Realpolitik
Frank Chodorov
[Reprinted from The Freeman, June, 1940]
The Germans always have a prefix for it. In terms of experience,
Realpolitik is merely an etymological dress suit for the gangsterism:
"Get while the getting is good."
Grab-politics, a more descriptive term, is political action based
upon immediacy rather than on principle. Present advantage is its own
justification and moral standard. To gain such advantage, it is right
to lie, to steal, to kill. Any ethical inhibition is indicative of
decadence.
This rationalization of unprincipled social action is not indigenous
to the Nazis. It is necessary to the doctrine of Statism, even in the
embryonic form characteristic of "democracies." Moral
standards are applicable to individuals only. A community cannot be
good or bad.
The State is an impersonal idea, and as such it is as devoid of
scruples as a robot. When the reality of this impersonal thing is
accepted, all standards which are associated with persons must be
dropped. A robot cannot be brought to trial; it has neither free will
nor responsibility.
The State, then, being a product of power and having for its purpose
the extension of its power, establishes the only guide by which this
purpose can be achieved. And that must be to take advantage of any
opportunity which the exigency of the day presents. If in the exercise
of that purpose it tramples upon the liberties which men have wrested
from it, there is no recourse to such assumed absolutes as human
rights because that would be endowing an impersonal thing with
personal attributes.
When people create the State-idea in their minds they do so because
it seems to them to be an instrument for their personal betterment.
They wish into it a moral purpose. In the internal affairs of the
nation, therefore, the villainies of the State are clothed with a
compounded ethical standard: the ultimate good of the whole community.
In international affairs even that semblance of morality disappears,
and Realpolitik comes into its own. For here is the field in which
State meets State and no holds are barred. The standard of action is
expediency, to which even the restrictions of signed contractual
obligations must give way. Diplomacy is the art of duplicity.
Realpolitik is as old as gangsterism, from which the world has never
been free. But this term has been embroidered in recent years with a
rationalization which has its roots in the cynicism of prevalent
social and economic thinking. In this view there are no absolutes, no
basic principles, no natural laws, no guide posts to direct thought or
action. History is construed as a sequence of accidents which are the
weather vanes that reveal the direction of the winds of our desire,
not the test tubes from which eternal verities may be learned. Indeed,
it is asserted that there are no such verities.
This off-hand denial of the possibility of principle, in spite of the
air of pontifical wisdom with which it is pronounced, is merely an
evidence of defeatism. Its logic is this: since in the past so many
guide posts of social thinking have led us up blind alleys none can be
dependable.
How far would we have come in the physical sciences if investigators
had been as cowardly and had sought refuge in a similar vacuum?
Indeed, their progress has been the result of seeking principle in
accident, of seeking new principle when accident proved the former one
undependable. Explaining accident by accident never occurred to them.
The dictum of no absolutes has wrought particular havoc with the
science of political economy, reducing it, in the way it is taught, to
a mere hodge-podge of words. And yet, because this science deals with
the very human problem of getting a living, the motivation accounting
for this confused state should be apparent.
It should be obvious that the getting of a living by the political
means must be distinguished from the getting of a living by the
economic means. Also, that the one is at the expense of the other, and
persistence in it must result in social maladjustment.
But that reasoning brings us to principles which are obnoxious to
those who, through the mechanism of the State, get their living
vicariously. It is to their interest that honest investigation be
discouraged.
As a result of such suasion the science of political economy has
become a conglomerate mass of nothingness, from which it cannot emerge
because its oracles brazenly declare it must be so.
Therefore, everything and anything goes, and the only measure of the
desirability of any course of social action is attainment of an
immediate objective. Immediacy is the order of the day in our internal
economy, and Realpolitik is its expression in international affairs.
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