Author’s Note: The following excerpt is from a longer, footnoted article titled “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent” that appeared in the fall 2006 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. Minor changes have been made for the sake of this format. Thanks to Dave Cooper for the idea.

Since the Cold War’s end, Heidegger has been the target of an on-going campaign of stigmatization and quarantine, for it’s now clear that he was not only an ardent supporter of the National Revolution of 1933, but a convinced (though idiosyncratic) National Socialist.

Surprisingly, though, the inquisitors deconstructing the suspect forces animating Heidegger’s thought stress that there’s “no spoor of biological racism” (George Steiner) in his published works.

It is, in fact, a matter of record that Heidegger opposed what Julius Evola and Francis Parker Yockey, along with Leon Trotsky, called the “zoological materialism” associated with “Nazi racism.”

Like the Italian and American prophets of Europe’s imperium, Heidegger believed the philistine, positivist, even liberal modernist character of so-called “scientific racism” was symptomatic of all the Conservative Revolution of the 1920s (of which National Socialism was an offshoot) had fought against.

Is it contradictory, then, to argue that the Heideggerian concept of freedom has a racial imperative?

Against a good deal of contemporary commentary, it must be insisted that Heidegger’s “anti-biologism” was not that of a nationalist indifferent to race, but rather that of one who subsumed the nation’s spiritual and demographic aspects within a single notion of being — a notion that may have privileged the former at the latter’s expense, but nevertheless one that presupposed the spirit’s manifestation within a specific biocultural community or Volk.

Emphasizing the history, destiny, and line of descent that makes a people a nation, the nationalism latent in Heidegger’s thought is reminiscent of what Walker Connor calls “nationalism in its pristine sense,” in that it designates “a people who believe they are ancestrally [i.e., biologically] related.”

Though a man’s body is subjectable to a purely biological analysis, Heidegger argues that it is never simply biological, but “something essentially other than an animal organism.”

This “other” belongs to man’s Dasein [i.e., to his quality as a situated expression of Being in a particular world at a particular moment in time] and thus has “a fundamentally different way of Being to that of nature.”

“Living, our body bodies forth as a wave in the stream of chaos — it is what comes to know, grasp, and take over the world.”

Biology in this way enters history and becomes historically significant.

Man’s body as such is not equivalent to a plant or animal organism, but part of man’s being-in-the-world, situated in that web of meanings, relationships, and histories which make up his world and which no science can successfully or adequately reduce to an empirical representation or valuation.

For the anti-scientistic Heidegger, the essence of a nation (or Volk) lies not in genetics, but in the destiny born of its collective experience of Being and time — or what in Contributions to Philosophy
he describes as that belongingness to a god who commands a people to go beyond itself to become the being inscribed in its destiny.

A people’s essence lies thus less in its organic manifestations (life) than in the being that makes it what it is (living): It lies in the being that forges blood and spirit into an identity defined by a specific destiny.

A purely biological construal, by contrast, reduces a “race” of men to one of Descartes’ abstract, becomingless objects — to something understandable factually or empirically, as if human races were analogous to those of the lower life forms.

Heidegger doesn’t say so explicitly, but the turn of his thought suggests that though a people’s blood may be basic to its biological formation, its determinants as a people, even genetically, reside elsewhere, outside of biology, in that Being whose inexplicable force molds a body of kindred human beings into a destining entity.

To contemporize a bit, one might say that for Heidegger man’s biological constitution (heredity) disposes him to certain cultural and other potentialities, but the latter are never mere offshoots of nature.

History, he argues, is not biology and culture is not applied zoology — except to a scientistic consciousness oblivious to all that distinguishes man from animal.

Edward Burne-Jones, "The Dream of Lancelot"

An analogy here might help.  One wouldn’t claim the essence of Breker’s The Torchbearer or Burne-Jones’ Dream of Lancelot is the material from which it was sculpted or painted.

The essence of the German Volk — or any of Europe’s nations — is likewise not the DNA constituent of its genotype.

Instead, it is the spirit animating it, making it a people with a history, an origin, and a destiny.

In compelling it to experience the world in a way all its own, this spirit is not the cultural superstructure familiar to the anthropologist or sociologist, but something akin to “the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk’s existence.”

It is this spirit that nourishes the soul of a people and infuses its blood with a will to destiny.

Heidegger’s ontological defense of European man may therefore reject the scientific racism of bourgeois materialism, with its abstract, deracinated concept of human being, but he’s hardly indifferent to Europe’s racial heritage, for though emphasizing a Volk’s spiritual or destining character, he also sees that this entails a specific bodily expression of being.

In the historical world of European man, human biology and human being are indeed one, with the biological, the ontic, subsumed to the ontological realm of self-assertion — like the material subsumed in the artist’s vision.

Together, they comprise the Dasein of man and Volk, the blood and heritage of a people. For like the “and” in Being and Time, the “and” in “blood and heritage” is not additive but unitary.  The two differ as terms, standing for different things, but there’s no heritage outside a specific blood group and no blood group without a heritage.

“Everything merely ‘organic’ is foreign to the law of history, as foreign as what is ‘logical’ in reason.”

Arno Breker, "The Great Torchbearer"

Human biology is consequently more ontological than zoological, more a product of Being than a facet of nature.

This is evident in such terms as “descent,” “lineage,” “heritage” — along with related notions of “breeding,” “upbringing,” “development,” “education,” “refinement,” and “culture” — terms evoking not animal instinct or even human consciousness, but rather a specific biocultural transmission of existence.

A people, in this Heideggerian sense, is not an autonomous, self-contained, ahistorical biological object, it’s not even specifically a gene pool, but a way of Being whose origin, history, and particular self-understanding is essential to what it is — even physiologically.

In order not to be misunderstood, let me stress that I’m not challenging the importance or even the primordiality of race as a zoological category, but rather subordinating our understanding of a race’s destining identity to philosophy’s larger ontological appreciation of its significance.

What Heidegger calls the “naturalist conception of human being” (i.e., the purely biological understanding of human race) has been integral to both liberal modernity and the history of the white man’s decline.

The roots of this conception are admittedly ancient.  Aristotle was the first to see man as a special kind of animal — the rational animal (zoon logikon). With the 18th-century Enlightenment and the advent of liberal modernity, when “reason attained its full metaphysical rank,” this “humanist” concept became hegemonic, introducing an era which confused man, a being-outside-himself, with something “present-at-hand” (i.e., with the decontextualized substance of a quantifying science indifferent to a being’s specific qualities).

Arno Breker, "Torchbearer"

As Being in this scientistic conceptualization withdraws from human being, the latter is depleted, reduced to a one-dimensional ontology fit for an animal that moves about on all fours — not for an upright assertion of Being capable of producing Homer, the Greek temples, or the invincible Hoplites.

It’s pertinent here to point out that “scientific racism,” especially its Darwinian distillation, originated as an offshoot of liberal thought and that the zoological “metaphysics” of this racism (in understanding human existence at the animal level) played a not insignificant role in getting us into the predicament that threatens us today.

In this sense, it seems hardly coincidental that the liberals’ understanding of the “highest animal” excludes any understanding that humans differ from animals not just in their reason or consciousness, but in their caring for the Being of their being.

Relatedly, natural science, the inspiration for scientific racism, treats the body abstractly, objectifying, decontextualizing, and uprooting it from human being — for the sake of abstraction and objectification.

Against the naturalist conception, Heidegger holds that the human body is not simply a vehicle of drives and instincts, but something linked to the human assertion of Being.

Science may have the power to manipulate the world’s physical properties, but for Heidegger it ignores man’s “peculiar transposedness into the encompassing contextual ring of living beings.”  It consequently misses what is most distinct and essential to him.

Accordingly, the Dasein of a Volk, like that of an individual, is not manifested in biology (at least not directly), but rather in the decisions it makes and the goals it sets for itself.

How it exists in the world in which it is thrown, how it appropriates the past it is bequeathed, the possibilities it pursues as it approaches the future, the call of destiny it heeds, the death it inevitably faces — these are what make a Volk what it is.

There is, moreover, nothing arbitrary or subjective in this.  Dasein is not only being-there, but being-with (Mitsein). For the most radical individualization of Dasein is always situated within a larger collective context — of history and culture, to be sure, but also of kin, community, and Volk.

“Each man,” Heidegger writes, “is in each instance in dialogue with his forebears and perhaps even more, and in a more hidden manner, with those who come after him.”

Because an individual’s fate, like a nation’s destiny, is shaped by its specific heritage, individual Dasein is invariably a co-happening with a community or people, even if it should rebel against the dominant social trends or disavow its beliefs.

Unlike the quantitative, atomizing impulse of liberal modernity, which separates “I” from “we” and treats the former as if it were a monadic ego shorn of the history and heritage situating and defining it as a distinct way of Being, Heidegger’s approach dissolves individual boundaries.

The individualization of an individual consequently becomes a co-historicizing with a people.

