SPOGBOLT   |   Location: Newfoundland, Canada

August 31, 2006

Notes on Notes on Nationalism

George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism (1945) contrasts nationalism with patriotism. Nationalism, he says, is the idolization of a particular group of people (not necessarily one's own nation, or even any nation at all), whereby the pursuit of that group's interests becomes one's overriding concern. One's individuality is sunk into the national or other group. Patriotism, on the other hand, is devotion to a particular place or way of life, which one believes to be "the best in the world" but which one has no desire to foist on other people.

I would question Orwell's assertion that the true patriot must believe his country to be the best in the world. One should be capable of acknowledging flaws in an object of one's love without ceasing to love him/her/it. Indeed any love that is dependent on the absolute superiority of the object seems doomed to fail in the end, with the exception, presumably, of the love of God. Orwell's "patriotism" thus seems to be partly infused with idolatrous "nationalism".

It does seem difficult to tell if a given person exhibits nationalism or patriotism, just as it is difficult to tell whether one person's love for another is grounded in illusion or reality, or indeed in some mixture of the two, as seems most likely. Kill off all vicious nationalistic feeling, and one may find that virtuous patriotism has been inadvertently destroyed as well. But this doesn't seem to be what Orwell is saying.

Most of the essay consists of criticisms of various "nationalisms" (Trotskyism, Zionism, Celtic nationalism, etc.) It is difficult to judge the accuracy of most of these descriptions without firsthand knowledge. What particularly struck my eye, however, was Orwell's section on the species of "negative nationalism" he refers to as "Anglophobia", i.e., national self-loathing on the part of English intellectuals. I was under the impression that such self-hatred, which has by now grown to psychotic proportions, had become noticeable starting somewhere around the end of the First World War, but that it had been temporarily put into abeyance by a tremendous spirit of national solidarity during the fight against Nazi Germany. But Orwell thinks that English left-wing intellectuals were more or less disloyal to their own country even during Britain's fight for self-preservation. Presumably Orwell should know about this, since he was a leading English intellectual himself. The relevant paragraph in full:

Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a markable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

Labels:

August 25, 2006

Reck-Malleczewen on nationalism

Another German anti-Nazi conservative was Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen, author of Diary of a Man in Despair (English translation 1970). Reck-Malleczewen was of Prussian aristocratic background but seems to have preferred Bavaria, where he had an estate. He did not conceal his loathing of the Nazis when he thought it dishonourable to do so, and not surprisingly ended up with a bullet to the neck in Dachau in 1945. His translator, Paul Rubens, compares him to Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Orwell.

Reck-Malleczewen appears to have been decisively soured on political nationalism by the experience of Nazism.

. . . I cannot overlook the fact that a European psychosis is nearing its end [1940] in the dance of death that is going on in Germany, the psychosis of nationalism, and that Europe must now decide either to destroy it, or be itself destroyed.
      Why must I honor as a force, foreseen at the time of the creation of the world, an idea—nationalism—which the builders of the cathedrals in Germany's greatest period had never heard of, which, indeed, never existed before 1789 and which the Nazis, who otherwise pose as the great liquidators of the French Revolution, have "re-created" out of dusty old scrolls?
      Why must I equate with basic human feelings like love and hate a philosophy which put an aura of heroism around mercantilism and the bourgeois drive for power, and which is today as rancid and flat as the whole of Rousseau. Nationalism is as tattered and dust-covered as the banner of Girondism itself, which great Carlyle called the worst of all time. It was possible only at a time of generalized atheism, and purposelessness, and brute force. Of course, I.G. Farben welcomed Hitler—he provided their poison factory with the aura of a philosophy! [This possibly refers to the unpleasant synthetic foodstuffs produced under the Nazis' self-sufficiency drive, which the author thinks may have caused a sudden doubling of the incidence of cancer in Germany.]
      The businessmen from the Ruhr were well aware of what they were doing when they hired this somber bandit. But should I pretend that I feel myself closer to a German coachman than to the French historian with whom I have been corresponding for decades, to keep this mercantilist ideology from going entirely to shreds? Am I supposed to make no protest when this same nationalism, supposedly the specially ordained protector of all the chief treasures of our national heritage, then turns about and grossly, cynically toys with these as only a barbarian would do?
      What price a forest if the "national" interest calls for a cellulose factory? Or a German cathedral that stands in the way of an autobahn? What is the value of a tiny remnant of the German soul when aggression is in the works and an entire nation is being systematically turned into cavemen—when their spiritual center is to be destroyed, and they are to be turned into an amorphous mass, whose only form is formlessness itself?
      But we must be completely clear: Why, if nationalism really is one of the basic impelling forces of mankind, as its apologists contend, was it discovered in such comparatively recent times as the French Revolution? How is it that this "basic force" did not exist in the days of the Song of the Niebelungs? And how does one explain the fact that in 1400 there was a German nation, but no nationalism—while today, when nationalism is in full bloom, even Goebbels gags a little at the statement that this conglomeration of wage earners, sergeants-gone-berserk, and virgin-typists is a nation? If nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out—that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed? (Diary, pp 109–111)
Nationalism, no matter how loudly defended today, is almost finished, and the coup de grace will come in this most moblike of all wars. Tomorrow it will be behind us, an ugly, sweaty dream. The idea of a united Europe was not always upheld by me, but I know now that we can no longer afford the luxury of considering it a mere idea. Europe must either make any further wars impossible, or this cradle of great ideas will see its cathedrals pulverized, and its landscape turned into a plain. (p. 113)
Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else's. (p. 149)

