National Socialism

by Lyle Burkhead

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. Countries would generate capital internally instead of depending on foreign investment. 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 and education, not on finance, insurance, real estate, casinos, and prisons.

There would be no dumbing-down policy in the schools or anywhere else.

There would be no TSA pat-downs. No such thing happened in the Reich, nor could it happen. An obscenity like that would be inconceivable. When you go through security at an American airport, the Zionists literally have you by the balls. Under National Socialism, the Zionists would not be running things, with all that that implies for both foreign and domestic policy.

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.

Students would not have to go into debt to get an education.

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. 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. I read the book all the way through and wrote a report, but the report was not very good. She gave me an A, but in my own mind I knew I did not deserve an A. Some of what I wrote was cribbed from Encyclopedia Britannica. My teacher expected a little too much from her star student. At that age I was not quite ready to read a book of that length and density, hold it all in my mind at once, and write a paper about it. I guess that's where this page is coming from. Fifty years later, I am still working on that assignment. Anyway I believed everything in the book. And why not?  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.

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 (pdf file). This is a booklet by Gottfried Feder which goes into more detail. The link is to a photocopy of Feder's booklet (in English).

Nazi-Sozi: Questions and Answers for National-Socialists (pdf file)

William N. Goetzmann, Financing Civilization - When Hitler heard Feder's lecture about the breaking of interest slavery, things started to fall into place in his mind, and the concept of National Socialism was born. He may not have understood what he was up against. He set out to overthrow a deeply rooted system with a very long history. William Goetzmann describes how it started. Here is a very short excerpt (not a substitute for the whole thing):

Second Millennium Ur may have been an early hothouse of capitalistic enterprize, but what of the borrowers mired in debt? The government may actually have preferred them this way. A study by the economist M. Darling of the rural economy of the Punjab in modern times suggests a disturbing thing about human nature -- people work harder and produce more when they are in debt. Darling found that crop yields for farmers in debt typically exceeded yields from unencumbered farmers. Farmers in the Punjab may have faced foreclosure, but for the ancient inhabitant of Ur, the motivation was even greater. Debtors were often forced to sell themselves into slavery.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while the first loan contracts and the legal system that enforced them may have been good for the Mesopotamian economy, they made life miserable for the working man and woman. If lending began, as historian Paul Millet believes, as a process of neighborly reciprocity in rural societies, then it evolved into something quite different. In Babylonian times, short-term debt was a tool used to extract taxes from the population, and to increase the productivity of temple lands. It is almost as though the government had found a way to extract the residual "goodwill" from the economy, by allowing individuals to shift financial obligations into the future. Lending in ancient Ur was mostly for emergency purposes -- where the government created the emergency! The other side of the coin is that certain entrepreneurs such as Dumuzi-gamil achieved economic upward mobility through borrowing. Thus, while the system was harsh on the populace, it encouraged creative and productive enterprise. For those with the imagination to exploit it, the financial system of Ur offered limitless possibilities.

Does this sound familiar?  It was more than 3,000 years ago. The premise of national socialism is that it is possible to get out of this. The way to get out of the system of debt slavery is to use enthusiasm instead of fear to motivate people.

David Graeber, Debt: The first five thousand years - as before, this snippet is not a substitute for the whole thing.

The Mesopotamian economy was dominated by large public institutions (Temples and Palaces) whose bureaucratic administrators effectively created money of account by establishing a fixed equivalent between silver and the staple crop, barley. Debts were calculated in silver, but silver was rarely used in transactions. Instead, payments were made in barley or in anything else that happened to be handy and acceptable. Major debts were recorded on cuneiform tablets kept as sureties by both parties to the transaction.

Certainly, markets did exist. Prices of certain commodities that were not produced within Temple or Palace holdings, and thus not subject to administered price schedules, would tend to fluctuate according to the vagaries of supply and demand. But most actual acts of everyday buying and selling, particularly those that were not carried out between absolute strangers, appear to have been made on credit. "Ale women", or local innkeepers, served beer, for example, and often rented rooms; customers ran up a tab; normally, the full sum was dispatched at harvest time. Market vendors presumably acted as they do in small-scale markets in Africa, or Central Asia, today, building up lists of trustworthy clients to whom they could extend credit.

The habit of money at interest also originates in Sumer – it remained unknown, for example, in Egypt. Interest rates, fixed at 20 percent, remained stable for 2,000 years. (This was not a sign of government control of the market: at this stage, institutions like this were what made markets possible.) This, however, led to some serious social problems. In years with bad harvests especially, peasants would start becoming hopelessly indebted to the rich, and would have to surrender their farms and, ultimately, family members, in debt bondage. Gradually, this condition seems to have come to a social crisis – not so much leading to popular uprisings, but to common people abandoning the cities and settled territory entirely and becoming semi-nomadic "bandits" and raiders. It soon became traditional for each new ruler to wipe the slate clean, cancel all debts, and declare a general amnesty or "freedom", so that all bonded labourers could return to their families. (It is significant here that the first word for "freedom" known in any human language, the Sumerian amarga, literally means "return to mother".) Biblical prophets instituted a similar custom, the Jubilee, whereby after seven years all debts were similarly cancelled. This is the direct ancestor of the New Testament notion of "redemption".

Historically, as we have seen, ages of virtual, credit money have also involved creating some sort of overarching institutions – Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place some sort of controls on the potentially catastrophic social consequences of debt. Almost invariably, they involve institutions (usually not strictly coincident to the state, usually larger) to protect debtors. So far the movement this time has been the other way around: starting with the '80s we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system, operating through the IMF, World Bank, corporations and other financial institutions, largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

The question is how we can create a countervailing force to oppose this "planetary administrative system."

