My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywhile your fascist movement may perform the purpose which Caesarism hasperformed before, may bring order out of chaos which the conflict between Spartacusand reaction has evoked, may for a few years or a few centuries give great peace tothe world, it yet carries within itself its own decay, and does not really achieve whatwe believe to be necessary." 'It was at this point that my thinking began to differ sharply from the attitude of thenational socialist movement in Spengler's country of origin, for it appeared thatintellectually the leaders saw the force of his argument but found no answer to it.Their propagandists felt that it was not an attractive doctrine to say to their membersfrom the mass of the people: struggle, sacrifice and give your all to make a few menCaesars, to secure a last, glorious blossoming of a civilisation, and then eternal night.So they saluted Spengler in private, but silenced him in their public doctrine;pessimism and revolution are contradictions in terms. We, on the contrary, saw histhesis as the premise to the modern argument, and we summoned the mighty spirit ofmodern science to provide the answer. Caesarism and science together could evolveFaustian man; a civilisation which could renew its youth in a persisting dynamism, asI described it in my later writing.The speech continued: 'I believe the answer to that case, which is the only really validcase, is that always before the factor of modern science was lacking. You have nowgot a completely new factor. If you can introduce into your system of government anew efficiency—and everyone admits that such movements when they come to powerare at least efficient: if you can bring to government for even a few years an executivepower and an efficiency which gets things done, you can release ... the imprisonedgenius of science to perform the task which it has to perform in the modern world.Whatever our divergent views on the structure of the State and economics may be, Ithink we must all agree that it would be possible, by sane organisation of the world,with the power of modern science and of industry to produce, to solve once and for allthe poverty problem, and to abolish... the worst attributes of disease and sufferingfrom the world. Therefore, if it is possible to have an efficient form of government,you have available for such a system, for the first time in history, an instrument bywhich the face of the earth might be changed for all time.Once the essential has been done, once modern science and technique have beenreleased and have performed their task, once you have changed your political andphilosophic system from a transitory and political to a permanent and technical basis,there will be no more need of the politics and of the controversies which distract theworld today. The problem of poverty will be solved, the major problems will bebanished, as they can be, and as everybody knows they can be, if modern science isproperly mobilised. Then mankind will be liberated for the things in life which reallymatter. 'Therefore, while it is perhaps true that certain of these phenomena in theeternal recurrences of history have been seen in the world before, and seen with greatbenefit to mankind, yet never before have the great executive movements possessedthe opportunity to complete their task which modern science and invention nowconfer upon them.'At a moment of great world crisis, a crisis which in the end will inevitably deepen, amovement emerges from a historic background which makes its emergence inevitable,carrying certain traditional attributes derived from a very glorious past, but facing the272 of 424