By the end of 1989, reunification of the two German regimes—the Federal Republic of Germany (‘West Germany’) and the German Democratic Republic (‘East Germany’) had become both highly probable and controversial. At the end of World War II, Soviet-occupied East Germany was ruled by Stalin, through an especially brutal and efficient local Communist Party, whereas West Germany became a commercial republic, albeit with a strong presence of American, French, and British military forces on the ground—the nucleus of the NATO alliance. Although the former capital city, Berlin, was located entirely within the East German sector, it was itself divided between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ section; eventually, the Communist regime built the Berlin Wall as a means of preventing their subjects from escaping to the West.

As the Soviet empire began to collapse in 1989, it became clear that divided Germany was no longer tenable. However, memories of the Nazi tyranny and two world wars died hard, and several heads of state opposed reunification. These included Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir, who raised fears of another Holocaust, and, more realistically, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterand, who could not bring themselves to relish the prospect of a newly-empowered Germany in the heart of Europe. Thatcher and Mitterand also worried that German reunification would damage Russian political support for Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom they had established a comfortable working relationship. This proved not at all unrealistic, as the loss of the Soviet empire did indeed tend to undermine Gorbachev, who would not survive German reunification for very long.

In December 1989, I wrote the following essay on reunification, which was distributed by Dawn Publishing Company, a firm in Quebec, Canada, to a network of readers interested in international politics.

 

With respect to German reunification, whatever our opinions may be, things will proceed regardless of what non-Germans think. If the Germans want reunification, they will have it. The only power on earth that can stop them is the Soviet Union.. German reunification, at the price of German neutrality in the Cold War, has been a Soviet goal all along. Why should the Kremlin intervene now? I expect them to bargain hard for concessions with respect not only to neutrality but NATO troops.

If he can accomplish that, Gorbachev will thereby consolidate his power. He will be able to say to his critics: ‘My honey caught more flies in a few years than your vinegar did in nearly four decades. Now, if you want to oust me and eliminate my reforms, do you really intend to reconquer eastern Europe? Because if you do not reconquer eastern Europe, reinstating the old system here at home will only serve to impoverish us still further, as we will lack colonies to exploit.’

Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir opposes German reunification. But should he?

Let’s step back for a moment and consider what the disintegration of communism in eastern Europe may mean, in terms of political principles. By now it is clear that thinkers of the twentieth century have yet to discover a single new political principle, although some modern tyrannies have invented the institutional and technological means to enhance the power of tyranny so much as to merit a new term, ‘totalitarian,’ to describe them. (Twentieth-century political thinkers have discovered, or, more precisely, systematized one new political method: Gandhiism or nonviolent resistance, as distinguished from Christian nonresistance. But this method has been used entirely at the service of principles or ideas that predated it—e.g., nationalism in India, the extension of full citizenship to African-Americans, and so on.) This century has instead served as a sort of laboratory in which two rival sets of political hypotheses were tested. ‘Laboratory’ is a metaphor that misses the absence of any control, scientific or other, over the various experiments that have occurred, but let it stand.

The great commercial-republican political philosophers (Locke, Montesquieu, Smith) sought to end the religious strife that had wracked Christian Europe. They formulated new institutions designed to re-channel religio-military spiritedness into business affairs and representative government. The solution works, generally speaking; commercial republics still have wars, but never with one another. As a by-product, commercial republicanism diluted anti-Jewish hatred, legitimizing the financial and commercial function Jews had been more or less forced into by the Christian churches by effectually repealing strict laws against ‘usury.’ Jewish people know this; since the Enlightenment, many of them have adopted some form of ‘liberalism.’

Hegel and other nineteenth-century Germans despised this ‘philosophy of shopkeepers.’ In this they followed but also radicalized Kant, who followed Rousseau, that great modern anti-bourgeois. The German ideologies of nationalism, communism, and racism are little more than vulgarized versions of Hegelianism. Sometimes they compete with one another, accusing each other of ‘bourgeois reaction’ (Bolshevism’s critique of fascism) or ‘Jewishness’ (Nazism’s counter-charge against Bolshevism). At least as often, they cooperate, as in the Soviet Union, where Jew-hatred and anti-‘capitalism’ mix quite easily, as indeed they also do in Marx’s essay, “On the Jewish Question.” According to the Germans and their disciples worldwide, the concept of ‘History’—said to be profound, comprehensive, and dynamic—must replace the concept of modern natural right—based upon the ‘state of nature,’ which ideologists of the ‘German’ schools condemn as ‘ahistorical’ in two senses: it is fiction, and it is static, unable to account for change.

