The Mysteries of Geopolitics

DEMOCRATIC IDEALS AND REALITY--Halford J. Mackinder--Holf ($2.50).

THE WORLD OF GENERAL HAUSHOFER--Andreas Dorpalen--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

GERMAN STRATEGY OF WORLD CONQUEST--Derwent Whittlesey--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

AN OUTLINE OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY --J. F. Horrabin--Knopf ($ 1.50).

In 1908 the Bavarian General Staff sent a young officer, Major Karl Haushofer, to study the workings of the Japanese Army. Traveling slowly via Suez and Singapore, young Haushofer hailed the flag of the Rising Sun with "immense relief." His long journey from the Fatherland had been humiliating: at many stages of the ship's passage--Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Aden, India, Singapore--he had seen a rocky bastion rise from the water flying the British Union Jack. A trained geographer, young Haushofer well knew of Britain's imperial lifeline. But on his trip this line took on a new and shocking significance in his eyes: it became a great steel shackle around the body of Germany.

Much of the story told in these books by contemporary geographers is of how Haushofer devoted his life to breaking this shackle, how he turned the useful subject of political geography (well discussed in Author Horrabin's little book) into militarism's pseudo science of the century--geopolitics: "the art of guiding practical politics." Author Mackinder's book contains theories from which Haushofer borrowed freely; Author Dorpalen has assembled a useful collection of the writings of Haushofer and his disciples; Author Whittlesey has a somewhat similar collection, plus excellent geopolitical maps.

Haushofer and Hitler. World War I raised young Haushofer to the rank of major general. He had a young aide-decamp named Rudolf Hess, who in the post war years attended his lectures on geography at the University of Munich. When the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch failed (1923), Haushofer hid Hess in his mountain home. When Hess was imprisoned with Hitler, Haushofer visited them there.

What did General Haushofer tell Corporal Hitler in the privacy of Landsberg jail? Author Dorpalen thinks he spoke of more than Germany's need for living space --which Hitler incorporated into Mein Kampf. For General Haushofer had by then a whole philosophy of German expansion for which, perhaps, he hoped Hitler might be a useful propagandist. Instead, the corporal adopted the general and, when the Nazi regime was established, Geopolitician Haushofer was installed in Munich as director of a great brain trust known as the Geopolitical Institute.

What Haushofer had to say to Hitler was partly based on a short pamphlet (The Geographical Pivot of History) written in 1904 by British Geographer Sir Halford Mackinder (who expanded it in 1919 into the now reissued Democratic Ideals and Reality). Like Haushofer, Mackinder knew the significance of that stony string of sea bases that joined England to her colonies and dominions. What, he asked, could menace them and the sea power which upheld them? Answer: the possession of a body of land so vast and rich that sea power could never encircle it effectively. Mackinder saw such a body of land in what he called the "World-Island" --Europe, Asia, Africa. He imagined it as a mighty whole, pushing the British naval bases on its edges into insignificance.

Studying his maps, Mackinder pondered the question of how such a huge World-Island would take form. It would start, he decided, by Germany & Russia coming into partnership, either voluntarily or by Germany's conquering Russia. German victory over Russia would mean German possession of a wealth so staggering that Mackinder called Russia and its environs "The Heartland" of the imagined World-Island, the "Pivot Area" of the world (see cut p. 92). No Anglo-American naval combination could possibly stand up against such strength.

Haushofer, fascinated by Mackinder, quoted Ovid: "It is a duty to learn from the enemy." The German proceeded on his life work--the promotion of a monster alliance of Germany, Japan, China, Russia and India against the British Empire. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact part of Haushofer's dream seemed to come true.

Haushofer's Hoax. If this were all there was to Haushofer, geopolitics would be little more interesting than the ambitions of any Prussian officer. But Haushofer's geopolitics became one of history's greatest hoaxes--a vast nonesuch of propaganda for luring Germans to the idea of world domination. While Mackinder was insisting that "maps are the essential apparatus of Kultur, and every educated German is a geographer," Haushofer was praising the "almost telepathic sensitivity of oceanic nations [such as Britain]" to foreign dangers and bemoaning the average German's lack of interest in the destiny of the Fatherland. Much of his geopolitics was made a catchall for any theory that would advance German militarism and expansion. Mysticisms, race theories, phony "cultural" conceptions, pseudo sciences--all were thrown into the chopper and emerged as neat geopolitical sausages.

From famed Philosopher Oswald Spengler, for instance, geopolitics took the ominous conception of space as "a spiritual something" suggested by "horizons, outlooks, distances, clouds, and . . . the far-spread fatherland embracing a great nation." From this it was only a step to Haushofer's convenient notion that it was absurd to try to find an "exact border line" between countries. "Border regions" he approved of, but as he believed that such regions were defined by the "culture" in them and that German "culture" was evident almost everywhere, it became clear that all space was destined to be a region of German culture.

Behind the great "thinkers" of geopolitics were its propagandistic pedants. They drew detailed maps of the world of Haushofer's dreams. They set to work to "prove" that the State was like the human body, with instinctive desires for expanding exercises. They made up appropriate omnibus words like "Rdumliche und zeit-liche Selbstbestimmungsstreben" (spatial and temporal striving for self-determination). They produced subtly arranged diagrams suggesting to the average German the dangers of foreign attack and encirclement. Czechoslovakia became like a snake's head buried deep in the belly of the Fatherland, instead of a vulnerable republic between Nazi jaws (see cut).

But behind this massive hoaxing of the German people, an elaborate machine of the utmost competence was at work. Nazi journalists, diplomats, politicians, teachers were trained intensively at the Geopolitical Institute. Haushofer's agents traveled to the corners of the earth assembling data on the nature, living conditions, cultural influences and conflicting opinions of the peoples of the world. Haushofer himself became president of 3,000 clubs devoted to Nazi propaganda in foreign lands.

After Haushofer What? In the years before World War II Haushofer watched Britain's dominions loosen their ties with the Motherland: he felt this to be contemptible weakness on Britain's part. He believed firmly that there was no real friendship between the U.S. and Britain; and by carefully avoiding references to Nazi designs on the U.S. (while propagandizing furiously against the U.S. in South America) he hoped to see a neutral U.S. in World War II. Today, somewhere in Germany, 73-year-old General Haushofer must watch with growing anxiety the United Nations' inroads on his plans for German hegemony.

In his retreat in a secluded Dorsetshire garden ("the quiet is broken only from time to time by the R.A.F. crossing overhead") 81-year-old, walrus-mustached Sir Halford Mackinder recently admitted he was "hard of hearing," but commented with disdainful sarcasm on Disciple Haushofer's theories.

"My up-to-date views on geopolitics?" asked Mackinder. "As I understand that word, which I myself never employ, it is the name given by Germans to a political theory which, by exploiting the geographical pattern of the globe, will lead to a world, empire under German control. I have always felt, and am still of the opinion, that the grouping of lands and seas is such as to lend itself to the growth of empires and, in the end, to a single empire. If I'm right, it is the duty of the Allied nations to take this threat seriously."

Says Author Whittlesey: "First should come a vast increase in factual information about all parts of the earth. . . . [We] may be [able] to work out an organization . . . not based on domination by any group. . . . It might well take the form of some degree of federation."

Says Author Horrabin: "A New European Order must be based on larger economic units than the twenty-odd sovereign states of the Europe of 1918-39. ... It cannot permit . . . the domination by any one (or two or three) nations. . . . That means the end of all empires--British and French, as well as German. . . . National sovereignty must go.''

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