3. Monarchy and War

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Modern history is nothing but an inventory of bankruptcy declarations.

—Nicolas Gomez Davila

I

Monarchy is a form of government rarely well understood in North America. To many people in that part of the world, it seems by now a totally obsolete, childish institution. The surviving monarchies, after all, might still play a symbolic or even a psychological role, but not really a decisive political role. As a rationalist and as a liberal—in the worldwide and not in the American sense—I am also a monarchist, who realizes that, combined with Christianity and antiquity, monarchy was responsible for the rise and flowering of Western civilization, which by now is slowly assuming an almost global character penetrating the whole world.

Yet, modern man’s mind is political rather than historical and is, therefore, hopelessly tied to the spirit of his time. The words of Goethe:

Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben bleibt im Dunklen unerfahren mag von Tag zu Tag er leben.

[He who cannot give account of the last three thousand years rests in darkness unexperienced though he lives from day to day.]

Such a person, intellectually nurtured by the boob tube and newspapers, would be greatly surprised to hear a British prime minister, Disraeli, saying:

The tendency of an advanced civilization is in truth Monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilization for its full development.… An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called a representative government.¹

Democracy is, after all, the oldest form of government where majorities rule over minorities. It is still today preserved by aborigines in various parts of the globe. You can find the names of the ethnologists who have studied this phenomenon in some of my books.² Democracy reappeared in a more civilized form in Athens, but when Socrates, in a truly political trial,³ praised monarchy, he was condemned to death. Remember also that Madariaga said rightly that our civilization rests on the death of two persons: a philosopher and the Son of God, both victims of the popular will. No wonder that Plato, Socrates’s follower, and Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, were fierce monarchists and that the latter, when democracy returned to Athens, went into exile in order not to suffer the fate of Socrates. In accordance with these leading philosophers of antiquity, Thomas Aquinas maintained that democracy was the least bad of the three evil forms of government; ochlocracy and tyranny, he admitted, were even worse. Plato’s thesis that democracy naturally evolves into tyranny was also adopted by Polybius, who believed in an anakyklosis, a natural circular evolutionary process from monarchy into aristocracy, aristocracy into democracy, democracy into tyranny. Indeed, reading Plato’s Republic, Books viii–ix, one gets an exact description of the transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialist tyranny.

The historically conscious observer realizes not only that countries like Great Britain, Spain, or the Netherlands, which today are monarchies, went through republican periods. Greece and Mexico, today republics, had already twice been monarchies. Still, the most “educational” case is that of Rome. If we had the opportunity— given also our knowledge of history—to meet a Roman citizen in the sixtieth year before Christ and told him that his country soon would become a monarchy, he certainly would have reacted most vigorously, blaming us for totally ignoring the Roman tradition and mentality. Monarchy? A return to the authoritarianism of Tarquinius Superbus? Out of the question! Yet Caesar already loomed beyond the horizon. Now, if we had the chance to meet with one of his descendants in the year 260 after Christ and told him of his ancestor’s indignation about our naïveté and arrogance, he certainly would have shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, he was right.” “But in the meantime?” “In the meantime? We still are a republic. Look at signs everywhere saying SENATUS POPULUSQUE ROMANUS! A monarchy? As among Orientals and barbarians? Out of the question!” “But you have an Emperor!” “Haha! Imperator means general and there always have been generals in republics!” Yet a few years later, Diocletian, the Imperator Augustus, had a golden crown put on his head and demanded proskynesis, the kneeling approach to his person. Then even the most stupid Romans realized that the republic had gone the way of all flesh. Tacitus, indeed, had suspected it a long time before.

There are still outstanding thinkers who have a deep respect for the monarchical order, for rational as well as sentimental motives. Yet even the rationalist has to take the psychological factor into his calculations—or he would cease to be a realistic rationalist. As a matter of fact, the increasing democratization of Western civilization has fostered “monarchophile” thinking although only on a rather high level. Thus it is not surprising that Theodor Herzl, founder of Zionism, had declared monarchy to be the best form of government, but since no descendants of David survived, the aristocratic constitution of Venice should be studied in the planning of a “Jewish State,” whereas democracy, as the worst type of rule, was to be strictly avoided.⁴ History is already telling us how right he was.

This introduction is necessary to understand the relationship between monarchy and war, monarchy and warfare, yet we are limiting ourselves here to the Christian monarchy in our civilization and not discussing some abstract form of monocracy. (Bear in mind that arche is not kratos.) We have indeed to remember the words of Nicolas Gomez Davila, that, without Christianity and antiquity as their background, Europeans would be nothing but palefaced barbarians.⁵ Nor should we forget that war is a calamity to be avoided, one of many results of our imperfections due to Original Sin—even if soldiers, by and large, play a positive role in the New Testament. Many of our saints—from St. Francis to St. Ignatius—have fought in battles. Still, eliminating, or, at least, limiting, war should be one of the goals to be achieved historically in our time or in the future.

II

The First Enlightenment produced the French Revolution, the great historical revival of democracy, a sadistic sex orgy in which indeed the “Divine Marquis” played personally⁶ and intellectually a leading role. It is not here the place to portray the revolution’s unspeakable horrors, which to a broader public were revealed only in the years preceding its two hundredth anniversary in 1989.⁷ But in order to explain its effects on wars and the methods of warfare, it is necessary to highlight its character and role in history. It wanted to bring liberty and equality under a common denominator, something Goethe considered only charlatans would promise.⁸ Equality, indeed, could merely be established in some form of slavery—just as a hedge can only be kept even by constantly trimming it. In this perverse competition between liberty and equality, the latter naturally won out.

Robespierre, before being dragged to notre chère mère la guillotine, had planned to put all Frenchmen into one uniform and all Frenchwomen into another. He also wanted to eliminate all church steeples as “undemocratic,” since they were taller than all other buildings.⁹

The revival of democracy from antiquity, with its ideal of equality, was closely connected with “nationalism,” a term understood by most Europeans as what in America might be called ethnicism (not to be confused with racism, which is not a linguistic-cultural but a biological concept). The basic drive we are alluding to is the craving for sameness, the twin of equality. (Whatever is the same is also equal, but not the other way around!) Differences after 1789 became suspect and were to be rejected, eradicated.

The traditional outlook of our culture, indeed, was vertical: God-Father in Heaven, the Holy Father in Rome, the king as the Father of the Fatherland, and the father as the king in the family. (In the lands of the Reformation, the monarch, not the pope, was the head of the Church.) Connected with the fathers figured the mothers—from the Regina Coeli down to the queens and the various matriarchs.

The new order now was increasingly flattened out until it became horizontal. Of course, not the people as such could rule, but the majority over the minority, and numbers assumed immense importance.¹⁰ Even truth became a matter of majorities, and the bigger the majority, the “truer” the right answer. The ideal was the consent, the affirmation by the majority— finally achieving almost a totality.¹¹ Hence also the totalitarian root of democracy, which stands for the “politization” of the entire people. Even the children, although not voting, are now educated in that direction.

It is obvious that the new order could tolerate no estates, and soon, the demand arose to eliminate social differences based on wealth and income rather than only on birth. For this development, one did not have to wait for Karl Marx. In 1794, the popular ire also turned against the rich, and some already were guillotined just for that reason. Needless to say, the new horizontalism also conflicted with the Christian tradition, which emphatically does not stand for equality.¹²

In the French schoolbooks, one can read “La terreur était terrible, mais grande”—”the Terror was terrible, but grand”— which, in view of our bottomless human stupidity, one nice day one even might say about German National and Russian International Socialism. Most of our contemporaries assume that the victims of the guillotine were largely degenerate aristocrats¹³ and that the final benefits of the revolution were greater than the damages or losses the French suffered. Yet only a few years before the celebration of its 200th anniversary in 1989, a flood of well-documented books came out which tore the mask away from the face of that godless event. Already in 1986, the French Deputy Bernard Antony warned the European Parliament in Strassburg not to celebrate “1789,” since it had bred National and International Socialism.¹⁴ About that time came the revelations of François Furet, Simon Schama and, above all, of Reynald Secher, for whose terrifying volume Professor Jean Meyer wrote in his preface that the worst and most nauseating atrocities could not even be mentioned.¹⁵ We are told that in this sadistic sex orgy, pregnant women were squeezed out in fruit- and winepresses, mothers and their children were slowly roasted to death in bakers’ ovens, and women’s genitals were filled with gun powder and brought to explosion. We cannot continue to dwell on these unspeakable horrors and should not be surprised that Sade was invoked in whose pornographic writings long passages are devoted to philosophical (and antireligious) reflections. The infamies and cruelties of the French Revolution were of such a low nature that the National and International Socialists appear in comparison to these democrats as sheer humanitarians. In the number of victims, however, they could not beat them, since the world has technically “progressed” after 1789 and now offers greater possibilities for mass murder. The 1989 celebrations of the French Revolution concentrated unilaterally on the “Declaration of Human Rights” (in the shadow of the guillotine!) and did not even mention the fall of the Bastille with its most unsavory details.¹⁶

The invention of the guillotine was psychologically a step in the “new direction:” the mechanization of swift murder. Yet the French Revolution left behind something much worse than the guillotine because it was permanent: the radical change in the nature of wars which made this human calamity more extensive and intensive: la levée des masses, conscription.

