Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935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

Sven Hedin with Hitler

Editor’s Note: Sven Hedin was one of the twentieth century’s greatest explorers. He was also a masterful writer who produced many gripping memoirs of his travels and discoveries in Central Asia, Mongolia, and the Himalayas. Hedin was one quarter Jewish (his mother’s father was a Jew). This fact was known to Hitler and the other Nazis whom Hedin befriended. It obviously did not hinder his access to the highest levels of the Third Reich.

“The Nobel judge who hobnobbed with Nazis”
Bob Brockie
Stuff.co.nz, December 28, 2009

Sven Hedin was one of Sweden’s most famous scientists. Back in the early 1900s he explored Central Asia and Mongolia, and became an international cartographer, hydrographer, photographer and author of popular travel books such as A Conquest of Tibet and Across the Gobi Desert.

Among the 150-odd books he wrote were multi-volume atlases of Central Asia.

In 1905 Hedin was appointed one of 18 judges on the Nobel Prize Committee. He continued voting on nominees until 1949.

In the 1930s, he came to admire Adolf Hitler and often visited him.

“Whenever I wanted to see Hitler I would call Prince Wissen of the German embassy here in Stockholm, a fine fellow, on Monday.

“He would call Berlin the same day, phone me back several hours later, and say Hitler would lunch with me on Friday. I would leave Thursday so as not to be late, and then see Hitler.

“He was a hypnotic talker, a fascinating man. I also made friends with Goebbels, Himmler, Goering and Doenitz.”

Now one would think that Nobel prize judges would be the most upright, august, wise, fair-minded and incorruptible people on Earth but, in an interview in 1946, Hedin told American writer William Irving that committee members were as prejudiced, irrational and vain as the rest of us.

Hedin explained that the anti- Semitism of one judge kept the prize from Albert Einstein when Einstein was expected to win it. The judge said that the theory of relativity was not actually a discovery, had never been proved, and was valueless.

So they withheld the prize from Einstein for seven years, by which time the dissenting judge’s influence had waned, and Einstein won the prize in 1921.

Another judge so hated Russians that he prevented Tolstoy, Chekhov Andreyev and Gorky from winning prizes. H G Wells? “Too minor and journalistic.” Somerset Maugham? “Too popular and undistinguished.” James Joyce? Hedin was puzzled. “Who is he?”

Most committee members were prejudiced against American novelists because wives tried to nominate their husbands officially. French and Italian writers Gide and D’Annunzio were denied the prize because they behaved immorally.

Hitler bestowed many honours on Hedin in the 1930s and asked him to make a pro-Nazi address at the Olympic Games in 1936. For his 75th birthday, they bestowed the Order of the German Eagle on him.

During World War II, Hedin was one of few prominent Swedes who urged Sweden to abandon its neutrality and support Nazi Germany. Even when Germany lost the war, Hedin pressed for America to join forces with a resurrected Germany in a third world war against Russia.

After the war, Hedin became an aged embarrassment to the Nobel Committee but he never regretted his pro-Nazi stand. He claimed that his direct line to Hitler and Himmler enabled him to free many Jewish intellectuals and their families from the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

But his science lives on. The Chinese Government still uses his 80-year-old maps to construct railways and canals, and to pinpoint mineral deposits.

Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939

Mark Antliff, a professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University, has put together a useful analysis of the cultural-aesthetic memes utilized by French fascists of 1909-1939 to promote their visions of national renewal. Antliff’s analysis focuses on the connection between fascist ideologies and the European avant-garde, which most people would more likely associate with the anti-national left. Antliff is fairly even handed in the book, with the occasional use of scare quotes to express his skepticism/disdain for certain “fascist ideas.”

In contrast, I believe his use of the term “democracy” should always have scare quotes, as “democratic” systems deceive the populace into believing that someone other than self-interested elites are running the show; however, apparently, Antliff and I disagree on our political preferences. Antliff also concludes the book with a line about how the ideas of the French fascists were not able to stem the tide of the “bloodshed” caused by the military aggressions of Hitler and Mussolini (including the invasion of France). Very well. One hopes an academic will write about the real blood that has been shed imposing “equality” on “the people” – either that of the mass-murdering Marxists or the genocidal globalist multiculturalists and their plans for a multiracial West. So much for my complaints about the book. What about fascism and avant-garde aesthetics?

Roger Griffin, in his Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), famously described fascism as “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” – making the elements of renewal, rebirth, and regeneration central to all permutations of this ideology. It is also important to differentiate between real fascism and “para-fascist” ersatz fascism. Para-fascism is often confused with real fascism in the public mind, which gives the false impression that fascism is ossified reactionary conservatism, rather than a revolutionary movement interested in avant-garde themes and ideas.

The differences between real revolutionary fascism and para-fascism are easily summarized: Para-fascist regimes are authoritarian, traditionalist, reactionary regimes, often military dictatorships, that fossilize a status quo favoring traditional elites of business, nobility, religion, and the military. Such regimes want nothing to do with the revolutionary and palingenetic aspects of true fascism; the idea that the secular religious, Futuristic, and avant-garde characteristics of, say, (early) Italian Fascism has anything to do with Franco’s Spain or Pinochet’s Chile is absurd.

Indeed, as Griffin makes clear, fascists and para-fascists are usually, by their very nature, bitter enemies. While para-fascists may co-opt some superficial characteristics of their fascist opponents, in power they tend to ruthlessly suppress the expression of revolutionary fascism. When para-fascism attempts to co-opt fascism by sharing power – as Antonescu attempted in Romania with the Legionaries — conflict is inevitable, since the objectives of the two parties are completely different: para-fascist ossification vs. fascist palingenetic regeneration. Thus, in Romania, civil war between para-fascists and fascists led to the victory of the para-fascists, and the exile of the fascist forces. The idea that Antonescu was “fascist” is a byproduct of either ideological ignorance or ideological mendacity, a Marxist desire to strip their fascist competitors of revolutionary dynamism and reduce them to mere “bourgeois hooligans.”

Not all fascisms were equally “fascist” and revolutionary, and even individual fascist movements have oscillated between revolutionary ideals and borderline reactionary para-fascism.

For example, Italian fascism went through three distinct phases. In the years before the seizure of power and in the first half-dozen years of Mussolini’s regime, Italian fascism was in its “purest” form – revolutionary and palingenetic – emphasizing the regeneration of the Italian people and the Italian nation-state. Avant-garde themes and theorists, particularly Futurism, were important in this period, and individuals such as Marinetti were influential in early day Italian fascism.

However, the forces of reaction and of compromise with the establishment were always present; the presence of the King and the Vatican were two impediments to the process of “fascistization” that Mussolini could not, or would not, deal with. In the end, the Concordat was a turning point and the regime’s second phase veered to the “right” in the 1930s, becoming more conservative and reactionary, replacing internal regeneration with external imperialism. Without WW II, chances were good that Italian fascism would have degenerated into a stagnant para-fascist regime similar to that of Franco’s Spain.

Military defeat and the overthrow of Il Duce stopped that process; in the last and third phase of Italian fascism, the “Salo Republic,” the ideology shifted to the left, embracing a militant socialism, and becoming overtly pan-European in scope.

What about the Hitler and the Nazis? There has been some debate as to whether German National Socialism was a form of fascism. It seems to me obvious that it was; that differences existed between the Italian and German forms of fascism is not an argument against that conclusion. All genuine fascisms displayed important differences, yet still contained within themselves the core components of Griffin’s “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism.”

In the case of National Socialism, the palingenesis was biological; Nazism was a heavily racialized and materialist form of fascism. The German National Socialists were tribalistic in worldview rather than Futurist, and, internal debates aside; Hitler himself was very hostile to the European avant-garde.

Thus, key differences between fascist forms are observed. The German brand had the biopolitical advantage of recognizing the importance of race. On the other hand, the Italian brand had the sociopolitical advantage of a more optimistic Futurist orientation, and was more open-minded with respect to tapping into the cultural energies created by the avant-garde artistic and sociopolitical movements extant in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In some sense, perhaps the “purest” brand of fascism was that of Codreanu and his “Legion of the Archangel Michael,” also known as the Iron Guard. This intensely palingenetic movement emphasized spiritual and moral regeneration to create a Romanian “New Man” to lead the nation to a higher level and fulfill the destiny of the Romanian people. This highly “virulent” form of “palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” proved itself unable to co-exist with Antonescu’s conservative authoritarian para-fascism; the Legionary movement’s attempt to seize full power for itself (rather than share it with para-fascists; this sharing was correctly seen by the Legionaries as being an emasculating compromise of their ideology) was crushed by the para-fascist military apparatus.

Three fascisms, three different movements. But the revolutionary energies unleashed by these ideologies stand in sharp contrast to the moribund and ossified conservatism of the para-fascists. The political/cultural avant-garde (Italian), the biological-racialist (German), and the spiritual/moral (Romanian) components of these fascisms are important to us today.

And it is probably wrong to separate out the avant-garde mindset as being only applicable to the political/cultural sphere. After all, we really do need new, cutting-edge memes with respect to both materialist race and non-materialist morality. To quote a certain pro-fascist poet: “Make it new!”

With respect to Antliff’s book itself, chapter topics include Sorelian myth and anti-Semitism, and the fascistic politics of Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier. The importance of Sorelian myth was underscored by a recent Michael O’Meara piece that appeared on TOQ Online. Antliff stresses that culture and aesthetics were extremely important to Sorel in his quest to formulate a doctrine of instrumentally utilizing myth to overturn the hated rationalist-capitalist-democratic system. Art is part of this aesthetic emphasis and, truth be told, Sorel focused on culture over politics; indeed, he was scornful of the power of the myth being used and squandered for low-level political aims.

Further, Sorel went through a distinctly “anti-Semitic” phase, in which Jews were considered the exemplars of ultra-rationalist anti-creators, whose worldview set them in opposition to native peoples and native cultural expressions and aesthetics. Opposing the pro-Dreyfus “French” journal La revue blanche, Sorel sarcastically referred to the journal’s Jewish founders as “two Jews come from Poland in order to regenerate our poor country, so unhappily still contaminated by the Christian civilization of the seventeenth century.” Sorel accused Jewish intellectuals of wanting to promote an abstract (i.e., non-ethnic, non-national, non-cultural) concept of (French) citizenship and to also promote “cosmopolitan anarchy.”

Related to this “anti-Semitism,” Sorel admired and promoted the Classical World; the values of classical heroes, such as the Greeks at Thermopylae, were something counterpoised against the Jewish ethic and the degeneration of parliamentary democracy.

Sorel considered art as related to the creativity of work, a creativity that he wished to inculcate into the “productive workers” in place of assembly line mass capitalism and rationalized “one man-one vote” democracy. He also considered an enlightened “proletariat” as being able to reinvigorate a stagnant bourgeoisie through class conflict.

Georges Valois, 1878–1945

Georges Valois (born Alfred-Georges Gressent) went through a wide variety of ideological contortions in his lifetime, from fascism to “libertarian communism,” ending up dying in a Nazi concentration camp after being captured as a member of the “French Resistance.” While such an unbalanced individual represents much of what is wrong with the “movement” (changing your mind is one thing – completely switching your worldview from one moment to the next is another), some of his activities during his “fascist stage” are of interest.

Particularly enlightening is the focus on the urbanism of Le Corbusier, which stands in contrast to much of the American “movement” and its anti-urbanist emphasis on militant ruralism. No doubt, in the West today, the city is an anti-white, anti-Western disaster, full of racial enemies. No doubt as well that throughout much of human history, the city was an unhealthy and sterilizing place, inimical to racial survival and racial progress.

However, in our modern technological age, if we can solve our racial problems, the city itself does not necessarily have to be a racial evil. As part of a natural continuum of human ecologies – isolated rural, rural, suburban/town, small city, larger cities, etc. – the city may play an important role in the Futurist racial ethnostate of tomorrow, a place of technological advancement, racially healthy avant-garde memes, and sociopolitical dynamism. Racial nationalism can and should be reconciled to a certain degree of urbanism – not the urbanism of degeneration, but that of regeneration.

This of course underlies a schism within activism that often goes unnoticed – between modernist, technological tribalist-racialist Futurism and a ruralist anti-technological ecotribalism. It is clear that the French fascists described by Antliff for the most part fall into the first group. Thus, a major divide exists between the Futurist-Modernist fascists (think Marinetti in Italy) and the ruralist soil-oriented romantic past-oriented fascists (think Darre in Germany, or the agrarian-nostalgic Vichy regime in France).

Of course, a healthy society needs both worldviews, and in practical terms a balance is required. For example, Valois incorporated a “love for the native soil” along with his Futurist mindset. Indeed, Valois contrasted “Asiatic nomadness” associated with communism with the “Latin sedentary” style — derived from “cultured Roman legions” — of the French, tied to the native soil and inclined to fascism. He also associated the hated nomadic lifestyle with capitalism, since hyper-rational capitalism uprooted the workers from grounding in an organic society and turned them into atomized, rootless “nomads.”

A related issue is the relationship between Futurism and the veneration of the past. Antliff makes clear that the emphasis on the past in fascism (e.g., the Greco-Roman classical world) was not meant to mean turning back the clock and shunning progress. Instead, this look to the past was, paradoxically, futurist, in that the fascists wanted to take from the past certain noble values and behaviors and use these to help build the modern, technological world of tomorrow. Therefore, one need not discard the past to build a new future, but judiciously use elements of the past as necessary building blocks for the projected futurist edifice. Different strands of fascist thought need not be incompatible, just as common ground must be found between the tribalist futurist and tribalist ruralist strands of modern racial nationalist thought.

Another French fascist, Philippe Lamour, also went through many ideological “twists and turns,” ultimately rejecting fascism in favor of anti-fascism and syndicalism. Lamour originally represented the fascist variant of “machine primitivism” – that is, an anti-rationalist “new consciousness attuned to the dynamism of technology.” Thus, urban industrialism, technology, productivity, and futurist modernism need not be associated with “rational” egalitarianism but with tribalistic fascism. Lamour wished to create a “community of producers” integrating the different classes of French society to overturn liberal democracy in favor of a modernist technologically dynamic fascist state.

Early French fascists such as Lamour also promoted the idea of a European federation, and attempted to make common cause with more pan-European and “leftist” German National Socialists, such as the Strasserian “Black Front,” who favored European cooperation as opposed to Hitler’s hegemony through military conquest. Not coincidentally, before he fell into Hitler’s orbit, Mussolini also favored an alliance of European (fascist) states, promoted through the doctrine of “Roman Universality,” with practical expression through events such as the pan-fascist Montreux conference.