Though potentially a force for conformity, Mitsein is a necessary condition for Dasein’s authentic realization.

Man and nation, Dasein and Mitsein, it follows, are free only to the degree they open themselves to what is inherent in their common heritage — to what constitutes the history of their related experience of Being — to what forms their destiny.

If a Volk exists as a Volk, then blood group, history, and destiny are one, for ontologically they constitute a single, encompassing experience of time and Being.

In this sense, a people’s essence transcends the purely “organic,” as it asserts its Dasein as a distinct destiny.

Otherwise, it ceases “to be” in any meaningful sense.

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

Three.
Race and State

From the above, the reader might conclude that Faye’s Heidegger is a wreck of a book.  And, in large part, it is, as I will discuss in the conclusion.

However, even the most disastrous wrecks (and this one bears the impressive moniker of Yale University Press) usually leave something to be salvaged.  There are, as such, discussions on the subjects of “race” and “the state,” which I thought might interest TOQ readers.

A) Race

National Socialism, especially its Hitlerian distillation, was a racial nationalism.

Yet Heidegger, as even his enemies acknowledge, was contemptuous of what at the time was called “biologism.”

Biologism is the doctrine, still prevalent in white nationalist ranks, that understands human races in purely zoological and materialist terms, as if men were no different from the lower life forms — slabs of meat whose existence is a product of genetics alone.

Quite naturally, Heidegger’s anti-biologism was a problem for Faye, for how was it possible to claim that Heidegger was a “Nazi racist,” if he rejected this seemingly defining aspect of racial thought?

In an earlier piece (”Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” TOQ, vol. 6, no. 3), I reconstructed the racial dimension of Heidegger’s thought solely on the basis of his philosophy.

But Faye, who obviously doesn’t put the same credence in Heidegger’s thought, is forced, as an alternative, to historically investigate the different currents of NSDAP racial doctrine.

In his account (which should be taken as suggestive rather than authoritative), the party, in the year after the revolution, divided into two camps vis-à-vis racial matters: the camp of the Nordicists and that of the Germanists.

The Nordicists were led by Hans K. Günther, a former philologist, and had a “biologist” notion of race, based on evolutionary biology, which sought, through eugenics, to enhance the “Nordic blood” in the German population.

By contrast, the Germanists, led by the biologist Fritz Merkenschlager and supported especially by the less Nordic South Germans, held that blood implied spirit and that spirit played the greater role in determining a people’s character.  (This ought not to be confused with Klages’ “psychologism.”)

The Germanists, as such, pointed out that Scandinavians were far more Nordic than Germans, yet their greater racial “purity” did not make them a greater people than the Germans, as Günther’s criteria would lead one to believe.

Rather, it was the Germans’ extraordinary Prussian spirit (this wonder of nature and Being) that made them a great nation.

This is not to say that the Germanists rejected the corporal or biological basis of their Volk — only that they believed their people’s blood could not be separated from their spirit without misunderstanding what makes them a people.

For the Germanists, then, race was not exclusively a matter of biological considerations alone, as Günther held, but rather a matter of blood and spirit.

(As an aside, I might mention that Julius Evola, whose idea of race represents, in my view, the highest point in the development of 20th-century racial thought, was much influenced by this debate, especially by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, whose raciology was a key component of the Germanist conception, emphasizing as it does the fact that one’s idea of race is ultimately determined by one’s conception of human being.)

Faye claims that, in a speech delivered in August 1933, Hitler emphasized the spiritual determinants of race, in language similar to Heidegger’s, and that he thus came down on the side of the Germanists.

The key point here is that, for Faye, the “völkisch racism” of the Germanists was no less “racist” than that of the biological racialists — implying that Heidegger’s Germanism was also as “racist.”

The Germanist conception, I might add, was especially well-suited to a “blubo” (a Blut-und-Boden nationalist) like Heidegger. Seeing man as Dasein (a being-there), situated not only in a specific life world (Umwelt), but in exchange with beings (Mitdasein) specific to his kind, his existence has meaning only in terms of the particularities native to his milieu, (which is why Heidegger rejected universalism and the individualist conception of man as a free-floating consciousness motivated strictly by reason or self-interest).

Darwinian conceptions of race for Heidegger, as they were for other  Germanists in the NSDAP, represented another form of liberalism, based on individualistic and universalist notions of man that reduced him to a disembedded object — refusing to recognize those matters, which, even more than strictly biological differences, make one people unlike another.

Without this recognition, Germanists held that “the Prussian aristocracy was no different from apples on a tree.”

B) The State

As a National Socialist, Faye’s Heidegger was above all concerned with lending legitimacy to the new Führer state.

To this end, Heidegger turned to Carl Schmitt, another of those “Nazi” intellectuals, who, for reasons that are beyond Faye’s ken, is seen by many as a great political thinker.

In his seminar on Hegel, Heidegger, accordingly, begins with the 1933 third edition of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (1927).

There Schmitt defines the concept of the state in terms of the political — and the political as those actions and motives that determine who the state’s “friends” and who its “enemies” are.

But though Heidegger begins with Schmitt, he nevertheless tries to go beyond his concept of the political.

Accepting that the “political” constitutes the essence of the state, Heidegger contends that Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction is secondary to the actual historical self-affirmation of a people’s being that goes into founding a state true to the nation.

In Heidegger’s view, Schmitt’s concept presupposes a people’s historical self-affirmation and is thus not fundamental but derivative.

It is worth quoting Heidegger here:

There is only friend and enemy where there is self-affirmation. The affirmation of self [i.e., the Volk] taken in this sense requires a specific conception of the historical being of a people and of the state itself. Because the state is that self-affirmation of the historical being of a people and because the state can be called polis, the political consequently appears as the friend/enemy relation. But that relation is not the political.

Rather, it follows the prior self-affirmation.

For libertarians and anarchists in our ranks, Heidegger’s modification of Schmitt’s proposition is probably beside the point.

But for a statist like myself, who believes a future white homeland in North America is inconceivable without a strong centralized political system to defend it, Heidegger’s modification of the Schmittian concept is a welcome affirmation of the state, seeing it as a necessary stage in a people’s self-assertion.

Four.
Conclusion

From the above, it should be obvious that Faye’s Heidegger is not quite the definitive interpretation that his promoters make it out to be.

Specifically, there is little that is philosophical in his critique of Heidegger’s philosophy and, relying on his moralizing attitude rather than on a philosophical deconstruction of Heidegger’s work, he ends up failing to make the argument he seeks to make.

If Faye’s reading of the seminars of 1933-34 are correct, than Heidegger was quite obviously more of a National Socialist than he let on. But this was already known in 1987-88.

Faye also claims that Heidegger’s pioneering work of the 1920s anticipated the National Socialist ideas he developed in the seminars of 1933-34 and that his postwar work simply continued, in a modified guise, what had begun earlier. This claim, though, is rhetorically asserted rather than demonstrated.

Worse, Faye ends up contradicting what he sets out to accomplish. For his criticism of Heidegger is little more than an ad hominem attack, which assumes that the negative adjectives (”abhorrent,” “appalling,” “monstrous,” “dangerous,” etc) he uses to describe his subject are a substitute for either a proper philosophical critique or a historical analysis.

In thus failing to refute the philosophical basis of Heidegger’s National Socialism, his argument fails, in effect.

But even if his adjectives were just, it doesn’t change the fact that however “immoral” a philosopher may be, he is nevertheless still a philosopher. Faye here makes a “category mistake” that confuses the standards of philosophy with those of morality. Besides, Heidegger was right in terms of his morals.

Faye is also a poor example of the philosophical rationalism that he offers as an alternative to Heidegger’s allegedly “irrational” philosophy — a rationalism whose enlightenment has been evident in the great fortunes that Jews have made from it.

Finally, in insisting that Heidegger be banned because of his fascist politics, Faye commits the “sin” that virtuous anti-fascists always accuse their opponents of committing.

In a word, Faye’s Heidegger is something of a hatchet job that, ultimately, reflects more on its author’s peculiarities than on his subject.

Yet after saying this, let me confess that though Faye makes a shoddy argument that doesn’t prove what he thinks he proves, he is nevertheless probably right in seeing Heidegger as a “Nazi.”  He simply doesn’t know how to make his case — or maybe he simply doesn’t want to spend the years it takes to “master” Heidegger’s thought.

Even more ironic is the scandal of Heidegger’s “Nazism” seen from outside Faye’s liberal paradigm. For in this optic, the scandal is not that Heidegger was a National Socialist — but rather that the most powerful philosophical intelligence of the last century believed in this most demonized of all modern ideologies.

But who sees or cares about this real scandal?

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Read Part 1 here.

Two.
Faye’s Argument

Heidegger’s seminars of 1933 and 1934, in Emmanuel Faye’s view, expose the “fiction” that separates Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics. For these seminars reveal a brown-shirted fanatic who threw himself into the National Revolution, hoping to become Hitler’s philosophical mentor.

