Friday, April 3, 2020

The Perils of Victimhood: on Master Races and National Bolsheviks



I.

In reading Heel of the Conqueror (1991), a Time-Life book on the German occupation of Western Europe, I came across this choice quote on the German expulsions of French nationals from the contested province of Alsace-Lorraine:

Wagner expelled 105,000 Jews and pro-French citizens into unoccupied France; Bürckel prepared a similar exodus involving another 100,000 people. 


The deportations caused a minor uproar in high Nazi circles. Although the Führer approved the action, Himmler did not. Charging Wagner and Bürckel with wastefully giving away redeemable racial stock to Germany's age-old enemy, the SS chieftain drew up new resettlement guidelines based on what he considered to be proper Nazi principles. Henceforward, he said, Wagner and Bürckel should expel only the lesser breeds, meaning Jews, Gypsies, blacks, criminals, the mentally ill, and 'all other trash that does not belong to us on the basis of blood'. Alsatians and Lorrainers with proper lineage but improper political ideas were to be resettled in Germany or in eastern Europe where they could acquire appreciation for national socialism. Those who persisted in proclaiming loyalty to France were to be sent to concentration camps. 


The exigencies of the war in Russia postponed the full enactment of Himmler's fantastic scheme... 

In defence of the Germans, Germany, in expelling the French from Alsace-Lorraine, was paying them back for the expulsion of over a 100,000 Germans by the French after WWI. The depressing reality of Europe in the first half of the 20th century was that, if you wanted to improve the lot of your country, you felt it best if you were to annex part of another, expel all or part of its people and repopulate it with some of your own. That was how things were done.

More important to me is the question: is the Himmler quote is genuine? We know that the Americans, Russians, and British forged an enormous number of documents - including speeches and directives of Nazi leaders - during the war and afterwards (mainly for use in the Nuremberg trials), in what was to become the biggest lie factory in history. Most authors on the war - authors whose books flood our shelves - have accepted all of these without demur (Goebbels' diaries, which are probably forged, have formed the basis of innumerable books on the Third Reich, including those of David Irving, an author who is supposedly a 'revisionist').

After some thought, I am inclined to think that the Himmler quotation is true, not invented. And my response to it is: what's not to like? Far Right nationalists in Europe - and its colonies - all agree on the need to expel the millions of Africans, Muslims and Asians from the Continent; they believe that, in particular, careful attention needs to be paid to the cities of Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Athens... They only diverge on one point: where the Jews fit in. The Zio-populists believe that the colossal feat of the European Reconquista can be undertaken without mentioning the Jewish question; at the least, they believe it can be undertaken with European Jewry's tacit approval. The other faction of the Far Right, the anti-Semitic, believes that nothing can be accomplished without tackling the Jewish question first.

Let us return, though, to WWII. In Spoil of Europe, a 1941 book by Thomas Reveille on German-occupied Western Europe, we find :



 At the other end of the caste system, and next removed from the lowest species, would be "Negroid" peoples; in Mein Kampf Hitler asserts that a fair number of Frenchmen are of this type. This theme was taken up with great vigour by the German press and periodicals during the summer and autumn of 1940. Even supposedly technical periodicals, such as the Deutsche Volkswirt , had special review columns, headed "Frankreich gegen die Zivilisation" (France Against Civilization), devoted to pamphlets and books describing France as the center of world prostitution, trade in narcotics, and Negroid development. In the hope of forestalling serious German measures, the Vichy regime has expelled from Metropolitan France Algerians, Moroccans, Arabs, and Negroes.

By the time of the outbreak of the war, France had earned the dubious distinction as the most 'pozzed' (to use Alt Right parlance) country in Europe. Alone of all the nations in Western Europe - which was ethnically homogeneous at the time - France had tolerated, and even encouraged, the formation of a sizable non-white immigrant population. By 1941 France changed her mind, but only because of her defeat and occupation by the Germans. Vichy made the French cities free of non-whites, for the first, and last, time in the 20th century (we can assume that the non-whites were allowed to return to the cities after the American and British 'liberation').

