,538,454 francs in private loans.^^
This success is the more significant when one considers the carefulness of
the French middle class in money matters. The secret of the company's
success lies in the fact that its several public loans were invariably backed
by Parliament. The building of the Canal was generally regarded as a public
and national service rather than as a private enterprise. When the company
went bankrupt, therefore, it was the foreign policy of the republic that really
suffered the blow. only after a few years did it become clear that even more
important was the ruination of some half-million middle-class Frenchmen.
Both the press and the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry came to roughly
the same conclusion: the company had already been bankrupt for several
years. De Lesseps, they contended, had been Uving in hopes of a miracle,
cherishing the dream that new funds would be somehow forthcoming to push
on with the work. In order to win sanction for the new loans he had been
obliged to bribe the press, haff of Parliament, and all of the higher officials.
This, however, had called for the employment of middlemen and these in
turn had commanded exorbitant commissions. Thus, the very thing which
had originally inspired public confidence in the enterprise, namely. Parlia-
ment's backing of the loans, proved in the end the factor which converted a
not too sound private business into a colossal racket.
There were no Jews either among the bribed members of Parliament or
on the board of the company. Jacques Reinach and Cornelius Herz, however,
vied for the honor of distributing the baksheesh among the members of the
Chamber, the former working on the right wing of the bourgeois parties and
the latter on the radicals (the anticlerical parties of the petty bourgeoisie).^^
Reinach was the secret financial counsellor of the government during the
1' Whether Colonel Henry forged the bordereau on orders from the chief of staff or
upon his own initiative, is still unknown. Similarly, the attempted assassination of
Labori, counsel for Dreyfus at the Rennes tribunal, has never been properly cleared
up. Cf. Emile Zola, Correspondance: lettres a Maitre Labori, Paris, 1929, p. 32, n. 1.
1** Cf. Walter Frank, Demokratie und Nationalismus in Frankreich, Hamburg, 1933,
p. 273.
i» Cf. Georges Suarez, La Vie orgueilleuse de Clemenceau, Paris, 1930, p. 156.
95 ANTISEMITISM
eighties -" and therefore handled its relations with the Panama Company,
while Herz's role was a double one. on the one hand he served Reinach as
liaison with the radical wings of Parliament, to which Reinach himself had
no access; on the other this office gave him such a good insight into the
extent of the corruption that he was able constantly to blackmail his boss and
to involve him ever deeper in the mess.^^
Naturally there were quite a number of smaller Jewish businessmen work-
ing for both Herz and Reinach. Their names, however, may well repose in
the oblivion into which they have deservedly fallen. The more uncertain the
situation of the company, the higher, naturally, was the rate of commission,
until in the end the company itself received but little of the moneys advanced
to it. Shortly before the crash Herz received for a single intra-parliamentary
transaction an advance of no less than 600,000 francs. The advance, how-
ever, was premature. The loan was not taken up and the shareholders were
simply 600,000 francs out of pocket.-- The whole ugly racket ended dis-
astrously for Reinach. Harassed by the blackmail of Herz he finally com-
mitted suicide.-^
Shortly before his death, however, he had taken a step the consequences
of which for French Jewry can scarcely be exaggerated. He had given the
Libre Parole, Edouard Drumont's antisemitic daily, his list of suborned
members of Parliament, the so-called "remittance men," imposing as the
sole condition that the paper should cover up for him personally when it
published its exposure. The Libre Parole was transformed overnight from
a small and politically insignificant sheet into one of the most influential
papers in the country, with 300,000 circulation. The golden opportunity
proffered by Reinach was handled with consummate care and skill. The list
of culprits was published in small installments so that hundreds of politicians
had to live on tenterhooks morning after morning. Drumont's journal, and
with it the entire antisemitic press and movement, emerged at last as a
dangerous force in the Third Republic.
The Panama scandal, which, in Drumont's phrase, rendered the invisible
visible, brought with it two revelations. First, it disclosed that the members
of Parliament and civil servants had become businessmen. Secondly, it
showed that the intermediaries between private enterprise (in this case,
the company) and the machinery of the state were almost exclusively Jews.^*
20 Such, for instance, was the testimony of the former minister, Rouvier, before the
Commission of Inquiry.
21 Barres (quoted by Bemanos, op. cit., p. 271) puts the matter tersely: "Whenever
Reinach had swallowed something, it was Cornelius Herz who knew how to make
him disgorge it."
"Cf. Frank, op. cit., in the chapter headed "Panama"; cf. Suarez, op. cit., p. 155.
23 The quarrel between Reinach and Herz lends to the Panama scandal an air of
gangsterism unusual in the nineteenth century. In his resistance to Herz's blackmail
Reinach went so far as to recruit the aid of former police inspectors in placing a price
of ten thousand francs on the head of his rival; cf. Suarez, op. cit., p. 157.
2< Cf. Levaillant, "La Genese de I'antisemitisme sous la troisieme Republique," in
Revue des etudes juives. Vol. LUX (1907), p. 97.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 97
What was most surprising was that all these Jews who worked in such an
intimate relationship with the state machinery were newcomers. Up to the
establishment of the Third Republic, the handling of the finances of the
state had been pretty well monopolized by the Rothschilds. An attempt by
their rivals, Pereires Brothers, to wrest part of it from their hands by estab-
lishing the Credit Mobilier had ended in a compromise. And in 1882, the
Rothschild group was still powerful enough to drive into bankruptcy the
Catholic Union Generale, the real purpose of which had been to ruin Jewish
bankers.-'^ Immediately after the conclusion of the peace treaty of 1871,
whose financial provisions had been handled on the French side by Roth-
schild and on the German side by Bleichroeder, a former agent of the house,
the Rothschilds embarked on an unprecedented policy: they came out openly
for the monarchists and against the republic.^^ What was new in this was
not the monarchist trend but the fact that for the first time an important
Jewish financial power set itself in opposition to the current regime. Up to
that time the Rothschilds had accommodated themselves to whatever political
system was in power. It seemed, therefore, that the republic was the first
form of government that really had no use for them.
Both the political influence and the social status of the Jews had for cen-
turies been due to the fact that they were a closed group who worked directly
for the state and were directly protected by it on account of their special
services. Their close and immediate connection with the machinery of gov-
ernment was possible only so long as the state remained at a distance from
the people, while the ruling classes continued to be indifferent to its manage-
ment. In such circumstances the Jews were, from the state's point of view,
the most dependable element in society just because they did not really be-
long to it. The parliamentary system allowed the liberal bourgeoisie to gain
control of the state machine. To this bourgeoisie, however, the Jews had
never belonged and they therefore regarded it with a not unwarranted sus-
picion. The regime no longer needed the Jews as much as before, since it
was now possible to achieve through Parliament a financial expansion be-
yond the wildest dreams of the former more or less absolute or constitutional
monarchs. Thus the leading Jewish houses gradually faded from the scene of
finance politics and betook themselves more and more to the antisemitic
salons of the aristocracy, there to dream of financing reactionary movements
designed to restore the good old days." Meanwhile, however, other Jewish
circles, newcomers among Jewish plutocrats, were beginning to take an in-
25 See Bernard Lazare, Contre rAntisemitisme: histoire d'une polemique, Paris, 1896.
28 on the complicity of the Haute Banque in the Orleanist movement see G.
Charensol, op. cit. one of the spokesmen of this powerful group was Arthur Meyer,
publisher of the Gaulois. A baptized Jew, Meyer belonged to the most virulent section
of the Anti-Dreyfusards. See Clemenceau, "Le spectacle du jour," in L'Iniquite, 1899;
see also the entries in Hohenlohe's diary, in Herzog, op. cit., under date of June 11,
1898.
-^ on current leanings toward Bonapartism see Frank, op. cit., p. 419, based upon
unpublished documents taken from the archives of the German ministry of foreign
affairs.
gg ANTISEMITISM
creasing part in the commercial life of the Third Republic. What the
Rothschilds had almost forgotten and what had nearly cost them their
power was the simple fact That once they withdrew, even for a moment,
from active interest in a regime, they immediately lost their influence not
only upon cabinet circles but upon the Jews. The Jewish immigrants were
the first to see their chance.-"* They realized only too well that the republic,
as it had developed, was not the logical sequel of a united people's uprising.
Out of the slaughter of some 20,000 Communards, out of military defeat
and economic collapse, what had in fact emerged was a regime whose
capacity for government had been doubtful from its inception. So much,
indeed, was this the case that within three years a society brought to the
brink of ruin was clamoring for a dictator. And when it got one in President
General MacMahon (whose only claim to distinction was his defeat at
Sedan ) , that individual had promptly turned out to be a parliamentarian of
the old school and after a few years (1879) resigned. Meanwhile, however,
the various elements in society, from the opportunists to the radicals and
from the coalitionists to the extreme right, had made up their minds what
kind of policies they required from their representatives and what methods
they ought to employ. The right policy was defense of vested interests and
the right method was corruption.^^ After 1881, swindle (to quote Leon Say)
became the only law.
It has been justly observed that at this period of French history every
political party had its Jew, in the same way that every royal household
once had its court Jew.^° The difference, however, was profound. Investment
of Jewish capital in the state had helped to give the Jews a productive role
in the economy of Europe. Without their assistance the eighteenth-century
development of the nation-state and its independent civil service would have
been inconceivable. It was, after all, to these court Jews that Western Jewry
owed its emancipation. The shady transactions of Reinach and his con-
federates did not even lead to permanent riches. ^^ All they did was to shroud
-** Jacques Reinach was born in Germany, received an Italian barony and was
naturalized in France. Cornelius Herz was born in France, the son of Bavarian parents.
Migrating to America in early youth, he acquired citizenship and amassed a fortune
there. For further details, cf. Brogan, op. cit., p. 268 ff.
Characteristic of the way in which native Jews disappeared from public office is the
fact that as soon as the affairs of the Panama Company began to go badly, Levy-
Cremieux, its original financial adviser, was replaced by Reinach; see Brogan, op. cit..
Book VI, chapter 2.
2" Georges Lachapelle, Les Finances de la Troisieme Republique, Paris, 1937, pp.
54 ff., describes in detail how the bureaucracy gained control of public funds and
how the Budget Commission was governed entirely by private interests.
With regard to the economic status of members of Parliament cf. Bernanos, op. cit.,
p. 192: "Most of them, like Gambetta, lacked even a change of underclothes."
30 As Frank remarks (op. cit.. pp. 321 ff.), the right had its Arthur Meyer, Bou-
langerism its Alfred Naquet, the opportunists their Reinachs, and the Radicals their
Dr. Cornelius Herz.
*i To these newcomers Drumont's charge applies (Les Tretaiix du succes, Paris,
1901, p. 237): "Those great Jews who start from nothing and attain everything . . .
they come from God knows where, live in a mystery, die in a guess. . . . They don't
arrive, they jump up. . . . They don't die, they fade out."
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 99
in even deeper darkness the mysterious and scandalous relations between
business and politics. These parasites upon a corrupt body served to provide
a thoroughly decadent society with an exceedingly dangerous alibi. Since
they were Jews it was possible to make scapegoats of them when public
indignation had to be allayed. Afterwards things could go on the same old
way. The antisemites could at once point to the Jewish parasites on a cor-
rupt society in order to "prove" that all Jews everywhere were nothing but
termites in the otherwise healthy body of the people. It did not matter to
them that the corruption of the body politic had started without the help of
Jews; that the policy of businessmen (in a bourgeois society to which Jews
had not belonged) and their ideal of unlimited competition had led to the
disintegration of the state in party politics; that the ruling classes had proved
incapable any longer of protecting their own interests, let alone those of
the country as a whole. The antisemites who called themselves patriots
introduced that new species of national feeling which consists primarily in
a complete whitewash of one's own people and a sweeping condemnation
of all others.
The Jews could remain a separate group outside of society only so long
as a more or less homogeneous and stable state machine had a use for them
and was interested in protecting them. The decay of the state machine
brought about the dissolution of the closed ranks of Jewry, which had so
long been bound up with it. The first sign of this appeared in the affairs
conducted by newly naturalized French Jews over whom their native-born
brethren had lost control in much the same way as occurred in the Ger-
many of the inflation period. The newcomers filled the gaps between the
commercial world and the state.
Far more disastrous was another process which likewise began at this
time and which was imposed from above. The dissolution of the state into
factions, while it disrupted the closed society of the Jews, did not force
them into a vacuum in which they could go on vegetating outside of state
and society. For that the Jews were too rich and, at a time when money
was one of the salient requisites of power, too powerful. Rather did they
tend to become absorbed into the variety of social "sets," in accordance with
their political leanings or, more frequently, their social connections. This,
however, did not lead to their disappearance. on the contrary, they main-
tained certain relations with the state machine and continued, albeit in a
crucially different form, to manipulate the business of the state. Thus, despite
their known opposition to the Third Republic, it was none other than the
Rothschilds who undertook the placement of the Russian loan while Arthur
Meyer, though baptized and an avowed monarchist, was among those in-
volved in the Panama scandal. This meant that the newcomers in French
Jewry who formed the principal links between private commerce and the
machinery of government were followed by the native-born. But if the Jews
had previously constituted a strong, close-knit group, whose usefulness for
the state was obvious, they were now split up into cliques, mutually antag-
onistic but all bent on the same purpose of helping society to batten on the
state.
100
ANTISEMITISM
III: Army and Clergy Against the Republic
SEEMINGLY REMOVED ffom all such factofs, Seemingly immune from all
corruption, stood the army, a heritage from the Second Empire. The re-
public had never dared to dominate it, even when monarchistic sympathies
and intrigues came to open ｅxpression in the Boulanger crisis. The officer
class consisted then as before of the sons of those old aristocratic families
whose ancestors, as emigres, had fought against their fatherland during the
revolutionary wars. These officers were strongly under the influence of the
clergy who ever since the Revolution had made a point of supporting re-
actionary and antirepublican movements. Their influence was perhaps
equally strong over those officers who were of somewhat lower birth but
who hoped, as a result of the Church's old practice of marking talent without
regard to pedigree, to gain promotion with the help of the clergy.
In contrast to the shifting and fluid cliques of society and Parliament,
where admission was easy and allegiance fickle, stood the rigorous exclusive-
ness of the army, so characteristic of the caste system. It was neither mili-
tary life, professional honor, nor esprit de corps that held its officers together
to form a reactionary bulwark against the republic and against all democratic
influences; it was simply the tie of caste." The refusal of the state to democ-
ratize the army and to subject it to the civil authorities entailed remarkable
consequences. It made the army an entity outside of the nation and created
an armed power whose loyalties could be turned in directions which none
could foretell. That this caste-ridden power, if but left to itself, was neither
for nor against anyone is shown clearly by the story of the almost burlesque
coups d'etat in which, despite statements to the contrary, it was really un-
willing to take part. Even its notorious monarchism was, in the final analysis,
nothing but an excuse for preserving itself as an independent interest-group,
ready to defend its privileges "without regard to and in despite of, even
against the republic." '-^ Contemporary journalists and later historians have
made valiant efforts to explain the conflict between military and civil powers
during the Dreyfus Affair in terms of an antagonism between "businessmen
and soldiers." " We know today, however, how unjustified is this indirectly
antiscmitic interpretation. The intelligence department of the General Staff
were themselves reasonably expert at business. Were they not trafficking as
^- See the excellent anonymous article, "The Dreyfus Case: A Study of French
Opinion." in The Contemporary Review, Vol. LXXIV (October, 1898).
^3 See Luxemburg, loc. cil.: "The reason the army was reluctant to make a move
was that it wanted to show its opposition to the civil power of the republic, without
at the same time losing the force of that opposition by committing itself to a monarchy."
3* It is under this caption that Maximilian Harden (a German Jew) described the
Dreyfus case in Die Zukunjt (1898). Walter Frank, the antisemitic historian, employs
the same slogan in the heading of his chapter on Dreyfus while Bernanos {op. cit.,
p. 413) remarks in the same vein that "rightly or wrongly, democracy sees in the mili-
tary its most dangerous rival."
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 101
openly in forged bordereaux and selling them as nonchalantly to foreign
military attaches as a leather merchant might traffic in skins and then become
President of the Republic, or the son-in-law of the President traffic in honors
and distinctions? ^^ Indeed, the zeal of Schwartzkoppen, the German attache,
who was anxious to discover more military secrets than France had to hide,
must have been a positive source of embarrassment to these gentlemen of
the counterespionage service who, after all, could sell no more than they
produced.
It was the great mistake of Catholic politicians to imagine that, in pursuit
of their European policy, they could make use of the French army simply
because it appeared to be antirepublican. The Church was, in fact, slated
to pay for this error with the loss of its entire political influence in France.^"
When the department of intelligence finally emerged as a common fake
factory, as Esterhazy, who was in a position to know, described the Deuxieme
Bureau," no one in France, not even the army, was so seriously compro-
mised as the Church. Toward the end of the last century the Catholic clergy
had been seeking to recover its old political power in just those quarters
where, for one or another reason, secular authority was on the wane among
the people. Cases in point were those of Spain, where a decadent feudal
aristocracy had brought about the economic and cultural ruin of the coun-
try, and Austria-Hungary, where a conflict of nationalities was threatening
daily to disrupt the state. And such too was the case in France, where the
nation appeared to be sinking fast into the slough of conflicting interests.^®
The army — left in a political vacuum by the Third Republic — gladly ac-
cepted the guidance of the Catholic clergy which at least provided for civilian
leadership without which the military lose their "raison d'etre (which) is to
defend the principle embodied in civilian society" — as Clemenceau put it.
The Catholic Church then owed its popularity to the widespread popular
skepticism which saw in the republic and in democracy the loss of all order,
security, and political will. To many the hierarchic system of the Church
seemed the only escape from chaos. Indeed, it was this, rather than any
religious revivahsm, which caused the clergy to be held in respect. ^^ As a
matter of fact, the staunchest supporters of the Church at that period were
the exponents of that so-called "cerebral" Catholicism, the "Cafliolics with-
out faith," who were henceforth to dominate the entire monarchist and ex-
35 The Panama scandal was preceded by the so-called "Wilson affair." The Presi-
dent's son-in-law was found conducting an open traffic in honors and decorations.
38 See Father Edouard Lecanuet, Les Signes avant-coureurs de la separation, 1894-
1910, Paris, 1930.
3" See Bruno Weil, L'Affaire Dreyfus, Paris, 1930, p. 169.
38 Cf. Clemenceau, "La Croisade," op. cit.: "Spain is writhing under the yoke
of the Roman Church. Italy appears to have succumbed. The only countries left are
Catholic Austria, already in her death-struggle, and the France of the Revolution,
against which the papal hosts are even now deployed."
39 Cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 152: "The point cannot be sufficiently repeated: the
real beneficiaries of that movement of reaction which followed the fall of the empire
and the defeat were the clergy. Thanks to them national reaction assumed after 1873
the character of a religious revival."
]02 ANTISEMITISM
treme nationalist movement. Without believing in their other-worldly basis,
these "Catholics" clamored for more power to all authoritarian institutions.
This, indeed, had been the line first laid down by Drumont and later endorsed
by Maurras/**
The large majority of the Catholic clergy, deeply involved in political
maneuvers, followed a policy of accommodation. In this, as the Dreyfus
Affair makes clear, they were conspicuously successful. Thus, when Victor
Basch took up the cause for a retrial his house at Rennes was stormed under
the leadership of three priests," while no less distinguished a figure than the
Dominican Father Didon called on the students of the College D'Arcueil
to "draw the sword, terrorize, cut off heads and run amok." "'- Similar too
was the outlook of the three hundred lesser clerics who immortalized them-
selves in the "Henry Memorial," as the Libre Parole's list of subscribers to a
fund for the benefit of Madame Henry (widow of the Colonel who had com-
mitted suicide while in prison ") was called, and which certainly is a monu-
ment for all time to the shocking corruption of the upper classes of the
French people at that date. During the period of the Dreyfus crisis it was
not her regular clergy, not her ordinary reUgious orders, and certainly not
her homines religiosi who influenced the political line of the Catholic Church.
As far as Europe was concerned, her reactionary policies in France, Austria,
and Spain, as well as her support of antisemitic trends in Vienna, Paris, and
Algiers were probably an immediate consequence of Jesuit influence. It was
the Jesuits who had always best represented, both in the written and spoken
word, the antisemitic school of the Catholic clergy.** This is largely the
consequence of their statutes according to which each novice must prove that
he has no Jewish blood back to the fourth generation.*^ And since the be-
ginning of the nineteenth century the direction of the Church's international
policy had passed into their hands.**
«> on Drumont and the origin of "cerebral Catholicism," see Bernanos, op. cit.,
pp. 127 ff.
*' Cf. Herzog, op. cit., under date of January 21, 1898.
*2 See Lecanuet, op. cit., p. 182.
*3 See above, note 10.
** The Jesuits' magazine Civilta Cattolica was for decades the most outspokenly
antisemitic and one of the most influential Catholic magazines in the world. It carried
anti-Jewish propaganda long before Italy went Fascist, and its policy was not affected
by the anti-Christian attitude of the Nazis. See Joshua Starr, "Italy's Antisemites," in
Jewish Social Studies, 1939.
According to L. Koch, SJ.: "Of all orders, the Society of Jesus through its con-
stitution is best protected against any Jewish influences." In Jesuiten-Lexikon, Pader-
born, 1934, article "Juden."
<•'• Originally, according to the Convention of 1593, all Christians of Jewish descent
were excluded. A decree of 1608 stipulated reinvestigations back to the fifth generation;
the last provision of 1923 reduced this to four generations. These requirements can be
waived oy the chief of the order in individual cases.
<6Cf. H. Boehmer, Les Jesuites, translated from the German, Paris, 1910, p. 284:
"Since 1820 ... no such thing as independent national churches able to resist the
Jesuit-dictated orders of the Pope has existed. The higher clergy of our day have pitched
their tents in front of the Holy See and the Church has become what Bellarmin, the
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 103
We have already observed how the dissolution of the state machinery
facilitated the entry of the Rothschilds into the circles of the antisemitic
aristocracy. The fashionable set of Faubourg Saint-Germain opened its
doors not only to a few ennobled Jews, but their baptized sycophants, the
antisemitic Jews, were also suffered to drift in as well as complete new-
comers.*^ Curiously enough, the Jews of Alsace, who like the Dreyfus family
had moved to Paris following the cession of that territory, took an especially
prominent part in this social climb. Their exaggerated patriotism came out
most markedly in the way they strove to dissociate themselves from Jewish
immigrants. The Dreyfus family belonged to that section of French Jewry
which sought to assimilate by adopting its own brand of antisemitism.**
This adjustment to the French aristocracy had one inevitable result: the
Jews tried to launch their sons upon the same higher military careers as
were pursued by those of their new-found friends. It was here that the first
cause of friction arose. The admission of the Jews into high society had
been relatively peaceful. The upper classes, despite their dreams of a restored
monarchy, were a politically spineless lot and did not bother unduly one
way or the other. But when the Jews began seeking equality in the army,
they came face to face with the determined opposition of the Jesuits who
were not prepared to tolerate the existence of officers immune to the influence
of the confessional." Moreover, they came up against an inveterate caste
spirit, which the easy atmosphere of the salons had led them to forget, a
caste spirit which, already strengthened by tradition and calling, was still
further fortified by uncompromising hostility to the Third Republic and
to the civil administration.
A modern historian has described the struggle between Jews and Jesuits
as a "struggle between two rivals," in which the "higher Jesuit clergy and
the Jewish plutocracy stood facing one another in the middle of France hke
two invisible lines of battle." ^° The description is true insofar as the Jews
great Jesuit controversialist, always demanded it should become, an absolute monarchy
whose policies can be directed by the Jesuits and whose development can be deter-
mined by pressing a button."
*" Cf. Clemenceau, "Le spectacle du jour," in op. cit.: "Rothschild, friend of the
entire antisemitic nobility ... of a piece with Arthur Meyer, who is more papist
than the Pope."
*8 on the Alsatian Jews, to whom Dreyfus belonged, see Andre Foucault, Un
nouvel aspect de V Affaire Dreyfus, in Les Oeuvres Libres, 1938, p. 310: "In the eyes
of the Jewish bourgeoisie of Paris they were the incarnation of nationalist raideur . . .
that attitude of distant disdain which the gentry affects towards its parvenu co-religion-
ists. Their desire to assimilate completely to Gallic modes, to live on intimate terms
with our old-established families, to occupy the most distinguished positions in the
state, and the contempt which they showed for the commercial elements of Jewry,
for the recently naturalized 'Polaks' of Galicia, gave them almost the appearance of
traitors against their own race. . . . The Dreyfuses of 1894? Why, they were anti-
semites!"
40 Cf. "K.V.T." in The Contemporary Review. LXXIV, 598: "By the will of the
democracy all Frenchmen are to be soldiers; by the will of the Church Catholics only
are to hold the chief commands."
so Herzog, op. cit., p. 35.
JQ4 ANTISEMITISM
found in the Jesuits their first unappeasable foes, while the latter came
promptly to realize how powerful a weapon antisemitism could be. This
was the first attempt and the only one prior to Hitler to exploit the "major
political concept" " of antisemitism on a Pan-European scale. on the other
hand, however, if it is assumed that the struggle was one of two equally
matched "rivals" the description is palpably false. The Jews sought no
higher degree of power than was being wielded by any of the other cliques
into which the republic had split. All they desired at the time was sufficient
influence to pursue their social and business interests. They did not aspire to
a political share in the management of the state. The only organized group
who sought that were the Jesuits. The trial of Dreyfus was preceded by a
number of incidents which show how resolutely and energetically the Jews
tried to gain a place in the army and how common, even at that time, was
the hostility toward them. Constantly subjected to gross insult, the few
Jewish officers there were were obliged always to fight duels while Gentile
comrades were unwilling to act as their seconds. It is, indeed, in this con-
nection that the infamous Esterhazy first comes upon the scene as an excep-
tion to the rule."
It has always remained somewhat obscure whether the arrest and con-
demnation of Dreyfus was simply a judicial error which just happened by
chance to light up a political conflagration, or whether the General Staff
deliberately planted the forged bordereau for the express purpose of at last
branding a Jew as a traitor. In favor of the latter hypothesis is the fact that
Dreyfus was the first Jew to find a post on the General Staff and under exist-
ing conditions this could only have aroused not merely annoyance but posi-
tive fury and consternation. In any case anti-Jewish hatred was unleashed
even before the verdict was returned. Contrary to custom, which demanded
the withholding of all information in a spy case still sub iudice, officers of
the General Staff cheerfully supplied the Libre Parole with details of the case
and the name of the accused. Apparently they feared lest Jewish influence
with the government lead to a suppression of the trial and a stifling of the
whole business. Some show of plausibility was afforded these fears by the
fact that certain circles of French Jewry were known at the time to be
seriously concerned about the precarious situation of Jewish officers.
"> Cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 151: "So, shorn of ridiculous hyperbole, antisemitism
showed itself for what it really is: not a mere piece of crankiness, a mental quirk,
but a major political concept."
=•- See Esterhazy's letter of July, 1894, to Edmond de Rothschild, quoted by J.
Reinach, op. cit., II, 53 ff.: "I did not hesitate when Captain Cremieux could find no
Christian officer to act as his second." Cf. T. Reinach, Histoire sommaire de I'Affaire
Dreyfus, pp. 60 ff. See also Herzog, op. cit., under date of 1892 and June, 1894, where
these duels are listed in detail and all of Esterhazy's intermediaries named. The last
occasion was in September, 1896, when he received 10,000 francs. This misplaced
generosity was later to have disquieting results. When, from the comfortable security
of England. Esterhazy at length made his revelations and thereby compelled a revision
of the case, the antisemitic press naturally suggested that he had been paid by the
Jews for his self-condemnation. The idea is still advanced as a major argument in
favor of Dreyfus' guilt.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 105
It must also be remembered that the Panama scandal was then fresh in
the public mind and that following the Rothschild loan to Russia distrust of
the Jews had grown considerably.^^ War Minister Mercier was not only
lauded by the bourgeois press at every fresh turn of the trial but even Jaures'
paper, the organ of the socialists, congratulated him on "having opposed the
formidable pressure of corrupt politicians and high finance." ^* Character-
istically this encomium drew from the Libre Parole the unstinted commenda-
tion, "Bravo, Jaures!" Two years later, when Bernard Lazare published his
first pamphlet on the miscarriage of justice, Jaures' paper carefully refrained
from discussing its contents but charged the sociaUst author with being an
admirer of Rothschild and probably a paid agent." Similarly, as late as 1897,
when the fight for Dreyfus' reinstatement had already begun, Jaures could
see nothing in it but the conflict of two bourgeois groups, the opportunists
and the clerics. Finally, even after the Rennes retrial Wilhelm Liebknecht,
the German Social Democrat, still believed in the guilt of Dreyfus because
he could not imagine that a member of the upper classes could ever be the
victim of a false verdict.^^
The skepticism of the radical and socialist press, strongly colored as it
was by anti-Jewish feelings, was strengthened by the bizarre tactics of the
Dreyfus family in its attempt to secure a retrial. In trying to save an inno-
cent man they employed the very methods usually adopted in the case of a
guilty one. They stood in mortal terror of publicity and relied exclusively on
back-door maneuvers." They were lavish with their cash and treated Lazare,
one of their most valuable helpers and one of the greatest figures in the case,
as if he were their paid agent.^^ Clemenceau, Zola, Picquard, and Labori — to
53 Herzog, op. cit., under date of 1892 shows at length how the Rothschilds began
to adapt themselves to the republic. Curiously enough the papal policy of coalitionism,
which represents an attempt at rapprochement by the Catholic Church, dates from
precisely the same year. It is therefore not impossible that the Rothschild line was
influenced by the clergy. As for the loan of 500 million francs to Russia, Count
Miinster pertinently observed: "Speculation is dead in France. . . . The capitalists
can find no way of negotiating their securities . . . and this will contribute to the
success of the loan. . . . The big Jews believe that if they make money they will best
be able to help their small-time brethren. The result is that, though the French market
is glutted with Russian securities, Frenchmen are still giving good francs for bad
roubles"; Herzog, ibid.
" Cf. J. Reinach, op. cit., I, 471.
65 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., p. 212.
56 Cf. Max J. Kohler, "Some New Light on the Dreyfus Case," in Studies in Jewish
Bibliography and Related Subjects in Memory of A. S. Freidus, New York, 1929.
57 The Dreyfus family, for instance, summarily rejected the suggestion of Arthur
Levy, the writer, and Levy-Bruhl, the scholar, that they should circulate a petition of
protest among all leading figures of public life. Instead they embarked on a series of
personal approaches to any politician with whom they happened to have contact;
cf. Dutrait-Crozon, op. cit., p. 51. See also Foucault, op. cit., p. 309: "At this distance,
one may wonder at the fact that the French Jews, instead of working on the papers
secretly, did not give adequate and open ｅxpression to their indignation."
58 Cf. Herzog, op. cit., under date of December, 1894 and January, 1898. See also
Charensol, op. cit., p. 79, and Charles Peguy, "Le Portrait de Bernard Lazare," in
Cahiers de la quinzaine, Series XI, No. 2 (1910).
70(5 ANTISEMITISM
name but the more active of the Dreyfusards — could in the end only save
their good names by dissociating their efforts, with greater or less fuss and
publicity, from the more concrete aspects of the issue. ^^
There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been
saved. The intrigues of a corrupt Parliament, the dry rot of a collapsing
society, and the clergy's lust for power should have been met squarely with
the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights — that
republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of
Clcmenceau) by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights
of all. To rely on Parliament or on society was to lose the fight before be-
ginning it. For one thing the resources of Jewry were in no way superior
to those of the rich Catholic bourgeoisie; for another all of the higher strata
of society, from the clerical and aristocratic families of the Faubourg Saint-
Germain to the anticlerical and radical petty bourgeoisie, were only too
willing to see the Jews formally removed from the body pohtic. In this way,
they reckoned, they would be able to purge themselves of possible taint.
The loss of Jewish social and commercial contacts seemed to them a price
well worth paying. Similarly, as the utterances of Jaures indicate, the Affair
was regarded by Parliament as a golden opportunity for rehabilitating, or
rather regaining, its time-honored reputation for incorruptibility. Last, but
by no means least, in the countenancing of such slogans as "Death to the
Jews" or "France for the French" an almost magic formula was discovered
for reconciling the masses to the existent state of government and society.
rv: The People and the Mob
IF IT IS the common error of our time to imagine that propaganda can achieve
all things and that a man can be talked into anything provided the talking is
sufficiently loud and cunning, in that period it was commonly believed that
the "voice of the people was the voice of God," and that the task of a leader
was, as Clemenceau so scornfully expressed it,^° to follow that voice shrewdly.
»» Labori's withdrawal, after Dreyfus' family bad hurriedly withdrawn the brief
from him while the Rennes tribunal was still sitting, caused a major scandal. An ex-
haustive, if greatly exaggerated, account will be found in Frank, op. cit., p. 432.
Labori's own statement, which speaks eloquently for his nobility of character, ap-
peared in La Grande Revue (February, 1900). After what had happened to his
counsel and friend Zola at once broke relations with the Dreyfus family. As for
Picquard, the Echo de Paris (November 30, 1901) reported that after Rennes he
had nothing more to do with the Dreyfuses. Clemenceau in face of the fact that the
whole of France, or even the whole world, grasped the real meaning of the trials
better than the accused or his family, was more inclined to consider the incident
humorous; cf. Weil, op. cit., pp. 307-8.
«oCf. Clemenceau's article, February 2, 1898, in op. cit. on the futility of trying
to win the workers with antisemitic slogans and especially on the attempts of Leon
Daudet, see the Royalist writer Dimier, Vingt ans d'Action Frangaise, Paris, 1926.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 707
Both views go back to the same fundamental error of regarding the mob as
identical with rather than as a caricature of the people.
The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are repre-
sented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also
comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions
fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the "strong
man," the "great leader." For the mob hates society from which it is excluded,
as well as Parliament where it is not represented. Plebiscites, therefore, with
which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old
concept of politicians who rely upon the mob. one of the more intelligent
leaders of the Anti-Dreyfusards, Deroulede, clamored for a "Republic
through plebiscite."
High society and politicians of the Third Republic had produced the
French mob in a series of scandals and public frauds. They now felt a tender
sentiment of parental familiarity with their offspring, a feeling mixed with
admiration and fear. The least society could do for its offspring was to pro-
tect it verbally. While the mob actually stormed Jewish shops and assailed
Jews in the streets, the language of high society made real, passionate vio-
lence look like harmless child's play.''^ The most important of the con-
temporary documents in this respect is the "Henry Memorial" and the
various solutions it proposed to the Jewish question: Jews were to be torn
to pieces like Marsyas in the Greek myth; Reinach ought to be boiled aUve;
Jews should be stewed in oil or pierced to death with needles; they should
be "circumcised up to the neck." one group of officers expressed great im-
patience to try out a new type of gun on the 100,000 Jews in the country.
Among the subscribers were more than 1,000 officers, including four gen-
erals in active service, and the minister of war, Mercier. The relatively large
number of intellectuals ^- and even of Jews in the list is surprising. The upper
classes knew that the mob was flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood.
Even a Jewish historian of the time, although he had seen with his own eyes
that Jews are no longer safe when the mob rules the street, spoke with secret
admiration of the "great collective movement." ^^ This only shows how
deeply most Jews were rooted in a society which was attempting to eUminate
them.
If Bemanos, with reference to the Dreyfus Affair, describes antisemitism
as a major political concept, he is undoubtedly right with respect to the mob.
^1 Very characteristic in this respect are the various depictions of contemporary
society in J. Reinach, op. cit., I, 233 ff.; Ill, 141: "Society hostesses fell in step with
Guerin. Their language (which scarcely outran their thoughts) would have struck
horror in the Amazon of Damohey . . ." Of special interest in this connection is an
article by Andre Chevrillon, "Huit Jours a Rennes," in La Grande Revue, February,
1900. He relates, inter alia, the following revealing incident: "A physician speaking to
some friends of mine about Dreyfus, chanced to remark, 'I'd like to torture him.' 'And
I wish,' rejoined one of the ladies, 'that he were innocent. Then he'd suffer more.' "
"2 The intellectuals include, strangely enough, Paul Valery, who contributed three
francs "non sans reflexion."
63 J. Reinach, op. cit., I, 233.
108 ANTISEMITISM
It had been tried out previously in Berlin and Vienna, by Ahlwardt and
Stoecker, by Schoenerer and Lueger, but nowhere was its efficacy more
clearly proved than in France. There can be no doubt that in the eyes of
the mob the Jews came to serve as an object lesson for all the things they
detested. If they hated society they could point to the way in which the Jews
were tolerated within it; and if they hated the government they could point
to the way in which the Jews had been protected by or were identifiable with
the state. While it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews,
the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims.
E.xcluded as it is from society and political representation, the mob turns
of necessity to extraparliamentary action. Moreover, it is inclined to seek
the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are
hidden from view and work behind the scenes. There can be no doubt that
during the nineteenth century Jewry fell into this category, as did Free-
masonry (especially in Latin countries) and the Jesuits."* It is, of course,
utterly untrue that any of these groups really constituted a secret society
bent on dominating the world by means of a gigantic conspiracy. Neverthe-
less, it is true that their influence, however overt it may have been, was
exerted beyond the formal realm of politics, operating on a large scale in
lobbies, lodges, and the confessional. Ever since the French Revolution these
three groups have shared the doubtful honor of being, in the eyes of the
European mob, the pivotal point of world politics. During the Dreyfus crisis
each was able to exploit this popular notion by hurling at the other charges
of conspiring to world domination. The slogan, "secret Judah," is due, no
doubt, to the inventiveness of certain Jesuits, who chose to see in the first
Zionist Congress (1897) the core of a Jewish world conspiracy.*'^ Similarly,
the concept of "secret Rome" is due to the anticlerical Freemasons and per-
haps to the indiscriminate slanders of some Jews as well.
The fickleness of the mob is proverbial, as the opponents of Dreyfus were
to learn to their sorrow when, in 1899, the wind changed and the small
group of true republicans, headed by Clemenceau, suddenly realized, with
mixed feelings, that a section of the mob had rallied to their side.^" In some
eyes the two parties to the great controversy now seemed like "two rival
gangs of charlatans squabbling for recognition by the rabble" ''^ while actually
the voice of the Jacobin Clemenceau had succeeded in bringing back one
part of the French people to their greatest tradition. Thus the great scholar,
Emile Duclaux, could write: "In this drama played before a whole people
^* A study of European superstition would probably show that Jews became objects
of this typically nineteenth-century brand of superstition fairly late. They were preceded
by the Rosicrucians, Templars, Jesuits, and Freemasons. The treatment of nineteenth-
century history suffers greatly from the lack of such a study.
o^-See "II caso Dreyfus," in Civiltd CattoUca (February 5, 1898). — Among the
exceptions to the foregoing statement the most notable is the Jesuit Pierre Charles
Louvain, who has denounced the "Protocols."
«« Cf. Martin du Card, Jean Barois, pp. 272 ff., and Daniel Halevy, in Cahiers de
la quinzaine. Series XI, cahier 10, Paris, 1910.
8^Cf. Georges Sorel, La Revolution dreyfusienne, Paris, 1911, pp. 70-71.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 109
and so worked up by the press that the whole nation ultimately took part
in it, we see the chorus and anti-chorus of the ancient tragedy railing at each
other. The scene is France and the theater is the world."
Led by the Jesuits and aided by the mob the army at last stepped into
the fray confident of victory. Counterattack from the civil power had been
effectively forestalled. The antisemitic press had stopped men's mouths by
publishing Reinach's lists of the deputies involved in the Panama scandal.^*
Everything suggested an effortless triumph. The society and the politicians
of the Third Republic, its scandals and affairs, had created a new class of
declasses; they could not be expected to fight against their own product; on
the contrary, they were to adopt the language and outlook of the mob.
Through the army the Jesuits would gain the upper hand over the corrupt
civil power and the way would thus be paved for a bloodless coup d'etat.
So long as there was only the Dreyfus family trying with bizarre methods
to rescue their kinsman from Devil's Island, and so long as there were only
Jews concerned about their standing in the antisemitic salons and the still
more antisemitic army, everything certainly pointed that way. Obviously
there was no reason to expect an attack on the army or on society from that
quarter. Was not the sole desire of the Jews to continue to be accepted in
society and suffered in the armed forces? No one in military or civilian
circles needed to suffer a sleepless night on their account.*'^ It was discon-
certing, therefore, when it transpired that in the intelligence office of the
General Staff there sat a high officer, who, though possessed of a good
Catholic background, excellent military prospects, and the "proper" degree
of antipathy toward the Jews, had yet not adopted the principle that the end
justifies the means. Such a man, utterly divorced from social clannishness
or professional ambition, was Picquard, and of this simple, quiet, politically
disinterested spirit the General Staff was soon to have its fill. Picquard was
no hero and certainly no martyr. He was simply that common type of citizen
with an average interest in public affairs who in the hour of danger (though
not a minute earlier) stands up to defend his country in the same unques-
tioning way as he discharges his daily dutiesJ" Nevertheless, the cause only
68 To what extent the hands of members of Parliament were tied is shown by the
case of Scheurer-Kestner, one of their better elements and vice-president of the senate.
No sooner had he entered his protest against the trial than Libre Parole proclaimed
the fact that his son-in-law had been involved in the Panama scandal. See Herzog,
op. cit., under date of November, 1897.
69 Cf. Brogan, op. cit., Book VII, ch. 1 : "The desire to let the matter rest was not
uncommon among French Jews, especially among the richer French Jews."
^0 Immediately after he had made his discoveries Picquard was banished to a dan-
gerous post in Tunis. Thereupon he made his will, exposed the whole business, and
deposited a copy of the document with his lawyer. A few months later, when it was
discovered that he was still alive, a deluge of mysterious letters came pouring in,
compromising him and accusing him of complicity with che "traitor" Dreyfus. He was
treated like a gangster who had threatened to "squeal." When all this proved of no
avail, he was arrested, drummed out of the array, and divested of his decorations, all
of which he endured with quiet equaoimity.
JJQ ANTISEMITISM
grew serious when, after several delays and hesitations, Clemenceau at last
became convinced that Dreyfus was innocent and the republic in danger.
At the beginning of the struggle only a handful of well-known writers and
scholars rallied to the cause, Zola, Anatole France, E. Duclaux, Gabriel
Monod, the historian, and Lucien Herr, librarian of the Ecole Normalc. To
these must be added the small and then insignificant circle of young intel-
lectuals who were later to make history in the Cahiers de la quinzaine.''^
That, however, was the full roster of Clemenceau's allies. There was no
political group, not a single politician of repute, ready to stand at his side.
The greatness of Clemenceau's approach lies in the fact that it was not
directed against a particular miscarriage of justice, but was based upon such
"abstract" ideas as justice, liberty, and civic virtue. It was based, in short,
on those very concepts which had formed the staple of old-time Jacobin
patriotism and against which much mud and abuse had already been hurled.
As time wore on and Clemenceau continued, unmoved by threats and dis-
appointments, to enunciate the same truths and to embody them in demands,
the more "concrete" nationalists lost ground. Followers of men like Barres,
who had accused the supporters of Dreyfus of losing themselves in a "welter
of metaphysics," came to realize that the abstractions of the "Tiger" were
actually nearer to political realities than the limited intelligence of ruined
businessmen or the barren traditionalism of fatalistic intellectuals.'^^ Where
the concrete approach of the realistic nationalists eventually led them is
illustrated by the priceless story of how Charles Maurras had "the honor
and pleasure," after the defeat of France, of falling in during his flight to
the south with a female astrologer who interpreted to him the political mean-
ing of recent events and advised him to collaborate with the Nazis. ^^
Although antisemitism had undoubtedly gained ground during the three
years following the arrest of Dreyfus, before the opening of Clemenceau's
campaign, and although the anti-Jewish press had attained a circulation
comparable to that of the chief papers, the streets had remained quiet. It
was only when Clemenceau began his articles in L'Aiirore, when Zola pub-
lished his J' Accuse, and when the Rennes tribunal set off the dismal suc-
cession of trials and retrials that the mob stirred into action. Every stroke of
the Dreyfusards (who were known to be a small minority) was followed
by a more or less violent disturbance on the streets.^* The organization of
the mob by the General Staff was remarkable. The trail leads straight from
TiTo this group, led by Charles Peguy, belonged the youthful Romain Rolland,
Suarez, Georges Sorel, Daniel Halcvy, and Bernard Lazare.
'- Cf. M. Barres, Scenes et doctrines du nationalisme, Paris, 1899.
'^ See Yves Simon, op. cit., pp. 54-55.
"<* The faculty rooms of Rennes University were wrecked after five professors had
declared themselves in favor of a retrial. After the appearance of Zola's first article
Royalist students demonstrated outside the offices of Figaro, after which the paper
desisted from further articles of the same type. The publisher of the pro-Dreyfus
La Bataille was beaten up on the street. The judges of the Court of Cassation, which
finally set aside the verdict of 1894, reported unanimously that they had been threat-
ened with "unlawful assault." Examples could be multiplied.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR HI
the army to the Libre Parole which, directly or indirectly, through its articles
or the personal intervention of its editors, mobilized students, monarchists,
adventurers, and plain gangsters and pushed them into the streets. If Zola
uttered a word, at once his windows were stoned. If Scheurer-Kestner wrote
to the colonial minister, he was at once beaten up on the streets while the
papers made scurrilous attacks on his private life. And all accounts agree
that if Zola, when once charged, had been acquitted he would never have
left the courtroom alive.
The cry, "Death to the Jews," swept the country. In Lyon, Rennes,
Nantes, Tours, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrant, and Marseille — everywhere,
in fact — antisemitic riots broke out and were invariably traceable to the
same source. Popular indignation broke out everywhere on the same day
and at precisely the same hour." Under the leadership of Guerin the mob
took on a military complexion. Antisemitic shock troops appeared on the
streets and made certain that every pro-Dreyfus meeting should end in blood-
shed. The complicity of the pohce was everywhere patent.^^
The most modern figure on the side of the Anti-Dreyfusards was probably
Jules Guerin. Ruined in business, he had begun his political career as a police
stool pigeon, and acquired that flair for discipline and organization which
invariably marks the underworld. This he was later able to divert into political
channels, becoming the founder and head of the Ligue Antisemite. In him
high society found its first criminal hero. In its adulation of Guerin bourgeois
society showed clearly that in its code of morals and ethics it had broken for
good with its own standards. Behind the Ligue stood two members of the
aristocracy, the Duke of Orleans and the Marquis de Mores. The latter had
lost his fortune in America and became famous for organizing the butchers of
Paris into a manslaughtering brigade.
Most eloquent of these modern tendencies was the farcical siege of the
so-called Fort Chabrol. It was here, in this first of "Brown Houses," that
the cream of the Ligue Antisemite foregathered when the police decided at
last to arrest their leader. The installations were the acme of technical per-
fection. "The windows were protected by iron shutters. There was a system
of electric bells and telephones from cellar to roof. Five yards or so behind
the massive entrance, itself always kept locked and bolted, there was a tall
grill of cast iron. on the right, between the grill and the main entrance was
a small door, likewise iron-plated, behind which sentries, handpicked from
the butcher legions, mounted guard day and night." " Max Regis, instigator
of the Algerian pogroms, is another who strikes a modern note. It was this
youthful Regis who once called upon a cheering Paris rabble to "water the
^5 on January 18, 1898, antisemitic demonstrations took place at Bordeaux, Mar-
seille, Clermont-Ferrant, Nantes, Rouen, and Lyon. on the following day student
riots broke out in Rouen, Toulouse, and Nantes.
^6 The crudest instance was that of the police prefect of Rennes, who advised Pro-
fessor Victor Basch, when the latter's house was stormed by a mob 2,000 strong, that
he ought to hand in his resignation, as he could no longer guarantee his safety.
'''' Cf. Bernanos, op. cit., p. 346.
JJ2 ANTISEMITISM
tree of freedom with the blood of the Jews." Regis represented that section
of the movement which hoped to achieve power by legal and parliamentary
methods. In accordance with this program he had himself elected mayor of
Algiers and utilized his office to unleash the pogroms in which several Jews
were killed, Jewish women criminally assaulted and Jewish-owned stores
looted. It was to him also that the polished and cultured Edouard Drumont,
that most famous French antisemite, owed his seat in Parliament.
What was new in all this was not the activity of the mob; for that there
were abundant precedents. What was new and surprising at the time — though
all too familiar to us — was the organization of the mob and the hero-worship
enjoyed by its leaders. The mob became the direct agent of that "concrete"
nationalism espoused by Barres, Maurras, and Daudet, who together formed
what was undoubtedly a kind of elite of the younger intellectuals. These men,
who despised the people and who had themselves but recently emerged from
a ruinous and decadent cult of estheticism, saw in the mob a living ｅxpression
of virile and primitive "strength." It was they and their theories which first
identified the mob with the people and converted its leaders into national
heroes.'** It was their philosophy of pessimism and their deUght in doom that
was the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European inteUigentsia.
Even Clemenceau was not immune from the temptation to identify the
mob with the people. What made him especially prone to this error was
the consistently ambiguous attitude of the Labor party toward the ques-
tion of "abstract" justice. No party, including the socialists, was ready to
make an issue of justice per se, "to stand, come what may, for justice, the
sole unbreakable bond of union between civilized men." " The socialists
stood for the interests of the workers, the opportunists for those of the liberal
bourgeoisie, the coalitionists for those of the Catholic higher classes, and
the radicals for those of the anticlerical petty bourgeoisie. The socialists had
the great advantage of speaking in the name of a homogeneous and united
class. Unlike the bourgeois parties they did not represent a society which
had split into innumerable cliques and cabals. Nevertheless, they were con-
cerned primarily and essentially with the interests of their class. They were
not troubled by any higher obligation toward human solidarity and had no
conception of what communal life really meant. Typical of their attitude
was the observation of Jules Guesde, the counterpart of Jaures in the French
party, that "law and honor are mere words."
The nihilism which characterized the nationalists was no monopoly of
the Anti-Dreyfusards. on the contrary, a large proportion of the socialists
and many of those who championed Dreyfus, like Guesde, spoke the same
language. If the Catholic La Croix remarked that "it is no longer a question
whether Dreyfus is innocent or guilty but only of who will win, the friends
of the army or its foes," the corresponding sentiment might well have been
^8 For these theories see especially Charles Maurras, Au Signe de Flore; souvenirs
de la vie politique; I'Affaire Dreyfus et la fondalion de I'Action Frangaise, Paris, 1931;
M. Barres, op. cit.; Leon Daudet, Panorama de la Troisieme Republique, Paris, 1936.
^* Cf. Clemenceau, "A la derive," in op. cit.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 113
voiced, mutatis mutandis, by the partisans of Dreyfus.^" Not only the mob
but a considerable section of the French people declared itself, at best, quite
uninterested in whether one group of the population was or was not to be
excluded from the law.
As soon as the mob began its campaign of terror against the partisans of
Dreyfus, it found the path open before it. As Clemenceau attests, the workers
of Paris cared little for the whole affair. If the various elements of the bour-
geoisie squabbled among themselves, that, they thought, scarcely affected
their own interests. "With the open consent of the people," wrote Clemen-
ceau, "they have proclaimed before the world the failure of their 'democracy.'
Through them a sovereign people shows itself thrust from its throne of
justice, shorn of its infallible majesty. For there is no denying that this evil
has befallen us with the full complicity of the people itself. . . . The people
is not God. Anyone could have foreseen that this new divinity would some
day topple to his fall. A collective tyrant, spread over the length and breadth
of the land, is no more acceptable than a single tyrant ensconced upon his
throne." "
At last Clemenceau convinced Jaures that an infringement of the rights
of one man was an infringement of the rights of all. But in this he was suc-
cessful only because the wrongdoers happened to be the inveterate enemies
of the people ever since the Revolution, namely, the aristocracy and the
clergy. It was against the rich and the clergy, not for the republic, not for
justice and freedom that the workers finally took to the streets. True, both
the speeches of Jaures and the articles of Clemenceau are redolent of the
old revolutionary passion for human rights. True, also, that this passion
was strong enough to rally the people to the struggle, but first they had to
be convinced that not only justice and the honor of the repubhc were at stake
but also their own class "interests." As it was, a large number of socialists,
both inside and outside the country, still regarded it as a mistake to meddle
(as they put it) in the internecine quarrels of the bourgeoisie or to bother
about saving the republic.
The first to wean the workers, at least partially, from this mood of in-
difference was that great lover of the people, Emile Zola. In his famous in-
dictment of the republic he was also, however, the first to deflect from the
presentation of precise political facts and to yield to the passions of the mob
by raising the bogy of "secret Rome." This was a note which Clemenceau
adopted only reluctantly, though Jaures did with enthusiasm. The real
achievement of Zola, which is hard to detect from his pamphlets, consists
in the resolute and dauntless courage with which this man, whose life and
works had exalted the people to a point "bordering on idolatry," stood up
to challenge, combat, and finally conquer the masses, in whom, like Clemen-
80 It was precisely this which so greatly disillusioned the champions of Dreyfus,
especially the circle around Charles Peguy. This disturbing similarity between Drey-
fusards and Anti-Dreyfusards is the subject matter of the instructive novel by Martin
du Gard, Jean Barois, 1913.
81 Preface to Contre la Justice, 1900.
jj^ ANTISEMITISM
ccau, he could all the time scarcely distinguish the mob from the people.
"Men have been found to resist the most powerful monarchs and to refuse
to bow down before them, but few indeed have been found to resist the
crowd, to stand up alone before misguided masses, to face their implacable
frenzy without weapons and with folded arms to dare a no when a yes is
demanded. Such a man was Zola!" "-
Scarcely had J' Accuse appeared when the Paris socialists held their first
meeting and passed a resolution calling for a revision of the Dreyfus case.
But only live days later some thirty-two socialist officials promptly came out
with a declaration that the fate of Dreyfus, "the class enemy," was no con-
cern of theirs. Behind this declaration stood large elements of the party in
Paris. Although a split in its ranks continued throughout the AlTair, the
party numbered enough Dreyfusards to prevent the Ligue Antisemite from
thenceforth controlling the streets. A socialist meeting even branded anti-
scmitism "a new form of reaction." Yet a few months later when the parlia-
mentary elections took place, Jaures was not r.iturned, and shortly after-
wards, when Cavaignac, the minister of war, treated the Chamber to a speech
attacking Dreyfus and commending the army as indispensable, the delegates
resolved, with only two dissenting votes, to placard the walls of Paris with
the text of that address. Similarly, when the great Paris strike broke out in
October of the same year, Miinster, the German ambassador, was able re-
liably and confidentially to inform Berlin that "as far as the broad masses
are concerned, this is in no sense a political issue. The workers are simply
out for higher wages and these they are bound to get in the end. As for the
Dreyfus case, they have never bothered their heads about it." *^
Who then, in broad terms, were the supporters of Dreyfus? Who were the
300,000 Frenchmen who so eagerly devoured Zola's J' Accuse and who fol-
lowed religiously the editorials of Clemenceau? Who were the men who
finally succeeded in splitting every class, even every family, in France into
opposing factions over the Dreyfus issue? The answer is that they formed
no party or homogeneous group. Admittedly they were recruited more from
the lower than from the upper classes, as they comprised, characteristically
enough, more physicians than lawyers or civil servants. By and large, how-
ever, they were a mixture of diverse elements: men as far apart as Zola and
Peguy or Jaures and Picquard, men who on the morrow would part com-
pany and go their several ways. "They come from political parties and
religious communities who have nothing in common, who are even in con-
flict with each other. . . . Those men do not know each other. They have
fought and on occasion will fight again. Do not deceive yourselves; those
are the 'elite' of the French democracy." «»
Had Clemenceau possessed enough self-confidence at that time to consider
only those who heeded him the true people of France, he would not have
""' Clemenceau, in a speech before the Senate several years later; cf. Weil op cit.,
pp. 112-13. ' f '
"3 See Herzog, op. cit., under date of October 10, 1898
8* "K.V.T.," op. cit., p. 608.
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 115
fallen prey to that fatal pride which marked the rest of his career. Out of
his experiences in the Dreyfus Affair grew his despair of the people, his con-
tempt for men, finally his belief that he and he alone would be able to save
the republic. He could never stoop to play the claque to the antics of the
mob. Therefore, once he began to identify the mob with the people, he
did indeed cut the ground from under his feet, and forced himseltf into that
grim aloofness which thereafter distinguished him.
The disunity of the French people was apparent in each family. Char-
acteristically enough, it found political ｅxpression only in the ranks of the
Labor party. All others, as well as all parliamentary groups, were solidly
against Dreyfus at the beginning of the campaign for a retrial. All this
means, however, is that the bourgeois parties no longer represented the true
feelings of the electorate, for the same disunity that was so patent among the
socialists obtained among almost all sections of the populace. Everywhere a
minority existed which took up Clemenceau's plea for justice, and this
heterogeneous minority made up the Dreyfusards. Their fight against the
army and the corrupt complicity of the republic which backed it was the
dominating factor in French internal politics from the end of 1897 until
the opening of the Exposition in 1900. It also exerted an appreciable in-
fluence on the nation's foreign policy. Nevertheless, this entire struggle, which
was to result eventually in at least a partial triumph, took place exclusively
outside of Parliament. In that so-called representative assembly, comprising
as it did a full 600 delegates drawn from every shade and color both of
labor and of the bourgeoisie, there were in 1898 but two supporters of
Dreyfus and one of them, Jaures, was not re-elected.
The disturbing thing about the Dreyfus Affair is that it was not only the
mob which had to work along extraparliamentary lines. The entire minority,
fighting as it was for Parliament, democracy, and the republic, was likewise
constrained to wage its battle outside the Chamber. The only difference
between the two elements was that while the one used the streets, the other
resorted to the press and the courts. In other words, the whole of France's
political life during the Dreyfus crisis was carried on outside Parliament.
Nor do the several parliamentary votes in favor of the army and against a
retrial in any way invalidate this conclusion. It is significant to remember
that when parliamentary feeling began to turn, shortly before the opening
of the Paris Exposition, Minister of War Gallifet was able to declare truth-
fully that this in no wise represented the mood of the country.*^ on the other
hand the vote against a retrial must not be construed as an endorsement of
the coup d'etat policy which the Jesuits and certain radical antisemites were
trying to introduce with the help of the army.®*^ It was due, rather, to plain
8^ Gallifet, minister of war, wrote to Waldeck: "Let us not forget that the great
majority of people in France are antisemitic. Our position would be, therefore, that on
the one side we would have the entire army and the majority of Frenchmen, not to
speak of the civil service and the senators; . . ." cf. J. Reinach, op. cit., V, 579.
86 The best known of such attempts is that of Deroulede who sought, while attending
the funeral of President Paul Faure, in February, 1899, to incite General Roget to
;;5 ANTISEMITISM
resistance against any change in the status quo. As a matter of fact, an equally
overwhelming majority of the Chamber would have rejected a military-
clerical dictatorship.
Those members of Parliament who had learned to regard politics as the
professional representation of vested interests were naturally anxious to
preserve that state of affairs upon which their "calling" and their profits de-
pended. The Dreyfus case revealed, moreover, that the people likewise
wanted their representatives to look after their own special interests rather
than to function as statesmen. It was distinctly unwise to mention the case in
election propaganda. Had this been due solely to antisemitism the situation
of the Dreyfusards would certainly have been hopeless. In point of fact,
during the elections they already enjoyed considerable support among the
working class. Nevertheless even those who sided with Dreyfus did not care
to see this political question dragged into the elections. It was, indeed, be-
cause he insisted on making it the pivot of his campaign that Jaures lost
his seat.
If Clemenceau and the Dreyfusards succeeded in winning over large
sections of all classes to the demand of a retrial, the Catholics reacted as a
bloc; among them there was no divergence of opinion. What the Jesuits did
in steering the aristocracy and the General Staff, was done for the middle
and lower classes by the Assumptionists, whose organ. La Croix, enjoyed
the largest circulation of all Catholic journals in France." Both centered
their agitation against the republic around the Jews. Both represented them-
selves as defenders of the army and the commonweal against the machina-
tions of "international Jewry." More striking, however, tlian the attitude of
the Catholics in France was the fact that the Catholic press throughout the
world was solidly against Dreyfus. "All these journalists marched and are
still marching at the word of command of their superiors." ** As the case
progressed, it became increasingly clear that the agitation against the Jews
in France followed an international line. Thus the Civilta CattoUca declared
that Jews must be excluded from the nation everywhere, in France, Germany,
Austria, and Italy. Catholic politicians were among the first to realize that
latter-day power politics must be based on the interplay of colonial ambi-
tions. They were therefore the first to link antisemitism to imperialism, de-
claring that the Jews were agents of England and thereby identifying
antagonism toward them with Anglophobia.^' The Dreyfus case, in which
mutiny. The German ambassadors and charges d'affaires in Paris reported such at-
tempts every few months. The situation is well summed up by Barres, op. cit., p. 4:
"in Rennes we have found our battlefield. All we need is soldiers or, more precisely,
generals — or. still more precisely, a general." only it was no accident that this general
was non-existent.
*' Brogan goes so far as to blame the Assumptionists for the entire clerical agitation.
88 "K.V.T.," op. cit.. p. 597.
8* "The initial stimulus in the Affair very probably came from London, where the
Congo-Nile mission of 1896-1898 was causing some degree of disquietude"; thus
Maurras in Action Frangaise (July 14, 1935). The Catholic press of Lxjndon defended
the Jesuits; see "The Jesuits and the Dreyfus Case," in The Month, Vol. XVni (1899).
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR H7
Jews were the central figures, thus afforded them a welcome opportunity to
play their game. If England had taken Egypt from the French the Jews were
to blame/" while the movement for an Anglo-American alliance was due,
of course, to "Rothschild imperialism." ®^ That the Catholic game was not
confined to France became abundantly clear once the curtain was rung down
on that particular scene. At the close of 1899, when Dreyfus had been par-
doned and when French public opinion had turned round through fear of a
projected boycott of the Exposition, only an interview with Pope Leo XIII
was needed to stop the spread of antisemitism throughout the world.^^ Even
in the United States, where championship of Dreyfus was particularly en-
thusiastic among the non-Catholics, it was possible to detect in the Catholic
press after 1897 a marked resurgence of antisemitic feeling which, however,
subsided overnight following the interview with Leo XIII.^* The "grand
strategy" of using antisemitism as an instrument of Catholicism had proved
abortive.
v: The Jews and the Dreyfusards
THE CASE of the unfortunate Captain Dreyfus had shown the world that in
every Jewish nobleman and multimillionaire there still remained something
of the old-time pariah, who has no country, for whom human rights do not
exist, and whom society would gladly exclude from its privileges. No one,
however, found it more difficult to grasp this fact than the emancipated Jews
themselves. "It isn't enough for them," wrote Bernard Lazare, "to reject any
solidarity with their foreign-born brethren; they have also to go charging
them with all the evils which their own cowardice engenders. They are not
content with being more jingoist than the native Frenchmen; like all emanci-
pated Jews everywhere, they have also of their own volition broken all ties
of solidarity. Indeed, they go so far that for the three dozen or so men in
France who are ready to defend one of their martyred brethren you can find
some thousands ready to stand guard over Devil's Island, alongside the
most rabid patriots of the country." »* Precisely because they had played so
small a part in the political development of the lands in which they lived,
they had come, during the course of the century, to make a fetish of legal
equality. To them it was the unquestionable basis of eternal security. When
the Dreyfus Affair broke out to warn them that their security was menaced,
they were deep in the process of a disintegrating assimilation, through which
»o Civiltd Cattolica, February 5, 1898.
81 See the particularly characteristic article of Rev. George McDermot, C.S.P., "Mr.
Chamberlain's Foreign Policy and the Dreyfus Case," in the American monthly
Catholic World, Vol. LXVII (September, 1898).
82 Cf. Lecanuet, op. cit., p. 188.
83 Cf. Rose A. Halperin, op. cit., pp. 59, 77 flf.
8* Bernard Lazare, Job's Dungheap, New York, 1948, p. 97.
US ANTISEMITISM
their lack of poliiical wisdom was intensified rather than otherwise. They
were rapidly assimilating themselves to those elements of society in which
nil political passions are smothered beneath the dead weight of social snob-
hcry, big business, and hitherto unknown opportunities for profit. They
hoped to get rid of the antipathy which this tendency had called forth by
diverting it against their poor and as yet unassimilatcd immigrant brethren.
Using the same tactics as Gentile society had employed against them they
took pains to dissociate themselves from the so-called Ostjuden. Political
antisemitism, as it had manifested itself in the pogroms of Russia and
Rumania, they dismissed airily as a survival from the Middle Ages, scarcely
a reality of modern politics. They could never understand that more was at
stake in the Dreyfus AITair than mere social status, if only because more than
mere social antisemitism had been brought to bear.
These then are the reasons why so few wholehearted supporters of Dreyfus
were to be found in the ranks of French Jewry. The Jews, including the very
family of the accused, shrank from starting a political fight. on just these
grounds, Labori, counsel for Zola, was refused the defense before the
Rcnncs tribunal, while Dreyfus' second lawyer, Demange, was constrained
to base his plea on the issue of doubt. It was hoped thereby to smother under
a deluge of compliments any possible attack from the army or its officers.
The idea was that the royal road to an acquittal was to pretend that the
whole thing boiled down to the possibility of a judicial error, the victim of
which just happened by chance to be a Jew. The result was a second verdict
and Dreyfus, refusing to face the true issue, was induced to renounce a
retrial and instead to petition for clemency, that is, to plead guilty."'' The
Jews failed to see that what was involved was an organized fight against
them on a political front. They therefore resisted the co-operation of men
who were prepared to meet the challenge on this basis. How blind their atti-
tude was is shown clearly by the case of Clemenceau. Clemenceau's struggle
for justice as the foundation of the state certainly embraced the restoration
of equal rights to the Jews. In an age, however, of class struggle on the one
hand and rampant jingoism on the other, it would have remained a political
abstraction had it not been conceived, at the same time, in actual terms of
the oppressed fighting their oppressors. Clemenceau was one of the few
true friends modern Jewry has known just because he recognized and pro-
claimed before the world that Jews were one of the oppressed peoples of
Europe. The antisemite tends to see in the Jewish parvenu an upstart pariah;
consequently in every huckster he fears a Rothschild and in every shnorrer
a parvenu. But Clemenceau, in his consuming passion for justice, still saw
the Rothschilds as members of a downtrodden people. His anguish over the
^■' Cf. Fcrnand Labori, "Le mal politique et les partis," in La Grande Revue
(October-December, 1901): "From the moment at Rennes when the accused pleaded
guilty and the defendant renounced recourse to a retrial in the hope of gaining a
pardon, the Dreyfus case as a great, universal human issue was definitely closed." In
his article entitled "Le Spectacle du jour," Clemenceau speaks of the Jews of Algiers
"in whose behalf Rothschild will not voice the least protest."
THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 119
national misfortune of France opened his eyes and his heart even to those
"unfortunates, who pose as leaders of their people and promptly leave them
in the lurch," to those cowed and subdued elements who, in their ignorance,
weakness and fear, have been so much bedazzled by admiration of the
stronger as to exclude them from partnership in any active struggle and who
are able to "rush to the aid of the winner" only when the battle has been
won.***
VI: The Pardon and Its Significance
THAT THE Drcyfus drama was a comedy became apparent only in its final
act. The deus ex machina who united the disrupted country, turned Parlia-
ment in favor of a retrial and eventually reconciled the disparate elements
of the people from the extreme right to the socialists, was nothing other than
the Paris Exposition of 1900. What Clemenceau's daily editorials, Zola's
pathos, Jaures' speeches, and the popular hatred of clergy and aristocracy
had failed to achieve, namely, a change of parliamentary feeling in favor of
Dreyfus, was at last accomplished by the fear of a boycott. The same Parlia-
ment that a year before had unanimously rejected a retrial, now by a two-
thirds majority passed a vote of censure on an anti-Dreyfus government. In
July, 1899, the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet came to power. President Loubct
pardoned Dreyfus and liquidated the entire affair. The Exposition was able
to open under the brightest of commercial skies and general fraternization
ensued: even socialists became eligible for government posts; Millerand, the
first socialist minister in Europe, received the portfolio of commerce.
Parliament became the champion of Dreyfus! That was the upshot. For
Clemenceau, of course, it was a defeat. To the bitter end he denounced the
ambiguous pardon and the even more ambiguous amnesty. "All it has done,"
wrote Zola, "is to lump together in a single stinking pardon men of honor
and hoodlums. All have been thrown into one pot." "^ Clemenceau remained,
as at the beginning, utterly alone. The socialists, above all, Jaures, welcomed
both pardon and amnesty. Did it not insure them a place in the government
and a more extensive representation of their special interests? A few months
later, in May, 1900, when the success of the Exposition was assured, the
real truth at last emerged. All these appeasement tactics were to be at the
expense of the Dreyfusards. The motion for a further retrial was defeated
425 to 60, and not even Clemenceau's own government in 1906 could change
the situation; it did not dare to entrust the retrial to a normal court of law.
The (illegal) acquittal through the Court of Appeals was a compromise.
But defeat for Clemenceau did not mean victory for the Church and the
88 See Clemenceau's articles entitled "Le Spectacle du jour," "Et les Juifs!" "La
Farce du syndicat," and "Encore les juifs!" in L'lniqiiite.
»' Cf. Zola's letter dated September 13, 1899, in Correspondance: lettres d Mditre
Labori.
J20 ANTISEMITISM
army. The separation of Church and State and the ban on parochial educa-
tion brought to an end the political influence of Catholicism in France.
Similarly, the subjection of the intelligence service to the ministry of war, i.e.,
to the civil authority, robbed the army of its blackmailing influence on cabinet
and Chamber and deprived it of any justification for conducting police in-
quiries on its own account.
In 1909 Drumont stood for the Academy. once his antisemitism had
been lauded by the Catholics and acclaimed by the people. Now, however,
the "greatest historian since Fustel" (Lemaitre) was obliged to yield to
Marcel Provost, author of the somewhat pornographic Demi-Vierges, and
the new "immortal" received the congratulations of the Jesuit Father Du
Lac."' Even the Society of Jesus had composed its quarrel with the Third
Republic. The close of the Dreyfus case marked the end of clerical anti-
semitism. The compromise adopted by the Third Republic cleared the de-
fendant without granting him a regular trial, while it restricted the activities
of Catholic organizations. Whereas Bernard Lazare had asked equal rights
for both sides, the state had allowed one exception for the Jews and another
which threatened the freedom of conscience of Catholics. ^^ The parties which
were really in conflict were both placed outside the law, with the result that
the Jewish question on the one hand and political Catholicism on the other
were banished thenceforth from the arena of practical politics.
Thus closes the only episode in which the subterranean forces of the
nineteenth century enter the full light of recorded history. The only visible
result was that it gave birth to the Zionist movement — the only political
answer Jews have ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology in which
they have ever taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center
of world events.
"« CI. Hcrzog, op. cit., p. 97.
•"• Lazare's position in the Dreyfus Affair is best described by Charles Peguy, "Notre
Jeunesse," in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Paris, 1910. Regarding him as the true repre-
sentative of Jewish interests, Peguy formulates Lazare's demands as follows: "He was
a partisan of the impartiality of the law. Impartiality of law in the Dreyfus case, im-
partial law in the case of the religious orders. This seems like a trifle; this can lead
far. This led him to isolation in death." (Translation quoted from Introduction to
Lazare's Job's Dungheap.) Lazare was one of the first Dreyfusards to protest against
the law governing congregations.
PART TWO
Imperialism
/ would annex the planets if I could.
CECIL RHODES
CHAPTER five:
The Political Emancipation
of the Bourgeoisie
THE THREE DECADES from 1884 to 1914 separate the nineteenth century,
which ended with the scramble for Africa and the birth of the pan-
movements, from the twentieth, which began with the first World War. This
is the period of Imperialism, with its stagnant quiet in Europe and breath-
taking developments in Asia and Africa.^ Some of the fundamental aspects of
this time appear so close to totalitarian phenomena of the twentieth century
that it may be justifiable to consider the whole period a preparatory stage
for coming catastrophes. Its quiet, on the other hand, makes it appear still
very much a part of the nineteenth century. We can hardly avoid looking at
this close and yet distant past with the too-wise eyes of those who know the
end of the story in advance, who know it led to an almost complete break
in the continuous flow of Western history as we had known it for more than
two thousand years. But we must also admit a certain nostalgia for what can
still be called a "golden age of security," for an age, that is, when even
horrors were still marked by a certain moderation and controlled by re-
spectabiUty, and therefore could be related to the general appearance of
sanity. In other words, no matter how close to us this past is, we are perfectly
aware that our experience of concentration camps and death factories is as
remote from its general atmosphere as it is from any other period in Western
history.
The central inner-European event of the imperialist period was the po-
litical emancipation of the bourgeoisie, which up to then had been the first
class^ in history to achieve economic pre-eminence without aspiring to politi-
caljule. The bourgeoisie had developed within, and together with, the nation-
state, which almost by definition ruled over and beyond a class-divided so-
ciety. Even when the bourgeoisie had already established itself as the ruling
class, it had left all pohtical decisions to the state. only when the nation-
state proved unfit to be the framework for the further growth of capitahst
economy did the latent fight between state and society become openly a
struggle for power. During the imperialist period neither the state nor the
1 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1905, 1938, p. 19: "Though, for convenience,
the year 1870 has been taken as indicative of the beginning of a conscious policy of
Imperialism, it will be evident that the movement did not attain its full impetus
until the middle of the eighties . . . from about 1884."
• 24 IMPERIALISM
bourgeoisie won a decisive victory. National institutions resisted throughout
the brutality and megalomania of imperialist aspirations, and bourgeois at-
tempts to use the state and its instruments of violence for its own economic
purposes were always only half successful. This changed when the German
bourgeoisie staked everything on the Hitler movement and aspired to rule
with the help of the mob, but then it turned out to be too late. The_bour-
gcoisie succeeded in destroying the nation-state but won a Pyrrhic victory;
the mob proved quite capable of taking care of politics by itself and liqui-
dated the bourgeoisie along with all other classes and institutions.
I: Expansion and the Nation-State
"EXPANSION IS everything," said Cecil Rhodes, and fell into despair, for
every night he saw overhead "these stars . . . these vast worlds which we
can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could." ^ He had discovered
the moving principle of the new, the imperialist era (within less than two
decades, British colonial possessions increased by AVz million square miles
and 66 million inhabitants, the French nation gained 3Vi million square
miles and 26 milHon people, the Germans won a new empire of a million
square miles and 1 3 million natives, and Belgium through her king acquired
900,000 square miles with SVi million population^); and yet in a flash of
wisdom Rhodes recognized at the same moment its inherent insanity and its
contradiction to the human condition. Naturally, neither insight nor sadness
changed his policies. He had no use for the flashes of wisdom that led him so
far beyond the normal capacities of an ambitious businessman with a marked
tendency toward megalomania.
"World politics is for a nation what megalomania is for an individual," *
said Eugen Richtcr (leader of the German progressive party) at about the
same historical moment. But his opposition in the Reichstag to Bismarck's
proposal to support private companies in the foundation of trading and
maritime stations, showed clearly that he understood the economic needs of
a nation in his time even less than Bismarck himself. It looked as though
those who opposed or ignored imperialism — like Eugen Richter in Germany,
or Gladstone in England, or Clemenceau in France — had lost touch with
reality and did not realize that trade and economics had already involved
every nation in world politics. The national principle was leading into pro-
vincial ignorance and the battle fought by sanity was lost.
2 S. Gertrude Millin. Rhodes, London, 1933, p. 138.
3 These figures are quoted by Carlton J. H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism,
New York, 1941, p. 237, and cover the period from 1871-1900.— See also Hobson,
op. cit., p. 19: "Within 15 years some 3% millions of square miles were added to
the British Empire, 1 million square miles with 14 millions inhabitants to the Ger-
man, 3'/i millions square miles with 37 millions inhabitants to the French."
♦ Sec Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Weltpolitik. Flugschriften des Alldeutschcn Verbandcs,
No. 5. 1897, p. 1.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 125
Moderation and confusion were the only rewards of any statesman's con-
sistent opposition to imperialist expansion. Thus Bismarck, in 1871, rejected
the offer of French possessions in Africa in exchange for Alsace-Lorraine,
and twenty years later acquired Heligoland from Great Britain in return for
Uganda, Zanzibar, and Vitu — two kingdoms for a bathtub, as the German
imperialists told him, not without justice. Thus in the eighties Clemenceau
opposed the imperialist party in France when they wanted to send an ex-
peditionary force to Egypt against the British, and thirty years later he sur-
rendered the Mosul oil fields to England for the sake of a French-British
alUance. Thus Gladstone was being denounced by Cromer in Egypt as "not
a man to whom the destinies of the British Empire could safely be
entrusted."
That statesmen, who thought primarily in terms of the established na-
tional territory, were suspicious of imperialism was justified enough, except
that more was involved than what they called "overseas adventures." They
knew by instinct rather than by insight that this new expansion movement,
in which "patriotism ... is best expressed in money-making" (Huebbe-
Schleiden) and the national flag is a "commercial asset" (Rhodes), could
only destroy the political body of the nation-state. Conquest as well as empire
building had fallen into disrepute for very good reasons. They had been car-
ried out successfully only by governments which, like the Roman Republic,
were based primarily on law, so that conquest could be followed by integra-
tion of the most heterogeneous peoples by imposing upon them a common
law. The nation-state, however, based upon a homogeneous population's
active consent to its government ("/e plebiscite de tous les jours" ^), lacked
such a unifying principle and would, in the case of conquest, have to assimi-
late rather than to integrate, to enforce consent rather than justice, that is,
to degenerate into tyranny. Robespierre was already well aware of this when
he exclaimed: "Perissent les colonies si elles nous en coiitent I'honneur, la
liberie."
Expansion as a permanent and supreme aim of politics is the central po-
litical idea of imperialism. Since it implies neither temporary looting nor the
more lasting assimilation of conquest, it is an entirely new concept in the
long history of political thought and action. The reason for this surprising
originality — surprising because entirely new concepts are very rare in poli-
tics — is simply that this concept is not really political at all, but has its
origin in the realm of business speculation, where expansion meant the
permanent broadening of industrial production and economic transactions
characteristic of the nineteenth century.
In the economic sphere, expansion was an adequate concept because in-
dustrial growth was a working reality. Expansion meant increase in actual
* Ernest Renan in his classical essay Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, Paris, 1882, stressed
"the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the un-
divided inheritance which has been handed down" as the chief elements which keep
the members of a people together in such a way that they form a nation. Translation
quoted from The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and other Studies, London, 1896.
/2<5 IMPERIALISM
production of goods to be used and consumed. The processes of production
arc as unlimited as the capacity of man to produce for, establish, furnish,
and improve on the human world. When production and economic growth
slowed down, their limits were not so much economic as political, insofar
as production depended on, and products were shared by, many different
peoples who were organized in widely differing political bodies.
Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came
up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie
turned to polities out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up
the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had
to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to
be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy.
With the slogan "expansion for expansion's sake," the bourgeoisie tried
and partly succeeded in persuading their national governments to enter upon
the path of world politics. The new policy they proposed seemed for a mo-
ment to find its natural limitations and balances in the very fact that several
nations started their expansions simultaneously and competitively. Im-
perialism in its initial stages could indeed still be described as a struggle of
"competing empires" and distinguished from the "idea of empire in the
ancient and medieval world (which) was that of a federation of States, under
a hegemony, covering ... the entire recognized world." '^ Yet such a com-
petition was only one of the many remnants of a past era, a concession to
that still prevailing national principle according to which mankind is a family
of nations vying for excellence, or to the liberal belief that competition will
automatically set up its own stabilizing predetermined limits before one
competitor has liquidated all the others. This happy balance, however, had
hardly been the inevitable outcome of mysterious economic laws, but had
relied heavily on political, and even more on police institutions that pre-
vented competitors from using revolvers. How a competition between fully
armed business concerns — "empires" — could end in anything but victory
for one and death for the others is difficult to understand. In other words,
competition is no more a principle of politics than expansion, and needs
political power just as badly for control and restraint.
In contrast to the economic structure, the political structure cannot be
expanded indefinitely, because it is not based upon the productivity of man,
which is, indeed, unlimited. Of all forms of government and organizations
of people, the nation-state is least suited for unlimited growth because the
genuine consent at its base cannot be stretched indefinitely, and is only
rarely, and with difliculty, won from conquered peoples. No nation-state
could with a clear conscience ever try to conquer foreign peoples, since
such a conscience comes only from the conviction of the conquering nation
that it is imposing a superior law upon barbarians.^ The nation, however,
" Hobson, op. cil.
^ This bad conscience springing from the belief in consent as the basis of all political
organization is very well described by Harold Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919-
1925. Boston-New York. 1934. in the discussion of British policy in Egypt: "The
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 127
conceived of its law as an outgrowth of a unique national substance which
was not valid beyond its own people and the boundaries of its own territory.
Wherever the nation-state appeared as conqueror, it aroused national
consciousness and desire for sovereignty among the conquered people,
thereby defeating all genuine attempts at empire building. Thus the French
incorporated Algeria as a province of the mother country, but could not
bring themselves to impose their own laws upon an Arab people. They con-
tinued rather to respect Islamic law and granted their Arab citizens "personal
status," producing the nonsensical hybrid of a nominally French territory,
legally as much a part of France as the Departement de la Seine, whose in-
habitants are not French citizens.
The early British "empire builders," putting their trust in conquest as a
permanent method of rule, were never able to incorporate their nearest
neighbors, the Irish, into the far-flung structure either of the British Empire
or the British Commonwealth of Nations; but when, after the last war, Ire-
land was granted dominion status and welcomed as a full-fledged member
of the British Commonwealth, the failure was just as real, if less palpable.
The oldest "possession" and newest dominion unilaterally denounced its
dominion status (in 1937) and severed all ties with the English nation when
it refused to participate in the war. England's rule by permanent conquest,
since it "simply failed to destroy" Ireland (Chesterton), had not so much
aroused her own "slumbering genius of imperialism" ^ as it had awakened
the spirit of national resistance in the Irish.
The national structure of the United Kingdom had made quick assimila-
tion and incorporation of the conquered peoples impossible; the British
Commonwealth was never a "Commonwealth of Nations" but the heir of the
United Kingdom, one nation dispersed throughout the world. Dispersion and
colonization did not expand, but transplanted, the political structure, with
the result that the members of the new federated body remained closely tied
to their common mother country for sound reasons of common past and
common law. The Irish example proves how ill fitted the United Kingdom
was to build an imperial structure in which many different peoples could live
contentedly together.** The British nation proved to be adept not at the
justification of our presence in Egypt remains based, not upon the defensible right of
conquest, or on force, but upon our own behef in the element of consent. That ele-
ment, in 1919, did not in any articulate form exist. It was dramatically challenged by
the Egyptian outburst of March 1919."
8 As Lord Salisbury put it, rejoicing over the defeat of Gladstone's first Home Rule
Bill. During the following twenty years of Conservative — and that was at that time
imperialist — rule (1885-1905), the English-Irish conflict was not only not solved but
became much more acute. See also Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Crimes of England,
1915, pp. 57 ff.
^ Why in the initial stages of national development the Tudors did not succeed in
incorporating Ireland into Great Britain as the Valois had succeeded in incorporating
Brittany and Burgundy into France, is still a riddle. It may be, however, that a
similar process was brutally interrupted by the Cromwell regime, which treated
Ireland as one great piece of booty to be divided among its servants. After the Crom-
well revolution, at any rate, which was as crucial for the formation of the British
J2S IMPERIALISM
Roman art of empire building but at following the Greek model of coloniza-
tion. Instead of conquering and imposing their own law upon foreign peo-
ples, the English colonists settled on newly won territory in the four corners
of the world and remained members of the same British nation. '° Whether
the federated structure of the Commonwealth, admirably built on the reality
of one nation dispersed over the earth, will be sufficiently elastic to balance
the nation's inherent difficulties in empire building and to admit perma-
nently non-British peoples as full-fledged "partners in the concern" of the
Commonwealth, remains to be seen. The present dominion status of India —
a status, by the way, flatly refused by Indian nationalists during the war — has
frequently been considered to be a temporary and transitory solution. ^^
The inner contradiction between the nation's body politic and conquest as
a political device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream.
It is due to this experience and not to humanitarian considerations that con-
quest has since been officially condemned and has played a minor role in
the adjustment of borderline conflicts. The Napoleonic failure to unite
Europe under the French flag was a clear indication that conquest by a
nation led either to the full awakening of the conquered people's national
consciousness and to consequent rebellion against the conqueror, or to
tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully
rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all
the national institutions of its own people.
The French, in contrast to the British and all other nations in Europe,
nation as the French Revolution became for the French, the United Kingdom had
already reached that stage of maturity that is always accompanied by a loss of the
power of assimilation and integration which the body politic of the nation possesses
only in its initial stages. What then followed was, indeed, one long sad story of
"coercion [that] was not imposed that the people might live quietly but that people
might die quietly" (Chesterton, op. cit., p. 60).
For a historical survey of the Irish question that includes the latest developments,
compare the excellent unbiased study of Nicholas Mansergh, Britain and Ireland (in
Longman's Pamphlets on the British Commonwealth, London, 1942).
10 Very characteristic is the following statement of J. A. Froude made shortly before
the beginning of the imperialist era: "Let it be once established that an Englishman
emigrating to Canada or the Cape, or Australia, or New Zealand did not forfeit his
nationality, that he was still on English soil as much as if he was in Devonshire or
Yorkshire, and would remain an Englishman while the English Empire lasted; and
if we spent a quarter of the sums which were sunk in the morasses at Balaclava in
sending out and establishing two millions of our people in those colonies, it would
contribute more to the essential strength of the country than all the wars in which
we have been entangled from Agincourt to Waterloo." Quoted from Robert Livingston
Schuyler, The Full of the Old Colonial System, New York, 1945, pp. 280-81.
"The eminent South African writer, Jan Disselboom, expressed very bluntly the
attitude of the Commonwealth peoples on this question: "Great Britain is merely a
partner in the concern ... all descended from the same closely allied stock. . . .
Those parts of the Empire which are not inhabited by races of which this is true,
were never partners in the concern. They were the private property of the pre-
dominant partner. . . . You can have the white dominion, or you can have the
Dominion of India, but you cannot have both." (Quoted from A. Carthill, The Lost
Dominion, 1924.)
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE J29
actually tried in recent times to combine ius with imperium and to build an
empire in the old Roman sense. They alone at least attempted to develop the
body politic of the nation into an imperial political structure, believed that
"the French nation (was) marching ... to spread the benefits of French
civilization"; they wanted to incorporate overseas possessions into the na-
tional body by treating the conquered peoples as "both . . . brothers and
, . . subjects — brothers in the fraternity of a common French civilization,
and subjects in that they are disciples of French light and followers of
French leading." *^ This was partly carried out when colored delegates took
their seats in the French Parliament and when Algeria was declared to be a
department of France.
The result of this daring enterprise was a particularly brutal exploitation
of overseas possessions for the sake of the nation. All theories to the con-
trary, the French Empire actually was evaluated from the point of view of
national defense, ^^ and the colonies were considered lands of soldiers which
could produce a jorce noire to protect the inhabitants of France against their
national enemies. Poincare's famous phrase in 1923, "France is not a coun-
try of forty millions; she is a country of one hundred millions," pointed
simply to the discovery of an "economical form of gunfodder, turned out by
mass-production methods." '^ When Clemenceau insisted at the peace table
in 1918 that he cared about nothing but "an unlimited right of levying black
troops to assist in the defense of French territory in Europe if France were
attacked in the future by Germany," ^^ he did not save the French nation
from German aggression, as we are now unfortunately in a position to know,
although his plan was carried out by the General Staff; but he dealt a death-
blow to the still dubious possibihty of a French Empire.^" Compared with
12 Ernest Barker, Idecis and Ideals of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1941, p. 4.
See also the very good introductory remarks on the foundations of the French Em-
pire in The French Colonial Empire (in Information Department Papers No. 25, pub-
lished by The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1941), pp. 9 ff. "The
aim is to assimilate colonial peoples to the French people, or, where this is not pos-
sible in more primitive communities, to 'associate' them, so that more and more the
difference between la France metropole and la France d'outremer shall be a geo-
graphical difference and not a fundamental one."
1-' See Gabriel Hanotaux, "Le General Mangin" in Revue des Deux Mondes (1925),
Tome 27.
1* W. P. Crozier, "France and her 'Black Empire' " in New Republic, January 23,
1924.
15 David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, New Haven, 1939,
I, 362 ff.
I*' A similar attempt at brutal exploitation of overseas possessions for the sake of
the nation was made by the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies after the defeat of
Napoleon had restored the Dutch colonies to the much impoverished mother country.
By means of compulsory cultivation the natives were reduced to slavery for the
benefit of the government in Holland. Multatuli's Max Havelaar, first published in
the sixties of the last century, was aimed at the government at home and not at the
services abroad. (See de Kat Angelino, Colonial Policy, Vol. II, The Dutch East Indies,
Chicago, 1931, p. 45.)
This system was quickly abandoned and the Netherlands Indies, for a while, be-
JJQ IMPERIALISM
this blind desperate nationalism, British imperialists compromising on the
mandate system looked like guardians of the self-determination of peoples.
And this despite the fact that they started at once to misuse the mandate
system by "indirect rule," a method which permits the administrator to
govern a people "not directly but through the medium of their own tribal
and local authorities." *'
The British tried to escape the dangerous inconsistency inherent in the
nation's attempt at empire building by leaving the conquered peoples to their
own devices as far as culture, religion, and law were concerned, by staying
aloof and refraining from spreading British law and culture. This did not
prevent the natives from developing national consciousness and from clamor-
ing for sovereignty and independence — though it may have retarded the
process somewhat. But it has strengthened tremendously the new im-
perialist consciousness of a fundamental, and not just a temporary, superi-
ority of man over man, of the "higher" over the "lower breeds." This in turn
exacerbated the subject peoples' fight for freedom and blinded them to the
unquestionable benefits of British rule. From the very aloofness of their
administrators who, "despite their genuine respect for the natives as a peo-
ple, and in some cases even their love for them . . . almost to a man, do
not believe that they are or ever will be capable of governing themselves
without supervision," " the "natives" could not but conclude that they were
being excluded and separated from the rest of mankind forever.
Imperialism is not empire building and expansion is not conquest. The
British conquerors, the old "breakers of law in India" (Burke), had little
in common with the exporters of British money or the administrators of the
Indian peoples. If the latter had changed from applying decrees to the mak-
ing of laws, they might have become empire builders. The point, however,
is that the English nation was not interested in this and would hardly have
supported them. As it was, the imperialist-minded businessmen were fol-
lowed by civil servants who wanted "the African to be left an African," while
quite a few, who had not yet outgrown what Harold Nicolson once called
came "the admiration of all colonizing nations." (Sir Hesketh Bell, former Governor
of Uganda, Northern Nigeria, etc., Foreign Colonial Administration in the Far East,
1928, Part I). The Dutch methods have many similarities with the French: the
granting of European status to deserving natives, introduction of a European school
system, and other devices of gradual assimilation. The Dutch thereby achieved the
same result: a strong national independence movement among the subject people.
In the present study Dutch and Belgian imperialism are being neglected. The first
is a curious and changing mixture of French and English methods; the second is
the story not of the expansion of the Belgian nation or even the Belgian bourgeoisie,
but of the expansion of the Belgian king personally, unchecked by any government,
unconnected with any other institution. Both the Dutch and the Belgian forms of
imperialism are atypical. The Netherlands did not expand during the eighties, but
only consolidated and modernized their old possessions. The unequalled atrocities
committed in the Belgian Congo, on the other hand, would offer too unfair an example
for what was generally happening in overseas possessions.
1^ Ernest Barker, op. cit., p. 69.
" Selwyn James, South of the Congo, New York, 1943, p. 326.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 131
their "boyhood-ideals," *° wanted to help them to "become a better Afri-
can" ^^ — whatever that may mean. In no case were they "disposed to apply
the administrative and political system of their own country to the govern-
ment of backward populations," ^^ and to tie the far-flung possessions of the
British Crown to the English nation.
In contrast to true imperial structures, where the institutions of the mother
country are in various ways integrated into the empire, it is characteristic of
imperialism that national institutions remain separate from the colonial ad-
ministration although they are allowed to exercise control. The actual mo-
tivation for this separation was a curious mixture of arrogance and respect:
the new arrogance of the administrators abroad who faced "backward pop-
ulations" or "lower breeds" found its correlative in the respect of old-fash-
ioned statesmen at home who felt that no nation had the right to impose its
law upon a foreign people. It was in the very nature of things that the arro-
gance turned out to be a device for rule, while the respect, which remained
entirely negative, did not produce a new way for peoples to live together,
but managed only to keep the ruthless imperialist rule by decree within
bounds. To the salutary restraint of national institutions and politicians we
owe whatever benefits the non-European peoples have been able, after all
and despite everything, to derive from Western domination. But the colonial
services never ceased to protest against the interference of the "inexperienced
majority" — the nation — that tried to press the "experienced minority" — the
imperialist administrators — "in the direction of imitation," -^ namely, of gov-
ernment in accordance with the general standards of justice and liberty at
home.
That a movement of expansion for expansion's sake grew up in nation-
states which more than any other poHtical bodies were defined by boundaries
and the limitations of possible conquest, is one example of the seemingly
absurd disparities between cause and effect which have become the hallmark
of modern history. The wild confusion of modern historical terminology is
only a by-product of these disparities. By comparisons with ancient Empires,
by mistaking expansion for conquest, by neglecting the difference between
Commonwealth and Empire (which pre-imperialist historians called the dif-
ference between plantations and possessions, or colonies and dependencies,
or, somewhat later, colonialism and imperialism^^), by neglecting, in other
1^ About these boyhood ideals and their role in British imperialism, see chapter vii.
How they were developed and cultivated is described in Rudyard Kipling's Stalky
and Company.
20 Ernest Barker, op. cit., p. 150.
21 Lord Cromer, "The Government of Subject Races," in Edinburgh Review, Jan-
uary, 1908.
2 2 Ibid.
23 The first scholar to use the term imperialism to differentiate clearly between the
"Empire" and the "Commonwealth" was J. A. Hobson. But the essential difference
was always well known. The principle of "colonial freedom" for instance, cherished
by all liberal British statesmen after the American Revolution, was held valid only
; ^2 IMPERIALISM
words, the difTcrcncc between export of (British) people and export of
(British) money,-* historians tried to dismiss the disturbing fact that so
many of the important events in modern history look as though molehills
had labored and had brought forth mountains.
Contemporary historians, confronted with the spectacle of a few capitalists
conducting their predatory searches round the globe for new investment pos-
sibilities and appealing to the profit motives of the much-too-rich and the
gambling instincts of the much-too-poor, want to clothe imperialism with
the old grandeur of Rome and Alexander the Great, a grandeur which would
make all following events more humanly tolerable. The disparity between
cause and elTect was betrayed in the famous, and unfortunately true, remark
that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness; it be-
came cruelly obvious in our own time when a World War was needed to get
rid of Hitler, which was shameful precisely because it was also comic.
Something similar was already apparent during the Dreyfus Affair when
the best elements in the nation were needed to conclude a struggle which had
started as a grotesque conspiracy and ended as a farce.
The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against
it. The tragedy of this half-hearted opposition was not that many national
representatives could be bought by the new imperialist businessmen; worse
than corruption was the fact that the incorruptible were convinced that im-
perialism was the only way to conduct world politics. Since maritime stations
and access to raw materials were really necessary for all nations, they came
to believe that annexation and expansion worked for the salvation of the
nation. They were the first to fail to understand the fundamental difference
between the old foundation of trade and maritime stations for the sake of
trade and the new policy of expansion. They believed Cecil Rhodes when
he told them to "wake up to the fact that you cannot live unless you have
the trade of the world," "that your trade is the world, and your life is the
world, and not England," and that therefore they "must deal with these
questions of expansion and retention of the world." -^ Without wanting to,
sometimes even without knowing it, they not only became accomplices in
imperialist politics, but were the first to be blamed and exposed for their
"imperialism." Such was the case of Clemenceau who, because he was so
desperately worried about the future of the French nation, turned "ira-
insofar as the colony was "formed of the British people or . . . such admixture of
the British population as to make it safe to introduce representative institutions." See
Robert Livingston Schuyler, op. cil., pp. 236 ff.
In the nineteenth century, we must distinguish three types of overseas possessions
within the British Empire: the settlements or plantations or colonies, like Australia
and other dominions; the trade stations and possessions like India; and the maritime
and military stations like the Cape of Good Hope, which were held for the sake of
the former. All these possessions underwent a change in government and political
significance in the era of imperialism.
** Ernest Barker, op. cil.
»»Millin, op. cit., p. 175.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 133
perialist" in the hope that colonial manpower would protect French citizens
against aggressors.
The conscience of the nation, represented by Parliament and a free press,
functioned, and was resented by colonial administrators, in all European
countries with colonial possessions — whether England, France, Belgium,
Germany, or Holland. In England, in order to distinguish between the im-
perial government seated in London and controlled by Parliament and co-
lonial administrators, this influence was called the "imperial factor," thereby
crediting imperialism with the merits and remnants of justice it so eagerly
tried to eliminate.^" The "imperial factor" was expressed politically in the
concept that the natives were not only protected but in a way represented
by the British, the "Imperial Parliament." ^' Here the English came very
close to the French experiment in empire building, although they never went
so far as to give actual representation to subject peoples. Nevertheless, they
obviously hoped that the nation as a whole could act as a kind of trustee
for its conquered peoples, and it is true that it invariably tried its best to
prevent the worst.
The conflict between the representatives of the "imperial factor" (which
should rather be called the national factor) and the colonial administrators
runs like a red thread through the history of British imperialism. The
"prayer" which Cromer addressed to Lord Salisbury during his adminis-
tration of Egypt in 1896, "save me from the English Departments,""^^ was
repeated over and over again, until in the twenties of this century the nation
and everything it stood for were openly blamed by the extreme imperialist
party for the threatened loss of India. The imperialists had always been
deeply resentful that the government of India should have "to justify its ex-
istence and its policy before public opinion in England"; this control now
made it impossible to proceed to those measures of "administrative mas-
26 The origin of this misnomer probably lies in the history of British rule in South
Africa, and goes back to the times when the local governors, Cecil Rhodes and
Jameson, involved the "Imperial Government" in London, much against its intentions,
in the war against the Boers. "In fact Rhodes, or rather Jameson, was absolute ruler
of a territory three times the size of England, which could be administered 'without
waiting for the grudging assent or polite censure of the High Commissioner' " who
was the representative of an Imperial Government that retained only "nominal con-
trol." (Reginal Ivan Lovcll, The Struggle for South Africa, 1875-1899, New York,
1934, p. 194.) And what happens in territories in which the British government has
resigned its jurisdiction to the local European population that lacks all traditional
and constitutional restraint of nation-states, can best be seen in the tragic story of
the South African Union since its independence, that is, since the time when the
"Imperial Government" no longer had any right to interfere,
27 The discussion in the House of Commons in May, 1908, between Charles Dilke
and the Colonial Secretary is interesting in this respect. Dilke warned against giving
self-government to the Crown colonies because this would result in rule of the
white planters over their colored workers. He was told that the natives too had a
representation in the English House of Commons. See G. Zoepfl, "Kolonien and
Kolonialpolitik" in Handwdrterbuch der Staatswissenschaften.
2« I^wrence J. Zetland, Lord Cromer, 1923, p. 224.
134 IMPERIALISM
sacres" " which, immediately after the close of the first World War, had
been tried occasionally elsewhere as a radical means of pacification,^" and
which indeed might have prevented India's independence.
A similar hostility prevailed in Germany between national representatives
and colonial administrators in Africa. In 1897, Carl Peters was removed
from his post in German Southeast Africa and had to resign from the gov-
ernment service because of atrocities against the natives. The same thing
happened to Governor Zimmerer. And in 1905, the tribal chiefs for the first
time addressed their complaints to the Reichstag, with the result that when
the colonial administrators threw them into jail, the German Government
intervened.^'
The same was true of French rule. The governors general appointed by
the government in Paris were either subject to powerful pressure from
French colonials as in Algeria, or simply refused to carry out reforms in the
treatment of natives, which were allegedly inspired by "the weak democratic
principles of (their) government." ^^ Everywhere imperialist administrators
felt that the control of the nation was an unbearable burden and threat to
domination.
And the imperialists were perfectly right. They knew the conditions of
modern rule over subject peoples better than those who on the one hand
protested against government by decree and arbitrary bureaucracy and on
the other hoped to retain their possessions forever for the greater glory of
the nation. The imperialists knew better than nationalists that the body
politic of the nation is not capable of empire building. They were perfectly
aware that the march of the nation and its conquest of peoples, if allowed
to follow its own inherent law, ends with the peoples' rise to nationhood and
the defeat of the conqueror. French methods, therefore, which always tried
to combine national aspirations with empire building, were much less suc-
cessful than British methods, which, after the eighties of the last century,
were openly imperialistic, although restrained by a mother country that
retained its national democratic institutions.
" A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion, 1924, pp. 41-42, 93.
*o An instance of "pacification" in the Near East was described at great length by
T. E. Lawrence in an article "France, Britain and the Arabs" written for The Ob-
server (1920): "There is a preliminary Arab success, the British reinforcements go
out as a punitive force. They fight their way ... to their objective, which is mean-
while bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats. Finally perhaps a village is
burnt and the district pacified. It is odd that we don't use poison gas on these occasions.
Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children. ... By
gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly; and
as a method of government it would be no more immoral than the present system."
See his Letters, edited by David Garnett, New York, 1939, pp. 311 fF.
"In 1910, on the other hand, the Colonial Secretary B. Dernburg had to resign
because he had antagonized the colonial planters by protecting the natives. See
Mary E. Townsend. Rise and Fall of Germany's Colonial Empire. New York 1930,
and P. Leutwem, Kdmpfe um Afrika, Luebeck, 1936.
" In }^e words of Leon Cayla, former Governor General of Madagascar and
fnend of Petam.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 135
II: Power and the Bourgeoisie
WHAT IMPERIALISTS actually wanted was expansion of political power with-
out the foundation of a body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched
off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and
the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could
no longer find productive investment within the national borders. For the
first time, investment of power did not pave the way for investment of money,
but export of power followed meekly in the train of exported money, since
uncontrollable investments in distant countries threatened to transform large
strata of society into gamblers, to change the whole capitalist economy from
a system of production into a system of financial speculation, and to replace
the profits of production with profits in commissions. The decade immedi-
ately before the imperialist era, the seventies of the last century, witnessed
an unparalleled increase in swindles, financial scandals, and gambling in the
stock market.
The pioneers in this pre-imperialist development were those Jewish finan-
ciers who had earned their wealth outside the capitalist system and had been
needed by the growing nation-states for internationally guaranteed loans. *^
With the firm establishment of the tax system that provided for sounder gov-
ernment finances, this group had every reason to fear complete extinction.
Having earned their money for centuries through commissions, they were
naturally the first to be tempted and invited to serve in the placement of
capital which could no longer be invested profitably in the domestic market.
The Jewish international financiers seemed indeed especially suited for such
essentially international business operations.^* What is more, the govern-
ments themselves, whose assistance in some form was needed for investments
in faraway countries, tended in the beginning to prefer the well-known
33 For this and the following compare chapter ii.
3* It is interesting that all early observers of imperialist developments stress this
Jewish element very strongly while it hardly plays any role in more recent literature.
Especially noteworthy, because very reliable in observation and very honest in
analysis, is J. A. Hobson's development in this respect. In the first essay which he
wrote on the subject, "Capitalism and Imperialism in South Africa" (in Contemporary
Review, 1900), he said: "Most of (the financiers) were Jews, for the Jews are par
excellence the international financiers, and, though English-speaking, most of them
are of continental origin. . . . They went there (Transvaal) for money, and those
who came early and made most have commonly withdrawn their persons, leaving their
economic fangs in the carcass of their prey. They fastened on the Rand ... as they
are prepared to fasten upon any other spot upon the globe. . . . Primarily, they are
financial speculators taking their gains not out of the genuine fruits of industry, even
the industry of others, but out of construction, promotion and financial manipulation
of companies." In Hobson's later study Imperialism, however, the Jews are not even
mentioned; it had become obvious in the meantime that their influence and role had
been temporary and somewhat superficial.
For the role of Jewish financiers in South Africa, see chapter vii.
/?6 IMPERIALISM
Jew ish financiers to newcomers in international finance, many of whom were
adventurers.
After the financiers had opened the channels of capital export to the
superfluous wealth, which had been condemned to idleness within the nar-
row framework of national production, it quickly became apparent that the
absentee shareholders did not care to take the tremendous risks which cor-
responded to their tremendously enlarged profits. Against these risks, the
commission-earning financiers, even with the benevolent assistance of the
state, did not have enough power to insure them: only the material power of
a state could do that.
As soon as it became clear that export of money would have to be fol-
lowed by export of government power, the position of financiers in general,
and Jewish financiers in particular, was considerably weakened, and the
leadership of imperialist business transactions and enterprise was gradually
taken over by members of the native bourgeoisie. Very instructive in this
respect is the career of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, who, an absolute new-
comer, in a few years could supplant the all-powerful Jewish financiers in
first place. In Germany, Bleichroeder, who in 1885 had still been a co-
partner in the founding of the Ostafrikanische Gesellschajt, was superseded
along with Baron Hirsch when Germany began the construction of the
Bagdad railroad, fourteen years later, by the coming giants of imperialist
enterprise, Siemens and the Deutsche Bank. Somehow the government's re-
luctance to yield real power to Jews and the Jews' reluctance to engage in
business with political implication coincided so well that, despite the great
wealth of the Jewish group, no actual struggle for power ever developed
after the initial stage of gambling and commission-earning had come to
an end.
The various national governments looked with misgiving upon the grow-
ing tendency to transform business into a political issue and to identify the
economic interests of a relatively small group with national interests as such.
But it seemed that the only alternative to export of power was the dehberate
sacrifice of a great part of the national wealth. only through the expansion
of the national instruments of violence could the foreign-investment move-
ment be rationalized, and the wild speculations with superfluous capital,
which had provoked gambling of all savings, be reintegrated into the eco-
nomic system of the nation. The state expanded its power because, given the
choice between greater losses than the economic body of any country could
sustain and greater gains than any people left to its own devices would have
dreamed of, it could only choose the latter.
The first consequence of power export was that the state's instruments of
violence, the police and the army, which in the framework of the nation
existed beside, and were controlled by, other national institutions, were
separated from this body and promoted to the position of national repre-
sentatives in uncivilized or weak countries. Here, in backward regions with-
out industries and political organization, where violence was given more
latitude than in any Western country, the so-called laws of capitalism were
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 137
actually allowed to create realities. The bourgeoisie's empty desire to have
money beget money as men beget men had remained an ugly dream so long
as money had to go the long way of investment in production; not money
had begotten money, but men had made things and money. The secret of
the new happy fulfillment was precisely that economic laws no longer stood
in the way of the greed of the owning classes. Money could finally beget
money because power, with complete disregard for all laws — economic as
well as ethical — could appropriate wealth. only when exported money suc-
ceeded in stimulating the export of power could it accomplish its owners'
designs. only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the
unHmited accumulation of capital.
Foreign investments, capital export which had started as an emergency
measure, became a permanent feature of all economic systems as soon as it
was protected by export of power. The imperialist concept of expansion,
according to which expansion is an end in itself and not a temporary
means, made its appearance in political thought when it had become obvious
that one of the most important permanent functions of the nation-state
would be expansion of power. The state-employed administrators of vio-
lence soon formed a new class within the nations and, although their field of
activity was far away from the mother country, wielded an important influ-
ence on the body politic at home. Since they were actually nothing but
functionaries of violence they could only think in terms of power politics.
They were the first who, as a class and supported by their everyday experi-
ence, would claim that power is the essence of every political structure.
The new feature of this imperialist political philosophy is not the pre-*/
dom inant place it gave violence, nor the discovery that power is one of the ^
basic political realities. Violence has always been the ultima ratio in po-
litical action and power has always been the visible ｅxpression of rule and
government. Butjierther had ever before been the conscious aim of the body
politic or the ultimate goal of any definite policy. For power left to itself can
achieve nothing but more power, and violence administered for power's (and
not for law's) sake turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until
there is nothing left to violate.
This contradiction, inherent in all ensuing power politics, however, takes
on an appearance of sense if one understands it in the context of a sup-
posedly permanent process which has no end or aim but itself. Then the
test of achievement can indeed become meaningless and power can be
thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action
that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that
begets money. The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the
hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless
accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies —
which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest —
well-nigh impossible. In fact, its logical consequence is the destruction of all
living communities, those of the conquered peoples as well as of the people
at home. For every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops
jjg IMPERIALISM
Stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and ex-
pansion/'! hcrcforc all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles
when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.
While the administrators of permanently increasing power in the past era
of moderate imperialism did not even try to incorporate conquered terri-
tories, and preserved existing backward political communities like empty
ruins of bygone life, their totalitarian successors dissolved and destroyed all
politically stabilized structures, their own as well as those of other peoples.
The mere export of violence made the servants into masters without giving
them the master's prerogative: the possible creation of something new.
Monopolistic concentration and tremendous accumulation of violence at
home made the servants active agents in the destruction, until finally totali-
tarian expansion became a nation- and a people-destroying force.
Power became the essence of political action and the center of political
thought when it was separated from the political community which it should
serve. This, it is true, was brought about by an economic factor. But the re-
sulting introduction of power as the only content of politics, and of expansion
as its only aim, would hardly have met with such universal applause, nor
would the resulting dissolution of the nation's body politic have met with
so little opposition, had it not so perfectly answered the hidden desires and
secret convictions of the economically and socially dominant classes. The
bourgeoisie, so long excluded from government by the nation-state and by
their own lack of interest in public aflairs, was politically emancipated by
imperialism.
Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the
bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism. It is well known how
little the owning classes had aspired to government, how well contented they
had been with every type of state that could be trusted with protection of
property rights. For them, indeed, the state had always been only a well-
organized police force. This false modesty, however, had the curious conse-
quence of keeping the whole bourgeois class out of the body poHtic; before
they were subjects in a monarchy or citizens in a republic, they were
essentially private persons. This privateness and primary concern with
money-making had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed
in all those proverbs — "nothing succeeds like success," "might is right,"
"right is expediency," etc. — that necessarily spring from the experience of a
society of competitors.
When, in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were
acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they
talked the language of successful businessmen and "thought in continents,"
these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules
and principles for the conduct of public affairs. The significant fact about
this process of revaluation, which began at the end of the last century and is
still in effect, is that it began with the application of bourgeois convictions
to foreign affairs and only slowly was extended to domestic politics. There-
fore, the nations concerned were hardly aware that the recklessness that had
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 139
prevailed in private life, and against which the public body always had to
defend itself and its individual citizens, was about to be elevated to the one
publicly honored political principle.
It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord
with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive
public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good,
conceived and outhned a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is
accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to
whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim, even if his prin-
ciples were not recognized by the bourgeois class for a long time. Hobbes's
Leviathan ^^•' exposed the only political theory according to which the state
is based not on some kind of constituting law — whether divine law, the law
of nature, or the law of social contract — which determines the rights and
wrongs of the individual's interest with respect to public affairs, but on the
individual interests themselves, so that "the private interest is the same with
the publique." ^'^
There is hardly a single bourgeois moral standard which has not been an-
ticipated by the unequaled magnificence of Hobbes's logic. He gives an
almost complete picture, not of Man but of the bourgeois man, an analysis
which in three hundred years has neither been outdated nor excelled. "Rea-
son ... is nothing but Reckoning"; "a free Subject, a free Will . . .
[are] words . . . without meaning; that is to say. Absurd." A being with-
out reason, without the capacity for truth, and without free will — that is,
without the capacity for responsibility — man is essentially a function of
society and judged therefore according to his "value or worth ... his
price; that is to say so much as would be given for the use of his power."
This price is constantly evaluated and re-evaluated by society, the "esteem of
others," depending upon the law of supply and demand.
Power, according to Hobbes, is the accumulated control that permits the
individual to fix prices and regulate supply and demand in such a way that
they contribute to his own advantage. The individual will consider his ad-
vantage in complete isolation, from the point of view of an absolute mi-
nority, so to speak; he will then realize that he can pursue and achieve his
interest only with the help of some kind of majority. Therefore, if man is
actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must
be the fundamental passion of man. It regulates the relations between indi-
vidual and society, and all other ambitions as well, for riches, knowledge,
and honor follow from it.
35 All quotes in the following if not annotated are from the Leviathan.
3s The coincidence of this identification with the totalitarian pretense of having
abolished the contradictions between individual and public interests is significant
enough (see chapter xii). However, one should not overlook the fact that Hobbes
wanted most of all to protect private interests by pretending that, rightly understood,
they were the interests of the body politic as well, while on the contrary totalitarian
regimes proclaim the nonexistence of privacy.
]40 IMPERIALISM
Hobbcs points out that in the struggle for power, as in their native ca-
pacities for power, all men are equal; for the equality of men is based on the
fact that each has by nature enough power to kill another. Weakness can be
compensated for by guile. Their equality as potential murderers places all
men in the same insecurity, from which arises the need for a state. The
raisori d'etre of the state is the need for some security of the individual, who
feels himself menaced by all his fellow-men.
The crucial feature in Hobbes's picture of man is not at all the realistic
pessimism for which it has been praised in recent times. For if it were true
that man is a being such as Hobbes would have him, he would be unable to
found any body politic at all. Hobbes, indeed, does not succeed, and does
not even want to succeed, in incorporating this being definitely into a po-
litical community. Hobbes's Man owes no loyalty to his country if it has
been defeated and he is excused for every treachery if he happens to be
taken prisoner. Those who live outside the Commonwealth (for instance,
slaves ) have no further obligation toward their fellow-men but are permitted
to kill as many as they can; while, on the contrary, "to resist the Sword of
the Commonwealth in defence of another man, guilty or innocent, no man
hath Liberty," which means that there is neither fellowship nor responsi-
bility between man and man. What holds them together is a common in-
terest which may be "some Capitall crime, for which every one of them ex-
pecteth death"; in this case they have the right to "resist the Sword of the
Commonwealth," to "joyn together, and assist, and defend one another. . . .
For they but defend their lives."
Thus membership in any form of community is for Hobbes a temporary
and limited affair which essentially does not change the solitary and private
character of the individual (who has "no pleasure, but on the contrary a
great deale of griefe in keeping company, where there is no power to over-
awe them all") or create permanent bonds between him and his fellow-men.
It seems as though Hobbes's picture of man defeats his purpose of pro-
viding the basis for a Commonwealth and gives instead a consistent pattern
of attitudes through which every genuine community can easily be de-
stroyed. This results in the inherent and admitted instability of Hobbes's
Commonwealth, whose very conception includes its own dissolution — "when
in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies get a final Victory . . . then
is the Commonwealth dissolved, and every man at liberty to protect him-
selfe" — an instability that is all the more striking as Hobbes's primary and
frequently repeated aim was to secure a maximum of safety and stability.
It would be a grave injustice to Hobbes and his dignity as a philosopher
to consider this picture of man an attempt at psychological realism or philo-
sophical truth. The fact is that Hobbes is interested in neither, but concerned
exclusively with the political structure itself, and he depicts the features of
man according to the needs of the Leviathan. For argument's and convic-
tion's sake, he presents his political outline as though he started from a
realistic insight into man, a being that "desires power after power," and as
though he proceeded from this insight to a plan for a body politic best
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 141
fitted for this power-thirsty animal. The actual process, i.e., the only
process in which his concept of man makes sense and goes beyond the
obvious banality of an assumed human wickedness, is precisely the opposite.
This new body poUtic was conceived for the benefit of the new bourgeois
society as it emerged in the seventeenth century and this picture of man is a
sketch for the new type of Man who would fit into it. The Commonwealth is
based on the delegation of power, and not of rights. It acquires a monopoly
on killing and provides in exchange a conditional guarantee against being
killed. Security is provided by the law, which is a direct emanation from the
power monopoly of the state (and is not established by man according to
human standards of right and wrong). And as this law flows directly from
absolute power, it represents absolute necessity in the eyes of the individual
who lives under it. In regard to the law of the state — that is, the accumulated
power of society as monopolized by the state — there is no question of right
or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois
society.
Deprived of political rights, the individual, to whom public and official
life manifests itself in the guise of necessity, acquires a new and increased
interest in his private life and his personal fate. Excluded from participation
in the management of public affairs that involve all citizens, the individual
loses his rightful place in society and his natural connection with his fellow-
men. He can now judge his individual private life only by comparing it with
that of others, and his relations with his fellow-men inside society take the
form of competition. once public affairs are regulated by the state under
the guise of necessity, the social or public careers of the competitors come
under the sway of chance. In a society of individuals, all equipped by nature
with equal capacity for power and equally protected from one another by
the state, only chance can decide who will succeed."
According to bourgeois standards, those who are completely unlucky and
unsuccessful are automatically barred from competition, which is the life of
society. Good fortune is identified with honor, and bad luck with shame. By
assigning his political rights to the state the individual also delegates his
social responsibiUties to it: he asks the state to relieve him of the burden of
8^ The elevation of chance to the position of final arbiter over the whole of life was
to reach its full development in the nineteenth century. With it came a new genre of
literature, the novel, and the decline of the drama. For the drama became meaning-
less in a world without action, while the novel could deal adequately with the destinies
of human beings who were either the victims of necessity or the favorites of luck.
Balzac showed the full range of the new genre and even presented human passions as
man's fate, containing neither virtue nor vice, neither reason nor free will. only the
novel in its full maturity, having interpreted and re-interpreted the entire scale of
human matters, could preach the new gospel of infatuation with one's own fate that
has played such a great role among nineteenth-century intellectuals. By means of
such infatuation the artist and intellectual tried to draw a line between themselves
and the philistines, to protect themselves against the inhumanity of good or bad
luck, and they developed all the gifts of modern sensitivity — for suffering, for under-
standing, for playing a prescribed role — which are so desperately needed by human
dignity, which demands of a man that ho at least be a willing victim if nothing else.
]42 IMPERIALISM
caring for the poor precisely as he asks for protection against criminals. The
difference between pauper and criminal disappears — both stand outside
society. The unsuccessful are robbed of the virtue that classical civilization
left them; the unfortunate can no longer appeal to Christian charity.
Hobbes liberates those who are excluded from society — the unsuccessful,
the unfortunate, the criminal — from every obligation toward society and state
if the state does not take care of them. They may give free rein to their de-
sire for power and are told to take advantage of their elemental ability to
kill, thus restoring that natural equahty which society conceals only for the
sake of expediency. Hobbes foresees and justifies the social outcasts' organi-
zation into a gang of murderers as a logical outcome of the bourgeoisie's
moral philosophy.
Since power is essentially only a means to an end a community based
solely on power must decay in the calm of order and stability; its complete
security reveals that it is built on sand. only by acquiring more power can it
guarantee the status quo; only by constantly extending its authority and only
through the process of power accumulation can it remain stable. Hobbes's
Commonwealth is a vacillating structure and must always provide itself with
new props from the outside; otherwise it would collapse overnight into the
aimless, senseless chaos of the private interests from which it sprang. Hobbes
embodies the necessity of power accumulation in the theory of the state of
nature, the "condition of perpetual war" of all against all, in which the
various single states still remain vis-a-vis each other like their individual
subjects before they submitted to the authority of a Commonwealth.^* This
ever-present possibility of war guarantees the Commonwealth a prospect of
permanence because it makes it possible for the state to increase its power
at the expense of other states.
It would be erroneous to take at its face value the obvious inconsistency
between Hobbes's plea for security of the individual and the inherent in-
stability of his Commonwealth. Here again he tries to persuade, to appeal
to certain basic instincts for security which he knew well enough could sur-
vive in the subjects of the Leviathan only in the form of absolute submission
to the power which "over-awes them all," that is, in an all-pervading, over-
whelming fear — not exactly the basic sentiment of a safe man. What Hobbes
actually starts from is an unmatched insight into the political needs of the
new social body of the rising bourgeoisie, whose fundamental belief in an
unending process of property accumulation was about to eliminate all indi-
vidual safety. Hobbes drew the necessary conclusions from social and eco-
nomic behavior patterns when he proposed his revolutionary changes in
political constitution. He outlined the only new body politic which could
38 The presently popular liberal notion of a World Government is based, like all
liberal notions of political power, on the same concept of individuals submitting to
a central authority which "overawes them all," except that nations are now taking the
place of individuals. The World Government is to overcome and eliminate authentic
politics, that is, different peoples getting along with each other in the full force of
their power.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 143
correspond to the new needs and interests of a new class. What he actually
achieved was a picture of man as he ought to become and ought to behave
if he wanted to fit into the coming bourgeois society.
Hobbes's insistence on power as the motor of all things human and divine
(even God's reign over men is "derived not from Creating them . . . but
from the Irresistible Power") sprang from the theoretically indisputable
proposition that a never-ending accumulation of property must be based on
a never-ending accumulation of power. The philosophical correlative of the
inherent instability of a community founded on power is the image of an
endless process of history which, in order to be consistent with the constant
growth of power, inexorably catches up with individuals, peoples, and
finally all mankind. The limitless process of capital accumulation needs the
political structure of so "unlimited a Power" that it can protect growing
property by constantly growing more powerful. Granted the fundamental
dynamism of the new social class, it is perfectly true that "he cannot assure
the power and means to live well, which he hath at present, without the
acquisition of more." The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered
by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither
a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of
Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature
enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosopny of power.
This process of never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the
protection of a never-ending accumulation of capital determined the "pro-
gressive" ideology of the late nineteenth century and foreshadowed the rise
of imperialism. Not the naive delusion of a limitless growth of property, but
the realization that power accumulation was the only guarantee for the sta-
bility of so-called economic laws, made progress irresistible. The eighteenth-
century notion of progress, as conceived in pre-revolutionary France, in-
tended criticism of the past to be a means of mastering the present and con-
trolling the future; progress culminated in the emancipation of man. But
this notion had little to do with the endless progress of bourgeois society,
which not only did not want the liberty and autonomy of man, but was ready
to sacrifice everything and everybody to supposedly superhuman laws of
history. "What we call progress is [the] wind . . . [that] drives [the angel
of history] irresistibly into the future to which he turns his back while the
pile of ruins before him towers to the skies." ^° only in Marx's dream of a
classless society which, in Joyce's words, was to awaken mankind from the
nightmare of history, does a last, though Utopian, trace of the eighteenth-
century concept appear.
39 Walter Benjamin, "Ober den Begriff der Geschichte," Institut fiir Sozialforschung.
New York, 1942, mimeographed. — The imperialists themselves were quite aware of
the implications of their concept of progress. Said the very representative author from
the Civil Services in India who wrote under the pseudonym A. Carthill: one must
always feel sorry for those persons who are crushed by the triumphal car of progress"
{op. cit., p. 209).
J44 IMPERIALISM
The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he
could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would
beget more power. When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural,
national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an "expansion is
everything" ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating
process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the
same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of per-
petual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the
progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irre-
sistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had
frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of
the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and
to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catas-
trophes once it had reached these limits.
In the imperialistic epoch a philosophy of power became the philosophy
of the elite, who quickly discovered and were quite ready to admit that the
thirst for power could be quenched only through destruction. This was the
essential cause of their nihilism (especially conspicuous in France at the
turn, and in Germany in the twenties, of this century) which replaced the
superstition of progress with the equally vulgar superstition of doom, and
preached automatic annihilation with the same enthusiasm that the fanatics
of automatic progress had preached the irresistibility of economic laws. It
had taken Hobbes, the great idolator of Success, three centuries to succeed.
This was partly because the French Revolution, with its conception of man as
lawmaker and citoyen, had almost succeeded in preventing the bourgeoisie
from fully developing its notion of history as a necessary process. But it
was also partly because of the revolutionary implications of the Common-
wealth, its fearless breach with Western tradition, which Hobbes did not fail
to point out.
Every man and every thought which does not serve and does not conform
to the ultimate purpose of a machine whose only purpose is the generation
and accumulation of power is a dangerous nuisance. Hobbes judged that the
books of the "ancient Greeks and Romans" were as "prejudicial" as the
teaching of a Christian "Summum bonum ... as [it] is spoken of in the
Books of the old Morall Philosophers" or the doctrine that "whatsoever a
man does against his Conscience, is Sinne" and that "Lawes are the Rules of
Just and Unjust." Hobbes's deep distrust of the whole Western tradition of
political thought will not surprise us if we remember that he wanted nothing
more nor less than the justification of Tyranny which, though it has occurred
many times in Western history, has never been honored with a philosophical
foundation. That the Leviathan actually amounts to a permanent govern-
ment of tyranny, Hobbes is proud to admit: "the name of Tyranny signi-
fieth nothing more nor lesse than the name of Soveraignty . . . ; I think the
toleration of a professed hatred of Tyranny, is a Toleration of hatred to
Commonwealth in generall. . . ."
Since Hobbes was a philosopher, he could already detect in the rise of the
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 145
bourgeoisie all those antitraditionalist qualities of the new class which would
take more than three hundred years to develop fully. His Leviathan was not
concerned with idle speculation about new political principles or the old
search for reason as it governs the community of men; it was strictly a
"reckoning of the consequences" that follow from the rise of a new class in
society whose existence is essentially tied up with property as a dynamic,
new property-producing device. The so-called accumulation of capital which
gave birth to the bourgeoisie changed the very conception of property and
wealth : they were no longer considered to be the results of accumulation and
acquisition but their beginnings; wealth became a never-ending process of
getting wealthier. The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class
is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that
everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of per-
petually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct
which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for con-
sumption.
Property by itself, however, is subject to use and consumption and there-
fore diminishes constantly. The most radical and the only secure form of
possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and for-
ever ours. Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their
holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate
fact that men must die. Death is the real reason why property and acquisition
can never become a true political principle. A social system based essentially
on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruc-
tion of all property. The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge
to property as the foundation of society, as the Umits of the globe are a chal-
lenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic. By transcending the
limits of human life in planning for an automatic continuous growth of
wealth beyond all personal needs and possibilities of consumption, indi-
vidual property is made a public affair and taken out of the sphere of mere
private life. Private interests which by their very nature are temporary, lim-
ited by man's natural span of life, can now escape into the sphere of pubUc
affairs and borrow from them that infinite length of time which is needed
for continuous accumulation. This seems to create a society very similar to
that of the ants and bees where "the Common good differeth not from the
Private; and being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby
the common benefit."
Since, however, men are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delu-
sion. Public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests
as though these interests could create a new quaUty through sheer addition.
All the so-called hberal concepts of politics (that is, all the pre-imperialist
pohtical notions of the bourgeoisie) — such as unlimited competition regu-
lated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of
competing activities, the pursuit of "enhghtened self-interest" as an adequate
pohtical virtue, unUmited progress inherent in the mere succession of events
— have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal be-
146 IMPERIALISM
havior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or
politics. Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie's
instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a
temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the
new class's faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle. The old
standards give way to the extent that automatically growing wealth actually
replaces political action.
Hobbcs was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the
bourgeoisie because he realized that acqu sition of wealth conceived as a
never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power,
for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing
territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of
never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization
capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He
even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psy-
chological traits of the new type of man who wjuld fit into such a society
and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power
itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a
power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender
all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor
meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and
who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and
does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incom-
prehensible ralson d'etat.
For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power
of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, de-
prived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a
cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sub-
lime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is
constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following
its own inherent law.
The ultimate destructive purpose of this Commonwealth is at least in-
dicated in the philosophical interpretation of human equality as an "equality
of ability" to kill. Living with all other nations "in the condition of a per-
petuall war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed,
and canons planted against their neighbours round about," it has no other
law of conduct but the "most conducing to [its] benefit" and will gradually
devour weaker structures until it comes to a last war "which provideth for
every man, by Victory, or Death."
By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political
limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop
the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every
man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the
power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not
have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending
process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 147
planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the
never-ending process of power generation.
Ill: The Alliance Between Mob and Capital
WHEN IMPERIALISM entered the scene of politics with the scramble for Africa
in the eighties, it was promoted by businessmen, opposed fiercely by the
governments in power, and welcomed by a surprisingly large section of the
educated classes.*" To the last it seemed to be God-sent, a cure for all evils,
an easy panacea for all conflicts. And it is true that imperialism in a sense
did not disappoint these hopes. It gave a new lease on life to political and
social structures which were quite obviously threatened by new social and
political forces and which, under other circumstances, without the inter-
ference of imperialist developments, would hardly have needed two world
wars to disappear.
As matters stood, imperialism spirited away all troubles and produced
that deceptive feeling of security, so universal in pre-war Europe, which
deceived all but the most sensitive minds. Peguy in France and Chesterton
in England knew instinctively that they lived in a world of hollow pretense
and that its stability was the greatest pretense of all. Until everything began
to crumble, the stability of obviously outdated political structures was a
fact, and their stubborn unconcerned longevity seemed to give the lie to
those who felt the ground tremble under their feet. The solution of the riddle
was imperialism. The answer to the fateful question: why did the European
comity of nations allow this evil to spread until everything was destroyed,
the good as well as the bad, is that all governments knew very well that their
countries were secretly disintegrating, that the body politic was being de-
stroyed from within, and that they lived on borrowed time.
Innocently enough, expansion appeared first as the outlet for excess
capital production and offered a remedy, capital export.*^ The tremendously
increased wealth produced by capitalist production under a social system
based on maldistribution had resulted in "oversaving" — that is, the accu-
*" "The Services offer the cleanest and most natural support to an aggressive foreign
policy; expansion of the empire appeals powerfully to the aristocracy and the pro-
fessional classes by offering new and ever-growing fields for the honorable and
profitable employment of their sons" (J. A. Hobson, "Capitalism and Imperialism in
South Africa," op. cit.). It was "above all . . . patriotic professors and publicists
regardless of political affiliation and unmindful of personal economic interest" who
sponsored "the outward imperialistic thrusts of the '70ies and early '80ies" (Hayes,
op. cit., p. 220).
*i For this and the following see J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, who as early as 1905
gave a masterly analysis of the driving economic forces and motives as well as of
some of its political implications. When, in 1938, his early study was republished,
Hobson could rightly state in his introduction to an unchanged text that his book was
real proof "that the chief perils and disturbances ... of today . . . were all latent
and discernible in the world of a generation ago. ..."
j^g IMPERIALISM
mulalion of capital which was condemned to idleness within the existing
national capacity for production and consumption. This money was actually
superfluous, needed by nobody though owned by a growing class of some-
bodies. The ensuing crises and depressions during the decades precedmg
the era of imperialism *■ had impressed upon the capitalists the thought
that their whole economic system of production depended upon a supply
and demand that from now on must come from "outside of capitalist so-
ciety." «' Such supply and demand came from inside the nation, so long as
the capitalist system did not control all its classes together with its entire
productive capacity. When capitalism had pervaded the entire economic
structure and all social strata had come into the orbit of its production and
consumption system, capitalists clearly had to decide either to see the whole
system collapse or to find new markets, that is, to penetrate new countries
which were not yet subject to capitalism and therefore could provide a
new noncapitalistic supply and demand.
The decisive point about the depressions of the sixties and seventies, which
initiated the era of imperialism, was that they forced the bourgeoisie to
realize for the first time that the original sin of simple robbery, which cen-
turies ago had made possible the "original accumulation of capital" (Marx)
and had started all further accumulation, had eventually to be repeated lest
the motor of accumulation suddenly die down." In the face of this danger,
which threatened not only the bourgeoisie but the whole nation with a
catastrophic breakdown in production, capitalist producers understood that
the forms and laws of their production system "from the beginning had
been calculated for the whole earth." *'
*- The obvious connection between the severe crises in the sixties in England and
the seventies on the Continent and imperialism is mentioned in Hayes, op. cit., in a
footnote only (on p. 219), and in Schuyler, op. cit., who believes that "a revival of
interest in emigration was an important factor in the beginnings of the imperial
movement" and that this interest had been caused by "a serious depression in British
trade and industry" toward the close of the sixties (p. 280). Schuyler also describes
at some length the strong "anti-imperial sentiment of the mid-Victorian era." Un-
fortunately. Schuyler makes no differentiation between the Commonwealth and the
Empire proper, although the discussion of pre-imperialist material might easily have
suggested such a differentiation.
*^ Rosa Luxemburg, Die Akkumulation des Kapitals, Berlin, 1923, p. 273.
♦< Rudolf Hilfcrding, Das Finanzkapilat, Wien, 1910, p. 401, mentions — but does
not analyze the implications of — the fact that imperialism "suddenly uses again the
methods of the original accumulation of capitalistic wealth."
♦* According to Rosa Luxemburg's brilliant insight into the political structure of
imperialism {op. cit., pp. 273 ff., pp. 361 ff.), the "historical process of the accumu-
lation of capital depends in all its aspects upon the existence of noncapitalist social
strata." so that "imperialism is the political ｅxpression of the accumulation of capital
in its competition for the possession of the remainders of the noncapitalistic world."
This essential dependence of capitalism upon a noncapitalistic world lies at the basis
of all other aspects of imperialism, which then may be explained as the results of
oversaving and maldistribution (Hobson, op. cit.), as the result of overproduction
and the consequent need for new markets (Lenin, Imperialism, the Last Stage of
Capitalism, 1917), as the result of an undersupply of raw material (Hayes, op. cit.),
or as capital export in order to equalize the national profit rate (Hilferding, op. cit.).
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 149
The first reaction to the satiirated home market, lack of raw materials,
and growing crises, was export of capital. The owners of superfluous wealth
first tried foreign investment without expansion and without political con-
trol, which resulted in an unparalleled orgy of swindles, financial scandals,
and stock-market speculation, all the more alarming since foreign invest-
ments grew much more rapidly than domestic ones.*" Big money resulting
from oversaving paved the way for little money, the product of the little
fellow's work. Domestic enterprises, in order to keep pace with high profits
from foreign investment, turned likewise to fraudulent methods and attracted
an increasing number of people who, in the hope of miraculous returns,
threw their money out of the window. The Panama scandal in France, the
Griindungsschwindel in Germany and Austria, became classic examples.
