It Is All Of Us Who Are Now Dispossessed

The condemnation of the National Socialist party goes much further than it seems to. In reality, it reaches all the solid forms, all the geological forms of political life. Every nation, every party which urges us to remember our soil, our tradition, our trade, our race is suspect. Whoever claims right of the first occupant and calls to witness things as obvious as the ownership of the city offends against a universal morality which denies the right of the people to write their laws. This applies not just to the Germans, it is all of us who are dispossessed. No one has any more the right to stand up in the city and say: “This ground belongs to me.” No has more the right to say: “We are the old ones, we built the houses of this city, anyone who does not want to obey our laws should get out.” It is written now that a council of impalpable beings has the capacity to know what occurs in our houses and our cities.

We lived up to now in a solid universe whose generations had deposited stratifications, one after the other. All was clear: the father was the father, the law was the law, the foreigner was the foreigner. One had the right to say that the law was hard, but it was the law. Today these sure bases of political life are anathema: for these truths constitute the program of a racist party condemned at the court of humanity. In exchange, the foreigner recommends us a universe according to his dreams. There are no more borders, there are no more cities.

**

We admit that what is essential is to save civilization and that, to make it triumph, it may be necessary to crush cities; what if National Socialism were also one of those chariots which carry the gods and whose wheels may need to pass over thousands of bodies, if that is necessary? 

-excerpted from “Nuremberg or the Promised Land” by Maurice Bardeche (1948)