Open Subversive Movements

Open Subversive Movements

Chapter from the book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924)

Although the sceptical reader who has reached this stage of the present work will perhaps be willing to admit that some connexion may be traced between hidden forces and open subversive movements, the objection he will still raise against the general thesis here set forth will probably be expressed somewhat in the following manner:

“It is quite possible that secret societies and other unseen agencies may have played a part in revolutions, but to attribute the continued revolt against the existing social order to these causes is absurd. Poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing, and above all the inequalities of human life are quite sufficient to produce a revolutionary spirit without the aid of secret instigators. Social revolution is simply a rising of the ‘have-nots’ against the ‘haves,’ and requires no further cause to explain it.”

Let it be at once admitted that the injustices here enumerated are real. The working classes throughout the nineteenth century had very genuine reasons for complaints. Wages were far too low, the rich sometimes showed themselves indifferent to the sufferings of the poor, employers of labour often made profits out of all proportion to the remuneration paid to the workers. Nor, in spite of the immense reforms introduced during the last hundred years, have all these grievances been redressed. The slums of our great cities still constitute a blot upon our civilization. Profiteering since the beginning of the war has been more flagrant than ever. “Rings” and combines provide fabulous wealth for individuals or groups at the expense of vast numbers of consumers. And in all classes of the community, just as before the French Revolution, people feast and dance whilst others live on the border-line of starvation.

But let us see how far the Socialist movement can be regarded as the spontaneous revolt of the “people” against this condition of things. Dividing the people after the manner of Marx into the non-revolutionary and the “revolutionary proletariat,” we shall find that the former category, by far the larger, combines with a strong respect for tradition a perfectly reasonable desire for social reform. Briefly it asks for adequate wages, decent housing, and a fair share of the good things of life. For State interference in the affairs of everyday life it feels nothing but abhorrence. The ideal of Communism as formulated by Lenin, wherein “the getting of food and clothing shall be no longer a private affair,”[1] would meet with stronger opposition from working men—and still more from working women, to whom “shopping” is as the breath of life—than from any other section of the population. Even such apparently benign Socialist schemes as “communal dining-rooms” or “communal kitchens” appeal less to the working-class mentality than to the upper-class mind that devises them.

Turning to the “revolutionary proletariat,” we shall find this individualistic instinct quite as strongly developed. It is not the Socialist idea of placing all wealth and property in the hands of the State, but the Anarchist plan of “expropriation,” of plunder on a gigantic scale for the benefit of the revolutionary masses, which really appeals to the disgruntled portion of the proletariat. The Socialist intellectual may write of the beauties of nationalization, of the joy of working for the common good without hope of personal gain; the revolutinary working man sees nothing to attract him in all this. Question him on his ideas of social transformation, and he will generally express himself in favour of some method by which he will acquire something he has not got; he does not want to see the rich man’s motor-car socialized by the State—he wants to drive about in it himself. The revolutionary working man is thus in reality not a Socialist but an Anarchist at heart. Nor in some cases is this unnatural. That the man who enjoys none of the good things of life should wish to snatch his share must at least appear comprehensible. What is not comprehensible is that he should wish to renounce all hope of ever possessing anything. Modern Socialist propagandists are very well aware of this attitude of the working classes towards their schemes, and therefore that as long as they explain the real programme they mean to put into operation, which is nothing but the workhouse system on a gigantic scale, they can meet with no success. As a life-long Socialist has frequently observed to me, “Socialism has never been a working-class movement; it was always we of the middle or upper classes who sought to instil the principles of Socialism into the minds of working men.” Mr. Hyndman’s candid confessions of the failures to enlist the sympathies even of slum-dwellers in his schemes of social regeneration bear out this testimony.

Less honest Socialist orators as the result of long experience have therefore adopted the more effectual policy of appealing to the predatory instincts of the crowd. From Babeuf onwards, Socialism has only been able to make headway by borrowing the language of Anarchy in order to blast its way to power.

Socialism is thus essentially a system of deception devised by middle-class theorists and in no sense a popular creed. Had the revolutionary movement of the past 150 years really proceeded from the people, it would inevitably have followed the line laid down by one of the two sections of the proletariat indicated above, that is to say, it would either have taken the form of a continuous and increasing agitation for social reforms which would have enlisted the sympathy of all right-thinking men and must therefore in the end have proved irresistible, or it would have followed the line of Anarchy, organizing brigandage on a larger and yet larger scale, until, all owners of wealth having been exterminated and their expropriators in their turn exterminated by their fellows, the world would have been reduced to a depopulated desert.

But the world revolution has followed neither of these lines. Always the opponent of sane social reforms which Socialists deride as “melioration” or as futile attempts to shore up an obsolete system, it has consistently disassociated itself from such men as Lord Shaftesbury, who did more to better the conditions of the working classes than anyone who has ever lived. Anarchy, on the other hand, has been used by them merely as a means to an end; for genuine revolutionary sentiment they have no use at all. In Russia the Anarchists became the first objects of Soviet vengeance. The cynical attitude of Socialists towards the revolutionary proletariat was illustrated by Mr. Bernard Shaw, who in December 1919 openly boasted that he had helped to organize the railway strike,[2] and two years later wrote about the miners’ strike in the following terms:

A Socialist State would not tolerate such an attack on the community as a strike for a moment. If a Trade Union attempted such a thing, the old Capitalist law against Trade Unions as conspiracies would be re-enacted within twenty-four hours and put ruthlessly into execution. Such a monstrosity as the recent coal strike, during which the coal-miners spent all their savings in damaging their neighbours and wrecking the national industries, would be impossible under Socialism. It was miserably defeated, as it deserved to be.[3]

Now, if this had been written by the Duke of Northumberland in the National Review instead of by Mr. Bernard Shaw in the Labour Monthly, one can imagine the outcry there would have been in the Socialist press. But the leaders of what is called democracy may always use what language they please in speaking of the people. “Our peasants,” Maxim Gorky openly declared, “are brutal and debased, hardly human. I hate them.”[4] It will be noticed that in descriptions of the French Revolution references to the savageries of the people are never resented by the Liberal or Socialist press; the persons of the leaders alone are sacred. It is clearly not the cause of democracy but of demagogy that these champions of “liberty” are out to defend.

