O Insurgente

Mais um texto de Ludwig von Mises que mantém plena actualidade: The Socialist Calumny Against the Jews.

Nazism wants to combat the Jewish mind. But it has not suc­ceeded so far in defining its characteristic features. The Jewish mind is no less mythical than the Jewish race.

The earlier German nationalists tried to oppose to the Jewish mind the “Christian-Teutonic” world-view. The combination of Christian and Teutonic is, however, untenable. No exegetical tricks can justify a German claim to a preferred position within the realm of Christianity. The Gospels do not mention the Germans. They consider all men equal under God. He who is anxious to discrimi­nate not only against Jews but against the Christian descendants of Jews has no use for the Gospels. Consistent anti-Semites must reject Christianity.

(…)

It is strange that the German armies, which exult in Eastern Europe in cowardly slaughtering thousands of defenseless Jewish women and children, are accompanied by army chaplains with Bibles in their hands. But the Third Reich is full of such con­tradictions.

Of course, the Nazis do not comply with the moral teachings of the Gospels. Neither do any other conquerors and warriors. Chris­tianity is no more allowed to become an obstacle in the way of Nazi politics than it was in the way of other aggressors.

Nazism not only fails explicitly to reject Christianity; it solemnly declares itself a Christian party. The twenty-fourth point of the “unalterable Party Program” proclaims that the party stands for positive Christianity, without linking itself with one of the various Christian churches and denominations. The term “positive” in this connection means neutrality in respect to the antagonisms between the various churches and sects.

Many Nazi writers, it is true, take pleasure in denouncing and deriding Christianity and in drafting plans for the establishment of a new German religion. The Nazi party as such, however, does not combat Christianity but the Christian churches as autonomous establishments and independent agencies. Its totalitarianism cannot tolerate the existence of any institution not completely subject to the Führer’s sovereignty. No German is granted the privilege of defying an order issued by the state by referring to an inde­pendent authority. The separation of church and state is contrary to the principles of totalitarianism. Nazism must consequently aim at a return to the conditions prevailing in the German Lutheran churches and likewise in the Prussian Union Church before the Constitution of Weimar. Then the civil authority was supreme in the church too. The ruler of the country was the supreme bishop of the Lutheran Church of his territory. His was the jus circa sacra.

The conflict with the Catholic Church is of a similar character. The Nazis will not tolerate any link between German citizens and foreigners or foreign institutions. They dissolved even the German Rotary Clubs because they were tied up with the Rotary Inter­national, whose headquarters are located in Chicago. A German citizen owes allegiance to his Führer and nation only; any kind of internationalism is an evil. Hitler could tolerate Catholicism only if the Pope were a resident of Germany and a subordinate of the party machine.

Except for Christianity, the Nazis reject as Jewish everything which stems from Jewish authors. This condemnation includes the writings of those Jews who, like Stahl, Lassalle, Gumplowicz, and Rathenau, have contributed many essential ideas to the system of Nazism. But the Jewish mind is, as the Nazis say, not limited to the Jews and their offspring only. Many “Aryans” have been im­bued with Jewish mentality—for instance the poet, writer, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the socialist Frederick Engels, the composer Johannes Brahms, the writer Thomas Mann, and the theologian Karl Barth. They too are damned. Then there are whole schools of thought, art, and literature rejected as Jewish. Inter­nationalism and pacifism are Jewish, but so is warmongering. So are liberalism and capitalism, as well as the “spurious” socialism of the Marxians and of the Bolsheviks. The epithets Jewish and West­ern are applied to the philosophies of Descartes and Hume, to positivism, materialism and empiro-criticism, to the economic the­ories both of the classics and of modern subjectivism. Atonal music, the Italian opera style, the operetta and the paintings of impres­sionism are also Jewish. In short, Jewish is what any Nazi dislikes. If one put together everything that various Nazis have stigmatized as Jewish, one would get the impression that our whole civilization has been the achievement only of Jews.