Historicists have looked forward to the confirmation of their hypothesis (where else?) in history. This is precisely what history has denied them. Real history, that is, experience, vindicates the allegedly superficial ‘eighteenth-century thought’ and proves the deep-thinking ‘nineteenth-century’ profoundly wrong. Experience, not theory, shows that there really is a state of nature, a place of war and scarcity which reappears whenever tyrants seize power in the name of some grand idea-scheme. Experience, not theory, shows that real economic dynamism comes from commercial republicanism, not from the destructive dynamics of the Nazis or the Byzantine immobility of the very ‘progressive’ U. S. S. R., whose only capacity to effect change has been as midwife to subversion in poverty-stricken despotisms. ‘Midwife’ again is the wrong metaphor; after all, the offspring bears the genetic traits of the Soviet system as much as the less indecent traits of the unfortunate mother country.

A united, commercial-republican Germany, surrounded by other commercial republics, signifies the practical refutation of ‘Germanism.’ Friends of freedom should work to ensure that ‘Germans’ the world over understand this, and do not forget it. Commercial-republic Europe will face to potential threats, one external, the other internal. Gorbachev recently reaffirmed his adherence to communism. His giant empire may rest its ambitions; it will not abandon them until it ceases to be an empire. Unless and until the Soviets become commercial republicans, Europe will be at hazard. In the meantime, if NATO and the Warsaw Pact both dissolve, the Soviets will increase their relative power, given their obvious geopolitical advantage over the United States: access to Europe by land.

Internally, the religious toleration commercial republicanism enforces often leads to a flaccid toleration of anti-republican political movements; moral relativism and spirited nihilism unwittingly collaborate. To some extent, ‘Germanism’ arose because commercial republicanism could not offer the intense spiritual satisfactions found in the religiously-buttressed despotisms and constitutional monarchies it replaced. These satisfactions were perverted or ‘secularized’ by the anti-religious ideologies that partially replaced Christianity and Judaism in the West. To a certain degree, this is inevitable. The United States houses all manner of bizarre cults; the best that can be said is, none of them gets very far. Therefore, strong religious institutions will remain indispensable as shields against both moral indifferentism and fanaticism. Easter Europe, as in the United States of 1787, has seen churches that fight for commercial republicanism, in the knowledge that it will lead them in peace. They must also learn better to guard themselves against the temptations inherent in the commercial-republican way of life.

The fear associated with German reunification is that Christian religious revival can include Jew-hatred. This is where Israel can seize what Herr Hegel would call a world-historical opportunity. As the only commercial republic in the Mideast with unique historical links to Germany, to Eastern Europe, and to Russia, Israel should reverse Shamir’s position and endorse German reunification. In doing so, however, it must make clear that Jews and Christians can flourish within commercial-republican regimes. ‘Never again’ must Jews or Christians entertain ideologies that subvert this regime. Such ideologies cause holocausts.

As it happens, Muslims do not seem nearly so ‘compatible’ with commercial republicanism. The only other commercial republic in the Mideast was Lebanon, ruled by a Christian minority; it disintegrated under pressure from Muslims. This raises questions about the capacity of the PLO to bring genuine self-government anywhere. What, exactly, does the PLO intend to establish in ‘Palestine’? A ‘democratic,’ secular state, they say, but given the abuses the word ‘democracy’ suffers (as in ‘German Democratic Republic’), it is impossible to view this rhetorical smoke with anything other than suspicion. The intifada, which is nothing less than an attempt to ‘Lebanonize’ Israel, can and must be suppressed as part of a comprehensive plan to defend not merely ‘the Jewish state’ (a concept many non-Jews will quite understandably view with indifference) but commercial republicanism, and therefore peace, in the Mideast.