At the same time, Faye argues that Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, particularly his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), was already infected with pre-fascist ideas, just as his postwar work, however much it may have resorted to a slightly different terminology, would continue to propagate National Socialist principles.

Earlier, however, when the young Heidegger was establishing himself in the world of German academic philosophy (the 1920s), there is very little public evidence of racial or anti-Jewish bias in his work. To explain this, Faye quotes Heidegger to the effect that “he wasn’t going to say what he thought until after he became a full professor.” His reticence on these matters was especially necessary given that his “mentor,” Edmund Husserl, was Jewish and that he needed Husserl’s support to replace him at Freiburg.

(For those militant Judeophobes who might think this is somehow compromising, let me point out that Wilhelm Stapel [1882-1954], after also doing a doctorate in Husserlian phenomenology, was a Protestant, nationalist, and anti-Semitic associate of the Conservative Revolution who played an important early role in NSDAP politics.)

Faye nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s early ideas, especially those of Being and Time, were already disposed to themes and principles that were National Socialist in nature.

In Being and Time, for example, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian cogito, Kant’s transcendental analytic, Husserlian phenomenology — along with every other bloodless rationalism dominating Western thought since the 18th century — for the sake of an analysis based on “existentials” (i.e., on man’s being in the world).

Like other intellectual members of Hitler’s party, Heidegger disparaged all forms of universalist thought, dismissing not only notions of man as an individual, but notions of the human spirit as pure intellect and reason.

In repudiating universalist, humanist, and individualist thought associated with liberal modernity, Faye’s Heidegger is seen not as contesting the underlying principles of liberal modernity, which he, as a former Catholic traditionalist, thought responsible for the alienation, rootlessness, and meaninglessness of the contemporary world. Rather he is depicted as preparing the way for the “Nazi” notion of an organic national community (Volksgemeinschaft) based on racial and anti-Jewish criteria.

Revealingly, this is about as far as Faye goes in treating Heidegger’s early thought. In fact, there is very little philosophical analysis at all of Being and Time or any other work in his book. Every damning criticism he makes of Heidegger is based on Heidegger’s so-called affinity with National Socialist themes or ideas — or what a liberal defending a Communist would call guilt by association.

Worse, Faye lacks any historical understanding of National Socialism, failing to see it as part of a larger anti-liberal movement that had emerged before Hitler was even born and which influenced Heidegger long before he had heard of the Führer.

For our crusading anti-fascist professor, however, the anti-liberal, anti-individualist, and anti-modern contours of Heideggerian thought are simply Hitlerian — because of their later association with Hitler’s movement — unrelated to whatever earlier influences that may have affected the development of his thought. Q.E.D.

Faye, though, fails to make the case that Heidegger’s pre-1933 thought was “Nazi,” both because he’s indifferent to Heidegger’s philosophical argument in Being and Time, which he dismisses in a series of rhetorical strokes, and, secondarily, because he doesn’t understand the historical/cultural context in which Heidegger worked out his thought.

More generally, he claims Heidegger negated “the human truths that are the underlying principle of philosophy” simply because whatever doesn’t accord with Faye’s own liberal understanding of philosophy (which, incidentally, rationalizes the radical destructurations that have come with the “Disneyfication, MacDonaldization, and globalization” of our coffee-colored world) is treated as inherently suspect.

Only on the basis of the 1933-34 and ‘34-35 seminars does Faye have a case to make.

For the Winter term of 1933-34 Heidegger led a seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History, and State.” If Faye’s account of the unpublished seminar report is accurate (and it’s hard to say given the endless exaggerations and distortions that run through his book), Heidegger outdid himself in presenting National Socialist doctrines as the philosophical basis for the new relationship that was to develop between the German people and their new state.

Like other National Socialists, Heidegger in this seminar views the “people” in völkisch terms presuming their “unity of blood and stock.”

Faye is particularly scandalized by the fact that Heidegger values the “people” (Volk) more than the “individual” and that the people, as an organic community of blood and spirit, excludes Jews and exalts its own particularity.

In this seminar, Heidegger goes even further, calling for a “Germanic state for the German nation,” extending his racial notion of the people to the political system, as he envisages the “will of the people” as finding embodiment in the will of the state’s leader (Führer).

Faye contends that people and state exist for Heidegger in the same relation as beings exist in relation to Being.

As such, Heidegger links ontology to politics, as the “question of all questions” (the “question of being”) is identified with the question of Germany’s political destiny.

Heidegger’s rejection of the humanist notion of the individual and of Enlightenment universalism in his treatment of Volk and Staat are, Faye thinks, synonymous with Hitlerism.

Though Faye’s argument here is more credible, it might also be pointed out that Heidegger’s privileging of the national community over the interests and freedoms of the individual has a long genealogy in German thought (unlike Anglo-American thought, which privileges the rational individual seeking to maximize his self-interest in the market).

The second seminar, in the Winter term of 1934-35, “On the State: Hegel,” again supports Faye’s case that Heidegger was essentially a “Nazi” propagandist and not a true philosopher. For in this seminar, he affirms the spirit of the new National Socialist state in Hegelian terms, spreading the “racist and human-life destroying conceptions that make up the foundations of Hitlerism.”

In both courses, Faye sees Heidegger associating and merging philosophy with National Socialism.

For this reason, his work ought not to be considered a philosophy at all, but rather a noxious political ideology.

Faye, in fact, cannot understand how Heidegger’s insidious project has managed to “procure a planetary public” or why he is so widely accepted as a great philosopher.

Apparently, Heidegger had the power to seduce the public — though on the basis of Faye’s account, it’s difficult to see how the political hack he describes could have pulled this off.

In any case, Faye warns that if Heidegger isn’t exposed for the political charlatan he is, terrible things are again possible. “Hitlerism and Nazism will continue to germinate through Heidegger’s writings at the risk of spawning new attempts at the complete destruction of thought and the extermination of humankind.”

To be continued . . .

Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

National Socialism was defeated on the field of battle, but it wasn’t defeated in the realm of thought.

Indeed, it’s undefeatable there because the only thing its enemies can do to counter its insidious ideas is to ban those thinkers, like Martin Heidegger, whose works might attract those wanting to know why National Socialism is undefeatable and why its world view continues to seduce the incredulous.

Or, at least, so thinks Emmanuel Faye in his recently translated Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).

Why, though, all this alarmed concern about a difficult, some say unreadable, philosopher of the last century?

The reason, Tom Rockmore says, is that he lent “philosophical cover to some of the darkest impulses that later led to Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust.”

One.
The Scandal

Faye’s book is part of a larger publishing phenomenon — in all the major European languages — related to the alleged National Socialism of the great Freiburg philosopher.

Like many prominent German academics of his age, Heidegger joined Hitler’s NSDAP shortly after the National Revolution of 1933.

He was subsequently made rector of the University of Freiburg, partly on the basis of his party affiliation, and in a famous rectorial address — “The Self-Assertion of the German University” — proposed certain reforms that sought to free German universities from “Jewish and modernist influences,” reorienting it in this way to the needs and destiny of the newly liberated Volksgemeinschaft.

Heidegger’s role as a public advocate of National Socialist principles did not, however, last very long.  Within a year of his appointment, he resigned the rectorship.

As he told the de-Nazification tribunal in 1945, his resignation was due to his frustration in preventing state interference in university affairs, a frustration that soon turned him away from all political engagements.

The story he told to the liberal inquisitors (which most Heideggerians accepted up to about 1988) was one in which a politically naive academic, swept up in the revolution’s excitement, had impulsively joined the party, only to become quickly disillusioned.

The story’s “dissimulations and falsehoods” were, indeed, good enough to spare him detention in a Yankee prison — unlike, say, Carl Schmitt who was incarcerated for two years after the war (though the only “Americans” Schmitt ever encountered there were German Jews in the conquerors’ uniform) — but not good enough to avoid a five-year ban on teaching.

In any case, it has always been known that Heidegger had at least a brief “flirtation” with “Nazism.”

Given the so-called “negligibility” of his National Socialism, he was able, after his ban, to resume his position as Germany’s leading philosopher.  By the time of his death (1976), he had become the most influential philosopher in the Western world.  His books have since been translated into all the European languages (and some non-European ones), his ideas have come to dominate contemporary continental thought, and they have even established a beachhead in the stultifying world of the Anglo-American academy, renowned for its indifference to philosophical issues.

Despite Heidegger’s enormous influence as “the century’s greatest philosopher,” he never quite shed the stigma of his early brush with National Socialism.  This was especially the case after 1987 and 1988.

Martin Heidegger, 1889 - 1976

For in late 1987 a little known Chilean-Jewish scholar, Victor Farìas, produced the first book-length examination of Heidegger’s “brush” with National Socialist politics.

His Heidegger and Nazism was not a particularly well-researched work, and there was a good deal of speculation and error in it.

