Classic Essays

One Man’s Striving: Part 6

Simpson198408_Part_6_William_Simpson_in_1940

by William Gayley Simpson

Part 6 of 7

The author of Which Way Western Man? broadens and deepens his understanding of the race’s roots, and his eyes are opened to the damage done to the race by its greatest enemy

(ILLUSTRATION: WILLIAM SIMPSON in the early 1940s)

Note – This is the sixth selection of excerpts from the unpublished autobiography of National Alliance member William Simpson to appear in NATIONAL VANGUARD. The earlier selections were in the issues of March, June, and August 1983; and January and March 1984. Mr. Simpson celebrated his 92nd birthday on the 23rd of last month, at the farm in New York which has been his home for the past 52 years.

Editor’s Introduction: By the mid-1930s William Simpson saw the Western world so firmly in the grip of malevolent and destructive forces that he had resigned himself to its imminent and inevitable dissolution. It was descending headlong into chaos; its society, its culture, its political institutions, and its people were doomed. No force capable of averting the long-developing catastrophe was at hand.

He saw not only the suicidal war which was looming on the horizon, and the West’s internal enemies who were feverishly preparing that war, but also the deep, inner sickness of the West which made it possible for those enemies to do their deadly work.

And he realized that his task was not to howl into the hurricane, but instead to look to the future — perhaps a very distant future — when the surviving men of the West might begin to build anew; and to do what he could to assure that certain values and principles innate in the best of the race — a certain immanent wisdom which had guided their ancestors during the healthiest periods of their past — would guide their building again in the future.

From his study of Nietzsche he had recognized many of the values and principles which would be essential if the new building were to be sound. Also during the 1930s he had sharpened his appreciation of the race’s roots, of its ties to the land from which it had sprung and of the traditional life modes which had evolved during long ages when it was left to its own devices.

His second voyage to England, in early 1934, was a period of especial revelation to him in this regard. He had made the trip to visit a young woman in whom he had developed a strong interest — the same one to whom he had recently written in an effort to persuade her not to become a nun — and the two of them stayed in a cottage in the village of Bibury, in the Cotswolds:

* * *

Bibury was a beautiful village, nestled in the rolling Coswold hills, with its trim one street winding along the banks of the Coln. Right across from our cottage was Arlington Row, a string of conjoined dwellings so famed for its architectural beauty that pictures of it are in the museums. In fact, I was entranced with many another of the houses in Bibury. They were in one style, and were all built of stone dug out of the surrounding hills. Even the roofs were made of a local shale, shaped into shingles. A beautiful and somehow lightening effect was obtained by laying the shingles in courses quite wide at the bottom and narrowing at the top to a few inches.

Instinctively I liked having people build with what was at hand, with materials that came out of the region in which they lived. Immediately their architecture takes on a unity that tends to be lost the moment they begin importing materials from all over creation. In any case, it gives one the sense that they accept the earth, belong to it, and are rooted in it. One feels in the midst of a people stable and contented.

I got the same impression when I met an old man who was then living in the very house in which his ancestors had lived for 400 years. He was just an ordinary workingman, but there he was: plowing the same fields, walking the same paths, fishing by the same stream, smoking his quiet pipe in the evening by the same fireplace that had known his forebears since the days of King Henry VIII. The walls within which he ate, slept, talked, and begat his children were steeped with the voices and scenes from the lives of 20 generations of the people who had put their blood into him. And these things tell.

I knew it for the first time a little later when, after 20 years, I returned to the birthplace of my mother, the old family homestead, and the scenes of her youth. The place seemed surrounded with an invisible cloud of witnesses. In their presence I felt charged with a new responsibility to make my life worthy of those who had gone before me.

In this setting I realized how naturally one’s family feeling would grow and one’s sense of family honor deepen, how one would begin to feel one’s life stretching out into and becoming identified with a long family past. And I could see how this solidarity, this sense of belonging somewhere on earth, of being rooted there and in the past of one’s kin, would make enormously for the strength and stability of a people. It was with new understanding, sympathy, and appreciation that I thought of ancestor worship. Perhaps it was not quite the benighted custom I had long deemed it.

