Frederick Augustus Voigt

Frederick Augustus Voigt (1892 – 1957), British journalist and author of German descent, most famous for his work with the Manchester Guardian and his opposition to dictatorship and totalitarianism on the European Continent.

Quotes

Unto Caesar (1938)

New York, NY, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938

• Believing as he does in force and determined to secure nothing by peaceful means that can be secured by violence, the Marxist lives in hope of wars and crises that will so unbalance the social order and so loosen the restraint imposed by law and custom, that violence can achieve a maximum breadth and intensity. The situation then arises which the Marxist terms ‘revolutionary.’ It is the situation he desires because he believes that only then is the ‘final and decisive battle possible.’ To Lenin —as to Hitler—the Great War was welcome because it promised to fulfill the revolutionary dream.
  • p. 27
• For the ‘little man’ the Marxist feels far greater hatred than for the capitalist. The ‘little man’ is worse than counter-revolutionary.’ He is unrevolutionary, and to be unrevolutionary is, in the eyes of the Marxist, to be a kind of leper. Marxists are habitually contemptuous of the ‘petit bourgeois mind’ as not a mind at all, but something reptilian, something infinitely mean and ignominious.
  • p. 29
• We have referred to Marxism and National Socialism as secular religions. They are not opposites, but are fundamentally akin, in a religious as well as in a secular sense. Both are messianic and socialistic. Both reject the Christian knowledge that all are under sin and both see in good and evil principles of class or race. Both have enthroned the modern Caesar, collective man, the implacable enemy of the individual soul. Both would render unto this Caesar the things which are God’s. Both would make man master of his own destiny, establish the Kingdom of Heaven in this world. Neither will hear of any Kingdom that is not of this world.
  • pp. 33-34
• For twenty years the Russian people have been agonizingly stretched and bloodily mutilated to fit the Procrustean bed of the Marxian ‘theory.’ The attempt to impose Marxism has been abandoned. The theory itself remains sacrosanct, but those who would still put it into practice are shot, imprisoned, or exiled. The Soviet Union is a despotism working through a secret police and a subservient bureaucracy. This alone is the denial of a doctrine essential to Marxism, namely, the ‘withering away’ of the State. So far from ‘withering away,’ the Russian State has greater coercive power than any other in the world.
  • pp.34-35
• Marxism would be a phenomenon of little more than historical interest, seeing that it has failed even in its principal stronghold, were it not so closely akin to National Socialism. National Socialism would have been inconceivable without Marxism.
  • p. 35
• The Marxist really believes that Marxism is ‘scientific.’ The National Socialist really believes that the Racial Principle has something to do with serious biology.
  • p. 46
• Lenin is a would-be destroyer of religion, Hitler a corrupter of religion. The National Socialist attack, accepting as it does much of liberal theology and natural religion, is far more dangerous to Christianity than the godlessness of its decay. Lenin would destroy the altar or at least promote its decay. Hitler would preserve the altar while replacing the Cross of Christ by the Swastika.
  • p. 50
• Christianity is never safe, but where there is one atom of Marxism or National Socialism left, Christianity is in mortal danger—and so are Marxism and National Socialism wherever there is one atom of Christianity left.
  • p. 62
• That the individual has any rights of his own, even the right to live, has no meaning at all to Lenin or Hitler.
  • p. 67
• Lenin and Hitler are quite unashamed in their constant advocacy of ruthlessness, of the bloodiest wars and upheavals. Throughout all Marxian and National Socialist literature there is not a trace of pity, magnanimity, forgiveness, or of any generous feeling, not one word of respect for honor or for righteousness—not one trace of toleration, not the slightest appreciation for a foe who might be brave, or even right in his own way.
  • p. 69
• Lenin and Hitler are haters of freedom and—in so far as they are capable of love at all—they are lovers of intolerance. They wanted freedom to establish unfreedom.
  • p. 77
• All National Socialist writers are obsessed with race, blood, and nationhood, just as all Marxist writers are obsessed with class and class-warfare. Just as there is no history for the Marxist that is not a history of class-struggle, so there is no history for the National Socialist that is not a history of racial conflict. Hitler demanded that the history of the world be rewritten so that ‘the racial question’ may be ‘raised to dominating eminence.’
  • p. 78
• The Marxian and National Socialist conception of history is not ‘historical’ at all, nor ‘scientific,’ nor ‘objective.’ It is sectarian and dictatorial. The myth, the ‘theory,’ the ‘ideology,’ or the ‘Weltanschauung’ is imposed upon the past, and ‘ideological’ dictatorship is established, all history being pressed, bludgeoned, and trimmed until it becomes a record of the transition from the primitive state of nature to the apocalypse that inaugurates the Millennium and brings history to an end.
  • p. 82
• Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.
  • p. 85
• Like Marx and Lenin, Hitler is an anti-capitalist. And as ‘capitalism ’ is evil, it is, in Hitler’s eyes, Jewish. Anti-Semitism and anti-Capitalism frequently go hand in hand—the Pan-German movement before the war and Austria’s anti-Semitism were strongly anti-capitalistic. Hitler made them indissoluble in Germany. He succeeded in bringing about a fusion of class hatred and racial hatred, of revolutionary socialism and revolutionary nationalism.
  • p. 118
• National Socialism, like Marxism, lives on hatred. There is no easier method of concentrating hate than anti-Semitism. The Jew, made to look gross and hideous, becomes the symbol of all that is hateful, of the enemy in the abstract and in the concrete. The Jew of caricature, the Jew with the hooked nose, dark, curly hair and fleshy lips, is made to symbolize evil as such in the eyes of the Nazi, just as the capitalist of caricature is made to symbolize evil as such in the eyes of the Communists.
  • p. 111

