Struggle for Survival

Like so many things, competition can be either good or bad, depending on how you approach it. It is bad if you define it as “seeking to humiliate and destroy others” or “obsessively comparing myself to others” or “placing winning above everything, including my character, integrity, love of others, and covenants with God.” However, it can be good if it is about coming together with others to bring out everyone’s best or have harmless fun. When it is done in the right spirit, it can make winning and losing less a matter of ego and can help you take joy in the accomplishment of others (as well as yourself). Whether it is sports, board games, a dance contest, or any other endeavour, healthy competition can sometimes enhance the experience for everyone. Unhealthy competition, on the other hand, can make everyone miserable. You can usually tell which is which by the spirit that accompanies it. “There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it,” reports 1 Corinthians 10.13. It is interesting to observe that in connection with this crude Darwinism the “socialist” Mr. Hitler champions the liberal principles of unrestricted competition. In a polemic against co-operation between different nationalistic groups he says: “By such a combination the free play of energies is tired up, the struggle for choosing the best is stopped, and accordingly the necessary and final victory of the healthier and stronger man is prevented forever.” Elsewhere he speaks of the free play of energies as the wisdom of life. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

To be sure, Dr. Darwin’s theory as such was not an expression of the feelings of a sado-masochistic character. On the contrary, for many of its adherents it appealed to the hope of a further evolution of humankind to higher stages of culture. For Mr. Hitler, however, it was an expression of and simultaneously a justification for his own sadism. He reveals quite naively the psychological significance which the Darwinian theory had for him. When he lived in Munich, still an unknown man, he used to awake at 5 o’clock in the morning. He had “gotten into the habit of throwing pieces of bread or hard crusts to the little mice which spent their time in the small room, and then of watching these droll little animals romp and scuffle for these few delicacies.” This “game” was the Darwinian “struggle for life” on a small scale. For Mr. Hitler it was the petty bourgeois substitutes for the circuses of the Roman Caesars, and a preliminary for the historical circuses he was to produce. The last rationalization for his sadism, his justification of it as a defense against attacks of others, finds manifold expressions in Mr. Hitler’s writings. He and the German people are always the ones who are innocent and the enemies are sadistic brutes. A great deal of this propaganda consists of deliberate, conscious lies. Partly, however, it has the same emotional “sincerity” which paranoid accusations have. These accusations always have the function of a defense against being found out with regard to one’s own sadism or destructiveness. They run according to the formula: It I you who have sadistic intention. Therefore I am innocent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

With Mr. Hitler’s defensive mechanism is irrational to the extreme, since he accuses his enemies of the very thing he quite frankly admits to be his own aims. Thus he accuses the Jewish people, the Communists, and the French of the very things that he says are the most legitimate aims of his own actions. He scarcely bothers to cover this contradiction by rationalizations. He accuses the Jewish people of brining the French African troops to the Rhine with the intention to destroy, by the bastardization which would necessarily set in, the white race and thus “in turn to rise personally to the position of master.” Mr. Hitler must have detected the contradiction of condemning others for that which he claims to be the most noble aim of his race, and he tries to rationalize the contradiction by saying of the Jews people that their instinct for self-preservation lacks the idealistic character which is to be found in the Aryan drive for mastery. The same accusations are used against the French. He accuses them of wanting to strangle Germany and to rob it of its strength. While this accusation is used as an argument for the necessity of destroying “the French drive for European hegemony,” he confesses that he would have acted like Clemenceau had he been in his place. The Communists are accused of brutality and the success of Marxism is attributed to it political will and activistic brutality. At the same time, however, Mr. Hitler declares: “What Germany was lacking was a close co-operation of brutal power and ingenious political intention.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The Czech crisis in 1938 and this present war brought many examples of the same kind. There was no act of Nazi oppression which was not explained as a defense against oppression by others. One can assume that these accusations were mere falsifications and have not the paranoid “sincerity” which those against the Jewish people and the French might have been coloured by. They still have a definite propaganda value, and part of the population, in particular the lower middle class which is receptive to these paranoid accusations on account of its own character structure, believed them. Mr. Hitler’s contempt for the powerless ones becomes particularly apparent when he speaks of people whose political aims—the fight for national freedom—were similar to those which he himself professed to have. Perhaps nowhere is the insincerity of Mr. Hitler’s interest in national freedom more blatant than in his scorn for powerless revolutionaries. Thus he speaks in an ironical and contemptuous manner of the little group of National Socialists he had originally joined in Munich. This was his impression of the first meeting he went to: “Terrible, terrible; this was clubmaking of the worst kind and manner. And this club I now was to join? Then the new memberships were discussed, that means, my being caught.” He calls them “a ridiculous small foundation,” the only advantage of which was to offer “the chance for real personal activity.” Mr. Hitler says that he would never have joined one of the existing big parties and this attitude is very characteristic of him. He had to start in a group which he felt to be inferior and weak. