National Socialism is the opposite of international finance capitalism, i.e. the opposite of globalization. Under National Socialism, engineers would not lose their jobs to outsourcing, and great industrial cities would not be disintegrating and turning back to farmland. There would be no such thing as Goldman Sachs, or the Federal Reserve, or big box stores full of merchandise from China. If China were National Socialist too, the Chinese economy would not depend on exports. Instead of a globalized economy, there would be independent national economies. International trade would still exist (you could still drive a Honda if that's what you want), but it would be a fraction of what it is now. The financial system would be simple and straightforward; there would be no such thing as "derivatives". The economy would be based on industry, not on finance, insurance, real estate, casinos, and prisons.
There would be no dumbing-down policy in the schools or anywhere else.
Instead of dying, the oceans would be flourishing. On land, desertification would be reversed. The "cancer industry" would not exist. The environmental and psychological causes of cancer would be addressed, and cancer would be rare. There would be no need to argue about how to pay for health care, because most people would normally stay healthy without "health care" as we know it today.
Under National Socialism, cities would not be full of drunks and homeless people. There would be no such thing as multiculturalism, or political correctness, or affirmative action. Schools would not teach kids to listen to hip-hop. First world countries would not turn themselves into third world countries. Just the opposite: National Socialism represents the gentrification of the world.
I did not know most of this until recently.
Like most people, I grew up believing that National Socialism was a Very Bad Thing. I thought it was all about war and exterminating people. If that were true, then of course it would be a Very Bad Thing. It would deserve all the opprobium that is heaped upon it. But in fact that is not what National Socialism is about.
When I was in the 9th grade, my world history teacher gave me an extra credit assignment. She asked me to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, and write a report on it. That was a pretty stiff assignment for a 9th grader, but I read the book all the way through, and I believed it. It never occurred to me that my teacher might be misinformed, or that mainstream historians such as William Shirer might be lying. I accepted what they told me.
Since then I have discovered that what happened in Germany in the Hitler era was very different from what they tell us. On this page I am going to present some of the facts that my world history teacher should have taught me. This is what every high school student should know about National Socialism.
The question "what is National Socialism" can be approached in two ways - (1) what was Hitler's original idea? and (2) what happened in the Third Reich?
1. The intention
The first question can be answered by going to the source, Mein Kampf. It is a long book (almost 700 pages). It is not well organized. Much of it is no longer relevant. Here is a very brief overview, with excerpts from four chapters.
Volume Two, Chapter 4: Personality and the Ideal of the People's State -- If you are new to the subject, this short chapter is a good place to start.
Excerpt:
Accordingly a human community is well organized only when it facilitates to the highest possible degree individual creative forces and utilizes their work for the benefit of the community. The most valuable factor of an invention, whether it be in the world of material realities or in the world of abstract ideas, is the personality of the inventor himself.
The first and supreme duty of an organized folk community is to place the inventor in a position where he can be of the greatest benefit to all. Indeed the very purpose of the organization is to put this principle into practice. Only by so doing can it ward off the curse of mechanization and remain a living thing. In itself it must personify the effort to place men of brains above the multitude and to make the latter obey the former.
Therefore not only does the organization possess no right to prevent men of brains from rising above the multitude but, on the contrary, it must use its organizing powers to enable and promote that ascension as far as it possibly can. It must start out from the principle that the blessings of mankind never came from the masses but from the creative brains of individuals, who are therefore the real benefactors of humanity.
Volume One, Chapter 8: The Beginning of my Political Activity -- another short, fundamental chapter.
Excerpt:
Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear: it only had to make certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation. This point of view could then be defined between two restrictive limits: preservation of a solvent, national, and independent economy on the one hand, assurance of the social rights of the workers on the other.
Previously I had been unable to recognize with the desired clarity the difference between this pure capital as the end result of productive labor and a capital whose existence and essence rests exclusively on speculation. For this I lacked the initial inspiration, which had simply not come my way.
But now this was provided most amply by one of the various gentlemen lecturing in the above-mentioned course: Gottfried Feder.
For the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan capital.
Right after listening to Feder's first lecture, the thought ran through my head that I had now found the way to one of the most essential premises for the foundation of a new party.
In my eyes Feder's merit consisted in having established with ruthless brutality the speculative and economic character of stock exchange and loan capital, and in having exposed its eternal and age-old presupposition which is interest. His arguments were so sound in all fundamental questions that their critics from the start questioned the theoretical correctness of the idea less than they doubted the practical possibility of its execution.
As I listened to Gottfried Feder's first lecture about the 'breaking of interest slavery,' I knew at once that this was a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance for the future of the German people. The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital. The development of Germany was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against international capital.
Volume One, Chapter 10: Causes of the Collapse -- a longer chapter that covers many of Hitler's basic ideas.
Excerpt:
The cure of a sickness can only be achieved if its cause is known, and the same is true of curing political evils. To be sure, the outward form of a sickness, its symptom which strikes the eye, is easier to see and discover than the inner cause. And this is the reason why so many people never go beyond the recognition of external effects and even confuse them with the cause, attempting, indeed, to deny the existence of the latter...
Even before the turn of the century an element began to intrude into our art which up to that time could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown. To be sure, even in earlier times there were occasional aberrations of taste, but such cases were rather artistic derailments, to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no longer of an artistic degeneration, but of a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit. In them the political collapse, which later became more visible, was culturally indicated. [A clearer translation of this paragraph is given below.]
