II. The Age of Parliamentarianism and Republicanism

“Europe has become the apostle of her own apostasy.” — Douglas Jerrold, England.

THE headway which egalitarianism and identitarianism made after the revolution of 1830 and 1848 is intimately connected with the rapid increase in importance of two geographical-social units. Europe of the nineteenth and the beginning twentieth century is a continent ruled by money, and money comes from the rich plains (regardless whether they are industrial or agricultural) and the cities.

To most Americans mountains are an “exceptional” geographic formation, but a look at the physical map of Europe will show them that this is not so on the old continent. There is only one large plain spreading from northern France across the Low Countries, northern Germany and Poland to Russia, a plain which is hardly interrupted by the low Ural mountains and which only ends at the Hindukush and the hilly lands behind Lake Baikal. Historical Europe on the other hand is mountainous. The Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, Turks, Bulgarians, Albanians, Croatians, Serbs, Slovenes, the Slovaks the Scots and the Welsh, half the Rumanians and Ruthenians, the Turks, the South Germans, the Sudeten Germans and the South French are either living in mountains or at least in very hilly countries. Many people see the “real” Europeans in these moutaineers. In these parts of the world traditions have been better preserved; patriarchalism, piety, loyalty, altruism — all the truly “romantic” virtues are here more at home than in the progressive plains. Other manifestations, such as the blood feud, also exist. Of course, the mountains are poor and bravery alone does not secure collective political influence. Thanks to the greater resources of the plains the mountaineers were always defeated in the long run but they regularly revenged themselves by producing a proportionately large number of political and military leaders.*

Mountain culture is not “advanced.” It is nevertheless aristocratic and “democratic” (demophil) at the same time. It is patriarchal by nature and we have mentioned the fact before, that serfdom practically never existed among the mountaineers. The mountains were essentially free. “Freedom thrives in the mountains,” Schiller exclaims justly. Yet it is also interesting to see how violently the mountain peasant was attacked by the urban writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, attacked and vilified for his loyalty to traditions. Having no social grievances (lack of large estates) he was the very despair of urban, leftist agitators.

The thwarted intellectuals, slaving in the gigantic cities under heaviest pressure, developed often an almost sinister grudge against the mountains and the snow-covered peaks; he at least considered himself to be a “modern” while the mountaineer dwelt in darkest superstition.** Yet the mountaineer always despised the people from the plains and the large cities and regarded them as miserable wretches, as proletarians and collectivized rabble, with an utter lack of personality.¹¹⁵

The age of the rule of the plains and the cities, which put an end to the rule of the mountains and castles, was indeed the beginning of the decline of Europe. The association of Berlin with Moscow, of nationalism with socialism, was, even in a geographical sense, a league of monotony against diversity.

It must be admitted though that there is a great strength in the collective onslaught of the people of the plains — from a military, political, and economic point of view. The first half of the nineteenth century produced the most spectacular victories of the French arms, the second half the victories of Prussia and of the Germanies led by Prussia. The great soldiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were the Spaniards and the Swiss, but technical civilization and industrial progress necessitated a soldier with a minimum of personal initiative and a maximum of obedience, cooperative spirit and lack of originality. The virtues of the sixteenth-century soldier are still necessary prerequisites of alpine warfare, but for the war in the plains — “total” wars and not “little wars” (guerrilla) — fight, to think, to decide. In the plains officers used to ride at the head of their troops and directed the solidly advancing carrés with stentorial commands. Nothing of that kind is possible in the mountains where personal initiative is of greater importance than mere discipline and drill;* even modern warfare in these parts is still individualized and numbers play a less important role than in the Lowlands.

Today it seems that European culture and civilization, once conceived and born in the craggy hills of Crete, Greece, and the Apennines, will be drowned in the monotonous, muddy plains between Paris and Moscow.

The second half of the nineteenth century sees an acceleration in the process of democratization, nationalization, centralization, and uniformization in all regions of Europe. The demand for a general ochlocratic franchise comes to the fore as the synthesis of Luther’s superstitious belief in the perspicacity and intelligence of the average man (reading his Bible) and Rousseau’s assertion that man is by nature good. It was impossible to resist the demands for political control on the part of the masses, who consisted admittedly of virtuous master minds.