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Mr. Hitler’s initiative and courage would not have been stimulated in a constellation where he had to fight existing power or to compete with his equals. He shows the same contempt for the powerless ones in what he writes about Indian revolutionaries. The same man who has used the slogan of national freedom for his own purposes more than anybody else, has nothing but contempt for such revolutionists who had no power and who dared to attack the powerful British Empire. He remembers, Mr. Hitler says, “some Asiatic fakir or other, perhaps, for all I care, some real Indian ‘fighters for freedom,’ who were then running around Europe, contrived to stuff even otherwise quite intelligent people with the fixed idea that the British Empire, whose keystone is in India, was on the verge of collapse right there…Indian rebels will, however, never achieve this…It is simply an impossibility for a coalition of cripples to storm a powerful State…I may not, simply because of my knowledge of their racial inferiority, link my own nation’s fate with that of these so-called ‘oppressed nations.’” The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless which is so typical for the sadomasochistic character explains a great deal of Mr. Hitler’s and His followers’ political actions. While the Republican government thought they could “appease” the Nazis by treating them leniently, they not only failed to appease them but aroused their hatred by the very lack of power and firmness they showed. Mr. Hitler hated the Weimar Republic because it was wea ad he admired the industrial and military leaders because they had power. He never fought against established strong power but always against groups which he thought to be essentially powerless. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Mr. Hitler’s—and for that matter, Mr. Mussolini’s—“revolution” happened under protection of existing power and their favourite objects were those who could not defend themselves. One might even venture to assume that Mr. Hitler’s attitude toward Great Britain was determined, among other factors, by this psychological complex. As long as he felt Britain to be powerful, he loved and admired her. His book gives expression to this love for Britian. When he recognized the weakness of the British position before and after Munich his love changed into hatred and the wish to destroy it. From this viewpoint “appeasement” was a policy which for a personality like Mr. Hitler was bound to arouse hatred, not friendship. So far we have spoken of the sadistic one. There is the wish to submit to an overwhelmingly strong power, to annihilate the self, besides the wish to have power over helpless beings. This masochistic side of the Nazi ideology and practice is most obvious with respect to the masses. They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve oneself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power. Mr. Hitler expresses this idea clearly in his definition of idealism: “Idealism alone leads men to voluntary acknowledgement of the privilege of force and strength and thus makes them become a dust particle of that order which forms and shapes the entire Universe.” Mr. Goebbles gives a similar definition of what he calls Socialism: “To be a socialist,” he writes, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Sacrificing the individual and reducing it to a bit of dust, to an atom, implies, according to Mr. Hitler, the renunciation of the right to asset one’ individual opinion, interests and happiness. This renunciation is the essence of a political organization in which “the individual renounces representing his personal opinion and his interests…” He praises “unselfishness” and teaches that “in the hunt for their own happiness, people fall all the more out of Heaven into Hell.” It is the aim of education to teach the individua not to assert his self. Already the boy in school must learn “to be silent, not only when he is blamed justly but he has also to learn, if necessary, to bear injustice in silence.” Concerning his ultimate goal he writes: “In the folkish State the folkish view of life has finally to succeed in brining about that nobler era when men see their care no longer in the better breeding of dogs, horses, and cats, but rather in the uplifting of mankind itself, an era in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, and the other gladly gives and sacrifices.” This sentence is somewhat surprising. One would expect that after the description of the one type of individual, who “knowingly and silently renounces,” an opposite type would be described, perhaps the one who leads, takes responsibility, or something similar. However, instead of that, Mr. Hitler defines that “other” type also by his ability to sacrifice. It is difficult to understand the difference between “silently renounces,” and “gladly sacrifices.