ON NATIONALISM AND THE
SOCIAL QUESTION

by Rowan Patterson & Welf Herfurth*

The great Austrian political thinker and champion of free-market liberalism, F.A. von Hayek, made a famous distinction in his work between 'values' and 'merits', summed up in his famous slogan 'There is no value to society'. (Margaret Thatcher was attempting to convey the same idea when she made her famous assertion that 'There is no such thing as society'). Hayek argued that, when we assess the worth of a man's labours - in providing us with symphonies, or paintings, or glass etchings, or plumbing, or shoes, or whatever - the marketplace provides us with the only accurate assessment of their value. The market, which is made up of individual buyers and sellers, assesses the value of, say, a pair of shoes at $90. If buyers disagree with the price charged by the shoe seller, the latter must drop his price, and sell at a discount, if he wants to move his product off the shelves. If he refuses to budge on prices, or if he is underestimated the demand for his product (mistakenly believing that there is a large demand for his shoes, when there wasn't) he goes out of business.

But, says Hayek, suppose we take the socialist point of view and say that the shoe seller is a meritorious individual - that he deserves a 'better' price for his shoes than the one consumers are accustomed to paying, or that he deserves to have shoes sold in amounts large enough to make him wealthy. We are then assessing the shoe seller's labour on the basis of 'merit' and not 'value'. Hayek's point is that such an assessment is entirely subjective: the shoe seller and his friends and family may believe that he is meritorious, and deserves to make more money than he does; but the buyers in the market may have an entirely different valuation. The consequence of this is that it is impossible to get all parties to come to an agreement on 'merit'; but it is entirely possible to get all parties to come an agreement on 'value' - and such an agreement happens every day, in the market. Hayek believes that we cannot assess the 'value' of 'society' (or a something 'socially useful', 'socially beneficial') in that same impersonal (and clear-cut) way. Hence, 'there is no value to society'.

Hayek makes a similar distinction between an economy based on 'needs' and 'wants'. Joe Bloggs, an abattoir worker who lives in Cowra, needs a job in Cowra - otherwise he will be forced to move elsewhere to look for work, or take up a different career. In an economy based on 'needs', the government will ensure that Joe Bloggs is given that job. But suppose that there is not enough consumer demand for meat from Cowra: the abattoir will be forced to close down because of the impersonal pressure of the market. In an economy based on consumer 'wants', the government will allow the abattoir to close down and will do nothing for Joe Bloggs or the other abattoir workers.

Similarly, people in sparsely-populated rural areas may demand phone coverage from the national telephone companies, which are reluctant to service those areas because there will be no profit in doing so. In an economy based on 'wants', the rural population will have to go without phone coverage, or move to the city where they can obtain it; in an economy based on 'needs', the government will ensure that they are provided with phone coverage.

What relevance does this all have to nationalism? A great deal! Even the self proclaimed Neo-Nazi Bill White writes that
(at http://www.overthrow.com/lsn/news.asp?articleID=10057 ) that:

Even race, while fundamental to the National Socialist worldview is not central to the National Socialist argument. When I talk to my organizers -- and check out our mailing list on Yahoo groups if you want confirmation -- I don't tell them to talk about race first, or immigration first, or any of these other issues first when trying to communicate the advantages of National Socialism to white people. I tell them to talk about the economy first -- in all its aspects -- and from there to point at the Jews, and then to show how Jewish connection to racial issues, and social-cultural issues, and political issues "trickles down" and reveals their poison in every aspect.

As has been written here at the New Right Australia/New Zealand site many times, National Socialism and Italian Fascism enjoyed their success first and foremost because they were social and economic doctrines first, and everything else second. The question - 'Do we want an economy based on needs, or wants?' - is as relevant today for nationalists as it was in 1933 or 1922.

The mainstream Right believes that we should have an economy based on consumer wants; the mainstream Left, one based on 'human' and 'social' needs. It is held, by a good many media commentators and intellectuals, that the Right has won the debate on the global economy; the twentieth century was the century of socialism, but, in the end, communism imploded from within, unable to compete with the Western capitalist economies. Even the West had to adopt, after the crises of the 1970s, competition and deregulation - inevitable 'market reforms' - in order to survive and prosper. America and the UK do well, it is argued, because they adopted the 'reform' path; Germany, France and other Continental countries have stagnated because of their adherence to the old welfare-state socialism.

The purpose of this article is not to revisit that old and hackneyed debate: it has received enough attention from mainstream journalists and intellectuals in the past twenty-five years. The intention of this article is to look at the place of the 'needs versus wants' and the 'merit versus value' debate within the context of the nationalist political struggle.

Now, in 2007, we can look at the benefits, and drawbacks, of economic systems such as communism and fascism with more perspective than, for instance, the people living in the 1930s and 1940s. The general consensus, in the mainstream Western media, is that communism has failed - and it is a view I, like many other nationalists, share. Take, for example, Mao's China. The difference between Maoist Marxism and ordinary Marxism was that the former championed the peasant, the latter the blue-collar labourer: Maoism could be described accurately as Marxism for the peasant class - it sought, not a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', but a 'dictatorship of the peasants' (or, more accurately, a dictatorship of an elite group of intellectuals who would rule in the name of the peasants). That was the official Maoist party line (we know, however, that Mao cared little for the peasants, and was interested foremost in making China a great geopolitical force, capable of being a rival to both Russia and America). At any rate, Mao's economic policies were disastrous for Chinese peasantry: under the Great Leap Forward, for instance, millions of them starved to death, mainly thanks to economic bungling and neglect (which occurs too often under communism). No greater example of communist failure can be found: after all, communism, ostensibly, intends to improve the national standard of living, and one of the main arguments against capitalism is that it leads to poverty and misery. But communism - as we have seen from the example of China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Cambodia and the African states which turned communist - led to even more poverty and misery than capitalism, and starvation on a hitherto unimagined scale.

Now, in the 2000s, China has been forced to adopt the market mechanism as an alternative to socialism; eventually it will move further and further from an economy geared towards satisfying 'needs' and to one which aims at satisfying 'wants'. Vietnam has done the same; only Cuba and North Korea remain as the last hold-outs.

Communism could have been expected to do well in Europe: after all, even the economically backward countries of Eastern Europe are far more developed than, for instance, China at the time of the communist revolution. Again, naive left-wingers in the West supported the Soviet Union in its war against Germany because they believed that the communist system was better: the fascists were tools of capitalism (so the party line went), and capitalism always leads to poverty, misery, injustice, inequality, etc. But, once the war was over, and the Red Army had conquered Germany and Eastern Europe, it turned out that communism as an economic system wasn't as good as capitalism or fascism; it was downright inferior. On a simple, day to day level, the standard of living was below that of the Western European countries: East Germany produced unreliable and inefficient state-designed cars, and built shoddy housing; and shoddy and inefficient consumer goods were the general rule throughout the whole Eastern bloc. No communist in the West would have been able to cope for long living in an Eastern bloc country, simply because of the vastly inferior standard of living. Communism in Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, declined for a number of reasons: but one of the main reasons is that, simply, the populations there wanted the lifestyle of the West: better cars, better clothes, better houses, reliable supplies of electricity, gas, and water...

For this reason, the communist parties in the West are, after the post-1989 collapse of Soviet communism, unpopular. That is, they do not have a mass base of support. Communist organisations may be active in student politics on university campuses; their refried Trotskyism manages to attract its share of followers (from my experience) of naive and politically uneducated youth. But it is out of the question that they will ever be able to win power in Australia or in any other Western country. The reason for that is that we all know, by now, that communism doesn't work. Or, rather, the price demanded by communism is too high for Westerners to pay; for one thing, our glitzy shopping malls will have to go (to replaced, presumably, by state-owned malls selling state-made jeans), and not even the most hardcore Leftist university student wants that. Communist activism in the West is one exercise in futility.

The reality is that, in Australia and most other Western countries, is that the Hayekian neoliberals have won for the most part. For the past 11 years, a conservative center-right government has actively striven to introduce competition. It has broken, for the most part, the trade unions' grip on the labour market, has allowed competition in various industries (including the dairy industry) and is now in the process of dismantling a price-support scheme for Australian farmers (which makes it illegal for farmers to sell their wheat overseas below a fixed price) which has existed for 67 years. It has also kept up the policy, introduced by successive Australian post-war governments, of free trade, and privatised the national telephone company.

The social democratic Labor Party, and members of the agrarian-socialist National Party (which, ironically, is in coalition with the conservatives), oppose these policies; many nationalists here in Australia oppose these policies as well. But my own reaction is: so what. The Labor Party, of course, opposes deregulation of the labour market because it is run by trade unionists who want to preserve their monopoly over the labour market. Competition in that area - where workers can work for less than minimum wage if they choose - will make the unions redundant. Likewise, the National Party is only looking after the interests of its constituency, Australian farmers - who believe (like farmers in France, America and Japan) that farming is a lifestyle, and not a business, and that the world owes them a living. The idea of putting agriculture on a market basis terrifies them, and rightfully so. Both groups - the blue-collar trade unionists, and the farmers - claim that their interests are the interests of Australia as a whole. But this is false. Non-white immigration does more damage to Australia than free trade or privatisation (in my opinion), but historically the unions and the farmers have done little to oppose it. A few trade unionists in Australia are now speaking out against immigration, simply because present government policies have loopholes which allow immigrants to work for below minimum wage. But, obviously, the concern of these unionists is based on self-interest, nothing more.

