CULTURE DISTORTION ARISING FROM PARASITIC ACTIVITY
by Ulick Varange (Francis Parker Yockey)
The book's Chicago-born author, Francis P. Yockey, was just 30 years old when he wrote Imperium in six months in a quiet village on Ireland's eastern coast. His masterpiece continues to shape the thinking and steel the will of readers around the world. Tens of thousands of copies of have been sold worldwide, with foreign-language editions in Spanish, German, and Hungarian.
Chapter 52: Culture Distortion Arising from Parasitic Activity
The elementary effects on the Culture-body of Culture-parasitism have already been seen: reduction of the Culture-population by displacement, loss of Culture-energy in friction. These effects arise from the mere existence of the parasite, however passive it may be. Far more deadly to the healthy realization of the Culture is the mingling in the Cultural life of parasitic elements, the activity of the Culture-parasite, his participation in creation and formation of Culture-tasks, ideas, and policy. The activity of the parasite generates at a higher level of intensity the repetition of the frictional phenomena which accompany the passive presence of the parasite. In California, every accretion of economic strength, every public display of collective energy on the part of the Chinese called forth new outbreaks of anti-Chinese activity among the Americans. The same applied to the Japanese group.
The worst riots have been those attendant on the progressive advance of the Negro into American public life. As long as the Negro was passive, there was a minimum of bitterness between the races. The year 1865 marked the beginning of a transition from passivity of the Negro to his activity. It was naturally not spontaneous; white Rationalist elements, Liberals, “tolerance” enthusiasts; Communists, created the movement to ignore the distinction between the races, and under their direction it grew to dimensions where recurrent race riots caused temporary cessation of public life in the largest cities of America . Tulsa, Beaumont, Jersey City, Chicago, Detroit, New York — these are only a few of the scenes of mass riots during the past quarter of a century. Each riot is preceded by a deluge of “tolerance” propaganda and sentimentalizing, and afterwards a public investigation is held which decides that the cause was lack of “tolerance” and “education.”
During the American occupation of England, 1942–1946, several large race battles occurred, with both sides using automatic weapons, between American troops and Negro troops, both of whom were there on a mission against England and Europe . The limited utility of Culturally-parasitic groups for purposes of military conscription is shown by this example. Actually, these Negro troops were a part of an American command engaged in the destruction of Europe, but a slight social incident in a public-house was enough to cause a flaming-up of the racial hatred developed by the sharing of the same life by parasite and host.
Troops from parasitic groups have little value if they are always two steps away from a race riot, and the Rationalists and Liberals discovered this by experimentation, rather than by looking at the chronicles of 5,000 years of the history of High Cultures. These Negro troops showed their willingness to destroy America as well as Europe. These examples of heightened tension between host and parasite are but the simpler form of the disease of Culture-distortion arising from parasitic activity. They differ only in degree from the resistance to Culture-parasitism. Much more serious is that form in which the parasite moves squarely into the public life of the Culture, or the Culture-nations, and directs their policy into his own channels. Neither in America nor in South Africa has the Negro attained to this significance. Nor yet have the Japanese, Chinese, Levantine, or Indian groups in America .
One group, however, has brought about a major Culture-distortion throughout the entire Western Civilization and its colonies on every continent, and that is the rear-guard in the West of the fulfilled Arabian Culture, the Church-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew.
From the Arabian Culture, which was inwardly fulfilled by about 1100 A.D., the Jew derived his world-outlook, his religion, State-form, Nation-Idea, People-feeling, and unity. From the West, however, he has derived his race and his Life-mission. We saw the developing of this race in the ghetto-existence during the first 800 years of our Western Culture. As Rationalism became more articulate—from 1750 on—and the Jew sensed wider possibilities for him of the new Life-phase of the West, he began to agitate against the ghetto which he had created for himself in the early days as symbol of his unity, spiritual and physical.
This race had a different ideal type from the Western, and this influenced the material which passed into the collective blood-stream of the ghetto-race. In the middle of the 20th century one sees Jews with Nordic pigmentation, but the racial purity has adapted the new material to the old racial look. To 19th century vertical racism, these phenomena were uncanny, but the 20th century has seen the primacy of the spiritual in race-formation.
When it is said, therefore, that the Jew derived his race from the West, it is not meant that he drew entirely on the stock of the Western peoples to recruit his own—although this did, and does, go on to some extent—but that by serving, through its own Cultural imperative, as a totally alien mass around the Jew, the West prevented the dilution and disappearance of the Jewish unity.
