The Noticing (November 1948)
[Der Weg 1948-11] An original translation of „Die Rundschau“
Title: The Noticing [de: Die Rundschau]
Author: The Noticer
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 02, Issue 11 (November 1948)
Page(s): 820-827
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
In this piece, "The Noticer" sharply critiques the post-WWII geopolitical landscape, expressing frustration with the United Nations' ineffective diplomacy and the hypocrisy of peace talks amidst ongoing war preparations. The author highlights the formation of a US-dominated Atlantic Union that sidelines Europe and diminishes its influence, while warning of the Soviet Union's expanding power in Asia. Through metaphors and historical references, the text underscores the manipulation of global events by powerful forces and questions the sustainability of Europe's cultural and political autonomy. Ultimately, "The Noticer" argues for a Europe that relies on its own strength, particularly emphasizing Germany's spiritual and historical role as central to the continent's future.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1948 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
The Noticing
While the UN in Paris engages in its customary dance of beating around the bush of political hierarchies—intertwining red and white roses, perceived by some as fragrant blooms and by others as a thorny crown—the world outside relentlessly drives towards decisions that are difficult to align with the aims of the United Nations, now entering its fourth year. It would be some comfort if we could conclude that an avalanche, obeying its own laws and gravity, is crushing the blooming meadows of honest effort and rolling inexorably towards the valleys of human misery; yet, alas, we cannot escape the realization that this avalanche is being steered by a determined hand.
These are the same forces that, with cheerful nonchalance, tinker with the scaffolding of peace on the Paris stage while at home they indulge in grim preparations for war. The Berlin problem, in the literal sense, still hangs in the air—and with it, peace itself; meanwhile, the Western European Union gains ground, and the chaining of a remnant of former global significance to the interests of the new masters makes brisk progress. The British Empire, now merely the "Commonwealth of Nations" since the latest Imperial Conference (the adjective "British" has been suppressed!), has unanimously declared its support for the Brussels Alliance of the five European states; at the same time, the United States of America and Canada—entering through two doors at once, as part of the Commonwealth and arm in arm with Uncle Sam—have announced that, after the U.S. elections, they will prepare to join this alliance of the upright.
Thus, what originally seemed a somewhat rickety structure of five militarily and economically not particularly formidable states, united in a Brussels Union, now appears as a formidable concentration of power—encompassing Western Europe, the British Empire, and the already immense strength of the USA. From small, ridiculed beginnings, an alliance has been forged in relatively rapid development, capable of counterbalancing the vast expansion of the Soviet blocs. This proves the point: the understanding cooperation of free and peaceful peoples has managed to unite in a war alliance to save Western civilization from the global communist threat—though it lacks a spiritual bond—and the dawn of a better future shines promisingly from this achievement.
But—alas—this bright shimmer is mere stagecraft, artificially induced effects: the development has not taken the path that its portrayal and public handling are meant to suggest to the believers. It was not a European seed from which the saving tree of life sprang.
What we have before us is the result of North American policy. If, as General Clay said, the North Americans are not in Germany to let the Germans do as they please, should they then have other reasons to hold on in Europe? Those who modestly offer themselves as helpers to the emerging Western Europe are the very ones who created this instrument of their policy. It was not the USA and the Empire that joined the Western European Union; rather, the Western European Union was brought into being solely to fit it into the global structure of a sea- and land-powerful world power, striving to secure its position against the restless expansion of the Eurasian colossus of the Soviet blocs. The Atlantic Union is being transferred from the realm of planning to the domain of reality, and what long-foreseen development had to bring has taken tangible shape. Europe has lost its central position, which still lingered as a shadow in the concept of Western Europe, and its flag has been lowered before the new banner of the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic Union. The countries close to England, which played a decisive role in the initial phases of this process—while the Scandinavian north is still being contested—become the coastal fringe of this sea-oriented power formation. Even before the term "Atlantic Union" was uttered, Navy Secretary Forrestal had already been appointed head of the new Department of Defense, encompassing the land, air, and sea forces of the USA, thereby underscoring the predominance of the fleet in the new order, as it always enjoyed precedence in the British Empire. This does not contradict the fact that, after more than a year of dispute, the strategic air force succeeded in asserting its independence from the naval command: the air, too, is a sea—open on all sides and without borders—and the aerial sea stands worthy and equal beside the ocean. It is also significant that both Roosevelt and Churchill, the pioneers of this new power configuration, came from the navy to state leadership. The exchange of telegrams between Roosevelt and Churchill since 1939 demonstrates the alarm over the fate of the British fleet that the collapse of France and the threatened invasion of England in 1940 triggered in Roosevelt, the president of neutral America: the domination of the seas by Anglo-Saxon power—now joined by the aerial sea—was a goal that Roosevelt always kept in view.
