England: Hitler's Inspiration by Brendan Clifford Book Review: Manuel Sarkisyanz, PhD: Hitler's English Inspirers.
348pp. Bibliographical Index. Index.
ISBN 0 85034 086 1.
Athol Books, 2003, €25.00, £20.00.Nobody who reads Mein Kampf can doubt that Hitler admired England and modelled himself on it. The only question is whether his admiration was soundly-based, or whether he caricatured England in the process of imitating it. Manuel Sarkisyanz's book gives the definitive answer to that question. The England which Hitler admired was the real England—the State and society which rejected the French Revolution and the general rights of man and asserted privileged rights for itself; which in its internal structure was an ordered hierarchy based on leadership and deference; which established ample Lebensraum for its people in other countries; which established an impassable racial distance between itself and the native peoples of those countries; and which bred in the lower middle and working classes—which were deferential at home—a mentality which enabled them to function as a master race in the colonies and possessions of Greater Britain, and with regard to foreigners in general. Nazism was in substance an attempt to Anglicize the German state and German society, neither of which had the inherent aptitude for these things which seemed to be present among the English.
The Anglicizing aspect of Nazism, and England's appreciation of its German proteges is extensively documented by Sarkisyanz. (I hesitate to refer to him as Professor Sarkisyanz because of the way that title has been thoroughly debased in Ireland and largely debased in England in recent times. Of all the Professors I have known, there is only one who is not a charlatan, and I did not realise for many years that he was a Professor. But Sarkisyanz is a Professor as in olden times and this book is based on a series of lectures delivered at Heidelberg University.)
I have been puzzling over the intimate relationship between Nazism and English Imperialism ever since I read Mein Kampf in Slieve Luacra over forty years ago. But one feature of that relationship had escaped my notice altogether: the founding of the Nazi educational system on the model of the English Public Schools, and the friendly interest taken by the headmasters of English Public Schools in their German imitators. Education is entirely outside my experience, and I am not the person to judge Sarkisyanz's argument in this respect. He takes Dr. Arnold of Rugby, Professor the Rev. Charles Kingsley, and the schooldays of Tom Brown as described by Tom Hughes, as typifying the ethos of English education. I know something of Kingsley and Hughes, the "Christian Socialists" who propagated the "muscular Christianity" which was an important component of the popular Imperialism that functioned as a kind of English national culture during the half-century before 1914. I saw a residue of it around 1960 during a brief acquaintance with the Working Men's College in Camden Town (London), and what I saw corresponds with what Sarkisyanz says.
The function of the Public Schools was to forge the middle classes, provincial yokels, and especially talented individuals from the lower middle classes into regimented expressions of Imperial will, inoculated against the temptations of culture by having a smattering of it sprinkled on them, and toughened against feelings of human affinity by the internal regime of the schools, so that they might go anywhere in the world and be immune. And that is what Hitler sought to reproduce in the NAPOLAs—an acronym for the German of National Political Educational Institutions.
"The way the new English leaders and subordinate leaders were being trained; the inculcation of spontaneous conformity (what the Nazis lauded as Gleichschaltung); the suppression of the social moral impulse and particularly of intellectual individuality; the moulding of individuals into a single type—all this meant that 'oddities' were jeered out… with no exception made for genius… This was the contribution of the rising middle-classes to the very English elite culture of spontaneous uniformity through a 'mass production of gentlemen of a standardized pattern'" (p120).
"It is plain that developing muscles, rather than feeling and spirit, was the task of elite educational institutions. And their products—disciplined rather than sensitive or thoughtful—playing cricket and rowing, were (and possibly still are) considered 'infinitely superior to philosophising German louts and spindly French intellectuals arguing about politics and art'. (Those attitudes persist amongst the English, though Germans have not philosophised for quite some time)" (p111).
"The motto of the NAPOLAs… was 'Be hard'. 'The harder and more rigorous the training, the better the finished product: and I have no doubt that this is achieved'. So remarked Christopher Sidgwick, a British Public Schoolmaster, after his 1937 inspection of Hitler's elite training—truly satisfied by the National Socialist parallel to the English models" (p120).
