37

The End of the Cycle

RUSSIA

In the Bolshevik revolution there are some traits worth examining. The revolution had very few of the romantic, stormy, chaotic, and irrational overtones that characterized other revolutions, especially the French one; on the contrary, it was intelligently planned and well executed. Lenin himself, from beginning to end, studied the problem of proletarian revolution like a mathematician dealing with a complex calculus problem by analyzing it in a detached and lucid way in all of its details. He was quoted as saying: “Martyrs and heroes are not necessary to the cause of the revolution; what the revolution needs is sound logic and an iron hand. Our task is not to lower the revolution to the level of the amateur, but to transform the amateur into a revolutionary.” The counterpart of this view was Trotsky’s activity, which made of the uprising and of the coup d’état not so much a problem of the masses and of the people, but rather a technique requiring the employment of specialized and well-directed teams.^[1]

In the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution it is possible to detect a ruthless ideological coherence. They were absolutely indifferent to the practical consequences and the countless calamities that derived from the application of abstract principles; to them “man” as such did not exist. It is almost as if in Bolshevism elemental forces became incarnated in a group of men who coupled the fierce concentration typical of a fanatic with the exact logic, method, and focus on the most effective means typical of a technician.

It was only in a second phase, which these leaders gave rise to and largely maintained within preestablished limits, that the uprising of the masses inhabiting the ancient Russian empire, and the regime of terror aimed at frantically extirpating what was connected to the ruling classes, eventually occurred.

Another characteristic trait was that while previous revolutions almost always escaped from the control of those who had started them and ended up devouring their “children,” this happened only to a small degree in Russia, where a continuity of power and terror was firmly established. Even though the logic of the red revolution did not hesitate to eliminate or remove those Bolsheviks who dared to venture outside the orthodox trajectory, and even though it had no regard for individuals and no scruples about the means to be employed for these removals, still, at the center of the revolution there were never relevant crises or oscillations. This is indeed a characteristic as well as sinister trait; it foreshadows an era in which the forces of darkness will no longer work behind the scenes but come out into the open, having found their most suitable incarnation in beings in whom daemonism teams up with a lucid intellect, a method, and a strong will to power. A phenomenon of this kind is one of the most salient characteristics of the terminal point of every cycle.

As far as the communist idea is concerned, anybody who forgets that there are two truths in communism is likely to be deceived. The first “esoteric” truth has a dogmatic and immutable character; it corresponds to the basic tenets of the revolution and is formulated in the writings and in the directives of the early Bolshevik period. The second is a changeable and “realistic” truth, which is forged case by case, often in apparent contrast with the first truth, and characterized by eventual compromises with the ideas of the “bourgeois” world (e.g., the patriotic idea, mitigation in the collectivization of private property, the Slavic myth, and so on). The varieties of this second truth are usually set aside as soon as they have achieved their tactical objective; they are mere instruments at the service of the first truth. Therefore, those who would fall into this trap and believe that Bolshevism is a thing of the past, that it has evolved and that it is going to take on normal forms of government and international relations, are indeed extremely naive.

However, one should not be deceived about the first truth either; the Marxist economic myth is not its primary element. The primary element is the disavowal of every spiritual and transcendent value; the philosophy and the sociology of historical materialism are just expressions of this disavowal and derive from it, not the other way around, and the corresponding communist praxis is but one of the many methods employed systematically to carry it out. Thus, there is an important consequence that can be arrived at by following this path all the way to the end and that is the integration, or better, the disintegration of the single individual into the so-called collective, which rules supreme. In the communist world an important goal is the elimination in man of everything that has the value of autonomous personality and of all that may represent an interest unrelated to the needs of the collectivity. More specifically, the mechanization, disintellectualization, and rationalization of every activity, on every plane, are the means employed to this end, rather than being, as in the last European civilization, the much deplored and passively suffered consequences of fatal processes. Once every horizon is reduced to that of the economy, the machine becomes the center of a new messianic promise and rationalization appears as one of the ways to eliminate the “residues” and the “individualistic rough edges” inherited from the “bourgeois era.”