The more clearly the Atlantic Union emerges as an expression of Anglo-Saxon power concentration against Slavic expansionism, the more Western Europe is pushed into a marginal position—or, seen from both sides, into the tension zone between the powers; it has become the anvil, while others wield the hammer. The original five-nation bloc is now merely one, albeit essential, pillar in the grand edifice of a world-spanning power whose center does not lie on the old continent of white culture, and which is simultaneously the coveted target of a steppe power awakened to fanaticism—a power that has no interest in Europe’s culture, whatever one may imagine, but will spiritually turn Europe into a steppe as soon as its armies hold sway over it.
Once the European Mediterranean was the center of the world, then a passage to the lands of the East; today, its significance can only be grasped when viewed from the Atlantic, as an extension of those fateful waters that carry the radiations of North American global influence eastward, just as the immeasurable expanses of the Pacific stretch into the distance on the other side. The three ancient peninsulas jutting from the body of Europe into the Mediterranean—Spain, Italy, Greece—therefore play the same important role as the North African coast and the land closure in the eastern part, Turkey and Palestine. All of them command Washington’s constant attention, and despite England’s hesitant stance in the case of Spain, an American military mission has been in the Pyrenees and in Madrid; the cool treatment of the Spanish democratic government languishing in exile all these years—despite the zenith of world democracy—finds its natural explanation today: the democratic sun bestows its grace only on those who serve its power-political interests, as becomes evident in their case. Certain considerations still need to be taken, and they are all the more advisable when dealing with a socialist government (as in England), which may nod amiably from afar to its ideologically akin Spanish brothers but prefers to do business with those who have more to offer than loyal democratic convictions. It has long been known—ever since the Madrid government was condemned from the lofty box of the UN—that a change of government in Spain would play into Moscow’s hands: in the democratic game of honest men, the "people’s democrat" always wins. This experience has been made wherever democratic freedom was made a condition of the new order in favor of the communist war comrade: in all Eastern European countries, in China, and in Indonesia. Thus, the fist of raison d’état breaks through the tattered silk glove of tolerance everywhere, even at home. It is understandable that in Spain, one gladly leaves the embarrassing craft of a democrat to others.
If some old notions have fallen, and the border of the United States now lies in Berlin—such extended borders are not conducive to peace but, as the English border first at the Rhine, then in Danzig showed, are truly harbingers of coming war storms—then one should not be surprised if, on the mast of a brig launched as a Western European Union, the flag of an Atlantic Union suddenly appears. And once one has come to know this Atlantic Union a little better—understanding where it comes from and where it is heading—it will no longer cause much head-shaking if one day, in its wake, the fez and tarboosh of Muslim fellow swimmers bob through the waves. The sparse news does not yet allow for firm conclusions as to whether the project of uniting and attaching twelve Mohammedan Middle Eastern states (from Egypt to Pakistan, across the entire Arab mosaic) is a matter of hopeful wishes and desirable goals or already a diplomatic tool in the making for saving civilization from communist inundation. Certainly, these states are conveniently located to keep the Kremlin away from Mesopotamian oil and the surf of the Indian Ocean. The encirclement belt against Soviet power, spanning the earth from both sides—across the Atlantic and the Pacific—surely presses for completion, and in Asia, there are weak points where the pressure from the Kremlin becomes all the more tangible. In China, no remedy has yet been found against the advance of Soviet power, and the communist armies that have reached the Yangtze threaten a breakthrough to the South Chinese coast—a prospect that has moved out of the realm of fantasy after the weakness of Nationalist China was laid bare in recent months. This would establish a connection with the hotspots of Southeast Asia, where flames are flaring up everywhere. More significant than the considerable distance from the great rivers of the North to Canton, the homeland of Sun Yat-sen, is the historical fact that the fate of all China has always been decided in the North, and the dice ultimately brought no gain to Chiang Kai-shek. Open communist uprisings were reported as suppressed only days ago in South Korea and in Java against the Indonesian republican government, but in the jungles of the hinterlands of Singapore and Burma, one encounters tougher nuts, as war and unrest have been sweeping through the land for many months. Equally unstable are the political conditions in the French Indochinese empire, and the closer Moscow’s shadow advances into the monsoon region, the stronger becomes the will for independence from white guardianship: the Kremlin sends like-colored comrades to fish for souls. It is idle to ponder whether a sophisticated image of Marxism arises in Malayan brains; that is unimportant. What matters is that the white masters have been displaced from the helm, and the Asian Soviet empire is skillfully inserting itself into that turbulent piece of earth, washed by the floods of two world oceans, near which an immense archipelago—scattered in the power sphere of the rival for universal dominion—beckons. How far unrest is spreading in Asia becomes clear when even in dreamy Indian towns, over which the tricolor of France still waves like a strange memory of past times—Mahé, Pondicherry—towns otherwise unnoticed by the busy world, the torch of revolution is thrown.