The world revolution is therefore not a popular movement but a conspiracy to impose on the people a system directly opposed to their real demands and aspirations, a system which, moreover, has proved disastrous every time an attempt has been made to put it into practice.

Russia has provided a further example of its futility. The fact that the more responsible leaders in this country do not advocate violence, does not affect the ultimate issue. Whilst Bolshevism sets out to destroy Capitalism at a blow, Socialism prefers a more gradual process. It is the difference between clubbing a man on the head and bleeding him to death—that is all.

The fact is that all Socialism leads to Communism in the long run[5] and therefore to disaster. The Bolshevist régime brought ruin and misery to Russia not because of the brutality of its methods, but because it was founded on the gigantic economic fallacy that industry can be carried on without private enterprise and personal initiative. The same theory applied by constitutional methods would produce precisely the same results. If the Socialists are ever allowed to carry out their full programme, England may be reduced to the state of Russia without the shedding of a drop of blood.

But how are we to explain the fact that in spite of the failure of Socialism in the past, in spite of the gigantic fiasco presented by Russia, in spite, moreover, of the declaration by the Bolsheviks themselves that Communism had failed and must be replaced by “a new economic policy,” that is to say by a return to “Capitalism,”[6] there should still be a large and increasing body of people to proclaim the efficacy of Socialism as the remedy for all social ills? In any other field of human experiment, in medicine or mechanical invention, failure spells oblivion; the prophylactic that does not cure, the machine that cannot be made to work, is speedily relegated to the scrap-heap. What indeed should we say of the bacteriologist, who, after killing innumerable patients with a particular serum, were to advertise it as an unqualified success? Should we not brand such a man as an unscrupulous charlatan or at best as a dangerous visionary? If, moreover, we were to find that large bands of agents backed by unlimited funds, were engaged in pressing his remedy upon the public and carefully avoiding all reference to the fatalities it had caused, should we not further conclude that there was “something behind all this”—some powerful company “running” the concern with a view to advancing its own private interests?

Why should not the same reasoning be applied to Socialism? For not only has Socialism never been known to succeed, but all its past failures are carefully kept dark by its exponents. Who, then, stands to gain by advocating it? And further, who provides the vast sums spent on propaganda? If in reality Socialism is a rising of the “have-nots” against the “haves,” how is it that most of the money seems to be on the side of the “have-nots”? For whilst organizations working for law and order are hampered at every turn for funds, no financial considerations ever seem to interfere with the activities of the so-called “Labour movement.” Socialism, in fact, appears to be a thoroughly “paying concern,” into which a young man enters as he might go into the City, with the reasonable expectation of “doing well.” It is only necessary to glance at the history of the past hundred years to realize that “agitation” has provided a pleasant and remunerative career for hundreds of middle-class authors, journalists, speakers, organizers, and dilettantes of all kinds who would otherwise have been condemned to pass their lives on office-stools or at schoolmasters’ desks. And when we read the accounts of the delightful treats provided for these “devoted workers” in the cause of the proletariat as given in the records of the First Internationale or the pages of Mrs. Snowden, we begin to understand the attractions of Socialism as a profession.[7]

But again I repeat: Who provides the funds for this vast campaign? Do they come out of the pockets of the workers or from some other mysterious reservoir of wealth? We shall return to this point in a later chapter.

How is it possible at any rate to believe in the sincerity of the exponents of equality who themselves adopt a style of living so different from that of the proletariat whose cause they profess to represent? If the doctrinaires of Socialism formed a band of ascetics who had voluntarily renounced luxury and amusement in order to lead lives of poverty and self-sacrifice—as countless really devoted men and women not calling themselves Socialists have done—we should still doubt the soundness of their economic theories as applied to society in general, but we should respect their disinterestedness. But with very few exceptions Socialist Intellectuals dine and sup, feast and amuse themselves with as few scruples of conscience as any unregenerate Tories.

With people such as these it is obviously as futile to reason as it would be to attempt to convince the agent of a quack medicine company that the nostrums he presses on the public will not effect a cure. He is very well aware of that already. Hence the efforts of well-meaning people to set forth in long, well-reasoned arguments the “fallacies of Socialism” produce little or no result. All these so-called “fallacies” have been exposed repeatedly by able writers and disproved by all experience, so that if based merely on ignorance or error they would long since have ceased to obtain credence. The truth is that they are not fallacies but lies, deliberately devised and circulated by men who do not believe in them for a moment and who can therefore only be described as unscrupulous charlatans exploiting the credulity of the public.