In the USSR, the abolition of private property and enterprise, which exists as a basic idea in the core doctrines of communism beyond various contingent accommodations, represents only an episode and the means to an end. The goal is the realization of collective man and radical materialism in every domain and with an obvious disproportion with regard to anything that may be deduced from any mere economic myth. It is typical of the communist system to regard the “I,” the “soul,” and the notion of “mine” as bourgeois illusions and prejudices, fixed ideas, and the principles of all evil and disorder from which an adequate, realistic culture and pedagogy must free the man living in the new Marxist-Leninist civilization. This is how a radical elimination of all the individualistic, libertarian, humanist, and romantic falsehoods of the phase I have called “Western unrealism,” is achieved. There is a well-known saying by Zinoviev: “In every intellectual I see an enemy of the Soviet power.” The will to turn art into art for the use of the masses, to stop art from doing “psychology” and from busying itself with the private concerns of single individuals, and to prevent art from delighting the parasitic higher classes and being an individualistic production is also well-known. The goal is rather to depersonalize art and transform it into “a powerful hammer spurring on the working class to action.” That science may prescind itself from politics—that is, from the communist idea as a formative power—and be “objective” is refuted by communist authorities who see in this a dangerous “counterrevolutionary” deviation. An example of this mentality was the case of Vasiliev and the other biologists who were sent to Siberia because the genetic theory that they upheld, which consisted in acknowledging the factors of “heredity” and of “innate disposition” and in viewing man as other than an amorphous substance that takes shape only through the determining action of the environment, as Marxism would have it, did not correspond to the central idea of communism. The most radical theories of evolutionary materialism and sociological scientism found in Western thought are assumed by communism and turned into dogma and into the “official view of the state,” the results being the brainwashing of the new generations and the contribution to the diffusion of a specific mentality. Enough is known about the antireligious campaign waged in the USSR, where it does not have the character of mere atheism, but rather of a real counterreligion; the latter betrays the true essence of Bolshevism mentioned above, which thus organizes the most apt means to eliminate the great disease of Western man, namely, that “faith” and need to “believe” that became his surrogates once the contact with the superworld was lost. An “education of feelings” in a similar direction is also contemplated so that the complications of the “bourgeois man,” sentimentalism, and the obsession with eroticism and the passions may once and for all be eliminated. After the social classes have been leveled, and considering that only the articulations imposed by technocracy and the totalitarian apparatus are respected, even the sexes are leveled; the complete equality of women with men is sanctioned in every domain since an ideal of communism is to eliminate the differences between men and women, who are henceforth to be considered as “comrades.” Thus, even the family is looked down upon, not only according to what it represented in the “age of the heroic right,” but also in the residues proper to the bourgeois period. The so-called ZAGS (“registry offices for documents of civil status”) represented a characteristic change in this regard. Anyway, it is well-known that in the USSR education is totally in the hands of the state, so that the child may learn to prefer the “collective” life to family life.

In the first constitution of the USSR a foreigner was automatically regarded as a member of the Union of the Soviets if he was a proletarian worker, whereas a Russian, if he was not a proletarian worker, was excluded from this union, denaturalized, and regarded as a pariah lacking a juridical personality.^[2] According to strict communist orthodoxy, Russia was simply the country in which the world revolution of the Fourth Estate triumphed and was first organized in order to expand further. In addition to a mysticism of the collectivity, the Russian people have traditionally been characterized by a confused messianic impulse regarding themselves as a God-carrying people predestined to a work of universal redemption. All this was developed in an inverted form and updated in Marxist terms: God was transformed into the materialized and collectivized man, and the “God-carrying people” became the one attempting to impose its civilization on this earth through any available means. The ensuing mitigation of the extremist version of this thesis, exemplified by the stigmatization of Trotskyism, did not prevent the USSR from thinking it had the right and even the duty to intervene anywhere in the world to support the cause of communism.