And if we are to judge the rightness or wrongness of every economic policy by self-interest, very well then: competition and privatisation does little to hurt me as a person. For example, competition in the airline industry in Australia, for instance, has allowed cut-price airlines like Jetstar and Virgin Blue to appear, which allow me to travel to nationalist conferences at cut-rate prices - something which would be impossible a few decades ago when established monopoly-protected airlines like Quantas dominated the market.

The problem is, I think, that many nationalists in Australia are prone to adopt the farmers' and the unions' struggles as their own; likewise, nationalists in other Western countries elsewhere do the same - champion the interests of farmers, or unions, or local business, against competition, from within or without.

They do so reflexively, because, they feel that, by being nationalist, they must side with the Left on nearly every economic issue. In my own experience, every nationalist I have encountered has opposed the neoliberal agenda of free trade, privatisation, deregulation, union-busting, etc. Nationalists take a left-wing position on most economic issues. This is for a number of reasons; but I think that the main cause is that the nationalism of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was economically on the Left, and that that period of nationalism still has a great ideological influence on Western nationalists today.

And I agree: nationalism is, and should remain, Left when it comes to the economy. But groups like local manufacturers, unions and farmers are very strong already, and do not need the support of nationalists; furthermore, they will reject any overtures we will care to make towards them, either because they do not give a damn about the issues we care about - e.g., immigration, or freedom of speech - or because they do not want to offend Jews and liberals.

Besides which, by focusing on free trade, or privatisation, or competition, we are ignoring the real issues. For instance, we are not paying attention to the problem of the massive unemployment which exists in most Western countries. We in Australia have quite a severe unemployment problem - something which may come as a surprise to foreign readers, as the official rate is only 4.6%. But other statistics belie that figure. We have, in Australia, 2.6 million Australians on welfare. (See 'Putting the benefits in doubt', The Australian, December 30, 2006, at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20988424-28737,00.html ).
Of that 2.6 million, 700,000 are on the disability pension. (See: 'Labor on "backflip" on tests for the disabled', The Australian, December 28, 2006, at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20980454-2702,00.html ).
We also have an epidemic of single parents, most of them women, collecting single parents' pension: 423,000 as of September 2006. (See: 'Single mums back on the job', The Australian, January 8, 2007, at http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,10166,21026129-462,00.html?from=public_rss ). Around 250,000 men in Australia between the ages of 25 and 44 are not looking for work. (See: 'Revealed: a nation of dropouts', The Age, April 17, 2006, at http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/revealed-a-nation-of-dropouts/2006/04/16/1145126008815.html).

So why is the unemployment rate only 4.6%? Firstly, because people are only counted as looking for work (and therefore being unemployed) if they are willing to take up a job in one week's time; secondly, anyone working at least two hours a week is counted as being employed full-time. These methods for counting the unemployed are set by the International Labor Organisation, an agency of the United Nations, and have been used in Australia since 1978. (Previously, the method used was to count the number of people on unemployment benefit. If that method were still in use today, the official unemployment rate would be 5.4%). Most other countries in the world use the method as well.

Understandably, that ILO method can downplay the number of unemployed quite dramatically. But hardly any mainstream political figure in Australia, whether on the Right or Left, questions its use; after all, the figures it produces are just too good. The conservative politicians, who have never been unemployed or experienced any significant economic hardship, simply assumes that the figures are correct and that the present conservative government has created a jobs cornucopia. (And indeed, deregulation of the labour market since the 1990s has created plenty of two hour a week jobs). So their welfare policy is fairly simple: the unemployed are scum, and deserve to be treated as such; the best policy is to use psychological pressure to force them off benefits and get them to look for work.

The policy has been successful insofar as that it has forced many people off unemployment benefits. It is safe to assume that many unemployed (or women, for instance, who would otherwise would have been unemployed) have jumped ship and become disabled, or single parents, simply because the requirements for those two pensions are less strict.

From my own experience (and the experience of anyone who is an urban commuter, or spends time in the central business districts of Australia's major cities), there is a growing, almost ubiquitous, Australian underclass. (The characteristics of an 'underclass' are, following the American author Charles Murray's definition, are: low rates of participation in the labour force, low educational attainment, a record of petty crime, chronic drug and alcohol abuse, poor diet, anti-social behaviour, and a penchant for giving birth to children out of wedlock). Comprising the underclass are a small, but growing percentage of the white population and a large percentage of the Indigenous population. Underclass people cannot find employment for two reasons: there are not enough low-wage, low-skill jobs for them, and employers find them too obnoxious and unprofessional to hire them anyway (at least at prevailing wage rates).

In Hitler's Germany, as we know, full employment prevailed. A small underclass existed (as it does in every society) which led a dissolute lifestyle and refused to work. The German government's policy was to offer a long-term unemployed person a job, and if that person refused a job offer three times in a row, they ended up in a concentration camp and wore a uniform with a black triangle - the symbol for 'asocial' prisoners.

In general, such a policy can be justified - in a situation of full employment. But Australia is not such a full-employment economy, even though the liberal democratic politicians say otherwise. The same can be said for other Western countries. (It is hard to judge the unemployment levels in other countries from a distance; but we can say for certain that unemployment in France and Germany is high, and that the same is true for most countries in Europe. Britain, which has low official unemployment figures, has a large number of people subsisting off the welfare state, as do the Scandinavian countries).

As to why we have a growing underclass, a number of complex social and economic explanations exist.

For one, most of the underclass traditionally would work in low-wage, low-skill jobs. But minimum wage laws effectively cancel out any such jobs. As well as that, most of the underclass are drop-outs from the working classes, who traditionally worked in low-skill manufacturing jobs, which are now being relocated offshore in Third World countries because of, among other things, minimum wage laws, high taxes and the simple fact that most workers in the Third World have a lower standard of living and therefore will demand lower wages than Australians.

Besides the economic, there are underlying social causes. The American author mentioned before, Charles Murray, believes that the decline of the institution of marriage is responsible for the growth of the underclass. Children in single-parent families grow up without a father who acts as a male role model. That is, the traditional husband and family man - who goes to work every day, stays monogamous, and does not engage in petty crime and anti-social behaviour - in the past acted as a role model and a stabilising influence. Nowadays, the welfare state, with its generous provision of single-parent pensions, pays women to bring up children without fathers. Furthermore, it encourages them to have more children in order to collect more money.

All of these explanations have value, I believe; even the work of a mainstream conservative like Murray has value in that it goes a long way to explaining the growth of the underclass, and what needs to be done about it. But it is essential for nationalists to recognise that nothing can be done about the underclass problem, and the unemployment problem, in a mainstream liberal democracy. Because of its inefficiencies, liberal democracy can do little to alleviate social and economic problems in the West - merely stave them off. (For instance, the German government has had 16 years to do something about Germany's unemployment problem, but has failed, and failed miserably, and will continue to fail).

But we have to draw a distinction here between the underclass and the rest: there are many people in Australia, and in the Western countries, who are down on their luck and who are not underclass scum. These people have been trampled on by successive liberal democratic governments. They have been left behind by both the mainstream Right and Left because, among other things, the unemployment statistics say they do not exist. (In Australia there is the spectacle of the person who is over fifty-five and who is without work. No employer will hire them because of their age, and, at the same time, they are too young to collect the old-age pension. There are also large numbers of over-educated university students who graduate every year and who are destined to dead-end and insecure casual work, or work as security guards, taxi drivers, etc. Also, a number of students who are still studying are forced to rely on charity thanks to, among other things, government cuts and the abolition of student services previously funded by the government).

It is my opinion that these people are potential recruits for nationalism - and good recruits at that. For one, they have some education and are (unlike the underclass) fundamentally decent people; secondly, they have the potential intelligence and perceptiveness to see that their problems will not be solved by a change in government at the ballot box. They will be receptive to the nationalist argument that the structural deficiencies in the economies of the West, and particularly the Western welfare-state countries like Australia, France and Germany, are due to the deficiencies inherent in liberal democracy.

So what are the solutions for the West's economic problems, in particular, its unemployment (and underemployment) problems? I am not arguing for complete and total socialism - as it exists in Cuba and North Korea - and I am not arguing for the complete cessation of 'free-market reform' either: only that there has to be a medium between the two. But the right direction lies towards the Left and not to the Right. We need to move towards an economy where people are treated on the basis of their 'merit', their 'social value', and not merely their market value. There are plenty of decent people who have been ground under by the economic mill, and who deserve better treatment.