III

The social pyramid in the new horizontalism was now upturned and quantity, not quality had its day. Everybody had the same rights—a truly microscopic share in decisions, effective only if it contributed to a majority—and also the same obligations. One could vote for a representative, but, in turn, a male had the duty to defend his country (or to participate in its aggressions), which might mean drudgery in barracks, captivity, wounds, mutilation, or even death—indeed, a very bad deal. The draftee almost ceased to be a real person as he was dragged out of his privacy and became an “individual,” a term which really means only the last indivisible part of a collective whole.¹⁷ Hyppolite Taine described the results of this return to the stage of primitive tribes with these ringing words, taken from his Origines de la France contemporaine:

One puts in the hands of each adult a ballot, but on the back of each a soldier a knapsack: with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the Twentieth Century, with what exasperation of ill will and distrust, with what loss of wholesome effort, by what a perversion of productive discoveries, accompanied by what an improvement in the means of destruction, by what recoil toward the inferior and unhealthy forms of the old combative societies, by what a backward step toward egoistic and brutal instincts, toward the sentiments, manner and morality of ancient cities and barbaric tribes, we know all too well.¹⁸

One of the most immediate and degrading consequences of the general military service in the time of war was the “indoctrination” of the draftee. They were in their vast majority innocent and largely even unwilling civilians whose enthusiasm for fighting and killing was very limited. So they were taught to hate the enemy, degraded to the impersonation of wickedness, ugliness, and devoid of all virtue. This had been different in previous ages, when soldiers were men—gentlemen as well as ruffians—who loved to fight and offered their services to anybody who led and paid them well. Prince Eugene of Savoy had vainly offered his services to France, but ended up as the glorious military hero of the Habsburgs. The same happened finally to Baron Gideon Loudon (Laudon), born in Livonia but of Scottish origin, whose father was an officer in the Swedish services. Loudon, however, served first in the Russian army, then offered his experience to Frederick II of Prussia; yet, rebuffed by him, Loudon joined the largely Austrian army of the holy Roman emperor—and defeated Frederick in battle. Such switches were rare in my own time, but not unheard of.¹⁹

Since right into the middle of the nineteenth century the vast majority of the “recruits” had only a very scant education—mass illiteracy prevailed for generations—they had to serve a long time in the army, frequently three, sometimes four years. Those who had bachelor’s degrees (age group 18 to 19 years) served only one year, and received commissions and became reserve officers. The idea was to have trained soldiers under arms as well as in a reserve capacity, periodically called to maneuvers. The loss of time for all was considerable.

Yet if one major power adopted that system it literally forced other countries (on the same continent), in order not to be outnumbered, to do exactly the same. And since the European monarchies in Europe had painfully experienced the numerical superiority of the French armies in the Napoleonic wars and—as “constitutional” monarchies—were drifting into the democratic cauldron, they too now were victims of a phenomenon called “militarism,” resulting in the “Armed Horde.” England, relying on its “splendid isolation,” was an exception from the rule, but the United States, politically already a victim of the “French School,” drafted in the War Between the States not only its citizens, but even the foreigners on its soil. Although these could not vote, they earned money, and thus, cash was redeemed by blood. Voluntary military service is a different matter. On a lower level, it might rely on the desire to fight;²⁰ on a higher one, on the fascination of army life;²¹ on the highest, on the wish to defend one’s country or bring to life a great ideal.²²

In the book from which we quoted Taine, the American author Hoffman Nickerson wrote:

During the last century and a half civilization has recreated the armed horde. Previously a rarity, it has become the accepted instrument of any great military effort. It has not however come alone. Exactly a hundred fifty years ago in 1789—shortly after the United States had sought to protect themselves against democracy by their Federal Constitution—the French Revolution began. From that time to our day democratic ideas have come to dominate politics just as the mass army has dominated war. It is the thesis of this book that the two are inseparably connected with each other and with a third thing, barbarism.²³

IV

The nineteenth century compromise of monarchy with democracy was also symbolized by the fact that the monarchs appeared in military uniforms and figured prominently as heads of the army. The horizontal-identitarian order assumed an increasingly “national” (ethnic) character and the general tendency was toward the ethnically unified state. We were faced by “Pan-Germanism,” by “Pan-Italianism” (the Risorgimento movement), even by “Pan-Slavism,” which transcended the “minor” ethnic boundaries.²⁴ Hand in hand with this evolution, we see in the German-speaking and Slavic areas the rise of collective gymnastic movements, cultivating a violent nationalistic spirit and manifesting themselves in gigantic “synchronized” performances.²⁵ This physical training also implied a paramilitary aim to impress the public with numbers.²⁶ Here we have undoubtedly one of the psychological roots of national socialism. The Communists, too, loved synchronized uniformed mass performances. Horizontalism asserted itself visually.

This is part of the nineteenth century’s still “mixed” transformation. Needless to say that the new ideal, the ethnically uniform state, is more in harmony with “militarization” than the ethnically mixed state—and also for the development of parliamentary institutions. Mark Twain has given us an account of parliamentary life in Vienna,²⁷ and John Stuart Mill has insisted that democracy is problematic in a multilingual state²⁸—no wonder, since totalitarian institutions need linguistic uniformity. Added to this is the fact that the ethnic majority, through its party (or parties), seeks to rule democratically, but not in a liberal way, over the minorities. (Multilinguality in a parliament as well as in an army creates enormous difficulties.) Hence also the hostility of the French Revolution toward the use of non-French languages in the Republic. The rise of democracy and of ethnic nationalism went in synchro-mesh. These two “horizontal” mass movements easily combined in the name of the demos. It is significant that the armed forces of the red “German Democratic Republic” were the conscripted and ideologically drilled National Volksarmee, the “National People’s Army,” in whose name the term “people” appears in two forms. Yet when the monarchist nobleman Charles de Gaulle proposed to the Socialist Leon Blum to transform the French Army into an armée du métier, a purely professional army consisting of volunteers, his plan (as a rightist undemocratic trick) was immediately rejected. Such an army could be easily mobilized against the dear people and might develop an esprit de corps, which would be fully “undemocratic.”

V

We spoke already about the “indoctrination” of draftees which, naturally, becomes very important in a time of war. An even greater evil is the fact that, since the recruits are taken from the population at large, the people itself has to be indoctrinated, in other words, made to hate the enemy collectively. For this purpose governments invoke in modern times the support of the mass media, which will inform the people about the evil of the enemy—with little or no regard to the truth. The attack will be launched in three directions: stressing the wickedness and inferiority of the hostile nation and the evil deeds committed by its armed forces, who consist of cowards, a low breed recruited from a fiendish people.

In World War I, the Western Allies, being more democratic, were also more skilled in organizing collective hatreds. Taking advantage of the stupidity of the masses (everywhere!), they could print almost anything and even the silliest accounts were readily believed, for instance, that German soldiers cut off the hands of Belgian babies. A Dutchman, Louis Raemaekers, produced in the service of the Allies incredibly nauseating etchings, depicting atrocities committed by the German armies. One of the worst showed a naked French girl crucified and spat upon by bespectacled, unshaven German soldiers. Nothing like it was manufactured by the Central Powers.²⁹ Georges Bernanos described in a memorable book the idiocies of French war propaganda in that period. According to Bernanos, the French were told that the German bodies on the battlefield emitted a worse stench than those of the French, and that the Germans were ridiculous cowards and did not even dare to interrupt the cozy life of the French poilus in their trenches. It was deceitful propaganda of the worst kind.³⁰ (Yet, during the French mutinies in 1917, whole battalions were “decimated,” i.e., every 10th man executed. So the war was not so entertaining or cozy at all.)

Naturally, World War I was no longer a cabinet-war between monarchs, but already what the Germans called a Völkerringen, a war between nations, at least up to 1917, when the Russian monarchy fell and made America’s entry politically feasible. Then it became an ideological crusade “to make the world safe for democracy,” as we had experienced already at the end of the eighteenth century, when France challenged Europe ideologically. It was interesting to see how the “tensions” were different on the two fronts—East and West. In the East, it was still until 1917 a fight among three emperors, and this was the reason why the old style there somehow survived and continued on a higher level. It was still a war between gentlemen,³¹ a fact evident not only at the front, but even in the homelands. In Russia, craftsmen and tradesmen among the prisoners were often released, and, until the Bolsheviks took over, they earned money very nicely. “Enemy aliens” were jailed in Britain, France, Italy, and Germany, but not in Austria.³² My family lived for half a year in an Austrian prison camp, where my father installed and ran an X-ray station, and we children loved the (mostly Russian) prisoners with whom we played. (They taught us the Cyrillic alphabet.) Then we lived nearly two years in Baden near Vienna, the headquarters of the Austro-Hungarian army, where I sported a British sailor’s suit with a ribbon on my cap inscribed “H.M.S. Renown.” We also had a French governess and spoke French with her in the streets. Mutatis mutandis something of the sort would have been unthinkable in the more “progressive” (and therefore more debased) West. After the fall of our great fortress Przemyst (it was starved into surrender), the Russian officers invited their Austro-Hungarian colleagues to a banquet, where they toasted each other. I know of an Austrian officer who, made a prisoner, handed to the Russians his calling card.³³ I had fun once after a lecture in America during a debate. A professor, a real leftist jerk with long hair, dark glasses, and jeans, complained that he could not understand my term “a gentlemen’s war.” “Of course, you couldn’t,” was my reaction. One can imagine the hilarity of the students.