Doubtless a feeling for family and rootage in the earth did make for conservatism and for a slower pace; but even for conservatism, yes, and for a philosophy of conservatism, experience had been slowly preparing me. By my very instincts I had long mistrusted America’s passion for being always “on the go” and for going ever faster. What inner restlessness does it not betray that no matter where people are, they so generally wish they were somewhere else?

There may be times when it is indeed good to go, but on the whole would it not be better to stay put? And is it really such a good thing that we can cross the continent or land in London within five hours? And just why should we think it will be better yet when we can do it in two?

And why again have most people nowadays come to assume that of course that is best which is newest, rather than that which is oldest, and because oldest, most thoroughly tried and proven? What is finally revealed by all our feverish pursuit of speed and novelty, except that we are a people who know no peace, security, or contentment?

Doubtless there is a great deal of pride and complacency among us (and even some reason for it) over that rationalization of existence by which we are able to travel ever faster, pile up things in ever greater variety and profusion, and now, as though we wished to escape from earth altogether, aspire even to plant a colony on the moon. But one thing is sure: we have become a race of nomads. We are a people on wheels. The average American address, I believe I have read, hardly holds for a twelvemonth.

We are become renters and debtors under bond, rather than owners. Ever fewer people know what it is to own even a home — not a trailer or an apartment, but a home, separate, debt free, and fixed in the earth. Which is to say, we are become a people without roots. And without roots — without roots in the earth, long roots — a people can no more exist than a tree. For the earth is our mother, and forever the source of all our life.

England was growing upon me more and more — I mean, the England of the countryside. I loved this England of ancient village churches, many of them so beautiful, and in any case overgrown with countless memories; of carved market-crosses; of cottages that seemed to have fairly unfolded out of the earth; of people who so obviously loved their land and who, through centuries, had both shaped their lives to it and shaped it and their homes to themselves. Everything seemed to fit.

It was not that there was lack of diversity: the speech of our host’s Gloucestershire cook, though she lived only 20 miles from Oxford, was so strange to me that half the time I had to be told what she had said. There was far more diversity than with us in America. And yet underneath all this variation (evidence, to my mind, of vitality, independence, and individuality) and binding all into a whole, there was unity. For all had been shaped, over centuries, by the moulding thumb of tradition.

To my surprise I found I liked tradition. I liked the feeling of a long past. It was in everything, from the towering cathedrals to the worn lintels on a workman’s cottage and the names of the places. I liked seeing people do things because of custom more than under compulsion of the law. Multiplication of laws among any people, an effort to hold them together by a band of iron, is evidence that their cohesiveness, the bond that holds them together by their common faith, habit, values, and purpose, is in a state of decay.

I was suddenly aware that as compared with England we in the United States were shallow. We had no depth, for we had no past. We had only surface. I began to feel that England, or that group of islands to which England belongs, was the rock whence I was hewn. I loved it. I belonged there. If I were ever to return there to live, I should only be going home.

* * *

Editor’s Note: A third trip three and a half years later, in the late summer of 1937, in which he toured Scandinavia as well as England, strengthened his feelings:

* * *

The trip was to mean a great deal to me, and yet it would have meant vastly more if only I could have made proper preparation for it. I had read a couple of books about Sweden, but they were mostly about the modern Sweden, the Sweden of the successful cooperatives. And while this was interesting and impressive, in a way, it was not the story that would have meant most to a man like me. First of all I ought to have got the historical setting of the Norse people as a whole. I should have read Thomas Carlyle’s chapter on the “Early Kings of Norway” and Snorri Sturlason’s Heimskringla … [as well as several more recent histories of the Vikings]. This would have given me some conception of how large a part Viking blood, injected into the veins of Iceland, Scotland, Ireland, England, France, Germany, Russia, and indeed of almost every country of Europe, even of southern Italy and Sicily, has had to do with the development of Western civilization.