So, from the dissident Right, something good came out of a bad war. Another example: the wartime German treatment of France's foremost minority - the Jews. The OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) wrote a classified wartime report 'German Military Government over Europe, 1939-1943' (1944) which can be found here. In the section 'German anti-Jewish legislation in occupied France and Alsace-Lorraine', the OSS writes :

On 21 and 27 August 1940 Gestapo agents in Paris made the rounds of the leading Jewish organizations, including the Jorid Jewish Congress, the Jewish National Fund, and the Ecole Rabbinique. On 3 and 28 November the offices of the Alliance Israelite Universelle and of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency were raided, and some sixty thousand volumes from the libraries of the Alliance and the Ecole Rabbinique were removed to the Institute for Research on the Jewish Problem in Frankfort.

The Germans here were behaving in a 'based' (again, to use Alt Right parlance) manner. You expect, then, the professional anti-Semites in the dissident Right movement - the Greg Johnsons, Kevin MacDonalds, Hunter Wallaces - to be full of praise as a consequence for Hitler, the NSDAP and the Germans in WWII, but alas, they are not. They do not see the German 'New Order' in Europe to be a model. This suggests to me that they are interested only in the problem, not the solution.

'Solution' here is the key word. It requires, when applied to Europe's Jewish question, and Muslim question, and African question, pragmatist, instrumentalist thinking. It becomes a matter of technics: if you have snow in your driveway, you need a shovel to clear it. And the example of Europe in WWII shows us that a precedent exists for the moving of millions of people around Western Europe. Europe does possess the logistical capability, it has demonstrated it.

Thought such as this naturally suggests political clichés along the lines of, 'Yes, we can do it, but do we have to will?'. No one denies that, in the aforementioned example, France could have expelled the non-whites from the cities before the Germans came; But it did not, because it did not want to; it liked having the non-whites there; it lacked the will to expel them.

A newly-found French resolve in this case proved to be decisive, as did institutions such as the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo, as did war (Hitler reflected that the war helped him accomplish much more, domestically and abroad, than during peacetime; in that regard, he was fond of quoting the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: 'War is the father of all things'). The Allies and the Soviets understood all this, which is they expended so much effort, after their victory, in destroying all traces of 'Prussianism' and 'Prussian militarism'. The great institution of the German army itself was wiped out, although for decades after the war ghostly after-images of it lingered in the East German Nationale Volksarmee.

This brings us to the concept of what I call the package deal. It is unlikely, at this juncture, that the conservatives of the Boris Johnson ilk will be able to make Europe's capital cities white again; ditto the populists of the Salvini and Orban ilk. Suit-and-tie conservatism, whether centrist or populist, has not  shown the capacity to deport millions of Africans, Muslims, Indians and Asians who invaded and occupied Europe after the war; indeed, that conservatism struggles, for the most part, to keep even the illegal of these immigrants out. Only the Germans, and the Germans of WWII at that, have proven to be capable of moving around non-Europeans around Europe. And the Germans, at the time, acted under the aegis of German or 'Prussian' militarism, which, if we are to make Europe white again, needs to be resurrected. The fulfillment of one demand depends upon the fulfillment of the other.

As noted in my last article, war (in Europe at least) has entered a new era in the 21st century: any war against the non-whites of Europe will be waged by the 'dregs of war', and this war will be so limited as not to be called war. But such an evolution does not preclude standing armies in the tradition of WWI and WWII. As the need arose, the Germans, before and during WWII, formed and built up a variety of paramilitaries and conventional armies. The Brownshirts, or SA, were tasked with ridding Germany of communists up until and after Hitler's ascent to power; the Waffen-SS was conceived first as a bodyguard for Hitler and a German conventional fighting force, and then a pan-European one; anti-communist forces, such as the Police Battalions in Greece, were organised to destroy resistance fighters and communist partisans... To go by history, then, we can imagine, in a future Europe, three armies: a conventional standing army, to defend Europe against Russia; a paramilitary, to quash the communist Left; an army of the 'dregs', to round up and turf out the Muslim, African and Indian invaders. Perhaps the second of these, the Brownshirt or Blackshirt-style paramilitary, will not be needed, given the extraordinary political (and military) weakness of the European Left after the collapse of communism in 1991; as the anti-Hitlerians in the Far Right never tire of reminding us, 'It's not the 1930s any more'. (It should be remembered that the SA, after 1933, by and large had outlived their usefulness - they had become a political and military liability by 1934).

