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Old December 7th, 2008 #1
Chad Wentworth
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Location: Romania
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Default Arthur Moeller van den Bruck - Germany's Third Empire

This Internet book is the same work published by George Allen And Unwin, London, 1934; it was reprinted by Howard Fertig, New York, 1971. This production is its first appearance in English on the Internet.

This work is often referred to in passing, but seldom read. Moeller appeared in the period after the First World War as one of the theorists of the broad Conservative Revolution in Germany. Internationally renowned for his translations of Dostoyevsky, this text is also a literary feast. However, the present book may be read for its analysis of civilization-crisis and visionary alternatives. In that sense it passes into the heritage of all who struggle against the international capitalist ascendency of our times.

Available here
 
Old December 8th, 2008 #2
Wakena
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A great book of vision. A signed copy was with Hitler in the bunker in Berlin.

Here are excepts from the beginnings of all the chapters. This book still remains pregnant with meaning.

Quote:
A war may be lost. The most ill-fated war is never irretrievable. The worst peace is never final.

But a Revolution must be won.

A revolution occurs once only. It is not a matter which a nation negotiates with other nations. It is the most private, intimate concern of a people, which that people must handle for itself and by itself. According to the direction in which the people voluntarily guides a revolution, its outcome determines that people’s future fate.
Quote:
Each People has its own Socialism



1

The whole error of socialism is latent in one sentence of Karl Marx: "Hence men set themselves only such tasks as they can fulfil."

This is untrue. Men set themselves only such tasks as they cannot fulfil. It is their genius who inspired them. It is their daimón who spurs them on.

The essence of Utopia is that it is never realized. The essence of Christian hope is that it is never fulfilled. The essence of the millennium is that it lives in prophecy, but never in the present.
Quote:
The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle.



2

When the World War broke out, the western newspapers blazed with the headline: la liberté est en jeu! This misled world opinion. The particular cause became a general cause and acquired a halo. What our enemies sought was not liberty but power. Anyone who had examined the question with an open mind would have made the discovery that in liberal countries political freedom is not enjoyed by the people, who on the contrary are carefully shepherded by certain ruling classes. What these ruling classes mean by liberty, is freedom and scope for their own intrigues. This they attain by means of parliamentism which secures them power under cover of the constitution and the so-called representation of the people. Such is the specious mask which liberalism wears when it shouts "liberty": the mask it wore at the outbreak of the War. This was the first betrayal.
Quote:
Democracy discloses whether a people knows its own mind or not.

After the Ninth of November German democracy was obliged to be of the same mind as our enemies. Such was the fate its own guilt brought down on it.

But will the German people continue to wish in the long run what its democracy wishes? Will this democracy be content to remain what it was yesterday and still is today: the fulfiller of the Treaty of Versailles? Will not the moment come when the people will protest? And will our democracy then take over the leadership and govern according to the people’s will, having so long governed as a tool according to the will of our enemies?

The justification of our democrats—the democrats of every party—depends on their answer: and on it depends also the fate of a nation responsible for and to itself.



2

The Revolution brought us no true democracy because the people came to power in such circumstances that we could neither respect ourselves nor command the respect of others.

A Revolution stands or falls by its ideals.
Quote:
The Proletarian is such by his own desire



1

The problem of the masses grows urgent.

It clamours not from the Left only. We find the liberal—who lives on the produce of human labour, or on the produce of trade or on dividends—in full retreat before the proletarian who claims that it is he who does the work. The liberal is now doing his best to stem the tide of the masses—which he himself set in motion—by eloquently assuring them that they also belong to the nation; that the great mother, democracy, will welcome them to her bosom and will undertake the care of the proletarian with the rest. The nation, with its demagogue leaders and parliamentary leading-strings, has the pace of a mollusc; but the masses are pressing on from behind. They are thrusting froward, they are dragging others with them. They are action!

The Right is beginning to recognize the pressure and the weight of the masses. The Right consists not only of men who defend property and the enjoyment of property, but men who defend values and the indestructibility of values, men who are of the considered opinion that values have not been created merely to be again destroyed. The conservative is the guardian of these values and feels it his natural mission to prevent their falling victims to the levelling forces of democracy or proletariat: to oppose the force of personality to the forces of the masses. The position of the conserving man has been undermined. The things for which he stands have outwardly lost their value in the Revolution. They were all subtly related to the question of personality, the personality of individuals and the personality of the nation, to questions of distinction and difference, of rank and order.
Quote:
A Policy may be reversed: History cannot



1

The revolutionary concludes overhastily that the world will now for all time be guided by the political principles which governed him in overthrowing it.

The reactionary takes the diametrically opposite line: he seriously considers it possible to delete the Revolution from the page of history as if it had never been.