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Mr. Hitler recognizes clearly that his philosophy of self-denial and sacrifice is meant for those whose economic situation doe not allow them any happiness. He does not want to bring about a social order which would make personal happiness possible for every individual; he wants to exploit the very poverty of the masses in order to make them believe in hi evangelism of self-annihilation. Quite frankly he declares: “We turn to the great army of those who are so poor that their personal lives could not mean the highest fortune of this World…” This whole preaching of self-sacrifice has an obvious purpose: If the wish for power on the side of the leader and the “elite” is to be realized, the masses have to resign themselves and submit. However, this masochistic longing is also to be found in Mr. Hitler himself. For him the superior power to which he submits is God, Fate, Necessity, History, Nature. Actually all these terms have about the same meaning to him, that of symbols of an overwhelmingly strong power. He starts his autobiography with the remark that to him it was a “good fortune that Fate designated Braunau on the Inn as the place of my birth.” He then goes on to say that the whole German people must be united in one state because only then, when this state would be too small for them all, necessity would give them “the moral right to acquire soil and territory.” The defeat in the war of 1914-1918 to him is “a deserved punishment by eternal retribution.” Nations that mix themselves with other races “sin against the will of eternal Providence” or, as he puts it another time, “against the will of the Eternal Creator.” Germany’s mission is ordered by “the Creator of the Universe.” Heaven is superior to people, for luckily one can fool people but “Heaven could not be bribed.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

In Russia, what happened by 1922 is clearer for the historian today than it was for the participants in those events. The hope for the revolution had failed. Just as Mr. Marx and Mr. Engles in the middle of the nineteenth century had underestimated the vitality of capitalism, so Mr. Lenin and Mr. Trotsky between 1917 and 1922 had failed to recognize that the majority of the workers in the West were not willing to give up the economic and social advantages the capitalist system had provided for them for the dangerous and insecure course of a socialist revolution. At first, in 1921 and 1922 the revolutionary retreat was made in good faith by Mr. Lenin and other leaders. They made a strategic retreat and hoped that some time in the future a new revolutionary situation would arise. However, with Mr. Lenin’s illness and death, Mr. Trosky’s slow elimination, and Mr. Stalin’s ascendancy, the retreat turned into a plain fraud. Although there is probably no single point at which this change could be said to have occurred, its development can be followed quite clearly in the sequence of events from the Rapallo pact in 1922 to the pact with Mr. Hitler in 1939. After the Putsch in Germany in 1923, through which “Communist prestige suffered a new and this tine an irreparable blow” Mr. Stalin’s view of the supremacy of Russia’s national interests over the revolutionary interests of the communist parities gained steady ascendency. He always had contempt for foreign Communist Parties and expressed this contempt many times. “The Comintern represents nothing. It exists only because of our support,” he said to Lominadze in the twenties. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The same attitude was expressed many years later when Mr. Stalin said to the Polish leader Mikolajczyk “communism fits Germany as a saddle fits a cow.” His personal contempt for the Chinese Communist was notorious. Under him, the relationship between Russian and the Communist movement changed drastically the might of Russian was the goal, and the Communist Parties had to serve this goal. For the first time Mr. Stalin acknowledged officially in 1925 that the acute revolutionary period after the First World War had passed and was being followed by a period of “relative stabilization.” Only in 1947 did he publish a speech to Communist students that he made in 1925, which throws a retrospective light on his attitude: “I suppose that the revolutionary forces of the West are great; that they grow; that they will grow, and that they may overthrow the bourgeoisie here of there. That is true. But it will be very difficult for them to hold their ground…The problem of our army, of its strength and readiness, will inevitably rise in connection with complications in the countries that surround us…This does not mean that in any such situation we are bound in duty to intervene actively against anybody.” This statement is a good example of the difference between ritualistic language and real policy which would from then on pervade all Russian statements. The expressions of hope in the growth of the revolutionary forces are the ritual, without which no Communist statement could be made, but the operative part of the statement lies in the point that Mr. Stalin evaded any commitment tht the Red Army would come out to help foreign revolutions hold their ground. He left this open, but insisted that the was not “bound in duty” to intervene. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Russia’s foreign policy seemed to be successful for a while in the attempt to open friendly relations with the West, especially with Great Britain. However, the British conservative government moved clearly toward a break with Russian between 1924 and 1927. The Soviet Trade Delegation in London was raided on May 12, 1927, and, although the raid apparently did not yield any very incriminating evidences, the British government nevertheless served all official relations with Russian on May 26, 1927. After this setback in it foreign policy, “the Soviet government turned its back even more resolutely than before on actual revolutionary activities abroad, retired into a semi-isolation, and devoted its efforts to the accomplishment of two great internal programs.” These two programs were the rapid industrialization of Russia, expressed in the first Five Year Plan, 1928-33, and the establishment of a tight control over Russian agriculture. Mr. Trotsky was expelled from the party, and Mr. Stalin began the construction of a Russian managerial industrialism. As George Kennan has pointed out, this new program demanded tremendous sacrifices from the Russian population, and Mr. Stalin, as a justification for these hardships, had to emphasize the appearance of an external danger. He also used radical phraseology to hide the final abandonment of the revolutionary ideas and, in addition, to show the Western powers the nuisance value of the Communist Parties as a response to their hostile reaction after 1924. These three motives explain the new militant course of the Comintern after 1927. Mr. Stalin declared in his report on 3 December 1927, that “the stabilization of capitalism is becoming more and more rotten and unstable.