CHAPTER IX

 

Plato Looks at Fascism

 

PLATO to his friend Aristotle, Greetings.  Knowing, my dear Aristotle, your interest in the classification of constitutions, I have long intended to write to you concerning my journey back to the world of space and time and to relate my experiences to you.  Now that occasion offers, I am anxious to pose you a problem which will tax even your genius for analysis and definition.  For, during my return to the world of space and time, I caught a glimpse of Germany, when a certain Adolf Hitler was ruling there, and I am still puzzling myself to discover in which of my classifications I shall put National Socialism - which is the name he gave both to the 'noble lie' that he invented and to the constitution with which he briefly endowed the German people.

      Let me, therefore, expound to you quite simply the problem which confronts me.  And in order that this matter may be perfectly clear, you must excuse me if I narrate to you something which happened to me during my stay in the capital of Germany.  For while I was there I attended a great assembly of the people.  In one covered hall were gathered close on thirty thousand men and women - though you will be glad to hear the women took no part save to applaud and to look with pleasure on the uniforms and physique of the men.  The gathering was well disciplined and gay with flags and uniforms and the public - unlike our own unruly Greek assemblies - applauded only at certain pre-arranged times, and then not with the confused hubbub of a democratic crowd, but with short and incisive shouts like the barking of well-trained dogs.  At this I was well pleased, since they had clearly come not to criticize their leaders but to receive from them inspiration and hope.

      There were many speakers, but two particularly attracted my notice.  The first was a small lame man, whose face bore a strong resemblance to the Hittite type which we used to see in the Peiraeus.  He was clearly a demagogue, not concerned with truth but with persuasion, and I therefore studied all that he said most carefully, being anxious to learn what sort of 'noble lie' the National Socialists provide for their common people.  But the second speaker was a philosopher, a learned man trained in academic research and professing to distinguish truth from rhetoric; and to him I also listened carefully in order to discover what is the philosophy of National Socialism, the esoteric truths of the faith which none but the elect can understand.

      In order that you may appreciate my difficulty to the full, I will repeat to you - as well as I can remember it - something of what each speaker said.  Do not convict me of falsehood if some details fall short of perfect accuracy, but rest assured that the general tenor is correct.  After much else, which is not to the point, the little man who looked like a Hittite spoke as follows:

      '... for National Socialism springs from the German soul and boldly vindicates the German conception of race as the fundamental unity upon which the State must be based.  It claims that the deep sense of community, which we Germans feel when we stand together on the field of battle, cannot be analysed into an ideological superstructure whose real basis is mercenary self-seeking.  Only a people who have permitted their stock to be contaminated with the blood of colonial peoples can accept the individualist philosophy of life which founds the State upon the rationalistic contract of a gang of Jews.  We Germans, thanks to a deep sense of blood-brotherhood which binds us together and which enables us to reject instinctively any "citizen" of mongrel stock, know that the doctrines of Liberalism and Democracy and Marxism are all variants of one foul disease with which the Jews seek to infect our people, to weaken its strength and so to gain the upper hand.  For we have seen how those conspirators rigged up the constitution of Weimar - with its mathematical "equality", its "individual rights", and its "toleration" - with the express purpose of eradicating our true German tradition of obedience to leadership, self-sacrifice for the community and death to the traitor.

      'For we must be clear in our minds, fellow-Germans, that the enemy is crafty and sly.  Dividing his forces, he gives them different names and pretends they are opposed to one another.  He does that to deceive you and to lull you into false security.  In France he veils his filthy countenance under the form of democracy.  In Russia he openly flaunts the Jewish ideal of class-hatred.  But he cannot hoodwink us.  World-capitalism and Communism are both internationalist organizations willing to sacrifice everything to swell their money-bags, and to suck the blood of women and children.  Democracy is lined up on the side of the Marxist dictatorship and the criminals of east and west and employing the League of Nations once more to encircle our country and to deny us our place in the sun.