The argument against this view always is: the spirit of the past - even the past of a not-so-distant 75 years ago - cannot be brought back. This objection, at first sight, expresses a common-sense 'realism', but is, in fact, rooted in ideology. Yockey observes in The Enemy of Europe (1953) that both the USSR and USA 'believe it possible to attain a static world-order in which History would have ceased exist'. That is to say, the West cannot possibly improve upon what America and Russia have accomplished: the door to any further development has been closed. The conclusion to be drawn from this is, naturally, that America and Russia's victory in WWII means that Europe will never see the reappearance of anything 'fashy' again.

Certainly, to judge by present events - and the events of the past 75 years - one must conclude that the Americans and Russians are right: the realists and pessimists have founded their view upon the facts - the brute facts. But this illustrates only a difference in perception. Spengler and his disciple Yockey perceived the shape of things to come, whereas the realists only perceive what is put in front of them. One side derives its worldview from the evidence of the senses, the other, from intuition. We on the Far Right have, in the modern era, tilted the scales to the realist side and have neglected the idealist. That explains why now we have taken such a pessimistic view of life in the West, seeing it as a prison from which there is no escape.

II.

The opponents of the Far Right dislike our anti-Semitism, naturally enough, but they dislike it even more when it threatens to become political - that is, political in Carl Schmitt's sense, in that it makes a distinction between Friend and Foe. It is one thing when anti-Semites write screeds and propagate memes; it is another when they seek to get into an actual position of power. This explains one of the reasons why the National Socialists and their allies were so despised, and that is because they actually did something about the Jewish question. The Far Left, and the Center, resist this 'doing something' because they understand that it meant curtains for them - the 'Jew fawners' as William Pierce used to call them; the Far Right, on the other hand, resists on the principle that - absurdly - nothing should be done. The modern-day anti-Semite's kingdom is not of this world. The real-world and political attempts to enact anti-Semitic strictures, in Europe from 1939 to 1945, created chaos and dissolved traditions of long standing. The Far Right today is opposed to this chaos, and moreover, it does not want to assume the responsibility, the burden, that comes with office. It prefers to snipe from the sidelines.

This explains, in part, the attraction the Far Right feels towards National Bolshevism and National Bolshevism's heroes in the struggle against USA, 'The West' and the 'New World Order': Ghaddafi, Milosevic, Hussein, Putin, Chavez,  Maduro, Assad... The National Bolshevik sees himself and the 'Axis of Resistance' as the underdog. Despite the fact that many of his heroes - the Mullahs of Iran and Putin of Russia - have held power, with an iron grip, for many decades, and could be described euphemistically as authoritarian, he sees himself as a rebel; despite the fact that they have accumulated obscene amounts of wealth, he sees himself as a socialist. He feels a resentment against the US - in particular against any of its authority and father figures, a resentment which a psychoanalyst would describe as Oedipal. That makes a perfect fit with the ideology of the 'Axis of Resistance': its leaders still a bear a grudge against 'Western imperialism', even though that ceased to exist (or at least ceased to function with good conscience) over a hundred years ago, as the downfall of the West probably could be traced back to the time of the end of WWI.

But it is not as though that the US, UK and Israel defend the West and the 'Axis of Resistance' ranges itself against it. As Yockey never ceased to iterate, America is a Jewish controlled entity - Jewry forms the mind, America the body - and it opposes the West as much as the 'Axis of Resistance' does. Both the USA and USSR formed, in Yockey's words, a 'concert of Bolshevism'.

