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Studying his maps, Mackinder pondered the question of how such a huge World-Island would take form. It would start, he decided, by Germany & Russia coming into partnership, either voluntarily or by Germany's conquering Russia. German victory over Russia would mean German possession of a wealth so staggering that Mackinder called Russia and its environs "The Heartland" of the imagined World-Island, the "Pivot Area" of the world (see cut p. 92). No Anglo-American naval combination could possibly stand up against such strength.
Haushofer, fascinated by Mackinder, quoted Ovid: "It is a duty to learn from the enemy." The German proceeded on his life work—the promotion of a monster alliance of Germany, Japan, China, Russia and India against the British Empire. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact part of Haushofer's dream seemed to come true.
Haushofer's Hoax. If this were all there was to Haushofer, geopolitics would be little more interesting than the ambitions of any Prussian officer. But Haushofer's geopolitics became one of history's greatest hoaxes—a vast nonesuch of propaganda for luring Germans to the idea of world domination. While Mackinder was insisting that "maps are the essential apparatus of Kultur, and every educated German is a geographer," Haushofer was praising the "almost telepathic sensitivity of oceanic nations [such as Britain]" to foreign dangers and bemoaning the average German's lack of interest in the destiny of the Fatherland. Much of his geopolitics was made a catchall for any theory that would advance German militarism and expansion. Mysticisms, race theories, phony "cultural" conceptions, pseudo sciences—all were thrown into the chopper and emerged as neat geopolitical sausages.
From famed Philosopher Oswald Spengler, for instance, geopolitics took the ominous conception of space as "a spiritual something" suggested by "horizons, outlooks, distances, clouds, and . . . the far-spread fatherland embracing a great nation." From this it was only a step to Haushofer's convenient notion that it was absurd to try to find an "exact border line" between countries. "Border regions" he approved of, but as he believed that such regions were defined by the "culture" in them and that German "culture" was evident almost everywhere, it became clear that all space was destined to be a region of German culture.
Behind the great "thinkers" of geopolitics were its propagandistic pedants. They drew detailed maps of the world of Haushofer's dreams. They set to work to "prove" that the State was like the human body, with instinctive desires for expanding exercises. They made up appropriate omnibus words like "Rdumliche und zeit-liche Selbstbestimmungsstreben" (spatial and temporal striving for self-determination). They produced subtly arranged diagrams suggesting to the average German the dangers of foreign attack and encirclement. Czechoslovakia became like a snake's head buried deep in the belly of the Fatherland, instead of a vulnerable republic between Nazi jaws (see cut).