The Far Right in the Balkans

The Far Right in the Balkans:
Roots & Perspectives

By Dimitris Michalopoulos

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Preamble 

“Rest assured . . . that after . . . years of suffering we have sufficient moral strength left to find an honourable exit from life.”[1]

It is in these very words that the soul of Corneliu Codreanu and his followers was expressed. Needless to say that Capitanul has been the noblest figure among the Far Right leaders in Europe during the interwar period. And paradoxical as it may appear, he was conscious of this. Julius Evola had met him in Bucharest and gave a fair description of his physical appearance and his mind. He was a young, large and slim man, in sporting behaviour, with an open face which immediately gives an impression of nobility, force and honesty.[2] And it was with honesty that Codreanu explained to Evola the differences between the Legionary Movement, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism by analogy with the human body: Italian Fascism was reviving the “Roman form of politics,” representing in the human organism the physiological form; German National Socialism focused on the “race instinct” of the “vital forces,” whilst Romanian Legionary represented “the element of the heart,” both spiritual and religious.[3]

He was right. Codreanu’s Legionaries used to live as ascetic warrior-monks, working freely for the People and even fasting three days a week.[4] They were not “criminals” as an American lady, author of an extremely well-written book on “Dracula surviving,” described them.[5] In point of fact, they did not use to gather in woods’ clearings at midnight, to stand there “two rings deep” around bonfires, “facing them and chanting.” Their faces were not “stiff and unsmiling”; and their eyes did not “glitter.”[6] In short, they were by no means Dracula’s protagonists. And if they grew truly enragés, it was after their Captain suffered a martyr’s death at the hands of the royal authorities.

The Legionaries’ message was clear. Unlike the Italian Fascists that rose to power thanks to the latent still involuntary support of the Roman Catholic Church, because the Pope wished the dispute between the secularized Kingdom of Italy and the Holy See to be ended;[7] and unlike the National Socialists of Germany that gradually adopted a latent but still hostile attitude vis-à-vis the Church, because the clergy, as a rule, side with the enemies of the Christ,[8] Romanian legionaries started from the very beginning. And in this case “very beginning” means: religiosity. Hitler himself was clear: “True religiosity is to be found whenever deep knowledge [of the things] goes with acknowledgement of human inadequacy.”[9] And Mussolini had declared as well: “Fascism is a religious concept, in the framework of which, man is seen in his immanent relationship with . . . an objective Volition that transcends the individual and enables him to be the conscious member of a spiritual community.”[10] Still, only in Romania the Far Right movement dared to proclaim that religiosity was the very basis of its ideology. As early as 1919, Codreanu termed his doctrine “National-Christian Socialism”;[11] and if truth be told, he was not only an intelligent man but a man of character as well. Let us recall the famous phrase uttered by Grigore Filipescu in the Romanian Parliament, in December 1934: În România sunt mulţi oameni inteligenţi, mai puţin oameni capabili şi foarte puţini oameni de character.[12]It was this very national lack that Codreanu tried to remedy: “My programme is a creative one,” he stated to Virginio Gayda, director of the Italian newspaper Giornale d’Italia, in January, 1938. I think of the most important and most difficult creation [namely] the New Man. [And I mean this] not only from the physical and intellectual viewpoint; for we already have such a Man in Romania. [I talk] from the moral viewpoint. I want at all costs to create a type of Hero.”[13]

He was aiming at achieving his own “Triumph of the Volition” through the principles of Faith and Work.[14] Work nay, Toil was for Codreanu and his Legionaries a sacred duty.[15] Yet he failed tragically but not miserably. As aforementioned, he was the noblest figure of the 1919-1939 European Far Right. Therefore, his death had a tremendous impact on Romanian and international politics.[16] Still, he was a Balkan figure; and this is important, because in the Balkans, namely Greece, the European Far Right was actually born. 

I. The Dogma 

The dogma of the Right was written down by Ioannis Metaxas, Prime Minister of Greece during the years 1936-1941 and organizer of the Reservists Movement. This movement was the first ideologically clear-cut Far Right movement in Europe, and emerged in Greece during WW 1, i.e. before Mussolini founded his Fasci di Combattimento. Metaxas was explicit:

Democracy [as conceived in the U.S.A. and Western Europe] is the offspring of Capitalism. It is the instrument through which Capitalism rules the masses. It is the instrument through which Capitalism displays its own will as the one of the populace. . . . This variety of democracy [i.e. the U.S. and Western Europe one] relies on universal suffrage by individual and secret ballot; i.e. it needs well-built political parties – hence the need of capital [= money]. It needs [moreover] newspapers, hence the need of capital [anew]. It . . . needs electoral organizations and electoral combats; that means money. [And] it needs a lot of other things that presuppose money as well. In short, only big capitalists or their puppets are able to fight in [the framework of] such a democracy. Men or [even] groups of people in short of money, even if they defend the noblest ideals, are doomed to failure. For if one has the control of the newspapers, is in a position to shape the public opinion according to his own views [and will]; and even if he defends principles abhorred by the people, he can conceal them [by means of the Press that he controls] in such a way, that the people swallow them at last. But even if the people do not swallow them, he can declare, through the newspapers he controls, that the people did swallow them. And then everybody believes that the others have swallowed the ‘principles’/lies [of the big capitalist] and surrenders as well.” The corollary: “Democracy is the unique kid of Capitalism [as Jesus Christ is the unique Son of God]: it is thanks to Democracy that Capitalism displays its  own will as it were the People’s one.”[17]

Paradoxical as it may appear, Metaxas agreed with Lenin. For the Soviet leader had written, as early as 1917, that “Democracy is the best [political] form of Capitalism.”[18] Here is the essence of the social analysis of politics – and it is surprising to notice that Metaxas, in full agreement with Lenin, was in sharp contrast with almost every other Far Right leader in Europe. Mussolini, for instance, was against Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy; yet his analysis was ‘entrenched’ in a strictly national framework[19] — most likely dictated by political necessities. Antonio Salazar, further, used to avoid such analyses, because he put into practice a peculiar economic system aiming above all and beyond everything to the balance of the State budget.[20] Franco did alike – as far as it is known; for he aimed to redress Spain after the Civil War ended and from 1960 on to develop Spanish industry.[21] And Hitler criticized mainly the system of “State Monopolist Capitalism,” gradually implemented in Germany from 1870, because it stripped the Germans of their wealth.[22] No wonder that to Lenin this very State Capitalism was all but a kind of Socialism.[23]

II. The Birth of the Far Right

In contrast, Metaxas had no such concerns. His ideas were clear-cut from the early 1910s on and stamped on the Reservists Movement. These Reservists were people who had taken part in the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars, somewhat like the French anciens combattants. This Greek variety of the Far Right had, therefore, the following characteristics:

1. It was a truly social movement, because its rank-and-file was composed exclusively from the so-called “Working People”: small-land-owning peasants, craftsmen, petty merchants and workers; in other words the people that were regarded as conservative/reactionary by Marx and Engels.[24] Wealthy people[25] and what is termed “Lumpenproletariat”[26] were suspected and a priori excluded.
2. The Diaspora Greeks were excluded as well. As a matter of fact, only people born in the heartland of Greece, namely the Peloponnesus, Mainland Greece, the Cyclades group of islands and the Ionian Islands were considered to be fully and truly Greeks.[27]
3. Any territorial expansion of Greece was rejected a priori;[28] therefore, any involvement in the 1914-1918 Great War and, further, in international antagonism (“Europe’s business” as it was called) was rebuffed.[29]
4. King Constantine of the Hellenes was ‘universally’ recognized as the virtual leader of the movement;[30] for he was credited with the victory of the Greek Army in the 1912-1913 Balkan Wars, and used to observe socially and nationally speaking, a really “Folkish Behaviour.”

Under these circumstances it was quite natural that the Entente Cordiale saw in “Royalist Greece” a bitter foe. King Constantine and his followers were by no means willing to enter the war at the side of Great Britain and France. Eleutherios Venizelos, nonetheless, Prime Minister of Greece in 1915, an ardent follower of the Entente Cordiale, invitedFrench and British troops to occupy Salonika after the Gallipoli debacle – Greece being still a neutral country notwithstanding.

Following the occupation of Salonika, operations took place in Macedonia against the Bulgarians, allies of the Germans. The Commander-in-Chief of the Entente troops in Salonika, therefore, the French general Maurice Sarrail, feared aggression of the “Royalist Troops” in his rear. Such a thought was not “nonsensical”; for the people in Southern Greece grew more and more friendly to the Second Reich.[31] As a result, a serious blockade was set up by the [British] Royal Navy around the littoral of Greece; and this blockade that caused famine in Southern Greece with a lot of fatalities, was enhanced due to advice given by Ronald Burrows, professor at the King’s College, London.[32] In November, 1916 (Old Style), moreover, French troops, reinforced by some British, Italian and even Russian ones, tried to conquer Athens, but they failed. Angered, Sophia, Queen Consort of the Hellenes, wrote to her brother, the Kaiser: La page s’est tournée, c’étant une grande victoire contre quatre grandes Puissances desquelles les troupes fuirent devant les Grecs . . .[33]

Still, in the spring of the following year, 1917, the French came back; and now the King deserted his followers. The Reservists, under Metaxas’ leadership, were ready to defend the King against the liberal Powers of the West. Yet the Sovereign, motivated by the interest of his House, preferred to give up and establish himself in Switzerland. Such an attitude notwithstanding, the Reservists and lato sensu the People kept adoring him. Late in May and early in June, 1917 (Old Style), the French literally conquered Athens,[34] imposed E. Venizelos as Prime Minister, and endowed him with dictatorial powers. Venizelos thought that territorial gains in Asia Minor would help him to consolidate his regime. But the Reservists did not agree; and when elections were held at last on November 1, 1920 (Old Style), they had set up such a tremendous “leaderless network”[35] that Liberals (i.e. the Venizelists) suffered a crushing defeat. It was now the turn of Venizelos to flee abroad; as a result, Constantine was back on his throne in December of the same year. He could abandon the Asia Minor peripeteia, actually a Venizelist one; but he did not; yet the analysis of his ‘bellicose’ policy would be beyond the scope of this paper.

The people nonetheless, led by the 1912-1913 Reservists, fought in Anatolia against the Turkish Nationalist troops of Mustapha Kemal, and after they were defeated by the Turks, did not abandon their King. But the Liberals stirred up a military coup, following which the King was removed anew: he was to die in Palermo, Sicily, early in 1923, aged only 55. His outstanding followers were shot at Goudi, near Athens, in November, 1922.[36] Only Metaxas proved to be able to survive; for he was smart enough to reject any involvement of himself in the Asia Minor Campaign.

The Royalist administration, nevertheless, gave the evidence of very essence of its social basis. On July 20, 1922, the compulsory Social Security of all workers and private employees was enacted. It was the first time in Greece that such a step was taken.[37] As a matter of fact, King Constantine, Metaxas and the Reservists wished Greece to be a country without very rich and very poor people. That is why, when Metaxas became Prime Minister, under King George II, son and heir of King Constantine, put in effect a policy of ‘social homogenization’. Workers, in whom Metaxas saw “potential petty bourgeois,” were protected against “capitalists” through hard and fast rules. His way of thinking was clear: Only authoritarian/totalitarian governments are able to protect the Folk against the capitalists who try to “enslave” it, by making it “swallow the bait of democracy.” As a matter of fact, Capitalism wants slaves; but slaves having the illusion that they are “free men.”[38]

Metaxas was successful in his effort to homogenize the Greek society. That is why when Italy declared war on Greece late in October, 1940, the Greek People were unanimous in defending their “fascist regime.” It was a virtual yet bloody tragicomedy: the defenders of the Greek variety of Fascism fighting against another Fascist country.[39] But this is another story to be told . . .

III. The Russian Roots

It is said that the Far Right, commonly termed as “Fascism,” was born in Russia after the 1905 upheaval. It is true – but only in letter, not “in spirit.” In point of fact, two Far Right organizations were active in the Tsars’ Empire up to 1914: the “League of the Russian People” and the “League of Michael the Archangel.” [40] It is likely that Codreanu ‘christened’ his own movement after his Russian forerunners. Yet the Russian embryonic Fascism was not adopted either by nobility or the Tsar himself. That is why the Bolshevists had no serious problems as to their extermination.[41] If truth be told, the main factors that favoured the 1917 major political change in Russia were — ironically enough — the nominal or virtual enemies of Marxism, namely Tsardom, the Church and the peasantry.

Tsar Nicholas II was apathetic and believed that the Church was to assist him in his effort to “unite” the Russian People. He was wrong. For the Patriarchate of Moscow was in practice abolished by Peter I the Great early in the eighteenth century; and the clergy was full of rancour against the Russian Monarchy. No matter that the Bolshevists persecuted and eventually murdered hundreds of priests. The Church was revived; and the first Patriarch of Moscow and All Russias to be elected after the fall of Tsardom, namely Tikhon, was explicit in his famous 1925 Testament: “. . . In the years of civil collapse, the Soviet Government was placed at the head of the Russian State by God, without the will of Whom nothing can be done on earth.” And further:

Upon taking power, the representatives of the Soviet regime in January 1918 issued a decree recognizing the full religious freedom of citizens. Thus the principle of freedom of conscience was recognized by the [Soviet] Constitution to any religious congregation and to our Orthodox Church as well. . . . That is why we in time recognized the new order of things in our letters to our flock and . . . [priests] and we sincerely and publicly acknowledged the Worker-Peasant government of Russia. . . . It is time for the faithful to recognize the Christian point of view that says ‘everything works out for the divine’ and adopt all that happened as God’s will. While admitting no compromise with our conscience and yielding nothing with regard to our religion, we must be sincere towards the government and the work of the USSR for the good of everyone and arrange our religious life in accordance with established order.[42]

No wonder, therefore, that the Church sided with the Soviet regime against National-Socialist Germany from 1941 on; and of course no wonder that the Orthodox Church became speedily one of the main pillars of the Soviet administration.

Peasants used to see in the Patriarch a ‘substitute’ for the Tsar. What is more peasants did not want the Soviet regime to be overthrown. The explanation of such a paradoxical attitude was furnished initially by Enver Pasha, the Young Turks’ leader, who after a tour in Russia walked into the British Military Mission at Berlin in January, 1920, and declared the following: “Whenever the Denikin danger approaches, the result is the determined, unanimous and united effort on the part of the peasants to defend their own [land]. . . . In the whole of Soviet Russia there is an iron military discipline. The only people starving are the former aristocracy and bourgeoisie, whilst the peasants, soldiers and officials of the Soviet government have more than sufficient food.”[43]

He was right. The Soviet regime tried to compromise with the peasantry, “foe par excellence” of Marxism,[44] and appointed Mikhaïl Kalinin as Head of the State.[45] Born in 1875, Kalinin was the typical figure of the Russian peasant.[46] His informal appearance, lack of culture, the very fact that he used to spend holidays in his countryside dwelling, the ease of being approached by “everybody” made the Soviet regime all but popular among the peasants.[47] In 1925, furthermore, the crop was “quite good.” Soviet officialdom grasped the chance and: a) reduced by 1/3 the taxes on land property;[48] b) reintroduced the golden ruble.[49] Peasants, reassured by the Patriarch, “another Tsar,” believed that “their time had come”: Communism “was over.”[50] The climax was reached when Nikolai Bukharin, at the “highest degree of power,” i.e. during the years 1926-1927, and with the support of Alexei Rykov, launched the famous slogan (for the benefit of peasants): Enrichissez-vous![51]

Needless to say that the in the late 1920s it was the time of “we had a good laugh, but enough.” On December 2, 1927, the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union began its works in Moscow; a decision was passed there calling for the fullest development of collectivization in agriculture.[52] A “determined offensive against the Kulaks” was launched which ended in millions and millions of fatalities among the Soviet peasantry.[53] In 1929 Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo and put to death in 1938 – and Rykov, too.[54]

Conclusions and Perspectives

Unlike the Greek variety of the Far Right, which saw in the Crown its natural leader and was subsequently termed “monarchical fascism,” the Romanian Iron Guard found in the person of the King Carol II its bitterest foe. The story is too known to be repeated here. The point, however, is that, quite paradoxically, Hitler and Ion Antonescu are the ones to be blamed for the slaughter of the Iron Guard. To be sure, the Guard had grown somewhat anarchical following the murder of Capitanul;[55] yet it was unlikely to be otherwise. Since even the Church had proved to be the ally of the establishment,[56] the only way out from the terrible impasse was the slogan: Trăiască moartea![57] The Iron Guard proved to be loyal to this slogan. Still it was Hitler who gave the green light to Antonescu uttering the words: Ich brauche keine Fanatiker. Ich brauche eine gesunde rumänische Armee.[58] The Stalingrad debacle may be regarded as Nemesis’ answer to whom needed only “a sound Army.”

* * *

The salient characteristic of the Greek Far Right was social; and Romanian’s was mysticism.[59] That is why the establishment saw in Codreanu a person without ‘true’ political experience, who was not able to conduct the State business.[60] Such critics are exaggerated, nay, nonsensical. The point, however, is that, if the roots of Europe’s Far Right are to be found in Russia, its most spiritual and, socially speaking, most efficient varieties are to be found in the Balkans, namely Romania and Greece. In the other Balkan countries, serious Rightist movements did not exist; for the populace saw in the Fascists the collaborators of invaders.

Albania is a well-known case; for the Communists had the peasantry’s support, because they were considered to be the only ‘serious’ Resistance fighters against the Italians. (That is why the Balli Kombëtar (= National Front) and the Legaliteti, viz. the monarchists, did not prove able to rouse public opinion.) Fascists, on the other hand, were regarded as unscrupulous people in the pay of the Italians.[61] In the former Yugoslavia, furthermore, the Far Rightist movements had a so salient nationalist character that it is not feasible to study them without taking into consideration the national/nationalist sentiments of the relevant peoples. Such a case was Bulgaria, too. The Far Right was closely associated with the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO);[62] and IMRO murdered cruelly Aleksandar Stamboliyski not for his liberal policies but because it feared the abandonment of Macedonians’ national aspirations.[63]

* * *

What are the perspectives of the Far Right in the Balkans? The answer to such a question is twofold; for the Far Right has two problems to cope with, namely Nationalism and Capitalism. Nationalism, first of all, is a leftist invention, and the evidence is Romania herself. Les quarante-huitards ont fait la Roumanie, I have been told several times by an eminent Romanian historian. He is right; but it should be never forgotten that the 1848 revolution in the Romanian lands was enthusiastically — and justly — hailed by Karl Marx, because it was a radical one.[64] And further, the Communist regimes in Europe proved to be far more nationalist than the so-called bourgeois ones. On the other hand, it is sure now that WW 2 was lost for Germany and her allies, because Fascism proved to be “too national.”[65] As a result, only if the Balkan Far Right rejects its “nationalist exclusiveness,” that is more or less nonsensical today, will it be able to become an important political factor.

Still, the Balkan Far Right has one more question to handle: its alleged association with Capitalism. Such an association proved to be all but a fraud;[66] yet the Far Right’s unparalleled ability to defend the interests of “peasants, craftsmen, workmen and petty merchants” has to be displayed orbi et urbi. But this depends on the skillfulness of the Far Right’s leaders – both present and future ones. For, all things considered, in our world Man bears the responsibility for his life.

Notes

 

[1] K. R. Bolton, “A Martyr’s Life” in Codreanu. Thoughts and Perspectives. Edited by Troy Southgate (London: Black Front Press, 2011), p. 7

[2] Ibid., p. 8.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 9.

[5] Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (London: Little, Brown, 2005), p. 395. (A charming description of Târgovişte to be found on pages 384-385.)

[6] Ibid., p. 394.

[7] That is why the Sovereign Victor Emanuel III did not sign the Decree imposing the state of war in Italy late in October 1922, and agreed that Mussolini be the Prime Minister On this very important subject, several articles have been published in the journal L’Uomo libero (Milan). See mainly: Sergio Gozzoli, “La rivolta della volontà,” No 66 (September, 2008), p. 45- 46; and also Fabio Calabrese, “Il grande equivoco,” No 70 (November, 2010), p. 69.

[8] Adolf Hitler, Riflessioni sulla religione, le chiese, il Vaticano; in Alfred Rosenberg, Introduzioni al Mito del XX Secolo, accompagnate da pagine della polemica cattolica contro il Mito (1930-1938), Genoa: Effepi, 2006, pp. 63-64.

[9] Ibid., p. 59.

[10] Benito Mussolini, “Fascismo,” Enciclopedia Italiana di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, vol. XIV (Edizioni Istituto G. Treccani, 1932), p.847.

[11] K. R. Bolton, “A Martyr’s Life,” p. 17.

[12] Cited by Gheorghe Barbul, Memorial Antonescu. Al Treilea Om al Axei (Bucharest: Editura Pro Hitoria, 2001), p. 13.

[13] Archives of the Foreign Ministry of Greece (hereafter: AYE), 1938/A/7/2. The French translation of Codreanu’s statement is attached to the dispatch no. 201 (Bucharest, January 26, 1938) of Kōnstantinos Kollas, Greek minister at Bucharest, to the Foreign Ministry of Greece.

[14] K. R. Bolton, “A Martyr’s Life,” p. 8.

[15] Ibid.

[16] AYE, 1938, A/ 7/2, Raoul Vivika-Rōsettēs, Greek minister at Beograd, to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No. 31883/A, Beograd, December 24, 1938; cf. Gh. Barbul, Memorial Antonescu…, pp. 42-43.

[17] I. Metaxas. To prosōpiko tou hēmerologio (= The Diaries of I.Metaxas), vol. 4. Edited by Phaidōn Vranas (Athens: Ikaros, 1960), p. 446.

[18] V. Lénine, « L’État et la révolution », Œuvres choisies en trois volumes, vol. 2 (Moscow: Éditions du progrès, 1975), p. 293.

[19] Benito Mussolini, “Fascismo,” p. 849ff.

[20] AYE, Kyvernēsē Kairou (the Cairo Government), 1942-1943, A/GE/k, Kimōn K. Kollas, Greek minister at Lisbon, to the Foreign Ministry of Greece (at Cairo), No. 951/A, Lisbon, September 4, 1942; the same to the same, No. 245/B, March 12, 1943; the same to the same (at London), No. 1164/A, Lisbon, November 4, 1943; the same to the same (at London), No. 212/A, Lisbon, March 3, 1943. His economic policy was explained in the speech he deliveredat at Braga, on May 28, 1966. (The French translation: AYE, 1966, 12.10.)

[21] AYE, 1967, 48.1, G. E. Bensēs, Greek Ambassador in Madrid, to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No. 2075/II, Madrid, November 6, 1967.

[22] Αdolph Hitler, Mein Kampf. Translated into Greek by Andreas Pankalos and Dēmētrēs Kōstelenos (Athens: Daremas, n.d.), σ. 266.

[23] V. Lénine, « L’État et la révolution », pp. 321, 334.

[24] Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Translated into Greek by Giōrgos Kottēs (Athens: Themelio, 1982), p. 56.

[25] Cf. Roger Pereyfitte, Les ambassades (Paris: Flammarion, 1971), p. 23 : Vous devez savoir, d’ores et déjà,.qu’à Athènes la société est divisée en deux camps : royalistes et vénizélistes – on appelle encore ainsi les républicains… Moyen de les reconnaître : les royalistes sont mal vêtus, car ils sont pauvres ; les vénizélistes sont élégants, car ils sont riches.

[26] Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Translated into Greek by Giōrgos Kottēs (Athens: Themelio, 1982), p. 56.

[27] Cf. G. Ventērēs, Hē Hellas tou 1910-1920 ( = The 1910-1920 Greece), Athens: Pyrsos, 1931, vol. II, p. 272.

[28] Viktōr Dousmanēs, Apomnēmoneumata (= Memoirs), Athens: Dēmētrakos, n. d., p. 43.

[29] K. G. Zavitzianos, Hai anamnēseis tou… 1914-1922 (= His Memoirs… 1914-1922), vol. I (Athens, 1946), p. 148.

[30] Cf. V. Dousmanēs, Apomnēmoneumata, p. 43.

[31] Aus den Geheimarchiven der Entente, vol. 5 (Dresden: Carl Reisner, 1932), doc. 188: the Russian minister at Athens to the Foreign Minister of Russia, Athens, August 15/ 28, p. 126.

[32] Parliamentary Archives (London [hereafter: PA]), F/ 55/ 1/ 1.

[33] Dēmētrēs Michalopoulos, “Hē kata ton Prōto Pankosmio Polemo allēlographia tou hellēnikou vasilikou zeugous me ton autokratora tēs Germanias” (= The correspondence of the Royal Couple of Greece with the Emperor of Germany during WW 1), Anakoinōseis hēmeridos (16 Martiou 2006) gia tēn epeteio tou thanatou tou Eleutheriou Venizelou (= Proceedings of the Congress held on March 16,2006, on the anniversary of Eleutherios Venizelos’ death), doc. 27, p. 109.

[34] Général Regnault, Laconquêted’Athènes (Juin-Juillet 1917), Paris:L. Fournier, 1919, pp. 51-52.

[35] Their leaders having been arrested by the French and interned in Corsica.

[36] See the volume Hē Dikē tōn Oktō kai hē ektelesē tōn Hexi (= The Trial of the Eight and the Execution of the Six Ones), Athens: Historical Institute for Studies on Eleutherios Venizelos, 2010².

[37] Ephēmeris tēs Kyvernēseōs tou Vasileiou tēs Hellados (= Official Gazette of the Kingdom of Greece), I, No. 119 (July 20, 1922), pp. 554-555.

[38] I. Metaxas. To prosōpiko tou hēmerologio, vol. 4, pp. 446-447.

[39] Cf. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar. Translated into Greek by Alexandros Kotzias (Athens: Galaxias, 1969), p. 158.

[40] History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [Bolsheviks]. Edited by a Commission of the C. C. of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1939, p. 78.)

[41] Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (London: Phoenix, 2007), p. 205.

[42] Dimitris Michalopoulos, “The Testament of Patriarch Tikhon,” Ab Aeterno (New Zealand), issue No. 7 (April-June 2011), p. 38.

[43] PA, LG/F/206/4/10.

[44] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Translated into Greek by Giōrgos Kottēs (Athens: Themelio, 1982), p. 48.

[45] Literally: President of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. (AYE, 1925, A/5/VII, Iōannēs Kokotakēs, chargé d’affaires of the Greek Legation at Moscow, to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No 2961, Moscow, November 20, 1925.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] AYE, 1925, A/5/VII, I. Kokotakēs to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No. 2779, Moscow, October 30, 1925.

[49] AYE, 1925, A/5/VII, I. Kokotakēs to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No. 2706, Moscow, October 20, 1925.

[50] Ibid.

[51] AYE, 1928, 65.3, L’URSS en 1927.(Written in January, 1928, by an agent of the Greek Legation at Moscow.)

[52] History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union…, p. 288.

[53] A chilling description in A. Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar, p. 161.

[54] Ibid., p. 294ff.

[55] Drept anachic. (Gh. Barbul, Memorial Antonescu, p.68.)

[56] Due to the Government headed by the Patriarch Miron. (AYE, 1938, 7/A/2, K. Kollas to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No. 373, Bucharest, February 14, 1938.)

[57] Gh. Barbul, Memorial Antonescu, p.68.

[58] Ibid., p. 97.

[59] AYE, 1938, 7/A/2, K. Kollas to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, No. 373, Bucharest, February 14, 1938.

[60] Ibid.

[61] AYE, 1940, 54.1, D. Argyropoulos, Consul General of Greece at Tirana, to the Foreign Minister of Greece, No. 194, Tiranë, January 27, 1940; the same to the same, No. 366, Tiranë, February 19, 1940; D. A. Tsankrēs, vice consul of Greece at Vlorë, to the Consul General of Greece at Tiranë, No. 276, Vlorë, March 9, 1940.

[62] See Albert Londres, Les comitadjis ou le terrorisme dans les Balkans, Paris : Albin Michel, 1932.

[63] See mainly Georges Castellan, L’Albanie (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), p. 49ff.

[64] Dan Berindei, La Revolution roumaine de 1848-1849, Bucharest : Editura enciclopedică, 1998.

[65] K. R. Bolton, Thinkers of the Right challenging Materialism (Luton: Luton Publications, 2003²), p. 81.

[66] Cf. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar, p. 212.

Source: Ab Aeterno, no. 12, April-June, 2012

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Crusade Without the Cross: The Paradox of the Greek Left

Crusade Without the Cross:
The Paradox of the Greek Left

By Dimitris Michalopoulos

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

To Francis Parker Yockey
In memoriam

Following the end of the Greek Civil War in 1949, many of the defeated Communists fled to countries behind the Iron Curtain. Most of them were to die before they could see their homeland again. Those who survived in the exile, came back to Greece as late as 1975. For not all of them wanted  to compromise with the right-wing 1949-1974 regime of Greece. Still, do you know what was the first reaction of the defeated fighters upon reaching the countries of the Soviet bloc, late in the 1940s? When they were asked to take a bath for sanitary reasons, they declined; for they did not want the oil spread on their body by the Orthodox priests during the christening ceremony to be removed!

Such was the statement of a Greek Communist intellectual in Paris, in 1995. I was bewildered. I was then considered to be a “specialist” on the relations between Greece and the countries of the Eastern bloc and I thought I knew “everything” on the “colonies” that the Greek Communists had founded mainly in the “People’s Democracies” and in the Soviet Union. I knew that the Greek Orthodox clergy had supported either overtly or in veiled terms the Communist “rebellion” in Greece. Still from the Greek Church’s backing up the Communists to the latter’s desire not to “lose the oil of the christening” there was a big gulf. That is why upon my coming back to Greece, I started looking into the matter. The result of my research? My Paris interlocutor was right.

It is not possible to recount the history of the Marxist ideas in Greece, without taking into account the Greek Orthodox Church. And so for two reasons: a) The Modern Greek nationhood relies wholly upon the Church. As a matter of fact, Greek is considered to be every Orthodox Christian who “recognizes the spiritual jurisdiction of the [Greek] Patriarchate of Constantinople”;[1] and b) thanks precisely to the Greek Church, Materialism was disseminated in the Balkans and, further, was raised to “official”, i.e. State ideology in the Romanian countries long before the 1789 Revolution in France.[2]

This story of materialistic ideas that were spread in the Balkans by the Greek Orthodox Church is a long (and very interesting) one. The roots are to be found in Byzantium itself. For from the eleventh century on, a revival of Platonism and neo-Platonism took place in Constantinople; and this revival led up to a kind of crypto-paganism. The 1453 capture of the Byzantine capital by the Ottomans put an end to this neo-platonic current; and Gennadius I Scholarius, the first Constantinopolitan Patriarch to be in office following the fall of the Byzantine Empire, directed the philosophical research of his flock towards the “beacon of Aristotle’s thought.” Still, this direction was to have very important consequences.

Ecclesiastical Preamble

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople/Istanbul was criticized prior to the 1821-1829 Greek War of Independence very mildly by the Left, viz. the Greek Enlightenment scholars and their disciples. And for good reason; for the Greek Enlightenment, thanks to the protection of the Orthodox Church, anticipated the French one by several decades. In other words, materialist doctrines were being taught throughout Greece by Greek Orthodox . . . clergymen. And as a result the Enlightenment principles became the State Ideology in Balkan countries long before they prevailed in France.

In such a contradictory evolution, two characters assumed the key role, namely Cyril Lucar (1572-1638) and Theophilus Corydaleus (1570-1646). Both were disciples of Cesare Cremonini (1550-1631) at the University of Padua; and both wholeheartedly adopted Cremonini’s materialistic interpretation of Aristotle’s thought.[3] For if St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) had managed to espouse the creeds of the Roman Catholic Church with Stagirite’s teaching, it was Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), professor at the Padua University from 1509 to 1512, who paved the path to the Enlightenment.

P. Pomponazzi published in 1516 his book De immortalitate animae (= On the Immortality of the Soul). He had moved at that time from the University of Padua to the one in Bologna; the impact of his book’s coming out, nonetheless, was terrible throughout Italy and even Europe. It triggered a real revolution in Christian thought; and this revolution was to culminate in 1517, i.e., merely a year later, with Luther’s Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, i.e., the famous Ninety-Five Theses.

As a matter of fact, Pomponazzi overtly disagreed in his book on the Immortality of the Soul with St Thomas Aquinas’ teaching. The latter, based on the Aristotelian intellectual production, professed that the human soul could survive separation from the body; yet Pomponazzi declared that the soul’s survival was incompatible with entelechy, i.e., the Actualizing Form, a fundamental concept in Stagirite’s thinking and teaching. The corollary was the solemnization of the belief that the human soul was tied irreversibly to the human body; and so all doors were opened to materialism.

It was C. Cremonini who crossed triumphantly the door opened by Pomponazzi. He was appointed professor at Padua University in 1591, and since the Papal jurisdiction did not encompass Padua (for it was protected by the Venetian Republic), he felt free to propagate his Aristotelian-based materialism. His enthusiastic admirers and followers saw in him Aristoteles redivivus (= Aristotle reborn), the princeps philosophorum (= Prince of the Philosophers), the genius Aristotelis (= Aristotle’s genius) and so on.[4]

The result? When Cyril Lucar, Cremonini’s student and follower, became Patriarch of Constantinople, he appointed Th. Corydaleus, also a follower of Cremonini, director of the Patriarchal Academy,[5] a prestigious institution of higher learning. Most likely it was in 1625;[6] and so Materialism came under the aegis and the virtual protection of the Greek Patriarchate, the leading one of the Orthodox Christendom. So, the Patriarchal Academy developed into the avant-garde of the European Left.[7]

That is why the “progressive mind” of the Patriarch Cyril I Lucar is nowadays enthusiastically acclaimed in Greece and in the Western countries as well. No matter that he was converted to Calvinism and even wrote a Confession of Faith clearly endorsing Protestant theses:[8] Confessio fidei reverendissimi domini Cyrilli, Patriarchae Constantinopolitani nomine et consensus Patriarcharum Alexandrini et Hierosolymitani, . . . , scripta Constantinopoli mense Martio anni 1629.[9] He was of course anathematized by an Ecclesiastical Council held in Constantinople in 1638.[10] Still, his memory remains unharmed.[11] For the Left-wing intelligentsia see in him the “Father of the Greek Enlightenment.”[12]

It is true that he founded an important printing house in 1627,[13] the first Greek one in the Levant. What is more, he was put to death by the Ottoman authorities, due mainly to accusations of the Jesuits who saw in him a bitter foe of the Roman Church. Still, the truth is that he was a Calvinist[14] and most likely a materialist.

His companion and zealous ally, Th. Corydaleus, was undoubtedly a materialist; and he did not dissimulate his ideas, though he was a Greek Orthodox clergyman. Unlike Cyril Lucar he did not suffer death at the hands of the Ottomans. Quite the contrary! He was ordained Metropolitan Bishop of Naupactus and Arta.[15] Further, he founded a school in Athens, his native city, where he continued teaching materialism shrouded in Aristotelian thought till the end of his life. He created chaos in his Metropolitan See; he became a monk in 1622 and renounced his vows in 1625; yet he was never stigmatized by the Greek Orthodox Church.[16] And the Ottoman authorities, properly “indoctrinated” by the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, ever never bothered him.

He wrote several books that enjoyed great popularity in both Greece and the Graecized Balkan countries as well up to the late eighteenth century. Needless to say that this popularity was mostly due to the high regard the Greek clergy had for them.[17] The result? The Maurokordatos family, a rich and very influential Greco-Jewish Constantinopolitan one, managed to have Sevastos Kyminitēs, their protégé and an ardent Corydaleus’ supporter,[18] appointed as head of the Bucharest Princely Academy. This Academy, along with the Patriarchal one in Constantinople, was a renowned educational institution, one of the very few in the Balkans at that time. No sooner than appointed, S. Kyminitēs began propagating materialism rooted in Aristotle’s thought. And even though he was totally disliked by his students, he enjoyed the protection of the Maurokordatos family, was a favorite with the Patriarchal Court at Constantinople and the Ottoman authorities as well. He maintained, therefore, his post until 1702, the year of his death. The corollary was that thanks to him materialism became the state Ideology in the Romanian Lands, Walachia and Moldavia,[19] then vassal countries of the Ottoman Empire.

The Left in Independent Greece

The Modern and Contemporary Greek people is a multiracial mixture. Since acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate at Constantinople was, in practice, the exclusive criterion of being regarded as Greek, it goes without saying that Modern Greeks are descendants of all the Balkan’s Christian nations – and mainly of Albanians, Slavs, and Romanians.[20] Civil strife flourished in such an ambiance; and democratic/socialist ideas thrived as well.

The first wholly democratic current, with obvious tendencies to turn actually into a socialist movement, was that of Theodōros Grivas, in Acarnania, viz. the south-western part of Mainland Greece. Thanks to his achievements during the Greek War of Independence, Grivas was a general of the Greek Army under Otho, the first King of Greece (1832-1862). Nonetheless, he had in view a radical change of Greece’s Statehood structures. In the framework of the revolution that put an end to Otho’s reign, in October 1862, he formed a “People’s Army” 4,500 strong, and declared he was “ready for a march to Athens” with the intention of proclaiming the Republic, endow Greece with a federal structure, and “rehabilitate the landless peasantry.” In short, he was in open conflict with the Provisory Government that assumed power after King Otho’s fall, and aspired only at establishing the so-called “Royal Republic” regime. Undoubtedly, Grivas had sympathizers in the main agglomerations of the country; that is why his “Popular Army”, wherein mostly landless peasants were recruited, struck terror among the wealthy social strata. Had he survived and put into effect his “march to Athens,” the course of the Modern History of Greece would be different. But in 1862 he was 65 years old and suffered from asthma; and he passed away on October 24, 1862 (Old Style).[21]

Rumors are going about him even today in Mainland Greece. He is said to have been poisoned by the British; and that he wanted to capture Athens in order to paint red the royal palace. Be that as it may, not only had the 1862 Grivas movement a clear-cut socialist character but many partisans of him proved to be ready to rise up in arms against the establishment.[22] It was on his ‘precedent’ that the communist uprising would be molded in the twentieth century.

* * *

The Greek Communist Party was founded on November 17, 1918 as the Socialist Labour Party of Greece.[23] It was renamed Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Hellados/K.K.E.) not earlier than late November, 1924.[24] From its very beginning, the K.K.E. had three key problems to cope with: a) the Macedonian Issue; b) the Trotskyite current within it; and c) the elaboration of a “revolutionary process” fit for Greece.

As for the first question, it must be kept in mind that the autochthonous population of Macedonia were Slavs; and those Slavs had often a Bulgarian national conscience. Whatever the fact of the matter, Macedonians were seeking independence; and the Greek Communists toed that very line in 1922.[25]

Such a decision, quite in accordance with the traditional/initial Marxist internationalism, was utterly disapproved by the public opinion of Greece and was abandoned at last. Pantelēs Pouliopoulos, nonetheless, the first Secretary-General of the newborn K.K.E. was put on trial and got eighteen months in prison.[26] Following his release in 1926, he was re-elected Secretary-General; yet he was at odds with the Party apparatus – already a Stalinist one. As a result he deserted the K.K.E. and founded his own Communist group,[27] baptized “Spartacus” after the journal they were publishing from 1928 on.[28]

The Greek “Spartacists” were overtly Trotskyites; and their deep disagreement with the Stalinist K.K.E. arose early in 1934. For it was then that Pouliopoulos published his book “A Democratic or a Socialist Revolution in Greece?”[29] and turned down the “revolutionary process” advocated by the K.K.E. The latter, obviously based on the Russian experience, “deserted” the workers and was seeking an alliance with the democratic bourgeois parties and, above all, the peasantry. Pouliopoulos and his Trotskyites, on the other hand, insisted on the necessity to propagate Marxism among the 100,000 “industrial proletarians,” dwelling mostly in Piraeus, the seaport of Athens.[30]

As for Piraeus, Pouliopoulos was correct: the workers there were mostly Right-wing or overtly fascists.[31] He tried, nevertheless, to indoctrinate them with Marxism’s Trotskyite variety but in vain. Meanwhile the K.K.E. concluded alliance with the Liberal Party (founded by Eleutherios Venizelos prior to World War I); yet this rapprochement accelerated the march of Greek politics towards the authoritarian government established jointly by King George II and his Prime Minister, Iōannēs Metaxas, on August 4, 1936.

Pouliopoulos, further, had a tragic end. Arrested by the Police of the authoritarian government in 1937, he declined the “offer” to leave his “homeland.” He was, therefore, imprisoned and, following the 1941 occupation of Greece by the Axis Powers, he was interned in an Italian concentration camp. At last, he was shot in 1943 by way of reprisal for a guerrilla attack against an Italian military train.[32] And an important “detail”: one of his “companions” was Andreas Papandreou,[33] who accepted the police’s offer to leave Greece, fled to the United States, became a university professor and, thanks to his American citizenship, Prime Minister of Greece in 1981.[34]

Civil Strife (1942-1949)

The authoritarian government established in August, 1936, stopped the Communist Party’s course to power. Still, the K.K.E. had one more card to play, namely the refugees who had immigrated into Greece from Turkey in the early 1920s. That was due to an agreement concluded by the two countries at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923, following the crushing defeat the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Turkish Nationalist Army. In the framework of this agreement, a compulsory exchange of populations was bilaterally agreed; as a result, ca. 1,500,000 people fled from Turkey into Greece.

If truth be told, this exchange had little, if any, relevance with the two involved countries. The crux was Macedonia and the framework, nay, the very basis of the machinations was the famous dogma of Sir Halford Mackinder. According to the latter’s doctrine if the “Slavs.” in practice the Russians, achieved to put under their control the seashore of Macedonia, they would “stand” as “world masters.”[35]

It is certain that Sir Halford Mackinder, one of the founders of the Jewish-run London School of Economics, announced his theory in 1904. Still, this announcement was all but a crystallization of ideas existing long before Sir Halford. For early in the nineteenth century the British Foreign Office already saw in the Ottoman Empire (that ruled Macedonia at that time) a “bulwark against Russian expansion.”[36] The collapse of this “bulwark”, nonetheless, was easily foreseen after the 1878 Berlin Congress. The corollary was that Greeks, under undisputable British influence, should be substituted for the autochthonous Macedonians. Such Greeks would come only from Asia Minor. That is why the 1923 Greco-Turkish “compulsory” exchange of populations was notified in advance by Eleutherios Venizelos as early as 1914.[37] The bulk of Macedonian Moslems (ca. 500,000 people overall) had emigrated into Turkey as soon as the Balkan wars were over. The Greeks, in essence the Christian Orthodox dwellers of Anatolia, were exhorted by the “heads” of their communities to leave their homeland (most likely upon advice of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul); and so in spite of the entreaties of their Turkish compatriots to stay.[38]

Therefore, the point is that the 1,500,000 people who immigrated into Greece and used to live there in unpredictable misery, were hopeful that they would soon be back in their homeland; but in 1926 their hope proved to be vain. That is why they took up the Communist ideology. The repercussions on Greek politics would be very serious.

In fact, from the early 1920s on the electoral strength of the K.K.E. was steadily rising. From 2% of the electorate in 1929, it attained 5% in 1932, 6% in 1933 and 9.5% in 1935.[39] It was one of the strongest Communist parties in Eastern Europe; and it is an irony that Greece was the sole country to escape from the Iron Curtain.

* * *

In 1941 Greece was occupied by the Axis Powers, namely Germany and Italy. Still, in that very year, on September 27, 1941, the National Liberation Front (Ethniko Apeleutherōtiko Metōpo/E.A.M.) was founded, wherein the K.K.E. was the leading force.[40] On June 7, 1942, moreover, the “armed struggle” against the occupation troops began by the E.A.M.’s “military arm,” namely “People’s National Liberation Army” (Ethnikos Laïkos Apeleutherōtikos Stratos/E.L.A.S).[41] The latter was under a leadership of Arēs Velouchiōtēs, a fortune-hunter who soon proved to be a military genius. From 1943 on, the whole of Greece was ruled by E.A.M. and strictly controlled by E.L.A.S. The Right-wing guerilla forces were speedily and savagely exterminated. The only exception was Epirus, where there flourished a nationalist armed movement, the “National Troops of Greek Partisans” (Ethnikai Homades Hellēnōn Antartōn/E.O.E.A.), guided by Napoleōn Zervas, a commissioned officer of the (regular) Greek Army.

Needless to say that E.A.M./E.L.A.S. were particularly powerful in the very regions where the Th. Grivas’ socialist movement had taken place in the nineteenth century. Still, it is essential to insist on the fact that the Communist-run guerilla troops were substantially assisted by the Greek Orthodox clergy. Even two Metropolitan Bishops overtly adhered to E.A.M.,[42] whilst the rank-and-file of E.L.A.S. included priests in cassocks.[43] The behavior, on the other hand, of the E.L.A.S. troops towards the Orthodox clergy and, generally speaking, the Church was more than kind.[44] For the Communist-run E.A.M. used to see in the Church a pillar of its power.

Thanks to the “Revolution” proclaimed by Arēs Velouchiōtēs already in 1942, ten to seventeen Italian and German divisions were nailed down in Greece early in 1943.[45] So, towering were the ambitions of the Communists: they considered the “struggle” against the occupation troops as the “First Stage” of the “Socialist Revolution in Greece.” Yet they reckoned without their host; and in that very case the “host” was Stalin. In May, 1943, he actually dissolved the Comintern, because “he had never seriously endorsed the [Trotskyite] idea of the World Revolution.”[46] The “dissolution” was, moreover, a friendly gesture to Great Britain and the U.S.A.; for Stalin was already preoccupied with the reconstruction “of his devastated country.”[47]

Late in September, 1944, the Greek Government “in exile” at Cairo was informed that the dogma of Sir Halford Mackinder was again in force. For the British wanted a cordon sanitaire to be formed by the countries on the north-eastern Mediterranean seashore, in order to stop the “Russian expansion.”[48] Such a country was, of course, Greece; and Stalin speedily agreed not to send Soviet troops in the Greek parts of Macedonia and Thrace.[49] In the evening of October 9, 1944, Churchill had a meeting with Stalin in the Kremlin: the agreement was “formally” concluded; and the British Prime Minister stated the following on October 27, in the House of Commons:

Upon the tangled questions of the Balkans, where there are Black Sea interests and Mediterranean interests to be considered, we were able to reach complete agreement and I do not feel that there is any immediate danger of our combined war effort be weakened by divergences of policy or doctrine, in Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria or Yugoslavia and, beyond the Balkans, Hungary. We have reached a very good working agreement about all these countries singly and in combination, in the object of . . . providing . . . for a peaceful settlement after the war is over.[50]

That meant that Greece was to be held under exclusive British control and that Yugoslavia was not going to be encompassed in the “Russian sphere of influence.” As a result, the Russophile E.A.M./E.L.A.S. were abandoned – and the tragedy of the Greek Left began.

* * *

During the operations against the occupation troops, the E.L.A.S. units were abundantly supplied by the British. And when, in October, 1944, the Germans evacuated Athens, the Communists considered the time to be ripe for the power to be seized by themselves. Early in December, 1944, therefore, a huge demonstration took place in the very center of the Greek capital; yet, contrary to what was going on so far, the Police opened fire. It was the beginning of the Civil War or, according to the Communists, the “Second Stage” of the “Revolution.” Churchill was eloquent in Parliament:

So far as has been ascertained the facts are as follows: the Greek Organization called E.A.M. had announced their intention to hold a demonstration on December 3rd. The Greek Government at first authorised this, but withdrew their permission when E.A.M. called for a general strike to begin on December 2nd. The strike in fact came into force early on December 3rd. Later in the morning the E.A.M. demonstration formed up and moved to the principle square of Athens, in spite of Government ban. On the evidence so far available I am not prepared to say who started the firing which then took place. The Police suffered one fatal casualty and had three men wounded. The latest authentic reports give the demonstration’s casualties as 11 killed and 60 wounded.[51]

Moscow remained silent, nay, indifferent.[52] What is more (and strangely enough) the battle in Athens were fought not by the well-trained units of E.L.A.S.[53] but by the latter’s Athens reserves – in fact bands of ill-equipped teenagers who were literally massacred by the British troops then occupying Athens.[54] Even today the accusations of “betrayal” against the 1944 Communist’s leadership are common. Still, the facts are not yet established. Two things are clear, nevertheless: a) the head of the Athens police force at that time, Angelos Ewert, was a British agent;[55] b) the Communist leadership that fled to the U.S.S.R. after the final defeat suffered by K.K.E. armed forces at the hands of the National Army in 1949 were never trusted by Stalin and, as a rule, met a “bad end.”[56]

In January, 1945, an agreement was reached between the British and the Communist troops. The latter laid down their arms, and were given the promise that they could develop freely political activity henceforth. Yet Churchill was determined to have “no peace without victory.”[57] A reign of terror followed;[58] A. Velouchiōtēs was murdered in 1945; and exasperated the Greek Communists triggered off the so-called “Third Stage” of their “Revolution” in 1946. In practice this was one more phase of the Civil War. It was to last until the summer of 1949. The Communist Army was defeated by the well-equipped National one and thanks to Tito’s attitude as well; for the latter, after his rupture with Stalin, overtly toed the line of the Western Powers.

All that time the Russians remained silent; and their “expansion” towards the Mediterranean Sea never took place. Simultaneously, autochthonous Macedonians, of Slavic stock, regarded as “Communists” by the Greek authorities, left their homes and fled either to Yugoslavia or in other countries of the “Iron Curtain.”[59]

Greece was once more a “Western Country.”

As an Epilogue

In April, 1967, two or three days after the military coup, at 2.00’ in the night, there was a ring at the front door. I woke up at once, though I sleep very soundly; I rushed out of my room and I went to look at what was going on.

All my family was up and about: three policemen had entered our home and were searching my father’s bookcase. Needless to say that they were silly people. What were they expecting to find out? The “dangerous” books, viz. the Marxist ones, were already carried by my Mother to the house of her own parents; and no policeman had the idea to search over there. The search, however, was about an hour long; afterwards, the policemen said good bye, and left our home.

That night I slept on my parents’ bed, between my dad and my mother, although I was 15. If truth be told, I was then and there like a baby; and my father kept patting my head, in order to calm me. The day after all our phone communications (either at home or in my father’s lawyer office) were cut off. You can imagine what it means for a barrister not to be able to make a phone call. Fortunately, we were without telephone only a year. For in 1968 we had again the ‘right’ to call up. 

It was this way that my High-School classmate and daughter of a leading Communist lawyer, answered to my entreaty. I had asked her to give an account of her experience – in her capacity as member of an influential family of the Greek Left; and she described to me the “most terrifying night” in her life. Her father was the Secretary-General of the E.A.M. in Thessaly; he was sentenced to death by a Court-Martial in the 1940s and he survived thanks to personal and family connections. Yet he was tired by his bitter experience of the “lost Communist Revolution”; and a couple of years following my classmate’s “most terrifying night”, he passed away due to a heart attack.

The military coup in question was the one brought off in Greece on April 21st, 1967. It had little (if anything) to do with Fascism. It is well-established today that its main reason lay in Mackinder’s dogma. The 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War, triggered off in the first decade of June, was in view long before it started. And it was clear that, following either an Arab victory (not likely) or defeat (most possible) the Soviet “presence” in the Eastern Mediterranean would be considerably increased.[60] Meantime, Greece was in a long political crisis; and the political ascendancy of Andreas Papandreou would undoubtedly pave the way for a “mass infiltration” of “Communists”, i.e., Russophile Left-wing people into the Greek State apparatus.[61] That is why the Israelis and the “military establishment” of the United States stirred up the coup and, of course, approved of it, whilst the U.S.A. Department of State disavowed it.[62]

This is the framework wherein the tragedy of the Greek Left took place. The Greek Left knew very little about Marx and Marxism. As a rule, the E.A.M./E.L.A.S. people used to see in Communism a remedy for the traumas that Greek National Life was leaving on their psyche. The refugees from Asia Minor wanted to go back to their “homes” and were frustrated by the foiling of their expectations. The peasants wished to have a less hard life. Educated people, like the father of my classmate, were seeking for the modernization and, if possible, Europeanization of the incredibly archaic social structures of Modern and Contemporary Greek nationhood. Almost the whole of them were conservative householders and good members of Greek Orthodox Church’s congregation. They were engaged in a “Crusade” in order to cure the painful paradoxes of Modern Greece. Yet they did not realize that their “Cross” was lost in the pitiless implementation of Mackinder’s Geopolitics.

Notes

[1] Correspondance du comte Capodistria, président de la Grèce, I (Geneva : Cherbouliez, 1839), p. 265.

[2] See Dimitris Michalopoulos, “The Enlightenment, the Porte and the Greek Church: A Paradox of Balkan History”, in Seyfi Kenan (ed.), The Ottomans and Europe. Travel, Encounter and Interaction (Istanbul: ISAM, 2010), pp. 449-468

[3] Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les académies princières de Bucarest et Jassy et leurs professeurs (Salonika : Institute for Balkan Studies, 1974), p. 181.

[4] Cléobule Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique et de la libre pensée dans les Balkans. La vie et l’œuvre de Théophile Corydalée (Salonika : Institute for Balkan Studies, 1967²), p. 192.

[5] Ibid., p. 22.

[6] Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity. Translated into Greek by N. K. Paparrodou (Athens: Bergadēs, 1979), p. 489.

[7] Ibid.; C. Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique…, p. 195; cf. Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les académies princières…, p. 181.

[8] Vasileios Stauridēs, Historia tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou, 1453-sēmeron (= History of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1453-today), Salonika: Kyriakidēs Bros, 1987, p. 40.

[9] “Kyrillos I Loukaris” (= Cyril I Lucar), Encyclopedia Papyros-Larousse-Britannica (in Greek), vol. 37^th (Athens: Papyros, 1989), p. 50.

[10] V. Stauridēs, Historia tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou…, p. 49.

[11]“Kyrillos I Loukaris”, Encyclopedia Papyros-Larousse-Britannica, vol. 37^th, p. 50.

[12] Ibid.

[13] V. Stauridēs, Historia tou Oikoumenikou Patriarcheiou…, p. 40.

[14] S. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, p. 475ff.

[15] Cl. Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique…, pp. 78-80.

[16] Ibid., p.76.

[17] Ibid., p. 103.

[18] N. Iorga, Byzance après Byzance (Bucharest : Association International d’Études du sud-est européen. Comité national roumain, 1971), pp. 212-213; Cl. Tsourkas, Les débuts de l’enseignement philosophique…, p. 173.

[19] Ariadna Camariano-Cioran, Les académies princières…, pp. 363-373, 667.

[20] Dimitris Michalopoulos, Fallmerayer et les Grecs, Istanbul : Isis, 2011.