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The official Comintern line was changed to say that the capitalist World had now entered upon another “cycle of wars and revolutions.” This new “revolutionary” line has been often interpreted by America Sovietologists as a proof that Stalinism never relinquished its revolutionary plans. These observers do not see that this radical line was purely in the service of Russian foreign and internal policy, and not the expression of any genuine revolutionary plants. The best over-all judgment on the new revolutionary line is presented by Gustav Hilger, the Counselor of the Germany Embassy in Moscow at the time. “Thus a competent Moscow observer of that day,” writes Mr. Kennan, “was able later, in describing Soviet policy during the first Five Year Plan period, to say that the Soviet Union ‘concealed an ironclad isolationism behind a façade of intensified Comintern activity which was designed in part to detract attention from her internal troubles.’” It must be noted furthermore that in spite of all radical talk, the Comintern did not send out any directives that demanded the seizure of power, but demanded only the continued struggle against “the capitalist offensive.” With the consolidation of Mr. Stalin’s power over all opponents, Mr. Hitler’s accession to power, and the beginning of the Roosevelt era, Mr. Stalin ordered another switch. He did not try to mobilize the German workers against Mr. Hitler with the goals of establishing a leftist government in Germany. On the contrary, led by a Moscow stooge who was treated with the complete contempt by the Moscow bosses, the K.P.D. was told to follow a policy which was plainly suicidal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Treating the socialists as their main enemies and making a tactical pact with the Nazis, the Communist Party did everything possible not to prevent a Nazi victory. It is unthinkable that Mr. Stalin would have demoralized and stultified the Germany Communist Part so completely had his aim been a revolution in Germany, or even the defeat of Mr. Hitler. This is not to imply that Mr. Stalin wished for Mr. Hitler’s victory. He certainly saw himself threatened by Mr. Hitler and tried his best to avert this threat. However, there are many good reasons—although no conclusive proof—to think that Mr. Stalin preferred the victory of Mr. Hitler to an authentic worker’s revolution in Germany. The German dictator was a military threat with which Mr. Stalin could hope to cope with diplomatic maneuvers and military preparation. A German workers’ revolution would have undermined the basis of his whole regime. As a society, we declare that the World’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath…a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on a shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixed the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit. Why should we look behind us, when we have to break in the mysterious portals of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. Already we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present. We wish to glorify War—the only health-giver of the World—militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

We wish to destroy the museums, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian meanness. There is indeed no greater distinction among human beings than that between those who love life and those who love death. This love of death is typically human acquisition. Humans are the only beings that can be bored, they are the only beings that can love death. While the impotent human (not referring to sexual impotence) cannot create life, one can destroy it and thus transcend it. The love of death in the midst of living is the ultimate perversion. There are some who are the true necrophiles—and they salute war and promote it, even thought they are mostly not aware of their motivation and rationalize their desires as serving life, honour, or freedom. They are probably the minority; but there are many who never made the choice between life and death, and who have escaped in busy-ness in order to hide this. They do not salute destruction, but they also do not salute life. They lack the joy of life which would be necessary to oppose war vigorously. Mr. Goethe once said that the most profound distinction between various historical periods is that between belief and disbelief, and added that all epochs in which belief dominates are brilliant, uplifting, and fruitful, while those in which disbelief dominates vanish because nobody cares to devote oneself to the unfruitful. The “belief” Mr. Goethe spoke of is deeply rooted in the love of life. Culture which create the conditions for loving life are also cultures of belief’ those which cannot create this love also cannot create belief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