Tremendous losses resulted from the promises of tremendous profits. The
owners of little money lost so much so quickly that the owners of superfluous
big capital soon saw themselves left alone in what was, in a sense, a battle-
field. Having failed to change the whole society into a community of
gamblers they were again superfluous, excluded from the normal process
of production to which, after some turmoil, all other classes returned
quietly, if somewhat impoverished and embittered.*^
Export of money and foreign investment as such are not imperiaUsm and
do not necessarily lead to expansion as a political device. As long as the
owners of superfluous capital were content with investing "large portions
of their property in foreign lands," even if this tendency ran "counter to
all past traditions of nationalism," ** they merely confirmed their aUenation
from the national body on which they were parasites anyway. only when
they demanded government protection of their investments (after the initial
stage of swindle had opened their eyes to the possible use of politics against
the risks of gambling) did they re-enter the life of the nation. In this appeal,
however, they followed the established tradition of bourgeois society, always
to consider political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the pro-
tection of individual property.*' only the fortunate coincidence of the rise
*8 According to Hilferding, op. cit., p. 409, note, the British income from foreign
investment increased ninefold while national income doubled from 1865 to 1898.
He assumes a similar though probably less marked increase for German and French
foreign investments.
*' For France see George Lachapelle, Les Finances de la Troisieme Republique,
Paris, 1937, and D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, New York,
1941. For Germany, compare the interesting contemporary testimonies like Max
Wirth, Geschichte der Handelskrisen, 1873, chapter 15, and A. Schaeffle, "Der 'grosse
Boersenkrach' des Jahres 1873" in Zeitschrift fiir die gesamte Staatswissenschaft,
1874, Band 30.
*8 J. A. Hobson, "Capitalism and Imperialism," op. cit.
*9 See Hilferding, op. cit., p. 406. "Hence the cry for strong state power by all capi-
talists with vested interests in foreign countries. . . . Exported capital feels safest
when the state power of its own country rules the new domain completely. ... Its
profits should be guaranteed by the state if possible. Thus, exportation of capital
favors an imperialist policy." P. 423: "It is a matter of course that the attitude of
the bourgeoisie toward the state undergoes a complete change when the political
.,- IMPERIALISM
of a new class of property holders and the industrial revolution had made
the Ixnirgcoisie producers and stimulators of production. As long as it ful-
filled this basic function in modern society, which is essentially a community
of producers, its wealth had an important function for the nation as a whole.
The owners of superfluous capital were the first section of the class to want
profits without fulfilling some real .social function— even if it was the func-
tion of an exploiting producer— and whom, consequently, no police could
ever have saved from the wrath of the people.
Expansion then was an escape not only for superfluous capital. More
important, it protected its owners against the menacing prospect of remain-
ing entirely superfluous and parasitical. It saved the bourgeoisie from the
consequences of maldistribution and revitalized its concept of ownership
at a time when wealth could no longer be used as a factor in production
within the national framework and had come into conflict with the produc-
tion ideal of the community as a whole.
Older than the superfluous wealth was another by-product of capitalist
production: the human debris that every crisis, following invariably upon
each period of industrial growth, eliminated permanently from producing
society. Men who had become permanently idle were as superfluous to the
community as the owners of superfluous wealth. That they were an actual
menace to society had been recognized throughout the nineteenth century
and their export had helped to populate the dominions of Canada and
Australia as well as the United States. The new fact in the imperialist era
is that these two superfluous forces, superfluous capital and superfluous
working power, joined hands and left the country together. The concept
of expansion, the export of government power and annexation of every
territory in which nationals had invested either their wealth or their work,
seemed the only alternative to increasing losses in wealth and population.
Imperialism and its idea of unlimited expansion seemed to offer a permanent
remedy for a permanent evil.'"
Ironically enough, the first country in which superfluous wealth and
power of the state becomes a competitive instrument for the finance capital in the
world market. The bourgeoisie had been hostile to the state in its fight against eco-
nomic mercantilism and political absolutism. . . . Theoretically at least, economic
life was to be completely free of state intervention; the state was to confine itself
politically to the safeguarding of security and the establishment of civil equality."
P. 426: "However, the desire for an expansionist policy causes a revolutionary change
in the mentality of the bourgeoisie. It ceases to be pacifist and humanist." P. 470:
"Socially, expansion is a vital condition for the preservation of capitalist society; eco-
nomically, it is the condition for the preservation of, and temporary increase in, the
profit rate."
'"These motives were especially outspoken in German imperialism. Among the
first activities of the Alldeutsche Verband (founded in 1891) were efi'orts to prevent
German emigrants from changing their citizenship, and the first imperialist speech of
William II. on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the
Reich, contained the following typical passage: "The German Empire has become a
World Empire. Thousands of our compatriots live everywhere, in distant parts of the
earth. . . . Gentlemen, it is your solemn duty to help me unite this greater German
Empire with our native country." Compare also J. A. Froude's statement in note 10.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 151
superfluous men were brought together was itself becoming superfluous.
South Africa had been in British possession since the beginning of the cen-
tury because it assured the maritime road to India. The opening of the
Suez Canal, however, and the subsequent administrative conquest of Egypt,
lessened considerably the importance of the old trade station on the Cape.
The British would, in all probability, have withdrawn from Africa just as
all European nations had done whenever their possessions and trade in-
terests in India were liquidated.
The particular irony and, in a sense, symbolical circumstance in the un-
expected development of South Africa into the "culture-bed of Imperial-
ism" ^^ lies in the very nature of its sudden attractiveness when it had lost
all value for the Empire proper: diamond fields were discovered in the
seventies and large gold mines in the eighties. The new desire for profit-at-
any-price converged for the first time with the old fortune hunt. Prospectors,
adventurers, and the scum of the big cities emigrated to the Dark Continent
along with capital from industrially developed countries. From now on, the
mob, begotten by the monstrous accumulation of capital, accompanied its
begetter on those voyages of discovery where nothing was discovered but
new possibilities for investment. The owners of superfluous wealth were the
only men who could use the superfluous men who came from the four
corners of the earth. Together they established the first paradise of parasites
whose lifeblood was gold. Imperialism, the product of superfluous money
and superfluous men, began its startling career by producing the most
superfluous and unreal goods.
It may still be doubtful whether the panacea of expansion would have
become so great a temptation for non-imperialists if it had offered its
dangerous solutions only for those superfluous forces which, in any case,
were already outside the nation's body corporate. The complicity of all
parliamentary parties in imperialist programs is a matter of record. The
history of the British Labor Party in this respect is an almost unbroken
chain of justifications of Cecil Rhodes' early prediction: "The workmen
find that although the Americans are exceedingly fond of them, and are
just now exchanging the most brotherly sentiments with them yet are shutting
out their goods. The workmen also find that Russia, France and Germany
locally are doing the same, and the workmen see that if they do not look
out they will have no place in the world to trade at all. And so the workmen
have become Imperialist and the Liberal Party are following." "^ In Ger-
many, the liberals (and not the Conservative Party) were the actual pro-
moters of that famous naval policy which contributed so heavily to the out-
break of the first World War.^^ The Socialist Party wavered between active
61 E. H. Damce, The Victorian Illusion, London, 1928, p. 164: "Africa, which had
been included neither in the itinerary of Saxondom nor in the professional philosophers
of imperial history, became the culture-bed of British imperialism."
62 Quoted from Millin, op. cit.
63 "The liberals, and not the Right of Parliament, were the supporters of the naval
policy." Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, 1919. See also Daniel Frymann (pseud, for
Heinrich Class), Wenn ich der Kaiser war, 1912: "The true imperial party is the Na-
.-« IMPERIALISM
support of ihc imperialist naval policy (it repeatedly voted funds for the
building of a German navy after 1906) and complete neglect of all ques-
tions of foreign policy. Occasional warnings against the Lumpenproletanat,
and the possible bribing of sections of the working class with crumbs from
the inHH-rialist table, did not lead to a deeper understanding of the great
appeal which the imperialist programs had to the rank and file of the party.
In Marxist terms the new phenomenon of an alliance between mob and
capital seemed so unnatural, so obviously in conflict with the doctrine of
class struggle, that the actual dangers of the imperialist attempt— to divide
mankind into master races and slave races, into higher and lower breeds,
into colored peoples and white men, all of which were attempts to unify
the people on the basis of the mob — were completely overlooked. Even the
breakdown of international solidarity at the outbreak of the first World War
did not disturb the complacency of the socialists and their faith in the
proletariat as such. Socialists were still probing the economic laws of im-
perialism when imperialists had long since stopped obeying them, when in
overseas countries these laws had been sacrificed to the "imperial factor"
or to the "race factor," and when only a few elderly gentlemen in high
finance still believed in the inalienable rights of the profit rate.
The curious weakness of popular opposition to imperialism, the numerous
inconsistencies and outright broken promises of liberal statesmen, frequently
ascribed to opportunism or bribery, have other and deeper causes. Neither
opportunism nor bribery could have persuaded a man like Gladstone to
break his promise, as the leader of the Liberal Party, to evacuate Egypt
when he became Prime Minister. Half consciously and hardly articulately,
these men shared with the people the conviction that the national body
itself was so deeply split into classes, that class struggle was so universal a
characteristic of modern political life, that the very cohesion of the nation
was jeopardized. Expansion again appeared as a lifesaver, if and insofar as
it could provide a common interest for the nation as a whole, and it is mainly
for this reason that imperialists were allowed to become "parasites upon
patriotism." '•"*
Partly, of course, such hopes still belonged with the old vicious practice of
"healing" domestic conflicts with foreign adventures. The difference, how-
ever, is marked. Adventures are by their very nature limited in time and
space; they may succeed temporarily in overcoming conflicts, although as
a rule they fail and tend rather to sharpen them. From the very beginning
the imperialist adventure of expansion appeared to be an eternal solution,
because expansion was conceived as unlimited. Furthermore, imperialism
was not an adventure in the usual sense, because it depended less on na-
tionalist slogans than on the seemingly solid basis of economic interests.
In a society of clashing interests, where the common good was identified
tional Liberal Party." Frymann, a prominent German chauvinist during the first World
War, even adds with respect to the conservatives: "The aloofness of conservative milieus
with regard to race doctrines is also worthy of note."
'♦ Hobson, op. cit., p. 61.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 153
with the sum total of individual interests, expansion as such appeared to be
a possible common interest of the nation as a whole. Since the owning and
dominant classes had convinced everybody that economic interest and the
passion for ownership are a sound basis for the body politic, even non-
imperialist statesmen were easily persuaded to yield when a common eco-
nomic interest appeared on the horizon.
These then are the reasons why nationalism developed so clear a tendency
toward imperialism, the inner contradiction of the two principles notwith-
standing.''* The more ill-fitted nations were for the incorporation of foreign
peoples (which contradicted the constitution of their own body politic),
the more they were tempted to oppress them. In theory, there is an abyss
between nationalism and imperialism; in practice, it can and has been
bridged by tribal nationalism and outright racism. From the beginning,
imperialists in all countries preached and boasted of their being "beyond
the parties," and the only ones to speak for the nation as a whole. This was
especially true of the Central and Eastern European countries • with few
or no overseas holdings; there the alliance between mob and capital took
place at home and resented even more bitterly (and attacked much more
violently) the national institutions and all national parties.'^®
The contemptuous indifference of imperialist politicians to domestic
issues was marked everywhere, however, and especially in England. While
"parties above parties" like the Primrose League were of secondary in-
fluence, imperialism was the chief cause of the degeneration of the two-party
system into the Front Bench system, which led to a "diminution of the power
of opposition" in Parliament and to a growth of "power of the Cabinet as
against the House of Commons." " Of course this was also carried through
as a policy beyond the strife of parties and particular interests, and by men
who claimed to speak for the nation as a whole. Such language was bound
to attract and delude precisely those persons who still retained a spark of
political idealism. The cry for unity resembled exactly the battle cries which
had always led peoples to war; and yet, nobody detected in the universal
and permanent instrument of unity the germ of universal and permanent war.
Government officials engaged more actively than any other group in the
nationalist brand of imperialism and were chiefly responsible for the con-
fusion of imperiaUsm with nationahsm. The nation-states had created and
depended upon the civil services as a permanent body of officials who. served
55 Hobson, op. cit., was the first to recognize both the fundamental opposition of
imperiaUsm and nationalism and the tendency of nationalism to become imperialist.
He called imperialism a perversion of nationalism "in which nations . . . transform
the wholesome stimulative rivalry of various national types into the cut-throat
struggle of competing empires" (p. 9.).
^'^ See chapter viii.
57 Hobson, op. cit., pp. 146 ff. — "There can be no doubt that the power of the
Cabinet as against the House of Commons has grown steadily and rapidly and it
appears to be still growing," noticed Bryce in 1901, in Studies in History and Juris-
prudence, 1901, I, 177. For the working of the Front Bench system see also Hilaire
Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, The Party System, London, 1911.
. ^j IMPERIALISM
recardlcss of class interest and governmental changes. Their professional
honor and sclf-respect-^^specially in England and Germany— denved from
their being servants of the nation as a whole. They were the only group with
a direct interest in supporting the state's fundamental claim to mdependence
of classes and factions. That the authority of the nation-state itself depended
largely on the economic independence and political neutrality of its civil
servants becomes obvious in our time; the dechne of nations has invariably
started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general
conviction that civil servants are in the pay, not of the state, but of the
owning classes. At the close of the century the owning classes had become
so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up
the pretense of serving the nation. Division into classes left them outside
the social body and forced them to form a clique of their own. In the
colonial services they escaped the actual disintegration of the national body.
In ruling foreign peoples in faraway countries, they could much better pre-
tend to be heroic servants of the nation, "who by their services had glorified
the British race," '^^ than if they had stayed at home. The colonies were no
longer simply "a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes" as
James Mill could still describe them; they were to become the very backbone
of British nationalism, which discovered in the domination of distant coun-
tries and the rule over strange peoples the only way to serve British, and
nothing but British, interests. The services actually believed that "the pe-
culiar genius of each nation shows itself nowhere more clearly than in their
system of dealing with subject races." °^
The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Ger-
many, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman.
In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social
loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his class in a foreign country
than to a man of another class in his own. Expansion gave nationalism a
new lease on life and therefore was accepted as an instrument of national
politics. The members of the new colonial societies and imperialist leagues
felt "far removed from the strife of parties," and the farther away they
moved the stronger their belief that they "represented only a national pur-
pose." "° This shows the desperate state of the European nations before
imperialism, how fragile their institutions had become, how outdated their
social system proved in the face of man's growing capacity to produce. The
^'^ Lord Curzon at the unveiling of Lord Cromer's memorial tablet. See Lawrence
J. Zetland, Lord Cromer, 1932, p. 362.
^»Sir Hesketh Bell, op. cit., Part I, p. 300.
The same sentiment prevailed in the Dutch colonial services. "The highest task, the
task without precedent is that which awaits the East Indian Civil Service official . . .
it should be considered as the highest honor to serve in its ranks .... the select
body which fulfills the mission of Holland overseas." See De Kat Angelino, Colonial
Policy, Chicago. 1931, II. 129.
•oThe President of the German "Kolonialverein," Hohenlohe-Langenburg, in 1884.
See Mary E. Townsend, Origin of Modern German Colonialism. 1871-1885. 1921.
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 155
means for preservation were desperate too, and in the end the remedy proved
worse than the evil — which, incidentally, it did not cure.
The allia nce between capital and mob is to be found at the genesis of
every consistently imperialist policy. In some countries, particularly in
GreaFIBritain, this new alliance between the much-too-rich and the much-
too-poor was and remained confined to overseas possessions. The so-called
hypocrisy of British policies was the result of the good sense of English
statesmen who drew a sharp line between colonial methods and normal
domestic policies, thereby avoiding with considerable success the feared
boomerang eff^ect of imperialism upon the homeland. In other countries,
particularly in Germany and Austria, the alliance took effect at home in
the form of pan-movements, and to a lesser extent in France, in a so-called
colonial policy. The aim of these "movements" was, so to speak, to im-
perialize the whole nation (and not only the "superfluous" part of it), to
combine domestic and foreign policy in such a way as to organize the nation
for_the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien
peoples.
The rise of the mob out of the capitalist organization was observed early,
and its growth carefully and anxiously noted by all great historians of the
nineteenth century. Historical pessimism from Burckhardt to Spengler springs
essentially from this consideration. But what the historians, sadly pre-
occupied with the phenomenon in itself, failed to grasp was that the mob
could not be identified with the growing industrial working class, and cer-
tainly not with the people as a whole, but that it was composed actually of
the refuse of all classes. This composition made it seem that the mob and
its representatives had abolished class differences, that those, standing out-
side the class-divided nation were the people itself (the Volksgemeinschaft,
as the Nazis would call it) rather than its distortion and caricature. The
historical pessimists understood the essential irresponsibility of this new
social stratum, and they also correctly foresaw the possibility of converting
democracy into a despotism whose tyrants would rise from the mob and
lean on it for support. Wh at they f ailed to understand was that the mobis^
not only the refuse but also the by-product of bourgeois society, directly
produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it. They failed for
this reason to notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the
underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century,
its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its
growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring. At the turn of the
century, the Dreyfus Affair showed that underworld and high society in
France were so closely bound together that it was difficult definitely to place
any of the "heroes" among the Anti-Dreyfusards in either category.
This feeling of kinship, the joining together of begetter and offspring,
already classically expressed in Balzac's novels, antedates all practical eco-
nomic, political, or social considerations and recalls those fundamental
psychological traits of the new type of Western man that Hobbes outlined
.-^ IMPERIALISM
ihrcc hundred years ago. But it is true that it was mainly due to the insights,
acuuircd by the bourgeoisie during the crises and depressions which pre-
ceded imperiaUsm, that high society finally admitted its readiness to accept
the revolutionary change in moral standards which Hobbes's "realism" had
proposed, and which was now being proposed anew by the mob and its
leaders. The very fact that the "original sin" of "original accumulation of
capital" would need additional sins to keep the system going was far more
effective in persuading the bourgeoisie to shake off the restraints of Western
tradition than either its philosopher or its underworld. It finally induced the
German bourgeoisie to throw off the mask of hypocrisy and openly confess
its relationship to the mob, calling on it expressly to champion its property
interests.
It is significant that this should have happened in Germany. In England
and Holland the development of bourgeois society had progressed relatively
quietly and the bourgeoisie of these countries enjoyed centuries of security
and freedom from fear. Its rise in France, however, was interrupted by a
great popular revolution whose consequences interfered with the bour-
geoisie's enjoyment of supremacy. In Germany, moreover, where the bour-
geoisie did not reach full development until the latter half of the nineteenth
century, its rise was accompanied from the start by the growth of a revolu-
tionary working-class movement with a tradition nearly as old as its own.
It was a matter of course that the less secure a bourgeois class felt in its own
country, the more it would be tempted to shed the heavy burden of hypoc-
risy. High society's affinity with the mob came to light in France earlier
than in Germany, but was in the end equally strong in both countries.
France, however, because of her revolutionary traditions and her relative
lack of industrialization, produced only a relatively small mob, so that her
bourgeoisie was finally forced to look for help beyond the frontiers and to
ally itself with Hitler Germany.
Whatever the precise nature of the long historical evolution of the bour-
geoisie in the various European countries, the political principles of the
mob, as encountered in imperialist ideologies and totalitarian movements,
betray a surprisingly strong affinity with the political attitudes of bourgeois
society, if the latter are cleansed of hypocrisy and untainted by concessions
to Christian tradition. What more recently made the nihihstic attitudes of
the mob so intellectually attractive to the bourgeoisie is a relationship of
principle that goes far beyond the actual birth of the mob.
In other words, the disparity between cause and effect which character-
ized the birth of imperialism has its reasons. The occasion — superfluous
wealth created by ovcraccumulation, which needed the mob's help to find
safe and profitable investment — set in motion a force that had always lain
in the basic structure of bourgeois society, though it had been hidden by
nobler traditions and by that blessed hypocrisy which La Rochefoucauld
called the compliment vice pays to virtue. At the same time, completely un-
principled power politics could not be played until a mass of people^ w^as
available who were free of all principles and so large numerically that they
THE POLITICAL EMANCIPATION OF THE BOURGEOISIE 157
surpassed the ability of state and society to take care of them. The fact that
this mob could be used only by imperialist politicians and inspired only by
racial doctrines made it appear as though imperialism alone were able to
settle the grave domestic, social, and economic problems of modern times.
The philosophy of Hobbes, it is true, contains nothing of modern race
doctrines, which not only stir up the mob, but in their totalitarian form out-
line very clearly the forms of organization through which humanity could
carry the endless process of capital and power accumulation through to its
logical end in self-destruction. But Hobbes at least provided political thought
with the prerequisite for all race doctrines, that is, the exclusion in principle
of the idea of humanity which constitutes the sole regulating idea of inter-
national law. With the assumption that foreign pohtics is necessarily outside
of the human contract, engaged in the perpetual war of all against all, which
is the law of the "state of nature," Hobbes affords the best possible theoretical
foundation for those naturalistic ideologies which hold nations to be tribes,
separated from each other by nature, without any connection whatever,
unconscious of the solidarity of mankind and having in common only the
instinct for self-preservation which man shares with the animal world. If
the idea of humanity, of which the most conclusive symbol is the common
origin of the human species, is no longer valid, then nothing is more plausible
than a theory according to which brown, yellow, or black races are descended
from some other species of apes than the white race, and that all together
are predestined by nature to war against each other until they have dis-
appeared from the face of the earth.
If it should prove to be true that we are imprisoned in Hobbes's endless
process of power accumulation, then the organization of the mob will in-
evitably take the form of transformation of nations into races, for there is,
under the conditions of an accumulating society, no other unifying bond
available between individuals who in the very process of power accumulation
and expansion are losing all natural connections with their fellow-men.
Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for
that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become
Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a jorce
noire, when Englishmen have turned into "white men," as already for a
disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself
signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may
say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end,
not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but
his unnatural death.
cnAPTKR six: Race-Thinking Before
Racism
IF RACE-THINKING were a German invention, as it has been sometimes
a>iscrted, then "German thinking" (whatever that may be) was vic-
torious in many parts of the spiritual world long before the Nazis started
their ill-fated attempt at world conquest. Hitlerism exercised its strong
international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism,
although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in
public opinion everywhere. The Nazi political war machine had long been
m motion when in 1939 German tanks began their march of destruction,
since — in political warfare — racism was calculated to be a more powerful
ally than any paid agent or secret organization of fifth columnists.
Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capi-
tals, the Nazis were confident that their best "propaganda" would be their
racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and
broken promises, they had never swerved for expediency's sake.^ Racism
was neither a new nor a secret weapon, though never before had it been
used with this thoroughgoing consistency.
The historical truth of the matter is that race-thinking, with its roots
deep in the eighteenth century, emerged simultaneously in all Western
countries during the nineteenth century. Racism has been the powerful
ideology of imperialistic pohcies since the turn of our century. It certainly
has absorbed and revived all the old patterns of race opinions which, how-
ever, by themselves would hardly have been able to create or, for that
matter, to degenerate into racism as a Weltanschauung or an ideology. In
the middle of the last century, race opinions were still judged by the
yardstick of political reason: Tocqueville wrote to Gobineau about the
lattcr's doctrines, "They are probably wrong and certainly pernicious." ^
Not until the end of the century were dignity and importance accorded
race-thinking as though it had been one of the major spiritual contribu-
tions of the Western world.'
» During the German-Russian pact, Nazi propaganda stopped all attacks on "Bol-
shevism" but never gave up the race-line.
2 "Lettres de Alexis de Tocqueville et de Arthur de Gobineau," in Revue des Deux
Monties, 1907. Tome 199, Letter of November 17, 1853.
3 The best historical account of race-thinking in the pattern of a "history of ideas"
is Erich Voegelin, Rasse und Staat, Tuebingen, 1933.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 159
Until the fateful days of the "scramble for Africa," race-thinking had
been one of the many free opinions which, within the general framework
of liberalism, argued and fought each other to win the consent of public
opinion/ only a few of them became full-fledged ideologies, that is, sys-
tems based upon a single opinion that proved strong enough to attract and
persuade a majority of people and broad enough to lead them through
the various experiences and situations of an average modern life. For an
ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the
key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the
intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to
rule nature and man. Few ideologies have won enough prominence to
survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come
out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets
history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets
history as a natural fight of races. The appeal of both to large masses was
so strong that they were able to enlist state support and establish them-
selves as official national doctrines. But far beyond the boundaries within
which race-thinking and class-thinking have developed into obligatory
patterns of thought, free public opinion has adopted them to such an extent
that not only intellectuals but great masses of people will no longer accept
a presentation of past or present facts that is not in agreement with either
of these views.
The tremendous power of persuasion inherent in the main ideologies of
our times is not accidental. Persuasion is not possible without appeal to
either experiences or desires, in other words to immediate political needs.
Plausibility in these matters comes neither from scientific facts, as the vari-
ous brands of Darwinists would like us to believe, nor from historical laws,
as the historians pretend, in their efforts to discover the law according to
which civilizations rise and fall. Every full-fledged ideology has been
created, continued and improved as a political weapon and not as a
theoretical doctrine. It is true that sometimes — and such is the case with
racism — an ideology has changed its original political sense, but without
immediate contact with political life none of them could be imagined.
Their scientific aspect is secondary and arises first from the desire to pro-
vide watertight arguments, and second because their persuasive power
also got hold of scientists, who no longer were interested in the result of
their research but left their laboratories and hurried off to preach to the
multitude their new interpretations of life and world.' We owe it to these
* For the host of nineteenth-century conflicting opinions see Carlton J. H. Hayes,
A Generation of Materialism, New York. 1941, pp. 111-122.
5 "Huxley neglected scientific research of his own from the '70's onward, so busy
was he in the role of 'Darwin's bulldog' barking and biting at theologians" (Hayes,
op. cit., p. 126). Ernst Haeckel's passion for popularizing scientific results which was
at least as strong as his passion for science itself, has been stressed recently by an ap-
plauding Nazi writer, H. Bruecher, "Ernst Haeckel, Ein Wegbereiter biologischen
Staatsdenkens." In Nationalsoziaiistische Monatshefte, 1935, Heft 69.
Two rather extreme examples may be quoted to show what scientists are capable
f(^ IMPERIALISM
"scientific" preachers rather than to any scientific findings that today no
single science is left into whose categorical system race-thinking has not
deeply |-)enetrated. This again has made historians, some of whom have
been tempted to hold science responsible for race-thinking, mistake certain
cither philological or biological research results for causes instead of
consequences of race-thinking." The opposite would have come closer to
the truth. As a matter of fact, the doctrine that Might is Right needed
several centuries (from the seventeenth to the nineteenth) to conquer natu-
ral science and produce the "law" of the survival of the fittest. And if, to
lake another instance, the theory of de Maistre and Schelling about savage
tribes as the decaying residues of former peoples had suited the nineteenth-
century political devices as well as the theory of progress, we would
probably never have heard much of "primitives" and no scientist would
have wasted his time looking for the "missing link" between ape and man.
The blame is not to be laid on any science as such, but rather on certain
scientists who were no less hypnotized by ideologies than their fellow-
citizens.
The fact that racism is the main ideological weapon of imperialistic
politics is so obvious that it seems as though many students prefer to
avoid the beaten track of truism. Instead, an old misconception of racism
of. Both were scholars of good standing, writing during World War I. The German
historian of art, Josef Strzygowski, in his Altai, Iran und Volkerwanderung (Leipzig,
|V|7) discovered the Nordic race to be composed of Germans. Ukrainians. Armenians,
Persians. Hungarians, Bulgars and Turks (pp. 306-307). The Society of Medicine of
Paris not only published a report on the discovery of "polychesia" (excessive defeca-
tion) and "bromidrosis" (body odor) in the German race, but proposed urinalysis
for the detection of German spies; German urine was "found" to contain 20 per cent
non-uric nitrogen as against 15 per cent for other races. See Jacques Barzun, Race,
New York. 1937. p. 239.
■' This quid pro quo was partly the result of the zeal of students who wanted to put
down every single instance in which race has been mentioned. Thereby they mistook
relatively harmless authors, for whom explanation by race was a possible and some-
times fascinating opinion, for full-fledged racists. Such opinions, in themselves harmless,
were advanced by the early anthropologists as starting points of their investiga-
tions. A typical instance is the naive hypothesis of Paul Broca. noted French anthro-
pologist of the middle of the last century, who assumed that "the brain has something
to do with race and the measured shape of the skull is the best way to get at the con-
tents of the brain" (quoted after Jacques Barzun, op. cit., p. 162). It is obvious that
this assertion, without the support of a conception of the nature of man, is simply
ridiculous.
As for the philologists of the early nineteenth century, whose concept of "Aryanism"
has seduced almost every student of racism to count them among the propagandists or
even inventors of race-thinking, they are as innocent as innocent can be. When they
overstepped the limits of pure research it was because they wanted to include in the
same cultural brotherhood as many nations as possible. In the words of Ernest Seillicre,
La Philosophie de ilmpcrialisnw. 4 vols.. 1903-1906: "There was a kind of intoxica-
tion: modern civilization believed it had recovered its pedigree . . . and an organism
was born which embraced in one and the same fraternity all nations whose language
showed some affinity with Sanskrit." (Preface, Tome I. p. xxxv.) In other words,
these men were still in the humanistic tradition of the eighteenth century and shared
its enthusiasm about strange people and exotic cultures.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 161
as a kind of exaggerated nationalism is still given currency. Valuable works
of students, especially in France, who have proved that racism is not only
a quite different phenomenon but tends to destroy the body politic of the
nation, are generally overlooked. Witnessing the gigantic competition be-
tween race-thinking and class-thinking for dominion over the minds of
modern men, some have been inclined to see in the one the ｅxpression of
national and in the other the ｅxpression of international trends, to believe
the one to be the mental preparation for national wars and the other to be
the ideology for civil wars. This has been possible because of the first
World War's curious mixture of old national and new imperialistic conflicts,
a mixture in which old national slogans proved still to possess a far greater
appeal to the masses of all countries involved than any imperialistic aims.
The last war, however, with its Quislings and collaborationists everywhere,
should have proved that racism can stir up civil conflicts in every country,
and is one of the most ingenious devices ever invented for preparing civil
war.
For the truth is that race-thinking entered the scene of active politics
the moment the European peoples had prepared, and to a certain extent
realized, the new body politic of the nation. From the very beginning,
racism deliberately cut across all national boundaries, whether defined by
geographical, linguistic, traditional, or any other standards, and denied
national-political existence as such. Race-thinking, rather than class-think-
ing, was the ever-present shadow accompanying the development of the
comity of European nations, until it finally grew to be the powerful weapon
for the destruction of those nations. Historically speaking, racists have a
worse record of patriotism than the representatives of all other inter-
national ideologies together, and they were the only ones who consistently
denied the great principle upon which national organizations of peoples
are built, the principle of equality and solidarity of all peoples guaranteed
by the idea of mankind.
i: A "Race" of Aristocrats Against a "Nation" of Citizens
A STEADILY rising interest in the most different, strange, and even savage
peoples was characteristic of France during the eighteenth century.
This was the time when Chinese paintings were admired and imitated,
when one of the most famous works of the century was named Lettres
Persanes, and when travelers' reports were the favorite reading of society.
The honesty and simplicity of savage and uncivilized peoples were opposed
to the sophistication and frivolity of culture. Long before the nineteenth
century with its tremendously enlarged opportunities for travel brought the
non-European world into the home of every average citizen, eighteenth-
century French society had tried to grasp spiritually the content of cultures
and countries that lay far beyond European boundaries. A great enthusiasm
jf^t IMPERIALISM
for "new specimens of mankind" (Herder) filled the hearts of the heroes
of ihc French Revolution who together with the French nation liberated
every people of every color under the French flag. This enthusiasm for
strange and foreign countries culminated in the message of fraternity, be-
cause" it was inspired by the desire to prove in every new and surprising
"specimen of mankind" the old saying of La Bruyere: "La raison est de tous
les climats."
Yet it is this nation-creating century and humanity-loving country to
which we must trace the germs of what later proved to become the nation-
destroying and humanity-annihilating power of racism.^ It is a remarkable
fact that the first author who assumed the coexistence of different peoples
with different origins in France, was at the same time the first to elaborate
definite class-thinking. The Comte de Boulainvillicrs, a French nobleman
who wrote at the beginning of the eighteenth century and whose works
were published after his death, interpreted the history of France as the
history of two different nations of which the one, of Germanic origin, had
conquered the older inhabitants, the "Gaules," had imposed its laws upon
them, had taken their lands, and had settled down as the ruling class, the
"peerage" whose supreme rights rested upon the "right of conquest" and
the "necessity of obedience always due to the strongest." * Engaged chiefly
in finding arguments against the rising political power of the Tiers Etat and
their spokesmen, the "nouveau corps" formed by "gens de lettres et de
his," Boulainvillicrs had to fight the monarchy too because the French king
wanted no longer to represent the peerage as primus inter pares but the
nation as a whole; in him, for a while, the new rising class found its most
powerful protector. In order to regain uncontested primacy for the nobility,
Boulainvillicrs proposed that his fellow-noblemen deny a common origin
with the French people, break up the unity of the nation, and claim an
original and therefore eternal distinction." Much bolder than most of the
later defenders of nobility, Boulainvillicrs denied any predestined connec-
tion with the soil; he conceded that the "Gaules" had been in France longer,
that the "Francs" were strangers and barbarians. He based his doctrine
solely on the eternal right of conquest and found no difficulty in asserting
that "Friesland . . . has been the true cradle of the French nation." Cen-
turies before the actual development of imperialistic racism, following only
the inherent logic of his concept, he considered the original inhabitants of
France natives in the modern sense, or in his own terms "subjects" — not of
' Francois Hotman, French sixteenth-century author of Franco-Gallia, is sometimes
held to be a forerunner of eighteenth-century racial doctrines, as by Ernest Seilliere,
op. cit. Against this misconception, Theophile Simar has rightly protested: "Hotman
appears, not as an apologist for the Teutons, but as the defender of the people which
was oppressed by the monarchy" (Etude Critique sur la Formation de la doctrine des
Races au I8e et son expansion au 19e siecle, Bruxelles, 1922, p. 20).
* Histoire de I'Ancien Gouvernement de la France, 1727, Tome I, p. 33.
■ That the Comte Boulainvillicrs' history was meant as a political weapon against
the Tiers Etat was stated by Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, 1748, XXX, chap. x.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 163
the king — but of all those whose advantage was descent from the con-
quering people, who by right of birth were to be called "Frenchmen."
Boulainvilliers was deeply influenced by the seventeenth-century might-
right doctrines and he certainly was one of the most consistent contempo-
rary disciples of Spinoza, whose Ethics he translated and whose Traite
theologico-polUique he analyzed. In his reception and application of
Spinoza's political ideas, might was changed into conquest and conquest
jicted as a kind of unique judgment on the natural qualities and human
^ivileges of men and nations. In this we may detect the first traces of later
naturalistic transformations the might-right doctrine was to go through.
This view is really corroborated by the fact that Boulainvilliers was one
of the outstanding freethinkers of his time, and that his attacks on the
Christian Church were hardly motivated by anticlericalism alone.
Boulainvilliers' theory, however, still deals with peoples and not with
races; it bases the right of the superior people on a historical deed, conquest,
and not on a physical fact — although the historical deed already has
a certain influence on the natural qualities of the conquered people. It
invents two different peoples within France in order to counteract the new
national idea, represented as it was to a certain extent by the absolute
monarchy in alliance with the Tiers Etat. Boulainvilliers is antinational at
a time when the idea of nationhood was felt to be new and revolutionary,
but had not yet shown, as it did in the French Revolution, how closely it
was connected with a democratic form of government. Boulainvilliers pre-
pared his country for civil war without knowing what civil war meant.
He is representative of many of the nobles who did not regard themselves
as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might
have much more in common with a foreign people of the "same society
and condition" than with its compatriots. It has been, indeed, these anti-
national trends that exercised their influence in the milieu of the emigres
and finally were absorbed by new and outspoken racial doctrines late in
the nineteenth century.
Not until the actual outbreak of the Revolution forced great numbers
of the French nobility to seek refuge in Germany and England did Boulain-
villiers' ideas show their usefulness as a political weapon. In the meantime,
his influence upon the French aristocracy was kept alive, as can be seen
in the works of another Comte, the Comte Dubuat-Nangay,^^ who wanted
to tie French nobility even closer to its continental brothers. on the eve
of the Revolution, this spokesman of French feudalism felt so insecure that
he hoped for "the creation of a kind of Internationale of aristocracy of
barbarian origin," ^^ and since the German nobility was the only one whose
help could eventually be expected, here too the true origin of the French
nation was supposed to be identical with that of the Germans and the
French lower classes, though no longer slaves, were not free by birth but
^0 Les Origines de I'Ancien Gouvernement de la France, de I'Allemagne et de I'ltalie,
1789.
11 Seilliere, op. cit., p. xxxii.
If^4 IMPERIALISM
by "affranchisscment," by grace of those who were free by birth, of the
nobility. A few years later the French exiles actually tried to form an
intcrmitionale of aristocrats in order to stave off the revolt of those they
considered to be a foreign enslaved people. And although the more practi-
cal side of these attempts suffered the spectacular disaster of Valmy,
emigres like Charles Francois Dominique de Villiers, who about 1800
opposed the "Gallo-Romains" to the Germanics, or like William Alter who
a decade later dreamed of a federation of all Germanic peoples/- did not
admit defeat. It probably never occurred to them that they were actually
traitors, so firmly were they convinced that the French Revolution was a
"war between foreign peoples" — as Fran9ois Guizot much later put it.
While Boulainvilliers, with the calm fairness of a less disturbed time,
based the rights of nobility solely on the rights of conquest without directly
depreciating the very nature of the other conquered nation, the Comte de
Montlosier, one of the rather dubious personages among the French exiles,
openly expressed his contempt for this "new people risen from slaves . . .
(a mixture) of all races and all times." ^^ Times obviously had changed
and noblemen who no longer belonged to an unconquered race also had
to change. They gave up the old idea, so dear to Boulainvilliers and even
to Montesquieu, that conquest alone, fortune des armes, determined the
destinies of men. The Valmy of noble ideologies came when the Abbe
Sie'yes in his famous pamphlet told the Tiers Etat to "send back into the
forests of Franconia all those families who preserve the absurd pretension
of being descended from the conquering race and of having succeeded to
their rights." '*
It is rather curious that from these early times when French noblemen
in their class struggle against the bourgeoisie discovered that they belonged
to another nation, had another genealogical origin, and were more closely
tied to an international caste than to the soil of France, all French racial
theories have supported the Germanism or at least the superiority of the
Nordic peoples as against their own countrymen. For if the men of the
French Revolution identified themselves mentally with Rome, it was not
because they opposed to the "Germanism" of their nobility a "Latinism" of
the Tiers Etat, but because they felt they were the spiritual heirs of Roman
Republicans. This historical claim, in contrast to the tribal identification
of the nobility, might have been among the causes that prevented "Latinism"
from emerging as a racial doctrine of its own. In any event, paradoxical as
it sounds, the fact is that Frenchmen were to insist earlier than Germans
12 See Rene Maunier, Sociologie Coloniale, Paris, 1932, Tome II, p. 115.
13 Montlosier, even in exile, was closely connected with the French chief of police,
Fouche, who helped him improve the sad financial conditions of a refugee. Later, he
served as a secret agent for Napoleon in French society. See Joseph Brugerette, Le
Comte de Montlosier, 1931, and Simar, op. cit., p. 71.
" Qu'cst-ce-que le Tiers Etat? (1789) published shortly before the outbreak of the
Revolution. Translation quoted after J. H. Clapham, The Abbe Sie'yes, London, 1912,
p. 62.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 765
or Englishmen on this idee fixe of Germanic superiority.^* Nor did the
birth of German racial consciousness after the Prussian defeat of 1806,
directed as it was against the French, change the course of racial ideologies
in France. In the forties of the last century, Augustin Thierry still adhered
to the identification of classes and races and distinguished between a
"Germanic nobility" and a "celtic bourgeoisie," ^® and again a nobleman,
the Comte de Remusat, proclaimed the Germanic origin of the European
aristocracy. Finally, the Comte de Gobineau developed an opinion already
generally accepted among the French nobility into a full-fledged historical
doctrine, claiming to have detected the secret law of the fall of civilizations
and to have exalted history to the dignity of a natural science. With him
race-thinking completed its first stage, and began its second stage whose
influences were to be felt until the twenties of our century.
II: Race Unity as a Substitute for National Emancipation
RACE-THINKING in Germany did not develop before the defeat of the old
Prussian army by Napoleon. It owed its rise to the Prussian patriots and
political romanticism, rather than to the nobility and their spokesmen. In
contrast to the French brand of race-thinking as a weapon for civil war
and for splitting the nation, German race-thinking was invented in an effort
to unite the people against foreign domination. Its authors did not look
for allies beyond the frontiers but wanted to awaken in the people a
consciousness of common origin. This actually excluded the nobility with
their notoriously cosmopolitan relations — which, however, were less char-
acteristic of the Prussian Junkers than of the rest of the European nobility;
at any rate, it excluded the possibility of this race-thinking basing itself
on the most exclusive class of the people.
Since German race-thinking accompanied the long frustrated attempts
to unite the numerous German states, it remained so closely connected, in
its early stages, with more general national feelings that it is rather difficult
to distinguish between mere nationalism and clear-cut racism. Harmless
national sentiments expressed themselves in what we know today to be
racial terms, so that even historians who identify the twentieth-century
German brand of racism with the peculiar language of German nationalism
have strangely been led into mistaking Nazism for German nationalism,
thereby helping to underestimate the tremendous international appeal of
Hitler's propaganda. These particular conditions of German nationalism
changed only when, after 1870, the unification of the nation actually had
taken place and German racism, together with German imperialism, fully
developed. From these early times, however, not a few characteristics sur-
15 "Historical Aryanism has its origin in 18th century feudalism and was supported
by 19th century Germanism" observes Seilliere, op. cit., p. ii.
^^ Lettres sur I'histoire de France (1840).
.^ IMPERIALISM
vivcd which have remained significant for the specifically German brand
of race-thinking.
In contrast to France, Prussian noblemen felt their mterests to be closely
connected with the position of the absolute monarchy and, at least since
the time of Frederick II, they sought recognition as the legitimate repre-
sentatives of the nation as a whole. With the exception of the few years of
Prussian reforms (from 1808-1812), the Prussian nobility was not fright-
ened by the rise of a bourgeois class that might have wanted to take over
the government, nor did they have to fear a coalition between the middle
classes and the ruling house. The Prussian king, until 1809 the greatest
landlord of the country, remained primus inter pares despite all efforts of
the Reformers. Race-thinking, therefore, developed outside the nobility, as
a weapon of certain nationalists who wanted the union of all German-
speaking peoples and therefore insisted on a common origin. They were
liberals in the sense that they were rather opposed to the exclusive rule of
the Prussian Junkers. As long as this common origin was defined by com-
mon language, one can hardly speak of race-thinking.^^
It is noteworthy that only after 1814 is this common origin described
frequently in terms of "blood relationship," of family ties, of tribal unity,
of unmixed origin. These definitions, which appear almost simultaneously
in the writings of the Catholic Josef Goerres and nationalistic liberals like
Ernst Moritz Arndl or F. L. Jahn, bear witness to the utter failure of the
hopes of rousing true national sentiments in the German people. Out of
the failure to raise the people to nationhood, out of the lack of common
historical memories and the apparent popular apathy to common destinies
in the future, a naturalistic appeal was born which addressed itself to
tribal instincts as a possible substitute for what the whole world had seen
to be the glorious power of French nationhood. The organic doctrine of a
history for which "every race is a separate, complete whole" ^^ was invented
by men who needed ideological definitions of national unity as a substitute
for political nationhood. It was a frustrated nationalism that led to Arndt's
statement that Germans — who apparently were the last to develop an organic
unit>' — had the luck to be of pure, unmixed stock, a "genuine people." "
Organic naturalistic definitions of peoples are an outstanding characteris-
tic of German ideologies and German historism. They nevertheless are not
yet actual racism, for the same men who speak in these "racial" terms still
uphold the central pillar of genuine nationhood, the equality of all peoples.
Thus, in the same article in which Jahn compares the laws of peoples with
"This is tne case for instance in Friedrich Schlegel's Philosophische Vorlesungen
aus den Juhren 1804-1806, 11, 357. The same holds true for Ernst Moritz Arndt.
See Alfred P. Pundt, Arndt and the National Awakening in Germany, New York,
1935, pp. 116 f. Even Fichte, the favorite modern scapegoat for German race-thinking,
hardly ever went beyond the limits of nationalism.
"Joseph Goerres, in Rheinischer Merkur, 1814, No. 25.
>» In Phantasien lur Berichtigung der Urteile Uber kunftige deutsche Verfassungen,
1815.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 167
the laws of animal life, he insists on the genuine equal plurality of peoples
in whose complete multitude alone mankind can be realized.^" And Arndt,
who later was to express strong sympathies with the national liberation move-
ments of the Poles and the Italians, exclaimed: "Cursed be anyone who
would subjugate and rule foreign peoples." ^^ Insofar as German national
feelings had not been the fruit of a genuine national development but rather
the reaction to foreign occupation,^^ national doctrines were of a peculiar
negative character, destined to create a wall around the people, to act as
substitutes for frontiers which could not be clearly defined either geograph-
ically or historically.
If, in the early form of French aristocracy, race-thinking had been in-
vented as an instrument of internal division and had turned out to be a
weapon for civil war, this early form of German race-doctrine was invented
as a weapon of internal national unity and turned out to be a weapon for
national wars. As the decline of the French nobility as an important class
in the French nation would have made this weapon useless if the foes of the
Third Republic had not revived it, so upon the accomplishment of German
national unity the organic doctrine of history would have lost its meaning
had not modern imperialistic schemers wanted to revive it, in order to
appeal to the people and to hide their hideous faces under the respectable
cover of nationalism. The same does not hold true for another source of
German racism which, though seemingly more remote from the scene of
politics, had a far stronger genuine bearing upon later political ideologies.
Political romanticism has been accused of inventing race-thinking, as it
has been and could be accused of inventing every other possible irresponsible
opinion. Adam Mueller and Friedrich Schlegel are symptomatic in the high-
est degree of a general playfulness of modern thought in which almost any
opinion can gain ground temporarily. No real thing, no historical event, no
political idea was safe from the all-embracing and all-destroying mania by
which these first literati could always find new and original opportunities
for new and fascinating opinions. "The world must be romanticized," as
Novalis put it, wanting "to bestow a high sense upon the common, a mys-
terious appearance upon the ordinary, the dignity of the unknown upon
20 "Animals of mixed stock have no real generative power; similarly, hybrid peo-
ples have no folk propagation of their own. . . . The ancestor of humanity is dead,
the original race is extinct. That is why each dying people is a misfortune for human-
ity. . . . Human nobility cannot express itself in one people alone." In Deutsches
Volkstum, 1810.
The same instance is expressed by Goerres, who despite his naturalistic definition of
people ("all members are united by a common tie of blood"), follows a true national
principle when he states: "No branch has a right to dominate the other" {op. cit.).
21 Blick aus der Zeit auf die Zeit, 1814. — Translation quoted from Alfred P. Pundt,
op. cit.
22 "Not until Austria and Prussia had fallen after a vain struggle did I really begin
to love Germany ... as Germany succumbed to conquest and subjection it became
to me one and indissoluble," writes E. M. Arndt in his Erinnerungen aus Schweden,
1818, p. 82. Translation quoted from Pundt, op. cit., p. 151.
/^i? IMPERIALISM
tlic well-known." " one of these romanticized objects was the people, an
object that could be changed at a moment's notice into the state, or the
family, or nobility, or anything else that either — in the earlier days — hap-
pened to cross the minds of one of these intellectuals or — later when, grow-
ing older, they had learned die reality of daily bread — happened to be asked
for by some paying patron.-' Therefore it is almost impossible to study the
development of any of the free competing opinions of which the nineteenth
century is so amazingly full, without coming across romanticism in its
Cierman form.
What these first modern intellectuals actually prepared was not so much
the development of any single opinion but the general mentality of modern
German scholars; these latter have proved more than once that hardly an
ideology can be found to which they would not willingly submit if the only
reality — which even a romantic can hardly afford to overlook — is at stake,
the reality of their position. For this peculiar behavior, romanticism pro-
vided the most excellent pretext in its unlimited idolization of the "per-
sonality" of the individual, whose very arbitrariness became the proof of
genius. Whatever served the so-called productivity of the individual, namely,
the entirely arbitrary game of his "ideas," could be made the center of a
whole outlook on life and world.
This inherent cynicism of romantic personality-worship has made possible
certain modern attitudes among intellectuals. They were fairly well repre-
sented by Mussolini, one of the last heirs of this movement, when he de-
scribed himself as at the same time "aristocrat and democrat, revolutionary
and reactionary, proletarian and antiproletarian, pacifist and antipacifist."
The ruthless individualism of romanticism never meant anything more
serious than that "everybody is free to create for himself his own ideology."
What was new in Mussolini's experiment was the "attempt to carry it out
with all possible energy." ^^
Because of this inherent "relativism" the direct contribution of roman-
ticism to the development of race-thinking can almost be neglected. In the
anarchic game whose rules entitle everybody at any given time to at least
one personal and arbitrary opinion, it is almost a matter of course that every
conceivable opinion should be formulated and duly printed. Much more
characteristic than this chaos was the fundamental belief in personality as
an ultimate aim in itself. In Germany, where the conflict between the nobility
and the rising middle class was never fought out on the political scene, per-
sonality worship developed as the only means of gaining at least some kind
of social emancipation. The governing class of the country frankly showed
its traditional contempt for business and its dislike for association with
merchants in spite of the latter's growing wealth and importance, so that it
23"Neue Fragmentcnsammlung" (1798) in Schriften, Leipzig, 1929, Tome II, p. 335.
=< For the romantic attitude in Germany see Carl Schmitt, Politische Romantik,
MiJnchcn, 1925.
-•• Mussolini, "Relativismo e Fascismo," in Diuturna, Milano, 1924. The translation
quoted from F. Neumann, Behemoth, 1942, pp. 462-463.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 769
was not easy to find the means of winning some kind of self-respect. The
classic German Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister, in which the middle-class
hero is educated by noblemen and actors because the bourgeois in his own
social sphere is without "personality," is evidence enough of the hopeless-
ness of the situation.
German intellectuals, though they hardly promoted a political fight for
the middle classes to which they belonged, fought an embittered and, un-
fortunately, highly successful battle for social status. Even those who had
written in defense of nobility still felt their own interests at stake when it
came to social ranks. In order to enter competition with rights and qualities
of birth, they formulated the new concept of the "innate personality" which
was to win general approval within bourgeois society. Like the title of the
heir of an old family, the "innate personality" was given by birth and not
acquired by merit. Just as the lack of common history for the formation of
the nation had been artificially overcome by the naturalistic concept of
organic development, so, in the social sphere, nature itself was supposed to
supply a title when political reality had refused it. Liberal writers soon
boasted of "true nobility" as opposed to the shabby titles of Baron or others
which could be given and taken away, and asserted, by implication, that
their natural privileges, like "force or genius," could not be retraced to any
human deed.-®
The discriminatory point of this new social concept was immediately
affirmed. During the long period of mere social antisemitism, which intro-
duced and prepared the discovery of Jew-hating as a political weapon, it
was the lack of "innate personality," the innate lack of tact, the innate lack
of productivity, the innate disposition for trading, etc., which separated the
behavior of his Jewish colleague from that of the average businessman. In
its feverish attempt to summon up some pride of its own against the caste
arrogance of the Junkers, without, however, daring to fight for political
leadership, the bourgeoisie from the very beginning wanted to look down
not so much on other lower classes of their own, but simply on other peoples.
Most significant for these attempts is the small literary work of Clemens
Brentano -^ which was written for and read in the ultranationalistic club
of Napoleon-haters that gathered together in 1808 under the name of "Die
Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft." In his highly sophisticated and witty
manner, Brentano points out the contrast between the "innate personality,"
the genial individual, and the "philistine" whom he immediately identifies
with Frenchmen and Jews. Thereafter, the German bourgeois would at least
try to attribute to other peoples all the qualities which the nobility despised
as typically bourgeois — at first to the French, later to the English, and al-
ways to the Jews. As for the mysterious qualities which an "innate person-
26 See the very interesting pamphlet against the nobility by the liberal writer Buch-
holz, Vntersuchungen ueber den Geburtsadel, Berlin, 1807, p. 68: "True nobility . . .
cannot be given or taken away; for, like power and genius, it sets itself and exists by
itself."
2^ Clemens Brentano, Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte, 1811.
jjQ IMPERIALISM
ality" received at birth, they were exactly the same as those the real Junkers
claimed for themselves.
Although in this way standards of nobility contributed to the rise of race-
thinking, the Junkers themselves did hardly anything for the shaping of
this mentality. The only Junker of this period to develop a political theory
of his own, Ludwig von der Marwitz, never used racial terms. According
to him, nations were separated by language— a spiritual and not a physical
difference — and although he was violently opposed to the French Revolu-
tion, he spoke like Robespierre when it came to the possible aggression of
one nation against another: "Who aims at expanding his frontiers should be
considered a disloyal betrayer among the whole European republic of
states." -' It was Adam Mueller who insisted on purity of descent as a test
of nobility, and it was Haller who went beyond the obvious fact that the
powerful rule those deprived of power by stating it as a natural law that
the weak should be dominated by the strong. Noblemen, of course, applauded
enthusiastically when they learned that their usurpation of power was not
only legal but in accordance with natural laws, and it was a consequence
of bourgeois definitions that during the course of the nineteenth century they
avoided "mesalliances" more carefully than ever before."
This insistence on common tribal origin as an essential of nationhood,
formulated by German nationalists during and after the war of 1814, and
the emphasis laid by the romantics on the innate personality and natural
nobility prepared the way intellectually for race-thinking in Germany. From
the former sprang the organic doctrine of history with its natural laws; from
the latter arose at the end of the century the grotesque homunculus of the
superman whose natural destiny it is to rule the world. As long as these
trends ran side by side, they were but temporary means of escape from
political realities. once welded together, they formed the very basis for
racism as a full-fledged ideology. This, however, did not happen first in
Germany, but in France, and was not accomplished by middle-class intel-
lectuals but by a highly gifted and frustrated nobleman, the Comte de
Gobineau.
Ill: The New Key to History
IN 1853, Count Arthur de Gobineau published his Essai sur Vlnegalite des
Races Hutnaines which, only some fifty years later, at the turn of the cen-
tury, was to become a kind of standard work for race theories in history.
2* "Entwurf eines Friedenspaktes." In Gerhard Ramlow, Ludwig von der Marwitz
and die Anjdnge konservativer Politik und Staatsauffassung in Preussen, Historische
Studien, Heft 185, p. 92.
2* See Sigmund Neumann, Die Stufen des preussischen Konservatismus, Historische
Studien, Heft 190, Berlin, 1930. Especially pp. 48, 51, 64, 82. For Adam Mueller, see
Elemente der Staatskunst, 1809.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 171
The first sentence of the four-volume work — "The fall of civilization is the
most striking and, at the same time, the most obscure of all phenomena of
history" ^^ — indicates clearly the essentially new and modern interest of its
author, the new pessimistic mood which pervades his work and which is
the ideological force that was capable of uniting all previous factors and
conflicting opinions. True, from time immemorial, mankind has wanted to
know as much as possible about past cultures, fallen empires, extinct peo-
ples; but nobody before Gobineau thought of finding one single reason, one
single force according to which civilization always and everywhere rises
and falls. Doctrines of decay seem to have some very intimate connection
with race-thinking. It certainly is no coincidence that another early "be-
liever in race," Benjamin Disraeli, was equally fascinated by the fall of
cultures, while on the other hand Hegel, whose philosophy was concerned
in great part with the dialectical law of development in history, was never
interested in the rise and fall of cultures as such or in any law which would
explain the death of nations: Gobineau demonstrated precisely such a law.
Without Darwinism or any other evolutionist theory to influence him, this
historian boasted of having introduced history into the family of natural
sciences, detected the natural law of all courses of events, reduced all
spiritual utterances or cultural phenomena to something "that by virtue of
exact science our eyes can see, our ears can hear, our hands can touch."
The most surprising aspect of the theory, set forth in the midst of the
optimistic nineteenth century, is the fact that the author is fascinated by
the fall and hardly interested in the rise of civilizations. At the time of writing
the Essai Gobineau gave but little thought to the possible use of his theory
as a weapon in actual politics, and therefore had the courage to draw the
inherent sinister consequences of his law of decay. In contrast to Spengler,
who predicts only the fall of Western culture, Gobineau foresees with "scien-
tific" precision nothing less than the definite disappearance of Man — or, in
his words, of the human race — from the face of the earth. After four volumes
of rewriting human history, he concludes: one might be tempted to assign
a total duration of 12 to 14 thousand years to human rule over the earth,
which era is divided into two periods : the first has passed away and possessed
the youth ... the second has begun and will witness the declining course
down toward decrepitude."
It has rightly been observed that Gobineau, thirty years before Nietzsche,
was concerned with the problem of "decadence." ^* There is, however, this
difference, that Nietzsche possessed the basic experience of European de-
cadence, writing as he did during the climax of this movement with
Baudelaire in France, Swinburne in England, and Wagner in Germany,
whereas Gobineau was hardly aware of the variety of the modern taedium
vitae, and must be regarded as the last heir of Boulainvilliers and the French
3° Translation quoted from The Inequality of Human Races, translated by Adrien
Collins, 1915.
31 See Robert Dreyfus, "La vie et les propheties du Comte de Gobineau," Paris, 1905,
in Cahiers de la quinzaine, Ser. 6, Cah. 16, p. 56.
jy2 IMPERIALISM
exiled nobility who, without psychological complications, simply (and
rightly) feared for the fate of aristocracy as a caste. With a certain naivete
he accepted almost literally the eighteenth-century doctrines about the
origin of the French people: the bourgeois are the descendants of Gallic-
Roman slaves, noblemen are Germanic.'- The same is true for his insistence
on the international character of nobility. A more modern aspect of his
theories is revealed in the fact that he possibly was an impostor (his French
title being more than dubious), that he exaggerated and overstrained the
older doctrines until they became frankly ridiculous — he claimed for him-
self a genealogy which led over a Scandinavian pirate to Odin: "I, too, am
of the race of Gods." " But his real importance is that in the midst of
progress-ideologies he prophesied doom, the end of mankind in a slow
natural catastrophe. When Gobineau started his work, in the days of the
bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, the fate of nobility appeared sealed. Nobihty
no longer needed to fear the victory of the Tiers Etat, it had already oc-
curred and they could only complain. Their distress, as expressed by Gobi-
neau, sometimes comes very near to the great despair of the poets of de-
cadence who, a few decades later, sang the frailty of all things human —
les neiges d'antan, the snows of yesteryear. As far as Gobineau himself was
concerned, this affinity is rather incidental; but it is interesting to note that
once this affinity was established, nothing could prevent very respectable
intellectuals at the turn of the century, like Robert Dreyfus in France or
Thomas Mann in Germany, from taking this descendant of Odin seriously.
Long before the horrible and the ridiculous had merged into the humanly
incomprehensible mixture that is the hallmark of our century, the ridiculous
had lost its power to kill.
It is also to the peculiar pessimistic mood, to the active despair of the last
decades of the century that Gobineau owed his belated fame. This, however,
does not necessarily mean that he himself was a forerunner of the generation
of "the merry dance of death and trade" (Joseph Conrad). He was neither
a statesman who believed in business nor a poet who praised death. He was
only a curious mixture of frustrated nobleman and romantic intellectual
who invented racism almost by accident. This was when he saw that he
could not simply accept the old doctrines of the two peoples within France
and that, in view of changed circumstances, he had to revise the old line
that the best men necessarily are at the top of society. In sad contrast to his
teachers, he had to explain why the best men, noblemen, could not even
hope to regain their former position. Step by step, he identified the fall of
his caste with the fall of France, then of Western civilization, and then of
the whole of mankind. Thus he made that discovery, for which he was so
much admired by later writers and biographers, that the fall of civilizations
is due to a degeneration of race and the decay of race is due to a mixture
of blood. This implies that in every mixture the lower race is always dom-
.„r ^"°'' ^°"^^ "• ^°'^^ ^^' P- '*'*5' a"^ the article "Ce qui est arrive a la France en
1870," in Europe. 1923.
" J. Duesberg, "Le Comte de Gobineau," in Revue Ginirale, 1939.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 173
inant. This kind of argumentation, almost commonplace after the turn of
the century, did not fit in with the progress-doctrines of Gobineau's con-
temporaries, who soon acquired another idee fixe, the "survival of the
fittest." The liberal optimism of the victorious bourgeoisie wanted a new
edition of the might-right theory, not the key to history or the proof of in-
evitable decay. Gobineau tried in vain to get a wider audience by taking a
side in the American slave issue and by conveniently building his whole
system on the basic conflict between white and black. He had to wait almost
fifty years to become a success among the elite, and not until the first World
War with its wave of death-philosophies could his works claim wide popu-
larity-^**
What Gobineau was actually looking for in politics was the definition and
creation of an "elite" to replace the aristocracy. Instead of princes, he
proposed a "race of princes," the Aryans, who he said were in danger of
being submerged by the lower non-Aryan classes through democracy. The
concept of race made it possible to organize the "innate personalities" of
German romanticism, to define them as members of a natural aristocracy
destined to rule over all others. If race and mixture of races are the all-
determining factors for the individual — and Gobineau did not assume the
existence of "pure" breeds — it is possible to pretend that physical superiori-
ties might evolve in every individual no matter what his present social situa-
tion, that every exceptional man belongs to the "true surviving sons of . . .
the Merovings," the "sons of kings." Thanks to race, an "elite" would be
formed which could lay claim to the old prerogatives of feudal families, and
this only by asserting that they felt like noblemen; the acceptance of the
race ideology as such would become conclusive proof that an individual was
"well-bred," that "blue blood" ran through his veins and that a superior
origin implied superior rights. From one political event, therefore, the decline
of the nobility, the Count drew two contradictory consequences — the decay
of the human race and the formation of a new natural aristocracy. But he did
not live to see the practical application of his teachings which resolved their
inherent contradictions — the new race-aristocracy actually began to effect
the "inevitable" decay of mankind in a supreme effort to destroy it.
Following the example of his forerunners, the exiled French noblemen,
Gobineau saw in his race-elite not only a bulwark against democracy but
also against the "Canaan monstrosity" of patriotism.^'* And since France
still happened to be the "patrie" par excellence, for her government —
3* See the Gobineau memorial issue of the French review Europe, 1923. Especially
the article of Clement Serpeille de Gobineau, "Le Gobinisme et la pensee moderne."
"Yet it was not until ... the middle of the war that I thought the Essai sur les
Races was inspired by a productive hypothesis, the only one that could explain certain
events happening before our eyes. ... I was surprised to note that this opinion was
almost unanimously shared. After the war, I noticed that for nearly the <vhole younger
generation the works of Gobineau had become a revelation."
35 Essai, Tome II, Book IV, p. 440 and note on p. 445: "The word patrie . . . has
regained its significance only since the Gallo-Roman strata rose and assumed a po-
litical role. With their triumph, patriotism has again become a virtue."
jj. IMPERIALISM
whether kingdom or Empire or Republic— was still based upon the essential
equality of men, and since, worst of all, she was the only country of his
Umc in which even people with black skin could enjoy civil rights, it was
natural for Gobineau to give allegiance not to the French people, but to
the English, and later, after the French defeat of 1871, to the Germans.^"
Nor can this lack of dignity be called accidental and this opportunism an
unhappy coincidence. The old saying that nothing succeeds like success
reckons with people who are used to various and arbitrary opinions. Ideolo-
gists who pretend to possess the key to reality are forced to change and
twist their opinions about single cases according to the latest events and can
never afford to come into conflict with their ever-changing deity, reality.
It would be absurd to ask people to be reliable who by their very convictions
must justify any given situation.
It must be conceded that up to the time when the Nazis, in establishing
themselves as a race-elite, frankly bestowed their contempt on all peoples,
including the German, French racism was the most consistent, for it never
fell into the weakness of patriotism. (This attitude did not change even
during the last war; true, the "essence aryenne" no longer was a monopoly
of the Germans but rather of the Anglo-Saxons, the Swedes, and the Nor-
mans, but nation, patriotism, and law were still considered to be "prejudices,
fictitious and nominal values.") " Even Taine believed firmly in the superior
genius of the "Germanic nation," ^* and Ernest Renan was probably the
first to oppose the "Semites" to the "Aryans" in a decisive "division du genre
humain," although he held civilization to be the great superior force which
destroys local originalities as well as original race differences.^'' All the loose
race talk that is so characteristic of French writers after 1870,*° even if they
are not racists in any strict sense of the word, follows antinational, pro-
Germanic lines.
If the consistent antinational trend of Gobinism served to equip the
enemies of French democracy and, later, of the Third Republic, with real
or fictitious allies beyond the frontiers of their country, the specific amalga-
mation of the race and "elite" concepts equipped the international intelli-
" See Seilliere, op. cit., Tome I: Le Comte de Gobineau et I'Aryanisme historique,
p. 32: "In the Essai Germany is hardly Germanic, Great Britain is Germanic to a
much higher degree. . . . Certainly, Gobineau later changed his mind, but under the
influence of success." It is interesting to note that for Seilliere who during his studies
became an ardent adherent of Gobinism — "the intellectual climate to which probably
the lungs of the 20th century will have to adapt themselves" — success appeared as
quite a sufficient reason for Gobineau's suddenly revised opinion.
3' Examples could be multiplied. The quotation is taken from Camille Spiess,
Imperialismes Gohinisme en France, Paris, 1917.
3s For Taine's stand see John S. White, "Taine on Race and Genius," in Social Re-
search, February, 1943.
3» In Gobineau's opinion, the Semites were a white hybrid race bastardized by a
mixture with blacks. For Renan see Histoire Generate et Systeme compare des Langues,
1863, Part I, pp. 4, 503, and passim. The same distinction in his Langues Semitiques,
♦0 This has been very well exposed by Jacques Barzun, op. cit.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 175
gentsia with new and exciting psychological toys to play with on the great
playground of history. Gobineau's "fils des rois" were close relatives of the
romantic heroes, saints, geniuses and supermen of the late nineteenth cen-
tury, all of whom can hardly hide their German romantic origin. The inherent
irresponsibility of romantic opinions received a new stimulant from Gobi-
neau's mixture of races, because this mixture showed a historical event of
the past which could be traced in the depths of one's own self. This meant
that inner experiences could be given historical significance, that one's own
self had become the battlefield of history. "Since I read the Essai, every time
some conflict stirred up the hidden sources of my being, I have felt that a
relentless battle went on in my soul, the battle between the black, the yellow,
the Semite and the Aryans." ^^ Significant as this and similar confessions
may be of the state of mind of modern intellectuals, who are the true heirs
of romanticism whatever opinion they happen to hold, they nevertheless
indicate the essential harmlessness and political innocence of people who
probably could have been forced into line by each and every ideology.
IV: The "Rights of Englishmen" vs. the Rights of Men
WHILE THE SEEDS of German race-thinking were planted during the Na-
poleonic wars, the beginnings of the later English development appeared
during the French Revolution and may be traced back to the man who
violently denounced it as the "most astonishing [crisis] that has hitherto
happened in the world" — to Edmund Burke. *^ The tremendous influence
his work has exercised not only on English but also on German political
thought is well known. The fact, however, must be stressed because of re-
semblances between German and English race-thinking as contrasted with
the French brand. These resemblances stem from the fact that both coun-
tries had defeated the Tricolor and therefore showed a certain tendency to
discriminate against the ideas of Liberte-Egalite-Fraternite as foreign in-
ventions. Social inequality being the basis of English society, British Con-
servatives felt not a little uncomfortable when it came to the "rights of
men." According to opinions widely held by nineteenth-century Tories, in-
equality belonged to the English national character. Disraeli found "some-
thing better than the Rights of Men in the rights of Englishmen" and to Sir
James Stephen "few things in history [seemed] so beggarly as the degree
to which the French allowed themselves to be excited about such things." "
This is one of the reasons why they could afford to develop race-thinking
41 This surprising gentleman is none other than the well-known writer and historian
Elie Faure, "Gobineau et le Probleme des Races," in Europe, 1923.
*'^ Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, Everyman's Library Edition, New
York, p. 8.
*^ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873, p. 254. For Lord Beaconsfield see Benjamin
Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck, 1853, p. 184.
776 IMPERIALISM
along national lines until the end of the nineteenth century, whereas the
same opinions in France showed their true antinational face from the very
beginning.
Burke's main argument against the "abstract principles" of the French
Revolution is contained in the following sentence: "It has been the uni-
form policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an
entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted
to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this king-
dom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior
right." The concept of inheritance, applied to the very nature of liberty, has
been the ideological basis from which English nationalism received its
curious touch of race-feeling ever since the French Revolution. Formulated
by a middle-class writer, it signified the direct acceptance of the feudal con-
cept of liberty as the sum total of privileges inherited together with title
and land. Without encroaching upon the rights of the privileged class within
the English nation, Burke enlarged the principle of these privileges to in-
clude the whole English people, establishing them as a kind of nobility
among nations. Hence he drew his contempt for those who claimed their
franchise as the rights of men, rights which he saw fit to claim only as "the
rights of Englishmen."
In England nationalism developed without serious attacks on the old
feudal classes. This has been possible because the English gentry, from the
seventeenth century on and in ever-increasing numbers, had assimilated the
higher ranks of the bourgeoisie, so that sometimes even the common man
could attain the position of a lord. By this process much of the ordinary
caste arrogance of nobility was taken away and a considerable sense of
responsibility for the nation as a whole was created; but by the same token,
feudal concepts and mentality could influence the political ideas of the lower
classes more easily than elsewhere. Thus, the concept of inheritance was
accepted almost unchanged and applied to the entire British "stock." The
consequence of this assimilation of noble standards was that the English
brand of race-thinking was almost obsessed with inheritance theories and
their modern equivalent, eugenics.
Ever since the European peoples made practical attempts to include all
the peoples of the earth in their conception of humanity, they have been
irritated by the great physical differences between themselves and the peo-
ples they found on other continents.'" The eighteenth-century enthusiasm
for the diversity in which the all-present identical nature of man and reason
could find ｅxpression provided a rather thin cover of argument to the crucial
question, whether the Christian tenet of the unity and equaUty of all men,
based upon common descent from one original set of parents, would be kept
** A significant if moderate echo of this inner bewilderment can be found in many
an eighteenth-century traveling report. Voltaire thought it important enough to make a
special note in his Dictionnaire Philosophique: "We have seen, moreover, how dif-
ferent the races are who inhabit this globe, and how great must have been the sur-
prise of the first Negro and the first white man who met" (Article: Homme).
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 177
in the hearts of men who were faced with tribes which, as far as we know,
never had found by themselves any adequate ｅxpression of human reason
or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular customs, and which
had developed human institutions only to a very low level. This new prob-
lem which appeared on the historical scene of Europe and America with the
more intimate knowledge of African tribes had already caused, and this
especially in America and some British possessions, a relapse into forms
of social organization which were thought to have been definitely liquidated
by Christianity. But even slavery, though actually established on a strict
racial basis, did not make the slave-holding peoples race-conscious be-
fore the nineteenth century. Throughout the eighteenth century, American
slave-holders themselves considered it a temporary institution and wanted to
abolish it gradually. Most of them probably would have said with Jefferson:
"I tremble when I think that God is just."
In France, where the problem of black tribes had been met with the
desire to assimilate and educate, the great scientist Leclerc de Buffon had
given a first classification of races which, based upon the European peoples
and classifying all others by their differences, had taught equality by strict
juxtaposition.^^ The eighteenth century, to use Tocqueville's admirably pre-
cise phrase, "believed in the variety of races but in the unity of the human
species." " In Germany, Herder had refused to apply the "ignoble word"
race to men, and even the first cultural historian of mankind to make use of
the classification of different species, Gustav Klemm," still respected the idea
of mankind as the general framework for his investigations.
But in America and England, where people had to solve a problem of
living together after the abolition of slavery, things were considerably less
easy. With the exception of South Africa — a country which influenced
Western racism only after the "scramble for Africa" in the eighties — these
nations were the first to deal with the race problem in practical politics. The
abolition of slavery sharpened inherent conflicts instead of finding a solution
for existing serious difficulties. This was especially true in England where
the "rights of Englishmen" were not replaced by a new political orientation
which might have declared the rights of men. The abolition of slavery in
the British possessions in 1834 and the discussion preceding the American
Civil War, therefore, found in England a highly confused public opinion
which was fertile soil for the various naturalistic doctrines which arose in
those decades.
The first of these was represented by the polygenists who, challenging
the Bible as a book of pious lies, denied any relationship between human
"races"; their main achievement was the destruction of the idea of the
natural law as the uniting Hnk between all men and all peoples. Although
it did not stipulate predestined racial superiority, polygenism arbitrarily iso-
lated all peoples from one another by the deep abyss of the physical impos-
es //w/o/>^ Naturelle, 1769-89.
*^Op. cit., leUer of May 15, 1852.
*'' Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, 1843-1852.
jyg IMPERIALISM
sibility of human understanding and communication. Polygenism explains
why "Hast is East and West is West; And never the twain shall meet," and
helped much to prevent intermarriage in the colonies and to promote dis-
crimination against individuals of mixed origin. According to polygenism,
these people are not true human beings; they belong to no single race, but
arc a kind of monster whose "every cell is the theater of a civil war." *^
Lasting as the influence of polygenism on English race-thinking proved
to be in the long run, in the nineteenth century it was soon to be beaten in
the field of public opinion by another docuine. This doctrine also started
from the principle of inheritance but added to it the political principle of the
nineteenth century, progress, whence it arrived at the opposite but far more
convincing conclusion that man is related not only to man but to animal
life, that the existence of lower races shows clearly that gradual differences
alone separate man and beast and that a powerful struggle for existence
dominates all living things. Darwinism was especially strengthened by the
fact that it followed the path of the old might-right doctrine. But while this
doctrine, when used exclusively by aristocrats, had spoken the proud language
of conquest, it was now translated into the rather bitter language of people
who had known the struggle for daily bread and fought their way to the
relative security of upstarts.
Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on
the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race as well as class rule
and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically
speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds
of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of im-
perialistic ideologies. •''-' In the seventies and eighties of the last century,
Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-
colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert
Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selec-
tion to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace.
For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the
struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and auto-
matic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed
to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new
"science" of eugenics.
The doctrine of the necessary survival of the fittest, with its implication
that the top layers in society eventually are the "fittest," died as the conquest
doctrine had died, namely, at the moment when the ruling classes in England
or the English domination in colonial possessions were no longer absolutely
secure, and when it became highly doubtful whether those who were "fittest"
today would still be the fittest tomorrow. The other part of Darwinism, the
genealogy of man from animal life, unfortunately survived. Eugenics prom-
ised to overcome the troublesome uncertainties of the survival doctrine ac-
<» A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion, 1924, p. 158.
<» See Friedrich Brie, Imperialistische Strdmungen in der englischen Literatur, Halle,
1928.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 179
cording to which it was impossible either to predict who would turn out to
be the fittest or to provide the means for the nations to develop everlasting
fitness. This possible consequence of applied eugenics was stressed in Ger-
many in the twenties as a reaction to Spengler's Decline of the West.^" The
process of selection had only to be changed from a natural necessity which
worked behind the backs of men into an "artificial," consciously applied
physical tool. Bestiality had always been inherent in eugenics, and Ernst
Haeckel's early remark that mercy-death would save "useless expenses for
family and state" is quite characteristic.^^ Finally the last disciples of Dar-
winism in Germany decided to leave the field of scientific research altogether,
to forget about the search for the missing link between man and ape, and
started instead their practical efforts to change man into what the Darwinists
thought an ape is.
But before Nazism, in the course of its totalitarian policy, attempted to
change man into a beast, there were numerous efforts to develop him on a
strictly hereditary basis into a god." Not only Herbert Spencer, but all the
early evolutionists and Darwinists "had as strong a faith in humanity's angelic
future as in man's simian origin." " Selected inheritance was believed to
result in "hereditary genius," ^^ and again aristocracy was held to be the
natural outcome, not of politics, but of natural selection, of pure breeding.
To transform the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from which choice
^0 See, for instance, Otto Bangert, Gold ocier Bint, 1927. "Therefore a civilization
can be eternal," p. 17.
f'l In Lebenswmnler, 1904, pp. 128 ff.
^- Almost a century before evolutionism had donned the cloak of science, warning
voices foretold the inherent consequences of a madness that was then merely in the
stage of pure imagination. Voltaire, more than once, had played with evolutionary
opinions — see chiefly "Philosophic Gencrale: Metaphysique, Morale et Theoiogie,"
Ocuvres Completes, 1785, Tome 40, pp. 16fr. — In his Dictionnaire Philosophique,
Article "Chaine des Etrcs Crccs," he wrote: "At first, our imagination is pleased at
the imperceptible transition of crude matter to organized matter, of plants to zoo-
phytes, of these zoophytes to animals, of these to man, of man to spirits, of these
spirits clothed with a small aerial body to immaterial substances; and ... to God
Himself. . . . But the most perfect spirit created by the Supreme Being, can he be-
come God? Is there not an infinity between God and him? ... Is there not obviously
a void between the monkey and man?"
53 Hayes, op. cit., p. 1 1 . Hayes rightly stresses the strong practical morality of all
these early materialists. He explains "this curious divorce of morals from beliefs" by
"what later sociologists have described as a time lag" (p. 130). This explanation,
however, appears rather weak if one recalls that other materialists who, like Haeckel
in Germany or Vacher de Lapouge in France, had left the calm of studies and
research for propaganda activities, did not greatly suffer from such a time lag; that,
on the other hand, their contemporaries who were not tinged by their materialistic
doctrines, such as Barres and Co. in France, were very practical adherents of the per-
verse brutality which swept France during the Dreyfus Affair. The sudden decay of
morals in the Western world seems to be caused less by an autonomous development of
certain "ideas" than by a series of new political events and new political and social
problems which confronted a bewildered and confused humanity.
^* Such was the title of the widely read book of Fr. Galton, published in 1869, which
caused a flood of literature about the same topic in the following decades.
.gQ IMPERIALISM
exemplars would develop into geniuses and supermen, was one of the many
'•ideas" produced by frustrated liberal intellectuals in their dreams of re-
placing the old governing classes by a new "elite" through nonpolitical
means. At the end of the century, writers treated political topics in terms
of biology and zoology as a matter of course, and zoologists wrote "Bio-
logical Views of our Foreign Policy" as though they had detected an in-
fallible guide for statesmen.^' All of them put forward new ways to control
and regulate the "survival of the fittest" in accordance with the national in-
terests of the English people/"
The most dangerous aspect of these evolutionist doctrines is that they
combined the inheritance concept with the insistence on personal achieve-
ment and individual character which had been so important for the self-
respect of the nineteenth-century middle class. This middle class wanted
scientists who could prove that the great men, not the aristocrats, were the
true representatives of the nation, in whom the "genius of the race" was
personified. These scientists provided an ideal escape from poHtical re-
sponsibility when they "proved" the early statement of Benjamin Disraeli
that the great man is "the personification of race, its choice exemplar." The
development of this "genius" found its logical end when another disciple
of evolutionism simply declared: "The Englishman is the Overman and the
history of England is the history of his evolution." "
It is as significant for English as it was for German race-thinking that it
originated among middle-class writers and not the nobility, that it was born
of the desire to extend the benefits of noble standards to all classes and that
it was nourished by true national feelings. In this respect, Carlyle's ideas on
the genius and hero were really more the weapons of a "social reformer"
than the doctrines of the "Father of British ImperiaUsm," a very unjust
accusation, indeed.'* His hero worship which earned him wide audiences in
both England and in Germany, had the same sources as the personahty
worship of German romanticism. It was the same assertion and glorification
of the innate greatness of the individual character independent of his social
environment. Among the men who influenced the colonial movement from
** "A Biological View of Our Foreign Policy" was published by P. Charles Michel in
Saturday Review, London, February, 1896. The most important works of this kind are:
Thomas Huxley, The Struggle for Existence in Human Society, 1888. His main thesis:
The fall of civilizations is necessary only as long as birthrate is uncontrolled. Benjamin
Kidd, Social Evolution, 1894. John B. Crozier, History of Intellectual Development on
the Lines of Modern Evolution, 1897-1901. Karl Pearson (National Life, 1901), Pro-
fessor of Eugenics at London University, was among the first to describe progress as a
kind of impersonal monster which devours everything that happens to be in its way.
Charles H. Harvey, The Biology of British Politics, 1904, argues that by strict control
of the "struggle for life" within the nation, a nation could become all-powerful for the
inevitable fight with other people for existence.
*« Sec especially K. Pearson, op. cit. But Fr. Galton had already stated: "I wish to
emphasize the fact that the improvement of the natural gifts of future generations of
the human race is largely under our control" (op. cit., ed. 1892, p. xxvi).
*' Testament of John Davidson, 1908.
" C. A. Bodclsen, Studies in Mid-Victorian ImperiaUsm, 1924, pp. 22 ff.
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 181
the middle of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of actual imperiaUsm
at its end, not one has escaped the influence of Carlyle, but not one can be
accused of preaching outspoken racism. Carlyle himself, in his essay on the
"Nigger Question" is concerned with means to help the West Indies produce
"heroes." Charles Dilke, whose Greater Britain (1869) is sometimes taken
as the beginning of imperialism,^^ was an advanced radical who glorified the
English colonists as being part of the British nation, as against those who
would look down upon them and their lands as mere colonies. J. R. Seeley,
whose Expansion of England (1883) sold 80,000 copies in less than two
years, still respects the Hindus as a foreign people and distinguishes them
clearly from "barbarians." Even Froude, whose admiration for the Boers,
the first white people to be converted clearly to the tribal philosophy of
racism, might appear suspect, opposed too many rights for South Africa
because "self-government in South Africa meant the government of the
natives by the European colonists and that is not self-government." *"
Very much as in Germany, English nationalism was born and stimulated
by a middle class which had never entirely emancipated itself from the
nobility and therefore bore the first germs of race-thinking. But unlike
Germany, whose lack of unity made necessary an ideological wall to sub-
stitute for historical or geographical facts, the British Isles were completely
separated from the surrounding world by natural frontiers and England as
a nation had to devise a theory of unity among people who lived in far-flung
colonies beyond the seas, separated from the mother country by thousands
of miles. The only link between them was common descent, common origin,
common language. The separation of the United States had shown that these
links in themselves do not guarantee domination; and not only America,
other colonies too, though not with the same violence, showed strong
tendencies toward developing along dififerent constitutional lines from the
mother country. In order to save these former British nationals, Dilke, in-
fluenced by Carlyle, spoke of "Saxondom," a word that seemed able to win
back even the people of the United States, to whom one-third of his book is
devoted. Being a radical, Dilke could act as though the War of Independence
had not been a war between two nations, but the English form of eighteenth-
century civil war, in which he belatedly sided with the Republicans. For
here lies one of the reasons for the surprising fact that social reformers and
radicals were the promoters of nationalism in England: they wanted to keep
the colonies not only because they thought they were necessary outlets for
the lower classes; they actually wanted to retain the influence on the mother
country which these more radical sons of the British Isles exercised. This
motif is strong with Froude, who wished "to retain the colonies because he
thought it possible to reproduce in them a simpler state of society and a
nobler way of life than were possible in industrial England," ^^ and it had a
58 E. H. Damce, The Victorian Illusion, 1928. "Imperialism began with a book . . .
Dilke's Greater Britain."
00 "Two Lectures on South Africa," in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867-1882.
«i C. A. Bodelsen, op. cit., p. 199.
IMPERIALISM
IS2
definite impact on Scclcy's Expansion of England: "When we have accus-
tomed ourselves to contemplate the whole Empire together and we call it all
lingland \se shall see that there too is a United States." Whatever later polit-
ical writers may nave used "Saxondom" for, in Dilkc's work it had a genuine
political meaning for a nation that was no longer held together by a limited
country. 'The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my
fellow and my guide — the key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of
strange new lands— is the conception ... of the grandeur of our race
already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps, eventually to over-
spread" (Preface). For Dilke, common origin, inheritance, "grandeur of
race" were neither physical facts nor the key to history but a much-needed
guide in the present world, the only reliable link in a boundless space.
Because English colonists had spread all over the earth, it happened that
the most dangerous concept of nationalism, the idea of "national mission,"
was especially strong in England. Although national mission as such de-
veloped for a long while untinged by racial influences in all countries where
peoples aspired to nationhood, it proved finally to have a peculiarly close
aflinity to race-thinking. The above-quoted English nationalists may be con-
sidered borderline cases in the light of later experience. In themselves, they
were not more harmful than, for example, Auguste Comte in France when
he expressed the hope for a united, organized, regenerated humanity under
the leadership — presidence — of France.''- They do not give up the idea of
mankind, though they think England is the supreme guarantee for humanity.
They could not help but ovcrstress this nationalistic concept because of its
inherent dissolution of the bond between soil and people implied in the mis-
sion idea, a dissolution which for English politics was not a propagated
ideology but an established fact with which every statesman had to reckon.
What separates them definitely from later racists is that none of them was
ever seriously concerned with discrimination against other peoples as lower
races, if only for the reason that the countries they were talking about,
Canada and Australia, were almost empty and had no serious population
problem.
It is, therefore, not by accident that the first English statesman who re-
peatedly stressed his belief in races and race superiority as a determining
factor of history and politics was a man who without particular interest in
the colonies and the English colonists — "the colonial deadweight which we
do not govern" — wanted to extend British imperial power to Asia and,
indeed, forcefully strengthened the position of Great Britain in the only
colony with a grave population and cultural problem. It was Benjamin
Disraeli who made the Queen of England the Empress of India; he was
the first English statesman who regarded India as the cornerstone of an
Empire and who wanted to cut the ties which linked the English people
to the nations of the Continent."^ Thereby he laid one of the foundation
•2 In his Discours sur I' Ensemble du Positivisme, 1848, pp. 384 ff.
9* "Power and influence we should exercise in Asia; consequently in Western
Europe" (W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of
RACE-THINKING BEFORE RACISM 183
stones for a fundamental change in British rule in India. This colony had
been governed with the usual ruthlessness of conquerors — men whom Burke
had called "the breakers of the law in India." It was now to receive a care-
fully planned administration which aimed at the establishment of a permanent
government by administrative measures. This experiment has brought Eng-
land very close to the danger against which Burke had warned, that the
"breakers of the law in India" might become "the makers of law for Eng-
land." "* For all those, to whom there was "no transaction in the history of
England of which we have more just cause to be proud . . . than the es-
tablishment of the Indian Empire," held Hberty and equality to be "big
names for a small thing." ""^
The policy introduced by Disraeli signified the establishment of an exclu-
sive caste in a foreign country whose only function was rule and not coloniza-
tion. For the realization of this conception which Disraeli did not live to see
accomplished, racism would indeed be an indispensable tool. It foreshadowed
the menacing transformation of the people from a nation into an "unmixed
race of a first-rate organization" that felt itself to be "the aristocracy of
nature" — to repeat in Disraeli's own words quoted above.""
What we have followed so far is the story of an opinion in which we
see only now, after all the terrible experiences of our times, the first dawn
of racism. But although racism has revived elements of race-thinking in every
country, it is not the history of an idea endowed by some "immanent logic"
with which we were concerned. Race-thinking was a source of convenient
arguments for varying political conflicts, but it never possessed any kind of
monopoly over the political life of the respective nations; it sharpened and
exploited existing conflicting interests or existing poHtical problems, but it
never created new conflicts or produced new categories of political think-
ing. Racism sprang from experiences and political constellations which were
still unknown and would have been utterly strange even to such devoted
defenders of "race" as Gobineau or Disraeh. There is an abyss between
the men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds and
active bestiality which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge. It is
highly probable that the thinking in terms of race would have disappeared
in due time together with other irresponsible opinions of the nineteenth cen-
tury, if the "scramble for Africa" and the new era of imperialism had not
exposed Western humanity to new and shocking experiences. Imperialism
Beaconsfield, New York, 1929, II, 210). But "If ever Europe by her shortsightedness
falls into an inferior and exhausted state, for England there will remain an illustrious
future" {Ibid., I, Book IV, ch. 2). For "England is no longer a mere European power
. . . she is really more an Asiatic power than a European." (Ibid., II, 201).
"* Burke, op. cit., pp. 42-43: "The power of the House of Commons ... is indeed
great; and long may it be able to preserve its greatness . . . and it will do so, as long
as it can keep the breaker of the law in India from becoming the maker of law for
England."
65 Sir James F. Stephen, op. cit., p. 253, and passim; see also his "Foundations of
the Government of India," 1883, in The Nineteenth Century, LXXX.
88 For Disraeli's racism, compare chapter iii.
184 IMPERIALISM
would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible "ex-
planation" and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed
in the civilized world.
Since, however, race-thinking did exist, it proved to be a powerful help
to racism. The very existence of an opinion which could boast of a certain
tradition served to hide the destructive forces of the new doctrine which,
without this appearance of national respectability or the seeming sanction of
tradition, might have disclosed its utter incompatibility with all Western
political and moral standards of the past, even before it was allowed to
destroy the comity of European nations.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Race and Bureaucracy
Two NEW DEVICES for political organization and rule over foreign peoples
were discovered during the first decades of imperialism. one was race as
a principle of the body politic, and the other bureaucracy as a principle of
foreign domination. Without race as a substitute for the nation, the scramble
for Africa and the investment fever might well have remained the purpose-
less "dance of death and trade" (Joseph Conrad) of all gold rushes. Without
bureaucracy as a substitute for government, the British possession of India
might well have been left to the recklessness of the "breakers of law in India"
(Burke) without changing the political climate of an entire era.
Both discoveries were actually made on the Dark Continent. Race was the
emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized
man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated
the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human
species. Race was the Boers' answer to the overwhelming monstrosity of
Africa — a whole continent populated and overpopulated by savages — an
explanation of the madness which grasped and illuminated them like "a
flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes.' " ^ This an-
swer resulted in the most terrible massacres in recent history, the Boers'
extermination of Hottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in
German Southeast Africa, the decimation of the peaceful Congo population
— from 20 to 40 million reduced to 8 million people; and finally, perhaps
worst of all, it resulted in the triumphant introduction of such means of
pacification into ordinary, respectable foreign policies. What head of a
civilized state would ever before have uttered the exhortation of William II
to a German expeditionary contingent fighting the Boxer insurrection in
1900: "Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of
Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in history, so
may the German name become known in such a manner in China that no
Chinese will ever again dare to look askance at a German." ^
1 Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness" in Yot4th and Other Tales, 1902, is the most
illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa.
^Quoted from Carlton J. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, New York, 1941,
p. 338. — An even worse case is of course that of Leopold II of Belgium, responsible
for the blackest pages in the history of Africa. "There was only one man who could
be accused of the outrages which reduced the native population [of the Congo] from
between 20 to 40 million in 1890 to 8,500,000 in 1911— Leopold II." See Selwyn
James, South of the Congo, New York, 1943, p. 305.
.«g IMPERIALISM
While race, whether as a home-grown ideology in Europe or an emer-
gency explanation for shattering experiences, has always attracted the worst
elements m Western civilization, bureaucracy was discovered by and first
attracted the best, and sometimes even the most clear-sighted, strata of the
i:uro|x-an intelligentsia. 1 he administrator who ruled by reports ■' and de-
crees in more hostile secrecy than any oriental despot grew out of a tradi-
tion of military discipline in the midst of ruthless and lawless men; for a
long time he had lived by the honest, earnest boyhood ideals of a modern
knight in shining armor sent to protect helpless and primitive people. And
he fulfilled this task, for better or worse, as long as he moved in a world
dominated by the old "trinity — war, trade and piracy" (Goethe), and not
in a complicated game of far-reaching investment policies which demanded
the domination of one people, not as before for the sake of its own riches,
but for the sake of another country's wealth. Bureaucracy was the organiza-
tion of the great game of expansion in which every area was considered a
stepping-stone to further involvements and every people an instrument for
further conquest.
Although in the end racism and bureaucracy proved to be interrelated
in many ways, they were discovered and developed independently. No one
who in one way or the other was implicated in their perfection ever came
to realize the full range of potentialities of power accumulation and destruc-
tion that this combination alone provided. Lord Cromer, who in Egypt
changed from an ordinary British charge d'affaires into an imperialist
bureaucrat, would no more have dreamed of combining administration with
mxssacre ("administrative massacres" as Carthill bluntly put it forty years
later), than the race fanatics of South Africa thought of organizing massacres
for the purpose of establishing a circumscribed, rational political community
(as the Nazis did in the extermination camps).
I: The Phantom World of the Dark Continent
vv TO THE END of the last century, the colonial enterprises of the seafaring
European peoples produced two outstanding forms of achievement: in re-
cently discovered and sparsely populated territories, the founding of new
settlements which adopted the legal and political institutions of the mother
country; and in well-known though exotic countries in the midst of foreign
peoples, the establishment of maritime and trade stations whose only func-
tion was to facilitate the never very peaceful exchange of the treasures of
the world. Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two con-
Uncnts that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the
hands of Europeans. Trade stations were characteristic of Asia where for
centuries Europeans had shown no ambition for permanent rule or inten-
Ti.' ^*^ A. Canhills description of the "Indian system of government by reports" in
The Lost Dominion, 1924, p. 70.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 187
tions of conquest, decimation of the native population, and permanent
settlement.* Both forms of overseas enterprise evolved in a long steady
process which extended over almost four centuries, during which the settle-
ments gradually achieved independence, and the possession of trade stations
shifted among the nations according to their relative weakness or strength
in Europe.
The only continent Europe had not touched in the course of its colonial
history was the Dark Continent of Africa. Its northern shores, populated by
Arabic peoples and tribes, were well known and had belonged to the Euro-
pean sphere of influence in one way or another since the days of antiquity.
Too well populated to attract settlers, and too poor to be exploited, these
regions suffered all kinds of foreign rule and anarchic neglect, but oddly
enough never — after the decline of the Egyptian Empire and the destruction
of Carthage — achieved authentic independence and reliable poHtical organ-
ization. European countries tried time and again, it is true, to reach beyond
the Mediterranean to impose their rule on Arabic lands and their Chris-
tianity on Moslem peoples, but they never attempted to treat North African
territories like overseas possessions. on the contrary, they frequently aspired
to incorporate them into the respective mother country. This age-old tradi-
tion, still followed in recent times by Italy and France, was broken in the
eighties when England went into Egypt to protect the Suez Canal without
any intention either of conquest or incorporation. The point is not that
Egypt was wronged but that England (a nation that did not lie on the shores
of the Mediterranean) could not possibly have been interested in Egypt as
such, but needed her only because there were treasures in India.
While imperialism changed Egypt from a country occasionally coveted
for her own sake into a military station for India and a stepping-stone for
further expansion, the exact opposite happened to South Africa. Since the
seventeenth century, the significance of the Cape of Good Hope had de-
pended upon India, the center of colonial wealth; any nation that established
trade stations there needed a maritime station on the Cape, which was then
abandoned when trade in India was liquidated. At the end of the eighteenth
century, the British East India Company defeated Portugal, Holland, and
France and won a trade monopoly in India; the occupation of South Africa
followed as a matter of course. If imperialism had simply continued the old
trends of colonial trade (which is so frequently mistaken for imperiahsm),
England would have liquidated her position in South Africa with the opening
of tlie Suez Canal in 1869.^ Although today South Africa belongs to the
* It is important to bear in mind that colonization of America and Australia was
accompanied by comparatively short periods of cruel liquidation because of the na-
tives' numerical weakness, whereas "in understanding the genesis of modern South
African society it is of the greatest importance to know that the land beyond the
Cape's borders was not the open land which lay before the Australian squatter. It was
already an area of settlement, of settlement by a great Bantu population." See C. W.
de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa, Social and Economic (Oxford, 1941), p. 59.
6 "As late as 1884 the British Government had still been willing to diminish its
authority and influence in South Africa" (De Kiewiet, op. cit., p, 113).
jpg IMPERIALISM
Commonwealth, it was always different from the other dominions; fertility
and sparscncss of population, the main prerequisites for definite settlement,
were lacking and a sinulc clfort to settle 5,000 unemployed Englishmen at
the beginning of the nineteenth century proved a failure. Not only did the
streams of emigrants from the British Isles consistently avoid South Africa
throughout the nineteenth century, but South Africa is the only dominion
from which a steady stream of emigrants has gone back to England in recent
times.* South Africa, which became the "culture-bed of Imperialism"
(Damce), was never claimed by England's most radical defenders of "Saxon-
dom" and it did not figure in the visions of her most romantic dreamers of
an Asiatic Empire. Th^s in itself shows how small the real influence of pre-
imperialist colonial enterprise and overseas settlement was on the develop-
ment of imperialism itself. If the Cape colony had remained within the
framework of prc-imperialist policies, it would have been abandoned at
the exact moment when it actually became all-important.
Although the discoveries of gold mines and diamond fields in the seventies
and eighties would have had little consequence in themselves if they had
not accidentally acted as a catalytic agent for imperialist forces, it remains
remarkable that the imperialists' claim to have found a permanent solution
to the problem of superfluity was initially motivated by a rush for the most
superfluous raw material on earth. Gold hardly has a place in human produc-
tion and is of no importance compared with iron, coal, oil, and rubber;
instead, it is the most ancient symbol of mere wealth. In its uselessness in
industrial production it bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous
money that financed the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did
the digging. To the imperialists' pretense of having discovered a permanent
savior for a decadent society and antiquated political organization, it added
its own pretense of apparently eternal stability and independence of all
functional determinants. It was significant that a society about to part with
all traditional absolute values began to look for an absolute value in the
world of economics where, indeed, such a thing does not and cannot exist,
since everything is functional by definition. This delusion of an absolute
value has made the production of gold since ancient times the business of
« The following table of British immigration to and emigration from South Africa
between 1924 and 1928 shows that Englishmen had a stronger inclination to leave the
country than other immigrants and that, with one exception, each year showed a
greater number of British people leaving the country than coming in:
British
Total
British
Total
Year
Immigration
Immigration
Emigration
Emigration
1924
3.724
5.265
5.275
5.857
1925
2.400
5.426
4.019
4.483
1926
4.094
6.575
3.512
3.799
1927
3.681
6.595
3.717
3.988
1928
3.285
7.050
3.409
4.127
Total 17.184 30.911 19.932 22.254
These figures are quoted from Leonard Barnes, Caliban in Africa. An Impression of
Colour Madness, Philadelphia, 1931, p. 59, note.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 189
adventurers, gamblers, criminals, of elements outside the pale of normal,
sane society. The new turn in the South African gold rush was that here
the luck-hunters were not distinctly outside civilized society but, on the
contrary, very clearly a by-product of this society, an inevitable residue of
the capitalist system and even the representatives of an economy that re-
lentlessly produced a superfluity of men and capital.
The superfluous men, "the Bohemians of the four continents" ^ who came
rushing down to the Cape, still had much in common with the old adven-
turers. They too felt "Ship me somewheres east of Suez where the best is
like the worst, / Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can
raise a thirst." The difference was not their morality or immorality, but
rather that the decision to join this crowd "of all nations and colors" * was
no longer up to them; that they had not stepped out of society but had been
spat out by it; that they were not enterprising beyond the permitted limits
of civilization but simply victims without use or function. Their only choice
had been a negative one, a decision against the workers' movements, in
which the best of the superfluous men or of those who were threatened with
superfluity estabhshed a kind of countersociety through which men could
find their way back into a human world of fellowship and purpose. They
were nothing of their own making, they were like living symbols of what
had happened to them, living abstractions and witnesses of the absurdity of
human institutions. They were not individuals like the old adventurers, they
were the shadows of events with which they had nothing to do.
Like Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," they were "hollow to
the core," "reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel
without courage." They believed in nothing and "could get (themselves) to
believe anything — anything." Expelled from a world with accepted social
values, they had been thrown back upon themselves and still had nothing
to fall back upon except, here and there, a streak of talent which made them
as dangerous as Kurtz if they were ever allowed to return to their homelands.
For the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was
the gift of fascination which makes a "splendid leader of an extreme party."
The more gifted were walking incarnations of resentment like the German
Carl Peters (possibly the model for Kurtz), who openly admitted that he
"was fed up with being counted among the pariahs and wanted to belong to
a master race." ^ But gifted or not, they were all "game for anything from
pitch and toss to wilful murder" and to them their fellow-men were "no
more one way or another than that fly there." Thus they brought with them,
or they learned quickly, the code of manners which befitted the coming
type of murderer to whom the only unforgivable sin is to lose his temper.
There were, to be sure, authentic gentlemen among them, like Mr. Jones
of Conrad's Victory, who out of boredom were willing to pay any price to
"J. A. Froude, "Leaves from a South African Journal" (1874), in Short Studies
on Great Subjects, 1867-1882, Vol. IV.
8 Ibid.
9 Quoted from Paul Ritter, Kolonien im deutschen Schrifttum, 1936, Preface.
IQQ IMPERIALISM
inhabit the "world of hazard and adventure," or like Mr. Heyst, who was
drunk with contempt for everything human until he drifted "like a detached
leaf . . . without ever catching on to anything." They were irresistibly
attracted by a world where everything was a joke, which could teach them
"the Cireat Joke" that is "the mastery of despair." The perfect gentleman
and the perfect scoundrel came to know each other well in the "great wild
jungle without law," and they found themselves "well-matched in their
enormous dissimilarity, identical souls in difTcrent disguises." We have seen
the behavior of high society during the Dreyfus Affair and watched Disraeli
discover the social relationship between vice and crime; here, too, we have
essentially the same story of high society falling in love with its own under-
world, and of the criminal feeling elevated when by civilized coldness, the
avoidance of "unnecessary exertion," and good manners he is allowed to
create a vicious, refined atmosphere around his crimes. This refinement, the
very contrast between the brutality of the crime and the manner of carrying
it out, becomes the bridge of deep understanding between himself and the
perfect gentleman. But what, after all, took decades to achieve in Europe,
because of the delaying effect of social ethical values, exploded with the
suddenness of a short circuit in the phantom world of colonial adventure.
Outside all social restraint and hypocrisy, against the backdrop of native
life, the gentleman and the criminal felt not only the closeness of men who
share the same color of skin, but the impact of a world of infinite possibili-
ties for crimes committed in the spirit of play, for the combination of horror
and laughter, that is for the full realization of their own phantom-like
existence. Native life lent these ghostlike events a seeming guarantee against
all consequences because anyhow it looked to these men like a "mere play of
shadows. A play of shadows, the dominant race could walk through un-
aflectcd and disregarded in the pursuit of its incomprehensible aims and
needs."
The world of native savages was a perfect setting for men who had
escaped the reality of civilization. Under a merciless sun, surrounded by an
entirely hostile nature, they were confronted with human beings who, living
without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were
as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse. "The prehistoric man
was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us — who could tell? We were
cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like
phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be, before
an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because
we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the
night of first ages, of those ages that are gone leaving hardly a sign — and
no memories. The earth seemed unearthly, ... and the men ... No,
they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it — this sus-
picion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled
and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was
just the thought of their humanity— like yours— the thought of your remote
kmship with this wild and passionate uproar" ("Heart of Darkness").
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 191
It is strange that, historically speaking, the existence of "prehistoric men"
had so little influence on Western man before the scramble for Africa. It is,
however, a matter of record that nothing much had happened as long as
savage tribes, outnumbered by European settlers, had been exterminated, as
long as shiploads of Negroes were imported as slaves into the Europe-
determined world of the United States, or even as long as only individuals
had drifted into the interior of the Dark Continent where the savages were
numerous enough to constitute a world of their own, a world of folly, to
which the European adventurer added the folly of the ivory hunt. Many of
these adventurers had gone mad in the silent wilderness of an overpopulated
continent where the presence of human beings only underlined utter soli-
tude, and where an untouched, overwhelmingly hostile nature that nobody
had ever taken the trouble to change into human landscape seemed to wait
in sublime patience "for the passing away of the fantastic invasion" of man.
But their madness had remained a matter of individual experience and with-
out consequences.
This changed with the men who arrived during the scramble for Africa.
These were no longer lonely individuals; "all Europe had contributed to the
making of (them)." They concentrated on the southern part of the con-
tinent where they met the Boers, a Dutch splinter group which had been
almost forgotten by Europe, but which now served as a natural introduc-
tion to the challenge of new surroundings. The response of the superfluous
men was largely determined by the response of the only European group
that ever, though in complete isolation, had to live in a world of black
savages.
The Boers are descended from Dutch settlers who in the middle of the
seventeenth century were stationed at the Cape to provide fresh vegetables
and meat for ships on their voyage to India. A small group of French
Huguenots was all that followed them in the course of the next century, so
that it was only with the help of a high birthrate that the little Dutch splinter
grew into a small people. Completely isolated from the current of European
history, they set out on a path such "as few nations have trod before them,
and scarcely one trod with success." ^^
The two main material factors in the development of the Boer people were
the extremely bad soil which could be used only for extensive cattle-raising,
and the very large black population which was organized in tribes and lived
as nomad hunters." The bad soil made close settlement impossible and
prevented the Dutch peasant settlers from following the village organization
of their homeland. Large families, isolated from each other by broad spaces
of wilderness, were forced into a kind of clan organization and only the ever-
present threat of a common foe, the black tribes which by far outnumbered
10 Lord Selbourne in 1907: "The white people of South Africa are committed to
such a path as few nations have trod before them, and scarcely one trod with success."
See Kiewiet, op. cit., chapter 6.
11 See especially chapter iii of Kiewiet, op. cit.
|g^ IMPERIALISM
the white settlers, deterred these clans from active war against each other.
Ihc solution to the double problem of lack of fertility and abundance of
natives \sas slavery."
Slavery, however, is a very inadequate word to describe what actually
happened. First of all, slavery, though it domesticated a certain part of the
savage population, never got hold of all of them, so the Boers were never
.iblc to forget their first horrible fright before a species of men whom human
pride and the sense of human dignity could not allow them to accept as
fcilow-mcn. This fright of something like oneself that still under no circum-
stances ought to be like oneself remained at the basis of slavery and became
the basis for a race society.
Mankind remembers the history of peoples but has only legendary
knowledge of prehistoric tribes. The word "race" has a precise meaning only
when and where peoples are confronted with such tribes of which they have
no historical record and which do not know any history of their own. Whether
these represent "prehistoric man," the accidentally surviving specimens of
the first forms of human life on earth, or whether they are the "posthistoric"
survivors of some unknown disaster which ended a civilization we do not
know. They certainly appeared rather like the survivors of one great catas-
trophe which might have been followed by smaller disasters until cata-
strophic monotony seemed to be a natural condition of human life. At any
rate, races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was par-
ticularly hostile. What made them different from other human beings was
not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of
nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had
not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had
remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality — compared to
which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as
it were, "natural" human beings who lacked the specifically human character,
the specifically human reality, so that when European men massacred them
they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.
Moreover, the senseless massacre of native tribes on the Dark Continent
was quite in keeping with the traditions of these tribes themselves. Ex-
termination of hostile tribes had been the rule in all African native wars,
and it was not abolished when a black leader happened to unite several
tribes under his leadership. King Tchaka, who at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century united the Zulu tribes in an extraordinarily disciplined and
warlike organization, established neither a people nor a nation of Zulus.
He only succeeded in exterminating more than one million members of
weaker tribes.'^ Since discipline and military organization by themselves
>2 "Slaves and Hottentots together provoked remarkable changes in the thought and
habits of the colonists, for climate and geography were not alone in forming the dis-
tinctive traits of the Boer race. Slaves and droughts, Hottentots and isolation, cheap
labor and land, combined to create the institutions and habits of South African society.
Ihc sons and daughters born to sturdy Hollanders and Huguenots learned to look
upon the labour of the field and upon all hard physical toil as the functions of a
servile race" (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 21).
" See James, op. cit., p. 28.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 193
cannot establish a political body, the destruction remained an unrecorded
episode in an unreal, incomprehensible process which cannot be accepted
by man and therefore is not remembered by human history.
Slavery in the case of the Boers was a form of adjustment of a European
people to a black race,^* and only superficially resembled those historical
instances when it had been a result of conquest or slave trade. No body
politic, no communal organization kept the Boers together, no territory was
definitely colonized, and the black slaves did not serve any white civilization.
The Boers had lost both their peasant relationship to the soil and their
civilized feeling for human fellowship. "Each man fled the tyranny of his
neighbor's smoke" ^^ was the rule of the country, and each Boer family
repeated in complete isolation the general pattern of Boer experience among
black savages and ruled over them in absolute lawlessness, unchecked by
"kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you stepping delicately
between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and
gallows and lunatic asylums" (Conrad). Ruling over tribes and living
parasitically from their labor, they came to occupy a position very similar
to that of the native tribal leaders whose domination they had liquidated.
The natives, at any rate, recognized them as a higher form of tribal leader-
ship, a kind of natural deity to which one has to submit; so that the divine
role of the Boers was as much imposed by their black slaves as assumed
freely by themselves. It is a matter of course that to these white gods of
black slaves each law meant only deprivation of freedom, government only
restriction of the wild arbitrariness of the clan.^" In the natives the Boers
discovered the only "raw material" which Africa provided in abundance
and they used them not for the production of riches but for the mere essen-
tials of human existence.
The black slaves in South Africa quickly became the only part of the
population that actually worked. Their toil was marked by all the known
disadvantages of slave labor, such as lack of initiative, laziness, neglect of
tools, and general inefficiency. Their work therefore barely sufficed to keep
their masters alive and never reached the comparative abundance which nur-
tures civilization. It was this absolute dependence on the work of others
and complete contempt for labor and productivity in any form that trans-
formed the Dutchman into the Boer and gave his concept of race a distinctly
economic meaning. ^^
1* "The true history of South African colonization describes the growth, not of a
settlement of Europeans, but of a totally new and unique society of different races and
colours and cultural attainments, fashioned by conflicts of racial heredity and the
oppositions of unequal social groups" (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 19).
I'' Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 19.
16 "[The Boers'] society was rebellious, but it was not revolutionary" {ibid., p. 58).
1^ "Little effort was made to raise the standard of living or increase the opportunities
of the class of slaves and servants. In this manner, the limited wealth of the Colony
became the privilege of its white population. . . . Thus early did South Africa learn
that a self-conscious group may escape the worst effects of life in a poor and unpros-
perous land by turning distinctions of race and colour into devices for social and eco-
nomic discrimination" (ibid., p. 22).
IQ^ IMPERIALISM
Ihc Bivrs ucrc the first European group to become completely alienated
irom the pride which Western man felt in living in a world created and
f.ibricatcd hy himself. '^ Fhey treated the natives as raw material and lived
on them as one might live on the fruits of wild trees. Lazy and unproductive,
;hcy agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had
vegetated for thousands of years. The great horror which had seized European
men at their first confrontation with native life was stimulated by precisely
this touch of inhumanity among human beings who apparently were as much
a part of nature as wild animals. The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the
way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature. When the
BtK-rs. in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though
they were just another form of animal life, they embarked upon a process
which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living
beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would
differ only in the color of their skin.
The poor whites in South Africa, who in 1923 formed 10 per cent of the
total white population'"' and whose standard of living does not differ much
from that of the Bantu tribes, are today a warning example of this possibility.
Their poverty is almost exclusively the consequence of their contempt for
work and their adjustment to the way of life of black tribes. Like the blacks,
they deserted the soil if the most primitive cultivation no longer yielded
the little that was necessary or if they had exterminated the animals of the
region.-" Together with their former slaves, they came to the gold and dia-
mond centers, abandoning their farms whenever the black workers departed.
But in contrast to the natives who were immediately hired as cheap un-
skilled labor, they demanded and were granted charity as the right of a
white skin, having lost all consciousness that normally men do not earn a
living by the color of their skin.-' Their race consciousness today is violent
"* The point is that, for instance, in "the West Indies such a large proportion of
slaves as were held at the Cape would have been a sign of wealth and a source of pros-
perity"; whereas "at the Cape slavery was the sign of an unenterprising economy . . .
whose labour was wastcfully and inefficiently used" (ih'uL). It was chiefly this that led
Barnes (o/i. (//.. p. 107) and many other observers to the conclusion: "South Africa
is thus a foreign country, not only in the sense that its standpoint is definitely un-
British. but also in the much more radical sense that its very raison d'etre, as an attempt
at an organised society, is in contradiction to the principles on which the states of
Christendom are founded."
'"This corresponded to as many as 160,000 individuals (Kiewiet, op. cil., p. 181).
James (op. cii.. p. 43) estimated the number of poor whites in 1943 at 500,000 which
would correspond to about 20 per cent of the white population.
-'" "The poor while Afrikaaner population, living on the same subsistence level as
the Banlus, is primarily the result of the Boers' inability or stubborn refusal to learn
agricultural science. Like the Bantu, the Boer likes to wander from one area to
another, tilling Ihc soil until it is no longer fertile, shooting the wild game until it
ceases to exist" (ibid.).
^' "Their race was their title of superiority over the natives, and to do manual labour
conflicted with the dignity conferred upon them by their race. . . . Such an aversion
degenerated, in those who were most demoralized, into a claim to charity as a right"
(Kiewiet. op. cil., p. 216).
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 195
not only because they have nothing to lose save their membership in the
white community, but also because the race concept seems to define their
own condition much more adequately than it does that of their former
slaves, who are well on the way to becoming workers, a normal part of
human civilization.
Racism as a ruling device was used in this society of whites and blacks
before imperialism exploited it as a major political idea. Its basis, and its
excuse, were still experience itself, a horrifying experience of something alien
beyond imagination or comprehension; it was ternpting indeed simply to
declare that these were not human beings. Since, however, despite all ideo-
logical explanations the black men stubbornly insisted on retaining their
human features, the "white men" could not but reconsider their own human-
ity and decide that they themselves were more than human and obviously
chosen by God to be the gods of black men. This conclusion was logical and
unavoidable if one wanted to deny radically all common bonds with savages;
in practice it meant that Christianity for the first time could not act as a
decisive curb on the dangerous perversions of human self-consciousness, a
premonition of its essential ineffectiveness in other more recent race so-
cieties."^ The Boers simply denied the Christian doctrine of the common
origin of men and changed those passages of the Old Testament which did
not yet transcend the limits of the old Israelite national religion into a super-
stition which could not even be called a heresy. ^^ Like the Jews, they firmly
believed in themselves as the chosen people,-* with the essential difference
that they were chosen not for the sake of divine salvation of mankind, but for
the lazy domination over another species that was condemned to an equally
lazy drudgery.'-' This was God's will on earth as the Dutch Reformed Church
proclaimed it and still proclaims it today in sharp and hostile contrast to
the missionaries of all other Christian denominations.^''
22 The Dutch Reformed Church has been in the forefront of the Boers' struggle
against the influence of Christian missionaries on the Cape. In 1944, however, they
went one step farther and adopted "without a single voice of dissent" a motion oppos-
ing the marriage of Boers with EngUsh-speaking citizens. (According to the Cape
Times, editorial of July 18, 1944. Quoted from New Africa, Council on African Af-
fairs. Monthly Bulletin, October, 1944.)
23 Kiewiet {op. cit., p. 181) mentions "the doctrine of racial superiority which was
drawn from the Bible and reinforced by the popular interpretation which the nine-
teenth century placed upon Darwin's theories."
2* "The God of the Old Testament has been to them almost as much a national
figure as He has been to the Jews. ... I recall a memorable scene in a Cape Town
club, where a bold Briton, dining by chance with three or four Dutchmen, ventured
to observe that Christ was a non-European and that, legally speaking, he would have
been a prohibited immigrant in the Union of South Africa. The Dutchmen were so
electrified at the remark that they nearly fell off their chairs" (Barnes, op. cit., p. 33).
25 "For the Boer farmer the separation and the degradation of the natives are or-
dained by God, and it is crime and blasphemy to argue to the contrary" (Norman Bent-
wich, "South Africa. Dominion of Racial Problems." In Political Quarterly, 1939,
Vol. X, No. 3).
26 "To this day the missionary is to the Boer the fundamental traitor, the white man
who stands for black against white" (S. Gertrude Millin, Rhodes, London, 1933, p. 38).
.Q^ IMPERIALISM
BiXT racism, unlike the other brands, has a touch of authenticity and, so
to speak of inniKence. A complete lack of literature and other mtellectual
achievement is the best witness to this statement." It was and remams a
desperate reaction to desperate living conditions which was inarticulate and
inconsequential as long as it was left alone. Things began to happen only
with the arrival of the British, who showed little interest m their newest
colony which in 1849 was still called a military station (as opposed to either
a colony or a plantation). But their mere presence— that is, their contrasting
altitude toward the natives whom they did not consider a different animal
species, their later attempts (after 1834) to abolish slavery, and above all
their elforts to impose fixed boundaries upon landed property — provoked
the stagnant Boer society into violent reactions. It is characteristic of the
Boers thai these reactions followed the same, repeated pattern throughout
the nineteenth century: Boer farmers escaped British law by treks into the
interior wilderness of the country, abandoning without regret their homes
and their farms. Rather than accept limitations upon their possessions, they
left ihem altogether. =" This does not mean that the Boers did not feel at
home wherever they happened to be; they felt and still feel much more at
home in Africa than any subsequent immigrants, but in Africa and not in
any specific limited territory. Their fantastic treks, which threw the British
administration into consternation, showed clearly that they had transformed
themselves into a tribe and had lost the European's feeling for a territory, a
pairia of his own. 1 hey behaved exactly like the black tribes who had also
roamed the Dark Continent for centuries — feeling at home wherever the
horde happened to be, and fleeing like death every attempt at definite settle-
ment.
Rootlessness is characteristic of all race organizations. What the European
"movements" consciously aimed at, the transformation of the people into a
horde, can be watched like a laboratory test in the Boers' early and sad
attempt. While rootlessness as a conscious aim was based primarily upon
2' "Because they had little art, less architecture, and no literature, they depended
upon their farms, their Bibles, and their blood to set them off sharply against the
native and the outlandcr" (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 121).
2" "The true Vortrckker hated a boundary. When the British Government insisted
on fixed boundaries for the Colony and for farms within it, something was taken from
him. ... It was best surely to betake themselves across the border where there were
water and free land and no British Government to disallow Vagrancy Laws and where
white men could not be haled to court to answer the complaints of their servants"
(Ihid., pp. 54-55). "The Great Trek, a movement unique in the history of colonization"
(p. 58) "was the defeat of the policy of more intensive settlement. The practice which
required the area of an entire Canadian township for the settlement of ten families was
extended through all of South Africa. It made for ever impossible the segregation of
white and black races in separate areas of settlement. ... By taking the Boers beyond
the reach of British law. the Great Trek enabled them to establish 'proper' relations
with the native population" (p. 56). "In later years, the Great Trek was to become
more than a protest; it was to become a rebellion against the British administration,
and the foundation stone of the Anglo-Boer racialism of the twentieth century" (James,
op. cit., p. 28).
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 797
hatred of a world that had no place for "superfluous" men, so that its de-
struction could become a supreme political goal, the rootlessness of the
Boers was a natural result of early emancipation from work and complete
lack of a human-built world. The same striking similarity prevails between
the "movements" and the Boers' interpretation of "chosenness." But while
the Pan-German, Pan-Slav, or Polish Messianic movements' chosenness was
a more or less conscious instrument for domination, the Boers' perversion
of Christianity was solidly rooted in a horrible reality in which miserable
"white men" were worshipped as divinities by equally unfortunate "black
men." Living in an environment which they had no power to transform into
a civilized world, they could discover no higher value than themselves. The
point, however, is that no matter whether racism appears as the natural
result of a catastrophe or as the conscious instrument for bringing it about,
it is always closely tied to contempt for labor, hatred of territorial limita-
tion, general rootlessness, and an activistic faith in one's own divine chosen-
ness.
Early British rule in South Africa, with its missionaries, soldiers, and
explorers, did not realize that the Boers' attitudes had some basis in reality.
They did not understand that absolute European supremacy — in which they,
after all, were as interested as the Boers — could hardly be maintained except
through racism because the permanent European settlement was so hope-
lessly outnumbered; ''•• they were shocked "if Europeans settled in Africa
were to act like savages themselves because it was the custom of the coun-
try," ^° and to their simple utilitarian minds it seemed folly to sacrifice pro-
ductivity and profit to the phantom world of white gods ruling over black
shadows. only with the settlement of Englishmen and other Europeans dur-
ing the gold rush did they gradually adjust to a population which could not
be lured back into European civilization even by profit motives, which had
lost contact even with the lower incentives of European man when it had
cut itself off from his higher motives, because both lose their meaning and
appeal in a society where nobody wants to achieve anything and everyone
has become a god.
II: Gold and Race
THE DIAMOND FIELDS of Kimbcrley and the gold mines of the Witwatersrand
happened to He in this phantom world of race, and "a land that had seen
boat-load after boat-load of emigrants for New Zealand and Australia pass
it unheeding by now saw men tumbling on to its wharves and hurrying
29 In 1939, the total population of the Union of South Africa amounted to 9,500,000
of whom 7,000,000 were natives and 2,500,000 Europeans. Of the latter, more than
1,250,000 were Boers, about one-third were British, and 100,000 were Jews. See Nor-
man Bentwich, op. cit.
30 J. A. Froude, op. cit., p. 375.
jgg IMPERIALISM
Up country to the mines. Most of them were English, but among them was
more than a sprinkling from Riga and Kiev, Hamburg and Frankfort, Rotter-
dam and San Francisco." " All of them belonged to "a class of persons who
prefer adventure and speculation to settled industry, and who do not work
well in the harness of ordinary life. . . . (There were] diggers from Amer-
ica and Australia, German speculators, traders, saloonkeepers, professional
gamblers, barristers , . . , ex-officers of the army and navy, younger sons
of good families ... a marvelous motley assemblage among whom money
flowed like water from the amazing productiveness of the mine." They were
joined by thousands of natives who first came to "steal diamonds and to lag
their earnings out in rifles and powder," ^- but quickly started to work for
wages and became the seemingly inexhaustible cheap labor supply when
the "most stagnant of colonial regions suddenly exploded into activity." -^^
The abundance of natives, of cheap labor, was the first and perhaps most
important difference between this gold rush and others of its type. It was
soon apparent that the mob from the four corners of the earth would not
even have to do the digging; at any rate, the permanent attraction of South
Africa, the permanent resource that tempted the adventurers to permanent
settlement, was not the gold but this human raw material which promised a
permanent emancipation from work." The Europeans served solely as super-
visors and did not even produce skilled labor and engineers, both of which
had constantly to be imported from Europe.
Second in importance only, for the ultimate outcome, was the fact that
this gold rush was not simply left to itself but was financed, organized, and
connected with the ordinary European economy through the accumulated
superfluous wealth and with the help of Jewish financiers. From the very
beginning "a hundred or so Jewish merchants who have gathered like eagles
over their prey"" actually acted as middlemen through whom European
capital was invested in the gold mining and diamond industries.
The only section of the South African population that did not have and
did not want to have a share in the suddenly exploding activities of the
country were the Boers. They hated all these uitlanders, who did not care for
citizenship but who needed and obtained British protection, thereby seem-
ingly strengthening British government influence on the Cape. The Boers
reacted as they had always reacted, they sold their diamond-laden possessions
m Kimberley and their farms with gold mines near Johannesburg and
trekked once more into the interior wilderness. They did not understand
that this new influx was different from the British missionaries, government
officials, or ordinary settlers, and they realized only when it was too late
3> Kiewict, op. cit., p. 119.
'2 Froude. op. cit., p. 400.
'3 Kiewict, op. cit., p. 119.
^« "What an abundance of rain and grass was to New Zealand mutton, what a plenty
oi Cheap grazing land was to Australian wool, what the fertile prairie acres were to
en^mr^-'^rL'"'' ^^^^"^ °^^'^^ '^^°"^ ^^ ^ South African mining and industrial
enterprise (Kjewiet, op. cit., p. 96).
"J. A. Froude. ibid.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 799
and they had already lost their share in the riches of the gold hunt that the
new idol of Gold was not at all irreconcilable with their idol of Blood, that
the new mob was as unwilling to work and as unfit to establish a civilization
as they were themselves, and would therefore spare them the British officials'
annoying insistence on law and the Christian missionaries' irritating con-
cept of human equality.
The Boers feared and fled what actually never happened, namely, the in-
dustrialization of the country. They were right insofar as normal production
and civilization would indeed have destroyed automatically the way of life
of a race society. A normal market for labor and merchandise would have
liquidated the privileges of race. But gold and diamonds, which soon pro-
vided a living for half of South Africa's population, were not merchandise
in the same sense and were not produced in the same way as wool in Aus-
tralia, meat in New Zealand, or wheat in Canada. The irrational, non-func-
tional place of gold in the economy made it independent of rational produc-
tion methods which, of course, could never have tolerated the fantastic dis-
parities between black and white wages. Gold, an object for speculation and
essentially dependent in value upon political factors, became the "lifeblood"
of South Africa ^^ but it could not and did not become the basis of a new
economic order.
The Boers also feared the mere presence of the uitlanders because they
mistook them for British settlers. The uitlanders, however, came solely in
order to get rich quickly, and only those remained who did not quite succeed
or who, like the Jews, had no country to return to. Neither group cared very
much to establish a community after the model of European countries, as
British settlers had done in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. It was
Barnato who happily discovered that "the Transvaal Government is like
no other government in the world. It is indeed not a government at all, but
an unlimited company of some twenty thousand shareholders." ^^ Similarly,
it was more or less a series of misunderstandings which finally led to the
British-Boer war, which the Boers wrongly believed to be "the culmination
of the British Government's lengthy quest for a united South Africa," while
it was actually prompted mainly by investment interests.^** When the Boers
lost the war, they lost no more than they had already deliberately abandoned,
that is, their share in the riches; but they definitely won the consent of all
other European elements, including the British government, to the lawless-
36 "The goldmines are the life-blood of the Union . . . one half of the population
obtained their livelihood directly or indirectly from the goldmining industry, and . . .
one half of the finances of the government were derived directly or indirectly from
gold mining" (Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 155).
3" See Paul H. Emden, Jews of Britain, A Series of Biographies, London, 1944,
chapter "From Cairo to the Cape."
^« Kiewiet {op. cit., pp. 138-39) mentions, however, also another "set of circum-
stances": "Any attempt by the British Government to secure concessions or reforms
from the Transvaal Government made it inevitably the agent of the mining mag-
nates. . . . Great Britain gave its support, whether this was clearly realized in Downing
Street or not, to capital and mining investments."
2QQ IMPERIALISM
ncss of a race society." Today, all sections of the population, British or
Afrikander, organized workers or capitalists, agree on the race question,*"
and whereas the rise of Nazi Germany and its conscious attempt to trans-
form the German people into a race strengthened the political position of
the Boers considerably, Germany's defeat has not weakened it.
The Boers hated and feared the financiers more than the other foreigners.
They somehow understood that the financier was a key figure in the com-
bination of superfluous wealth and superfluous men, that it was his function
to turn (he essentially transitory gold hunt into a much broader and more
permanent business.*' The war with the British, moreover, soon demon-
strated an even more decisive aspect; it was quite obvious that it had been
prompted by foreign investors who demanded the government's protection
of their tremendous profits in faraway countries as a matter of course — as
though armies engaged in a war against foreign peoples were nothing but
native police forces involved in a fight with native criminals. It made little
difference to the Boers that the men who introduced this kind of violence
into the shadowy affairs of the gold and diamond production were no longer
the financiers, but those who somehow had risen from the mob itself and,
like Cecil Rhodes, believed less in profits than in expansion for expansion's
sake.*= The financiers, who were mostly Jews and only the representatives,
not the owners, of the superfluous capital, had neither the necessary political
influence nor enough economic power to introduce poHtical purposes and the
use of violence into speculation and gambling.
Without doubt the financiers, though finally not the decisive factor in
»» "Much of the hesitant and evasive conduct of British statesmanship in the gen-
eration before the Boer War could be attributed to the indecision of the British Gov-
ernment between its obligation to the natives and its obligation to the white com-
munities. . . . Now, however, the Boer War compelled a decision on native policy.
In the terms of the peace the British Government promised that no attempt would be
made to alter the political status of the natives before self-government had been
granted to the ex-Rcpublics. In that epochal decision the British Government receded
from its humanitarian position and enabled the Boer leaders to win a signal victory in
the peace negotiations which marked their military defeat. Great Britain abandoned
the effort to exercise a control over the vital relations between white and black.
Downing Street had surrendered to the frontiers" (Kiewiet, op. cit., pp. 143-44).
♦0 "There is ... an entirely erroneous notion that the Africaaners and the English-
speaking people of South Africa still disagree on how to treat the natives. on the
contrary, it is one of the few things on which they do agree" (James, op. cit., p. 47).
<• This was mostly due to the methods of Alfred Beit who had arrived in 1875 to
buy diamonds for a Hamburg firm. "Till then only speculators had been shareholders
in mining ventures. . . . Beit's method attracted the genuine investor also" (Emden,
op. cit.).
*' Very characteristic in this respect was Barnato's attitude when it came to the
amalgamation of his business with the Rhodes group. "For Barnato the amalgamation
was nothmg but a financial transaction in which he wanted to make money. ... He
therefore desired that the company should have nothing to do with politics. Rhodes
however was not merely a business man. . . ." This shows how very wrong Barnato
was when he thought that "if I had received the education of Cecil Rhodes there would
not have been a Cecil Rhodes" {ibid.).
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 201
imperialism, were remarkably representative of it in its initial period/^ They
had taken advantage of the overproduction of capital and its accompanying
complete reversal of economic and moral values. Instead of mere trade in
goods and mere profit from production, trade in capital itself emerged on
an unprecedented scale. This alone would have given them a prominent
position; in addition profits from investments in foreign countries soon in-
creased at a much more rapid rate than trade profits, so that traders and
merchants lost their primacy to the financier." The main economic char-
acteristic of the financier is that he earns his profits not from production and
exploitation or exchange of merchandise or normal banking, but solely
through commissions. This is important in our context because it gives him
that touch of unreality, of phantom-hke existence and essential futility
even in a normal economy, that are typical of so many South African
events. The financiers certainly did not exploit anybody and they had
least control over the course of their business ventures, whether these
turned out to be common swindles or sound enterprises belatedly confirmed.
It is also significant that it was precisely the mob element among the
Jewish people who turned into financiers. It is true that the discovery of gold
mines in South Africa had coincided with the first modem pogroms in
Russia, so that a trickle of Jewish emigrants went to South Africa. There,
however, they would hardly have played a role in the international crowd
of desperadoes and fortune hunters if a few Jewish financiers had not been
there ahead of them and taken an immediate interest in the newcomers who
clearly could represent them in the population.
The Jewish financiers came from practically every country on the con-
tinent where they had been, in terms of class, as superfluous as the other
South African immigrants. They were quite different from the few estab-
lished families of Jewish notables whose influence had steadily decreased
after 1820, and into whose ranks they could therefore no longer be assimi-
lated. They belonged in that new caste of Jewish financiers which, from the
seventies and eighties on, we find in all European capitals, where they had
come, mostly after having left their countries of origin, in order to try their
luck in the international stock-market gamble. This they did everywhere to
the great dismay of the older Jewish families, who were too weak to stop
the unscrupulousness of the newcomers and therefore only too glad if the
latter decided to transfer the field of their activities overseas. In other words,
the Jewish financiers had become as superfluous in legitimate Jewish bank-
ing as the wealth they represented had become superfluous in legitimate
*s Compare chapter v, note 34.
** The increase in profits from foreign investment and a relative decrease of foreign
trade profits characterizes the economic side of imperialism. In 1899, it was estimated
that Great Britain's whole foreign and colonial trade had brought her an income of
only 18 million pounds, while in the same year profits from foreign investment
amounted to 90 or 100 million pounds. See J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, London, 1938,
pp. 53 ff. It is obvious that investment demanded a much more conscious long-range
policy of exploitation than mere trade.
■)Q-y IMPERIALISM
industrial enterprise and the fortune hunters in the world of legitimate labor.
In South Africa itself, where the merchant was about to lose his status within
the countr>'s economy to the financier, the new arrivals, the Barnatos,
Beits. Sammy Marks, removed the older Jewish settlers from first position
much more easily than in Europe."'' In South Africa, though hardly any-
where else, they were the third factor in the initial alliance between capi-
tal and mob; to a large extent, they set the alliance into motion, handled
the influx of capital and its investment in the gold mines and diamond
fields, and soon became more conspicuous than anybody else.
The fact of their Jewish origin added an undefinable symbolic flavor to
the role of the financiers — a flavor of essential homelessness and rootlessness
— and thus served to introduce an element of mystery, as well as to symbol-
ize the whole affair. To this must be added their actual international connec-
tions, which naturally stimulated the general popular delusions concerning
Jewish political power all over the world. It is quite comprehensible that
all the fantastic notions of a secret international Jewish power — notions
which originally had been the result of the closeness of Jewish banking
capital to the state's sphere of business — became even more virulent here
than on the European continent. Here, for the first time Jews were driven
into the midst of a race society and almost automatically singled out by the
Boers from all other "white" people for special hatred, not only as the
representatives of the whole enterprise, but as a different "race," the embodi-
ment of a devilish principle introduced into the normal world of "blacks"
and "whites." This hatred was all the more violent as it was partly caused
by the suspicion that the Jews with their own older and more authentic
claim would be harder than anyone else to convince of the Boers' claim
to chosenness. While Christianity simply denied the principle as such,
Judaism seemed a direct challenge and rival. Long before the Nazis con-
sciously built up an antisemitic movement in South Africa, the race issue
had invaded the conflict between the uitlander and the Boers in the form of
antisemitism,"" which is all the more noteworthy since the importance of
Jews in the South African gold and diamond economy did not survive the
turn of the century.
As soon as the gold and diamond industries reached the stage of imperialist
development where absentee shareholders demand their governments' polit-
ical protection, it turned out that the Jews could not hold their important
economic position. They had no home government to turn to and their posi-
tion in South African society was so insecure that much more was at stake
for them than a mere decrease in influence. They could preserve economic
*'- Early Jewish settlers in South Africa in the eighteenth and the first part of the
nineteenth century were adventurers; traders and merchants followed them after the
middle of the century, among whom the most prominent turned to industries such as
fishing, sealing, and whaling (De Pass Brothers) and ostrich breeding (the Mosenthal
family). Later, they were almost forced into the Kimberley diamond industries where,
however, they never achieved such pre-eminence as Barnato and Beit.
"Ernst Schultze, "Die Judenfrage in Sued-Afrika." in Der Weltkampf, October,
1938, Vol. XV, No. 178.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 203
security and permanent settlement in South Africa, which they needed more
than any other group of uitlanders, only if they achieved some status in
society — which in this case meant admission to exclusive British clubs.