Reck-Malleczewen is here using a very broad brush. He does not seem to acknowledge (as would Hermann Rauschning) that the Nazi version of nationalism may be essentially different from nationalism in general: both are sweepingly condemned. In particular, if I understand him correctly, nationalism implies economic policies aimed at self-sufficiency, and is therefore an ideology for businessmen; but this also implies unnecessary industrialization and destruction of the natural environment that nationalists supposedly cherish so much. In his reference to the German coachman versus the French historian, he even seems to be going beyond a rejection of nationalism as a political ideology, into the rejection of the idea that one's personal loyalties should be to one's national community.

These ideas of Reck-Malleczewen's do not strike me as worked out particularly well; they seem more like first intellectual impressions on the subject. They do provide a striking example of how Nazism rendered the concept of nationalism loathsome in the eyes of sensitive Europeans, even conservative ones, and made European political union seem an imperative.

(Thanks to Hugh at Jihadwatch for this reference.)

Labels:

Hermann Rauschning (5)

The role of the military

Rauschning deals at some length with the complicity of the German army with Nazism. His point of view here is rather different from what we are used to in the English-speaking world, with our long tradition—at least up to this point—of constitutional stability and supremacy of the civilian authorities. German constitutional democracy was a novelty, and had evidently broken down by the end of the Weimar Republic; and the German conservatives had never believed in democracy in the first place. In the absence of constitutional legitimacy, there is no absolute requirement that the military keep out of politics. The question is rather what principles it should follow in deciding whether to intervene. Rauschning supplies an interesting answer:

The resolve of the army to intervene in political developments and direct their course is to be explained simply by the recognition of its duty to guarantee the security and the military efficiency of the nation. There is no justification for attributing to the heads of the army any other motives than those connected with their professional duty, though this always included the summons to the leadership of the nation at a time of emergency.
. . . . Amid the tendencies to general dissolution, the army is everywhere the last refuge of the state. (pp 136–137.)

This implies that the German army had a professional duty to remove Nazism, which was leading Germany into reckless military adventures and revolutionary chaos. In fact, not only did the army acquiesce in the Nazi régime, it was itself "the strongest revolutionizing influence in Germany" (p. 132).

The First World War, Rauschning says, destroyed the traditional conservative ethos of the German army, which regarded war as a last resort. The habits of expediency learned during the war produced an officer corps that saw craftiness as its principal virtue. Because the war was a total one, it also introduced the idea of the need for a "permanent mobilization of the whole nation". Such an ideology of "all-comprehending militarism", of the subordination of peacetime life to the requirements of national defence, is highly compatible with Nazism. (As Rauschning emphasizes, permanent mobilization is actually likely to lead eventually to the exhaustion of national strength, but presumably this was not apparent to everyone in the military leadership, or it was regarded as too long-term a problem to worry about.)

