Omitting Hitler: Liddell, the Russians and the Strategy of Omission

Over the past ten or so years, I've seen the same debates again and again in nationalism.

Far Right nationalism (or neofascism or neo-Nazism or White Nationalism or Radical Traditionalism or whatever you want to call it) is made up of a certain number of beliefs, just in the same way that Marxism (for example) is. Once you buy into nationalism, you get a bunch of doctrines, a collection of doctrines. These include (and are not restricted to): racialism; anti-Semitism; Holocaust Revisionism; WWII revisionism; Southern nationalism (or at least, anti-Lincolnism); anti-Islam; antipathy towards most liberal democratic parties and the liberal democratic political system in general; a strong preference for anti-egalitarian and extreme-right thinkers such as Yockey, Evola, Kevin McDonald, Lothrop Stoddard, Carl Schmitt, Spengler, Nietzsche, Heidegger... Nationalism, as Ayn Rand would say, is a package deal and more or less you can take it or leave it. That is to say, you can accept the bundle of doctrines (and the characters who are associated with 'the movement', some of whom are quite eccentric and dubious) or not, but if you find some of the points made by nationalists debatable, and the personages attracted to nationalism unsavoury, you'd best be advised to leave.

The reason for that is that one can't 'improve' nationalism: any efforts to change the core curriculum of nationalism are doomed to failure, because - as it has evolved over the decades since the war - the corpus of nationalist thought and ideology is hidebound and resistant to change. But that doesn't stop some from trying to change it, or rather, from trying to censor little bits and pieces of it. The belief of these censors is that nationalism will become acceptable to 'normal' members of the public (that is, to people who are not part of the marginal and highly unconventional nationalist subculture (and it is a subculture)) if those 'normal' members are not told certain things. 'Don't mention the Jews' or 'Don't mention the war' or even 'Don't mention race' - leave these out of the nationalist discourse and one will become, overnight, respectable. The emphasis is not on being intelligent and asking intelligent and interesting questions on, for instance, Jews (for instance: to what extent do Jews have political influence in Russia or Iran or Ukraine, do they have it to the same degree that they do in the US and UK, and if not, why?); no, it's on forbidding, or discouraging, discussion of a topic altogether.

To me, this is a strange strategy and it underestimates the intellectual curiosity of the general public - they (in my experience, and in the experience of a good many nationalists) love to hear offbeat, out of the mainstream theories regarding Masonry, the Federal Reserve, the Jews, Israel, the New World Order, 911, Pearl Harbour, Auschwitz, the Illuminati, providing these theories are presented in a tasteful and intelligent way. At the least, they are open to debate on these things and will give them a fair hearing. Other 'normals' - usually a small minority - are absolutely horrified by unconventional Far Right and extremist ideas and simply don't want to hear them; they don't want to hear anyone cast aspersions on illegal immigrants, Muslims, Afro-Americans, Chinese, Indians, Roma and become enraged when they do. But it goes without saying that you can't have a debate with such people: why are you even trying? What's more, why are you labouring under the delusion that, if you talk racialism and White Nationalism and surreptitiously leave out the Jewish question, or Holocaust denial, you'll win over such people? And why is it that they are a priority before open-minded and unprejudiced members of the general public?

The strategy of omission, as I call it, makes no sense. A parallel is this: suppose a Marxist said, 'We won't mention dialectical materialism' or 'We won't mention the theory of surplus value' or 'We won't even mention class war', in the belief that communism would be made respectable in the eyes of the general public (even acceptable to non-communists) - he would be howled down by his comrades. You really can't have a communism without the fundamental building blocks, and when an intellectual tries to jettison the fundamentals (and change Marxism into something that it isn't) a funny thing happens - the 'old' Marxism, the fundamentalist Marxism, grows back, as solid and as nutty as ever. Nationalist doctrine is built of similar stuff. But proponents of the strategy of omission ignore this fact and there is no shortage of these proponents; in fact, the nationalist movement chooses to incubate them. Which is why I say nationalists are an odd lot - at least, odd compared to the Marxists, who have a degree of common sense.

