G. K. Chesterton on Hitler

“All Over the world the middle class is not only impoverished; it is not only discouraged but shell-shocked. It has lost inner vitality and belief in itself. Under successive moral and material crises it has finally permitted its clamorous foes to invade its very conscience.” All this is wrong, according to Ludwig Lewisohn, who comes to the defense of the middle class in this month’s Scribner’s in an article entitled “A Bourgeois Takes His Stand.”

“A grave and initial recent error of the middle class has been its acceptance of its enemies’ notions and definition of itself,” he writes. Although few of its members have actually read “Das Kapital”, the influence of that powerful presentation of half-truths has sickered through a hundred channels and has convinced the middle class that it is nothing indeed except the creation, sometime in the sixteenth century, of the ‘transformation of feudal into capitalistic exploitation’.”

Mr. Lewisohn denies that the origin of the middle class is economic. It is rather psycho-biological. He defines the bourgeois as one who “desires security, dignity, privacy, liberation from sordid care for the sake of cultural disinterestedness If he does not desire the last for himself, he desires it or, at least in many cases, creates it for his children.” The bourgeois, Mr. Lewisohn holds, may be quite simply an eternal human type who has existed within every civilization—a psychological and moral type, to which we owe all the major achievements of civilization, including “Das Kapital.”

To prove his point, he goes back through the ages and tells us that the father of Aristotle was a physician and Plato came of a good family and Aristophanes’ father was a landowner. Cicero came of upper-middle class people, the father of Virgil was a solid yeoman and so was the father of Horace.

“The bourgeois wrongs both himself and society as a whole,” concludes Mr. Lewisohn, “by any abandonment of his central position by admitting for a moment that he is the product of an age of industrialism and capitalism. He is the eternal religious property-holding freeman of the ages. In his hands is the civilization which begins with Isaiah and Plato, a civilization which the machine age has not essentially changed.”

HITLERISM A JEWISH PRODUCT

“Hitlerism is almost entirely of Jewish origin,” states G. K. Chesterton in an article entitled “The Judaism of Hitler,” in G. K.’s Weekly of July 20. He frankly denies that “Nordic men ever brought anything in the way of an idea into the world.”

Discussing the development of the Germans he says:

“They borrowed their idea of imperialism from the Romans. They borrowed the idea of militarism from the French. The German Emperors modelled themselves on the Austrian Emperors who modelled themselves on the Greek and Roman Emperors. The greatest of Prussians did not even conceal his contempt for Prussia. He refused to talk anything but French, or to exchange ideas with anyone, except somebody of the type of Voltaire. … The whole idea of German Unity was originally a liberal movement on the line of the French Revolution. Then came the more modern and much more mortally dangerous idea of Race which the Germans borrowed from a Frenchman named Gobineau. And on top of that idea of Race, came the grand, imperial and insane idea of a Chosen Race, of a sacred seed that is, as the Kaiser said, the salt of the earth; of a people that is God’s favorite and guided by him in a sense which he does not guide other and lesser peoples. And if anybody asks where anybody got the idea, there is only one possible or conceivable answer. He got it from the Jews….”

THE RIGHTS OF MINORITIES

“The present course of the German government in countenancing measures prejudicial to the rights of its Jewish citizens brings into prominence what is perhaps one of the oldest problems—and not the least difficult—which confronts civilized governments. This is the problem of guaranteeing the racial, religious and political rights of minorities.” John Simons, writing in this week’s Commonweal, feels that although much has been accomplished in safeguarding the rights of the citizens in the modern state, “the events in Germany should make us realize that, except in certain of the lesser nations of central and eastern Europe, minority groups are largely dependent on that decent respect for human rights which most governments observe.

After discussing the machinery which has been set up by the League of Nations for the protection of minorities, he offers a more complete program.

“Protection for minorities,” he concludes, “should include a provision to this effect: that any nation finding it impossible to adjust its differences with a minority group, allocate lands prorated according to the numbers of the discriminated group and endow it with autonomy in governing its local affairs, though still requiring its loyalty in matters affecting national sovereignty.”