How Civilisations Collapse

How Civilisations Collapse

Lecture delivered at the annual ceremonial meeting of the Society of Friends of Science in Vilnius [1938]

I.

A distinguished Italian writer, a historian by profession, a researcher of Rome’s past, and at the same time an unusually astute observer of our times, Guglielmo Ferrero wrote before the war an excellent work entitled Tra due mondi on the differences between the Germanic and Latin spirits; he later developed the same thesis and made it more precise in several essays he published during the war. But the events that unfolded in Russia in March 1917 pushed his thoughts in a different direction.

The Russian revolutionaries destroyed the construction that had been built for centuries in the course of a few days with rapidity and ease surpassing all expectations. Stunned and as if terrified by the unexpected success, the victors called the moderate parties to participate in government for the time being. But already after less than eight months, the most extreme element felt master of the situation; the Bolsheviks seized all power into their hands and, with cruelty unheard of in history, began the work of destroying Russia, behaving towards Europe cowering in abject fear as its future rulers, initiators and creators of a new era in history, self-confident and arrogant.

In the face of the menacing cloud scudding from the east, bearing the weight of a storm that would bring the destruction of civilisation, all dissertations on the opposites of the Latin and Germanic spirits lost their meaning; both Latinism and Germanism should have joined together for a common goal, for the common defence of the essential foundations of social existence.

The latter was already a political issue that not everyone wanted to address, but the rationale of the political postulate, imposing itself on every reasonable and honest person, was very easy to understand and evaluate; Ferrero understood, assessed and presented it[1]. As a historian, an analogy between the fall of the Roman Empire and the state of the world today came to his mind - an analogy in which the final days of Rome gave an outline of what is currently happening on a colossal scale.

Every civilisation, having reached a certain height, ossifies - and that ossification is the beginning of its disintegration. Translating this into Spengler’s language, we would say that every culture, having exhausted all the possibilities it contains, becomes a civilisation and loses its ability to develop further. The characteristic of civilisation is artificiality, as opposed to nature, and the decline of that creative force in the life of nations, which is religion.

But is every civilisation doomed from the start? Ferrero, less ruthless than Spengler in his deterministic view of history, ascribes greater importance to both human will and chance. Both can contribute, if not to salvation, then at any rate to the extension of life or, conversely, they can hasten the moment of death. Various causes of the fall of Rome were mentioned - the monstrosity of the emperors’ absolutism, which turned into arbitrariness and economically drained the population through taxes - the growing predominance in state life of both the lower classes, who did not understand the interests of the state, and the barbaric elements subordinate to Rome, to whom these interests were alien - the spread of Christianity, which in its deepest essence was a negation of statehood... However, all this, in Ferrero’s opinion, would not have caused a catastrophe so violent and widespread if it were not for the addition of a terrible political incident that accelerated everything and made it impossible to implement any preventive measures.

In 232, when the emperor Alexander Severus fell victim to a conspiracy of rebellious legionaries, Roman civilisation was a great and uniform power in Europe, Asia and Africa, not yet disturbed, at least apparently, by any subversive forces. The armies were numerous and well-trained, the administration was sound, the fine arts flourished, philosophy and literature were fervently cultivated, and the science of law had representatives such as the world had never seen and attracted nobler minds with the prospect of fruitful work on the improvement and strengthening of the state, the strength of which lay in the fact that all peoples subject to the empire were endowed with the same justice, derived from the eternal principles of reason and conscience. Fifty years have now passed - and everything has changed: civilisation is in a state of agony, the empire represents one great ruin in which despotism, as cruel as it is weak, rears its ugly head. How did this happen? - we ask with Ferrero.

The Roman Empire had no hereditary dynasty. In principle, the emperor was elected by the Roman people, assembled in comitia, after which the election was approved by the Senate by a separate lex de imperio. But by the end of the first century, comitia were already a fiction; the emperor received power directly from the Senate. This is not to say that the Senate always chose the emperor on its own; it was too weak and usually succumbed to the current of the moment, the influence and will of powerful individuals. After all, it was the supreme authority, the source of power, and the emperor only became a legitimate ruler when the lex de imperio was presented to him by the Senate. As an aristocratic institution to which only a few families had access, the Senate embodied the continuity of tradition - and this doubled its authority. But every institution, to survive, must continue drawing vital juices from the soil on which it grew and from the atmosphere it breathes. In other words, it must assimilate new elements brought in by the spirit of the times. Emperor Vespasian had the right idea when he enlarged the Senate, admitting to it and the state of knighthood a thousand new families chosen from among the more important in the provinces. Thanks to this reform, he can be considered, says Ferrero, the second founder of the empire after Augustus; he is followed by an era of peace and prosperity which is adorned with the names of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius.

The latter, although a wise man and a follower of Stoic philosophy, entertained an unwise thought of adopting as his companion, or co-emperor, his son Commodus, in order to secure succession for him. Young, untrained, lacking character and with the worst instincts, Commodus, having ascended the throne after his father’s death, immediately entered into a violent conflict with the Senate, a civil war ensued in which the Senate failed to bring the situation under control. Then, without consulting the Senate, and supported by his legions, Septimus Severus seized imperial power. He thus inflicted a fatal blow on the Senate, and his reign became a gradual battering of the fallen Senate. He confiscated the property of recalcitrant senators or punished them with death; he humiliated the sluggish, depriving them of the last vestiges of power and importance and giving to the people of the lower classes offices which had hitherto been the exclusive privilege of senators. Worse still, trusting only his legions, he made them a power elevated far above the Senate - and, as commander-in-chief, he was the first of the emperors to have the audacity to have himself titled dominus, lord, or self-appointed monarch. In a word, on the ruins of the oldest and most dignified institution, in the majesty of which, sanctified by centuries of glory and power, the emperors derived their right to rule, military despotism prevailed. And this was that “terrible case”, perhaps, Ferrero adds, the most terrible in history, which hastened the catastrophe of Rome and the ancient civilisation.

After the death of Septimus Severus, his sons quarrelled over power; new riots followed. Learned by experience, and noble in ideas and intentions, Alexander Severus seeks to restore the lost importance of the Senate and follow in the footsteps of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, but this provokes a mutiny in the troops, and the emperor falls from the hands of the conspirators. Henceforth, imperial power becomes a plaything in the hands of the praetorians, the empire a spectre of bloody and exhausting civil wars. No wonder: the destruction of the Senate’s dignity left Rome without a principle telling how to distinguish between legitimate and misappropriated power, without a political institution strong enough to impose such a principle; Rome had a terrible problem to solve because the resolution of this issue determined the future fate of the empire and its existence - a matter of discovering and establishing a new principle of authority and legitimacy.

Futile efforts. Emperor Diocletian was a powerful individual, an excellent administrator, but in his attempt to save the old ideology, the old order, he had Christianity against him. It was one thing that not only survived but strengthened itself amidst the upheavals from which the empire crumbled. But Christianity turned the ancient view of the world upside down, revealing that the ultimate goal of man, in which all others are contained, is not the common good (salus rei publicae), but God, that is, the pursuit of individual perfection that a man can attain regardless of the form of government and political and social institutions. By the beauty of its moral protest against the decay into which the pagan world was plunging, Christianity drew all the deeper souls towards itself, towards the depths of the inner life, but at the same time pulled them away from public life, from the service of the State. In this sense, it was becoming, without the knowledge and will of its adherents, an anti-state element. The triumph of the Gospel of Christ, as a result of the upheavals through which the third century was passing, was the most important event of the age; all the best was to be found in the ranks of the workers in the vineyard of Christ, but did not this spiritual deepening and exclusive concentration in one direction lead to the disappearance of those forces and talents which are indispensable for the management of such a complex organism as the state?

