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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Conclusion:

In a complex relation to the "Germanic idea" stands Nietzsche, who in his spirit and blood was not a pure German. The Germanic spirit, a very strong spirit, wants in the end to produce a kind of Germanic religion of Germanism, which comes into antagonism with Christianity. There is no Christ's spirit in this religion. Now Drewes is an archetypal exponent of this religion of Germanism, as well as Chamberlain. Р. Wagner was its prophet. It is a purely Aryan, anti-Semitic religion, a religion of smooth and unleavened monism, without mad antinomianism, without apocalypse. There is no repentance and no sacrifice in this Germanic religion. The German is least capable of repentance. And he may be virtuous, moral, perfect, honest, but he can hardly be holy. Repentance is substituted with pessimism. Germanic religion attributes the source of evil to an unconscious deity, to the original chaos, but never to man, never to the Germanic man himself. The Germanic religion is the purest monophysitism, the recognition of only one and one nature, the divine, and not of two natures, the divine and the human, as in the Christian religion. Therefore, no matter how high, to all appearances, this Germanic religion elevates a man – it, after all, in the deepest sense denies man as a distinctive religious beginning.

In such a purely monistic, monophysite religious consciousness there can be no prophecies of a new life, a new world epoch, a new earth and a new heaven, no quest for a new city, so characteristic of Slavism. German monistic organization, German order do not allow apocalyptic experiences, do not tolerate feelings of the coming of the end of the old world, they fixate this world in a bad infinity. The Germans leave the apocalypse entirely to the Russian chaos, so despised by them. And we, in turn, despise this eternal German order.

The Germanic world is Central Europe by and large. German ideologists recognize the Germans as the creators and custodians of Central European culture. They consider France, England, Italy, Russia to be the outskirts of Europe. The fate of Germanism is presented as the fate of Europe, the victory of Germanism is understood as the victory of European culture. The religion of Germanism recognizes the German people as the only pure Aryan race, which is called to establish European spiritual culture not only by the efforts of the spirit, but also by blood and iron. Germanism would like to consolidate forever the global supremacy of central Europe, it seeks to extend its influence to the East, to Turkey and China, but it prevents the genuine transcending of Europe and insular European culture. Everywhere Germanism, obsessed with the idea of its exclusive cultural mission, carries its insular-European and insular-German culture, enriching itself with nothing, recognizing no one and nothing in the world.... And these claims of German-European centralism are a great obstacle in the way of connecting East and West, i.e. of solving the main task of world history.

These exclusive claims of the Germanic spirit are exactly that which cannot be borne by the rest of the world. German ideologists even turned the racial anthropological theory about the exclusive advantages of long-headed blondes into a kind of religious Germanic messianism. Instead of "Aryans" they introduced the term "Indo-Germans". The spirit of Teutonic pride has permeated all Germanic science and philosophy. Germans are not content with an instinctive contempt for other races and peoples; they want to despise on a scientific basis, to despise in an orderly, organized and disciplined manner. German self-confidence is always pedantic and methodologically sound. We Russians can least of all endure the domination of the pretensions of the religion of Germanism. We must oppose it with our own spirit, our own religion, our own aspirations. This does not prevent us from appreciating the great phenomena of the Germanic spirit, from nourishing ourselves with them, as with all the great things in the world. But the pride of the Germanic will must be opposed with our own religious will. Central Germanic Europe cannot acquire world domination, its idea is not a global idea. In the Russian spirit lies the greater Christian universalism, a greater recognition of all and everything in the world.

Published in June 1916

Didn't work out well for either party (well, Berdyaev himself did okay, first in Berlin, then in Paris). But Russians got their minute of fame as the standard bearers of the new worldwide Messianic delusion, making full use of German-Jewish faux-materialism.

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