THE SHATTERING OF WHITE SOLIDARITY
The instinctive comity of the white peoples is, as I have already said,
perhaps the greatest constant of history. It is the psychological basis of
white civilization. Cohesive instinct is as vital to race as gravitation
is to matter. Without them, atomic disintegration would alike result. In
speaking of race-instinct, I am not referring merely to the ethnic
theories that have been elaborated at various times. Those theories were,
after all, but attempts to explain intellectually the urge of that
profound emotion known to sociologists as the "consciousness of kind."
White race-consciousness has been of course perturbed by numberless
internal frictions, which have at times produced partial inhibitions of
unitary feeling. Nevertheless, when really faced by non-white opposition,
white men have in the past instinctively tended to close their ranks
against the common foe. One of the Great War's most deplorable results has
been an unprecedented weakening of white solidarity which, if not
repaired, may produce the most disastrous consequences.
During the nineteenth century the sentiment of white solidarity was
strong. The great explorers and empire-builders who spread white
ascendancy to the ends of the earth felt that they were apostles of their
race and civilization as well as of a particular country. Rivalries might
be keen and colonial boundary questions acute; nevertheless, in their
calmer moments, the white peoples felt that the expansion of one white
nation buttressed the expansion of all.
Professor Pearson undoubtedly voiced the spirit of the day when he wrote
(about 1890) that it would be well "if European statesmen could understand
that the wars which carry desolation into civilized countries are allowing
the lower races to recruit their numbers and strength. Two centuries hence
it may be matter of serious concern to the world if Russia has been
displaced by China on the Amoor, if France has not been able to colonize
North Africa, or if England is not holding India. For civilized men there
can be only one fatherland, and whatever extends the influence of those
races that have taken their faith from Palestine, their laws of beauty
from Greece, and their civil law from Rome, ought to be matter of
rejoicing to Russian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Frenchman alike."[118]
The progress of science also fortified white race-consciousness with its
sanctions. The researches of European scholars identified the founders of
our civilization with a race of tall, white-skinned barbarians, possessing
regular features, brown or blond hair, and light eyes. This was, of
course, what we now know as the Nordic type. At first the problem was ill
understood, the tests applied being language and culture rather than
physical characteristics. For these reasons the early "Caucasian" and
"Aryan" hypotheses were self-contradictory and inadequate. Nevertheless,
the basis was sound, and the effects on white popular psychology were
excellent.
Particularly good were the effects upon the peoples predominantly of
Nordic blood. Obviously typifying as they did the prehistoric creators of
white civilization, Nordics everywhere were strengthened in consciousness
of genetic worth, feeling of responsibility for world-progress, and urge
toward fraternal collaboration. The supreme value of Nordic blood was
clearly analyzed by the French thinker Count Arthur de Gobineau as early
as 1854[119] (albeit Gobineau employed the misleading "Aryan"
terminology), and his thesis was subsequently elaborated by many other
writers, notably by Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians.
The results of all this were plainly apparent by the closing years of the
nineteenth century. Quickened Nordic race-consciousness played an
important part in stimulating Anglo-American fraternization, and induced
acts like the Oxford Scholarship legacy of Cecil Rhodes. The trend of this
movement, though cross-cut by nationalistic considerations, was clearly in
the direction of a Nordic _entente_--a Pan-Nordic syndication of power for
the safeguarding of the race-heritage and the harmonious evolution of the
whole white world. It was a glorious aspiration, which, had it been
realized, would have averted Armageddon.
Unfortunately the aspiration remained a dream. The ill-balanced tendencies
of the late nineteenth century were against it, and they ultimately
prevailed. The abnormal growth of national-imperialism, in particular,
wrought fatal havoc. The exponents of imperialistic propagandas like
Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism put forth literally boundless pretensions,
planning the domination of the entire planet by their special brand of
national-imperialism. Such men had scant regard for race-lines. All who
stood outside their particular nationalistic group were vowed to the same
subjection.
