Classics | Arthur Moeller van den Bruck | Germany's Third Empire | Part 7 -and

Part 7 (end)

The whole suffices; the part does not. While the revolutionary conceives the state as an "apparatus of compulsion" which impedes the attainment of his goal, the conservative conceives the state as a means towards securing, and as an expression of, the community of life. The question is only whether the conservative will have to get his way in opposition to the Revolution or whether the revolutionary will of himself turn towards conservatism.

The revolutionary is entirely absorbed in the contemplation of an ultimate power which shall be his. As a proletarian, he feels that he cannot hope to arrive at it himself; but he trusts to the momentum of his mass movement.

The conservative conceives that among the results of the War—though perhaps the least important of them—is a movement released by the revolution which brings economic upheaval in its train, and that a point has been reached at which the age of capitalism is to be succeeded by an age of socialism, just as the feudal age was in its day succeeded by the age of capitalism.

The conservative starts from the data; he preserves detachment towards the vicissitudes of life, seeks to gauge their extent, to anticipate the demands of the present and to stabilize the future. This is what distinguishes the conservative from the revolutionary—the politically-conscious man from the politically-ingenuous—and this underlies all the divergencies of their political strategy and political tactics.

The revolutionary assumes that man is by nature "good" and that only history and economics have made him "bad," the conservative knows that man is weak and must be compelled to develop his strength. The revolutionary trustfully believes in progress, and imagines that in proportion as economic exploitations cease to foster the evil, the good in man will assert itself.

He hopes that the movement of the "immense majority"—to which the proletariat is stirred by the thought of class war—will produce a "genuine mass progress" in all domains "of public and private life."

The conservative is much more sceptical. He does not believe in any such progress-for-the-sake-of-progress as reason demands. He believes much more in catastrophe, in the powerlessness of man to avert it, in the inevitability of the march of fate and in the terrible disillusionment which awaits the over-credulous. He believes only in the power of grace and of election granted to the individual, in the sign of which men and nations and epochs must stand if success is to wait upon their will.

While the revolutionary seeks to enlist believers in his utopia, the conservative fears that democracy will prove to be the tertius gaudens: an international, westernizing, liberal, formal, corrupt democracy, composed of an immense minority of the rich (both men and nations) which with entire lack of scruple has hitherto understood only too well how the immense majority can be controlled.

The conservative’s forecast of the future is this: if it proves impossible conservatively to harness the forces of the Revolution, then Germany will finally perish of this democracy, of the democratic struggles which tear Europe to pieces, of the suffering, the discord, the pettiness of this democratic strife which may well last for centuries.

We have the experience of the Russian and of the German Revolutions behind us, and we can see how again and yet again all calculations have proved to be miscalculations, while self-willed fate continues to hold sway. While the Revolution was rolling over Russia, and Germany was still in the throes of her own Revolution, many Germans made a comparison between the two countries and said: Russia has time, Germany has not.

The contrary is the case. Russia has allowed herself no time; but Germany has had to take time. It was and is true that every hour is of burning importance while Germany waits anxiously for help. An industrial country is infinitely harder hit by a collapse than an agrarian country. After 1918 Germany was faced by the possibility of further upheavals (whether revolutionary or counter-revolutionary makes little difference); their origin lay in the external foreign pressure but their focus lay in the peculiar economic conditions of Germany, in industrial crises, in communist putsches, in the gradual proletarianization of the educated classes, eager not for a class war but for a war of liberation. Germany tried again and again to recover from the blows she had dealt herself in the Revolution and the terrible blows later dealt her by her enemies in Versailles. Germany waited; we must today admit that fate compelled her to wait, even though she had no idea what she was really waiting for. Was she waiting for Russia’s stabilization?—or America’s deliberation?—or England’s decision?—or the union of the neutrals?—or her own preparedness?—Hitherto Russia has been the danger to Europe; now Germany is the danger. Only the conservative counter-movement offers salvation, if it is not the movement of a party only but the involuntary effort at self-preservation of a desperately-threatened people, a supreme effort of self-defence in face of danger.

Even the revolutionary does not shrink from the defensive war into which the war of the nations has merged since the sham peace which was supposed to end it. But the revolutionary would wage it for his doctrine, for the class-war ideal, and for all the other catchwords which he gets second-hand from Russia. His words are therefore double-edged. He talks of war against the "capitalism of the Entente" but he means war against "all capitalism."