"But I surely also know that then, despite a convulsive rage at the perpetrators of this crime, I will again stand erect over this European graveyard and swear the solemn oath that to my last breath I will fight tooth and nail against those who attempted, in vain to be sure, to destroy the cradle of our Western Culture, with its unmatched accomplishments, with its deeds unique in the annals of Humanity. This, I, Francis Yockey, do solemnly swear!"
Weisbaden, Germany 1946
Every race, no matter how transitory it may be contemplated from the viewpoint of History, expresses a certain idea, a certain plane of existence by its life, and its idea is bound to be attractive to some individuals outside it. Thus in Western life, we are not unfamiliar with the man who, after associating with Jews, reading their literature, and adopting their viewpoint, actually becomes a Jew in the fullest sense of the word. It is not necessary that he have "Jewish blood." The converse is also known: many Jews have adopted Western feelings and rhythms, and have thereby acquired Western race.
This process — contemptuously called "assimilation" by the Jewish leaders — threatened during the 19th century the very existence of the Jewish race by ultimate absorption of its total racial body into the Western races. To halt it, the leaders of the Jews evolved the program of Zionism, which was solely an expedient for maintaining the unity of the Jewish race, and maintaining its continued existence as such. For this reason they also recognized the value of anti-semitism of the social type. It was serving the same purpose of preserving the racial unity of the Jews.
In parasitism, an individual organism, the parasite, consumes nutrients from another organism, its host, resulting in a decrease in fitness to the host. In extreme cases, parasites can cause disease in the host organism; in these situations, we refer to them as pathogens.
We divide parasites into two categories: endoparasites, which live inside the body of their hosts, and ectoparasites, which live and feed on the outside of the body of their host.
Examples of endoparasites include flukes, tapeworms, fungi, bacteria, and protozoa. Ectoparasites include ticks and lice, plants, protozoa, bacteria, and fungi.
An exception, however, occurs with parasitoids, which blur the line between parasitism and predation. The best-known parasitoids include several species of wasp, which immobilize — but do not kill — a host by stinging it. The female then carries the host to a burrow, where she lays eggs within the host’s body. After the larvae hatch, they consume the living tissues of the host, eventually killing it.
The Crusades, the birth-cry of the West, made the new organism firm, proved its viability. The wars of Castile and Aragon war against the Barbarian gave Spain the inner strength to bear its grand Ultramontane mission. England’s victories on colonial battlefields all over the world gave it the compelling sense of a mission. Rome’s wars in its national infancy gave it the inner firmness which enabled it to undertake the Punic Wars which gave it mastery of the Classical Civilization at last.
Thus it is obvious that the mutual contact of the West and the Jew had an opposite signification for the two organisms. To the Jew, it was a source of strength, and informing; to the West it was a drain of strength, and deforming. The Jew was within the West, but the West was not within him. Persecution strengthens, if it stops short of extermination. The quotation which stands at the beginning of this work is as true for the West now as it was for the Jew in the early days.
When the subject of persecution is touched upon, the source of the Life-mission of the Jew has been named. A millennium of massacres, robbery, cheating, burning, insults, mistreatments, expulsions, exploitation — these were the gift of the West to the Jew. They not only strengthened him, made him race-hard, but gave him a mission, the mission of revenge and destruction. The Western peoples and monarchs were storing up explosives in the soul of the alien in their midst.
The great organic regularity of war governs Life: even primitive tribes in Africa engage in war, when they have, as far as a Culture-people can see, nothing whatever to fight about. The appearance of a High Culture on the earth, and the concentration of power which its high organization and articulation give to it, bring about in the human surroundings a counter-will to destroy, balancing the will-to-create of the High Culture. In Life, not-to-belong is the same as to oppose. The opposition may be in abeyance long or forever because of other, stronger oppositions, but it remains, latent and potential. The contact of two superpersonal organisms can only engender opposition and war. The West and the Jewish organism were engaged during the millennium of their contact in constant, unremitting war. It was not the warfare of the battlefield, of the clash of ships-of-the-line, but a different form of war.
The total alien-ness of the Jew made him politically invisible to the West. It did not regard him as a nation, for he had no dynasty, no territory. He spoke the prevailing language of whatever landscape he was in. He had no visible State in the Western style. It seemed that Jewry was simply a religion, and as such not a political unit, for even in the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–1648, religion played a subordinate role to dynastic politics, and Fronde politics. Therefore, even though the West itself had given the Jew his political mission of revenge and destruction, it could not see him as a political unit.
