Swastika Night

by Katharine Burdekin

  “But why, Alfred? I’ve no doubt you were, but why of course, if he was right about the Blood?”

  “Because if there’s any real difference, the thing you are yourself is the best thing. A man doesn’t want to be an elephant or a rabbit. The elephant if it could think wouldn’t want to be a rabbit or a man. It wants to be itself, because itself is the very best thing there is in the world. In a way, it is the world, it is all life. The life you are yourself is all life. If you look with envy or longing or inferiority-feeling at any other kind of life, you have lost your life, lost your Self. So if a German is a different kind of life, a really different kind, he feels superior, but so do I. An acceptance on my part of fundamental inferiority is a sin not only against my manhood but against life itself. Do you know the type of Englishman who is always trying to be taken for a German and will hardly speak his own language?”

  “Yes.”

  “You despise them a good deal more than an ordinary fellow who never pretends?”

  “Yes, I certainly do.”

  “And so do most Germans, even those without your knowledge. The Germans consciously want us to accept our inferiority, unconsciously they despise us for doing it. For unconsciously they are in touch with life and know it is a crime against life. Well, the reason why women have never been able to develop whatever it is they are, besides their animal body, is because they have committed the crime against life. They see another form of life, undoubtedly different from their own, nothing half so vague as Blood, but differing in sex, and they say ‘that form is better than our form’. And for that reason men have always unconsciously despised them, while consciously urging them to accept their inferiority. And just as those futile Englishmen are neither English nor German, but only half-baked cowards and idiots, so women are neither men nor women, but a sort of mess.”

  “But, Alfred, Alfred, you cannot mean that women ought to think of themselves as superior to us? It’s a lunatic thought.”

  “It’s a logical thought,” said Alfred. “You mustn’t think of women as they are now, it is very muddling. You must think of the argument. Everything that is something must want to be itself before every other form of life. Women are something—female, they must want to be that, they must think it the most superior, the highest possible form of human life. But of course we must not think it too. Otherwise the crime is committed again, and we shall be a mess. Women must be proud of having daughters, we must be proud of having sons. Could a woman, ever in the world, have been as proud of having ten daughters and no son as a man could be of having ten sons and no daughters?”

  “No !” gasped the Knight. “Of course not. As far as I know.”

  “Then the crime was committed in the real tribal darkness before history began, and there you are,” said Alfred, satisfied.

  “Where are we?” demanded the Knight.

  “There’s the explanation why women always live according to an imposed pattern, because they are not women at all, and never have been. They are not themselves. Nothing can be, unless it knows it is superior to everything else. No man could believe God was She. No woman could believe God was He. It would be making God inferior.”

  “But apart from God, how could women ever think themselves superior, whatever they turned into, when they cannot be soldiers? At least they can be, they have been, as you’ll read in von Hess’s book, but only a few particularly gifted by Nature. There must always be force of some kind, to uphold any kind of law. Women cannot apply force.”

  “The human values of this world are masculine. There are no feminine values because there are no women. Nobody could tell what we should admire or what we should do, or how we should behave if there were women instead of half-women. It is an unimaginable state of things.”

  “Your whole argument is fantastic.”

  “The argument is as sound and solid as a new block of cylinders. The ideas raised by it seem fantastic. But you cannot pick a hole in the argument. Now I was thinking about how it was to be put right, and the crime stopped. There are two things women have never had which men have had, of a developing and encouraging nature. One is sexual invulnerability and the other is pride in their sex, which is the humblest boy’s birthright. And yet, until they can get back those two things, which they lost when they committed their crime and accepted men’s idea of their inferiority, they can never develop their little remaining spark of self-hood and life. We know it is still there, or they wouldn’t be unhappy now.”

  “Of course they can never get complete and certain sexual invulnerability,” said the Knight. “No matter what sort of laws you make. Laws can always be broken.”

