THIS QUARTER
5
Needless to say, Mr. Mumford is horrified by the racial doctrines
of the Nazis; but his horror by no means prevents him from sliding
into the national mysticism that inspires these doctrines.
If
the Nazis
deduce Bolshevism from the nature of the Jewish mind, Mr. Mumford
deduces fascism from the nature of the German mind; and, by im–
plication, he advises us to operate on the diseased Teutonic brain
with the sharp instruments employed only two decades ago with
so ·much success by such celebrated doctors of democracy as Czar
Nicholas, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Woodrow Wilson.
Once an anti-fascist is far gone in jitterbuggery, he suffers a
total loss of memory. But Mr. Mumford improves upon most of
the jitterbugs by raising amnesia to the level of a principle. He is
simply oblivious to the fact that besides poets and philosophers of
imperialist conquest, German culture also nurtured the socialist hu–
manism of Marx and Engels. He simply
will
not remember that
the things he is now saying about the German people have been
for years commonly considered to be the intellectual obscenities of
a period of war-delirium. He simply cannot recall that far from
being an invention of the vicious German mind, fascism came to
power in Italy fully ten years before President Hindenburg, the
democratic candidate of all the Mumfords of Weimar Germany,
handed over the state to Adolf Hitler. He simply is unable to rec–
qllect that before Hitler applied unstinted terror to curb the masses,
the German proletariat, as a class, at no time supported any but
anti-fascist political parties. And it seems ·to have entirely escaped
him that since fascist tendencies are growing in virtually every
country-with the working people everywhere resisting such ten–
dencies and the bourgeois classes, as a whole or in part, encouraging
them-it is plainly unreasonable to explain fascism on national
instead of on class grounds.
How are we to account for Mr. Mumford's wild statements?
Is it that he is an ignorant and irresponsible person? No, such a
characterization would be as simple-minded on our part as it would
be
unfair to him. Neither national nor individual qualities expose
the sources of Mr. Mumford's obscurantist opinions. The only way
to account for them is to understand their operational logic, namely,
the political uses to which they are put in the present period of war–
preparedness. Obviously Mr. Mumford is not a hermit-thinker
meditating- in a lonely hut on the eternal problems of being and be–
coming. In the real social world he plays the part of a spokesman for
the liberal intelligentsia. This group, after some light-minded ad–
venturing with radical ideas, is now re-engaging itself to conservative
interests. Its members must now at all costs forget everything thev
