I.
I see from the news that Neo-Nazism is making a comeback amongst the youth of Australia, especially in the state of Victoria. This development I find interesting, as I know a great deal of the subject of Neo-Nazism and I can share some of that knowledge with these youth. In lieu of a face to face lecture - which is difficult to organise at the moment, given the circumstances - I here present some of my insights in written form.
II.
Last year I showed an elderly relative of mine the movie Star Wars (1977) (I refuse to call it by its modern name, A New Hope); she had not seen it previously, having led a sheltered life. Interestingly enough, when the first Imperial officer (clad in a black Wehrmacht uniform and donning a WWII-era Japanese army style hat) came into view, she exclaimed that the Imperials were 'Nazis'. And then, at the end credits, when she saw Peter Cushing's name appear - the great Cushing having played the imperial officer Moff Tarkin - she wondered aloud, 'Which character was Peter Cushing? Oh, that's right: he was the creepy-voiced Nazi'. All this was amusing, all right, but as I reflected on it later, a train of thought started which led to some serious philosophical musings. I asked myself what exactly is it that makes a 'Nazi'? Were Moff Tarkin and the other Imperials cast in the mold of a Platonic Ideal of 'Nazidom'? And these questions in turn led to another, one which was more technical than philosophical: how is that Neo-Nazis are to be recruited, trained and deployed - how is it that they are to be mass produced, in the same way that the Marxist Left mass produces commies?
Oddly enough, I think the second question is more easily answered than the first.
Neo-Nazism, according to the dictionary definition, seeks to revive the theory and practice of German National Socialism. That to my mind is a reasonable working definition.
Now, no-one in the movement uses the term Neo-Nazism as I do, and do frequently; in our milieu, its usage is frowned upon and the term 'National Socialism' is much preferred. But as Carolyn Yeager points out, those who range themselves as enemies of Hitler, the NSDAP, the Third Reich, can and do borrow the term National Socialism; a much better term to use would be 'Hitlerism', which leaves others in no doubt as to where one stands.
If an intellectual is to be a student of Hitlerism, he should read, carefully, Hitler's Mein Kampf (1923) (and its sequel, Zweites Buch (1928)); Hitler's collected speeches; and Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century (1931). But a full understanding and appreciation of these requires that one study German and European history, which, I regret to say, is a task that many Hitlerians never undertake - they can tell you nothing of the lives of the men Hitler considered to be the three greatest Germans, Luther, Frederick the Great and Bismarck, nor the history of the unification of Germany, nor the history of WWI... They do not know who or what a Prussian was. It is as though someone declared themselves to be a Maoist and at the same time professed total ignorance of Chinese personages such as Sun Yat Sen.
If one does not grasp Hitlerism, one will not grasp Neo-Nazism, which is a revival of it. But fortunately, a book does exist that puts a thousand years of German and European history into political context, and that is Yockey's Imperium (1948). Much has changed since Yockey wrote his book, yes, but much has not; his chapter on the American negro and communism still holds true seventy years later, as we can see from recent events.
The trouble with Imperium is that many in the movement have read it, but few shows signs of understanding it or at least assimilating its ideas. For example, the white nationalist Greg Johnson publishes new editions of Yockey's work, which I think is commendable, but Johnson opposes Hitler and German National Socialism and I find little influence of Imperium in Johnson's thinking.
Part of the fault lies in Yockey; he is an acquired taste, and I while I find the book easy to read - I have re-read it five or six times - others do not. The study of Imperium demands a preliminary study of Spengler, which is asking a lot, as while Spengler wrote many short books - including the Hour of Decision (1934), a blatantly racialist work which is bound to appeal to many white nationalists - his magnum opus, the Decline of the West (1918-1922) clocks in at half a million words. Reading this work will take time, even though Spengler (for a German philosopher) writes clearly enough. An abridged version of the Decline does exist, but it numbers nearly 500 pages.
All the same, Spengler's five or six published works, in combination with Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political (1932) (which Yockey borrowed from liberally), plus Yockey, will convert any reasonably open-minded intellectual into a 'Hitlerian'. These books cannot fail.
After one has digested all these, the problem becomes one of orientating oneself politically, armed with these ideas, in today's world. Supposing that Yockey were to come back to life in 2021 (he died sixty years ago), would he be surprised, shocked, by recent developments? Yes and no. Both Yockey and Spengler anticipated that, at some point in the future, Russia would abandon the Marxist ideology, so one can guess that the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been no great surprise to Yockey. But he would have been surprised by the massive non-white invasion of the Western world. Yockey narrates how, in his time, American Jewish groups devoted themselves to the spreading pro-immigration propaganda and the breaking down racial barriers; but the idea that America, having fallen under the sway of these groups, would give up its immigration restrictions and allow the importation of some 59 million people (the greatest movement of any peoples in any time in history) would have seemed to Yockey to be only a theoretical, not a practical, possibility. In short, were Yockey to return to today's Los Angeles - a city he once lived in - he would be shocked, appalled, angered and confused. The same would apply were he to return to visit today's Paris, London, Rome, Berlin.