Art Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole.
Anyone to whom this seems strange need only subject the art of the happily Bolshevized states to an examination, and, to his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men, with which, since the turn of the century, we have become familiar under the collective concepts of cubism and dadaism, as the official and recognized art of those states. Even in the short period of the Bavarian Republic of Councils, this phenomenon appeared. Even here it could be seen that all the official posters, propagandist drawings in the newspapers, etc., bore the imprint, not only of political but of cultural decay.
Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic 'experiences' would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly looked on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable.
Volume Two, Chapter 15: The Right of Emergency Defense -- the last chapter of the book.
Excerpt:
As the leadership of our destinies has, since the end of the War, been quite openly furnished by Jews, we really cannot assume that faulty knowledge alone is the cause of our misfortune; we must, on the contrary, hold the conviction that conscious purpose is destroying our nation. And once we examine the apparent madness of our nation's leadership in the field of foreign affairs from this standpoint, it is revealed as the subtlest, ice-cold logic, in the service of the Jewish idea and struggle for world conquest.
If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.
The strength of a nation lies primarily, not in its weapons, but in its will, and before foreign enemies are conquered, the enemy within must be annihilated... A Germany saved from these mortal enemies of her existence and her future would possess forces which the whole world could no longer have stifled. On the day when Marxism is smashed in Germany, her fetters will in truth be broken forever. For never in our history have we been defeated by the strength of our foes, but always by our own vices and by the enemies in our own camp.
That is the end of the excerpt. Please note that there is an epistemological point here: instead of telling you what he said, I showed you. I let him speak for himself. Instead of telling you what to think about it, I am just showing you his words, and you can decide for yourself what to think about it. This is not the way National Socialism is usually discussed.
I have been quoting from the Manheim translation. The Murphy translation is also available. Sometimes Murphy is clearer than Manheim, sometimes not. For example, compare Murphy's rendition of this statement with the way Manheim phrased it, above:
The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence.
Compare Murphy's translation of Hitler's statement about art with Manheim's:
At the turn of the last century a new element began to make its appearance in our world. It was an element which had been hitherto absolutely unknown and foreign to us. In former times there had certainly been offences against good taste; but these were mostly departures from the orthodox canons of art, and posterity could recognize a certain historical value in them. But the new products showed signs, not only of artistic aberration but of spiritual degeneration. Here, in the cultural sphere, the signs of the coming collapse first became manifest.
In this case Murphy is definitely better. When you read Manheim's version of that paragraph, your eyes probably glazed over. Manheim tries to keep long German sentences in more or less their original form. Murphy breaks them up into shorter sentences, which works better in English. Not only that, Murphy seems to "get it" in a way that Manheim doesn't. Murphy usually conveys the meaning better.
The Murphy translation can be found here (text file) and here (PDF file).
The German text of Mein Kampf can be found here, at least for the time being. In the past I have linked to sites that had Mein Kampf, but when I checked back a few months later the links were dead. I don't know why people go to the trouble of putting up a website and then abandon it. In any case, if these links don't work, a bit of search engine sleuthing should turn up English and German versions of Mein Kampf. It will always be available somewhere. The Manheim translation is available in bookstores. It's better than nothing.
There is another translation, called the Ford Edition, but I have not read it. What we really need is an entirely new book, a sequel that brings Mein Kampf up to date. A lot of what Hitler said about Germany in the 1920's does not apply to our situation today, but some of it does. Some of what he said was wrong even at the time. We need to think it through and sort out what is still valid from what isn't.
In addition to Mein Kampf, The 25 points of the NSDAP Program should also be consulted, if you are new to the subject. The 25 points can be taken as a brief definition of National Socialism. This is how it was presented to people at the time. When people joined the party, especially in the early years, this is what they were joining. The NSDAP was the party that intended to put this program into action. I say intended, because some of the points were never implemented.
The Program of the NSDAP - a booklet by Gottfried Feder which goes into more detail. A photocopy of Feder's booklet (in English) can be found here. This is not the same as the other link. The photocopy has a much better translation, but due to the way the booklet was put into the copier, some of the words cannot be read. The material is not quite the same, either.
Nazi-Sozi: Questions and Answers for National-Socialists (pdf file)
Finally, there is this booklet by Goebbels, written in 1931. It is a dialogue between him and an interested but skeptical worker. Unfortunately, there is no indication of who is saying what. You just have to figure it out as you go along. Usually it is obvious which voice is speaking, but sometimes you have to stop and think. Keeps you on your toes. This was how the NSDAP explained itself in the two years leading up to 1933. Those years were the time when they broke through to a mass audience, an audience of millions. The ideas in this booklet are what appealed to those millions (leaving aside the appeal of the Fuehrer himself). The word "Nazi" only occurs in the expression "Nazi-Sozi," and only on the cover. They did not call themselves "The Nazi Party." They were basically the German WORKERS Party.
Here are excerpts from the booklet:
Our platform is concise: the liberty of the working German people. The way to achieve it is clear and simple: the liberation of the German worker, and his reintegration into the national framework.