[21] Archives des Affaires étrangères (Paris [hereafter : AAE]), Mémoires et documents. Grèce, vol. 7 (1830-1862), f. 212r.; D. Michalopoulos, Vie politique en Grèce pendant les années 1862-1869 (Athens : University of Athens/Saripoleion, 1981), pp. 52-55.

[22] AAE, Correspondance politique, Grèce, vol. 85 (novembre-décembre 1862), ff. 46v., 85r., 102v.

[23] Panos Lagdas, Arēs Velouchiōtēs . Ho prōtos tou agōna (=Arēs Velouchiōtēs. The First one in the [Armed Communist] Struggle), vol. I (Athens: Kypselē, 1964), p. 121.

[24] Dēmētrēs Livieratos, Pantelēs Pouliopoulos. Henas dianooumenos epanastatēs (=Pantelēs Pouliopoulos, an Intellectual Revolutionary), Athens: Glaros, 1992, p. 23.

[25] D. Livieratos, Pantelēs Pouliopoulos…, p. 25ff.

[26] Ibid., pp. 27-28.

[27] Ibid., p. 30.

[28] Ibid., p. 35.

[29] Pantelēs Pouliopoulos, Dēmokratikē ē Sosialistikē epanastasē stēn Hellada, Athens, 1966².

[30] Ibid., pp. 181,191.

[31] Dimitris Michalopoulos, « La Roumanie et la Grèce dans la Seconde Guerre mondiale », Revue Roumaine d’Histoire (Bucharest), tome XLIII (2004), pp. 227- 229.

[32] D. Livieratos, Pantelēs Pouliopoulos…, pp. 87-90.

[33] Andreas Papandreou, Democracy at Gunpoint. The Greek Front (Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 68, 70.

[34] Oral testimony by Aikaterinē Anastasiadou, sister of P. Pouliopoulos’ wife (1996).

[35] Orestēs E. Vidalēs, To synchrono geōpolitiko perivallon kai hē ethnikē mas politikē (= The Contemporary Geopolitical Environment and [Greek] national policy), Athens: Hellinikē Euroekdotikē, 1988, p.23ff.

[36] Theophilus C. Prousis, Lord Strangford at the Sublime Porte (1821): The Eastern Crisis (Istanbul: Isis, 2010), p. 38.

[37] Eleutherios Venizelos Papers (Athens), I/35/1, E. Venizelos to the Greek minister at Bucharest (Athens, late in 1914). Published in : Dimitris Michalopoulos, Attitudes parallèles. Éleuthérios Vénisélos et Take Ionescu dans la Grande Guerre (Athens : Historical Institute for Studies on Eleutherios Venizelos and his Era, 2008), pp. 35-36.

[38] Markos Vafeiadēs, Apomnēmoneumata (= Memoirs), vol. I (Athens : Diphros, 1984), p. 44.

[39] Sp. Linardatos, Pōs eftasame stēn 4ē Augoustou (= How did we reach on August 4^th), Athens: Themelio, 1965), pp. 61, 152.

[40] Dionysēs Charitopoulos, Arēs, ho archēgos tōn ataktōn (= Ares, Leader of the Irregulars), vol. I (Athens: Exantas, 1997), p. 71.

[41] P. Lagdas, Arēs Velouchiōtēs…, vol. II (Athens : Kypselē, 1964), pp. 15-21.

[42] D. Charitopoulos, Arēs…, vol. I, 453-454; vol. II (Athens: Exantas, 2004), pp. 249, 260.

[43] Ibid., vol. I, pp. 398-400; vol. II, pp. 53-54, 249.

[44] Ibid., vol. I, p. 400; P. Lagdas, Arēs Velouchiōtēs…, vol. II, pp. 239-240.

[45] Archives of the Foreign Ministry of Greece (hereafter: AYE), Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē (= Ambassador Athanasius Politēs’ Papers), 9, A. Politēs, Greek ambassador to the Soviet Union, to the Greek Government at Cairo, telegram No. 44, Kuibyshev, February 14, 1943; and telegram No. 123, Kuibyshev, April 8, 1943.

[46] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 9, A. Politēs to the Greek Government at Cairo, telegram No. 229, Kuibyshev, May 26, 1943.

[47] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 9, A. Politēs to the Greek Government at Cairo, telegram No. 240, Kuibyshev, June 4, 1943.

[48] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, the Press Office of the Greek Government at Cairo, to A. Politēs, telegram No. 617, Cairo, October I^st, 1944.

[49] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, the Press Office of the Greek Government at Cairo, to A. Politēs, telegram No. 422, Cairo, October 2, 1944.

[50] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, “The Prime Minister’s statement on the Moscow talks… Issued by the Press Department of the British Embassy”, Moscow, Saturday, October 28, 1944.

[51] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, “Prime Minister’s answer in Parliament…to question about incidents in Athens on December 3rd.”

[52] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, A. Politēs to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, dispatch 1204/E, Moscow, December 4. 1944.

[53] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 10, Dēmētrios Pappas, Greek Ambassador in Cairo, to A. Politēs, dispatch No. 6113, Cairo, December 22, 1944.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Sp. V. Markezinēs, Synchronē Politikē Historia tēs Hellados, 1936-1975 (= Political History of Contemporary Greece, 1936-1975), vol. III (Athens: Papyros: 1944), p. 56 (note 40).

[56] N. I. Mertzos, Svarnout. To prodomeno antartiko (= Svarnout. The Betrayed Guerilla), Salonika, 1984⁶, pp. 10-11.

[57] Sp. V. Markezinēs, Synchronē Politikē Historia tēs Hellados…, vol. II (Athens: Papyros, 1994), pp. 38-39.

[58] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 11. (A file full of Tass bulletins concerning the situation in Greece.) Oral testimonies recollected by the author of these lines as well.

[59] AYE, Archeion presvy Athanasiou Politē, 11, A.Politēs to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, dispatch No. 1032/C, Moscow, September 17, 1945. (According to the Tass Agency, reliable in that case.)

[60] AYE, 1967, 2.4, “The Middle East Crisis.” Memorandum signed by D. N. Karagiannēs, ref.number GMA35-1368, Athens, August 5, 1967.

[61] AYE, 1967, 5.1, Colonel Iōannēs Sorokos, military attaché of the Greek Embassy in Washington, to the Greek Ambassador to the U.S.A., No. 1312/0009, Washington, D. C., May 10, 1967.

[62] Ibid.; Alexandros Matsas, Greek Ambassador in Washington, D.C., to the Foreign Ministry of Greece, dispatch No. 1674, Washington, D.C., May 19, 1967.

Source: Ab Aeterno no. 13, October-December, 2012.

 

 

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El Magnicidio de Carrero Blanco

El Magnicidio de Carrero Blanco

por Pedro Navarro

Ex: http://www.arbil.org

Cuanto más se profundiza más se tiene la clara sensación de que una mano superior guió aquel conjunto de acciones, anteriores y posteriores al magnicidio, que determinaron el desastroso rumbo que tomó España a partir de él.

Hace un tiempo tuve el gusto de publicar un trabajo sobre el tema en estas mismas páginas (Arbil nº 114: El Asesinato de Carrero Blanco). Por eso, cuando he leído “El Magnicidio de Carrero Blanco”, recientemente publicado por José María Manrique y Matías Ros en la Editorial Akron, he visto confirmada mi tesis de que “el pecado original del actual sistema español fue aquel asesinato”. Este libro, en tamaño de bolsillo (160 páginas), pero no por ello exento de rigor, y, por un módico precio (8 €), facilita al lector medio el acceso a casi todas las informaciones “abiertas” publicadas, así como reveladoras aportaciones originales y un fundamentado análisis de todas ellas. La presentación del libro, con sus 35 ilustraciones y más de 100 notas a pié de página, así como el tipo de letra, le hacen de fácil y cómoda lectura y comprensión. Procurando no caer en la tentación de hacer un resumen del mismo, con lo que les privaría del superior placer de leerlo, voy a tratar de demostrarles mi tesis en base, fundamentalmente, a su contenido.

El pecado original de la actual “democracia española”

Para empezar, a ninguna persona medianamente informada le puede quedar la duda de que con el Almirante Carrero Blanco vivo, la “ejemplar transición democrática” española, como muchas veces se la denomina, hubiera sido francamente distinta de la que fue y, sin duda, mejor. Carrero no había cumplido 70 años cuando fu asesinado en diciembre de 1973 y cabía esperar que su salud le habría permitido continuar en el gobierno hasta la proclamación de la nueva Constitución (lo fue en 1978). Nadie que conozca cuan vergonzosamente se entregó el Sáhara Español a Marruecos por supeditación a los intereses norteamericanos, apenas dos años después del magnicidio, creerá que ello hubiera posible con Carrero Blanco de Presidente del Gobierno; no en vano el Almirante era Subsecretario de la Presidencia de Gobierno cuando la Guerra de Ifni-Sáhara de 1957-58, y supo en primera persona los entresijos de la política marroquí y norteamericana (esta última forzó la creación de las provincias africanas ante el veto, unilateral a España, de empleo del armamento de origen yanqui), por lo que estaba vacunado contra ellas. Lo mismo puede decirse de la aberrante Constitución que nació cinco años del magnicidio, tanto por la ausencia de referencias a Dios (que ha llevado a la casi total degradación moral actual) como por la imposición del suicida e inviable “Estado de las Autonomías”, que está a punto de acabar, económica y físicamente, con España.

Por supuesto, los más de 2.000 muertos del terrorismo (la mayor parte durante los dos lustros que siguieron a su vil asesinato) no se habrían producido, pues habría impulsado medidas de todo tipo para impedirlo (en lugar de amnistías “indiscriminadas” y mano blanda). Por último, sin duda, un episodio tan vergonzoso como el del 23-F de 1981, en el sentido de maniobra de la Corona ante la descomposición del régimen, seguida de la negación de la misma y del abandono posterior de quienes la apoyaron [i] no se habría producido, fundamentalmente porque la descomposición nacional con Carrero de Presidente hubiera sido incomparablemente menor.

Por otra parte, sus profundos catolicismo (en el sentido de justicia social y amor al prójimo) y patriotismo le hubieran llevado, además de a luchar por una Constitución digna de España, a posturas de independencia en política internacional, en relación con el conflicto árabe-israelí (como la adoptada ante la Guerra del Ramadán-Yon Kippur, octubre de 1973, ante las negociaciones de los convenios con los Estados Unidos [ii], en la entrada en el Mercado Común (en 1970 España firmó una acuerdo preferencial en muchos aspectos superior al de 1986 [iii]), y en el programa nuclear y aeroespacial español [iv].

Bueno, todo ello si sus enemigos, que eran y son los de España, la tradicional y única, no hubieran antes acabado con su carácter de Presidente de Gobierno, cosa esta última que fácilmente se podría haber producido, al menos al cabo de algunos años. Está claro que su profundo “junacarlismo” le hubiera hecho obedecer al Rey, normalmente sin oposición, caso de que le hubiera pedido su dimisión con cualquier excusa más o menos creíble; pero también lo está, para mí, que Juan Carlos no se habría atrevido a pedírsela en los primeros años, al menos hasta contar con una situación apropiada; en este sentido es revelador que el ya Rey, en la práctica (Jefe de Estado en funciones), no se atrevió a pedírsela a Arias Navarro cuando éste “con Franco moribundo, le presentó la dimisión dándole una palmadita en las rodillas e instándole a que formara una dictadura militar” [v]

Los etarras: impunidad y apoyos

Sentado el anterior “axioma”, de que Carrero Blanco era incompatible con el programa que alguien se hubiera trazado para conseguir una España como la que hoy desgraciadamente tenemos los españoles, estamos en el buen camino para entender los pormenores del atentado. Como se desprende del libro que comento, los etarras gozaron de una suerte inaudita durante el largo año que deambularon por Madrid preparando el secuestro que luego fue asesinato. Se ha dicho, hasta la saciedad, por los que hoy denominaríamos “voceros de la versión oficial”, que la Policía y los Servicios Secretos fallaron estrepitosamente, a la vez que Carrero era poco menos que un irresponsable suicida que despreciaba su seguridad. Pero lo cierto es que ambas instituciones de aquella “dictadura militar” tenían una eficacia enorme y difícilmente, en aquella sociedad normalmente sana y estructurada, se les escapaba nada. Por otra parte, Carrero, desde que fue nombrado Presidente de Gobierno, medio año antes del atentado, tenía previsto trasladar su residencia a las proximidades de El Pardo, y, desde luego, el detalle de su seguridad era cosa que le debían dar hecho; por ejemplo, la víspera del atentado  Carrero recibió seguridades absolutas a sus pregunta claras a Arias (Ministro de Interior) y a Federico Quintero Morente (Jefe Superior de Policía de Madrid). Recientemente el periódico La Gaceta (Madrid, 17 de enero de 2011) publicó el hallazgo de un nuevo documento, un explícito informe de la Guardia Civil de octubre de 1972 (anterior a los ya conocidos) sobre posibles atentados comunistas contra personalidades del Régimen capaces de ser garantes de la continuidad del mismo. Por su interés, lo trascribo a continuación:

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Origen: ANDORRA – 1

Fecha: 17-10-972

Asunto: PROYECTOS COMUNISTAS DE REALIZAR ATENTADOS CONTRA PERSONALIDADES ESPAÑOLAS

Noticias recogidas en los medios comunistas españoles de Francia señalan que existen proyectos de realizar atentados para eliminar a personalidades destacadas del Régimen actual, con el fin de evitar que a la muerte o sustitución de Francos, lo que consideran ocurrirá a corto plazo, pueden forzar la continuidad del Régimen, y con ella privarles de poder volver a España, sobre lo que se habían hecho ilusiones y concebido esperanzas. Estas medidas parece que se han acordado como consecuencia de la actitud que vienen adoptando determinadas personalidades, que tanto en su comportamiento con en sus apariciones en público vienen haciendo hincapié en que después de la muerte de Franco todo continuará exactamente igual, lo que viene causando entre ellos gran disgusto puesto que tuerce todo los planes del Partido Comunista. Entre las personalidades que ellos consideran promotoras de la idea y capaces de conseguir la continuidad del Régimen, además del Príncipe, a quien se lo han dado todo hecho, señalan al Vicepresidente del Gobierno, verdadero motor del Régimen franquista tantos años, que tiene todos los resortes de poder en sus manos y a quien ven como futuro Jefe de Gobierno y como tal su influencia sobre el Príncipe será decisiva(,) a los falangistas Girón, que ya ha empezado a salir de su madriguera, y a Rodríguez de Valcárcel, como figuras destacadas, sin olvidar al Director de la Guardia Civil, franquista destacado y que por su lealtad a Carrero Blanco, se le trajo expresamente desde Argelia para ponerlo al frente de la Guardia Civil, como brazo ejecutor suyo, desde donde, siguiendo su directrices, desprecia y persigue con saña a los patriotas vascos.

--------------

Es “curioso” como este documento, que habla explícitamente de las relaciones del PC con “atentados” y con los “patriotas vascos”, haya estado desaparecido hasta ahora. Así mismo es de resaltar el certero análisis de la situación política, que cuadra con el “bloqueo” que se hizo posteriormente a Rodríguez de Valcárcel y, especialmente, a Iniesta Cano (Director de la GC).

Volviendo a los etarras, el libro demuestra, hasta donde estas cosas se pueden demostrar desde fuera del sistema, que numerosos etarras se movieron libremente por Madrid durante más de un año, realizando incluso una “Asamblea Nacional”, además de atracos a armerías, a centinelas de Capitanía General, y un largo etcétera en el que se incluían prácticas de tiro diversas por los alrededores, cosas todas ellas que les dejaron a merced de la policía en muchas ocasiones, de las que salieron “milagrosamente” o con inexplicables ayudas.

Por supuesto, también contaron con la ayuda inestimable de numerosos miembros del Partido Comunista, por no decir del mismo PC, incluido su máximo responsable “en el interior” (Sánchez Montero), tanto en información, viajes, alojamientos y “zulos” secretos, y otro largo etcétera; todo ello quedó sumarialmente demostrado con ocasión de las investigaciones del atentado de la Cafetería Rolando.

Otro tópico es el de la ineficacia de los numerosísimos y descoordinados servicios secretos, cargando las tintas en “los fallos” del Servicio de Carrero, el SECED, cuando el mismo no tenía responsabilidades más que en temas de involución, quedando la lucha antiterrorista en manos de la Policía y Guardia Civil, además del, en la práctica, único verdadero servicio secreto nacional digno de tal denominación, el del Alto Estado Mayor. El Servicio “del Alto” era el heredero del SIPM de la Guerra de Liberación, formado por hombres tan eficaces, y luego tan famosos, como el General Díaz Alegría (embajador privado de Juan Carlos en numerosas ocasiones), el entonces Coronel Gutiérrez Mellado (luego omnipotente Vicepresidente del Gobierno durante varios años), y el Capitán José Luis Cortina (de la promoción del rey y amigo personal suyo, fue el famoso controlador de la trama del 23-F, en cuyo juicio hizo las más reveladoras declaraciones sobre el atentado a Carrero, gracias a las cuales salió absuelto).

Las conexiones internacionales

Las investigaciones policiales seguidas, fundamentalmente, como consecuencia del sumario por el atentado etarra en la Cafetería Rolando (calle Correo, Madrid 13 de septiembre de 1974, 12 muertos y 80 heridos) quedó demostrado que el Partido Comunista de España, a través de miembros del mismo como Sánchez Montero, Genoveva Forest, Alfonso Sastre, Lidia Falcón y Antonio Durán, entre otros muchos, venía colaborando desde hacía años con ETA). La excusa de que su presidente, Santiago Carrillo (el responsable del genocidio de Paracuellos del Jarama), se había desmarcado de la URSS abrazando el eurocomunismo y repudiando la violencia, no deja de ser eso, una maniobra política; la Unión Soviética no perdió nunca el control sobre los partidos comunistas de otras naciones, como lo demuestra el “Informe Mitrojin” [vi]

En el libro de Ros y Manrique se apunta como promotor inicial del atentado las actividades de una “ Junta Democrática”, que fue establecida por el PCE en París a comienzos de los años 70, con la adhesión gradual de personajes “independientes”; de su entorno saldría la información que puso a ETA sobre la pista de Carrero. A este respecto, a mí me han llegado fundados rumores de que un ex ministro de Franco, en un viaje privado a París, conoció a un alto cargo de los servicios secretos franceses, quien acabó diciéndole que ellos grabaron, en un hotel de París, una conversación de exiliados españoles; en la misma, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, que luego sería fundador del FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista Patriota; de tendencia marxista-leninista), y en cuya página web se reconoce que era masón, dijo algo así como que “ para acabar con el régimen hay que matar a Carrero ”, y, ante las dificultades que todos los asistentes (fundamentalmente comunistas y socialistas) ponían, añadió “ pues entonces pongan mil millones de pesetas encima de la mesa para que se haga”.

Además, hay indicios suficientes como para pensar que el atentado inicial, uno de los más perfectos, técnicamente, de la historia moderna, según Stanley G. Payne, fue diseñado por el famoso terrorista comunista Ilich Ramírez, alias Carlos.

Una vez puesto en marcha el dispositivo etarra para el secuestro (luego asesinato) del Presidente del Gobierno, todo parece indicar que la CIA tuvo conocimiento de ello por dos fuentes quizás independientes. La primera habría sido un infiltrado en su dirección, pues no en vano el separatismo vasco de la posguerra española mantuvo importantísimos contactos con los servicios secretos ingleses, primero, y norteamericanos después, llegando estos últimos a crear la “Brigada Rosthchild” de “comandos” vascos durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial; la segunda vía habría sido la mera contravigilancia exterior de la Embajada de EE.UU. en Madrid, la cual habría detectado las labores de vigilancia y seguimiento que los etarras hacían a Carrero Blanco, el cual vivía e iba a misa diaria en un entorno inmediato a la embajada norteamericana (pocas decenas de metros). Este conocimiento permitió el seguimiento y “monitorización” de los etarras casi en tiempo real; en este sentido, los autores aportan la novedad de un testimonio reservado, según el cual se encontraron tres micrófonos, muy bien ocultos, en el piso que normalmente servía de vivienda a los terroristas. Pude ocurrir que, como escribió el famoso y misteriosamente desaparecido González Mata, alias Cisne (importante miembro de la CIA, a la vez que agente secreto español), los norteamericanos avisaran a los servicios secretos militares españoles, los únicos importantes y con competencias y enlaces internacionales.

En este contexto, la tarde antes del asesinato el Almirante estuvo reunido con Henry Kissinger, Secretado de Estado norteamericano. Casualmente, Kissinger también se encontraba en Roma poco antes de que las Brigadas Rojas secuestraran, y posteriormente mataran el 9 de mayo de 1978 a un Aldo Moro, presidente de la Democracia Cristiana pero entonces proclive a un Gobierno con los comunistas; y parece ser que también estuvo reunido con Abdel Nasser en el Cairo poco antes, relativamente, de su asesinato.

 

La CIA bien pudo “dejar hacer” a ETA y manejar voluntades españolas para facilitar el atentado de Madrid.

La luz y el peso de la Historia

Estoy convencido de que la Masonería es muy buena en Inglaterra para Inglaterra, lo malo es que en España sigue siendo muy buena para Inglaterra”, dijo el Generalísimo Franco a Foster Dulles, Secretario de Estado de Estados Unidos (entre 1953 y 1959). Traigo esa cita aquí para ilustrar el peso que esa(s) organización secreta en el magnicidio. En este sentido, los autores citan las siguiente frases de Ricardo de la Cierva: Una organización terrorista iba a ejecutarlo; alguien con mucho poder lo supo y dejó hacer; alguien con mucha información lo supo y lo ocultó deliberadamente;  alguien, quizá el mismo que lo supo y lo ocultó, iluminó a los terroristas; otros se encargaron  de protegerlos evitando que pudieran ser descubiertos (…) ironía trágica: los dos grandes enemigos (de España) que Carrero  señalaba en su “testamento”, el comunismo y la masonería (que hoy llamaríamos mundialismo) serían … el inspirador probable y el inspirador posible de su asesinato La sombra de la masonería no estuvo lejos de los cuatro magnicidios anteriores (Prim en 1871, Cánovas en 1897, Canalejas en 1912 y Dato en 1921) ; la duquesa de Carrero pensó, desde el primer momento, que su esposo había muerto por su hostilidad a la masonería [vii]

Dicho lo anterior, uno de los principales aciertos del libro que comento está en haber tenido en cuenta el axioma de que la historia es luz de nuestros días y, consecuentemente, haber investigado en esa dirección.

Fruto de ello es el estremecedor anexo titulado “El Asunto Gabaldón”, episodio de la inmediatísima posguerra (1939) en el que la masonería deja su huella en una serie de atentados, asesinatos y ajusticiamientos, recogidos en los correspondientes Consejos de Guerra y memorias particulares, en los que aparecen nombres de los servicios secretos nacionales que cobrarán un especial protagonismo a finales de los años setenta del pasado siglo.

España 1973: Muchos traidores y muchos enemigos

“ Sí... sí... él es. Él es el traidor...pero debemos obrar con cautela ”. La frase, referida a Arias Navarro, la pronunció Franco, primero dubitativo y luego desconcertado y algo pasivo, después que Utrera Molina, ex ministro de la vivienda y en 1974 Secretario General del Movimiento, le trajera documentos que demostraban que Arias quería disolver el Movimiento y grabaciones magnetofónicas en las que se oía al entonces Presidente del Gobierno decir: “ ¡Franco es un viejo! Y aquí no hay más cojones que los míos ” [viii] . Arias, como Gutiérrez Mellado, fue miembro del SIMP durante la guerra. Junto a esos sonoros nombres, desfilan por el libro otros en comprometidas situaciones: el general Manuel Díaz Alegría, los coroneles José Antonio Sáenz de Santa María y Gabino Fernández Campo, y un largo etcétera de mandos policiales, de la Guardia Civil, de los servicios secretos y de la política. Todos ellos tendrán en el régimen que se instauró a la muerte de Franco altos honores y responsabilidades, como si una mano superior les hubiera guiado y, posteriormente, premiado.

En el mismo sentido, los supuestos autores materiales del atentado serían amnistiados, dentro del apartado “crímenes de intencionalidad política”, incluso sin haber sido juzgados (requisito imprescindible para la amnistía), lo que desmonta el pretendido afán de “reconciliación y perdón” de una ley, la 46/1977 “de Amnistía”, que curiosamente carece de “exposición de motivos” [ix] . Además, previamente se habían aprobado el Indulto General de 1975 (Decreto 3357) y el Real Decreto Ley 10/1976 Sobre Amnistía, a los que hay que sumar otras disposiciones similares y conexas desde 1945.

Todo ello deja la clara sensación de que una mano superior guió aquel conjunto de acciones, anteriores y posteriores al magnicidio, que determinaron el desastroso rumbo que tomó España a partir de él. Y digo sensación, por no decir certeza, ya que, con ocasión del último aniversario, han florecido múltiples declaraciones al respecto que así lo sostienen, entre las que destaca la de Ángel López Montero al diario El Mundo (21-II-2011); en ellas, abogado defensor del Teniente Coronel Tejero afirmó que él escuchó al Comandante Cortina, el jefe de la Agrupación Operativa de Misiones Especiales (AOME) del CESID, decir por teléfono, desde un improvisado locutorio del lugar donde se celebraba el consejo de guerra contra los implicados en el 23F, a un desconocido interlocutor: «Que no me jodan, que saco hasta lo de Carrero Blanco».

 

“Testimonio de parte”

Lógicamente, les recomiendo la compra del libro, uno de los que merecen leerse y conservarse en toda biblioteca. FICHA TÉCNICA Título:   El magnicidio de Carrero Blanco   Editorial: Akron , León, 2010. http://www.editorialakron.es/cms/index.php Autores:   José María Manrique y Matías Ros     Páginas:   161, con 35 ilustraciones     Precio:   8 euros

·- ·-· -······-·
Pedro Navarro

 

 

i Véase, fundamentalmente, la obra de Jesús Palacios El 23-F, el Rey y su Secreto;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4ZDM_YRutY; http://libros.libertaddigital.com/el-23f-el-rey-y-su-secreto-1276238408.html.

 

ii Ángel Viñas, en Los pactos secretos de Franco con Estados Unidos,recogió la siguiente frase de Carrero con relación a ellos: “Los americanos han resuelto sus problemas, pero nosotros no”.

 

iiiEl camino de España hacia el mercado común;

http://www.diariovasco.com/pg060103/prensa/noticias/Opinion/200601/03/DVA-OPI-347.html

 

iv España, Potencia Nuclear; http://www.democracianacional.org/dn/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2655

 

v Jesús Palacios, Ob. Cit. página 138. El malestar de Juan Carlos “venía desde aquel momento en que, siendo príncipe, Arias se había dirigido a él llamándole niñato”. Palacios reseña también un testimonio manuscrito del General Armada (preceptor del príncipe y clave del 23F), según el cual “Arias se enfadó mucho cuando se enteró (que Juan Carlos había enviado a Díez Alegría a París a entrevistarse con Don Juan, su padre, para que no se opusiera a que se coronara a su hijo) y le presentó al príncipe la dimisión dándole unas palmaditas fuertes en la rodilla”.

 

vi El Mayor del KGB Vasili Mitrojin recopiló material secreto durante 30 años, el cual publicó parcialmente tras su huída del Telón de Acero; http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo_Mitrojin

 

vii De la Cierva, Ricardo. ¿Dónde está el sumario de Carrero Blanco?, Pag. 14; ARC Editores. Madrid. 1996.

 

viii Antonio Ramos Espejo y otros: Crónica de un sueño, 1973-83Memoria de la Transición democrática en Málaga; página 43. C&T Editores, Málaga 2005. http://books.google.es/books?id=eBaBqRoBGCoC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=utrera+molina,+%22Franco+es+un+viejo%22&source=bl&ots=p3OiZ0uZ9A&sig=JfQNDDbrTDEy9CH-ikpWmkg4xvE&hl=es&ei=2_caTf-oL4Sk8QPX84T-BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=utrera%20molina%2C%20%22Franco%20es%20un%20viejo%22&f=false

 

ixLey 46/1977, de 15 de octubre, de amnistía. http://noticias.juridicas.com/base_datos/Penal/l46-1977.html

 

America Goes to War

America Goes to War

By Ralph Raico

Mises.org

[Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal (2010)]

With the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic which eventually provided the context — or rather, pretext — for America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore.

In 1909, an international conference had produced the Declaration of London, a statement of international law as it applied to war at sea. Since it was not ratified by all the signatories, the declaration never came into effect. However, once war started the United States inquired whether the belligerents were willing to abide by its stipulations. The Central Powers agreed, providing the entente did the same. The British agreed, with certain modifications, which effectively negated the declaration.[1] British “modifications” included adding a large number of previously “free” items to the “conditional” contraband list and changing the status of key raw materials — most important of all, food — to “absolute” contraband, allegedly because they could be used by the German army.

The traditional understanding of international law on this point was expounded a decade and a half earlier by the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury:

Foodstuffs, with a hostile destination, can be considered contraband of war only if they are supplies for the enemy’s forces. It is not sufficient that they are capable of being so used; it must be shown that this was in fact their destination at the time of the seizure.[2]

That had also been the historical position of the US government. But in 1914 the British claimed the right to capture food as well as other previously “conditional contraband” destined not only for hostile but even for neutral ports, on the pretense that they would ultimately reach Germany and thus the German army. In reality, the aim was, as Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty candidly admitted, to “starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission.”[3]

Britain now assumed “practically complete control over all neutral trade,” in “flat violation of international laws.”[4] A strong protest was prepared by State Department lawyers but never sent. Instead, Colonel House and Spring-Rice, the British ambassador, conferred and came up with an alternative. Denying that the new note was even a “formal protest,” the United States politely requested that London reconsider its policy. The British expressed their appreciation for the American viewpoint, and quietly resolved to continue with their violations.[5]

In November 1914, the British Admiralty announced, supposedly in response to the discovery of a German ship unloading mines off the English coast, that henceforth the whole of the North Sea was a “military area,” or war zone, which would be mined, and into which neutral ships proceeded “at their own risk.” The British action was in blatant contravention of international law — including the Declaration of Paris, of 1856, which Britain had signed — among other reasons, because it conspicuously failed to meet the criteria for a legal blockade.[6]

The British moves meant that American commerce with Germany was effectively ended, as the United States became the arsenal of the entente. Bound now by financial as well as sentimental ties to England, much of American big business worked in one way or another for the Allied cause. The house of J.P. Morgan, which volunteered itself as coordinator of supplies for Britain, consulted regularly with the Wilson administration in its financial operations for the entente. The Wall Street Journal and other organs of the business elite were noisily pro-British at every turn, until we were finally brought into the European fray.[7]

The United States refused to join the Scandinavian neutrals in objecting to the closing of the North Sea, nor did it send a protest of its own.[8] However, when, in February, 1915, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, in which enemy merchant ships were liable to be destroyed, Berlin was put on notice: if any American vessels or American lives should be lost through U-boat action, Germany would be held to a “strict accountability.”[9]

In March, a British steamship, Falaba, carrying munitions and passengers, was torpedoed, resulting in the death of one American, among others. The ensuing note to Berlin entrenched Wilson’s preposterous doctrine — that the United States had the right and duty to protect Americans sailing on ships flying a belligerent flag. Later, John Bassett Moore, for over 30 years professor of international law at Columbia, long-time member of the Hague Tribunal, and, after the war, a judge at the International Court of Justice, stated of this and of an equally absurd Wilsonian principle:

what most decisively contributed to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason and to settled law, and no other professed neutral advanced them.[10]

Wilson had placed America on a direct collision course with Germany.

On May 7, 1915, came the most famous incident in the North Atlantic war. The British liner Lusitaniawas sunk, with the loss of 1,195 lives, including 124 Americans, by far the largest number of American victims of German submarines before our entry into the war.[11] There was outrage in the eastern seaboard press and throughout the American social elite and political class. Wilson was livid. A note was fired off to Berlin, reiterating the principle of “strict accountability,” and concluding, ominously, that Germany

will not expect the Government of the United States to omit any word or any act necessary to the performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment.[12]

At this time, the British released the Bryce Report on Belgian atrocities. A work of raw entente propaganda, though profiting from the name of the distinguished English writer, the report underscored the true nature of the unspeakable Hun.[13] Anglophiles everywhere were enraged. The Republican Party establishment raised the ante on Wilson, demanding firmer action. The great majority of Americans, who devoutly wished to avoid war, had no spokesmen within the leadership of either of the major parties. America was beginning to reap the benefits of our divinely appointed “bipartisan foreign policy.”

In their reply to the State Department note, the Germans observed that submarine warfare was a reprisal for the illegal hunger blockade; that the Lusitania was carrying munitions of war; that it was registered as an auxiliary cruiser of the British Navy; that British merchant ships had been directed to ram or fire upon surfacing U-boats; and that the Lusitania had been armed.[14]

Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, tried to reason with the president: “Germany has a right to prevent contraband going to the Allies, and a ship carrying contraband should not rely upon passengers to protect her from attack — it would be like putting women and children in front of an army.” He reminded Wilson that a proposed American compromise, whereby Britain would allow food into Germany and the Germans would abandon submarine attacks on merchant ships, had been welcomed by Germany but rejected by England. Finally, Bryan blurted out: “Why be shocked by the drowning of a few people, if there is to be no objection to starving a nation?”[15] In June, convinced that the administration was headed for war, Bryan resigned.[16]

The British blockade was taking a heavy toll, and in February 1916, Germany announced that enemy merchant ships, except passenger liners, would be treated as auxiliary cruisers, liable to be attacked without warning. The State Department countered with a declaration that, in the absence of “conclusive evidence of aggressive purpose” in each individual case, armed belligerent merchant ships enjoyed all the immunities of peaceful vessels.[17] Wilson rejected congressional calls at least to issue a warning to Americans traveling on armed merchant ships that they did so at their own risk. During the Mexican civil war, he had cautioned Americans against traveling in Mexico.[18]But now Wilson stubbornly refused.

Attention shifted to the sea war once more when a French passenger ship, the Sussex, bearing no flag or markings, was sunk by a U-boat, and several Americans injured. A harsh American protest elicited the so-called Sussex pledge from a German government anxious to avoid a break: Germany would cease attacking without warning enemy merchant ships found in the war zone. This was made explicitly conditioned, however, on the presumption that “the Government of the United States will now demand and insist that the British Government shall forthwith observe the rules of international law.” In turn, Washington curtly informed the Germans that their own responsibility was “absolute,” in no way contingent on the conduct of any other power.[19] As Borchard and Lage commented:

This persistent refusal of President Wilson to see that there was a relation between the British irregularities and the German submarine warfare is probably the crux of the American involvement. The position taken is obviously unsustainable, for it is a neutral’s duty to hold the scales even and to favor neither side.[20]

But in reality, the American leaders were anything but neutral.

Anglophile does not begin to describe our ambassador to London, Walter Hines Page, who, in his abject eagerness to please his hosts, displayed all the qualities of a good English spaniel. Afterwards, Edward Grey wrote of Page, “From the first he considered that the United States could be brought into the war early on the side of the Allies if the issue were rightly presented to it and a great appeal made by the President.”

“Page’s advice and suggestion were of the greatest value in warning us when to be careful or encouraging us when we could safely be firm.” Grey recalled in particular one incident, when Washington contested the right of the Royal Navy to stop American shipments to neutral ports. Page came to him with the message. “‘I am instructed,’ he said, ‘to read this despatch to you.’ He read and I listened. He then added: ‘I have now read the despatch, but I do not agree with it; let us consider how it should be answered.’” Grey, of course, regarded Page’s conduct as “the highest type of patriotism.”[21]

Page’s attitude was not out of place among his superiors in Washington. In his memoirs, Bryan’s successor as Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, described how, after the Lusitania episode, Britain “continued her policy of tightening the blockade and closing every possible channel by which articles could find their way to Germany,” committing ever more flagrant violations of our neutral rights. In response to State Department notes questioning these policies, the British never gave the slightest satisfaction. They knew they didn’t have to. For, as Lansing confessed:

in dealing with the British Government there was always in my mind the conviction that we would ultimately become an ally of Great Britain and that it would not do, therefore, to let our controversies reach a point where diplomatic correspondence gave place to action.

Once joining the British, “we would presumably wish to adopt some of the policies and practices, which the British adopted,” for then we, too, would be aiming to “destroy the morale of the German people by an economic isolation, which would cause them to lack the very necessaries of life.” With astounding candor, Lansing disclosed that the years-long exchange of notes with Britain had been a sham:

everything was submerged in verbiage. It was done with deliberate purpose. It insured the continuance of the controversies and left the questions unsettled, which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war.[22]

Colonel House, too, was distinctly unneutral. Breaking with all previous American practice, as well as with international law, House maintained that it was the character of the foreign government that must decide which belligerent a “neutral” United States should favor. When in September 1914, the Austrian ambassador complained to House about the British attempt to starve the peoples of Central Europe — “Germany faces famine if the war continues” — House smugly reported the interview to Wilson: “He forgot to add that England is not exercising her power in an objectionable way, for it is controlled by a democracy.”[23]

In their president, Page, Lansing, and House found a man whose heart beat as theirs. Wilson confided to his private secretary his deep belief: “England is fighting our fight and you may well understand that I shall not, in the present state of the world’s affairs, place obstacles in her way.… I will not take any action to embarrass England when she is fighting for her life and the life of the world.”[24]

Meanwhile, Colonel House had discovered a means to put the impending American entry into war to good use — by furthering the cause of democracy and “turning the world into the right paths.” The author of Philip Dru: Administrator revealed his vision to the president who “knew that God had chosen him to do great things.”[25] The ordeal by fire would be a hard one, but “no matter what sacrifices we make, the end will justify them.” After this final battle against the forces of reaction, the United States would join with other democracies to uphold the peace of the world and freedom on both land and sea, forever. To Wilson, House spoke words of seduction: “This is the part I think you are destined to play in this world tragedy, and it is the noblest part that has ever come to a son of man. This country will follow you along such a path, no matter what the cost may be.”[26]

As the British leaders had planned and hoped, the Germans were starving. On January 31, 1917, Germany announced that the next day it would begin unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson was stunned, but it is difficult to see why. This is what the Germans had been implicitly threatening for years, if nothing was done to end the illegal British blockade.

The United States severed diplomatic relations with Berlin. The president decided that American merchant ships were to be armed and defended by American sailors, thus placing munitions and other contraband sailing to Britain under the protection of the US Navy. When 11 senators, headed by Robert La Follette, filibustered the authorization bill, a livid Wilson denounced them: “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” Wilson hesitated to act, however, well aware that the defiant senators represented far more than just themselves.

There were troubling reports — from the standpoint of the war party in Washington — like that from William Durant, head of General Motors. Durant telephoned Colonel House, entreating him to stop the rush to war; he had just returned from the West and met only one man between New York and California who wanted war.[27] But opinion began to shift and gave Wilson the opening he needed. A telegram, sent by Alfred Zimmermann of the German Foreign Office to the Mexican government, had been intercepted by British intelligence and forwarded to Washington. Zimmermann proposed a military alliance with Mexico in case war broke out between the United States and Germany. Mexico was promised the American Southwest, including Texas. The telegram was released to the press.

For the first time backed by popular feeling, Wilson authorized the arming of American merchant ships. In mid-March, a number of freighters entering the declared submarine zone were sunk, and the president called Congress into special session for April 2.

Given his war speech, Woodrow Wilson may be seen as the anti-Washington. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, advised that “the great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible” (emphasis in original). Wilson was also the anti-John Quincy Adams. Adams, author of the Monroe Doctrine, declared that the United States of America “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Discarding this whole tradition, Wilson put forward the vision of an America that was entangled in countless political connections with foreign powers and on perpetual patrol for monsters to destroy. Our purpose in going to war was

to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy … [we fight] for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world at last free.[28]

Wilson was answered in the Senate by Robert La Follette, and in the House by the Democratic leader Claude Kitchin, to no avail.[29] In Congress, near-hysteria reigned, as both chambers approved the declaration of war by wide margins. The political class and its associates in the press, the universities, and the pulpits ardently seconded the plunge into world war and the abandonment of the America that was. As for the population at large, it acquiesced, as one historian has remarked, out of general boredom with peace, the habit of obedience to its rulers, and a highly unrealistic notion of the consequences of America’s taking up arms.[30]

Three times in his war message, Wilson referred to the need to fight without passion or vindictiveness — rather a professor’s idea of what waging war entailed. The reality for America would be quite different.

Notes

[1] Charles Callan Tansill, America Goes to War (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963 [1938]),pp. 135–62.

[2] Ibid., p. 148.

[3] Cited in H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917(Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939),p. 83. As Lord Devlin put it, the Admiralty’s orders “were clear enough. All food consigned to Germany through neutral ports was to be captured, and all food consigned to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany.… The British were determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful.” Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 193, 195.

[4] Edwin Borchard and William Pooter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937), p. 61.

[5] Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, pp. 62–72. The US ambassador in London, Walter Hines Page, was already showing his colors. In October, he sent a telegram to the State Department, denouncing any American protests against British interference with neutral rights. “This is not a war in the sense we have hitherto used the word. It is a world-clash of systems of government, a struggle to the extermination of English civilization or of Prussian military autocracy. Precedents have gone to the scrap heap.”

[6] See Ralph Raico, “The Politics of Hunger: A Review,” in Review of Austrian Economics, vol. 3 (1989), p. 254, and the sources cited. The article is included in the present volume.

[7] Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 132–33: “The Wall Street Journal was never troubled by a policy of ‘editorial neutrality,’ and as the war progressed it lost no opportunity to condemn the Central Powers in the most unmeasured terms.”

[8] Ibid., pp. 177–78.

[9] Robert M. La Follete, the progressive senator from Wisconsin, scathingly exposed Wilson’s double standard in a speech on the Senate floor two days after Wilson’s call for war. It is reprinted in the vital collection, Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, Jr., eds., We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 123–32.

[10] H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939),p. 112. Cf. Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, p. 136 (emphasis in original): “there was no precedent or legal warrant for a neutral to protect a belligerent ship from attack by its enemy because it happened to have on board American citizens. The exclusive jurisdiction of the country of the vessel’s flag, to which all on board are subject, is an unchallengeable rule of law.”

[11] On the possible involvement of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, in the genesis of this disaster, see “Rethinking Churchill,” in the present volume.

[12] Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Major Problems in American Foreign Policy. Documents and Essays, vol. 2, Since 1914, 2nd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1978), pp. 30–32.

[13] On the fraudulence of the Bryce Report, see Read, Atrocity Propaganda, pp. 201–08; Peterson,Propaganda for War, pp. 51–70; and Knightley, The First Casualty, pp. 83–84, 107.

[14] Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 323. The German captain of the U-boat that sank the Lusitaniaafterwards pointed out that British captains of merchant ships had already been decorated or given bounties for ramming or attempting to ram surfaced submarines; see also Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 114.

[15] William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird Bryan, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1925), pp. 397–99; Tansill, America Goes to War, pp. 258–59.

[16] To my mind, Bryan’s antiwar position and principled resignation more than make up for his views on evolution, despite H. L. Mencken’s attempted demolition of Bryan in a well-known essay.

[17] Edwin Borchard and William Pooter Lage, Neutrality for the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1937),pp. 122–24. John Bassett Moore was scathing in his denunciation of Wilson’s new doctrine, that an armed merchant ship enjoyed all the rights of an unarmed one. Citing precedents going back to Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, Moore stated that: “By the position actually taken, the United States was committed, while professing to be a neutral, to maintain a belligerent position.” Alex Mathews Arnett, Claude Kitchin and the Wilson War Policies (New York: Russell and Russell, 1971 [1937]), pp. 157–58.

[18] In fact, during the Mexican conflict, Wilson had prohibited outright the shipment of arms to Mexico. As late as August, 1913, he declared: “I shall follow the best practice of nations in this matter of neutrality by forbidding the exportation of arms or munitions of war of any kind from the United States to any part of the Republic of Mexico.” Tansill, America Goes to War, p. 64.

[19] Ibid., pp. 511–15.

[20] Borchard and Lage, Neutrality, p. 168.

[21] Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years. 1892–1916 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925), pp. 101–02, 108–11.

[22] Robert Lansing, War Memoirs (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1935), pp. 127–28.

[23] Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926), vol. 1, p. 323.

[24] Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921), p. 231. Proofs such as these that our leaders had shamelessly lied in their protestations of neutrality were published in the 1920s and ’30s. This explains the passion of the anti-war movement before the Second World War much better than the imaginary “Nazi sympathies” or “anti-Semitism” nowadays invoked by ignorant interventionist writers. As Susan A. Brewer writes in Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq (New York: Oxford University Press 2009), p. 280, “The Committee on Public Information presented the war as a noble crusade fought for democracy against demonized Germans. Such a portrayal was overturned by unfulfilled war aims overseas, the abuse of civil liberties at home, and revelations of false atrocity propaganda. In the years that followed Americans expressed distrust of government propaganda and military intervention in what they considered to be other people’s wars.” This helps account for the appearance from time to time of debunking works of popular revisionism by authors infuriated by the facts they discovered, such as C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1969 [1929]); Walter Millis, Road to War: America 1914–1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); and later Charles L. Mee, Jr., The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980); and Walter Karp’s invaluable, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920) (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

[25] Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776(Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997),p. 127.

[26] Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 1, p. 470; vol. 2, p. 92.

[27] Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, vol. 2, p. 448.

[28] The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, January 24-April 6, 1917, Arthur S. Link, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), vol. 41, pp. 525–27.

[29] See Robert M. La Follette, “Speech on the Declaration of War against Germany,” in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., ed., Voices in Dissent: An Anthology of Individualist Thought in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), pp. 211–22; and Arnett, Claude Kitchin, pp. 227–35.

[30] Otis L. Graham, Jr., The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900–1928 (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1987), p. 89.

The Best of Ralph Raico

Ralph Raico, Professor Emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape. Send him mail.

Previous article by Ralph Raico: Universal Church, Tiny States, Private Property

Quito y la geopolítica inglesa: 1698-1830

Quito y la geopolítica inglesa: 1698-1830

Una breve aproximación histórica.

 

Por Francisco Núñez Proaño

 

Ex: http://www.arbil.org/

“Los ingleses considerados como pueblo, son tan imprudentes, tan estrechos y tan poco prácticos en cosas políticas como cualquier otra nación. Pero poseen una tradición de confianza, pese a su gusto por los debates y las controversias públicas. La diferencia esta que el inglés es ‘objeto’ de un Gobierno con antiquísimos y triunfantes hábitos” – Oswald Spengler


Quito en el mundo de los siglos XVI Y XVII

Algo más de un lustro después de haber sido fundada San Francisco de Quito trascendió por primera vez al ámbito de las líneas geopolíticas europeas debido al descubrimiento del río más largo y caudaloso de la Tierra[1], llamado inicialmente por “los argonautas de la selva” sus descubridores españoles: “Río San Francisco de Quito” y  finalmente “Río de las Amazonas”.

La expedición que había partido de Guayaquil y Quito en 1541 y llegó a célebre término en la desembocadura del “río-mar” en el Océano Atlántico en 1542.  El conquistador y descubridor Francisco de Orellana firma en Valladolid las capitulaciones conformes con el Príncipe Regente de Castilla, Felipe de Austria, en ausencia de su padre Carlos I de Castilla y V del Sacro Imperio Romano Germánico, quien se encontraba fuera de España tratando sus asuntos europeos, entonces se le conceden los títulos de Adelantado y Capitán General de la Nueva Andalucía a Orellana que sin embargo no pudo ver sus expectativas cumplidas al morir tres años después en las playas Atlánticas del Amazonas que descubriera un 12 de Febrero de 1542[2].

Tuvo que transcurrir casi un siglo para que en 1637-38, el explorador Pedro de Texeira al servicio Felipe III de Portugal y IV de Castilla respectivamente, remontara el curso del Amazonas desde el Atlántico hacia Quito, reconfirmando así la posibilidad y la existencia de comunicación directa entre el Océano Atlántico y el Virreinato del Perú. Conformando así una realidad bi-oceánica de facto para los Reinos americanos con todas las implicaciones geopolíticas de este hecho de por medio. En 1639 la expedición se volvió a realizar desde Quito hacia el Gran Pará por decisión de las autoridades virreinales, pero en esta ocasión Texeira fue acompañado por los jesuitas Cristóbal de Acuña y Andrés de Artieda[3], personas de confianza de la Audiencia de Quito, delegados del Virrey del Perú. Por órdenes superiores Acuña realizaría una importante y mundialmente conocida crónica de esta exploración.

Entre 1542 y 1639 la Monarquía Hispánica tuvo prohibido a sus súbditos penetrar o escribir sobre el gran Río Amazonas.[4] “Oficialmente estaba proscrito describir al Amazonas geográficamente, peor darlo a conocer al mundo, pues, había el temor de que potencias enemigas, que asediaban el subcontinente sudamericano, “invadieran” el río-mar apropiado por España, cuando éste era todavía una maraña inexpugnable y su extensa cuenca fluvial era virgen para el mundo occidental, con la excepción de la incursión de Orellana… Tales potencias eran además Holanda, Inglaterra, Francia y Portugal, las cuales habían recibido ‘concesiones’ de la corona para ‘colonizar’ Guyanas y la desembocadura del río.”[5]

En 1640, Cristóbal de Acuña presentó su relación al Rey Felipe IV de España. Se llama a esta la “crónica breve” donde se incluía un mapa del curso del Amazonas hasta las faldas de los Andes con Quito como cabecera política de la región. Su informe y mapa, fueron prohibidos de publicarse por ser “estratégicamente importantes”[6], como se diría ahora “reserva geopolítica”… “en la jerga de seguridad del Consejo de Indias, los papeles de Acuña eran ‘clasificados’ para las preocupadas autoridades de la corona. Y por ello: ‘hásele mandado no saque a la luz nada, porque los enemigos no emprendan continuar esta navegación y perficcionarla’.”[7]

Debido a estos hechos “Acuña tuvo entonces que volver a escribir una segunda relación, eliminando de aquella los detalles geográficos y estratégicos inconvenientes a la Corona… la orientación de la segunda crónica será amplia y diversificada en secciones y apostillas elegantes. Esta es la crónica oficial, la que ha venido leyendo y conoce el mundo occidental desde los años señalados (1641, 1645). Su ficha es: Nuevo Descubrimiento del Gran río del Amazonas, el año de 1639, por la Provincia de Quito, en el Reyno del Perú. Madrid.”[8] [9]

Esta crónica tendrá tremendas consecuencias geopolíticas para el Imperio Hispánico.

1698: Inglaterra pone sus ojos en Quito.

Geopolíticamente hablando el primer documento público, o uno de los primeros documentos públicos ingleses que hace referencia a Quito[10] es la edición inglesa de 1698 de la crónica de Acuña: Voyages and discoveries in South America. The first up the river of Amazons to Quito in Peru, and back again to Brazil, perform’d at the Command of the King of Spain by Christopher d’ Acugna… Done into English from the Originals… London, printed for S. Buckley, 1698.[11] Aquí se señala acuciosamente:

“Las siguientes relaciones son de los descubrimientos de las partes más ricas del mundo, aún no pobladas por los europeos, y otras que aunque poco conocidas, dignas… por todas las bendiciones de paz, ningunas otras parecen tan encantadoras o rentables que (para) la navegación y el comercio, especialmente para la nación inglesa (el resaltado es mío), cuyo genio es mucho más inclinado a las mejoras en el mar y las plantaciones en el extranjero, las cuales traen gran riqueza al reino, particularmente esas en América, donde los españoles por su mala conducta han dado oportunidades a algunos de sus vecinos para poner una parte de la riqueza y el comercio de esta vasta tierra extensión de tierra. El frecuente saqueo de sus ciudades (poblaciones) y aprovechamiento (sic) de sus barcos por los ingleses, franceses, y los holandeses, puso a Felipe III en la búsqueda de nuevas vías de transporte de los tesoros de Perú, Chile, y (Nueva) Granada hacia España para lo cual [la costa en el Golfo de México es bien conocida tanto como las de Europa] ordenó desde la Corte en Madrid a los gobernadores de Brasil y Perú enviar (una misión) para intentar la navegación del gran río de las Amazonas, allí donde se encontraron (practicable o prácticamente en francés en el original) el oro, plata, y otras mercancías del Perú (la Real Audiencia de Quito incluida) y de países adyacentes que podrían ser enviados hacia el sur (down –sic) por el Pará, donde poner y abordar a los galeones  que se encuentran menos expuestos allí, que en Cartagena, Porto Belo, o Vera Cruz, las averiguaciones (sobre) la boca de ese río son desconocidas y peligrosas a los extraños – extranjeros.”[12] [13]

Esta primordial declaración de los intereses sobre estas regiones “tan encantadoras” y “rentables para la navegación y el comercio, especialmente para la nación inglesa”, demuestra el inicio de un plan estratégico de desestabilización del Imperio Hispánico con el objetivo de sustraer del espacio español americano a las Provincias o Reinos de las Indias Occidentales para beneficio y usufructo de la esfera geoeconómica y comercial inglesa, es decir, para constituir a estas regiones en Estados tributarios de lo que más tarde se denominaría el Reino Unido de Gran Bretaña.

Notable es que en esta misma edición inglesa de la obra del Padre Acuña, se incluya un mapa del norte de la América del Sur: Perú, Quito, Reino de Granada (Kingdom of Granada), Los Quijos, Venezuela, Nueva Andalucía, Guyana, Carabuyanas y Brasil;  con una precisión destacable para la época y  donde el río Amazonas nace en Quito

La delineación geográfica del trazado del mapa se basa indudablemente y como se señala allí mismo en la relación de Acuña. Convirtiendo a Quito un objetivo estratégico inglés,  la llave para las riquezas del Perú que podrían ser transportadas por el Amazonas hacia el Atlántico por el Pará como se menciona en la introducción precitada del libro.

Clara y acertada fue la previsión de las autoridades españolas en prohibir la difusión de los detalles relacionados a la cuenca del río Amazonas, donde los intereses de sus adversarios globales le acarrarían el desmembramiento de sus provincias ultramarinas.

1711: “Una propuesta para humillar a España”.

A comienzos del Siglo XVIII  el atraso de España respecto de Francia e Inglaterra era considerable. En el intento de recuperar la supremacía española, la dinastía real de la Casa de Borbón inició una serie de transformaciones conocidas como reformas borbónicas. En América tales medidas fueron motivo de descontento y estimularon ideas de sedición sobre todo en los sectores afectados por las mismas. Carlos III fue el máximo exponente de esa voluntad de reformas, pretendiendo con estas hacer más eficiente la administración del Estado; liberar el comercio, impulsar la educación y las ciencias, aumentar los tributos, y sobre todo concentrar el poder político en la Corona violentando de esta manera muchos fueros tradicionales de las Españas europeas y americanas[14], generando así una severa crisis económica en el Reino de Quito.

