Putin's fever dream and the ghosts of Prussia

I.

At the beginning of the war, Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a 'Demilitarisation and de-Nazification operation'; he vowed to excise 'Drug addicts and Neo-Nazis' from the Ukrainian government. Of course he was misusing the word 'Nazi', and the misuse - not only by Putin but by others - threatens to make the word meaningless and confronts us with yet another instance of an underlying degeneration of modern language and thought. 

(For another instance, given to us again by the Russians, read of this 'De-Nazification' manifesto by the Kremlin publicist Timofey Sergeytsev, a surreal and hallucinatory screed which has already earned for itself international notoriety). 

So what does the word 'Nazi' mean? My answer is - among other things - German soldiers. Recently- the conservative YouTube star Tim Pool came under fire for calling the Bundeswehr's military tattoo, the Zapfenstreich, 'Nazi'. His detractors accused Pool of being ignorant of German history, but I believe he was on to something. One can see at once the correlations between the Bundeswehr's torchlit ceremonies and the Wehrmacht's; and surely the Wehrmacht qualifies as 'Nazi'? 

I think what it is that American conservatives such as Pool object to (and have objected to for the past hundred years) is not so much 'Nazism' as (what used to be called) 'German militarism'. Pool is denigrating German soldiery, and he is doing so because this is what Americans have been doing for a long time. Right from the outset of WWI, English, American and Canadian propaganda sought to make Germany and her military, Germany and her allegedly bloodthirsty Wilhelmine Prussians, one and the same in the Anglo public's mind. The Anglos were by doing so making an attack on a German political institution: in German political life, the Prussian and then the German army possessed outsized power right up until 1945. And what made that army different from others that intervene frequently in civilian political life was that it had fought in actual wars - quite big ones - and had fought effectively. The Anglos feared the Germany army because it was strong; they would not have feared if it were weak. 

The Allied effort to dismantle the institution of the German army after WWI failed; after WWII, it succeeded. So it is a great irony of history that Germany recently announced its intention to remilitarise (and with tacit American approval).

Last week, German Chancellor Olag Scholz made a shocking announcement, declaring that Germany would massively increase its defense spending in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

If Berlin carries this plan out, German rearmament may be the most significant geopolitical consequence of Russia’s unprovoked aggression.

Russia invaded Ukraine, and it appears to have transformed German security policy overnight.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that Germany would increase its defense budget until it exceeded the 2% NATO benchmark, an increase of more than 30%.  The announcement was greeted positively by the German public, which seems suddenly to have awoken to the threat of a hostile and resurgent Russia.

And thus far, fears of German rearmament in Europe appear invisible. Scholz has backed up the decision to rearm by taking steps to reduce German dependence on Russian natural gas and will allow the transfer of lethal arms to Ukraine.

At first sight, it seems odd for a man of the Left such as Scholz to be undertaking a 'militarist' course of action and one that could potentially shake modern Germany (which is supposedly pacifist) to its core. But a precedent does exist: we only need to consider German military history at time of the Weimar Republic; then - and this may be a surprise to many - the Germans went to war several times (at least three times against the Poles) even though the Republic was led by social democrats and liberal conservatives.  

So history could be repeating itself. But the announcement of Germany's remilitarisation seems to have passed largely unnoticed by those on the dissident Right, even by those who proclaim themselves to be 'National Socialist'. Unfortunately, many on the Right (including myself at times) have fallen into the habit of discounting modern Germany; indeed, they often give the impression that they believe German history came an end in 1945. To them, the Bonn Republic (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) never existed. One consequence of this shortsightedness is that important political developments in Germany, Europe, the West, are neglected. Contrary to the point of view that says that nothing in recent German history is worthy of note, I believe that the implications the current war in Ukraine does hold for Germany are indeed important, and I shall be exploring these here. 

II.

One of the themes of the present crisis is: political change only occurs through changes of the facts on the ground. War constitutes one of those facts, and the disruptions we are seeing in the present global order would not have occurred without the Russo-Ukrainian war: as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, 'War is the father of all things'. 

The corollary of the above is that political discussions, polemics, propaganda do not count for much. At least for the past eight years we have been subjected to what I call the 'Putin line', a line which has been disseminated far and wide through Western intellectual circles and media outlets. Arguments against the line so far have showed themselves to be useless; experience demonstrates that one cannot prove the line to be false through argument, discussion, intellectualising. The repeated failure of such attempts gives rise to the disturbing possibility that the Putin line can only be proven false through through great events - such as a war. That is, if Russia loses the current war, support for the Putin line in the West will erode. And the tragedy is that it took a war, and enormous suffering, to bring about that result. 

So what is the Putin line? How does one detect it? Through a series of key words and phrases which appear ad nauseam throughout the 'alternative media' (and by extension the normal media - the lines between 'alt' and 'normal' media have become increasingly blurred). A certain script has been generated, almost as if by a bot, and it replicates itself, reproduces, spreads. Here is a sample. 'Victoria Nuland, 2014 Maidan coup, CIA coup, Neo-Nazis in Kiev, Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Russia's geopolitical interests, Ukraine is not a real country, Crimea has always been Russian, the Donbas is filled with Russian speakers and so belongs to Russia, the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics are rebels who are seeking freedom from Kiev's oppressive rule, the Ukrainians are genociding the Russians of the Donbas, NATO has been provoking Russia, Russia is being encircled by NATO, Russia is fearful of Western depredations because of its past experiences with the Nazis in WWII, attacking Russia is suicide (ask Napoleon and Hitler), Russia needs a buffer against NATO expansionism, neocon warmongers are leading us to the abyss of WWIII, securing Russia's flank against NATO makes geopolitical sense, Putin makes good points...'

One discovers a rich lode of the Putin line at Unz.Org; there the purveyors are, among others, Philip Giraldi, John Mearsheimer, Andrew Anglin, Pat Buchanan, Pepe Escobar, Anatoly Karlin, Paul Craig Roberts, The Saker, Eric Margolis, the late Stephen F. Cohen, Eric Striker... But one even encounters proponents of the line at some of the sites which are more hard-edged than Unz.Org - that is, the radical white nationalist, racialist and anti-Semitic sites. Kevin McDonald has recently published a piece at the Occidental Observer with the title (surely generated by an artificial intelligence algorithm?) 'Neocons, Ukraine, Russia, and the Western Struggle for Hegemony'. 