To get to the bottom of this question: what is the nature of the social problem? Seventeen million workers are unconditionally at the mercy of Capitalism, which has complete control over all methods of production; they are thus forced to sell their own, their only capital - their power of work - at the lowest possible price. And for this reason, they rightly feel cast-out from a society (by whatever name: people, state, or nation) which silently tolerates the situation.
The solution to the social problem is therefore nothing more or less than the social reintegration of a part of the population, its decisive involvement in all matters of political and economic importance, and, in this way, the reintegration of our nation into the grand course of history.
The expression "working people" is not synonymous with "unskilled labor." The concept "worker" includes anyone, at any skill level, who is at the mercy of capitalism. In recent years engineers, including software engineers, have discovered that they too are part of this group. (It should be noted that without capitalism their jobs would not exist in the first place. The "social problem" is not as simple as Goebbels makes it out to be.)
I have been quoting Hitler and Goebbels, as if they meant what they said. I need to pause here and consider their sincerity.
Just about all students are taught that Hitler and his associates were openly dishonest, and that they used the "Big Lie" as one of their main techniques, both before and after they came to power. For example, if you look up the Wikipedia article about George Orwell's book, 1984, you find two alleged quotations, one from Hitler and one from Goebbels.
“The broad mass of the nation ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” — Adolf Hitler, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf
This alleged quotation is repeated over and over. One of the things "everybody knows" about Hitler is that he cynically advocated lying as a basic principle. Well, let's look at the whole thing in its original context. This is what he actually wrote (Mein Kampf, page 231):
This most of all shows the assertion that the lost War was the cause of the German collapse to be a lie. No, this military collapse was itself only the consequence of a large number of symptoms of disease and their causes, which even in peacetime were with the German nation. This was the first consequence, catastrophic and visible to all, of an ethical and moral poisoning, of a diminution in the instinct of self-preservation and its preconditions, which for many years had begun to undermine the foundations of the people and the Reich.
It required the whole bottomless falsehood of the Jews and their Marxist fighting organization to lay the blame for the collapse on that very man who alone, with superhuman energy and will power, tried to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw and save the nation from its time of deepest humiliation and disgrace. By branding Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland.
In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick - a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.
The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race - and what a race! One of the greatest minds of humanity [Schopenhauer] has nailed them forever as such in an eternally correct phrase of fundamental truth: he called them 'the great masters of the lie.' And anyone who does not recognize this or does not want to believe it will never in this world be able to help the truth to victory.
Hitler was not advocating the Big Lie, he was complaining about it.
Wikipedia also gives us this alleged quotation by Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” — Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels
Please note that Wikipedia does not give a citation for this. Nobody ever does, because there is no source for it. Nevertheless everybody keeps repeating it over and over.
What Goebbels actually said can be found, in great detail, on the Nazi and East German Propaganda Guide Page of the Calvin College website. If you do a Google search for "tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it" you get more than 20,000 results. But if you do this search
"tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it" site:www.calvin.edu
you get zero results. In other words, that expression is not found in any of the documents collected in their Propaganda Guide Page. Of course it is possible that the statement occurs in some document that is not included in the Propaganda Guide Page. I cannot be absolutely certain that he never said any such thing. However, judging by what I know about Goebbels, the statement is totally out of character, and I would bet 100-to-1 that he never said it.
[Note added years later: The Calvin site now has its own search box (look near the bottom of the page), and if you search for "tell a lie big enough" it gives you a page of false quotations, of which this is one. Randall Bytwerk, the author of the Calvin site, is honest enough to have such a page. I am impressed.]
The alleged Goebbels quotation is itself an example of a lie that has been repeated so many times that everybody believes it.
In other words, to spell this out as clearly as possible, when people accuse Hitler and Goebbels of advocating the Big Lie, they are lying. They are turning the situation upside down. The alleged Hitler quotation is taken out of context so it appears to mean the opposite of what Hitler intended. They are accusing Hitler and Goebbels of doing what they themselves are doing. This is the kind of lie Hitler was complaining about. It is exactly the kind of falsification of history and destruction of language that Orwell was complaining about.
In fact this is perfectly Orwellian. It just doesn't get any better than this.
2. The reality
What difference does it make? What is at stake here? This brings us to the second question, what happened in the Third Reich? This question is a lot more difficult to answer. There is an enormous amount of disinformation about the Third Reich. Finding out what happened is not easy, because almost everybody thinks it's all right to lie to make a point against the evil Nazis.
Matt Koehl gave a talk in which he summarized National Socialism very well. I am going to quote some of his introductory remarks:
This morning I would like to talk about the good society. More specifically, I would like to discuss the economic and social aspects of a good society.
Among other things in such a society, we would want a stable and prosperous economy, one with full employment and living wages. We would want affordable housing, whether in the purchasing or renting of a home. We would want a system of health care accessible to everyone, regardless of economic circumstance. We would want generous provision for disability, maternity leave and retirement. We would want free access to college education and vocational training for any qualified applicant. We would want a healthy farming community, one which favors small family farms over large agribusiness conglomerates.
We would want the kind of public safety where one didn't have to live in gated communities to feel secure, and where one could walk down the street of any city at any time, day or night-without fear of being mugged, assaulted, or worse. We would want rigorous protection of the environment under a regime that is more concerned about the condition of our forests, our earth, our air and our waters than about corporate profit and pollution.
These are some the things we would want - for every citizen of our good society.