A strong statement of support for German national aspirations under a commercial-republican regime can win friends in Germany and the United States, so long as that statement intelligently clarifies the character of those aspirations. Far more important, it would provide a chance to set forth a standard or a framework for a genuine political settlement, by establishing the point that Israel is the model for Mideast politics. Israeli officials never say what would need to happen in the surrounding states in order to establish a just and lasting peace. The lesson of North America, the lesson of Europe, is, ‘If you want peace, surround yourself with commercial republics.’ This puts the pressure on the Muslim regimes, where it belongs. It enables statesmen, journalists, clergy, and other interested persons to ask the Muslims, ‘What are you doing, concretely, to promote peace in the one proven and lasting way, the way of commercial republicanism?’ In such an atmosphere, an Israeli proposal to partition both Lebanon and Jordan so as to produce four commercial republics in those two countries, would be quite reasonable. Realistic? Of course not. But why not? Because too many Muslims want theocracy more than they want peace. Indeed, the define ‘peace,’ Islam, as theocracy. The world does not yet sufficiently appreciate this. But now that the world does finally acknowledge the benefits of commercial republicanism, it can begin to appreciate it.

Unfortunately, Israel’s social-democratic founders were themselves too ‘German,’ and many of its leading politicians continue to be. Socialism and/or nationalism has preoccupied them. For this reason, Israelis today tend to obscure the issues in their own minds. They worry about a reunified Germany on nationalist grounds, instead of seeing the opportunities it presents politically. They tend to think more in terms of ‘Germans-versus-Jews’ than in terms of tyranny versus commercial republicanism. The example of the Weimar Republic—the ill-conceived product of a punitive war settlement—should not be taken as decisive. When Israelis do appeal to ‘fellow democrats’ around the world they are too sentimental, too vulnerable to the claim that they contradict themselves by opposing a ‘Palestinian’ state. Luckily for them, Muslims are even more muddled, and send even more violently mixed signals.

Thomas G. West and Sanderson Schaub: Marx and the Gulag. Montclair: The Claremont Institute, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, July 28, 1988.

 

Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev calls for the “opening” and “restructuring” of the Soviet Union. His wife, a professor of Marxism-Leninism, gives every evidence of endorsing such plans, accompanied as they are by a military buildup largely uninterrupted by the planned dismantling of medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.

These seemingly contradictory doings raise the questions, ‘What is Marxism-Leninism?’ ‘Can it animate Stalin and Gorbachev, violent purges and small-potatoes reform?’ ‘If so, how so?’ This brief and closely-reasoned pair of essays shows how the Soviet ideology can bend so easily while enduring so tenaciously.

Professor Thomas G. West demonstrates the continuity—denied by superficial writers—between the teachings of Karl Marx and the practice of V. I. Lenin. Following and deepening the insight of Alfred G. Meyer, whose book Marxism: The Unity of Theory and Practice appeared almost thirty years ago, West observes that Marx calls for and predicts the material embodiment of rational thought by means of revolution. A small cadre of revolutionary, that is, acting intellectuals will lead a passive working class to overthrow the bourgeois order, establishing a ‘proletarian’ dictatorship (as defined by party leaders) which will reshape human and all other forms of nature and lead to the stateless utopia of pure communism.

Party dictators will use terror in the early stages of this series of revolutions—hence the purges of Lenin and Stalin, repeated by every other major Leninist revolutionary who has seized power. Marx explicitly mentioned “France in 1793,” with its Reign of Terror, as the precursor of the specifically communist reign of terror he did not live to see.

By 1881, two years before his death, Marx no longer assumed that a country—and he was thinking of Russia—needed to undergo a phase of capitalism before the socialist revolution. He regarded capitalism as historically necessary in much of western Europe, but not in the East. Although European and North American scholars often overlook this teaching, Russians from Lenin to the Gorbachevs have not. Even many Soviet scholars, who emphasize what they are pleased to call the scientific character of Marxism–its discussion of class ‘contradictions’ yielding a predictable pattern of historical events culminating in revolution–usually fail to understand this deep slash into the socio-economic Gordian Knot. Professor West, however, sees clearly: “For Marx, the core was always the revolution. Everything else in his theory was subject to revision.”

Lenin took this late development of Marx’s thought and used it to destroy czarism, seize power, and consolidate the first communist regime. In the face of conservative (‘reactionary’) working classes, Lenin and Stalin attacked: “The ‘proletarian vanguard,’ Lenin admits, is not even the party, but only the Politburo of the party, consisting of Lenin and a handful of close colleagues…. The stronger the bourgeois ‘force of habit,’ the smaller and more despotic must be the governing organization of revolutionaries.”

This is why “the despotism and wholesale violence of Marxism in practice arise not in spite of but because of the high ideals of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.” Men who demand the embodiment of the ideal in human society, not by divine grace but by human will and action, men who moreover treat nature as mere matter to be conquered not respected, will inevitably turn to violence, because they hate stubborn, ‘reactionary’ human nature and the very concept of God.

