BOLSHEVISM
The Bolshevist explosion, which will appear in history I think as the
point of departure from which shall date the new attitude of the Western
nations towards the Jews, is not only a field in which we can study the
evil effect of secrecy, but one in which we can analyse all the various
forces which tend to bring Israel into such ceaseless conflict with the
society around it.
It merits, therefore, a very special examination, both as an opportunity
for the study of our subject and as a turning-point of the first moment
in history.
Why did a Jewish organization thus attempt to transform society? Why did
it use the methods which we know it used? Why was that particular venue
chosen? What aim had the actors in view? What measure of success did
they hope to achieve? By what method do they propose to extend their
influence? When we can answer those questions we shall have gone far to
discovering the almost fatal causes of conflict between this peculiar
nation and those among whom they move.
The answers usually given to these questions by the avowed enemies of
the Jewish race are always inadequate and often false. When they
contain an element of truth (which they often do) that truth is quite
insufficient to account for the full phenomena. But the accretions of
falsehood and exaggeration render the whole thing inexplicable--indeed,
these explanations of the Russian revolution are very good specimens of
the way in which the European so misunderstands the Jew that he imputes
to him powers which neither he nor any other poor mortal can ever
exercise.
Thus we are asked to believe that this political upheaval was part of
one highly-organized plot centuries old, the agents of which were
millions of human beings all pledged to the destruction of our society
and acting in complete discipline under a few leaders superhumanly wise!
The thing is nonsense on the face of it. Men have no capacity for acting
in this fashion. They are far too limited, far too diverse.
Moreover, the motive is completely lacking. Why merely destroy and why,
if your object is merely to destroy, manifest such wide differences in
your aims? One may say justly that there is always a tendency to
reaction against alien surroundings, and in so far as that reaction is
intense and effective it is destructive of those surroundings. One may
point out that such reaction in the case of the Jews, as in the case of
all other alien bodies, is in the main unconscious and instinctive. All
that is true enough; but the conception of a vast age-long plot,
culminating in the contemporary Russian affair, will not hold water, any
more than will the corresponding hallucination which led men to believe
that the French revolution (a thing utterly different in kind from the
Russian) was the mere outward expression of a strictly disciplined
secret body. In the case of the French Revolution everything was put
down (by the forerunners of to-day's Anti-Semitic enthusiasts) to the
secret agency of The Order of Templars acting unweariedly through six
centuries, and finally bringing down the French monarchy. In the case,
of course, of the Bolshevist anarchy a still longer range is given to
the final result: for "Templars" read "Jews," and for "600" read "2,000"
years. It is all smoke.
More serious is the statement that this combination of Jews for the
destruction of the old Russian society was an act of racial revenge.
There is a great element of truth in that. There is no doubt that the
greater part of the Jews who took over power in the Russian cities four
years ago felt an appetite for revenge against the old Russian State
comparable to that felt by any oppressed people against their
oppressors. Probably it was more intense even than any other example
that could be quoted. We are all witnesses to the way in which the
Russian people, religion, and government, and particularly the person
and office of the Emperor--were attacked and decried by the Jews in
Western Europe, of the way in which the Jews ceaselessly conspired
against the Russian State, and of the brutal repression to which they
were subject. When you release a force of hatred so violent it may run
to any length. That sudden release, that sudden opportunity for
satisfying the thirst for vengeance, must explain a very large part of
what followed. But even that does not account for the whole. It would
account for mere massacre and mere chaos. It would not account for the
attempts--rather pitiful attempts--at construction and for the
obviously designed system of direction which has continued on the same
lines since the Jews first assumed power and is still fully manifest
after nearly five years of that power.
Still less is it sufficient to say that the Jew is everywhere the
organizer and leader of revolution and that we only see him at work in
Russia with greater vigour and thoroughness because the opportunity is
there greater.
The Jew is not everywhere a revolutionary. He is everywhere discontented
with a society alien to him: that is natural and inevitable. But he does
not exercise his power invariably, or even ordinarily, towards the
oversetting of an established social order by which, incidentally, he
often largely benefits.
You do not find the Jew in history perpetually leading the innumerable
revolts which citizens in the mass make against the privileged or the
superior conditions of the minority. He has sometimes benefited by these
movements in the past; more often suffered. We often find individual
Jews sympathizing with the revolutionary side, but we also find many
individual Jews sympathizing with the other. The Jew is not, in the
history of Europe, the prime agent of revolution: quite the contrary.
