The Prussian Disease
If you have noticed how the Thought Police of SocJus, and various Leftists, Morlocks and Posthumans, regard all their foes, from Sad Puppies to Christian to Conservatives to Libertarians, to Caucasians and to Males as being simultaneously too stupid, foolish, weak, confused, and mentally crippled to be worthy of the time and effort needed to spit on us, and yet, at the same time and in the same sense, so clever, cunning, diabolical, overpowering, patient and ruthless as to justify that any blow struck against us by fair means or foul must be struck, truth, honesty, courtesy, and humanity be damned if it slows the blow.
Now, how can we be ants, easily crushed, if we are giants, terrors who footfalls shake the world?
Tom Simon, in addressing the question, has the good sense to quote GK Chesterton:
It’s the Prussian disease, as described by G. K. Chesterton inThe Appetite of Tyranny (from which Mike Flynn quoted on this very blog a few days ago). Here is an excerpt:
In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.… it seems to amount to saying, ‘It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you.’
The spokesmen of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. … [In] is his more recent order to his troops touching the war in Northern France.
As most people know, his words ran, ‘It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French’s contemptible little Army.’
The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.
If French’s little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies.
If all the skill and valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once.
He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing.
He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed.
Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.
Now tell me what the difference is between that and the attitude of the Puppy Kickers. I’ve been searching for years and haven’t found it yet.
And for those of you without the good taste to read everything written my Mike Flynn at least twice, to savor it, he also has the good sense to quote the Apostle of Common Sense, and I have to good fortune to have a good excuse to quote him quoting him.
“Other European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders; but Germans pity only themselves. They might take forcible possession of the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or the Garonne — and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and true stands the watch on Rhine; and what a shame it would be if any one took their own little river away from them.
…..
But it is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him.”— Chesterton, “The Refusal of Recipricity”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