The hatred of Marxist-Leninists the world over for the regime dedicated, in its Declaration of Independence, to the laws of nature and of nature’s God, follows from their ideology. Tactical compromises? Of course. True accommodation? Never: not without the abandonment of the ideology itself, and of the patterns of mind it causes.

Hatred of the concept of God must yield anti-Judaism. Marx himself was the son of a Jew who had converted to Christianity. Almost predictably, one of the first major essays Marx wrote, “On the Jewish Question,” amounts to “a sustained and scathing attack on Jews and Judaism,” as Sanderson Schaub rightly sees. “One may even sum up the purpose of Marxist revolution in a word as the ’emancipation’ or reconstruction of the Jew.”

If this begins to sound like proto-Hitlerism, it is no accident. As Schaub sees, the attack on the kind of emancipation of Jews seen in commercial republicanism, and the substitution of a new ’emancipation’ consisting of the forceful abolition of Judaism itself, involves communists and Nazis alike in acts of repression, sometimes genocide. Fundamentally, both of these ideological parties seek to replace the Creator-God of Judaism and Christianity with “god-like creation ex nihilo by men, as guided and radically reshaped by revolutionary ‘vanguards.'”

Both ideologies equate ‘bourgeois’ with ‘Jew.’ “What Marx elsewhere calls capitalism, to be overthrown by violent revolution, Marx in his essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ calls Judaism.” The attack on commercial republicanism, Marxist or Hitlerite, begins to look increasingly like a return to a worse form of anti-Judaic, anti-‘capitalist’ European feudalism—a return to medievalism without the grace of God or the intelligence of scholasticism. The historical result of Marxism-Leninism, after the terror exhausted itself, turned out to be an all-consuming bureaucracy combining the worst of the medieval Church and State. “The Soviet Gulag is the agonizing hell of Marx’s utopian ecstasy.”

“What Marx calls the Jew in man… is ultimately his mind or spirit”—human nature and divine grace. These must be obliterated, Marxists insist, ‘overcome’ by the fusion of theory and practice that produces re-created ‘Communist Man.’ Tactical concessions, such as Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” in the 1920s and Gorbachev’s program today, in no way alter this ambition. Along with a substantial selection of writings by Marx and Lenin themselves, this short book deserves inclusion in every college course on socialism or on comparative regimes in the twentieth century.

Mort Rosenblum: Mission to Civilize: The French Way. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, March 18, 1987.

 

For 2,000 years, the rooster has symbolized France. He rarely stops crowing, for, as Mort Rosenblum notes, the sun never sets on the French Empire, even today. The political and economic character of the empire no longer overawes anyone. But France is “perhaps the only cultural superpower”: “Freed of its colonies, it is the master”—a mastery “based firmly and squarely on illusion.”

Rosenblum is an American journalist. By illusion, he very nearly means culture, which to be sure is not exactly political, military, economic, or technological. Culture is not tangible, and both the American and the journalist in Rosenblum doubt the reality of the intangible. As an American, Rosenblum undoubtedly knows that American popular culture—its music, movies, even some of its television shows—predominates; however, he means high culture, not low.

To his credit, despite his apparent materialism, Rosenblum also senses that Voltaire and Rousseau, though dead, are not simply dead, not illusory. He does not see clearly why this is so. Perhaps one might suggest that Voltaire and Rousseau each expresses in an unsurpassed way certain thoughts that reflect human nature. Not the whole of human nature, to be sure. But recognizable parts of it—not illusions or at least not sheer illusions. If, as Rosenblum rightly says, “France adds up to more than the sum of its parts,” his book’s parts add up to less than a whole, because he hasn’t thought through what ‘cultural power’ or ‘cultural empire’ means. The French mission civilisatrice does indeed “project the rayonnement ,” the radiance, “of our culture,” as President Mitterand crows. But what are that rayonnement and the sun that generates it?

Rosenblum cannot quite say, although he says much, and much of that with wit and sense. (“The French use some English or concepts not readily found in their own language, such as fair play and gentleman.“) He identifies two principal components of Frenchness: realism and illusionism. “In France, power and self-interest are respectable goals,” but one must leaven this hard dough with panache: “One can assume any pose, and command any priority, if it is done with conviction and flair.” Oddly, neither Rostand nor his Cyrano rate an entry in the book, but the shadow of that famous nose falls on every page.