El tramado de la historia nos devela que existieron intereses mucho más poderosos detrás de la crisis a lo largo del continente y en particular en Quito. En un folleto extraño por su poca difusión y perturbador por su alevosía titulado “Una propuesta para humillar a España”, escrito en 1711 en Inglaterra “por una persona de distinción” se menciona un funesto plan para acabar con la Monarquía Católica Hispánica, atacando su principales puntos y centros de poder y comercio, que entonces gravitaban en torno al núcleo continental del Virreinato del Perú, los actuales Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia. Se dice allí de Quito:

“…dada la considerable falta (?) que tienen de estas mercaderías (textiles ingleses), que tanto necesitan el consumo de ellas, aumentaría, porque nuestros productos y tales son irrazonablemente caros (debido a la restricción del libre comercio en ese entonces), por las razones ya mencionadas, y así los pobres y aún los comerciantes, hacen uso de las telas de Quito para sus vestidos y solo los mejores usan géneros y telas inglesas. Pero si de una vez, nosotros podemos fijar nuestro comercio, por el camino que yo propongo (directamente por Buenos Aires y a través del continente hacia el interior, sin tener que pasar por Cádiz), con seguridad, arruinaríamos, en pocos años, la manufactura de Quito (el resaltado es mío).”[15] [16]

Tal como sucedería finalmente hacia finales del siglo XVIII y comienzos del siglo XIX hasta la mal llamada independencia. Irónicamente puedo decir que con sorpresa. Este se conformó entonces como un plan  estratégico británico en 1711 para conquistar las Provincias de España en América.
La apertura del comercio trajo devastadoras consecuencias para Quito y la sierra centro-norte del actual Ecuador. Los paños ingleses introducidos a precios más bajos que los quiteños, significaron la pérdida del mercado del norte del Virreinato del Perú. La necesidad de remitir fondos para la defensa de Cartagena de Indias ocasionó la escasez del circulante. La crisis económica estuvo acompañada de una grave convulsión social ocasionada tanto por las rebeliones indígenas[17], como por la creciente incertidumbre de los barrios, quienes en forma tradicional protestaban contra esta situación al grito de “¡VIVA EL REY! – ¡ABAJO EL MAL GOBIERNO!”, demostrando así que ante todo y más allá del pronunciamiento el Rey era el Rey. Un Rey distante pero benévolo.

El largo siglo XVIII – Plan Maitland-Pitt

Desde la elaboración del plan para humillar a España que como se puede comprobar fehacientemente con los hechos históricos sucedidos desde entonces fue cumplido al pie de la letra hasta la formal secesión de Quito y de las demás Españas americanas respecto de la España europea, transcurrieron 111 años (1711-1822), un largo siglo XVIII decadente por causa de la acción externa de Inglaterra y de la extenuada biología política imperial hispana.

El general escocés Thomas Maitland diseñó en el año 1800 un “Plan para capturar Buenos Aires y Chile y luego emancipar Perú y Quito”, donde se expone como Inglaterra se propone la conquista de la América del Sur. Para 1804 este plan fue adoptado por el Primer Ministro británico William Pitt (el joven). Maitland en despacho a Pitt delimita la acción a ser concretada con estas palabras:

“Estimado Señor: Hace un tiempo tuve el honor de someter a su consideración el borrador de un plan para atacar los asentamientos españoles en el Río de la Plata. Mi objetivo era procurar a Inglaterra un beneficio grande, aunque en cierto modo limitado, abriendo un nuevo y extenso mercado para nuestras manufacturas… que tuviera como objetivo la emancipación de esas inmensas y valiosas posesiones y la apertura de una fuente de permanente e incalculable beneficio para nosotros, resultado de inducir a los habitantes de los nuevos países a abrir sus puertos y recibir nuestras manufacturas, de Gran Bretaña y de la India… Una expedición a Caracas desde las Antillas, y una fuerza enviada a Buenos Aires, podrían realmente proveer la emancipación de los colonos españoles en las posesiones orientales, pero el efecto de tal emancipación, aunque considerable, no podría jamás ser tenido por seguro en las más ricas posesiones de España en la costa del Pacífico, y es menester observar que la razón por la cual los españoles han asignado importancia a sus posesiones orientales es que ellas sirven como defensa para proteger sus más valiosas posesiones occidentales… Por lo tanto, yo concibo que, con vistas a un impacto sobre el conjunto de las posesiones españolas en Sud América, nada de sustancial puede lograrse sin atacar por ambos lados, aproximadamente al mismo tiempo (Nota del autor del artículo: Bolívar y San Martín), con un plan y una coordinación tales que nos permitan reducirlos, por la fuerza si fuera necesario, en todas sus inmensas posesiones sobre el Océano Pacífico.”[18]

¿Y Quito? Pues como señala el nombre del plan, los objetivos son el Perú y Quito:

“… un ataque sobre ambos lados sin conexión o relación entre sí, aun cuando ambos sean exitosos, no nos conduciría a nuestro gran objetivo que es abrir el comercio de toda Sudamérica (en concordancia con el plan de 1711)… La perspectiva de un beneficio inmediato e inmensa riqueza naturalmente inclinará a los participantes en esta operación a dirigir sus miradas, de inmediato, a las ricas provincias de Perú y Quito… Chile se convertiría en un punto desde el cual podríamos dirigir nuestros esfuerzos contra las provincias más ricas… El fin de nuestra empresa sería indudablemente la emancipación de Perú y México [Quito], lo cual solo se podrá mediante la posesión de Chile.”[19]
Así concluye el decisivo documento. La recóndita política exterior inglesa en esta ocasión había de coronar sus aspiraciones con los objetivos cumplidos pocos años más tarde. Simón Bolívar y José de San Martín fueron por lo tanto meros ejecutores de los planes británicos.

La invasión anglo – caribeña.

El capacitado historiador guayaquileño Jaime Rodríguez denominaría acertadamente al proceso de separación e independencia forzada por parte de las tropas bolivarianas como “la conquista del Reino de Quito”. El iluminado y anglófilo Bolívar[20] no tenía la intención de permitir a Quito, ni a Guayaquil, ni a Cuenca decidir sobre sus destinos:

“Los americanos no estaban subyugados por los ‘brutales españoles’: durante la mayor parte del Antiguo Régimen, la Monarquía española no mantuvo un ejército regular en América, y cuando se formó uno tras la Guerra de los Siete Años (1756-1763), la mayoría de los oficiales y soldados eran americanos. La Monarquía española nunca tuvo los recursos para dominar el Nuevo Mundo por la fuerza, especialmente después  de seis años de guerra encarnizada en la Península y de la ocupación francesa de 1808-1814. La lealtad de los pueblos de la región (América) hacia la Monarquía española fue producto de una cultura política compartida y de los lazos sociales y económicos. En el caso específico del Ecuador, es importante situar la ‘revolución de Quito’ en un contexto más amplio y examinar lo que sucedió entre el fracaso de la Junta de Quito a finales de 1812 y la declaración de independencia de Guayaquil, a finales de 1820. En esa época había muy pocos españoles en América. Si el pueblo del Reino de Quito hubiera querido la independencia, podría haberse rebelado mucho antes de 1820. En lugar de ellos, ejércitos venidos de Colombia forzaron a Quito a aceptar su separación de  la Monarquía española y a asumir un estatus secundario dentro de la nueva nación colombiana… irónicamente, la emancipación tuvo como resultado la conquista del Reino de Quito por parte de las fuerzas colombianas”.[21]

Inglaterra como instigadora de la subversión, no solo que permitió el reclutamiento de mercenarios, sino que alentó el mismo; llegaron en cantidades considerables los ingleses para engrosar las filas de los separatistas, completando 720 en 1817, a los que se sumaron nada menos que 5088 incorporados en 1819. Todos estos actuarían taxativamente para la consecución de los fines de sus amos.
Bolívar mandó a Antonio José de Sucre a Guayaquil con 700 soldados para la liberación de la sierra quiteña. Sucre se puso al mando no sólo de los efectivos colombianos, sino también de un contingente de tropas guayaquileñas e inglesas, estas últimas ordenadas en al Batallón Albión bajo el comando de los generales John Illingworth[22]  y Daniel Florencio O’Leary[23] [24]. Una vez que Sucre se instaló en Guayaquil, intentó penetrar la sierra por Alausí, pero fracasó en dos ocasiones. En vista de esa experiencia, cambió de estrategia, incursionando por Cuenca, donde el poder realista había sido restaurado. Con la ayuda de un contingente enviado por San Martín, Sucre derrotó a las tropas realistas acantonadas en Cuenca en febrero de 1822. Las tropas realistas se retiraron a Quito donde estaba su comandante Melchor Aymerich. Luego Sucre avanzó hacía Quito con 3.000 efectivos enfrentándose exitosamente con el ejército realista de Melchor Aymerich en las faldas del Pichincha el 24 de mayo de 1822. Los 3000 mil efectivos que ganaron la Batalla del Pichincha eran mayormente soldados reclutados en Colombia, Venezuela e Inglaterra como correspondía al ejercito multinacional que había armado Bolívar, sin embargo no se encontraban quiteños en el mismo.
Julio Albi explica el siguiente dato fundamental acerca de la batalla de Pichincha:

“El Ejército realista, en la que sería su última batalla en el reino de Quito, estaba formado sobre  todo por americanos. Los jinetes procedían todos del reclutamiento local (criollos y quiteños por tanto). En cuanto a los infantes, el batallón de Tiradores de Cádiz era ‘casi todo de europeos… y los otros Cuerpos españoles o realistas, compuestos de americanos’ ”[25]

Ingleses versus quiteños: Papel destacado en esta batalla fue el protagonizado por el Batallón Albión[26]. Carlos García Arrieche lo refiere así:

“La oportuna y decisiva participación del Albión en Pichincha, en aquel memorable 24 de mayo de 1822, ha quedado perpetuada y reconocida en el fragmento del parte oficial del combate emitido por el general Sucre, donde expresa: ‘Las municiones se estaban agotando… Tres compañías del Aragón, el mejor batallón realista estaban ya a punto de flanquear a los patriotas, cuando llegaron, con el resto del parque, las tres compañías del Albión, con su coronel Mackintosh a la cabeza; y entrando con la bizarría que siempre ha distinguido a este cuerpo, puso en completa derrota a los de Aragón.”[27]
Presagio de un futuro de dominación y coloniaje económico, cultural y cada tanto –cuando lo ameritara- político. La luz que vino del norte arrasó con todo a su paso.

Después de la celebración del triunfo, Sucre presionó al ayuntamiento quiteño para que incorporara al territorio de la Real Audiencia de Quito a la República de Colombia. Aunque algunos miembros de la aristocracia quiteña se resistieron, el ayuntamiento finalmente cumplió con el pedido de Sucre. En junio de 1822, Bolívar entró a Quito después de haber derrotado a efectivos realistas en Pasto.
“Aceptando las exigencias británicas dentro de los rumbos trazados por Bolívar” el 18 de abril de 1825 se firmó entre los plenipotenciarios de Gran Bretaña y la Gran Colombia el Tratado de Amistad, Comercio y Navegación, “que no difiere sustancialmente” de los tratados celebrados ese mismo año por las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata y Chile, y más tarde por Perú y México con la gran potencia talasocrática. Para cuando el Ecuador se constituyó como un Estado “soberano” separado de la Gran Colombia en 1830, ya tenía normadas sus relaciones exteriores, comerciales y políticas, en condiciones de exclusividad con Inglaterra, aún antes de dotarse de su norma fundamental, de su primera Constitución.[28]

The Aftermath: Colofón del vasallaje. 

Finalmente, la geopolítica inglesa había extendido exitosamente las líneas de sus redes hasta Quito como pretendía desde 1698. El hemisferio americano había sido transferido de Provincias o Reinos de España a Estados tributarios ingleses. Leviatán se había impuesto sobre Behemot y la isla (extra-europea) del creciente interior se enseñoreaba en el creciente exterior de la tierra, en la periferia del mundo desarrollado como se diría hoy.

El general Juan José Flores –venezolano de nacimiento-, primer presidente del Estado del Ecuador (tributario de Inglaterra)  desde mayo de 1830 –sin la denominación de República por entonces-, lo reconocería por decreto con estos términos:

“Juan José Flores, Presidente del Estado del Ecuador, etc. Habiendo tenido noticias oficiales de la muerte de S.M.B. el Rey Jorge IV y deseando dar un testimonio público del gran sentimiento que ha cabido al Gobierno de ese Estado y a todos sus habitantes, por la pérdida de un monarca que ha sido el más firme apoyo de nuestros derechos en la gloriosa contienda de la libertad e independencia de Colombia y que supo estrechar con ella muy leales y francas relaciones de amistad, comercio y navegación.

Decreta:

Art. 1°- Todos los individuos del Ejército y Marina (¿Cuál marina? ¿Los mercenarios y súbditos ingleses como el almirante Illingworth acaso?) llevarán por ocho días consecutivos desde la publicación de este Decreto, el luto prevenido por el Reglamento sobre divisas y uniformes de 20 de julio de 1828. (!)

Art. 2°- Por igual tiempo pondrán todos los empleados públicos un lazo negro en el brazo izquierdo y en particular en el sombrero. (!)

Art. 3°- El Ministro Secretario del Despacho, queda encargado de la ejecución.
Quito, a 28 de Octubre de 1830.

J.J. Flores.”[29]

Con estos rigurosos honores a un monarca británico iniciábamos pomposamente nuestra vida “independiente”.

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[1] Los más recientes estudios geográficos dan cuenta del Amazonas desde su origen fluvial es el más largo del mundo con 6800 km, seguido por el Nilo con 6756 km.
[2] Salvador Lara, Jorge, Quito y el Emperador Carlos V, Quito, 1958.
[3] Andrés de Artieda, Lector de Teología del colegio de Quito. Desconozco si el Padre Artieda era criollo o no.
[4] Burgos Guevara, Hugo, La crónica prohibida. Cristóbal de Acuña en el Amazonas, Ed. Fonsal, Quito 2005,   pág. 17
[5] Ibídem
[6] Ibídem, pág. 89
[7] Ibídem
[8] Ibdídem, pág. 19 “Adicionalmente debemos mencionar que el Memorial de Acuña, elevado al Real Consejo de Indias el 20 de marzo de 1641, tuvo una primera edición con el título mencionado antes. No quedan ejemplares de esta obra, por lo que ha circulado más la Relación reproducida en la conocida crónica del padre Manuel Rodríguez, El Marañón y el Amazonas, publicada en 1684. Todas las ediciones siguientes, en inglés, francés, portugués, alemán y español, se han basado en la edición de 1684.”
[9] Ibídem, págs. 91-92. Autoridad como Jaime Regan dice de este libro: “De ella quedan muy pocos ejemplares en el mundo, llegándose a cotizar uno de ellos en el mercado de anticuario en USA $10.000 (USD)”. “No se debe confundir esta segunda crónica con la primera, no solo por las implicaciones de deformación histórica, sino porque la primera ha permanecido enclaustrada en Roma, y su identidad ha sido confundida ante la conciencia mundial. La crónica primigenia, escrita por Acuña, reza así: RELACION DEL DESCUBRIMIENTO DEL RÍO DE LAS AMAZONAS OY [sic] RIO DE SAN FRANCO DEL QUITOY DECLARACIÓN DEL MAPA EN DONDE ESTÁ PINTADO. Fue encontrada por Hugo Burgos G. en Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Letras Annuas de la Vice provincia de Quito y el Nuevo Reino en los Reynos del Peru 1605-1669, R.et Q. 15I,-9, Folio 274-280). El documento es manuscrito, paleografía jesuítica de comienzos del siglo XVII.”
[10]  Como lo hemos referido: entiéndase que al referirnos a Quito abarcamos a todo el actual territorio de la República del Ecuador, de la entonces Real Audiencia de Quito (que incluía territorios del actual sur de Colombia y norte del Perú) y del conocido Reino de Quito-del denominado Departamento del Sur de la Gran Colombia-. La Audiencia y finalmente Capitanía General de Quito –Sede virreinal de facto con Mourgeon-.
[11] Voyages and discoveries in South America. The first up the river of Amazons to Quito in Peru, and back again to Brazil, perform’d at the Command of the King of Spain by Christopher d’ Acugna… Done into English from the Originals… London, printed for S. Buckley, 1698. Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia de la Repúplica Argentina – Buenos Aires.  Se señala en la introducción al mismo: “Accordingly they departed (Father d’ Acugna and Pedro d’ Texeira) from Quito Jan. 16. 1639 and arrived at Para Dec. 12. following. Thence he went into Spain, and presented to the King his Master an –amuse- relation of the said River; which was published at Madrid in 1641, and entitled Nuevo descubrimiento del gran Río de las Amazonas, in 4…”
[12] Ibídem, Introducción, traducción del autor del presente artículo.
[13] Un precedente histórico del denominado eje multimodal Manta-Manaos.
[14] Espinosa Fernández de Córdoba, Carlos, Historia del Ecuador en contexto regional y global, Ed. Lexus, Barcelona – España, 2010., pág. 432.
[15] “Una persona de distinción”, Una propuesta para humillar a España, traducción, advertencia  preliminar y notas del Capitán de Fragata Bernardo N. Rodríguez, Ed. Del Comando en Jefe de la Armada de la República Argentina, Libros e impresos raros, Buenos Aires, 1970, pág. 20
[16] “Curiosamente” esta ruta de “libre comercio” que preveía el folleto citado fue la misma ruta que utilizó José de San Martín para su campaña “libertadora” desde Buenos Aires al Perú y culminada por las huestes de Lavalle en las batallas de Riobamba y Pichincha, campaña que se vería rematada con sendos tratados comerciales con Inglaterra.
[17] El historiador Carlos Espinosa Fernández de Córdoba señala al respecto: “Hay que recordar que la fiebre de sublevaciones indígenas que persistió a lo largo del siglo anterior (siglo XVIII) no constituyó una verdadera amenaza al sistema imperante”, Ob. Cit., pág. 437
[18] En: Terragno, Rodolfo H., Maitland & San Martín, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes – Argentina, 1998; y Diario íntimo de San Martín. Londres 1824. Una misión secreta, Ed. Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 2009.
[19] En: Terragno, Rodolfo H., Maitland & San Martín, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes – Argentina, 1998; y Diario íntimo de San Martín. Londres 1824. Una misión secreta, Ed. Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 2009.
[20] Así opinaba el “Libertador” sobre Quito: “… hombres tan malvados e ingratos. Yo creo que le he dicho a Vd., antes de ahora, que los quiteños son los peores colombianos. El hecho es que siempre lo he pensado, y que se necesita un rigor triple que el que se emplearía en otra parte. Los venezolanos son unos santos en comparación de esos malvados. Los quiteños y los peruanos son la misma cosa: viciosos hasta la infamia y bajos hasta el extremo. Los blancos tienen el carácter de los indios, y los indios son todos truchimanes, todos ladrones, todos embusteros, todos falsos, sin ningún principio de moral que los guíe.” Bolívar a Santander, Pativilca, 7 de enero de 1824, en Vicente Lecuna, Cartas del Libertador, Tomo IV, págs. 12-14.
[21] Rodríguez, Jaime, La revolución política durante la época de la independencia -  El Reino de Quito 1808- 1822,Coporación editora nacional, Biblioteca de Historia Volumen N° 20, Quito, 2006,, págs. 35, 36, 37
[22] Illingworth es ancestro de muchos oligarcas ecuatorianos y de algún separatista guayaquileño. Como Jefe de la Escuadra unida del Perú y Colombia, sostuvo el sitio de El Callao y conjuntamente con el general Salom; “tuvo el privilegio” de recibir la capitulación de esa plaza fuerte –el último baluarte del Imperio en la América del Sur- el 21 de enero de 1826.
[23] Representando al gobierno británico asistió a los solemnes actos del traslado de los restos del “Libertador” a Caracas, en 1842 colaborando para que las ceremonias resultasen “dignas” del célebre hombre. Al sugerir en una comunicación al Foreign Office –para quien trabajaba desde 1840 cuando se reincorporó formalmente al servicio de “Su Majestad Británica”- la conveniencia de enviar un navío  de guerra para escoltar al barco que conduciría a La Guaira desde Santa Marta, las cenizas de Bolívar, O’Leary recalcaba: “Ningún gesto podrá satisfacer más a los pueblos de Venezuela y Colombia que esta muestra de respeto a la memoria de un hombre de Estado que en toda su vida pública mostró siempre un sincero deseo de mantener estrechas relaciones con Inglaterra”.
[24] Cabe destacar que muchos de estos ingleses y sus descendientes pasaron a formar parte de la oligarquía plutocrática ecuatoriana, paradigmáticamente representados por la familia Wright, gracias a las propiedades y dineros robados a sus legítimos dueños  por acción y “gracia” del “Libertador” que supo como recompensar a sus mercenarios.
[25] Albi, Julio, Banderas olvidadas- El Ejército realista en América”, Ed. De Cultura Hispánica, Madrid, 1990, pág. 328
[26] García Arrieche, Carlos, Británicos en la Emancipación Ecuatoriana, aparecido en el Boletín de la Academia Nacional de Historia Vol. 59, núm. 127-128, ene-dic. 1976, Quito, pág. 54
[27] Ibídem.
[28] Este Tratado mantendría su plena vigencia hasta cuando se firmó otro de índole similar esta vez  entre el Ecuador ya como República separada y Gran Bretaña durante el gobierno de Diego Noboa.
[29] Homenaje póstumo del Gobierno ecuatoriano, por la memoria de S.M.B. el Rey Jorge IV, de Gran Bretaña en Historia Diplomática de la República del Ecuador del Dr. Jorge W. Villacrés Moscoso, quien señala al respecto: “Entre los actos más significativos y por cierto curiosos, que merecen resaltarse en las relaciones entre nuestro país e Inglaterra, figura el homenaje póstumo, que rindió el Gobierno Ecuatoriano, presidido  por ese entonces por el General Juan José Flores, con motivo de la muerte de S.M.B. el Rey Jorge IV, y lo hizo mediante el decreto correspondiente datado el 28 de octubre de 1830, es decir a los pocos meses de haberse separado el Ecuador de la Gran Colombia y constituídose en estado independiente.”

 

 

Publicado 14th July 2013 por RevistaArbil

Une étude sur les déserteurs des armées alliées pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale

Wolfgang KAUFMANN:

Une étude sur les déserteurs des armées alliées pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale

 

L’historien Charles Glass a examiné le sort des 150.000 déserteurs des armées britanniques et américaines pendant la seconde guerre mondiale

 

En Allemagne, on dresse depuis 1986 des monuments aux déserteurs allemands de la seconde guerre mondiale. En Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis, personne, jusqu’il y a peu, ne voulait aborder cette thématique historique des déserteurs des armées de la coalition anti-hitlérienne. Charles Glass, ancien correspondant d’ABC pour le Moyen Orient, otage de milices chiites au Liban pendant 67 jours en 1987, vient d’innover en la matière: il a brisé ce tabou de l’histoire contemporaine, en racontant par le menu l’histoire des 50.000 militaires américains et des 100.000 militaires britanniques qui ont déserté leurs unités sur les théâtres d’opération d’Europe et d’Afrique du Nord. Le chiffre de 150.000 hommes est énorme: cela signifie qu’un soldat sur cent a abandonné illégalement son unité.

Chez les Américains, constate Glass, les déserteurs ne peuvent pas être considérés comme des lâches ou des tire-au-flanc; il s’agit souvent de soldats qui se sont avérés des combattants exemplaires et courageux, voir des idéalistes qui ont prouvé leur valeur au front. Ils ont flanché pour les motifs que l’on classe dans la catégorie “SNAFU” (“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”). Il peut s’agir de beaucoup de choses: ces soldats déserteurs avaient été traités bestialement par leurs supérieurs hiérarchiques incompétents, leur ravitaillement n’arrivait pas à temps, les conditions hygiéniques étaient déplorables; aussi le fait que c’était toujours les mêmes unités qui devaient verser leur sang, alors que personne, dans la hiérarchie militaire, n’estimait nécessaire de les relever et d’envoyer des unités fraîches en première ligne.

Dans une telle situation, on peut comprendre la lassitude des déserteurs surtout que certaines divisions d’infanterie en France et en Italie ont perdu jusqu’à 75% de leurs effectifs. Pour beaucoup de GI’s appartenant à ces unités lourdement éprouvées, il apparaissait normal de déserter ou de refuser d’obéir aux ordres, même face à l’ennemi. Parmi les militaires qui ont réfusé d’obéir, il y avait le Lieutenant Albert C. Homcy, de la 36ème division d’infanterie, qui n’a pas agi pour son bien propre mais pour celui de ses subordonnés. Il a comparu devant le conseil de guerre le 19 octobre 1944 à Docelles, qui l’a condamné à 50 ans de travaux forcés parce qu’il avait refusé d’obéir à un ordre qui lui demandait d’armer et d’envoyer à l’assaut contre les blindés allemands des cuisiniers, des boulangers et des ordonnances sans formation militaire aucune.

Au cours de l’automne 1944, dans l’US Army en Europe, il y avait chaque mois près de 8500 déserteurs ou de cas d’absentéisme de longue durée, également passibles de lourdes sanctions. La situation était similaire chez les Britanniques: depuis l’offensive de Rommel en Afrique du Nord, le nombre de déserteurs dans les unités envoyées dans cette région a augmenté dans des proportions telles que toutes les prisons militaires du Proche Orient étaient pleines à craquer et que le commandant-en-chef Claude Auchinleck envisageait de rétablir la peine de mort pour désertion, ce qui n’a toutefois pas été accepté pour des motifs de politique intérieure (ndt: ou parce que les Chypriotes grecs et turcs ou les Juifs de Palestine avaient été enrôlés de force et en masse dans la 8ème Armée, contre leur volonté?). Les autorités britanniques ont dès lors été forcées d’entourer tous les camps militaires britanniques d’une triple rangée de barbelés pour réduire le nombre de “fuites”.

Le cauchemar du commandement allié et des décideurs politiques de la coalition anti-hitlérienne n’était pas tellement les déserteurs proprement dits, qui plongeaient tout simplement dans la clandestinité et attendaient la fin de la guerre, mais plutôt ceux d’entre eux qui se liguaient en bandes et se donnaient pour activité principale de piller la logistique des alliés et de vendre leur butin au marché noir. La constitution de pareilles bandes a commencé dès le débarquement des troupes anglo-saxonnes en Italie, où les gangs de déserteurs amorcèrent une coopération fructueuse avec la mafia locale. Parmi elles, le “Lane Gang”, dirigé par un simple soldat de 23 ans, Werner Schmeidel, s’est taillé une solide réputation. Ce “gang” a réussi à s’emparer d’une cassette militaire contenant 133.000 dollars en argent liquide. A l’automne 1944, ces attaques perpétrées par les “gangs” a enrayé l’offensive du Général Patton en direction de l’Allemagne: des déserteurs américains et des bandes criminelles françaises avaient attaqué et pillé les véhicules de la logistique amenant vivres et carburants.

La situation la plus dramatique s’observait alors dans le Paris “libéré”, où régnait l’anarchie la plus totale: entre août 1944 et avril 1945, la “Criminal Investigation Branch” de l’armée américaine a ouvert 7912 dossiers concernant des délits importants, dont 3098 cas de pillage de biens militaires américains et 3481 cas de viol ou de meurtre (ou d’assassinat). La plupart de ces dossiers concernaient des soldats américains déserteurs. La situation était analogue en Grande-Bretagne où 40.000 soldats britanniques étaient entrés dans la clandestinité et étaient responsables de 90% des délits commis dans le pays. Pour combattre ce fléau, la justice militaire américaine s’est montrée beaucoup plus sévère que son homologue britannique: de juin 1944 à l’automne 1945, 70 soldats américains ont été exécutés pour avoir commis des délits très graves pendant leur période de désertion. La masse énorme des déserteurs “normaux” était internée dans d’immenses camps comme le “Loire Disciplinary Training Center” où séjournait 4500 condamnés. Ceux-ci y étaient systématiquement humiliés et maltraités. Des cas de décès ont été signalés et attestés car des gardiens ont à leur tour été traduits devant des juridictions militaires. En Angleterre, la chasse aux déserteurs s’est terminée en pantalonnade: ainsi, la police militaire britannique a organisé une gigantesque razzia le 14 décembre 1945, baptisée “Operation Dragnet”. Résultat? Quatre arrestations! Alors qu’à Londres seulement, quelque 20.000 déserteurs devaient se cacher.

Au début de l’année 1945, l’armée américaine se rend compte que la plupart des déserteurs condamnés avaient été de bons soldats qui, vu le stress auquel ils avaient été soumis pendant de trop longues périodes en zones de combat, auraient dû être envoyés en clinique plutôt qu’en détention. Les psychologues entrent alors en scène, ce qui conduit à une révision de la plupart des jugements qui avaient condamné les soldats à des peines entre 15 ans et la perpétuité.

En Grande-Bretagne, il a fallu attendre plus longtemps la réhabilitation des déserteurs malgré la pression de l’opinion publique. Finalement, Churchill a cédé et annoncé une amnistie officielle en février 1953.

Wolfgang KAUFMANN.

(article paru dans “Junge Freiheit”, n°49/2013; http://www.jungefreiheit.de ).

Charles GLASS, The Deserters. A hidden history of World War II, Penguin Press, New York, 2013, 380 pages, ill., 20,40 euro.

1914-1918 l'épuration républicaine

1914-1918 l'épuration républicaine

par Frédéric WINKLER

Ex: http://anti-mythes.blogspot.com

Après le populicide de la révolution, ses horreurs, ses tanneries de peaux humaines et ses déportations, les massacres et les souffrances des ouvriers, le Camp de Conlie, la Commune, le désastre de 1870, arrive la guerre de 1914-1918. Ouvrons la ténébreuse page continuant l’épuration républicaine. En présence de la déformation historique à laquelle nous assistons quotidiennement, il est bon et utile de rappeler que la République en France est le régime le plus inhumain, le plus meurtrier, le plus sanglant de notre histoire. Il a été en même temps le plus ingrat, le plus inique et le plus odieux envers ses combattants et fidèles. Ce régime n'hésita pas à sacrifier inutilement les patriotes, allant même jusqu’à imaginer de brûler leur femmes dans les fours, durant la révolution par furie sanguinaire !!!

Comme la république semble avoir oublié ses alliés dans les milliers de Serbes, venus mourir chez nous. Il n’y a pas si longtemps, c’est à force de bombardements que nous les avons remerciés. La Sainte Russie envoya des forces venues nous rejoindre aussi pour faire face aux prussiens. Le Tsar fut lamentablement abandonné parce que monarque sans doute, par une république agissant contre les trônes. L’Allemagne soutiendra d’ailleurs les révolutionnaires, cassant ainsi le conflit sur le front oriental et ramenant ses forces sur nous… Nous abandonnerons, dans les années qui suivront, nos alliés russes, dans une atroce guerre civile, dont les armées blanches, sauveront l’honneur. La république fit germer la révolution russe par ses idées qui, par l’attrait de fausse liberté d’abord, entraîne les peuples vers les catastrophes les plus sanguinaires. A croire que les peuples n’ont pas de mémoire, cette horreur laissera au monde l’image symbolique de l’innocence du Tsarévitch, comme jadis Louis XVII, et de ses sœurs massacrés, au nom d’une idéologie infernale, créant les pires régimes dictatoriaux, massacrant les peuples, aux ordres cachés de puissances d’argent…

En 1912, nos dirigeants savaient qu'ils allaient engager la France dans une grande guerre. Mais, les élections approchant, ils s'efforçaient de tromper l'opinion publique. Sans entrer dans un quelconque débat idéologique, mais les évènements des Inventaires contre les catholiques, purgeant l’armée d’officiers écartés par religion, l’affaire des Fiches, l’Affaire Dreyfus affaiblissant nos services de renseignement et encore l’armée, permirent à l’Allemagne d’avoir la supériorité sur notre pauvre pays déjà bien affaibli. 1914 c’est la Mobilisation Générale. Dès les premiers jours de la guerre, la France paysanne fut atteinte de plein fouet par cet appel aux armes. Aussitôt la déclaration de guerre, 30 % de la population active masculine est retirée en quelques jours des usines et des champs. Sur les 5 200 000 actifs masculins c’est entre 1 500 000 et 2 millions qui quittent leurs fermes et cela dans les premiers jours du mois d’août, en pleine moisson. On se demande d’ailleurs pourquoi le gouvernement républicain procédait si soudainement à cette « levée en masse » puisque par ailleurs il croyait, comme la plupart des têtes pensantes de l’époque, que le conflit ne durerait que quelques mois. Il faut voir, dans l’improvisation et le désordre qui marquèrent les premiers jours de la Grande Guerre, à la fois l’impéritie et l’incapacité du personnel politique républicain, à l’instar des « grands ancêtres» faisant face 122 ans plus tôt dans la plus complète anarchie aux conflits qu’ils avaient eux-mêmes provoquée.

D’autre part l’influence des idéologies contradictoires secrétées par l’esprit révolutionnaire et démocratique : entre le pseudo-patriotisme jacobin sacrifiant criminellement toute la jeunesse du pays au nom de la « Nation en armes» et un pacifisme humanitaire, vague et utopique, inspirant au gouvernement de la IIIe République l’ordre absurde du recul des armées françaises de 10 km en-deçà de la frontière afin de prouver au monde la volonté pacifique de la France ! N’oublions pas aussi que lors des premiers mois de la guerre, l’équipement du soldat français, était constitué entre-autre d’un simple képi et d’un pantalon rouge garance datant de la fin du XIXème siècle, cela maintenu par la volonté des députés républicains en souvenir des grandes heures de la Révolution… La cavalerie chargeait les lignes ennemis à cheval le sabre au clair, alors qu’en face les Allemands avaient déjà des tenues camouflées, un casque et des mitrailleuses, positionnées en premières lignes, alors que nous y mettions notre infanterie ? Voilà qui en dit long sur le déclin des élites militaires françaises depuis la fin de l’Ancien Régime et les épopées Napoléoniennes, qui d’ailleurs, avaient profités largement des avancées technologiques et de l’armée professionnelle de nos rois.

Les allemands profitèrent, par leurs observateurs, des avancées modernes des conflits mondiaux comme la guerre de Sécession qui terrassa l’Amérique de 1861 à 1865. Nous n’aborderont pas ni les scandales incessants ni l’instabilité de l’Etat républicain, ni l’argent de l’Allemagne soudoyant les journaux français afin d’empêcher tout retour monarchique en France… « Partis pour Berlin la fleur au fusil » et dans le plus complet désordre, les paysans français furent rapidement victimes d’un des plus grands massacre du XXème siècle qui se révèlera particulièrement riche en la matière. En 1918, après quatre ans de furieuses batailles et d’atroces boucheries, 3 millions de paysans sont mobilisés, soit 60% du recensement de 1910 et, quand le 11 novembre 1918, survint l’armistice, il y avait un million et demi de morts, dont 20% de Bretons, désirait-on se débarrasser des fils de chouans ? et d’innombrables blessés et estropiés à vie. Comme l’écrivit Henri Servien dans sa Petite histoire de France : « On peut labourer les friches et reconstruire mais les pertes humaines sont irréparables. Toute une génération ardente et généreuse, une jeunesse d’élite était disparue. Elle ne fut pas remplacée et l’élan du pays fut brisé. »

Car le problème était bien là ! A l’époque des Rois, il n’y avait pas de mobilisation générale. Au Moyen-Âge seul les nobles et les seigneurs avaient le droit de faire la Guerre. Plus tard c’est un système de recrutement dans les campagnes qui permit de grossir les rangs des régiments en fonction des besoins de l’armée. Le paysan avait le choix d’aller se battre ou non. Avec l’arrivé de la république, c’est la conscription qui règne, de 18 à 60 ans, on peut être envoyé à la mort, depuis la fameuse levée en masse des 300 000 hommes en 1793, contre lequel s’était insurgée la Vendée. Du reste, quand on a plus d’homme on mobilise les adolescents comme le fera Napoléon avec ses « Marie-Louise », qui seront décimé à Leipzig ! Anatole France dénonçait lui-même ce système en ces termes : « La honte des républiques et des empires, le crime des crimes sera toujours d’avoir tiré un paysan de la paix doré de ses champs et de sa charrue et de l’avoir enfermé entre les murs d’une caserne pour lui apprendre à tuer un homme »

Ces guerres souvent plus idéologiques qu'utiles coûtèrent sept invasions de plus en plus ruineuses et déchirantes. Seule la période monarchique, qui va de 1815 à 1848, représentait une période de paix et de libération en supprimant le service militaire obligatoire. A part cette transition, la république n’apportait que guerres, luttes civiles et misère… C’est donc au nom de la Liberté et des Droits de l’Homme, que le français de 1914 avait perdu sa liberté d’aller ou de ne pas aller à la guerre ! Les républicains proclamèrent « l’union sacrée » afin d’exiger de la part des opposants politiques de ne plus attaquer la république durant la guerre et d’observer un comportement neutre face au gouvernement. Charles Maurras, leader du mouvement royaliste et nationaliste « l’Action française » acceptera cette union sacrée qu’il qualifiera de « compromis nationaliste ». Ce choix s’avèrera catastrophique car non seulement les royalistes se firent massacrer en première ligne, la république voyant avec satisfaction disparaitre l’élite insurrectionnel royaliste, mais le maintien d’une année de plus dans la guerre révèlera les buts cachés du conflit : la destruction de la monarchie Autrichienne. L’historien Pierre Bécat mit en évidence l’escroquerie de cette union sacrée en rappelant cet épisode : Le ministre Viviani s'écriait : «Tous les réactionnaires se font tuer», et Géraud Richard ami du futur ministre de l'Armement Albert Thomas répondait : « Pendant ce temps nous bourrons de copains toutes les administrations ».

C’est en 1917, que le nouvel empereur, Charles d'Autriche, fit des offres de paix séparée à la France. Le Prince Sixte de Bourbon, qui avait servi d'intermédiaire, a publié, à ce sujet, tout un ouvrage : L'Offre de Paix séparée de l'Autriche, avec deux lettres autographes de l'Empereur et une du Comte Czernin. C'était une occasion inespérée d'arrêter la tuerie, de récupérer nos anciennes provinces, d'en finir avec la domination prussienne et d'en revenir à une ère de paix équilibrée, grâce à l'accord franco-autrichien. Mais l'Autriche était catholique. II fallait donc sauver un Etat protestant. Dans les salons de la Béchellerie, le vieux Rapport disait (v. livre cité) : «...L'Allemagne ne sera pas battue, elle ne peut pas l'être, sa défaite marquerait une régression de l'esprit humain. Songez, le pays de Kant, de Fichte, de Schopenhauer. » Si les poilus avaient su qu'ils faisaient la guerre pour cela !...

Et ce fut dans ces conditions que la République fit massacrer un million d'hommes de plus, pour en arriver à perdre la paix et, par le Traité de Versailles, à jeter les bases d'une nouvelle guerre. Jacques Bainville en fit la prophétie… Tel était l’état d’esprit des dirigeants de la république.

En 1917, il y eut des mutineries. De véritables héros, oui nous disons bien des héros, ont été fusillés, voici dans quelles conditions. On les envoyait à l'attaque, après leur avoir promis une permission. Ils en revenaient après avoir perdu leurs copains et la promesse était oubliée. Il fallait recommencer le lendemain, et puis encore les jours suivants, inlassablement envoyer les maris, les fils, les frères, les cousins et les oncles au carnage. Toujours nos fantassins face aux mitrailleuses allemandes, canons chargés à mitraille et gaz destructeurs qui se régalaient. Charger continuellement, inutilement sous le commandement quelquefois de généraux stupides, comme par une volonté de faire disparaitre le peuple de France dans un déluge de feu. Finalement, les malheureux survivants, voyant que miséricorde se perdait et qu'on se moquait d'eux, se mutinèrent. Clemenceau, dont Daudet disait qu’il était « Un calcul biliaire sculpté dans une tête de mort » et autres complices s'étaient fait la main jadis contre les ouvriers, à Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, à Draveil-Vigneux, on tire sur les ouvriers et la fusillade des viticulteurs à Narbonne en 1907. La république fut le plus antisocial des régimes que la France connut. Quelques poilus de plus ou de moins ne pesaient pas lourd à cette époque. « Je fais la guerre, je fais toujours la guerre », disait Clémenceau le 8 mars 1918 à la tribune de l’Assemblée, pour résumer son jusqu'au-boutisme. Pendant qu’il « faisait la guerre » les poilus eux se faisaient massacrer au front, à moitié enterrés dans l’humidité et la boue, dans la fureur des combats, sous un déluge de feu de sang en affrontant le froid.

Depuis la plus haute antiquité, il n'y a pas de régime au monde qui ait fait massacrer autant d'hommes que les Républiques en France. Aussi bien à l'intérieur qu'à l'extérieur. Lorsque les Spartiates en danger avaient fait appel aux Ilotes, ils ne se comportaient pas plus ignominieusement envers eux que l'on fait les Républiques avec les combattants de la grande guerre. Dans un numéro de cette remarquable publication qu'est «le Touring Club de France», Yvan Christ a décrit «Les Invalides», créées par Louis XIV pour des anciens combattants qui n'étaient, à cette époque-là, que des mercenaires, et que l'on traitait avec mille fois plus d'égards que les Anciens combattants d'aujourd'hui. L’humanité des rois de France était telle, que Louis XV, fut après Fontenoy plébiscité comme grand humaniste européen grâce au fait qu’il fit soigner avec grande attention tous les blessés ennemis, jusqu’à mettre à disposition son propre médecin…

De 1914 à 1919, la république a traité les blessés comme s'ils étaient pis que des galériens. Des boiteux, des blessés de la face, du ventre, des trépanés étaient brutalement renvoyés au front et s'entendaient dire : « Quand vous y serez, vous vous ferez évacuer.» Il fallait des hommes ! Des prisonniers à leur tour passèrent en conseil de guerre, comme étant suspects de s'être rendus. De 1919 à 1940, et même ultérieurement, les blessés de guerre ont été traités comme du bétail. Nombreux sont ceux qui ont été dépouillés au passage de certificats d'origine de blessure ou d'autres pièces qu'ils n'ont pu récupérer. On leur marchande un pourcentage d'invalidité comme un morceau de sucre en temps de disette. De grands blessés, qui traînent leur misère durant plus de cinquante ans, n'ont même pas et n'auront jamais la Légion d'honneur réservée à des chanteurs, banquiers, comiques ou serviteurs du régime...

On se demande ce que penserait Louis XIV qui avait créé les Invalides pour le respect de ses soldats. Et Napoléon pour qui la Légion d'honneur devait récompenser surtout les faits de guerre...

C'est bien en véritables ilotes que la République a transformé ses combattants. Quant à ceux de la guerre de 1914, elle a attendu ce jour fatidique où ils ont tous disparu, pour entamer son hypocrite mascarade d’hommage au centenaire de la Grande Guerre, en cette année 2014.

Mais arrêtons-nous un instant, pensons à la vie que fut celle de tous ceux qui survécurent, handicapés ou non, ne pouvant retrouver les fonctions d’avant le conflit et pensant chaque nuit à leur copains râlant dans les tranchées embouées ou mourant ignorés de tous, abandonnés. Demandez-vous, ce que fut la vie de ces femmes, mères ou épouses, sœurs ou fiancée devant l’attente interminable des portraits et photos. Elles devaient trouver le temps long devant les minutes et les heures interminables défilant avant un retour éventuel ou l’horrible nouvelle. Et toutes celles qui resteront seules à jamais, blessés jusqu’au plus profond d’elles-mêmes devant l’indifférence d’un système qui n’a rien d’humain, puisque bâti sur le sang… Et toutes celles qui attendront des nouvelles qui n’arriveront jamais car nombreux seront disparus tout simplement…

Demain il y aura très certainement de futures guerres à mener car ainsi vont les hommes, et l’histoire de notre pays nous le prouve. Alors il ne tient qu’à nous de ne pas tomber dans le panneau. Ce jour-là, c’est la république qu’il faudra combattre et surtout ne plus commettre l’erreur de la confondre avec la France. Il n’y a pas de régime idéal mais seulement des gouvernements plus humains. Il ne tient qu’à vous de découvrir comment vivaient nos ancêtres afin de comprendre combien la révolution et la république vous a menti. Le règne de l’usure et de l’argent dirige la république aux ordres du nouvel ordre mondial, libérez-vous et brisez vos chaînes. Ouvrez les archives, textes, élections, guildes, contrats, droits corporatifs d’avant 1789 et vous comprendrez que seul un Roi peut être humain…

Notre jour viendra

Frédéric Winkler

http://www.actionroyaliste.com/articles/regard-empirique/1306-1914-2014-un-centenaire-de-trop--

La RDA faisait des affaires avec Pinochet!

La RDA faisait des affaires avec Pinochet!

MUNICH – Après le coup d’Etat militaire de septembre 1973 au Chili contre le gouvernement socialiste d’Allende, la RDA communiste, inféodée alors au bloc soviétique, a manifesté bruyamment sa solidarité avec les victimes de ce putsch et a amorcé une propagande véhémente contre le régime militaire du Général Augusto Pinochet, suivie en cela par toutes les gauches et par les “bobos” de toutes catégories. Le monde soviétique et les médias occidentaux faisaient cause commune, sans jamais démontrer que le régime de Pinochet était un banc d’essai pour l’économie néo-libérale des “Chicago Boys”. La RDA accorde alors l’asile politique à plus de deux mille Chiliens et rompt toutes les relations diplomatiques avec Santiago. Mais cette hostilité, savamment mise en scène selon toutes les règles de l’art de l’agitprop, ne fut qu’un seul côté de la médaille. Un historien contemporain, Georg Dufner, d’origine chilienne mais installé en Allemagne, a examiné attentivement les documents de la STASI (la police politique est-allemande) et a consigné le fruit de ses recherches dans un essai paru dans les très sérieux et très scientifiques “Vierteljahrhefte für Zeitgeschichte”, n°4/2013 (“Cahiers trimestriels d’histoire contemporaine”). Dans ce texte, on peut apprendre que “le gouvernement de la RDA avait décidé de poursuivre son commerce extérieur avec le Chili” car ce pays andin “jouait un rôle tout particulier dans la fourniture de biens d’importation et de matières premières à la RDA”. Pour cette raison, entièrement pragmatique, “l’Etat allemand des ouvriers et paysans” a gardé les meilleures relations économiques avec la junte néo-libérale, en dépit de sa propagande officielle. Dans les années 1974 et 1975, les relations économico-commerciales entre la RDA et le régime de Pinochet ont même connu leur apogée, ce que Berlin-Est cherchait bien entendu à garder secret.

Ces faits, incontournables, montrent que les langage propagandistes et les démonisations sont des discours destinés à berner les gogos. Et que tous les gauchistes, mâles et femelles, qui nous ont bassiné les oreilles dans les années 70 à propos de Pinochet, de ses pompes et de ses oeuvres, étaient bel et bien de profonds imbéciles, des manipulés sans cervelle, dont les héritiers actuels sont encore de plus grosses andouilles, plus lourdauds encore quand ils énoncent leurs “vérités” de gauche ou leurs nouvelles “vérités”, cette fois habillées de sottises néo-libérales.

Source: “Junge Freiheit”, Berlin, n°49/2013; http://www.jungefreiheit.de . Pour le travail de l’historien Georg Dufner, voir http://www.ifz-muenchen.de ).

Maurras, inlassable avocat des langues régionales

Maurras, inlassable avocat des langues régionales

 

Ex: http://anti-mythes.blogspot.com

 

 

De ses tout premiers engagements de jeunesse, Maurras a-t-il conservé l’idée que décentralisation et défense des langues régionales vont de pair ? C’est une hypothèse naturelle, tant la chose allait de soi dans la Déclaration des jeunes félibres fédéralistes de 1892. Mais ce n’est qu’une hypothèse, qu’il faudrait étayer par des études sérieuses qui, à notre connaissance, n’existent pas.

Lorsque Maurras construit son corpus doctrinal sur la République centralisatrice, les problématiques linguistiques n’y figurent pas en première ligne, ne serait-ce que parce tous les territoires ne sont pas concernés, ou pas également concernés. On pourrait dès lors formuler l’hypothèse inverse : le combat de Maurras pour la décentralisation, qui a donné lieu à un nombre considérable d’écrits, et son combat pour la langue et la culture provençales, accessoirement pour le breton ou l’alsacien, ont été menés quasi indépendamment l’un de l’autre, avec des rencontres qui ne sont que fortuites.

 

Pourquoi se poser cette question ? Simplement parce que l’ouvrage de synthèse que Maurras consacre aux langues régionales et à leur enseignement, Jarres de Biot, date de 1951, soit un an avant sa mort, alors que son équivalent L’Idée de la décentralisation a été composé en 1898.

 

Un élément de réponse se trouve peut-être dans l’observation du comportement du pays légal. Tout député, même le plus pénétré d’idéologie jacobine, sera un jour en butte au pouvoir d’un préfet et en tirera la conclusion que, s’il avait été libre de ses mouvements et de ses décisions, les choses seraient allé mieux et plus vite. Il y a donc chez chaque élu un décentralisateur qui sommeille et, lorsqu’il est dans l’opposition, il trouvera aisément matière à faire une proposition en ce sens. Dans L’Idée de la décentralisation, Maurras dresse l’impressionnante liste de ces joutes parlementaires, analysées avec minutie, et nul doute qu’il a continué à les suivre avec attention tout le restant à vivre de la III^e République. Le scénario en a toujours été le même ; le parti au pouvoir enterre le projet, quelle que soit sa couleur, et c’est l’un des siens qui en représentera un autre semblable lorsque le gouvernement sera renversé, ce qui était fréquent à l’époque.

 

Les propositions en faveur des langues régionales, également récurrentes et également toujours retoquées, n’obéissaient pas à la même logique. Elles n’étaient présentées que par des élus des régions concernées, Bretons, Basques, Catalans… qui pouvaient également être décentralisateurs, mais qui souvent ne l’étaient pas. Maurras eut d’ailleurs très tôt affaire à certains dirigeants du Félibrige qui étaient de farouches jacobins. Ceci l’a sans doute amené à faire la part des choses.

 

Jarres de Biot, que nous publions aujourd’hui et qui n’a été tiré à l’époque qu’en édition de luxe à 500 exemplaires, est sans doute, avec Le Mont de Saturne qui est d’un tout autre genre, le plus achevé, le plus documenté, le mieux argumenté des textes écrits par le Maurras d’après guerre.

 

Sa publication fait suite à des polémiques qui se sont déroulées en 1950 pendant la discussion de la première loi républicaine sur l’enseignement des langues régionales, dite « loi Deixonne ». L’un des principaux adversaires de cette mesure fut l’académicien Georges Duhamel qui sonna le tocsin dans plusieurs articles du Figaro. Jarres de Biot est en fait la réponse de Maurras aux articles de Georges Duhamel ; il n’évoque pas la loi Deixonne en tant que telle.

Il n’est pas inutile de resituer ces événements dans leur contexte. Tout a commencé par l’initiative de deux députés communistes bretons, Pierre Hervé et l’aïeul Marcel Cachin. Ceux-ci exhument une proposition de loi déposée avant guerre par un député démocrate-chrétien nommé Trémintin, laquelle concernait l’enseignement de la langue bretonne à l’école primaire. Ils la rajeunissent quelque peu et la déposent, le 16 mai 1947. Mais juste avant, le 5 mai, le gouvernement Ramadier se sépare des ministres communistes ; c’est le début de la guerre froide en France. La bataille pour la langue bretonne commence donc dans un climat d’affrontement violent qui lui confère un enjeu inattendu ; rapidement, le MRP s’y associe, ce qui met les socialistes en minorité. Ceux-ci tiennent certes le gouvernement, mais sur ce point précis ils doivent composer et finissent par nommer un de leurs, Maurice Deixonne, rapporteur du projet de loi, avec mission occulte de le saboter autant que possible.

 

Deixonne est un gros bosseur, qui de son propre aveu ne connaît rien au sujet, et qui de plus a sans doute quelques fréquentations ultra-pacifistes d’avant guerre à se faire pardonner, la plupart de ses amis d’alors ayant fini dans la collaboration. C’est un orphelin qui s’est fait lui-même à coup de brillantes études ; mais dès la fin des années 1920 il interrompt sa carrière universitaire pour s’engager au parti socialiste. Sa puissance de travail impressionne ; d’ailleurs sa la loi sur les langues régionales, qui porte son nom, ne figure même pas dans sa biographie de l’Assemblée, tant il y a fait d’autres choses depuis jugées plus importantes…

 

Il s’attelle à la tâche et finalement, contre toute attente, réussit à finaliser un texte consensuel qui sera adopté par l’Assemblée le 30 décembre 1949.

 

Entre temps il sera parvenu à faire la jonction avec les députés catalans, puis à intégrer le basque et l’occitan, terme préféré après de longues escarmouches à ceux de provençal ou de langue d’oc. Il aura ainsi pratiquement reconstitué le contenu de la circulaire Carcopino de décembre 1941, qui par la force des choses ne concernait ni le flamand, ni l’alsacien, ni le lorrain, et qui a été abolie à la Libération.

Il reste alors, ainsi fonctionnait la quatrième République, à faire adopter le texte par le Conseil des ministres. Cela durera toute l’année 1950, jusqu’à promulgation de la loi le 11 janvier 1951. Cette année 1950 verra la polémique gagner la presse, l’Académie Française et tout le monde enseignant, avec d’un côté une alliance de fait entre communistes et MRP, auxquels on peut joindre l’Action française, et de l’autre les jacobins de tout bord, dénonçant les risques épouvantables qu’une heure facultative de langue bretonne à l’école fera immanquablement courir à l’unité française.

Le texte final de la loi est plus que modeste. Les mots « facultatif », « dans la mesure du possible », reviennent sans cesse. Le ton à l’égard des langues concernées est volontiers condescendant : il est question de « richesse du folklore et des arts populaires » ; rien de bien subversif, et cependant cela a conduit Georges Duhamel à pousser des cris d’orfraie au long de cinq éditoriaux d’avril et de mai 1950. Avec au moins une conséquence heureuse,celle d’avoir incité Maurras à écrire ce qu’il avait sur le cœur, sans doute depuis cinquante ans et plus.

Il y a eu deux éditions de Jarres de Biot, comportant en plus du texte lui-même des illustrations et des poèmes. Nous avons noté les variantes entre les deux éditions, et reproduit l’ensemble des illustrations. Nous publierons en revanche les poèmes à part, dans un autre cadre, car ils n’ont aucun rapport avec la loi Deixonne ni avec Georges Duhamel.

http://maurras.net/2013/03/02/maurras-inlassable-avocat-des-langues-regionales/#more-1901

La poudrière des Balkans

La poudrière des Balkans...

