This is the twelfth chapter in my series on culture wars. In the last chapter, I argued that the causes of the 1914-18 war owed next to nothing to Europe’s Christian inheritance-though all sides invoked God. The purposes invoked to justify the war were secular in nature: the balance of power, national territory, for Marxists class, and for racists the selection of the fittest. Racists and Marxists shared a common  vision of  the world as one of relentless competition, where the winners take what they can and the losers suffer what they must. Where they differed was in their emphasis on class and race, though they as often as not came to similar conclusions, whenever the lines of class and race blurred-which they usually did and do.  The only voice to speak in the European interest for peace- Pope Benedikt XV, Giacomo della Chiesa-was not invited to the deliberations which issued in the Treaty of Versailles. Nor were the defeated powers invited-Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, Turkey. They were presented with the terms, which they proceeded to interpret, not surprisingly, as victor’s justice. This was a far cry from the international law invoked by Great Britain, whose government  held from the very beginning of the conflict that the competitive instincts of humanity had to be subject to international rules. The problem was that the interpretation of those laws-particularly the right of peoples to self-determination- was provided by the victors in the conflict.  

What follows starts with a sketch of the legacy of war that the peacemakers inherited, the challenges they faced, the principle personalities who put their stamp on events, and the ideologies which whirled around them in the succeeding three decades: Marxist-Leninism and its critics,  the dominant ideas of social Darwinism and of racial nationalism; the voices of Christian Europe to please listen to the heart of the continent’s true traditions will be dealt with in a separate chapter.

The legacy of war.

The main legacy of the war was the 40 million casualties, the killed, the widows, the orphans and the crippled in body and mind who survived in the flesh, in the memories or in the memorials which were erected across Europe. Once the direct shock of the war had passed and the shrines erected, the results of the conflagration began to seep in: the broken families, the childless parents,  the fatherless children, the inheritances without heirs, and the burning question of what it had all been for. The immediate answers provided were that  evil men had led the world to disaster – William II; the Tsar Nicholas, The Hapsburgs, and the Ottoman califate. Monarchs all, they were duly banished, assassinated, ex-patriated or de-fenestrated, and then  replaced by constitutional states, with parliaments, voters, political parties and presidents. Their presence stood as witness to the aspirations of nineteenth century reformers, who had anticipated  that if only nations could be self-governing, hereditary monarchs removed, representative governments installed, peace and prosperity would break out and war would be a thing of the past. To these hopes were added the promise that the returning soldiers in this war could be brought home to dwell in “a land fit for heroes”.  The theory of national self-determination was applied most conspicuously to the Hapsburg empire which had dissolved into a multiplicity of fragile polities, inheriting  all the multinational features of their predecessor, but lacking its legitimacy, size, or political cohesion to deal with their multiple internal problems. Violence carried on in much of the practice of European politics during the interwar years. Ireland’s war of Independence from Great Britain (1919-1921) led to 2,346 deaths, followed by the  Irish civil war (1922-1923) which claimed 1,485 dead. Infinitely more violent, were the civil wars of  1917 to 1923, that broke out in the Soviet Union as the heir to Tsarist Russia imposed its will at the cost of 7 million dead. Initially, markets were suppressed, then allowed to operate,  before the revolution entered an even more murderous cycle of violence. Of the Hapsburg successor states-Poland, Czechoslovakia, diminutive Austria, Yugoslavia-only Czechoslovakia imposed itself as a viable entity before it was brutally dismantled in 1938-39. 

The answer to the lead question: what had the world war all been for? came back in hushed tones, and for good reason. It was, and is, a metaphysical question, which took many forms and bore no ready answer. One shape the question took  was where did this urge to the utmost brutality hail from? If it came from humanity, not much trust could be placed in the comforting doctrine of a “nice” humanity. The use of ever more poisoned gas indicated rather a boundless capacity for cruelty. Or maybe the war was a higher expression of class conflict, in which case  there would be a good argument that humanity could do with less of it. Less of it, according to the Marxist lexicon,  might mean more inequality; inequalities though would mean more class war and hence  assuredly more brutality. A similar dead end was reached  if the driving force of human affairs was thought to be race, in which humanity was destined to mix or to murder: if they mixed, as was the case for a few hundred Africans who ended up in Germany, married German women, and spawned mixed blood children, these were called “Rhineland bastards”, and looked down on as living evidence of what happened when racial purity was compromised. If the races  murdered each other there would be no end to the horror. Only Benedikt XV’s answer was clear: the leaders and their peoples had not heeded the laws of God, and particularly the injunction: “Thou shalt not kill”. But that answer was religious, not secular, in inspiration.

The barbarity of the war dealt a devastating blow to Europe’s religious inheritance. How did a Christian God permit such abominations, the question was repeatedly asked. Maybe He did not exist, and the certitudes of the past had not been warranted.  The doubt left Europe’s  moral pre-suppositions of right and wrong, already diluted by secularist  beliefs in class, race, or nation, severely dented. Suppose that God did not exist, what were the foundations of morality, of right and wrong, of the law to be? The predominant answer among the public was to evade the question  and to seek solace in entertainment: Josephine Baker, the black goddess from Missouri revealing nearly all in diaphonous shawls, the flipper, jazz, Paul Robeson’s velvety bass interpretation of negro spirituals, or Satchmo Armstrong’s mix of gravel and jazz. Football, too, pulled the public into the stadia away from the pulpit, leaving up-market entertainment to the cultured few. Oswald Spengler wrote his two volume compendium, The Decline of the West, in the years 1918-1922, in which he stated that “the coming of Ceasarism breaks the dictatorship of money and its political weapon democracy”^[1] but his ponderous prose sold only 100,000 copies by 1926- a measure of the respective size of markets for the few. By comparison, football attracted fans by the hundred thousand. The 1937 match of England versus Scotland at Hampden Park in Glascow, to take one instance, attracted 150,000 spectators. Other football matches across the UK on the same day recorded high attendance, too. Newspaper circulation  revealed a similar trajectory: serious newspapers like The Times and the Daily Telegraph were niche markets; the  combined circulation of newspapers in Great Britain was calculated as 13 million. They peddled “triviality and sex appeal” rather than the serious matter of politics, lamented a 1938 Report on the British Press, published by the earnestly reformist Political and Economic Planning Insitute.^[2] The British public thus stood accused of rejecting  serious politics as the substitute for a religion, which they were slowly abandoning. 