Any return to today's America would lead to some hard choices on Yockey's part, e.g., the choice between Trump and Biden in 2020. In that election, both candidates were fully embedded in the American pro-Jewish, pro-Israel power structure, and both had married their children off to Jews; but one had, during his time in office, cut legal immigration by 49%, and the other had, during the 2020 campaign, vowed to increase it a hundred fold. So should Yockey get behind the immigration-restrictionist candidate or abstain from electoral politics altogether? There are no easy answers and the past gives us no guideposts. And this brings us back to the main shortcoming of Hitler's writing. The collected speeches, which encompass the entirety of Hitler's career, put forth a compelling and tragic narrative of the rise and fall of a great man and a great nation; but the collection comes to an end of April 1945 - there it stops, abruptly, without giving any indication of what came next. This is the problem with old books: the argument could be made that Hitler's writing, and even Yockey's, constitute nothing more than white man's history, a record of a world which has been left behind.
Having said that, Hitlerism has not been mummified, has not been turned into a dusty, inanimate object; Hitler has not gone the same way of Napoleon; he has not been made safe and respectable. Political possibilities still exist in Hitlerism. The day that a statue of Hitler has been put up in Berlin, the day that a sympathetic nine-hour movie portrayal of the rise and fall of the Third Reich - of the same stamp as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) trilogy - is released, then we know that Hitlerism has become safe, respectable, assimilated. But neither will happen any time soon. The political establishment in Europe and its colonies, including the United States, still lives in fear of a revival of Hitlerism.
Significantly, that same establishment does not live in fear of a revival of Napoleonism nor Marxism-Leninism nor Islam. And even though the political establishment in America abominates white Americans, particularly Southerners, it does not seriously expect a return of the Confederacy and Southern secessionism; the last time that Southern nationalism and racialism posed anything like a threat to the establishment was sixty years ago.
III.
At the risk of repeating myself (I have written on this subject in many articles), the essence of 'Nazism' lies in 'Prussianism', or what Spengler calls 'Prussian Socialism'. Spengler calls it an 'Idea', which Yockey defines as a 'Living, breathing, formless reality'. And the best means of comprehending this Idea is to look at it in action - during the course of Germany's war.
To give a summary of that war... It begins when Germany goes to war with France and England, and invades the Low Countries and northern France; and it invades Russia after a Russo-German peace treaty collapses under the weight of what Germany sees as Russian aggression.
Russia, in the German ideology, represents Asiatic barbarism and despotism (by warring on Russia, Germany is defending Europe from 'The East'). The war against Russia moves quickly, and Germany is initially successful, conquering the Ukraine, the Baltics, Crimea, White Russia (Belarus) and the Trans-Caucasus. Germany, which is over-populated and demands living or elbow room, states its intention of colonising these annexed territories and populating them with peasant farmers and invalid soldiers.
Diplomatically and militarily, the situation is in a state of flux. Sweden and Spain stay neutral, but Serbia is invaded by Germany and Hungary; Romania, initially an ally of Germany, turns against it, sides with Russia and England, and invades Hungary to reclaim lost ancestral lands. In the West, Germany is unable to invade England, a mighty sea-faring power, from across the English Channel or the North Sea, but it does wage submarine and aerial warfare against her. England, for the most part, shows itself to be incompetent in the war; its adventures - for example, an expedition sent to Greece to defend it against the Germans - turn out badly.
It is in the field of propaganda that England proves to achieve its greatest success. It accuses Germany of unprovoked aggression. The German nation is to be condemned in the court of world opinion for its authoritarianism and militarism; Germany is said to be an autocracy, led by a histrionic, mentally unstable despot of a leader, and Germans as a people are guilty of moral failings. Germany lusts for power and worships the use of force. And indeed, Germany's conduct in the war shocks the world. Germany adopts brutal counter-insurgency tactics; builds concentration camps; takes hostages; deports citizens (of territories it occupies) back to Germany for use as forced labour; practises scorched earth warfare... Such is the outrage that England and America demand that the German leadership be put on trial for 'war crimes'.
America becomes embroiled in the war on the English side, thanks to America's president, a Democrat with a solid electoral base in the South and who has some sympathies with what we would today call white nationalism. Through suasion, he overcomes America's inhibitions against foreign entanglements - America's 'Isolationism' - and wages an internal war against a perceived German fifth column in America; and this takes place after he wins re-election on a promise to keep America out of the 'European War'.