The historical future is already determined; there are certain limited and ascertainable alternatives. Our alternative is that between the end of the nuclear arms race—and destruction. Whether the voice of this prophet will win over the voices of doom and weariness depends on the degree of vitality the World and especially the younger generation has preserved. If we are to perish we cannot claim not to have been warned. Every word becomes a concept, not just when it is meant to serve as a kind of reminder of the single, absolutely individualized original experience to which it owes its emergence, but when it has to fit countless more or less similar—that is, strictly speaking, never equal, hence blatantly unequal—cases. Every concept arises by means of the equating of the unequal. Just as certain as it is that no one leaf is exactly the same as any other, so, too, it is certain that the concept leaf is formed by arbitrarily ignoring these individual differences, by forgetting what distinguishes one from the other, thus giving rise to the notion that there is in nature something other than leaves, something like “The Leaf,” a kind of prototype according to which all leaves were woven, drawn, delineated, coloured, crimped, painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no specimen turned out correctly or reliably as a true copy of the prototype. We call a man honest. We ask, “Why did he act so honestly today?” Our answer is, usually, “Because of his honesty.” Honesty! Which is again like saying, “Leaf is the cause of leaves.” We really have no knowledge at all of an essential quality called Honesty, but we do know countless individualized, hence unequal, actions, which we equate by leaving aside the unequal and henceforth designate as honest actions; finally, from them we formulate a qualitas occulta with the name Honesty. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Overlooking the individual and the actual yields concepts, just as it yields forms, whereas nature know neither forms nor concepts, hence no species, but only what remains for us an inaccessible and indefinable X. For even the distinction we draw between the individual and the species is anthropomorphic and does not stem from the essence of things, though neither can we say that it does not correspond to the essence of things, for that would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as indemonstrable as its counterpart. What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphours, metonymies, anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, translated, and embellished, and that after long use strike a people as fixed, canonical, and binging: truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphours that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal. We still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for we have hitherto heard only of the obligation to be truthful, which society imposes in order to exist-that is, the obligation to use the customary metaphours, hence morally expressed, the obligation to lie in accordance with a fixed convention, to lie in droves in a style binding for all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Humans forget, of course, that his is how things are; one therefore lies in this way unconsciously and according to centuries-old habits—and precisely by means of this unconsciousness, precisely be means of this forgetting, one arrives at the feeling of truth. A moral impulse pertaining to truth is awoken out of this feeling of being obligated to designate one thing red, another cold, a third mute: in contrast to the liar, whom no one trusts, whom everyone shuns, man proves to himself how venerable, trustworthy, and useful truth is. As a rational being he now submits his actions to the rule of abstractions: no longer does he let himself be swept away by sudden impressions, by intuitions, one first generalizes all these impressions into paler, cooler concepts in order to hitch the wagon of one’s life and one’s action to them. Everything that distinguishes man from beast hinges on this capacity to dispel intuitive metaphours in a schema, hence to dissolve an image into a concept. For in the realm of those schemata something becomes possible that could never be achieved by intuitive first impressions, namely, the construction of a pyramidal order of castes and degrees, creating a new World of laws, privileges, subordinations, and boundary demarcations, which now stands over against the other intuitive World of first impressions as the more fixed, more universal, ore familiar, more human, hence something regulatory and imperative. Whereas every metaphour of intuition is individual and without equal and so always knows how to escape al classification, the great edifice of concepts exhibits the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and in logic exhales the severity and coolness proper to mathematics. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Whoever has felt that breath will scarcely believe that concepts, too, as bony and eight-cornered as dice, and just as moveable, are not the lingering residues of metaphours, and that the illusion of the artistic rendering of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then at least the grandmother of every concept. In this dice game of concepts, however, “truth” means using every die s it is marked, counting it dots precisely, establishing correct classifications, and never violating the order of castes and rankings of class. Just as the Romans and Etruscans carved up the sky with rigid mathematical lines, installing a god in each circumscribed space as in a templum, so, too, every people has above it just such a mathematically divided Heaven of concepts and understands the demand of truth to mean that each concept of god is to be found only in its own sphere. In this, one may well admire man as a great architectural genius who manages to erect an infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on shifting foundations and flowing water. Of course, in order to rest on such foundations, it must be a structure made as if of spiderwebs, delicate enough to be carried way by the waves, firm enough not to be blown apart by the wind. Measured thus, man as architectural genius far surpasses the bee: the latter builds with wax, which it gathers from nature; man builds with the much more delicate material of concepts, which he must first fabricate from out of himself. In this, he is to be admired—but not on account of his drive to truth, to the pure cognition of things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18