The first thing one observes in this rhetoric is that it is not racialist, nationalist, white nationalist, even populist; no, it is centered around a deracinated geopolitics. Perhaps because of its odd rootlessness, it wanders around and makes itself felt everywhere. You can find it in - to take two examples completely at random -  the writings of Larry Johnson, a journalist for the conservative pro-Trump site The Gateway Pundit, and David Stockton, an economist for the Reagan administration. Doubtless the reader can think of his own examples. 

To repeat, one cannot argue against the line on any of its points - against the theses (for example) of 'NATO expansionism', 'the Vicki Nuland / CIA / Mossad / Neo-Nazi EuroMaidan coup'; argumentation holds no sway. In that connection, a number of commentators have noted that the Russian people themselves, when the subject of the war in Ukraine is brought up, remain remarkably obtuse when presented with facts that contradict the Putin line. One cannot consider a discussion with them to be a discussion, for that term implies a willingness to change one's mind, and the minds of the Putin line's proponents cannot change. Arguing with them is akin to arguing with a computer. 

III.

The intellectual is naturally biased towards argumentation, rationality, ideas. He therefore fails to understand - in instances such as the present war - why it is that the belligerents do what they do. The simple explanation for this complex behaviour is this truism: that nations and peoples over the course of a time show a propensity towards certain actions; that they travel in a certain groove. 

Once an intellectual realises this, answers to some troubling political questions present themselves at once. Something that has puzzled me over the course of the past eight years is the number of Americans - some of them quite intellectually distinguished (see Kevin McDonald and John Mearsheimer) - who tout the Putin line. It seems that the deepest attraction to the Putin line is to be found among Americans. At first this strikes us as paradoxical: the most blistering invective of the Putin line's proponents is showered upon Americans and to a lesser extent other Anglo-Saxons. But the fact is that America and Russia have shared a long friendship. Twice in the last century they have allied themselves against the Germany and Germany's allies so as to ensure Germany's defeat. Yockey writes in Imperium (1948): 

During the Second World War, for instance, freedom and democracy were used as terms to describe all members of the coalition against Europe, with an entire disregard of semantics... In the American press, for example, both during the 1914 war and the 1939 war, Russia was always described as a "democracy". The House of Romanov and the Bolshevik regime were equally democratic. This was necessary to preserve the homogeneous picture of these wars which this press had painted for its readers: the war was one of democracy against dictatorship; Europe was dictatorship, ergo, anything fighting Europe was democracy.

Yockey lists America and Russia, along with Japan, as the three major enemies of Europe at the turn of the 20th century. It is significant that the American enmity towards Europe and the alliance with Russia are over a hundred years old; this shows that the Americans have been at it for a long time. And, added to that, so have the Russians. 

Much of what held true then (a century ago) holds true today for Ukraine as well as Russia. What we are seeing today in Ukraine is nothing new. Ukraine has been treated in an imperialist fashion by Russia for centuries. In order to understand the Russian political and military strategy of the present, we need to look to that of the past. 

A hundred years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine because of disagreements with the ideology of the Kiev government: 

The Bolsheviks invaded Ukraine from Kursk in late December 1918 where the new Ukrainian Soviet government was reestablished earlier in November of the same year. On 16 January 1919 Ukraine officially declared a war on Russia while the Russian Soviet government continued to deny all claims of invasion [emphasis mine; Russia today is denying that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine is an invasion]... On 5 February, the Bolsheviks captured Kyiv.

(Incidentally, the Russians had in 1917 invaded Ukraine from Belarus - just as they had in 2022). 

An examination of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict of a hundred years ago brings to light the first use by the Russians of what became a time-honoured maneuver: the Russian setting up of a 'Independent People's Republic' on enemy territory and the Russian denial of all connection between that 'Republic' and Moscow. 

All this [the Russian political tumult of 1917] led to the October Revolution in Petrograd, which quickly spread all over the empire. The [Ukrainian nationalist] Kiev Uprising in November 1917 led to the defeat of Russian Republic forces in the capital. Soon after, the Central Rada [Ukrainian nationalist council] took power in Kiev, while in late December 1917 the Bolsheviks set up a rival Ukrainian republic in the eastern city of Kharkov  – initially also called the "Ukrainian People's Republic". Hostilities against the Central Rada government in Kiev began immediately. Under these circumstances, the Rada declared Ukrainian independence on January 22, 1918 and broke ties with Russia. 

Thirty years later, Finland saw an iteration of one of the 'People's Republics': the Terijoki Government or Finnish Democratic Republic, which was founded by the Russians before the outbreak of the Russo-Finnish War (also known as the Winter War) in 1939; and a hundred years later, Ukraine saw another: the Donetsk and Luhansk 'People's Republics', founded after the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014. And now, in southern Ukraine in 2022, it appears that the Russians are planning to set up another 'Independent People's Republic' - in the captured region of Kherson. 

IV.

To judge by history, the Russians do not make good neighbours; ask not only the Ukrainians, but the Finns, Poles, Georgians, Balts. But Germany has found it difficult to face this truth. The reluctance of Germany to acknowledge the affects Russia has upon its neighbours can be traced back to Germany's history. For over a hundred years, the Germans have felt a powerful attraction towards Bolshevism. The eastern half of Germany lived under communism for forty years, and the former DDR (German Democratic Republic) was sustained not only by force and fear but also the warm acquiescence of a significant proportion of eastern Germany's elite. In the post-communist era, Germany - along with France, another nation strongly attracted to Russia - numbered among one of Putin's enablers. And after the outbreak in 2014 of war with Ukraine, the Putin line worked its magic among the uppermost echelons of German state and society. Schönbach, the head of the German navy, was filmed spouting the Putin line at a conference in January this year and was forced to quit afterwards. (Ironically enough, Schönbach declared that the idea Russia wanted to invade Ukraine was 'Nonsense'). 

But one cannot lay all the blame at the door of Putin. Obviously, 'guilt for Germany's Nazi past' forms the biggest obstacle towards the German recognition of what Russia is. The social democrats and liberal conservatives who run Germany today do not want to be associated with anything 'Nazi'; this is to say, they do not want to be seen as belonging to the Germany of old, which fought two wars against Russia, one of which Germany won, the other Germany lost; for they believe that the Germans of those times were quite literally mad; they see the German militarists as being in the grip of fevered hallucinations. The German General Staff of 1914 and 1941 viewed Russia as the enemy; it ascribed negative qualities to the Russian character; it considered the possibility of Germans having to live under Russian rule, or even continuing to have Russia as a neighbour, most unpleasant. But it was wrong to think so; in fact, it had deluded itself - at least, that is what the German communist propaganda of the past hundred years has attempted to convince us. The leftist Germans of the Bundesrepublik here agree with the communists for the most part, but only because with the passage of time, the history of the German Left has been largely forgotten. It should be remembered that the German Social Democrats voted in 1914 for war credits to fund Germany's war against Russia and France, thereby placing themselves in what today would be called the 'Russophobe' camp. After the vote, Lenin denounced the Social Democrats for this 'betrayal of the working class' and accused them of splitting the Left. (But it was not so cut and dried: the Social Democrats have always talked out of both sides of their mouths: after Germany's defeat in WWI, they insisted that they had never, never supported 'Prussian militarism'). 