      'This world conspiracy against the German people is proved by the famous Protocol of the Elders of Zion.  It does not affect my argument that this protocol is said to be a "forgery": so-called scientific proof cannot controvert the fact that in that document the very essence of Hebraic Reason is disclosed.  No scientist can disprove our racial theory since it does not consist of biological concepts but is the expression of the German philosophy of life.  Racialism is not an international science but a German creed, and though ten thousand intellectuals disprove it, our own German blood will scorn their rational argumentation: we shall always KNOW deep down and instinctively who our enemy is.  World Jewry does not simply means the subhuman members of the Jewish species: world Jewry is the spirit of Jewish reason wherever it is found, the spirit of Jewish religion in every land, the octopus of class-war and capitalist cruelty which threatens to strangle the Aryan race, to dry up its life-blood and so to weaken our European culture that it succumbs to the menace of Oriental Bolshevism.

      'It is this spirit of Jewish reason which in the last two hundred years has permeated European culture and well-nigh destroyed it.  In capitalism it invented an economic machine to exploit the natural wealth of nations and to divide the spoils among the high-priests of world finance: a machine whose imperialism and rapacity mobilizes the masses to fight not for their countries but for the interests of world Jewry.  In Christianity it found a religion of humility and brotherly love to sap the vitality of the race: so that Christian humanitarians now spend millions a year on preserving the unfit and the cripples and in encouraging them to breed at the cost of the healthy and strong.  In Liberalism and Communism it found philosophies ready to make the nonsensical assertion that all men are equal and rational, to deny blood-brotherhood and the distinction of leader and follower and so to subject the Western world to the rule of the machine and of finance.  In democracy it found a system of government calculated precisely to accentuate party differences, to put power into the hands of political bosses and to destroy the natural leadership of the nation.  Jewish reason instigated the failure of democracy in order to introduce Communism, and finally to enslave the German people to Jewish Bolshevism.

      'But Jewish reason has not been content to befoul our politics.  It has seeped into our universities and schools.  Everywhere its destructive spirit of ridicule has tried to weaken our German spirit and to replace German culture and manners with the drab morality of an international cultural Bolshevism.  Culture, my friends, springs from the organic life of the race.  Cultural Bolshevism tries to kill that life by clamping on us all the machine-made products of the intellect.  It destroys imagination and romance and replaces them with rationalistic cleverness.

      'Everywhere you look, you will find the enemy.  True to his loathsome nature, he knows the arts of concealment and subterfuge, of alias and alibi.  You must smell him out and when you have found him I know that you will not be knock-kneed or snivel Christian sentimentalities, but will have your revolvers ready.

      'But let us turn to the positive side of our task.  National Socialism has triumphed: it has destroyed democracy and forestalled the Communist conspiracy within German itself.  It has knocked on the head a few Socialists and Liberals and Pacifists and Democrats - incurable degenerates - and it has locked up the cases which were not so hopeless and given them a taste of German re-education.  The German people has been freed from its slavery to an un-German creed, and, conscious of its destiny once more, is working as a blood-brotherhood for the Cause.  The faction and dissension bred by parliamentary institutions has been suppressed: the doctrine of class-war has been eradicated from the German heart, and the employee and employer collaborate once more for the good of the nation.  Only the Churches have been reluctant to toe the line, but, since we have the youth of the nation behind us, we can afford to disregard the snivelling scrupulosities of Lutheran greybeards and of the black moles.  Germany has rekindled the flame of German tradition, and strong in that tradition we have smashed unemployment at home and the League of Nations abroad.  The whole world trembles before us - or, rather, the statesmen tremble - while the peoples become gradually aware of their Aryan inheritance and look to us to liberate them from their miseries.'

