PART 3 OF 3
The development from chivalry to knighthood already began under Konrad II, and this was maintained until far into the 14th century. The knights saw themselves as children of the empire, and were thus under obligation to defend emperor and kingdom against external foes. This fact gave them justification for the existence of their order, it led to the actual knightly concept of honour which is its first worldly representation attaining some highest purpose in accordance with social rank. After the almost complete subjectivism of the Vikings and the old Germanic captains with their followers, a large section of the people was consequently adjusted to the spiritual centrepoint of the entire race. The practice of granting a sword, of girding it, finally the knighting ceremony, represented symbolically an inward elevation and ennobling. If the later knight through his becoming ossified and stereotyped represented a fragment of antiquity amidst a new social life, if the plundering raids of idle knights during peace also offer a displeasing picture, then these are things which even the best idea does not escape containing, and the fact remains that up to the present the word knightly is used to describe only a man who greatly protects his fellow men and knows how to safeguard honour.
It is self evident that the Roman system also made efforts to render the knights’ order serviceable to itself which, among other things, found expression in the dedication of the sword. At the very beginning of his oathtaking, the knight obligated himself to serve religion, then to stand by the oppressed, and only lastly to grant the emperor obedience. This was the formal establishment of a Roman influence, such as had already been carried out earlier. Certain pious historians have even attempted to trace back the foundation of the knights’ order to Rome (like their dogmas to Jesus) and in fact Gregorius VII is cited as their founder. This naturally only occurs with the intention of bringing even the representation of this anti Roman idea—by tracing its origin back to the pope—into dependency upon the latter, naturally with different consequences resulting from it for the present. Thus, for example, the historian Gefrorer knows how to relate the manner in which the knightly idea of holy Rome originated, in order to then unveil the latter’s intentions: Only as a result of the powerful influence which the church gained through the office of Gregorius VIII on the warriors’ order of the western Christian kingdoms, and in fact on the Roman first, did the knights’ order attain its full substance as an institution or corporation which laid upon it the task of rendering serviceable by special duties the heroic courage of the soldiers of religion. Fame, honour, race, people, emperor and kingdom, were and are thus regarded by the representatives of the Roman system as mere names and subordinates; as the purpose of such a knights’ order is falsely attributed to the pope, only service for the latter appears. By this the unchangeable politics of the Roman church have also become completely clear, and in fact it has been successful by means of hypnotising sermons to shed torrents of blood for the power hungry church in countless crusades, to make the heroic heart serve religion, to subordinate honour to love. Iper and Arras, cry the Flemings; Husta heya Beyerlant, ran the battlecry of the Bavarians; Rome could not prevent this, but it could sow discord by playing off different interests against each other. And it has regarded this as its life’s task up to today. Out of instinct for self preservation, Rome cannot tolerate any organisation which is conscious of its people and honour, even less a self sufficient, completely honour conscious nation. Therefore it must promote dissension and sow war and racial decomposition. This is inherent in the nature of its faceless system and will not alter, as long as this system exists.
Another, apparently ineradicable, falsification of history dominates even today those circles which give a clear account of Rome and its system, namely that all education and culture which gradually passed over the west was a consequence of church activity. In fact, the exact opposite is the case.
Pressed by the Langobards, Pope Stephanus II (in approximately 755) begs for aid and implores that he might be invited into Franconia. This takes place and Pippin receives the pope on foot, but the latter, conscious of his weak position, shows himself as the poor apostle of Christ, wraps himself and his priests in hair shirts, strews ashes on his head, and on his knees implores the king to help the Roman people. Since this time France has regarded itself as the eldest daughter of Rome (wisely refusing, however, since Hugo Capet, the enticements of a Roman title). The same pope then works against the union of Charlemagne with a Langobard woman. He writes that Charles might not pollute in a disloyal and most stinking manner the high, noble and kingly race of the Franks with the blood of the Langobards, and in such event begs heaven to hand over Charles to the eternal flames. But since this threat made no impression upon the emperor, the holy father later allied himself with this same stinking Langobard king. The Myth of the 20th Century 45
At the time, when the spiritual influencing on the world is said to have been performed from Rome outwards, things in reality proceeded there in a highly unspiritual manner. In 896, Pope Stephanus VI hit upon the idea of digging up the decomposed corpse of his predecessor, condemning the dead man to death at a synod as an evil usurper, hacking three fingers off his perjured corpse, and handing him over to the Roman people to be drowned. Shortly afterwards, Stephanus himself was flung into prison and strangled, while the corpse of his predecessor was once again fished out of the Tiber and newly robed as pope. (this text taken from
www.adolfhitler.ws)
