Nationalism and Culture (96 page)
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Authors: Rudolf Rocker
Tags: #General, #History, #Sociology, #Social Science, #Political Science, #Political Ideologies, #Culture, #Multicultural Education, #Nationalism and nationality, #Education, #Nationalism, #Nationalism & Patriotism
reality the existence of the modern state is a constant menace to peace, an ever present incentive to organized mass murder and the destruction of all cultural achievements. Outside of this costly "protection" which the state affords its citizens it creates nothing positive, does not enrich human culture a pennyworth} but at once puts all new cultural achievements in the service of destruction, so that they become, not a blessing to the people, but a curse.
The history of the state is the history of human oppression and intellectual disfranchisement. It is the story of the unlimited lust for power of small minorities which could be satisfied only by the enslavement and exploitation of the people. The deeper the state with its countless agencies penetrates into the sphere of activity of social life, the more its leaders succeed in changing men into mindless automatons of their will, the more inevitably will the world become a vast prison in which at last there will be no breath of freedom. The conditions in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Russia and Germany speak too eloquent a language for us to be longer deceived about the inevitable consequences of such an "evolution." That along this pathway there lies no rosy future for men is clear to all who have eyes to see and ears to hear. What is today arising on the social horizon of Europe and the world is the dictatorship of darkness which believes that the whole of society can be geared to the wheels of a machine whose steady drive smothers everything organic and elevates the soullessness of mechanics to a principle. Let us not deceive ourselves: It is not the form of the state^ it is the state itself which creates the evil and continually nourishes and fosters it. The more the government crowds out the social element in human life or forces it under its rule, the more rapidly society dissolves into its separate partsj which then lose all inner connection and either rush thoughtlessly into idiotic collisions over conflicting interests or drift helplessly with the stream, not caring whither they are borne.
The further this state of things progresses the harder it will be to gather men again into a new social community and to persuade them to a renewal of social life. The delusive belief in a dictatorship which is today spreading over Europe like a pestilence is only the ripe fruit of an unthinking belief in the state, which has for decades been implanted in men. Not the government of men but the administration of things is the great problem set for our age, and it can never be solved within the frame of the present state organization. It is not so much how we are governed, but that we are governed at all} for this is a mark of our immaturity and prevents us from taking our affairs into our own hands. We purchase the "protection" of the state with our freedom even to stay alive and do not realize that it is this "protection" which makes a hell of our life, while only freedom can endow it with dignity and strength.
There are today only too many who have recognized the evils of dictatorship as such, but who comfort themselves with the fatalistic belief that it is indispensable as a transition stage, provided, that is, that we have in mind the so-called "proletarian dictatorship," which, we are told, is to lead to socialism. Were not the perils by which the young communist state in Russia was threatened on every side a moral justification for the dictatorship? And must one not concede that the dictatorship would yield place to a condition of greater freedom as soon as these perils were overcome and the "proletarian state" had been consolidated internally?
Since then almost twenty years have gone by in that country.. And Russia is today the strongest military state in Europe and is bound to France and other states by a strong alliance for mutual security. The Bolshevist state has not only been recognized by all the other powers, it is also represented today in all the bodies of international diplomacy and is exposed to no greater dangers from without than is every other great power in Europe. But the internal political conditions in Russia have not changed j they have grown worse from year to year and have made any hope for the future a mockery. With every year the number of the political victims has become greater. Among them are to be found thousands who for the last fifteen years have been dragged from prison to prison, or have been put to death, not because they have rebelled against the existing system with weapons in their hands, but merely because they were unable to accept the doctrines prescribed by the state and were of a different opinion from the ruling powers as to the solution of the social problem.
This situation cannot be explained by the pressure of external conditions, as so many have naively persuaded themselves. It is the logical result of an out and out anti-libertarian attitude which has not the slightest understanding or sympathy for the rights and convictions of men. It is the logic of the totalitarian state, which concedes to the individual only so much justification for his existence as makes him of service to the political machine. A system which could stigmatize freedom as a "bourgeois prejudice" could only lead to such an outcome. In its course it had to raise to a fundamental principle of state the suppression of all free expression of opinion and to make the scaffold and the jail the cornerstone of its existence. More than that: it had to proceed further along this disastrous course than any reactionary system of the past. Its leaders did not content themselves with rendering their revolutionary and socialistic opponents harmless, with dragging them before the bar or burying them alive j they also denied to their victims sincerity of opinion and purity of character, and shrank from no means of picturing them to the world as scoundrels and purchased tools of reaction.
