"This English-German liberalism now exerts a business-like control over practically all the important German newspapers, the entire educated class, and the liberal party. But the professors are not aware of this. In England the liberal is a liberal through and through; he is ethically free, and for this reason also economically free, and is quite conscious of the connection. The German liberal has two discrete personalities, the ethical and the commercial. The one personality thinks, the other acts and controls; only the latter personality is aware of the mutual relationship—and finds it amusing.

Thus we find two great economic principles opposed to each other in the modern world. The Viking has become a free-tradesman; the Teutonic knight is now an administrative official. There can be no reconciliation. Each of these principles is proclaimed by a German people, Faustian men par excellence. Neither can accept a restriction of its will, and neither can be satisfied until the whole world has succumbed to its particular idea. This being the case, war will be waged until one side gains final victory. Is world economy to be worldwide exploitation, or worldwide organization? Are the Caesars of the coming empire to be billionaires or universal administrators? Shall the population of the earth, so long as this empire of Faustian civilization holds together, be subjected to cartels and trusts, or to men such as those envisioned in the closing pages of Goethe’s Faust, Part II? Truly, the destiny of the world is at stake."

Yet another prophecy of WW2.

"A philosophical debate about "monarchy" or "republic" is really a quarrel about words. The monarchic form of government an sich is just as unreal a concept as the cloud form an sich. An ancient Classical "republic" and a Western European "republic" are two incommensurate things. The ultimate meaning of great political crises is something other than a change in the form of government. When a crisis elicits the cry of "monarchy" or "republic" it is really nothing more than a cry, the verbal cue in a melodramatic scene, although it is the only thing most people in a given epoch can understand and be inspired by. In reality, following such ecstatic moments a people will always return to its own political pattern, the essential quality of which can almost never be expressed in popular language. The instincts of a vigorous race are so strong that they can come to grips with any form of government that historical accident may put in their path, and mold it to their own purposes. And when this takes place no one is conscious that the political pattern in question has been realized in name only. The true political shape of any given country is not be found in the wording of its constitution; it is, rather, the unwritten and unconscious laws according to which the constitution is put into effect. Without reference to the particular nations under discussion, the words "republic," "parliamentarism," and "democracy" are meaningless.

"

The superrationality of many important truths.

"Nor shall we German escape it either. It is our destiny, just as it was the destiny of Rome and China, indeed of all mature cultures. But—billionaires or generals, bankers or civil servants of the highest quality? That is the eternal question.

"

We seem to have gotten the Billionaires.

"The materialist view of history, which postulates economic conditions as "cause" (in the physical sense) and religion, laws, customs, art, and science as "effect," doubtless has its persuasive aspects in this late period of Western culture, for it appeals to the mentality of irreligious and traditionless urban people. Not because economic conditions are in fact a "cause," but because art and religion have become empty, lifeless, and external, and because they now linger on as the pale shadow of the only strongly developed form that identifies our age. Precisely this state of affairs is symptomatically English; the notion of religion as "cant," of art as "comfort" for the upper class and as alms for the lower ("art for the masses") has accompanied the English style of living during its infiltration of other countries.

"

". We are not "human beings an sich." That was a factor in yesterday’s ideology. "Cosmopolitanism" is a wretched word. We are persons of a particular century, a particular nation, a particular circle, a particular type. These are the necessary conditions under which we can give meaning and depth to existence, by being doers, even if we do with words"

"Today Marxism is collapsing amid the clamorous orgy of its attempt to become reality. With the year 1918 the Communist Manifesto has entered upon a career as a literary curiosity like that of the Contrat social after 1793. True instinctive socialism, the expression of the Old Prussian mode of life, once was carried off on a literary sojourn to England to be diluted into an anti-English theory; it is now on its way back to an awareness of its origins and its full meaning.

"

The prophecy is obvious.

"A true International is only possible as the victory of the idea of a single race over all the others, and not as the mixture of all separate opinions into one colorless mass. "

"If the German worker can give up Marxism and begin to think as a socialist, he will easily become the Prussian type just described. "

"The Russians are by no means a people like the Germans and the English. Like the Germanic tribes of the Carolingian age they contain within themselves the potentialities of many future peoples. "

"There is no more repulsive spectacle than the attempted of certain Protestant groups to revivify the cadaver of religion by smearing it with bolshevist offal."

(The catholic church has also gone down this route ,since the war especially )