Today, we have NONE of these things. Why? Do these expectations of a good society sound unreasonable, or utopian?
I say to you that they are not - as is proven by the fact that there once was a society which had all of these things and more.
That society, of course, was the Third Reich. At a time when America and most of Europe were mired in depression, National Socialist Germany had a level of prosperity that few places have even now. This is how it happened:
The first years of the Reich by Leon Degrelle
"We have the power. Now our gigantic work begins."
Those were Hitler's words on the night of January 30, 1933, as cheering crowds surged past him, for five long hours, beneath the windows of the Chancellery in Berlin.
His political struggle had lasted 14 years. He himself was 43, that is, physically and intellectually at the peak of his powers. He had won over millions of Germans and organized them into Germany's largest and most dynamic political party, a party girded by a human rampart of hundreds of thousands of storm troopers, three fourths of them members of the working class. He had been extremely shrewd. All but toying with his adversaries, Hitler had, one after another, vanquished them all.
Standing there at the window, his arm raised to the delirious throng, he must have known a feeling of triumph. But he seemed almost torpid, absorbed, as if lost in another world.
It was a world far removed from the delirium in the street, a world of 65 million citizens who loved him or hated him, but all of whom, from that night on, had become his responsibility. And as he knew -- as almost all Germans knew in January of 1933 -- this was a crushing, an almost desperate responsibility.
Half a century later, few people understand the crisis Germany faced at that time. Today, it's easy to assume that Germans have always been well-fed and even plump. But the Germans Hitler inherited were virtual skeletons.
During the preceding years, a score of "democratic" governments had come and gone, often in utter confusion. Instead of alleviating the people's misery, they had increased it, due to their own instability: it was impossible for them to pursue any given plan for more than a year or two. Germany had arrived at a dead end. In just a few years there had been 224,000 suicides - a horrifying figure, bespeaking a state of misery even more horrifying.
By the beginning of 1933, the misery of the German people was virtually universal. At least six million unemployed and hungry workers roamed aimlessly through the streets, receiving a pitiful unemployment benefit of less than 42 marks per month. Many of those out of work had families to feed, so that altogether some 20 million Germans, a third of the country's population, were reduced to trying to survive on about 40 pfennigs per person per day.
Those still lucky enough to have some kind of job were not much better off. Workers and employees had taken a cut of 25 percent in their wages and salaries. Twenty-one percent of them were earning between 100 and 250 marks per month; 69.2 percent of them, in January of 1933, were being paid less than 1,200 marks annually. No more than about 100,000 Germans, it was estimated, were able to live without financial worries.
During the three years before Hitler came to power, total earnings had fallen by more than half, from 23 billion marks to 11 billion. The average per capita income had dropped from 1,187 marks in 1929 to 627 marks, a scarcely tolerable level, in 1932. By January 1933, when Hitler took office, 90 percent of the German people were destitute.
...
Hitler knew that the task he had set himself would be immense and difficult to accomplish, that he would have to transform Germany in practically every respect: the structure of the state, social law, the constitution of society, the economy, civic spirit, culture, the very nature of men's thinking. To accomplish his great goal, he would need to reestablish the equilibrium of the social classes within the context of a regenerated community, free his nation from foreign hegemony, and restructure its geographic unity.
Task number one: he would have to restore work and honor to the lives of six million unemployed. This was his immediate goal, a task that everyone else thought impossible to achieve.
After he had once again closed the windows of the chancellery, Hitler, with clenched fists and resolute mien, said simply: "The great venture begins. The day of the Third Reich has come."
That was the starting point. Just a few years later, Germany was not only back on its feet, it was the most dynamic country in the world. Skipping ahead to a later point in the article,
Hitler's tremendous social achievement in putting Germany's six million unemployed back to work is seldom acknowledged today. Although it was much more than a transitory achievement, "democratic" historians routinely dismiss it in just a few lines. Since 1945, not a single objective scholarly study has been devoted to this highly significant, indeed unprecedented, historical phenomenon.
Similarly neglected is the body of sweeping reforms that dramatically changed the condition of the worker in Germany. Factories were transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers, with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields. Hundreds of thousands of attractive houses were built for working class families. A policy of several weeks of paid vacation was introduced, along with weekend and holiday trips by land and sea. A wide-ranging program of physical and cultural education for young workers was established, with the world's best system of technical training. The Third Reich's social security and workers' health insurance system was the world's most modern and complete.
This remarkable record of social achievement is routinely hushed up today because it embarrasses those who uphold the orthodox view of the Third Reich. Otherwise, readers might begin to think that perhaps Hitler was the greatest social builder of the twentieth century.
Because Hitler's program of social reform was a crucially important - indeed, essential -- part of his life work, a realization of this fact might induce people to view Hitler with new eyes. Not surprisingly, therefore, all this is passed over in silence. Most historians insist on treating Hitler and the Third Reich simplistically, as part of a Manichaean morality play of good versus evil.
Nevertheless, restoring work and bread to millions of unemployed who had been living in misery for years; restructuring industrial life; conceiving and establishing an organization for the effective defense and betterment of the nation's millions of wage earners; creating a new bureaucracy and judicial system that guaranteed the civic rights of each member of the national community, while simultaneously holding each person to his or her responsibilities as a German citizen: this organic body of reforms was part of a single, comprehensive plan, which Hitler had conceived and worked out years earlier.