The risorgimento in the political sense was probably a boon to Italy, but from a cultural point of view it was fatal because it extinguished the many little suns which, in preceding centuries, had given to Italy her great variety of cultural expressions so essential to the grandeur of the Italian past. Something similar happened also in the Germanies, but this process in the other half of the former Holy Roman Empire will be treated separately.

Uniformism had created the demand that all people with an identical or similar literary language should draw together in common political units.¹¹⁶ Yet literary languages are usually artificial creations, coined by certain masters at a given moment in history and accepted by the upper classes. The English-speaking reader should bear in mind that the literary languages of the European continent are not of aristocratic or royal mark. “The King’s English” has no equivalent either in the Germanic countries nor in the Mediterranean area. It usually is the upper bourgeoisie who speaks the literary, i.e., the artificially standardized language, with the greatest perfection, while there is often a “low-class” dialectical strain in the idiom of the nobility and even royalty.* The Empress Maria Theresa spoke broadest Viennese, and this local dialect continued to be used by the Emperors of Austria until 1848.** The late King of Saxony repeatedly used the Saxonian dialect, and argot expressions are far more widespread in aristocratic circles around Paris and Budapest than in the haute bourgeoisie, which always prided itself on a strongly standardized language, which is nothing else but an intranational Esperanto (understood and spoken everywhere inside the nation).***

Artificial languages are far more collective — they comprise more people — than local dialects. But the artificial language often lacks character and originality. It is the urban, commercial spirit of the middle classes which demands uniformity for business purposes and has already killed many a truly living language in order to supplant it by an international (or rather intertribal) jargon. Hebrew was displaced about 300 years before the birth of our Lord by the Aramaic slang of Syrian traders, spoken between Alexandria and Babylon.

The nineteenth or twentieth century nationalist of either the “democratic” or socialist pattern would have hardly consented to the exhortation of St. Stephen, King of Hungary, who said to his sons: “Unius linguae uniusque moris regnum imbecille et fragile est.”* It is the urban middle class which became the protagonist for the national state with one languge, one law, one independent church and left its deadly centralism all over the Old World between Calais and Vladivostok.

This is the reason why the middle-class revolutions of 1848 in Berlin, Italy, Vienna, Baden, Prague, Munich, and Pesth had not only an ochlocratic but also a strongly nationalistic character. Pan-Italism, Pan-Germanism and the weirdest growth of all, Pan-Slavism, revolted against the supranational monarchy. The endless, monotonous plains of eastern Europe had accepted with almost Asiatic fervor the gospel of a gigantic unification preached for the first time by Jan Kollár, a Lutheran Slovak minister in Magyar-German Pesth. Pan-Slavism differed from the two other isms inasmuch as it wanted to unite not one nation, but a whole family of nations, who show as many differences as the Icelanders from the Tyroleans or the English from the East Prussians. Pan-Latinism or Pan-Teutonism have not yet made their appearance on the political stage and they probably never will. Yet what the disciples of these Panisms wanted was a vastly simplified Europe, consisting of three or four states, all uniform, all “democratically” governed, a bad imitation of the American Middle West, with about 150 million “customers” each, run by lawyers, journalists, businessmen, and teachers of gymnastics.