The Emperor Constantine, seeing the ineffectiveness of Diocletian’s struggle against Christianity and the futility of his efforts to save the empire, turned the other way and embraced Christianity in order to exploit this new power for the purposes of the state. The aftermath showed that he was too late; the old Rome and, with it, the old civilisation were dying. A resumption of republican institutions was no longer possible. It was necessary, therefore, to establish a solid hereditary monarchical power, but on what basis could it be built, since the foundation of any legal order, which was the Senate, had been destroyed, and the idea of hereditary monarchy, alien to the traditions of Rome, could not find a foothold in the sentiments of the people? For this reason, Constantine had to move the state’s capital to the East, to the heartland of monarchism, to Byzantium. For Rome, for the old imperial Rome, there was no longer any hope of salvation.

We repeat. The various factors of decay, marked in every old civilisation, were also marked in Rome, but the end of Rome was immeasurably hastened by that terrible accident of subversion, effected by the skilful hand but untrained thought of a soldier who only valued and believed in physical force.

Was the World War the same unexpected accident as Septimius Severus’ assassination of the Senate? This is what Ferrero claims. There is an exaggeration in this claim. The threat of a great war had been looming over Europe for a number of years. It had been prepared by the ever-worsening Russo-German and Russo-Austrian antagonisms in the Middle East, the Anglo-German antagonisms in the markets of the world, and the Franco-German antagonisms in the aftermath of the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871. It was difficult to untangle them otherwise than with weapons, but it was not impossible. Common sense dictated that political and economic contradictions should be resolved by means of agreements, and in this way, with the goodwill of the state leaders, it was possible to delay the outbreak ad infinitum [to infinity].

The unexpected case that suddenly inflamed passions and thwarted peace efforts was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and his tragic death. The unexpected nature of this case resembles, in terms of consequences but on a much larger scale, what happened after that brief revolution led by Septimius Severus, which destroyed the majesty of the moral authority of the Senate, and unable to replace it with any idea or higher principle, left the world-dominating Roman Empire at the mercy of blind passions and forces. This refuge of internal order, which was the authority of the Senate in Rome, was monarchism “by the grace of God” in the powerful monarchies of Central and Northern Europe, the democratic principle of the will of the people in the Western states. The authority of both principles was destroyed by war.

“Meanwhile”, wrote Ferrero, “we politicise as if it were only a matter of establishing the relationship between the victors on the one side and the vanquished on the other as if nothing else had happened but the transfer of power and political prestige from one group of powers to another.” We fail to grasp that the year 1917 was the final act of a drama that unfolded over centuries - the last act because it swept away from the stage the powerful Russian dynasty, followed by the mighty, much older dynasties of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and other German dynasties, and the days of the dynasties that remained are numbered.

II.

The monarchical principle lost its last support in the world war. We are facing the same danger of the collapse of our civilisation that Rome faced in the third century, for we do not see and do not know with what new authority we could replace the monarchical principle.

And democracy? - they will tell us. It is true that at the beginning of the war, it was announced that it was not the allied states but the world’s democracies that had entered into battle to save the world with its civilisation from German militarism, but this was only a platitude. Only very naïve people could believe that once Germany and Austria-Hungary were defeated, militarism would disappear from the face of the earth, and there would be a delightful idyll of united and happy nations.

The democratic principle, in the name of which it was decided to destroy the central states, went bankrupt - and it went bankrupt shamefully: Soviet Russia is a proof of that. It was supposed to be a guarantor of order and progress; it is neither.

It had its spring but a short one. In the epoch between 1815 and 1848, monarchism and dynasties were opposed to the principle of the sovereignty of the people, which was understood mystically as the source of truth and goodness. This sovereignty was proclaimed by the revolutions of 1848, but the victorious sovereigns did not have the courage to take power into their own hands. It was taken in France by Napoleon III, while in Germany the Frankfurt Diet, elected by popular vote, began to look for a new emperor for Germany. The defeat of the democratic idea was so severe that its depressing effect on democracy can be seen over as many as three generations.