Lamour’s greatest contribution to French fascism was the promotion of the “conflict of generations,” pitting the younger fascistic generation of WW I against the older generation of parliamentary democrats. This latter group was seen as being out of touch with the new age of national regeneration, avant-garde culture and politics, Sorelian myth, as well as technological productivity. Lamour and his “war generation” were at the forefront of the battle of youth vs. the image of fossilized reactionary status quo politicians.

Aesthetically, the work of German artist Germaine Krull and even Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein influenced the avant-garde sensibilities of “machine primitive” young French fascists such as Lamour. Antliff summarizes Lamour’s unique contribution to the ideology of interwar French fascism as the melding of “machine aesthetics” to the concept of generational warfare. Thus, to Lamour, technological dynamism and the replacement of the ossified previous generation with fresh youth were the Sorelian myths required to spark an era of national renewal.

Thierry Maulnier, 1908–1988

Thierry Maulnier (born Jacques Talagrand), author of “Crisis Is in Man,” had as his concept of Sorelian myth “classical violence.” Within the journal Combat, Maulnier and colleagues opposed the leftist French Popular Front’s Marxist-themed “culture” with their own view of aesthetics in architecture and sculpture. Antliff describes Combat’s as focusing on “three interrelated spheres: political institutions, human spirituality, and aesthetics.” The classicism of the Maulnier school promoted the idea of a “synthesis of Dionysian energy and Apollonian restraint.”

Politically, Maulnier wished for a form of French fascism that rejected parliamentary democracy but which still supported the rights and aspirations of the individual, as opposed to what was perceived as the more authoritarian and collectivist societies of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany. These distinctions between French and other fascisms became more salient after Mussolini fell into Hitler’s orbit and became hostile to French national interests. Indeed, before the start of WW II, Maulnier advocated a “minimal fascist program” for France that would be both a short-term “fix” to bolster the French military for confrontation with the Axis, as well as preparation for the long-term and permanent fascistic remodeling of society after the Axis threat had dissipated.

It must be noted that the Valois, Lamour, and Maulnier fascist ideologies, while linked together by a palingenetic call for national renewal and a rejection of parliamentary democracy, did differ in important ways. In particular, the classicism of Maulnier can be contrasted with the militant futurism and “machine primitivism” of Lamour. Although Antliff stresses that the French fascist focus on the classical world does not necessarily imply a rejection of modernism per se, the specific differences between Maulnier and Lamour were the greatest of any of the individuals profiled by Antliff. Valois and Lamour both embraced the image of “industrial production” as a central motif of their ideology; however, while Lamour spun together a myth of generational conflict, Valois instead emphasized a “spirit of victory” in which the heroism of WW I will now be turned to a battle of the entire nation to create an organized fascist-industrial society. Of these three men, it was Lamour who was the most steadfastly “avant-garde” in cultural-aesthetic orientation, Maulnier the least.

Crude ethnic stereotyping may lead one to conclude that an emphasis on art, culture, and aesthetics in the creation of fascist ideology was (and is) a particularly “French” phenomenon. Of course, other fascist movements were concerned with these issues, sometimes to a significant extent, but none of them incorporated such memes into the core of the political thinking as did French fascist thinkers. Indeed, the cultural-aesthetic emphasis of the French strain of fascism is a breath of fresh air after immersion in the more focused political thought of the Italian Fascists and the racialist ideals of the German National Socialists.

In fact, all three areas of focus – cultural-aesthetic, political, and racialist – are required for a complete memetic complex to promote fascistic ideals. As a biological reductionist, I would emphasize the racialist first of all, but doing so with respect to modern genetic science rather than the sort of quackery that passed as “racial science” under the Nazis. However, biological racialism by itself is not enough. Without an edifice of political and cultural-aesthetic memes, the foundation of ultimate interests will go nowhere.

Related to this issue of political aesthetics, I was impressed by Alex Kurtagic’s analysis of “semiotic systems” and the importance of style in shaping perceptions of status within nationalist memes. This is important. Of course, the enemy will, as a matter of course, attempt to oppose this approach through co-option and/or mockery.

Co-option is a problem for any memetic threat to establishment power; for example, the GOP has effectively co-opted “rightist, racist” concerns through the exploitation of “implicit whiteness.” This strategy has enabled the Republicans to retain white support while at the same time moving continuously leftward in the direction of overtly anti-white policies.

Thus, while aesthetics and style are important, they always must be innately linked to content to prevent the establishment from utilizing the same semiotic systems to promote the exact opposite of our objectives. Dealing with co-option will be difficult, and it is crucially important that the problem be analyzed from the beginning in a proactive fashion.

In other words, right from the start, the construction of unique avant-garde racial-nationalist semiotic systems must incorporate strategies for preventing co-option and dealing with co-option if these preventive measures fail. Therefore, we must identify, in advance, as many problems with each approach as possible, and develop multiple contingency plans for dealing with each emergent counter-move of the establishment.

Mockery is also a problem; the establishment, utilizing its control of the mass media and its stable of celebrity puppets, can subject any racial-nationalist semiotic system to a barrage of withering ridicule. It is important that the elitist and superior nature of the system be of sufficient strength that adherents can turn around such ridicule and assert it as a matter of pride and not shame. In other words, the establishment ridicule itself must be mocked as the pathetic attempts of a dying and out-of-touch system to delegitimize a novel movement of which they are afraid.

Again, careful planning is required to plan against the establishment’s ridicule strategy, but if both co-option and mockery can be successfully dealt with, the semiotic-aesthetic strategy has a chance to achieve its objectives. And those objectives are, in essence, to defuse the “social pricing” attacks of the establishment against racial-nationalist activists and adherents, by providing an alternative value system opposed to, and independent of, establishment standards and acceptance.

In summary, Antliff has dissected a particularly interesting and heretofore unexplored strain of French fascism characterized by an embrace of avant-garde cultural concepts, modernism, Futurism, productivity and the planned society, urbanism and industrial technology, exemplified by so-called “machine primitivism.”

With today’s worries of “peak oil,” and concerns that the multiracial West will collapse, visions of decentralized ruralistic tribalism have again become prominent in nationalist thought. However, the white man is endlessly inventive, and free of the shackles of genocidal globalist multiculturalism, the technological genius of whites, so unleashed, may provide the foundation for a Futurist, technologically advanced and tribalist society. Such a society would have options for both the urbanist technological and ruralist agrarian lifestyles for those whose preferences are for one or the other.

Although I am sure he is an “anti-fascist,” Antliff’s work helps us to consider one technological Futurist option. The major conclusion from both Antliff’s and Kurtagic’s analyses is that staid and conformist methods for sociopolitical activism may be best replaced, at least in part, by avant-garde memes that let some “fresh air” into stale “movement” environs.

Editor’s Note: For the first part of this review essay on Dominique Venner’ s Ernst Jünger: Un autre destin européen (Paris: Éds. du Rocher, 2009), click here.

4. Der Arbeiter

Jünger’s nationalist politics turned out to be a passing phase in his long life.  By 1930, after the wind started to go from the revolutionary-nationalist sails and the National Socialists of Hitler’s NSDAP began their electoral ascent, he appeared less frequently in the pages of its publications.

Part of this was due, Venner suggests, to the fact that, like many “idealists,” he thought politics belonged to Corneille’s heroic world (in which duty, honor, and morality dominated), not to Machiavelli’s morally compromising one.

Venner also notes that the very nature of Jünger’s “soldierly heroism” was alien to the sensibility of the rebel or revolutionary.

In Der Arbeiter (The Worker, 1932), which makes a violent condemnation of liberal democracy and an apology for “a new, young, brutal elite” inspired by a heroic realism, Jünger criticized the bourgeoisie not only as a soldier opposing its unmanly fixation on peace and security, but also from a “fascist” perspective, which dismissed the principle of “enlightened self-interest” as a deception born in denial of life’s underlying tragedy.

The technological character of modern warfare became for him a manifestation of “elemental, mythical, irrational forces” that transcended bourgeois economic concepts and ideologies, drawing, in its demands for courage and duty, on those Nietzschean life forces opposing the nihilism inherent to liberal modern societies.

In advocating a technoeconomic mobilization against the bourgeois order for the sake of overcoming its atomizing differentiations, Martin Heidegger, for one, thought Der Arbeiter’s technological orientation was just another example of the nihilism that had issued from World War I.

Venner, by contrast, argues that the book can be read as a defiance of nihilism, to the degree it sought to turn nihilism’s technological arms against itself.

A strong self-consciousness anchored in a new elite modeled on Prussian military forms, Jünger held, was alone capable of delivering Germans from a decadence oriented to the lowest, isolating reaches of human life.

Jünger’s vision of “a heroic world of work,” like much in his life, was shaped by his wartime experience.

With the advent of modern “industrial” war, the battlefield became a “factory,” where “battalions of workers” operated the new heavy machinery of destruction.  This is the image of the social organ as a giant machine whose complex tasks are directed by a central intelligence or spirit — one, Jünger hoped, which would function along Prussian lines, rather than according to the debased, often Jewish ones of our present masters.

Against the inorganic and inherently meaningless world of the bourgeoisie, Jünger’s proposed “worker-soldier” ceases, as such, to be a cog and becomes an integral component of a larger hierarchical order, in which each position is a necessary and meaningful feature of t he whole.

Unlike the “civilized” bourgeois of Weimar’s liberal republic, the worker-soldier fully submits to the demands of industrial production, becoming one with its “vitality.”

Confronting its “dark impulses” and overcoming himself in its demands, like the soldier overcoming death on the field of battle, der Arbeiter affirms both “the eternal Will to Power at work in all living things” and the “Eternal” in his own race and heritage.

Against the nation-destroying egoism of liberal democracy, Jünger’s Der Arbeiter extols a philosophy based on eternal struggle, where the elemental forces of instinctive life, suffocated by modernity’s distorting strictures, are mobilized in a titanic struggle that revives “the ancient virtues of manliness, courage, resoluteness, hardness, discipline, and honor.”

Though Jünger did not think in biological-racial terms and though his nationalism was more anti-bourgeois and soldierly than völkisch, he was nevertheless not all that far, in certain respects, from the NSDAP, whose Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1939 that National Socialism too “understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time.”

Following the “coup of 1933,” Jünger, Spengler, von Salomon and others of the Conservative Revolution became silent opponents of the new regime, which they saw as a corruption of National Socialism.

In their view, Hitler’s new regime lacked real culture, high morals, and a sense of measure.  Without these virtues, it could only squander the possibility of a real redressment.  As a consequence, these conservative revolutionaries thought Hitler would lead Germany not to rebirth, but to catastrophe.

In contrast, though, to liberal and socialist critics, they refused to abandon their country, however critical they were of the new NS state.

It was not, then, that these revolutionary nationalists rejected the new regime because it was “plebeian,” as is often argued, but rather because they saw it as a betrayal of the national socialism, which the Conservative Revolution had conceived as an alternative to liberal modernity.

5. Destiny

Jünger’s heroic realist period was followed by the humanist one announced in Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs), which was immediately (and correctly) interpreted by the NSDAP as a thinly veiled attack on it.

Hitler, however, had an immense respect for the hero of World War I and ordered that he not be touched.

Throughout the Second World War, as Jünger’s spiritual flirtation with the anti-Hitler opposition grew, he seemed always to be, almost providentially, protected by higher forces.

Venner is very critical of Jünger’s subsequent postwar evolution as an “anarch”: a figure developed in his dystopian novel Eumeswil (1977).  This figure, faced with the powerlessness imposed on him by the occupying barbarians (Communist Russia and Liberal America), is compelled to observe, rather than to act against, their stultified world.

Venner nevertheless balances Jünger’s weaknesses against his strengths (evident in the extraordinary beauty of his art, the equally extraordinary heroism of his earlier representation of Prussian arms, and not least in his refusal to disavow his early work and submit to the Allied denazification).  On balance, he judges these strengths and weaknesses to be inherently estimable.

Jünger’s work, more importantly, serves for Venner to highlight the spiritual collapse of Western Man, who has succumbed to liberalism’s economic/technological realm of consummate meaningless.

For Venner’s Jünger, the European has been transformed by the occupying powers into a spiritually and morally vacuous being, who lacks a love of beautiful things, instinctively denigrates noble ideas, is attentive only to his advantage, fixates on security, remains docile before propagandists and social-engineers, and deludes himself with philanthropic theories.

Jünger’s anarch is not the counterpoint of the monarch, as is the anarchist.

Instead, he is a detached observer who renounces struggle, though he remains unconquered, the king of himself.

Deprived of his role as a historical actor, the self-conscious European today tends to take refuge in Jünger’s anarch.

The world-shattering catastrophes of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, after ejecting the European from history, has, provisionally, broken the will of his destining project.  Thus overwhelmed, he has slipped into a state of near dormition.

Like Ulysses, Venner argues it will take a long journey, suffering, and many new trials before the European recovers the lost country of his destiny.

Is there another European destiny?

Perhaps.

In the last somber century, which has suppressed and entombed Europe, as a spirit and a force in the world, there stands Ernst Jünger, who fought Dionysus’ destructive chaos like a form-giving Apollo, so as to forge from his struggle a thing of beauty and power.

In Venner’s essay, Jünger becomes a European exemplar, the modern Gestalt of the Homeric tradition, always alert to the world’s wonder and to the dangerous opportunities it offers as a means of going beyond one self to achieve the fate to which one is destined.

Man of action and contemplation, of high culture and great courage, a loyal friend of France, who sought to reconcile the two brother peoples of the old Carolingian world, the young Jünger reminds us, Venner says, of what Europe once was and what she can be again in a future true to her destiny.

In Jünger’s early works on war, there is, Venner points out, a strong hint of the Iliad, the mythic foundation of the white man’s world.

Jünger, indeed, personifies many of those traits which Europeans of good lineage have always displayed in confrontation with the challenges of their age.

Thus it was that whenever Jünger evoked destiny, he did so in ways similar to those who call on Allah, God, Providence, or History.

Destiny for him is fate in the ancient sense.

Homer said that even the gods are subject to destiny, in the sense of being subject to forces beyond what human reason can explain or control.  This is not Christian fatalism, but Nietzsche’s amor fati (love of destiny), the approbation of that which one is because that is what one is and cannot be otherwise — though modern man, in the folly of his amnesic materialism, deludes himself into thinking that he can be anyone — a fish out of water, a white equal to a black, a spirit become a digestive tract.

