Part 33 (1/2)
This alliance between the two extremes of ardent Monarchism and revolutionary Socialism existed at the beginning of the war or even earlier, and, as is now well known, it was the Jewish Social Democrat, Israel Lazarewitch, alias Helphandt alias Parvus, who arranged with the German General Staff for the pa.s.sage of Lenin from Switzerland to Russia, accompanied by Karl Radek, the Austrian Jew deserter, and a number of other Jews.
Now, Switzerland has been for hundreds of years a centre of revolutionary and secret-society intrigue. As early as the sixteenth century the Pope, writing to the Kings of France and Spain, warned them that Geneva was ”un foyer eternel de revolution,” and Joseph de Maistre, quoting this letter in 1817, declared Geneva to be the metropolis of the revolutionaries, whose art of deception he describes as ”the great European secret.”[797] Elsewhere, a year earlier, he had referred to Illuminism as the root of all the evil at work. It is now known that at the moment de Maistre wrote these words an inner ring of revolutionaries, claiming direct descent from Weishaupt and even from an earlier sect existing at the end of the fifteenth century, profited by the fall of Napoleon I to reconstruct its organization and took up its headquarters in Switzerland with branch offices in London and Paris. The same secret ring of Illuminati is believed to have been intimately connected with the organization of the Bolshevist revolution, although none of the leading Bolsheviks are said to have been members of the innermost circle, which is understood to consist of men belonging to the highest intellectual and financial cla.s.ses whose names remained absolutely unknown. Outside this absolutely secret ring there existed, however, a semi-secret circle of high initiates of subversive societies drawn from all over the world and belonging to various nationalities--German, Jewish, French, Russian, and even j.a.panese. This group, which might be described as the active ring of the inner circle, appears to have been in touch with, if not in control of, a committee which met in Switzerland to carry out the programme of the Third Internationale.
It was thus in Switzerland that at the same time high initiates of Pan-German secret societies foregathered and that an active centre of pro-German, anti-Entente, and even Bolshevist propaganda was established. These Germans, although Monarchists themselves, co-operated with the secret revolutionary forces in stirring up trouble in the countries of the Allies. At the same time the conferences of the Second Internationale, attended by members of the British I.L.P. took place in Switzerland, and at one of these--the Berne Conference of 1919--the delegates were entertained by a mysterious ”American” millionaire, John de Kay, living himself in great style, paying for press service at the rate of 2,000 francs a day, lavis.h.i.+ng money on the conference, and at the same time subsidizing a Pacifist and Defeatest paper named _La Feuille_.
It is impossible, then, to ignore the role of Germany in the present outbreak of world revolution. In the British White Paper on Bolshevism in Russia we find it stated by an Englishman who had been through the whole of the Revolution in that country that:
The Germans initiated disturbances in order to reduce Russia to chaos. They printed ma.s.ses of paper money to finance their schemes; the notes, of which I possess specimens, can be easily recognized by a special mark.[798]
What has Germany to say to all this? Simply that the promotion of Bolshevism was a military ”necessity” in order to bring about the downfall of her opponents, but that the propaganda utilized by her was in reality of Jewish origin, and that Jewry, not Germany, was the real author of world revolution.
It is easy to see how such a theory can be made to serve the cause of Pan-Germanism. For if Germany can persuade us that the Jews alone were responsible for the war and were also the sole authors of Bolshevism, we shall naturally be led to the conclusion that Germany is, after all, innocent of the crimes attributed to her, and that our only safety lies in forgoing reparations, restoring her to her former power, and coalescing with her against a common enemy. We shall therefore do well to accept with extreme caution advice on the Jewish question emanating from German sources, and to test the sincerity of the spirit in which it is offered by considering the relations which have hitherto existed between the Germans and the Jews.
Now, Germany has long been the home of modern ”anti-Semitism.” Although in every country and at every period, but more particularly in the East of Europe during the last century, the Jews have suffered from unpopularity, it was Germany that organized this aversion into a definite plan of campaign. If in Russia, Galicia, and Poland the Jews have met with sporadic violence at the hands of the peasants, in Germany they have been systematically held up by the authorities to hatred and contempt. Luther, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Treitschke, successively inveighed against the Jewish race. Jews were denied admission to masonic lodges and to the rank of officers in the army, whilst society excluded them up to the outbreak of war.