Thus the new phenomenon of total war posed a fundamental dilemma. If the army was to retain its traditional moral basis, it would have to abandon the concept of permanent mobilization; yet this would leave Germany militarily vulnerable. (The solution to this would appear to have been some form of international arms limitation arrangement, but the institutions necessary for this did not yet exist. The League of Nations, the first major attempt to limit national sovereignty, was seriously flawed, as Mussolini and Hitler demonstrated.) As a result the army was irremediably split on the question of whether the revolutionary development towards total national mobilization should be opposed or supported. In such circumstances it could readily be dominated by the Nazis. Despite this, the army regarded the Nazi Party as a mere instrument that it could use for craftily guiding civilian politics, for ruling from behind the scenes without provoking popular opposition. This was a a "very superficial judgment of National Socialism" and a "disastrous subordination of broad policy to opportunist considerations of tactics" (p. 140).

As Hitler succeeded in bringing about the rearmament of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty, and later won astounding military successes in the first part of the war, the army succumbed to the temptation of power and fell into line behind the Nazi leadership. Only when military catastrophe loomed, in 1944, did the officer corps stir itself to make an unsuccessful bid to remove Hitler from power.

Labels:

August 24, 2006

Hermann Rauschning (4)

The suicide of the old order

The German conservatives do not come off well in Rauschning's book, where he writes that "it is mainly to the monarchist elements that Germany owes her present [1938] condition" (p. 111), referring principally to the deal of January 1933 which saw Hitler given the Chancellorship. Subsequently, the Army also failed to intervene to remove Hitler from power.

There were three basic reasons for this failure of the moderate right: the conservatives underestimated the Nazis' tactical abilities and ruthlessness; they were remarkably blind to the fact that the Nazi movement was inherently revolutionary, not conservative, in character; and finally, many of them tended to some extent to share basic Nazi views, despite the complete incompatibility of Nazism with genuine conservatism. Thus the conservatives succeeded not only in bringing to power a monstrous régime, but in discrediting traditional conservatism in Germany, perhaps for all time. Germany today has disowned its past—not just the Nazi period—probably more than any other Western country.

The most disturbing aspect of the conservatives' role is the convergence of Nazi and "conservative" thinking. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Rauschning says, German conservatism has been "decaying and degenerating" (p. 106). The conservatives have been losing their traditional values, which have been eaten away by the prevailing scepticism, and moving instead in the direction of nihilism. German monarchism fell into a "complete scepticism as to the relevance of spiritual and moral forces to practical politics" (p. 111). The Christian tradition of the former ruling classes was replaced by "ideas of power and interest" (p. 110). . . . CONTINUE

Rauschning cites conservative writers such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt as carrying some blame for this nihilist tendency. Within Nazi Germany, Jünger somehow managed to publish a thinly veiled denunciation of Hitler, and he remained a respected figure after the war. Yet Rauschning claims (without arguing the matter) that Jünger's philosophy of "dynamism" is essentially that of the Nazis. Carl Schmitt, a Conservative who later went over to Nazism, is treated at greater length.

Schmitt's view appears to be that what we call human society no longer exists in an era of control of the masses. There remains only an upper class of ruling officials at the head of the masses usefully organized down to the smallest detail. A revolution will thus amount simply to a change in the personnel of the ruling upper class; any accompanying disorders will be immaterial. In the first steps taken by the National Socialists after coming to power, the Nationalists and Conservatives saw only the establishment of the officials and the ruling class in power and an organization and control of the masses which was proceeding in an extremely chaotic way but was at least clearly destined to last. (p. 107.)
. . . long before 1933 . . . Carl Schmitt [went] beyond the retrogressive revision of the Constitution and the abolition of the franchise to the rejection of the whole "chimaera" of a State based on the laws. The revolutionary democratic legislator who builds up the State on the basis of an ideology gives place in his conception to the man of violence, who by the force of his own will gives the State the stamp of a dictatorship . . . . Here are plain links with National Socialism, the popular National Socialism of the first phase, with its nationalist doctrine. Along these lines the middle-class man and the pan-German of the old style come to approval of the methods of tyranny, of the character of the new dictator, tyrant, and usurper. In this conception his methods are only despotic on the surface, but in reality salutary and necessary. Terrorism included, they are necessary to constrain the nation to unity and higher insight and Germandom. (pp 108–109.)