Monarchs and heads of state tried to exploit this for their own ends. They faced the following question: how a monarch should manage the affairs of the state jointly with democracy, and at the same time in such a way that democracy was nevertheless dependent on the monarch. Napoleon III pursued a path leading to a successful solution, but the disaster at Sedan hindered him, destroying his work. What he failed to do, was happily to be accomplished by his victor, Bismarck. The epoch of German hegemony (1870-1914) can be described as “the triumph of the monarchical principle, using democracy for its own ends”.

Today, monarchism lies defeated right down the line. But can it be said that democracy has triumphed? No, because its triumph is short-lived by nature; it is only a stage on the road to tyranny. For what is democracy? It is the rule of numbers, not only over privilege but over knowledge and reason, thus the rule of matter over spirit, the supremacy of careerists - demagogues leading masses degraded by agitation and impassioned. In saying this, I proclaim nothing new; I repeat a conclusion invariably reached by all thinkers with soul and heart who have pondered this subject. “Democratic is that government”, said Emil Faguet , “in which merit never finds and cannot find recognition.” No wonder: democracy is consumed by the lust for equality and devours it with the fire of a passion insatiable and irrepressible. “They would prefer” - the words of V. Cherbuliez – “slavery with equality than freedom without it”... “If their sighs could be heard, the state, with the fate of all its citizens in its hands, would so dispose of itself that all would have the same height, the same width of back, the same suppleness in knees and elbows, the same cerebral ganglia, the same customs, tastes and ideas and, if possible, the same faces.” Cherbuliez was Swiss - and it was in this most democratic country of Europe that the democratic idea was subjected to the harshest criticism, where the most eloquent warning voices could be heard.

For Charles Secrétan, also Swiss, professor at the University of Lausanne, and one of the most profound thinkers in the second half of the 19th century, the fact of the widespread triumph of democratic orientations was the starting point for pondering not just politics and sociology, but the metaphysical foundations of being. He recognised the validity of the democratic principle but saw all its dangerous consequences. For democracy is by its very nature opposed to all superiority; it puts in the place of the best those who flatter it and thus transforms itself into an organ of the passions of the mob. – “And into this democratic abyss, more or less quickly, all nations descend by the force of their own gravity, and unless some unexpected and fresh powers emerge, civilisation will eventually fade away in the mud of universal stupefaction.” According to Secrétan, only superior individuals could be the expression of such redemptive powers; only people with a sound mind and a righteous heart, individuals imbued with a sense of duty, could counteract the general disarray and halt the world’s decline. The awareness of duty lifts us from the things of this world to eternal things, leading to the affirmation of God, human responsibility before God, and moral order in the universe. This thought, more precisely Kant’s thought, the system built upon it, was expounded by Secrétan in one of the most beautiful books I know, La Civilisation et les croyances.

His fellow countryman, Fr H. Amiel, a professor in Geneva and also a poet, did not create a philosophical system; he only wrote down in his diary what he was looking at and the thoughts that came to him because of it, but this diary, published after his death, a masterpiece of profound, subtle thought, and clothed in a masterly form, earned him a place among the most eminent minds of the 19th century that stood on the border between philosophy and literature.

As late as 1851, in an era of almost universal belief in the salubriousness of democratic ideals, Amiel predicted the inevitable spiritual levelling of humanity in the event of their victory: “the future statistician will register a rising progress, but the moralist a gradual decline, progres des choses, déclin des âmes [progress of things, decline of souls]”. It cannot be otherwise; mankind must atone for every fiction it accepts as truth, and democracy consists in the fiction that “popular vote and wisdom are the same thing” and that, therefore, “the majority possesses not only power but also reason”. By this path, it will reach “through demagogy to the point of absurdity, giving the most stupid the right to judge the most important things…” “The most stupid will fall from one folly to another; it will give the impression that something is changing, and they will identify every change with progress...” We will be witnesses to a general lowering of the moral level, and “who can take comfort from the fact that, as in the 5th century the invasion of barbarians into the Roman Empire, so now the dreadful democratic flood will not immediately destroy the fruits and works of the old, high culture”. But how quickly it will tarnish and vulgarise everything. Having set his thoughts in this direction, Amiel faced a conclusion reached today by naturalists who apply the principle of entropy to social phenomena.

