Many people could benefit from an approach that prioritizes their interests over loyalty to abstract principles. <\/p>\n
Should not loyalty to your group be a principle? <\/p>\n
Extending this type of thinking to the West might well lead to more rights for majorities and fewer rights for minorities. How could a country with one dominant religious and racial identity become stronger from the admission of many races and religions? Then it would be up to the minority groups to make the case that their presence is a blessing. <\/p>\n
When a country is at war, it employs censorship in its group interest. <\/p>\n
Maybe it is impossible to have complete free speech. Perhaps every society has to hold certain things, certain symbols, certain identities, sacred. Perhaps every society to survive needs a soft totalitarianism in certain areas.<\/p>\n
Is this fierce protection of Jews in the following story anti-Christian? Jews and the Christian missionaries described have clashing interests and when Jews assert their interests, that is not good for the Christians. Similarly, when Gentiles assert their group interests, that is called anti-Semitism when it clashes with Jewish interests. <\/p>\n
From the group Jewish Israel<\/a>:<\/p>\n \nJewishIsrael is pleased to see that a growing number of concerned columnists across the religious and political divide are covering the severity of the missionary problem in Israel. Writers such as Diane Bederman and Donny Fuchs have persevered despite the controversy and unpleasant challenges that come with exploring territory which is deemed \u201cuntouchable\u201d in an era marked by Israel\u2019s enormous dependence on evangelical Christian support.<\/p>\n Sacrificing principles which are fundamental to Judaism, Jewish identity and Jewish continuity should not be done in the name of \u201cdemocracy\u201d, \u201ctolerance\u201d or\u201d freedom of religion and expression\u201d. This is an issue all Jews can agree on regardless of political views or degree of religious observance…<\/p>\n The issue of increasing fundamental Christian influence in Israel should be of worry to every Jew concerned with the continuity of Judaism. This is an issue which should unify the Diaspora and Israeli communities rather than cause divisions along political and religious lines. JewishIsrael encourages thinking Jewish writers and activists to honestly explore this very challenging problem via a Jewish perspective, which requires putting partisan politics aside and prioritizing the survival of Israel as a unique Jewish nation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Historian Paul Johnson writes in his book Modern Times about the 20th Century<\/a>:<\/p>\n The new Weimar constitution was drawn up under the guidance of The cleavage within the constitution might not have mattered so In point of fact, it was the Easterners who had ruled Germany For the moment, however, the Westerners were triumphant. Of course Berlin, with its 4 million population, held the primacy. What particularly distinguished Berlin was its theatre, by far the Berlin was also the world-capital in the related fields of opera and The Right, in short, could practise violence with little fear of legal The universities and especially the professoriate were overwhelm- By sheer bad luck, the most widely read and influential book in Neatly complementing Spengler’s analysis was the work of two Spurred on by their professors, the German student body, which It is probably true to say that Hitler’s cultural assets were the Many people could benefit from an approach that prioritizes their interests over loyalty to abstract principles. Should not loyalty to your group be a principle? Extending this type of thinking to the West might well lead to more rights for … Continue reading
\nthe great sociologist Max Weber. It gave parliament full financial
\nsovereignty for the first time. It was supposed to embody all the best
\nfeatures of the American constitution. But it had one serious
\nweakness. The President, elected for a seven-year term, was not the
\nhead of government: that was the Chancellor, a party figure respon-
\nsible to parliament. But the President, under Article 48, was endowed
\nwith emergency powers when parliament was not in session. From
\n1923 onwards this article was pervertedly invoked whenever par-
\nliament was deadlocked. And parliament was often deadlocked,
\nbecause proportional representation prevented the development of a
\ntwo-party system and absolute majorities. To many Germans, who
\nhad been brought up on the notion that Germany and the Germans
\nwere a metaphysical, organic unity, the spectacle of a divided,
\njammed parliament was unnatural. The argument that parliament
\nwas the forum in which quite genuine and unavoidable conflicts of
\ninterest were peacefully resolved was alien to them, unacceptable.
\nInstead they saw the Reichstag as a mere theatre for the enactment of
\n‘the game of the parties’, while the real, eternal, organic and
\nhonourable Germany was embodied in the person of the President
\nand Article 48…<\/p>\n
\nmuch had it not reflected a much deeper division in German
\nsociety, and indeed in German minds. I call this the East\u2014 West
\ndivision, and it is one of the central themes of modern times, in so
\nfar as they have been influenced by Germany’s destiny. The princi-
\npal characteristic of the pre-war German regime of princes, generals
\nand landowners, the law-professors who endowed it with academic
\nlegitimacy, and the Lutheran pastors who gave it moral authority,
\nwas illiberalism. This ruling caste hated the West with passionate
\nloathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and
\nlack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied. They
\nwanted to keep Germany ‘pure’ of the West, and this was one
\nmotive for their plans to resume the medieval conquest and set-
\ntlement of the East, carving out a continental empire for Germany
\nwhich would make her independent of the Anglo-Saxon world
\nsystem. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between
\n‘civilization’, which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immo-
\nral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and
\n‘culture’, which was pure, national, German, spiritual and authen-
\ntic. 17 Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East.