History shows us that powers such as Germany are bound by certain realities. Germany at the start of its two wars with Russia lived next door, or at least within marching distance, to Russia; it did not exist in isolation, in a vacuum. The reality of Germany's geopolitical situation helped determine Germany's peculiar national character: had the country been relocated somewhere else - to the moon, perhaps, or the planet Mars - it would not have been 'militarist'. Thus, the German General Staff, the 'Prussian militarists', were only responding to certain realities. In both WWI and WWII, the German behaviour can only be understood properly in relation to the Russian. 

What if the above 'certain realities' held true for Germany in 2022 as they did in 1914 and 1941? The Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Finns, the Balts take a negative view of their Russian neighbour; what would happen if the Germans were to do the same? 

One step may be (to follow Carl Schmitt) naming Russia as the enemy, and after that, remilitarisation and rearmament. From this it follows, almost inevitably, that any ideology of the past is to be swept aside as a change in ideas leads to a change in actions. Scholz, in his speech announcing what is in effect Germany's rearmament, made the usual praises of 'democracy' and implied that Russia was not 'democratic' (how so?). But we can dismiss this talk of 'democracy' as mere talk. The changes being made under the surface count more than the ideology being planted on the top. To put it another way, institutional structures determine, or at least, constrain, thought; a German who founds a monastery or convent would be forced, by circumstances, to think like a German Catholic monk or a nun; a German who founds an army, to think like a 'Prussian militarist'. And this is despite any reservations that the German may have felt beforehand towards Catholicism or militarism; he may even have been, prior to his career as a monk or a general, an atheist or a pacifist. 

V.

Russians such as Dugin enjoy talking of geopolitics; let us, then, in order to indulge them, talk geopolitics. Before WWII, Germany, Italy, France, England, could be considered to be great powers, or at least sovereign nations; after WWII, each of them was reduced to a position of inferiority in relation to the two colossi America and Russia. As a consequence, it follows that if the European powers were to put up a successful defence against the Russian and American, they could only do so if they all stood together. A European unity, then, would need to be forged. 

I am saying nothing new here, as the thesis of a necessity of European unity has become a cliché of post-war political thought - see the work of Yockey, Bardèche, Thiriart. It even appears earlier in the genuflections of two conquerors of Continent, Napoleon and Hitler. Both men, after they both had attained to the heights of success, could afford the luxury of pondering an age-old problem: how to unify Europe's fractured and squabbling nations. 

It should not be forgotten of Napoleon and Hitler that their military triumphs underlay their lofty aspirations towards a pan-European unity; if France and Germany had not achieved victory on the battlefield, well, their leaders would have been in no position to spare a thought for the noble (and perhaps unworldly) idea of Pan-Europeanism. Military weakness translates into political weakness, so much so that the two can barely be separated. The grand cause of Pan-Europa around 1800 rode on the back of the French army, and around 1900, on the back of the German. In the respective epochs it was France and  Germany that did the heavy lifting. 

This forces us to confront a truth which some of us may not be comfortable with, and that is this: in any Pan-European State (present or future), all nations are not equal. Sweden does not count as much as Germany, Portugal not as much as France. Germany occupies a higher place in the hierarchy than Greece or Ireland. The conclusion to be drawn, then, is that some care and consideration should be accorded to Germany, given the fact that in any Pan-European State, Germany most likely will be contributing the bulk of the military and economic resources. 

But after its defeat in two world wars, Germany was weakened politically and militarily. Considering the  post-war amputations of Germany's territories alone, one can say that after WWI, one arm and one leg were torn off, and after WWII, the other arm and the other leg. (And this is putting to one side, for the moment, the questions of the Allied 'denazification' of the Germans after WWII, the war guilt inculcation for both world wars, the forced imposition of Holocaust propaganda...). Assuming that Germany does occupy a position of extreme importance in the European project, how, then, with a weak Germany, is the motor of Pan-Europa expected to run? 

We must look to the past and ask ourselves what it is that made the Germany of 1922 so different to the Germany of 2022; the former was more 'based' (to use 4Chan parlance) compared to the latter - many aspects of it are far more desirable (and this is despite the fact that the Germany of 1922 was plagued with a multitude of woes, one of them being the notorious hyperinflation). Look at the many great thinkers that Weimar produced; Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler and other 'Conservative Revolutionaries' are still admired and discussed on the Far Right a hundred years later. 

It is fitting that the themes of conflict, war and death appear so frequently in the thinking of the Conservative Revolutionaries: at least three of them, Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jünger, served along with millions of other Germans in WWI. Moreover, the 400-year-old institution of the German army still existed (albeit in attenuated form) in the Weimar years. One cannot say that the Reichswehr was as 'pozzed' (again to borrow from 4Chan parlance) as the Bundeswehr: the Reichwehr, like the old Imperial Army, was led by patiots and 'German militarists', men such as von Seeckt, the archetypal Prussian general. (Spengler for a brief time worked as a political activist on behalf of von Seeckt; he wanted the general to become leader of Germany). So before, during and after WWI we find a continuity. That tradition - so despised by the Anglo world - persisted into WWII. As the British author Keith Simpson writes of Germany in WWI, 'The general staff, and in turn the German government, adopted an increasingly unrealistic policy of territorial annexation, and the occupation policy and behaviour of the army in Belgium, northern France, Poland and Russia was to give it a reputation for brutality which foreshadowed that of the Führerheer [Führer army] in the Second World War'. (History of the German Army, 1985). 

On that note, Russia's invasion of Ukraine does present a few problems for German nationalists and self-proclaimed 'National Socialists'. We now hear moral condemnations of the Russians, statements of principles which ought to have been binding but have been violated in the Russian war against Ukraine: 'Bigger countries should not invade smaller countries'; 'Occupying powers should not behave in a high-handed manner'. But Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, repeatedly violated these precepts in WWII and the years immediately leading up that war. If a big nation did not act contrary to these precepts,  the pages of history, to borrow from Hegel, would not have been written. (In that connection, one ought to read the chapters in Imperium concerning America and how America won its colonial empire). 