But if this description may be legitimately applied to the brains behind Socialism and to certain of its leading doctrinaires, there are doubtless thousands of honest visionaries to be found in the movement. A system that professes to cure all the ills of life inevitably appeals to generous minds that feel but do not reason. In reality many of these people, did they but know it, are simply social reformers at heart and not Socialists at all, and their ignorance of what Socialism really means leads them to range themselves under the banner of a party that claims a monopoly of ideals. Others again, particularly amongst the young intelligentsia, take up Socialism in the same spirit as they would adopt a fashion in ties or waistcoats, for fear of being regarded as “reactionaries.” That in reality, far from being “advanced,” the profession of Socialism is as retrogressive as would be a return to the side-whiskers and plaid trousers of the last century, does not occur to them. The great triumph of Mussolini was to make the youth of Italy realize that to be a Communist was to be a “back number,” and that progress consisted in marching forward to new ideas and aspirations. The young men of Cabet’s settlement discovered this sixty years ago when they formed themselves into a band of “Progressives” in opposition to the old men who still clung to the obsolete doctrine of Communism.

Socialism at the present moment is in reality less a creed than a cult, founded not on practical experience but on unreal theory. It is here we find a connexion with secret societies. M. Augustin Cochin in his brilliant essays on the French Revolution[8] has described that “World of the Clouds” of which the Grand Orient was the capital, peopled by the precursors of the French Revolution. “Whilst in the real world the criterion of all thought lies in putting it to the test,” there in the World of the Clouds the criterion is opinion. “They are there to talk, not to do; all this intellectual agitation, this immense traffic in speeches, writings, correspondence, leads not to the slightest beginning of work, of real effort.” We should be wrong to judge them harshly; their theories on the perfectibility of human nature, on the advantages of savagery, which appear to us “dangerous chimeras,” were never intended to apply to real life, only to the World of the Clouds, where they present no danger but become, on the contrary, “the most fecund truths.”

The revolutionary explosion might well have finally shattered these illusions but for the Grand Orient. We have already seen the identity of theory between French Masonry and French Socialism in the nineteenth century. It was thus that, although in France one experiment after another demonstrated the unreality of Socialist Utopias, the lodges were always there to reconstruct the mirage and lead humanity on again across the burning desert sands towards the same phantom palm-trees and illusory pools of water.

Whatever the manner in which these ideas penetrated to this country—whether through the Radicals of the last century, adorers of the Encyclopædist Masons of France, or through the British disciples of German Social Democrats from the time of the First Internationale onwards—it is impossible to ignore the resemblance between the theories not only of French but of modern British Socialism and the doctrines of illuminized Freemasonry. Thus the idea running through Freemasonry of a Golden Age before the Fall, when man was free and happy, and which through the application of masonic principles is to return once more, finds an exact counterpart in the Socialist conception of a past halcyon era of Liberty and Equality, which is to return not merely in the form of a regenerated social order, but as a complete Millennium from which all the ills of human life have been eliminated. This idea has always haunted the imagination of Socialist writers from Rousseau to William Morris, and leads directly up to the further theory—the necessity for destroying civilization.

I cannot find in Mr. Lothrop Stoddart’s conception of the revolutionary movement as the revolt of the “Under Man” against civilization the origin of this campaign. In reality the leaders of world revolution have not been “Under Men,” victims of oppression or of adverse fate, nor could they be ranged in this category on account of physical or mental inferiority. It is true that most revolutionary agitators have been in some way abnormal and that the revolutionary army has largely been recruited from the unfit, but the real inspirers of the movement have frequently been men in prosperous circumstances and of brilliant intellect who might have distinguished themselves on other lines had they not chosen to devote their talents to subversion. To call Weishaupt, for example, an “Under Man” would be absurd. But let us see what is the idea on which the plan of destroying civilization is ostensibly founded.

It will be remembered that Rousseau like Weishaupt held that the Golden Age of felicity did not end in the garden of Eden, as is popularly supposed, but was prolonged into tribal and nomadic life. Up to this moment Communism was the happy disposition under which the human race existed and which vanished with the introduction of civilization. Civilization is therefore the fons et origo mali and should be done away with. Let no one exclaim that this theory died out either with Rousseau or with Weishaupt; the idea that “civilization is all wrong” runs all through the writings and speeches of our Intellectual Socialists today. I have referred elsewhere to Mr. H. G. Wells’s prediction that mankind will more and more revert to the nomadic life, and Mr. Snowden has recently referred in tones of evident nostalgia to that productive era when man “lived under a system of tribal Communism.”[9] The children who attend the Socialist Schools are also taught in the “Red Catechism” the advantages of savagery, thus:

Question. Do savages starve in the midst of plenty?
Answer. No; when there is plenty of food they all rejoice, feast, and make merry.[10]

That when there is not plenty of food they occasionally eat each other is not mentioned.

Here, then, is the theory on which this yearning for a return to nature is based. For it is quite probable that if a Golden Age ever existed it was Communistic; it is also true that certain primitive tribes have found it possible to continue the same system, for the simple reason that when and where the earth was very thinly populated it brought forth, without the artificial aid of agriculture, more than enough to supply each man’s needs. There was therefore no need for laws to protect property, since every man could help himself freely to all that he required. If at the present time a dozen people were shipwrecked on a fertile island some miles in area, the institution of property would be equally superfluous; if, however, several hundred were to share the same fate, it would at once become necessary to institute some system of cultivation which in its turn would necessitate either the institution of property, by which each man would depend on his own plot of land for his existence, or a communal system, by which all would be obliged to work for the common good and force applied to those who refused to do their allotted share.

Peaceful Communism is thus simply a matter of population; the conditions under which men can sit in the sun and enjoy the fruits of the earth with little effort must be transformed with the multiplication of the human species into a system which recognizes private property, or a communal State which enforces compulsory labour by means of overseers with whips. It was perhaps an appreciation of this truth that impelled the practical exponents of Rousseau’s doctrines, the Terrorists of 1793, to embark on their “plan of depopulation” by way of establishing Communism on a peaceful basis.