After this, the popes alternately overthrow one another, and imprison each other by turns, until Sergius III, his concubine Marozia at his left hand, ascends the chair of Peter. This woman Marozia, along with her mother Theodora, secures herself influential bishops as lovers and props of her rule. When Sergius was disposed of, Marozia, after a brief pause, raised her son to be pope as John XI. Her first son Albrich was highly outraged at this and overthrew the rule of his mother. After his death his son occupied the papal office as John XII. But conditions still did not improve. In 938, the expelled Pope Bonifacius VII was successful in throwing his rival representative of Jesus into prison and leaving him to die there. But Bonifacius also did not enjoy the tiara for long: he was driven out himself by the royal nobility and by the woman Theodora, already mentioned, the famous mother of that very energetic whore Marozia, whose grandson Crescentius became master of Rome, and who now sold the papal chair to willing creatures. In 1024 a man took the papal throne who had previously never been a cleric. He bought himself the representation of god and called himself John XIX. Later a ten year old son of a count was elected as Pope Benedictus IX. But since the latter gave himself up prematurely to every conceivable vice, he became too dissolute even for the Romans; they therefore elected a new representative of Christ, who called himself Sylvester III. But the new pope was soon seized with anxiety at the dangers of his office and preferred to barter the latter for 1,000 pounds of gold to Gregorius VI, at which the expelled Benedictus was morally outraged and raised a renewed claim to the chair of Peter. The honourable cardinal Caesar Baronius openly called these popes whore’s stallions. This scandal only ceased when Emperor Henry III intervened.
These were the conditions in Rome during the 10th and 11th centuries which every German ought to be familiar with, but concerning which silence is wisely kept by a school of historical writing filled with lies on the one side and cowardly silence on the other. At this very time began the national gathering of the Germans under Heinrich I, and the conscious attempt at national recovery and development under Otto I the Great. Thanks to him, a German knight, the bishops obtained great influence, acquired the rank of princes, and provided spiritual knowledge, promoted crafts, trade and farming. Directed and protected by the emperor, not by the pope, the first cultural centres blossomed in Quedlinburg, Reichenau, and Hersfeld. The popes, on the other hand, had honourable men murdered; such popes as Hadrianus IV who ordered Arnold of Brescia to be strangled and burned when he heard of the latter’s sermons of repentance. It should be remarked in passing that the popes had fixed sums paid them by the whore houses, which Paul I (1464-1471) had shaped into a permanent source of income. Sixtus IV drew 20,000 gold ducats yearly form the houses of pleasure. The clergy had to pay fixed taxes for their concubines, while the Vatican rewarded its officials with passes for the brothels. Sixtus IV even permitted pederasty for a fixed payment. Innocentius VIII had 16 children of his own to feed. Alexander VI, however, declared that the pope stood higher than the king, in the same way as man above the beasts. Therefore, he had a dozen bishops and cardinals, who appeared dangerous to him, murdered. For 300,000 gold ducats Pope Alexander VI deposed the Jhem, the Turkish pretender to the throne, and with a clear conscience calmly gathered in the money of the unbeliever, the sultan. In 1501 Alexander VI named his daughter Lucrezia for a time as his representative.
Underlying the efforts of Otto I undoubtedly lay the idea of a German national church which seemed to have died out with the vanished Aryan Goths. For the same reason, he stipulated that the clergy be chosen from land owners, but this also caused him to subordinate himself to the papacy: the Romans had to swear not to elect a pope without the agreement of the Emperor. Otto III autocratically appointed two popes. Similarly Heinrich III purged the papacy. In the great dispute between Archbishop Willigris of Mainz against the antinational Roman centralism, all German bishops, because of their consciously open rejection, found themselves in opposition to the pope, who finally had to give way. One was freer then in Germany than in 1870 and 1930!
However, the papacy received a great strengthening from the Clunyians who wished to create an international structure dependent only on the pope and above the state. This movement admittedly set as its goal a reform of the dissolute monastic system, but very soon showed its un Germanic spiritual outlook. The hitherto customary practices of penance against the sinful devilish flesh, upon which the Teutons had looked with laughter, were divested of their earlier clumsy form and transformed into a cunning martyrdom of the soul (forerunners, as it were, of Jesuitism). For stipulated parts of the Clunylan monasteries, strict commands of silence existed, every gaiety of mind was forbidden, and friendships not tolerated. Informing upon others was given the stamp of pious duty, and those found guilty had to undergo dishonouring punishments. This unnatural form of discipline clearly originates from that Ligurian eastern race which, before the immigration of the Nordics, settled southeast France among other places. This trampling down of the soul, this inward self emasculation and lust for subjugation under alien demons and magical powers, however, shows us the spirit of the Roman church as being in the closest, racially conditioned mutual alliance with all un Aryan blood and decomposed populations. It is therefore also no accident that the reforms of the Clunyians immediately gained a foothold in the eastern racial parts of Lorraine. Archbishop Aribo of Mainz at once made a stand against this spiritual sickness and supported the power conscious Konrad II. In the north the old blood stirred almost simultaneously: Bishop Adalbert von Wettin set a Germanic national church as his goal: the word Deutsch became universal usage for the first time; German monks of the Roman church sought for the still remaining, almost destroyed spiritual treasures of their people.