The great acts of violence, successful and unsuccessful, which have
marked our society from the agrarian troubles of pagan Rome to the
French Revolution, the land war in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in
London, or whatever modern movement you will, have appealed much more to
the fighting instincts and political traditions of _our_ race than they
have to the Jews. They are marked everywhere by an attitude towards
property and patriotism which are the very opposite of the Jews'
characteristics. The Revolutions of the past were for the better
distribution of property and for the betterment of the State. Often they
were openly undertaken because patriotism had been offended by defeat in
war and because the Nation was thought to be betrayed. Usually they were
jingo and always for distribution of wealth.
It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution and of its attempted
extension elsewhere that it repudiates patriotism and the division of
property. In that, it differs from all others; and it is markedly,
obviously, _Jewish_. But why had the Jews a chance of action in Russia
which they lacked elsewhere?
What were the special characters in the Russian opportunity which made
the Jew the creator of the whole movement?
There are, I take it, three main factors present in this case peculiarly
suitable to the Jewish effort.
In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was directed towards,
a particular social phenomenon in which that profound instinct in the
European, the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell upon the
state of affairs called _Industrial Capitalism_, the chief mark of which
is the destruction in the mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the
atrophying) of that essential part of the European soul--ownership. The
Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sympathize with us in that central core
of our civic instincts. He has never understood the European sense of
property and I doubt if he ever will.
But in Russia _Industrial Capitalism_ was quite new. The resentment
against it was keen. The victims were the sons of peasants, or had
themselves been born peasants, so that this proletarian mass in the
Russian towns, though less than a tenth of the whole nation, was
peculiarly open to propaganda against its masters. And an attack
successfully conducted, on that weakest point of modern Capitalism,
might easily succeed and _then_ spread to neighbouring industrialized
centres in Poland, Germany, and so westward.
Now the attack on this international phenomenon, an attack directed
against Industrial Capitalism, required an international force. It
needed men who had international experience and were ready with an
international formula.
There are two, and only two, organized international forces in Europe
to-day with a soul and identity in them. One is the Catholic Church, and
the other is Jewry. But the Catholic Church, for reasons which I will
discuss in a moment, cannot and never will directly attack industrial
capitalism. It will undoubtedly attack that system in flank and
indirectly destroy it in the long run wherever the Faith has a strong
hold upon masses of people. But it will not and cannot directly attack
it. The Jew, on the other hand, is free to attack it precisely because
our sense of property means nothing to him, is to him something strange,
and even, I think, comic. Further, the Jew was present, he was on the
spot. The Church was not.
Of the two international forces present, therefore, the Jews alone could
act.
Here I must digress and say why the other great international force, the
Catholic Church, has not been able--and will never be able--to attack
Industrial Capitalism as a whole and directly, though, as I have said,
it acts indirectly as a solvent of this evil and will destroy it
wherever society remains Catholic. The Catholic Church, not only in its
abstract doctrine, but acting as the expression of our European
civilization, is profoundly attached to the conception of private
property. It makes the family the unit of the State and it perceives
that the freedom of the family is most secure where the family owns. It
perceives, as do all Europeans, instinctively or explicitly, that
property is the correlative of freedom, or, at any rate, of that only
kind of freedom which we Europeans care to have: that it is the
safeguard of spiritual health (the mark of which is humour), of breadth
and diversity in action, of elasticity in the State, of permanence in
institutions. Property, as widely distributed as possible, but sacred as
a principle, is an inevitable social accompaniment of Catholicism.
Apart from this, it is also a definite feature of Catholic doctrine to
deny that private property is immoral. No Catholic can say that private
property is immoral without cutting himself off from the Communion of
the Church, any more than he can say that the authority in the State is
immoral. He cannot be a communist, in abstract morals any more than he
can be an anarchist.
Now Industrial Capitalism is a disease of property. It is the monstrous
state of affairs in which a very few men derive their vast advantage
from the corresponding fact that most men whom they exploit do not own.
But it remains true that the sheet-anchor of Capitalism is a sense of
ownership in the mass as well as in the privileged few. The only moral
force remaining to Industrial Capitalism, the only spiritual tie which
prevents its dissolution, is this admission by the European mind that
property is a right--even property in a diseased and exaggerated form.
The whole of the operations of Industrial Capitalism rely upon the
sanctity of property and the sanctity of contract which develops from
the sanctity of property. And whenever society loses this sense,
industrial capitalism will fall into chaos. The Church cannot deny that
one moral principle. Its action will always be towards the dissolution
of the great accumulations promoted by capitalism. It always will work
indirectly for the establishment of well-divided property, an ideal
defined by the voice of its great modern Pope, Leo XIII, who explicitly
states it in his _Rerum Novarum_. But the Church can never take the
short cut of destroying Industrial Capitalism root and branch and at
once, by erecting against it the doctrine of Communism or (as many
people call diluted Communism) "Socialism." It never can do so in
theory, and still less will it ever do so in practice. A Catholic
society will always tend to be a society of owners: with all the
elements of co-operation, with the Guild, with masses of corporate
property attached to the State or connected with the city, with the
college, with the corporation. For without such corporate property in a
State, property is never well founded.