Incongruous as it sounds, both Judeo-America and Israel see themselves as the oppressed, not the oppressor. (Zionism, as an ideology, has its roots in progressivism, liberalism, and nationalism (which itself began life as a left-wing idea)). And who is on the receiving end of the anti-authoritarian imprecations of Judeo-America? Who plays the role of the demonic and authoritarian father figure? The answer is of course Hitler. This can be easily revealed by a survey of all the Anglo-Jewish propaganda of the past eighty-five years. How many of the books published since then concern tricking, hoodwinking, evading, escaping Hitler and the Nazis: as if Hitler were some vengeful and demonic father god, who, like Jahweh or Saturn, punishes his worshipers and devours his children.

In contrast, Hitler - and before him, Kaiser Wilhelm - never, in their speeches,  took up the mantle of the underdog: they saw themselves as the equal, not the inferior, of their opponents. And this is understandable, as Germany - along with France, Spain, Italy, France, England - is to be identified with the West: it is no 'Bolshevik' nation rebelling against Western imperialism, it is Western imperialism. Because, by the time of the beginning of WWII, Germany had occupied more than was occupied, it took a dim view of guerrillas, partisans, irregulars, francs-tireurs, rebels, 'patriots' and 'nationalists' fighting for independence against a foreign oppressor. (Nationalism of this sort and guerrilla warfare go together, as Carl Schmitt I think has shown in his classic study, The Theory of the Partisan (1962)).

(Germany's ally in the war, Imperial Japan, did take up the underdog mantle: it saw itself as leading a 'Bolshevik' (in Yockey's sense) crusade against the West, which would culminate in the white's man ejection from Asia and the building of a 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere').

On this subject, when reading Anglo-Saxon publications from the war, one notices an English and American obsession with the National Socialist concept of the Herrenvolk, a word which is (deliberately) mistranslated into English as 'Master Race' but in reality means 'Gentlemanly people' or 'Lordly people'. The Anglo authors are irked no end by this word: to them it signifies an infernal German arrogance. How dare the Germans believe that they are to be situated above the Poles, the Czechs, the Ukrainians? The insolent German pride had to be broken - among other things by putting the German leadership on trial for 'war crimes'. (The Allies demanded a trial during both WWI and WWII, but only after the latter was their demand met).

But if one wants to rule over people from other lands, one must believe in one's right to rule. One needs to believe in one's worth. In other words, self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, is required. If that quality had been missing in the Anglo-Saxons, then the Dravidians of India would never have been suborned and administered by a handful of British, the blacks of the American South and the Caribbean by a handful of white men.

Yockey writes, 'All politics is an activity related to power'. Politics can be compared to a game: you want power, the other man has it, so you 'strike him down' (in Yockey's words) and appropriate it. The dissident Right (for the most part) agrees that Jewry has accumulated a great deal of power in the West, but does it want to take that power from Jewry? Or does it want to be the perpetual complainant and rebel...

If the dissident Right chooses the former course of action, it must follow the example of the Germans in WWII. For as Ernst Zündel - normally a pacifistic and idealist man - once remarked, in that time the Germans, and the peoples of Europe, for once, and once only, had the upper hand over Jewry; they were the subject, not the object. And Jewry has never forgotten, which is why they have kept a watchful eye on the neofascists in Europe and the nativists in America for the past 75 years. (This ties in with the Jewish mentality in Israel: despite being one of the richest countries in the Middle East, and the most powerful military, Israel still sees itself as an injured party 'oppressed' by the Palestinians).

The Germans, from 1933 to 1945, were faced with an existential choice - to be or not to be - in relation to Jewry: were they to be the master or the servant? They chose to be the master. In doing so, they knew they were kicking a hornet's nest, flying into a storm; they recognised that the spirit of the age - of Masonry, liberalism, 'Jew-fawning', tolerance of the alien,  - was against them; but nevertheless, they staked all on the one claim. And for this, they never received gratitude from the Far Right: 'Why did you invade Poland? You should have stopped at Czechoslovakia - or Austria'. All the same, the Far Right (particularly in America) will need to study their example.

