Georges Duhamel: Civilization 1914-1917. E. S. Brooks translation. New York: The Century Company, 1919.
Georges Duhamel: America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future. Charles Minor Thompson translation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931.
Tomislav Sunic: Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. Self-published, 2007.
For the European Right, the United States of America has loomed as a menace for a long time, held up as the embodiment of modernity—modernity seen as dehumanization, as the extension of the technological conquest of nature to human nature itself, an extension animated by misconceived notions of equality and liberty. But while Georges Duhamel criticized America for on the grounds of traditional European humanism, the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem, the New Right criticizes it in large measure for adhering to that heritage itself, especially to ‘Jerusalem.’
Georges Duhamel served as a French army surgeon throughout the First World War. In Civilization 1914-1917— a title of bitter irony—he begins with a soldier whose face he saw only for a moment, in the light of a match on a train at night, moving toward the front in 1916. Recalling that he had been in action twelve times to this point, the man said, “I’m always in luck: I have never been wounded but once.” The flare of the match “gave me a fleeting glimpse of a charming face”; “his whole presence radiated a sane and tranquil courage.” This was the “face of France.” This is no chauvinism on Duhamel’s part. The French fought with unremitting valor in that war. Those who deride supposed French poltroonery, along with France’s losses to Germany in 1871 and 1940, forget that the Germany of those years was no longer the Germany Napoleon rolled through at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, the thirty-seven sovereign German states had been united by Prussia into one powerful, militarized country, outnumbering the French by much more than three-to-two by 1914. In wars fought by mass armies, sheer population counted, as indeed the French in 1814 and the Germans in 1944 both learned during their invasions of Russia. “The world knows too little,” Duhamel rightly says, of “those Frenchmen of…grandeur of soul, indomitable intelligence, and touching naivete.”
“Will there ever be a night black enough to rob me of the image glimpsed in that flash of light?” Yet that face was disfigured in the war, where Duhamel “inhaled the fetid breath of fields thickly sown with corpses” in a “kingdom of dust” and mud, punctuated by field hospitals, where a “mass of human larvae writh[ed] on the floor,” larvae themselves covered with the larvae of the flies, feeding on the suppurating wounds of men in agony. “At times, overcome by all this suffering, I would beg for duty outside the camp, in order to let some fresh air in upon my mind and renew the tenor of my reflections,” which turned to “those people in the interior of the country” who “fill[ed] the cafe-concerts, the exhibitions, the moving pictures, the brothels—shamelessly enjoying themselves, the world and the season—and, sheltered by this trembling rampart of sacrifice, refuse to share in the universal distress.” War duty gave Duhamel “the opportunity to know men better than I had known them until then; to know them under a purer light, naked before death, stripped even of those instincts which disfigure the divine beauty of simple souls.” Even in the misery of war, “our race of workers has remained vigorous, pure, worth of the noble traditions of humanity”—men like Rebic, hideously wounded but weeping because he saw “all the trouble I am causing you,” his caregivers. Or the mortally wounded Réchousset, who looked at his “thin, ulcerated legs” and asked, “What’s the meaning of all this?” Or the doctor who told Duhamel, “The very idea of God seems to be something apart” from this “great catastrophe,” adding that the men must be told, “very simply,” that “there are some wounds that we cannot heal,” that only “when people stop making such wounds” will “the problem no longer exist.” “I owe to the war the knowledge of a new anguish—that of living beside a human being whom I knew, in spite of his strength and beauty, to be living under the threat of a terrible doom, and who had no future save that which hope and ignorance gave him.”
And then there was Rabot, a small man, his growth stunted by poor diet as a child, suffering “fearful, interminable dressing, repeated every day for months.” A well-born French lady, accompanied by “handsome, well-dressed,” and “very attentive” officers, entered the hospital, evidently on a fine mission to elevate the morale of the patients. “Rabot,” she told him, “You know already the greatest recompense of all: Glory! The rapturous ardor of combat!” Your suffering is “divine, because it is endured for all”; your wound is “holy,” making a hero a “god,” Christlike. At this, “a religious silence reigned in the ward.” Except for Rabot. He “ceased to resemble himself. All his features drew together, violently agitated in a manner that was almost tragic. A hoarse voice issued in jerks from his skeleton-like chest, and all the world could see that Rabot was laughing.” He laughed for nearly an hour, long after the lady and her retinue had departed. “After that it was as if something had changed in Rabot’s life.” Whenever his dressing was changed and he was “on the point of weeping and felt pain, one could always make him forget it and extort a little smile from him by saying in time: ‘Rabot! They’re going to send for the lady in green.'”