However consumed by the Heraclitian flux into which he had been swept up and which, in turned, swept away his youthful self, the mature Jünger nevertheless realized that Europe’s postwar dormition would not be eternal — that the young Jünger, in some future turn of the wheel, would have another occasion to pursue a fate full of heroic, limpid transparency.

For Venner, Jünger’s life, particularly that of the early period, holds out to the White Men of the West the figure of another European destiny.

Like a chisel on steel, his work engraved the traits of something permanent in our heritage — that of a great destiny whose heroism and conviction  unconsciously asserts itself in terms of what it has consciously come to understand.

Our world may now be ruled by barbarians who offend our sense of justice and freedom — just as they deny us our right to live as a distinct people, faithful to who we are.

Europeans, though, have repeatedly thrown back such barbarians.  Throughout their history, at Thermopylae or at Salamis, at Portiers and before the gates of Vienna for example, there have been instances of extreme tension, where the highest values of their civilization depended on a handful of men — the men whom the author of In Stahlgewittern beckons us to be.

What the young infantry officer had learned in the storms of steel became thus an enduring form of his life, a form forged in a difficult time, from a Herculean struggle against the crushing weight of matter and machine, as it strove for something higher than mere survival.  This is the form that Venner imposes on his understanding of Jünger’s life.

It is one, perhaps, that white Americans may also one day have to impose on their own lives.

In Dominique Venner’s historical essay, Ernst Jünger: Un autre destin européen, the subject is presented as une figure ultime, a European archetype provisionally absent from Europe today, but nevertheless one rooted in the depths of the European spirit — and destined, thus, to re-appear should Europeans ever re-awake to re-assert themselves in the world.

Somewhat like a seismograph, the successive stages of Jünger’s long life (1895-1998) seemed to register the successive twentieth-century epochs of which he was its most emblematic representative.

In the period 1914-18, when Europeans worshiped the gods of war, he was a great warrior.  After the defeat of 1918 and the shame of Weimar, he served as an eloquent proponent of the Conservative Revolution’s resistance to the Wilsonians “new world order.”  Then, after looking to Hitler to deliver the Germans from their travails, he found that their presumed deliverer threatened an even more devastating travail, becoming, then, a precocious critic of the NS dictator.

During the Second World War, when French and other Europeans living under the swastika hoped for a united Europe, Jünger, stationed in Paris with the Wehrmacht, was their champion.  Following the war, when Europeans sought a new humanism to re-animate their exhausted civilization, Jünger’s Der Friede (The Peace, 1944), with its thoughts on spiritual regeneration amidst the ruins, was its exemplar.  Finally, as the postwar expectations turned to a subduing sense of powerlessness, born from the occupation of the two extra-European continental blocs, his later work prescribed an autonomous, almost indifferent detachment from the prevailing powers.

Spanning these varied epochal roles, there were, in Venner’s view, two different Jüngers: the rebellious one of his youth (whom Venner extols) and the Olympian one of his maturity (with whom he is less sympathetic).

The first, true to pre-1945 Europe, was dominated by Mars and the radical anti-bourgeois spirit of the German 1920s.

The second Jünger begins with On the Marble Cliffs (1939) and develops during the course of WORLD WAR II, as he assumed a more artistic, contemplative course — less Nietzschean than Goethean.  This is the Jünger who adapted himself to Europe’s post-1945 prostration.

For Venner the two seemingly contradictory Jüngers symbolize the alternative destinies to which Europeans have been subject in the twentieth century.

1. Das Elternhaus

In a youth nurtured by a thoughtful father and a tender mother, Jünger learned French, Greek, and Latin, read greatly, developed what would become a life-long interest in entomology, and sank deep roots into his family’s intimate familiarity with European history, culture, and science.  This early cultivation of his spirit — which had nothing to do with the prestigious schools he attended and, in fact, was pursued as an alternative to what he took to be the philistine routines of bourgeois society — would make him one of the preeminent High Culture representatives of European Man.

The man of high culture was also a man of action.  This was suggested early on, for every summer during his boyhood, Jünger and his younger brother, Georg Friedrich (later a respected writer in his own right) spent at their country house in Northwest Hanover (Rehburg), where they devoted themselves to wandering through forests and marches remote to human habitation, day in and day out, like wild Indians one with nature.

These boyhood adventures, combined with copious reading of travel and adventure stories, assumed a certain resonance in this age of colonialism.

Thoughts of faraway places, like savage Africa (a primitive continent devoid of civilization, virtually peopleless, and symbol of a new European adventure) could not but capture the young Jünger’s imagination, which was already seeking out mythic realities and archaic truths as an alternative to bourgeois reasonableness.

In November 1913, he ran away from home, to France, to join the French Foreign Legion — less for the sake of the warrior’s vocation, for which he would later be known, than for that of the high adventure he hoped to find in Africa, as a slaver or an explorer.

His father eventually collected him in Algeria — after bribing him with a promised expedition to Kilimanjaro, if he would only first return home and complete his university studies.

The young Jünger, though, did not have long to wait for another adventure.

In August 1914, on the third day of what we now know as WORLD WAR I, he enlisted with a regiment of Hanoverian fusiliers: “The war seized us like an intoxication.”

Intoxication soon gave way to a sobering familiarity with the war’s harsh, primeval violence.

Wounded for what would be the first of more than seven times in April 1915, his father convinced him to take a commission (perhaps not realizing that lieutenants had the highest rate of mortality).  But typical of his spirit, he refused his father’s request to assume a position in the rear, away from the danger, and, in fact, became a “shock trooper,” the bravest and most imperiled of the war’s foot soldiers.

Through its stern trials and murderous punishments, the war would give form not merely to the highly decorated soldier, the youngest ever to receive the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military accommodation, but also to the writer and thinker to whom Venner pays homage in his essay.

2. Fire and Steel

In In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel, 1920), which made him one of the most celebrated German writers of his age, and in other war-related works written in the Twenties (The Battle as Inner Experience, Fire and Blood, Copse 125, etc.), Jünger recognized every soldier’s right to kill his enemy and to be killed by him.

There was no hate or rancor in Jünger’s view of the enemy, for he honored both his rights and his heroism.  His disdain was reserved solely for pacifists, who, in their detachment not just from the state, but from the people of whom they themselves were an organic part, insisted on seeing only the horror of war, as if man’s highest duty was to flee the pains and torments that come with virile resolution, failing, thus, to understand that man’s destructive impulse is an essential facet of his nature, the verso of his creativity.

Between two civilized peoples, war (whose cruelty and absurdity Jünger never ceased to emphasize) tended to exalt, test, and extenuate a people’s values.  As such, he saw it as the supreme spiritual experience, as clashing “psychic powers” engaged and tested themselves against one another.  His was not the typical nationalistic, imperialistic, or militaristic apology for war, but an affirmation of raw life free from the “human, all too human” (Nietzsche) world centered on bourgeois optimism and its denial of death and destruction.

Jünger was indeed less concerned with what war was fought over, than with how it was fought.

Amidst destroyed villages and desolate fields ruined by battling armies, Jünger argued that one must stand like granite.  The fields and villages could always be restored or rebuilt, but the time and destiny of those who fought would never return.  Like Homer’s Hector, Jünger’s soldier unhesitantly rises to his fate, determined to make his death a beautiful one.

Courage for Jünger became man’s principal virtue and danger a chance to engage life at its highest, most primordial level.

This sense of struggle — and of death as the end we all face — implies that every generation must play its part, as it engages the fate bestowed to it.

Certain writers with similar experiences of the war (like Drieu La Rochelle or Céline) believed the values of courage and heroism had been trivialized in modern industrialized war . . . but not Jünger, who refused to submit to the weight of matter and machine.

The nature of twentieth-century war (dieser Scheisskrieg) simply demanded a greater will and audacity.

In reference to his own experience, he contended that a person’s psychic energy could prevail over the titanic forces of modern technology.

This was less a romantic rejection of technology’s awesome powers than a recognition that his submission to war’s imperatives created the opportunity for new experiences of personal elevation and individual authenticity.  He wrote in In Stahlgewittern that it was never a question of the scale and might of the forces opposing them, but of the courage and conviction of the men behind these forces.

In a similar vein, Venner makes a revealing comparison between Jünger’s Das Wäldchen 125 (Copse 125) and Drieu’s La Comedie De Charleroi (1934), both of which focus on incidents situated within one of the major WORLD WAR I battles.  Though Drieu in his novel looked back on the war from the perspective of the victors, the horrors and futilities dominating his view seem to suggest that he was among the vanquished, while Jünger’s work, in emphasizing the Homeric vitality of the German soldier, conveys, paradoxically, a sense of victory and triumph, despite Germany’s actual defeat.

The revolutionary nationalist Franz Schauwecker expressed it in this way: The war gave form to the “German mystique.”  “We fought the entire world . .  . In losing the war, we nevertheless won.  For even with defeat, we won what was needed for future victories.”  That is, they acquired not just the knowledge but the will to dominate the whole world.

Focusing on archaic conceptions of struggle that prefigure new forms of creativity, such ideas are obviously remote to contemporary notions of enlightened self-interest, which have come to frame the meaningless orientations of our age.

Great historical movements, it follows, cannot be explained in terms of pure causality.

The mytho-historic vision worked out in Jünger’s subsequent books would cause him to suppose that a people’s life is ultimately subject to another force, another reality — dictated by man’s confrontation with destiny — that is, with what man is fated to be if he is to be himself.

Resisting in this way the materialist interpretation of war, as well as the dominant nihilism, Jünger privileged the primacy of the spirit, as it engages the forces seeking to deny man his destined fate.

It’s this heroic resistance to what denies the European his destiny, which makes Jünger such an exemplary figure for Venner.

3. The Conservative Revolution

Following World War I, all Europe was in intellectual revolt against the old order.  This was especially so in Germany.

The nationalist, anti-liberal intellectual effervescence of the 1920s, which Armin Mohler christened the “Conservative Revolution” (arguably the most fertile movement of twentieth-century thought) was no counter-revolution, but a revolutionary, profoundly Maistrian movement — seeking not a restoration, but a transcendence.

Represented by the young Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Carl Schmitt, Ernst von Salomon, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Gottfried Benn, Martin Heidegger, and Jünger, among others, the Conservative Revolution was shaped by two major influences: German romanticism in its rejection of arid eighteenth-century rationalism and Nietzsche in his revolt against the nihilism spawned by modern existence.

Against the demobilizing cult of reason enthroned by the Enlightenment, source of all people-killing materialisms, the Conservative Revolution sought to rally the vital forces refusing to abide by liberalism’s bloodless dominion.  This anti-liberalism drew on what Jünger called “heroic realism” (which, being purely irrational — and hence “unrealistic” — ignores the overwhelming odds against it for the sake of something higher in itself).

History, Spengler said, is the history of those who don’t calculate.

If, for example, the Irish had rationally accessed the situation facing them, they would have succumbed to the genocidal yoke of the British Crown, becoming thus a people without a history.

Jünger’s heroic realist “resigns” himself to his fate, as he rushes to it to affirm all that is distinct to his spirit.  Like Spengler, Jünger saw history not as the Enlightenment’s march of progress, but as the manifestation of the willful, instinctual life force animating the possibilities inherent in life’s ultimately inexplicable forms.

Rejecting liberalism’s illusory beliefs in its alleged mastery of history, history becomes for him a manifestation of those vital elemental forces superior to those that come from liberalism’s reign of quantity.

Jünger sympathized with that Conservative-Revolutionary tendency which Mohler called “national revolutionary,” specifically to its Nationalist Bolshevik wing, which upheld the Lutheran-Prussian tradition, with its distinct mix of Germanic and Slavic elements, oriented to the East and against the West (in contrast to Bavarian and Austrian Catholics, who, like Hitler, took the opposite stance).

Thomas Mann wrote at the time that a greater bond links the Germans to the Russians than to the French and to the other nations born of Rome.

In this view, Germany and Russia, unlike the liberal Franco-Anglo-American realm, had avoided the bourgeoisie’s “slave world” (Nietzsche), whose obsessive materialism has since inundated the junked-clogged market societies now dominating us.

It was this Prussian Russophilia of National Bolshevism, which is what set its principal proponent, Ernst Niekisch, against Hitler.

Based not on an affinity for Leninism, but on a proposed anti-liberal alliance of Proletarian Russia and Proletarian Germany against the Capitalist West, National Bolshevism — not to be confused with the tendency Mikhail Agursky describes in The Third Rome or with certain other tendencies that today identify themselves with this moniker — represented an alternative to Western decadence that was arguably less infected with the liberal virus than was Hitler’s particular derivation of National Socialism.

During the Weimar period, nationalists were in fact much closer to Communists (who categorically rejected the bourgeois order of the Wilsonians) than to liberals or socialists.  Collaboration between the revolutionary-nationalist right and the German Communist party (KPD), the largest, most militant Communist party outside Russia, occurred, accordingly, in numerous direct and indirect ways.

(National Bolsheviks, as such, rejected the conservative argument that Russian Communism, or more accurately said, Russia under Communist rule, was merely a product of a demonic Jewish enterprise.  Even Hitler, fierce anti-Bolshevik that he was, esteemed German Communists who defected to his ranks in ways he never did for socialist or liberal defectors — for Communists were not only in open rebellion against the liberal decadence of the West, but, in their self-sacrifice and conviction, were imbued with the same exemplary, soldierly courage.)

For National Bolsheviks, Russian Communism was only superficially Marxist.

They thus sought a Russo-Prussiancentric Europe — which they saw as preferable to Hitler’s notion, inspired by the crusading imperialism of his lapsed Habsburg Catholicism, of a German-dominated Russia.

Despite understanding that socialism (in favoring a social order oriented to the nation’s higher welfare rather than to individual self-interest), was simply another side of nationalism, these nationalists nevertheless realized that Marxism was incapable of fighting capitalism, because it was, at root, an offshoot of the same Enlightenment materialism.  The Marxist values of class struggle had, indeed, ended up perpetuating bourgeois values, for its central axis was a rationalist, calculating, and thus very Jewish conception of class as a purely economic category — whose highest rational goal, not means, was to understand and possess the world as a resource from which wealth and riches could be had and to which all questions of being were never posed.

Nationalists, by contrast, saw workers as an organic part of the nation, who needed to be integrated into and made to feel a part of its natural hierarchy.

Workers were not members of some macro-economic category — “the international proletariat” — as Marxists supposed.  There was only one proletariat, that born of the bourgeois-dominated nation, and, under a true nationalist regime faithful to the archaic spirit of Prussia’s heroic nobility, this stratum would be transformed into a healthy producer estate (the traditional base of the Aryan social pyramid), ceasing thus to be the alienated, ostracized, and oppressed class that the bourgeoisie had made of it.