The men and women who sat in the prisons of tsarist Russia were
regarded by the liberty-loving world as martyrs to their opinions. Even the prison wardens of tsarism did not have the effrontery to attack their integrity or to question their sincerity. The victims of the proletarian dictatorship, however, were shamelessly besmirched and slandered by their oppressors and held up to the world as the scum of society. And hundreds of thousands of blind fanatics in every country, with their poor brains tuned only to the rhythm of the Moscow waltz, having lost all capacity to think for themselves, or perhaps never having possessed it, babble back without thinking whatever the Russian autocrats have dictated to them.
We have here to do with a reaction that goes deeper and is more disastrous in its consequences than any political reaction of the past. For the reaction of today is not embodied in special systems of government that have grown out of the methods of violence employed by small minorities. The reaction of today is the blind faith of broad masses which proclaims as unconditionally good even the most shameful violation of human rights so long as it is perpetrated by one particular side, and condemns uncritically whatever is damned by that side as false and heretical. Belief in the political infallibility of the dictator today replaces the belief in the religious infallibility of the Catholic pope and leads morally to the same results. It is possible to struggle against the force of reactionary ideas as long as one can appeal to reason and to human experience. Against the blind fanaticism of unthinking parrots who condemn any honest conviction in advance, all reason is powerless. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are merely the symbols of this blind faith which ruthlessly condemns everything that opposes its power.
The disgraceful judicial farces over the so-called "Trotzkyists" in Moscow are a bloody illustration of this. Everyone who has even a trace of independent judgment must recognize that the genuine tragedy in these judicial farces has been enacted behind the scenes of the court trial. The oldest and most outstanding leaders of a party, all trusted friends of the dead Lenin, compete with one another before the court in gruesome self-accusation such as has never before been witnessed in a political trial. Each seeks to outdo the others in his depiction of his own unworthiness so as to appear before the world as the despicable tool of fascism; all, however, with astounding unanimity point to Trotzky as the actual instigator of tlieir alleged crimes.
No movement is secure against individual traitors in its ranks. But to believe that the great majority of the most prominent leaders of a movement found themselves prepared for the betrayal of everything that they had formerly preached—for that one must be more than blind. And if, after all, this horrible accusation was based on facts? Then so much the worse. What judgment can one pass on a movement whose oldest and
most prominent leaders, all of whom had at some time occupied the highest positions that the party had in its gift, were secretly in the service of reaction? And if the great majority of the old leaders were traitors, who is to guarantee that the three or four of the old guard who are left alive are made of better stuff? Here, too, that law manifests itself that lies at the foundation of every dictatorship: the dictator can know no peace until he has rid himself of all inconvenient competitors. That same implicit logic that forced Robespierre to deliver his friends of yesterday to the headsman, that same logic that impelled Hitler on the bloody night of June 30, 1934, to clear his closest comrades out of his way, that same logic it was that just today drove Stalin to rid himself of the so-called "Trotzkyists" because he was afraid they might become dangerous to his power. For every dictator the dead opponent is the safest opponent.
After all, the same fate had overtaken these victims as they had so often dealt out to their opponents of other factions when they were still in power. They were minds of the same mind and blood of the same blood, inspired by the same obsession for power as their headsmen, treading every law of humanity under foot to maintain their own power. They have been robbed not only of their lives but of their honor, and the odium of treason has been heaped upon their names. But Trotzky too, who in 1924 had the workers and sailors of Kronstadt slaughtered—fourteen thousand men, women and children—was not content with drowning in blood the protest of those pioneers of the Russian Revolution; he and his assistants did not hesitate to denounce their victims to the world as counterrevolutionaries and allies of tsarism. Today he has to endure being represented to the world by his former friends as the ally of Hitler and the tool of fascism. That is the Nemesis of history.