It nevertheless blew apart the story Heidegger had told his American inquisitors in 1945, revealing that he had been a party member between 1933 and 1945; that his National Socialism was something more than the flirtation of a politically naive philosopher; and that his affiliation with the Third Reich was anything but “fleeting, casual, or accidental but [rather] central to his philosophical enterprise.”

This “revelation” — that the greatest philosophical mind of the 20th century had been a devoted Hitlerite — provoked a worldwide scandal.

In the year following Farìas’ work, at least seven books appeared on the subject.

The most impressive of these was by Hugo Ott, a German historian, whose Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (1994) lent a good deal of historically-documented substance to Farìas’ charges.

In the decades since the appearance of Farìas’ and Ott’s work, a “slew” of books and articles (no one is counting any more) have continued to probe the dark recesses of Heidegger’s scandalous politics.

Almost every work in the vast literature devoted to Heideggerian philosophy must now, in testament to the impact of these studies, begin with some sort of “reckoning” with his “Nazism” — a reckoning that usually ends up erecting a wall between his philosophy and his politics.

In this context, Emmanuel Faye’s book is presently being touted as the “best researched and most damaging” work on Heidegger’s National Socialism — one that aims to tear down the wall compartmentalizing his politics and to brand him, once and for all, as an apologist for “the greatest crime of the 20th century.”

It’s fitting that Faye, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Paris-Nanterre, is French, for nowhere else have Heidegger’s ideas been as influential as in France.

Heidegger began appearing in French translation as early as the late 1930s.  The publication in 1943 of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, based on a misreading of Heidegger, gave birth to “existentialism,” which dominated Western thought in the late 1940s and 1950s, helping thus to popularize certain Heideggerian ideas.

At the same time, French thinkers were the first to pursue the issue of Heidegger’s alleged National Socialism.

Karl Löwith, one of the philosopher’s former Jewish students exiled in France, argued in 1946 that Heidegger’s politics was inseparable from his philosophical thought. Others soon joined him in making similar arguments.

Though Löwith’s critique of Heidegger appeared in Les Temps Modernes, Sartre’s famous journal, the ensuing, often quite heated, French controversy was mainly restricted to scholarly journals.  Faye’s father, Jean-Pierre Faye, also a philosopher, figured prominently in these debates during the 1960s.

It was, though, only with Farìas and Ott that the debate over Heidegger’s relationship to the Third Reich spread beyond the academic journals and touched the larger intellectual public.

This debate continues to this day.

Part of the difficulty in determining the exact degree and nature of Heidegger’s political commitment after 1933 is due to the fact that Heidegger’s thought bears on virtually every realm of contemporary European intellectual endeavor, on the right as well as the left, and that there’s been, as a consequence, a thoughtful unwillingness to see Heidegger’s National Socialism as anything other than contingent — and thus without philosophical implication.

This unwillingness has been compounded by the fact that the Heidegger archives at Marbach are under the control of Heidegger’s son, Hermann, who controls scholarly access to them, hindering, supposedly, an authoritative account of Heidegger’s thinking in the period 1933-1945.

Moreover, only eighty of the planned 120 volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe have thus far appeared and, as Faye contends, these are not “complete,” for the family has allegedly prevented the more “compromising” works from being published.

The authority of Faye’s Heidegger — which endeavors to eliminate everything separating his politics from his philosophy — rests on two previously unavailable seminars reports from the key 1933-34 period, as well as certain documents, letters, and other evidence, which have appeared in little known or obscure German publications — evidence he sees as “proving” that Heidegger’s “Nazism” was anything but contingent — and that this “Nazism” was, in fact, not only inseparable from his thought, but formative of its core.

On this basis, along with Heidegger’s collaboration with certain NSDAP thinkers, Faye claims that the philosophy of the famous Swabian is so infused with National Socialist principles that it ought no longer to be treated as philosophy at all, but, instead, banned as “Nazi propaganda.”

To be continued . . .

Lucian Freud, "Benefits Supervisor Sleeping"

Psychanalyse de judaïsme
Hervé Ryssen
Levallois: Éds. Baskerville, 2006

“The Psychoanalysis of Judaism” is Hervé Ryssen’s second book on the Jews.

For Ryssen, who rejects neither the ethnoracial nor the religious designation of Jews, it is their mentality that most distinguishes them from other peoples.

To understand this mentality, his first book, Les Espérances planétariennes (2005), looked at the “planetary ideology” dominating the work of contemporary Jewish intellectuals.

Ryssen’s second work approaches the Jews in a related but somewhat different way — in order to uncover the characterological or psychological foundations of their mentality. (His is not actually a “psychoanalysis” in the Freudian sense).

And like his first work, Psychanalyse de judaïsme is argued through extensive quotations from the various writers who are its subject — quotations which are often pages long and comprise more than half the book. This makes its 400 pages a rather tedious read, especially given that the argument lies buried amidst the endless quotations. (Those enamored of French clarity and eloquence will find this particularly challenging).

I’ve gained, though, a greater patience with his “method.”

For it’s clearer to me now, especially after Greg Johnson’s translation of Ryssen’s Mechanopolis interview, that his “method” is dictated in large part by the political restrictions imposed on his type of “discourse.”

Nearly everywhere in the EU, it is a crime to “incite racial hatred.”

To avoid the inquisitor, Ryssen must proceed carefully.

By extensively quoting and documenting what the Jews say about themselves and their intentions, while implying rather than explicitly stating what he thinks, he is able to publish his incendiary books.

The downside is that this makes them a chore to read and blunts his arguments.

* * *

In his characterological analysis of the Jewish intellectual, Ryssen re-visits the planetary ideology he examined in his first work.

Given the centrality of this ideology to their mentality, Ryssen claims Judaism is as much a political project as it is a religion — a project inspired by the messianic expectations that make up Judaism’s religious core — as Jews endeavor to break down borders, unify the earth, and establish the universal peace announced by their vengeful prophets.

Religious Jews understand this aspiration for a unified, peaceful world order in terms of their millennial longing for the messiah and the restoration of David’s ancient kingdom. Non-religious Jews, Ryssen’s focus, see it in secular terms — as a multiracial planetary Utopia based on Jewish values (assumed to be those of a unified humanity).

Their compulsion to realize this planetary ideology has made the Jews a people preeminently defined by their priests, prophets, and publicists.

Every Jewish intellectual or artistic production aims, as such, to instill planetary expectations in others.

In this spirit, they urge gentiles to deny their race, religion, heritage — in effect, every particularistic identity that divides them from the rest of humanity.

From the Europeans’ most intimate personal relations to the cultural fundament of their civilization — everything particular to them becomes a monstrosity, obstructing the advent of the Jews’ perfectly planned world.

Blood loyalty, tradition, established institutions and practices — in their resistance to globalism’s leveling impetus — are deemed “racist,” designated thus for crucifixion.

The only thing European they have any real appreciation of is the beauty of Europe’s women.

Similarly, their ideology assumes that all men are brothers under the skin — and that the ideal human state is a nomadic one, unattached to anything or any place.

They favor for this reason mass Third World immigration, publicizing it as a “chance” for Europe — to undermine the old ways, mix different populations, and create the coffee-colored world of their Utopian expectations.

Above all, they stand as champions of America’s international order, with its capitalist obsessions, its inherent pluralism and openness, and its profound affinity with the Jewish spirit.

Indeed, anti-Americanism is a kind of anti-Semitism to them.

Yet no matter how inspiring Jewish messianic strivings are to their intellectuals, they remain an illusion that distorts their view of the world, sets them apart from other peoples, and nurtures certain psychological disorders in them.

As such, the Jews’ planetary ideology is both reflective and formative of who they are, shaping their national character, as their ideologues endeavor to re-shape the world in their own image.

* * *

How does Ryssen characterize the cosmopolitans as a people?

First, he sees them as a people full of overweening pride. Having a world-historical mission to unite humanity, they consider themselves not just “chosen,” but superior, imbued with humanity’s highest, most lofty spirit.

This makes them the pivot of all things.

Unable to conceive of the world without themselves and their extraordinary spirit, they are convinced of their self-designated moral superiority, even if others fail to recognize it. They think, in this vein, that nothing compares to Jewish suffering: The tragedy of World War Two’s 50 million dead is hardly commensurate in their eyes to that of the fabled “Six Million.”

Despite the great persecutions they have suffered from all the various peoples amongst whom they have dwelled, these persecutions never seem to have anything to do with who they are or with the way they relate to others. They are always innocent.

When they do fail, their failure is that of “man” in general.

If they suffer “oedipal” feelings or other neurotic sexual neuroses, then it’s something universal, not Jewish; if their culture is misogynist, then all cultures are; if they are money-grubbing, then economics, as Marx held, is everywhere and in every time enthroned.

They can do no wrong — that’s the goy’s specialty.