In a previous article published -The radicalisation of the middle classes- (http://www.newrightausnz.org/articles/theradicalisationofthe.html) it was argued that nationalism should aim at forming its base in the middle class, following the example of the National Socialist and fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s. That recommendation is correct: but it is essential to point out that the middle-class followers of Italian Fascism and National Socialism - the office workers, the small business owners, the intellectuals - were, for the most part, unemployed (or underemployed). They understood, instinctively, that the fascists were acting in their interest. Hitler never said anything as blunt as, 'Vote for me, German office girls, and I'll get you a job'; but that was the underlying message in the National Socialists speeches and writings. National Socialist and Italian Fascist propaganda was pitched at a fairly high intellectual level, aimed at Germans and Italians (and other Europeans) with a degree of education. That, combined with the repeated emphasis in that propaganda on 'social' needs and 'social' justice, meant that the lower middle-classes recognised fascism for what it was: socialism in their interest, and not that of the working-classes (who were either attracted to communism or mainstream social democracy).

Circumstances today, of course, are different than from Europe and the rest of the West in the 1930s. But they are similar in that the times are ripe for social revolution - a revolution of the decent, i.e., people who are not underclass but who deserve better treatment. The likes of a Hayek may object to such 'subjective' assessments of value. But governments are always allocating resources on the basis of some perceived merit, and this is a fact of life. In Australia, for instance, immigrants from Sudan get preferential treatment; waves of Africans are brought over, either to work in low-wage, low-skill jobs, or, more likely, put on welfare with that last wave of 'refugees' we all had to feel sorry for - the Vietnamese. Whatever contribution the African, Vietnamese and Muslim immigrants make to economic life (and it is minimal, in my opinion) is overshadowed by the social cost. (But, to Hayek, we cannot assess 'social' cost).

Nationalists will have, in my view, little to no serious competition when it comes to tackling the 'social question'. The Marxists, surprisingly enough, are out of touch on social issues. In the main, this is because of their narrow-minded ideology. In their worldview, there only 'good' working-class people and 'bad' corporations (with the petit bourgeoisie existing in the middle). The Marxist fights for social justice for the working-class, but ignores the plight of the middle-class. Furthermore, the analysis of the Marxists is limited: social problems are caused by capitalism and the big corporations; the idea that Jews, for instance, could be a contributing factor to social decadence and decline is nonsense - anti-Semitism is 'the socialism of fools'. The Marxists further alienate themselves from ordinary people of Indo-European descent when they champion the rights of immigrants, and denounce any opposition to immigration as racism, fascism, etc.

As we all know, the economic depression of the 1930s brought the German National Socialists to power. Many Westerners believed that fascism was a viable alternative to liberal democracy, which, it was perceived, had failed. It is for that reason that more than a few nationalists today express a desire for some economic catastrophe, comparable on a scale to that of the 1930s, to occur. After all, that will only increase support for nationalism. (We know that, electorally, the German National Socialists did badly in the late 1920s because, among other things, of the improving economy). But I believe that this argument is fallacious. For one thing, the catastrophe, in many Western countries, is already here. Germany today, for instance, has more people on its unemployment rolls than during the Depression.

In order to attract more public support, nationalists need to bring up, again and again, the 'social question' - and persuade people that the causes of any economic deprivation go deeper than the mainstream analysis. (That is, we know that the economies of the West may be bad because of high inflation, high interest rates, high taxes; but why the high interest rates, why the high taxes? Why do we have a class of politicians who embark on policies which we all know will only hurt the economy?).

At the same time, we must not make the mistake of leaping straight into electoral politics, expecting that, once we form a new, populist party, nationalists will come to power and make everything right again. Pauline Hanson's One Nation did a good job, initially, of addressing the 'social question' and the concerns of people who had been left behind by the policies of the mainstream parties; but it failed to build up a critical mass of popular support as preparation for any electoral activity. At the federal elections of 1998, One Nation received one million votes, but failed to break through Australia's proportional voting system; the major parties triumphed.

Nationalism must, before it becomes embodied in a party, be a state of mind and a mass movement; a state of mind and a movement which exists in a large segment of the population - the 'decent' we have identified here.

*Welf Herfurth is a political activist who lives in Sydney / Australia. He was born and raised in Germany. He can be contacted on herfurth@iinet.net.au

Nationalist Socialism, Nationalist Communism and National Bolshevism

by Andrew Webb


I've written this essay on the demand of the owner of this site, in order to make clear some vital distinctions between three ideologies: national socialism, national communism and National Bolshevism. (A note: when I refer to 'the movement' in this essay, I am referring to the large number of anti-'Semitic' and racialist groupings traditionally associated with the Far Right, in North America, Europe and European colonies such as South Africa and New Zealand).

NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM

What is National Bolshevism?

To answer this, we must look at the development of the socialist idea.

It was generally agreed, in the patriotic and anti-Semitic circles in Europe at the time, that the Russian Revolution of 1917 (and the aborted revolutions in Hungary in 1919 and Germany in 1918) were Jewish affairs. Jews had been fomenting subversion against the absolute monarchist regimés of Europe since the days of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and had appropriated the socialist idea for use as a means of gaining power. This subversion culminated in the Russian Revolution.

The Slavic racial element played a role, of course. Contemporaries of the revolution such as Hitler, Spengler and Lothrop Stoddard noted that Russia, since Peter the Great, had been divided into two: on one side, the Westernised Petrine aristocracy, mostly of German stock; on the other, the Asiatic residue possessed of a deep, primitive religiousness and a hostility to anything Western. The Revolution saw an uprising among the Asiatic racial element against the Westernised aristocracy.

What the Jews did was harness the Asiatic maelstrom and used it as a stepping-stone to power. Jewish Bolshevists exterminated the Petrine ruling class, and killed and starved millions of Russian supporters of the old regimé, in particular the peasants (who, as a class, have always been despised by Jews everywhere).

When does the 'national' in National Bolshevism enter the picture?

With Stalin's ascent to power to in 1924, Trotsky's exile in 1928, and the purges of the communist party rank and file (which, as we know, mostly consisted of Jews) in the 1930s, some anti-Semites claimed at the time that this saw the end of Jewish influence in the Soviet Union. Therefore, Hitler and other fascists were mistaken in detecting a Jewish component in Stalinism. This doctrine is one version of National Bolshevism.

As well as this, Stalin was condemned by the (Jewish) Trotskyists, for restricting socialism to 'one country', for not fomenting subversion elsewhere. Stalin had made socialism too nationalistic - a 'national socialism', in fact -when socialism, at bottom, is incompatible with nationalism. Stalinist 'national socialism' of this kind is often called National Bolshevism as well.
(Wartime Russian propaganda never referred to the Nazis as 'national socialists': that was the term used by the Stalinists to describe their own communism. The communists testifying at the International Military Tribunal always referred to the Nazis and the Wehrmacht as 'Hitlerians' or 'fascists').

In Weimar Germany, some communists, such as the Jew Karl Radek, advocated an alliance between Germany and Communist Russia, as early as 1919. It was felt that were Germany to take such a course, it would be resisting the West, which had imposed the Versailles Treaty upon it. In other words, Germany would turn Bolshevist out of nationalist and geopolitical reasons. That idea survived into the 1930s and could be found in the left-currents of German National Socialism, as represented by Goebbels, the Strasser Brothers, and Ernst Röhm and his communist Brownshirt faction.

So far, we have identified three National Bolshevisms: one, anti-Semitic, pre-war Stalinism; two, nationalist communism (or what I call national communism); and three, the advocacy of an alliance between Germany and a Bolshevism which may or may not be Jewish.

THE MYTH OF PRE-WAR ANTI-SEMITIC STALINISM

Did an anti-Semitic Stalinism of the 1930s exist?

In my opinion, no: the notion that Jews had been purged by Stalin in the 1930s is a falsehood. This is proved by the Holocaust Revisionist Walter N. Sanning's The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry (1983), a study of Jewish demography in Europe and the Soviet Union before and after the "Holocaust".

Sanning's figures showed that from 1926 to 1939, the Jewish population in the Soviet Union increased from 2.6 million to 3 million - a jump of over 12%. Furthermore, the Jewish population of Leningrad increased from 84,000 in 1926 to 200,000 in 1940 and the Jewish population of Moscow increased from 131,000 to 400,000 in the same years.

As for the war, 200,000 Jews died as servicemen in the Red Army and 130,000 Jewish civilians died in the Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union. An unknown but high percentage of the latter were killed as partisans, or in retaliation for partisan atrocities; others were killed by the Soviet natives for their role in the slaughter and deportation of tens of thousands of Slavs.
Added to this, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence concerning Jewish commissars, Jewish partisans, Jewish collaborators with Soviet occupiers, and so on. Jewish communists, and Jews in general, supported the Soviet Union's war against fascism, and certainly the very Jewish Roosevelt administration did.

THE DEJUDAISATION OF BOLSHEVISM?

Nevertheless, the Soviet Union stopped, at some point, being Jewish. Historians of international relations would agree that the Soviet Union had become an enemy of America (and hence Jewry) sometime around 1948. Stalin, of course, armed Israel in its "war of independence" against the Arabs in 1948, funnelling arms through Czechoslovakia, and the USSR was one of the first States to recognise Israel diplomatically. But 1948 also saw the breakdown of amicable relations between America and the USSR. And by 1953, the year of the 'doctor's plot' and Stalin's aborted plan to exterminate Soviet Jewry, the love affair between the Jews and Soviet communism was over.