      I was well pleased with this speech, displaying, as it did, an understanding of the popular mind which can only appreciate half-truths tricked up in the vulgar trimmings of symbol and myth.  For I need not assure you that none of what he said approximated even to the truth, or remind you that the Jewish people, like all others, is composed of good and bad, stupid and intelligent, and so on.  But the speaker had seen that the 'noble lie' need not take account of scientifically ascertainable fact, but must always express truth in the form of a symbol, and so, for reasons which I need not go into, he had chosen the Jew to represent all things evil and dangerous for the common man.  But most subtle of all, he had grasped that reason, which for us is the highest good, is for the vulgar a snare and a delusion, and therefore in his 'noble lie' he displayed an irony worthy of Socrates himself, making reason and philosophy the chief cause of all our troubles, and abusing the Jew for possessing the most priceless treasure of man.  How I relished the impudence of the fellow, seeing well that he had reason enough and to spare and had yoked it to the service of the very rhetoric and 'intellectualism' which he so vehemently denounced.  If he is strictly subjected to the commands of a philosopher, I thought, he can indeed be entrusted with the task of controlling the popular passions.  For he has the power of uniting them in a common purpose, of making them forget their present discomforts and pains for the sake of future bliss, and of fixing in their minds the picture of an enemy for whose destruction they will risk all.  But since this enemy is only a symbol with no real counterpart, he can manipulate it and disguise it in countless garbs, so that anything which it is to the interest of the State to oppose and to destroy, appears to the people as an example of Jewish reason, and anything which is to be defended and advanced is seen as an instance of Aryan virtue.  In this way, by the use of these two myths, he is able to raise up a well-nigh fanatical enthusiasm among the populace for any enterprise which he may undertake.

      And I observed that the people were well pleased with the 'noble lie'.  Buffeted and bruised by many years of war and political faction, uncertain of employment, and subjected to currency manipulation and commercial intrigues on whose ingenuity and devilments even our traders and bankers would gaze with amazement, they had grown weary of a self-government which was no self-government, but the tyranny of politicians and generals and industrialists.  They had been filled, as all these modern democracies were, with vague religious ideals of brotherhood and love and understanding, and had believed that parliamentary government was somehow or other connected with these ideals.  And so, when they were defeated in war, they set up a democratic regime and stretched out friendly arms to the democracies which had defeated them.  Poor souls!  They were speedily disillusioned.  For the modern democracies are as nationalist and imperialist in their actual policy - whatever their sentiments may be - as the Athens of Pericles and even of Cleon.  After the war they set up a League of Nations which, like our own Delian League, degenerated into an empire, or rather, an instrument of empire, for control of which the Great Powers within it fiercely struggled - all the while speaking words as honeyed and as high-sounding as Pericles himself.

      And so at last the common people in Germany were schooled by hard necessity to see that democracy is only agreeable for a people with money to spend and rich men to squeeze; and that though it is pleasant to allow open competition for shares in a large cake, it is not so pleasant to fight for a loaf of bread against rich and influential people.  For they go off with the bread and the common man preserves only the freedom to starve.

      Thus the German people saw with regard both to home and to foreign affairs.  For in Germany itself, as the class-war grew fiercer, the plight of the common people became steadily worse: and abroad, the disturbances of trade caused by the World War compelled the victorious democracies to regard Germany as a rival and not as a friend, and to seek by every mean to prevent her jeopardizing their own trade.  

      Thus history was preparing the German people to accept a revolution and to welcome a dictatorship which should impose order upon their own troubled lives and should, by force of arms and by the rugged language of the soldier, expose the hypocrisies of the League of Nations.  Now among the townsmen and the labourers in the factories there was a resolve to impose the dictatorship of the Communists, and this might well have been achieved if the leaders had not befuddled the minds of their followers with talk of self-government and workers' control and suchlike democratic foolery.  For these leaders could never make up their minds whether they wished to be democratic demagogues or dictators, and so the people had no confidence in them - which was just as well - and turned with enthusiasm to the 'noble lie' of the National Socialists.  Within the space of a few months these remarkable men had conquered power, thanks partly to the financial aid which was rendered by the industrialists and partly to the rhetoric of leaders like the lame man whom I had just heard.

      I have related all this to you that you may appreciate to the full the capacities of the fellow.  Rest assured he does not need to study your Politics in order to discover how to retain his power.  And so let us leave him and turn our attention to the second speaker.