Having once been what sociologists call “service nomads,” acting as civilizational or religious “go-betweens,” their planetary ideology is linked to their cosmopolitan heritage, just as this heritage enhances the plasticity of their character, enabling them to adapt to new surroundings, while retaining their Jewish identity. In this way, they easily “assimilate” the culture of their host, though they never actually assimilate in the sense of developing an organic attachment to it that demotes the centrality of their Jewish identity.

Rooted solely in themselves, as their great thinker Franz Rosenzweig noted, they lack attachment to exterior things — to a land or a locality, a transcendent reference or a defining folklore.

They are noted for being “mobile, clever, articulate, flexible, and good at being a stranger.” Their thought and behavior are often audacious — stimulating, complex, effervescent, full of chutzpah, but rarely great in its achievements, lacking as they do the well-nourished depth of rooted sentiments and an intrinsic, life-affirming standard of value.

More negatively, the Jewish sense of mission causes their more unstable members to become megalomaniacal in their ethnocentrism.

This makes them prone to grandiose reasoning, exaggerating, dramatizing, even lying without the slightest hesitation.

If this is not enough, they are inclined to pontificate on everything, even those things of which they know nothing, telling us what’s best for us and what we ought to think or do.

They are wont, as the French say, to “drown the fish” (noyer le poisson), overwhelming every situation with contradictory discourses, justifying, as they dissimulate.

They are similarly disposed to inversion (making the noble common and vice versa), to materialism, and to low-mindedness — as they drag everything and everyone down to their veiled, usurious level.

As planetary cultists, they pursue lives of constant agitation, with their existence being a carousel, which revolves around the disturbances, disorders, and irritations they bring to their host, as they plot, scheme, and subvert.

The bad faith they sow inevitably yields hostile reactions, poisoning their relations with gentiles, whose potential violence is an endless source of anxiety to them.

Whenever they bring down persecution on themselves (which they can’t seem to help), they rarely understand why — though they are quick to seek revenge.

They are, relatedly, ridden with fears of separation, expulsion, disaster — seeing monsters everywhere.

Stuck between the grandiose idea they have of themselves and the hostility they inevitably provoke in the real world, Jews have become extremely neurotic about their identity (often going to therapy for years to reconcile themselves with who they are).

Anxiety, paranoia, ambiguity, and a good deal of hatred comes with being “chosen.”

* * *

What does Ryssen make of this complex of specifically Jewish characteristics?

He sees it in terms of the psychological disorder known in French as histrionisme.

In English, this is called (I think) “histrionic personality disorder” or what, up to a few decades ago, was known as “hysteria.”

The hysteria studied by its pioneering student, Jean-Martin Charcot, or discussed in Freud’s early case studies — such as that of emotionally distraught women swooning or losing control of themselves in the period’s Victorian and Viennese salons — is rarely encountered today.

The contemporary definition describes hysteria as a condition marked by excessive emotionality — evident, for example, in those who seek to please others or draw attention to themselves, or in those who try to “seduce” in an “excessive and invading” way. (Hence, its “histrionic” nature).

Hyperemotional, hysterics tend, as a consequence, to the fragile, impulsive, highly subjective, but also to the seductive, egocentric, and exhibitionist — prone as they are to self-engrandizing delusion.  This goes with their extremely “plastic” personalities that bend and form in the presence of others.  Their social activities are accordingly inauthentic and they are usually incapable of imagining the perspectives of others, let alone respecting them.

* * *

Ryssen argues that the “histrionic personality disorder,” though not applicable to all, matches that of many cosmopolitan intellectuals.

He then suggests (sincerely or not, I don’t know) that given the disorder’s severity Jews should start looking in the mirror, to confront who they really are, not what their illusions imagine them to be.

To “cure” themselves and their elites of this debilitating disorder, they must fight, therefore, against the fantasies that keep them in their mental ghetto.

He claims that numerous Jews over the last century have, in fact, preferred to abandon their neuroses and root themselves among European peoples, even if this has taken several generations to complete.

Real assimilation is possible, Ryssen claims, — if Jews are willing to reject their judéité.

* * *

By this reasoning, those who aren’t actually Jews, but who have assimilated their intellectual reflexes, become such, in spirit.

If Judaism, then, is above all “a particular psychic disposition,” as Ryssen contends, it helps to explain why so many white Americans live today under the influence of their planetary expectations and why even some of their most ardent critics bear elements of their distinct “histrionic personality disorder.”

The conclusion I take from this is that the struggle against the cosmopolitans’ anti-white jihad will be as much a struggle against a certain mentality, associated with “Judaization,” as it will be a struggle against Jewish power.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which he shepherded through Congress, would eliminate the remaining legal barriers to racial equality and commit the federal government to its insurance.

His State Department also put its entire weight behind these acts, warning members of Congress that the failure to embrace this legislation would severely hamper America’s Cold War effort.

Johnson then appointed numerous blacks to executive positions in his administration — more than all former presidents combined — and, worse, announced a “War on Poverty” to address black economic grievances.

In October 1965, he pushed through an immigration reform bill to eliminate the “discriminatory” national origins system created in 1924. For once segregation had been outlawed, the old immigration law appeared as an embarrassment to a nation now committed to multiracialism and anti-Communism.

Johnson’s radical reforms were the dramatic climax of the complicated relationship that had existed between race relations and foreign policy since 1945, for it was plainly evident after their passage that the US government was now fully committed to racial equality.

When Johnson left office in 1968, overwhelmed by the social-racial chaos his administration had caused, the series of factors that had earlier promoted the “Cold War on whites” also shifted.

Both decolonization and desegregation had, in effect, been achieved by 1968.

Nixon’s administration would then establish diplomatic relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union, demoting the significance of the Cold War (even though the Soviets continued to link imperialism and the “oppression of American blacks” in their anti-Vietnam rhetoric).

The nature of race relations and the problems associated with them also changed. No sooner had Johnson’s landmark bills been passed than a black rebellion broke out in Watts, leaving thirty-four dead and causing millions of dollars in property damage.

Here was the unwelcome shape of things to come, for racial conflict, it was now clear, was not a purely Southern problem, but no less a national one.

Throughout the remainder of the decade, virtually every major American city would be scared and seared by similar riots/rebellions, as the black masses, signaling their rejection of white liberalism and its gradualist approach to racism and discrimination, took to rioting and looting to promote the “Black Liberation” advocated by “the angry children of Malcolm X.”

Other sorts of protests also emerged — against poverty and war — further overshadowing the struggle against discrimination.

At the same time, increased urban violence and the revolutionary demands of the Black Power movement alienated much of the Establishment and set off a white “backlash” in the electorate, which demanded “law and order” and eventually brought Richard Nixon to power.

Though racial conflict would continue after 1968s and in some cases became more violent and vocal, its effect on US foreign policy seemed to wane.

Part of this was due to the ensuing white backlash, part to the fact that the legal basis of Jim Crow had been dismantled, and part to the Vietnam war, which re-focused international attention away from American race relations and toward American militarism.

Then, as Vietnam eclipsed civil rights as a defining issue of US prestige abroad and as the government continued to introduce domestic programs designed to promote not just black rights, but black employment, housing, and welfare, the linkage between race and foreign relations snapped.

Once it did, a different order of forces — associated with the rise of Jewish influence, the Cultural Revolution, and the new anti-white system of race relations — was mobilized against white interests.

The story of race and equality also became more complicated after 1968, for, internationally, it was now obvious that the US government was committed to eliminating the remaining racial barriers and, domestically, that economic and class problems were as integral to black failure as were legal barriers — economic and class problems that lacked the international resonance of legal segregation.

In such a situation, critics found it increasingly difficult to charge that things hadn’t changed and weren’t continuing to change — as we on the other side well know.

***

The Second World War had thrust the United States into a position of world leadership.

Though race played no part in determining US relations to the Soviet Union or shaping its global capitalist system, it did affect the way they were approached.

The crusade against Europe and the subsequent emergence of various nationalist movements in the Third World after 1945 changed the dynamic of the international arena and compelled the United States to reconsider its traditional system of race relations. This put the US civil rights movement and anti-Communism on parallel tracks.

At the same time, the international projection of US power brought new scrutiny to the character of American society. Racial incidents in the South ceased, thus, to be local events and became potential international headlines, detrimental to US global concerns.

As the boundaries between domestic and foreign affairs blurred, US officials, as was made clear to every president from Truman to Johnson, realized that they would not be able to maintain their world leadership, if American domestic affairs alienated the overwhelming majority of the world’s nonwhite population. Race relations at home were here again linked to US prestige and influence abroad.

The great changes that have reshaped America’s racial hierarchy in the last half-century, especially in subordinating white interests to blacks, are, I would argue, virtually incomprehensible apart from the international context of the Cold War.

