Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski.

  • Bronisław Malinowski
Date:
1944
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Freedom and civilization / by Bronislaw Malinowski. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    331/360 page 313
    Europe into actual slave communities are neither temporary nor metaphorical. The German nation, partly through the cunning trickery of the Nazis, partly through brutal coercion, partly will¬ ingly, partly through indoctrination of the young, have accepted their historic mission of masterhood. They have paid and are paying for it an enormous price, for they themselves have been transformed into real slaves of the Nazi king. They are waiting now to he reimbursed. Those of us even who refuse to admit that a whole nation can in a space of some six or seven years be com¬ pletely corrupted from top to bottom, have to recognize that sufficient willing and effective tools—human tools—have been found and produced in Germany to carry out, not only the fight¬ ing, but much more significant, the brutal, inhuman, unyielding task of oppressing the subject nations. Those of us who have lived in Germany and have seen the working of the Nazi regime as it was applied to the Jews and dissenters, know that nothing com¬ parable to it has ever been produced by men turned into machines and machines used by inhuman men. Let us try to imagine the world under the rule of the Nazis. There are those who suggest that in the long run such a system would undergo a gradual progressive change and work itself out into a regime, different perhaps, but comparable to a modern democracy. This was the argument of the “wave of the future” apologists and other Nazi sympathizers, and this argument still lingers in the minds of many. Had the Nazis not added the claim that “tomorrow we will be masters of the world”, not only in their song, but in their practice, this might have been a correct argu¬ ment. Nazism, however, from the very beginning and in its very foundations, was a regime made to turn Germany into an assemblage of inhuman machines, or better, of interchangeable parts of a military machine. This machine has now been turned loose to subjugate large portions of the world, or indeed the
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