  “I don’t mean anything about laws. I mean a personal invulnerability. Wild animals, female animals, have it. They have a mating season, and at other times they keep the males away. They don’t want them and they don’t have to suffer them. But I don’t mean that women can go back to that. I mean a soul-power which would come from being themselves, from being women. Men would never want to force them. It would be unthinkable, impossible.”

  “Nothing is or ever has been unthinkable or impossible to men. Von Hess says so.”

  “Nothing is unthinkable to men who are born of mess. Lots of evil things might be unthinkable to the sons of men and women.”

  “And what is your remedy, my dear Alfred?” asked the Knight sarcastically.

  “The remedy, in theory, is as simple as the argument. The highest possible masculine pattern of living should be imposed on women, and when they have come up again to a little understanding, it should be explained to them the crime they at one time committed; that men do not really admire them for it, that inside themselves they hate them for it, and that they may, must, now consider themselves superior and bring their daughters up accordingly. Could women possibly be taught to read, before they are themselves, I mean? There’s no imaginable limit to what they might be or do afterwards.”

  The Knight laughed, a little hysterically.

  “Alfred, you are really the most fantastic thinker. You don’t even know that women could read—read, write, make books, music, pictures, houses (all inferior to men’s, of course), be lawyers, doctors, governors, soldiers, fly aeroplanes—”

  “Did they, by God!” Alfred was amazed and instantly jealous. “And you won’t let us! Well!”

  “All that, and yet you’re saying the only remedy for all sin (as far as I can make out) is that women should think themselves superior to us.”

  “To all other forms of life as well,” said Alfred soothingly.

  “Certainly you have reached your conclusion by logic. Why, the women who could do all those things never thought themselves superior. They were aiming at equality only, the modest little things.”

  Alfred sighed.

  “You will think about women and not about the argument. Of course they never thought themselves superior then. They were not being themselves. They were living an imposed masculine pattern just as ours do now. They were no more women than ours, they were only in a better position to become so, if any man had had the common sense to see what the real trouble was, and tell them about it.”

  “They didn’t know there was any trouble.”

  “Well, you do. You told me that the pliancy of woman is the tragedy of the human race, and when I tell you what causes it you cannot see it or take in the argument at all. You won’t look at it impersonally, and that probably has been always the trouble with Germans. But let’s leave the women now. We can’t do anything about it. Do you think there are any books in the Japanese Empire?”

  “No,” said the Knight. “I won’t leave it for a minute. Supposing what women are is just an inferior sort of man, and that they were being themselves when they were moulded to the most masculine pattern and could imitate men fairly well, as they did in Socialist Russia, what becomes of your argument then? The Russian women certainly weren’t unproductive of girls.”

  “When women are being what they are really the pattern will neve
r change. They won’t allow men to change the pattern. And yet you say yourself that women never mind the pattern being changed, however much it’s to their own disadvantage. Were women ever doctors and lawyers and writers and things in Germany?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Hitler discouraged them. But, mind, he didn’t want them to be wholly illiterate and ugly and animal, and lose their nationality and class and rejection-rights.”

  “No, but he wanted to change the pattern a little. And what had the women to say about it?”

  “They were wildly enthusiastic about him and everything he did.”

  “Then there’s your answer. Why should women be wildly enthusiastic about a man at all? It’s an unnatural crime to allow something totally different from yourself to impose a pattern of living on you. Now it may astonish you, but the average Nazi doesn’t dislike me at all. I have lots of friends, fellows I like and who like me, among the Nazis in England. And that’s because though I have to accept the German pattern of living and belief outwardly, because I belong to a conquered nation, inwardly I have thrown it off. They realise, unconsciously, that I am really myself, different (if there is any real difference between English and Germans) and therefore superior feeling. And they like it. They despise the German-English consciously, and unconsciously. They only despise me consciously, and half the time they’ve forgotten all about it.”

  “They wouldn’t like it much if you ran about saying you were superior.”

  “No. Because then religion and tradition and all sorts of conscious things would get in the way. Besides, it would take a very long course of impersonal and objective thinking before any German could realise that he could still feel superior without making everybody else in the world feel inferior. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I can understand your argument when you apply it to yourself and us. But, after all, we’re all men.”