This attitude has declined in England. A generation ago, in the brief era of Ted Heath and Harold Wilson, it seemed that it had been discarded. There has, however, been a resurgence of it under Thatcher and Blair—the lower middle class upstart and the finished Public Schoolboy. The social-democratic mode of development has been aborted, and I would not bet against a complete reversion to the era of "muscular Christianity", minus the Christianity.
But the Germans give no sign that they are reverting to what they were before they tried to become English at Hitler's bidding. For two centuries Germany meant philosophy, music and poetry. It appears to have subverted itself in all of those spheres through its gigantic attempt to make itself a state and society of the English kind—as England wiped out its traditional life through the savage iconoclasm of its state-inspired and state-controlled Reformation. In Germany everything was sacrificed to statehood—perhaps necessarily so, in view of what England was doing to the world—and now it is incapable of being a state, except in the formal sense of occupying a large political space at the centre of Europe.
The historian who symbolises the resurgence of Victorian England under Thatcher and Blair is Andrew Roberts. He writes to be read by people who think about public affairs, rather than by students to pass exams. A few years ago, when a statue of Bomber Harris was unveiled, many of the sensitive souls who had developed in the social democratic era, were upset. They asked what was the military purpose of burning the civilian populations of Dresden and other undefended German cities in 1945 when the war was won, if not over. Some thought it was designed to obstruct the Russian advance and marked the start of the Cold War. Roberts said its purpose was not military but moral: it was to burn into the brains of the Germans the moral principle that they must never again confront England. And it worked. Leaving aside the Christian Democracy of the Adenauer period, it seems to me that the German mind is a kind of English Crown Colony. Habermas may jabber away pretentiously as if there were still a German intelligentsia, but it is only jabbering. Thought is extinct. And even beyond the region of general thought there is obedience. The most socialist thing in Europe in the 1990s was the (West) German economic system. People were accustomed to it, and were happy with it, but it is now being eroded because Blairite Britain says it must—and foremost amongst the British propagandists for the capitalist reform of the German economy was Kim Howells, the Minister for Competition, who was one of the mindless militants of Scargill's suicidal socialism twenty years ago.
Sarkisyanz is the last German intellectual. He is able to be a German intellectual precisely because he is not German. His family background is Armenian/Russian. His parents emigrated to Iran when he was a child and he spent the Second World War there—and he says that, when the Russians invaded jointly with the British in 1941, they dropped anti-British propaganda leaflets. Those leaflets had been prepared in Baku in 1940 when Britain, having merely declared war on Germany, was trying to start a shooting war with Russia, first in Finland and then in the Caucasus. Very little has been said in British war histories about Allied preparations to bomb the Baku oil industry, but it is now admitted. The Russians printed millions of propaganda leaflets in preparations for a counter-move, and used them even though a late change of circumstance made Britain an ally. This incident—which is not related in the book—brings out the contingency of the British war with Germany. Sarkisyanz takes it that Russia was the fundamental enemy and this explains the apparent irrationality of British foreign policy in the late 1930s. And Churchill tacitly concedes that point in his War Memoirs, even though his Man of Destiny role was won by keeping the war with Germany going until it led to the arrival of Stalin as an ally and Saviour. And, even though I do not like an understanding of events which is so closely determined, the only alternative I could find to the explanation of British foreign policy as a bungled attempt to direct the energy of Nazi Germany against Bolshevik Russia, is that it was simply insane.
Sarkisyanz's world outlook is certainly not Bolshevik, or even Menshevik. It lies outside the Marxist spectrum. He says his parents had no political affiliation, but if his orientation reflects theirs, I would guess that it was Right S.R.—the wing of the Socialist Revolutionary movement that was not Marxist. I mentioned names, in search of a response, and the name that got the most direct response was Pitirim Sorokin, who was the most admirable of all the intellectuals who played a part in the Russian Revolution. Sorokin maintained a Right SR resistance until 1922, when he went to America and became one of the more interesting sociologists. Sarkisyanz knew him in the USA, where he also knew Kerensky and learned from him that the British Government undermined his position in the Summer of 1917 by their dealings with the warlord, General Kornilov, who might be seen as a pioneering Fascist, though an ineffectual one because his position was too simply counter-revolutionary. This is detailed in the book.