VI

A war between entire nations developing into an ideological crusade—the word “crusade” has near-religious implications— was bound to assume total and totalitarian features. Anatole France realized this very well.³⁴ The “totalitarians” could kindle the fervor of their soldiers more easily, because they operated in a highly authoritarian framework. (This also explains why the German army fought for well over two years—1942–1945—in a hopelessly defensive rear action.) Yet the hate propaganda of the “democracies” was partly very successful. Thus (mixed with racist motives), the United States decided to put the West Coast’s entire foreign as well as American population of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps (which the British had invented during the Boer War). There were among them U.S. citizens with only one Japanese grandparent, looking like “Caucasians,” and not speaking a word of Japanese.³⁵ And after the final mass surrender of German soldiers in May 1945, they were not treated as ordinary war prisoners protected by the Hague Convention, but as DEF (“Disarmed Enemy Forces”) and were dealt with miserably. They were starved and suffered enormous losses—possibly even a million.³⁶ Indignation about the German concentration camps, however, played only a minor role in this “policy,” because the facts were largely not believed. People remembered the lies spread about the Germans during World War I.³⁷

Upon entering the Age of the Armed Horde, wars inevitably took on new forms and another character. The idea was no longer to outmaneuver the enemy and just to win battles, but— since this was a war between peoples and ideologies—to kill as many enemies as possible, whereby wars assumed an “exterminatory” character. The mercenaries of the past belonged to different nationalities and, once they “signed up,” could be employed for different reasons and operations by their employer or even “traded” in to another one. He who sells himself can also be sold to somebody else.³⁸

Since wars had evolved very democratically from clashes between crowned heads to conflicts between masses of people, entire nations became collectively enemies of other nations. Therefore, wars could at long last be waged against civilians, not only against beleaguered cities, but against entire populations—men, women, and children. And since technology had progressed, it now had become possible to attack the hinterland of the enemy: villages and cities. Aviation had done the trick.

The French, pioneers in aviation, made a beginning in World War I by bombing a Corpus Christi procession in Karlsruhe and killing children, but the Germans followed up and dropped bombs from their Zeppelins on British cities and fired artillery missiles from a very long distance (80 miles) on Paris. Frenchmen had to die, regardless of age and sex. And this seemed all right. Europe had fallen as low as all that.

Curiously enough, it was the Third Reich (although planning aggressive wars) which desired to ban aerial warfare except on well-defined battlefronts. In 1935, the Germans, wanting a pact outlawing war on civilians in the hinterland, suggested this to Great Britain, which at that time had a Labour government. However, the offer for such a pact was turned down on the ground that all efforts to humanize war would make wars more acceptable and would thus be a blow to the noble cause of pacifism. Actually, all important British authors confirm the thesis that in World War II the aerial warfare à outrance was started, willed, and perfected by the democracies, not by the National Socialists. German attacks outside of the actual war zone were always retaliations. Some British authors merely shamefacedly admitted this fact; others boasted of it.³⁹ Above all, Mr. Churchill.⁴⁰

General J.F.C. Fuller stated rightly that “it was Mr. Churchill who lit the fuse which detonated a war of devastation and terrorization unrivaled since the invasion of the Seldjuks.”⁴¹ It reached its all-time high with the destruction of Dresden, the German Florence, with a loss of 204,000 lives⁴² and the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁴³ Although the Japanese had twice desperately asked for armistice conditions—in April 1945 through the Vatican and in July via Moscow—the answer was only the infamous and idiotic “unconditional surrender” formula. (The American people knew nothing about this, and during that period, not only thousands of Japanese died in vain but also innumerable American “boys.”) The hatred generated by propaganda heated up the horizontal-collective mentality to such a degree that the war in the Pacific assumed, in the words of American Socialist leader Norman Thomas, the character of a militarily organized race riot.

The racist aspect of that war received a very concrete expression in a memorable incident: an American soldier sent President Roosevelt a paper-knife, made of the thighbone of a Japanese soldier killed in action. The president wrote him a letter of thanks and expressed his hope to get more such presents. This piece of news reached the Japanese, whereupon Ken Harada, Japanese ambassador at the Vatican, decided to protest via Roman channels. The president then changed his mind and promised to give his paper-knife a dignified burial. Could one imagine one of the crowned heads of Europe engaged in a similar “incident”? Francis Joseph using a thighbone of a Prussian grenadier as a paper-knife? Or Queen Victoria in such a delicate way the keybone of a Boer sharpshooter? Only a paramount chief on the Upper Ubangi might have acted similarly.

An even graver evidence of sheer gorillism appeared in the bombing of a Gestapo center in the Hague that killed 800 Dutch, or, even worse, the “carpet-bombing” of Le Havre just prior to its liberation but after the evacuation by the Germans, with more than 3,500 victims. De Gaulle in London was outraged, but the British-American Allies justified themselves saying: “We really thought that the Gerries were still in the city!” Thereupon de Gaulle really hit the ceiling. Butchering 3,500 Frenchmen just to get a few Germans!⁴⁴ He went to Le Havre for their burial, heading the cortege with the clergy.

Nor was there any respect for the cultural treasures of the Old World. In World War I, the Germans were accused of having shelled Reims Cathedral (with the excuse that observers were hidden in the spire) and having willfully burned down parts of Louvain-Leuwen because civilians had fired on their troops. But World War II was far more “progressive,” which means that Europe and North America had declined for the last 200 years under “populist” rule and had reached the cultural and ethical level of Dahomey’s Glegle or Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada.⁴⁵ The raids over Germany were called “Baedecker-Raids” because, fearing for their safety, the Allied planes flew very high and emptied their freight more or less in the historic centers of the cities, destroying the most beautiful buildings whereas the industrial war production had suffered astonishingly little. So the hearts of Frankfurt, Munich, Nuremberg, Hamburg, and Bremen were all in shambles, but not the industrial establishments surrounding them. (Some Allied spokesmen explained that one wanted to “hit” the workers’ dwellings while others thought that annihilating German “Kultur” destroyed Nazi arrogance!) Yet that blood orgy contributed very little to Allied victory. IG-Farben and other big enterprises functioned to the bitter end.

One of the worst and most idiotic feats was the destruction of the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino in Italy by the American army. The Allies had been informed that there were no German troops inside. Since the building remained intact, a hue and cry was raised in the United States that to spare the monastery would mean to be yielding to “Roman Catholic interests” at the cost of American lives. “Our boys” would have to die just to please the pope! Finally the military yielded in order to bolster the “home front.” The vox populi should not be thwarted, and a political, not a military, decision was made—the old building went down in fire and ashes. Thereupon it became safe for the Germans to occupy the ruins, whereas to defend a huge solidly structured building under artillery fire would have been suicidal. Now the American soldiers faced an enemy much better entrenched and protected by the rocks of the destroyed abbey. No falling walls could bury them. The Allied losses became now much bigger. And so were those of the poor betrayed Poles who had to fight with them, but “public opinion” was satisfied: the war was fought democratically.⁴⁶

Yet what did some of the American soldiers think of the frequently irreparable losses of architectural beauty? An officer stationed near Benevento, asked whether he had any misgivings, replied to an American journalist: “There’s nothing what can be done about it—Italy is just lousy with clerical monuments.”

Most unfortunately, World War II had also another fatal aspect: the resistance movement, enthusiastically applauded by the “public” of the Western Alliance. An exception has to be made for the Polish Armia Kraiowa, as well for Jewish fighters, because the national like the international socialists wanted to deprive them of their upper classes or to exterminate them altogether.⁴⁷ With no legal armies for their defense, they had the moral right to fight in order to protect their very existence.⁴⁸ Yet, as in other countries, the occupying army had no other means to combat these sly attackers but to take hostages and shoot them. Nations not completely democratized did not engage in such activities, and only too often “Resisters” were former collaborators who, sensing that the Third Reich was a sinking ship, changed sides.⁴⁹ Obviously, the French Resistancebecame truly active only after the collapse of the National-International Alliance. There had been a predecessor of the civilian Resistance—after France became a republic in 1870— in the form of the franc-tireurs, entirely in keeping with the rising horizontalism. One used to have naturally no right to participate in a war without wearing the “king’s coat.” The alternative was to sink down to the level of savages. This was somewhat different in the case of the Balkans where after 50 years of Turkish rule the Christian tradition had been broken and one went to war “collectively,” as we painfully experienced in two world wars.⁵⁰ First we had the nationalistic komitadjis, then the ideological partizani.

VII

One of the worst results of the democratization of wars was and remains the difficulty in terminating a war by peace or, at least, by lengthy periods of peace, because in a slowly democratized or fully democratic order, having fought with conscripted soldiers, one is governed largely by representatives of the people, by men who do not think historically, but politically. Of history, economics, cultural mentalities, and geography they know nothing. Moreover, they think “personally,” not dynastically. What do they have primarily in mind? The weal of their grand- and great-grandchildren or the winning of the next election? The returning soldiers, too, if they have been fighting on the winning side, want to see the fruits of their sufferings and yearn for a “peace” with maximum gains for their country. (Mercenaries thought otherwise. They had their next job in mind.)