La Nouvelle Revue d'Histoire est en kiosque (n° 70, janvier - février 2014).

Le dossier central est consacré aux Balkans comme zone de déchirement et de conflit tout au long du XXe siècle. On peut y lire, notamment,  des articles de Philippe Conrad ("Histoire des Balkans" ; "1914-1915, la Serbie dans la guerre"), de Tancrède Josseran ("Les guerres balkaniques de 1912-1913"), de Gérard Hocmard ("Les conflits balkaniques et la politique britannique"), de Rémy Porte ("L'Armée d'Orient 1915-1919"), d'Yves Morel ("L'échec du royaume yougoslave") de Martin Benoist ("L’État oustachi de Croatie"), de Frédéric Le Moal ("Le combat perdu des tchetniks"), de Thierry Buron ("Churchill et les résistances yougoslave et grecque") et de Alexis Troude ("Yougoslavie : une désintégration programmée").

Hors dossier, on pourra lire, en particulier, un entretien avec le général, et historien,  André Bach ("Commémoration du centenaire de 1914") ainsi que des articles d'Emma Demeester ("Gaston d'Orléans, un adversaire de Richelieu"), de Rémi Soulier ("Michel de Nostredame, un médecin des âmes"), de Jean Kappel ("L'aventure française au Sahara"), de Pierre de Meuse ("Quand la France était en Syrie"), d'André Cubzac ("L’avènement et le triomphe du marché") et d'Yves Nantillé ("Le septennat de Giscard d'Estaing").

 

La Démocratie au Moyen Âge !

by Morpheus

 

Ex: http://www.cercledesvolontaires.fr

 

En dépit de la vague romantique qui, au XIXe siècle, va entreprendre une réhabilitation partielle et souvent mythique du récit « historique » de cette longue époque (un millénaire) que les érudits de la renaissance ont reléguée au rang de « moyen-âge », l’imagerie commune en garde encore des idées complètement fausses : le moyen-âge, pour beaucoup, c’est l’époque où le petit peuple, ignorant et analphabète, est soumis au diktat implacable d’un ordre politique militaire monarchique, et d’un ordre spirituel clérical séculaire et dogmatique ; c’est l’époque des seigneurs, de l’inquisition, des sorcières et des bûchers ; c’est l’époque des guerres incessantes, des croisades sanglantes et de la peste ; en résumé, le moyen-âge serait une époque obscure, sombre, « gothique ». Voici ce que nous en dit Michel FRAGONARD :

« (…) l’histoire représente, au XIXe siècle, un enjeu « politique » essentiel (en témoigne d’ailleurs l’attention des gouvernements, dont l’action d’un Guizot, lui-même historien, est le meilleur exemple) : sa promotion est inséparable de l’affirmation du sentiment national, fruit à la fois de la Révolution française et des courants romantiques allemands ; et l’un des enjeux essentiels est la question des origines nationales. On comprend alors l’intérêt des historiens, initiateurs et propagateurs de cette conscience nationale, pour le Moyen Age, aux fondements de la nation. Intérêt non dépourvu de considérations idéologiques : au moment où, en France, conscience nationale et aspiration démocratique sont intimement liées dans une mystique du « peuple » (notion combien ambiguë), l’œuvre d’Augustin Thierry (Récits des temps mérovingiens, Essais sur la formation et les progrès de l’histoire du Tiers État) est sous-tendue par une thèse historico-ethnique (les origines proprement « gauloises » du peuple français, à contre-pied d’une historiographie « aristocratique » insistant sur les origines franques). Dans cette quête historique d’un Moyen Age où se trouvent les sources de la nation, l’exemple le plus illustre, en France, est celui de Michelet, qui consacre six volumes de sa monumentale Histoire de France (inachevée) au Moyen Age et qui, dans ses autres ouvrages, revient régulièrement sur la période (voir la Sorcière). »

Il nous suffit de voir à quoi ressemble ce mouvement culturel « gothique » né dans les années 1990, qui mêle à la fois l’imagerie mythique de ce moyen-âge du XIXe siècle et les idées les plus noires que le quidam se fait de cette ère. Vêtus et maquillé de noir ou de sombre, visages tristes ou désespérés, véhicules « morts-vivants » d’un romantisme lui-même sombre, noir et désenchanté.

Que dire alors de l’idée que l’on se fait au sujet de la politique au moyen-âge ? A l’évocation d’une démocratie au moyen-âge, la plupart vont faire les yeux ronds et se dire « mais de quoi parle-t-il ? ». Moyen-âge et démocratie sont deux termes que la plupart considèrent antinomiques. Or, la réalité est bien différente. La démocratie était plus vivace durant la majeure partie du moyen-âge et de la renaissance, qu’elle ne le fut depuis la Révolution. En fait, c’est la Révolution qui va éteindre un ensemble de pratiques démocratiques populaires qui perdurera jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle.

Ce que je découvre, en parcourant l’excellent livre de Francis Dupuis-Déri « Démocratie. Histoire politique d’un mot aux États-Unis et en France », est entre autre une déconstruction radicale de ce moyen-âge obscurantiste que l’élite contre révolutionnaire et le « siècle des Lumières » a durablement imprimé dans nos esprits. Permettez-moi de partager avec vous les quelques passages de ce livre qui nous éclairent sur cette activité démocratique vivace au moyen-âge.

« Au Moyen Age et pendant la Renaissance européenne, des milliers de villages disposaient d’une assemblée d’habitants où se prenaient en commun les décisions au sujet de la collectivité. Les « communautés d’habitants », qui disposaient même d’un statut juridique, ont fonctionné sur le mode de l’autogestion pendant des siècles. Les rois et les nobles se contentaient de gérer les affaires liées à la guerre ou à leurs domaines privés, d’administrer la justice et de mobiliser leurs sujets par des corvées. Les autorités monarchiques ou aristocratiques ne s’ingéraient pas dans les affaires de la communauté, qui se réunissait en assemblée pour délibérer au sujet d’enjeux politiques, communaux, financiers, judiciaires et paroissiaux[1]. »

Voilà déjà qui tranche avec les images d’une monarchie omnipotente et omniprésente, gérant, en collaboration avec l’Église, tous les faits et gestes de leurs sujets. En réalité, l’aristocratie nobiliaire avait bien d’autres chats à fouetter que de s’occuper des affaires du peuple, et elle laissait donc volontiers à ses gens le soin de s’occuper de leurs propres affaires. Le peuple disposait donc de fait d’une large autonomie, autrement plus grande que nous n’en disposons actuellement sous le régime prétendument représentatif. Et cette autonomie s’étendait sur des domaines importants et essentiels, comme nous allons le voir.

« On discutait ainsi des moissons, du partage de la récolte commune ou de sa mise en vente, de la coupe de bois en terre communale, de la réfection des ponts, puits et moulins, de l’embauche de l’instituteur, des bergers, de l’horloger, des gardes-forestiers, parfois même du curé, des gardiens lorsque sévissaient les brigands, les loups ou les épidémies. On y désignait ceux qui serviraient dans la milice, on débattait de l’obligation d’héberger la troupe royale ou de l’utilité de dépêcher un notable pour aller soumettre à la cour des doléances au nom de la communauté. »

Imaginez que, dans votre ville ou votre commune, de nos jours, vous puissiez, par le biais d’une assemblée communale publique, décider en commun de la répartition de la récolte commune ou de sa mise en vente (alors qu’aujourd’hui, les paysans – souvent les « serfs » modernes de l’industrie agro-alimentaire – se voient imposer leur cotât de production, les prix de vente, le cahier des charges et jusqu’aux semences qu’ils peuvent utiliser), la réfections ou l’édification des ouvrages d’art (routes, voiries communales, ponts, éoliennes, barrages, écluses, etc.), de qui, parmi les habitants, servira dans la police municipale (qui est maintenant un corps centralisé au service de l’Etat, et non du peuple). Impensable, n’est-ce pas ? Pourtant, les assemblées d’habitants étaient dynamiques.

« Il y avait environ dix assemblées par an, parfois une quinzaine. Elles se déroulaient sous les arbres (le chêne), au cimetière, devant ou dans l’église, ou encore dans un champ. Bref, dans un lieu public, car il était interdit de tenir l’assemblée dans un lieu privé, pour éviter les magouilles. Une étude statistique de quelque 1500 procès-verbaux indique que ces assemblées comptaient en moyenne 27 participants, soit une représentation d’environ 60% des foyers des communautés, et pouvaient même accueillir jusqu’à quelques centaines d’individus, dont 10 à 20% de femmes. Mais à l’époque, dix personnes suffisaient pour former « un peuple » et tenir une assemblée. La participation à l’assemblée était obligatoire et une amende était imposée aux absents quand l’enjeu était important. Un quorum des deux tiers devait alors être respecté pour que la décision collective soit valide, par exemple celle d’aliéner une partie des biens communs de la communauté (bois ou pâturage). Il était si important que la communauté s’exprime que même lorsque la peste a frappé dans la région de Nîmes, en 1649, l’assemblée a été convoquée dans la campagne sur les deux rives d’une rivière, pour permettre de réunir à la fois les personnes ayant fui la ville et celles qui y étaient restées. En général, le vote était rapide, à main levée, par acclamation ou selon le système des « ballote » distinguant les « pour » des « contre » par des boules noires et blanches. Lorsque la décision était importante, les noms des personnes votantes étaient portés au procès-verbal. »

Ainsi, le peuple, au moyen-âge, parvenait à s’autogérer sur tout un ensemble de domaines considérés non comme « privés », mais comme publiques, car à l’inverse de nous, les « modernes » atomisés par une culture du chacun pour soi (la culture individualiste que nous devons à l’origine aux physiocrates du XVIIIe siècle et à leurs successeurs libéraux et capitalistes du XIXe et du XXe siècle), nos ancêtres « médiévaux » avaient conscience de l’interdépendance mutuelle dans laquelle ils étaient, et la majeure partie des ressources produites par la terre étaient considérées comme un ensemble de richesses communes, non comme des richesses privées. Cela n’empêchait pas le commerce, l’artisanat, ni même une certaine forme d’industrie. Ils parvenaient, en dépit de leurs intérêts individuels, à s’entendre et à gérer eux-mêmes ces ressources en commun, chose qui nous semblent aujourd’hui hors de portée – il suffit, pour s’en convaincre, de voir les commentaires récurrents qui décrient l’apathie populaire et considère, aujourd’hui, la masse comme incapable de débattre et de décider communément de ses propres intérêts. Ainsi, il serait impossible aux hommes « modernes » de ce XXIe siècle de faire ce que les paysans « incultes » du moyen-âge faisaient couramment ? Si cela est vrai, pouvons-nous encore parler de « progrès de la modernité » ? Ne devrions-nous pas plutôt faire le terrible constat de la régression imposée par cette « modernité » ?

« La démocratie médiévale, bien vivante alors, mais aujourd’hui si méconnue, permettait au peuple de traverser de longs mois sans contact direct avec des représentants de la monarchie, une institution qui offrait finalement très peu de services à sa population composée de sujets, non de citoyens. En d’autres termes : un territoire et une population pouvaient être soumis à plusieurs types de régimes politiques simultanément, soit un régime autoritaire (monarchie pour le royaume, aristocratie pour la région) et un régime égalitaire (démocratie locale ou professionnelle). »

 

 

On rêverait, de nos jours, de disposer de cette autonomie et de ce régime égalitaire, rien qu’au niveau local de nos villes ou de nos communes. Or, même cela nous est refusé, et cette simple idée fait se dresser un mur de défit et de mépris qui, au moyen-âge ou à la renaissance, aurait donné lieu à une « jacquerie », une révolte justifiée du peuple contre l’oppression d’un pouvoir par trop dictatorial et jugé tyrannique. En Espagne, les autorités gouvernementales ont mis leurs institutions judiciaires en marche pour détruire cette expérience unique d’autogestion réussie dans la petite ville andalouse de Marinaleda, dont le succès jette une lumière crue sur l’échec de la politique libérale nationale. Décidément, les « élites » libérales, de gauche comme de droite, n’aiment pas la démocratie, et ils le montrent de façon brutale. Cet événement récent montre ce qui se produisit à la Révolution et qui signa durablement le glas de l’expérience démocratique populaire.

« Les communautés d’habitants et les guildes de métiers perdent peu à peu de leur autonomie politique non pas en raison d’un dysfonctionnement de leurs pratiques démocratiques, qui se poursuivent dans certains cas jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle, mais plutôt en raison de la montée en puissance de l’État, de plus en plus autoritaire et centralisateur. [...] Or, si la démocratie locale peut bien s’accommoder d’un roi et même l’honorer, c’est dans la mesure où il se contente de rendre justice et de vivre surtout des revenus de ses domaines. De nouveaux prélèvements fiscaux et l’élargissement de la conscription militaire sont perçus dans les communautés comme le résultat de mauvaises décisions du roi ou de ses conseillers, et comme une transgression inacceptable et révoltante des coutumes et des droits acquis. L’assemblée d’habitants est alors un espace où s’organise la résistance face à cette montée en puissance de l’État. »

Voilà ce que l’élite contre-révolutionnaire – les « patriotes » et les « pères fondateurs » du XVIIIe siècle, ont très bien compris, et voilà pourquoi ils se sont attaché à décrier cette population agissante. Jugeons donc de cette sentence de ce procureur de la république qui este contre Babeuf dans un procès en trahison – et l’accuse par ailleurs d’être un « anarchiste » :

« Qui oserait calculer tous les terribles effets de la chute de cette masse effrayante de prolétaires, multipliée par la débauche, par la fainéantise, par toutes les passions, et par tous les vices qui pullulent dans une nation corrompue, se précipitant tout à coup sur la classe des propriétaires et des citoyens sages, industrieux et économes ? Quel horrible bouleversement que l’anéantissement de ce droit de propriété, base universelle et principale d’ordre social ! Plus de propriété ! Que deviennent à l’instant les arts ? Que devient l’industrie ?[2] »

Que voulait Babeuf ? Selon lui, la société était divisée en deux classes aux intérêts opposés, soit l’élite et le peuple. Chacune voulait la république, mais l’une la voulait bourgeoise et aristocratique, tandis que l’autre entendais l’avoir faite populaire et démocratique. Populaire et démocratique ? Vous n’y pensez pas !

L’interdiction de s’assembler est alors justifiée par un discours qui relève de l’agoraphobie politique : on présente les assemblées comme tumultueuses et contrôlées par les pauvres. En 1784, l’intendant de Bourgogne explique ainsi que : « ces assemblées où tout le monde est admis, où les gens les moins dociles font taire les citoyens sages et instruits, ne peuvent être qu’une source de désordre ». Le ton est donné. Ce genre de discours, nous ne le connaissons que trop, encore aujourd’hui. Pourtant, l’historien Antoine Follian écrit qu’il « n’y a probablement pas plus de  »tumultes » au XVIIIe siècle qu’au XVIe siècle. Soit les autorités s’offusquent de choses qui n’en vallent pas la peine, soit ce n’est qu’un prétexte pour servir une politique de resserrement des assemblées sur les  »notables » ».

Parfois, le rejet des principes démocratiques sont moins virulents, tout en étant pourtant suffisamment catégoriques pour en rejeter l’idée même. Ainsi Bresson écrit dans ses Réflexions sur les bases d’une constitution, par le citoyen[3] :

« Je sais fort bien ce qu’est une république démocratique ; mais je ne peux concevoir une constitution démocratique pour un pays qui ne peut être une république démocratique. Dans une république démocratique, le peuple en corps a le débat des lois, adopte ou rejette la loi proposée, décide la paix ou la guerre, juge même dans certaines circonstances. Cela est impossible, physiquement impossible en France ; ainsi la France ne peut être une république démocratique : c’est mentir à la nature même des choses que de la nommer ainsi[4]. »

De l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, dans les États-Unis émergeant de leur propre révolution, d’autres expriment la même idée, pour les mêmes raisons, ainsi par exemple le fédéraliste Noah Webster qui explique :

« Dans un gouvernement parfait, tous les membres d’une société devraient être présents, et chacun devrait donner son suffrage dans les actes législatifs, par lesquels il sera lié. Cela est impraticable dans les grands États ; et même si cela l’était, il est très peu probable qu’il s’agisse du meilleur mode de législation. Cela a d’ailleurs été pratiqué dans les États libres de l’Antiquité ; et ce fut la cause de malédictions innombrables. Pour éviter ces malédictions, les modernes ont inventé la doctrine de la représentation, qui semble être la perfection du gouvernement humain. »

On voit bien, aujourd’hui, la damnation à laquelle nous a mené, en un peu plus de deux siècles de « perfection du gouvernement humain », la représentation ! son bilan à lui seul réduit en miette les sophismes des pères fondateurs et révèle surtout que leur dialectique avait essentiellement pour vocation le service de leurs intérêts de classe sociale dominante, et que ces arguments étaient très certainement fondés… pour décrier l’aristocratie bourgeoise !

De  nos jours, les mêmes sophismes et les mêmes raisonnements antidémocratiques, exprimant une agoraphobie politique (détestation de la démocratie dite « directe ») culturellement imposée depuis deux siècles à l’inconscient collectif, se retrouvent jusque dans la conception populaire qui, comme par une sorte de syndrome de Stockholm collectif, se fait elle-même, parfois, défenseur de cette rhétorique qui peut se résumer en quatre points, comme le synthétise Francis Dupuis-Déri dans son livre :

« 1) le « peuple », poussé par ses passions, serait déraisonnable en matière politique et ne saurait gouverner pour le bien commun. »

> Je ne dirais pas les choses autrement au sujet des gouvernements prétendument représentatif et de cette « élite » oligarchique qui nous gouverne depuis deux siècles. Pour le dire autrement : « c’est c’ui qui dit qui est » (désolé, mais c’est vraiment là qu’on en est !).

« 2) conséquemment, des démagogues prendraient inévitablement le contrôle de l’assemblée par la manipulation. »

> En conséquence, des lobbys financiers et industriels prennent inévitablement le contrôle de l’assemblée par la corruption et la manipulation, tandis que les démagogues divisent les peuples dans de faux enjeux politiques de façade, laissant libre court en coulisses aux magouilles politiques les plus scandaleuses.

« 3) l’agora deviendrait inévitablement un lieu où les factions s’affrontent et la majorité impose sa tyrannie à la minorité, ce qui signifie généralement qu’en démocratie (directe), les pauvres, presque toujours majoritaires, opprimeraient les riches, presque toujours minoritaires. »

> L’agora devient le lieu où des factions s’affrontent sur des enjeux factices (au travers les affrontement des partis politiques pour accéder ou conserver le pouvoir), permettant toujours aux minorités (généralement les plus riches) de l’emporter sur la majorité (généralement les plus pauvres ou les moins bien nantis).

« 4) enfin, la démocratie directe peut être bien adaptée au monde antique et à une cité, mais elle n’est pas adaptée au monde moderne, où l’unité de base est la nation, trop nombreuse et dispersée pour permettre une assemblée délibérante. »

> Dès lors, l’oligarchie (travestie en pseudo démocratie « moderne ») est bien adaptée au gouvernement des États modernes libéraux, et toute forme de démocratie, même locale, est une entrave inacceptable à la main mise des marchés sur les ressources et à l’exploitation des travailleurs actifs, toujours majoritaires, par la minorité rentière passive, toujours minoritaire. Francis Dupuis-Déri est très clair sur un point essentiel :

« L’idée et l’idéal de « république » a déterminé en grande partie la formation du régime électoral libéral que nous connaissons aujourd’hui sous le nom de « démocratie ». Donc, l’idée de « démocratie » n’a pas joué de rôle déterminant dans l’instauration des démocraties modernes libérales pour la simple et bonne raison que les patriotes les plus influents et leurs partisans étaient animés par un idéal républicain. La république représentait le régime modèle de patriotes notoires [...]. »

C’est donc dire – et là je m’adresse tout spécialement à vous, amis français (je suis Belge) – que la république fut, a toujours été, et est encore l’enterrement définitif de tout projet de (vraie) démocratie. En ne cessant, comme une antienne, de vous référer à « la République »[5], vous vous faites défenseur d’un régime qui dès l’origine et à toutes les époques fut instauré pour empêcher la démocratie et imposer le dictat d’une minorité possédante et dominante sur une majorité dépossédée et dominée. Si j’étais français, je ne militerais donc certainement pas pour une « VIème République », mais bien pour une « Première Démocratie ».

Au minimum, il nous faut reconquérir cette précieuse et vitale autonomie communale que même la vile engeance monarchique accordait aux gueux que furent nos ancêtres, et que nous refusent avec force et obstination nos prétendus représentants « démocratiquement élus » (cherchez l’erreur). Si nous ne nous en montrons pas capable, alors que la malédiction de la tyrannie oligarchique et ploutocratique continue à s’abattre implacablement sur nous et qu’elle étouffe à jamais nos plaintes et nos cris !

Nous pourrons alors à nouveau aller crever dans les tranchées en chantant avec Jacques Brel « Oui not’ Monsieur, oui not’ bon Maître ».

Comme en ’14…

Morpheus

 

---

[1] Henry Bardeau, « De l’origine des assemblées d’habitants », Droit romain : du mandatum pecuniae – Droit français : les assemblées générales des communautés d’habitants en France du XIIIe siècle à la Révolution, Paris, Arthur Rousseau, 1893, p. 63.

[2] Gérard Walter, op. cit., p. 230-231.

[3] Où l’on peut voir que l’idée de Étienne Chouard n’a rien de neuf et fut bel et bien menée – et tuée dans l’œuf – au moment de la Révolution.

[4] Jean-Baptiste Marie-François Bresson, op. cit., p. 2-3.

[5] Prenez donc, s’il vous plaît, un peu de recul et montrez-vous, juste un moment, autocritique, et vous verrez à quel point ce mot de « république » vous empoisonne l’esprit et obscurcit ce que votre discernement pourrait éclairer : les républiques n’ont jamais été des démocraties, mais au contraire, furent toujours des oligarchies.

William Joyce

William Joyce

By Kerry Bolton

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

William Joyce, more infamously known to history as “Lord Haw Haw,” the epitome of a British Traitor, was hanged on the basis of a passport technicality on January 3, 1946. Like the name “Quisling” (see Ralph Hewin’s excellent biography Quisling: Prophet Without Honour) much nonsense persists about Joyce. 

The following is redacted from my introduction to William Joyce’s Twilight Over England ^[2] (London: Black House Publishing, 2013). The second part of the introduction, not included here, examines the primary points of Joyce’s book, the continuing relevance of which is its cogent criticism of Free Trade liberalism and international finance.

***

Twenty-five years ago I was told a little anecdote by a work colleague, a middle aged Englishman. He said that as a small lad in England he and his friends were one Christmas eve singing carols to earn some pocket money. One household they came to was particularly memorable for him during those Depression years. A gentleman answered the door, invited the children inside and gave them each not only a cake but also a shilling. What struck my work colleague all those years later, still, was not only the generosity of the amount each child had been given, but more particularly, that someone from the ‘middle class’, invited a group of working class children in to the household where they received their cakes and coins. Such lack of social snobbery was a rarity that my work colleague had never forgotten. My English friend concluded by stating that the kind benefactor was named William Joyce.

My English friend was no Nazi; not even vaguely ‘right-wing’. His anecdote on this humanity of William Joyce, enduringly hated as a traitor, whose very name, as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, as he was dubbed by the Allied propaganda machine, is Britain’s equivalent to Norway’s Quisling, and America’s Benedict Arnold. Joyce, as a British ‘Nazi’, is automatically regarded as a rogue, a lunatic, an apologist for mass murder and aggression, a fool, or any combination thereof. Yet the anecdote from my English friend’s childhood betrays a human side to the likes of William Joyce that just maybe indicates the he was none of those things, but a man of entirely different character. For in Twilight Over England, written while Joyce’s beloved Britain – yes, beloved Britain – was at war with Germany, and while Joyce had made the fateful decision that siding with those who were fighting Britain was the greatest manifestation of that love of Britain, we have the testament of a man deeply anguished at the level to which his people had been reduced by a rapacious system. That this system of international finance and Free Trade is more fully enthroned today and over more of the world than in Joyce’s time shows the relevance of this volume for the present and foreseeable future. In Twilight Over England we might discern – if we open our minds, and for a little while at least, leave behind the prejudgements and the victor’s hateful propaganda – the historical circumstances, centuries in the making, that brought this Briton to a martyr’s death.

Indeed, J A Cole, as objective a biographer that one could expect, described Joyce as ‘intelligent, well-educated, dedicated, hardworking, fluent and sharp-tongued’.[1] Although critical of Joyce, Cole also described him as ‘so unlike the stereotype which fear and prejudice had created’.[2] As a paid broadcaster for the Germans during the war, Joyce retained a character devoid of egotism and vanity, living frugally, refusing pay raises and perks other than cigarettes, and only being persuaded with some difficulty to buy himself a smartly-cut suit.[3] How far away the reality of Joyce was from the character depicted, apparently without a shred of good conscience, by Rebecca West, who gloated at Joyce’s trial, referring to him as opening ‘a vista into a mean life’, always speaking ‘as though he was better fed and better clothed than we were, and so, we now know, he was’,[4] going so far as to describe Joyce as ‘a tiny little creature’,[5] presumably confident that such was the hysteria that nothing she wrote against him would be challenged. It is as though West, and a gaggle of lesser slanderers, took all that Joyce truly was and turned it on its head. However, anyone with an eye to fame or money can still write whatever junk they can contrive on certain events related to the Second World War, and seldom are they called to account for their humbug. Indeed, to expose the lies can render one a jail sentence in many states and the destruction of one’s reputation and career.[6]

Joyce was a rare combination in history: an activist, a revolutionary, and a tough fighter, scarred with a Communist-welded razorblade. He was not some sallow intellectual whose only battle was fought within the brain and with verbosity at a safe distance from one’s targets. He had been the Director of Propaganda for a mass movement, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which like Fascist movements across the world in the aftermath of the First World War, attracted individuals of many types and classes in solidarity. In Britain these included the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, a founder of modern English literature;[7] Wyndham Lewis, novelist, painter, philosopher and co-founder with Pound of the Vorticist arts movement; the British nature writer and Hawthorne Prize Winner Henry Williamson, who never repudiated his belief in the heroic virtues of Mosley or Hitler, even after the war and who, like many who joined Mosley, was a First World War veteran haunted by the prospect of another war, but also reminded of the Europe that might still be when on Christmas Eve 1914 Germans and Britons greeted each other in no-man’s land to play football, returning to slaughter one another the following day; the military strategist, General J F C Fuller, father of modern tank warfare; and many others of the highest intellectual and cultural calibre.

William was born in New York on 24 April 1906, his father, Michael Francis Joyce, a Catholic, having migrated from Ireland in 1892, and marrying Gertrude Brooke, daughter of a Lancashire physician. In 1906 the family returned to Ireland, Michael having done well as a builder, and now becoming a publican and a property owner. William was educated at Catholic schools, and at an early age threw himself with gusto into whatever he did: When assisting at a service in the chapel he swung the censer with such force that the glowing incense flew down the aisle. He received his broken nose not through a fist fight with a Communist during the 1920s or 30s, but with a boy at school who had called him an ‘Orangeman’, because of the Joyce family’s avidly pro-British sentiments at the time of Ireland’s tribulations. His nose was not properly attended to, and hence William always had a distinctively nasal tone to his voice. During the Republican rebellion Michael’s properties endured arson. Young William saw the body of his neighbour, a policeman, on the road, with a bullet through his head. On another occasion he witnessed a Sinn Feiner cornered and shot by police.[8]

In 1920 the British Government reinforced the Royal Irish Constabulary with the Black & Tan paramilitaries. At fourteen, William served as a spy for the authorities, keeping his eyes and ears open for snippets of information that might be of use, and ran a squad of sub-agents. With the truce of 1921, and the departure of the British, the Joyce family moved to England. At 15, eager to continue serving King and Empire, he enlisted in the army at Worcester, giving his age as 18, but his real age was soon discovered and he was discharged. At 16 he joined the Officer Training Corps at the University of London, and after graduating from Battersea Polytechnic, enrolled at Birbeck College, part of the University.

Of Joyce’s intellectual gifts, his lifelong friend and comrade, John MacNab related to Cole:

‘He kept no files, diaries or notes of any kind, but he could recall the date, place and circumstances of remote events and meetings with people. He never forgot a face or a name, and could give a full account, unhesitatingly, of almost anything that had ever happened to him. At intervals of years he would repeat the same account without the least variation. He could quote – always exactly – any poem he had ever read with attention, and even notable pieces of prose. As a Latin scholar his technical qualifications were inferior to my own, yet he was the one who could quote Virgil or Horace etc., freely and always to the point, not I’.[9]

MacNab stated that Joyce was a multi-linguist, gifted in mathematics and his ability to teach it. ‘He read widely in history, philosophy, theology, psychology, theoretical physics and chemistry, economics law, medicine, anatomy and physiology. When he broke his collarbone in 1936 while skating, he was able to set it himself due to his knowledge of physiology. He was a talented pianist’.[10]

British Fascisti

While pursuing a BA in Latin, French, English and History, in 1923 he joined the British Fascisti, founded that year by Miss R L Linton-Orman, a member of a distinguished military family who had served with the Women’s Reserve Ambulance during the Frost World War and had twice been awarded the Croix de Charité for gallantry for heroic rescues in Salonica.[11]

The first such body to be established in Britain, inspired by the assumption to power by Mussolini in 1922, and the destruction of Communism in Italy, there was not much ideological substance to the British Fascisti (later ‘British Fascists’), other than loyalty to ‘King and Empire’, a determination to form a paramilitary force to stop Communism in the event of revolution or strikes, and to maintain order at Conservative Party meetings when Communists and Labourites threatened violence. The membership was drawn mainly from the middle and upper classes, and included a good number of retired officers. The first president of the British Fascists was Lord Garvagh, who was succeeded by Brigadier-General Blakeney, later associated with both Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League, a small but persistent anti-Semitic group; and Mosley’s British Union.[12] The present of such personalities indicates the impression that Fascist Italy was making on important sections of Britain, and that it could never be dismissed as the collective delusions of a ‘lunatic fringe’.

Despite the lack of ideological substance, many stalwart Fascists got their start with the British Fascisti, including those who were to play a prominent role in the British Union of Fascists (BUF). It was as leader of the ‘I Squad’ of the British Fascisti that on 22 October 1924 Joyce stationed his men at Lambeth Baths Hall in South-East London, to protect the election meeting of Jack Lazarus, Conservative party Parliamentary candidate for Lambeth North, from Communist attack. These were times in which electoral meetings not approved by the Left were subjected to attack from Communist and Labour party thugs armed with razors, often put into potatoes for throwing, and spiked sticks. Hence, the British Fascisti emerged at a time of a very real threat of violence by the Left against the Conservative and Unionist parties, regardless of the other shortcomings of the organisation as a serious political alternative.

The Communist assault on Lazarus’ election meeting was ‘vicious’.[13] A ‘Jewish Communist’, as Joyce described him, jumped on his back and tried to slash his throat with a razor, but only succeeded in cutting Joyce from mouth to ear, his neck protected by a thick woollen scarf. He did not realise he had been slashed until the crowd drew back aghast, and he attempted to stem the blood with a handkerchief given to him, then walked to the police station where he collapsed.

While active with the British Fascisti, Joyce was also president of the Conservative Society at Birbeck College, where he developed his oratory, seeing Conservatism as the upholder of ‘Anglo-Saxon tradition and supremacy’.[14] Meanwhile, 1926 proceeded with a General Strike that did not result in the threat of a Soviet Britain, and the British Fascisti went into decline. That year Joyce married Hazel Barr, while continuing to do well with his studies, and the following year obtained First Class Honours in English, but did not complete his MA. His attempts for several years to introduce the Conservative Party to ‘true Nationalism’ failed. Biding his time, as the several small Fascist groups that arose failed to impress him, Joyce taught at the Victoria Tutorial College, and then at King’s College.

The Red thuggery that the British Fascists had attempted to combat continued. A target was to be not a party from the Right but from the Left: the New Party, founded in 1931 by the Labour Party’s most promising young politician, Sir Oswald Mosley, after Labour Caucus refused to adopt Mosley’s bold plan for unemployment.[15] The New Party was regarded as traitorous by the Labour Party, and was subjected to violent attacks by Communists and Labourites. It was such violence that contributed to Mosley’s turning to Fascism and forming his Blackshirt squads to protect the meetings that he could not efficiently protect during the New Party electoral campaigns, although even then he had started forming a squad of stewards trained in boxing by Jewish boxing champion Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis. Mosley records that extreme Left reaction had been subdued until the promising results of the New Party vote came out in a by-election.[16] Mosley, referring to the General Election soon after, related: ‘All over the country we met a storm of organised violence. They were simply out to smother us, we were to be mobbed down by denying us our only resource: the spoken word; we were to be mobbed out of existence’.[17]

In 1932 Mosley visited Fascist Italy, and like many others was impressed by what he saw at a time when Britain continued to stagnate. Joyce read the news reports of Mosley’s visit with interest but, having long had an increasing animosity against Jewish influence in Britain, was more interested in the progress that the Hitler movement was making in Germany.[18] When Mosley re-established the New Party as the British Union of Fascists most of the adherents of other Fascist groups, particularly the British Fascists, joined him. Joyce joined the BUF in 1933,[19] and, fatefully, obtained a British passport by falsely claiming that he had been born a British subject, with the expectation that he might accompany Mosley on a visit to Hitler.

Joyce was soon noted in the BUF for his oratory skills, and he resigned his teaching post at Victoria Tutorial College and his studies at London University to become the BUF’s West London Area Administration Officer. He then became Propaganda Director, addressing hundreds of meetings. It was on hearing Joyce, then 28, speaking that ex-Labour MP John Beckett,[20] joined the BUF, and committed himself to National Socialism, having previously been impressed by what he had seen in Fascist Italy, declaring Joyce to be one of the greatest orators who had recruited thousands to Fascism.[21] Indeed, Joyce filled in for Mosley if the latter could not attend a function. Jeffrey Hamm, a young Mosleyite before the war, who became particularly active in Mosley’s post-war Union Movement, reminisced on Joyce’s oratory that ‘his wit and repartee were proverbial’. ‘On one occasion a buxom lady in the crowd was shouting abuse at him, culminating in an angry roar: “You bastard!” Quick as a flash Joyce gave her a cheerful wave, as he cried: “Hullo, Mother!”’[22]

Joyce divorced Hazel amicably in 1934. He had sired two daughters who were close to their father, despite his hectic life as a Fascist leader.

His BUF classes on Fascist ideology, held jointly with his closest colleague, John Angus Macnab, with whom he also established a private tutoring business, were used to propagate his own views on Fascism, and here he introduced the term National Socialism to the movement, which was renamed the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists in 1936.[23] Although Joyce believed that National Socialism was intrinsically based on the nation from which it arose, was more inclined to quote Thomas Carlyle than Hitler, and eschewed both the swastika and the fasces when creating his own movement, he saw Hitler as a closer example to consider than Mussolini, not least because Hitler dealt with the Jewish question head-on. It was Joyce who coined the BUF axiom: ‘If you love your country you are National. If you love your people, you are Socialist. Be a National Socialist’. The reader will find this phrase cogently explained in Twilight Over England.

Joyce met Christian Bauer, who represented Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff, in Britain, and at Bauer’s request, after his return to Germany, Joyce maintained contact with him,[24] although it transpired that Bauer was more important when in Britain than he was in Germany.

In 1937 Joyce married Margaret White, a Manchester BUF organiser, who had accepted his proposal at a party, even although the two hardly knew one another. It had been literally ‘love at first sight’ between the two, and a scholarly member of her branch remarked on the engagement that it ‘may be uncomfortable being married to a genius. And William is a genius, you know!’[25] On the first day of the year, the Public Order Act was introduced banning the wearing of uniforms at public political functions; i.e. the black shirt, prohibiting the effective stewarding of open-air meetings, and other measures designed to impinge on the BUF campaign. As previously stated, Mosley had adopted a black shirt uniform to establish a disciplined and recognisable formation to keep order at his meetings having experienced Red thuggery at New Party meetings, as had the Conservative Party many years. The banning of the uniform saw a considerable rise in disorder at BUF functions. Despite the great deal of nonsense that had been alleged about ‘Fascist violence,’ the Blackshirts always answered the razorblade and the cosh with fists when necessary. One of these great myths is that Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, who had supported the BUF during the first few years, withdrew his support in 1934 because of such Fascist violence. In fact, as related by Randolf Churchill some thirty years later, it was due to ‘the pressure of Jewish advertisers’.[26]

By 1937, both Joyce and Beckett, editor of Action and The Blackshirt, had become increasingly critical of BUF administration. Matters were decided when Mosley was obliged through financial stringency to reduce the paid-staff by four-fifths. Among them were both Joyce and Beckett. Macnab, the editor of Fascist Quarterly, resigned in protest at Joyce’s dismissal. Macnab & Joyce, Private Tutors, was a now established to earn a modest income to offer tuition for university entrance and professional preliminary examinations, and to teach English to foreign pupils of sound character.

National Socialist League

Joyce’s concerns were directed towards forming a new political organisation that would more precisely reflect his view on British National Socialism. Joyce, Beckett, McNabb and a few others founded the National Socialist League. Despite Joyce’s admiration for Hitler, his organisation was based on British roots. That a front-group for the League was named the Carlyle Club after Thomas Carlyle, whom Joyce often cited as a precursor of British National Socialism, is indicative of the British character of his variation of National Socialism. After all the concept of the National and the Social synthesis is universal, and movements of such a type had been arising spontaneously and independently of one another since the immediate aftermath of the First World War. One might refer to the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, the Hungarist movement in Hungary, National-Syndicalist Falangism in Spain, and many others throughout the world. The Israeli scholar Dr Zeev Sternhell provides a convincing argument for the emergence of proto-Fascism from a union of Left-wing syndicalist and Right-wing Monarchist theorists in France as early as the late 19th century.[27] Mosley’s ‘Fascism’ had been based on his Birmingham manifesto to cure unemployment through a massive public works programme that had been rejected as too radical by the Labour Government, not by reading Mein Kampf or Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism.

As for Joyce’s National Socialist League, it was surprisingly ‘democratic’ in structure, with leaders elected at branch level, and no fuehrer-complex being evident in either Beckett of Joyce. Nor was there a paramilitary complexion to the group.[28] The symbol was a ship’s steering wheel, the design of which is also suggestive of a Union Jack, below which was the motto: ‘Steer Straight’. A newspaper was published, The Helmsman. Funding came from Alec Scrimgeour, an elderly stockbroker, whom Joyce had known since the BUF, and who treated Joyce as a son. Cole mentions that one supporters ‘claimed to be the King of Poland’. This cannot be anyone other than the New Zealand poet Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk who, unlike his many contemporaries who were embracing to Communism, being a Monarchist, embraced the Right, then Fascism and National Socialism, and never recanted. Indeed, even in December 1945, Potocki printed an ‘Xmas card’, the ‘X’ in the shape of a swastika, with a poem that paid tribute to ‘our William Joyce’. As to his eccentric claim to the throne of Poland, it was as legitimate as any other, being descended from a Polish noble lineage. [29]

The primary ideological text of the League was National Socialism Now, published in September 1937. National Socialism Now is a cogent 57 pages defining the fundamentals of National Socialist ethos, method of statecraft, and type financial and economic systems. Joyce’s opening lines are that,

‘We deal with National Socialism for Britain; for we are British. Our League is entirely British; and to win the victory for National Socialism here, we must work hard enough to be excused the inspiring task of describing National Socialism elsewhere’.[30]

While National Socialism was forever linked with the name of Hitler, no matter where it arises it ‘must arise from the soil and people or not at all’.

‘It springs from no temporary grievance, but from the revolutionary yearning of the people to cast off the chains of gross, sordid, democratic materialism without having to put on the shackles of Marxian Materialism, which would be identical with the chains cast off’.[31]

Joyce returned to a theme that he had introduced to the BUF, that the synthesis of Nationalism and Socialism is a logical development; that ‘the people’ are identical with ‘the nation’, and anything else, whether called ‘nationalism’ or ‘socialism’, is a waste of time. It was Socialism that provided the foundation for class unity rather than class antagonism, which had been engendered by the dislocations caused by industrialism and usury. Such class division is aggravated rather than transcended by Marxism and other forms of materialistic socialism. Both Capitalism and Marxism are international. Indeed Marx pointed this out in The Communist Manifesto, and described anyone resisting this internationalising tendency of Capitalism as ‘reactionary’, because the historical process towards Communism is aided by Capitalist internationalisation, and what Marx called the ‘uniformity in the mode of production’ across the world.[32] Today we call this ‘globalisation’ and the process has been accelerating. What has emerged is not Communism, but a Capitalist ‘new world order’. Communism is not even anti-Capitalist, but an extension of it, and hence, as Joyce explains in Twilight, it is Nationalism, intrinsically based on Socialism, that not only opposes Capitalism, but transcends it. Equally, any Socialism that embraces internationalism is not only hopeless in combating Capitalism, but assists in its victory. We are now able with both hindsight and observing present-day events, to confirm that this indeed the case. Communism, and Social Democracy literally failed to ‘delver the goods’, and now Free Trade Capitalism runs rampant over the entire world, imposed by US weaponry where, where debt to international finance and the opiate of the shopping mall and MTV are insufficient. The Socialism of Joyce’s day, represented mainly by the Labour Party, did not oppose the system of international finance any more than the Conservative Party, that had long since forsaken its patriotic and rural origins, and both permitted a system of Liberal Free Trade that invested capital to build up cotton manufacturing in India for example, while allowing the mill workers of Lancashire to rot.[33] The same situation is visited upon us in recent years, with Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ in Britain, and in New Zealand, the Labour Party during the 1980s, being in the forefront of inaugurating ‘Free Trade’ in the name of ‘socialism’. Joyce saw it going on in his own day. We relive it today. The same old abandonment to Capitalism by Social Democracy, which had also obliged Mosley to resign from the Labour Party in disgust.

The weakness of Westminster parliamentary democracy allowed international finance to carry on unhindered. Joyce’s British National Socialism advocated the ‘leadership principle’, with authority to act, but in Britain’s case the symbol of unity within one personality had existed for centauries in the form of the Crown, and Joyce did not envisage a National Socialist Britain that need be under the dictatorship of a British ‘fuehrer’. Indeed, he advocated the corporatist or organic state that he had alluded to in his BUF pamphlet, Dictatorship. In NS Now Joyce pointed to the guilds of Medieval Britain, and outlined a corporate state based on the revival of the guilds as taking over many functions of the state. Both employers and employees would be represented in the same corporative organs, which was the method of successful industrial organisation that would be enacted in Germany in the Reich Economic Chamber. Parliament would hence be a corporative body with representatives elected from such guilds.

Joyce next turned his attention to the financial system. National Socialist banking reform is based the premise that money and credit should serve the people, and not master them. Hence, credit and currency should be issued by the state according to the production of the people, allowing the people to consume that production. Private financial interests should not issue credit and currency as a profit -making commodity. Currency and credit are only intended as a means of exchanging goods and services. That is the method that National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan used and by which they flourished in the midst of the world Depression.[34] Again, there is nothing intrinsically ‘fascist’ or ‘nazi’ in such a banking system. The First New Zealand Labour Government had initiated the same type of policy, issuing 1% Reserve Bank state credit in 1935 for the construction of New Zealand’s iconic state housing project, which itself solved 75% of the unemployment rate.[35] Banking reformers around the world were demanding that the state assume its prerogative to issue the nation’s own credit and currency, without recourse to becoming indebted in perpetuity to international finance.[36] As Joyce was to emphasis in Twilight, it was this struggle between productive work and parasitism that led to the world war, the fact being that it was the Axis states that posed a deathly challenge to this parasitism the world over. New Zealand, despite the Labour Government measures in 1935, true to Social Democratic form, did not go beyond those limited measures, despite their success, and despite the promises the party had made in its 1934 election manifesto. Again, Social Democracy posed no real challenge to the system of world trade and banking that was – and remains – in the hands of a few parasites.

The League was ‘openly and unashamedly Imperialist.’ One of the primary aims of ‘Fascism’ was to create autarchic or self-sufficient economics states, or geo-political blocs. Of course, with Britain being the greatest imperial power, British Fascism or National Socialism sought to re-create the Empire as an autarchic bloc, where investments would be made only within the Empire, and not placed outside the Empire, only to undermine the manufacturing the agricultural sectors of the Empire peoples. Joyce pointed out that the system of international trade and finance was the enemy of both the British and the Colonial peoples; that both were equally exploited, and granting independence to India was not going to change that situation a jot. National Socialism would end usury and exploitation in India with the same methods as in Britain.[37] What Fascism was trying to address was the iniquitous system that is today called ‘globalisation’, whereby investments can be moved out of states and indeed entire industries shut-down and relocated to cheap labour pools, and currency speculators can make vast fortunes overnight by destroying entire economies. That is the system that won the Second World War against the Axis and that is the system that has driven the world to the present debt crisis, as it inevitably would. That is the system for which the Allied troops fought and died, just as the same plutocratic wire-pullers of ‘democracy’ declare war on states that are problematic to the ‘new world order’.

Finally, Joyce addressed the matter of foreign policy. Even then the war drums were being beaten against Germany, Italy and Japan. Joyce saw the keystone of world peace and order being an alliance between Britain and Germany with the assistance of Italy, which would form a bulwark against both international finance and Communism. From the 1920s, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, an alliance with Britain and Italy was envisaged as the cornerstone of Germany’s future foreign policy, Hitler definitively stating: ‘In the predictable future there can only be two allies for Germany in Europe: England and Italy’.[38] Was this mere cant, albeit dictated a decade before Hitler came to Office, while sitting in a jail following the abortive Munich putsch? Hitler in both public and private pronouncements always affirmed his admiration for the British Empire and the kinship that should have existed between the Third Reich and the Empire. Like Joyce, he believed that the two would be a great stabilising force in the world, and legitimate scholarship has only confirmed these views.

Captain A H M Ramsay, Conservative Member of Parliament for Midlothian and Peeblesshire from 1931 until his detention through 1940-1944, under Defence Regulation 18B along with Mosley and 1000 others, wrote after the war a volume much in the mode of Joyce’s Twilight and NS Now not only in regard to the war but also the takeover of Britain by international finance. Joyce had been a member of Ramsay’s Right Club that campaigned against war with Germany.[39] Like Joyce, Ramsay pointed to the Judaic character of the Puritan revolutionary zealots, whose armies ‘marched around Scotland, aided by their Geneva sympathisers, dispensing Judaic justice’.[40] Ramsay proceeds to consider the formation of the Bank of England with the encumbering of Britain with a National Debt; a matter that is dealt with in relative detail by Joyce in Twilight. Ramsay points out that the officialdom of ‘world Jewry’ had ‘declared war’ on Germany as soon as Hitler assumed Office. An ‘international economic boycott’ was declared by the World Jewish Economic Federation, headed by Samuel Untermeyer from the USA, who wrote in The New York Times of a ‘holy war’ against Germany, in which both Jew and Gentile must embark, while the Jews were the ‘aristocrats of the world’.[41] The Jewish leadership through its influence on politics, business and media the world over, hoped to economically strangle Germany. They could not ruin Germany through such means however, because the Hitler regime’s banking and trade reform not only withdrew Germany from the international finance system, but through barter proceeded to capture the markets of central Europe and South America. As Joyce was to emphasise in Twilight, this was the real cause of the world war; a conflict between two systems, one productive and creative, the other parasitic and exploitive.

It should be pointed out that Ramsay enjoyed the friendship and confidence of British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain in the moths immediately preceding the World War. Ramsay alludes to Chamberlain’s guarantee to assist Poland in the event of invasion on the basis of a supposed Germany ultimatum that transpired to be fraudulent,[42] and that Germany had sought for months a negotiated solution for the return of Danzig and the ‘Polish Corridor’ to Germany, while Poland resorted to what today would be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Germans within Poland; a matter which will be considered further.

Ramsay points out that Hitler had ‘again and again made it clear that he never intended to attack or harm the British Empire’. [43] Indeed, what is called the ‘Phoney War’ ensued, where no real fighting was taking place. The situation changed immediately Churchill became Prime Minister. Then the previous policy of only bombing military targets was reversed, and British Bomber Command was ordered to bomb civilian targets, a strategy that would eventually lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German civilians by the end of the war, the fire-bombing of Dresden,[44] Hamburg, Berlin and other German cities going down in infamy as obliterating in deadly infernos more victims than the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Actions speak louder than words, as it is said, and Hitler on numerous occasions offered his hand of friendship, while still in a position of strength, indeed winning the war. One of the most notable occasions is that involving the British invasion of Dunkirk, around which much nonsense about British heroism continues to be spoken. Ramsay cites the pre-eminent official British military historian Captain Liddell Hart. This nonsense continues despite Hart’s book on World War II, The Other Side of the Hill, having been published in 1948, with chapter 10 entitled ‘How Hitler beat France and saved Britain’. Ramsay comments that the chapter would ‘astound all propaganda-blinded people… for the author therein proves that not only did Hitler save this country; but that this was not the result of some unforeseen factor, or indecision or folly, but was of set purpose, based on his long enunciated and faithfully maintained principle’. Hart details how Hitler halted the Panzer Corps on 22 May 1940, allowing the British troops to escape back to Britain. Hitler had cabled Von Kleist that the armoured divisions were not to advance or fire. Von Kleist ignored the order, and then came an ‘emphatic order’, according to Von Kleist, that he was to ‘withdraw behind the canal. My tanks were kept halted there for three days’.[45] Hart records a conversation between Hitler and Marshall Von Runstedt two days later (24 May):

‘He [Hitler] then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilisation that Britain had brought into the world… He compared the British Empire with the Catholic Church – saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany’s position on the Continent. The return of Germany’s lost colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops, if she should be involved with any difficulties anywhere. He concluded by saying that his aim was to make peace with Britain, on a basis that she would regard compatible with her honour to accept’. [46]

Captain Hart comments on the above: ‘If the British army had been captured at Dunkirk, the British people might have felt that their honour had suffered a stain, which they must wipe out. By letting it escape, Hitler hoped to conciliate them’.[47] Hart alluded to the pro-British sentiments in Mein Kampf and the manner by which Hitler did not deviate from his desire for an alliance with Britain. As we now know, so far from the British people being cognisant of the equanimity of Hitler towards them, the propaganda machine merely used this to further inflame them toward war, and Dunkirk had ever since been portrayed as a great feat of British moral courage.

Even during the early 1920s, when Hitler was in jail dictating Mein Kampf he realised that any future goodwill between Germany and Britain relied on the question as to ‘whether the exiting influence of the Jews is not stronger than any understanding or good intentions and will this frustrate and nullify all plans’.[48] Mosley, Ramsay, Admiral Sir Barry Domvile and hundreds of others jailed under 18B, who sought peace with Germany, were aware of this also. However, there were still prominent people within Britain who were free, to whom Hitler might appeal for peace, and it is presumably with these in mind that Hitler kept open the prospect of a negotiated peace with honour.

However, eminent people who hoped for a negotiated peace with Germany were no match for the war party and its backers. Winston Churchill, whose drunken, opulent lifestyle had got him into debt, led the war party. He had personal reasons for assuring the destruction of Hitler, even if that also meant the destruction of the British Empire; which, of course, it did. By 1938 Churchill was bankrupt, and Chartwell House was about to be put on the market. A few days before however Sir Henry Strakosch, the South African Jewish mining magnate and financial adviser, came to the rescue and agreed to pay off Churchill’s debts.[49] Churchill had whored himself to international finance for the sake of £18,000, and in so doing doomed the lives of millions and the survival of the British Empire. Strakosch was financial adviser to General Smuts of South Africa, and in 1920 drafted the blueprint for the Reserve Bank of South Africa.[50] He has also served as adviser on setting up the Reserve Bank of India. Like the US Federal Reserve Bank and other central banks throughout the world, the reader should not be confused into thinking that these acted as state banks issuing state credit, even when they were, like the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, nationalised. These central banks were based on plans provided by individuals such as Strakosch, the Bank of England’s Sir Otto Niemeyer, and Warburg in the USA. The thraldom of most states to international finance, from which Germany, Italy and Japan had broken free, is the most significant cause of World War II, as explained by Joyce in Twilight.

Since the 1920s Churchill’s financial adviser for his stock market dealings had been Bernard Baruch, the international financier who had run the US War Industries Board during the First World War I, and had become the virtual dictator of the USA during the war years.[51] Nothing would or could divert Churchill from leading Britain into war with Germany.

To Germany

During the Munich crisis in 1938 Joyce foresaw the coming war, and the quandary that placed him as an avidly pro-British devotee of National Socialism and Anglo-German accord. He told Macnab that in the event of war, he could not fight against Germany in the service of international finance but neither could he be a conscientious objector and evade national service. He had already envisaged sending Margaret to Ireland with Macnab, while he would go to Germany, perhaps to fight the Russians[52].

Mosley’s answer was to immediately issue a call to his supporters to fully support the war effort once the war that he had vigorously campaigned against, had eventuated, while he and 800 of his followers were detained under Emergency Defence Regulation 18B. Mosley’s order stated that ‘Our members should do what the law requires of them; and, if they are members of the armed Forces or services of the Crown, they should obey their orders and, in every particular, obey the rules of the Service’. However, it was also a call to ‘stand-fast’ against the ‘corrupt Jewish money-power’ and ‘to take every opportunity within your power to awaken the people and to demand peace’.[53]

Among the first to die in the war were two Blackshirts, Kenneth Day and George Brocking, while on an RAF daylight bomber raid on Brűnsbuttel.[54]

While Joyce campaigned with his National Socialist League, and Mosley held meetings attracting the largest audiences ever seen in Britain to the very eve of war, Joyce also sought to widen his campaign. He was involved in an anti-war campaign with Lord Lymington, Conservative MP, and an early advocate of agricultural self-sufficiency and organic farming,[55] also a particular concern of both Joyce and the BUF.[56] Lord Lymington and Joyce created the British Council Against European Commitments. Lymington’s group joined with a similar organisation founded by Hastings William Sackville Russell, Lord Tavistock (later Duke of Bedford) and emerged as the British People’s Party (BPP), the policy of which not only included peace, but in particular advocacy of banking reform.[57] Joyce had confided in Beckett that he would probably go to Germany in the event of war, and Beckett left the League to become General secretary of the BPP. It is often commented that there was a fallen out between Joyce and Beckett, but, as will be seen, they remained steadfast friends.

