“How are things, in this respect, in the world of the ‘democracies’? They now want, for the third time this century, to lead humanity to war in the name of ‘the war against war’. This requires men to fight at the same time that war as such is criticized. It demands heroes while proclaiming pacifism as the highest ideal. It demands warriors while it has made ‘warrior’ a synonym for attacker and criminal, since it has reduced the moral basis of ‘the just war’ to that of a large-scale police operation, and it has reduced the meaning of the spirit of combat to that of having to defend oneself as a last resort. […]

In the opposing bloc there are forces which combine technology with the elemental force of fanaticism, of dark and savage determination and of the contempt for individual life found among masses which, whether through their own ancient traditions or through the exaltation of the collectivist ideology, hardly value their own existence. This is the tide which will swell forth not only from the Red East, but from the whole of a contaminated and unleashed Asia.

However, what is really required to defend ‘the West’ against the sudden rise of these barbaric and elemental forces is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life. Apart from the military-technical apparatus the world of the ‘Westerners’ has at its disposal only a limp and shapeless substance – and the cult of the skin, the myth of ‘safety’ and of ‘war on war’, and the ideal of the long, comfortable, guaranteed, ‘democratic’ existence, which is preferred to the ideal of the fulfillment which can be grasped only on the frontiers between life and death in the meeting of the essence of living with the extreme of danger.”