I.
America at present finds itself caught in the throes of a communist revolution. Many conservative commentators have noted that the upheaval bears a resemblance to the Cultural Revolution in China, which is true enough, but comparisons should also be made to the communist revolutions in Germany in the period 1918-1923 and Hungary in 1919. In particular, the establishment of a Soviet (the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ) in the middle of Seattle recalls the establishment of the
Soviet Republic in Bavaria.
While the recent upsurge may be
a fleeting phenomenon - Kurt Eisner's Soviet did not last long, and neither will Raz Simone's - what is important is that nothing like CHAZ has ever been attempted on American soil. America today is looking more and more like the Central Europe of a hundred years ago. And that has led me to pick up and re-read a classic anti-communist work from that time, one which is written by a Central European - Hitler's
Mein Kampf. It contains a great many insights which are pertinent to America's travails (and the Anglosphere's, as Australia and England are following the same path as America). 'Woke' capital, the defection of conservatives to the Left, bullying by 'SJWs' - it is all anticipated by
Mein Kampf.
Peter Brimelow once wrote a famous article,
'America's Immigration Policy - Hitler's Revenge?'; I think that the events in America today are a case of Stalin's revenge. In the early 1990s, Soviet communism collapsed, and with it, American communism. The left-wing activist Max Elbaum describes in his
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Mao, Lenin and Che (2002) the meltdown of the non-CPUSA and non-Trotskyite communist groups in 1989: in that year, the pro-Russian communists were dealt a deathblow by the anti-communist revolts in Eastern and Central Europe, and the pro-China communists by the bad publicity after the Tiananmen Square massacre. After 1989, communists such as Elbaum tried their hand at a non-Leninist leftism before giving up, and by the 1990s, most of the hardened Marxist-Leninist cadre disappeared into obscurity. The consequence was that we enjoyed, in the 1990s, the first decade in over a hundred years which was free of communism (in that respect, the 1990s seem like a golden era). Leninism had in that decade suffered an ignoble fate and one which for it was worse than death: it became the subject of postmodern humour and irony - see, for example, the famous Seinfeld episode
'The Race' (1994). But after Obama's election and Occupy Wall Street, Marxism staged a remarkable comeback, with the results we all know. And the reason for the communist revival is not hard to discern. As
Ann Coulter argues, it is immigration - massive, non-white immigration - which is to blame: if you import Third World people, you import Third World Marxism. This has what has tipped Western nations to the Left. In the Anglosphere, the two foremost Center-Left parties - the US Democratic Party, the British Labour Party - have been transformed into communist parties in all but name (and Center-Left parties elsewhere in the West (e.g., Australia, France, Germany, Sweden) have followed their example). But communists understand that parliaments and elections will only get you so far, and they feel that they cannot rely upon a 'bourgeois' figure such as a President Biden to deliver the goods; hence, they are resorting to time-honoured Leninist methods - intimidation, riots, violence... The use of these has shattered American society, and the communists will not let up in their offensive, as they believe in the long term their tactics will pay off. The riots may peter out, the Seattle Soviet may dissolve - this time. But what happens next time? And when will be 'next time'? A stormy decade lies ahead. And Stalin may have the last laugh.
Here I am throwing around the words 'Marxist', 'Bolshevik', 'Leninist', 'communist' liberally, and this raises the question of definition. We can sum up Marxism in bullet points - e.g., Marxism is a political concept that encompasses theories of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, historical materialism and so forth; we can also connect it to the actual political regimes in Moscow and Beijing, and the franchisee parties that these regimes ran all around the world; but we must acknowledge, in the last analysis, that Marxism cannot be defined by mere reference to Soviet politics fifty years ago or textbooks on dialectical materialism. Marxism surpasses history and theory. Marxism exists beneath the surface of society, it then bubbles, it erupts; it is a primal force, an underground force and a spiritual force; it is what Evola would call daemonic. As Hitler says in
Mein Kampf:
International Marxism is nothing but the application - effected by the Jew, Karl Marx - of a general conception of life to a definite profession of political faith; but in reality that general concept had existed long before the time of Karl Marx. If it had not already existed as a widely diffused infection the amazing political progress of the Marxist teaching would never have been possible. In reality what distinguished Karl Marx from the millions who were affected in the same way was that, in a world already in a state of gradual decomposition, he used his keen powers of prognosis to detect the essential poisons, so as to extract them and concentrate them, with the art of a necromancer, in a solution which would bring about the rapid destruction of the independent nations on the globe.