Gymnastic teachers were not unimportant; the gymnastic leagues of central and eastern Europe wielded great political power. Supported by the bourgeoisie (and even the lower classes) they were the main carriers of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism. Their performances in mass drill, their semimilitary maneuvers, their worship of health, discipline, and co-ordination, and finally their anticlericalism of varying degree, made them heralds as well as executors of a mass age.** The Sokol (“Falcon”) and Orel (“Eagle”) organizations among the Slavs, the numerous gymnastic leagues among the Teutons — mainly the Austrian, Moravian, and Bohemian Germans — are typical for these various movements with parallel goals. Nevertheless their purpose was not primarily a military one. Their main objective was rather of a psychological nature. The spectacular collective displays organized on a scale only surpassed by the parades of the National Socialists in Nuremberg, served the feeling of collective might and a “belonging together.” The numerous men’s glee clubs, so widespread among German and Slav nationalists, had a similar purpose. Community singing was also one of the strongest magnetic features of the Lutheran Reformation.* It is not surprising that these gymnastic leagues featuring a definite Weltanschauung had a deep political influence mainly on the lower middle class. They started out featuring certain liberal tendencies. This liberalism is still apparent in the writing of the Turnvater Jahn, the founder of the German Gymnastic Leagues. In the thirties of this century their Austrian groups (Deutscher Turnverein, featuring an emblem remarkably like the Swastika) became violently national socialistic and dropped the liberal ideas. It is no exaggeration to say that while the Slav gymnastic leagues (the “Sokols”)** were partly responsible for the breaking up of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Deutscher Turnverein (German Gymnastic League) had a lion share in the annexation of Austria.

Both risorgimentos — the Italian and the German — were accompanied by two strange and disquieting phenomena. Neither movement was carried primarily by a royal or imperial house. Two great parliamentarian and one popular leader — Bismarck, Cavour, and Garibaldi — were the men who really did the job, not their royal masters. On account of these two large scale unifications we behold many rulers deprived of their thrones, either by sheer force or due to the revolutionary cooperation of their subjects. The Kings of Hanover and the Two Sicilies, the grand dukes of Tuscany and Hesse-Nassau had to flee from their countries just as in Napoleonic times.

Prussia again played with the idea of incorporating Saxony, yet this German kingdom escaped its fate the second time since the Congress of Vienna, as by a miracle.

But the fact that other legitimate European rulers were accessories to these actions, so alien to their own as well as to the Christian European tradition, indicates the beginning of the end for the very institution of supranational monarchy in the Eastern Hemisphere. Once the respect for rights and laws was broken nature took its course. Seventy years ago the ignorant mob howled triumphantly when the dukes and kings packed their bags and fled from their homelands; today it is the burgher, the peasant, the worker who is driven out by the conquerors and is not even permitted to take his tools or his savings with him as in the case of vanquished Poland. The nations of Europe will have ample opportunity to think with nostalgia of the days when monarch fought against monarch and not nation against nation, and yet it is without doubt the monarchs who were the accessories of nationalistic mass sentiment, who dug their own graves and maybe even those of their subjects.

There is also another aspect of nineteenth-century nationalism of greater importance and gravity. The national collectivism of that period, with a steadily increasing statism lurking around the corner, persuaded the forlorn and helpless individual that he is merely the part of a whole. Seventeenth-century pantheism already had affirmed that we and the universe are a “part” of God. Spinoza no less than Calvin with his predestination and denial of free will had blazed the trail leading to an integral depreciation of person and personality. Now we see the urban slave depressed by his inferiority, partly real and partly imaginary, clamoring for a God or some “divine corporation” whose part he could be and whose divine essence he could share. People begin now to be primarily members of a nation, a class, a political party, and many organized their lives accordingly. We see no longer men and women giving solemn oaths of loyalty to a ruler, an order, a spiritual head, as in the days of old. They cease to serve according to their own free will and choice because they are now under the pressure of a powerful collective, horizontal, or vertical stratification of society which forces them to a blind, instinctive, and often unreasonable homage to a group interest. Whosoever will not submit to the group discipline, does not yield to the group authority or dares to separate himself from the “group soul,” is considered a traitor.

In the Middle Ages people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one’s own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry “traitor” was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no “traitors to the proletariat” or “traitors to democracy.” Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have layed down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape¹¹⁷We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both.

Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century we see the crowned heads of Europe, who should have been inspired to work for the summum bonum of their respective nations, merely executing the will of the Herd like the last, sordid politician in an ochlocracy, fawning for popularity. We know only too well that the General Will and the General Good are not the same, that there is sometimes even between the seemingly obvious general good and the eternal principles of justice and equity an abyss that cannot be overbridged; and cleavages between the local good and the general good are equally frequent. But true ochlocracy, based on genuine majority rule, will always put the general good before the local one. (“Happiness for the greatest number.”) The principle Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, engraved on the German coins, sounds very altruistic, but carried to the last, logical consequence it leads to the adoration of the ant heap and the contempt for the person.