We see the strategy of omission endorsed in a recent debate  between Colin Liddell and pseudo-neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, the proprietor of the Daily Stormer site. Liddell is an exceptionally intelligent and talented man who has the wrong views. He more or less advocates giving in to the liberal anti-Nazis and anti-Germans and to the Holocaust Exterminationists; this way, 'White Nationalists' will be more respectable, more acceptable, to the general public and will start winning votes like the Front National and the Swedish Democrats. It's not a question of being clever-clever and practising deception, concealing what one's true beliefs are - there are plenty of party members in the Front National, UKIP, Swedish Democrats and other Far Right populist parties who are very extreme, neo-Nazi in fact, and don't swallow the official party line on race, Israel, the Holocaust and the rest of it; no, to Liddell, one must repent - one must believe, one must take to heart the liberal anti-German narrative which has pervaded the Western culture since the Nuremberg trials after WWII. Liddell is so wrong on this, so poisonous to morale, that I think his pens and papers should be taken away from him and that he should be forbidden to write. We don't need these ideas, and in fact we can a dose of liberal and communist anti-Nazism from the mainstream media - from the History Channel, for example - or one of Vladimir Putin's speeches.

As Carolyn Yeager has explained in her summary of Maurice Bardèche's classic book Nuremberg or the Promised Land (1948), nationalists and racialists can't avoid addressing the subject of Nazism, the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials, simply because we live in a post-Nuremberg social, political and moral order, a post-Nuremberg New World Order. There's a reason why all European nationalism is outlawed or has the potential to be outlawed; why illegal immigrants to Europe have more rights than indigenous Europeans; why the Pope Francis brand of liberal humanist morality is de facto the compulsory morality of today; why Britain began to dismantle its immigration restriction laws after 1949 and not before; why allegiance to that morality comes before any allegiance to fatherland, state, the armed forces, nation, community, race. The reason is the legal precedent of the Nuremberg trials. Bardèche predicted it all - and non-white immigration and the destruction of any immigration restrictionism in Europe and the West - back in 1948, simply by outlining the implications of the Nuremberg ideology and following it to its conclusion. This is why, I think, so many nationalists and revisionists state today that had Hitler won the war, things would have been very different from Britain - that the mass non-white immigration after 1949 would not have taken place, for example. Bardèche would have agreed, and would have pointed out that the reason why 'things would have been different' was that the Nuremberg trials would have never have happened. The truth of the matter is that the US and UK soldiers of the war, who had a high degree of racial and national consciousness, and pride and patriotism, were in fact fighting for the death of patriotism and the destruction of their own countries.

The fate of Western nationalism is inextricably bound up with the Nuremberg precedent. Populist parties such as UKIP and the Swedish Democrats have been successful, and will continue to be successful, while ducking it. But sooner or later they will run up against it, most likely when they near closer and closer to political power - and to actually doing things, like building an Israeli-style border fence or cutting off welfare to immigrants or even deporting illegal immigrants. An Italian nationalist could make a case that the illegal immigrants of Lampedusa shouldn't be allowed into Italy, as there's enough unemployed in Italy as it is and there isn't enough welfare money to go around - besides which, things like jobs and welfare and public services in Italy should go to Italians first. All reasonable enough, you might think, and inarguable; what's more, the position of this nationalist doesn't evoke WWII and the Holocaust and doesn't call for fascist revival. But your Pope Francis liberal humanist, your crusading liberal journalist from the Swedish Expressen newspaper, would object by stating, 'But the immigrants on Lampedusa are human'. End of argument. Humanity, you see, trumps everything; it comes before love of fatherland and love of Italians, it even comes before the rational use and expenditure of national resources; it even comes before common sense - it allows Ebola-infected illegal immigrants to come into one's country. These are the implications of the Nuremberg doctrine and they are all-powerful - more powerful than Nigel Farage's English nationalism which is not really a nationalism. The closer the Farages, Le Pens and Åkessons come to power, the more their parties will be treated like criminal gangs - and some sections of the establishment media are doing that already. To ameliorate the position of one's nation is a violation of international law, post-1945, and a political party formed for this purpose is in actual fact a criminal organisation engaged in a criminal conspiracy. Which is why the entire Western liberal establishment views nationalist parties as being no better than the Nazis.

To me, the conundrum can only be solved by a frontal assault. That, in turn, means adopting all or some of the doctrines of neo-Nazism. Assuming for the moment that I'm right, here's the question: what, according to the proponents of the strategy of omission, is the problem with neo-Nazism?