The German emperor had lifted the pope out of a swamp, restored the church to honour, and ennobled its servants. Roman universalism, strengthened anew as a result, naturally utilised these forces and based itself—as usual—on proven forgeries in order to establish the rule of the papacy over the emperor as willed by god, and to set centralism against episcopalism. This struggle was carried on by every conceivable means: subjects were incited against the emperor, indeed the church ban was announced against unapostolic bishops. That was Rome’s gratitude.
The longevity of the papacy has been praised with particular emphasis by Roman historical writers as proof of its divine appointment. But anyone who knows that Rome has to thank the emperors first and foremost for its position of power, and solely the The Myth of the 20th Century 46
inner greatness of devout aristocratic spirits like Francis of Assisi, Albertus Magnus and Meister Eckehart for its spiritual influence, will certainly have a different opinion about this. Besides, the permanence of an establishment is not a measure of its inner value. It is solely a question of the forces which have helped it to perpetuate itself. Egyptian culture was much older than the Roman church; the Mandarin can record more known ancestors than the pope; Lao Tse and Confucius lived two thousand five hundred years ago and are still dominant today.
The German Roman Emperors only died out about a hundred years ago. The time approaches at which the pope will also become what he should be: the head of the Italian national church (the disputes between nationalistic Fascism and the Vatican will, it is to be hoped, hasten this). The papacy (irrespective of the fact that a number of really great men have also sat on the so called chair of Peter) had to build up its rule on the prerequisite of spiritual slavery and racial decomposition of the Germanically determined peoples. Out of the great free souls who even in the 11th to 14th centuries devoted themselves to Rome as an idea holy to them, the Vatican created weapons of servitude. Since the strengthening of Jesuitism, since the Tridentine council, Rome has remained under racially inferior influence and has become rigid. The unclean moral theory of Alfons the holy of Liguori on the one side, the dishonourable activity of Jesuitism on the other, has resulted in the fact that since the suffocating of Meister Eckehart’s religion, all really great European culture has sprung from an antichurch spirit, ranging from Dante (who in 1864 was still expressly damned by the papacy because, among other reasons, he had described Rome as a sewer) and Giotto to Copernicus and Luther; not to speak of German classical art and Nordic painting and music. Everything which a slavish mentality called love gathered under Rome, everything which strove for honour and freedom of soul, parted more and more consciously from the Roman spiritual world.
The knights’ order lost its importance in the 15th and 16th centuries. But the concept of honour which it cultivated had awoken in other sections of the people. The townsman commoner freed himself from the dominance of the castle, built his cities and churches, carried on commerce and trade, and joined together into powerful leagues, until finally the thirty years’ war ended an entire culture.
It is demonstrated by the Hansa that the Germanic concept of honour was embodied even in the merchant whenever the latter relied upon himself and could operate without oriental middlemen. Originally a modest merchants’ league with the purpose of safeguarding trade, the Hansa later stretched its arms out far; it not only traded, but built, founded and colonised. The ruins of Novgorod and Wisby speak an equally loud language of moral power as the town halls of Bruges, Lübeck and Bremen. Over 75 cities formed a protective league which, according to its innermost nature, had the task of forming a centre of German power against imperial impotence. But before other similar ideas could take deeper root, the greatest catastrophe of German history intruded. And with the same consequences as had been shown by the Huguenot wars in France: the character of the German people was altered. If Germany at the beginning of the 16th century, in spite of the weak imperial rule, possessed a proud peasantry and a prosperous burgher class, then thirty bloody years (which still did not satisfy Pope Innocentius X) exterminated the best blood of Germany, numerous hordes of alien race from foreign states destroyed the native stock, a whole generation grew up in the midst of robbery and murder. Bavaria alone recorded 5000 abandoned farmsteads, hundreds of flourishing cities lay in ruins, nearly two thirds of the German people were annihilated. There no longer existed any art, any culture, any character. Dishonourable princes plundered a wretched people, and these subjects dully and stupidly allowed everything to happen to them. And yet despite all, Germanic blood stirred itself against the ruination from the Habsburgs and the French threat. The blood of the Lower Saxons which had once advanced to the Duna demonstrated resistance to total decline above and below. Like a promising cry the trumpets of Fehrbellin still resound in our ears today, and the voice of the great Elector with whose deeds Germany’s recovery, salvation and rebirth, had their beginning. One may criticise Prussia however much one likes, but this decisive salvation of the Germanic substance remains forever its deed of renown; without it there would exist no German culture, in fact no real German people; at best millions defenceless to looting by neighbours lusting for booty and by the avaricious princes of the church.
