Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE NEW AGE 79

the East. The Jews, he maintained, had a right “to regress to the East from which they emerged.” The alternative to Zionism was assimilation; “not only the abandonment of Judaism and the acceptance of the Science of the Logos, but the assimilation of Jewish with Aryan blood by deliberate intermarriage of Jews with Aryans.”4> It is necessary to emphasise at this point, I think, that Mitrinovi¢ was writing in the early 1920s, before Hitler's attempt at a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem,” and the terminology used by Mitrinovi¢ reflects this fact. Thus, by Aryan Mitrinovic did not mean “the Teutonic brutality of Germany and Albion” but rather that section of humanity wherein the values of reason, personality and individual freewill were most strongly established. It was the white race, the Aryan world, which had the mission and responsibility of organising the world functionally. If the Jews chose Zionism rather than assimilation into that section of humanity, then, according to Mitrinovic¢,

they symbolically cut themselves off from the Aryan world; and it must follow, sooner or later, that they must forego the privileges of the function thus abandoned.“

Perhaps understandably, many of the subscribers to The New Age read such statements as indicative of anti-semitism on the part of their author. Mitrinovic responded to his accusers:

.. we ask them to believe that we do not belong to the anti-Semitic school that has, as its chief characteristics, either a national chauvinism as “tribal” as that of the Jews themselves, or a cult, nominally catholic, that is Judaic in spirit .. . Nor are we pro-Aryan on tribal or even racial grounds.

He went on to warn such ‘chauvinists’ that,

About the Aryan race we shall have something critical to say in due course; we trust that our Aryan readers are not purring with too complete a sense of complacency, since they will certainly be disturbed in it if they do us the justice of reading these notes to the bitter end.47

What, then was the proper role of Europe and the “Aryan world” of the West in the development towards a functional ordering of the world?

Universal Humanity could be achieved only through the conscious will of free individuals. It was in Europe, in the western world, that, under the influence of Christianity, individuality and reason were most developed and valued.