Socialism,* largely an answer to the sins of “liberal” capitalism, belongs to the same category of herdist collectivism, this time on a social rather than geographical basis.¹¹⁸ (There is a third herdism in biologicis and numerous combinations between the three fundamental manifestations.)**

Yet it must be clearly understood that there is no real enmity between capitalism and socialism, which after all is only a capitalism of the étatistic brand. The normal tendency in the development of capitalism is toward socialism. Real socialism merely wants to speed up the life process of capitalism which is the concentration of wealth and means of production in fewer and fewer hands, until finally every cent in the country is controlled by a single person. Elections in that theoretical capitalistic “democracy” of the final stage merely mean that all employees of Mr. XY, the final capitalist, the only employer, go to the polls. Mr. XY is by that time already the invisible dictator of the country in question, and State and “Society” are one. Mr. XY, without personally disposing all the time or all his money, controls nevertheless every penny, and probably derives as much satisfaction from his illimited power as (let us say) the secretary of the Communist Party in the Communist State, or perhaps as may be the case with even more benevolent “leaders” of the Soviet State of tomorrow. Different forces as well as “misguided” socialist tendencies act as breaks against the real socialist interest of bigger and better capitalism. Once all financial power is in the hands of one person and this person assumes the highest political office, the Socialist State stands already in its final form; it only needs a little repainting but no transforming. Under such circumstances—as in every totalitarian state—money and power, power and money become one and the same thing.*** If the monopolistic capitalist wants to eat in a restaurant he can do so without paying because the restaurant is his. The totalitarian, communist dictator can feed equally without paying cash in his monolithic state where money, power, belief, society, government have been unified at the expense of the individual personality. Thus we see capitalism and socialism advocating the ant-heap State (or Society) in an unholy union with equal fervor.

But often we see socialistic party organizations assuming a comparatively medieval attitude by doing everything in their power to thwart the centralizing efforts of monopolistic capitalism. Socialists frequently advocated distribution of wealth by increased taxation and antitrust laws. This, for their unorthodox attitude, can only be explained by their desire to protect their political organizations (for which they care more than for abstract ideas) against the combined attack of State plus Money, a combination they call for reasons unknown “Fascism.”*We have therefore to see in the struggle between socialism and capitalism (i.e., between state capitalism and private capitalism) statism and capitalism, nationalism and herdist democratism, socialism and statism, nazism and bolshevism, nationalism and socialism, a whole series of bogus issues which are fought with a bitterness worthy of a better cause. Yet the hatred and the ferocity in this struggle is natural and characteristic for every fratricidal warfare. In such a strife no pardon can be given because the different sides consider each other to be “traitors” in the sacred race for identity and the construction of the universal ant heap. Their common enemy was the past, the great tradition, the Church with her aspects of hierarchy and otherworldliness, her subtle affinities with patriarchalism and monarchy, her spirituality and deeply seated skepticism toward the modern world. There was to all practical purposes no “new-fangled” modern idea from labor conditions to conscription,** from militarism to socialism, from continental liberalism to religious modernism which the Popes had not criticized in sharp, uncompromising terms.***

At the height of the socialist agitation there arose a doctrine which seemingly erected a materialist barrier against herdism; the theory of evolution.¹¹⁹

Evolution itself, as well as the broader interest for biology which ensued from it, led to the tentative establishment of racialist theories. These were first of all welcomed in aristocratic quarters that are always keen on genealogy, thankful for every vindication of their hard-pressed caste, and overjoyous at a defense based not on sentimental but on “scientific” grounds. The fact that the French aristocracy considers itself to be largely of Frankish, i.e., Nordic, origin led Count Gobineau to his apologia of the Nordic Race which caused such havoc in many a Germanic, British, and American brain from Atlanta, Georgia, to Riga, Livonia.