Along with Steve Keen and Cullen Roche, Michael Hudson is one of the best critics of mainstream economics. More of his ideas can be found on Globalresearch, Counterpunch, and his website. Here is Michael Hudson on debt:

I’ve spent much of my time looking through history to read up on how the failure to wipe out the debt overhead led to the collapse of Rome’s imperial republic, and to the Ottoman Empire as what was known as “the spoiling of Egypt” and “the ruin of Persia” toward the end of the 19th century. I’ve also published a series of four colloquia by assyriologists and archaeologists describing how earlier, from about 2500 to perhaps 300 BC, Babylonian and other Near Eastern rulers kept their citizens free and preserved their landholdings by annulling personal and agrarian debts when they took the throne – a true “tax holiday” – or when economic or military conditions warranted a general Clean Slate.

These Clean Slates were adopted literally, almost word for word, in the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25. Even the same Hebrew word, deror, was used for the Babylonian andurarum proclaimed by rulers of Hammurapi’s dynasty from 2000 to 1600 BC. So it is remarkable to me that men claiming to be Christian leaders today should ignore the fact that in the very first sermon that Jesus gave, in Nazareth (Luke 4:14-30), he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah 61 and promised that he had come “to proclaim the Year of the Lord,” the Jubilee Year. That was the literal “good news” that the Bible preached, as the Dead Sea scrolls have abundantly illustrated.

Ellen Brown, "Thinking Outside the Box: How a Bankrupt Germany solved its Infrastructure Problems"

When Hitler came to power, the country was completely, hopelessly broke. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed crushing reparations payments on the German people, who were expected to reimburse the costs of the war for all participants — costs totaling three times the value of all the property in the country. Speculation in the German mark had caused it to plummet, precipitating one of the worst runaway inflations in modern times. At its peak, a wheelbarrow full of 100 billion-mark banknotes could not buy a loaf of bread. The national treasury was empty, and huge numbers of homes and farms had been lost to the banks and speculators. People were living in hovels and starving. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before - the total destruction of the national currency, wiping out people's savings, their businesses, and the economy generally. Making matters worse, at the end of the decade global depression hit. Germany had no choice but to succumb to debt slavery to international lenders.

Or so it seemed. Hitler and the National Socialists, who came to power in 1933, thwarted the international banking cartel by issuing their own money. In this they took their cue from Abraham Lincoln, who funded the American Civil War with government-issued paper money called "Greenbacks." Hitler began his national credit program by devising a plan of public works. Projects earmarked for funding included flood control, repair of public buildings and private residences, and construction of new buildings, roads, bridges, canals, and port facilities. The projected cost of the various programs was fixed at one billion units of the national currency. One billion non-inflationary bills of exchange, called Labor Treasury Certificates, were then issued against this cost. Millions of people were put to work on these projects, and the workers were paid with the Treasury Certificates. This government-issued money wasn't backed by gold, but it was backed by something of real value. It was essentially a receipt for labor and materials delivered to the government. Hitler said, "for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark's worth of work done or goods produced." The workers then spent the Certificates on other goods and services, creating more jobs for more people.

Henry C K Liu, Nazism and the German Economic Miracle

The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began. In fact, German economic recovery preceded and later enabled German rearmament, in contrast to the US economy, where constitutional roadblocks placed by the US Supreme Court on the New Deal delayed economic recovery until US entry to World War II put the US market economy on a war footing.

This article describes a precursor of National Socialism, hundreds of years ago:

The Commonwealth of France's Louis XI: Foundations Of The Nation State by Pierre Beaudry

When, in 1429, Joan of Arc took charge of a broken down French army - demoralized from decades of fighting England - and led it to a stunning first victory at the battle of Orléans, it seemed that France, and with it, the known civilized world, was doomed. Nearly 95 percent of the population still alive was suffering in utter poverty. In spite of all of this, by the middle of the century, France had produced a leader, King Louis XI, who in the course of his reign (1461-1483), transformed this depopulated scorched earth into the most productive nation-state in the world, and a model for nation-building efforts of Spain, England, and eventually America.

Louis's development of France was based on the idea of the commonwealth, government on behalf of the physical and cultural enrichment of the people and the nation-state - the common good - as opposed to the territorial looting of an empire. Such a commonwealth could only be achieved by means of improving the productive powers of labor of that population. In this fashion, the nation-state must be ruled in a dirigistic fashion from a centralized government which commits itself to fostering man's ability to reflect this general purpose through breakthroughs in art and science. In turn, the elevated individual soul will ennoble the nation-state by making a contribution to its advancement and progress.

Jonathan Tennenbaum, The Isotope Economy (pdf file) - This article describes what the economy might look like if it were based on real industry, not on finance, real estate, etc. This is what the Third Reich would be doing if it had survived into the 21st Century.

Pierre Beaudry and Jonathan Tennenbaum most definitely do not consider themselves to be describing National Socialism. Neither does Michael Hudson. I don't know of any discussions of economics from an explicitly National Socialist viewpoint - with the possible exception of Ellen Brown's article, and even she says "Hitler has rightfully gone down in infamy in the history books" - so I have just linked to some pages that I have found enlightening and relevant. The point is, these articles indicate what National Socialism is about. Contrary to what they keep telling us, it's not about "white power."

Just creating a new monetary system is not enough; but even though it is not sufficient, it is necessary. You have to get economics right, or else whatever you do will come to nothing.

