THE FALL OF PARIS
447
effects of violence were tried out in every sphere of life. Modern–
ism in art was suppressed, in order to seal the secret of the tyrant's
spirit. The extermination of Reds and Social-Democrats was accom–
plished through the primitive medium of the Reichstag fire; the
breaking of the Jews with routine hoodlumism; the torture of
Protestant Bishops with an approach specially prepared; the
extinction of the Catholics with strokes of a different sort. New
provocations were invented, with the prolixity of the Paris Schools
of Post-War, in order to gauge the resilience of the victim. He was
dosed with drugs of peace, allowing the analyst to chart his deter–
mination and will to victory. Greed was weighed against courage
and love of tradition-so that friends might be purchased among
the patriots of all countries. Finally, when the open fight began,
the German "extremists" pretended by months of sea battle to
have agreed to fight with the enemy's weapons, all the time prepar–
ing to annihilate him with surprises.
Thus German leadership, with its ferocious enclosed energy,
with an
assur~nce
and shamelessness that only philosophy can pro–
duce, seized control of the spirit of modern industrial culture
relinquished by the Paris studios. The scuttling of middle-class
conservative values became a physical fact.
And the "defenders of culture"? At the stroke of the Hitler
gong, the last tremors in art, literature, science, politics, cease as
if at a signal. For six years, not a single new idea makes itself
heard. Impregnated by the thrust from the center of Europe, minds
formerly independent slink into institutions for the disgraced.
Here sickly "new worlds" are born-Stalinist Nationalist Utopias,
Catholic "Cities of God," Social Credit Luna Parks-and quickly
disowned. No imagination dares to grapple with the present and
the future. No one develops a fresh nucleus of resistance. The old
faces reappear, the old banners are brought up from the cellar, and
the blessings of the Church, the Family, and the Classics are heaped
against the crumbling Maginot Line of the status quo.
So that, at last, when the crisis is ripe, a fast-moving explosive
force finds nothing in its path but a pile of decomposed scrapings.
The Academy had failed to halt modern art, and fascism was
not to he stopped by cliches.
In the Fascist political and military adventures, Modernist
mysticism, dreaming of an absolute power to re-arrange life