Sarkisyanz therefore is not only the last German intellectual but also the last intellectual of the bourgeois revolution. He is a displaced Russian, but still a Russian by temperament, with a liking for Nekrassov, the poet of the people. He is a German by intellectual affinity, becoming one after Germany had ceased to be itself, and preserving the outlook of the old Germany in spite of the new. In recent times he has found scope for the idealism of the bourgeois revolution in Mexico, with relation to the Indians. And in this book he has taken revenge on England for the example which, as the leading power in the world, it gave to the Germans when their world was thrown into flux—England also being chiefly responsible for throwing it into flux.
The England/Nazi relationship is not entirely ignored by academics in England. Some detail work is done in obscure corners, with no conclusions drawn, and more with a view to explaining it away than to explaining it. One of these academics, whose writing parallels Sarkisyanz's in a particular sphere, was asked to supply a Foreword to the English translation. He refused on the grounds that it had an Irish publisher. Although that is a very sound reason for a respectable academic, there was also an unspoken reason—that he refused to associate himself with conclusions which followed coherently from his own work.
The book has an Irish publisher because no English publisher would have it. And it is published by Athol Books because no commercial publisher came forward when Sarkisyanz advertised for one with a whole-page synopsis in Books Ireland. Ireland is currently in the grip of Know-Nothingism with regard to the history of Europe, led by the magazine Translation Ireland (Editor Marco Sonzogni, chief guru Hans Christian Oeser). But the English edition still fared better than the German, where it found no publisher and no periodical would accept an advert for it—not even the bold investigative magazine, Der Spiegel—when Sarkisyanz published it himself. It is treated as neo-Nazi literature by the state which flourished after 1950 by maintaining an extensive continuity with the Nazi state. The kind of Anglophilia that motivated Hitler no longer exists in Germany. He sought to understand England, the most successful state of modern times, in order to imitate it. A different kind of Anglophilia now prevails in Germany—a kind which obeys and does not attempt to understand.
I have long had it in mind to write a book on The Pre-History of Fascism In England. The pre-history of Fascism in Germany has been written about extensively in England, some writers tracing it back to the mauling which the German tribes gave the Roman Legions in the Teutoberg Forest 2,000 years ago. It is only fair that the same standards should be applied to English history as England applies to Germany. And that is what Sarkisyanz has done.
By doing it he gave great offence to the Heidelberg University authorities. Unable to sack him, they removed his lectures from the printed syllabus. He took them to the Administrative Court and obliged them to revoke this breach of academic freedom. Would such a thing be conceivable in Ireland?
He was offered his professorship in Heidelberg forty years ago after publishing a book on Millennarianism in the Russian Revolution. He has the interesting idea that Bolshevism was the outcome of Christianity (an idea expressed by Blok during the Revolution, in a poem called The Twelve as far as I remember), while Nazism was the outcome of Humanism (a view expressed somewhere by C.C. O'Brien, I think). I don't know if Sarkisyanz has developed this contrast anywhere, but I can see that there is a case for it. And it is in accordance with the easy transition from capitalist democracy to Fascism—and from Fascism back to capitalist democracy in the case of Spain—while a comprehensive rupture always marked the transition from capitalist democracy to Bolshevism, and no state of the Bolshevik kind ever made the easy transition to capitalist democracy that was made by Spain. Christianity is only the humbug of the capitalist state, and a state forged in earnest through the spirit of Christianity must be dysfunctional in the Christian capitalist world.
Sarkisyanz is too kind—or too Christian—when it comes to accounting for the difference in practical outcome between fascism as applied in England and in Germany. He takes it to be because the "muscular Christianity" was in some degree authentically Christian. I think that a great many differences in circumstance should be allowed for before that conclusion is warranted. English fascism was applied deliberately over a period of centuries under the aegis of a securely established State, which fought a multitude of wars and was only defeated once—by its American colony, and that defeat was enacted far from the homeland. If it had been defeated in the 1914 War, and in all probability it would have been but for the entry of America, it would probably have responded much as Germany did. (And, because of the way Britain entered the war, and conducted it, a settlement would have been tantamount to a defeat, since the war was in no sense defensive on the British side, its only European object being to crush Germany.) When defeat seemed an imminent prospect early in 1918, the Pemberton Billing affair showed that there was a Fascist movement ready and waiting.