The Jew has neither that political instinct in his national tradition
nor a religious doctrine supporting and expressing such an instinct. The
same thing in him which makes him a speculator and a nomad blinds him
to, and makes him actually contemptuous of, the European sense of
property. When therefore we have reached, through Industrial Capitalism,
or any other social disease, a state of affairs in which the practical
denial of property is possible because the mass of men have lost the
desire for it, and when the repudiation of property offers an immediate
solution for intolerable evils, then the Jew can appear at once as a
leader.
One must find in such a movement an international leader because the
disease is international, and still more because the proposed cure of
that disease, through Communism, _must_ be international if it is to
succeed. A Communist society may stand apart from the general society of
owners in other countries, but if it is to succeed in competition with
them it must convert them to its own creed.
The Jew took international action for granted. He took the narrow and
false economic view of property--that it was a mere institution to be
modified indefinitely, and, if necessary, abolished. He had an obvious
opportunity for leadership accorded to him when international action
against property was demanded. Again, our national sense, patriotism,
which is incomprehensible to the Jew save on the false analogy of his
own peculiar nomadic and tribal patriotism, is a check upon Communism,
and, indeed, against revolution of any kind. The process of thought in
the patriotic citizen--largely unconscious but none the less
efficacious--is somewhat as follows:
"I cannot function save as a citizen of my nation, and, what is more,
that nation made me what I am. It is my creator in a sense and so has
authority over me. I must even give up my life in its defence if
necessary, because but for its existence I and those like me could not
be. My happiness, my freedom of individual action, my self-expression
are all bound up with the existence of the civic unit of which I am a
part. If something which appears to me good in the abstract, or which
apparently will procure for me a material good, involves danger to that
civic unit, I must forego the good, regarding the continued existence
and strength of my people as a greater good to which the lesser should
be sacrificed."
That, I say roughly, is the expression of the patriotic instinct in the
European man. That is what he has felt for many and many a great State
in the past and for every polity to which he has ever belonged; that is
what he feels to-day for his country.
The Jew has the same feeling, of course, for his Israel, but since that
nation is not a collection of human beings, inhabiting one place and
living by traditions rooted in its soil, since it has not a strong,
visible, external form, his patriotism is necessarily of a different
complexion. It has different connotations and our patriotism seems
negligible to him.
The implied fallacies current in the modern industrial revolutionary
formulæ, in such phrases as "What does it matter to the working man
whether he is exploited by a German or an English master?" or, again,
"Why should the individual Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction
called England?" or again, "Nationalism is the great obstacle to the
full development of humanity"--all that sort of thing, which we feel by
instinct and can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be nonsense in
our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as very good sense indeed. For in his
case these things involve no fallacies at all; they apply to _him_
vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be sacrificed for England? In
what way is England, or France, or Ireland, or any other nation
necessary to _him_? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that these
terms, "France, Ireland, England, Russia," are but abstractions? The
_real_ thing in his eyes when he thinks of us, is the individual and his
certain needs, especially his physical and material needs; because upon
these there can be no doubt; upon these all are agreed; these are
visible and tangible. "England," "France," "Poland" are whimsies.
It is true that if you were to put his special case to the Jew with
similar force and say, "No Jew should run any risk for Israel," "no Jew
should suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow Jew in
distress," "the idea of Israel is a vague abstraction--all that counts
is the individual Jew and especially his physical requirements"; if you
said that sort of thing you would be offending the most profound
instincts of Jewish patriotism and you would, in fact, clash with the
overt and covert action of the Jews throughout the world. But the Jew
would answer that, as his was an international polity, the argument
applying to our national polity did not apply to him; that his feelings,
though analogous to ours, were of a different kind, and that, at any
rate, he cannot sacrifice a fine idea of his like Communism for our
provincial and local habit, called by us Europeans "the love of our
country."
There is more than this in the business. Even those truths which we know
to be truths have little effect upon us, unless they enter into the
practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a number of Jews who would
admit at once the truth of any nationalist statement made by a European.
When a Frenchman, or an Englishman, or a Russian says to him, "My first
duty is to my people; I must keep them strong as well as in being and I
must sacrifice my interests to theirs when it is necessary," there are
many Jews who would answer: "You are quite right. The theory is sound.