To find out exactly how Hitler did it, you have to read the whole article. The importance of this article cannot be overstated. I am tempted to dispense with my own National Socialism page and put Degrelle's article here in its place. It's that good. If you want to know what the Third Reich was about, you have to read it. (BTW, there are some strange typos in this article. When you come to a word that doesn't make sense, try adding 'end' to it. For example, 'amed' becomes 'amended'.)
When Degrelle talks about factories "transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers, with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields," and the holidays, and so forth, he is describing the Strength Through Joy program. This is the heart of National Socialism.
Now we come to one of the things that made the Reich unique. What follows is from another Degrelle article, although some of it consists of quotations from others. First I want to emphasize that this only happened on a few occasions. I saw a series of movies from the Third Reich. After seeing 18 movies, I came away with the realization that daily life was still daily life in the Nazi era. That said, however, it is true that on certain numinous occasions German consciousness rose to a higher level.
Nothing has been omitted to obtain the desired effect, a parade of a hundred thousand SA, pounding the pavements of the town for five hours, a forest of standards in which the blood-red emblems and the eagles of the party dominate, deafening fanfares, salvos of artillery, torchlight tattoos uncoiling their serpent of fire between the illuminated facades of the medieval town, batteries of searchlights aimed skyward, weaving a vault of light above the Luitpoldshain amphitheater: everything contributes to create an impression of ordered power from which the most skeptical visitors return astounded. It is impossible to resist this swirl of colors and songs and light whose intensity no report, no film will ever reproduce. For nearly a week the crowd has been swimming, rolling in a tidal wave of emotion.
The stadium itself was gigantic, surrounded by columns three times as tall as those of the Acropolis. The columns were surmounted by eagles of granite and joined together by tens of thousands of flaming banners with swastikas turning in their solar disks. Streams of blue vapor rose from tall basins.
Hitler had even invented an entirely new form of architecture that was made not of stone but of light. He’d had hundreds of air defense beacons installed on the four sides of the giant site. Their beams of light rose up very high and very straight in the night like the pillars of an unreal cathedral. It was quite a fabulous imaginary construction, worthy of Zeus, master of light and of the night of the heavens. Then, like a prophet, Hitler came forward.
Here’s the man now standing upon the rostrum. Then the flags unfurl. No singing, no rolling of the drums. A most extraordinary silence reigns when, from the edge of the stadium, before each of the spaces separating the brown shirt groups, the first ranks of standard-bearers emerge. The only light is that of the cathedral, blue and unreal, above which one sees butterflies spiraling: airplanes perhaps or simply dust. But a spotlight beam has alighted on the flags, emphasizing the red mass of them and following them as they advance.
The beams of 150 gigantic searchlights pierced the overcast sky of a gray-black night. High in the air, on the surface of the clouds, the shafts of light came together to form the figure of a square... The image is gripping... Stirred by a light wind, the flags framing the stands tremble slightly in the sparkling light. The main speaker’s platform comes into view in a blaze of light... To the right and to the left, flames shoot out of immense cups supported by pillars. From the opposite stands, on command, a flood of more than 30,000 flags pours toward the center, the tips of the staffs and the fringes of silver glittering in the illumination of the searchlights.
As always, Hitler was the first victim of this production made of light, of crowds, of symmetry and of “life’s tragic awareness.” It was precisely in these orations made before the “first militants” and after the minute of silence observed in honor of the dead that Hitler frequently found his speech marked by a sort of exaltation and rapture: on these occasions and in a few extraordinary words, he has celebrated a sort of mystic communion before the spotlights sweep down on the center of the stage, and the flags, uniforms and musical instruments come ablaze in flashes of red, silver and gold.
Life in the Third Reich - a speech by Friedrich Kurreck. (It can also be found here.) There is a certain mindset and body language associated with National Socialism. It is the opposite of depression. Herr Kurreck describes it very well:
The German Folk-Community Spirit Survived the War - Here is an example: The postwar Ruhr district was a huge heap of rubble as the English took away its remaining undamaged machinery to England as reparations. As you know, the Soviets did the same.
A general strike was called by the newly established union to prevent the removal of a large 10,000 ton forging press. This was the biggest press in the world and it could have brought us economic advantages. I would also like to add that the union leader still thought as a German. This matter concerned the preservation of remaining jobs and the preservation of our people. This rally also found representatives of the Ruhr business in attendance. After the many fighting speeches had been made by the union side, a businessman asked to speak. He declared: “Let them take the old thing. We used it to make our entire war production. We shall build new ones that are bigger and better!” At one stroke came the determined decision: “Yes, yes, yes!” was the answer. He had said the magic words. The old spirit of the folk-community was still alive and discoverable!
Ministry of Illusion: Nazi movies as a window into Nazi Germany
In 1995 I saw a series of German films from the Hitler era. That was a turning point for me. That was when I knew that they are lying to us about what kind of place Germany was in the National Socialist era. The story we are told about the Third Reich is no more accurate than the story Islamic students are told about America, "the Great Satan."
