Totalitarian Aggression
DR BORKENAU has made for himself quite a distinguished reputation with his books since he came to this country. A trained sociologist, he is an original and arresting thinker on politics, a little too much given, perhaps, to shocking the reader with his clever paradoxes. This book is certainly %cry disturbing to the orthodoxy both of the Left and of the Right, perhaps - even more to the former, since orthodoxy matters less to the latter. Dr. Borkenau's thesis is that we are living in the midst of a totalitarian revolution which is implicit in the structure of modern society ; that it is, in fact, the socialist revolution which Marx foresaw, though its agent has not been the proletariat as he expected. This is not very agreeable news for the Left, though there is a great deal in it. It is not that he approves in the least of the barbarism which has accompanied this process, either in Germany or Russia, or he might have added Italy. (He regards Italian Fascism as a conservative phenomenon, in which he may be :riistaken.) A disillusioned historian would make the point that human beings seem quite unable to make the profound .djustments necessary in society from time to time—Reforma- ion and Counter-Reformation, the French Revolution, the lolshevik and Nazi Revolutions—without the most un- conomic distress and suffering and the most fearful relapses, temporarily at least, from civilised standards.
Dr. Borkenau goes on, somewhat cheerlessly, but, I ant afraid, convincingly, to point out that in the struggle against the ubiquitous aggression that has accompanied the rise of these totalitarian regimes we are forced to introduce certain of their economic and political features. In particular, on the economic side, what marks that aspect of their revolution, "the transition from an economic system run by individual property owners at their own risk for their own profit, to a centralised and planned economy." Collectivism, he concludes, is an unavoidable result of the conditions of modern life : that will remain out of the struggle with the totalitarian enemy, will be brought nearer by it when we have defeated the intoler- able aggression which is its leading feature on the political side.
Let that be as it may be. What I find most penetrating are, naturally enough, his comments on the Nazi mentality and the German mentality in general. (He is much better on Germany than he is on Russia, which I suspect he does not know.) He has a fascinating passage on what Germany and German thought owes to the West, and how completely her thinkers have transformed what they took over from us, so that she has become something not quite either West or East. Anybody who knows Germany, Germans or German knows how right he is when he marks the German dislike of the West as too settled, too well-defined, too unproblematic. Only those who know neither Germany nor German labour under the delusion that they are like us. Germans love unsettlement, disturbance ; they like churning up the depths, in personal relations having their heart perpetually out on the carpet. Dr. Borkenau points out with what perfection the unstable, neurotic William II symbolised his era, the Wilheltnian, in Germany, and how the madman of genius, Hitler, surrounded by gangsters, does his. He might have gone further to point out what the late lamented Dr. Kantorowitz pointed out to me, how the leaders whom the Germans have followed have always been neurotics : Luther, Frederick the Great, William, Hitler—even Bismarck had a most unbalanced strain in. him. A member of one of the greatest of English political families once remarked to me on this difference between the English and the Germans : that the English distrust a man the moment he becomes hysterical, while the Germans do not begin to follow until he does. The contrast between Strcse- mann and Hitler illustrates this, and how well the latter, if intuitively, realises that: he always gives them hysteria, and how they lap it up!
This, I imagine, is rather what Professor Heamshaw feels. But his book could be so much better done. It is just a short text-book of German history on the foreign side, par- ticularly of German expansion, in which dear old Baring- Gould is quoted as an authority! But though it is not well done, it is perhaps better than that it should not be done
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