One might even argue that, in world historical terms, the destruction of America’s former white-centric racial hierarchy represents a more consequential outcome than the collapse of Soviet Communism. For by the end of the Cold War, European-America had been transformed into a multiracial nation and the very idea of “white supremacy” exiled to the US equivalent of the Gulag.

The result is the present prospect of extinction — not unrelated, of course, to American-Jewish machinations, yet hardly dependent on them.

Nevertheless, the logic of Cold War civil rights had already taken hold of the government, propelling it ever closer toward the racial chaos we know today.

Though no racist, Eisenhower wasn’t keen on civil rights. Under his administration, blacks lost the easy access to the White House that they had acquired under Truman; only once, late in his presidency did he ever meet with civil rights leaders. Moreover, as a former soldier who had spent a good part of his career in the South, he had developed a real sympathy for Southern life (as “open-minded” Yankees do).

If civil rights were to be introduced (and he felt that some symbolic changes ought, perhaps, to be made for the sake of “national security”), he was convinced that it should be done slowly and moderately.

A few weeks before the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which put the Constitution on the side of desegregation, he is reputed to have told Earl Warren that “segregationists are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside big overgrown Negroes.”

His was a generational attitude that was less and less shared by New Class elites. Thus, even though introduced by the Truman administration, the Republican National Committee was quick to take credit for Brown, portraying it as “the Eisenhower administration’s many-frontal attack on global Communism” — however unenthusiastic Eisenhower may have actually been.

Brown, indeed, provided the US government with a powerful counter to Soviet propaganda. The USIF went into overdrive to publicize it throughout the world, where it got largely favorable reviews.

Brown’s radical judicial assault on American race relations would, in fact, signal the beginning of the end for Jim Crow.

Buoyed up on the court’s decision, as well as the escalating struggle for decolonization in Africa and the Third World, the NAACP at this point sensed that the tide had at last turned in its favor.

In December 1955 it waged a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which would mark the advent of mass civil rights organizing. M.L. King described the boycott as part of a global process in which “the oppressed peoples of the world” had risen up against colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

This new stage in the civil movement can hardly be understood without the backdrop of the Cold War and the type of world it was creating.

Many, though, wanted no part of this world.

Unlike their counterparts today, Southern whites refused to passively accept this assault on their traditional way of life.

This was especially evident in September 1957 at Little Rock’s Central High School, where the first major challenge to Brown was made, as thousands of belligerent whites, supported by their governor, Orval Faubus, and the state National Guard, prepared to resist the court-mandated admission of nine Negroes to their all-white institution.

Not merely the Jewish controlled media in the United States, but the media worldwide carried vivid images of jeering white crowds threatening the nine neatly dressed and apparently well-mannered black teens, who, in braving the “mobs,” sought, simply, “to sit in the same classroom with white boys and girls.”

The Soviets, who would humiliate the US during the crisis by putting the first man-made satellite into orbit, offered the world numerous commentaries on this “racist” form of “American barbarism” — commentaries that were reprinted and circulated throughout the Third World.

At the same time, US embassies abroad deluged Washington with information on Little Rock’s unfavorable international impact and John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, warned that both the UN and the nonaligned Third World was watching to see if the US was really committed to civil rights.

With the impending threat of violence in the streets and the plummeting of US prestige aboard, Eisenhower finally acted, sending in the 101st Airborne Division in order to stop, among other things, “the disservice . . . that has been done to the nation in the eyes of the world” — as “our enemies . . . gloat over the incident and use it everywhere to misrepresent our nation.”

As the first president since Reconstruction to mobilize the army in defense of black civil rights, Eisenhower had not wanted to intervene, but the breakdown of law and the continuing Soviet propaganda binge about US “racial terror” had forced his hand.

He acted, revealingly, more to uphold federal authority and repair the country’s international image than he did to promote racial equality. In a national televised address, he said “it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world.” In a word, Little Rock’s resistance to desegregation was a threat to national security.

At this point, the Cold War logic of civil rights became nearly irreversible.

***

The ensuing Kennedy and Johnson administrations would finalize Jim Crow’s demise.

Unlike the Democratic presidents preceding and succeeding him, John F. Kennedy entered the White House without strong feelings about civil rights.

The only Negro he had actually ever encountered up to then was his valet.

While in the Senate, he did, admittedly, take up the cause of African independence, but this was mainly a gentrified gesture of his Irish heritage rather than any genuine commitment to Negro nationalism.

Kennedy’s defining identity as a politician (if an American politician can be said to have an identity unrelated to electoral considerations) was anti-Communism (this wretched liberal ideology dear to both the American right and left, as well as to not a few WN), which he had inherited from the great Joseph McCarthy. Indeed, his fierce anti-Communism made his administration the most dangerous in the history of the Cold War.

Like other Democrats of the period, he paid formal lip service to a moderate version of civil rights, though he had a poor record of support for it in the Senate. His main concern was that both segregationists and desegregationalists seemed almost indifferent to the issue of Communism.

For the first two and a half years of his administration he accordingly refused to offer any real leadership on the issue of civil rights.

The accelerating conflict in the South, however, would not long allow this inaction.

There was something ironic in this.

Kennedy’s election had signalled not only a generational turn in American politics, it was widely felt as if it had ushered in a new spirit in American life. His “youth and charisma,” combined with the fact that he was the first Catholic to hold the office, seemed to herald the advent of a new era. Though the “Sixties,” as a distinct political-cultural period, did not actually begin until about 1964 or 1965, his election was its prelude.

This was especially evident in the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement, which was beginning to move out of the courts and into the streets.

In Eisenhower’s last year in office, civil rights organizations had staged sit-ins, with great fanfare, at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, inaugurating the age of mass civil disobedience. By August 1961, over 70,000 people are estimated to have participated in these sit-ins, which were expanded to include various other segregated public facilities.

Then in May 1961, “Freedom Riders” started challenging discrimination in interstate transit, which the courts had earlier rule to be unconstitutional. Given the violence, demonstrations, and TV coverage that accompanied the Freedom Riders, they proved to be a distinct embarrassment to the new administration.

Kennedy, who was planning to meet Khrushchev in Vienna, also feared they were making him look weak and vulnerable in the international media. He condemned the Freedom Riders as “unpatriotic,” tarnishing the nation’s image at the very moment when he was about to make an entrance on the world stage.

His problems with the burgeoning civil rights movement were, however, just beginning.

In September 1962 he faced another major racial crisis, this time at the University of Mississippi, where large crowds of angry whites sought to prevent the court-ordered admission of the Negro James Meredith.

With the campus beset with riots, violence, death, and gun fire, Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, was forced to intervene. He sent in several hundred federal marshals and then federalized the Mississippi National Guard — ultimately, to stop the TV images and the unfavorable international coverage.

Then, in May 1963, the impact of race on US international politics came to a head in Birmingham, Alabama, where Bull Connor (who would inspire Hollywood’s image of the pudgy, brutal Southern sheriff) turned high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on a thousand black civil rights’ marchers.

The vivid images of “peaceful blacks” being assaulted by “Nazi-like” police made for spectacular television. The Soviets had a field day and global opinion turned hostile.

A few weeks later, George Wallace — whose earlier campaign slogan was “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” — also defied the federal government, preventing the integration of the University of Alabama, creating, in the process, another worldwide TV spectacle.

Kennedy again sent in federal marshals, but at this point he decided that something needed to be done to get these embarrassing protests out of the streets and back into the courts, where they could be controlled. The result was his decision in June 1963 to submit a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress that would outlaw all public forms of segregation.

Passed after his assassination, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would mark the impending demise of Jim Crow.

In this struggle, racial equality and civil rights inevitably became an integral facet of the larger ideological struggle.

This was due to the fact that “the world [was] no longer white.”

Once Europe had been reduced to rubble, its prestige in, as well as its hold on its overseas empire was everywhere weakened. The nonwhites of these former European governed lands became, as such, a “constituency” to be won by rival liberal or Communist cold warriors.

In 1947, India, the world’s second largest “nation,” achieved independence, soon followed Indonesia. By the end of Truman’s administration (March 1953), most of Asia and the Middle East had freed itself of European domination. Africa would follow in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

In this new era, to maintain America’s leadership of the non-Communist “free world,” Americans could no longer ignore (or control) the world’s nonwhite majority.

The Cold War, as a consequence, would be fought largely for the hearts and minds of the former colonial world (what a French journalist in 1955 called the “Third World”).

Truman, like most of the early cold warriors, was not exactly a racial egalitarian. As a Missourian, whose heritage was more Southern than Midwestern, he was not without racial “prejudice,” though in the course of his Senate career, he came to support anti-lynching legislation and the abolition of poll taxes. It was Cold War imperatives, however, that made him into a forthright proponent of “civil rights.”

Most of Truman’s top advisers, including the “Wise Men” who helped him create the Cold War state, came from the old WASP elite and tended to be racial conservatives (contemptuous not only of Negroes, but of Jews). Though at times sympathetic to Southern concerns and with no particular affection for “the poor Negro” of liberal imagination, they too would be forced to embrace the cause of civil rights — linked, as it was, to the Cold War.

