The World War
for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence. But this persistence can never result except from a definite intellectual conviction alone. All violence not founded upon a solid intellectual basis is vacillating and uncertain. It lacks that stability which can reside only in a fanatically intense world-concept. It flows from the energy and brutal determination of an individual, and is subject to all the changes of personality, its nature and strength.
But there is yet another consideration:
Any world-concept, whether religious or political in nature—the dividing line is often hard to fix—strives less for the negative destruction of hostile ideas than positively to affirm its own. Thus its battle is less defense than attack. It is at an advantage even in setting its aim, because the aim is victory for its own idea, whereas on the other hand it is hard to decide when the negative aim of destroying a hostile doctrine may be considered accomplished and assured. For this reason if for no other, the world-concept’s attack is better planned and also more forceful than its defense; as everywhere else, so here the decision rests with the attack, not with the defense. But a struggle by violent means against an intellectual power remains mere defense unless the sword is in turn upholding, proclaiming, and disseminating a new intellectual teaching.
In summation, therefore, we may remember this:
Every attempt to combat a world-concept by violent means will eventually fail unless the struggle takes on the form of an attack for a new intellectual attitude. Only in a struggle of two world-concepts may the weapon of brute force, persistently and ruthlessly used, bring victory to the side it supports.
Thus far the attempts to combat Marxism had always failed for that reason. This was why even Bismarck’s socialistic legislation fell short, and was bound to fall short. There was no platform, no new world-concept for whose rise the battle could have been fought. For only the proverbial wisdom of high ministerial functionaries could have managed to suppose that drivel
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