They were forced to trade their influence against the position of a gentle-
man, as Cecil Rhodes very bluntly put it when he bought his way into the
Barnato Diamond Trust, after having amalgamated his De Beers Company
with Alfred Beit's Company.*^ But these Jews had more to offer than just
economic power; it was thanks to them that Cecil Rhodes, as much a new-
comer and adventurer as they, was finally accepted by England's respectable
banking business with which the Jewish financiers after all had better con-
nections than anybody else.*^ "Not one of the English banks would have
lent a single shilling on the security of gold shares. It was the unbounded
confidence of these diamond men from Kimberley that operated like a mag-
net upon their co-rehgionists at home." *^
The gold rush became a full-fledged imperialist enterprise only after Cecil
Rhodes had dispossessed the Jews, taken investment policies from Eng-
land's into his own hands, and had become the central figure on the Cape.
Seventy-five per cent of the dividends paid to shareholders went abroad,
and a large majority of them to Great Britain. Rhodes succeeded in inter-
esting the British government in his business affairs, persuaded them that
expansion and export of the instruments of violence was necessary to protect
investments, and that such a policy was a holy duty of every national govern-
ment. on the other hand, he introduced on the Cape itself that typically
imperialist economic policy of neglecting all industrial enterprises which were
not owned by absentee shareholders, so that finally not only the gold mining
companies but the government itself discouraged the exploitation of abundant
base metal deposits and the production of consumers' goods. ^^ With the
initiation of this policy, Rhodes introduced the most potent factor in the
eventual appeasement of the Boers; the neglect of all authentic industrial
enterprise was the most solid guarantee for the avoidance of normal capitaUst
development and thus against a normal end of race society.
It took the Boers several decades to understand that imperialism was
*^ Barnato sold his shares to Rhodes in order to be introduced to the Kimberley
Club. "This is no mere money transaction," Rhodes is reported to have told Barnato,
"I propose to make a gentleman of you." Barnato enjoyed his life as a gentleman for
eight years and then committed suicide. See Millin, op. cit., pp. 14, 85.
*8 "The path from one Jew [in this case, Alfred Beit from Hamburg] to another is
an easy one. Rhodes went to England to see Lord Rothschild and Lord Rothschild ap-
proved of him" {ibid.).
''^ Emden, op. cit.
60 "South Africa concentrated almost all its peacetime industrial energy on the pro-
duction of gold. The average investor put his money into gold because it offered the
quickest and biggest returns. But South Africa also has tremendous deposits of iron
ore, copper, asbestos, manganese, tin, lead, platinum, chrome, mica and graphite.
These, along with the coal mines and the handful of factories producing consumer
goods, were known as 'secondary' industries. The investing public's interest in them was
limited. And development of these secondary industries was discouraged by the gold-
mining companies and to a large extent by the government" (James, op. cit., p. 333).
20^ IMPERIALISM
nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Aus-
tralia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country
at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one
specific field. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called
laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as
profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the aboli-
tion of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first
example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the
dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.
In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed
masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies
came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives
were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently
at a terrific price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight
when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid whites
wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; ^^ expenses for municipal gov-
ernment became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced
with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from
mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase
of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any
more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that
the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough."
At first glance, it is surprising that a violent antisemitism survived the
disappearance of the Jewish financiers as well as the successful indoctrination
with racism of all parts of the European population. The Jews were certainly
no excepfion to this rule; they adjusted to racism as well as everybody else
and their behavior toward black people was beyond reproach." Yet they
had, without being aware of it and under pressure of special circumstances,
broken with one of the most powerful traditions of the country.
The first sign of "anormal" behavior came immediately after the Jewish
financiers had lost their position in the gold and diamond industries. They
did not leave the country but settled down permanently ** into a unique posi-
*' James, op. cit., pp. 111-112. "The Government reckoned that this was a good ex-
ample for private employers to follow . . . and public opinion soon forced changes
in the hiring policies of many employers."
*2 James, op. cit., p. 108.
»' Here again, a definite difference between the earlier settlers and the financiers
can be recognized until the end of the nineteenth century. Saul Salomon, for instance,
a Negrophilist member of the Cape Parliament, was a descendant of a family which
had settled in South Africa in the early nineteenth century. Emden, op. cit.
"Between 1924 and 1930, 12,319 Jews immigrated to South Africa while only
461 left the country. These figures are very striking if one considers that the total
immigration for the same period after deduction of emigrants amounted to 14,241
persons. (See SchulUe, op. cit.) If we compare these figures with the immigration
table of note 6, it follows that Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immi-
gration to South Africa in the twenties, and that they, in sharp contrast to all other
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 205
tion for a white group: they neither belonged to the "lifeblood" of Africa
nor to the "poor white trash." Instead they started almost immediately to
build up those industries and professions which according to South African
opinion are "secondary" because they are not connected with gold." Jews
became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members
of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no
matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of
the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern
by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and pro-
ductivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a
bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all
poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.®"
This change in the economic function, the transformation of South African
Jewry from representing the most shadowy characters in the shadow world
of gold and race into the only productive part of the population, came like
an oddly belated confirmation of the original fears of the Boers. They had
hated the Jews not so much as the middlemen of superfluous wealth or the
representatives of the world of gold; they had feared and despised them as
the very image of the uitlanders who would try to change the country into
a normal producing part of Western civilization, whose profit motives, at
least, would mortally endanger the phantom world of race. And when the
Jews were finally cut off from the golden lifeblood of the uitlanders and
could not leave the country as all other foreigners would have done in
similar circumstances, developing "secondary" industries instead, the Boers
turned out to be right. The Jews, entirely by themselves and without being
the image of anything or anybody, had become a real menace to race society.
As matters stand today, the Jews have against them the concerted hostility
of all those who believe in race or gold — and that is practically the whole
European population in South Africa. Yet they cannot and will not make
common cause with the only other group which slowly and gradually is
being won away from race society: the black workers who are becoming
more and more aware of their humanity under the impact of regular labor
and urban life. Although they, in contrast to the "whites," do have a genuine
race origin, they have made no fetish of race, and the abolition of race society
means only the promise of their liberation.
In contrast to the Nazis, to whom racism and antisemitism were major
political weapons for the destruction of civilization and the setting up of a
new body politic, racism and antisemitism are a matter of course and a
categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration
is less than 2 per cent.
5* "Rabid Afrikaaner nationalist leaders have deplored the fact that there are
102,000 Jews in the Union; most of them are white-collar workers, industrial em-
ployers, shopkeepers, or members of the professions. The Jews did much- to build up
the secondary industries of South Africa — i.e., industries other than gold and diamond
mining — concentrating particularly on the manufacture of clothes and furniture"
(James, op. cit., p. 46).
" Ibid., pp. 67-68.
20(i IMPERIALISM
natural consequence of the status quo in South Africa. They did not need
Nazism in order to be born and they influenced Nazism only in an indirect
way.
There were, however, real and immediate boomerang effects of South
Africa's race society on the behavior of European peoples: since cheap
Indian and Chinese labor had been madly imported to South Africa when-
ever her interior supply was temporarily halted,"*^ a change of attitude to-
ward colored people was felt immediately in Asia where, for the first time,
people were treated in almost the same way as those African savages who
had frightened Europeans literally out of their wits. The difference was only
that there could be no excuse and no humanly comprehensible reason for
treating Indians and Chinese as though they were not human beings. In a
certain sense, it is only here that the real crime began, because here every-
one ought to have known what he was doing. It is true that the race notion
was somewhat modified in Asia; "higher and lower breeds," as the "white
man" would say when he started to shoulder his burden, still indicate a scale
and the possibility of gradual development, and the idea somehow escapes
the concept of two entirely different species of animal life. on the other hand,
since the race principle supplanted the older notion of alien and strange peo-
ples in Asia, it was a much more consciously applied weapon for domination
and exploitation than in Africa.
Less immediately significant but of greater importance for totalitarian
governments was the other experience in Africa's race society, that profit
motives are not holy and can be overruled, that societies can function ac-
cording to principles other than economic, and that such circumstances may
favor those who under conditions of rationalized production and the capital-
ist system would belong to the underprivileged. South Africa's race society
taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused
premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could
create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a
revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and
that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such
tactics.
The full impact of the African experience was first realized by leaders
of the mob, like Carl Peters, who decided that they too had to belong to a
master race. African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for
the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had
seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how,
simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one's own
people into the position of the master race. Here they were cured of the
" More than 100,000 Indian coolies were imported to the sugar plantations of Natal
in the nineteenth century. These were followed by Chinese laborers in the mines who
numbered about 55,000 in 1907. In 1910, the British government ordered the repatria-
tion of all Chinese mine laborers, and in 1913 it prohibited any further immigration
from India or any other part of Asia. In 1931, 142,000 Asiatics were still in the Union
and treated like African natives. (See also Scbultze, op. cit )
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 207
illusion that the historical process is necessarily "progressive," for if it was
the course of older colonization to trek to something, the "Dutchman trekked
away from everything," ^* and if "economic history once taught that man
had developed by gradual steps from a life of hunting to pastoral pursuits
and finally to a settled and agricultural life," the story of the Boers clearly
demonstrated that one could also come "from a land that had taken the lead
in a thrifty and intensive cultivation . . . [and] gradually become a herds-
man and a hunter." ^^ These leaders understood very well that precisely
because the Boers had sunk back to the level of savage tribes they remained
their undisputed masters. They were perfectly willing to pay the price, to
recede to the level of a race organization, if by so doing they could buy
lordship over other "races." And they knew from their experiences with
people gathered from the four corners of the earth in South Africa that the
whole mob of the Western civilized world would be with them.^°
III: The Imperialist Character
OF THE TWO main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered
in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt, and India; the former
was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity
European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a con-
sequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign
peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time
in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into
an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureauc-
racy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow-
man and no people for another people.
The exaggerated sense of responsibility in the British administrators of
India who succeeded Burke's "breakers of law" had its material basis in the
fact that the British Empire had actually been acquired in a "fit of absent-
mindedness." Those, therefore, who were confronted with the accomplished
fact and the job of keeping what had become theirs through an accident, had
to find an interpretation that could change the accident into a kind of willed
act. Such historical changes of fact have been carried through by legends
^* Barnes, op. cit., p. 13.
^8 Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 13.
CO "When economists declared that higher wages were a form of bounty, and that
protected labour was uneconomical, the answer was given that the sacrifice was well
made if the unfortunate elements in the white population ultimately found an assured
footing in modern life." "But it has not been in South Africa alone that the voice of
the conventional economist has gone unheeded since the end of the Great War. . . .
In a generation which saw England abandon free trade, America leave the gold standard,
the Third Reich embrace autarchy, . . . South Africa's insistence that its economic
life must be organized to secure the dominant position of the white race is not seriously
out of place" (Kiewiet, op. cit., pp. 224 and 245).
2Qg IMPERIALISM
since ancient Umcs. and legends dreamed up by the British intelligentsia
have played a decisive role in the formation of the bureaucrat and the secret
agent of the British services.
Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history.
Man, who has not been granted the gift of undoing, who is always an un-
consiilted heir of other men's deeds, and who is always burdened with a
responsibility that appears to be the consequence of an unending chain of
events rather than conscious acts, demands an explanation and interpreta-
tion of the past in which the mysterious key to his future destiny seems to
be concealed. Legends were the spiritual foundations of every ancient city,
empire, people, promising safe guidance through the limitless spaces of the
future. Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true
significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond
memories.
Legendary explanations of history always served as belated corrections
of facts and real events, which were needed precisely because history itself
would hold man responsible for deeds he had not done and for consequences
he had never foreseen. The truth of the ancient legends — what gives them
their fascinating actuality many centuries after the cities and empires and
peoples they served have crumbled to dust — was nothing but the form in
which past events were made to fit the human condition in general and
political aspirations in particular. only in the frankly invented tale about
events did man consent to assume his responsibility for them, and to con-
sider past events his past. Legends made him master of what he had not
done, and capable of dealing with what he could not undo. In this sense,
legends are not only among the first memories of mankind, but actually the
true beginning of human history.
The flourishing of historical and political legends came to a rather abrupt
end with the birth of Christianity. Its interpretation of history, from the days
of Adam to the Last Judgment, as one single road to redemption and salva-
tion, olTered the most powerful and all-inclusive legendary explanation of
human destiny. only after the spiritual unity of Christian peoples gave way
to the plurality of nations, when the road to salvation became an uncertain
article of individual faith rather than a universal theory applicable to all
happenings, did new kinds of historical explanations emerge. The nineteenth
century has offered us the curious spectacle of an almost simultaneous birth
of the most varying and contradictory ideologies, each of which claimed to
know the hidden truth about otherwise incomprehensible facts. Legends,
however, arc not ideologies; they do not aim at universal explanation but
are always concerned with concrete facts. It seems rather significant that
the growth of national bodies was nowhere accompanied by a foundation
legend, and that a first unique attempt in modem times was made precisely
when the decline of the national body had become obvious and imperialism
seemed to take the place of old-fashioned nationalism.
The author of the imperialist legend is Rudyard Kipling, its topic is the
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 209
British Empire, its result the imperialist character (imperialism was the
only school of character in modern politics). And while the legend of the
British Empire has little to do with the realities of British imperialism, it
forced or deluded into its services the best sons of England. For legends at-
tract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the
whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very
worst. No doubt, no political structure could have been more evocative of
legendary tales and justifications than the British Empire, than the British
people's drifting from the conscious founding of colonies into ruling and
dominating foreign peoples all over the world.
The foundation legend, as Kipling tells it, starts from the fundamental
reality of the people of the British Isles.*'' Surrounded by the sea, they need
and win the help of the three elements of Water, Wind, and Sun through the
invention of the Ship. The ship made the always dangerous alliance with the
elements possible and made the Englishman master of the world. "You'll
win the world," says Kipling, "without anyone caring how you did it: you'll
keep the world without anyone knowing how you did it: and you'll carry the
world on your backs without anyone seeing how you did it. But neither you
nor your sons will get anything out of that little job except Four Gifts — one
for the Sea, one for the Wind, one for the Sun and one for the Ship that
carries you. . . . For, winning the world, and keeping the world, and carry-
ing the world on their backs — on land, or on sea, or in the air — your sons
will always have the Four Gifts. Long-headed and slow-spoken and heavy
— damned heavy — in the hand, will they be; and always a little bit to wind-
ward of every enemy — that they may be a safeguard to all who pass on the
seas on their lawful occasions."
What brings the little tale of the "First Sailor" so close to ancient founda-
tion legends is that it presents the British as the only politically mature
people, caring for law and burdened with the welfare of the world, in the
midst of barbarian tribes who neither care nor know what keeps the world
together. Unfortunately this presentation lacked the innate truth of ancient
legends; the world cared and knew and saw how they did it and no such
tale could ever have convinced the world that they did not "get anything out
of that little job." Yet there was a certain reality in England herself which
corresponded to Kipling's legend and made it at all possible, and that was
the existence of such virtues as chivalry, nobility, bravery, even though they
were utterly out of place in a political reality ruled by Cecil Rhodes or Lord
Curzon.
The fact that the "white man's burden" is either hypocrisy or racism has
not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in
earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism.
As real in England as the tradition of hypocrisy is another less obvious one
which one is tempted to call a tradition of dragon-slayers who went enthusi-
astically into far and curious lands to strange and naive peoples to slay the
"' Rudyard Kipling, "The First Sailor," in Humorous Tales, 1891.
^.Q IMPERIALISM
numerous dragons that had plagued them for centuries. There is more than
a grain of truth in Kipling's other tale, "The Tomb of His Ancestor," "^
in which the Chinn family "serve India generation after generation, as
dolphins follow in line across the open sea." They shoot the deer that steals
the poi>r man's crop, teach him the mysteries of better agricultural methods,
free him from some of his more harmful superstitions and kill lions and
tigers in grand style. Their only reward is indeed a "tomb of ancestors" and
a family legend, believed by the whole Indian tribe, according to which "the
revered ancestor ... has a tiger of his own — a saddle tiger that he rides
round the country whenever he feels inclined." Unfortunately, this riding
around the countryside is "a sure sign of war or pestilence or — or some-
Ihiniz." and in this particular case it is a sign of vaccination. So that Chinn
the Voungcst, a not very important underling in the hierarchy of the Army
Services, but all-important as far as the Indian tribe is concerned, has to
shoot the beast of his ancestor so that people can be vaccinated without fear
of "war or pestilence or something."
As modern life goes, the Chinns indeed "are luckier than most folks."
Their chance is that they were born into a career that gently and naturally
leads them to the realization of the best dreams of youth. When other boys
have to forget "noble dreams," they happen to be just old enough to trans-
late them into action. And when after thirty years of service they retire,
their steamer will pass "the outward bound troopship, carrying his son east-
ward to the family duty," so that the power of old Mr. Chinn's existence as
a government-appointed and army-paid dragon-slayer can be imparted to the
next generation. No doubt, the British government pays them for their serv-
ices, but it is not at all clear in whose service they eventually land. There
is a strong possibility that they really serve this particular Indian tribe, gen-
eration after generation, and it is consoling all around that at least the tribe
itself is convinced of this. The fact that the higher services know hardly
anything of little Lieutenant Chinn's strange duties and adventures, that
they are hardly aware of his being a successful reincarnation of his grand-
father, gives his dreamlike double existence an undisturbed basis in reality. He
is simply at home in two worlds, separated by water- and gossip-tight walls.
Born in "the heart of the scrubby tigerish country" and educated among his
own people in peaceful, well-balanced, ill-informed England, he is ready to
live permanently with two peoples and is rooted in and well acquainted with
the tradition, language, superstition, and prejudices of both. At a moment's
notice he can change from the obedient underling of one of His Majesty's
soldiers into an exciting and noble figure in the natives' world, a well-beloved
protector of the weak, the dragon-slayer of old tales.
The point is that these queer quixotic protectors of the weak who played
their role behind the scenes of oflicial British rule were not so much the
product of a primitive people's naive imagination as of dreams which con-
tained the best of European and Christian traditions, even when they had
" In The Day's Work. 1898.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 211
already deteriorated into the futility of boyhood ideals. It was neither His
Majesty's soldier nor the British higher official who could teach the natives
something of the greatness of the Western world. only those who had never
been able to outgrow their boyhood ideals and therefore had enlisted in the
colonial services were fit for the task. Imperialism to them was nothing but
an accidental opportunity to escape a society in which a man had to forget
his youth if he wanted to grow up. English society was only too glad to see
them depart to faraway countries, a circumstance which permitted the tolera-
tion and even the furtherance of boyhood ideals in the public school system;
the colonial services took them away from England and prevented, so to
speak, their converting the ideals of their boyhood into the mature ideas of
men. Strange and curious lands attracted the best of England's youth since
the end of the nineteenth century, deprived her society of the most honest
and the most dangerous elements, and guaranteed, in addition to this bliss,
a certain conservation, or perhaps petrification, of boyhood noblesse which
preserved and infantilized Western moral standards.
Lord Cromer, secretary to the Viceroy and financial member in the pre-
imperialist government of India, still belonged in the category of British
dragon-slayers. Led solely by "the sense of sacrifice" for backward popula-
tions and "the sense of duty" *^^ to the glory of Great Britain that "has given
birth to a class of officials who have both the desire and the capacity to
govern,"*''' he declined in 1894 the post of Viceroy and refused ten years
later the position of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Instead of such
honors, which would have satisfied a lesser man, he became the little-publi-
cized and all-powerful British Consul General in Egypt from 1883 to 1907.
There he became the first imperialist administrator, certainly "second to
none among those who by their services have glorified the British race"; "'^
perhaps the last to die in undisturbed pride: "Let these suffice for Britain's
meed — / No nobler price was ever won, / The blessings of a people freed /
The consciousness of duty done." *"'
Cromer went to Egypt because he realized that "the Englishman straining
far over to hold his loved India [has to] plant a firm foot on the banks of
the Nile." *'^ Egypt was to him only a means to an end, a necessary expansion
for the sake of security for India. At almost the same moment it happened
that another Englishman set foot on the African continent, though at its op-
posite end and for opposite reasons: Cecil Rhodes went to South Africa
and saved the Cape colony after it had lost all importance for the English-
man's "loved India." Rhodes's ideas on expansion were far more advanced
"3 Lawrence J. Zetland, Lord Cromer, 1932, p. 16.
«' Lord Cromer, "The Government of Subject Races" in Edinburgh Review, Janu-
ary, 1908.
^^ Lord Curzon at the unveiling of the memorial tablet for Cromer. See Zetland,
op. cit., p. 362.
66 Quoted from a long poem by Cromer. See Zetland, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
«^ From a letter Lord Cromer wrote in 1882. Ibid., p. 87.
212 IMPERIALISM
than those of his more respectable colleague in the north; to him expansion did
not need to be justified by such sensible motives as the holding of what one
already possessed. "Expansion was everything" and India, South Africa, and
Eg>pt were equally important or unimportant as stepping-stones in an ex-
pansion limited only by the size of the earth. There certainly was an abyss
between the vulgar megalomaniac and the educated man of sacrifice and
duty; yet they arrived at roughly identical results and were equally respon-
sible for the "Great Game" of secrecy, which was no less insane and no less
detrimental to politics than the phantom world of race.
The outstanding similarity between Rhodes's rule in South Africa and
Cromer's domination of Egypt was that both regarded the countries not as
desirable ends in themselves but merely as means for some supposedly higher
purpose. They were similar therefore in their indifference and aloofness, in
their genuine lack of interest in their subjects, an attitude which differed as
much from the cruelty and arbitrariness of native despots in Asia as from the
exploiting carelessness of conquerors, or the insane and anarchic oppression
of one race tribe through another. As soon as Cromer started to rule Egypt
for the sake of India, he lost his role of protector of "backward peoples"
and could no longer sincerely believe that "the self-interest of the subject-
races is the principal basis of the whole Imperial fabric." "**
Aloofness became the new attitude of all members of the British services;
it was a more dangerous form of governing than despotism and arbitrariness
because it did not even tolerate that last link between the despot and his sub-
jects, which is formed by bribery and gifts. The very integrity of the British
administration made despotic government more inhuman and inaccessible
to its subjects than Asiatic rulers or reckless conquerors had ever been.**^
Integrity and aloofness were symbols for an absolute division of interests
to the point where they are not even permitted to conflict. In comparison,
exploitation, oppression, or corruption look hke safeguards of human dig-
nity, because exploiter and exploited, oppressor and oppressed, corruptor
and corrupted still live in the same world, still share the same goals, fight
each odier for the possession of the same things; and it is this tertium com-
parationis which aloofness destroyed. Worst of all was the fact that the aloof
administrator was hardly aware that he had invented a new form of govern-
ment but actually believed that his attitude was conditioned by "the forcible
contact with a people living on a lower plane." So, instead of believing in
his individual superiority with some degree of essentially harmless vanity,
he felt that he belonged to "a nation which had reached a comparatively
high plane of civilization" "^ and therefore held his position by right of birth,
regardless of personal achievements.
Lord Cromer's career is fascinating because it embodies the very turning
«' Lord Cromer, op. cil.
•» Bribery "was perhaps the most human institution among the barbed-wire entangle-
ments of the Russian order." Moissaye J. Olgin, The Soul of the Russian Revolution.
New York, 1917.
'« Zetland, op. cit., p. 89.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 213
point from the older colonial to imperialist services. His first reaction to his
duties in Egypt was a marked uneasiness and concern about a state of af-
fairs which was not "annexation" but a "hybrid form of government to which
no name can be given and for which there is no precedent." ^^ In 1885, after
two years of service, he still harbored serious doubts about a system in which
he was the nominal British Consul General and the actual ruler of Egypt
and wrote that a "highly delicate mechanism [whose] efficient working de-
pends very greatly on the judgment and ability of a few individuals . . . can
... be justified [only] if we are able to keep before our eyes the possibihty
of evacuation. ... If that possibility becomes so remote as to be of no
practical account ... it would be better for us ... to arrange . . . with
the other Powers that we should take over the government of the country,
guarantee its debt, etc." ^^ No doubt Cromer was right, and either, occupa-
tion or evacuation, would have normalized matters. But that "hybrid form
of government" without precedent was to become characteristic of all im-
perialist enterprise, with the result that a few decades afterwards everybody
had lost Cromer's early sound judgment about possible and impossible forms
of government, just as there was lost Lord Selboume's early insight that a
race society as a way of life was unprecedented. Nothing could better char-
acterize the initial stage of imperialism than the combination of these two
judgments on conditions in Africa: a way of life without precedent in the
south, a government without precedent in the north.
In the following years, Cromer reconciled himself to the "hybrid form
of government"; in his letters he began to justify it and to expound the need
for the government without name and precedent. At the end of his life, he
laid down (in his essay on "The Government of Subject Races") the main
lines of what one may well call a philosophy of the bureaucrat.
Cromer started by recognizing that "personal influence" without a legal
or written political treaty could be enough for "sufficiently effective super-
vision over public affairs" ^^ in foreign countries. This kind of informal in-
fluence was preferable to a well-defined policy because it could be altered
at a moment's notice and did not necessarily involve the home government
in case of difficulties. It required a highly trained, highly reliable staff whose
loyalty and patriotism were not connected with personal ambition or vanity
and who would even be required to renounce the human aspiration of having
their names connected with their achievements. Their greatest passion would
have to be for secrecy ("the less British officials are talked about the
better"),^* for a role behind the scenes; their greatest contempt would be
directed at publicity and people who love it.
Cromer himself possessed all these qualities to a very high degree; his
wrath was never more strongly aroused than when he was "brought out of
'^i From a letter Lord Cromer wrote in 1884. Ibid., p. 117.
'^2 In a letter to Lord Granville, a member of the Liberal Party, in 1885. Ibid., p. 219.
"From a letter to Lord Rosebery in 1886. Ibid., p. 134.
^* Ibid., p. 352.
w^ IMPERIALISM
Ihisl hiding place." when "the reality which before was only known to a
few behind the scenes [became] patent to all the world." " His pride was
indeed U> "remain more or less hidden [andl to pull the strmgs." ^« In ex-
change, and in order to make his work possible at all, the bureaucrat has to
feel safe from control— the praise as well as the blame, that is— of all public
institutions, either Parliament, the "English Departments," or the press.
i;ver>' growth of democracy or even the simple functioning of existing
demiKratic institutions can only be a danger, for it is impossible to govern
"a people bv a people— the people of India by the people of England." "
Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an "experienced minority"
which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from "the
inexperienced majority." Each people is fundamentally an inexperienced
majority and can therefore not be trusted with such a highly specialized
matter as politics and public affairs. Bureaucrats, moreover, are not sup-
posed to have general ideas about political matters at all; their patriotism
should never lead them so far astray that they believe in the inherent good-
ness of political principles in their own country; that would only result in
their cheap "imitative" application "to the government of backward popula-
tions." which, according to Cromer, was the principal defect of the French
system.'"
Nobody will ever pretend that Cecil Rhodes suffered from a lack of
vanity. According to Jameson, he expected to be remembered for at least
four thousand years. Yet, despite all his appetite for self-glorification, he hit
upon the same idea of rule through secrecy as the overmodest Lord Cromer.
Extremely fond of drawing up wills, Rhodes insisted in all of them (over
the course of two decades of his public life) that his money should be used
to found "a secret society ... to carry out his scheme," which was to be
"organized like Loyola's, supported by the accumulated wealth of those
whose aspiration is a desire to do something," so that eventually there would
be "between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all
over the world, each one of whom would have had impressed upon his mind
in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder, each
one of whom, moreover, would have been especially — mathematically —
selected towards the Founder's purpose." ''" More farsighted than Cromer,
"From a letter to Lord Rosebery in 1893. Ibid., pp. 204-205.
" From a letter to Lord Rosebery in 1893. Ibid., p. 192.
^T From a speech by Cromer in Parliament after 1904. Ibid., p. 3n.
^» During the negotiations and considerations of the administrative pattern for the
annexation of the Sudan. Cromer insisted on keeping the whole matter outside the
sphere of French influence; he did this not because he wanted to secure a monopoly in
Africa for England but much rather because he had "the utmost want of confidence in
their administrative system as applied to subject races" (from a letter to Salisbury in
1899, Ibid., p. 248).
'" Rhodes drew up six wills (the first was already composed in 1877), all of which
mention the "secret society." For extensive quotes, see Basil Williams. Cecil Rhodes,
London. 1921. and Millin. op. cit., pp. 128 and 331. The citations are upon the authority
of W. T. Stead.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 215
Rhodes opened the society at once to all members of the "Nordic race" *" so
that the aim was not so much the growth and glory of Great Britain — her
occupation of the "entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the valley of
the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South Amer-
ica, the islands of the Pacific, . . . the whole of the Malay Archipelago,
the seaboards of China and Japan [and] the ultimate recovery of the United
States" *^ — as the expansion of the "Nordic race" which, organized in a
secret society, would establish a bureaucratic government over all peoples
of the earth.
What overcame Rhodes's monstrous innate vanity and made him dis-
cover the charms of secrecy was the same thing that overcame Cromer's
innate sense of duty: the discovery of an expansion which was not driven
by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless
process in which every country would serve only as stepping-stone for further
expansion. In view of such a concept, the desire for glory can no longer
be satisfied by the glorious triumph over a specific people for the sake of
one's own people, nor can the sense of duty be fulfilled through the con-
sciousness of specific services and the fulfillment of specific tasks. No matter
what individual qualities or defects a man may have, once he has entered
the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were,
cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself
with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the
whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and
eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic
trend, his highest possible achievement. Then, as Rhodes was insane enough
to say, he could indeed "do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It
was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a god — nothing less." ^^
But Lord Cromer sanely pointed out the same phenomenon of men degrad-
ing themselves voluntarily into mere instruments or mere functions when he
called the bureaucrats "instruments of incomparable value in the execution
of a policy of Imperialism." ®^
It is obvious that these secret and anonymous agents of the force of ex-
pansion felt no obligation to man-made laws. The only "law" they obeyed
was the "law" of expansion, and the only proof of their "lawfulness" was
success. They had to be perfectly willing to disappear into complete oblivion
once failure had been proved, if for any reason they were no longer "in-
struments of incomparable value." As long as they were successful, the
feeling of embodying forces greater than themselves made it relatively easy
to resign and even to despise applause and glorification. They were monsters
of conceit in their success and monsters of modesty in their failure.
80 It is well known that Rhodes's "secret society" ended as the very respectable
Rhodes Scholarship Association to which even today not only Englishmen but mem-
bers of all "Nordic races," such as Germans, Scandinavians, and Americans, are
admitted.
81 Basil Williams, op. cit., p. 51.
82 Millin, op. cit., p. 92. "^ Cromer, op. cit.
2/^ IMPERIALISM
At the basis of bureaucracy as a form of government, and of its inherent
replacement of law with temporary and changing decrees, lies this supersti-
tion of a possible and magic identification of man with the forces of history.
1 he ideal of such a political body will always be the man behind the scenes
who pulls the strings of history. Cromer hnally shunned every "written in-
strument, or, indeed, anything which is tangible" "' in his relationships with
Egypt — even a proclamation of annexation — in order to be free to obey
only the law of expansion, without obligation to a man-made treaty. Thus
docs the bureaucrat shun every general law, handling each situation sepa-
rately by decree, because a law's inherent stability threatens to establish a
permanent community in which nobody could possibly be a god because all
would have to obey a law.
The two key figures in this system, whose very essence is aimless process,
arc the bureaucrat on one side and the secret agent on the other. Both types,
as long as they served only British imperialism, never quite denied that
they were descended from dragon-slayers and protectors of the weak and
therefore never drove bureaucratic regimes to their inherent extremes. A
British bureaucrat almost two decades after Cromer's death knew "adminis-
trative massacres" could keep India within the British Empire, but he knew
also how Utopian it would be to try to get the support of the hated "Eng-
lish Departments" for an otherwise quite realistic plan.*^ Lord Curzon,
Viceroy of India, showed nothing of Cromer's noblesse and was quite
characteristic of a society that increasingly inclined to accept the mob's
race standards if they were offered in the form of fashionable snobbery.*^
But snobbery is incompatible with fanaticism and therefore never really
efficient.
The same is true of the members of the British Secret Service. They too
are of illustrious origin — what the dragon-slayer was to the bureaucrat, the
adventurer is to the secret agent — and they too can rightly lay claim to a
•« From a letter of Lord Cromer to Lord Rosebery in 1886. Zetland, op. cit., p. 134.
»=> "The Indian system of government by reports was . . . suspect [in England].
There was no trial by jury in India and the judges were all paid servants of the Crown,
many of them removable at pleasure. . . . Some of the men of formal law felt rather
uneasy as to the success of the Indian experiment. 'If,' they said, 'despotism and
bureaucracy work so well in India, may not that be perhaps at some time used as an
argument for introducing something of the same system here?' " The government of
India, at any rate, "knew well enough that it would have to justify its existence and its
policy before public opinion in England, and it well knew that that public opinion would
never tolerate oppression" (A. Carthill, op. cit., pp. 70 and 41-42).
"« Harold Nicolson in his Curzon: The Last Phase 1919-1925, Boston-New York,
1934. tells the following story: "Behind the lines in Flanders was a large brewery in the
vats of which the private soldiers would bathe on returning from the trenches. Curzon
was taken to see this dantesque exhibit. He watched with interest those hundred naked
hgures disportmg themselves in the steam. 'Dear me!,' he said. 'I had no conception
that the lower classes had such white skins.' Curzon would deny the authenticity of
this story but loved it none the less" (pp. 47-48).
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 277
foundation legend, the legend of the Great Game as told by Rudyard Kipling
in Kim.
Of course every adventurer knows what Kipling means when he praises
Kim because "what he loved was the game for its own sake." Every person
still able to wonder at "this great and wonderful world" knows that it is
hardly an argument against the game when "missionaries and secretaries of
charitable societies could not see the beauty of it." Still less, it seems, have
those a right to speak who think it "a sin to kiss a white girl's mouth and
a virtue to kiss a black man's shoe." ^^ Since life itself ultimately has to be
lived and loved for its own sake, adventure and love of the game for its
own sake easily appear to be a most intensely human symbol of life. It
is this underlying passionate humanity that makes Kim the only novel of
the imperialist era in which a genuine brotherhood links together the
"higher and lower breeds," in which Kim, "a Sahib and the son of a
Sahib," can rightly talk of "us" when he talks of the "chain-men," "all
on one lead-rope." There is more to this "we" — strange in the mouth
of a believer in imperialism — than the all-enveloping anonymity of men
who are proud to have "no name, but only a number and a letter," more
than the common pride of having "a price upon [one's] head." What
makes them comrades is the common experience of being — through dan-
ger, fear, constant surprise, utter lack of habits, constant preparedness
to change their identities — symbols of life itself, symbols, for instance,
of happenings all over India, immediately sharing the life of it all as
"it runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind," and therefore no longer
"alone, one person, in the middle of it all," trapped, as it were, by the
limitations of one's own individuality or nationality. Playing the Great
Game, a man may feel as though he lives the only life worth while because
he has been stripped of everything which may still be considered to be
accessory. Life itself seems to be left, in a fantastically intensified purity,
when man has cut himself off from all ordinary social ties, family, regular
occupation, a definite goal, ambitions, and the guarded place in a com-
munity to which he belongs by birth. "When every one is dead the Great
Game is finished. Not before." When one is dead, life is finished, not before,
not when one happens to achieve whatever he may have wanted. That the
game has no ultimate purpose makes it so dangerously similar to life itself.
Purposelessness is the very charm of Kim's existence. Not for the sake
of England did he accept his strange duties, nor for the sake of India, nor for
any other worthy or unworthy cause. Imperialist notions like expansion for
expansion's or power for power's sake might have suited him, but he would
not have cared particularly and certainly would not have constructed any
such formula. He stepped into his peculiar way of "theirs not to reason
why, theirs but to do and die" without even asking the first question. He
was tempted only by the basic endlessness of the game and by secrecy as
87 Carthill, op. cit., p. 88.
,.„ IMPERIALISM
such. And secrecy again seems like a symbol of the basic mysteriousness of
Somehow it was not the fault of the born adventurers, of those who by
their very nature dwelt outside society and outside all political bodies, that
they found m imperialism a political game that was endless by definition;
ihcy were not supposed to know that in politics an endless game can end
only in catastrophe and that political secrecy hardly ever ends in anything
nobler than the vulgar duplicity of a spy. The joke on these players of the
Great Game was that their employers knew what they wanted and used their
passion for anonymity for ordinary spying. But this triumph of the profit-
hungry- investors was temporary, and they were duly cheated when a few
decades later they met the players of the game of totalitarianism, a game
played without ulterior motives like profit and therefore played with such
murderous efficiency that it devoured even those who financed it.
Before this happened, however, the imperialists had destroyed the best
man who ever turned from an adventurer (with a strong mixture of dragon-
slayer) into a secret agent, Lawrence of Arabia. Never again was the experi-
ment of secret politics made more purely by a more decent man. Lawrence
experimented fearlessly upon himself, and then came back and believed that
he belonged to the "lost generation." He thought this was because "the old
men came out again and took from us our victory" in order to "re-make
[the world] in the likeness of the former world they knew." ^^ Actually the
old men were quite inefficient even in this, and handed their victory, together
with their power, down to other men of the same "lost generation," who
were neither older nor so dissimilar to Lawrence. The only difference was
that Lawrence still clung fast to a morality which, however, had already
lost all objective bases and consisted only of a kind of private and neces-
sarily quixotic attitude of chivalry.
Lawrence was seduced into becoming a secret agent in Arabia because of
his strong desire to leave the world of dull respectability whose continuity
had become simply meaningless, because of his disgust with the world as well
as with himself. What attracted him most in Arab civilization was its "gospel
of bareness . . . [which] involves apparently a sort of moral bareness
too," which "has refined itself clear of household gods." ^^ What he tried
to avoid most of all after he had returned to English civilization was living
a life of his own, so that he ended with an apparently incomprehensible en-
listment as a private in the British army, which obviously was the only in-
stitution in which a man's honor could be identified with the loss of his
individual personality.
When the outbreak of the first World War sent T. E. Lawrence to the
Arabs of the Near East with the assignment to rouse them into a rebellion
against their Turkish masters and make them fight on the British side, he
•«T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Introduction (first edition, 1926) which
was omitted on the advice of George Bernard Shaw from the later edition. See T. E.
Lawrence, Letters, edited by David Garnett, New York, 1939, pp. 262 ff.
»» From a letter written in 1918. Letters, p. 244.
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 219
came into the very midst of the Great Game. He could achieve his purpose
only if a national movement was stirred up among Arab tribes, a national
movement that ultimately was to serve British imperialism. Lawrence had to
behave as though the Arab national movement were his prime interest, and
he did it so well that he came to believe in it himself. But then again he
did not belong, he was ultimately unable "to think their thought" and to
"assume their character." "" Pretending to be an Arab, he could only lose
his "English self" ®* and was fascinated by the complete secrecy of self-
effacement rather than fooled by the obvious justifications of benevolent
rule over backward peoples that Lord Cromer might have used. one genera-
tion older and sadder than Cromer, he took great delight in a role that de-
manded a reconditioning of his whole personality until he fitted into the
Great Game, until he became the incarnation of the force of the Arab na-
tional movement, until he lost all natural vanity in his mysterious alliance
with forces necessarily bigger than himself, no matter how big he could have
been, until he acquired a deadly "contempt, not for other men, but for all
they do" on their own initiative and not in alliance with the forces of history.
When, at the end of the war, Lawrence had to abandon the pretenses of
a secret agent and somehow recover his "English self," '■*- he "looked at the
West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me.""''
From the Great Game of incalculable bigness, which no publicity had
glorified or Umited and which had elevated him, in his twenties, above kings
and prime ministers because he had "made 'em or played with them," ""'
Lawrence came home with an obsessive desire for anonymity and the deep
conviction that nothing he could possibly still do with his life would ever
satisfy him. This conclusion he drew from his perfect knowledge that it was
not he who had been big, but only the role he had aptly assumed, that his
bigness had been the result of the Game and not a product of himself. Now
he did not "want to be big any more" and, determined that he was not
"going to be respectable again," he thus was indeed "cured ... of any
desire ever to do anything for myself." °^ He had been the phantom of a
force, and he became a phantom among the living when the force, the
function, was taken away from him. What he was frantically looking for was
another role to play, and this incidentally was the "game" about which
^o T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Garden City, 1938, chapter i.
»i Ibid.
82 How ambiguous and how difficult a process this must have been is illustrated by
the following anecdote: "Lawrence had accepted an invitation to dinner at Claridge's
and a party afterwards at Mrs. Harry Lindsay's. He shirked the dinner, but came to
the party in Arab dresses." This happened in 1919. Letters, p. 272, note 1.
83 Lawrence, op. cit., ch. i.
8* Lawrence wrote in 1929: "Anyone who had gone up so fast as I went . . . and
had seen so much of the inside of the top of the world might well lose his aspirations,
and get weary of the ordinary motives of action, which had moved him till he reached
the top. I wasn't King or Prime Minister, but I made 'em, or played with them, and
after that there wasn't much more, in that direction, for me to do" {Letters, p. 653).
^^ Ibid., pp. 244, 447, 450. Compare especially the letter of 1918 (p. 244) with the
two letters to George Bernard Shaw of 1923 (p. 447) and 1928 (p. 616).
220 IMPERIALISM
George Bernard Shaw inquired so kindly but uncomprehendingly, as though
he srK>kc from another century, not understanding why a man of such great
achie\ements should not own up to them.''" only another role, another
function would be stroni; enough to prevent himself and the world from
idcntif>ing him with his deeds in Arabia, from replacing his old self with
a new personality. He did not want to become "Lawrence of Arabia," since,
fundamentally, he did not want to regain a new self after having lost the old.
His greatness was that he was passionate enough to refuse cheap compro-
mises and easy roads into reality and respectability, that he never lost his
awareness that he had been only a function and had played a role and there-
fore "must not benefit in any way from what he had done in Arabia. The
honors which he had won were refused. The jobs offered on account of his
reputation had to be declined nor would he allow himself to exploit his suc-
cess by profiting from writing a single paid piece of journalism under the
name of Lawrence." "^
The story of T. E. Lawrence in all its moving bitterness and greatness
was not simply the story of a paid official or a hired spy, but precisely the
story of a real agent or functionary, of somebody who actually believed he
had entered — or been driven into — the stream of historical necessity and
become a functionary or agent of the secret forces which rule the world.
"I had pushed my go-cart into the eternal stream, and so it went faster than
the ones that are pushed cross-stream or up-stream. I did not believe finally
in the Arab movement: but thought it necessary in its time and place." "^
Just as Cromer had ruled Egypt for the sake of India, or Rhodes South
Africa for the sake of further expansion, Lawrence had acted for some
ulterior unpredictable purpose. The only satisfaction he could get out of
this, lacking the calm good conscience of some limited achievement, came
from the sense of functioning itself, from being embraced and driven by
some big movement. Back in London and in despair, he would try to find
some substitute for this kind of "self-satisfaction" and would only get it
out of hot speed on a motor-bike." "^ Although Lawrence had not yet been
seized by the fanaticism of an ideology of movement, probably because he
was too well educated for the superstitions of his time, he had already ex-
perienced that fascination, based on despair of all possible human responsi-
bility, which the eternal stream and its eternal movement exert. He drowned
himself in it and nothing was left of him but some inexplicable decency and
a pride in having "pushed the right way." "I am still puzzled as to how far
the individual counts: a lot, I fancy, if he pushes the right way." i"" This,
then, is the end of the real pride of Western man who no longer counts as
an end in himself, no longer does "a thing of himself nor a thing so clean
»« George Bernard Shaw, asking Lawrence in 1928 "What is your game really?",
suggested that his role in the army or his looking for a job as a night-watchman (for
which he could "get good references") were not authentic.
•' Garnett. op. cil.. p. 264. »» //j/d., in 1924, p. 456.
^^Ullers, in 1930. p. 693. ^'^o Ibid., p 693
RACE AND BUREAUCRACY 221
as to be his own" ^"^ by giving laws to the world, but has a chance only "if
he pushes the right way," in alliance with the secret forces of history and
necessity — of which he is but a function.
When the European mob discovered what a "lovely virtue" a white skin
could be in Africa,^"^ when the English conqueror in India became an ad-
ministrator who no longer believed in the universal validity of law, but was
convinced of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate, when the dragon-
slayers turned into either "white men" of "higher breeds" or into bureau-
crats and spies, playing the Great Game of endless ulterior motives in an
endless movement; when the British Intelligence Services (especially after the
first World War) began to attract England's best sons, who preferred serv-
ing mysterious forces all over the world to serving the common good of
their country, the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. Lying under
anybody's nose were many of the elements which gathered together could
create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism. "Administrative mas-
sacres" were proposed by Indian bureaucrats while African officials declared
that "no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed
to stand in the way" of white rule.^"^
The happy fact is that although British imperialist rule sank to some level
of vulgarity, cruelty played a lesser role between the two World Wars than
ever before and a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded. It is
this moderation in the midst of plain insanity that paved the way for what
Churchill has called "the liquidation of His Majesty's Empire" and that
eventually may turn out to mean the transformation of the English nation
into a Commonwealth of English peoples.
i°i Lawrence, op. cit., chapter i.
102 Millin, op. cit., p. 15.
103 As put by Sir Thomas Watt, a citizen of South Africa, of British descent. See
Barnes, op. cit., p. 230.
c „ . .. . K a K . . .. T : Continental Imperialism :
lh(^ Pan-iVlovements
NAZISM AND BOLSHEVISM owc morc to Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism
(respectively) than to any other ideology or pohtical movement. This
is most evident in foreign policies, where the strategies of Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia have followed so closely the well-known programs of
conquest outlined by the pan-movements before and during the first World
War that totalitarian aims have frequently been mistaken for the pursuance
of some permanent German or Russian interests. While neither Hitler nor
Sialin has ever acknowledged his debt to imperialism in the development
of his methods of rule, neither has hesitated to admit his indebtedness to
the pan-movements' ideology or to imitate their slogans.^
The birth of the pan-movements did not coincide with the birth of im-
f>crialism; around 1870, Pan-Slavism had already outgrown the vague and
confused theories of the Slavophiles,- and Pan-German sentiment was cur-
rent in Austria as early as the middle of the nineteenth century. They crys-
tallized into movements, however, and captured the imagination of broader
strata only with the triumphant imperialist expansion of the Western nations
in the eighties. The Central and Eastern European nations, which had no
colonial possessions and little hope for overseas expansion, now decided
that they "had the same right to expand as other great peoples and that if
[they were] not granted this possibility overseas, [they would] be forced
> Hitler wrote in Mein Kampj (New York, 1939): In Vienna, "I laid the founda-
tions for a world concept in general and a way of political thinking in particular
which I had later only to complete in detail, but which never afterward forsook me"
(p. 129). — Stalin came back to Pan-Slav slogans during the last war. The 1945 Pan-
Slav Congress in Sofia, which had been called by the victorious Russians, adopted
a resolution pronouncing it "not only an international political necessity to declare
Russian its language of general communication and the official language of all Slav
countries, but a moral necessity." (See Aufhau, New York, April 6, 1945.) Shortly
before, the Bulgarian radio had broadcast a message by the Metropolitan Stefan,
vicar of the Holy Bulgarian Synod, in which he called upon the Russian people "to
remember their messianic mission" and prophesied the coming "unity of the Slav
people." (See Politics, January, 1945.)
2 For an exhaustive presentation and discussion of the Slavophiles see Alexandre
Koyri, La philosopliie el le prohleme national en Russie au debut du 19e siecle
(Institut Fran^ais de Leningrad, Bibliotheque Vol. X, Paris, 1929).
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 223
to do it in Europe." ^ Pan-Germans and Pan-Slavs agreed that, living in
"continental states" and being "continental peoples," they had to look for
colonies on the continent," to expand in geographic continuity from a center
of power,'^ that against "the idea of England . . . expressed by the words:
I want to rule the sea, [stands] the idea of Russia [expressed] by the words:
I want to rule the land," ® and that eventually the "tremendous superiority
of the land to the sea . . . , the superior significance of land power to sea
power . . . ," would become apparent.^
The chief importance of continental, as distinguished from overseas, im-
perialism lies in the fact that its concept of cohesive expansion does not
allow for any geographic distance between the methods and institutions of
colony and of nation, so that it did not require boomerang effects in order
to make itself and all its consequences felt in Europe. Continental imperial-
ism truly begins at home.** If it shared with overseas imperialism the contempt
for the narrowness of the nation-state, it opposed to it not so much economic
arguments, which after all quite frequently expressed authentic national
needs, as an "enlarged tribal consciousness" ^ which was supposed to unite
all people of similar folk origin, independent of history and no matter where
3 Ernst Hasse, Deutsche Politik. 4. Heft. Die Zukunjt des deutschen Volkstums,
1907, p. 132.
* Ibid., 3. Heft. Deutsciie Grenzpolitik, pp. 167-168. Geopolitical theories of this
kind were current among the AUdeutschen, the members of the Pan-German League.
They always compared Germany's geopolitical needs with those of Russia. Austrian
Pan-Germans characteristically never drew such a parallel.
!^ The Slavophile writer Danilewski, whose Russia and Europe (1871) became the
standard work of Pan-Slavism, praised the Russians' "political capacity" because of
their "tremendous thousand-year-old state that still grows and whose power does
not expand like the European power in a colonial way but remains always concen-
trated around its nucleus, Moscow." See K. Staehlin, Geschiclite Russlands von den
Anfiingen bis zur Gegenwart, 1923-1939, 5 vols., IV/1, 274.
"The quotation is from J. Slowacki, a Polish publicist who wrote in the forties.
See N. O. Lossky, Three Chapters from the History of Polish Messianism, Prague,
1936, in International Philosophical Library, II, 9.
Pan-Slavism, the first of the pan-isms (see Hoetzsch, Russland, Berlin, 1913, p. 439),
expressed these geopolitical theories almost forty years before Pan-Germanism began
to "think in continents." The contrast between English sea power and continental land
power was so conspicuous that it would be far-fetched to look for influences.
"> Reismann-Grone, Ueberseepolitik oder Festlandspolitik?, 1905, in AUdeutsche
Flugschriften, No. 22, p. 17.
« Ernst Hasse of the Pan-German League proposed to treat certain nationalities
(Poles, Czechs, Jews, Italians, etc.) in the same way as overseas imperialism treated
natives in non-European continents. See Deutsche Politik. 1. Heft: Das Deutsche
Reich als Nationalstaat, 1905, p. 62. This is the chief difference between the Pan-
German League, founded in 1886, and earlier colonial societies such as the Central-
Verein fiir Handelsgeographie (founded in 1863). A very reliable description of the
activities of the Pan-German League is given in Mildred S. Wertheimer, The Pan-
German League, 1890-1914, 1924.
8 Emil Deckert, Panlatinismus, Panslawismus und Panteutonismus in ihrer Bedeutung
fiir die politische Weltlage, Frankfurt a/M, 1914, p. 4.
■yt^ IMPERIALISM
they happened to live.'" Continental imperialism, therefore, started with a
much closer afVinity to race concepts, enthusiastically absorbed the tradition
of race-thinking." and relied very little on specific experiences. Its race con-
cepts were completely ideological in basis and developed much more quickly
into a con\enient political weapon than similar theories expressed by over-
seas imperialists which could always claim a certain basis in authentic
experience.
Ihe pan-movements have generally been given scant attention in the dis-
cussion of imperialism. Their dreams of continental empires were over-
shadowed by the more tangible results of overseas expansion, and their
lack of interest in economics '- stood in ridiculous contrast to the tremendous
profits of early imperialism. Moreover, in a period when almost everybody
had come to believe that politics and economics were more or less the same
thing, it was easy to overlook the similarities as well as the significant differ-
ences between the two brands of imperialism. The protagonists of the pan-
movements share with Western imperialists that awareness of all foreign-
policy issues which had been forgotten by the older ruling groups of the na-
tion-state." Their influence on intellectuals was even more pronounced —
the Russian intelligentsia, with only a few exceptions, was Pan-Slavic, and
Pan-Germanism started in Austria almost as a students' movement.^* Their
chief difference from the more respectable imperialism of the Western na-
tions was the lack of capitalist support; their attempts to expand were not
"> Pan-Germans already talked before the first World War of the distinction between
"Slaalsfremde," people of Germanic origin who happened to live under the authority
of another country, and "Volksfremde," people of non-Germanic origin who happened
to live in Germany. See Daniel Frymann (pseud, for Heinrich Class), Wenn ich der
Kaiser war. Polilische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten, 1912.
When Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich, Hitler addressed the German
people of Austria with typically Pan-German slogans. "Wherever we may have been
born." he told them, we are all "the sons of the German people." Hitler's Speeches,
cd. by N. H. Baynes. 1942, II. 1408.
>>Th. G. Masaryk. Zur riissischen Geschichts- und Religlonsphilosophie (1913),
describes the "zoological nationalism" of the Slavophiles since Danilewski (p. 257).
Otto Bonhard, official historian of the Pan-German League, stated the close relation-
ship between its ideology and the racism of Gobineau and H. S. Chamberlain. See
Geschichie des aildeutschen Verbandes, 1920, p. 95.
1= An exception is Friedrich Naumann. Central Europe (London, 1916), who wanted
to replace the many nationalities in Central Europe with one united "economic
people" (Wirtschaftsvolk) under German leadership. Although his book was a best-
seller throughout the first World War, it influenced only the Austrian Social Democratic
Party; see Karl Renner, Oesterreichs Erneuerung. Politisch-programmatische Aufsdtze
Vienna, 1916. pp. 37 ff.
'» "At least before the war, the interest of the great parties in foreign affairs had
been completely overshadowed by domestic issues. The Pan-German League's attitude
IS different and this is undoubtedly a propaganda asset" (Martin Wenck, Alldeutsche
Taktik, 1917).
I " ^iQ.A^"' ^n^'f^' ^"^^'^^'^ ''''■ deutschnationalen Bewegung in Oesterreich,
ena. 1926 p. 90: It ,s a fact "that the student body does not at all simply mirror
he general political constellation; on the contrary, strong Pan-German opinions have
largely originated in the student body and thence found their way into general politics "
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 225
and could not be preceded by export of superfluous money and superfluous
men, because Europe did not offer colonial opportunities for either. Among
their leaders, we find therefore almost no businessmen and few adventurers,
but many members of the free professions, teachers, and civil servants.'*
While overseas imperialism, its antinational tendencies notwithstanding,
succeeded in giving a new lease on life to the antiquated institutions of the
nation-state, continental imperialism was and remained unequivocally hos-
tile to all existing political bodies. Its general mood, therefore, was far more
rebellious and its leaders far more adept at revolutionary rhetoric. While
overseas imperialism had offered real enough panaceas for the residues of
all classes, continental imperialism had nothing to offer except an ideology
and a movement. Yet this was quite enough in a time which preferred a key
to history to political action, when men in the midst of communal disintegra-
tion and social atomization wanted to belong at any price. Similarly, the
visible distinction of a white skin, whose advantages in a black or brown en-
vironment are easily understood, could be matched successfully by a purely
imaginary distinction between an Eastern and a Western, or an Aryan and
a non-Aryan soul. The point is that a rather complicated ideology and an
organization which furthered no immediate interest proved to be more at-
tractive than tangible advantages and commonplace convictions.
Despite their lack of success, with its proverbial appeal to the mob, the
pan-movements exerted from the beginning a much stronger attraction than
overseas imperialism. This popular appeal, which withstood tangible failures
and constant changes of program, foreshadowed later totalitarian groups
which were similarly vague as to actual goals and subject to day-to-day
changes of political lines. What held the pan-movements' membership to-
gether was much more a general mood than a clearly defined aim. It is true
that overseas imperialism also placed expansion as such above any program
of conquest and therefore took possession of every territory that offered it-
self as an easy opportunity. Yet, however capricious the export of super-
fluous money may have been, it served to delimit the ensuing expansion; the
aims of the pan-movements lacked even this rather anarchic element of
human planning and geographic restraint. Yet, though they had no specific
programs for world conquest, they generated an all-embracing mood of total
predominance, of touching and embracing all human issues, of "pan-human-
ism," as Dostoevski once put it.*"
In the imperialist alliance between mob and capital, the initiative lay
mostly with the representatives of business — except in the case of South
Africa, where a clear-cut mob policy developed very early. In the part-
is Useful information about the social composition of the membership of the Pan-
German League, its local and executive officers, can be found in Wertheimer, op. cit.
See also Lothar Werner, Der alldeutsche Verband. 1890-1918. Historische Studien.
Heft 278, Berlin, 1935, and Gottfried Nippold, Der deutsche Chauvinismus, 1913, pp.
179 ff.
i« Quoted from Hans Kohn, "The Permanent Mission" in The Review of Politics,
July, 1948.
226 IMPERIALISM
movements, on the other hand, the initiative always lay exclusively wjth
the mob, which was led then (as today) by a certain brand of intellectuals^
Ihey still lacked the ambition to rule the globe, and they did not even
dream of the possibilities of total domination. But they did know how t o or-
gani/.e the mob, and they were aware of the organizational, not merely
ideological or propaganda, uses to which race concepts can be put. Their
significance is only superficially grasped in the relatively modest theories of
foreign policy — a Germanized Central Europe or a Russianized Eastern
and Southern Europe — which served as starting points for the world-con-
quest programs of Nazism and Bolshevism." The "Germanic peoples" out-
side the Reich and "our minor Slavonic brethren" outside Holy Russia
generated a comfortable smoke screen of national rights to self-determina-
tion, easy stepping-stones to further expansion. Yet, much more essential
was the fact that the totalitarian governments inherited an aura of holiness:
they had only to invoke the past of "Holy Russia" or "the Holy Roman Em-
pire" to arouse all kinds of superstitions in Slav or German intellectuals.^*
Pseudomystical nonsense, enriched by countless and arbitrary historical
memories, provided an emotional appeal that seemed to transcend, in depth
and breadth, the limitations of nationalism. Out of it, at any rate, grew that
new kind of nationalist feeling whose violence proved an excellent motor
to set mob masses in motion and quite adequate to replace the older na-
tional patriotism as an emotional center.
This new type of tribal nationalism, more or less characteristic of all
Central and Eastern European nations and nationalities, was quite different
in content and significance — though not in violence — from Western nation-
alist excesses. Chauvinism — now usually thought of in connection with the
"nationalisme integral" of Maurras and Barres around the turn of the cen-
tury, with its romantic glorification of the past and its morbid cult of the
dead — even in its most wildly fantastic manifestations, did not hold that men
of French origin, born and raised in another country, without any knowledge
of French language or culture, would be "born Frenchmen" thanks to some
mysterious qualities of body or soul. only with the "enlarged tribal con-
sciousness" did that peculiar identification of nationality with one's own soul
emerge, that turned-inward pride that is no longer concerned only with
public affairs but pervades every phase of private life until, for example,
"the private life of each true Pole ... is a public life of Polishness." ^^
In psychological terms, the chief difTerence between even the most violent
»' Danilewski, op. cit., included in a future Russian empire all Balkan countries,
Turkey. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Galicia, and Istria with Trieste.
'« The Slavophile K. S. Aksakow, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century,
took the omcial name "Holy Russia" quite literally, as did later Pan-Slavs. See Th. G.
Masaryk, op. cit., pp. 234 ff.— Very characteristic of the vague nonsense of Pan-
Gcrmanism is Moellcr van den Bruck, Germany's Third Empire (New York, 1934),
in which he proclaims: "There is only one Empire, as there is only one Church. Any-
thmg else that claims the title may be a state or a community or a sect. There exists
only The Empire" (p. 263).
i» George Cleinow, Die Zukunft Polens, Leipzig, 1914, II, 93 ff.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 227
chauvinism and this tribal nationaUsm is that the one is extroverted, con-
cerned with visible spiritual and material achievements of the nation,
whereas the other, even in its mildest forms (for example, the German youth
movement) is introverted, concentrates on the individual's own soul which
is considered as the embodiment of general national qualities. Chauvinist
mystique still points to something that really existed in the past (as in
the case of the nationalisme integral) and merely tries to elevate this into a
realm beyond human control; tribalism, on the other hand, starts from non-
existent pseudomystical elements which it proposes to realize fully in the
future. It can be easily recognized by the tremendous arrogance, inherent in
its self-concentration, which dares to measure a people, its past and present,
by the yardstick of exalted inner qualities and inevitably rejects its visible
existence, tradition, institutions, and culture.
Po litica lly speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people
is surrounded by "a world of enemies," one against all," that a fundamental
difference exists be tween this people and all others. It cla ims its people to be
unique, individua l, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the
very possibility of a common mankind lonjg before it is used to destroy the
humanity, of man.
i: Tribal Nationalism
JUST AS continental imperialism sprang from the frustrated ambitions of
countries which did not get their share in the sudden expansion of the
eighties, so tribalism appeared as the nationalism of those peoples who had
not participated in national emancipation and had not achieved the sov-
ereignty of a nation-state. Wherever the two frustrations were combined, as
in multinational Austria-Hungary and Russia, the pan-movements naturally
found their most fertile soil. Moreover, since the Dual Monarchy harbored
both Slavic and German irredentist nationalities, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Ger-
manism concentrated from the beginning on its destruction, and Austria-
Hungary became the real center of pan-movements. Russian Pan-Slavs
claimed as early as 1870 that the best possible starting point for a Pan-Slav
empire would be the disintegration of Austria,^" and Austrian Pan-Germans
were so violently aggressive against their own government that even the
Alldeutsche Verband in Germany complained frequently about the "exag-
20 During the Crimean War (1853-1856) Michael Pagodin, a Russian folklorist
and philologist, wrote a letter to the Czar in which he called the Slav peoples Russia's
only reliable powerful aUies (Staehlin, op. cit., p. 35); shortly thereafter General
Nikolai Muravyev-Amursky, one of the great Russian empire-builders," hoped for
"the liberation of the Slavs from Austria and Turkey" (Hans Kohn, op. cit.); and as
early as 1870 a military pamphlet appeared which demanded the "destruction of
Austria as a necessary condition for a Pan-Slav federation" (see Staehlin, op. cit.,
p. 282).
^■,g IMPERIALISM
aerations" of the Austrian brother movement.==* The German-conceived
hlueprint for the economic union of Central Europe under German leader-
ship, along with all similar continental-empire projects of the German Pan-
Cicrmans, changed at once, when Austrian Pan-Germans got hold of it, into
a structure that would become "the center of German life all over the earth
and be allied with all other Germanic states." "
It is self-evident that the expansionist tendencies of Pan-Slavism were
as embarrassing to the Czar as the Austrian Pan-Germans' unsolicited pro-
fessions of loyalty to the Reich and disloyalty to Austria were to Bismarck."
For no matter how high national feelings occasionally ran, or how ridiculous
nationalistic claims might become in times of emergency, as long as they
were bound to a defined national territory and controlled by pride in a limited
nation-state they remained within limits which the tribalism of the pan-
movements overstepped at once.
The modernity of the pan-movements may best be gauged from their en-
tirely new position on antisemitism. Suppressed minorities like the Slavs in
Austria and the Poles in Czarist Russia were more likely, because of their
conflict with the government, to discover the hidden connections between
the Jewish communities and the European nation-states, and this discovery
could easily lead to more fundamental hostility. Wherever antagonism to the
state was not identified with lack of patriotism, as in Poland, where it was
a sign of Polish loyalty to be disloyal to the Czar, or in Austria, where Ger-
mans looked upon Bismarck as their great national figure, this antisemitism
assumed more violent forms because the Jews then appeared as agents not
only of an oppressive state machine but of a foreign oppressor. But the
fundamental role of antisemitism in the pan-movements is explained as little
by the position of minorities as by the specific experiences which Schoenerer,
the protagonist of Austrian Pan-Germanism, had had in his earlier career
when, still a member of the Liberal Party, he became aware of the connec-
tions between the Hapsburg monarchy and the Rothschilds' domination of
Austria's railroad system. =' This by itself would hardly have made him an-
nounce that "we Pan-Germans regard antisemitism as the mainstay of our
*> Sec Otto Bonhard, op. dr., pp. 58 flf., and Hugo Grell, Der alldeutsche Verband,
seine Geschichle, seine Beslrebungen, seine Erfolge, 1898, in Alldeutsche Flugschriften,
No. 8.
** According to the Austrian Pan-German program of 1913, quoted from Eduard
Pichl (al. Hcrwig), Georg Schoenerer, 1938. 6 vols., VI, 375.
"When Schoenerer. with his admiration for Bismarck, declared in 1876 that
"Austria as a great power must cease" (Pichl, op. cit., I, 90), Bismarck thought and
told his Austrian admirers that "a powerful Austria is a vital necessity to Germany."
See F. A. Neuschaefer, Georg Ritier von Schoenerer (Dissertation), Hamburg, 1935.
The Czars' attitude toward Pan-Slavism was much more equivocal because the Pan-
Slav conception of the state included strong popular support for despotic government.
Yet even under such tempting circumstances, the Czar refused to support^ the expan-
sionist demand of the Slavophiles and their successors. See Staehlin, op. cit., pp. 30 ff.
•* See chapter ii.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 229
national ideology."-"^ nor could anything similar have induced the Pan-Slav
Russian writer Rozanov to pretend that "there is no problem in Russian life
in which like a 'comma' there is not also the question: How to cof)e with
the Jew."'-'"'
The clue to the sudden emergence of antisemitism as the center of a whole
outlook on life and the world — as distinguished from its mere political role
in France during the Dreyfus Affair or its role as an instrument of propa-
ganda in the German Stoecker movement — lies in the nature of tribalism
rather than in political facts and circumstances. The true significance of the
pan-movements' antisemitism is that hatred of the Jews was, for the first
time, severed from all actual exp>erience concerning the Jewish people, polit-
ical, social, or economic, and followed only the peculiar logic of an ideology.
Tribal nationalism, the driving force behind continental imperialism, had
little in common with the nationalism of the fully developed Western nation-
state. The nation-state, with its claim to popular representation and national
sovereignty,', as it had developed since the French Revolution through the
nineteenth century, was the result of a combination of two factors that were
still separate in the eighteenth centurv' and remained separate in Russia and
Austria-Hungary: nationality and state. Nations entered the scene of history
and were emancipated when peoples had acquired a consciousness of them-
selves as cultural and historical entities, and of their territorv- as a permanent
home, where history had left its visible traces, whose cultivation was the
product of the common labor of their ancestors and whose future would de-
pend upon the course of a common civilization. Wherever nation-states
came into being, migrations came to an end, while, on the other hand, in the
Eastern and Southern European regions the establishment of nation-states
failed because they could not fall back upon firmly rooted peasant classes.-'
Sociologically the nation-state was the body politic of the European emanci-
pated peasant classes, and this is the reason why national armies could keep
their permanent position within these states only up to the end of the last
centurv', that is. only as long as they were truly representative of the rural
class. "The Army,"' as Marx has pointed out, "was the 'point of honor" with
the allotment farmers: it was themselves turned into masters, defending
abroad their newly established property. . . . The uniform was their state
costume, war was their poetry; the allotment was the fatherland, and patriot-
ism became the ideal form of property.""-'' The Western nationalism which
^'' Pichl, op. cit.. I. 26. TTie translation is quoted from the excellent article by Oscar
Karbach, "The Founder of Modern Political Antisemitism: Georg von Schoenerer."
in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. VII, No 1, January. 1945.
^'^Vassiliff Rozanov, Fallen Uaves, 1929, pp. 163-164.
" See C. A. Macartney. National States and National Minorities, Lo.ndon, 1934,
pp. 432 ff.
^® Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte English translation by
De Leon. 1898.
■y^Q IMPERIALISM
culminated in general conscription was the product of firmly rooted and
emancipated peasant classes.
While consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development,
the structure of the state was derived from centuries of monarchy and en-
lightened despotism. Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed
constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the pro-
tection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and
was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-
state was that the people's rising national consciousness interfered with these
functions. In the name of the will of the people the state was forced to
recognize only "nationals" as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights
only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and
fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an in-
strument of the law into an instrument of the nation.
The conquest of the state by the nation ^° was greatly facilitated by the
downfall of the absolute monarchy and the subsequent new development of
classes. The absolute monarch was supposed to serve the interests of the
nation as a whole, to be the visible exponent and proof of the existence of
such a common interest. The enlightened despotism was based on Rohan's
"kings command the peoples and interest commands the king"; ^" with the
abolition of the king and sovereignty of the people, this common interest was
in constant danger of being replaced by a permanent conflict among class in-
terests and struggle for control of the state machinery, that is, by a permanent
civil war. The only remaining bond between the citizens of a nation-state
without a monarch to symbolize their essential community, seemed to be
national, that is, common origin. So that in a century when every class and
section in the population was dominated by class or group interest, the inter-
est of the nation as a whole was supposedly guaranteed in a common origin,
which sentimentally expressed itself in nationalism.
The secret conflict between state and nation came to light at the very birth
of the modern nation-state, when the French Revolution combined the decla-
ration of the Rights of Man with the demand for national sovereignty. The
same essential rights were at once claimed as the inahenable heritage of all
human beings and as the specific heritage of specific nations, the same nation
was at once declared to be subject to laws, which supposedly would flow
from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that is, bound by no universal law
and acknowledging nothing superior to itself." The practical outcome of this
contradiction was that from then on human rights were protected and en-
forced only as national rights and that the very institution of a state, whose
supreme task was to protect and guarantee man his rights as man, as citizen
26 Sec J. T. Delos, La Nation, Montreal. 1944, an outstanding study on the subject.
30 See the Due de Rohan, De flnteret des Princes et Etats de la Chretiente, 1638,
dedicated to the Cardinal Richelieu.
31 one of the most illuminating discussions of the principle of sovereignty is still
Jean Bodin. Six Livres de la Republique, 1576. For a good report and discussion of
Bodm's mam theories, see George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 1937.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 231
and as national, lost its legal, rational appearance and could be interpreted
by the romantics as the nebulous representative of a "national soul" which
through the very fact of its existence was supposed to be beyond or above
the law. National sovereignty, accordingly, lost its original connotation of
freedom of the people and was being surrounded by a pseudomystical aura of
lawless arbitrariness.
Nationalism is essentially the ｅxpression of this perversion of the state
into an instrument of the nation and the identification of the citizen with the
member of the nation. The relationship between state and society was de-
termined by the fact of class struggle, which had supplanted the former
feudal order. Society was pervaded by liberal individualism which wrongly
believed that the state ruled over mere individuals, when in reality it ruled
over classes, and which saw in the state a kind of supreme individual before
which all others had to bow. It seemed to be the will of the nation that the
state protect it from the consequences of its social atomization and, at the
same time, guarantee its possibility of remaining in a state of atomization. To
be equal to this task, the state had to enforce all earlier tendencies toward
centralization; only a strongly centralized administration which monopolized
all instruments of violence and power-possibihties could counterbalance the
centrifugal forces constantly produced in a class-ridden society. Nationalism,
then, became the precious cement for binding together a centralized state
and an atomized society, and it actually proved to be the only working, live
connection between the individuals of the nation-state.
Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the govern-
ment and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance
between nation and state on one hand, between the nationals of an atomized
society on the other. Native citizens of a nation-state frequently looked down
upon naturalized citizens, those who had received their rights by law and not
by birth, from the state and not from the nation; but they never went so
far as to propose the Pan-German distinction between "Staatsfremde,"
aliens of the state, and "Volksjremde," aliens of the nation, which was
later incorporated into Nazi legislation. Insofar as the state, even in its per-
verted form, remained a legal institution, nationalism was controlled by some
law, and insofar as it had sprung from the identification of nationals with
their territory, it was limited by definite boundaries.
Quite different was the first national reaction of peoples for whom nation-
ality had not yet developed beyond the inarticulateness of ethnic conscious-
ness, whose languages had not yet outgrown the dialect stage through which
all European languages went before they became suited for literary purposes,
whose peasant classes had not struck deep roots in the country and were not
on the verge of emancipation, and to whom, consequently, their national
quality appeared to be much more a portable private matter, inherent in
their very personality, than a matter of public concern and civilization.^- If
32 Interesting in this context are the socialist propositions of Karl Renner and Otto
Bauer in Austria to separate nationality entirely from its territorial basis and to make
it a kind of personal status; this of course corresponded to a situation in which ethnic
2J2 IMPERIALISM
they wanted to match the national pride of Western nations, they had no
country, no state, no historic achievement to show but could only point to
themselves, and that meant, at best, to their language— as though language
by itself were already an achievement — at worst, to their Slavic, or Ger-
manic, or God-knows-what soul. Yet in a century which naively assumed
that all peoples were virtually nations there was hardly anything else left
to the oppressed peoples of Austria-Hungary, Czarist Russia, or the Balkan
countries, where no conditions existed for the realization of the Western
national trinity of pcoplc-tcrritory-statc, where frontiers had changed con-
stantly for many centuries and populations had been in a stage of more or
less continuous migration. Here were masses who had not the slightest idea
of the meaning of patria and patriotism, not the vaguest notion of responsi-
bility for a common, limited community. This was the trouble with the "belt
of mixed populations" (Macartney) that stretched from the Baltic to the
Adriatic and found its most articulate ｅxpression in the Dual Monarchy.
Tribal nationalism grew out of this atmosphere of rootlessness. It spread
widely not only among the peoples of Austria-Hungary but also, though on
a higher level, among members of the unhappy intelligentsia of Czarist Rus-
sia. Rootlessness was the true source of that "enlarged tribal consciousness"
which actually meant that members of these peoples had no definite home
but felt at home wherever other members of their "tribe" happened to
live. "It is our distinction," said Schoenerer, ". . . that we do not gravi-
tate toward Vienna but gravitate to whatever place Germans may live in." ^^
The hallmark of the pan-movements was that they never even tried to
achieve national emancipation, but at once, in their dreams of expansion,
transcended the narrow bounds of a national community and proclaimed a
folk community that would remain a political factor even if its members
were dispersed all over the earth. Similarly, and in contrast to the true na-
tional liberation movements of small peoples, which always began with an
exploration of the national past, they did not stop to consider history but
projected the basis of their community into a future toward which the move-
ment was supposed to march.
Tribal nationalism, spreading through all oppressed nationalities in East-
em and Southern Europe, developed into a new form of organization, the
pan-movements, among those peoples who combined some kind of national
home country, Germany and Russia, with a large, dispersed irredenta, Ger-
mans and Slavs abroad.^* In contrast to overseas imperialism, which was
groups were dispersed all over the empire without losing any of their national char-
acter. See Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitdtenfrage imd die dsterreichisvhe Sozialdemo-
kratic, Vienna, 1907, on the personal (as opposed to the territorial) principle, pp.
332 ff., 353 ff. "The personal principle wants to organize nations not as territorial
bodies but as mere associations of persons."
3' Pichl. op. cit., I, 152.
3< No full-fledged pan-movement ever developed except under these conditions.
Pan-Latinism was a misnomer for a few abortive attempts of the Latin nations to
make some kind of alliance against the German danger, and even Polish Messianism
never claimed more than what at some time might conceivably have been Polish-
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 233
content with relative superiority, a national mission, or a white man's burden,
the pan-movements started with absolute claims to chosenness. Nationalism
has been frequently described as an emotional surrogate of religion, but only
the tribalism of the pan-movements offered a new religious theory and a new
concept of holiness. It was not the Czar's religious function and position in
the Greek Church that led Russian Pan-Slavs to the atVirmation of the Chris-
tian nature of the Russian people, of their being, according to Dostoevski,
the "Christopher among the nations" who carry God directly into the affairs
of this world. ■'■• It was because of claims to being "the true divine people of
modern times" '"■ that the Pan-Slavs abandoned their earlier liberal tenden-
cies and, notwithstanding governmental opposition and occasionally even
persecution, became staunch defenders of Holy Russia.
Austrian Pan-Germans laid similar claims to divine chosenness even
though they, with a similar liberal past, remained anticlerical and became
anti-Christians. When Hitler, a self-confessed disciple of Schoenerer, stated
during the last war: "God the Almighty has made our nation. We are defend-
ing His work by defending its very existence," ''■ the reply from the other
side, from a follower of Pan-Slavism, was equally true to type: "The German
monsters are not only our foes, but God's foes." '^ These recent formulations
were not born of propaganda needs of the moment, and this kind of fanati-
cism does not simply abuse religious language; behind it lies a veritable
theology which gave the earlier pan-movements their momentum and re-
tained a considerable influence on the development of modern totalitarian
movements.
The pan-movements preached the divine origin of their own people as
against the Jewish-Christian faith in the divine origin of Man. According to
them, man, belonging inevitably to some people, received his divine origin
only indirectly through membership in a people. The individual, therefore,
has his divine value only as long as he belongs to the people singled out
for divine origin. He forfeits this whenever he decides to change his nation-
ality, in which case he severs all bonds through which he was endowed with
dominated territory. See also Dcckcrt, op. cit., who stated in 1914: "that Pan-Latinism
has declined more and more, and that nationalism and state consciousness have be-
come stronger and retained a greater potential there than anywhere else in Europe"
(p. 7).
3-' Nicolas Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, 19.^7, p. 102. — K. S.
Aksakow called the Russian people the only Christian people on earth" in 18.'55 (see
Hans Ehrenberg and N. V. Bubnotl. Ocstlichcs Chrisicntum, Bd. I, pp. 92 ff.), and the
poet Tyutchev asserted at the same time that "the Russian people is Christian not
only through the Orthodoxy of its faith but by something more intimate. It is Christian
by that faculty of renunciation and sacrifice which is the foundation of its moral
nature." Quoted from Hans Kohn, op. cit.
3« According to Chaadaycv whose Philosophical Letters. 1S29-1831 constituted the
first systematic attempt to see world history centered around the Russian people. See
Ehrenberg, op. cit., 1, 5 fT.
3" Speech of January 30, 1945, as recorded in the New York Times, January 31.
s** The words of Luke, the Archbishop of Tambov, as quoted in The Journal of
the Moscow Patriarchate, No. 2, 1944.
2^4 IMPERIALISM
divine origin and falls, as it were, into metaphysical homelessness. The polit-
ical advantage of this concept was twofold. It made nationality a permanent
quality which no longer could be touched by history, no matter what hap-
pened to a given people — emigration, conquest, dispersion. Of even more
immediate impact, however, was that in the absolute contrast between the
divine origin of one's own people and all other nondivine peoples all differ-
ences between the individual members of the people disappeared, whether
social or economic or psychological. Divine origin changed the people into
a uniform "chosen" mass of arrogant robots.^^
The untruth of this theory is as conspicuous as its poHtical usefulness.
God created neither men — whose origin clearly is procreation — nor peoples
— who came into being as the result of human organization. Men are unequal
according to their natural origin, their different organization, and fate in his-
tory. 1 heir equality is an equality of rights only, that is, an equality of human
purpose; yet behind this equality of human purpose lies, according to Jew-
ish-Christian tradition, another equality, expressed in the concept of one
common origin beyond human history, human nature, and human purpose
— the common origin in the mythical, unidentifiable Man who alone is God's
creation. This divine origin is the metaphysical concept on which the polit-
ical equality of purpose may be based, the purpose of establishing mankind
on earth. Nineteenth-century positivism and progressivism perverted this
purpose of human equality when they set out to demonstrate what cannot be
demonstrated, namely, that men are equal by nature and different only by
history and circumstances, so that they can be equalized not by rights, but
by circumstances and education. Nationalism and its concept of a "national
mission" perverted the national concept of mankind as a family of nations
into a hierarchical structure where differences of history and organization
were misinterpreted as diflerences between men, residing in natural origin.
Racism, which denied the common origin of man and repudiated the common
purpose of estabUshing humanity, introduced the concept of the divine origin
of one people as contrasted with all others, thereby covering the temporary
and changeable product of human endeavor with a pseudomystical cloud of
divine eternity and finality.
This finality is what acts as the common denominator between the pan-
movements' philosophy and race concepts, and explains their inherent af-
finity in theoretical terms. Politically, it is not important whether God or
nature is thought to be the origin of a people; in both cases, no matter how
exalted the claim for one's own people, peoples are transformed into animal
species so that a Russian appears as different from a German as a wolf is
from a fox. A "divine people" lives in a world in which it is the born perse-
»eThis was already recognized by the Russian Jesuit, Prince Ivan S. Gagarin, in
his pamphlet La Russie sera-l-elle catholique? (1856) in which he attacked the
Slavophiles because "they wish to establish the most complete religious, political, and
national uniformity. In their foreign policy, they wish to fuse all Orthodox Christians
of whatever nationality, and all Slavs of whatever religion, in a great Slav and Orthodox
empire." (Quoted from Hans Kohn, op. cit.)
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 235
cutor of all other weaker species, or the bom victim of all other stronger
species. only the rules of the animal kingdom can possibly apply to its polit-
ical destinies.
The tribalism of the pan-movements with its concept of the "divine origin"
of one people owed part of its great appeal to its contempt for liberal in-
dividualism/" the ideal of mankind and the dignity of man. No human dig-
nity is left if the individual owes his value only to the fact that he happens
to be born a German or a Russian; but there is, in its stead, a new coherence,
a sense of mutual reliability among all members of the people which indeed
was very apt to assuage the rightful apprehensions of modern men as to what
might happen to them if, isolated individuals in an atomized society, they
were not protected by sheer numbers and enforced uniform coherence.
Similarly, the "belt of mixed populations," more exposed than other sections
of Europe to the storms of history and less rooted in Western tradition, felt
earlier than other European peoples the terror of the ideal of humanity and
of the Judaeo-Christian faith in the common origin of man. They did not
harbor any illusions about the "noble savage," because they knew something
of the potentialities of evil without research into the habits of cannibals. The
more peoples know about one another, the less they want to recognize other
peoples as their equals, the more they recoil from the ideal of humanity.
The appeal of tribal isolation and master race ambitions was partly due
to an instinctive feeling that mankind, whether a religious or humanistic
ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility.*^ The shrinking of geo-
graphic distances made this a political actuality of the first order.*^ It also
made idealistic talk about mankind and the dignity of man an affair of the
past simply because all these fine and dreamlike notions, with their time-
honored traditions, suddenly assumed a terrifying timeliness. Even insistence
on the sinfulness of all men, of course absent from the phraseology of the
liberal protagonists of "mankind," by no means suffices for an understand-
ing of the fact — which the people understood only too well — that the idea
^0 "People will recognize that man has no other destination in this world but to
work for the destruction of his personality and its replacement through a social and
unpersonal existence." Chaadayev, op. cit. Quoted from Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 60.
*i The following passage in Frymann, op. cit., p. 186, is characteristic: "We know
our own people, its qualities and its shortcomings — mankind we do not know and we
refuse to care or get enthusiastic about it. Where does it begin, where does it end,
that we are supposed to love because it belongs to mankind . . . ? Are the decadent
or half-bestial Russian peasant of the mir, the Negro of East-Africa, the half-breed
of German South-West Africa, or the unbearable Jews of Galicia and Rumania all
members of mankind? . . . one can believe in the solidarity of the Germanic peo-
ples — whoever is outside this sphere does not matter to us."
^2 It was this shrinking of geographic distances that found an ｅxpression in Fried-
rich Naumann's Central Europe: "The day is still distant when there shall be 'one fold
and one shepherd,' but the days are past when shepherds without number, lesser or
greater, drove their flocks unrestrained over the pastures of Europe. The spirit of
large-scale industry and of super-national organisation has seized politics. People
think, as Cecil Rhodes once expressed it, 'in Continents.' " These few sentences were
quoted in innumerable articles and pamphlets of the time.
2J6 IMPERIALISM
of hunKinily. purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence
that in one form or another men must assume responsibihty for all crimes
committed by men, and that eventually all nations will be forced to answer
for the evil committed by all others.
Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of
escaping this predicament of common responsibility. Their metaphysical
rootlessness, which matched so well the territorial uprootedness of the na-
tionalities it tirst seized, was equally well suited to the needs of the shifting
masses of modern cities and was therefore grasped at once by totalitarian-
ism; even the fanatical adoption by the Bolsheviks of the greatest antina-
tional doctrine. Marxism, was counteracted and Pan-Slav propaganda rein-
troduced in Soviet Russia because of the tremendous isolating value of these
theories in themselves."'-'
It is true that the system of rule in Austria-Hungary and Czarist Russia
served as a veritable education in tribal nationalism, based as it was upon
the oppression of nationalities. In Russia this oppression was the exclusive
monopoly of the bureaucracy which also oppressed the Russian people with
the result that only the Russian intelligentsia became Pan-Slav. The Dual
Monarchy, on the contrary, dominated its troublesome nationalities by giv-
ing to them just enough freedom to oppress other nationalities, with the
result that these became the real mass basis for the ideology of the pan-
movements. The secret of the survival of the House of Hapsburg in the
nineteenth century lay in careful balance and support of a supranational
machinery by the mutual antagonism and exploitation of Czechs by Ger-
mans, of Slovaks by Hungarians, of Ruthenians by Poles, and so on. For
all of them it became a matter of course that one might achieve nation-
hood at the expense of the others and that one would gladly be deprived
of freedom if the oppression came from one's own national government.
The two pan-movements developed without any help from the Russian
or German governments. This did not prevent their Austrian adherents from
indulging in the delights of high treason against the Austrian government.
It was this possibility of educating masses in the spirit of high treason which
provided Austrian pan-movements with the sizable popular support they
always lacked in Germany and Russia proper. It was as much easier to
induce the German worker to attack the German bourgeoisie than the gov-
ernment, as it was easier in Russia "to arouse the peasants against squires
than against the Czar." '^ The difference in the attitudes of German workers
" Very interesting in this respect arc the new theories of Soviet Russian genetics.
Inhcniance of acquired characteristics clearly means that populations living under
unfavorable conditions pass on poorer hereditary endowment and vice versa. "In a
word, we should have innate master and subject races." See H. S. Muller. "The Soviet
Master Race Theory," in New Leader. July 30. 1949.
"G. FedotoVs "Russia and Freedom," in The Review of Politics. Vol. VIII, No. 1,
January 1946. is a veritable masterpiece of historical writing; it gives the gist of the
whole of Russian history.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 237
and Russian peasants were surely tremendous; the former looked upon a
not too beloved monarch as the symbol of national unity, and the latter
considered the head of their government to be the true representative of
God on earth. These differences, however, mattered less than the fact that
neither in Russia nor in Germany was the government so weak as in Austria,
nor had its authority fallen into such disrepute that the pan-movements
could make political capital out of revolutionary unrest. only in Austria
did the revolutionary impetus find its natural outlet in the pan-movements.
The (not very ably carried out) device of divide et impera did little to di-
minish the centrifugal tendencies of national sentiments, but it succeeded
quite well in inducing superiority complexes and a general mood of dis-
loyalty.
Hostility to the state as an institution runs through the theories of all pan-
movements. The Slavophiles' opposition to the state has been rightly de-
scribed as "entirely different from anything to be found in the system of
official nationalism"; *'•" the state by its very nature was held to be alien to
the people. Slav superiority was felt to lie in the Russian people's indiffer-
ence to the state, in their keeping themselves as a corpus separatum from
their own government. This is what the Slavophiles meant when they called
the Russians a "stateless people" and this made it possible for these "liber-
als" to reconcile themselves to despotism; it was in accord with the demand
of despotism that the people not "interfere with state power," that is, with
the absoluteness of that power.^" The Pan-Germans, who were more articu-
late politically, always insisted on the priority of national over state interest *^
and usually argued that "world politics transcends the framework of the
state," that the only permanent factor in the course of history was the
people and not states; and that therefore national needs, changing with cir-
cumstances, should determine, at all times, the political acts of the state. ^*
But what in Germany and Russia remained only high-sounding phrases up to
the end of the first World War, had a real enough aspect in the Dual Mon-
archy whose decay generated a permanent spiteful contempt for the gov-
ernment.
It would be a serious error to assume that the leaders of the pan-move-
ments were reactionaries or "counter-revolutionaries." Though as a rule not
too interested in social questions, they never made the mistake of siding with
capitalist exploitation and most of them had belonged, and quite a few
continued to belong, to liberal, progressive parties. It is quite true, in a
*5 N. Berdyaev, op. cit., p. 29.
*" K. S. Aksakov in Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 97.
^^ See for instance Schoenerer's complaint that the Austrian "Verfassungspartei"
still subordinated national interests to state interests (Pichl, op. cit., I, 151). See also
the characteristic passages in the Fan-German Graf E. Reventlow's Judas Kampf und
Niederlage in Deutschland, 1937, pp. 39 ff. Reventlow saw National Socialism as the
realization of Pan-Germanism because of its refusal to "idolize" the state which is
only one of the functions of folk life.
48 Ernst Hasse, Deutsche WeltpoUtik, 1897, in Alldeutsche Flugschriften, No. 5,
and Deutsche Politik, 1. Heft: Das deutsche Reich als Nationalstaat, 1905, p. 50.
-,« IMPERIALISM
sense that the Pan-German League "embodied a real attempt at popular
control in foreign alTairs. It believed firmly in the efficiency of a strong na-
tionally minded publie opinion ... and initiating national policies through
force of popular demand." ♦» Except that the mob, organized in the pan-
movements and inspired by race ideologies, was not at all the same people
whose revolutionary actions had led to constitutional government and whose
true representatives at that time could be found only in the workers' move-
ments, but with its "enlarged tribal consciousness" and its conspicuous lack
of patriotism resembled much rather a "race."
Pan-Slavism, in contrast to Pan-Germanism, was formed by and perme-
ated the whole Ru.ssian intelligentsia. Much less developed in organizational
form and much less consistent in political programs, it maintained for a
remarkably long time a very high level of literary sophistication and philo-
sophical speculation. While Rozanov speculated about the mysterious dif-
ferences between Jewish and Christian sex power and came to the surpris-
ing conclusion that the Jews are "united with that power, Christians being
separated from it," '" the leader of Austria's Pan-Germans cheerfully dis-
covered devices to "attract the interest of the little man by propaganda songs,
post cards, Schocnerer beer mugs, walking sticks and matches. ^^ Yet eventu-
ally "Schelling and Hegel were discarded and natural science was called upon
to furnish the theoretical ammunition" by the Pan-Slavs as well.^^
Pan-Germanism, founded by a single man, Georg von Schoenerer, and
chiefly supported by German-Austrian students, spoke from the beginning a
strikingly vulgar language, destined to appeal to much larger and different
social strata. Schocnerer was consequently also "the first to perceive the
possibilities of antiscmitism as an instrument for forcing the direction of
foreign policy and disrupting ... the internal structure of the state." "
Some of the rea.sons for the suitability of the Jewish people for this purpose
arc obvious: their very prominent position with respect to the Hapsburg
monarchy together with the fact that in a multinational country they were
more easily recognized as a separate nationality than in nation-states whose
citizens, at least in theory, were of homogeneous stock. This, however, while
it certainly explains the violence of the Austrian brand of antisemitism and
shows how shrewd a politician Schoenerer was when he exploited the issue,
docs not help us understand the central ideological role of antisemitism in
both pan-movements.
"Enlarged tribal consciousness" as the emotional motor of the pan-move-
ments was fully developed before antisemitism became their central and cen-
tralizing issue. Pan-Slavism, with its longer and more respectable history of
'» Wcrthcimcr. op. cit., p. 209.
*• Rozanov, op. cit., pp. 56-57.
»' Oscar Karbach, op. cit.
»' Louis Lcvine, Pan-Slavism and European Politics. New York, 1914, describes this
change from the older Slavophile generation to the new Pan-Slav movement
»• Oscar Karbach, op. cit.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 239
philosophic speculation and a more conspicuous political ineffectiveness,
turned antisemitic only in the last decades of the nineteenth century; Schoe-
nerer the Pan-German had already openly announced his hostility to state
institutions when many Jews were still members of his party." In Germany,
where the Stoecker movement had demonstrated the usefulness of anti-
semitism as a political propaganda weapon, the Pan-German League started
with a certain antisemitic tendency, but before 1918 it never went so far as
to exclude Jews from membership.^' The Slavophiles' occasional antipathy
to Jews turned into antisemitism in the whole Russian intelligentsia when,
after the assassination of the Czar in 1881, a wave of pogroms organized
by the government brought the Jewish question into the focus of pubhc at-
tention.
Schoenerer, who discovered antisemitism at the same time, probably be-
came aware of its possibilities almost by accident: since he wanted above all
to destroy the Hapsburg empire, it was not difficult to calculate the effect
of the exclusion of one nationality on a state structure that rested on a multi-
tude of nationalities. The whole fabric of this peculiar constitution, the pre-
carious balance of its bureaucracy could be shattered if the moderate op-
pression, under which all nationaUties enjoyed a certain amount of equality,
was undermined by popular movements. Yet, this purpose could have been
equally well served by the Pan-Germans' furious hatred of the Slav national-
ities, a hatred which had been well established long before the movement
turned antisemitic and which had been approved by its Jewish members.
What made the antisemitism of the pan-movements so effective that it
could survive the general decline of antisemitic propaganda during the de-
ceptive quiet that preceded the outbreak of the first World War was its
merger with the tribal nationalism of Eastern Europe. For there existed an
inherent affinity between the pan-movements' theories about peoples and the
rootless existence of the Jewish people. It seemed the Jews were the one
perfect example of a people in the tribal sense, their organization the model
the pan-movements were striving to emulate, their survival and their sup-
posed power the best proof of the correctness of racial theories.
If other nationalities in the Dual Monarchy were but weakly rooted in
the soil and had little sense of the meaning of a common territory, the Jews
were the example of a people who without any home at all had been able to
keep their identity through the centuries and could therefore be cited as
proof that no territory was needed to constitute a nationality.'" If the pan-
movements insisted on the secondary importance of the state and the para-
mount importance of the people, organized throughout countries and not
necessarily represented in visible institutions, the Jews were a perfect model
^* The Linz Program, which remained the Pan-Germans' program in Austria, was
originally phrased without its Jew paragraph; there were even three Jews on the
drafting committee in 1882. The Jew paragraph was added in 1885. See Oscar
Karbach, op. cit.
S5 Otto Bonhard, op. cit., p. 45.
B« So by the certainly not antisemitic Socialist Otto Bauer, op. cit., p. 373.
2^Q IMPERIALISM
of a nation without a state and without visible institutions." If tribal na-
tionalities pointed to themselves as the center of their national pride, re-
gardless of historical achievements and partnership in recorded events, if
they believed that some mysterious inherent psychological or physical qual-
ity made them the incarnation not of Germany but Germanism, not of
Russia, but the Russian soul, they somehow knew, even if they did not
know how to express it, that the Jcwishness of assimilated Jews was ex-
actly the same kind of personal individual embodiment of Judaism and that
the peculiar pride of secularized Jews, who had not given up the claim to
chi>senness. really meant that they believed they were different and better
simply because they happend to be born as Jews, regardless of Jewish
achievements and tradition.
It is true enough that this Jewish attitude, this, as it were, Jewish brand
of tribal nationalism, had been the result of the abnormal position of the
Jews in modern states, outside the pale of society and nation. But the posi-
tion of these shifting ethnic groups, who became conscious of their nation-
ality only through the example of other — Western — nations, and later the
position of the uprooted masses of the big cities, which racism mobilized so
cflicicntly, was in many ways very similar. They too were outside the pale
of siKiety. and they too were outside the political body of the nation-state
which seemed to be the only satisfactory political organization of peoples.
In the Jews they recognized at once their happier, luckier competitors be-
cause, as they saw it, the Jews had found a way of constituting a society of
their own which, precisely because it had no visible representation and no
normal political outlet, could become a substitute for the nation.
But what drove the Jews into the center of these racial ideologies more
than anything else was the even more obvious fact that the pan-movements'
claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim. It did
not matter that the Jewish concept had nothing in common with the tribal
theories about the divine origin of one's own people. The mob was not
much concerned with such niceties of historical correctness and was hardly
aware of the dilTerence between a Jewish mission in history to achieve the
establishment of mankind and its own "mission" to dominate all other
peoples on earth. But the leaders of the pan-movements knew quite well
that the Jews had divided the world, exactly as they had, into two halves —
themselves and all the others.'"^ In this dichotomy the Jews again appeared
" Very instructive for Jewish self-interpretation is A. S. Steinberg's essay "Die
wcll:insch;iulichen Voraussetzungen dcr judischen Geschichtsschreibung," in Dubnov
Fesisihrifi, 1930: "If one . . . is convinced of the concept of life as expressed in
Jewish history . . . then the state question loses its importance, no matter how one
may answer it."
"-The closeness of these concepts to each other may be seen in the following co-
incidence to which many other examples could be added: Steinberg, op. cit., says of
he Jews: their history takes place outside all usual historical laws; Chaadayev calls
ihc Kuvsians an exception people. Berdyaycv stated bluntly {op. cit., p. 135): "Rus-
sian Mcssianism is akin to Jewish Messianism."
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 241
to be the luckier competitors who had inherited something, were recognized
for something which Gentiles had to build from scratch. ^^
It is a "truism" that has not been made truer by repetition that antiscm-
itism is only a form of envy. But in relation to Jewish chosenness it is true
enough. Whenever peoples have been separated from action and achieve-
ments, when these natural ties with the common world have broken or do
not exist for one reason or another, they have been inclined to turn upon
themselves in their naked natural givenness and to claim divinity and a mis-
sion to redeem the whole world. When this happens in Western civilization,
such peoples will invariably find the age-old claim of the Jews in their way.
This is what the spokesmen of pan-movements sensed, and this is why they
remained so untroubled by the realistic question of whether the Jewish
problem in terms of numbers ^nd power was important enough to make
hatred of Jews the mainstay of their ideology. As their own national pride
was independent of all achievements, so their hatred of the Jews had eman-
cipated itself from all specific Jewish deeds and misdeeds. In this the pan-
movements were in complete agreement, although neither knew how to
utilize this ideological mainstay for purposes of political organization.
The time-lag between the formulation of the pan-movements' ideology and
the possibility of its serious political application is demonstrated by the fact
that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" — forged around 1900 by agents
of the Russian secret police in Paris upon the suggestion of Pobyedonostzev,
the political adviser of Nicholas II, and the only Pan-Slav ever in an influ-
ential position — remained a half -forgotten pamphlet until 1919, when it
began its veritably triumphal procession through all European countries and
languages; "^^ its circulation some thirty years later was second only to Hit-
ler's Mein Kampf. Neither the forger nor his employer knew that a time
would come when the police would be the central institution of a society
and the whole power of a country organized according to the supposedly
Jewish principles laid down in the Protocols. Perhaps it was Stalin who was
the first to discover all the potentialities for rule that the police possessed; it
certainly was Hitler who, shrewder than Schoenerer his spiritual father,
knew how to use the hierarchical principle of racism, how to exploit the anti-
semitic assertion of the existence of a "worst" people in order properly to
organize the "best" and all the conquered and oppressed in between, how to
generalize the superiority complex of the pan-movements so that each people,
with the necessary exception of the Jews, could look down upon one that
was even worse off than itself.
Apparently a few more decades of hidden chaos and open despair were
necessary before large strata of people happily admitted that they were going
69 See the antisemite E. Reventlow, op. cit., but also the philosemite Russian phi-
losopher Vladimir Solovyov, Judaism and the Christian Question (1884): Between the
two religious nations, the Russians and the Poles, history has introduced a third re-
ligious people, the Jews. See Ehrenberg, op. cit., p. 314 ff. See also Cleinow, op. cit.,
pp. 44 flf.
«o See John S. Curtiss, The Protocols of Zion, New York, 1942.
2^2 IMPERIALISM
to achieve what, as they believed, only Jews in their innate devilisiiness had
K-cn able to achieve thus far. The leaders of the pan-movements, at any rate,
though already vaguely aware of the social question, were very one-sided
in their insistence on foreign policy. They therefore were unable to see that
antiscmitism could form the necessary link connecting domestic with ex-
ternal methods; they did not know yet how to establish their "folk com-
munity." that is. the completely uprooted, racially indoctrinated horde.
That the pan-movements' fanaticism hit ipon the Jews as the ideological
center, which was the beginning of the end of European Jewry, constitutes
one of the most logical and most bitter revenges history has ever taken. For
of course there is some truth in "enlightened" assertions from Voltaire to
Rcnan and Taine that the Jews' concept of chosenness, their identification
of religion and nationality, their claim to an absolute position in history and
a singlcd-out relationship with God, brought into Western civilization an
otherwise unknown element of fanaticism ( inherit .;d by Christianity with its
claim to exclusive possession of Truth) on one side, and on the other an
clement of pride that was dangerously close to its racial perversion.''^ Politi-
cally, it was of no consequence that Judaism and an intact Jewish piety al-
ways were notably free of, and even hostile to, the heretical immanence of
the Divine.
For tribal nationalism is the precise perversion of a religion which made
God choose one nation, one's own nation; only because this ancient myth,
together with the only people surviving from antiquity, had struck deep roots
in Western civilization could the modern mob leader, with a certain amount
of plausibility, summon up the impudence to drag God into the petty con-
flicts between peoples and to ask His consent to an election which the leader
had already happily manipulated."^ The hatred of the racists against the
Jews sprang from a superstitious apprehension that it actually might be the
Jews, and not themselves, whom God had chosen, to whom success was
granted by divine providence. There was an element of feeble-minded re-
sentment against a people who, it was feared, had received a rationally in-
comprehensible guarantee that they would emerge eventually, and in spite of
appearances, as the final victors in world history.
For to the mentality of the mob the Jewish concept of a divine mission to
•' See Bcrdyaev, op. cit., p. 5: "Religion and nationality in the Muscovite kingdom
grew up together, as they did also in the consciousness of the ancient Hebrew people.
And in the same way as Messianic consciousness was an attribute of Judaism, it was
an attribute of Russian Orthodoxy also."
" A fantastic example of the madness in the whole business is the following pas-
sage m Leon Bloy— which fortunately is not characteristic of French nationalism:
France is so much the first of the nations that all others, no matter who they are,
must be honored if they are permitted to eat the bread of her dogs. If only France is
happy, then the rest of the world can be satisfied even though they have to pay for
rXrr,h.'?'"'M ^i'^'^'^^^H' °r destruction. But if France suffers, then God Himself
Drcde!;,nJ,.nn •• n' ^H . • • J^'' '' ^' ^^'°'"'^ ^"'J ^s inevitable as the secret of
predestination. Quoted from R. Nadolny. Germanisierung oder Slavisierung? . 1928,
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS
bring about the kingdom of God could only appear in the vulgar
success and failure. Fear and hatred were nourished and somewhal
alized by the fact that Christianity, a religion of Jewish origin, had already
conquered Western mankind. Guided by their own ridiculous superstition,
the leaders of the pan-movements found that little hidden cog in the me-
chanics of Jewish piety that made a complete reversion and perversion pos-
sible, so that chosenness was no longer the myth for an ultimate realization
of the ideal of a common humanity — but for its final destruction.
II: The Inheritance of Lawlessness
OPEN DISREGARD for law and legal institutions and ideological justification
of lawlessness has been much more characteristic of continental than of
overseas imperialism. This is partly due to the fact that continental imperial-
ists lacked the geographical distance to separate the illegality of their rule
on foreign continents from the legality of their home countries' institutions.
Of equal importance is the fact that the pan-movements originated in coun-
tries which had never known constitutional government, so that their lead-
ers naturally conceived of government and power in terms of arbitrary de-
cisions from above.
Contempt for law became characteristic of all movements. Though more
fully articulated in Pan-Slavism than in Pan-Germanism it reflected the
actual conditions of rule in both Russia and Austria-Hungary. To describe
these two despotisms, the only ones left in Europe at the outbreak of the first
World War, in terms of multinational states gives only one part of the pic-
ture. As much as for their rule over multinational territories they were dis-
tinguished from other governments in that they governed the peoples di-
rectly (and not only exploited them) by a bureaucracy; parties played in-
significant roles, and parliaments had no legislative functions; the state ruled
through an administration that applied decrees. The significance of Parlia-
ment for the Dual Monarchy was little more than that of a not too bright
debating society. In Russia as well as pre-war Austria serious opposition
could hardly be found there but was exerted by outside groups who knew
that their entering the parliamentary system would only detract popular
attention and support from them.
Legally, government by bureaucracy is government by decree, and this
means that power, which in constitutional government only enforces the law,
becomes the direct source of all legislation. Decrees moreover remain anony-
mous (while laws can always be traced to specific men or assemblies), and
therefore seem to flow from some over-all ruling power that needs no justi-
fication. Pobyedonostzev's contempt for the "snares" of the law was the
eternal contempt of the administrator for the supposed lack of freedom of
the legislator, who is hemmed in by principles, and for the inaction of the
executors of law, who are restricted by its interpretation. The bureaucrat.
7.^4 IMPERIALISM
who by merely administering decrees has the illusion of constant action, feels
tremendously superior to these "impractical" people who are forever en-
tangled in "legal niceties" and therefore stay outside the sphere of power
which to him is the source of everything.
Ihe administrator considers the law to be powerless because it is by
definition separated from its application. The decree, on the other hand,
does not exist at all except if and when it is applied; it needs no justification
except applicability. It is true that decrees are used by all governments in
times of emergency, but then the emergency itself is a clear justification and
automatic limitation. In governments by bureaucracy decrees appear in their
naked purity as though they were no longer issued by powerful men, but
were the incarnation of power itself and the administrator only its accidental
agent. There are no general principles which simple reason can understand
behind the decree, but ever-changing circumstances which only an expert
can know in detail. People ruled by decree never know what rules them be-
cause of the impossibility of understanding decrees in themselves and the
carefully organized ignorance of specific circumstances and their practical
significance in which all administrators keep their subjects. Colonial imperi-
alism, which also ruled by decree and was sometimes even defined as the
"rci;inu' dvs dec rets,"''-" was dangerous enough; yet the very fact that the ad-
ministrators over native populations were imported and felt to be usurpers,
mitigated its influence on the subject peoples. only where, as in Russia and
Austria, native rulers and a native bureaucracy were accepted as the legiti-
mate government, could rule by decree create the atmosphere of arbitrari-
ness and .secretiveness which effectively hid its mere expediency.
Rule by decree has conspicuous advantages for the domination of far-
flung territories with heterogeneous populations and for a policy of oppres-
sion. Its efficiency is superior simply because it ignores all intermediary
stages between issuance and application, and because it prevents political
reasoning by the people through the withholding of information. It can
easily overcome the variety of local customs and need not rely on the neces-
sarily slow process of development of general law. It is most helpful for the
establishment of a centralized administration because it overrides auto-
matically all matters of local autonomy. If rule by good laws has sometimes
been called the rule of wisdom, rule by appropriate decrees may rightly be
called the rule of cleverness. For it is clever to reckon with ulterior motives
and aims, and it is wise to understand and create by deduction from gen-
erally accepted principles.
Government by bureaucracy has to be distinguished from the mere out-
growth and deformation of civil services which frequently accompanied the
decline of the nation-state — as, notably, in France. There the administration
has survived all changes in regime since the Revolution, entrenched itself
like a parasite in the body politic, developed its own class interests, and be-
come a useless organism whose only purpose appears to be chicanery and
prevention of normal economic and political development. There are of
'i^^A<^' llt'"'^^*^'"' ^'■"''^' Elementaire cle U}-iskttion Algi-riemie, 1903, Vol. II,
pp. nu-152: The rcf-ime des decrets i.s tfie government of all French colonies."
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 245
course many superficial similarities between the two types of bureaucracy,
especially if one pays too much attention to the striking psychological simi-
larity of petty officials. But if the French people have made the very serious
mistake of accepting their administration as a necessary evil, they have
never committed the fatal error of allowing it to rule the country — even
though the consequence has been that nobody rules it. The French atmos-
phere of government has become one of inefficiency and vexations; but
it has not created an aura of pseudomysticism.
And it is this pseudomysticism that is the stamp of bureaucracy when it
becomes a form of government. Since the people it dominates never really
know why something is happening, and a rational interpretation of laws does
not exist, there remains only one thing that counts, the brutal naked event
itself. What happens to one then becomes subject to an interpretation whose
possibilities are endless, unlimited by reason and unhampered by knowl-
edge. Within the framework of such endless interpretative speculation, so
characteristic of all branches of Russian pre-revolutionary literature, the
whole texture of life and world assume a mysterious secrecy and depth.
There is a dangerous charm in this aura because of its seemingly inex-
haustible richness; interpretation of suffering has a much larger range than
that of action for the former goes on in the inwardness of the soul and re-
leases all the possibilities of human imagination, whereas the latter is con-
stantly checked, and possibly led into absurdity, by outward consequence
and controllable experience.
one of the most glaring differences between the old-fashioned rule by
bureaucracy and the up-to-date totalitarian brand is that Russia's and Aus-
tria's pre-war rulers were content with an idle radiance of power and, sat-
isfied to control its outward destinies, left the whole inner life of the soul
intact. Totalitarian bureaucracy, with a more complete understanding of
the meaning of absolute power, intruded upon the private individual and his
inner life with equal brutality. The result of this radical efficiency has been
that the inner spontaneity of people under its rule was killed along with their
social and political activities, so that the merely political sterility under the
older bureaucracies was followed by total sterility under totalitarian rule.
The age which saw the rise of the pan-movements, however, was still
happily ignorant of total sterilization. on the contrary, to an innocent ob-
server (as most Westerners were) the so-called Eastern soul appeared to be
incomparably richer, its psychology more profound, its literature more
meaningful than that of the "shallow" Western democracies. This psycho-
logical and literary adventure into the "depths" of suffering did not come
to pass in Austria-Hungary because its literature was mainly German-
language literature, which after all was and remained part and parcel of Ger-
man literature in general. Instead of inspiring profound humbug, Austrian
bureaucracy rather caused its greatest modern writer to become the humorist
and critic of the whole matter. Franz Kafka knew well enough the super-
stition of fate which possesses people who live under the perpetual rule of
accidents, the inevitable tendency to read a special superhuman meaning
into happenings whose rational significance is beyond the knowledge and
jj^ IMPERIALISM
undcpiianding of the ccncemed. He was well aware of the weird attractive-
ness of such peoples, their melancholy and beautifully sad folk tales which
seemed so superior to the lighter and brighter literature of more fortunate
peoples. He exposed the pride in necessity as such, even the necessity of
evil, and the nauseating conceit which identifies evil and misfortune with
destiny. The miracle is only that he could do this in a world in which the
main elements of this atmosphere were not fully articulated; he trusted his
great powers of imagination to draw all the necessary conclusions and, as
it were, to complete what reality had somehow neglected to bring into full
focus."
only the Russian Empire of that time offered a complete picture of rule
by bureaucracy. 1 he chaotic conditions of the country — too vast to be ruled,
populated by primitive peoples without experience in political organization
of any kind, who vegetated under the incomprehensible overlordship of the
Russian bureaucracy — conjured up an atmosphere of anarchy and hazard in
which the conflicting whims of petty officials and the daily accidents of in-
competence and inconsistency inspired a philosophy that saw in the Acci-
dent the true Lord of Life, something like the apparition of Divine Prov-
idence.** To the Pan-Slav who always insisted on the so much more "inter-
esting" conditions in Russia against the shallow boredom of civilized coun-
tries, it looked as though the Divine had found an intimate immanence in
the soul of the unhappy Russian people, matched nowhere else on earth.
In an unending stream of literary variations the Pan-Slavs opposed the pro-
fundity and violence of Russia to the superficial banality of the West, which
did not know suffering or the meaning of sacrifice, and behind whose sterile
civilized surface were hidden frivolity and triteness. "^^ The totalitarian move-
ments still owed much of their appeal to this vague and embittered anti-
*' Sec especially the magnificent story in The Castle (1930) of the Barnabases, which
reads like a weird travesty of a piece of Russian literature. The family is living under
a curse, treated as lepers till they feel themselves such, merely because one of their
pretty daughters once dared to reject the indecent advances of an important official.
The plain villagers, controlled to the last detail by a bureaucracy, and slaves even in
their thoughts to the whims of their all-powerful officials, had long since come to
realize that to be in the right or to be in the wrong was for them a matter of pure
"fate" which they could not alter. It is not, as K. naively assumes, the sender of an
obscene letter who is exposed, but the recipient who becomes branded and tainted.
This is what the villagers mean when they speak of their "fate." In K.'s view, "it's
unjust and monstrous, but |he is) the only one in the village of that opinion.'
«« Dcitkalion of accidents serves of course as rationalization for every people that
is not master of its own destiny. See for instance Steinberg, op. cit.: "For it is Accident
that has become decisive for the structure of Jewish history. And Accident .... in
the language of religion is called Providence" (p. 34).
«»A Russian writer once said that Pan-Slavism "engenders an implacable hatred
of the West, a morbid cult of everything Russian; ... the salvation of the universe
is .still possible, but it can come about only through Russia. . . . The Pan-Slavists,
seeing enemies of their idea everywhere, persecute everybody who does not agree
with them . . ." (Victor Berard, f Empire riisse et le tsarisme, 1905.) See also N. V.
Bubnoff. Kuliur und Geschichte im russischen Denken der Gegenwart, 1927, in
Osteuropa: Quellcn und Studien. Heft 2. Chapter v
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 247
Western mood that was especially in vogue in pre-Hitler Germany and Aus-
tria, but had seized the general European intelligentsia of the twenties as
well. Up to the moment of actual seizure of power, they could use this pas-
sion for the profound and rich "irrational," and during the crucial years
when the exiled Russian intelligentsia exerted a not negligible influence upon
the spiritual mood of an entirely disturbed Europe, this purely literary atti-
tude proved to be a strong emotional factor in preparing the ground for total-
itarianism."*
Movem ents, as contrasted to parties, did not simply degenerate into bu-
reaucratic jnachines,"^ but saw in bureaucratic regimes possible models of
organization. The admiration which inspired the Pan-Slav Pogodin's descrip-
tion of the machine of Czarist Russian bureaucracy would have been shared
by them all: "A tremendous machine, constructed after the simplest prin-
ciples, guided by the hand of one man . . . which sets it in motion at every
moment with a single movement, no matter which direction and speed he
may choose. And this is not merely a mechanical motion, the machine is
entirely animated by inherited emotions, which are subordination, limitless
confidence and devotion to the Czar who is their God on earth. Who would
dare to attack us and whom could we not force into obedience?" '^^
Pan-Slavists were less opposed to the state than their Pan-Germanist col-
leagues. They sometimes even tried to convince the Czar to become the
head of the movement. The reason for this tendency is of course that the
Czar's position differed considerably from that of any European monarch,
the Emperor of Austria-Hungary not excluded, and that the Russian des-
potism never developed into a rational state in the Western sense but re-
mained fluid, anarchic, and unorganized. Czarism, therefore, sometimes ap-
peared to the Pan-Slavists as the symbol of a gigantic moving force sur-
rounded by a halo of unique holiness. "'■* Pan-Slavism, in contrast to Pan-
Germanism, did not have to invent a new ideology to suit the needs of the
60 Ehrenberg, op. cit., stresses this in his epilogue: The ideas of a Kirejcwski,
Chomjakow, Leontjew "may have died out in Russia after the Revolution. But now
they have spread all over Europe and live today in Sofia, Constantinople, Berlin,
Paris, London. Russians, and precisely the disciples of these authors, . . . publish
books and edit magazines that are read in all European countries; through them,
these ideas — the ideas of their spiritual fathers — are represented. The Russian spirit
has become European" (p. 334).
"7 For the bureaucratization of party machines, Robert Michels, Political Parties;
a sociolosical study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy (English
translation Glencoe, 1949, from the German edition of 1911), is still the standard
work.
"** K. Staehlin, "Die Entstchung des Panslawismus," in G ermano-Slavica, 1936,
Heft 4.
"" M. N. Katkov: "All power has its derivation from God; the Russian Czar, how-
ever, was granted a special significance distinguishing him from the rest of the world's
rulers. ... He is a successor of the Caesars of the Eastern Empire, . . . the founders
of the very creed of the Faith of Christ. . . . Herein lies the mystery of the deep
distinction between Russia and all the nations of the world." Quoted from Salo W.
Baron, Modern Nationalism and Religion, 1947.
■4,s
IMPERIALISM
Slavic soul ;md its movement, but could interpret— and make a mystery of —
Czarism as the anti-Western, anticonstitutional, antistatc ｅxpression of the
movement itself. This mystification of anarchic power inspired Pan-Slavism
with its most pernicious theories about the transcendent nature and inherent
gixxlncss of all power. Power was conceived as a divine emanation per-
vadmg all natural and human activity. It was no longer a means to achieve
somcthini;: it simply existed, men were dedicated to its service for the love
of CukI, and any law that might regulate or restrain its "limitless and ter-
rible strength" was clearly sacrilege, in its complete arbitrariness, power as
such was held to be holy, whether it was the power of the Czar or the power
of sex. Laws were not only incompatible with it, they were sinful, man-
made "snares" that prevented the full development of the "divine."'" The
government, no matter what it did, was still the "Supreme Power in action,"^'
and the Pan-Slav movement only had to adhere to this power and to or-
ganize its }x>pular support, which eventually would permeate and therefore
sanctify the whole [-n^ople — a colossal herd, obedient to the arbitrary will
of one man. ruled neither by law nor interest, but kept together solely by
the cohesive force of their numbers and the conviction of their own holiness.
From the beginning, the movements lacking the "strength of inherited
emotions" had to differ from the model of the already existing Russian
despotism in two respects. They had to make propaganda which the estab-
hshed bureaucracy hardly needed, and did this by introducing an element
o_f_yiolence; '-■ and they found a substitute for the role of "inherited emo-
'" Pobycilt>nosl/cv in his RejUitions of a Russian Statesman, London, 1898: "Power
cxiNis not for itself alone bin for the love of God. It is a service to which men are
dedicated. Ihence comes the limitless, terrible strength of power and its limitless and
icrriblc burden" (p. 254). Or: "The law becomes a snare not only to the people, but
to the very authorities engai;ed in its administration ... if at every step the
executor of the law finds in the law itself restrictive prescriptions . . . then all
HUthority is lost in doubt, weakened by the law . . . and crushed by the fear of
responsibility" (p. 88).
" According to Katkov "government in Russia means a thing totally different from
what is understood by (his term in other countries. ... In Russia the government in
Ihc highest sense of the word, is the Supreme Power in action. . . ." Moissaye J. Olgin,
The Soul <»/ the Russian Revolution. New York. 1917, p. 57. — In a more rationalized
form, we find the theory that "legal guarantees were needed in states founded upon
conquest and threatened by the conflict of classes and races; they were superfluous in
a Russia with harmony of classes and friendship of races" (Hans Kohn, op. cit.).
Although idolization of power played a less articulate role in Pan-Germanism, there
wa.ii always a certain antilegal tendency which for instance comes out clearly in
Frymann. op. cii.. who as early as 1912 proposed the introduction of that "protective
cusicxly iSnhcrhfitshafi). that is. arrest without any legal reason, which the Nazis
then used to fill concentration camps.
" There is of course a patent similarity between the French mob organization
durmg Ihc Dreyfus Affair (see p. 1 1 1 ) and Russian pogrom groups such as the "Black
Hundreds -m which the "wildest and the least cultivated dregs of old Russia [were
gathered ahd which) kept contact with the majority of the Orthodox episcopate"
(P-cdotow. op. (//.)-or the "League of the Russian People" with its secret Fighting
Squadrons recruited rom the lower agents of the police, paid by the government,
and led by intellectuals. See fc. Cherikover. "New Materials on the Pogroms in Russia
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 249
tions" in the ideologies which Continental parties had already developed
to a co nsiderable extent. The difference in their use of ideology was that
they not only added ideological justification to interest representation, but
used ideologies as organizational principles. If the parties had been bodies
for the organization of class interests, the movements became embodiments
of ideologies. I n oth er words, movements were "charged with philosophy"
and claim ed they had set into motion "the individualization of the moral
u niversal within a collective." ^^
It is true that concretization of ideas had first been conceived in Hegel's
theory of state and history and had been further developed in Marx's theory
of the proletariat as the protagonist of mankind. It is of course not acci-
dental that Russian Pan-Slavism was as much influenced by Hegel as Bol-
shevism was influenced by Marx. Yet neither Marx nor Hegel assumed
actual human beings and actual parties or countries to be ideas in the flesh;
both believed in the process of history in which ideas could be concretized
only in a complicated dialectical movement. It needed the vulgarity of mob
leaders to hit upon the tremendous possibilities of such concretization for
the organization of masses. These men began to tell the mob that each of
its members could become such a lofty all-important walking embodiment
of something ideal if he would only join the movement. Then he no longer
had to be loyal or generous or courageous, he would automatically be the
very incarnation of Loyalty, Generosity, Courage. Pan-Germanism showed
itself somewhat superior in organizational theory, insofar as it shrewdly
deprived the individual German of all these wondrous qualities if he did
not adhere to the movement (thereby foreshadowing the spiteful contempt
which Nazism later expressed for the non-Party members of the German
people), whereas Pan-Slavism, absorbed deeply in its limitless speculations
about the Slav soul, assumed that every Slav consciously or unconsciously
possessed such a soul no matter whether he was properly organized or not.
It needed Stalin's ruthlessness to introduce into Bolshevism the same con-
tempt for the Russian people that the Nazis showed toward the Germans.
I t is thi s absoluteness of movements which more than anything else sep-
arates them from party structures and their partiality, and serves to justify
thei r claim to overrule all objections of individual conscience. The partic-
ular reality of the individual person appears against the background of a
spurious reality of the general and universal, shrinks into a negligible quan-
tity or is submerged in the stream of dynamic movement of the universal
itself. In this stream the difference between ends and means evaporates
together with the personality, and the result is the monstrous immorality
of ideological politics. All that matters is embodied in the moving movement
itself; every idea, every value has vanished into a welter of superstitious
pseudoscientific immanence.
-f
at the Beginning of the Eighties" in Historishe Shriftn (Vilna), II, 463; and N. M.
Gelber, "The Russian Pogroms in the Early Eighties in the Light of the Austrian
Diplomatic Correspondence," ibid.
73 Deles, op. cit.
250 IMPERIALISM
III: Party and Movement
THi STRIKING iind fatcful difference between continental and overseas im-
perialism has been that their initial successes and failures were in exact op-
position. While continental imperialism, even in its beginnings, succeeded
in realizing the imperialist hostility against the nation-state by organizing
large strata of people outside the party system, and always failed to get
results in tangible expansion, overseas imperialism, in its mad and success-
ful rushes to annex more and more far-flung territories, was never very
successful when it attempted to change the home countries' political struc-
ture. The nation-state system's ruin, having been prepared by its own over-
seas imperialism, was eventually carried out by those movements which had
originated outside its own realm. And when it came to pass that movements
began successfully to compete with the nation-state's party system, it was
also seen that they could undermine only countries with a multiparty sys-
tem, that mere imperialist tradition was not sufficient to give them mass
appeal, and that Great Britain, the classic country of two-party rule, did
not produce a movement of either Fascist or Communist orientation of
any consequence outside her party system.
The slogan "above the parties," the appeal to "men of all parties," and
the boast that they would "stand far removed from the strife of parties and
represent only a national purpose" was equally characteristic of all imperial-
ist groups,"* where it appeared as a natural consequence of their exclusive
interest in foreign policy in which the nation was supposed to act as a
whole in any event, independent of classes and parties."^ Since, moreover, in
the Continental systems this representation of the nation as a whole had
"As the President of the German Kolonialverein put it in 1884. See Mary E.
Townscnd. Origin of Modern German Colonialism: 1871-1885, New York, 1921.
The Pan-German League always insisted on its being "above the parties; this was
and is a vital condition for the League" (Otto Bonhard, op. cit.). The first real party
that claimed to be more than a party, namely an "imperial party," was the National-
Liberal Party in Germany under the leadership of Ernst Bassermann (Frymann,
op. lit.).
In Russia, the Pan-Slavs needed only to pretend to be nothing more than popular
support for the government, in order to be removed from all competition with parties;
for the government as "the Supreme Power in action . . . cannot be understood as
related to parties." Thus M. N. Katkov, close journalistic collaborator of Pobyedo-
nostzev Sec Olgin, op. cit., p. 57.
"This clearly was still the purpose of the early "beyond party" groups among
which up to 1918 the Pan-German League must still be counted. "Standing outside of
all organized political parties, we may go our purely national way. We do not ask: Are
you conservative' Are you liberal? ... The German nation is the meeting point
upon which all parties can make common cause." Lehr, Zwecke and Ziele des all-
deuischen Verbandes. Flugschriften, No. 14. Translation quoted from Wertheimer,
op. cit., p. 1 10.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 251
been the "monopoly" of the state,'^" it could even seem that the imperialists
put the state's interests above everything else, or that the interest of the
nation as a whole had found in them its long-sought popular support. Yet
despite all such claims to true popularity the "parties above parties" re-
mained small societies of intellectuals and well-to-do people who, like the
Pan-German League, could hope to find a larger appeal only in times of
national emergency J^
The decisive invention of the pan-movements, therefore, was not that
they too claimed to be outside and above the party system, but that they
called themselves "movements," their very name alluding to the profound
distrust for all parties that was already widespread in Europe at the turn
of the century and finally became so decisive that in the days of the Weimar
Rep ublic, for instance, "oach new group believed it could find no better
l egitim ization and no better appeal to the masses than a clear insistence
that it was not a 'party' but a 'movement.' "'*'
It is true that the actual disintegration of the European party system was
brought about, not by the pan- but by the totalitarian movements. The
pan-movements, however, which found their place somewhere between the
small and comparatively harmless imperialist societies and the totalitarian
movements, were forerunners of the totalitarians, insofar as they had
already discarded the element of snobbery so conspicuous in all imperialist
leagues, whether the snobbery of wealth and birth in England or of educa-
tion in Germany, and therefore could take advantage of the deep popular
hatred for those institutions which were supposed to represent the people. '''*
It is not surprising that the appeal of movements in Europe has not been
hurt much by the defeat of Nazism and the growing fear of Bolshevism.
As matters stand now, the only country in Europe where Parliament is not
despised and the party system not hated is Great Britain.^"
■'"Carl Schmitt, Stuat, Bewegung, Volk (1934). speaks of the "monopoly of politics
which the state had acquired during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."
''■' Wertheimer, op. cit., depicts the situation quite correctly when she says: "That
there was any vital connection before the war between the Pan-German League and
the imperial government is entirely preposterous." on the other hand, it was perfectly
true that German policy during the first World War was decisively influenced by Pan-
Germans because the higher officer corps had become Pan-German. See Hans Del-
briJck, Ludendorffs Selhstportrait. Berlin, 1922. Compare also his earlier article
on the subject, "Die Alldeutschen," in Preussische Jahrhiicher, 154, December, 1913.
''^ Sigmund Neumann, Die deutschen Parteien, 1932, p. 99.
^" Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 1923, pp. vii-viii, describes the situa-
tion: "When the World War ended in defeat ... we met Germans everywhere who
said they were outside all parties, who talked about 'freedom from parties,' who tried
to find a point of view 'above parties.' ... A complete lack of respect for Parlia-
ments . . . which at no time have the faintest idea of what is really going on in the
country ... is very widespread among the people."
*" British dissatisfaction with the Front Bench system has nothing to do with this
anti-Parliamentarian sentiment, the British in this instance being opposed to some-
thing that prevents Parliament from functioning properly.
252
IMPERIALISM
Faced with the stability of political institutions in the British Isles and the
simultaneous decline of all nation-states on the Continent, one can hardly
avoid concluding that the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the
Continental party system must be an important factor. For the merely
material differences between a greatly impoverished England and an un-
dcstroyed France were not great after the close of this war; unemployment,
the greatest revolutionizing factor in prewar Europe, had hit England even
harder than many Continental countries; and the shock to which England's
political stability was being exposed right after the war through the Labor
Government's liquidation of imperialist government in India and its ten-
tative efforts to rebuild an English world policy along nonimperialist lines
must have been tremendous. Nor does mere difference in social structure
account for the relative strength of Great Britain; for the economic basis
of her social system has been severely changed by the socialist Government
without any decisive change in political institutions.
Behind the external difference between the Anglo-Saxon two-party and
the Continental multiparty system lies a fundamental distinction between
the party's function within the body politic, which has great consequences
for the party's attitude to power, and the citizen's position in his state. In
the two-party system one party always represents the government and
actually rules the country, so that, temporarily, the party in power becomes
identical with the state. The state, as a permanent guarantee of the coun-
try's unity, is represented only in the permanence of the office of the King*^^
( for the permanent Undersecretaryship of the Foreign Office is only a mat-
ter of continuity). As the two parties are planned and organized for alter-
nate rule,"*- all branches of the administration are planned and organized
for alternation. Since the rule of each party is limited in time, the opposition
party exerts a control whose efficiency is strengthened by the certainty
that it is the ruler of tomorrow. In fact, it is the opposition rather than
the symbolic position of the King that guarantees the integrity of the whole
against one-party dictatorship. The obvious advantages of this system are
that there is no essential difference between government and state, that
power as well as the state remain within the grasp of the citizens organized
in the party, which represents the power and the state either of today or
of tomorrow, and that consequently there is no occasion for indulgence in
lofty speculations about Power and State as though they were something
beyond human reach, metaphysical entities independent of the will and
action of the citizens.
"' The British party system, the oldest of all, "began to take shape . . . only when
the affairs of state ceased to be exclusively the prerogative of the crown . . . ," that
IS. after 1688. "The King's role has been historically to represent the nation as a
unity as against the factional strife of parties." See article "Political Parties" 3, "Great
BrMam by W. A. Rudlin in Encyclopedu, of the Social Sciences.
" In what seems to be the earliest history of the "party," George W. Cooke, The
Hiuory of Party. London. 1836, in the preface defines the subject as a system by
which "two classes of statesmen . . . alternately govern a mighty empire."
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 253
The Continental party system supposes that each party defines itself con-
sciously as a part of the whole, which in turn is represented by a state above
parties.**^ A one-party rule therefore can only signify the dictatorial dom-
ination of one part over all others. Governments formed by alliances be-
tween party leaders are always only party governments, clearly distinguished
from the state which rests above and beyond them. one of the minor
shortcomings of this system is that cabinet members cannot be chosen ac-
cording to competence, for too many parties are represented, and ministers
are necessarily chosen according to party alliances; ^^^ the British system,
on the other hand, permits a choice of the best men from the large ranks
of one party. Much more relevant, however, is the fact that the multiparty
system never allows any one man or any one party to assume full responsi-
bility, with the natural consequence that no government, formed by party
alliances, ever feels fully responsible. Even if the improbable happens and
an absolute majority of one party dominates Parliament and results in one-
party rule, this can only end either in dictatorship, because the system is
not prepared for such government, or in the bad conscience of a still truly
democratic leadership which, accustomed to thinking of itself only as part
of the whole, will naturally be afraid of using its power. This bad conscience
functioned in a well-nigh exemplary fashion when, after the first World
War, the German and Austrian Social Democratic parties emerged for a
short moment as absolute majority parties, yet repudiated the power which
went with this position. '^^
Since the rise of the party systems it has been a matter of course to
identify parties with particular interests, economic or others,**** and all Con-
"^ The best account of the essence of the Continental party system is given by the
Swiss jurist Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Charakter unci Geist der politischen Parteien,
1869. He states: "It is true that a party is only part of a greater whole, never this
whole itself. ... It must never identify itself with the whole, the people or the
state . . . ; therefore a party may fight against other parties, but it must never ignore
them and usually must not want to destroy them. No party can exist all by itself"
(p. 3). The same idea is expressed by Karl Rosenkranz, a German Hegelian philoso-
pher, whose book on political parties appeared before parties existed in Germany:
Ueber den Begriff der politischen Partei ( 1843): "Party is conscious partiality" (p. 9).
^■^ See John Gilbert Heinberg, Comparative Major European Governments, New
York, 1937, chapters vii and viii. "In England one political party usually has a majority
in the House of Commons, and the leaders of the party are members of the Cab-
inet. ... In France, no political party in practice ever has a majority of the mem-
bers of the Chamber of Deputies, and, consequently, the Council of Ministers is com-
posed of the leaders of a number of party groups" (p. 158).
'^^ See Demokratie and Partei, ed. by Peter R. Rohden, Vienna, 1932, Introduction:
"The distinguishing characteristic of German parties is . . . that all parlianjentary
groups are resigned not to represent the volonte generate. . . . That is why the parties
were so embarrassed when the November Revolution brought them to power. Each
of them was so organized that it could only make a relative claim, i.e., it always reck-
oned with the existence of other parties representing other partial interests and thus
naurally limited its own ambitions" (pp. 13-14).
^^ The Continental party system is of very recent date. With the exception of the
French parties which date back to the French Revolution, no European country knew
party representation prior to 1848. Parties came into being through formation of
2S4 IMPERIALISM
tincntal parties, not only the labor groups, have been very frank in admit-
ting this as long as they could be sure that a state above parties exerts its
power more or less in the interest of all. 1 he Anglo-Saxon party, on the
contrary, founded on some "particular principle" for the service of the
"national interest.""' is itself the actual or future state of the country;
particular interests are represented in the party itself, as its right and left
wmg, and held in check by the very necessities of government. And since
in the two-party system a party cannot exist for any length of time if it
dt-tcs not win enough strength to assume power, no theoretical justification
IS needed, no ideologies are developed, and the peculiar fanaticism of Con-
tinental party strife, which springs not so much from conflicting interests
as from antagonistic ideologies, is completely absent. ^^
The trouble with the Continental parties, separated on principle from
government and power, was not so much that they were trapped in the nar-
rowness of particular interests as that they were ashamed of these interests
and therefore developed those justifications which led each one into an
ideology claiming that its particular interests coincided with the most gen-
eral interests of humanity. The conservative party was not content to defend
the interests of landed property but needed a philosophy according to which
God had created man to till the soil by the sweat of his brow. The same
is true for the progress ideology of the middle-class parties and for the
labor parties' claim that the proletariat is the leader of mankind. This
strange combination of lofty philosophy and down-to-earth interests is para-
doxical only at first glance. Since these parties did not organize their
members (or educate their leaders) for the purpose of handling public
affairs, but represented them only as private individuals with private inter-
ests, they had to cater to all private needs, spiritual as well as material.
In other words, the chief difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the
Continental party is that the former is a political organization of citizens
who need to "act in concert" in order to act at all,^'* while the latter is
iclions in Parliament. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party was the first party
(m 1889) with a fully formulated program (Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, loc. cit.).
For Germany, see Ludwiy Be rgst raes.se r. Ge.ichichle der politischen Parteien, 1921.
All parties were frankly based upon protection of interests; the German Conservative
Party for instance developed from the "Association to protect the interests of big
landed property'" founded in 1848. Interests were not necessarily economic, however.
The Dutch parties, for instance, were formed "over the two questions that so largely
dommalc Dutch politics— the broiidening of the franchise and the subsidizing of
private Imainiy denominational] education" (Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
Int. cil.).
" F-.dmund Burke-s definition of party: "Party is a body of men united for promot-
ing;, by ihcir joint endeavor, the national interest, upon some particular principle in
which they arc all agreed" (Upon Party. 2nd edition, London, 1850).
""Arthur N. Ho\combc '(Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, loc. cit.) rightly
stressed that in the double party system the principles of the two parties "have tended
to be the same. If they had not been substantially the same, submission to the victor
would have been intolerable to the vanquished."