Man can only function as a part of a particular society," and so forth;
but it is one thing to recognize a truth and another thing to experience
it in one's bones, as it were, and these truths, even where he is
admitting them, are truths indifferent to the Jew.
Therefore when, as in the particular case of Russia, a national feeling
stood in the way of an abstract ideal, it seemed the most natural thing
in the world to the Jew that the national obstacle should go to the wall
in order that _his_ ideal of Communism might triumph.
There lay behind this great change in the Russian towns, and the capture
of what remains of Russian government by the Jewish Committees, a force
most positive. It was the sense of social justice, the indignation
against indefensible evils.
That sense of social justice, that indignation against indefensible
modern evils, we all feel. There may be men among the wealthier classes
of Western Europe who are so ignorant of the past, or so stupid, that
they do honestly believe Industrial Capitalism to be an inevitable and
even perhaps a good thing. But such men must be very rare. Not only must
they be rare, but they cannot have any wide social experience. A man has
only got to live the life of the poor in the great industrial cities
for a day to see the enormity of the wrong that has to be righted. There
are, of course, not a few but many thousands of individuals who try to
find arguments for Industrial Capitalism, either because they benefit
themselves through the system and are the richer by it, or because they
are the hired servants of those who so benefit--and of this kind are the
writers in the capitalist press. But all these, who are hired advocates,
or advocates with a direct proprietary interest in the continuance of
the modern disease, may be neglected; for they are not in good faith.
They are not really arguing that the thing is good in itself, they are
only trying to find arguments as lawyers do for something which they
have to defend and which in their hearts they admit is evil; or to the
evil of which they are indifferent so long as it gives them a
disproportionate share of material enjoyment.
We must add to these the sincere man who will admit the domination of
Industrial Capitalism because he honestly believes that, bad as it is,
it is _now_ become inevitable and that to tamper with it would bring the
whole State into anarchy. "Such as it is," he would say, "the structure
of our society now depends upon it. We may palliate its evils, we may
try very gradually to transform its worst features. But in its essence
it must remain as it is, or our last state will be worse than our
first."
Of this kind are those who argue that any social experiment antagonistic
to Industrial Capitalism, if pushed sufficiently far, would result in
famine and chaos and even physical evils far worse than the physical
evils which the mass of men have to suffer in the great towns which
capitalism has produced.
Apart from these categories, the masses of men, I say, to-day are
convinced that Industrial Capitalism is an evil, an evil of the grossest
sort; an evil of a sort unknown to the greater part of human history and
unknown to-day in the greater part of the human race; an evil which
those peasant societies, or societies of well-divided property
throughout Europe, are happy to have escaped; and an evil from which we,
who are caught in it, are trying to escape as best we may.
In that modifying phrase "as best we may" lies the crux, for the great
mass of Europeans feel that any attack on Industrial Capitalism which
denies the nation its supreme place, or which impedes the superior task
of keeping the nation strong and wealthy, is barred; they also feel
instinctively that any attack which denies the general right of private
property and the value of that institution to the healthy conduct of our
affairs is also barred. The great mass of our race, when faced by the
problem of Industrial Capitalism, feel that it has to be solved in some
way that will neither destroy property nor the nation through which the
individual alone can function.
But this, which is true of the great mass of our race, is not true of
the Jews. Therefore they were able, in the case of the Russian
Revolution, to go straight for their object, and that object was (apart
from the obvious object of revenge, of love of power, and the rest) the
destruction of an economic inequality.
These Jews who have destroyed what we knew as Russia were undoubtedly
possessed of a political ideal: the ideal of Communism. No doubt many
individuals among them (all ultimately) would prefer the good of Israel
to the good of any Russian. No doubt the wreaking of vengeance upon
former oppressors was strong, as also the appetite for destroying a
general and a national sentiment alien to them and even repulsive to
them; but there remains, as a positive motive behind the whole affair,
the ideal of Communism. The Jews alone of the forces present were
capable of heartily entertaining that ideal, and were free of all
obstacles against the achievement of it--the obstacle of patriotism, the
obstacle of religion, the obstacle of the sense of property.
These considerations, I take it, are what explains the Jewish character
of the upheaval in the East, with its destruction of the Russian nation,
its enormous experiments in social economy, its inevitable
impoverishment of the State as a whole, its enthusiastic support by the
minority which accepts its doctrine.
Those very few men and women who have been witnesses of the Jewish
experiment in Russia (excluding those engaged in propaganda upon one
side or the other) give us a picture which is much what we should have
expected of the situation.
