THE DUBUQUE TELEGRAPH-HERALD

Dubuque, Iowa, U.S.A.

29 January 1915

(page 4)

GERMAN VIEW OF WAR.

By Aleister Crowley, a Famous English Poet.

Against the Boers we Englishmen did not dare employ savage troops. Europe would have risen in arms at the abomination.

Today we do it, because all armed Europe is already either for us or against us. Can we complain if the German papers say that the Kaiser is fighting for culture and civilization, when the flower of the allied troops are black, brown, and yellow “heathens,” the very folks whom we have stopped from hook-swinging, suttee, child murder, human sacrifice and cannibal feast? From Senegambia, Morocco, the Soudan, Afghanistan, every wild band of robber clans, come fighting men to slay the compatriots of Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Durer, Helmholtz, Hertz, Haekel, and a million others perhaps obscurer, no less noble, men of the Fatherland of music, of philosophy, of science and of medicine, the land where education is a reality and not a farce, the land whose life blood washed out the tyranny of the Dark Ages.

The Huns!

Indignation has led me from the point of my paragraph. It was my purpose to expose the infamous pretence—which, however, it not too inane to dupe even clean-sighted Englishmen in their hysteric hour—the pretence that the Kaiser is a “mad dog,” a homicidal maniac, a man like Nebuchadnezzar in the Hebrew fable, or like Attila the Scourge of God, or Tamerlane.

It is a lie. The Kaiser has always been, and is today, a man of peace. He has indeed lived up to the maxim Si vis pacem, para bellum and, loaded with the legacy of hate which the impolite annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had thrust upon his shoulders, he could do no less without offering the breast of Germany to the ravisher. A lamb to the slaughter, indeed, with La Revanche in every mouth! What would he do, with men yet alive who remembered Jena, and the ceaseless raids and ravages of Bonaparte?

But in a hundred crises he kept his head: he kept the peace. He had plenty of chances to smash France forever; he did not take them. An ambitious prince might have put a relative on the throne of Louis XIV while France was torn by the Boulanger affair, the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus horror, when Diogenes might have gone through France with a modern search-light for his lantern without finding a single man who was not a traitor to his country, or at least to the Republic and the most trustworthy man of affairs was he who could be trusted to put the “double-cross” on every one. The Kaiser never stirred.

It would have been easy to destroy the Russian menace at the time when Japan was straining the sinews of the Tartar giant, or when the Moscow Revolution showed that the Tsar could not trust his own soldiers, and the Imperial Guard, hastily summoned from St. Petersburg, shut up the garrison of Moscow in the Kremlin, trained their own guns upon them, and disarmed them. The Kaiser did nothing.