American involvement in the war leads to the decline of Germany's military fortunes: once millions of American soldiers had landed in Europe, it was all up for Germany (as Hitler later acknowledged) and Germany is forced to pull out of the conquered Eastern territories in great haste. It is at this late point that Germany's anti-Russian rhetoric intensifies; it makes an appeal to the West to aid it in a struggle against 'Asiatic Bolshevism'. But Germany's pleas fall on deaf ears. It is defeated and partitioned, and the Germans living in the territories amputated from Germany are ethnically cleansed. The German currency becomes worthless and an Allied blockade on food to Germany leads to the death of many Germans. America, however, shows signs of coming around to the German way of thinking and commences the first of many military interventions against communism. Meanwhile, in what we would today call the Third World, European's reputation among the 'coloured peoples' has diminished as a result of the fratricidal war. The natives become restless; a 'coloured' revolt stirs against Western imperialism, colonialism, racialism, the repercussions of which are still being felt today.
IV.
Yockey portrays the war as a conflict between two nations, two ideas: Germany and England, Socialism and Capitalism. On deeper examination of the Allied propaganda written at the time of the war, it becomes clear that it is the bellicose - and painfully forthright and frank - German political thought which was instrumental in inciting 'Capitalist' England and America against 'Socialist' Germany. I will reproduce here, at length, some quotations from some of Germany's leading nationalist intellectuals. These were compiled by a pair of American scholars in a wartime anti-German propaganda work and grouped under the heading 'Dispossessing the Conquered'.
[In the occupied territories] Germans alone will govern... They alone will exercise political rights; they alone will serve in the army and in the navy; they alone will have the right to become landowners; thus they will acquire the conviction that, as in the Middle Ages, the Germans are a people of rulers. However, they will condescend so far as to delegate inferior tasks to foreign subjects who live among them.
[...]
If we take, we must also keep. A foreign territory is not incorporated until the day when the rights of property of Germans are rooted in its soil. With all necessary prudence, but also with inflexible determination, a process of expropriation should he inaugurated, by which the Poles and the Alsatians and Lorrainers would he gradually transported to the interior of the Empire, while Germans would replace them on the frontiers.
We wish to commence in a new empire a new life of which the supreme aim shall be: Greater Germany whose task shall be the well-being of Germans. All other laws are dependent on this great one... Those only may become complete citizens whose mother tongue is German, whose education corresponds to that of the common school (Volksschule), who are of pure German blood, and who take the oath of allegiance. Rights of citizenship may be canceled by the courts for any word or act contrary to German interests... No foreigner shall acquire house or land in Greater Germany.
[...]
When we have won, and obtained territorial concessions, we shall receive lands inhabited by French or Russians, consequently by enemies. One wonders if such an increase of territory will improve our situation... Those who have learned to think according to the historical school will be horrified when we demand the 'evacuation' of land inhabited by Europeans; for that signifies the violent interruption of an historical development centuries old. Besides, the idea wounds the sensibilities of civilized man and is contrary to the modern law of nations which protects individual property. But if we consider seriously the peculiar position of the German people, squeezed into the middle of Europe and running the risk of being suffocated for want of air, it must he agreed that we might he compelled to demand from a vanquished enemy, either in the East or in the West, that he should hand over the unpopulated territory.
[...]
We may depend upon the re-Germanizing of Alsace, but not of Livonia and Kurland. There no other course is open to us but to keep the subject race in as uncivilized a condition as possible, and thus prevent them from becoming a danger to the handful of their conquerors.
[...]
[In case of war with Russia:] We shall demand the cession of such territory as we need for the straightening of our frontiers and for colonization. Evacuation of it will be required.
[...]
War will unify the strong nation that is capable of a future and make it free, and will establish the people on a healthy substantial basis. Those are the two chief purposes of war. A third can, however, be suggested, that a nation even when her national and fundamental interests do not coincide with those of another nation, still must rudely destroy this people's highest interests, must indeed remorselessly cut off from this foreign people the means of living for the future. It is a great, powerful nation which, overturns a less courageous and frequently degenerate people and takes its territory from it. For a great, strong people finds its house too narrow, it cannot stir and move about, cannot work and build up, cannot thrive and grow. The great nation needs new territory. Therefore it must spread out over foreign soil, and must displace strangers with the power of the sword.
[...]
Slowly, not too hastily, we people of Germanic blood must proceed in the settlement of the lands which are to be ours in the future.
The lands which we need to-day and in the future for colonizing, we must thoroughly cleanse of foreign elements.
[...]
The historical view as to the biological evolution of races tells us that there are dominant races and subordinate races. Political history is nothing more than the history of the struggles between the dominant races. Conquest in particular is always a function of the dominant races. Where now in all the world does it stand written that conquering races are under obligations to grant after an interval political rights to the conquered? Is not the practice of political rights an advantage which biologically belongs to the dominant races?