I should also have read one or another of the excellent monographs on the history of Norse literature. And at a very minimum I should have read The Voelsunga Saga and some half-dozen of the shorter sagas, preferably in those admirably vigorous translations done into archaic English by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson. This as nothing else would have given me an idea of what manner of man the old Viking was, and some sense of the driving impulses that must have had much to do both with shaping my own past and determining the character of the civilization created by the peoples of northwestern Europe.

As it was, I did not even know what a saga was. And I did not really find out till one day a year or so later when, while in the stacks of the library of Wesleyan University, I came face to face with a whole section of books on things Norse, and I went home with as many of these books as I could take out. Then I began to find out. And then, too, I began for the first time to feel ashamed that while we bring up our children to know the fabled lore of the Greeks, the Romans, and even the Hindus, Egyptians, and Jews, we pass by almost entirely the great stories that circulated at the firesides of the people from whom we ourselves are most directly sprung. I vowed that, late as it might be, I would do the best I could to make up the lack in myself. And if ever I had more children, I would be prepared to see that they got what I had missed ….

Stockholm, the “Venice of the North,” was one of the most beautiful cities I had ever seen …. Oh, that I had known more of the history of the place! Yet even as it .was I. got a good deal out of prowling alone and at all hours through the older parts of the city.

One sunshiny morning I was walking briskly along the main street of Stockholm, not thinking of anything in particular, but feeling my own health and happiness and looking with pleasure into the faces of the people I passed. And suddenly it came over me, “Never have I seen so many beautiful women before!” Predominantly blue-eyed and fair-haired, they were erect, full-bosomed, with shapely legs and elastic step, and with light in their eyes and the bloom of health in their cheeks and on their naturally red lips. Nowhere was there any rouge, that abomination of nastiness by which degenerate women have sought to hide their sickliness and which healthy women are so often too weak to refuse. I exulted in this spectacle of health and beauty before me.

I have wondered since whether it was due to the fact that the Swedish people, though their blood is not entirely unmixed with that of outsiders, is probably less mixed than that of any other people in modern Europe. Certainly this mixing of bloods (or more exactly, of genes) tends to produce people of bodily asymmetry, people whose parts, inherited from widely different ancestors, do not belong together ….

* * *

Editor’s Note: In addition to his exploration of Stockholm he traveled some 3,000 miles in Scandinavia, visiting Goeteborg, Uppsala, Trondheim, Lilliehammer, and Bergen, and forming a deep impression of the land and the people — of fjords, mountains, dwellings, faces, speech, and manners. Then he went to Scotland, where he first visited an old friend from America, Aleck Ross, in the fishing village of Rosehearty, on the north coast:

* * *

Aleck and I spent most of our time in long walks along the cliffs overlooking the sea, but in the evenings sometimes played at bowls on the green outside the village. One day we overtook an 80-year-old man, out for a walk. He was a retired shoemaker, but he talked with me of Thoreau and Emerson, he had had letters published in the London Times, and he not only expressed himself in English that was grammatically perfect, and also crisp, vigorous, and incisive, but he had ideas: his conversation was worth listening to.

And in another village nearby, I met an elderly woman who in her way was even more remarkable, one of the most beautiful personalities I had ever met anywhere. And I said to myself, “In what village at home could I find such people as these? And what is it makes this difference between America and Britain? In the United States the villages — at least the villages I have known — are dying. All the blood is being drained out of them. But here it is not so.” …

On the way south I visited the cathedrals of York, Durham, Lincoln, and Ely — four of the greatest in England. It was the climax in my experience of medieval architecture. Sometimes I would sit for half an hour in one spot completely absorbed in the beauty and wonder about me. I can’t criticize it or even describe it, but it filled me with an ecstasy of joy and awe.

What a world it must have been when the people of a single town, not one of them counting more than 20,000 souls, not even London, could band together and in a venture sustained through centuries and out of their own souls and brains, out of their own labor and the rock and timber about them, create a thing like this! It was their corporate “gift to God.” And gift to God was each single corbel and gargoyle, each face or bit of tracery carved on the chancel choirstalls, yes, each lock and hinge on the cloister gate. Such love, such devotion, such meaning was packed into every square foot of those towering spaces!