In this anti-Communist war it waged, the United States was now obliged to demonstrate that historic white racism was not part of its international anti-Communist coalition.

Anti-racism, as a result, became almost as important to US international interests as anti-Communism.

This was especially the case since the Soviets were adept at making hay out of American racial practices. In 1946, for example, when Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, denounced Communists for denying certain East Europeans voting rights, they retorted that Negroes in Byrnes’ home state of South Carolina, as well as throughout the rest of the American South, were similarly and less justifiably denied voting rights.

This would not be the only time that Byrnes was made to look like a fool.

Then, as the machinery of the Cold War was put in place, the Soviets’ anti-US rhetoric increasingly made American racial practice the centerpiece of their propaganda, which put the US on the defensive.

This would again be the case, when later, as US bombing runs over North Korea and then North Vietnam killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the Soviets linked “the American way of waging war” to the “oppression of colored people in the US,” (which, of course, ignored the fact that Anglo-American bombers had earlier killed 900,000 German civilians, as well as many tens of thousands of French, Belgium, Dutch, Italian, and other European civilians — often doing so intentionally, striving to kill the largest possible number of innocents).

Given US claims to the mantle of the “Free World’s” leadership and the nonwhite world’s new definition of itself in terms hostile to the white man’s former attitude to it, the American color bar would henceforth be subject to unprecedented international scrutiny. Every headline reporting a lynching or another Southern effort to shore up Jim Crow took, as a consequence, a toll on America’s international standing.

One US ambassador described the country’s race problem as its “Achilles’ heel,” another called it “the greatest propaganda gift that could be given to the Kremlin,” and a third asked: “How can we persuade these Africans and Asians . . . that we believe in human dignity when we deny our own citizens the right to this basic dignity on the basis of skin color?”

In this struggle between the “Communist East” and the “liberal West,” Truman’s cold warriors had now to keep the nonwhite “South” allied with the white “North.”

US foreign relations, it followed, would no longer be insulated from the nation’s race relations.

Numerous propaganda agencies were specifically created to counter Soviet propaganda and to tell a “story” not of racial equality (which evidently didn’t exist), but of on-going racial progress. The United States Information Agency (USIF) — with its vast array of radio stations, printed materials, and foreign-based “America Houses” — endeavored, thus, to put a different spin on US race relations.

Propaganda, however, was not enough.

***

All the major US Cold War initiatives of the late 1940s — the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), NSC 68 (1950) — emerged against mounting demands for racial equality, in the US and abroad.

Truman, accordingly, would be the first president to make civil rights a concern of his administration.

In 1946, he formed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights, staffed with liberals, which reported that a major reform in race relations was needed to fight the Cold War, that on-going discrimination was undermining US diplomacy, and that the US had to take account of what “the world thinks of us and our record.”

He also urged Congress to enact civil rights laws to establish a permanent committee on civil rights, to outlaw lynching, and to protect the right to vote.

Because Southerners stymied him in Congress, he turned to executive orders to promote reforms and, at the same time, involved his Justice Department in various desegregation litigations.

His most important civil rights’ “accomplishment” was, unquestionably, his executive order of June 1948 to desegregate the army and the civil service.

It wasn’t until the Korea War, however, when manpower shortages compelled commanders to actively implement it, that the army actually began to desegregate and not until 1955 that the process was completed. It was nevertheless the most consequential step toward racial equality yet taken.

As a politician sensitive to the negative electoral implications of civil rights, he, of course, didn’t want to alienate the Southern base of the Democratic Party. But here he failed. Rather naively, he thought the introduction of a pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic Party program wouldn’t upset the party’s Southern wing (given that party programs are usually forgotten the moment the votes are counted). He was wrong: The Dixiecrats bolted and formed a States’ Rights Party (the first step toward the South’s eventual abandonment of the Democratic Party).

But once he was free of the Dixiecrats, he could openly court the black northern vote. During the campaign, he was not particularly outspoken on civil rights, knowing that northern whites weren’t much different than Southerners in this respect.

But he did become the first president to address a national convention of the NAACP and the first to campaign in Harlem, where he said: “Democracy’s answer to the challenges of [Communist] totalitarianism is its promise of equal rights and equal opportunities for all mankind” (not mentioning, of course, that such rights and opportunities were meaningful only among peoples of similar natural endowment).

In November 1948, in winning the vast majority of the black vote, he captured the White House with the narrowest of margins.

Given Congress’ on-going resistance to civil rights reform, Truman increasingly looked to the courts, especially the Supreme Court, which had already ruled against segregated interstate transportation (1946) and showed a willingness to play a role in the Cold War of ideas.

In 1948 Truman’s Justice Department filed amicus curiae briefs in the Shelley v. Kraemer case that struck down housing covenants. In 1949 it intervened in Henderson v. United States to prohibit segregation in railroad transportation. In the same year it participated in cases challenging school desegregation — McLaurin v. Oklahoma and Sweatt v. Painter. Finally, in December 1952, it intervened in the Brown v. Board of Education case (resolved in 1954).

In each of these cases, Truman’s State Department stressed their national security implications, an argument for which the court had already shown sympathy.

By the time the little cold warrior left office, Jim Crow’s days were numbered: The military had been desegregated, the Democratic Party had gone on record for racial equality, and judicial interventions had begun to lower the legal barriers to discrimination.

Selling the Cold War: A Racially-Integrated America Menaced by White Russian Communists

“The world is white no longer.”
– James Baldwin

For white nationalists — whose cyber-based “movement” is still in its infancy — simple explanations tend to be the rule.

The reductionist “anti-Semitism” that dominates WN ranks and serves as a catch-all explanation for the predicament white people find themselves in today, to cite the most prominent example, is wont to attribute every assault on white life to Jewish perfidy.

There is, certainly, no disputing the existence of this “perfidy,” for no other group — not the browns or blacks, not the former powers of international Communism, not anyone or anything — is or has been so disposed to breaching the color line, undermining America’s traditional racial hierarchy, or propelling the processes responsible for the present dispossession of the country’s white majority.

To think, however, that Organized Jewry has been the alpha and omega of this dispossession is not just simple-minded, it’s dishonorable.

It’s simple-minded because it understands complex historical processes in Kindergarten terms. It ignores other, no less culpable factors.

More fundamentally, it ignores or conflates the differences between structural imperatives and conspiratorial designs, between concrete objective forces and the subjective influences of interest and conscience.

History, as such, offers few cases where monocausal explanations suffice, for the confluence of fortune, structure, and subject (fortuna, necessita, virtu) undergirding the historical process means that significant historical changes are almost always the consequence of a combination of forces unique to their specific time and place.

By the same reasoning, monocausal explanations focusing exclusively on a demonized “other” are dishonorable because they spare whites all responsibility for their misfortunes, refuse to acknowledge the dysgenic and self-destructive forces indigenous to modern society, and ignore the numerous, inherently Jewish facets of the American project.

In criticizing this, I do so not to absolve the Jews, but to preface the subject of this essay — the anti-white consequences of the Cold War — which offers a somewhat broader explanation of white dispossession (though there are at least a couple of others that can also be made).

***

The Second World War was a watershed event in both American and world history.

It changed not only America’s relationship with the rest of the world, it fundamentally changed America.

Thomas Hart Benton, "Negro Soldier," 1942

The struggle against National Socialist Germany (despite the racial character of the Pacific War against the “Japs”) was ideologically waged as a war against fascism and racism.

As the unadmirable Gunnar Myrdal wrote in 1944, “In fighting fascism and racism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial tolerance and . . . racial equality.”

Its international crusade for liberal ideals stood, though, in obvious contradiction to the exclusion of various colored peoples, blacks particularly, who were denied a place in the country’s political and social firmament — denied because whites wanted a white nation, like other Europeans.

Myrdal called this supposed contradiction between its ideals and practices the “American Dilemma.”

It would become especially conspicuous after 1945, when America’s newly assumed international role left it with numerous, new obligations that drew attention to its so-called “dilemma” (which, in actuality, was a dilemma of American liberalism).

The war, moreover, changed not just the prevailing Zeitgeist.

The colossal undertaking to put 13 million men in uniform, to arm them (and the allies), and to fight on several different fronts in distant parts of the world required a national mobilization of unprecedented scope.

The war, it followed, brought great dislocations, disrupting traditional social relations and forcing the alteration of many traditional attitudes.

America’s democratic crusade against “German racism” also brought millions of blacks north to work in defense plants. This had a major impact on housing and employment. It also heightened black self-confidence, freed them from the older Southern forms of race relations, and emboldened their challenge to white supremacy. This became especially evident in 1943, when 200 race riots flared up in more than forty-five American cities, anticipating the contentious racial battles of the postwar era, especially those of the 1960s and ’70s.