  “And therefore not so different. Probably without any right to fundamental superiority feeling among ourselves.”

  “But when you go on to women, I cannot follow you. Their depth of inferiority lies in the very fact that they are so different.”

  “Why does it?”

  “Because their physique and their mental make-up prevent them doing anything worth while, doing it well, that is, except just their animal job of bearing children.”

  “And which sex has been setting the standard of what is worth while ?”

  “Well, the male sex,” the Knight admitted.

  “And how do you know what women will do when they have stopped being submissive and despising themselves and causing the tragedy of the human race?”

  The Knight shook his head.

  “Now we’re back at the same place again. I will think about what you say, and try to understand it. But I am one of the men, I expect, who cannot be impersonal.”

  “Well, of course your thinking has been conditioned by von Hess. The only hope probably for impersonal thinking is having to think by yourself. Any kind of tradition must rot you up.”

  “And why haven’t you thought about women before? They have always been there. I didn’t make them, neither did von Hess.”

  “I never knew they were important. If you could have made me believe fleas were important I would think seriously and impersonally and as far as possible without prejudice of fleas. I should not say, immediately, oh well, it’s only a flea. Low, low, base flea.”

  “But if someone seriously put it to you, a flea thinks itself superior to everything, and the whole of life——”

  “It does!” cried Alfred. “And God likes it to think like that! Yes, whatever God is, He must want women to feel themselves superior, and fleas, and lice, and men. It’s just a condition of healthy life. And now, do you think there are any books in the Japanese Empire? Old books, I mean. Oh, highly-born, let’s leave the women. There’s so much I want to know.”

  The Knight almost visibly dragged his mind away from the question of women, which as Alfred treated it was repugnant and absurd and yet somehow held an unholy fascination for him, and turned it on to the Japanese Empire, which suddenly, however huge and however potentially dangerous, seemed friendly by comparison.

  “I don’t think there are any pre-imperial records there either,” he said. “We do not know, of course; Asia and America are vast places, and the Japanese, however slavishly imitative they are, could probably never manage to be as thorough and as patient in destruction as our people. But von Hess has a speculative sentence about that point. He says: ‘Either we shall at some time conquer the Japanese and thus have the whole world and its records under our control, or the Japanese, whose only mental characteristic as a nation is ape-like imitativeness, will copy us and destroy the records themselves in each country they conquer.’ All I know is that the Japanese of the Samurai class believe themselves to be the originators of civilisation in Asia and America and Australasia, which is rather amusing, seeing even their pre-westernisation culture, what you might call their own native culture, was borrowed from the Chinese. The Japanese are quite incapable of originating anything at all, or creating anything except yellow-faced babies. Fortunately now even that low form of creation is failing them.”

  “You are a little prejudiced against them perhaps,” Alfred suggested. “Have you met many Japanese?”

  “I was on duty for five years on the Eastern Frontier in Persia, and after the truce had become to all intents and purposes an absolutely permanent peace (until something different happens in one or other of the Empires) there was courteous if not exactly friendly contact between us and the Samurai. I applied for the duty on purpose to get in touch with the Japanese, and I found it duller than anything you like to imagine. They are an utterly boring people. They think of nothing, no nothing, except war-machines, their honour and the Emperor.”

  “But then how do they differ from most German Knights? Isn’t it that when you see people you can criticise who have the same idea of life as you, you see not perhaps how bad the idea is but how dull it is?”

  “I’ve always known it is a bad idea, and I have always been able to criticise the other Knights. And I do assure you that the Japanese are a great deal duller and more stupid than we are. We have the remnants of a great culture of our own; our music, for instance, is ours, it expresses something we have lost certainly, but which was German when it was alive. The Japanese have nothing but a few dirty rags all cut off other nations’ clothes. If they were to conquer the world, culture could never start again, it would be a lost, permanently lost, human activity.”

  “Are the Japanese women the same as ours?”