But our Intellectual Socialists deny this necessity on the ground that under the benign régime of Socialism all men would be good and happy and would work joyfully for the welfare of the community. The fact that this has not proved the case even in voluntary Communist settlements does not daunt them, because, as has been said, their creed is founded not on practical experiment, but on theory, and it is here that we again find the inspiration of Grand Orient Freemasonry. The assumption that under an ideal social order all human failings would vanish derives directly from the two masonic doctrines which the Grand Orient, under the influence of Illuminism, has brought to a reductio ad absurdum—the perfectibility of human nature and universal brotherhood. The whole philosophy of Socialism is built upon these false premises.

Indeed the actual phraseology of illuminized Freemasonry has now passed into the language of Socialism; thus the old formulæ of “the United States of Europe” and “the Universal Republic” have been adopted not only by Mrs. Besant and her followers[11] as the last word in modern thought, but have also reappeared as a brilliant inspiration under the pen of Mr. H. G. Wells in the slightly varied form of the “World State.” It would be amusing, for anyone who had the time, to discover how many of the ideas of our so-called advanced thinkers might be found almost verbatim in the writings of Weishaupt, the République Universelle of Anacharsis Clootz, and in the speeches of Grand Orient orators during the last century.

Moreover, the world revolution is not only founded on the doctrines of illuminized Freemasonry, but has adopted the same method of organization. Thus, after the plan of the secret societies, from the Batinis onward, we shall find the forces of revolution divided into successive grades—the lowest consisting of the revolutionary proletariat, the chair à révolution as Marx expressed it, knowing nothing of the theory of Socialism, still less of the real aims of the leaders; above this the semi-initiates, the doctrinaires of Socialism, comprising doubtless many sincere enthusiasts; but above these again further grades leading up to the real initiates, who alone know whither the whole movement is tending.

For the final goal of world revolution is not Socialism or even Communism, it is not a change in the existing economic system, it is not the destruction of civilization in a material sense; the revolution desired by the leaders is a moral and spiritual revolution, an anarchy of ideas by which all standards set up throughout nineteen centuries shall be reversed, all honoured traditions trampled under foot, and above all the Christian ideal finally obliterated.

It is true that a certain section of the Socialist movement proclaims itself Christian. The Illuminati made the same profession, so have the modern Theosophists and Rosicrucians. But, as in the case of these secret societies, we should ask of so-called Christian Socialists: What do they mean by Christ? What do they mean by Christianity? On examination it will be found that their Christ is a being of their own inventing, that their Christianity is a perversion of Christ’s real teaching.

The Christ of Socialism invoked in the interests of Pacifism as the opponent of force and in the interests of class warfare as a Socialist, a revolutionary, or even an “agitator,” bears no resemblance to the real Christ. Christ was not a Pacifist when He told His disciples to arm themselves with swords, when He made a scourge of cords and drove the money-changers from the Temple. He did not tell men to forgive the enemies of their country or of their religion, but only their private enemies. Christ was not a Socialist when He declared that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth.” Socialism teaches that a man must never rest content as long as another man possesses that which he has not. Christ did not believe in equality of payment when He told the parable of the ten talents and the unprofitable servant. Socialism would reduce all labour to the pace of the slowest. Above all, Christ was not a Socialist when He bade the young man who had great possessions sell all that he had and give it to the poor. What school of Socialism has ever issued such a command? On the contrary, Socialists are enjoined by their leaders not to give their money away in charity lest they should help by this means to prolong the existence of the present social system. The truth is that, as I showed in connexion with the fallacy of representing Christ as an Essene, there is no evidence to show that He or His disciples practised even the purest form of Communism. Christ did not advocate any economic or political system; He preached a spirit which if applied to any system would lead to peace among men. It is true that He enjoined His disciples to despise riches and that He denounced many of the rich men with whom He came into contact, but it must not be forgotten that His immediate mission was to a race that had always glorified riches, that had worshipped the golden calf, and by which wealth was regarded as the natural reward of godliness.[12] Christ came to teach men not to look for present reward in the form of increased material welfare, but to do good out of love to God and one’s neighbour.

I do not doubt that in the past such men as Kingsley and J. F. D. Maurice sincerely imagined that they were following in the footsteps of the Master by describing themselves as Christian Socialists, but that the present leaders of Socialism in England are Christians at heart is impossible to believe in view of their attitude towards the campaign against Christianity in Russia. Never once have they or their allies, the Quakers, officially denounced the persecution not only of the priests but of all who profess the Christian faith in Russia.[13] Listen to this voice from the abyss of Russia:

We very much ask for prayer for the Church of Russia; it is passing through great tribulation and it is a question whether spiritual or earthly power will triumph. Many are being executed for not denying God.… Those placed by God at the helm need all the prayer and help of Christians all over the earth, because their fate is partly theirs too, for it is a question of faith triumphing over atheism, and it is a tug-of-war between those two principles.[14]

And again:

I look upon the persecution of the Russian Church as an effort to overthrow Christianity in general, for we are governed just now by the power of darkness, and all that we consider sinful seems to get the upper hand and to prosper.