It is no accident of chance, if today in the midst of a terrible new fall into the abyss, the figure of Frederick the Great appears particularly invested with radiant glory, that in him there are concentrated—in spite also of his human sides—all those values of character for whose predominance the best Germans struggle hopefully today, namely, personal boldness, ruthless power of decision, consciousness of responsibility, penetrating cleverness, and an awareness of honour such as had never before been chosen with such mythic greatness as the guiding star of an entire life.
How can a prince outlive his state, the fame of his people and his own honour?
he asks of his sister on September 17, 1757. Misfortune will never make him cowardly, on the contrary:
I will never accept disgrace. The honour which in war made me place my life at stake a hundred times, has allowed me to defy death as an event of lesser importance.
He goes on to emphasise:
One will not be able to say of me, that I have outlived the freedom of my Fatherland or the greatness of my house.
If I had more than one life, I would sacrifice it for the Fatherland
writes Frederick on August 16, 1759, after a terrible defeat.
I do not think of fame, but of the state.
My inalterable loyalty towards the Fatherland and honour allow me to undertake everything, although hope does not guide me,
are his words a few days later. To Luise Dorothea von Gotha he also makes the avowal:
Perhaps Prussia’s hour of destiny has come, perhaps one will experience a new despotic emperorship. I do not know. But I vouch for the fact that it will only come to that after streams of blood have flowed and that I will not look upon my Fatherland in chains and at Germans in the most disgraceful slavery.
And Frederick writes anew to d’Argens:
You should know that it is not necessary that I live but certainly that I do my duty,
and:
Never will I experience the moment which would compel me to conclude a disadvantageous peace. The Myth of the 20th Century 47
I will either allow myself to be buried under the ruins of my Fatherland or ..... make an end to my life myself ..... I have allowed myself to be guided by this inner voice and by the demands of honour and I also intend doing this in the future.
If Frederick Wilhelm I was the symbol of civic honourableness and self limiting diplomacy, then Frederick II was the symbol of everything heroic which appeared forgotten and vanished in blood, dirt and misery. His life is the truest, greatest German history, and any German who attempts to falsify with malicious gloss the figure of Frederick must appear to us today as a most despicable rascal.
But it was only a few whom he managed to influence. In spite of his great work for peace, the broad layers of the people were crude, without cultural tradition; the educated were decadent, foppish, un Prussian, un German. They only allowed the disciplining forms of Frederick to take effect upon them against their will and Frederick himself—to whose government Kant had dedicated his Critique of pure reason—found no intellectual independence within the Germans of his day compared with the French, so that his love for French literature also laid the way for the victory of the new French world of thought which in its version of love in the form of the teaching of humanitarianism, crippled the organic powers of Prussia which had still not awoken to full consciousness, and later made it incapable of resisting the armies of the French revolution.
This new doctrine of humanitarianism was the religion of the freemasons. The latter has provided up to the present the spiritual foundations of an abstract universalistic culture, the starting point of all self seeking sermons promising bliss. It also gave (around 1740) the stamp to the political slogans of the last 150 years: liberty, equality and fraternity, and gave birth to chaotic, racially decomposing humane democracy.
At the beginning of the 18th century men gathered at an assembly in London whose conflict with the former religion of love had led in many cases to their exile from people and Fatherland, and who in the midst of a dissolute time founded a league of mankind for the promotion of humanity and brotherhood. Since this league recognised only mankind, no racial or religious difference was made from the start.
Masonry is a humanitarian league for the spreading of tolerant and humane principles, in the striving for which the Jew and Turk can have as great a share as a Christian.
So ran the constitution set up in 1722. The idea of humanitarianism was to form the principle, the purpose and the substance of freemasonry. It is—according to the Freiburg ritual—more far reaching than all churches, states and schools, than all classes, peoples and nationalities; for it extends over the whole of mankind. The German lodge teaches us the same even today. The Roman church and the freemasonic antichurch are thus united in tearing down all barriers which have been erected by spiritual and physical forms. Both call upon their supporters in the name of love or humanity, in the name of a boundless universalism, except that the church demands complete subjection, subordination within its domain (which naturally is to be the entire earth), while the antichurch preaches an unrestricted destruction of frontiers, makes the suffering and joy of the individual man into the measure of its judgement, which must be regarded as the cause of the present situation, namely, that the material well being of the individual has become the highest good for democracy and receives the first place from it in the life of society.