To be continued

All this requires a well-oiled propaganda machine to convince the boobs that they’re out fighting for freedom. And, of course, the standard way of saying that the dictator you want to demonize is evil is to say that he is “like Hitler.” I searched for the following phrases in Google with quotation marks to see which government heads are the leading Hitlers.

That’s quite impressive, but as far as Hitlerness is concerned, nobody can compare to the last two US presidents.

Poor Carter became a Hitler for criticizing Israel in that book of his.  It looks like  being president before the internet era took off really hurt Clinton’s and Reagan’s Hitler rankings. Obama has only been in office for 8 months. In another year he will become the all-time leading Hitler.

Interestingly, even entire countries can be “like Hitler.”

Poor Israel is really not well-liked. They’re Hitler, and the people who oppose them are Hitlers too.

From HBD Books, September 5, 2009

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.

Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.

By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.

What cause could justify such sacrifices?

The German-Polish war had come out of a quarrel over a town the size of Ocean City, Md., in summer. Danzig, 95 percent German, had been severed from Germany at Versailles in violation of Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Even British leaders thought Danzig should be returned.

Why did Warsaw not negotiate with Berlin, which was hinting at an offer of compensatory territory in Slovakia? Because the Poles had a war guarantee from Britain that, should Germany attack, Britain and her empire would come to Poland’s rescue.

But why would Britain hand an unsolicited war guarantee to a junta of Polish colonels, giving them the power to drag Britain into a second war with the most powerful nation in Europe?

Was Danzig worth a war? Unlike the 7 million Hong Kongese whom the British surrendered to Beijing, who didn’t want to go, the Danzigers were clamoring to return to Germany.

Comes the response: The war guarantee was not about Danzig, or even about Poland. It was about the moral and strategic imperative “to stop Hitler” after he showed, by tearing up the Munich pact and Czechoslovakia with it, that he was out to conquer the world. And this Nazi beast could not be allowed to do that.

If true, a fair point. Americans, after all, were prepared to use atom bombs to keep the Red Army from the Channel. But where is the evidence that Adolf Hitler, whose victims as of March 1939 were a fraction of Gen. Pinochet’s, or Fidel Castro‘s, was out to conquer the world? . . . Read the whole article.

"Obey us, or we'll weep!"

County officials today will weigh in on whether the LA Opera should hold a festival honoring the music of Richard Wagner, an anti-semitic 19th-century composer.

The opera company is scheduled to perform Wagner’s “Ring” cycle opera over several months, starting in April 2010. It will also feature lectures and other events tied the composer.

But county Supervisor Michael Antonovich, who represents parts of the San Gabriel Valley, has introduced a motion calling on the Board of Supervisors to oppose the opera company’s plans to feature Wagner’s work so prominently.

Some have charged that his music, which was admired by Adolf Hitler, represents a Nazi ideology and should not be performed. But representatives of the opera company say Antonovich is attempting censorship.

The board lacks the power to regulate what music the opera company can perform: Today’s motion, if approved, would result in a letter from the board to the opera company asking it to lessen its focus on Wagner by including works by other composers and offering lectures focusing on Wagner’s openly anti-semitic views.

“This is not an issue of censorship but of balance,” Antonovich said. “They need to include individuals who object to how Wagner’s music was used by the Nazis…he shouldn’t be glorified.”

Local attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who serves on the LA Opera board and is president of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, said Antonovich was using the issue to generate publicity for a cause few people are concerned about. “There is no groundswell of people who are opposed to this,” said Schoenberg.

He added that nobody at the opera company is trying to deny Wagner’s contemptible views.

“He was a crazy anti-semite, and a terrible person,” said Schoenberg. “I wouldn’t have him to dinner. But his music is undeniably great.”

He pointed out that similar debates about Wagner broke out in Israel in the 1990s, but his music was ultimately performed by the Israeli Philharmonic.

Carie Delmar, who has a local opera blog and has long opposed performing Wagner, said she’s concerned with the way Wagner’s music was used by the Nazis.

“For Holocaust survivors, his music brings back horrible memories,” said Delmar. “His music was, like, a soundtrack for the Holocaust.”

“L.A. County Supervisor Antonovich weighs in on Wagner’s opera”
by Dan Abendschein
San Gabriel Valley Tribune, July 20, 2009

In 2009, we mark the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun (1859-1952). The Norwegian novelist, born Knut Pedersen, is, along with Hendrik Ibsen, the most widely read and translated Norwegian writer of all. In 1890, Knut Hamsun made his debut with his stylistically innovative novel Hunger. From the start, this novel was a great success and was the beginning of a long and productive literary career. In 1920, Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize for literature. His influence on European and American literature is immense and incalculable. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and I. B. Singer were inspired by the talent of Knut Hamsun. Singer called him the “father of modern literature.” In Flanders, two writers, Felix Timmermans and Gerald Walschap, were inspired by the Norwegian Nobel Prize-winner.

In Norway, the 150th birthday of Knut Hamsun will be celebrated by theatrical exhibitions, productions, and an international conference. One of the main squares of Oslo, located just beside the national Opera, will henceforth bear his name. A monument will finally be erected in his honor. One might say that the Norwegians have just discovered the name of their very famous compatriot. Recently, a large number of towns and villages have named squares and streets for him. At the place where he resided, in Hamaroy, a “Knut Hamsun Center” will officially open on August 4th, the day of his birth. On that day, a special postage stamp will be issued. Yet Knut Hamsun was denounced and vilified for decades by the Norwegian establishment.

Hamsun lived a nomadic life much of his existence. He was born the son of a poor tailor. His destitute father entrusted him to a rich uncle. The small boy was to work for this uncle in order to repay the debts that his parents had run up, plus interest. At the end of four years, the young boy, then fourteen years old, had enough of this uncle and went out into the big world. Twice hunger forced him to emigrate to the United States where he took countless odd jobs. But always he had the same objective in mind: to become a writer. His model was his compatriot Björnstjerne Björnson.

Germanophile

After his literary breakthrough with Hunger, Hamsun became incredibly productive. He owed a large part of his success to the German translations of his works. His books received huge printings there. Thanks to his German publisher, Hamsun finally knew financial security after so many years utter destitution. But there was more. The Norwegian writer never hid his Germanophilia. Indeed, it became more pronounced as his Anglophobia grew. British arrogance revolted him. He could no longer tolerate it after the Boer Wars and the forceful interventions in Ireland. In his eyes, the British did not deserve any respect at all, only contempt. To this Anglophobia, he quickly added anti-Communism.

During the German occupation of Norway (1940-45), he certainly aided the occupiers, but remained above all an intransigent Norwegian patriot. In its articles, Knut Hamsun exhorted his compatriots to volunteer to help the Germans fight Bolshevism. In his eyes, the US president Roosevelt was an “honorary Jew.” He was received by Hitler and Goebbels with all honors. The meeting with Hitler had long-term effects. From the start, Hamsun, who was close to deafness, trampled under foot the rules of protocol and pressed the Führer to remove the feared and hated German governor Terboven.  Nobody ever had the cheek to speak to Hitler in this tone and come straight to the point. Hamsun’s intervention was, however, effective: after his visit to Hitler, the arbitrary executions of hostages ceased.

The Gallows?

On May 26th, 1945, Hamsun and his wife, a convinced National Socialist, were placed under house arrest. For unclear reasons, Hamsun was declared “psychologically disturbed” and locked up for a while in a private psychiatric clinic in Oslo. The left government wanted to get rid of him but, but aside from his Germanophilia, he was irreproachable. He had never been member of anything. Quite the contrary! Thanks to him, a good number of lives had been saved. Admittedly, he had refused to deny the sympathy he felt for Hitler.

At the end of 1945, the Soviet Minister for foreign affairs, Molotov, informed his Norwegian colleague Trygve Lie that it “would be regrettable to see Norway condemning his great writer to the gallows.” Molotov had taken this step with the agreement of Stalin. It was after this intervention that the Norwegian government abandoned plans to try Hamsun and contented itself with levying a large fine what almost bankrupted him. The question remains open: would Norway have condemned the old man Hamsun to capital punishment? The Norwegian collaborators were all condemned to heavy punishments. But the Soviet Union could exert a strong and dreaded influence in Scandinavia in the immediate post-war period.

Until his death in February 1952, the Norwegian government spoke of Hamsun as a common delinquent. He would have to wait sixty years for his rehabilitation.

Editor’s Note: The following sketch of Knut Hamsun’s life and work should be supplemented by Mark Deavin’s discussion here of Hamsun’s greatest book, Growth of The Soil, for which he won the Nobel prize for literature. See also Robert Ferguson’s biography Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun. Also noteworthy is Knut Hamsun Remembers America: Essays and Stories, 1885 – 1949.

Knut Hamsun, 1859 - 1952

Knut Hamsun has had a decisive impact on the course of twentieth century literature, both in Europe and America, yet he is little discussed let alone honored even in his native Norway.

Ernest Hemingway tried to emulate him as did Henry Miller, who called Hamsun “the Dickens of my generation.” Thomas Mann wrote, “never has the Nobel Prize been awarded to one so worthy of it.” Herman Hesse called Hamsun his favorite author. Admired by H. G. Wells, Kafka, and Brecht, Hamsun always enjoyed a great following not only in Germany but also in Russia, lauded especially by Maxim Gorky. Even inside the Communist State Hamsun continued to be published despite his politics. For Hamsun saw in National Socialist Germany an attempt to reconnect man with the soil in the face of industrialization and materialism.

Hamsun’s influence on literature will continue, even if his name remains obscured.

Origins

Hamsun was born Knut Pedersen of an impoverished peasant family of seven children on August 4th, 1859. His father was a farmer and a tailor; his mother’s lineage was of Viking nobility. Knut had a hard upbringing on his uncle’s farm where he was sent when he was nine. But his uncle also ran the local library, which gave Knut the chance to begin his self-education.

Knut left his uncle’s farm in 1873, and over the next few years worked at a variety of jobs, laboring, teaching, and clerical, as he widely journeyed about.

Literary Stirrings

At 18 he had published his first novel called The Enigmatic One, a love story. This was followed by a poem A Reconciliation. He then paid for the publication of another novel Bjorger. But acknowledgment as a writer was a decade away as there was little interest in his peasant tales.

In 1882 Knut traveled to the USA, joining the great Norwegian emigration to that country. Between numerous jobs he was able to get some newspaper articles published and began a series of lectures on authors among the Norwegian community. From this early start, Hamsun wrote without moral judgment, as an observer of life. He was the first to develop the novel based on the psychology of characters. Hamsun wrote of what he saw and felt particularly identifying with the workers and the tramps. But he was soon disillusioned with America and had a low regard for its lack of real culture.

Hamsun’s first major literary work came in 1888 when he succeeded in getting published a short story in a magazine, which was to form part of his novel, Hunger. The story gained him access to the literary scene in Copenhagen. Hamsun became a celebrity among the young intellectuals. He was invited to lecture before university audiences. He was commissioned to write a book on America in 1889 setting aside the completion of Hunger. The result was The Cultural Life of Modern America. Here he attacked the crass materialism of the country. His contempt for democracy as a form of despotism is expressed: his abhorrence for its leveling nature and mob politics. America is a land where the highest morality is money, where the meaning of art is reduced to cash value. He also expresses his misgivings about the presence of Africans in the USA. The Civil war is described as a war against the aristocracy by northern capitalists. He writes:

Instead of founding an intellectual elite, America has established a mulatto stud farm.

Fame

Hunger appeared in mid 1890. It has been described as one of the great novels of urban alienation. Like much of his writing it is partly autobiographical. It centers on a young budding writer trying to fend off poverty, wandering the streets in rags, but in some odd way enjoying the experiences despite the hardship. Through an act of will the character maintains his identity. This was perhaps the first novel to make the workings of the mind the central theme. It was a genre he was to continue experimenting with over the next ten years. He contended against contemporary psychology that states that individuals are not dominated by a single personality type. Instead they have a complex of types that are often not integrated. He wrote of his aim for literature:

I will therefore have contradictions in the inner man considered as a quite natural phenomenon, and I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic.

Hamsun’s next great novel of the 1890s was Mysteries, virtually a self-portrait. One reviewer described Hamsun as expressing “the wildest paradoxes,” a hatred of the bourgeoisie academics and the mass. The principal character, Nagel, is presented in the form of free flowing thought associations and a stream of consciousness.

Editor Lynge is a thinly veiled attack on an antagonistic and influential newspaper editor. Here Hamsun identifies himself as “a radical who belongs to no party, but is an individual in the extreme.” The book caused uproar among literary circles, but sold well.

Having outraged the literary establishment, Hamsun next set about critiquing the younger set of artists as arrogant and talentless wastrels in Shallow Soil. Here Hanka Tidemand, a liberated and modern woman of the type detested by Hamsun, finds her true nature back with her hard working husband and children, after an affair with an artist. She realizes her mistaken course, on the verge of divorce, when she sees her children. Here Hamsun sets out his constant theme of rediscovering one’s roots in the simple life, in family and children.

The Kareno trilogy of plays (At the Gates of the Kingdom, Evening Glow, and The Game of Life) focuses Hamsun’s growing anti-democratic sentiment in the character of Ivar Kareno, a young philosopher who states:

I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, not the man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar.

Hamsun had become a celebrity, cheered in the streets by crowds although he despised the publicity and public attention. Traveling to Russia he finds to his dismay the American type of modernity and industrialism even under the Communists. Traveling on to Turkey he finds more to admire in the “ancient races,” having left

. . . the life of chatter and cackle behind.

They smile and are silent. Maybe it’s best that way. The Koran has created an attitude toward life which cannot be debated, or discussed at meetings. The attitude is simply this:

happiness is to survive: afterward things will be better. Fatalism.

Such a rejection of the modern rationalist spirit of Europe and America was “simple, like iron.” Likewise his admiration for the simplicity of the Russian who “still knows how to obey.”

Hamsun’s poem Letter to Byron in Heaven is regarded as one of his most radical writings. He appeals to Lord Byron to return and save society from degeneration, democracy and feminism.

In 1934 Hamsun wrote an article, “Wait and See,” in which he attacked the opponents of National Socialist Germany, and sarcastically asked if a return of Communists, Jews, and Bruning to Germany is preferable.

Occupation

In April 1940 the Germans occupied Norway to secure the sea route, after the British had on several occasions breached Norwegian neutrality, including the mining of Norway’s territorial waters.