"" Burke, op. ci,.: "They believed that no men could act with effect, who did not
..ct m concert; that no men could act in concert, who did not act with confidence; that
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 255
the organization of private individuals who want their interests to be pro-
tected against interference from public affairs.
It is consistent with this system that the Continental state philosophy rec-
ognized men to be citizens only insofar as they were not party members, i.e.,
in their individual unorganized relationship to the state {Staatsbiirger) or in
their patriotic enthusiasm in times of emergency {citoyens) .^^ This was
the unfortunate result of the transformation of the citoyen of the French
Revolution into the bourgeois of the nineteenth century on one hand, and
of the antagonism between state and society on the other. The Germans
tended to consider patriotism an obedient self-oblivion before the authori-
ties and the French an enthusiastic loyalty to the phantom of "eternal
France." In both cases, patriotism meant an abandonment of one's party
and partial interests in favor of the government and the national interest.
The point is that such nationalistic deformation was almost inevitable in a
system that created political parties out of private interests, so that the pub-
lic good had to depend upon force from above and a vague generous self-
sacrifice from below which could be achieved only by arousing national-
istic passions. In England, on the contrary, antagonism between private
and national interest never played a decisive role in politics. The more,
therefore, the party system on the Continent corresponded to class interests,
the more urgent was the need of the nation for nationalism, for some pop-
ular ｅxpression and support of national interests, a support which England
with its direct government by party and opposition never needed so much.
If we consider the difference between the Continental multiparty and the
British two-party system with regard to their predisposition to the rise
of movements, it seems plausible that it should be easier for a one-party
dictatorship to seize the state machinery in countries where the state is
above the parties, and thereby above the citizens, than in those where the
citizens by acting "in concert," i.e., through party organization, can win
power legally and feel themselves to be the proprietors of the state either
of today or of tomorrow. It appears even more plausible that the mystifica-
no men could act with confidence, who were not bound together by common opinions,
common affections, and common interests."
^° For the Central European concept of citizen (the Staatsbiirger) as opposed to
party member, see Bluntschli, op. cit.: "Parties are not state institutions, . . . not
members of the state organism, but free social associations whose formations depend
upon a changing membership united for common political action by a definite con-
viction." The difference between state and party interest is stressed time and again:
"The party must never put itself above the state, must never put its party interest
above the state interest" (pp. 9 and 10).
Burke, on the contrary, argues against the concept according to which party in-
terests or party membership make a man a worse citizen. "Commonwealths are made
of families, free commonwealths of parties also; and we may as well affirm that our
natural regards and ties of blood tend inevitably to make men bad citizens, as that the
bonds of our party weaken those by which we are held to our country" {op. cit.).
Lord John Russell, on Party (1850), even goes one step further when he asserts that
the chief of the good effects of parties is "that it gives a substance to the shadowy
opinions of politicians, and attaches them to steady and lasting principles."
_Mft IMPERIALISM
tion of pKHvcr inherent in the movements should be more easily achieved
ihe f.irthcr removed the eitizcns arc from the sources of power — easier
in bureaucraticaily ruled countries where power positively transcends the
capacity to understand on the part of the ruled, than in constitutionally
governed countries where the law is above power and power is only a
rneans of its enforcement; and easier yet in countries where the state power
IS beyond the reach of the parties and therefore, even if it remains within
the reach of the citizen's intelligence, is removed beyond the reach of his
practical experience and action.
The ahenation of the masses from government, which was the beginning
i)f their eventual hatred of and disgust with Parliament, was different in
France and other Western democracies on one hand, and in the Central
European countries, Germany chiefly, on the other. In Germany, where
the state was by definition above the parties, party leaders as a rule sur-
rendered their party allegiance the moment they became ministers and
were charged with official duties. Disloyalty to one's own party was the
duty of everyone in public office.'" In France, ruled by party alliances, no
real government has been possible since the establishment of the Third
Republic and its fantastic record of cabinets. Her weakness was the op-
posite of the German one; she had liquidated the state which was above the
parties and above Parliament without reorganizing her party system into
a body capable of governing. The government necessarily became a ridic-
ulous exponent of the ever-changing moods of Parliament and public
opinion. The German system, on the other hand, made Parliament a more
or less useful battlefield for conflicting interests and opinions whose main
function was to influence the government but whose practical necessity
in the handling of state affairs was, to say the least, debatable. In France,
the parties suffocated the government; in Germany, the state emasculated
the parties.
Since the end of the last century, the repute of these Constitutional par-
liaments and parties has constantly declined; to the people at large they
looked like expensive and unnecessary institutions. For this reason alone
each group that claimed to present something a bove party and class inter-
^ts and starFed o utside ot Parliament had a great Chance for po pularity."
Such groups seeTiTgtf--m orc competent, more ainccrc , and moro concc nTed
with public affairs. This, however, was so in appearance only, for the true
goal of every "party above parties" was to promote one particular interest
until it had devoured all others, and to make one particular group the
master of the state machine. This is what finally happened in Italy under
"' Compare with this attitude the telling fact that in Great Britain Ramsay Mac-
Donald was never able to live down his "betrayal" of the Labor Party. In Germany
ihc spirit of civil service asked of those in public office to be "above the parties."
Against this spirit of the old Prussian civil service the Nazis asserted the priority of
the Party, because they wanted dictatorship. Goebbels demanded explicitly: "Each
party member who becomes a state functionary has to remain a National Socialist
first ... and to co-operate closely with the party administration" (quoted from GoU-
fried Neesse, Pariei iinJ Staat, 1939, p. 28).
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 251
Mussolini's Fascism, which up to 1938 was not totalitarian but just an
ordinary nationalist dictatorship developed logically from a multiparty
democracy. For there is indeed some truth in the old truism about the
affinity between majority rule and dictatorship, but this affinity has nothing
whatever to do with totalitarianism. It is obvious that, after many decades
of inefficient and muddled multiparty rule, the seizure of the state for the
advantage of one party can come as a great relief because it assures at
least, though only for a limited time, some consistency, some permanence,
and a little less contradiction.
The fact that the seizure of power by the Nazis was usually identified
with such a one-party dictatorship merely showed how much political
thinking was still rooted in the old established patterns, and how little the
people were prepared for what really was to come. The only typically
modern aspect of the Fascist party dictatorship is that here, too, the party
insisted that it was a movement; that it was nothing of the kind, but
merely usurped the slogan "movement" in order to attract the masses,
became evident as soon as it seized the state machine without drastically
changing the power structure of the country, being content to fill ail gov-
ernment positions with party members. It was precisely through the iden-
tification of the party with the state, which both the Nazis and the
Bolsheviks have always carefully avoided, that the party ceased to be
a "movement" and became tied to the basically stable structure of the state.
Even though the totalitarian movements and their predecessors, the pan-
movements, were not "parties above parties" aspiring to seize the state
machine but movements aiming at the destruction of the state, the Nazis
found it very convenient to pose as such, that is, to pretend to follow faith-
fully the Italian model of Fascism. Thus they could win the help of those
upper-class and business elite who mistook the Nazis for the older groups
they had themselves frequently initiated and which had made only th^^
rather modest pretense of conquering the state machine for one party. ^^
The businessmen who helped Hitler into power naively believed that they
were only supporting a dictator, and one of their own making, who would
naturally rule to the advantage of their own class and the disadvantage of
all others.
The imperialist-inspired "parties above parties" had never known how to
profit from popular hatred of the party system as such; Germany's frus-
trated pre-war imperialism, in spite of its dreams of continental expansion
and its violent denunciation of the nation-state's democratic institutions,
never reached the scope of a movement. It certainly was not sufficient to
haughtily discard class interests, the very foundation of the nation's party
system, for this left them less appeal than even the ordinary parties still
^^ Such as the Kolonialverein, the Centralverein fiir Handelsgeographie, the Flot-
tenverein, or even the Pan-German League, which however prior to the first World
War had no connection whatsoever with big business. See Wertheimer, op. cit., p. 73.
Typical of this "above parties" of the bourgeoisie were of course the Nationalliberalen;
see note 74.
2$g IMPERIALISM
enjoyed. What they conspicuously lacked, despite all high-sounding na-
tionalist phrases, was a real nationalist or other ideology. After the first
World War. when the German Pan-Germans, especially Ludendorff and
his wife, recognized this error and tried to make up for it, they failed
despite their remarkable ability to appeal to the most superstitious beliefs
of the masses because they clung to an outdated nontotalitarian state wor-
ship and could not understand that the masses' furious interest in the
so-called "suprastate powers" {iiberstaatliche Mdchte) — i.e., the Jesuits,
the Jews, and the Freemasons — did not spring from nation or state worship
but, on the contrary, from envy and the desire also to become a "suprastate
power." "^
The only countries where to all appearances state idolatry and nation
worship were not yet outmoded and where nationalist slogans against the
"suprastate" forces were still a serious concern of the people were those
Latin-European countries like Italy and, to a lesser degree, Spain and
Portugal, which had actually suffered a definite hindrance to their full
national development through the power of the Church. It was partly due
to this authentic element of belated national development and partly to
the wisdom of the Church, which very sagely recognized that Fascism was
neither anti-Christian nor totalitarian in principle and only established a
separation of Church and State which already existed in other countries,
that the initial anticlerical flavor of Fascist nationalism subsided rather
quickly and gave way to a modus vivendi as in Italy, or to a positive al-
liance, as in Spain and Portugal.
Mussolini's interpretation of the corporate state idea was an attempt to
overcome the notorious national dangers in a class-ridden society with a
new integrated social organization"^ and to solve the antagonism between
state and society, on which the nation-state had rested, by the incorpora-
tion of the society into the state.""' The Fascist movement, a "party above
parties," because it claimed to represent the interest of the nation as a
whole, seized the state machine, identified itself with the highest national
"^ Erich Ludendorff, Die iiberstaatUchen Miichte im letzten Jahre des Weltkrieges,
Leipzig, 1927. See also Feldherrnworte. 1938. 2 vols.; I, 43, 55; II, 80.
"* The main purpose of the corporate state was "that of correcting and neutralizing
a condition brought about by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century which
dissociated capital and labor in industry, giving rise on the one hand to a capitalist
class of employers of labor and on the other to a great propertyless class, the industrial
proletariat. The juxtaposition of these classes inevitably led to the clash of their
opposing interests" (The Fascist Era, published by the Fascist Confederation of In-
dustrialists, Rome, 1939, Chapter iii).
"■"If the State is truly to represent the nation, then the people composing the
nation must be part of the State.
"How is this to be secured?
"The Fascist answer is by organizing the people in groups according to their re-
spective activities, groups which through their leaders . . . rise by stages as in a
pyrarnid. at the base of which are the masses and at the apex the State.
"No group outside the State, no group against the State, all groups within the
Mate . . . which ... is the nation itself rendered articulate." (Ibid.)
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 259
authority, and tried to make the whole people "part of the state." It did
not, however, think itself "above the state," and its leaders did not conceive
of themselves as "above the nation."^'' As regards the Fascists, their
movement had come to an end with the seizure of power, at least with
respect to domestic policies; the movement could now maintain its motion
only in matters of foreign policy, in the sense of imperialist expansion and
typically imperialist adventures. Even before the seizure of power, the
Nazis clearly kept aloof from this Fascist form of dictatorship, in which
the "movement" merely serves to bring the party to power, and con-
sciously used the party "to drive on the movement," which, contrary to
the party, must not have any "definite, closely determined goals. "^^
The difference^ fcptwppn th? Fns'"i''t nn^ th*^ totfi'jta rian moveme nts is
best illustrated by their attitude toward the army, thatis, toward the na-
tional institution par excellence. In contrast to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks,
who destroyed the spirit of the army by subordinating it to the political
commissars or totalitarian elite formations, the Fascists could use such
intensely nationalist instruments as the army, with which they identified
themselves as they had identified themselves with the state. They wanted
a Fascist state and a Fascist army, but still an army and a state; only in
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia army and state became subordinated
functions of the movement. The Fascist dictator — but neither Hitler nor
Stalin — was the only true usurper in the sense of classical political theory,
and his one-party rule was in a sense the only one still intimately coimected
with the multiparty system. He carried out what the imperialist-minded
leagues, societies, and "parties above parties" had aimed at, so that it is
particularly Italian Fascism that has become the only example of a modern
mass movement organized within the framework of an existing state,
inspired solely by extreme nationalism, and which transformed the people
permanently into such Staatsbiirger or patriotes as the nation-state had
mobilized only in times of emergency and union sacree.^^
There are no movements without hatred o f t he state, a nd this was virtu-
ally unknown to the German Pan-Germans in tlie relative stability of pre-
war Germany. The movements originated in Austria-Hungary, where
hatred of the state was an ｅxpression of patriotism for the oppressed
nationalities and where the parties — with the exception of the Social Demo-
^^ For the relationship between party and state in totaUtarian countries and especially
the incorporation of the Fascist party into the state of Italy, see Franz Neumann,
Behemoth, 1942, chapter 1.
^"^ See the extremely interesting presentation of the relationship between party and
movement in the "Dienstvorschrift fiir die Parteiorganisation der NSDAP," 1932,
p. II ff., and the presentation by Werner Best in Die deutsche Polizei, 1941, p. 107,
which has the same orientation: "It is the task of the Party ... to hold the move-
ment together and give it support and direction."
'"'Mussolini, in his speech of November 14, 1933, defends his one-party rule with
arguments current in all nation-states during a war: A single political party is needed
so "that political discipline may exist . . . and that the bond of a common fate may
unite everyone above contrasting interests" (Benito Mussolini, Four Speeches on the
Corporate State, Rome, 1935).
>^j IMPERIALISM
Lfaiic Party (next to the Christian-Social Party the only one sincerely loyal
to Austria')— were formed alonj: national, and not along class lines. This
•A-as possible because economic and national interests were almost iden-
tical here and because economic and social status depended largely on
nationality; nationalism, therefore, which had been a unifying force in the
nation-states, here became at once a principle of internal disruption, which
resulted in a decisive ditTerence in the structure of the parties as com-
pared with those of nation-states. What held together the members of the
parties in multinational Austria-Hungary was not a particular interest,
as in the other Continental party systems, or a particular principle for
organized action as in the Anglo-Saxon, but chiefly the sentiment of be-
longing to the same nationality. Strictly speaking, this should have been
and was a great weakness in the Austrian parties, because no definite goals
or programs could be deduced from the sentiment of tribal belonging.
The pan-movements made a virtue of this shortcoming by transforming
parties into movements and by discovering that form of organization which,
in contrast to all others, would never need a goal or program but could
change its policy from day to day without harm to its membership. Long
before Nazism proudly pronounced that though it had a program it did
not need one. Pan-Germanism discovered how much more important for
mass appeal a general mood was than laid-down outlines and platforms.
For the only thing that counts in a movement is precisely that it keeps
itself in constant movement."" The Nazis, therefore, used to refer to the
fourteen years of the Weimar Republic as the "time of the System" —
Sysicmzcii — the implication being that this time was sterile, lacked dyna-
mism, did not "move." and was followed by their "era of the movement."
The state, even as a one-party dictatorship, was felt to be in the way of
the ever-changing needs of an ever-growing movement. There was no more
characteristic difference between the imperialist "above party group" of
the Pan-German League in Germany itself and the Pan-German movement
in Austria than their attitudes toward the state: ^°" while the "party above
parties" wanted only to seize the state machine, the true movement aimed
at its destruction; while the former still recognized the state as highest
authority once its representation had fallen into the hands of the members
of one party (as in Mussolini's Italy), the latter recognized the movement
as independent of and superior in authority to the state.
The pan-movements' hostility to the party system acquired practical
significance when, after the first World War, the party system ceased to be
""The following anecdote recorded by Berdyaev is noteworthy: "A Soviet young
man went lo France . . . [and] was asked what impression France left upon him.
He answered: There is no freedom in this country.' . . . The young man expounded
his idea of freedom: . . The so-called [French] freedom was of the kind which
leaves cverylhmt; unchanged; every day was like its predecessors; ... and so the
young man who came from Russia was bored in France" {op. cit.. pp. 182-183).
'""The Austrian state hostility sometimes occurred also among German Pan-
Germans, especially if these were Aiislamlscleiitsche. like Moeller van den Bruck.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 261
a working device and the class system of European society broke down
under the weight of growing masses entirely declassed by events. What
came to the fore then were no longer mere pan-movements but their totali-
tarian successors, which in a few years determined the politics of all other
parties to such a degree that they became either anti-Fascist or anti-
Bolshevik or both.'"^ By this negative approach seemingly forced upon them
from the outside, the older parties showed clearly that they too were no
longer able to function as representatives of specific class interests but
had become mere defenders of the status quo. The speed with which the
German and Austrian Pan-Germans rallied to Nazism has a parallel in
the much slower and more complicated course through which Pan-Slavs
finally found out that the liquidation of Lenin's Russian Revolution had
been thorough enough to make it possible for them to support Stalin
wholeheartedly. That Bolshevism and Nazism at the height of their power
outgrew mere tribal nationalism and had little use for those who were
still actually convinced of it in principle, rather than as mere propaganda
material, was neither the Pan-Germans' nor the Pan-Slavs' fault and hardly
checked their enthusiasm.
The decay of the Continental party system went hand in hand with a
decline of the prestige of the nation-state. National homogeneity was
severely disturbed by migrations and France, the nation par excellence,
became in a matter of years utterly dependent on foreign labor; a restrictive
immigration policy, inadequate to new needs, was still truly "national,"
but made it all the more obvious that the nation-state was no longer capable
of facing the major political issues of the time.^**- Even more serious was
the ill-fated effort of the peace treaties of 1919 to introduce national state
organizations into Eastern and Southern Europe where the state people
frequently had only a relative majority and were outnumbered by the
combined "minorities." This new situation would have been sufficient in
itself to undermine seriously the class basis of the party system; every-
where parties were now organized along national lines as though the
liquidation of the Dual Monarchy had served only to enable a host of
similar experiments to start on a dwarfed scale. ^"^ In other countries, where
the nation-state and the class basis of its parties were not touched by mi-
grations and heterogeneity of population, inflation and unemployment caused
a similar breakdown; and it is obvious that the more rigid the country's
'°' Hitler described the situation correctly when he said during the elections of
1932: "Against National Socialism there are only negative majorities in Germany"
(quoted from Konrad Heiden, Der Fiihrer, 1944, p. 564).
'°^ At the outbreak of the second World War, at least 10 per cent of France's pop-
ulation was foreign and not naturalized. Her mines in the north were chiefly worked
by Poles and Belgians, her agriculture in the south by Spaniards and Italians. See
Carr-Saunders, World Population. Oxford, 1936, pp. 145-158.
'°^ "Since 1918 none of the [succession states] has produced ... a party which
might embrace more than one race, one religion, one social class or one region. The
only exception is the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia" {Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, loc. cit.).
2f,2 IMPERIALISM
cloM system, the more class-conscious its people had been, the more
dramatic and dangerous was this breakdown.
This was the situation between the two wars when evejy movement had
a greater chanc e than any ^ irty because the movement attacked the instiTtl^
TiOfl ol the stale and did not apf>eal to classes. Fascism and Nazism always
boasted that their hatred was directed not against individual classes, but
the class system as such, which they denounced as an invention of Marxism.
Even more significant was the fact that the Communists also, notwithstand-
ing their Marxist ideology, had to abandon the rigidity of their class appeal
when, after 1935, under the pretext of enlarging their mass base, they
formed Popular Fronts everywhere and began to appeal to the same grow-
mg masses outside all class strata which up to then had been the natural
prey to Fascist movements. Jsirtna f ^ f th^ r,\(\ p prt^es ^was pr ppare<i - to r e c e i v fe—
these masses, nor did they gauge correctly the growing importance of their
8umTvrs~Trnd the growing political influence of their leaders. This error in
judgment by the older parties can be explained by the fact that their secure
position in Parliament and safe representation in the offices and institutions
of the state made them feel much closer to the sources of power than to
the masses; they thought the state would remain forever the undisputed
master of all instruments of violence, and that the army, that supreme insti-
tution of the nation-state, would remain the decisive element in all domestic
crises. They therefore felt free to ridicule the numerous paramilitary forma-
tions which had sprung up without any officially recognized help. For the
weaker the party system grew under the pressure of movements outside
of Parliament and classes, the more rapidly all former antagonism of the
parties to the state disappeared. The parties, laboring under the illusion
of a "state above parties," misinterpreted this harmony as a source of
strength, as a wondrous relationship to something of a higher order. But the
state was as threatened as the party system by the pressure of revolutionary
movements, and it could no longer afford to keep its lofty and necessarily
unpopular position above internal domestic strife. The army had long since
ceased to be a reliable bulwark against revolutionary unrest, not because
it was in sympathy with the revolution but because it had lost its position.
Twice in modern times, and both times in France, the nation par excellence,
the army had already proved its essential unwillingness or incapacity to
help those in power or to seize power by itself: in 1850, when it permitted
the mob of the "Society of December 10" to carry Napoleon III to power,i"^
and again at the end of the nineteenth century, during the Dreyfus Affair,
when nothing would have been easier than the establishment of a military
dictatorship. The,jiciilj:alit^ ^f the army, its willingness to serve every
master, eventually left thTltSTe m a position of "mediation between the
organized party interests. It was no longer above but between the classes
of society." "'■• In other words, the state and the parties together defended
'"* See Karl Marx, op. cit.
'"'Carl Schmitt. op. cit., p. 31.
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 263
the status quo without reaHzing that this very alliance served as much as
anything else to change the status quo.
The break down of the European party syste m occurred in a spectacular
wa'y with Hitler's rise to power. It is now otten conveniently forgotten
that at the moment of the outbreak of the second World War, the majority
of European countries had already adopted some form of dictatorship and
discarded the party system, and that this revolutionary change in govern-
ment had been effected in most countries without revolutionary upheaval.
Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to
the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for
power. After all, it did not make much difference if a few thousand almost
unarmed people staged a march on Rome and took over the government
in Italy, or whether in Poland (in 1934) a so-called "partyless bloc,"
with a program of support for a semifascist government and a membership
drawn from the nobility and the poorest peasantry, workers and business-
men, Catholics and orthodox Jews, legally won two-thirds of the seats in
Parliament.'*"'
In France, Hitler's rise to power, accompanied by a growth of Com-
munism and Fascism, quickly cancelled the other parties' original relation-
ships to each other and changed time-honored party lines overnight. The
French Right, up to then strongly anti-German and pro-war, after 1933
became the vanguard of pacifism and understanding with Germany. The
Left switched with equal speed from pacifism at any price to a firm stand
against Germany and was soon accused of being a party of warmongers
by the same parties which only a few years before had denounced its
pacifism as national treachery. ^'^'^ The years that followed Hitler's rise to
power proved even more disastrous to the integrity of the French party
system. In the Munich crisis each party, from Right to Left, split internally
on the only relevant political issue: who was for, who was against war with
Germany.*"^ Each party harbored a peace faction and a war faction; none
of them could remain united on major political decisions and none stood
the test of Fascism and Nazism without splitting into anti-Fascist on one
side, Nazi fellow-travelers on the other. That Hitler could choose freely
from all parties for the erection of puppet regimes was the consequence of
this pre-war situation, and not of an especially shrewd Nazi maneuver.
There was not a single party in Europe that did not produce collaborators.
Against the disintegration of the older parties stood the clear-cut unity
of the Fascist and Communist movements everywhere — the former, outside
of Germany and Italy, loyally advocating peace even at the price of foreign
domination, and the latter for a long while preaching war even at the price
""'Vaclav Fiala, "Les Partis politiques polonais," in Monde Slave, Fevrier, 1935.
'"■^ See the careful analysis by Charles A. Micaud, The French Right and Nazi
Germany. 1933-1939. 1943.
"^^ The most famous instance was the split in the French socialist party in 1938
when Blum's faction remained in a minority against Deal's pro-Munich group during
the party Congress of the Seine Department.
j>^^ IMPERIALISM
of national ruin. The point, however, is not so much that the extreme Right
even. Av here had abandoned its traditional nationalism in favor of Hitler's
Kuropc and that the extreme Left had forgotten its traditional pacifism in
favor of old nationalist slogans, but rather that both movements could
count on the loyalty of a membership and leadership which would not be
disturbed by a sudden switch in policy. This was dramatically exposed in
the Cierman-Russian nonaggression pact, when the Nazis had to drop their
chief slogan against Bolshevism and the Communists had to return to a
pacifism which they always had denounced as petty-bourgeois. Such sudden
turns did not hurt them in the least. It is still well remembered how strong
the Communists remained after their second volte-face less than two years
later when the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, and this in
spite of the fact that both political lines had involved the rank and file in
serious and dangerous political activities which demanded real sacrifices
and constant action.
Different in appearance but much more violent in reality was the break-
down of the party system in pre-Hitler Germany. This came into the open
during the last presidential elections in 1932 when entirely new and com-
plicated forms of mass propaganda were adopted by all parties.
The choice of candidates was itself peculiar. While it was a matter of
.ourse that the two movements, which stood outside of and fought the
parliamentary system from opposite sides, would present their own candi-
dates (Hitler for the Nazis, and Thiilmann for the Communists), it was
rather surprising to see that all other parties could suddenly agree upon
one candidate. That this candidate happened to be old Hindenburg who
enjoyed the matchless popularity which, since the time of MacMahon,
awaits the defeated general at home, was not just a joke; it showed how
much the old parties wanted merely to identify themselves with the old-
time state, the state above the parties whose most potent symbol had been
the national army, to what an extent, in other words, they had already given
up the party system itself. For in the face of the movements, the differences
between the parties had indeed become quite meaningless; the existence of
all of them was at stake and consequently they banded together and hoped
to maintain a status quo that guaranteed their existence. Hindenbur:g..became
t{?e symbol oM he nation-state and the part y system, while Hitler and^al-
_IIiann _£omnctccl with each ot.^er to becom EIiriir Imih ^^ymhnlj^ tT^7~j^;^P
As significant as the choice of candidates were the electoraT^osterSTi^one
of them praised its candidate for his own merits; the posters for Hinden-
burg claimed merely that "a vote for Thiilmann is a vote for Hitler"—
warning the workers not to waste their votes on a candidate sure to be
beaten (Thiilmann) and thus put Hitler in the saddle. This was how the
Social Democrats reconciled themselves to Hindenburg., who was not even
mentioned. The parties of the Right played the same game and emphasized
that "a vote for Hitler is a vote for Thalmann." Both, in addition, alluded
quite clearly to the instances in which the Nazis and Communists had made
common cause, in order to convince aU loyal party members, whether
CONTINENTAL IMPERIALISM: THE PAN-MOVEMENTS 265
Right or Left, that the preservation of the status quo demanded Hindenburg.
In contrast to the propaganda for Hindenburg that appealed to those
who wanted the status quo at any price — and in 1932 that meant unemploy-
ment for almost half the German people — the candidates of the movements
had to reckon with those who wanted change at any price (even at the price
of destruction of all legal institutions), and these were at least as numerous
as the ever-growing millions of unemployed and their families. The Nazis
therefore did not wince at the absurdity that "a vote for Thalmann is a
vote for Hindenburg," the Communists did not hesitate to reply that "a
vote for Hitler is a vote for Hindenburg," both threatening their voters
with the menace of the status quo in exactly the same way their opponents
had threatened their members with the specter of the revolution.
Behind the curious uniformity of method used by the supporters of all the
candidates lay the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls
because it was frightened — afraid of the Communists, afraid of the Nazis,
or afraid of the status quo. In this general fear all class divisions disappeared
from the political scene; while the party alliance for the defense of the status
quo blurred the older class structure maintained in the separate parties,
the rank and file of the movements was completely heterogeneous and as
dynamic and fluctuating as unemployment itself. ^^•* While within the frame-
work of the national institutions the parliamentary Left had joined the
parliamentary Right, the two movements were busy organizing together the
famous transportation strike on the streets of Berlin in November, 1932.
When one considers the extraordinarily rapid decline of the Continental
party system, one should bear in mind the very short life span of the whole
institution. It existed nowhere before the nineteenth century, and in most
European countries the formation of political parties took place only after
1848, so that its reign as an unchallenged institution in national politics
lasted hardly four decades. During the last two decades of the nineteenth
century, all the significant political developments in France, as well as in
Austria-Hungary, already took place outside of and in opposition to parlia-
mentary parties, while everywhere smaller imperialist "parties above parties"
challenged the institution for the sake of popular support for an aggressive,
expansionist foreign policy.
While the imperialist leagues set themselves above parties for the sake
of identification with the nation-state, the pan-movements attacked these
same parties as part and parcel of a general system which included the
nation-state; they were not so much "above parties" as "above the state"
for the sake of a direct identification with the people. The totalitarian
'°® The German socialist party underwent a typical change from the beginning of
the century to 1933. Prior to the first World War only 10 per cent of its members did
not belong to the working class whereas about 25 per cent of its votes came from the
middle classes. In 1930, however, only 60 per cent of its members were workers and
at least 40 per cent of its votes were middle-class votes. See Sigmund Neumann, op.
cit., pp. 28 ff.
_>rtrt IMPERIALISM
movements eventually were led to discard the people also, whom, how-
ever, following closely in the footsteps of the pan-movements they used
for propaganda purposes. The "totalitarian state" is a state in appearance
only, and the movement no longer truly identifies itself even with the
needs of the people. Thr Mnvt^pienthynow is above state and peoplg^
ready to sacrifice both for the sake"ori tsjaeolo^IL"The Movement ... is
StaTiT as wL 'tt us P c up Te^ and neither the present state . . . nor the present
German people can even be conceived without the Movement.""**
Nothing proves better the irreparable decay of the party system than the
great efforts after this war to revive it on the Continent, their pitiful results,
the enhanced appeal of movements after the defeat of Nazism, and the
obvious threat of Bolshevism to national independence. The result of all
efforts to restore the status quo has been only the restoration of a political
situation in which the destructive movements are the only "parties" that
function properly. Their leadership has maintained authority under the
most trying circumstances and in spite of constantly changing party lines.
In order to gauge correctly the chances for survival of the European nation-
state, it would be wise not to pay too much attention to nationalist slogans
which the movements occasionally adopt for purposes of hiding their
true intentions, but rather to consider that by now everybody knows that
they are regional branches of international organizations, that the rank
and file is not disturbed in the least when it becomes obvious that their
policy serves foreign-policy interests of another and even hostile power,
and that denunciations of their leaders as fifth columnists, traitors to the
country, etc., do not impress their members to any considerable degree. In
contrast to the old parties, the movements have survived the last war and
are today the only "parties" which have remained alive and meaningful
to their adherents.
""Schmilt, op. cit.
CHAPTER nine: Thc Decliiie of the Nation-
State and the End of the Rights of Man
IT IS ALMOST impossible even now to describe what actually happened
in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the
first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning
of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet
this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of
sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The
first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have
been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The
first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair,
something which no other war had ever done. Inflation destroyed the whole
class of small property owners beyond hope for recovery or new formation,
something which no monetary crisis had ever done so radically before.
Unemployment, when it came, reached fabulous proportions, was no longer
restricted to the working class but seized with insignificant exceptions whole
nations. Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of
uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their prede-
cessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their
happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and
could be assimilated nowhere. once they had left their homeland they
remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless;
once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the
scum of the earth. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid,
no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be
undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a
judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked
rather like the ｅxpression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.
Before totalitarian politics consciously attacked and partially destroyed
the very structure of European civilization, the explosion of 1914 and its
severe consequences of instability had sufficiently shattered the facade of
Europe's political system to lay bare its hidden frame. Such visible exposures
were the sufferings of more and more groups of people to whom suddenly
the rules of the world around them had ceased to apply. It was precisely
the seeming stability of the surrounding world that made each group forced
out of its protective boundaries look like an unfortunate exception to
>^,V IMPERIALISM
.in Otherwise sane and normal rule, and which filled with equal cynicism
victims and observers of an apparently unjust and abnormal fate. Both
rnisiixik this cynicism for growing wisdom in the ways of the world, while
.ictuaily they were more baffled and therefore became more stupid than
they ever had been before. Hatred, certainly not lacking in the pre-war
world, began to play a central role in public affairs everywhere, so that the
[x>litical scene in the deceptively quiet years of the twenties assumed the
sordid and weird atmosphere of a Strindbergian family quarrel. Nothing
perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than
this vague, pervasive hatred of everybody and everything, without a focus
for its passionate attention, with nobody to make responsible for the state
of affairs — neither the government nor the bourgeoisie nor an outside
power. It consequently turned in all directions, haphazardly and unpre-
dictably, incapable of assuming an air of healthy indifference toward
anything under the sun.
This atmosphere of disintegration, though characteristic of the whole of
F-urope between the two wars, was more visible in the defeated than in the
victorious countries, and it developed fully in the states newly established
after the liquidation of the Dual Monarchy and the Czarist Empire. The
last remnants of solidarity between the nonemancipated nationalities in
the "belt of mixed populations" evaporated with the disappearance of a
central despotic bureaucracy which had also served to gather together and
divert from each other the diffuse hatreds and conflicting national claims.
Now everybody was against everybody else, and most of all against his
closest neighbors — the Slovaks against the Czechs, the Croats against the
Serbs, the Ukrainians against the Poles. And this was not the result of the
conflict between nationalities and the state peoples (or minorities and
majorities); the Slovaks not only constantly sabotaged the democratic
Czech government in Prague, but at the same time persecuted the Hun-
garian minority on their own soil, while a similar hostility against the state
people on one hand, and among themselves on the other, existed among
the dissatisfied minorities in Poland.
At first glance these troubles in the old European trouble spot looked
like petty nationalist quarrels without any consequence for the political
destinies of Europe. Yet in these regions and out of the liquidation of the
two multinational states of pre-war Europe, Russia and Austria-Hungary,
two victim groups emerged whose sufferings were different from those of
all others in the era between the wars; they were worse off than the dispos-
sessed middle classes, the unemployed, the small rentiers, the pensioners
whom events had deprived of social status, the possibility to work, and
the right to hold property: they had lost those rights which had been
thought of and even defined as inalienable, namely the Rights of Man. The
stateless and the minorities, rightly termed "cousins-germane," ^ had no
. ' .^^..^•. Lawford Childs. "Refugees— a Permanent Problem in International Organ-
'"k.°u J1 t' !' ""' '"^'''"'f''^- Problems of Peace. 13th Series, London, 1938,
published by the International Labor Office.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 269
governments to represent and to protect them and therefore were forced
to Hve either under the law of exception of the Minority Treaties, which
all governments (except Czechoslovakia) had signed under protest and
never recognized as law, or under conditions of absolute lawlessness.
With the emergence of the minorities in Eastern and Southern Europe
and with the stateless people driven into Central and Western Europe, a
completely new element of disintegration was introduced into postwar
Europe. Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics,
and the constitutional inability of European nation-states to guarantee human
rights to those who had lost nationally guaranteed rights, made it possible
for the persecuting governments to impose their standard of values even
upon their opponents. Those whom the persecutor had singled out as
scum of the earth — Jews, Trotskyites, etc. — actually were received as scum
of the earth everywhere; those whom persecution had called undesirable
became the indesirables of Europe. The official SS newspaper, the Schwarze
Korps, stated explicitly in 1938 that if the world was not yet convinced
that the Jews were the scum of the earth, it soon would be when unidenti-
fiable beggars, without nationality, without money, and without passports
crossed their frontiers.- And it is true that this kind of factual propaganda
worked better than Goebbels' rhetoric, not only because it established the
Jews as scum of the earth, but also because the incredible plight of an
ever-growing group of innocent people was like a practical demonstration
of the totalitarian movements' cynical claims that no such thing as inalien-
able human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to
the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of
the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase "human rights" became
for all concerned — victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike — the evidence
of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.
i: The "Nation of Minorities" and the Stateless People
MODERN POWER CONDITIONS which make national sovereignty a mockery
except for giant states, the rise of imperialism, and the pan-movements un-
- The early persecution of German Jews by the Nazis must be considered as an
attempt to spread antisemitism among "those peoples who are friendlily disposed to
Jews, above all the Western democracies" rather than as an effort to get rid of the
Jews. A circular letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to all German authorities
abroad shortly after the November pogroms of 1938, stated: "The emigration move-
ment of only about 100,000 Jews has already sufficed to awaken the interest of many
countries in the Jewish danger. . . . Germany is very interested in maintaining the
dispersal of Jewry . . . the influx of Jews in all parts of the world invokes the op-
position of the native population and thereby forms the best propaganda for the
German Jewish policy. . . . The poorer and therefore more burdensome the im-
migrating Jew is to the country absorbing him, the stronger the country will react."
See Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, 1946, published by the U. S. Gov-
ernment, VI, 87 ff.
-() IMPERIALISM
dcrniined the stability of Europe's nation-state system from the outside.
None of these factors, however, had sprung directly from the tradition and
the institutions of nation-states themselves. Their internal disintegration
began only after the first World War, with the appearance of minorities
created by the Peace Treaties and of a constantly growing refugee move-
ment, the consequence of revolutions.
The inadequacy of the Peace Treaties has often been explained by the
fact that the peacemakers belonged to a generation formed by experiences
in the pre-war era. so that they never quite realized the full impact of the
war whose peace they had to conclude. There is no better proof of this than
their attempt to regulate the nationality problem in Eastern and Southern
Europe through the establishment of nation-states and the introduction of
minority treaties. If the wisdom of the extension of a form of government
which even in countries with old and settled national tradition could not
handle the new problems of world politics had become questionable, it was
even more doubtful whether it could be imported into an area which lacked
the very conditions for the rise of nation-states: homogeneity of population
and rootedness in the soil. But to assume that nation-states could be estab-
lished by the methods of the Peace Treaties was simply preposterous.
Indeed: one glance at the demographic map of Europe should be suffi-
cient to show that the nation-state principle cannot be introduced into
Eastern Europe."^ The Treaties lumped together many peoples in single
states, called some of them "state people" and entrusted them with the
government, silently assumed that others (such as the Slovaks in Czecho-
slovakia, or the Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia) were equal partners
in the government, which of course they were not/ and with equal arbi-
trariness created out of the remnant a third group of nationalities called
"minorities," thereby adding to the many burdens of the new states the
trouble of observing special regulations for part of the population.^ The
result was that those peoples to whom states were not conceded, no matter
whether they were official minorities or only nationalities, considered the
Treaties an arbitrary game which handed out rule to some and servitude
to others. The newly created states, on the other hand, which were prom-
ised equal status in national sovereignty with the Western nations, regarded
the Minority Treaties as an open breach of promise and discrimination
' Kurt Tramples, "Voikerbund und Volkerfreiheit," in Siiddeutsche Monatshefte, 26.
Jahrpang. Juli 1929.
' The struggle of the Slovaks against the "Czech" government in Prague ended with
the Hitler-supported independence of Slovakia; the Yugoslav constitution of 1921 was
"accepted" in Parliament against the votes of all Croat and Slovene representatives.
Kor a good summary of Yugoslav history between the two wars, see Propylaen
WeUgeschkhte. Dos Zeitalter des Imperialismus. 1933, Band 10, 471 flF.
• Mussolini was quite right when he wrote after the Munich crisis: "If Czecho-
slovakia finds herself today in what might be called a 'delicate situation,' it is because
she was not iust Czechoslovakia, but Czech-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-
Rumano-Slovakia. . . ." (Quoted from Hubert Ripka, Mimich: Before and After,
1 ondon. 1939, p. 1 17.)
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 27 1
because only new states, and not even defeated Germany, were bound to
them.
The perplexing power vacuum resulting from the dissolution of the Dual
Monarchy and the liberation of Poland and the Baltic countries from Czar-
ist despotism was not the only factor that had tempted the statesmen into
this disastrous experiment. Much stronger was the impossibility of arguing
away any longer the more than 100 million Europeans who had never
reached the stage of national freedom and self-determination to which co-
lonial peoples already aspired and which was being held out to them. It was
indeed true that the role of the Western and Central European proletariat,
the oppressed history-suffering group whose emancipation was a matter of
life and death for the whole European social system, was played in the East
by "peoples without a history."*' The national liberation movements of the
East were revolutionary in much the same way as the workers' movements
in the West; both represented the "unhistorical" strata of Europe's popula-
tion and both strove to secure recognition and participation in public affairs.
Since the object was to conserve the European status quo, the granting of
national self-determination and sovereignty to all European peoples seemed
indeed inevitable; the alternative would have been to condemn them ruth-
lessly to the status of colonial peoples (something the pan-movements had
always proposed) and to introduce colonial methods into European affairs. '^
The point, of course, is that the European status quo could not be pre-
served and that it became clear only after the downfall of the last rem-
nants of European autocracy that Europe had been ruled by a system which
had never taken into account or responded to the needs of at least 25 per
cent of her population. This evil, however, was not cured with the estab-
lishment of the succession states, because about 30 per cent of their roughly
100 million inhabitants were officially recognized as exceptions who had
to be specially protected by minority treaties. This figure, moreover, by no
° This term was first coined by Otto Bauer, Die Nationalitiitenfrage unci die oster-
reichische Sozialdemokratie, Vienna, 1907.
Historical consciousness played a great role in the formation of national conscious-
ness. The emancipation of nations from dynastic rule and the overlordship of an inter-
national aristocracy was accompanied by the emancipation of literature from the "in-
ternational" language of the learned (Latin first and later French) and the growth
of national languages out of the popular vernacular. It seemed that peoples whose
language was fit for literature had reached national maturity per definitionem. The
liberation movements of Eastern European nationalities, therefore, started with a
kind of philological revival (the results were sometimes grotesque and sometimes
very fruitful) whose political function it was to prove that the people who possessed
a literature and a history of their own, had the right to national sovereignty.
^ Of course this was not always a clear-cut ahernative. So far nobody has bothered
to find out the characteristic similarities between colonial and minority exploitation.
only Jacob Robinson, "Staatsbiirgerliche und wirtschaftliche Gleichberechtigung" in
Siiddeutsche Monatshefte, 26: Jahrgang, July, 1929, remarks in passing: "A peculiar
economic protectionism appeared, not directed against othc; countries but against cer-
tain groups of the population. Surprisingly, certain methods of colonial exploitation
could be observed in Central Europe."
272 IMPERIALISM
means tells the whole story; it only indicates the difference between peoples
with a government of their own and those who supposedly were too small
and tiK) scattered to reach full nationhood. The Minority Treaties covered
only those nationalities of whom there were considerable numbers in at
least two of the succession states, but omitted from consideration all the
other nationalities without a government of their own, so that in some
of the succession states the nationally frustrated peoples constituted 50 per
cent of the total population.^ The worst factor in this situation was not
even that it became a matter of course for the nationalities to be disloyal
to their imposed government and for the governments to oppress their
nationalities as etViciently as possible, but that the nationally frustrated
population was firmly convinced — as was everybody else — that true free-
dom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained
only with full national emancipation, that people without their own national
government were deprived of human rights. In this conviction, which could
base itself on the fact that the French Revolution had combined the decla-
ration of the Rights of Man with national sovereignty, they were supported
by the Minority Treaties themselves, which did not entrust the governments
with the protection of different nationalities but charged the League of
Nations with the safeguarding of the rights of those who, for reasons of
territorial settlement, had been left without national states of their own.
Not that the minorities would trust the League of Nations any more
than they had trusted the state peoples. The League, after all, was com-
posed of national statesmen whose sympathies could not but be with the
unhappy new governments which were hampered and opposed on principle
by between 25 and 50 per cent of their inhabitants. Therefore the creators
of the Minority Treaties were soon forced to interpret their real intentions
more strictly and to point out the "duties" the minorities owed to the new
stales;" it now developed that the Treaties had been conceived merely as a
painless and humane method of assimilation, an interpretation which
naturally enraged the minorities.^" But nothing else could have been ex-
" It has been estimated that prior to 1914 there were about 100 million people whose
national aspirations had not been fulfilled. (See Charles Kingsley Webster, "Minori-
ties: History," in Encyclopedia BritannUa, 1929.) The population of minorities was
estimated approximately between 25 and 30 millions. (P. de Azcarate, "Minorities:
League of Nations." ihid.). The actual situation in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia was
much worse. In the former, the Czech "state people" constituted, with 7,200.000,
about 50 per cent of the population, and in the latter 5,000,000 Serbs formed only 42
per cent of the total. See W. Winkler, Statistisches Handhuch der eiiropdischen Na-
lit>nahi,iicn. Vienna. 1931; Otto Junghann, National Minorities in Europe, 1932.
Shphtly dilTerent figures are given by Tramples, op. cit.
' P. dc Azcarate. op. cit.: "The Treaties contain no stipulations regarding the 'duties'
of minorities towards the States of which they are a part. The Third Ordinary As-
sembly of the League, however, in 1922. . . . adopted . . . resolutions regarding the
duties of minorities. . ..." & &
n • "^^'^•J^u*^"''^ ''"'* '^^ ^"^'""^ delegates were most outspoken in this respect. Said
h!!!"l I ^^^^P^o^i^'"'' at which we should aim is not the disappearance of the minorities.
but a kind of assimilation " And Sir Austen Chamberlain. British representative,
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 273
pected within a system of sovereign nation-states; if the Minority Treaties
had been intended to be more than a temporary remedy for a topsy-turvy
situation, then their impHed restriction on national sovereignty would have
affected the national sovereignty of the older European powers. The repre-
sentatives of the great nations knew only too well that minorities within
nation-states must sooner or later be either assimilated or hquidated. And
it did not matter whether they were moved by humanitarian considerations
to protect splinter nationalities from persecution, or whether political con-
siderations led them to oppose bilateral treaties between the concerned
states and the majority countries of the minorities (after all, the Germans
were the strongest of all the officially recognized minorities, both in num-
bers and economic position); they were neither willing nor able to overthrow
the laws by which nation-states exist. *^
Neither the League of Nations nor the Minority Treaties would have
prevented the newly established states from more or less forcefully assimi-
lating their minorities. The strongest factor against assimilation was the
numerical and cultural weakness of the so-called state peoples. The Russian
or the Jewish minority in Poland did not feel Polish culture to be superior
to its own and neither was particularly impressed by the fact that Poles
formed roughly 60 per cent of Poland's population.
The embittered nationalities, completely disregarding the League of Na-
tions, soon decided to take matters into their own hands. They banded to-
gether in a minority congress which was remarkable in more than one
respect. It contradicted the very idea behind the League treaties by calling
itself officially the "Congress of Organized National Groups in European
States," thereby nullifying the great labor spent during the peace negotiations
to avoid the ominous word "national."^- This had the important conse-
quence that all "nationalities," and not just "minorities," would join and
that the number of the "nation of minorities" grew so considerably that
even claimed that "the object of the Minority Treaties [is] ... to secure . . . that
measure of protection and justice which would gradually prepare them to be merged
in the national community to which they belonged" (C. A. Macartney, National States
and National Minorities, London, 1934, pp. 276, 277).
" It is true that some Czech statesmen, the most liberal and democratic of the lead-
ers of national movements, once dreamed of making the Czechoslovak republic a kind
of Switzerland. The reason why even Benes never serious attempted to effectuate such
a solution to his harassing nationality problems was that Switzerland was not a model
that could be imitated, but rather a particularly fortunate exception that proved an
otherwise established rule. The newly established states did not feel secure enough to
abandon a centralized state apparatus and could not create overnight those small self-
administrative bodies of communes and cantons upon whose very extensive powers the
Swiss system of federation is based.
'^Wilson notably, who had been a fervent advocate of granting "racial, religious,
and linguistic rights to the minorities," "feared that 'national rights' would prove harm-
ful inasmuch as minority groups thus marked as separate corporate bodies would be
rendered thereby 'liable to jealousy and attack'" (Oscar J. Janowsky, The Jews and
Minority Rights, New York, 1933, p. 351). Macartney, op. cit., p. 4, describes the
situation and the "prudent work of the Joint Foreign Committee" that labored to
avoid the term "national."
2^4 IMPERIALISM
the combined nationalities in the succession states outnumbered the state
peoples. But in still another way the "Congress of National Groups" dealt
a decisive blow to the League treaties. one of the most baffling aspects of
the Eastern European nationality problem (more baffling than the small
size and great number of peoples involved, or the "belt of mixed popula-
tions"'*) was the interregional character of the nationalities which, in case
they put their national interests above the interests of their respective gov-
ernments, made them an obvious risk to the security of their countries."
The League treaties had attempted to ignore the interregional character of
the minorities by concluding a separate treaty with each country, as though
there were no Jewish or German minority beyond the borders of the re-
spective states. The "Congress of National Groups" not only sidestepped
the territorial principle of the League; it was naturally dominated by the
two nationalities which were represented in all succession states and were
therefore in a position, if they wished, to make their weight felt all over
Eastern and Southern Europe. These two groups were the Germans and
the Jews. The German minorities in Rumania and Czechoslovakia voted of
course with the German minorities in Poland and Hungary, and nobody
could have expected the Polish Jews, for instance, to remain indiflferent to
discriminatory practices of the Rumanian government. In other words,
national interests and not common interests of minorities as such formed
the true basis of membership in the Congress, '•"' and only the harmonious
relationship between the Jews and the Germans (the Weimar Republic had
successfully played the role of special protector of minorities) kept it to-
gether. Therefore, in 1933 when the Jewish delegation demanded a protest
against the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich (a move which they had
no right to make, strictly speaking, because German Jews were no minority)
and the Germans announced their solidarity with Germany and were sup-
ported by a majority (antisemitism was ripe in all succession states), the
Congress, after the Jewish delegation had left forever, sank into complete
insignificance.
The real significance of the Minority Treaties lies not in their practical
application but in the fact that they were guaranteed by an international
body, the League of Nations. Minorities had existed before,i« but the
"The term is Macartney's, op. cit., passim.
'* "The result of the Peace settlement was that every State in the belt of mixed popu-
lation . . now looked upon itself as a national state. But the facts were against them.
... Not one of these states was in fact uni-national, just as there was not, on the
other hand, one nation all of whose members lived in a single state" (Macartney, op.
lit., p. 210). ' '^
'In 1933 the chairman of the Congress expressly emphasized: one thing is cer-
lajn: we do not meet in our congresses merely as members of abstract minorities;
each of us belongs body and soul to a specific people, his own, and feels himself tied
to the fate of that people for better or worse. Consequently, each of us stands here, if
I may say %o as a full-blooded German or full-blooded Jew, as a full-blooded Hun-
garian or full-blooded Ukrainian." See Sitzungshericht cles Kongresses der organisierten
nattonalen Gruppen in den Siaaten Eiiropas. 1933. p. 8.
'•The first minorities arose when the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 275
minority as a permanent institution, the recognition that milHons of people
lived outside normal legal protection and needed an additional guarantee of
their elementary rights from an outside body, and the assumption that this
state of affairs was not temporary but that the Treaties were needed in order
to establish a lasting modus vivendi — all this was something new, certainly
on such a scale, in European history. The Minority Treaties said in plain
language what until then had been only implied in the working system of
nation-states, namely, that only nationals could be citizens, only people of
the same national origin could enjoy the full protection of legal institutions,
that persons of different nationality needed some law of exception until
or unless they were completely assimilated and divorced from their origin.
The interpretative speeches on the League treaties by statesmen of coun-
tries without minority obligations spoke an even plainer language: they
took it for granted that the law of a country could not be responsible for
persons insisting on a different nationality.^^ They thereby admitted — ^and
were quickly given the opportunity to prove it practically with the rise of
stateless people — that the transformation of the state from an instrument
of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation
had conquered the state, national interest had priority over law long be-
fore Hitler could pronounce "right is what is good for the German people."
Here again the language of the mob was only the language of public opinion
cleansed of hypocrisy and restraint.
Certainly the danger of this development had been inherent in the struc-
ture of the nation-state since the beginning. But insofar as the establishment
of nation-states coincided with the establishment of constitutional govern-
ment, they always had represented and been based upon the rule of law as
against the rule of arbitrary administration and despotism. So that when the
precarious balance between nation and state, between national interest and
legal institutions broke down, the disintegration of this form of government
and of organization of peoples came about with terrifying swiftness. Its
disintegration, curiously enough, started at precisely the moment when the
right to national self-determination was recognized for all of Europe and
when its essential conviction, the supremacy of the will of the nation over
all legal and "abstract" institutions, was universally accepted.
accomplished the suppression of the principle cuius regio eius religio. The Congress of
Vienna in 1815 had already taken steps to secure certain rights to the Polish populations
in Russia, Prussia, and Austria, rights that certainly were not merely "religious"; it is,
however, characteristic that all later treaties — the protocol guaranteeing the inde-
pendence of Greece in 1830, the one guaranteeing the independence of Moldavia and
Wallachia in 1856, and the Congress of Berlin in 1878 concerned with Rumania —
speak of "religious," and not "national" minorities, which were granted "civil" but
not "political" rights.
'^ De Melio Franco, representative of Brazil on the Council of the League of Na-
tions, put the problem very clearly: "It seems to me obvious that those who con-
ceived this system of protection did not dream of creating within certain States a group
of inhabitants who would regard themselves as permanently foreign to the general or-
ganization of the country" (Macartney, op. cit., p. 277).
27(t IMPERIALISM
At the time of the Minority Treaties it could be, and was, argued in
their favor, as i( were as their excuse, that the older nations enjoyed consti-
tutions which unplicitly or explicitly (as in the case of France, the nation
IHtr t-xcfllt-nir) were founded upon the Rights of Man, that even if there
were other nationalities within their borders they needed no additional law
for them, and that only in the newly established succession states was a
temporary enforcement of human rights necessary as a compromise and
exception."* The arrival of the stateless people brought an end to this illusion.
The minorities were only half stateless; de jure they belonged to some
ptilitical body even though they needed additional protection in the form of
special treaties and guarantees; some secondary rights, such as speaking
one's own language and staying in one's own cultural and social milieu,
were in jeopardy and were halfheartedly protected by an outside body;
but other more elementary rights, such as the right to residence and to
work, were never touched. The framers of the Minority Treaties did not
foresee the possibility of wholesale population transfers or the problem of
people who had become "undeportable" because there was no country on
earth in which they enjoyed the right to residence. The minorities could
still be regarded as an exceptional phenomenon, peculiar to certain terri-
tories that deviated from the norm. This argument was always tempting
because it left the system itself untouched; it has in a way survived the
second World War whose peacemakers, convinced of the impracticability
of minority treaties, began to "repatriate" nationalities as much as possible
in an ctTort to unscramble "the belt of mixed populations."^^ And this at-
tempted large-scale repatriation was not the direct result of the catastrophic
experiences following in the wake of the Minority Treaties; rather, it was
hoped that such a step would finally solve a problem which, in the pre-
ceding decades, had assumed ever larger proportions and for which an
internationally recognized and accepted procedure simply did not exist —
the problem of the stateless people.
Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence
'""The regime for the prelection of minorities was designed to provide a remedy
in cases where a territorial settlement was inevitably imperfect from the point of view
of nationality" (Joseph Roucek. The Minority Principle us a Problem of Political
Sciencf. Prague. 1928. p. 29). The trouble was that imperfection of territorial settle-
ment was the fault not only in the minority settlements but in the establishment of the
succession states themselves, since there was no territory in this region to which several
nationalities could not lay claim.
'"An almost symbolic evidence of this change of mind can be found in statements
of President Eduard Benes of Czecho.slovakia, the only country that after the first
World War had submitted with good grace to the obligations of the Minority Treaties.
Shortly after the outbreak of World War II Benes began to lend his support to the
principle of transfer of populations, which finally led to the expulsion of the German
minority and the addition of another category to the growing mass of Displaced Per-
sons. I-or Benes stand, see Oscar I. Janowsky, Nationalities and National Minorities.
New York, 1945. pp. 136 ff.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 211
has been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary his-
tory, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless
persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics.^" Their ex-
istence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the
different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event
since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category to
those who lived outside the pale of the law, while none of the categories, no
matter how the original constellation changed, could ever be renormalized.^^
Among them, we still find that oldest group of stateless people, the
Heimatlosen produced by the Peace Treaties of 1919, the dissolution of
Austria-Hungary, and the establishment of the Baltic states. Sometimes their
real origin could not be determined, especially if at the end of the war they
happened not to reside in the city of their birth, 2- sometimes their place of
^° "The problem of statelessness became prominent after the Great War. Before the
war, provisions existed in some countries, notably in the United States, under which
naturalization could be revoked in those cases in which the naturalized person ceased
to maintain a genuine attachment to his adopted country. A person so denaturalized
became stateless. During the war, the principal European States found it necessary to
amend their laws of nationality so as to take power to cancel naturalization" (John
Hope Simpson, The Refugee Problem, Institute of International Affairs, Oxford, 1939,
p. 231). The class of stateless persons created through revocation of naturalization was
very small; they established, however, an easy precedent so that, in the interwar period,
naturalized citizens were as a rule the first section of a population that became state-
less. Mass cancellation of naturalizations, such as the one introduced by Nazi Germany
in 1933 against all naturalized Germans of Jewish origin, usually preceded denationali-
zation of citizens by birth in similar categories, and the introduction of laws that made
denaturalization possible through simple decree, like the ones in Belgium and other
Western democracies in the thirties, usually preceded actual mass denaturalization; a
good instance is the practice of the Greek government with respect to the Armenian
refugees: of 45,000 Armenian refugees 1,000 were naturalized between 1923 and 1928.
After 1928, a law which would have naturalized all refugees under twenty-two years
of age was suspended, and in 1936, all naturalizations were canceled by the govern-
ment. (See Simpson, op. cit., p. 41.)
^' Twenty-five years after the Soviet regime had disowned one and a half million
Russians, it was estimated that at least 350,000 to 450,000 were still stateless — which
is a tremendous percentage if one considers that a whole generation had passed since
the initial flight, that a considerable portion had gone overseas, and that another large
part had acquired citizenship in different countries through marriage. (See Simpson,
op. cit., p. 559; Eugene M. Kulischer, The Displacement of Population in Europe,
Montreal, 1943; Winifred N. Hadsel, "Can Europe's Refugees Find New Homes?" in
Foreign Policy Reports, August, 1943, Vol. X, no. 10.)
It is true that the United States has placed stateless immigrants on a footing of com-
plete equality with other foreigners, but this has been possible only because this, the
country par excellence of immigration, has always considered newcomers as pros-
pective citizens of its own, regardless of their former national allegiances.
^^ The American Friends Service Bulletin (General Relief Bulletin, March, 1943)
prints the perplexed report of one of their field workers in Spain who had been con-
fronted with the problem of "a man who was born in Berlin, Germany, but who is of
Polish origin because of his Polish parents and who is therefore . . . Apatride, but is
claiming Ukrainian nationality and has been claimed by the Russian government for
repatriation and service in the Red Army."
2yg IMPERIALISM
origin changed hands so many times in the turmoil of postwar disputes
that the nationality of its inhabitants changed from year to year (as in Vilna
which a French official once termed la capitale des apatrides); more often
than one would imagine, people took refuge in statelessness after the first
World War in order to remain where they were and avoid being deported
to a "homeland" where they would be strangers (as in the case of many
Polish and Rumanian Jews in France and Germany, mercifully helped by
the antiscmitic attitude of their respective consulates).
Unimportant in himself, apparently just a legal freak, the apatride
received belated attention and consideration when he was joined in his
legal status by the postwar refugees who had been forced out of their coun-
tries by revolutions, and were promptly denationalized by the victorious
governments at home. To this group belong, in chronological order, mil-
lions of Russians, hundreds of thousands of Armenians, thousands of Hun-
garians, hundreds of thousands of Germans, and more than half a million
Spaniards — to enumerate only the more important categories. The behavior
of these governments may appear today to be the natural consequence of
civil war; but at the time mass denationalizations were something entirely
new and unforeseen. They presupposed a state structure which, if it was
not yet fully totalitarian, at least would not tolerate any opposition and
would rather lose its citizens than harbor people with different views. They
revealed, moreover, what had been hidden throughout the history of na-
tional sovereignty, that sovereignties of neighboring countries could come
into deadly conflict not only in the extreme case of war but in peace. It now
became clear that full national sovereignty was possible only as long as the
comity of European nations existed; for it was this spirit of unorganized
solidarity and agreement that prevented any government's exercise of its
full sovereign power. Theoretically, in the sphere of international law, it
had always been true that sovereignty is nowhere more absolute than in
matters of "emigration, naturalization, nationality, and expulsion"; ^3 the
point, however, is that practical consideration and the silent acknowledg-
ment of common interests restrained national sovereignty until the rise of
totalitarian regimes. one is almost tempted to measure the degree of totali-
tarian infection by the extent to which the concerned governments use
their sovereign right of denationalization (and it would be quite interesting
then to discover that Mussolini's Italy was rather reluctant to treat its
refugees this way^^). But one should bear in mind at the same time that
there was hardly a country left on the Continent that did not pass between
the two wars some new legislation which, even if it did not use this right
- ' Lawrence Preuss, "La Denationalisation imposee pour des motifs politiques," in
Revue Internationale Fran(;aise dii Droit des Gens, 1937, Vol. IV, Nos. 1, 2, 5.
^^ An Italian law of 1926 against "abusive emigration" seemed to foreshadow de-
naturalization measures against anti-Fascist refugees; however, after 1929 the de-
naturalization policy was abandoned and Fascist organizations abroad were intro-
duced. Of the 40,000 members of the Unione Popolare Italiana in France, at least
10,000 were authentic anti-Fascist refugees, but only 3,000 were without passports.
See Simpson, op. cit., pp. 122 ff.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 279
extensively, was always phrased to allow for getting rid of a great number
of its inhabitants at any opportune moment.'^'''
No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with a more poignant irony
than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who
stubbornly insist on regarding as "inalienable" those human rights, which
are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries,
and the situation of the rightless themselves. Their situation has deteriorated
just as stubbornly, until the internment camp — prior to the second World
War the exception rather than the rule for the stateless — has become the
routine solution for the problem of domicile of the "displaced persons."
Even the terminology applied to the stateless has deteriorated. The term
"stateless" at least acknowledged the fact that these persons had lost the
protection of their government and required international agreements for
safeguarding their legal status. The postwar term "displaced persons" was
invented during the war for the express purpose of liquidating stateless-
ness once and for all by ignoring its existence. Nonrecognition of stateless-
ness always means repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin,
which either refuses to recognize the prospective repatriate as a citizen,
or, on the contrary, urgently wants him back for punishment. Since non-
totalitarian countries, in spite of their bad intentions inspired by the climate
of war, generally have shied away from mass repatriations, the number
of stateless people — twelve years after the end of the war — is larger than
ever. The decision of the statesmen to solve the problem of statelessness
by ignoring it is further revealed by the lack of any reliable statistics on
the subject. This much is known, however: while there are one million
"recognized" stateless, there are more than ten million so-called "de facto"
stateless; and whereas the relatively innocuous problem of the "de jure"
stateless occasionally comes up at international conferences, the core of state-
lessness, which is identical with the refugee question, is simply not men-
tioned. Worse still, the number of potentially stateless people is con-
tinually on the increase. Prior to the last war, only totalitarian or half-
totalitarian dictatorships resorted to the weapon of denaturalization with
^° The first law of this type was a French war measure in 1915 which concerned
only naturalized citizens of enemy origin who had retained their original nationality;
Portugal went much farther in a decree of 1916 which automatically denaturalized
all persons born of a German father. Belgium issued a law in 1922 which canceled
naturalization of persons who had committed antinationa! acts during the war, and
reaffirmed it by a new decree in 1934 which in the characteristically vague manner
of the time spoke of persons "manquant gravement a letirs devoirs de citoyen beige."
In Italy, since 1926, all persons could be denaturalized who were not" "worthy of
Italian citizenship" or a menace to the public order. Egypt and Turkey in 1926 and
1928 respectively issued laws according to which people could be denaturalized who
were a threat to the social order. France threatened with denaturalization those of its
new citizens who committed acts contrary to the interests of France (1927). Austria
in 1933 could deprive of Austrian nationality any of her citizens who served or par-
ticipated abroad in an action hostile to Austria. Germany, finally, in 1933 followed
closely the various Russian nationality decrees since 1921 by stating that all persons
"residing abroad" could at will be deprived of German nationality.
2S0 IMPERIALISM
regard lo those who were citizens by birth; now we have reached the point
where even free democracies, as, for instance, the United States, were
seriously considering depriving native Americans who are Communists
of their citizenship. The sinister aspect of these measures is that they are
being considered in all innocence. Yet, one need only remember the ex-
treme care of the Nazis, who insisted that all Jews of non-German nationality
"should be deprived of their citizenship either prior to, or, at the latest,
on the day of deportation"-^" (for German Jews such a decree was not
needed, because in the Third Reich there existed a law according to which
all Jews who had left the territory — including, of course, those deported to
a Polish camp — automatically lost their citizenship) in order to realize
the true implications of statelessness.
The first great damage done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival
of hundreds of thousands of stateless people was that the right of asylum,
the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in
the sphere of international relationships, was being abolished. Its long
and sacred history dates back to the very beginnings of regulated political
life. Since ancient times it has protected both the refugee and the land of
refuge from situations in which people were forced to become outlaws
through circumstances beyond their control. It was the only modern rem-
nant of the medieval principle that quid quid est in territorio est de terri-
loriu, for in all other cases the modern state tended to protect its citizens
beyond its own borders and to make sure, by means of reciprocal treaties,
that they remained subject to the laws of their country. But though the
right of asylum continued to function in a world organized into nation-
states and. in individual instances, even survived both World Wars, it was
felt to be an anachronism and in conflict with the international rights of the
slate. Therefore it cannot be found in written law, in no constitution or
international agreement, and the Covenant of the League of Nations never
even so much as mentioned it.^" It shares, in this respect, the fate of the
Rights of Man, which also never became law but led a somewhat shadowy
^ -The quotation is taken from an order of Hauptsturmfuhrer Dannecker, dated
March 10. 1943, and referring to the "deportation of 5,000 Jews from France, quota
1942." The document (photostat in the Centre de Documentation Juive in Paris) is
part of the Nuremberfi Documents No. RF 1216. Identical arrangements were made
for the Bulgarian Jews. Cf. ibidem the relevant memorandum by L. R. Wagner, dated
April 3. 1943, Document NG 4180.
'"S. I.awford Childs (op. cit.) deplores the fact that the Covenant of the League
contained "no charter for political refugees, no solace for exiles." The most recent
attempt of the United Nations to obtain, at least for a small group of stateless— the
so-called "Je jure stateless"— an improvement of their legal status was no more than
a mere gesture: namely, to gather the representatives of at least twenty states, but
with the explicit assurance that participation in such a conference would entail no
obligations whatsoever. Even under these circumstances it remained extremely doubtful
whether the conference could be called. See the news item in the New York Times.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 281
existence as an appeal in individual exceptional cases for which normal
legal institutions did not suffice.^^
The second great shock that the European world suffered through the
arrival of the refugees ^^ was the realization that it was impossible to get
rid of them or transform them into nationals of the country of refuge. From
the beginning everybody had agreed that there were only two ways to solve
the problem: repatriation or naturalization.-^ When the example of the first
Russian and Armenian waves proved that neither way gave any tangible
results, the countries of refuge simply refused to recognize statelessness in
all later arrivals, thereby making the situation of the refugees even more
intolerable.^" From the point of view of the governments concerned it was
understandable enough that they should keep reminding the League of
Nations "that [its] Refugee work must be liquidated with the utmost ra-
pidity";^' they had many reasons to fear that those who had been ejected
^'' The only guardians of the right of asylum were the few societies whose special
aim was the protection of human rights. The most important of them, the French-
sponsored Ligue des Droits de I'Homme with branches in all democratic European
countries, behaved as though the question were still merely the saving of individuals
persecuted for their political convictions and activities. This assumption, pointless
already in the case of millions of Russian refugees, became simply absurd for Jews
and Armenians. The Ligue was neither ideologically nor administratively equipped to
handle the new problems. Since it did not want to face the new situation, it stumbled
into functions which were much better fulfilled by any of the many charity agencies
which the refugees had built up themselves with the help of their compatriots. When
the Rights of Man became the object of an especially inefficient charity organization,
the concept of human rights naturally was discredited a little more.
^*^ The many and varied efforts of the legal profession to simplify the problem by
stating a difference between the stateless person and the refugee — such as maintaining
"that the status of a stateless person is characterized by the fact of his having no nation-
ality, whereas that of a refugee is determined by his having lost diplomatic protection"
(Simpson, op. cit., p. 232) — were always defeated by the fact that "all refugees are for
practical purposes stateless" (Simpson, op. cit., p. 4).
^" The most ironical formulation of this general expectation was made by R. Yewdall
Jermings, "Some International Aspects of the Refugee Question" in British Yearbook
of International Law, 1939: "The status of a refugee is not, of course, a permanent
one. The aim is that he should rid himself of that status as soon as possible, either by
repatriation or by naturalization in the country of refuge."
^° only the Russians, in every respect the aristocracy of the stateless people, and the
Armenians, who were assimilated to the Russian status, were ever officially recognized
as "stateless," placed under the protection of the League of Nations' Nansen Office,
and given traveling papers.
^' Childs, op. cit. The reason for this desperate attempt at promptness was the fear
of all governments that even the smallest positive gesture "might encourage countries
to get rid of their unwanted people and that many might emigrate who would otherwise
remain in their countries even under serious disabilities" (Louise W. Holborn, "The
Legal Status of Political Refugees, 1920-38," in American Journal of International Law.
1938).
See also Georges Mauco (in Esprit, 7e annee. No. 82, July, 1939, p. 590): "An
assimilation of the German refugees to the status of other refugees who were taken
care of by the Nansen office would naturally have been the simplest and best solution
rs:
IMPERIALISM
from the old trinity of state-people-territory, which still formed the basis
of E:uropcan organization and political civilization, formed only the begin-
ning of an increasing movement, were only the first trickle from an ever-
growing reservoir. It was obvious, and even the Evian Conference recog-
nized it in 1938, that all German and Austrian Jews were potentially
stateless; and it was only natural that the minority countries should be
encouraged by Germany's example to try to use the same methods for
getting rid of some of their minority populations.'^-' Among the minorities
the Jews and the Armenians ran the greatest risks and soon showed the
highest proportion of statelessness; but they proved also that minority
treaties did not necessarily offer protection but could also serve as an in-
strument to single out certain groups for eventual expulsion.
Almost as frightening as these new dangers arising from the old trouble
spots of Europe was the entirely new kind of behavior of all European na-
tionals in "ideological" struggles. Not only were people expelled from coun-
try and citizenship, but more and more persons of all countries, including
the Western democracies, volunteered to fight in civil wars abroad (some-
thing which up to then only a few idealists or adventurers had done) even
when this meant cutting themselves off from their national communities.
This was the lesson of the Spanish Civil War and one of the reasons why
the governments were so frightened by the International Brigade. Matters
would not have been quite so bad if this had meant that people no longer
clung so closely to their nationality and were ready eventually to be as-
similated into another national community. But this was not at all the case.
The stateless people had already shown a surprising stubbornness in re-
taining their nationality; in every sense the refugees represented separate
foreign minorities who frequently did not care to be naturalized, and they
never banded together, as the minorities had done temporarily, to defend
common interests.^'' The International Brigade was organized into national
for the German refugees themselves. But the governments did not want to extend the
privileges already granted to a new category of refugees who, moreover, threatened
to increase their number indefinitely."
^* To the 600,000 Jews in Germany and Austria who were potentially stateless in
1938, must be added the Jews of Rumania (the president of the Rumanian Federal
Commission for Minorities, Professor Dragomir, having just announced to the world
the impending revision of the citizenship of all Rumanian Jews) and Poland (whose
foreign minister Beck had officially declared that Poland had one million Jews too
many). See Simpson, op. cit., p. 235.
^^ It is difficult to decide what came first, the nation-states' reluctance to naturalize
refugees (the practice of naturalization became increasingly restricted and the practice
of denaturalization increasingly common with the arrival of refugees) or the refugees'
reluctance to accept another citizenship. In countries with minority populations like
Poland, the refugees (Russians and Ukrainians) had a definite tendency to assimilate
to the mmonties without however demanding Polish citizenship. (See Simpson, op. cit.,
p. 364.)
The behavior of Russian refugees is quite characteristic. The Nansen passport de-
scribed Its bearer as "personne d'origine riisse," because one would not have dared
to tell the Russian emigre that he was without nationality or of doubtful nationality."
(See Marc Vichniac, "Le Statut International des Apatrides," in Recueil des Cours de
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 283
battalions in which the Germans felt they fought against Hitler and the Ital-
ians against Mussolini, just as a few years later, in the Resistance, the
Spanish refugees felt they fought against Franco when they helped the
French against Vichy. What the European governments were so afraid of
in this process was that the new stateless people could no longer be said
to be of dubious or doubtful nationality (de nationalite indeterminee) .
Even though they had renounced their citizenship, no longer had any con-
nection with or loyalty to their country of origin, and did not identify their
nationality with a visible, fully recognized government, they retained a
strong attachment to their nationality. National splinter groups and minori-
ties, without deep roots in their territory and with no loyalty or relationship
to the state, had ceased to be characteristic only of the East. They had by
now infiltrated, as refugees and stateless persons, the older nation-states of
the West.
The real trouble started as soon as the two recognized remedies, repatria-
tion and naturalization, were tried. Repatriation measures naturally failed
when there was no country to which these people could be deported. They
failed not because of consideration for the stateless person (as it may ap-
pear today when Soviet Russia claims its former citizens and the democratic
countries must protect them from a repatriation they do not want); and
not because of humanitarian sentiments on the part of the countries that
were swamped with refugees; but because neither the country of origin nor
any other agreed to accept the stateless person. It would seem that the very
undeportability of the stateless person should have prevented a govern-
ment's expelling him; but since the man without a state was "an anomaly
for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general
law"-'^ — an outlaw by definition — he was completely at the mercy of the
police, which itself did not worry too much about committing a few illegal
acts in order to diminish the country's burden of indesirables.^-' In other
words, the state, insisting on its sovereign right of expulsion, was forced by
I'Academie de Droit hitenuitioniil. Vol. XXXIII, 1933.) An attempt to provide all
stateless persons with uniform identity cards was bitterly contested by the holders of
Nansen passports, who claimed that their passport was "a sign of legal recognition
of their peculiar status." (See Jermings, op. cit.) Before the outbreak of the war even
refugees from Germany were far from eager to be merged with the mass of the state-
less, but preferred the description "refiigie proveiuint d'Allemagne" with its remnant
of nationality.
More convincing than the complaints of European countries about the difficulties of
assimilating refugees are statements from overseas which agree with the former that
"of all classes of European immigrants the least easy to assimilate are the South,
Eastern, and Central Europeans." (See "Canada and the Doctrine of Peaceful
Changes," edited by H. F. Angus in International Studies Conference: Demographic
Questions: Peaceful Changes, 1937, pp. 75-76.)
^■^ Jermings, op. cit.
^^ A circular letter of the Dutch authorities (May 7, 1938) expressly considered each
refugee as an "undesirable alien," and defined a refugee as an "alien who left his
country under the pressure of circumstances." See "L'Emigration, Probleme Revolu-
tionnaire," in Esprit, 7e annee, No. 82, July, 1939, p. 602.
J»,SV IMPERIALISM
ihc illegal nature of statelessness into admittedly illegal acts.^" It smuggled
its expelled stateless into the neighboring countries, with the result that the
latter retaliated in kind. The ideal solution of repatriation, to smuggle the
refugee back into his country of origin, succeeded only in a few prominent
instances, partly because a nontotalitarian police was still restrained by a
few rudimentary ethical considerations, partly because the stateless person
was as likely to be smuggled back from his home country as from any
other, and last but not least because the whole traffic could go on only with
neighboring countries. The consequences of this smuggling were petty wars
between the police at the frontiers, which did not exactly contribute to good
international relations, and an accumulation of jail sentences for the state-
less who. with the help of the police of one country, had passed "illegally"
into the territory of another.
Every attempt by international conferences to establish some legal status
for stateless people failed because no agreement could possibly replace the
territory to which an alien, within the framework of existing law, must be
deportable. All discussions about the refugee problems revolved around
this one question: How can the refugee be made deportable again? The
second World War and the DP camps were not necessary to show that the
only practical substitute for a nonexistent homeland was an internment camp.
Indeed, as early as the thirties this was the only "country" the world had
to offer the stateless.^''
Naturalization, on the other hand, also proved to be a failure. The whole
naturalization system of European countries fell apart when it was con-
fronted with stateless people, and this for the same reasons that the right
of asylum had been set aside. Essentially naturalization was an appendage
to the nation-state's legislation that reckoned only with "nationals," people
born in its territory and citizens by birth. Naturalization was needed in ex-
ceptional cases, for single individuals whom circumstances might have
driven into a foreign territory. The whole process broke down when it be-
"'Lawrence Preuss. op. vit., describes the spread of illegality as follows: "The ini-
tial illegal act of the denationalizing government . . . puts the expelling country in
the position of an offender of international law, because its authorities violate the law
of the country to which the stateless person is expelled. The latter country, in turn,
cannot get rid of him . . . except by violating ... the law of a third country. . . .
(The stateless person finds himself before the following alternative]: either he vio-
lates the law of the country where he resides ... or he violates the law of the coun-
try to which he is expelled."
Sir John Fischer Williams ("Denationalisation," in British Year Book of International
Law. VII. 1927) concludes from this situation that denationalization is contrary to
international law; yet at the Conference pour la Codification du Droit International at
the Hague in 1930. it was only the Finnish government which maintained that "loss of
nationality . should never constitute a punishment ... nor be pronounced in
° „■■ '°. ee' rid of an undesirable person through expulsion."
Childs, op. cit., after having come to the sad conclusion that "the real difficulty
about receiving a refugee is that if he turns out badly . . . there is no way of getting
nd of him. proposed "transitional centers" to which the refugee could be returned
pu^rjos'"'" '^^''''^' '" °'^^'' '^°'''''' '''''"''^ '■^P'^'^^ ^ homeland for deportation
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 285
came a question of handling mass applications for naturalization:^^ even
from the purely administrative point of view, no European civil service
could possibly have dealt with the problem. Instead of naturalizing at least
a small portion of the new arrivals, the countries began to cancel earlier
naturalizations, partly because of general panic and partly because the ar-
rival of great masses of newcomers actually changed the always precarious
position of naturalized citizens of the same origin.'*'' Cancellation of natural-
ization or the introduction of new laws which obviously paved the way for
mass denaturalization^" shattered what little confidence the refugees might
have retained in the possibility of adjusting themselves to a new normal
life; if assimilation to the new country once looked a little shabby or dis-
loyal, it was now simply ridiculous. The difference between a naturalized
citizen and a stateless resident was not great enough to justify taking any
trouble, the former being frequently deprived of important civil rights and
threatened at any moment with the fate of the latter. Naturalized persons
were largely assimilated to the status of ordinary aliens, and since the
naturalized had already lost their previous citizenship, these measures simply
threatened another considerable group with statelessness.
It was almost pathetic to see how helpless the European governments
were, despite their consciousness of the danger of statelessness to their estab-
lished legal and political institutions and despite all their efforts to stem the
tide. Explosive events were no longer necessary. once a number of state-
less people were admitted to an otherwise normal country, statelessness
spread like a contagious disease. Not only were naturalized citizens in
danger of reverting to the status of statelessness, but living conditions for
all aliens markedly deteriorated. In the thirties it became increasingly diffi-
^^ Two instances of mass naturalization in the Near East were clearly exceptional:
one involved Greek refugees from Turkey whom the Greek government naturalized
en bloc in 1922 because it was actually a matter of repatriation of a Greek minority
and not of foreign citizens; the other benefited Armenian refugees from Turkey in
Syria, Lebanon, and other formerly Turkish countries, that is, a population with which
the Near East had shared common citizenship only a few years ago.
^® Where a wave of refugees found members of their own nationality already set-
tled in the country to which they immigrated — as was the case with the Armenians
and Italians in France, for example, and with Jews everywhere — a certain retrogression
set in in the assimilation of those who had been there longer. For their help and
solidarity could be mobilized only by appealing to the original nationality they had
in common with the newcomers. This point was of immediate interest to countries
flooded by refugees but unable or unwilling to give them direct help or the right to
work. In all these cases, national feelings of the older group proved to be one of the
main factors in the successful establishment of the refugees" (Simpson, op. cit., pp.
45-46), but by appealing to such national conscience and solidarity, the receiving
countries naturally increased the number of unassimilated aliens. To take one par-
ticularly interesting instance, 10,000 Italian refugees were enough to postpone indefi-
nitely the assimilation of almost one million Italian immigrants in France.
'*° The French government, followed by other Western countries, introduced during
the thirties an increasing number of restrictions for naturalized citizens: they were
eliminated from certain professions for up to ten years after their naturalization, they
had no political rights, etc.
:S6
IMPERIALISM
cult to distinguish clearly between stateless refugees and normal resident
aliens. once the government tried to use its right and repatriate a resident
ilien against his will, he would do his utmost to find refuge in statelessness.
During the first World War enemy aliens had already discovered the great
advantages of statelessness. But what then had been the cunning of in-
dividuals who found a loophole in the law had now become the instinctive
reaction of masses. France, Europe's greatest immigrant-reception area,-*'
because she had regulated the chaotic labor market by calling in alien
workers in times of need and deporting them in times of unemployment
and crisis, taught her aliens a lesson about the advantages of statelessness
which they did not readily forget. After 1935, the year of mass repatriation
by the Laval government from which only the stateless were saved, so-called
"economic immigrants" and other groups of earlier origin — Balkans,
Italians. Poles, and Spaniards — mixed with the waves of refugees into a
tangle that never again could be unraveled.
Much worse than what statelessness did to the time-honored and neces-
sary distinctions between nationals and foreigners, and to the sovereign
right of states in matters of nationality and expulsion, was the damage
suffered by the very structure of legal national institutions when a grow-
ing number of residents had to live outside the jurisdiction of these laws
and without being protected by any other. The stateless person, without
right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly
to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever com-
mitting a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which per-
tain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly
for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become
an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal.
The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced
outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a
crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least
temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For
then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind
of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm.
The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a
criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another
criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. only as an offender
against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his
sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which
there are no lawyers and no appeals. The same man who was in jail yes-
terday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights what-
ever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without
sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried
to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen be-
cause of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, com-
plain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no
*' Simpson, op. cit.. p. 289.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 287
longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all
the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a re-
spectable person. ^2
A much less reliable and much more difficult way to rise from an un-
recognized anomaly to the status of recognized exception would be to be-
come a genius. Just as the law knows only one difference between human
beings, the difference between the normal noncriminal and the anomalous
criminal, so a conformist society has recognized only one form of determined
individualism, the genius. European bourgeois society wanted the genius to
stay outside of human laws, to be a kind of monster whose chief social
function was to create excitement, and it did not matter if he actually was
an outlaw. Moreover, the loss of citizenship deprived people not only of
protection, but also of all clearly established, officially recognized identity,
a fact for which their eternal feverish efforts to obtain at least birth certifi-
cates from the country that denationalized them was a very exact symbol;
one of their problems was solved when they achieved the degree of dis-
tinction that will rescue a man from the huge and nameless crowd. only
fame will eventually answer the repeated complaint of refugees of all social
strata that "nobody here knows who I am"; and it is true that the chances
of the famous refugee are improved just as a dog with a name has a better
chance to survive than a stray dog who is just a dog in general.^"'
The nation-state, incapable of providing a law for those who had lost the
protection of a national government, transferred the whole matter to the
police. This was the first time the police in Western Europe had received
authority to act on its own, to rule directly over people; in one sphere of
public life it was no longer an instrument to carry out and enforce the law,
but had become a ruling authority independent of government and min-
istries.^* Its strength and its emancipation from law and government grew
in direct proportion to the influx of refugees. The greater the ratio of state-
^- In practical terms, any sentence meted out to him will be of small consequence
compared with an expulsion order, cancellation of a work permit, or a decree sending
him into an internment camp. A West Coast Japanese- American who was in jail when
the army ordered the internment of all Americans of Japanese ancestry would not
have been forced to liquidate his property at too low a price; he would have remained
right where he was, armed with a lawyer to look after his interests; and if he was
so lucky as to receive a long sentence, he might have returned righteously and peace-
fully to his former business and profession, even that of a professional thief. His jail
sentence guaranteed him the constitutional rights that nothing else — no protests of
loyalty and no appeals — could have obtained for him once his citizenship had become
doubtful.
*^ The fact that the same principle of formation of an elite frequently worked in
totalitarian concentration camps where the "aristocracy" was composed of a majority
of criminals and a few "geniuses," that is entertainers and artists, shows how closely
related the social positions of these groups are.
** In France, for instance, it was a matter of record that an order of expulsion
emanating from the police was much more serious than one which was issued only" by
the Ministry of Interior and that the Minister of Interior could only in rare cases
cancel a police expulsion, while the opposite procedure was often merely a question of
bribery. Constitutionally, the police is under the authority of the Ministry of Interior.
2f(S IMPERIALISM
less and potentially stateless to the population at large — in prewar France
it had reached 10 per cent of the total — the greater the danger of a gradual
transformation into a police state.
It gcK-s without saying that the totalitarian regimes, where the police
had risen to the peak of power, were especially eager to consolidate this
power through the domination over vast groups of people, who, regardless
of any offenses committed by individuals, found themselves anyway be-
yond the pale of the law. In Nazi Germany, the Nuremberg Laws with their
distinction between Reich citizens (full citizens) and nationals (second-
class citizens without political rights) had paved the way for a development
in which eventually all nationals of "alien blood" could lose their nation-
ality by official decree; only the outbreak of the war prevented a corre-
sponding legislation, which had been prepared in detail. ^*^ on the other
hand, the increasing groups of stateless in the nontotalitarian countries
led to a form of lawlessness, organized by the police, which practically
resulted in a co-ordination of the free world with the legislation of the
totalitarian countries. That concentration camps were ultimately provided
for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable
differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic
as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the
totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp
and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put
him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war
the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of "national
security," had on their own initiative established close connections with
the Gestapo and the GPU, so that one might say there existed an independ-
ent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy func-
tioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between
the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the
^'•In February, 1938, the Reich and Prussian Ministry of Interior presented the
"draft of a law concerning the acquisition and loss of German nationality" which went
far beyond the Nuremberg legislation. It provided that all children of "Jews, Jews of
mixed blood or persons of otherwise alien blood" (who could never become Reich
citizens anyway) were also no longer entitled to the nationality, "even if the father
possesses German nationality by birth." That these measures were no longer merely
concerned with anti-Jewish legislation is evident from an opinion expressed July 19,
1939 by the Minister of Justice, who suggests that "the words Jew and Jew of mixed
b ood should If possible be avoided in the law, to be replaced by 'persons of alien
t>lood or persons of non-German or non-Germanic [nicht artverwandt] blood.' "
An interesting feature in planning this extraordinary expansion of the stateless popu-
d ion in Nazi Germany concerns the foundlings, who are explicitly regarded as state-
nrnHni ,k'." '"^""K^'.'O" °^ '^^'' '^'^'^' 'characteristics can be made." Here the
nZnliv h. T'^ 'nd'V'dual is born with inalienable rights guaranteed by his
siScs unt k" ^'^''^'^^^•ely reversed: every individual is born rightless. namely
stateless, unless subsequently other conclusions are reached
of an M;SHL''°'t,''.'TY"''"^'^' ^'"^' "^ '^'^ legislation, including the opinions
I Yidd r Sn.?fi ?' .*^^^''"""'/'/ "''eh Command, can be found in the arcWves of
me Yiouish ^lentitic Institute in New York (G-75).
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 289
time of Leon Blum's popular-front government, which was guided by a
decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various
police organizations were never overburdened with "prejudices" against any
totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU
agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo
agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all
totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and po-
litical importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies.
That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from
the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to or-
ganize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police
forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police
had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination
of stateless and refugees.
Both in the history of the "nation of minorities" and in the formation of
a stateless people, Jews have played a significant role. They were at the head
of the so-called minority movement because of their great need for protec-
tion (matched only by the need of the Armenians) and their excellent inter-
national connections, but above all because they formed a majority in no
country and therefore could be regarded as the minorite par excellence, i.e.,
the only minority whose interests could be defended only by internationally
guaranteed protection.^^
The special needs of the Jewish people were the best possible pretext
for denying that the Treaties were a compromise between the new nations'
tendency forcefully to assimilate alien peoples and nationalities who for
reasons of expediency could not be granted the right to national self-
determination.
A similar incident made the Jews prominent in the discussion of the ref-
ugee and statelessness problem. The first Heimatlose or apatrides, as they
were created by the Peace Treaties, were for the most part Jews who came
from the succession states and were unable or unwilling to place themselves
under the new minority protection of their homelands. Not until Germany
forced German Jewry into emigration and statelessness did they form a
very considerable portion of the stateless people. But in the years following
Hitler's successful persecution of German Jews all the minority countries
began to think in terms of expatriating their minorities, and it was only
natural that they should start with the minorite par excellence, the only
nationality that actually had no other protection than a minority system
which by now had become a mockery.
The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem*^ was a pre-
■"'' on the role of the Jews in formulating the Minority Treaties, see Macartney,
op. cit., pp. 4, 213, 281 and passim; David Erdstein, Le Statut juridique des Minorites
en Europe, Paris, 1932, pp. 11 ff.; Oscar J. Janowsky, op. cit.
■*" This was by no means only a notion of Nazi Germany, though only a Nazi author
dared to express it: "It is true that a refugee question will continue to exist even
M>() IMPERIALISM
text used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it.
None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler's solution of the Jewish prob-
lem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Ger-
many, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and
finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to
extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the
world how really to "liquidate" all problems concerning minorities and
stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was
considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved — namely, by means
of a colonized and then conquered territory — but this solved neither the
problem of the minorities nor the stateless. on the contrary, like virtually
all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely
produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the
number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.
And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms
of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale in-
volving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and
1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse
to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the
image of the nation-state.
For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For
the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law
has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was des-
tined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation
dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals.
Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something
contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of
their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the
extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficuh it is for states
to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them
with an omnipotent police.
II: The Perplexities of the Rights of Man
THE DECLARATION of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century
was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that
from then on Man, and not God's command or the customs of history,
should be the source of Law. Independent of the privileges which history
had bestowed upon certain strata of society or certain nations, the declara-
tion indicated man's emancipation from all tutelage and announced that he
had now come of age.
when there is no longer a Jewish question; but since Jews form such a high percent-
age of the refugees, the refugee question will be much simplified" (Kabermann, "Das
mternationale Fliichtlingsproblem," in Zeitschrift fiir Politik. Bd. 29, Heft 3, 1939).
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 291
Beyond this, there was another implication of which the framers of the
declaration were only half aware. The proclamation of human rights was
also meant to be a much-needed protection in the new era where individuals
were no longer secure in the estates to which they were born or sure of
their equality before God as Christians. In other words, in the new secu-
larized and emancipated society, men were no longer sure of these social
and human rights which until then had been outside the political order and
guaranteed not by government and constitution, but by social, spiritual, and
religious forces. Therefore throughout the nineteenth century, the consensus
of opinion was that human rights had to be invoked whenever individuals
needed protection against the new sovereignty of the state and the new
arbitrariness of society.
Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed to be "inalienable," irreducible
to and undeducible from other rights or laws, no authority was invoked for
their establishment; Man himself was their source as well as their ultimate
goal. No special law, moreover, was deemed necessary to protect them be-
cause all laws were supposed to rest upon them. Man appeared as the only
sovereign in matters of law as the people was proclaimed the only sovereign
in matters of government. The people's sovereignty (different from that of
the prince) was not proclaimed by the grace of God but in the name of
Man, so that it seemed only natural that the "inalienable" rights of man
would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of
the people to sovereign self-government.
In other words, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated,
completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without ref-
erence to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into
a member of a people. From the beginning the paradox involved in the dec-
laration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an "abstract"
human being who seemed to exist nowhere, for even savages lived in some
kind of a social order. If a tribal or other "backward" community did not
enjoy human rights, it was obviously because as a whole it had not yet
reached that stage of civilization, the stage of popular and national sov-
ereignty, but was oppressed by foreign or native despots. The whole ques-
tion of human rights, therefore, was quickly and inextricably blended with
the question of national emancipation; only the emancipated sovereignty
of the people, of one's own people, seemed to be able to insure them. As
mankind, since the French Revolution, was conceived in the image of a
family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not
the individual, was the image of man.
The full implication of this identification of the rights of man with the
rights of peoples in the European nation-state system came to light only
when a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose
elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of
nation-states in the middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart
of Africa. The Rights of Man, after all, had been defined as "inalienable"
because they were supposed to be independent of all governments; but it
ij2 IMPERULISM
turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and
had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect
them and no institution was willing to guarantee them. Or when, as in the
case of the minorities, an international body arrogated to itself a nongovern-
mental authority, its failure was apparent even before its measures were
fully realized; not only were the governments more or less openly opposed
to this encroachment on their sovereignty, but the concerned nationalities
themselves did not recognize a nonnational guarantee, mistrusted everything
which was not clear-cut support of their "national" (as opposed to their
mere "linguistic, religious, and ethnic") rights, and preferred either, like the
Germans or Hungarians, to turn to the protection of the "national" mother
country, or, like the Jews, to some kind of interterritorial solidarity."*"^
The stateless people were as convinced as the minorities that loss of na-
tional rights was identical with loss of human rights, that the former in-
evitably entailed the latter. The more they were excluded from right in any
form, the more they tended to look for a reintegration into a national, into
their own national community. The Russian refugees were only the first to
insist on their nationality and to defend themselves furiously against attempts
to lump them together with other stateless people. Since them, not a single
group of refugees or Displaced Persons has failed to develop a fierce, violent
group consciousness and to clamor for rights as — and only as — Poles or
Jews or Germans, etc.
Even worse was that all societies formed for the protection of the Rights
of Man, all attempts to arrive at a new bill of human rights were sponsored
by marginal figures — by a few international jurists without political experi-
ence or professional philanthropists supported by the uncertain sentiments
of professional idealists. The groups they formed, the declarations they is-
sued, showed an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that
of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. No statesman, no po-
litical figure of any importance could possibly take them seriously; and
none of the liberal or radical parties in Europe thought it necessary to
incorporate into their program a new declaration of human rights. Neither
before nor after the second World War have the victims themselves ever
invoked these fundamental rights, which were so evidently denied them, in
their many attempts to find a way out of the barbed-wire labyrinth into which
events had driven them. on the contrary, the victims shared the disdain
" Pathetic instances of this exclusive confidence in national rights were the con-
sent before the second World War, of nearly 75 per cent of the German minority in
the Itahan Tyrol to leave their homes and resettle in Germany, the voluntary repatria-
tion of a German island in Slovenia which had been there since the fourteenth century
or. immediately after the close of the war, the unanimous rejection by Jewish refugees
in an Italian DP camp of an offer of mass naturalization by the Italian government.
In the face of the experience of European peoples between the two wars, it would be
a serious mistake to interpret this behavior simply as another example of fanatic
nationalist sentiment; these people no longer felt sure of their elementary rights if
these were not protected by a government to which they belonged by birth. See
Eugene M. Kulisher, op. cit.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 293
and indifference of the powers that be for any attempt of the marginal so-
cieties to enforce human rights in any elementary or general sense.
The failure of all responsible persons to meet the calamity of an ever-
growing body of people forced to live outside the scope of all tangible law
with the proclamation of a new bill of rights was certainly not due to ill
will. Never before had the Rights of Man, solemnly proclaimed by the
French and the American revolutions as the new fundament for civilized
societies, been a practical political issue. During the nineteenth century,
these rights had been invoked in a rather perfunctory way, to defend indi-
viduals against the increasing power of the state and to mitigate the new
social insecurity caused by the industrial revolution. Then the meaning of
human rights acquired a new connotation: they became the standard slogan
of the protectors of the underprivileged, a kind of additional law, a right
of exception necessary for those who had nothing better to fall back upon.
The reason why the concept of human rights was treated as a sort of
stepchild by nineteenth-century political thought and why no liberal or
radical party in the twentieth century, even when an urgent need for en-
forcement of human rights arose, saw fit to include them in its program
seems obvious: civil rights — that is the varying rights of citizens in different
countries — were supposed to embody and spell out in the form of tangible
laws the eternal Rights of Man, which by themselves were supposed to be
independent of citizenship and nationality. All human beings were citizens
of some kind of political community; if the laws of their country did not
live up to the demands of the Rights of Man, they were expected to change
them, by legislation in democratic countries or through revolutionary action
in despotisms.
The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable —
even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them — whenever
people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state. To this
fact, disturbing enough in itself, one must add the confusion created by the
many recent attempts to frame a new bill of human rights, which have
demonstrated that no one seems able to define with any assurance what these
general human rights, as distinguished from the rights of citizens, really are.
Although everyone seems to agree that the plight of these people consists
precisely in their loss of the Rights of Man, no one seems to know which
rights they lost when they lost these human rights.
The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and
this meant the loss of the entire social texture into which they were born and
in which they established for themselves a distinct place in the world. This
calamity is far from unprecedented; in the long memory of history, forced
migrations of individuals or whole groups of people for political or economic
reasons look like everyday occurrences. What is unprecedented is not the
loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one. Suddenly, there
was no place on earth where migrants could go without the severest restric-
tions, no country where they would be assimilated, no territory where they
could found a new community of their own. This, moreover, had next to
iy^ IMPERIALISM
nothing to do with any material problem of overpopulation; it was a prob-
lem not of space but of political organization. Nobody had been aware that
mankind, for so long a time considered under the image of a family of na-
tions, had reached the stage where whoever was thrown out of one of these
tightly organized closed communities found himself thrown out of the family
of nations altogether.^'*
The second loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of government
protection, and this did not imply just the loss of legal status in their own,
but in all countries. Treaties of reciprocity and international agreements
have woven a web around the earth that makes it possible for the citizen of
every country to take his legal status with him no matter where he goes (so
that, for instance, a German citizen under the Nazi regime might not be
able to enter a mixed marriage abroad because of the Nuremberg laws).
Yet. whoever is no longer caught in it finds himself out of legality altogether
(thus during the last war stateless people were invariably in a worse position
than enemy aliens who were still indirectly protected by their governments
through international agreements).
By itself the loss of government protection is no more unprecedented than
the loss of a home. Civilized countries did offer the right of asylum to those
who. for political reasons, had been persecuted by their governments, and
this practice, though never officially incorporated into any constitution, has
functioned well enough throughout the nineteenth and even in our century.
Tlie trouble arose when it appeared that the new categories of persecuted
were far too numerous to be handled by an unofficial practice destined for
exceptional cases. Moreover, the majority could hardly qualify for the right
of asylum, which implicitly presupposed political or religious convictions
which were not outlawed in the country of refuge. The new refugees were
persecuted not because of what they had done or thought, but because of
what they unchangeably were — born into the wrong kind of race or the
wrong kind of class or drafted by the wrong kind of government (as in the
case of the Spanish Republican Army).^"'
The more the number of rightless people increased, the greater became
the temptation to pay less attention to the deeds of the persecuting govern-
ments than to the status of the persecuted. And the first glaring fact was
that these people, though persecuted under some political pretext, were no
"The few chances for reintegration open to the new migrants were mostly based
on their nationality: Spanish refugees, for instance, were welcomed to a certain extent
in Mexico. The United States, in the early twenties, adopted a quota system according
to which each nationality already represented in the country received, so to speak, the
right to receive a number of former countrymen proportionate to its numerical part
in the total population.
'" How dangerous it can be to be innocent from the point of view of the perse-
cutmg government, became very clear when, during the last war, the American gov-
ernment offered asylum to all those German refugees who were threatened by the
extradition paragraph in the German-French Armistice. The condition was, of course,
that the applicant could prove that he had done something against the Nazi regime.
The proportion of refugees from Germany who were able to fulfill this condition was
very small, and they, strangely enough, were not the people who were most in danger.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 295
longer, as the persecuted had been throughout history, a liability and an
image of shame for the persecutors; that they were not considered and
hardly pretended to be active enemies (the few thousand Soviet chizens who
voluntarily left Soviet Russia after the second World War and found asylum
in democratic countries did more damage to the prestige of the Soviet Union
than millions of refugees in the twenties who belonged to the wrong class),
but that they were and appeared to be nothing but human beings whose very
innocence — from every point of view, and especially that of the persecuting
government — was their greatest misfortune. Innocence, in the sense of com-
plete lack of responsibility, was the mark of their rightlessness as it was the
seal of their loss of political status.
only in appearance therefore do the needs for a reinforcement of human
rights touch upon the fate of the authentic political refugee. Political ref-
ugees, of necessity few in number, still enjoy the right to asylum in many
countries, and this right acts, in an informal way, as a genuine substitute for
national law.
one of the surprising aspects of our experience with stateless people who
benefit legally from committing a crime has been the fact that it seems to
be easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legality than someone
who has committed an offense. Anatole France's famous quip, "If I am
accused of stealing the towers of Notre Dame, I can only flee the country,"
has assumed a horrible reality. Jurists are so used to thinking of law in terms
of punishment, which indeed always deprives us of certain rights, that they
may find it even more difficult than the layman to recognize that the depriva-
tion of legality, i.e., of all rights, no longer has a connection with specific
crimes.
This situation illustrates the many perplexities inherent in the concept of
human rights. No matter how they have once been defined (life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, according to the American formula, or as equality
before the law, liberty, protection of property, and national sovereignty,
according to the French); no matter how one may attempt to improve an
ambiguous formulation like the pursuit of happiness, or an antiquated one
like unqualified right to property; the real situation of those whom the
twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law shows that these are
rights of citizens whose loss does not entail absolute rightlessness. The sol-
dier during the war is deprived of his right to life, the criminal of his right
to freedom, all citizens during an emergency of their right to the pursuit of
happiness, but nobody would ever claim that in any of these instances a
loss of human rights has taken place. These rights, on the other hand, can
be granted (though hardly enjoyed) even under conditions of fundamental
rightlessness.
The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of
opinion — formulas which were designed to solve problems within given
communities — but that they no longer belong to any community whatso-
ever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no
2<^6 IMPERIALISM
law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even
to oppress them. only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their
right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly "superfluous," if no-
btxly can be found to "claim" them, may their lives be in danger. Even the
Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal
status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the
world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps;
and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested
the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim
these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was
created before the right to live was challenged.
The same is true even to an ironical extent with regard to the right of
freedom which is sometimes considered to be the very essence of human
rights. There is no question that those outside the pale of the law may have
more freedom of movement than a lawfully imprisoned criminal or that
they enjoy more freedom of opinion in the internment camps of democratic
countries than they would in any ordinary despotism, not to mention in a
totalitarian country."'" But neither physical safety — being fed by some state
or private welfare agency — nor freedom of opinion changes in the least their
fundamental situation of rightlessness. The prolongation of their lives is due
to charity and not to right, for no law exists which could force the nations
to feed them; their freedom of movement, if they have it at all, gives them
no right to residence which even the jailed criminal enjoys as a matter of
course; and their freedom of opinion is a fool's freedom, for nothing they
think matters anyhow.
These last points are crucial. The fundamental deprivation of human
rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the
world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something
much more fundamental than freedom and justice, which are rights of cit-
izens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born
is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of
choice, or when one is placed in a situation where, unless he commits a
crime, his treatment by others does not depend on what he does or does not
do. This extremity, and nothing else, is the situation of people deprived of
human rights. They are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the
right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the
right to opinion. Privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and
doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relation
whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do.
We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that
means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and
•"Even under the conditions of totalitarian terror, concentration camps sometimes
?,m^,"." 7^^ °"'y P'2" where certain remnants of freedom of thought and discussion
JIh ^^^^r "* '^°"''^'' ^" ^''"'■•^ ''"^ ^""^ ^"'•'. Paris, 1947, passim, for
940 n 7nn'r"°" '? ^"^henwald. and Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London,
he Soviet ni' f 1 °^ '"^^"y-" "'^^ f'^^^«"^ °f "^'"d" that reigned in some of
the ;>oviet places of detention.
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 297
opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only
when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these
rights because of the new global political situation. The trouble is that this
calamity arose not from any lack of civilization, backwardness, or mere
tyranny, but, on the contrary, that it could not be repaired, because there
was no longer any "uncivilized" spot on earth, because whether we like it
or not we have really started to live in one World. only with a completely
organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become
identical with expulsion from humanity altogether.
Before this, what we must call a "human right" today would have been
thought of as a general characteristic of the human condition which no
tyrant could take away. Its loss entails the loss of the relevance of speech
(and man, since Aristotle, has been defined as a being commanding the
power of speech and thought), and the loss of all human relationship (and
man, again since Aristotle, has been thought of as the "political animal,"
that is one who by definition lives in a community), the loss, in other words,
of some of the most essential characteristics of human life. This was to a
certain extent the plight of slaves, whom Aristotle therefore did not count
among human beings. Slavery's fundamental offense against human rights
was not that it took liberty away (which can happen in maii.y other situa-
tions), but that it excluded a certain category of people even from the pos-
sibility of fighting for freedom — a fight possible under tyranny, and even
under the desperate conditions of modern terror (but not under any condi-
tions of concentration-camp life). Slavery's crime against humanity did not
begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course
this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which
some men were "born" free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it
was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanc-
tion for the crime was attributed to nature. Yet in the light of recent events
it is possible to say that even slaves still belonged to some sort of human
community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited, and this kept them
within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive
character, a place in society — more than the abstract nakedness of being
human and nothing but human. Not the loss of specific rights, then, but
the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever,
has been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people.
Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his
essential quality as man, his human dignity. only the loss of a polity itself
expels him from humanity.
The right that corresponds to this loss and that was never even men-
tioned among the human rights cannot be expressed in the categories of
the eighteenth century because they presume that rights spring immediately
from the "nature" of man — whereby it makes relatively little difference
whether this nature is visualized in terms of the natural law or in terms of
a being created in the image of God, whether it concerns "natural" rights or
divine commands. The decisive factor is that these rights and the human
dignity they bestow should remain valid and real even if only a single human
29,^ IMPERIALISM
being existed on earth; they are independent of human plurality and should
remain valid even if a human being is expelled from the human community.
When the Rights of Man were proclaimed for the first time, they were
regarded as being independent of history and the privileges which history
had accorded certain strata of society. The new independence constituted
the newly discovered dignity of man. From the beginning, this new dignity
was of a rather ambiguous nature. Historical rights were replaced by natural
rights, "nature" took the place of history, and it was tacitly assumed that
nature was less alien than history to the essence of man. The very language
of the Declaration of Independence as well as of the Declaration des Droits
de I'Homme — "inalienable," "given with birth," "self-evident truths" — im-
plies the belief in a kind of human "nature" which would be subject to
the same laws of growth as that of the individual and from which rights and
laws could be deduced. Today we are perhaps better qualified to judge
exactly what this human "nature" amounts to; in any event it has shown
us potentialities that were neither recognized nor even suspected by West-
ern philosophy and religion, which for more than three thousand years have
defined and redefined this "nature." But it is not only the, as it were, human
aspect of nature that has become questionable to us. Ever since man learned
to master it to such an extent that the destruction of all organic life on
earth with man-made instruments has become conceivable and technically
possible, he has been alienated from nature. Ever since a deeper knowledge
of natural processes instilled serious doubts about the existence of natural
laws at all, nature itself has assumed a sinister aspect. How should one be
able to deduce laws and rights from a universe which apparently knows
neither the one nor the other category?
Man of the twentieth century has become just as emancipated from
nature as eighteenth-century man was from history. History and nature have
become equally alien to us, namely, in the sense that the essence of man
can no longer be comprehended in terms of either category. on the other
hand, humanity, which for the eighteenth century, in Kantian terminology,
was no more than a regulative idea, has today become an inescapable fact.
This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role
formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that
the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to hu-
manity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain
whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian
attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international or-
ganizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present
sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agree-
ments and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a
sphere that is above the nations does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma
would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world gov-
ernment." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility,
but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the ver-
sion promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against hu-
man rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 299
be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful
for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what
is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception
of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain
ineffectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the
constitutions prevent this.) A conception of law which identifies what is
right with the notion of what is good for — for the individual, or the family,
or the people, or the largest number — becomes inevitable once the absolute
and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost
their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to
which the "good for" applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite
conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities,
that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude
quite democratically — namely by majority decision — that for humanity as
a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the
problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest per-
plexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so
long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political
and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: "Not
man, but a god, must be the measure of all things."
These facts and reflections offer what seems an ironical, bitter, and be-
lated confirmation of the famous arguments with which Edmund Burke
opposed the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. They
appear to buttress his assertion that human rights were an "abstraction,"
that it was much wiser to rely on an "entailed inheritance" of rights which
one transmits to one's children like life itself, and to claim one's rights to be
the "rights of an Englishman" rather than the inalienable rights of man.^^
According to Burke, the rights which we enjoy spring "from within the na-
tion," so that neither natural law, nor divine command, nor any concept of
mankind such as Robespierre's "human race," "the sovereign of the earth,"
are needed as a source of law.^^
The pragmatic soundness of Burke's concept seems to be beyond doubt in
the light of our manifold experiences. Not only did loss of national rights in
all instances entail the loss of human rights; the restoration of human rights,
as the recent example of the State of Israel proves, has been achieved so
far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights. The
conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human
being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed
to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had in-
deed lost all other qualities and specific relationships — except that they were
still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of
being human. And in view of objective political conditions, it is hard to say
how the concepts of man upon which human rights are based — that he is
^' Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, edited by E. J.
Payne, Everyman's Library.
■"'^Robespierre, Speeches, 1927. Speech of April 24, 1793.
JfOO IMPERIALISM
created in the image of God (in the American formula), or that he is the
a'prcsentativc of mankind, or that he harbors within himself the sacred de-
mands of natural law (in the French formula) — could have helped to find
a solution to the problem.
The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration
and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people
could see without Burke's arguments that the abstract nakedness of being
nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were re-
garded as savages and, afraid that they might end by being considered beasts,
they insisted on their nationality, the last sign of their former citizenship, as
their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of
natural, their preference for national, rights comes precisely from their real-
ization that natural rights are granted even to savages. Burke had already
feared that natural "inalienable" rights would confirm only the "right of the
naked savage,""''' and therefore reduce civilized nations to the status of sav-
agery. Because only savages have nothing more to fall back upon than the
minimum fact of their human origin, people cling to their nationality all the
more desperately when they have lost the rights and protection that such
nationality once gave them. only their past with its "entailed inheritance"
seems to attest to the fact that they still belong to the civilized world.
If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the
implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly
the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided.
Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a
man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to
treat him as a fellow-man. This is one of the reasons why it is far more dif-
ficult to destroy the legal personality of a criminal, that is of a man who has
taken upon himself the responsibility for an act whose consequences now
determine his fate, than of a man who has been disallowed all common hu-
man responsibilities.
Burke's arguments therefore gain an added significance if we look only
at the general human condition of those who have been forced out of all
political communities. Regardless of treatment, independent of liberties or
oppression, justice or injustice, they have lost all those parts of the world
and all those aspects of human existence which are the result of our common
labor, the outcome of the human artifice. If the tragedy of savage tribes is
that they inhabit an unchanged nature which they cannot master, yet upon
whose abundance or frugality they depend for their livelihood, that they live
and die without leaving any trace, without having contributed anything to a
common world, then these rightless people are indeed thrown back into a
peculiar state of nature. Certainly they are not barbarians; some of them,
indeed, belong to the most educated strata of their respective countries;
nevertheless, in a world that has almost liquidated savagery, they appear as
the first signs of a possible regression from civilization.
The more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the
^^ Introduction by Payne to Burke, op. cit.
I
DECLINE OF NATION-STATE; END OF RIGHTS OF MAN 301
world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice
— the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything
that is merely and mysteriously given them. The human being who has lost
his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and
the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a con-
sistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate
only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere exist-
ence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that
which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of
our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only
by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great
and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, "Volo ut sis (I
want you to be)," without being able to give any particular reason for such
supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.
Since the Greeks, we have known that highly developed political life
breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentment
against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made
as he is — single, unique, unchangeable. This whole sphere of the merely
given, relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to
the public sphere, because the public sphere is as consistently based on the
law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal dif-
ference and differentiation. Equality, in contrast to all that is involved in
mere existence, is not given us, but is the result of human organization inso-
far as it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we
become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to
guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.
Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality
through organization, because man can act in and change and build a com-
mon world, together with his equals and only with his equals. The dark
background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchange-
able and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which
in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human
activity — which are identical with the limitations of human equality. The
reason why highly developed political communities, such as the ancient city-
states or modern nation-states, so often insist on ethnic homogeneity is
that they hope to eliminate as far as possible those natural and always pres-
ent differences and differentiations which by themselves arouse dumb hatred,
mistrust, and discrimination because they indicate all too clearly those
spheres where men cannot act and change at will, i.e., the limitations of the
human artifice. The "alien" is a frightening symbol of the fact of difference
as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man
cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct
tendency to destroy. If a Negro in a white community is considered a Negro
and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of
action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as "nec-
essary" consequences of some "Negro" qualities; he has become some speci-
302
IMPERIALISM
men of an animal species, called man. Much the same thing happens to
those who have lost all distinctive political qualities and have become human
beings and nothing else. No doubt, wherever public life and its law of
equality are completely victorious, wherever a civilization succeeds in elim-
inating or reducing to a minimum the dark background of difference, it
will end in complete petrifaction and be punished, so to speak, for having
forgotten that man is only the master, not the creator of the world.
The great danger arising from the existence of people forced to live out-
side the common world is that they are thrown back, in the midst of civil-
ization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation. They lack
that tremendous equalizing of differences which comes from being citizens
of some commonwealth and yet, since they are no longer allowed to par-
take in the human artifice, they begin to belong to the human race in
much the same way as animals belong to a specific animal species. The par-
adox involved in the loss of human rights is that such loss coincides with
the instant when a person becomes a human being in general — without a
profession, without a citizenship, without an opinion, without a deed by
which to identify and specify himself — and different in general, representing
nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of
ｅxpression within and action upon a common world, loses all significance.
The danger in the existence of such people is twofold: first and more
obviously, their ever-increasing numbers threaten our political life, our
human artifice, the world which is the result of our common and co-ordi-
nated effort in much the same, perhaps even more terrifying, way as the
wild elements of nature once threatened the existence of man-made cities
and countrysides. Deadly danger to any civilization is no longer likely to
come from without. Nature has been mastered and no barbarians threaten to
destroy what they cannot understand, as the Mongolians threatened Europe
for centuries. Even the emergence of totalitarian governments is a phe-
nomenon within, not outside, our civilization. The danger is that a global,
universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own
midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all ap-
p>earances, are the conditions of savages.^*
'■■* This modern expulsion from humanity has much more radical consequences than
the ancient and medieval custom of outlawry. Outlawry, certainly the "most fearful
fate which primitive law could inflict," placing the life of the outlawed person at the
mercy of anyone he met, disappeared with the establishment of an effective system of
law enforcement and was finally replaced by extradition treaties between the nations.
It had been primarily a substitute for a police force, designed to compel criminals to
surrender.
The early Middle Ages seem to have been quite conscious of the danger involved
m "civil death." Excommunication in the late Roman Empire meant ecclesiastical
death but left a person who had lost his membership in the church full freedom in
all other respects. Ecclesiastical and civil death became identical only in the Mero-
vmgian era, and there excommunication "in general practice [was] limited to tempo-
rary withdrawal or suspension of the rights of membership which might be regained."
See the articles "Outlawry" and "Excommunication" in the Encyclopedia of Social
Sciences. Also the article "Friedlosigkeit" in the Schweizer Lexikon
PART THREE
Totalitarianism
Normal men do not know that everything is possible.
DAVID ROUSSET
CHAPTER TEN
A Classless Society
i: The Masses
NOTHING is more characteristic of the totaUtarian movements in general
and of the quality of fame of their leaders in particular than the
startling swiftness with which they are forgotten and the startling ease with
which they can be replaced. What Stalin accomplished laboriously over
many years through bitter factional struggles and vast concessions at least
to the name of his predecessor — namely, to legitimate himself as Lenin's
political heir — Stalin's successors attempted to do without concessions to
the name of their predecessor, even though Stalin had thirty years' time and
could manipulate a propaganda apparatus, unknown in Lenin's day, to
immortalize his name. The same is true for Hitler, who during his lifetime
exercised a fascination to which allegedly no one was immune,^ and who
' The "magic spell" that Hitler cast over his listeners has been acknowledged many
times, latterly by the publishers of Hitlers Tischgesprache, Bonn, 1951 {Hitler's Table
Talks, American edition. New York, 1953; quotations from the original German
edition). This fascination — "the strange magnetism that radiated from Hitler in such
a compelling manner" — rested indeed on the fanatical belief of this man in himself"
(introduction by Gerhard Ritter, p. 14), on his pseudo-authoritative judgments about
everything under the sun, and on the fact that his opinions — whether they dealt with
the harmful effects of smoking or with Napoleon's policies — could always be fitted
into an all-encompassing ideology.
Fascination is a social phenomenon, and the fascination Hitler exercised over his
environment must be understood in terms of the particular company he kept. Society
is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a
crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern
society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened,
so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of
unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many
times he has been demonstrably wrong. Hitler, who knew the modern chaos of
opinions from first-hand experience, discovered that the helpless seesawing between
various opinions and "the conviction . . . that everything is balderdash" (p. 281)
could best be avoided by adhering to one of the many current opinions with "unbend-
ing consistency." The hair-raising arbitrariness of such fanaticism holds great fascina-
tion for society because for the duration of the social gathering it is freed from the
chaos of opinions that it constantly generates. This "gift" of fascination, however,
has only social relevance; it is so prominent in the Tischgesprficlie because here Hitler
played the game of society and was not speaking to his own kind but to the generals
of the Wehrmacht, all of whom more or less belonged to "society." To believe that
Hitler's successes were based on his "powers of fascination" is altogether erroneous;
with those qualities alone he would have never advanced beyond the role of a promi-
nent figure in the salons.
jfQfy TOTALITARIANISM
after his defeat and death is today so thoroughly forgotten that he scarcely
plays any further role even among the neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi groups of
postwar Germany. This impermanence no doubt has something to do with
the proverbial fickleness of the masses and the fame that rests on them;
more likely, it can be traced to the perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian
movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving
and set everything around them in motion. Therefore, in a certain sense
this very impermanence is a rather flattering testimonial to the dead leaders
insofar as they succeeded in contaminating their subjects with the speci-
fically totalitarian virus; for if there is such a thing as a totalitarian per-
sonality or mentality, this extraordinary adaptability and absence of con-
tinuity are no doubt its outstanding characteristics. Hence it might be a
mistake to assume that the inconstancy and forgetfulness of the masses
signify that they are cured of the totalitarian delusion, which is occasionally
identified with the Hitler or Stalin cult; the opposite might well be true.
It would be a still more serious mistake to forget, because of this Im-
permanence, that the totalitarian regimes, so long as they are in power, and
the totalitarian leaders, so long as they are alive, "command and rest upoii
mass support" up to the end.'- Hitler's rise to power was legal in terms of
majority rule"* and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leader-
ship of large populations, survived many interior and exterior crises, and
braved the numerous dangers of relentless intra-party struggles if they had
not had the confidence of the masses. Neither the Moscow trials nor the
liquidation of the Rohm faction would have been possible if these masses
had not supported Stalin and Hitler. The widespread belief that Hitler was
simply an agent of German industrialists and that Stalin was victorious in
the succession struggle after Lenin's death only through a sinister conspiracy
are both legends which can be refuted by many facts but above all by the
leaders' indisputable popularity.'' Nor can their popularity be attributed Lo
the victory of masterful and lying propaganda over ignorance and stupidity.
' See the illuminating remarks of Carlton J. H. Hayes on "The Novelty of Totali-
tarianism in the History of Western Civilization," in Symposium on the Totalitarian
Slate. 1939. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1940,
Vol. LXXXII.
^ This was indeed "the first large revolution in history that was carried out by
applying the existing formal code of law at the moment of seizing power" (Hans
Frank. Recht und Verwaltung, 1939, p. 8).
* The best study of Hitler and his career is the new Hitler biography by Alan Bul-
lock. Hitler, A Study in Tyranny, London, 1952. In the English tradition of political
biographies it makes meticulous use of all available source material and gives a com-
prehensive picture of the contemporary political background. By this publication the
excellent books of Konrad Heiden— primarily Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power,
Boston, 1944— have been superseded in their details although they remain important
for the general mterpretation of events. For Stalin's career, Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A
Cr/nro/ Survey of Bolshevism. New York, 1939, is still a standard work. Isaac
L)cutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography. New York and London, 1949, is indispensable
u\ T "^ documentary material and great insight into the internal struggles of the
Bolshevik party; it suffers from an interpretation which likens Stalin to— Cromwell,
Napoleon, and Robespierre.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 307
For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede and accom-
pany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and
would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their
past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. The Nazis "were con-
vinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,"'' Bol-
shevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize
ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propa-
ganda, and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value
of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of
mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in
politics.
The attraction of evil and crime for the mob mentality is nothing new. It
has always been true that the mob will greet "deeds of violence with the
admiring remark: it may be mean but it is very clever."" The disturbing
factor in the success of totalitarianism is rather the true selflessness of its
adherents: it may be understandable that a Nazi or Bolshevik will not be
shaken in his conviction by crimes against people who do not belong to
the movement or are even hostile to it; but the amazing fact is that neither
is he likely to waver when the monster begins to devour its own children
and not even if he becomes a victim of persecution himself, if he is framed
and condemned, if he is purged from the party and sent to a forced-labor
or a concentration camp. on the contrary, to the wonder of the whole
civilized world, he may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and
frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the move-
ment is not touched.^ It would be naive to consider this stubbornness of
conviction which outlives all actual experiences and cancels all immediate
self-interest a simple ｅxpression of fervent idealism. Idealism, foolish or
heroic, always springs from some individual decision and conviction and
is subject to experience and argument.^ The fanaticism of totalitarian move-
' Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy, London, 1940, p. 231.
° Quoted from the German edition of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Die
Zionistischen Protokolle mit cinem Vor- unci N athwart von Theodor Fritsch, 1924,
p. 29.
^ This, to be sure, is a specialty of the Russian brand of totalitarianism. It is inter-
esting to note that in the early trial of foreign engineers in the Soviet Union, Com-
munist sympathies were already used as an argument for self-accusation: "All the
time the authorities insisted on my admitting having committed acts of sabotage I had
never done. 1 refused. I was told: 'If you are in favour of the Soviet Government, as
you pretend you are, prove it by your actions; the Government needs your con-
fession.' " Reported by Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 153.
A theoretical justification for this behavior was given by Trotsky: "We can only
be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in
the right. The English have a saying, 'My country, right or wrong.' . . . We have
much better historical justification in saying whether it is right or wrong in certain
individual concrete cases, it is my party" (Souvarine, op. tit., p. 361).
on the other hand, the Red Army officers who did not belong to the movement
had to be tried behind closed doors.
^ The Nazi author Andreas Pfenning explicitly rejects the notion that the SA were
fighting for an "ideal" or were prompted by an "idealistic experience." Their "basic
^Q^ TOTALITARIANISM
mcnts. contrary to all forms of idealism, breaks down the moment the move-
ment leaves its fanaticized followers in the lurch, killing in them any re-
maining conviction that might have survived the collapse of the movement
itself." But within the organizational framework of the movement, so long
as it holds together, the fanaticized members can be reached by neither
experience nor argument; identification with the movement and total con-
formism seem to have destroyed the very capacity for experience, even if
it be as extreme as torture or the fear of death.
The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses —
not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; Jiot
citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling of public affairs,
like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries. While all political groups de-
pend upon proportionate strength, the totalitarian movements depend on
the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem
impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with
relatively small populations.'" After the first World War, a deeply anti-
democratic, prodictatorial wave of semitotalitarian and totalitarian move-
ments swept Europe; Fascist movements spread from Italy to nearly all
Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech part of Czechoslovakia
was one of the notable exceptions); yet even Mussolini, who was so fond
of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to estabHsh a full-fledged
totalitarian regime" and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party
experience came into existence in the course of the struggle." "Gemeinschaft und
Staatswissenschaft," in Zeitschrift jilr die gesamte StaatswissenschafJ, Band 96. Trans-
lation quoted from Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual Slate, New York and London, 1941.
p. 192. From the extensive literature issued in pamphlet form by the main indoctrina-
tion center (Hauptamt-Sihultingsanu) of the SS, it is quite evident that the word
"idealism" has been studiously avoided. Not idealism was demanded of SS members,
but "utter logical consistency in all questions of ideology and the ruthless pursuit of
the political struggle" (Werner Best, Die deutsche Polizei, 1941, p. 99).
" In this respect postwar Germany offers many illuminating examples. It was as-
tonishing enough that American Negro troops were by no means received with hostility,
in spite of the massive racial indoctrination undertaken by the Nazis. But equally
startling was "the fact that the Waffen-SS in the last days of German resistance
against the Allies did not fight 'to the last man' " and that this special Nazi combat
unit "after the enormous sacrifices of the preceding years, which far exceeded the
proportionate losses of the Wehrmacht, in the last few weeks acted like any unit drawn
from the ranks of civilians, and bowed to the hopelessness of the situation" (Karl O.
Pae^el, "Die SS," in Vierteljahreshejte fiir Zeitgeschichte, January, 1954).
'The Moscow-dominated Eastern European governments rule for the sake of
Moscow and act as agents of the Comintern; they are examples of the spread of the
Moscow-directed totalitarian movement, not of native developments. The only excep-
tion seems to be Tito of Yugoslavia, who may have broken with Moscow because he
realized that the Russian-inspired totalitarian methods would cost him a heavy per-
centage of Yugoslavia's population.
"Proof of the nontotalitarian nature of the Fascist dictatorship is the surprisingly
small number and the comparatively mild sentences meted out to political offenders.
During the particularly active years from 1926 to 1932, the special tribunals for po-
litical offenders pronounced 7 death semences, 257 sentences of 10 or more years
imprisonment, 1,360 under 10 years, and sentenced many more to exile; 12,000, more-
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 309
rule. Similar nontotalitarian dictatorships sprang up in prewar Rumania,
Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, Portugal and Franco Spain. The Nazis,
who had an unfailing instinct for such differences, used to comment con-
temptuously on the shortcomings of their Fascist allies while their genuine
admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party
in Germany) was matched and checked only by their contempt for Eastern
European races. ^^ The only man for whom Hitler had "unqualified respect"
was "Stalin the genius," ^^ and while in the case of Stalin and the Russian
over, were arrested and found innocent, a procedure quite inconceivable under condi-
tions of Nazi or Bolshevik terror. See E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political
Police: The Technique of Control by Fear, London, 1945, pp. 51 ff.
'^ Nazi political theorists have always emphatically stated that "Mussolini's 'ethical
state' and Hitler's 'ideological state' [Weltanschauiingsstaat] cannot be mentioned in
the same breath" (Gottfried Neesse, "Die verfassungsrechtliche Gestaltung der Ein-
Partei," in Zeitschrift jiir die gesainte Staatswissenschaft, 1938, Band 98).
Goebbels on the difference between Fascism and National Socialism: "[Fascism]
is . . . nothing like National Socialism. While the latter goes deep down to the roots.
Fascism is only a superficial thing" (The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, ed. by Louis
Lochner, New York, 1948, p. 71). "[The Duce] is not a revolutionary like the Fiihrer
or Stalin. He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities
of a worldwide revolutionary and insurrectionist" {ibid., p. 468).
Himmler expressed the same opinion in a speech delivered in 1943 at a Conference
of Commanding Officers: "Fascism and National Socialism are two fundamentally
different things, . . . there is absolutely no comparison between Fascism and National
Socialism as spiritual, ideological movements." See Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cit., Ap-
pendix A.
Hitler recognized in the early twenties the affinity between the Nazi and the Com-
munist movements: "In our movement the two extremes come together: the Com-
munists from the Left and the officers and the students from the Right. These two
have always been the most active elements. . . . The Communists were the idealists
of Socialism. . . ." See Heiden, op. cit., p. 147. Rohm, the chief of the SA, only
repeated a current opinion when he wrote in the late twenties: "Many things are be-
tween us and the Communists, but we respect the sincerity of their conviction and
their willingness to bring sacrifices for their own cause, and this unites us with them"
(Ernst Rohm, Die Geschichte eines Hochverrdters, 1933, Volksausgabe, p. 273).
During the last war, the Nazis more readily recognized the Russians as their peers
than any other nation. Hitler, speaking in May, 1943, at a conference of the Reichs-
leiter and Gauleiter, "began with the fact that in this war bourgeoisie and revolutionary
states are facing each other. It has been an easy thing for us to knock out the
bourgeois states, for they were quite inferior to us in their upbringing and attitude.
Countries with an ideology have an edge on bourgois states. ... [In the East] we
met an opponent who also sponsors an ideology, even though a wrong one. . . ."
(Goebbels Diaries, p. 355). — This estimate was based on ideological, not on military
considerations. Gottfried Neesse, Partei iind Staat, 1936, gave the official version of
the movement's struggle for power when he wrote: "For us the united front of the
system extends from the German National People's Party [i.e., the extreme Right]
to the Social Democrats. The Communist Party was an enemy outside of the system.
During the first months of 1933, therefore, when the doom of the system was already
sealed, we still had to fight a decisive battle against the Communist Party" (p. 76).
^'^ Hitlers Tischgesprdche, p. 113. There we also find numerous examples showing
that, contrary to certain postwar legends. Hitler never intended to defend "the West"
against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join "the Reds" for the destruction
of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia. See especially
pp. 95, 108. 113 ff., 158, 385.
^IQ TOTALITARIANISM
regime wc do not have (and presumably never will have) the rich docu-
mentary material that is available for Germany, we nevertheless know since
Khrushchev's speech before the Twentieth Party Congress that Stalin trusted
only one man and that was Hitler.'^
The point is that in all these smaller European countries nontotalitarian
dictatorships were preceded by totalitarian movements, so that it appeared
that totalitarianism was too ambitious an aim, that although it had served
well enough to organize the masses until the movement seized power, the
absolute size of the country then forced the would-be totalitarian ruler of
masses into the more familiar patterns of class or party dictatorship. The
truth is that these countries simply did not control enough human material
to allow for total domination and its inherent great losses in population.^"'
Without much hope for the conquest of more heavily populated territories,
the tyrants in these small countries were forced into a certain old-fashioned
moderation lest they lose whatever people they had to rule. This is also
why Nazism, up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over Europe,
lagged so far behind its Russian counterpart in consistency and ruthlessness;
even the German people were not numerous enough to allow for the full
development of this newest form of government. only if Germany had won
the war would she have known a fully developed totalitarian rulership, and
the sacrifices this would have entailed not only for the "inferior races" but
for the Germans themselves can be gleaned and evaluated from the legacy of
Hitler's plans.'" In any event it was only during the war, after the conquests
'*We now know that Stalin was warned repeatedly of the imminent attack of
Hitler on the Soviet Union. Even when the Soviet military attache in Berlin informed
him of the day of the Nazi attack, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would violate
the treaty. (See Khrushchev's "Speech on Stalin," text released by the State Depart-
ment. New York Times. June 5, 1956.)
''The following information reported by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, seems to be an
outstanding illustration: "According to W. Krivitsky, whose excellent confidential
source of information is the GPU: 'Instead of the 171 million inhabitants calculated
for 1937, only 145 million were found; thus nearly 30 million people in the USSR are
missing.' " And this, it should be kept in mind, occurred after the dekulakization of
the early thirties which had cost an estimated 8 million human lives. See Com-
munism in Action. U. S. Government. Washington, 1946, p. 140.
"A large part of these plans, based on the original documents, can be found in
Leon Poliakov's Breviaire de la Maine. Paris, 1951, chapter 8 (American edition
under the title Harvest of Hate, Syracuse, 1954; we quote from the original French
edition), but only insofar as they referred to the extermination of non-Germanic
peoples, above all those of Slavic origin. That the Nazi engine of destruction would
not have stopped even before the German people is evident from a Reich health bill
drafted by Hitler himself. Here he proposes to "isolate" from the rest of the population
all families with cases of heart or lung ailments among them, their physical liquidation
bemg of course the next step in this program. This as well as several other interesting
projects for a victorious postwar Germany are contained in a circular letter to the
district leaders (Kreisleiter) of Hesse-Nassau in the form of a report on a discussion
at the Fuehrer's headquarters concerning "measures that before ... and after victorious
termination of the war" should be adopted. See the collection of documents in
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Washington, 1946, et seq., Vol. VII, p. 175. In the
same context belongs the planned enactment of an "over-all alien legislation," by
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 311
in the East furnished large masses of people and made the extermination
camps possible, that Germany was able to establish a truly totalitarian rule.
(Conversely, the chances for totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the
lands of traditional Oriental despotism, in India and China, where there
is almost inexhaustible material to feed the power-accumulating and man-
destroying machinery of total domination, and where, moreover, the mass
man's typical feeling of superfluousness — an entirely new phenomenon in
Europe, the concomitant of mass unemployment and the population growth
of the last 150 years — has been prevalent for centuries in the contempt for
the value of human life.) Moderation or less murderous methods of rule
were hardly attributable to the governments' fear of popular rebellion; de-
population in their own country was a much more serious threat. only
where great masses are superfluous or can be spared without disastrous
results of depopulation is totalitarian rule, as distinguished from a totalitarian
movement, at all possible.
Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for
one reason o r another have acquired the appetite for political organization.
Mas ses are n ot held together by a consciousness of common interest and they
lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined,
limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal
with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a
combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization Jbased on
comm on interest, into political parties or municipal governments or pro-
fessional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every coun-
try and form the majority of those large numbers of neutral, politically
indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and
of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930^'' that they recruited
their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all
other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their atten-
tion. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of
means of which the "institutional authority" of the poUce — namely, to ship persons
innocent of any offenses to concentration camps — was to be legalized and expanded.
(See Paul Werner, SS-Standartenfiihrer, in Deiitsches Jiigendrecht, Heft 4, 1944.)
In connection with this "negative population policy." which in its aim at extermina-
tion decidedly matches the Bolshevist party purges, it is important to remember that
"in this process of selection there can never be a standstill" (Himmler, "Die Schutz-
staffel," in Grundlagen, Aiifhau und Wirtschaftsordniing des nationalsozialistischen
Staates, No. 7b). "The struggle of the Fuehrer and his party was a hitherto unattained
selection. . . . This selection and this struggle were ostensibly accomplished on January
30, 1933. . . . The Fuehrer and his old guard knew that the real struggle had just
begun" (Robert Ley, Der Weg zur Ordensburg, o.D. Verlag der Deutschen Arbeits-
front. "Not available for sale").