Indeed, the national-imperialists presently seized upon race teachings,
and prostituted them to their own ends. A notable example of this is the
extreme Pan-German propaganda of Houston Stewart Chamberlain[120] and his
fellows. Chamberlain makes two cardinal assumptions: he conceives modern
Germany as racially almost purely Nordic; and he regards all Nordics
outside the German linguistic-cultural group as either unconscious or
renegade Teutons who must at all costs be brought into the German fold. To
any one who understands the scientific realities of race, the monstrous
absurdity of these assumptions is instantly apparent. The fact is that
modern Germany, far from being purely Nordic, is mainly Alpine in race.
Nordic blood preponderates only in the northwest, and is merely veneered
over the rest of Germany, especially in the upper classes. While the
_Germania_ of Roman days was unquestionably a Nordic land, it has been
computed that of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire in 1914,
only 9,000,000 were purely Nordic in character. This displacement of the
German Nordics since classic times is chiefly due to Germany's troubled
history, especially to the horrible Thirty Years' War which virtually
annihilated the Nordics of south Germany. This racial displacement has
wrought correspondingly profound changes in the character of the German
people.
The truth of the matter is, of course, that the Pan-Germans were thinking
in terms of nationality instead of race, and that they were using
pseudo-racial arguments as camouflage for essentially political ends. The
pity of it is that these arguments have had such disastrous repercussions
in the genuine racial sphere. The late war has not only exploded
Pan-Germanism, it has also discredited Nordic race-feeling, so unjustly
confused by many persons with Pan-German nationalistic propaganda. Such
persons should remember that the overwhelming majority of Nordics live
outside of Germany, being mainly found in Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon
countries, northern France, the Netherlands, and Baltic Russia. To let
Teuton propaganda gull us into thinking of Germany as the Nordic
fatherland is both a danger and an absurdity.
While Pan-Germanism was mainly responsible for precipitating Armageddon
with all its disastrous consequences, it was Russian Pan-Slavism which
dealt the first shrewd blow to white solidarity. Toward the close of the
nineteenth century, Pan-Slavism's "Eastern" wing, led by Prince Ukhtomsky
and other chauvinists of his ilk, went so far in its imperialistic
obsession as actually to deny Russia's white blood. These Pan-Slavists
boldly proclaimed the morbid, mystical dogma that Russia was Asiatic, not
European, and thereupon attempted to seize China as a lever for upsetting,
first the rest of Asia, and then the non-Russian white world--elegantly
described as "the rotten west." The white Power immediately menaced was,
of course, England, who in acute fear for her Indian Empire, promptly
riposted by allying herself with Japan. Russia was diplomatically isolated
and militarily beaten in the Russo-Japanese War. Thus the Russo-Japanese
War, that destroyer of white prestige whose ominous results we have
already noted, was precipitated mainly by the reckless short-sightedness
of white men themselves.
A second blow to white solidarity was presently administered--this time by
England in concluding her second alliance-treaty with Japan. The original
alliance, signed in 1902, was negotiated for a definite, limited
objective--the checkmating of Russia's over-weening imperialism. Even that
instrument was dangerous, but under the circumstances it was justifiable
and inevitable. The second alliance-treaty, however, was so general and
far-reaching in character that practically all white men in the Far East,
including most emphatically Englishmen themselves, pronounced it a great
disaster.
Meanwhile, German imperialism was plotting even deadlier strokes at white
race-comity, not merely by preparing war against white neighbors in
Europe, but also by ingratiating itself with the Moslem East and by toying
with schemes for building up a black military empire in central Africa.
Lastly, France was actually recruiting black, brown, and yellow hordes for
use on European battle-fields; while Italy, by her buccaneering raid on
Tripoli, outraged Islam's sense of justice and strained its patience to
the breaking-point.
Thus, in the years preceding Armageddon, all the European Powers displayed
a reckless absorption in particularistic ambitions and showed a callous
indifference to larger race-interests. The rapid weakening of white
solidarity was clearly apparent.
However, white solidarity, though diplomatically compromised, was
emotionally not yet really undermined. Those dangerous games above
mentioned were largely the work of cynical chancelleries and
ultra-imperialist propagandas. The average European, whatever his
nationality, still tended to react instinctively against such practices.