Moreover, generosity is a virtue more frequently found in the small top layers than among the masses. It takes, after all, intelligence to suspect that generosity very often pays while egotism does not. Fenelon, in a brilliant book, exhorted the Dauphin:

Peace treaties are meaningless if you are the stronger one and if you force your neighbor to sign a treaty to avoid greater evil; then he signs in the same way as a person who surrenders his purse to a brigand who points his pistol at his throat.⁵¹

Yet already in the nineteenth century, in which we witnessed the democratization of (“constitutional”) monarchies, we see that the warning of Fenelon was increasingly ignored. The German drive for unification and the Italian Risorgimento offered opportunities to annex entire countries and to make dynasties homeless. In this respect, the Italians made the start. The sovereigns of Modena, Parma, Tuscany, and the Bourbons of both Sicilies had to quit. After the liberation of Sleswig-Holstein from Danish rule by the German League, the legitimate heirs were not allowed to take over their inheritance. The situation was made worse by the outcome of the German-Prussian War of 1866,⁵² which ended with Prussia’s incorporation not only of Sleswig-Holstein, but also of Hesse-Nassau, the Imperial City of Frankfurt and, by no means last, the Kingdom of Hanover.⁵³ This was the policy of Bismarck, who had started his life as a typical Prussian conservative and a devout Lutheran Christian, but who became a German nationalist and a “National Liberal” who soon after the establishment of the German Empire (the “Second Reich”) initiated as a “nationalistic progressivist” the Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church.⁵⁴

Yet the real break came with the end of World War I, which, as we said, changed from a War between Nations into an ideological “Crusade to Make the World Safe for Democracy.” By 1900, Europe had only two democratic republics (France and Switzerland), a form of government then represented on this globe largely by South and Central American nations “enriched” in 1910 and 1912 by Portugal and China.⁵⁵ The great victory of democracy in Central Europe—its triumph in Russia lasted only seven months—and the disappearance of the three emperors—created a new scene. The democrats expected to fashion the “peace” democratically, i.e., by the consent of the majority of the voters in the victorious nations. Of course, if we look at the Fourteen Points of Wilson,⁵⁶ the defeated should have expected the principle of self-determination applied even to them, but this lovely document had merely been a bait for surrender, like the mockery of the Atlantic Charter. Since the victors were the democracies, the “treaties” were not treaties but dictates that had to please the voters at home. Since these had been taught to “hate the enemy,” the dictates were in reality voted for (even if indirectly) by the agitated masses. In Britain, we had the famous “Khaki Election,” an orgy of demagoguery in which Lloyd George promised to ruin the German middle class through exorbitant reparations, to make Germany pay “so that the pips squeak,” and to “hang the Kaiser.”

George F. Kennan has said very rightly that our evils nearly all go back to World War I, not to the fighting, but to the “outcome.” I would name four reasons for his thesis: the American intervention which artificially prolonged the war and prevented a compromise peace;⁵⁷ the combination of national combat with an ideological crusade, thus aggravating the issue; the mountainous historical, geographic, economic, and psychological ignorance of the politicians who naturally (thinking only of elections) wanted to please the voters; and the intellectual vacuum of the dear people whose emotions had been whipped up to the nth degree.

The bad taste of a Bismarck, who organized the celebrations for the establishment of the Second Reich in Versailles, was now imitated by these clowns who prepared the humiliation of the German Reich in the Mirror Hall of the same building. There, as in the far more important dictates of St. Germain-en-Laye and Trianon, were laid the foundations of the Third Reich and World War II with an admirable foresight and loving care in all details. Needless to say that the Versailles treaty did tremendous harm in Germany internally, but it hardly changed the map of Europe. It was the destruction of the Habsburg Empire that made Germany the geopolitical winner of World War I. Bordering after 1919 on only one great power—France—it was now the direct or indirect neighbor in the East of partly artificial, partly militarily indefensible states. As His Magnificence, the rector of Breslau University, Ernst Kornemann, pointed out in 1926, the time to take advantage of this advantageous situation would come sooner or later. And it came. What Hitler actually inherited from these nincompoops who had dictated the Paris Suburban treaties was not only an internal situation characterized by the economic uprooting of important social layers and the imposition of an unworkable form of government,⁵⁸ but also a uniquely profitable geopolitical position due to the division of Austria-Hungary.⁵⁹ If Hitler had had any sense of humor, he would have erected a colossal monument to Woodrow Wilson.⁶⁰

Looking back at these happenings, John Maynard Keynes, who assisted Lloyd George at these conferences, could write that

The Carthaginian Peace is not practically right and possible.… The Clock cannot be set back … without setting up such strains in the European structure and letting loose such human and spiritual forces as, pushing beyond frontiers and races, will overwhelm not only you and your “guarantees,” but your institutions and the existing order of your Society.⁶¹

Well, one of these “guarantees” was the League of Nations, which Compton Mackenzie called “a typist’s dream of the Holy Roman Empire” and which the Congress of the United States refused to join.⁶² Still, there is no doubt that general satisfaction reigned in the nations of the victors—not only among Americans, British, French, and Italians, but also among the Czechs, Rumanians, and Serbs.⁶³ However, intelligent Poles, seeing their country buffeted between Germany and the Soviet Union, remained skeptical.⁶⁴ Yet “history,” always immensely brutal, might have said to the defeated: “Since you were disloyal to your better self, to your heritage and traditions, you will serve not emperors but exterminators in abject slavery, pitiless megalomaniacs, who will force you back to another slaughter!” And to the victors, she would say: “Profiting from your huge superiority in men and wealth, you have abused your triumph and have paid dearly not only with men, women and children but moreover lost your worldwide prestige and possessions!”

Looking back to World War I, the old democratic enthusiasm for extending the great ideals of the French Revolution reappears,⁶⁵ even at the price of enormous bloodshed, because democracy means to simple spirits “freedom from rule”—from above or from the outside. When a compromise peace was in the offing, the democratic idealists went up in arms. The “Left hand of Wilson” in foreign politics, George D. Herron, preferred even a Prussian victory to a compromise peace—which to him meant aristocracy, the Ruhr barons, the Catholic Church, and the Habsburgs and “would break God’s heart,” whereas even after a triumph of the Hohenzollerns, the nations “still might awake after a long baleful night to cosmic intimacy and infinite knowledge.”⁶⁶ Herron was greatly admired by Wilson, who made him his go-between in Europe during the war and thus gave him the opportunity to torpedo the Austrian peace effort in February 1918 because it would have meant the political survival of the Habsburgs.⁶⁷ Yet, if you have conscription, the lives of soldiers are of little value—they are easily replaceable. The same holds true for the rebuff suffered by the secret German Right before the outbreak of World War II (the Halder-Beck conspiracy) and then during the war of their efforts through Dr. Bell, the bishop of Chichester, who begged in vain to get the cooperation of Winston Churchill.⁶⁸

The Germans had to sign the “treaty” in Versailles because the hunger blockade worked like thumbscrews. The hope for a liberal democracy in Russia had been snuffed out by the radical Social Democrats, the so-called Bolsheviks, and thus Russia no longer was a “fit partner in a league of honor,” as Wilson had greeted the rule of Alexander Kerensky. (The New Russia, the “Socialist Fatherland,” had 20 years later the delightful chance to start World War II jointly with the National Socialists.)

Had the European monarchs ever tried to enforce monarchism either in the Second or the Third French Republic, in Brazil after the fall of the monarchy, or in Portugal in 1910? No, because there is no such thing as “monarchism.” Democracy as democratism is a gnostic ideology, hell-bent on “saving the world.”⁶⁹ Monarchy is “familistic.” The family is something natural. It needs no philosophical impulses. It represents no secular religion.

Yet to make people happy (after one’s own fashion) requires sometimes a little and occasionally even a lot of pressure. In February 1914, Mr. Wilson thought that the Mexicans would be much happier if they imitated politically the United States, which in turn had imitated France.⁷⁰ This worried Sir Edward Grey, British foreign minister. A curious dialogue developed between Grey and the American ambassador, Walter Hines Page. The theme was the Mexican reluctance to adopt a full-fledged democracy, which the United States, after all, had fostered and abetted in Mexico even before the days they had supported Benito Juarez, the murderer of Emperor Maximilian.⁷¹ And such was the exchange of opinions:

	Grey:	Suppose you have to intervene, what then?
	Page:	Make ‘em vote and live by their decisions.
	Grey:	But suppose they will not so live?
	Page:	We’ll go in again and make’em vote again.
	Grey:	And keep this up for 200 years?
	Page:	Yes. The United States will be here for 200 years and it can continue to shoot them for that little space till they learn to vote and rule themselves.72

With that unsophisticated mentality, the “young democracies” were forced to “enjoy” self-government, to rave about their “new republican liberty.”⁷³ This wording reminds one of the Napoleonic conquerors of the Tyrol and the spirit in which the Suburban Paris treaties were dictated.⁷⁴ France had drowned Europe in blood during the 1795–1815 period. Yet at the Congress of Vienna, its delegates were received in great honor, the language of the sessions and discussions was French and France left the conference tables—slightly enlarged.⁷⁵ There was no cry to “Hang the Empereur!” nor was there a “public” whose animal craving for revenge had to be satisfied.

