The Noticing [Der Weg 1948-02]
An original translation of "Die Rundschau"
Source Documents: German Scan
Note(s): This article appears in “Der Weg”, a German-language magazine founded in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the years immediately following the destruction of the Third Reich. See the links above for more information on the magazine and its contents.
Title: The Noticing [de: Die Rundschau]
Author(s): The Noticer
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 2, Issue 2 (February 1948)
Page(s): 133-136
Referenced Documents: None.
The Noticing
In his traditional New Year’s address, the Pope has denounced lying as the stigma of our age, and surely, in doing so, the head of Catholic Christendom touches upon a problem so blatant and profound that it would be wrong to dismiss his charge as merely a pious moral homily. The Pope’s accusation, fearsome because it rings true, does not rest solely in the realm of the religious, though the fate of Christianity itself, as it stands today, lies in the balance alongside that of the white nations, whose scale tips perilously. This, no doubt, is apt to stir unease upon the Chair of Saint Peter.
Nor is it the supposed neo-paganism of the National Socialist state—whose armed forces honored and shielded Rome, neither bombing it nor posing it any threat—that now causes the Lord of Christendom’s heart to seize with dread. Rather, it is the ever-rising red tide that imperils the endurance of this 2000-year-old institution. Since we have ventured into the domain of morality, it seems permissible, spurred by the Holy See’s prophetic warning, to pose this question: should not the papal indictment also encompass those who revile a people and a land that, with iron resolve and fidelity to Europe’s destiny and Christendom’s call, stood as a bulwark before this continent and its spiritual and material treasures, battling sacrificially to utter collapse against an enemy who boldly inscribes godlessness and enmity toward religion upon his banner?
Should Europe drown beneath the deluge of Marxist-Leninist godlessness and amorality, then perhaps in the Vatican the final Lord’s Prayer might be uttered at its hallowed site, and a personal refuge sought beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Yet we venture to doubt whether the Golden Calf in that paradise would suffer another deity within its blinding halo. In what condition will the nearing 2000th anniversary of Christendom find the legacy of the Nazarene? A shadowed question, heavy with apocalyptic foreboding!
Let those called to such tasks unravel religious mysteries; ours lies upon the solid ground of earthly truths. Here, we cannot rightly deny that morality among nations has traced a chilling downward arc since the days of the First World War, when the brazen rupture of solemn pledges to an entire people—before the eyes of the world, and indeed before Christendom and its earthly stewards!—ushered in a new era. By the law of its inception, this age has climbed only to loftier peaks that bear not the shadow, nor even the trace of a trace, of the Ethicist of the Sermon on the Mount.
Morality among nations has worn thin, a tarnished coin flung wildly through the world’s chaotic currents, devalued day by day for its utter lack of substance. Like a wraith, it haunts every corner, dripping like dew from every leaf one beholds—morality alone. Yet reach for these glinting, shimmering drops, and nothing remains; all dissolves into the clammy chill of disillusionment.
True, the unadulterated truth, meted out to mortals in mere droplets, claims no ancestral seat upon the thrones of power. Philosophical yardsticks cannot be laid against human works that must hold their own amid the day’s tumult, between good and evil. Yet between the pinnacle of ethics and oily pretense, there may lie many paths of political leadership—surely nearer to a humble measure of decency among nations than what passes today as international politics. In the empty drone of ceaselessly parroted platitudes lies the shallowness of a Tibetan prayer-wheel faith. But if an eternal God can shed grace upon the wayward and the wretched, then history must wield a sterner rod against the taint of impure intent in the realm of political dominion or patronage.
With brisk tempo, the drama unfolds upon the political stage since that fateful year of reckoning passed—the reckoning that no peace can endure on this earth. Above all, let the spectacle suffice! Against the cities of Manchuria and North China crash the relentless assaults of well-armed red divisions, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, despite their vaunted “defensive triumphs,” have withdrawn to the plain between the Yellow River and the Yangtze. From Uncle Sam’s purse came a laughably meager sum to fight communism in his service and interest, while General Tien Young Ting, for the Nanking government in Guam, stares upon heaps of refuse and rubble—war materiel’s remnants, sold by the USA to China for 174 million dollars before wind and weather finish their ruin. To North America, these stocks are worthless; to China, scarcely more.
Meanwhile, tensions sharpen in Palestine, where an Arab-Jewish skirmish rages unabated; mere watching will mend nothing here, nor in Greece. Yet to grasp either crisis bears risks perhaps graver still. For democratic Moscow champions world peace and non-intervention in states not yet bowed beneath the Red Army’s immediate weight. Should Washington and London decry political meddling in Hungary and Bulgaria, the Kremlin can hardly be expected to stand mute if American guns in Greece strike up a reel for democracy. To claim universal sway for political tenets is to wield a double-edged blade while foes still hold a voice in its use. So too, the quest for universal doctrines marches arm in arm with pretenders to universal rule: communism spurns national borders no less than the capital of the golden international.
