/lit/ - Literature

>The Great Challenge Facing the West

>Today more or less everywhere -- in the Far East, India, South America, South Africa -- industrial regions are in being, or coming into being, which, owing to their low scales of wages, confront us with a deadly competition. The unassailable privileges of the white nations have been thrown away, squandered, betrayed. The others have caught up with their instructors. Possibly -- with the cunning of the colored races and the over-ripe intelligence of their ancient civilizations -- they have surpassed them.

>Where there is coal, petroleum or water-power, there a new weapon can be forged against the heart of Faustian [Western] civilization. The exploited world is beginning to take its revenge on its masters. The countless hands of the colored races -- at least as clever, and far less demanding -- will shatter the economic organization of the whites at its foundation. The accustomed luxury of the white worker, in contrast to that of the coolie, will be his doom. The labor of the white is itself becoming superfluous. The huge masses of men centered in the Northern coal areas, the great industrial works, the capital invested in them, whole cities and districts, threaten to succumb to the competition. The center of gravity of production is steadily shifting away from them, especially given that even the colored races' respect for the whites came to an end with the [First] World War. This is the real and final basis of the unemployment that prevails in the white countries. It is no mere crisis, but the beginning of a catastrophe...