Antisemitism: Part One of the Origins of Totalitarianism
Page 83
***
10 Les Origines de l’Ancien Gouvernement de la France, de l’Allemagne et de l’Italie, 1789.
[back]
***
11 Seillière, op. cit., p. xxxii.
[back]
***
12 See René Maunier, Sociologie Coloniale, Paris, 1932, Tome II, p. 115.
[back]
***
13 Montlosier, even in exile, was closely connected with the French chief of police, Fouché, 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.
[back]
***
14 Qu’est-ce-que le Tiers Etat? ( 1789) published shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution. Translation quoted after J. H. Clapham, The Abbé Siéyès, London, 1912, p. 62.
[back]
***
15 “Historical Aryanism has its origin in 18th century feudalism and was supported by 19th century Germanism” observes Seilliere, op. cit., p. ii.
[back]
***
16 Lettres sur l’histoire de France (1840).
[back]
***
17 This is the case for instance in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophische Vorlesungen aus den Jahren 1804–1806, II, 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.
[back]
***
18 Joseph Goerres, in Rheinischer Merkur, 1814, No. 25.
[back]
***
19 In Phantasien zur Berichtigung der Urteile Uber künftige deutsche Verfassungen, 1815.
[back]
***
20 “Animals of mixed stock have no real generative power; similarly, hybrid peoples 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 humanity.... Human nobility cannot express itself in one people alone.” In Deulsches 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.).
[back]
***
21 Blick aus der Zeit auf die Zeit, 1814.—Translation quoted from Alfred P. Pundt, op. cit.
[back]
***
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.
[back]
***
23 “Neue Fragmentcnsammlung” (1798) in Schriften, Leipzig, 1929, Tome II, p. 335.
[back]
***
24 For the romantic attitude in Germany see Carl Schmitt, Pohtische Romantik, Munchen, 1925.
[back]
***
25 Mussolini, “Relativismo e Fascismo,” in Diuturna, Milano, 1924. The translation quoted from F. Neumann, Behemoth, 1942, pp. 462–463.
[back]
***
26 See the very interesting pamphlet against the nobility by the liberal writer Buchholz, Untersuchungen 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.”
[back]
***
27 Clemens Brentano, Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte, 1811.
[back]
***
28 “Entwurf eines Friedenspaktes.” In Gerhard Ramlow, Ludwig von der Marwitz und die Anfänge konservativer Politik und Staatsauffassung in Preussen, Historische Studien, Heft 185, p. 92.
[back]
***
29 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.
[back]
***
30 Translation quoted from The Inequality of Human Races, translated by Adrien Collins, 1915.
[back]
***
31 See Robert Dreyfus, “La vie et les prophéties du Comte de Gobineau,” Paris, 1905, in Cahiers de la quinzaine. Ser. 6, Cah. 16, p. 56.
[back]
***
32 Essai, Tome II, Book IV, p. 445, and the article “Ce qui est arrivé á la France en 1870,” in Europe, 1923.
[back]
***
33 J. Duesberg, “Le Comte de Gobineau,” in Revue Générale, 1939.
[back]
***
34 See the Gobineau memorial issue of the French review Europe, 1923. Especially the article of Clément Serpeille de Gobineau, “Le Gobinisme et la pensée 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 Whole younger generation the works of Gobineau had become a revelation.”
[back]
***
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 political role. With their triumph, patriotism has again become a virtue.”
[back]
***
36 See Seillière, op. cit., Tome I: Le Comte de Gobineau et l’Aryanisme historique, p. 32: “In the Essai Germany is hardly Germanie, 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 Seillière 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.
[back]
***
37 Examples could be multiplied. The quotation is taken from Camille Spiess, Impérialismes Gobinisme en France, Paris, 1917.
[back]
***
38 For Taine’s stand see John S. White, “Taine on Race and Genius,” in Social Research, February, 1943.
[back]
***
39 In Gobineau’s opinion, the Semites were a white hybrid race bastardized by a mixture with blacks. For Renan see Histoire Générale et Système comparé des Langues, 1863, Part I, pp. 4, 503, and passim. The same distinction in his Langues Sémitiques, I, 15.