As forebodings of war approached in 1939, one of the first to depart from Britain to Germany was Mrs Francis Dorothy Eckersley, a member of the BUF, whose son was at school there. Mrs Eckersley was to play a role in the Joyce’s settling in Berlin. Before Macnab visited Berlin, Joyce had asked him to take a message to Christian Bauer, asking whether Goebbels would arrange for the immediate naturalisation of Joyce and his wife, should they settle in Germany.[58] Defence Regulation 18B was about to be passed when Joyce received news from Macnab that naturalisation would be granted. He then received news from an MI5 agent to whom he given information on Communist activities, that it was likely he would be arrest under 18B within a matter of days.[59] The Joyce’s left for Germany on 26 August 1939, William convinced that imprisonment in Britain during the war would mean unbearable suffering for Margaret.

To the Joyce’s dismay, Christian Bauer did not have the influence in Berlin that had been assumed, and he had been ‘called up’. However, Mrs Eckersley did have connections with the Foreign Office, and Joyce was able to secure a part-time job as a translator of German scripts.[60] Within days, war had been declared by Britain against Germany, a declaration that was not met by the Germans with any more jubilation than it was met by the Joyces and many other Britons. In England, meanwhile Mosley was holding the largest rallies in British Union history, and just two months previously the biggest indoor hall in England had been filled with 20,000 people to hear Mosley.[61] Mosley was arrested under 18B on 23 May 1940, and his wife Diana on 29 June.[62] Captain Ramsay MP, and Admiral Sir Barry Domvile CB, founder of the Link, which had also campaigned for Anglo-German cooperation, were among the 1000 others.[63]

Mrs Eckersley’s friends had been at work to secure Joyce a position, and Dr Erich Hetzler, an official in the Foreign Office, who had studied economics in England, interviewed him. It is notable that during the interview Joyce explained he was a National Socialist and British, but that a National Socialist in Britain was not the same as in Germany.[64] Hetzler recommended Joyce to the English-speaking department of the Reich radio service. Norman Baillie-Stewart, a former Subaltern in the Seaforth Highlanders, headed the English news service, under the direction of Walter Kamm. Joyce’s first broadcast, reading a news bulletin, took place on 11 September 1939. He did well, but drew the immediately jealousy of Baillie-Stewart.[65]

The disparaging nick-name of ‘haw-haw’, which was to become synonymous with Joyce, first appeared in the Daily Express on 14 September 1939 where the columnist, the pseudonymous Jonah Barrington, commented on a broadcast from Germany: ‘A gent I’d like to meet is moaning periodically from Zeesen. He speaks English of the haw-haw, damit-get-out-of-my-way variety, and his strong suit is gentlemanly indignation’.[66] The name was picked up by British propaganda, and stuck, like the name of Quisling was to become synonymous with ‘traitor’.

Ironically, Barrington was describing Baillie-Stewart. Barrington and the media ran with the typically banal propaganda image, and ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ was introduced to the public as a figure of ridicule. Lord Haw-Haw soon became conflated with Joyce and stuck, since Joyce would become the leading British broadcaster, despite his own voice, affected by the broken nose he had since childhood, not being suggestive of the ‘Bertie Wooster’ type figure that Barrington was trying to portray.[67] Other half-witted attempts at satire by Barrington, with names such as The Whopper, Uncle Boo-Hoo and Mopey, fell by the way, while Lord Haw-Haw remained. It was Lord Donegal, writing for the Sunday Dispatch, who suggested that Lord Haw-Haw might be Joyce. However, the voice that he asked Macnab, then a volunteer ambulance driver, to hear, was Baillie-Stewart, and Macnab could reply honestly that it did not sound anything like Joyce.[68]

Joyce could now apply for naturalisation, and correctly recorded his birthplace as New York.[69] Margaret was employed writing women’s features for the radio network, and became known as Lady Haw-Haw. The broadcasts were widely listened to in Britain. The matter of the identities of Baillie-Stewart and William Joyce were soon resolved by the British, but ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ stuck with Joyce rather than with Baillie-Stewart,[70] another reflection of the puerility of British war propaganda. Comedians began to lampoon Lord Haw-Haw. The deaths of millions of Britons and Germans were such a whopping good laugh for those who could avoid service by larking about on the Home Front, while Mosleyites were among the first to enlist and die.

Interestingly, Cole discusses the insistence of ‘upper class’ origins for William Joyce by the British propaganda machine, and hence the maintenance of the ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ myth as an aristocratic ‘traitor’, perhaps also reminding audiences of Sir Oswald Mosley’s aristocratic birth, and the similar backgrounds of others who had sought conciliation with Germany and who had seen Fascism and National Socialism as a means of transcending class divisions. Cole writes: ‘The theme of the aristocratic traitor aroused such an immense public response that the jeering appeared to be directed as much at the traditional British upper classes as at an unknown traitor in Germany’.[71] The irony was that Joyce was the very antithesis of the character portrayed by British propaganda, as indicated by the opening anecdote of this introduction, and he lived simply and without thought of his material well-being.

A survey by the BBC concluded that Joyce was getting six million regular listeners daily, and 18,000,000 occasional listeners. The reasons for this included not only the mirth that had been directed at Lord Haw-Haw, but also that the broadcasts focused on ‘undeniable evils in this country… their news sense, their presentation’, making them ‘a familiar feature of the social landscape’.[72]

In early 1940 the Buro Concordia was formed under the direction of Dr Hetzler, which would focus on explaining National Socialism to English listeners. Joyce would lead the team and write the programmes. He refused insistent offers of a salary increase. The first programme was aired in February 1940, under the name of the New British Broadcasting Station, transmitting for half an hour from East Prussia, albeit under sparse conditions and resources.[73]

It was at this time, in February 1940, that Joyce was asked by the Foreign Office to write a book, Twilight Over England. While Joyce addressed a British audience, which would have few chances to read the book, the Foreign Office, had intended an English language testament for audiences in the USA and India. Twilight also went into German and Swedish editions, at least. The book as will be seen, is largely an indictment of the English system of Free Trade, the influence of Jews and the iniquity of international finance.

On hindsight, reading the volume today, one might be struck by its current relevance, as the world is plunged into what American strategists approvingly call ‘constant conflict’, in extending in the hallowed name of ‘Democracy’ the system of debt and exploitation which the Axis fought seventy years ago. As Joyce tried to explain, Westminster democracy and party government is a system that has not brought any meaningful benefits to the people who have lived under the ‘Mother of all Parliaments’ for centuries, let alone to tribesmen from the deserts of Afghanistan to the jungles of New Guinea, who are having this odd system born from the merchant class of England, imposed on them by force of arms. We still live under the same system that Joyce exposed, because international finance won the war.

By mid 1940 the British had ceased considering Lord Haw-Haw as a joke and were worried by what they thought was his inside knowledge of events in Britain. Other secret Anglophone broadcasting stations were planned under Buro Concordia.[74]. Meanwhile, Joyce’s commitment to Britain was indicated by his having defaced his British passport so that after it had expired it could not be used by German Intelligence, which was eager to obtain such passports.[75] So much for disloyalty.

In July 1940 Hitler made a peace offer to Britain, and Joyce was optimistic. On ‘Workers’ Challenge’, a broadcasting service pitched specifically to British workers, Joyce stated that British workers and German workers did not wish to fight each other. The British Communists had been saying that the war was between capitalist powers and was not a workers’ fight, until the party-line was reversed when Germany and the USSR came into conflict. ‘Workers’ Challenge’ called for a workers’ revolt against Churchill and a peace that would have nothing to do with the nazification of Britain. Of coursed, Churchill was committed to unconditional surrender, and the chance to save the Empire and Europe was rejected for the sake of Churchill’s ego, or perhaps mainly due to his £18,000 debt to Strakosch and his friendship with ‘Barney’ Baruch (?). As Joyce commented on his programme on 23 July, the rejection of peace would bring tragedy to England, and if Britons remained silent then it must be assumed that they consented to their own annihilation.[76] Joyce was prescient. Is there still doubt? While it might be a cliché to say that British won the war but lost the peace, that is beyond rational doubt. As for the impact of ‘Workers’ Challenge’, a BBC survey found that it had a ‘heavy following’, that ‘the following grows’, and that a lot of Joyce’s remarks ‘were true’.[77]

On 28 August the first air raid casualties in Berlin occurred. Both Joyce and the CBS foreign correspondent William Shirer, epitome of the anti-Nazi propagandist, were at the broadcasting house. Shirer, who had avoided meeting the ‘traitor’ for a year, noted in his diary that Lord Haw-Haw ‘in the air-raids has shown guts’.[78] Joyce went out to see the damage and was ‘profoundly moved’ by the devastation. Already there were comments on the civilian targets of the British, in contrast to the military objectives of the Luftwaffe, but could anyone in Germany have envisaged the criminal fire-bombing of defenceless German cities that was to become the speciality of Bomber Command?

Shirer, the inveterate anti-Nazi whose book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich became a classic history,[79] nonetheless observed Joyce as ‘an amusing and even intelligent fellow’, ‘heavily built and of about five feet nine inches, with Irish eyes that twinkle’.[80] He noted that Joyce had a deep hatred of capitalism. ‘Strange as it may seem, he thinks the Nazi movement is a proletarian one which will free the world from the bonds of “plutocratic capitalists”. He sees himself primarily as a liberator of the working class’.[81]

Shirer’s quip about the ‘strangeness’ of Joyce’s view of National Socialism as a movement fighting capitalism is perhaps best explained by Shirer’s own ignorance as to the character of both National Socialism and the war.[82] The reader will see the anti-plutocratic character of National Socialism explained in Twilight, a copy of which Joyce gave to Shirer.

Twilight was published in September 1940, by Santoro, an elderly Italian who owned a Berlin publishing house, Internationaler Verlag, the English edition running to 100,000 copies.[83] They were distributed at POW camps, where there were efforts to recruit for a Legion of Saint George (also known as the British Free Corps) as a unit of the Waffen SS to fight on the Eastern Front (not against fellow Britons).[84]

After a year of delays, the Joyce’s were German citizens. In 1941 Joyce registered for military service and was put in a reserved category. Joyce was now permitted to reveal his identity and stated:

‘I, William Joyce, left England because I would not fight for Jewry against Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. I left England because I thought that victory which would preserve existing conditions would be more damaging to Britain than defeat’.[85]

On 11 May 1941 Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess reached Scotland on his ill-fated peace mission. It was undertaken at a time when war between the USSR and Germany was approaching, and the German authorities were obliged to repudiate the Hess mission as the lone efforts of someone who had become mentally unhinged. Perhaps Hess was unbalanced if he thought he could overcome the war party led by Churchill, but there was still thought to be a prominent peace party within influential circles who aimed for a negotiated peace. Hess had flown to Scotland in the hope of talking with the Duke of Hamilton, who was thought to be among the peace party. It is known that Hess had long been discussing possibilities of a peace mission to Britain, with Hitler’s knowledge, and that Hess’ friend Albrecht Haushofer had been in contact with the Duke of Hamilton.[86] New evidence has come to light that Hess probably did fly to Britain with Hitler’s approval. British historian Peter Padfield states that Hess brought with him to Britain detailed peace proposals from Hitler. The proposals asked for Britain’s neutrality in a coming conflict with the USSR, in return for which Germany would withdraw from Western Europe and would have no claims on Britain or the Empire.[87] Of course, such proposals were perfectly in keeping with the foreign policy aims that Hitler had desired since the 1920s, as we have seen previously. The proposals from Hitler specified German aims in Russia and even stated the precise time of the German offensive. Padfield remarks: ‘This was not a renegade plot. Hitler had sent Hess and he brought over a fully developed peace treaty for Germany to evacuate all the occupied countries in the West’.[88] Padfield also remarks on a significant ‘negotiated peace’ faction in Britain, and the ruin that peace would have meant for Churchill’s career. There is also allusion to this peace faction including the Royal Family.

Joyce expected he would soon die, whether fighting the Russians, during an air-raid or hanged. Awarded the War Merit Cross 1st Class, a civilian medal, which meant little to him, he was called up to the home guard, the Volkssturm, and he started training with weapons.[89] During the course of an air-raid, confined in a shelter, he proceeded to teach a French journalist English songs, which drew the attention of an air-warden. When Joyce refused the order to quieten a scuffle ensued, Joyce received a cut lip, and the warden a black eye. The air-raid warden stated that Joyce would be reported. Bellowing with laughter at the absurdity of the situation, Joyce was duly notified that he was charged with ‘sub-treason’, and that the warden had been the personal chauffer of Freisler, president of the People’s Court. His employers warned him that the charge was more serious than he assumed. However, the court and all traces of the documentation as well as Freisler’s chauffeur were buried in rubble from an air-raid and so was the charge of ‘sub-treason’.[90]

At the suggestion that the Joyces obtain false papers with the view to escaping as the war drew to a conclusion, Joyce was furious and adamant that ‘soldiers cannot run away, so why should I?’[91] For Joyce, from boyhood to the end of his life, honour an integrity were paramount, courage an instinct.

With Berlin in ruins, the staff of Buro Concordia prepared to relocate. With the impending Russian occupation of the city, the staff of the English Language Services proceeded to Apen, a small town between Bremen and the Dutch border, although Joyce would have preferred the barricades with his Volkssturm colleagues.

Finale

On 30 April 1945 the staff were called together and told of Hitler’s death. Lord and Lady Haw-Haw made their final broadcasts that day. Joyce reiterated what he had always said:

‘Britain’s victories are barren. They leave her poor and they leave her people hungry. They leave her bereft of the markets and the wealth that she possessed six years ago. But above all, they leave her with an immensely greater problem than she had then. We are nearing the end of one phase of Europe’s history, but the next will be no happier. It will be grimmer, harder and perhaps bloodier. And now I ask you earnestly, can Britain survive? I am profoundly convinced that without German help she cannot’.

Is there any reader who is so ignorant or so naïve, other than the ideologically or ethnically biased, who can deny that Joyce has been proved correct? Britain lost her Empire, lost her markets, the Commonwealth and colonial peoples were detached from her and left to wallow in Third World poverty, or become colonies of a US led world order, and debt became more than ever the preferred method of economics.

Orders came from Goebbels, the first from the Reichsminister that had acknowledged them, that the Joyces were not to fall into Allied hands. However, attempts to get them to neutral Sweden via Denmark or to Eire, were abortive. They ended up in Flensburg, back in the crumbling and occupied Reich. Joyce, as was his habit, adopted a rascally attitude even now, and played what he called ‘Russian roulette’ by greeting British soldiers, to see if they would recognise his voice. On a stroll back from the woods he encountered two officers collecting firewood, and approached them offering some sticks. One of the officers, Lieutenant Perry,[92] a returning Jewish refugee serving as an interpreter, a type that was now swarming over Germany in the wake of the Allied occupation, recognised Joyce’s voice. They pursued Joyce in a vehicle, and Perry asked, ‘You wouldn’t happen to be William Joyce would you?’ Joyce reached for the less than convincing fake identity papers that had been given to him by the Germans and was shot by Perry, the bullet entering through Joyce’s right thigh and passing through the left.[93]

The military authorities promptly called on Margaret Joyce at the lodging of an elderly widow, who was also detained, but quickly released, albeit not before her household food rations had been looted by the liberators.

Joyce’s first court appearance on treason charges was held at the Old Bailey on 17 September 1945. He entered a ‘not guilty’ plea. The main problem for the prosecution was in regard to whether Joyce was a British national under the protection of the Crown when he made his broadcasts in Germany. Joyce had never been a British citizen, and he had obtained a British passport for his move to Germany by making a false declaration. Two of the three charges could not be upheld. The case reached the House of Lords. However, Joyce was in no doubt that his hanging was required, and his defence team had even received death threats should he be acquitted. Joyce was hanged on the basis that because he had a British passport he was under the protection of the Crown when he started his broadcasts, and therefore committed high treason. The charge was dubious at best. He had never used his British status for protection at any time, and there is no reason to believe he would have in any circumstances. He moved to Germany with the intention of become a German citizen as promptly as possible, although German officialdom had been tardy in the process. Joyce was hanged on a passport technicality. Judgement was passed on 18 December 1945 to dismiss the appeal. Lord Porter dissented, stating that it was by no means clear that Joyce could have been considered to have owed allegiance to the Crown at the time of the broadcasts.[94]

Joyce on being told the decision wrote to Margaret that it was a relief the matter was over and that he found it undignified to have to plead for his life before his enemies, and to ‘observer their pretence at “fair play”’. Amidst the petty vengefulness of a befuddled and war-worn people, The Manchester Guardian nonetheless questioned the appropriateness of death sentences for Joyce and John Amery (whose trial had lasted eight minutes) for views that ‘were once shared by many who walk untouched among us’. Joyce appreciated the acknowledgment of his sincerity by the Guardian. His friends remained steadfast, and John Macnab was particularly active on Joyce behalf. Macnab, an avid Catholic, remarked on his last visits to Joyce that ‘being with him gave a sense of inward peace, like being in a quiet church’.[95] Some of his former teachers at Birbeck College, remembering the likeable and hardworking student, asked the prison Governor to relay their well-wishes to Joyce. He handed his brother Quentin his final message:

‘In death, as in this life, I defy the Jews who caused this last war: and I defy the power of Darkness which they represent. I warn the British people against the aggressive Imperialism of the Soviet Union.

‘May Britain be great once again; and, in the hour of the greatest danger to the West, may the standard of the Hakenkreuz be raised from the dust, crowned with the historic words “Ihr habt doch gesiegt”. I am proud to die for my ideals; and I am sorry for the sons of Britain who have died without knowing why’.

Joyce’s old friend, the one-timer Labour Party stalwart John Beckett, wrote to him in his final days: ‘Our children will grow up to think of you as an honest and courageous martyr in the fight against alien control of our country … That is how we shall remember you, and what we will tell our people’.[96] It has only recently been known that Beckett’s departure from the National Socialist League was for reasons other than a falling-out with Joyce. Beckett referred to this when writing to Joyce:

‘No one knows better than myself the sincerity of the beliefs which led to the course of action you chose. You remember we discussed the position in 1938, and the disagreement and respect I showed for your opinion then, remains’.[97]

Joyce replied in a letter that was intercepted and never given to Beckett:

‘Of course I remember, quite vividly, how we discussed the situation in 1938. I do not, in the most infinitesimal degree, regret what I have done. For me, there was nothing else to do. I am proud to die for what I have done’.[98]

Beckett in his farewell wrote to Joyce: ‘Goodbye, William, it’s been good to know you and there are few things in my life I am prouder of than our association. Yours always, John’.[99]

Joyce took holy communion, wrote to his wife and to Macnab, and at 9:00 am precisely he was taken from his cell by the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint and hanged.[100]

On the morning of 3 January 1946, the day of his execution, a crowd of 300 gathered outside Wandsworth prison; most to gloat but some to pay their final respects. Some of the crowd, on the notice of Joyce’s execution being posted up, set themselves apart from the crowd and gave the Fascist salute in Joyce’s honour.

Notes

[1] J A Cole, Lord Haw-Haw: The Full Story of William Joyce (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 307

[2] Cole, 16.

[3] Cole, 212.

[4] Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (London: The Reprint Society, 1952), 3.

[5] Ibid., 4.

[6] One might recall the fates of Dr Robert Faurrison in France, Fred Leuchter in the USA, David Irving in England, Dr Joel Hayward in New Zealand, Ernst Zundel in Canada, et al.

[7] K R Bolton, Artists of the Right (San Francisco, Counter-Currents Publications, 2012), 97-119. Pound, stranded in Italy with his wife when the USA entered the war, broadcast for Italy on a programme called ‘Europe Calling’, analogous to Joyce’s broadcasts named ‘Germany Calling’. Handed over to US troops after the war by Italian partisans, Pound was confined in an animal cage under the scathing Pisan sun. The embarrassment of trying and hanging for treason one of the world’s greatest literary figures was avoided by declaring Pound unfit to stand trial, and he was confined to a mental asylum for thirteen years, after which, still undiagnosed or treated for any supposed ‘mental illness’, he was permitted to leave the USA and return to Italy.

[8] Cole, op. cit., 22-23.

[9] Ibid., 56.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 51.

[12] Ibid., 53.

[13] Cole., op. cit., 30.

[14] Ibid.,  31.

[15] Oswald Mosley (1968) My Life (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), 294.

[16] Ibid, 295.

[17] Ibid., 297.

[18] Cole, op. cit., 39.

[19] Thurlow, op. cit., 98.

[20] In 1925 Beckett become the youngest Labour MP of his time, at the age of 30. Becoming increasingly radical, he was expelled from the Labour party and lost his seat in 1931, joining the BUF two years later.

[21] Cole, op. cit, 45.

[22] Jeffrey Hamm, Action Replay (London: Howard Baker, 1983), 151.

[23] Cole, op.cit., 57.

[24] Cole, op. cit., 59.

[25] Ibid., 65.

[26] Randolf Churchill in letter to The Spectator, 27 December 1963, cited by Mosley, My Life, op. cit., 363.

[27] Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left Nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986); The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton, 1994).

[28] Cole, op. cit., 73.

[29] K R Bolton, ‘Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk: New Zealand Poet, “Polish King”, and “Good European”’, Counter-Currents Publishing, http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/count-potocki-de-montalk-part-iii/

[30] William Joyce, National Socialism Now, 1939, Chapter 1.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 71-72.

[33] Joyce, NS Now, op. cit., Chapter 2.

[34] K R Bolton, The Banking Swindle (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), 103-120.

[35] Ibid., 96-100.

[36] Ibid, passim.

[37] W Joyce, NS Now, op. cit., Chapter 4.

[38] Adolf Hitler (1926), Mein Kampf (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1969), 570.

[39] Ramsay was one of the many veterans who had served in the First World War ‘with gallantry’ (Griffiths, 353) who were imprisoned under Regulation 18B. Members of the Right Club included Admiral Wilmot Nicholson (another First World War hero), Mrs Frances Eckersley, who was to assist the Joyce’s on their arrival to Germany; and the Duke of Wellington. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (London: Oxford University Press, 1983) 353-355.

[40] A H M Ramsay, The Nameless War (1952), 17.

[41] Ramsay, ibid., 54.

[42] Ramsay, ibid., 59-60.

[43] Ramsay, ibid., 62.

[44] David Irving (1966), The Destruction of Dresden (London: Futura Publications, 1980).

[45] Ramsay, op. cit., 67.

[46] Cited by Ramsay, ibid., 68.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Hitler, Mein Kampf, op. cit., 575.

[49] David Irving, Churchill’s War Vol. 1 (Western Australia: Veritas Publishing, 1987), 104.

[50] Stephen Mitford Goodson, Inside the Reserve Bank of South Africa (2013), 67-69.

[51] David Irving, op. cit., ., 14.

[52] Cole, op. cit., 77.

[53] Stephen Dorril, Black Shirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 466.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Griffiths, op. cit., 319.

[56] The BUF had its own notable agricultural expert, Jorian Jencks, author of BUF rural policies.

[57] Griffiths, op. cit., 352.

[58] Cole, op. cit., 82-83.

[59] Cole, ibid., 86.

[60] Cole, 103.

[61] Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 440.

[62] Ibid., 449.

[63] Ibid., 455.

[64] Cole, op. cit., 108.

[65] Ibid., 113.

[66] Ibid., 115.

[67] Ibid.

[68] Ibid., 118.

[69] Ibid., 121.

[70] Ibid., 124.

[71] Ibid., 126.

[72] Ibid., 127.

[73] Ibid., 137.

[74] Cole, 159.

[75] Ibid. 161.

[76] Cole, 164.

[77] Cole, ibid., 182.

[78] Cited by Cole, ibid., 170.

[79] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Secker and Warburg, 1977).

[80] Recall the description of Joyce’s appearance by Shirer with that of Rebecca West.

[81] Cited by Cole, op. cit., 174-175.

[82] Shirer was listed as a Communist sympathiser in a 1950 US publication, Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, based on FBI documents. Shirer had been a member of the Committee for the Prevention of World War III, founded in the USA in 1944, which lobbied for the elimination of Germany. Among its members were James P Warburg, ‘ideologue’ of the society and a scion of the influential Warburg banking dynasty. Did Shirer ever regard the alliance between plutocrats and Leftists against the Axis to be ‘strange’? For several years after the war the Committee’s aims were implemented under the so-called Morgenthau Plan, named after US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., a supporter of the society. The Morgenthau Plan attempted to exterminate the German people through starvation, until being reversed by the Marshall Plan several years after the war, when it was realised that the Germans might be needed to fight the Russians, again.  See: James Bacque, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians Under Allied Occupation 1944-1950 (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1997).

[83] Adrian Weale, Renegades: Hitler’s Englishmen (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1994), 36.

[84] Ibid., passim.

[85] Cole, op. cit., 190.

[86] Wolf Rudiger Hess, My Father Rudolf Hess (London: W H Allen, 1986), 66-67.

[87] Jasper Copping, ‘Nazis “offered to leave Western Europe for free hand to attack USSR”’, The Telegraph, 26 September 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10336126/Nazis-offered-to-leave-western-Europe-in-exchange-for-free-hand-to-attack-USSR.html

[88] Peter Padfield, Hess, Hitler and Churchill (Icon books Ltd., 2013), cited by Copping, ibid.

[89] Cole, 219.

[90] Cole, 221.

[91] Ibid., 222

[92] The large numbers of Jewish lawyers and interpreters who entered Germany with the Occupation forces were given false names. See Cole, op. cit., 247.

[93] Ibid., 246.

[94] Ibid., 287.

[95] Cole, 300.

[96] Cited by Beckett’s son, the author and journalist Francis Beckett, ‘My Father and Lord Haw-Haw’, The Guardian, 10 February 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/feb/10/secondworldwar.world

[97] Ibid.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Ibid.

[100] Adrien Weal, op.cit., 195.

 

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Il telegramma Zimmermann: la vera ragione che spinse gli USA ad entrare in guerra nel 1917

Il telegramma Zimmermann: la vera ragione che spinse gli USA ad entrare in guerra nel 1917

Alessandro Lattanzio

Ex: http://aurorasitio.wordpress.com

Viene spesso, fin troppo spesso, affermato che la causa dell’entrata in guerra di Washington, nella Prima Guerra mondiale, sia stato l’affondamento da parte di un sommergibile tedesco del transatlantico inglese Lusitania, che trascinò con se 123 cittadini statunitensi. (1) In realtà la nave fu affondata nel 1915, mentre gli USA entrarono in guerra nel 1917. Infatti, entrarono in guerra in reazione alla faccenda del “telegramma Zimmermann”.

Il 16 gennaio 1917, Arthur Zimmermann, segretario agli Esteri della Germania imperiale, inviò un telegramma cifrato all’ambasciatore tedesco a Washington, utilizzando il nuovo codice 7500 che gli inglesi non avevano potuto decifrare, ma l’ambasciatore a Washington ritrasmise il telegramma nel vecchio codice 103040, noto agli inglesi, all’ambasciatore tedesco in Messico.

Il testo del telegramma affermava: “Abbiamo intenzione di cominciare la guerra sottomarina senza restrizioni il primo di febbraio. Ci adopereremo, nonostante ciò, a mantenere gli Stati Uniti neutrali. Nel caso non succeda, faremo al Messico una proposta di alleanza sulla seguente base: combattere insieme, fare la pace insieme, un generoso sostegno finanziario e la comprensione da parte nostra del diritto del Messico a riprendersi i territori perduti di Texas, New Mexico e Arizona. I dettagli sono lasciati a voi. Potrete informare il presidente (del Messico) di quanto sopra secretato non appena lo scoppio della guerra contro gli Stati Uniti è certo, e aggiungerei il suggerimento che avrebbe dovuto, di propria iniziativa, invitare il Giappone ad aderirvi immediatamente e anche a mediare tra il Giappone e noi. Si prega di richiamare l’attenzione del presidente sul fatto che l’impiego illimitato dei nostri sottomarini offre ora la prospettiva di convincere l’Inghilterra a fare la pace entro pochi mesi. Accusate ricevuta. Zimmermann”

In realtà, il telegramma venne concepito da un funzionario del ministero degli esteri tedesco, Hans Arthur von Kemnitz, che ne scrisse una prima bozza che Zimmermann firmò quasi senza leggere, probabilmente perché impegnato a redigere il testo diplomatico che giustificava l’annuncio della “guerra sottomarina senza restrizioni” contro il traffico navale diretto nel Regno Unito. Quando un altro funzionario seppe del telegramma, esclamò: “Kemnitz, quel fantastico idiota, ha fatto questo!?“
Berlino dovette criptare il telegramma perché la Germania era consapevole che gli alleati intercettavano tutte le comunicazioni transatlantiche, una conseguenza della prima azione offensiva della Gran Bretagna nella guerra. All’alba del primo giorno della Prima guerra mondiale, la nave inglese Telconia si avvicinò alle coste tedesche e tranciò i cavi sottomarini transatlantici che collegavano la Germania con il resto del mondo. Questo atto di sabotaggio costrinse i tedeschi ad inviare i messaggi tramite collegamenti radio poco sicuri o cavi sottomarini di proprietà estera. Zimmermann fu costretto a trasmettere il suo telegramma cifrato attraverso la Danimarca e la Svezia con un cavo sottomarino statunitense che passava anche per il Regno Unito. Va ricordato, inoltre, che uno stretto collaboratore del presidente statunitense Woodrow Wilson, il colonnello Edward House, fece si che il dipartimento di Stato degli USA consentisse ai tedeschi la trasmissione di messaggi cifrati diplomatici tra Washington, Londra, Copenhagen e Berlino.

Il telegramma di Zimmermann ben presto venne intercettato ed analizzato dalla Sala 40 dell’Ammiragliato inglese, l’ufficio dell’intelligence elettronica inglese. Winston Churchill, Primo lord dell’Ammiragliato inlgese, ordinò la creazione della sezione intercettazione e decodificazione dei messaggi criptati tedeschi, appunto la Sala 40, divenuta di vitale importanza per gli Alleati. La Sala 40 era formata da linguisti e criptoanalisti. Il telegramma Zimmermann, decifrato parzialmente da Nigel de Grey e dal reverendo William Montgomery, affermava che la Germania voleva istigare il Messico ad attaccare gli USA, un’informazione che avrebbe spinto il presidente degli USA Woodrow Wilson ad abbandonare la neutralità degli Stati Uniti, perciò Montgomery e de Grey lo passarono subito all’ammiraglio Reginald Hall, direttore della Naval Intelligence, aspettandosi che lo trasmettesse agli statunitensi. Ma l’ammiraglio lo ripose nella sua cassaforte, incoraggiando i criptoanalisti a completare il lavoro. Infatti, il 5 febbraio 1917, Hall non ebbe il nulla osta dal Foreign Office affinché consegnasse agli statunitensi tali informazioni. Ma Hall convocò un ufficiale dell’intelligence statunitense a Londra e gli diede lo stesso il telegramma. “In altre parole, il direttore dell’intelligence navale aveva unilateralmente preso la decisione di condividere un’informazione altamente sensibile con una potenza straniera, senza l’autorizzazione del proprio governo“.

Hall pensava che se gli statunitensi venivano a conoscenza del telegramma Zimmermann, i tedeschi avrebbero potuto concludere che il loro nuovo sistema di cifratura 7500 era stato spezzato, spingendoli a sviluppare un nuovo sistema di cifratura, bloccando così l’intelligence inglese. Inoltre “Hall era consapevole che la guerra totale degli U-boat sarebbe iniziata entro due settimane, e che essa avrebbe indotto il presidente Wilson a dichiarare guerra alla Germania imperiale, senza bisogno di compromettere la preziosa fonte dell’intelligence inglese”. Ma il 3 febbraio 1917, sebbene la Germania avesse avviato la guerra sottomarina senza restrizioni, il Congresso statunitense e il presidente Wilson annunciarono la prosecuzione della neutralità. D’altra parte, negli USA era diffuso un notevole sentimento anti-inglese, in particolare tra i cittadini di origini tedesche ed irlandesi, questi ultimi infuriati per la brutale repressione della Rivolta di Pasqua del 1916 a Dublino e, inoltre, presso la stampa statunitense Gran Bretagna e Francia non godevano di maggiore simpatia della Germania. Tutto ciò spinse gli inglesi a sfruttare il telegramma Zimmermann. All’improvviso, e in sole due settimane, Montgomery e de Grey completarono la decifrazione del telegramma. Inoltre, gli inglesi si resero conto che von Bernstorff, l’ambasciatore tedesco a Washington, trasmise il messaggio a von Eckhardt, l’ambasciatore tedesco in Messico, utilizzando il vecchio sistema di cifratura 103040 e “dopo aver fatto alcune piccole modifiche al testo” che poi von Eckhardt avrebbe presentato al presidente messicano Carranza. Se Hall avesse potuto avere la versione “messicana” del telegramma Zimmermann, i tedeschi avrebbero supposto che fosse stato reso pubblico dal governo messicano, e che non era stato intercettato dagli inglesi. Hall contattò un agente inglese in Messico, il signor H., che a sua volta s’infiltrò nell’ufficio telegrafico messicano. Il signor H. poté ottenere così la versione messicana del telegramma di Zimmermann. Hall consegnò tale versione del telegramma ad Arthur Balfour, il segretario agli Esteri inglese, che il 23 febbraio convocò l’ambasciatore statunitense a Londra Walter Page per consegnargli il telegramma di Zimmermann. Il 25 febbraio, il presidente Wilson ebbe la ‘prova eloquente’, come disse, che la Germania incoraggiava un’aggressione agli USA. Il telegramma, in realtà, affermava che il Messico avrebbe dichiarato guerra agli USA solo se questi avessero dichiarato guerra alla Germania. Ciò avrebbe giustificato l’intervento degli USA nella Prima guerra mondiale? Infatti il telegramma di Zimmermann viene citato come il casus belli della guerra tra USA e Germania imperiale. Ma, infine, il Messico sarebbe mai stato un serio nemico per gli Stati Uniti? Il Messico era preda da anni di una feroce guerra civile, non poteva costituire una qualsiasi seria minaccia per gli USA, e Berlino avrebbe dovuto saperlo. Il presidente messicano Venustiano Carranza assegnò a un generale il compito di valutare la fattibilità di un’aggressione agli USA, ma il generale concluse che non sarebbe stato possibile per i seguenti motivi:
- gli Stati Uniti erano militarmente molto più forti del Messico.
- le promesse della Germania erano ritenute appunto soltanto tali. Il Messico non poteva utilizzare alcun “generoso sostegno finanziario” per acquistare armi e munizioni, per la semplice ragione che poteva comprarli solo negli Stati Uniti, mentre la Germania non poteva inviare alcunché in Messico dato che la Royal Navy, ed eventualmente l’US Navy, controllava le rotte atlantiche.
- infine, il Messico aveva adottato una politica di cooperazione con Argentina, Brasile e Cile per evitare un qualsiasi contrasto con gli Stati Uniti e migliorare le relazioni regionali.

Comunque il telegramma fu reso pubblico, ma stampa e parte del governo degli Stati Uniti lo ritennero una bufala ideata dagli inglesi per coinvolgere gli USA nella guerra. Tuttavia, Zimmermann, in modo sbalorditivo, ne ammise pubblicamente la paternità, dicendo a una conferenza stampa a Berlino che semplicemente “non posso negarlo. E’ vero”. La Germania poteva benissimo dire che il “telegramma Zimmermann” era un falso, approfondendo così i gravi dubbi sulla faccenda espressi negli USA, dove l’opinione pubblica era poco restia a partecipare alla Grande Guerra. Perché allora Zimmerman confessò di averlo inviato?

Nell’ottobre 2005, venne scoperto il presunto dattiloscritto originale della decifratura del telegramma Zimmermann, “scoperto da uno storico rimasto ignoto” che lavorava su un testo ufficiale della storia del Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), il servizio segreto elettronico inglese. Si riteneva che tale documento sia il telegramma mostrato all’ambasciatore Page nel 1917. Molti documenti segreti relativi a tale incidente furono distrutti su ordine dell’ammiraglio Reginald Hall. Certo, tutto ciò suscita un sospetto: in realtà si sa cosa ha scritto Zimmermann (Kemnitz), ma non è noto cosa avessero di certo mostrato gli inglesi ai diplomatici e al presidente degli USA.

In Germania, le indagini su come gli statunitensi avessero ottenuto il telegramma Zimmermann portarono a credere che fosse stato violato in Messico, proprio come previsto dall’intelligence inglese. Quindi il presidente Wilson, che nel gennaio 1917 aveva detto che sarebbe stato un “crimine contro la civiltà” trascinare il suo popolo in guerra, il 2 aprile dello stesso 1917 affermò: “Consiglio che il Congresso dichiari che il recente corso del governo imperiale non sia in realtà nient’altro che una guerra contro il governo e il popolo degli Stati Uniti, e di accettare formalmente lo status di belligerante cui siamo stati così spinti”.

La diplomazia inglese (così come la sua propaganda nera) cercarono ostinatamente di convincere il presidente Wilson ad abbandonare la promessa di neutralità fatta nella sua campagna elettorale per le presidenziali del 1916, e di entrare in guerra a fianco degli Alleati, ma come affermò la storica statunitense Barbara Tuchman, “Una sola mossa della Sala 40 era riuscita laddove tre anni d’intensa diplomazia avevano fallito”.Alessandro Lattanzio, 3/1/2014

Note:
1) “Gli inglesi contarono 1198 vittime, tra cui 123 statunitensi, mentre in realtà i morti furono 1201; vennero infatti omessi i corpi dei tre tedeschi inviati sul Lusitania dall’attaché militare tedesco a Washington di allora, von Papen, per fotografare eventuali materiali sospetti. I tre furono scoperti e tenuti a bordo come prigionieri. In seguito, il segretario personale del presidente Wilson, Joseph Tumulty, fece credere a Washington che le spie fossero in possesso di un ordigno esplosivo, mentre invece si trattava della macchina fotografica”.

Fonti:
The Telegram that brought US into Great War is found, Ben Fenton
The Zimmermann Telegram, Joseph C. Goulden
The Zimmermann Telegram, Barbara Tuchman

Matthias HELLNER:

L’occupation de la Ruhr en 1923

 

Lorsque les Français sont entrés dans la Ruhr, les ouvriers ont déclenché la résistance passive et l’inflation a pris des proportions calamiteuses

 

En janvier 1923, les soldats français et belges occupent l’ensemble de la région de la Ruhr. Une vague d’indignation secoue alors toutes les couches de la population dans le Reich vaincu. Le Chancelier Cuno, en poste depuis le 22 novembre 1922, déclare qu’il faut organiser la résistance passive contre l’occupation. En France toutefois, les esprits se divisent pour juger l’entrée des troupes en territoire allemand, entrée justifiée par le retard d’une livraison de bois imposée par les clauses de réparation. Les socialistes tentent de démontrer les dangers d’une occupation. Clémenceau s’y opposait et le Maréchal Foch parlait d’un “terrible nid de guêpes” où la France avait mis la main.

 

Par l’appel à la résistance passive, toute la vie économique de la région occupée fut paralysée. Les hauts fourneaux furent éteints et les mines fermées. Les cheminots se mirent en grève et les fonctionnaires allemands s’en tinrent à la convention prise, d’éviter tous contacts avec les autorités occupantes. Pour transporter les minerais et le charbon de la Ruhr vers la France, des milliers de techniciens et de cheminots furent mobilisés pour travailler dans la région occupée. Mais dès que les transports se remirent à rouler, des vétérans allemands, dont d’anciens combattants des corps francs comme Heinz Oskar Hauenstein et Albert Leo Schlageter, passèrent à la résistance active et organisèrent des actions de sabotage. Ils firent sauter des ponts, des lignes de chemin de fer et des canaux pour empêcher le transport vers l’étranger des biens économiques allemands.

 

Les autorités occupantes réagirent avec dureté. La région occupée fut complètement verrouillée et la police allemande désarmée. Krupp et d’autres industriels furent condamnés à quinze ans de prison. Partout des confrontations sanglantes eurent lieu. En mars, quatorze ouvriers de chez Krupp furent abattus; d’innombrables citoyens furent arrêtés ou expulsés. Lorsque les Français arrêtèrent Schlageter suite à une trahison, alors qu’il venait de faire sauter un pont près de Calkum, tous les recours en grâce furent inutiles, les Français voulant faire un exemple. L’officier de la Grande Guerre, âgé de 28 ans, fut fusillé le 26 mai. La résistance se poursuivit néanmoins sans discontinuer.

 

Fin mai, le parti communiste tente un coup de force et les soulèvements armés qu’il téléguidait furent anéantis par des volontaires armés. Au même moment, les attentats contre les occupants se multipliaient. Ainsi, le 10 juin à Dortmund, deux officiers français sont abattus en pleine rue. La réaction des Français a coûté la vie à sept civils.

 

Les tentatives françaises de détacher des régions rhénanes du Reich avec l’aide de mouvements séparatistes ne connurent aucun succès. Des attentats perpétrés contre des chefs séparatistes et la résistance de toute la population ruinèrent ces tentatives. Le 26 septembre, Stresemann, qui, le 13 août, avait remplacé Cuno au poste de Chancelier, déclare que la résistance passive doit se terminer. A ce moment-là, 132 Allemands avaient été tués; onze d’entre eux avaient été condamnés à mort mais un seul avait été exécuté. 150.000 personnes avaient été expulsées de la région; d’innombrables autres avaient écopé d’amendes ou avaient subi des peines de prison.

 

La République de Weimar était dans un état de désolation épouvantable. Non seulement elle avait dû renoncer au poids économique de la région de la Ruhr mais elle avait dû aussi payer pour entretenir la population paralysée par la résistance passive ordonnée par Cuno. L’inflation galopante ne pouvait plus être arrêtée. Le 1 juillet un dollar américain coûtait déjà 160.000 mark; le 1 août, le dollar valait 1.100.000 mark; le 1 novembre 130.000.000.000 mark et le 30 novembre 4.200.000.000.000 mark!

 

Pour stabiliser l’état de la République, il a fallu procéder à une réforme monétaire et, simultanément, l’Allemagne accepte en août 1924 le Plan Dawes lors de la Conférence de Londres, plan qui réglait le paiement des réparations sur des bases nouvelles. En juillet et en août 1925, les Français évacuent finalement une grande partie des régions occupées, sous pression de la Grande-Bretagne et des Etats-Unis. L’aventure de la Ruhr était terminée.

 

Matthias HELLNER.

(article paru dans “zur Zeit”, Vienne, http://www.zurzeit.at , n°25/2013).

Geschiedenisles: Nederlandse protestanten kozen in 16e eeuw kant van de islam

Geschiedenisles: Nederlandse protestanten kozen in 16e eeuw kant van de islam

 

Ex: http://xandernieuws.punt.nl

Lutheranen en Calvinisten uit Nederland en Engeland vochten zij aan zij met moslim invasiemacht

De unitaristische koning Sigismund zweert trouw aan sultan Suleiman de Grote. Beiden hadden hun afwijzing van de leer van de Drie-eenheid gemeen.

Op 15 december schreven we -op basis van onderzoek van een Amerikaanse auteur en een prent uit de 19e eeuw- dat Maarten Luther de kerstboom populair zou hebben gemaakt. Een Nederlandse auteur liet mij echter weten dat die afbeelding enkel fantasie was, en dat de kerstboom pas in de 19e eeuw in zwang raakte. Wél historisch verifieerbaar, maar nog minder bekend, is dat Luther het Vaticaan dermate haatte, dat hij een moslimheerser boven de paus verkoos. Dit leidde er mede toe dat protestanten in Holland, Vlaanderen en Engeland de kant kozen van de Ottomaanse Turken, toen deze Europa probeerden te veroveren. In onze tijd lijken veel kerken eenzelfde fatale fout te maken, door te beweren dat Jahweh en Allah één en dezelfde God zouden zijn.

Protestanten staan toch al niet bekend vanwege hun kennis van de historie van hun eigen kerken, noch van de inhoud of zelfs het bestaan van de meeste Bijbelse eindtijdprofetieën. Voor de meesten zal het daarom een schok zijn dat Luther toleranter stond tegenover moslims, dan tegenover katholieken en joden.

Luther schreef weliswaar een traktaat met de titel 'De oorlog tegen de Turk', waarbij hij zich op theologische gronden verzette tegen de islam, en de Duitsers opriep een invasie te weerstaan, maar hij schreef tevens: 'Laat de Turk geloven en leven zoals hij wil, net zoals men het pausdom en andere valse christenen laat leven.' En: 'Een slimme Turk is een betere heerser dan een domme christen.'

Haat tegen paus en joden groter dan afkeer van islam

De 'grote reformator' besefte heel goed dat de islam theologisch onverenigbaar was met het christendom, en ook wat er zou gebeuren als de Turken Europa zouden veroveren. Zijn haat tegen de paus en de joden was echter dermate groot, dat hij zijn volgelingen bewust opriep om desnoods een Turkse (moslim)heerser over zich te accepteren.

Tenslotte had Luther de joden en de paus als de 'antichrist' en 'de geïncarneerde duivel' omschreven, en ging hij zelfs zover dat hij zei dat sommige van zijn Duitse tijdgenoten 'feitelijk de komst en heerschappij van de Turken wilden, omdat ze vonden dat het Duitse volk wild en onbeschaafd was, ja, zelfs half-duivels en half-menselijk' (bron: The Ottoman Empire and early modern Europe, Daniel Goffman, 2002).

Sultan Suleiman en unitariër Sigismund

Suleiman de Grote, destijds de sultan van het Ottomaans Rijk, stuurde een brief aan Luthers volgelingen in Holland en Vlaanderen, waarin hij schreef dat hij zich verwant aan hen voelde, 'omdat ze geen beelden aanbaden, in één God geloofden en tegen de paus en de keizer vochten'. Met de Duitse prinsen die zich achter Luther schaarden wilde hij zelfs een alliantie vormen tegen de keizer en de paus, en beloofde hij bescherming aan de protestanten in Hongarije en Transsylvanië.

Eén van de grootste collaborateurs met Suleiman was een unitariër, John Sigismund Zápolya (koning John of János II), die tijdens zijn heerschappij over Hongarije afhankelijk was van de steun van de sultan, aan wie Sigismunds vader (koning John I) trouw had gezworen. Sigismund was de oprichter van de unitaristische 'kerk' van Transsylvanië, die bij de reformatorische kerken in ongenade was geraakt vanwege het ontkennen van de leer van de Drie-eenheid, die ook door de islam als godslasterlijk wordt afgewezen.

Marokko wilde alliantie met Ottomaans Rijk en Holland

Ongeveer een eeuw later stuurde Marokko een moslimdiplomaat naar Europa, met als doel een alliantie te vormen tussen het protestantse Holland, het Ottomaanse Rijk en de islamitische koninkrijken van Marokko en de Morisco's. Deze diplomaat, Al-Hajari, schreef in 'Het Boek van de Beschermer van de godsdienst tegen de beeldenaanbidders' dat 'hun leraren (Luther en Calvijn) hen (de protestanten) waarschuwden tegen de paus en de aanbidders van beelden; ze vertelden hen tevens de moslims niet te haten, omdat zij het zwaard van God in de wereld tegen de beeldenaanbidders zijn. Daarom kiezen zij de kant van de moslims.'

Vanwege hun gezamenlijke haat tegen de katholieke kerk was het voor de volgelingen van Luther en Calvijn niet moeilijk om de kant van de islamitische invasiemacht te kiezen. Met onder andere zijn halfhartige uitspraken over de islam had Luther hiervoor de basis gelegd. Daarmee hield het echter niet op; Murad III, de opvolger van Suleiman, schreef een brief waarin hij een alliantie met de Lutheranen in Vlaanderen en Spanje voorstelde:

'Wat jullie aandeel betreft: aanbid geen afgoden, jullie hebben de beelden en afbeeldingen en 'klokken' van de kerken verwijderd, en jullie geloof beleden door te verklaren dat God Almachtig één is, en de Heilige Jezus zijn Profeet en Dienaar, en nu met hart en ziel zoeken en verlangen naar het ware geloof. Maar de trouweloze die ze Papa noemen ontkent dat de Schepper Eén is, schrijft goddelijkheid toe aan de Heilige Jezus (vrede zij met hem!), en aanbidt beelden en afbeeldingen die hij met zijn eigen handen heeft gemaakt. Hiermee trekt hij de éénheid van God in twijfel en leidt hij velen dat verkeerde pad op.'

Lutheranen en Calvinisten steunden mosliminvasie Europa

Tijdens de slag van Lepanto in 1571 vochten Lutheranen en Calvinisten uit Holland en Engeland zelfs zij aan zij met de islamitische Ottomanen. Dit verraad kende ruim een eeuw later een vervolg in de cruciale slag om Wenen in 1681. Imre Thokoly, de leider van de protestanten in Hongarije, viel toen samen met de Ottomanen Wenen aan. Het is aan de genade van God en de Poolse koning Johannes Sobieski te danken dat het de moslims niet lukte om na Constantinopel ook Wenen te veroveren. Was dat wel gebeurd, dan was Europa wellicht al eeuwen islamitisch geweest.

De volgelingen van Luther en Calvijn kozen dus vóór de islam, omdat beide partijen het katholicisme als de grootste vijand beschouwden. In de 16e eeuw was het onder Nederlandse protestanten een algemeen gezegde dat zij 'liever een Turk dan een papist (volgeling van de paus)' zouden zijn. Eerder hadden Orthodoxe christenen in Constantinopel een vergelijkbaars credo: 'beter een tulband dan de tiara (kroon van de paus)'. Voor deze houding betaalden zij een bittere prijs, toen hun stad in 1453 door de Ottomaanse Turken werd veroverd, en duizenden van hen werden afgeslacht.

Geen excuus voor collaboratie met islam

Anno 2013/2014 dreigt de geschiedenis zich te herhalen. Opnieuw zoekt de islam met suikerzoete woorden toenadering tot de christelijke kerken, door te beweren dat wij dezelfde god zouden aanbidden, en wij veel met elkaar gemeen zouden hebben.

Johannes de Damascener, die werkte aan het hof van de Kalief van Syrië, noemde in zijn boek 'De Bron van Kennis' de islam echter de 'ketterij van de Hagarenen' (afstammelingen van Hagar, de moeder van Ismaël), Allah 'Baäl' en moslims 'verminkers van God', als tegenwerping tegen de (valse) beschuldiging van moslims dat christenen drie Goden zouden aanbidden.*

Christenen hebben geen enkel excuus voor het collaboreren met de islam. Hiermee hebben zij zelfs de kerk en hun geloof verraden, want juist in veel landen waar moslims de baas zijn wordt een uitroeiingsoorlog tegen christenen gevoerd. En als dat christenen niets zegt, dan zouden ze een korte blik op de islamitische leer moeten werpen, die immers de complete basis van het christelijke geloof -de 'Vader en de Zoon', het sterven van Jezus aan het kruis, de opstanding- ontkent en zich volgens de Bijbel daarmee aan de grootste godslasteringen schuldig maakt.

Samenwerking met islam = eigen doodvonnis tekenen

Honderden jaren geschiedenis laat zien dat iedereen die gaat samenwerken met de islam, uiteindelijk een prooi zal worden en op vaak bloedige wijze het onderspit zal moeten delven. De anti-Israël, antisemitische en pro-islamhouding van veel kerken is in dit opzicht even angstwekkend als veelzeggend. Zo verkettert de Lutheraanse Wereldraad regelmatig de Joodse staat voor het zich verdedigen tegen Palestijnse terroristen. En dat is niet zo vreemd als bedacht wordt dat Luther zelf tijdens het grootste deel van zijn leven een openlijke antisemiet was. (1)

Is dit een pleidooi om dan maar katholiek te worden? Zeker niet, want er is theologisch heel veel mis met de leer van het Vaticaan, dat tenslotte de basis heeft gelegd van de onbijbelse vervangingstheologie die ook door de protestantse kerken wordt geleerd, en die onder andere heeft geleid tot eeuwenlange Jodenvervolgingen en een aanhoudende blindheid voor het grootste deel van de Bijbelse eindtijdprofetieën.

Christenen moeten verschillen opzij zetten

Zoals we gisteren al schreven kan het Vaticaan echter nooit de 'hoer van Babylon' zijn, zoals veel kerken en groepen nog altijd leren. Katholieken belijden net als protestanten en evangelische/pinksterchristenen dezelfde Verlosser. In het licht van de islamitische oorlog tegen het christendom wordt het daarom hoog tijd dat christenen van alle gezindten hun theologische verschillen accepteren en laten voor wat ze zijn, en elkaar vinden in hun belijdenis dat Jezus de Christus is, is opgestaan uit de dood, en de enige Weg is om verzoend te worden met God de Vader. Doen we dat niet, dan zouden wij op termijn wel eens hetzelfde lot als de christenen in Azië en Noord Afrika kunnen ondergaan.

* Om een zijdelingse discussie over de Drie-eenheid te vermijden: noch de katholieken, noch de protestanten, noch de evangelischen zeggen drie Goden te aanbidden, maar één God die zich op drie wijzen manifesteert, namelijk als Vader, als Zoon, en als Heilige Geest - net zoals u zelf één persoon bent die uit drie 'delen' bestaat, namelijk geest, ziel en lichaam, waarbij uw lichaam is onderworpen aan uw geest (en zo de Zoon is onderworpen aan de Vader, zoals de Bijbel schrijft). Wij zijn immers naar Zijn beeld (Genesis 1:27) geschapen.

Xander

(1) Shoebat

RHF nº XXVI

RHF n°XXVI

Acaba de aparecer el nº XXVI de la Revista de Historia del Fascismo correspondiente al mes de noviembre de 2013 que incluye los siguientes artículos:

Sumario:

DOSIER
Arde el Reichstag:
¿Cómo? ¿Cuándo? ¿Por qué?. Del 30 de enero al 5 de marzo de 1933: semanas decisivas

En la noche del 27 de febrero de 1933, cuando aún no se cumplía un mes del nombramiento de Hitler como Canciller, el Reichstag quedaba convertido en cenizas. Aun hoy subsiste en de­bate sobre quién incendió el edificio e incluso el autor material, Marinus Van Der Lubbe, ha sido rehabilitado en 1998. La respuesta del gobierno consistió en presentar una ley especial para la represión de estos actos de terrorismo que tuvo como consecuencia la prohibición del Partido Comunista Alemán (KPD) y sucesivas modificaciones legales que concentraron el poder en manos de Hitler. Presentamos la cronología de los acontecimientos y un análisis crítico del episodio.