Gary North has offered a detailed critique of Ellen Brown, both her scholarship and her economics. Her reply can be found here. Gary North clearly gets the better of this exchange. When Ellen Brown says somebody is widely quoted as having said something, and Gary North points out that there is no evidence that he ever said any such thing, and she responds that her original statement is true, because he IS widely quoted as having said it... I can only laugh.

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: Now the expression "tell a lie big enough" can be found on the Calvin site. It is on a page of false quotations. 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. And they put these lies in an article about 1984, of all things.

This is perfectly Orwellian. It just doesn't get any better than this.

2. The reality - what happened in the Third Reich?

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.

This is what 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 the physical and cultural education, and so forth, he is describing the Strength Through Joy program. This is the heart of National Socialism.

National Socialism is cornucopian. The idea is for everybody to have an abundant life, with plenty of headroom. It's kind of like the American Dream, of generations past, the dream that has been abandoned.

Many people think that if we abolish the Fed, and go back to the gold standard, that would set everything right. No, it wouldn't. Other people think that if we could just go back to Franklin's paper money, or Lincoln's greenbacks, that would fix everything. No, it wouldn't. As long as we have the same crew in New York and Washington running things, it doesn't matter what we do about the Fed, or the monetary system in general. Hitler himself said that just fiddling with the financial system is not enough.

Franklin's paper money or Lincoln's Greenbacks will only work if Franklin or Lincoln is at the helm. Even then, it is not clear to me that the greenback system is stable. It may work for a few years, but how long will it last?  --- Since writing this, I have learned that it is even worse than I thought. Gary North argues convincingly that: "The myth of 'Lincoln money' is perhaps the most deceptive historical error of the Greenbackers. It ignores what Lincoln said and did." This is Error #3 on the linked page. There are many more. I regret having quoted Ellen Brown. Anyway I stand by my point that the success of any kind of Greenback currency depends on who is running it. It does not work automatically, and it may not work at all. Of course the same thing applies to any other monetary system.

The problem is not capitalism per se, but crony capitalism. There is such a thing as crony socialism, too. I see the same thing happening everywhere - the US, Russia, China, etc. Insiders game the system (any system) and make off with the loot. Politics is not about isms, it's about people.

When communism was collapsing, and people were talking about establishing democracy in Russia, somebody wrote an article in which he posed the question: How can you have democracy in Russia - where is the human material for it?  In other words, how can you have democracy in a country of thugs and crooks?  You can't.

The same thing applies to Germany, the United States, and everywhere else. How can you have a government that acts in the public interest, in a country where there is a complete lack of public spirit among the people? 

"Neither the wisest Constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." - Samuel Adams

Let me repeat something Degrelle said, for emphasis:

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.

That is what it takes to have National Socialism. Nothing less will do.

The Nuremburg Rallies

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. It was not one ecstatic rally after another. Most of the time people just went about their business. However, the rallies were an essential part of the Third Reich. Without the esprit de corps generated by the rallies, the transformation of Germany described above could not have happened.

What follows is from another Degrelle article, although some of it consists of quotations from others.

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. There is a certain body language and mindset associated with National Socialism. It is the opposite of depression, and also the opposite of the "slacker" mindset. Herr Kurreck describes it thus:

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 the winter of 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 caricature of National Socialism, including the Third Wave.

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. When they discover that they are in love with the same girl, there is no alpha-male confrontatation. They let her decide. They bend over backwards to give each other a fair chance.

Skinheads would not recognize themselves in any of the movies I saw from the Third Reich. There is nothing remotely resembling a skinhead in the entire series of 18 movies.

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, would not have much use for today's neo-Nazis, and conversely, neo-Nazis would not like the Reich that actually existed.

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.

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."

Health was an essential part of National Socialism. It was wired into their culture. There is a telling anecdote in The Nazi War on Cancer: the Austrian authorities could easily follow the penetration of National Socialism into their country, because whenever a town was converted to National Socialist, tobacco sales went down.

Gun control in the Third Reich

If you read political discussions on the internet, hardly a week goes by without some liar 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.

What do the Jews have to do with globalization? Good question. The short answer is that I don't really know. But they know. I bought a copy of the Jerusalem Post (issue of April 5, 2002), because I wanted to get another view of what's happening in Israel (i.e. another view besides the one I get from my usual news sources). I found something that bears on our present subject.

There is an editorial by Amotz Asa-el about the Jewish idea of tikun olam, which means "mending the world." He says that Jews should stop trying to change the world, and just think about how to escape from it or insulate themselves from it. In the course of this discussion, he mentions George Soros, who, he says, is "in the habit of shedding crocodile tears over capitalism's wrongs." He goes on to say:

...the day is near when those who today hide behind the amorphous of definition [sic] of "anti-globalization activists" will come forth with conspiracy theories linking the excessively high profile and world-mending Soros with other global Jewish economic players, like the IMF's Stanley Fischer, the World bank's James Wolfensohn, the US Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan.

Until I read this, it had not occurred to me to make that connection. I didn't even know Wolfensohn was a Jew. But Mr. Asa-el thinks it's self-evident that being against globalization amounts to the same thing as being against the Jews. Amotz Asa-el thinks this is so obvious that anti-globalization activists must know it too, and therefore they must be "hiding" behind the anti-globalization slogan.