So, assuming that this realpolitik or machtpolitik perspective is right, the problem for the apologists of Russia, Germany, Japan becomes one of justification of these countries' conduct; this can become quite sophisticated and can extend into the fields of law, philosophy...

So one must resist the temptation, when writing on the present conflict, to borrow (consciously or unconsciously) the Anglo rhetoric of 1914 and compare Ukraine to 'brave little Belgium' or 'brave little Serbia'. This does bear on the problem we are considering, which is how Germany was in 1922. Then Germany in that year was not ashamed of itself, its strength, its upholding of valour, discipline, self-sacrifice, obedience, etc. as virtues. Five years of a relentless Anglo propaganda barrage, the opening salvo of which was a denunciation of the invasion of Belgium as the worst crime in the history of the world and one that should damn Germany for all time, had not budged the Germans one inch. 

But in addition, much of modern Germany's aversion to the martial comes about from the fact that in the past 75 years, Germany has never had the opportunity - or the inclination - to stand up on its own, show its strength, fight. In short, Germany has lacked a real army. That army, and its ethos of 'Prussian militarism', underlay Weimar Germany - and the thought of the Conservative Revolutionaries. 'Prussian militarism' lay so deep in the foundations of German life that the Conservative Revolutionaries were unable to see it beneath their feet. All that is needed for a recovery of it in the 21st century is the rebuilding of the army. 

Perhaps, too, another war is needed. In keeping with the past, that war would either be against France and England (now a distant possibility) or Russia (now a close possibility). 

VI.

One beneficial outcome of the present war is that we are no longer paying attention to the Covidians. The Covidians had been waging their own war, a war against all of humanity, since 2020, but by the start of 2022, their offensive - which had been extraordinarily successful - was running out of steam, as all offensives do eventually; and the Russo-Ukraine war drove the final nail into the coffin. Human nature, long repressed, had reasserted itself. For two years, we had been forced to make 'safety' the supreme value; we had been locked in our homes, been made to take injections, etc., etc., all in the name of 'staying safe'. As a counter-reaction to this, now a sort of war fever has broken out. One of the phenomena that always accompanies such a fever is the sight of men who are rushing to the front, volunteering to fight, deliberately placing themselves in danger - all of which is the very reverse of the Covidian ethos. (Ironically, both Ukraine and Russia were in thrall to the Covidians before the war and had adopted a harsh Covidian regime (not dissimilar to the one that pervades in Australia and New Zealand), one which I imagine has been now largely swept away). Covidianism has been sidetracked, and much of that is due to the problem of scarce resource allocation, or economics, that surfaces at a time of war. The satisfaction of the wants of the Covidians clashes with those of the warriors. A soldier cannot be expected to wear a muzzle-mask and follow the injunction to 'stay safe' while coming under enemy fire; an army recruiter who is desperately short of manpower cannot be expected to bar the 'unvaxxed' from enlisting. In 2022, a nation can either allocate scarce resources to war or Covidianism; there is no middle ground.

So the war has already produced one beneficial outcome; and it may produce more. Let us look at the effects of a war upon Germany; suppose Germany was mobilised for what Ludendorff (the WWI German general) called 'total war'? The investment of scarce resources into war - and total war demands the investment of all of those resources - means that certain parasitic, anti-national elements in German life would be starved. It is almost as if there are two competing spheres, the 'militarist' and the 'anti-national', and if the former expands at the expense of the latter, then the latter is pushed out and made smaller. This principle - which only applies, perhaps, to the Germans - explains why it is that they were so 'unpozzed' before 1945. A military tradition had existed for hundreds of years, a distinctly Prussian one, which formed the backbone of the nation, and it had consistently - and effortlessly - repelled the 'anti-national' elements and forced them to the margins of national life. 

Does that tradition exist today? Survivals did exist in the army of the Bonn Republic, as we have seen, and the army of the DDR. The East German army, the National People's Army (NVA), notoriously drew upon Wehrmacht dress and drill. One can see this in evidence in the many YouTube clips of the NVA marches; a snide person in the comments of one of these remarked that East Germany was so poor, it could not afford new uniforms and so had to use 'Nazi' ones (which was a low blow, but perhaps true). What is interesting is that the Russians, and the East German communists, allowed this. The survivals of the old, prewar German army in both East and West Germany indicate that either the Americans and the Russians could not extirpate the German military tradition completely or at least felt that a complete extirpation was not desirable.

VII.

I agree with the Russian white nationalist Wolf Stoner that the war represents a turning history in the West; and furthermore, it exposes certain underlying realities of human existence. As such, Stoner believes that a return to 'normiedom' is impossible - at least for now. The prospect of more war, and not less, looms on the horizon: Russia is slating Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Kazakhstan (!) for 'de-Nazification' ('Besides Ukraine, Russia Must "De-Nazify" Six More Countries, Moscow Deputy Says'). Russia lacks the military capacity to make good on these threats, of course, but that hardly matters - what does is that the threats are being made and the world is taking them seriously.

What has concerned me here are not the consequences for Russia, or even Ukraine, but Europe. One of the consequences is that Germany has moved by a small increment to where it was a hundred years ago. This movement, small as it is, has proven too much for some, as this post by a German at 4Chan shows: 

Supposing that Germany reintroduced conscription (which was abolished there in 2011), built up an army of up to a million strong, and threw into battle in 'the East'; the experience of war would permanently alter the lives of German men - and their ideology. The Freikorps sprang up after WWI because hundreds of thousands of German men were unable to return to civilian life. 

Two ironies have emerged. Putin intended to prevent 'NATO expansionism' by force, but has only ended up NATO-ifying Ukraine; Putin intended to combat 'Nazism', but has only pushed Germany closer to 'Nazism' - the real 'Nazism', that is, not some hallucinatory construct - than at any time in the past seventy-five years. 

A Farewell to Normiedom? On the 1990s, the End of History, American White Nationalism and German Neo-Nazism

 I. 

Before Christmas, I commiserated with some of my friends in the movement and swapped stories about life under the lockdowns and mandates. I raised eyebrows when I declared that the past two years were perhaps the worst in Australian history. My argument was that one could point to, say, the Great Depression as being on the face of it a worse time, but even the Great Depression did not deprive one of freedom - the freedom to enjoy small pleasures and be a normal human being. Back then, if one could afford it, one could smoke and drink in a bar without a capacity limit, for instance - a bar in which one did not have to 'check in' with a QR code, present a 'digital passport' to the publican, or wear a surgical mask... When I put it this way, my friends agreed.