Involuntarily my own love flowed forth in return. I exulted in the thought of men’s doing their work in such love. And I knew it would never be enough to make the hours men spend at our machines shorter and fewer. We should never have a world in which men were happy until again the work of their hands had meaning, and they could do it with personal satisfaction and with love …. ”

My appreciation of the Middle Ages was deepening. At the very first, owing to my historical ignorance, I had hardly distinguished them from the Dark Ages. I had felt a certain shock of incredulity when I first came upon the suggestion that the Middle Ages might, at least in many respects, have been ahead of our own time. But now I was beginning to wonder whether perhaps I should not have been happier to live in that age than in any other of which I knew.

* * *

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, there was more than the life of the Middle Ages for him to think about in the Europe of 1937. Everywhere he went there was an ominous foreboding of the calamity to come. The war propagandists were at work in Sweden as in England, and throughout his trip his awakening feelings for the past were disturbed by his growing fears for the future:

* * *

I returned to England [from Scandinavia] with a keen sense of my own Nordic background, and with an awareness such as I never had had before, that the great Germanic, Norse, British, and early American peoples were one in their origins and belonged together. It seemed the overwhelming tragedy of the modern age that Britain and Germany had had to lock horns in the life-and-death struggle of 1914, and that forces apparently beyond their control were forcing them daily nearer to another convulsion, which might well be the destruction of them both, and of all Europe with them.

There were prominent leaders on both sides who had vowed that these two great peoples must never again allow themselves to be ranged on opposite sides in a war. Who was it, what was it, that had kept them from reaching some reconciliation of their differences — that seemed, indeed, to be preparing them to leap again at each other’s throat?

I did not know. I had never been interested in politics, and for years had made little effort to keep up with current affairs beyond noting the general drift of events. I had been absorbed in what I had believed to be more real and in the long run more significant. But increasingly I was finding myself engulfed, along with all other men of the Western world, in the surge of a veritable tide that seemed to be sweeping us to destruction.

Wherever I went the look on men’s faces as they scanned the papers betrayed the anxiety with which they beheld the daily worsening situation. Another war would finish what was left of European civilization. But there was no agreement as to what was basically wrong. Most everyone was damning Hitler as a boorish upstart or a rabid megalomaniac, but there were historical savants who declared that but for the Treaty of Versailles there could not have been any Hitler, that some of its provisions were so monstrously unjust as to have made another war inevitable, even that these provisions were dictated by people who actually wanted to make another war inevitable, for unavowed aims of their own.

Socialists and Communists, of course, cursed the vicious antagonisms generated by national capitalism’s competition for markets. Pacifists preached that they who take the sword shall perish by the sword, and urged brotherly love, forgiveness, and an effort to lift the conflict from the plane of physical force to that of the spirit. …

But everywhere it was but words. And from week to week the clouds loomed on the horizon bigger and blacker. The most powerful men, as well as the wisest, seemed to know as little how to dissipate the gathering holocaust as to turn aside a tornado.

* * *

Editor’s Note: The trip which had raised so many questions also provided clues to their answers. He met an extraordinary man while in England who helped him begin to understand who was behind the rush to war, and why.

Before proceeding further with Simpson’s experiences in England in September 1937, however, we should let him tell us of an episode in his life nearly five years earlier — an episode involving persons and places not previously mentioned in this series of excerpts from his autobiography:

* * *

Shortly before Christmas 1932 John Rothschild wrote to ask whether I would do some carpentry and cabinet work on the house he August 1984 and his wife were leasing in Brooklyn. I could live with them in their home in Manhattan while I did the job …. [2]

(Note 2 – Rothschild was a Jewish friend whom Simpson had first met in 1922, near the beginning of his Franciscan period.)

It was at this time I began really to know John. In the early days of my Franciscan venture he had passed through a period of turmoil when he too had been very strongly minded to “go and sell all.” But in the end he went another way. Perhaps it was his love of beautiful things that deterred him.

Nevertheless, one could easily see evidence of the streak that might have made him Franciscan. He was always lavish. If he indulged himself, he also gave with free hand to his friends and those he loved. And he bore with him an appearance of inner quietness and self-possession that I never knew to be disturbed. At this time he was the head of The Open Road, which he had founded some years before. This was a student travel organization, which rather specialized in trips to Soviet Russia.

John and I later came to be close friends. He began to spend some weeks with me regularly each summer, as a paying guest, and in time brought a number of his friends to the farm on the same basis….

One evening [in December 1932] while I was doing his job he had a small select group of fellow Jews meet in his home. One of them was my friend Richard Mayer, [3] of whose distinguished appearance I have already written, but most of them were young. I was the only Gentile present. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss the’ growing danger of anti-Jewish feeling in the United States — what is commonly, though erroneously, referred to as “anti-Semitism.” It was a mark of their confidence that they allowed me to be present.

(Note 3 – This was another Jewish friend from 1922.)

To me their uneasiness seemed uncalled for. I must still have been almost completely devoid of any race consciousness. I did not think even of myself in biological terms, as belonging to a particular race, nor as being supremely indebted to the cultural inheritance this race had produced. I was a human being, and met every other man first of all as another human being, as an individual, whom I valued according to the worth I found in him as a person. Even Richard Mayer, who could hardly have been taken for anything but a Jewish aristocrat (he might have passed as some kin of Disraeli), I had never thought of, until he himself asked me about it, as a Jew. He was simply my friend.

I was then 40 years old, but I think it was not until that evening that some little Jew-consciousness began to dawn within me. My eyes opened then, probably with some surprise in them, upon the fact that a Jew might be a creature quite different from myself, and that individually and collectively he might have an outlook on life and special problems of existence that distinguished him from all other people.

The experience lay completely dormant in my consciousness. I did nothing about it and gave it no thought. But the very next fall another experience prodded me a step further into an awareness that there might even be such a thing as a Jewish Question, a Jewish Problem — and that the problem might be one that concerned the Gentile’s existence as much as the Jew’s.

I think it may have been on my way back from my weeks of work for Scott Nearing in Vermont that I stopped at Union Theological Seminary to see my old teacher and dearly loved friend Dr. Julius A. Bewer, who in his field, the Old Testament, was outstanding among American scholars. He was to become a member of the committee that brought out the latest authorized revision of the Bible. And among all the men I have known he was no less outstanding for his dignity, his humanity, his generosity, his integrity, and his calm judicial temper.

For some years he had been going home to Germany in the summers — perhaps to deliver lectures at one of the great universities. Earlier visits had left him distressed over the chaos and despair that gripped the German people. But this last summer — it was the first after Hitler’s accession to power — he had been electrified by the enormous change that had swept over the land. Everybody had work, bank accounts were soaring, there was light in men’s faces, and the young people once more went about singing. Hope was in the air. At last there seemed to be a clear road ahead, and the people were being welded into a new unity in a common purpose to follow it.

“But,” I replied, “while this is all very impressive, surely you wouldn’t endorse the way our papers say Hitler has been treating the Jews.”

“No,” he agreed, “I could not defend the way Hitler has been treating the Jews, but apparently things had reached such a pass that something had to be done about it. I was told this by people who were kindly disposed to the Jews and who severely condemned their treatment by Hitler. One of these, a friend of mine, is a world-renowned scholar.”

And then he went on to say that Jews controlled the German National Bank, and through the Bank the German government. They controlled all the most effective means of reaching and shaping the public mind: the publishing business, the papers and magazines, the radio, and the movies. Indeed, he averred that the Jews, though they numbered less than one per cent of the population, had been fast crowding Germans even out of their own universities.

I said nothing in reply. What could I have said? It was all totally new to me. I had never before heard such suspicions raised against “the Jews.” I had never before been led to think of “them” as against “us,” or had them spotted as an alien entity encysted within our social body to our danger. But Dr. Bewer was in a position to know what he was talking about, and he was the very last man of my acquaintance to make such charges without having satisfied himself that there was ground for them. Indeed, they came from him less as an accusation than as a reluctant confession about a matter that gravely concerned him — and concerned him all the more because he did not know the answer to it. He certainly was not of a mind to go with Hitler.