Another time, a train ran over a guard at a crossing called “La Folie.” “We picked up the debris, here and there, on all sides, fragments of bleeding flesh, entrails, and I remember finding a hand closed over a cheese. Death had surprised the man while he was eating.” Duhamel and his comrades carried the body parts from place to place, but no office in the army would accept them. He ended by taking the bloody mass back to his barracks, placing it next to his bed that night. “For a long moment,” listening to the sound of blood dropping from the stretcher to the floor, “I occupied myself with counting the drops while I reflected on many dreary things, the times we live in, for instance.” This was but one among “the uninterrupted file of human bodies” that entered the field hospital. “Sacred human flesh—holy substance that serves thought, art, love, all that is great in life—you are nothing but a vile, malodorous paste that one rakes in one’s hands in disgust, to judge whether or not it is fit for killing.” As for those officials, reluctant to accept corpses, their type is seen in a civilian bureaucrat, M. Perrier-Langlade, who “was what is called a great organizer.” He keened to interfere in everyone else’s business, entering an office and “at once chang[ing] the position of every object and the function of every man,” his orders falling “like a rain of hail.” “An organization upon which his genius had been exercised would take several weeks to return to its normal functioning,” proving that “men of power who have ideas will never admit that simple mortals can have any.” Another such fellow “seized a fountainpen and was covering the walls with schemas,” “showing us in precise formulas how he wished us to think and act henceforth.” As he put it, “personal experience must abdicate before discipline.”
Consequently, Duhamel writes, “I hate the twentieth century, as I hate rotten Europe and the whole world on which this wretched Europe is spread out like a great spot of axle-grease.” The machines “that used to amuse me once, when I knew nothing about anything…now fill me with horror, because they are the very soul of this war, the principle and reason of this war.” Escape to a primitive society? No use: “I had thought of going to live among the savages, among the black people, but there aren’t even any real black people now. They all ride bicycles and want to be decorated,” decorated for their service in—the war.
There is nothing about America in Civilization 1914-1917. The Americans themselves had only begun to arrive in Europe in June 1917, to be readied for action at the front in October. But Duhamel turned his attention to France’s ally, detesting what he saw.
Scenes from the Life of the Future (retitled America the Menace by its enterprising American publisher) begins where Civilization left off. “Of all the tasks common to the men of my time none is more urgent than of incessantly reviewing and correcting the idea of civilization,” “that burden of servitudes that is called independence.” Before the Great War, “the ideal of a universal civilization, built up by all that which the arts, the sciences, the philosophies, and even the religions had bountifully contributed to it, knew a period of great breadth and of almost insolent vogue”; “under an apparent pessimism, all the realistic and naturalistic literature of France was a paean in praise of civilization, the redeemer.” This “universal civilization” was to be “both ethical and scientific,” an engine of “both spiritual and temporal progress.” It was “at the height of its fortune when the war attacked it.”
Universal civilization dissolved quickly because it harbored a contradiction at its core. It is one thing to understand civilization morally, as a means to “make people more human.” It is another thing to understand civilization as the realm of intricately designed machines, a civilization “that may be described as Baconian, since it is wholly based on the applications of the inductive method.” Baconian induction can tell you how to make machines, but it cannot tell you what to use them for. The teleology of modernism was supplied by historicism, in particular by various sorts of historicist progressivism. Historicism takes the results of empirical observation, facts recorded in history, then draws a general conclusion from those acts respecting ‘where history is going.’ Duhamel regards the war as the empirical refutation of this theory—a sort of malign but revealing Baconian experiment—while seeing that the war might be dismissed as a horrible but temporary setback, a sharp dip in the overall upward trend. The example of America is a much better indication of what ‘the end of history’ will look like.
“No nation has thrown itself into the excesses of industrial civilization more deliberately than America.” It began as a sort of tabula rasa, “free of traditions, of monuments, of a history,” a people “with no other ties than their redoubtable selves,” a land of industriousness and of industriousness alone. “American, then, represent for us the future”; because its deck started out cleared, it hasn’t needed to clear out any Old World and Old Regime debris. This is why “in material civilization, the American people are older than we,” a people “who even now are enacting for us many scenes of our future life.” But “before twenty years have passed” (i.e., by midcentury) “we shall be able to find all the stigmata of this devouring civilization on all the members of Europe.” Just as Tocqueville saw Europe’s future in American “democracy”—that is, in the condition of civil-social equality—so Duhamel sees it in American industrialism, American ‘machinism.’