VIII

Of course, it would be naive to think that wars in the truly monarchical period of our Christian history were a pleasant pastime. Wars were not infrequent, and the discipline among the mercenaries was miserable. Occupied cities had to pay contributions, taking booty was accepted, marauding soldiers were a plague. It was only in the eighteenth century that wars had assumed a civilized character.⁷⁶ The fact that the generals belonged to noble families helped greatly. They had the right upbringing, and Europe’s aristocracy was internationally related—although not to the extent of the royal-imperial families.⁷⁷ In judging the character of their enemies, they certainly were never influenced by the mass media. One cannot imagine Marlborough being moved by the editorials in London’s Daily Courant … as President Kennedy was by David Halberstam of the New York Times.

The monarchs, however, were not only an international, but also an interracial breed, a great advantage also to nations they ruled, because it gave them a certain distance from their subjects, whom thus they could judge more objectively. In 1909, the only genuinely native sovereign dynasties in Europe were the Petrovic-Njegos in Montenegro and the Karagjorgjevic in Serbia, certainly not the most important or distinguished ones. The House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ruled in Saxe-Coburg, Great Britain,⁷⁸ Belgium, Portugal, and Bulgaria; the Holstein-Gattorps in Russia, where the real Romanovs had died out with Peter II; the Bourbons in Spain; the Alemannic Hohenzollerns in Prussia and Rumania; the Sonderburg-Gluecksburg-Augustenburgs in Denmark, Norway, and Greece; the Nassaus in the Netherlands and in Luxembourg; the Swiss-Lotharingian Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary; and the (French) Savoys in Italy. They all descended from Muhammad,⁷⁹ from Charlemagne, had a drop of Jewish blood,⁸⁰ and looking at the motherline of Maria Theresia one comes to Kumanian (Turk-Tatar) princes.⁸¹

It is true that the Reformation raised a wall between the Catholic and “Protestant” families, but it was sometimes broken.⁸² In spite of quarrels, wars, and denominational differences even as late as 1870, the defeated Napoleon III dined as a prisoner together with William I of Prussia and Bismarck in Wilhelmshoehe Castle, where the Prussian king addressed the emperor of the French as “Mon cher Monsieur frere!”⁸³ Self-control, good manners, and generosity belonged to a monarch.

Here we have to keep in mind that the interrelationship between the monarchs was tightened in the course of centuries, but they also were not entirely immune to the influence of the historic developments after 1789, in other words to democracy, socialism,⁸⁴ nationalism, to “horizontalist” temptations.⁸⁵ It is even doubtful whether Lloyd George alone was responsible for not saving the lives of the Russian Imperial family.⁸⁶ The British in 1917 refused to give them asylum.

Monarchy had several great advantages. First of all, one could expect a monarch to be psychologically⁸⁷ and intellectually prepared for his task. Contemplating the intellectual preparation of some leading politicians for their task, one can only throw up one’s hands in horror—often their “looks” and their gift of gab alone got them into office. A second asset is (or rather was) their international relationships and their lack of local ties.⁸⁸ Number three is the fact that they owe their position to no party, faction, estate, interest group, or class, but only, to use the words of Bossuet, to “the sweet process of nature.”⁸⁹ The fourth advantage is that the monarchs had the chance to act historically. It is obvious that in democracies where the primary problem is to win the elections and where instability with nicely spaced changes—a sort of Punch-and-Judy show—is even a matter of pride, a constructive foreign policy is well nigh impossible.⁹⁰ Monarchs were in office until they died and left their realm to their sons or nearest relative. They could act historically, not politically, in a way without a time limit. Hence, their various “Political Testaments.”

This has been aptly demonstrated by Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe in an essay which likened the democratic procedure to a small child wanting to get his wishes fulfilled immediately and protesting in tears if there is a delay or a negative reaction. A monarch as member of a dynasty can plan for the distant future, even for generations.⁹¹ Yet it would be most erroneous to believe that a return to monarchy, even a Christian monarchy, would solve all our problems. Remember the praise the great monarchist Charles Maurras bestowed on this form of government: “Le moindre mal. La possibilité du bien”—The least evil. The possibility of something good.

Still, a monarch as member of a dynasty can plan for the distant future, even for generations. In our time, with the globe transformed into an immensely complex scenery, the abyss between the Scita and the Scienda, the actual knowledge of voters and candidates compared with the necessary knowledge is unavoidably widening all the time. And since the required knowledge among those active or passive in the democratic process is minute, only sentiments, sympathies and antipathies, pleasing and unpleasant factors are now effective. Hence, democracies act like rabbits jumping in all imaginable directions, into unwanted wars, idealistic “crusades,” and into undesirable, fatal peace arrangements.⁹² From their childhood on, monarchs were prepared for their duties. They “inherited” their profession as traditionally as craftsmen did in the past. The son of a tailor became a tailor, and so forth. These tailors produced passable garments, sometimes bad ones, occasionally even excellent ones. So with the monarchs. Yet dentists, lawyers, cobblers, farmers, plumbers could not have produced any clothes whatsoever, but only sheer monstrosities. Hence, the decline of Europe, lasting already more than 200 years— which also means that one should not forget the already once-mentioned fact that monarchy compromised with democracy during the nineteenth century and acquired merely a psychological role in the twentieth.⁹³

Wars, however, are undesirable under all circumstances. The ideal solution—at present a dream without any hope of realization—would be a gremium of Christian monarchs, such as we have in a Muslim version in Malaysia,⁹⁴ controlling the globe aware of the fact that wars today, thanks to the developments of technology, chemistry, physics, and biology, have assumed a suicidal character.⁹⁵ They menace the survival of all mankind, which, so far, has spiritually no common denominator. Neither has the U.N. nor really the European Union. So far, it can only boast of a common economic unity to become more prosperous and a common defense against outside enemies (but without any aggressive drive). Under these circumstances, its coat of arms should be a fat porcupine, a beast fairly safe in its natural surroundings, but certainly not a valid symbol for Europe.

¹See Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, or The New Generation (London: Longmans, 1849), bk. 5, chap. 8.

²See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality? (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1993), p. 314, n. 474.

³The political aspects of the death of Socrates can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the 1911 as well as in the most recent edition. Other authors are mentioned in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1989), p. 349, n. 47. Recently I.F. Stone, in his The Trial of Socrates (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), has dealt with the same subject from a leftist point of view. According to him, Socrates was some sort of “fascist.”

⁴See Theodor Herzl, “Der Judenstaat,” in Theodor Herzls zionistische Schriften (Charlottenburg: Juedischer Verlag, n.d.), p. 119. The Romans investigated around the year 100 whether any descendants of King David were still alive, but found only two old men without issue. Needless to say, most Israelites saw in Jesus, not the son of a poor oikodomos, but a prince of royal blood and pretender to the throne of Israel!

⁵See Nicolas Gomez Davila, Auf verlorenem Posten (Vienna: Karolinger, 1992), p. 259, translated from the Nuevos Escolios a un texto implicito (Bogota: Nueva Biblioteca Colombiana, 1986).

⁶The Marquis de Sade was held as a prisoner in the Bastille, a partly luxurious jail for criminal noblemen, until July 4, 1789, by a royal lettre de cachet upon the behest of his mother-in-law (largely for cruelties to his wife). At Bastille, he incited with a funnel the population in the quarter to liberate “innocent prisoners.” The commander of the jail begged Louis XVI to liberate him from this burden, whereupon Sade was transferred to Charenton, a jail for the criminally insane. Ten days later, on July 14, the Bastille was stormed, Sade was released from Charenton and became eventually as “Citizen Brutus Sade” commander of a Section des Piques (some sort of democratic SS), a very active revolutionary, who boasted of the role he had played in the fall of the Bastille. No wonder he became a cult figure to the students in 1968. (See Gilbert Lely, Vie du Marquis de Sade, 2 vols. [Paris: Gallimard NFR, 1952 and 1957], vol. 1, p. 273.)

⁷See Reynald Secher, Le genocide franco-francais (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986). Most amazing was a factory in Pont-de-Cle where they manufactured book covers and riding breeches from the skins of butchered royalists.

⁸Goethe spoke about “Phantasten und Charlatane,” be they legislators or revolutionaries. See his Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 955.

⁹See Crane Brinton, The Jacobins (New York: Macmillan, 1930). In Strassburg, preparations already were made to destroy the spires of the world-famous cathedral. In some villages, the “project” was already carried out. Since the Alsatians “did not speak the republican language” (i.e., French), plans were made to remedy this lack of “sameness.” The proposals were (1) to take away their children, (2) to disperse the families evenly all over France, or (3) to guillotine them all. This account of Brinton, a Harvard professor, reads like a description of the Third Reich.

¹⁰In this sense, one has to understand the statement of Jorge Louis Borges: “Yo descreo en la democracia porque es un abuso curioso de la estadistica.”

¹¹In the German elections of 1932, about 98 percent went to the polls—very democratic, but how suicidal! The totalitarian powers later “produced” numbers approaching 100 percent, but they still loved—very democratically—to stage “plebiscites.”

¹²It is most amazing that one encounters fairly well-educated Christians who believe that “we are all equal before God.” If Judas Iskariot were equal to John the Baptist or John the Evangelist, Christianity could close shop. The Dominican R.L. Bruckberger said rightly that the New Testament is a message of human inequality (or could one imagine that, at the Day of Judgment, all sentences could be identical? that God would not “discriminate” between saints and sinners?).