Yet the extraordinary fact remains that of all nations the Germans have always been the favourites of the Jews. Throughout the whole movement for the unification of Germany under the aegis of Prussia, Jews played a leading part, and in the recent war Germany found in them some of her most valuable allies. As Maximilian Harden recently pointed out: ”The services of the Jews to Germany during the war were enormous. The patriotism of the Jews was beyond reproach, in many cases even ludicrous and offensive in its intensity.” And in spite of ”anti-Semitism,” Harden declares: ”There is a strong affinity between the German and the Jew.”[799]
To the Ashken.a.z.im Germany even more than Palestine has appeared the Land of Promise. Thus some years before the war Professor Ludwig Geiger, leader of the Liberal Jews of Berlin, denounced ”Zionist sophisms” in the words: ”The German Jew who has a voice in German literature must, as he has been accustomed to for the last century and a half, look upon Germany alone as his fatherland, upon the German language as his mother-tongue, and the future of that nation must remain the only one upon which he bases his hopes.”[800]
How are we to explain this unrequited devotion? Simply by the German policy of enlisting every dynamic force in her service. She has known how to use the Jews just as she has known how to use the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the Socialists for the purpose of Pan-Germanism. From Frederick the Great, who employed the Jew Ephraim to coin false money, to William II, who kept in touch with Rathenau by means of a private telephone wire, the rulers of Germany have always allowed them to co-operate in their schemes of world-domination. As the allies of Bismarck, who used them freely to fill his war-chests, the Jews directed the power of the secret societies in the interests of Germany; in 1871 the Jew Bloechreider acted as adviser to the new German Empire as to the best method of wresting indemnities from France. And Germany, whilst heaping insults on the Jews, nevertheless fulfils certain conditions essential to Jewish enterprise. Unlike England and France, she has never allowed herself to be seriously weakened by democratic ideas, and therefore to the Jews--as to British believers in autocracy--she represents the principle of stability.
Moreover, Germany as the home of militarism offers a wide field for Jewish speculation. We have only to couple together an aphorism of Mirabeau's with one of Werner Sombart's to perceive the bond of union between the two races, thus: ”War is the national industry of Prussia”
and ”Wars are the Jews' harvests.” As long ago as 1793 Anacharsis Clootz, the apostle of universal brotherhood and defender of the Jewish race, declared that if Germany were to be prevented from going to war the Jews must be persuaded to withdraw their support from her military adventures:
War could not begin or last in Germany without the activity, the intelligence, and the money of the Jews. Magazines and munitions of all kinds are provided by Hebrew capitalists and all the subaltern agents of military provisionment are of the same nation. We have only to come to an understanding with our brothers, the Rabbis, to produce astonis.h.i.+ng, miraculous results.[801]
Mr. Ford, the American motor-car manufacturer, appears to have arrived at much the same conclusion expressed in the words recently attributed to him: ”We don't need the League of Nations to end war. Put under control the fifty most wealthy Jewish financiers, who produce wars for their own profit, and wars will cease.”[802]
On another occasion Mr. Ford is reported to have said that the Jews who voyaged with him in the Peace s.h.i.+p in 1915 ”went out of their way to convince” him of ”the direct relations between the International Jew and the war”: they ”went into details to tell me the means by which the Jews controlled the war--how they had the money, how they had cornered all the basic materials needed to fight the war,” etc.[803]
Without in any way absolving Germany from the crime of the war, it is necessary to take this secondary factor into consideration if peace between the nations is to be established. For as long as the l.u.s.t of war lingers in the hearts of the Germans and the l.u.s.t of gain at the price of human suffering lingers in the hearts of the Jews, both races will remain necessary to each other and the hideous nightmare of war will continue to brood over the world.
There is then a great deal of truth in the Socialist phrase ”Capitalists' Wars,” although not in the sense they attribute to it. For it will be noticed that the Capitalists who are most instrumental in making wars are precisely those whom the Socialists are always careful to s.h.i.+eld from blame. The following incident will ill.u.s.trate this point.
At a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation Mr. Adolphe Smith moved a resolution appealing to the organized workers of Great Britain--
Not to permit themselves in the supposed interests of their fellow-workers in other countries, to be used by sinister financial and militarist influences merely to weaken the Entente nations in the present critical situation, and urging them to keep careful watch against such manoeuvres on the part of pro-German international financiers, who were able to exercise considerable reactionary influence among the wealthy and official cla.s.ses in this country.[804]
Mr. Hyndman added that ”the most serious danger by which we were threatened was from the most powerful group of capitalists in Europe headed by Hugo Stinnes and backed by Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and the militarist party in Germany.” This resolution was opposed by a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party and eventually withdrawn.
The connexion between German Imperialism, International Finance, Illuminism, Bolshevism, and certain sections of British Socialism is thus apparent. Is Germany then the secret power behind the thing we call Bolshevism? Are Illuminism and Pan-Germanism one and the same thing? To this hypothesis two objections present themselves: firstly, that the spirit of Illuminism and Bolshevism existed, as we have seen in earlier chapters of this book, long before modern Germany came into existence; and secondly, that Germany herself is not entirely free from the contagion. For although the danger of Bolshevism in Germany has been doubtless greatly exaggerated in order to prevent the Allies from pressing their demands for disarmament and reparations, nevertheless Bolshevism under its illuminated name of Spartacism cannot be regarded as a movement entirely staged for the deception of Europe. Moreover, just as in the countries of the Allies it has shown itself, under the guise of Pacifism, savagely anti-national and pro-German, so in Germany, as also in Hungary, it turned Pacifism to the opposite purpose by professing sympathy at moments with the Allies.
It is clear, then, that besides Pan-Germanism there is another power at work, a power far older, that seeks to destroy all national spirit, all ordered government in every country, Germany included. What is this power? A large body of opinion replies: the Jewish power.
15
THE REAL JEWISH PERIL