It may be true that the protesters are hiding behind a euphemism. Maybe they do not want to admit, even to themselves, what the situation actually is. Before the Second World War, antisemitism was a phenomenon of the left as much as the right. In those days, everybody who was interested in such things knew who the international financiers were, and people were not afraid to name names. Since the war, the "Holocaust" accusation has made it impossible for anyone to make an issue of Jewish financial power.

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 is not a gas chamber. My argument begins where any such argument must begin: with the physical evidence, the rooms themselves. All six reasons are necessary to nail down the conclusion. To see the whole argument, you have to click on the link.

In the summer of 1995, I went to the debate between Mark Weber and Michael Shermer. Mark Weber won by default. Michael Shermer didn't really say anything. He just tried to pretend that there is nothing to argue about. I picked up some literature from the Institute for Historical Review (which sponsored the debate) and made a lot of notes about things that needed to be checked out.

Over the next few months, I spent a big portion of my time investigating the subject. By the end of the year, it was obvious that the revisionists were basically right. However, I could not bring myself to say that there were no gas chambers. I could not think that thought. All I could say was that the other side has not proved their case. This remained true throughout 1996 and into 1997. It wasn't until the summer of 1997, two years after the debate, that the "six reasons" argument finally started to take shape in my mind. Only then could I imagine that there really were no gas chambers.

It is very difficult to get the gas chamber image out of one's mind. Trying to do so generates huge cognitive dissonance. And even when you get beyond that, the question remains, what did happen?

The gas chamber story is a lie, but it is not totally implausible in light of other things that really did happen. Hitler wanted to create a Judenfrei Europe. He wanted to move the Jews out of the way as much as possible. He wanted to get rid of their financial power, their cultural influence (modern art and music, pornography, the so-called "mainstream" media), and their way of thinking, even down to such a fundamental level as "Jewish physics".  As David Irving (a revisionist) said, the Germans shipped Jews off to the east, and nobody cared what happened to them. Some were shot and buried in mass graves. Many died of typhus. According to Arthur Butz (another revisionist), thousands of Jews were dumped in the Soviet Union, in a war zone, and left to fend for themselves.

If the word "Holocaust" is construed in a general sense, so that it means trying to get rid of the Jews and establish a Judenfrei society, then yes, the "Holocaust" did happen. If "the Holocaust" is construed as "six million Jews were killed in gas chambers," then it is a lie. That did not happen.

The "Judenfrei" concept was not absolute. There was never any intention of killing every last Jew. Thousands of Jews served in the German armed forces. Some Jews were pilots in the German air force.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if someone had suggested to Hitler, "Why don't we exterminate them in gas chambers?"  First he would have done a double-take and laughed at the outrageousness of the idea, but then what?  Would he have just dismissed it as a stupid joke, or would he have considered doing it?  It's hard to say. In any case he didn't exterminate them in gas chambers.

The German word usually translated "exterminate" is "ausrotten". It literally means root out. Hitler did not attack the root of Judaism.

Attacking individual Jews - putting them in concentration camps - is like throwing a rock at your TV because you don't like the program. It is like a bull charging at the matador's flag. It is like pulling up dandelions and leaving the roots.

Should Judaism be rooted out?  Why or why not?  What is the root, anyway?  What does "should" mean in this context?  What kind of argument could be brought to bear on this question?  What kind of moral framework would apply here?

Consider 1 Samuel chapter 15 for their take on it. The Judenfrei concept was not absolute, but the inverse concept is absolute. "Now, go, and you shall smite Amalek, and you shall utterly destroy all that is his, and you shall not have pity on him: and you shall slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

Should Europeans be rooted out?  Why or why not?  Same questions as above. What does "should" mean in this context?  What kind of argument could be brought to bear on this question?  What kind of moral framework would apply here?  The same one?

Should revisionists be locked up?  Why or why not?  Same questions as before.

What about the judge who sentenced Ernst Zundel to prison?  Should he be locked up?  Why or why not?  Same questions again.

What about 9/11 skeptics?  Should Robin Hordon be locked up?  Same questions again.

And then there is this: Palestinians to the ovens

Does the same moral framework apply in all these cases?

Michael Chertoff, dual Israeli/US citizen, former head of Homeland Security, says that 9/11 truth is in the same category as Holocaust Denial. Why would he say that? Why would he frame 9/11 as a Jewish issue?

National Socialism and race

Most of Mein Kampf  is not about race. What Hitler said about race can be found primarily in Volume One, chapter 11, and Volume Two, chapter 2. I can't make enough sense of it even to summarize it. I do want to emphasize one point that comes out clearly. He says (page 362)

Not for nothing did the young movement establish a definite program in which it did not use the word 'folkish'. The concept folkish, in view of its conceptual boundlessness, is no possible basis for a movement and offers no standard for membership in one.

To repeat: it did not use the word 'folkish'.

In modern terms, 'folkish' would be equivalent to 'racist' or 'pro-White'. It also includes the idea of going back to pre-Christian times, back to the era of Vikings and Druids. Hitler wanted an idea that would motivate men to commit themselves to a fighting organization, and 'folkish' is not it.  'Folkish' will bring people to some kind of Renaissance Fair event, or to a meeting at a psychic shop, but if you want to recruit an army like the SA, 'folkish' is not going to cut it. In contemporary terms, 'White Power' is not going to cut it. You have to have a definite political program. They were the National Socialist German Workers Party, not the Folkish Party or White People's Party.

Contrary to what I expected, I did not see any preoccupation with race in the Ministry of Illusion films.