This was shown by the sharp criticism which arose from the most varied
quarters. For example: Russia and Britain were alike sternly taken to task
both at home and abroad for their respective Far Eastern policies;
proposed German alliances with Pan-Islamism and Japan preached by
disciples of _Machtpolitik_ were strenuously opposed as race-treason by
powerful sections of German thought; while Italy's Tripolitan imbroglio
was generally denounced as the most foolhardy trifling with the common
European interest.
A good illustration of instinctive white solidarity in the early years of
the twentieth century is a French journalist's description of the attitude
of the white spectators (of various nationalities) gathered to watch the
landing in Japan of the first Russian prisoners taken in the
Russo-Japanese War. This writer depicts in moving language the literally
horrifying effect of the spectacle upon himself and his fellows. "What a
triumph," he exclaims, "what a revenge for the little Nippons to see thus
humiliated these big, splendid men who, for them, represented, not only
Russians, but those Europeans whom they so detest! This scene tragic in
its simplicity, this grief passing amid joy, these whites, vanquished and
captives, defiling before those free and triumphant yellows--this was not
Russia beaten by Japan, not the defeat of one nation by another; it was
something new, enormous, prodigious; it was the victory of one world over
another; it was the revenge which effaced the centuries of humiliations
borne by Asia; it was the awakening hope of the Oriental peoples; it was
the first blow given to the other race, to that accursed race of the West,
which, for so many years, had triumphed without even having to struggle.
And the Japanese crowd felt all this, and the few other Asiatics who found
themselves there shared in this triumph. The humiliation of these whites
was solemn, frightful. I completely forgot that these captives were
Russians, and I would add that the other Europeans there, though
anti-Russian, felt the same _malaise_: they also were forced to feel that
these captives were their own kind. When we took the train for Kobe, an
instinctive solidarity drove us huddling into the same compartment."[121]
Thus white solidarity, while unquestionably weakened, was still a weighty
factor down to August, 1914. But the first shots of Armageddon saw white
solidarity literally blown from the muzzles of the guns. An explosion of
internecine hatred burst forth more intense and general than any ever
known before. Both sets of combatants proclaimed a duel to the death; both
sides vowed the enemy to something near annihilation; while even
scientists and _litterateurs_, disrupting the ancient commonwealths of
wisdom and beauty, put one another furiously to the ban.
In their savage death-grapple neither side hesitated for an instant to
grasp at any weapon, whatever the ultimate consequences to the race. The
Allies poured into white Europe colored hordes of every pigment under the
sun; the Teutonic Powers wielded Pan-Islam as a besom of wrath to sweep
clean every white foothold in Hither Asia and North Africa; while far and
wide over the Dark Continent black armies fought for their respective
masters--and learned the hidden weakness of the white man's power. In the
Far East, Japan, left to her own devices, bent amorphous China to her
imperious will, thereby raising up a potential menace for the entire
earth. Every day the tide of intestine hatred within the white world rose
higher, until the very concept of a common blood and cultural past seemed
in danger of being blotted out.
A symposium of the "hate literature" of the Great War is fortunately no
part of my task, but the reader will readily recall both its abysmal fury
and its irreconcilable implications. The most appalling feature was the
way in which many writers assumed that this state of mind would be
permanent; that the end of the Great War might be only the beginning of a
war-cycle leading to the utter disruption of white solidarity and
civilization. In the spring of 1916, the London _Nation_ remarked
gloomily: "Europe is now being mentally conceived as inevitably and
permanently dual. We are ceasing to think of Europe. The normal end of war
(which is peace) is to be submerged in the idea of a war-series
indefinitely prolonged. Soon the entire Continent will have but one
longing--the longing for rest. The cup is to be dashed from its lips! For
a world steeped in fear and ruled by the barren logomachy of hate,
diplomatic intercourse would almost cease to be possible.... In the matter
of culture, modern Europe would tend to relapse to a state inferior even
to that of mediaeval Europe, and to sink far below that of the
Renaissance."[122]
In similar vein, the noted German historian Eduard Meyer[123] predicted
that Armageddon was only the first of a long series of Anglo-German "Punic
Wars" in which modern civilization would retrograde to a condition of
semi-barbarism. Germany, according to this prophecy, would be the
victor--but a Pyrrhic victor, for the colored races, taking advantage of
white decadence, would destroy European supremacy and involve all the
white nations in a common ruin.