However, though this talk with Dr. Bewer undeniably fixed itself in my memory, I still was not moved to investigate what reason there might be for his very evident anxiety. My own main interests were absorbing, and they directed my attention elsewhere.

* * *

Editor’s Note: In another place [4] Simpson has written more about his feelings toward Jews during this period of his life:

(Note 4 – An unpublished manuscript dealing specifically with the Jewish Question.)

* * *

Somehow it had never entered my head that Jews in general were more different from myself than other foreigners, say, Italians; or that there was anything in particular about their history, their character, or their purpose that made them a danger to my country or to the racial stock from which I am sprung. To be sure, of the Jews with whom I had come into contact, there had been a pretty high proportion whom I had not liked very well. On the other hand, my Christianity, which I long took very seriously, had declared that God had made of one blood all the children of men. Race and nationality, therefore, were of no consequence.

Also, I had grown up amidst the prevalence of the democratic dogma, which in America has tacitly accepted the idea of the “melting pot” as a good thing. From my boyhood I had been used to meeting on every hand great numbers of men of strange cast and distant origin, but all presumably on their way to becoming American citizens. The Jews might be foreign, but hardly more so than Poles or French, and certainly not as different as Negroes. The truth is, I took Jews, as I took all men, simply as human beings, all of whom I accepted as my brothers. It had never occurred to me to lump them all together as “the Jews.” I took them as they came — that is, as individuals, some of whom I liked and some of whom I did not.

But on the whole I had been rather fortunate in the Jews with whom life had given me something more than the casual contact of the street .or the marketplace. I remember, for instance, the thickly lisping but very eager German Jew who painted and papered my study when I was a minister. He knew his craft and loved it, and did his work with that care and exactitude which is so revelatory of character, and which has always commanded my admiration.

And I remember another Jew, whom I knew later — a young lad from Russia, with fair hair and sky-blue eyes that were quick to mirror whatever was in his soul. He had a great love of animals and of the soil; and when he plowed wanted his feet bare that he might the more intimately feel the earth, and his head uncovered to sun and wind. An earthy fellow he was, in the best sense, and very kind, earnest, impulsive, and generous.

But I suppose my general estimate of Jews depended most on three friendships I had been privileged to enjoy for many years. All of them, as perhaps was natural, began in the early days of my Franciscan venture; and all of them, it should be noted too, were with individuals who had broken away from orthodox Judaism. One was with a young German Jewess, among the most mystical people I have ever known, who back in 1925 and 1926 gave me an understanding and therefore a support I felt badly in need of at the time and found nowhere else.

Another was with a Jew even then perhaps somewhat past middle age, very tall and very lanky, with generous mouth firmly set, nose strongly hooked, graying black hair, eyes dark, deep-set, and penetrating under heavy bushy eyebrows. He was quiet and reserved, bore himself with aristocratic dignity, and stood out in almost any company. He had made his million and then had it confiscated at the end of World War I because he was a German alien.

The third was with a Jew more nearly of my own age, who bore one of the most distinguished names in the history of modern finance. [5] Yet he seems to have been sprung from ancestors animated less by any love of money than by idealism. At any rate his father had written two biographical studies of Lincoln, of whom he was a great admirer. And my friend himself had been so moved by my Franciscan way of life that for a while he could barely resist his desire to embrace it for himself. And even till near our friendship’s end he was able to say, in a letter of recommendation in my behalf, that he felt closer to me than to any other man on earth.

(Note 5 – This Jew was John Rothschild, introduced above in the autobiographical excerpt. The Jew described in the preceding paragraph was Richard Meyer, also introduced in the same autobiographical excerpt.)

