Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock

Author:Albert Jay Nock [Nock, Albert Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute
Published: 2011-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE war of 1914 ended in an orgy of looting, as any rational being might have known it would, even if he had never heard of the secret treaties which predetermined this ending. It ended as all wars have ended and must end. Any pretence to the contrary is mere idleness. One can say for Brennus that he was no hypocrite, exuding repulsive slaver about “mandates,” “reparations,” and the like. He chucked his sword on the scales, saying Vae victis, and that was that. Of all the predatory crew assembled at Versailles, the only one for whom I had a grain of respect was old Clémenceau. He was a robber and a brigand, but he never pretended to be anything else, and he was a robber in the grand style. His attitude towards his associates pleased me. He regarded Lloyd George, Wilson, Orlando and their attendant small-fry from a lofty height of disdain, as one might imagine Jesse James or Dick Turpin regarding a gang of confidence men, area-sneaks, porch-climbers. He also took no pains to disguise his opinion of them, which delighted me. If you left your watch and pocket-book at home, you could do business with Clémenceau. He would not poison your rum-and-water or besmear your character, and all his cards were on the table. As highwaymen go, one has a good bit of respect for that sort.

In my view, the most significant and distressing result of the war was one which has gone virtually unnoticed; it completed the destruction of Europe begun by the war of 1870. Before that there had existed a very real European spirit, a community of understanding, a reciprocity in culture, which expressed itself in many common modes of thought and feeling, even of action. One gets probably the most complete understanding of it from the writings of the great Weltbürger Goethe. The persistent pernicious meddling of England in Continental affairs had done all it could to check the unifying influence of this spirit on European political organization, and Bismarck, as the architect of the imperial Germany, finished the job. It was after the events of 1870 that the Austrian Reichskanzler von Beust made his celebrated remark, “Europe no longer exists.” This was strictly true. The European spirit, which was the only Europe worth preserving, the only Europe that held any promise for the future, the only Europe that the student of civilised man cared two straws about,—this spirit was finally asphyxiated in smoke from the guns of von Steinmetz and Frederick-Charles.

Economism then had a clear field. The European spirit was everywhere promptly replaced by the spirit of an unintelligent, myopic, dogged, militant, political and economic nationalism, and the war of 1914 fixed this spirit upon Europe forever, as far as one can see. Wilson’s shallow stultiloquence about “self-determination” and “the rights of small nations” rationalised it everywhere to the complete satisfaction of the political mind, and gave it respectability as good sound separatist doctrine. Epstean’s law immediately and on all sides swept

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