And so the war between the Western Culture and the Jew was a subterranean one. The Jew could not emerge in his unity and fight the West openly, for the reason of the odds involved. The West would at once have united against an open Jewish attack, and destroyed him utterly. The Jew had perforce to carry on his politics by the method of penetrating the conflicts among Western forces, ideas, States, and trying to influence the outcome in his favor. He favored always the side pointing toward materialism, triumph of economics, opposition to absolutism, opposition to the religious unity of the West, freedom of trade and usury.
The tactics of this Jewish warfare was employment of money. His dispersion, his materialism, his finished cosmopolitanism, all precluded him from taking part in the heroic form of combat on the field, and he was thus confined to the war of lending, or refusing to lend, of bribing, of gaining legally enforcible power over important individuals. Since the early days when the Western Popes had forbade Christians to take interest, the Jew had enjoyed a favored economic position. Cromwell brought them back to England when he decided there was “not enough money in the land.” Theirs were the largest banking houses in the West in the 17th century. The Bank of England itself was founded on concessions granted to Ali-ben-Israel by Cromwell. This bank proceeded to give 4½ per cent on deposits and re-lent to the Government at 8 per cent.
This tactic had not been freely available to him before the middle of the millennium. Scholastic philosophy, the laws of the Church, the Spirit of the Age, the power of the feudal barons to rob him — all were against the Jew. St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, in the 13th century, taught that trade was to be despised, as being the creature of desire for gain, which tends to become measureless, that the taking of interest was injustice, that the Jews should be deprived of the money they had taken through usury, and forced to work and give up their lust for gain. Various Popes directed bulls against the economic practices, the materialism, the rising influence, of the Jew.
But the Soul of the West itself was slowly externalizing. The decisive turning-point of 1789 was prepared for by centuries of slow changes. The old inwardness of the West, which gave to the feudal centuries their self-evident spiritual cohesion, gradually was undermined by new conflicts especially those of town versus country, of trade-nobility versus land-nobility, of materialism against the spirit of religion. The Reformation was a schism in the whole soul of the West. In it appeared as a symbol of the coming triumph of materialism the system of Calvinism. Calvin taught the sanctity of economic activity; he sanctioned usury; he interpreted wealth as a sign of Election to salvation. This spirit was abroad; Henry VIII legalized usury in England in 1545. The old Western doctrine of the sinfulness of usury was rejected.
This represented liberation for the Jew, accessibility to power, even if disguised, invisible power. In the Reformation time, the Jew was found everywhere fighting against the Church, and, as between Luther and Calvin, supporting Calvin, for Luther also rejected usury. The victory of Puritanism in England, an adaptation of Calvinism, gave the Jew favorable conditions. The Puritan writer Baxter even recognized a religious duty to choose the more gainful of two economic choices. To choose the less gainful was to disregard the will of God. This atmosphere protected and increased the Jew in his possessions, so that none of the old robbery by monarchs and barons could occur again.
II
From the beginning of the 17th century, an undercurrent appears in Western history, a twist, a distortion. It had its greatest effect in England, and there in the economic life. Many of the most rapacious aspects of the ascendancy of usury and finance-capitalism were not English at all, but ascribable to the rising influence of the Jew. Again, these effects do not redound to the blame of the Jew. The religious side of the Jewish unity permitted the taking of interest, and prescribed a different ethic as between Jews and goyim from that between Jews. It was meritorious according to the religion of the Jew to inflict injury on the goy. This religious tenet might have remained a dead letter, but for the life-mission of the Jew, whose formation in the centuries of persecution has been seen. The Jew was merely being himself, but his influence was not Western, and was a distortion of Western Culture. Even in the 19th century, after this sanctification of greed had been firmly established, Carlyle, a high representative of the Western soul, cried out in horror at the spectacle of universal thievery and throat-cutting with cunning economico-legal weapons, at the utter lack of social conscience which sacrificed whole strata of nations to want and misery.
The distorting effects of the presence of the Jew on Western economic life from the very beginning have been comprehensively set forth by the outstanding European economic thinker Werner Sombart in his Jews and Modern Capitalism. After the awakening within the Western soul of a stronger interest in the material world, the Jew became more secure, more indispensable, and more powerful. Even if he had wished to go into callings other than usury, they were closed to him, for the Western guilds admitted only Christians. His original economic superiority was thus maintained, and highly-placed Westerners in many cases became dependent on him. They in turn could not attack him, for the new commercial laws, reflecting the growing spirit of trade, protected him in his possessions, his bonds, and his contracts. The story of Shylock shows the dual picture of the Jew — socially cringing on the Rialto, but emerging as a lion in the courtroom. It was the West that cast him into these two roles. It expected him to play a purely subordinate part, and at the same time it gave him a path to a leading part.
