Nationalism and Culture (44 page)

Similar ideas were advanced by Professor Ernst Horneffer of the University of Giessen, who in conventions of the German industrialists frequently plays star parts. At one of these meetings he declared: "The danger of the social movement can only be obviated by a division among the masses. Life's table is occupied to the very last place, and consequently industry can never guarantee to its employees anything more than bare existence. This is an unbreakable natural law. Hence all social politics is unspeakable stupidity."

Herr Horneffer has since made these humanitarian doctrines unmistakably clear in a special essay, Socialism and the Death Struggle of German Industry, in which he reaches the following conclusions:

I maintain that the economic condition of the worker, basically and essentially, by and large, can in reality not be changed. The workers will once and for all have to be content with their economic condition, that is, with a wage only sufficient for the most necessary, the most urgent, the most indi^ensable requirements of life, in fact barely sufficient to sustain life. A fundamental change in the workers' economic status, their rise to an essentially different state of economic welfare, can never happen; this is a desire impossible of fulfillment for all time.

To the objection that under these circumstances it might easily happen that the wage would not suffice even for the most necessary demands of life the learned professor replies, with enviable peace of soul, that in such a case public charity would have to help, and if this did not suffice then the state as representative of the moral spirit of the people must step into the breach. Dr. F. Giese of the Technical High School of Stuttgart, who is an especially urgent advocate of the rationalization of industry according to "scientific methods," dealt with the early elimination of the modern laborer from every calling with these dry words:

The directors of industry can view it as a simple biological law that today everywhere man's capacity for production in the competitive struggle must soon reach its end. The dyeing of the hair is customary in America, but we do not mistake this for a natural evolution toward which pity and patience would in practice perhaps be the worst sort of procedure for a technical treatment of men.*

The phrase, "technical treatment of men," is especially significantj it shows with frightful clearness into what byways capitalistic industrialism

* The meaning of the last sentence is far from clear in the German original.— Translator

has already led. Reading a heart effusion like the above, one comes to realize the deep significance of what Bakunin said regarding the prospects of government by pure scientists. The consequences of such an experiment would indeed be unthinkable.

That a system of mental gymnastics as senseless as it is brutal can today proudly proclaim itself as scientific knowledge is a proof of the asocial spirit of the time, which by the extremity of its system of mass exploitation and by its blind belief in the state has suppressed all of man's natural relations with his fellow men and forcibly torn the individual from the environment in which he had his deepest roots. For the assertion of fascism that liberalism, and man's need of freedom incorporated in it, atomized society and resolved it into its elements, while the state, so to speak, surrounded human groupings with a protective frame and thereby prevented the community from falling apart, is a specious fraud based at best on a gross self-deception.

Not the desire for freedom has atomized society and awakened asocial instincts in man, but the shocking inequality of economic conditions and, above all, the state, which bred the monopoly whose festering, cancerous growth has destroyed the fine cellular tissue of social relationships. If the social urge were not a natural need of man which he received at the very threshold of humanity as a legacy from hoary ancestors and which he has since uninterruptedly developed and extended, then not even the state would have been able to draw men into a closer union. For one can create no community by forcibly chaining elements which are basically antagonistic. It is true that one can compel men to fulfill certain duties if one has the necessary power, but one will never be able to induce them to perform the compulsory task with love and from inner desire. These are things no state can compel, be its power ever so great—for these there is necessary above all the feeling of social union and of the innate relationship of man to man.

Compulsion does not unite, compulsion only separates menj for it lacks the inner drive of all social unions—the understanding which recognizes the facts and the sympathy which comprehends the feeling of the fellow man because it feels itself related to him. By subjecting men to a common compulsion one does not bring them closer to one another, rather one creates estrangements between them and breeds impulses of selfishness and separation. Social ties have permanence and completely fulfill their purpose only when they are based on good will and spring from the needs of men. Only under such conditions is a relationship possible where social union and the freedom of the individual are so closely intergrown that they can no longer be recognized as separate entities.

Just as in every revealed religion the individual has to win the promised heavenly kingdom for himself and docs not concern himself

too greatly about the salvation of others, being sufficiently occupied with achieving his own, so also within the state man tries to find ways and means of adjusting himself without cudgeling his brain too much about whether others succeed in doing so or not. It is the state which on principle undermines man's social feeling by assuming the part of adjuster in all affairs and trying to reduce them to the same formula, which is for its supporters the measure of all things. The more easily the state disposes of the personal needs of the citizens, the deeper and more ruthlessly it dips into their individual lives and disregards their private rights, the more successfully it stifles in them the feeling of social union, the easier it is for it to dissolve society into its separate parts and incorporate them as lifeless accessories into the gears of the political machine.

Modern technology is about to construct the "mechanical man" and has already achieved some very pretty results in this field. We already have automatons in human form which move to and fro with their iron limbs and perform certain services—give correct change, and other things of that sort. There is something uncanny about this invention which gives the illusion of calculated human action j yet it is only a concealed clockwork that without opposition obeys its master's will. But it would seem that the mechanical man is something more than a bizarre notion of modern technology. If the people of the European-American cultural realm do not within reasonable time revert to their best traditions there is real danger that we shall rush on to the era of the mechanical man with giant strides.