The ulcerated state of European war-psychology did, in fact, lend ominous
emphasis to these gloomy prognostications. Before 1914, as we have seen,
imperialistic trafficking with common race-interests usually roused
wide-spread criticism, while even more, the use of colored troops in white
quarrels always roused bitter popular condemnation. In the darkest hours
of the Boer War, English public opinion had refused to sanction the use of
either black African or brown Indian troops against the white foe, while
French plans for raising black armies of African savages for use in Europe
were almost universally reprobated. Before Armageddon there thus existed a
genuine moral repugnance against settling domestic differences by calling
in the alien without the gates.
The Great War, however, sent all such scruples promptly into the discard.
Not only did the belligerent governments use all the colored troops they
could equip, but the belligerent peoples hailed this action with
unqualified approval. The Allies were of course the more successful in
practice, but the Germans were just as eager, and the exertions of the
Prussian General Liman von Sanders actually got Turkish divisions to the
European battle-fronts.
The psychological effect of these colored auxiliaries in deepening the
hatred of the white combatants was deplorable. Germany's use of Turks
raised among the Allies wrathful emotions reminiscent of the Crusades,
while the havoc wrought in the Teutonic ranks by black Senegalese and
yellow Gurkhas, together with Allied utterances like Lord Curzon's wish to
see Bengal lancers on the Unter den Linden and Gurkhas camping at Sans
Souci, so maddened the German people that the very suggestion of white
solidarity was jeeringly scoffed at as the most idiotic sentimentality.
Here is a German officer's account of a Senegalese attack on his position,
which vividly depicts the mingled horror and fury awakened in German
hearts by these black opponents: "They came. First singly, at wide
intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish.
Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed
closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in the cloud. Entire bodies
and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare, now sinking in the
shadows, came nearer and nearer. Strong, wild fellows, their log-like,
fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing their grinning
teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and their necks stretched
forward. Some with bayonets on their rifles. Many only armed with knives.
Monsters all, in their confused hatred. Frightful their distorted, dark
grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes.
Eyes that seem like terrible beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born
beings. Eyes that seemed to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained,
no longer to be restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats
spitting and yowling, with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel
dissemblance of their beastly malice. Behind them came the first wave of
the attackers, in close order, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and
falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless."[124]
Here, again, is the proposal of a British officer, to raise a million
black savages from England's African colonies for use on the Western
Front. Major Stuart-Stephens exults in Britain's "almost unlimited
reservoir of African man-power." In northern Nigeria alone, he remarks,
there are to-day more than 700,000 warlike tribesmen. "Let them be used!"
says the major. "These 'bonny fechters' are now engaged in the pastoral
arts of peace. But I would make bold to assert that a couple of hundred
thousand could, after six months' training, be usefully employed in
daredevil charges into German trenches." Major Stuart-Stephens hopes that
at least the Sudanese battalions will be transferred _en masse_ to the
Western Front. "This," he concludes, "would mean the placing at once in
the trenches of, say, 70,000 big, lusty coal-black devils, the time of
whose life is the wielding of the bayonet, and whose advent would not be
regarded by the Boches as a pleasing omen of more to come of the same
sort."[125]
The military possibilities are truly engaging! There are literally tens of
millions of fighting blacks and scores of millions of fighting Asiatics
now living under white rule who could conceivably be armed and shipped to
European battle-fields. After which, of course, Europe, the white
homeland, would be--a queer place.
Fortunately for our race, the late war did not see this sort of thing
carried to its logical conclusion. But the harm done was bad enough. The
white world grew accustomed to the use of colored mercenaries and to the
contracting of alliances with colored peoples against white opponents as a
mere matter of course.
The German war-mind, in particular, teemed with colored alliance-projects.