In like manner there is the school question. The man with political rights sets up schools, and the speech used in the instruction is his speech... The purpose must be to crush the [individuality of the] conquered people and its political and lingual existence...
The conquerors are acting only according to biological principles if they suppress alien languages and undertake to destroy strange popular customs... Only the conquering race must be populous, so that it can overrun the territory it has won. Nations that are populous are, moreover, the only nations which have a moral claim to conquest, for it is wrong that in one country there should be overpopulation while close at hand — and at the same time on better soil — a less numerous population stretches its limbs at ease.
[As to the inferior races:] From political life they are to be excluded. They are eligible only to positions of a non- political character, to commercial commissions, chambers of commerce, etc.,...The principal thing for the conqueror is the outspoken will to rule and the will to destroy the political and national life of the conquered.
V.
The above passages sound as though they were taken from Hitler's Table Talk (1953), a work which has become notorious on the dissident Right for its brutal and somewhat coarse frankness; but they were in fact taken from WWI-era German nationalist publications. They are reproduced in the anti-German propaganda work, Conquest and Kultur: Aims of the Germans in their own words (1918), compiled by the Americans Wallace Notestein and Elmer Edgar Stoll.
Likewise, my account of 'the war' does not summarise WWII but WWI. My intention here has been to show that Hitler and German National Socialism are of a piece with German history - they did not come out of the blue - and further, that Hitler's ideas were in keeping with mainstream German political thought of the time, that they were not an aberration and certainly did not stem from some bizarre set of occult, even Satanic, beliefs.
In addition, greater clarity can be gained from studying 'Prussianism' in the context of WWI rather than WWII; the preoccupations of today's historians - among them the Holocaust - do not obscure our view of the subject. The attitudes of Germany's enemies, Russia, France, England, America, stand in sharp relief and are not overshadowed by the question of what Germany did nor did not do to the Jews. Viewed from this perspective, then, we can sum up WWI as: WWII without the Jews.
Looking at the above quotations from the perspective of today, it is remarkable that they could be found in the opinion columns of respectable newspapers and the books of respectable publishers of the time: to our surprise, 'Prussianism' was mainstream in Germany in the late 19th century and early 20th. But, to the anti-German type on the dissident Right, all this proves only that the Germans were 'bad' long before Hitler, indeed, the Germans have been 'bad' for at least a 150 years. For these quotations offend modern sensibilities, and the sensibilities of many of those on the white nationalist side of politics who take umbrage to the Hitler of Table Talk, that is, the type of white nationalist who writes for Greg Johnson's Counter-Currents and Ron Unz' Unz.Org.
When considering this brand of German nationalism, one can understand the frustration of those on the dissident Right who wish to turn wayward youth away from National Socialism, Nazism, all forms of 'Prussian Socialism'. 'Haven't these youngsters read Table Talk? Don't they understand that National Socialism is for Germans only, and that it counsels the most brutal, barbaric treatment of the Poles, Russians, Czechs, Ukrainians? And aren't the Poles and the Russians most "based"? Isn't their nationalism is better than German nationalism...'.
I do not here seek to rebut the arguments of those anti-Hitlerians; I merely observe that they are rehearsing the same line as the Anglo (that is, English and American) war polemicists of a hundred years ago; today they call it National Socialism, yesterday they called it Pan-Germanism. And whatever form it takes, German nationalism touches a raw nerve. Tell an American white nationalist that a fundamental inequality exists between black and white, and you will meet with approval; tell him that the same inequality exists between a German and a Pole, or a German and a Russian, and you will meet with disapproval. But then, Americans, unlike the Germans, do not have to live next door to millions of Poles and Russians. (And as for the French, Hitler was fond of quoting Schopenhauer: 'Africa has its monkeys, Europe its French').
The difference between an American white nationalist and a German National Socialist can be expressed thus: the American puts race first, politics second; the German, politics first, race second. Upon interrogating the American as to his ideology, you will quickly discover that he has no theory of the State, of politics (this is true of William Pierce, George Lincoln Rockwell, Harold Covington); he seems to think that once the non-whites, in particular the negroes, are removed, the politics will take care of itself; constitutional structures which are amenable to the white man in America will spontaneously appear. This explains why the Confederacy was unable to move beyond the strictures laid down by the Founding Fathers; upon the secession, they drew up a constitution and elected a president, and by doing both, they did not depart overly much from the America of the 18th century. The founders of the new Confederate State did not crown Jefferson Davis as emperor. But, in all fairness, American white nationalists are obsessed (as their Southern forebears were) by the negro question to the exclusion of all others because it has been paramount in America for 400 years, whereas it has only made itself felt on the Continent in the past 20 or so. Even to Yockey, who favours Europe over America, the negro question hovers in the forefront of his consciousness; Yockey hailed from Chicago, Illinois, which is now a negro city, and while he wrung his hands in despair over the demographic decline of America's founding stock (which came about, in his view, because of an excess of Eastern European immigration at the turn of the century), he would be the first to admit that a Pole or Czech or Greek or Italian immigrant is preferable to a native-born negro. It is interesting to speculate what political choices he would have made in the 1970s, when whites were being ethnically cleansed from north-eastern cities such as Detroit and a de facto anti-negro alliance sprung up between three classes of Americans: founding stock Americans, Americans who had emigrated from Eastern Europe, and Jews (see Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (2012) by Dominic Sandbrook). Politics makes for strange bedfellows.
But to return to Pan-Germanism: the above quotations, I think, contain some of the essence of 'Nazism', and furthermore, they illustrate the gulf that exists between German thought and English thought, or German and American. A work such as Modern Germany in relation to the great war (1916), which is an anthology of pro-German propaganda essays by German professors, contains more genuine 'Nazism' than all the works of William Pierce, Harold Covington, George Lincoln Rockwell, James Mason. The professors there express themselves in a more genteel fashion than the authors quoted in Conquest and Kultur, as after all, they are striving to put Germany in the best possible light; but the undercurrents of 'Prussianism' still move beneath the surface. (In that connection, it should be noted that the Anglo propaganda of the war did not spare the members of the German academic class who espoused nationalism: it called them 'hate professors').
You see, in this wartime literature, the national virtues of Germany on display, one of them being a frankness, a forthrightness, that borders on rudeness - there are times when virtue of honesty becomes a vice. Here is a quotation from Conquest and Kultur:
Within Europe... we must be exceedingly careful, and must acquire new territory only after the most mature deliberation, especially where it will take years of unremitting labor to convert our antagonists to the view that the under the German scepter — 'War state' though we proclaim ourselves — is well worth living. True, our foreign policy must not be too tender-hearted — hard times need stout fists. In the coming diplomatic convention, if the glib foreign hucksters present cooked-up objections to our taking our rights, our fist, like Bismarck, must pound the green table till the ink bottles dance, if they refuse to give us our due — what we think necessary for permanent peace. This is self-evident, and must remain so.
Now, this Pan German author - who made the above statement in a book published in 1915 - could be accused, perhaps by a white nationalist of the Greg Johnson type, of fomenting divisiveness between the European nations. But I think extenuating circumstances exist for the ideologists of both the Second and Third Reich. If we are to watch these two excellent animated map videos, on the fall out from the Trianon and St Germain Treaties, we will be confronted with the tawdry spectacle of the post-WWI white nations of Eastern and Central Europe waging war against one another (wars which continued long after the end of WWI); partitioning and annexing one another's territories; carrying out pogroms of the Jews; and practising 'ethnic transfers'. Eastern and Central Europe are a byword for ethnic mayhem, and literal imperialism (German and Austro-Hungarian) was all that held Eastern and Central Europe together. Each nation could only make gains at the expense of the other in what was a classic example of a zero-sum game. It is no surprise, then, that F.A. von Hayek, an Austrian, makes reference (in a work published some thirty years after the war) to the 'poison of nationalism'.
All this is moot, perhaps, given that now Europe is being colonised by the Third World - by its former colonial subjects in Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Asia, in fact - and so the feeling today is that whites in Europe ought to be uniting in racial solidarity against the common foe. Accounts of WWI tell us that disputes in 1905 and 1911 over which European country should own Morocco - France or Germany - helped cause WWI, but the disputes between the European Great Powers over colonial possessions seem to we moderns to be quaint, and unbearably so: we want to say to the Europe of a hundred years ago, 'Worry not about going to Morocco, for Morocco will come to you - especially you, France'; for as we know, hundreds of thousands of North Africans migrated to France after WWII, the result being that the Muslim population of France now numbers in the millions.
But this state of affairs has come about precisely because of colonialism, or rather lack of it, and the lack of Prussian-style forcefulness and vigour. It is no coincidence that almost immediately after the breakdown of European colonial and imperialist rule in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, millions of the former colonial subjects began to invade Europe. This causal link between the invasion of Europe and the decline of colonialism has become more and more evident with the passing of years, so much so that Europeans can now say to themselves of the non-white world that 'We fought over there to prevent them from coming here'. Sadly, Europe could not maintain its empire 'Over there' because Europe had become weak - weak because of two fratricidal wars or as part of a natural biological decline or both. Today's Europe presents a striking contrast with the Europe of a hundred years ago, when whites ruled most of the world, and inwardly believed that they had the right to do.