The theory of Evolution brought only temporary relief to the badly harassed aristocracy of Europe. It is more important to remember that it gave a new impetus to materialism, and that while weakening the Christian tradition even further in the minds of many it gave birth to a new type of group consciousness, thus increasing the already virulent herd spirit. The worship of the sciences became more intensive and the mobs waited eagerly for new gospels to emerge from the laboratories. The new “scientific” discoveries were preached with furor and fervor and soon there was a veritable persecution of true Christians going on in intellectual as well as popular circles.¹²⁰

The effect of Evolutionism upon the European mind was not homogeneous. Racialism became only strong and violent in the twentieth century; herdism of that type was brought in relation to small, identical biological groups with common characteristics. The herdists of the nineteenth century made a different use of this theory; they enlarged humanity by including the animals and Darwin’s assertion that the brain of an ant is the most wonderful particle of the world, more wonderful perhaps than the human brain, is characteristic for the trend of the time.¹²¹ The ants had their eulogy written in the early twentieth century by Maurice Maeterlinck, and Waldemar Bonsels delighted in sentimental tales about the life of the bees (Die Biene Maja). But great savants like Father Wasmann, S.J., exploded the myth of the “intelligence” of these extremely uniformistic insects who live in strict, unvarying discipline.¹²²

The theory of evolution was also a powerful attack against free will and a further step toward determinism which marks so strongly the progressive ideas of western civilization with their false and deceptive outcry for “liberty.”¹²³

Modern slavery indeed reached its zenith in the modern city¹²⁴ which is so hostile to true personality.¹²⁵ The earning of a livelihood under most humiliating and monotonous conditions, often under the dictatorship of technology, the tyranny of the watch, the increased control by the state, which in the urban areas is far more effective and efficient than in rural areas, resulted in the slow and painful birth of a new man who was a most ideal material for politicians, generals, dictators,¹²⁶ newspaper editors, and traffic cops. Yet his full maturity for the job of total servitude was not reached before the First Great War, one of the most sanguinary blunders in modern history.¹²⁷

Nietzsche foresaw this development when he wrote in his Der Wille zur Macht hoping at least for a benevolent and worthy, not a malicious and ochlocratic tyrant:

A man who has preserved a strong will combined with wide knowledge has now greater chances than ever. Servile obedience (Dressierbarkeit) has enormously increased in democratic Europe; human beings who adapt themselves easily and are submissive constitute the rule; the result is an animal of the herd, even if quite intelligent. Whoever is able to rule finds a great mass of those who are ready to serve.

“Wide knowledge,” being the survival of an intellectual and aristocratic age, could easily be dispensed with. Volcanic emotion is all that is necessary for the mob master’s sordid role.

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*Of the better known political and military leaders of the past 400 years the following came from the mountains: Stalin, Mussolini, Napoleon, Nicholas Horthy, Dollfuss, Henry IV of Navarre, the Counts of Habsburg and of Savoy, General Franco, Mustapha Kemal, Salazar, Metaxas, Kondylis, Maniu, Lloyd-George, Ramsay MacDonald, Foch, Joffre, Count Bethlen, Venizelos, and others.

**Yet we can observe from time to time the typical bourgeois veneration and adoration of the peasant and mainly of the mountaineer. The Austrian and South German city dweller will don a peasant costume when he spends his summer vacation in the mountains. In the past ten to twenty years a growing feeling of helplessness, despair, and inferiority can be observed among the urbanites which resulted in different movements promoting the return to the land. Today the cities (exposed to bombings, famines, diseases, etc.) are already in a retrograde development which is often symbolically expressed by a “ruralization” of their character. Thirty years ago hardly anybody would have thought to dress in Vienna like a Tyrolean shepherd or a Styrian gamekeeper, yet today the situation has materially changed and the rural influence is quite considerable.

*This explains the successes of the Serb Chetnitzi against German occupation troops.

*The Swiss bourgeoisie was always an exception. Schwytzerdütsch was always spoken by Swiss “society” and literary German was only used in conversation with foreigners. It would sound extremely genteel to speak the literary language among the Swiss Germans. This is not true of Austria. Pangermanism had therefore an appeal for certain Austrians, none for the Swiss.

