Activate Javascript or update your browser for the full Digital Library experience.
Previous Page
–
Next Page
OCR
THE FATHERLAND . 5
HONESTY 15 THE BEST POLICY
By Aleister Crowley
(In last week’: issue of Tm: FATHERLAND Mr. Aleisler Crowley, the famous English poet, exposed will: remarkable forcible-
ues: the inherent hypocrisy of his cauntrynmz. The following paper concludes Mr. Crowley’: anaIy.ri.r of British sham and folly.)
IX
GAINST the Boers we Englishmen did not dare employ
savage troops. Europe would have risen in arms at the
abomination.
To-day we do it, because all armed Europe is already either for
us or against us. And, with all that, we use the Japanese! Can
we complain if the German papers say that the Kaiser is fighting
for culture, for civilization, when the flower of the allied troops
are black, brown, and yellow “heathens," the very folks whom
we have stopped from hook-swinging, suttec, child-murder, hu-
man sacrifice and cannibal feast? From Senegambia, Morocco,
the Soudan, Afghanistan, every wild band of robber clans, come
fighting men to slay the compatriots of Kant, Hegel, Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Dfrrer, Helmholtz,
Hertz, Haeckel, and a million others perhaps obscurer, no less
noble, men of the Fatherland of music, of philosophy, of science
and of medicine, the land where education is a reality and not a
farce, the land of Luther and Melancthon, the land whose life
blood washed out the Ecclesiastical tyranny of the Dark Ages.
The Hunsl
Indignation has led me from the point of my paragraph. It
was my purpose to expose the infamous pretence--which, how-
ever, is not too inane to dupe even clean-sighted Englishmen in
their hysteric hour-the pretence that the Kaiser is a “mad dog,"
3 homicidal maniac, a man like Nebuchadnezzar in the Hebrew
fable, or like Attila the Scourge of God, or Tamerlane. '
It is a lie. The Kaiser has always been, and is to-day, a man of
Peace. ‘He has indeed lived up to the maxim Si vi: patent, para
bellum and, loaded with the legacy of hate which the impolitic
annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had thrust upon his shoulders, he
could do no less without offering the breast of Germany to the
ravisher. A lamb to the slaughter, indeed, with La Rcvanche in
C-Very mouth! VVhat would he do, with men yet alive who re-
mcmbered Jena, and the ceaseless raids and ravages of Bona-
Dane?
But in a hundred crises he kept his head; he kept the D6309-
He had plenty of chances to smash France forever; he did not
take them, An ambitious prince might have put a relative on the
throne of Louis XIV while France was torn by the Boulanger
affair, the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus horror, when Diogenes
might have gone through France with a modern search-lightfor
his lantern without finding a single man who was not a traitor
t0 his country, or at least to the Republic and the most trust-
worthy man of affairs was he who could be trusted to put the
"double-cross” on every one. The Kaiser never stirred.
it would have been easy to destroy the Russian menace at the
time when Japan was straining the sinews of the Tartar grant,
or when the Moscow Revolution showed that the Tsar could not
trust his own soldiers, and the Imperial Guard, hastily summoned
from St. Petersburg, shut up the garrison of Moscow in the
Kremlin, trained their own guns upon them, and disarmed them.
The Kaiser did nothing. '
And then came the Triple Ententc.
Germany was held like a deer in a lion’s jaws. Austria, her only
friend, was being mined by insidious politics even more ‘surely
than by open attacks. Barred in the Adriatic; barred In the
Baltic, the Teuton had but one small strip of reasonably’ “Pm
C03-SL That the Kaiser made that coast the EFCHW“ “Val base
in the .world was held to be a "menace."
Surely the Russo- apanese war and the Boer war showed
plainly-if any fool there were who could not see it It I’’“"‘''‘''
that the greatest, widest, best, and only impregnablc militafl’ 5359
is the sea. To-day we can bring Russian troops from Vladi-
vostock or Archangel and land them at Ostend, a million at a
time, and Germany must be well-served indeed by spies if she
knows of the operation in time to guard against it. Such a power"
is the supreme strategic advantage. Is it then sotreacherous and
aggressive if Germany, threatened by an alliance (hyprocritically
described as an entente) of powers outnumbering her by six to
one, sought to keep open a path to raid that universal base of
operations? For this she has ruined herself financially, has ham.
pered her social and economic development, has been compelled
to serve the Leah of war when the whole genius of the nation
lies with the Rachel of peace. The English are the least military
and the most warlike of all peoples, said someone; the converse
is truer still of Germany. ‘
From Vercingetorix to Wilhelm 1, Germany, as Germany,
hardly could claim a victory. Even to-day it is military Prussia
which drags Bavaria-art-lover, and all the peasant provinces, to
war. And all the might of the Junker and his fierceness and his
bravery and his aristocratic prestige could never do it but for the
root-fact which every German feels: that, unarmed, he would be
the morsel of a moment for the Russian Octopus, or the toy to
grasp and shatter of some warrior schoolboy like Caesar or
Napoleon.
Pan-Germanism itself, intrinsically bad as it is if regarded
from the standpoint of the Universe. has its apology. One be-
comes tired of being an irremovable obstacle; one thinks it may
be less strain on the nerves if one takes one's turn at being an
irresistible force. “Why does a goalkeeper look old sooner than
a centre forward?”
Even the stolid Teuton nature must tire of the perpetual
squeeze of Russia, the spurs of the French chanticleer struck
ever and anon in his hide.
And since the Entente the ordeal of the Kaiser has been Pro-
methean. Insult after insult he has had to swallow; injury upon
injury he has had to endure. The Kiao-Chau adventure, harm-
less and rational, was balked, then sterilized. then counterpoised.
The colonies did not prosper. England built like a maniac
against his navy; Churchill deliberately pulled his nose by the
impudent proposal for limitation of arguments.
Agadir was a fresh humiliation; for a few acres of uninhabit-
able jungle on the Congo he had to surrender all interest in Mo-
rocco, a country he had nursed for years. V
II: is still a diplomatic secret, and I must not betray it. But
who financed Italy in her Tripolitan adventure, and why?
The last straw was the Balkan war. Blotted was his one hope
of escape to the East; his ewe-lamb, Turkey, was torn to pieces
before his eyes, and he could not stir a finger to prevent it. Aus-
tria still blocked in the Adriatic, Italy alienated from the Triple
Alliance, the Slav expanding everywhere, Constantinople itself
threatened, Roumania (even) turning toward Russia, he must
have felt like a victim of that maiden of armor and spears that
once executed justice on the weak. What was his only success?
The formation of the Kingdom of Albania--a kingdom pour
rire, a kingdom a la Gilbert and Sullivan, Prince William of Wied
less like a cat on hot bricks than like a spider on a glowing
shovel. He never possessed so much as his capital in peace.
And all this had been accomplished without sword drawn or
cannon fired.
Here then stood Wilhelm, dauntlcss but defeated. His dip-
lomacy had failed; his one ally was handicapped by domestic un-
rest; he was isolated in Europe; England was increasing her
navy at :1 pace which he could never beat; France, with her three
.-"-1.- ,......,...E,..,---..... .a.......-... .-