Another source of the erosion of values in conservatism, Rauschning notes, was the military, which carried wartime ideas of expediency into peacetime political life through the personal connections between the officer corps and the Conservative leadership (p. 115).

In Rauschning's estimation there did exist Conservatives who would have been capable of successful national leadership under the conditions of the German crisis, but these were rejected by their own party as "ideologists and dreamers" (p. 114). An "entirely un-Conservative politician", Hugenberg, came to the head of the reactionary parties and inspired in them a "crude and unthinking materialism", the "belief in the ability of a suitable political machine to achieve any and every political task" (p. 116). Such "realism" is actually deeply unrealistic: "A policy of national renewal and reconstruction cannot grow to fruition in the absence of the only soil in which it can thrive, loyalty and justice and freedom." Nor, Rauschning suggests, is such unrealism limited to German conservatism.

In our day there is a sort of international understanding between reactionaries. All are proceeding along the same fatal course of self-destruction. By their abandonment of the principles on which their whole existence depends, they are destroying the basis of their existence more thoroughly and more rapidly than the extremest of their political opponents could have done . . . . The great financiers, in their support of political dynamism, overlook the fact that they can continue to live at the expense of that movement only so long as there still remain free democracies to be reduced to dictatorships, and that they are assisting the very authorities that are restricting the field of independent enterprise. And in the same way all the groups that profess Conservatism are training and nurturing the very element that intends to overthrow them. (p. 117.)

Labels:

August 22, 2006

Hermann Rauschning (3)

England and Israel

(This is not really part of the main point of this series of posts, but I can't resist putting it in anyway.) Rauschning describes a dislike of England on the part of the Nazis, associated not with its geopolitical position but with its national culture, which the Nazis saw as too closely akin to Judaism.

The German dislike of England is derived directly from the ideas of anti-Semitism. The Englishman in his Puritanism, saturated with the spirit of the Old Testament, has become the chief representative of the capitalism which, in the eyes of National Socialists, is the principal Jewish achievement; thus, the British Empire is a Jewish empire, an empire in which the typically Jewish way of thinking, guidance by economic considerations . . . dominates. The Liberalism of the English mind is the essential and almost insuperable obstacle to an alliance between Germany and England . . . . The English through their Puritans have become the nation that appropriated the promise to Israel . . . . England has made this identification of economic success with the blessing of God the ethical framework of her public morality and civic virtues. England is Judah. This is the character the national propaganda against England will one day assume, when it is found necessary in the Third Reich to prepare for a struggle (Germany's Revolution of Destruction, p. 205).

One cannot help thinking that the Nazis had a point here, and that such observations are even more apt in the case of the United States—which has been so congenial to Jews that they may be disappearing into the Gentile population. Many Jews do regard "the Anglosphere" as their natural home, or their second home after the State of Israel itself. One might also mention the Unitarian form of Christianity that became prominent among the ruling classes in both England and the U.S. in the 18th–19th centuries. Of course, what the Nazis failed to recognize was that merchants can turn into warriors. The English, Americans and more recently the Jews all turned out to be formidable fighters when they were pushed far enough, beating the militaristic peoples at their own game.

In view of this basic affinity between England and Israel, the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism in England, and the spectacle of planeloads of British Jews, no longer so welcome in their native land, making aliyah to Israel during wartime, seems one more sign that England has slipped her traditional moorings.


Update (09/18): From February 2005, an intellectual bombshell of a review by Spengler of a book by Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham's Promise. Wyschogrod offers "a way for Christians to think of themselves as a special case of Judaism", and there is some interest in this idea among American Protestant theologians. Spengler, who is an extremely smart person, thinks that "this might be one of the most important books of the 21st century." He (Spengler) regards American Evangelical Protestantism as the most viable form of Christianity at the present time, and therefore as crucial to the survival of Western culture. Evangelical Christianity is so far not a political movement, but in light of Wyschogrod's ideas there seems to be "a chance that the US might return to the world view of its founders: that of a Chosen People in a Promised Land. If that occurs, the world will be a different place." The reconciliation of Christianity and Judaism would be no small thing either, though I suppose that sectarian divisions may appear even between very similar religious groups.

