Frederick Augustus Voigt Quotes

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.

He who is never ashamed of his country has as little patriotism as he who is never proud of his country.

Justice is not humane if it is never severe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.