The more materialistic the Culture became, the more it approached the Jew, and the greater was his advantage. The West gradually abandoned its exclusiveness, but he retained his, invisible to the West.
The epoch is the appearance of Rationalism, the radical affirmation of Materialism. Around 1750, the new ideas are ascendant in the West: “freedom,” “humanity,” Deism, opposition to religion and to absolutism, “democracy,” enthusiasm for “the people,” belief in the goodness of human nature, “Return to Nature.” Reason challenges tradition, and slowly the old, highly-refined Western structures of thought and statecraft go down. Lessing, in this period, put the Jew into a leading role in his play Nathan der Weise, what a century before would have been ridiculous. The intellectuals became enthusiastic for the ghetto man with his highly refined caste system, his private religion existing side by side with his external materialism. He was the cosmopolitan and, as such, seemed to the Western intellectuals to be pointing toward the Western future. For the first and last time, Westerners and Jews worked together on Cultural tasks — the spreading of the new ideas. The Cultural distortion now spread to the political life. The form of the French Revolution was due to Culture-distortion. The particular epoch that this great episode marks is, of course, an organic Western development. The distortion is manifest in these particular facts, occurring in this particular way, in this particular time and place. Otherwise put — the distortion occurred on the surface of history, not in its depths, for there distortion cannot occur. A human analogy is offered in incarceration: it distorts the surface of a man’s life, by changing all the facts of it, but it does not touch his inner development, physical or spiritual. Distortion is twisting, warping, frustration; it is not killing, nor can it kill. It is a chronic illness, a running sore, a waste, an impurity in the Cultural life-stream.
The philosopher has treated in full outline the best known example of Culture-distortion in the Arabian Culture. There it was the old, civilized, Romans who permeated the new upspringing life of the Aramaean world. This new Culture had to force its way through the entire corpus of life-forms of the Roman world in order to express itself. Its early centuries are a progressive emancipation from Culture-distortion, a fight against Culture-distortion. The Mithradatic Wars are an early outbreak of this fight. The Romans were the “Jews” of that world, i.e., the finished economic thinkers, with complete Cultural unity, in the midst of an area of awakening religion. The distortion extended into every direction of Life — law, philosophy, economics, politics, literature, war. Its occurrence was at the very inception of the Culture, which slowly freed itself from the completely alien world of the Roman. But the inmost soul of this new Culture was not touched by the distortion — it was its actualization, its surface, its expression, its facts, that were distorted.
Similarly, it is only the facts of the period 1775–1815, the period of the French Revolution, that were distorted. The great transition which was symbolized by this horrible event — the change of direction of the soul of the West from Culture to Civilization — could have happened in innumerable other ways.
It was the policy of the distorters to make the French public finance dependent on debts and interests, as they had long since made the English government. An absolute monarchy, however, with its centralization of power, militates against the subservience of the State to the power of Money. Therefore the idea was to introduce constitutional monarchy into France, and for this purpose, the distorters and their instrument, Necker, forced the summoning of the Estates-General. Its membership was also determined by the distorters to a large extent, and a constitutional monarchy was instituted.
Necker immediately tried to raise two large loans, without success. A solution of the financial crisis was suggested by Talleyrand in the form of confiscation of the real property of the Church. Mirabeau supported this and further suggested the issue of currency against the confiscated property. Necker refused, since such money, non-interest bearing and unconnected with debt, would not serve the distorters.
In the financial crisis, Necker was exiled, and Mirabeau became dictator. He immediately issued land-money to save the country from the panic the distorters were trying to bring about. But outside France, Necker, representing the power of Money and the distorters, then launched a continental war against France, exciting it from both within and without. The idea was that a war would necessitate large foreign purchases by France in England, Spain, and elsewhere; that the land-money, the assignats, would be refused by the Money powers outside of France, and that France would be forced to succumb to the gold-monopolists. From this war a straight line led to the Terror.
At the very beginning of the Civilization we see the same gigantic conflict between Authority and Money that lasts for generations into the Future. It is the battle of Napoleon against six coalitions. Napoleon has been painted by a distorted history-writing as a mere conqueror; his State-philosophy is ignored. But his autarchic economic ideas were dearly outlined by him to Las Casas and to Caulaincourt. He saw economy as production, not trade, and based primarily on agriculture, secondarily on industry, and lastly on foreign trade. He was opposed to interest-bearing money.