Unable to compete with the Allies in getting colored troops to Europe,
Germans planned to revenge themselves in other fields. The Turkish
alliance and the resulting "Holy War" proclamation were hailed with
delight. "Over there in Turkey," wrote the well-known German publicist
Ernst Jaeckh, "stretch Anatolia and Mesopotamia: Anatolia, the 'Land of
the Sunrise'; Mesopotamia, the region of ancient paradise. May these names
be to us a sign: may this World War bring to Germany and Turkey the
sunrise and the paradise of a new time; may it confer upon an assured
Turkey and a Greater Germany the blessing of a fruitful Turco-Teutonic
collaboration in peace after a victorious Turco-Teutonic collaboration in
war."[126]
The scope of Germany's Asiatic aspirations during the war is exemplified
by an article from the pen of the learned Orientalist Professor Bernhardt
Molden.[127] Germany's aid to Turkey, contends Professor Molden, is merely
symptomatic of her policy to raise the other Asiatic peoples now crushed
beneath English and Russian domination. Thus Germany will create puissant
allies for the "Second Punic War." Germany must therefore strive to
solidify the great Central Asian _bloc_--Turkey, Persia, Afghanistan,
China. Professor Molden urges a "Pan-Asian railroad" from Constantinople
to Peking. This should be especially alluring to Afghanistan, which would
thereby become one of the great pivots of world-politics and trade. In
fine: "Germany must free Asia." As another prominent German writer,
Friedrich Delitzsch, wrote in similar vein: "To renovate the East--such is
Germany's mission."[128]
In such a mood, Germans hailed Japan's absence of genuine hostility with
the greatest satisfaction. The gust of rage which swept Germany at
Japan's seizure of Kiao-chao was soon allayed by numerous writers
preaching reconciliation and eventual alliance with the mistress of the
Far East. Typical of this pro-Japanese propaganda is an article by Herr J.
Witte, a former official in the Far East, which appeared in 1915. Herr
Witte chides his countrymen for their talk about the Yellow Peril. Such a
peril may exist in the future, but it is not pressing at this moment, "at
any rate for us Germans, who have no great territorial possessions in the
Far East.... We might permit ourselves to speak of a Yellow Peril if there
was a white solidarity. This, however, does not exist. We are learning
this just now by bitter experience on our own flesh and blood. Our foes
have marshalled peoples of all races against us in battle. So long as this
helps them, all race-antipathies and race-interests are to them matters of
supreme indifference. Under these circumstances, in the midst of a
life-and-death struggle against the peoples of the white race, shall we
play the role of guardian angel of these peoples against the yellow
peoples? For us, as Germans, there is now only one supreme life-interest,
to which all other interests must be subordinated: the safety and
advancement of Germany and of _Deutschtum_ in the world." Herr Witte
therefore advocates a "close political understanding between Germany and
Japan. In future we can accomplish nothing in the teeth of Japan.
Therefore we must get on good terms with Japan. And we can do it, too.
Germany is, in fact, the country above all others who in the future has
the best prospect of allying herself advantageously with the Far Eastern
peoples."[129]
And so it went throughout the war-years: both sides using all possible
colored aid to down the white foe; both sides alike reckless of the
ultimate racial consequences.
In fact, leaving ultimate consequences aside, many persons feared during
the later phases of the war that Europe might be headed for immediate
dissolution. As early as mid-1916, Lord Loreburn expressed apprehension
lest the war was entailing general bankruptcy and "such a destruction of
the male youth of Europe as will break the thin crust of civilization
which has been built up since the Dark Ages."[130] These fears were
intensified by the Russian revolution of 1917, with its hideous corollary
of Bolshevism which definitely triumphed before the close of that year.
The Bolshevik triumph evoked despairing predictions like Lord Lansdowne's:
"We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin
for the civilized world."[131]
Well, the war was prolonged for another year, ending in the triumph of the
Allies and America, though leaving Europe in the deplorable condition
reviewed in the preceding chapter. The hopes of mankind were now centred
on the Peace Conference, but these hopes were oversanguine, for the
Versailles "settlement" was riddled with political and economic
imperfections from the Saar to Shantung.
