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

80 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

The character of independence and of Promethean self-realisation are the gifts of the European to the humanity of all men; self-government of the individual; god-consciousness in the individual soul; identification of the ultimate personal awareness with the Sonhood itself.*8

Thus, if the world was to-be consciously organised as an organic whole, it was Europe, the brain of the world, that must take the lead.

If there is a focusing force in the world and a need and a want of a synthetic humanness, these, surely, are revealed in the culture of Europe. If there be a specific and natural organic function of concentration; of thought; of consciousness, in the human whole, there is no doubt that this divine function is performed by Europe. Europe is chosen... both by Providence and Destiny, and must be finally chosen also by the Will of Humanity, to become the continent of the world’s synthesis, the organ of the unification of the body of man.“

This, then, was Europe’s mission in the development of the world. Only Europe, the white race, the western world, could “establish a functional world system in which each of the races and nations is called upon to play its natural and organic part.”>° This was not to say that Europe had a divine right to rule and determine the course of the world in pursuance of her own narrow interests. The solutions to the problems of world-ordering, Mitrinovic wrote, “must be such that while they satisfy the European mind they satisfy the best minds of all the other races; for it is contrary to both reason and justice that the brain should dictate what the other organs do not find it easy and natural and proper to carry out, namely their own highest functions.”>! Moreover, he acknowledged that “there are individual minds in all races and nations that are ‘universal,’ and capable of taking a world-view of world-affairs.”5? He hoped to enlist these in the work towards re-ordering the world; particularly in the light of Europe’s history —“an almost unbroken story of chicanery, greed and ill-will’>3—and her patent failure to live up to her world-responsibilities. Thus, in her relations with China, for instance, “incredibly little of all that Europe has hitherto done to China lies outside the definition of crime.”>* The history of her dealing with Africa and Asia revealed a similar story. It was, Mitrinovic claimed, “unimaginable to the complacent European mind what crimes have been perpetrated by Europe on the Black race.”

All-in-all, since the re-discovery of Africa alone, a hundred million Blacks have been enslaved or put to death in the supposed interest of Europe, not to mention