From the same fatalistic conception which believes that it is impossible to dispense with dictatorship as a necessary transition stage to better social conditions, arises also the dangerous belief, which today finds ever wider and wider acceptance, that in the end the world can only choose between communism and fascism, because there is no other practicable way out. Such a view of the situation only proves that its holders are not yet at all clear about the real nature of fascism and communism and have not yet grasped that both grew on the same tree. It must, of course, not be forgotten that "communism" is to be taken here as merely a name for the present Russian system of government, which is as far removed from the original meaning of communism as a social system of economic equality as is every other system of government.
That the original motives of the Bolshevist dictatorship in Russia were different from those of the fascist dictatorship in Italy and Germany is not disputed. But once it was brought into being, dictatorship in Russia, just as in the fascist states, led to the same immediate results; indeed,
the similarity of the two systems becomes progressively more apparent. The fact is that the whole internal development of Bolshevism in Russia and the social reconstruction in the fascist countries have reached a stage where, so far as the actual tendencies are concerned, no conflict can any longer be recognized between the two systems. Today we deal only with secondary differences, which can be distinguished also between the fascism of Germany and that of Italy, and which find their explanation in the peculiar conditions in the different countries.
Under Stalin's dictatorship Russia has developed in greater measure into a totalitarian state than has Germany or Italy. The arbitrary and brutal suppression of every other faction and of all freedom of opinion, the reduction of every sphere of public life to the iron control of the state, the omnipotence of an unrestrained and unscrupulous police system which interferes in the most intimate affairs of human beings and supervises every breath of the individual, the unexampled disregard for human life which shrinks from no means of clearing disagreeable elements out of the way—this and much more has taken on in Bolshevist Russia the same scope as in the countries of Hitler and Mussolini. Even the original international tendency of the Bolshevist movement, which could once have been regarded as the essential mark of distinction between Russian state communism and the extreme nationalistic aims of fascism, has completely disappeared under Stalin's regime to give place to a strictly nationalistic education of Russian youth. This youth, it is true, still sings the "Internationale" on ceremonial occasions, but it is no less firmly bound with iron chains to the interests of the national state than is the fascist youth of Germany and Italy.
On the other hand fascism in Germany, and still more definitely in Italy, is turning more and more into the road" to state capitalism. The nationalization of all the financial institutions in Italy, the step by step subjection of all foreign trade to the control of the state, the nationaliza-ion of heavy industry already announced by Mussolini, and much else, show ever more clearly the tendency toward a development of state capitalism after the Russian pattern, a phenomenon that is causing no little brain-racking for the big capitalist accomplices of fascism. Similar phenomena are today appearing with increasing frequency in Germany. In reality these tendencies are only the logical result of the idea of the totalitarian state, which can never rest content until it has brought every field of social life equally into its service.
Fascism and "communism" are therefore not to be evaluated as the opposition of two different conceptions of the nature of society, they are merely two different forms of the same effort and operate to the same end. And this is not changed in the least by the declaration of war against communism that Hitler has proclaimed with such passion, for every
person of insight recognizes clearly that this is just a propagandist trick to scare the bourgeois world out of its wits. Even the ruthless brutality that characterizes the new autocrats in Bolshevist Russia as well as those in the fascist states finds its explanation in the fact that they are all upstarts: the parvenu of power is no whit better than the parvenu of wealth.
That fascism and communism, or better, Stalinism, could ever have been regarded as opposed to one another is explained chiefly by the pitiful behavior of the so-called "democratic" states, which in their defensive struggle against the flood of fascism more and more appropriate its methods, and so are swept inevitably further and further into the current of fascist tendencies. Here is being repeated on a large scale the situation which helped Hitler to his victory in Germany. In their efforts to put a check on the "greater evil" by means of a lesser one the republican parties in Germany kept restricting constitutional rights and privileges more and more until at last there was hardly anything left of the so-called "constitutional" state. In fact, Bruening's government, which enjoyed the full support of the Social Democratic party, governed at last entirely by decree, having eliminated the legislative bodies. Thus, the antagonism between democracy and fascism gradually faded away until at last Hitler emerged as the joyful heir of the German Republic.