Out of eighteen movies in the Ministry of Illusion series, there were no racial jokes, no racial epithets, no racial confrontations, no racial profiling or stereotyping, no awareness of race at all, with the exception of one scene in one movie. In Kaiser of California, there is a scene in a bar in San Francisco, with whites and blacks partying together. This was during the Gold Rush. Johann Suter had come from Germany to California. In just a few years he established farms, orchards, and ranches, and found work for thousands of immigrants. Then somebody discovered gold. His people quit working and started panning for gold. He went bankrupt. His life fell apart. The gold destroyed him. The scene in the bar is part of that.

Quoting from my Ministry of Illusion review,

These movies are amazing, not so much for what is in them as for what is not in them. There are no Jewish capitalists here, no Jewish bolsheviks, no degenerate Jewish artists or journalists, no Jewish villains of any kind. That whole issue just doesn't come up. In the whole series there is only one character who appears to be Jewish: in The Great Love, the singer is accompanied by a pianist/composer named Alexander Rudinsky, who is in love with her. He is a decent man, not a villain at all. In fact when matters are coming to a head, the plot turns on the question of whether he will do the right thing - and he does. (I found out later that out of a thousand movies made in Nazi Germany, three were anti-Semitic.)

As an American, I grew up with the idea that Nazism = racism. Those terms are synonymous, and Nazism is also supposed to be synonymous with National Socialism.

It is true that Nazism = racism, by definition. The essential thing to understand is that
Nazism /= National Socialism.

The word "Nazism" is an anachronism. Nobody in the 1920's and 1930's would describe his ideology as "Nazism." Hitler did not use that word. The word "Nazism" was introduced by enemies of the Reich, with the intention of confusing the issue.

In the 1950's and 60's, there were magazines with titles like Action for Men and Man's Adventure. They had stories about torture, illustrated with drawings of young women tied up and tortured. They used all kinds of torture - usually whips or branding irons, sometimes blowtorches, electric shocks, racks, etc. It was all sexual. Some favorite themes were whipping breasts, and burning breasts with swastika branding irons. The torturers wore German uniforms and Swastika armbands. These were Jewish magazines published in New York. The association of Nazism with sexual torture was established in the minds of a generation of boys.

Meanwhile we were all told, by both anti-Nazis and neo-Nazis, that Nazism is basically a variant of the Ku Klux Klan. Nazism is all about White Power. The lesson we are supposed to learn is: National Socialism = Nazism, and Nazism is racism of the most small-minded kind, with torture and death camps as the subtext - and that is all there is to it.  The idea is to make the real history of the Reich disappear down the memory hole.

National Socialism is not "Nazism." The idea of National Socialism was defined by Hitler in Mein Kampf, and the reality of it was described by Leon Degrelle in his article.

Of course Hitler was not PC. He was a racist, even more than most people in those days, and there is nothing wrong with not being PC, but that is not what National Socialism is about.  Race is part of it, but not the main thing. Race was in the background, not the foreground. This is one of the things that I did not understand for a long time.

The question that needs to be asked is, what did the Aryans aspire to do when they were in control of their own destiny?  How does this compare with what the Chinese aspire to?  or the Americans?  or anybody?  What the Aryans aspired to was indicated at the top of the page.

You don't have to be a German nationalist to share those aspirations.

The Third Wave

Ron Jones's "Third Wave" story is a lie on two levels. First, he is lying about what happened at Cubberly High School. The Third Wave did not happen the way he describes it. His story 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. Second, the point he is trying to make is also a lie. He claims that the Third Wave was a lesson about life in the Third Reich. In fact life in the Reich was not like that. Not even close.

Several years ago I wrote a page called Why I am not a Nazi. 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. As recently as three or four years ago I still thought it was about race. I am finally (as of December 2010) beginning to appreciate what a vast difference there is between postwar "Nazism" and the original idea of National Socialism. But even the original idea was flawed.

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 in any way shape or form. I am pretty dubious about populist economic programs. National Socialism worked in Germany, at least for a few years, but that was a unique situation, probably not repeatable. Everything had to come together just right to make it work. Most of the time attempts to reform the financial system just make things worse (look at Argentina, for example).

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. I have even less use for police states. Regardless of all the good things that may be said about the Third Reich, it remains true that the Reich was the prototype of the modern security state.

I don't want to be part of an "organized folk community."  I am a rootless cosmopolitan. That is the traditional epithet for the Jews. It applies to me as much as anybody. Why then am I doing this?  Why am I writing about the Third Reich, if I am not an enthusiastic National Socialist?

It is possible for the world I described at the top of the page to actually exist. The Reich was flawed, both in concept and in execution, but it was a step towards creating that world.

The political/financial system that is detroying us is based on lies. It depends on a belief system - a false belief system. That is why it is vulnerable. It depends on maintaining an illusion. The way to fight it is to pop the illusion, and that can be done. As usual, George Orwell got it right: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Illusions are just that, illusions. Lies ultimately have no force.

I must admit that I have bad days when I am as pessimistic as anybody, but those are just moods that pass away. They should not be taken too seriously. When I am thinking clearly, I know that we can get leverage on our situation and change it.

Leon Degrelle said Hitler would have to "transform Germany in practically every respect ... civic spirit, culture, the very nature of men's thinking."  The transformation was started, but it was not carried through with the thoroughness that was required. Like getting control of the financial system, this task also remains unfinished in our time.

It can be finished.

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.

The Nazi police state

Returning to the statement that the Reich was the prototype of the modern security state - this needs a closer examination.

I am adding these comments in 2010-11, when the US/Israeli government is taking the idea of the police state to a whole new level. It doesn't seem fair to blame Hitler for what the Zionists are doing, but he set the precedent.