The question is: why did the Jews fall out with Stalin? The answer, I think, is to be found in Sanning's statistics.

The USSR incorporated 2 million Jews in 1940 (with the annexation of Eastern Poland, the Baltic States and North-Eastern Romania), raising its Jewish population from 3 to 5 million. But it lost 1 million Jews in the war, many of those in senior positions in the communist hierarchy. The majority of those fatalities - 700,000 - had died in labour camps in the Siberia and the Urals alongside millions of other Soviet citizens.

Stalin had been prepared years in advance for a European assault on the USSR. Before and during the Nazi attack, he deported millions of Soviet citizens (Sanning gives the figure of 25 to 30 million) away from the front line and to Siberia and the Urals. There they were put to work manufacturing arms and electricity.

The production of arms and electricity required skilled personnel. Jews occupied the leading administrative positions in the Soviet Union and formed the most educated class, standing at the top of the social pyramid in the Soviet Union, just as they do in America now. Stalin deported them for this reason. (A large number of women and their children were deported because many women were employed in Soviet industry, thanks to feminist reforms).

Sanning estimates that of the 3.6 million Soviet Jews living in areas which later came under Nazi control, 80%, or 2.9 million, were evacuated. Five million people alone from the Ukraine were deported, a high proportion of whom were Jews or ethnic Russians (both of whom occupied the leading professional and administrative positions in Ukraine, to the detriment of Ukrainians).
Because of the losses in the labour camps, and in combat with European armies, the élite Soviet Jewish class was gutted. Although a large number of Jews remained in the Soviet Union - over 4 million - the power of the Jews there had been broken.

(For more on the implications of Sanning's work, see Yggdrasil's essay Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?")

This is why neo-fascists who were more sensitive to geopolitical developments, such as Francis Parker Yockey and Jean-Francois Thiriart, proposed an alliance between post-war fascism and Soviet communism. They believed that were the Russians to win the Cold War and overrun Europe, Europe would be dejudaised as well. Therefore, an opening could exist to mobilise the Continent for a war against America (and Israel).

NATIONAL COMMUNISM

After the war, and the breakup of the European empire, a new phenomenon emerged: national communism, or more accurately, national liberation communism.

Yockey held that ever since the First World War, the 'Outer World' (the non-European colonial world) had been agitating against the colonial powers Europe and America. He called the desire of the coloured races to overthrow the white man 'Bolshevism' (although of course, the anti-colonialist tendencies were not restricted to the communism of the USSR).

It was Europe's defeat at the hands of America in WWII, Yockey argued, that saw the downfall of the European colonial empire - the largest in history. 'Bolshevism' stood triumphant. Although America, by winning the war against Europe, inherited Europe's empire, it showed no interest in maintaining it, giving the most valuable possessions away (China and India in particular).

Many of the 'Outer World' countries did not win their independence at once, having to overthrow colonial rulers like Britain and France by force. The national revolutionaries adopted communism as an anti-colonialist ideology, as communism is uniquely suited to that purpose. But they gave it a different slant from orthodox Soviet Marxist-Leninism, a more 'national' flavour. Hence Maoism, Castroism, Ho Chi Minhism and the rest.

This independence from Soviet communism, however, was only ideological. After achieving independence, a country like Vietnam or Cuba would have no option but to join forces with one of the two communist superpowers, China and Russia.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM

By 'National Socialism', I am not referring to the German variety, of course, but a post-war variant of national communism. More or less, other anti-colonialist tendencies in the 'Outer World' did not want to go the whole route towards communism, opting instead for 'socialism', which would see the retention of some private property.

In addition, they differed from the national communists in that they followed the policy of non-alignment. This refers to the practice of neutrality in the Cold War: non-aligned countries went with neither the East nor West, choosing instead a 'Third Position'.

The most famous exponents of the 'Third Way' were Juan Peron (Argentina), Nassar (Egypt), Sukarno (Indonesia), and a host of other Third World demagogues. Yockey writes, in his essay The World in Flames (1961):

No estimate would be complete which leaves two great political developments out of account, both of recent years. The first is the Arab Revolt, led by a great and vigorous man, Gamal Abdul Nasser. The second is the formation of nationalist, neutralist regimes by such brilliant statesmen as Marshal Jozef Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Nehru of India, Field Marshal Ayub Khan of Pakistan, General Ibrahim Abboud of the Sudan, Sekou Toure of Guinea, Sukarno of Indonesia, Nkruniah of Ghana, and others. These personalities embody an Idea, none are out for money or publicity. They live simply, work for and live for their ideas. One such man, in a position of leadership, is a world-historical force. All lead weak political units, and cannot by themselves fight either of the great world-powers. But all want independence for their people; Nasser, for example, for some 300,000,000 Moslems. Each is a symbol to great human masses. Their significance, in each case, in this Estimate, is that they diminish the Jewish-American power without augmenting the Russian-Chinese power. By their Palestine policy, the Zionists may even succeed in driving the Arab world to fight for Russia. Eventually responsible leadership for a restive mass of some 180,000,000 Latin Americans will evolve. Already the seeds of revolt against Jewish-American economic domination have been sown. Witness Cuba.

Nowadays, the surviving national socialist regimes include Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Burma. The Burmese junta are the authors of a manifesto called 'The Burmese Path to Socialism;' Iraq and Syria both subscribe to the Arab nationalist and socialist ideology of Ba'athism.

The national socialist regimés mentioned by Yockey have either crossed over into the American sphere of influence or have become irrelevant. Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Egypt now serve as vassals to the West; the African nations have become insignificant - which is another way of saying that they are so strife-torn that no superpower can be bothered gaining a foothold there. (I am speaking of the black African states, of course, not the Arab ones in North Africa: Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, because of their proximity to Israel, occupy important places on the geopolitical chessboard). For the most part, the West has regained control over all its errant colonies - except that the Jews of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not Europeans and Americans, now rule 'the West'.

JEWISH ANTI-COMMUNISM

Up to 1948, we could say that all Jews were united in support of two causes: 'Bolshevism', as defined by Yockey, and the destruction of fascism and monarchism in Europe. Jews, in America and elsewhere, were Stalinist communists or liberal supporters of communism.

Then, after 1948, Jewish-controlled America became the biggest enemy of communism. All at once, we saw: former Jewish communists, such as Sydney Hook and Irving Kristol, leading an ideological assault on communism and founding the neoconservative movement; the Red Scare; the coming to American consciousness of the extent of Stalin's cruelty; accusations that the USSR was 'anti-Semitic'; and so on. Why?

Yockey's answer was as follows: in 1917, the Jews gained control of the Soviet Union; in 1933, the Jews gained control of America upon the election of Roosevelt; in 1945, the Jews, through the USA, controlled Europe and the entire colonial world; but by 1948 or thereabouts, the Jews had lost control of the Soviet Union, for the reasons described above.

At the end of the war, the Jews, possessed a vast European colonial empire; but, with the onset of the Cold War, they had to fight the colonial subjects who wanted 'Third Positionism' or an alliance with the Soviet Union.

But Jews are inherent Bolshevists, motivated by one desire: to destroy European-Western civilisation. Their quarrel is not with the peoples of the coloured races, but Westerners. They do not hate Russia with the same intensity that they hate the Germans.

As Yockey writes, in The World-:

Most of the cinema in North America treats Russia and Russians as interesting and admirable, human and good. The cinema's purpose in the general scheme of propaganda is to control the emotional attitudes of the population. Control of the intellectual attitudes is the work of the press, and here Russia is treated negatively. Why this duality? Every ruling regime gives perforce in its propaganda a picture of itself, and the Washington Zionist regime itself suffers from this quality. Russia is not a total enemy, but a rival. The Korean war, 1950-1953 expressed the limited hostility of the Washington regime toward Russia and its official war-aim was not "victory" or "unconditional surrender" [as per against Nazi Germany], but "a just truce". When the Germans in Russia make some new technical advance, Eisenhower congratulates the Moscow regime. Roosevelt never congratulated Hitler on such occasions. The Russian flag is flown in the United States on all festive, "international" occasions. Never did the German flag appear, nor does it today. The fundamental ineradicable Jewish hatred of Germany appears in the fact that even the Germany they control directly is not permitted to sit among the United Nations, on a par with the other puppets. The spate of anti-German films in the theatres and on television continues unabated. The anti-Russian films are few indeed. One conclusion emerges, of military-political significance: in the Third World War, the Washington regime will list Germany among its enemies. Already the radio propagandists say "Russia and Red Germany." The intention here is, not only that the German rifle battalions be slaughtered by the Russian advance, but that the way be opened for the bombardment of Germany again, this time with more destructive bombs.

To a certain extent, Jewry considered communist Russia and China to be friendly rivals, not deadly enemies, like Nazi Germany, which had to be destroyed at all costs. And, certainly, Jewry sympathised with the Bolshevist aims of the Russians and Chinese- eg, the goal of the liberation of the Third World from European and white domination.

