The Hour of Decision (1934): Germany and World-Historical Evolution by Oswald Spengler

Author:Oswald Spengler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

14

WHO is it, then, who has flattered and organized this mass of wage-earners in the cities and industrial areas, provided them with catchwords, driven them by cynical propaganda into the class war against the majority of the nation? It is not the industrious and highly trained workman, the “vagabond,” as he is contemptuously called in the Marx-Engels correspondence. In a letter to Marx on the 9th May 1851 Engels speaks of the democratic Red and Communistic mob, and on the 11th December 1851 writes to him: “What is the rabble good for if it forgets how to fight?” The manual worker is merely a means to the private ends of professional revolutionaries. He is to fight for the satisfaction of their hatred of the conservative forces and their thirst for power.1 If only workers were to be recognized as representatives of the workers• the benches on the Left would be very empty in all parliaments. Among the originators of their theoretical programs and leaders of revolutionary campaigns there is not one who actually worked for years in a factory.2 The political Bohemia of Western Europe in which Bolshevism grew up from the middle of the nineteenth century was composed of the same elements which went to the making of the revolutionary Liberalism of 1770. Whether the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris was for “Capitalism” or that of June against it, whether “Liberty and Equality” were to be secured for the middle class in 1789 or for the lower orders in 1793 and 1918, the aims of the inciters of these movements and their ultimate motives were in fact all exactly the same; and no different is the situation in Spain today, and perhaps that in the United States tomorrow. It is from the intellectual “mob,” with the failures from all academic professions, the spiritually unfit and morally inhibited, at its head, that the gangsters of Liberal and Bolshevist risings are recruited. Their “dictatorship of the proletariat” — which is to say, their own dictatorship with the help of the proletariat — is to be their revenge on those who are happy and successful, as a last means of appeasing the morbid vanity and vulgar greed for power which alike arise from unsettled self-respect, the final expression of depraved and misdirected instincts.

Among all these jurists, journalists, schoolmasters, artists, and technicians one is apt to overlook one type, the most sinister of all: the sunken priest. Religion is the personal relation to the powers of the world around us, expressed in a world view, in pious usages and the personal attitude of renunciation. A church is the organization of a priesthood which fights for its temporal power. It brings the forms of religious life, and therewith the people who cling to them, under its power, and it is therefore the born enemy of all other forms of power: State, rank, or nation. During the Persian Wars the priesthood of Delphi agitated on behalf of Xerxes and against the national defence. Cyrus

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