President Woodrow Wilson, the champion of the principle of national self-determination, was not a man to suffer from doubts. He was Presbyterian; he considered it a self-evident truth that the Constitution of 1789 needed an update; but he was also convinced that his  updated American model was the way forward for the benighted Europeans with their histories, their wars, their monarchs and aristocrats. Of course the application of the principle threw up a host of problems, but the direction of travel is what mattered, and the problems could be dealt with in the fullness of time. A new Europe would emerge as a continent of representative democracies, all blessed by universal suffrage, settling their differences through negotiation and by the good offices provided by the League of Nations, located in Geneva. Yes, Germany had been labelled by the Paris peacemakers as the guilty party in launching the war. The country had been  saddled with reparations that the overwhelming majority of German citizens repudiated. But these were failures, made in the heat of the moment, that would prove amenable to repair. So it proved. German debts were twice parred down in 1923-24 and again in 1929-30, while Germany was welcomed in as a full member of the League in 1925. It was also true that the deep wounds inflicted by the war made reconciliation between statesmen, let alone between the peoples, incredibly difficult to achieve. But reconciliation of some sorts was the only alternative if a repeat performance was to be avoided. These great tasks were made even more elusive in the light of financial instabilities inherited from the war, or in the light of the creation of new and untried states, and of rising expectations accompanying the extension of the vote. As Germany’s Foreign Minister, Gustav Stresemann, said,  Europe was “dancing on a volcano”. 

The leading men of the interwar years who championed the  liberal order which struggled to emerge from Versailles could not have been more different. In the 1920s, three may be picked out: the Scottish Labour politician, Ramsay MacDonald, was co-founder of the Labour party, a conscientious objector during the first World War, and who considered the Treaty of Versailles “an act of unparalleled madness”. ^[3] Three times Prime Minister, he sought to facilitate Germany’s active participation in the European concert of powers. This made him vulnerable to Winston Churchill’s criticism that he failed to stand up to National Socialist Germany. He resigned as Premier in 1937, and died later that year. Aristide Briand, a stalwart of the Third Republic, served eleven times as Prime Minister. Briand had been  active in the ministerial politicking in Paris in support of the massive battles at Verdun, the Somme and the Nivelle offensive. But he came to believe that reconcilation with Germany was vital, and famously received the Nobel Prize in 1926 for his part in bringing Germany into the European fold at Locarno. He went on to put his name to the Kellogg-Briand pact, which declared the intent to  outlaw war.  In 1930, he proposed a European Union to the French government, in his “Memorandum on the Organisation of a Regime of European Federal Union”. ^[4] His plan was not adopted and he died in 1932.  But its memory was revived after 1945. Gustav Stresemann, our third personality to place his stamp on events in the 1920s, served shortly as German Chancellor in 1923, and then for six years as Foreign Minister from 1923 to 1929. During the World War, he had been a passionate advocate for German territorial expansion, an ardent monarchist, and supporter of the war effort. He came to be a reluctant supporter of the Weimar Republic, and as Foreign Minister oversaw the reduction in Germany’s reparations commitment, Germany’s admission to the League of Nations and the signing of the Kellog-Briand pact. He received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Briand, but died of a series of strokes in October 1929, at the young age of 51. In retrospect, he was considered the outstanding German statesman of the decade. 

In the 1930s, there were two personalities from the liberal camp who stood out from the crowd. Edouard Daladier had fought on the western front in the World War, starting with the rank of sergeant and ending as a much decorated captain of infantry. He served in several ministries during the 1920s, became a short term Prime Minister, and joined the Leon Blum Popular Front coalition in 1936. His main contribution came as Minister of Defense in the coming four years.  He was much influenced by intelligence reports that Germany was arming fast for war, and correctly surmised that Hitler’s ambition was an unprecedented German domination over Europe. So Daladier took a hawkish line in demanding a major increase in funds, the development of a powerful state-led arms industry, a commanding French naval presence in the Mediterranean, and above all co-operation with the British Empire. This proved to be his Achilles heal, because the British Conservatives-given the very high rate of deaths in the officer corps during the World War-favoured peace, almost at any price.   He did however extract from London a “continental commitment”, whereby in the event of war, Britain would commit to the defense of France, and was still Defense Minister in the crucial month of May, when the French armies collapsed in the face of Germany’s “blitzkrieg” tactics. He lived on after 1945 until his passing in 1970. His main counterpart in shaping the western democracies’ policies in the face of a National Socialist Germany was Neville Chamberlain, who served first as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1931 to 1937 and then as Prime Minister until May 1940. Initially, Chamberlain focused on developing employment law, legal holidays and housing, and cutting back on defense., but he became alarmed at Germany’s belligerent diplomacy and switched to invest in developing a powerful airforce. No help from his UK was forthcoming when Germany absorbed Austria in March 1938, whereupon Hitler’s demands switched to the Sudetenland Germans in Czechoslovakia. In a bid to prevent war, Chamberlain flew three times in September to visit Hitler in Germany, whence he returned with his famous piece of paper, announcing to the cheering crowds at Heston airport  that there would be “peace in our time”. Hitler immediately absorbed the Sudetenland, and on 9 November 1938 launched his progrom against the Jews at Kristallnacht. This proved the turning point in British opinion away from appeasement. Despite Hitler’s peaceful promises, German troops invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. The invasion made it now evident that Hitler’s words counted for nothing. Chamberlain issued a commitment to Poland that if it was attacked, Germany would find itself at war with the British Empire. Hitler did not believe the threat, and instructed his generals to prepare for an invasion of Poland. “Our enemies, he told them, are small worms. I saw them at Munich”. ^[5]

Chamberlain clung on to his office until the debates in the House of Commons on May 7-9 1940 over the failed Franco-British expedition to Norway. Churchill delivered a vigorous speech in support of the government, but the Prime Minister’s position had been irredeemably weakened. The next day, on May 10, Germany invaded the Low Countries. Chamberlain favoured Lord Halifax as his successor; Halifax was open  to negotiations with Hitler, and  enjoyed strong support in the Tory party. But Halifax declined the offer, and Chamberlain swung behind Churchill. “You and I must rally,” he broadcast to the nation, “behind our new leader, and with our united strength, and with unshakable courage fight, and work until this wild beast, which has sprung out of his lair upon us, has been finally disarmed and overthrown”. ^[6] There was no turning back.

Marxism-Leninism and its critics. 

Two political systems challenged the post-1918 liberal order in the inter-war years: both were distinctly hostile to Europe’s Christian legacy. The essence of the Christian tradition in politics is that there is no making heaven on earth. To make the attempt is blind folly. Rather, it instructs us to consider all political systems faulty, because that is the condition of man. The radical challengers were not of such an opinion:  the alternative Europe under construction in the USSR sought to attain the socialist paradise through the abolition of class warfare; the radical authoritarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler considered law to be what the mighty made it, and Hitler in particular sought to establish a racial hierarchy, with the Germanic race at the top, to which the  rest was subservient.