\nThe real Germany was not part of international civilization but a
\nnational race-culture of its own. When Germany responded to the
\npull of the West, it met disaster; when it pursued its destiny in the
\nEast, it fulfilled itself. <\/p>\n
\nthroughout, who had created the war-anxiety, got Germany into
\nwar, and then lost it. In the minds of most Germans, however, the
\n‘stab-in-the-back’ mythology refuted this factual analysis because it
\nattributed the loss of the war to the defeatism and treachery of the
\nWesterners, who had then signed the armistice, accepted the disas-
\ntrous peace, introduced the Republic and enthroned ‘the rule of the
\nparties’. It was thus the Westerners who were responsible for all
\nGermany’s misfortunes in the post-war world, as was only logical,
\nfor they were the puppets or paid agents of the politicians of the West
\nin Paris and London, and of the international financial community in
\nWall Street and the City. Their outpost in Germany was the
\nparliament in Weimar. But authentic German culture still had its
\nredoubt within the Republic, in the person of President Hindenburg,
\nan Easterner par excellence, and in the authority of Article 48. In
\ntime, that vital bridgehead could be extended. <\/p>\n
\nWeimar was a ‘Western’ republic. It stood for civilization rather than
\nculture: civilization was in office, culture in opposition. It is no
\ncoincidence, either, that German civilization reached its gaudiest
\nflowering during the 1920s, when Germany, for a brief period,
\nbecame the world-centre of ideas and art. This triumph had been
\nbuilding up for a long time. Germany was by far the best-educated
\nnation in the world – as long ago as the late eighteenth century it had
\npassed the 50 per cent literacy mark. During the nineteenth century it
\nhad progressively established a system of higher education which for
\nthoroughness and diversity of scholarship was without equal. There
\nwere world-famous universities at Munich, Berlin, Hamburg,
\nGottingen, Marburg, Freiburg, Heidelberg and Frankfurt. The Ger-
\nman liberal intelligentsia had opted out of public and political life in
\nthe 1860s, leaving the field to Bismarck and his successors. But it had
\nnot emigrated; indeed, it had spread itself, and when it began to
\nresurface just before the Great War, and took command in 1918,
\nwhat was most striking about it was its polycentral strength. <\/p>\n
\nBut, unlike Paris, it did not drain all the country’s intellectual and
\nartistic energies into itself. While Berlin had its Alexanderplatz and
\nKurfurstendamm, there were plenty of other cultural magnets: the
\nBruehl in Dresden, the Jungfernsteg in Hamburg, the Schweidnitzter-
\nstrasse in Breslau or the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. The centre of
\narchitectural experiment, the famous Bauhaus, was in Weimar, later
\nmoving to Dessau. The most important centre of art studies, the
\nWarburg Institute, was in Hamburg. Dresden had one of the finest
\nart galleries in the world as well as a leading European opera house,
\nunder Fritz Busch, where two of Richard Strauss’s operas had their
\nfirst performance. Munich had a score of theatres, as well as another
\ngreat gallery; it was the home of Simplicissimus, the leading satirical
\nmagazine, and of Thomas Mann, the leading novelist. Frankfurter
\nZeitung was Germany’s best newspaper, and Frankfurt was a leading
\ntheatrical and operatic centre (as was Munich); and other cities,
\nsuch as Nuremberg, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Diisseldorf, saw the first
\nperformances of some of the most important plays of the Twenties. 18 <\/p>\n
\nworld’s richest in the 1920s, with a strongly political tone. Its
\npre-eminence had begun before the war, with Max Reinhardt’s reign
\nat the Deutsche Theater, but in 1918 republicanism took over
\ncompletely. Some playwrights were committed revolutionaries, like
\nFriedrich Wolf and Ernst Toller, who worked for Erwin Piscator’s
\n‘Proletarian Theatre’, for which George Grosz designed scenery.
\nBertholt Brecht, whose play Drums in the Night was first staged in
\nBerlin in 1922, when he was twenty-four, wrote political allegories.
