Top 15 Frederick Augustus Voigt Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Justice is not humane if it is never severe.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Marxism has led to Fascism and National-Socialism, because, in all essentials, it is Fascism and National Socialism.

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.

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.’