THE FACTIONAL SPLIT IN JEWRY

One of the most common objections to anti-Semitism is that anti-Semites lump all Jews together, making them out to be a monolithic conspiracy, when clearly Jews disagree on a good many questions - Israel for instance.

Most rational non-Jews, who are not completely deluded by philo-Semitic and Zionist propaganda, will agree that Israel and its supporters in Diaspora Jewry are a vicious bunch. But, say the incorrigible philo-Semites, 'Not all Jews support Israel. Why, my friend Greenburg hates Israel, and he's a Jew'.

The fact that Bush Jr (like every American president before him) is a slave of Israel, and that his foreign policy is written for him by hard-right Zionist Jews like Richard Perle, is an open secret. But we all know, too, that Jews such as Noam Chomsky, Israel Shamir, Israel Shahak, Norman Finklestein and even mainstream Jewish reporters such as Suzanne Goldenberg (of the British newspaper The Guardian) and Orla Guerin (of the BBC) number among the biggest boosters of the Palestinian cause.

The dichotomy is explained by the fact that Jewry now is in the possession of the mightiest military and political power in history - the United States - and all the vassal states which the US has conquered through force or diplomacy. As the ruling élite of the Jewish-American State, it is under an obligation to maintain the empire if it does not wish to surrender it. At the same time, it feels sympathy for the 'Third World', even for the Palestinians in their national liberation struggle against Israel.

Jewry is divided into two factions: on the left, we find the liberal Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews who feel that the Arabs are their natural allies in the struggle against European civilisation; on the right, the neoconservative hawks - a tendency represented now by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz - who want to use goyim armies to annihilate the enemies of Israel.

Yockey, describing the factional split in Jewry, writes in The World- that:

It is a psychological riddle, decipherable only thus: the Zionists have two minds, which function independently. As Zionists, they are committed to the destruction of the Western Civilization, and in this they sympathize with Russia, with China, with Japan, with the Arabs, and as such they anathematize Germany, which is the mind and heart of the Western Civilization. As custodians of the United States, they must half-heartedly remain at least the technical and political domination of that Civilization even while destroying its soul and its meaning. In a word, they are working simultaneously for and against the Western Civilization. Quite obviously they are thus doing more damage than conferring benefit! If a commander of a fortress sympathizes with the enemy, but yet insists in defending the fortress rather than surrendering it, he has surely found the highest formula of destruction.

GOOD JEW, BAD JEW

William Pierce, in a radio talk, once spoke of the factional divisions in the (2002) coalition government in Israel: on one side, Shimon Peres, the leader of the Labour Party, the "dove"; on the other, Ariel Sharon, the leader of the Likud, the "hawk". Peres and Sharon, Pierce said, were 'good cop and bad cop', or at least hoped to present themselves as so to the goyim of the West.

Clearly one could not find two Jews more dissimilar than, for instance, radical leftist Noam Chomsky and extreme Likudnik Richard Perle - but are they that dissimilar?

Both the Zionists and anti-Zionists only differ in the field of foreign policy. The Zionist Right in America generally agrees with the social program of the anti-Zionist Left. That is, both favour: more forced immigration of non-whites; more multiculturalism; more MTV; more pornography; more cultural nihilism; more permissiveness towards Negro and Hispanic crime; more attacks on the cultural heritage of Europeans and Americans; and so on. Certainly neither Jewish faction can abide any Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism or "racism" of any sort (although the neoconservative Right is sympathetic to anti-Muslim "racism"). Holocaust Revisionism is definitely out.

The truth of the matter Jewish-American "liberals" and "conservatives" are working towards the same Jewish-Bolshevist goals: they only disagree on how these are to be implemented.
The neoconservatives believe that 'democracy' and 'free markets' will do the trick and should be imposed upon recalcitrant Muslim nations, by force if necessary. The radical Jewish-American left, on the other hand, focuses on domestic policy: it wants to eliminate 'capitalism'.

That 'capitalism' is not, of course, Jewish capitalism (Jews are the wealthiest economic group in America), but the capitalism of the Rockefellers and Fords and other Yankee, WASP, East Coast plutocrats - the kind who ruled America before the ascent to power of Roosevelt and his gang of Jewish liberals and crypto-communists.

The America before 1933, as Pierce wrote, was, for all its faults, healthy and white, and for this reason the American Jews of both the Right and Left hate it and want to extirpate it. The neoconservatives may not be as obsessed with destroying European culture and civilisation from within as the liberal and anti-Zionist Jews are, but this is because they give the political destruction of enemies of Israel more priority than anything else.

Even so, the neoconservatives are not completely indifferent to domestic politics. They will use the opportunity of a civil state of emergency, like the present one that exists in America, to crack down on white nationalists, anti-Semites, Holocaust Deniers, and so on.

OPPORTUNITIES & STRATEGIES

The Bush administration, since 9-11, has been a godsend for anti-Semites: America, as a power, has become completely Israelised; it emanates the obnoxiousness, the self-centredness, the solipsism and the bullying arrogance of the Jew. As a result, it has alienated the Muslim world and not a few independent-thinking Europeans, of all political persuasions, as well. (At this rate, we can only hope that Bush and his neoconservative coterie win re-election in 2004).

It is possible that Jewry will win its war against the Muslim enemies of Israel: after all, it won the war against Nazi Germany, and against post-Stalinist Russia - both of whom were tougher opponents than the Arabs. But the world has become tired of Jews. One can say that Jewry has long been the chairman of the board of the 'Bolshevist' corporation, but now the shareholders - the coloured peoples of the Third World countries the USA rules or seeks to rule - are becoming disgruntled. Perhaps the coloured peoples will look for, and find, a new leader in the person of Russia or China.

What of the peoples of European descent? Should they join forces, like the National Bolshevists of old, with the Third World enemies of Jewry - ie, China, Russia and the 'rogue states'?

Obviously, the National Bolshevism of Yockey, Thiriart, Otto Remer ended in failure: by the 1980s, it was apparent to all that any alliance between European nationalists and the USSR would fail to deliver the goods. The world economy had been torn apart in the 1970s, and the USSR's brand of socialism - unlike China's - was incapable of weathering the storm. The USSR, then, was placed in a position of extreme weakness, with the results we all know. We in the movement sided with a loser; it is possible that, by siding with the Arabs, we are siding with another loser, and that the Arabs will be defeated just as the Russians were.

One of the problems with Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism is that neither of them possesses a true antagonism towards the Jews and Israel. The truth is that Judaism is part and parcel of the Arabic-Middle Eastern culture, history and civilisation. At bottom, the quarrel between the Arabs and the Jews is nothing more than a brother's quarrel - like, for instance, a quarrel between French and Germans. The Muslims really only make two demands on America and Israel: that Israel withdraw from the Occupied Territories, evacuate the settlements, and allow the formation of a Palestinian State; and that Israel withdraw from the Golan Heights.

Were Israel to do so, it would guarantee peace with the Palestinians and with Syria, and the entire Muslim world, and we in the West would lose an ally in the Arabs.

On the other hand, we in the West who are aware of the Jews' true character have grievances against the Jew too numerous to mention. At bottom is our visceral disgust for the Jew: we do not see him as a wayward brother, as the Muslims do, but a total enemy who is completely foreign to us and who is responsible for the most terrible crimes in history. We will not be satisfied by a mere Israeli withdrawal from the Territories and the Golan - what good would that do us?

Eventually, we in the West will need to wage war against the Jew - a total, no-holds barred, war. The Arabs and the rest of the coloured world will have no stomach for that: their opposition to the Jew is merely political, not racial, cultural, spiritual.

Furthermore, the Arabs and the rest of the Third World will oppose the revival of an America and a Europe under a white, as opposed to Jewish, leadership. The three superpowers today are China, Russia and Israel-America. The coloured races have no real objection to this arrangement: they much prefer that America and Europe be ruled by Jews than by whites, for Jews are fellow members of the 'Bolshevist' club, and victims, like them, of Western "racism" and oppression.

Suppose that the Negroes of America were given a choice between the present Jewish-controlled politicians - who at least can be counted upon to give them plenty of welfare - and a government of white separatists: who would they choose? The question answers itself.
FNF NOTE: At this point I must object. Why should they have to choose between either? Why not give them a government and a community/land of their own which they and they alone are responsible for its success or failure?

It is true that Westerners who want to overthrow Jewish rule are in a vulnerable position, that we need all the help we can get - and that means help from the Russians, Chinese and the Arabs. American nationalists should not even spurn offers of assistance from disaffected Negroes and Hispanics.

THE VERDICT ON NATIONAL SOCIALISM

Whether or not one adopts a National Bolshevist stance - and by that I mean a stance of anti-Semitic socialism - depends on one's economic views. Some in the movement see capitalism as a degrading, exploitative, unstable economic system which must be replaced with socialism at all costs; others have no problem with it. Clearly, socialism, at the present, is further away from realisation in the Western world more than ever. Despite the recurring financial and economic crises which have occurred since 1970, capitalism still endures. I would venture to say that, at this point in time, socialism - or even corporatism, which has been championed by many distinguished theorists of post-war fascism - is an unrealistic option.