Hamsun wrote in Vidkun Quisling’s newspaper that he hoped Germany would protect Norway from Britain in the West and Communism in the East. Ironically, Quisling, his very name becoming synonymous with ‘traitor.’ was the only politician who had campaigned before the war for a strong defense capability, and was particularly pro-British, having been honored by the British Government for looking after British interests in Russia. He sought an alliance of Nordic nations including Germany and Britain, against Communism. The only strong resistance against the German invasion came from a garrison commanded by an officer who belonged to the Quisling party. The King and Government quickly fled, leaving Norway without a Government. Quisling stepped in to fill the void as the only political figure willing to try and look after Norwegian interests under the occupation. He declared himself Minister President, but because he was not a pliant tool he did not enjoy the confidence of the German military authorities. He was soon forced to resign in favor of an administrative council under German control, but eventually regained a measure of authority.

Meanwhile, Hamsun urged Norwegians to rally behind Quisling so that some form of sovereignty could be restored. He described Quisling as “more than a politician, he is a thinker, a constructive spirit.” It was a view that was to be expressed after the war by British journalist Ralph Hewins, who had himself done his share during the war to besmirch Quisling’s name. Hamsun’s longest wartime article appeared in the German language Berlin-Tokyo-Rome periodical in February 1942. He wrote:

Europe does not want either the Jew or their gold, neither the Americans nor their country.

Despite Hamsun’s pro-German sentiment he championed the rights of his countrymen, including those who resisted the German occupation. He attempted in intercede for the writer Ronald Fangen, and many others, who had been arrested by the Gestapo. In 1943 Hamsun and his wife accepted the invitation of Goebbels to visit Germany. Goebbels wrote of Hamsun as being “the embodiment of what an epic writer should be.” Hamsun was equally impressed and sent Goebbels the Nobel medal he had been awarded, which Goebbels accepted as Hamsun’s “expression of solidarity with our battle for a new Europe, and a happy society.” Whilst en route to Norway from Germany, Hamsun met Hitler, a meeting which did not go well, as Hamsun took the opportunity to condemn the military administration of Norway which had rendered Quisling powerless. However, Hamsun continued to support Germany and expressed his pride in a son joining the Norwegian Waffen SS. In 1944 he visited a Panzer division and toured a U-Boat. Hamsun received his 85th birthday greetings from Hitler.

In 1945 a stroke forced Hamsun to quiet his activities. But with Hitler’s death Hamsun defiantly wrote a tribute for the press:

I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior of mankind, and a prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally failed him. Thus might the average western European regard Hitler? We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.

Post-War Persecution

Membership of Quisling’s party was declared a criminal offense and Hamsun’s sons Tore and Arild were among the first of 90,000 to be arrested. Marie and Knut were arrested a few weeks later. Due to his age, at 86, Hamsun was sent to a hospital rather than prison, although the stress and treatment struck considerably at his still quite good health. He was defiant and stated he would have assisted the Germans more if he could.

He was sent to an old folks home where he was a popular guest. However, prosecuting Norway’s leading cultural figure, like America’s dealing with Ezra Pound for treason, was an embarrassing matter. Consequently he spent 119 days in a psychiatric clinic. The psychiatrists found in him, as in the characters of his novel’s, a complex interplay of traits, but the most prominent of all they described was his “absolute honesty.” The conclusion was that Hamsun was not insane but that he was mentally impaired. However, a reading of his autobiographical On Overgrown Paths, written amidst the threats of prosecution and the interrogations, shows him to be perfectly lucid. Hamsun, as his last writing shows, although deaf and going blind retained his mental faculties impressively, along with a certain fatalism and humor.

Although the Attorney General opted not to proceed against Hamsun, the Crown wished to try him as a member of the National Samlung Party run by Quisling. To Hamsun the action at least meant that he was being officially acknowledged as of sound mind. He was fined 425,000 kroner.

With ruinous fines hanging over them the Hamsuns returned to Norholm. On appeal the fine was reduced to 325,000 kroner. Tore was also fined, and his brother Arild was jailed until 1949 for his membership of the Norwegian Waffen SS. Marie was released from jail in 1948.

Hamsun’s On Overgrown Paths was published in 1949 and became an immediate best seller, although Hamsun ended his days in poverty on his farm. He died in his sleep on nineteenth February 1952.

Chapter 5 of K. R. Bolton, Thinkers of the Right: Challenging Materialism (Luton, England: Luton Publications, 2003).

Oswald Spengler, 1880 - 1936

Oswald Spengler was born in Blankenburg (Harz) in central Germany in 1880, the eldest of four children, and the only boy. His mother’s side of the family was quite artistically bent. His father, who had originally been a mining technician and came from a long line of mineworkers, was an official in the German postal bureaucracy, and he provided his family with a simple but comfortable middle class home.

The young Oswald never enjoyed the best of health, and suffered from migraine headaches that were to plague him all his life. He also had an anxiety complex, though he was not without grandiose thoughts — which because of his frail constitution had to be acted out in daydreams only.

When he was ten the family moved to the university city of Halle. Here Spengler received a classical Gymnasium education, studying Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural sciences. Here too he developed his strong affinity for the arts — especially poetry, drama, and music. He tried his hand at some youthful artistic creations of his own, a few of which have survived — they are indicative of a tremendous enthusiasm but not much else. At this time also he came under the influence of Goethe and Nietzsche, two figures whose importance to Spengler the youth and the man cannot be overestimated.

After his father’s death in 1901, Spengler at 21 entered the University of Munich. In accordance with German student-custom of the time, after a year he proceeded to other universities, first Berlin and then Halle. His main courses of study were in the classical cultures, mathematics, and the physical sciences. His university education was financed in large part by a legacy from a deceased aunt.

His doctoral dissertation at Halle was on Heraclitus, the “dark philosopher” of ancient Greece whose most memorable line was “War is the Father of all things.” He failed to pass his first examination because of “insufficient references” — a characteristic of all his later writings that some critics took a great delight in pointing out. However, he passed a second examination in 1904, and then set to writing the secondary dissertation necessary to qualify as a high school teacher. This became The Development of the Organ of Sight in the Higher Realms of the Animal Kingdom. It was approved, and Spengler received his teaching certificate.

His first post was at a school in Saarbrücken. Then he moved to Düsseldorf and, finally, Hamburg. He taught mathematics, physical sciences, history, and German literature, and by all accounts was a good and conscientious instructor. But his heart was not really in it, and when in 1911 the opportunity presented itself for him to “go his own way” (his mother had died and left him an inheritance that guaranteed him a measure of financial independence), he took it, and left the teaching profession for good.

Historical Explanation of Current Trends

He settled in Munich, there to live the life of an independent scholar/philosopher. He began the writing of a book of observations on contemporary politics whose idea had preoccupied him for some time. Originally to be titled Conservative and Liberal, it was planned as an exposition and explanation of the current trends in Europe — an accelerating arms race, Entente “encirclement” of Germany, a succession of international crises, increasing polarity of the nations — and where they were leading. However in late 1911 he was suddenly struck by the notion that the events of the day could only be interpreted in “global” and “total-cultural” terms. He saw Europe as marching off to suicide, a first step toward the final demise of European culture in the world and in history.

The Great War of 1914-1918 only confirmed in his mind the validity of a thesis already developed. His planned work kept increasing in scope far, far beyond the original bounds.

Spengler had tied up most of his money in foreign investments, but the war had largely invalidated them, and he was forced to live out the war years in conditions of genuine poverty. Nevertheless he kept at his work, often writing by candle-light, and in 1917 was ready to publish. He encountered great difficulty in finding a publisher, partly because of the nature of the work, partly because of the chaotic conditions prevailing at the time. However in the summer of 1918, coincident with the German collapse, finally appeared the first volume of The Decline of the West, subtitled Form and Actuality.

Publishing Success

To no little surprise on the part of both Spengler and his publisher, the book was an immediate and unprecedented success. It offered a rational explanation for the great European disaster, explaining it as part of an inevitable world-historic process. German readers especially took it to heart, but the work soon proved popular throughout Europe and was quickly translated into other languages. Nineteen-nineteen was “Spengler’s year,” and his name was on many tongues.

Professional historians, however, took great umbrage at this pretentious work by an amateur (Spengler was not a trained historian), and their criticisms — particularly of numerous errors of fact and the unique and unapologetic “non-scientific” approach of the author — filled many pages. It is easier now than it was then to dispose of this line of rejection-criticism. Anyway, with regard to the validity of his postulate of rapid Western decline, the contemporary Spenglerian need only say to these critics: Look about you. What do you see?

In 1922 Spengler issued a revised edition of the first volume containing minor corrections and revisions, and the year after saw the appearance of the second volume, subtitled Perspectives of World History. He thereafter remained satisfied with the work, and all his later writings and pronouncements are only enlargements upon the theme he laid out in Decline.

A Direct Approach

The basic idea and essential components of The Decline of the West are not difficult to understand or delineate. (In fact, it is the work’s very simplicity that was too much for his professional critics.) First, though, a proper understanding requires a recognition of Spengler’s special approach to history. He himself called it the “physiogmatic” approach — looking things directly in the face or heart, intuitively, rather than strictly scientifically. Too often the real meaning of things is obscured by a mask of scientific-mechanistic “facts.” Hence the blindness of the professional “scientist-type” historians, who in a grand lack of imagination see only the visible.

Utilizing his physiogmatic approach, Spengler was confident of his ability to decipher the riddle of History — even, as he states in Decline’s very first sentence, to predetermine history.

The following are his basic postulates:

1. The “linear” view of history must be rejected, in favor of the cyclical. Heretofore history, especially Western history, had been viewed as a “linear” progression from lower to higher, like rungs on a ladder — an unlimited evolution upward. Western history is thus viewed as developing progressively: Greek > Roman > Medieval > Renaissance > Modern, or, Ancient > Medieval >Modern. This concept, Spengler insisted, is only a product of Western man’s ego — as if everything in the past pointed to him, existed so that he might exist as a yet-more perfected form.

This “incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme” can at last be replaced by one now discernible from the vantage-point of years and a greater and more fundamental knowledge of the past: the notion of History as moving in definite, observable, and — except in minor ways — unrelated cycles.

‘High Cultures’

2. The cyclical movements of history are not those of mere nations, states, races, or events, but of High Cultures. Recorded history gives us eight such “high cultures”: the Indian, the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mexican (Mayan-Aztec), the Arabian (or “Magian”), the Classical (Greece and Rome), and the European-Western.

Atlas Bringing Heracles the Golden Apples in the presence of Athena, a metope illustrating Heracles' Eleventh Labor, with Athena helping Heracles hold up the sky. From the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, c. 460 BC.

Each High Culture has as a distinguishing feature a “prime symbol.” The Egyptian symbol, for example, was the “Way” or “Path,” which can be seen in the ancient Egyptians’ preoccupation — in religion, art, and architecture (the pyramids) — with the sequential passages of the soul. The prime symbol of the Classical culture was the “point-present” concern, that is, the fascination with the nearby, the small, the “space” of immediate and logical visibility: note here Euclidean geometry, the two-dimensional style of Classical painting and relief-sculpture (you will never see a vanishing point in the background, that is, where there is a background at all), and especially: the lack of facial expression of Grecian busts and statues, signifying nothing behind or beyond the outward.

The prime symbol of Western culture is the “Faustian Soul” (from the tale of Doctor Faustus), symbolizing the upward reaching for nothing less than the “Infinite.” This is basically a tragic symbol, for it reaches for what even the reacher knows is unreachable. It is exemplified, for instance, by Gothic architecture (especially the interiors of Gothic cathedrals, with their vertical lines and seeming “ceilinglessness”).

Amiens choir

The “prime symbol” effects everything in the Culture, manifesting itself in art, science, technics and politics. Each Culture’s symbol-soul expresses itself especially in its art, and each Culture has an art form that is most representative of its own symbol. In the Classical, they were sculpture and drama. In Western culture, after architecture in the Gothic era, the great representative form was music — actually the pluperfect expression of the Faustian soul, transcending as it does the limits of sight for the “limitless” world of sound.

‘Organic’ Development

3. High Cultures are “living” things — organic in nature — and must pass through the stages of birth-development-fulfillment-decay-death. Hence a “morphology” of history. All previous cultures have passed through these distinct stages, and Western culture can be no exception. In fact, its present stage in the organic development-process can be pinpointed.

The high-water mark of a High Culture is its phase of fulfillment — called the “culture” phase. The beginning of decline and decay in a Culture is the transition point between its “culture” phase and the “civilization” phase that inevitably follows.

The “civilization” phase witnesses drastic social upheavals, mass movements of peoples, continual wars and constant crises. All this takes place along with the growth of the great “megalopolis” — huge urban and suburban centers that sap the surrounding countrysides of their vitality, intellect, strength, and soul. The inhabitants of these urban conglomerations — now the bulk of the populace — are a rootless, soulless, godless, and materialistic mass, who love nothing more than their panem et circenses. From these come the subhuman “fellaheen” — fitting participants in the dying-out of a culture.

With the civilization phase comes the rule of Money and its twin tools, Democracy and the Press. Money rules over the chaos, and only Money profits by it. But the true bearers of the culture — the men whose souls are still one with the culture-soul — are disgusted and repelled by the Money-power and its fellaheen, and act to break it, as they are compelled to do so — and as the mass culture-soul compels finally the end of the dictatorship of money. Thus the civilization phase concludes with the Age of Caesarism, in which great power come into the hands of great men, helped in this by the chaos of late Money-rule. The advent of the Caesars marks the return of Authority and Duty, of Honor and “Blood,” and the end of democracy.

With this arrives the “imperialistic” stage of civilization, in which the Caesars with their bands of followers battle each other for control of the earth. The great masses are uncomprehending and uncaring; the megalopoli slowly depopulate, and the masses gradually “return to the land,” to busy themselves there with the same soil-tasks as their ancestors centuries before. The turmoil of events goes on above their heads. Now, amidst all the chaos of the times, there comes a “second religiosity”; a longing return to the old symbols of the faith of the culture. Fortified thus, the masses in a kind of resigned contentment bury their souls and their efforts into the soil from which they and their culture sprang, and against this background the dying of the Culture and the civilization it created is played out.

Predictable Life Cycles

Every Culture’s life-span can be seen to last about a thousand years: The Classical existed from 900 BC to 100 AD; the Arabian (Hebraic-Semitic Christian-Islamic) from 100 BC to 900 AD; the Western from 1000 AD to 2000 AD. However, this span is the ideal, in the sense that a man’s ideal life-span is 70 years, though he may never reach that age, or may live well beyond it. The death of a Culture may in fact be played out over hundreds of years, or it may occur instantaneously because of outer forces — as in the sudden end of the Mexican Culture.