''' F. Borkenau describes the situation correctly: "The Communists had only very
modest successes when they tried to win influence among the masses of the working
class; their mass basis, therefore, if they had it at all, moved more and more away
from the proletariat" ("Die neue Komintern," in Der Monat, Berlin, 1949, Heft 4).
^/•> TOTALITARIANISM
people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This per-
mitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda,
and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these move-
ments not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as
a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never
been "spoiled" by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute
opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in
death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.
They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural,
social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and
therefore beyond the power of reason. This would have been a shortcoming
only if they had sincerely entered into competition with other parties;
it was not if they were sure of dealing with people who had reason to be
equally hostile to all parties.
The success of totalitarian movements among the masses meant the end
of two illusions of democratically ruled countries in general and of Euro-
pean nation-states and their party system in particular. The first was that
the people in its majority had taken an active part in government and that
each individual was in sympathy with one's own or somebody else's party.
on the contrary, the movements showed that the politically neutral and
indifferent masses could easily be the majority in a democratically ruled
country, that therefore a democracy could function according to rules
which are actively recognized by only a minority. The second democratic
illusion exploded by the totalitarian movements was that these politically
indifferent masses did not matter, that they were truly neutral and consti-
tuted no more than the inarticulate backward setting for the political life
of the nation. Now they made apparent what no other organ of public
opinion had ever been able to show, namely, that democratic government
had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent
and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible in-
stitutions and organizations of the country. Thus when the totalitarian
movements invaded Parliament with their contempt for parliamentary gov-
ernment, they merely appeared inconsistent: actually, they succeeded in
convincing the people at large that parliamentary majorities were spurious
and did not necessarily correspond to the realities of the country, thereby
undermining the self-respect and the confidence of governments which
also believed in majority rule rather than in their constitutions.
It has frequently been pointed out that totalitarian movements use and
abuse democratic freedoms in order to abolish them. This is not just devil-
ish cleverness on the part of the leaders or childish stupidity on the part
of the masses. Democratic freedoms may be based on the equality of all
citizens before the law; yet they acquire their meaning and function
organically only where the citizens belong to and are represented by groups
or form a social and political hierarchy. The breakdown of the class sys-
tem, the only social and political stratification of the European nation-states,
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 313
certainly was one of the most dramatic events in recent German history" ^^
and as favorable to the rise of Nazism as the absence of social stratifica-
tion in Russia's immense rural population (this "great flaccid body destitute
of political education, almost inaccessible to ideas capable of ennobling
action"^'*) was to the Bolshevik overthrow of the democratic Kerensky
government. Conditions in pre-Hitler Germany are indicative of the dangers
implicit in the development of the Western part of the world since, with
the end of the second World War, the same dramatic event of a breakdown
of the class system repeated itself in almost all European countries, while
events in Russia clearly indicate the direction which the inevitable revolu-
tionary changes in Asia may take. Practically speaking, it will make little
difference whether totalitarian movements adopt the pattern of Nazism or
Bolshevism, organize the masses in the name of race or class, pretend
to follow the laws of life and nature or of dialectics and economics.
I ndifferen ce to public affairs, neutrality on political issues, are in them-
selves no su fficient cause for the rise of totalitarian movements. The com-
petitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy
and even hostility toward public life not only, and not even primarily, in
the social strata which were exploited and excluded from active participa-
tion in the rule of the country, but first of all in its own class. The long
period of false modesty, when the bourgeoisie was content with being the
dominating class in society without aspiring to political rule, which it gladly
left to the aristocracy, was followed by the imperialist era, during which
the bourgeoisie grew increasingly hostile to existing national institutions and
began to claim and to organize itself for the exercise of political power.
Both the early apathy and the later demand for monopolistic dictatorial
direction of the nation's foreign affairs had their roots in a way and philoso-
phy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual's suc-
cess or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen's duties and responsibili-
ties could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and
energy. These bourgeois attitudes are very useful for those forms of dic-
tatorship in which a "strong man" takes upon himself the troublesome
responsibility for the conduct of public affairs; they are a positive hindrance
to totalitarian movements which can tolerate bourgeois individualism no
more than any other kind of individualism. The apathetic sections of a
bourgeois-dominated society, no matter how unwilling they may be to
assume the responsibilities of citizens, keep their personalities intact if
only because without them they could hardly expect to survive the com-
petitive struggle for life.
The decisive differences between nineteenth-century mob organizations
and twentieth-century mass movements are difficult to perceive because the
modern totalitarian leaders do not differ much in psychology and mentality
from the earlier mob leaders, whose moral standards and political devices
so closely resembled those of the bourgeoisie. Yet, insofar as individualism
>« William Ebenstein, The Nazi State, New York, 1943, p. 247.
'" As Maxim Gorky had described them. See Souvarine, op. cit., p. 290.
J14 TOTALITARIANISM
characterized the bourgeoisie's as well as the mob's attitude to life, the
totalitarian movements can rightly claim that they were the first truly
antibourgcois parties; none of their nineteenth-century predecessors, neither
the ScKicty of the 1 0th of December which helped Louis Napoleon into
pt>wcr, the butcher brigades of the Dreyfus Affair, the Black Hundreds of
the Russian pogroms, nor the pan-movements, ever involved their members
to the point of complete loss of individual claims and ambition, or had ever
realized that an organization could succeed in extinguishing individual
identity permanently and not just for the moment of collective heroic action.
The relationship between the bourgeois-dominated class society and the
masses which emerged from its breakdown is not the same as the relation-
ship between the bourgeoisie and the mob which was a by-product of capi-
talist production. The masses share with the mob only one characteristic,
namely, that both stand outside all social ramifications and normal political
representation. The masses do not inherit, as the mob does — albeit in a
perverted form — the standards and attitudes of the dominating class, but
reflect and somehow pervert the standards and attitudes toward public
affairs of all classes. The standards of the mass man were determined not
only and not even primarily by the specific class to which he had once
belonged, but rather by all-pervasive influences and convictions which were
tacitly and inarticulately shared by all classes of society alike.
Membership in a class, although looser and never as inevitably determined
by social origin as in the orders and estates of feudal society, was generally
by birth, and only extraordinary gifts or luck could change it. Social status
was decisive for the individual's participation in politics, and except in cases
of national emergency when he was supposed to act only as a national,
regardless of his class or party membership, he never was directly con-
fronted with public affairs or felt directly responsible for their conduct. The
rise of a class to greater importance in the community was always accom-
panied by the education and training of a certain number of its members
for politics as a job, for paid (or, if they could afford it, unpaid) service
in the government and representation of the class in Parliament. That the
majority of people remained outside all party or other political organization
was not important to anyone, and no truer for one particular class than
another. In other words, membership in a class, its limited group obliga-
tions and traditional attitudes toward government, prevented the growth
of a citizenry that felt individually and personally responsible for the rule
of the country. This apolitical character of the nation-state's populations
came to light only when the class system broke down and carried with it
the whole fabric of visible and invisible threads which bound the people
to the body politic.
The breakdown of the class system meant automatically the breakdown
of the party system, chiefly because these parties, being interest parties,
could no longer represent class interests. Their continuance was of some
importance to the members of former classes who hoped against hope to
regain their old social status and who stuck together not because they had
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 3]5
common interests any longer but because they hoped to restore them. The
parties, consequently, became more and more psychological and ideological
in their propaganda, more and more apologetic and nostalgic in their polit-
ical approach. They had lost, moreover, without being aware of it, those
neutral supporters who had never been interested in politics because they
felt that parties existed to take care of their interests. So that the first
signs of the breakdown of the Continental party system were not the
desertion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from
the younger generation, and the loss of the silent consent and support of the
unorganized masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever
they saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition.
The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities
behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious
individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension
that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the
most respected, articulate and representative members of the community
were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as
they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence for
the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed
worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the
Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the
form of a centrist or rightist party, and former members of the middle and
upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right. The number of
this mass of generally dissatisfied and desperate men increased rapidly in
Germany and Austria after the first World War, when inflation and un-
employment added to the disrupting consequences of military defeat; they
existed in great proportion in all the succession states, and they have sup-
ported the extreme movements in France and Italy since the second
World War.
In this atmosphere of the breakdown of class society the psychology of
the European mass man developed. The fact that with monotonous but
abstract uniformity the same fate had befallen a mass of individuals did
not prevent their judging themselves in terms of individual failure or the
world in terms of specific injustice. This self-centered bitterness, however,
although repeated again and again in individual isolation, was not a common
bond despite its tendency to extinguish individual differences, because it was
based on no common interest, economic or social or political. Self-cen-
teredness, therefore, went hand in hand with a decisive weakening of the
instinct for self-preservation. Selflessness in the sense that oneself does not
matter, the feeling of being expendable, was no longer the ｅxpression of
individual idealism but a mass phenomenon. The old adage that the poor
and oppressed have nothing to lose but their chains no longer applied to
the mass men, for they lost much more than the chains of misery when they
lost interest in their own well-being: the source of all the worries and cares
which make human life troublesome and anguished was gone. Compared
Uf)
TOTALITARIANISM
with their nonmaterialism, a Christian monk looks like a man absorbed
in worldly affairs. Himmler, who knew so well the mentality of those whom
he organized, described not only his SS-men, but the large strata from which
he recruited them, when he said they were not interested in "everyday
problems" but only "in ideological questions of importance for decades
and centuries, so that the man . . . knows he is working for a great task
which occurs but once in 2,000 years." ^o The gigantic massing of individuals
produced a mentality which, like Cecil Rhodes some forty years before,
thought in continents and felt in centuries.
Eminent European scholars and statesmen had predicted, from the early
nineteenth century onward, the rise of the mass man and the coming of a
mass age. A whole literature on mass behavior and mass psychology had
demonstrated and popularized the wisdom, so familiar to the ancients, of
the affinity between democracy and dictatorship, between mob rule and
tyranny. They had prepared certain politically conscious and overconscious
sections of the Western educated worid for the emergence of demagogues,
for gullibility, superstition, and brutality. Yet, while all these predictions in
a sense came true, they lost much of their significance in view of such
unexpected and unpredicted phenomena as the radical loss of self-interest,^!
the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal
catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as
guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of
common sense.
The masses, contrary to prediction, did not result from growing equality
of condition, from the spread of general education and its inevitablejower-
ing of standards and popularization of content. (America, the classical land
of equality of condition and of general education with all its shortcomings,
knows less of the modern psychology of masses than perhaps any other
country in the world.) It soon became apparent that highly cultured people
were particularly attracted to mass movements and that, generally, highly
differentiated individualism and sophistication did not prevent, indeed
sometimes encouraged, the self-abandonment into the mass for which mass
movements provided. Since the obvious fact that individualization and culti-
vation do not prevent the formation of mass attitudes was so unexpected, it
has frequently been blamed upon the morbidity or nihilism of the modern
intelligentsia, upon a supposedly typical intellectual self-hatred, upon the
spirit's "hostility to life" and antagonism to vitality. Yet, the much-
slandered intellectuals were only the most illustrative example and the
most articulate spokesmen for a much more general phenomenon. Social
atomization and extreme individualization preceded the mass movements
^" Heinrich Himmler's speech on "Organization and Obligation of the SS and the
Police." published in Nalional-politischer Lehrgang der Wehrmacht vom 15-23. Januar
1937. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Office of the United
States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. U. S. Government,
Washington. 1946, IV, 616 ff.
^' Gustave Lebon, La Psychologic des Foules. 1895, mentions the peculiar selfless-
ness of the masses. See chapter ii. paragraph 5.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 317
which, muc h more easily and earlier than they did the sociable, nonin-
diyidualistic members of the traditional parties, attracted the completely
unorga nized, the typical "nonjoiners" who for individualistic reasons al-
ways h ad refused to recognize social links or obligations.
The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atom-
ized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the
individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The
chief chara cteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but
his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-
ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with
nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first help-
lessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent
nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts
and purposes for purely demagogic reasons. ^^
Neither tribal nationalism nor rebellious nihilism is characteristic of or
ideologically appropriate to the masses as they were to the mob. But the
most gifted mass leaders of our time have still risen from the mob rather
than from the masses. ^^ Hitler's biography reads like a textbook example in
this respect, and the point about Stalin is that he comes from the conspira-
tory apparatus of the Bolshevik party with its specific mixture of outcasts
and revolutionaries. Hitler's early party, almost exclusively composed of
misfits, failures, and adventurers, indeed represented the "armed bo-
hemians" ^^ who were only the reverse side of bourgeois society and whom,
consequently, the German bourgeoisie should have been able to use suc-
cessfully for its own purposes. Actually, the bourgeoisie was as much
taken in by the Nazis as was the Rohm-Schleicher faction in the Reichs-
wehr, which also thought that Hitler, whom they had used as a stool-
pigeon, or the SA, which they had used for militaristic propaganda and
paramilitary training, would act as their agents and help in the establish-
ment of a military dictatorship.^"* Both considered the Nazi movement in
^^ The founders of the Nazi party referred to it occasionally even before Hitler
took over as a "party of the Left." An incident which occurred after the parliamentary
elections of 1932 is also interesting: "Gregor Strasser bitterly pointed out to his
Leader that before the elections the National Socialists in the Reichstag might have
formed a majority with the Center; now this possibility was ended, the two parties
were less than half of parliament; . . . But with the Communists they still had a
majority, Hitler replied; no one can govern against us" (Heiden, op. cit., pp. 94 and
495, respectively).
^^ Compare Carlton J. H. Hayes, op. cit., who does not differentiate between the
mob and the masses, thinks that totalitarian dictators "have come from the masses
rather than from the classes."
^* This is the central theory of K. Heiden, whose analyses of the Nazi movement
are still outstanding. "From the wreckage of dead classes arises the new class of
intellectuals, and at the head march the most ruthless, those with the least to lose,
hence the strongest: the armed bohemians, to whom war is home and civil war
fatherland" (op. cit., p. 100).
*^ The plot between Reichswehr General Schleicher and Rohm, the chief of the
SA, consisted of a plan to bring all paramilitary formations under the military
authority of the Reichswehr, which at once would have added millions to the German
fIS
TOTALITARIANISM
their own terms, in terms of the political philosophy of the mob,^" and
overlooked the independent, spontaneous support given the new mob
leaders by masses as well as the mob leaders' genuine talents for creating
new forms of organization. The mob as leader of these masses was no
longer the agent of the bourgeoisie or of anyone else except the masses.
That totalitarian movements depended less on the structurelessness of
a mass society than on the specific conditions of an atomized and in-
dividualized mass, can best be seen in a comparison of Nazism and Bol-
shevism which began in their respective countries under very different
circumstances. To change Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship into full
totalitarian rule, Stalin had first to create artificially that atomized society
which had been prepared for the Nazis in Germany by historical cir-
cumstances.
The October Revolution's amazingly easy victory occurred in a country
where a despotic and centralized bureaucracy governed a structureless mass
population which neither the remnants of the rural feudal orders nor the
weak, nascent urban capitalist classes had organized. When Lenin said
that nowhere in the world would it have been so easy to win power and
so difficult to keep it, he was aware not only of the weakness of the Rus-
sian working class, but of anarchic social conditions in general, which
favored sudden changes. Without the instincts of a mass leader — he was
no orator and had a passion for public admission and analysis of his own
errors, which is against the rules of even ordinary demagogy — Lenin seized
at once upon all the possible differentiations, social, national, professional,
that might bring some structure into the population, and he seemed con-
vinced that in such stratification lay the salvation of the revolution. He
legalized the anarchic expropriation of the landowners by the rural masses
and established thereby for the first and probably last time in Russia that
emancipated peasant class which, since the French Revolution, had been
army. This, of course, would inevitably have led to a military dictatorship. In June.
1934, Hitler liquidated Rohm and Schleicher. The initial negotiations were started
with the full knowledge of Hitler who used Rohm's connections with the Reichswehr
to deceive German military circles about his real intentions. In April, 1932, Rohm
testified in one of Hitler's lawsuits that the SA's military status had the full under-
standing of the Reichswehr. (For documentary evidence on the Rohm-Schleicher plan,
sec Nazi Conspiracy. V, 456 f[. See also Heiden, op. cit.. p. 450.) Rohm himself proudly
reports his negotiations with Schleicher, which according to him were started in 1931.
Schleicher had promised to put the SA under the command of Reichswehr ollicers
in case of an emergency. (See Die Memoiren des Stahschefs Rohm, Saarbriicken,
1934, p. 170.) The militaristic character of the SA, shaped by Rohm and constantly
fought by Hitler, continued to determine its vocabulary even after the liquidation
of the Rohm faction. Contrary to the SS, the members of the SA always insisted
on being the "representatives of Germany's military will," and for them the Third
Reich was a "military community [supported by] two pillars: Party and Wehrmacht"
(sec Handhiuh cler SA. Berlin, 1939, and Victor Lutze, "Die Sturmabteilungen," in
Gnmdlagen. Aiifbaii mid Wirtschaftxordnimg des imtionalsozialistischen Staates,
No. 7a).
^" Rohm's autobiography especially is a veritable classic in this kind of literature.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 319
the firmest supporter of the Western nation-states. He tried to strengthen
the working class by encouraging independent trade unions. He tolerated
the timid appearance of a new middle class which resulted from the NEP
policy after the end of the civil war. He introduced further distinguishing
features by organizing, and sometimes inventing, as many nationalities as
possible, furthering national consciousness and awareness of historical and
cultural differences even among the most primitive tribes in the Soviet
Union. It seems clear that in these purely practical political matters Lenin
followed his great instincts for statesmanship rather than his Marxist con-
victions; his policy, at any rate, proves that he was more frightened by the
absence of social and other structure than by the possible development of
centrifugal tendencies in the newly emancipated nationalities or even by
the growth of a new bourgeoisie out of the newly established middle and
peasant classes. There is no doubt that Lenin suffered his greatest defeat
when, with the outbreak of the civil war, the supreme power that he orig-
inally planned to concentrate in the Soviets definitely passed into the hands
of the party bureaucracy; but even this development, tragic as it was for
the course of the revolution, would not necessarily have led to totalitarian-
ism. A one-party dictatorship added only one more class to the already
developing social stratification of the country, i.e., bureaucracy, which,
according to socialist critics of the revolution, "possessed the State as pri-
vate property" (Marx).-^ At the moment of Lenin's death the roads were
still open. The formation of workers, peasants, and middle classes need not
necessarily have led to the class struggle which had been characteristic of
European capitalism. Agriculture could still be developed on a collective,
co-operative, or private basis, and the national economy was still free to
follow a socialist, state-capitalist, or a free-enterprise pattern. None of
these alternatives would have automatically destroyed the new structure
of the country.
All these new classes and nationalities were in Stalin's way when he began
to prepare the country for totalitarian government. In order to fabricate an
atomized and structureless mass, he had first to liquidate the remnants of
power in the Soviets which, as the chief organ of national representation,
still played a certain role and prevented absolute rule by the party hierarchy.
^' It is well known that the anti-Stalinist splinter groups have based their criticism
of the development of the Soviet Union on this Marxist formulation, and have
actually never outgrown it. The repeated "purges" of Soviet bureaucracy, which were
tantamount to a liquidation of bureaucracy as a class, have never prevented them
from seeing in it the dominating and ruling class of the Soviet Union. The following
is the estimate of Rakovsky, writing in 1930 from his exile in Siberia: "Under our
eyes has formed and is being formed a great class of directors which has its internal
subdivisions and which increases through calculated co-option and direct or indirect
nominations. . . . The element which unites this original class is a form, also original,
of private property, to wit, the State power" (quoted from Souvarine, op. cit., p. 564).
This analysis is indeed quite accurate for the development of the pre-Stalinist era.
For the development of the relationship between party and Soviets, which is of
decisive importance for the course of the October revolution, see I. Deutscher, The
Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, 1954.
jf20 TOTALITARIANISM
Therefore he first undermined the national Soviets through the introduc-
tion of Bolshevik cells from which alone the higher functionaries to the
central committees were appointed.-^ By 1930, the last traces of former
communal institutions had disappeared and had been replaced by a firmly
centralized party bureaucracy whose tendencies toward Russification were
not too different from those of the Czarist regime, except that the new
bureaucrats were no longer afraid of literacy.
The Bolshevik government then proceeded to the liquidation of classes
and started, for ideological and propaganda reasons, with the property-
owning classes, the new middle class in the cities, and the peasants in the
country. Because of the combination of numbers and property, the peasants
up to then had been potentially the most powerful class in the Union; their
liquidation, consequently, was more thorough and more cruel than that of
any other group and was carried through by artificial famine and deporta-
tion under the pretext of expropriation of the kulaks and collectivization.
The liquidation of the middle and peasant classes was completed in the
early thirties; those who were not among the many millions of dead or
the millions of deported slave laborers had learned "who is master here,"
had realized that their lives and the lives of their families depended not
upon their fellow-citizens but exclusively on the whims of the government
which they faced in complete loneliness without any help whatsoever from
the group to which they happened to belong. The exact moment when
collectivization produced a new peasantry bound by common interests,
which owing to its numerical and economic key position in the country's
economy again presented a potential danger to totalitarian rule, cannot
be determined either from statistics or documentary sources. But for those
who know how to read totalitarian "source material" this moment had
come two years before Stalin died, when he proposed to dissolve the col-
lectives and transform them into larger units. He did not live to carry
out this plan; this time the sacrifices would have been still greater and
the chaotic consequences for the total economy still more catastrophic
than the liquidation of the first peasant class, but there is no reason to
doubt that he might have succeeded; there is no class that cannot be
wiped out if a sufficient number of its members ar6 murdered.
The next class to be liquidated as a group were the workers. As a class
they were much weaker and offered much less resistance than the peasants
because their spontaneous expropriation of factory owners during the revo-
lution, unlike the peasants' expropriation of landowners, had been frus-
•"" In 1927, 90 per cent of the village Soviets and 75 per cent of their chairmen were
non-party members; the executive committees of the counties were made up of 50
per cent party members and 50 per cent non-party members, while in the Central Com-
mittee 75 per cent of the delegates were party members. See the article on "Bolshevism"
by Maurice Dodd in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences.
How the party members of the Soviets, by voting "in conformity with the instruc-
tions they received from the permanent officials of the Party," destroyed the Soviet
system from within is described in detail in A. Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism,
London, 1934, chapter vi.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 321
trated at once by the government which confiscated the factories as state
property under the pretext that the state belonged to the proletariat in any
event. The Stakhanov system, adopted in the early thirties, broke up all
solidarity and class consciousness among the workers, first by the ferocious
competition and second by the temporary solidification of a Stakhanovite
aristocracy whose social distance from the ordinary worker naturally was
felt more acutely than the distance between the workers and the manage-
ment. This process was completed in 1938 with the introduction of the
labor book which transformed the whole Russian worker class officially
into a gigantic forced-labor force.
on top of these measures came the liquidation of that bureaucracy which
had helped to carry out the previous liquidation measures. It took Stalin
about two years, from 1936 to 1938, to rid himself of the whole adminis-
trative and military aristocracy of the Soviet society; nearly all offices,
factories, economic and cultural bodies, government, party, and military
bureaus came into new hands, when "nearly half the administrative per-
sonnel, party and nonparty, had been swept out," and more than 50 per
cent of all party members and "at least eight million more" were liqui-
dated.2^ Again the introduction of an interior passport, on which all de-
partures from one city to another have to be registered and authorized,
completed the destruction of the party bureaucracy as a class. As for its
juridical status, the bureaucracy along with the party functionaries was
now on the same level with the workers; it, too, had now become a part
of the vast multitude of Russian forced laborers and its status as a privi-
leged class in Soviet society was a thing of the past. And since this general
purge ended with the liquidation of the highest police officials — the same
who had organized the general purge in the first place — not even the cadres
of the GPU which had carried out the terror could any longer delude them-
selves that as a group they represented anything at all, let alone power.
None of these immense sacrifices in human life was motivated by a
raison d'etat in the old sense of the term. None of the liquidated social
strata was hostile to the regime or likely to become hostile in the foreseeable
future. Active organized opposition had ceased to exist by 1930 when
Stalin, in his speech to the Sixteenth Party Congress, outlawed the rightist
and leftist deviations inside the Party, and even these feeble oppositions
had hardly been able to base themselves on any of the existing classes.^"
*® These figures are taken from Victor Kravchenko's Book / Chose Freedom: The
Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 1946, pp. 278 and 303.
This is of course a highly questionable source. But since in the case ol Soviet Russia
we basically have nothing but questionable sources to resort to — meaning that we have
to rely altogether on news stories, reports and evaluations of one kind or another —
all we can do is use whatever information at least appears to have a high degree of
probability. Some historians seem to think that the opposite method — namely, to use
exclusively whatever material is furnished by the Russian government — is more reli-
able, but this is the not the case. It is precisely the official material that is nothing
but propaganda.
^° Stalin's Report to the Sixteenth Congress denounced the devations as the "re-
flection" of the resistance of the peasant and petty bourgeois classes in the ranks of the
i22 TOTALITARIANISM
Dictatorial terror — distinguished from totalitarian terror insofar as it
threatens only authentic opponents but not harmless citizens without polit-
ical opinions — had been grim enough to suffocate all political life, open or
clandestine, even before Lenin's death. Intervention from abroad, which
might ally itself with one of the dissatisfied sections in the population, was
no longer a danger when, by 1930, the Soviet regime had been recognized
by a majority of governments and concluded commercial and other inter-
national agreements with many countries. (Nor did Stalin's government
eliminate such a possibility as far as the people themselves were con-
cerned: we know now that Hitler, if he had been an ordinary conqueror
and not a rival totalitarian ruler, might have had an extraordinary chance
to win for his cause at least the people of the Ukraine.)
If the liquidation of classes made no political sense, it was positively dis-
astrous for the Soviet economy. The consequences of the artificial famine
in 1933 were felt for years throughout the country; the introduction of the
Stakhanov system in 1935, with its arbitrary speed-up of individual output
and its complete disregard of the necessities for teamwork in industrial
production, resulted in a "chaotic imbalance" of the young industry. ^^ The
liquidation of the bureaucracy, that is, of the class of factory managers and
engineers, finally deprived industrial enterprises of what little experience
and know-how the new Russian technical intelligentsia had been able to
acquire.
Equality of condition among their subjects has been one of the foremost
concerns of despotisms and tyrannies since ancient times, yet such equal-
ization is not sufficient for totalitarian rule because it leaves more or less
intact certain nonpolitical communal bonds between the subjects, such as
family ties and common cultural interests. If totalitarianism takes its own
claim seriously, it must come to the point where it has "to finish once and
for all with the neutrality of chess," that is, with the autonomous existence
of any activity whatsoever. The lovers of "chess for the sake of chess,"
aptly compared by their liquidator with the lovers of "art for art's sake,"^^
are not yet absolutely atomized elements in a mass society whose completely
heterogeneous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitarian-
ism. From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to
chess for the sake of chess is only in degree different and less dangerous
than a class of farmers for the sake of farming. Himmler quite aptly defined
the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will
ever do "a thing for its own sake."^^
Party. (See Leninism, 1933, Vol. II, chapter iii.) Against this attack the opposition was
curiously defenseless because they too, and especially Trotsky, were "always anxious
to discover a struggle of classes behind the struggles of cliques" (Souvarine, op. cit.,
p. 440).
'■" Kravchenko, op. cit., p. 187.
^* Souvarine, op. cit., p. 575.
"The watchword of the SS as formulated by Himmler himself begins with the
words: "There is no task that exists for its own sake." See Gunter d'Alquen, "Die SS,"
in Schriften der Hochschule fiir Politik, 1939. The pamphlets issued by the SS solely
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 323
Mass atomization in Soviet society was achieved by the skillful use of
repeated purges which invariably precede actual group liquidation. In order
to destroy all social and family ties, the purges are conducted in such a way
as to threaten with the same fate the defendant and all his ordinary rela-
tions, from mere acquaintances up to his closest friends and relatives. The
consequence of the simple and ingenious device of "guilt by association" is
that as soon as a man is accused, his former friends are transformed im-
mediately into his bitterest enemies; in order to save their own skins, they
volunteer information and rush in with denunciations to corroborate the
nonexistent evidence against him; this obviously is the only way to prove
their own trustworthiness. Retrospectively, they will try to prove that their
acquaintance or friendship with the accused was only a pretext for spying
on him and revealing him as a saboteur, a Trotskyite, a foreign spy, or a
Fascist. Merit being "gauged by the number of your denunciations of close
comrades," ^^ it is obvious that the most elementary caution demands that
one avoid all intimate contacts, if possible — not in order to prevent dis-
covery of one's secret thoughts, but rather to eliminate, in the almost cer-
tain case of future trouble, all persons who might have not only an ordinary
cheap interest in your denunciation but an irresistible need to bring about
your ruin simply because they are in danger of their own lives. In the last
analysis, it has been through the development of this device to its farthest
and most fantastic extremes that Bolshevik rulers have succeeded in cre-
ating an atomized and individualized society the like of which we have
never seen before and which events or catastrophes alone would hardly
have brought about.
Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated
i ndividuals . Comp ared with all other parties and movements, their most
conspicuous e xternal characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted,
unconditioiial, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This de-
mand is made by the leaders of totalitarian movements even before they
seize power. It usually precedes the total organization of the country under
their actual rule and it follows from the claim of their ideologies that their
organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race. Where,
however, totalitarian rule has not been prepared by a totalitarian movement
(and this, in contradistinction to Nazi Germany, was the case in Russia),
the movement has to be organized afterward and the conditions for its
growth have artificially to be created in order to make total loyalty — the
psychological basis for total domination — at all possible. Such loyalty can
be_expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without
any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaint-
for internal consumption emphasize time and again "the absolute necessity for under-
standing the futility of everything that is an end in itself" (see Der Reichsfiihrer SS
iind Chef der deutschen Polizei, undated, only for internal use within the police").
^^ The practice itself has been abundantly documented. W. Krivitsky, in his book
In Stalin's Secret Services (New York, 1939), traces it directly to Stalin.
|-,j TOTALITARIANISM
4IXC*. derives his sense of havinp ;i phice in the world only from his be-
!.<fu-in.' lo a movement, his membership in the party.
loyally is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete
.....i.Mi. from which changes of mind might naturally arise. The totalitarian
movrmenis. each in its own way. have done their utmost to get rid of the
party programs which specified concrete content and which they inherited
from earlier, nontotalitarian stages of development. No matter how radi-
cally ihcy might have been phrased, every definite political goal which does
noi simply assert or circumscribe the claim to world rule, every political
program which deals with issues more specific than "ideological questions
of impt>rtance for centuries" is an obstruction to totalitarianism. Hitler's
greatest achievement in the organization of the Nazi movement, which he
gradually built up from the obscure crackpot membership of a typically
nationalistic little party, was that he unburdened the movement of the
party's earlier program, not by changing or officially abolishing it, but
simply by refusing to talk about it or discuss its points, whose relative
moderateness of content and phraseology were very soon outdated.^"' Stal-
in's task in this as in other respects was much more formidable; the socialist
program of the Bolshevik party was a much more troublesome burden^*
than the 25 points of an amateur economist and a crackpot politician.^''
But Stalin achieved eventually, after having abolished the factions of the
Russian party, the same result through the constant zigzag of the Commu-
nist Party lines, and the constant reinterpretation and application of Marx-
ism which voided the doctrine of all its content because it was no longer
possible to predict what course or action it would inspire. The fact that
the most perfect education in Marxism and Leninism was no guide whatso-
ever for political behavior — that, on the contrary, one could follow the
party line only if one repeated each morning what Stalin had announced
ihc night before — naturally resulted in the same state of mind, the same
concentrated obedience, undivided by any attempt to understand what one
was doing, that Himmler's ingenious watchword for his SS-men expressed:
"My honor is my loyalty."^'*
^' Miller Maicd in Mein Kumpj (2 vols.. 1st German ed.. 1925 and 1927 respectively.
Un«»purgaicd iranslalion. New York. 1939) that it was better to have an antiquated
program ihan to allow a discussion of program (Book II, chapter v). Soon he was to
proclaim publicly: once wc lake over the government, the program will come of
itKlf. . The first thing must be an inconceivable wave of propaganda. That is a
poJiiical action which would have little to do with the other problems of the moment."
See Hei«kn. op. tii., p. 203.
" Souvanne. in our opinion wrongly, suggests that Lenin had already abolished the
rcHe of a party program; "Nothing could show more clearly the non-existence of
Bol^hevivm as a doctrine except in Lenin's brain; every Bolshevik left to himself
wandered from the line' of his faction ... for these men were bound together by their
lernperamcnt and by the ascendancy of Lenin rather than by ideas" (op. cit p. 85).
Gottfried Fedcrs Program of the Nazi Party with its famous 25 points has played
a greater role m the literature about the movement than in the movement itself.
r,n.J, I.'"?'*'"' °^ ^^^ *^'^'^^o^'l- formulated by Himmler himself, is difficult to
vc^n J^i kIT" '^'^"'""'^•^ "^'''"*' f''^^ I'eisst Treuer indicates an absolute de-
vo<ion and obedience which transcends the meaning of mere discipline or personal
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 325
Lack of or ignoring of a party program is by itself not necessarily a sign
of totalitarianism. The first to consider programs and platforms as needless
scraps of paper and embarrassing promises, inconsistent with the style and
impetus of a movement, was Mussolini with his Fascist philosophy of ac-
tivism and inspiration through the historical moment itselif.^'^ Mere lust for
power combined with contempt for "talkative" articulation of what they
intend to do with it is characteristic of all mob leaders, but does not come
up to the standards of totalitarianism. The true goal of Fascism was only
to seize power and establish the Fascist "elite" as uncontested ruler over
the country. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means,
namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its
peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion,
totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing hu-
man beings from within. In this sense it eliminates the distance between
the rulers and the ruled and achieves a condition in which power and the
will to power, as we understand them, play no role, or at best, a secondary
role. In substance, the totalitarian leader is nothing more nor less than the
functionary of the masses he leads; he is not a power-hungry individual
imposing a tyrannical and arbitrary will upon his subjects. Being a mere
functionary, he can be replaced at any time, and he depends just as much
on the "will" of the masses he embodies as the masses depend on him.
Without him they would lack external representation and remain an amor-
phous horde; without the masses the leader is a nonentity. Hitler, who was
fully aware of this interdependence, expressed it once in a speech ad-
dressed to the SA: "All that you are, you are through me; all that I am,
I am through you alone." ^'^ We are only too inclined to belittle such state-
ments or to misunderstand them in the sense that acting is defined here
in terms of giving and executing orders, as has happened too often in the
political tradition and history of the West.^^ But this idea has always pre-
supposed someone in command who thinks and wills, and then imposes
his thought and will on a thought- and will-deprived group — be it by per-
suasion, authority, or violence. Hitler, however, was of the opinion that
even "thinking . . . [exists] only by virtue of giving or executing orders,"*^
faithfulness. Nazi Conspiracy, whose translations of German documents and Nazi
literature are indispensable source material but, unfortunately, are very uneven, renders
the SS watchword: "My honor signifies faithfulness" (V, 346).
^^ Mussolini was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal
program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone. Behind this act
lay the notion that the actuality of the moment itself was the chief element of inspira-
tion, which would only be hampered by a party program. The philosophy of Italian
Fascism has been expressed by Gentile's "actualism" rather than by Sorel's "myths."
Compare also the article "Fascism" in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. The
Program of 1921 was formulated when the movement had been in existence two years
and contained, for the most part, its nationalist philosophy.
''° Ernst Bayer, Die SA, Berlin, 1938. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy,
IV, 783.
"' For the first time in Plato's Statesman, 305, where acting is interpreted in terms
of archein and prattein — of ordering the start of an action and of executing this order.
'^^ Hitlers Tischgesprdche, p. 198.
t:r>
TOTALITARIANISM
and thereby eliminated even theoretically the distinction between thinking
and acting on one hand, and between the rulers and the ruled on the other.
Neither National Socialism nor Bolshevism has ever proclaimed a new
form of government or asserted that its goals were reached with the seizure
of power and the control of the state machinery. Their idea of domination
was something that no state and no mere apparatus of violence can ever
achieve, but only a movement that is constantly kept in motion: namely,
the j^rrmanent domination of each single individual in each and every
sphere of life.^' The seizure of power through the means of violence is never
an end in itself but only the means to an end, and the seizure of power in
any given country is only a welcome transitory stage but never the end of
the movement. The practical goal of the movement is to organize as mariy
pciiplc as possible within its framework and to set and keep them in
motion; a political goal that would constitute the end of the movement
simply does not exist.
II: The Temporary Alliance Between the Mob and the Elite
WHAT IS MORE disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional
loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of
totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert
on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash
indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naivete, the
terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among
its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.
This attraction for the elite is as important a clue to the understanding of
totalitarian movements (though hardly of totalitarian regimes) as their
more obvious connection with the mob. It indicates the specific atmosphere,
the general climate in which the rise of totalitarianism takes place. It should
be remembered that the leaders of totalitarian movements and their sym-
pathizers arc, so to speak, older than the masses which they organize so that
chronologically speaking the masses do not have to wait helplessly for the
rise of their own leaders in the midst of a decaying class society, of which
they are the most outstanding product. Those who voluntarily left society
before the wreckage of classes had come about, along with the mob, which
was an earlier by-product of the rule of the bourgeoisie, stand ready to
welcome them. The present totalitarian rulers and the leaders of totalitarian
movements still bear the characteristic traits of the mob, whose psychology
*' Mfin Kampf. Book I. chapter xi. See also, for example. Dieter Schwarz, Angriffe
auf Jir natitmalsozialisiisihe Weltanschauung: Aus dem Schwarzen Korps, No. 2,
1936. who answers the obvious criticism that National Socialists after their rise to
power continued to talk about "a struggle": "National Socialism as an ideology
H^rlianuhauungl will not abandon its struggle until ... the way of life of each in-
dividual German has been shaped by its fundamental values and these are realized
every day anew."
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 327
and political philosophy are fairly well known; what will happen once the
authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be
a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, cal-
culated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler,
will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vin-
dictive cruelty of Stalin.
In this respect, the situation after the second World War in Europe does
not differ essentially from that after the first; just as in the twenties the
ideologies of Fascism, Bolshevism, and Nazism were formulated and the
movements led by the so-called front generation, by those who had been
brought up and still remembered distinctly the times before the war, so the
present general political and intellectual climate of postwar totalitarianism
is being determined by a generation which knew intimately the time and
life which preceded the present. This is specifically true for France, where
the breakdown of the class system came after the second instead of after the
first War. Like the mob men and the adventurers of the imperialist era, the
leaders of totalitarian movements have in common with their intellectual
sympathizers the fact that both had been outside the class and national sys-
tem of respectable European society even before this system broke down.
This breakdown, when the smugness of spurious respectability gave way
to anarchic despair, seemed the first great opportunity for the elite as well as
the mob. This is obvious for the new mass leaders whose careers reproduce
the features of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life,
perversion and disaster in private life. The fact that their lives prior to their
political careers had been failures, naively held against them by the more
respectable leaders of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass
appeal. It seemed to prove that individually they embodied the mass destiny
of the time and that their desire to sacrifice everything for the movement,
their assurance of devotion to those who had been struck by catastrophe,
their determination never to be tempted back into the security of normal
life, and their contempt for respectability were quite sincere and not just
inspired by passing ambitions.
The postwar elite, on the other hand, was only slightly younger than the
generation which had let itself be used and abused by imperiaUsm for the
sake of glorious careers outside of respectability, as gamblers and spies and
adventurers, as knights in shining armor and dragon-killers. They shared
with Lawrence of Arabia the yearning for "losing their selves" and the
violent disgust with all existing standards, with every power that be. If they
still remembered the "golden age of security," they also remembered how
they had hated it and how real their enthusiasm had been at the outbreak
of the first World War. Not only Hitler and not only the failures thanked
God on their knees when mobilization swept Europe in 1914.^^ They did
not even have to reproach themselves with having been an easy prey for
chauvinist propaganda or lying explanations about the purely defensive
^^ See Hitler's description of his reaction to the outbreak of the first World War in
Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter v.
f2g TOTALITARIANISM
character of the war. I he elite went to war with an exultant hope that
evcr>ihinR they knew, the whole culture and texture of life, might go down
in iiN -Ntorms of steel" (Ernst Jiinger). In the carefully chosen words of
Thom.is Mann, war was "chastisement" and "purification"; "war in itself,
rather than victories, inspired the poet." Or in the words of a student of the
lime, "what counts is always the readiness to make a sacrifice, not the object
for which the sacrifice is made"; or in the words of a young worker, "it
doesn't matter whether one lives a few years longer or not. one would like
to have something to show for one's life."^'' And long before one of Nazism's
intellectual sympathizers announced, "When I hear the word culture, I
drau my revolver," pt>ets had proclaimed their disgust with "rubbish cul-
ture" and called poetically on "ye Barbarians, Scythians, Negroes, Indians,
to trample it down."^"
Simply to brand as outbursts of nihilism this violent dissatisfaction with
the prewar age and subsequent attempts at restoring it (from Nietzsche
and Sorcl to Pareto. from Rimbaud and T. E. Lawrence to Jiinger, Brecht,
and Malraux. from Bakunin and Nechayev to Alexander Blok) is to over-
look how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the
ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie. Yet it is also
true that the "front generation," in marked contrast to their own chosen
spiritual fathers, were completely absorbed by their desire to see the ruin
of this whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life. This desire
was so great that it outweighed in impact and articulateness all earlier
attempts at a "transformation of values," such as Nietzsche had attempted,
or a reorganization of political life as indicated in Sorel's writings, or a re-
vival of human authenticity in Bakunin, or a passionate love of life in the
purity of exotic adventures in Rimbaud. Destruction without mitigation,
chaos and ruin as such assumed the dignity of supreme values. ^^
The genuineness of these feelings can be seen in the fact that very few
of this generation were cured of their war enthusiasm by actual experience
of its horrors. The survivors of the trenches did not become pacifists. They
cherished an experience which, they thought, might serve to separate them
*■• Sec the colleciion of material on the "inner chronicle of the first World War" by
H«nna Haacsbrink. Unknown Germany, New Haven, 1948, pp. 43, 45, 81, respec-
tively The great value of this collection for the imponderables of historical atmos-
phere makes the lack of similar studies for France, England, and Italy all the more
deplorable.
** Ihid.. pp. 20-21.
Q '!i^'\^'^"*^*' ^'"^ " feeling of complete alienation from normal life. Wrote Rudolf
Binding, for instance: "More and more we are to be counted among the dead, among
ihe estranged— because the greatness of the occurrence estranges and separates us—
rather than among the banished whose return is possible" {ibid., p. 160). A curious
rcmin.Kencc of the front generations elite claim can still be found in Himmler's
acctHint ^of how he finally hit upon his "form of selection" for the reorganization of
\Z ul ' AA uT^ u^''"^ selection procedure is brought about by war, the struggle
for IJfe and death. In this procedure the value of blood is shown through achievement.
■ ^. war. however, is an exceptional circumstance, and a way had to be found to make
%elc>.ti<>ns in peace time (op. cir).
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 329
definitely from the hated surroundings of respectability. They clung to their
memories of four years of life in the trenches as though they constituted an
objective criterion for the establishment of a new elite. Nor did they yield
to the temptation to idealize this past; on the contrary, the worshipers of
war were the first to concede that war in the era of machines could not pos-
sibly breed virtues like chivalry, courage, honor, and manliness,*^ that it
imposed on men nothing but the experience of bare destruction together
with the humiliation of being only small cogs in the majestic wheel of
slaughter.
This generation remembered the war as the great prelude to the break-
down of classes and their transformation into masses. War, with its constant
murderous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death, the "great equal-
izer" •*•' and therefore the true father of a new world order. The passion for
equality and justice, the longing to transcend narrow and meaningless class
lines, to abandon stupid privileges and prejudices, seemed to find in war a
way out of the old condescending attitudes of pity for the oppressed and
disinherited. In times of growing misery and individual helplessness, it seems
as difficult to resist pity when it grows into an all-devouring passion as it is
not to resent its very boundlessness, which seems to kill human dignity with
a more deadly certainty than misery itself.
In the early years of his career, when a restoration of the European status
quo was still the most serious threat to the ambitions of the mob,^° Hitler
appealed almost exclusively to these sentiments of the front generation. The
peculiar selflessness of the mass man appeared here as yearning for anonym-
ity, for being just a number and functioning only as a cog, for every trans-
formation, in brief, which would wipe out the spurious identifications with
specific types or predetermined functions within society. War had been ex-
perienced as that "mightiest of all mass actions" which obliterated individual
differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off in-
dividuals through unique unexchangeable destinies, could now be interpreted
as "an instrument of historical progress." ^^ Nor did national distinctions
limit the masses into which the postwar elite wished to be immersed. The
first World War, somewhat paradoxically, had almost extinguished genuine
national feelings in Europe where, between the wars, it was far more im-
portant to have belonged to the generation of the trenches, no matter on
which side, than to be a German or a Frenchman.^^ The Nazis based their
■** See, for instance, Ernst Jiinger, The Storm of Steel, London, 1929.
■•^ Hafkesbrink, op. cit., p. 156.
''° Heiden, op. cit., shows how consistently Hitler sided with catastrophe in the
early days of the movement, how he feared a possible recovery of Germany. "Half a
dozen times [i.e., during the Ruhrputsch], in different terms, he declared to his storm
troops that Germany was going under. 'Our job is to insure the success of our move-
ment' " (p. 167) — a success which at that moment depended upon the collapse of the
fight in the Ruhr.
^' Hafkesbrink, op. cit., pp. 156-157.
^^ This feeling was already widespread during the war when Rudolf Binding wrote:
"[This war] is not to be compared with a campaign. For there one leader pits his
.iJO
TOTALITARIANISM
whole pu-iM.v;..iKla on this indistinct comradeship, this "community of fate,"
and won over .1 great number of veteran organizations in all European coun-
tncs. thereby proving how meaningless national slogans had become even in
the ranks of the so-called Right, which used them for their connotation
of violence rather than for their specific national content.
No single element in this general intellectual climate in postwar Europe
was vers new. Bakunin had already confessed, "I do not want to be /, I want
to be HV."'^ and Nechayev had preached the evangel of the "doomed man"
with "no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, prop-
erty, not even a name of his own."'"'^ The antihumanist, antiliberal, anti-
individualist, and anticultural instincts of the front generation, their brilliant
and wittv praise of violence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the awk-
ward and pompous "scientific" proofs of the imperialist elite that a struggle
of all against all is the law of the universe, that expansion is a psychological
necessity before it is a political device, and that man has to behave by such
universal laws.'' What was new in the writings of the front generation was
their high literary standard and great depth of passion. The postwar writers
no longer needed the scientific demonstrations of genetics, and they made
little if any use of the collected works of Gobineau or Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, which belonged already to the cultural household of the
Philistines. They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.-"'" If they believed
at all in universal laws, they certainly did not particularly care to conform
to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of
men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too
proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and re-
will apainsi that of another. But in this War both adversaries lie on the ground,
.ind only the War has its will" (ibid., p. 67).
''Bakunin in a letter written on February 7, 1870. See Max Nomad, Apostles of
Rr\oluiinn. Boston. 1939, p. 180.
'■'The Catechism of the Revolutionist" was either written by Bakunin himself
or by his disciple Nechayev. For the question of authorship and a translation of the
complete text, see Nomad, op. til., p. 227 ff. In any event, the "system of complete
disregard for any tenets of simple decency and fairness in [the revolutionist's] atti-
tude towards other human beings . . . went down in Russian revolutionary history
under the name of "Nechayevshchina' " {ibid., p. 224).
■•'• Outsiandint: amonp these political theorists of imperialism is Ernest Seilliere,
\t\Muismi' el Dominaiion: E.s.<iais de Critique Imperialiste, 1913. See also Cargill
Spriclsma. We Imperudists: Notes on Ernest Seilliere's Philosophy of Imperialism,
New York. I9.'«l; G. Monod in La Revue Hi.storique. January. 1912; and Louis Esteve,
I'nr nnuville P.\ychol<>f>ie de I'lmperialisme: Ernest Seilliere, 1913.
"In France, since 1930, the Marquis de Sade has become one of the favored au-
thors of the literary avant-garde. Jean Paulhan. in his Introduction to a new edition
of Sade's Lis Infortunes de la Vertn. Paris, 1946, remarks: "When I see so many
writers today consciously trying to deny artifice and the literary game for the sake
of the inexpressible [un cvenemeni indicible] . . . , anxiously looking for the sublime
m the infamous, for the great in the subversive .... I ask myself ... if our mod-
ern literature, m those parts which appear to us most vital— or at any rate most ag-
gressive— has not turned entirely toward the past, and if it was not precisely Sade
who deternimcd .1." .Sec also Georges Bataille, "Le Secret de Sade," in La Critique,
Tome III. Nos. 15-16. 17. 1947.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 331
integrate them into the world. They were satisfied with bUnd partisanship
in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or con-
tent, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted
society's humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.
If we compare this generation with the nineteenth-century ideologists,
with whose theories they sometimes seem to have so much in common, their
chief distinction is their greater authenticity and passion. They had been
more deeply touched by misery, they were more concerned with the per-
plexities and more deadly hurt by hypocrisy than all the apostles of good will
and brotherhood had been. And they could no longer escape into exotic
lands, could no longer afford to be dragon-slayers among strange and excit-
ing people. There was no escape from the daily routine of misery, meekness,
frustration, and resentment embellished by a fake culture of educated talk;
no conformity to the customs of fairy-tale lands could possibly save them
from the rising nausea that this combination continuously inspired.
This inability to escape into the wide world, this feeling of being caught
again and again in the trappings of society — so different from the conditions
which had formed the imperialist character — added a constant strain and
the yearning for violence to the older passion for anonymity and losing
oneself. Without the possibility of a radical change of role and character,
such as the identification with the Arab national movement or the rites of an
Indian village, the self-willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of de-
struction seemed to be a salvation from the automatic identification with
pre-established functions in society and their utter banality, and at the same
time to help destroy the functioning itself. These people felt attracted to the
pronounced activism of totalitarian movements, to their curious and only
seemingly contradictory insistence on both the primacy of sheer action and
the overwhelming force of sheer necessity. This mixture corresponded pre-
cisely to the war experience of the "front generation," to the experience of
constant activity within the framework of overwhelming fatality.
Activism, rnoreover, seemed to provide new answers to the old and
trouBlesorne question, "Who am I?" which always appears with redoubled
persistence in times of crisis. If society insisted, "You are what you appear
to be," postwar activism replied: "You are what you have done" — for in-
stance, the man who for the first time had crossed the Atlantic in an air-
plane (as in Brecht's Der Plug der Lindberghs) — an answer which after the
second World War was repeated and slightly varied by Sartre's "You are
your life" (in Huis Clos). The pertinence of these answers lies less in their
validity as redefinitions of personal identity than in their usefulness for an
eventual escape from social identification, from the multiplicity of inter-
changeable roles and functions which society had imposed. The point was
to do something, heroic or criminal, which was unpredictable and undeter-
mined by anybody else.
The pronounced activism of the totalitarian movements, their preference
for terrorism over all other forms of political activity, attracted the intel-
lectual elite and the mob alike, precisely because this terrorism was so ut-
ii> TOTALITARIANISM
icrty different from ihat of the earlier revolutionary societies. It was no
lonj.'cr a matter of calculated policy which saw in terrorist acts the only
n»eans to eliminate certain outstanding personalities who, because of their
policies or position, had become the symbol of oppression. What proved so
attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through
which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of politi-
cal ｅxpressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched de-
lightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing
to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of
one's existence on the normal strata of society. It was still the same spirit
and the same game which made Goebbels, long before the eventual defeat of
Nazi Ciermanv. announce with obvious delight that the Nazis, in case of
defeat, would know how to slam the door behind them and not to be for-
gotten for centuries.
Yet it is here if anywhere that a valid criterion may be found for dis-
tinguishing the elite from the mob in the pretotalitarian atmosphere. What
the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed with great precision, was
access to history even at the price of destruction. Goebbels' sincere convic-
tion that "the greatest happiness that a contemporary can experience today"
is cither to be a genius or to serve one,"'^ was typical of the mob but neither
of the masses nor the sympathizing elite. The latter, on the contrary, took
anonymity seriously to the point of seriously denying the existence of genius;
all the art theories of the twenties tried desperately to prove that the excel-
lent is the product of skill, craftsmanship, logic, and the realization of the
potentialities of the material.''^ The mob, and not the elite, was charmed
by the "radiant power of fame" (Stefan Zweig) and accepted enthusiastically
the genius idolatry of the late bourgeois world. In this the mob of the twen-
tieth century followed faithfully the pattern of earlier parvenus who also
had discovered the fact that bourgeois society would rather open its doors
to the fascinating "abnormal," the genius, the homosexual, or the Jew, than
to simple merit. The elite's contempt for the genius and its yearning for
anonymity was still witness of a spirit which neither the masses nor the mob
were in a position to understand, and which, in the words of Robespierre,
strove to assert the grandeur of man against the pettiness of the great.
This difference between the elite and the mob notwithstanding, there is
no doubt that the elite was pleased whenever the underworld frightened re-
spectable society into accepting it on an equal footing. The members of the
elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization,
for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past
forced their way into it. They were not particularly outraged at the mon-
strous forgeries in historiography of which all totalitarian regimes are guilty
and which announce themselves clearly enough in totalitarian propaganda.
They had convinced themselves that traditional historiography was a forgery
'Goebbels, op. lit., p. 139.
■" The ari theories of the Bauhaus were characteristic in this respect. See also
Hcrtoll Brechls remarks on the theater, GcsumnwUe Werke, London, 1938.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 333
in any case, since it had excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from
the memory of mankind. Those who were rejected by their own time were
usually forgotten by history, and insult added to injury had troubled all
sensitive consciences ever since faith in a hereafter where the last would be
the first had disappeared. Injustices in the past as well as the present became
intolerable when there was no longer any hope that the scales of justice
eventually would be set right. Marx's great attempt to rewrite world history
in terms of class struggles fascinated even those who did not believe in the
correctness of his thesis, because of his original intention to find a device by
which to force the destinies of those excluded from official history into the
memory of posterity.
The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on
this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy re-
spectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were
forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler the housepainter and self-
admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries
perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life,
insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of
European history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was
rather gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate
those sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recogni-
tion in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical material-
ism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of
Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not
the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti-
clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits
and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The
object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal
official history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of
which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the out-
ward fagade erected explicitly to fool the people.
To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its
conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the
playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascina-
tion in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventu-
ally be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change
his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood
may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and clever-
ness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin's and Hitler's skill in
the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into
a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted
the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared
to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality
of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the
necessary inspiration for action.
.^i't
TOTALITARIANISM
The ;ittrac(ion which the totalitarian movements exert on the elite, so
long as and wherever they have not seized power, has been perplexing be-
cause the patently vulgar and arbitrary, positive doctrines of totalitarianism
arc more conspicuous to the outsider and mere observer than the general
motxl which pervades the pretotalitarian atmosphere. These doctrines were
so much at variance with generally accepted intellectual, cultural, and moral
standards that one could conclude that only an inherent fundamental short-
coming of character in the intellectual, "la trahison des dens" (J. Benda),
or a perverse self-hatred of the spirit, accounted for the delight with which
the elite accepted the "ideas" of the mob. What the spokesmen of humanism
and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and their
unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time, is that an at-
mosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated
(after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted
their vital appeal ) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propo-
sitions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely
because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. Vul-
garity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories
carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pre-
tenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life. In the
growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions — which were actually
the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy —
those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left re-
spectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the
content itself.'''
Since the bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions
and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues which it not
only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in con-
tempt, it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values,
and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon
which the existing society seemed to rest. What a temptation to flaunt ex-
treme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to
wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate
and pretended to be gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wicked-
ness, but of meanness! The intellectual elite of the twenties who knew little
of the earlier connections between mob and bourgeoisie was certain that the
old game of epater le bourgeois could be played to perfection if one started
to shock society with an ironically exaggerated picture of its own behavior.
At that time, nobody anticipated that the true victims of this irony would
'The following passage by Rohm is typical of the feelinu of almost the whole
younger generation and not only of an elite: "Hypocrisy and Pharisaism rule. They
arc the most conspicuous characteristics of society today. . . . Nothing could be more
lying than the so-called morals of society." These boys "dont find their way in the
philisiinc world of bourgeois double morals and don't know any longer how to dis-
tmpu.sh between truth and error" (Die Gcschkhte ernes Hochverniters, pp. 267 and
-M). The homosexuality of these circles was also at least partially an ｅxpression of
incir protest against society.
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY J35
be the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The avant-garde did not know they
were running their heads not against walls but against open doors, that a
unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority,
and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the
spirit of the time. Particularly significant in this respect was the reception
given Brecht's Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented
gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gang-
sters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the
audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when
the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song
in the play, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral," was greeted
with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons.
The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie
applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long
that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expres-
sion of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the un-
veiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the
work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bour-
geoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden
philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so
that the only political result of Brecht's "revolution" was to encourage
everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept
openly the standards of the mob.
A reaction similar in its ambiguity was aroused some ten years later in
France by Celine's Bagatelles pour un Massacre, in which he proposed to
massacre all the Jews. Andre Gide was publicly delighted in the pages of the
Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, not of course because he wanted to kill the Jews
of France, but because he rejoiced in the blunt admission of such a desire
and in the fascinating contradiction between Celine's bluntness and the
hypocritical politeness which surrounded the Jewish question in all respect-
able quarters. How irresistible the desire for the unmasking of hypocrisy
was among the elite can be gauged by the fact that such delight could not
even be spoiled by Hitler's very real persecution of the Jews, which at the
time of Celine's writing was already in full swing. Yet aversion against the
philosemitism of the liberals had much more to do with this reaction than
hatred of Jews. A similar frame of mind explains the remarkable fact that
Hitler's and Stalin's widely publicized opinions about art and their persecu-
tion of modern artists have never been able to destroy the attraction which
the totalitarian movements had for avant-garde artists; this shows the elite's
lack of a sense of reality, together with its perverted selflessness, both of
which resemble only too closely the fictitious world and the absence of self-
interest among the masses. It was the great opportunity of the totalitarian
movements, and the reason why a temporary alliance between the intellectual
elite and the mob could come about, that in an elementary and undifferen-
tiated way their problems had become the same and foreshadowed the
problems and mentality of the masses.
fffi TOTALITARIANISM
CU>scIy rclaled to the attraction which the mob's lack of hypocrisy and
the masses' lack of self-interest exerted on the elite was the equally irre-
sistible appeal of the totalitarian movements' spurious claim to have abol-
ished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a
mysterious irrational wholeness in man. Since Balzac revealed the private
lives of the public figures of French society and since Ibsen's dramatization
of the "Pillars of Society" had conquered the Continental theater, the issue
of double morality was one of the main topics for tragedies, comedies, and
novels. Double morality as practiced by the bourgeoisie became the out-
standing sign of that e.sprii de serieux, which is always pompous and never
sincere. This division between private and public or social life had nothing
to do with the justified separation between the personal and public spheres,
but was rather the psychological reflection of the nineteenth-century struggle
between houri^eois and ciioyen, between the man who judged and used all
public institutions by the yardstick of his private interests and the respon-
sible citizen who was concerned with public affairs as the affairs of all. In
this connection, the liberals' political philosophy, according to which the
mere sum of individual interests adds up to the miracle of the common good,
appeared to be only a rationalization of the recklessness with which private
interests were pressed regardless of the common good.
Against the class spirit of the Continental parties, which had always
admitted they represented certain interests, and against the "opportunism"
resulting from their conception of themselves as only parts of a total, the
totalitarian movements asserted their "superiority" in that they carried a
Wt'Uanschouunii by which they would take possession of man as a whole.^"
In this claim to totality the mob leaders of the movements again formulated
and only reversed the bourgeoisie's own political philosophy. The bourgeois
class, having made its way through social pressure and, frequently, through
an economic blackmail of political institutions, always believed that the
public and visible organs of power were directed by their own secret, non-
public interests and influence. In this sense, the bourgeoisie's political
philosophy was always "totalitarian"; it always assumed an identity of
politics, economics and society, in which political institutions served only
as the facjade for private interests. The bourgeoisie's double standard, its
differentiation between public and private life, were a concession to the
nation-state which had desperately tried to keep the two spheres apart.
What appealed to the elite was radicalism as such. Marx's hopeful predic-
tions that the state would wither away and a classless society emerge were
no longer radical, no longer Messianic enough. If Berdyaev is right in stat-
ing that "Russian revolutionaries . . . had always been totalitarian," then
the attraction which Soviet Russia exerted almost equally on Nazi and Com-
munist intellectual fellow-travelers lay precisely in the fact that in Russia
'■" The role of the Wclinnscluiuiinfi in the formation of the Nazi movement has been
stressed many times by Hitler himself. In Mein Kampf, it is interesting to note that
he pretends to have understood the necessity of basing a party on a Weltanschauung
through the superiority of the Marxist parties. Book II, chapter i: "Weltanschauung
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 337
"the revolution was a religion and a philosophy, not merely a conflict con-
cerned with the social and political side of life.""^ The truth was that the
transformation of classes into masses and the breakdown of the prestige and
authority of political institutions had brought to Western European coun-
tries conditions which resembled those prevalent in Russia, so that it was
no accident that their revolutionaries also began to take on the typically
Russian revolutionary fanaticism which looked forward, not to change in
social or political conditions, but to the radical destruction of every existing
creed, value, and institution. The mob merely took advantage of this new
mood and brought about a short-lived alliance of revolutionaries and crim-
inals, which also had been present in many revolutionary sects in Czarist
Russia but conspicuously absent from the European scene.
The disturbing alliance between the mob and the elite, and the curious
coincidence of their aspirations, had their origin in the fact that these strata
had been the first to be eliminated from the structure of the nation-state and
the framework of class society. They found each other so easily, if only
temporarily, because they both sensed that they represented the fate of the
time, that they were followed by unending masses, that sooner or later the
majority of European peoples might be with them — as they thought, ready
to make their revolution.
It turned out that they were both mistaken. The mob, the underworld of
the bourgeois class, hoped that the helpless masses would help them into
power, would support them when they attempted to forward their private
interests, that they would be able simply to replace the older strata of bour-
geois society and to instill into it the more enterprising spirit of the under-
world. Yet totalitarianism in power learned quickly that enterprising spirit
was not restricted to the mob strata of the population and that, in any event,
such initiative could only be a threat to the total domination of man. Ab-
sence of scruple, on the other hand, was not restricted to the mob either and,
in any event, could be taught in a relatively short time. For the ruthless ma-
chines of domination and extermination, the masses of co-ordinated philis-
tines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes
than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were
well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.
It is not fortuitous, then, that the few protests against the Nazis' mass
atrocities against the Jews and Eastern European peoples were voiced not
by the military men nor by any other part of the co-ordinated masses of
respectable philistines, but precisely by those early comrades of Hitler who
were typical representatives of the mob.*'^ Nor was Himmler, the most power-
"' Nicolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, 1937, pp. 124-125.
"^ There is, for instance, the curious intervention of Welheim Kube, General Com-
missar in Minsk and one of the oldest members of the Party, who in 1941, i.e., at the
beginning of the mass murder, wrote to his chief: "I certainly am tough and willing
to co-operate in the solution of the Jewish question, but people who have been brought
up in our own culture are, after all, different from the local bestial hordes. Are we
to assign the task of slaughtering them to the Lithuanians and Letts who are dis-
JJS
TOTALITARIANISM
ful man in Germany after 1936, one of those "armed bohemians" (Heiden)
whose features were distressingly similar to those of the intellectual elite.
Himmlcr was himself "more normal," that is, more of a philistine, than any
of the original leaders of the Nazi movement."'' He was not a bohemian like
Gix-bbcls. or a sex criminal like Streicher, or a crackpot like Rosenberg, or
a fanatic like Hitler, or an adventurer like Goring. He proved his supreme
ability for organizing the masses into total domination by assuming that
most people are neither bohemians, fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs,
crackpots, nor social failures, but first and foremost job holders and good
family men.
The Philistine's retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to
matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product
of the bourgeoisie's belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine
is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is
produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man
whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in
history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and
was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about
nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything —
belief, honor, dignity — on the slightest provocation. Nothing proved easier
to destroy than the privacy and private morality of people who thought of
nothing but safeguarding their private lives. After a few years of power and
criminated against even by the indigenous population? I could not do it. I ask you to
give me clear-cut instructions to take care of the matter in the most humane way for
ihc sake of the prestige of our Reich and our Party." This letter is published in Max
Wcinrcich, Hitler's Professors, New York, 1946, pp. 153-154. Kube's intervention was
quickly overruled, yet an almost identical attempt to save the lives of Danish Jews,
made by W. Best, the Reich's plenipotentiary in Denmark, and a well-known Nazi,
was more successful. See Nazi Conspiracy, V. 2.
Similarly Alfred Rosenberg, who had preached the inferiority of the Slav peoples,
obviously never realized that his theories might one day mean their liquidation. Charged
with the administration of the Ukraine, he wrote outraged reports about conditions
there during the fall of 1942 after he had tried earlier to get direct intervention from
Hitler himself. See Nazi Conspiracy, III, 83 fT., and IV, 62.
There are of course some exceptions to this rule. The man who saved Paris from
destruction was General von Choltitz who, however, still "feared that he would be
deprived of his command as he had not executed his orders" even though he knew
that the "war had been lost for several years." That he would have had the courage
to resist the order "to turn Paris into a mass of ruins" without the energetic support
of a Nazi of old standing. Otto Abetz the Ambassador to France, appears dubious ac-
cording to his own testimony during the trial of Abetz in Paris. See New York Times,
July 21. 1949.
"' An Englishman, Stephen H. Roberts. The House that Hitler Built. London, 1939.
describes Himmler as "a man of exquisite courtesy and still interested in the simple
things of life. He has none of the pose of those Nazis who act as demigods. ... No
man 'ooks less like his job than this police dictator of Germany, and I am convinced
that nobody I met in Germany is more normal. . . ." (pp. 89-90)— This reminds
one in a curious way of the remark of Stalin's mother who according to Bolshevik
propaganda said of him: "An exemplary son. 1 wish everybody were like him"
(Souvarmc. op. cii., p. 656).
A CLASSLESS SOCIETY 339
systematic co-ordination, the Nazis could rightly announce: "The only person
who is still a private individual in Germany is somebody who is asleep.""*
In all fairness to those among the elite, on the other hand, who at one
time or another have let themselves be seduced by totalitarian movements,
and who sometimes, because of their intellectual abilities, are even accused
of having inspired totalitarianism, it must be stated that what these des-
perate men of the twentieth century did or did not do had no influence on
totalitarianism whatsoever, although it did play some part in earlier, suc-
cessful, attempts of the movements to force the outside world to take their
doctrines seriously. Wherever totalitarian movements seized power, this
whole group of sympathizers was shaken off even before the regimes pro-
ceeded toward their greatest crimes. Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic ini-
tiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob,
and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent
persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass
leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything
they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative
in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totali-
tarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of
their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence
and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."''
"^ The remark was made by Robert Ley. See Kohn-Bramstedt, op. tit., p. 178.
"'' Bolshevik policy, in this respect surprisingly consistent, is well known and hardly
needs further comment. Picasso, to take the most famous instance, is not liked in
Russia even though he has become a Communist, it is possible that Andre Gide's
sudden reversal of attitude after seeing the Bolshevik reality in Soviet Russia (Retour
lie I'URSS) in 1936, definitely convinced Stalin of the uselessness of creative artists
even as fellow-travelers. Nazi policy was distinguished from Bolshevik measures only
insofar as it did not yet kill its first-rate talents.
It would be worthwhile to study in detail the careers of those comparatively few
German scholars who went beyond mere co-operation and volunteered their services
because they were convinced Nazis. (Weinreich, op. lit., the only available study, and
misleading because he does not distinguish between professors who adopted the Nazi
creed and those who owed their careers exclusively to the regime, omits the earlier
careers of the concerned scholars and thus indiscriminately puts well-known men of
great achievement into the same category as crackpots.) Most interesting is the ex-
ample of the jurist Carl Schmitt, whose very ingenious theories about the end of
democracy and legal government still make arresting reading; as early as the middle
thirties, he was replaced by the Nazis' own brand of political and legal theorists,
such as Hans Frank, the later governor of Poland, Gottfried Neesse, and Reinhard
Hoehn. The last to fall into disgrace was the historian Walter Frank, who had been
a convinced antisemite and member of the Nazi party before it came to power, and
who, in 1933, became director of the newly founded Reichsinstitut fiir Geschichte des
Neuen Deutschlands with its famous Forschungsabteilung Judenfrage, and editor of
the nine-volume Forschiingen ztir Judenfrage (1937-1944). In the early forties, Frank
had to cede his position and influence to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg, whose Der
Mythos cles 20. Jahrhttiulerts certainly shows no aspiration whatsoever to "scholar-
ship." Frank clearly was mistrusted for no other reason than that he was not a char-
latan.
What neither the elite nor the mob that "embraced" National Socialism with such
J40 TOTALITARIANISM
fervor could undcrNiand was thai one cannot embrace this Order ... by accident.
Above ind bcvond the williniiness to serve stands the unrelenting necessity of selection
thai knows neither exienuatinj; circumstances nor clemency" {Der Weg iler SS, issued
by the SS Hauptamt-S*.huliinf;samt. n.d.. p. 4). In other words, concerning the selec-
tion of those who would belong to them the Nazis intended to make their own decisions,
rcKiirdlcss of the "accident" of any opinions. The same appears to be true for the
selection of Bolshevists for the secret police. F. Beck and W. Godin report in Russian
Purge unJ the hxlrmlion of Confession, 1951. p. 160, that the members of the NKVD
are claimed from the ranks of party members without having the slightest opportunity
to volunteer for this "career."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Totalitarian
Movement
i: Totalitarian Propaganda
onLY THE MOB and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of total-
itarianism itself; t he masse s have to be won by propaganda. Under
conditions of constitutional government and freedom of opinion, totalitarian
movements struggling for power can use terror to a limited extent only and
share with other parties the necessity of winning adherents and of appearing
plausible to a public which is not yet rigorously isolated from all other
sources of information.
It was recognized early and has frequently been asserted that in total-
itarian countries propaganda and terror present two sides of the same coin.^
This, however, is only partly true. Wherever totalitarianism possesses ab-
solute control, it replaces propaganda with indoctrination and uses violence
not so much to frighten people (this is done only in the initial stages when
political opposition still exists) as to realize constantly its ideological doc-
trines and its practical lies. Totalitarianism will not be satisfied to assert, in
the face of contrary facts, that unemployment does not exist; it will abolish
unemployment benefits as part of its propaganda.- Equally important is the
fact that the refusal to acknowledge unemployment realized — albeit in a
rather unexpected way — the old socialist doctrine: He who does not work
shall not eat. Or when, to take another instance, Stalin decided to rewrite
' See, for instance, E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police: The Tech-
nique of Control by Fear, London, 1945, p. 164 flf. The explanation is that "terror
without propaganda would lose most of its psychological effect, whereas propaganda
without terror does not contain its full punch" (p. 175). What is overlooked in these
and similar statements, which mostly go around in circles, is the fact that not only
political propaganda but the whole of modern mass publicity contains an element of
threat; that terror, on the other hand, can be fully effective without propaganda, so
long as it is only a question of conventional political terror of tyranny. only when
terror is intended to coerce not merely from without but. as it were, from within,
when the political regime wants more than power, is terror in need of propa-
ganda. In this sense the Nazi theorist, Eugen Hadamovsky, could say in Propaganda
iind nationale Macht, 1933: "Propaganda and violence are never contradictions. Use
of violence can be part of the propaganda" (p. 22).
^ "At that time, it was officially announced that unemployment was 'liquidated' in
Soviet Russia. The result of the announcement was that all unemployment benefits
were equally 'liquidated'" (Anton Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 109).
.u:
TOTALITARIANISM
the hisior>' of ihc Russian Revolution, the propaganda of his new version
consisted in destroying, together with the older books and documents, their
authors and readers: the publication in 1938 of a new official history of the
Communist Party was the signal that the superpurge which had decimated
a whole generation of Soviet intellectuals had come to an end. Similarly,
the Nazis in the Eastern occupied territories at first used chiefly antisemitic
propaganda to win firmer control of the population. They neither needed
nor used terror to support this propaganda. When they liquidated the greater
part of the Polish intelligentsia, they did it not because of its opposition, but
because according to their doctrine Poles had no intellect, and when they
planned to kidnap blue-eyed and blond-haired children, they did not intend
to frighten the population but to save "Germanic blood. ^
Since totalitarian movements exist in a world which itself is nontotali-
tarian. they are forced to resort to what we commonly regard as propaganda.
But such propaganda always makes its appeal to an external sphere — be it
the nontotalitarian strata of the population at home or the nontotalitarian
countries abroad. This external sphere to which totalitarian propaganda
makes its appeal may vary greatly; even after the seizure of power totali-
tarian propaganda may address itself to those segments of its own popula-
tion whose co-ordination was not followed by sufficient indoctrination. In
this respect Hitler's speeches to his generals during the war are veritable
models of propaganda, characterized mainly by the monstrous lies with
which the Fuehrer entertained his guests in an attempt to win them over.'*
The external sphere can also be represented by groups of sympathizers who
'The so-called "Opcriilion Hay" began with a decree dated February 16, 1942, by
Himmlcr "concerning [individuals] of German stock in Poland," stipulating that their
children should be sent to families "that are willing [to accept them] without reserva-
tion*, out of love for the good blood in them" (Nuremberg Document R 135, photo-
stated by the Centre dc Documentation Juive, Paris). It seems that in June, 1944, the
Ninth Army actually kidnapped 40,000 to 50,000 children and subsequently transported
Ihcm to Germany. A report on this matter, sent to the General Staff of the Wehrmacht
m Berlin by a man called Brandenburg, mentions similar plans for the Ukraine (Docu-
ment PS 031, published by Leon Poliakov in Brcviaire de la Haine, p. 317). Himmler
himself made several references to this plan. (See Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression,
Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality,
U.S. Government. Washington, 1946. Ill, 640, which contains excerpts from Himmler's
speech at Cracow in March, 1942; sec also the comments on Himmler's speech at
Bad Schachen in 1943 in Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cil.. p. 244.) How the selection of
these children was arrived at can be gathered from medical certificates made out by
Medical Section II at Minsk on August 10, 1942: "The racial examination of Natalie
Harpf. born August 14, 1922, showed a normally developed girl of predominantly
East Baltic type with Nordic features."— "Examination of Arnold Cornies, born Feb-
ruary 19. 1930, showed a normally developed boy, twelve years old, of predominantly
Eastern type with Nordic features." Signed: N. Wc. (Document in the archives of
the Yiddish Scientific Institute, New York. No. Occ E 3a-17.)
For the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia, which, in Hitler's opinion, could
be^ -wiped out without qualms," sec Poliakov, op. cit.. p. 321, and Document NO 2472.
Sec Hitlers 1 ,v hgcsprache. In the summer of 1942, he still talks about "[kicking]
even the last Jew out of Europe" (p. 113) and resettling the Jews in Siberia or Africa
(p. -Ml), or Madagascar, while in reality he had already decided on the "final solu-
tion prior to the Russian invasion, probably in 1940, and ordered the gas ovens to
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 343
are not yet ready to accept the true aims of the movement; finally, it often
happens that even party members are regarded by the Fuehrer's inner circle
or the members of the elite formations as belonging to such an external
sphere, and in this case they, too, are still in need of propaganda because
they cannot yet be reliably dominated. In order not to overestimate the
importance of the propaganda lies one should recall the much more numer-
ous instances in which Hitler was completely sincere and brutally unequivocal
in the definition of the movement's true aims, but they were simply not
acknowledged by a public unprepared for such consistency/' But, basically
speaking, totalitarian domination strives to restrict propaganda methods
solely to its foreign policy or to the branches of the movement abroad for
the purpose of supplying them with suitable material. Whenever totalitarian
indoctrination at home comes into conflict with the propaganda line for
consumption abroad (which happened in Russia during the war, not when
Stalin had concluded his alliance with Hitler, but when the war with Hitler
brought him into the camp of the democracies), the propaganda is ex-
plained at home as a "temporary tactical maneuver."" As far as possible,
this distinction between ideological doctrine for the initiated in the move-
ment, who are no longer in need of propaganda, and unadulterated propa-
ganda for the outside world is already established in the prepower existence
of the movements. The relationship between propaganda and indoctrination
usually depends upon the size of the movements on one hand, and upon
outside pressure on the other. The smaller the movement, the more energy
it will expend in mere propaganda; the greater the pressure on totalitarian
regimes from the outside world — a pressure that even behind iron curtains
cannot be ignored entirely — the more actively will the totalitarian dictators
be set up in the fall of 1941 (see Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, II, pp. 265 ff.;
Ill, pp. 783 ff. Document PS 1104; V. pp. 322 ff. Document PS 2605). Himmler al-
ready knew in the spring of 1941 that "the Jews [must be] exterminated to the last
man by the end of the war. This is the unequivocal desire and command of the
Fuehrer" (Dossier Kersten in the Centre de Documentation Juive).
^ In this connection there is a very interesting report, dated July 16, 1940, on a
discussion at the Fuehrer's headquarters, in the presence of Rosenberg, Lammers and
Keitel, which Hitler began by stating the following "basic principles": "It was now
essential not to parade our ultimate goal before the entire world; . . . Hence it must
not be obvious that [the decrees for maintaining peace and order in the occupied ter-
ritories] point to a final settlement. All necessary measures — executions, resettlements
— can, and will be, carried out in spite of this." This is followed by a discussion which
makes no reference whatever to Hitler's words and in which Hitler no longer partici-
pates. He quite obviously had not been "understood" (Document L 221 in the Centre
de Documentation Juive).
® For Stalin's confidence that Hitler would not attack Russia, see Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin: a Political Biography. New York and London, 1949, pp. 454 ff., and especially
the footnote on p. 458: "It was only in 1948 that the Chief of the State Planning Com-
mission, Vice-Premier N. Voznesensky, disclosed that the economic plans for the third
quarter of 1941 had been based on the assumption of peace and that a new plan,
suited for war, had been drafted only after the outbreak of hostilities." Deutscher's
estimate has now been solidly confirmed by Khrushchev's report on Stalin's reaction to
the German attack on the Soviet Union. See his "Speech on Stalin" at the Twentieth
Congress as released by the State Department, New York Times, June 5, 1956.
}^j TOTALITARIANISM
engage in propaganda. The essential point is that the necessities for propa-
ganda arc always dictated by the outside world and that the movements
themselves do not actually propagate but indoctrinate. Conversely, indoc-
irmation, inevitably coupled with terror, increases with the strength of the
movements or the totalitarian governments' isolation and security from out-
side interference.
Propaganda is indeed part and parcel of "psychological warfare"; but
terror is more. Terror continues to be used by totalitarian regimes even
when its psychological aims are achieved: its real horror is that it reigns
over a completely subdued population. Where the rule of terror is brought
to perfection, as in concentration camps, propaganda disappears entirely;
it was even expressly prohibited in Nazi Germany.'^ Propaganda, in other
words, is one, and possibly the most important, instrument of totalitarian-
ism for dealing with the nontotalitarian world; terror, on the contrary, is
the very essence of its form of government. Its existence depends as little on
psychological or other subjective factors as the existence of laws in a
constitutionally governed country depends upon the number of people who
transgress them.
Terror as the counterpart of propaganda played a greater role in Nazism
than in Communism. The Nazis did not strike at prominent figures as had
been done in the earlier wave of political crimes in Germany (the murder
of Rathenau and Erzberger); instead, by killing small socialist functionaries
or influential members of opposing parties, they attempted to prove to the
population the dangers involved in mere membership. This kind of mass
terror, which still operated on a comparatively small scale, increased steadily
because neither the police nor the courts seriously prosecuted political of-
fenders on the so-called Right. It was valuable as what a Nazi publicist has
aptly called "power propaganda": ^ it made clear to the population at large
that the power of the Nazis was greater than that of the authorities and that
it was safer to be a member of a Nazi paramilitary organization than a
loyal Republican. This impression was greatly strengthened by the specific
use the Nazis made of their political crimes. They always admitted them
publicly, never apologized for "excesses of the lower ranks" — such apologies
were used only by Nazi sympathizers — and impressed the population as
being very different from the "idle talkers" of other parties.
The similarities between this kind of terror and plain gangsterism are too
' "tducaiion [in the concentration camps] consists of discipline, never of any kind
of instruction on an ideological basis, for the prisoners have for the most part slave-
like souls" (Heinrich Himmler, Nazi Conspiracy. IV, 616 ff.).
" Eugcn Hadamovsky, op. tit., is outstanding in the literature on totalitarian propa-
ganda. Without explicitly stating it, Hadamovsky offers an intelligent and revealing
pro-Nazi interpretation of Hitler's own exposition on the subject in "Propaganda and
Orpani/alion." in Book II, chapter xi of Mein Kampf (2 vols., 1st German edition,
IV.5 and 1927 respectively. Unexpurgated translation, New York, 1939).— See also
^, „*• ^"' P"'>'>''^f>e Propaganda der NSDAP im Kampf urn die Macht, 1936,
pp. 21 n.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 345
obvious to be pointed out. This does not mean that Nazism was gangster-
ism, as has sometimes been concluded, but only that the Nazis, without ad-
mitting it, learned as much from American gangster organizations as their
propaganda, admittedly, learned from American business publicity.
More specific in totalitarian propaganda, however, than direct threats and
crimes against individuals is the use of indirect, veiled, and menacing hints
against all who will not heed its teachings and, later, mass murder perpe-
trated on "guilty" and "innocent" alike. People are threatened by Commu-
nist propaganda with missing the train of history, with remaining hopelessly
behind their time, with spending their lives uselessly, just as they were threat-
ened by the Nazis with living against the eternal laws of nature and life,
with an irreparable and mysterious deterioration of their blood. The strong
emphasis of totalitarian propaganda on the "scientific" nature of its asser-
tions has been compared to certain advertising techniques which also ad-
dress themselves to masses. And it is true that the advertising columns of
every newspaper show this "scientificality," by which a manufacturer proves
with facts and figures and the help of a "research" department that his is
the "best soap in the world."" It is also true that there is a certain element
of violence in the imaginative exaggerations of publicity men, that behind
the assertion that girls who do not use this particular brand of soap may
go through life with pimples and without a husband, lies the wild dream of
monopoly, the dream that one day the manufacturer of the only soap that
prevents pimples" may have the power to deprive of husbands all girls who
do not use his soap. Science in the instances of both business publicity and
totalitarian propaganda is obviously only a surrogate for power. The obses-
sion of totalitarian movements with "scientific" proofs ceases once they are
in power. The Nazis dismissed even those scholars who were willing to
serve them, and the Bolsheviks use the reputation of their scientists for
entirely unscientific purposes and force them into the role of charlatans.
But there is nothing more to the frequently overrated similarities between
mass advertisement and mass propaganda. Businessmen usually do not pose
as prophets and they do not constantly demonstrate the correctness of their
predictions. The scientificality of totalitarian propaganda is characterized by
its almost exclusive insistence on scientific prophecy as distinguished from
the more old-fashioned appeal to the past. Nowhere does the ideological
origin, of socialism in one instance and racism in the other, show more
clearly than when their spokesmen pretend that they have discovered the
hidden forces that will bring them good fortune in the chain of fatality.
There is of course a great appeal to the masses in "absolutist systems which
represent all the events of history as depending upon the great first causes
linked by the chain of fatality, and which, as it were, suppress men from
the history of the human race" (in the words of Tocqueville ) . But it cannot
^Hitler's analysis of "War Propaganda" (Mein Kumpj, Book I, chapter vi) stresses
the business angle of propaganda and uses the example of publicity for soap. Its im-
portance has been generally overestimated, while his later positive ideas on "Propa-
ganda and Organization" were neglected.
^^^ TOTALITARIANISM
he doubted cither that the Nazi leadership actually believed in, and did not
merely use as propaganda, such doctrines as the following: "The more ac-
curately ue recognize and observe the laws of nature and life, ... so much
the moTC do we conform to the will of the Almighty. The more insight we
havr into the will of the Almighty, the greater will be our successes."'" It is
quite apparent that ver\' few changes are needed to express Stalin's creed in
two sentences which might run as follows: "The more accurately we recog-
nize and observe the laws of history and class struggle, so much the more do
we conform to dialectic materialism. The more insight we have into dialectic
materialism, the greater will be our success." Stalin's notion of "correct
leadership."" at any rate, could hardly be better illustrated.
lot.ilitarian propaganda raised ideological scientificality and its tech-
nique of making statements in the form of predictions to a height of eflfi-
cicncy of method and absurdity of content because, demagogically speaking,
there is hardly a better way to avoid discussion than by releasing an argu-
ment from the control of the present and by saying that only the future can
reveal its merits. However, totalitarian ideologies did not invent this pro-
cedure, and were not the only ones to use it. Scientificality of mass prop-
aganda has indeed been so universally employed in modern politics that it
has been interpreted as a more general sign of that obsession with science
which has characterized the Western world since the rise of mathematics
and physics in the sixteenth century; thus totalitarianism appears to be only
the last stage in a process during which "science [has become] an idol that
will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man." *^
And there was, indeed, an early connection between scientificality and the
rise of the masses. The "collectivism" of masses was welcomed by those who
hoped for the appearance of "natural laws of historical development" which
would eliminate the unpredictability of the individual's actions and be-
havior.'' There has been cited the example of Enfantin who could already
"see the time approaching when the 'art of moving the masses' will be so
perfectly developed that the painter, the musician, and the poet will possess
the power to please and to move with the same certainty as the mathema-
tician solves a geometrical problem or the chemist analyses any substance,"
'"See Martin Bormann's important memorandum on the "Relationship of National
Socialism and Christianity" in Nazi Conspiracy. VI, 1036 ff. Similar formulations can
he found lime and again in the pamphlet literature issued by the SS for the "ideologi-
cal mdotlrmalion ■ of its cadets. 'The laws of nature are subject to an unchangeable
will that cannot be influenced. Hence it is necessary to recognize these laws" ("SS-Mann
und Blutsfragc." Schriftenrcihc fiir die wc'llansdwiiliche SchiiUtng der Ordntmgspolizei,
1942). All these arc nothing but variations of certain phrases taken from Hitler's
Mein Kampf. of which the following is quoted as the motto for the pamphlet just
mentioned: "While man attempts to struggle against the iron logic of nature, he comes
into conflict with the basic principles to which alone he owes his very existence as man."
" i. Stalin. Leninism (1933), Vol. II, chapter iii.
1948^"*^ Vocgclin. "The Origins of Scientism," in Social Research, December,
vi'u^c iT' ^' ": "*y^''- "The Counter-Revolution of Science," in Economica, Vol.
VIII (hcboiary. May. August. 1941), p. 13.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 347
and it has been concluded that modern propaganda was born then and
there.i^
Yet whatever the shortcomings of positivism, pragmatism, and behavior-
ism, and however great their influence on the formation of the nineteenth-
century brand of common sense, it is not at all "the cancerous growth of the
utilitarian segment of existence"''"' which characterizes the masses to whom
totalitarian propaganda and scientificality appeal. The positivists' conviction,
as we know it from Comte, that the future is eventually scientifically pre-
dictable, rests on the evaluation of interest as an all-pervasive force in
history and the assumption that objective laws of power can be discovered.
Rohan's political theory that "the kings command the peoples and the
interest commands the king," that objective interest is the rule "that alone
can never fail," that "rightly or wrongly understood, the interest makes
governments live or die" is the traditional core of modern utilitarianism,
positivist or socialist, but none of these theories assumes that it is possible
"to transform the nature of man" as totalitarianism indeed tries to do. on
the contrary, they all implicitly or explicitly assume that human nature is
always the same, that history is the story of changing objective circum-
stances and the human reactions to them, and that interest, rightly under-
stood, may lead to a change of circumstances, but not to a change of human
reactions as such. "Scientism" in politics still presupposes that human
welfare is its object, a concept which is utterly alien to totalitarianism.'*'
It is precisely because the utilitarian core of ideologies was taken for
granted that the anti-utilitarian behavior of totalitarian governments, their
complete indifference to mass interest, has been such a shock. This intro-
duced into contemporary politics an element of unheard-of unpredictability.
Totalitarian propaganda, however — although in the form of shifted emphasis
— indicated even before totalitarianism could seize power how far the
masses had drifted from mere concern with interest. Thus the suspicion of
the Allies that the murder of the insane which Hitler ordered at the begin-
ning of the war should be attributed to the desire to get rid of unnecessary
mouths to feed was altogether unjustified.'^ Hitler was not forced by the war
^* Ibid., p. 137. The quotation is from the Saint-Simonist magazine Protliicteiir, I,
399.
''' Voegelin. op. cit.
"'William Ebenstein, The Nazi Stale. New York, 1943, in discussing the "Perma-
nent War Economy" of the Nazi state is almost the only critic who has realized that
"the endless discussion ... as to the socialist or capitalist nature of the German
economy under the Nazi regime is largely artificial . . . [because it] tends to over-
look the vital fact that capitalism and socialism are categories which relate to
Western welfare economics" (p. 239).
'■'The testimony of Karl Brandt, one of the physicians charged by Hitler with
carrying out the program of euthanasia, is characteristic in this context (Medical Trial.
US afiain.st Karl Brandt et al. Hearing of May 14, 1947). Brandt vehemently protested
against the suspicion that the project was initiated to eliminate superfluous food con-
sumers; he emphasized that party members who brought up such arguments in the
discussion had always been sharply rebuked. In his opinion, the measures were dic-
tated solely by "ethical considerations." The same is, of course, true for the deporta-
j^ TOTALITARIANISM
lo throw ;ill ethical considerations overboard, but regarded the mass slaugh-
ter of war as an incomparable opportunity to start a murder program
which, like all other points of his program, was calculated in terms of mil-
lennia.'- Since \irtually all of F.uropean history through many centuries
had taught pci^ple to judge each political action by its cui bono and all po-
litical events by their particular underlying interests, they were suddenly
confronted with an element of unprecedented unpredictability. Because of
its dcm.igogic qualities, totalitarian propaganda, which long before the
seizure of p<-)wer clearly indicated how little the masses were driven by the
famous instinct of self-preservation, was not taken seriously. The success of
totalitarian propaganda, however, does not rest so much on its demagoguery
as on the knowledge that interest as a collective force can be felt only where
stable sixri.il bodies provide the necessary transmission belts between the
individual and the group; no effective propaganda based on mere inter-
est can be carried on among masses whose chief characteristic is that they
belong to no social or political body, and who therefore present a veritable
chaos of individual interests. The fanaticism of members of totalitarian
movements, so clearly different in quality from the greatest loyalty of mem-
bers of ordinary' parlies, is produced by the lack of self-interest of masses
who arc quite prepared to sacrifice themselves. The Nazis have proved that
one can lead a whole people into war with the slogan "or else we shall go
down" (something which the war propaganda of 1914 would have avoided
carefully), and this is not in times of misery, unemployment, or frustrated
national ambitions. The same spirit showed itself during the last months of
u war that was obviously lost, when Nazi propaganda consoled an already
badly frightened population with the promise that the Fuehrer "in his wis-
dom had prepared an easy death for the German people by gassing them in
case of defeat." '•'
Totalitarian movements use socialism and racism by emptying them of
their utilitarian content, the interests of a class or nation. The form of in-
fallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more
important than their content.-" The chief qualification of a mass leader has
lions. The files are filled with desperate memoranda written by the military complain-
ing ihat the deportations of millions of Jews and Poles completely disregarded all
•military and economic necessities." See Poliakov, op. tit., p. 321, as well as the
documcniary material published there.
'"The decisive decree starting all subsequent mass murders was signed by Hitler
on September 1. 1939— the day the war broke out— and referred not merely to the
in\anc (as is often erroneously assumed) but to all those who were "incurably sick."
The insane were only the first to go.
'"Sec Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, Tagehuch eines Verzweifelten, Stutt-
gart. 1947. p. 190.
"'Hitler based the superiority of ideological movements over political parties on
lh€ fact that Ideologies {Welianschaii„nf;cn) always "proclaim their infallibility" (Mein
KampU Book II. chapter v, -Weltanschaiiunfi and Organization").- The first pages of
the official handbook for the Hitler Youth, The Nazi Primer, New York, 1938, con-
vrqucnlly emphasize that all questions of iVellan.schauung, formerly deemed "unreal-
iMic and "ununderstandable," "have become so clear, simple and definite [my italics]
Ihai every comrade can understand them and co-operate in their solution "
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 349
become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. -^ The assump-
tion of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence
as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or
nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they
are bound to assert themselves in the long run.-- Mass leaders in power
have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make
their predictions come true. The Nazis did not hesitate to use, at the end of
the war, the concentrated force of their still intact organization to bring
about as complete a destruction of Germany as possible, in order to make
true their prediction that the German people would be ruined in case of
defeat.
The propaganda eflFect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a
mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian
dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of
prophecy. The most famous example is Hitler's announcement to the Ger-
man Reichstag in January, 1939: "I want today once again to make a
prophecy: In case the Jewish financiers . . . succeed once more in hurling
the peoples into a world war, the result will be . . . the annihilation of the
Jewish race in Europe."-^ Translated into nontotalitarian language, this
meant: I intend to make war and I intend to kill the Jews of Europe. Simi-
larly Stalin, in the great speech before the Central Committee of the Com-
munist Party in 1930 in which he prepared the physical liquidation of
intraparty right and left deviationists, described them as representatives of
"dying classes."-^ This definition not only gave the argument its specific
sharpness but also announced, in totalitarian style, the physical destruc-
tion of those whose "dying out" had just been prophesied. In both instances
the same objective is accomplished: the liquidation is fitted into a historical
process in which man only does or sufi"ers what, according to immutable
laws, is bound to happen anyway. As soon as the execution of the victims
has been carried out, the "prophecy" becomes a retrospective alibi: noth-
ing happened but what had already been predicted.-'' It does not matter
^' The first among the "pledges of the Party member," as enumerated in the Orgcini-
sationsbiich Jer NSDAP, reads: "The Fiihrer is always right." Edition pubhshed in
1936, p. 8. But the Dienstvorschrift fiir die P.O. Jer NSDAP, 1932, p. 38, puts it this
way: "Hitler's decision is final!" Note the remarkable difference in phraseology.
"Their claim to be infallible, [that] neither of them has ever sincerely admitted an
error" is in this respect the decisive difference between Stalin and Trotsky on one hand,
and Lenin on the other. See Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism,
New York, 1939, p. 583.
^^ That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being
right, because they permit the interpretation of all defeats as the beginning of victory,
is obvious. one of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred
after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize
that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party.
-•'Quoted from Goebbels: The Goehhels Diaries (1942-1943), ed. by Louis Loch-
ner. New York, 1948, p. 148.
^* Stalin, op. cit., loc. cit.
^^ In a speech he made in September, 1942, when the extermination of the Jews
was in full swing. Hitler explicitly referred to his speech of January 30, 1939 (published
jl^Q TOTALITARIANISM
whether the "laws of history" spell the "doom" of the classes and their
representatives, or whether the "laws of nature . . . exterminate" all those
elements — dcnuKracies, Jews, Eastern subhumans (Untermenschen), or
the mcurably sick— that are not "fit to live" anyway. Incidentally, Hitler
too spoke of "dying classes" that ought to be "eliminated without much
ado"-"
This method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only
after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or
falsity of a totalitarian dictator's prediction is as weird as arguing with a
potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive — since
by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof
of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such con-
ditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before
mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is
marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such,-^ for in their opinion
fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The asser-
tion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so
long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other
words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian
propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only
in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly
realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.
The language of prophetic scientificality corresponded to the needs of
masses who had lost their home in the world and now were prepared to be
reintegrated into eternal, all-dominating forces which by themselves would
bear man, the swimmer on the waves of adversity, to the shores of safety.
"We shape the life of our people and our legislation according to the ver-
dicts of genetics," -'* said the Nazis, just as the Bolsheviks assure their fol-
lowers that economic forces have the power of a verdict of history. They
thereby promise a victory which is independent of "temporary" defeats and
failures in specific enterprises. For masses, in contrast to classes, want vic-
tory and success as such, in their most abstract form; they are not bound
together by those special collective interests which they feel to be essential
to their survival as a group and which they therefore may assert even in
a* a booklet tilled Der Fiihrer vor Jem ersten Reichstag Grossdeutschlands, 1939), and
lo the Reichstag session of September 1, 1939, when he had announced that "if Jewry
»hould msiigalc an international world war to exterminate the Aryan peoples of
Europe, not the Aryan peoples but Jewry will [rest of sentence drowned by applause]"
(*ee Der hiihrer znm KrieRswinterhiljswerk, Schriften NSV, No. 14, p. 33).
" In the speech of January 30, 1939. p. 19. as quoted above.
" Konrad Heidcn, Der Fuehrer: Hitlers Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, underlines
Hitlers phenomenal untruthfulness," "the lack of demonstrable reality in nearly all
his utterances, his "indifference to facts which he does not regard as vitally im-
portant (pp. 368. 374).— In almost identical terms, Khrushchev describes "Stalin's
reluctance to consider l.fes realities" and his indifference to "the real state of affairs,"
op. (,i Sialm s opinion of the importance of facts is best expressed in his periodic re-
visions of Russian history.
" Nazi Primer.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 351
the face of overwhelming odds. More important to them than the cause that
may be victorious, or the particular enterprise that may be a success, is the
victory of no matter what cause, and success in no matter what enterprise.
Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but
it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for
them by fifty years of the rise of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-
state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier
mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring
instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did
not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in
silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic impor-
tance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society
had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.
Mysteriousness as such became the first criterion for the choice of topics.
The origin of mystery did not matter; it could lie in a reasonable, politically
comprehensible desire for secrecy, as in the case of the British Secret Serv-
ices or the French Deuxieme Bureau; or in the conspiratory need of revolu-
tionary groups, as in the case of anarchist and other terrorist sects; or in the
structure of societies whose original secret content had long since become
well known and where only the formal ritual still retained the former mys-
tery, as in the case of the Freemasons; or in age-old superstitions which had
woven legends around certain groups, as in the case of the Jesuits and the
Jews. The Nazis were undoubtedly superior in the selection of such topics
for mass propaganda; but the Bolsheviks have gradually learned the trick,
although they rely less on traditionally accepted mysteries and prefer their
own inventions — since the middle thirties, one mysterious world conspiracy
has followed another in Bolshevik propaganda, starting with the plot of the
Trotskyites, followed by the rule of the 300 families, to the sinister imperial-
ist (i.e., global) machinations of the British or American Secret Services.-"
The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief
characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible,
in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears
but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once
universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and
not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which
they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance be-
cause of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and re-
member, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.
What the masses refuse to recognize is the fortuitousness that pervades
^■' It is interesting to note that the Bolsheviks during the Stalin era somehow accumu-
lated conspiracies, that the discovery of a new one did not mean they would discard
the former. The Trotskyite conspiracy started around 1930, the 300 families were
added during the Popular Front period, from 1935 onward, British imperialism became
an actual conspiracy during the Stalin-Hitler alliance, the "American Secret Service"
followed soon after the close of the war; the last, Jewish cosmopolitanism, had an
obvious and disquieting resemblance to Nazi propaganda.
1^7 TOTALITARIANISM
reality. They iirc predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as
mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all-
cmbracm^: omni[H>tcncc \shich is supposed lo be at the root of every acci-
dent Totalitarian pri>paganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction,
from coincidence into consistency.
The chief disability of totalitarian propaganda is that it cannot fulfill this
longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and pre-
dictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense. If, for
instance, all the "confessions" of political opponents in the Soviet Union are
phrased in the same language and admit the same motives, the consistency-
hungry masses will accept the fiction as supreme proof of their truthfulness;
whereas conunon sense tells us that it is precisely their consistency which
is out of this world and proves that they are a fabrication. Figuratively speak-
ing, it is as though the masses demand a constant repetition of the miracle
of the Septuagint. when, according to ancient legend, seventy isolated trans-
lators produced an identical Greek version of the Old Testament. Common
sense can accept this tale only as a legend or a miracle; yet it could also be
adduced as proof of the absolute faithfulness of every single word in the
translated text.
In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire
to escajX" from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no
longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their
longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human
mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The
masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are
forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become
its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of
chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative con-
sistency. I he revolt of the masses against "realism," common sense, and all
"the plausibilities of the world" (Burke) was the result of their atomization,
of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of
communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In
their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into
the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the
necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously
msult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before
the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay
or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of
an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready
to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid
or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a
minimum of self-respect.
While it has been the specialty of Nazi propaganda to profit from the
longmg of the masses for consistency, Bolshevik methods have demon-
strated, as though in a laboratory, its impact on the isolated mass man. The
Soviet secret police, so eager to convince its victims of their guiU for crimes
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 353
they never committed, and in many instances were in no position to com-
mit, completely isolates and eliminates all real factors, so that the very logic,
the very consistency of "the story" contained in the prepared confession
becomes overwhelming. In a situation where the dividing line between
fiction and reality is blurred by the monstrosity and the inner consistency
of the accusation, not only the strength of character to resist constant
threats but great confidence in the existence of fellow human beings — rela-
tives or friends or neighbors — who will never believe "the story" are required
to resist the temptation to yield to the mere abstract possibility of guilt.
To be sure, this extreme of an artificially fabricated insanity can be
achieved only in a totalitarian world. Then, however, it is part of the propa-
ganda apparatus of the totalitarian regimes to which confessions are not
indispensable for punishment. "Confessions" are as much a specialty of
Bolshevik propaganda as the curious pedantry of legalizing crimes by retro-
spective and retroactive legislation was a specialty of Nazi propaganda. The
aim in both cases is consistency.
Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doc-
trines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which
is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in
which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and
are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal
to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian
propaganda — before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains
to prevent anyone's disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet
of an entirely imaginary world — lies in its ability to shut the masses off
from the real world. The only signs which the real world still offers to the
understanding of the unintegrated and disintegrating masses — whom every
new stroke of ill luck makes more gullible — are, so to speak, its lacunae,
the questions it does not care to discuss publicly, or the rumors it does not
dare to contradict because they hit, although in an exaggerated and de-
formed way, some sore spot.
From these sore spots the lies of totalitarian propaganda derive the ele-
ment of truthfulness and real experience they need to bridge the gulf between
reality and fiction. only terror could rely on mere fiction, and even the
terror-sustained lying fictions of totalitarian regimes have not yet become
entirely arbitrary, although they are usually cruder, more impudent, and, so
to speak, more original than those of the movements. (It takes power, not
propaganda skill, to circulate a revised history of the Russian Revolution in
which no man by the name of Trotsky was ever commander-in-chief of the
Red Army.) The lies of the movements, on the other hand, are much
subtler. They attach themselves to every aspect of social and political life
that is hidden from the public eye. They succeed best where the official
authorities have surrounded themselves with an atmosphere of secrecy. In
the eyes of the masses, they then acquire the reputation of superior "realism"
because they touch upon real conditions whose existence is being hidden.
Revelations of scandals in high society, of corruption of politicians, every-
jj^ TOTALITARIANISM
thing that belongs to yellow journalism, becomes in their hands a weapon
of more than sensational importance.
The most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda was the story of a Jewish
world conspiracy. Concentration on antisemitic propaganda had been a
common device of demagogues ever since the end of the nineteenth century,
and was widespread in the Germany and Austria of the twenties. The more
consistently a discussion of the Jewish question was avoided by all parties
and organs of public opinion, the more convinced the mob became that
Jews were the true representatives of the powers that be, and that the Jew-
ish issue was the symbol for the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the whole
system.
The actual content of postwar antisemitic propaganda was neither a
monopoly of the Nazis nor particularly new and original. Lies about a Jew-
ish world conspiracy had been current since the Dreyfus Affair and based
themselves on the existing international interrelationship and interdepend-
ence of a Jewish people dispersed all over the world. Exaggerated notions
of Jewish world power are even older; they can be traced back to the end
of the eighteenth century, when the intimate connection betwen Jewish
business and the nation-states had become visible. The representation of the
Jew as the incarnation of evil is usually blamed on remnants and supersti-
tious memories from the Middle Ages, but is actually closely connected with
the more recent ambiguous role which Jews played in European society
since their emancipation. one thing was undeniable: in the postwar period
Jews had become more prominent than ever before.
The point about the Jews themselves is that they grew prominent and
conspicuous in inverse proportion to their real influence and position of
power. Every decrease in the stability and force of the nation-states was a
direct blow to Jewish positions. The partially successful conquest of the
state by the nation made it impossible for the government machine to main-
tain its position above all classes and parties, and thereby nullified the value
of alliances with the Jewish sector of the population, which was supposed
also to stay outside the ranks of society and to be indifferent to party poli-
tics. The growing concern with foreign policy of the imperialist-minded
bourgeoisie and its growing influence on the state machinery was accom-
panied by the steadfast refusal of the largest segment of Jewish wealth to
engage itself in industrial enterprises and to leave the tradition of capital
trading. All this taken together almost ended the economic usefulness to the
state of the Jews as a group, and the advantages to themselves of social
separation. After the first World War, Central European Jewries became as
assimilated and nationalized as French Jewry had become during the first
decades of the Third Republic.
How conscious the concerned states were of the changed situation came
to light when, in 1917, the German government, following a long-established
tradition, tried to use its Jews for tentative peace negotiations with the
Allies. Instead of addressing itself to the established leaders of German
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 355
Jewry, it went to the small and comparatively uninfluential Zionist minority
which were still trusted in the old way precisely because they insisted on
the existence of a Jewish people independent of citizenship, and could there-
fore be expected to render services which depended upon international con-
nections and an international point of view. The step, however, turned out
to have been a mistake for the German government. The Zionists did some-
thing that no Jewish banker had ever done before; they set their own con-
ditions and told the government that they would only negotiate a peace
without annexations and reparations.'"' The old Jewish indifference to po-
litical issues was gone; the majority could no longer be used, since it was
no longer aloof from the nation, and the Zionist minority was useless because
it had political ideas of its own.
The replacement of monarchical governments by republics in Central
Europe completed the disintegration of Central European Jewries, just as
the establishment of the Third Republic had done it in France some fifty
years earlier. The Jews had already lost much of their influence when the
new governments established themselves under conditions in which they
lacked the power as well as the interest to protect their Jews. During the
peace negotiations in Versailles, Jews were used chiefly as experts, and
even antisemites admitted that the petty Jewish swindlers in the postwar
era, mostly new arrivals (behind whose fraudulent activities, which dis-
tinguished them sharply from their native coreligionists, lay an attitude
which oddly resembled the old indifference to the standards of their environ-
ment), had no connections with the representatives of a supposed Jewish
international.^^
Among a host of competing antisemitic groups and in an atmosphere ripe
with antisemitism, Nazi propaganda developed a method of treating this
subject which was different from and superior to all others. Still, not one
Nazi slogan was new — not even Hitler's shrewd picture of a class struggle
caused by the Jewish businessman who exploits his workers, while at the
same time his brother in the factory courtyard incites them to strike.^^ The
only new element was that the Nazi party demanded proof of non-Jewish
descent for membership and that it remained, the Feder program notwith-
standing, extremely vague about the actual measures to be taken against
Jews once it came to power.^"* The Nazis placed the Jewish issue at the center
^° See Chaim Weizmann's autobiography, Trial and Error, New York, 1949, p. 185.
•" See, for instance, Otto Bonhard, Jiulische Geld- iind Weliherrschaft?, 1926, p. 57.
•'^Hitler used this picture for the first time in 1922: "Moses Kohn on the one side
encourages his association to refuse the workers' demands, while his brother Isaac in
the factory invites the masses . . ." to strike. {Hitler's Speeches: 1922-1939, ed.
Baynes, London, 1942, p. 29.) It is noteworthy that no complete collection of
Hitler's speeches was ever published in Nazi Germany, so that one is forced to resort
to the English edition. That this was no accident can be seen from a bibliography
compiled by Philipp Bouhler, Die Reden des Fiihrer's nach der Machtiihernahme,
1940: only the public speeches were printed verbatim in the Volkischer Beobachter;
as for speeches to the Fuehrerkorps and other party units, they were merely "referred
to" in that newspaper. They were not at any time meant for publication.
^ ' Feder's 25 points contain only standard measures demanded by all antisemitic
j5ft TOTALITARIANISM
of their propapand;i in the sense that antisemitism was no longer a question
of opinions about jx-oplc dilTcrent from the majority, or a concern of na-
tional jxihtics.'* but the intimate concern of every individual in his personal
existence, no one could be a member whose "family tree" was not in order,
and the hii:her the rank in the Nazi hierarchy, the farther back the family
tree had to be traced.-'' By the same token, though less consistently, Bol-
shevism changed the Marxist doctrine of the inevitable final victory of the
proletariat by organizing its members as "born proletarians" and making
other class origins shameful and scandalous.^"
Nazi propaganda was ingenious enough to transform antisemitism into a
principle of self-delinition, and thus to eliminate it from the fluctuations of
mere opinion. It used the persuasion of mass demagogy only as a prepara-
tory step and never overestimated its lasting influence, whether in oratory
or in print.'" This gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and
futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification which not only
restored some of the self-respect they had formerly derived from their func-
tion in society, but also created a kind of spurious stability which made them
better candidates for an organization. Through this kind of propaganda, the
movement could set itself up as an artificial extension of the mass meeting
and rationalize the essentially futile feelings of self-importance and hysterical
groups: expulsion of naiurali/ed Jews, and treatment of native Jews as aliens. Nazi
aniiscmilic oratory was always much more radical than its program.
W.ildcmar Citirian. "Antisemitism in Modern Germany," in Essays on Antisemitism,
cd. by Koppcl S. Pinson. New York, 1946, p. 243, stresses the lack of originality in
Na/i antisemitism : "All these demands and views were not remarkable for their
ori{;inality — they were self-evident in all nationalistic circles; what was remarkable
was the dcmapofiic and oratorical skill with which they were presented."
" A typical example of mere nationalistic antisemitism within the Nazi movement
itself is Rohm who writes: "And here again, my opinion differs from that of the
national philistinc. Not: the Jew is to be blamed for everything! We are to be blamed
for the fact that the Jew can rule today" (Ernst Rohm, Die Geschiclite eines Hoch-
vrrniiers. 19.13, Volksausgabe, p. 284).
'SS applicants had to trace their ancestry back to 1750. Applicants for leading
positions in the party were asked only three questions: I. What have you done for
the party' 2. Arc you absolutely sound, physically, mentally, morally? 3. Is your
family tree in order? Sec Nazi Primer.
It IS characteristic for the affinity between the two systems that the elite and police
formations of the Bolsheviks— the NKVD— also demanded proof of ancestry from
Iheir members. See V. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Parf-e and the Extraction of Con-
ffiMim. 1951.
'"Thus the totalitarian tendencies of McCarthyism in the United States showed
most glaringly m the attempt not merely to persecute Communists, but to force every
citizen to furnish proof of not being a Communist.
•'one should not overestimate the intluence of the press . . . , it decreases in
general while the influence of the organization increases" (Hadamovsky. op. cit.. p.
TrLi. , "'^^'•^Papers arc helpless when they are supposed to fight against the ag-
gressive force of a living organization" (,7,/J.. p. 65). "Power formations which have
vToL^^T '" ""^^^ P^oP^eanda are fluctuating and can disappear quickly unless the
violence of an organization supports the propaganda" (ibid., p 21 )
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 357
security that it offered to the isolated individuals of an atomized society.^**
The same ingenious application of slogans, coined by others and tried out
before, was apparent in the Nazis' treatment of other relevant issues. When
public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and so-
cialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and
actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the
Left, the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nazi) offered a
synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose
double trademark of "German" and "Worker" connected the nationalism of
the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi
movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended
implicitly to incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic
political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried,
and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in
such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and
the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and
those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior
sinister motives — for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these
things at once?
It is interesting that even in their beginnings the Nazis were prudent
enough never to use slogans which, like democracy, republic, dictatorship,
or monarchy, indicated a specific form of government.^'* It is as though, in
this one matter, they had always known that they would be entirely original.
Every discussion about the actual form of their future government could
be dismissed as empty talk about mere formalities — the state, according to
Hitler, being only a "means" for the conservation of the race, as the state,
according to Bolshevik propaganda, is only an instrument in the struggle
of classes. "*•*
■'** "The mass-meeting is the strongest form of propaganda . . . [because] each in-
dividual feels more self-confident and more powerful in the unity of a mass" (ibid,
p. 47). "The enthusiasm of the moment becomes a principle and a spiritual attitude
through organization and systematic training and discipline" {ibid., p. 21-22).
^® In the isolated instances in which Hitler concerned himself with this question at
all, he used to emphasize: "Incidentally, I am not the head of a state in the sense of a
dictator or monarch, but I am a leader of the German people" (see Ausgewdhlte
Reden des Fiilirers, 1939, p. 114). — Hans Frank expresses himself in the same spirit:
"The National Socialist Reich is not a dictatorial, let alone an arbitrary, regime. Rather,
the National Socialist Reich rests on the mutual loyalty of the Fiihrer and the people"
(in Recht iind Verwaltung, Munich, 1939, p. 15).
■"' Hitler repeated many times: "The state is only the means to an end. The end is:
Conservation of race" (Reden, 1939, p. 125). He also stressed that his movement "does
not rest on the state idea, but is primarily based on the closed Vulksgemeinschaft"
(see Reden, 1933. p. 125, and the speech before the new generation of political
leaders [Fiihrernachwnchs], 1937, which is printed as an addendum in Hitlers Tisch-
gespniche, p. 446). This, nintalis mntandis, is also the core of the complicated double
talk which is Stalin's so-called "state theory": "We are in favor of the State dying
out, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the
proletariat which represents the most powerful and mighty authority of all forms of
f^ff TOTALITARIANISM
In another curious and roundabout way, however, the Nazis gave a propa-
ganda answer to the question of what their future role would be, and that
was in their use of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" as a model for the
future organization of the German masses for "world empire." The use of
the ProtiKois was not restricted to the Nazis; hundreds of thousands of
copies were sold in postwar Germany, and even their open adoption as a
handbook of politics was not new.^' Nevertheless, this forgery was mainly
used for the purpose of denouncing the Jews and arousing the mob to the
dangers of Jewish domination.''- In terms of mere propaganda, the discovery
of the Nazis was that the masses were not so frightened by Jewish world
rule as they were interested in how it could be done, that the popularity of
the Protocols was based on admiration and eagerness to learn rather than
on hatred, and that it would be wise to stay as close as possible to certain
of their outstanding formulas, as in the case of the famous slogan: "Right
is what is good for the German people," which was copied from the Proto-
cols' "Everything that benefits the Jewish people is morally right and
sacred." ""^
The Protocols are a very curious and noteworthy document in many re-
spects. Apart from their cheap Machiavellianism, their essential political
characteristic is that in their crackpot manner they touch on every important
political issue of the time. They are antinational in principle and picture the
nation-state as a colossus with feet of clay. They discard national sovereignty
Slate which have existed up to the present day. The highest possible development of
the power of the State with the object of preparing the conditions for the dying out
of the Slate: that is the Marxist formula" {op. cil., loc. cit.).
" Alexander Stein, Adi)lj Hitler, Schiiler der "Weisen von Zion," Karlsbad, 1936,
was the first to analyze by philological comparison the ideological identity of the teach-
ings of the Nazis with that of the "Elders of Zion." See also R. M. Blank, Adolf Hitler
rl les "Proioiolcs des Sages de Sion," 1938.
The first to admit indebtedness to the teachings of the Protocols was Theodor
Fritsch. the "grand old man" of German postwar antisemitism. He writes in the epi-
logue to his edition of the Protocolx. 1924: "Our future statesmen and diplomats will
have to learn from the oriental masters of villainy even the ABC of government, and
for this purpose, the 'Zionist Protocols' offer an excellent preparatory schooling."
" on the history of the Protocols, see John S. Curtiss, An Appraisal of the Proto-
cols of Zion. 1942.
The fact that the Protocols were a forgery was irrelevant for propaganda purposes.
The Russian publicist S. A. Nilus who published the second Russian edition in 1905
was already well aware of the doubtful character of this "document" and added the
obvious: "But if it were possible to show its authenticity by documents or by the
testimony of trustworthy witnesses, if it were possible to disclose the persons standing
at the head of the world-wide plot . . . then . . . 'the secret iniquity" could be
broken. . . . Translation in Curtiss. op. cit.
Hitler did not need Nilus to use the same trick: the best proof of their authenticity
IS Jhat they have been proved to be a forgery. And he also adds the argumem of their
piausiliiliiy : What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously made clear.
And that IS what counts" {Mein Kampf, Book I, chapter xi).
" ^"^^}'- "P- ^'"; "\Der Juden] oberster Grund.mtz lautet: 'Alles. was dem Volke
Jiida niitzl, ist nwralisch nnd isl heilig.' "
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 359
and believe, as Hitler once put it, in a world empire on a national basis."*^
They are not satisfied with revolution in a particular country, but aim at the
conquest and rule of the world. They promise the people that, regardless of
superiority in numbers, territory, and state power, they will be able to
achieve world conquest through organization alone. To be sure, part of
their persuasive strength derives from very old elements of superstition.
The notion of the uninterrupted existence of an international sect that has
pursued the same revolutionary aims since antiquity is very old*'' and has
played a role in political backstairs literature ever since the French Revolu-
tion, even though it did not occur to anyone writing at the end of the
eighteenth century that the "revolutionary sect," this "peculiar nation . . .
in the midst of all civilized nations," could be the Jews.*"
It was the motif of a global conspiracy in the Protocols which appealed
most to the masses, for it corresponded so well to the new power situation.
(Hitler very early promised that the Nazi movement would "transcend the
narrow limits of modern nationalism,"*^ and during the war attempts were
^^ "World Empires spring from a national basis, but they expand soon far beyond
it" {Reden).
^" Henri Rollin, L Apocalypse ile Notre Temps, Paris, 1939, who considers the popu-
larity of the Protocols to be second only to the Bible (p. 40), shows the similarity
between them and the Monita SecreUi. first published in 1612 and still sold in 1939 on
the streets of Paris, which claim to reveal a Jesuit conspiracy "that justifies all vil-
lainies and all uses of violence. . . . This is a real campaign against the established
order" (p. 32).
^® This whole literature is well represented by the Chevalier de Malet, Recherches
politiques et historiques qui prouvent I'existence d'line secte revolutionnaire, 1817, who
quotes extensively from earlier authors. The heroes of the French Revolution are to
him "mannequins" of an "agence secrete," the agents of the Freemasons. But Free-
masonry is only the name which his contemporaries have given to a "revolutionary
sect" which has existed at all times and whose policy always has been to attack "re-
maining behind the scenes, manipulating the strings of the marionettes it thought con-
venient to put on the scene." He starts by saying: "Probably, it will be difficult to
believe in a plan which was formed in antiquity and always followed with the same
constancy: . . . the authors of the Revolution are no more French than they are
German, halian, English, etc. They constitute a peculiar nation which was born and
has grown in darkness, in the midst of all civilized nations, with the aim of subduing
them all to its domination."
For an extensive discussion of this literature, see E. Lesueur, La Franc-Ma^onnerie
Artesienne uu I8e siecle, Bibliotheque d'Histoire Revolutionnaire, 1914. How per-
sistent these conspiracy legends are in themselves, even under normal circumstances,
can be seen by the enormous anti-Freemason crackpot literature in France, which is
hardly less extensive than its antisemitic counterpart. A kind of compendium of all
theories which saw in the French Revolution the product of secret conspiracy so-
cieties can be found in G. Bord, La Franc-Ma<,onnerie en France des origines a 1815,
1908.
*'' Reden. — See the transcript of a session of the SS Committee on Labor Questions
at SS headquarters in Berlin on January 12, 1943, where it was suggested that the word
"nation," a concept being burdened with connotations of liberalism, should be elimi-
nated as it was inadequate for the Germanic peoples (Document 705 — PS in Nazi Con-
spiracy and Aggression, V, 515).
^^^ TOTALITARIANISM
made within the SS to erase the word "nation" from the National Socialist
vixrabulary altogether.) only world powers seemed still to have a chance of
independent survival and only global politics a chance of lasting results.
That this situation should frighten the smaller nations which are not world
powers is only too understandable. The Protocols seemed to show a way
out that did not depend upon objective unalterable conditions, but only on
the power of organization.
Nazi propaganda, in other words, discovered in "the supranational be-
cause intensely national Jew"*^ the forerunner of the German master of
the world and assured the masses that "the nations that have been the first
to see through the Jew and have been the first to fight him are going to take
his place in the domination of the world."-*" The delusion of an already
existing Jewish world domination formed the basis for the illusion of future
German world domination. This was what Himmler had in mind when he
stated that "we owe the art of government to the Jews," namely, to the
ProtcKols which "the FiJhrer [had] learned by heart." ^" Thus the Protocols
presented world conquest as a practical possibility, implied that the whole
affair was only a question of inspired or shrewd know-how, and that no-
body stood in the way of a German victory over the entire world but a
patently small p)eople, the Jews, who ruled it without possessing instruments
of violence — an easy opponent, therefore, once their secret was discovered
and their method emulated on a larger scale.
Nazi propaganda concentrated all these new and promising vistas in one
concept which it labeled V olksgemeinschajt. This new community, tenta-
tively realized in the Nazi movement in the pretotalitarian atmosphere, was
based on the absolute equality of all Germans, an equality not of rights but
of nature, and their absolute difference from all other people.^' After the
Nazis came to power, this concept gradually lost its importance and gave
way to a general contempt for the German people (which the Nazis had
always harbored but could not very well show publicly before) on one
hand,''- and a great eagerness, on the other, to enlarge their own ranks from
'" HitUr's Speeches, ed. Baynes, p. 6.
*" Gochbels, op. cii. p. 377. This promise, implied in all antisemitic propaganda of
ihc Nazi type, was prepared by Hitler's "The most extreme contrast to the Aryan is
the Jew" {Mi'in Kantpj. Book I, chapter xi).
" Dossier Kcrstcn. in the Centre de Documentation Juive.
•' Hitler's early promise (Rcden), "I shall never recognize that other nations have
the same right as the German," became official doctrine: "The foundation of the na-
tional socialist outlook in life is the perception of the unlikeness of men" (Nazi Primer,
p. 5).
'* For instance. Hitler in 1923: "The German people consists for one third of
heroes, for another third, of cowards, while the rest are traitors" (Hitler's Speeches, ed.
Baynes, p. 76).
After Ihc seizure of power this trend became more brutally outspoken. See, for in-
stance. Goebbcis in 1934: "Who are the people to criticize? Party members? No. The
rest of the German people? They should consider themselves lucky to be still alive. It
would be loo much of a good thing altogether, if those who live at our mercy should
be allowed to criticize." Quoted from Kohn-Bramstedt. op. cit., pp. 178-179. — During
the war Hiilcr declared: "I am nothing but a magnet constantly moving across the
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 361
"Aryans" of other nations, an idea which had played only a small role in
the prepower stage of Nazi propaganda. ^^ The Volksgemeinschaft was
merely the propagandistic preparation for an "Aryan" racial society which
in the end would have doomed all peoples, including the Germans.
To a certain extent, the Volksgemeinschaft was the Nazis' attempt to
counter the Communist promise of a classless society. The propaganda ap-
peal of the one over the other seems obvious if we disregard all ideological
implications. While both promised to level all social and property differences,
the classless society had the obvious connotation that everybody would be
leveled to the status of a factory worker, while the Volksgemeinschaft, with
its connotation of conspiracy for world conquest, held out a reasonable
hope that every German could eventually become a factory owner. The even
greater advantage of the Volksgemeinschaft, however, was that its establish-
ment did not have to wait for some future time and did not depend upon
objective conditions: it could be realized immediately in the fictitious world
of the movement.
The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion but organiza-
tion — the "accumulation of power without the possession of the means of
violence." ^^ For this purpose, originality in ideological content can only
be considered an unnecessary obstacle. It is no accident that the two totali-
tarian movements of our time, so frightfully "new" in methods of rule and
ingenious in forms of organization, have never preached a new doctrine,
have never invented an ideology which was not already popular.^"' Not the
passing successes of demagogy win the masses, but the visible reality and
power of a "living organization."^" Hitler's brilliant gifts as a mass orator
did not win him his position in the movement but rather misled his op-
ponents into underestimating him as a simple demagogue, and Stalin was
able to defeat the greater orator of the Russian Revolution.^^ What distin-
German nation and extracting the steel from this people. And I have often stated that
the time will come when all worth-while men in Germany are going to be in my camp.
And those who will not be in my camp are worthless anyway." Even then it was
clear to Hitler's immediate environment what would happen to those who "are worth-
less anyway" (see Der grossdeutsche Freiheitskampf. Reden Hitlers vom I. 9. 1939 —
10. 3. 1940, p. 174). — Himmler meant the same when he said: "The Fiihrer does not
think in German, but in Germanic terms" (Dossier Kersten, cf. above), except that
we know from Hitlers Tischgesprdvhe (p. 315 ff.) that in those days he was already
making fun even of the Germanic "clamor" and thought in "Aryan terms."
^^ Himmler in a speech to SS leaders at Kharkov in April, 1943 {Nazi Conspiracy,
IV, 572 ff.): "I very soon formed a Germanic SS in the various countries. . . ." An
early prepower indication of this non-national policy was given by Hitler (Reden):
"We shall certainly also receive into the new master class representatives of other
nations, i.e., those who deserve it because of their participation in our fight."
•''^ Hadamovsky, op. cit.
'"'• Heiden, op. cit., p. 139: Propaganda is not "the art of instilling an opinion in the
masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses."
^"Hadamovsky, op. cit., passim. The term is taken from Hitler, Mein Kampf (Book
11, chapter xi), where the "living organization" of a movement is contrasted with the
"dead mechanism" of a bureaucratic party.
•'■' It would be a serious error to interpret totalitarian leaders in terms of Max
.»rt:
TOTALITARIANISM
guishcs the totalitarian leaders and dictators is rather the simple-minded,
single-minded purposefulness with which they choose those elements from
existing ideologies which are best fitted to become the fundaments of an-
other, entirely fictitious world. The fiction of the Protocols was as adequate
as the fiction of a Trotskyite conspiracy, for both contained an element of
plausibility — the nonpublic influence of the Jews in the past; the struggle for
power between Trotsky and Stalin — which not even the fictitious world of
totalitarianism can safely do without. Their art consists in using, and at the
same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in
the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are
definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience. With
such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to com-
pete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, con-
sistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and strictness of the
organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the
explosion of more specific lies — the power of the Jews after their helpless
slaughter, the sinister global conspiracy of Trotskyites after their liquidation
in Soviet Russia and the murder of Trotsky.
The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their
original lies in the face of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to
what turned the trick, and, at least in the case of Stalin, cannot be explained
by the psychology of the liar whose very success may make him his own last
victim. once these propaganda slogans are integrated into a "living organiza-
tion," they cannot be safely eliminated without wrecking the whole structure.
The assumption of a Jewish world conspiracy was transformed by totali-
tarian propaganda from an objective, arguable matter into the chief element
of the Nazi reality; the point was that the Nazis acted as though the world
were dominated by the Jews and needed a counterconspiracy to defend itself.
Racism for them was no longer a debatable theory of dubious scientific
value, but was being realized every day in the functioning hierarchy of a
political organization in whose framework it would have been very "unreal-
istic" to question it. Similarly, Bolshevism no longer needs to win an argu-
ment about class struggle, internationalism, and unconditional dependence
of the welfare of the proletariat on the welfare of the Soviet Union; the
functioning organization of the Comintern is more convincing than any
argument or mere ideology can ever be.
Weber's category of the "charismatic leadership." See Hans Gerth, "The Nazi Party,"
in American Journal of Sociolof-y, 1940, Vol. XLV. (A similar misunderstanding is
also the shortcoming of Heiden's biography, op. cit.) Gerth describes Hitler as the
charismatic leader of a bureaucratic party. This alone, in his opinion, can account for
the fact that "however flagrantly actions may have contradicted words, nothing could
disrupt the firmly disciplinary organization." (This contradiction, by the way, is much
more characteristic of Stalin who "took care always to say the opposite of what he
did, and to do the opposite of what he said." Souvarine, op. cit., p. 431.)
For the source of this misunderstanding see Alfred von Martin, "Zur Soziologie der
Gcgcnwart," m Zeitschrift fiir Kiilturgeschichte, Band 27, and Arnold Koettgen, "Die
Gcsclzmassigkeit der Verwaltung im Fuhrerstaat," in Reichsverwaltungsblatt, 1936,
both of whom characterize the Nazi state as a bureaucracy with charismatic leadership.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 363
The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda
over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for
the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue
about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouch-
able an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic. The organization of
the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out
only under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany, questioning the validity
of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a
career depended upon an "Aryan" physiognomy (Himmler used to select
the applicants for the SS from photographs) and the amount of food upon
the number of one's Jewish grandparents, was like questioning the existence
of the world.
The advantages of a propaganda that constantly "adds the power of or-
ganization" ^'" to the feeble and unreliable voice of argument, and thereby
realizes, so to speak, on the spur of the moment, whatever it says, are ob-
vious beyond demonstration. Foolproof against arguments based on a reality
which the movements promised to change, against a counterpropaganda dis-
qualified by the mere fact that it belongs to or defends a world which the
shiftless masses cannot and will not accept, it can be disproved only by an-
other, a stronger or better, reality.
It is in the moment of defeat that the inherent weakness of totalitarian
propaganda becomes visible. Without the force of the movement, its mem-
bers cease at once to believe in the dogma for which yesterday they still
were ready to sacrifice their lives. The moment the movement, that is, the
fictitious world which sheltered them, is destroyed, the masses revert to
their old status of isolated individuals who either happily accept a new func-
tion in a changed world or sink back into their old desperate superfluous-
ness. The members of totalitarian movements, utterly fanatical as long as
the movement exists, will not follow the example of religious fanatics and die
the death of martyrs (even though they were only too willing to die the
death of robots)."''* Rather they will quietly give up the movement as a bad
bet and look around for another promising fiction or wait until the former
fiction regains enough strength to establish another mass movement.
The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed
and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom prob-
ably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be
taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. Nazism
as an ideology had been so fully "realized" that its content ceased to exist
"'" Hadamovsky, op. tit., p. 21. For totalitarian purposes it is a mistake to propagate
their ideology through teaching or persuasion. In the words of Robert Ley, it can be
neither "taught" nor "learned," but only "exercised" and "practiced" (see Der Weg
zur onlensburg, undated).
^''•' R. Hoehn, one of the outstanding Nazi political theorists, interpreted this lack of
a doctrine or even a common set of ideals and beliefs in the movement in his Reichsge-
meinscliaft und Volksgemeinschujt. Hamburg, 1935: "From the point of view of a
folk community, every community of values is destructive" (p. 83).
TOTALITARIANISM
as an mdciK-ndcnt set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so to speak;
destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, least of all
ihc fanaticism of believers.
II : Totalilnrian Organization
THE loRMS OF totalitarian organization, as distinguished from their ideo-
logical content and propaganda slogans, are completely new.<^o They are
designed to translate the propaganda lies of the movement, woven around
a central fiction — the conspiracy of the Jews, or the Trotskyites, or 300
families, etc. — into a functioning reality, to build up, even under nontotali-
tarian circumstances, a society whose members act and react according to
the rules of a fictitious world. In contrast with seemingly similar parties and
movements of Fascist or Socialist, nationalist or Communist orientation, all
of which back up their propaganda with terrorism as soon as they have
reached a certain stage of extremism (which mostly depends on the stage
of dcsF>cration of their members), the totalitarian movement is really in
earnest about its propaganda, and this earnestness is expressed much more
frightcningly in the organization of its followers than in the physical liqui-
dation of its opponents. Organization and propaganda (rather than terror
and propaganda) are two sides of the same coin."^
The most strikingly new organizational device of the movements in their
prepower stage is the creation of front organizations, the distinction drawn
between party members and sympathizers. Compared to this invention,
other typically totalitarian features, such as the appointment of functionaries
from above and the eventual monopolization of appointments by one man
are secondary in importance. The so-called "leader principle" is in itself
not totalitarian; it has borrowed certain features from authoritarianism and
military dictatorship which have greatly contributed toward obscuring and
belittling the essentially totalitarian phenomenon. If the functionaries ap-
pointed from above possessed real authority and responsibility, we would
have to do with a hierarchical structure in which authority and power are
delegated and governed by laws. Much the same is true for the organization
of an army and the military dictatorship established after its model; here,
absolute power of command from the top down and absolute obedience
from the bottom up correspond to the situation of extreme danger in combat,
which is precisely why they are not totalitarian. A hierarchically organized
chain of command means that the commander's power is dependent on the
whole hierarchic system in which he operates. Every hierarchy, no matter
"" Hitler, discussing the relationship between Weltanschauung and organization, ad-
mils as a matter of course that the Nazis took over from other groups and parties the
"racial idea" (die vdlkische Idee) and acted as though they were its only representa-
tives because they were the first to base a fighting organization on it and to formulate
il for practical purposes. Op. lit.. Book II, chapter v.
"' See Hitler, "Propaganda and Organization," in op. cit.. Book II, chapter xi.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 365
how authoritarian in its direction, and every chain of command, no matter
how arbitrary or dictatorial the content of orders, tends to stabilize and
would have restricted the total power of the leader of a totalitarian move-
ment."- In the language of the Nazis, the never-resting, dynamic "will of
the Fuehrer" — and not his orders, a phrase that might imply a fixed and
circumscribed authority — becomes the "supreme law" in a totalitarian
state."^ It is only from the position in which the totalitarian movement,
thanks to its unique organization, places the leader — only from his func-
tional importance for the movement — that the leader principle develops
its totalitarian character. This is also borne out by the fact that both in
Hitler's and Stalin's case the actual leader principle crystallized only rather
slowly, and parallel with the progressive "totalitarianization" of the move-
ment."^
An anonymity which contributes greatly to the weirdness of the whole
phenomenon clouds the beginnings of this new organizational structure. We
do not know who first decided to organize fellow-travelers into front organ-
izations, who first saw in vaguely sympathizing masses — upon whom all
parties used to count at election day but whom they considered to be too
fluctuating for membership — not only a reservoir from which to draw party
members, but a decisive force in itself. The early Communist-inspired or-
•'- Himmler's vehemently urgent request "not to issue any decree concerning the
definition of the term 'Jew' " is a case in point; for "with all these foolish commit-
ments we will only be tying our hands" (Nuremberg Document No. 626, letter to
Berger dated July 28, 1942, photostatic copy at the Centre de Documentation Juive).
