NAZISM IS NIHILISM

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 September 1939, Page 8

NAZISM IS NIHILISM

GROWS BY DESTRUCTION “Nazi power is truly a Nihilist poAver,” says the “Yorkshire Post.” It grows by destruction —for it hates and destroys, if it can, anything it cannot understand or absorb. And it holds nothing sacred but itself.

“It would, of course, be an absurdity to imagine that this temper of mind is solely confined to Germany, though it is true that in Germany it finds its most complete and unqualified expression just now. But the worship of success, especially of material and size, and of many of those trappings of success which power and money can secure, is not unknown in England. “There are plenty of English people who are inclined to think that in the world as we know it, force, power, money, and the things they achieve, are the real things, by the side of which spiritual truths appear remote and unpractical-. In fact, however, that is not so. AVithout a vision or ideal, man develops a malaise of the soul. The society which has lost hope loses energy, and collapses from inner weakness.

“If Europe could be imagined as subdued under Nazi rule —reduced to a slave-peace by the Prussian jackboot —Europe would die. For the Nazi kind of materialism has nothing to offer but more and more conquest for the German, and more and more subjection for other races. “To that process obviously there are limits, and when they are reached this particular gospel has no more to say. It contains within itself nothing constructive. < It has no message of culture —it is, indeed, inimical to true culture.”