The Germans recognized themselves in movies like "Request Concert" and "The Great Love." That's how they saw themselves, and that's how the German government wanted them to see themselves. The characters in those movies are anything but blond beasts, and anything but cult zombies. The movies have absolutely nothing in common with Castle Wolfenstein or any other cliché about National Socialism. "Request Concert" was the most popular movie of the Nazi era. It is the definitive Nazi movie. The main characters are soldiers. They are reminiscent of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire.
Skinheads would not recognize themselves in any of the movies I saw in the Ministry of Illusion series. The Germany of our imagination has very little to do with the Germany that actually existed. The strangest thing about this is that some people like the postwar caricature of National Socialism, and they call themselves "neo-Nazis"! The Germans who lived in the Reich, the ones who watched these movies, wouldn't have much use for today's neo-Nazis, and conversely, neo-Nazis wouldn't like the Reich that actually existed. They have little interest in it. Neo-Nazis are attracted to the dark side of National Socialist Germany, the side that is not represented in these movies, the side that most Germans were not even aware of, and didn't want to be aware of -- the side that is constantly rubbed in our faces now.
These movies don't show us a complete picture of Nazi Germany, any more than Norman Rockwell's paintings show us a complete picture of America. Americans recognized themselves in Rockwell's paintings (or at least they thought they did, which amounts to the same thing), but the way life was actually lived in America, even in the most idyllic small towns, was very different. That must have been true in Germany too.
Nevertheless the Ministry of Illusion movies are an indispensable reality check. There was a jarring contrast between what I saw and what I expected to see. If the Germans were who I thought they were, they would not have watched movies like this.
A serious student of history who wants to know what really happened in the Third Reich (assuming any such students exist) should make a point to see some of these films. When you watch the same movies that the Germans watched at the time, it's almost like being there.
Gun control in the Third Reich
If you read political discussions on the internet, hardly a week goes by without somebody saying "They are going to confiscate our guns, just like Hitler did!"
In fact no such thing happened. This priceless document describes the policy about guns in the Reich. The author is Heinz Weichardt, whose father was Editor of the Berliner Morgenpost, and whose mother was Jewish.
Since my early teens I had been an avid gun lover. In Austria, where we lived at the time, there were in effect no restrictions on the possession of handguns or rifles. If there were, they certainly were not enforced. At the age of fifteen, I could walk into one of the finest gunshops in Vienna and purchase any weapon in the store, as long as I had the necessary money.
Unfortunately I didn't, but after some time I had scraped together a sufficient amount to start my modest collection by acquiring three low-priced handguns. Shortly thereafter, in 1929, we moved to Berlin.
In Germany, under the Weimar Republic, one had to register each gun with the police. There were no restrictions on possession except if you wanted to carry them. In this case you had to have a hunting licence which required a lengthy course in gun handling, marksmanship, game laws and the handling of bagged game.
The police had absolutely no say or power to refuse you the ownership of your guns when you came to register. It was a purely bureaucratic measure which enabled the police to trace a gun involved in a criminal action.
My guns were registered in the name of my (Jewish) mother, who had contributed the money for their original purchase, because I was only fifteen years old and could not own firearms until I reached maturity (21 years).
After Hitler came to power, nothing was changed in the existing gun regulations; nobody had to turn in the registered guns - period. My mother still had them on the day of her immigration to the US (May 1941) and gave them to a friend of mine because importation of firearms was prohibited under US law.
It gets better. You just have to read the whole thing, including his description of the Gestapo raid after word got around the neighborhood that he was planning to buy 100 Parabellums.
Six Reasons Why the Gas Chamber Story is a Lie
The first and most fundamental reason is that the room that is supposed to be a gas chamber isn't a gas chamber. My argument begins where any such argument must begin: with the physical evidence, the rooms themselves.
The gas chamber story is the biggest Big Lie there ever was.
Peter Staudenmaier, Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents - a hostile but informative article which, as the author says, "presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich."
The economics of National Socialism
An online book about Otto Strasser by Douglas Reed. He says many of the 25 points of National Socialism - especially points 11 through 17, the socialist part of the program - were never implemented.
Going back to the quotation from Mein Kampf,
Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear: it only had to make certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation.
The idea here is that you don't want to eliminate the capital markets completely. That would be suicidal. That would be full fledged socialism, which would destroy the whole economy. You just have to make sure that capital stays in its place. The essential idea of American government is that the government exists to serve the people. It has no rights of its own. National Socialism extends this idea to include banks and corporations: the financial system exists to serve the people. It has no right to exist on its own. We don't serve it, it serves us.
Of course the bankers don't see it that way. The financial system is international. It is firmly entrenched. It is bigger than any government that tries to control it. We are screwed.
The Sanskrit Story and the Third Wave
I begin this page by describing a Sanskrit class that I took in 1990. Then I retell the story of Ron Jones's "Third Wave" experiment, and follow that up with a long discussion. The Third Wave didn't happen the way Ron Jones described it. It does have some basis in fact, but most of it is fiction. It's a fable, intended to make a political point. However, it's not presented as a fable. It's supposed to be historical fact. It isn't.
If a new virus appeared, and infected everybody on earth, and changed everybody's skin to white, would that make any difference? Of course not. We would all still be who we are. Germans would still be Germans, Chinese would still be Chinese, and Africans would still be Africans. Wiggers would still be wiggers. We need to stop talking about "the white race" and call things by their right names. It's not about color.