" ' The formulation "The will of the Fuehrer is the supreme law" is found in all
official rules and regulations governing the conduct of the Party and the SS. The best
source on this subject is Otto Gauweiler, Rechlseinrichtiingen tiiid Rechtsaufgaben der
Bewegung, 1939.
''^Heiden, up. cit., p. 292, reports the following difference between the first and the
following editions of Mein Kainpf: The first edition proposes the election of party
officials who only after their election are vested with "unlimited power and authority";
all following editions establish appointment of party officials from above by the next
higher leader. Naturally, for the stability of totalitarian regimes the appointment from
above is a much more important principle than the "unlimited authority" of the ap-
pointed official. In practice, the subleaders' authority was decisively limited through
the Leader's absolute sovereignty. See below.
Stalin, coming from the conspiratory apparatus of the Bolshevik party, probably
never thought this a problem. To him, appointments in the party machine were a
question of accumulation of personal power. (Yet, it was only in the thirties, after he
had studied Hitler's example, that he let himself be addressed as "leader.") It must be
admitted, however, that he could easily justify these methods by quoting Lenin's
theory that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by
its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness," and that its leader-
ship therefore necessarily comes from without. (See What is to be done?, first published
in 1902, in Collected Works, Vol. IV, Book II.) The point is that Lenin considered
the Communist Party as the "most progressive" part of the working class and at the
same time "the lever of political organization" which "directs the whole mass of the
proletariat." i.e., an organization outside and above the class. (See W. H. Chamberlin,
The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921, New York, 1935, II. 361.) Nevertheless, Lenin
did not question the validity of inner-party democracy, though he was inclined to re-
strict democracy to the working class itself.
^rtrt TOTALITARIANISM
ganizations of sympathizers, such as the Friends of the Soviet Union or the
Red Relief associations, developed into front organizations but were orig-
inally nothing more or less than what their names indicated: a gathering of
sympathizers for financial or other (for instance, legal) help. Hitler was the
first to say that each movement should divide the masses which have been
won through propaganda into two categories, sympathizers and members.
This in itself is interesting enough; even more significant is that he based this
division upon a more general philosophy according to which most people are
too lazy and cowardly for anything more than mere theoretical insight, and
only a minority want to fight for their convictions."'" Hitler, consequently,
was the first to devise a conscious policy of constantly enlarging the ranks of
sympathizers while at the same time keeping the number of party members
strictly limited.'"' This notion of a minority of party members surrounded by
a majority of sympathizers comes very close to the later reality of front
organizations — a term which indeed expresses most aptly their eventual
function, and indicates the relationship between members and sympathizers
within the movement itself. For the front organizations of sympathizers are
no less essential to the functioning of the movement than its actual mem-
bership.
The front organizations surround the movements' membership with a
protective wall which separates them from the outside, normal world; at
the same time, they form a bridge back into normalcy, without which the
members in the prepower stage would feel too sharply the differences be-
tween their beliefs and those of normal people, between the lying fictitious-
ness of their own and the reality of the normal world. The ingeniousness of
this device during the movements' struggle for power is that the front or-
ganizations not only isolate the members but offer them a semblance of out-
side normalcy which wards of! the impact of true reality more etifectively
than mere indoctrination. It is the difference between his own and the fel-
low-traveler's attitudes which confirms a Nazi or Bolshevik in his belief in
the fictitious explanation of the world, for the fellow-traveler has the same
convictions, after all, albeit in a more "normal," i.e., less fanatic, more
confused form; so that to the party member it appears that anyone whom
the movement has not expressly singled out as an enemy (a Jew, a capi-
talist, etc.) is on his side, that the world is full of secret allies who merely
cannot, as yet, summon up the necessary strength of mind and character to
draw the logical conclusions from their own convictions."^
'•'• Hiiler, op. til.. Book II, chapter xi.
'•'• Ihid. This principle was strictly enforced as soon as the Nazis seized power. Of 7
million members of the Hitler youth only 50.000 were accepted for party membership
m 1937. See the preface by H. L. Childs to The Nazi Primer.— Compare also Gottfried
Necsse. "Die verfassungsrechtliche Gestaltung der Ein-Partei." in Zeitschift jiir die
Kt'samie SiiwtsHissenMhafi. 1938. Band 98, p. 678: "Even the one-Party must never
prow to the point where it would embrace the whole population. It is 'total' because
of its ideological influence on the nation."
" See Hitler's differentiation between the "radical people" who alone were prepared
to become members of the party and hundreds of thousands of sympathizers who were
too cowardly to make the necessary sacrifice. Op. cii loc tit
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 361
The world at large, on the other side, usually gets its first glimpse of a
totalitarian movement through its front organizations. The sympathizers,
who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian
society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the
movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread
their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole at-
mosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recog-
nizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions. The
fellow-traveler organizations surround the totalitarian movements with a
mist of normality and respectability that fools the membership about the
true character of the outside world as much as it does the outside world
about the true character of the movement. The front organization functions
both ways: as the fagade of the totalitarian movement to the nontotali-
tarian world, and as the fagade of this world to the inner hierarchy of the
movement.
Even more striking than this relationship is the fact that it is repeated
on different levels within the movement itself. As party members are related
to and separated from the fellow-travelers, so are the elite formations of the
movement related to and separated from the ordinary members. If the fel-
low-traveler still appears to be a normal inhabitant of the outside world
who has adopted the totalitarian creed as one may adopt the program of
an ordinary party, the ordinary member of the Nazi or Bolshevik movement
still belongs, in many respects, to the surrounding world: his professional
and social relationships are not yet absolutely determined by his party mem-
bership, although he may realize — as distinguished from the mere sympa-
thizer — that in case of conflict between his party allegiance and his private
life, the former is supposed to be decisive. The member of a militant group,
on the other hand, is wholly identified with the movement; he has no pro-
fession and no private life independent of it. Just as the sympathizers
constitute a protective wall around the members of the movement and
represent the outside world to them, so the ordinary membership surrounds
the militant groups and represents the normal outside world to them.
A definite advantage of this structure is that it blunts the impact of one of
the basic totalitarian tenets — that the world is divided into two gigantic hos-
tile camps, one of which is the movement, and that the movement can and
must fight the whole world — a claim which prepares the way for the indis-
criminate aggressiveness of totalitarian regimes in power. Through a care-
fully graduated hierarchy of militancy in which each rank is the higher level's
image of the nontotalitarian world because it is less militant and its mem-
bers less totally organized, the shock of the terrifying and monstrous totali-
tarian dichotomy is vitiated and never full realized; this type of organiza-
tion prevents its members' ever being directly confronted with the outside
world, whose hostility remains for them a mere ideological assumption. They
are so well protected against the reality of the nontotalitarian world that
they constantly underestimate the tremendous risks of totalitarian politics.
There is no doubt that the totalitarian movements attack the status quo
JM
TOTALITARIANISM
niotv radically than did any of the earlier revolutionary parties. They can
afford this radicalism, apparently so unsuited to mass organizations, because
their orjianization offers a temporary substitute for ordinary, nonpolitical
life, which totalitarianism actually seeks to abolish. The whole world of
non[x>li(ical social relationships, from which the "professional revolutionary"
had to cut himself off or had to accept as they were, exists in the form of
less militant groups in the movement; within this hierarchically organized
world the fighters for world conquest and world revolution are never ex-
posed to the shock inevitably generated by the discrepancy between "revolu-
tionary" beliefs and the "normal" world. The reason why the movements in
their prepower, revolutionary stage can attract so many ordinary philistines
is that their members live in a fool's paradise of normalcy; the party mem-
bers are surrounded by the normal world of sympathizers and the elite
formations by the normal world of ordinary members.
Another advantage of the totalitarian pattern is that it can be repeated
indefinitely and keeps the organization in a state of fluidity which permits it
constantly to insert new layers and define new degrees of militancy. The
whole history of the Nazi party can be told in terms of new formations
within the Nazi movement. The SA, the stormtroopers (founded in 1922),
were the first Nazi formation which was supposed to be more militant than
the party itself;''^ in 1926, the SS was founded as the elite formation of the
SA; after three years, the SS was separated from the SA and put under
Himmler's command; it took Himmler only a few more years to repeat the
same game within the SS. one after the other, and each more militant than
its predecessor, there now came into being, first, the Shock Troops,"'' then
the Death Head units (the "guard units for the concentration camps"),
which later were merged to form the Armed SS (Waffen-SS), finally the
Security Service (the "ideological intelligence service of the Party," and its
executive arm for the "negative population policy") and the Office for Ques-
tions of Race and Resettlement (Rasse-und Siedlungswesen) , whose tasks
were of a "positive kind" — all of them developing out of the General SS,
whose members, except for the higher Fuehrer Corps, remained in their
civilian occupations. To all these new formations the member of the Gen-
eral SS now stood in the same relationship as the SA-man to the SS-man,
or the party member to the SA-man, or the member of a front organization
to a party member.'" Now the General SS was charged not only with "safe-
""•"^ec Hitler: chapter on the SA in op. cit.. Book 11, chapter ix, second part.
'■" In translating Verfii/^inifixlnippc. i.e., the special units of the SS which originally
were supposed to be at Hitler's special disposal, as shock troops, 1 follow O. C. Giles,
Tin- GcMiipo. Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, No. 36, 1940.
'"' The most important source for the organization and history of the SS is Himmler's
"Wcscn iind Aufgabe der SS und der Polizei," in Suinmelhefti' ciiisf^ewcihlter Vortriige
mid Ride. 1939. In the course of the war, when the ranks of the Waffen-SS had to
be filled with enlistments owing to losses at the front, the Waffen-SS lost its elite char-
acter within the SS to such an extent that now the General SS, i.e., the higher Fuehrer
Corps, once again represented the real nuclear elite of the movement.
Very revealing documentary material for this last phase of the SS can be found in
the archives of the Hoover Library, Himmler File, Folder 278. It shows that the SS
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 369
guarding the . . . embodiments of the National Socialist idea," but also with
"protecting the members of all special SS cadres from becoming detached
from the movement itself."^'
This fluctuating hierarchy, with its constant addition of new layers and
shifts in authority, is well known from secret control bodies, the secret police
or espionage services, where new controls are always needed to control
the controllers. In the prepower stage of the movements, total espionage is
not yet possible; but the fluctuating hierarchy, similar to that of secret
services, makes it possible, even without actual power, to degrade any rank
or group that wavers or shows signs of decreasing radicalism by the mere
insertion of a new more radical layer, hence driving the older group auto-
matically in the direction of the front organization and away from the center
of the movement. Thus, the Nazi elite formations were primarily inner-
party organizations: the SA rose to the position of a superparty when the
party appeared to lose in radicality and was then in turn and for similar
reasons superseded by the SS.
The military value of the totalitarian elite formations, especially of the
SA and the SS, are frequently overrated, while their purely inner-party sig-
nificance has been somewhat neglected."^- None of the Fascist Shirt-organiza-
tions was founded for specific defensive or aggressive purposes, though de-
fense of the leaders or the ordinary party members usually was cited as a
went about its recruiting both among foreign workers and the native population by
deliberately imitating the methods and rules of the French Foreign Legion. Enlistment
among the Germans was based on an order by Hitler (never published) dated De-
cember, 1942, according to which "the 1925 class [should] be drafted into the Waffen-
SS" (Himmler in a letter to Bormann). Conscription and enlistment were handled
ostensibly on a voluntary basis. Precisely what this amounted to can be seen from
numerous reports of SS leaders entrusted with this assignment. A report dated July 21,
1943, describes how the police surround the hall in which French workers are to be
enlisted, how the French first sing the MurseiUuise and then try to jump out of the
windows. Attempts among German youth were scarcely more encouraging. Although
they were put under extraordinary pressure and told that "they certainly would
not want to join the 'dirty gray hordes'" of the army, only 18 out of 220 members
of the Hitler youth reported for duty (according to a report of April 30, 1943, sub-
mitted by Haussler, head of Conscription Center Southwest of the Waffen-SS); all
others preferred to join the Wehrmacht. It is possible that the greater losses of the
SS, as compared with those of the Wehrmacht, entered into their decisions (see Karl O.
Paetel, "Die SS," in Vierteljalireshefte fi'ir Zeitgeschichte, January, 1954). But that
this factor alone could not have been decisive is proved by the following: As early as
January, 1940, Hitler had ordered the drafting of SA-men into the Waffen-SS, and
the results for Koenigsberg, based on a report that has been preserved, were listed as
follows: 1807 SA-men were called up "for police service"; of these, 1094 failed to
report; 631 were found to be unfit; 82 were fit for service in the SS.
"" Werner Best, op. cit., 1941, p. 99.
'^ This, however, was not the fault of Hitler, who always insisted that the very
name of the SA (Stiirmahlcilung) indicated that it was only "a section of the move-
ment" just like other party formations such as the propaganda department, the news-
paper, the scientific institutes, etc. He also tried to dispel the illusions of the possible
military value of a paramilitary formation and wanted training to be carried through
according to the needs of the party and not according to the principles of an army.
Op. cit., loc. cit.
J70 TOTALITARIANISM
pretext.'' The paramilitiiry form of Nazi and Fascist elite groups was the
result of their being founded as "instruments of the ideological fight of the
movement"'* against the widespread pacifism in Europe after the first
World War. For totalitarian purposes it was much more important to set
up. as "the e.xpression of an aggressive attitude," ''■''' a fake army which re-
sembled as closely as possible the bogus army of the pacifists (unable to
understand the constitutional place of an army within the political body,
the pacifists had denounced all military institutions as bands of willful
murderers), than to have a troop of well-trained soldiers. The SA and the
SS were certainly model organizations for arbitrary violence and murder;
they were hardly as well trained as the Black Reichswehr, and they were
not equipped for a fight against regular troops. Militaristic propaganda was
more popular in postwar Germany than military training, and uniforms did
not enhance the military value of paramilitary troops, though they were use-
ful as a clear indication of the abolition of civilian standards and morals;
somehow these uniforms eased considerably the consciences of the mur-
derers and also made them even more receptive to unquestioning obedience
and unquestioned authority. Despite these militaristic trappings, the inner-
party faction of the Nazis, which was primarily nationalistic and militaristic
and therefore viewed the paramilitary troops not as mere party formations
but as an illegal enlargement of the Reichswehr (which had been limited by
the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty), was the first to be liquidated.
Rohm, the leader of the SA stormtroopers, had indeed dreamed of and
negotiated for incorporation of his SA into the Reichswehr after the Nazis
seized power. He was killed by Hitler because he tried to transform the new
Nazi regime into a military dictatorship.'^*' Hitler had made it clear several
" The official reason for the foundation of the SA was protection of Nazi meet-
ings, while the original task of the SS was protection of Nazi leaders.
''* Hitler, op. cii., luc. tit.
'^ Ernst Bayer. Die SA. Berlin, 1938. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV.
'" Rohm's autobiography shows clearly how little his political convictions agreed
with those of the Nazis. He always desired a "SoUlaienstaat" and always insisted on
the "Primal des Soldalen vor Jem Politiker" (op. lii., p. 349). Especially telling for
his nontotalitarian attitude, or rather for his inability even to understand totalitarian-
ism and its "total" claim, is the following passage: "I don't see why the following three
things should not be compatible: my loyalty to the hereditary prince of the house of
Wittelsbach and heir to Bavaria's crown; my admiration for the quartermaster-general
of ihc World War [i.e.. Ludendorff], who today embodies the conscience of the Ger-
man people; and my comradeship with the harbinger and bearer of the political
struggle. Adolf Hitler" (p. 348). What ultimately cost Rohm his head was that after
the seizure of power he envisioned a Fascist dictatorship patterned after the Italian
regime, in which the Nazi party would "break the chains of the party" and "itself
become the state," which was exactly what Hitler meant to avoid under all circum-
stances. See Ernst Rohm, Wariim SA?, speech before the diplomatic corps, December,
1933. Berlin, undated.
Within the Nazi party, the possibility of an SA-Reichswehr plot against the rule of
the SS and the police apparently never was quite forgotten. Hans Frank, Governor
General of Poland, in 1942, eight years after the murder of Rohm and General
Schleicher, was suspected of wishing "after the war . . . to inaugurate the greatest
fight for justice [against the SS] with the assistance of the Armed Forces and the
SA (Nan Conspiracy, VI, 747).
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 371
years before that such a development was not desired by the Nazi move-
ment when he dismissed Rohm — a real soldier whose experience in the war
and in the organization of the Black Reichswehr would have made him
indispensable to a serious military training program — from his position as
chief of the SA and chose Himmler, a man without the slightest knowledge
of military matters, as reorganizer of the SS.
Apart from the importance of the elite formations to the organizational
structure of the movement, where they comprised the changing nuclei of
militancy, their paramilitary character must be understood in connection
with other professional party organizations, such as those for teachers,
lawyers, physicians, students, university professors, technicians, and workers.
All these were primarily duplicates of existing nontotalitarian professional
societies, paraprofessional as the stormtroopers were paramilitary. It was
characteristic that the more clearly the European Communist parties be-
came branches of a Moscow-directed Bolshevik movement, the more they,
too, used their front organizations to compete with existing purely profes-
sional groups. The difference between the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in this
respect was only that the Nazis had a pronounced tendency to consider these
paraprofessional formations as part of the party elite, while the Commu-
nists preferred to recruit from them the material for their front organizations.
The important factor for the movements is that, even before they seize
power, they give the impression that all elements of society are embodied in
their ranks. (The ultimate goal of Nazi propaganda was to organize the
whole German people as sympathizers."^) The Nazis went one step further
in this game and set up a series of fake departments which were modeled
after the regular state administration, such as their own department of for-
eign affairs, education, culture, sport, etc. None of these institutions had
more professional value than the imitation of the army represented by the
stormtroopers, but together they created a perfect world of appearances in
which every reality in the nontotalitarian world was slavishly duplicated in
the form of humbug.
This technique of duplication, certainly useless for the direct overthrow
of government, proved extremely fruitful in the work of undermining ac-
tively existing institutions and in the "decomposition of the status quo"''*
which totalitarian organizations invariably prefer to an open show of force.
If it is the task of movements "to bore their way like polyps into all posi-
tions of power," '^^ then they must be ready for any specific social and po-
litical position. In accordance with their claim to total domination, every
single organized group in the nontotalitarian society is felt to present a
specific challenge to the movement to destroy it; every one needs, so to
speak, a specific instrument of destruction. The practical value of the fake
organizations came to light when the Nazis seized power and were ready
^^ Hitler, op. tit.. Book II, chapter xi, states that propaganda attempts to force a
doctrine on the whole people while the organization incorporates only a comparatively
small proportion of its more militant members. — Compare also G. Neesse, op. cit.
""* Hitler, op. cit., lac. cit.
'''•' Hadamovsky, op. cit., p. 28.
JJ2 TOTALITARIANISM
at once to destroy the existing teachers' organizations with another teach-
ers' organization, the existing lawyers' clubs with a Nazi-sponsored lawyers'
club. etc. They could change overnight the whole structure of German
society — and not just political life — precisely because they had prepared its
exact counterpart within their own ranks. In this respect, the task of the
paramilitary formations was finished when the regular military hierarchy
could be placed, during the last stages of the war, under the authority of SS
generals. The technique of this "co-ordination" was as ingenious and irre-
sistible as the deterioration of professional standards was swift and radical,
although these results were more immediately felt in the highly technical
and specialized field of warfare than anywhere else.
If the importance of paramilitary formations for totalitarian movements
is not to be found in their doubtful military value, neither is it wholly in
their fake imitation of the regular army. As elite formations they are more
sharply separated from the outside world than any other group. The Nazis
realized very early the intimate connection between total militancy and
total separation from normality; the stormtroopers were never assigned to
duty in their home communities, and the active cadres of the SA in the
prepower stage, and of the SS under the Nazi regime, were so mobile and
so frequently exchanged that they could not possibly get used to and take
root in any other part of the ordinary world. ^'^ They were organized after
the model of criminal gangs and used for organized murder.^' These mur-
ders were publicly paraded and officially admitted by the upper Nazi
hierarchy, so that open complicity made it well-nigh impossible for mem-
bers to quit the movement even under the nontotalitarian government and
even if they were not threatened, as they actually were, by their former
comrades. In this respect, the function of the elite formations is the very
opposite of that of the front organizations: while the latter lend the move-
ment an air of respectability and inspire confidence, the former, by extend-
ing complicity, make every party member aware that he has left for good
the normal world which outlaws murder and that he will be held account-
able for all crimes committed by the elite.^^ 7^,5 jg achieved even in the
""The Death Head units of the SS were placed under the following rules: 1. No
brigade is called for duty in its native district. 2. Every unit is to change after three
weeks' service. 3. Members are never to be sent into the streets alone or ever to display
their Death Head insignia in public. See: Secret Speech by Himmler to the German
Army General Staff 1938 (the speech, however, was delivered in 1937, see Nazi Con-
spiracy. IV, 616, where only excerpts are published). Published by the American Com-
mittee for Anti-Nazi Literature.
"' Hemrich Himmler. Die Schutztaffel als antibolschewistische Kampforganisation:
Aus dem Schwarzen Korps, No. 3, 1936. said publicly: "I know that there are people
in Germany who get sick when they see this black coat. We understand that and
don t expect to be loved by too many people."
" In his speeches to the SS Himmler always stressed committed crimes, underlining
their gravity. About the liquidation of the Jews, for instance, he would say: "I also
want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among ourselves it should
be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly." on the
liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia: ". . . you should hear this but also forget it
immediately . . . (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558 and 553, respectively)
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 373
prepower stage, when the leadership systematically claims responsibility for
all crimes and leaves no doubt that they are committed for the ultimate
good of the movement.
The artificial creation of civil-war conditions by which the Nazis black-
mailed their way into power has more than the obvious advantage of stirring
up trouble. For the movement, organized violence is the most efficient of
the many protective walls which surround its fictitious world, whose "reality"
is proved when a member fears leaving the movement more than he fears
the consequences of his complicity in illegal actions, and feels more secure
as a member than as an opponent. This feeling of security, resulting from
the organized violence with which the elite formations protect the party
members from the outside world, is as important to the integrity of the
fictitious world of the organization as the fear of its terror.
In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion,
sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle
of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery
which corresponds to his "intangible preponderance."^^ His position within
this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its
members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes
his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles
for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucratic-organizational qualities.
He is distinguished from earlier types of dictators in that he hardly wins
through simple violence. Hitler needed neither the SA nor the SS to secure
his position as leader of the Nazi movement; on the contrary, Rohm, the
chief of the SA and able to count upon its loyalty to his own person, was
one of Hitler's inner-party enemies. Stalin won against Trotsky, who not
only had a far greater mass appeal but, as chief of the Red Army, held in his
hands the greatest power potential in Soviet Russia at the time.** Not Stalin,
but Trotsky, moreover, was the greatest organizational talent, the ablest
bureaucrat of the Russian Revolution.^^ on the other hand, both Hitler and
Stalin were masters of detail and devoted themselves in the early stages of
Goebbels, op. cit., p. 266, notes in a similar vein: on the Jewish question, espe-
cially, we have taken a position from which there is no escape. . . . Experience
teaches that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges fight with much
greater determination than those who are still able to retreat."
"^ Souvarine, op. cit., p. 648. — The way the totalitarian movements have kept the
private lives of their leaders (Hitler and Stalin) absolutely secret contrasts with the
publicity value which all democracies find in parading the private lives of Presidents,
Kings, Prime Ministers, etc., in public. Totalitarian methods do not allow for an identi-
fication based on the conviction: Even the highest of us is only human.
Souvarine. op. cit., p. xiii, quotes the most frequently used tags to describe Stalin:
"Stalin, the mysterious host of the Kremlin"; "Stalin, impenetrable personality"; "Stalin,
the Communist Sphinx"; "Stalin, the Enigma," the "insoluble mystery," etc.
84 "jf [jrotsky] had chosen to stage a military coup d'etat he might perhaps have
defeated the triumvirs. But he left office without the slightest attempt at rallying in
his defence the army he had created and led for seven years" (Isaac Deutscher, op. cit.,
p. 297).
*^ The Commissariat for War under Trotsky "was a model institution" and Trotsky
was called in in all cases of disorder in other departments. Souvarine, op. cit., p. 288.
^7^ TOTALITARIANISM
their careers almost entirely to questions of personnel, so that after a few
years hardly any man of importance remained who did not owe his position
to them.""
Such personal abilities, however, though an absolute prerequisite for the
first stages of such a career and even later far from insignificant, are no
longer decisive when a totalitarian movement has been built up, has estab-
lished the principle that "the will of the Fuehrer is the Party's law," and
when its whole hierarchy has been efficiently trained for a single purpose —
swiftly to communicate the will of the Leader to all ranks. When this has
been achieved, the Leader is irreplaceable because the whole complicated
structure of the movement would lose its raison d'etre without his com-
mands. Now, despite eternal cabals in the inner clique and unending shifts
of personnel, with their tremendous accumulation of hatred, bitterness, and
personal resentment, the Leader's position can remain secure against chaotic
palace revolutions not because of his superior gifts, about which the men in
his intimate surroundings frequently have no great illusions, but because of
these men's sincere and sensible conviction that without him everything
would be immediately lost.
The supreme task of the Leader is to impersonate the double function
characteristic of each layer of the movement — to act as the magic defense of
the movement against the outside world; and at the same time, to be the
direct bridge by which the movement is connected with it. The Leader repre-
sents the movement in a way totally different from all ordinary party lead-
ers; he claims personal responsibility for every action, deed, or misdeed,
committed by any member or functionary in his official capacity. This total
responsibility is the most important organizational aspect of the so-called
Leader principle, according to which every functionary is not only appointed
by the Leader but is his walking embodiment, and every order is supposed
to emanate from this one ever-present source. This thorough identification
of the Leader with every appointed subleader and this monopoly of respon-
sibility for everything which is being done are also the most conspicuous
signs of the decisive difference between a totalitarian leader and an ordinary
dictator or despot. A tyrant would never identify himself with his subordi-
nates, let alone with every one of their acts;" he might use them as scape-
""The circumstances surrounding Stalin's death seem to contradict the infallibility
of these methods. There is the possibility that Stalin, who, before he died, undoubtedly
planned still another general purge, was killed by someone in his environment because
no one felt safe any longer, but despite a great deal of circumstantial evidence this can-
not be proved.
"'Thus Hitler personally cabled his responsibility for the Potempa murder to the
SA assassms in 1932, although presumably he had nothing whatever to do with it.
What mattered here was establishing a principle of identification, or, in the language
of the Nazis, "the mutual loyalty of the Leader and the people" on which "the Reich
rests (Hans Frank, «/>. c(7.).
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 375
goats and gladly have them criticized in order to save himself from the
wrath of the people, but he would always maintain an absolute distance from
all his subordinates and all his subjects. The Leader, on the contrary, can-
not tolerate criticism of his subordinates, since they act always in his name;
if he wants to correct his own errors, he must liquidate those who carried
them out; if he wants to blame his mistakes on others, he must kill them.'*'*
For within this organizational framework a mistake can only be a fraud:
the impersonation of the Leader by an impostor.
This total responsibility for everything done by the movement and this
total identification with every one of its functionaries have the very prac-
tical consequence that nobody ever experiences a situation in which he has
to be responsible for his own actions or can explain the reasons for them.
Since the Leader has monopolized the right and possibility of explanation,
he appears to the outside world as the only person who knows what he is
doing, i.e., the only representative of the movement with whom one may
still talk in nontotalitarian terms and who, if reproached or opposed, cannot
say: Don't ask me, ask the Leader. Being in the center of the movement, the
Leader can act as though he were above it. It is therefore perfectly under-
standable (and perfectly futile) for outsiders to set their hopes time and
again on a personal talk with the Leader himself when they have to deal
with totalitarian movements or governments. The real mystery of the totali-
tarian Leader resides in an organization which makes it possible for him
to assume the total responsibility for all crimes committed by the elite forma-
tions of the movement and to claim at the same time, the honest, innocent
respectability of its most naive fellow-traveler.^"
"" one of Stalin's distinctive characteristics ... is systematically to throw his own
misdeeds and crimes, as well as his political errors ... on the shoulders of those
whose discredit and ruin he is plotting" (Soiivarine, op. cit.. p. 655). It is obvious that
a totalitarian leader can choose freely whom he wants to impersonate his own errors
since all acts committed by subleaders are supposed to be inspired by him, so that
anybody can be forced into the role of an impostor.
"'That it was Hitler himself — and not Himmler, or Bormann, or Goebbels — who
always initiated the actually "radical" measures; that they were always more radical
than the proposals made by his immediate environment; that even Himmler was
appalled when he was entrusted with the "final solution" of the Jewish question —
all this has now been proved by innumerable documents. And the fairy tale that
Stalin was more moderate than the leftist factions of the Bolshevist Party is no
longer believed, either. It is all the more important to remember that totalitarian
leaders invariably try to appear more moderate to the outside world and that their
real role — namely, to drive the movement forward at any price and if anything to
step up its speed — remains carefully concealed. See, for instance, Admiral Erich
Raeder's memo on "My Relationship to Adolf Hitler and to the Party" in Nazi Cun-
.ipiracy, VIII, 707 ff. "When information or rumours arose about radical measures of
the Party and the Gestapo, one could come to the conclusion by the conduct of the
Fuehrer that such measures were not ordered by the Fuehrer himself. ... In the
course of future years, I gradually came to the conclusion that the Fuehrer himself
always leaned toward the more radical solution without letting on outwardly."
|7rt TOTALITARIANISM
The totalitarian movements have been called "secret societies established
m broad daylight." "' Indeed, little as we know of the sociological struc-
ture and the more recent history of secret societies, the structure of the
movements, unprecedented if compared with parties and factions, reminds
one of nothing so much as of certain outstanding traits of secret societies."'
Secret societies also form hierarchies according to degrees of "initiation,"
regulate the life of their members according to a secret and fictitious as-
sumption which makes everything look as though it were something else,
adopt a strategy of consistent lying to deceive the noninitiated external
masses, demand unquestioning obedience from their members who are held
together by allegiance to a frequently unknown and always mysterious
leader, who himself is surrounded, or supposed to be surrounded, by a small
group of initiated who in turn are surrounded by the half-initiated who
form a "bulTer area" against the hostile profane world."- With secret so-
cieties, the totalitarian movements also share the dichotomous division of
the world between "sworn blood brothers" and an indistinct inarticulate mass
In the inlraparly struggle which preceded his rise to absolute power, Stalin was care-
ful always to pose as "the man of the golden mean" (see Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 295 flf);
■ hough certainly no "man of compromise," he never abandoned this role altogether.
When, for instance, in 1936 a foreign journalist questioned him about the movement's
aim of world revolution, he replied: "We have never had such plans and intentions.
. This is the product of a misunderstanding ... a comic one, or rather a tragicomic
one" (Deutscher, op. cit., p. 422).
""See Alexandre Koyre, "The Political Function of the Modern Lie." in Contem-
luirury Jewish Record, June, 1945.
Hitler, op. cit.. Book II, chapter ix, discusses extensively the pros and cons of secret
societies as models for totalitarian movements. His considerations actually led him to
Koyrc's conclusion, i.e.. to adopt the principles of secret societies without their
secreliveness and to establish them in "broad daylight." There was, in the prepower
stage of the movement, hardly anything which the Nazis consistently kept secret. It
was only during the war. when the Nazi regime became fully totalitarianized and the
party leadership found itself surrounded from all sides by the military hierarchy on
which it depended for the conduct of the war, that the elite formations were instructed
in no uncertain terms to keep everything connected with "final solutions"— /.t.,
deportations and mass exterminations— absolutely secret. This was also the time
when Hitler began to act like the chief of a band of conspirators, but not without
personally announcing and circulating this fact explicitly. During a discussion with
the General StafT in May, 1939, Hitler laid down the following rules, which sound
as If they had been copied from a primer for a secret society: "1. No one who need
not know must be informed. 2. No one must know any more than he needs to. 3. No
one must know any earlier than he has to" (quoted from Heinz Holldack, Was wirklich
ceschah. 1949, p. 378).
The following analysis follows closely Georg Simmel's "Sociology of Secrecy and
?onA''*'KT'r"^'' u" ^'"' '^''"''■'™" J<>">-'^<>1 of Sociology, Vol. XI, No. 4, January,
r?nsiX^"h/l^'"'.' u'T\a °^ ^'" ^"''"'"f^'^'- Leipzig, 1908, selections of which are
translated by Kurt H. WolfT under the title The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 1950.
lion to hp"^n. .""""r f r^' ^'"'^'' °f '^^ '"'^'^'y constitute a mediating transi-
Phe e If ren Hsion' /?.' "'''''' '^'' ^""^ about the gradual compression of the
abruDtne s o^ ^7 r.^'^' 'T'.'. "^^''^ "'^^'"'^^ ""^'^ ^^'^"•"^ protection than the
abruptness of a radical standing wholly without or wholly within could secure" (ibid..
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 377
of sworn enemies."^ This distinction, based on absolute hostility to the sur-
rounding world, is very different from the ordinary parties' tendency to
divide people into those who belong and those who don't. Parties and open
societies in general will consider only those who expressly oppose them to
be their enemies, while it has always been the principle of secret societies
that "whosoever is not expressly included is excluded." ^^ This esoteric prin-
ciple seems to be entirely inappropriate for mass organizations; yet the
Nazis gave their members at least the psychological equivalent for the ini-
tiation ritual of secret societies when, instead of simply excluding Jews, from
membership, they demanded proof of non-Jewish descent from their mem-
bers and set up a complicated machine to shed light on the dark ancestry
of some 80 million Germans. It was of course a comedy, and even an ex-
pensive one, when 80 million Germans set out to look for Jewish grand-
fathers; yet everybody came out of the examination with the feeling that he
belonged to a group of included which stood against an imaginary multi-
tude of ineligibles. The same principle is confirmed in the Bolshevik move-
ment through repeated party purges which inspire in everybody who is not
excluded a reaffirmation of his inclusion.
Perhaps the most striking similarity between the secret societies and the
totalitarian movements lies in the role of the ritual. The marches around
the Red Square in Moscow are in this respect no less characteristic than
the pompous formalities of the Nuremberg party days. In the center of the
Nazi ritual was the so-called "blood banner," and in the center of the Bolshe-
vik ritual stands the mummified corpse of Lenin, both of which introduce a
strong element of idolatry into the ceremony. Such idolatry hardly is proof
"' The terms "sworn brothers," "sworn comrades," "sworn community," etc., are
repeated ud nauseam throughout Nazi hterature, partly because of their appeal to
juvenile romanticism which was widespread in the German youth movement. It was
mainly Himmler who used these terms in a more definite sense, introduced them into
the "central watchword" of the SS ("Thus we have fallen in line and march forward
to a distant future following the unchangeable laws as a National Socialist order of
Nordic men and as a sworn community of their tribes [Sippen]" see D'Alquen, op.
cit.) and gave them their articulate meaning of "absolute hostility" against all others
(see Simmel, op. cit., p. 489): "Then when the mass of humanity of 1 to 1 '/a milliards
[sic!] lines up against us, the Germanic people, . . ." See Himmler's speech at the
meeting of the SS Major Generals at Posen, October 4, 1943, Nazi Conspiracy, IV,
558.
■'^ Simmel, op. cit., p. 490. — This, like so many other principles, was adopted by
the Nazis after careful reflection on the implications of the "Protocols of the Elders of
Zion." Hitler said as early as 1922: "[The gentlemen of the Right] have never yet
understood that it is not necessary to be an enemy of the Jew to drag you one day
... to the scaffold ... it is quite enough . . . not to be a Jew: that will secure the
scaffold for you" (Hitler's Speeches, p. 12). At that time, nobody could guess that this
particular form of propaganda actually meant: one day, it will not be necessary to be
an enemy of ours to be dragged to the scaffold; it will be quite enough to be a Jew,
or, ultimately, a member of some other people, to be declared "racially unfit" by some
Health Commission. Himmler believed and preached that the whole SS was based on
the principle that "we must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of
our own blood and nobody else" {op. cit., ioc. cit.).
378
TOTALITARIANISM
—as is sometimes asserted— of pseudoreligious or heretical tendencies. The
"idols" are mere organizational devices, famihar from the ritual of secret
societies, which also^ used to frighten their members into secretiveness by
means of frightful, awe-inspiring symbols. It is obvious that people are more
securely held together through the common experience of a secret ritual than
by the common sharing of the secret itself. That the secret of totalitarian
movements is exposed in broad daylight does not necessarily change the
nature of the experience.'''^
These similarities are not, of course, accidental; they cannot simply be
explained by the fact that both Hitler and Stalin had been members of
modern secret societies before they became totalitarian leaders — Hitler in
the secret service of the Reichswehr and Stalin in the conspiracy section of
the Bolshevik party. They are to some extent the natural outcome of the
conspiracy fiction of totalitarianism whose organizations supposedly have
been founded to counteract secret societies — the secret society of the Jews
or the conspiratory society of the Trotskyites. What is remarkable in the to-
talitarian organizations is rather that they could adopt so many organiza-
tional devices of secret societies without ever trying to keep their own goal
a secret. That the Nazis wanted to conquer the world, deport "racially alien"
peoples and exterminate those of "inferior biological heritage," that the
Bolsheviks work for the world revolution, was never a secret; these aims,
on the contrary, were always part of their propaganda. In other words,
the totalitarian movements imitate all the paraphernalia of the secret so-
cieties but empty them of the only thing that could excuse, or was sup-
posed to excuse, their methods — the necessity to safeguard a secret.
In this, as in so many other respects, Nazism and Bolshevism arrived at
the same organizational result from very different historical beginnings. The
Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves, more
or less consciously, after the example of the secret society of the Elders of
Zion. whereas the Bolsheviks came from a revolutionary party, whose aim
was one-party dictatorship, passed through a stage in which the party was
"entirely apart and above everything" to the moment when the Politburo
of the party was "entirely apart from and above everything";'**' finally
Stalin imposed upon this party structure the rigid totalitarian rules of its
conspiratory sector and only then discovered the need for a central fiction
to maintain the iron discipline of a secret society under the conditions of a
mass organization. The Nazi development may be more logical, more con-
sistent in itself, but the history of the Bolshevik party offers a better illus-
tration of the essentially fictitious character of totalitarianism, precisely
because the fictitious global conspiracies against and according to which the
Bolshevik conspiracy is supposedly organized have not been ideologically
fixed. They have changed — from the Trotskyites to the 300 families, then
to various "imperialisms" and recently to "rootless cosmopolitanism" — and
were adjusted to passing needs; yet at no moment and under none of the
"'See Simmel, op. cit.. pp. 480-481.
""Souvarine, op. cit.. p. 319. follows a formulation of Bukharin.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 379
most various circumstances has it been possible for Bolshevism to do with-
out some such fiction.
The means by which Stalin changed the Russian one-party dictatorship
into a totalitarian regime and the revolutionary Communist parties all over
the world into totalitarian movements was the liquidation of factions, the
abolition of inner-party democracy and the transformation of national Com-
munist parties into Moscow-directed branches of the Comintern. Secret so-
cieties in general, and the conspiratory apparatus of revolutionary parties
in particular, have always been characterized by absence of factions, sup-
pression of dissident opinions, and absolute centralization of command. All
these measures have the obvious utilitarian purpose of protecting the mem-
bers against persecution and the society against treason; the total obedience
asked of each member and the absolute power in the hands of the chief were
only inevitable by-products of practical necessities. The trouble, however,
is that conspirators have an understandable tendency to think that the most
efficient methods in politics in general are those of conspiratory societies and
that if one can apply them in broad daylight and support them with a whole
nation's instruments of violence, the possibilities for power accumulation
become absolutely limitless. ^^ The conspiratory sector of a revolutionary
party can, as long as the party itself is still intact, be likened to the role of
the army within an intact political body: although its own rules of conduct
differ radically from those of the civilian body, it serves, remains subject to,
and is controlled by it. Just as the danger of a military dictatorship arises
when the army no longer serves but wants to dominate the body politic, so
the danger of totalitarianism arises when the conspiratory sector of a revolu-
tionary party emancipates itself from the control of the party and aspires
to leadership. This is what happened to the Communist parties under the
Stalin regime. Stalin's methods were always typical of a man who came from
the conspiratory sector of the party: his devotion to detail, his emphasis
on the personal side of politics, his ruthlessness in the use and liquidation
of comrades and friends. His chief support in the succession struggle after
Lenin's death came from the secret police "^ which at that time had already
become one of the most important and powerful sections of the party.^'' It
was only natural that the Cheka's sympathies should be with the representa-
tive of the conspiratory section, with the man who already looked upon it
■''' Souvarine, op. cit., p. 113, mentions that Stalin "was always impressed by men
who brought off 'an affair.' He looked on politics as an 'affair' requiring dexterity."
"" In the inner-party struggles during the twenties, "the collaborators of the GPU
were almost without exception fanatic adversaries of the Right and adherents of
Stalin. The various services of the GPU were at that time the bulwarks of the Stalinist
section" (Ciliga, op. cit., p. 48). — Souvarine, op. cit., p. 289, reports that Stalin even
before had "continued the police activity he had begun during the Civil War" and
been the representative of the Politburo in the GPU.
'•*■* Immediately after the civil war in Russia, Pravda stated "that the formula 'All
power to the Soviets' had been replaced by 'All power to the Chekas.' . . . The end
of the armed hostilities reduced military control . . . but left a ramified Cheka which
perfected itself by simplification of its operation" (Souvarine, op. cit., p. 251).
fffQ TOTALITARIANISM
as a kind of secret society and therefore was likely to preserve and to ex-
pand its privileges.
The seizure of the Communist parties by their conspiratory sector, how-
ever, was only the first step in their transformation into totalitarian move-
ments. It was not enough that the secret police in Russia and its agents in
the Communist parties abroad played the same role in the movement as the
elite formations which the Nazis had constituted in the form of paramilitary
troops. The parties themselves had to be transformed, if the rule of the
secret police was to remain stable. Liquidation of factions and inner-party
democracy, consequently, was accompanied in Russia by the admission of
large, politically uneducated and "neutral" masses to membership, a policy
which was quickly followed by the Communist parties abroad after the Pop-
ular Front policy had initiated it.
Nazi totalitarianism started with a mass organization which was only
gradually dominated by elite formations, while the Bolsheviks started with
elite formations and organized the masses accordingly. The result was the
same in both cases. The Nazis, moreover, because of their militaristic tra-
dition and prejudices, originally modeled their elite formations after the
army, while the Bolsheviks from the beginning endowed the secret police
with the exercise of supreme power. Yet after a few years this difference
too disappeared: the chief of the SS became the chief of the secret police,
and the SS formations were gradually incorporated into and replaced the
former personnel of the Gestapo, even though this personnel already con-
sisted of reliable Nazis. ^''^
It is because of the essential affinity between the functioning of a secret
society of conspirators and of the secret police organized to combat it that
totalitarian regimes, based on a fiction of global conspiracy and aiming at
global rule, eventually concentrate all power in the hands of the police. In
the prepower stage, however, the "secret societies in broad daylight" offer
other organizational advantages. The obvious contradiction between a mass
organization and an exclusive society, which alone can be trusted to keep
a secret, is of no importance compared with the fact that the very structure
of secret and conspiratory societies could translate the totalitarian ideo-
logical dichotomy — the blind hostility of the masses against the existing world
regardless of its divergences and differences — into an organizational prin-
ciple. From the viewpoint of an organization which functions according to
the principle that v/hoever is not included is excluded, whoever is not with
me is against me, the world at large loses all the nuances, differentiations,
and pluralistic aspects which had in any event become confusing and un-
'""Thc Gestapo was set up by Goring in 1933; Himmler was appointed chief of
the Gestapo in 1934 and began at once to replace its personnel with his SS-men; at the
end of the war, 75 per cent of all Gestapo agents were SS-men. It must also be con-
sidered that the SS units were particularly qualified for this job as Himmler had
organized them, even in the prepower stage, for espionage duty among party mem-
bers (Hciden, op. cii.. p. 308). For the history of the Gestapo, see Giles, op. cit., and
also Nazi Conspiracy, Vol. II, chapter xii.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 381
bearable to the masses who had lost their place and their orientation in it.^**^
What inspired them with the unwavering loyalty of members of secret so-
cieties was not so much the secret as the dichotomy between Us and all
others. This could be kept intact by imitating the secret societies' organiza-
tional structure and emptying it of its rational purpose of safeguarding a
secret. Nor did it matter if a conspiracy ideology was the origin of this
development, as in the case of the Nazis, or a parasitic growth of the con-
spiratory sector of a revolutionary party, as in the case of the Bolsheviks.
The claim inherent in totalitarian organization is that everything outside
the movement is "dying," a claim which is drastically realized under the
murderous conditions of totalitarian rule, but which even in the prepower
stage appears plausible to the masses who escape from disintegration and
disorientation into the fictitious home of the movement.
Totalitarian movements have proved time and again that they can com-
mand the same total loyalty in life and death which had been the prerogative
of secret and conspiratory societies. ^''^ The complete absence of resistance
in a thoroughly trained and armed troop like the SA in the face of the mur-
der of a beloved leader (Rohm) and hundreds of close comrades was a
curious spectacle. At that moment probably Rohm, and not Hitler, had
the power of the Reichswehr behind him. But these incidents in the Nazi
movement have by now been overshadowed by the ever-repeated spectacle
of self-confessed "criminals" in the Bolshevik parties. Trials based on absurd
confessions have become part of an internally all-important and externally
incomprehensible ritual. But, no matter how the victims are being prepared
today, this ritual owes its existence to the probably unfabricated confessions
of the old Bolshevik guard in 1936. Long feefore the time of the Moscow
Trials men condemned to death would receive their sentences with great
calm, an attitude "particularly prevalent among members of the Cheka." ^^^
So long as the movement exists, its peculiar form of organization makes sure
that at least the elite formations can no longer conceive of a life outside the
closely knit band of men who, even if they are condemned, still feel
superior to the rest of the uninitiated world. And since this organization's
exclusive aim has always been to deceive and fight and uUimately conquer
'°* It was probably one of the decisive ideological errors of Rosenberg, who fell
from the Fuehrer's favor and lost his influence in the movement to men like Himm-
ler, Bormann, and even Streicher, that his Myth of the Twentieth Century admits a
racial pluralism from which only the Jews were excluded. He thereby violated the
principle that whoever is not included ("the Germanic people") is excluded ("the mass
of humanity"). Cf. note 87.
'"^ Simmel, op. cit., p. 492, enumerates secret criminal societies in which the mem-
bers voluntarily set up one commander whom they obey from then on without
criticism and without limitation.
'°^ Ciliga, op. cit., pp. 96-97. He also describes how in the twenties even ordinary
prisoners in the GPU prison of Leningrad who had been condemned to death allowed
themselves to be taken to execution "without a word, without a cry of revolt against
the Government that put them to death" (p. 183).
jg2 TOTALITARIANISM
the outside world, its members are satisfied to pay with their lives if only
this helps again to fool the world.*"*
The chief value, however, of the secret or conspiratory societies' organ-
iziitional structure and moral standards for purposes of mass organization
docs not even lie in the inherent guarantees of unconditional belonging and
loyalty, and organizational manifestation of unquestioned hostility to the
outside world, but in their unsurpassed capacity to establish and safeguard
the fictitious world through consistent lying. The whole hierarchical struc-
ture of totalitarian movements, from naive fellow-travelers to party mem-
bers, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader
himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gulli-
bility and cynicism with which each member, depending upon his rank and
standing in the movement, is expected to react to the changing lying state-
ments of the leaders and the central unchanging ideological fiction of the
movement.
A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding character-
istic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses.
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the
point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing,
think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture
in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion
that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism
the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that
its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how ab-
surd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held
every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based
their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such
conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one
day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their
falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the lead-
ers who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along
that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior
tactical cleverness.
What had been a demonstrable reaction of mass audiences became an im-
portant hierarchical principle for mass organizations. A mixture of gulli-
bility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements, and
the higher the rank the more cynicism weighs down gullibility. The essen-
tial conviction shared by all ranks, from fellow-traveler to leader, is that
politics is a game of cheating and that the "first commandment" of the
movement: "The Fuehrer is always right," is as necessary for the purposes
of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline
are for the purposes of war. *"''•.
'"'Ciliga reports how the condemned party members "thought that if these execu-
tions saved the bureaucratic dictatorship as a whole, if they calmed the rebellious
peasantry (or rather if they misled them into error), the sacrifice of their lives would
not have been in vain" {op. cil.. pp. 96-97).
'"•Goebbels" notion of the role of diplomacy in politics is characteristic: "There is
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 383
The machine that generates, organizes, and spreads the monstrous false-
hoods of totaHtarian movements depends again upon the position of the
Leader. To the propaganda assertion that all happenings are scientifically
predictable according to the laws of nature or economics, totalitarian or-
ganization adds the position of one man who has monopolized this knowl-
edge and whose principal quality is that he "was always right and will
always be right." ''^" To a member of a totalitarian movement this knowledge
has nothing to do with truth and this being right nothing to do with the
objective truthfulness of the Leader's statements which cannot be disproved
by facts, but only by future success or failure. The Leader is always right
in his actions and since these are planned for centuries to come, the ultimate
test of what he does has been removed beyond the experience of his con-
temporaries.^"^
The only group supposed to believe loyally and textually in the Leader's
words are the sympathizers whose confidence surrounds the movement with
an atmosphere of honesty and simple-mindedness, and helps the Leader to
fulfill half his task, that is, to inspire confidence in the movement. The party
members never believe public statements and are not supposed to, but are
complimented by totalitarian propaganda on that superior intelligence
which supposedly distinguishes them from the nontotalitarian outside world,
which, in turn, they know only from the abnormal gullibility of sympathizers.
only Nazi sympathizers believed Hitler when he swore his famous legality
oath before the supreme court of the Weimar Republic; members of the
movement knew very well that he lied, and trusted him more than ever be-
cause he apparently was able to fool public opinion and the authorities.
When in later years Hitler repeated the performance for the whole world,
when he swore to his good intentions and at the same time most openly pre-
pared his crimes, the admiration of the Nazi membership naturally was
boundless. Similarly, only Bolshevik fellow-travelers believed in the dissolu-
tion of the Comintern, and only the nonorganized masses of the Russian
people and the fellow-travelers abroad were meant to take at face value
Stalin's prodemocratic statements during the war. Bolshevik party members
were explicitly warned not to be fooled by tactical maneuvers and were
asked to admire their Leader's shrewdness in betraying his allies. ^"^
Without the organizational division of the movement into elite forma-
tions, membership, and sympathizers, the lies of the Leader would not work.
no doubt that one does best if one keeps the diplomats uninformed about the back-
ground of politics. . . . Genuineness in playing an appeasement role is sometimes the
most convincing argument for their political trustworthiness" (op. cit.. p. 87).
'""Rudolf Hess in a broadcast in 1934. Nazi Conspiracy, I, 193.
'"■'Werner Best op. cit., explained: "Whether the will of the government lays
down the 'right' rules ... is no longer a question of law, but a question of fate. For
actual misuses . . . will be punished more surely before history by fate itself with mis-
fortune and overthrow and ruin, because of the violation of the 'laws of life,' than
by a State Court of Justice." Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 490.
'"•* See Kravchenko, op. cit., p. 422. "No properly indoctrinated Communist felt
that the Party was 'lying' in professing one set of policies in public and its very op-
posite in private."
fg^ TOTALITARIANISM
The graduation of cynicism expressed in a hierarchy of contempt is at least
as necessary in the face of constant refutation as plain gullibility. The point
is that the sympathizers in front organizations despise their fellow-citizens'
complete lack of initiation, the party members despise the fellow-travelers'
gullibility and lack of radicalism, the elite formations despise for similar rea-
sons the party membership, and within the elite formations a similar hier-
archy of contempt accompanies every new foundation and development. ^"''
The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies
credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism
of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader
will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his
own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief
handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it
ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enor-
mity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it
would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless
of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfor-
tunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness
rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the
liar or forces him to live up to his pretense.
While the membership does not believe statements made for public con-
sumption, it believes all the more fervently the standard cliches of ideological
explanation, the keys to past and future history which totalitarian move-
ments took from nineteenth-century ideologies, and transformed, through
organization, into a working reality. These ideological elements in which the
masses had come to believe anyhow, albeit rather vaguely and abstractly,
were turned into factual lies of an all-comprehensive nature (the domination
of the world by the Jews instead of a general theory about races, the con-
spiracy of Wall Street instead of a general theory about classes) and inte-
grated into a general scheme of action in which only the "dying" — the dying
classes of capitalist countries or the decadent nations — are supposed to
stand in the way of the movement. In contrast to the movements' tactical
lies which change literally from day to day, these ideological lies are sup-
posed to be believed like sacred untouchable truths. They are surrounded
by a carefully elaborated system of "scientific" proofs which do not have
to be convincing for the completely "uninitiated," but still appeal to some
vulgarized thirst for knowledge by "demonstrating" the inferiority of the
Jews or the misery of people living under a capitalist system.
The elite formations are distinguished from the ordinary party mem-
bership in that they do not need such demonstrations and are not even
supposed to believe in the literal truth of ideological cliches. These are fabri-
cated to answer a quest for truth among the masses which in its insistence on
explanation and demonstration still has much in common with the normal
••«• "The National Socialist despises his fellow German, the SA man the other
National Socialists, the SS man the SA man" (Heiden, op. cit., p. 308).
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 385
world. The elite is not composed of ideologists; its members' whole educa-
tion is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth
and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their
ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of
purpose. In distinction to the mass membership which, for instance, needs
some demonstration of the inferiority of the Jewish race before it can safely
be asked to kill Jews, the elite formations understand that the statement, all
Jews are inferior, means, all Jews should be killed; they know that when they
are told that only Moscow has a subway, the real meaning of the statement
is that all subways should be destroyed, and are not unduly surprised when
they discover the subway in Paris. The tremendous shock of disillusion which
the Red Army suffered on its conquering trip to Europe could be cured only
by concentration camps and forced exile for a large part of the occupation
troops; but the police formations which accompanied the Army were pre-
pared for the shock, not by different and more correct information — there
is no secret training school in Soviet Russia which gives out authentic facts
about life abroad — but simply by a general training in supreme contempt
for all facts and all reality.
This mentality of the elite is no mere mass phenomenon, no mere con-
sequence of social rootlessness, economic disaster, and political anarchy;
it needs careful preparation and cultivation and forms a more important,
though less easily recognizable, part of the curriculum of totalitarian lead-
ership schools, the Nazi Ordensburgen for the SS troops, and the Bolshevik
training centers for Comintern agents, than race indoctrination or the tech-
niques of civil war. Without the elite and its artificially induced inability to
understand facts as facts, to distinguish between truth and falsehood, the
movement could never move in the direction of realizing its fiction. The
outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to
think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like
a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and
reality.
The topmost layer in the organization of totalitarian movements is the
intimate circle around the Leader, which can be a formal institution, like
the Bolshevik Politburo, or a changing clique of men who do not necessarily
hold office, like the entourage of Hitler. To them ideological cliches are mere
devices to organize the masses, and they feel no compunction about changing
them according to the needs of circumstances if only the organizing principle
is kept intact. In this connection, the chief merit of Himmler's reorganiza-
tion of the SS was that he found a very simple method for "solving the
problem of blood by action," that is, for selecting the members of the elite
according to "good blood" and preparing them to "carry on a racial struggle
without mercy" against everyone who could not trace his "Aryan" ancestry
back to 1750, or was less than 5 feet 8 inches tall ("I know that people who
have reached a certain height must possess the desired blood to some de-
?,Vft TOTALITARIANISM
grce") or did not have blue eyes and blond hair."" The importance of this
racism in action was that the organization became independent of almost
all concrete teachings of no matter what racial "science," independent also
of antiscmitism insofar as it was a specific doctrine concerning the nature
and role of the Jews, whose usefulness would have ended with their ex-
termination.'" Racism was safe and independent of the scientificality of
propaganda once an elite had been selected by a "race commission" and
placed under the authority of special "marriage laws,""- while at the
opposite end and under the jurisdiction of this "racial elite," concentration
camps existed for the sake of "better demonstration of the laws of inheri-
tance and race.""^ on the strength of this "living organization," the Nazis
could dispense with dogmatism and offer friendship to Semitic peoples, like
the Arabs, or enter into alliances with the very representatives of the Yellow
Danger, the Japanese. The reality of a race society, the formation of an
elite selected from an allegedly racial viewpoint, would indeed have been
a better safeguard for the doctrine of racism than the finest scientific or
pseudo-scientific proof.
The policy-makers of Bolshevism show the same superiority to their own
avowed dogmas. They are quite capable of interrupting every existing class
struggle with a sudden alliance with capitalism without undermining the
reliability of their cadres or committing treason against their belief in class
struggle. The dichotomous principle of class struggle having become an
organizational device, having, as it were, petrified into uncompromising
hostility against the whole world through the secret police cadres in Russia
"" Himmler originally selected the candidates of the SS from photographs. Later
a Race Commission, before which the applicant had to appear in person, approved or
disapproved of his racial appearance. See Himmler on "Organization and Obligation of
the SS and the Police," Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.
'" Himmler was well aware of the fact that it was one of his "most important and
lasting accomplishments" to have transformed the racial question from "a negative
concept based on matter-of-course antisemitism" into "an organizational task for
building up the SS" {Der Reichsfiihrer SS iind Chef der deutschen Polizei, "exclusively
for use within the police"; undated). Thus, "for the first time, the racial question had
been placed into, or. better still, had become the focal point, going far beyond the
negative concept underlying the natural hatred of Jews. The revolutionary idea of
the Fuehrer had been infused with warm lifeblood" {Der Weg der SS. Der Reichs-
fiihrer SS. SS-Hauptamt-Schulungsamt. Dust jacket: "Not for publication," undated,
p. 25).
'"As soon as he was appointed chief of the SS in 1929, Himmler introduced the
pnnciple of racial selection and marriage laws and added: "The SS knows very well
that this order is of great significance. Taunts, sneers or misunderstanding don't touch
us: the future is ours." Quoted from d'Alquen, op. cit. And again, fourteen years later,
in his speech at Kharkov {Nazi Conspiracy. IV, 572 ff.), Himmler reminds his SS
leaders that we were the first really to solve the problem of blood by action . . .
and by problem of blood, we of course do not mean antisemitism. Antisemitism is
exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is
nJ^T'^h '^'""''.""^- -But for us the question of blood was a reminder of our
own^worth, a reminder of what is actually the basis holding this German people to-
"^ Himmler. op. cit.. Nazi Conspiracy. IV. 616 ff.
THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENT 387
and the Comintern agents abroad, Bolshevik policy has become remarkably
free of "prejudices."
It is this freedom from the content of their own ideologies which char-
acterizes the highest rank of the totalitarian hierarchy. These men consider
everything and everybody in terms of organization, and this includes the
Leader who to them is neither an inspired talisman nor the one who is in-
fallibly right, but the simple consequence of this type of organization; he
is needed, not as a person, but as a function, and as such he is indispensable
to the movement. In contrast, however, to other despotic forms of govern-
ment, where frequently a clique rules and the despot plays only the repre-
sentative role of a puppet ruler, totalitarian leaders are actually free to do
whatever they please and can count on the loyalty of their entourage even
if they choose to murder them.
The more technical reason for this suicidal loyalty is that succession to
the supreme office is not regulated by any inheritance or other laws. A suc-
cessful palace revolt would have as disastrous results for the movement as
a whole as a military defeat. It is in the nature of the movement that once
the Leader has assumed his office, the whole organization is so absolutely
identified with him that any admission of a mistake or removal from office
would break the spell of infallibility which surrounds the office of the
Leader and spell doom to all those connected with the movement. It is not
the truthfulness of the Leader's words but the infallibility of his actions
which is the basis for the structure. Without it and in the heat of a discus-
sion which presumes fallibility, the whole fictitious world of totalitarianism
goes to pieces, overwhelmed at once by the factuality of the real world which
only the movement steered in an infallibly right direction by the Leader was
able to ward off.
However, the loyalty of those who believe neither in ideological cliches
nor in the infallibility of the Leader also has deeper, nontechnical reasons.
What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in human omnipo-
tence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests
on the solid conviction that everything is possible. It is true that these men,
few in number, are not easily caught in their own specific lies and that they
do not necessarily believe in racism or economics, in the conspiracy of the
Jews or of Wall Street. Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent
conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous convic-
tion that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior
organization will certainly destroy. Confident that power of organization
can destroy power of substance, as the violence of a well-organized gang
might rob a rich man of ill-guarded wealth, they constantly underestimate
the substantial power of stable communities and overestimate the driving
force of a movement. Since, moreover, they do not actually believe in the
factual existence of a world conspiracy against them, but use it only as an
organizational device, they fail to understand that their own conspiracy may
eventually provoke the whole world into uniting against them.
Yet no matter how the delusion of human omnipotence through organiza-
jtgg TOTALITARIANISM
lion is ultimately defeated, within the movement its practical consequence
is that the entourage of the Leader, in case of disagreement with him, will
never be very sure of their own opinions, since they believe sincerely that
their disagreements do not really matter, that even the maddest device has
a fair chance of success if properly organized. The point of their loyalty is
not that they believe the Leader is infallible, but that they are convinced that
everybody who commands the instruments of violence with the superior
methods of totalitarian organization can become infallible. This delusion is
greatly strengthened when totalitarian regimes hold the power to demonstrate
the relativity of success and failure, and to show how a loss in substance
can become a gain in organization. (The fantastic mismanagement of indus-
trial enterprise in Soviet Russia led to the atomization of the working class,
and the terrifying mistreatment of civilian prisoners in Eastern territories
under Nazi occupation, though it caused a "deplorable loss of labor,"
"thinking in terms of generations, [was] not to be regretted."^'"*) More-
over, the decision regarding success and failure under totalitarian circum-
stances is very largely a matter of organized and terrorized public opinion.
In a totally fictitious world, failures need not be recorded, admitted, and
remembered. Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the
existence of the nontotalitarian world.
"* Himmler in his speech at Posen, Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Totalitarianism in Power
WHEN A MOVEMENT, international in organization, all-comprehensive in
its ideological scope, and global in its political aspiration, seizes power
in one country, it obviously puts itself in a paradoxical situation. The socialist
movement was spared this crisis, first, because the national question — and
that meant the strategical problem involved in the revolution — had been
curiously neglected by Marx and Engels, and, secondly, because it faced
governmental problems only after the first World War had divested the Sec-
ond International of its authority over the national members, which every-
where had accepted the primacy of national sentiments over international
solidarity as an unalterable fact. In other words, when the time came for
the socialist movements to seize power in their respective countries, they
had already been transformed into national parties.
This transformation never occurred in the totalitarian, the Bolshevik and
the Nazi movements. At the time it seized power the danger to the move-
ment lay in the fact that, on one hand, it might become "ossified" by taking
over the state machine and frozen into a form of absolute government,^
and that, on the other hand, its freedom of movement might be limited
by the borders of the territory in which it came to power. To a totalitarian
movement, both dangers are equally deadly: a development toward abso-
lutism would put an end to the movement's interior drive, and a develop-
ment toward nationalism would frustrate its exterior expansion, without
which the movement cannot survive. The form of government the two
movements developed, or, rather, which almost automatically developed
from their double claim to total domination and global rule, is best char-
acterized by Trotsky's slogan of "permanent revolution" although Trotsky's
theory was no more than a socialist forecast of a series of revolutions, from
the antifeudal bourgeois to the antibourgeois proletarian, which would
spread from one country to the other.^ only the term itself suggests "per-
' The Nazis fully realized that the seizure of power might lead to the establishment
of absolutism. "National Socialism, however, has not spearheaded the struggle against
liberalism in order to bog down in absolutism and start the game all over again"
(Werner Best, Die deutsche Polizei, p. 20). The warning expressed here, as in count-
less other places, is directed against the state's claim to be absolute.
-Trotsky's theory, first pronounced in 1905, did of course not differ from the revo-
lutionary strategy of all Leninists in whose eyes "Russia herself was merely the first
domain, the first rampart, of international revolution: her interests were to be sub-
ordinated to the supernational strategy of militant socialism. For the time being,
however, the boundaries of both Russia and victorious socialism were the same"
(Isaac Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography. New York and London, 1949, p. 243).
JQQ TOTALITARIANISM
mancncy." with all its semi-anarchistic implications, and is, strictly speak-
ing, a misnomer; yet even Lenin was more impressed by the term than by
its theoretical content. In the Soviet Union, at any rate, revolutions, in the
form of general purges, became a permanent institution of the Stalin
regime after 1934.'' Here, as in other instances, Stalin concentrated his
attacks on Trotsky's half-forgotten slogan precisely because he had decided
to use this technique.' In Nazi Germany, a similar tendency toward per-
manent revolution was clearly discernible though the Nazis did not have
time to realize it to the same extent. Characteristically enough, their "per-
manent revolution" also started with the liquidation of the party faction
which had dared to proclaim openly the "next stage of the revolution"^ —
'I he ycitr 1934 is significant because of the new Party statute, announced at the
Seventeenth Party Congress, which provided that "periodic . . . purges are to [be] car-
ried out for the systematic cleansing of the Party." (Quoted from A. Avtorkhanov, "So-
cial Differentiation and Contradictions in the Party," Bulletin of the Institute for the
Stuily of the USSR. Munich. February, 1956.) — The party purges during the early years
of the Russian Revolution have nothing in common with their later totalitarian perver-
sion into an instrument of permanent instability. The first purges were conducted by lo-
cal control commissions before an open forum to which party and non-party members
had free access. They were planned as a democratic control organ against bureau-
cratic corruption in the party and "were to serve as a substitute for real elections"
(Deutscher, op. cit.. pp. 233-34). — An excellent short survey of the development of
the purges can be found in Avtorkhanov's recent article which also refutes the legend
that the murder of Kirov gave rise to the new policy. The general purge had begun
before Kirov's death which was no more than a "convenient pretext to give it added
drive." In view of the many "inexplicable and mysterious" circumstances surrounding
Kirov's murder, one suspects that the "convenient pretext" was carefully planned and
executed by Stalin himself. See Khrushchev's "Speech on Stalin," New York Times,
June 5. 1956.
' Deutscher, op. cit.. p. 282, describes the first attack on Trotsky's "permanent rev-
olution" and Stalin's counterformulation of "socialism in one country" as an accident
of political maneuvering. In 1924, Stalin's "immediate purpose was to descredit Trotsky.
. Searching in Trotsky's past, the triumvirs came across the theory of 'perma-
nent revolution." which he had formulated in 1905. ... It was in the course of that
polemic that Stalin arrived at his formula of 'socialism in one country.' "
'The liquidation of the Rohm faction in June, 1934, was preceded by a short in-
terval of stabilization. At the beginning of the year, Rudolf Diels, the chief of the
political police in Berlin, could report that there were no more illegal ("revolution-
ary") arrests by the SA and that older arrests of this kind were being investigated.
{Nazi Conspiracy. U. S. Government. Washington. 1946, V, 205.) In April, 1934,
Rcichsminister of the Interior Wilhclm Frick, an old member of the Nazi Party, issued
a decree to place restrictions upon the exercise of "protective custody" (ihid., Ill, 555)
in consideration of the "stabilization of the national situation." (See Das Archiv,
m'Lo'' I'l^Vto^' ^'■* ^^'"^ '^^'^'"*=^- however, was never published (Nazi Conspiracy, VII,
1099; II 259). The political police of Prussia had prepared a special report on the ex-
cesses of the SA for Hitler in the year 1933 and suggested the prosecution of the SA
leaders named therein.
Hitler solved the situation by killing these SA leaders without legal proceedings
««^ discharging all those police officers who had opposed the SA. (See the sworn affi-
?nml.°, I n'; ''"/'■• ^' ^^'*' '" '^''' "^^""^^ he had safeguarded himself
completely against all legalization and stabilization. Among the numerous jurists who
was rl'r ^' f P'ed 'he •;National Socialist idea" only very few comprehended what
was really at stake. In this group belongs primarily Theodor Maunz, whose essay
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 391
and precisely because "the Fuehrer and his old guard knew that the real
struggle had just begun."" Here, instead of the Bolshevik concept of per-
manent revolution, we find the notion of a racial "selection which can never
stand still" thus requiring a constant radicalization of the standards by
which the selection, i.e., the extermination of the unfit, is carried outJ The
point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order
to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.
There could have been no better solution for the perplexities inherent in
the co-existence of a government and a movement, of both a totalitarian
claim and limited power in a limited territory, of ostensible membership in
a comity of nations in which each respects the other's sovereignty and claim
to world rule, than this formula stripped of its original content. For the
totalitarian ruler is confronted with a dual task which at first appears contra-
dictory to the point of absurdity: he must establish the fictitious world of
the movement as a tangible working reality of everyday life, and he must,
on the other hand, prevent this new world from developing a new stability;
for a stabilization of its laws and institutions would surely liquidate the
movement itself and with it the hope for eventual world conquest. The
totalitarian ruler must, at any price, prevent normalization from reaching the
point where a new way of life could develop — one which might, after a
time, lose its bastard qualities and take its place among the widely differ-
ing and profoundly contrasting ways of life of the nations of the earth. The
moment the revolutionary institutions became a national way of life (that
moment when Hitler's claim that Nazism is not an export commodity or
Stalin's that socialism can be built in one country, would be more than an
attempt to fool the nontotalitarian world), totalitarianism would lose its
"total" quality and become subject to the law of the nations, according to
which each possesses a specific territory, people, and historical tradition
which relates it to other nations — a plurality which ipso facto refutes every
contention that any specific form of government is absolutely valid.
Practically speaking, the paradox of totalitarianism in power is that the
possession of all instruments of governmental power and violence in one
country is not an unmixed blessing for a totalitarian movement. Its disregard
Gestalt iind Recht iter Polizei (Hamburg, 1943) is quoted with approval even by those
authors, who, like Paul Werner, belonged to the higher Fuehrer Corps of the SS.
" Robert Ley, Der Wef^ ziir Ordenshurg (undated, about 1936). "Special edition
... for the Fuehrer Corps of the Party . . . Not for free sale."
■^ Heinrich Himmler, "Die Schutzstaffel," in Griindlagen, Aiifhuii iind Wirtschafts-
ordnung des nutivmdsozhdistischen Staales, Nr. 7h. This constant radicalization of
the principle of racial selection can be found in all phases of Nazi policy. Thus, the
first to be exterminated were the full Jews, to be followed by those who were half-
Jewish and one-quarter Jewish; or first the insane, to be followed by the incurably
sick and, eventually, by all families in which there were any "incurably sick." The
"selection which can never stand still" did not stop before the SS itself, either. A
Fuehrer decree dated May 19, 1943, ordered that all men who were bound to foreigners
by family ties, marriage or friendship were to be eliminated from state, party, Wehr-
macht and economy; this affected 1,200 SS leaders (see Hoover Library Archives,
Himmler File, Folder 330).
J9:
TOTALITARIANISM
for facts, its strict adherence to the rules of a fictitious world, becomes stead-
ily more difficult to maintain, yet remains as essential as it was before. Power
means a direct confrontation with reality, and totalitarianism in power is
constantly concerned with overcoming this challenge. Propaganda and or-
ganization no longer suffice to assert that the impossible is possible, that the
incredible is true, that an insane consistency rules the world; the chief psycho-
logical support of totalitarian fiction — the active resentment of the status
quo. which the masses refused to accept as the only possible world — is no
longer there; every bit of factual information that leaks through the iron
curtain, set up against the ever-threatening flood of reality from the other,
nontotalitarian side, is a greater menace to totalitarian domination than
counterpropaganda has been to totalitarian movements.
The struggle for total domination of the total population of the earth, the
elimination of every competing nontotalitarian reality, is inherent in the
totalitarian regimes themselves; if they do not pursue global rule as their
ultimate goal, they are only too likely to lose whatever power they have
already seized. Even a single individual can be absolutely and reliably dom-
inated only under global totalitarian conditions. Ascendancy to power there-
fore means primarily the establishment of official and officially recognized
headquarters (or branches in the case of satellite countries) for the move-
ment and the acquisition of a kind of laboratory in which to carry out the
experiment with or rather against reality, the experiment in organizing a
people for ultimate purposes which disregard individuality as well as na-
tionality, under conditions which are admittedly not perfect but are sufficient
for important partial results. Totalitarianism in power uses the state admin-
istration for its long-range goal of world conquest and for the direction of
the branches of the movement; it establishes the secret police as the execu-
tors and guardians of its domestic experiment in constantly transforming
reality into fiction; and it finally erects concentration camps as special
laboratories to carry through its experiment in total domination.
i: The So-called Totalitarian State
HISTORY TEACHES THAT rise to power and responsibility affects deeply the
nature of revolutionary parties. Experience and common sense were perfectly
justified in expecting that totalitarianism in power would gradually lose its
revolutionary momentum and Utopian character, that the everyday business
of government and the possession of real power would moderate the pre-
power claims of the movements and gradually destroy the fictitious world
of their organizations. It seems, after all, to be in the very nature of things,
personal or public, that extreme demands and goals are checked by ob-
jective conditions; and reality, taken as a whole, is only to a very small
extent determined by the inclination toward fiction of a mass society of
atomized individuals.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 393
Many of the errors of the nontotalitarian world in its diplomatic deal-
ings with totalitarian governments (the most conspicuous ones being con-
fidence in the Munich pact with Hitler and the Yalta agreements with Stalin)
can clearly be traced to an experience and a common sense which suddenly
proved to have lost its grasp on reality. Contrary to all expectations, im-
portant concessions and greatly heightened international prestige did not
help to reintegrate the totalitarian countries into the comity of nations or
induce them to abandon their lying complaint that the whole world had
solidly lined up against them. And far from preventing this, diplomatic vic-
tories clearly precipitated their recourse to the instruments of violence and
resulted in all instances in increased hostility against the powers that had
shown themselves willing to compromise.
These disappointments suffered by statesmen and diplomats find their
parallel in the earlier disillusionment of benevolent observers and sympa-
thizers with the new revolutionary governments. What they had looked for-
ward to was the establishment of new institutions and the creation of a new
code of law which, no matter how revolutionary in content, would lead to a
stabilization of conditions and thus check the momentum of the totalitarian
movements at least in the countries where they had seized power. What
happened instead was that terror increased both in Soviet Russia and Nazi
Germany in inverse ratio to the existence of internal political opposition, so
that it looked as though political opposition had not been the pretext of
terror (as liberal accusers of the regime were wont to assert) but the last
impediment to its full fury.^
Even more disturbing was the handling of the constitutional question by
the totalitarian regimes. In the early years of their power the Nazis let loose
an avalanche of laws and decrees, but they never bothered to abolish offi-
** It is common knowledge that in Russia "the repression of socialists and anarchists
had grown in severity in the same ratio as the country became pacified" (Anton Ciliga,
The Russian Enigma, London, 1940, p. 244). Deutscher, op. tit., p. 218, thinks that
the reason for the vanishing of the "libertarian spirit of the revolution" at the moment
of victory could be found in a changed attitude of the peasants: they turned against
Bolshevism "the more resolutely the more they became confident that the power of
the landlords and the White generals had been broken." This explanation seems rather
weak in view of the dimensions which terror was to assume after 1930. It also fails
to take into account that full terror did not break loose in the twenties but in the
thirties, when the opposition of the peasant classes was no longer an active factor in
the situation. — Khrushchev, too (op. cit.), notes that "extreme repressive measures
were not used" against the opposition during the fight against the Trotskyites and the
Bukharinites, but that "the repression against them began" much later after they had
long been defeated.
Terror by the Nazi regime reached its peak during the war, when the German na-
tion was actually "united." Its preparation goes back to 1936 when all organized in-
terior resistance had vanished and Himmler proposed an expansion of the concentra-
tion camps. Characteristic of this spirit of oppression regardless of resistance is Himm-
ler's speech at Kharkov before the SS leaders in 1943: "We have only one task, . . .
to carry on the racial struggle without mercy. . . . We will never let that excellent
weapon, the dread and terrible reputation which preceded us in the battles for Khar-
kov, fade, but will constantly add new meaning to it" {Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 572 ff.).
^Q^ TOTALITARIANISM
cially the Weimar constitution; they even left the civil services more or less
intact— a fact which induced many native and foreign observers to hope for
restraint of the party and for rapid normaUzation of the new regime. But
when with the issuance of the Nuremberg Laws this development had come
to an end, it turned out that the Nazis themselves showed no concern what-
soever about their own legislation. Rather, there was only the constant
going ahead on the road toward ever-new fields," so that finally the "pur-
pose and scope of the secret state police" as well as of all other state or
party institutions created by the Nazis could "in no manner be covered by
the laws and regulations issued for them."" In practice, this permanent
state of lawlessness found ｅxpression in the fact that "a number of valid reg-
ulations [were] no longer made public."'" Theoretically, it corresponded to
Hitler's dictum that "the total state must not know any difference between
law and ethics";" because if it assumed that the valid law is identical with
the ethics common to all and springing from their consciences, then there
is indeed no further necessity for public decrees. The Soviet Union, where the
prerevolutionary civil services had been exterminated in the revolution and
the regime had paid scant attention to constitutional questions during the
period of revolutionary change, even went to the trouble of issuing an entirely
new and very elaborate constitution in 1936 ("a veil of liberal phrases and
premises over the guillotine in the background"'-), an event which was
hailed in Russia and abroad as the conclusion of the revolutionary period.
Yet the publication of the constitution turned out to be the beginning of the
gigantic superpurge which in nearly two years liquidated the existing ad-
ministration and erased all traces of normal life and economic recovery
which had developed in the four years after the liquidation of kulaks and
" See Theodor Maunz, op. cii., pp. 5 and 49. — How little the Nazis thought of the
laws and regulations they themselves had issued, and which were regularly published
by W. Hoche under the title of Die Gesetzgehung des Kabinetts Hitler (Berlin, 1933
ff. ). may be gathered from a random remark made by one of their constitutional
jurists. He felt that in spite of the absence of a comprehensive new legal order there nev-
ertheless had occurred a "comprehensive reform" (see Ernst R. Huber, "Die deutsche
Polizei," in Zeitschrijt fiir die gesamtc Stautswissensclutft, Band 101, 1940/1, p. 273 ff.).
'° Maunz, op. cil., p. 49. To my knowledge, Maunz is the only one among Nazi
authors who has mentioned this circumstance and sufficiently emphasized it. only by
going through the five volumes of Verfiigungeii, Anordnimgen. Bekanntgahen, which
were collected and printed during the war by the party chancellery on instructions of
Martin Bormann, is it possible to obtain an insight into this secret legislation by which
Germany in fact was governed. According to the preface, the volumes were "meant
solely for internal party work and to be treated as confidential." Four of these evi-
dently very rare volumes, compared to which the Hoche collection of the legislation
of Hitler's cabinet is merely a fa?ade, are in the Hoover Library.
"This was the Fuehrer's "warning" to the jurists in 1933, quoted by Hans Frank,
Naimnalsoziali.uische Leitsdize fiir ein neues deutsches Strafrecht, Zweiter Teil,
1936, p. 8.
' Deutscher, op. cit.. p. 381.— There were earlier attempts at establishing a consti-
tution, m 1918 and 1924. The constitutional reform in 1944 under which some of the
soviet Republics were to have their own foreign representatives and their own armies,
was a tactical maneuver designed to assure the Soviet Union of some additional votes
m the United Nations.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 395
enforced collectivization of the rural population.'^ From then on, the con-
stitution of 1936 played exactly the same role the Weimar constitution played
under the Nazi regime: it was completely disregarded but never abolished;
the only difference was that Stalin could afford one more absurdity — with
the exception of Vishinsky, all those who had drafted the never-repudiated
constitution were executed as traitors.
What strikes the observer of the totalitarian state is certainly not its mono-
lithic structure. on the contrary, all serious students of the subject agree at
least on the co-existence (or the conflict) of a dual authority, the party and
the state. Many, moreover, have stressed the peculiar "shapelessness" of the
totalitarian government.''* Thomas Masaryk saw early that "the so-called
Bolshevik system has never been anything but a complete absence of sys-
tem";'"' and it is perfectly true that "even an expert would be driven mad
if he tried to unravel the relationships between Party and State" in the Third
Reich.'" It has also been frequently observed that the relationship between
the two sources of authority, between state and party, is one of ostensible
and real authority, so that the government machine is usually pictured as
the powerless fagade which hides and protects the real power of the party. '"^
'■'See Deutscher, op. cit., p. 375. — Upon close reading of Stalin's speech concern-
ing the constitution (his report to the Extraordinary Eighth Soviet Congress of No-
vember 25, 1936) it becomes evident that it was never meant to be definitive. Stalin
stated explicitly: "This is the framework of our constitution at the given historical
moment. Thus the draft of the new constitution represents the sum total of the road
already traveled, the sum total of achievements already existing." In other words,
the constitution was already dated the moment it was announced, and was merely of
historical interest. That this is not just an arbitrary interpretation is proved by Molo-
tov, who in his speech about the constitution picks up Stalin's theme and underlines
the provisional nature of the whole matter: "We have realized only the first, the lower
phase, of Communism. Even this first phase of Communism, Socialism, is by no means
completed; only its skeletal structure has been erected" (see Die Verfassung des
Sozialistisclien Stautes der Arbeiter und Baiiern, Editions Promethee, Strasbourg,
1937, pp. 42 and 84).
'^ "German constitutional life is thus characterized by its utter shapelessness, in con-
trast to Italy" (Franz Neumann, Behemoth, 1942, Appendix, p. 521).
' ' Quoted from Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, New York
1939, p. 695.
'"Stephen H. Roberts. The House that Hitler Built, London, 1939, p. 72.
"Justice Robert H. Jackson, in his opening speech at the Nuremberg Trials, based
his description of the political structure of Nazi Germany consistently on the co-
existence of "two governments in Germany — the real and the ostensible. The forms
of the German Republic were maintained for a time and it was the outward and vis-
ible government. But the real authority in the State was outside of and above the law
and rested in the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party" (Nazi Conspiracy, I, 125). See
also the distinction of Roberts, op. cit., p. 101, between the party and a shadow state:
"Hitler obviously leans toward increasing the duplication of functions."
Students of Nazi Germany seem agreed that the state had only ostensible authority.
For the only exception, see Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State, New York and London,
1941, who claims the co-existence of a "normative and a prerogative state" living in
constant friction as "competitive and not complementary parts of the German Reich."
According to Fraenkel, the normative state was maintained by the Nazis for the pro-
tection of the capitalist order and private property and had full authority in all eco-
nomic matters, while the prerogative state of the party ruled supreme in all political
matters.
jy^ TOTALITARIANISM
All levels of the administrative machine in the Third Reich were subject
to a curious duplication of offices. With a fantastic thoroughness, the Nazis
made sure that every function of the state administration would be duplicated
bv some party organ: '^ the Weimar division of Germany into states and
provinces was duplicated by the Nazi division into Gaue whose borderlines,
however, did not coincide, so that every given locality belonged, even geo-
graphically, to two altogether different administrative units.^" Nor was the
duplication of functions abandoned when, after 1933, outstanding Nazis
occupied the official ministries of the state; when Frick, for instance, became
Minister of the Interior or Guerthner Minister of Justice. These old and
trusted party members, once they had embarked upon official nonparty
careers, lost their power and became as uninfluential as other civil servants.
Both came under the factual authority of Himmler, the rising chief of the
pt^licc, who normally would have been subordinate to the Minister of the
Interior.-" Better known abroad has been the fate of the old German Foreign
Affairs Office in the Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis left its personnel nearly
untouched and of course never abolished it; yet at the same time they main-
tained the prepower Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Party, headed by Rosen-
berg;-' and since this office had specialized in maintaining contacts with
Fascist organizations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, they set up another
'"■'For those positions of state power which the National Socialists could not oc-
cupy with their own people, they created corresponding 'shadow offices' in their own
party orpani/ation, in this way setting up a second state beside the state . . ." (Konrad
Hcidcn, Per liichrcr: Hitler's Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, p. 616).
'"O. C. Giles, The Gestapo. Oxford Pamphlets on World Affairs, No. 36, 1940,
describes the constant overlapping of party and state departments.
•"Characteristic is a memo of Minister of the Interior Frick, who resented the fact
thai Himmler, the leader of the SS, should have superior power. See Nazi Conspiracy,
111. 547.— Noteworthy in this respect also are Rosenberg's notes about a discussion
with Hitler in 1942: Rosenberg had never before the war held a state position but
belonged to the intimate circle around Hitler. Now that he had become Reichsminister
for the Eastern Occupied Territories, he was constantly confronted with "direct ac-
tions" of other plenipotentiaries (chiefly SS-men) who overlooked him because he
now belonged to the ostensible apparatus of the state. See ibid., IV, 65 ff. The same
happened to Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland. There were only two cases
in which the attainment of ministerial rank did not entail any loss of power and
prestige: that of Minister of Propaganda Goebbels, and of Minister of the Interior
Himmler. As regards Himmler, we possess a memorandum, presumably from the
year 1935, which illustrates the systematic singlemindedness of the Nazis in regulating
the relations between party and state. This memorandum, which apparently origi-
nated in Hitler's immediate entourage and was found among the correspondence of
the Reichstuliiitlaniiir of the Fuehrer and the Gestapo, contains a warning against
making Himmler state secretary of the Ministry of the Interior because in that case
he could "no longer be a political leader" and "would be alienated from the party."
Here, too, we find mention of the technical principle regulating the relations between
party and state: "A Reichsleiter [a high party functionary] must not be subordinated
to a Reichsminister [a high state functionary]." (The undated, unsigned memorandum,
entitled Die f>eheime Staatspolizei. can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library,
File P. Wiedemann.)
" See the "Brief Report on Activities of Rosenberg's Foreign Affairs Bureau of the
Party from 1933 to 1943." ihid. MI, 27 ff.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 397
organ to compete with the office in the Wilhelmstrasse, the so-called Ribben-
trop Bureau, which handled foreign affairs in the West, and survived the
departure of its chief as Ambassador to England, that is, his incorporation
into the official apparatus of the Wilhelmstrasse. Finally, in addition to these
party institutions, the Foreign Office received another duplication in the
form of an SS Office, which was responsible "for negotiations with all racially
Germanic groups in Denmark, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands.""
These examples prove that for the Nazis the duplication of offices was a
matter of principle and not just an expedient for providing jobs for party
members.
The same division between a real and an ostensible government developed
from very different beginnings in Soviet Russia.-^ The ostensible government
originally sprang from the All-Russian Soviet Congress, which during the
civil war lost its influence and power to the Bolshevik party. This process
started when the Red Army was made autonomous and the secret political
police re-established as an organ of the party, and not of the Soviet Con-
gress;-^ it was completed in 1923, during the first year of Stalin's General
Secretaryship.-"' From then on, the Soviets became the shadow government
in whose midst, through cells formed by Bolshevik party members, func-
tioned the representatives of real power who were appointed and responsible
to the Central Committee in Moscow. The crucial point in the later de-
velopment was not the conquest of the Soviets by the party, but the fact
that "although it would have presented no difficulties, the Bolsheviks did
not abolish the Soviets and used them as the decorative outward symbol of
their authority."-''
The co-existence of an ostensible and a real government therefore was
partly the outcome of the revolution itself and preceded Stalin's totalitarian
dictatorship. Yet while the Nazis simply retained the existing administration
and deprived it of all power, Stalin had to revive his shadow government,
which in the early thirties had lost all its functions and was half forgotten
'^'^ Based on a Fuehrer decree of August 12, 1942. See Verfiigungen, Anordnungen,
Bekanntgaben, op. cit., Nr. A 54/42.
^^ "Behind the ostensible government was a real government," which Victor Krav-
chenko (/ Chose Freedom: The Personal Life of a Soviet Official, New York, 1946,
p. Ill) saw in the "secret police system."
^'' See Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism, London, 1934, chapter vi.
"There are in reality two political edifices in Russia that rise parallel to one another:
the shadow government of the Soviets and the de facto government of the Bolshevik
Party."
-'■ Deutscher, op. cit., pp. 255-256, sums up Stalin's report to the Twelfth Party Con-
gress about the work of the personnel department during his first year in the General
Secretariat: "The year before only 27 per cent of the regional leaders of the trade
unions were members of the party. At present 57 per cent of them were Communists.
The percentage of Communists in the management of co-operatives had risen from 5
to 50 per cent; and in the commanding staffs of the armed forces from 16 to 24. The
same happened in all other institutions which Stalin described as the 'transmission
belts' connecting the party with the people."
^® Arthur Rosenberg, op. cit., loc. cit.
fgff TOTALITARIANISM
in Russia; he introduced the Soviet constitution as the symbol of the exist-
ence as well as the powerlessness of the Soviets. (None of its paragraphs
ever had the slightest practical significance for life and jurisdiction in Rus-
sia. ) The ostensible Russian government, utterly lacking the glamour of
tradition so necessary for a fagade, apparently needed the sacred halo of
written law. The totalitarian defiance of law and legality (which "in spite
of the greatest changes . . . still [remain] the ｅxpression of a permanently
desired order") -'' found in the written Soviet constitution, as in the never-
repudiated Weimar constitution, a permanent background for its own law-
lessness, the permanent challenge to the nontotalitarian world and its stand-
ards whose helplessness and impotence could be demonstrated daily.-^
Duplication of offices and division of authority, the co-existence of real
and ostensible power, are sufficient to create confusion but not to explain
the "shapelessness" of the whole structure. one should not forget that only
a building can have a structure, but that a movement — if the word is to be
taken ;ls seriously and as literally as the Nazis meant it — can have only a
direction, and that any form of legal or governmental structure can be only
a handicap to a movement which is being propelled with increasing speed
in a certain direction. Even in the prepower stage the totalitarian movements
represented those masses that were no longer willing to live in any kind of
structure, regardless of its nature; masses that had started to move in order
to flood the legal and geographical borders securely determined by the gov-
ernment. Therefore, judged by our conceptions of government and state
structure, these movements, so long as they find themselves physically still
limited to a specific territory, necessarily must try to destroy all structure,
and for this willful destruction a mere duplication of all offices into party
and state institutions would not be sufficient. Since duplication involves a
relationship between the fagade of the state and the inner core of the party,
it, too. would eventually result in some kind of structure, where the rela-
tionship between party and state would automatically end in a legal regula-
tion which restricts and stabilizes their respective authority."*
" Maunz, op. cit.. p. 12.
'" The jurist and Obersturmbannfuehrer, Professor R. Hoehn, has expressed this in
the following words: "And there was still another thing which foreigners, but Ger-
mans, too, had to get used to: namely, that the task of the secret state police . . .
was taken over by a community of persons who originated within the movement, and
continue to be rooted in it. That the term state police actually makes no allowance
for this fact shall be mentioned here only in passing" (Gnnutfragen der deutschen
Polizfi. Report on the Constitutive Session of the Committee on Police Law of the
Academy for German Law, October II. 1936. Hamburg, 1937. with contributions by
Frank. Himmler and Hoehn).
'" For example, such an attempt to circumscribe the separate responsibilities and to
counter the "anarchy of authority" was made by Hans Frank in Recht iind Verwaltung,
1939. and again in an address titled Technik des Stciales, in 1941. He expressed the
opinion that "legal guarantees ' were not the "prerogative of liberal systems of gov-
ernment" and that the administration should continue to be governed, as before, by
the laws of the Reich, which now were inspired and guided by the program of the
National Socialist party. It was precisely because he wanted to prevent such a new
legal order at any price that Hitler never acknowledged the program of the Nazi
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 399
As a matter of fact, duplication of offices, seemingly the result of the
party-state problem in all one-party dictatorships, is only the most conspicu-
ous sign of a more complicated phenomenon that is better defined as multi-
plication of offices than duplication. The Nazis were not content to establish
Gone in addition to the old provinces, but also introduced a great many
other geographical divisions in accordance with the different party organ-
izations: the territorial units of the SA were neither co-extensive with the
Gaue nor with the provinces; they differed, moreover, from those of the SS
and none of them corresponded to the zones dividing the Hitler Youth. ^"
To this geographical confusion must be added the fact that the original
relationship between real and ostensible power repeated itself throughout,
albeit in an ever-changing way. The inhabitant of Hitler's Third Reich
lived not only under the simultaneous and often conflicting authorities of
competing powers, such as the civil services, the party, the SA, and the
SS; he could never be sure and was never explicitly told whose authority
he was supposed to place above all others. He had to develop a kind of
sixth sense to know at a given moment whom to obey and whom to disregard.
Those, on the other hand, who had to execute the orders which the leader-
ship, in the interest of the movement, regarded as genuinely necessary — in
contradistinction to governmental measures, such orders were of course en-
trusted only to the party's elite formations — were not much better off.
Mostly such orders were "intentionally vague, and given in the expectation
that their recipient would recognize the intent of the order giver, and
act accordingly";^' for the elite formations were by no means merely obli-
party. Of party members who made such proposals he was wont to speak with con-
tempt, describing them as "eternally tied to the past," as persons "who are unable
to leap across their own shadow" (Felix Kersten, Totenkopf unci Tretie, Hamburg).
'" "The 32 Gaue ... do not coincide with the administrative or military regions,
or even the 21 divisions of the SA, or the 10 regions of the SS, or the 23 zones of
the Hitler Youth. . . . Such discrepancies are the more remarkable because there is
no reason for them" (Roberts, op. tit., p. 98).
" Nuremberg Documents, PS 3063 in the Centre de Documentation Juive in Paris.
The document is a report of the supreme party court about "events and party court
proceedings connected with the antisemitic demonstrations of November 9. 1938." on
the basis of investigations by the police and the office of the Attorney General the
supreme court came to the conclusion that "the verbal instructions of the Reichs-
propagandaleiter must have been understood by all party leaders to mean that, to
the outside, the party did not wish to appear as the instigator of the demonstration,
but in reality was to organize and carry it through. . . . The re-examination of the
command echelons has shown . . . that the active National Socialist molded in the
prepower struggle [Kanipfzeit] takes it for granted that actions in which the party
does not wish to appear in the role of organizer are not ordered with unequivocal clar-
ity and down to the last detail. Hence he is accustomed to understand that an order
may mean more than its verbal content, just as it has more or less become routine
with the order giver, in the interests of the party . . . not to say everything and only
to intimate what he wants to achieve by the order. . . . Thus, the . . . orders —
for instance, not the Jew Griinspan but all Jewry must be blamed for the death of
Party Comrade vom Rath, . . . pistols should be brought along, . . . every
SA-man now ought to know what he had to do — were understood by a number of
subleaders to mean that Jewish blood would now have to be shed for the blood of
^QQ TOTALITARIANISM
gated to obey the orders of the Fuehrer (this was mandatory for all existing
organizations anyway), but "to execute the will of the leadership."-^- And,
as can be gathered from the lengthy proceedings concerning "excesses" be-
fore the party courts, this was by no means one and the same thing. The
only difference was that the elite formations, thanks to their special indoc-
trination for such purposes, had been trained to understand that certain
"hints meant more than their mere verbal contents." ^^
Technically speaking, the movement within the apparatus of totalitarian
domination derives its mobility from the fact that the leadership constantly
shifts the actual center of power, often to other organizations, but without
dissolving or even publicly exposing the groups that have thus been deprived
of their power. In the early period of the Nazi regime, immediately after the
Reichstag fire, the SA was the real authority and the party the ostensible one;
power then shifted from the SA to the SS and finally from the SS to the Se-
curity Service." The point is that none of the organs of power was ever de-
prived of its right to pretend that it embodied the will of the Leader.^" But not
only was the will of the Leader so unstable that compared with it the whims of
Oriental despots are a shining example of steadfastness; the consistent and
ever-changing division between real secret authority and ostensible open rep-
resentation made the actual seat of power a mystery by definition, and this
to such an extent that the members of the ruling clique themselves could
never be absolutely sure of their own position in the secret power hierarchy.
Alfred Rosenberg, for instance, despite his long career in the party and his
impressive accumulation of ostensible power and offices in the party hier-
archy, still talked about the creation of a series of Eastern European States
Party Comrade vom Rath. . . ." Particularly significant is the end of the report, in
which the supreme party court quite openly takes exception to these methods: "It is
another question whether, in the interest of discipline, the order that is intentionally
vague, and piven in the expectation that its recipient will recognize the intent of the
order giver and act accordingly, must not be relegated to the past." Here, too, there
were persons who, in Hitler's words, "were unable to leap across their own shadow" and
insisted upon legislative measures, because they did not understand that not the order
hut the will of the Fuehrer was the supreme law. Here, the difference between the
mentality of the elite formations and the party agencies is particularly clear.
'* Best (op. lit.) puts it this way: "So long as the police execute this will of the
leadership, they are acting within the law; if the will of the leadership is transgressed,
then not the police, but a member of the police, has committed a violation."
' ' Sec footnote 31.
" In 1933, after the Reichstag fire, "SA leaders were more powerful than Gauleiter.
They also refused obedience to Goring." See Rudolf Diels's sworn affidavit in Nazi
Cnnspiracy. V. 224; Diets was chief of the political police under Goring.
'•The SA obviously resented its loss of rank and power in the Nazi hierarchy and
tried desperately to keep up appearances. In their magazines— Dt-r SA-Mann, Das
^rchiv. f/c— many indications, veiled and unveiled, of this impotent rivalry with the
•Vi can be found. More interesting is that Hitler still in 1936, when the SA had al-
ready lost Its power, would assure them in a speech: "All that you are, you are
through me; and a I that I am, I am through you alone." See Ernst Bayer, Die SA.
Berlin. 1938. Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV 782
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 401
as a security wall against Moscow at a time when those invested with real
power had already decided that no state structure would succeed the defeat
of the Soviet Union and that the population of the Eastern occupied territories
had become definitely stateless and could therefore be exterminated.^^ In
other words, since knowledge of whom to obey and a comparatively perma-
nent settlement of hierarchy would introduce an element of stability which
is essentially absent from totalitarian rule, the Nazis constantly disavowed
real authority whenever it had come into the open and created new instances
of government compared with which the former became a shadow govern-
ment — a game which obviously could go indefinitely. one of the most im-
portant technical differences between the Soviet and the National Socialist
system is that Stalin, whenever he shifted the power emphasis within his own
movement from one apparatus to another, had the tendency to liquidate the
apparatus together with its staff, while Hitler, in spite of his contemptuous
comments on people who "are unable to leap across their own shadows," ^'^
was perfectly willing to continue using these shadows even though in another
function.
The multiplication of offices .was extremely useful for the constant shift-
ing of power; the longer, moreover, a totalitarian regime stays in power, the
greater becomes the number of offices and the possibility of jobs exclusively
dependent upon the movement, since no office is abolished when its author-
ity is liquidated. The Nazi regime started this multiplication with an initial
co-ordination of all existing associations, societies, and institutions. The
interesting thing in this nation-wide manipulation was that co-ordination
did not signify incorporation into the already existing respective party or-
ganizations. The result was that up to the end of the regime, there were not
one, but two National Socialist student organizations, two Nazi women's
organizations, two Nazi organizations for university professors, lawyers,
physicians, and so forth.^** It was by no means sure, however, that in all
cases the original party organization would be more powerful than its co-
"' Compare Rosenberg's speech of June, 1941: "I believe that our political task will
consist of . . . organizing these peoples in certain types of political bodies . . . and
building them up against Moscow" with the "Undated Memorandum for the Adminis-
tration in the Occupied Eastern Territories": "With the dissolution of the USSR after
her defeat, no body politic is left in the Eastern territories and therefore ... no
citizenship for their population" (Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg,
1947, XXVI, p. 616 and 604, respectively).
'•^''Hitlers Tischpespriichc, Bonn, 1951, p. 213. Usually, Hitler meant some high-
ranking Nazi functionaries who had their reservations about murdering all those with-
out compunctions, whom he described as "human junk [Gesox]" (see p. 248 ff. and
passim ) .
■''** For the variety of overlapping party organizations, see Rang-itnd Organisations-
tiste der NSDAP, Stuttgart, 1947, and Nazi Conspiracy, I, 178, which distinguishes four
main categories: 1. Glicdernngen der NSDAP, which had existed before its rise to
power; 2. Angeschlossenc Verhiinde der NSDAP, which comprise those societies which
had been co-ordinated; 3. Bet rente Organisationen der NSDAP; and 4. Weilere national-
sozialistische Organisationen. In nearly every category, one finds a different students',
women's, teachers', and workers' organization.
40;' TOTALITARIANISM
ordinatcd counterpart.^'" Nor could anybody predict with any assurance
which party organ would rise in the ranks of the internal party hierarchy.'^
A classical instance of this planned shapelessness occurred in the organ-
ization of scientific antisemitism. In 1933, an institute for study of the
Jewish question ( Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage) was founded in
Munich which, since the Jewish question presumably had determined the
whole of German history, quickly enlarged into a research institute for mod-
ern German history. Headed by the well-known historian Walter Frank,
it transformed the traditional universities into seats of ostensible learning
or fai,\idcs. In 1940, another institute for the study of the Jewish question
was founded in Frankfurt, headed by Alfred Rosenberg, whose standing as
a party member was considerably higher. The Munich institute consequently
was relegated to a shadowy existence; the Frankfurt, not the Munich insti-
tution was supposed to receive the treasures from looted European Jewish
collections and become the seat of a comprehensive library on Judaism.
Yet, when these collections actually arrived in Germany a few years later,
their most precious parts went not to Frankfurt, but to Berlin, where they
were received by Himmler's special Gestapo department for the liquidation
(not merely the study) of the Jewish question, which was headed by Eich-
mann. None of the older institutions was ever abolished, so that in 1944 the
situation was this: behind the fagade of the universities' history departments
stood threateningly the more real power of the Munich institute, behind
which rose Rosenberg's institute in Frankfurt, and only behind these three
facades, hidden and protected by them, lay the real center of authority, the
Rekhssicherheitshauptomt, a special division of the Gestapo.
The fagade of the Soviet government, despite its written constitution, is
even less impressive, erected even more exclusively for foreign observation
than the state administration which the Nazis inherited and retained from
the Weimar Republic. Lacking the Nazis' original accumulation of offices in
the period of co-ordination, the Soviet regime relies even more on constant
creation of new offices to put the former centers of power in the shadow.
The gigantic increase of the bureaucratic apparatus, inherent in this method,
is checked by repeated liquidation through purges. Nevertheless, in Russia,
too, we can distinguish at least three strictly separate organizations: the
Soviet or state apparatus, the party apparatus, and the NKVD apparatus,
each of which has its own independent department of economy, a political
'"The gigantic organization for public works, headed by Todt and later led by
Albert Speer. was created by Hitler outside of all party hierarchies and affiliations.
This organization might have been used against the authority of party or even police
organizations. It is noteworthy that Speer could risk pointing out to Hitler (during a
conference in 1942) the impossibility of organizing production under Himmler's
regime, and even demand jurisdiction over slave labor and concentration camps. See
Nazi Conspiracy, I, 916-917.
*"Such an innocuous and unimportant society, for instance, as the NSKK (the Na-
tional Socialist corps of automobilists founded in 1930) was suddenly elevated, in 1933,
to the status of an elite formation, sharing with the SA and the SS the privilege of an
independent affiliated unit of the party. Nothing followed this rise in the ranks of the
Nazi hierarchy; retrospectively, it looks like an idle threat to the SA and SS.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 403
department, a ministry of education and culture, a military department, etc."*^
In Russia, the ostensible power of the party bureaucracy as against the
real power of the secret police corresponds to the original duplication of
party and state as known in Nazi Germany, and the multiplication becomes
evident only in the secret police itself, with its extremely complicated, widely
ramified network of agents, in which one department is always assigned to
supervising and spying on another. Every enterprise in the Soviet Union has
its special department of the secret police, which spies on party members
and ordinary personnel alike. Co-existent with this department is another
police division of the party itself, which again watches everybody, including
the agents of the NKVD, and whose members are not known to the rival
body. Added to these two espionage organizations must be the unions in
the factories, which must see to it that the workers fulfill their prescribed
quotas. Far more important than these apparatuses, however, is "the special
department" of the NKVD which represents "an NKVD within the NKVD,"
i.e., a secret police within the secret police*^ All reports of these competing
police agencies ultimately end up in the Moscow Central Committee and
the Politburo. Here it is decided which of the reports is decisive and which
of the police divisions shall be entitled to carry out the respective police
measures. Neither the average inhabitant of the country nor any one of the
police departments knows, of course, what decision will be made; today it
may be the special division of the NKVD, tomorrow the party's network of
agents; the day after, it may be the local committees or one of the regional
bodies. Among all these departments there exists no legally rooted hierarchy
of power or authority; the only certainty is that eventually one of them will
be chosen to embody "the will of the leadership."
The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure is
that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry,
and the less is known of the existence of an institution, the more powerful
it will ultimately turn out to be. According to this rule, the Soviets, recog-
nized by a written constitution as the highest authority of the state, have
less power than the Bolshevik party; the Bolshevik party, which recruits its
members openly and is recognized as the ruling class, has less power than
the secret police. Real power begins where secrecy begins. In this respect the
Nazi and the Bolshevik states were very much alike; their difference lay
chiefly in the monopolization and centralization of secret police services in
Himmler on one hand, and the maze of apparently unrelated and uncon-
nected police activities in Russia on the other.
■" F. Beck and W. Godin, Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, 1951,
p. 153.
*^ Ibid., p. 159 ff. — According to other reports, there are different examples of the
staggering multiplication of the Soviet police apparatus, primarily the local and re-
gional associations of the NKVD, which work independently of one another and
which have their counterparts in the local and regional networks of party agents. It
is in the nature of things that we know considerably less about Russian conditions than
we do about those in Nazi Germany, especially as far as organizational details are
concerned.
^0^ TOTALITARIANISM
If wc consider the totalitarian state solely as an instrument of power and
leave aside questions of administrative efficiency, industrial capacity, and
cci>nomic productivity, then its shapelessness turns out to be an ideally
suited instrument for the realization of the so-called Leader principle. A
continuous competition between offices, whose functions not only overlap
but which are charged with identical tasks,^'' gives opposition or sabotage
almost no chance to become effective; a swift change of emphasis which
relegates one office to the shadow and elevates another to authority can
solve all problems without anybody's becoming aware of the change or of
the fact that opposition had existed, the additional advantage of the sys-
tem being that the opposing office is likely never to learn of its defeat, since
it is either not abolished at all (as in the case of the Nazi regime) or it is
liquidated much later and without any apparent connection with the specific
matter. This can be done all the more easily since nobody, except those few
initiated, knows the exact relationship between the authorities. only once in
a while does the nontotalitarian world catch a glimpse of these conditions, as
when a high official abroad confesses that an obscure clerk in the Embassy
had been his immediate superior. In retrospect it is often possible to
determine why such a sudden loss of power occurred, or, rather, that it
occurred at all. For instance, it is not hard to understand today why at
the outbreak of war people like Alfred Rosenberg or Hans Frank were
removed to state positions and thus eliminated from the real center of
power, namely, the Fuehrer's inner circle.^'* The important thing is that
they not only did not know the reasons for these moves, but presumably
not even suspected that such apparently exalted positions as Governor
General of Poland or Reichsminister for all Eastern territories did not
signify the climax but the end of their National Socialist careers.
The Leader principle does not establish a hierarchy in the totalitarian
state any more than it does in the totalitarian movement; authority is not
filtered down from the top through all intervening layers to the bottom of
the body politic as is the case in authoritarian regimes. The factual reason
is that there is no hierarchy without authority and that, in spite of the
numerous misunderstandings concerning the so-called "authoritarian per-
sonality," the principle of authority is in all important respects diametrically
opposed to that of totalitarian domination. Quite apart from its origin
*■' According to the testimony of one of his former employees (Nazi Conspiracy, VI,
461 ). It was "a specialty of Himmler to give one task to two different people."
"In the aforementioned address (see footnote 29) Hans Frank showed that at some
pomt he wanted to stabilize the movement, and his numerous complaints as Governor
General of Poland testify to a total lack of understanding of the deliberately anti-
ulilitarian tendencies of Nazi policy. He cannot understand why the subjected peoples
are not exploited but exterminated. Rosenberg, in the eyes of Hitler, was racially
unreliable because he meant to establish satellite states in the conquered Eastern ter-
ritories and did not understand that Hitler's population policy aimed at depopulating
these territories. fro
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 405
in Roman history, authority, no matter in what form, always is meant to
restrict or Hmit freedom, but never to abolish it. Totalitarian domination,
however, aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spon-
taneity in general, and by no means at a restriction of freedom no matter
how tyrannical. Technically, this absence of any authority or hierarchy
in the totalitarian system is shown by the fact that between the supreme
power (the Fuehrer) and the ruled there are no reliable intervening levels,
each of which would receive its due share of authority and obedience. The
will of the Fuehrer can be embodied everywhere and at all times, and he
himself is not tied to any hierarchy, not even the one he might, have estab-
lished himself. Therefore, it is not accurate to say that the movement,
after its seizure of power, founds a multiplicity of principalities in whose
realm each little leader is free to do as he pleases and to imitate the big
leader at the top.^"' The Nazi claim that "the party is the order of
fuehrers" ^''" was an ordinary lie. Just as the infinite multiplication of offices
and confusion of authority leads to a state of affairs in which every citizen
feels himself directly confronted with the will of the Leader, who arbitrarily
chooses the executing organ of his decisions, so the one and a half million
"fuehrers" throughout the Third Reich *' knew very well that their authority
derived directly from Hitler without the intervening levels of a functioning
hierarchy."*^ The direct dependence was real and the intervening hierarchy,
certainly of social importance, was an ostensible, spurious imitation of an
authoritarian state.
The Leader's absolute monopoly of power and authority is most con-
spicuous in the relationship between him and his chief of police, who in
a totalitarian country occupies the most powerful public position. Yet
despite the enormous material and organizational power at his disposal
as the head of a veritable police army and of the elite formations, the
chief of police apparently is in no position ever to seize power and himself
become the ruler of the country. Thus prior to Hitler's fall, Himmler never
dreamed of touching Hitler's claim to leadership *^ and was never proposed
"' The notion of a division into "little principalities" which formed "a pyramid of
power outside the law with the Fuehrer at its apex" is Robert H. Jackson's. See chap-
ter xii of Nazi Conspiracy, II, 1 ff. In order to avoid the establishment of such an
authoritarian state. Hitler, as early as 1934, issued the following party decree: "The
form of address 'Mein Fuehrer" is reserved for the Fuehrer alone. I herewith forbid
all subleaders of the NSDAP to allow themselves to be addressed as 'Mein Reichs-
leiter,' etc., either in words or in writing. Rather, the form of address has to be Pg.
[Party Comrade] ... or Gauleiter, etc." See Verfiigungen, Anordniingen, Bekanntgaben,
op. cit., decree of August 20, 1934.
"'* See the Organisationshiicli der NSDAP.
^^See Chart 14 in Vol. VIII of Naz.i Conspiracy.
^^ All oaths in the party as well as the elite formations were taken on the person
of Adolf Hitler.
■'"The first step of Himmler in this direction occurred in the fall of 1944, when
he ordered on his own initiative that the gas installations in the extermination camps
^,,r, TOTALITARIANISM
as Hitler's successor. Even more interesting in this context is Beria's ill-
fated attempt at seizing power after Stalin's death. Although Stalin had never
pcrniittcd any of his police chiefs to enjoy a position comparable to that
of Himmler during the last years of Nazi rule, Beria, too, disposed of
enough troops to challenge the rule of the party after Stalin's death simply
by occupying the whole of Moscow and all accesses to the Kremlin;
nobixJy except the Red Army might have disrupted his claim to power and
this would have led to a bloody civil war whose outcome would by no
means have been assured. The point is that Beria voluntarily abandoned
all his positions only a few days later even though he must have known
that he would forfeit his life because for a matter of days he had dared to
play off the power of the police against the power of the party. ^°
This lack of absolute power does of course not prevent the chief of
police from organizing his enormous apparatus in accordance with totali-
tarian power principles. Thus it is most remarkable to see how Himmler
after his appointment began the reorganization of the German police by
introducing into the hitherto centralized apparatus of the secret police the
multiplication of offices — i.e., he apparently did what all experts of power
who preceded the totalitarian regimes would have feared as decentralization
leading to a diminution of power. To the service of the Gestapo Himmler
first added the Security Service, originally a division of the SS and founded
as an inner-party police body. While the main offices of the Gestapo and
the Security Service were eventually centralized in Berlin, the regional
branches of these two huge secret services retained their separate identities
and each reported directly to Himmler's own office in Berlin. ^^ In the
course of the war, Himmler added two more intelligence services: one
consisted of so-called inspectors who were supposed to control and co-
ordinate the Security Service with the police and who were subject to the
jurisdiction of the SS; the second was a specifically military intelligence
bureau which acted independently of the Reich's military forces and finally
succeeded in absorbing the army's own military intelligence. =-
The complete absence of successful or unsuccessful palace revolutions is
one of the most remarkable characteristics of totalitarian dictatorships.
be dismaniled and the mass slaughter be stopped. This was his way of initiating
peace negotiations with the Western powers. Interestingly enough. Hitler apparently
was never informed of these preparations; it seems that no one dared tell him that
one of his most important war aims had already been given up. See Leon Poliakov,
Breuiirr de la Hiiiiic. 1951, p. 232.
■" For the events following Stalin's death, see Harrison E. Salisbury. American in
Russia. New York, 1955.
., l^V^^ excellent analysis of the structure of the Nazi police in Nazi Conspiracy.
II, 250 ff.. esp. p. 256.
'-^ Ibid., p. 252.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 407
(With one exception no dissatisfied Nazis took part in tiie military con-
spiracy against Hitler of July, 1944.) on the surface, the Leader principle
seems to invite bloody changes of personal power without a change of
regime. This is but one of many indications that the totalitarian form of
government has very little to do with lust for power or even the desire for
a power-generating machine, with the game of power for power's sake
which has been characteristic of the last stages of imperialist rule. Tech-
nically speaking, however, it is one of the most important indications that
totalitarian government, all appearances notwithstanding, is not rule by a
clique or a gang.^^ The evidence of Hitler's as well as Stalin's dictatorship
points clearly to the fact that isolation of atomized individuals provides not
only the mass basis for totalitarian rule, but is carried through to the very
top of the whole structure. Stalin has shot almost everybody who could
claim to belong to the ruling clique and has moved the members of the
Politburo back and forth whenever a clique was on the point of consolidating
itself. Hitler destroyed cliques in Nazi Germany with less drastic means — the
only bloody purge having been directed against the Rohm clique which
indeed was firmly kept together through the homosexuality of its leading
members; he prevented their formation by constant shifts in power and
authority, and frequent changes of intimates in his immediate surroundings,
so that all former solidarity between those who had come into power with
him quickly evaporated. It seems obvious, moreover, that the monstrous
unfaithfulness which is reported in almost identical terms as the outstanding
trait in both Hitler's and Stalin's characters did not allow them to pre-
side over anything so lasting and durable as a clique. However that may be,
the point is that there exists no interrelationship between those holding office;
they are not bound together by equal status in a political hierarchy or the
relationship between superiors and inferiors, or even the uncertain loyalties
of gangsters. In Soviet Russia, everybody knows that the top manager of a
big industrial concern can as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs be
demoted any day to the lowest social and political status, and that a com-
plete unknown may step into his place. The gangster complicity, on the
other hand, which played some role in the early stages of the Nazi dic-
tatorship, loses all cohesive force, for totalitarianism uses its power precisely
■' Franz Neumann, op. cit., pp. 521 ff., is doubtful "whether Germany can be called
a State. It is far more a gang where the leaders are perpetually compelled to agree
after disagreements." Konrad Heiden's works on Nazi Germany are representative for
the theory of government by a clique. — As regards the formation of cliques around
Hitler, The Bormunn Letters, published by Trevor-Roper, are quite enlightening. In
the trial of the doctors (the United States vs. Karl Brandt et al., hearing of May 13,
1947), Victor Brack testified that as early as 1933 Bormann, acting no doubt on
Hitler's orders, had begun to organize a group of persons who stood above state
and party.
408
TOTALITARIANISM
to spread this complicity through the population until it has organized the
guilt of the whole people under its domination."'*
The absence of a ruling clique has made the question of a successor to
the totalitarian dictator especially baffling and troublesome. It is true that
this issue has plagued all usurpers, and it is quite characteristic that none
of the totalitarian dictators ever tried the old method of establishing a
dynasty and appointing their sons. Against Hitler's numerous and therefore
self-defeating appointments stands Stalin's method, which made the suc-
cession one of the most dangerous honors in the Soviet Union. Under totali-
tarian conditions, knowledge of the labyrinth of transmission belts equals
supreme power, and every appointed successor who actually comes to know
what is going on is automatically removed after a certain time. A valid and
comparatively permanent appointment would indeed presuppose the exist-
ence of a clique whose members would share the Leader's monopoly of
knowledge of what is going on, which the Leader must avoid by all means.
Hitler once explained this in his own terms to the supreme commanders of
the Wehrmacht, who in the midst of the turmoil of war were presumably
racking their brains over this problem: "As the ultimate factor I must, in
all modesty, name my own person: irreplaceable. . . . The destiny of the
Reich depends on me alone." '^'^ There is no need to look for any irony in
the word modesty; the totalitarian leader, in marked contrast to all former
usurpers, despots and tyrants, seems to believe that the question of his
succession is not overly important, that no special qualities or training are
needed for the job, that the country will eventually obey anybody who hap-
pens to hold the appointment at the moment of his death, and that no
power-thirsty rivals will dispute his legitimacy.^**
As techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear simple and
'* Compare the author's contribution to the discussion of the problem of German
guilt: "Organized Guilt," in Jewish Frontier, January, 1945.
'•' In a speech of November 23, 1939, quoted from Trial of Major War Criminals,
Vol. 26. p. 332. That this pronouncement was more than a hysterical aberration
dictated by chance is apparent from Himmler's speech (the stenographic transcript
can be found in the archives of the Hoover Library, Himmler File, Folder 332) at
the conference of mayors at Posen in March, 1944. It says: "What values can we
place onto the scales of history? The value of our own people. . . . The second, I
would almost say, even greater value is the unique person of our Fuehrer Adolf
Hitler, . . . who for the first time after two thousand years . . . was sent to the
Germanic race as a great leader. . . ."
'"See Hitler's statements on this question in Hitlers Tischgespriiche, pp. 253 f.
and 222 f.: The new Fuehrer would have to be elected by a "senate"; the guiding
pnncipic for the Fuehrer's election must be that any discussion among the person-
alities participating in the election should cease for the duration of the proceedings.
Within three hours Wehrmacht, party and all civil servants will have to be newly
sworn in. "He had no illusions about the fact that in this election of the supreme
head of the state there might not always be an outstanding Fuehrer personality at the
helm of the Reich." But this entailed no dangers, "so long as the over-all machinery
functions properly."
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 409
ingeniously eflfective. They assure not only an absolute power monopoly,
but unparalleled certainty that all commands will always be carried out; the
multiplicity of the transmission belts, the confusion of the hierarchy, secure
the dictator's complete independence of all his inferiors and make possible
the swift and surprising changes in policy for which totalitarianism has be-
come famous. The body politic of the country is shock-proof because of its
shapelessness.
The reasons why such extraordinary efficiency was never tried before are
as simple as the device itself. The multiplication of offices destroys all sense
of responsibility and competence; it is not merely a tremendously burden-
some and unproductive increase of administration, but actually hinders pro-
ductivity because conflicting orders constantly delay real work until the order
of the Leader has decided the matter. The fanaticism of the elite cadres, ab-
solutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systemati-
cally all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which
sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely dif-
ferent.^'^ And this mentality is not confined to the elite but gradually per-
vades the entire population, the most intimate details of whose life and
death depend upon political decisions — that is, upon causes and ulterior
motives which have nothing to do with performance. Constant removal, de-
motion, and promotion make reliable teamwork impossible and prevent
the development of experience. Economically speaking, slave labor is a lux-
ury which Russia should not be able to afford; in a time of acute shortage
of technical skill, the camps were filled with "highly qualified engineers
[who] compete for the right to do plumbing jobs, repair clocks, electric
lighting and telephone." ^^ But then, from a purely utilitarian point of view,
Russia should not have been able to afford the purges in the thirties that in-
terrupted a long-awaited economic recovery, or the physical destruction of
the Red Army general staff, which led almost to a defeat in the Russian-
Finnish war.
Conditions in Germany were different in degree. In the beginning, the
Nazis showed a certain tendency to retain technical and administrative skill,
to allow profits in business, and to dominate economically without too much
interference. At the outbreak of the war Germany was not yet completely
totalitarianized, and if one accepts preparation for war as a rational motive,
it must be conceded that until roughly 1942 her economy was allowed to
^^ one of the guiding principles for the SS formulated by Himmler himself reads:
"No task exists for its own sake." See Gunter d'Alquen, Die SS. Geschichte, Aufgabe
iiml Organisation tier Scluitzslaffein cler NSDAP, 1939, in Schriften der Hochschule
fiir Politik.
•''* See David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Russia, 1947, who
also report that during the war when mobilization had created an acute problem of
manpower, the death rate in the labor camps was about 40 per cent during one year.
In general, they estimate that the output of a worker in the camps is below 50 per
cent of that of a free laborer.
^IQ TOTALITARIANISM
function more or less rationally. The preparation for war in itself is not
anti-utilitarian, despite its prohibitive costs,''" for it may indeed be much
•'cheaper to seize the wealth and resources of other nations by conquest than
to buy them from foreign countries or produce them at home.""" Economic
laws of investment and production, of stabilizing gains and profits, and of ex-
haustion do not apply if one intends in any event to replenish the depleted
home economy with loot from other countries; it is quite true, and the
sympathizing German people were perfectly aware of it, that the famous
Nazi slogan of "guns or butter" actually meant "butter through guns.""' It
was not until 1942 that the rules of totalitarian domination began to out-
weigh all other considerations.
1 he radicalization began immediately at the outbreak of war; one may even
surmise that one of Hitler's reasons for provoking this war was that it en-
abled him to accelerate the development in a manner that would have been
unthinkable in peacetime.''- The remarkable thing about this process, how-
ever, is that it was by no means checked by such a shattering defeat as Stalin-
grad, and that the danger of losing the war altogether was only another in-
citement to throw overboard all utilitarian considerations and make an all-out
attempt to realize through ruthless total organization the goals of totalitarian
racial ideology, no matter for how short a time."'' After Stalingrad, the elite
formations which had been strictly separated from the people were greatly
'■"Thomas Reveille, The Spoil of Europe, 1941, estimates that Germany during the
first year of war was able to cover her entire preparatory war expenses of the years
1933 to 1939.
"" William Ebenstein, The Nazi State, p. 257.
"' Ihid., p. 270.
"* This is supported by the fact that the decree to murder all incurably sick was
issued on the day the war broke out, but even more so by Hitler's statements during
the war, quoted by Goebbels (The Goehbels Diaries, ed. Louis P. Lochner, 1948)
to the effect that "the war had made possible for us the solution of a whole series of
problems that could never have been solved in normal times," and that, no matter
how ihc war turned out, "the Jews will certainly be the losers" (p. 314).
'"The Wehrmacht of course tried time and again to explain to the various party
organs the dangers of a war conduct in which commands were issued with utter
disregard for all military, civilian and economic necessities (see, for instance, Poliakov,
op. ill., p. 321). But even many high Nazi functionaries had ditficulty understanding
this neglect of all objective economic and military factors in the situation. They had
to be told time and again that "economic considerations should fundamentally remain
unconsidered in the settlement of the [Jewish] problem" (Nazi Conspiracy. VI, 402),
but still would complain that the interruption of a big building program in Poland
"would not have happened if the many thousands of Jews working at it had not been
deported. Now the order is given that the Jews will have to be removed from the
armament projects. I hope that this . . . order will soon be cancelled, for then the
situation will be still worse." This hope of Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland,
was as htile fulfilled as his later expectations of a militarily more sensible policy
toward Poles and Ukrainians. His complaints are interestinc (see his Diary in Nazi
Conipiraty W. 902 ff.) because he is frightened exclusively by the anti-utilitarian
aspect of Nazi policies during the war. once we have won the war, then for all I
care, mincc-meat can be made of the Poles and the Ukrainians and all the others
who run around here. . . ."
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 411
expanded; the ban on party membership for those in the armed forces was
lifted and the military command was subordinated to SS commanders. The
jealously guarded crime monopoly of the SS was abandoned and soldiers
were assigned at will to duties of mass murder."* Neither military, nor eco-
nomic, nor political considerations were allowed to interfere with the costly
and troublesome program of mass exterminations and deportations.
If one considers these last years of Nazi rule and their version of a "five-
year plan," which they had no time to carry out but which aimed at the
extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, of 170 million Russians
(as mentioned in one plan), the intelligentsia of Western Europe such as the
Dutch and the people of Alsace and Lorraine, as well as of all those Germans
who would be disqualified under the prospective Reich health bill or the
planned "community alien law," the analogy to the Bolshevik five-year plan
of 1929, the first year of clear-cut totalitarian dictatorship in Russia, is al-
most inescapable. Vulgar eugenic slogans in one case, high-sounding eco-
nomic phrases in the other, were the prelude to "a piece of prodigious
insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were turned
upside down.""''
To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the
road to insanity. The point is rather that our bewilderment about the anti-
utilitarian character of the totalitarian state structure springs from the mis-
taken notion that we are dealing with a normal state after all — a bureaucracy,
a tyranny, a dictatorship — from our overlooking the emphatic assertions by
totalitarian rulers that they consider the country where they happened to
seize power only the temporary headquarters of the international movement
on the road to world conquest, that they reckon victories and defeats in
terms of centuries or millennia, and that the global interests always overrule
the local interests of their own territory."" The famous "Right is what is
"^ Originally, only special units of the SS — the Death Head formations — were em-
ployed in the concentration camps. Later replacements came from the Armed SS divi-
sions. From 1944 on, units of the regular armed forces were also employed but
usually incorporated in the Armed SS. (See the Affidavit of a former SS official of the
concentration camp of Neuengamme in Nazi Conspiracy, VII, 211.) How the active
presence of the Wehrmacht made itself felt in the concentration camps has been
described in Odd Nansen's concentration camp diary Day After Day, London, 1949.
Unfortunately, it shows that these regular army troops were at least as brutal as the SS.
'''" Deutscher, op. cit., p. 326. This quotation carries weight because it comes from
the .most benevolent of Stalin's non-Communist biographers.
""The Nazis were especially fond of reckoning in terms of millennia. Himmler's
pronouncements that SS-men were solely interested in "ideological questions whose
importance counted in terms of decades and centuries" and that they "served a
cause which in two thousand years occurred only once" are repeated, with slight
variations, throughout the entire indoctrination material issued by the SS-Hauptamt-
Schulungsamt {Wescn iiiul Aiiffiabe tier SS iinJ Jer Polizei, p. 160). — As for the
Bolshevik version, the best reference is the program of the Communist International
as formulated by Stalin as early as 1928 at the Sixth Congress in Moscow. Particularly
interesting is the evaluation of the Soviet Union as "the bases for the world movement,
the center of international revolution, the greatest factor in world history. In the
USSR, the world proletariat for the first time acquires a country . . ." (quoted from
.;/•> TOTALITARIANISM
jjixxl Un the German people" was meant only for mass propaganda; Nazis
were told that "Right is what is good for the movement,"*'^ and these two
interests did by no means always coincide. The Nazis did not think that the
(icrmans were a master race, to whom the world belonged, but that they
should be led by a master race, as should all other nations, and that this
race was only on the point of being born."** Not the Germans were the dawn
of the master race, but the SS."'' The "Germanic world empire," as Himmler
said, or the "Aryan" world empire, as Hitler would have put it, was in any
event still centuries off.'"' For the "movement" it was more important to
demonstrate that it was possible to fabricate a race by annihilating other
"races" than to win a war with limited aims. What strikes the outside ob-
server as a "piece of prodigious insanity" is nothing but the consequence
i>f the absolute primacy of the movement not only over the state, but also
over the nation, the people and the positions of power held by the rulers
themselves. The reason why the ingenious devices of totalitarian rule, with
their absolute and unsurpassed concentration of power in the hands of a
single man, were never tried out before, is that no ordinary tyrant was ever
mad enough to discard all limited and local interests — economic, national,
human. militar>' — in favor of a purely fictitious reality in some indefinite
distant future.
Since totalitarianism in power remains faithful to the original tenets of
the movement, the striking similarities between the organizational devices
of the movement and the so-called totalitarian state are hardly surprising.
The division between party members and fellow-travelers organized in front
W. H. Chamberlain, Blueprint for World Conquest, 1946, where the programs of
ihc Third International are reprinted verbatim).
'•' This change of the official motto can be found in the Organisationsbuch der
SSDAP. p. 7.
••"See Heiden, op. cii.. p. 722.— Hitler stated in a speech of November 23, 1937,
before the future political leaders at the Ordensburg Sonthofen: Not "ridiculously
small tribes, tiny countries, states or dynasties . . . but only races [can] function as
world conquerors. A race, however — at least in the conscious sense — we still have
to become" (see Hitlers Tischgespriiche, p. 445). — In complete harmony with this
by no means accidental phrasing is a decree of August 9, 1941, in which Hitler
prohibited the further use of the term "German race" because it would lead to the
•sacrifice of the racial idea as such in favor of a mere nationality principle, and to
Ihc destruction of important conceptual preconditions of our whole racial and folk
policy" (Verjiigiingen. AnorJnnngen. Bekunntgahen). It is obvious that the concept
of a German race would have constituted an impediment to the progressive "selection"
and extermination of undesirable parts among the German population which in
those very years was being planned for the future.
" " Himmler consequently "very soon formed a Germanic SS in the various countries"
whom he told: "We do not expect you to become German out of opportunism. But
wc do expect you to subordinate your national ideal to the greater racial and historical
Ideal, to the Germanic Reich" (Heiden, op. tit.). Its future task would be to form
through "the most copious breeding" a "racial superstratum" which in another
twenty to thirty years would "present the whole of Europe with its leading class"
( Himmler s speech at the meeting of the SS Major Generals at Posen in 1943, in
Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 558 ff.).
'" Himmler, ibid., p. 572.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 413
organizations, far from disappearing, leads to the "co-ordination" of the
whole population, who are now organized as sympathizers. The tremendous
increase in sympathizers is checked by limiting party strength to a privileged
"class" of a few millions and creating a superparty of several hundred thou-
sand, the elite formations. Multiplication of offices, duplication of functions,
and adaptation of the party-sympathizer relationship to the new conditions
mean simply that the peculiar onion-like structure of the movement, in
which every layer was the front of the next more militant formation, is
retained. The state machine is transformed into a front organization of sym-
pathizing bureaucrats whose function in domestic affairs is to spread con-
fidence among the masses of merely co-ordinated citizens and whose foreign
affairs consist in fooling the outside, nontotalitarian world. The Leader, in
his dual capacity as chief of the state and leader of the movement, again
combines in his person the acme of militant ruthlessness and confidence-
inspiring normality.
one of the important differences between a totalitarian movement and a
totalitarian state is that the totalitarian dictator can and must practice the to-
talitarian art of lying more consistently and on a larger scale than the leader
of a movement. This is partly the automatic consequence of swelling the
ranks of fellow-travelers, and is partly due to the fact that unpleasant state-
ments by a statesman are not as easily revoked as those of a demagogic
party leader. For this purpose. Hitler chose to fall back, without any detours,
on the old-fashioned nationalism which he had denounced many times
before his ascent to power; by posing as a violent nationalist, claiming that
National Socialism was not an "export commodity," he appeased Germans
and non-Germans alike and implied that Nazi ambitions would be satisfied
when the traditional demands of a nationalist German foreign policy — re-
turn of territories ceded in the Versailles treaties, Anschluss of Austria, an-
nexation of the German-speaking parts of Bohemia — were fulfilled. Stalin
likewise reckoned with both Russian public opinion and the non-Russian
world when he invented his theory of "socialism in one country" and threw
the onus of world revolution on Trotsky.''^^
Systematic lying to the whole world can be safely carried out only under
the conditions of totalitarian rule, where the fictitious quality of everyday
reality makes propaganda largely superfluous. In their prepower stage the
movements can never afford to hide their true goals to the same degree
— 'after all, they are meant to inspire mass organizations. But, given the
possibility to exterminate Jews like bedbugs, namely, by poison gas, it is
no longer necessary to propagate that Jews are bedbugs;^- given the power
to teach a whole nation the history of the Russian Revolution without men-
^' Deutscher, op. cit., describes Stalin's remarkable "sensibility to all those psy-
chological undercurrents ... of which he set himself up as a mouthpiece" (p. 292).
"The very name of Trotsky's theory, 'permanent revolution,' sounded like an ominous
warning to a tired generation. . . . Stalin appealed directly to the horror of risk and
uncertainty that had taken possession of many Bolsheviks" (p. 291).
■'^ Thus Hitler could afford to use the favorite cliche "decent Jew" once he had
begun to exterminate them, namely, in December, 1941, in the Tischgesprdche, p. 346.
^/^ TOTALITARIANISM
tioning the name of Trotsky, there is no further need for propaganda against
Trotsky. But the use of the methods for carrying out the ideological goals
can be "expected" only from those who are "ideologically utterly firm" —
whether they have acquired such firmness in the Comintern schools or the
special Nazi indoctrination centers — even if these goals continue to be
publicized. on such occasions it invariably turns out that the mere sym-
pathizers never realize what is happening.^-' This leads to the paradox that
"the secret society in broad daylight" is never more conspiratory in char-
acter and methods than after it has been recognized as a full-fledged mem-
ber of the comity of nations. It is only logical that Hitler, prior to his seizure
of power, resisted all attempts to organize the party and even the elite for-
mations on a conspiratory basis; yet after 1933 he was quite eager to help
transform the SS into a kind of secret society.''^ Similarly, the Moscow-
directed Communist parties, in marked contrast to their predecessors, show
a curious tendency to prefer the conditions of conspiracy even where com-
plete legality is possible. '^'^ The more conspicuous the power of totalitari-
anism the more secret become its true goals. To know the ultimate aims of
Hitler's rule in Germany, it was much wiser to rely on his propaganda
speeches and Mcin Kampf than on the oratory of the Chancellor of the
Third Reich; just as it would have been wiser to distrust Stalin's words
about "socialism in one country," invented for the passing purpose of
seizing power after Lenin's death, and to take more seriously his repeated
hostility to democratic countries. The totalitarian dictators have proved that
they knew only too well the danger inherent in their pose of normality;
that is. the danger of a true nationalist policy or of actually building
socialism in one country. This they try to overcome through a permanent
and consistent discrepancy between reassuring words and the reality of
"' Hitler, therefore, speaking to members of the General Staff (Blomberg, Fritsch,
Kaedcr) and high-ranking civilians (Neurath, Goring) in November, 1937, could
permit himself to state openly that he needed depopulated space and reject the idea
of conquering alien peoples. That this would automatically result in a policy of ex-
terminating such peoples was evidently not realized by any one of his listeners.