Or did he? The more I think about it, the more I wonder if the "Nazi police state" is like the gas chambers, an illusion that is very difficult to get out of one's mind. I certainly didn't see any evidence of a police state in the Ministry of Illusion films. That was one of the things I expected to see, but didn't.  Quoting from my review,

To an American, the most amazing thing of all is the lack of police in these movies. Hollywood produces one cop show after another. It would be hard to put together a series of 18 Hollywood movies (not to mention TV shows) spanning a 13 year period without including some cop shows. But there are almost no police investigations in these Nazi movies. There are occasions when the characters get in trouble with the king or the mayor, but the police as an independent institutional force just barely exist in this universe. The characters have affairs, fight duels, and generally do whatever they want without thinking about the police. There is a trial at the end of Closing Chord. That's almost the only time the police appear.

I would have thought that the Nazis would be obsessed with law and order, even more than Americans. I thought there would be story after story about heroic Gestapo agents ferreting out enemies of the state -- Dirty Klaus instead of Dirty Harry. But if these movies are any indication, law and order as we understand it was a matter of little interest to the Germans.

Could this be the result of censorship? -- Possibly the government thought the police were too sacred to be the subject of a movie?  No, that can't be true, because there is one movie about law enforcement -- The Broken Jug -- and the authorities get no respect at all. I say "authorities" because there are no police as such in this village. There is no one with a uniform or a badge. It's much more primitive than that. In any case, The Broken Jug is a joke, and the local magistrate is the butt of the joke -- it's like a Keystone Kops movie -- and this is supposed to be Hitler's favorite movie!!

As far as TSA is concerned, there was no precedent in the Reich. The very idea goes against the spirit of Strength through Joy. The Reich was not that kind of place. That's almost the whole point of it: not to be  a TSA kind of place. There is a scene in The Great Love where people are getting on a train, and a scene in Request Concert where they are entering the stadium at the 1936 Olympics. There is no security check in either place. In the train scene, people just get on the train. Period. Simple as that. It is a totally routine thing, relaxed, with no sense of fear and no need for security. They joke with each other as they come in and take their seats.

That is how people used public transportation in the Third Reich. It was not a precedent for TSA or a step in that direction.

The Gestapo and the SS could do whatever they wanted, without answering to anybody, when they were dealing with communists and others who were not "on board."  This was not the case when they were dealing with ordinary citizens. Then there were constraints of both law and custom.

I already mentioned Heinz Weichardt, the man who said his guns did not have to be turned in after Hitler came to power. Here is more of his story. He was planning to buy 100 Parabellums, with the idea of reselling them and making enough profit to buy one for himself.

Alas, my plan was of short duration. Some envious or overzealous citizen felt obliged to inform the authorities of my dreamy deal. It was followed by the famous knock on the door, and on opening I faced three agents of the secret police (Gestapo). No hands in the pockets groping for hidden arms, no shouted orders or threats, only showing of identifications and the polite question if I had any firearms at home and if they could see them.

I asked them in, got my guns and asked my mother to show the registration receipts. The disappointment of the rather mild-mannered gentlemen at the measly display was obvious and they asked about the whereabouts of the one hundred Parabellums I was suspected of harbouring. My heart sank and I told them about my, now surely aborted, hoped-for big deal, which as yet had not been completed. They looked greatly relieved and the man in charge said that a perfunctory search of our premises was in order. No drawers were ripped out and emptied, nothing was displaced or damaged - only a short look under beds, into armoires and storage cabinets.

When they were ready to leave the man in charge spotted a letter on the table with a Jewish-sounding name of the sender and being obviously informed about my mother's racial background he very kindly admonished her that because of the new conditions prevalent to be especially careful and not to break any of the existing laws. With that they apologized for the inconvenience they had caused and left. My loaded guns remained on the table.

In order fully to appreciate this story you must remember that the Parabellum was at that time still the most powerful and sophisticated military handgun on the European market. Today's equivalent would be a fully automatic MP5 or Ingram. Just imagine somebody informing the "democratic" American government that I was stocking one hundred of those, possibly intending to sell them to some shady characters harbouring racist or otherwise non-PC views.

As I read this story, the key thing is the end: he was not planning to sell the guns to shady characters, and he was not a shady character himself. He had nothing to do with Communists. He was just a kid trying to make some money. If the Gestapo already knew of him, and had reason to think he was subversive, that would be a different situation. In that case, they would not have been so polite. If they suspected him already, and then found Communist literature when they searched the apartment, he would have had a ticket to Dachau.

Heinz Weichardt was not just an ordinary citizen. He was from a prominent family. His father was editor of a major newspaper. But then he was also a Jew, which puts a weird twist on it. Anyway his experience with the Gestapo was not necessarily typical. YMMV. A real Gestapo raid must have been like an American drug bust. The knock on the door is famous for a reason. The Nazi police state cannot be a complete illusion.

TSA and the Gestapo are on opposite sides, politically. As far as TSA is concerned, National Socialists are shady characters by definition, and vice versa - if the Gestapo still existed, TSA agents would go to Dachau; not just the agents, but their bosses, right up the line, including the neocons who created TSA. On a political level, that is what National Socialism was about. Hitler thought that if he did not eliminate the Marxists, Germany faced the prospect of a Communist police state. There is no gentle way to get rid of Communists. They play hardball, and you have to fight them the same way. Hitler created a police state to forestall an even worse police state. There was going to be a police state of some kind, it was just a question of which side the police would be on.