The battle of the distorters against these ideas contributes much to the form of the facts of Western history from Napoleon’s assumption of the Consulate to 1815. Regardless of what these facts would have been otherwise, it was a distortion of Western history that a Culture-parasite engaged actively and decisively in the expression of the Western soul. In the battle between Western forces, the outcome of which is organically shaped by the progressive development of our Culture-soul, the casting of totally foreign power into the balance is a warping and frustration.
We do not know what Western history had otherwise been, but it is quite obvious that the power of Money never would have enjoyed its absolute sway during the 19th century if it had not been for the disease of Culture-distortion. There would have been two poles in the Western soul — reaching down into every individual — the pole of money-thinking, and the pole of authority and tradition. The absolute triumph of Money exacted a horrible toll of Western lives and health. It sacrificed the agricultural class of whole countries to the selfish interest of Trade. It let loose wars for private interests with the blood of patriots. The Opium War is enough to name — a war in which English soldiers and sailors had to die in order to force upon the Chinese Emperor recognition and protection of the opium monopoly enjoyed by distorters based in the Western Civilization.
The debt system was forced onto every European State. Prussia borrowed from Nathan Rothschild in 1818. Russia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, followed in order. But the shallow materialistic Spirit of the Age, hostile as it was to deep thinking and probing beneath the surface remained blind, Philosophy, which had produced Berkeley and Leibnitz, was contented now with Mill and Spencer. Economic thinking was satisfied with Adam Smith, who taught — in the face of the ruin and destitution of millions — that the pursuit of his own selfish economic interests by each man would advance the collective life. When amazing propositions like these were accepted generally, it is not surprising that but few Westerners were conscious of the distortion of the Cultural life of the West. Byron was one of these few, as The Age of Bronze, and lines in Don Juan and other poems, show us. Charles Lamb and Carlyle were also aware, but for the most part Westerners were bent upon execution of the command of Louis-Phillipe: Enrichissez-vous!
III
The economic life, although influenced in its forms by Culture, is really only the raw material of Culture, a preliminary condition of the higher life. The role of economy in a High Culture is precisely analogous to its part in the life of a creative man, like Cervantes, Dante, or Goethe. For such a man to be tied to a bench is a distortion of his life. Every High Culture is creative — its whole life is a continuous superpersonal creating. Thus to place the economic life in the center, and to say that it is Life, and all else is secondary, is a distortion of Culture.
But that was the effect of the distorters from two sides. The masters of money worked solely for the spread of the Sovereignty of Money over the old traditions of the West. From the under side, the distortion of Marxism denied everything else in the world except economics, and said that the proletariat must exploit the Western Civilization for its own benefit.
From the examination of the articulation of a High Culture, the Cultural importance of the “proletariat” is known. In one word, it is — nihil. This is a plain fact, not an expression of an ideology, and because it is a fact, the distorter Marx, with his abysmal, snarling hatred of the Western Civilization, chose it as an instrument of destruction. From above and below, the distorters sought to employ the only techniques they understood, economic ones, in an instinctive attempt to destroy the body of the hated West. This, it cannot be said too often, is outside praise and blame: the distorters were acting from compulsion, their conduct was irrational, unconscious, springing from organic necessity.
The idea of Money, and the idea of class-war on an economic basis, both appear in other Cultures at a corresponding time. The distortion of our life was not manifest in the mere existence of these phenomena, but in their universality, their absolute form, and the bitterness with which they confused and divided the entire West. The presence of the distorter, a sort of organic catalyst, is interwoven into all these disintegrating, shattering ideas and developments.
The West only succumbed to this Culture-distortion because of its own externalization. Once the West began to dabble with Materialism, the distorters aggravated it. The breaking down of some barriers led the distorter to work for the removal of all distinctions. He turned Deism into atheism — but kept his own runes and phylacteries. In the battle of Rationalism against Tradition, he enhanced the division of the West by ever more absolute demands.
The very status of the distorter was the occasion of bitter discord in the Western nations. In England, public life was distorted over the question, which continually came up, of Jewish status. This question had nothing whatever to do with the English organism, but in battle after battle, Englishmen wasted themselves fighting for or against things like Jewish citizenship, membership in Parliament, in the Bar, the professions, government offices. Similar struggles divided Western society every where. The result of the steady financialization of the economic life, substituting the idea of Money for the idea of goods, was the steady ruination of the material and spiritual life of the working people and farmers in all the Western lands. The death of millions through the 19th and 20th centuries from conditions of dirt, malnutrition and sub-human living conditions, through typhus, hunger, and tuberculosis, is traceable to the transformation of the economy of production into a battlefield of the Master of Money against the entrepreneur and the industrialist. The Master of Money was the one who brought about the triumph of the corporate form of business ownership. This forced every business owner into interest servitude to the Master of Money, for it was the latter who bought the shares and then proceeded to grind the employees of the enterprises by turning the proceeds of the industry entirely into dividends. To a banker, wages paid to living human beings as the economic basis of their lives are merely a “cost of production.” To lower this “cost” was to increase his own profits. It did not matter whether rachitic children, starvation of families, debased national life, was the result — the aim was Profit.