Labels:

August 20, 2006

Hermann Rauschning (2)

The essence of Nazism

Nazism succeeded by disguising itself as an ally to a wide variety of Germans, even where this required obvious self-contradiction, as in the case of monarchists and socialists. Adding to this confusion, many members of the Nazi party itself, especially at the lower levels of the hierarchy and in the earlier years of the movement, would also have been taken in by such disguises. Which of these self-portrayals was the genuine one? Rauschning says that at its core, National Socialism was neither nationalist (right-wing) nor socialist (left-wing), but nihilist: concerned with the pursuit and celebration of unlimited power and energy for their own sake, with the liberating effect of violence, and with the elimination of ethical constraints. Every positive value was seen by Nazism as an obstacle to its open-ended domination, and therefore systematically demolished. The public Nazi ideology was merely a rationalization of the use of force. Nazism achieved power "almost without the slightest tangible ideas of what it was going to do" with it (Germany's Revolution of Destruction, p. 24). Neither nationalism nor even racism is an essential feature of mature Nazism.

This nihilism put Nazism in diametric opposition to conservatism properly so-called, whose own core is the concern for the preservation of traditional values, especially those deriving from Christianity. Conservatism and Nazism are both anti-liberal, but conservatives oppose liberalism as the destroyer of values, while Nazism seeks in effect to complete the work of liberalism, by destroying those values which remain after liberalism has collapsed, so that it can erect a totalitarian despotism in the spiritual desert.

For the very reason that we [conservatives] acknowledge the eternal values of the nation, and of a political order rooted in the nation, we are bound to turn against this revolution, whose subversive course involves the utter destruction of all traditional spiritual standards . . . . These values are the product of the intellectual and historical unity of Western civilization . . . . Without these, Nationalism is not a conservative principle, but the implement of a destructive revolution . . . . (p. xii)

The sole ethical value within the Party was loyalty to superiors, without which the Party, which encouraged rivalry between its constituent branches as a device for mutual supervision and for refining the tactics of violent self-aggrandizement, would have instantly disintegrated into rival gangs.

Rauschning was writing at the end of the peacetime phase of the Nazi régime. The war which followed provided a different kind of environment for Nazism, permitting it to draw upon the reserves of German patriotism in much the same way as other governments fighting for their existence with the support of their people. If Hitler had not entered into war, Nazism, according to Rauschning's analysis, would have continued on its aborted path of cultural destruction within Germany, first dominating then obliterating the Church, high culture, science, the army, national customs, private property, the economy, and the family. The future would be the "all-pervading atmosphere of barracks and prison" (p. 94). Human individuality, since it could not be dominated, would have to be destroyed too. Nazism would even destroy its own élites, replacing them with a succession of more radicalized younger generations. Anti-Semitic outrages were merely a foretaste of and a training for what was in store for the whole population. Nazism acted like Bolshevism, with the difference that Bolshevism openly announced its destructive intentions, while Nazism professed to uphold what it destroyed.

One has the feeling that Orwell may have had Rauschning in mind when he wrote 1984. A basic difference between their respective visions of the future, however, is that Rauschning sees that it is impossible for a nihilist régime to be stable or long-lasting. Rauschning stresses repeatedly that it is in the nature of a nihilistic movement such as Nazism to live by devouring everything in its path, that the "permanent revolution" cannot be stopped from within until it has reduced its host society to complete exhaustion and atomization. There will be no "thousand-year Reich": long before that time has elapsed, the régime will have eaten away the foundations of its own existence. The Nazi élite itself has a strong subconscious sense of the short time left to the Reich, Rauschning asserts (p. 50). But the temporary nature of Nazism is of little consolation, because the people emerging from the ruins will be spiritually crippled, scarcely recognizable as human beings. Nazism naturally wishes to extend its power over the whole world, and if it succeeds the whole of humanity will suffer this fate.