A measure of cant and hypocrisy prevented those Europeans from openly declaring that they had that right, and that they were good rulers, and that they were engaged in colonial enterprises for purely selfish reasons. But the German habit of a rather coarse and brutal honesty expunged any trace of English-style cant and liberalism from German discourse. It is this German trait that helped earn the enmity of the Anglos before the outbreak of WWI - that and the German argument that the British Empire was fading, and that of all the Western European nations, Germany alone possessed the vitality which was a requisite for leadership. As honesty carried to excess can become rudeness, self-confidence can become arrogance:
Mere force or calculation gives mastery; for leadership more is required — superior culture, superior morality, respect for distinctive national characteristics, an intelligence capable of comprehending and assimilating foreign elements. These qualities insure to the people which possesses them all the world power of the future, and we Germans are that people. [Conquest and Kultur-]
The reader can see for himself that a continuity exists between the self-confidence of the German in WWI and WWII; a direct line can be traced from the Pan-German of WWI and the German soldier of WWII, who, as we know from a thousand war movies and TV shows, wears a resplendent uniform, is full of an insufferable cockiness, and whenever he comes across a female character in occupied France or Holland, addresses her as 'My good woman' with a supercilious smile - Moff Tarkin, when he addresses Princess Leia, smiles in exactly the same way. As to whether or not one likes this type, well, that is a matter of taste. I myself enjoy reading the WWI books written a hundred years ago, as in that time, the white man - and especially the German - embodied strength, power, self-confidence; furthermore, the primary concern of the white nations of that time - which of them should rule the non-white world - makes a piquant contrast with those of the present. And many others come away with the same impression. It is this modern-day nostalgia for the old European imperialism that explains, to my mind, the appeal of the representations of that imperialism in popular culture - e.g., the Steampunk genre of alternative history fiction and the Kaiserreich modifications of the computer game Hearts of Iron IV.
VI.
I think that the above goes some way to explaining what a 'Nazi' is. But much of it concerns external policy, that is, Germany's relation to other nations; what of the internal?
Much has been written in dissident Right circles on the German jurist Carl Schmitt and his famous Friend / Enemy distinction. The anti-Nazi American academic, William Ebenstein, gives an excellent summary of Schmitt's theory in the wartime book, The Nazi State (1943) under the heading 'The Nazi Theory of Politics'. He includes a lengthy quotation from Goebbels so as to prove his thesis that the National Socialists were Schmittians:
In an editorial on “Politics and Warfare,” in Das Ketch of May II, 1941, Dr. Goebbels, member of the German Government, states that “it is frequently not easy to distinguish, in the existential struggle of people, whether the means employed belong to the realm of politics or warfare. . . . The western democracies do not have the slightest notion of the working of National Socialist politics. They measure them with categories typical of these democracies, and then inevitably arrive at catastrophical blunders. With us, politics is as soldierly as the waging of war is political. Both pursue the same aims.” Dr. Goebbels at the same time thanked providence that the enemies of National Socialism, both inside Germany and outside, failed or refused to understand this Nazi conception of politics as perpetual total war aiming at the total destruction of the enemy. This failure of understanding the nature of Nazi politics. Dr. Goebbels concluded in the quoted editorial, “is one of the most puzzling characteristics of the forces which have opposed Nazism from its evolution from a small group of men to a great world power.”
To we moderns, who lived our entire lives in what is supposedly a 'liberal democracy', Goebbels' way of thinking sounds strange, if not foreign. But I think when it is applied to three of our modern shibboleths - democracy, the multi-party system, and press freedom - it produces some interesting results.
Before WWI, the German political system - which was a constitutional monarchy, not unlike England's - could be classified as democratic. I here define democracy as an equal and fair contest between two or more candidates: for there to be a democracy, there must be what Schmitt calls the 'equal chance'. In 1914, Germans were allowed to choose between competing political parties, and it mattered not that suffrage was not universal; women were not allowed not to vote in England and America, the two most exalted 'democracies', until WWI was over. But Germany's enemies England and America considered the German and 'Prussian' system to be authoritarian and the Kaiser a tyrant. In the hundreds of anti-German polemics published during the war, Germany's critics demanded reform, and these demands were packaged as helpful suggestions and recommendations. But Germany was not fooled. In response, Germany asked the question why it was that Germany should accept the recommendations of two of its worst enemies, England and America? Furthermore, was the exchange intended to flow both ways: would America and England accept it if the suggestions for reform were made by Germany? That question answers itself, and in the negative. During WWI, France, England, America had ranged themselves against Germany as the Enemy in Schmittian terms; a conflict existed, and this conflict was existential, that is to say, it concerned the matter of Germany's very existence as a political unit. The best argument for the German political system in WWI - and by extension, WWII - was that the Enemy opposed it. One could write sophisticated political treatises, of the order of Plato's Republic, defending the German system, but after a certain point the conflict ceases to be intellectual and becomes political, which is to say existential. Intellectual disputation and discussion crosses over into warfare, in this case, psychological warfare.