Only he summed up his conclusion as a question: “Is not universal levelling a law of nature, and will not its realisation be the end of everything?” In other words, should it not be presumed that the world is striving with all its might to destroy what it has itself produced? In that case, “life would be a blind pursuit of its own negation, an effort to make what it most fears and hates happen sooner - it would be weaving a mortal shirt for itself and laying stones for its own tomb.” In 1871, impressed by the Paris Commune, he again threw a prophetic question, “Is not international communism merely the quartermaster of Russian nihilism, which will be a common grave for old races, like the Latin races, and slave races like the Slavonic?”

III.

Could it be that these jibes against democracy are meant to show that the four writers mentioned were partisans of some black reaction? Nothing of the sort. They all realised that the course of history was moving towards democracy and that no force could stop it. So they did not intend to obstruct - and not only because they could not, because they felt powerless; they also understood justice itself demanded that people had the right to have an opinion of their own, their view of things that concerned them directly.

But they had eyes, and they saw; they wondered, therefore, at the dangerous consequences of the victory of the democratic idea, which, pursuing its postulates one by one, would eventually fall into the abyss of incurable absurdities. But in foreseeing and denouncing the future perversions of democratism, they were aiming at the doctrine itself; they did not have before their eyes those specimens of degraded humanity which we look upon today; they had no opportunity of knowing precisely what democracy would be like in practice.

This opportunity did not have to wait long. I spent 25 years of my life in Kraków and vividly remember the first results of the introduction of the Fifth Electoral Curia, which was to herald the universal vote. To the Vienna Parliament, demagogues began to flood in, promising their voters mountains of gold; figures that would not be admitted to any decent society took their seats there, and the solemnly beautiful building where, before, serious men discussed state affairs became a scene of tavern-like uproar. „Doesn’t this mean the end of parliamentarism?”, I asked in 1902 a great Russian thinker, a lawyer by profession and former professor of constitutional law, Boris Chicherin. „Unfortunately, people have not yet invented, and probably will not invent, a better form than parliamentarism,” he replied sadly.

Much later, already in the era of the Russian Revolution, but still under Kerensky, I happened to spend an evening in Saint Petersburg in the company of the president of the Italian delegation, Marquis della Torretta, who was to become foreign minister soon afterwards. “After such a long and bloody war”, he argued, “the world will not return to the old order, there will be great democratic reforms, they will happen everywhere, also with us in Italy.” „Could you, sir,” I asked, „even consider the possibility of a republic?” „In Italy,” he exclaimed, „never! By the example of France, we see that a republic signifies the rule of plutocracy, and we all understand that the person of the monarch is a factor of balance between plutocracy and those whom it harms – a guarantee of order amid the disorder of conflicting parties and cliques.”

The French socialist, Fr. Delaisi, devoted his celebrated book La Démocratie et les Financiers to explaining to himself and the reader how it could happen that great capital managed to transform democracy into an excellent, flexible and yet powerful weapon for its plunderous intentions against the state. “It is commonly believed,” we read there, “that financiers are the opponents of democracy; this is a blatant error. On the contrary, they are its managers and most faithful guardians, I should say its actual inventors. Out of it, they have created that Chinese wall, beyond which they can quietly conceal their machinations; within it, they have the best tool for defence in case of any disturbances directed against them.”

Some might consider this dependence of democracy on great capital to be the delusion of a publicist carried away by political passion. The same point has now been raised - elevated to the level of a guiding principle for the course of history - by a thinker of greater stature, Oswald Spengler: „When one speaks,” he argues, „of great upheavals in the name of the democratic idea, it must be remembered that democracy and plutocracy are two equivalent expressions…” Revolutions sack kings and magnates, as if to put bankers (“Geldmenschen”) in their place, and “nothing more tragicomic than to see all those teachers of liberty and reformers of the world fighting against the power of capital, and not seeing and understanding that they are thereby supporting it.”[2] Democracy stands on universal suffrage, for which people once went to their deaths, but there can be no “freedom of election where there is no freedom of public opinion, which is despotically governed by the press, which is the expression of that freedom”.