This disintegrating view of the world was and is the prerequisite for the political teaching of democracy and of the coercive dogma of the necessity of the free interplay of forces. Thus all the forces which work for the loosening of state, national and social bonds, necessarily made effort to render themselves of service to this philosophy of freemasonry, consequently also the league of mankind. Here we see international Jewry worming its way from instinct coupled with conscious reflection into the organisation of freemasonry. Admittedly, the racial essence in the league of mankind reacted just as defensively against the attempt by the church to exterminate Germanic nature, but it is nevertheless easily proved that, while Nordic man defended himself against Rome, the blind Hodur unwittingly gave him the death blow from behind. Freemasonry in Italy, France and England, became a political league of men, and led the democratic revolutions of the 19th century. Year by year its world outlook undermined the bases of all Germanic nature. Today we see the busy representatives of the international stock exchange and of world trade moving almost everywhere behind the leadership of the antichurch. All in the name of humanitarianism. The hypocrisy of the present day exploiters of humanity is without question more degrading than those attempts at slavery which in the name of Christian love have so often plunged Europe into unrest and chaos. Thanks to the preaching of humanitarianism and the doctrine of human equality, every Jew, negro and mulatto can become a citizen of equal rights in a European state; thanks to the humanitarian concern for the individual, there are hosts of luxury institutions for the incurably sick and insane in European states; thanks to humanitarianism, the confirmed criminal is regarded as merely an unfortunate without any concern for the interests of the people as a whole, is let loose again into society at the first opportunity, and not hindered in his capacity of reproduction. In the name of humanity and freedom of spirit the pornographic journalist and every dishonourable scoundrel is allowed to trade in every imaginable brothel literature; thanks to humanity negroes and Jews may marry into the Nordic race, indeed even occupy important offices. This humanitarianism, unconnected with any racial concept of honour, has among others, made the indescribably corrupt system of stock exchange swindling into a respected profession; indeed this organised band of criminals in frock coats and top hats today decides at world trade and expert conferences veritably autocratically over the fate of millions of hardworking people.
In the wake of this freemasonic democracy swindle, the entire Marxist movement falsified the beginnings of a healthy protest by the workers, and controlled all social democratic parties in the service of the stock exchange with aid of Jewish finance, Jewish leaders and the Jewish, partly individualistic, partly universalistic, ideology. The industrial worker of the 19th century, cheated of his destiny, suddenly uprooted, robbed of all balanced judgement, fled to the alluring preachments of a proletarian international, believed that by class struggle, that is, by destruction of half his own body, he would be able to become free, intoxicated himself on the power attained, and poured over this the whitewash of humanism. Today this delusion has burst, and the Marxist leadership has been unmasked as perpetrating a frightful swindle of a hard struggling class. (See Alfred Rosenberg: International high-finance as the mistress of the workers’ movement in all lands, München, 1925).
The paradox both of democracy as well as of Marxist doctrine consists in that they both in actuality represent the most brutal, dishonourable materialistic view of the world and consciously foster all impulses which will aid decomposition, but at the same time The Myth of the 20th Century 48
give assurances of their mercifulness, their love for the subjected and exploited. In a clever way the spiritual readiness for the sacrifice of the proletariat is called upon, to make the latter inwardly dependent on its leaders. We see in Marxism the idea of sacrifice and of love playing the same role as in the Roman catholic system. Blood and honour were likewise mocked and derided by the leaders of Marxism until, however, these indestructible ideas nevertheless revealed themselves in the workers. Today there is at last talk of proletarian honour. If this idea spreads, then everything is still not lost, for with the holding aloft of the idea of honour in general, the German working class will also know how to rid itself once and for all of its Marxist leadership. If this idea of class honour then takes shape into that of national honour, then German freedom will be secured as a result. But this is only possible when all the real workers of the German people form a front against all those who have sold themselves to trade, profit and the stock exchange, irrespective of whether this fact is covered with the cloak of democracy, Christianity, internationalism or humanitarianism.