Also, though every culture has its unique Soul and is in essence a special and separate entity, the development of the life cycle is paralleled in all of them: For each phase of the cycle in a given Culture, and for all great events affecting its course, there is a counterpart in the history of every other culture. Thus, Napoleon, who ushered in the civilization phase of the Western, finds his counterpart in Alexander of Macedon, who did the same for the Classical. Hence the “contemporaneousness” of all high cultures.

In barest outline these are the essential components of Spengler’s theory of historical Culture-cycles. In a few sentences it might be summed up:

Human history is the cyclical record of the rise and fall of unrelated High Cultures. These Cultures are in reality super life-forms, that is, they are organic in nature, and like all organisms must pass through the phases of birth-life-death. Though separate entities in themselves, all High Cultures experience parallel development, and events and phases in any one find their corresponding events and phases in the others. It is possible from the vantage point of the twentieth century to glean from the past the meaning of cyclic history, and thus to predict the decline and fall of the West.

Needless to say, such a theory — though somewhat heralded in the work of Giambattista Vico and the nineteenth-century Russian Nikolai Danilevsky, as well as in Nietzsche — was destined to shake the foundations of the intellectual and semi-intellectual world. It did so in short order, partly owing to its felicitous timing, and partly to the brilliance (though not unflawed) with which Spengler presented it.

Polemic Style

There are easier books to read than Decline – there are also harder — but a big reason for its unprecedented (for such a work) popular success was the same reason for its by-and-large dismissal by the learned critics: its style. Scorning the type of “learnedness” that demanded only cautionary and judicious statements — every one backed by a footnote — Spengler gave freewheeling vent to his opinions and judgments. Many passages are in the style of a polemic, from which no disagreement can be brooked.

To be sure, the two volumes of Decline, no matter the opinionated style and unconventional methodology, are essentially a comprehensive justification of the ideas presented, drawn from the histories of the different High Cultures. He used the comparative method which, of course, is appropriate if indeed all the phases of a High Culture are contemporaneous with those of any other. No one man could possibly have an equally comprehensive knowledge of all the Cultures surveyed, hence Spengler’s treatment is uneven, and he spends relatively little time on the Mexican, Indian, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Chinese — concentrating on the Arabian, Classical, and Western, especially these last two. The most valuable portion of the work, as even his critics acknowledge, is his comparative delineation of the parallel developments of the Classical and Western cultures.

Spengler’s vast knowledge of the arts allowed him to place learned emphasis on their importance to the symbolism and inner meaning of a Culture, and the passages on art forms are generally regarded as being among the more thought-provoking. Also eyebrow-raising is a chapter (the very first, in fact, after the Introduction) on “The Meaning of Numbers,” in which he asserted that even mathematics — supposedly the one certain “universal” field of knowledge — has a different meaning in different cultures: numbers are relative to the people who use them.

“Truth” is likewise relative, and Spengler conceded that what was true for him might not be true for another — even another wholly of the same culture and era. Thus Spengler’s greatest breakthrough may perhaps be his postulation of the non-universality of things, the “differentness” or distinctiveness of different people and cultures (despite their fated common end — an idea that is beginning to take hold in the modern West, which started this century supremely confident of the wisdom and possibility of making the world over in its image.

Age of Caesars

But is was his placing of the current West into his historical scheme that aroused the most interest and the most controversy. Spengler, as the title of his work suggests, saw the West as doomed to the same eventual extinction that all the other High Cultures had faced. The West, he said, was now in the middle of its “civilization” phase, which had begun, roughly, with Napoleon. The coming of the Caesars (of which Napoleon was only a foreshadowing) was perhaps only decades away. Yet Spengler did not counsel any kind of sighing resignation to fate, or blithe acceptance of coming defeat and death. In a later essay, “Pessimism?” (1922), he wrote that the men of the West must still be men, and do all they could to realize the immense possibilities still open to them. Above all, they must embrace the one absolute imperative: The destruction of Money and democracy, especially in the field of politics, that grand and all-encompassing field of endeavor.

‘Prussian’ Socialism

After the publication of the first volume of Decline, Spengler’s thoughts turned increasingly to contemporary politics in Germany. After experiencing the Bavarian revolution and its short-lived Soviet republic, he wrote a slender volume titled Prussianism and Socialism. Its theme was that a tragic misunderstanding of the concepts was at work: Conservatives and socialists, instead of being at loggerheads, should united under the banner of a true socialism. This was not the Marxist-materialist abomination, he said, but essentially the same thing as Prussianism: a socialism of the German community, based on its unique work ethic, discipline, and organic rank instead of “money.” This “Prussian” socialism he sharply contrasted both to the capitalistic ethic of England and the “socialism” of Marx (!), whose theories amounted to “capitalism for the proletariat.”

In his corporate state proposals Spengler anticipated the Fascists, although he never was one, and his “socialism” was essentially that of the National Socialists (but without the folkish racialism). His early appraisal of a corporation for which the State would have directional control but not ownership of or direct responsibility for the various private segments of the economy sounded much like Werner Sombart’s later favorable review of National Socialist economics in his A New Social Philosophy [Princeton Univ. Press, 1937; translation of Deutscher Sozialismus (1934)].

Prussianism and Socialism did not meet with a favorable reaction from the critics or the public — eager though the public had been, at first, to learn his views. The book’s message was considered to “visionary” and eccentric — it cut across too many party lines. The years 1920-23 saw Spengler retreat into a preoccupation with the revision of the first volume of Decline, and the completion of the second. He did occasionally give lectures, and wrote some essays, only a few of which have survived.

Political Involvement

In 1924, following the social-economic upheaval of the terrible inflation, Spengler entered the political fray in an effort to bring Reichswehr general Hans von Seekt to power as the country’s leader. But the effort came to naught. Spengler proved totally ineffective in practical politics. It was the old story of the would-be “philosopher-king,” who was more philosopher than king (or king-maker).

After 1925, at the start of Weimar Germany’s all-too-brief period of relative stability, Spengler devoted most of his time to his research and writing. He was particularly concerned that he had left an important gap in his great work — that of the pre-history of man. In Decline he had written that prehistoric man was basically without a history, but he revised that opinion. His work on the subject was only fragmentary, but 30 years after his death a compilation was published under the title Early Period of World History.

His main task as he saw it, however, was a grand and all-encompassing work on his metaphysics — of which Decline had only given hints. He never did finish this, though Fundamental Questions, in the main a collection of aphorisms on the subject, was published in 1965.

In 1931 he published Man and Technics, a book that reflected his fascination with the development and usage, past and future, of the technical. The development of advanced technology is unique to the West, and he predicted where it would lead. Man and Technics is a racialist book, though not in a narrow “Germanic” sense. Rather it warns the European or white races of the pressing danger from the outer Colored races. It predicts a time when the Colored peoples of the earth will use the very technology of the West to destroy the West.

Reservations About Hitler

There is much in Spengler’s thinking that permits one to characterize him as a kind of “proto-Nazi”: his call for a return to Authority, his hatred of “decadent” democracy, his exaltation of the spirit of “Prussianism,” his idea of war as essential to life. However, he never joined the National Socialist party, despite the repeated entreaties of such NS luminaries as Gregor Strasser and Ernst Hanfstängl. He regarded the National Socialists as immature, fascinated with marching bands and patriotic slogans, playing with the bauble of power but not realizing the philosophical significance and new imperatives of the age. Of Hitler he supposed to have said that what Germany needed was a hero, not a heroic tenor. Still, he did vote for Hitler against Hindenburg in the 1932 election. He met Hitler in person only once, in July 1933, but Spengler came away unimpressed from their lengthy discussion.

His views about the National Socialists and the direction Germany should properly be taking surfaced in late 1933, in his book The Hour of Decision [translation of Die Jahre der Entscheidung]. He began it by stating that no one could have looked forward to the National Socialist revolution with greater longing than he. In the course of the work, though, he expressed (sometimes in veiled form) his reservations about the new regime. Germanophile though he certainly was, nevertheless he viewed the National Socialists as too narrowly German in character, and not sufficiently European.

Although he continued the racialist tone of Man and Technics, Spengler belittled what he regarded as the exclusiveness of the National Socialist concept of race. In the face of the outer danger, what should be emphasized is the unity of the various European races, not their fragmentation. Beyond a matter-of-fact recognition of the “colored peril” and the superiority of white civilization, Spengler repeated his own “non-materialist” concept of race (which he had already expressed in Decline): Certain men — of whatever ancestry — have “race” (a kind of will-to-power), and these are the makers of history.

Predicting a second world war, Spengler warned in Hour of Decision that the National Socialists were not sufficiently watchful of the powerful hostile forces outside the country that would mobilize to destroy them, and Germany. His most direct criticism was phrased in this way: “And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.” Finally, but after it had already achieved a wide circulation, the authorities prohibited the book’s further distribution.

Oswald Spengler, shortly after predicting that in a decade there would no longer be a German Reich, died of a heart attack on May 8, 1936, in his Munich apartment. He went to his death convinced that he had been right, and that events were unfolding in fulfillment of what he had written in The Decline of the West. He was certain that he lived in the twilight period of his Culture — which, despite his foreboding and gloomy pronouncements, he loved and cared for deeply to the very end.

Journal of Historical Review, 17/2 (March/April 1998), 2-7.

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, b. 1935

Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the enfant terrible of modern or post-war German cinema, was born in 1935 of vaguely upper class stock. His father owned landed estates in Eastern Germany before the war and his son lived in Rostock until 1945.

Syberberg’s doctoral thesis — very much in the Germanic tradition — concerned the notion of existentialism or the absurd in Durrenmatt’s drama. He himself seems to have been influenced by two vast and yet ‘monstrous’ paradigms: these were Brecht’s notion of epic theatre and Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total art-work.

Without doubt, his seminal achievement has to be Hitler: A Film from Germany (Our Hitler) which appeared in 1978. Although Syberberg was to later furnish a retrospective and documentary feel to his ideas in a non-fiction treatment, The Ister, in 2004. It comes across as a companion piece or dialectical counter-point to the previous work. It’s definitely not a mea culpa.

Hitler — ein Film aus Deutschland ran to 442 minutes and happened to be co-produced by the BBC (somewhat paradoxically). It starred Heinz Schubert and had no definite plot other than an intriguing series of tableaux. In a different set of circumstances (or primarily dealing with variegated meats) many would have found it avant-garde or occult. Its matter proved to be episodic, mannerist, arcane, and dream-like. Syberberg, its director, made extensive use of rear projection amid an orgy of declamation, dramaturgical feel, and topical onrush. Tropes are introduced, not like Natalie Sarraute, but after the fashion of a flickering magic camera or F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in 1924. (A film which came to be suppressed by the German authorities owing to copyright tiffs.)

The first part deals with the issue of Hitler’s personality cult; it’s dark, deliberately baroque and romantic in its aesthetic. It is quite clear that Syberberg wishes to plunge headlong into the thicket of what George L. Mosse called Nazi Culture; that’s to say, the volkish underpinnings of German ‘irrationalism’ in the nineteenth century. National Socialism emerged out of this heady stew, but contemporary Germany has repudiated it or deliberately buried this memory. It allows itself the backward glance of Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe when spliced with Henze’s agit-prop.

The second part of this monumental piece of cinema (which is almost as long as Gance’s silent Napoleon from the ‘twenties) explores Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in every sense.

The film’s third section deals with the Shoah and Himmler’s various attitudes towards it — the latter very much seen in vignette.

Whereas the epic’s fourth quartet — sign-posted as “We Children of Hell” — consists of a personal appearance by Syberberg as the director. This is by no means either solipsist or Hitchcock-like, merely a desire to intrude an authorial and personal insistence. Having done so, he strides around with a large Hitler puppet (ventriloquism originated in Germany) and enters into debates over the bitter harvest of German romanticism and the plight of artists in the federal republic.

What does Hans-Jürgen Syberberg hope to achieve by means of this activity? Well! his enormous filmic canvas sets up a challenge to every known rule of Hollywood cinema. Whereupon the work’s visual Weltanschauung also happens to be partly French, being strongly influenced by Henry Langois’ set designs. Likewise, the fact that the work’s stasis or static vortex involves one location — one set — brings it very close to Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio in Latin.

Influential critics pontificated about its significance upon arrival, but neither Susan Sontag or Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe could hammer out definite conclusions. Most of them miss the fact that the clue to this piece lies in its visualization: its medium is truly the message in terms of Marshall McLuhan’s hectoring.

For the film’s visual language exemplifies its deeply romantic, roseate, ethereal, Germanic race soul, anti-modernist, dream-like, oneiric, and Wagnerian climacteric. It happens to be deeply fascistic but purely on an auric or eye-sensitive level; at once happening to be lit up by a post-modern mantra. The film comes across as heroic in its anti-heroic indeterminacy.

Superficially — and with the objective part of the mind — Syberberg appears to be opposed to what Moeller van den Bruck called The Third Empire. But not really . . . since, if we enter into back-brain subjectivity, then we are dealing with a fantasy or phantasmagoria which mourns the fact of Germany’s defeat. What Syberberg is doing literally confuses the rational, practical and political mind (perforce). For, by virtue of adopting an apodictic structure, he can remain aesthetically entranced while preserving a strict ideological neutrality.

Like the Australian effort Romper Stomper, this film is ultimately neutral and neither for or against — at the level of the journalist’s page. In reality, such a transgression proves to be deeply blasphemous under Bonn’s republic . . . if we conceive of Adenauer’s construction as a second Weimar.

Moreover, the inner methodology of Syberberg’s attitude can be seen in various articles –- one in particular, “Spiritual Reactionaries after German Reunification” by Diederichsen and Cametzky, springs to mind. Likewise, Syberberg sought to clear up any confusion with his own polemic — Vom Ungluck und Gluck der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the last War, 1990). This contained a strong attack on Bonn’s philo-semitism.

Michael Walker, the editor of Scorpion magazine and by then a German citizen, warned that Syberberg faced ‘un-person’ status as a result. For his filmography has little real appeal either on behalf of NDP supporters or contemporary liberals. In this overall regard, his visualization might be considered to be a splicing of Caspar David Friedrich and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. It’s not a tabernacle of the ruins, a la Wolfgang Borchert’s stories about the “year zero” of 1945, but an aesthetic Germanicism which remains cool, cynical, acidic, upper class, and even ‘subversive’.

