Form: Quote Commentary

SPENGLER: “ANGLOS ARE ESSENTIALLY VIKING PIRATES”

Spengler: Liberalism works for the English because they are essentially Viking pirates

—“England did away with the principle of the organized state, and put in its place the notion of the free private citizen.

The citizen demands permission to fight alone in the ruthless struggle for existence, for this is the only way he can satisfy his Viking instincts.

Buckle, Malthus, and Darwin later postulated that the basic essence of “society” was the naked struggle for existence. And they were absolutely right, at least as far as their own country and people were concerned.

To be sure, in modern England this principle operates in a highly refined and perfected fashion.

But evidence of a more rudimentary adherence to it can be found in the Icelandic sagas, where such behavior is obviously spontaneous and not borrowed from another culture.

The forces with which William the Conqueror took England in 1066 could be called a “society” of knightly adventurers, and English trading companies have subdued and expropriated entire countries—most recently, since 1390, the inland regions of South Africa. Gradually the entire English nation assumed the characteristics of a “society.”

The Old Norse instinct for piracy and clever trading has, in the end. influenced the Englishman’s attitude toward all of reality, including property, work, foreign peoples, and the weaker individuals and classes among his own people. The same instinct has also yielded political techniques that are extremely effective weapons in the struggle for mastery of the globe.

A concept complementary to that of “society” is the “private citizen.” He represents the sum of certain positive ethical qualities which like all great. ethical virtues are not acquired through training or education, but are borne in the blood and perfected after “passing through generation after generation.

The peculiarly English style of politics is essentially one that involves private citizens or groups of such individuals. This, and only this, is the very meaning of parliamentary government.

Cecil Rhodes was a private citizen who conquered foreign countries. The American billionaires are private citizens who rule foreign countries by means of an inferior class of professional politicians.

German liberalism, on the other hand, is ethically valueless. It merely says “No!” to the state, and is unable to justify its opposition by offering equally high-minded and vigorous positive- suggestions.”— Spengler

( via Rorik Svalbard )