\nHe was attracted to Communism by its violence, as he was to
\nAmerican gangsterism, and his friend Arnolt Bronnen to fascism;
\nBrecht designed his own ‘uniform’, the first of the Leftist outfits –
\nleather cap, steel-rimmed glasses, leather coat. When The
\nThreepenny Opera, which he wrote with the composer Kurt Weill,
\nwas put on in 1928 it set an all-time record for an opera by receiving
\nover 4,000 performances throughout Europe in a single year. 1 ^ But
\nthe bulk of the Berlin successes were written by liberal sophisticates,
\nmore notable for being ‘daring’, pessimistic, problematical, above all
\n‘disturbing’, than directly political: men like Georg Kaiser, Carl
\nSternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Hasenclever, Ferdinand Bruck-
\nner and Ferenc Molnar. 20 Sometimes the ‘cultural Right’ went for a
\nparticular play, as when it tried to disrupt the first night of Der
\nfrohliche Weinberg by Carl Zuckmayer (who also wrote the script
\nfor The Blue Angel). But it was really the theatre as a whole to which
\nconservatives objected, for there were no right-wing or nationalist
\nplays whatever put on in Berlin. After watching a Gerhart Haupt-
\nmann play, a German prefect of police summed up the reaction of
\nKw\/tar-Germany: ‘The whole trend ought to be liquidated.’ 21 <\/p>\n
\nfilm. It was crowded with first-class directors, impresarios, conduc-
\ntors and producers: Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Max Ophuls, Victor
\nBarnowsky, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Leo Blech, Joseph von
\nSternberg {The Blue Angel), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder {Emil and
\nthe Detectives), Fritz Lang {Metropolis). In designing and making
\nscenery and costumes, lighting-effects, the standards of orchestral
\nplaying and choral singing, in sheer attention to detail, Berlin had no
\nrivals anywhere. When Wozzeck, a new opera written by Arnold
\nSchoenberg’s gifted pupil Alban Berg, received its premiere at the
\nBerlin State Opera in 1925, the conductor Erich Kleiber insisted on
\nno less than 130 rehearsals. 22 The 1929 Berlin Music Festival
\nfeatured Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Furtwangler, George Szell,
\nKlemperer, Toscanini, Gigli, Casals, Cortot and Thibaud. 23 Against
\nthis background of talent, craftsmanship and expertise, Germany was
\nable to develop the world’s leading film industry, producing more
\nfilms in the 1920s than the rest of Europe put together; 646 in the
\nyear 1922 alone…<\/p>\n
\nretribution. Judges and juries felt they were participating in the battle between German culture and alien civilization: it was right to
\nrecognize that violence might be a legitimate response to cultural
\nprovocation. Thus when the great liberal journalist Maximilian
\nHarden, who was also a Jew, was nearly beaten to death by two
\nthugs in 1922, the would-be killers got only a nominal sentence. The
\ndefence argued that Harden provoked the attack by his ‘unpatriotic
\narticles’, and the jury found ‘mitigating circumstances’. <\/p>\n
\ningly on the side of Kultur. The jurists and the teachers of German
\nliterature and language were stridently nationalist. The historians
\nwere the worst of the lot. Heinrich von Treitschke had written of
\nGermany’s appointment with destiny and warned the Jews not to
\nget in the way of the ‘young nation’. His hugely influential History
\nof Germany in the Nineteenth Century, a Wilhelmine classic, went
\ninto another big popular edition in 1920. Contemporary historians
\nlike Erich Marcks, Georg von Below and Dietrich Schafer still
\ncelebrated the achievements of Bismarck (the anniversaries of Sedan
\nand the founding of the empire were both public universities’
\nholidays) and the lessons they drew from the Great War centred
\naround Germany’s lack of ‘relentlessness’. They provided academic
\nbacking for the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth. The academic community
\nas a whole was a forcing-house for nationalist mythology. Instead
\nof encouraging self-criticism and scepticism, the professors called
\nfor ‘spiritual revivals’ and peddled panaceas. 51 <\/p>\n
\n1920s Germany was The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler,
\na foolish and pedantic schoolteacher. He conceived his book in
\n1911 as a warning against undue German optimism. He wrote it
\nduring the war in anticipation of a German victory. Its first volume
\nactually appeared in 1918, when defeat gave it an astonishing
\nrelevance and topicality. Thus it became a best-seller. The essence
\nof the book was social Darwinism. He defined eight historic cul-
\ntures and argued that the ‘laws of morphology’ applied to them.