  “I never saw any. But the Japanese regard women in the same way as we do, of course, as beings without nationality. They copied von Wied’s idea, and the women of Asia and America—women all over the Empire—are just the same—ugly, animal and wretched. If only some other nation had conquered the East—the Chinese, or the Siberian Russians, or the North Americans—things would have been very different.”

  “And if only some other nation than Germany had conquered Europe things would have been different, wouldn’t they? Or is it perhaps the conquering itself that is wrong? It is hard to tell which comes first. Whether dull, stupid, soulless nations make the best conquerors, or whether conquest makes nations dull, stupid and soulless. What were the British like when they had an empire? Does von Hess say anything about that?”

  “It wasn’t a conquest empire really. It was made by restlessness. The English and Irish and Scotch and Welsh just roved about on the sea and took places before other Europeans got there, or places the others didn’t want, and suppressed the practically unarmed native inhabitants and just stayed there. It was an empire ruled in the most sloppy way you can imagine; everyone did exactly as they pleased without any reference to the British Government, and only the dark races were treated with a certain amount of authority. It was never strong in a military sense, and when it could no longer be defended
by a big and efficient navy (von Hess allows you a certain talent for sea-fighting) it just fell to pieces. The Japanese got most of it and we had the rest, the African portions.”

  “And what does he say about the character of the people? Were they dull, stupid and soulless? Or was a sloppy Empire better than a military one?”

  “He doesn’t say. You see, he knew the Germans were in their madness committing a great crime against humanity in destroying the records, but he never attributed the madness to militarism and conquest, thinking those bad things in themselves. He blamed a flaw in the German character. A tendency to moral cowardice, mad spiritual panic, he calls it in one place. His few remarks on the English character have reference to this weakness of Germans, for in what he calls the Nordic population of the islands, that is among the English and the lowland Scots, he finds an opposite tendency. He thinks little of your ancestors as soldiers or administrators, he says your general culture was nothing to compare with the French, that your music was almost non-existent, and that your only claim to great literature rested on two poets, both inferior he thinks (he says ‘I think’) to the greatest Germans, and a magnificent translation of the Christian Bible. But he says, the English have one claim to real greatness, which lies in a toughness of moral fibre, an immovable attachment to what they believe, often in the face of large majorities, to be right, that von Hess finds admirable. He says, ‘They are sturdy heretics. The best of them are incapable of spiritual panic, even the ordinary men among them are hard to move to dubiously moral courses by spiritual pressure. If they get a notion that a certain thing is right they will hold to it with the utmost stubbornness. A Christian sect called the Society of Friends gained influence far out of proportion to their small numbers by their tenacious devotion to their principles, which included a refusal to bear arms for any purpose whatsoever. When England was in the gravest danger both in the 1914 war and the Final European War a large proportion of these men still refused to fight, no matter what moral or physical pressure was brought to bear on them, and what is more remarkable than that is that in the 1914 war there was in the country at large even a certain amount of sympathy, not with their pacifism, but with their moral attitude. A genuine Friend (not a coward hiding under the shelter of the sect) was right not to fight because he believed fighting to be wrong. A man must do what he thinks right and (Englishmen are inclined to add) I am the sole judge of what that is.’ Von Hess goes on, ‘You cannot imagine a similar strength of moral feeling among large numbers of Germans, or that any of them could respect pacifist principles in time of war; but that very tolerance of sincerity in ideas which oneself finds loathsome shows a reserve of spiritual power which I cannot help envying for our people. In these English and Scotch heretics of all ages and in the common men who could not withhold from them all sympathy, England’s real greatness lay. If they can resist, not the physical destruction of their records, for that will be impossible, but the Germanisation of their character, and somehow, in face of all the deception they will suffer, remain themselves, there will be soul-power in Europe after the passing of this dark evil time.’ There, Alfred. Have these heretics’ qualities descended to you? Have you resisted the Germanisation of your character? I think many of the English have, most successfully. That’s one reason why the Knights always try to be sent there.”