More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The untheatricality of most British Socialist leaders is a mark of uprightness and intellectual integrity, but it handicaps the experiment of nationalization which is undoubtedly the central purpose of their lives.
Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull.
life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral.
The behavior of the members of the Donner party when they were buoyed by hope and, later, when hope was gone illustrates the dependence of cooperativeness and the communal spirit on hope. Those without hope are divided and driven to desperate self-seeking.
This preoccupation with the past stems not only from a desire to demonstrate the legitimacy of the movement and the illegitimacy of the old order, but also to show up the present as a mere interlude between past and future.
In their fanatical cry of “all or nothing at all” the second alternative echoes perhaps a more ardent wish than the first.
It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting.
It is of interest that the Jews who submitted to extermination in Hitler’s Europe fought recklessly when transferred to Palestine.
They, indeed, fought and died for cities yet to be built and gardens yet to be planted.
“Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.”
Still, his sense of security is derived from his passionate attachment and not from the excellence of his cause. The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle.
Though they seem to be at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end.
And it is easier for a fanatic Communist to be converted to fascism, chauvinism or Catholicism than to become a sober liberal.
“The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men.”
The ex-soldier is a veteran, even a hero; the ex-true believer is a renegade.
The fanatical soldier is usually a fanatic turned soldier rather than the other way around.
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents.
without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
Hitler used anti-Semitism not only to unify his Germans but also to sap the resoluteness of Jew-hating Poland, Rumania, Hungary, and finally even France.
There is perhaps no surer way of infecting ourselves with virulent hatred toward a person than by doing him a grave injustice.
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
According to Renan, Islam obtained from its coerced converts “a faith ever tending to grow stronger.”29 Fanatical orthodoxy is in all movements a late development. It comes when the movement is in full possession of power and can impose its faith by force as well as by persuasion.
Said Melanchthon, Luther’s wisest lieutenant: “Without the intervention of the civil authority what would our precepts become?—Platonic laws.”
“Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.”
The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership.
In this country, the American employer often finds in the racial fanatic of our South—so given to mass violence—a respectful and docile factory hand. The army, too, finds him particularly amenable to discipline.
A Communist commissar of industry has probably more in common with a capitalist industrialist than with a Communist theoretician. The real International is that of men of action.
How else explain the surprising fact that the Lenins, Trotskys, Mussolinis and Hitlers who spent the best part of their lives talking their heads off in cafés and meetings reveal themselves suddenly as the most able and tireless men of action of their time?
Here then is another reason for the apparent indispensability of a mass movement in the modernization of backward and stagnant countries.
A people steeped in action is likely to be the least religious, the least revolutionary and the least chauvinist. The social stability and the political and religious tolerance of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is due in part to the relative abundance among them of the will, skill and opportunities for action. Action served them as a substitute for a mass movement.
No wonder they heiled him as their Savior.
As Abraham was ready to sacrifice his only son to prove his devotion to Jehovah, so must the fanatical Nazi or Communist be ready to sacrifice relatives and friends to demonstrate his total surrender to the holy cause.
“We Germans are so happy. We are free from freedom.”
On the other hand, a dispensation of undoubted merit and vigor may be swept away if it fails to win the allegiance of the articulate minority.
Lenin himself recognized that where the ground is not ready for them the Communists “find it hard to approach the masses … and even get them to listen to them.”
The emergence of an articulate minority where there was none before is a potential revolutionary step. The Western powers were indirect and unknowing fomenters of mass movements in Asia not only by kindling resentment (see Section 1) but also by creating articulate minorities through educational work which was largely philanthropic. Many of the revolutionary leaders in India, China and Indonesia received their training in conservative Western institutions. The American college at Beirut, which is directed and supported by Godfearing, conservative Americans, is a school for revolutionaries in
...more
“Vanity,” said Napoleon, “made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext.”
Jesus Himself might not have preached a new Gospel had the dominant Pharisees taken Him into the fold, called Him Rabbi, and listened to Him with deference.
been won over to Prussiandom by the bestowal of a title and an important government job;
“God would prefer to suffer the government to exist no matter how evil, rather than to allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so.”
Now it is not altogether farfetched to assume that, had the British in India instead of cultivating the Nizams, Maharajas, Nawabs, Gekawars and so on made an effort to win the Indian intellectual; had they treated him as an equal, encouraged him in his work and allowed him a share of the fleshpots, they could perhaps have maintained their rule there indefinitely.
The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand, Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence.
The reason for the tragic fate which almost always overtakes the intellectual midwives of a mass movement is that, no matter how much they preach and glorify the united effort, they remain essentially individualists.
Peter Viereck points out that most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize.
Hitler—himself a fanatic—could diagnose with precision the state of mind of the fanatics who plotted against him within the ranks of the National Socialist party. In his order to the newly appointed chief of the SA after the purge of Röhm in 1934 he speaks of those who will not settle down: “… without realizing it, [they] have found in nihilism their ultimate confession of faith … their unrest and disquietude can find satisfaction only in some conspiratorial activity of the mind, in perpetually plotting the disintegration of whatever the set-up of the moment happens to be.”
Trotsky was essentially a man of words—vain, brilliant and an individualist to the core. The cataclysmic collapse of an Empire and Lenin’s overpowering will brought him into the camp of the fanatics. In the civil war he displayed unequaled talents as an organizer and general.
There are, of course, rare leaders such as Lincoln, Gandhi, even F.D.R., Churchill and Nehru. They do not hesitate to harness man’s hungers and fears to weld a following and make it zealous unto death in the service of a holy cause; but unlike a Hitler, a Stalin, or even a Luther and a Calvin,1 they are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world. The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from and blended with their faith in humanity, for they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind.
He finds the assertion that all men are cowards less debatable than that all men are fools, and, in the words of Sir John Maynard, inclines to found the new order on the necks of the people rather than in their hearts.