¹³Of those condemned to death by the “courts” and usually guillotined, only 8 percent belonged to the nobility. Farmers represented the largest share—32 percent. We have no exact data about the number of victims in the big slaughters, above all in the Vendée, Brittany, Lyon, Toulon, Bordeaux and Marseilles. Mass slaughters also took place in monasteries and convents. The estimates run between 120,000 and 250,000.

¹⁴Goebbels insisted that the German Revolution was a counterpart to the French Revolution. The Soviets renamed battleships they took over from the old regime “Danton” and “Marat.”

¹⁵There were forerunners to the publications of Secher, Furet, and Schama, authors like Cabanes and Nass and Jacques Cretineau-Joly, who told us how the genitals of the Princess de Lamballe were carried in triumph through the streets of Paris and of how a cook’s apprentice after the storming of the Tuileries was covered with butter and roasted alive. The enthusiasm for equality had frightening consequences.

¹⁶The defenders of the Bastille were invalids and some Swiss mercenaries. They had been promised freedom, if they surrendered. Yet the mob killed without pity, and a young butcher qui savait faire les viandes was fetched to sever the head of Governor de Launay. The seven minor criminals were set free.

¹⁷The word “person” comes from the Etruscan phersu, the mask which actors had to wear, determining their (intransferrable) role on the stage. (It is significant that individu is in French a term of abuse.)

¹⁸Cited in Hoffman Nickerson, The Armed Horde, 1793–1939 (New York: Putnam, 1940).

¹⁹Bismarck, who was Prussian ambassador in St. Petersburg, was offered by Nicholas I a Russian career, which he rejected. Yet the Portuguese ambassador in Berlin, Count Joaquin Oriola, transferred to Prussian civil service. It was perfectly all right to choose one’s employer inside or outside of one’s own country.

²⁰See Nickerson, Armed Horde. p. 15.

²¹The Irish in New York revolted against this (draft) regulation. Popular indignation turned against them, as embodiments of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Still, in 1935, I met in London an Englishman who had served in the Prussian army in World War I. As his father was lying permanently ill in a German sanitarium, he lived with him before World War I. His boyish “dream” was to become either an actor or a Prussian officer. The father rejected both careers, but they found out that a foreigner could be accepted by the Prussian army. So he became its officer and served William II faithfully after the war broke out, but only on the Eastern front. In August 1914, he considered his army oath he had solemnly given weightier than his nationality. Yet he despised the Nazis, and under great difficulties, he worked his way back to Britain without being tried for treason.

²²In the Spanish Civil War, there were idealistic volunteers from foreign countries on both sides—communists, socialists, and democrats. Among the “Nationalists,” I encountered French and Irish.

²³See Nickerson, Armed Horde, p. 14.

²⁴During the celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in Wittenberg Castle, the Pan-Germanist students added the red color of the revolution to the black-golden Imperial flag. Yet there the Lutheran minister Jan Kollar, a Slovak from Hungary, conceived the idea of Pan-Slavism.

²⁵Friedrich Ludwig Jahn spent a few years in a fortress (an honorable prison) as a “demagogue.” He visited Paris in 1814, dressed in an “Old Germanic” fantasy costume, and pushed passersby from the sidewalks, finally climbed the Arc de Triomph, and tried to wrestle the tuba from the hands of the angel. He luckily failed. Miroslav Tyrs (Tiersch) founded the radically anti-Habsburg and anti-German Sokol (Falcon) gymnastic movement, patterned after Jahn’s Turnerbund. The crowds adore masses in motion.

²⁶In democracies, worshipping numbers, smallness is seemingly a great handicap. Jacob Burckhardt told us already in 1866 that

The despair in everything small is a serious evil in every respect. He who does not belong to a nation of thirty millions cries: “Help us, oh Lord, we are drowning!” The philistine wants to eat from a big kettle with diabolical determination or it does not taste well to him.

See Emil Duerr, Freiheit und Macht bei Jacob Burckhardt (Basel: Helbing and Lichtental, 1918). Here are some of the roots of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism.

²⁷Mark Twain described the hopeless situation in the Austrian Parliament which he visited in 1897. His “Traveller’s Record” appeared periodically in Harper’s Magazine.

²⁸John Stuart Mill declared it very simply: “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities.” Considerations on Representative Government (New York, 1882), p. 310. Switzerland is very much an exception to the rule as the Swiss feel an overpowering Helvetic loyalty far above their ethnicities.

²⁹There were also some hate-expressions current among the people of the Central Powers, like the hate-poem of Ernst Lissauer. Slogans like Gott strafe England! (God punish England!) and Serbien muss sterbien! (Serbia must die!) were frequently repeated, but nobody invented such nonsense as calling sauerkraut “liberty cabbage” or German shepherd dogs “Alsatians.” In England, people even burned German pianos and put badger dogs to sleep to prevent them from being tortured by children. In the United States, people stopped teaching German. Those who taught German enjoyed a sabbatical and then taught Spanish! My father (1879–1952), very much a gentleman of the old school, considered national hatreds the zenith of vulgarity.

³⁰See Georges Bernanos, La grande peur des bien-pensants (Paris: Grasset, 1949), pp. 414–18. Bernanos, a devout Catholic and monarchist, characterized World War I (in which he had participated as a soldier): “That famous, pitiless war of the pacifist and humanitarian democracies.”

³¹Aviators in the West, who frequently engaged in personal duels in the sky, were still fighting a gentlemen’s war. Fritz Reck-Malleczewen (who died in the Dachau concentration camp) described the despair of a German uhlan piercing to death a Russian horseman with his lance. Weeping, he knelt before the dying man, who forgave him. Solzhenitsyn, on the other hand, mentioned cossacks who happened to venture upon a car with German generals without molesting them. “This was just an accident. It was not planned!” they explained afterward. When the Austrians reconquered Lemberg (Lwow), they found in an apartment deserted by the Russian occupants a list of damaged objects and the money to cover the repair.

This was different in World War II. By that time, the majority of the Soviet soldiers were literate, had “progressed,” were “enlightened,” and behaved worse than gorillas—more than 2 million cases of rape, also in liberated areas!

³²On the treatment and the concept of “enemy aliens,” see Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), vol. 4, pp. 160–62. This organized hatred against “enemy aliens” also led to mob hostilities. Thus the “patriotic” canaille of St. Petersburg burnt down the German Embassy after the outbreak of World War I, but more or less the same people, about three years later, were instrumental in staging the Bolshevik revolution, the “Red October.”

³³Of gentlemen in that war, one got a good account in the film La grande illusion with Stroheim and Gabin (1937). The title of the film was most fitting in the light of the events which took place after September 1, 1939. This film, showing French airmen downed by Germans and hosted by them afterward, reminds us of Caulaincourt’s story about a Baron Wintzigerode who, dressed in a long cloak over his Russian uniform, interrogated a French soldier standing guard in front of a camp near Moscow in 1812. Stopped and arrested by a French officer, he was brought before Napoleon, who discovered that he was a subject of his brother Jerome, king of Westphalia. The upstart Corsican lost his temper, menaced Wintzigerode with execution as a spy, and wanted to attack the arrogant baron physically, but the French officers held him back and, ashamed about their sovereign’s bad behavior, invited Wintzigerode to dinner in the officers’ mess. See Memoires du General de Caulaincourt, Duc de Vicence (Paris: Plon, 1933), part 1, p. 100.

³⁴After Ribot, France’s foreign minister, and, above all, Clemenceau had torpedoed the peace efforts of Emperor Charles of Austria, Anatole France remarked: “A King of France, yes, a King would have taken pity on our poor people, bled white, attenuated, at the end of their strength. But democracy is without heart, without bowels. A slave of the powers of money, it is pitiless and inhumane.” See Sir Charles Petrie, Twenty Years Armistice and After (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode), p. 12. René Schickele, in his Die Grenze (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932), p. 145–46, told us that Clemenceau menaced Anatole France with jail if he were to publish a single line about his reactions to the war!

³⁵See Carey MacWilliams, “Moving the West-Coast Japanese,” in Harper’s Magazine, September 1942. Their fully “Caucasian” spouses usually went with them. Of the far-more-exposed Hawaiian population, one third was Japanese, but they were not “concentrated,” since the “Sons of the Golden West” were not active on these islands. However, there was not a single case of espionage among the “American Japanese,” and the most heavily decorated American battalion consisted of Hawaiian “Japanese.” They paraded in New York.

³⁶See James Bacque, Other Losses (Toronto: Stoddard, 1989). Germany complained that 1.7 million prisoners had not been returned after the war. It is true that the Third Reich starved to death many Russian prisoners. German prisoners starved in Russia, but on their trip home, those who returned were often implored for food by the hungry population.

³⁷In November 1945, people were interviewed on a street corner in Detroit about their reactions to the horrors of the German concentration camps. Ninety percent were convinced that all films about them had been “staged” and reminded the interviewers of the fake propaganda stories of World War I—Belgian babies with their hands cut off! As Cicero said in his De divinatione: “We do not believe a liar, even if he speaks the truth.”

³⁸The Grand Duke of Hesse did not “sell” his own subjects in armed formation to the British during the American War of Liberation; these men were mercenaries from all sorts of nations, who had signed up voluntarily for his army.