But by another side of his nature he was a typical urban intellectual. He had no inclination toward any work with his hands. His predominant aptitudes required the city. He was a born promoter. He seemed to know almost everybody of importance and had mastered the art of personal influence. But he was quiet, self-possessed, a man of excellent artistic taste, and he loved to make gifts. I have known very few men so generous. And very few of my friends of 25 years ago followed with as much patience and understanding as he the changes that began to come over my thinking after my reading of Nietzsche, or went so far in agreement, or were so long loyal with their backing.

* * *

Editor’s Note: Now we return to September 1937, when Simpson was in England:

* * *

One of the most important events of my trip was my meeting with Anthony M. Ludovici, a distinguished scholar and prolific writer, then only beginning to be recognized for what he was. I had supper and an evening with him and his wife at their home near London, and several hours at my room in London itself, where he came with a close friend the next afternoon ….

He was a very spare man, of erect carriage, dark earnest eyes, and very sensitive face. All the furnishings of his home showed him to be very artistic in his interests and taste. He was a brilliant conversationalist, very fertile in his imagination, quick in his thinking, almost encyclopedic in his knowledge, and ready in the expression of his ideas ….

His view of the world situation was different from any other I came upon, and startled me by reviving August 1984 my recollections of the almost forgotten conversation I had had with Dr. Bewer just four years before. One of the first things he said to me was: “What do you make of the Jewish Question?”

“The Jewish Question!” I replied; “What is that?” For even after my talk with Dr. Bewer I had not come to lump Jews together as a whole, or to look upon them as particularly different from myself. I still had my very close Jewish friends. And certainly I had never thought of the Jews collectively as constituting any menace. But when I showed how little I was aware that there was such a thing as a Jewish Question, my host proceeded to lay before me a proposition that was as unpleasant as it was disturbing.

He began by alleging in regard to Britain what Dr. Bewer had represented in regard to Germany: that the Jewish international money power controlled the Bank of England, and that to it the government had become hogtied by overwhelming debt. And since the first allegiance of Jewish international finance was not to Britain but to Jewry, its irresistible power would always be exerted to dragoon any British government into serving the interests of Jewry rather than those of Britain.

The position of the British people was all the more perilous because this power operated so silently and invisibly as to escape notice and almost defy detection, and because every important means for reaching and shaping the public mind, whether press, cinema, or radio, was likewise in the hands of the Jews. Moreover, it was the same story in France, and he had reason to think it was the same in the United States. And world Jewry — or more exactly, a certain dominant hard core within world Jewry — (it had become terrifyingly apparent) was determined to have war.

At the bottom of it all, according to my host, was the Jews’ hatred of Hitler, not so much because of any alleged persecutions as because of certain financial measures he had initiated that struck at the very root of the Jewish control of the modern world. Rightly or wrongly Hitler felt that the Jews were ruining Germany, that they had taken the direction of German life out of German hands.

The crux of the matter lay in the power of Jewish international finance, which aimed, in regard to Germany as with every other nation on earth, to get it into debt, and into ever deeper debt, that the Jews might extort ever larger amounts of interest money out of taxpayers’ pockets, and above all, that they might exercise the creditor’s power to force his debtor to do his will. The hand that lends must always be stronger than the hand that receives.

And Hitler, therefore, who had set the German people to dreaming of a Germany thoroughly rejuvenated and regenerated, saw clearly that such dreams must be frustrated unless Germany could get on her feet without going into debt to the international bankers. It was his success in accomplishing this, and the very example he set to other nations to do likewise, which was making the Jewish bankers’ hair stand on end and driving them to fury. For if Hitler’s system succeeded, it would destroy the Jews’ system of getting the nations into debt and keeping them in debt, and thus destroy their power to coerce the nations into doing what would serve their purpose.

There was a lot more to it than that, but my host talked fast, and I could not afterwards recall everything he had said. But this was the heart of it. And as the upshot of it all, the decree had gone forth, not only to all Jewry but to the entire world, that Hitler and all his works must be destroyed. In fact, a “fighting fund” of no less than $2.5 billion had been raised, and even announced in the London papers, for this express purpose. In every country every possible means was being used to influence the world to bring Germany down ….