At any rate, we in the movement should strive for product differentiation: that is, offering prospective recruits something they will not find in, for instance, the ideologies of anarchism/Marxism, environmentalism, conservatism, and so on. Our strength lies in our willingness to address racial politics, and, above all, our willingness to name the Jew.

Certainly anti-Semitism is compatible with a wide variety of ideologies: there is no reason why the Green parties around the world should not stand on anti-Semitic, anti-Israel platforms and espouse Holocaust denial. Likewise, there is no reason why a 'pink' liberal cannot be racialist: after all, the Democrat Party in America was the bastion of Southern racialism for many years.
But it just so happens that only our movement is left to take up cudgels on the race question and the Jew question. The Jews and their vassals have seized control of all the disparate political factions of the West - on both the Left and Right - and succeeded in removing any "racist" and anti-Semitic ideological elements. The movement, on the other hand, has been left alone. Part of this is because our movement, in the post-war years, has been too small and unimportant for the Jews to infiltrate and take over; but mostly it is because we have deliberately fostered an environment in which no Jew could ever feel welcome.

As a result, we in the movement have the monopoly on racialism and anti-Semitism, and, in these present times, when the Jewish domination of American and European policy is becoming clear to even the most imperceptive individuals, we should be exploiting that monopoly as much as possible. That means, then, putting our doctrines on economics and social policy on the back burner for the time being. The movement, at the present, is incapable of steering the Western world towards socialism: but it can foment anti-Semitism, which will do more to destabilise the Jewish (and Masonic?) political and financial power structure more than any socialist polemics.



Russian National Unity and National Bolshevik Flags provided courtesy of FOTW. For further information on the flags of the rising 'Red and Brown Axis,' visit:NAT. BOLSH. FLAGS

FNF NOTE: The author's conclusion that for now, we must place all other Social Justice issues and environmental concerns aside are entirely disagreed with. Our greatest strength is that we are not just simple minded racists like the majority of the "movement" he speaks of. Our strengths are given to us by the fact that we are concerned with a plethora of issues, folkish autonomy is but one of the many issues we are taking heed to. Those that only concentrate one the one issue, we believe, are doomed to failure. The so-called "movement" that is referred to throughout the article has only that one cause. It is for that reason that their "movement" is stagnant and hasn't moved anywhere for decades. The very thought of giving space on one of their websites to causes like National Bolshevism, National Anarchism, and Third Position movements would send most of these pathetic right-wing reactionaries into anaphylactic shock! Instead, we must move forward, not left or right, and continue in the fight for National Freedom, as well as Social Justice!

Taken from http://www.folkandfaith.com/articles/nationalbolshevism.shtml

ON KAMERADSCHAFT

by Welf Herfurth*


This is an article about German nationalism - specifically, about the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) - and what other nationalists outside Germany can learn from the NPD's practical approach to politics and creating a ‘parallel society’.

The NPD has been achieving good results in German state elections recently, and may even do well in upcoming federal elections. But, aside from some electoral success (which is not as hard as one might think for the 'Far Right' to achieve in Europe), the NPD have experienced some success in building up a mass support base in Germany as well - an extra-parliamentary support base. Their thinking is that nationalism must first become a popular mass movement as well as an electoral one: it is this that should be given a priority.

Nationalists, of course, are aware of how adverse the political situation is for nationalism in Germany. It is a general rule, I think, of modern politics that the more strategically important a country is in the nationalist struggle, the more repressive it will be.

France and Germany, by my own estimation, are the most repressive states on the Continent. Which is not to say that censorship and persecution are not equally strong elsewhere: but that the liberal-Zionist establishment seems to stand to lose more if France and German go nationalist, the two countries being widely acknowledged as the two leading powers on the Continent? It is fair to say that were nationalists to gain power in France and Germany, followed by Britain, Spain and Italy, the other European countries would fall like dominoes – Europe itself would see a pan-European nationalist revolution. Which is why the liberal, pro-USA and pro-Israel establishment devotes so much time to persecuting and censoring nationalists in France and Germany.

But this alone does not explain, I think, precisely why the nationalist struggle in Germany in particular is so important. Most nationalists are very sympathetic to German nationalism, out of a sense of solidarity: which is why Le Pen's Front National, and the British National Party, for example, cultivate ties with the NPD. But, surprisingly enough, there is little evidence of any desire to imitate the 'German model' of post war nationalism. Which is surprising, considering the number of Nutzis, for instance, who are present in the movement.

But it is evident that the Nutzis are only interested in one period of German history – the period of the Third Reich, and its inception - and in nothing that came before or after; their desire is to bring about another Hitlerian revolution (what Francis Parker Yockey called 'The European Revolution of 1933') in 'white' countries across the world. Everything is interpreted through the Nutzi ideological prism: Bill White's website, www.overthrow.com, regularly classifies the NPD as a 'National Socialist' party - ie, Nutzi and American. One would expect the Nutzis to display some form of Germanophilism, an exaggerated respect for German political and cultural achievements (which one finds in the thinking of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Yockey, both non-Germans). But, ironically, Nutzism and its related 'white power'/white nationalist offshoots have very little interest in German nationalism since the war.

The position I will be taking in this article is a very unusual one and might be hard to understand for non Germans. I am recommending here that nationalist movements outside of Germany pay attention to the 'German model' and deliberately isolate some of its elements and incorporate them into their own ideologies and practices; their aim should be to minimise the parochial elements unique to their own countries (America, France, Australia or whatever) and become more 'German' and more 'Prussian'.

Our starting point here is Spengler's famous essay 'Prussianism and Socialism' (1920). Spengler's essay can be seen as a sketch of a certain economic and social system which was later embodied in German National Socialism. But it was more than an economic program, but a style of life, which transcends National Socialism. The Nutzis who appropriate National Socialist uniforms and symbols are using the outer trappings of 'Prussianism', leaving the basics and fundamentals untouched. The German Nationalists, today's NPD, and the German trade unions led by August Bebel (a figure praised by Spengler) contain the German or 'Prussian' spirit, which Spengler describes as follows:

I should like to make clear what I mean by the term "Prussianism." The name, of course, refers to an area of Europe where certain attitudes took on impressive shape and began to evolve. But Prussianism is, first and foremost, a feeling, an instinct, a compulsion. It is the embodiment of spiritual and intellectual traits—and that means also of certain physical qualities—that have long since become the distinguishing characteristics of a race, or rather of the best and most typical representatives of this race. Certainly not every person born in England is "English" in the racial sense; and not everyone born in Prussia in genuinely "Prussian." This word denotes everything we Germans possess by way of destiny, will, inner drive, and ability, and nothing of our vague ideas, desires, and whims. There are true Prussian types in all of Germany—I am thinking of men like Friedrich List and Hegel, of certain inventors, scholars, engineers, and organizers, but especially of a particular type of German worker. Since the Battles of Rossbach and Leuthen there have been many Germans who in the depth of their souls have harbored a small strain of Prussianism, a potential source of energy which can become active at great moments of history.
As yet, however, the only real Prussian achievements have been the creations of Frederick William I and Frederick the Great: the Prussian state and the Prussian people. ('Prussians and Englishmen', 11, in 'Prussianism and Socialism')

He goes on to say that:

To the Prussian way of thinking, the will of the individual is subsumed under the will of the totality.
The officers’ corps, the members of the civil service branches, August Bebel’s army of workers, and ultimately the German Volk of 1813, 1870, and 1914 have all felt, willed, and acted as a suprapersonal unity. This is not just herd instinct; it is an expression of sublime strength and freedom, something which the outsider can never understand. Prussianism is exclusive. Even in its proletarian form it rejects the workers of other countries together with their egoistic pseudo-socialism. ('Prussians and Englishmen', 13)

The essential thing is that such a spirit exists beyond a program, or even a party which competes against other parties in elections. As Spengler writes:

Socialism, i.e., Prussianism as it is not yet understood, is a real entity of the highest order.
Marxism is literature. Literature can become obsolete; reality either conquers or dies. We need only compare socialist criticism as it is heard at international conventions with but one socialist fact, the party of August Bebel. The popular phrase about ideas making history, when understood as it should be, is nothing but the special pleading of literary gossips. Ideas cannot be expressed. An artist can see them, a thinker can feel them, a statesman or soldier can make them real. Ideas become conscious only through the blood—instinctively, not by means of abstract contemplation. They make their existence known by the life style of peoples, the symbolism of deeds and accomplishments. And whether or not people are aware of them, either correctly or falsely, is a trifling matter. ('Marx', 21, in 'Prussianism and Socialism')

So, this is what the NPD possesses which many other nationalist organisations outside of Germany do not: a uniquely Prussian and communitarian (if we reject the Blairite overtones of such a word) spirit. This manifests itself in the NPD's extra-parliamentary activities, especially in the eastern parts of Germany: it runs kindergartens, discos, youth groups, community volunteer organisations which assist pensioners... Volunteer organisations like the fire brigades, Technische Hilfswerk (a equivalent of the Australian SES), Red Cross, etc, are full of nationalists and in some parts of Germany these organisations are fully controlled by nationalists.