From a historical point of view, during the Stalinist phase the myth of the “revolution” in the older sense of the word, which was always associated with chaos and disorder, is already a thing of the past; a new form of social order and unity is pursued through totalitarianism. Society becomes a machine in which there is only one engine, the communist state. Man is just a lever or cog in this machine for which the value of human life is null and any infamy is allowed, and as soon as man opposes it he is immediately swept away and broken by its gears. Matter and spirit are enrolled in a common effort, and thus the USSR appears as a bloc that does not leave anything outside itself; a bloc that is simultaneously state, trust, and church, as well as a political, ideological, and economical-industrial system. This is the ideal of the superstate as the sinister inversion of the traditional organic ideal.

Generally speaking, in the Soviet communist ideal there are aspects in which some sort of peculiar asceticism or catharsis is at work to attain the radical overcoming of the individualistic and humanistic element and the return to the principles of absolute reality and impersonality; and yet this overcoming is upside down, in other words, it is not directed upwards but downwards; not toward the superhuman, but toward the subpersonal; not toward organicism, but toward mechanism; not toward spiritual liberation, but toward total social enslavement.

For practical purposes it does not really matter that the primitivism of the great heteroclite mass that comprises the USSR, in which all the racially superior elements have been eliminated through mass purges, may postpone to an indefinite future the effective formation of the “new man,” and the “Soviet man.” A direction has been imparted. The terminal myth of the world of the Fourth Estate has taken a decisive form and one of the greatest concentrations of power in the world is at its service; this power is the headquarters of all organized actions, whether covert or open, of the instigation of the international masses and of the colored peoples.

AMERICA

Although Bolshevism, according to Lenin’s words, saw the Roman and Germanic world as the “greatest obstacle to the advent of the new man,” and although, by taking advantage of the blinding of the democratic nations that willed a “crusade” against the powers of the Axis, it has been successful in eliminating that world as far as the direction of European destiny is concerned, as an ideology it has regarded America as some kind of promised land. With the demise of the old gods, the consequence of the exaltation of the technical and mechanical ideal was a kind of “cult of America.” “The revolutionary storm of Soviet Russia must join the pace of American life,” and, “The task of the new proletarian Russia is to intensify the mechanization already at work in America and to extend it to every domain,” have been the official directives. Thus, Gasteff proclaimed “super-Americanism” and the poet Mayakovski celebrated Chicago, the “electro-dynamo-mechanical metropolis,” with his collectivist hymn.^[3] Obviously here the hated America, regarded as the bulwark of “capitalist imperialism,” faded into the background while America as the civilization of the machine, quantity, and technocracy came into the foreground. References to congeniality, far from being extrinsic, may be confirmed in the elements taken from several other domains.

What and how many the divergences are between Russia and America in an ethnic, historical, and temperamental context is well-known and does not require any further illustrations. These divergences, however, are powerless before a fundamental fact; parts of an “ideal” that in Bolshevism either does not exist as such or is imposed with crude means have been realized in America through an almost spontaneous process, so much so as to acquire a natural and evident character. Thus, in a context much wider than he would have ever imagined, Engels’ prophecy has been fulfilled, namely, that the world of capitalism would open the way for the Fourth Estate.

America too, in the essential way it views life and the world, has created a “civilization” that represents the exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over and above any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has also put the view in which man is considered in terms of quality and personality within an organic system in opposition with that view in which man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate.

While in the formation process of the Soviet communist mentality the mass-man who lived mystically in the subsoil of the Slavic race has had a relevant role (the only modern feature is the context in which it can carry out its rational incarnation within an omnipotent political structure), in America this phenomenon derives from an inflexible determinism by virtue of which man, in the act of detaching himself from the spiritual dimension and in pursuing a merely temporal greatness, and having overcome all individualist illusions, ceases to belong to himself and becomes a dependent part of an entity that eventually he can no longer control and that conditions him in multiple ways. The ideal of material conquest that is associated with physical well-being and “prosperity” has determined the transformations and the perversions that America represents.