Given that we on the Far Right are living in a time of great crisis, we should be expected to scent an opportunity in it; surely we should be excited over our prospects? One cause for optimism is that many of those attending the Freedom marches are 'normies' who had been 'red-pilled' by recent events. But the evidence suggests to me that the answer to the above question is no: for at present the Far Right seems demoralised and despondent. 

And as to why, I think the answer lies in the fact that politics often disappoints - Far Right politics especially - but up until now the Far Right activist could always escape any discouragement and disappointment and seek passage from the 'red-pilled' world to the 'blue-pilled', from the world of radical Right politics to the world of 'normiedom'. But after 2020 that avenue has been closed off; the gateway to 'normiedom' has been shut, perhaps permanently. And perhaps, once the Covidians are through with them, the 'normies' will have been done way with altogether. 

II.

Usually around this time of year, I re-read Yockey's Imperium (1948), and I re-read this work, a profoundly spiritual one, so as to renew my faith. But this year I feel a reluctance to read it: I feel that it belongs to a past age - the age of dramatic politics - and that the difference between the past age and the present has become too large to ignore.

Imperium was written in 1947, and the 1940s, perhaps Europe's most tragic decade in a millenia, saw a great deal of drama. Some politicians (such as Stalin) seem to thrive in such a dramatic environment: they have an endless appetite for crises, confrontations, wars; for their politics is the politics of what Carl Schmitt calls the exception. 

After Stalin's death, the leadership of the Soviet Union and the communist world was handed to Khrushchev, a much duller man than Stalin - certainly a less confrontational one - and by the middle of the 1950s the countries of the Eastern and Western bloc had settled down to the task of peaceful economic development. They sought to rebuild their countries, many of which had been laid waste to by deprivation and war. But Mao rejected any politics of compromise and conciliation and he stood as an odd man out: privately the other communist heads of state were appalled by his extremism and immoderation. For in that period, non-dramatic politics held sway and Western leaders followed the same path as Khrushchev. The result of it was that, when one looks back on history the East and West in the 1950s, one spies at once on its surface a patina of dullness - even if one takes all the Cold War hysteria, nuclear-saber rattling, wars in the former Western colonies, etc., into account. Daniel Bell drew a similar conclusion in his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960): the sharp opposition between Left and Right had been muted; the politics of confrontation had been replaced by the politics of technocracy. 

It took time, but even Yockey came to acknowledge the truth of Bell's thesis. He had spent most of the decade building a post-war fascist international with links to the non-aligned regimes of the Third World - an international like that depicted in Frederick Forsyth's  far-fetched novel The Odessa File (1972). WWII veterans filled the ranks of these European organisations which perhaps in truth were nothing more than old soldiers' clubs. The members belonged to another time and one can intuit a recognition of this fact - at least at the subconscious level - in Yockey's writings as the decade drew to a close. His last essay, 'The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation' (1960), does not exhibit as nearly as much a sense of self-assurance and grandeur as Imperium; Yockey here hovers at the edge of great world events; he is an onlooker, not a participant. In its undertone of ironic detachment I find an anticipation of postmodernism. And indeed, a connection exists between the sleepy 1950s and the postmodern 1990s - both of them decidedly dull decades from a political standpoint - and this explains in part why it was that the postmodernists alternatively paid homage and made fun of the 1950s.  

Yockey felt out of place in the 1950s and hated it. Nowadays we in the movement view the 1950s in a different light. Many white nationalists, race realists, immigration skeptics, et al., do not understand Yockey's objection to the America of the 1950s, for example: they see the America of that time as a white man's paradise and that decade as a golden age. To the white nationalist, statistics bear both these contentions out. William Pierce often remarked in his radio talks that America in 1950 was 90% white - something to be proud of. The Americans in this time kept both immigrants and negroes under wraps, and while it is true that desegregation began in earnest in the 1950s, many of the great cities in the north of America were majority white and remained so for the next two decades. 

Another reason for the divergence between the views of Yockey and the white nationalists is that the white nationalists show a pronounced tendency to laud the past at the expense of the present. In a review of the film House of Gucci (2021), Trevor Lynch writes that the film is a 'Meticulous, nostalgia-infused reconstruction of another era, this time the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, a time that seems impossibly glamorous, wholesome, and white compared with the present'. It is at this point that Pierce would take exception to Lynch; Pierce depicts America in the era of the 'Late 1970s to the mid-1990s' as a dystopian hellscape (he published the Turner Diaries, the ultimate dystopian novel, in 1978) but was forever waxing lyrical over the greatness and whiteness of America in the 1950s: a decade can be one white nationalist's hell and another's heaven. 

I agree with Lynch and disagree with Pierce. In part, this is because at the time of writing I would prefer to live in any decade except for the 2020s - I would even be prepared to travel back in time and live in the 1940s: one, I imagine, could live a good life then, provided one was able to dodge all the bombs and bullets. But the main source of my disagreement with Pierce is because I have for the past few months been watching episodes of a famous American daytime TV soap from the time of the late 1990s, and this delving into the recent past - even if it is a mythical and fantastical past - has prompted me to ask myself what possibly could have been wrong with the 1990s. An objective view of the decade would reveal in that decade we had it all. 

III. 

Unlike the 2020s, the 1990s were characterised by an absence of politics. Electoral politics was relegated to the background: the three presidential elections in that time (1993, 1996, 2000 (the 1990s as a decade came to an end, in my judgment, on September 11, 2001)) were dull affairs, and more or less, you could take or leave mainstream politics - it did not interfere with your life in any appreciable manner. 

This state of affairs came about because of the collapse of the Left in the years 1989 to 1991. For hundreds of years, the Right had functioned as a response, a reaction, to the Left; but with the disappearance of the Left came the disappearance of the Right. And that in turn led to the cessation of the political. 

After the end of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, the Left was decimated. The old school communist parties (including the Australian) were wound up for the most part. As for the other sectors of the Left - the anarchists and antifa - they lived at the fringes of society: there was no mainstream acceptance or even awareness of them. And as for Black Lives Matter, social justice warriors (SJWs), 'woke' capital - they did not exist. So: thirty years ago we lived in a world which was blessedly free (mostly) of leftism. 

But a serpent did dwell in this garden of Eden: academic neo-Marxism (known by many as 'cultural Marxism'). Critical Race Theory (CRT), Postcolonial Theory, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Gender Studies began to rear their  heads. Generally, though, this new tendency - labeled 'political correctness' by hostile conservative commentators - was confined to academia. And on occasion it was mocked and not feted (as it is now) by the media. 