NACIONAL-SINDICALISMO
Crónica de una frustración histórica
Las causas que impidieron el arraigo de un fascismo en España

La crónica del «fascismo español», esto es, del movi­miento nacional-sindicalista, es también la crónica de una permanente frustración que se manifestó ya desde los primeros momentos y que lo ha acompañado a lo largo de toda su historia. Debemos, pues, hablar de un «fascismo frustrado» mucho más que de una experiencia histórica consumada. Este artículo tiene dos partes, en la primera se aluden a las distintas causas que generaron esa frustración. En la segunda se describen las biografías de los dos principales exponentes de la «derecha falangista»: Onésimo Redondo Ortega y Julio Ruiz de Alda.

NACIONAL-SINDICALISMO
Dos biografías de la “derecha falangista”
Onésimo Redondo y Ruiz de Alda
(por Eduardo Núñez)

Después de esta introducción presentamos las biografías de los dos dirigentes falangistas más conocidos de su «ala derecha». Se trata de dos biografías sintéticas que nos sirven para situar a los personajes. Al lector le será sumamente fácil, con la introducción que hemos realizado, entender que situemos a estos dos personajes en la «derecha fa­langista». Vale la pena decir que, en el propio José Antonio, se percibe una evolución nítida a lo largo del año 1935 que lo va desplazando del «ala derecha», hacia nuevas posiciones. Esta evolución, por el contrario, no se percibe ni en Onésimo Redondo, ni en Julio Ruiz de Alda.

FASCISMOS INTERNACIONALES
Camisas doradas y el fascismo en México
(por Eduardo Basurto)

En el México insurgente del primer tercio del si­glo XX, tras las guerras cristeras (de las que León Degrelle fue un testigo excepcional) apareció el movimiento de los Camisas Doradas, rama militante de la Acción Revolucionaria Mexicanista, dirigida por Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco, un movimiento que rechazaba a la democracia parlamentaria y el marxismo. Son considerados como el «partido fascista» mexicano más amplio y con una base más sólida. Su ciclo histórico fue breve pero aquí lo repasamos, desde sus orígenes hasta su extinción en el tiempo en el que la guerra ya había vuelto a prender en Europa.

NEOFASCISMO
Memorias de Stefano Delle Chiaie
Los años del exilio español

Reanudamos la traducción y publicación de las memorias de Stefano Delle Chiaie editadas en Italia con el título de El Águila y el Cóndor. Llega­mos a la dilatada etapa española en la que Delle Chiaie consigue crear, junto con el Comandante Borghese, una «santuario» en nuestro país cuya vigencia se prolongará hasta un año después de la muerte de Franco. Esta etapa es prolija en acontecimientos que están ligados en buena medida a las peripecias de la policía española de la época y que harán que el nombre de Delle Chiaie aparezca con mucha frecuencia en las primeras páginas de los medios de comunicación españoles durante la transición.

Formato 15x21 cm
232 páginas
Portada: cuatricomía, plastificada, con solapas
PVP: 18,00 €
Pedidos superiores a 10 ejemplares: 9:00 €

Bernard Lugan : le vrai Nelson Mandela

Bernard Lugan : le vrai Nelson Mandela

Les Japonais et la Guerre de l'Asie-Pacifique

Les Japonais et la Guerre de l'Asie-Pacifique

 

De la tragédie au mythe

Rémy Valat
Ex: http://metamag.fr

Le livre de Michael Lucken, Les Japonais et la guerre (1937-1952), est un ouvrage qui fera date dans l'historiographie du Japon contemporain autant par l'originalité et la pertinence de l'approche méthodologique que par l'acuité des idées exprimées par son auteur. 

Michael Lucken est professeur des université près l'Institut des langues et des civilisations orientales, spécialiste de l'art japonais, spécialité qui est une des pièces maîtresse du dispositif analytique et des sources exploitées par l’auteur pour saisir notamment les mécanismes psychologiques ayant animé les Japonais pendant la guerre de l'Asie-pacifique et l'immédiat après-guerre (fin de l'occupation américaine). Rien de plus précieux en effet, en une période où la parole publique n'est pas nécessairement libre, que de recourir aux sources littéraires, graphiques et visuelles pour saisir l'ampleur affective du drame, son appropriation par les Japonais et son instrumentalisation par les pouvoirs politiques nippons et américains. 

Il suffit de garder en mémoire les passages poignants de Shûsako Endô, notamment dans son roman Le fleuve sacré, pour apprécier l'impact sur cet auteur lorsqu'il fût informé a posteriori des actes de cannibalisme commis par des soldats affamés, harcelés et en déroute en pleine jungle de Birmanie. L'ombre de la guerre se pose aussi implicitement ou explicitement dans les réalisations cinématographiques et la bande dessinée contemporaines (films, anime, manga). Surtout, Michael Lucken, qui a exploité une importante quantité de sources japonaises, nous démontre comment la Seconde Guerre mondiale est devenue « une figure mythique » au Japon. Il nous explique comment la fin du conflit, et en particulier le drame des bombes atomiques, a été exploitée par l'empereur et sa chancellerie pour assurer, avec le consentement des autorités américaines d'occupation (SCAP), la survie et la permanence de l'institution impériale au prix du sacrifices de nombreuses vies humaines, d'une interprétation et d'une manipulation de la réalité historique. Ce thème est abordé dans la seconde partie de l’ouvrage et apporte un éclairage sur les enjeux mémoriels et politiques actuellement en jeu en Asie.

L’auteur relate peu les crimes commis par l'armée japonaise en guerre. Cela a déjà été traité par Jean-Louis Margolin (Violences et crimes du Japon en guerre, 1937-1945, Grand Pluriel, 2009) et les campagnes militaires, ce n'est pas l'objet principal de son livre. Il a surtout étudié le vécu de l'arrière, l'impact de la guerre sur le quotidien : une guerre d'abord coloniale et lointaine, et qui devient de plus en plus présente en raison d'un plus grand embrigadement du corps social, de l'accroissement du nombre des tués et des bombardements alliés. Le lecteur pourra être choqué par le mépris des autorités pour leurs soldats, et en particulier du problème du rapatriement des ossements des morts au combat : pour les Japonais, le respect aux défunts et le deuil des familles est conditionné par le retour des cendres, de restes ou d'effets personnels du défunt ; or, la réalité des engagements armés ne le permettant pas toujours, les autorités militaires japonaises ont multipliés les expédients, et même préconisé le prélèvement in vivo et anticipé de reliques, principalement les phanères (à l'instar des pilotes de kamikaze qui avaient la tête rasée, à l'exception d'une mèche de cheveux destinée à être envoyée aux proches du héros). Ce mépris a ouvert très tôt les portes à toutes les sollicitations au sacrifice : si la valorisation et la pratique d’offrir héroïquement sa vie au combat est ancienne au Japon (et pas uniquement japonaise, l'auteur explique brillamment l'influence de la pensée occidentale au Japon, et en particulier Romain Rolland), c’est surtout l’exemple des trois soldats qui se seraient délibérément sacrifiés à Shangai le 22 février 1932 en transportant un tube de Bangalore (explosif servant à faire des brèches dans les fortifications ou lignes de barbelées adverses) que les contemporains de la guerre ont en mémoire : ces « trois bombes humaines » ou « projectiles de chair » sont à l’origine du terme « nikudan », largement employé dans la presse pour désigner les soldats prêts à mourir dans une mission sans retour. L'épisode des kamikaze se situe dans cette continuité, mais avec une intensité supérieure, car le Japon se trouve devant le gouffre de la défaite...

Enfin, Michael Lucken nous éclaire sur la dimension romantique de l'engagement patriotique de la population japonaise qui pensait sincèrement que l'occupation nippone en Asie serait temporaire, le temps nécessaire d' « éclairer spirituellement » les populations des pays conquis... Malgré la brièveté de la présence des armées impériales, le message d'émancipation véhiculé à l'époque a porté ses fruits, comme en témoigne la vague de décolonisation asiatique. Nous est révélée l'irrationalité et le romantisme du peuple et des élites nippons dans le déclenchement et la poursuite d'une guerre avec de faibles, voire aucune, perspectives de victoire. « Le Japon enfermé dans la modernité occidentale (…) n'avait d'autres solutions (…) que de se lancer dans la guerre, pour que les individus puissent ainsi une dernière fois sentir et prolonger la pureté du souffle national. Il n'y avait à l'horizon ni paix ni après-guerre, seul importait un engagement immédiat, complet et sans retour. La lumière se trouverait dans la ruine. » 

Michael Lucken, Les Japonais et la guerre (1937-1952), Fayard, 2013, 399 p.

A 70 anni dai bombardamenti alleati

Weimar 1941-1942: la Société Européenne des Ecrivains

Weimar 1941-1942: la Société Européenne des Ecrivains

par Christophe Dolbeau

Au soir du 4 octobre 1941, trois écrivains français, Jacques Chardonne, Marcel Jouhandeau et Ramon Fernandez, embarquent dans un train de nuit qui va les conduire en Allemagne où les autorités les invitent à participer à un congrès littéraire. Ils seront rejoints ultérieurement par quatre de leurs confrères, Abel Bonnard, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Robert Brasillach et André Fraigneau. Favorables au nazisme, pragmatiques, opportunistes ou simplement séduits par le discours européen de leurs interlocuteurs allemands, ces sept hommes apportent ainsi leur caution à une ambitieuse entreprise du Dr Gœbbels : mobiliser les écrivains derrière la bannière du Reich pour construire une Europe nouvelle.

À la découverte du Reich

À un peu plus d’un an de l’armistice franco-allemand et tandis qu’une bonne moitié de la France est occupée, ce voyage est tout sauf anodin. Il démontre qu’une page est en train de se tourner et que certains intellectuels sont prêts à jouer la carte allemande. Ce phénomène n’est pas circonscrit à la France et dès l’escale de Cologne, nos voyageurs retrouvent un petit groupe de collègues arrivés des quatre coins du continent. Il y là une romancière bulgare, Fani Popowa-Mutafowa (1), membre du mouvement fascisant des « Ratniks » (Combattants), un essayiste et poète croate, Antun Bonifačić (2), proche du gouvernement oustachi, le jeune poète et dramaturge finnois Arvi Kivimaa (3), le Danois Svend Fleuron (4), auteur d’ouvrages sur la nature et les animaux sauvages, et son compatriote Ejnar Howalt (5), dramaturge et militant du parti national-socialiste danois, le philosophe fasciste italien Alfredo Acito, les phalangistes espagnols Ernesto Giménez Caballero (6) et Luis Felipe Vivanco (7), le Norvégien Kåre Bjørgen (8), disciple de Quisling, le Suédois Einar Malm (9), le poète frison Rintsje Piter Sybesma (10) et les Flamands Ferdinand Vercnocke (11) et Filip de Pillecijn (12). Pour accueillir et guider cette quinzaine d’invités, les organisateurs de la tournée ont mobilisé toute une escouade de jeunes talents au premier rang desquels se détachent l’historien Karl-Heinz Bremer (13) et le lieutenant Gerhard Heller (14), deux hommes qui jouent à Paris un rôle capital. Autour d’eux sont également du voyage les poètes Moritz Jahn (15), Karl-Heinz Bischoff (16), Friedrich Schnack (17) et Hans Baumann (18), ainsi que le dramaturge August Hinrichs (19) et le romancier et traducteur Carl Rothe (20). Les autorités ne lésinent pas : les visiteurs sont traités de façon royale et entre deux pèlerinages culturels, ils ont droit à toutes sortes d’attentions. On les emmène voir la maison de Stefan George, à Bingen, puis le foyer natal de Gœthe, à Mayence, avant de leur faire déguster quelques bons crus rhénans et de les recevoir en grandes pompes à Heidelberg. À Munich, le groupe est hébergé au Bayerischer Hof, l’un des plus beaux hôtels de la ville, où il rencontre Hanns Johst (21), le tout puissant président de la Chambre des Écrivains du Reich. À Salzbourg, les voyageurs assistent à une représentation des Noces de Figaro et le lendemain, ils sont à Vienne où le bourgmestre leur offre le souper. Ils visitent ensuite Baden, la station thermale qu’affectionnait Beethoven, et font le tour de la demeure de Schubert, avant de prendre part, à la Hofburg, au grand dîner d’apparat qu’offre en leur honneur le coruscant Reichsstatthalter de l’Ostmark, Baldur von Schirach. Le 21 octobre, une dernière étape conduit enfin les visiteurs à Berlin où ils rencontrent Carl Schmitt et visitent Babelsberg, la nouvelle chancellerie et le ministère de la propagande où le Dr Gœbbels leur adresse quelques mots de bienvenue. Leur périple touristique s’achève là car le 23 octobre, ils sont attendus à Weimar où vont débuter les rencontres poétiques (Dichtertreffen) dont ils sont les hôtes d’honneur.

Littérature et Ordre Nouveau

Le 24 octobre 1941, c’est donc dans la grande Weimarhalle et sous un oriflamme frappé d’une Croix de fer, d’un livre et d’un glaive que s’ouvre le congrès qui a pour thème « la littérature dans l’Europe de demain ». Le groupe des invités étrangers s’est étoffé de quelques personnalités et il compte désormais une bonne trentaine de membres. Au nombre des gens qui sont venus directement figurent les Français Abel Bonnard, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Robert Brasillach et André Fraigneau que nous avons cités plus haut, les Flamands Felix Timmermans (22) et Ernest Claes (23), les Néerlandais Jan de Vries (24) et Jan Eekhout (25), le Finlandais Veikko Antero Koskenniemi (26), le Suisse John Knittel (27), le Norvégien Lars Hansen (28), l’Italien Arturo Farinelli (29), les Roumains Niculae I. Herescu (30) et Ion Sân-Giorgiu (31) et les Hongrois József Nyirö (32) et Lörinc Szabó (33). Après le discours d’inauguration que prononce Wilhelm Hægert, chef de la section « littérature » au ministère de la Propagande et vice-président de la Chambre des Écrivains, plusieurs orateurs allemands, dont Hanns Johst, Hans Baumann, Bruno Brehm (34) et Mauritz Jahn, se succèdent à la tribune pour évoquer qui le rôle phare de la race germanique dans l’essor et la défense de la culture européenne, qui la croisade contre le communisme ou qui encore la place du poète en temps de guerre et la nécessité de célébrer l’héroïsme sous toutes ses formes.. Au-delà de ces allocutions plus ou moins inspirées, l’événement majeur de ces journées reste toutefois la décision que prennent les participants de pérenniser le climat amical du congrès et de formaliser leur coopération en se regroupant de façon permanente au sein d’une nouvelle association, la Société Européenne des Écrivains (Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung ou ESV). Cette initiative a, semble-t-il, pour origine une suggestion conjointe du Prix nobel norvégien Knut Hamsun, du Flamand Stijn Streuvels (35) et de la romancière finnoise Maila Talvio (36), et le Dr Gœbbels en a, bien sûr, aussitôt saisi tout l’intérêt : placée sous le haut patronage de son ministère, la nouvelle association ne pourra que contribuer au rayonnement culturel du Reich et favoriser la collaboration en Europe. À titre personnel, le ministre y voit aussi une belle revanche sur le PEN club international qui a exclu son pays en 1934, et plus précisément sur son président d’alors, H. G. Wells, un individu qui prétend n’avoir « jamais rencontré un homme plus juste, plus candide et plus honnête » que Joseph Staline…

La Société Européenne des Écrivains (ESV) se choisit un président en la personne du romancier italo-bavarois Hans Carossa (37), deux vice-présidents, M.M. Koskenniemi et Giovanni Papini (38), et un secrétaire général qui sera Carl Rothe. Les statuts de l’association ne seront signés que le 27 mars 1942 (39), au terme du premier exercice. Ils sont assez souples et dénués de connotation politique. L’article deux précise que le but de la société est « l’encouragement des contacts personnels et des rencontres entre écrivains des nations européennes, la discussion et la solution de tâches et de désirs communs dans toutes les branches de la littérature ; la consultation compétente en matière juridique et économique » (40) ; l’article cinq indique que l’association « se divise en groupes nationaux qui sont représentés par leurs porte-parole » ; l’article sept stipule que « l’on n’est membre qu’à titre purement personnel » et que « l’on n’acquiert pas la qualité de membre par une adhésion volontaire mais uniquement par une nomination », cette dernière étant faite par le président de la société, sur proposition du porte-parole du groupement national (article 8). Le siège social est établi à Weimar (article 3) et la cotisation fixée à dix Reichsmarks (article 12). Entre deux flâneries dans Weimar, une visite de la maison de Gœthe et un dîner au château de Tiefurt, les congressistes participent à différents ateliers. Parmi divers projets, ils envisagent de créer une grande bibliothèque ouverte aux membres de la société et se promettent d’encourager activement la diffusion dans toute l’Europe des meilleures œuvres des auteurs contemporains. Dans l’immédiat, ils se fixent néanmoins pour premier objectif de lancer une publication de prestige qui servira de vitrine à l’association. Les protecteurs allemands de l’ESV ayant donné leur accord et promis quelques crédits, le premier numéro du mensuel Europäische Literatur verra le jour en mai 1942. Dirigé par Wilhelm Ruoff, il s’agit d’un magazine très éclectique et non dépourvu d’attraits qui traite aussi bien de la poésie japonaise que de la littérature espagnole contemporaine, de la poésie lyrique croate ou du point de vue danois sur les lettres américaines, qui aborde de grands thèmes comme le Danube, le Rhin ou Dante en Allemagne, et consacre de nombreux reportages aux auteurs de l’ESV (41).

Les premières rencontres européennes s’achèvent le dimanche 26 octobre pour faire place à la Semaine du livre de guerre allemand qu’inaugure Joseph Gœbbels. Dans son allocution d’ouverture, le ministre ne manque pas de saluer les invités étrangers. Ceux-ci étaient présents, le matin même, lorsque le Reichsminister est allé fleurir les tombes jumelles de Gœthe et de Schiller, et dans la soirée, ils prennent part à un dîner d’adieu suivi d’une représentation de l’Iphigénie en Tauride de Gœthe. Le lendemain, les congressistes regagnent leurs pays respectifs, à l’exception de Bonnard, Drieu la Rochelle, Brasillach et Fraigneau qui font un crochet à Jäckelsbruch où Arno Breker les reçoit dans son atelier, puis à Berlin où ils s’entretiennent avec quelques travailleurs français. À leur retour, tous les invités de Weimar vanteront la parfaite courtoisie de leurs hôtes, l’organisation impeccable de leur séjour et l’ambiance particulièrement conviviale du congrès ; tous souligneront également les belles perspectives de réconciliation et de renaissance européenne qu’ouvrent de telles rencontres.

Un indéniable succès

Dès la fin de l’année 1941, la toute nouvelle Société Européenne des Écrivains commence à s’organiser et ses « groupes nationaux » à recruter. Un certain mystère demeure, aujourd’hui encore, sur la composition du groupe français dont on ne connaît avec certitude que ceux de ses membres qui se sont rendus à Weimar. On peut toutefois supputer que des gens comme Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Ernest Fornairon, Edouard Dujardin ou Camille Mauclair ont pu y appartenir mais ce ne sont que des suppositions. Apparaît aussi à Paris, en février 1943, un hebdomadaire baptisé Panorama dont les objectifs sont fort proches de ceux de Europäische Literatur (42) et dont les collaborateurs sont souvent les mêmes. Moins de cachotteries, en revanche, pour la Finlande où l’on sait précisément qu’une cinquantaine d’écrivains, dont Mika Waltari (43) et Viljo Kajava (44), figurent dans le groupe local de l’ESV. En Norvège, Knut Hamsun a rejoint l’association et en Suède, Sven Hedin (45) a fait de même. En Croatie et outre Antun Bonifačić que nous avons déjà mentionné, l’association compte 17 membres dont Mile Budak (46), Slavko Kolar (47), Mihovil Kombol (48), Milan Begović (49), Dobriša Cesarić (50), Zvonko Milković (51) et Ivan Goran Kovačić (52). En Espagne, où le recrutement de l’ESV n’est pas bien connu, il est probable que fassent partie de l’association quelques-uns des poètes (53) qui signent, en 1941, le recueil Poemas de la Alemania eterna, mais il s’agit là encore d’une hypothèse. La Belgique, de son côté, est un pays où l’ESV – qui dispose de deux groupes – rencontre un franc succès. Chez les Flamands, la plupart des auteurs nationalistes et « völkisch » – Stijn Streuvels, Felix Timmermans, Filip de Pillecijn, Ferdinand Vercnocke, Emiel Buysse (54), Ernest Claes, Cyriel Verschaeve (55), Gerard Walschap (56), Wies Moens (57) et Antoon Thiry (58) – en font partie (59), et quant à la « section wallonne et belge de langue française », elle rassemble, entre autres, les romanciers prolétariens Pierre Hubermont (60) et Constant Malva (61) (photo ci-dessous), l’académicienne Marie Gevers (62), le journaliste Pierre Daye (63), le traducteur Guillaume Samsoen de Gérard (64), le régionaliste Joseph Mignolet (65), le rexiste Lucien Jablou (alias Franz Briel) et même le très curieux Sulev Jacques Kaja (66).

Conformément aux statuts de l’association comme aux vœux de ses membres, la Société Européenne des Écrivains se réunit une seconde fois à l’automne 1942, entre le 7 et le 11 octobre. Cette fois, il n’y a pas eu de balade touristique et les conditions de guerre se font sentir : l’hébergement est bien moins luxueux et les menus frugaux. Dans un rapport à son ministre de tutelle, l’un des participants italiens se plaindra notamment de l’omniprésence de la soupe de pommes de terre et de la margarine… Quoi qu’il en soit, de nombreux auteurs étrangers ont cependant fait le déplacement. La Finlandaise Maila Talvio est présente, tout comme ses compatriotes Veikko Antero Koskenniemi, Mika Waltari, Viljo Kajava, Örnulf Tigerstedt (67) et Tito Colliander (68). On dénombre également cinq Français, M. M. Jacques Chardonne, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, André Fraigneau, André Thérive et Georges Blond (69), le Roumain Liviu Rebreanu (70), le poète hollandais Henri Bruning (71), le dramaturge danois Svend Borberg (72) et le romancier slovaque Jozef Cíger-Hronský (73). Contrairement au premier congrès, la délégation italienne est cette fois plutôt fournie avec les académiciens Arturo Farinelli, Antonio Baldini (74) et Emilio Cecchi (75), le philosophe et musicologue Giulio Cogni (76), les universitaires fascistes Mario Sertoli et Alfredo Acito, le critique Enrico Falqui (77) et les deux valeurs montantes que sont Elio Vittorini (78) et Giaime Pintor (79).

Ce second congrès a pour thème « le poète et le guerrier » et en l’absence de Hans Carossa comme de Papini, c’est le Finnois Koskenniemi qui préside. Comme l’année précédente, la plupart des orateurs sont des écrivains allemands – Edwin Erich Dwinger (80), Wilhelm Ehmer (81), Wilhelm Schäfer (82), Gerhard Schumann, Georg von der Vring (83) et Hermann Burte (84) – mais deux Italiens, Arturo Farinelli et Emilio Cecchi, sont également invités à s’adresser à l’assemblée. Si les communications et les débats restent très académiques, l’association prend toutefois, sur le plan pratique, une décision importante, celle d’attribuer, pour la première fois, une bourse d’encouragement à deux jeunes auteurs : la Finlandaise Irja Salla (85) et le Croate Dobriša Cesarić. La guerre et ses enjeux sont bien évidemment au cœur de toutes les conversations des congressistes auxquels Joseph Goebbels ne manque pas de rappeler, dans son discours de clôture, que le conflit en cours n’est pas seulement un combat entre des forces matérielles mais aussi un affrontement entre des forces spirituelles et que les écrivains n’ont d’autre choix que de s’engager. Le 11 octobre, les écrivains se séparent et pour la plupart, ils ne se reverront pas : du fait de la tournure négative du conflit et de l’intensification des bombardements aériens sur l’Allemagne, il n’y aura, en effet, pas d’autre réunion plénière de l’ESV jusqu’à la dissolution officielle de l’association, en 1948. En 1943, néanmoins, plusieurs membres de l’ESV – Robert Brasillach, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Pierre Daye, Filip de Pillecijn, Ferdinand Vercnocke, Örnulf Tigerstedt – se rendront à Katyn pour témoigner de l’ampleur du massacre commis par les Soviétiques : ce sera sans doute la dernière manifestation officielle de l’association.

Une initiative novatrice

À l’issue de cette brève évocation de la Société Européenne des Écrivains, force est de constater que le III^e Reich et l’Europe occupée n’étaient pas le désert culturel absolu que l’on nous a si souvent décrit. Dans cet enfer, il y avait des musiciens, des peintres et des sculpteurs qui s’exprimaient (86) et aussi des écrivains qui ne se sentaient pas si mal. Et quant au Dr Gœbbels, loin de brandir son Browning à l’énoncé du mot culture (87), il témoignait, au contraire, d’un réel intérêt pour les Lettres et les Arts, domaines où il faisait souvent montre (toutes proportions gardées, bien sûr) d’un « libéralisme » étonnant. La Société Européenne des Écrivains en est un peu l’illustration puisque le ministre de la Propagande en avait, en toute connaissance de cause, confié les leviers de commande à des hommes qui n’avaient rien de grands partisans du régime nazi. Hans Carossa et Carl Rothe n’étaient pas membres du NSDAP : le premier se réclamait presque ouvertement de l’ « émigration intérieure » et quant au second, il était même carrément en relation avec des conspirateurs antinazis. Parmi les membres allemands de l’association, nombreux étaient les auteurs qui, à l’instar de Hans Friedrich Blunck (88), Karl Heinrich Waggerl (89), Wilhelm Schäfer ou Eugen Roth (90), n’avaient pas la carte du parti, et si l’on trouvait, bien sûr, chez les adhérents étrangers, un fort contingent de sympathisants déclarés du national-socialisme, on y rencontrait aussi des conservateurs, des européistes et de simples anticommunistes. Lorsque, en mars 1942 et à l’occasion d’une réunion de l’ESV, Giovanni Papini fit un vibrant éloge du christianisme, on ne peut pas dire qu’il était vraiment en adéquation avec la doctrine nazie. Quelques auteurs provenaient d’horizons peu orthodoxes, comme l’académicien Emilio Cecchi qui avait signé, en 1925, le Manifeste des intellectuels antifascistes de Benedeto Croce, ou Viljo Kajava qui était un ancien marxiste. Certains, enfin, n’avaient pas véritablement choisi leur camp : ils étaient peut-être là par opportunisme ou par simple curiosité. Ainsi, les Croates Dobriša Cesarić, Slavko Kolar et Ivan Goran Kovačić ne tarderont-ils pas à se rallier à Tito, et les Italiens Vittorini et Pintor à rejoindre eux aussi les partisans communistes ou les forces alliées…

« Nul n’aura de l’esprit, hors nous et nos amis », écrivait déjà Molière auquel Jean-Paul Sartre fait écho à sa manière en affirmant que « par définition, un fasciste ne peut pas avoir de talent » (91). N’en déplaise à « l’agité du bocal » (comme le surnommait Céline), la Société Européenne des Écrivains comptait tout de même dans ses rangs des personnalités comme Knut Hamsun, Sven Hedin, Karl Heinrich Waggerl ou John Knittel qui étaient des auteurs de notoriété internationale et au talent unanimement reconnu. Elle réunissait aussi des gens comme Eugen Roth, Marcel Jouhandeau (photo), Mile Budak, Stijn Streuvels, V. A. Koskenniemi ou József Nyírö qui figuraient à l’époque et dans leurs pays respectifs parmi les auteurs les plus lus. Certes, à côté de ces « célébrités », l’ESV accueillait quelques écrivains moins connus mais ce déficit de notoriété ne tenait pas tant à leur manque de talent qu’au fait que l’ancien système les avait délibérément ignorés ou marginalisés pour des raisons idéologiques…

Au total et même si l’expérience a rapidement tourné court, il semble juste de dire que cette Société Européenne des Écrivains fut une initiative plutôt heureuse et novatrice. Il serait sans aucun doute naïf de ne pas voir la part d’hypocrisie et d’instrumentalisation politique qu’elle recelait, mais au-delà de cette indispensable réserve, force est de reconnaître que cette association s’inscrivait bel et bien dans le cadre d’un vrai projet européen. Elle traduisait indubitablement le désir sincère de nombreux écrivains de se concerter et d’avancer ensemble sur des chemins nouveaux, loin des coteries communisantes et cosmopolites qui régnaient avant-guerre sur la littérature et l’édition. Elle traduisait peut-être aussi, mais avec plus ou moins de sincérité, le souhait ou l’arrière-pensée de certains dirigeants allemands de bâtir autour de leur pays une véritable confédération européenne (92).

Christophe Dolbeau

Notes

(1) Fani Popowa-Mutafowa (1902-1977) est l’auteur de nombreux romans historiques (Le dernier des Assénides ; Ivan Assen II ; La fille du tsar Kaloyan) ; elle sera emprisonnée par les communistes en 1945.

(2) Antun Bonifačić (1901-1986) est l’auteur de recueils de poésie (Pjesme ; Sabrane pjesme), de romans (Krv Majke Zemlje ; Mladice ; Bit ćete kao Bogovi) et d’essais (Paul Valéry ; Ljudi Zapada). Réfugié au Brésil puis aux USA, il présidera le Mouvement de Libération Croate (HOP) entre 1975 et 1981.

(3) Arvi Kivimaa (1904-1984) a été le directeur du Théâtre de Tampere (1940-42) et du Théâtre National de Finlande (1950-1974). Auteur de romans (Epäjumala ; Viheriövä risti), il a également écrit des nouvelles, des essais et des pièces de théâtre.

(4) Svend Fleuron (1874-1966) est l’auteur de nombreux romans consacrés à la nature et aux animaux (Le roman d’un brochet ; Les cygnes du lac de Wild).

(5) Ejnar Howalt (1891-1953) est un auteur de comédies (Asfalten synger ; Hvis jeg havde Penge) ; il appartenait au parti national-socialiste danois (DNSAP).

(6) Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899-1988) est l’auteur de divers ouvrages inspirés par le surréalisme, l’ultraïsme et le futurisme (Yo, inspector de alcantarillas ; Julepe de menta) ainsi que d’essais politiques (Genio de España ; La nueva catolicidad). Il fut l’un des premiers phalangistes. Après la guerre, il servira dans la diplomatie et occupera notamment le poste d’ambassadeur au Paraguay. Voir C. Dolbeau, « Ernesto Giménez Caballero, un phalangiste hors norme », in Les Parias, Lyon, Irminsul, 2001, pp. 229-239.

(7) Architecte de profession et neveu de José Bergamín, Luis Felipe Vivanco (1907-1975) a publié de nombreux recueils de poésie (Cantos de primavera ; Tiempo de dolor ; Continuación de la vida). D’abord de sympathie républicaine, il s’est rallié aux idées phalangistes en 1936.

(8) Kåre Bjørgen (1897-1974) est le poète officiel du Nasjonal Samling de Vidkun Quisling ; il est l’auteur de plusieurs recueils « engagés » (I Noregs namn ; Eld og blod ; Storm og stille) et d’une pièce dramatique (Angvare).

(9) Einar Malm (1900-1988) est un romancier, poète et scénariste (auteur notamment de l’adaptation cinématographique du roman d’August Strindberg Hemsöborna). Après guerre, il a consacré plusieurs ouvrages aux Indiens d’Amérique du Nord.

(10) Originaire de la Frise, Rintsje Piter Sybesma (1894-1975) est l’auteur de récits en prose (Om it hiem ; It anker) et de poésie (Ta de moam ; Der Zehnte Mai ; De swetten útlein). Il était membre du Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging de Anton Mussert.

(11) Avocat de profession et d’origine ostendaise, Ferdinand Vercnocke (1906-1989) est l’auteur de poèmes (Zeeland ; Heervaart ; Ask en Embla) et de récits en prose (Liebaerts, sagen voor de Dietsche jeugd ; Onze adelbrieven) ; il a également été le scénariste du film de propagande Vlaanderen te weer (1944). Il était sympathisant du Vlaams Nationaal Verbond (VNV).

(12) Filip de Pillecijn (1891-1962) est l’un des fondateurs du pèlerinage de l’Yser. Il est l’auteur de romans (Blauwbaard ; Hans van Malmédy ; De soldaat Johan), de nouvelles (Monsieur Hawarden ; Schaduwen) et d’essais biographiques (Stijn Streuvels en zijn werk ; Renaat De Rudder). Sympathisant des mouvements nationalistes VNV et DeVlag, il sera condamné à 10 ans de prison en 1947 mais sortira de détention en 1949.

(13) Historien de formation, Karl-Heinz Bremer (1911-1942), a été lecteur d’allemand à la Sorbonne et à l’École Normale Supérieure ; il fut aussi le traducteur des œuvres de Montherlant. Après avoir été l’un des dirigeants de l’Institut Allemand de Paris, il est envoyé sur le front de l’Est et tombe au combat à Veliky Novgorod, près du Lac Ilmen.

(14) Après des études de lettres à Berlin, Pise et Toulouse, Gerhard Heller (1909-1982) a travaillé à la Radio Berlin. Affecté à la Propaganda Staffel de Paris durant l’Occupation, il y supervise les services de la censure, ce qui le met en contact avec de nombreux éditeurs et écrivains.

(15) Moritz Jahn (1884-1979) est un professeur spécialisé dans l’étude du bas allemand. Il est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages sur cette thématique (Ulenspegel un Jan Dood ; Boleke Roleffs) ainsi que de nombreux essais (Das Denkmal des Junggesellen ; Die Gleichen).

(16) Libraire de profession, Karl-Heinz Bischoff (1900-1978) est l’auteur de nombreux récits et essais (Bis zur Heimkehr im Sommer ; Die Muschel ; Das grössere Glück). Membre du NSDAP, il fut également fonctionnaire auprès de la Chambre des Écrivains.

(17) Friedrich Schnack (1888-1977) a étudié la botanique, la géologie et l’entomologie avant de faire carrière dans le journalisme et la littérature. Il est l’auteur de poèmes (Vogel Zeitvorbei ; Palisander), de romans (Die goldenen Äpfel ; Die Orgel des Himmels), d’ouvrages sur la nature (Cornelia und die Heilkräuter ; Sybille und die Feldblumen) et de livres de voyage (Der Maler von Malaya ; Der Zauberer von Sansibar ; Der Mann aus Alaska).

(18) Instituteur, Hans Baumann (1914-1988) est un poète et l’un des plus célèbres compositeurs de chansons (Es zittern die morschen Knochen ; Hohe Nacht der klaren Sterne) de la Jeunesse Hitlérienne. Après la guerre (où il a servi dans une compagnie de propagande), il écrit des livres pour enfants qui rencontrent un grand succès.

(19) Spécialiste du bas allemand, August Hinrichs (1879-1956) est l’auteur de très nombreux récits et comédies (Der Moorhof ; Das Licht der Heimat ; Das Volk am Meer ; Der Musterbauer, etc) ainsi que de pièces radiophoniques.

(20) Carl Rothe (1900-1970) est l’auteur de romans (Die Zinnsoldaten ; Olivia) et d’essais (Weltkrieg gegen Deutsche Wirtschaft ; Karl IV von Luxemburg, deutscher Kaiser und König von Böhmen). Membre de l’Association pour le germanisme à l’étranger (VDA), il n’adhère pas, en revanche, au NSDAP et entretient des liens d’amitié avec plusieurs adversaires du régime (notamment Adolf Reichwein et Caesar von Hofacker, l’un des conjurés du 20 juillet 1944). Il sera, après guerre, le traducteur de Pierre Gaxotte.

(21) Président de la Chambre des Écrivains et de l’Académie de Poésie, Hanns Johst (1890-1978) est l’auteur de nouvelles (Der Anfang ; Die Begegnung ; Mask und Gesicht), de poèmes (Rolandruf ; Die Strasse), d’essais (Meine Erde heisst Deutschland) et de pièces de théâtre (Strof ; Propheten ; Wechsler und Händler ; Der Herr Monsieur ; Thomas Paine). Il est surtout connu pour sa pièce Schlageter où figure la fameuse phrase « Quand j’entends parler de culture, j’arme mon Browning ». Après guerre, il sera interné par les Alliés durant trois ans et demi.

(22) Autodidacte, Felix Timmermans (1886-1947) est l’auteur de romans (Pallieter ; Het kindeke Jezus in Vlaanderen ; Pieter Bruegel ; De familie Hernat), de poésie (Door de dagen ; Adagio) et de pièces de théâtre ; c’était également un peintre de talent. Ses ouvrages sont parmi les plus appréciés du public flamand.

(23) Ernest Claes (1885-1968) est l’auteur de très nombreux romans (De Witte ; Het leven van Herman Coene ; Kobeke ; De moeder en de drie soldaten ; etc). Brièvement interné à la fin de la guerre en raison de son appartenance au VNV, il sera finalement acquitté.

(24) Professeur à l’université de Leyde, Jan de Vries (1890-1964) est un linguiste et un mythographe de réputation internationale. Auteur de nombreux ouvrages qui font autorité (De Germaansche Oudheid ; Altgermanische Religiongeschichte ; Kelten und Germanen ; Het Nibelungenlied ; etc), il sera inquiété à la Libération bien qu’il se fût toujours montré très indépendant à l’égard des nazis.

(25) Jan Eekhout (1900-1978) est l’auteur de poésie (Louteringen ; In aedibus amoris ; De zanger van den Nacht) et de romans (Leven en daden van Pastoor Poncke van Damme in Vlaanderen ; De historie van Kathelijne Claes van Sluys in Vlaanderen ; etc). Proche du NSB de A. Mussert, il sera condamné à deux ans d’emprisonnement à la Libération.

(26) Professeur de littérature à l’Université de Turku et président de l’Association des Écrivains Finnois (1941-46), Veikko Antero Koskenniemi (1885-1962) est l’auteur de récits épiques (Nuori Anssi), de poèmes (Runoja ; Valkeat kaupungit ; Hiilivalkea) et d’essais (Kirjoja ja kirjailijoita). C’était l’un des auteurs les plus populaires de Finlande.

(27) John Knittel (1891-1970) est l’auteur de pièces de théâtre et de romans (Capitaine West ; Thérèse Étienne ; Le Basalte bleu ; Le Commandant ; Via Mala ; Le Docteur Ibrahim ; Amédée ; etc). En raison de ses sympathies pour le III^e Reich, il sera exclu de l’Association des Écrivains Suisses…

(28) Originaire du nord de la Norvège, Lars Hansen (1869-1944) est l’auteur de romans (I Spitsbergens vold ; Jens Sørskar ; En havets søn ; Hvalrossen av Tromsø ; Beitsaren ; Kongen på Råsa ; Odin klarte det) qui seront pour la plupart traduits en allemand. Il était membre du Nasjonal Samling de V. Quisling.

(29) Linguiste de réputation internationale, Arturo Farinelli (1867-1948) fut professeur aux universités d’Innsbruck et Turin et membre de l’Académie d’Italie (1929). Il est l’auteur de nombreux essais (Die Beziehungen zwischen Spanien und Deutschland in der Literatur ; Dante, Pétrarque et Boccace en Espagne ; Le romantisme dans le monde latin ; Lope de Vega en Allemagne ; etc).

(30) Latiniste de réputation internationale, Niculae I. Herescu (1903-1961) fut professeur d’université, fondateur et directeur de l’Institut Roumain d’Études Latines, président de la Fondation Culturelle Carol I^er et de l’Association des Écrivains Roumains. Il est l’auteur de nombreux essais (La poésie latine : étude des structures phoniques ; Bibliographie de la littérature latine ; Ovidiana ; Points de vue sur la langue de Tite Live ; etc). À partir de 1944, il vit en exil, d’abord au Portugal puis en France

(31) Ion Sân-Giorgiu (1893-1950) est un poète (moderniste), un essayiste, un critique littéraire et un dramaturge, auteur de plusieurs pièces à succès (Masca ; Banchetul ; Femeia cu douā suflete). Membre successivement du Parti National Chrétien et du Front de la Renaissance Nationale, il sympathise ensuite avec la Garde de Fer. Émigré en 1944 et condamné à mort par contumace, il siègera au sein du gouvernement légionnaire en exil qu’avait fondé Horia Sima.

(32) Originaire de Transylvanie, József Nyírö (1889-1953) est l’auteur de romans et de nouvelles (Uz Bence ; Isten igájában ; Halhatatlan élet ; Nésna Küzdelem ; etc) très appréciés du public hongrois. Membre du mouvement des Croix Fléchées, il trouvera refuge en Allemagne puis en Espagne à la fin de la guerre.

(33) Lörinc Szabó (1900-1957) est l’auteur de plusieurs recueils de poésie (Föld, erdö, Isten ; Kalibán ; Te meg a világ ; Régen és most ; etc) qui lui ont valu de nombreuses distinctions. Il est également le traducteur de Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Villon, Verlaine, Gœthe, Kleist et Rilke. Il sera complètement exclu de la vie publique hongroise au lendemain de la guerre.

(34) D’origine autrichienne, Bruno Brehm (1892-1974) est l’auteur de plus de quarante romans et récits (Der lachende Gott ; Apis und este ; Das war das Ende ; Weder Kaiser noch König ; Tag der Erfüllung ; etc). Officier durant la Première Guerre mondiale, il sert à nouveau comme officier d’ordonnance (en Grèce, en Russie et en Afrique du Nord) durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

(35) Ancien boulanger, Stijn Streuvels (1871-1969) est un écrivain extrêmement prolixe et très populaire auprès du public flamand. La plupart de ses récits et romans (Zomerland ; De oogst ; Openlucht ; Reinaert de Vos ; De werkman ; etc) décrivent la vie des paysans et des gens modestes en Flandre Occidentale. À deux reprises, S. Streuvels a manqué de très peu le prix Nobel de littérature.

(36) Très célèbre en Finlande, Maila Talvio (1871-1951) est l’auteur de très nombreux romans et nouvelles (Haapaniemen keinu ; Aili ; Juha Joutsia ; Kirjava keto ; Itämeren tytar ; Pimeänpirtin hävitys ; Silmä yössä ; Karjet, etc). Elle a par ailleurs traduit et adapté en finnois les œuvres de Mæterlinck et Andersen. Animatrice d’un salon littéraire réputé, elle est également connue pour avoir ardemment défendu la cause des Polonais et des Baltes.

(37) Médecin de profession, Hans Carossa (1878-1956) est l’auteur de poésie (Gesammelte Gedichte), de nouvelles et de romans, souvent autobiographiques (Eine Kindheit ; Verwandlungen einer Jugend ; Der Artz Gion ; Rumänisches Tagebuchs ; Geheimnisse des reifen Lebens ; Das Jahr der schönen Täuschungen).

(38) Ancien instituteur, Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) est l’auteur de recueils de poésie, d’essais (Storia della letteratura italiana ; Il crepuscolo dei filosofi ; Storia di Cristo), de nouvelles (Il pilota cieco) et de romans (Un uomo finito ; Gog ; etc). Il était également membre du tiers ordre franciscain et académicien.

(39) Les signataires allemands sont H. F. Blunck, H. Baumann, H. Carossa, Moritz Jahn, Herybert Menzel et Gerhard Schumann ; les signataires étrangers sont S. Kolar (Croatie), Jan de Vries (Pays-Bas), Svend Borberg (Danemark), F. de Pillecijn (Belgique), F. Popowa-Mutafowa (Bulgarie), Arvi Kivimaa et Örnulf Tigerstedt (Finlande), J. Chardonne (France), G. Papini (Italie), J. C. Hronsky (Slovaquie), E. Giménez Caballero (Espagne), L. Rebreanu (Roumanie) et J. Knittel (Suisse).

(40) Voir la traduction française des statuts citée par B. Delcord in « À propos de quelques “chapelles“ politico-littéraires en Belgique (1919-1945 », Cahiers d’Histoire de la II^e Guerre mondiale, Bruxelles, Centre de Recherches et d’Études historiques de la II^e Guerre mondiale, N° 10, octobre 1986, p. 205.

(41) Voir Oliver Lubrich, « Comparative Literature – in, from and beyond Germany », in Comparative Critical Studies, 3.1-2 (2006), 47-67.

(42) Sur Panorama, voir Lionel Richard, Le nazisme et la culture, Paris, Maspero, 1978, pp. 290-292.

(43) Mika Waltari (1908-1979) est l’auteur de romans (Suuri illusioni ; Kiinalainen kissa ; Vieras mies tuli taloon ; Fine Van Brooklyn ; Kaarina Maununtytar ; Sinuhe egyptiläinen ; Johannes Angelos ; etc) mais également de contes pour enfants et de pièces de théâtre. De nombreux textes de N. Waltari ont été traduits et adaptés au cinéma.

(44) Viljo Kajava (1909-1998) est l’auteur de quelques romans, de pièces radiophoniques et surtout de nombreux recueils de poésie (Rakentajat ; Murrosvuodet ; Tampereen runot ; etc). Il a fait ses débuts à l’extrême gauche de l’échiquier politique.

(45) Sven Hedin (1865-1952) est un célèbre géographe et explorateur. Il est l’auteur de récits de voyage (Le Tibet dévoilé ; Bagdad – Babylon – Ninive ; Persien und Mesopotamien ; Von Peking nach Moskau ; Rätsel der Gobi ; Der wandernde See ; etc), d’ouvrages autobiographiques (Mein Leben als Entdecker ; Eroberungszüge in Tibet ; Ohne Auftrag in Berlin) et d’ouvrages politiques (Ein Volk in Waffen ; Deutschland und der Weltfriede ; Amerika im Kampf der Kontinente). Sympathisant du III^e Reich (bien qu’il eût des ascendants juifs), il interviendra à plusieurs reprises en faveur de prisonniers juifs et norvégiens et sauvera la vie de plusieurs d’entre eux. En 1946, il obtiendra également la grâce du général allemand Nikolaus von Falkenhorst qui avait été condamné à mort par un tribunal britannique.

(46) Avocat de profession, Mile Budak (1889-1945) est l’auteur de récits autobiographiques (Ratno robije ; Na vulkanima) et de romans consacrés à la vie des paysans croates (Ognjište ; Direktor Križanić ; Na Veliki Petak ; San o sreći ; Kresojića soj). Membre de l’Oustacha, ministre et ambassadeur de l’État Indépendant Croate, il sera condamné à mort et exécuté par les partisans de Tito. Voir C. Dolbeau, « Mile Budak, itinéraire d’un réprouvé » sur http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2013/11/08/temp-bd4084d8309dec37480915bf93bde6df-5216585.html

(47) Slavko Kolar (1891-1963) est l’auteur de scénarios, de livres pour enfants, de pièces de théâtre (Politička večera ; Sedmorica u podrumu), de textes autobiographiques et de nouvelles ou romans (Povratak ; Svoga tela gospodar ; Čizme ; Jesu li kravama potrebni repovi ; etc). Il sera président de l’Association des Écrivains Croates.

(48) Mihovil Kombol (1883-1955) est l’auteur d’études et d’essais consacrés à l’histoire de la littérature (Dinko Ranjina i talijanski petrarkisti ; Povijest hrvatske književnosti do narodnog preporoda ; Zadar kao književno središte).

(49) Milan Begović (1876-1948) est l’auteur de quelques romans et nouvelles mais il est surtout connu pour ses pièces de théâtre (Pustolov pred vratima ; Amerikanska jahta u splitskoj luci ; Gospođa Walewska ; Bez trećega) et son anthologie de la prose moderne (Hrvatska proza XX. stoljeća). Il sera exclu en 1945 de l’Association des Écrivains Croates.

(50) Dobriša Cesarić (1902-1980) est un traducteur, un compositeur de chansons (Knjiga prepjeva) et l’auteur d’une dizaine de recueils de poésie (Lirika ; Pjesme ; Izabrani stihovi ; Slap, izabrane pjesme ; etc). Après guerre, il sera président de l’Association des Écrivains Croates et membre de l’Académie Yougoslave.

(51) Avocat de profession, Zvonko Milković (1888-1978) est l’auteur d’une anthologie de la poésie croate (Hrvatska mlada lirika) et de plusieurs recueils de poésie (Pobožni časovi ; Pjesme ; Krenimo u rano jutro).

(52) Ivan Goran Kovačić (1913-1943) est l’auteur de poèmes (Lirika 1932 ; Dani gnjeva). Rallié aux partisans communistes durant l’hiver 1942, il sera tué par des Tchetniks serbes. Plusieurs de ses œuvres seront publiées après la guerre (Hrvatske pjesme partizanke ; Ognji i rože ; etc).

(53) À savoir Emilio Carrere, Alfredo Marquerie, Tomás Borrás, José Montero Alonso, etc.

(54) Emiel Buysse (1910-1987) est un journaliste nationaliste, auteur de nombreux récits et essais (Vlamingen ; Miele keert terug ; Sneeuw en houtrook ; etc).

(55) Cyriel Verschaeve (1874-1949) est un prêtre catholique et un militant nationaliste. Poète, philosophe, essayiste et dramaturge, il est l’auteur de nombreux ouvrages (Judas ; Maria-Magdalena ; Jacob van Artevelde ; Passieverhaal ; De Kruisboom ; Het Uur van Vlaanderen ; Eeuwige gestalten ; etc). Chef du Conseil culturel flamand en 1940, il se réfugie en Autriche à la fin de la guerre et sera déchu de la nationalité belge.

(56) Gerard Walschap (1898-1989) est l’auteur de pièces de théâtre, de nouvelles (Volk), de romans (Adelaide ; Houtekiet ; Een mens van goede wil ; Sybille ; Oproer in Kongo) et de contes pour enfants (De doot in het dorp ; De kaartridder van Herpeneert). Il sera anobli (titre de baron) en 1975.

(57) Wies Moens (1898-1982) est un historien de la littérature, un poète et un pamphlétaire. Il est l’auteur de divers recueils de poésie (Gedichten ; De tocht ; Golfslag ; De spitsboog ; etc) et de quelques récits en prose (De dooden leven ; Dertig dagen oorlog). Proche du mouvement solidariste (Verdinaso), il est condamné à mort par contumace, en 1945, et se réfugie aux Pays-Bas où il finira ses jours.

(58) Antoon Thiry (1888-1954) est l’auteur de nombreux romans (Pauwke’s vagevuur ; Onder Sinte Gommarus’ wake ; De vader ; Mijnheer van Geertrui zijn kerstnacht ; De hoorn schalt ; Gasten in ‘t huis ten have ; De zevenslager ; etc). Sympathisant du mouvement DeVlag, il sera condamné à trois ans de prison à la fin de la guerre.

(59) Voir Hedwig Speliers, « Le miracle de Weimar », in Textyles hors série N° 2 (1997), p. 167.

(60) Ancien aide-maçon, Pierre Hubermont (1903-1989) est un écrivain prolétarien qui fut membre du Parti Ouvrier Belge et prit part à la conférence des écrivains révolutionnaires (Kharkov, 1930). Il est l’auteur de plusieurs romans sociaux dont Treize hommes dans la mine, La Terre assassinée, Les Cordonniers, Marie des Pauvres, L’Arbre creux, et d’un témoignage sur les exhumations de Katyn (J’étais à Katyn, témoignage oculaire). Condamné à seize ans de détention pour collaboration, il sera remis en liberté en 1950.

(61) Ancien mineur de fond et militant trotskyste, Constant Malva (1903-1969) est un écrivain prolétarien. Il est l’auteur de divers contes et récits sociaux (Un propr’ à rien ; Borins ; Un ouvrier qui s’ennuie ; Mon homme de coupe ; Un mineur vous parle ; Le Jambot). Il sera condamné à une peine d’emprisonnement à la Libération.

(62) D’origine flamande mais d’expression française, Marie Gevers (1883-1975) est l’auteur de poèmes (Missembourg ; Les arbres et le vent), de romans (La Comtesse des digues ; Madame Orpha ou la sérénade de mai ; Guldentop ; La ligne de vie ; Paix sur les champs ; Château de l’Ouest ; etc), d’ouvrages sur la nature (L’herbier légendaire) et de contes et récits pour les enfants (Les oiseaux prisonniers ; Le Noël du petit Joseph) ; elle a également traduit et adapté en français de nombreux récits néerlandais. En 1938, elle fut la première femme élue à l’Académie Royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique. Ses livres ont été traduits dans une dizaine de langues.

(63) Journaliste et ancien parlementaire rexiste, Pierre Daye (1892-1960) est l’auteur de très nombreux essais (La politique coloniale belge de Léopold II ; Le Maroc s’éveille ; La Belgique et la mer ; Beaux jours du Pacifique ; Stanley ; Guerre et Révolution ; L’Europe aux Européens ; Portrait de Léon Degrelle ; Trente-deux mois chez les députés ; et). Condamné à mort par contumace et déchu de la nationalité belge (1947), il vit après guerre en exil en Argentine où il finit ses jours.

(64) Guillaume Samsoen de Gérard est un traducteur d’origine liégeoise, membre du parti rexiste. Il est l’auteur d’essais (Missions secrètes en Ukraine ; Le comte de Tilly).

(65) Joseph Mignolet (1893-1973) est un écrivain patoisant. Il est l’auteur de recueils de poésie (Fleûrs di brouwîres ; Lès lâmes), de pièces de théâtre (Li vôye qui monte) et de romans (Vès l’ loumûre ; Li blanke dame ; etc).

(66) Sulev Jacques Kaja ou de son vrai nom Jacques Baruch (1919-2002) est un journaliste, spécialiste des peuples finno-ougriens. Diplômé d’esperanto et très attaché à la défense de l’Estonie (au point de prendre un pseudonyme estonien), il signe durant la guerre l’essai Un an de bolchevisme dans les pays Baltes, ce qui lui vaudra cinq mois de prison à la Libération. Après la guerre, il occupe divers emplois (horticulteur, ébéniste, antiquaire) et collabore à l’hebdomadaire Tintin ; il aurait peut-être inspiré à Hergé le personnage du pilote Szut qui apparaît dans Coke en stock… Il est également l’auteur de Légendes d’Estonie.

(67) Örnulf Tigerstedt (1900-1962) est un écrivain finnois de langue suédoise. Il est l’auteur de poésie (Vid gränsen ; Block och öde ; De heliga vägarna ; etc), d’essais (Skott i överkant ; Utan örnar) et de textes politiques (Statspolisen slår till ; Hemliga stämplingar).

(68) Tito Colliander (1904-1989) est un écrivain finnois de langue suédoise et de religion orthodoxe. Il est l’auteur de poèmes, de biographies, d’essais religieux, de pièces de théâtre et de romans (En vandrare ; Korståget ; Förbarma dig ; Taina ; Ljuset ; Grottan ; Vis om är kvar ; etc).

(69) R. Brasillach, A. Bonnard, M. Jouhandeau et R. Fernandez sont excusés…

(70) Liviu Rebreanu (1885-1944) est un journaliste, un romancier et un dramaturge. Il est l’auteur de nouvelles (Golanii ; Mărturisire ; Cântecul lebedei ; etc), de romans (Ion ; Gorila ; Jar ; etc) et de pièces de théâtre (Cadrilul ; Plicul ; Apostolii). Il a été directeur du Théâtre National et présidera (1940-44) l’Association des Écrivains Roumains.