The self-destructiveness of Nazism is not obvious, because the monster temporarily thrives on what it consumes. Every constructive value is first pressed into the service of Nazi power before it is destroyed by its subjection to base nihilism. Nazism acts very much like an addictive stimulant for the host society; its vaunted achievements are "essentially nothing more than a squandering of existing reserves" (p. 95). For example, Nazism was wrecking the economic and military institutions of Germany, but these were still strong enough to make Germany a formidable military force in World War II. Rauschning emphasizes in this connection the role of propaganda: it is a mistake, he argues, to expect that this will remain effective indefinitely. Propaganda has to be continually heightened in order to remain effective (p. 87); once it works the soil to death, the result will be complete apathy. Thus the Nazi, not the Jewish scapegoat, is the true parasitic drainer of the national life-blood (p. 99).

Rauschning now and then attempts to reason his way out of the vicious circle of progressive destruction, but in his more consistent passages, he offer little hope that Nazism can be reformed from within. A constructive political opposition grows less likely, because its leaders would require "genuine faith in the practical importance of the things of the spirit", and this is steadily being wiped out in Germany. Nor would the people, deadened to the political slogans that have been abused by Nazism, be likely to rally to such an opposition (p. 101).

Labels: ,

August 18, 2006

Hermann Rauschning (1)

Hermann Rauschning was a German of aristocratic background who served (1933–1934) as Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, but openly turned against the Nazis and had to flee to Switzerland (1936). At the beginning of the War he published a book recounting a large number of alleged personal meetings with Hitler which was apparently phoney, a (successful) attempt to solve his personal financial problems. This episode is unfortunate, because it also tends unfairly to discredit another work of his, Germany's Revolution of Destruction (known in the U.S. as The Revolution of Nihilism), published in English in 1939. This book offers an unusually close-up view of Nazism by a thoughtful observer, a participant in the politics of the time who is also capable of intellectual detachment. It is on a much higher level than the technocrat Albert Speer's wartime memoir, for example, from what I remember of the latter.

Above all, the book should be of extraordinary interest to conservatives, because Rauschning, who was and remained a conservative, is unusually honest about the relationships between German conservatism and Nazism. As far as I am aware, there is no other book written from a conservative standpoint which shows such intellectual honesty. (Kuehnelt-Leddihn, to take a notable example, evades the issue by simply designating Nazism as "leftist" and denying that conservative aristocratic Nazis, like Rauschning, were of any significance.) Nazism probably would never have come to power without the tactical cooperation of moderate conservatives such as Rauschning, and he is fully aware of the catastrophic error for which he bears some responsibility. He not only admits this mistake, but goes on relentlessly to examine the contamination of conservative thinking itself by Nazi-like elements. This analysis may be of even greater significance today, when a number of intelligent observers see a danger of new right-wing extremist movements in response to what may well be the collapse of liberalism in Europe and/or the United States.

Labels:

August 16, 2006

Two nationalisms

Eric Voegelin (see earlier posts) somewhere mentions that nationalism was the spiritually inferior successor to medieval Christianity. Other conservatives (or people now thought of as conservative) have also seen nationalism as an evil to be transcended by some form of internationalism. Ortega y Gasset, for example, says somewhere that the creation of a European union is the major historical task facing the Europeans of his time. The German conservative writer Hermann Rauschning—about whom more later—held similarly that nationalist conservatism could no longer be a constructive political influence:

There is no room any longer for a nationalist Conservatism, only a European one. One of the fundamental changes in Conservatism is this release from narrow nationalist patriotism, since the civilization that has to be rescued and conserved is the common possession of the West. In this sense the idea of the Third Reich ["Third Realm"], before the National Socialist usurpation, was a Conservative idea. In Moeller van den Bruck's original conception it was not a German idea, it had no nationalist limitation; it was a political idea of European scope . . . .

(Germany's Revolution of Destruction, 1939, p. 121.) By contrast, contemporary conservatives tend to view the European Union, the fruit of postwar internationalist sentiments held by both Left and Right, with fear and loathing, as the embryo of a new left-wing totalitarian tyranny under which dissenting voices will be silenced and all initiative crushed in the name of "tolerance" and "equality". Many conservatives now also regard the EU project as a mortal threat to the survival of national identity.