      You can imagine with what eagerness I awaited his words.  For I said to myself, 'He must be no mean philosopher if he can control a sophist so cunning as this fellow has proved himself to be.  But since he is a gentleman, well-bred and well-educated (as the first speaker was not), no doubt he has within him a soul more resolute and an intelligence more powerful than even my friend Dion of Syracuse.'  In this surmise I was to be sadly disappointed.  For judge of my horror and amazement when he said:

      'Fellow Germans, you have heard the wonderful speech of the Doctor, and you will agree with me that he has expressed the supreme truths of German philosophy.  I am an academic, and I freely admit to you that, before the revolution, I did not actively support National Socialism.  I was blinded by the Jewish Press and by my fellow academics - most of whom, I am glad to say, are now in exile largely owing to my zeal - and did not then see the divine qualities of our leader or the place which God has given him in German history.  But now my eyes are opened and I am content to serve as a humble collaborator in the great work of national regeneration.  I see now that intellect and criticism must be schooled to accept the promptings of intuition and of that knowledge which streams in the blood of the Aryan and challenges the barren logic of Liberalism.  I have renounced that scientific spirit which is a product of Jewish intellect and I am devoting my services to the cause we all have at heart.  Before the great days of March 1933 I called myself a philosopher and pretended to study Plato: but, in fact, I contented myself with petty elucidation of the text and tried to read into him my Liberal prejudices.  I confess this all to you openly, and I thank God that my students burnt all the books which I then wrote.  I have now written a great work entitled Platon und der ursprung des Nationalsozialistischen Staatsgedankens.  For it is my intention to prove to the world that all that is true in philosophy can be found, if you search long enough, in the pages of Mein Kampf, and that for this reason Plato, insofar as he spoke the truth, was a prototype of National Socialism.  In this book I maintain that Plato preached the revolution which Adolf Hitler has so wonderfully carried through, the spiritual regeneration of his people from commercialism, individualism, and cultural Bolshevism.  Rejecting the degenerate democracy of Athens, he turned to aristocratic Sparta and sought in Syracuse to rekindle the Spartan spirit.  Sparta was a military State: and the Spartan citizen was a soldier of Laconia (as his land was called) - laconic in his speech as a soldier should be.  From boyhood he lived a soldier's life and the State saw to his education.  The boys were divided into "packs" under the leadership of an elder boy and were given a Spartan training.  Their food and their dress was simple: their intellectual education, that which a soldier needs.  They went barefoot, and they were encouraged to steal if they were hungry: but they were flogged if the theft was discovered.  For to learn to steal successfully teaches the art of ambush and forage which every warrior needs.  This Spartan education is a wonderful prototype of our Aryan ideals.  It subordinates the individual to the State, and the follower to the leader; and it develops those qualities of courage, simplicity, and discipline which are the marks of a warrior - and of a ruling race.

      'Sparta was Plato's ideal, and it is our Nazi ideal too.  We, like Plato, reject the luxury and intrigue and intellectualism of Athens: we reject the imperialism of mathematical equality which enables the demagogue and the commercial magnate to rob the natural ruler of his power.  We too claim that the common people need not self-government but good government: and we believe that the statesman's job is the education of a warrior class to whom the protection of the people can be entrusted.

      'But how was it that Plato the Athenian advocated in his Republic the restoration of the Spartan State?  Because, my friends, Plato was greater than the Athens in which he lived.  He was able to free himself from her corrupting influence and to recreate in his mind the vision of the true Greek city-state, a simple community of warrior-rulers and happy peasants, and he had the courage to tell his fellow-citizens that they must learn their lesson from Sparta.  Of course in his writings there are still traces of the individualism and intellectualism of Athenian thought; but if we are to discover the true Plato we must disregard these blemishes and realize that Plato, in his early years, fell under the dangerous influence of Socrates, the prophet of sophistical rationalism, the sceptical defamer of the city-state.  Plato was at first charmed by his cleverness, his verbal agility, and his apparent opposition to democracy, and for many years he succumbed to a dangerous intellectualism.  But in the Republic his aristocratic spirit reasserted itself; he renounced Socrates and claimed kinship with Sparta; his discarded toleration and a weak sympathy with the common man and, aware of his spiritual vocation, advocated the concentration of all power in the hands of the bearers of Aryan culture - the warriors.  The Republic is the abnegation by the pupil of a perverse master, and the assertion that even friendship must be sacrificed to the cause of the Aryan race; it is, indeed, the philosophical archetype of that terrible decision which our leader himself made when he ordered the blood bath of June 30, 1934.'