The final victory of Mao Tse-tung, the Chinese communist leader, over Chiang Kai-shek would bring Moscow unforeseen gains and an increase in power that shortsighted, quarreling Europe cannot imagine. While Europe fights and debates over provinces vital to Germany—over pieces of its body—the Soviet Union is incorporating territories in Asia into which all of Europe could disappear several times over, swelling its power ever further. That spatially small Europe encompasses more valuable cultural soil, that in upcoming decisions it is not the quantity of Asia but the quality of Europe that matters: is there not too much self-overestimation and too little sense of brutal reality in this? Who guarantees, who promises eternal duration to European culture, primacy to the European man, if Europe and the European abandon themselves, destroy the best values, and prove incapable of maintaining themselves as an independent factor in the threatening chaos? Asian Bolshevism—let those who sentimentally invoke the time of Bismarck and the Tsardom not forget—desires no European culture in its sphere of rule: the steppe wants not the splendid forest of intellectual life, not the towering spires of ethical values, but the uniform plain of Marxist flattening. On the other hand: can Europe place its hopes in those who betrayed it in the hours of decision and played into the hands of Bolshevism? Who today once again harness Europe to foreign power interests? Europe’s future rests only in Europe itself, in the European man, and in a military alliance filled with foreign spirit lies only ruin—unless within it, and despite it, a European community spirit arises that saves itself through the fire of the coming world conflagration. We can see no signs of this in England or in France, both of which have shown little European behavior in their history. The spiritual fountain of youth for Europe is Germany—the continent’s most severely tested country throughout its history—which has suffered most from Europe’s disunity and discord, endured the most devastations from Asian incursions, fought the most sacrificial battles for Europe’s preservation and existence, and from the ever-flowing spring of its creative spirit has given Europe the most, always keeping Europe’s enemies at bay in hard times, never leading them into Europe out of selfish motives.
The very fact of the Atlantic Union proves the correctness of our thesis: without Germany, Europe must reach for foreign help. It is no longer in a condition to face the future with its own means, its own strength; it lives in this time of armistice—not of peace—on overseas support and must rely entirely on foreign help in war. What, under healthy and reasonable conditions—and why are they not established?—continental European power Germany achieves for Europe must now be begged, bartered, and paid for with the surrender of independence and freedom of action from non-European continents; for history, which according to Spengler is completely unsentimental, knows no humanitarian processes and no help that is not a political business: humanity in politics always serves only to veil the real things, and it was reserved for the Anglo-Saxon-Puritan mentality to skillfully introduce and exploit its concept as a negotiable coin in the power struggle. But already the Soviet Union no longer accepts this coin, and this contrast clearly illuminates its true meaning and the lack of universal recognition.
The fact of the Atlantic Union goes hand in hand with the exclusion of Germany as an equal subject of the mutilated and deprived European community: the absurdity of dismantlings and the plundering of the German economy in the sense of the Morgenthau Plan continues unabated, while the storm is already gathering over Europe and the world. Such a policy means the impotence of Europe’s most populous and capable nation at the moment of fateful decisions, and from this, grave consequences must arise for the old continent. Its future cannot be separated from Germany’s future; Europe is weak and a helpless object of foreign powers as long as Germany is kept in this state.
Europe still has a future insofar as a German people can survive the chaos of the times. In it lie stronger spiritual forces untapped than the braided mandarinism of France and the flat commercial instinct of the English islands can produce. Indeed, the present is bleak, not yet filled with a glimmer of a bright future—only glaring lightning from storm clouds reveals the desolate lunar landscape that is to receive new ruin. From the haven and hope of humanity—from Europe—a frontier bastion has been made in the struggle of newly arisen empires, of which we do not know whether they can comprehend and preserve Europe’s heritage. It seems that the responsible politicians of the rest of Europe have not yet realized this—selfishness paralyzes their insight. In the narrowness of their mental world, they do not see the redistribution of the world taking place; and while, with closed windows, at congresses, conferences, and meetings, in the press and in the bickering of party politics, they blindly grapple with every kind of "isms" as if the earth were an academy of unscientific philosophers, outside in the turmoil of the world—with the means of power politics, with the eyes of reality, and with the ruthlessness of a pitiless and utterly inhumane struggle for existence—a restratification is being carried out that is very different from the construction projects in the Atlantic and San Francisco Charters. There, it is not about law but about power, and if a law prevails, it is the law of the stronger, which has knocked down the last statutes of international trust. Two world wars were fought for the victory of "international law"—for the validity of might and the unrestricted command of the victor. In the end, it becomes indifferent what colors adorn the banners of modern crusaders and world improvers. Let holy simplicity praise the path taken since Brussels as a European one, and let the leaders on this path puff themselves up as saviors of civilization; the truth looks different and much more phrase-free. Who directs the European orchestra of thin-sounding violins becomes quite clear in other respects. Washington was offered the leadership and direction of the new alliance—the White House graciously declined: it is indeed ready and prepared to accept the ready-forged crown, which is too heavy for the others, but its principles forbid it to give instructions in European matters on an open stage. The wires on which puppets dance are not visible from the audience. And while the USA attends to its internal elections—let the world wait in the meantime—Europe enters into commitments from which America then derives the right, in the event of war, to decide whether and when the moment for its direct intervention has come: right and duty in this alliance between lion and lamb are separated by the ocean—will one not, in the last hour, remember the German shepherd when the wolf breaks into the European fold?
THE NOTICER