And like Tocqueville, Duhamel voyaged to America. After boarding the ship that took him across the Atlantic, he fell into a conversation with the captain, who described a fantastic ‘potential’ scheme for diverting the Gulf Stream for some purpose he thought good: “What makes the strength and greatness of America is that there are always Americans who think seriously about everything.” Among those things Americans had thought of and enacted was a thoroughgoing inspection of Duhamel’s person and property at his port of entry, including an explanation of laws prohibiting alcoholic beverages, a health exam, and a plethora of customs rules, minutely enforced—fully two hours of “administrative fuss,” the institutionalization of M. Perrier-Langlade. The ship itself, a technological marvel, speeds the traveler comfortably to his chosen destination, but these “astonishing facilities offered by science to the traveler are thwarted by the dictator who speaks in the name of that same science,” holding that science “does not admit of doubt.” “Faith in science,” a new religion, is the faith of America. A physician justifies Prohibition by saying that while “that law is irksome to me sometimes…I am thankful to the State for protecting me, if necessary, even from myself.”
American culture, such as it is, partakes of the same “new barbarity.” The movie theater “had the luxury of some big, bourgeois brothel—an industrialized luxury, made by soulless machines for a crowd whose own soul seems to be disappearing.” American soullessness reveals itself in the music it tolerates in such a place, “a sort of soft dough of music, nameless and tasteless,” a pastiche of fragment from European classics—the wedding march from “Lohengrin,” a bit of Haydn’s “Military Symphony,” the first allegro of Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony,” a few bars of Wagner’s “Tristan” and Shubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” (“Poor symphony! It had never been worse ‘unfinished’ than it was here.”). All polished off with a round of…jazz, that “triumph of barbaric folly.” “Was there no one to cry murder? For great men were being murdered. All those works which from our youth we have stammered with our hearts rather than with our lips, all those sublime songs which at the age of passionate enthusiasms were our daily bread, our study, and our glory, all those thoughts which stood for the flesh and blood of our masters, were dismembered, hacked to pieces, and mutilated. They passed by us now like shameful flotsam and jetsam on this wave of warm melted lard.” “The cinema is a pastime for slaves, an amusement for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,” a “spectacle that demands no effort, that does not imply any sequence of ideas, that raises no questions, that evokes no deep feeling, that lights no light in the depths of any heart, that excites no hope, if not the ridiculous one of some day becoming a ‘star’ at Los Angeles.”
And then there was vaudeville, The Ziegfield Follies, with its bare-legged showgirls, pop vocalists, and “young comedians in flaring trousers and short jackets, who raced upon the stage, spouted four jokes and raced off again”; they “seemed like living symbols of the young American—likable, uneducated, taking what comes, without initiative or individuality.” The ‘acts’ “succeeded one another in a dizzy jostle.” “Hurry, hurry! Faster, faster!” No boredom must be permitted, but neither must anything rouse the American citizen from “his bovine slumber.” Above all, American entertainment rejects thought. “A people stupefied by fugitive pleasures that are only skin-deep, and that are obtained without the smallest mental effort, will some day find itself incapable of doing any task that requires sustained resolution, or of advancing even a little through the energy of its thought.” Do not cite American manufacturing achievements against me, as counter-evidence. “A building rises two or three stories a week. Wagner needed twenty years to put together his Tetralogy, Littré a lifetime to build his dictionary.” Indeed, the greatest European buildings, the cathedrals, took many decades to complete.) American arts, the arts of the machine age, of the forward rush of Progress, “subject our hearts and minds to no tests,” striving to “gratify us to the limit” while “procur[ing] for us always a painful sensation as of unquenched thirst.” Although “its essence is motion,” it “leaves us dull and motionless, as if paralyzed.” Duhamel remarks to one American, you are poor because “Time is the greatest wealth, and you never have any.”
Still another form of American self-entertainment may be found in the football stadium, a structure “belong[ing] to that sort of architecture which is cynically frank about its utilitarian purpose.” That purpose is, once again, to rev up a “plebeian crowd, without distinction and without authority” with glee clubs, bands, songs, and shouts organized by the captain of cheerleading squad. “With a megaphone in her hand, and with her skirts flying in the wind, she screamed, flounced about, gave play to leg and haunch, and performed a suggestive and furious dance de ventre, like the dances of the prostitutes in the Mediterranean ports. From time to time she reassembled her aviary”— her cheerleading subordinates—and “encouraged it to a fresh outburst of shrill screaming.” The sound of America is not music; the sound of America is noise.