      You can imagine my feelings!  Dionysius' book on my philosophy [See Plato, Letter VII, 341.] was nothing to this.  I was just about to rise to my feet when I noticed that the audience had already become exceedingly restive and that the chairman had hurriedly pushed the philosopher off the dais.  I therefore made my way towards him, plucked him by the sleeve, and disguising my identity, said to him with all the self-control I could muster, 'I should be obliged if you could speak to me for a moment.'  The philosopher recognized me for a foreigner by my accent and (hoping, I presume, to advance his position by persuading me of the excellence of all things German) immediately complied with my request.

      I will not waste your time with the details of our conversation.  Anxious to retain the sobriety which is the mark of the true philosopher, I did not at once attack him for his slanders on the memory of Socrates, but turned the talk to Sparta and politely expressed my interest at his delight with Spartan ideals.  I asked him if he really thought that Germany was like Sparta, and when he replied affirmatively, I reminded him that in Sparta the Helot serfs outnumbered the Spartiates by fifteen to one, and that for this reason the Spartiates, always in fear of a revolt, organized a secret police to murder any Helot who showed any initiative.  Did he think that on this point there was any resemblance?  Not bothering to wait for a reply, I went on to show that Sparta was an agricultural community, that all wealth was forbidden to its ruling class, and that in this way the Spartans avoided the imperialism of Athens.  With no interest in markets or raw materials and with a ban on the participation of the citizen in trade, they had no incentive to foreign adventures.  Furthermore the terror of Helot revolts kept them always at home.  Such was the condition of Sparta: did he press the analogy here?  Did he suggest that in Germany capitalism had been suppressed or that the National Socialist was forbidden all access to wealth?  Of course he did not.  Germany was an industrial State with the same needs and aspirations as any democracy, and in Germany the industrialist has even more influence in politics than in the democracies.

      I admit to you that all this was easy game, but I felt it my duty to expose to this professor of philosophy the full depths of his ignorance and turpitude and self-deception, and so I concluded the matter by saying, 'My dear sir, there was among the Athenians many who admired Sparta, but none of us were blind to her failings.  Plato most of all attacked the one-sidedness of her education and the vile condition of her serfs.  As for your suggestion that your new State has a Spartan constitution simply because it has adopted her boorishness and cruelty as an instrument for suppressing democracy and furthering its imperialist pretensions, that is fantastic, and you know it.'

      He agreed reluctantly, muttering something about not pressing analogies too far; but I would not let him go, and went on to discuss the Republic, showing that I, so far from renouncing Athens, had tried to fuse together the virtues of Athenian reason with those of Spartan morale.  I had tried to turn the tyranny of a cruel militarism into the gentle rule of the philosopher who is resolved to give happiness to his people, and sacrifices the pleasures of wealth and family to fit himself for the task of ruling.  I argued that I denounced militarism as fiercely as I denounced democracy, and that no-one had praised reason and intellect more highly than I.  And then I turned on him personally and said: 'My friend - for we must be friendly to all - you call yourself a philosopher and you have been privileged to enjoy all the advantages which money and education can lavish on a man.  You have chosen the highest calling which man can choose and claim to have devoted yourself to the service of truth and wisdom.  And yet you have dared to declare before your countrymen that philosophy must serve the "noble lie" and that reason must be the instrument of intuition and of the blood.  You call yourself not only a philosopher, but a patriot too; and yet you dare to besmirch the name of Socrates who, above all men, strove to harmonize these two vocations and died in the attempt.  I tell you that in so doing you have proved yourself a coward, unworthy of both philosophy and of your State.  For what has happened?  A great revolution has taken place, and a chance has been given to you in that shift of power to make the influence of truth ad philosophic integrity once again supreme in Germany.  The people are disciplined and content to obey the commands of the soldiers and demagogues who have gained control.  And yet you professors and philosophers and scientists, instead of seeing the duty which rests on your shoulders of gaining control over the new leaders, and imposing on their myths the law and order which would give them shape, have accepted these myths as truth, toadying to the men you should command, and intriguing against one another for comfortable positions in the new order.  It was your duty to uphold the intellectualism of Athens, and to set it over the Spartan virtues of the military class: to see to it that the vested interests should not turn and twist the Aryan myth to their own advantage, making of your new discipline an instrument of selfish economic oppression.  Above all, you should have retained your universities pure and intact from the noble lies which must be provided for the lower orders, and seen to it that there, at least, the spirit of pure research was preserved and strengthened by a resolution among you all to shrink at nothing in order to achieve power in the State.