Few of the Black Lives Matters protesters, rioters, looters and arsonists have read Marx's
Kapital or Engels'
Anti-Dühring. The same can be said of the statue and monument defacers and destroyers; the corporations who have donated large sums of money to 'anti-racist' causes and who are promoting Black Lives Matters propaganda; the Social Justice Warriors who are banning movies and TV shows and are getting people fired... What counts is the underlying feeling. Modern Leftism can only be understood if we look at as a species of animus directed against a particular ethnic group. Leftism champions socialism, but hates the white working-class, which it regards as the most reactionary and 'racist' of all the social strata; it champions feminism, but hates white women, the 'Karens' and the 'Beckys'; it champions anti-racism, but hates the culture, institutions, history, habits, social mores of a particular race - the white race.
How can Leftism, and its offshoot Marxism, be defeated? My advice is that we on the Right could do worse than following the precepts of
Mein Kampf - a textbook written by one of the 20th century's foremost practitioners of anti-communism. It is true that one in the 1990s and 2000s could reasonably view
Mein Kampf as rather dated and anti-communism as a relic of the Cold War; but old ideas have a way of coming back into fashion, as recent events have shown.
The trouble is that many on the Right - the Far Right and Center - are perfectly aware of the communist problem, but are not casting about for an anti-communist solution, and certainly not the one proffered by Hitler. The Americans on the Right are clinging to the American tradition of democracy (and for the purposes of this essay I define democracy as a fair and even contest between two or more competing parties).
The American system has survived for hundreds of years, and will continue to survive for hundreds more - if it is left alone. Hitler, in chapter three of
Mein Kampf, 'Political reflections arising out of my sojourn in Vienna', runs through the structural defects of democracy and the parliamentary system, and these defects of democracy can be classified as endogenous, that is, internal to the system. The hide-bound devotee of democracy will remain impervious to such criticisms, as these by themselves do not demonstrate that the system is heading towards collapse. But later in 'Political reflections', Hitler plays his trump card. He asks: what if a political force which is exogenous, i.e., outside the system, intervenes? What if a stranger to democracy enters into it and no longer wants to play by its rules? Then democracy collapses. American democracy will meet this fate, unless communism relinquishes its hold on the Democratic Party, the press, Hollywood, academia, the 'woke' corporations, indeed, the public consciousness itself. But that seems unlikely. Trump may win the next election, but communism will not keel over and die; if anything, it will redouble its efforts.
II.
I will return to this subject - the death of democracy, as postulated by
Mein Kampf - later. For the moment, I want to reproduce some passages which I feel have become extremely pertinent.
The first of these concerns the subject of bullying, in particular, bullying by the liberals and leftists in the official media; this passage applies, in 2020, also to bullying by Social Justice Warriors on social media:
Within less than two years I had gained a clear understanding of Social Democracy, in its teaching and the technique of its operations.
I recognized the infamy of that technique whereby the movement carried on a campaign of mental terrorism against the bourgeoisie, who are neither morally nor spiritually equipped to withstand such attacks. The tactics of Social Democracy consisted in opening, at a given signal, a veritable drum-fire of lies and calumnies against the man whom they believed to be the most redoubtable of their adversaries, until the nerves of the latter gave way and they sacrificed the man who was attacked, simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace. But the hope proved always to be a foolish one, for they were never left in peace.
The same tactics are repeated again and again, until fear of these mad dogs exercises, through suggestion, a paralysing effect on their victims.
Through its own experience Social Democracy learned the value of strength, and for that reason it attacks mostly those in whom it scents stuff of the more stalwart kind [Donald Trump?], which is indeed a very rare possession. On the other hand it praises every weakling among its adversaries [Mitt Romney?], more or less cautiously, according to the measure of his mental qualities known or presumed. They have less fear of a man of genius who lacks will-power than of a vigorous character with mediocre intelligence and at the same time they highly commend those who are devoid of intelligence and will-power.