I despise the Africanized culture I live in more than words can express, but "white" is the wrong concept, "power" is the wrong concept, and when you combine them to form "white power," you get a red herring to say the least.
As an American, I grew up with the idea that Nazism = racism. Those terms are practically synonymous in American English. The neo-Nazis themselves propagate the idea that Nazism is racism, either because they are ignorant enough to believe it, or because that is what they are paid to do (or some of both). In any case it is a false idea.
First of all, the word "Nazism" is an anachronism. As far as I can tell, there was nobody in the 1920's and 1930's who would describe his ideology as "Nazism." I don't think there was any such concept at the time. So we really ought to be asking whether National Socialism was equivalent to racism. The answer is no.
If you look up "race" in the index of Mein Kampf, and go to the pages listed, it turns out that when the subject of race comes up, Hitler is usually talking about Jewish racism.
The topic of white vs black racial conflict is mentioned in passing. It's pretty obvious which side Hitler is on, but it wasn't a big issue at the time. He does talk about the Aryans a lot, but the expression 'master race' does not occur in Mein Kampf, nor does the word 'übermensch'.
Hitler was a racist, like most people in those days, but that is not what National Socialism is about. Race was in the background, not the foreground. This is one of the things that I did not understand for a long time.
Why I am not a National Socialist - Since I have had so many second thoughts, a more appropriate title for this page might be "why I have deeply mixed feelings about the whole thing." Like the "what is whiteness" page, the "why I'm not" page is not so much an essay as a debate I am having with myself. The fact that National Socialism is a moving target makes it that much more confusing. My present understanding of National Socialism is very different from what I thought it was a decade ago.
If you have read this far, you have probably gotten the impression that I am an enthusiastic National Socialist. Alas, it's not that simple. I would give Hitler a mixed review. I am not a nationalist, not a socialist, not a conservative, and not really that estranged from the financial system (the system is good to people like me). Plus, I have no use for the nanny state. The last thing I need is to have even more busybodies telling me how to live my life. There is too much of that already. So I am almost the opposite of a National Socialist. I don't want to be part of an "organized folk community."
But I hate being lied to.
Beyond that, there must be a reason why I am doing this. Getting the facts straightened out is always important, but why am I so concerned with these particular facts?
Life does not have to be the way it usually is. Something better is possible. When I saw the Ministry of Illusion films, I left my nightmarish existence in Los Angeles behind and entered a different world. I will remember it as long as I live.
For one brief moment, the sun appeared to be emerging into the world. A man dared to create a domain that would be free of lies, free of cancer, free of depression, free of everything nonsensical and incoherent. A door opened and revealed a cathedral of light. Flashes of red, silver and gold lit up the sky. Then the light went out.
It still shines in my mind.
When I started writing these pages, in 1999, the idea was to come up with a new philosophy, called Post-Nazism, that would revive the parts of National Socialism that are still valid in our time, without the historical baggage. After a while I got discouraged and gave up on that project. Now that this site is getting more traffic - the gas chamber page by itself got about 30,000 visitors in 2005 and has been getting more than 1000 visitors a week in the winter and spring of 2006 - I am starting to think it might be worth pursuing after all. However, I really have no idea how to proceed. I am not sure how much, if any, of Hitler's original idea is valid in our time.
In one of the quotations from Mein Kampf, Hitler said
The cure of a sickness can only be achieved if its cause is known, and the same is true of curing political evils... the new products showed signs, not only of artistic aberration but of spiritual degeneration. Here, in the cultural sphere, the signs of the coming collapse first became manifest.
Neither Hitler nor anyone else thought this through and reached a conclusion. I don't know much about the history of painting, but I do know something about music. Classical music had already lost the thread before the end of the 19th century (Elgar, Debussy). The seeds of Messiaen had been planted long before. The spiritual degeneration started to become apparent even before the middle of the 19th century (Schumann, Liszt). It did not start (as I used to think) with Schoenberg and Stravinsky in the early 20th century. It was well underway before they were born. As for what caused it, no one knows.
If we don't know the cause, we don't know the cure either.
There is no reason to think National Socialism is the cure. Classical music emerged in early modern times, when the aristocracy and the church ran things. It was anything but populist. There was classical music in France under the ancien régime, but not after the revolution. There never was any classical music in America. As the masses were integrated into society - as their lives opened up and they demanded a public voice - classical music gave way to modern music. I would assume that the same thing applies to art. If you want to create a society in which classical music and art can flourish, installing a populist government may be exactly the wrong thing to do.
Or it may just be irrelevant. Politics is froth on the surface of deeper cultural trends. If the Third Reich had survived, it would have had little long-term effect on music and art even in Germany, let alone the rest of the world.
For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable.
The regressive development is ongoing and the end is coming into view.
Sometimes I regret ever having used the expression "post-Nazi." Anyone who uses the word "Nazi" is going to be lumped together with neo-Nazis. Calling myself a "post-Nazi" is not enough to disassociate myself from them. I have nothing to do with neo-Nazis. They are cigarette-smoking idiots who like the ugly side of National Socialism and have no clue about the wholesome, constructive side of it. They think it's all about exterminating other races. They have never heard of Strength Through Joy.