“What is the truth?” - Spengler goes on to ask – “for the crowd, the truth is that which it constantly hears and reads about”. “Three months of press reprimand and the world will know the truth”... “No animal tamer has such power over his menagerie as a newspaper has over those who read it diligently. When the need arises, it releases the reading public, like a pack of dogs, into the street - and they rush towards the indicated destination, smashing windows, going wild - until suddenly the tamer from the press gives a signal with their cane, the public quiets down and disperses peacefully, each to their own home”.

“One cannot imagine a more fearful satire on the freedom of thought; in the past, it was forbidden to think freely; today, it is allowed, but no one can think freely anymore because everyone is under the influence of what the newspaper has whispered to them... Does this mean that under the rule of democracy, governed by financiers, great ideals have left the stage? No, they exist, but „they triumph only in the realm of books (im Reich der Bücher), which is not of this world...” „Only there, in the depths of the soul, does the peace for which we long become a reality, the sacred, Godly peace of hermits who have withdrawn from the tumult of the world; a spectacle sublime in its aimlessness, purposeless and sublime, like the procession of stars in the sky... One can admire it, and one can weep over it – as one pleases.”

It is with a sense of pride that I can state that the brilliant, I won’t say thinker, but truly ingenious improviser in matters of philosophy, sociology, and politics, Count Wojciech Dzieduszycki, outpaced by many years Spengler and many others who wrote about the power of great capital.

He presented the omnipotence of the Leviathan - this was the term he used to describe great capital - in 1902 in his gushing dialogues[3]. But he did not stop there. The Leviathan’s power was closely linked to the materialisation of the world, the collapse of religion. „Doom only,” we read there, „can be foretold for humanity that toils to kill its soul. Because what truly distinguishes man from animals? Religious feeling. „Without it, man would be nothing but a very malicious, cunning, and repulsive monkey.” And what will these monkeys do when they feel themselves masters of the world? Dzieduszycki didn’t know Russia; he was little interested in it; his imagination carried him to Rome. What will the future rulers of the eternal city, of the kind of „cunning and malicious monkeys,” do with Rome, with St. Peter’s Basilica?”

First, they will make the church a national monument, a desecrated and soulless place, a dead preparation, like St Martin’s in Naples today, the Certosa in Pavia, or the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. No one will say mass there; no one will pray there; a stupid guard will guide a flock of even more stupid tourists who will not take off their hats, staring at the tombs or looking at the relics of St Peter, transferred to the sacristy and placed there in a glass box. And that will be the first phase. Then they will think it a pity to use such a huge edifice for some museum collection, and they will arrange a place of folk entertainment here; there will be various shops in the chapels, merchants will drink beer in front of Michelangelo’s marble Madonna; there will be buffets everywhere, shows in the church, in the dome, and on the apostle’s confession a streetwalker will sing indecent songs. On feast days, an orchestra will play a monstre cancan  on a separate scaffolding behind the altar, and some clown dressed as the Pope, surrounded by a retinue of histrions, will pretend to bless the nation. That will be phase two. Then - then the crack in the dome will show, so they will take down the old stone dome and replace it with an imitation made of iron; but soon they will realise that it is not worth preserving the old edifice, so they will raze it to the ground, set up a manure factory, and in Chicago a massive model of this basilica will be built out of painted sheet metal until it becomes dreary and is sold for scrap.

This will be the end.

But St Peter’s Basilica, praise be to God, is still standing; divine service is held there daily, and from there, the Pope blesses the whole Christian world. It was not in St Peter’s Basilica that Dzieduszycki’s grim vision was fulfilled but in the desecrated and destroyed shrines of the Saviour in Moscow and Isaac in St Petersburg.