The spirit of Frederick the Great takes effect today on the German people like an unyielding natural force. Everything which rediscovered itself amidst the confusion of triumphing subhumanity, saw its highest striving embodied in the struggle for freedom conducted by old Fritz, as if a bronze pen has outlined Germanic nature in advance through all veils of time. But then, alongside this greatness, occurred the incomprehensible tragedy that the spiritual freedom possible to a great man became limited to small possessions, and his spirit which had striven to shape itself by a terrible but necessary discipline, was driven into the arms of French democracy brilliant with outward show. Napoleon encountered a Prussia given over to bewigged ostentation and outward show. The latter collapsed because it no longer thought in the manner of Frederick, but as pacifist liberalistic.
We have fallen asleep on the laurels of Frederick the Great,
wrote Queen Luise later to her father. But from this defeat there finally arose the idea of a united Germany; Prussia’s honour became Germany’s concern. Gneisenau and Blücher, Scharnhorst and Jahn, Arndt and Stein, were all the embodiment of the old concept of honour. They have also expressed this all their life long, like Queen Luise herself, who wished to do everything to ease the lot of her people, except what went against her feeling of honour.
We know all this, or should know, in the same way as the student bodies who unrolled their banners and climbed the barricades later, when weak and subservient spirit—those eternally unblessed consequences of the thirty years’ war, still dominant today—had cheated Germany of its supreme efforts during the war of liberation, until the dream of Germans then apparently found fulfilment on the battlefields of Metz, Mars la Tour, Saint Privat and Sedan. For the Versailles of 1871 was a political agreement devoid of any mythical outlook on the world. The unconditionality of the great German idea which made Blücher declare that if kings did not wish the elevation of their people, then they should be driven out; which occasioned Stein to put before the king of Prussia the choice of either signing the proclamation To my people, or going to Spandau; this unconditionality was lacking in the generation after 1871. The latter gave itself up to economics, to world trade, became freemasonic humanistic, became sated, forgot the task of enlarging its living space, and collapsed, disintegrated by democracy, Marxism and humanitarianism. Only today has the hour of rebirth come.
The humility of the Christian church and freemasonic humanitarianism were two forms by which the idea of love was preached as the highest value to human groups which were to be directed from some ambitious centre of power. The fact that many teachers of Christian humility as well as liberal humanism had no such intention did not play any role at all; it is merely a question of how the value proclaimed was utilised. At the end of the 19th century the idea of love appeared in a third form which was presented to us by Bolshevism: in the Russian doctrine of suffering and sympathy, symbolised in the Dostoyevskian man.
In his Diary, Dostoyevski speaks quite openly of an absolute, deeply rooted longing, among Russians, for suffering, for continual suffering; suffering in everything, even in enjoyment. On the basis of this, his characters act and live. Therefore in sympathy also lies the strongpoint of Russian morality. The people know that a criminal acts sinfully, but: There are unexpressed ideas ..... the description of a criminal as an unfortunate must be included in these ideas which are inherent in the Russian people. This idea is a purely Russian one.
Dostoyevski is the magnifying glass of the Russian soul; through his personality one can read the whole of Russia in its often incomprehensible diversity. In fact, the conclusions which he draws from his confession of belief are just as characteristic as his reflections when judging the condition of the Russian soul. He remarked that this idea of suffering is closely linked with traits of the impersonal and subjected. The Russian suicide, for example, has not the shadow of doubt that the self to be killed could be an immortal one. At the same time, he is not an atheist in any way. He has apparently heard nothing at all about this: Consider the earlier atheists: when they had lost faith in one thing, they immediately began to believe passionately in another. Consider the beliefs of Diderot, Voltaire ..... Completely TABVLA RASA with ours; indeed, and why make mention of Voltaire here? There is simply a lack of money to keep a lover to himself, and nothing more.
To find this recognition existing in a man who only wished to live to one day see his people happy and educated, is alarming and is made greater by Dostoyevski’s remark that in Russia there is no one who does not tell lies. In fact, the most honourable people of all can lie. First of all, because truth seems to bore a Russian; but secondly, because we are all ashamed of ourselves, and each makes efforts to unconditionally show himself as something other than he is. And despite all longing for knowledge and truth the Russian is nevertheless badly equipped. But here the reverse side of subjugation is revealed: unbounded arrogance. The Russian:
Perhaps understands nothing at all about the questions which he undertakes to solve, but he does not feel ashamed and his conscience is calm. This lack of conscience gives proof of such an indifference in relation to self criticism, of such a lack of self respect, that one falls into despair and loses hope of the nation ever possessing anything independent or bringing salvation.
Lieutenant Pirogow, in full uniform, is struck by a German on the street. After he has made sure that no one could have witnessed the incident, Pirogow flees into a side alley, in order as hero of the salon to make a proposal of marriage that same evening to an aristocratic lady. The latter knew nothing about the cowardice of her lover. Do you believe that she would have accepted him if she had known? Answer: She would have done so unconditionally.