Yet it is for this power that the Socialist Party of Great Britain have for years been demanding recognition. Even the appeals for help from their fellow-Socialists in Russia have left them cold. “We would suggest,” ran one such appeal—

That the British Labour Party issue an official protest against the Soviet Government’s inhuman treatment of its political opponents in general and the political prisoners in particular.
That meetings of protest should be organized in the industrial towns of Great Britain.
That the British Labour Party make an official representation to the Soviet Government directly, urging the latter to put a stop to the persecutions of the Socialists in Russia.[15]
And it was of this régime that Mr. Lansbury wrote:

Whatever their faults, the Communist leaders of Russia have hitched their wagon to a star—the star of love, brotherhood, comradeship.[16]

The callous indifference displayed by British Socialists, with the honourable exception of the Social Democratic Federation,[17] towards the crimes of the Bolsheviks offers indeed a painful contrast to the attitude of the other Socialists of Europe. At the conference of the Labour and Socialist International at Hamburg in May 1923, a resolution was passed condemning the persecution by the Soviet Government. When the resolution was put to the congress, 196 voted for, 2 against it, and 39, including the 30 British delegates, abstained.

I ask, then: Why should the Socialists of Great Britain be differentiated from the Bolsheviks of Russia? In every question of importance they have always lent them their support. In the great war on Christianity they have acted as the advance guard by the institution of Socialist Sunday schools, from which all religious teaching is excluded. Socialists are very anxious to disassociate these from the “Proletarian” Sunday schools which teach atheism. But from ignoring the existence of God to denying it is but a step; moreover, it will be noticed that the Socialists have never issued any protests against the blasphemies of the Proletarian schools. The real attitude of the Socialist Party towards religion may perhaps be gauged by the notice, reproduced below, which once appeared in its official organ the Daily Herald, of which Mr. Lansbury, widely advertised as a fervent Christian, was once editor and is now managing director.

BOOKS WE ALL PRETEND TO HAVE READ
The Bible is a real book, although during the whole of the nineteenth century the Churches turned a blind eye to the fact that it was a free translation by Jacobean clergymen of a Greek text of doubtful authenticity and of multiple authorship. The Bible is as divinely inspired as Shakespeare, or Milton, or Anatole France. But it is not as “pure” as the texts of these authors, for it is:—
(1) A miscellaneous collection of folk and traditional history bound to and described as the “Old Testament,” and
(2) “The New Testament,” a collection of Eastern theological doctrines centralized in the figure of a great Syrian mystic religious teacher, Jesus.
Those who will go to the Bible with an unprejudiced mind will discover that it is one of the great books of the world, full of beauty, humour, and aspiration, and disfigured, as great books often are, by occasional brutalities and crudities.— Daily Herald, February 7, 1923.
It was to the party controlling this organ that 700 clergymen of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church of Scotland saw fit to offer their congratulations by means of a memorial presented to Mr. Ramsay MacDonald in March 1923. Shall we yet see the scene of Brumaire 1793 repeated and a procession of prelates presenting themselves at Westminster to lay down their rings and crosses and declare that “henceforth there shall be no other worship than that of liberty and holy equality”?

Already the desecration of the churches has begun. The red flag was recently carried into the City Temple by a band of unemployed, although several of their number objected to its presence in the church. An attempt to sing “The Red Flag” was also suppressed by a section of the unemployed themselves, who had apparently retained some sense ot decency.[18]

Weishaupt’s design of enlisting the clergy in the work of world revolution has been carried out according to plan. Those Catholic priests in Ireland who inflamed popular passions acted as the tools of the International Atheist conspiracy and found at last the movement turning against themselves. The Protestant clergymen who profess “Christian Socialism” are playing the same part. Doubtless without knowing it, they act as the agents of the Continental Illuminati and pave the way, as did the emissaries of Weishaupt, for the open attack on all forms of religion. It is not a mere accident that the blasphemous masquerades of the French Revolution have recently been repeated in Russia. The horrible incidents described in the press[19] were simply the outward manifestation of a continuous conspiracy of which evidence was seen some years ago in Portugal under the influence of the Carbonarios, led by Alfonso Costa, whose utterances at times bore a striking resemblance to those of Anacharsis Clootz. The late Duchess of Bedford thus described the war on religion which inaugurated the new Republic:

One of the most zealous enterprises of this great society [the Carbonarios] is, in their own words, to exterminate “the Christian myth” in the minds of the nation of Portugal. The little children in the schools have badges pinned into their clothes with the words “No God! No religion!” and a British tourist who made a journey throughout the country of Portugal met bands of innocent babes carrying banners, on which the inscription was “We have no need of God.”[20]

Is it only a coincidence that last year a Socialist and Communist meeting in Trafalgar Square displayed a red banner bearing the motto: “No King, no God, no Law”?[21]

I repeat: It is not an economic revolution which forms the plan of the real directors of the movement, it is neither the “dictatorship of the proletariat” nor the reorganization of society by the Intelligentsia of “Labour”; it is the destruction of the Christian idea. Socialist orators may inveigh against corrupt aristocracy or “bloated Capitalists,” but these are not in reality the people who will suffer most if the aim of the conspiracy is achieved. The world revolution has always shown itself indulgent towards selfish and corrupt aristocrats, from the Marquis de Sade and the Duc d’Orléans onwards; it is the gentle, the upright, the benevolent, who have fallen victims to revolutionary fury.