Schmitt's theory and Goebbels' practice applies to the second institution we in the West today value: the multi-party electoral system. In the ideal democratic system, ideologically-differing candidates and parties compete against one another in a free and fair contest, and nowhere is it presupposed that the losing contestants are to be annihilated; instead, the rule is that they are to sit on the back bench until a short number of years pass, and it is then that they will get their chance to mount a serious bid for office. The tradition in American politics is that a candidate who is elected to the presidency for one term shall get a second; that is a matter of mutual agreement - unspoken agreement - between Republicans and Democrats. The opposition party will get their shot at the presidency once the incumbent party has served two terms: then the two parties will compete in what is called a 'change election', and usually the opposition party will win. The incumbent party, having lost the presidency, is then demoted to the opposition party, but in the mid-terms it will almost always win House of Representatives. And so it goes, in a circle. But the 'totalitarian' ideology is, by its nature, bound to reject such this rather neat and well-functioning system; it views politics not as a friendly and fair contest but as a war. This is what the quotation from Goebbels tells us. In keeping with this Schmittian thesis, the NSDAP saw electoral campaigns as military campaigns, and it demanded - and got - what Roosevelt later called the 'unconditional surrender' of its opponents, the rival political parties. (But the NSDAP did not quite obtain unconditional surrender from its opponents the Centre Party, the Social Democrat Party, the German People's Party,the Bavarian People's Party; politicians of the rival parties were granted some leeway by the NSDAP after it achieved complete dominance in March 1933; candidates from the parties, which had been dissolved, were allowed to run as independents, or 'guests', in the November 1933 elections, and the elections of 1936 and 1938). But to the modern reader, all this sounds somewhat archaic, it smacks of the politics of the 1930s; do these formulas of war and 'unconditional surrender' hold true in modern times? Well, they do: we saw it in the 2020 US Presidential election. The Democrats stole the election from Trump through fraud, and possibly won the run-off campaign in Georgia for the two Senate seats using the same fraudulent methods. The Democrats won in 2020 a monopoly of state power (by cheating) with the consequence that after January the 6th - the day of the Democrat coup against Trump - that monopoly is being exploited by the Democrats, who want to use the offices of state to eliminate their opponents. They are attempting to achieve this elimination by declaring all voters and followers of Trump to be the 'Internal Enemy'. (Such declarations do not happen often in American political life; according to Yockey, the designation of the 'Internal Enemy' has been used only three times in American history; the first during the aftermath of the War of Independence, the second during the Civil War, the third during WWII (when American sympathisers with Germany were treated as hostiles)). And what the Democrats demand from conservatives and pro-Trump Republicans is unconditional surrender.
From this, we can say that democracy in 2021 is finished in America. It may be that democracy will be restored, but prospects look bleak. The pessimistic conclusion to be drawn that if the Right is ever to regain State power, it can only do so if it avails itself of the same 'totalitarian' methods of the Left. And that means it must go down the 'Nazi' path.
And this leads us to the subject of the third valued institution, and that is the free press.
Schmitt, in more than one of his works, defines the intellectuals as the discussing class. Parliament, in the liberal world view, should act as a forum for free and untrammeled discussion between distinguished gentlemen who, by disputing, and disputing freely and openly, will arrive at the truth, much like the philosophers in the agoras of ancient Greece. Politics is to be reduced to debate, and the precondition of the liberal political order or system is that this debate be free and untrammeled, and furthermore, open to all - it must be transparent. Liberalism, as Schmitt points out, believes in the redeeming value of publicity.
The ideal of the free press fits in with all this; the free press is to function as a journalistic parliament. It allows the free and frank exchange of opinions - and perhaps it did in 1980 or 1990 or 2000, but does it do so in 2021? The answer is no. Since 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy, the press in America and everywhere else in the West, has arrogated to itself political powers. It has become a political force. One consequence of this was that the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, AP, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, et al., waged war every day on the Trump administration. After the stolen election of 2020, that almost military-campaign concluded in a victory for the media and the two other institutions with which the media shares power: Big Tech and Hollywood. It is this - a triumvirate - that now reigns, not the Democratic Party (and as for Biden, he is an empty vessel).
The triumvirate does not allow ideological competitors: it seeks to destroy them - as is becoming painfully apparent, day by day. The left-wing ideology that animates the triumvirate counsels the crippling, decapitation, extermination of the triumvirate's political opponents. Such a Leninist mentality could not be further removed from the liberal ideal.
Complete freedom of the press, and intellectual discussion, does not exist in its entirety in the West - try and publish an op-ed denying the Holocaust in an American or European newspaper and see what happens to you - and it never has. But one could say, up until recent times, that the media approached the liberal ideal, at least to a reasonable degree. Now all that has changed. The repressiveness, the deplatforming, the progandising, the vilification, the twisting of the truth, has reached such proportions that even the most dimwitted conservative (the type of conservative always insisting that the commies, SJWs, antifa are the 'Real Nazis') is beginning to see.
