READING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
31
the fascists destroy the capitalist system itself-this is another story.) Sev·
eral years ago, for example, a Nazieconomist proposed
planned
depres·
sions:
"If
there must be crises, then let us have planned and limited crises."
He suggested that the disorderly old-fashioned "business cycle" be replaced
by "a planned upswing epoch of say thirty years," to be followed by a
"sacrificial year" of collapse and ruin. This
annus terribilis
"should be
annowiCed at least ten years in advance, to give every one time to prepare
for it." His proposal was stillborn, since obviously
if
the State has enough
c.ontrol over economic forces to
plan
depressions, it can also
prevent
them,
which is what seems to have happened in Germany since 1933.
It
is
significant, however, that such a proposal should have been seri–
ously made. The Nazis are true Germans in this remorseless application
of system to the irrational as well as to the rational. Before Hitler and
Goebbels went to work, who would have thought that anti-Semitism,
crudest and most primitive of cultural hangovers from the middle ages,
could become the State doctrine of the most advanced industrial nation of
Europe? There is a touch of the paranoiac, with his systematized delu–
sions, in this, and it is not surprising that the unsystematic Anglo-Saxon
nations have long regarded the Germans as not wholly sane. When the
liberal weeklies depict Hitler as a
madma~,
they are carrying on a long
tradition. Disraeli deno"Q.nced "the fifty mad professors at Frankfurt,''
Palmerston called Bismarck "the crazy minister at Berlin," and Lord
Salisbury was sure that Wilhelm II "must be a little off his head." Ac–
tually, the lunacy lies deep in the economic and social system of modern
monopoly capitalism, and the Germans are guilty merely of doing con·
sciously and systematically what other imperialist nations do under cover
of a smokescreen of hypocrisy. But, of course, every one is shocked when
the fig leaf is dropped.
Thus it is with the greatest of all the lunacies of modern capitalism:
the fact that its only perspective is mass slaughter and devastation. As
every one knows, the Nazis began building their war economy ("wehrwirt·
schaft") long before the fall of 1939; for the last four years, the one aim
of their entire system has been preparation for war. Today, too late, the
democracies are coming to understand that efficient warmaking is the only
important activity of modern capitalism. The Germans understood this
years ago, and proceeded to organize on a vast scale and with the utmost
scientific efficiency the apparatus for destruction.
THE RATIONALIZATION
OF DESTRUCTION
In their military tactics, also, the Germans,
with that method and thoroughness and
lack of all taste and proportion which is
the maddening thing about them, have simply dared to carry out the logic