Here are some passages on the alliance between the finance-capitalists and the communists - an alliance which, until recently, would have seemed to we moderns something paradoxical. It is only now, with the onset of 'woke' capital, that we understand some of what Hitler is talking about (for a list of corporations that support the Black Lives Matter, antifa and communist riots, see
here).
What other country in the world possessed a better-organized and administered business enterprise than the German State Railways, for instance? It was left to the Revolution to destroy this standard organization, until a time came when it was taken out of the hands of the nation and socialized, in the sense which the founders of the Republic had given to that word, namely, making it subservient to the international stock-exchange capitalists, who were the wire-pullers of the German Revolution...
Without knowing it, the [communist] worker is placing himself at the service of the very power against which he believes he is fighting. Apparently he is made to fight against capital and thus he is all the more easily brought to fight for capitalist interests. Outcries are systematically raised against international capital but in reality it is against the structure of national economics that these slogans are directed. The idea is to demolish this structure and on its ruins triumphantly erect the structure of the International Stock Exchange...
The internationalization of our German economic system, that is to say, the transference of our productive forces to the control of Jewish international finance, can be completely carried out only in a State that has been politically Bolshevized. But the Marxist fighting forces, commanded by international and Jewish stock-exchange capital, cannot finally smash the national resistance in Germany without friendly help from outside. For this purpose French armies would first have to invade and overcome the territory of the German Reich until a state of international chaos would set in, and then the country would have to succumb to Bolshevik storm troops in the service of Jewish international finance.
Finally, here is
Mein Kampf on the ineffectual anti-communism of the conservatives:
At the elections to the Reichstag the growing number of Marxist votes indicated that the internal breakdown and the political collapse were then rapidly approaching. All the victories of the so-called bourgeois parties were fruitless, not only because they could not prevent the numerical increase in the growing mass of Marxist votes, even when the bourgeois parties triumphed at the polls, but mainly because they themselves were already infected with the germs of decay. Though quite unaware of it, the bourgeois world was infected from within with the deadly virus of Marxist ideas. The fact that they sometimes openly resisted was to be explained by the competitive strife among ambitious political leaders, rather than by attributing it to any opposition in principle between adversaries who were determined to fight one another to the bitter end.
And:
Thus the Marxist doctrine is the concentrated extract of the mentality which underlies the general concept of life to-day. For this reason alone it is out of the question and even ridiculous to think that what is called our bourgeois world can put up any effective fight against Marxism. For this bourgeois world is permeated with all those same poisons and its conception of life in general differs from Marxism only in degree and in the character of the persons who hold it. The bourgeois world is Marxist but believes in the possibility of a certain group of people - that is to say, the bourgeoisie - being able to dominate the world, while Marxism itself systematically aims at delivering the world into the hands of the Jews.
III.
Now we come to the passage in which Hitler prophecies the death of democracy.
On a spiritual training ground of that kind [service in parliament] it is not possible for the bourgeois forces to develop the strength which is necessary to carry on the fight against the organized might of Marxism. Indeed they have never seriously thought of doing so. Though these parliamentary quacks who represent the white race are generally recognized as persons of quite inferior mental capacity, they are shrewd enough to know that they could not seriously entertain the hope of being able to use the weapon of Western Democracy to fight a doctrine for the advance of which Western Democracy, with all its accessories, is employed as a means to an end.
That is to say, one cannot fight Marxism in the name of democracy. Marxists do not revere democracy, and they treat it as a means, not an end, and a means that is to be discarded at will:
Democracy is exploited by the Marxists for the purpose of paralysing their opponents and gaining for themselves a free hand to put their own methods into action. When certain groups of Marxists use all their ingenuity for the time being to make it be believed that they are inseparably attached to the principles of democracy, it may be well to recall the fact that when critical occasions arose these same gentlemen snapped their fingers at the principle of decision by majority vote, as that principle is understood by Western Democracy.
