Is it a coincidence that Social Democracy has a crowd of faithful followers in every jail? Does a party that advocates physical violence, day after day, bear no part of the blame for the horribly rampant coarseness of the masses, for those cowardly fatal stabbings that have become so common in the factory districts of the Lower Rhine that people barely pay attention? The very foundations of all communal life are being threatened by Social Democracy, those simple conceptions of discipline and decency that ought to be beyond dispute among well-mannered people. The teachings on society's injustice destroy the worker’s firmly held sense of honor, so that breaches of promise and poor and dishonest work are hardly considered disgraceful any more; instead, they arouse a diseasedly mistrustful oversensitivity to any justified reproach. [ . . . ]
Such a coarsely sensualist political tendency has no conception of a fatherland, no sense of the personality of the national state. The notion of national customs and tradition, this moving force of history in our century, remains incomprehensible to socialism. [ . . . ] Everywhere, socialism goes hand in hand with unpatriotic cosmopolitanism and slack commitment to the state. Switzerland has almost completely escaped the socialist movement, not merely because it lacks any big urban centers but because a strong Swiss confederate patriotism is alive among the mass of the people.
The learned friends of socialism like to point to the English Chartists, who also began with cosmopolitan dreams and nonetheless learned how to submit to the fatherland in the end. In this context, though, they overlook the fact that England's island population, with its ancient state unity and brusque national pride, has powers of resistance that our empire – incomplete and open to foreign influence – lacks. What they also overlook is that Chartism was genuinely English from the start, while German Social Democracy is controlled from abroad by a mob of homeless conspirators. Is there any sign that in the decade since its founding, Social Democracy has drawn closer to the idea of the national state in any way? No, it has actually opposed this notion in a more hostile manner from year to year. [ . . . ]
Thus socialism alienates its comrades from the state and the fatherland, offering instead of this community of love and respect, which it destroys, a community of class hatred. The nature of the modern state presses for a balancing of class differences. Today, among all social strata, class-consciousness figures little when compared with the consciousness of citizenship and patriotism. It is only among the lower classes that a violent form of agitation endeavors to foster a boastful kind of class pride. And by what means! No Persian pasha has ever been flattered more sycophantically than the “actual people” have been by Social Democracy. All of the despicable tricks of French radicalism from the 1840s are being mustered to arouse an indescribable arrogance among the masses. [ . . . ]
print version
return to list
previous document