[back]
***
40 This has been very well exposed by Jacques Barzun, op. cit.
[back]
***
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.
[back]
***
42 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, Everyman’s Library Edition, New York, p. 8.
[back]
***
43 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873, p. 254. For Lord Beaconsfield see Benjamin Disraeli, Lord George Bentinck, 1853, p. 184.
[back]
***
44 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 different the races are who inhabit this globe, and how great must have been the surprise of the first Negro and the first white man who met” (Article: Homme)
.
[back]
***
45 Histoire Naturelle, 1769–89.
[back]
***
46 Op. cit., letter of May 15, 1852.
[back]
***
47 Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, 1843–1852.
[back]
***
48 A. Carthill, The Lost Dominion, 1924, p. 158.
[back]
***
49 See Friedrich Brie, Imperialistische Strömungen in der englischen Literatur, Halle, 1928.
[back]
***
50 See, for instance, Otto Bangert, Gold oder Blut, 1927. “Therefore a civilization can be eternal,” p. 17.
[back]
***
51 In Lebenswunder, 1904, pp. 128 ff.
[back]
***
52 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 “Philosophie Générale: Métaphysique, Morale et Théologie,” Oeuvres Complètes, 1785, Tome 40, pp. 16ff.—In his Dictionnaire Philosophique, Article “Chaîne des Etres Créés,” he wrote: “At first, our imagination is pleased at the imperceptible transition of crude matter to organized matter, of plants to zoophytes, 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 become God? Is there not an infinity between God and him?...Is there not obviously a void between the monkey and man?”
[back]
***
53 Hayes, op. cit., p. 11. 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 Barrés and Co. in France, were very practical adherents of the perverse 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.
[back]
***
54 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.
[back]
***
55 “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), Professor 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.
[back]
***
56 See 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).
[back]
***
57 Testament of John Davidson, 1908.
[back]
***
58 C. A. Bodelsen, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism, 1924, pp. 22 ff.
[back]
***
59 E. H. Damce, The Victorian Illusion, 1928. “Imperialism began with a book ... Dilke’s Greater Britain.”
[back]
***
60 “Two Lectures on South Africa,” in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867–1882.
[back]
***
61 C. A. Bodelsen, op. cit., p. 199.
[back]
***
62 In his Discours sur l’Ensemble du Positivisme, 1848, pp. 384 ff.
[back]
***
63 “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 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).
[back]
***
64 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.”
[back]
***
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.
[back]
***
66 For Disraeli’s racism, compare chapter iii.
[back]
***
1 Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” in Youth and Other Tales, 1902, is the most illuminating work on actual race experience in Africa.
[back]
***
2 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.
[back]
***
3 See A. Carthill’s description of the “Indian system of government by reports” in The Lost Dominion, 1924, p. 70.
[back]
***
4 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 natives’ 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.
[back]
***
5 “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).
[back]
***
6 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:
These figures are quoted from Leonard Barnes, Caliban in Africa. An Impression of Colour Madness, Philadelphia, 1931, p. 59, note.
[back]
***
; 7 J. A. Froude, “Leaves from a South African Journal” (1874), in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 1867–1882, Vol. IV.
[back]
***
8 Ibid.
[back]
***
9 Quoted from Paul Ritter, Kolonien im deutschen Schrifttum, 1936, Preface.
[back]
***
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.
[back]
***
11 See especially chapter iii of Kiewiet, op. cit.
[back]
***
12 “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 distinctive 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. The 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).
[back]
***
13 See James, op. cit., p. 28.
[back]
***
14 “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).
[back]
***
15 Kiewiet, op. cit., p. 19.
[back]
***
16 “[The Boers’] society was rebellious, but it was not revolutionary” (ibid., p. 58).
[back]
***
17 “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 unprosperous land by turning distinctions of race and colour into devices for social and economic discrimination” (ibid., p. 22).
[back]
***
18 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 prosperity”; whereas “at the Cape slavery was the sign of an unenterprising economy ...whose labour was wastefully and inefficiently used” {ibid.). It was chiefly this that led Barnes (op. cit., 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.”