He is neither honest enough, nor logical enough, to distinguish between the French attackers and the Germans attacked. He marshals the proletariat for war—equally against both. With his international preoccupations he addresses himself to humanity, equates humanity with the proletariat, and abandons his own people to its tormentors.

To the conservative on the other hand the defensive war is a war for very life, for the nation’s freedom, for the nation’s preservation, only possible in freedom. This makes his cause a natural cause, the cause of all whose elementary instinct is to turn and rise against the oppressor—without seeking justification in any doctrine. We hope that here—as ultimately everywhere and all the time—Life will prove mightier than Theory.

The revolutionary and the conservative have today a common foe—not in the reactionary; he is merely an obstruction. The revolutionary has always succeeded in getting the better of the reactionary; the conservative has always overcome the reactionary in himself.

The common foe is the liberal. The revolutionary instinctively feels it; the conservative consciously knows it. The revolutionary gives him another name and calls him capitalist. He takes the economic point of view and calls him the exploiter of the masses, who is withholding the rights of life from the proletariat. The conservative recognizes in the liberal an age-old enemy; mentally a freebooter, politically a rationalist and a utilitarian who can sneak in disguise into any form of government, can destroy religion and has even been able to destroy conservatism. The liberal grasps at power in the name of liberty; he may be known alike by the lying plausibility of his words and unscrupulousness of his deeds. We can see this in the political outrages of the grande bourgeoisie of France, who brought about the World War for their own ends, and the plans of their ambitious lawyers and pious generals who invaded our territories with their white and coloured troops.

The revolutionary loves to talk of epochs succeeding each other, but he has an eye only for the future to which he conceives himself to be leading the way. He marches in step with the proletariat, advancing to class war, and under the Marxist flag he believes his victory assured.

The conservative on the other hand who takes his stand on data, not only economic but also political and moral data, cannot ignore the economic question, because it is far from being proved that the capitalist epoch is nearing its close—as the revolutionary hastily maintains. It is not yet clear whether the World War has smashed capitalism in world economics or not rather cleared the way for it. He only knows that the world always tend to become—by a law of nature—conservative. His is the responsibility to see that the world through all its vicissitudes is stabilized, united and organized: politically by the state, morally by men.

He knows also that the world which until the appearance therein of the liberal was always conservative, cannot become conservative again until the liberal is eliminated. The conservative, in embarking on his fight against the liberal, is aware that it is only the continuation of the great struggle between two principles which began when the age of enlightenment came to bring darkness rather than light to the world. This struggle has been going for three hundred years; the conservative is prepared to believe that it may last for another three hundred until it is fought to a finish—once and for all.

The revolutionary is incapable of seeing these connections. Partly because he is himself a product of the age on enlightenment and is still enmeshed in its illusions and self-deceptions—himself only a most radical variety of liberal. He sees time only as the present. History for him begins with himself. And he hopes with the blows of his horny fists to usher in the millennium.

He has no links with the past he ignores, or with the future he conceives. Before he catches up the knowledge that he lacks, which other men—conservatives or even revolutionaries, but assuredly no proletarians—have already attained, the proletarian will have missed the possibilities of the present. For are not the liberals ranged behind his back with tanks and machine guns, with press and propaganda, with triumphant militarism and with triumphant ideology?

The conservative recognizes the peril. The revolutionary is his comrade in the fight so far as he is a man and not merely a reactionary. The conservative does not appeal to party Germans, whether of the Right or Left, for in them he sees the bane of his country.

The conservative belongs to a Third Party which cuts across all political party lines, repudiates the political thought that brought Germany and Europe to ruin, and appeals to the man in every German, and to the German in man. He trusts that there still exist in Germany many men whose reason has not been darkened by enlightenment, but who have preserved clearness of understanding. Men with true, simple, straightforward insight, with strong, virile, primitive passions: and the will to act accordingly. He trusts that a people of such men still lives in a Germany that must pass through suffering, to find in the Empire its fulfilment; and he trusts that the degenerate European world will allow itself to be set in order once again by this country and this people.

Has the Revolution robbed conservative thought of its meaning? Not so. The Revolution has restored its meaning to conservative thought.