The alternative Europe under construction in the USSR sought to remake society, in fact remake humanity no less. This required the nascent state to redefine marriage from its inherited form of male supremacy, the subjugation of women, and the related ability of men to ascertain parenthood, and thereby be able to define inheritance. As Frederick Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, “Supremacy of the man in the family and generation of children that could be his offspring and were destined to be the heirs of his wealth-these were openly avowed by the Greeks to be the sole objects of monogamy”.^[7] With monogamy, Engels argued, came the patriarchal family, the foundation of class conflict in the antagonism of the sexes, and the inheritance of inequality through the transmission of property over the generations. Only a union based on love, rather than property  held the sanction of morality, so when love ceased to exist, or when it was succeeded by a new passion, divorce would become a benefit. This was the spirit which inspired  the new regime in Russia to implement the  Matrimonial Code of 1918, which ordained that all church marriages were invalid, and therefore could be dissolved by the will of either party. Lenin appointed Alexandra Kollontai, his leading feminist, as commissar for social welfare. In In her book, Communism and the Family,  she writes that capitalism had swept away the traditional family, forcing the mother to go out to work, leaving the children unattended. In the new socialist world to be created, the revolutionary woman must no longer say, “these are my children”, but must remember that “there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers”. “In place of the individual and egoistic family, a great universal family of workers will develop, in which all the workers, men and women, will above all be comrades.” “Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child, but the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them.”^[8]

In the 13^th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, following Lenin’s death in January 1924, the family was decried as the “stronghold of all the turpitudes of the old regime”. Its abolition was to be hastened by a slew of measures: the status of illegitimacy was scrapped, primacy given to the legal rights of the individual over the family, no grounds divorce permitted and abortion legalised. The result was that by 1934 there were nearly three times more abortions than births in Moscow and 44% more divorces than registered marriages. ^[9] This was no way to prepare for the expected war against the western capitalist states, so Stalin reversed policy, began to strengthen the patriarchal family, award women with large families and made divorces more difficult to obtain. Here enscapsulated is progressive policy in action: implement out of conviction, then repent at leisure. The new round of naiveté starts off with lamentation over the supposedly  unexpected consequences, then reverses direction after much damage has been done, and launches on a new conviction that righteousness resides in faith-Luther’s claim. 

The attempt to remake Russia in the communist likeness came up against the wealth of Russia’s religious, literary and musical inheritance. To be sure, the Russians counted for only 44% of the empire’s population, where the development of consciousness among its many nationalities was expressed in the awakening to their particular troves of music, poetry and folklore. But none of this could obscure the religiosity of Russia’s peoples evidenced in the liturgies, monasteries, and choral chants of their cathedrals; the resonance across Russia and Europe of their great authors-Tolstoy, Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, or Dostoevsky- or the music of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Moussorgsky, or Rimsky Korsakov. One example may suffice to illustrate the point that Russian culture proved far too powerful to be re-engineered by a cluster of Marxist-Leninists, however determined. In February 1913, the reigning dynasty celebrated the 300 years of Romanov rule , beginning with a solemn thanksgiving in the Kazan cathedral, attended by all that the monarchy counted as good and great. Later in the week, there was a gala performance of Glinka’s opera, A Life for the Tsar, in which the peasant Susanin gives his life so that the Tsar may live. The Tsar’s intent was to celebrate what he considered to be the deep bond between himself and his people.^[10] The opera continued to be sung under Stalin, who intervened in the text to excise all reference to the Tsar. Stalin’s version continued to be sung until the collapse of the regime in the late 1980s, when the old wording reappeared. With the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s cathedrals filled anew.

Stalin consolidated his strangle hold on power in the second half of the 1920s, through the collectivisation of  agriculture.   Under his Five Year Plans , he created a centralized command economy which brooked no opposition. The first to suffer were the Ukrainian peasantry. Their seeds and animals were confiscated; the forced savings were ploughed into industry, which grew at breakneck speed, but at the cost of a disastrous famine. In the years 1930-33,  between 3 to 10 million people died of hunger. When German troops entered the Ukraine in 1941 with a view to exploiting the Ukraine’s resources, they were astonished to find themselves greeted as liberators. The wretched natives then had to learn that the National Socialist regime intended to strip them of everything they possessed, ensuring thereby the deaths of upward of a further 10 million people. Meanwhile Stalin, convinced that he was surrounded by “enemies of the people”, orchestrated the Great Purge in which 1.6 million were arrested, an estimated 18 million people disappeared into his Gulag system of forced labour camps, where 1.5 million died as a result, and a further 6 million were deported to remote regions of the USSR. By 1937,the dictator had absolute control over party, government and people. Under his new Constitution, the population of the USSR was assured that they enjoyed both freedom of religion and freedom of speech. This parody was celebrated by George Orwell in his novel Animal Farm, in which a bunch of barnyard animals overthrow their human masters and set up their own egalitarian society-on the model of the original Russian revolutionaries. In none too short a time, the more calculating of the animals-the pigs-form a dictatorship which turns out to be even worse than the humans they had overthrown. They did so in the name of equality, where “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”.

Europe’s intellectuals had initially been attracted to Lenin’s project, none more so than in the United Kingdom. John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, lectured the Soviet politburo in September 1924, where he argued for a wide swathe of activities to come under centralized state control. ^[11] This preference for an activist state differed as night and day from the small-state liberalism of Gladstone. In 1932, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, two founding members of the Fabian Society, visited the USSR at the height of the Ukrainian famine and came back to write a laudatory 1,000 page volume, entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? The text was penned mainly by Sidney, who went on a further fact finding mission in 1933, and then relied on texts and statistics supplied by the Soviet embassy in London. Later editions dropped the question mark. The book was published by the Left Book Club, which produced  R.Palme Dutt’s World Politics, 1918-1936, a pro-Stalin account of Soviet foreign policy; ^[12] in their book, the Webbs omitted any  mention of the man-made famine; and later described Stalin’s purges as  “strenuous efforts” “to cut out the deadwood”. ^[13] A younger version of the Webbs is Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012),  the famous British historian. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain at Cambridge University in 1936; remained a life-long communist, through the thick and thin of successive revelations; and retreated into “hooded, wooden language, redolent of party-speak”, whenever he touched on a politically sensitive zone.^[14] As David Caute wrote about Hobsbawm’s memoirs, Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life,^[15] in The Spectator,”One keeps asking of Hobsbawm: didn’t you know what Deutscher and Orwell knew? Didn’t you know about the induced famine, the horrors of collectivisation, the false confessions, the terror within the Party, the massive forced labour of the gulag? As Orwell himself documented, a great deal of evidence was reliably knowable even before 1939, but Hobsbawm pleads that much of it was not reliably knowable until Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956.» ^[16] It is a legitimate question to ask how, with such views, Hobsbawm became so acclaimed in British academe.