Several Russians are travelling in a railway train with Justus van Liebig, the great chemist who, however, is recognised by none of them. One of them who understands nothing about chemistry begins to talk with Liebig on this subject. He talks beautifully and at length until reaching his station when he takes his luggage and leaves the compartment proudly and enormously satisfied with himself. But the The Myth of the 20th Century 49
other Russians never doubted for a moment that the charlatan had triumphed in the debate.
Dostoyevski attributes this self abasement (linked with sudden arrogance) to the cultivation over two hundred years of a total lack of self reliance and to constant spitting into the Russian face during a similar period which brought the Russian conscience into catastrophic subjection. Today we are forced to make another judgement, that there is something unhealthy, sick, bastardised in Russian blood, which again and again frustrates all attempts to reach the heights. Psychologism is not the consequence of a strong spiritual life, but exactly the opposite, a sign of a crippling of soul. Just as a wounded man will again and again feel and look at his wound, so a man sick of soul will examine his inner conditions. In the Russian idea of suffering and subjection, the most powerful tension exists between the values of love and honour. In the entire west the idea of honour and freedom broke through again and again, in spite of burnings at the stake and papal interdicts. With the Russian man, such as he became almost a prophet around the turn of the 20th century—not the slightest role is played by honour as a formative power. Mitya Karamasov, who kicks and ill treats his father, abasing himself again afterwards, is not familiar with the idea, nor the brooding Ivan, nor Stara Sossima (one of the most beautiful figures of Russian literature), not to mention old Karamasov himself. Prince Myshkin plays the sick idiotic role of a man devoid of personality to conclusion with shattering power. Ragoshin is of dissolute passion, a European backbone is also lacking to him. Raskolnikov is inwardly unbalanced, Smerdyakov finally the concentration of everything slavish, devoid of upward longing. To the latter are joined all those gesticulating students and sick revolutionaries who talk with one another entire nights long, debate without knowing in the end about what they actually argued. These are allegories of a sick blood, of a poisoned soul.
Once Turgenev looked around in Russia for a model of power and uprightness for the hero of a novel. He found no one suitable and chose a Bulgarian whom he called Insarov. Gorki descended to the dregs of society, described the tramp devoid of will, without faith, or at most only with such as glimmered like the glow of phosphorus in rotten wood. Andreyev created the man who received boxes on the ear, and as men they all confirm the bitter recognition by Shaadayev, that Russia belongs neither to the west nor to the east, that it is not governed by an organically strong tradition of its own. The Russian is a world exception in that he has not introduced a single new idea into the multitude produced by mankind, and everything which he has received of progress has been distorted by him. The Russian admittedly moves, but on a crooked line, which does not lead to any goal, and he is like a small child which cannot think correctly.
As elaborated, this recognition also slumbered in Dostoyevski; the lack of personality consciousness had clearly been recognised by him. But the torment of longing to nevertheless present the world with something original sprang from his idea of universal mankind, which was apparently to be regarded as synonymous with Russia. It is Russia which has presented in its bosom the true image of Christ, with the ultimate destiny, when the peoples of the west have lost the way, of revealing a new path of salvation to them. Suffering, sorrowing mankind is a prophecy for the coming message of Russia.
Today it is clear that Dostoyevski’s despairing attempt fundamentally resembles the behaviour of the Russian whom he had placed opposite to Justus von Liebig: a broken soul, devoid of personality, who arrogates to himself the position of conqueror of the world.
Dostoyevski had success spiritually among all Europeans who had fallen into a tired weariness, with all bastards of the great city and—disregarding his anti Semitic outlook—with the Jewish literary world, which saw in his characters and in Tolstoy’s barren pacifism a further welcome means for the disintegration of the west. The artistic power of Dostoyevski is not under debate here, but the characters as such, which he created, and the accompanying environment. From now on, everything which was sick, broken and decayed was held to be human. The humbled and persecuted became heroes, epileptics were represented as being problems of deep concern to mankind, as unassailable like the decaying holy beggars of the middle ages or Simon Stylites. By this the conception of Germanic man was transformed into its opposite. What the west regards as human is a hero like Achilles or the creative struggling Faust; human is a power like the untiring Leonardo; human is a struggle such as Richard Wagner and Frederick the Great embodied. A clearing out must be performed once and for all of this Russian disease of representing criminals as unfortunates, and rotten decayed men as symbols of humanity. Even the Indian, upon whom many Russians call (in a false way) accepts his fate as self guilt, as guilt from an earlier life. In whatever manner one interprets this Indian doctrine of the migration of souls, it is aristocratic, and once originated from a courageous heart. But Dostoyevskian lamentation about the power of darkness is the helpless stammering of a poisoned blood. This decayed blood created its highest value in the longing for suffering, in humility, universal human love, and became hostile to nature, as triumphant Rome once did, until Europe managed to a certain extent to shake off this ascetic Egyptian African masochism.