It has been correctly pointed out that:

In its race toward richness and power, America has abandoned the axis of freedom in order to follow that of productivity….All the energies, including those related to the ideals and to religion, lead toward the same productive purpose: we are in the presence of a productive society, almost a theocracy of productivity, which is increasingly aiming at producing things rather than people, or people only as more efficient workers …

In the U.S., some kind of mysticism surrounds the supreme rights of the community. The human being, having become a means rather than an end in itself, accepts the role of “cog-in-the machine” without thinking for a second that in the process he may be somewhat belittled. … Hence, a collectivism which is willed by the elites and a critically accepted by the masses, surreptitiously undermines man’s autonomy and strictly channels his actions, thus confirming his very abdication without him realizing it….No protests and no reaction of the great American masses ever ensued against the collective tyranny. They accept it freely, as a natural thing, and almost as if it were expedient.^[4]

On this basis the same themes emerge, in the sense that even in the more general domain of culture there is a necessary and spontaneous correspondence with the principles that shape the Soviet world.

And therefore, although America is far from banning the culture of intellectuality, it certainly nurtures an instinctive indifference toward it, and to the degree that intellectuality does not become an instrument of something practical, it is almost as if it were a luxury that those who are intent upon serious things (such as “getting rich fast,” “volunteer work,” and sundry campaigns and lobbies to promote various social issues) should not indulge in. Generally speaking, in the USA, while men work, women get involved in “spiritual issues”; hence the strong percentage of women in countless sects and societies in which spiritualism, psychoanalysis, and counterfeits of Eastern doctrines are mixed with humanitarianism, feminism, and sentimentalism, as well as with social versions of puritanism and scientism—all things that truly reflect the American understanding of “spirituality.” And when we see America acquire with its dollars some representatives and works of ancient European culture for the benefit and the enjoyment of the upper crust of the Third Estate, the true center lies elsewhere. In America any inventor who discovers some new tool that will improve production will always win more social approval and acknowledgment than the traditional type of the intellectual; moreover, anything that is profit, reality, or action in the material sense of the word will always be valued more than anything that may derive from a line of aristocratic dignity. Thus, even though America has not officially banished ancient philosophy like communism did, it has done something better; through a William James it has declared that the useful is the criterion of truth and that the value of any concept, even metaphysical ones, should be measured by its practical efficiency, which in the context of the American mentality always ends up meaning “socioeconomic efficiency.” So-called pragmatism is one of the more typical features of the entire American civilization; among others are Dewey’s theories and so-called behaviorism, this last being the exact reflection of theories dev loped from Pavlov’s studies concerning conditioned reflexes; it totally excludes the existence of an “I” and of a substantial principle called “consciousness.” The consequence of this typically “democratic” theory is that anybody can become anything they wish to be, provided a certain amount of training and pedagogy be supplied; in other words man, in himself, is believed to be a shapeless and moldable substance, just like communism wants him to be when it regards as antirevolutionary and anti-Marxist the genetic theory of innate qualities elaborated in the field of biology. The power that advertising enjoys in the USA can be explained by the inner inconsistency and passivity of the American soul, which in many respects displays the two-dimensional characteristics of puberty rather than youth.

Soviet communism officially professes atheism. America does not go that far, and yet without realizing it, and often believing the contrary, it is running down a path in which nothing is left of what in the context of Catholicism had a religious meaning. I have previously discussed what religiosity is reduced to in Protestantism; once every principle of authority and hierarchy has been rejected and religiosity has rid itself of metaphysical interest, dogmas, rituals, symbols, and sacraments, it has thereby been reduced to mere moralism, which in puritan Anglo-Saxon countries, and especially in America, is employed in the service of a conformist collectivity.