By and large, the Left had been forgotten and what really stung the Left was the speed with which it had been forgotten. Only a few months after the dissolution of the USSR, race war was to take precedence over class war.  Ethnic wars broke out in the former Soviet republics and Yugoslavia - wars which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives - and intellectuals such as Bell pronounced these to be portents of the wars to come: wars henceforth were to be motivated not by ideology but ethnicity. This seemed to be an accurate assessment given that the move away from Marxism was permanent and irrevocable. Botched privatisations, IMF 'shock treatment', etc., may have plunged the economies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR into chaos, but there was never any question of a return to communism. 

It is this rather peculiar set of circumstances which explains much of the apoliticism of the period. On a personal note, at the time I took politics - mainstream politics - seriously. I read a number of books written by authors of the mainstream Left and Right (so as to be 'even-handed' and 'objective') and following the lead of my baby boomer parents, I read the newspapers, listened to the radio news and watched the TV news every day so as to keep up with current events. But at the same time, I had no fixed political convictions. I clung to a rather confused and incoherent collection of Left and Right ideas. Had I been pressed, I would have admitted that I was more interested in hobbies and popular culture than politics. In this, I was a typical 'normie'. I have since discovered how typical I was from reading Carl Boggs' classic work The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (2000): 

Why do so many Americans feel that politics has become irrelevant to their daily lives? Why is there so little public discussion of important social issues, despite unprecedented access to mass media and new communication technologies? This book delves beneath the sound bites and news headlines to explore the ongoing process of depoliticization in the United States. Attuned to the many contemporary trends eroding the public sphere, Carl Boggs illuminates the American retreat to an eerily privatized landscape of shopping malls, gated communities, new-age fads, rural militias, isolated computer terminals, and postmodern intellectual discourse. Yet Boggs maintains hope that current trends can be reversed, issuing an eloquent call for revitalizing politics, culture, and civic society. The paperback concludes with a new postscript on the movement against corporate globalization and the tumultuous presidential election of 2000.

IV.

In the nineties, the Far Right prospered and the Far Left did not, and in response to the burgeoning popularity of the Far Right, Boggs wrote a chapter on the proliferating Far Right movements of the decade. He regarded these as 'apolitical' - apolitical in the sense of being detached from civic society (and by that definition he was correct). 

What was my view of these 'apolitical' Far Right movements? For most of the nineties I was blissfully unaware of William Pierce's National Alliance, Richard Butler's Aryan Nations, Jared Taylor's American Renaissance, Tom Metzger's WAR. I was not exposed to their ideas; I was perfectly 'blue-pilled'. Perhaps for that reason I could enjoy with a clean conscience American TV shows such as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Melrose Place (and lesser-known action TV shows such as Renegade, Pointman, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Fortune Hunter) like the rest of the sheep. 

I can imagine a white nationalist objecting to my consumption of this fare. The white nationalists would ask me in an accusatory tone: was I not aware that these TV shows were decadent garbage - and Jewish? Did I not know that David Duchovny, the star of the X-Files, was a Jew, that Mark Frankel, the star of Fortune Hunter, was a Jew? That the cast of Seinfeld were all Jews? (This is the standard white nationalist debating tactic; to pronounce something to be Jewish is to refute it, whether it is Jewish or no). 

Had I encountered these scolding white nationalists in the time of my innocence, I would have recognised them at once for what they were: killjoys. Pierce made America in the 1990s out to be unlivable when it was not. Pierce could always be counted on to bring the dark side of American life to your attention; he would always be regaling you with gruesome accounts of black on white atrocities such as the Wichita Massacre and the Knoxville Horror. But no rational American could be expected to live their lives in constant fear of being robbed, raped or murdered. But that was the outcome that Pierce and Taylor (author of The Color of Crime (1999)) apparently wanted. 

This is not to say that Pierce and Taylor did not provide value: of course they did. The question concerns what economists call opportunity costs: what would have benefited the average 'normie' c. 1995 - 'blue-pilling' or 'red-pilling'? The benefit of one cancels out of the other: this is the opportunity cost. 

The price paid for 'red-pilling' is that the 1990s-era state of mind - which was one of contentment and complacency - would have been spoiled for good. Pierce, a proponent of dramatic politics to be sure, opposed this 1990s mood, and surprisingly enough, he would have half-agreed with Fukuyama, who argued in an essay (and then a book) that while it is true that the the summit of human achievement had been reached by the 1990s, the peak had been attained only at the expense of foregoing of all heroism, risk and adventure. 'The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands'. [Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?', The National Interest, Summer 1989]. To this, Fukuyama expressed reservations and Pierce, full-blown opposition. For what mattered to Pierce more than anything else was the 'Fame of a dead man's deeds' - the remembrance through the ages of a life heroically lived. 

V.

Fukuyama built his argument on Hegel - and Marx, a fact which outraged the Left. History, Fukuyama says, results from Man's 'thinking things through': Man only explores the full implications of an idea - such as Bolshevism - by living through an idea. After 75 years of living the Bolshevist idea, Man had come to the conclusion that the idea did not work: hence the end of socialism in Eastern Europe, China and the Soviet Union. In this Hegelian discourse, the operative word is 'end': Fukuyama takes up the Hegelian thesis that history is a story with a beginning, middle and end, and as such it cannot be properly understood until the end is reached. Hegel writes, 'The owl of Minerva [the goddess of wisdom] spreads its wings only with the coming of dusk'. 

One should not overestimate the influence of intellectuals: they do not determine all that goes on in the culture of a particular period of time (e.g., the 1990s). All the same, credit must go to where credit is due to Fukuyama and the French postmodernist thinkers. In the decade of the 1990s they alone succeeded in capturing the essence of the age. It should be not forgotten that thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard - all outcasts from the French Left - opposed Marxism for most of their careers and so naturally enough their ideas suited the post-Marxist era. 

Thirty years later, one intriguing possibility is that the ideas of Hegel and Fukuyama could serve as a means of illuminating one way out of our predicament. Covidianism has been forced upon humanity, much like Bolshevism, and is the product of a plan years in the making, much like Bolshevism; so Covidianism could be overturned, once Man has 'thought it through', that is, lived through the implications right to the end, much like Bolshevism. 

VI. 

The coming year will see a battle - perhaps the final battle - between what I call Covidian Man and what Fukuyama calls (after Nietzsche) the Last Man. I believe that the Last Man would win any such battle as he is in accord with nature whereas Covidian Man is not - Covidian Man is decidedly unnatural. 