In any large modern state with a capitalist economy there are conflicting social elements which are held in functional combination. In the Great War, three major European states were destroyed and the social elements were set free. In Russia a new system was founded on one of the elements and the state set itself the object of destroying the others. In Central Europe the freely-conflicting social elements were forcibly brought back into functional combination by Fascism. At least that is the conclusion I reached thirty years ago and I have never found reason to change it. Taking this to be the case, it follows that Fascism has existed in dispersed form in the British state ever since it settled down about three hundred years ago. Heads were regularly broken during the free conflict of the preceding 60 years, until the emergence of an effective aristocracy capable of eliciting deference from the other classes enabled the conflicting elements to be held in functional combination by means of routine methods which were sometimes almost legal.
The splitting apart of the social elements in the twentieth century, in a capitalist economy which had made itself absolutely dependent on profiting from world trade, obviously needed more drastic action to restore the social combination than was required in the 17th century. But, what was done in a rush in Germany in the aftermath of defeat, and in a condition of deliberately applied national humiliation by the victor, is what was done at leisure in Britain in conditions of security, prosperity, and military triumph. And the racism and territorial expansionism of German Fascism had their clearest precedents in England.
Hitler's inspiration was England, rather than any particular line of Englishmen. The English who declared themselves Fascist influenced him least of all. Hitler looked to the mainstream rather than the fringe, and to actions rather than words—although he specifically acknowledged his debt to the English war propaganda in the use of words. The English writers and politicians particularly singled out by Sarkisyanz are Burke, Carlyle, Disraeli, Baden-Powell, Churchill, Curzon, Milner, Kingsley, Kipling, Neville Chamberlain, G.B. Shaw and H.G. Wells. I put it to him that Carlyle was greatly admired by the Irish nationalists closest to his own outlook, the Young Irelanders, but he would not be tempted into any diversions, and rightly so.
I would, however, raise a quibble about General Lettow-Vorbeck, not only because his long and effective resistance to greatly superior British forces in East Africa in 1914-18 were to some extent an inspiration to the Irish who in 1919 were not willing to just sit down and let their vote be ignored by the British, but because, whatever he might have done in S.W. Africa some years earlier, his actions in East Africa were the beginnings of racial equality between Europeans and natives in Africa.
On the question of extermination, his most quoted author is Sir Charles Dilke. there was a time when England was very frank about the need to exterminate peoples in other countries. Others are as frank today:
"Morris contends that… 'The great American democracy could not have been achieved without the extermination of the Indians. There are cases in which the general and final good justifies difficult and cruel deeds that are carried out in the course of history' …In other words, under specific conditions, specific circumstances, Morris believes that it is possible to justify genocide. In the case of the Indians, it is the existence of the American nation. In the case of the Palestinians, it is the existence of the Jewish state… The circumstantial justifications for transfer and for genocide are exactly the same… If, for instance, you have to expel, and those expelled insist on returning to their homes, there's no choice but to exterminate them. Morris documents this solution in his book on Israel's border wars in the 1950s."
Morris is the eminent Israeli historian, Benny Morris. An interview with him, published in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, is here commented on by Adi Ophir, a Jewish Philosophy professor in Tel Aviv University (translation, Daniel Breslau).Extermination is today being practised on principle in the name of the progress of civilisation in the Middle East. It is something different in kind from tribal conflict in Rwanda where an oppressed majority responded in the only way it could to bloody conquest by a smaller but more aristocratic, better organised and better armed tribe (backed by the Americans and the Ugandans); or to the upsurge of Balkan nationalist antagonism when the state that had contained it for half a century was pulled apart at the behest of Britain and Germany. The precedent for this civilising genocide is not Nazism, because it never tires of telling the world that it is the only democratic state in the Middle East. The precedent for it is found in the state which set the Zionist project in motion (knowing very well that it was a genocidal project: only simpletons could not have known). But that state was also Hitler's inspiration: a fact for which Sarkisyanz gives chapter and verse.
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