France’s universalist idealism—from the medieval crusades to ‘save’ Jerusalem to the modern ‘Rights of Man’—receive less emphasis here. Fitting neither the realistic nor the illusionistic frame, but borrowing from the contents of both, it may better explain the attraction of the rayonnement than either. Charles de Gaulle described French collaborators during the war with the Nazis as “realists who know nothing of the realities.” In doing so, he represented the strength of France, neither low-realist nor illusionist. At the time he said that, de Gaulle was scarcely more than a voice on the radio in London, and Hitler ruled continental Europe. But de Gaulle was right. Whether it speaks for liberation or conquest, French civilization owes its appeal to a partly arrogant but partly true insistence that it defends and advances humanity, civilization itself, and not only France. It therefore carries with it its own anti-imperialism, for once a conquered people discover their rights as men and citizens, rights inherent in the humanity they share with their conquerors, they have all the principles they need to end that imperialism—and the conqueror begins to lose the reason he had for his conquest. All that remains is the practical question of whether those ruled are ready to rule themselves.

History obsesses France, and Rosenblum rightly discusses the history of the French mission. He is wrong to devote only 150 pages of a 450-page book to that discussion, giving over the remainder to rehashes of well-known events and personages in a deadpan style reminiscent of the late American humorist Will Cuppy. Still, there are insights: “Those who defended colonialism as noble, and those who rejected it as immoral, each saw their view vindicated,” but in two world wars “to a large degree, France owed its freedom to officers trained in the colonies.” Rosenblum also sees that French universalism succeeds best against particularisms, tribalisms. It begins to sputter when confronted with any rival universalism; he mentions Islam, but he might also cite American principles and Marxist ideology. (De Gaulle shrewdly tried to undermine the last two by calling them mere disguises for national ambitions.)

Rosenblum has visited every corner of the French cultural empire, and he never fails to say something informative about each one. At times he has too much to say, as when he allocates twenty pages to a narration of the French destruction of a “Greenpeace” ship interfering with nuclear testing in the south Pacific; the story speaks well for Rosenblum’s journalistic diligence, but adds little to the argument of his book.

He well describes “the elaborate trompe-d’oeil” by which France ‘decolonized’ many of its African territories while retaining control with ‘advisors’ and ‘technicians.’ The still-colonized former colonies generally prefer this arrangement. In Gabon, Rosenblum asked one citizen, “Don’t you sometimes feel there are too many white faces around here?” “On the contrary,” the man replied, “there are not enough.”

As for French racism, it of course exists. But French universalism includes toleration, which often mitigates the worst hostility. Regrettably, other types of universalism do not invariably preach toleration. “For Islamic politicians, businessmen, warlords, and terrorists who feel hemmed in by the stern lines of East and West [that mark the Cold War], Paris is a secular Mecca. It is the capital of live and let live—or not.” France has difficulty delimiting its own toleration, and thus falls victim to the intolerance of others. The political fanatics it tolerates within its borders do not always tolerate it, and citizens pay in blood for a too-complaisant ‘realism.’

Rosenblum optimistically predicts, “It is certain that there will always be a France.” He should be more cautious. When he describes his friends Jean-Claud and Hélène, “both in advertising, world travelers,” as “the best of modern France,” one must worry about modern France. While I am sure these people make pleasant company, rayonnement needs more than globe-trotting publicity types to make it worth defending or heeding. Jean-Claude hopes his son “will have both roots and wings”; one knows not whether to tremble more for the mixed metaphor or the logical confusion that produced it. Rootedness and flight don’t go together, and if the best of modern France assume they do, Frenchness may turn all-illusory, on the way to evanescing.

The rayonnement of medieval France, the France of the Crusades, uneasily but impressively combined Roman and Christian forms of piety. The rayonnement of modern France is the Lumière, the Enlightenment—quite different from the civic virtues of Rome or the spiritual universalism of Christianity. The Enlightenment replaces patriotism and charity with toleration and public liberality empowered by the scientific conquest of nature. Its power comes from its appeal to comfortable self-preservation elevated somewhat by sentiments of generosity. It attracts, in part because it refuses to command. Its weakness comes from its neglect of politics, of the particular (this country, this regime), its inability to command. Its weakness is its strength, its strength its weakness.

The prospects for Frenchness may depend upon whether and how the best of modern France can make la Lumière only one part of the spectrum of rayonnement.