Socialism with its hatred of all superiority, of noble virtues—loyalty and patriotism—with its passion for dragging down instead of building up, serves the purpose of the deeper conspiracy. If the Christian Intelligentsia can be destroyed or won over and the nation deprived of all its natural leaders, the world-revolutionaries reckon that they will be able to mould the proletariat according to their desires. This being so, the thing we now call Bolshevism forms only one phase of the movement which is carried on by countless different methods, apparently disconnected but all tending towards the same end. We have only to look around us in the world today to see everywhere the same disintegrating power at work—in art, literature, the drama, the daily press—in every sphere that can influence the mind of the public. Just as in the French Revolution a play on the massacre of St. Bartholomew was staged in order to rouse the passions of the people against the monarchy, so our modern cinemas perpetually endeavour to stir up class hatred by scenes and phrases showing “the injustice of kings,” “the sufferings of the people,” the selfishness of “aristocrats,” regardless of whether these enter into the theme of the narrative or not.[22] And in the realms of literature, not merely in works of fiction but in manuals for schools, in histories and books professing to be of serious educative value and receiving a skilfully organized boom throughout the press, everything is done to weaken patriotism, to shake belief in all existing institutions by the systematic perversion of both contemporary and historical facts, whilst novels and plays calculated to undermine all ideas of morality are pressed upon the public as works of genius which, in order to maintain a reputation for intellect, it is essential to admire. I do not believe that all this is accidental; I do not believe that the public asks for the anti-patriotic or demoralizing books and plays placed before it; on the contrary, it invariably responds to an appeal to patriotism and simple healthy emotions. The heart of the people is still sound, but ceaseless efforts are made to corrupt it.

This conspiracy has long been apparent to Continental observers. Some years before the war, Monsieur de Lannoy, a member of an anti-masonic association in France, at a conference on “the influence of judæo-masonic sects in the theatre, in literature, in the fashions,” showed how “orders of things which appear to have no connexion with each other are skilfully bound up together and directed by a single methodical movement towards a common end. This common end is the paganization of the universe, the destruction of all Christianity, the return to the loosest morals of antiquity.”[23] Robison saw in the indecent dress of the period of the Directory the result of Weishaupt’s teaching, and traces to the same cause the ceremony which took place in Notre Dame when a woman of loose morals was held up to the admiration of the public.[24] The same glorification of vice has found exponents amongst the modern Illuminati in this country. In The Equinox—the Journal of Scientific Illuminism, it is proposed that prostitutes should be placed on the same level as soldiers who have served their country and be honoured and pensioned by the State.[25] The community of women was not an idea that originated with the Russian Bolsheviks, but one that has run through all the revolutionary movements of the past.

The attempt to pervert all conceptions of beauty in the sphere of art serves to pave the way for moral perversion. In the New York Herald two years ago there appeared a circular protesting against the so-called Modernistic cult in art as “world-wide Bolshevist propaganda.” The circular went on to declare:

This aims to overthrow and destroy all existing social systems, including that of the arts. This modernistic degenerate cult is simply the Bolshevist philosophy applied in art. The triumph of Bolshevism therefore means the destruction of the present æsthetic system, the transportation of all æsthetic values, and the deification of ugliness.

The whole propaganda of the movement was said to be organized by “a coterie of European art-dealers”—elsewhere described as German—who had flooded the market with the works of artists who began as “a small group of neurotic egomaniacs in Paris styling themselves worshippers of Satan, the God of Ugliness.” Some of these men were suffering from the “visual derangement” of the insane, whilst “many of the pictures exhibited another form of mania. The system of this is an incontrollable desire to mutilate the human body.” Sadism, as we know, played a prominent part in both the French and Russian revolutions. The most important point in all this is not that degenerates should be found to perpetrate these abominations, but what the circular describes as the “Machiavellian campaign organized for the unloading of these works. Editions de luxe … were published and sold by the picture dealers; … every crafty device known to the picture trade was resorted to in order to discredit and destroy the heretofore universally accepted standards of æsthetics.”[26]

This process of reversing all accepted standards may also be brought about by subtler methods. We have already seen that occult practices may lead to the obliteration of all sense of truth and of normal sexual instincts. Under the influence of so-called occult science, which is, in reality, simply powerful suggestion or self-hypnotism, all a man’s natural impulses and inhibitive springs of action may be broken; he will no longer react to the conceptions of beauty or ugliness, or right or wrong, which, unknown to himself, formed the law of his being. Thus not only his conscious deeds but his subconscious mental processes may pass under the control of another, or become entirely deranged.

Much the same consequences may result from the Freud system of Psychoanalysis, which, particularly by its insistence on sex, tends to subordinate the will to impulses of a harmful kind. An eminent American neuro-psychiatrist of New York has expressed his opinion on this subject in the following words:

The Freud theory is anti-Christian and subversive of organized society. Christianity teaches that the individual can resist temptation and Freudism teaches that the matter of yielding to or resisting temptation is one for which the individual is not wilfully responsible. Freudism makes of the individual a machine, absolutely controlled by subconscious reflexes.… It would of course be difficult to prove that psychoanalysis has been evolved as a destructive propaganda measure, but in one sense the point is immaterial. Whether conscious or unconscious, it makes for destructive effect.[27]

In general, the art of the conspiracy is not so much to create movements as to capture existing movements, often innocuous and even admirable in themselves, and turn them to a subversive purpose. Thus birth control, which—if combined with the restriction of alien immigration and carried out under proper direction—would provide a solution to the frightful problem of overpopulation, can without these provisos become a source of national weakness and demoralization. It is easy to see how a limitation of the native population would serve the cause of England’s enemies by reducing her fighting forces and by making room for undesirable aliens. That the birth-control campaign may also be used for evil purposes is suggested by the fact that it has not been confined to our own overcrowded island, but has been carried on in France, where under-population has long constituted a tragedy. In 1903 and 1904 the “Ligue de la Régéneration Humaine,” founded by Monsieur Paul Robin, in its organ L’Émancipateur issued not only instructions on “the means how to avoid large families,” but also pamphlets on “free love and free maternity.”[28] The campaign of race-suicide was thus combined with the undermining of morality; legal families were to be limited and illegal births encouraged. This was quite in accord with the doctrines of the Grand Orient, in whose Temples, Monsieur Copin-Albancelli points out, the principle of “la libre maternité”—known in this country as “the right to motherhood”—was advocated.

