GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

648
ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
fascist State makes to direct, control and regulate the
sphere not only of the individual, but of group activity.
"The revolution will be at an end/' a leader in the German
paper, the Frankfurter Z*itvng, declared in 1933, "once we
possess the whole State. There must be no party, no
organization besides our own/' Thus a football team in
Italy is never merely a football team; it is an expression
of the spiritt an extension of the being of the State. Foot*
ball matches with foreign teams are accordingly treated
as matters of national prestige. Victory is hailed as a
triumph over the enemy, a testimony
to national virtue
and a sign of racial superiority; defeat is attributed to
foul play and regarded as a casus btlli. The players
are regarded as having the honour of the nation in their
keeping. Thus when in 1936 the Naples Football club lost
a European cup, it was perfectly logical on totalitarian
principles for the State to punish the players by fining
them 25 each. (The captain incidentally was fined
40.)
It is on the same principle that trade unions conceived
as independent organizations, owning allegiance to a
movement which is internationally rather than nationally
organized, are regarded as excrescences upon the body of
the State. The destruction of the independent labour
movement in Germany after the successful Nazi revolution
was, therefore, a perfectly logical expression of the under-
lying theory. "Why do we require a Labour Party?",
the leader already quoted continues "We ourselves are
the Labour Party. Why do we require national parties?
We ourselves are a national party. Why die need for
Marxist or Christian trade union leaders?" As with the
labour movement so with the Jews; they, too, owned allegiance
to an organization international Jewry which
extended beyond the bounds of the Nation-State. Because
of this extra-State allegiance, it was argued that, however
keenly they might desire to be good Germans, the whole
of their being could never be absorbed in and exhausted
by the duties and interests of the good German. The