The revolutionary is soon cured of his error. The very day that sees the old moulds of life shattered, brings home to him the urgent necessity of casting it into new moulds. He who has hitherto been wont to criticize the conditions of the state, without troubling overmuch to understand them, makes the disconcerting discovery that certain conditions, laws, interrelationships exist in the political world which cannot be ignored. He becomes suddenly conscious of a responsibility which forbids him to substitute for orderly government the improvisations he had had in his mind; he finds he must make adjustments, even at the cost of compromise. The actual needs of the millions, who after the severe upheaval yearn for some equilibrium in life compels him to make concessions to reality. The revolutionary has to become an opportunist.

The reactionary on the other hand imagines that we need only revert to the old moulds in order to have everything again exactly "as it was before." He has no inclination to compromise with the new. He believes that if only he had the political power it would be perfectly simple to reorganize the world according to the admirable scheme of older days.

The reactionary recognizes the fact of the revolution but he refuses to recognize the revolution itself. He demands emphatically the restoration of the status quo ante.

The revolution has so obviously been wrong—historically wrong: as everyone can see after the event! It seems as if the reactionary might be right.

Let us go slowly—we must distinguish between the reactionary and the conservative.
Quote:
Conservatism has Eternity on its side



1

We live in order to bequeath.

The conservative is the man who refuses to believe that the aim of our existence is fulfilled in one short span; the man who believe that our existence only carries on an aim.

He sees that one life is not enough to create the things which a man’s mind and a man’s will design. He sees that we as men are born each in a given age, but that we only continue what other men have begun, and that others again take over where we leave off. He sees individuals perish while the Whole continues; series of generations employed in the traditional service of a single thought; nations busy in building up their history.

The conservative ponders on what is ephemeral, and obsolete and unworthy; he ponders also on what is enduring and what is worthy to endure. He recognizes the power that links past and future; he recognizes the enduring element in the transitory present.

His far-seeing eye ranges through space beyond the limits of the temporary horizon.



2

The liberal thinks on other lines. For him life is an end in itself. He demands liberty to enjoy life to the utmost, to procure the maximum of happiness for the individual. Provided one generation enjoys life and another follows and enjoys, man’s well-being—at any rate the liberal’s personal well-being, which is always his first consideration—is assured.

The liberal is, however, chary of using the word enjoyment; he prefers to talk of progress. Men are continually perfecting means to lighten the burden of life, and the path of liberty leads through progress to gradual perfection. Thus the liberal tries by generalities to divert attention from the egotism which liberalism invented so as not to be without some philosophy of its own.

The conservative sees through this humbug. The liberal must admit that everything which he as an individual undertakes is dependent on the conditions of life of the existing community. He must admit that, while repudiating all obligation, liberalism seeks to enjoy the fruits garnered by an earlier conservatism.
Quote:
We must have the strength to live in antitheses



1

The Third Party wills the Third Empire.

The Third Empire stands for the continuity of history.

The Third Party is the party of all who wish to see Germany preserved for the German people.

Germans of all parties cry out at this point: "We want it too!" We are very willing to believe you; but we know only too well that you are thinking of the Germany of your party, and that you want to see life in Germany cut according to your party programme.

Some of you come with your red flag, which is only an infuriating rag the colour of blood without brains. The red flag can never be ours, not even if you deck it out with a hammer and sickle and a star for humanity. Others of you have brought out the black-red-gold flag which once the romantics hailed as the flag of our first Empire; but it has long since lost the golden glory with which stormy and enthusiastic youth endowed it. Others of you cling to the black-white-red of our second Empire, which fluttered above a dream of power that dreamt of sailing the seven seas before it had even conquered the continent. We lived to see the day when this, our proudest flag, sank amid the vortices of Scapa Flow.

Over Germany, today only one flag is flying, the token of mourning and the symbol of our life: only one flag which tolerates no colour near it and robs the people who move below its sable folds of all their joy in merry pennons and in gaudy standards: only the black flag of need, humiliation and an utter bitterness—a bitterness which clothes itself in self-control lest it should pass into despair—a black banner of unrestful thoughts that hover day and night over the fate which a conspiring world has designed for our disarmed country: a banner of resistance for men who will not resignedly acquiesce in the work of annihilation that begins with the dismemberment of our country and is intended to end with the obliteration of our nationhood: a banner of revolt for Germans who are resolved to fling back deceit in the teeth of the deceiver, to rescue their nation and to preserve their Empire.



2

Today we call this resolution not conservative but nationalist.

This nationalist will desires to conserve all that in Germany is worth conserving. It wills to preserve Germany for Germany’s sake: and it knows what it wills.

The nationalist does not say, as the patriot does, that Germany is worth preserving because she is German. For him the nation is not an end in itself.

The nationalist’s dreams are of the future. He is a conservative because he knows that there can be no future which has not its roots in the past. He is also a politician because he knows that past and future can only be secure if the nation is secure in the present.
-- Cthulhu
 
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