Unfortunately, there was all too little time for discussion: I had to leave for an appointment. But, as I took my departure, he put in my hands some papers and pamphlets which he quickly gathered together, and with them a small book by “Cobbett” which bore the title Jews and the Jews in England. He thought it might help to move me toward investigating the vastly disturbing proposition he had set before me. This too, as I eventually discovered, was by Ludovici himself. He had had resort to a pseudonym because of his conviction that if he allowed it to come out under his own name, even though he had written it without rancor and as a scholar, he would never afterward have been able to get another book published ….

Stretched out on my deck chair on the return trip across the Atlantic I pondered many things. I thought of the various forms of social organization which human history reveals, and of the varying evils that had clouded every one of them. Man is a very old animal, and every social philosophy has long ago been conceived and every possible social form applied. And any good to be attained by anyone of them will always be shadowed, more or less, by some evil. There is no such thing as a perfect society. The idea of it is a sheer abstraction and can have no existence outside the heads of romantic idealists.

Inevitably, the achievement of one end will mean the sacrifice of some other; and the highest good of one man, or of one type or caliber of man, will be to some extent at another’s expense. The great question to be answered in evaluating any society or any attempt at social amelioration is: Good for whom? Good for what? Good for the elevation and dominance and duration of a people and the achievement of culture — or good for the day, the majority, “the happiness of the greatest number”? Good for the most gifted and noblest — or good for the weakest, most botched, and most miserable?

Always somebody and something must be sacrificed. The critical question, therefore, will always remain: Who is to be sacrificed to whom? What good do you want, and are you willing to pay the price of it?

My mind roamed over the darkening international situation. I remembered the remark of my Jewish friend Richard Mayer, to the effect that Judaism and Christianity belonged together. Certainly Christianity, and especially Puritanism, was only a revived and revamped Judaism. Indeed, there were those who perceived in Christianity only the history of Jewish heresy. But I was far less concerned about the bearing of these two religions on each other and their relationship to the future than I was about what had been the historic effect on the European world of having the White people who created it pass under the direction of a religion that had not come out of their own life experience, out of their own unspoiled and unperverted instinct, traditions, and values.

Nietzsche had declared, quite correctly, that Christianity was “the revenge of the Jews on the Gentiles”: the Gentiles had taken from them their homeland, and the Jews had got even by foisting upon the former their religion. And Blake had perceived, no less correctly, that “all nations believe the jews’ code and worship the jews’ god,” and had pronounced in conclusion that “no greater subjection can be.” Inevitably the question arose: Can the Western White man, especially Nordic Western man, ever fully repossess his own soul until he has thrown off this alien religion?

But perhaps there was nothing in my entire trip to which my thoughts returned so much as the question about the part that some power within world Jewry might be taking to drive the world into war. As I dipped into the book that Ludovici had placed in my hands just before I left England, I discovered at once that he was quite right in claiming that it was written without rancor, not at all as a diatribe or as propaganda, but as a factual presentation of a situation. It was directed less against the Jews themselves than against certain Jewish values with which he felt their presence in our midst had infected us, and which he believed to be to our great injury and danger.

Though I was yet a long way from any readiness to form a judgment, I did find myself strongly inclined to agree with him, that no really strong and great people will ever surrender the direction of its destiny to a people of alien blood and tradition, be they Jews or others, if they can by any means prevent it.. Whether or not one could endorse the particular policy Hitler was following (he did; Dr. Bewer did not), I was impressed with the fact that both were agreed that something must be done to break the Jewish hold on Germany’s life.

* * *

Source: National Vanguard magazine, August 1984, pages 11-17

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Will W Williams
Will W Williams
29 April, 2018 12:32 pm

Nietzsche had declared, quite correctly, that Christianity was “the revenge of the Jews on the Gentiles”: the Gentiles had taken from them their homeland, and the Jews had got even by foisting upon the former their religion… Inevitably the question arose: Can the Western White man, especially Nordic Western man, ever fully repossess his own soul until he has thrown off this alien religion?

The answer to that leading question is a resounding, “No, he cannot!”