The ‘infiltration’ of nationalists became such a problem that in 2005 the interior minister of Brandenburg, a state in the eastern part of Germany, called for the banning of nationalists in any volunteer organisation. Unfortunately for the minister this was rebuked by the very same volunteer organisations with the warning that if nationalists should be not allowed to become members the services would have such a shortage of volunteers that many units would not be able to function.

These techniques for building up grass-roots support are nothing new: after all, the Italian Fascists and the German National Socialists used them, and had borrowed them from the Italian and German communist parties. But the essential thing is that the NPD uses them in the service of an Idea (as Spengler defines them): which, if put into words, is to be expressed (vaguely) as feeling of Volksgemeinschaft, or Kameradschaft, of Germans helping other Germans. Moreover, this is done in a disciplined (I should say self-disciplined) and almost militaristic manner, and out of a sense of duty. Spengler writes that:

Service—that is the style of Old Prussia, similar to that of Old Spain, which also created a people by engaging in knightly warfare against the heathen. Not "I" but "we"—a feeling of community to which every individual sacrifices his whole being. The individual does not matter; he must offer himself to the totality. All exist for all, and all partake of that glorious inner freedom, the libertas oboe dientiae which has always distinguished the best exemplars of Prussian breeding. The Prussian army, Prussian civil service, and August Bebel’s workers’ brigades are all products of this breeding principle. ('Prussians and Englishmen', 12)

This is pre-State politics, pre-parliamentary politics. It shows that, in order to be 'nationalist' in Germany, one need not have control of parliament; that or a massive army of panzers and Messerschmitts.

The 'Prussianism' of the German people can be expressed in an extra-parliamentarian and communitarian way, by small actions which, taken together, benefit the totality. The NPD understood that grass roots level involvement is the key to electoral success. While all the other parties talk about the problems in the society, the NPD and other nationalists work in and within the community to solve the problems first hand.

Media commentators are always remarking that the German economy is a mess, which is true. Germany, like France, is one of the richest countries in the world, but has high unemployment and low levels of economic growth. It would be easy to blame this on purely economic causes, as the critics of the German government want to do; certainly, Chancellor Angela Merkel's tax hikes have made the German economy (already unhealthy under Schröder) worse. The economists prescribe solutions which are purely economical: cut taxes, get rid of the excessive restrictions on hiring and firing workers, and cut down on the excessive social security contributions employers are forced to pay, and the German economy will be fine again. Because of the increased economic growth, Germans will be too busy enjoying themselves to notice the creeping immigration problem (and the economic growth will only attract more immigrants).
And, not only will the immigrant problem recede from the consciousness of the average German, so will Germany's servitude to Israel and America, forced upon it by Germany's defeat in the war and sixty years of Holocaust-brainwashing. What German would care about redressing past historical injustices - eg., the expulsion of the Germans from the East, or the Morgenthau Plan - when he is making money?

This is more or less the plan the liberal-democrats have for Germany (and for France and the other 'sick' countries of Europe). Economic growth, and a solution to Germany's unemployment problem, is desirable, of course. But it is likely that neither will be achieved under Merkel's government, or the one after that, or the one after that. The Germans, at this point in time, have an inability to get their act together. What is lacking is not only decisiveness, but, importantly, a feeling of goodwill, or, as I would put it, Volksgemeinschaft.

The enemies of German nationalism are always comparing today's economic circumstances to that of 1932: each election victory by the so-called "Far Right" is a sign of "rising Neo-Nazism" which will see the arrival of a "Fourth Reich", and so on. This is all nonsense, of course: but one similarity exists between the Germany of 2006 and the Germany of 1932, and that is the absence of the feeling of a Volksgemeinschaft. The German National Socialists were accused of having a rather vague program before they took office; that is, they did not have a plan. But they did have a sense of Volksgemeinschaft, and it was their appeal to Germany - their call for Germans to start helping other Germans - which led to the turnaround in the German economy. It was the same spirit which existed in the catastrophic aftermath of WWII and the deliberate devastation of Germany through the Morgenthau Plan - that this time the Germans will pull through, through co-operation and effort.

One cannot induce that spirit through self-abnegation - self-abnegation which exists in Germany today, where Turkish immigrants are considered "German" and massive government funds are earmarked as compensation payments to Jews who were "gassed" by Germans during the war (and then many turned up alive again). Germany's economic problems go beyond the economy - it is not merely a matter of taxes and trade union laws.

But the same applies to the rest of Europe. Britain, for instance, has low unemployment figures (at least on paper); but it suffers from more or less the same problems as does Germany - for one, social isolation and a paralysis in the face of immigration, which erodes the British identity and threatens to depopulate the British Isles of white Britons altogether. Just as serious is the sordidness of British life, especially British urban life. This is symbolised by the rise of the 'chav' - the Briton who dresses up as a Negro, engages in petty and violent crime, destroys himself through drink and drugs, fathers illegitimate children (all supported by the welfare state) and drops out of school in his teens.

We are seeing the rise here of a new social type, a new type of ‘Untermenschen’, which will spread to the Continent as well. These problems are exacerbated, in Britain, by a traditional spirit of liberal individualism, which, as Spengler would say, is part of the British soul, as it were. But again, they can be partly relieved by the infusion of Volksgemeinschaft - imported from Germany. The same goes for France, and the same for Spain and Italy.

The key is for nationalists to organise themselves into hierarchical, disciplined, extra-parliamentary communitarian organisations - activist organisations. This spreads the word on the ground that nationalism (whether it be in Australia, Britain, France or Spain) is a good thing - that the media is distorting nationalism when it portrays it as the exclusive domain of skinheads intent on beating up foreigners. But, more than a good public relations exercise, such activism also embodies a new Idea - the Prussian Idea - of self-sacrifice and dedication to the good of one's community. (It goes without saying that this is the community which is indigenous to those countries - not the community of Kurdish asylum seekers or Albanian day labourers).

At this point, the reader will be wondering how a French nationalist can become 'Prussian', if 'Prussianism', as Spengler defines it, is something so uniquely German. But, while 'Prussianism' is of the blood, it can be transferred. Yockey wrote that Mussolini 'Effected the transformation of Italy by infusing it with the Prussian-German Socialist Ethos' ('Stronger Power-Currents in an Age of Absolute Politics' in 'The Enemy of Europe'), in the 1920s, and that 'In this century, it is of scant importance what language a European speaks and in what geographic area he was brought up. Of importance only is the spirituality that permeates his inner life. Europe’s Churchill’s and Toyne’s prove that it is possible for Americans to be born and raised in Europe. The example of Mussolini shows that an ethical Prussian can be born and raised in the Romagna, and the examples of Ezra Pound, William Joyce, Robert Best, Douglas Chandler, and others show that Europeans can be born or raised in America'. ('The Demise of the Western Nations' in 'The Enemy of Europe')

Indeed, I would argue that all of the fascism of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s was an expression of the German Idea - that Mosley, Mussolini, Quisling and the rest were 'Prussian' in the same way that Mussolini was. But one of the main differences between European nationalism then and now is that the fascists were proponents of corporatist economic programs, of remodeling Europe's capitalist economies on the basis of the corporatist guilds of the Middle Ages. Even the post-war theorists of neo-fascism, such as Yockey and Evola, were attracted to the idea. But this essay is not endorsing corporatism, or any economic program - or, indeed, any program which can be expressed in a political manifesto for an organisation trying to get itself elected to parliament. One of the shortcomings of modern nationalism is that it thinks too much of these things: draw up a manifesto, and try to get elected with it - as if this were the way that politics works.

The NPD's approach, on the other hand, is to concentrate on three battles: the battles for the streets of Germany, the battles for the minds of the intellectuals and, finally, the battle for the parliaments.

Again, community-based activism is something that the Maoists, for instance, attempt to do; but their main tool is guerrilla warfare and intimidation of the peasant population. After the rural areas have been won over, the Maoist insurgency can concentrate on the cities, in particular, the capital. We nationalists, of course, differ from the Maoists in our choice of means and ends; but the idea of 'communities first' is a good one. Nationalism has to be expressed as a style, as a way of life, before it can become an electoral movement.

Before drafting this essay, I discussed the idea of Volksgemeinschaft, and what the German nationalists were attempting to do with it, with an apolitical friend. He accused us, German nationalists, of using a myth - of a uniquely German or 'Prussian' spirit – which did not in fact exist. The German nationalists were creating Volksgemeinschaft through the act of living it. I could have argued with him that 'Prussianism' is not a fiction; but this would have been beside the point. The Holocaust, one could argue, is an extrapolation, but it has been an extremely profitable one for the Jews and one which has brought post-war Germany (and Europe) to its knees; Zionism, or rather, the Jewish claim to Palestine, is a myth, but it is one that ethnically cleansed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the former Palestine and led to the creation of the most powerful State in the Western world.

So how can nationalists here in Australia imitate the German example? The essential thing is to take small steps at the beginning. Nationalists can buy goods and services off other nationalists. (For instance, at a skinhead concert, a tattooist was pointed out to me as a fellow nationalist. If I wanted a tattoo, I was told, I should go this man. And indeed I should: why spend money on a tattooist who is apolitical or not a nationalist?). Nationalists can also join volunteer community organisations - such as volunteer fire brigades, the SES, Red Cross, Scout groups, ect.