It is ill fated that today ancient Greek love is described by the same word in so called Christian teaching, and Dostoyevski and Platon are even mentioned in the same breath. The Eros of Greece was a spiritual exuberance, linked always with creative feeling for Nature, and the divine Platon is a completely different figure from that presented to us by theologians and professors. From Homeros to Platon, nature and love have been one, just as the highest art in Hellas remained racially connected. But church love set itself up not only against all ideas of race and people, but it even went beyond this. Zeno the holy said in the fourth century A.D.: The greatest renown of Christian virtue is to trample with the feet upon Nature. The church has faithfully followed this dogma wherever it could assert it. The insulting of the body as unclean has lasted uninterrupted into our days, when nationalism and the racial idea are combated as pagan. The Imitation of Jesus—to attain which the devout rolled themselves in ashes, beat themselves with whips, went about in pus and sores, loaded themselves with iron chains, sat on a pillar for thirty years like Simon Stylites, or, like holy Thalelaeos, spent ten years clamped inside a wagon wheel, to pass the remainder of his life in a narrow cage—all this was a parallel to the abstract good of Sokrates, and to later Dostoyevskian man.
It is not unnatural love, not an unrealisable community of the good and faithful, not a universal humanity with decomposed blood, which has always had a creative effect in culture and art, but, as in Hellas, fruitful Eros and racial beauty, in Germania honour and the dynamic of race. Whoever disregards these laws is incapable of showing the way to a strong future for the Germanic west.
With Dostoyevski one can virtually touch with the hand his great holy will in its constant struggle with the forces of decline. While he praises Russian man as the signpost of the European future, he already sees Russia delivered up to demons. He knows in advance who will be master in the play of forces: Unemployed lawyers and insolent Jews. Kerensky and Trotsky are predicted. In the year 1917, Russian Man finally disintegrated. He fell into two parts. The Nordic Russian blood gave up the struggle, the eastern Mongolian, The Myth of the 20th Century 50
powerfully stirred up, summoned Chinese and desert peoples to its aid, Jews and Armenians pushed forward to leadership, and the Kalmuch Tartar Lenin became master. The demonry of this blood directed itself instinctively against everything which outwardly still had some honest effect, looked manly and Nordic, like a living reproach against a type of man whom Lothrop Stoddard rightly described as the underman. Out of the impotent love of earlier grew an epileptic attack, carried through politically with all the energy of the insane. Smerdyakov ruled over Russia. Irrespective of in whatever way the Russian experiment may develop, Bolshevism as ruler has only been possible as the consequence of a racially and spiritually sick national body which could not decide in favour of honour, but only of bloodless love. Whoever desires a new Germany, will, as a result, also reject the Russian temptation from himself along with its Jewish manipulation. The turning away from the latter is already occurring. The future will record the results.
When the world war broke out, the leading men of national outlook in Germany, who were afflicted with sickness, did not recognise destiny as consisting either in the honour and freedom of the people or in love, but in trade. This poisoning necessarily led to a crisis, to a bursting of the swollen pus. This occurred on November 9, 1918. The ensuing times proved that all the old parties and their leaders were rotten, useless for a new structure of our state. They were forced to talk of the people and yet thought only of economics; they spoke of the unity of the Reich and yet thought of profits; they carried on Christian politics and diligently feathered their own nests. The spiritual and political situation of our times is therefore the following:
The old Syrian Jewish eastern church system has dethroned itself: starting from a dogma which did not correspond to the laws of spiritual structure of the Nordic west, in the effort to push to one side the culture carrying and creating ideas of the Nordic race—honour, freedom and duty—or to become evangelistic, this process of poisoning has led many times to the gravest disasters. Today we recognise that the highest central values of the Roman and protestant churches, as a negative form of Christianity, do not correspond to our soul, that they stand in the way of the organic powers of the peoples determined by the Nordic race, that they have to make way for the latter, must allow themselves to be revalued in the sense of a Germanic Christianity. This is the meaning of the present search after religious truth.
The old nationalism is dead. Once, in 1813, it flared up, but since then it has more and more forfeited its unconditional nature; it became poisoned by bureaucratic dynasticism, industrial politics, stock exchange profit economy, typified, thanks to humanitarian stupidity, in the idealless townsman of the nineteenth century, and finally collapsed on November 9, 1918, when its supporters and representatives ran away before a few hordes of deserters and jail birds.