Chosen Peoples by Israel Zangwill — Read

Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that / "Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If / Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where / it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its / citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves / to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has / unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common / British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather / with Japan than with Judaea. For in Japan, too, beneath all the / romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the / individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of / those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely / existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the / State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater / scale of the mediaeval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life / from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its / subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has / given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they / shall inherit the earth."

Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw / clearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that / "in which the slow suicide of all is called Life," and "a welcome / service unto all preachers of death" -- a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous / idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. "We / are," boasts a Japanese writer, "a people of the present and the / Tangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible."