Die Brücke

“But,” a mocking critic may still persist, “just how is an aristocracy to get started?” In all frankness, I must allow that this question cannot be answered specifically. Inevitably, the way to it will vary with the people concerned and with the circumstances in which they find themselves. But where the need of an aristocracy is felt acutely enough, the way will always be found. Where, ever, has a dam sufficed to keep water from finding its way to the sea? If a people of sound instinct comes to realize that it must find superior leadership or die, it will work miracles.

But as far as we are concerned, we Americans, we modern White men of Western civilization, among us it is not going to get started—not as any form of social organization—not in our day. Our chance to build this way has gone. The whole tradition has been thoroughly destroyed. Our way to a new aristocracy lies through chaos. We shall first have to become ashes before the phoenix of a new nobility shall arise in our midst. But if the world holds together, there will at last be those, a few, always a few, who will again start the old long climb toward the heights, and again lay out the road to a world in which superiority of every sort shall thrive.

In the meantime, there is work enough for us Aryan men to do. Despite all appearances to the contrary what has been and what shall be are not sundered. The Future shall be born out of the womb of the Past. To it, invisible arteries must carry the blood and the heartbeat of the Human Greatness that has been. Here, we must keep faith. We cannot, in a day like this, when everything is falling, hope to build a new aristocracy. But we can ourselves be noble, and we can undertake to nourish and foster all the spiritual treasure of the past, which shall sustain and guide the reaching life of Man when again it is time to build. Let us then love and reverence all that has made men great, and let it speak out in all that we think and say and feel and do—in the very look of us. Let us go down in death rather than ever lower our standard or bend the knee to the new all-conquering barbarian. Let us keep vigil through the night that is ahead—alone if we must, but better, if we can, with a group, close-knit with still other groups, all believing in Man, believing in what Man has done and in what Man shall yet do again, pledged to the end to keep alive the great tradition, which contains both the secret of what Man has been and the promise of Superman.

Of what we may do, I will write more concretely before I lay down my pen. But for the moment it is enough to remember this: If the world holds together the Dawn will come, my friends. And more than the Dawn—the Spring! Now we sow our seed in the winter, on the snow, and on the very verge of the dead of night. But there cometh the Spring! Shall we not, even now, let the thought of it burn in our hearts and warm them, the promise of it light our faces, and the call of it temper and inspire our lives?

1945, 1970.

Excerpted from Which Way Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson