OPTIMIST But can you deny the enthusiasm of our brave soldiers as they march off to war, or the pride in the eyes of those who stand and watch them as they go?
GRUMBLER Certainly not; I merely point out that the brave soldiers would rather change places with the proud watchers than the proud watchers with the brave soldiers.
OPTIMIST But can you deny the great surge of solidarity the war has produced, as if by magic?
GRUMBLER The solidarity would be even greater if no one had to march off, and everyone could be a proud watcher.
OPTIMIST The German Kaiser has said: For me there are no Parties any longer, there are only Patriots.
GRUMBLER That may apply to Germany, elsewhere people perhaps have higher ambitions.
OPTIMIST In what way?
GRUMBLER Given the different nationalities elsewhere, they can’t all be patriotic Germans.
OPTIMIST But you were the one who denounced the depravity of mankind in peacetime!
GRUMBLER Mankind carries its depravity over into the war, it infects the war with it so that the war becomes corrupted, and that depravity will continue, unscathed and magnified, when peace returns. Before the doctor can cure the plague, it will kill both him and his patient.
OPTIMIST Yes, but if mankind really is like that, is not war better than peace?
GRUMBLER When all is said and done, peace returns.
OPTIMIST But I should have thought war would put an end to the evil.
GRUMBLER It perpetuates it.
OPTIMIST All war?
GRUMBLER All this war. It feeds on the degeneracy of our age, whose bacilli replenish its bombs.
OPTIMIST But at least idealism has returned, has it not? Does that not signify the end of the evil?
GRUMBLER Evil flourishes best in the shadow of the ideal.
OPTIMIST But the inspirational examples of sacrificial courage must surely outlive the war.
GRUMBLER The evil lives by the war and outlives it, it gorges upon its victims.
OPTIMIST You underestimate the moral energy the war has unleashed.
GRUMBLER Far from it. It’s true that many who now must die may also kill, but at least they are exempted from the opportunity to profiteer. Except that the others who proudly stand and watch make up for the loss. The sinners are those who have been exempted from service, not the new recruits.
OPTIMIST You’re confusing a mere surface phenomenon, the distinctive feature of a corrupt metropolis, with its healthy core.
GRUMBLER The fate of the healthy core is to become a surface phenomenon. Civilization is moving towards a single global metropolis. You can turn a Westphalian peasant into a petty Berlin crook at the drop of a hat, but not the other way round, and there’s no going back.
OPTIMIST But surely the great idea we are fighting for means recovery is possible, precisely because there is once more such an idea, and even one people can die for.
GRUMBLER Even if people die for it, that doesn’t mean they recover. For they’re not dying for that idea, but from it. And they die from it, whether they live or die for it, in war and peace. For they live by it.
OPTIMIST That’s playing with words. What idea are you thinking of?
GRUMBLER The idea for which our people are dying, without having it, without profiting from it, and from which they are dying without knowing it. The idea of the capitalist, namely Judeo-Christian global destruction, which inspires those who are not fighting. Those people thrive by living off the idea and, assuming they’re not immortal, will die of obesity or diabetes.
OPTIMIST Well, if that’s the only idea which is being fought over, who will emerge as victor?
GRUMBLER Not the culture which has devoted itself most readily to the idea, I would hope — an idea which depends for implementation on precisely the power complex which this idea, and this idea alone, was capable of creating.
OPTIMIST If I understand you right, the others, the enemy, are fighting for a different idea?
GRUMBLER Let us hope so. For a more humane idea. For an idea that would liberate European culture from that power complex. To liberate themselves and bring about a moral transformation, having sensed the direction from which danger comes.
OPTIMIST And you believe the statesmen of the enemy powers are conscious of such things, even though they blatantly defend their trading interests and have been stigmatized in global headlines for their commercial envy?
GRUMBLER Global headlines appear twice daily here, and that’s too often to create the authority necessary in dealings with the Entente. No, statesmen are never conscious of an idea, but it does remain dormant in the instinct of the peoples until, one day, a statesman puts it into practice. Then it takes on a quite different complexion, arising from a different motive. We should slowly be getting used to the fact that what they call British envy, French revanchism, and Russian rapacity is, rather, an aversion to tramping columns of sweaty feet in their hobnail German boots.
OPTIMIST So you don’t believe it was simply a premeditated attack?
GRUMBLER No, I do.
OPTIMIST But then how—?
GRUMBLER As a rule, an attack is launched against the victim rather than against the aggressor. Or let us call it an attack that came as something of a surprise to the aggressor, and an act of self-defence which caught the victim somewhat unprepared.
OPTIMIST You are joking, aren’t you?
GRUMBLER Seriously, I believe this European coalition against Central Europe to be the ultimate deed of which Christian civilization was capable.
OPTIMIST So you are obviously of the opinion that it was not Central Europe but the Entente which acted in self-defence. But what if the Entente is not capable of carrying through this defensive attack to a successful conclusion, as now seems to be the case?
GRUMBLER Then this trade war would provisionally be decided in favour of those who had less religion, before turning into an openly religious war 100 years hence.
OPTIMIST What do you mean?
GRUMBLER I mean that Europe’s Judaized Christianity would then capitulate before the dictates of the Asiatic spirit.
OPTIMIST And with what weapons would the Asiatic spirit enforce that?
GRUMBLER Simply with weapons. With precisely that idea of quantity and advanced technology to which alone the idea of Central Europe, its infernal spirit, is vulnerable. Quantity China already has, next it will add the weapon of technology. In good time it will proceed to Japanization. It will proceed as England does today on a smaller scale, being obliged to introduce militarism in order finally to get rid of it.
OPTIMIST But England is not managing to get rid of it.
GRUMBLER I hope it will. And that, in the process, it will not get rid of what makes it England, if it were to become militarized; that it will not gain material victory at the cost of spiritual impoverishment. Otherwise Europe would become germanized. Militarism is perhaps a condition by which a European people is vanquished, after having vanquished with it. The Germans were the first to give up what they had been in order to become the top military nation on earth. May that not befall the others, especially not the English, whom a nobler instinct for self-preservation has up to now kept from introducing conscription. The present state of self-defence which calls universally and inexorably for conscription is born of despair, but it is also a gamble. England could defeat itself at the same time as Germany. The only race strong enough to survive technology does so outside Europe. At times that’s how I see it. May the Christian God grant a different outcome!
OPTIMIST Aha, your Chinese! Militarily, the most inept race!
GRUMBLER Indeed! They lack all the achievements of modernity, for they may have passed through those stages in some earlier time unknown to us, and thereby ensured their survival. It will be child’s play for them to regain them, once they need them, in order to make the Europeans give them up. The sparks will fly, too, but for a moral purpose. That’s what I call a religious war worthy of the name.