The ideology was that each working-man could, if he wished, become a Master of Money. If he did not, it was his own fault. The Money Masters owed no duty to anyone, for they had made themselves. Not the converse, however, for if their foreign holdings were attacked, it was the patriotic duty of the starvelings to rescue the Money Masters.
The terrible results of the ascendancy of Money in throwing whole sections of the population into existence on the margin of starvation, had, as was to be expected, a counter-effect. The resultant seething discontent of these masses was also rendered into an instrument of the policy of the distorters.
In between was the enemy — the body of the Western Civilization. Above was the financial technique of mastery over this body. Below was the trade-union technique. The millions of the others were the spoils of this war on two fronts. The role of the distorter was to increase the division, render it sharper, make it work for his advantage. No historian has ever presented the policy and effect of the Culture-distorters better than Baruch Levy presented it in his famous letter to Marx:
“The Jewish people, taken collectively, will be its own Messiah. It will attain to mastery of the world through the union of all other human races, through abolition of boundaries and monarchies, which are the bulwarks of Particularism, and through the erection of a universal Republic, in which the Jews will everywhere enjoy universal rights.
“In this new organization of mankind the sons of Israel will spread themselves over the whole inhabited world, and they, since they belong all to the same race and culture-tradition, without at the same time having a definite nationality, will form the leading element without finding opposition.
“The government of the nations, which will make up this universal Republic, will pass without effort into the hands of the Israelites, by the very fact of the victory of the proletariat. The Jewish race can then do away with private property, and after that everywhere administer the public funds.
“Then shall the promises of the Talmud be fulfilled. When the time of the Messiah has come, the Jews will hold in their hands the key to the wealth of the world.”
This was the expression of the foreign body in the Western organism. There is nothing sinister about it to the distorter — to him the West is a brutish monster of pride, selfishness, and cruelty. The life-conditions of the two organisms, or any two organisms of this rank, are simply different. For the distorter to promote the economic obsession within the West, which undermines its soul and opens a path for him, is only obedience to the obvious. It is the eternal relationship of host and parasite, which is found in the plant world, the world of animals, and the world of human beings. For the West to be itself is to stifle the expression of the distorter and restrict his soul: for him to be himself is to frustrate the expression of the Western soul.
It must be clearly understood that Culture-distortion cannot kill the host, for it cannot reach to the Soul, but can only affect the expressions of that Soul, as they reach the phase of actualization. If distortion could reach into the Soul, it would no longer be felt as such, for the Soul would be changed. But the Soul continues in its purity and intensity, and its externalizing only is distorted. Here is the source of the tension: the disjunction between that which was possible and that which has become actual is visible. Reaction begins: with each victory of Culture-distortion, the feeling of frustration grows, and the more determined is the hostility of the Culture-bearing elements. Propaganda cannot touch this process, for it is organic, and must occur, while Life is present.
IV
Culture-distortion affects the Culture life on every plane. When the Culture is in a politically nationalistic stage, as the West was during the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century, not only the life of each nation may be distorted, but also the relations between the nations themselves.
The simplest illustration would be hypothetical. The Chinese parasitic group in America was never able to attain to the level of Culture-distortion, but let us suppose it had. If it had possessed public power in America at a time when, let us say, England was marking out spheres of influence for itself in China, the Chinese element in America would have inevitably worked for a war by America against England. If its degree of public power had been sufficient, it would have succeeded. This would have been distortion of the international life of the Western Civilization. It would have been an intra-Western war on a Chinese issue. This hypothetical case did occur, repeatedly, with other participants, throughout the 19th century. Whatever country was engaged in persecution of the Culture-distorter in Europe, or whatever country was slow in granting him the civil rights, legal protection, and financial possibilities that he needed, found itself the object of the policy of the Culture-distorter. The distortion was never absolute, for the public power of the distorter was never that. It was always a mere twisting, not a transformation; an influence, not a command; hidden, not visible; a deviation, not a straight line. The distorter never appeared as himself, for so to do would have been to destroy himself, a tiny parasite in a gigantic host. Distortion was always masked by Western ideals — freedom, democracy, liberty, and the like. This, again, was not sinister, for it was a life-necessity of the distorter thus to conduct his policy. His small numbers precluded a challenge of the entire West on the battlefield.