Continental intellectuals were no less attracted to Marxism.  This should not surprise. A recurrent theme was their repudiation of the experience in the Great War, either as participants or as conscientious objectors.   Lenin’s thesis that war is what the great capitalist powers did appealed to them.^[17] Henri Barbusse, for instance, a novelist, fought in the French army at Verdun, then joined the Communist party in revulsion at the war, and wrote a hagiography of Stalin;  ^[18] Romain Rolland, French author of the roman fleuve Jean Christophe-a musical genius who came to live in France-lived in Switzerland during the Great War, and  came in the 1930s to be a leading supporter of Stalin; Berthold Brecht, playwrite and poet, who left Germany in 1933, absorbed a heterodox Marxism,  and was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954; André Gide, one of the leading novelists of the first forty years of the twentieth century, was sympathetic to the revolution, befriended Léon Blum, the French Prime Minister, and went in 1936 to the USSR, but returned disillusioned at what he had seen. By this time, many who had joined the broader progressive movement, began to make unflattering comparisons of the dictatorships, fascist, national socialist and Stalinist. This was the case of Leon Trotsky, who wrote that ‘Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep differences in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena’. ^[19] George Orwell, commenting about his experience in Republic Spain during the Spanish Civil war of 1936-39, wrote that the Spanish Republican government had forced fascism onto Spanish workers “under the pretext of resisting Fascism”.^[20]Reviewing Arthur Koestler’s book, Darkness at Noon, an allegory about Stalin’s purges of 1938, Orwell wrote in a 1941 review in The New Statesman, that “What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them. »^[21]

The decisive factor in silencing the many voices who spoke in support of the fascist and national socialist causes was victory in war. Victory revealed the brutalities of the creed; its verdict was final; there was no appeal. There was no second life to Giovanni Gentile’s Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals from 1925, which praised “the religious character of fascism” , glorified violence and was endorsed a by a galaxy of Italian intellectual luminaries. ^[22] The survivors included the Marxists, who could bathe in the Red Army’s contribution to victory in “the Great Patriotic War”; they declared, with Stalin, that fascism, national socialism, and Franco’s national Catholicism were all the same, were “fascist” and were all “right wing”;  victory also enabled them to  support the many state-led programmes to reconstruct the damaged economies of western Europe. In this, they were aided and abetted by the US Marshall Plan, designed to revive the European economies, finance US exports, and bottle Soviet influence behind clearly delineated frontiers. But the Marshall Plan and its beneficiaries, was intent on reviving a market economy, hence a bourgeois social structure of owners, whose property rights would be guaranteed, whose family structures would underpin the principle of inheritance, and  hence revive inequalities in society. In western Europe, there would be owners and workers; in eastern Europe, there would be the party-privileged, and the rest. There was never any attempt  to build socialist societies freed from what true believers considered to be pernicious bourgeois features. Furthermore, post-war Marxists did not dominate, so much as share influence with liberal, parliamentary and Christian organisations. The iron curtain which came to divide Germany and Europe in two halves, under two hostile great powers, also ended the older struggle of European powers for supremacy; obliterated the fascist and national socialistic political movements, outside of the political backwaters of Franco Spain and Salazar’s Portugal; and brought a peace to Europe, which it had never previously experienced. ^[23]

Friedrich Engels had famously stated at Marx’s funeral in 1883 that while Darwin discovered the law of organic Nature, Marx discovered the law of human development. Class war, as Engels stated in his 1884 book on the family,  was rooted in the social roles of the sexes as defined in the patriarchal family. In other words, Marx’s class war was, and is,  sourced in the politics of biology. The theoretician who elaborated on this insight was  the Austrian Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). His  mother committed suicide and his father, a depressive,  died in 1914. Reich served in the Hapsburg armies for the duration of the Great War, and then began his studies in Vienna ; as one of Freud’s favourite pupils, he presented his major study, The Function of the Orgasm in 1926.  Naturally combative, he became a militant member of the Austrian communist party; broke with Freud, and then with the communist party. His best known work is The Sexual Revolution, published in 1930, which extols the psychological benefits of free sex. The book holds that the phenomenon of dictatorship originates in the Christian injunction to sexual inhibition which is instilled in children from an early age. The inhibition produces emotional disorders, which endanger humanity and pervade society. He proposed to smash monogamy- a key pillar of European society. How radical this process of smashing the old and building the new would be  may be appreciated by the following quote from his 1953 book, The Murder of Christ : “It was the people who made Hitler and not Hitler who subdued the people. Without Hitler or Stalinism in the people there could be no Hitler or Stalin. This was the counter-truth of 1932”. If the sexual revolution which Reich had suggested had triumphed, the great disaster would have been avoided. “ The genitally gratified person is not harassed by filthy pornographic thoughts and dreams. He has no impulses to rape or to seduce against anybody’s will. He is far removed from acts of rape and perversion of any kind. It is the fully genital character who truly fulfils the moral law of Christianity, and of every other truly religious ethics”. ^[24] The free play of sex would destroy the bourgeois world.

The roots of  of social Darwinism. 

Cold war Europe also proved inhospitable to the doctrines of social Darwinism, which had held such prominence since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The thesis he laid out was one of natural selection by accidental variations, and represented a frontal assault on Providence as the source of creation.^[25] It was propounded with a bevy of  literary, geological and biological references, which swept to the conclusion that the struggle for life, was “ the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals..”. In the Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1870, Darwin expounded his position with greater clarity: “With savages, he writes, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated, and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this is most injurious to the race of man.” ^[26]

Darwin’s impact on UK opinion was profound: early Victorian reforms had been carried through on an alliance between Benthamite utilitarians, with their preferred vehicle in The Economist, and the Wesleyians, champions of the lengthy and successful campaign against slavery. Darwin challenged  the Christian ethos of reform, and proposed biological determinism as a substitute. The new religion, which he spawned,  was materialist, and took multiple forms: Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s “Bulldog” coined the term “agnosticism” in order to establish that a claim had to be able to distinguish between what is knowable and what is not. Matthew Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, proclaimed his faith in a “ muscular Christianity” , rather than Christian rituals and dogmas. propounded by the national church.  ^[27] What came to be known as “social Darwinism” was given its academic credentials by Carl Pearson,  who founded the world’s first university statistics department at University College London in 1911. He was also a convinced geneticist. “History shows me one way, he wrote, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.” ^[28]

Before the 1914 war, eugenics enjoyed wide appeal in the United Kingdom: it claimed to be scientific; it was rooted in Nature; imperialists used it to proclaim the superiority of their race; barons of industry cited it to justify their success;  and “progressives” worried about overbreeding by the unfit. In the UK, D.H.Lawrence  contemplated building a lethal chamber into which, with a band playing softly, “all the sick, the halt and the maimed” would be gently led.^[29] H.G. Wells and G.B. Shaw expressed similar opinions. The left-wing Fabian Society was keen to reduce poverty with the help of eugenics. Sidney Webb expressed his views in a Fabian Tract , No. 131, “The Decline in the Birth Rate”, in which he complained of the “national degeneration”, resulting from Irish Catholics or Russian, Polish and German Jews breeding like rabbits. The heart of this eugenics movement in the UK was essentially a Darwin family business. Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, had been an effective propagator of the great man’s ideas; in 1911, Darwin’s son, Leonard replaced his cousin, Galton as chairman of the national eugenics society. That year, an offshoot of the Society was opened in Cambridge. Three of Darwin’s sons joined. The group’s treasurer was the young John Maynard Keynes. The society lobbied hard for a Feeble-minded Persons Control Bill,  which proposed intelligence as the chief criterion for determining who was fit and unfit. Fortunately, the bill failed: Colonel Wedgwood, MP, killed the bill with a memorable speech in which he affirmed that that the people of this country will not tolerate  “such a monstrous injustice as that people are to be sent to prison for life for merely being abnormal”.^[30]  But the government brought in its own bill-the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which stayed on the statute book until 1959. In the UK, you were fully human if you were deemed intelligent.