'*This began with an order in July, 1934, by which the SS was elevated to the rank
of an independent organization within the NSDAP, and completed by a top secret de-
cree of August. 1938. which declared that the SS special formations, the Death Head
Units and the Shock Troops {Verfii^nnfistnippen) were neither part of the army nor
of the police; the Death Head Units had "to clear up special tasks of police nature"
and the Shock Troops were "a standing armed unit exclusively at my disposal" {Nazi
Con\pinuy. Ill, 459). Two subsequent decrees of October, 1939, and April, 1940,
established special jurisdiction in general matters for all SS members {ibid., II, 184).
From then on all pamphlets issued by the SS indoctrination office carry such notations
as "Solely for use of the police," "Not for publication," "Exclusively for leaders and
those entrusted with ideological education." It would be worth while to compile a
bibliography of the voluminous secret literature, which includes a great many legis-
lative measures, that was printed during the Nazi era. Interestingly enough, there
IS not a single SA booklet among this type of literature, and this is probably the
most conclusive proof that after 1934 the SA ceased to be an elite formation.
^-Compare Franz Borkenau, "Die neue Komintern," in Der Monat Berlin, 1949,
Heft 4.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 415
rule, by consciously developing a method of always doing the opposite of
what they say J" Stalin has carried this art of balance, which demands more
skill than the ordinary routine of diplomacy, to the point where a modera-
tion in foreign policy or the political line of the Comintern is almost invari-
ably accompanied by radical purges in the Russian party. It was certainly
more than coincidence that the Popular Front policy and the drafting of
the comparatively liberal Soviet constitution were accompanied by the
Moscow Trials.
Evidence that totalitarian governments aspire to conquer the globe and
bring all countries on earth under their domination can be found repeatedly
in Nazi and Bolshevik literature. Yet these ideological programs, inherited
from pretotalitarian movements (from the supranationalist antisemitic par-
ties and the Pan-German dreams of empire in the case of the Nazis, from
the international concept of revolutionary socialism in the case of the Bol-
sheviks) are not decisive. What is decisive is that totalitarian regimes really
conduct their foreign policy on the consistent assumption that they will even-
tually achieve this ultimate goal, and never lose sight of it no matter how
distant it may appear or how seriously its "ideal" demands may conflict
with the necessities of the moment. They therefore consider no country as
permanently foreign, but, on the contrary, every country as their potential
territory. Rise to power, the fact that in one country the fictitious world of
the movement has become a tangible reality, creates a relationship to other
nations which is similar to the situation of the totalitarian party under non-
totalitarian rule: the tangible reality of the fiction, backed by internationally
recognized state power, can be exported the same way contempt for parlia-
ment could be imported into a nontotalitarian parliament. In this respect,
the prewar "solution" of the Jewish question was the outstanding export
commodity of Nazi Germany: expulsion of Jews carried an important por-
tion of Nazism into other countries; by forcing Jews to leave the Reich pass-
portless and penniless, the legend of the Wandering Jew was realized, and
by forcing the Jews into uncompromising hostility against them, the Nazis
had created the pretext for taking a passionate interest in all nations'
domestic policies.''^
How seriously the Nazis took their conspiratorial fiction, according to
which they were the future rulers of the world, came to light in 1 940 when —
despite necessity, and in the face of all their all-too-real chances of winning
over the occupied peoples of Europe — they started their depopulation poli-
cies in the Eastern territories, regardless of loss of manpower and serious
military consequences, and introduced legislation which with retroactive
^" Instances are too obvious and too numerous to be quoted. This tactic, however,
should not be simply identified with the enormous lack of faithfulness and truthful-
ness which all biographers of Hitler and Stalin report as outstanding traits of their
character.
'^ See the Circular Letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to all German au-
thorities abroad of January, 1939, in Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 87 flf.
416
TOTALITARIANISM
force cx{H)rtcd part of the Third Reich's penal code into the Western occu-
pied countries.'" There was hardly a more effective way of pubUcizing the
Nazi claim to world rule than punishing as high treason every utterance or
action against the Third Reich, no matter when, where, or by whom it had
been made. Nazi law treated the whole world as falling potentially under
its jurisdiction, so that the occupying army was no longer an instrument of
conquest that carried with it the new law of the conqueror, but an executive
organ which enforced a law which already supposedly existed for everyone.
The assumption that Nazi law was binding beyond the German border
and the punishment of non-Germans were more than mere devices of op-
pression. Totalitarian regimes are not afraid of the logical implications of
world conquest even if they work the other way around and are detrimental
to their own peoples' interests. Logically, it is indisputable that a plan for
world conquest involves the abolition of differences between the conquering
mother country and the conquered territories, as well as the difference be-
tween foreign and domestic politics, upon which all existing nontotalitarian
institutions and all international intercourse are based. If the totalitarian
conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the
same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign
conqueror.'" And it is perfectly true that the totalitarian movement seizes
power in much the same sense as a foreign conqueror may occupy a coun-
try which he governs not for its own sake but for the benefit of something
or somebody else. The Nazis behaved like foreign conquerors in Germany
when, against all national interests, they tried and half succeeded in con-
verting their defeat into a final catastrophe for the whole German people;
similarly in case of victory, they intended to extend their extermination
politics into the ranks of "racially unfit" Germans. *^<'
A similar attitude seems to have inspired Soviet foreign policy after the
war. The cost of its aggressiveness to the Russian people themselves is
'" In 1940, the Nazi government decreed that offenses ranging from high treason
against the Reich to "malicious agitatoriai utterances against leading persons of the
State or the Nazi Party" should be punished with retroactive force in all German
occupied territories, no matter whether they had been committed by Germans or by
natives of these countries. See Giles, op. cit. — For the disastrous consequences of the
Nazi ■■SieJIiint'spolitik" in Poland and the Ukraine, see Trial, on. cit., Vols. XXVI and
XXIX.
'"The term is Kravchenko's, op. cit., p. 303, who, describing conditions in Russia
after the supcrpurge of 1936-1938, remarks: "Had a foreign conqueror taken over the
machinery of Soviet life ... the change could hardly have been more thorough or
more cruel."
"" Hitler contemplated during the war the introduction of a National Health Bill:
"After national X-ray examination, the Fuehrer is to be given a list of sick persons,
particularly those with lung and heart diseases. on the basis of the new Reich Health
Law . . . these families will no longer be able to remain among the public and can
no longer be allowed to produce children. What will happen to these families will be
the subject of further orders of the Fuehrer." It does not need much imagination to
guess what these further orders would have been. The number of people no longer
allowed "to remain among the public" would have formed a considerable portion of
the German population {Nazi Conspiracy, VI, 175).
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 417
prohibitive: it has foregone the great postwar loan from the United States
which would have enabled Russia to reconstruct devastated areas and in-
dustrialize the country in a rational, productive way. The extension of
Comintern governments throughout the Balkans and the occupation of
large Eastern territories brought no tangible benefits, but on the contrary
strained Russian resources still further. But this policy certainly served
the interests of the Bolshevik movement, which has spread over almost half
of the inhabited world.
Like a foreign conqueror, the totalitarian dictator regards the natural
and industrial riches of each country, including his own, as a source of
loot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion. Since
this economy of systematic spoliation is carried out for the sake of the
movement and not of the nation, no people and no territory, as the poten-
tial beneficiary, can possibly set a saturation point to the process. The to-
talitarian dictator is like a foreign conqueror who comes from nowhere, and
his looting is likely to benefit nobody. Distribution of the spoils is calculated
not to strengthen the economy of the home country but only as a temporary
tactical maneuver. For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as
much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts. The
fact that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign con-
queror makes matters worse because it adds to ruthlessness an efficiency
which is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings. Stalin's
war against the Ukraine in the early thirties was twice as effective as the
terribly bloody German invasion and occupation.^^ This is the reason why
totalitarianism prefers quisling governments to direct rule despite the ob-
vious dangers of such regimes.
The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politics
in an especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an en-
tirely new and unprecedented concept of power, just as behind their Real-
politik lies an entirely new and unprecedented concept of reality. Supreme
disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness
and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utili-
tarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; "idealism,"
i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust
"' The total number of Russian dead in four years of war is estimated at between 12
and 21 million. Stalin exterminated in a single year in the Ukraine alone about 8
million people (estimate). See Communism in Action. U. S. Government. Washington,
1946, House Document No. 754, pp. 140-141. — Unlike the Nazi regime which kept
rather accurate accounts on the number of its victims, there are no reliable figures for
the millions of people who were killed in the Russian system. Nevertheless the fol-
lowing estimate, quoted by Souvarine, op. cit., p. 669, carries some weight insofar as
it stems from Walter Krivitsky, who had direct access to the information contained
in the GPU files. According to these figures the census of 1937 in the Soviet Union,
which Soviet statisticians had expected to reach 171 million persons, showed that
there were actually only 145 millions. This would point to a loss in population of 26
millions, a figure which does not include the losses quoted above.
4/S TOTALITARIANISM
for power — these have all introduced into international politics a new and
more disturbing factor than mere aggressiveness would have been able to do.
Power, as conceived by totalitarianism, lies exclusively in the force pro-
duced through organization. Just as Stalin saw every institution, independent
of its actual function, only as a "transmission belt connecting the party with
the people" ''- and honestly believed that the most precious treasures of the
Soviet Union were not the riches of its soil or the productive capacity of its
huge manpower, but the "cadres" of the party ^'^ (i.e., the police), so Hitler,
as early as 1929, saw the "great thing" of the movement in the fact that
sixty thousand men "have outwardly become almost a unit, that actually
these members are uniform not only in ideas, but that even the facial ex-
pression is almost the same. Look at these laughing eyes, this fanatical en-
thusiasm and you will discover . . . how a hundred thousand men in a
movement become a single type."*** Whatever connection power had in the
minds of Western man with earthly possessions, with wealth, treasures, and
riches, has been dissolved into a kind of dematerialized mechanism whose
every move generates power as friction or galvanic currents generate elec-
tricity. The totalitarian division of states into Have and Have-not countries
is more than a demagogic device; those who make it are actually convinced
that the power of material possessions is negligible and only stands in the
way of the development of organizational power. To Stalin constant growth
and development of police cadres were incomparably more important than
the oil in Baku, the coal and ore in the Urals, the granaries in the Ukraine,
or the potential treasures of Siberia — in short the development of Russia's
full power arsenal. The same mentality led Hitler to sacrifice all Germany
to the cadres of the SS; he did not consider the war lost when German
cities lay in rubble and industrial capacity was destroyed, but only when he
learned that the SS troops were no longer reliable.^'"' To a man who believed
in organizational omnipotence against all mere material factors, military
or economic, and who, moreover, calculated the eventual victory of his
enterprise in centuries, defeat was not military catastrophe or threatened
starvation of the population, but only the destruction of the elite formations
which were supposed to carry the conspiracy for world rule through a line
of generations to its eventual end.
The structurelessness of the totalitarian state, its neglect of material
"^ Deutscher, op. cii.. p. 256.
"' B. Souvarine, op. tit., p. 605, quotes Stalin as saying at the height of terror in
1937: "You must reach the understanding that of all the precious assets existing in the
world, the most precious and decisive are the cadres." All reports show that in Soviet
Russia the secret police must be regarded as the real elite formation of the party.
Characteristic for this nature of the police is that since the early twenties NKVD
agents were "not recruited on a voluntary basis," but drawn from the ranks of the
party. Furthermore, "the NKVD could not be chosen as a career" (see Beck and
Godin. op. cit., p. 160).
*** Quoted from Heiden, op. cit., p. 311.
K ". '^*^'^°■■<^'"e ^o reports of the last meeting. Hitler decided to commit suicide after
he had learned that the SS troops could no longer be trusted. See H. R. Trevor-Roper.
The Last Days of Hitler, 1947, pp. 116 fT.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 419
interests, its emancipation from the profit motive, and its nonutilitarian
attitudes in general have more than anything else contributed to making
contemporary politics well-nigh unpredictable. The inability of the non-
totalitarian world to grasp a mentality which functions independently of all
calculable action in terms of men and material, and is completely indif-
ferent to national interest and the well-being of its people, shows itself in a
curious dilemma of judgment: those who rightly understand the terrible
efficiency of totalitarian organization and police are likely to overestimate
the material force of totalitarian countries, while those who understand the
wasteful incompetence of totalitarian economics are likely to underestimate
the power potential which can be created in disregard of all material factors.
II : The Secret Police
UP TO NOW we know only two authentic forms of totalitarian domination:
the dictatorship of National Socialism after 1938, and the dictatorship of
Bolshevism since 1930. These forms of domination differ basically from
other kinds of dictatorial, despotic or tyrannical rule; and even though they
have developed, with a certain continuity, from party dictatorships, their
essentially totalitarian features are new and cannot be derived from one-
party systems. The goal of one-party systems is not only to seize the gov-
ernment administration but, by filling all offices with party members, to
achieve a complete amalgamation of state and party, so that after the
seizure of power the party becomes a kind of propaganda organization for
the government. This system is "total" only in a negative sense, namely,
in that the ruling party will tolerate no other parties, no opposition and
no freedom of political opinion. once a party dictatorship has come to
power, it leaves the original power relationship between state and party
intact; the government and the army exercise the same power as before,
and the "revolution" consists only in the fact that all government positions
are now occupied by parly members. In all these cases the power of the
party rests on a monopoly guaranteed by the state and the party no longer
possesses its own power center.
The revolution initiated by the totalitarian movements after they have
seized power is of a considerably more radical nature. From the start, they
consciously strive to maintain the essential differences between state and
movement and to prevent the "revolutionary" institutions of the movement
from being absorbed by the government.^" The problem of seizing the state
*"' Hitler frequently commented on the relationship between state and party, and
always emphasized that not the state, but the race, or the "united folk community,"
was of primary importance (cf. the afore-quoted speech, reprinted as annex to the
Tischgesprache). In his speech at the Nuremberg Parteitag of 1935, he gave this
theory its most succinct ｅxpression: "It is not the state that commands us, but we
who command the state." It is self-evident that, in practice, such powers of command
are possible only if the institutions of the party remain independent from those of
the state.
•420
TOTALITARIANISM
machine without amalgamating with it is solved by permitting only those
party members whose importance for the movement is secondary to rise
in the state hierarchy. AH real power is vested in the institutions of the
movement, and outside the state and military apparatuses. It is inside the
movement, which remains the center of action of the country, that all de-
cisions are made; the oflicial civil services are often not even informed of
what is going on, and party members with the ambition to rise to the rank
of ministers have in all cases paid for such "bourgeois" wishes with the loss
of their influence on the movement and of the confidence of its leaders.
Totalitarianism in power uses the state as its outward fagade, to repre-
sent the country in the nontotalitarian world. As such, the totalitarian state
is the logical heir of the totalitarian movement from which it borrows its
organizational structure. Totalitarian rulers deal with nontotalitarian gov-
ernments in the same way they dealt with parliamentary parties or intra-
party factions before their rise to power and, though on an enlarged inter-
national scene, are again faced with the double problem of shielding the
fictitious world of the movement (or the totalitarian country) from the im-
pact of factuality and of presenting a semblance of normality and common
sense to the normal outside world.
Above the state and behind the facades of ostensible power, in a maze of
multiplied offices, underlying all shifts of authority and in a chaos of ineffi-
ciency, lies the power nucleus of the country, the superefficient and super-
competent services of the secret police.^"" The emphasis on the police as the
sole organ of power, and the corresponding neglect of the seemingly greater
power arsenal of the army, which is characteristic of all totalitarian regimes,
can still be partially explained by the totalitarian aspiration to world rule
and its conscious abolition of the distinction between a foreign country and
a home country, between foreign and domestic affairs. The military forces,
trained to fight a foreign aggressor, have always been a dubious instrument
for civil-war purposes; even under totalitarian conditions they find it diffi-
cult to regard their own people with the eyes of a foreign conqueror.^^ More
important in this respect, however, is that their value becomes dubious even
in time of war. Since the totalitarian ruler conducts his policies on the as-
sumption of an eventual world government, he treats the victims of his ag-
gression as though they were rebels, guilty of high treason, and consequently
prefers to rule occupied territories with police, and not with military forces.
Even before the movement seizes power, it possesses a secret police and
spy service with branches in various countries. Later its agents receive more
money and authority than the regular military intelligence service and are
"'"Otto Gauweilcr, Rechtseinrkhtimgen iind Rechtsaiifguhen der Bewegung, 1939,
notes expressly that Himmler's special position as Reichsfuehrer-SS and head of the
German police rested on the fact that the police administration had achieved "a genuine
unity of party and state" which was not even attempted anywhere else in the gov-
ernment.
During the peasant revolts of the twenties in Russia, Voroshilov allegedly refused
the support of the Red Army; this led to the introduction of special divisions of the
OPU for punitive expeditions. Sec Ciliga. op. tit., p. 95.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 421
frequently the secret chiefs of embassies and consulates abroad.**'* Its main
tasks consist in forming fifth columns, directing the branches of the move-
ment, influencing the domestic policies of the respective countries, and gen-
erally preparing for the time when the totalitarian ruler — after overthrow
of the government or military victory — can openly feel at home. In other
words, the international branches of the secret police are the transmission
belts which constantly transform the ostensibly foreign policy of the to-
talitarian state into the potentially domestic business of the totalitarian
movement.
These functions, however, which the secret police fulfill in order to pre-
pare the totalitarian Utopia of world rule, are secondary to those required
for the present realization of the totalitarian fiction in one country. The dom-
inant role of the secret police in the domestic politics of totalitarian coun-
tries has naturally contributed much to the common misconception of totali-
tarianism. All despotisms rely heavily on secret services and feel more
threatened by their own than by any foreign people. However, this analogy
between totalitarianism and despotism holds only for the first stages of to-
talitarian rule, when there is still a political opposition. In this as in other
respects totalitarianism takes advantage of, and gives conscious support to,
nontotalitarian misconceptions, no matter how uncomplimentary they may
be. Himmler, in his famous speech to the Reichswehr staff in 1937, assumed
the role of an ordinary tyrant when he explained the constant expansion of
the police forces by assuming the existence of a "fourth theater in case of
war, internal Germany."**" Similarly, Stalin at almost the same moment half
succeeded in convincing the old Bolshevik guard, whose "confessions" he
needed, of a war threat against the Soviet Union and, consequently, an
emergency in which the country must remain united even behind a despot.
The most striking aspect of these statements was that both were made after
all political opposition had been extinguished, that the secret services were
expanded when actually no opponents were left to be spied upon. When
war came, Himmler neither needed nor used his SS troops in Germany it-
self, except for the running of concentration camps and policing of foreign
slave labor; the bulk of the armed SS served at the Eastern front where they
were used for "special assignments" — usually mass murder — and the en-
forcement of policy which frequently ran counter to the military as well as
the Nazi civilian hierarchy. Like the secret police of the Soviet Union, the
SS formations usually arrived after the military forces had pacified the con-
quered territory and had dealt with outright political opposition.
In the first stages of a totalitarian regime, however, the secret police and
the party's elite formations still play a role similar to that in other forms of
dictatorship and the well-known terror regimes of the past; and the excessive
cruelty of their methods is unparalleled only in the history of modern
•*** In 1935, the Gestapo agents abroad received 20 million marks while the regular
espionage service of the Reichswehr had to get along with a budget of 8 million. See
Pierre Dehillotte, Gestapo, Paris, 1940, p. II.
"^ See Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 ff.
^22 TOTALITARIANISM
Western countries. The first stage of ferreting out secret enemies and hunting
down former opponents is usually combined with drafting the entire popula-
tion into front organizations and re-educating old party members for volun-
tary espionage services, so that the rather dubious sympathies of the drafted
sympathizers need not worry the specially trained cadres of the police. It is
during this stage that a neighbor gradually becomes a more dangerous enemy
to one who happens to harbor "dangerous thoughts" than are the officially
apfxiinted police agents. The end of the first stage comes with the liquidation
of open and secret resistance in any organized form; it can be set at about
1935 in Germany and approximately 1930 in Soviet Russia.
only after the extermination of real enemies has been completed and the
hunt for "objective enemies" begun does terror become the actual content
of totalitarian regimes. Under the pretext of building socialism in one coun-
try, or using a given territory as a laboratory for a revolutionary experiment,
or realizing the Volksgemeinschaft, the second claim of totalitarianism,
the claim to total domination, is carried out. And although theoretically
total domination is possible only under the conditions of world rule, the to-
talitarian regimes have proved that this part of the totalitarian Utopia can
be realized almost to perfection, because it is temporarily independent of
defeat or victory. Thus Hitler could rejoice even in the midst of military
setbacks over the extermination of Jews and the establishment of death fac-
tories; no matter what the final outcome, without the war it would never
have been possible "to burn the bridges" and to realize some of the goals
of the totalitarian movement.^"
The elite formations of the Nazi movement and the "cadres" of the Bol-
shevik movement serve the goal of total domination rather than the security
of the regime in power. Just as the totalitarian claim to world rule is only
in appearance the same as imperialist expansion, so the claim to total dom-
ination only seems familiar to the student of despotism. If the chief differ-
ence between totalitarian and imperialist expansion is that the former
recognizes no difference between a home and a foreign country, then the
chief difference between a despotic and a totalitarian secret police is that the
latter does not hunt secret thoughts and does not use the old method of
secret services, the method of provocation.^*
Since the totalitarian secret police begins its career after the pacification
of the country, it always appears entirely superfluous to all outside observers
r, on the contrary, misleads them into thinking that there is some secret
"" See note 62.
'" Maurice Laporte, Histuire tie I'Okliniiw. Paris, 1935, rightly called the method of
provocation "the foundation stone" of the secret police (p. 19).
In Soviet Russia, provocation, far from being the secret weapon of the secret police,
has been used as the widely propagandized public method of the regime to gauge the
temper of public opinion. The reluctance of the population to avail itself of the periodi-
cally recurring invitations to criticize or react to "liberal" interludes in the terror
regime shows that such gestures are understood as provocation on a mass scale. Provo-
cation has mdeed become the totalitarian version of public opinion polls.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 423
resistance. ^^' The superfluousness of secret services is nothing new; they
have always been haunted by the need to prove their usefulness and keep
their jobs after their original task had been completed. The methods used
for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather
difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-
government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been
inspired by the police itself."-^ Similarly, the role of secret agents in all revolu-
tionary parties in Czarist Russia strongly suggests that without their "inspir-
ing" provocative actions the course of the Russian revolutionary movement
would have been far less successful.''^ Provocation, in other words, helped as
much to maintain the continuity of tradition as it did to disrupt time and
again the organization of the revolution.
This dubious role of provocation might have been one reason why the
totalitarian rulers discarded it. Provocation, moreover, is clearly necessary
only on the assumption that suspicion is not sufficient for arrest and punish-
ment. None of the totalitarian rulers, of course, ever dreamed of conditions
in which he would have to resort to provocation in order to trap somebody
he thought to be an enemy. More important than these technical considera-
tions is the fact that totalitarianism defined its enemies ideologically before
it seized power, so that categories of the "suspects" were not established
through police information. Thus the Jews in Nazi Germany or the de-
scendants of the former ruling classes in Soviet Russia were not really sus-
pected of any hostile action; they had been declared "objective" enemies
of the regime in accordance with its ideology.
The chief difference between the despotic and the totalitarian secret police
lies in the difference between the "suspect" and the "objective enemy." The
latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his own desire to
overthrow it.'^^ He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be
"- Interesting in this respect are the attempts made by Nazi civil servants in Germany
to reduce the competence and the personnel of the Gestapo on the ground that Nazifi-
cation of the country had been achieved, so that Himmler, who on the contrary
wanted to expand the secret services at this moment (around 1934), had to exaggerate
the danger coming from the "internal enemies." See Nazi Conspiracy, II, 259; V, 205;
III, 547.
"^ See Gallier-Boissiere, Mysteries of the French Secret Police, 1938, p. 234.
•'^ It seems, after all, no accident that the foundation of the Okhrana in 1880
ushered in a period of unsurpassed revolutionary activities in Russia. In order to prove
its usefulness, it had occasionally to organize murders, and its agents "served despite
themselves the ideas of those whom they denounced. ... If a pamphlet was distrib-
uted by a police agent or if the execution of a minister was organized by an Azev —
the result was the same" (M. Laporte, op. cit., p. 25). The more important executions
moreover seem to have been police jobs — Stolypin and von Plehve. Decisive for the
revolutionary tradition was the fact that in times of calm the police agents had to
"stir up anew the energies and stimulate the zeal" of the revolutionaries (ibid., p. 71).
See also Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made A Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
1948, who calls this phenomenon "Police Socialism."
"^ Hans Frank, who later became Governor General of Poland, made a typical dif-
ferentiation between a person "dangerous to the State" and a person who is "hostile
to the State." The former implies an objective quality which is independent of will
^24 TOTALITARIANISM
provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a "carrier of tendencies"
like the carrier of a disease."" Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler
proceeds like a man who persistently insults another man until everybody
knows that the latter is his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go
and kill him in self-defense. This certainly is a little crude, but it works—
as c\fT>body will know who ever watched how certain successful careerists
eliminate competitors.
The introduction of the notion of "objective enemy" is much more de-
cisive for the functioning of totalitarian regimes than the ideological defini-
tion of the respective categories. If it were only a matter of hating Jews or
bourgeois, the totalitarian regimes could, after the commission of one gi-
gantic crime, return, as it were, to the rules of normal life and government.
As we know, the opposite is the case. The category of objective enemies
outlives the first ideologically determined foes of the movement; new ob-
jective enemies are discovered according to changing circumstances: the
Nazis, foreseeing the completion of Jewish extermination, had already taken
the necessary preliminary steps for the liquidation of the Polish people, while
Hitler even planned the decimation of certain categories of Germans;"^ the
Bolsheviks, having started with descendants of the former ruling classes,
directed their full terror against the kulaks (in the early thirties), who in
turn were followed by Russians of Polish origin (between 1936 and 1938),
the Tartars and the Volga Germans during the war, former prisoners of war
and units of the occupational forces of the Red Army after the war, and Rus-
sian Jewry after the establishment of a Jewish state. The choice of such cate-
gories is never entirely arbitrary; since they are publicized and used for
propaganda purposes of the movement abroad, they must appear plausible
as possible enemies; the choice of a particular category may even be due
and behavior; the political police of the Nazis is concerned not just with actions hostile
to the state but with "all attempts — no matter what their aim — which in their effects
endanger the State." See Deittsclies Verwaltiingsrecht, pp. 420-430. Translation quoted
from Niizi Conspiracy. IV, 881 ff. — In the words of Maunz, op. cit., p. 44: "By elimi-
nating dangerous persons, the security measure . . . means to ward off a state of
danger to the national community, independently of any offense that may have been
committed by these persons, [it is a question of] warding off an objective danger."
"" R. Hoehn, a Nazi jurist and member of the SS, said in an obituary on Reinhard
Heydrich, who prior to his rule of Czechoslovakia had been one of the closest collab-
orators with Himmler: He regarded his opponents "not as individuals but as carriers
of tendencies endangering the state and therefore beyond the pale of the national
community." In Deutsche Allgemeine Zeititng of June 6, 1942; quoted from E. Kohn-
Bramstedt, Dictatorship and Political Police, London, 1945.
'" As early as 1941, during a staff meeting in Hitler's headquarters, it was proposed
to impose upon the Polish population those regulations by which the Jews had been
prepared for the extermination camps: change of names if these were of German
ongm; death sentences for sexual intercourse between Germans and Poles (Rassen-
schande); obligation to wear a P-sign in Germany similar to the Yellow Star for Jews.
See Nazi Conspiracy, VIII, 237 ff., and Hans Frank's diary in Trial, op. cit., XXIX, 683.
Naturally, the Poles themselves soon began to worry about what would happen to
them when the Nazis had finished the extermination of the Jews (Nazi Conspiracy, IV,
916).— For Hitler's plans regarding the German people, see note 80.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 425
to certain propaganda needs of the movement at large — as for instance the
sudden entirely unprecedented emergence of governmental antisemitism in
the Soviet Union, which may be calculated to win sympathies for the Soviet
Union in the European satellite countries. The show trials which require
subjective confessions of guilt from "objectively" identified enemies are
meant for these purposes; they can best be staged with those who have
received a totalitarian indoctrination that enables them "subjectively" to
understand their own "objective" harmfulness and to confess "for the sake
of the cause." ^^ The concept of the "objective opponent," whose identity
changes according to the prevailing circumstances — so that, as soon as one
category is liquidated, war may be declared on another — corresponds ex-
actly to the factual situation reiterated time and again by totalitarian rulers:
namely, that their regime is not a government in any traditional sense, but
a movement, whose advance constantly meets with new obstacles that have
to be eliminated. So far as one ma" speak a^ all of any legal thinking within
the totalitarian system, the "objective opponent" is its central idea.
Closely connected with this transformation of the suspect mto the objec-
tive enemy is the change of position of the secret police in the totalitarian
state. The secret services have rightly been called a state within the state, and
this not only in despotisms but also under constitutional or semiconstitu-
tional governments. The mere possession of secret information has always
given this branch a decisive superiority over all other branches of the civil
services and constituted an open threat to members of the government."^ The
totalitarian police, on the contrary, is totally subject to the will of the Leader,
who alone can decide who the next potential enemy will be and who, as
Stalin did, can also single out cadres of the secret police for liquidation.
Since the police are no longer permitted to use provocation, they have been
deprived of the only available means of perpetuating themselves independ-
ently of the government and have become entirely dependent on the higher
authorities for the safeguarding of their jobs. Like the army in a nontotali-
tarian state, the police in totalitarian countries merely execute political policy
and have lost all the prerogatives which they held under despotic bureauc-
racies.^'"^
"" Beck and Godin, op. til., p. 87, speak of the "objective characteristics" which
invited arrest in the USSR; among them was membership in the NKVD (p. 153).
Subjective insight into the objective necessity of arrest and confession could most
easily be achieved with former members of the secret police. In the words of an ex-
NKVD agent: "My superiors know me and my work well enough, and if the party
and the NKVD now require me to confess to such things they must have good reasons
for what they are doing. My duty as a loyal Soviet citizen is not to withhold the con-
fession required of me" {ihiiL, p. 231).
"" Well known is the situation in France where ministers lived in constant fear of
the secret "Jos.siers" of the police. For the situation in Czarist Russia, see Laporte,
op. tit., pp. 22-23: "Eventually the Okhrana will wield a power far superior to the
power of the more regular authorities. . . . The Okhrana . . . will inform the Czar
only of what it chooses to."
""""Unlike the Okhrana, which had been a state within a state, the GPU is a de-
partment of the Soviet government; . . . and its activities are much less independent"
(Roger N. Baldwin, "Political Police," in Entytlopetlia of StHitil Sciences).
^-ift TOTALITARIANISM
The task of the totalitarian police is not to discover crimes, but to be on
hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the popu-
lation. Their chief pohtical distinction is that they alone are in the con-
fidence of the highest authority and know which political line will be
enforced. This does not apply only to matters of high policy, such as the liqui-
dation of a whole class or ethnic group (only the cadres of the GPU knew
the actual goal of the Soviet government in the early thirties and only the
SS formations knew that the Jews were to be exterminated in the early
forties); the point about everyday life under totalitarian conditions is that
only the agents of the NKVD in an industrial enterprise are informed of
what Moscow wants when it orders, for instance, a speed-up in the fabrica-
tion of pipes — whether it simply wants more pipes, or to ruin the director of
the factory, or to liquidate the whole management, or to abolish this par-
ticular factory, or, finally, to have this order repeated all over the nation so
that a new purge can begin.
one of the reasons for the duplication of secret services whose agents
are unknown to each other is that total domination needs the most extreme
flexibility; to use our example, Moscow may not yet know, when it gives its
order for pipes, whether it wants pipes — which are always needed — or a
purge. Multiplication of secret services makes last-minute changes pos-
sible, so that one branch may be preparing to bestow the Order of Lenin
on the director of the factory while another makes arrangements for his ar-
rest. The efficiency of the police consists in the fact that such contradictory
assignments can be prepared simultaneously.
Under totalitarian, as under other regimes, the secret police has a mo-
nopoly on certain vital information. But the kind of knowledge that can be
possessed only by the police has undergone an important change: the police
are no longer concerned with knowing what is going on in the heads of future
victims (most of the time they ignore who these victims will be), and the
police have become the trustees of the greatest state secrets. This automati-
cally means a great improvement in prestige and position, even though it is
accompanied by a definite loss of real power. The secret services no longer
know anything that the Leader does not know better; in terms of power,
they have sunk to the level of the executioner.
From a legal point of view, even more interesting than the change from
the suspect to the objective enemy is the totalitarian replacement of the
suspected offense by the possible crime. The possible crime is no more sub-
jective than the objective enemy. While the suspect is arrested because he is
thought to be capable of committing a crime that more or less fits his per-
sonality (or his suspected personality ),i''i the totalitarian version of the
'"' Typical of the concept of the suspect is the following story related by C. Pobye-
donostzev in L'Aiitocratie Russe: Memoires poUtiques, correspondance officiele et
dociimenis iiudits . . . 1881-1894, Paris, 1927: General Cherevin of the Okhrana is
asked, because the opposing party has hired a Jewish lawyer, to intervene in favor of
a lady who is about to lose a lawsuit. Says the General: "The same night I ordered
the arrest of this cursed Jew and held him as a so-called politically suspect person.
. . . After all, could I treat in the same manner friends and a dirty Jew who may
be innocent today but who was guilty yesterday or will be guilty tomorrow?"
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 427
possible crime is based on the logical anticipation of objective developments.
The Moscow Trials of the old Bolshevik guard and the chiefs of the Red
Army were classic examples of punishment for possible crimes. Behind the
fantastic, fabricated charges one can easily detect the following logical cal-
culation: developments in the Soviet Union might lead to a crisis, a crisis
might lead to the overthrow of Stalin's dictatorship, this might weaken the
country's military force and possibly bring about a situation in which the
new government would have to sign a truce or even conclude an alliance
with Hitler. Whereupon Stalin proceeded to declare that a plot for the over-
throw of the government and a conspiracy with Hitler existed.'"- Against
these "objective," though entirely improbable, possibilities stood only "sub-
jective" factors, such as the trustworthiness of the accused, their fatigue,
their inability to understand what was going on, their firm conviction that
without Stalin everything would be lost, their sincere hatred of Fascism —
that is, a number of factual details which naturally lacked the consistency of
the fictitious, logical, possible crime. Totalitarianism's central assumption
that everything is possible thus leads through consistent elimination of all
factual restraints to the absurd and terrible consequence that every crime the
rulers can conceive of must be punished, regardless of whether or not it has
been committed. The possible crime, like the objective enemy, is of course
beyond the competence of the police, who can neither discover, invent, nor
provoke it. Here again the secret services depend entirely upon the political
authorities. Their independence as a state within the state is gone.
only in one respect does the totalitarian secret police still resemble closely
the secret services of nontotalitarian countries. The secret police has tradi-
tionally, i.e., since Fouche, profited from its victims and has augmented the
official state-authorized budget from certain unorthodox sources simply by
assuming a position of partnership in activities it was supposed to suppress,
such as gambling and prostitution.'"'' These illegal methods of financing itself,
ranging from friendly acceptance of bribes to outright blackmail, were a
'"" The charges in the Moscow Trials "were based ... on a grotesquely brutalized
and distorting anticipation of possible developments. [Stalin's] reasoning probably
developed along the following lines: they may want to overthrow me in a crisis — I
shall charge them with having made the attempt. ... A change of government may
weaken Russia's fighting capacity; and if they succeed, they may be compelled to sign
a truce with Hitler, and perhaps even agree to a cession of territory. ... I shall ac-
cuse them of having entered already into a treacherous alliance with Germany and
ceded Soviet territory." This is I. Deutscher's brilliant explanation of the Moscow
Trials, op. cit.. p. 377.
A good example of the Nazi version of the possible crime can be found in Hans
Frank, op. cit.: "A complete catalogue of attempts 'dangerous to the State' can never
be drawn up because it can never be foreseen what may endanger the leadership and
the people some time in the future." (Translation quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV,
881.)
'"^ The criminal methods of the secret police are of course no monopoly of the
French tradition. In Austria, for example, the feared political police under Maria
Theresa was organized by Kaunitz from the cadres of the so-called "chastity com-
missars" who used to live by blackmail. See Moritz Bermann, Maria Theresia iind
Kaiser Joseph II, Vienna-Leipzig, 1881. I owe this reference to Robert Pick.
^2S TOTALITARIANISM
prominent factor in freeing the secret services from the public authorities
and strengthened their position as a state within the state. It is curious to
sec that the financing of police activities with income from its victims has
survived all other changes. In Soviet Russia, the NKVD is almost entirely
dependent upon the exploitation of slave labor which, indeed, seems to
yield no i>thcr profit and to serve no other purpose but the financing of the
huge secret apparatus."" Himmler first financed his SS troops, who were the
cadres of the Nazi secret police, through the confiscation of Jewish property;
he then concluded an agreement with Darre, the Minister of Agriculture, by
which Himmler received the several hundred million marks which Darre
earned annually by buying agricultural commodities cheaply abroad and
selling them at fixed prices in Germany.'"''* This source of regular income
disappeared of course during the war; Albert Speer, the successor of Todt
and the greatest employer of manpower in Germany after 1942, proposed
a similar deal to Himmler in 1942; if Himmler agreed to release from SS
authority the imported slave laborers whose work had been remarkably
incfticient, the Speer organization would give him a certain percentage of
the profits for the SS.'"" To such more or less regular sources of income,
Himmler added the old blackmail methods of secret services in times of
financial crisis: in their communities SS units formed groups of "Friends
of the SS" who had to "volunteer" the necessary funds for the needs of the
local SS men.'"' (It is noteworthy that in its various financial operations the
Nazi secret police did not exploit its prisoners. Except in the last years of
the war, when the use of human material in the concentration camps was
no longer determined by Himmler alone, work in the camps "had no ra-
tional purpose except that of increasing the burden and torture of the
unfortunate prisoners."'"**)
However, these financial irregularities are the sole, and not very im-
portant, traces of the secret police tradition. They are possible because of
""That the huge police organization is paid with profits from slave labor is cer-
tain; surprising is that the police budget seems not even entirely covered by it; Krav-
chenko. op. cii.. mentions special taxes, imposed by the NKVD on convicted citizens
who continue to live and work in freedom.
'"'See Fritz Thyssen. / Paid Hitler. London. 1941.
'""See Nazi Conspiruvy, I. 916-917. — The economic activity of the SS was con-
solidated in a central office for economic and administrative affairs. To the Treasury
and Internal Revenue, the SS declared its financial assets as "party property earmarked
for special purposes" (letter of May 5. 1943, quoted from M. Wolfson, Uebersicht
tier GlifJvrinii; verhrccherischcr Nazi-Or^ani.sutidiwn. Omgiis. December, 1947).
""Sec Kohn-Bramstedt, op. cii., p. 112. — The blackmail motive is clearly revealed
if we consider that this kind of fund-raising was always organized by local SS units
in the localities where they were stationed. See Der Weg cicr SS, issued by the SS-
Hiiuptuint-Schiiliingsumt (undated), p. 14.
'"" IhiJ.. p. 124. — Certain compromises in this respect were made for those require-
ments pertaining to the maintenance of the camps and the personal needs of the SS.
Sec Wolfson. op. til., letter of September 19. 1941, from Oswald Pohl, head of the
WVH iWinschafts-iind Verwultiing.s-Haiiptamt) to the Reichskommissar for price
control. It seems that all these economic activities in the concentration camps devel-
oped only durmp the war and under the pressure of acute labor shortage.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 429
the general contempt of totalitarian regimes for economic and financial
matters, so that methods which under normal conditions would be illegal,
and would distinguish the secret police from other more respectable de-
partments of the administration, no longer indicate that we are dealing here
with a department which enjoys independence, is not controlled by other au-
thorities, lives in an atmosphere of irregularity, nonrespectability, and inse-
curity. The position of the totalitarian secret police, on the contrary, has
been completely stabilized, and its services are wholly integrated in the ad-
ministration. Not only is the organization not beyond the pale of the law,
but, rather, it is the embodiment of the law, and its respectability is above
suspicion. It no longer organizes murders on its own initiative, no longer
provokes offenses against state and society, and it sternly proceeds against
all forms of bribery, blackmail and irregular financial gains. The moral lec-
ture, coupled with very tangible threats, that Himmler could permit himself
to deliver to his men in the middle of the war — "We had the moral right
... to wipe out this [Jewish] people bent on wiping us out, but we do
not have the right to enrich ourselves in any manner whatsoever, be it by
a fur coat, a watch, a single mark, or a cigarette" ^"^ — strikes a note that
one would look for in vain in the history of the secret police. If it still is
concerned with "dangerous thoughts," they are hardly ones which the sus-
pected persons know to be dangerous; the regimentation of all intellectual
and artistic life demands a constant re-establishment and revision of stand-
ards which naturally is accompanied by repeated eliminations of intellectuals
whose "dangerous thoughts" usually consist in certain ideas that were still
entirely orthodox the day before. While, therefore, its police function in
the accepted meaning of the word has become superfluous, the economic
function of the secret police, sometimes thought to have replaced the first,
is even more dubious. It is undeniable, to be sure, that the NKVD periodi-
cally rounds up a percentage of the Soviet population and sends them into
camps which are known under the flattering misnomer of forced-labor
camps;"" yet although it is quite possible that this is the Soviet Union's
'"^ Himmler's speech of October, 1943, at Posen, Intcnwtioiwl Military Trials,
Nuremberg, 1945-46, Vol. 29, p. 146.
"""Bek Bulat (the pen name of a former Soviet professor) has been able to study
documents of the North Caucasian NKVD. From these documents it was obvious
that in June, 1937, when the great purge was at its apex, the government prescribed
the local NKVDs to have a certain percentage of the population arrested. . . . The
percentage varied from one province to the other, reaching 5 per cent in the least
loyal areas. The average for the whole of the Soviet Union was about 3 per cent."
Reported by David J. Dallin in The New Leader, January 8, 1949. — Beck and Godin,
op. cit., p. 239, arrive at a slightly divergent and quite plausible assumption, accord-
ing to which "arrests were planned as follows: The NKVD files covered practically
the whole population, and everyone was classified in a category. Thus statistics were
available in every town showing how many former Whites, members of opposing par-
ties, etc., were living in them. All incriminating material collected . . . and gathered
from prisoners' confessions was also entered in the files, and each person's card was
marked to show how dangerous he was considered; this depending on the amount of
suspicious or incriminating material appearing in his file. As the statistics were regu-
4.U) TOTALITARIANISM
way of solving its unemployment problem, it is also generally known that
the output in those camps is infinitely lower than that of ordinary Soviet
labor and hardly suffices to pay the expenses of the police apparatus.
Neither dubious nor superfluous is the political function of the secret
police, the "best organized and the most efficient" of all government de-
partments.'" in the power apparatus of the totalitarian regime. It constitutes
the true executive branch of the government through which all orders are
transmitted. Through the net of secret agents, the totalitarian ruler has created
for himself a directly executive transmission belt which, in distinction to
the onion-like structure of the ostensible hierarchy, is completely severed
and isolated from all other institutions."- In this sense, the secret police
agents are the only openly ruling class in totalitarian countries and their
standards and scale of values permeate the entire texture of totalitarian so-
ciety.
From this viewpoint, it may not be too surprising that certain peculiar
qualities of the secret police are general qualities of totalitarian society rather
than peculiarities of the totalitarian secret police. The category of the sus-
pect thus embraces under totalitarian conditions the total population; every
thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently chang-
ing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it oc-
curs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects
by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior,
for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind.
Since, moreover, it is impossible ever to know beyond doubt another man's
heart — torture in this context is only the desperate and eternally futile at-
tempt to achieve what cannot be achieved — suspicion can no longer be al-
layed if neither a community of values nor the predictabilities of self-interest
exist as social (as distinguished from merely psychological) realities. Mutual
suspicion, therefore, permeates all social relationships in totalitarian coun-
tries and creates an all-pervasive atmosphere even outside the special pur-
view of the secret police.
In totalitarian regimes provocation, once only the specialty of the secret
agent, becomes a method of dealing with his neighbor which everybody,
willingly or unwillingly, is forced to follow. Everyone, in a way, is the agent
larly reported lo higher authorities, it was possible to arrange a purge at any moment,
with full knowledge of the exact number of persons in each category."
' ' ' Baldwin, op. cil.
"•'The Russian secret-police cadres were as much at the 'personal disposal" of Stalin
as the SS Shock Troops (Verfii^iinfistnippcn) were at the personal disposal of Hitler.
Both, even if they are called to serve with the military forces in time of war, live
under their own special jurisdiction. The special "marriage laws" which served to
segregate the SS from the rest of the population, were the first and most fundamental
regulations which Himmler introduced when he took over the reorganization of the SS.
Even prior to Himmler's marriage laws, in 1927, the SS was instructed by official
decree "never [to participate] in discussions at membership meetings" (Der Weg der
SS. op. cil.). The same conduct is reported about the members of the NKVD, who
kept deliberately to themselves and above all did not associate with other sections of
the party aristocracy (Beck and Godin, op. cit., p. 163).
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER
431
provocateur of everyone else; for obviously everybody will call himself an
agent provocateur if ever an ordinary friendly exchange of "dangerous
thoughts" (or what in the meantime have become dangerous thoughts)
should come to the attention of the authorities. Collaboration of the popula-
tion in denouncing political opponents and volunteer service as stool pigeons
are certainly not unprecedented, but in totalitarian countries they are so well
organized that the work of specialists is almost superfluous. In a system of
ubiquitous spying, where everybody may be a police agent and each indi-
vidual feels himself under constant surveillance; under circumstances, more-
over, where careers are extremely insecure and where the most spectacular
ascents and falls have become everyday occurrences, every word becomes
equivocal and subject to retrospective "interpretation."
The most striking illustration of the permeation of totalitarian society
with secret police methods and standards can be found in the matter of
careers. The double agent in nontotalitarian regimes served the cause he was
supposed to combat almost as much as, and sometimes more than, the au-
thorities. Frequently he harbored a sort of double ambition: he wanted to
rise in the ranks of the revolutionary parties as well as in the ranks of the
services. In order to win promotion in both fields, he had only to adopt cer-
tain methods which in a normal society belong to the secret daydreams of
the small employee who depends on seniority for advancement: through his
connections with the police, he could certainly eliminate his rivals and su-
periors in the party, and through his connections with the revolutionaries he
had at least a chance to get rid of his chief in the police.'^'' If we consider the
career conditions in present Russian society, the similarity to such methods
is striking. Not only do almost all higher officials owe their positions to
purges that removed their predecessors, but promotions in all walks of life
are accelerated in this way. About every ten years, a nation-wide purge
makes room for the new generation, freshly graduated and hungry for jobs.
The government has itself established those conditions for advancement
*which the police agent formerly had to create.
This regular violent turnover of the whole gigantic administrative ma-
chine, while it prevents the development of competence, has many ad-
wantages: it assures the relative youth of officials and prevents a stabiliza-
tion of conditions which, at least in time of peace, are fraught with danger
lifor totalitarian rule; by eliminating seniority and merit, it prevents the de-
velopment of the loyalties that usually tie younger staff members to their
f elders, upon whose opinion and good will their advancement "depends; it
neliminates once and for all the dangers of unemployment and assures every-
one of a job compatible with his education. Thus, in 1939, after the gigantic
t>purge in the Soviet Union had come to an end, Stalin could note with great
lisatisfaction that "the Party was able to promote to leading posts in State
or Party affairs more than 500,000 young Bolsheviks.""'* The humiliation
"■'Typical is the splendid career of police agent Malinovsky, who ended as deputy
nof the Bolsheviks in parliament. See Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cii.. chapter xxxi.
"''Quoted from Avtorkhanov, op. lit.
4J2 TOTALITARIANISM
implicit in owing a job to the unjust elimination of one's predecessor has
the same demoralizing elTect that the elimination of the Jews had upon
the German professions: it makes every jobholder a conscious accomplice
in the crimes of the government, their beneficiary whether he likes it or
not. with the result that the more sensitive the humiliated individual happens
to be. the more ardently he will defend the regime. In other words, this
system is the logical outgrowth of the Leader principle in its full implica-
tions and the best possible guarantee for loyalty, in that it makes every new
generation depend for its livelihood on the current political line of the
Leader which started the job-creating purge. It also realizes the identity of
public and private interests, of which defenders of the Soviet Union used
to be so proud (or. in the Nazi version, the abolition of the private sphere
of life), insofar as every individual of any consequence owes his whole ex-
istence to the political interest of the regime; and when this factual identity
of interest is broken and the next purge has swept him out of office, the
regime makes sure that he disappears from the world of the living. In a not
very dilTerent way. the double agent was identified with the cause of the
revolution (without which he would lose his job), and not only with the
secret police; in that sphere, too, a spectacular rise could end only in an
anonymous death, since it was rather unlikely that the double game could
be played forever. The totalitarian government, when it set such conditions
for promotion in all careers as had previously prevailed only among social
outcasts, has effected one of the most far-reaching changes in social psy-
chology. The psychology of the double agent, who was willing to pay the
price of a short life for the exalted existence of a few years at the peak, has
necessarily become the philosophy in personal matters of the whole post-
revolutionary generation in Russia, and to a lesser but still very dangerous
extent, in postwar Germany.
This is the society, permeated by standards and living by methods which
once had been the monopoly of the secret police, in which the totalitarian
secret police functions. only in the initial stages, when a struggle for power
is still going on, are its victims those who can be suspected of opposition. It
then embarks upon its totalitarian career with the persecution of the ob-
jective enemy, which may be the Jews or the Poles (as in the case of the
Nazis) or so-called "counter-revolutionaries" — an accusation which "in
Soviet Russia ... is established . . . before any question as to [the] be-
havior [of the accused] has arisen at all" — who may be people who at
any time owned a shop or a house or "had parents or grandparents who
owned such things," "'* or who happened to belong to one of the Red Army
occupational forces, or were Russians of Polish origin. only in its last and
fully totalitarian stage are the concepts of the objective enemy and the
logically possible crime abandoned, the victims chosen completely at ran-
dom and, even without being accused, declared unfit to live. This new cate-
gory of "undesirables" may consist, as in the case of the Nazis, of the men-
tally ill or persons with lung and heart disease, or in the Soviet Union, of
"'•The Dark Side of the Moon. New York, 1947.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 433
people who happen to have been taken up in that percentage, varying from
one province to another, which is ordered to be deported.
This consistent arbitrariness negates human freedom more efficiently than
any tyranny ever could. one had at least to be an enemy of tyranny in order
to be punished by it. Freedom of opinion was not abolished for those who
were brave enough to risk their necks. Theoretically, the choice of opposi-
tion remains in totalitarian regimes too; but such freedom is almost invali-
dated if committing a voluntary act only assures a "punishment" that every-
one else may have to bear anyway. Freedom in this system has not only
dwindled down to its last and apparently still indestructible guarantee, the
possibility of suicide, but has lost its distinctive mark because the conse-
quences of its exercise are shared with completely innocent people. If Hit-
ler had had the time to realize his dream of a General German Health Bill,
the man suffering from a lung disease would have been subject to the same
fate as a Communist in the early and a Jew in the later years of the Nazi
regime. Similarly, the opponent of the regime in Russia, suffering the same
fate as millions of people who are chosen for concentration camps to make
up certain quotas, only relieves the police of the burden of arbitrary choice.
The innocent and the guilty are equally undesirable.
The change in the concept of crime and criminals determines the new and
terrible methods of the totalitarian secret police. Criminals are punished,
undesirables disappear from the face of the earth; the only trace which they
leave behind is the memory of those who knew and loved them, and one
of the most difficult tasks of the secret police is to make sure that even such
traces will disappear together with the condemned man.
The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have
invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card
in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political
friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaint-
ances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends
of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between
the suspect's friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends
were indicated by lines between the respective circles.*^*' Obviously the limi-
tations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theo-
retically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relation-
ships of the entire population. And this is the Utopian goal of the totalitarian
secret police. It has given up the traditional old police dream which the
lie detector is still supposed to realize, and no longer tries to find out who
is who, or who thinks what. (The lie detector is perhaps the most graphic
example of the fascination that this dream apparently exerts over the
mentality of all policemen; for obviously the complicated measuring equip-
ment can hardly establish anything except the cold-blooded or nervous
temperament of its victims. Actually, the feeble-minded reasoning under-
lying the use of this mechanism can only be explained by the irrational wish
that some form of mind reading were possible after all.) This old dream
""See Laporte, op. cit., p. 39.
4.U TOTALITARIANISM
was terrible enouuh and since time immemorial has invariably led to torture
and the most abominable cruelties. There was only one thing in its favor:
it asked for the impossible. The modern dream of the totalitarian police,
with its modern techniques, is incomparably more terrible. Now the police
dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice
at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what
degree of intimacy: and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable al-
though its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this
map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the
totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible tc
obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
If the reports of arrested NKVD agents can be trusted, the Russian
secret police has come uncomfortably close to this ideal of totalitarian
rule. The police has secret dossiers about each inhabitant of the vast
country, carefully listing the many relationships that exist between people,
from chance acquaintances to genuine friendship to family relations; for
it is only to discover these relationships that the defendants, whose "crimes"
have anyway been established "objectively" prior to their arrest, are ques-
tioned so closely. Finally, as for the gift of memory so dangerous to
totalitarian rule, foreign observers feel that "if it is true that elephants
never forget, Russians seem to us to be the very opposite of elephants. . . .
Soviet Russian psychology seems to make forgetfulness really possible.""''
How important to the total-domination apparatus this complete disap-
pearance of its victims is can be seen in those instances where, for one
reason or another, the regime was confronted with the memory of survivors.
During the war, one SS commandant made the terrible mistake of inform-
ing a French woman of her husband's death in a German concentration
camp; this slip caused a small avalanche of orders and instructions to all
camp commandants, warning them that under no circumstances was in-
formation ever to be given to the outside world. ^"^ The point is that, as far
as the French widow was concerned, her husband had supposedly ceased to
live at the moment of his arrest, or rather had ceased ever to have lived.
Similarly, the Soviet police officers, accustomed to this system since their
birth, could only stare in amazement at those people in occupied Poland
who tried desperately to find out what had happened to their friends and
relatives under arrest.""
In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are
made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by acci-
dent and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former exist-
ence as a body and a grave. Compared with this newest invention for doing
away with people, the old-fashioned method of murder, political or criminal,
is inefficient indeed. The murderer leaves behind him a corpse, and although
he tries to efface the traces of his own identity, he has no power to erase the
"' Beck and Godin, op. dt.. pp. 234 and 127.
""See Nazi Conspiracy. VII, 84 ff.
"" The Dark Side of the Moon.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 435
identity of his victim from the memory of the surviving world. The op)eration
of the secret poUce, on the contrary, miraculously sees to it that the vic-
tim never existed at all.
The connection between secret police and secret societies is obvious. The
establishment of the former always needed and used the argument of dangers
arising from the existence of the latter. The totalitarian secret police is the
first in history which neither needs nor uses these old-fashioned pretexts of
all tyrants. The anonymity of its victims, who cannot be called enemies of
the regime and whose identity is unknown to the persecutors until the arbi-
trary decision of the government eliminates them from the world of the
living and exterminates their memory from the world of the dead, is beyond
all secrecy, beyond the strictest silence, beyond the greatest mastery of
double life that the discipline of conspiratory societies used to impose upon
their members.
The totalitarian movements which, during their rise to power, imitate cer-
tain organizational features of secret societies and yet establish themselves
in broad daylight, create a true secret society only after their ascendancy to
rule. The secret society of totalitarian regimes is the secret police; the only
strictly guarded secret in a totalitarian country, the only esoteric knowledge
that exists, concerns the operations of the police and the conditions in the
concentration camps. ^-■' Of course the population at large and the party
members specifically know all the general facts — that concentration camps
exist, that people disappear, that innocent persons are arrested; at the same
time, every person in a totalitarian country knows also that it is the great-
est crime ever to talk about these "secrets." Inasmuch as man depends for
his knowledge upon the affirmation and comprehension of his fellow-men,
this generally shared but individually guarded, this never-communicated in-
formation loses its quality of reality and assumes the nature of a mere
nightmare. only those who are in possession of the strictly esoteric knowl-
edge concerning the eventual new categories of undesirables and the opera-
tional methods of the cadres are in a position to communicate with each
other about what actually constitutes the reality for all. They alone are in a
position to believe in what they know to be true. This is their secret, and
in order to guard this secret they are established as a secret organization.
They remain members even if this secret organization arrests them, forces
them to make confessions, and finally liquidates them. So long as they
guard the secret they belong to the elite, and as a rule they do not betray
it even when they are in the prisons and concentration camps. ^-^
We already have noted that one of the many paradoxes that offend the
'^" "There was little in the SS that was not secret. The greatest secret was the prac-
tices in the concentration camps. Not even members of the Gestapo were admitted
... to the camps without a special permit" (Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat, Munich,
1946, p. 297).
'^' Beck and Godin, op. cit.. p. 169, report how the arrested NKVD officials "took
the greatest care never to reveal any NKVD secrets."
4if, TOTALITARIANISM
common sense of the nontotalitarian world is the seemingly irrational use
which totahtarianism makes of conspiratory methods. The totahtarian move-
ments, apparently persecuted by the police, very sparingly use methods of
conspiracy foi the overthrow of the government in their struggle for power,
whereas totalitarianism in power, after it has been recognized by all govern-
ments and seemingly outgrown its revolutionary stage, develops a true se-
cret police as the nucleus of its government and power. It seems that offi-
cial recognition is felt to be a greater menace to the conspiracy content of
the totalitarian movement, a menace of interior disintegration, than the half-
hearted police measures of nontotalitarian regimes.
The truth of the matter is that totalitarian leaders, though they are con-
vinced that they must follow consistently the fiction and the rules of the ficti-
tious world which were laid down during their struggle for power, discover
only gradually the full implications of this fictitious world and its rules. Their
faith in human omnipotence, their conviction that everything can be done
through organization, carries them into experiments which human imagina-
tions may have outlined but human activity certainly never realized. Their
hideous discoveries in the realm of the possible are inspired by an ideological
scicntificality which has proved to be less controlled by reason and less
willing to recognize factuality than the wildest fantasies of prescientific and
prephilosophical speculation. They establish the secret society which now
no longer operates in broad daylight, the society of the secret police or the
political soldier or the ideologically trained fighter, in order to be able to
carry out the indecent experimental inquiry into what is possible.
The totalitarian conspiracy against the nontotalitarian world, on the
other hand, its claim to world domination, remains as open and unguarded
under conditions of totalitarian rule as in the totalitarian movements. It is
practically impressed upon the co-ordinated population of "sympathizers"
in the form of a supposed conspiracy of the whole world against their own
country. The totalitarian dichotomy is propagated by making it a duty for
every national abroad to report home as though he were a secret agent, and
by treating every foreigner as a spy for his home government.'-'- It is for the
practical realization of this dochotomy rather than because of specific secrets,
military and other, that iron curtains separate the inhabitants of a totalitarian
country from the rest of the world. Their real secret, the concentration
camps, those laboratories in the experiment of total domination, is shielded
by the totalitarian regimes from the eyes of their own people as well as from
all others.
For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is
the most efTicient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes.
"Normal men don't know that everything is possible,"'-"' refuse to believe
"^Typical is the following dialogue reported in Dark Side of the Moon: "To an ad-
mission that one had ever been outside Poland the next question invariably was: 'And
for whom were you spying? . . . one man . . . asked: 'But you too have foreign
visitors. Do you suppose they are all spies?' The answer was: 'What do you think?
Do you imagine we are so naive as not to be perfectly aware of it?' "
"■'David Rousset. The Other Kingdom, New York, 1947.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 437
their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous, just as the mass men did
not trust theirs in the face of a normal reahty in which no place was left
for them.'-^ The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward
realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian
world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the total-
itarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality
in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the
normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is
constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure
that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever pub-
lished, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable re-
ports about the places of the living dead.
Because of this policy, the results of the totalitarian experiment are only
partially known. Although we have enough reports from concentration
camps to assess the possibilities of total domination and to catch a glimpse
into the abyss of the "possible," we do not know the extent of character
transformation under a totalitarian regime. We know even less how many of
the normal people around us would be willing to accept the totalitarian way
of life — that is, to pay the price of a considerably shorter life for the assured
fulfillment of all their career dreams. It is easy to realize the extent to which
totalitarian propaganda and even some totalitarian institutions answer the
needs of the new homeless masses, but it is almost impossible to know
how many of them, if they are further exposed to a constant threat of un-
employment, will gladly acquiesce to a "population policy" that consists of
regular elimination of surplus people, and how many, once they have fully
grasped their growing incapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will
gladly conform to a system that, together with spontaneity, eliminates re-
sponsibility.
In other words, while we know the operation and the specific function of
the totalitarian secret police, we do not know how well or to what an extent
the "secret" of this secret society corresponds to the secret desires and the
secret complicities of the masses in our time.
Ill: Total Domination
THE CONCENTRATION and extermination camps of totalitarian regimes serve
as the laboratories in which the fundamental belief of totalitarianism that
everything is possible is being verified. Compared with this, all other ex-
periments are secondary in importance — including those in the field of
'^^ The Nazis were well aware of the protective wall of incredulity which surrounded
their enterprise. A secret report to Rosenberg about the massacre of 5,000 Jews in
1943 states explicitly: "Imagine only that these occurrences would become known to
the other side and exploited by them. Most likely such propaganda would have no
effect only because people who hear and read about it simply would not be ready to
believe it" {Nazi Conspiracy. I, 1001).
4iM tor Al I tARIANISM
medicine whose horrors are recorded in detail in the trials against the
physicians of the 7 hird Reich — although it is characteristic that these hibora-
lorics were used for experiments of every kind.
Intal doniination, which strives to organize the inlinilc plurality and
differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual,
is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-
changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can
be exchanged at random for any other. The problem is to fabricate some-
thing that does not exist, namely, a kind of human species resembling other
animal species whose only "freedom" would consist in "preserving the
species."'-'"' Totalitarian clomination attempts to achieve this goal both
through ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through ab-
solute terror in the camps; and the atrocities for which the elite formations
are ruthlessly used become, as it were, the practical application of the
ideological indoctrination— the testing ground in which the latter must
prove itself — while the appalling spectacle of the camps themselves is sup
posed to furnish the "theoretical" verification of the ideology.
The camps are meant not only to exterminate people and degrade human
beings, but also serve the ghastly experiment of eliminating, under scien-
tifically controlled conditions, spontaneity itself as an ｅxpression of human
behavior and of transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into
something that even animals are not; for Pavlov's dog, which, as we know,
was trained to eat not when it was hungry but when a bell rang, was a per-
verted animal.
Under normal circumstances this can never be accomplished, because
spontaneity can never be entirely eliminated insofar as it is connected not
only with human freedom but with life itself, in the sense of simply keeping
alive. It is only in the concentration camps that such an experiment is at
all possible, and therefore they are not only "la .socictc la plus lotalitaire
encore realisee" (David Rousset) but the guiding social ideal of total
domination in general. Just as the stability of the totalitarian regime depends
on the isolation of the fictitious world of the movement from the outside
world, so the experiment of total domination in the concentration camps
depends on sealing off the latter against the world of all others, the world
of the living in general, even against the outside world of a country under
totalitarian rule. This isolation explains the peculiar unreality and lack of
credibility that characterize all reports from the concentration camps and
constitute one of the main dilliculties for the true understanding of totali-
tarian domination, which stands or falls with the existence of these concen-
tration and extermination camps; for, unlikely as it may sound, these camps
are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power.
''In Ihc I i.\i lif;r\i»tiili('. Hitler mcnticms scvcriil limes lliiit he "[strives] for a
coniljtion in whiLh ciith individniil knows that tic lives anil dies for Ihc preservation
of his species" (p. 349). Sec :ils.. p V17: "A fly lays millions of eggs, all of which
perish. Bill Ihc flics remain."
TO! AI.IIARIANISM IN I'OWllR 439
There are numerous reports by survivors.'-" The more authentic they are,
the less they attempt to communicate things that evade human understand-
ing and human experience — sulTerings, that is, that transform men into "un-
comphiining animals."'-'^ None of these reports inspires those passions of
outrage and sympathy through which men have always been mobiHzed for
justice. on the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration
camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned
to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with re-
gard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for
reality.'-*^
This doubt of people concerning themselves and the reality of their own
experience only reveals what the Nazis have always known: that men de-
termined to commit crimes will find it expedient to organize them on the
vastest, most improbable scale. Not only because this renders all punish-
ments provided by the legal system inadequate and absurd; but because the
very inmiensity of the crimes guarantees that the murderers who proclaim
their innocence with all manner of lies will be more readily believed than
the victims who tell the truth. The Nazis did not even consider it necessary
to keep this discovery to themselves. Hitler circulated millions of copies of
his book in which he stated that to be successful, a lie must be enormous —
which did not prevent people from believing him as, similarly, the Nazis'
proclamations, repeated ad nauseam, that the Jews would be exterminated
like bedbugs (i.e.. with poison gas), prevented anybody from not believing
them.
There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible
'-"The best reports on Nazi concentration camps are David Roiisset, l.es Jours de
Nolle- Mori. Paris, 1947; luigen Kogon, <>/>. til.: liriino Beltelheim, on Dachau and
Buchenwald" (from May, 1938, to April, 1939), in Nazi Coii.spimcy. VII, 824 IF. For
Soviet concentration camps, see the excellent collection of reports by Polish survivors
published under the title The Dark Side of tin- Moon: also David J. Dallin, op. cit.,
thoufh his reports arc sometimes less convincing because they come from "prominent"
personalities who are intent on drawing up manifestos and indictments.
'-■' The Dark Side of the Moon; the introduction also stresses this peculiar lack of
communication: "They record but do not communicate."
'^" See especially Bruno Betlelheim, op. til. "It seemed as if I had become con-
vinced that these horrible and degrading experiences somehow did not happen to 'me'
as subject but to 'me' as an object. This experience was corroborated by the state-
ments of other prisoners. ... It was as if I watched things happening in which I
only vaguely participated. . . . 'This cannot be true, such things just do not happen.'
. . . The prisoners had to convince themselves that this was real, was really hap-
pening and not just a nightmare. They were never wholly successful."
See also Rousset, op. cit.. p. 213. ". . . Those who haven't seen it with their own
eyes can't believe it. Did you yourself, before you came here, take the rumors about
the gas chambers seriously?
"No, 1 said.
". . . You see? Well, they're all like you. The lot of them in Paris, London, New
York, even at Birkcnau, right outside the crematoriums . . . still incredulous, five
minutes before they were sent down into the cellar of the crematorium. . . ."
440
TOTALITARIANISM
by nic.ms of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a
liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totali-
tarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can
fmd numerous analogies and precedents. The extraordinarily bloody terror
during the initial stage of totalitarian rule serves indeed the exclusive purpose
of defeating the opponent and rendering all further opposition impos-
sible; but total terror is launched only after this initial stage has been over-
come and the regime no longer has anything to fear from the opposition.
In this context it has been frequently remarked that in such a case the means
have become the end, but this is after all only an admission, in paradoxical
disguise, that the category "the end justifies the means" no longer applies,
that terror has lost its "purpose," that it is no longer the means to frighten
people. Nor does the explanation suffice that the revolution, as in the case
of the French Revolution, was devouring its own children, for the terror
continues even after everybody who might be described as a child of the
revolution in one capacity or another — the Russian factions, the power cen-
ters of party, the army, the bureaucracy — has long since been devoured.
Many things that nowadays have become the specialty of totalitarian gov-
ernment are only too well known from the study of history. There have
almost always been wars of aggression; the massacre of hostile populations
after a victory went unchecked until the Romans mitigated it by introducing
the parcere suhjeciis; through centuries the extermination of native peoples
went hand in hand with the colonization of the Americas, Australia and
Africa; slavery is one of the oldest institutions of mankind and all empires
of antiquity were based on the labor of state-owned slaves who erected their
public buildings. Not even concentration camps are an invention of totali-
tarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at
the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as
well as India for "undesirable elements"; here, too, we first find the term
"protective custody" which was later adopted by the Third Reich. These
camps correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the be-
ginning of totalitarian rule; they were used for "suspects" whose offenses
could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process
of law. All this clearly points to totalitarian methods of domination; all
these are elements they utilize, develop and crystallize on the basis of the
nihilistic principle that "everything is permitted," which they inherited and
already take for granted. But wherever these new forms of domination assume
their authentically totalitarian structure they transcend this principle, which
is still tied to the utilitarian motives and self-interest of the rulers, and try
their hand in a realm that up to now has been completely unknown to us:
the realm where "everything is possible." And, characteristically enough,
this is precisely the realm that cannot be limited by either utilitarian motives
or self-interest, regardless of the latter's content.
What runs counter to common sense is not the nihilistic principle that
"everything is permitted," which was already contained in the nineteenth-
century utilitarian conception of common sense. What common sense and
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 441
"normal people" refuse to believe is that everything is possible.*-* We at-
tempt to understand elements in present or recollected experience that simply
surpass our powers of understanding. We attempt to classify as criminal
a thing which, as we all feel, no such category was ever intended to cover.
What meaning has the concept of murder when we are confronted with the
mass production of corpses? We attempt to understand the behavior of
concentration-camp inmates and SS-men psychologically, when the very
thing that must be realized is that the psyche can be destroyed even without
the destruction of the physical man; that, indeed, psyche, character, and
individuality seem under certain circumstances to express themselves only
through the rapidity or slowness with which they disintegrate.*^*^ The end
result in any case is inanimate men, i.e., men who can no longer be psycho-
logically understood, whose return to the psychologically or otherwise in-
telligibly human world closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus. All
statements of common sense, whether of a psychological or sociological
nature, serve only to encourage those who think it "superficial" to "dwell
on horrors." *3*
If it is true that the concentration camps are the most consequential insti-
tution of totalitarian rule, "dwelling on horrors" would seem to be indis-
pensable for the understanding of totalitarianism. But recollection can no
more do this than can the uncommunicative eyewitness report. In both
these genres there is an inherent tendency to run away from the experience;
instinctively or rationally, both types of writer are so much aware of the
terrible abyss that separates the world of the living from that of the living
dead, that they cannot supply anything more than a series of remembered
occurrences that must seem just as incredible to those who relate them as to
their audience. only the fearful imagination of those who have been
aroused by such reports but have not actually been smitten in their own
flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror
which, when confronted by real, present horror, inexorably paralyzes every-
thing that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors.
Such thoughts are useful only for the perception of political contexts and
the mobilization of political passions. A change of personality of any sort
whatever can no more be induced by thinking about horrors than by the real
experience of horror. The reduction of a man to a bundle of reactions sepa-
rates him as radically as mental disease from everything within him that is
personality or character. When, like Lazarus, he rises from the dead, he
finds his personality or character unchanged, just as he had left it.
Just as the horror, or the dwelling on it, cannot affect a change of char-
acter in him, cannot make men better or worse, thus it cannot become the
basis of a political community or party in a narrower sense. The attempts to
build up a European elite with a program of intra-European understanding
based on the common European experience of the concentration camps have
'^''The first to understand this was Rousset in his Univers Concentrationnaire, 1947.
'^" Rousset, op. cit., p. 587.
'^' See Georges Bataille in Critique, January, 1948, p. 72.
442 TOTALITARIANISM
foundered in much the same manner as the attempts following the first World
War to draw political conclusions from the international experience of the
front generation. In both cases it turned out that the experiences themselves
can communicate no more than nihilistic banalities.''*- Political consequences
such as postwar pacifism, for example, derived from the general fear of
war. not from the experiences in war. Instead of producing a pacifism devoid
of reality, the insight into the structure of modern wars, guided and mobilized
by fear, might have led to the realization that the only standard for a neces-
sary war is the fight against conditions under which people no longer wish
to live — and our experiences with the tormenting hell of the totalitarian
camps have enlightened us only too well about the possibility of such con-
ditions.''" Thus the fear of concentration camps and the resulting insight into
the nature of total domination might serve to invalidate all obsolete political
diflcrentiations from right to left and to introduce beside and above them
the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time,
namely: whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.
In any event, the fearful imagination has the great advantage to dissolve
the sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the
superstition that something good might result from evil. Such dialectical
acrobatics had at least a semblance of justification so long as the worst that
man could inflict upon man was murder. But, as we know today, murder is
only a limited evil. The murderer who kills a man— a man who has to die
anyway — still moves within the realm of life and death familiar to us; both
have indeed a necessary connection on which the dialectic is founded, even
if it is not always conscious of it. The murderer leaves a corpse behind and
does not pretend that his victim has never existed; if he wipes out any traces,
they are those of his own identity, and not the memory and grief of the
persons who loved his victim; he destroys a life, but he does not destroy
the fact of existence itself.
The Nazis, with the precision peculiar to them, used to register their
operations in the concentration camps under the heading "under cover of
the night (Nacht unci NebeD^ The radicalism of measures to treat people as
if they had never existed and to make them disappear in the literal sense
of the word is frequently not apparent at first glance, because both the
German and the Russian system are not uniform but consist of a series of
categories in which people are treated very differently. In the case of Ger-
many, these different categories used to exist in the same camp, but without
coming into contact with each other; frequently, the isolation between the
categories was even stricter than the isolation from the outside world. Thus,
out of racial considerations, Scandinavian nationals during the war were
112
Roussel's book contains many such "insights" into human "nature," based chiefly
on the observation that after a while the mentality of the inmates is scarcely dis-
tinguishable from that of the camp guards.
"" In order to avoid misunderstandings it may be appropriate to add that with the
invention of the hydrogen bomb the whole war question has undergone another de-
cisive change. A discussion of this question is of course beyond the theme of this book.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 443
quite differently treated by the Germans than the members of other peoples,
although the former were outspoken enemies of the Nazis. The latter in turn
were divided into those whose "extermination" was immediately on the
agenda, as in the case of the Jews, or could be expected in the predictable
future, as in the case of the Poles, Russians and Ukrainians, and into those
who were not yet covered by instructions about such an over-all "final so-
lution," as in the case of the French and Belgians. In Russia, on the other
hand, we must distinguish three more or less independent systems. First,
there are the authentic forced-labor groups that live in relative freedom and
are sentenced for limited periods. Secondly, there are the concentration
camps in which the human material is ruthlessly exploited and the mortality
rate is extremely high, but which are essentially organized for labor purposes.
And, thirdly, there are the annihilation camps in which the inmates are sys-
tematically wiped out through starvation and neglect.
The real horror of the concentration and extermination camps lies in the
fact that the inmates, even if they happen to keep alive, are more effectively
cut off from the world of the living than if they had died, because terror
enforces oblivion. Here, murder is as impersonal as the squashing of a gnat.
Someone may die as the result of systematic torture or starvation, or because
the camp is overcrowded and superfluous human material must be liqui-
dated. Conversely, it may happen that due to a shortage of new human
shipments the danger arises that the camps become depopulated and that the
order is now given to reduce the death rate at any price. ^^^ David Rousset
called his report on the period in a German concentration camp "Les Jours
de Notre Mort," and it is indeed as if there were a possibility to give perma-
nence to the process of dying itself and to enforce a condition in which
both death and life are obstructed equally effectively.
It is the appearance of some radical evil, previously unknown to us, that
puts an end to the notion of developments and transformations of qualities. -■
Here, there are neither political nor historical nor simply moral standards
but, at the most, the realization that something seems to be involved in
modern politics that actually should never be involved in politics as we
used to understand it, namely all or nothing — all, and that is an undeter-
mined infinity of forms of human living-together, or nothing, for a victory
of the concentration-camp system would mean the same inexorable doom
for human beings as the use of the hydrogen bomb would mean the doom
of the human race.
'■'^ This happened in Germany toward the end of 1942, whereupon Himmler served
notice to all camp commandants "to reduce the death rate at all costs." For it had
turned out that of the 136,000 new arrivals, 70,000 were already dead on reaching
the camp or died immediately thereafter. See Nazi Conspiracy, IV, Annex II.— Later
reports from Soviet Russian camps unanimously confirm that after 1949 — -that is, when
Stalin was still alive — the death rate in the concentration camps, which previously had
reached up to 60 per cent of the inmates, was systematically lowered, presumably due
to a general and acute labor shortage in the Soviet Union. This improvement in living
conditions should not be confused with the crisis of the regime after Stalin's death
which, characteristically enough, first made itself felt in the concentration camps. Cf.
Wilhelm Starlinger, Grenzen der Sowjetmacht, Wiirzburg, 1955.
444 TOTALITARIANISM
I here arc no parallels to the lite in the concentration camps. Its horror
can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it
stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very
reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it
iin|Xissible for him to believe fully in his own past experiences. It is as though
he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the
world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or
dead, is such that it is as though they had never been born. Therefore all
parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential.
Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for
a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead no-
where.
Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The
convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolutely tortured and he
is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the
world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does
not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery
has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concen-
tration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of
their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as
property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, be-
cause he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, be-
cause he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is abso-
lutely superfluous, although in times of acute labor shortage, as in Russia
and in Germany during the war, he is used for work.
The concentration camp as an institution was not established for the sake
of any possible labor yield; the only permanent economic function of the
camps has been the financing of their own supervisory apparatus; thus from
the economic point of view the concentration camps exist mostly for their
own sake. Any work that has been performed could have been done much
better and more cheaply under different conditions. ^^^ Especially Russia,
whose concentration camps are mostly described as forced-labor camps be-
cause Soviet bureaucracy has chosen to dignify them with this name, re-
veals most clearly that forced labor is not the primary issue; forced labor
is the normal condition of all Russian workers, who have no freedom of
movement and can be arbitrarily drafted for work to any place at any time.
''See Kogon, op. dt., p. 58: "A large part of the work exacted in the concentra-
tion camps was useless, either it was superfluous or it was so miserably planned that
it had to be done over two or three times." Also Bettelheim, op. cil., pp. 831-32: "New
prisoners particularly were forced to perform nonsensical tasks. . . . They felt de-
based . . . and preferred even harder work when it produced something useful. . . ."
Even Dallin. who has built his whole book on the thesis that the purpose of Russian
camps is to provide cheap labor, is forced to admit the inefficiency of camp labor,
op. lit., p. 105. — The current theories about the Russian camp system as an economic
measure for providing a cheap labor supply would stand clearly refuted if recent re-
ports on mass amnesties and the abolition of concentration camps should prove to be
true. For if the camps had served an important economic purpose, the regime cer-
tainly could not have afforded their rapid liquidation without grave consequences for
the whole economic system.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 445
The incredibility of the horrors is closely bound up with their economic use-
lessness. The Nazis carried this tiselessness to the point of open anti-utility
when in the midst of the war, despite the shortage of building material and
rolling stock, they set up enormous, costly extermination factories and trans-
ported millions of people back and forth.^^" In the eyes of a strictly utili-
tarian world the obvious contradiction between these acts and military ex-
pediency gave the whole enterprise an air of mad unreality.
This atmosphere of madness and unreality, created by an apparent lack
of purpose, is the real iron curtain which hides all forms of concentration
camps from the eyes of the world. Seen from outside, they and the things
that happen in them can be described only in images drawn from a life after
death, that is, a life removed from earthly purposes. Concentration camps
can very aptly be divided into three types corresponding to three basic
Western conceptions of a life after death: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell. To
Hades correspond those relatively mild forms, once popular even in non-
totalitarian countries, for getting undesirable elements of all sorts — refugees,
stateless persons, the asocial and the unemployed — out of the way; as DP
camps, which are nothing other than camps for persons who have become
superfluous and bothersome, they have survived the war. Purgatory is rep-
resented by the Soviet Union's labor camps, where neglect is combined
with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by
those types of camp perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was
thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible
torment.
All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off
in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them
were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and
some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a
while between life and death before admitting them to eternal peace.
It is not so much the barbed wire as the skillfully manufactured unreality
of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ulti-
mately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure. Every-
thing that was done in the camps is known to us from the world of perverse,
malignant fantasies. The difficult thing to understand is that, like such fan-
tasies, these gruesome crimes took place in a phantom world, which, how-
ever, has materialized, as it were, into a world which is complete with all sen-
sual data of reality but lacks that structure of consequence and responsibility
without which reality remains for us a mass of incomprehensible data. The
result is that a place has been established where men can be tortured and
slaughtered, and yet neither the tormentors nor the tormented, and least of
'■'"Apart from the millions of people whom the Nazis transported to the ex-
termination camps, they constantly attempted new colonization plans — transported
Germans from Germany or the occupied territories to the East for colonization pur-
poses. This was of course a serious handicap for military actions and economic ex-
ploitation. For the numerous discussions on these subjects and the constant conflict be-
tween the Nazi civilian hierarchy in the Eastern occupied territories and the SS
hierarchy see especially Vol. XXIX of Trial of the Major War Criminals, Nuremberg,
1947.
44f) TOTALITARIANISM
all the outsider, can be aware that what is happening is anything more than
a cruel game or an absurd dream.''"
Ihc films which the Allies circulated in Germany and elsewhere after
the war showed clearly that this atmosphere of insanity and unreality is not
dispelled by pure reportage. To the unprejudiced observer these pictures are
just about as convincing as snapshots of mysterious substances taken at spir-
itualist seances.'-'" Common sense reacted to the horrors of Buchenwald and
Auschwitz with the plausible argument: "What crime must these people
have committed that such things were done to them!"; or, in Germany and
Austria, in the midst of starvation, overpopulation, and general hatred: "Too
bad that they've stopped gassing the Jews"; and everywhere with the skep-
tical shrug that greets ineffectual propaganda.
If the propaganda of truth fails to convince the average person because
it is too monstrous, it is positively dangerous to those who know from their
own imaginings what they themselves are capable of doing and who are
therefore perfectly willing to believe in the reality of what they have seen.
Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the
human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence
can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even
a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern
methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more
numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves
only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and
that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the
earth open.
These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying,' ^®
seem to express more than a desperate attempt at saying what is outside the
realm of human speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as
radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last
Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope.
Unable as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by
every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise
they had longed for and of the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized
features of Marx's classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messi-
' " Bcllelhcim, op. cli., notes that the guards in the camps embraced an attitude
toward the atmosphere of unreahty similar to that of the prisoners themselves.
' '" It is of some importance to realize that all pictures of concentration camps are
misieadinj: insofar as they show the camps in their last stages, at the moment the
Allied troops marched in. There were no death camps in Germany proper, and at that
point all extermination equipment had already been dismantled. on the other hand,
what provoked the outrage of the Allies most and what gives the films their special
horror— namely, the sight of the human skeletons — was not at all typical for the Ger-
man concentration camps; extermination was handled systematically by gas, not by
starvation. The condition of the camps was a result of the war events during the final
months: Himmler had ordered the evacuation of all extermination camps in the East,
the German camps were consequently vastly overcrowded, and he was no longer in a
position to assure the food supply in Germany.
'"•"That life in a concentration camp was simply a dragged-out process of dying is
stressed by Rousset, op. tit., passim.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 447
anic Age, so the reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much
as medieval pictures of Hell.
The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional
conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an
absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace.
For in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable
with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common
sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order
to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims:
no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with
which concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state:
such "punishment" can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on
anyone.
In comparison with the insane end-result — concentration-camp society —
the process by which men are prepared for this end, and the methods by
which individuals are adapted to these conditions, are transparent and logi-
cal. The insane mass manufacture of corpses is preceded by the historically
and politically intelligible preparation of living corpses. The impetus and
what is more important, the silent consent to such unprecedented conditions
are the products of those events which in a period of political disintegration
suddenly and unexpectedly made hundreds of thousands of human beings
homeless, stateless, outlawed and unwanted, while millions of human beings
were made economically superfluous and socially burdensome by unemploy-
ment. This in turn could only happen because the Rights of Man, which had
never been philosophically established but merely formulated, which had
never been politically secured but merely proclaimed, have, in their tradi-
tional form, lost all validity.
The first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the
juridical person in man. This was done, on the one hand, by putting cer-
tain categories of people outside the protection of the law and forcing at
the same time, through the instrument of denationalization, the nontotali-
tarian world into recognition of lawlessness; it was done, on the other, by
placing the concentration camp outside the normal penal system, and by
selecting its inmates outside the normal judicial procedure in which a
definite crime entails a predictable penalty. Thus criminals, who for other
reasons are an essential element in concentration-camp society, are ordinarily
sent to a camp only on completion of their prison sentence. Under all cir-
cumstances totalitarian domination sees to it that the categories gathered
in the camps — Jews, carriers of diseases, representatives of dying classes —
have already lost their capacity for both normal or criminal action. Propa-
gandistically this means that the "protective custody" is handled as a "pre-
ventive police measure,"'^" that is, a measure that deprives people of the
ability to act. Deviations from this rule in Russia must be attributed to the
catastrophic shortage of prisons and to a desire, so far unrealized, to trans-
' '" Maunz, op. cit., p. 50, insists that criminals should never be sent to the camps
for the time of their regular sentences.
^4,V TOTALITARIANISM
form iho whole pcnul system into a system of concentration camps. '^'
The inclusion of criminals is necessary in order to make plausible the
propaiiandistic claim of the movement that the institution exists for asocial
elements."- Criminals do not properly belong in the concentration camps,
if only because it is harder to kill the juridical person in a man who is guilty
of some crime than in a totally innocent person. If they constitute a perma-
nent category among the inmates, it is a concession of the totalitarian state
to the prejudices of society, which can in this way most readily be accus-
tomed to the existence of the camps. In order, on the other hand, to keep
the camp system itself intact, it is essential as long as there is a penal sys-
tem in the country that criminals should be sent to the camps only on com-
pletion of their sentence, that is when they are actually entitled to their
freedom. Under no circumstances must the concentration camp become a
calculable punishment for definite offenses.
The amalgamation of criminals with all other categories has moreover the
advantage of making it shockingly evident to all other arrivals that they have
landed on the lowest level of society. It soon turns out, to be sure, that
they have every reason to envy the lowest thief and murderer; but mean-
while the lowest level is a good beginning. Moreover it is an effective means
of camouflage: this happens only to criminals and nothing worse is happen-
ing than that what deservedly happens to criminals.
The criminals everywhere constitute the aristocracy of the camps. (In
Germany, during the war, they were replaced in the leadership by the Com-
munists, because not even a minimum of rational work could be performed
under the chaotic conditions created by a criminal administration. This was
merely a temporary transformation of concentration camps into forced-labor
camps, a thoroughly atypical phenomenon of limited duration.)^'*-'' What
places the criminals in the leadership is not so much the affinity between
supervisory personnel and criminal elements — in the Soviet Union appar-
ently the supervisors are not, like the SS, a special elite trained to commit
crimes'" — as the fact that only criminals have been sent to the camp in
'•" The shortage of prison space in Russia has been such that in the year 1925-26,
only 36 per cent of all court sentences could be carried out. See Dallin, op. cit., p.
158 ff.
'^^ "Gestapo and SS have always attached great importance to mixing the cate-
gories of inmates in the camps. In no camp have the inmates belonged exclusively to
one category" (Kogon, op. cit., p. 19).
In Russia, it has also been customary from the beginning to mix political prisoners
and criminals. During the first ten years of Soviet power, the Left political groups en-
joyed certain privileges; only with the full development of the totalitarian character of
the regime "after the end of the twenties, the politicals were even officially treated as
inferior to the common criminals" (Dallin, op. tit., p. 177 ff. ).
'*' Rousset's book suffers from his overestimation of the influence of the German
Communists, who dominated the internal administration of Buchenwald during the
war.
'" See for instance the testimony of Mrs. Buber-Neumann (former wife of the Ger-
man Communist Heinz Neumann), who survived Soviet and German concentration
camps: "The Russians never . . . evinced the sadistic streak of the Nazis. . . . Our
Russian guards were decent men and not sadists, but they faithfully fulfilled the re-
quirements of the inhuman system" {Under Two Dictators).
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 449
connection with some definite activity. They at least know why they are in
a concentration camp and therefore have kept a remnant of their juridical
person. For the politicals this is only subjectively true; their actions, insofar
as they were actions and not mere opinions or someone else's vague suspi-
cions, or accidental membership in a politically disapproved group, are as
a rule not covered by the normal legal system of the country and not juridi-
cally defined. ^^■''
To the amalgam of politicals and criminals with which concentration
camps in Russia and Germany started out, was added at an early date a
third element which was soon to constitute the majority of all concentration-
camp inmates. This largest group has consisted ever since of people who had
done nothing whatsoever that, either in their own consciousness or the con-
sciousness of their tormenters, had any rational connection with their arrest.
In Germany, after 1938, this element was represented by masses of Jews,
in Russia by any groups which, for any reason having nothing to do with
their actions, had incurred the disfavor of the authorities. These groups,
innocent in every sense, are the most suitable for thorough experimentation
in disfranchisement and destruction of the juridical person, and therefore
they are both qualitatively and quantitatively the most essential category of
the camp population. This principle was most fully realized in the gas
chambers which, if only because of their enormous capacity, could not be
intended for individual cases but only for people in general. In this connec-
tion, the following dialogue sums up the situation of the individual: "For
what purpose, may I ask, do the gas chambers exist?" — "For what purpose
were you born?"^^" It is this third group of the totally innocent who in every
case fare the worst in the camps. Criminals and politicals are assimilated to
this category; thus deprived of the protective distinction that comes of their
having done something, they are utterly exposed to the arbitrary. The
ultimate goal, partly achieved in the Soviet Union and clearly indicated in
the last phases of Nazi terror, is to have the whole camp population com-
posed of this category of innocent people.
Contrasting with the complete haphazardness with which the inmates are
selected are the categories, meaningless in themselves but useful from the
standpoint of organization, into which they are usually divided on their ar-
rival. In the German camps there were criminals, politicals, asocial elements,
religious offenders, and Jews, all distinguished by insignia. When the French
set up concentration camps after the Spanish Civil War, they immediately
introduced the typical totalitarian amalgam of politicals with criminals and
the innocent (in this case the stateless), and despite their inexperience
proved remarkably inventive in creating meaningless categories of inmates. ^^^
' '' Bruno Beltelheim, "Behavior in Extreme Situations," in Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psycholof>y, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, 1943, describes the self-esteem of the crim-
inals and the political prisoners as compared with those who have not done any-
thing. The latter "were least able to withstand the initial shock," the first to disin-
tegrate. Bettelheim blames this on their middle-class origin.
'^•^Rousset, op. lit., p. 71.
"' For conditions in French concentration camps, see Arthur Koestler, Scum of the
Earth, 1941.
JS(; TOTALITARIANISM
Oriiiin.illy devised in oixkv lo pa-vent any growth of solidarity among the
inmates, this technique proved particularly valuable because no one could
know whether his own category was better or worse than someone else's.
In Germany this eternally shifting though pedantically organized edifice
was given an appearance of solidity by the fact that under any and all cir-
cumstances the Jews were the lowest category. The gruesome and grotesque
part of it was that the inmates identified themselves with these categories,
as though they represented a last authentic remnant of their juridical person.
Even if we disregard all other circumstances, it is no wonder that a Com-
munist of 1933 should have come out of the camps more Communistic than
he went in, a Jew more Jewish, and, in France, the wife of a Foreign Le-
gionary more convinced of the value of the Foreign Legion; it would seem
as though these categories promised some last shred of predictable treat-
ment, as though they embodied some last and hence most fundamental
juridical identity.
While the classification of inmates by categories is only a tactical, organ-
izational measure, the arbitrary selection of victims indicates the essential
principle of the institution. If the concentration camps had been dependent
on the existence of political adversaries, they would scarcely have survived
the first years of the totiUitarian regimes. one only has to take a look at
the number of inmates at Buchenwald in the years after 1936 in order to
understand how absolutely necessary the element of the innocent was for
the continued existence of the camps. "The camps would have died out if in
making its arrests the Gestapo had considered only the principle of oppo-
sition,"'^"* and toward the end of 1937 Buchenwald, with less than 1,000
inmates, was close to dying out until the November pogroms brought more
than 20,000 new arrivals.'^'' In Germany, this element of the innocent was
furnished in vast numbers by the Jews since 1938; in Russia, it consisted
of random groups of the population which for some reason entirely uncon-
nected with their actions had fallen into disgrace.'''" But if in Germany the
really totalitarian type of concentration camp with its enormous majority
of completely "innocent" inmates was not established until 1938, in Russia
it goes back to the early thirties, since up to 1930 the majority of the con-
centration-camp population still consisted of criminals, counterrevolution-
aries and "politicals" (meaning, in this case, members of deviationist fac-
tions). Since then there have been so many innocent people in the camps
that it is difficult to classify them — persons who had some sort of contact
with a foreign country, Russians of Polish origin (particularly in the years
1936 to 1938), peasants whose villages for some economic reason were
liquidated, deported nationalities, demobilized soldiers of the Red Army
who happened to belong to regiments that stayed too long abroad as occu-
pation forces or had become prisoners of war in Germany, etc. But the
Kogon, op. til., p. 6.
See Nazi Conspiracy. IV, 800 fl".
Beck and Godin, op. cit.. state explicitly that "opponents constituted only a
relatively small proportion of the [Russian] prison population" (p. 87), and that there
was no connection whatever between "a man's imprisonment and any offense" (p. 95),
I4H
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 451
existence of a political opposition is for a concentration-camp system only
a pretext, and the purpose of the system is not achieved even when, under
the most monstrous terror, the population becomes more or less voluntarily
co-ordinated, i.e., relinquishes its political rights. The aim of an arbitrary
system is to destroy the civil rights of the whole population, who ultimately
become just as outlawed in their own country as the stateless and homeless.
The destruction of a man's rights, the killing of the juridical person in him,
is a prerequisite for dominating him entirely. And this applies not only to
special categories such as criminals, political opponents, Jews, homosexuals,
on whom the early experiments were made, but to every inhabitant of a
totalitarian state. Free consent is as much an obstacle to total domination
as free opposition.^'*' The arbitrary arrest which chooses among innocent
people destroys the validity of free consent, just as torture — as distinguished
from death — destroys the possibility of opposition.
Any, even the most tyrannical, restriction of this arbitrary persecution to
certain opinions of a religious or political nature, to certain modes of in-
tellectual or erotic social behavior, to certain freshly invented "crimes,"
would render the camps superfluous, because in the long run no attitude
and no opinion can withstand the threat of so much horror; and above all
it would make for a new system of justice, which, given any stability at all,
could not fail to produce a new juridical person in man, that would elude
the totalitarian domination. The so-called "Volksnutzen" of the Nazis, con-
stantly fluctuating (because what is useful today can be injurious tomorrow)
and the eternally shifting party line of the Soviet Union which, being retro-
active, almost daily makes new groups of people available for the concen-
tration camps, are the only guaranty for the continued existence of the con-
centration camps, and hence for the continued total disfranchisement of man.
The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder
of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom,
for the first time in history, impossible: "How many people here still believe
that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real mas-
terpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all
human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses
are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no
longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond
one's own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social mean-,
ing. There are hundreds of thousands of us here, all living in absolute soli-
tude. That is why we are subdued no matter what happens." ^°-
' '' Bruno Bettelheim, on Dachau and Buchenwald," when discussing the fact that
most prisoners "made their peace with the values of the Gestapo," emphasizes that
"this was not the result of propaganda ... the Gestapo insisted that it would pre-
vent them from expressing their feelings anyway" (pp. 834-35).
Himniler explicitly prohibited propaganda of any kind in the camps. "Education
consists of discipline, never of any kind of instruction on an ideological basis." on
Organization and Obligation of the SS and the Police," in National-politischer Lehrgang
■ler Wehnmicht, 1937. Quoted from Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 616 fT.
'"'^ Rousset, op. Lit., p. 464.
4^2 TOTALITARIANISM
The c.imps and the murder of political adversaries are only part of or-
ganized oblivion that not only embraces carriers of public opinion such as
the spoken and the written word, but extends even to the families and friends
of the victim. Grief and remembrance are forbidden. In the Soviet Union a
woman will sue for divorce immediately after her husband's arrest in order
to save the lives of her children; if her husband chances to come back, she
will indignantly turn him out of the house. '•'^^ The Western world has
hitherto, even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be
remembered as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all
men (and only men). It is only because even Achilles set out for Hector's
funeral, only because the most despotic governments honored the slain
enemy, only because the Romans allowed the Christians to write their
niartyrologies, only because the Church kept its heretics alive in the memory
of men, that all was not lost and never could be lost. The concentration
camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find
out whether a prisoner is dead or alive) robbed death of its meaning as the
end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death,
proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one.
His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never really existed.
This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed by man's
conscience which tells him that it is better to die a victim than to live as a
bureaucrat of murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph
when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist
escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable
and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and
thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he
is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean
the immediate murder of his own family — how is he to decide? The alter-
native is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder.
Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed
by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed? ^^*
Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be
adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organ-
ized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended
to the victims and thus made really total. The SS implicated concentration-
camp inmates — criminals, politicals, Jews — in their crimes by making them
responsible for a large part of the administration, thus confronting them with
the hopeless dilemma whether to send their friends to their death, or to help
murder other men who happened to be strangers, and forcing them, in any
event, to behave like murderers.''"''^ The point is not only that hatred is
diverted from those who are guilty (the capos were more hated than the
'^'■'See the report of Sergei Malakhov in Dallin, op. cit., pp. 20 flf.
'^'^See Albert Camus in Twice A Year, 1947.
' '■■• Rousset's book, op. cit.. consists largely of discussions of this dilemma by pris-
oners.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 453
SS), but that the distinguishing Hne between persecutor and persecuted, be-
tween the murderer and his victim, is constantly blurred.'^"
once the moral person has been killed, the one thing that still prevents
men from being made into living corpses is the differentiation of the in-
dividual, his unique identity. In a sterile form such individuality can be pre-
served through a persistent stoicism, and it is certain that many men under
totalitarian rule have taken and are each day still taking refuge in this
absolute isolation of a personality without rights or conscience. There is no
doubt that this part of the human person, precisely because it depends so
essentially on nature and on forces that cannot be controlled by the will, is
the hardest to destroy (and when destroyed is most easily repaired ).^'^^
The methods of dealing with this uniqueness of the human person are
numerous and we shall not attempt to list them. They begin with the mon-
strous conditions in the transports to the camps, when hundreds of human
beings are packed into a cattle-car stark naked, glued to each other, and
shunted back and forth over the countryside for days on end; they continue
upon arrival at the camp, the well-organized shock of the first hours, the
shaving of the head, the grotesque camp clothing; and they end in the utterly
unimaginable tortures so gauged as not to kill the body, at any event not
quickly. The aim of all these methods, in any case, is to manipulate the
human body — with its infinite possibilities of suffering — in such a way as
to make it destroy the human person as inexorably as do certain mental
diseases of organic origin.
It is here that the utter lunacy of the entire process becomes most ap-
parent. Torture, to be sure, is an essential feature of the whole totalitarian
police and judiciary apparatus; it is used every day to make people talk.
This type of torture, since it pursues a definite, rational aim, has certain
limitations: either the prisoner talks within a certain time, or he is killed. To
this rationally conducted torture anothc, irrational, sadistic type was added
in the first Nazi concentration camps and in the cellars of the Gestapo.
Carried on for the most part by the SA, it pursued no aims and w£.s not sys-
tematic, but depended on the initiative of largely abnormal elements. The
mortality was so high that only a few concentration-camp inmates of 1933
survived these first years. This type of torture seemed to be not so much a
calculated political institution as a concession of the regime to its criminal
and abnormal elements, who were thus rewarded for services rendered. Be-
hind the blind bestiality of the SA, there often lay a deep hatred and resent-
ment against all those who were socially, intellectually, or physically better
'^^ Bettelheim, op. cit., describes the process by which the guards as well as the
prisoners became "conditioned" to the life in the camp and were afraid of returning
to the outer world.
Rousset, therefore, is right when he insists that the truth is that "victim and execu-
tioner are alike ignoble; the lesson of the camps is the brotherhood of abjection" (p.
588).
oners was "how to live as well as possible within the camp."
'^^ Bettelheim, op. cit.. describes how "the main concern of the new prisoners
seemed to be to remain intact as a personality" while the problem of the old pris-
4S4 TOTALITARIANISM
off than themselves, and who now, as if in fulfillment of their wildest dreams,
were in their power. This resentment, which never died out entirely in the
camps, strikes us as a last remnant of humanly understandable feeling.'^'^
The real horror began, however, when the SS took over the administration
of the camps. The old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold
and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human
dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely. The camps were no
longer amusement parks for beasts in human form, that is, for men who
really belonged in mental institutions and prisons; the reverse became true:
they were turned into "drill grounds," on which perfectly normal men were
trained to be full-fledged members of the SS.'''"'
The killing of man's individuality, of the uniqueness shaped in equal
parts by nature, will, and destiny, which has become so self-evident a premise
for all human relations that even identical twins inspire a certain uneasiness,
creates a horror that vastly overshadows the outrage of the juridical-political
person and the despair of the moral person. It is this horror that gives rise
' " Rousset. op. (it., p. 390. reports an SS-man haranguing a professor as follows:
"Vou used to be a professor. Well, you're no professor now. You're no big shot any
more. You're nothing but a little runt now. Just as little as you can be. I'm the big
fellow now."
''■" Kogon. op. cil.. p. 6. speaks of the possibility that the camps will be maintained
as training and experimental grounds for the SS. He also gives a good report on the
difference between the early camps administered by the SA and the later ones under
the SS. "None of these first camps had more than a thousand inmates. . . . Life in
them beggared all description. The accounts of the few old prisoners who survived
those years agree that there was scarcely any form of sadistic perversion that was
not practiced by the SA men. But they were all acts of individual bestiality, there was
still no fully organized cold system, embracing masses of men. This was the accom-
plishment of the SS" (p. 7).
I his new mechanized system eased the feeling of responsibility as much as was
humanly possible. When, for instance, the order came to kill every day .several hun-
dred Russian prisoners, the slaughter was performed by shooting through a hole with-
out seeing the victim. (See Ernest Feder. 'Essai sur la Psychologie de la Terreur," in
.Sy nihescs. Brussels. 1946.) on the other hand, perversion was artificially produced
in otherwise normal men. Rousset reports the following from a SS guard: "Usually I
keep on hitting until I ejaculate. I have a wife and three children in Breslau. I used to
be perfectly normal. That's what they've made of me. Now when they give me a
pass out of here. I don't go home. I don't dare look my wife in the face" (p. 273).
— The documents from the Hitler era contain numerous testimonials for the average
normality of those entrusted with carrying out Hitler's program of extermination. A
good collection is found in Leon Poliakov's "The Weapon of Antisernitism," published
by UNESCO in The Third Reich. London. 1955. Most of the men in the units used
for these purposes were not volunteers but had been drafted from the ordinary police
for these special assignments. But even tn-ined SS-men found this kind of duty worse
than front-line fighting. In his report of a mass execution by the SS. an eyewitness
gives high praise to this troop which had been so "idealistic" that it was able to bear
"the entire extermination without the help of liquor."
That one wanted to eliminate all personal motives and passions during the "ex-
terminations" and hence keep the cruelties to a minimum is revealed by the fact that \
a group of doctors and engineers entrusted with handling the gas installations were i
making constant improvements that were not only designed to raise the productive
capacity of the corpse factories but also to accelerate and ease the agony of death.
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 455
to the nihilistic generalizations which maintain plausibly enough that essen-
tially all men alike are beasts."'" Actually the experience of the concen-
tration camps does show that human beings can be transformed into speci-
mens of the human animal, and that man's "nature" is only "human"
insofar as it opens up to man the possibility of becoming something highly
unnatural, that is, a man.
After murder of the moral person and annihilation of the juridical person,
the destruction of the individuality is almost always successful. Conceivably
some laws of mass psychology may be found to explain why millions of
human beings allowed themselves to be marched unresistingly into the gas
chambers, although these laws would explain nothing else but the destruc-
tion of individuality. It is more significant that those individually condemned
to death very seldom attempted to take one of their executioners with them,
that there were scarcely any serious revolts, and that even in the moment
of liberation there were very few spontaneous massacres of SS men. For to
destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man's power to begin some-
thing new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on
the basis of reactions to environment and events."'' Nothing then remains
but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog
in Pavlov's experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when
going to their own death, and which do nothing but react. This is the real
triumph of the system: "The triumph of the SS demands that the tortured
victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he re-
nounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity.
And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the
SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in de-
stroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold ... is incomparably the
best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more
terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their
death. The man who sees this says to himself: 'For them to be thus reduced,
what power must be concealed in the hands of the masters,' and he turns
away, full of bitterness but defeated.""'-
If we take totalitarian aspirations seriously and refuse to be misled by the
'""This is very prominent in Rousset's work. "The social conditions of life in the
camps have transformed the great mass of inmates, both the Germans and the de-
portees, regardless of their previous social position and education . . . into a de-
generate rabble, entirely submissive to the primitive reflexes of the animal instinct"
(p. 183).
"" In this context also belongs the astonishing rarety of suicides in the camps. Suicide
occurred far more often before arrest and deportation than in the camp itself, which
is of course partly explained by the fact that every attempt was made to prevent sui-
cides which are. after all, spontaneous acts. From the statistical material for Buchen-
wald (Nazi Conspiracy, IV, 8t)0 fT. ) it is evident that scarcely more than one-half
per cent of the deaths could be traced to suicide, that frequently there were only two
suicides per year, although in the same year the total number of deaths reached 3,516.
The reports from Russian camps mention the same phenomenon. Cf.. for instance.
Starlinger, op. cit., p. 57.
"'- Rousset, op. cit., p. 525.
75A TOTALITARIANISM
coninion-scnse assertion that they are Utopian and unrealizable, it develops
that the siK'iety of the dying established in the camps is the only form of
society in which it is possible to dominate man entirely. Those who aspire
to total domination must liijuidatc all spontaneity, such as the mere existence
of individuality will always engender, and track it down in its most private
forms, regardless of how unpolitical and harmless these may seem. Pavlov's
dog. the human specimen reduced to the most elementary reactions, the
bundle of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other
bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way, is the model
•'citizen" of a totalitarian state; and such a citizen can be produced only
imperfectly outside of the camps.
Ihe uselcssness of the camps, their cynically admitted anti-utility, is only
apparent. In reality they are most essential to the preservation of the regime's
power than any of its other institutions. Without concentration camps, with-
out the undefined fear they inspire and the very well-defined training they
offer in totalitarian domination, which can nowhere else be fully tested with
all of its most radical possibilities, a totalitarian state can neither inspire
its nuclear troops with fanaticism nor maintain a whole people in complete
apathy. The dominating and the dominated would only too quickly sink
back into the "old bourgeois routine"; after early "excesses," they would
succumb to everyday life with its human laws; in short, they would develop
in the direction which all observers counseled by common sense were so
prone to predict. The tragic fallacy of all these prophecies, originating in a
world that was still safe, was to suppose that there was such a thing as one
human nature established for all time, to identify this human nature with
history, and thus to declare that the idea of total domination was not only
inhuman but also unrealistic. Meanwhile we have learned that the power of
man is so great that he really can be what he wishes to be.
It is in the very nature of totalitarian regimes to demand unlimited power.
Such power can only be secured if literally all men, without a single excep-
tion, are reliably dominated in every aspect of their life. In the realm of
foreign affairs new neutral territories must constantly be subjugated, while
at home ever-new human groups must be mastered in expanding concentra-
tion camps, or, when circumstances require liquidated to make room for
others. The question of opposition is unimportant both in foreign and
domestic affairs. Any neutrality, indeed any spontaneously given friendship,
is from the standpoint of totalitarian domination just as dangerous as open
hostility, precisely because spontaneity as such, with its incalculability, is
the greatest of all obstacles to total domination over man. The Communists
of non-Communist countries, who fled or were called to Moscow, learned
by bitter experience that they constituted a menace to the Soviet Union. Con-
vinced Communists are in this sense, which alone has any reality today,
just as ridiculous and just as menacing to the regime in Russia, as, for
example, the convinced Nazis of the Rohm faction were to the Nazis.
What makes conviction and opinion of any sort so ridiculous and dan-
gerous under totalitarian conditions is that totalitarian regimes take the
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 457
greatest pride in having no need of them, or of any human help of any kind.
Men insofar as they are more than animal reaction and fulfillment of func-
tions are entirely superfluous to totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism strives
not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are
superfluous. Total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world
of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spon-
taneity. Precisely because man's resources are so great, he can be fully
dominated only when he becomes a specimen of the animal-species man.
Therefore character is a threat and even the most unjust legal rules are
an obstacle; but individuality, anything indeed that distinguishes one man
from another, is intolerable. As long as all men have not been made equally
superfluous — and this has been accomplished only in concentration camps
— the ideal of totalitarian domination has not been achieved. Totalitarian
states strive constantly, though never with complete success, to establish
the superfluity of man — by the arbitrary selection of various groups for con-
centration camps, by constant purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass
liquidations. Common sense protests desperately that the masses are sub-
missive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore superfluous;
if they were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply:
The apparatus seems superfluous to you only because it serves to make men
superfluous.
The totalitarian attempt to make men superfluous reflects ihe experience
of modern masses of their superfluity on an overcrowded earth. The world
of the dying, in which men are taught they are superfluous through a way
of life in which punishment is meted out without connection with crime, in
which exploitation is practiced without profit, and where work is performed
without product, is a place where senselessness is daiiy produced anew. Yet,
within the framework of the totalitarian ideology, nothing could be more
sensible and logical; if the inmates are vermin, it is logical that they should
be killed by poison gas; if they are degenerate, they should not be allowed
to contaminate the population; if they have "slave-like souls" (Himmler),
no one should waste his time trying to re-educate them. Seen through the
eyes of the ideology, the trouble with the camps is almost that they make
too much sense, that the execution of the doctrine is too consistent.
While the totalitarian regimes are thus resolutely and cynically emptying
the world of the only thing that makes sense to the utilitarian expectations
of common sense, they impose upon it at the same time a kind of super-
sense which the ideologies actually always meant when they pretended to
have found the key to history or the solution to the riddles of the universe.
Over and above the senselessness of totalitarian society is enthroned the
ridiculous supersense of its ideological superstition. Ideologies are harmless,
uncritical, and arbitrary opinions only as long as they are not believed in
seriously. once their claim to total validity is taken literally they become the
nuclei of logical systems in which, as in the systems of paranoiacs, every-
thing follows comprehensibly and even compulsorily once the first premise
45,V TOTALITARIANISM
is accepted. 1 he insanity of such systems lies not only in their first premise
but in the very logicality with which they are constructed. The curious logi-
cality of all isms, their simple-minded trust in the salvation value of stub-
born devotion without regard for specific, varying factors, already harbors
the first germs of totalitarian contempt for reality and factuality.
Common sense trained in utilitarian thinking is helpless against this ideo-
logical supersensc, since totalitarian regimes establish a functioning world
of no-sense. The ideological contempt for factuality still contained the proud
assumption of human mastery over the world; it is, after all, contempt for
reality which makes possible changing the world, the erection of the human
artifice. What destroys the element of pride in the totalitarian contempt for
reality (and thereby distinguishes it radically from revolutionary theories
and attitudes) is the supersense which gives the contempt for reality its
cogency, logicality, and consistency. What makes a truly totalitarian device
out of the Bolshevik claim that the present Russian system is superior to
all others is the fact that the totalitarian ruler draws from this claim the logi-
cally imF)eccable conclusion that without this system people never could
have built such a wonderful thing as, let us say, a subway; from this, he
again draws the logical conclusion that anyone who knows of the existence
of the Paris subway is a suspect because he may cause people to doubt that
one can do things only in the Bolshevik way. This leads to the final conclu-
sion that in order to remain a loyal Bolshevik, you have to destroy the Paris
subway. Nothing matters but consistency.
With these new structures, built on the strength of supersense and driven
by the motor of logicality, we are indeed at the end of the bourgeois era of
profits and power, as well as at the end of imperialism and expansion. The
aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from lust for power, and if it
feverishly seeks to expand, it does so neither for expansion's sake nor for
profit, but only for ideological reasons: to make the world consistent, to
prove that its respective supersense has been right.
It is chiefly for the sake of this supersense, for the sake of complete con-
sistency, that it is necessary for totalitarianism to destroy every trace of
what we commonly call human dignity. For respect for human dignity implies
the recognition of my fellow-men or our fellow-nations as subjects, as builders
of worlds or cobuilders of a common world. No ideology which aims at the
explanation of all historical events of the past and at mapping out the
course of all events of the future can bear the unpredictability which springs
from the fact that men are creative, that they can bring forward something
so new that nobody ever foresaw it.
What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation
of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but
the transformation of human nature itself. The concentration camps are the
laboratories where changes in human nature are tested, and their shame-
fulness therefore is not just the business of their inmates and those who run
them according to strictly "scientific" standards; it is the concern of all
men. Suffering, of which there has been always too much on earth, is not
TOTALITARIANISM IN POWER 459
the issue, nor is the number of victims. Human nature as such is at stake,
and even though it seems that these experiments succeed not in changing
man but only in destroying him, by creating a society in which the nihiHstic
banality of homo homini lupus is consistently realized, one should bear in
mind the necessary limitations to an experiment which requires global con-
trol in order to show conclusive results.
Until now the totalitarian belief that everything is possible seems to have
proved only that everything can be destroyed. Yet, in their effort to prove
that everything is possible, totalitarian regimes have discovered without
knowing it that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive.
When the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unfor-
givable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained
by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for
power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love
could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the
death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer "human" in the eyes
of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale
even of solidarity in human sinfulness.
It is inherent in our entire philosophical tradition that we cannot conceive
of a "radical evil," and this is true both for Christian theology, which con-
ceded even to the Devil himself a celestial origin, as well as for Kant, the
only philosopher who, in the word he coined for it, at least must have sus-
pected the existence of this evil even though he immediately rationalized it
in the concept of a "perverted ill will" that could be explained by compre-
hensible motives. Therefore, we actually have nothing to fall back on in
order to understand a phenomenon that nevertheless confronts us with its
overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know. There is only
one thing that seems to be discernible: we may say that radical evil has
emerged in connection with a system in which all men have become equally
superfluous. The manipulators of this system believe in their own super-
fluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers
are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are
alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born. The danger of the corpse
factories and holes of oblivion is that today, with populations and home-
lessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously ren-
dered superfluous if we continue to think of our world in utilitarian terms.
Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy
with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous. The im-
plied temptation is well understood by the utilitarian common sense of the
masses, who in most countries are too desperate to retain much fear of
death. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of
annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of over-
population, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses,
are as much of an attraction as a warning. Totalitarian solutions may well
survive the faU of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations
which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social,
or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.
.MAPTKR thirteen: IcleologY Bncl Terror:
A Novel Form of Government
IN THE PRECEDING chapcrs we emphasized repeatedly that the means of
total domination are not only more drastic but that totalitarianism differs
essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as
despotism, tyranny and dictatorship. Wherever it rose to power, it devel-
oped entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and
political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national
tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian govern-
ment always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system,
not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center
of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly
directed toward world domination. Present totalitarian governments have
developed from one-party systems; whenever these became truly totalitarian,
they started to operate according to a system of values so radically different
from all others, that none of our traditional legal, moral, or common sense
utilitarian categories could any longer help us to come to terms with, or
judge, or predict their course of action.
If it is true that the elements of totalitarianism can be found by retracing
the history and analyzing the political implications of what we usually call
the crisis of our century, then the conclusion is unavoidable that this crisis
is no mere threat from the outside, no mere result of some aggressive foreign
policy of either Germany or Russia, and that it will no more disappear with
the death of Stalin than it disappeared with the fall of Nazi Germany. It may
even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic
form — though not necessarily the cruelest — only when totalitarianism has
become a thing of the past.
It is in the line of such reflections to raise the question whether totalitarian
government, born of this crisis and at the same time its clearest and only
unequivocal symptom, is merely a makeshift arrangement, which borrows
its methods of intimidation, its means of organization and its instruments
of violence from the well-known political arsenal of tyranny, despotism and
dictatorships, and owes its existence only to the deplorable, but perhaps
accidental failure of the traditional political forces — liberal or conservative,
national or socialist, republican or monarchist, authoritarian or democratic.
Or whether, on the contrary, there is such a thing as the nature of totali-
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 461
tarian government, whether it has its own essence and can be compared with
and defined Hke other forms of government such as Western thought has
known and recognized since the times of ancient philosophy. If this is true,
then the entirely new and unprecedented forms of totahtarian organization
and course of action must rest on one of the few basic experiences which
men can have whenever they live together, and are concerned with public
affairs. If there is a basic experience which finds its political ｅxpression in
totalitarian domination, then, in view of the novelty of the totalitarian form
of government, this must be an experience which, for whatever reason, has
never before served as the foundation of a body politic and whose general
mood — although it may be familiar in every other respect — never before
has pervaded, and directed the handling of, public affairs.
If we consider this in terms of the history of ideas, it seems extremely
unlikely. For the forms of government under which men live have been
very few; they were discovered early, classified by the Greeks and have
proved extraordinarily long-lived. If we apply these findings, whose funda-
mental idea, despite many variations, did not change in the two and a half
thousand years that separate Plato from Kant, we are tempted at once to
interpret totalitarianism as some modern form of tyranny, that is a lawless
government where power is wielded by one man. Arbitrary power, unre-
stricted by law, yielded in the interest of the ruler and hostile to the interests
of the governed, on one hand, fear as the principle of action, namely fear
of the people by the ruler and fear of the ruler by the people, on the other —
these have been the hallmarks of tyranny throughout our tradition.
Instead of saying that totalitarian government is unprecedented, we could
also say that it has exploded the very alternative on which all definitions
of the essence of governments have been based in political philosophy, that
is the alternative between lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary
and legitimate power. That lawful government and legitimate power, on one
side, lawlessness and arbitrary power on the other, belonged together and
were inseparable has never been questioned. Yet, totalitarian rule confronts
us with a totally different kind of government. It defies, it is true, all positive
laws, even to the extreme of defying those which it has itself established (as
in the case of the Soviet Constitution of 1936, to quote only the most out-
standing example) or which it did not care to abolish (as in the case of
the Weimar Constitution which the Nazi government never revoked). But
it operates neither without guidance of law nor is it arbitrary, for it claims
to obey strictly and unequivocally those laws of Nature or of History from
which all positive laws always have been supposed to spring.
It is the monstrous, yet seemingly unanswerable claim of totalitarian rule
that, far from being "lawless," it goes to the sources of authority from which
positive laws received their ultimate legitimation, that far from being arbi-
trary it is more obedient to these suprahuman forces than any government
ever was before, and that far from wielding its power in the interest of one
man, it is quite prepared to sacrifice everybody's vital immediate interests
to the execution of what it assumes to be the law of History or the law of
^f^2 TOTALITARIANISM
Nature. Its defiance of positive laws claims to be a higher form of legitimacy
which, since it is inspired by the sources themselves, can do away with
petty leiiaiity. lotalitarian lawfulness pretends to have found a way to
establish the rule of justice on earth — something which the legality of
fX)sitive law admittedly could never attain. The discrepancy between legality
and justice could never be bridged because the standards of right and wrong
into which positive law translates its own source of authority — "natural
law" governing the whole universe, or divine law revealed in human history,
or customs and traditions expressing the law common to the sentiments of
all men — are necessarily general and must be valid for a countless and un-
predictable number of cases, so that each concrete individual case with its
unrepeatable set of circumstances somehow escapes it.
Totalitarian lawfulness, defying legality and pretending to establish the
direct reign of justice on earth, executes the law of History or of Nature
without translating it into standards of right and wrong for individual be-
havior. It applies the law directly to mankind without bothering with the
behavior of men. The law of Nature or the law of History, if properly
executed, is expected to produce mankind as its end product; and this ex-
pectation lies behind the claim to global rule of all totalitarian governments.
Totalitarian policy claims to transform the human species into an active
unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only
passively and reluctantly be subjected. If it is true that the link between
totalitarian countries and the civilized world was broken through the mon-
strous crimes of totalitarian regimes, it is also true that this criminality was
not due to simple aggressiveness, ruthlessness, warfare and treachery, but
to a conscious break of that consensus iiiris which, according to Cicero, con-
stitutes a "people," and which, as international law, in modern times has
constituted the civilized world insofar as it remains the foundation-stone of
international relations even under the conditions of war. Both moral judg-
ment and legal punishment presuppose this basic consent; the criminal can
be judged justly only because he takes part in the consensus iuris, and even
the revealed law of God can function among men only when they listen
and consent to it.
At this point the fundamental difference between the totalitarian and all
other concepts of law comes to light. Totalitarian policy does not replace
one set of laws with another, does not establish its own consensus iuris,
does not create, by one revolution, a new form of legality. Its defiance of all,
even its own positive laws implies that it believes it can do without any
consensus iuris whatever, and still not resign itself to the tyrannical state
of lawlessness, arbitrariness and fear. It can do without the consensus iuris
because it promises to release the fulfillment of law from all action and will
of man; and it promises justice on earth because it claims to make mankind
itself the embodiment of the law.
This identification of man and law, which seems to cancel the discrepancy
between legality and justice that has plagued legal thought since ancient
times, has nothing in common with the lumen naturale or the voice of con-
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 463
science, by which Nature or Divinity as the sources of authority for the ius
natiirale or the historically revealed commands of God, are supposed to
announce their authority in man himself. This never made man a walking
embodiment of the law, but on the contrary remained distinct from him as
the authority which demanded consent and obedience. Nature or Divinity
as the source of authority for positive laws were thought of as permanent and
eternal; positive laws were changing and changeable according to circum-
stances, but they possessed a relative permanence as compared with the
much more rapidly changing actions of men; and they derived this perma-
nence from the eternal presence of their source of authority. Positive laws,
therefore, are primarily designed to function as stabilizing factors for the
ever changing movements of men.
In the interpretation of totalitarianism, all laws have become laws of
movement. When the Nazis talked about the law of nature or when the
Bolsheviks talk about the law of history, neither nature nor history is
any longer the stabilizing source of authority for the actions of mortal men;
they are movements in themselves. Underlying the Nazis' belief in race
laws as the ｅxpression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin's idea of
man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily
stop with the present species of human beings, just as under the Bolsheviks'
belief in class-struggle as the ｅxpression of the law of history lies Marx's
notion of society as the product of a gigantic historical movement which
races according to its own law of motion to the end of historical times
when it will abolish itself.
The difference between Marx's historical and Darwin's naturalistic ap-
proach has frequently been pointed out, usually and rightly in favor of
Marx. This has led us to forget the great and positive interest Marx took
in Darwin's theories; Engels could not think of a greater compliment to
Marx's scholarly achievements than to call him the "Darwin of history."'
If one considers, not the actual achievement, but the basic philosophies
of both men, it turns out that ultimately the movement of history and the
movement of nature are one and the same. Darwin's introduction of the
concept of development into nature, his insistence that, at least in the field
of biology, natural movement is not circular but unilinear, moving in an
infinitely progressing direction, means in fact that nature is, as it were,
being swept into history, that natural life is considered to be historical. The
"natural" law of the survival of the fittest is just as much a historical law
and could be used as such by racism as Marx's law of the survival of the
most progressive class. Marx's class struggle, on the other hand, as the
driving force of history is only the outward ｅxpression of the development
' In his funeral speech on Marx, Engels said: "Just as Darwin discovered the law
of development of organic life, so Marx discovered the law of development of human
history." A similar comment is found in Engels' introduction to the edition of the
Cominiinist Manifesto in 1890, and in his introduction to the Urspnitif; der Familie,
he once more mentions "Darwin's theory of evolution" and "Marx's theory of surplus
value" side by side.
46-t TOTALITARIANISM
of productive forces which in turn have their origin in the "labor-power"
of men. Labor, according to Marx, is not a historical but a natural-
biological force — released through man's "metabolism with nature" by
which he conserves his individual life and reproduces the species.'' Engels
saw the affinity between the basic convictions of the two men very clearly
because he understood the decisive role which the concept of development
played in both theories. The tremendous intellectual change which took
place in the middle of the last century consisted in the refusal to view or
accept anything "as it is" and in the consistent interpretation of everything
as being only a stage of some further development. Whether the driving force
of this development was called nature or history is relatively secondary.
in these ideologies, the term "law" itself changed its meaning: from ex-
pressing the framework of stability within which human actions and motions
can take place, it became the ｅxpression of the motion itself.
Totalitarian politics which proceeded to follow the recipes of ideologies
has unmasked the true nature of these movements insofar as it clearly
showed that there could be no end to this process. If it is the law of nature
to eliminate everything that is harmful and unfit to live, it would mean
the end of nature itself if new categories of the harmful and unfit-to-live
could not be found; if it is the law of history that in a class struggle certain
classes "wither away," it would mean the end of human history itself if
rudimentary new classes did not form, so that they in turn could "wither
away" under the hands of totalitarian rulers. In other words, the law of
killing by which totalitarian movements seize and exercise power would
remain a law of the movement even if they ever succeeded in making all
of humanity subject to their rule.
By lawful government we understand a body politic in which positive
laws are needed to translate and realize the immutable ius naturale or the
eternal commandments of God into standards of right and wrong. only
in these standards, in the body of positive laws of each country, do the
ius naturale or the Commandments of God achieve their political reality.
In the body politic of totalitarian government, this place of positive laws
is taken by total terror, which is designed to translate into reality the law
of movement of history or nature. Just as positive laws, though they
define transgressions, are independent of them — the absence of crimes in
any society does not render laws superfluous but, on the contrary, signifies
their most perfect rule — so terror in totalitarian government has ceased
to be a mere means for the suppression of opposition, though it is also
used for such purposes. Terror becomes total when it becomes independent
of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its
way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawless-
ness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian
domination.
* For Marx's labor concept as "an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which
there can be no metabolism between man and nature, and therefore no life," see
Capital Vol. I. Part I, ch. I and 5. The quoted passage is from ch. 1, section 2.
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR
465
Terror is the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to
make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through
mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action. As such, terror
seeks to "stabilize" men in order to liberate the forces of nature or history.
It is this movement which singles out the foes of mankind against whom
terror is let loose, and no free action of either opposition or sympathy can
be permitted to interfere with the elimination of the "objective enemy" of
History or Nature, of the class or the race. Guilt and innocence become
senseless notions; "guilty" is he who stands in the way of the natural or
historical process which has passed judgment over "inferior races,", over
individuals "unfit to live," over "dying classes and decadent peoples."
Terror executes these judgments, and before its court, all concerned are
subjectively innocent: the murdered because they did nothing against the
system, and the murderers because they do not really murder but execute
a death sentence pronounced by some higher tribunal. The rulers them-
selves do not claim to be just or wise, but only to execute historical or
natural laws; they do not apply laws, but execute a movement in accordance
with its inherent law. Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the move-
ment of some suprahuman force. Nature or History.
Terror as the execution of a law of movement whose ultimate goal is not
the welfare of men or the interest of one man but the fabrication of man-
kind, eliminates individuals for the sake of the species, sacrifices the "parts"
for the sake of the "whole." The suprahuman force of Nature or History has
its own beginning and its own end, so that it can be hindered only by the
new beginning and the individual end which the life of each man actually is.
Positive laws in constitutional government are designed to erect boundaries
and establish channels of communication between men whose community
is continually endangered by the new men born into it. With each new birth,
a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come
into being. The stability of the laws corresponds to the constant motion of
all human affairs, a motion which can never end as long as men are born
and die. The laws hedge in each new beginning and at the same time
assure its freedom of movement, the potentiality of something entirely new
and unpredictable; the boundaries of positive laws are for the political
existence of man what memory is for his historical existence : they guarantee
the pre-existence of a common world, the reality of some continuity which
transcends the individual life span of each generation, absorbs all new origins
and is nourished by them.
Total terror is so easily mistaken for a symptom of tyrannical government
because totalitarian government in its initial stages must behave like a
tyranny and raze the boundaries of man-made law. But total terror leaves
no arbitrary lawlessness behind it and does not rage for the sake of some
arbitrary will or for the sake of despotic power of one man against all,
least of all for the sake of a war of all against all. It substitutes for the boun-
daries and channels of communication between individual men a band of
iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality
4M TOTALITARIANISM
had disappeared into one Man of gigantic dimensions. To abolish the fences
of laws between men — as tyranny docs — means to take away man's liberties
and destroy freedom as a living political reality; for the space between men
as it is hedged in by laws, is the living space of freedom. Total terror uses
this old instrument of tyranny but destroys at the same time also the law-
less, fenceless wilderness of fear and suspicion which tyranny leaves behind.
This desert, to be sure, is no longer a living space of freedom, but it still
provides some room for the fear-guided movements and suspicion-ridden
actions of its inhabitants.
By pressing men against each other, total terror destroys the space be-
tween them; compared to the condition within its iron band, even the desert
of tyranny, insofar as it is still some kind of space, appears like a guarantee
of freedom. Totalitarian government does not just curtail liberties or abolish
essential freedoms; nor does it, at least to our limited knowledge, succeed
in eradicating the love for freedom from the hearts of man. It destroys the
one essential prerequisite of all freedom which is simply the capacity of
motion which cannot exist without space.
Total terror, the essence of totalitarian government, exists neither for
nor against men. It is supposed to provide the forces of nature or history
with an incomparable instrument to accelerate their movement. This move-
ment, proceeding according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hin-
dered; eventually its force will always prove more powerful than the most
powerful forces engendered by the actions and the will of men. But it can
be slowed down and is slowed down almost inevitably by the freedom of
man, which even totalitarian rulers cannot deny, for this freedom — irrele-
vant and arbitrary as they may deem it — is identical with the fact that men
are being born and that therefore each of them is a new beginning, begins,
in a sense, the world anew. From the totalitarian point of view, the fact
that men are born and die can be only regarded as an annoying interference
with higher forces. Terror, therefore, as the obedient servant of natural
or historical movement has to eliminate from the process not only freedom
in any specific sense, but the very source of freedom which is given with
the fact of the birth of man and resides in his capacity to make a new begin-
ning. In the iron band of terror, which destroys the plurality of men and
makes out of many the one who unfailingly will act as though he himself
were part of the course of history or nature, a device has been found not
only to liberate the historical and natural forces, but to accelerate them to
a speed they never would reach if left to themselves. Practically speaking,
this means that terror executes on the spot the death sentences which
Nature is supposed to have pronounced on races or individuals who are "unfit
to live," or History on "dying classes," without waiting for the slower and
less efficient processes of nature or history themselves.
In this concept, where the essence of government itself has become mo-
tion, a very old problem of political thought seems to have found a solution
similar to the one already noted for the discrepancy between legality and
justice. If the essence of government is defined as lawfulness, and if it is
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 461
understood that laws are the stabilizing forces in the public affairs of men
(as indeed it always has been since Plato invoked Zeus, the god of the boun-
daries, in his Laws), then the problem of movement of the body politic
and the actions of its citizens arises. Lawfulness sets limitations to actions,
but does not inspire them; the greatness, but also the perplexity of laws in
free societies is that they only tell what one should not, but never what one
should do. The necessary movement of a body politic can never be found
in its essence if only because this essence — again since Plato — has always
been defined with a view to its permanence. Duration seemed one of the
surest yardsticks for the goodness of a government. It is still for Montes-
quieu the supreme proof for the badness of tyranny that only tyrannies are
liable to be destroyed from within, to decline by themselves, whereas all
other governments are destroyed through exterior circumstances. Therefore
what the definition of governments always needed was what Montesquieu
called a "principle of action" which, different in each form of government,
would inspire government and citizens alike in their public activity and
serve as a criterion, beyond the merely negative yardstick of lawfulness, for
judging all action in public affairs. Such guiding principles and criteria of
action are, according to Montesquieu, honor in a monarchy, virtue in a re-
public and fear in a tyranny.
In a perfect totalitarian government, where all men have become one
Man, where all action aims at the acceleration of the movement of nature
or history, where every single act is the execution of a death sentence which
Nature or History has already pronounced, that is, under conditions where
terror can be completely relied upon to keep the movement in constant
motion, no principle of action separate from its essence would be needed at
all. Yet as long as totalitarian rule has not conquered the earth and with
the iron band of terror made each single man a part of one mankind, terror
in its double function as essence of government and principle, not of action,
but of motion, cannot be fully realized. Just as lawfulness in constitutional
government is insufficient to inspire and guide men's actions, so terror in
totalitarian government is not sufficient to inspire and guide human behavior.
While under present conditions totalitarian domination still shares with
other forms of government the need for a guide for the behavior of its citi-
zens in public affairs, it does not need and could not even use a principle
of action strictly speaking, since it will eliminate precisely the capacity of
man to act. Under conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer
serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims
without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance
v^ath the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under to-
talitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before;
but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no
longer help to avoid the dangers man fears. The same is true for sympathy
or support of the regime; for total terror not only selects its victims accord-
ing to objective standards; it chooses its executioners with as complete
a disregard as possible for the candidate's conviction and sympathies. The
46S TOTALITARIANISM
consistent elimination of conviction as a motive for action has become a
matter of record since the great purges in Soviet Russia and the satelhte
countries. The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill con-
victions but to destroy the capacity to form any. The introduction of purely
objective criteria into the selective system of the SS troops was Himmler's
great organizational invention; he selected the candidates from photographs
according to purely racial criteria. Nature itself decided, not only who was
to be eliminated, but also who was to be trained as an executioner.
No guiding principle of behavior, taken itself from the realm of human
action, such as virtue, honor, fear, is necessary or can be useful to set into
mi>tion a body politic which no longer uses terror as a means of intimida-
tion, but whose essence is terror. In its stead, it has introduced an entirely
new principle into public affairs that dispenses with human will to action
altogether and appeals to the craving need for some insight into the law
of movement according to which the terror functions and upon which, there-
fore, all private destinies depend.
The inhabitants of a totalitarian country are thrown into and caught in
the process of nature or history for the sake of accelerating its movement;
as such, they can only be executioners or victims of its inherent law. The
process may decide that those who today eliminate races and individuals
or the members of dying classes and decadent peoples are tomorrow those
who must be sacrificed. What totalitarian rule needs to guide the behavior
of its subjects is a preparation to fit each of them equally well for the role
of executioner and the role of victim. This two-sided preparation, the sub-
stitute for a principle of action, is the ideology.
Ideologies — isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain
everything and every occurence by deducing it from a single premise — are
a very recent phenomenon and, for many decades, played a negligible role
in political life. only with the wisdom of hindsight can we discover in them
certain elements which have made them so disturbingly useful for totalitarian
rule. Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great political potentialities of
the ideologies discovered.