I have been fighting the Red, Bolshevik plague since its inception as much as I know how and can. I consider the most dangerous thing in the Russian Revolution to be the declaration of war against God. By destroying the idea of God, one thereby destroys the idea of man as a being bearing the image and likeness of God. With thought and soul, man reaches beyond matter; Bolshevism, by weeding out from the soul its higher ideal elements, trampled it, defiled it, and bestialised it. Can a meaner goal be imagined? I have often tried to demonstrate this; I have put all the power of feelings into my words; naively, I thought that they would open the eyes of many. Those words fell on deaf ears because who, to repeat the words of an eminent German, today has time to have a soul, who is moved by the fight for God, for the soul?

And rightly so, in Russian émigré circles in Paris, the question of Bolshevism was put on a new level a few years ago. “The issue of our epoch,” said Professor Peter Struve, “which divides mankind into two opposite and mutually exclusive worlds, is freedom, is the feeling of freedom. Some feel it, others do not. Whoever lacks this feeling is a born slave and his place is in the Soviet state.” Merezhkovsky developed this thought with his usual force and vividness: “The lack of the feeling of freedom”, he said, “reflects on the face of the one who does not know it. He is something completely different from what I am, not only spiritually but physiologically, he breathes with different lungs. What I live, what I burn with, what I love, it kills him, in an atmosphere of freedom he suffocates. We are witnessing the emergence of a new species of beings; physically they are supposedly human, morally they are not; they are anthropoids, we are facing the terrible threat of anthropoid invasion.”

It would seem that the elementary feeling of human dignity, which is intrinsic to human nature, has not yet died, it lives on even in those who have renounced God and the soul. So they will flare up with indignation when someone labels them as wicked and calls them, because they are suffocating in an atmosphere of freedom, creatures only physically similar to man, but devoid of that which makes man human. Far from it! “The core of the new creative force”, reads the Polish communist magazine[4] , “is a machine transforming man in its own image and likeness”. So instead of God - a machine, a man-machine or automaton, so “a man stripped of his individuality, of his conscience, a man with the mentality of a spy, with the soul of an executioner, and subjected to the discipline of the torture”[5], in a word, a debased man - this is the ideal of the new man. A conversation with him could be summarised as follows: “Do you want to be moral idiots and are not ashamed of it?” – “What should we be ashamed of? What you call moral idiocy is the highest goal of history. It is precisely what we mean by a formless, malleable man, like trodden clay, devoid of a national, traditional bond, devoid of an internal autonomous moral bond, accountable only to a superior.” In other words, a degraded, feral herd of people and a dictator’s stick, making order in this feral and degraded herd....

“The vapour of blood” - in the words of Arthur Gorski – “from the cellars of the Cheka and moral stench of bestiality in man spread from Russia all over the Cosmos, hit all the way to the stars.”

No, the stars are flowing in unperturbed tranquillity along their eternal routes, but the stench of Bolshevik bestialism has infected the whole world, those even who have chosen to crush communism and the Soviets; in methods of struggle and crushing they are Bolsheviks in spirit.

When the Roman Empire crumbled, it was taken over by barbarians, but they adopted the religion and civilisation of a dying world. Our civilisation will crumble, as Ernest Renan has already predicted, due to internal barbarism, and this, I would add, in the most hideous form imaginable; I speak wrongly, until now, nothing of the kind could be imagined. Rape was admitted, atrocities were committed, and this was seen as proof of energy in the pursuit of a goal. But who would consciously set universal defilement as an objective, who would triumphantly admit to their own meanness? Before this phenomenon of inevitable decay and end, we stand powerless and helpless, but let us persist in our resistance; perhaps some new circumstance, instead of causing our downfall, this time will save us.

[1] La ruine de la civilisation antique (1921).

[2] Der Untergang des Abendlandes.

[3] Mesjanizm polski a prawda dziejowa, Kraków 1902.

[4] I quote from Arthur Gorski’s article „Obrachunki”, Marchołt, no. 3, p. 530.

[5] Definition of L. Bertrand, Le livre de consolation (Paris, Fayard).