The result is what Tocqueville called soft despotism, attained partly by political means but mostly through culture. “This slavery has established itself so stealthily and advanced with such caution that men could hardly keep from accommodating themselves to it.” Who can argue against “obviously reasonable principles of hygiene, morality esthetics, and social civilization”? When enacted, such principles provide a sense of security to each citizen and “quickly assume the character and strength of organic habits.” “In the modern state, most men good-humoredly recognize their incompetence in a multitude of things, and modestly delegate every power to specialists whose zeal is all the greater because it rarely goes unpaid.” The modern states “go beyond their rights,” but citizens do not notice that they are on the road to serfdom. They travel that road on automobiles, with “rouged and powdered young girls pilot[ing] mastodons to and from school.” Those mastodons will soon end up in the elephant graveyard of the automobile junkyard, emblems of “the great country that does not produce in order to enjoy in moderation and in reason, but that enjoys as it acquires—feverishly and without sense—so that it may be able to produce a little bit more.” On the highway, Duhamel saw in the interior of a car “a symbol of the world of the future,” a “charming woman with manicured nails and beautiful legs, who smoked a cigarette while traveling between fifty and sixty miles an hour, while her husband, seated on the cushions of the rear seat, with a set jaw scribbled figures on the back of an envelope.”
In the middle of America is Chicago, “the tumor, the cancer, among cities,” a place of noise and “tainted fogs,” where gargantuan buildings are thrown up in months only to be torn down tomorrow, “putting into its place something else, bigger, more complex, and more expensive.” In such a city, “the artist “must fall into step,” obey, “either hurry or quit.” “All the ideas that animate” Chicago architecture “smell of fashion and of death.” Its slaughterhouses only add not only to the physical but to the spiritual stink, lending the city “the natural and intimate odor of American luxury” in sanctuaries of “carnivorous humanity, the realm of scientific death.” “You have put into practice a sort of bourgeois communism,” he tells one Chicagoan,” with the “same suppression of the individual.” Before seeing it, who could have imagined Chicago, “the ant-hill, the city that is not even ugly, but that is haggard and inhuman as a drunkard’s nightmare”? “I gazed through the window of the nocturnal city, unbridled and shaken with all the furies and with all the lust that seemed to me to be seeking everywhere, even in the rain-sodden clouds, the phantom of joy, pure human joy, forever driven from the world.” The “genius of America” does “not know the soundest ambition of all: the ambition to defy time.” In America, “everything is too big; everything discourages Apollo and Minerva.” Nature itself is tyrannized, as “the greatest river in the world,” the “legendary Mississippi,” which begins not far from Chicago, can barely be seen for the docks, oil tanks, and levees that crowd its banks.
In a sense, America opposes time’s ravages not by making monuments that will last but by idolizing statistics, by following the law of averages. Duhamel includes his dialogue with an American businessman, a manufacture of mattresses, “a genius in the field of trade.” They discussed insurance. Railroad crossings, they agreed, are dangerous. To reduce the danger, the railroad owners could invest in modifying the crossings but insurance against injuries and deaths is less expensive. When Duhamel ventured to suggest that numbers “do not cover every aspect of the question,” Mr. Stone (Duhamel isn’t above naming him that) dismisses such “sentimental considerations,” considerations which would falsify the arithmetic “without helping anyone.” But does this not “lower the standard of public morals?” No, Mr. Stone replies, because insurance “settles a loss that otherwise might have no chance of fair compensation.” To put it more systematically, Stone argues that railroad accidents will be more numerous than they would be if the railroad companies fixed the crossings, but those accident victims who would be injured at the improved crossing would go uncompensated. Duhamel suggests that it would be better, morally, if the number of accidents were reduced. Stone may well think that the companies would be sued by the (less numerous) victims, so they will need insurance anyway, although presumably their premiums would be lower. In his own business, he wants insurance against employee theft because he prefers not to “spy on my employees to find out whether they are honest” nor to “trust to their conception of good and evil, to scruples of their conscience.” He would rather insure each of them “for a sum corresponding to the harm he can do me.”
Duhamel observes that Mr. Stone has drifted into moral language, despite his attempt to brush it off as mere sentiment. He then brings down a rather heavy hammer, Henri Bergson, who distinguishes “the extensive,” which can be measured, translated into numbers, and “the intensive,” which “is subject to no measure.” “To that question insurance makes an answer that I find disquieting, but that all the rest of the world is beginning to approve: according to the insurance people, the common measure between the extensive and the intensive is money.” Stone replies that this is “one of the greatest achievements” of the insurance industry: it permits disputants to resolve their conflicts peacefully, “conflicts that threaten to perpetuate themselves in anger and hatred.” That is, qualitative/”intensive” disputes, if pressed, must lead to violence, precisely because they admit of no worldly measure. To this, Duhamel can only say that modern civilization oversimplifies, “pretend[ing] to harmonize the universe” by “commercial[ing] certain moral values.” Insofar as it does this, modern civilization becomes uncivilized, reducing acts of faith, hope, and contrition to a cash nexus.” Thus, “almost all scientific discoveries”—in this case, the “law of compensation”—are “big with a certain amount of good and with a notable quantity of evil.”