Hitler: ein filme aus Deutschland appears to be “anti” on the surface of its discontinuous images; themselves a kaleidoscope of Cranach, Pacher and Kraceur’s over-flowing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Yet the inner or sub-conscious mind that directs this movie proves to be spiritually, not factually, revisionist in character.

His earlier cinema history testifies to this. For example, his first effort — Romy, Anatomy of a Face (1965) — deliberates on a classic German actress’ profile. It is an exercise in phrenology which concentrates on Romy Schneider. Whereas his second example in 1966 deals with the aged actor Fritz Kortner — a star of German theater earlier in the twentieth century who specialized in one event: Shylock’s eternal scream of vengeance. Syberberg described the rushes for such an epiphany as ‘superhuman’.

You can view Hitler: ein film aus Deutschland for free online at www.syberberg.de.

From http://www.jonathanbowden.co.uk/

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, January 3, 1893 – March 15, 1945

The powers threatening our people became hegemonic in May 1945, when the liberal-Communist coalition known as the “United Nations” imposed its dictatorship on defeated Germany.

This dictatorship—whose defining characteristic, East and West, is its techno-economic worship of the Jewish Moloch—was subsequently imposed on the rest of Europe and, in the form of globalization, now holds the whole world in its grip.

For white nationalists, the defeat of National Socialist Germany is both the pivotal event of the twentieth century and the origin of their own movement—to save the white race from the rising tide of color.

White nationalists resume, in effect, the struggle of the defeated Germans. But they do so not uncritically.

As an idea and a movement, National Socialism (like Fascism) was a product of the late nineteenth-century political convergence that brought together elements from the revolutionary anti-liberal wing of the labor movement and elements from the revolutionary anti-liberal wing of the nationalist right. Hitler’s NSDAP was the most imposing historical offshoot of this anti-liberal convergence, but one not always faithful to its origins—which bears on the fact that Hitler shares at least part of the responsibility for the most devastating defeat ever experienced by the white race.

It’s not enough, then, for the present generation of white nationalists to honor his heroic resistance to the anti-Aryan forces.

Of greater need, it seems to me, is to identify and come to terms with his failings, for these, more than his triumphs, now effect our survival as a people.

The following is an excerpt from a piece that Pierre Drieu La Rochelle wrote in the dark days after August 1944, after the so-called “Liberation” of Paris and before the suicide that “saved” him from De Gaulle’s hangman.

It was written in haste, on the run, and never completed, but is nevertheless an illuminating examination of Hitler’s shortcomings (even where incorrect).

The central point of Drieu’s piece (and it should be remembered that he, like many of France’s most talented thinkers and artists, collaborated with the Germans in the hope of creating a new European order) is that Germany alone was no match for the combined powers of the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

Only a Europe recast on the basis of National Socialist principles, he believed, could triumph against this coalition and the Jews who inspired and guided it.

Hitler’s petty bourgeois nationalism, critiqued here by Drieu, prevented him from mobilizing the various national families of Europe in a common front, proving that his distillation of the anti-liberal project was inadequate to the great tasks facing the white man in this period.

* * *

From Drieu’s “Notes sur l’Allemagne”:

I was shocked by the extreme political incompetence of the Germans in 1939, 1940, and 1941, after the victories [which made them Europe’s master]. It was in this period that their political failings sealed the fate of their future military defeat.

These failings seem even greater than those committed under Napoleon [in the period 1799-1815, when the French had mastered Europe]. The Germans obviously drew none of the lessons from the Napoleonic adventure.

Was German incompetence the incompetence of fascism in general? This is the question.

The imbecilic maxim guiding Hitler was: “First, wage and win the war; then, reorganize Europe.” This maxim contradicted all the lessons of history, all the teachings of Europe’s greatest statesmen, particularly those of the Germans, like Frederick and Bismarck. It was Clausewitz who said war is only the extension of politics.

But even if one accepts Hitler’s maxim, the German dictator committed a number of military mistakes:

1. Why did he wait six months between the Polish campaign and the French campaign?

2. Why did he squander another ten months after the French campaign?

3. Why in late 1940 did he wage a futile aerial assault on England, instead of striking the British Empire at its most accessible point, Gibraltar?

After July 1940 [when no European power opposed him on the continent], he could have crossed Spain, destroyed the [English] naval base at Gibraltar, and closed off the Mediterranean.

The armistice with Pétain [which led to the establishment of the Vichy regime] was [another] German disaster. If the French had followed [Paul] Reynaud [the last Premier of the Third Republic who advocated continued resistance from France’s North African colonies], the Germans would have been forced to do what was [militarily] necessary to win the war.

For once master of Gibraltar, Hitler would have rendered [the English base at] Malta useless, avoided the Italian folly in the Balkans [which doomed Operation Barbarosa in Russia], and assured the possibility of an immediate and relatively uncostly campaign against [English occupied] Egypt. Instead of bombing London, he should, have seized Alexandria, Cairo, and Suez.

This would have settled the peace in the Balkans, avoiding the exhausting occupations of Greece and Yugoslavia, [it would have cut England off from her overseas empire, and guaranteed Europe’s Middle Eastern energy sources].

These military failings followed from Hitler’s total lack of imagination outside of Germany.

He was [essentially] a German politician; good for Germany, but only there.

Lacking political culture, education, and a larger tradition, having never traveled, being a xenophobe like many popular demagogues, he did not possess an understanding of what was necessary to make his strategy and diplomacy work outside Germany.

All his dreams, all his talents, were devoted to winning the war of 1914, as if conditions [in 1940] were still those of 1914. . . He thus underestimated Russian developments and totally ignored American power, which had already made itself felt in the Great War.

He did understand the importance of the tank and the airplane [whose military possibility came into their own after 1918], but not in relationship to the enormous industrial potential of Russia and America.

He neglected [the role of] artillery, which was a step back from 1916-1918.

He is least reproachable in his estimation of submarine warfare, whose significance was already evident in 1916. But even here, the Anglo-Saxons [i.e., the Anglo-Americans] deployed their maritime genius in a way difficult for a European continental to anticipate.

Hitler’s political errors [, however,] were far worse and more thorough-going than his military errors. He hardly comprehended the problem, seeing it in terms of 1914—in terms, that is, of diplomacy, national states, cabinet politics, and [rival] chancelleries. His understanding of Europe did not even measure up to that of old aristocrats like Bismarck and Wilhelm II, who never forgot the tradition of solidarity that united Europe’s dynasties, courts, and nobilities. . .

It’s curious that this man who knew how to inspire the masses in his own country, who always maintained the closest contact with his people, never, not for a second, thought of extending his [successful] German policies to the rest of Europe. He [simply] did not understand the necessity of forging a policy to address Europe domestically and not just internationally.

Diplomats and ambassadors had lost command of the stage after 1940—it was now in the hands of political leaders capable of winning the masses with the kind of social policies that had succeeded in Germany and could succeed elsewhere.

Hitler didn’t understand this. After his armies invaded Poland, France, and elsewhere, he never thought of implementing the social and political practices that had worked in Germany . . . He never thought of carrying out policies that would have forged bonds of solidarity between the occupied and the occupiers. . .

These failures lead me to suspect that the Germans’ political stupidity . . . owed something to fascism—that political and social system awkwardly situated between liberal democracy and Communist totalitarianism.

In the fascist system there was something of the “juste milieu” that could only lead to the miserable failure awaiting the Germans. [A French term meaning a “golden mean” or a “happy medium,” “juste milieu” is historically associated with the moderate centrist politics (or anti-politics) of bourgeois constitutionalists—first exemplified by France’s July Monarchy (1830-48) and subsequently perfected in the American party system].

The Germans have no political tradition. For centuries, most of them inhabited small principalities or cities where larger political forces had no part to play.

However, there was Vienna and Berlin. In these two capitals, politics was the province of a small [aristocratic] caste. The events of 1918 [i.e., the liberal revolutions that led to the Weimar and Viennese republics] abruptly dislodged this caste, severing its ties from the new governing class.

Everything that has transpired in the last few years suggests that Germany remains what it was in the eighteenth century . . . a land unable to anchor its warrior virtues in politically sound principles . . .

[Part of this seems due to the fact that] the German is no psychologist. He is too much a theoretician, too intellectually speculative, for that. He lacks psychology in the way a mathematician or metaphysician does. German literature is rarely psychological; it develops ideas, not characters. The sole German psychologist is Nietzsche [and] he was basically one of a kind. . . Politically, the Germans [like the French] are less subtle and plastic than the English or the Russians, who have the best psychological literature and hence the best diplomacy and politics.

Hitler’s behavior reflected the backward state of German, and beyond that, European attitudes.

This son of an Austrian custom official inherited all the prejudices of his father’s generation (as had Napoleon). And like every German nationalist of Austrian extraction, he had an unshakable respect for the German Army and the Prussian aristocracy. Despite everything that disposed him against it, he remained the loyal Reichwehr agent he was in Munich [in 1919]. . . If he subsequently became a member of a socialist party [Anton Drexler’s German Workers’ Party]—of which he promptly became the leader—it was above all because this party was a nationalist one. Nationalism was always more important to him than socialism—even if his early years should have inclined him to think otherwise . . .

Like Mussolini, Hitler had no heartfelt commitment to socialism. [Drieu refers here not to the Semitic socialism of Marx, with its materialism, collectivism, and internationalism, but rather to the older European corporate socialism, which privileges the needs of family, community, and nation over those of the economy] . . . That’s why he so readily sacrificed the [socialist] dynamism of his movement for the sake of what the Wehrmacht aristocracy and the barons of heavy industry were willing to concede. He thought these alone would suffice in furnishing him with what was needed for his war of European conquest. . .

Fascism failed to organize Europe because it was essentially a system of the “juste milieu” —a system seeking a middle way between communism and capitalism. . .

Fascism failed because it did not become explicitly socialist. The narrowness of its nationalist base prevented it from becoming a European socialism . . .

Action and reaction: On the one side, the weakness of Hitlerian and Mussolinian socialism prevented it from crossing national borders and becoming a European nationalism; on the other, the narrowness of Mussolinian and Hitlerian nationalism stifled its socialism, reducing it to a form of military statism. . .

Source: Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Textes retrouvées (Paris: Eds. du Rocher, 1992).

Churchill, Hitler, and “the Unnecessary War”
How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
Patrick J. Buchanan
New York: Crown Publishers, 2008

Many reviewers of the respectable class become unhinged upon seeing the words “unnecessary war” in the title of a book dealing with World War II—in their minds, the “Good War” to destroy the ultimate evil of Hitler’s Nazism.[1] And, of course, Buchanan was already in deep kimchi on this issue since he had expressed a similar criticism of American entry into World War II in his A Republic, Not an Empire.[2]

With this mindset, most establishment reviewers simply proceed to write a diatribe against Buchanan for failing to recognize the allegedly obvious need to destroy Hitler, bringing up the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and other rhetorical devices that effectively silence rational debate in America’s less-than-free intellectual milieu. However, Buchanan’s book is far more than a discussion of the merits of fighting World War II. For Buchanan is dealing with the overarching issue of the decline of the West—a topic he previously dealt with at length in his The Death of the West.[3] In his view, the “physical wounds” of World Wars I and II are significant factors in this decline. Buchanan writes: “The questions this book answers are huge but simple. Were these two world wars the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesman responsible for the death of the West?” (p. xi). Early in his Introduction, Buchanan essentially answers that question: “Historians will look back on 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 as two phases of the Great Civil War of the West, when the once Christian nations of Europe fell upon one another with such savage abandon they brought down all their empires, brought an end to centuries of Western rule, and advanced the death of their civilization” (p. xvii).

Buchanan sees Britain as the key nation involved in this process of Western suicide. And its own fall from power was emblematic of the decline of the broader Western civilization. At the turn of the twentieth century, Britain stood out as the most powerful nation of the West, which in turn dominated the entire world. “Of all the empires of modernity,” Buchanan writes, “the British was the greatest—indeed, the greatest since Rome—encompassing a fourth of the Earth’s surface and people” (p. xiii). But Britain was fundamentally responsible for turning two localized European wars into the World Wars that shattered Western civilization.

Contrary to the carping of his critics, Buchanan does not fabricate his historical facts and opinions but rather relies on reputable historians for his information, which is heavily footnoted. In fact, most of his points should not be controversial to people who are familiar with the history of the period, as shocking as it may be to members of the quarter-educated punditocracy.

Buchanan points out that at the onset of the European war in August 1914, most of the British Parliament and Cabinet were opposed to entering the conflict. Only Foreign Minister Edward Grey and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, held that it was necessary to back France militarily in order to prevent Germany from becoming the dominant power on the Continent. In 1906, however, Grey had secretly promised France support in the event of a war with Germany, which, Buchanan implies, might have served to encourage French belligerency in 1914. However, it was only the German invasion of neutral Belgium—the “rape” of “little Belgium” as pro-war propagandists bellowed—that galvanized a majority in the Cabinet and in Parliament for war.

Buchanan maintains that a victorious Germany, even with the expanded war aims put forth after the onset of the war, would not have posed a serious threat to Britain. And certainly it would have been better than the battered Europe that emerged from World War I. Describing the possible alternate outcome, Buchanan writes:

Germany, as the most powerful nation in Europe, aligned with a free Poland that owed its existence to Germany, would have been the western bulwark against any Russian drive into Europe. There would have been no Hitler and no Stalin. Other evils would have arisen, but how could the first half of the twentieth century have produced more evil than it did? (p. 62)

As it was, the four year world war led to the death of millions, with millions more seriously wounded. The utter destruction and sense of hopelessness caused by the war led to the rise of Communism. And the peace ending the war punished Germany and other members of the Central powers, setting the stage for future conflict. The Allies “scourged Germany and disposed her of territory, industry, people, colonies, money, and honor by forcing her to sign the ‘War Guilt Lie’” (p. 97). Buchanan acknowledges that it was not literally the “Carthaginian peace” that its critics charged. Germany “was still alive, more united, more populous and potentially powerful than France, and her people were now possessed of a burning sense of betrayal” (p. 97). But by making the new democratic German government accept the peace treaty, the Allies had destroyed the image of democratic government in Germany among the German people. In essence, the peace left “Europe divided between satiated powers, and revisionist powers determined to retrieve the lands and peoples that had been taken from them” (p. 95). It was “not only an unjust but an unsustainable peace. Wedged between a brooding Bolshevik Russia and a humiliated Germany were six new nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The last two held five million Germans captive. Against each of the six, Russia or Germany held a grievance. Yet none could defend its independence against a resurrected Germany or a revived Russia. Should Russia and Germany unite, no force on Earth could save the six” (p. 98). It should be noted that Buchanan’s negative depiction of the World War I peace is quite conventional, and was held by most liberal thinkers of the time.[4]

Buchanan likewise provides a very conventional interpretation of British foreign policy during the interwar period, which oscillated between idealism and Realpolitik and ultimately had the effect of weakening Britain’s position in the world. Buchanan points out that Britain needed the support of Japan, Italy, and the United States to counter a revived Germany, but its diplomacy undercut such an alliance. To begin with, Britain terminated its alliance with Japan to placate the United States as part of the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. Buchanan contends that the Japanese alliance had not only provided Britain with a powerful ally but served to restrain Japanese expansionism.