Social Darwinist ideas fell on fertile soil in the United States, too, but-as in the United Kingdom- these ideas were far from uniformly sanctioned. Jim Crow laws were on the books of all southern Democrat states, and the titans of business such as J.D. Rockefeller  invoked natural selection as “the working out of a law of nature and a law of God”.^[31]  As Haeckel, the biologist propagator of Darwinism  in Germany, stated  in his book, The Wonders of Life, published in the USA by Harper’s in 1904,  those at the bottom of the human pile   “.. are psychologically nearer to apes and dogs than to civilized Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives”. ^[32]  Such views ran parallel to concerns about America’s racial stock, as immigration in the  first two decades of the century, topped over fourteen million people. America’s moneyed élite turned enthusiastically to the study of eugenics: the widow of the railway magnate, E.H. Harriman helped to fund the Eugenics Record Office in 1910; Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Oliver Wendell Holmes were all eugenics enthusiasts. Applications of eugenics were found in recruitment to the armed forces, where intelligence tests were used to weed out the feeble-minded; birth control measures were targeted at curbing the size of Black families; and there was much lamentation at the supposed passing of the Nordic race. ^[33]

Nevertheless, social Darwinism was not compatible with the Christian roots of the United States, whose  founders had proclaimed the equality of all men, and invoked God in the constitution. When the pygmy, Ota Benga, was put on display in the Bronx Zoo, alongside an orangutan, in 1906, the Reverend J.H. Gordan of the Coloured Baptists’ Ministers’ Conference wrote in the pages of The New York Times, that “the Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favour should  not be permitted”.^[34]  Over the succeeding century, the US public has broadly agreed with the Reverend Gordan:  Jim Crowe laws have been repealed; Darwin’s theories are rejected by two thirds of Americans, and a particular feature of America’s wealthy is their generous commitment to philanthropy-in other words to providing a helping hand to the less well endowed. 

Darwin’s ideas had the deepest and most important impact on Germany. His  ideas were relayed by a galaxy of intellectual luminaries, preaching the new materialist religion from the prominence of their university chairs. Their resonance was compounded by the fact that German universities at the time  were the most advanced in  early twentieth century Europe; Germany swept the board of Nobel prizes; scholars from the UK and the USA flocked  to study under them; German theological studies were followed with deep appreciation across the Anglosphere. Variants of Darwinism were taught by the  eminent oriental linguist August Schleicher; Alexander Tille, the student of Nietszche, and most effectively by the biologist Ernst Haeckel. Their combined message held that the strongest individuals had always prevailed in the struggle for life. ^[35]  Arguably, the most prominent disseminator of Darwin’s ideas was the British-German philosopher, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who has been referred to as “Hitler’s John the Baptist”. ^[36] He was not a university man; he was self-taught, and it showed in his argumentation. But he had a huge following.  He was a Richard Wagner  fan, embraced völkisch belief in the unity of race, art, nation and politics;^[37] he also married Wagner’s  daughter, and  penned a blockbuster two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, published in 1899. Two races were at each others throats, the book contended-the Aryans and the Jews. The  Aryans, Europeans all, were  the source  of  what was good and great in the world.   All  bad in the world derived from “the Jew”. “The Jew” “put his foot upon the neck of all nations of the world” in order to “be lord and possessor of the whole earth”. William II was fascinated. The  correspondence between monarch and Chamberlain  ranged far and wide, to embrace the noble mission of the Germanic race; the corroding forces of Roman Catholicism the threat from  materialism; the “destructive poison” of Judentum, the “Yellow Peril”, “Tartarised Slavdom, the black hordes”, not to forget Social Democrats,  freethinkers, ^[38]  and the depraved British. ^[39] With so many enemies to contend with, it is not at all clear how Chamberlain could imagine that the Germanic race could lead the world. 

Chamberlain is the crucial link between Germany’s pre-1914 social Darwinism, and its full-blooded application under the National Socialists. The ageing Chamberlain was an ardent champion of a muscular German foreign policy.  Perhaps with an eye to pulling the wool over Catholic eyes, he contended that Jesus was too good not to be an Aryan. But unlike the Papacy he urged war at every turn:  to annex lands in Europe and Africa, to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, to bomb Britain into submission, and to destroy her naval supremacy. Britain, he was convinced,  was the mastermind behind the war,^[40] while Germany was the innocent party.  Germany alone had preserved racial purity, and its traditional hierarchy, while Britain had become a vulgar, money-grubbing plutocracy under Jewish influence.^[41] He told Wilhelm in January 1917 that they were engaged in “the war of Judentum and its near relative Americanism for the control of the world”.^[42]His essays sold a million copies over the course of the war. ^[43] Not surprisingly,-given his beliefs- he was shattered by the defeat, the collapse of the monarchy, and the creation of “the Jewish Republic” of Weimar. Defeat, he was convinced,  was due to “the stab in the back” by the Nation’s enemies-the Social Democrats and Jews in particular.^[44] If anything, he became more influential with the Kaiser’s departure. Hitler is reported as having read Foundations, Chamberlain’s biography of Wagner, and his wartime essays. In particular, he absorbed Chamberlain’s  proposal that the  Jews should be excised from German society.^[45]  On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, praised Foundations as “the gospel of the National Socialist movement”.  ^[46]  Hitler attended his burial at Beyrouth in 1927.

Radical nationalisms.

Mussolini (1883-1945) is the uncontested founder of Fascism. He owed much to his father, Alessandro who was a radical revolutionary in the Italian national tradition, a “mangiapreti”, deeply hostile to the Catholic Church, and self-schooled in a country where illiteracy was still 70%. Alessandro named his son Benito, after Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary who had the Archduke Maximilian executed for leading a puppet government under French auspices; his second name was Amilcare after Cipriani, who had been a Garilbaldi companion, and Andrea, his third name,  after the Romagnolo radical, Costa. Mussolini had a complex relation to formal religion: he hated his two years in Catholic school as a young boy, and never lost the chance to attack the Church; but he was not hostile to religion; both his mother and Arnaldo, his brother-whom he loved- were practicing Catholics. He was a voracious reader,and a good public speaker-the headmaster chose him in 1902 to give the memorial speech on Verdi’s death at his home town, Forlimpopoli. He also proved to be a good writer, and newspaper editor. In his father’s footsteps, he regularly adopted extremist positions. In 1902, he fled to Switzerland, where he fell in with radical anarchists and socialists, but also took the time to attend the lectures of the great Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. In 1910,  he was married to Rachele, but that did not prevent him from being a hyper-active womanizer- he is recorded as boasting 169 mistresses, and deployed his luscious eyes to great effect with women of high society. Not least, he clearly considered himself a gift to the world, writing his autobiography at the age of 28. Eventually, he married Rachele in Church. She survived him, living until 1979, running her own restaurant where she regularly served “tagliatelle alla camisa nera”. Rachele remained devoted to his memory to the last.