A more sinister example of the cash nexus in America was slavery. As did Tocqueville, Duhamel reserves a place for the dilemma of race in America. The slavery his predecessor saw is gone, but racial segregation remains. When another of his dialogic partners calls this problem insoluble, Duhamel meets his interlocutor with irony. “Until this moment I have never had any assured belief in immanent justice,” in the conviction “that every fault is punished in the end.” But now I see that “the unnumbered crimes of the slave-trade and of slavery that were the foundation of American prosperity cannot be expiated, and that those crimes have pierced the side of American happiness with an incurable wound—do you not find that, from the moral point of view, the idea is consolatory, and, all things considered, beautiful?”
Duhamel does not expect that this incurable wound will kill America, and in a way that is the problem. America prospered with slavery but it continues to prosper, to an even greater degree, without it. This makes it a menace. In Alabama, Duhamel asks a bull breeder why one of the bulls is “so bad-tempered.” He wasn’t always that way, the breeder recalls, but after he fought another bull and killed it, “he has been crazy with pride”; now knowing “what conquering is,” the bull “wants to conquer everything he sees.” For his part, Duhamel “thought sadly of the great peoples who glory suddenly intoxicates”—his own France, under Napoleon, cannot be far from his mind—peoples “who, alas, have no rings in their noses” with which they can be restrained, like the bad-tempered bull. America was not so much intoxicated by its victory in the Great War but at “the moment when the home market became too small for the United States,” and it took its commercial and manufacturing way of life worldwide.
Tocqueville saw the future of Europe, of the world, in the democracy he saw in America. Duhamel undertakes the same attempt. “By means of this America I am questioning the future; I am trying to determine that path that, willy-nilly, we must follow.” He invokes Maurice Maeterlinck’s comparison of modern life to the nests of ants and termites—the “same effacement of the individual, the same progressive reduction and unification of social types, the same organization of the group into special castes, the same submission of everyone to those obscure exigencies which Maeterlinck names the genius of the hive or of the ant-hill.” Human beings differ from insects, however, in their inventiveness. They will find new ways to subject themselves to inhuman tyranny. And so, “if steel machinery refuses to make profitable progress, nothing remains except to turn to man and modify the human machine” by means of “scientific human breeding and selection,” to “create a body of people, sexless, devoid of passion, exclusively devoted to the instruction, the feeding, and the defense of the city?” Eugenics had already been proposed and assembly lines implemented in Duhamel’s lifetime.
Those who have emigrated to America are dupes, “miserable multitudes” drawn to the light of Liberty’s torch like insects to the flame. “What has their new country given them in exchange for their sacrifices? It has given them new needs and new desires. The whole philosophy of this industrial dictatorship leads to this unrighteous scheme: to impose appetites and needs on man.” But “the supreme luxury is silence, fresh air, real music, intellectual liberty, and the habit of joyous living,” “delicate riches” for which no one in America cares. Americans only want “to keep selling, even on credit, above all, on credit!” pushing back “the limits of the market, unceasingly to put off till the morrow the threatening saturation point.” Immigration homogenizes, lending itself to the same thoughts, the same desires to produce and consume; with commercial and personal credit, faith in money has replaced faith in God. “Spread everywhere with infinite variations, the American system now has the whole world for its field,” seemingly “compatible with every political system,” turning even the Soviet Union “into a colony” of American materialism. And it is inescapable, since “there are no revolutions among the insects.”
The only hope is in collapse, unpredictable collapse: if “someday without anyone’s knowing why, without anyone’s foreseeing it, without anyone’s succeeding in explaining it after the event, the incredible machine foes off the track, collapses, and falls in cinders. For in the case of man, you never know.”
Duhamel’s wrote his jeremiad in the name of the old European civilization, against modernity and its attempt to conquer nature with the technologies generated by Baconian science. The Croatian New-Right political scientist, Tomislav Sunic detests that civilization as well, hearkening to a certain conception of pre-Biblical, pre-Socratic Europe. But unlike Duhamel, he sees in America and “Americanism” the nadir of the West, biblical and philosophic. “The former European conservative palaver needs to be reexamined.”
But New-Right neopaganism is not his initial stance, although he does devote a few sentences, early on, to conjecturing that “Americanism…could have become a true motivating force of creativity for a large number of people of European extraction” in the United States had it “renounced Biblical moralism and adopted instead a neo-Darwinian, evolutionary, and racialist approach in its domestic and foreign policy” (as indeed Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century). “Racialism and eugenics had numerous supporters in America and both fields were well combined with early American liberalism,” that is, progressivism.” For the most part, however, in his early chapters he limits himself to deploring America as the product of Enlightenment—that is to say, modern—notions, especially equality and progress.