**The Emperor Francis Joseph who ascended the throne 11 years after Queen Victoria and died 15 years later than the British ruler was, like her, aristocratic in character but bourgeois in his tastes. The rule of these two monarchs saw the spectacular rise of the bourgeoisie.

***All leftists (with the paradoxical exception of the Spanish leftists) had always a teeth-gnashing hatred for dialectical differences because these disturbed the herdist uniformity to which they were all instinctively devoted. Evelyn M. Acomb writes in her scholarly work “The French Laic Laws (1879–1889)”: They (the anticlericals) held that differences in religion would only divide citizens, who should be imbued with the sense of “union, concord, and fraternity which ought to exist between the children of the mère-patrie.” They attacked the religious orders for not obeying the laws, for trying to elude military service, and for encouraging local dialects.

It is universally agreed in all the reports of academy inspectors that wherever a language other than French is spoken, whether it is a true language like the Breton or a simple patois, in all these districts, the religious orders, supported by the clergy, who insist that the catechism should be learned in patois, exert all their efforts to prevent the French language from being used. (Journal Officiel de la République Française. May 26, pp. 5690–5691.)

*“A country of only one language and one custom is foolish and fragile.”

**Later we see “Counter Leagues,” i.e., Catholic as well as Socialist Gymnastic Leagues. The Socialists did finally everything in their power to make good use of the collectivizing effects of sports and gymnastics—inside and outside of Russia. In all these Leagues the emphasis was always put on the subordination of the individual under the whole. Their influence and importance can never be overrated and it is surprising that no serious treatise has been written about them. (They were mentioned though in Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics.)

*“Viel mehr wurden hinübergesungen als hinübergepredigt,” did the Catholics complain.

**The Czechoslovak Republic, Yugoslavia and even Poland showed great recognition for the work of the Sokols after their establishment as independent states. Czechoslovakia featured the founder of the Sokols on their stamps and the Sokol-slet’s (Falconflights: mass meetings and mass performances) were always memorable events. Yugoslavia celebrated the great slets with a special issue of her stamps. The Czechs also unofficially called some of their bank notes “Sokols.”

The founder of the Sokols, Miroslav Tyrš, was, needless to say, a great admirer of Taine, a violent evolutionist and an enthusiastic monist preaching an odd political biologism, spiced with a romantic anticlericalism and anti-Habsburgism. His vistas were largely “Nazi” which did not prevent the invading Nazi hords from suppressing the Sokols.

*Socialism demanded labor’s access to a machine to be owned by itself, and passed over the fact that all that made such propaganda plausible was that ownership of the worker had already passed to the machine (James N. Wood, Democracy and the Will to Power, p. 124).

**It must be kept in mind that there is no such thing as Catholic or Christian collectivism. Christianity ties man primarily to God and secondarily to his fellow man (in whom he does not like himself, but God and God’s image). True religion is always “vertical” and not “horizontal.”

***This would be possible in a State without social checks, as, for instance, Bolivia, which is largely owned by Señor Patiño.

*Mr. Lewis of the C.I.O., advocating the candidacy of Mr. Willkie, who was acclaimed by American Capital, assumed a truly and genuinely socialistic attitude. There is nothing more antisocialistic than the protection of a multitude of small enterprises.

**Conscription and militarism were vigorously attacked by Leo XIII. Though never “pacifist” in the Leftish sense and respecting the good soldier, the Church always disliked militarism and the “armed horde.” The two greatest Catholic saints—St. Francis of Assisi and St. Ignatius—were soldiers before their call, but the picture of the “armed industrialist” in his far distance bomber has often little to do with the idea of the miles Christianus.

***It was evident from the beginning that a great political (not necessarily spiritual) defeat of the church would eliminate the importance of the common great enemy and thus inaugurate a period of endless mutual strife between the modern heresies. The years 1847, 1860, 1866, 1870, 1898, and 1918 were milestones of ecclesiastic defeat which opened the road to the Great Massacre.