Much of all this depends upon psychology. In the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche sketches out his famous theory of Master and Slave morality - a theory that the dissident Right is by and large enamored of. The most important aspect of Nietzsche's idea is that yes, while it is the case that the being, the character, of the Master and the Slave determine their qualities, individual choice plays a part as well. To transpose the theory into the modern era (and a transposition is needed, as in Nietzsche and Hegel the encounter between the Master and the Slave takes place in some primeval past), we see that Masters and Slaves choose to be so: they act upon their better or lesser angels. The Far Right can, in effect, talk itself into being a Master or a Slave - into being either the rebel Spartacus or the emperor Augustus. So far, under the influence of National Bolshevism, they have opted for Spartacus.

III.

This brings us to a related question. Before, during and after the war, the Germans, the 'master race', were victimised to an extraordinary degree. This has been chronicled by a multitude of revisionist-minded authors, among them to be counted are Austin J. App (one of the earliest writers to tackle the subject) and the most famous Thomas Goodrich (one of the latest). But, it goes without saying, all this material makes depressing reading. Joe Owens, the British nationalist, observed that, to judge by Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947 (2010), German nationalism - and by extension any Far Right and European nationalism - leads to economic ruin, misery, poverty, destruction. One has to ask, then, does the Hellstorm thesis in fact serve as propaganda against nationalism and the Far Right, and could it be that this propaganda in its demoralising power is more effective than the Jewish, liberal, 'anti-racist' and 'anti-fascist' sort?

In Nietzsche's narrative, the Master is tricked into adopting the morality of the Slave. Prior to his encounter with the Slave, the Master values strength, mastery, pride, a belief in his good fortune and the ability to surmount all obstacles with ease. He begins to doubt, however, his self-worth and think of himself small, weak, insignificant, unlucky, after exposure to the toxic Slave morality. He becomes transformed. He no longer sees himself as the hammer, but the anvil, in the words of Bülow's famous speech.

Whereas the Master is poisoned by the morality of the Slave, the dissident Rightist is poisoned by the morality of the victim - or rather, the morality of victimology. Reading of the tremendous suffering of the Germans - and the nations that helped them (Italy, France, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary) - in the aftermath of the war lowers one's morale. Why embark on the nationalist venture, why challenge Jewish (and Masonic, and liberal, and Marxist) power if it leads to one's cities being turned into rubble, and to one's people being starved, impoverished, immiserised, enslaved, raped, murdered? Far better to follow the example of Joe Owens, and campaign for local government on promises of improved bin collection; throw your weight behind a third party (the Brexit Party) which goes nowhere; better yet, found your own 'British nationalist' party (after all, Britain can't have too many of those): that is the pragmatic, sensible way of going about things.

After contemplating the horrors of Hellstorm, one must ask what the political use of it all is: does victimology bring benefits? Jewry has proven to be adept at exploiting its victim status in WWII (as have China and Russia); its suffering won for it an entire country - Israel. But Western countries, such as Germany, cannot play the victim as well as Jewry. For one, Germany will always be placed at the bottom of the list of people who suffered the most during the war, Jewry always at the top. And Germany, like Britain, or France, or Italy, or Portugal or any other Western country which had arrogated colonies to itself, is temperamentally unsuited to seeing itself as a poor, downtrodden, weak, suffering and brutalised nation, despite the fact that it, out of all the Western European countries, lost the most people during and after the war.

This explains why National Bolshevism can never succeed in Germany or any other Western European country. On a subconscious level, the Western countries know that the incendiary 'Bolshevik' (in Yockey's sense) rhetoric of the Slobodon Milosevics, Saddam Husseins, Muammar Ghaddafis, Aleksander Dugins, is aimed at them. In the eyes of these men, Europe and its colonies have bullied, oppressed and exploited the coloured world. The achievements of white Australians, for instance, count for nothing, as Australia, rightly understood, is a nation of convicts and murderers of aboriginals.