In India, fate’s caprice has jolted Kashmir—remote from the world, thus dubbed the “Happy Valley”—from its reveries. Across meadows of fairy-tale splendor, war’s smoldering fuse licks, fanned to vivid flame by the fanatic fervor of Muslim Pathans, Sikhs, and Hindus, while the singular humanity of the 78-year-old Mahatma Gandhi starves toward Nirvana in his fifteenth fast.
On the very day that Dutch and Indonesian Republicans, after half a year’s dithering, agreed aboard the USA transport “Renville” in Batavia Bay to halt hostilities per the UN Security Council’s “recommendation,” that same Council had to dispatch a like admonition to Kashmir. It would surprise no one if the dawning year offers the bustling bureaucrats of Lake Success many such quandaries still.
England’s policy stirs anew since the keys to coffers across the sea jangle with promise—Albion has once more claimed the lion’s share of Marshall Plan funds! The tie between Europe’s “humanitarian” rebuilding and the yoking of every alms-taker to Uncle Sam’s grand contest with the Kremlin’s lords grows plainer. While Germany tries its economic leaders as “war criminals,” the USA summons their ilk to counsel government, plotting for the chance that 17 billion dollars cannot purchase peace, and Foster Dulles’s second course—arming to the hilt—might prevail. Yet Dulles misspeaks of “alternatives”; these are likely twin roads the USA treads at once. Safety first, and American policy relishes quashing every risk while it can.
Even those who see no soul’s salvation in communism, nor the future’s ideal in Moscow’s iron grip, must not blind themselves to this: under Moscow’s mighty surge, Eastern and Southeastern Europe to the Adriatic—once Genghis Khan’s reach!—is forged into a stout ram of Slavic expansion and deluge. To the Kremlin’s far-seeing system, ruined remnant Europe stands exposed, an ideological clutter of moldering notions and suicidal myopia, whence each thrust of Eurasia’s primal force looses only dust clouds of mental rot. Culture-proud Western Europe, a wasting coastal fringe in this twentieth century, has ever met the East with incomprehension. Such blindness of self-exaltation spared Europe ruin while the strong central realm, a battle-ready Germany, held its shield before the continent, Christianity, and culture—repulsing Asian tides at the Unstrut (933), Lechfeld (955), Liegnitz (1241), and Vienna. That stalwart Germany is gone, and with it, Europe’s doom before Asia’s charge is sealed. A culture unguarded by a mighty arm against barbarian inroads crumbles to naught. No fleeting raiders these, who burn and flee; today, Europe’s very soil thunders under the Red Army’s tread, and a Slavic unity, forged under one will, knows its hour to seize Europe’s reign.
Warnings have not been wanting. An American, Homer Lea, foresaw before the First World War, in 1911, the rising Slavic flood as Europe’s future fulcrum. His vision held true, though he could not yet grasp how the latent vigor of a biologically potent Slavdom would one day be swept up by a world-revolutionary current, becoming a peril to all.
In these days of Europe’s apocalypse, what lingers of the continent is ruled by the lunacy of extermination and blind hatred for Europe’s defenders. This armless, headless husk yet clings to the fantasy that a flood of phrases might stem the tempest’s tide.
Remnant Europe quakes and reels within its last crumbling walls, where greedy ravens bicker madly over final scraps, deaf to the looming end—while Moscow, with steadfast aim, builds its realm of swelling might, stone upon stone. Last August saw a Yugoslav-Bulgarian pact; now follows one between Bulgaria and Romania. Gone are the days of inward pacts—the Little Entente, the Balkan Entente, alliances right and left, each nullifying the last. A single stream courses through the rising Slavic bloc, melding all non-Slavic folk caught within. One will, one aim, spans from the Chinese Sea to the Mediterranean, defying the blinkered policies of Paris and London and their train of servile Western European lesser states. To these overweening gravediggers of Europe, plundering yet more from a ravaged Germany outweighs lifting their gaze to the peril nearing all Europe. But whom the gods would ruin, they first strike blind.
It feels a frenzied Mardi Gras when frail elders—Blum, Nitti—step onto this stage, aiming to mold fate with the mental relics of yore, strutting the bridge as the ship slips beneath their feet. Who, in earnest, believes France’s “troisième force” or Italy’s “terza forza” will dent the Third International?
This proves yet again that the intellectual’s cleverness bears no kin to political sense or grasp. Parliamentary tightropes and numeric mysticism will crowd Europe’s waning days as long as Moscow wills, poised to end this farce when it deems the hour ripe. Moscow watches, clear-eyed, the rot and rending of Europe’s heart: Germany. Why buy with war what peace can yield? We’ve said before: Moscow craves no war—it reaps more in peace than through blood-soaked tolls.
Now our view finds echo in Foster Dulles, a chief helmsman of North American foreign policy. Before the Foreign Policy Association, he declared: Russia seeks neither peace nor war; it seeks the erasure of non-communist regimes by simpler means.
Would it not be wiser if the world arrayed against Moscow also sought such simpler, war-sparing ways? To fatten the rich with dollars while thrusting the desperate into communism’s embrace—what a wretched tableau of mental barrenness from those who, as America’s “Time” magazine writes, last year resolved to “assume the leadership of the world!”
The Noticer