The modern "mass man," this uprooted fellow traveler of modern technology in the age of capitalism, who is almost completely controlled by external influences and whirled up and down by every mood of the moment—because his soul is atrophied and he has lost that inner balance which can maintain itself only in a true communion—already comes dangerously close to the mechanical man. Capitalistic giant industry, division of labor, now achieving its greatest triumph in the Taylor system and the so-called rationalization of industry, a dreary barracks system drilled into the drafted citizens, the connected modern educational drill and all that is related to it—these are phenomena whose importance must not be underestimated while we are inquiring about the inner connections among existing conditions. But modern nationalism with its outspoken antagonism to freedom and its senseless, utterly extreme militaristic attitude, is only the bridge to a great and soulless automatism which would really lead to the already announced "Decline of the West" if not halted in time. For the present, however, we do not believe in such a gloomy future; rather, we are firmly convinced that even today mankind carries within it a multitude of hidden forces and creative impulses which will enable it

victoriously to surmount the calamitous crisis now threatening all human culture.

What today surrounds us on all sides is comparable to a dreary chaos in which all the germs of social decay have fully ripened. And yet there are within the mad whirl of events also numerous beginnings of a new order developing apart from the ways of parties and of political life, hopefully and joyfully pointing toward the future. To further these new beginnings, to nurse and strengthen them so that they may not untimely perish, is today the noblest task of every fighting man, of every man who, though convinced of the instability of present conditions, refuses in tame submission to let fate take its course, but is ever on the lookout for something that promises a new upsurge of spiritual and social culture. But such an upsurge can occur only under the sign of freedom and social union, for only out of these can grow that deepest and purest yearning for social justice which finds expression in the social collaboration of men and smoothes the way for a new community. The leaders of the fascist and nationalist reactions know this very wellj hence, they hate freedom as a sin against the holy spirit of the nation, which is in fact but their own evil spirit. So, Mussolini declares:

Men are tired of freedom. They have celebrated an orgy with it. Freedom is today no longer the chaste and severe virgin for which the generations of the first half of the last century fought and died. For the enterprising, restless, rough youth now appearing in the dawn of modern history there are other values which have a much greater magic: Ordery Hierarchy^ Dis-cifUne. One must recognize once and for all that fascism knows no idols, worships no fetishes. Over the more or less decayed corpse of the goddess of freedom it has already marched, and it will if necessary return and march over it again. . . . Facts speak louder than the book; experience means more than a doctrine. The great experience of the after effects of the war now appearing before our eyes shows the decline of liberalism. In Russia and Italy it has been shown that one can rule without, over, and against the whole liberal ideology. Communism and fascism stand apart from liberalism.''

This is quite clear, even though the conclusions which Mussolini draws from this, his latest understanding, are open to refutation. That "one can rule against the whole liberal ideology" was known long before himj every rulership based on force had adopted this principle. The Holy Alliance was founded only for the purpose of eliminating from Europe the liberal ideas of 1789, in which year the first "declaration of human and civil rights" had been announced, and Metternich left no means untried to transform this tacit wish of the despots into reality. But in the long run his anti-humanitarian attempts had as little success as those of Napoleon before him, who had expressed opinions about freedom quite similar

•"Compulsion and Consent," in the fascist periodical, Gerarchia, April, 1922.

to those of Mussolini, and who had worked like one possessed towards the end of making every human emotion, every pulse-beat of social life, conform to the rhythm of his gigantic state machine.

But even the proud boast of fascism that it "knows no idols, worships no fetishes," loses all significance j for fascism has only thrown the idols from their pedestals, tumbled the pedestals into the dust, and put in their place a gigantic Moloch which seizes on the soul of man and bends his spirit beneath a Caudine yoke: The state everythingj man nothing! The citizen's life aim is to find fulfillment in being employed by the state—"swallowed by the machine and spewed out again as dead ciphers." This constitutes the whole task of the so-called "totalitarian state" which has been set up in Italy and Germany. To achieve this end the spirit has been violated, all human feeling enchained, and the young seed from which the future was to grow crushed with shameless brutality. Not alone labor movements of whatever tendency became victims of the fascist dictatorship} everyone who dared to kick against the pricks or even to assume a neutral attitude towards the new rulers had to learn in his own person how fascism "marches over the body of freedom."

Art, the theater, science, literature and philosophy came under the shameful guardianship of a regime whose ignorant leaders hesitated at no crime to achieve power and confirm themselves in their new positions. The number of victims who in those bloody days when fascism seized power in Italy (and later on in both Italy and Germany) were murdered by inhuman wretches, runs into the thousands. Many thousands of innocent men were expelled from their homes and chased into exile, among them a long line of prominent scholars and artists of worldwide reputation, who in any other nation would have been regarded as honors to the land. Barbaric hordes forced themselves into the homes of peaceful citizens, plundered their libraries, and publicly burned hundreds of thousands of the best books. Other thousands were torn from the bosoms of their families, dragged into concentration camps where their human dignity was daily trodden under foot, and many were slowly tortured to death by cowardly hangmen or driven to suicide.

In Germany this madness assumed especially vicious forms because of the artificially trained racial fanaticism, directed mainly against the Jewish people. The barbarism of past centuries awoke suddenly to new life. A regular flood of vulgar incendiary pamphlets appealing to men's lowest instincts descended on Germany and muddied all the channels of public opinion.®

* Here is one little specimen from among thousands:

"There are two sorts of anti-Semitism, the higher and the lower. The first is intellectual, human, is a palliative, and consists in making laws which limit the Jewish sphere of influence. These laws make it possible for Jews and Gentiles to live

Realms which the wildest despotism had up to now left untouched, as, for example, the relations between the sexes, are now in Germany subject to the supervision of the state. Special "race officials" are appointed to guard the people from "racial shame," and to brand marriages between Jews or colored people and so-called "Aryans" as crimes, and to punish them. So that sexual ethics have at last happily arrived at the level of cattle-breeding. Such are the blessings of Hitler's totalitarian state.