It is the continual and stupendous dead pressure of this inhuman upon
the living human under which the modern world is groaning. Not merely
the subject races, but you who live under the delusion that you are
free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetich
of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide
suspicion and greed and panic.
I have seen in Japan the voluntary submission of the whole people to the
trimming of their minds and clipping of their freedom by their
government, which through various educational agencies regulates their
thoughts, manufactures their feelings, becomes suspiciously watchful
when they show signs of inclining toward the spiritual, leading them
through a narrow path not toward what is true but what is necessary for
the complete welding of them into one uniform mass according to its own
recipe. The people accept this all-pervading mental slavery with
cheerfulness and pride because of their nervous desire to turn
themselves into a machine of power, called the Nation, and emulate other
machines in their collective worldliness.
When questioned as to the wisdom of its course the newly converted
fanatic of nationalism answers that "so long as nations are rampant in
this world we have not the option freely to develop our higher humanity.
We must utilize every faculty that we possess to resist the evil by
assuming it ourselves in the fullest degree. For the only brotherhood
possible in the modern world is the brotherhood of hooliganism." The
recognition of the fraternal bond of love between Japan and Russia,
which has lately been celebrated with an immense display of rejoicing in
Japan, was not owing to any sudden recrudescence of the spirit of
Christianity or of Buddhism, but it was a bond established according to
the modern faith in a surer relationship of mutual menace of
bloodshedding. Yes, one cannot but acknowledge that these facts are the
facts of the world of the Nation, and the only moral of it is that all
the peoples of the earth should strain their physical, moral and
intellectual resources to the utmost to defeat one another in the
wrestling match of powerfulness. In the ancient days Sparta paid all
her attention to becoming powerful; she did become so by crippling her
humanity, and died of the amputation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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