³⁹The German army was about to conquer Rotterdam and Warsaw when the Luftwaffe attacked these cities. The Bombardment of Coventry was a retaliation for the bombardment of Berlin. Basil Liddell-Hart insisted that the Germans had regarded the proposed (but rejected) airpact as in force, but the allies always renewed their bombardments. See Basil Liddell-Hart, “War Limited,” in Harper’s Magazine (March 1946), pp. 198–99. The British principal assistant to the Air Ministry defended in two publications the policy of destroying the enemy’s economy and incidentally killing entire sectors of the population. See J.M. Spaight, The Battle of Britain (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1941) and Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944). Churchill, in his The Second World War, 6 vols. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1948), vol. 2, pp. 565, 567, admitted to having plans for the buildup of an enormous air force abroad beyond the German reach and thus to crush the Third Reich. Its human losses in the air war as compared to those of the British were about one to 10.

⁴⁰As a matter of fact, two German pilots were demoted because, in the early stage of the war, they had dropped bombs on London’s East End and not on military targets. Actually, the RAF had advised against attacking Berlin or other German cities, but Churchill opposed this idea. See Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1975), pp. 237–38.

⁴¹See General J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War, 1935–1945 (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1949), pp. 22–23.

⁴²See David Irving, The Destruction of Dresden (London: William Kimber, 1963). The city was chockful with refugees from the East. The interesting question is, how many non-German slave-workers, citizens of Allied countries, were killed in that raid, surely at least 5,000. It was ordered by Churchill, perhaps to impress the Russians at Yalta. In February 1945, the war was practically lost by the Germans.

⁴³Nagasaki was even harder hit than Hiroshima. It was the cradle of the Catholic Church in Japan and had the tallest cathedral in the Far East. The cathedral was filled with worshippers on that day, when “Fat Boy” was dropped a few hundred yards from it, killing about 8 percent of Japan’s Catholic population in the suburb of Urakami. They had survived 265 years in the “underground” before they were wiped out by the minions of Harry S. Truman.

⁴⁴See Ann O’Hare McCormick in The New York Times, October 9, 1944. Over 1,500 people were also wounded or permanently mutilated—a real carnage.

⁴⁵See the article “Dahomey” in the 1911 edition (the 11th) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Henry Kyemba, State of Blood (London: Corgi Books, 1977). Idi Amin also “lectured” at the U.N. in New York, but practiced “gastronomic democracy,” convinced that human flesh had a “lovely salty flavor.” (Kyemba was one of his former ministers.)

⁴⁶My father-in-law’s chauffeur served as a German soldier at Monte Cassino and told me that he and his companions thought the Americans had gone out of their minds. There was not a single German soldier in the building. The rubble was ideal for defense. Nor could the American Army fight the Vietnam War in a purely military way, but had often to make its moves in synchromesh with a fabricated public opinion. (I was over there five times, hosted by the American Army, and know what I am talking about.)

⁴⁷The two socialisms tried jointly to exterminate the Polish top layers. The Russians admitted 15,000 butchered in Katyn and elsewhere. In Auschwitz, one can see barrack after barrack with the photos of Polish victims. The camp was first designed to exterminate Poles; the Hebrew flood came in full force only by 1941.

⁴⁸The same holds true for the battle over the Warsaw Ghetto. There had been no peace or armistice between Germany and Poland, nor a declared war between Germany and Czechoslovakia.

⁴⁹According to the Goebbels Diaries (New York: Doubleday, 1948), the cooperation between the Czech industry and working class with the occupants was perfect. Then the Germans walked into the trap laid by the Czech government in exile, which organized the assassination of Heydrich, and they retaliated with the destruction of Lidice. After the war, the Germans of Bohemia-Moravia, even before being expelled, suffered atrociously—more often than not at the hands of former collaborators who now proved their “patriotism” by torturing helpless civilians. He who has any illusions about the human character should reread Joshua 8:21.

⁵⁰In World War I, the Austro-Hungarian occupants had in Serbia great troubles with franc-tireurs (erroneously called komitadjis). In World War II, the savagery and cruelties had no limit—Croats fought with the Germans and with the Serbs; Serbs fought Croats, Germans, Italians, and other Serbs in an Asian manner. Churchill supported the Bolsheviks because (as he told Fitzroy MacLean) they were “better at killing Germans” than his original allies under Colonel Draza Mihajlovic, who was roundly betrayed by the West and executed by the Titoists.

⁵¹See François Fenelon de la Mothe, “Direction pour la conscience d’un roi,” in Oeuvres (Paris, 1787), vol. 25, p. 489.

⁵²This was the war of the German League against the Prussian-Italian alliance. To call it the “Austro-Prussian War” is a misnomer.

⁵³Did William I approve of the war against the German League? His queen ostentatiously left Berlin at the outbreak of the war.

⁵⁴Bismarck was the driving and deciding force. William I of Prussia had a certain reluctance about becoming German emperor—emperor of “Germany” (Deutschland). A country with that name exists officially only since 1949. One must remember that the Habsburgs ruled the “Germanies” for over 600 years, the Hohenzollerns only for 47 years, and that William’s predecessor, his brother, Frederick William IV, had declared that he would be only too happy if at the coronation of a Habsburg as German emperor he could hold the wash basin at the ceremony.

⁵⁵We do not mention Poland at all, which, since 1572, was an elective monarchy ruled actually by the nobility and was called a republic (rzeczpospolita). This most tolerant country in Europe had ceased to exist by 1795.

⁵⁶The “Fourteen Points” actually had been written by Walter Lippmann. It mentioned the “autonomous development” of the nationalities of Austria-Hungary. The word “autonomous” is not clear in English. It might stand for total separation, but also for local rights and privileges. Lippmann, an admirable man, told me that in his mind it had the latter meaning.

⁵⁷In an interview to the New York Enquirer, Churchill berated, in June 1936, the United States for having joined the Allies in 1917. These had secretly tried to reach a compromise peace which would have saved countless human lives and certainly would have prevented the rise of National Socialism and probably even of Communism in Russia. His interview was read aloud by an “isolationist” before Congress in September 1939. Yet such a compromise peace would have not fulfilled Wilson’s dream of making the world unsafe by democracy.

⁵⁸Jacques Bainville dreaded the idea of a German Republic (demanded by the German Socialist Karl Liebknecht). He was certain that it would imitate the Jacobins and, in the name of a Germany “one and indivisible,” become violently nationalistic. (See his article in the Action Francaise, September 29, 1914.) How right he was! Goebbels had seen in German National Socialism the companion picture to the French Revolution and boasted that his party represented “the German Left” (in Der Angriff, December 6, 1931).

⁵⁹To the broad public in the Western democracies, Germany and “the Kaiser” were The Enemy, but not so among the leading politicians, who were all joined by a Leftist-Protestant dislike against the Danubian Monarchy for which one finds ample documentation in my books. Clemenceau loathed the Habsburgs so much that when the Germans were nearing Paris in August 1914, he only lambasted Austria. (See the surprise of Poincare in his diaries.) Lloyd George adored Hitler but attacked Franco “because I always line up against the priests,” as he explained to Virginia Cowley. Sir Denis Brogan and Raymond Aron very correctly called World War I the “Second War of Austrian Succession.” World War II was undoubtedly the Third War in this series.

⁶⁰The Social Democrat Paul Loebe, president of the Reichstag, although twice shortly incarcerated by the National Socialists, received a pension in the Third Reich for his merits in replacing the monarchy with a republic.

⁶¹See John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), pp. 4–5.

⁶²As an excuse for Wilson, it should be mentioned that in 1896, he had suffered his first stroke, and a second massive stroke in 1906, which blinded him in one eye and forced him to write with his left hand. This ruin of a man won the 1912 elections thanks to the antics of Theodore Roosevelt. At the Paris peace conferences, Wilson was tortured by two delicate ailments and suffered in September 1919 a third stroke, which subsequently resulted in his wife running the White House. See Edwin W. Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981). Just as important and frightening is the book Sigmund Freud wrote jointly with William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). Freud said to Max Eastman that Wilson was “the silliest fool of the entire century and also a criminal without realizing it.” (Needless to say that Freud was not a man of the Left and never wanted his theories to be used by the medical profession.)

⁶³June 28, the day of the assassination of Sultan Murad, a Serb, in 1389, was exactly 525 years later to the day to the double murder of Sarayevo. It was cleverly selected for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles underwritten on June 28, 1919, also by the “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,” which in 1929 was named “Jugoslavia.” On the same day, a meeting of “Czechoslovak” ministers decided to send a congratulatory telegram for that crime to the new Balkan state, expressing “the hope for further such heroic deeds.” Butchering a couple! There we see the bloody heritage of the French Revolution.

⁶⁴Poland was ardently hated by Lloyd George, and he saw to it that a Polish part of Silesia was given to Czechoslovakia. When he heard about the Red Army’s advance on Warsaw in 1920, he danced joyfully. As to his character, see the biography of his son, the Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, My Father Lloyd George (New York: Crown Publishers, 1960).

⁶⁵“Democracy” is, above all, a theological problem. Government is the result of Original Sin. Democracy embodies the illusion that “self-government” means really to rule oneself and nobody else involved, whereas it is simply the rule of the majority over the minority. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman told us that “Self-government is better than good government.” So the next time we have a serious disease, we should practice quackery on ourselves and dispense with the medical profession.