I am not sure I buy this argument. The Communist threat was real, and it may have justified extreme measures in 1933-34, but after the National Socialist regime was established, there was no excuse for continuing the state of emergency. Things should have returned to normal after a year or two.

Maybe things did return to normal, more or less, for people who were not looking for trouble. The evidence is ambiguous. On the one hand I have the Ministry of Illusion films, with their complete lack of law and order themes. The films establish that the police state did not impinge on everyday life. People went about their affairs with no reference to it. It was not even hovering in the background. There were several movies where authority in general was an issue - not police authority specifically, but authorities of various kinds, such as bosses and commanding officers. The authority figures did not usually come off well. They were not the heroes of their respective stories (except in Fugitives). They interfered in the protagonists' lives and made nuisances of themselves, or sometimes just made asses of themselves.

The Broken Jug is particularly revealing. It is the only movie that is specifically concerned with law enforcement, sort of. It's a comedy. Here is what I wrote about it in Ministry of Illusion:

A wonderful farce; according to the flyer that accompanied this series of movies, The Broken Jug was Hitler's favorite movie, but considering the general inaccuracy of the flyer, I don't know whether to believe this. The story takes place in a Dogpatch-like village in rural Holland. A senior judge from the city is on a tour of the countryside to inspect the legal system. He arrives here just in time to sit in on the most absurd trial ever imagined. The judge is a drunken buffoon. The plaintiff is a woman who lives nearby, whose precious jug was broken the night before by a man who was trying to escape from her yard after being caught near her daughter's bedroom. She says the man was Rupert, her daughter's boyfriend. Rupert denies this, and says another man was present. As the trial goes on it becomes increasingly obvious that the real culprit is the judge himself. The senior judge finally straightens everything out, and the village judge is chased out of town. If you like physical humor -- slapstick -- you will love this. The actors are so good that I believed the whole thing, as if I were watching a documentary; only at the end did it finally occur to me that these people are actors, not idiots.

The senior judge has no authority of his own. He is an old man, small and unimposing. He represents The Law. The village judge - a large man who would be imposing if he were not such a clown - is the authority figure in the village, and he is abusing his position. He is also making a complete fool of himself. He gets chased out of town at the end. This is supposed to be Hitler's favorite movie. What does this tell us about the Nazi police state?

I started this thread with 'On the one hand' - what about the other hand?  What evidence is there that things did not return to normal after a year or two?  Well, obviously Nazi Germany was a police state. Everybody knows that.  /sarcasm

Seriously, 'everybody knows' is not evidence... but still.  It was common knowledge at the time, disputed by no one, that the Third Reich was a security state. My understanding is that both the Stasi and the CIA had their roots in the security apparatus of the Reich. Hitler campaigned on a law and order platform, and then he did what he said he would do - lock the bastards up and restore order. Regardless of what Heinz Weichardt says, I just cannot believe that there was no police state in the Third Reich. And yet there was no trace of it in the movies. One way to make sense of this is to take the War on Drugs as an analogy. It would certainly be possible to put together a series of 18 American movies in which there is no reference whatever to SWAT teams, drug busts and prison rape. That doesn't mean those things don't happen. The War on Drugs does exist, and it destroys many lives, but it does not affect most people most of the time, and there is no reason for it to be mentioned in movies.

There was no precedent for TSA in the Third Reich, but there was a precedent for people 'disappearing' into Guantanamo and similar places. Soon after Hitler came to power, communists started disappearing into concentration camps. Hitler did not believe in habeas corpus any more than George Bush does (or Barack Obama).

Enemies of the state (or of the church) have been disappearing into prisons for many centuries. There are many precedents for Guantanamo.

My position is that out of control police are unacceptable, no matter which side they are supposed to be on. One way or another, we are going to get leverage on the situation and bring the Stanford Prison Experiment to an end.

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 skinheads. They like the thuggish side of the Third Reich and have no clue about the constructive side of it. They have never heard of Strength Through Joy.

Skinheads think it's all about exterminating other races. The link is to a YouTube video, "The 14 Words", directed by Steven Dupler. It is a Jewish video about skinheads. Eric Davidson, who is featured in the video, brought it to my attention, in an email in October of 2008, just before the election. The subject line was "Lunatic Fringe... I Know You're Out There!"  This was bait, obviously, but Eric was fishing in the wrong pond. I told him that the skinhead with the beer and the Brutal Attack shirt, who says he wants to exterminate other races, is a plant, and Hitler would have him taken out and shot. Eric wrote back and said he is not a plant, just a loudmouthed knucklehead. Be that as it may, he is the opposite of a National Socialist, and so is everybody else in the video.

"The 14 Words" is disinformation of the worst kind. All the skinheads in it are playing the roles they are supposed to play. Hitler never said anything about exterminating all non-European races. That's not what National Socialism is about. That is what the Jews want us to think it's about.

Try to imagine the skinheads in "The 14 Words" juxtaposed with the Germans described by Friedrich Kurreck. Then you will see what I mean when I say they are the opposite of National Socialists. Of course if you have seen any of the Ministry of Illusion films, or Triumph of the Will, it will be self-evident that "The 14 Words" has nothing to do with the Reich that actually existed.

The whole "neo-Nazi" thing is pretty much of an illusion. Back in the 1950's and 60's, 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, at least one is an agent, and sometimes all three.

Neo-Nazism is not just politically wrong, it is psychologically wrong, rhetorically wrong, dramatically wrong, and metaphysically wrong. It is deeply incoherent.