At the same time, a million negroes were drafted into the military.

Though the army remained segregated, it quickly discovered the inefficiency and expense of maintaining separate facilities. It was even forced, whenever the exhausted, ill-supplied, and depleted forces of the Wehrmacht beat back the unheroic GIs, to bypass its segregated practices and throw in blacks troops to support decimated or beleaguered white units.

Black veterans, relatedly, provided many of the shock troops that would assault Jim Crow after 1945.

These developments — combined with the retreat of “scientific racism” in the 1930s, the wartime expansion of the New Deal state, the defeat and demonization of German anti-liberalism, and the Cold War’s ensuing crusade for democracy and equality — would together undermine much of the legitimacy of traditional American racial practices.

As one Alabama governor (Frank Dixon) rather tendentiously put it (and only a Southerner could make this argument with a straight face), “The Huns have wrecked the theory of the master race.”

***

Following the war, American power in the world was supreme, unchallenged, except by the Soviet Union, which, after having lost 27 million Russians in the course of the war (compared to 250,000 US combat deaths), was not actually in a position to defy the new superpower, though its unwillingness to submit to Washington’s tutelage would automatically cast it as a potential rival.

At this pivotal historical moment, when the whole world lay prostrate before them, American leaders felt as if they had been granted the Mandate of Heaven.

Inspired by the biblical Zionism of their Puritan heritage and encouraged by the economic self-interests of the great corporations, these leaders would reshape the international arena to reflect and serve the interests of American democracy and capitalism (each the economic or ideological mirror of the other).

Before even the war’s end, New Deal planners had developed the programs and trained the personnel who would occupy Germany, Italy, and (they thought) France and integrate them into the new American-led Atlantic “coalition”; Britain had earlier been deprived of its sovereignty and integrated. At the same time, a host of American-created international organizations — especially the United Nations, whose 1945 Charter committed its members to opposing racial discrimination — were designed to ensure the American governance of this new international order.

It was left, thought, to the administration of Harry S. Truman, the architect of the Cold War, to mould the exact contours of this order.

***

Russian-Americans relations had soured in the closing phase of the war, as political differences became more important than strategic ones. By 1946 they were engaged in a war of words, with the Soviets countering American claims of tyranny by pointing to lynchings, poll taxes, and other facets of Jim Crow to expose the fraudulence of America’s democratic-egalitarian ideology.

By 1947, with the announcement of the Truman Doctrine to fight the international forces of Communist subversion, a Cold War, which would last until 1989, was implicitly declared.

In many respects, this was a phony war.

A severely exhausted and crippled Soviet Union posed no threat to the US.

But this phony war had become a political necessity for US leaders.

The New Deal, which arose in response to the breakdown of liberal capitalism in 1929, had failed (unlike Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany) to fix the depressed economy. It was only with the advent of “Defense Preparations” in 1939 and the war economy after 1941 that the American economy began to rebound.

The most pressing concern of liberal democrats after 1945 was thus avoiding another economic collapse — which meant on-going defense preparations and continued government intervention in the economy.

To justify this New-Deal created “Pentagon capitalism,” as well as a National Security State to oversee it, it was necessary, however, “to scare the hell out of the American people.”

Hence the ensuing transformation of good old “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) into the great bogeyman bent on enslaving the world.

To be continued . . .

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.

3. The Crisis of the Old Order

“When and whenever [men] are subjects without being citizens, they inevitably endow other concerns and pursuits—economic, social, cultural—with an independent and hence rival authority.” This was the great failing of Absolutism.

In such a situation, the voluntary associations of the bourgeoisie—Masonic lodges, salons, clubs, coffee-houses, academies, sociétés de pensées, the “Republic of Letters”—became rival centers of moral authority and eventually rival models of political authority.

The criticism of these bourgeois organs sought to “test” the validity or truth of its subject, making reason a factor of judgement in its process of pro and con.

Bourgeois judgements critical of the political system set off, in turn, a crisis threatening the existing State.

As scientific materialists, armed with a naive analytic-empiricist epistemology, such bourgeois critics waged their subversive campaign with no appreciation of existing political realities or the imperatives and limits these realities imposed. This would make their moral crusade unrealistic, Utopian, unconcerned with the “contingency, conflict, and compulsion” that occupies and defines the political field.

Their Utopian proposals (their anti-political politics) constituted, as such, no actual political alternative, based as they were on a purely formal, abstract understanding of the political realm, which it subjected to the individual’s moral conscience.

But once the private moral realm started to impinge on the political sphere of the Absolutist State, the State itself was again called into question.

First unconsciously and then increasingly consciously, the bourgeois Enlightenment applied its Utopian and ultimately hypocritical standards to the State, whose political imperatives were ignored rather than recognized for what they were—so as not to complicate its own geometrical schemes of reform.

The Enlightenment, it followed, was wont to see itself in moral terms, not political—not even metapolitical—ones.

This self-deceiving politics could only end in ideological excess and terror—for the sole way to realize its Utopian political theology would be by forcing others to accept and submit to it.

The result, Koselleck concludes, was the advent of the modern condition—this “sense that we are being sucked into an open and unknown future, the pace of which has kept us in a constant state of breathelessness ever since the dissolution of the traditional ständische societies.”

The turbulent “tribune of reason” bequeathed by the Enlightenment aimed, moreover, at every sphere of human endeavor—not just the Absolutist State, traditional Catholic Christianity, or the numerous corporate restraints inhibiting the market.

Everything historically given was, as such, to be re-conceived as a historical process that had to be re-directed, reformed, and re-planned, as the dictates of fate gave way to the rationalist obliteration of political aporia (i.e., the impasses or challenges posed by exceptional situations determined only by the sovereign).

Through its Règne de la Critique, the bourgeoisie (as prosecutor, judge, and jury) subjected the State to an enlightened conscience that debunked its “rationality” and increasingly advocated, or implied, its replacement.

With this rationalist critique of Absolutism came an unfolding philosophy of history—which promised a victory that was to be gained without struggle or war, that applied to all mankind, and that would bring about a better, more rational, and peaceful future—if only “reason” (i.e., bourgeois interests) was allowed to rule.

Through this critique, politics—the tough decisions fundamental to human existence—was dissolved into an Utopian project indifferent to the historical given. Everything, it followed, was subject to criticism, nothing was taboo—not the “order of human things,” not even life itself would be spared the alienation that came with the critic’s unpolitical reason.

Then, as the critic assumed the right to subject the whole world to his verdict, acting as “the king of kings,” criticism was “transformed into a maelstrom that sucks the present from under the feet of the critic”—for his criticisms amounted to an endless assault on the present in the name of a far-off, but allegedly enlightened future.

4. Modern Pathogenesis

At the highest level, Koselleck offers “a generic theory of the modern world”—one that seeks to explain something of our age to us.

In his view, criticism engendered crisis, calling the future into question.

The Enlightenment’s culture of critique could, however, only culminate in revolution—a revolution whose new order would privilege the rich and powerful (and, in time, the Jews).

By subordinating law to morality, ignoring the differences that divide men over the great questions of existence, the liberal State born of Enlightenment culture stripped sovereignty of its power.

Henceforth bourgeois morality became the invisible framework of the State, as sovereign authority was changed into an act of persuasion and reason—and the essence of politics (no longer the polemic over fundamental problems of human existence) became the non-political rule of a discursive bourgeoisie indifferent to matters of faith and desirous of a fate-less society without a sovereign State.

As social and political realities were indiscriminately mixed and subjected to the invisible opinion of the bourgeois public, based on an ostensively objective reason, everything failing to accord with that opinion became an injustice, subject to reform.

Society here assumed the right to abrogate whatever laws it wished, inadvertently establishing a reign of permanent revolution.

Refusing to recognize the State’s amoral (rather than immoral) character, the emerging bourgeois political system—with its culpablizing, but “value free” politics and its civil ideal taken as the universal destiny of all humanity—not infrequently had to resort to naked force to realize its Utopia: the terror and mass killings that followed 1789, the nuclear holocaust inherent in the Cold War, the on-going, unrelenting destructuration of the local and global today.

The consequence has been liberalism’s non-political State (whether in its 19th-century guise as a Night Watchman State or in its 20th-century Nanny State form). This State replaced politics with morality, tradition with planning, disagreements with a cold indifference to all that matters. It became thus a legal order, a Rechtsstaat, supposedly unattached to any constituting system of ascription or belief, and thus beyond any “exception” that might make visible the actual basis of bourgeois rule.

In this situation, where politics were negated and political problems were reduced to “organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks,” the world was emptied of “seriousness” and turned into a vast realm of entertainment, where the bourgeois was allowed to enjoy the fruits of his acquisitions.

With liberalism, then, politics ceases to be a destiny and becomes a technique hostile to all who refuse its philistine philosophy of history—for the linear notion of progress inherent in this philosophy undermines and “reforms” everything that has historically ensured the integrity of white life.