(71) Henri Bruning (1900-1983) est un poète et un essayiste. Il est l’auteur des recueils Het verbond et Fuga, ainsi que de nombreux essais (Subjectieve normen ; Verworpen christendom ; Voorspel ; Vluchtige vertoogen ; Heilig verbond ; etc). Membre du mouvement solidariste (Verdinaso) puis du NSB, il sera condamné, à la fin de la guerre, à deux ans de détention et dix ans d’interdiction de publier.

(72) Svend Borberg (1888-1947) est l’auteur de poèmes (Verdensspejlet) et de pièces de théâtre (Ingen ; Cirkus juris ; Synder og Helgen). Il est le père de Claus von Bülow.

(73) Jozef Cíger-Hronský (1896-1960) est l’auteur de nouvelles (U nás ; Domov ; Proroctvo doktora Stankovského ; Na križných cestách ; etc), de comédies (Firma Moor ; Návrat) et de livres pour enfants (Janko Hrášok ; Sokoliar Tomáš ; Tri múdre kozliatka ; etc). À la fin de la guerre, il émigre en Italie puis en Argentine où il fonde l’Association des Écrivains Slovaques en Exil. Il présidera également le Conseil National Slovaque.

(74) Antonio Baldini (1889-1962) est l’auteur de récits (Nostro Purgatorio ; Amici allo spiedo), d’essais (Ludovico della tranquillità ; Fine Ottocento. Carducci, Pascoli, D’Annunzio e minori) et de carnets de voyage (La vecchia del Bar Bullier ; Italia del Bonincontro ; Melafumo ; Doppio Melafumo). Il est entré à l’Académie en 1939.

(75) Emilio Cecchi (1884-1966) est l’auteur de récits (Pesci rossi ; Messico ; Et in Arcadia ego ; Corse al trotto vecchie e nuove ; etc), d’ouvrages de critique d’art (Pittura italiana dell’Ottocento ; La scultura fiorentina del Quattrocento) et de critique littéraire (La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli ; Storia della letteratura inglese del secolo XIX ; I grandi romantici inglesi ; etc). Il a également été scénariste et producteur de cinéma. Il est entré à l’Académie en 1940.

(76) Giulio Cogni (1908-1983) est l’auteur d’essais sur la musique (Che cosa è la musica ; Le forze segrete della musica ; Wagner e Beethoven) et la philosophie (Saggio sull’Amore come nuovo principio d’immortalità ; Lo Spirito Assoluto ; Il razzismo ; I valori della stirpe italiana ; etc).

(77) Autodidacte, Enrico Falqui (1901-1974) est l’auteur de très nombreux ouvrages d’histoire de la littérature et d’anthologies (Scrittori nuovi ; Antologia della prosa scientifica italiana del Seicento ; La letteratura del ventennio nero ; Prosatori e narratori del Novecento italiano ; etc).

(78) Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) est l’auteur d’essais (La tragica vicenda di Carlo III ; Americana ; Diario in pubblico) et de romans (Piccola borghesia ; Nei morlacchi – Viaggio in Sardegna ; Conversazione in Sicilia ; Il garofano rosso ; Le donne di Messina ; etc). Rallié à la résistance antifasciste, il dirigera après guerre le quotidien communiste L’Unità.

(79) Giaime Pintor (1919-1943) est un journaliste et un traducteur qui a collaboré à l’anthologie Teatro tedesco. Recruté par les services secrets anglais et envoyé en mission à Rome, il saute sur une mine le 1^er décembre 1943. La plupart de ses essais et traductions paraîtront après sa mort (Poesie di Rainer Maria Rilke ; Saggio su la Rivoluzione di Carlo Pisacane ; Vathek di William Beckford ; Il sangue d’Europa ; etc).

(80) Edwin Erich Dwinger (1898-1981) est l’auteur de nombreux essais et romans (Der grosse Grab ; Die Armee hinter Stacheldraht ; Die zwölf Räuber ; Die letzen Reiter ; Zwischen Weiss und Rot ; Ein Erbhof im Allgäu ; Der Tod in Polen ; Dichter unter den Waffen ; etc). Hostile à la politique anti-slave du III^e Reich, il soutient le général Vlassov et finit par être assigné à résidence et placé sous la surveillance du Sicherheitsdienst.

(81) Wilhelm Ehmer (1896-1976) est un journaliste, auteur de plusieurs récits à succès (Peter reist um die Welt ; Um den Gipfel der Welt ; Das Ringen um den Himalaya ; So werden wir gelebt ; etc). Son ouvrage consacré à l ‘alpiniste britannique Mallory et à la conquête de l’Everest avait été particulièrement salué par la critique.

(82) Wilhelm Schäfer (1868-1952) est un écrivain völkisch extrêmement prolixe. Il est l’auteur de dizaines de pièces de théâtre, nouvelles et romans (Der Hauptmann von Köpenick ; Die Zehn Gebote ; Rheinsagen ; Lebenstag eines Menschenfreundes ; Winckelmanns Ende ; Die rote Hanne ; Deutsche Reden ; etc).

(83) Georg von der Vring (1889-1968) est l’auteur de poèmes (Südergast ; Oktoberrose ; Der Schwan ; etc), de romans (Soldat Suhren ; Die Spanische Hochzeit ; Der Zeuge ; Argonnerwald ; Der Schritt über die Schwelle ; Frühwind ; etc) ainsi que de traductions de Verlaine, Maupassant ou Francis Jammes. G. von der Vring a enseigné le dessin et il est également peintre. Ancien combattant de la Première Guerre mondiale d’où il était revenu résolument pacifiste, il était plutôt mal vu du régime nazi.

(84) Hermann Burte (1879-1960) est l’auteur de poésie (Alemannische Gedichte ; Ursula ; Das Heit im Geiste ; etc), d’une tragédie (Katte) et de romans (Wiltfeber, der ewige Deutsche). H. Burte était également un peintre et un spécialiste du dialecte alémanique.

(85) Irja Salla ou de son vrai nom Taju Birgitta Tiara Sallinen (1912-1966) est l’auteur de romans (Kaksi tietä ; Liisa-Beatan tarina ; Unissakävijä).

(86) À l’automne 1941, il y eut aussi un voyage en Allemagne de musiciens français et un autre de peintres et sculpteurs. Parmi les musiciens invités aux « fêtes Mozart » figuraient les compositeurs Florent Schmitt, Max d’Ollone, Alfred Bachelet, Marcel Delannoy, Marcel Labey, Gustave Samazeuilh, Arthur Honneger, mais aussi Jacques Rouché, Robert Bernard et Lucien Rebatet. Chez les peintres et sculpteurs figuraient Paul Belmondo, Charles Despiau, Henri Bouchard, Louis Lejeune, André Derain, Roland Oudot, Raymond Legueult, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, Othon Friesz et Paul Landowski…

(87) Célèbre réplique tirée de la pièce Schlageter de Hanns Johst (v. note 21) et souvent associée aux dirigeants nazis.

(88) Juriste de formation, Hans-Friedrich Blunck (1888-1961) est l’auteur d’essais (Die nordische Welt) et de romans (Totentanz ; Berend Fock ; Die Weibsmühle ; Werdendes Volk ; Die Jägerin ; etc). Il s’intéresse particulièrement à l’histoire des peuples nordiques, au parler bas allemand, au panthéon germanique et aux sagas scandinaves. Il fut le premier président de la Chambre des Écrivains et n’était pas membre du NSDAP.

(89) Karl Heinrich Waggerl (1897-1973) est un écrivain autrichien. Il est l’auteur de nouvelles et récits (Das Wiesenbuch ; Feierabend ; etc) ainsi que de romans (Brot ; Schweres Blut ; Mütter ; etc). Il a également constitué une importante collection de photographies.

(90) Eugen Roth (1895-1976) est l’auteur de poésie et de romans (Ein Mensch ; Die Frau in der Weltgeschichte ; Der Wunderdoktor ; Der Fischkasten ; Der letzte Mensch ; etc). Ses ouvrages sont parmi les plus lus du monde germanique.

(91) cité par F. Bergeron, in Guide des citations de l’homme de droite, Paris, Editions du Trident, 1989, p. 60.

(92) Derrière le pangermanisme officiel des milieux dirigeants du III^e Reich existaient de réelles tendances européennes dont témoigne par exemple le manifeste pour une « communauté européenne » que signe Ribbentrop, le 21 mars 1943. On sait que des dignitaires comme Walther Funk et Arthur Seyss-Inquart étaient favorables à un projet européen, de même que certains hauts fonctionnaires (Hans Frohwein, Cécil von Renthe-Fink, Walter Hallstein, Heinrich Hunke, Alexander Dolezalek).

Bibliographie

• L. Richard, Le nazisme et la culture, Paris, Maspero, 1978.

• B. Delcord, « À propos de quelques “chapelles“ politico-littéraires en Belgique (1919-1940) », in Cahiers d’Histoire de la II^e Guerre mondiale, Bruxelles, Centre de Recherches et d’Études historiques de la II^e Guerre mondiale, N° 10, octobre 1986.

• F. R. Hausmann, « Dichte, Dichter, tage nicht ! ». Die Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung in Weimar 1941-1948, Francfort, Vittorio Klostermann, 2004.

• F. R. Hausmann, « Kollaborierende Intellektuelle in Weimar – Die ‘Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung’ alq ‘Anti-P.E.N.-Club’ », in Europa in Weimar. Visionen eines Kontinents, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2008.

• F. Dufay, Le voyage d’automne, Paris, Perrin, 2008.

• H. Speliers, « Le miracle de Weimar », in Textyles, Hors série N° 2 (1997).

• H. Speliers, « Het wonder van Weimar. Een collaboratie verhaal », in Gierik & Nieuw Vlaams Tijdschrift, N° 80 (2003).

• O. Lubrich, « Comparative Literature – in, from and beyond Germany », in Comparative Critical Studies 3.1-2 (2006).

• M. C. Angelini, « 1942. Note in margine al Convegno degli scrittori europei a Weimar » in Studi (e Testi) italiani, N° 5 (2000).

• M. Serri, Il breve viaggio, Venise, Marsilio, 2002.

• J. Hillesheim, E. Michael, Lexikon nationalsozialistischer Dichter, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 1993.

Allemagne : 90 ans après, l’hyperinflation est encore dans tous les esprits

Allemagne : 90 ans après, l’hyperinflation est encore dans tous les esprits

Ex: http://linformationnationaliste.hautetfort.com

Le 15 novembre 1923, il fallait 2.500 milliards de marks pour un dollar. L’hyperinflation allemande est un phénomène structurant de la pensée outre Rhin, comme le décrypte aujourd’hui l’historien et écrivain britannique Frederik Taylor dans “The Downfall of Money”, paru en septembre aux éditions Bloomsbury.

Voici 90 ans, le 15 novembre 1923, une nouvelle monnaie, le Rentenmark, était mise en circulation en Allemagne au cours incroyable d’un Rentenmark pour 1.000 milliards de marks.

A ce moment-là, il fallait 2.500 milliards de marks pour obtenir un dollar, la seule monnaie du monde qui s’échangeât alors sans difficultés contre de l’or. A la veille du début de la première guerre mondiale, un peu plus de neuf ans plus tôt, le dollar valait 4,19 marks…

Ce 15 novembre 1923 marque l’acmé de l’hyperinflation allemande, qui a débuté à l’été 1922 et s’est accélérée à la fin de l’été 1923, jusqu’à devenir folle. En août 1923, le dollar ne valait encore « que » 350.000 marks…

Un anniversaire passé inaperçu

Le 90ème anniversaire de cet événement est passé un peu inaperçu, y compris en Allemagne, dans une Europe qui, désormais, craint plus la déflation que son contraire. C’est pourtant l’occasion de se pencher sur un phénomène qui modèle encore une grande partie de la pensée économique et politique allemande, et, partant, européenne.

Le lecteur francophone aura bien du mal à trouver, dans sa langue, une histoire détaillée et complète de l’hyperinflation allemande. Il pourra néanmoins, s’il lit l’anglais, se tourner avec profit vers l’ouvrage de Frederick Taylor. Il y trouvera un récit minutieux des causes qui ont conduit l’Allemagne à la catastrophe de 1923 et une réflexion très poussée sur ses conséquences.

L’illusion de la politique économique durant la guerre

Au chapitre des causes, l’auteur souligne la responsabilité de la politique économique allemande pendant la guerre. En Allemagne comme en France ou au Royaume-Uni, le conflit a été financé par la planche à billets. Mais, soumis à un blocus sévère, le Reich a dû faire un usage moins immodéré encore que ses adversaires de la création monétaire et de la dette publique.

Frederick Taylor montre bien, en se fondant notamment la thèse développée dans les années 1960 par l’historien allemand Fritz Fischer, combien les responsables militaires et civils allemands ont compté sur la victoire pour payer leurs dettes.

En France, on a longtemps blâmé l’illusion de « l’Allemagne paiera » qui a guidé la politique du pays dans les années 1920. Mais l’on ignore souvent que, de l’autre côté de la ligne bleue des Vosges, on se berçait, également, durant la guerre de l’illusion que « la France paiera. »

« Si Dieu nous offre la victoire et la possibilité de construire la paix selon nos besoins et nos nécessités, nous entendons, et nous sommes légitimes pour cela, ne pas oublier la question des coûts du conflit », proclame dans un discours cité dans l’ouvrage le vice-chancelier Karl Helferich en août 1915 au Reichstag.

Un “mur de la dette“

Après sa défaite, l’Allemagne s’est naturellement retrouvée face à un « mur de la dette » impossible à franchir sans avoir encore recours à la création monétaire. Un recours qui s’est rapidement auto-entretenu: pour rembourser les dettes, on en contractait de nouvelles et l’on payait le tout avec de l’argent fraîchement imprimé.

La Reichsbank, encore aux mains de responsables nommées par la monarchie, a alors poursuivi, malgré la défaite et Versailles, la politique menée durant la guerre. Et c’est ce qui a conduit à l’hyperinflation.

L’incapacité des gouvernants à briser le cercle vicieux de l’inflation

Mais – et ce n’est pas le moindre des intérêts de l’ouvrage de Frederick Taylor de le montrer – l’hyperinflation allemande n’est pas qu’un phénomène économique. Si la hausse des prix et l’endettement public a échappé à tout contrôle, c’est aussi parce que les gouvernements issus de la défaite ont été incapables de prendre des mesures sévères pour contrer cette spirale. Pourquoi ?

Parce que le régime républicain est d’emblée un régime faible, pris en étau entre la gauche révolutionnaire et l’extrême-droite revancharde. Les années 1919-1923, pendant lesquelles l’Allemagne prend le chemin de l’hyperinflation, sont aussi celles d’une instabilité politique profonde où les coups d’Etat monarchistes et les assassinats politiques succèdent aux tentatives révolutionnaires.

“Les considérations économiques ne sont jamais venues qu’en deuxième lieu“

Comme le résume Frederick Taylor: « Les politiciens de la république de Weimar, socialistes ou non, ont montré une tendance à prendre des décisions en termes de bénéfices sociaux et politiques perçus. Les considérations économiques, même les plus apparemment urgentes, ne sont jamais venues qu’en deuxième lieu. » Et d’ajouter : « le temps ne semblait jamais venu d’imposer à nouveau une chasteté financière potentiellement trop douloureuse. »

Dans ces conditions, tenir une politique économique de réduction des dépenses et de contrôle de la masse monétaire tenait de la gageure. Frederick Taylor montre avec brio comment les gouvernements tentèrent alors « d’acheter » le ralliement populaire à la république par la dépense publique. Le seul homme, selon l’auteur, capable de faire cesser cette politique était Mathias Erzberger, assassiné par des nationalistes en août 1921.

Le jeu trouble du patronat

Frederick Taylor montre aussi le jeu trouble du patronat allemand dans cette période. Lui aussi a craint la « contagion révolutionnaire » russe et, pour arracher la paix sociale, va accorder des hausses sensibles de salaires qui vont alimenter la spirale inflationniste.

D’autant que les exportateurs, comme Hugo Stinnes, un magnat de la sidérurgie dont l’auteur fait un portrait très complet, vont profiter de leurs accès aux marchés étrangers et donc aux devises pour gagner des sommes considérables.

Régulièrement, les industriels vont freiner toute tentative gouvernementale pour ralentir la hausse des prix afin de bénéficier d’une compétitivité immense grâce à la dévaluation du mark. Frederick Taylor raconte ainsi que, jusqu’à l’été 1923 et à l’emballement de l’inflation, l’Allemagne affichait un quasi-plein emploi !

La responsabilité américaine mise en évidence

Enfin, de façon plus traditionnelle, Frederick Taylor pointe la responsabilité des alliés. Mais il la replace aussi à sa juste valeur et sans le simplisme habituel. Certes, le traité de Versailles imposait des conditions impossibles à une économie déjà à terre. Certes, la politique « jusqu’au-boutiste » de Raymond Poincaré en 1922-23, notamment l’occupation de la Ruhr en janvier 1923, est une des causes les plus directes de l’hyperinflation.

Mais Frederick Taylor pointe aussi la mauvaise volonté allemande et, surtout, la responsabilité ultime des États-Unis.

C’est parce que les Américains voulaient que les dettes de guerre de leurs alliés – et notamment des Français – fussent intégralement payées que ces derniers ont été si exigeants eux-mêmes avec l’Allemagne. « Les réparations, écrit Frederick Taylor, furent un moyen pour les alliés victorieux de rembourser leurs propres dettes de guerre » aux Américains.

« Pour dégager des excédents, il faut que quelqu’un accuse un déficit »

Mais pour que les vœux américains et ceux des alliés fussent satisfaits, il eût fallu que les pays européens puissent dégager des excédents commerciaux suffisants pour obtenir l’or nécessaire aux remboursements de ces dettes de guerre. Toutefois, comme le souligne Frederick Taylor, « pour dégager des excédents, il faut que quelqu’un accuse un déficit. »

Or, à ce moment même, les Américains (et les Britanniques) mènent une politique d’austérité budgétaire qui conduit à une récession de leurs économies. « A qui, alors, l’Allemagne était supposée vendre ses produits pour obtenir l’or nécessaire aux remboursement des réparations ? », s’interroge l’auteur.

L’ouvrage de Frederick Taylor montre ainsi la responsabilité de la politique isolationniste américaine menée par les administrations républicaines arrivées au pouvoir à partir de 1920 dans l’escalade de la situation allemande. Bien loin de l’image d’Épinal d’une Amérique soucieuse de l’avenir de l’Allemagne s’opposant à une France aveuglée par la vengeance…

L’effet sur la classe moyenne intellectuelle

Pour finir, après voir décrit brillamment la folie de cet automne 1923 et – ce qui n’est pas le moins intéressant – son impact sur la société allemande et sur la psyché collective allemande, Frederick Taylor insiste sur l’effet « éthique » de l’inflation qui, en dévaluant l’argent dévalue également les repères de bien et de mal et les liens humains.

« En 1923, toute l’Allemagne était devenue un vaste marché où tout était à vendre », souligne l’auteur. Les classes moyennes, notamment celles qui vivaient du travail intellectuel, la Bildungbürgertum, voient alors leurs valeurs s’effondrer. Par exemple, celle du mariage fondée sur un système de dot en échange de la virginité de l’épousée.

« Quand l’argent est devenu sans valeur, le système s’est effondré », note ainsi une femme témoin de l’époque citée par l’auteur. Laquelle conclut : « Ce qui est arrivé avec l’inflation, c’est que la virginité a absolument cessé d’importer. »

La construction du mythe

Cet effondrement de la classe moyenne est un des arguments essentiels de Frederick Taylor pour expliquer un paradoxe. L’Allemagne n’a pas été le seul pays frappé par l’hyperinflation à cette époque. Quoique dans une mesure moindre, la France, l’Italie et l’Autriche ont connu aussi des périodes de ce type.

A d’autres époques, la Grèce ou la Hongrie du lendemain de la Seconde guerre mondiale ont connu des périodes d’hyperinflation plus sévères que l’Allemagne des années 1920. Mais « aucun de ces pays n’a été aussi apeuré de façon permanente par cette expérience », souligne l’auteur.

Le triomphe d’Hitler est venu pendant la déflation

« Pourquoi ce traumatisme allemand ? » s’interroge-t-il à la fin du livre. Il y a évidemment l’horreur nazie. Mais le triomphe d’Hitler est venu pendant la déflation, non pendant l’inflation où, précisément, le putsch nazi de Munich de novembre 1923 a échoué.

Frederick Taylor explique ce traumatisme par son impact sur les classes moyennes intellectuelles. Ces dernières avaient, sous l’Empire, un prestige social immense. Avec l’inflation, ces classes se sont muées en un nouveau prolétariat. Alors que les ouvriers ont plus ou moins pu couvrir la perte de valeur de la monnaie grâce aux hausses de salaires, la Bildungsbürgertum a subi une déchéance qui l’a rapprochée socialement de la classe ouvrière.

Les « ordolibéraux » sont les traumatisés de 1923

« Dans le cas de l’Allemagne, c’est en grande partie parce qu’une classe sociale relativement petite, mais jadis extraordinairement prestigieuse, a perdu plus que quiconque dans l’inflation » que le traumatisme allemand a été construit. Les victimes principales de l’inflation « sont devenues une grande force qui forgera l’opinion au cours des trois quarts de siècle suivants. »

C’est cette classe qui ira grossir les rangs des déçus de Weimar en 1930-1933 et c’est elle qui organisera la reconstruction du pays après 1945. Ceux que l’on a appelé les « ordolibéraux » sont les traumatisés de 1923. « Ce phénomène joue un rôle important, peut-être crucial, dans la transformation de l’expérience de l’inflation qui a été une expérience dure, mais supportable pour beaucoup – en une catastrophe nationale reconnue par tous », explique Frederick Taylor.

La lecture de son ouvrage permet de comprendre une bonne partie du fossé qui sépare encore l’Allemagne du reste de l’Europe.

La Tribune

http://fortune.fdesouche.com/333957-allemagne-90-ans-apre...

Psychopathology of the Left

Psychopathology of the Left:
Some Preliminary Notes

by Kerry Bolton

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Editor’s Note:

The following essay was later incorporated into Kerry Bolton’s The Psychotic Left: From Jacobin France to the Occupy Movement ^[2], available from Black House Publishing ^[3].

The ‘Right’ of the political dichotomy, including even social and moral values that have traditionally been regarded – until recently – as normative, has for approximately eighty years, been the subject of analysis not just politically and sociologically, but psychologically.

The impetus for a psychological analysis of the Right and even of conservative morality, as a mental aberration, was led by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory which, with the rise of Hitler, was transferred en masse to the USA under the auspices of Columbia University, where it was re-established in New York as the Institute of Social Research.[1] The seminal document issued by this coterie, headed by Theodore Adorno, was The Authoritarian Personality,[2] a psychological study which intended to show through statistical analysis with a survey based on an ‘F’ (Fascism) Scale, that traditional values on morality, and especially the family and parental authority, were in need of psychological reorientation and were symptoms of latent ‘fascism’. In particular, the patriarchal family came under attack as the root institution for the cultivation of a ‘fascist’ mentality.[3]

While Leftist social scientists such as those of the Frankfurt School sought to show through statistical analysis that conservative values are psychologically abnormal, concurrently there was a move to show that Leftists have normative values. Rothman and Lichter in their psycho-historical study of Jews in the US New Left, state that studies by social scientists have been devised to show that Leftists possess positive, normative values. They write that in the USA and to a lesser extent Europe most ‘commentaries and “scientific” studies of the student movement agreed that the radical young represented the best in their societies’. Rothman and Lichter point out that the studies involved very small numbers and that the examiners’ sympathies were with their subjects politically. This coterie of social scientists produced a stream of studies ‘that seemed to prove, that radical students were democratic, humanitarian, psychologically healthy and morally advanced’. ‘All these critical studies are either impressionistic or based on small samples’.[4]

Many social scientists attributed many ‘positive’ personality attributes or political views to the New Left largely because their questionnaires were either constructed in such a manner as to ascribe such attributes to radical students almost by definition, or because the students… knew how to respond ‘appropriately’ to the questions posed.[5]

Hence the perception has persisted that that ‘Right’ is based on values emanating from the mentally dysfunctional, often based in the patriarchal family; and the ‘Left’ is mentally healthy. Rothman and Lichter are critical of the Frankfurt School, and the use of the so-called “‘F’ scale to uncover ‘Fascist’ tendencies as personality types. Rothman and Lichter argue that The Authoritarian Personality was a study intended to confirm the preconceived opinions of the authors.[6]

However, Rothman and Lichter’s studies of New Left students found that ‘radicals were significantly more likely than moderates to manifest tendencies toward a negative identity, masochistic surrender and treating people as concepts’. Jewish radicals typically manifested a tendency to escape from a dominating mother, while non-Jewish radicals regarded their fathers as more dominant but flawed.[7]

Although the synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism was unacceptable to the Stalinists, and the Critical Theorists were rejected by the German Communist Party,[8] the USSR found psychiatry a useful means of silencing ‘dissidents’ by subjecting them to psychiatric examination and routinely diagnosing them as schizophrenic, whereafter they would be confined to a mental asylum and concomitantly anti-Sovietism identified as a form of psychosis.[9]

The celebrated poet Ezra Pound received similar treatment on his forcible return from Italy to the USA after World War II, having first been confined to an open air cage by the American occupation forces in Italy. To avoid the publicity of a treason trial for one of the world’s most eminent literati, Pound was confined to St Elizabeths mental asylum.[10]

Use of Psychiatry against Dissidents in the Liberal West

The Right has continued to be portrayed as a mental aberration, whether in its most extreme Hitlerite forms, or merely as enduring conservative values on the family, such values being portrayed as regressive. For example, the seminal post-War ‘fascist’ philosopher Francis Parker Yockey, upon his arrest for passport violations in San Francisco in 1960, was ordered to undergo a mental examination by the Court[11] ensuring that anyone who tended towards such ideas could likewise be relegated as insane. Indeed, he committed suicide in prison during trial for the very reason that he feared being subjected to lobotomy or medication that would reduce him to a mentally vegetative state.[12] While the Leftist or liberal critic would typically respond that this in itself indicates Yockey’s mental state, the situation is not that simplistic, especially at that time.

Indeed, Dr Thomas Szasz, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Syracuse New York Upstate Medical University, and an eminent critique of Freudianism, has written that ‘we are replacing social controls justified by race with social controls justified by psychiatric diagnosis’. Szasz cites the case of General Edwin Walker, a primary victim of the Kennedy era witch-hunt against ‘Right-wingers’ in the military. Walker was forced to resign due to his anti-Communist education programme among the American military forces in Germany. Apparently the Liberal-American conflict with the USSR was not supposed to extend to an examination of Communist ideology, which might come uncomfortably close to ‘Right-wing extremism’. Gen. Walker, after his forced resignation, became a prominent fighter against desegregation, communism and liberalism. Walker assisted Governor Ross Barnett in leading mass resistance against the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, enforced by the invasion of Mississippi by Federal Troops in 1962. Szasz writes:

Arrested on four federal charges, including ‘inciting, assisting, and engaging in an insurrection against the authority of the United States,’ Walker was taken before a U.S. commissioner and held pending the posting of $100,000 bond. While he was making arrangements to post bail, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered Walker flown, on a government aircraft, to Springfield, Missouri, to be incarcerated in the U.S. Medical Center for Prisoners for ‘psychiatric observation’ on suspicion that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.[13]

Walker’s entry in Wikipedia mentions neither this nor the ensuing confrontation between Walker’s legal team and the government’s psychiatric team. The reader is told only that Walker ‘posted bond and returned home to Dallas, where he was greeted by a crowd of 200 supporters. After a federal grand jury adjourned in January 1963 without indicting him, the charges were dropped’.[14]

Szasz is able to write on the Walker case from first-hand experience, as he was asked to advise Walker’s legal team. Of particular interest here is that Szasz writes:

I summarized the evidence for my view that psychiatry is a threat to civil liberties, especially to the liberties of individuals stigmatized as ‘right-wingers’, illustrated by the famous case of Ezra Pound, who was locked up for 13 years while the government ostensibly waited for his ‘doctors’ to restore his competence to stand trial. Now the Kennedys and their psychiatrists were in the process of doing the same thing to Walker.[15]

Had Yockey therefore been so ‘paranoid’ two years previously when he was worried that he would be diagnosed insane, locked away in a facility and subjected to cerebral destruction through the then widely used methods of lobotomy or electric shock?

Szasz told the legal team that it would be no use trying to argue for Walker’s released on the basis of truth. However, the defence expert witness, Dr. Robert L. Stubblefield, chief psychiatrist at the Southwest Medical Center in Dallas, was able to expose Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, long-time chief medical officer at Baltimore City’s Supreme Court, as ‘an evil quack’, as Szasz states it, Walker was declared mentally fit, and a Federal Grand Jury refused to indict him.

Szasz states that even Senator Barry Goldwater two years later, as Republican Presidential candidate, was a target of politicised psychiatry:

Less than two years later, my view that organized American psychiatry was becoming overtly political, seeking the existential invalidation and psychiatric destruction of individuals who do not share the psychiatric establishment’s left-liberal ‘progressive’ views, received further dramatic support. In 1964, when Senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate for president, 1,189 psychiatrists publicly declared–without benefit of examination–that Goldwater was ‘psychologically unfit to be President of the United States’. Many offered a diagnosis of ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ as the basis for their judgment.[16]

The use of psychiatry to marginalize political opponents of Left-liberal dogma is obviously not a mere paranoid delusion of the Right. Hence, for example, The Nizkor Project, which specialises in smearing Rightists and ‘Holocaust deniers’, uses a psychiatric term in describing the US ‘militia movement’ as ‘paranoid’’.[17]

Yet the Left, despite its manifestation of the most extreme forms of sadism since the French Revolution of 1789-92, has largely escaped critical psychological analyses of its leaders and ideologues. The Left is now doctrinally acceptable as normative, and the adherents of its most extreme variation – communism – can maintain respectable positions in academia, and have their books published by the large publishers, while those of the Right are marginalized.

Rather, Karl Marx for example, continues to be feted among respectable quarters as a seminal and still valuable contributor to sociology. While Jim Jones is generally perceived as deranged, he is considered within the context of any other cult leader such as David Koresh, rather than as an apostle of the Left whose actions were consistent with the Left doctrinally and historically, and whose psychological profile is analogous to that of other Leftists still regarded as paragons of democratic and liberal values.

The Left and the Degenerative Personality

The Hungarian physician and sociologist Dr Max Nordau wrote on the degeneration of culture and philosophy as a symptom of mental and moral degeneration. Writing in 1895, Nordau provided a proto-psychohistorical perspective on Leftist revolutions, which was developed several decades later by the American, Dr Lothrop Stoddard, who described such upheavals as the ‘revolt against civilisation’.[18] This theory postulates that civilisational values are an unendurable burden upon the mentally subnormal, including types that are both what might popularly be called the ‘unbalanced genius’ and the common criminal. Hence, the ‘revolt against civilisation’ is rationalised as a political doctrine for the overthrow of social order, and the unleashing of pent-up depravity. The revolutionary Left is rationalised sociopathology.

Dr Nordau described several types of social marginality, which often includes the highly intelligent:

Quite a number of different designations have been found for these persons. Maudsley and Ball call them ‘Borderland dwellers’ – that is to say, dwellers on the borderland between reason and pronounced madness. Magnan gives to them the name of ‘higher degenerates’ and Lombroso[19] speaks of mattoids (from matto, the Italian for insane).[20]

These ‘mattoids’ or ‘borderland dwellers’ provide the leadership of social upheavals, while the types that might typically be found in the criminal underworld provide the mobs. Nordau states:

In the mental development of degenerates, we meet with the same irregularity that we have observed in their physical growth. The asymmetry of face and cranium finds, as it were, its counterpart in their mental faculties. Some of the latter are completely stunted, others morbidly exaggerated. That which nearly all degenerates lack is the sense of morality and of right and wrong. For them there exists no law, no decency, no modesty. In order to satisfy any momentary impulse, or inclination, or caprice, they commit crimes and trespasses with the greatest calmness and self-complacency, and do not comprehend that other persons take offence. When this phenomenon is present in a high degree, we speak of ‘moral insanity’ with Maudsley; there are, nevertheless, lower stages in which the degenerate does not, perhaps, himself commit any act which will bring him into conflict with the criminal code, but at least asserts the theoretical legitimacy of crime; seeks, with philosophically sounding fustian, to prove that ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ virtue and vice, are arbitrary distinctions; goes into raptures over evildoers and their deeds; professes to discover beauties in the lowest and most repulsive things; and tries to awaken interest in, and so-called ‘comprehension’ of, every bestiality. The two psychological roots of moral insanity, in all its degrees of development, are, firstly, unbounded egoism, and, secondly, impulsiveness: – i.e., inability to resist a sudden impulse to any deed; and these characteristics also constitute the chief intellectual stigmata of degenerates.[21]

Nordau considers how the ‘mattoid’ uses revolution as an outlet for destructive urges:

In view of Lombroso’s researches [Lombroso, La Physionomie des Anarchistes, 1891, p. 227] it can scarcely be doubted that the writings and acts of revolutionists and anarchists are also attributable to degeneracy. The degenerate is incapable of adapting himself to existing circumstances. This incapacity, indeed, is an indication of morbid variation in every species, and probably a primary cause of their sudden extinction. He therefore rebels against conditions and views of things which he necessarily feels to be painful, chiefly because they impose upon him the duty of self-control, of which he is incapable on account of his organic weakness of will. Thus he becomes an improver of the world, and devises plans for making mankind happy, which, without exception, are conspicuous just as much by their fervent philanthropy, and often pathetic sincerity, as by their absurdity and monstrous ignorance of all real relations.[22]

It is the ‘mattoids’ who provide the philosophical justification for violence done against civilized values in the name of ‘freedom’, and who continue to be upheld by today’s intelligentsia, itself often of mattoid type, as ‘great thinkers’. Nordau writes of them:

“The degenerate,’’ says Legrain, [Paul Maurice Legrain, Du délire chez les dégénérés; Paris, 1886, p. 11] may be a genius. A badly balanced mind is susceptible of the highest conceptions, while, on the other hand, one meets in the same mind with traits of meanness and pettiness all the more striking from the fact that they co-exist with the most brilliant qualities. ‘As regards their intellect, they can (says Jacques Roubinovitch, Hystérie male et dégénérescence; Paris,1890, p.33) ‘attain to a high degree of development, but from a moral point of view their existence is completely deranged … A degenerate will employ his brilliant faculties quite as well in the service of some grand object as in the satisfaction of the basest propensities (Lombroso has cited a large number of undoubted geniuses who were equally undoubted mattoids, graphomaniacs, or pronounced lunatics.)[23]

It is perhaps more than anything else that the forces of the Left, in both Socialist and Liberal-democratic forms, masquerade as the wave of the future, while any individual, doctrine or institution opposing or blocking them is disparaged as regressive. Yet, as Nordau pointed out over a century ago, these ‘moderns’, these ‘progressives’, who disparage all tradition and want to make the world anew, are the heralds of atavism, whether in the arts, ethics or politics. Nordau continues:

Retrogression, relapse – this is in general the ideal of this band who dare to speak of liberty and progress. They wish to be the future. That is one of their chief pretensions. That is one of the means by which they catch the largest number of simpletons. We have, however, seen in all individual cases that it is not the future but the most forgotten, far-away past Degenerates lisp and stammer, instead of speaking. They utter monosyllabic cries, instead of constructing grammatically and syntactically articulated sentences. They draw and paint like children, who dirty tables and walls with mischievous hands. They compose music like that of the yellow natives of East Asia. They confound all the arts, and lead them back to the primitive forms they had before evolution differentiated them. Every one of their qualities is atavistic, and we know, moreover, that atavism is one of the most constant marks of degeneracy.[24]

Nordau wrote of these ‘modernist’ trends in art, philosophy and politics as going against the normative values that decades later started to be described by Adorno and his team from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory as incipient ‘fascism’:

The ‘freedom’ and ‘modernity’, the ‘progress’ and ‘truth’, of these fellows are not ours. We have nothing in common with them. They wish for self-indulgence; we wish for work. They wish to drown consciousness in the unconscious; we wish to strengthen and enrich consciousness. They wish for evasive ideation and babble; we wish for attention, observation, and knowledge. The criterion by which true modems may be recognised and distinguished from impostors calling themselves moderns may be this: Whoever preaches absence of discipline is an enemy of progress; and whoever worships his ‘I’ is an enemy to society. Society has for its first premise, neighbourly love and capacity for self-sacrifice; and progress is the effect of an ever more rigorous subjugation of the beast in man, of an ever tenser self-restraint, an ever keener sense of duty and responsibility. The emancipation for which we are striving is of the judgement, not of the appetites.[25]

If one notes what Nordau was describing as normative civilisational values in 1895, he would certainly have been diagnosed as mentally imbalanced and an incipient ‘fascist’, possibly even an ‘anti-Semitism’ – if we disregard his Jewish background and role in later life in the Zionist movement – by Adorno and the other authors of The Authoritarian Personality.

Jacobinism and Bolshevism: The Revolt of the Under-Man

Lothrop Stoddard, whose works became very widely read in the early 20th century, writing in the aftermath of the Bolshevik upheaval that had reduced Russia to a hell, took up the theme of mental and physical degeneration as causes of revolt against civilisational values by what he termed the ‘under-man’. Giving an account of the personality types of the Bolsheviks and their methods of sadism, Stoddard wrote:

It would be extremely instructive if the Bolshevik leaders could be psycho-analyzed. Certainly, many of their acts suggest peculiar mental states. The atrocities perpetrated by some of the Bolshevik Commissars, for example, are so revolting that they seem explicable only by mental aberrations like homicidal mania or the sexual perversion known as sadism.

One such scientific examination of a group of Bolshevik leaders has been made. At the time of the Red terror in the city of Kiev, in the summer of 1919, the medical professors of Kiev University were spared on account of their usefulness to their terrorist masters. Three of these men were competent alienists, who were able to diagnose the Bolshevik leaders mentally in the course of their professional duties. Now their diagnosis was that nearly all the Bolshevik leaders were degenerates, of more or less unsound mind. Furthermore, most of them were alcoholics, a majority were syphilitic, while many were drug fiends…[26]

Stoddard gives a dramatic illustration of the roles being played out in such revolts, when an internationally acclaimed philology scholar, Professor Timofie Florinsky of Kiev University, was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and spontaneously shot by one of the ‘judges’ for giving an ‘irritating reply’ to a question. The murderous Commissar, Rosa Schwartz, a former prostitute, was drunk.[27]

The Kiev event is pregnant with historical and cultural meaning. The clash of two worlds, fundamentally alien to each other but coinciding in time and space: the commissar, a drunken ex-whore, puts to death in an instant of primal savagery the scholar. Such scenes had been played out en masse by the mobs during the French Revolution, continuously plied with alcohol and drugs, pushed onward by prostitutes, pirates and criminals, and agitated by mattoids from among depraved elements of the upper and middle classes.

While it now seems to be regarded as passé to refer to what was once widely called the Red Terror in Bolshevik Russia, attention being drawn almost entirely to the ‘crimes of the Nazis’, any reference to major atrocities other than that involving Jews being regarded as ‘relativising the Holocaust’,[28] the implementation of the Bolshevik policy on terror shows symptoms of mass sadism in a literal, psychotic sense. One must go to the accounts of the time, however, in order to realise the character of the sadism.

After Denikin’s White Army defeated the Bolsheviks at Odessa in August 1919, Rev. R Courtier-Forster, Chaplain of the British forces at Odessa and the Black Sea ports, who had been held captive by the Bolsheviks, reported the horrors of Bolshevism, relating how on the ship “Sinope”, the largest cruiser of the Black Sea Fleet, some of his personal friends had been chained to planks and slowly pushed into the ship’s furnaces to be roasted alive. Others were scalded with steam from the ship’s boilers. Mass rapes were committed, while the local Soviet press debated the possibilities of nationalizing women. The screams from women being raped, and from other victims in what Rev. Courtier-Forster called the ‘Bolshevik’s House of Torture’ at Catherine Square, could be heard for blocks around, while at Catherine Square the Bolsheviks tried to muffle the screams with the noise of lorries thundering up and down the street.[29]

When the Rohrberg Commission of Enquiry entered Kiev, after the Soviets had been driven out in August 1919, it described the ‘execution hall’ of the Bolsehvik secret police, the Cheka, as follows:

All the cement floor of the great garage (the execution hall of the departmental Cheka of Kiev) was flooded with blood. This blood was no longer flowing, it formed a layer of several inches: it was a horrible mixture of blood, brains, of pieces of skull, of tufts of hair and other human remains. All the walls were bespattered with blood; pieces of brains and scalps were sticking to them. A gutter twenty-five centimetres wide by twenty-five centimetres deep and about ten metres long ran from the centre of the garage towards a subterranean drain. This gutter along its whole length was full to the top with blood…Usually as soon as the massacre had taken place the bodies were conveyed out of the town in motor lorries and buried beside the grave about which we have spoken; we found in a corner of the garden another grave which was older and contained about eighty bodies. Here we discovered on the bodies traces of cruelties and mutilations the most varied and unimaginable. Some bodies were disembowelled, others had limbs chopped off, some were literally hacked to pieces. Some had their eyes put out and the head, face, neck and trunk covered with deep wounds. Further on we found a corpse with a wedge driven into the chest. Some had no tongues. In a corner of the grave we discovered a certain quantity of arms and legs….[30]

Such atavistic savagery goes even beyond mass murder. It is the psychosis of a Jeffrey Dahmer,[31] or Edward Gein,[32] rationalised as a political ideology with noble ideals, that continues to have adherents with respectable positions in academia.

The precursor of the Bolshevik Revolution, that of France during the period 1789-1792 unleashed a mass psychosis of revolt of the dregs of France, led by the mattoid elements. As in today’s Western liberal-democracies, the theory is that manifestations of inequality and differences can be eliminated by changing the social structure according to dogma. The doctrine of the French Revolution was a ‘return to Nature’, an idolised and imaginative interpretation of what Nature was supposed to be like, concocted in the drawing rooms of the European intelligentsia, by writers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Weishaupt, the founder of the proto-communist Illuminati. According to these ideologues, the cause of tyranny, injustice, violence and inequality, was civilisation. If civilisation itself could be overthrown and humanity returned to a supposed innocent state of nature, then all could live in an idyllic state of happiness, peace and brotherhood. This requires the abolition of civilisational institutions such as marriage, private property, Church, state, monarchy. Karl Marx formalized precisely the same doctrine about half a century later. This atavism is ironically heralded as ‘progressive’.

The French sociologist Gustave Le Bon noted in 1895:

The idea that institutions can remedy the defects of societies, that national progress is the consequence of the improvement of institutions and governments, and that social changes can be effected by decrees – this idea, I say, is still generally accepted. It was the starting point of the French Revolution, and the social theories of the present day are based upon it.[33]

Le Bon later wrote, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, of the same atavism that had afflicted France now unfolding in Russia:

The Bolshevik mentality is as old as history. Cain, in the Old Testament, had the mind of a Bolshevik. But it is only in our days that this ancient mentality has met with a political doctrine to justify it. This is the reason of its rapid propagation, which has been undermining the old social scaffolding.[34]

The reader is referred to Nesta H Webster’s history, The French Revolution,[xxxv] which draws on contemporary documents from both Jacobins and Royalists, which dramatically brings to life the depravity and cowardice of the dregs of France, led by disaffected mattoid lawyers and Orleanist aristocrats, and of the heroism of those loyal to the King, including those among the common folk. What is notable in this context is the manner by which the mob could be agitated with the continuous supply of alcohol and narcotics that seemed to maintain a blood frenzy, paid for by the wealth of the Duc d’Orléans, a craven megalomaniac who desired to usurp the Throne on the backs of the criminal underworld that he had unleashed.

Here in the French Revolution is a dress rehearsal for the blood-letting by the Bolsheviks, 130 years later. At the Convent des Carmes, Rue de Vaugirard, up to 200 priests had been incarcerated. Here a drunken mob converged and with pistols and sabres killed the defenceless priests.[26] The Archbishop of Arles had his face cleaved almost in two, as he offered his life in the hope of appeasing the bloodlust and sparing the other priests. The old man’s death only excited the mob further, and they fired upon the priests kneeling in prayer in the chapel.[37] Other such massacres were conducted on priests imprisoned at the Abbaye in Paris. However, there were more victims among ‘the people’ than among the aristocrats and clergy. The revolutionary leaders sought to ‘amputate’ France, and to radically reduce its population, reminiscent of Pol Pot.

In La Vendée region a policy of wholesale extermination was undertaken to eliminate a folk who remained steadfast to King and Church.

Webster notes a curious transformation of France during the era, which shows that the Revolution was a victory of the ‘under-man’ and a return to the atavistic on the ruins of civilisation. She writes that mediocre lawyers such as Robespierre, who now held the power, vented their frustration at years of personal failure by trying to eliminate the talented and intelligent. All those who had devoted themselves to scholarship were targeted. ‘The war on education was even carried out against the treasures of science, art and literature’. One revolutionary luminary proposed killing the collection of rare animals at the Museum of Natural History. A widespread notion of the revolutionaries was to burn all the libraries and retain only books pertaining to the Revolution and to law. Thousands of books and valuable paintings were disposed of or destroyed. ‘Not only education but politeness in all forms was to be destroyed’. It became necessary to assume a ‘rough and boorish manner’ and to present ‘an uncultivated appearance’. ‘A refined countenance, hands that bore no marks of manual labour, well-brushed hair, clean and decent garments, were regarded with suspicion – to make sure of keeping one’s head it was advisable that it should be unkempt’. It was advisable to ruffle one’s hair, grow the thickness of whiskers, soil the hands…’ ‘In a word, it was not only a war on nobility, on wealth, on industry, on art, on intellect; it was a war on civilisation’.[38]

It might be observed today that the cult of the dirty and the unkempt has become a normative aspect of society.

Notes

1. K R Bolton, Revolution from Above (London: Arktos Media Ltd., 2011), p. 101.

2. T W Adorno, et al The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950).

3. K R Bolton, ‘”Sex Pol” Ideology: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society’, Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2010, pp 329-38.

4. S Rothman and S R Lichter, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians and the New Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 50-52.

5. Ibid., p. 55.

6. Ibid., p. 60.

7. Ibid., p. 286.

8. Myran Sharaf, Fury on Earth – A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (London: Andre Deutsch, 1983), p. 169; K R Bolton, ‘Sex Pol Ideology’, op. cit., pp. 347-348.

9. Ibid., p. 339.

10. E Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St Elizabeth’s (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984).

11. ‘Jailbreak plot’ told in passport case’, San Francisco Chronicle, 15 January 1960, p. 5.

12. Michael O’Meara, ‘Introduction’, Francis Parker Yockey (1949), The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front (Shamley Green, England: Wermod & Wermod Publishing Group, 2012), xvi. http://shop.wermodandwermod.com/the-proclamation-of-london-of-the-european-liberation-front.html

13. Yockey was to be subjected to precisely the same procedure.

14. Thomas Szasz, ‘The Shame of Medicine: The Case of General Edwin Walker’, The Freeman, Vol. 59, no. 8, October 2009, http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/the-therapeutic-state/the-shame-of-medicine-the-case-of-general-edwin-walker/

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17.‘Paranoia as Patriotism: Far Right Influences on the Militia movement’, The Nizkor Project, http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/adl/paranoia-as-patriotism/minutemen.html

18. Lothrop Stoddard (1922), The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-Man (Wermod & Wermod, 2012).

19. Cesare Lombroso is widely regarded as the founder of criminology.

20. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D Appleton & Co., 1895), p. 18.

21. Ibid., pp. 18-19.

22. Ibid., p. 22.

23. Ibid., pp. 32-33.

24. Ibid., p. 555.

25. Ibid., p. 560.

26. Lothrop Stoddard, op. cit., Chapter VI: ‘Rebellion of the Under-Man’, p. 177,

27. Ibid., p. 177 n.

28. Deborah E Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (London: Penguin Books, 1994). See especially Chapter 11: ‘Watching on the Rhine: The Future Course of Holocaust Denial’, pp. 209-222.

29. R. Courtier-Forster, ‘Bolshevism, Reign of Torture at Odessa’, London Times, 3 December, 1919, pp. 2, 3, 4.

30. S Melgunoff, La terreur rouge (Paris, 1927), cited by Vicomte Leon de Poncins, The Secret Powers Behind Revolution (California: Christian Book Club of America, n.d.), p. 149.

31. Jeffrey Dahmer killed 17 young men during 1978-1991, refrigerated and cannibalised their body parts.

32. Edward Gein was a cannibal, necrophile, and grave robber, who used bodies parts to construct leggings, furniture covering and so forth.

33. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, op.cit., p. 86.

34. Gustave Le Bon, The World in Revolt (New York, 1921) p. 179; cited by Stoddard, op. cit., Chapter VII: ‘The War Against Chaos’.

35. Nesta H Webster, The French Revolution, 1919, 1969. Wermod & Wermod, Britain, will be issuing a de luxe edition of The French Revolution in 1912, with an introduction by this author. The pages cited in this article are from the 1969 edition.

36. Ibid., p. 311.

37. Ibid., p. 312.

38. Ibid., pp. 412-413.

Source: Ab Aeterno, no. 10, January-March 2010.

 

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Occult Roots of the Russian Revolution

Occult Roots of the Russian Revolution

Ex: http://www.gnostics.com

Dearest friend, do you not see
All that we perceive –
Only reflects and shadows forth
What our eyes cannot see.
Dearest friend, do you not hear
In the clamour of everyday life –
Only the unstrung echoing fall of
Jubilant harmonies.
– Vladimir Soloviev, 1892

The Great Russian Revolution of 1917, launched by Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevic party, profoundly influenced the history of the twentieth century. The fall of the Russian Empire and its replacement by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ushered in а new аgе in world politics. More than this, the Russian Revolution was the triumph of а dynamic revolutionary ideology that directly challenged Western capitalism. But what of the hidden origins of this Revolution? Did secret influences contribute to the victory of Lenin and the Bolshevics?

Innumerable books, not to forget massive scholarly studies, are devoted to examining the Russian Revolution and the rise of Soviet Communism. All this impressive research is almost exclusively devoted to the obvious political, economic and social dimensions, i.e. the surface manifestations of history. However, within or behind this mundane history lies another reality that is more interesting and more important than the everyday analysis offered by mainstream historians and writers.

Establishment historians pay little attention to the remarkable impact occult and Gnostic ideas had on the rise of Bolshevism and the victory of the Russian Revolution.

A number of social and political movements, including Marxism and Lenin’s Bolshevism, have been linked to Gnosticism, which flourished in the early centuries of the Christian era. The political scientists A. Besancon and L. Pellicani argue the intellectual roots of Russian Bolshevism are a structural repetition of the ancient Gnostic paradigm. A distinguishing feature of Gnosticism is an illusive, symbolic interpretation of reality, including history.

For the early Christian Gnostics the Absolute – termed the ‘Unknown Father’– has nothing in common with the wrathful ‘God’ worshipped by theist religion. In fact, for these Gnostics, the ‘God’ of the Old Testament is the adversary of their ‘Unknown Father’, the true God. Our world, including all human institutions, is not the work of the true God, but of a false creator, the Demiurge, who keeps us captive in the world, away from the divine light and truth.

Therefore, in Gnosticism, the world is merely a sort of illusion, a set of allegorical symbols, a reverse image of the real essence of history. Man, who is asleep to his inner potential, must awake and become an active partner of the ‘Unknown Father’ in the transformation of all life. Otherwise he remains a prisoner in what the eminent Russian Gnostic philosopher Vladimir Solviev (1853-1900) aptly described as “a kind of nightmare of sleeping humanity.” A number of Gnostic communities – like nineteenth century communists – held contempt for material goods and lived communally, teaching “the world and its laws, religious, moral and social, are of little relevance to the plan of salvation.”¹

Gnostics, Mystic Sects & Radicals

Russian mystical sects played an extremely important part in the Bolshevik revolution, on the side of the Bolsheviks. In spite of their rejection of the state and the church, these sects were deeply nationalistic, since their members were hostile to foreign innovations. They hated the West.
— Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome

Throughout nineteenth century Europe we find numerous connections between Gnostics, mystics, occultists and radical socialists. They constituted what the historian James Webb calls “a progressive underground” united by a common opposition to the established order of their day. Constantly, Webb writes, “we find socialists and occultists running in harness.”² Sundry spiritual communities emerged across the United States, with clear Gnostic and occult doctrines, which attempted to follow a pure communistic life style. Victoria Woodhull, the president of the American Association of Spiritualists during the 1870s, was a radical socialist. Woodhull believed that Spiritualism signified not only religious enlightenment, but also a cultural, political and social revolution. She published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto and tried in vain to persuade Karl Marx that the goals of Spiritualism and Communism were the same.

Dissident Christian mystics, spiritualists, occultists and radical socialists often found themselves together at the forefront of political movements for social justice, worker’s rights, free love and the emancipation of women. Nineteenth century occultists and socialists even used the same language in calling for a new age of universal brotherhood, justice and peace. They all shared a charismatic vision of what the future could be – a radical alternative to the oppressive old political, social, economic and religious power structures. And more often than not they found themselves facing the same common enemy in the unholy alliance of State and Church.

The birth of radical socialist ideas in Russia cannot be easily separated from the spiritual communism practiced by diverse Russian sects. For centuries folk myths nourished a widespread belief in the possibility of an earthly communist paradise united by fraternal love, where justice, truth and equality prevailed. One prominent Russian legend told of the lost land of Belovode (the Kingdom of the White Waters), said to be “across the water” and inhabited by Russian Old Believer mystics. In Belovode, spiritual life reigned supreme, and all went barefoot sharing the fruits of the land and their labour. There were no oppressive rules, crime, and war. Another Russian legend concerned Kitezh, the radiant city beneath the lake. Kitezh will only rise from the waters and appear again when Russia returns to the true Christ and is once more worthy to see it and its priceless treasures. Early in the twentieth century such myths captured the popular imagination and were associated with the hopes of revolution.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a schism occurred within the Russian Orthodox Church of a new religious movement called the Old Believers. The result was that many Russian spiritual dissidents took courage from the split to found their own communities, giving vent to Gnostic ideas that had long been simmering underground. The Old Believers, in the face of severe repression, clung tenaciously to their ancient mystic tradition and expressed their separation from the official world of Imperial Orthodox Russia in collective migration to the fringes of the state, mass suicide by fire, rebellion, and a monastic communism.