Egalitarianism and progressivism made Homo americanus and Homo sovieticus “twin brothers.” The difference was that the American elites were smarter than the Soviet elites, preferring an easygoing soft despotism, the ideology of “fun,” to the “physical terror” wielded by the Leninists, which provoked resistance. “Communism kills the body, in contrast to Americanism which kills the soul,” but most people would rather let their souls die than have their bodies die. Sunic assigns the cause of the twinship of American and Soviet man to “the same principles of egalitarianism, however much their methods varied in name, time and place.”
The problem is obvious: the equality described as a self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence is founded on natural right, the Soviet principle of equality on historical right. The American Founders hold that all men are created equal, but only with regard to their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and not on the ’empirical’ grounds of equal intelligence or moral character. Few if any of the American Founders themselves supposed themselves the moral equals of George Washington, to take one example. The founders of the Soviet Union held not that all men are created equal (as atheists, they denied that men were created, in the first place), but that ‘history,’ conceived as the conflict between socioeconomic classes, proceeds ‘dialectically’ toward an inevitable outcome in egalitarian communalism. Further, the effort to hurry ‘history’ along to that consummation was utterly unrestricted by any regard for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or, of course, property, which was held to be the shibboleth of the hated ‘bourgeoisie’ and its ‘capitalism.’ It is simply not true that “discourse about the end of history has been a standard theme in America over the last two hundred years.” The Americans argued not from ‘history’ but from natural rights, holding democratic and commercial republicanism to be the best regime for securing natural rights.
Despite his animus against the Declaration of Independence and his esteem for the racialist Southern writer, George Fitzhugh, Sunic more or less sees this, although he prefers not to admit it openly. He argues, rather, that once the flood gates of egalitarianism open—however modest this may appear at the beginning—the logic of equality will gather momentum and will end up eventually in some protean form of proto-communist temptation.” That is, Sunic avails himself of the same logic of historicism that he deplores, although in this case it is a logic of inevitable decline, not of progress. He equally partakes of the relativism of historicism, dismissing Thomas Jefferson as merely “a man of his epoch” whose “intellectual legacy can only be understood within the spirit of his time, ” who “certainly did not consider native Indians or Africans to be his equals”—a claim that ignores the actual understanding of equality Jefferson propounded. But to the historicist, it doesn’t really matter what Jefferson thought. “What Jefferson and his likes had in mind is of little importance; what is important is what his successors and non-European American interpreters had in mind two centuries later,” namely, “justification for copying paleo-communistic practices,” such as thought-policing on the basis of ‘political correctness.’ Historicism commits him to the perilous strategy of political prediction. There are, he claims, “looming inter-racial riots in America, which will likely break up America,” he claims, without explaining why such riots, were they to occur, would ruin the country any more than the ones that actually happened in the last century did.
Sunic blames the epidemic of political correctness on the post-World War II effort to sustain the regime change in western Germany in the aftermath of Nazism. “Although Fascism, as an organized political system, no longer poses a threat to Western democracies, any criticism—however mild it may be—of egalitarianism and multiculturalism can earn the author or politician the stigma of ‘fascism,’ or even worse, of ‘anti-Semitism.'” Thus, “principles of vilification of an intellectual opponent or a political adversary have become the rule in postmodernity.” One must ask, when has vilification of intellectual opponents and political adversaries not been the rule? Ancient Athens, whether pre- or post-Socratic? Rome? China, ancient or modern? Have intellectual opponents and political adversaries often been subject not merely to vilification but death, more or less throughout human history?
At the end of World War II, “the liberal and communist tenets of free speech and freedom of expression did not apply at all to the defeated side which had earlier been branded as ‘the enemy of humanity.'” But when were freedom of speech and of expression tenets of communism? And was fascism not in principle an enemy of humanity, being based, in its Nazi version and in its later Italian version, upon a doctrine of biologically-based racial superiority, a superiority so pronounced that it claimed to entitle its proponents to enslave and kill members of the inferior races?
“The entire West, including America itself, has become a victim of collective guilt which, strangely enough, is induced more by intellectual self-denial and by Christian-inspired atonement, and less by state repression,” since the despotism remains ‘soft,’ needing not “to resort to violent means” for its enforcement but by “a cultural smearing campaign.” One might reply to this, that does not need to subscribe to that soft despotism, which has indeed prevailed in many sectors of intellectual and political life in the West, to blame it on influences other than regime change in postwar Germany or on Christianity. It is indeed to a substantial extent true that “post-communist and post-Marxist intellectuals” “relentlessly avocat the ideology of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and globalism.” It is silly to blame this on “Judeo-Centric modern historiography.” But that is what Sunic proceeds to do in the second half of the book.