It is curious to notice that the apparently innocent invention of Esperanto receives support from the same quarter. This is not surprising since we know that the idea of a universal language has long haunted the minds of Freemasons. I have myself seen a document emanating from a body of French Masons stating that Esperanto is directly under the control of the three masonic powers of France—the Grand Orient, the Grande Loge Nationale, and the Droit Humain.

That it is largely used for promoting Bolshevism has been frequently stated. In July 1922, M. Bérard, Minister of Education, issued a circular “to the heads of all French Universities, academies, and colleges, calling on them not to help in any way in the teaching of Esperanto on the ground that Bolsheviks use it as one of their dangerous forms of propaganda.”[29] A correspondent points out to me that another universal language, Ido, is used for propaganda by the Anarchists, and that several journals distributed by revolutionary societies, written in Ido, are “frankly and baldly Anarchical.” The writer adds:

Last week I received a copy of Libereso (Liberty), monthly organ of the Anarchist Section of the “Emancipating Star”—“Cosmopolitan Union of Labour-class Idists.” It commands carrying out Anarchistic principles to their extreme limits; commends “La Ruzo” (ruse); is sarcastic regarding Socialism and Democracy.… It contains an appeal for help (in money) for the Anarchists imprisoned in Russia … written by Alexander Berkmann and signed by him with Emma Goldmann and A. Schapiro.

Here, then, we have a revolutionary movement which is anti-Socialist and even anti-Bolshevist, which tends to prove the opinion I have already expressed, that Bolshevism is only one phase of the world conspiracy. But if we explain this by the old antagonism between the opposing revolutionary camps of Anarchy and Socialism, how are we to account for the fact that the same destructive purpose animates people who are neither Anarchist nor Socialist, but can only be ranged in the category of extreme reaction? Of this phase of the movement Nietzsche provides the supreme example. In his imprecations against “the Crucified,” the advocate of autocracy and militarism rivals the most infuriated of revolutionary Socialists. The whole spirit of perversion is contained in the description of Nietzsche by his friend Georges Brandes: “His thoughts stole inquisitively along forbidden paths: ‘This thing passes for a value. Can we not turn it upside-down? This is regarded as good. Is it not rather evil?’” What is this but Satanism? The case of Nietzsche is not to be explained away by the fact that he died raving mad, since a number of apparently sane people still profess for him unbounded admiration, and whilst deriding Socialism and even attacking Bolshevism join in the war against Christian civilization. The conspiracy therefore exists apart from so-called democratic circles.

Not long ago I picked up an Italian novel by an anti-Socialist containing precisely the same diatribes against “Christian-bourgeois society” that are to be found in Anarchist and Bolshevist literature. “The family,” says the author, “is the kernel of contemporary society and its base. Whoever would really reform or subvert must begin by reforming and subverting the family.… The family … is the principal path of all unhappiness, of all vice, of all hypocrisy, of all moral ugliness …”; and he goes on to show that the two countries which have proved themselves the sanest and the strongest are Germany and America, because they have advanced by long strides towards free love.[30]

The writer of these words may be of no importance, but they should be noted because they are symptomatic and help us to locate certain centres of infection.

It is impossible to observe all these miscellaneous movements going on all around us without being struck by the similarity of aim between them; each seems to form part of a common plan, which, like the separate pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, convey no meaning, but when fitted together make up a perfectly clear design. That there is somewhere in the background a point of contact is suggested by the fact that we find members of the different groups playing a double and a treble rôle, the same name occurring in the list of patrons in a Birth Control paper and in a revolutionary secret society, amongst the exponents of Psycho-Analysis and the members of an Irish Republican Committee.

With the open as with the secret forces the great method of warfare is the capture of public opinion. A hidden influence behind the press contributes powerfully to this end. Some of the subtlest disintegrating propaganda during the last seven years has emanated from the so-called “Capitalist press.” The Daily Herald is only the brass band of the Revolution. It is to the journals inspired and patronized by the Intelligentsia that we must turn to find the doctrines of Illuminism set forth with the most persuasive eloquence.[31]

More than eighty years ago a Frenchman endowed with extraordinary prophetic instinct foretold not only the danger that would one day come from Russia, but that the press would facilitate the destruction of civilization:

When our cosmopolitan democracy, bearing its last fruits, shall have made of war a thing odious to whole populations, when the nations calling themselves the most civilized on earth shall have finished enervating themselves in their political debaucheries, … the floodgates of the North will open on us once again, then we shall undergo a last invasion not of ignorant barbarians but of cunning and enlightened masters, more enlightened than ourselves, for they will have learnt from our own excesses how we can and must be governed.

It is not for nothing that Providence piles up so many inactive forces in the East of Europe. One day the sleeping giant will arise and force will put an end to the reign of words. In vain, then, distracted equality will call the old aristocracy to the help of liberty; the weapon grasped again too late and wielded by hands too long inactive will have become powerless. Society will perish for having trusted to words void of sense or contradictory; then the deceitful echoes of public opinion, the newspapers, wishing at all costs to keep their readers, will push [the world] to ruin if only to have something to relate for a month longer. They will kill society to live upon its corpse.[32]

Today the newspapers, no longer the echoes of public opinion but its supreme directors, throw open their columns to every form of disintegrating doctrine and close them to arguments that could effectually arrest the forces of destruction.