During the entire 19th and early 20th centuries there was, in addition to the surface history of Western politics and Western economics, another history — that of the advance of the Culture-parasite through his own politics, with consequent distortion of Western politics and economics. The contemporary Europe could only catch glimpses of this second history. Because of its political nationalism, it could not conceive of a political unit without a definite territory, a definite language, a “Constitution,” an army, a navy, a Cabinet, and the rest of the Western political equipment. It was not acquainted with the history of the Arabian Culture and its Nation-idea, nor with the unity of its remnant that was strewn through the West.
Within each nation it worked for the adoption of constitutions, the attenuation of the old aristocratic forms, the spread of “democracy,” the rule of parties, the extension of the franchise, the breaking down of the old exclusiveness of the West. All of these transformations are quantitative, the negation of quality. The democratization of a land was a prerequisite to the conquest of power therein. If the resistance was too great within, other nations where power had already been gained were mobilized against the recalcitrant nation, and war was the result.
Throughout the 19th century Russia — which still figured then as a member of the Western State-system — Austria, and Prussia resisted Culture-distortion. The Church of Rome also stood out, and was marked down as an enemy.
By 1858 the point had been reached where the Culture-distorter could mobilize the government of France and the public sentiment of England in the case of the Mortara child. When an international incident among Western nations could be created by the case of one private Jewish child, it is not surprising that much larger Jewish affairs could bring about much greater international results in the Western political system.
The greatest enemy of all was Russia, the land of the pogrom. It has been seen that when there was a large pogrom in Kiev in 1906, the Roosevelt government in America broke off diplomatic relations with the Russian government. No Americans were concerned in any way in the pogrom, and so the case is indicative of the strength of the distorter. If the victims of the pogrom had been Laplanders, Cossacks, Balts, or Ukrainians, it would have passed unnoticed by Washington .
The First World War, both in its original form, and in its development, was not at all indicative of the Western problems of the time. The treatment of this great turning-point belongs to another place, but here the result for Russia, the great enemy of the distorter, can be shown. The connection of the Culture-distorter with Bolshevism was the subject of loud boasting in his press in the early days of Bolshevism. Romanov Russia was paid back a thousandfold for the pogroms of three centuries. The Tsar and his family were shot against a wall in Ekaterinburg, and a Kabbalistic symbol was scrawled above their bodies. The entire stratum which had been the vehicle of the Western Civilization in Russia was massacred or driven out. Russia was lost to Europe, and became the greatest threat to the Western body. In the Bolshevist wars, plagues, and famines, immediately following the Revolution, a number between ten and twenty millions perished. The slogan was: Destroy everything! — which meant — everything Western. Among other changes in Russia, anti-semitism was made a crime.
This example shows the magnitude to which Culture-distortion can attain. The tremendous formative power of the Western Culture had pulled Russia into its spiritual orbit. The instrument of this development was Peter the Great. The Romanov dynasty he founded in the 17th century had been the great symbol of the ascendancy of the Western spirit in the vast subcontinent called Russia, with its teeming millions of primitive populations. The transformation was, of course, not complete. It could not have been, since a High Culture has a situs, and does not move about. Nevertheless the Romanov dynasty and the Western stratum it represented in Russia gave Europe for three centuries comparative security in the East. Bolshevism removed this security.
When the armies of Alexander occupied Paris in 1814, they were compelled by the Western veneer of their leaders to behave as Western troops. It was somewhat as though Western troops were occupying a foreign Western capital. But the Bolshevist troops which planted the red flag in the heart of Europe in 1945 had nothing in common with the West whatever. In their primitive blood and instincts was the wordless imperative: destroy everything!
V
The phenomenon of Culture-distortion is not confined to the sphere of action. The ascendancy of the Classical Civilization over the early Arabian Culture, up to about 300 A.D., showed a complete distortion of the expressions of the new, rising, Culture. The philosopher has described the situation — which lasted for centuries — as a “Pseudomorphosis,” a “false-forming” of all the manifestations of the new Culture-soul.
The high refinement of our Western arts, and their esoteric nature, which made them accessible only to a few, made their distortion by Cultural outsiders impossible. Westerners themselves occasionally — for instance Chippendale, the Classicists in belles lettres, philosophy, and the arts of form — sought to introduce extra-Cultural motives in Western things, but they transformed them in their very using of them, adapting them to our feeling. But there are no Culture-distorters in a great Western art during its period of highest development. Calderon, Rembrandt, Meister Erwin von Steinbach, Gottfried von Strasburg, Shakespeare, Bach, Leonardo, Mozart, have no counterparts with extra-Cultural backgrounds. Oil painting and music remained entirely Western as long as they were in process of fulfillment. When, with the end of the 19th century, both of these great arts had become history, the distorters emerged with atrociousness in the pictorial realm, and clangor in the world of music.