In the world view of Yockey's 'Bolshevik' - which is the same as that of the contemporary Left - the German stands at the top of the hierarchy of bullies. The Anglo-Saxon of WWI acted as the midwife to this conception, which is now a hundred years old: the war was portrayed as a life and death struggle between Anglo-Saxon freedom and German tyranny, and between Anglo-Saxon respect for human life and 'Prussian' contempt.

In the end, the German is unable to shake this national self-image off: he cannot exchange the role of the wolf for that of the lamb. This is especially the case in view of the events of WWII. Many of the countries allied with the Germans during the war strove afterwards to absolve themselves of accusations of wrongdoing against the Jews by making the argument, 'It wasn't us, it was the Germans'. The Germans themselves cannot use that argument. In the words of Harry Truman, 'The buck stops here'.

IV.

In a recent article on Brian Ruhe, we find one commentator exclaiming, 'Man, what in the names of the Gods is going on here?'; another replies, 'Nazbols, that’s what’s going on. They’re sick in the head'.

National Bolshevism exerts a grip on the impressionable minds of many in the nationalist movement, and one has to ask why. After some reflection, I believe I have come up with the answer, and this is what I call the 'theory of baggage'.

Once you buy into 'neofascism' or 'Neo-Nazism', you are in effect assuming the debts of not only the Third Reich but the entire German people: you are buying into 'Germanism', 'Teutonism', 'Prussian Socialism' (as Spengler calls it), and must, as a consequence, justify nearly everything that the Germans and their helpers did before and during the war. One thereby shoulders a heavy burden. But the heaviness of one's load gives one an advantage, as I will demonstrate.

Suppose you are an international traveler about to board a plane. As you are wheeling your bags through the terminal, a Russian traveler notices you and remarks that you have plenty of space left over in your suitcase. Would it be too much trouble, he asks, if you can make room for one item that he wants you to carry? The item is marked 'Syrian War'. Agreeing with him that indeed you have too much room, you cheerfully assent. He then asks you to carry a second item: 'Ukrainian War'. And then another two: 'Georgian War' and 'Chechen War'. It goes without saying that soon you will be encumbered with Russian gear - all of it impeccably 'anti-imperialist' and 'anti-Zionist' and 'anti-NWO', but a hindrance nonetheless. And by taking on Russian obligations, you have marked yourself out as a fellow traveler with National Bolshevism.

On the other hand, suppose you are a sincere, committed 'Neo-Nazi' - not a Strasserite or some other permutation, but someone who follows (more or less) the Hitler party line. When approached by a mysterious Russian asking you to carry things for him, you'll reply, 'Sorry - I've too much baggage'.

Movement people only become National Bolshevist because of a vacuity - too much empty space in their luggage. Whereas mainline fascism of the old school (with no Strasserite deviations) fills up all spaces: it is a plenum, not a vacuum. And it represents the furthest advance in Far Right ideology up to, and including, WWII. But because any open espousal of it places you, as an activist, in danger, most Far Rightists find it too hot to handle. The result is that they contrive substitute ideologies, such as Identitarianism and Southern nationalism, which lack content. One does not go far with stop gap ideas, which is why, for example, Hunter Wallace abandoned Southern nationalism - there simply was not much to it. The other flaw with makeshift ideas is that they leave you open and vulnerable to the blandishments of the Putins, Ghaddafis and other high-octane salesman who, in the last analysis, stand for nothing except crude despotism and personal power.

One might object Russia (and China, another country touted by the Naz Bols) wield the upper hand: the Putins and Xis run actual states, with actual armies, whereas I - and other like me - are dreamer intellectuals in the same position as, say, an Ernst Jünger or Arther Moeller van den Bruck between the wars. One cannot deny that, in comparison to Hitler and Mussolini, Putin and the Chinese communists, show real staying power. One cannot argue with material success.

My response to that is that a difference exists (as mentioned before) between a politics derived from the senses and from intuition. We can either live in accordance with what is present before us or what may come to be. The Spenglers and Yockeys take after the latter, not the former. They encourage us to dare to dream, and take a gamble on what is not present before us. And without trances and vagaries, nothing is accomplished. One must remember that, before he founded the SS, Himmler was a chicken farmer...