The assumption here is that there really is such a thing as a neo-Nazi, i.e. that people who call themselves "neo-Nazis" are sincere. That is a big assumption. Back in the 1950's and 60's, when Communism was the big bogeyman, the FBI had a saying about the Communists: "When three of them meet, one of them is ours." The Communists could not even have a meeting of three people without one of them being an agent. On one notorious occasion, there was a Communist meeting, and everybody who showed up was an FBI agent. They just had a good laugh and went home. The same thing applies to "neo-Nazis". When three of them meet...
I think the most offensive skinheads are paid to be offensive. Nevertheless some neo-Nazis are not government agents. They are sincere, and they are an echo of something that really did exist in the Third Reich.
National Socialism was built on a cracked foundation. Nietzschean nihilism was part of it from day one. I am not sure it is possible to separate the valid part of it from the occultism and alcoholic thuggishness. Not to mention the war - I don't believe for a minute that Hitler was forced into war against his will. Hitler's attempt to carve out lebensraum in Russia was a throwback to the migrations of earlier, pre-civilized times. It was reminiscent of the Huns, Mongols, and Turks.
It was also reminiscent of the White settlers carving out lebensraum in America.
Realistically, the socialist part of National Socialism probably couldn't be implemented. As the spirit said to Johann Suter - see Ministry of Illusion for the context - "Why do you keep trying to fight the gold? You can't stop the wheels of the world." Money always wins.
Socialism doesn't work. It has failed everywhere it has been tried. The Third Reich was prosperous because the socialistic parts of the original program were never implemented.
Realistically, also, "the old spirit of the folk-community" described by Friedrich Kurreck is probably gone forever. The innocent Sponge-Bob enthusiasm he describes is inconceivable today. American machinists are not like that. I don't know if German machinists could ever be like that again. This is a hard thing to say. If we are living in a world in which the old spirit of the folk-community is dead forever, then we have a bleak future.
There are times when I wish I didn't have to be realistic.
Hitler had to make compromises. He accepted financial support from big business, otherwise he could never have come to power at all. The working class will always be the working class. They will never have power. They will always be dependent on the kindness of strangers. Even though the Third Reich was not really socialist, in the Strasser sense, it was as close as you can come to a society in which the working class is treated fairly and has a chance for a good life. America in the 1950's and 1960's was also close to that ideal. We didn't call it Strength Through Joy - it was not an official program, it just happened - but the result was similar.
I don't know if that will ever happen again. We seem to be entering a regressive era in which the working class - and the middle class too, as far as that goes - have the same status they had in the Roman Empire. I don't know if the working class will ever have a chance for a good life in any future society, and, frankly, I'm not sure I care. Of course, I would like to live in a society that's fair to working people, but how important is that in the general scheme of things? I'm not working class. It's not my problem. I would like to live in a world in which Germany and all other countries have freed themselves from the international financial system, but I'm not sure how important that is, either. I am, first of all, a transhumanist. That trumps everything. As far as I'm concerned, the main reason for not being a National Socialist is that it's a waste of time. I don't believe in spending my time and energy on noble lost causes.
Post-Nazism isn't really about socialism, or nationalism. It's about thought control. It's about freeing our minds. To me, the most important thing is not so much the Reich itself as the fact that they are lying about it, and, even worse, it's illegal to question their lies in Germany and many other countries. That is my problem. That is important in the general scheme of things.
At least it is important to me. The difficulty, of course, is that this issue by itself doesn't have any traction. Almost no one cares about it, even in academia - especially in academia.
I think there must be a way out of this, but I don't know what it is. Not right now. The thing to do is put the subject aside, and wait for further developments. A few years from now, we will be in a different situation. We are on the threshold of events that will reshuffle the deck, and then we can make a fresh start.
If you hold a three-year-old on your knee and tell him stories, he lives in the world you create for him. Your mind contains his mind. Stories rule.
As things stand now, we are not the storytellers, we are the three-year-olds. We live in someone else's story -- an illusory world that someone else has created for us.
That has to change. If we are to have any hope of turning our situation around, we have to be the storytellers. As I said in Ministry of Illusion,
There is a fallacy that is widely believed: that in a conflict between races or cultures, the one with the best street fighters wins. That's not how it works. The one with the best storytellers wins.
In the October 5, 2001 edition of the Los Angeles Times there was an article by Howard Rosenberg about an episode of a TV show, "The West Wing," made in response to the events of September 11. I didn't see the show (I don't watch "The West Wing" or any such show - I don't watch TV at all), so I will just assume that his description is accurate.
According to Rosenberg, the plot is as follows. A group of high school students on a tour are "trapped in the White House during a tense lockdown ordered in response to a possible security breach that turned out to be a false alarm."
The White House staff members take turns "lecturing the students and themselves about the roots and nature of terrorism and how a wounded U.S. should respond."
Later in the show the President and First Lady also make an appearance and deliver their own lectures to this captive audience.
This is a perfect metaphor for the situation we are in. We are like those students. We are a captive audience, and we are going to listen to their lecture whether we like it or not. Whatever is happening, they tell us what to think about it. In this case it's the 9/11 attack, but it could be anything. They not only tell us what to think, they very helpfully provide the vocabulary in which we frame our thoughts. And then, of course, they tell us we are Critical Thinkers.
They contain us. We live in their story. We play the roles and speak the dialogue that they provide for us.
Post-Nazism is basically an attempt to escape from this situation.
School's out!