Like most people, I grew up believing that National Socialism was a Very Bad Thing. When I was in the 9th grade, my world history teacher gave me an extra credit assignment - read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, and write a report on it. I did. That was a pretty stiff assignment for a 9th grader, but I read the book all the way through. 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. It is a large subject, and this page is not intended to be a complete discussion of it. I have hardly scratched the surface. The page would have to be much longer than it is, just to cover the main points. I hope some honest historian will write a new history of the Third Reich to supersede William Shirer's book - i.e. someone will do for German history what Alexander Solschenitsyn has done for Russian history. I am not in a position to write such a book, but this page is intended to be a step in the right direction.
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?
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.
"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.
"But anyone who in the spring of 1923 wanted to make France's occupation of the Ruhr an occasion for reviving our military implements of power had first to give the nation its spiritual weapons, strengthen its will power, and destroy the corrupters of this most precious national strength.
"Just as in 1918 we paid with our blood for the fact that in 1914 and 1915 we did not proceed to trample the head of the Marxist serpent once and for all, we would have to pay most catastrophically if in the spring of 1923 we did not avail ourselves of the opportunity to halt the activity of the Marxist traitors and murderers of the nation for good.
"Any idea of real resistance to France was utter nonsense if we did not declare war against those forces which five years before had broken German resistance on the battlefields from within.
"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.
"And in 1923 we faced exactly the same situation as in 1918. Regardless what type of resistance was decided on, the first requirement was always the elimination of the Marxist poison from our national body. And in my opinion, it was then the very first task of a truly national government to seek and find the forces which were resolved to declare a war of annihilation on Marxism, and then to give these forces a free road; it was their duty not to worship the idiocy of 'law and order' at a moment when the enemy without was administering the most annihilating blow to the fatherland and at home treason lurked on every street corner. No, at that time a really national government should have desired disorder and unrest, provided only that amid the confusion a basic reckoning with Marxism at last became possible and actually took place. If this were not done, any thought of resistance, regardless of what type, was pure madness.
"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 (1939) 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 I think Murphy is definitely better. 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.
Manheim, Murphy, and the original German text can be found here.
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.
There is also 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 citation 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.
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 exactly the kind of thing Hitler was complaining about. It is also the kind of falsification of history that Orwell was complaining about.
What difference does it make? What is at stake here? This brings us to the second question, what happened in the Third Reich? Recently Matt Koehl gave a talk in which he summarized National Socialism as well as I have ever seen it done. 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 most of the world was mired in depression, National Socialist Germany had a level of prosperity that we don't even have today. 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. 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.
Three essays by Germans who lived in the Reich
One of the authors is Leon Degrelle. The others are Hans Schmidt and Friedrich Kurreck. Here is an excerpt from Herr Kurreck's essay. This is the very heart of National Socialism:
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!
'Nazi Terror' - From A Jewish National Socialist
Yes, a Jewish National Socialist. This priceless document provides a unique perspective on 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 he bought 100 Parabellums.
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.
Now, moving on to some of my own pages:
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.
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. The fact that "Request Concert" has been banned means it reveals something they don't want us to know.
A serious student of history who wants to know what really happened in the Third Reich should make a point to see some of these films. You can only learn so much from books. When you watch the same movies that the Germans watched at the time, it's almost like being there.
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.
For most people, this is merely an academic issue. When they start drafting young men and women and sending them to the Middle East to serve as cannon fodder for Israel, it will be a matter of more pressing interest. If you or someone close to you may be drafted, it behooves you to understand the background of the war, and that requires understanding the origin of the state of Israel. Finding out what did and did not happen in the Holocaust is an essential step toward understanding what's going on in the world today.
Agendas of revisionists and anti-revisionists - Michael Shermer poses the question, "Who says the Holocaust never happened, and why do they say it?" First of all, he's lying: revisionists don't say the Holocaust never happened. Beyond that, several points need to be made here. This is, obviously, an ad hominem argument: instead of focusing on the factual question of whether there were gas chambers, he focuses on who his opponents are, and on their supposed motives.
But as long as that question has been raised, it needs to be discussed, and the converse question also needs to be addressed: Who says there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and the other Nazi camps, and why do they say it?
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.
The rest of this page has more to do with "how I feel about it" than with "what it is." This discussion really belongs on another page.
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.
There are a lot of White Power sites on the internet. They just keep repeating the same old clichés. Both their words and their behavior are echoes of the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, and the skinheads of the 1980s and 1990s, all of which is irrelevant today.
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.
We are all supposed to support the American agenda, i.e. the attempt to create an integrated society and a drug-free society. There must be a few who think, as I do, that the American agenda is monstrous. It's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
Why I am not a National Socialist - since I have had so many second thoughts, a more appropriate title might be "why I have deeply mixed feelings about the whole thing." Like the what is whiteness page, this is not so much an essay as a debate I am having with myself.
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 Six Reasons 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.
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. As I said above, they are idiots who like the ugly side of National Socialism and have no clue about the positive, idealistic side of it.
I have to admit that the ugly side of it was there all along. 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. If it comes down to a choice between accepting the whole thing or rejecting the whole thing, I have to reject it. If it comes down to an either/or choice, the only thing to do is start over with a new concept. I will probably end up doing that, but for the time being - maybe not much longer - I am going to stick with "post-Nazism."
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.
Not only that, socialism just 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 just inconceivable today. American machinists are not like that. I don't know if German machinists could be like that, ever 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.
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 those students. We are all 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 terrorist 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!