Siegfried has correctly pointed out that “the only true American religion is Calvinism, understood as the view according to which the true. cell of the social organism is not the individual, but the community,” in which wealth is regarded, in one’s mind as well as in others’, as a sign of divine election. Thus, “it becomes difficult to distinguish between religious aspiration and the pursuit of wealth…It is regarded as a moral and even as a desirable thing for the religious spirit to become a factor of social progress and of economic development.”^[5] Consequently, the traditional virtues that are required to achieve any supernatural goal eventually come to be regarded as useless and even harmful. In the eyes of a typical American, the ascetic is regarded as one who wastes time, when he is not looked down upon as a social parasite; the hero, in the ancient sense, is regarded as some kind of fanatic or lunatic to be neutralized through pacifism and humanitarianism, while the fanatical puritan moralist is himself surrounded by a bright aura.

Is all this that far off from Lenin’s recommendation to ostracize “every view that is supernatural or extraneous to class interests” and wipe out as an infectious disease any residue of independent spirituality? Does not the technocratic ideology arise both in America and in Russia from the ranks of secularized and all-powerful men?^[6]

Let us reflect on the following point. Through the New Economic Policy (NEP) in Russia private capitalism was abolished only to be replaced with state capitalism; the latter consisted of a centralized capitalism without any visible capitalists and it engaged in a mastodonic yet hopeless enterprise. In theory, every Soviet citizen was both a worker and an investor in the all-inclusive socialist state. For practical purposes he was an investor who never received dividends; aside from what he was given to make a living, the fruit of his work went to the party, which in turn invested it in other companies and industries without allowing it to stop circulating and to end up in anybody’s pocket. The result was the ever greater power of collective man, though not without a specific relation to the plans of global revolution and subversion. Let us recall what has been said about the role that asceticism plays in capitalism (a typically American phenomenon) and about wealth, which in America instead of being the goal of one’s work and the means to display a greatness that transcends mere economic fortunes, becomes the means to generate more work, new profits, and so on in an endless and uninterrupted chain. Once we keep this in mind, we will see that in America, what asserts itself here and there in a spontaneous way and in the context of “freedom,” is the same style that the centralized structures of the communist state try to realize in a violent way. Moreover, in the appalling size of the American metropolis, in which the individual (the “nomad of the asphalt”) realizes his nothingness before the immense reign of quantity, before the groups, trusts, and omnipotent standards, before the jungle of skyscrapers and factories, while the dominators are chained to the very things they dominate—in all this the collective dimension is increasingly revealed in a greater form of anonymity than in the tyranny exercised by the Soviet system over its primitive and abulic subjects.

The intellectual standardization, conformism, and mandatory normalization that is organized on a grand scale are typically American phenomena, though they happen to coincide with the Soviet ideal of the “official view of the state” that is to be imposed on the collectivity. It has rightly been observed that every American (whether he be named Wilson or Roosevelt, Bryan or Rockefeller) is an evangelist who cannot leave his fellow men alone, who constantly feels the need to preach and work for the conversion, purification, and elevation of each and everyone to the standard moral level of America, which he believes to be superior and higher than all others. This attitude originated with abolitionism during the Civil War and culminated with the double democratic “crusade” in Europe envisioned by Wilson and by Roosevelt. And yet even in minor matters, whether it be prohibitionism or the feminist, pacifist, or environmental propaganda, we always find the same spirit, the same leveling and standardizing will and the petulant intrusion of the collective and the social dimension in the individual sphere. Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is “open-minded” and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.