\nThe last, the culture of the West, was already showing symptoms of
\ndecay, such as democracy, plutocracy and technology, indicating
\nthat’ ‘civilization’ was taking over from ‘culture’. It seemed to
\nexplain why Germany had been defeated. It also heralded a coming
\nage of cruel war in which would arise new Caesars, and democrats
\nand humanitarians would have to be replaced by new elites of
\nsteel-hardened heroes who would look not for personal gain but
\nfor service to the community. 52 He followed it up in 1920 with a
\nsensational essay, Prussianism and Socialism, which called for a
\nclassless, national socialism, in which the entire nation worked
\ntogether under a dictator. It was exactly the sort of argument
\nMussolini was beginning to put forward in Italy. <\/p>\n
\nother important Easterners. Carl Schmitt, Germany’s leading legal
\nphilosopher, who poured out a flood of books and articles during
\nthese years, constantly stressed the argument that order could only
\nbe restored when the demands of the state were given preference
\nover the quest for an illusory ‘freedom’. The Reich would not be
\nsecure until Weimar was remodelled as an authoritarian state around
\nthe principle embodied in Article 48. 53 The point was restated in a
\nhistorical perspective by the cultural historian Arthur Moeller van
\nden Bruck in a brilliant book published in 1923. The Germans, he
\nargued, were the leading European creators. Their first Reich, the
\nmedieval empire, had formed Europe. Their second creation, Bis-
\nmarck’s, was artificial because it had admitted the corruption of
\nliberalism: that, of course, was why it had collapsed under test.
\nWeimar was a mere interlude of chaos. Now the Germans had
\nanother opportunity: by purging society of liberalism and capitalism,
\nthey could build the third and final state which would embody all
\nGermany’s values and endure for a thousand years. He entitled this
\nremarkable exercise in historical prophecy The Third Reich, 54 <\/p>\n
\naveraged about 100,000 during the Weimar period, gave an enthusias-
\ntic reception to these Easterner philosophies. The notion that the
\nstudent body is in some constitutional way a depository of humanita-
\nrian idealism will not survive a study of the Weimar period. Next to
\nthe ex-servicemen, the students provided the chief manpower res-
\nervoir of the violent extremists, especially of the Right. Student
\npolitics were dominated by the right-wing Hochschulring movement
\nthroughout the 1920s until it was replaced by the Nazis. 55 The Right
\nextremists proceeded by converting half a dozen students on a
\ncampus, turning them into full-time activists, paid not to study. The
\nactivists could then swing the mass of the student body behind them.
\nThe Nazis did consistently better among the students than among the
\npopulation as a whole and their electoral gains were always preceded
\nby advances on the campus, students proving their best proselytizers.
\nStudents saw Nazism as a radical movement. They liked its egalita-
\nrianism. They liked its anti-Semitism too. Indeed, the students were
\nmore anti-Semitic than either the working class or the bourgeoisie.
\nMost German student societies had excluded Jews even before 1914.
\nIn 1919 the fraternities subscribed to the ‘Eisenach Resolution’,
\nwhich stated that the racial objection to Jews was insuperable and
\ncould not be removed by baptism. The next year they deprived
\nJewish students of the ‘honour’ of duelling. In 1922 the authorities at
\nBerlin University cancelled a memorial service in honour of the
\nmurdered Walther Rathenau rather than risk a violent student
\ndemonstration. This policy of appeasement towards student violence
\nbecame the pattern of the 1920s, the rectors and faculties always
\ncapitulating to the most outrageous demands of student leaders
\nrather than risk trouble. By 1929 the universities had passed almost
\nwholly into the Easterner camp…<\/p>\n
\nsource of his appeal. Popular detestation of Weimar culture was an
\nenormous source of political energy, which he tapped with relish.
\nLenin’s notion of giving up music to concentrate on politics would
\nhave been incomprehensible to him. In Germany, music was politics;
\nand especially music-drama. Hitler exemplifies the truth that ar-
\nchitectural and theatrical skills are closely related. His romantic-
\nartistic instincts led him to rediscover a truth almost as old as the
\npolls itself, which certainly goes back to the Pharaohs: that the
\npresentation of the charismatic leader, whether Renaissance mon-
\narch or modern democratic politician, is at least as important as the
\ncontent. One of the reasons Hitler admired Wagner was that he
\nlearnt so much from him, especially from Parsifal, which became the
\nmodel for his political spectaculars. The lesson he derived from the
\nWestern Front was that wars could be won or lost by propaganda: a
\nthought which inspired his famous sixth chapter of Mein Kampf. The
\nobject of all propaganda, he wrote, was ‘an encroachment upon
\nman’s freedom of will’. 67 This could be achieved by the ‘mysterious
\nmagic’ of Bayreuth, the ‘artificial twilight of Catholic Gothic chur-
\nches’, and both these effects he used; but he also plundered the tricks
\nof Reinhardt and other despised Weimar producers and the cinema of
\nFritz Lang. The scenes of his oratory were designed and set with
\nenviable professional skill; the attention to detail was fanatical.
\nHitler was the first to appreciate the power of amplification and the
\ndevilry of the searchlight: he seems to have invented son et lumiere
\nand used it with devastating effect at his mass night-meetings. He
\nimported political costumery and insignia from Mussolini’s Italy but
\nimproved upon them, so that Hitlerian uniforms remain the standard
\nof excellence in totalitarian sumptuary. Both Stalinism and Maoism
\nimitated Hitler’s staging, exceeding it in scale but not in style. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"