The argument runs as follows. The real founding date of America was 1619, not 1776 or 1789, when the Constitution was ratified. “Biblical vocabulary has played a much stronger role in American public affairs than the much-lauded American constitutionalism or the praised rule of law” because “despite the fact that America’s founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment, opposed to religious fanaticism of any sort, the Calvinist heritage continued to have the upper hand in formulating the American political character and American society at large.” Sunic offers no proof of this, and no proof of his charge that America’s “obsession with moralistic preaching borders on mass delirium,” unbeknownst to “most Americans.” As for religious freedom, “what is the point of talking about tolerance in a system where Biblical conformism” in the form of Bible-established moral convictions, even among ‘secularists,’ “is considered a norm by all”? Worse still, “of all Christian denominations, Calvinism was the closest to the Jewish religion and…the United States owes its very existence to Jews,” some of whom bankrolled the American Revolution. “From its inception, America was an ideal country for Jews.” More, “Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and American in their diverse Christian modalities,” with “postmodern Americanism” being “just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset.”
This was understood by “the best anti-Semitic brains” of the 1930s, who were harnessed by “the government in National Socialist Germany” to “document every nook and cranny of Judaism in the Soviet Union and America.” But alas, Sunic sighs, “at the beginning of the 21st century, these books are either banned or derided as unscientific and anti-Semitic prose.” It is not clear why anti-Semitic brains would not produce anti-Semitic prose, or why those opposed to anti-Semitism are wrong to describe their prose as anti-Semitic. But to be fair to Sunic, what he wants to say is that almost all anti-Semitism is ill-founded because it is Christian, or Christian-derived, and “Was Jesus not a Jew?” His point is to formulate a way “to counter strong Jewish influence in Americanism without lapsing into anti-Semitism” of the sort that Christianity-ladened anti-Semites uphold. Sunic is, strictly speaking, anti-Judaic and therefore anti-Christian. [1] “The West, and particularly America will cease to be Israelite once it leaves this neurosis” of “yearning to become Israelite” and “returns to its local myths,” the myths that predated the arrival of Judaism and Christianity in Europe, when the anti-Semite of Europe and America ceases “lug[ging] behind himself a Levantine deity that is not of European cultural origin.”
Sunic does not expect a revival of ancient paganism, preferring a “modern version of it, “a certain sensibility and a ‘way of life.'” The effort to construct this sensibility will include recurrence to “ancient myths, fairy tales, and forms of folklore that bear the peculiar mark of pre-Christian themes,” but much more “forging another civilization, or rather, a modernized version of scientific and cultural Hellenism,” with the polytheism of the ancients translated into a moral code that “stres[ses] courage, personal honor, and spiritual and physical self-surpassing”—that is, a warrior ethic that acknowledges hierarchy against egalitarianism, including the hierarchy of “biological Darwinism. “In pagan cosmogony, man alone is considered a forger of his own destiny (faber suae fortunae), exempt from historical determinism, from any ‘divine grace,’ or economic and material constraints.” At the same time, Sunic claims that the polytheism of pre-Christian religions “offers homage to all ‘gods’ and, above all…respects the plurality of all customs, political and social systems, and all conceptions of the world—of which these gods are sublime expressions”—well, except for the God of the Bible. “Democracy and independence—all of this existed among the early predecessors of Americans in ancient Europe, albeit in its own unique social and religious settings.” Avoiding such severe Biblical dichotomies as good and evil, the pagans were so much more tolerant than Western civilization became, under the Bible’s baleful influence.
This is, of course, rubbish. Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was practiced among ancient Europeans (including the Greeks) as well as by ancient Americans. And indeed it was practiced by the best (and worst) anti-Semitic brains in Germany and Russia during the 1930s. Judaism prohibits it. Nor did the ancients regard themselves as masters of fate; fate may favor the bold, favor the ‘makers,’ but no one in pre-Socratic Greece or in the ancient world generally denied its ultimate authority. As for toleration, religious or otherwise, the Greeks killed Socrates and the Romans killed Christians. “Who can dispute that Athens was the homeland of European America before Jerusalem became its painful edifice?” Who can dispute that pre-Biblical Athens was every bit as warlike and intolerant as post-Biblical Athens?
