The driving out of power and control of the intellectual elements was forecast by Pareto, who is reported as believing: "In certain historical periods the ruling intelligent elements (die herrschenden Schlauen) are pushed aside by the unscrupulous men of force (Gewaltmenschen)." ²⁴

Hitler's policy of uprooting and displacing not only liberal intellectuals but also aristocrats and wealthy persons was clearly stated in his Danzig speech of October, 1939, in which he said: ²⁵

In that country [Poland] there ruled a minority of aristocratic or non-aristocratic owners of vast estates and wealthy intellectuals to whom, under the most favorable circumstances, their own Polish compatriots were nothing but mass manpower.

His party followers, even in his own country, but especially in occupied territory, seek to displace as many of these elements as is feasible and to place themselves in their stead.

Walter Lippmann expresses the belief that the Soviet did the same kind of purging; "as we have seen in Austria, Czeckoslovakia and in both halves of Poland, these conquerors do not merely occupy the territory of their victims; they deliberately exterminate the leaders of the vanquished nation." ²⁶ Lippmann goes on to say:

When they take possession of a country, they systematically kill, imprison and exile the political, economic, intellectual and religious leaders in order to deprive the peasants and workers and small merchants of any organized leadership around which they can rally.

Under dictatorships, when the class structure has been driven asunder, new troubles beset the governing clique. Men begin to struggle ruthlessly against each other for power; they are jealous and suspicious of each other. They spy on each other, even within the "solid party," and they engage in counter-espionage against their colleagues. No social class considerations, no intermarriage of families, no tradition of administrative poise, guide them. They lust after each other's positions. In the long run, so long as prestige is personalized, so long as there are only rulers and no ruling classes, there must be more purges, a growth of fear, retaliation, stagnation, inefficiency. The German universities under Adolph Hitler (ne Schickelgruber) are a case in point.

A hierarchy of dictators, each in his own realm, large or small from the Führer down to the man who spies on the local block, is not a hierarchy of social classes. Force becomes the only means of creating order; there is none of the oil of deference which greases the social structure and lets it enjoy custom-built law and order, as in England.

Sombart, in his dotage, imagines that new groups will come to replace the old ones. He says: ²⁷

In the order or rank, which will count in the future, the military (not the Olympic champions!) will stand on the top, and in the last place will be business. Within the economic system agriculture will take the first place.

In Germany the military leaders have always received the highest honors, but the idea of destroying the prestige of commercialism and industrialism is indeed a far-fetched notion for a nation like Germany. Furthermore, only a decline in centralized political control could enable even the hereditary peasants to build up again, by consensus, their natural leaders.

What has happened in Italy, Germany, the Soviet Union, and especially in the Axis-occupied countries, has been taking place in Spain. Morrison, the Harvard historian, writes that "Spanish Loyalists, whose only crime was to be on the losing side, are being executed daily." ²⁸ One must infer that these were leaders, intellectuals, and other important personages, along with some suspected members of the lower orders.

Spengler, who is usually thought of as an exponent of fascism, had serious misgivings about its effect upon the middle and upper classes. He writes: ²⁹

Mussolini's creative idea was grand, and it has had an international effect: it revealed a possible form for the combating of Bolshevism. But this form arose out of intimidating the enemy and is therefore full of dangers: revolution from below, organized and participated in for the greater part by men from below; an armed party-militia, paralleled in Caesar's Rome by the bands of Clodius and Milo; the tendency to subordinate intellectual and economic leadership . . . to disregard other's property, to confuse the conceptions of nation and mass . . . .