Like any Far Right political activist, I have often come to lose my patience with the Last Man, the 'normie': his slothfulness and contentedness at times have made me despair of him so much so that I at have often considered dropping out of politics altogether. In one such dark period I was rescued from the slough of despond by re-reading Spengler and Yockey. I came to the realisation that the 'normie' had existed in every Culture prior to the Western. The 'normie' was with us in the days of ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, India; he is with us today; and he will be with us in the future. After our Western Culture perishes - like all the Cultures that preceded it - he will preponderate. The ruin of Western Culture will be inhabited by Nietzsche's Last Man, Spengler's Fellahin.

(It is this prediction of Spengler's that warranted, in the eyes of many, charges of pessimism). 

At the beginning of this essay, I intimated that that the Far Right activist occupies two worlds - the world of the 'red-pilled' and the world of the 'normie'. The cause of the activist's recent despondency is that our activist much likes the world of the 'normie' and he is sorry to see it go - he mourns its demise at the hands of Covidianism. On a personal note, my friends and I have many fond recollections of many happy hours spent in the bars and restaurants in the bohemian and 'normie' quarter of the city I live in; we spent those hours discussing politics and ideas while enjoying food and wine in a carefree and convivial atmosphere - like normal humans. All of these pleasures have been taken away by the Covidians. Are they gone for good? The Covidians say yes. According to them, the masks, hand dispensers, capacity limits, digital passports, QR codes, social distancing, working remotely, coerced injections, contact tracing, nasal swab tests, lockdowns, prison camps, etc., will stay in place forever and ever; certainly we cannot foresee any abeyance in the new year. No wonder then that so many in the movement have been driven to despair; the ground - the 'normie' ground - has disappeared beneath us. 

VII.

Something that is missing from today which was present yesterday is trust - trust in politicians, journalists, health officials, intellectuals, our peer group in other words. Only a few years ago we believed that the globalist elites - the Davos men - did not want to kill us or make us sick; we believed there was a lack of animus on their part towards us or at the least a lack of interest; and we believed that they were content to leave us alone. 

That trust can only exist if you believe that the universe is benevolent and means well by you. We find that optimism in evidence in many of the movies representative of the 1990s - one in particular being the  negro comedy Friday (1995). The movie is set in the suburb of South Central Los Angeles, but surprisingly enough, the suburb is not portrayed as a hellhole rife with gang shootings, etc.: the producers originally wanted a violent film but were persuaded by one of the stars, Ice Cube, to downplay any violence - a violent (and exciting) film, Ice Cube argued, would not have been true to life. In the completed movie, South Central LA comes across as a sunny, prosperous, happy place,and perhaps a little dull - certainly a place in which the Last Man lives. 

Spengler writes of the Cosmopolis - the World City - the city which appears with the onset of the old age of a Culture and which devours and incorporates all the suburbs, towns and countryside around it, making it all urban. The World City spawns copies of itself everywhere. This is why the suburb of South Central LA - in the 1990s, at least - resembles the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne; and in much the same way, the fictional Mid-Western town portrayed in the daytime TV soap I mentioned earlier resembles any town in rural and regional Australia. The World City is omnipresent. 

One can criticise the Cosmopolis for its ubiquity, its homogeneity and its universality, but one must concede that in it, one could lead a life of freedom, one could enjoy the fruits of a consumer society and one could enjoy these - following the collapse of Marxism - without guilt. How life has changed today! By 2022, the World City had been turned into a giant prison. 

Perhaps - and this is a pessimistic line of thought - the free life of the World City contained the seeds of its own destruction. The cults and secret societies run by egalitarians, republicans, technocrats, intellectuals, free-thinkers, et al., only appear towards the end of a Culture's life and not its beginning. Furthermore, they only appear in the cities. Perhaps, then, it is the World City which bears the burden of guilt for giving us Klaus Schwab, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, George Soros... 

VIII.

Even so, who is it that shoulders the ultimate responsibility for the granting of the Schwabs and Faucis power - absolute power - over us? The answer is the 'normie'. 

Covidianism has met with a great deal of resistance - it has not had things all its own way - and a common theme in the polemics against it is the stupidity of the sheep who allowed, step to step, the Covidians to take over their lives. All activists against Covidianism have run up against the obstacles of 'normie' stupidity, gullibility and the rest; the 'normie' seems impervious to facts. When the 'normie' is told that the mask he wears everywhere looks stupid, and worse, is useless in protecting him against Covid, he shrugs - all that matters is that his peer group endorses it and makes it compulsory; likewise, when he is presented with proof that the injections will kill or incapacitate a fifth or third or half of their recipients, this means nothing to him, he will not be deterred at all from lining up for his seventh or eighth booster shot. But of course he will be the first to complain that he was not sufficiently warned should it finally be acknowledged, by the political and health establishments, that the injections are almost guaranteed to cause a compromised immune system, strokes, heart attacks and even death. 

In short, his conditioning has proven to be extremely strong and effective. Supposing that the Covidians were overthrown tomorrow, at least 50% of the population would continue to wear their masks. This really should not surprise us, seeing that that the former members of a cult have a difficult time shrugging off the cult's beliefs and practices. Exiting a cult physically is one thing, exiting it mentally is another; the latter can take years. 

The above does seem to go against my earlier contention that the 'normie', seeing that Covidianism is unnatural and destructive, rise up against it. But the contradiction can be resolved if we accept that yes, the 'normie' will revolt, but only after a period of time. And how long would that period be? It took Eastern and Central Europe forty years to do away with communism (another unnatural doctrine); earlier revolts, such as those in Berlin in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, were brutally crushed. But we should not speculate: we can scarcely tell if the anti-Covidian revolution will take four years or forty.  

Two lessons emerge from the two revolts in Hungary in the last century, that is, the revolt of 1956 and the revolt of 1989. The first lesson is that the Left does not change; the second lesson, that the Right does. As an example of the former, consider the fact that the revolts against communism in 1956 and Covidianism in 2021 were regarded by the Left to be at both times the work of a neofascist conspiracy. This shows that the Left has hardly changed its tune in the past 65 years. In contrast, the Right has changed its tune. A prime example is Viktor Orbán: this is a man who in his youth fought for freedom as an anti-communist activist; this a man who became one of the heroes of the 1989 revolution; but this is also a man who has now joined the ranks of the Covidians; this is a man who no longer fights against totalitarianism but throws in his lot with it. The Orban case shows that Covidianism corrupts and corrupts absolutely. One could hypothesise that other anti-communists activists from the eighties, activists who at the time were the darlings of the conservative Right, men such as Václav Havel and Lech Walesa - would have been corrupted by Covidianism as well. 

In his anti-communist days, Orban would have believed, along with Fukuyama and Fukuyama's mentor Kojève, in Hegel's 'cunning of reason'. This is the idea that Man possesses enough logical capability to arrive at the correct conclusion after 'thinking things through'. Following Hegel, anti-communist liberals such as Orbán and Havel in the 1980s took an optimistic view of human nature: they believed that Man was smart enough to see through Marxism and so would be smart enough to reject it. 

But to paraphrase Keynes, in the long run we are all dead, and the Covidians could, up until the time that they meet the same fate as the Eastern European communists in 1989, cause tremendous damage - and they have done so already. 

Besides which, some of us in the movement do not believe in the 'cunning of reason'. The dark thought has crossed our minds that perhaps the 'normie' cannot be relied upon to make decisions in his own best interest. As proof, we only need look at the history of the past two years. 

IX.

I have written here on the travails of the Far Left in the 1990s, and now I will touch upon those of the Far Right. 

Ironically, by the 1990s, German nationalism had become a victim of its own success. As a thought experiment, let us suppose that we were to take an old-school German National Socialist - one who had lived through the war - from 1955 and transport him in time to 1995. We would see at once that the man was an anachronism; the events of 1989 to 1991 had put him out of business. Deeply disturbed, he would be asking himself a number of discomforting questions. With the reunification of Germany and the destruction of communism, what use was there for National Socialism? Why should he continue to be a National Socialist? Why would his fellow Germans want to become National Socialist again? 

Perhaps our time-traveller would knuckle under and resign himself to life as a German 'normie'. He would learn to amuse himself by watching American trash television, dancing at the Berlin Love Parade and shopping at the Bonn malls. The last activity should occupy an important place in his new political world-view, for in Fukuyama's interpretation of Hegel's concept of freedom, freedom means freedom to shop. Acceding to this thesis, in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the communist government of East Germany relented: it allowed Berliners from the Eastern half of the city to cross into the Western in order to shop. 

Our hypothetical National Socialist would, under the compulsion of events, be forced to navigate his way back to 'normiedom'. But I can imagine that many of the old fascists of his generation, men who knew and respected Hitler and lived through National Socialism - men such as Otto Remer, Otto Skorzeny, Léon Degrelle, Hans-Ulrich Rudel - would have objected. I would have found it interesting to debate post-communist politics with these men while they were in full possession of their faculties. To that end, a time machine would be necessary to pluck them out of the past and from a past in which they were young and vigorous - and hungry for political power.  

Debate matters here. In this modern age, we no longer believe in the divine right of kings and we expect politicians - even the most firmly entrenched ones - to argue the case for their legitimacy. Why should such and such a politician rule over us? The politician has to give reasons why and he must win over any sceptics and doubters. Even a politician who seizes through power through force of arms must devote  an inordinate amount of time and energy to persuasion and speech-making. See Castro, for instance, who like every successful communist revolutionary, won power not through the ballot box but a successful military campaign. Castro, a former lawyer, had to argue his case in the court of public opinion constantly. All politicians labour under similar constraints, even Neo-Nazi ones. So if we were to transport into the early nineties the young and vigorous Otto Remer of the early fifties, what arguments would he make for his being elected to office? Why should Germans vote for his Socialist Reich Party? My guess is that Remer's arguments would have fallen short; the sudden and abrupt changes in Germany and Eastern Europe would have revealed him to be a relic. 

This touches upon the question of the relation of the 'new' National Socialism to the 'old'. In a conversation fifteen years ago with a German nationalist who had met Remer, I argued that Remer's positions in the 1950s represented a departure from 'classic' National Socialism.  My friend dismissed the notion and referred to Remer condescendingly as an 'Old Nazi', and reflecting later and looking at photos of Socialist Reich Party rallies (which looked a lot like 'old' Nazi rallies) I came to the conclusion that my friend was right. 

Up to the 1970s, the German nationalist movement was filled with old Nazis who had new obsessions; these were Holocaust and WWII Revisionism. It is a knowledge and agreement with these that constitutes 'red-pilling': unless one is accordance with Remer's views on these, one is not 'red-pilled'. 

The great obstacle that the German nationalist - and we in the movement outside Germany - encounters when attempting to 'red-pill' the 'normie' is not hostility but indifference. He is not interested in the correct view of WWII or the Holocaust because he feels - rightly or wrongly - that the events of eighty years ago do not affect his life. And that is especially true today after two years of lockdowns. Why should he want to know the truth about the Holocaust when he has been unable to get a haircut for three months? 

The 'normie' often cannot see the wood for the trees. We can set ourselves the task of educating him, and in this educating him on the connections between the Covidians of today and the Masons of old; but it is more important that we exploit the openings that the Covidians have given us. They have made a rift in the social, economic and political structure. 

Like a good many observers, I find the behaviour of the globalist elites perplexing. Up until 2020, everything was going their way - the Great Replacement was proceeding along nicely, for example - and whatever they did met with the assent of the population. But in 2020, they undertook two actions that would endanger their position. The first of these was the ouster of an American president in a left-wing coup, the first in America's history; the second, the imposition of Covidianism across the entire world. In both instances, the elites broke with normality - and perhaps with the 'normie' as well. To judge by their actions of the last two years, it is as if the globalist elites, the neo-Masons, et al., have a political death wish: they want the 'normie' to turn against them - and terminate them with extreme prejudice. To that end they are doing everything possible... 

In 1969, Lord Russell of Liverpool published Return of the Swastika? The Rising Threat of Resurgent Nazism in Germany; Russell was one of the prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crimes 'trials', and twenty five years after the war, he finds that the Germans are not behaving to his satisfaction. Russell is filled with suspicion and rage; he excoriates the Germans - for their obduracy and also for their attitudes. He does not give one inch on the Holocaust story (and why should he, given the instrumental role he played in building it) and he rakes the Germans over the coals. What is interesting here is that both Russell and Covidians perceive their enemies in exactly the same way, their rhetoric takes the same tone. Reading Russell, we half-expect him to denounce the Germans for fomenting (to use a favourite pejorative term of the globalists) 'conspiracy theories'. In the parlance of 4Chan, too large a sector of the German population was 'based' and 'red-pilled' - that, in Russell's eyes, was their crime. 

The war crimes 'trials', the Morgenthau Plan, etc., and even Russell's propaganda were inflicted upon the Germans with the intention of continuing the war after the war. We in 2022 are approaching a state of war; abiding by Carl Schmitt's Friend / Enemy distinction, the globalists now see a large sector of the population as the Enemy. If Remer or any of the other 'old Nazis' were to return to the present, they would see that as a positive development; at last their Enemy has given them something to work with.