Britain needed Mussolini’s Italy to check German revanchism in Europe, a task which “Il Duce” was very willing to undertake. However, Britain drove Mussolini into the arms of Hitler by supporting the League of Nations’ sanctions against Italy after it attacked Ethiopia in 1935. “By assuming the moral high ground to condemn a land grab in Africa, not unlike those Britain had been conducting for centuries, Britain lost Italy,” Buchanan observes. “Her diplomacy had created yet another enemy. And this one sat astride the Mediterranean sea lanes critical in the defense of Britain’s Far Eastern empire against that other alienated ally, Japan” ( p. 155).

America, disillusioned by the war’s outcome, returned to its traditional non-interventionism in the 1920s, so it was not available to back British interests. Consequently, Britain would only have France to counter Hitler’s expansionism in the second half of the 1930s.

Buchanan provides a straightforward account of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s and Foreign Minister Halifax’s appeasement policy. The goal was to rectify the wrongs of Versailles so as to prevent the outbreak of war. “They believed,” Buchanan points out, “that addressing Germany’s valid grievances and escorting her back into Europe as a Great Power with equality of rights was the path to the peace they wished to build” (p. 201). Buchanan asserts that such a policy probably would have worked with democratic Weimar Germany, but not with Hitler’s regime, because of its insatiable demands and brutality.

Munich was the high point of appeasement and is conventionally considered one of the great disasters of British foreign policy. Buchanan explains Chamberlain’s reasoning for the policy, which was quite understandable. First, morality seemed to be on Germany’s side since the predominantly German population of the Sudetenland wanted to join Germany. Moreover, maintaining the current boundaries of Czechoslovakia was not a key British interest worth the cost of British lives. Finally, Britain did not have the wherewithal to intervene militarily in such a distant, land-locked country.

Churchill, who represented the minority of Britons who sought war as an alternative, believed that support from Stalinist Russia would serve to counter Hitler. Of course, as Buchanan points out, the morality of such an alliance was highly dubious because Stalin had caused the deaths of millions of people during the 1930s, while Hitler’s victims still numbered in the hundreds or low thousands before the start of the war in 1939. Moreover, Communist Russia would have to traverse Rumania and Poland to defend Czechoslovakia, and the governments of these two countries were adamantly opposed to allowing Soviet armies passage, correctly realizing that those troops would likely remain in their lands and bring about their Sovietization. It should also be added that it was questionable whether the Soviet Union really intended to make war on the side of the Western democracies, because Stalin hoped that a great war among the capitalist states, analogous to World War I, would bring about their exhaustion and facilitate the triumph of Communist revolution, aided by the intervention of the Soviet Red Army.[5]

Buchanan concludes that Chamberlain was right not to fight over the Sudetenland but “was wrong in believing that by surrendering it to Hitler he had bought anything but time,” which he should have used to rearm Britain in preparation for an inevitable war (p. 235). Instead, Chamberlain believed that Hitler could be trusted and that peace would prevail.

While Buchanan faults Chamberlain for not properly preparing for war after the Munich Agreement, he does not believe that Munich per se brought on the debacle of war. What did bring about World War II, according to Buchanan, was the British guarantee to defend Poland in March 1939. This guarantee made Poland more resistant to compromise with Germany, and made any British decision for war hinge on the decisions made by Poland. Moreover, as Buchanan points out, “Britain had no vital interest in Eastern Europe to justify a war to the death with Germany and no ability to wage war there” (p. 263).

Buchanan, while citing several explanations for the Polish guarantee, seems to give special credence to the view that Chamberlain was more of a realist than a bewildered naïf. Buchanan holds that a clear analysis of Chamberlain’s words and intent shows that in the guarantee the Prime Minister had not bound Britain to fight for the territorial integrity of Poland but only for its independence as a nation. “The British war guarantee,” Buchanan contends, “had not been crafted to give Britain a pretext for war, but to give Chamberlain leverage to persuade the Poles to give Danzig back” (p. 270). Chamberlain seemed to be “signaling his willingness for a second Munich, where Poland would cede Danzig and provide a road-and-rail route across the Corridor, but in return for Hitler’s guarantee of Poland’s independence” (p. 270). Hitler, however, did not grasp this “diplomatic subtlety” and believed that a German effort to take any Polish territory would mean war. The Poles did not understand Chamberlain’s intent either, and assumed that Britain would back their intransigence and thus refused to discuss any territorial changes with Germany. Buchanan, however, seems to reverse this interpretation of Chamberlain’s motivation when discussing his guarantees to other European countries in 1939, writing that “Chamberlain had lost touch with reality” (p. 278).

In the end, Britain and France went to war with Germany over Poland without the means to defend her. Poland’s fate was finally sealed when Hitler made his deal with Stalin in August 1939, which, in a secret protocol, offered the Soviet dictator the extensive territory that he sought in Eastern Europe.

Some reviewers have claimed that Buchanan excuses Hitler of blame for the war, but this is far from the truth. Buchanan actually states that Hitler bore “full moral responsibility” for the war on Poland in 1939 (p. 292), in contradistinction to the wider world war, though even here the charge of “full responsibility” would seem to be belied by much of the information in the book. For Buchanan points out that the Germans not only had justified grievances regarding the Versailles territorial settlement, but that, despite Hitler’s bold demands, the German-Polish war might not have happened without Britain’s meddling in 1939. Buchanan’s analysis certainly does not absolve Hitler of moral responsibility for the Second World War (much less palliate his crimes against humanity), but it does show that there is plenty of blame to go around.

Buchanan writes that “had there been no war guarantee, Poland . . . might have done a deal over Danzig and been spared six million dead” (p. 293). It is quite possible that after any territorial deal with Poland, Hitler would have consequently made much greater demands against her. Perhaps he would have acted no differently toward Poland and the Polish Jews than he actually did—but the outcome could not have been worse for the Polish Jews, almost all of whom were exterminated during the World War II. And Polish gentiles suffered far more than the inhabitants of other countries that resisted Hitler less strenuously. In short, a war purportedly to defend Poland was an utter disaster for the inhabitants of Poland. It is hardly outrageous to question whether this was the best possible outcome and to attempt to envision a better alternative.

Buchanan shows how World War II was hardly a “Good War.” The Allies committed extreme atrocities such as the deliberate mass bombing of civilians and genocidal population expulsions. The result was the enslavement of half of Europe by Soviet Communism. “To Churchill,” Buchanan writes, “the independence and freedom of one hundred million Christian peoples of Eastern Europe were not worth a war with Russia in 1945. Why, then, had they been worth a war with Germany in 1939?” (p. 373).

Buchanan holds that had Britain not gone to war against Germany, a war between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany would have been inevitable, and that such a conflict would have exhausted both dictatorships, making it nigh impossible for either of them to conquer Western Europe. Although this scenario would not have been a certainty, a military stalemate between the two totalitarian behemoths would seem to be the most realistic assessment based on the actual outcome of World War II. Certainly, the Soviet Union relied on Western support to defeat the Nazi armies; and Germany was unable to knock out the Soviet Union during the lengthy period before American military began to play a significant role in Europe.

Buchanan contrasts the lengthy wars fought by Britain, which gravely weakened it, and the relative avoidance of war by the United States, which enabled it to become the world’s greatest superpower. In Buchanan’s view, the United States “won the Cold War—by avoiding the blunders Britain made that plunged her into two world wars” (p. 419). In the post-Cold War era, however, the United States has ignored this crucial lesson, instead becoming involved in unnecessary, enervating wars. “America is overextended as the British Empire of 1939,” Buchanan opines. “We have commitments to fight on behalf of scores of nations that have nothing to do with our vital interests, commitments we could not honor were several to be called in at once” (p. 423). Buchanan maintains that in continuing along this road the United States will come to the same ruinous end as Britain.

Buchanan’s British analogy, unfortunately, can be seen as giving too much to the position of the current neo-conservative war party. Although I think Buchanan’s non-interventionist position on the World Wars is correct, it should be acknowledged that Britain faced difficult choices. Allowing Germany to become the dominant power on the Continent would have been harmful to British interests—though the two World Wars made things even worse. In contrast, today it is hard to see any serious negative consequences resulting from the United States’ pursuit of a peaceful policy in the Middle East. No Middle East country or terrorist group possesses (or possessed) military power in any way comparable to that of Germany under the Second or Third Reichs, and, at least, Iran and Iraq do (did) not have any real interest in turning off the oil spigot to the West since selling oil is the lifeblood of their economies.

Another important aspect of the book is Buchanan’s attack on the cult of Winston Churchill, who has served as a role model for America’s recent bellicose foreign policy, with President George W. Bush even placing a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. Buchanan maintains that Churchill, with his lust for war, was the individual most responsible for the two devastating World Wars.

In contrast to the current Churchill hagiography, Buchanan portrays the “British Bulldog” as a poor military strategist who was ruthlessly indifferent to the loss of human life, advocating policies that could easily be labeled war crimes. Churchill proposed both the incompetent effort to breech the Dardanelles in 1915, ending with the disastrous Gallipolli invasion, and the bungled Norwegian campaign of April 1940. Ironically, the failures of the Norwegian venture caused the downfall of the Chamberlain government and brought Churchill to power on May 10, 1940.

Churchill supported the naval blockade of Germany in World War I, which in addition to stopping war materiel prevented food shipments, causing an estimated 750,000 civilian deaths. Churchill admitted that the purpose of the blockade was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission” (p. 391). He successfully proposed the use of poisonous gas against Iraqi rebels in the interwar period and likewise sought the use of poison gas against German civilians in World War II, though the plan was not implemented due to opposition from the British military. Churchill was, however, successful in initiating the policy of intentionally bombing civilians, which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Equally, if not more, inhumane, Churchill’s support for the forcible “repatriation” of Soviet POWs to the Soviet Union and the “ethnic cleansing” of Germans from Eastern and Central Europe involved the deaths of millions of people. And, of course, Churchill was willing to turn over Eastern Europe’s millions to slavery and death under Stalinist rule.

Overall, the Buchanan thesis makes considerable sense—though in some cases it assumes a foresight that would not be possible. For example, the pursuit of containment by the United States in the Cold War period, which Buchanan praises, was a policy largely rejected by the contemporary American Right, of which Buchanan was a member. The American Right held that the policy of containment was a defensive policy that could not achieve victory but instead likely lead to defeat—a position best expressed by James Burnham. And, at least up until Reagan’s presidency, the power of the Soviet Union greatly increased, both in terms of its nuclear arsenal and its global stretch, relative to that of the United States. While Buchanan touts Reagan’s avoidance of war, what most distinguished Reagan from his presidential predecessors and the foreign policy establishment was his willingness to take a harder stance toward the Soviets—a difference that terrified liberals of the time. Reagan’s hard-line stance consisted of a massive arms build-up, and, more importantly, an offensive military strategy (violating the policy of containment), which had the United States supporting a revolt against the Soviet-controlled government in Afghanistan. (The policy was begun under President Carter but significantly expanded under Reagan.) Perhaps, if the United States had launched such a policy in the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet Empire would have unraveled much earlier and not been such a threat to the United States. The Soviet Union was obviously the first country that could destroy the United States, and it achieved this lethal potential during the policy of containment. To this reviewer, it does not seem inevitable that everything would have ultimately turned out for the best.

While Buchanan makes a good case that the two World Wars were deleterious to the West, it would seem that they were only one factor, and probably not the primary one, in bringing about the downfall of Western power—a decline that was observed by astute observers such as Oswald Spengler prior to 1914.[6] (Buchanan himself is not oblivious to these other factors but gives a prominent place to the wars.) Moreover, it is questionable if Britain would have retained its empire any longer than it did, even without the wars, given the spread of nationalism to the non-Western world and the latter’s greater rates of population increase compared to Europe. Also, the growing belief in the West of universal equality obviously militated against European rule over foreign peoples.

In sum, Buchanan’s work provides an excellent account of British diplomacy and European events during the crucial period of the two world wars, which have shaped the world in which we now live. It covers a host of issues and events that are relatively unknown to those who pose as today’s educated class, and does so in a very readable fashion. While this reviewer regards Buchanan’s theses as fundamentally sound, the work provides a fount of information even to those who would dispute its point of view.

Forthcoming in TOQ vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 2009).

One result of the triumph of the culture of critique is that Americans must endure constant defamations against the pre-1965 culture of America. A good example is the defamation of Henry Ford — an icon when I was growing up but now known mainly as an anti-Semite from America’s dark past.

Henry Ford

A recent rather egregious example of Henry Ford defamation is an article by Edwin Black promoting his book Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust. Black claims that

To purvey this new brand of Jew hatred [i.e., “political anti-Semitism”] to the world, Ford purchased a failed newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which serialized the Protocols for 91 weeks. His company then published the series as a book, The International Jew. Using the techniques of mass production, Ford was able to escalate the Protocols from a negligible, randomly circulated irritant to a national sensation of 500,000 copies. Devoting the national sales force and the assets of the Ford Motor Company to the task made Henry Ford the first to organize political anti-Semitism in America. Indeed, he was the hero of anti-Semites the world over.

The problem with this is that The International Jew is far more than a serialization of the Protocols. Indeed, it is not a serialization of the Protocols at all. Rather, it is a series of journalistic articles (of uneven quality) on Jewish issues written by two of Ford’s employees, Ernest Liebold and Billy Cameron.  Liebold was a college-educated bank president before he became Ford’s personal secretary and alter-ego.  Cameron was a journalist who subscribed to an early version of the Christian identity movement that believed the Anglo-Saxons were descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel.

Black’s zeal to discredit Ford even leads him to claim that TIJ was then distributed in Germany where Hitler read it at least two years before writing Mein Kampf. The proof of this is that Hitler refers to the Protocols in Mein Kampf.

The logic seems to be that Hitler never would have heard of the Protocols except for the nefarious work of Henry Ford who was responsible for distributing it in Germany. No Henry Ford, no Holocaust.

This is ridiculous. . . . More