Politics & Power Quote by Carroll Quigley

Quigley’s sentence isn’t trying to “both-sides” Bolshevism and Nazism so much as map the fear geometry that made interwar Europe combustible. The key move is his verb choice: “presented itself.” That phrasing quietly shifts attention away from doctrines as self-evident realities and toward how threats are perceived, packaged, and received. Ideologies don’t just arrive; they appear, with a certain face, to a particular audience.

The split he draws is classed and institutional. Bolshevism as an “economic threat to themselves” points straight at property, status, and the architecture of ownership. It’s the nightmare of expropriation, of a world where the rules that safeguard wealth are rewritten. Nazism as a “political threat to their countries” recasts danger at the level of sovereignty, borders, and state legitimacy. One menace targets the balance sheet; the other targets the flag.

The subtext is that elites could rationalize different responses because the threats hit different nerves. If Bolshevism endangers “themselves,” defensive action can be framed as self-preservation, even when it hardens inequality. If Nazism endangers “their countries,” response becomes patriotic duty, even when it demands militarization and emergency powers. Quigley is also hinting at a tragic asymmetry in moral clarity: economic fear is intimate and immediate; political fear can be narrativized as national survival.

Context matters here: post-1917 revolution panic, the Great Depression, and fragile parliamentary states created a market for strong explanations and stronger men. Quigley’s intent is diagnostic, not exculpatory: he’s describing how threat perception, not just ideology, organized alliances, appeasement, and the grim calculus that followed.