Were the prewar conservatives then simply wrong? The key point here, I think, is that the term "nationalism" can refer to different things. As Voegelin mentions, the traditional nationalisms of the major modern European nations, such as Britain and France, and adopted by Germany in the nineteenth century, were of a virulent form. A formerly united Christian moral community was divided into compatriots and foreigners ("wogs begin at Calais"), and the good of one's own national community was regarded as the summum bonum. National churches tended to displace international Catholicism, even in the remaining Catholic countries. One's own nation was chauvinistically considered to be the centre of civilization. Remnants of this nationalistic self-importance still persist in France, for example, despite that country's reduced cultural and political standing. Such an attitude was perhaps a precondition of the fratricidal First World War among the European powers. The experiences of the twentieth century justly discredited this kind nationalism in the eyes of Europe, or perhaps one should say of the European élites.

There is another, healthy kind of nationalism, though, which is also threatened by ill-conceived internationalizing movements. This might be called the nationalism of small countries—because small countries, unless they are very exceptional, cannot reasonably regard themselves as the centre of the moral or cultural universe. Probably no Welsh person regards Wales as the source of all that is good in modern civilization. Nevertheless, the inhabitants of such countries can deeply love them. If their nation has a genuinely distinct culture, they may also see that it has, as a national unit rather than as an aggregate of individuals, something to contribute to a wider (for example, Western) culture. British conservatives of the early 20th century used to call this the "national vocation". Smaller nations can more readily regard themselves as culturally unique and therefore significant without being supremacist. Once larger nations lose their supremacist inclinations, they may be ready to adopt this moderate kind of nationalism too. It would probably be a positive sign if an English nationalism, for example, regarded some variety of Celtic nationalism as its model (despite the excesses to which Irish nationalism has been prone). Another good sign would be for nationalists from different countries to genuinely respect one another, rather than merely make tactical alliances against homogenizing internationalism.

On a political level, any form of centralized government tends to unduly suppress local variety and autonomy. In the classical liberal view, culture is properly not a project of government at all, but of individuals and voluntary associations. Cultural unity on a European scale (for example) requires not extensive political control from Brussels, but the absence of military threats within Europe, together with the freedom of movement and communication across national borders. A NATO-type military alliance, as a means of securing peace among European countries, might well be a more appropriate foundation for a healthy European culture, composed of thriving national elements, than a federal union aiming explicitly at the creation of a common European culture.

Unfortunately, the danger remains that a moderate nationalism may be sharpened into the older chauvinist variety, for the reason that our own age is spiritually deprived, and therefore liable to ruin any good thing by turning it into an idol. (This has happened, for example, to "human rights".)

Labels:

August 10, 2006

An Israeli military-civilian split?

(via Ultima Thule)

Jonathan Ariel, in Israelinsider, reports that relations between the country's political leadership, with its civilian background (the defence minister, for example, is a former peace activist), and the military command are "at the lowest point in the country's history" as as result of difficulties in Lebanon. According to Ariel, senior IDF officers blame Prime Minister Olmert for gutting their detailed operational plan for destroying Hezbollah, presumably because he wished to limit the scope of the war. They believe that this decision brought about unnecessary Israeli military casualties while restricting the effectiveness of the Israeli offensive.

Some senior officers have been mentioning the C-word in private conversations. They have been saying that a coup d'etat might be the only way to prevent an outcome in Lebanon [i.e., Israeli military failure] that could embolden the Arab world to join forces with Syria and Iran in an all out assault on Israel, given the fact that such a development would be spurred entirely by the Arab and Moslem world's perception of Israel's leadership as weak, craven and vacillating, and therefore ripe for intimidation.

See also The U.S. military-civilian split (1) to (3)

August 09, 2006

Comments on the BNP constitution

BNP leader Nick Griffin (see this earlier post) gave a speech in which he appeared to announce that a BNP government would take direct control of the British TV and newspapers. By contrast, the provision of the party constitution (2004 edition; pdf file here) dealing with free speech and other civil liberties seems to be the most liberal part of that document. . . . CONTINUE Section 1, Article 2f says:

The British National Party will introduce a Bill of Rights, establishing as absolute the right of all British people to effective freedom of speech, assembly and worship. The undemocratic power of the mass media and vested interest groups will be curbed by the introduction of a statutory right of reply and tougher penalties for corruption in public affairs. We favour a devolved, democratic system in which political decisions are made by ordinary citizens at the most local level of government possible. We are pledged to extend and rejuvenate democratic government by means of electronic media and Citizens' Initiative referenda, and by returning to Parliament the powers that have been appropriated by the EU.