But the democratic countries have learned nothing from this example and are now traveling with fatalistic submissiveness along the same path. This is today especially evident in their pitiful behavior with regard to the frightful occurrences in Spain. A conspiracy of power-loving officers rose against a democratic government elected by the people and with the help of foreign mercenaries and under the direction of Hitler and Mussolini let loose a murderous war against their own people that is laying waste the whole country and has already cost hundreds of thousands of human lives. And while an entire people with heroic determination prepares to defend itself against this bloody violation of its rights and liberties and puts up against this handful of conscienceless adventurers such a struggle as the world has never before witnessed, the "democracies" of Europe have known nothing better to do in opposition to this base violation of every human right than to entrench themselves behind a ridiculous neutrality pact—when everyone knew in advance that neither Hitler nor Mussolini would respect it. By this masterpiece of diplomacy a liberty-loving people that is risking the lives of its sons anu daughters in defense of its rights, and the cowardly hangmen who threaten to drown these rights in a bath of blood, are treated as equal combatants and put morally on the same footing. Can one wonder, then, that democracy today has no attractions to oppose to fascism?
For months now the world has looked On calmly while the capital of
a country is exposed to all the horrors of war, and defenseless women and children are mowed down by fascist barbarians. And nowhere does there rise a word of protest to call a halt to these horrors. Bourgeois democracy has grown senile and has lost all sympathy for the rights it once used to defend. It is this blunting of its morals, this lack of ethical ideals, that cripples its wings and forces it to borrow the methods of the enemy that is threatening to devour it. Centralization of government has broken its spirit and crippled its initiative. That is the reason why many think today that they must choose between fascism and "communism."
If today there still is a choice, it is not that between fascism and "communism," but the choice between despotism and freedom, between brutal compulsion and free agreement, between the exploitation of human beings and cooperative industry for the benefit of all.
Fourier, Proudhon, Pi y Margall and others believed that the nineteenth century would begin the dissolution of the Great State and prepare the way for an epoch of Federations of Free Leagues and Municipalities which, in their opinion, would open for the people of Europe a new period of their history. They were mistaken as to the time, but their point of yiew is still correct, for governmental centralization has assumed a scope which must fill even the least suspicious with secret dread of the future— in Europe and in the world at large. Only a federalistic social organization, supported by the common interest of all and based on the free agreement of all human groups, can free us from the curse of the political machine which feeds on the sweat and blood of the people.
Federalism is organic collaboration of all social forces towards a common goal on the basis of covenants freely arrived at. Federalism is not disintegration of creative activity, not chaotic running hither and thither j it is the united work and effort of all members for the freedom and welfare of all. It is unity of action, sprung from inner conviction, which finds expression in the vital solidarity of all. It is the voluntary spirit, working from within outward, which does not exhaust itself in mindless imitation of prescribed patterns permitting no personal initiative. Monopoly of power must disappear, together with monopoly of property, that men may be eased of the weight which rests like a mountain on their souls and cripples the wings of the spirit.
Liberation of economics from capitalism! Liberation of society from the state! Under this sign the social struggles of the near future will take place, smoothing the way for a new era of freedom, justice and solidarity. Every movement which strikes capitalism in the core of its being and seeks to free economics from the tyranny of monopoly; every initiative which opposes the state's effective action and aims at the elimination of force from the life of society, is a step nearer to freedom and the coming of a new age. Everything which steers towards the opposite goal
—under whatever name—strengthens consciously or unconsciously the forces of that political, social and economic reaction which today raises its head more threateningly than ever before.
And with the state will disappear also the nation—which is only the state-folk—in order that the concept of humanity may take on a new meaning. This will reveal itself in its every part, and from it the rich manifoldness of life will for the first time create a whole.
The sense of dependence on a higher power, that source of all religious and political bondage which ever chains man to the past and blocks the path to a brighter future, will yield place to an enlightenment which makes man himself the master of his fate. Here also Nietzsche's saying holds true: "Not where you come from will from now on redound to your honor, but whither you are going! Your will and your foot, which tries always to outrun you—that shall be your new honor."