The German Revolution of 1918 to 1919 woke the conservatives up like a bucket of cold water:
Such was the case in those days when the bourgeois parliamentarians, in their monumental shortsightedness, believed that the security of the Reich was guaranteed because it had an overwhelming numerical majority in its favour, and the Marxists did not hesitate suddenly to grasp supreme power in their own hands, backed by a mob of loafers, deserters, political place-hunters and Jewish dilettanti. That was a blow in the face for that democracy in which so many parliamentarians believed. Only those credulous parliamentary wizards [Mitch McConnell?] who represented bourgeois democracy could have believed that the brutal determination of those whose interest it is to spread the Marxist world-pest, of which they are the carriers, could for a moment, now or in the future, be held in check by the magical formulas of Western Parliamentarianism. Marxism will march shoulder to shoulder with democracy until it succeeds indirectly in securing for its own criminal purposes even the support of those whose minds are nationally orientated and whom Marxism strives to exterminate.
What happens when the Marxists lose an election, or if anti-communist legislation is passed?
But if the Marxists should one day come to believe that there was a danger that from this witch’s cauldron of our parliamentary democracy a majority vote might be concocted, which by reason of its numerical majority would be empowered to enact legislation and might use that power seriously to combat Marxism, then the whole parliamentarian hocus-pocus would be at an end. Instead of appealing to the democratic conscience, the standard bearers of the Red International would immediately send forth a furious rallying-cry among the proletarian masses and the ensuing fight would not take place in the sedate atmosphere of Parliament but in the factories and the streets. Then democracy would be annihilated forthwith. And what the intellectual prowess of the apostles who represented the people in Parliament had failed to accomplish would now be successfully carried out by the crow-bar and the sledge-hammer of the exasperated proletarian masses - just as in the autumn of 1918. At a blow they would awaken the bourgeois world to see the madness of thinking that the Jewish drive towards world-conquest can be effectually opposed by means of Western Democracy.
Hitler concludes:
As I have said, only a very credulous soul could think of binding himself to observe the rules of the game when he has to face a player for whom those rules are nothing but a mere bluff or a means of serving his own interests, which means he will discard them when they prove no longer useful for his purpose.
IV.
The above describes, to a tee, what America has been undergoing since at least the election of Trump. The Far Left, and its sympathisers on the Center Left and Right, have been using unconstitutional means to oust Trump. (When I say 'unconstitutional', I mean the refusal to accept established political rules, customs, traditions; this refusal may not breach the American constitution as written, but it does breach the spirit of the constitution). The Left is forever accusing Trump of breaking the rules, but it is the political actor that is breaking the rules. For example: the Left does not follow one of the underlying principles of democracy, and that is the doctrine of the consent of the loser; the Left does not recognise Trump's win in 2016 as legitimate, and instead of ceding power to its opponent after its having been defeated in a fair contest, it has sought to use its power in the spheres outside the electoral and parliamentary to unseat Trump.
In theory, political power in a democracy resides in elected officials, but in practice, it is diffused throughout the political organism. It can be found in the Deep State (the police, the secret police, the military, the armed forces, the public sector, education) and also civil society (the trade unions, the chambers of commerce, the churches, the sports bodies, and most importantly of all, the media / entertainment complex). The last of these, the media / entertainment complex, has in 2020 become a virtual political power in itself. It has waged an unrelenting war against Trump from the beginning, and some elements of the Deep State have joined in the campaign. Only recently, certain of America's generals have been praised for their 'defiance' of Trump; both this insubordination and the praise of it are unprecedented in American history, and the conduct of the generals has fueled speculation by the Left that a military coup d'état could push Trump out of office.
To judge by recent events, the Far Left has completed its long march through the institutions. But it is not only the institutions. The covid lockdown (which has been lauded to the skies by the communist Left) and the Black Lives Matter riots prove that the Left has colonised the American, and Western, public consciousness. How else do we explain the scenes of mass hysteria? The uniformity of slogans in both the covid and 'anti-racist' discourse? America, and the West, is being guided through Yuri Bezmenov's famous
four stages of subversion. And it is at this point that democracy breaks down, as voting, and the will of the majority, now count for little. (As Hitler writes in the Vienna chapter in
Mein Kampf, 'At first I was quite surprised when I realized how little time was necessary for this dangerous Great Power [the media] within the State to produce a certain belief among the public; and in doing so the genuine will and convictions of the public were often completely misconstrued').
On that note, to what extent was George Floyd a creation of the media? But such a phenomenon was not unknown in Hitler's day:
It took the Press only a few days to transform some ridiculously trivial matter into an issue of national importance, while vital problems were completely ignored or filched and hidden away from public attention.