There's a big difference between opposing neo-Nazism because it is wrong and because a) it is extremely unpopular, b) faces extreme resistance from the liberal establishment and therefore c) is extremely difficult to implement. No communist would ever, ever renounce his communism because of a), b) and c) (communism, like neo-Nazism, is, in the West, extremely unpopular, faces extreme resistance and is extremely difficult to implement); he doesn't renounce it, because he believes it is true and that there's no running from the truth. The same goes for the real neo-Nazi or neofascist. He believes that the doctrine is true: the Holocaust is Jewish religious rubbish and simply didn't happen - six million, or even one million, Jews weren't gassed in giant gas chambers; that the Germans didn't start WWII; that the racial question is the paramount question in politics... He believes in the core tenets and doesn't bail on neo-Nazism because of the resistance it faces and because of its unpopularity. Indeed, Hitler and Mussolini never promised their followers a rose garden; they never said that being a Fascist or a National Socialist wasn't a tough slog and wasn't unpopular. Our ideas determine our actions, and our actions reveal what we believe. The real National Socialists, the real Fascists, were the (in American Mafia parlance) 'stand-up guys' who didn't quit, didn't renounce their beliefs, when the going got tough, as it did in 1944 and 1945. We find this line from an April 1945 propaganda text by Werner Naumann, Goebbels aide and post-war German nationalist, The Time to Decide: 'Now it will become clear who is really ready to stand without compromise for the principles proclaimed during good times, and who belongs to the lukewarm and weary whose cowardly conduct in these days only proves that they do not belong to us'. But Liddell, as I will prove in a moment, shows every sign of giving up a large part of the post-war Far Right nationalist doctrine not only because it is unpopular (e.g., these are the parts of the doctrine which can get people chucked into jail) but because he believes it is untrue.

Again it has to be pointed out that the strategy is one of omission; it's not one of proselytising to a (as yet not fully indoctrinated) 'normal' member of the general public and holding back certain unpalatable or esoteric subjects until the time is right. It's true that one must use discretion in politics and possess a sense of timing, and it's understandable why a nationalist should dance around, at first, the Jewish question or Holocaust denial or even the subject of race and IQ. Marxists follow a similar strategy - deferring on the 'difficult' subjects. This is a different thing from not mentioning them altogether. It's clear that Liddell is no fool when it comes to the Jewish question: one respondent, 'Augur Mayson', writes, 'It is folly to believe that we can triumph while sheltering the identity of the enemy'; Liddell replies, 'That's more of your bullshit. I am open to the JQ [Jewish question]'.

I said before that the debate between Liddell and Anglin was one between a liberal anti-Nazi and a pseudo-neo-Nazi. What's 'pseudo' neo-Nazism? There's a way of sorting the sheep from the goats, or the real neo-Nazis from the pseudos; I call it the Bagration test. I ask the reputed neo-Nazi the question, 'What do you think of Operation Bagration in 1944? Were the results good or bad?' and 'What do you think of the aftermath?'. To explain: Operation Bagration was the codename of a successful offensive against the German army in 1944, which led to the encirclement and destruction of an entire Army Group and to the 'liberation' of Minsk. The Germans got their arses handed to them on a plate in that one, and the aftermath I am referring to was the parading and humiliation of the German POWs through Moscow afterwards. The Germans were forced to take laxatives, were paraded past a jeering Muscovite crowd (who yelled abuse and threw objects at them); as they defecated involuntarily through their trouser legs, a street sweeper sprayed water on the streets behind them. The significance of this is that this year in Eastern Ukraine the Russian 'rebel' soldiers in the east of the Ukraine re-enacted the infamous post-Bagration parade - they herded captured Ukrainians past an crowd who threw bags of flour and yelled 'Fascist pigs!' at them. Both the 1944 parade and the 2014 parade were pieces of Stalinist nastiness, and war crimes - it's an offence to humiliate POWs - and the 'rebels' did their cause no good by it (although I imagine that they thought it was quite splendid and clever, very Russian, very patriotic). The question is, though, what a so-called 'neo-Nazi' thinks of it. A real 'National Socialist' wouldn't support the Germans being defeated in Minsk and wouldn't abide by any glorious commemorations of it; he wouldn't support the humiliation of German POWs, or the re-enactment of it, either. Anglin, being a Putinista - one of Putin's useful idiots in the West - supports both, ergo, he is not a real neo-Nazi. This is the Bagration test. There's no way of evading it - no Stalinist, Putinist, neo-Bolshevist, National-Bolshevik / Eurasianist trickery and nonsense and mind-bending rhetoric which attempts to prove that Stalin and Russian communism were good and German National Socialism and European fascism were bad. Either you are or your aren't.

The Bagration test applies to quite a few Russian 'neo-Nazis' as well. Half of Russia's nationalists are in jail right now because of Putin, the other half are working for him - as propagandists, agitators, soldiers - in the Ukraine. Clearly the 'National Socialism' - all the uniforms, runes, swastika tattoos, Hitler salutes - of these Putinista Russian nationalists didn't add up to much; what matters is what one believes and does, not the symbols and tattoos that one wears.