This was what a sceptical minority had feared from the first. At the very
beginning of the war, for instance, the French publicist Urbain Gohier had
predicted that when the diplomats gathered at the end of the conflict they
would find the problem of constructive settlement insoluble.[132]
Most persons, however, had been more hopeful. Disappointment and
disillusionment were therefore correspondingly intense. The majority of
liberal-minded, forward-looking men and women throughout the world
deplored the Versailles settlement's faulty character, some, however,
accepting the situation as the best of a bad business, others entirely
repudiating it on the ground that by crystallizing an intolerable status
it would entail worse disasters in the near future.
General Smuts, the South African delegate to the Conference, well
represents the first attitude. In a formal protest against the Versailles
settlement, General Smuts stated: "I have signed the peace treaty, not
because I consider it a satisfactory document, but because it is
imperatively necessary to close the war; because the world needs peace
above all, and nothing could be more fatal than the continuance of the
state of suspense between war and peace. The six months since the
armistice was signed have, perhaps, been as upsetting, unsettling, and
ruinous to Europe as the previous four years of war. I look upon the peace
treaty as the close of these two chapters of war and armistice, and only
on that ground do I agree to it. I say this now, not in criticism, but in
faith; not because I wish to find fault with the work done, but rather
because I feel that in the treaty we have not yet achieved the real peace
to which our peoples were looking, and because I feel that the real work
of making peace will only begin after this treaty has been signed, and a
definite halt has thereby been called to the destructive passions that
have been desolating Europe for nearly five years."[133]
The English economist J. L. Garvin, who, like General Smuts, accepted the
treaty _faute de mieux_, makes these trenchant comments upon the
settlement itself: "Derisive human genius surveying with pity and laughter
the present state of mankind and some of the obsolete means adopted at
Paris to remedy it, might do most good by another satire like Rabelais,
Gulliver, or Candide. But let us put from us here the temptation to
conjure up vistas of the grotesque. Let us pursue these plain studies in
common sense. A treaty even when signed is paper. It is in itself
inoperative without the action or control of living forces which it seeks
to express or repress. Treaties not drawn against sound and certain assets
may be dishonored in the sequel like bad checks or bills. You do not get
peace merely by putting it on paper. And, much more to the point, all
that is called peace does not necessarily spell prosperity any more than
all that glitters is gold. You can 'make a solitude and call it peace.'
The quintessence of death or stupefaction resembles a kind of peace. You
can prolong relative stagnation and depression and yet say that it is
peace. But that would not be the reconciling and lasting, the constructive
and the creative peace, as it was visioned by the Allied peoples in their
greatest moments of insight and inspiration during the war. For that
higher and wiser thing we lavished our pent-up energies and the
accumulated treasure of a hundred years, and sent so many of our best to
die."[134]
That veteran student of world-politics Doctor E. J. Dillon put the matter
succinctly when he wrote: "The peace is being made not, as originally
projected, on the basis of the fourteen points, nor on the lines of
territorial equilibrium, but by a compromise which misses the advantage of
either, and combines certain evils of both. The treaty has failed to lay
the axe to the roots of war, has perhaps increased their number while
purporting to destroy them. The germs of future conflicts, not only
between the recent belligerents, but also between other groups of states,
are numerous, and if present symptoms may be trusted will sprout up in the
fulness of time."[135]
The badness of the Versailles treaties is nowhere more manifest than in
the way they have alienated idealistic support and enthusiasm from the
inchoate League of Nations. Multitudes of persons once zealous Leaguers
now feel that the League has no moral foundation. Such persons contend
that even were the covenant theoretically perfect, the League could no
more succeed on the basis of the present peace settlement than a
flawlessly designed palace could be erected if superimposed upon a
quicksand.
Europe is thus in evil case. Her statesmen have failed to formulate a
constructive settlement. Old problems remain unsolved while fresh problems
arise. The danger is redoubled by the fact that both Europe and the entire
world are faced with a new peril--Bolshevism. The menace of Bolshevism is
simply incalculable. Bolshevism is a peril in some ways unprecedented in
the world's history. It is not merely a war against a social system, not
merely a war against our civilization; it is a war of the hand against the
brain. For the first time since man was man there is a definite schism
between the hand and the head. Every principle which mankind has thus far
evolved: community of interest, the solidarity of civilization and
culture, the dignity of labor, of muscle, of brawn, dominated and
illumined by intellect and spirit--all these Bolshevism howls down and
tramples in the mud.