Thus, according to this statement, the mass media would suffer nothing more than being forced to give airtime or space to those it criticized, or so I interpret a "statutory right of reply". It is not clear how one should interpret what appears to be such a flagrant contradiction. If Art. 2f were merely for public relations purposes, why would the BNP publicize a speech contradicting it? The article is also part of a constitution which seems to be a serious document, not a propaganda device—at least where it deals with internal party affairs. Perhaps, as is often the case with opposition political parties, there is no coherent policy position in this area.

Ordinarily, the effect of such incoherence is to leave the status quo intact in the event that the party comes to power. Would this be the case with a BNP government? It seems difficult for an outsider to say. Presumably, though, any government trying to direct a mass media previously dominated by liberals would require a fairly large number of personnel dedicated to this task. The kind of contradiction just noted would seem to work against establishing such a group within the BNP, unless it was generally understood at upper party levels that Article 2f was only "for show"—that is, unless there was a second, secret constitution alongside the public one (which seems implausible). For comparison, one might look to the German Nazi Party, which, I think, never made any bones about its intention to abolish such "decadent" liberal institutions as freedom of the press.

The internal party aspects of the constitution, meanwhile, strike me as a curious mixture of Anglo-Saxon political tradition and the Führerprinzip. A great deal of power is given to the party leader (the Chairman), including even the power to make constitutional changes (Sect. 14). One might think that this would render the constitution meaningless, and the power of the Chairman absolute. Yet many of the provisions of the constitution describe working legal forms. Most importantly, there is an annual election, by the party membership, to the Chairmanship, in the event that anyone challenges the incumbent (Sect. 4); the procedures for holding the election are laid out in some detail, and Nick Griffin himself won his position in a contested election. There is also an "advisory council" which may call a general membership meeting, over the opposition of the Chairman, by a two-thirds majority, and this general meeting can then make changes to the constitution (Sect. 14). Thus the advisory council would seem to provide a potential check to the power of the Chairman—if not a very strong one, given that the Chairman himself appoints the advisory council. In Section 3, the Chairman is given "full executive power" over all party appointments and policies, yet has to remain within broad policy guidelines spelled out in Section 1 (at least, presumably, until he announces that those guidelines are to be amended). Such provisions as the vetting of all parliamentary candidates by the Chairman (Sect. 11) are not in the traditional parliamentary spirit, but then neither are they unusual among contemporary centrist parties.

Who can say how such a constitution might evolve as the organization approached power?

Update (08/10): Some recent discussion of the BNP at the American blog View From the Right:

And a 2005 article by Robert Locke: BNP goes straight

Previous post on the BNP

Labels:

August 06, 2006

Karl Kraus

Karl Kraus, who died in 1936, is known as a great Viennese intellectual. Little of his work is as yet available in English. The following, by Hugh McDiarmid, was quoted by Thomas Szasz in his Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors (1976), a book about Kraus's lack of veneration for the sacred cow of psychoanalysis.

And, above all, Karl Kraus . . .
. . . whose thinking was a voyage
Of exploration in a landscape of words
And that language German.
—For, while an English writer or speaker
Over long stretches of his verbal enterprise
Is protected by the tact and wisdom
Of linguistic convention, his German counterpart
Risks revealing himself as an idiot
Or a scoundrel through the ring and rhythm
Of his first sentence. Had Hitler's speeches
Been accessible to the West in their unspeakable original
We might have been spared the War
For the War was partly caused
By Hitler's innocent translators
Unavoidably missing in smooth and diplomatic
French or English the original's diabolic resonance.
Only German, in all its notorious long-windedness
Offers such short cuts to the termini of mankind.
It was Karl Kraus who knew them all.
He examined the language spoken and written
By his contemporaries and found
That they lived by wrong ideas.
Listening to what they said he discovered
The impure springs of their actions.
Reading what they wrote he knew
They were heading for disaster.