As an active member of the Italian Socialist party prior to 1914, Mussolini was on the radical wing, favoured ideas of direct action and was appointed editor in 1912 of Avanti, the party newspaper. Circulation rose over three times under his lead, but in October 1914, he openly criticised Italy’s neutrality in the war, and was expelled from the party for his pains. He immediately started publication of Il Popolo d’Italia, with financial support from the more conservative newspaper, Il Resto del Carlino, along with  British and French monies which flowed his way.  Italy entered the war against Austria in May 1915, while Mussolini joined the army, and became a spokesmen for the view that  the “trinceristi”- the frontline fighters- had the moral right to remake Italy after the war. Straight after the war’s end, Mussolini founded the fascist movement, composed mainly of ex-servicemen, and within a short time was elected to parliament, where he delivered his opening speech in June 1921. He and Giovanni Gentile wrote The Doctrine of Fascism, which stated that “Fascism is a religious conception of life”, establishing the corporate state in 1925-1926. The prime idea was abolition of class war, the  settlement of labour disputes by tribunal, and the creation of a new aristocracy that would emerge out of the collapse of the democratic idea. The most famous prefect of Fascism was Cesare Mori, the prefect of Palermo who partially crushed the mafia  by a series of measures in the mid-1920s, causing the survivors to flee to America. They returned in the train of the US armies in 1943, and re-established their operations in preparation for the golden years of crime in the post-war years. 

Mussolini was among the first to nationalize revolution; the declaration of war in August 1914 had sounded the death-knell of international socialism. Entry to a war fought in the name of the patria was an experiment to rescue the idea and marry it to the nation: henceforth, Fascism would trace a Third Way between the International of Socialism and the rule of the bourgeoisie. Its appeal was rooted as much as anything in Mussolini’s early success in returning Italy to a semblance of order.  As Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher and humanist commented, “Fascism was like a working man, impetuous, violent even, but generous and a lover of the patria”. ^[47] His success in restoring law and order to Italy won widespread admiration: differences, that had kept Catholics out of politics since 1870, were settled with the Vatican. Lady Ivy Chamberlain, the wife of Austen-Chancellor of the Exchequer then Foreign Minister, came to Italy sporting her fascist broach; G.K.Chesterton was a supporter; President Roosevelt invited Mussolini in 1933 to the USA; Churchill referred to the Duce  as “the Roman genius”. His response to the international financial crisis of 1929 was greatly admired:  he created the state-holding company, Instituto per la Riconstruzione Industriale to buy up shares of banks in danger of failing; introduced unemployment benefit in 1933, and by the end of the 1930s,had  13 million Italians inscribed in the state health insurance scheme. Italians enthusiastically endorsed the regime; Italian women adored him by the millions; the Italian ocean liner, Rex, set the fastest record for crossing the Atlantic; Alfa Romeo won the Mille Miglia; Primo Carrera won the world heavyweight championship; and Italy won the World cup in football in 1934, again in 1938, and the Gold Medal at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. The Fascist slogan, “many women, much honour” won the unequivocal consent of Italian men. ^[48]

Things went wrong for Mussolini, and for Italy, in the mid-1930s. This is a judgement made in retrospect; at the time, Fascist Italy still bathed in extensive admiration. It had set the tone for authoritarian and corporatist parties across Europe, mainly located in Catholic cultures. The Rex party achieved prominence in Belgium, as did the Croix de Feu, made up primarily of veterans from the World War  in France. Action Française, which advocated monarchy exploiting the symbols of Christianity, was proscribed by the Vatican, but became influential in the occupied France of 1940-44. Before the Anschluss of Austria to Germany in 1938, the diminutive Engelbert Dollfuss abolished parliament in Austria and established a “Christian, German state of Austria” based on the estates and “strong authoritarian leadership”. In Romania, the Legion of the Archangel Gabriel sought land redistribution, propagated virulent anti-semitism, and deployed indiscriminate violence. That decade saw dictatorships thrive in Estonia, Poland and in Portugal, while in 1936 General Franco moved to lead the rebels against the constitutional government of Spain. This was the context where Stalin’s brainwave of labelling all his opponents “fascists” began to gain political traction. Lenin’s chief companion, Leon Trotsky became a fascist, as did the arch-conservative general, Francisco Franco. Stalin played the modest pipe smoker to the naïve European leftists who flocked to Moscow to see the worker’s paradise with their own eyes; but in effect he precipitated the Soviet Union into an orgy of terror, to rid himself of all enemies, imagined and real. A million and a half opponents disappeared into the gulag; he slaughtered his leading generals; and in August 1939, Stalin made a pact with Hitler, to divide up Poland. By the time, the second World War broke out that autumn, three fifths of Europeans lived in states under some form of authoritarian rule. Parliamentary government as a system of government was confined to 11 countries in north-western Europe. The experiment of converting the Austro-Hungarian empire into a collection of constitutional democracies revealed the bankruptcy of the Versailles settlement. ^[49]

The ultimate reason for Mussolini’s demise, and with it the devastation of Italy by war, was that the Duce allowed Italy to be sucked into the wake of Hitler’s Germany. His big mistake was to have invaded Ethiopia in 1935, depriving Italy of ready alliance with Great Britain; he then sent military aid to General Franco, when the rebels rose against the Republican government, as did Hitler’s Germany. Stalin sent support to the Republicans, with a view to converting Spain into a communist state-the first Soviet Republic in the western sphere of influence.^[50]  What developed into the German-Italian axis was cemented by their participation on the same side in Spain’s civil war, the failure of Great Britain and France to effectively oppose Hitler’s determined revision of the Versailles settlement, and in 1938 the absorption of Austria into the German Reich, with the result that the German-Italian border now ran through the Alps. Pope Pius IX expressed the Vatican’s deep disquiet at the turn of events in his statement, Mit Brennender Sorge, in which he condemned Nazi anti-semitism as founded on the “myth of blood and race”, and then told students how Italy had disgracefully begun to imitate the anti-semitic laws applied in Germany. The Duce’s new policy on Jews was announced on July 14, 1938 in the Giornale d’italia, in a statement known as the Manifesto della Razza, followed by the first anti-Jewish laws which resulted in their expulsion from the armed forces,  as from secondary and university teaching posts or as pupils. The German-Italian alliance, known as the Pact of Steel, was confirmed in May 1939, linking the two countries both politically and militarily. Hitler was now in the steering seat: Mussolini was not informed about German preparations for the invasion of Poland, nor was the Duce informed about the pending alliance between Hitler and Stalin, confirmed in August 1939. Hitler ran the Axis. Italy followed in the greater power’s train.