      'But instead of this you have flattered and pampered the new rulers, like lackeys fearful of losing their weekly wage.  You have proclaimed as philosophic truths the myths and symbols of the politicians and have allowed your universities to become the home of vulgar propaganda and sophistical half-truths.  You will tell me that it was impossible for you to gain power and influence, and that the new rulers were not amenable to reason.  My good sir, that may possibly be true, but it is not a truth which you have tested.  My two best friends gave their lives in the attempt.  Socrates was executed by the Athenians, and Dion was murdered at Syracuse.  They did not shrink from the uttermost danger to proclaim the cause of truth on every occasion and to persuade the rulers to see the error of their ways and to entrust the conduct of affairs to reason.  They in their time were prepared to give their lives, but you and your associates will not risk your pay.  Instead, you slyly prostitute the cause of truth to rhetoric and sophistry.

      'I do not only refer to the members of your universities, but to all the "educated" gentlemen who now sit passive under the tyranny of myth.  I know that a few, inspired with true philosophy, have retired into private life or fled to exile so that the rest of the world may not forget that your country was once famous for its promotion of truth, and that Germans can still prefer philosophy to prosperity.  But the majority are like yourself, and as a result the "noble lie" which could be the means of happiness to all is become an instrument of insane destruction.  Believed no less by the rulers than by their subjects, it has effected not regeneration, but tyranny.  For the motives of your rulers are ambition and power.  They have suppressed democracy only to replace it by intrigue and secret corruption and palace revolution.

      'But this is not to be accounted to their fault.  They are men who know no better, loyal and devoted when knowledge rules, but cruel and insensate when power is left to them alone.  Long ago I foretold what would happen in such a State, and I cannot do better before I let you go than to repeat to you my own words:

      '"Such then will be the revolution.  But after the revolution how will it be governed?... It will distrust the wise rulers, for its wise men will now be of mixed character, not simple and sincere as before; it will prefer spirited and more straightforward men, made more for war than for peace, will have a great admiration for military tricks and stratagems, and will always be engaging in war.

      '"... These men will be avaricious ... with a fierce secret passion for gold and silver.  They will have storehouses and treasuries of their own where they will store their wealth in secret.  They will be ringed round with dwellings, mere private nests where they may squander a lavish expenditure on their wives, and whomsoever they please.

      '"... They will be sparing of their money ... but their desires will make them enjoy spending other men's money.  They will pluck the fruits of pleasure in secret, running away from the law, like boys running away from their father.  Compulsion and not persuasion will have controlled their education, because they have neglected the true Muse, who is accompanied by reason and philosophy, and have honoured gymnastics above music."' [See REPUBLIC, 547.]

      'You described,' he said, 'a constitution compounded throughout of good and evil.'

      'Yes, it is a compound,' I said.  'But one single feature is conspicuous in it, and that is rivalry and ambition.'

      When I had spoken thus, I bade him a curt farewell.

      Such, my dear Aristotle, were my experiences in Nazi Germany, and I have related them at length, because I was sure it would interest you to see that human nature has not changed profoundly since you died.  When I return I will ask you to give your opinion on my analysis of the National Socialist (or Fascist) State, which I hold to be a mixed constitution containing elements of both democracy and oligarchy, and also to chide me if I was too severe with the calumniator of my friend Socrates.  For I remember that you were always calmer in your judgement and, expecting little of mankind, were less shocked by iniquity than I.