Ideologies are known for their scientific character: they combine the sci-
entific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be
scientific philosophy. The word "ideology" seems to imply that an idea
can become the subject matter of a science just as animals are the subject
matter of zoology, and that the suffix -logy in ideology, as in zoology, indi-
cates nothing but the logoi, the scientific statements made on it. If this were
true, an ideology would indeed be a pseudo-science and a pseudo-philos-
ophy, transgressing at the same time the limitations of science and the
limitations of philosophy. Deism, for example, would then be the ideology
which treats the idea of God, with which philosophy is concerned, in the sci-
entific manner of theology for which God is a revealed reality. (A theology
which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an
idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical,
i
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 469
tangible existence of animals.) Yet we know that this is only part of the
truth. Deism, though it denies divine revelation, does not simply make "sci-
entific" statements on a God which is only an "idea," but uses the idea of
God in order to explain the course of the world. The "ideas" of isms — race
in racism, God in deism, etc. — never form the subject matter of the ideologies
and the suffix -logy never indicates simply a body of "scientific" statements.
An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of
an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the "idea" is applied; the
result of this application is not a body of statements about something that
is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology
treats the course of events as though it followed the same "law" as the
logical exposition of its "idea." Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries
of the whole historical process — the secrets of the past, the intricacies of
the present, the uncertainties of the future — because of the logic inherent
in their respective ideas.
Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being. They are historical,
concerned with becoming and perishing, with the rise and fall of cultures,
even if they try to explain history by some "law of nature." The word
"race" in racism does not signify any genuine curiosity about the human
races as a field for scientific exploration, but is the "idea" by which the
movement of history is explained as one consistent process.
The "idea" of an ideology is neither Plato's eternal essence grasped by
the eyes of the mind nor Kant's regulative principle of reason but has
become an instrument of explanation. To an ideology, history does not
appear in the light of an idea (which would imply that history is seen
sub specie of some ideal eternity which itself is beyond historical mo-
tion) but as something which can be calculated by it. What fits the "idea"
into this new role is its own "logic," that is a movement which is the con-
sequence of the "idea" itself and needs no outside factor to set it into mo-
tion. Racism is the belief that there is a motion inherent in the very idea
of race, just as deism is the belief that a motion is inherent in the very
notion of God.
The movement of history and the logical process of this notion are sup-
posed to correspond to each other, so that whatever happens, happens ac-
cording to the logic of one "idea." However, the only possible movement
in the realm of logic is the process of deduction from a premise. Dialectical
logic, with its process from thesis through antithesis to synthesis which in
turn becomes the thesis of the next dialectical movement, is not different
in principle, once an ideology gets hold of it; the first thesis becomes the
premise and its advantage for ideological explanation is that this dialectical
device can explain away factual contradictions as stages of one identical,
consistent movement.
As soon as logic as a movement of thought — and not as a necessary con-
trol of thinking — is applied to an idea, this idea is transformed into a prem-
ise. Ideological world explanations performed this operation long before
it became so eminently fruitful for totalitarian reasoning. The purely nega-
470 TOTALITARIANISM
live coercion of logic, the prohibition of contradictions, became "produc-
tive" so that a whole hne of thought could be initiated, and forced upon the
mind, by drawing conclusions in the manner of mere argumentation. This
argumentative process could be interrupted neither by a new idea (which
would have been another premise with a different set of consequences) nor
by a new experience. Ideologies always assume that one idea is sufficient to
explain everything in the development from the premise, and that no experi-
ence can teach anything because everything is comprehended in this con-
sistent process of logical deduction. The danger in exchanging the necessary
insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology
and its Weltanschauung, is not even so much the risk of falling for some
usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom
inherent in man's capacity to think for the straightjacket of logic with which
man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside
power.
The Weltanschauungen and ideologies of the nineteenth century are not
in themselves totalitarian, and although racism and communism have be-
come the decisive ideologies of the twentieth century they were not, in
principle, any "more totalitarian" than the others; it happened because the
elements of experience on which they were originally based — the struggle
between the races for world domination, and the struggle between the classes
for political power in the respective countries — turned out to be politically
more important than those of other ideologies. In this sense the ideological
victory of racism and communism over all other isms was decided before
the totalitarian movements took hold of precisely these ideologies. on the
other hand, all ideologies contain totalitarian elements, but these are
fully developed only by totalitarian movements, and this creates the de-
ceptive impression that only racism and communism are totalitarian in
character. The truth is, rather, that the real nature of all ideologies was
revealed only in the role that the ideology plays in the apparatus of totali-
tarian domination. Seen from this aspect, there appear three specifically
totalitarian elements that are peculiar to all ideological thinking.
First, in their claim to total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to
explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away. They
are in all cases concerned solely with the element of motion, that is, with
history in the customary sense of the word. Ideologies are always oriented
toward history, even when, as in the case of racism, they seemingly proceed
from the premise of nature; here, nature serves merely to explain historical
matters and reduce them to matters of nature. The claim to total explanation
promises to explain all historical happenings, the total explanation of the
past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the
future. Secondly, in this capacity ideological thinking becomes independent
of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a
question of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological think-
ing becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five
senses, and insists on a "truer" reality concealed behind all perceptible
I
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 471
things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a
sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it. The sixth sense is pro-
vided by precisely the ideology, that particular ideological indoctrination
which is taught by the educational institutions, established exclusively for
this purpose, to train the "political soldiers" in the Ordensburgen of the
Nazis or the schools of the Comintern and the Cominform. The propaganda
of the totalitarian movement also serves to emancipate thought from expe-
rience and reality; it always strives to inject a secret meaning into every
public, tangible event and to suspect a secret intent behind every public
political act. once the movements have come to power, they proceed to
change reality in accordance with their ideological claims. The concept of
enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and this produces a mentality in
which reality — real enmity or real friendship — is no longer experienced and
understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed to signify some-
thing else.
Thirdly, since the ideologies have no power to transform reality, they
achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain meth-
ods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely
logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, de-
ducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that
exists nowhere in the realm of reality. The deducing may proceed logically
or dialectically; in either case it involves a consistent process of argumenta-
tion which, because it thinks in terms of a process, is supposed to be able
to comprehend the movement of the suprahuman, natural or historical proc-
esses. Comprehension is achieved by the mind's imitating, either logically or
dialectically, the laws of "scientifically" established movements with which
through the process of imitation it becomes integrated. Ideological argu-
mentation, always a kind of logical deduction, corresponds to the two afore-
mentioned elements of the ideologies — the element of movement and of
emancipation from reality and experience — first, because its thought move-
ment does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and, secondly,
because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from
experienced reality into an axiomatic premise, leaving from then on the
subsequent argumentation process completely untouched from any further
experience. once it has established its premise, its point of departure, expe-
riences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught
by reality.
The device both totalitarian rulers used to transform their respective
ideologies into weapons with which each of their subjects could force him-
self into step with the terror movement was deceptively simple and incon-
spicuous: they took them dead seriously, took pride the one in his supreme
gift for "ice cold reasoning" (Hitler) and the other in the "mercilessness of
his dialectics," and proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes
of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked preposterously "primi-
tive" and absurd: a "dying class" consisted of people condemned to death;
races that are "unfit to live" were to be exterminated. Whoever agreed that
472 TOTALITARIANISM
ihcrc arc such things as "dying classes" and did not draw the conse-
quence of killing their members, or that the right to live had something to
do with race and did not draw the consequence of killing "unfit races," was
plainly either stupid or a coward. This stringent logicality as a guide to
action (Krmeatcs the whole structure of totalitarian movements and govern-
ments. It is exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin who, although they
did not add a single new thought to the ideas and propaganda slogans of
their movements, for this reason alone must be considered ideologists of the
greatest importance.
What distinguished these new totalitarian ideologists from their prede-
cessors was that it was no longer primarily the "idea" of the ideology — the
struggle of classes and the exploitation of the workers or the struggle of
races and the care for Germanic peoples — which appealed to them, but the
logical process which could be developed from it. According to Stalin,
neither the idea nor the oratory but "the irresistible force of logic thoroughly
overpowered [Lenin's] audience." The power, which Marx thought was
born when the idea seized the masses, was discovered to reside, not in the
idea itself, but in its logical process which "like a mighty tentacle seizes
you on all sides as in a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear
yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter
defeat."-' only when the realization of the ideological aims, the classless
society or the master race, was at stake, could this force show itself. In the
process of realization, the original substance upon which the ideologies based
themselves as long as they had to appeal to the masses — the exploitation of
the workers or the national aspirations of Germany — is gradually lost, de-
voured as it were by the process itself: in perfect accordance with "ice cold
reasoning" and the "irresistible force of logic," the workers lost under Bol-
shevik rule even those rights they had been granted under Tsarist oppression
and the German people suffered a kind of warfare which did not pay the
slightest regard to the minimum requirements for survival of the German
nation. It is in the nature of ideological politics — and is not simply a be-
trayal committed for the sake of self-interest or lust for power — that the real
content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which
originally had brought about the "idea" (the struggle of classes as the law
of history or the struggle of races as the law of nature), is devoured by the
logic with which the "idea" is carried out.
The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires
in place of Montesquieu's principle of action is not the ideology itself —
racism or dialectical materialism — but its inherent logicality. The most per-
suasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was
very fond, is: You can't say A without saying B and C and so on, down to
the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality
'Stalin's speech of January 28, 1924; quoted from Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. I,
p. 33, Moscow, 1947. — It is interesting to note that Stalin's "logic" is among the few
qualities that Khrushchev praises in his devastating speech at the Twentieth Party
Congress.
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 473
seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves.
To the extent that the Bolshevik purge succeeds in making its victims con-
fess to crimes they never committed, it relies chiefly on this basic fear and
argues as follows : We are all agreed on the premise that history is a struggle
of classes and on the role of the Party in its conduct. You know therefore
that, historically speaking, the Party is always right (in the words of Trot-
sky: "We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided
no other way of being in the right."). At this historical moment, that is in
accordance with the law of history, certain crimes are due to be commit-
ted which the Party, knowing the law of history, must punish. For these
crimes, the Party needs criminals; it may be that the Party, though knowing
the crimes, does not quite know the criminals; more important than to be
sure about the criminals is to punish the crimes, because without such
punishment. History will not be advanced but may even be hindered in its
course. You, therefore, either have committed the crimes or have been
called by the Party to play the role of the criminal — in either case, you have
objectively become an enemy of the Party. If you don't confess, you cease
to help History through the Party, and have become a real enemy. — The
coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and,
through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which
you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C
which it logically engenders.
Totalitarian rulers rely on the compulsion with which we can compel our-
selves, for the limited mobilization of people which even they still need;
this inner compulsion is the tyranny of logicality against which nothing
stands but the great capacity of men to start something new. The tyranny of
logicality begins with the mind's submission to logic as a never-ending proc-
ess, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submis-
sion, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of
movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner
capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a
political reality is identical with a space of movement between men. Over
the beginning, no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power, because
its chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning. As terror
is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning
arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality
is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking — which as the freest and purest
of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of
deduction. Totalitarian government can be safe only to the extent that it
can mobilize man's own will power in order to force him into that gigantic
movement of History or Nature which supposedly uses mankind as its
material and knows neither birth nor death.
The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band,
presses masses of isolated men together and supports them in a world which
has become a wilderness for them, and the self-coercive force of logical
deduction on the other, which prepares each individual in his lonely isola-
474 TOTALITARIANISM
tion against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in
order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving. Just
as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships
between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all rela-
tionships with reality. I he preparation has succeeded when people have lost
contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for to-
gether with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and
thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or
the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact
and fiction {i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true
and false {i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
The question we raised at the start of these considerations and to which
we now return is what kind of basic experience in the living-together of
men permeates a form of government whose essence is terror and whose
principle of action is the logicality of ideological thinking. That such a com-
bination was never used before in the varied forms of political domination
is obvious. Still, the basic experience on which it rests must be human and
known to men, insofar as even this most "original" of all political bodies
has been devised by, and is somehow answering the needs of, men.
It has frequently been observed that terror can rule absolutely only over
men who are isolated against each other and that, therefore, one of the
primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.
Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile
ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its
hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting to-
gether, "acting in concert" (Burke) ; isolated men are powerless by definition.
Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability to act at all,
have always been characteristic of tyrannies. Political contacts between men
are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities for action
and power are frustrated. But not all contacts between men are broken and
not all human capacities destroyed. The whole sphere of private life with
the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact. We
know that the iron band of total terror leaves no space for such private
life and that the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man's capacity
for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action.
What we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the ,
sphere of social intercourse. Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I
can be isolated — that is in a situation in which I cannot act, because there
is nobody who will act with me — without being lonely; and I can be lonely
— that is in a situation in which I as a person feel myself deserted by all
human companionship — without being isolated. Isolation is that impasse
into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where
they act together in the pursuit of a common concern, is destroyed. Yet iso-
lation, though destructive of power and the capacity for action, not only
leaves intact but is required for all so-called productive activities of men.
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 4'/^
Man insofar as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work,
that is to leave temporarily the realm of politics. Fabrication {poiesis, the
making of things), as distinguished from action {praxis) on one hand and
sheer labor on the other, is always performed in a certain isolation from
common concerns, no matter whether the result is a piece of craftsman-
ship or of art. In isolation, man remains in contact with the world as the
human artifice; only when the most elementary form of human creativity,
which is the capacity to add something of one's own to the common world,
is destroyed, isolation becomes altogether unbearable. This can happen in a
world whose chief values are dictated by labor, that is where all human
activities have been transformed into laboring. Under such conditions, only
the sheer effort of labor which is the effort to keep alive is left and the rela-
tionship with the world as a human artifice is broken. Isolated man who
lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of
things as well, if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an
animal laborans whose necessary "metabolism with nature" is of concern to
no one. Isolation then becomes loneliness. Tyranny based on isolation gen-
erally leaves the productive capacities of man intact; a tyranny over "labor-
ers," however, as for instance the rule over slaves in antiquity, would
automatically be a rule over lonely, not only isolated, men and tend to be
totalitarian.
While isolation concerns only the political realm of life, loneliness con-
cerns human life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies,
certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is,
without destroying, by isolating men, their political capacities. But totali-
tarian domination as a form of government is new in that it is not content
with this isolation and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on lone-
liness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among
the most radical and desperate experiences of man.
Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian
government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its execu-
tioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superflu-
ousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning
of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperi-
alism at the end of the last century and the break-down of political institu-
tions and social traditions in our own time. To be uprooted means to have
no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be super-
fluous means not to belong to the world at all. Uprootedness can be the
preliminary condition for supcrfluousness, just as isolation can (but must
not) be the preliminary condition for loneliness. Taken in itself, without
consideration of its recent historical causes and its new role in politics,
loneliness is at the same time contrary to the basic requirements of the
human condition and one of the fundamental experiences of every human
life. Even the experience of the materially and sensually given world depends
upon my being in contact with other men, upon our common sense which
regulates and controls all other senses and without which each of us would
^ TOTALITARIANISM
...vv)scd in his own particularity of sense data which in themselves are
unrchable and treacherous. only because we have common sense, that is
only because not one man, but men in the plural inhabit the earth can we
trust our immediate sensual experience. Yet, we have only to remind our-
selves that one day we shall have to leave this common world which will
i!o on as before and for whose continuity we are superfluous in order to
realize loneliness, the experience of being abandoned by everything and
cver>'body.
Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas lone-
liness shows itself most sharply in company with others. Apart from a few
stray remarks — usuiilly framed in a paradoxical mood like Cato's statement
(reported by Cicero, De Re Publico, I, 17): numquam minus solum esse
quam cum solus esset, "never was he less alone than when he was alone,"
or. rather, "never was he less lonely than when he was in solitude" — it seems
that Epictetus. the emancipated slave philosopher of Greek origin, was the
tirst to distinguish between loneliness and solitude. His discovery, in a way,
was accidental, his chief interest being neither solitude nor loneliness, but
being alone {monos) in the sense of absolute independence. As Epictetus
sees it (Disseriutiones. Book 3, ch. 13) the lonely man (eremos) finds him-
self surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to
whose hostility he is exposed. The solitary man, on the contrary, is alone
and therefore "can be together with himself" since men have the capacity
of "talking with themselves." In solitude, in other words, I am "by myself,"
together with my self, and therefore two-in-one, whereas in loneliness I am
actually one, deserted by all others. All thinking, strictly speaking, is done
in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of
the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men be-
cause they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of
thought. The problem of solitude is that this two-in-one needs the others in
order to become one again: one unchangeable individual whose identity
can never be mistaken for that of any other. For the confirmation of my
identity 1 depend entirely upon other people; and it is the great saving grace
of companionship for solitary men that it makes them "whole" again, saves
them from the dialogue of thought in which one remains always equivocal,
restores the identity which makes them speak with the single voice of one
unexchangeable person.
Solitude can become loneliness; this happens when all by myself I am
deserted by my own self. Solitary men have always been in danger of lone-
liness, when they can no longer find the redeeming grace of companionship
to save them from duality and equivocality and doubt. Historically, it seems
as though this danger became sufficiently great to be noticed by others and
recorded by history only in the nineteenth century. It showed itself clearly
when philosophers, for whom alone solitude is a way of life and a condi-
tion of work, were no longer content with the fact that "philosophy is only
for the few" and began to insist that nobody "understands" them. Character-
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 417
istic in this respect is the anecdote reported from Hegel's deathbed which
hardly could have been told of any great philosopher before him: "Nobody
has understood me except one; and he also misunderstood." Conversely,
there is always the chance that a lonely man finds himself and starts the
thinking dialogue of solitude. This seems to have happened to Nietzsche in
Sils Maria when he conceived Zarathustra. In two poems ("Sils Maria" and
"Aus hohen Bergen") he tells of the empty expectation and the yearning
waiting of the lonely until suddenly "um Mittag war's, da wurde Eins zu
iZwei . ./ Nun feiern wir, vereinten Siegs gewiss,/ das Fest der Feste;/
Freund Zarathustra kam, der Cast der Gdste!" ("Noon was, when one
became Two . . . Certain of united victory we celebrate the feast of feasts;
friend Zarathustra came, the guest of guests.")
What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which
can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trust-
ing and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses
trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence
in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world,
capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time.
The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor
the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independ-
ent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose
premise is the self-evident. The elementary rules of cogent evidence, the
truism that two and two equals four cannot be perverted even under the
conditions of absolute loneliness. It is the only reliable "truth" human be-
ings can fall back upon once they have lost the mutual guarantee, the com-
mon sense, men need in order to experience and live and know their way
in a common world. But this "truth" is empty or rather no truth at all,
because it does not reveal anything. (To define consistency as truth as some
modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth.) Under the con-
ditions of loneliness, therefore, the self-evident is no longer just a means of
the intellect and begins to be productive, to develop its own lines of
"thought." That thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logi-
cality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection
with loneliness was once noticed by Luther (whose experiences in the phe-
nomena of solitude and loneliness probably were second to no one's and
who once dared to say that "there must be a God because man needs one
being whom he can trust") in a little-known remark on the Bible text "it
is not good that man should be alone": A lonely man, says Luther, "always
deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst."*
The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having any-
thing to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this "thinking every-
thing to the worst," in this deducing process which always arrives at the
worst possible conclusions.
'' "Ein solcher (sc. einsamer) Meiisch folgert immer eins cms Jem anJern unci denkt
cilles zum Argsten." In ErbaiiUche Schriften, "Warum die Einsamkeit zu fliehen?"
478 TOTALITARIANISM
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totaUtarian
world is the fact that lonchness, once a borderline experience usually suf-
fered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an every-
day experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The merciless
process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks
like a suicidal escape from this reality. The "ice-cold reasoning" and the
"mighty tentacle" of dialectics which "seizes you as in a vise" appears like
a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied
upon. It is the innor coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of
contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity outside all relationships
with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone,
and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the
extreme situation of solitary confinement. By destroying all space between
men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities
of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning
of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets
go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even
the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic
into thought are obliterated. If this practice is compared with that of tyranny,
it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let
loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth.
The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are
indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. Their danger is not
that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like
tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. Just as fear and the im-
potence from which fear springs are antipolitical principles and throw
men into a situation contrary to political action, so loneliness and the
logical-ideological deducing the worst that comes from it represent an anti-
social situation and harbor a principle destructive for all human living-
together. Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous
than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical
and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage
the world as we know it — a world which everywhere seems to have come
to an end — before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to
assert itself.
Apart from such considerations — which as predictions are of little avail
and less consolation — there remains the fact that the crisis of our time and
its central experience have brought forth an entirely new form of govern-
ment which as a potentiality and an ever-present danger is only too likely
to stay with us from now on, just as other forms of government which came
about at different historical moments and rested on different fundamental
experiences have stayed with mankind regardless of temporary defeats —
monarchies, and republics, tyrannies, dictatorships and despotism.
But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily con-
tains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only "message"
IDEOLOGY AND TERROR 479
which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical
event, is the supreme capacity of man; poUtically, it is identical with man's
freedom. Iniiium ut esset homo creatus est — "that a beginning be made
man was created" said Augustine.^ This beginning is guaranteed by each
new birth; it is indeed every man.
-' De Chime Dei, Book 12, chapter 20.
cHAiTKu kourteen: Epiloguei Reflectlons
on the lliiiiL^ariaii Revolution
As I WRITE this, more than one year has passed since the flames of the
. Hungarian revolution illuminated the immense landscape of post-
war totalitarianism for twelve long days. This was a true event whose stature
will not depend upon victory or defeat; its greatness is secure in the tragedy
it enacted. For who can forget the silent procession of black-clad women in
the streets of Russian-occupied Budapest, mourning their dead in public,
the last political gesture of the revolution? And who can doubt the solidity
of this remembrance when one year after the revolution the defeated and
terrorized people have still enough st.rength of action left to commemorate
once more in public the death of their freedom by shunning spontaneously
and unanimously all places of pubHc entertainment, theaters, movies, coffee
houses and restaurants?
The context of circumstances within which the revolution happened was
of great significance, but it was not compelling enough to release one of
those automatic processes that seem almost always to imprison history and
which actually are not even historical, if we understand by historical what-
ever is worthy of being remembered. What happened in Hungary happened
nowhere else, and the twelve days of the revolution contained more history
than the twelve years since the Red Army had "liberated" the country from
Nazi domination.
For twelve years everything had happened according to expectations —
the long dreary story of deceit and broken promises, of hopes against hope
and final disillusionment: from the beginning with popular front tactics
and a sham parliamentary system to the open establishment of a one-party
dictatorship which quickly liquidated the leaders and members of the for-
merly tolerated parties, until the last stage was set when the native commu-
nist leaders, whom Moscow rightly or wrongly mistrusted, were no less
brutally framed, humiliated in show trials, tortured and killed while the
most despicable and most corrupt elements in the party, not communists
but Moscow agents, ruled the country. All this and much more was pre-
dictable, not because there were any social or historical forces pressing in
one direction, but because this was the automatic result of Russian hegemony.
It was as though the Russian rulers repeated in great haste all the stages
EPILOGUE 481
of the October revolution up to the emergence of totalitarian dictatorship;
the story, therefore, while unspeakably terrible, is without much interest of
its own and varies very Httle; what happened in one satellite country hap-
pened at almost the same moment in all others from the Baltic Sea down
to the Adriatic.
The only exceptions to this rule were the Baltic States on the one hand,
and Eastern Germany on the other. The former were unhappy enough to
be directly incorporated into the Soviet Union, with the consequence that
the ceremonious repetition of the whole development had to be dispensed
with and their status immediately assimilated to that enjoyed by other
Soviet nationalities. When up to fifty per cent of the population was de-
ported and the loss made good by forced random immigration, it became
clear that they had been assimilated to the status of the Tartars, the Kalmyks
or the Volga Germans, that is, to those who had been found untrustworthy
during the war against Hitler. The case of Eastern Germany is an excep-
tion in the opposite direction. It never became even a satellite country but
remained occupied territory with a Quisling government despite the zeal of
German Moscow agents, with the result that the country, though still miser-
able enough when compared with the Bundesrepublik, fared much better
economically as well as politically than the satellites. But these regions are
exceptions only because they, too, fall into the orbit of Russian power; they
are not exceptions to the satellite system because they did not belong to it.
Not even the difficulties which began shortly after Stalin's death can be
called unexpected, because they reflected so faithfully the difficulties, or rather
the controversies, within the top Russian leadership. Here, too, there seemed
to be a repetition of conditions in the Twenties, before the streamlining of
the international communist movement into its eventual totalitarian shape
had been completed, when every Communist party split into factions which
faithfully mirrored the faction-ridden Russian party and each spHnter looked
up to its respective Russian protector as to a patron saint — which indeed he
was since the destinies of his proteges all over the world depended utterly
upon his own fate. It certainly was interesting, and gave food for thought
about certain unchanging structures of this movement, that Stalin's death
was not only followed by the same succession crisis as Lenin's thirty years
ago (which, after all, in the absence of any law of succession is rather a
matter of course), but that the crisis was met again by the temporary solu-
tion of "collective leadership," a term coined by Stalin in 1925, and that
the result in the Communist Parties abroad was again a desperate struggle
to line up with one of the leaders and form a faction around him. Thus,
Kadar is as much a protege of Khrushchev as Nagy was a protege of Malen-
kov. Even in the atmosphere of stark and sometimes sublime tragedy which
the Hungarian revolution created, this repetitiveness frequently bordered
upon the comical, as when one of the last broadcasts of the Communist
Free Radio Rajk from Hungary urged "the comrades to join the pseudo-
Communist Party of Kadar" and turn it into a "true Hungarian Communist
4}i2 TOTALITARIANISM
party." For in the same vein the early opposition to Stalin had urged the
comrades not to leave the party but to use the Trojan-horse tactic, until
Stalin himself ordered the same tactics for the German Communists with
rcs|xrct to the Nazi movement. Fach time the result was the same: the joiners
became true and good Stalinists and Nazis for all practical purposes.
The Hungarian revolution interrupted these types of automatic occur-
rences and conscious or unconscious repetitions just when the student of
totalitarianism had grown accustoined to them, and public opinion apa-
thetic. This event was not prepared at all by developments in Poland. It
was totally unexpected and took everybody by surprise — those who did
and suffered, no less than those who watched in furious impotence from
the outside, or those in Moscow who prepared to invade and conquer the
country like enemy territory.' For what happened here was something in
which nobody any longer believed, if he ever had believed in it — neither the
communists nor the anti-communists, and least of all those who, either with-
out knowing or without caring about the price other people would have to
pay, were talking about possibilities and duties of people to rebel against to-
talitarian terror. If there was ever such a thing as Rosa Luxemburg's "spon-
taneous revolution" — this sudden uprising of an oppressed people for the
sake of freedom and hardly anything else, without the demoralizing chaos
of military defeat preceding it, without coup d'etat techniques, without a
closely knit apparatus of organizers and conspirators, without the under-
mining propaganda of a revolutionary party, something, that is, which
ever>'body, conservatives and liberals, radicals and revolutionists, had dis-
carded as a noble dream — then we had the privilege to witness it. Perhaps
the Hungarian professor was right when he told the United Nations Com-
mission: "It was unique in history, that the Hungarian revolution had no
leaders. It was not organized; it was not centrally directed. The will for
freedom was the moving force in every action."
Events, past and present, — not social forces and historical trends, nor
questionnaires and motivation research, nor any other gadgets in the ar-
senal of the social sciences — are the true, the only reliable teachers of poli-
tical scientists, as they are the most trustworthy source of information for
those engaged in politics. once such an event as the spontaneous uprising
in Hungary has happened, every policy, theory and forecast of future poten-
tialities needs re -examination. In its light we must check and enlarge our
understanding of the totalitarian form of government as well as of the
nature of the totalitarian version of imperialism.
' Boris I. Nicolaevsky, whose "Battle in Ihe Kremlin" — a series of six articles pub-
lished by The New Leader, XL (July 29-September 2, 1957)— is the most compre-
hensive and the soundest analysis of developments in Russia after Stalin's death, finds
"that the United Nations' report on the Hungarian Revolution has established that the
outbreak of violence in Budapest was the result of cleliherate provocation." I am not
convinced; but even if he is right, the result of Ihe Russian provocation was certainly
unexpected and went far beyond the original intentions.
EPILOGUE 483
i: Russia after Statins Death
SPONTANEOUS AS THE Hungarian revolution was, it cannot be understood
outside the context of developments after Stalin's death. As we know today,
this death occurred on the eve of a gigantic new purge, so that whether he
died a natural death or was killed, the atmosphere in the party's higher
echelons must have been one of intense fear. Since no successor existed,
no one appointed by Stalin and no one quick enough or who felt up to the
task, a struggle for succession among the top leadership followed immedi-
ately and caused the crisis in Soviet Russia and the satellite countries. Its
outcome even now, five years after the death of Stalin, may not yet be de-
cided. But one thing is sure: one of the most serious flaws in totalitarian
dictatorship is its apparent inability to find a solution to this problem.
The attitude of totalitarian dictators in this matter we knew before: Stalin's
carelessness in occasionally appointing his successor only to kill or demote
him a few years later was matched and supplemented by a few scattered
remarks of Hitler on the subject; everything we knew suggested strongly
that they were convinced that the question was of minor importance be-
cause almost anybody would do as long as the apparatus remained intact.
To understand this carelessness, one must bear in mind that the choice ob-
viously was limited to a small circle of people who by the very fact that
they were on top and alive had proven their superiority under totalitarian
conditions, with everything that such superiority implies. From the totali-
tarian viewpoint, moreover, a binding regulation of succession would intro-
duce an element of stability, alien to and possibly in the way of the needs
of the "movement" and its extreme flexibility. If a succession law existed,
it would indeed be the only stable, unalterable law in the whole structure
and therefore possibly a first step in the direction of some kind of legality.
Whatever we may have known, we could not possibly know what would
happen in the case of the dictator's death. only Stalin's death disclosed that
succession is an unsolved problem and causes a serious crisis in which the
relations among the potential successors themselves, between them and the
masses, and the relationship among the various apparatuses on whose sup-
port they can count are involved. Totalitarian leaders, being mass leaders,
need popularity, which is no less efl'ective if, under totalitarian conditions,
it is fabricated by propaganda and supported by terror. The first stage in
the succession struggle was a competition for popularity, because none of
the competitors was well known, let alone popular — with the exception,
perhaps, of Zhukov, who, being an army man, was the least likely to succeed
in rising to power. Khrushchev borrowed tested American devices, travelled
around, shook hands and even learned how to kiss babies. Beria engaged in
an anti-war, appeasement policy whose very extremes were oddly reminiscent
of Himmler's efforts during the last months of the war to succeed Hitler by
^,S-f TOTALITARIANISM
becoming the man the Allied powers would trust enough to conclude peace
with. Malenkov preached a greater emphasis on consumer goods and prom-
ised to raise the standard of living. All of them together eventually liqui-
dated Bcria, not only because his foreign policy had become dangerous but
also because he was of course the very symbol of popular hatred in Russia
as well as abroad — which, again as in the case of Himmler, apparently
everybody knew except himself.
This competition for mass popularity should not be mistaken for a genu-
ine fear of the masses. Fear, to be sure, was a potent motive for the estab-
lishment of the collective leadership but unlike the triumvirate after Lenin's
death, which was indeed a mutual security pact against the "counter-revo-
lution," the collective leadership after Stalin's death was a mutual security
pact of the concerned gentlemen against each other. And anyone who trou-
bles to look up their past — all of them staunch Stalinists, educated and
tested only in the Stalin era — will have to admit that their fear of each
other was entirely justified.
Fear of the masses, on the other hand, would hardly have been justified.
At the moment of Stalin's death, the police apparatus was still intact and
later developments proved that one could even afford to break up the police
empire and loosen the terror. For while there was some evidence of boom-
erang effects from the unrest in the satellite countries — a few student dis-
turbances, one strike in a Moscow plant, some very cautious demands for
more leeway in "self-criticism," though hardly any demands for freedom
among the intellectuals- — there has never been any evidence of open revolt
or of the regime's being afraid of it. Moreover, the little show of opposition
among intellectuals was highly encouraged from above, and such an encour-
agement, far from being a genuine concession, was one of Stalin's tested
devices of domination. Appeals for "self-criticism" have served for decades
as deliberate provocation by which to bring opponents into the open and
test public opinion, whereupon the situation is dealt with appropriately. As
far as Russia proper is concerned, Khrushchev's speech in 1957 informing
the intellectuals that they had indulged in "incorrect understanding of the
essence of the party's criticism of the Stalin personality cult," underestimated
"the positive role of Stalin" and should go back to "Socialism realism . . .
[with itsj unlimited opportunities" in developing "their talents to glorify,"
was not much more than a routine performance.
Another aspect of the same speech is more interesting. For in it Khrush-
chev announces the establishment of "creative unions" through which "the
creative growth of every writer, artist, sculptor, etc." would be subject "to
constant comradely concern." Here we find a clue to how he intends to re-
place the restriction of police terror and to the meaning of his insistence on
- Those who harbor illusions in this matter should read the exchange of letters be-
tween Ivan Anissimov, editor of the Soviet magazine Foreii^n Literature, and Ignazio
Siione. which took place during the last months of 1956 and has been published by
Tempo Prescnte in Italy and The New Leader, XL (July 15, 1957), under the title
"A Troubled Dialogue."
EPILOGUE 485
decentralization. He seems to plan a surveillance exerted not by an outside
(police) body but recruited from the midst of the people, in this case the
writers and artists themselves. This would be an institutionalization of, pos-
sibly an improvement upon, the mutual spying principle which permeates
all totalitarian societies, and whose effectiveness Stalin had achieved by
making information and denunciation of others the only test of loyalty. An-
other innovation points in the same direction. This is Khrushchev's new
decree about "social parasites," who will also be selected for punishment in
concentration camps by the populace itself. In other words, Khrushchev
proposes to replace certain functions of the secret police with a highly or-
ganized mob rule, as though he thought the people by now can be trusted
to be their own policemen and to take the initiative in the selection of victims.
Similar new developments in the techniques of domination can be dis-
covered in the much discussed decentralization projects. For, far from indi-
cating a democratization of Soviet society or a rationalization of Soviet
economy, they were obviously aimed at breaking the power of the mana-
gerial class through the establishment of new economic regions with new
men to run them.^ The redeployment of Moscow-centralized personnel to the
provinces assured abo^e all their atomization; they were now subject to
the surveillance of local party authorities, who surely will not fail to exert
the same "constant comradely concern with the creative growth" of every
plant and every branch of production. This aim is not new; Khrushchev
learned from Stalin that every group of people who begin to show signs of
class identity and solidarity must be broken up, ideologically for the sake of
the classless society and practically for the sake of an atomized society
which alone can be totally dominated.^ But what Stalin achieved by means
of a permanent revolution and periodic gigantic purges, Khrushchev hopes
to achieve by new devices, built into, so to speak, the social structure itself
and meant to assure atomization from within.
This difference in method and approach is important enough, especially
as it is not restricted to the period of the "thaw." It was quite striking, though
it has been hardly noticed, that the bloody crushing of the Hungarian revo-
lution, terrible and effective as it was, did not represent a typically Stalinist
■' Nicolaevsky, loc. cit., brings valuable material for "Khrushchev's fight against the
Soviet managerial class . . . (which) goes far back into the past." Compare also the
article by Richard Lowenthal in Prohlcms of Cominiiiusin, September-October, 1957,
"New Purge in the Kremlin," which comes to the conclusion: "What had started as a
drive for more economical rationality had turned into a drive for more direct party rule
in the economic field."
^ Milovan Djilas, like many former communists, is less outraged by the loss of free-
dom under a communist dictatorship than by the loss of equality. High salaries, the
possession of mink coats, automobiles and villas by the ruling bureaucracy must of
course be very annoying to those who joined the movement for the sake of social
justice. But they are not the sign of a "new class." If, on the other hand, it should be
true that such a new class is forming in Yugoslavia, this alone would demonstrate that
Tito's dictatorship is not totalitarian, which, indeed, it is not. See Djilas' The New Class
(New York, 1957).
4S6 TOTALITARIANISM
solution. Stalin most probably would have preferred a police action to a
military operation, and he would certainly have carried it through, not merely
by execution of leaders and imprisonment of thousands, but by wholesale
deportation and by consciously depopulating the country. Nothing finally
would have been further from his mind than to send enough aid to prevent
a complete collapse of the Hungarian economy and to stave off mass starva-
tion, as the Soviet Union has done in the year following the revolution.
It may be too early to tell how permanent this change in methods will
turn out to be. It may be a temporary phenomenon, a hangover, as it were,
from the time of collective leadership, of unsolved conflicts within the inner
circle of the regime with the concomitant relaxation of terror and ideological
rigidity. Moreover, these methods are as yet untried and their effects could
be quite different from those expected. Yet, as it is certain that the relative
relaxation of the post-Stalin era was not caused by pressure from below, it
seems plausible that certain objective factors strongly favor an abandonment
of some features and devices which we have come to identify with totali-
tarian rule.
First among them is the fact that the Soviet Union for the first time suffers
from a very real shortage of labor. In this situation, chiefly due to severe
losses during the war but also to the country's progressing industrialization,
the institution of slave labor, concentration — and extermination — camps
which, among their other functions, also had to solve the acute unemploy-
ment problem of the thirties, caused partly by the enforced collectivization
of the peasants, are not only obsolete but positively dangerous. It is quite
possible that the younger generation objected to Stalin's plans for a new
super-purge not only on the grounds of personal security, but because they
felt that Russia was no longer in a position to afford the prohibitively high
cost in "human material" involved. This seems to be the most plausible ex-
planation of why the liquidation of Beria and his clique was followed by an
apparently serious and successful liquidation of the police slave-empire, the
transformation of some camps into forced settlements, and the release of a
probably considerable number of inmates.
A second factor, closely connected with the first, is the emergence of
Communist China, which because of its threefold superiority in population
— 600 against 200 million — puts Russia at a serious disadvantage in the
half-hidden, but very real struggle for ultimate supremacy. Even more im-
portant, China, its adherence to the Soviet bloc notwithstanding, has thus
far refused to follow the Russian depopulation policy; for great as the num-
ber of victims in the first years of dictatorial rule may appear — 15 million
seems a plausible guess — it is insignificant in proportion to the population
when compared with the losses Stalin used to inflict on his subjects.'"' These
'The best proof of the difference between Mao's and Stalin's rule may be found in
a comparison of the population censuses in China and Russia. The last Chinese census,
counting close to 600 million people, was higher than statistical expectations, while
Russian censuses for decades have been considerably lower than what statistically was
expected. In the absence of reliable figures for population losses through extermina-
tion, one could guess the figure of those who were murdered in Russia from these mil-
lions of people who were "statistically lost."
EPILOGUE 487
considerations of sheer numerical force, while they do not preclude the
establishment of a police state or necessitate the abolition of rule through
terror, definitely stand in the way of the type of mass liquidation of "inno-
cents" or "objective enemies" which was so highly characteristic of both
the Hitler and the Stalin regimes.
These factors seem to impel Russia herself to the inner-communist heresy
of national communism which obviously has become the ruling regime in
Yugoslavia and in China. It is not surprising that communists of smaller
countries like Gomulka, Rajk and Nagy, and Tito himself, should incline
to this deviation. Communists who were more than simple agents of Mos-
cow — willing to become ruling bureaucrats anywhere in the world when,
for some higher reason of world revolutionary strategy, the country of their
birth should cease to exist — had no other choice. The case is different in
China, which could have afforded the price of totalitarian terror even more
easily than Russia. The fact, however, is that Mao has deliberately chosen
the national alternative and formulated a number of theories in his famous
speech in 1957 which are in accordance with it and in flagrant contradic-
tion to the official Russian ideology. No doubt, the text of on the Correct
Handling of Contradictions among the People" constitutes the first piece
of serious writing which has come out of the communist orbit since Lenin's
death," and with it the ideological initiative has shifted from Moscow to
Peiping. This, it is true, may harbor momentous consequences for the future;
it may even change the totalitarian nature of the Russian regime. But at
this moment all such hopes are, to say the least, premature. By now Zhukov's
demotion should have convinced those who had any doubts in this matter,
for one reason for his dismissal is certainly that he was guilty of "nationalist
deviations," that, in other words, he started to speak about the "Soviet
people" in much the same sense in which Mao tries to reintroduce le peuple,
word and concept, into communist ideology.
Still, it may be that fear of Chinese competition constituted an important
factor in the liquidation of the police empire, and in this case it would
indeed be more than a mere maneuver or temporary concession; but in
view of the fact that no similar change in ideology has taken place, so that
the ultimate goal of world domination through war and revolution has re-
mained unchanged, it is considerably less than a strategic change. It is a
tactical retreat, and there are indications that Khrushchev quite deliberately
has left the door wide open for the reestablishment of fullfledged terror as
well as the recurrence of super-purges.
"The complete text was published by The New Leader. XL (September 9, 1957;
Section 2), in a supplementary pamphlet with a valuable commentary by G. F. Hud-
son. Reading the speech, one quickly realizes that the usual title "Let a Hundred
Flowers Bloom" is quite misleading. The chief new theoretical elements are the
recognition of contradictions between classes, on the one hand, and between the
people and the government on the other, even under a Communist dictatorship. Of
even greater importance is the strong populist note in the speech. on the matter of
freedom, on the other hand, Mao is quite orthodox. Freedom to him is a means to an
end as is democracy; both "are relative, not absolute, they come into being and develop
under specific historical circumstances."
48S TOTALITARIANISM
one of these indications I have mentioned already. It is the law against
"stK'ial parasites" (a term only too familiar to the student of Nazi totali-
tarianism) by which at any moment any number of people can again dis-
appear into the concentration camps without having committed any crime
against the regime. The totalitarian character of the decree is illustrated
by the careful omission of criminal acts which remain subject to prosecution
in court, by the failure to define what constitutes a "social crime," and by
the extra-legal way of its punishment: deportation to places which are not
identified. As a matter of fact, the issuance of this law should be enough to
show that all the talk about a new Soviet legality is sheer hypocrisy.
Another indication appears in Khrushchev's secret speech at the Twen-
tieth Party Congress. The speech was originally not meant for public con-
sumption; it addressed the higher echelons of the Russian party, and par-
ticularly those who were involved in the gamble of "collective leadership."
This audience probably understood immediately that the speech could be
interpreted in two altogether difTerent ways. Either Stalin's mental sickness
was the cause of all crimes, and then nobody was to blame, neither those
who heard Mr. Khrushchev nor Mr. Khrushchev himself; moreover, and
even more important, in this case the mutual fear from which the collective
leadership emerged was unjustified, because only an unbalanced mind would
plot murder. Or, because of his mental condition and insane suspiciousness,
Stalin had been susceptible to evil influences, and in this case not Stalin
was to blame but whoever used his diseased power for his own ends. The
first alternative remained the official interpretation until 1957 when Khrush-
chev, with the help of the army, seized power. The second reading became
official policy when Khrushchev justified his coup d'etat by stressing Malen-
kov's role in the Leningrad affair, alluding implicitly to Malenkov's job as
head of Stalin's personal secretariat, which had made him the unofficial
head of the NKVD. It is common knowledge that the techniques of Khrush-
chev's coiq) d'etat followed closely the pattern set by Stalin in the twenties
for the liquidation of the triumvirate and the right and left wing factions
in the party, and it therefore seemed only proper that Khrushchev imme-
diately rehabilitate his late master and curtail certain intellectual liberties.
No one, least of all probably Mr. Khrushchev himself, can know what
the course of his future actions will be. one thing is certain: on the basis
of his coup d'etat speech, he can not only liquidate his exiled colleagues
from the collective leadership at any moment, he can also let loose a new
purge of Stalin collaborators in the higher echelons of the party, govern-
mental and managerial bureaucracies. The law against social parasites, on
the other hand, makes possible the reintroduction of mass-deportations and
the re-establishment of slave labor on a large scale, should this prove de-
sirable. As yet, nothing has been decided; but if one reads certain statements
of the Kadar group in Hungary, which mirrors Khrushchev very closely
(Kadar's denunciation of Rakosi was modelled after the pattern of Khrush-
chev's earlier denunciation of Stalin), and which held that "the old Stalinist
group had not been severe enough in crushing the enemies of socialism,"
that its mistake was "an insufficient application of the dictatorship of the
EPILOGUE 489
proletariat,"^ one wonders if the hopes of some Western observers for the
emergence of some "enhghtened totalitarianism" will not turn out to be
wishful thinking.
The last of the post-Stalin changes in the USSR to be mentioned in our
context concerns the temporary shift of the party's emphasis from the police
to the army. In recent years, Western observers placed their greatest hope
for a change within the totalitarian system on the sudden ascendancy of the
army and especially on the rise of Marshal Zhukov in the Soviet hierarchy.
These hopes were not entirely unfounded, for it has thus far been an out-
standing characteristic of totalitarian government that the army played- a
subordinate role and could not compete with the police cadres either in
power or in prestige. They were, however, exaggerated because another
prominent feature of totalitarian government was left out of account. It
was forgotten that no other form of government is so flexible in its institu-
tions, can so easily shift power from one apparatus to the other or create
new ones without even having to liquidate the old.
Moreover, ascendancy of the police over the military apparatus is the
hallmark of all, and not only of totalitarian tyrannies; in the latter case, it
not only answered the need to suppress the population at home but fitted
the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard
the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic
violence and rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel
rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially
a police force, for the rule and even conquest of foreign territories with the
ultimate aim of amalgamation of the army and police under the leadership
of the SS. In view of the flexibility of totalitarianism, we should be prepared
for the possibility of the opposite process, the transformation of the army
and the military into a police organ, or for an amalgamation of military and
police troops under the command of the higher officer corps of the army; as
long as the party remains the uncontested highest authority, this does not
necessarily preclude police methods of rule. This would have been impossible
in Germany because of the strong military traditions of the Relchswehr which
could be broken only from the outside. But this reason, if it ever had the
same force in Russia, certainly is valid only so long as the officer corps is not
exclusively chosen from the ranks of the party and is not so reliable and
pliable as the elite cadres of the police. It is quite possible that Khrushchev
will replace the political commissars in the army by the same control from
within — exerted by trusted officers — and supplement it with the same or-
ganized mob rule — the mob in this instance being the soldiers — by which he
is trying to replace police control in cultural and economic matters. If this
should succeed, the decisive difference between army and police would cease
to exist.
When, in the course of the succession crisis, Khrushchev appealed to
Zhukov for support, the army's ascendancy over the police was an accom-
plished fact. This had been one of the automatic consequences of the
"^ See Paul Landy, "Hungary since the Revolution," in Problems of Communism,
September-October, 1957.
4(J0 TOTALITARIANISM
breaking up of the police empire, the other being a temporary strengthening
of the managerial group who were rid of their most serious economic com-
petitor and, at the same time, inherited the huge police share in Soviet
industries, mines and real estate. It speaks for Khrushchev's shrewdness that
he grasped these consequences more quickly than his colleagues and acted
accordingly. Of the two beneficiaries of the partial liquidation of the police
apparatus, the army was by far the stronger for the simple reason that the
onlv instrument of violence left with which to decide inner-party conflicts
was the army. And. indeed, Khrushchev used Zhukov exactly the same way
Stalin had used his relationships to the secret police in the succession strug-
gle of thirty years ago. Yet, just as in the case of Stalin the supreme power
continued to reside in the party, not in the police, so in this case it was
never the army but again the party apparatus which retained the highest
power. And just as Stalin never hesitated to purge his police cadres and
liquidate their chiefs, so Khrushchev has followed up his inner-party ma-
neuvers by removing Zhukov from the highest command. But even in the
days of his highest prestige, Zhukov did not obtain more than minor con-
cessions such as a new party directive affirming the supreme authority of
military commands against interference by political commissars, and they
bore an ominous resemblance to conditions during the war when military
considerations together with nationalist propaganda overruled party indoc-
trination for a few years.
This last point is decisive. There hardly ever was anything to substantiate
hopes for a gradual transformation of totalitarian domination into a mili-
tary dictatorship and, from the viewpoint of peace, it is by no means sure
that such a transformation was to be desired. Rule by the military, curi-
ously enough, has come to be identified with a determinedly peaceful
disposition. But the observation that generals are among the most peace-
loving and least dangerous creatures in the world, though quite correct in
the Western hemisphere of the last forty years, does not necessarily hold
true for those who by definition are aggressors. Zhukov certainly was not
another Eisenhower, and throughout the period of rising army prestige, there
have been signs that Russia prepared herself for war. This has little to do
with the launching of satellites and the development of an intercontinental
rocket, although these successes gave the policy its material basis. What
we should not forget is that Malenkov's statement in 1954: that a third
world war under the conditions of nuclear warfare would spell doom to
mankind as a whole was immediately followed by his defeat. The trouble
was that he probably meant what he said, for his program of non-military
industrial development and greater production of consumer goods was in
line with this statement — together they most likely cost him the support of
the army and helped Khrushchev in the inner-party struggle. one year later,
at any rate, Molotov expressed the opposite conviction: that nuclear war
would be disastrous only for the imperialist and capitalist powers, whereas
the communist bloc would profit by it no less than it had profited by the
two previous wars. Khrushchev uttered the same opinion in 1956 and con-
firmed it officially in 1957 prior to Zhukov's fall: "A new worid war could
EPILOGUE 491
only end in collapse for capitalism . . . Socialism will live on while capitalism
will not remain. For despite great losses mankind will not only survive,
but will continue to develop." So emphatic was this statement in an inter-
view for foreign consumption about peaceful coexistence, that he felt him-
self that "some may think Communists are interested in war, since it would
lead to the victory of socialism.'"* This, to be sure, never meant that Russia
actually was on the point of starting a war. Totalitarian leaders can change
their minds like everyone else, and it stands to reason that the Russian
rulers are wavering not only between the hope for victory and the fear
of defeat, but between the hope that victory may make them the uncon-
tested masters over the globe and fear lest, exhausted by a too costly victory,
they be left alone to face the growing power colossus of China. The latter
considerations, which of course are hypothetical, are along national lines;
if they prevail, Russia may indeed be interested in coming to a temporary
arrangement with the United States to freeze the present constellation in
which the two super-powers are bound to recognize and respect the existing
spheres of influence.
The demotion of Zhukov may be the most dramatic manifestation of this
change of mind. From the little we know at this moment, it seems likely
that Zhukov, accused of "adventurism," the inner-party equivalent for war-
mongering, wanted war and that Khrushchev, after a moment's hesitation,
decided to follow once more the "wisdom" of his dead master whose ruth-
lessness in domestic policies always was matched by an extreme caution in
foreign affairs. It could also be that Khrushchev accused Zhukov of war
preparations because he himself was toying with the idea — as Stalin accused
Tukhachevski of plotting with Nazi Germany when he himself prepared an
alliance with Hitler. At any event, it was only proper that Zhukov's dis-
missal should have been followed by the strongest affirmation of peaceful-
ness that has come out of Soviet Russia since the end of the war, a toast
hailing the wartime alliance against Hitler accompanied by a veritable curse
on the warmongers — who in Khrushchev's mind just then were not the
"capitalist and imperialist powers" but rather his generals at home. Unfor-
tunately, and much as we are tempted to put our faith in a sincere change
of Mr. Khrushchev's heart, it is only too likely that his words were for
public consumption in Russia and the satellite countries, where Zhukov's
popularity perhaps made a denunciation of him as a warmonger necessary.
Neither they nor subsequent proposals to end experiments with nuclear
weapons are reliable indications of a change in the party's inner evaluation
of war under the conditions of nuclear weapons.
It is in the terrible nature of totalitarian government that a more reliable
indication of Russia's present unwillingness to risk another world war lies
in the fact that conditions have turned for the worse again in the whole
orbit of Soviet domination, where for a number of years the Russian people
as well as the people in the satellite countries had enjoyed a comparatively
easier and more plentiful life. It was one of the mainstays of Stalin's politics
** See the text of James Reston's interview with Khrushchev in the New York Times,
October 10, 1957.
^VJ TOTALITARIANISM
to combine an aggressive foreign policy with concessions at home and to
Lomix'nsatc for concessions abroad with an increase of terror, in order to
prevent that the moving force of the totahtarian movement should ever
come to a standstill. Ihe recent radicalization of Soviet politics in Hungary,
Poland and Russia herself, which was in no way provoked by popular un-
rest or rebellion but has been accompanied by a less aggressive attitude
toward the Western world, may simply signify that here, too, Khrushchev
will show himself a faithful disciple of his dead master.
Ihat we must gauge our own security by the tragedy of others is
bad enough, but it is not the worst. The worst is that under these cir-
cumstances the most important political issue of the nuclear age, the war
question, cannot be raised, let alone solved. As far as the nontotalitarian
world is concerned, it is a matter of fact that another world war will harbor a
threat of destruction to the existence of mankind, even to the existence of
organic life on earth. This, obviously, makes all past political thought about
war, its possible justification for the sake of freedom, its role as an ultima
ratio in foreism affairs, perfectly obsolete. But what is a matter of fact for
us. is a matter of ideology for the totalitarian mind. The point is not in dif-
ferences of opinion and basic convictions nor the concomitant difficulties in
coming to an agreement, but in the much more terrifying impossibility of
agreeing about facts.'' Mr. Khrushchev's oflf-the-record contribution to the
war discussion, "poor men do not mind fire," is truly appalling, not merely
because such popular verities of yesterday have become dangerous irrele-
vancies today, but because it shows with rare precision that, no matter how
vulgar his ｅxpressions may be, he actually thinks and operates within the
closed framework of his ideology and will not permit new facts to penetrate it.
It has always been an error to measure the threat of totalitarianism by
the yardstick of the relatively harmless conflict between a communist and
a capitalist society and to overlook the explosive contradiction between the
totalitarian fiction and the everyday world of factuality in which we live. But
it was never more dangerously wrong than today when the same technical
discoveries, which taken together constitute for us a factually changed world,
are at the disposition of those who in dead seriousness regard them as mere
means, that is, as devices with which to make real a purely fictitious world
built of lies and based on denials of facts. The freedom of mankind, let alone
its survival, does not depend upon a free market economy; yet freedom as
well as survival may well deprnd upon our success or failure to persuade
the other part of the world to recognize facts as they are and to come to
terms with the factuality of the world as it is.
II: The Hungarian Revolution
PERHAPS NOTHING ILLUSTRATES better that there still exists a difference in
mentality between the Soviet Union and her satellites than the fact that
" This basic difference comes out most clearly in dialogues between Westerners and
totalitarian-trained people. Both Mr. Reston's interview and the correspondence be-
EPILOGUE 493
Krushchev's speech at the Twentieth Party Congress could at the same time
end the thaw in Russia ^" and release the unrest, finally the uprising, in the
newly bolshevized territories. Here, the sinister ambiguity we mentioned
above obviously was lost on the average reader who must have read the
speech with pretty much the same understanding as the average reader in the
free world. In this naive reading it could not but cause a tremendous relief,
because it sounded as though a normal human being were talking about nor-
mal human occurrences — insanity and crimes creeping into politics; Marxian
phraseology and historical necessity were conspicuous by their absence. Had
this been the "correct understanding" of the speech, the Twentieth Party
Congress would have been an event of enormous significance. It would have
indicated a break with totalitarian methods, though not with socialist meas-
ures or dictatorial procedures, and healed the breach between the two world
powers. For Khrushchev had only confirmed the charge of the free world
that this was not so much a communist as a crime-ridden government which
lacked not only the democratic type of legality but any restriction of power
through law whatsoever. If the Soviet government now intended to operate
a socialist economy on the same level as the western world operated a free-
market economy, then there was no reason why the two main powers, to-
gether with their respective allies, should not be able to coexist and coop-
erate peacefully and in good faith.
Several months elapsed before the secret party speech reached first the
Western world through the New York Times and then the communist-ruled
countries. Its immediate consequence was something unheard of — open re-
bellions in Poland and Hungary which had not happened through all the
preceding years when Stalin was silently and most efficiently downgraded,
when a number of Stalinists like Rakosi in Hungary had been removed from
power and a relaxation of controls had taken place, nor had it happened
when these controls, alrervdy prior to the publication of the secret speech,
were gradually retightened and some Stalinists rehabilitated. The point is
that the people were aroused only by open words, and not by silent ma-
neuvers, no matter how telling they might have been for the observer of the
totalitarian scene, and no amount of bad faith behind these words — and
this bad faith was by no means inactive — could alter their inflammatory
power. Not acts, "mere words" had succeeded much against their intention
in breaking the deadly spell of impotent apathy which totalitarian terror
and ideology cast over the minds of men.
However, this did not happen everywhere. It happened only where some
old-guard communists, like Nagy and Gomulka, had miraculously survived
the meticulous care with which Stalin had purged not only the Russian
party but the international movement of everybody who was not a mere
agent. In the beginning, the Polish and Hungarian developments were quite
tween Silone and Anissimov, loc. tit., read like object lessons in this peculiarity of the
totalitarian mentality with its horrifying capacity to avoid all real issues and dissolve
all facts in ideological talk.
'" This is the opinion of Boris Nicolaevsky, loc. cil., which he amply supports by
a careful compilation and analysis of all available information.
4^)4 TOTALITARIANISM
similar. In both countries, an inner-party split had occurred between the
"Muscovites" and these survivors, and the general mood, including the
stress on national tradition, religious freedom, and violent dissatisfaction
among students, was similar. one is tempted to say that it was almost an
accident that what happened in Hungary did not happen in Poland and vice
versa. I he fact, however, is that Gomulka, setting before the Polish people's
eyes the tragic fate of Hungary, could stop the rebellion in its initial stage,
so that neither the exhilarating experience of power which comes from act-
ing together nor the consequences resulting from boldly putting freedom on
the market place could come to pass.
The third fact to remember is that the rebellion in both countries
started with intellectuals and university students, and generally with the
younger generation, that is, with those strata of the population whose ma-
terial well-being and ideological indoctrination had been one of the prime
concerns of the regime. Not the underprivileged, but the overprivileged of
communist society took the initiative, and their motive was neither their
own nor their fellow-citizens' material misery, but exclusively Freedom and
Truth." This, especially, must have been as rude a lesson for Moscow as
it was heartwarming for the free world. Not only that bribes did not work,
but the rise of totalitarian ideologies and movements has thus far always
attracted the intelligentsia, and experience has shown that nobody can be
so easily bribed and frightened into submission to nonsense as scholars,
writers and artists. The voice from Eastern Europe, speaking so plainly and
simply of freedom and truth, sounded like an ultimate affirmation that
human nature is unchangeable, that nihilism will be futile, that even in the
absence of all teaching and the presence of overwhelming indoctrination a
yearning for freedom and truth will rise out of man's heart and mind forever.
Unfortunately, such conclusions need qualification. First, the rebellions
happened in countries whose experience with total domination had been
quite short-lived. Not before 1949 were the satellite countries even super-
ficially bolshevized, and the process was inlerrupted in 1953 by Stalin's death
and the subsequent period of thaw. The succeeding struggle resulted in the
formation of factions, and discussion became inevitable. The cry for free-
dom was born in the atmosphere of these inner-party discussions, but only
in the recently conquered territories; for nothing comparable with these
words and deeds could be witnessed in Russia proper. Ilya Ehrenburg, an
old bohemian and habitue of left-bank Paris bistros, may have nourished
certain hopes when he coined the right metaphor 'Thaw' for the new party
line, but he is of course much more typical of those whom "the gods have
failed" than of the Russian intelligentsia. Dudintsev's novel Not by Bread
Alone, unlike Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, probably a product of the encour-
aged self-criticism mentioned above, is not concerned with freedom, but with
the opening of careers to talent. And scarce evidence of some authentic
"The truly admirable United Nations' Report on the Problem of Hungary quotes
a young girl student as follows: "Even though we might lack bread and other neces-
sities of life, we wanted freedom. We, the young people, were particularly hampered
because we were brought up amidst lies. We continually had to lie. We could not have
a healthy idea, because everything was choked in us. We wanted freedom of thought."
EPILOGUE 495
rebelliousness among Russian intellectuals points much rather to a yearn-
ing for the right to know factual truth than for any right of freedom. one
such instance occurs also in Dudintsev's novel, where he recounts the early
days of the Nazi invasion when he was watching from a trench a fight be-
tween German and Russian airplanes in which the Messerschmitts proved
victorious although they were outnumbered: "Something snapped in me
because I had always been told that our planes were the fastest and the
best." Here, indeed, the author tells of one long moment during which to-
talitarian disputing-away of facts did not prevail; experience of factual
truth exploded the "historical truth" of the party's argument, whose "our
planes are the fastest and the best" means: eventually we shall have the
fastest and the best planes, perhaps at the cost of destroying all those who
could compete with us.
Whatever our convictions and hopes concerning human nature may be,
all our experiences with these regimes indicate that, once they are firmly
established, factual reality is a much greater danger to them than an innate
yearning for freedom. We know this from the Stalinist measure to deport
the returning soldiers of the Russian occupation army en masse to concen-
tration camps because they had been exposed to the impact of reality; as
we know it from the curiously complete breakdown of Nazi indoctrination
after Hitler's defeat and the automatic destruction of his fictitious world.
The point is that the impact of factual reality, like all other human experi-
ences, needs speech if it is to survive the moment of experience, needs talk
and communication with others to remain sure of itself. Total domination
succeeds to the extent that it succeeds in interrupting all channels of com-
munication, those from person to person inside the four walls of privacy no
less than the public ones which are safeguarded in democracies by freedom
of speech and opinion. Whether this process of making every person incom-
municado succeeds except in the extreme situations of solitary confinement
and of torture is hard to say; in any event, it takes time, and it is obvious
that it is far from completed in the satellite countries. So long as terror is
not supplemented by the ideological compulsion from within, so hideously
manifest in the self-denunciations of the show trials,^- the ability of people
to distinguish between truth and lies on the elementary factual level remains
unimpaired; oppression, therefore, is felt for what it is and freedom is de-
manded.
'-The collapse of the regime in Hungary has yielded one more beautiful example of
motivation and technique of these self-denunciations by making public the preparation
of Rajk. for his show trial. Kadar was in charge and his conversation with Rajk was
secretly recorded by Rakosi — presumably for future use against Kadar — and the record
played back at the Central Committee's meeting which ousted Rakosi. The comrades
heard the following: "Dear Laci, 1 come to you on behalf of Comrade Rakosi. He re-
quested me to come and explain the situation to you. Of course, we all know that
you are innocent. But Comrade Rakosi believes that you will understand. only really
great comrades are chosen for such roles. He asked me to tell you that by doing this
you will render historic service to the Communist movement." (Quoted from E. M.,
"Janos Kadar: A Profile," in Problems of Coniniiinisin.) The combination of gross
flattery and ideology is not accidental; there is an element of naked vanity in the
ideology itself.
^96 TOTALITARIANISM
The Hiingan.in people, young and old, knew that they were "living amidst
lies" and asked, unanimously and in all manifestos, for something the Rus-
sian intcllieentsia apparently has even forgotten how to dream of, namely,
for freedom of thought, it would probably be erroneous to conclude from
this unanimity that the same concern for freedom of thought which gave
rise to the rebellion among the intellectuals also turned the rebellion into a
revolution of the whole people, an uprising which spread like wildfire until
no one was left outside its ranks except the members of the political police
— the only Hungarians prepared to defend the regime. A similar error would
be to conclude from the initiative taken by members of the Communist
Party that the revolution was primarily an inner-party affair, a revolt of
"true" against "false" communists. The facts speak an altogether different
language. What are the facts?
An unarmed and essentially harmless student demonstration grew from
a few thousand suddenly and spontaneously into a huge crowd which took
it upon itself to carry out one of the students' demands, the overturning of
Stalin's statue in one of the public squares in Budapest. The following day,
some students went to the Radio Building to persuade the station to broad-
cast the sixteen points of their manifesto. A large crowd immediately gath-
ered, as if from nowhere, and when the AVH, the political police guarding
the building, tried to disperse the crowd with a few shots, the revolution
broke out. The masses attacked the police and acquired their first weapons.
The workers, hearing of the situation, left the factories and joined the crowd.
The army, called to defend the regime and help the armed police, sided
with the revolution and armed the people. What had started as a student
demonstration had become an armed uprising in less than twenty-four hours.
From this moment onward, no programs, points or manifestos played
any role; what carried the revolution was the sheer momentum of acting-
together of the whole people whose demands were so obvious that they
hardly needed elaborate formulation: Russian troops should leave the terri-
tory and free elections should determine a new government. The question
was no longer how much freedom to permit to action, speech and thought,
but how to institutionalize a freedom which was already an accomplished
fact. For if we leave aside the outside interventions of Russian troops —
first of those stationed in the country and then of regular battalions com-
ing from Russia in full battle preparation — we may well say that never a
revolution achieved its aims so quickly, so completely and with so few
losses. The amazing thing about the Hungarian revolution is that there was
was no civil war. For the Hungarian army disintegrated in hours and the
dictatorship was stripped of all power in a couple of days. No group, no
class in the nation opposed the will of the people once it had become known
and its voice had been heard in the market place. For the members of the
AVH, who remained loyal to the end, formed neither group nor class, the
lower echelons having been recruited from the dregs of the population:
criminals, Nazi agents, highly compromised members of the Hungarian
fascist party, the higher ranks being composed of Moscow agents, Hun-
garians with Russian citizenship under the orders of NKVD officers.
EPILOGUE 497
The swift disintegration of tlie whole power structure — party, army and
governmental offices — and the absence of internal strife in the developments
that followed are all the more remarkable when we consider that the up-
rising was clearly started by communists, who, however, did not retain the
initiative, and still never became the object of wrath and vengeance for
non-communists nor turned themselves against the people. The striking ab-
sence of ideological dispute, the concomitant lack of fanaticism and the
ensuing atmosphere of fraternity, which came into being with the first dem-
onstration in the streets and lasted until the bitter end, can be explained only
on the assumption that ideological indoctrination had disintegrated even
more swiftly than the political structure. It was as though ideology, of what-
ever shade and brand, had simply been wiped out of existence and memory
the moment the people, intellectuals and workers, communists and non-
communists, found themselves together in the streets fighting for freedom.^^
In this respect, the change in reality brought about by the revolution had
much the same effect on the minds of the Hungarian people as the sudden
breakdown of the Nazi world had on the minds of the German people.
Important as these aspects are, they tell us more about the nature of the
regime the Hungarian revolution rebelled against than about the revolu-
tion itself. In its positive significance, the outstanding feature of the uprising
was that no chaos resulted from the actions of people without leadership
and without previously formulated program. First, there was no looting, no
trespassing of property, among a multitude whose standard of life had been
miserable and whose hunger for merchandise notorious. There were no
crimes against life either, for the few instances of public hanging of AVH
officers were conducted with remarkable restraint and discrimination. In-
stead of the mob rule which might have been expected, there appeared
immediately, almost simultaneously with the uprising itself, the Revolu-
tionary and Workers' Councils, that is, the same organization which for
more than a hundred years now has emerged whenever the people have
been permitted for a few days, or a few weeks or months, to follow their
own political devices without a government (or a party program) imposed
from above.
For these councils made their first appearance in the revolution which
swept Europe in 1848; they reappeared in the revolt of the Paris Commune
in 1871, existed for a few weeks during the first Russian revolution of 1905,
to reappear in full force in the October revolution in Russia and the No-
vember revolutions in Germany and Austria after the first World War.
Until now, they have always been defeated, but by no means only by the
"counter-revolution." The Bolshevik regime destroyed their power even
under Lenin and attested to their popularity by stealing their name {soviet
being the Russian word for council). In Russia, the Supreme Soviet is needed
'^ This aspect is especially striicing when we learn that the insurgents were almost
immediately joined by "800 cadets from the Petofi Military Academy. These were
mostly sons of high Government and Communist Party officials and AVH officers;
they had led a privileged life in the Military Academy and had been indoctrinated for
years." (United Nations' Report.)
49S TOTALITARIANISM
to conceal the fact that the true seat of power is in the party apparatus and
to present to the outside world the facade of a non-existent parliament. In
addition, it serves as a kind of honor system; membership, acquired through
nomination by the party, is bestowed for outstanding achievement in all
professions and walks of life. Members of the Russian Soviets neither rule
nor govern; they do not legislate and have no political rights whatsoever,
not even the privilege to execute party orders. They are not supposed to act
at all; they are chosen in recognition of non-political achievements — for
their contribution to the "building of socialism." When Soviet-Russian tanks
crushed the revolution in Hungary, they actually destroyed the only free
and acting Soviets in existence anywhere in the world." And in Germany,
again, it was not the "reliction," but the Social Democrats who liquidated
the Soldiers' and Workers' Councils in 1919.
In the case of the Hungarian revolution, even more markedly than in
the case of earlier ones, the establishment of the Councils represented "the
first practical step to restore order and lo reorganize the Hungarian economy
on a socialist basis, but without rigid Party control or the apparatus of
terror."'"' The councils thus were charged with two tasks, one political, the
other economic, and though it would be wrong to believe that the dividing
line between them was unblurred, we may assume that the Revolutionary
Councils fulfilled mainly political functions while the Workers' Councils
were supposed to handle economic life. In the following, we shall deal only
with the Revolutionary Councils and the political aspect; their immediate
task was to prevent chaos and the spreading of crime, and in this they were
quite successful. The question whether economic, as distinguished from
political, functions can be handled by councils, whether, in other words, it
is possible to run factories under the management and ownership of the
workers, we shall have to leave open. (As a matter of fact, it is quite doubt-
ful whether the political principle of equality and self-rule can be applied
to the economic sphere of life as well. It may be that ancient political theory,
which held that economics, since it was bound up with the necessities of
life, needed the rule of masters to function well, was not so wrong after all.
For it is somehow, albeit paradoxically, supported by the fact that when-
ever the modern age has believed that history is primarily the result of eco-
nomic forces, it has come to the conviction that man is not free and that
history is subject to necessity.)
At any event, the Revolutionary and the Workers' Councils, though they
emerged together, are better kept apart, because the former were primarily
the answer to political tyranny, whereas the latter in the case of the Hun-
garian revolution were the reaction against trade unions that did not repre-
sent the workers but the party's control over them. Not only the Workers'
Councils, the program of the Revolutionary Councils too must be understood
in the context of special conditions of the Hungarian revolution. Thus the
demand for free general elections belongs to the program inherent in the
'■•The only writer, so far as I know, who made this point was Ignazio Silone in an
article in The New Leader, XL (January 21, 1957).
'^This is the evaluation of the United Nations' Report.
EPILOGUE 499
emergence of councils everywhere, whereas the demand to restore the multi-
party system, as it had ruled Hungary and all European countries prior to
the rise of tyranny, was the almost automatic reaction to the particularities
of the situation, the shameful suppression and persecution of all parties which
had preceded the one-party dictatorship.
In order to understand the council system, it is well to remember that it
is as old as the party system itself; as such, it represents the only alternative
to it, that is, the only alternative of democratic electoral representation to
the one presented by the Continental multi-party system with its insistence
on class interests on the one hand and ideology, or Weltanschauung, on the
other. But while the historical origin of the party system lies in Parliament
with its factions, the councils were born exclusively out of the actions and
spontaneous demands of the people, and they were not deduced from an
ideology nor foreseen, let alone preconceived, by any theory about the best
form of government. Wherever they appeared, they were met with utmost
hostility from the party-bureaucracies and their leaders from right to left
and with the unanimous neglect of political theorists and political scien-
tists. The point is that the councils have always been undoubtedly demo-
cratic, but in a sense never seen before and never thought about. And since
nobody, neither statesman nor political scientists nor parties, has ever paid
any serious attention to this new and wholly untried form of organization,
its stubborn re -emergence for more than a century could not be more spon-
taneous and less influenced by outside interest or theory.
Under modern conditions, the councils are the only democratic alterna-
tive we know to the party system, and the principles on which they are
based stand in sharp opposition to the principles of the party system in many
respects. Thus, the men elected for the councils are chosen at the bottom,
and not selected by the party machinery and proposed to the electorate
either as individuals with alternate choices or as a slate of candidates. The
choice, moreover, of the voter is not prompted by a program or a platform
or an ideology, but exclusively by his estimation of a man, in whose per-
sonal integrity, courage and judgment he is supposed to have enough confi-
dence to entrust him with his representation. The elected, therefore, is not
bound by anyhing except trust in his personal qualities, and his pride is "to
have been elected by the workers, and not by the government" ^^ or a party,
that is, by his peers and from neither above nor below.
once such a body of trusted men is elected, it will of course again de-
velop differences of opinion which in turn may lead into the formation of
"parties." But these groups of men holding the same opinion within the
councils would not be parties, strictly speaking; they would constitute those
factions from which the parliamentary parties originally developed. The
election of a candidate would not depend upon his adherence to a given
faction, but still on his personal power of persuasion with which he could
'"See The Revolt in Hungary; A Docnnientttry Chronology of Events, which re-
cords the story of the Hungarian revolution in a compilation of the broadcasts of the
Hungarian radio stations, official and unofficial. Published by the Free Europe Com-
mittee, New York, n.d.
^00 TOTALITARIANISM
present his point of view. In other words, the councils would control the
parties, they would not be their representatives. The strength of any given
faction would not depend upon its bureaucratic apparatus and not even upon
the appeal of its program or Weltanschauung, but on the number of trusted
and trustworthy men it holds in its ranks. This development manifested it-
self clearly in the initial stages of the Russian revolution, and the chief
reason why Lenin felt he had to emasculate the Soviets was that the Social
Revolutionaries counted more men trusted by the people than the Bolsheviks;
the power of the Communist Party, which had been responsible for the revo-
lution, was endangered by the council system which had grown out of the
revolution.
Remarkable, finally, is the great inherent flexibility of the system, which
seems to need no special conditions for its establishment except the coming
together and acting together of a certain number of people on a non-
temporary basis. In Hungary, we have seen the simultaneous setting-up of
all kinds of councils, each of them corresponding to a previously existing
group in which people habitually lived together or met regularly and knew
each other. Thus neighborhood councils emerged from sheer living together
and grew into county and other territorial councils; revolutionary councils
grew out of fighting together; councils of writers and artists, one is tempted
to think, were born in the cajes, students' and youths' councils at the uni-
versity, military councils in the army, councils of civil servants in the min-
istries, workers' councils in the factories, and so on. The formation of a
council in each disparate group turned a merely haphazard togetherness
into a political institution.
The men elected were communists and non-communists; party lines seem
to have played no role whatsoever, the criterion, in the words of a news-
paper, being solely that there is "none among them who would misuse his
power or think only of his personal position." And this is more a criterion
of qualification than of morality. Whoever misuses power or perverts it into
violence, or is only interested in his private affairs and without concern for
the common world, is simply not fit to play a role in political life. The same
principles were observed in the further stages of election; for the councils,
elected directly at the base, were urged to elect representatives for the
higher bodies "without regard for Party affiliation and with due regard to
the confidence of the working people." ^^
one of the most striking aspects of the Hungarian revolution is that this
principle of the council system not only reemerged, but that in twelve short
days a good deal of its range of potentialities could emerge with it. The
council-men were hardly elected in direct vote when these new councils
began freely to coordinate among themselves to choose from their own midst
the representatives for the higher councils up to the Supreme National Coun-
cil, the counterpart of normal government, — and the initiative for this came
from the just revived Nationa' Peasant Party, certainly the last group to be
suspected of extreme ideas. While this Supreme Council remained in prep-
aration, the necessary preliminary steps had been taken everywhere: work-
''' Ibid.
EPILOGUE 50]
ers' councils had set up coordinating committees and Central Workers'
Councils were already functioning in many areas; revolutionary councils in
the provinces were coordinated and planning to set up a National Revolu-
tionary Committee with which to replace the National Assembly. Here, as
in all other instances, when for the shortest historical moment the voice
of the people has been heard, unaltered by the shouts of the mob and un-
stifled by the bureaucracies of the parties, we can do no more than draw a
very sketchy picture of the potentialities and physiognomy of the only demo-
cratic system which in Europe, where the party system was discredited al-
most as soon as it was born, was ever really popular. (We discussed in
Chapter VIII, Section 3, the decisive difference between the Continental
multi-party system and the Anglo-American two-party system which one
must always keep in mind for a proper understanding of European events
and revolutions.) The rise of the councils, not the restoration of parties,
was the clear sign of a true upsurge of democracy against dictatorship, of
freedom against tyranny.
When we ponder the lesson of the Hungarian revolution, it may be well
to consider how the restored regime proceeded in crushing the uprising. The
Russian army in a full-fledged invasion needed three whole weeks to pacify
the country — which indeed speaks well for the solidity of the organizational
power of the councils. The people's demands for freedom and truth were,
of course, denied, but in one respect the government did make a concession.
The peasants, who in Hungary as in Poland had spontaneously left the col-
lectives, were not forced back, with the result that the whole experiment of
collective farming practically collapsed in both countries and the agricul-
tural output of these regions fell far below the requirements for the national
economy. The concession to the peasants, therefore, the only class which
at least up to now has derived certain profits from the rebellions, was im-
portant materially as well as ideologically. The first blow of bloody oppres-
sion was directed against the Revolutionary Councils, the organ of action
and representative for the people as a whole. After the nation had been
once more reduced to impotence, freedom of thought was adamantly and
without the slightest concession stamped out. only then followed the disso-
lution of the Workers' Councils, which the regime regarded as a substitute for
party and govenmient-directed trade unions rather than as a political body.
It certainly is noteworthy that the same order in the restoration of total
domination has been followed in Poland where the Russian rulers did not
have to crush a revolution but had only to withdraw certain concessions,
won in the upheaval of 1956. Here too the new workers' councils, that is,
trade unions independent of party control, were the last to go; they had been
able to survive for eighteen months, until April 1958, and their liquidation
followed upon and was accompanied by ever more severe restrictions on
intellectual liberties. If we translate into theory the order of these measures,
we see that first priority is given to freedom of action, embodied in the
Revolutionary Councils in Hungary; they were crushed first and their mem-
bers were the first to be persecuted. But freedom of thought was felt to be
502 TOTALITARIANISM
almost equally dangerous, and the persecution of intellectuals followed im-
mediately upon the liquidation of the councils. Interest representation, which
the workers had established in their own trade unions, apparently contained
too great an element of action to be tolerated; still, it was suppressed more
slowly and less violently than the other two. Finally, and most interesting,
all Marxist talk about the absolute priority of the economic system notwith-
standing, the only sphere where temporary concessions were deemed pos-
sible and wise was precisely the economic, where nothing more was at stake
than the organization of labor and the mode of consumption and appro-
priation of consumer goods.
Clearly, these measures were not dictated by materialist ideology. They
were guided by the very realistic understanding that freedom resides in the
human capacities of action and thought, and not in labor and earning a
living. Since labor and earning a living, like all strictly economic activities,
are subject to necessity anyhow, bound to the necessities of life, it was
not thought likely that demands for more liberties in this sphere would ever
lead by themselves to the claim of freedom. Whatever the free world may
think of the issue at stake in its conflict with totalitarianism, the totalitarian
dictators themselves have shown in practice that they know very well that
the difference in economic systems, far from constituting the hard core of
final disagreement, is even the only one where concessions are possible.
Ill: The Satellite System
THE LAST WORDS to comc out of free Hungary were spoken over the Radio
Station Kossuth and ended with the following sentence: "Today it is Hun-
gary and tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, it will be the turn of other
countries because the imperialism of Moscow does not know borders, and
is only trying to play for time." A few days earlier, the Communist Free
Radio (Rajk) had already declared that "it was not only Stalin who used
Communism as a pretext to expand Russian imperialism" and that it had
been among the goals of the Hungarian revolution "to present a clear pic-
ture of Russia's brutal colonial rule."
We said in the beginning that the development and expansion of post-war
Soviet totalitarianism must be seen in the flaming light of the Hungarian
revolution. This light — who would deny it? — is not steady, it flares and
flickers; yet it is the only authentic light we have. The words spoken during
the event by men acting in freedom and fighting for it carry more weight
and, so we hope, are heard by more people than theoretical reflections, pre-
cisely because they are spoken on the spur and in the excitement of the
moment.'** If these people said that what they were fighting against was im-
'" To avoid misunderstandings: I do not mean to attribute the same high significance
to reports or theories by victims or eye-witnesses. The presence of terror paralyzes and
sterilizes thought even more effectively than action. If one does not mind risking one's
EPILOGUE 503
perialism, political science must accept the term, although we might have
preferred, for conceptual as well as historical reasons, to reserve the word
"imperialism" for the colonial expansion of Europe which began in the last
third of the nineteenth century and ended with the liquidation of British rule
over India. Our task then can only be to analyze what kind of imperialism
developed out of the totalitarian form of government.
As we saw before, imperialism, both word and phenomenon, was un-
known until the ever-quickening pace of industrial production forced open
the territorial limitations of the nation-state.'" Its outstanding feature was
expressed in the slogan of the time: expansion for expansion's sake, which
meant expansion without regard to what traditionally had been regarded as
national interests such as the defense of the territory and its limited ag-
grandizement through annexation of neighboring lands. Imperialist expan-
sion was prompted not by political, but economic motives, and it followed
the expanding economy wherever it happened to lead in the form of invest-
ment of capital, surplus money within the national economy, and of the
emigration of unemployable people, who had also become superfluous to
the life of the nation. Imperialism thus was the result of the nation-state's
attempt to survive under the circumstances of a new economy and in the
presence of an emerging world market. Its dilemma was that economic inter-
ests of the nationals demanded an expansion which could not be justified
on the grounds of traditional nationalism with its insistence on historical
identity of people, state and territory.
From beginning to end and for better and worse, the destinies of imperi-
alism, the fate that befell the ruling nations no less than the lot suffered by
their "subject races," were determined by this origin. National consciousness
was perverted into race consciousness, prompted by the natural solidarity
of "white men" in alien lands, which, in turn, made the subject races color
conscious. But together with racism, nationalism made its inroads into the
ancient cultures of Asia and the tribal wilderness of Africa, and if the
imperialist-minded colonial bureaucracy could turn a deaf ear to the national
aspirations which they themselves had aroused, the nation-state could not
without denying the very principle of its own existence. The colonial bu-
reaucracies lived in a perennial conflict with their home governments, and
while imperialism undermined nationalism by shifting the loyalties from
the nation to the race, the nation-state with its still intact legal and political
institutions always prevailed in preventing the worst excesses. The fear of
boomerang effects of imperialism upon the mother country remained strong
enough to make the national parliaments a bulwark of justice for the op-
pressed people and against the colonial administration.
Imperialism on the whole was a failure because of the dichotomy between
the nation-state's legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other
life, it is easier to act than to think under conditions of terror. And the spell cast by
terror over man's mind can be broken only by freedom, not by mere thought.
'■' A good summary of the historical background is now available in R. Koebner,
"The Emergence of the Concept of Imperialism," in the Ciimhr'ulfie Journal, 1952.
504 TOTALITARIANISM
people pcriivmently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance
or incompetence. British impcriaUsts knew very well that "administrative
massacres" could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public
opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could
have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to
commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories
of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate
the empire.
Such recollections of the past may serve to remind us of how much greater
the chances of success arc for an imperialism directed by a totalitarian gov-
ernment. Moreover, Russia was never a nation-state, strictly speaking; even
the Czars ruled a multi-national empire from the power center in Moscow.
The principle of national self-determination, this nightmare of the old
imperialists who had to deny to the subject people the very principle of
their own political existence, poses not even a problem to the Moscow rulers
today. They rule the satellites with essentially the same device they use
for their empire at home; they make concessions to national culture on the
folklore and linguistic level, imposing at the same time not only the Moscow-
conceived and directed policy, but also Russian as the oflficial language for
all nationalities. Introduction of obligatory study of Russian was one of the
first demands by Moscow in the process of bolshevization, as the demand
for its abolition figured prominently in all manifestos in Hungary and Poland.
No dichotomy of principle, therefore, between home rule and colonial
rule will impose restraint on totalitarian imperialism, and if it, too, has to
fear certain boomerang effects from its imperialist adventures, they have
other causes. Thus, the fact that the Russian army had to be called in to
crush the Hungarian uprising may have been one of the reasons why Zhukov
could nourish certain hopes of winning an ascendancy over the party at
home and, at any rate, for consolidating his newly-won ascendancy over
the police. For the Hungarian events seemed to prove that police troops,
though modelled after the Russian NKVD, were not sufficient to deal with
a full-fledged rebellion. Of even greater importance, the swift disintegration
of the Hungarian army, which alone had enabled an annoying but harmless
show of dissatisfaction to grow into an armed uprising, demonstrated to what
an extent the regime everywhere depended upon the loyalty of its soldiers
and oflicers' corps. Khrushchev's quick reaction against such hopes and
aspirations shows a concern with boomerang effects upon the home govern-
ment similar to the concern of the older type of imperialism. But here the
danger of boomerangs is temporary, because of the inevitable time lag in
bolshevization between mother country and colony. Thus, the disaffection
of satellite armies, their doubtful reliability in case of war, proves only that
in these regions national military traditions are still intact and that bol-
shevization was slower in an institution which, after all, was inherited from
the former regime and had not, like the political police, been built up from
scratch.
Boomerang effects in totalitarian imperialism, naturally, are distinguished
EPILOGUE 505
from those of national imperialism in that they work in the opposite di-
rection — the few, faint-hearted stirrings of unrest in Russia probably were
caused by events in Poland and Hungary — and so do the measures the gov-
ernment is forced to take to combat them. For just as European imperiahsm
could never transgress certain limits of oppression even when the effective-
ness of extreme measures was beyond doubt, because public opinion at home
would not have supported them and a legal government could not have sur-
vived them, so Russian totalitarianism is forced to crush opposition and with-
hold all concessions, even when they may pacify the oppressed countries
for the time being and make them more reliable in case of war, because
such "mildness" would endanger the government at home and place the
conquered territories in a privileged position.
This last point was, indeed, of considerable importance in the initial
stages of the satellite system, when the main concern of the ruling imperiaUst
power was not hovv' to maintain a distinction between national and colonial
areas, but on the contrary how to equalize conditions in the newly con-
quered territories down to the level of Soviet Russia herself. Russia's post-
war expansion was not caused, and her rule of the conquered territories is
not determined, by economic considerations; the profit motive, so conspi-
cuous in Europe's overseas imperialism, is replaced here by sheer power
considerations. But these are not of a national character and not led by the
interest of Russia herself, although it is true that for almost a decade the
Moscow rulers seemed interested in nothing more than robbing their satel-
lites of their industrial and other possessions and forcing them into grossly
unfair trade agreements. Yet the very neglect with which the Russians used
to treat their spoils from dismantled industries, which were frequently ruined
even before shipped to Russia, indicates that their true aim was much rather
to force the satellite standard of life down than to raise their own. This
trend has now been reversed and large quantities of coal, iron ore, oil as
well as agricultural products are shipped back into the subject regions whose
needs have become a serious drain on Russian resources and have caused
severe shortages in the USSR. The goal is again equalization of conditions.
However, these and other distinctions between Western national and
Russian totalitarian imperialism do not go to the heart of the matter. For
the immediate predecessor of totalitarian imperialism is not the British,
Dutch or French version of overseas colonial rule, but the German, Austrian
and Russian version of a continental imperialism which never actually suc-
ceeded, and therefore is neglected by students of imperialism, but which in
the form of the so-called pan-movements — pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism
— was a very potent political force in Central and Eastern Europe. Not
only does totalitarianism, nazism no less than bolshevism, owe a heavy debt
to pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism in matters of ideology and organization;
their expansion program, though global in scope and thereby distinguished
from those of the pan-movements, follows the aims of continental imperi-
alism. The main point here is that the strategy of expansion follows geo-
graphic continuity and extends from a power center to a widening periphery
^06 TOTALITARIANISM
which then is supposed to gravitate "naturally" toward its center. This co-
hesive extension could of course never have tolerated a dichotomy between
home government and colonial rule; and since continental imperialism in-
tended to found its "empire" in Europe itself, it did not depend upon a
color line to distinguish between "higher and lower breeds"; instead it pro-
posed to treat European peoples as colonials under the rule of a master race
of Germanic or Slavic origin.
The word "satellite" is indeed a very appropriate metaphor for the Russian
version of totalitarian imperialism. Cohesive extension, and neither far-flung
possessions nor the engineering of communist revolutions in distant coun-
tries, spells the present bolshevist strategy for global conquest. (It is indeed
quite likely that Russia would be almost as unhappy as America if, through
some queer accident of chaotic conditions, the Communist Party should be
able to seize power legally in France.) Since the expansion is continuous
and starts from the national frontier, it can easily hide its ultimate aims
behind traditional nationalist claims; thus, Stalin's demands at Yalta would
hardly have been granted so easily if the allied statesmen had not felt that
he demanded no more than what Russian foreign policy had traditionally
aimed at. It was the same misunderstanding Hitler profited from at Munich
when he claimed he wanted no more than the annexation of German terri-
tory in Austria and Czechoslovakia and the liberation of German minorities.
The satellite system itself, however, is neither the only nor the most
natural version of totalitarian imperialism. It must be seen against the back-
ground of Nazi imperialism, with which the Russian model has only one
thing in common, the insistence on cohesive expansion; Hitler's lack of in-
terest in acquiring overseas possessions or pressing the nationalist German
claim for restitution of former German colonies was notorious. Nazi Ger-
many ruled Western Europe through Quislings, corrupt native politicians
and collaborators, and carried out a policy of depopulation and extermina-
tion in the East with the aim of having these emptied lands colonized by
elite troops after the war. Moscow's agents in the satellite countries are no
Quislings, but old and tested members of the communist movement, and
as such they are in no worse a position in the face of their Moscow masters
than any Ukrainian or White Russian bureaucrat, who, also, is supposed to
sacrifice the national interests of his people to the demands of the interna-
tional movement or Moscow. And not even Stalin, it seems, wanted to
exterminate the populations of the satellite countries and to recolonize the
territory. Another alternative for Russian imperialism would have been
to rule this whole region like the Baltic countries, without the intermediary
of local authorities, that is, to incorporate them directly into the Soviet Em-
pire which claims to be the Union of federal republics.
The satellite system is clearly a compromise and perhaps a temporary
one. It was born in the post-war constellation of two great powers agreeing
between themselves about their spheres of influence, albeit in a hostile
manner. As such, the satellite system is the Russian answer to the American
system of alliances, and their sham independence is important to Russia as
EPILOGUE 507
the reflection of the intact national sovereignty of America's allies. The
metaphor, unfortunately, is again only too appropriate; for it corresponds
to the fears every country must feel when it goes into an alliance with one
of the super-powers, a fear, that is, not so much of losing its identity alto-
gether as of becoming a "satellite" country gravitating in the orbit, and kept
alive onJy by the force of attraction, of the central power. And certainly
the danger of the coexistence of two hostile super-powers is that every sys-
tem of alliances initiated by either will automatically degenerate into a
satellite system until the whole world is sucked into their power orbits. It
has been American policy to divide the world into communist, allied and
neutral countries with the aim of preserving the balance between the two
super-powers by recognizing in fact, if not de jure, the respective spheres of
influence and by insisting on the neutrality of the rest.^ No matter how
uneasy this balance of power may be, the image of American foreign policy
is essentially that of a stable structure. But Russian foreign policy is guided
by a different image in which there are no neutral countries. Disregarding
as irrelevant the small European neutrals like Switzerland, and focussing
their attention chiefly on Asia and Africa, the Russians, as Khrushchev re-
cently pointed out, reckon with a force of revolutionary nationalism in
addition to American "imperialism" and Russian-Chinese communism, so
that the important third part of the world consists of areas where, according
to communism, the national revolution is on the agenda of history and with
it an automatic increase of Russia's sphere of influence. Insofar as Russian
utterances about the possibilities of peaceful competition between the two
super-powers are more than propaganda talk, it is not a competition in the
production of cars, refrigerators and butter, but a competition in the gradual
enlargement of the two respective spheres of influence that is at stake.
Although the satellite system may have been bom as a compromise be-
tween the inherent tendencies of totalitarian domination and the need to
maintain a facsimile of normal foreign policy with regard to the free world,
the devices of rulership developed by Russian imperialism were quite in
agreement with it. In every instance, the conquest by the might of the
Soviet empire was enacted as though a seizure of power by a native party
had taken place. The elaborate preparatory game in the forties when first,
prior to full bolshevization, several parties were tolerated and then liqui-
dated in favor of a one-party dictatorship, served to fortify the illusion of
independent domestic developments. What Moscow did was to create exact
replicas not only of its own form of government but of the developments
which had led up to it. In order to make sure that the development would
not lead in an "incorrect" direction, it took care even at the time of Popular
Front tactics to reserve the Ministry of Interior for Communists, thus re-
maining in control of the police, which had been set up in nucleo by Soviet
police units accompanying the occupation army. The police was organized
^° The sorry spectacle of the free world's strict non-intervention in Hungarian af-
fairs and even toleration of a military invasion by Russian troops has shown to what
a degree this recognition is a fait accompli.
>()S TOTALITARIANISM
in orthodox totalitarian fashion, an elite spy group within the police charged
with informing on the ordinary members of the police who in turn informed
on the party members and the population at large. The bolshevization of
the country was introduced through the same show trials of prominent party
members we know from Russia, while here, too, the less prominent ones
were deported to concentration camps, presumably in Russia. From the
beginning, moreover, this police spy net was duplicated by a similar or-
ganization established by the Russian army, and the only distinction between
the two competing bodies was "that they served different masters within
one Soviet oligarchy." This duplication and multiplication of offices is also
in line with orthodox totalitarian institutions. And like its model in Russia,
the police in the satellite countries kept "cadre-cards" for every citizen in
the country, on which presumably not only compromising information was
recorded, but information on associations, friends, family, and acquain-
tances which is much more valuable for totalitarian terror.
Yet, while the police was set up in strict accordance with the Russian
model, the device of creating replicas and staffing them with native per-
sonnel was not followed. This was the only institution in which Russian
advisers did not stay in the background but openly supervised the natives
and even ran the show trials. Something similar seems to have happened to
the satellite armies, which after the Hungarian uprising were put under the
command of Russian officers, but while this military control was clearly a
reaction against unforeseen developments, the control of the police was
planned as though the Russian rulers thought that everything would follow
automatically once this most important device of total domination had set
the mechanism into motion.
There is, however, another rather inconspicuous but not uninteresting
difference between the Russian and the satellite system, which concerns the
method of selecting rank and file members of the police. Here, too, the
Russians had to fall back upon experiences in the early stages of totali-
tarian rule and rely upon criminal and otherwise compromised elements in
the population. This stands in stark contrast to the system the Russians have
been practicing for more than twenty-five years now, in which the police
appoints its new members from the rank and file of the party and even
from the population at large. The point is that members of the NKVD are
drafted into police service in almost the same way as all citizens are drafted
into military service. This flaw in reproduction obviously is caused by the
time lag in totalitarian development we mentioned above; in the satellite
countries the police is still an "elite" body in the original sense of the word,
whose members are chosen according to characteristics which distinguish
them not only from the ordinary citizen but also from the ordinary party
member.
Up to now, this time element has thwarted Moscow's attempts to create
exact replicas of the Russian government in the satellite countries. We do
not know whether this time lag would have become so dangerously notice-
able if the succession crisis after Stalin's death had not pushed all develop-
EPILOGUE 509
ments in uncalculated directions. At any event, it was at that moment that
the facsimile character of the satelHte governments, with its slavish imita-
tion of the Moscow masters, took its revenge. For the destalinization period
and the succession crisis, which did not create major disturbances in Russia
proper, had their most dangerous consequences in those countries, Poland
and Hungary, which followed Russia most obediently in destalinization,
while Rumania and Albania and even Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, where
the Stalinists had succeeded in keeping power against the Moscow trend,
remained quiet and loyal. No doubt, from the viewpoint of totalitarian im-
perialism, destalinization was a major mistake.
It is chiefly this difference in reaction to developments in Russia which
explains certain diversities of present conditions in the satellite countries,
and this diversity is due to certain failures of totalitarian imperialism; it
does not indicate a new, more promising stage in its development. The seri-
ousness of these failures is best gauged by the number of Soviet divisions
stationed in the satellite countries — 28 garrisons are still needed to occupy
Hungary while Hungarian soldiers, now commanded directly by Russian
officers, can still not be trusted with weapons, and the situation is hardly
much better elsewhere. The presence of Russian troops, though legalized
by the Warsaw pact which could conveniently be modelled on NATO, may
help to destroy the illusion of independence for the sake of which the whole
system was devised and which in itself, even disregarding all other atrocities,
constitutes a worse hypocrisy than any committed by imperialist Europe in
its colonial rule. Sitting on bayonets is not only an old-fashioned and rather
uncomfortable device of domination, it is a serious setback to totalitarian
aspirations which had hoped to be able to keep the satellites in the Moscow
orbit by the sheer force of ideology and terror. But until now these setbacks
have not been able to break the spell of attraction this system exerts in
Asia and Africa, that is, in all regions whose political and emotional life
is still tuned to the reaction against an older imperialism where foreigners
openly assumed power. Unfortunately, these people, without much experience
in politics in general and in modern politics in particular, are only too easy
to fool; they are apt to conclude that whatever this is, it is not imperialism
as they knew it, and whatever the faults of the regime may be, the principle
of racial equality is not violated. This is not likely to change so long as the
former colonial people are color conscious instead of freedom minded.
The failures of totalitarian imperialism should be taken no less seriously
than the successes of Soviet technicians and engineers. But neither the fail-
ures of 1956 nor the successes of 1957 indicate a new development of this
form of government from within, either in the direction of enlightened despot-
ism or some other form of dictatorship. If the dramatic events of the Hungar-
ian revolution demonstrate anything, it is at best the dangers which may grow
out of the lawlessness and formlessness inherent in the very dynamics of
this regime and so glaringly apparent in its inability to solve the succession
problem. At present, this danger is past; Khrushchev seized power through a
careful repetition of all the methods Stalin used in his rise to power, and we
do not know yet whether this repetition of the relatively bloodless twenties
510 TOTALITARIANISM
will again be followed by a full-fledged terror like that of the thirties. More
important, wc cannot even tell whether the succession crisis would have
become dangerous if it had not been for the presence of the satellites and
their insufticient training in totalitarianism. one may suspect that only the
coincidence of the succession crisis with recent expansion brought about
actual danger to the regime.
Still, the danger signs of 1956 were real enough, and although today they
are overshadowed by the successes of 1957 and the fact that the system
was able to survive, it would not be wise to forget them. If they promise
anything at all, it is much rather a sudden and dramatic collapse of the
whole regime than a gradual normalization. Such a catastrophic develop-
ment, as we learned from the Hungarian revolution, need not necessarily
entail chaos — though it certainly would be rather unwise to expect from
the Russian people, after forty years of tyranny and thirty years of totali-
tarianism, the same spirit and the same political productivity which the
Hungarian people showed in their most glorious hour.
Index
Abetz, Otto, 338
Africa, 78, 79, 130-31, 147, 186-207,
2 1 3, 440, 507, 509. See also South
Africa
Ahlwardt, Hermann, 108
Aksakov, K. S., 226, 233
Albania, 509
Alexander II, 239
Alexander the Great, 132
Algeria, 50, 102, 111-12, 118, 127,
129, 134, 207
Alsace, 47, 103, 125,411
Alter, WiUiam, 164
America, 186, 440, 506-507. See also
United States
Anissimov, Ivan, 484, 492
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 166, 167
Asia, 182, 186, 206, 313, 507, 509
Asscmblee Nationaie, 18, 33
Augustine, St., 301, 479
Auschwitz, 446
Australia, 128, 132, 150, 182, 186,
197, 199, 204, 440
Austria, 44, 79, 86, 224, 253, 260 f.,
279, 315, 413, 427, 446, 497, 506
Austria-Hungary, 5, 16, 37, 42 ff., 45,
64-65, 101 f., 155, 222, 224, 227-
43, 245, 259 f., 265, 268, 277
Avtorkhanov, A., 390, 431
Bagdad Railroad, 136
Bakunin, Michael, 328, 330
Baltic States, 277, 309, 417, 481, 506
Balzac, Honore de, 91, 141, 155, 336
Bank of England, 26
Banque de France, 19
Bantu tribes, 187, 194, 204
Barnato, Barney, 199, 200, 202, 203
Barnato Diamond Trust, 203
Barres, Maurice, 93, 94, 96, 110, 112,
116, 179, 226
Basch, Victor, 102, 111
Bassermann, Ernst, 250
Bataille, Georges, 330, 441
Baudelaire, Charles, 171
Bauer, Otto, 231 f., 239
Bavaria, 16, 17
Bayer, Ernst, 325, 326, 400
Beaconsfield, Lady, 69
Beaconsfield, Earl of, see Disraeli, Ben-
jamin
Beck, F., 403, 418, 425, 429-30, 434,
435, 450
Beit, Afred, 200, 202, 203
Belgian Congo, 130, 185
Belgium, 130, 133, 279, 397
Bell, Sir Hesketh, 130, 154
Benda, Julien, 334
Benes, Eduard, 273, 276
Benjamin, Walter, 79, 143
Berdyaev, Nicolai, 336-37
Beria, L. P., 406, 483, 484, 486
Berlin, 57-62, 85, 265, 402, 406
Bernanos, Georges, 50, 93, 101, 104,
107
Best, Werner, 338, 369, 383, 389, 400
Bettelheim, Bruno, 439, 444, 445, 449,
451, 453
Binding, Rudolf, 328
Birkenau, 439
Bismarck, Otto von, 18, 20, 21, 22, 32,
35,45, 65, 124, 125, 228
Bleichroeder, Gerson, 18, 20, 21. 32,
35, 97, 136
Blok, Alexander, 328
Blomberg, 414
Bloy, Leon, 242
Blum, Leon, 289
Bluntschli, Johann Casper, 253
Bodin, Jean, 230
Boeckel, Otto, 38
Boerne, Ludwig, 47, 63, 64, 65
512
Bohemia, 413
BoisdefTrc, 89
Bonhard, Otto, 355
Borkenau. l-ranz, 414
Bormann, Martin. 346, 381, 407
Boulainvillicrs. Comte de, 162 ff., 171
Boulanger, Georges, 100
Bourbons, 24, 47
Brack, Victor, 407
Brandt, Karl. 347-48
Brecht, Bertold, 328, 331, 332. 335
Brentano, Clemens von, 61 f., 169
British East India Company, 187
British Empire, 51, 57, 127, 128, 130,
132, 182. 207, 209 flf., 216, 221,
503, 504. See also England
British Imperial Parliament, 133
British Labor Party, 151
British Liberal Party, 151
British Parliament, 133, 153
Broca, Paul, 160
Brogan, D. W., 93, 109, 116
Brousse, Paul, 48
Buber-Neumann, Mrs., 448
Buchenwald, 446. 450, 451
Budapest, 480, 482, 496
Buelow, Hans B. von, 91
Buffon, Leclerc de, 177
Bulgaria, 509
Burckhardt, Jacob, 155
Burke, Edmund, 4, 70, 130, 175-76,
183, 185, 207, 254 flf., 299, 300,
352, 474
Calmer, Liefman. 16
Camus, Albert, 452
Canada, 128, 150, 182, 199,204
Cape of Good Hope, 132, 151, 187.
See also South Africa
Carlyle, Thomas, 71, 72, 180 f.
Carthage, 187
Carthiil, A., 128, 143, 178, 186, 216
Catholic Church, 37, 44, 46, 47, 92-
120 passim, 258, 263, 333, 405,
452
Cavaignac, Jean-Baptiste, 114
Cayla, Leon, 134
Cecil, Lord Robert, 71
Celine, Louis Ferdinand, 49, 335
Central Europe, 226, 228, 235, 256,
268 fT., 308, 355, 505
INDEX
Central Vereinfuer Handelsgeographie,
223, 257
Chaadayev, 233, 235, 240
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 330,
333
Chamberlain, W. H., 411-412
Cheka, 379
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 51, 74, 127,
128, 147
China, 55, 185, 206, 311. See also
Communist China
Choltitz, General von, 338
Chomjakov, 247
Christian Socialist Party, Austria, 37,
44, 260
Christlich-Deutsche Tischgesellschaft,
62, 169
Churchill, Winston, 221
Ciliga, Anton, 381, 382, 393, 420
Civilta CattoHca, 102, 116
Clemenceau, Georges, 22, 79, 89, 90,
93, 95, 101, 103, 105-20 passim,
124, 129, 132
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 16
Color Bar Bill, 204
Commonwealth, British, 127, 128, 131,
148,221
Communist China, 486, 487, 491, 507
Communist Free Radio Rajk, 481-482,
502
Comte, Auguste, 182, 347
Congo Nile Mission, 116
Congress of Organized National
Groups in European States,
273, 274
Congress of Berlin, 275
Congress of Vienna, 21, 30, 32, 33, 34,
275
Coningsby, 75
Conrad, Joseph, 172, 185, 189 flf., 193
Conservative Party, 32, 46, 69, 71,
127, 151, 175
Credit Mobilier, 97
Creditanstalt, Vienna, 42
Cremieux, Adolphe, 104
Croats, 268, 270
Cromer, Lord, 125, 131, 133, 186,
211-16, 219, 220
Cromwell, Oliver, 127
Crossfire, 80
INDEX
513
Curzon, Lord Evelyn Baring, 154, 209,
216
Czar, 228, 233, 247, 271
Czarist Russia, 50, 91, 105, 118, 201,
212, 223, 226 ff., 231 f., 236,
245 flf., 268, 314, 320, 337, 423,
425, 433, 472, 497, 504
Czechoslovakia, 226, 261, 268, 269,
270, 274, 308, 424, 506, 509
Daladier, Edouard, 48
Dallin, David J., 409, 429, 439, 444,
447, 448, 452
Danilewski, N. Y., 223, 224, 226
Dannecker, Hauptsturmfuhrer, 280
Dark Side of the Moon, 432, 434, 436,
439
Darre, Walter, 428
Darwin, Charles, 159, 330, 463
Das Schwarze Korps, 269
Daudet, Leon, 106, 112
Deat, Marcel, 92
Death Head Units, see SS
De Beers Company, 203
Declaration des Droits de I'Homme,
298
Declaration of Independence, 298
Decline of the West, 179
Delos, J. T., 230 f.
Demange, 91 f., 118
Denmark, 338, 397
De Pass Brothers, 202
Dernburg, Bernhard, 134
E>eroulede, Paul, 115 f.
Deutsche Bank, 136
Deutscher, Isaac, 343, 373, 376, 389,
390, 393, 395, 397, 411, 413,
418, 427
Deuxieme Bureau, 101
Diderot, Denis, 23
Didon, Father, 102
Diels, Rudolf, 390, 400
Dilke, Charles, 133, 181, 182
Disraeli, Benjamin, 21, 24, 68-79, 80,
83, 87, 171, 175, 180, 182 f., 190
Disselboom, Jan, 128
Djilas, Milovan, 485
Dohn, Christian Wilhelm, 12, 30
Doriot, Jacques, 49, 92
Dostoevski, F. M., 225, 233
Dr. Zhivago, 494
Dreigroschenoper, 335
Dreyfus Affair, 4, 10, 45, 47, 78,
79, 86 f., 89 ff., 95-119, 132, 155,
179, 190, 229, 248, 262, 314
Dreyfus, Alfred, 85, 86, 89-120 passim
Dreyfus Family, 103, 105, 109 f.
Dreyfus, Robert, 172
Drumont, Edouard, 50, 96, 98, 102,
112, 120
Dual Monarchy, 268, 271
Dubuat-Nan9ay, Comte, 163
Duclaux, Emile, 108, 110
Dudintsev, V., 494
Duehring, Eugen, 35
DuLac, Father, S. J., 120
Dutch East Indies, 129-30, 154
Dutch Reformed Church, 195
Eastern Europe, 225, 261, 268-69,
270-71, 274, 308, 309, 494, 505
Eastern Germany, 481
Ebenstein, William, 313, 347, 410
Ecole des Cadavres, 49
Egypt, 117, 125 f., 133, 152, 186, 187,
207 ff., 211-16, 279
Ehrenburg, Ilya, 494
Eichmann, 402
Eisemenger, J. A., 17
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 16
Enfantin, B. P., 346-47
Engels, Friedrich, 37, 389, 463
England, 16, 26, 39, 117, 124 ff., 154,
181 ff., 186 fT., 196 f., 203, 207,
209 ff., 214, 223, 250 ff., 503, 504
Epictetus, 476
Erzberger, Matthias, 344
Essai sur I'lnegalite des Races Hu-
maines, 170 f.
Esterhazy, see Walsin-Esterhazy
Esteve, Louis, 330
Europe, 123, 147, 154, 250 ff., 266,
267-70, 281, 282-85, 286, 308-
11, 337, 349, 503-507
Evian Conference, 282
Faure, Elie, 175
Faure, Paul, 1 15
Fayolle, Marie-Emile, 93
Feder, Ernest, 454
Feder, Gottfried, 324
Fernandez, Ramon, 86
514
Fichtc. Johann G., 166
Foch, Ferdinand, 93
Fort Chabrol, 1 1 1
Fouchc, Joseph, 164, 427
Fourier, Charles, 48 f.
Fraenkel. Ernst, 395
France. 20, 21, 26, 35 f.. 42 f., 44, 48,
50 51, 65, 79 ff., 80-120 passim,
P5 127, 129, 133-35, 161, 177,
187, 253-54, 265, 276, 279, 283-
89, 314, 335, 355, 425. See also
Third Republic; Vichy Govern-
ment
France, Anatole, 110, 295
Franco, De Mello, 275
Franco, Francisco, 283, 309
Frank. Hans, 339, 357, 370, 375, 394,
396, 398, 404, 410, 423-24, 427
Frank, Walter, 21, 100, 339, 402
Frankfurt, 402
Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-
Hungary, 5
Frederick II, 13, 16, 18, 30, 59, 166
Frederick William I, 12
Frederick William III, 32
Frederick William IV, 32, 33
Freemasonry, 108, 258, 333, 351, 359
French Parliament, 91 ff., 95-120 pas-
sim
Frick, Wilhelm, 396
Fritsch, Theodor, 39, 358, 414
Froude, J. A., 69, 128, 181
Frymann, Daniel, 152, 235, 248
Fuggers, 16
Gallier-Boissiere, Jean, 423
Galliffet, G. A. A., 115
Galton. Fr. 179, 180
Gambetta, Leon, 98
Gauweiler, Otto, 420
Gentile, Giovanni, 325
Gentz, Friedrich, 60
German Liberal Party (Austria), 43
German National Peoples' Party, 309
German Progressive Parly, 124
German-Russian Non-Aggression Pact,
158, 264
German South-East Africa, 134, 185
Germany, 21-26, 29, 34, 35 f., 38,
41 ff., 51, 57 f., 62 f., 83, 86, 91,
133 f., 150, 253, 255 ff., 263-65,
INDEX
273-75, 278, 292, 294, 306, 313,
315, 335, 370, 445, 472, 497, 498.
See also Nazi Germany; Pan-
German League; Prussia; Weimar
Republic
Gerth, Hans, 362
Gestapo, 380. 406, 421, 423, 450, 451,
453
Gide, Andre, 49, 335, 339
Giles, 420
Giraudoux, Jean, 48, 49
Gladstone, William E., 124, 125, 127,
152
Glagau, Otto, 36
Gobineau, Arthur de, 158, 164, 165,
170-75, 183, 224, 330, 333
Godin, W., 403, 418, 425, 429-30, 434,
435, 450
Goebbels, Josef, 256, 269, 309, 332,
338, 349, 360, 373, 383, 396, 410
Goering, Hermann, 338, 380, 400, 414
Goerres, Josef, 166, 167
Goethe, J. W. von, 58, 59, 169, 186
Gomulka, 487, 493
Gordon, Judah Leib, 65
Gorky, Maxim, 313
GPU, 288, 289, 310, 321, 379, 381,
417, 420, 425-26
Granville, Lord, 213
Grattenauer, G. W. E., 61
Great Britain, see British Empire;
England
Greater Britain, 181
Greece, 285
Guerin, Jules, 94, 107, 111
Guesde, Jules, 1 12
Guizot, Francois, 164
Hadamovsky, Eugen, 341, 344, 356-
57, 360, 361, 363, 371
Haeckel, Ernst, 159, 179
Hafkesbrink, Hanna, 328, 329
Halevy, Daniel, 110
Haller, Ludwig von, 170
Harden, Maximilian, 100
Harvey, Charles H., 180
Haute Banque, 97
Hayek, F. A. von, 346
Hayes, C. J. H., 124, 147, 148, 159,
179
Heart of Darkness, 1 89-90
INDEX
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 171,
238, 249, 349, 477
Heiden, Konrad, 317, 318, 324, 329,
338, 350, 361, 365, 384, 396,
407, 412, 418
Heine, Heinrich, 58, 65
Heligoland, 125
Henry, Colonel Joseph, 89
Herder, J. G., 57, 58, 162, 177
Herr, Lucien, 110
Herz, Cornelius, 95 f., 98
Herz, Markus, 57
Hess, Rudolf, 383
Heydrich, Reinhard, 424
Hilferding, Rudolf, 148, 149
Himmler, Heinrich, 309, 311, 316,
317, 322-25, 327, 328, 337-39,
342, 343, 344, 360, 361, 363,
365, 368-72, 377, 380, 381, 385-
88, 391, 393, 396, 398, 402-12
passim, 420, 421, 423, 424, 428-
30, 443, 446, 451, 457, 468
Hindenberg, Paul von, 264-65
Hirsch, Baron Moritz, 136
Hitler, 4, 77, 88, 93 f., 104, 132, 165,
222, 224, 233, 241, 257, 259,
263-65, 275, 283, 289, 290, 305,
306, 310, 311, 317, 322, 324,
325, 327, 329, 333, 335-39, 342-
50 passim, 355-78 passim, All,
414, 427, 430, 433, 438, 439, 454,
471, 472, 481, 483, 487, 495, 506
Hitler Youth, 348, 399
Hobbes, Thomas, 139-47, 155-57
Hobson, J. A., 24, 123, 131, 135, 147,
148, 153
Hoehn, Reinhard, 339, 363, 398, 424
Hohenlohe-Langenburg, 154
Hohenlohe-Schillingsfiirst, C. von, 91
Holland, see Netherlands
Holy Alliance, 27, 32, 33
Holy Bulgarian Synod, 222
Holy Roman Empire, 226
"Holy Russia," 226, 233
Home Rule Bill, Gladstone's, 127
Hotman, Francois, 162
Hottentot tribe, 185, 192
Hudson, G. F., 487
Huebbe-Schleiden, 125
Hugenots, 191, 192
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 23, 30, 56 f.
515
Hungary, 42, 226, 268, 274, 278, 292,
309, 480-82, 485-86, 488, 493-
509
Huxley, T. H., 159, 180
India, 128, 132, 133 f., 143, 151,
182 f., 185, 187, 207, 210, 211 flf.,
216, 217, 221, 290, 311, 440,
503, 504
International Brigade, 282-83
Ireland, 127 f.
Italy, 21, 26, 167, 256-58, 263, 278,
279, 292, 308, 315
Israel, State of, 299
Istria, 226
]' Accuse, 89, 110, 114
Jackson, Justice Robert H., 395, 405
Jacobins, 12, 22, 106, 110
Jahn, F. L., 66
Jameson. Sir Leander Starr, 133, 214
Jaures, Jean, 92, 105, 112, 114, 119
Jefferson, Thomas, 177
Jesuits, 76, 102, 103 f., 108, 109, 116,
120, 258, 333, 351
JofTre, J. J. C, 93
Johannesburg, 198
Joyce, James, 143
Juenger, Ernst, 328, 329
Junkers, 38
Kadar, Janos, 481, 488, 495
Kafka, Franz, 245 f.
Kant, Immanuel, 461
Katkov, M. N., 247, 248, 250
Kaunitz, 427
Keitel, 343
Kerensky, Alexander, 313
Kersten, Felix, 399
Khedive of Egypt, 78
Khrushchev, 310, 343, 350, 390, 393,
472, 481, 483, 484, 485, 487-93,
504, 507, 509
Kim, 217-18
Kimberley, South Africa, 197, 202,
203
Kipling, Rudyard, 131, 178, 189, 208-
10, 217
Kirejewski, 247
Kirov, 390
Klemm, Gustav, 177
516
Kocbner. R.. 503
Koestler. Arthur, 449
Kogon, Eugon. 435. 439. 444. 448.
450. 454
Kohn-Bramstcdt. E.. 341, 342. 424,
428
Kolonialvcrein. 154, 250, 257
Koyrc. Alexandre. 376
Kraus. Karl. 65. 66
Kravchenko. Victor. 321. 323. 383,
397. 417. 428
Kremlin, 406
Krivitsky. Walter, 417
Kube. Wilhelm, 337-38
Kurfuerst of Hessen. 27
La Bataille, 1 1
Labori. Fernand. 95 105. 106, 118
La Bruyere, Jean de, 162
La Croix, 112, 116
L'Affaire Dreyfus, a play, 90
Lammers, 343
Landy. Paul, 489
Laporte. Maurice, 422, 423, 425, 433
Lapouge, Vacher de, 179
Larcher, 244
La Rochefoucauld, Fr. de, 156
Lasalle, Ferdinand, 43
L'Aurore, 93, 110
Laval, Pierre, 90, 286
Lawrence, T. E., 134, 218-21, 327,
328
Lazare, Bernard, 65, 67, 89, 105, 110,
117. 120
League of Nations, 272-75, 280-81
"League of the Russian People," 248
Lebanon, 285
Le Gaulois, 97
Lemaitre, Jules, 120
Lenin, V. L, 148, 261, 305, 306, 318-
19, 322, 349, 365, 390, 472, 497,
500
Leo Xin, Pope, 117
Leontjev, 247
Leopold n, 185
"Les Jours de Notre Mori," 443
Les Juifs. Rois de I'Epoque, 47
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 95
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 57, 59
Leviathan, 139 fT.
Levy, Arthur, 105
INDEX
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 105
Ley, Robert, 339. 363,391
Liberal Party, Austrian, 228, 237
Liberal Party, British, 151, 152
Libre Parole, 93, 96, 104, 105, 109,
111
Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 105
Ligue Antisemme, 111, 114
Ligue des Droits de I'Homme, 281
London, 71 fT.
Lorraine, 41 1
Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia, 59,
60
Louis Philippe, 24, 47, 172
Louvain, Pierre Charles, S.J., 108
Lowcnthal. Richard. 485
Loyola. Ignatius of, 214
Ludendorff, Erich, 258
Lueger, Karl, 44, 108
Luke, Archbishop of Tambov, 233
Luther, Martin, 477
Luxemburg, Rosa, 94, 100, 148, 482
Lyautey, L. H. G., 93
Macartney, C. A., 274
MacDonald, Ramsay, 256
MacMahon, E. P. M. de, 98, 264
Madagascar, 134
Maistre, Comte J. M. de, 160
Malakhov. Sergei, 452
Malan. 205
Malenkov, 481, 484, 488, 490
Malet, Chevalier de, 359
Malraux. Andre, 328
Mann, Thomas, 328
Mao, Tse-Tung, 486, 487
Marks, Sammy, 202
Martin du Card, Roger, 113
Maria Theresa, 427
Marwitz, Ludwig von der, 31, 34
Marx, Karl, 34, 36, 47 f., 64, 65, 143,
148, 152, 229, 249, 319, 333, 336,
389, 446, 462, 464, 472
Masaryk, Thomas. 224, 395
Maunx, Theodor, 390-91, 394, 398,
424, 447
Maurice of Saxony, 62
Maurras, Charles, 94, 102, 110, 112,
116, 226
Mein Kampf, 24
Mendelssohn, Abraham, 60
INDEX
577
Mendelssohn, Moses, 57, 58 f., 62
Mercier, General, 105, 107
Metternich, Prince Clemens, 5, 22, 25,
34
Mexico, 294
Meyer, Arthur, 97
Mill, James, 154
Millerand, Alexandre, 119
Mirabeau, Honore Q. R. de, 33, 57
Moeller, van den Bruck, Arthur, 226,
251
Molotov, 395, 490
Monod, Gabriel, 110, 330
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat,
Baron de, 161, 162, 164, 467,
472
Montlosier, Comte de, 164
Mores, Marquis de, 1 1 1
Moscow, 397, 401, 406, 414, 415, 456,
483, 484, 485, 487, 494, 504,
506, 507
Mosenthal family, 202
Mosul oilfields, 125
Mueller, Adam, 33, 167, 170
Muenster, Count, 105, 114
Muravyev-Amursky, Nikolai, 227
Munich, 49, 263, 393, 402, 506
Mussolini, Benito, 49, 168, 257, 258,
259, 270, 278, 283, 308, 325
Nansen Office, 281-82
Napoleon I, 24, 26, 29, 47, 59, 60, 61,
70, 128, 129, 165, 175
Napoleon III, 19, 24, 46, 47, 148, 262,
314, 423
Naquet, Alfred, 98
Nathan the Wise, 57
National-Liberal Party, German, 250
National Socialism. See Nazi Party
Naumann, Friedrich, 224, 235
Nazi Germany, 6, 156, 200, 207, 222,
259, 274, 280, 288-90, 309-11,
323, 332, 338, 339, 342, 344,
349, 358, 363, 390, 393-99, 402-
25 passim, 428, 438, 440, 442-51,
460, 489, 506
Nazi Party, 206, 257-66, 338-49, 364-
86 passim, 390-419 passim
Near East, 134, 218, 285
Nechayev, Sergei, 328, 330
Neesse, Gottfried, 256, 309, 339, 366
NEP, 319
Netherlands, The, 129 f., 132, 154,
156, 397
Netherlands East Indies, 129 f.
Neuengamme, 411
Neumann, Franz, 259, 395, 407
Neurath, 414
New Leader, The, 482, 484, 498
New York Times, The, 491, 492, 493
New Zealand, 128, 197, 199
Nicholas II, 241
Nicolaevsky, Boris I., 409, 482, 485,
492
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 34, 171, 328,
477
Nilus, S. A., 358
NKVD, 340, 356, 403, 418, 425-30,
434, 488, 496, 504, 508
Nomad, Max, 330
North Africa, 187. See also Africa
Norway, 397
Not by Bread Alone, 494
Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, 49, 335
Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg),
167
NSKK (National Socialist Automo-
bilists' Corps), 402
Okhrana, 423, 425, 433
on the Correct Handling of Contra-
dictions Among the People," 487
Oppenheim, Henry, 78
Oppenheimer, Samuel, 16, 42
Orleans, Duke of. 111
Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft, 136
Ouvrard, G. J., 24
Pagodin, Michael, 227, 247
Palestine, 290
Panama Company, 95
Pan-German League (Alldeutscher
Verband), 39, 45, 150, 197,
223, 224, 225, 227, 238, 239,
250, 251, 257-59
Pan-Slav Congress, 222
Pan-Slav Federation, 227, 250
Pareto, Vilfredo, 328
Paris, 79-88, 102, 338
Paris World Exposition, 89, 91, 115,
117, 119
Pasternak, Boris, 494
518
Paulhan, Jean, 330
Paulus. H. E. G.. 33
Pearson. Karl, 180
Pcguy, Charles. 110. 113. 114, 120.
147
Peiping. 486
Pereires Brothers, 97
Pclain, Henri Philippe. 48 f., 90 f., 92,
93. 134
Peters. Carl. 134. 185. 189, 206
Picasso. Pablo, 339
Pichl, Eduard, 43, 228. 237
Picquard. Colonel, 89, 105. 106. 109,
114
Plato. 9. 299. 325. 461, 467. 476
Plchve. Count von, 423
Pobyedonostzev, C, 241, 243, 248,
250, 426
Pohl, Oswald. 428
Poincare, Raymond, 129
Poland. 29, 167, 197, 228, 232, 263,
268, 271, 273 f., 280, 309, 339,
342. 404, 410 f., 416, 423, 424,
434, 436, 482, 493, 501, 504 f.,
509
Poliakov, Leon, 348, 406, 410, 454
Portugal. 187, 258, 279, 309
Posen. 60, 388
Pravda. 379
Precis de V Affaire Dreyfus, 90
Prevost, Marcel, 120
Protestant Church, 38
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion," 7,
94, 241, 307, 333, 358-60, 362,
377
Proust, Marcel, 80-87 passim
Pruess, Lawrence, 278, 284
Prussia, 16, 17 f., 20, 29 flf., 58, 59,
60-68 passim, 166, 288
Radio Station Kossuth, 502
Racder, Admiral Erich, 375, 414
Rajk, 487, 495
Rakosi, 488, 493, 495
Rakovsky, 319
Rathenau, Walter, 21, 24, 51, 344
Regis. Max, 1 1 1 f .
Reichsinstitut fuer Geschichte des
Neuen Deutschlands, 339
Reichstag, 349, 400
Reichswehr, 370, 378, 381, 421
INDEX
Reinach, Jacques, 95 f., 98, 107, 109
Remembrance of Things Past, 80-87
passim
Remusat, Comte de, 165
Renan, Ernest, 125, 174, 242
Renner, Karl, 231
Rennes, 89
"Report on the Problem of Hungary,"
494, 497, 498
Reston, James, 491, 492
Retour de lURSS, 339
Reventlow, Graf E., 237
Reveille, Thomas, 410
"Revolt in Hungary, The: A Docu-
mentary Chronology, 499, 500
Rhodes, Cecil, 124, 132, 133, 136,
144, 151, 200, 203, 209, 211 f.,
214 f., 220, 235, 316
Rhodes Scholarship Association, 215
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 397
Richter, Eugen, 124
Rimbaud, Arthur, 328
Robespierre, Maximilien, 22, 125, 170,
299, 333
Roget, General, 115 f.
Rohan, Henri, Due de, 230, 347
Rohm, Ernst, 306, 309, 317, 334,
356, 370 f., 373, 381, 390, 407
Rolland, Romain, 110
Rollin, Henri, 359
Roman Empire, 9, 23, 125, 132, 302,
405, 440, 452
Rome, 263
Rosenberg, Alfred, 338, 339, 343, 396,
397, 401-404,437
Rosicrucians, 108
Rothschild, Edmond de, 104
Rothschild Family, 14, 17, 21, 24, 25,
26 f., 42 f., 47 f., 62, 70, 76, 97,
98 f., 103, 105, 117, 118, 203,
228
Rothschild, Lionel 78
Rothschild, Meyer Amschel, 26
Rousset, David. 436, 438, 439, 441,
442, 443, 446, 448, 449, 451,
452, 453, 454, 455
Rouvier, Maurice, 96
Rozanov, Vassiliff, 229, 238
Ruehs, Christian Friedrich, 63
Rumania, 29, 118, 235, 274, 309, 509
Russell, Lord John, 255
INDEX
519
Russia, see Czarist Russia; Soviet Rus-
sia
Russian Parliament, 243
Ruthenians, 236
SA (Sturmabteilung), 307-09, 317,
318, 325, 368-74, 381, 390,
399, 453
Sade, Marquis de, 330
Salisbury, Lord, 127, 133, 214
Salomon, Saul, 204
Sandherr, Colonel, 89
Sartre, Jean Paul, 331
Say, Leon, 98
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
160, 238
Scheurer-Kestner, Auguste, 89, 94,
109, 111
Schlcgel, Friedrich, 60, 166, 167
Schleicher, General Kurt von, 317,
318
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 58
Schmitt, Carl, 262, 266, 339
Schoenerer, Georg Ritter von, 43 f.,
108, 228 f., 232, 233, 237, 238 f.,
241
Schwartzkoppen, 89, 101
Second Empire, 4, 24, 48, 85, 100
Secret Police, see Cheka; Gestapo;
GPU; NKVD; Okhrana
Seeley, J. R., 181, 182
Selbourne, Lord, 191, 213
Seilliere, Ernest, 160, 162, 174, 330
Serbs, 268
Shaw, George Bernard, 218, 220
Siemens, Werner von, 136
Sieyes, Abbe, 164
Silone, Ignazio, 484, 492, 498
Simmel, Georg, 376-77, 378, 381
Sixteenth Communist Party Congress,
321
Slovaks, 268, 270
Social Democratic Party
in Austria, 44, 54, 61, 65, 224, 253,
259-60
in France, 105, 112, 114, 262
in Germany, 38, 253, 264-65, 315
in Sweden, 254
Society of Jesus, see Jesuits
Society of the 10th of December, 262,
314
Sombart, Werner, 14
Sorel, Georges, 110, 325, 328
South Africa, 133, 135, 151, 177, 181,
187-207, 440
Southern Europe, 261, 269, 270, 274
Souvarine, Boris, 306, 307, 313, 319,
324, 338, 349, 373, 375, 378,
379, 395, 417, 418
Soviet Russia, 222, 236, 259, 261, 273,
279, 283, 295, 306 f., 309 f., 313,
318-23, 337, 339, 341, 343, 352,
362, 373, 379 flF., 388, 390, 393 f.,
397 f., 400-403, 406-11, 416-34
passim, 442-52, 456, 460, 468,
480-509 passim
Spain, 101, 102, 258, 278, 282, 283,
309
Speer, Albert, 402, 428
Spencer, Herbert, 178, 179
Spengler, Oswald, 155, 171, 179
Spinoza, Baruch de, 163
Sprietsma, Cargill, 330
SS, 308, 316, 318, 322-25, 340, 346,
356, 360, 361, 368-73, 377, 380,
385-86, 391, 396, 397, 399, 411-
14, 418, 428-30, 435, 452-55, 489
Stalin, Josef, 222, 241, 249, 259, 305-
11, 318-23, 333, 335, 339, 341,
343, 346, 349, 350, 361-62, 365,
373-83 /7a.vi7m,- 390-401, 406-31
passim, 443, 460, 472, 481-88,
493, 502, 505, 508, 509
Stalingrad, 410
Starlinger, Wilhelm, 443, 455
Stein, Alexander, 358
Stefan, Metropolitan, 222
Stephen, Sir James, 175
Stoecker, Adolf, 18, 32, 35, 38, 43,
108, 229
Stolypin, Peter Arkadievitch, 423 '
Strasser, Gregor, 317
Streicher, Julius, 338, 381
Suarez, Georges, 110
Suez Canal, 78, 95, 151, 187
Sweden, 252
Swinburne, Algernon, 171
Switzerland, 507
Syria, 285
Taine, Hippolyte, 174, 242
Tartars, 481
S2(}
Ichaka. King, 192
Templars. 108
Thaclmann. Ernst. 264-65
7/i,/u'. The. 494
Third Reich, see Nazi Germany
Third Republic. 4 f., 24, 44. 46, 79,
85. 89-120 passim. 167, 174, 256
Tito. Marshall. 309. 487
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 4. 158, 177,
345
Todt. 402. 428
Toussenel. Alphonse, 47
Transvaal. 135. 199
Trevor-Roper. H. R., 407, 418
Trotsky. Leon, 269. 307, 349, 353,
362. 373. 389, 390, 413, 414, 473
Tudor. House of, 127
Tunis. 109
Turkey. 218, 226, 227, 279, 285
Twentieth Communist Party Congress,
310
Tyuchev, 233
Uganda, 125, 130
Ukraine, 268, 322, 338, 342, 410, 411 ,
416. 417
Une errcur judiciaire; la verite sur
r Affaire Dreyfus. 89
Union Gcnerale, 97
Union of South Africa, see South
Africa
United Kingdom, see England
United Nations, 482. See also "Report
on the Problem of Hungary"
United States, 12, 55, 117, 181, 280,
287, 294, 316, 417, 491
Valery, Paul, 107
Valmy, 164
Valois, House of, 127
Varnhagen. Rahel, 59, 60, 61, 66
Verfassun^spartei, in Austria, 237
Verfiici^iinf^struppen, see SS
Versailles, 355, 412
Vichy Government, 45, 48 f., 93, 283
Victoria, Queen of England, 68, 71,
75, 182
Victory. 189-90
INDEX
Vienna, 21, 44
Villiers, Charles Francois Dominique
de, 164
Vilna, 278
Vishinsky, Andrei, 395
Vitu. 125
Voegelin, Eric, 346, 347
Voix du Nord. 90 f.
Voltaire, F. M. Arouet de, 176, 179,
242
Voroshilov, K., 420
Voznesensky, N., 343
Wagner, Richard, 171
Waldeck-Rousseau, Rene, 115, 119
Walsin-Esterhazy, Major, 89, 92, 101,
104
Warburg Family, 24
Weimar Republic, 21, 25, 79, 251,
260, 274, 283, 394, 395, 402
Weinreich, Max, 338, 339
Wcizmann, Chaim, 355
Werner, Paul, 311, 391
Wertheimer, Mildred S., 251
Wcrtheimer, Samson, 14
West Indies, 194
Western Europe, 269, 271, 287, 411,
506
Weygand, Maxime, 93
Wilhelm Meister, 59 f., 169
William II, 18, 150, 185
Williams, Sir John Fischer, 284
Wilson, Woodrow, 273
Witwatersrand, 197
Wolfe, Bertram D., 423, 431
Wolf son, M., 428
Yalta, 393, 506
Yugoslavia, 270, 485
Zanzibar, 125
Zhukov, 483, 487, 489, 490, 491, 504
Zimmerer, 134
Zola, Emile, 89, 90, 92, 94, 105, 106,
110, 111, 113 f., 119
Zulu tribes, 192
Zweig, Stefan, 50, 52, 332
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LA36 THE MEANING OF HISTORY by Nicholas Berdyaev
LA37 SELECTED WRITINGS OF ST. AUGUSTINE edited by Rofier Hazel-
ton
LA38 CHRISTIAN HYMNS edited by Luther Noss
LA39 anselm: viofjR ouaerens intellectum (faith in search of
UNDERSTANDING) by Karl Barth
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L 006 860 690 4
ORIG
Hannal^^ren!
Containing two new chapters: ideology and terror and reflec-
tions on THE HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION
To the First Edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism (the present
expanded edition contains two completely new chapters) the critical
response was unanimous:
"An anatomy of totalitarianism that is both a work of synthesis and
a notable contribution to original thinking. . . ."
The New Yorker
". . . it is written throughout under the stress of deep emotion: for
Miss Arendt totalitarianism is a tragedy of the human race. ... It is
also a pessimistic book ... the reader can be grateful for a disquiet-
ing, moving and thought-provoking book."
E. H. Carr, The New York times
"With this book, Hannah Arendt emerges as the most original and
profound — therefore the most valuable — political theoretician of our
times. I can compare her only with another woman: Simone Weil."
Dwight Macdonald, the new leader
". . . her book will be read as a brilliant creative reconstruction. . . .
It will stand as the measure of one person's spiritual torment and vic-
tory."
August Heckscher, The New York herald-tribune
"It is not only an achievement in historiography, but also in political
science and, as in its extraordinarily illuminating discussion of the
rights of man, in philosophy and ethics. It is throughout a densely
imaginative work, truly serious. ... I happen to think such an ex-
perience in understanding our times as this book provides is itself a
social force not to be underestimated."
David Riesman, commentary
Meridian Books are published by
The World Publishing Company • Cleveland and New York
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