It seems that the great mass of the nation has affirmed the instinct of
private property with the greatest vigour, and that some nine-tenths of
the Russians have settled down upon the land to which they always
claimed ownership and in which their sense of ownership is more fierce
than ever. In the towns the unnatural system--unnatural because it
opposes all our instincts as Europeans--works more and more slackly as
the original system of terror weakens. For it is clear that Communism
needs a despot, and the active rule of a despot is necessarily short: it
is a system incapable of transition and therefore of duration.
The perfectly explicable but deplorable exercise of vengeance by the
Jews has been directed against what we euphemistically term the
governing directing classes, who have been massacred wholesale and whose
remnants are subjected to perpetual persecution.
The productivity of the industrial masses has naturally sunk to a very
low level, because under Communism it can only work through something
like military discipline, and work done under those conditions is on a
much lower productive level than free work.
But the real interest in the Jewish revolution in Russia, to which is
now permanently affixed the name of Bolshevist (which is nothing more
than the Russian for "whole-hogger"), lies in these two points: first,
the continued propaganda of Communism throughout the world (which
propaganda in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish
agents); secondly, and much more important, the effect of the Jewish
revolution in producing hostility to the Jews throughout the world.
I say this second fact is much more important because it is the more
real and the more enduring. You will never make a Communist of the
highly-civilized, tenacious, intelligent and humorous Occidental
European. You will no more make a Communist of him than you will make
him walk on all fours or permanently abjure the use of good liquor. You
may get middle-class faddists to accept Communism as a mere creed, and
of course you can easily get exasperated men, ground down by
capitalism, to accept _any_ theory, _any_ system, which promises them
relief. But you will not get Communism working in men who boast the old
European blood, in the descendants of those who created our past and its
monuments. They will certainly preserve their traditions and their
character. Though the peril must be combated, and is being successfully
combated everywhere, it is not a peril of great magnitude to the West.
The other effect of the Jewish revolution in Russia--the peril into
which it has put the Jews themselves--_is_ permanent and _is_ of the
first magnitude. I know no way to meet it except to explain why that
revolution was almost necessarily a Jewish revolution, to emphasize the
sincerity of the Jews who have led it, to exculpate them as far as
possible, and, at any rate, to shield their unfortunate compatriots
abroad from the consequences of what was certainly a very bad piece of
tactics so far as the future of this people was concerned.
We ought, I think, not to nourish a new and special hostility against
the Jew on account of what he has done in Russia, but, on the contrary,
to excuse him, especially because he is a Jew. We ought, as it seems to
me, to say: "He had reasons for action and excuse for action which men
of our race would not have had, and though we must prevent that action
from spreading, we must not allow what seemed quite natural under the
circumstances to the Jew to warp our attempted solution of the Jewish
problem. We ought to work for its solution as impartially and as soberly
as though the provocation of Bolshevism had never been given."
That sounds an extreme thing to say, and I fear it will be ridiculed by
most of those who (as they tell us) have had their eyes opened by the
Bolshevist explosion and who are now confirmed enemies of the Jewish
people. But though it sound fantastic, I am convinced that it is a right
attitude. To lose one's judgment on a permanent problem through panic or
heat, to forget the elements of such a problem merely because it has
been presented to us suddenly in an acute form, is the negation of
reason. As well might a man who is dealing with the problem of fermented
liquor, and trying to get people to use it rationally, let his judgment
be overcome by a case of delirium tremens and rush thereupon into some
scheme of prohibition. The very test which distinguishes good
statesmanship from bad is the power to keep one's head under
provocations like these; to maintain a middle course and to aim at
whatever solution our reason tells us to be just under _normal_
circumstances. We who saw the gravity of the Jewish problem long before
the recognition of it was general, and who studied it under calmer
conditions for many years, have a right to be heard now: now that the
tide is making against these people and that the fear of anarchy
threatens to turn men's heads.
We were long blamed for attacking the Jews, we are already blamed for
defending them. It is a proof that our attitude is well grounded and
unaffected by fashion.
The Bolshevist revolution will not last. Its Jewish character was
inevitable. It had a side to it of Jewish enthusiasm for a sort of
incorporeal justice, and, in any case, it ought not to be allowed to
deflect us from a conclusion which the much larger lines of history and
all general considerations of reason impose.
Our conclusion, as I have said, is a recognition and protection of the
Jewish nation as something quite different from ourselves and yet
necessarily inhabiting our society. Such a full recognition leaves us
fore-armed against the tendency in the Jew (which we cannot avoid) to
forget our national feelings and to misconceive our sense of ownership.
It would render impossible the conspiracies and the vengeance which have
destroyed Russia, and I believe that had the former Russian Government
treated the Jews as I say they should be treated, it would be in power
to-day.
THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A WHOLE