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in France but backed the reactionary Vendee against the young
French republic. The British Conservatives preferred the Royal
House of Bourbon to a parliamentary government, or even to
Napoleon, because the latter was to them closely connected with the
radical bourgeois revolution. In India, British rule has been linked
with the interests of a small caste of princely and landowning para·
sites who are against democracy in India in defense of their own
and of British privileges.
German imperialism at its best - under the Kaiser - also
sought the cooperation of the most reactionary elements in foreign
countries where it tried to obtain "control" or "cooperation."
Imperial Germany under the Hohenzollerns supported the most
corrupt, parasitic cliques in Turkey-the old feudal lords who sup·
pressed any native progressive elements. Hitler followed this pat·
tern. He expressly acknowledged that he would stick to the tradi–
tion. Even before he came to power, he wrote against those
"national revolutionaries" who thought of fighting the Versailles
Treaty
in
alliance with oppressed colonial peoples.
"Already in the years 1920-21, when the young National
Socialist movement was slowly beginning to raise itself above the
political horizon and live, and there was pronounced the German
national freedom movement, people came to the party from vari·
ous quarters trying to establish some connection between it and the
freedom movements of other countries.
... I always guarded
against such attempts.
"As a German, I would, despite everything, still far rather
see India under English than under some other rule."*
Habitat: Western Europe
In countries which were economically "penetrated" by West·
ern capital and were indebted to the superior Western powers, the
Conservative Man of the British, Dutch, or German type did not
exist, or existed only as an exception to the rule. In Southeastern
and Eastern Europe, economic life was stagnating while Western
industries flourished. There the peasant was suffering from the
dual burden of high taxation and indebtedness to big landowners,
mostly former feudal lords who had become a new kind of super·
*Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf,
Reyna! and Hitchcock edition, New York, 1939,
p.
954,956.