The Press succeeded in the magical art of producing names from nowhere within the course of a few weeks. They made it appear that the great hopes of the masses were bound up with those names. And so they made those names more popular than any man of real ability could ever hope to be in a long lifetime. All this was done, despite the fact that such names were utterly unknown and indeed had never been heard of even up to a month before the Press publicly emblazoned them. At the same time old and tried figures in the political and other spheres of life quickly faded from the public memory and were forgotten as if they were dead, though still healthy and in the enjoyment of their full vigor.
V.
Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf as a salesman: at the time, he was selling a product to the German people, and specifically, the German Far Right. His prescriptions for communism worked in Germany ten years after publication, but, one may object, will not work for America, as substantial differences between America and Germany (and America and Europe) exist.
But Hitler's analysis of communism, at least, does hold true for America, as 2020 America has traded places with Weimar Germany.
Americans live under a regimen of democracy, Germans do not. Democracy, in Germany since the war, means the rule of Merkel and the parties (the SPD, the CSU/CDU, the Greens, the Free Democrats), and any parties (such as Alternative for Germany (AfD)) outside this circle are regarded as
'undemocratic' even though they may play by the rules of democracy as conventionally understood. The AfD functions as though all the norms of democracy - the fair contest, the equal chance, the consent of the loser, etc. - apply in Germany when in fact they do not. In America, in contrast, the norms still apply. But now that American democracy has come under sustained and ferocious attack by the Left, the foundations of the democratic state will be chipped away as they were in Weimar.
Liberal historians have puzzled over why Weimar fell so easily to Hitler, as easily as a tree which has grown rotten and hollowed out from the inside topples in a storm. The truth is that Weimar democracy had attrited by 1933 and had been damaged irreparably by years of relentless and savage assaults by the Left (after 1928, the communists directed most of their (not inconsiderable) firepower at the Social Democrats (the SPD), a party which was one of the main pillars of Weimar). But in today's historiography, the NSDAP and Hindenberg reap most of the blame - the Far Right, not the Far Left, is said to have bored away at democracy from within and caused its collapse. It is clear, however, from
Mein Kampf that the NSDAP would not have succeeded - indeed, it would not even have been formed - if not for the German Revolution of 1918-1919 and the Left's subsequent antics, as Hitler freely admits.
Ann Coulter in her column reflects that a hundred years ago, Americans did not take to Bolshevism. It is the historical unpopularity of socialism in America, and the continuing survival of American democracy, which has led to complacency among conservative Americans who look to communism on the Continent and say to themselves, 'It can't happen here'. But alas, it can. A President Biden may disappoint the Far Left in much the same way as President Obama did, but one must take the long view: communism moves incrementally, two steps forward, one step back, and America has moved leftward under Obama and even further leftward under Trump to a degree which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. It is not inconceivable that in years to come America will turn into Cuba or Venezuela.
I mentioned earlier the prescriptions of
Mein Kampf. If we in the Anglosphere were to follow the book literally, we would form a third political party, wear uniforms, hold huge rallies, make demagogic speeches, mobilise a bunch of paramilitary toughs to keep order at party rallies and crack communist skulls... But that would be applying, in a mechanistic fashion, tactics which would not be appropriate for America in 2020 (for one, third parties in America have never worked and never will). The conditions for the efficacious use of such tactics have not been met, the time is not ripe. In contrast, by 1933, democracy in Germany had been eroded; Weimar resembled nothing more than a collapsing glacier. In such a state of affairs, freedom - and chaos - reign. The reason why the NSDAP got away with street violence is because the Far Left got away with it. (On that topic, the Trump supporters at his upcoming rallies may be subjected to
violence by the Left (we saw a foretaste of this in the lead-up to the election of 2016). That would violate another of the unwritten rules of democracy, namely, the principle of allowing your opponent's rallies and conventions to proceed without intimidation and violence, and again it is something that would have been unthinkable twenty or even ten years ago).But when cracks and chasms appear, opportunities present themselves. One of the unintended consequences of the recent upheaval is that not only does it represent a breakthrough for the Far Left, it represents a breakthrough for the Far Right. The Left's devices can, and often do, backfire - remember the case of
Chile.
