Page 81 - The Disasters Darwinism Brought To Humanity

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T T H E T E R R I B L E A L L I A N C E B E T W E E N D A R W I N A N D F A S C I S M 81
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Left page. The situation in London,
bombed by German planes in the
Second World War.
crudest form, but they will never succeed in removing it as
a driving motive of the world… It is in accordance with
this great principle that the catastrophe of the world war
came about as the result of the motive forces in the lives of
states and peoples, like a thunderstorm which must by its
nature discharge itself."
Seen against this sort of ideological background, Conrad's insistence on the
need for a preventive war in order to preserve the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy becomes comprehensible.
We have seen too how these views were not limited to military figures, and
that Max Weber for example was deeply concerned with the international
struggle for survival. Again Kurt Riezler, the personal assistant and confi-
dant of the German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, wrote in
1914: "Eternal and absolute enmity is fundamentally inherent in relations
between peoples; and the hostility which we observe everywhere… is not
the result of a perversion of human nature but is the essence of the world
and the source of life itself." 65
Friedrich von Bernhardi, a First World War general and German
Social Darwinist, was also one of these leaders. "War" declared Bernhardi
"is a biological necessity"; it "is as necessary as the struggle of the elements
of nature"; it "gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on
the very nature of things." 66