SolarGeneral Proudly Presents...
...by Francis Parker Yockey
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All wars are in some way related to politics, and the aim of Politics is to obtain power. If a state emerges from a war with less power at its disposal than it had at the beginning of the war, then it has lost the war. Whose troops return from the battlefield and whose troops lie dead on it does not matter: military victory may involve real, political victory, or it may not. Incidents outside the military arena can transform a mere military victory into an actual political defeat.
Thus it happened that the chief losers in the First World War were England and Germany. The chief victor was Japan ; it won no military victory, of course, for the simple reason that it had not actively participated in the conflict. Russia, directly after its revolutionary transformation, found itself in a position that gave it an enormous increase of power, since Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been eliminated as European Great Powers. America was a political victor, but, lacking political experience and a leader-stratum, it was completely unable to consolidate its new power-position; hence it had to abandon most of its winnings.
Germany 's losses are obvious: loss of twenty percent of its territory, complete loss of its foreign credits and its colonial empire, loss of the greater part of its rolling stock and its mineral wealth, loss of its prestige-it was robbed of everything under the Versailles dictate.
But England had to resign itself to even greater losses. To America it completely lost its influence in the Western Hemisphere and, just as completely, its former supremacy at sea; to Russia it had to surrender its position in Central Asia ; to Japan and America its power-position in the Pacific; and to the coloured world-revolution its international prestige. The War undermined the British Empire, and more particularly, it thoroughly undermined the British Raj. Led by revolutionaries like Gandhi, the subject peoples of India began to take matters into their own hands. Soon the White rulers discovered that their voice had lost its authority. They saw themselves forced to negotiate at every moment with the active, awakened, native population, and, both personally and officially, they had to learn to behave with great circumspection. Similar things occurred among the subjugated peoples of Europe 's other colonial powers. Everywhere in the Coloured World the White European lost power and prestige. In this manner, not only did the two leading European states, England and Germany, lose the War, but so did the entire Western Culture, although that organism, in toto, had not participated militarily in it. Neutral Holland thus suffered a political defeat in the War, proving once again that political defeat does not depend on military defeat.
In the case of France, political and military victory coincided. Before the War, France was the weakest of the Great Powers; in the 1920's, it was the master of Europe. Indeed, it felt itself able once more to play the role of Napoleon, the opposition vis-à-vis England, and during the transitory political hegemony of France over continental Europe the diplomatic struggle between France and England was the most dynamic on earth.
The temporary supremacy of France during the Interbellum-Period shows the nature of power. Ultimately, power depends upon inner qualities. Mere possession of fleets, weapons, and masses of troops cannot provide a safeguard for power. Such things are only appurtenances of power, and possession of them is not its source. Within the political world, power is constantly in motion. There are strong but shallow currents of power which can temporarily work against the deeper, truer, farther-aiming power-currents. France was, in regard to its military, industrial and natural resources, to all appearances absolutely secure in Europe for the immediate future. In 1923, ignoring England 's protests, it undertook a military invasion of Germany. At that time, two German thinkers were discussing the European situation. When the one expressed his opinion that within a decade Germany would again be the centre-of-gravity in European politics, the other, who was a “realist,” rudely broke off the conversation. Hermann Keyserling was “realist” enough to recognise “reality”-any banker's apprentice can do that,— but Spengler was thinking of the source of power in Europe, of the Destiny of the Western Civilisation.
During the 1930's, French mastery over Europe dwindled away like a morning mist. There was no great crisis at that time, no epochal war. The very fact of the European Revolution of 1933 dissolved French hegemony without a struggle, without a trace of hostilities. France 's position was due solely to material factors, to simple control of the apparatus of power. The inner qualities of the regime that had this power at its disposal were not equal to asserting and preserving it. This regime was the bearer of no World-Hypothesis, no Idea, no Ethic. Its dynamism was a crude desire for mastery: it utterly lacked the feeling of a superpersonal Mission, lacked a world-outlook, a European Hypothesis. When it was confronted with the European Revolution of 1933, its power simply evaporated. Bayonets can give one neither a good conscience nor the Inner Imperative to rule. The vassals defected, and France suddenly found itself in the position of a vassal vis-à-vis England. The choice of its lord and master was the last formal act testifying to the political existence of France as a nation.
A nation is simply an Idea, not a mass of people, not even the form into which that mass has been shaped. This form is the expression of the Idea, and the Idea is primary. Before the Idea there is no nation; when the Idea has fulfilled itself, the nation has disappeared for ever. It matters not whether custom, form, nomenclature, diplomacy, and the material apparatus of power remain to convince yesterday-romantics that the nation survives. The Holy Roman Empire survived as a form until 1806, but as a political fact it had ceased to exist with the decay of the power of the Hohenstaufens after the battle at Legnano in 1176. However, in Politics, facts, not claims, not names, nor legalistic fictions are normative. In religious times, in an age of faith, men may again use in the realm of Politics words that have long ceased to describe facts. But in this Age of Absolute Politics, political fictions have lost their charm for stronger minds, no less than their effectiveness.
The death of a nation is a Ponderable, an event that must come to expression, and its When can be foreseen with sufficient accuracy to be made the basis of long-range policy. A nation shows that it is dying when it ceases to believe in its Mission and its superiority. It begins to hate everything new and everything that would drive it forward. It looks about, and seeks to make defensive preparations in every direction. No longer does it strive to enlarge, but is content merely to maintain, its power-position. To preserve power, however, one must continually increase it. A nation need not die tumultuously in a great military defeat. As a rule, nations die quite peacefully, sinking deeper and deeper into sterile conservatism and shrinking back more and more from great decisions.Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter
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