I have said before that one of the reasons why the Bolshevik ideology took a liking to America is due to the fact that it fully realized how, in the latter’s type of civilization, technology contributes to the idea of depersonalization. The moral standard corresponds to the American’s practical standard. The comforts available to everyone and the superproduction of consumerist civilization that characterize the USA have been purchased with the enslavement of millions of people to the automatism of work, as if in their work they have been formed by an extreme level of specialization that narrows the mental field of action and dulls every sensibility. Instead of the type of the artisan, for whom every job was an art and whose production carried the imprint of personality (since it presupposed a personal, direct, and qualitative knowledge of that particular trade), we have today a herd of pariah who dumbly witness the work of machines, the secrets of which are known only to the person in charge of repairing them. Stalin and Ford can be said to meet here, and thus a vicious circle is established; the standardization inherent in every mechanical and quantitative product determines and imposes the standardization on those who purchase them; the uniformity of tastes and progressive reduction to a few types corresponds to what is directly manifested in people’s minds. In America everything works toward this goal; conformism in terms of “matter of fact” and “like-mindedness” is the password on all planes of existence. Thus, when the dams are not broken by the phenomenon of organized crime and by other uncontrolled forms of “supercompensation” (I have previously mentioned the “beat generation”), the American soul is protected from any transcendent vocation by its optimistic, sports-minded, and simplistic view of the world.

Thus, the great majority of Americans could be said to represent a refutation on a large scale of the Cartesian principle, “Cogito ergo sum“; they “do not think and are.” Better yet, in many cases they are dangerous individuals and in several instances their primitivism goes way beyond the Slavic primitivism of “homo sovieticus.”

Obviously, the leveling process applies to the sexes as well. The Soviet emancipation of the woman parallels that emancipation that in America the feminist idiocy, deriving from “democracy” all its logical conclusions, had achieved a long time ago in conjunction with the materialistic and practical degradation of man. Through countless and repeated divorces the disintegration of the family in America is characterized by the same pace that we could expect in a society that knows only “comrades.” The women, having given up their true nature, believe they can elevate themselves by taking on and practicing all kinds of traditionally masculine activities. These women are chaste in their immorality and banal even in their lowest perversions; quite often they find in alcohol the way to rid themselves of the repressed or deviated energies of their own nature. Moreover, young women seem to know very little of the polarity and the elemental magnetism of sex as they indulge in a comradely and sportive promiscuity. These phenomena are typically American, even though their contagious diffusion all over the world makes it difficult for people to trace their origin to America. Actually, if there is a difference between this promiscuity and that envisioned by communism, it is resolved in a pejorative sense by a gynaecocratic factor, since every woman and young girl in America and other Anglo-Saxon countries considers it only natural that some kind of preeminence and existential respectability be bestowed upon her as if it were her inalienable right.^[7]

In the early days of Bolshevism somebody formulated the ideal of a cacophonous, collectivist music that was meant to purify music itself of its sentimental bourgeois content. This is what America has realized on a large scale and spread all over the world through a very significant phenomenon: jazz. In the ballrooms of American cities where hundreds of couples shake like epileptic and automatic puppets to the sounds of black music, what is awakened is truly a “mass state” and the life of a mechanized collective entity. Very few phenomena are so indicative of the general structure of the modern world in its last phase as this, since what characterizes it is the coexistence of a mechanical, inanimate element consisting in movement of a primitivist and subpersonal type that transports man into a climate of turbid sensations (“a petrified forest wrecked by chaos,” said H. Miller). Moreover, what in Bolshevism was programmed and occasionally realized in theatrical representations of the awakening of the proletarian world in view of a systematic activation of the masses, in America found its equivalent long ago but on a larger scale and in a spontaneous form; I am referring to the senseless delirium of sporting events, which are based on a plebeian and materialistic degradation of the cult of action. These frenzies represent the phenomena of the incursion of the collective and the regression into the collective.

Walt Whitman, the American poet and mystic of democracy, may be regarded as the forerunner of that “collective poetry” that urges one to action, which is one of the communist ideals and programs. A similar kind of lyricism permeates several aspects of the American life: sports, ceaseless activity, productivity, and volunteer work. Just as in the case of the USSR we can only wait for adequate developments to resolve the primitivist and chaotic residues of the Slavic soul, likewise, in America one can logically expect the individualistic residues of the spirit of the cowboys, pioneers, and what is still to transpire from the deeds of gangsters and anarchical existentialists to be eventually reduced and taken up in the mainstream.