What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest—the circle of the real Initiates?

footnotes

[1] “The struggle to instil into the masses the idea of the Soviet State control, and accounting, that this idea may be realised and a break be made with the accursed past, which accustomed the people to look upon the work of getting food and clothing as a ‘private’ affair and on purchase and sale as something that ‘concerns only myself’—this is a most momentous struggle, of universal historical significance, a struggle for Socialist consciousness against bourgeois-anarchistic ‘freedom.’”—Lenin, The Soviets at Work, p. 22 (The Socialist Information and Research Bureau, 196 St. Vincent Street, Glasgow, 1919).

[2] Mr. Bernard Shaw on “Railway Strike Secrets,” reported in Morning Post for December 3, 1919.

[3] Mr. Bernard Shaw in the Labour Monthly for October 1921.

[4] Report of interview with Maxim Gorky in Daily News for October 3, 1921.

[5] Opinion expressed to me in conversation with a Socialist. Cf. Keir Hardie, “Communism, the final goal of Socialism” (Serfdom to Socialism, p. 36).

[6] “By the decree of May 22, 1922, the right of private ownership of means of production and for production itself was re-established.” See article by Krassin on “The New Economic Policy of the Soviet Government” in Reconstruction (the monthly review edited by Parvus) for September 1922.

[7] See Guillaume’s Documents de l’Internationale and Mrs. Snowden’s A Political Pilgrim in Europe.

[8] Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Démocratie (1921). M. Augustin Cochin collaborated with M. Charles Charpentier in throwing new light on the French Revolution, and triumphantly refuted M. Aulard in 1908. Unhappily his work was cut short by the war and he was killed at the front in July 1916, leaving his great history of the Revolution unfinished.

[9] Mr. Philip Snowden in debate on Socialism in the House of Commons on March 20, 1923: “By far the greatest time that man has been upon this globe he has lived not under a system of private enterprise, not under capitalism, but under a system of tribal communism, and it is well worthwhile to remember that most of the great inventions that have been the basis of our machinery and our modern discoveries were invented by men who lived together in tribes.”

[10] The Red Catechism, by Tom Anderson, p. 3.

[11] E.g. the following extract from an address by Miss Esther Bright to the Esoteric School of Theosophy quoted in The Patriot for March 22, 1923: “The hearty and understanding co-operation between E.S.T. members of many nations will form a nucleus upon which the nations may build the big brotherhood which we hope may become the United States of Europe. United States! What a fine sound it has when one looks at the Europe of today!” A review named Les États-Unis d’Europe existed as early as 1868, and M. Goyau shows that this formula and also that of the “République Universelle” were slogans current amongst the pacifists before and during the war of 1870 which they signally failed to avert.—L’Idée de Patrie et l’Humanitarisme, pp. 113, 115.

[12] How bitterly this attitude is still resented by the Jews is shown in the article on Jesus in the Jewish Encyclopædia, which observes that: “In almost all of his public utterances he was harsh, severe, and distinctly unjust … toward the ruling and well-to-do classes. After reading his diatribes against the Pharisees, the Scribes, and the rich, it is scarcely to be wondered at that these were concerned in helping to silence him” (vol. vii, p. 164).

[13] The execution of Monseigneur Butkievitch, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Petrograd, was condoned by the Daily Herald, the New Statesman, and the Nation. See the Daily Herald for April 7, 1923.

[14] Letters from a friend of the present writer in Russia, dates of August 1922 and February 1923.

[15] Daily Herald for February 21, 1922.

[16] Ibid., March 18, 1920.

[17] See Report of Annual Conference of the Social Democratic Federation in Morning Postfor August 6, 1923, where it is said that “Whole-hearted denunciation of Sovietism was the chief feature of the day’s discussion,” etc.

[18] Evening Standard for January 15, 1924.

[19] Daily Telegraph for January 8, 1923; Daily Mail for January 24, 1923.

[20] Report of speech by Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, at a public meeting to protest against the treatment of political prisoners in Portugal, April 22, 1913, quoted in Portuguese Political Prisoners, p. 89 (published by Upcott Gill & Son).

[21] Evening Standard, May 14, 1923.

[22] That this use of the cinema for revolutionary propaganda is deliberate was proved to me by personal experience. A man who had been struck with the dramatic possibilities of something I had written wrote to ask if he might place it before a certain well-known film producer in America. I gave my consent, and some time later he informed me that the producer in question regretted he could not film my work as it might appear to be anti-Bolshevist propaganda. Soon after this the same producer brought out a film on the same subject with the moral turned round the other way, so as to make the whole thing subtly revolutionary, and brought this over to England, where he advertised it as anti-Bolshevist propaganda! This is typical of the duplicity displayed by these propagandists.

[23] Quoted in Le Problème de la Mode, by the Baronne de Montenach, p. 30 (1913).

[24] Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy, pp. 251, 252 (1798).

[25] Article by A. Quiller in The Equinox for September 1910, p. 338.

[26] New York Herald for September 6 and 7, 1921.

[27] Private communication to the author.

[28] Paul Bureau, La Crise morale des Temps nouveaux, p. 108 (1907).

[29] Daily Mail, July 14, 1922.

[30] Le smorfie dell’anima, by Mario Mariani (1919).

[31] A leader writer in one of the most important literary Constitutional journals in this country observed to me in conversation that “all such nonsense as patriotism ought to be done away with”; another writer for the same paper told me he would not in the least regret to see the British Empire broken up.

[32] Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839, I. 149 (1843).