Pax Britannica (1949)

London, UK, Constable & Company Ltd, 1949

• Every enlightened, humane, and patriotic Englishman has been ashamed, upon occasion, of what his country has done and will be fearful of what she may do yet. He would be a Pharisee were he to assume that there is a separate England of evil-doers: that this England is not his England, the real England, but another England.
  • p. 7
• He who is never ashamed of his country has as little patriotism as he who is never proud of his country.
  • p. 8
• It is said that only when the Germans are weak and disunited are they great—great, that is to say, in art and letters, in science, in speculative thought.
  • p. 14
• But Germans are not interested in freedom as the English understand it. When they say freedom, they do not mean the liberty of the individual to do what he likes within the limits imposed by the written and unwritten law, but the liberty of the nation to do what it pleases in defiance of international law.
  • p. 14
• Justice is not humane if it is never severe.
  • p. 16
• Parliamentary government does not suit the Germans. They cannot conceive of loyal opposition or of opposition without personal animosity. They care little for individual freedom. But they do care for equality and they have a passion for justice. Egalitarian States tend to be despotic, and when the passion for justice becomes a frenzy that moves whole multitudes, it will lead to extreme injustice.
  • p. 16
• Socialism is always destructive of liberty unless it be adulterated and restricted. The Germans who supported the Revolution of 1918 and made the Republic possible wanted freedom and Socialism, not realizing that they could not have both. They wanted Socialism the more of the two, but failed, because they were unable to command sufficient power. But they had freedom—the freedom that enabled a new form of Socialism, namely National Socialism, to establish itself.
  • p. 24
• The Russian Socialism of the German Communists, the liberal Socialism of the Social Democrats, the national, and therefore German, Socialism of the National Socialists—Socialism, in one form or another, was desired by the vast majority of Germans. In the end, Socialism prevailed.
  • p. 24
• What happened to the German genius under the National Socialist visitation? Books were banned or burnt, works of art were destroyed or cosigned to lumber rooms, artists were condemned to solitude, writers were silenced or driven into exile. Upon the genius of Germany a crude, anti-scientific, anti-philosophical, pseudo-religious ideology animated by a narrow, ruthless fanaticism were impressed. Despite its youthful fervour, Hitler’s National Socialism was not a rejuvenation.
  • p. 26
• There were never so many who believe in nothing as there are today. The super-abundance of false beliefs has led to unbelief. But today the way to belief has led to unbelief. There is no other way.
  • p. 28