If this was the proper context, it would be easy to produce more evidence concerning the similarities between the two countries that would allow us to see in communist Russia and in America two faces of the same coin, or two movements whose destructive paths converge. The former is a reality unfolding under the iron fist of a dictatorship and through a radical nationalization and rationalization. The latter is a spontaneous realization (and therefore more worrisome) of a mankind that accepts and even wants to be what it is, that feels healthy, free, and strong and that implements the same tendencies as communism but without the fanatical and fatalistic dedication of the communist Slav. And yet, behind both “civilizations” those who have eyes to see can detect the warning signs of the advent of the “Nameless Beast.”

Despite all, there are some who still believe that American “democracy” is the antidote for Soviet communism and the only alternative for the so-called free world. Generally speaking, a danger is clearly recognized in the presence of a brutal, physical attack from the outside but not one coming from the inside. For quite some time Europe has been under the influence of America and therefore has undergone the perversion of traditional values arid ideals inherent in the North American world. This has happened as some sort of fatal reaction. America represents a “Far West,” and it contains the further and radical development of the basic trends that have been adopted by modern Western civilization. Thus, it is not possible to put up a valid resistance to the modern world while still holding on to the principles and especially to the technological and productive mirage on which this world is based. With the development of this accelerating influence, chances are that the closing of the pincers from East and West around a Europe, which following World War II, has no new ideas to offer and that ceased to enjoy the rank of an autonomous and hegemonic world power even in the political arena, will not even be perceived with a sense of capitulation. The final collapse will not even have the character of a tragedy.

The communist world and America, in their being persuaded of having a universal mission to accomplish, represent a reality to be reckoned with. An eventual conflict between them will be, on the plane of world subversion, the last of the violent operations and will require the beastly holocaust of millions of human lives; and so, the last phase of the involution and shift of power through all four traditional castes and the advent of a collectivized humanity will eventually be achieved. And even if the feared catastrophe of a nuclear holocaust is averted, this civilization of titans, iron, crystal, and cement metropolises, of swarming masses, statistics, and technology that keeps the forces of matter at the leash will appear as a world that wobbles in its orbit; one day it will wrest itself free and lose itself in a space in which there is no light other than the sinister glow cast by the acceleration of its own fall.

Footnotes

1. C. Malaparte, La Technique du coup d’état (Paris, 1931), 13.

2. M. Sertoli, La costituzione russa. (Florence, 1928), 67-85. This paradoxical situation occurred: once the pariahs organized themselves into an omnipotent organization, they reduced to the status of pariah anybody who adhered to the values and was faithful to the class principles that traditionally defined the nonpariah.

3. R. Fülöp-Miller, Mind and Face of Bolshevism (London, 1927). Stalin himself, in his Principles of Leninism, declared that the union of the revolutionary spirit and Americanism characterizes the style of Leninism in the work of the party and the state, as well as the complete type of the Leninist activist.

4. A. Siegfried, Les États-Unis d’aujourd’hui (Paris, 1927), 436, 349, 350. There is another, opposite phenomenon to be considered, represented by the so-called beat generation and by the “hipsters” in whom an existential rebellion of some youth against American civilization has only an anarchist and destructive character, often ending up without any good causes to fight for and lacking a higher reference point. See my L’arco e la clava, chap. 14, entitled “Youth, the ‘Beats’ and Right-wing Anarchists.”

5. Op. cit., 35–36, 40, 51.

6. The emergence in America of “atheist Christianity” and of the “theologians of the death of God” (such as T. Altizer, Paul van Buren, and J. A. T. Robinson) is a recent and very significant phenomenon. According to this movement, the idea of God in its aspect of transcendence and supernaturalism ought to be dismissed, since it is no longer operative or acceptable to modern man; better yet, modern man should not even be bothered with the term “god,” due to the traditional implications of such a term. The only thing to be spared is a “demythologized” and secularized version of Christianity, amounting to nothing more than a social and humanitarian morality.

7. This is also reflected in the incredible severity of the penal sanctions that in some states (including the death penalty) are being meted out for “sexual crimes” against women.