Because of the extent of their public power, they were able to hold up these horrors as worthy successors to Rembrandt and Wagner. Any minor artist continuing to work in the old traditions was smothered, while a Culture-distorter was praised as a great artist. The tendency in the middle of the 20th century finally became simply to take old works of art and distort them, without any pretense as to the process. A form of “music” taken from the primitive culture of African aborigines was adopted, and the works of Western masters were forced into this form. The pretense of originality was given up. When a Culture-distorter produced a drama, it was often simply a Shakespearean play, distorted, twisted, and made to convey the social propaganda of the distorter. Any other drama was stifled by the total ascendancy of the Cultural outsider, and his control of the channels of publicity.
In this realm, as in the realm of action, it was exclusiveness that kept the Western soul pure in its expressions, and it was the victory of quantitative ideas, methods, and feelings that laid the life of the West open to the entrance of the Culture-distorter.
In the domain of action, Money, Democracy and Economics — all quantitative, none of them exclusive — had admitted the outsider to public power. Without Western materialism, money-thinking, and liberalism, the entry of the outsider into Western public life had been as impossible as the mastery of Talmudic casuistry would have been to a Westerner.
And with this, we come to the Future.
The coming developments of the Western Soul are known. Authority is re-appearing, the old Western pride and exclusiveness are back. The spirit of Money is giving way to Authority; parliamentarism is yielding to order. Social disarticulation will be replaced by cohesion and hierarchy. Politics is destined to move into a new realm: the Western nations are gone, and the Western nation is coming. The consciousness of the unity of the West supplants the petty-stateism of the 19th century.
Sternness and discipline are the characteristics of the Western soul in the 20th century. Gone are the pathological individualism and feebleness of will of 19th century Europe. Respect for the mystery of Life, and for the symbolic significance of living Ideas take the place of 19th century Materialism. Vitalism has triumphed over mechanism, the soul over Rationalism.
Ever since the appearance of Calvin the West has been steadily moving toward more absolute Materialism. The apogee of the curve was reached by the First World War, and this powerful epoch into a new world marked also the reappearance of the Western soul in its unimpaired purity. It had come through the long Cultural crisis of Rationalism, and its ever youthful Destiny produced the Resurgence of Authority and the unification of Europe in such a self-evident form that no force in Europe save retarders and distorters — both pathological — even opposed it.
This movement toward Materialism was a movement toward the Culture-distorter in the sense that it made his entry into Western affairs possible. When men were counted, naturally he too was included. But the counting-mania has ceased, and the old exclusiveness is coming back. The phenomenon of Disraeli, a Culture-distorter as prime minister of a Western State, would have been simply unthinkable a century previous, in Pitt’s time, and it is just as unthinkable now and for the Western Future.
The movement away from Materialism is a progression away from the Culture-distorter. In the realm of thought, Materialism is fighting a desperate rear-guard action. It is vanquished in every realm: physics, cosmogony, biology, psychology, philosophy, belles lettres. This irresistible trend simply makes distortion impossible to him, for it makes the affairs of the West inaccessible to him. The Western was always esoteric: when Goethe’s Collected Works were published in 1790, only 600 copies were subscribed. Yet this public was enough for his fame over all Europe. Buxtehude, Orlando Gibbons, Bach and Mozart wrote for a small public, including no Culture-distorters. Napoleon’s policy was understood in its last ramifications by few persons in his contemporary Europe. The distorters could only see so much as touched them.
The Culture-bearing stratum of the West is drawing together over the crumbled walls of vertical nationalism. The West is shedding the skin of Materialism, returning to the purity of its own soul for its last great inner task, the creation of the Culture-State-Nation-People-Race-Empire unity of the West, as the basis for the fulfillment of the Inner Imperative of Absolute Imperialism.
The problem of Culture-distortion is therewith fundamentally altered. The very possibility of a parasite being admitted to the public life of the West is fast passing away. With a sound instinct, the distorter has given up Europe, and bases himself henceforth outside Europe. The old tools of finance-capitalism and class war have lost their efficacy in the presence of the Resurgence of Authority, and only armies matter now. From without, he carries on his same compulsory revenge-mission.
In one Western colony, America, Culture-diseases are still present which from they have exerted and continue to exert a decisive influence on world-happening.
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