Neo-Nazism is wrong in so many ways, so consistently wrong, that it cannot have happened by accident. It is designed to be incoherent. It is designed to be ineffectual, even more than the 'folkish' concept that Hitler rejected. Lenin said the best way to control the opposition is to lead it, and that is what they have done.

When I started working on this page, a decade ago, I thought the subject was "Nazism," not National Socialism. Since then I have gradually come to understand that what we call "Nazism" is a postwar creation. In his famous Third Wave story, Ron Jones says there was a rally that brought the Third Wave to a conclusion. He is lying about what happened, but let that go for the moment. According to him, he assembled the students who had been in the Third Wave, plus others who had heard about it, and told them there was no Leader, as they had been led to expect. While they sit there in shock and guilt, he continues:

With that I switched on a rear screen projector. It quickly illuminated a white drop cloth hanging behind the television. Large numbers appeared in a countdown. The roar of the Nuremberg Rally blasted into vision. My heart was pounding. In ghostly images the history of the Third Reich paraded into the room. The discipline. The march of super race. The big lie. Arrogance, violence, terror. People being pushed into vans. The visual stench of death camps. Faces without eyes. The trials. The plea of ignorance. I was only doing my job. My job. As abruptly as it started the film froze to a halt on a single written frame. "Everyone must accept the blame. No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part."

This is not National Socialism, which was described above by Leon Degrelle. It is Nazism, which is a Jewish invention. Ron Jones's ghostly images depict the story we live in - the lies and accusations that frame our lives. It's a story.  It's a story that casts a spell on us and makes it impossible to see what happened in the Reich, and what is happening now.

"Everyone must accept the blame," he says. Exactly. That is the point of the "Nazism" story. We always stand accused. We are always in the wrong. No matter how outrageous the behavior of Israel, the neocons, the Zionist TSA, or anyone else, we have no moral standing to criticize. We are guilty, eternally. All of us, all the time, no matter what. "No one can claim that they didn't in some way take part."

Does this work both ways?  Does it mean all Jews must accept the blame for what Israel does, and for what Goldman Sachs does, and for what the NKVD did in Russia, and for what the current German government did to Ernst Zundel?  No, of course not. It never works both ways. There is always a double standard. The same moral framework never applies to both us and them. We are always guilty, even though Ron Jones is the one who is lying. 

In the "Nazism" story, there was no such thing as Strength Through Joy. There was no reform of the financial system. There was no sense of a burden being lifted when millions of jobless people found work and meaning. There was no aspiration to create a whole new civilization. According to the Jewish storytellers, nothing like that happened. In their story, it's all about the march of the super race, the big lie, death camps, and guilt.

Especially guilt.

The "Nazism" story tells us nothing about the Reich as most Germans experienced it. At the time, the Germans lived in a bright, sunlit world, not a gray world of ghostly images. They thought the Third Reich was about moral regeneration. They were proud to take part in it. The idea that they (or we) should feel guilty about it would be weird and incomprehensible to them. Feeling guilty about being part of the Reich is like feeling guilty about not smoking. Strength Through Joy is not something one feels guilty about.

When I saw the Ministry of Illusion movies, I was struck by the fact that there was a spirit of light-hearted joviality that infused most of them. The story about "Nazism" that I got from William Shirer, Ron Jones, neo-Nazis, Man's Action  magazine, and many other sources, the story that I grew up with, did not prepare me for what I saw.

I don't belong with Hitler and his comrades, with their baggy uniforms and Nazi salutes. Nor do I belong with Friedrich Kurreck's union guys. That's not who I am. In spite of what Hitler said about men of brains being treated as the greatest benefactors of humanity, they didn't get much respect. There was not much room for genius in the Reich. In the Soviet Union they had chess schools, and mentoring programs for promising young mathematicians. Soviet mathematics was world class. In the Third Reich, many of the mathematicians left, some because they were Jews, others (Hermann Weyl, for example) because they just didn't want to live in Hitler's Reich. I understand how they felt - the same way I would feel if Darryl Gates became President. (The Los Angeles police chief who said "Anyone who smokes marijuana should be taken out and shot.")

It should be noted that mathematicians who did not want to stay in the Reich were free to leave. Soviet citizens were not allowed to emigrate.

What I saw in the Ministry of Illusion films was part of the reality of National Socialism, but Hermann Weyl's viewpoint is valid too. The Third Reich was part Norman Rockwell and part Abu Ghraib.

And the wheel turns...

In 2011, we have reached a dead end. Our present system is on its last legs. It is time to make a fresh start.

Post-Nazism is not about reviving National Socialism in its original form. I would not want to do that, even if it could be done. 1936 was a long time coming and a long time gone. It's over. You can't go home again. Hitler has turned into a character who does comedy routines on YouTube.  It's, like, soooo over.

However, the original idea is still there. It is possible for the world described at the top of the page to exist. It is possible for our future to lie in that direction.

Post-Nazism is about thought control. It's about freeing our minds. Whatever happens, that has to be the first step. We have to leave "Nazism" behind. 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 several countries, including Germany. They are not going to give up until it is illegal everywhere.

That is not going to happen. On the most fundamental level, they have lost. The containment battle is over. Everything else follows.

In a letter to his wife written from his prison cell in Germany, Ernst Zundel said

We are close to an upheaval of horrific proportions that will change the political landscape drastically. Nothing will be as it has been up to now.

It's coming.

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, now known as 9/11. I didn't see the show. I don't watch "The West Wing" or any such show. I don't watch TV at all. 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 an escape from this situation, and a reversal of it.

School's out!