'What matters is what one believes and does' - this is a truism, a platitude, a commonplace, but it has to be repeated again and again. Supposing one was a member of the Charlemagne SS division in the Battle of Berlin - what would one do? One could either a) attempt to desert and then surrender to the Allies out of a (mistaken) belief that the Allies treat their POWs better than the Russians or b) defect to the Russians and make spurious Duginist / Eurasianist / Putinist arguments to the effect that Stalin and Russia 'resist' 'Truman's Yankee-imperialist New World Order', that Russia is to be praised for 'resisting' 'The West'? Now, the trouble with b) is that you, as a Frenchman, are the West - so you are 'resisting' yourself; you can't change into an honorary Mongol or Tartar or Tajik. The better, more honourable, option is c) fight and die for an ideal you believe in, an ideal which you were fortunate to live to see brought into being during the years 1940-1945 - Hitler's social, cultural and economic policies. You have only one life to give, and you've come this far, so why not. This is something the Liddells don't understand - honour. The Liddells don't have anything to offer except carping, cavilling, sneering - it's the conduct more becoming of what Yockey calls the Age of Criticism rather than the present Age (the age of neofascism and neo-Nazism), the Age of Faith and Authority.

The ironic thing is that the Liddells believe that trimming and tacking the sails, corner-cutting, is a real winner: just admit that Hitler started WWII, that Hitler gassed the Jews, and don't mention, whatever you do, the Jewish question, and you'll be fine. The fallacy is that the sensitive people who are likely to be offended by Holocaust Revisionism and anti-Semitism - the people who, for some unexplained reason, we must all go out to propitiate - are just as likely to be offended by the other parts of the Far Right doctrine. This is brought up in an exchange between Liddell and his respondents:

YAZATA: And yet Hitler is seen as edgy and countercultural by some western youth too. You've no reason to say, the aesthetic can't become more mainstream again.

LIDDELL: Until that happens, Hitlerphilia will just serve as a ghettoizing device for White nationalism.

DANIEL J ANTINORA: focusing explicitly on race serves equally well to 'ghettoize' us. vaguely mentioning race as well. citing crime statistics as well.

But let us look at a statement Liddell makes in the comments section of his article, a statement which is useful to us because of its length and because of its explicitness - it tells us exactly where he stands. He gives his version of WWII:

here was a war on so all the big powers committed what are commonly called "atrocities" - too many to mention. But this was also an unnecessary war that was started by the German invasion of Poland and ended by German defeat, so there is a certain logic in the Germans getting to carry the can.

This might not be entirely fair, but that is the way it is. The worst excesses of the past - be it the rape of millions of German women by Soviet troops, the starving and execution of civilians (Jewish and otherwise), the forced repatriation of the Cossacks by the British to the Soviet Union, Katyn, the various bombing of cities by all the combatants, etc., etc. - can all be laid, to some extent, at the door of Hitler and the Nazis, and of course they are. Modern Germans passively go along with this even though there is a lot they could do to help balance the narrative.

It would have been a different story, of course, if they had won, but the fact is they lost and the price of losing was to be forever associated with the negatives of the war.

You can work overtime to bring this or that aspect of the war to the public's attention, including allied atrocities like Rhine Meadows, the Marocchinate, etc., but it's always uphill work and even if you succeed, you end up with "yes, but they started it."

To make European nationalism today contingent on changing deeply ingrained negative perceptions of German Nazism is simply a mechanism for neutralizing nationalism and destroying Europe. This means that European nationalism has to be decoupled from the debacle of WWII. The Daily Stormer essentially exists to prevent this decoupling happening. It's a cinch therefore that the Stormer is financed and run by globalists and anti-nationalists, who may or may not be Jews. Even if it isn't, it may as well be in terms of its effects.

This is a terrible doctrine. For one thing, it leaves Germany - the most important nation in Europe today - hanging high and dry. The French and Italian nationalists can lay the blame on the Germans, and even claim that they were 'victims' of the Nazis during the occupation of their respective countries; for the German nationalist parties, such as the NPD, this is no option. As German nationalists they are forced, by definition, to defend German National Socialism and the conduct of their grandfathers during the war. Their nationalism is 'contingent on changing deeply ingrained negative perceptions of German Nazism' and can't be 'decoupled from the debacle of WWII'; the NPD, and all the German nationalist organisations today, 'essentially exists to prevent this decoupling happening'. Meaning that they are mechanisms 'for neutralizing nationalism and destroying Europe'. Perhaps one can say, then, that they are 'financed and run by globalists and anti-nationalists, who may or may not be Jews' or 'may as well be' in terms of their effects. But what goes for the NPD, goes for Jobbik and the Golden Dawn. The latter has become something of a sacred cow among nationalists, so Liddell is wading into dangerous waters. One must ask, why is Greek neo-Nazism acceptable and not German? British? Australian?

