The author of the article stated that the two symbols which are today opposed to one another, namely that of Bolshevism and National Socialism, stand for regimes which “in essential structure are similar and in many of their laws—their buttresses—are identical. The similarity is moreover increasing.” He went on to say:
“In both countries are the same censorships on art, literature, and of course the Press, the same war on the intelligentsia, the attack on religion, and the massed display of arms, whether in the Red Square or the Tempelhofer Feld.”
“The strange and terrible thing is,” he declared, “that two nations, once so widely different, should have been schooled and driven into patterns so drably similar.”
One sees here much verbiage and little understanding. The anonymous writer of this article has obviously not studied the essential and fundamental principles either of National Socialism or Bolshevism. He considers merely certain superficial phenomena and he has not taken cognisance of what serious journalists have had to say on the matter in question or compared his views with their objective statements. This entirely erroneous judgment of the case might be passed over with a shrug of the shoulders and considered merely as part of the daily order of things, were it not for the fact that the two problems here discussed belong in their essentials to political phenomena which are important for the future of Europe. Moreover this strikingly cursory judgment on the problem is not merely a single case but has to be taken in conjunction with a much wider and more influential section of West European opinion.
In contradistinction to this, I shall try here to analyse Bolshevism into its basic elements and show these as clearly as I can to the German and European public. This is not an easy task, in view of the fact that the Propagandist Institutions of the Communist International are undoubtedly well organised and have not been unsuccessful in putting before the public of the world, outside of the Russian frontiers, an entirely false picture of Bolshevism. This picture is an extraordinarily dangerous one because of the tension which it can and must naturally cause. Let us also note the profound hatred in liberal circles throughout the world in regard to National Socialism and its practical constructive work in Germany. Hence the possibility here also of mistaken judgments, such as these already mentioned. They pass by what is essential.
International communism would entirely do away with all national and racial qualities which are founded in human nature itself; in property it sees the most primary cause of the breakdown of world trade in the capitalist system. Accordingly it exploits this through an extensive and carefully organised and brutal system of action, setting aside personal values and sacrificing the individual to a hollow mass-idol that is only a travesty of actual life itself. At the same time it ignores and destroys all the idealistic and higher strivings of men and nations, through its own crass and empty materialist principles. On the other hand, National Socialism sees in all these things—in property, in personal values and in nation and race and the principles of idealism—these forces which carry on every human civilisation and fundamentally determine its worth.
Bolshevism is explicitly determined on bringing about a revolution among all the nations. In its own essence it has an aggressive and international tendency. But National Socialism confines itself to Germany and is not a product for export, either in its abstract or practical characteristics. Bolshevism denies religion as a principle, fundamentally and entirely. It recognises religion only as an “opium for the people.” For the help and support of religious belief, however, National Socialism absolutely places in the foreground of its programme a belief in God and that transcendental idealism which has been destined by Nature to bring to expression the racial soul of a nation. National Socialism would give the lead in a new concept and shaping of European civilisation. But the Bolshevics carry on a campaign, directed by the Jews, with the international underworld, against culture as such. Bolshevism is not merely anti-bourgeois; it is against human civilisation itself.
In its final consequences it signifies the destruction of all the commercial, social, political and cultural achievements of Western Europe, in favour of a deracinated and nomadic international cabal which has found its representation in Judaism. This grandiose attempt to overthrow the civilised world is so much more dangerous in its effects because the Communist International, which is a past master in the art of misrepresentation, has been able to find its protectors and pioneers among a great part of these intellectual circles in Europe whose physical and spiritual destruction much be the first result of a Bolshevic world revolution.
Bolshevism, which is in reality an attack on the world of the spirit, pretends to be intellectual itself. Where circumstances demand, it comes as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But underneath the false mask which it here and there assumes, there are always the satanic forces of world destruction. And where it has had the opportunity of practising its theories it has created “The Paradise of the Workers and Peasants,” in the shape of a fearful desert of starving and hungering people. If we are to take the word of its doctrine then we find a terrible contradiction between its theory and its practice. Its theory is glowing and grandiose but it carries poison in its attractive gloss. Over against this, what we have from it in reality is terrible and forbidding. This is shown in the millions of sacrifices which have been made in honour of it, through executions with the sword, the axe or the hangman’s rope or hunger. Its teaching promises “the fatherland of the workers and peasants,” which shall know no frontiers, and a classless social order which will be protected against exploitation through the state, and it preaches an economic principle in which “everything belongs to everybody” and that thereby a real and universal world peace will be ushered in.
Millions of workers on hunger-wages such as are not thought of in western Europe, millions of afflicted and sorrowing peasants who have been robbed of their land, which is being completely ruined by the stupid experiment of a paralysing collectivism, famine which claims millions of victims year after year in a country of such vast extent that it might serve as a granary for the whole of Europe, the formation and equipping of an army which, according to the claims of all leading Bolshevists, is to be used for carrying out the world revolution, the brutal and merciless domination of this madly-led apparatus of State and Party at the hands of a small terrorist minority which is mostly Jewish—all this speaks another language, a language which the world cannot listen to permanently because it rings with the story of nameless suffering and indescribable hardships borne by a nation of 160 million people.
The fact that, in order to carry out its aims, Bolshevism uses propagandist methods which are perceptible only by those which have experience in such things and are entirely accepted in good faith by the average citizen makes this Terror International extraordinarily dangerous for other states and peoples. This propaganda starts out from the principle that the end sanctifies the means, that lies and slander, the terrorising of the individual and of the mass, robbery and burnings and strikes and insurrection, espionage and sabotage of armies can and ought to be made use of, and therewith that the aim of revolutionising the whole world must be specially and solely kept in view. This extraordinarily pernicious method of influencing the masses of the people does not stop before anything or anybody. Those alone are competent to deal with it who see into its secret driving forces and are capable of adopting the necessary contrary measures. This propaganda understands how to adopt every instrument to its purpose. It takes on an intellectual shape in intellectual circles. It is bourgeois with the bourgeoisie and proletarian with the proletariat. It is mild and passive where that attitude suits and it is pugnacious wherever it meets opposition that needs to be suppressed.