⁶⁶See George D. Herron, The Menace of Peace (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917), pp. 9–10. Wilson found himself apparently only understood by this defrocked minister (he had committed adultery), a former socialist and pacifist who, after his divorce, married the daughter of the very wealthy Mrs. Rand, foundress of the Rand School of Social Science in New York.

⁶⁷Herron’s willful ruining of the Austrian peace effort in February 1918 is well described by his Slovak “assistant,” Stefan Osusky, in George D. Herron: Dovernik Wilsonov pocas vojny (Pressburg: Naklad Prudov, 1925). Incidentally, it was Herron’s idea to have the League of Nations headquarters located in Geneva, the city of Calvin and Rousseau. The “Herron Papers” are preserved at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California, and are available in 13 neatly typed volumes.

⁶⁸I met the bishop of Chichester after the war in New York. He assured me that Churchill had not read the material he gave him. (With one bottle of whiskey every day, he obviously did not have the time.) Anthony Eden was afraid to irritate the Soviets if contacts were taken up with German generals. Eden was also the man who surrendered the anti-communist Russians, Croats and Slovenes to the Soviets and to Tito. They were butchered en masse.

⁶⁹The gnostic character of democracy was also obvious to Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery, 1968).

⁷⁰I get great pleasure in asking American audiences where in the Declaration of Independence and/or the Constitution one finds such nouns as “democracy” and “republic.” Their surprise is great when they discover that these terms appear in neither document, and when I tell them that, according to Charles Beard, the Founding Fathers hated democracy more than Original Sin, they are amazed. Nor are they delighted when I tell them that after 1828 their country had gone to the French School.

⁷¹The Duce was given his Spanish first name by his anarchist father. It was Benito (instead of Benedetto), in honor of Benito Juarez, who had a monarch executed! The fasces, we must remember, are a republican symbol and Fascism found its full realization only in the Repubblica Sociale Italiana with the seat in Salo.

⁷²See Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1925), vol. 1, p. 188.

⁷³How much female American influence was then active in the political scene? Masaryk, who had persuaded Wilson that Austria was even guiltier than Germany in the war, had an American wife, and so did Clemenceau. Churchill then only played a minor role, but his mother was American. Sonnino, the Italian foreign minister’s mother, however, was not American but British, and he became an Anglican.

⁷⁴When the French army during the Napoleonic Wars invaded the Tyrol, they declared solemnly: “We bring you liberty whether you like it or not!” Amusing when one realizes that ever since the late fourteenth century the Tyroleans had a Landtag where all four estates were represented and they all had equal power.

⁷⁵France received in 1814–15 the papal enclave of Avignon and also joined the Holy Alliance. (Britain soon left it.)

⁷⁶In Lucerne, one can admire the “Dying Lion” by Thorvaldsen, erected to the memory of the Swiss mercenaries who died loyally in the service of Louis XVI at the Tuileries. They were massacred to the last man.

⁷⁷The surrender of Breda, painted by Velasquez, can be seen in Madrid’s Prado. The painting shows “Gentlemen of the Old School” in a delightful ceremony. That “Old School” still existed in World War I. The son of that supreme traitor, Thomas G. Masaryk, served in the Austro-Hungarian army until the very end as a Hussar captain. Then he told his colonel that neither he nor his fellow officers ever mentioned the well-known activities of his father. “It was often at the very tip of our tongues,” the colonel replied, “but, of course, we never did.” This has been reported by Indro Montanelli. Could anybody imagine anything similar in a Western army? (“Guilt by association” is a term totally unknown in a personalist civilization.)

⁷⁸When the British Royal House changed its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor to please the dear people, William II remarked: “Children, next time we go to the theater we’ll see the ‘Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.’” Prince Charles belongs de facto to the House of Sonderburg-Gluecksburg-Augustenburg, alias Windsor. His father was, after all, born a Greek prince—without a drop of Greek blood.

⁷⁹Alfonso IV, king of Castile, married the daughter of a captive Moroccan prince, from whom all sovereign houses of Europe descend. Corresponding with members of European dynasties King Hassan II of Morocco and his friends call each other “Cher Cousin.”

⁸⁰The Hebrew ancestor is Pierleone, brother of the antipope Anaclet II, the “pope from the ghetto.”

⁸¹By Otto Forst de Battaglia, Das Geheimnis des Blutes (Vienna: Reinhold, 1932), pp. 45–46, we are informed that William II and George V of Britain had also Genghis-Khan as a common ancestor.

⁸²Elena of Spain, wife of Alfonso XIII and granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was originally an Anglican; Astrid, wife of Leopold III of Belgium a Lutheran princess from Sweden; the present queen of Spain is a great-granddaughter of William II.

⁸³Napoleon III had been offended, because Nicholas I had addressed him merely as “Dear Cousin.” At that meeting in Kassel, Bismarck spoke an impeccable French, whereas Napoleon III had a German accent, having spent his youth and student years in German exile. (Napoleon I spoke French with an Italian accent.)

⁸⁴In the quarrel between William II and Bismarck, which led to the latter’s dismissal, the “social question” played a major role. The emperor was finally emphatic on the side of the Provider State favoring a more social legislation.

⁸⁵The inroads of ethnicism in the feeling of monarchs was evident when, in 1916, Empress Alexandra, receiving in audience a young Austrian Countess Kinsky, sent by the Red Cross to inspect Russian prison camps. Thinking that her visitor (due to her name) felt herself to be a Czech, she asked her: “Do you really like these Germans, dear child?” But the countess stiffened up and replied: “These are our allies, Your Majesty!” Whereupon the empress immediately apologized for her faux pas. See Nora Graefin Kinsky, Russisches Tagebuch (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976), p. 87.

⁸⁶It is unclear whether the guilt for not saving Nicholas II and his family lies with Lloyd George or George V, or both. They saw in him, knowing about his peace efforts, a “traitor.” William II was desperate about not being able to do anything for them. When the “Bolshevik” wing of the Social Democrats took over, the fate of the Imperial family was sealed.

⁸⁷Monarchs usually realized that had they been born a few blocks away from the royal or imperial palace, they would never have been sovereigns. Nor could they claim that their office was due to their intelligence, courage, intuitions, or superior qualities. Hence, the much more highly developed megalomania of popular leaders, especially if they were not religious. (The dictum of Acton, “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is only valid for non-religious people. Charles V, in whose realm the sun never set, was a true saint compared with Rufino Barrios, the atheistic tyrant of Guatemala, or with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, or Hitler.)

⁸⁸Today, monarchs have merely symbolic value, their marriages no longer play a political role and have partly lost their international character. Still, it is significant that Swedish royalty is permitted to marry nonroyalty, provided the partner is a foreigner. Yet the present law of succession is clearly “undynastic:” a daughter can precede a male heir. So, the name of the dynasty becomes fictitious, like that of the “Windsors.”

⁸⁹In the Middle Ages, the European monarchs were very much subject to Constitutions. There was the principle of rex sub lege. See Fritz Kern, Gottesgnadentum und Widerstandsrecht im fruehen Mittelalter (Leipzig: Koehler, 1914). The right to rebellion survived in post-Reformist Europe. The Jesuit Juan de Mariana taught: Justum est necare reges impios. For Calvin, a monstrous monarch was: un ire de dieu whom one had to suffer with patience. Luther taught in the same way. According to Fernando d’Antonio, Thomas Aquinas permitted tyrannicide in the course of a general rebellion (see his Il tirannicidio nel pensiero del Acquinate, 1939). As to the “grace of God”—whatever we are is due to the grace of God.

⁹⁰As to the impossibility of a sound foreign policy in a democratic age, see my article “Foreign Policy and the Popular Will,” Chronicles (June 1998). Democracies are merry-go-rounds.

⁹¹See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Time Preference, Government and the Process of De-Civilization: From Monarchy to Democracy,” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Denson, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

⁹²All the wars of the United States after 1945 have been deeply affected by the democratic process—in Korea, in Vietnam, and even in the Persian Gulf. The most amazing was the case of Vietnam. See Leslie Gelb, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1978). The message of this book by a leftist author is revealed by the title: the irony lies in the fact that this victory of communism was at the same time a victory of democracy, and the system worked because majority opinion forced the White House, the Pentagon, and the Congress to “give up.” Thus 56,000 men died totally in vain. That victory could have been won is proved in the book by the dissident Viet-Cong Colonel Bui-Tin, Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel (London: Hurst, 1995). All due to errors at the top? Remember chapter eight, volume one, of James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth, entitled: “Why a great man cannot be elected President of the United States.” This is only partly due to the inverted pyramid, since the half educated had nearly reached the original top.

⁹³We have to bear in mind that democracies boast of their instability and their dislike for expertise. The real “hero” in democratic folklore is always the “successful amateur,” not the expert, which proves that knowledge and experience have no value.

⁹⁴The Sultans of Malaysia vote a man among themselves, for the next five years, the “Yang di-Pertuan Agong” into power. He is addressed as “Your Majesty.” The title and position of the person heading, one nice day, the European Union is a riddle.

⁹⁵European monarchs are still psychologic lightning rods, preventing “popular leaders” grabbing absolute power. This even worked in the case of Italy where a king, in a great emergency, was able to put a dictator into an ambulance and have him shipped to a mountain top. Yet to what extent a “constitutional monarchy” is problematic was shown in Belgium, where a king abdicated temporarily in order not to sign a fundamentally immoral law. He was then called back by the parliament.