One poster made a good reply to Liddell, which I shall reproduce here in full:

Thank you for your reply.

You say "European nationalism has to be decoupled from the debacle of WWII."

Well, there are two possible ways forward: one as you say, is to attempt to decouple nationalism from the debacle of WWII."

But is this not accepting that white nationalism is/was indeed evil and that we would only seek to decouple if the narrative as presented by Jews were true? What do we do if, as I and many other people believe, the Germans were the good guys, and Hitler the ultimate good guy? He tried to remove the Jewish shackles from his country (which would undoubtedly have benefited all our white countries) but ultimately, the Jews defeated him, with the help of millions of white people who believed their lies.

The other is to tell the truth about that time and rather than decouple ourselves from someone who spoke the truth, rather, decouple the Jewish LIES from the truth and stand by that truth rather than accept their lies as truth.

White nationalism has made no serious attempt to stand by the truth of that time - we have ALWAYS yielded to the Jewish lies. We are therefore always beaten before we even start - we always accept that white nationalism leads to evil and throwing millions of people we don't like into gas chambers. Knowing what we know about our enemy, how will "they" ever let us decouple ourselves from that, if we just accept their version of events, lies masquerading as truth? They won't - surely you understand that?

Now, it is one thing to reject Hitler and NS symbolism on "purely tactical grounds" because of his ultimate defeat and because of the negative associations falsely, but incredibly successfully built up against it by our mortal enemy, the Jews. It is quite another to reject it because you accept as truth, most if not all of the jewish inspired demonology.

Sadly, for me, the whole tone of your article went way beyond rejecting Hitler on purely tactical grounds. Many of the phrases you wrote can not possibly have been written by someone sympathetic to the cause fought by Germany to determine their own future. Rather, many of them have come straight out of the jewish inspired anti-Nazi handbook. Some of your phrases, to me, evinced hatred of Hitler and Germany rather than any admiration of his/their attempts to extricate themselves from jewish hegemony.

He tried. He tried damn hard. Can you even begin to imagine the magnitude of his struggle, knowing what we know now about how difficult it is to win this struggle - where are we now? What progress do WE ever make? Nobody has ever tried harder, or done better to retake control of their lives from the jews, but he lost. The jews, with our help, defeated him, but his cause was true and he made the ultimate sacrifice in the attempt. Is that any reason to mock him by asking such as "When, since Hitler blew his brains out ..." Can you not see how disrespectful that is? Does such disrespect not look sort of, well ... "jewy" ... or at least, something that could well have been written by a Jew?

I have read many articles of yours in the past, often referenced by sites I respect, and generally admired them, but this one has gone too far in the opposite direction and placed you in a category of, at best "no longer to be trusted."

This poster has said it all here. The question is, where do we nationalists go to from here? One step would be to acknowledge what it is we are, and not go for the omissions and amputations of the nationalist doctrine (which has built up over the past 75 years) that the Liddells demand; another is to address the confusion brought about by the recent Ukraine crisis. It's been very disorienting, these past few months, to see two nominally white countries, Russia and Ukraine, comparing each other to the Nazis, using Jews in high positions of power and each deploying 'neo-Nazis', real or pseudo, as activists for their respective national causes and even combatants. Even more confusing is that many neofascist, neo-Nazi and Far Right parties and individuals in Europe and America have championed a country which has been the enemy of the West for at least 200 years and is led by a self-proclaimed anti-fascist and anti-Nazi who has made any questioning of the Nuremberg trial a criminal offence. It's as though Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Finland and other European countries expended all those lives in the 1941-1945 war for nothing. Waffen-SS and Spanish Blue Division soldiers are turning in their graves. Shame! In my opinion, the Putinista neo-Nazis - the Anglins, the Kevin Alfred Stroms, the Bill Whites and others - need to be driven out of the movement, their errors corrected.

To those who charge that this would lead to (what the Marxists call) sectarianism, splitting, dogmatism in the nationalist movement - I agree. It's just that sort of thing which is sorely needed.