Once we have identified a certain class - in this case, journalists - as a political actor, we should be asking: does that class use its political power in ways which are beneficial? Clearly the answer in this case is no. In 2020, the Western media (and not only the US media) aided and abetted the Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters, and through these actions sought to trigger a race war; it incited violence against Trump and his supporters, and is still continuing to do so; and it induced a state of hysteria regarding Covid-19, which has led to consequences we are all too familiar with. 2020 would have looked very different had the media shown some more of the objectivity and neutrality it had displayed thirty to forty years ago - and the willingness to do actual journalism. And in the present year, the media is committing the worst crime of all from our point of view: the media, along with the Far Left, is fostering a climate of race-hatred - race-hatred against white people. All this goes some way to explaining why it is that so many in the West hold the journalistic profession in contempt - why so many believe that there is no lower form of human life than a journalist.
In 2021, we are faced with two possibilities. The first is that future conservative governments intervene to restore a measure of freedom of discussion, debate and enquiry. The second is that a civil war of sorts gets underway as it did in Weimar Germany or Salvador Allende's Chile or Isabel Peron's Argentina; this war is to take place between the Far Right and the Far Left, and in the event of a victory for the Far Right, press freedoms are to be suspended. (But from the perspective of we moderns, that suspension would be purely formal and no great loss, as freedom of the press, freedom of discussion and freedom of expression today have already disappeared).
It seems unlikely that the old liberal order in journalism can be restored. Suppose that Trump had attempted to do that, he would have been accused of 'assaulting press freedom' and 'endangering democracy', the media having become adept at borrowing liberal rhetoric in order to camouflage itself. The journalist has made himself a political actor, and he will, upon coming under attack, do what all politicians do, and that is, fight for his survival as a political unit. Enoch Powell frequently quoted Thucydides' maxim that political power, once gained, is never relinquished - at least not voluntarily. It is unlikely that, now that the Left - which is the media, Big Tech, Hollywood, the SJW Twitter mob, the Antifa, the Critical Race Theorists - has attained near-absolute power that it will give it up. The Left will not experience a sudden religious conversion and then decide to behave in keeping with the ideals of classical liberalism. And so, the present state of affairs could continue indefinitely; the example of Venezuela shows that once the Left get in power, they cannot be gotten out. To this, the Friend / Enemy distinction provides the only redress. But once we begin to talk this way, we are speaking the language of Schmitt and Goebbels.
VII.
At the beginning of this article, I posed the question, 'What is a "Nazi"?' and I challenged myself to come up with an answer which was not something along the lines of, 'Go read a book on 20th century German history'.
The screenwriters of the science fiction TV and movie franchises Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica were faced with a similar challenge. They had to create characters - who were to be the bad guys, naturally - who were to be distinctly 'Nazi' and at the same time not German, for these stories were set in galaxies far, far away. And some subtlety was required (and was achieved): the Empire in Star Wars, for example, were not to merely serve as a stand-in for the Nazis, the Rebels not as a stand-in for the resistance fighters in German-occupied Europe: no, George Lucas made the story a metaphor for (among other things) the American war in Vietnam.
Dissecting the political philosophy of Star Wars and other science-fiction franchises is a difficult and onerous task, but one that must be done, for a political philosophy does animate the more overtly 'Nazi' science-fiction characters, and the purpose of my article has been to divine what that philosophy was. And my answer? Take some of the 'Prussian Militarism' of the first half of the 20th century and add Schmitt's concept of the political: we then arrive at something which is not the last word on the subject, but a point of departure.
It should be noted that 'Prussianism', 'Prussian Militarism', need not be grounded in the actual and historical Prussia - the Prussia of Frederick the Great and the House of Hohenzollern. The writers of the science-fiction franchises took 'Prussianism' out of its historical context and transported it to a place as far removed from Prussia as possible. In much the same way, George R. Martin, who wrote the fantasy novels which were adapted in the TV series Game of Thrones (2011-2019), modeled his world on Europe of the feudal era - comparisons have been drawn between his story and the history of the War of the Roses - but at the same time, his characters are not English (even though they speak (in the TV adaptation) with English accents).
Here I have only attempted to define 'Nazism'; I have left open the question of its value - that is, whether it is good or not - and also the question of whether or not Hitlerism can stage a comeback, in Germany and Europe, some time in the future. Spengler and Yockey made predictions of a resurgence of 'Socialism' some time in the 21st century, but as I lack their prophetic vision, I will not be as bold. My current thinking is that the effective political activist must position himself with a view to the immediate and not the distant, to the present and not the future.
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