Page 208 - The Track Of The Jew Through The Ages - Alfred Rosenberg

The Track of the Jew through the Ages

Socialism, as Marx developed it in the form of a system, is
naturally not only a battle for worldly questions, but a world-view
in general. Two factors have in his doctrine become landmarks: brutal
class-struggle and internationalism.
Without going deep into the "bourgeois" science of
ethnology, all men were explained by the extreme power of a fanatic
as being equal; what makes them apparently unequal was said to be
only social injustices, and the religious and political battles and
events turn out to be class-struggles of social groups. It would be
indeed interesting to illuminate history from this point of view and,
naturally, nobody should underestimate the effects of social
structures, but it is characteristic that this seminal idea could become
a fundamental dogma for an entire life. To reduce everything to an
abstract principle and to enforce this with fanaticism, that is again
the same mind and character that has set up against all the thought
of India and Europe only "God is God and we are his people".
In this thought we must glimpse a danger for our entire
culture, a firebrand hurled into every national community: one is
expected to try to work, not with one another, but against one another.
Ifthe battle of interests be a pre-existing fact, it still makes a powerful
difference if the principle of brutality or that of mutual cooperation
is appealed to everywhere. Decisive is the orientation of thought
and not occasional events; and the thought-orientation that was borne
into the working masses was the tendency that corroded the entire
German life.
If a Thomas Moore wished to exclude irreligious men from
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his Utopia, if even the French revolutionaries had a desire to
approximate to a symbol, if a Karl Ernst v. Baer 447 indeed did not
wish to hear of a science that could kill the religious feeling, the
mind ofMarx sets itself in an anti-religious, quite purely materialistic
point of view. All science and history is materialism, all religion is
the rule of priests, all work is quantity. In its entire feeling, thought
and action is lacking an understanding of quality and personality as

446
[Thomas More's Latin work on the ideal republic of the island of Utopia was
published in 1516.]
447
[See above pp. 5, 165.]
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