Gnostic communities, with their communalism and disdain for private property, proliferated throughout Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Known by a variety of names such as Common Hope, United Brotherhood, Love of Brotherhood, Righthanded Brotherhood, White Doves, Believers in Christ, Friends of God, Wanderers, their followers reportedly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Ruthlessly persecuted by the authorities, they made up a spiritual underground, often hiding themselves from inquisitive eyes. A countrywide revolutionary sectarianism that rejected the state, the church, society, law, and even religious commandments, which they declared were abolished when the Holy Spirit descended to humanity.

The origin of Gnostic ideas in Russia is difficult to trace, but they appear to be an outgrowth of two powerful spiritual impulses in Russian religious history. The first is the Christian esoteric tradition preserved within the monastic communities of the Russian Orthodox Church. A mystical tradition going back by way of Greek Neoplatonism, Origin and Clement of Alexandria to St. John the “beloved disciple”. “Russian Orthodox mystical theology has bent more than a little in the direction of the Gnostic heresy,” notes the historian Maria Carlson.³ The second impulse originated with Essene and Manichean missionaries who reached Russia in the early centuries of the Christian era. An impulse later given new vitality by the Bogomils whose Gnostic teachings had gained a foothold in Russia by the thirteenth century.

By the end of the nineteenth century occult and Gnostic ideas enjoyed wide circulation among all segments of the Russian population. At one point the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948) welcomed the Gnostics, urging “Gnosticism should be revived and should enter into our life for all time.”⁴ After the 1917 Revolution, Gnosticism, observed the Russian scholar Mikhail Agursky, “contributed considerably to Soviet culture and even influenced Soviet political life. Its foundations were laid before the revolution…[by] several gnostic trends in nineteenth century Russian culture.”

While Russian Gnostics rejected the world order and strove to live by the apostolic precept to hold “all things in common,”⁵ they were also profoundly aware of the approaching end of the age. “Russian popular Gnosticism had a very pronounced apocalyptic character,” says Mikhail Agursky. “Russian mystical sectarians lived in anticipation of a catastrophe. The degradation of human life demanded purifying fire from heaven, which would devour the new Sodom and Gomorrah and replace them with the Kingdom of God. Any revolution could easily be identified by such sectarians as this fire, regardless of its external form.”⁶

Russian Socialism

Bolshevik collectivism had roots in long-standing Russian values of individual self-sacrifice. The suffering, martyrdom, humility, and sacrifice of Christ was deeply embedded in the texture of Russian religious thought and practice, and the lives of Russian saints were a litany of suffering. The Old Believers, heretics in the eyes of the official church for their adherence to their own version of the truth, suffered persecution for centuries at the hands of the government and sought escape in mass immolation, colonization, and, finally, economic mutual aid.
— Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks

Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), seen by many as the father of Russian socialism, was a friend and admirer of the French revolutionary Proudhon, who viewed himself as a Christian socialist. Proudhon worked intermittently all his adult life on a never completed study of the original teachings of Jesus Christ. Herzen also paid special attention to Russia’s persecuted religious sectarians. He printed a special supplement for the Old Believers, the mystic Christian traditionalists who had been driven out of the Russian Orthodox Church. Nicholas Chernyshevsky, another Russian socialist thinker of the nineteenth century, wrote an article in praise of the “fools for Christ’s sake” and defended members of the spiritual underground.

The Russian radicals of the 1800s, in the words of James H. Billington, looked upon “socialism as an outgrowth of suppressed traditions within heretical Christianity.”⁷ They saw the genesis of Russian socialism in the spiritual underground of the Gnostics and religious sectarians. One influential network of Russian socialists openly claimed to be rediscovering “the teaching of Christ in its original purity,” which “had as its basic doctrine charity and its aim the realisation of freedom and the destruction of private property.”⁸

Nicholas Chernyshevsky (1828-1889), who spent much of his life in penal servitude, penned the utopian novel What Is To Be Done? as a vision of the future new society and a guidebook for the revolutionaries who would build it. Chernyshevsky wrote:

Then say to all: this is what will come to pass in the future, a radiant and beautiful future. Have love for it, strive toward it, work on behalf of it, bring it ever nearer, bear what you can from it into your present life. The more you can carry from that future into your present life, the more your life will be radiant and good, the richer it will be in happiness and pleasure.

Chernyshevsky’s novel inspired two generations of idealistic young radicals. Among them was Alexandre Ulianov, the beloved elder brother of V.I. Lenin. He was executed in 1887 for his part in the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander III. Vladimir Lenin told how Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? “captivated my brother, and captivated me… It transformed me completely.” What impressed the future leader of the Russian Revolution was how Chernyshevsky:

not only demonstrated the necessity for every correctly thinking and really honest man to become a revolutionary, but also showed – even more importantly – what a revolutionary should be like, what his principles should be, how he must achieve his goals, what methods and means he should employ to realise them.⁹

Nicholas Berdyaev observed that the “Russian revolutionaries who were to be inspired by the ideas of Chernyshevsky present an interesting psychological problem. The best of Russian revolutionaries acquiesced during this earthly life in persecution, want, imprisonment, exile, penal servitude, execution, and they had no hope whatever of another life beyond this. The comparison with Christians of that time is almost disadvantageous to the latter; they highly cherished the blessings of this earthly life and counted upon the blessings of heavenly life.”¹⁰

Chernyshevsky, like those who followed him, was passionately committed to the power of reason. His philosophy firmly grounded in the materialist outlook and a sober utilitarianism. But in his life Chernyshevsky was the embodiment of self-abnegation, single-mindedness and asceticism. Like a true saint he asked nothing for himself, but wanted everything for the people as a whole. When the police officers took him into exile in Siberia they said, “Our orders were to bring a criminal and we are bringing a saint. “These two elements, the religious and the secular, the ascetic and the calculating,” writes historian Geoffrey Hosking, “remained in unresolved tension in his personality, but on the level of theory he sought a resolution in the idea of a social revolution to be promoted by the best people on the basis of personal example.”¹¹

Inspired by Chernyshevsky, groups of young radicals emerged committed to the reconstruction of Russia as a federation of village communes and communally run factories. The reading list of one such revolutionary cell is revealing because it included the New Testament and histories of Russian Gnostic communities. The leader of the main radical circle in the Russian capital St. Petersburg spoke of founding “a religion of humanity.” He called his circle “an Order of Knights” and included in its ranks members of a Gnostic “God-manhood sect” which taught that each individual is potentially destined to become a god. It was not uncommon for the revolutionary call “liberty, equality, and fraternity” to be written on crosses, or for Russian revolutionaries to declare their belief in “Christ, St. Paul, and Chernyshevsky.”

The Russian socialists frequently visited religious sectarians and sought their support because of their history of alienation from the tsarist regime. Emil Dillon, an English journalist who had personal contact with several persecuted religious communities, reminds us:

Among the various revolutionary agencies which were at work… the most unpretending, indirect, and effective were certain religious sectarians…. Coercion in religious matters did more to spread political disaffection than the most enterprising revolutionary propagandists. It turned the best spirits of the nation against the tripartite system of God, Tsar, and fatherland, and convinced even average people not only that there was no lifegiving principle in the State, but that no faculty of the individual or the nation had room left for unimpeded growth.¹²

 V.I. Lenin & The Spiritual Underground

Men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph. These constructions… I propose to call myths; the syndicalist “general strike” and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths.
— Georges Sorel, 1906

Religious sectarians played a significant part in the formation of Bolshevism, V.I. Lenin’s unique brand of revolutionary Marxism. Indeed, Marxism with its aggressive commitment to atheism and scientific materialism, scorned all religion as “the opium of the people.” Yet this did not prevent some Bolshevic leaders from utilising concepts taken directly from occultism and radical Gnosticism. Nor did the obvious materialist outlook of Communism, as Bolshevism became known, stop Russia’s spiritual underground from giving valuable patronage to Lenin’s revolutionary cause.

One of Vladimir Lenin’s early supporters was the radical Russian journalist V. A. Posse, who edited a Marxist journal Zhizn’ (Life) from Geneva. Zhizn’ aimed to enlist the support of Russia’s burgeoning dissident religious communities in the fight to overthrow the tsarist autocracy. Posse’s publishing enterprise received the backing of V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, a Marxist revolutionary and importantly a specialist on Russian Gnostic sects. Through Bonch-Bruevich’s connections to the spiritual underground of Old Believers and Gnostics, Posse secured important financial help for Zhizn’.

The goal of Zhizn’ was to reach a broad peasant and proletarian audience of readers that would some day constitute a popular front against the hated Russian government. Lenin soon began contributing articles to Zhizn’. To Posse, Lenin appeared like some kind of mystic sectarian, a Gnostic radical, whose asceticism was exceeded only by his self-confidence. Both Bonch-Bruevich and Posse were impressed by Lenin’s zeal to build an effective revolutionary party. Lenin disdained religion and showed little interest in the ‘religious’ orientation of Zhizn’. The Russian Marxist thinker Plekhanov, one of Lenin’s early mentors, openly expressed his hostility to the journal’s ‘religious’ bent. He wrote to Lenin complaining that Zhizn’, “on almost every page talks about Christ and religion. In public I shall call it an organ of Christian socialism.”

The Zhizn’ publishing enterprise came to an end in 1902 and its operations were effectively transferred into Lenin’s hands. This led to the organisation in 1903-1904 of the very first Bolshevic publishing house by Bonch-Bruevich and Lenin. Both men viewed the Russian sectarians as valuable revolutionary allies. As one scholar notes, “Russian religious dissent appealed to Bolshevism even before that movement had acquired a name.”¹³

V.D. Bonch-Bruevich (1873-1955) came to revolutionary Marxism under the influence of the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s social teachings. Like Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, he started his revolutionary career distributing Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is within You, a work infused with neo-Gnostic themes. In 1899 Bonch-Bruevich left Russia for Canada to live among the Doukhobors, Russian Gnostic communists whose refusal to pay taxes and serve in the army drove them into exile. Bonch-Bruevich reported on the secret doctrines of the Doukhobors and put in writing their fundamental oral teachings known as the ‘Living Book’. On his return to Europe in 1901 Bonch-Bruevich introduced Lenin to the chief tenets of these Gnostic communists. The Doukhobors, with their radical rejection of the Church and State, with their denial of the uniqueness of the historical Christ, and their neglect of the Bible in favour of their own secret tradition, were of some interest to the founder of Bolshevism.

In 1904 Bonch-Bruevich, with Lenin’s support, began publishing Rassvet (Dawn) in an effort to spread revolutionary Marxism among the religious dissidents. His first editorial attacked all the Russian tsars for their persecution of the Old Believers and sectarians, and stated that the journal’s goal was to report events occurring world wide, “in various corners of our vast motherland, and among the ranks of Sectarians and Schismatics.” Rassvet combined Communist and apocalyptic themes that were both compelling and comprehensible to Russia’s spiritual underground.

By the early years of the twentieth century Russia was in a revolutionary mood. Bonch-Bruevich wrote that this would soon produce a “street battle of the awakened people.” He urged his fellow Communist revolutionaries to use the language of the spiritual underground in persuading the masses that the government was “Satan” and that “all men are brothers” in the eyes of God. He wrote:

If the proletariat-sectarian in his speech requires the word ‘devil’, then identify this old concept of an evil principle with capitalism, and identify the word ‘Christ’, as a concept of eternal good, happiness, and freedom, with socialism.

 Communist God-Builders  & The Occult

If a newcomer to the vast quantity of occult literature begins browsing at random, puzzlement and impatience will soon be his lot; for he will find jumbled together the droppings of all cultures, and occasional fragments of philosophy perhaps profound but almost certainly subversive to right living in the society in which he finds himself. The occult is rejected knowledge: that is, an Underground whose basic unity is that of Opposition to an establishment of Powers That Are.
— James Webb, Occult Underground

A Marxist pamphlet written before 1917 and later reissued by the Soviet government bluntly declared that man is destined to “take possession of the universe and extend his species into distant cosmic regions, taking over the whole solar system. Human beings will be immortal.” Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment in the new Soviet state, believed that as religious conviction had been a great force of change in history, Marxists should conceive the struggle to transform nature through labor as their form of devotion, and the spirit of collective humanity as their god.

A.V. Lunacharsky (1875-1933) and the Russian writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), close friends of Vladimir Lenin, were acquainted with a broad spectrum of occult thought, including Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Both these prominent Bolshevic revolutionaries shared a life-long interest in ancient mystery cults, religious sectarianism, parapsychology and Gnosticism. Maria Carlson maintains that Gorky’s “vision of a New Nature and a New World, subsequently assimilated to its socialist expression as the Radiant Future, is fundamentally Theosophic.”¹⁴ Gorky valued the writings of the occultists Emanuel Swedenborg and Paracelsus, as well as those of Fabre d’Olivet and Eduard Schure.

Drawing on the imagery of the ancient solar mysteries, Gorky declared in Children of the Sun, “we people are the children of the sun, the bright source of life; we are born of the sun and will vanquish the murky fear of death.” In his Confession, the “people” have become God, creators of miracles, possessors of true religious consciousness, and immortal. Gorky envisioned a beautiful future of work for the love of work and of man as “master of all things.” Revealing his familiarity with parapsychology and faith healing, Gorky tells how an assembled crowd uses its collective energy to heal a paralysed girl. He was deeply impressed by research into thought transference, often writing of the “miraculous power of thought”, while expressing the hope that one day reason and science would end fear.

The ideas advanced by Lunacharsky and Gorky became known as God building, described by one researcher as a “movement of secular rejuvenation with mystery cult aspects.”¹⁵ God building implied that a human collective, through the concentration of released human energy, can perform the same miracles that were assigned to supra-natural beings. God builders regarded early Christianity as an authentic example of collective God building, Christ being nothing other than the focus of collective human energy. “The time will come,” said Gorky, “when all popular will shall once again amalgamate in one point. Then an invincible and miraculous power will emerge, and God will be resurrected.”¹⁶ Years before, Fyodor Dostoyevsky had written in The Possessed, “God is the synthetic personality of the whole people.” According to Mikhail Agursky:

For Gorky, God-building was first of all a theurgical action, the creation of the new Nature and the annihilation of the old, and therefore it coincided fully with the Kingdom of the Spirit. He considered God to be a theurgical outcome of a collective work, the outcome of human unity and of the negation of the human ego.¹⁷

Before the Russian Revolution, Lunacharsky’s political propaganda relied heavily on words and images ultimately derived from Russian Gnostics and religious sectarians. In one pamphlet he urged readers to refuse to pay taxes or serve in the army, to form local revolutionary committees, to demand ownership of their land, overthrow the autocracy and replace it with a “brotherly society” of socialism. Indeed, there was as much attention given to Christ as to Marx in Lunacharsky’s writings. “Christianity, in all its forms, even the purest and most progressive,” he wrote, “is the ideology of the downtrodden classes, the hopelessly immobile, those who cannot believe in their own powers; Christianity is also a weapon of exploitation.” But Lunacharsky realised there is also an underground spiritual tradition, the arcane language and symbols of which might be used to mobilise the people to carry out the revolution.

Occult elements are obvious in Lunacharsky’s early plays and poems, including a reference to the “astral spirit”, and a familiarity with white magic and demonology. He discussed Gnosticism, the Logos, Pythagoras, and solar cults in his two volume work Religion and Socialism. After the Bolshevic Revolution, Lunacharsky wrote an occult play called Vasilisa the Wise. This was to be followed by a never published “dramatic poem” entitled Mitra the Saviour, a clear reference to the pre-Christian occult deity. Significantly, it is Lunacharsky, along with the scholar of Russian Gnostic sects V.D. Bonch-Bruevich, who is credited with developing the so-called “cult of Lenin” which dominated Soviet life following the Bolshevic leaders’ death in 1924.

 Soviet Power & Spiritual Revolution

A Weltanschauung has conquered a state, and emanating from this state it will slowly shatter the entire world and bring about its collapse. Bolshevism, if unchecked, will change the world as completely as Christianity did. Three hundred years from now it will no longer be said that it is merely a question of organising production in a different way… If this movement continues to develop, Lenin, three hundred years from now, will be regarded not only as one of the revolutionaries of 1917, but as the founder of a new world doctrine, and he will be worshipped as much perhaps as Buddha.
— Adolf Hitler, 1932¹⁸

In the wake of the total collapse of Imperial Russia and the devastation caused by the First World War, Lenin and the Bolshevics seized power in October 1917. A revolution that would not have been possible without the active support and participation of the Russian spiritual underground. The Bolshevics, in the opinion of one Russian scholar:

most probably would not have been able to take power or to consolidate it if the multimillion masses of Russian sectarians had not taken part in the total destruction brought about by the revolution, which acquired a mystical character for them. To them the state and the church were receptacles of all kinds of evil, and their destruction and debasement were regarded as a mystic duty, exactly as it was with the [medieval Gnostic sects of] Anabaptists, Bogomils, Cathars, and Taborites.¹⁹

Ground down by centuries of autocratic tsarist rule as well as the Orthodox Church, its mere appendage, the Russian people came to accept the Communism of Lenin. “Bolshevism is a Russian word,” wrote an anti-Communist Russian in 1919. “But not only a word. Because in that guise, in that form and in those manifestations which have crystallized in Russia… Bolshevism is a uniquely Russian phenomenon, with deep ties to the Russian soul.”²⁰ Even the Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Goebbels, who built his political career fighting Communism, confessed that no tsar had ever understood the Russian people as deeply as Lenin, who gave them what they wanted most – land and freedom.

Lenin wedded the dialectical materialism of Marx to the deep-rooted tradition of Russian socialism permeated as it was by Gnostic, apocalyptic, and messianic elements. In the same manner he reconciled the Marxist commitment to science, atheism and technological progress with the Russian ideas of justice, truth and self-sacrifice for the collective. Similarly the leader of Bolshevism merged the Marxist call for proletarian internationalism and world revolution with the centuries old notion of Russia’s great mission as the harbinger of universal brotherhood. Violently opposed to all religion, atheistic Bolshevism drew much from the spiritual underground, becoming in the words of one of Lenin’s comrades, “the most religious of all religions.”

“Nonetheless we have studied Marxism a bit,” wrote Lenin, “we have studied how and when opposites can and must be combined. The main thing is: in our revolution… we have in practice repeatedly combined opposites.” Several centuries earlier the Muslim Gnostic teacher Jalalladin Rumi pointed out, “It is necessary to note that opposite things work together even though nominally opposed.”

After the 1917 Bolshevic Revolution:

occultism was part of a cluster of ideas that inspired a mystical revolutionism based on the belief that great earthly events such as revolution reflect a realignment of cosmic forces. Revolution, then, had eschatological significance. Its result would be a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ peopled by a new kind of human being and characterized by a new kind of society cemented by love, common ideals, and sacrifice.

The Bolshevic Revolution did not quash interest in the occult. Some pre-revolutionary occult ideas and symbols were transformed along more ‘scientific’ lines. Mingled with compatible concepts, they permeated early Soviet art, literature, thought, and science. Soviet political activists who did not believe in the occult used symbols, themes, and techniques drawn from it for agitation and propaganda. Further transformed, some of them were incorporated in the official culture of Stalin’s time.²¹

Apocalyptic and mess-ianic themes, popularised for centuries by the Russian spiritual underground, were played out in the Bolshevic Revolution and fueled the drive to build a classless, communist society. The dream of a communist paradise on earth created by human hands, a new world adorned by technological perfection, social justice and brotherhood, was found both in Marx and in the Russian spiritual underground.

Lenin promulgated a law exempting religious sectarians from military service. Writers and poets, drawing inspiration from the Russian religious underground, hailed the Revolution as a messianic, world mystery. One writer compared the Bolshevic Revolution with the origin of Christianity. “Christ was followed,” he exclaimed, “not by professors, nor by virtuous philosophers, nor by shopkeepers. Christ was followed by rascals. And the revolution will also be followed by rascals, apart from those who launched it. And one must not be afraid of this.”

Alexander Blok (1880-1921) was the most important Russian poet to recognise the Bolshevics. A student of Gnosticism, Blok discerned the inner meaning of the tumultuous political and social events. There was a hidden spiritual content at the core of the external upheavals of the Revolution and the bloody Civil War that followed. Blok clearly expressed this in his famous poem The Twelve, where the invisible Christ leads the revolutionary march.

Another Russian poet and occultist, Andrei Bely, a disciple of Steiner’s Anthroposophical movement, hailed the Revolution as the first stage of a far greater cultural and spiritual revolution to come. For Bely, as for his contemporary Blok, the Bolshevic Revolution was above all a powerful theurgical instrument. Andrei Bely (1880-1934) saw theurgy as a means to change the world actively in collaboration with God. In spite of the turmoil and bloodshed, for these Russian occultists the revolution served as an instrument of the new creation. Bely celebrated the 1917 Revolution in a poem, Christ is Resurrected, in which the Bolshevic take over is compared with the mystery of Crucifixion and Resurrection. Rudolf Steiner understood why the Russians welcomed the October Revolution, but criticised Bolshevism as a dangerous mix of Western abstract thinking and Eastern mysticism.

The Russian spiritual underground spawned several important writers and poets who welcomed the Bolshevic Revolution. Two of the most outstanding were Nikolai Kliuev (1887-1937) and Sergei Esenin (1895-1925). Occult images and Russian messianic themes abound in their poems. Kliuev saw Lenin as the popular leader and embodiment of the Old Belief. In typically Gnostic fashion Esenin disdained the old God of the Church and proclaimed a “new Nazareth”. The young Esenin gave support to the Bolshevic Red Army and even tried to join the Bolshevic party. Tragically, Kliuev felt betrayed by the Revolution, was arrested and died on the way to a labor camp in 1937. Esenin took his own life in 1925 believing dark forces had usurped the Russian Revolution.

By the early 1920s the Bolshevics had consolidated their hold over much of the former Russian Empire. The Communist Party emerged as the monolithic embodiment of the popular will. All occult societies, including the Theosophists and Anthroposophists, were disbanded. Freemasonry was virulently condemned and its lodges closed. In the drive to modernise Russia and build a technologically advanced Soviet Union, occult notions were publicly classed as superstition and openly ridiculed. The new Soviet State, with its Marxist-Leninist ideology, became the sole arbitrator of all thought. Leading occult teachers were forced into exile. Yet many of those associated with the spiritual underground joined the Communist Party and found employment in various Soviet organisations.

The sway of the spiritual underground did not disappear. Arcane truths and primordial urges took on new forms in keeping with the new reality. Esoteric ideas were clothed in the language of a new epoch. One writer explains:

In Stalin’s time, occult themes and techniques detached from their doctrinal base became part of the official culture…. The occult themes of Soviet literature of the 1920s were transformed into the magical or fantastic elements that observers have noted in Socialist Realism. Stalin himself was invested with occult powers.²²

The Russian thinker, Isai Lezhnev (1891-1955), insisted on the profoundly religious character of Communism, which was “equal to atheism only in a narrow theological sense.” Emotionally, psychologically, Bolshevism was extremely religious, seeing itself as the only custodian of absolute truth. Lezhnev correctly discerned in Bolshevism the rise of a “new religion” which brought with it a new culture and political order. He embraced Marxism-Leninism and welcomed Stalin as a manifestation of the “popular spirit”.

The Russian Revolution, which gave rise to the super power known as the Soviet Union, cast a gigantic shadow over the twentieth century. Bolshevism, the materialistic worldview developed by Vladimir Lenin, left its mark on all aspects of modern thought. And the roots of Lenin’s Communism and the Soviet Union go deep into the ancient secret tradition of humanity.

Was atheistic Bolshevism, for all its worship of science and materialism, the expression of something supra-natural? Many in the spiritual underground passionately believed so. The Gnostic poet Valery Briusov (1873-1924), who joined the Bolshevic party in 1920, had been involved in magick, occultism and spiritualism prior to the revolution. Briusov stressed that Russia’s destiny was being worked out, not on earth, but by mystic forces for which the 1917 Revolution was part of the occult plot.

Another prominent Russian occultist, the acclaimed artist Nicholas Roerich, acknowledged Lenin and Communism as cosmic phenomenon. In 1926 he wrote:

He [Lenin] incorporated and circumspectly fitted every material into the world order. This opened up for him the path into all parts of the world. And people have formed a legend not only as a record of his deeds but also as a mark of his aspirations…. We have seen for ourselves how the nations have understood the magnetic power of communism. Friends, the worst counsellor is negativity. Behind every negation ignorance is concealed.

The philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, a former Marxist who came to embrace Christian mysticism, was exiled from the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He had studied occultism and was acquainted with many Russian Gnostic sects. His 1909 book The Philosophy of Freedom is full of Gnostic themes. And like the Gnostics, Berdyaev opposed the institution of the family as yoking men and women to “necessity” and the endless chain of birth and death. Writing from exile, more than twenty-five years after the Revolution, Berdyaev observed:

Russian communism is a distortion of the Russian messianic idea; it proclaims light from the East which is destined to enlighten the bourgeois darkness of the West. There is in communism its own truth and its own falsehood. Its truth is a social truth, a revelation of the possibility of the brotherhood of man and of peoples, the suppression of classes, whereas its falsehood lies in its spiritual foundations which result in a process of dehumanisation, in the denial of the worth of the individual man, in the narrowing of human thought…. Communism is a Russian phenomenon in spite of its Marxist ideology. Communism is the Russian destiny, it is a moment in the inner destiny of the Russian people and it must be lived through by the inward strength of the Russian people. Communism must be surmounted but not destroyed, and into the highest stage which will come after communism there must enter the truth of communism also but freed from its element of falsehood. The Russian Revolution awakened and unfettered the enormous powers of the Russian people. In this lies its principle meaning.²³

 

The Hammer and Sickle: Occult Symbols?

Throughout the twentieth century the hammer and sickle were universally recognised as symbols of communism and the Soviet Union. For millions of people the hammer and sickle symbolised a new political and economic order offering progress, justice and liberty. While countless others looked on the same hammer and sickle as ominous emblems of oppression, hatred and tyranny.

Occultists and students of ancient wisdom saw something more. Behind the outward appearance of these communist emblems, which officially represented the emancipation of labor, there was an element unknown to the masses.

Russian occultists saw the Bolshevics as unconsciously working for the cosmic mission of Russia and interpreted the Soviet hammer and sickle as hidden symbols of the blacksmith’s art, hinting at future transmutation and transformation. Both metallurgy and alchemy (regarded as an occult science) sort to destroy impure elements with fire and thereby release a refined product, whether forged metal (the smith) or spiritual gold (the alchemist). Fire is associated with transfiguration, regeneration, and purification, while iron is associated with Mars (the god of war) and the astral world.

To the occultist, the communist hammer and sickle symbolised conflict and transmutation. The forging – in the fires of struggle – of base elements into a purer, higher form. The atheistic Bolshevic, like the occultist, proclaimed that ordinary man must be transformed into new man, free of the bonds of selfish desires and of the oppressive past, in order to freely build the new civilisation of the future.

Footnotes:

1. Benjamin Walker, Gnosticism Its History & Influence

2. James Webb, Occult Underground

3. Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth

4. As quoted in Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth

5. Acts 2:44-47

6. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome

7. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe

8. As quoted in James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe

9. As quoted in Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia

10. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea

11. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire

12. As quoted in Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome

13. Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks

14. Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth

15. Richard Noll, The Jung Cult

16. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome

17. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal

18. As quoted in Hitler’s Words, edited by Gordon Prange

19. Mikhail Agursky, The Third Rome

20. As quoted in Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime 1919-1924

21. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal

22. Ibid

23. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Russian Idea

Als in Polen die Mark galt

Während des Ersten Weltkrieges existierte ein von Hohenzollern- und Habsburgerreich errichteter polnischer Nationalstaat

Ex: http://www.preussische-allgemeine.de

 

Der 11. November 1918 markiert nicht nur das Ende der Kampfhandlungen des Ersten Weltkrieges, sondern für die Polen zugleich die Wiedergeburt ihres Staates, der 1795 mit der Dritten Teilung des Landes von der Landkarte verschwunden war. Beinahe in Vergessenheit geraten ist in diesem Zusammenhang aber, dass schon fast auf den Tag genau zwei Jahre vorher, nämlich am 5. November 1916, ein neuer polnischer Staat ins Leben gerufen worden war, der als „Regentschaftskönigreich Polen“ in die Annalen einging.

Da es vorläufig noch keinen König gab, wurde im Dezember 1916 zunächst ein Provisorischer Staatsrat als Regierung gebildet. Dieser bestand aus 25 Mitgliedern, wobei 15 aus den seit Beginn des Weltkriegs vom Deutschen Reich besetzten Teilen Kongresspolens kamen und zehn aus dem von Österreich-Ungarn okkupierten Landesteil. Ernannt wurden die Mitglieder des Staatsrates am 11. Januar 1917, die konstituierende Sitzung fand drei Tage später statt. Vorsitzender beziehungsweise Präsident mit dem Titel „Kronmarschall“ wurde Wacław Niemojowski, sein Stellvertreter Józef Mikołwski-Pomorski. Auch der spätere Nationalheld und Gründer der Republik, Józef Piłsudski, gehörte dem Staatsrat an. Er war dort für militärische Angelegenheiten zuständig. Es formierte sich auch ein Parlament, „Nationalrat“ genannt, das vom 16. bis zum 18. März 1917 tagte. Bereits am 9. Dezember 1916 war eine Polnische Nationalbank gegründet worden, die eine neue landeseigene Währung herausgab, die Polnische Mark.

Im April 1917 legte der deutsche Generalgouverneur Generaloberst Hans von Beseler mit Sitz in Warschau die Justiz sowie das Schul- und das Pressewesen in die Hände des Staatsrates. Im selben Monat erfolgte auch ein Werbeaufruf zur Gründung polnischer Streitkräfte. In ihr sollten nur ehemalige russische Untertanen, sogenannte Nationalpolen, dienen, wohingegen die Polen aus dem österreichisch-ungarischen Herrschaftsbereich in der k.u.k. Armee verbleiben sollten. Auf Kritik stieß auch die vom deutschen und dem österreich-ungarischen Generalgouverneur ausgearbeitete Eidesformel: „Ich schwöre zu Gott dem Allmächtigen, dass ich meinem Vaterlande, dem Polnischen Königreich, und meinem künftigen König zu Lande und zu Wasser und an welchen Orten es immer sei, getreu und redlich dienen, in gegenwärtigem Kriege treue Waffenbrüderschaft mit den Heeren Deutschlands und Österreich-Ungarns und der ihnen verbündeten Staaten halten … werde.“ Es gab Vorbehalte dagegen, auf einen König vereidigt zu werden, der noch gar nicht einmal bekannt war. Außerdem wurde kritisiert, dass eine Armee keinen Eid auf eine Waffenbrüderschaft leisten könne, denn nur der Regierung stünde es zu, Bündnisse abzuschließen. Gleichwohl bestätigte der Staatsrat am 3. Juli die Eidesformel, und Soldaten, die den Eid dennoch nicht ablegen wollten, wurden interniert. Aus Protest gegen diese Vorgänge waren Piłsudski und drei weitere dem linken Spektrum angehörige Mitglieder des Staatsrates am Tag zuvor von ihren Ämtern zurückgetreten. Am 22. Juli ließ man Piłsudski schließlich in Schutzhaft nehmen und verbrachte ihn zuerst in die Festung Wesel, später nach Magdeburg. Anfang August 1917 wurde dann die neu aufgestellte polnische Armee an die Ostfront verlegt. Nun zeugten sich die Meinungsverschiedenheiten über den weiteren Weg in aller Deutlichkeit. Ihr Höhepunkt wurde am 6. August erreicht, als Niemojowski darüber sein Amt als Kronmarschall niederlegte. Am 25. August stellte der Staatsrat seine Tätigkeit ein, und in seiner allerletzten Sitzung am 30. August bildete er einen auch „Übergangskomitee“ genannten Interimsausschuss, der vorläufig die Regierungsgeschäfte führen sollte und an dessen Spitze der bisherige stellvertretende Kronmarschall Mikołowski-Pomorski trat.

Bis zum 12. September des Jahres war eine provisorische Verfassung ausgearbeitet. Dieses sogenannte Patent beschrieb Polen als konstitutionelle Monarchie mit einem aus einem Abgeordnetenhaus und einem Senat bestehenden Zweikammerparlament. Bis zur Übernahme der Staatsgewalt durch einen noch zu bestimmenden König sollte diese von einem dreiköpfigen Regentschaftsrat ausgeübt werden, in den man sechs Tage später folgende Personen berief: Aleksander Kardinal Kakowski, Erzbischof von Warschau, Fürst Zdzisław Lubomirski, Stadtpräsident (Oberbürgermeister) von Warschau, und Józef Ostrowski, vormals Vorsitzender des Polenklubs in der russischen Duma in St. Petersburg. Am 15. Oktober 1917, dem 100. Todestag des polnischen Nationalhelden Tadeusz Kosciuszko, wurde der Regentschaftsrat vereidigt. Am 27. Oktober trat er offiziell sein Amt an.

Genau einen Monat später kam es zur Einsetzung einer ersten ordentlichen Regierung unter Ministerpräsident Jan Kucharzewski, nachdem zuvor seit dem 1. Februar 1917 lediglich eine provi-sorische Regierung unter Michał Łempicki, einem Mitglied des Provisorischen Staatsrates, amtiert hatte.

Am 4. Februar 1918 wurde ein Gesetz über die Schaffung eines Parlaments erlassen, das die Bezeichnung „Staatsrat“ erhielt. Dieser setzte sich aus 110 Abgeordneten zusammen. 55 davon wurden von den Gemeinden und Regionalräten am 9. April 1918 gewählt, 43 wurden vom Regentschaftsrat ernannt, und zwölf gehörten ihm kraft ihres Amtes beziehungsweise aufgrund einer Funktion an. Zu letzteren zählten Bischöfe ebenso wie Universitätsrektoren und der Präsident des Obersten Gerichtshofes. An der Spitze fungierte als „Sprecher der Krone“ ein Marschall, ab dem 14. Juni 1918 Francis John Pulaski. Daneben saßen im Parlamentspräsidium zwei Vizemarschälle, Józef Mikołowski-Pomorski und Stefan Badzynski, sowie vier Beisitzer (Sekretäre). Am 21. Juni fand die feierliche Eröffnung statt, und bis zum 7. Oktober, als man die Arbeit einstellte, folgten insgesamt 14 Plenarsitzungen.

Bereits am 6. Januar 1918 war der Regentschaftsrat zum Antrittsbesuch beim Deutschen Kaiser und beim Reichskanzler nach Berlin gekommen. Drei Tage später reiste man weiter nach Wien.

In Polen selbst war man besorgt, ja sogar empört, dass die deutschen Militärbehörden am 11. Dezember 1917 einen unabhängigen litauischen Staat mit Wilna (Vilnius) als Hauptstadt proklamiert hatten, war doch gerade diese Region in der Mehrheit von Polen besiedelt, weshalb die Regierung in Warschau dort auch Territorialansprüche stellte. Dies, die Forderung aus deutschen Militärkreisen nach Schaffung eines „Schutzstreifens“ auf polnischem Gebiet entlang der Grenze zum Deutschen Reich und schließlich die Weigerung der deutschen Besatzungsbehörden, statt nur einer eigeschränkten die volle Verwaltung an die Polen zu übergeben, riefen in der Bevölkerung zunehmend eine antideutsche Haltung hervor, was wiederum den Befürwortern einer austropolnischen Lösung in die Hände spielte, also einer Vereinigung Polens mit dem Habsburgerreich unter einer gemeinsamen Krone. Der österreichische Kaiser Karl I. ging im August 1918 sogar auf Distanz zu allen deutschen Plänen, erklärte eine Anwartschaft Erzherzog Karl Stephans auf die polnische Königskrone für obsolet und favorisierte stattdessen die erwähnte austropolnische Lösung mit ihm selbst als Herrscher über das gesamte Imperium.

Währenddessen wandte sich das Blatt immer mehr zu Ungunsten der Mittelmächte. Am 6. Ok-tober 1918 erklärte der Regentschaftsrat in Warschau die 14 Punkte des US-amerikanischen Präsidenten Woodrow Wilson zur Grundlage einer polnischen Staatsbildung, am folgenden Tag verkündete er gar die vollständige Unabhängigkeit Polens und löste zugleich das Parlament, den Staatsrat, auf. Der deutsche Generalgouverneur von Beseler legte daraufhin die gesamte Administration in polnische Hände und übertrug dem Regentschaftsrat am 23. Oktober auch den Oberbefehl über die polnischen Truppen.
Und dann ging alles ganz schnell: Am 6. November bildet sich unter der Führung des Sozialisten Ignacy Daszynski in Lublin eine „Provisorische Volksregierung der polnischen Republik“, die den Regentschaftsrat für abgesetzt erklärte. Das rief in Warschau den Protest gemäßigter Kräfte hervor, und weil sowohl der Regentschaftsrat als auch dessen Kabinett unter Ministerpräsident Władysław Wróblewski im Amt verblieben, amtierten einige Tage lang zwei Regierungen nebeneinander. Nachdem jedoch am 11. November 1918 der kurz zuvor aus deutscher Haft entlassene Józef Piłsudski in Warschau eingetroffen war und die polnische Republik ausgerufen hatte, übertrugen ihm sowohl die Regierung in Warschau als auch die Gegenregierung in Lublin die Regierungsgewalt. Die deutschen Truppen in der Hauptstadt, die sich geweigert hatten, auf polnische Aufständische zu schießen, wurden entwaffnet, und als der Regentschaftsrat am 14. November endgültig alle Staatsgewalt in die Hände Piłsudskis legte, wurde auch der abschließende Akt besiegelt: Das Regentschaftskönigreich Polen, die vierte und letzte Monarchie auf polnischem Boden, hatte aufgehört zu existieren.    

Wolfgang Reith

Historical Reflections on the Notion of “World War”

Robert Steuckers:

Historical Reflections on the Notion of “World War”

First thesis in this paper is: a World War was started in 1756, during the “Seven Years’ War” or “Austrian Succession War” and has lasted till now. We still experiment the effects of this 1756 World War and present-day events are far results of the scheme inaugurated during that remoted 18th century era.

Of course, it’s impossible to ignore all the dramatic events of the 17th century, which lead to the situation of the mid-18th century, but it would make this short paper too exhaustive. Even if Britain could already master the Western Mediterranean by controling Gibraltar and the Balears Isles after the “Spanish Succession War”, many British historians are anyway aware nowadays that British unmistakeable supremacy was born immediately after the “Seven Years’ War” and that seapower became the most determining factor for global superiority since then. Also it would be silly to forget about a certain globalization of conflicts in the 16th century: Pizzaro conquered the Inca Empire and stole its gold to finance Charles V’s war against the Ottomans in Northern Africa, while the Portuguese were invading the shores of the Indian Ocean, beating the Mameluks’ fleet in front of the Gujarat’s coasts and waging war against the Yemenite and Somali allies of the Turks in Abyssinia. The Spaniards, established in the Philippines, fought successfully against the Chinese pirates, who wanted to disturb Spanish trade in the Pacific. Ivan IV the Terrible by conquering the Volga basin till the Caspian made the first steps in the direction of the Russian conquest of Northern Asia. The war between Christianity (as defined by Emperor Charles V and Philipp II of Spain) and the Muslims was indeed a World War but not yet fully coordinated as it would always be the case after 1759.

For the British historian Frank McLynn, the British could beat their main French enemy in 1759 —the fourth year of the “Seven Years’ War”— on four continents and achieve absolute mastery of the seas. Seapower and sea warfare means automatically that all main wars become world wars, due to the technically possible ubiquity of vessels and the necessity to protect sea routes to Europe (or to any other place in the world), to transport all kind of materials and to support operating troops on the continental theatre. In India the Moghul Empire was replaced by British rule that introduced the harsh discipline of incipient industrialism to a traditional non hectic society and let the derelict Indian masses —of which one-third perished during a famine in 1769— produce huge bulks of cheap goods to submerge the European markets, preventing for many decades the emerging of a genuine large-scale industry in the main kingdoms of continental Europe. While France was tied up in a ruinous war in Europe, the British Prime Minister Pitt could invest a considerable amount of money in the North American war and defeat the French in Canada, taking the main strategical bases along the Saint-Lawrence river and conquering the Great Lakes region, leaving a giant but isolated Louisiana to the French. From 1759 on, Britain as a seapower could definitively control the Northern Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean, even if the French could take revenge by building a new efficient and modern fleet in the 1770s anyway without regaining full global power.

The Treaty of Paris of 1763 marked the end of French domination in India and Canada, a situation that didn’t preoccupy Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour but puzzled the King’s successor, the future Louis XVI, who is generally considered as a weak monarch only interested in making slots. This is pure propaganda propagated by the British, the French revolutionaries and the modern trends in political thought. Louis XVI was deeply interested in seapower and sea exploration, exactly as the Russian were when they sent Captain Spangberg who explored the Kurils and the main Northern Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1738 and some years or decades later when they sent brilliant sailors and captains around the world such as Bering and his Lieutenant Tshirikov —who was the first officer to hoist the Russian imperial flag on the Pacific coast of Northern America— and Admiral von Krusenstern (who claimed the Hawai Islands for Russia), Fabian Gottlieb Bellingshausen (who circumnavigated the Antarctic for the first time in mankind’s history) and Otto von Kotzebue (who explored Micronesia and Polynesia), working in coordination with land explorers such as Aleksandr Baranov who founded twenty-four naval and fishing posts from the Kamtshatka peninsula to California. If the constant and precious work of these sea and land explorers would have been carried on ceaselessly, the Pacific would have become a Russian lake. But fur trade as a single practiced economical activity was not enough to establish a Russian New World empire directly linked to the Russian possessions in East Siberia, even if Tsar Aleksandr I was —exactly as Louis XVI was for France— in favour of Pacific expension. Tsar Nikolai I, as a strict follower of the ultraconservative principles of Metternich’s diplomacy, refused all cooperation with revolutionary Mexico that had rebelled against Spain, a country protected by the Holy Alliance, which refused of course all modifications in political regimes in name of a too uncompromising traditional continuity.

Louis XVI, after having inherited the crown, started immediately to prepare revenge in order to nullify the humiliating clauses of the 1763 Paris Treaty. Ministers Choiseul and Praslin modernized the dockyards, proposed a better scientific training of the naval officers and favoured explorations under the leading of able captains like Kerguelen and Bougainville. On the diplomatic level, they imposed the Spanish alliance in order to have two fleets totalizing more vessels than the British fleet, especially if they could table on the Dutch as a third potential ally. The aim was to build a complete Western European alliance against British supremacy, while Russia as another latent ally in the East was trying to concentrate its efforts to control the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Northern Pacific. This was a genuine, efficient and pragmatical Eurasianism avant la lettre! The efforts of the French, Spaniards and Dutch contributed to the American revolt and independance, as the colonists of the thirteen British colonies on the East Coast of the present-day US-territory were crushed under a terrible fiscality coined by non-elected officials to finance the English war effort. It is a paradox of modern history that traditional powers like France and Spain contributed to the birth of the most anti-traditional power that ever existed in mankind’s history. But modernity is born out the simple existence of a worldwide thalassocracy. The power which detains seapower (or thalassocracy) is ipso facto the bearer of modern dissolution as naval systems are not bound to Earth, where men live, have always lived and created the continuities of living history.

Pitt ,who was governing England at that time, could not tolerate the constant challenge of the French-Spanish-Dutch alliance, that forced Britain to dedicate huge budgets to cope with the united will of the challenging Western European powers. This lethal alliance had to be broken or the civil peace within the enemies’ borders reduced to nothing in order to paralyze all fruitful foreign policies. French historians such as Olivier Blanc put the hypothesis that the riots of the French Revolution were financed by Pitt’s secret funds in order to annihilate the danger of the French numerous and efficient vessels. And indeed the fall of the French monarchy implied the decay of the French fleet: for a time, vessels were still built in the dockyards to consolidate the seapower of which Louis XVI dreamt of but as the officers were mainly noblemen, they were either dismissed or eliminated or compulsed to emigrate so that there was no enough commanding staff anymore and no able personnel that could have been easily replaced by conscription as for the regiments of the land forces. Prof. Bennichon, as a leading French historian of navies, concludes a recent study of him by saying that workers in the dockyards of Toulon weren’t paid anymore, they and their families were starving and consequently looted the wood reserves, so that the new Republican regime was totally unable to engage the British forces on sea. Moreover, the new violent and chaotic regime was unable to find allies in Europe, the Spaniards and the Dutch prefering to join their forces to the British-lead coalition. The English were then able to reduce French naval activities to coastal navigation. A British blocus of the continent could from then on be organized. On the Mediterranean stage, the French after the battle of Abukir were unable to repatriate their own troops from Egypt and after Trafalgar unable to threaten Britain’s coasts or to attempt a landing in rebelling Ireland. Napoleon didn’t believe in seapower and was finally beaten on the continent in Leipzig and Waterloo. Prof. Bennichon: “Which conclusions can we draw from the Franco-British clash (of the 18th century)? The mastery of seapower implies first of all the long term existence of a political will. If there is no political will, the successive interruptions in naval policy compels the unstable regime to repeated expensive fresh starts without being able in the end to face emergencies... Fleets cannot be created spontaneously and rapidly in the quite short time that an emergency situation lasts: they always should preexist before a conflict breaks out”. Artificially created interruptions like the French revolution and the civil disorders it stirred up at the beginning of the 1790s, as they were apparently instigated by Pitt’s services —or like the Yeltsin era in Russia in the 1990s— have as an obvious purpose to lame long term projects in the production of efficient armaments and to doom the adverse power plunged into inefficiency to yield power on the international chessboard.

The artificially created French revolution can so be perceived as a revenge for the lost battle of Yorktown in 1783, the very year Empress Catherine II of Russia had taken Crimea from the Turks. In 1783 the thalassocratic power in Britain had apparently decided to crush the French naval power by all secret and unconventional means and to control the development of Russian naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Black Sea, so that Russian seapower couldn’t trespass the limits of the Bosphorus and interfere in the Eastern Mediterranean. What concerns explicitly Russia, an anonymous document from a British government department was issued in 1791 and had as title “Russian Armament”; it sketched the strategy to adopt in order to keep the Russian fleet down, as the defeats of the French in the Mediterranean implied of course the complete British control of this sea area, so that the whole European continent could be entangled from Norway to Gibraltar and from Gilbraltar to Syria and Egypt. This brings us to the conclusion that any single largely dominating seapower is strategically compelled to meddle into other powers’ internal affairs to create civil dissension to weaken any candidate challenger. These permanent interferences —now known as “orange revolutions”— mean permanent war, so that the birth of a global seapower implies quasi automatically the emerging process of permanent global war, replacing the previous state of large numbers of local wars, that couldn’t be thoroughly globalized.

After Waterloo and the Vienna Conference, Britain had no serious challenger in Europe anymore but had now as a constant policy to try to keep all the navies in the world down. The non entirely secured mastery of the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans and the largely but not completed mastery of the Mediterranean was indeed the puzzle that British decision-makers had to solve in order to gain definitively global power. Aiming at acquiring completely this mastery will be the next needed steps. Controling already Gibraltar and Malta, trying vainly to annex to Britain Sicily and Southern Italy, the British had not a complete grasp on the Eastern Mediterranean area, that could eventually come under control of a reborn Ottoman Empire or of Russia after a possible push in direction of the Straights. The struggle for getting control overthere was thus mainly a preventive struggle against Russia and was, in fact, the plain application of the strategies settled in the anonymous text of 1791, “Russian Armament”. The Crimean War was a conflict aiming at containing Russia far northwards beyond the Turkish Straights in order that the Russian navy would never become able to bring war vessels into the Eastern Mediterranean and so to occupy Cyprus of Creta and, by fortifying these insular strong points, to block the planned shortest highway to India through a future digged canal through one of the Egyptian isthmuses. The Crimean War was therefore an wide-scale operation directly or indirectly deduced from the domination of the Indian Ocean after the French-British clash of 1756-1763 and from the gradual mastery of the Mediterranean from the Spanish Succession War to the expulsion of Napoleon’s forces out of the area, with as main obtained geostrategical asset, the taking over of Malta in 1802-1804. The mastery of this island, formerly in the hands of the Malta Knights, allowed the British and the French to benefit from an excellent rear base to send reinforcements and supplies to Crimea (or “Tavrida” as Empress Catherine II liked to call this strategic place her generals conquered in 1783).

The next step to link the Northern Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean through the Mediterranean corridor was to dig the Suez Canal, what a French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps did in 1869. The British by using the non military weapon of bank speculation bought all the shares of the private company having realised the job and managed so to get the control of the newly created waterway. In 1877 the Rumanians and the Bulgars revolted against their Turkish sovereign and were helped by Russian troops that could have reached the coasts of the Aegean Sea and controled the Marmara Sea and the Straights. The British sent weapons, military trainers and ships to protect the Turkish capital City from any possible Bulgarian invasion and occupation in exchange of an acceptance of British sovereignty on Cyprus, which was settled in 1878. The complete control of the Mediterranean corridor was acquired by this poker trick as well as the English domination on Egypt in 1882, allowing also an outright supervision of the Red Sea from Port Said till Aden (under British supervision since 1821). The completion of the dubble mastery upon the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, that had already been acquired but was not yet fully secured, made of Britain the main and uncontested superpower on the Earth in the second half of the 19th century.

The question one should ask now is quite simple: “Is a supremacy on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and in the Mediterranean area the key to a complete global power?”. I would answer negatively. The German geopolitician Karl Haushofer remembered in his memoirs a conversation he had with Lord Kitchener in India on the way to Japan, where the Bavarian artillery officer was due to become a military attaché. Kitchener told Haushofer and his wife that if Germany (that dominated Micronesia after Spain had sold the huge archipelago just before the disasters of the American-Spanish war of 1898) and Britain would lost control of the Pacific after any German-British war, both powers would be considerably reduced as global actors to the straight benefit of Japan and the United States. This vision Kitchener disclosed to Karl and Martha Haushofer in a private conversation in 1909 stressed the importance of dominating three oceans to become a real global unchallenged power: the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. If there is no added domination of the Pacific the global superpower dominating the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, i. e. Britain at the time of Kitchener, will be inevitably challenged, risking simultaneously to change down and fall back.

In 1909, Russia had sold Alaska to the United States (1867) and had only reduced ambitions in the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, especially after the disaster of Tshushima in 1905. France was present in Indochina but without being able to cut maritime routes dominated by the British. Britain had Australia and New Zeland as dominions but no strategical islands in the Middle and the Northern Pacific. The United States had developped a Pacific strategy since they became a bioceanic power after having conquered California during the Mexican-American war of 1848. The several stages of the gradual Pacific strategy elaborated by the United States were: the results of the Mexican-American War in 1848, i. e. the conquest of all their Pacific coast; the purchase of Alaska in 1867; and the events of the year 1898 when they colonized the Philippines after having waged war against Spain. Even if the Russian Doctor Schaeffer tried to make of the volcanic archipelago of Hawai a Russian protectorate in 1817, US American whale hunters used to winter in the islands so that the islands came gradually under US domination to become an actual US strong point immediately after the conquest of the formerly Spanish Philippines in 1898. But as Japan had inherited in Versailles the sovereignty on Micronesia, the clash foreseen by Lord Kitchener in 1909 didn’t happen in the Pacific between German and British forces but during the Second World War between the American and Japanese navies. In 1945, Micronesia came under American influence, so that the United States could control the entire Pacific area, the North Atlantic area and gradually the Indian Ocean, especially when they finished building a navy and airforce strong point in Diego Garcia in the very middle part of the Indian Ocean, from where they can now strike every position along the coasts of the so-called “Monsoon countries”. According to the present-day American strategist Robert Kaplan, the control of the “Monsoon lands” will be crucial in the near future, as it allows the domination of the Indian Ocean linking the Atlantic to the Pacific where US hegemony is uncontested.

Kaplan’s book on the “Monsoon area” is indeed the proof that American have inherited the British strategy in the Indian Ocean but that, contrary to the British, they also control the Pacific except perhaps the maritime routes along the Chinese coasts in the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea, that are protected by a quite efficient Chinese fleet that is steadily growing in strength and size. They nevertheless are able to disturb intensely the Chinese vital highways if Taiwan, South Korea or Vietnam are recruited into a kind of East Asian naval NATO.

What could be the answer to the challenge of a superpower that controls the three main oceans of this planet? To create a strategical thought system that would imitate the naval policy of Choiseul and Louis XVI, i. e. unite the available forces (for instance the naval forces of the BRICS-countries) and constantly build up the naval forces in order to exercice a continuous pressure on the “big navy” so that it finally risks “imperial overstretch”. Besides, it is also necessary to find other routes to the Pacific, for instance in the Arctic but we should know that if we look for such alternative routes the near North American Arctic bordering powers will be perfectly able to disturb Northern Siberian Arctic coastal navigation by displaying long range missiles along their own coast and Groenland.

History is not closed, despite the prophecies of Francis Fukuyama in the early 1990s. The main problems already spotted by Louis XVI and his brilliant captains as well as by the Russian explorers of the 18th and 19th centuries are still actual. And another main idea to remember constantly: A single World War had been started in 1756 and is not finished yet, as all the moves on the world chessboard made by the actual superpower of the time are derived from the results of the double British victory in India and Canada during the “Seven Years’ War”. Peace is impossible, is a mere and pure theoretical view as long as a single power is trying to dominate the three oceans, refusing to accept the fact that sea routes belong to all mankind.

Robert Steuckers.

(Vorst-Flotzenberg, november 2013).

 

Bibliography:

• Philippe Conrad (ed.), “La puissance et la mer”, numéro spécial hors-série (n°7) de La nouvelle revue d’histoire, automne-hiver 2013.

• Philippe Conrad, “Quand le Pacifique était un lac russe”, in “La puissance et la mer”, op. cit..

• Philippe Bonnichon, “La rivalité navale franco-anglaise (1755-1805)”, in “La puissance et la mer”, op. cit.

• Niall Ferguson, Empire – How Britain Made the Modern World, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2004.

• Richard Harding, Seapower and Naval Warfare – 1650-1830, UCL Press, London, 1999.

• Robert Kaplan, Monsoon – The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, Random House, New York, 2011.

• Charles King, The Black Sea – A History, Oxford University Press, 2004.

• Frank McLynn, 1759 – The Year Britain BecameMaster of the World, Pimlico, London, 2005.

• Richard Overy, Atlas of 20th Century History, Collins Books, London, 2005.

• Tom Pocock, Battle for Empire – The Very First World War – 1756-63, Caxton Editions, London, 1998.

• Robert Steuckers, “Karl Haushofer: l’itinéraire d’un géopoliticien allemand”, sur: http://robertsteuckers.blogspot.com (juillet 2012).