Mussolini and Hitler were chalk and cheese. Mussolini was an arch-pragmatist, who made policy on a hunch which as often as not in his early  years, served him well. This was particularly the case with women, whom he looked on as there to be conquered. “She became mine” is a frequent entry to his diary. Nor did his fascination for women abandon him, but his intuition led him in later years from one disastrous political decision to another. Hitler by contrast was an ideologue, convinced that biology was the source of law, and that  Judeo-Christianity had warped the European world for well over one and a half thousand years, and had to be uprooted and replaced. National-socialism, he is pithily quoted as saying, is none other than applied biology. After 1945, biological politics for a while fell into disrepute, given revelation of the concentration camps, accompanied by abundant evidence that the kernel of national-Socialist policy was not just conquest and war, but the elimination of Jews, socialists, homosexuals, and anybody else who incurred the displeasure of the regime.  Hitler came to occupy in the western imagination a unique place in a Hell that an increasingly post-Christian Europe had otherwise evacuated of sinners following the death of good and evil, and where he sat in solitary confinement, perhaps accompanied by Goebbels, Himmler, Goering, Hans Franck and other major war criminals. 

But this is history with hindsight; the ideas informing the National-Socialist movement were widespread in the European world. As Jonah Goldberg reminds us, British socialism, the lodestar for American progressivism, was saturated with eugenics.^[51] The Fabians, John Maynard Keynes, the Huxley’s, The New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian were all supporters of eugenics. Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood-habitually a major donor to the Democratic Party-promoted birth control with a view to curbing the size of black families. Black leaders, like Jesse Jackson, correctly suspected that the cause of abortion “rights” was not so much to promote women’s rights, as to curb black babies. The prime target of Planned Parenthood was the black population. Likewise, her English counterpart Marie Stopes, was keen on “racial hygiene”. Hitler’s cardinal failure was to target Jews-historically the people directly related to what had become the religious foundation of European law. 

Hitler was of course a pragmatist in that he seized any opportunity that came his way to revise the hated treaty of Versailles.^[52] A.J.P. Taylor argued the case in his book on the origins of the second world war , questioning whether Hitler was burdened by ideological preconceptions. Yet it is perfectly reasonable to argue with Taylor that Hitler was an arch-pragmatist, and also to point out that he saw the world through a racial prism. The opportunities he seized were identified in his version of social Darwinism.  Internally, the task to overturn Versailles did not turn out to be too difficult: he exploited the death of Field Marshall Hindenburg in 1934 to hoist himself into the position of Führer- the overall commander of the armed forces, of foreign policy and domestic politics. He backed down when the Austrian National Socialist putsch in Vienna failed, but went ahead to absorb Austria into the Reich four years later when conditions had ripened. A.J.P. Taylor is surely correct to write that all he had to do was to announce that he was dissatisfied and then to wait for the concessions to fall into his lap.^[53] His opponents in Paris and London were not prepared to go to war, so that absorbing the Rhineland, then Austria, the German speaking territories of Czechoslovakia, and then-he hoped- the German speaking city of Danzig could be accomplished at minimum cost in lives and treasure. 

Hitler at most was prepared to launch a series of short wars, definitely not a total war for which Germany was not prepared. ^[54] What he failed to assess correctly was the changing mood in the UK: public opinion there was fundamentally in agreement that German territories, if they wished, should be absorbed into the Reich. All the outward signs were that the UK was not interested in fighting over eastern Europe, let alone over what were little more than minor frontier changes on the Franco-German border. What turned British opinion was Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies; his investment in armaments, in expanding the armed forces, which pointed in the direction of war, and then the bullying,  occupying and dividing of Czechoslovakia. Prime Minister Chamberlain hoped to have called a halt to Hitler’s piecemeal revisionism of Versailles by extending a British empire alliance with Poland. Poland though was part of Hitler’s dream of Lebensraum, as was Ukraine. He chose not to believe that Chamberlain would honour his commitment to Warsaw. Paul Schmidt,  Hitler’s interpreter, records Hitler’s stunned silence when he realized that Germany was now at war with the British Empire. ^[55]

Hitler was a pragmatist, but it is undeniable that he was also  a true revolutionary, with a vision to turn the inherited world upside down, and establish a Thousand Year Reich for the benefit of the Germans. His was a cultural revolution, designed to replace Christianity with a race-based ethics. ^[56]The necessary partner in this endeavour, paradoxically,  was the Vatican, the first state to have reached a Concordat with him in 1933. The paradox was that the Vatican and National Socialist doctrine were totally incompatible; the necessity of partnership was rooted in the fact that  one third of Germans adhered to the Catholic Church, and also because the Church had long blamed the Jewish leadership of the time for Christ’s death. But national Socialism shared the widespread progressive view that religion was a phoney invention of the past, and Church-regime relations remained tense as the National Socialists seized every opportunity to advance its racial policies.  The terms of the Concordat of 1933 did not extend to Austria, so with Anschluss the full venom of National Socialist hostility to the Church was unleashed, a precedent that was repeated with even greater cruelty in Poland. Wehrmacht soldiers were informed that the war in the east was part of a Crusade against “Jewish Bolshevism”, a point clarified in the general order of October 10,1941, issued by Field Marshall Walter von Reichenau:  “… The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimina- tion of asiatic influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks which exceed the onesided routine of soldiering. The soldier in the eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities which have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations.Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just revenge on subhuman Jewry. The Army has to aim at another purpose, i. e., the annihilation of revolts in the hinterland which, as experience proves, have always been caused by Jews.” ^[57]

The outcome of the war, ending in National Socialism’s total defeat, is well documented and does not need repeating, except to make the point that the allies decided to outdo the Reich in violence: the alliance between the unlikely partners of the USA, the USSR, the British Empire and de Gaulle’s France committed itself to unconditional surrender. There was to be no negotiation, only war prosecuted until the last German soldier lay down arms. What does bear repeating is that the discovery of the concentration camps, the capture of the Reich’s immense documentation, the Nuremberg trials, the detailed histories of the period that followed, and the allied insistence-on this there was widespread agreement despite the rivalry between East and West- that no quarter should be given to whoever sought to defend the National Socialist record, plus the military occupation of Germany, meant that National Socialism died with Hitler in the bunker. Mussolini was machine gunned with his mistress, Clara Petacci, a few days before. There was to be no revival; no clamour as after Versailles against victor’s justice, no return to the past. Nie wieder was the slogan which anchored itself in German hearts, which the allies all welcomed but the longer term import of which they failed to divine. From being militantly beilligerent, Germany switched to being militantly pacifist.  