Sunic attempts to leverage these claims into a critique of U. S. foreign policy. He dissents from Europeans who claim that American military interventions in the post-World War II decades have “had as a sole objective economic imperialism.” (He does, however, praise the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, who “had some influence on the views held by National Socialist Germany”; actually, he tutored Hitler and Rudolf Hess during their imprisonment in the early 1920s. Haushofer claimed that “American economic imperialism [was] irreconcilable with the notion of Germany’s self-sufficient large spaces (Grossraum), i.e. an international regime best suited for co-existence with different states and cultures”— a capacious and tolerant place, indeed, had it not entailed genocide and enslavement of ‘inferior races,’ at least in its Nazi version.) The intention has rather been “the desire to spread American democracy around the world,” an ambition that military challengers to America “ran the risk of being placed outside the category of humanity or labeled as a terrorist.” He fails to produce an example of American policy makers who have placed military “challengers” to America as outside the category of humanity. As for the terrorists, well, they are terrorists. “Why not point out that Bible-inspired American ideology can be as intolerant as Islamism”? I can only answer: probably because it isn’t.
Sunic doesn’t limit his complaints to the postwar era, however. Pre-war Germany “was on the way of becoming a major Euro-Asian steam-roller ready to challenge America’s access to energy sources in the rimland countries of the Middle East and the Pacific Basin.” If so, why were Americans not at war with the biggest empire in the world at that time, Great Britain? As Sunic would have it, America was really to blame for Hitler’s declaration of war, since the United States had engaged in “illegal supplying of war material to the Soviet Union and Great Britain” before that declaration; had fought German submarines in the Atlantic; and, horror of horrors, had permitt[ed] “incessant anti-German media hectoring by American Jews.” He quotes with approval the assessment of “German scholar Giselher Wirsing, who had close ties with propaganda officials in the Third Reich,” who wrote, “In degenerated Puritanism lies, side by side with Judaism, America’s inborn danger.” But never mind, regimes and policies aside, even if “there were some replica of America, with the same geographical size, the same military capability, and sharing the same democratic values—it is very likely that present day American would sooner or later find itself on a collision course” with it. Why does Sunic think so? Because, for all his interest in culture, Sunic prefers not to notice the importance of political regimes and the obvious fact, understood since Montesquieu, that commercial republics don’t make war against each other.
Sunic concedes that it might, realistically speaking, be “preferable to have American-staged security to some vague notions replete with fear and violence.” Unfortunately, ‘Judaic’ America instead sets for itself “absolute foes that merit total annihilation,” as seen, he alleges, in the American Civil War, the “firebombing of defenseless European cities during the Second World War,” and the overall “destruction of Germany.” The argument founders on the observation that the secessionist states were scarcely annihilated, the defenseless European cities were the sites of the German military industries, and Germany wasn’t destroyed. In fact, West Germany, as distinguished from Soviet-controlled East Germany, became the economic powerhouse of Europe within a generation, thanks in part to American aid and protection from the Soviet empire. “Nobody knows the exact number of Germans killed by American forces during and after World War II,” although one must observe that is likely to be considerably fewer than 11 million—the generally accepted number of innocents murdered by the Nazis, quite apart from the deaths inflicted in the wars they started. Predictably, Sunic calls that number exaggerated. Sure, maybe it was only seven or eight million.
As for ‘postmodernism,’ Sunic follows the French scholar Christian Ruby in distinguishing it from “neo-modernity.” The latter is “more convivial and more egalitarian in its sources, having its philosophical root in the philosophy of Kant and universal reason,” all of which Sunic despises. Postmodernity “has its inspiration in nihilist and pro-fascist philosophers, Nietzsche and Heidegger.” (Nietzsche, who died two decades before Mussolini invented fascism, utterly despised German nationalism, but let that pass.) Sunic has a good old time ridiculing Leftists for appropriating postmodernism for egalitarian causes (“they abhor every aspect of fascism yet, on the other, their theories are inconceivable without the extrapolation of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s prose”). Postmodernity’s only good aspect is that “it is self-destructive.” In his characteristically desultory fashion, he soon turns to lauding George Fitzhugh, the pro-slavery author of Cannibals All! “Black slavery was to Fitzhugh a matter of fact; a social bond necessary for black Americans, who due to their incapacity to equally participate in free trade and cut throat competition, are far better off in farm bondage in the South supervised by a paternalistic white farmer, than working for a Northern white crook who pontificates about human rights and strips them of human dignity. In what sense are 21st century blacks in America better off than their predecessors?” (They aren’t enslaved, for starters, and exhibit no inclination to return to either slavery or post-slavery Southern segregation.) Blacks, according to Sunic, along with “other races and individuals,” lack “the stamina and the genes to compete in the free market.” “Only a true aristocratic society, where leaders are role models, can have lasting legitimacy.”
“In the near future, Americanism, similar to the former system of communism, will only function as an elementary form of mass survivalism in which interracial wars will be the norm.” Or so Sunic hopes.
Note
- That anti-Semitism has its origins not fundamentally in racism but in anti-Judaism is the argument of Dennis Praeger and Joseph Telushkin: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. For a review, see “Anti-Jewish Malice” on this website under “Bible Notes.”
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