Bolshevism's cardinal tenets--the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the
destruction of the "classes" by social war--are of truly hideous import.
The "classes," as conceived by Bolshevism, are very numerous. They
comprise not merely the "idle rich," but also the whole of the upper and
middle social strata, the landowning country folk, the skilled working
men; in short, all except those who work with their untutored hands,
_plus_ the elect few who philosophize for those who work with their
untutored hands.
The effect of such ideas, if successful, not only on our civilization, but
also on the very fibre of the race, can be imagined. The death or
degradation of nearly all persons displaying constructive ability, and the
tyranny of the ignorant and anti-social elements, would be the most
gigantic triumph of disgenics ever seen. Beside it the ill effects of war
would pale into insignificance. Civilization would wither like a plant
stricken by blight, while the race, summarily drained of its good blood,
would sink like lead into the depths of degenerate barbarism.
This is precisely what is occurring in Russia to-day. Bolshevism has ruled
Russia less than three years--and Russia is ruined. She ekes out a bare
existence on the remains of past accumulations, on the surviving scraps of
her material and spiritual capital. Everywhere are hunger, cold, disease,
terror, physical and moral death. The "proletariat" is making its "clean
sweep." The "classes" are being systematically eliminated by execution,
massacre, and starvation. The racial impoverishment is simply
incalculable. Meanwhile Lenine, surrounded by his Chinese executioners,
sits behind the Kremlin walls, a modern Jenghiz Khan plotting the plunder
of a world.
Lenine's Chinese "braves" are merely symptomatic of the intrigues which
Bolshevism is carrying on throughout the non-white world. Bolshevism is,
in fact, as anti-racial as it is anti-social. To the Bolshevik mind, with
its furious hatred of constructive ability and its fanatical determination
to enforce levelling, proletarian equality, the very existence of superior
biological values is a crime. Bolshevism has vowed the proletarianization
of the world, beginning with the white peoples. To this end it not only
foments social revolution within the white world itself, but it also seeks
to enlist the colored races in its grand assault on civilization. The
rulers of Soviet Russia are well aware of the profound ferment now going
on in colored lands. They watch this ferment with the same terrible glee
that they watched the Great War and the fiasco of Versailles--and they
plot to turn it to the same profit.
Accordingly, in every quarter of the globe, in Asia, Africa, Latin
America, and the United States, Bolshevik agitators whisper in the ears of
discontented colored men their gospel of hatred and revenge. Every
nationalist aspiration, every political grievance, every social
discrimination, is fuel for Bolshevism's hellish incitement to racial as
well as to class war.
And this Bolshevik propaganda has not been in vain. Its results already
show in the most diverse quarters, and they are ominous for the future.
China, Japan, Afghanistan, India, Java, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil,
Chile, Peru, Mexico, and the "black belts" of our own United States: here
is a partial list of the lands where the Bolshevik leaven in color is
clearly at work.
Bolshevism thus reveals itself as the arch-enemy of civilization and the
race. Bolshevism is the renegade, the traitor within the gates, who would
betray the citadel, degrade the very fibre of our being, and ultimately
hurl a rebarbarized, racially impoverished world into the most debased and
hopeless of mongrelizations.
Therefore, Bolshevism must be crushed out with iron heels, no matter what
the cost. If this means more war, let it mean more war. We know only too
well war's dreadful toll, particularly on racial values. But what
war-losses could compare with the losses inflicted by the living death of
Bolshevism? There are some things worse than war, and Bolshevism stands
foremost among those dread alternatives.
So ends our survey of the white world as it emerges from the Great War.
The prospect is not a brilliant one. Weakened and impoverished by
Armageddon, handicapped by an unconstructive peace, and facing internal
Bolshevist disaffection which must at all costs be mastered, the white
world is ill-prepared to confront--the rising tide of color. What that
tide portends will be the subject of the concluding chapters.
_PART III_
THE DELUGE ON THE DIKES