The political debates of the years from 1918 to 1949 have an evergreen quality about them. Europe and the world cried out for peace. But that required multiple acts of contrition on all sides; a realization that all major voices had to be included in the peace settlement; a deeper questioning about the secular reasons for launching the war; and not least, the inclusion of Germany and the Soviet Union in the settlement. This represented a series of very high hurdles, which European leaders crossed one after the other, in the hope that war could be avoided. The British Ambassador to Berlin,  Neville Henderson, wrote in his memoir, that when Germany’s Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, rejected Great Britain’s request that all German forces be withdrawn from Poland as a preliminary to negotiations, he answered: “It will be left to history to judge where the blame really lay”. ^[58] The verdict has been as absolute as was the allied victory. In terms of ideas, social darwinism took the hardest knocks, despite the fact that its assumptions  were widespread across the European world and North America. There was no appeal after the revelations about the industrial scale of National Socialist massacres of Jews and other undesirables. A formerly keen eugenicist, such as Keynes, recognized as such when in 1945 he resigned from the Eugenics Society, in which he had played a prominent role for over three decades, in a desperate attempt to dissassocate his name from anything to do with Hitler’s crimes. Stalin’s version of Marxist-Leninism subtly hitched itself to the glorious victories of the peoples of the USSR, but lumbered on with a declining resonance over the following decades. The role of the USSR in the defeat of National Socialism enabled Marxist-Leninism to to pass over its being rooted in the politics of biology, as Engels had pointed out. Its reawakening after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991 indicates as clearly as can be that the inspiration of Marxist-Leninism is fundamentally religious. Belief is not amenable to refutation. That is why the liberal democracies, led by Great Britain and France, continue to hobble on, as they did in the inter-war period, lurching from one predictable crisis to another, precisely because in liberal democracies, nothing is sacred, everything is open to doubt and to questioning. The paradox of western democracies is that doubt is their fundamental belief. They reached this conviction because the source of their origin is Christianity. The following chapter covers the European Christian experience over the century from 1850 to 1950.

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^[1] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives on World History, London, Allen and Unwin, 1922, Vol II. Pp.506-507.

^[2] Political and Economic Planning, Report on the British Press, London, PEP, 1938. Cited in  Adrian Bingham, « Monitoring the popular press: an historical perspective”, May 2005. 

^[3] Quoted in David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald, London, Jonathan Cape, 1977, p.250. 

^[4] Aristide Briand, Memorandum on the Organisation of a System of Federal European Union, France, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1930. Library of Congress pdf. 

^[5] Robert Self, Neville Chamberlain, Ashgate, 2006, p.369.  

^[6] Cited in Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, 2^nd ed Archon Books, 1970, p. 441. 

^[7] Frederick Engels , The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, translated by Ernest Untermann, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr, 1909, p. 79. 

^[8] Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family, in English translation by Alex Holt, in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, Allison and Busby, 1977. 

^[9] Cited in Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West, Tan Books, republished in 2022. p. 87. 

^[10] The incident is told in Orlando Figes, magnificent book, A People’s Tragedy, The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, London, Pimlico, 1997. pp.4-5, 8, 112. 

^[11] The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes, London, MacMillan and Cambridge University Press, 1971-1989, Vol.19, p.441. 

^[12] R.Palme Dutt, World Politics, 1918-1936, Maine Press, reprint 2007.  

^[13] Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism, Bodley head, 2009, p.122.

^[14] Tony Judt quoted in Richard J. Evans,  Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, London, Little Brown, 2019. p. 618.

^[15] Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times,: A Twentieth Century Life, Allen Unwin, 1964.

^[16] David Caute, Great helmsman or mad wrecker », The Spectator, October 19, 2002. 

^[17] « War and Revolution”,  Lecture May 1917, Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, Volume 24, pp.398-421.

^[18] Staline: Un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme, Paris, Flammarion, 1935.  

^[19] Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed : What is the Soviet Union and where is it going ? Translated by Max Eastman, Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1937, p.278. 

^[20] Quoted by Tom Buchanan, « Three Lives of Homage to Catalonia”, The Library, September 2002 (3), pp.302-314. 

^[21] Gary Raymond, « The Untouched  legacy of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell”, in Wales, Arts Review, February 24, 2016. 

^[22] Emiliana P. Noether,  Italian intellectuals under Fascism”, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 1971), p.641

^[23] Field, p.189. 

^[24] Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ: Volume One, The Emotional Plague of Mankind, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1953. Pp. 302-303. 

^[25] Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx and Wagner : Critique of a Heritage, 2^nd ed, New York, Anchor Books, 1958. p. 11. 

^[26] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol 1, London, Murray, 1871. p. 168. 

^[27] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralisation of Society from Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.p. 28. 

^[28] Karl Pearson, “The Woman’s Question”,   in The Ethic of Freethought. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1888. pp. 370–394.

^[29]  Quoted in Ian Kershaw,  To Hell and Back, p.20.

^[30] Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 17 May 1912, Vol.38 cc 1443-519. Cited in Sewell, p.6. 

^[31] Quoted in Robert Reich, The Two American Darwinisms, The American Prospect, November 20, 2005. 

^[32] Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life New York, Harpers, 1904, pp. 56-57. 

^[33] Madison Grant, friend of US Presidents, lawyer, Yale alum and famed as a founder conservationist, wrote The Passing of the Great Race, New York, Scribner’s, 1916. 

^[34] Quoted in Dennis Sowell, p.6.

^[35] Alexander Tille, Von Darwin bis Nietszche: Ein Buch Entwicklungspolitik, Leipzig, 1895, p.23; Fritz Bolle, Walther Buchholz, Darwinismus and Zeitgeist, in Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte, January 1962, pp. 143-180. 

^[36] James D. Foreman, Nazism, New York, London, Franklin Watts, 1978, p.14

^[37] Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, p.75. 

^[38]  Field pp, 252,254, 261. 

^[39] Field p.359

^[40] Field, pp.381, 305-306. 

^[41] Ian Buruma, Anglomania : A European Love Affair, New York, Vintage 2000. pp220-221. 

^[42] Field, p.384. 

^[43] Field, p.340. 

^[44] Field, pp.396-401. 

^[45] Richard J.Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, London, Allen Lane, 2003, p.204.

^[46] William L.Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Simon and Schuster, 1959, p.109. 

^[47] Quoted in Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life, London, Sharpe Books, 2018, p. 157. 

^[48] Nicholas Farrell, p. 235.

^[49] Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back, p. 245. 

^[50] Ronald Radosh, Mary B.Habeck, Grigory Sevastianov, Spain Betrayed: the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War, Yale University Press, 2001.

^[51] Jonah Goldberg, Liberal fascism : The secret history of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, London, Penguin Books, especially pp. 247-283. 

^[52] On Hitler’s pragmatism, A.J.P.Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, London, Penguin Books, 1964.

^[53] Taylor, p.101. 

^[54] Taylor, p.17

^[55] Dr. Paul Schmidt, The Secret History of German Diplomacy 1935-1945, edited by R.H.C.Steed, London, William Heinemann, 1951. p. 156.

^[56] Johan Chapoutot, Comprendre le nazisme, Paris, Editions Tallandier, 2020. 

^[57] Quoted in Kershaw, To Hell and Back, p. 377. 

^[58] Neville Henderson, Failure of a Mission, 1937-1939. New York, Putnam, 1940. p.300.