Unions, too, are examples of large, extra-parliamentary, community-based organisations (which is why communists have traditionally spent so much time and effort infiltrating them). Suppose that one powerful trade union had a hundred, or two hundred, or more, nationalist activists - that would be a powerful force. (It needs not even be a blue-collar union - imagine that the white-collar financial services unions had a large nationalist membership). There are many possibilities in this direction.

Equally as important, if not more so, is to break down stereotypes of what a nationalist is. On Jewish-produced TV shows and in Hollywood movies ('American History X', 'Oz', and so forth), nationalists are portrayed as skinhead misfits who end up in jail, for instance. With her lowbrow and populist attitude, Pauline Hanson reinforced the notion of Australian nationalists as being stupid (and a few are - but there are many stupid leftists, as well). When meeting non-nationalists, it is important to make a positive first impression as a person, as a human being - and then let them know that you are nationalist. Often they are surprised that someone with education, and a good job, can be a nationalist. Their perception, fed by the Jewish-owned media, is that anyone who is an 'extreme' nationalist is a "Nazi" who is covered in swastika tattoos, etc. So the discovery that a normal, decent intelligent human being can be a so-called "Nazi" is a big shock to them.

Politics is not a collection of truths, but of facts, as Spengler would say. What matters is what is done.

The German nationalists have very little: not much in the way of an intellectual, worked-out ideology (in the way that the Marxists do); they cannot use uniforms, or salutes, and, for their national flags, must use old German Imperial flags as a symbol of Germany before it was reduced to vassaldom. But, in their discipline and their service to the community, in their comradeship, they represent the true Germany, the German Idea.

And it is this what matters; the organisation of the German people into a community which does not hate itself, which thinks and acts as a totality. Never mind the fact that today's Germans do not see themselves as 'Prussian' and hate themselves and their history; so long as a small minority is the standard-bearer of the German Idea, Germany is preserved. By liberating Germany from bondage to NATO and Israel, and reconstructing a new Germany (really the old Germany) on the basis of Volksgemeinschaft, the German nationalists will liberate Europe and the West as well - but only if nationalists world wide follow their example.

*Welf Herfurth is a political activist who lives in Sydney / Australia. He was born and raised in Germany. He can be contacted on herfurth@iinet.net.au

The Political Horizon

Introduction to "The Hour of Decision,"

by Oswald Spenger,


1

Is there today a man among the White races who has eyes to see what is going on around him on the face of the globe? To see the immensity of the danger which looms over this mass of peoples? I do not speak of the educated or uneducated city crowds, the newspaper-readers, the herds who vote at elections -- and, for that matter, there is no longer any quality-differenee between voters and those for whom they vote -- but of the ruling classes of the White nations, in so far as they have not been destroyed, of the statesmen in so far as there are any left; of the true leaders of policy, of economic life, of armies, and of thought. Does anyone, I ask, see over and beyond his time, his own continent, his country, or even the narrow circle of his own activities?

We live in momentous times. The stupendous dynamism of the historical epoch that has now dawned makes it the grandest, not only in the Faustian civilization of Western Europe, but -- for that very reason -- in all world-history, greater and by far more terrible than the ages of Caesar and Napoleon. Yet how blind are the human beings over whom this mighty destiny is surging, whirling them in confusion, exalting them, destroying them! Who among them sees and comprehends what is being done to them and around them? Some wise old Chinaman or Indian, perhaps, who gazes around him in silence with the stored-up thought of a thousand years in his soul. But how superficial, how narrow, how small-minded are the judgments and measures of Western Europe and America! What do the inhabitants of the Middle West of the United States know of what goes on beyond New York and San Francisco? What conception has a middle-class Englishman, not to speak of a French provincial, of the trend of affairs on the Continent? What, indeed, does any one of them know of the direction in which his very own destiny is facing? All we have is a number of absurd catchwords, such as "overcoming the economic crisis," "understanding of peoples," "national security and self-sufficingness," with which to "overcome" catastrophes within the space of a generation or two by means of "prosperity" and disarmament.

But it is of Germany that I am speaking here: Germany, to whom the storm of facts is more menacing than to any other country and whose existence is, in the most alarming sense of the word, at stake. What short-sightedness and noisy superficiality reigns among us, and how provincial the standpoint when major problems emerge! Let us set up a ring-fenced Third Empire or, alternatively, Soviet State; let us do away with the army or with property, with economists, or with agriculture; let us give maximum independence to all the little provinces, or alternatively suppress them; let us allow the former lords of industry or administration to get to work again in the style of 1900, or -- why not? -- let us have a revolution, proclaim a dictatorship (are there not dozens of candidates confident of their fitness for the job?), and all will be well.

But -- Germany is not an island. No other country is in the same degree woven actively or passively into the world's destiny. Her geographical situation alone, her lack of natural boundaries, make this inevitable. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries she was "Central Europe"; in the twentieth she is again, as in and after the thirteenth century, a frontier against "Asia." For no country is it more essential that its sphere of political and economic thought should reach far beyond its own boundaries. Everything that happens afar involves the heart of Germany.

Our past is having its revenge -- seven hundred years of the petty provincial regime of small states with never a breath of greatness, an idea, an aim. This is not going to be made good in two generations. And Bismarck's creative work had the one great fault that he did not train the coming generation to meet the facts of the new form of our political life. The facts were seen, but not grasped. Men could not inwardly adapt themselves to the new horizons, problems, and obligations. They did not live with them. And the average German continued to apply to his greater country the old particularist and partisan outlook -- shallow and cramped, stupid and parochial. This small-mindedness dates from the time of the Hohenstaufen emperors and the Hansa. The first, whose vision ranged over the Mediterranean, and the second, whose rule extended from the Scheldt to Novgorod, alike fell before other and more securely based powers for want of wise and substantial backing from within their own frontiers. And from that time on, the German has shut himself up in innumerable little fatherlands and petty local interests, measuring world history by his own horizon, and dreaming hungrily and miserably of a kingdom in the clouds -- to describe which condition the phrase "German idealism" was invented. To this petty and essentially German mode of thought belong almost all the political ideals and Utopias that have sprouted from the bog of the Weimar State: the International, Communist, Pacifist, Ultramontane, Federal, Aryan visions of sacrum imperium, Soviet State, or Third Empire, as the case might be.

All parties now think and act as if Germany had the world to herself. Trade unions see no further than the industrial area. Colonial policy has always been odious to them because it does not fit in with the scheme of class war. In their dogmatic narrowness they do not, or will not, comprehend that it was precisely the working man for whom the economic imperialism of the years round 1900, with its assured facilities for the sale of products and the purchase of raw materials, was the basic premise of existence. This the English workman had long before grasped. The enthusiasm of German democracy for disarmament stops short at the frontiers of the French sphere of power. The Federalists would have their already greatly reduced country split up again into a bundle of dwarf states of the old sort, thereby giving foreign powers the opportunity to play off one against the other. And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.

2

ADDED to all this is the universal dread of reality. We "pale-faces" have it, all of us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the spiritual weakness of the "Late" man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time, and death. He has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place. That is what he longs to -- forget, refute, or contest. He takes flight from history into solitude, into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another, or into suicide. Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and cowardly optimism: it is so, but it ought not to be, therefore it is otherwise. We sing in the woods at night because we are afraid. Similarly, the cowardice of cities shouts its apparent optimism to the world at large for very fear. Reality is no longer to be borne. The wish-picture of the future is set in place of facts -- although fate has never taken any notice of human fancies -- from the children's Land of Do-Nothing to the World Peace and Workers' Paradise of the grown-ups.

Little as one knows of events in the future -- for all that can be got from a comparison with other civilizations is the general form of future facts and their march through the ages -- so much is certain: the forces which will sway the future are no other than those of the past. These forces are: the will of the Strong, healthy instincts, race, the will to possession and power; while justice, happiness, and peace -- those dreams which will always remain dreams -- hover ineffectively over them.

Further, in our own civilization since the sixteenth century it has rapidly grown more impossible for most of us to gain a general view of the ever more confusing events and situations of world politics and economics or to grasp (let alone control) the forces and tendencies at work in them. True statesmen become rarer and rarer. Most of the doings (as distinct from the events) in the history of these centuries was indeed the work of semi-experts and amateurs with luck on their side. Still, they could always rely upon the people's instinct to back them. It is only now that this instinct has become so weak, and the voluble criticism of blithe ignorance so strong, as to make it more and more likely that a true statesman, with a real knowledge of things, will not receive this instinctive support -- even at the level of grudging tolerance -- but will be prevented from doing what has to be done by the opposition of all the "know-betters." Frederick the Great experienced the first of these types of opposition; Bismarck almost fell a victim to the second. Only later generations, and not even they, can appreciate the grandeur and creativeness of such leaders. But we do have to see to it that the present confines itself to ingratitude and incomprehension and does not proceed to counteraction. Germans in particular are great at suspecting, criticizing, and voiding creative action. They have none of that historical experience and force of tradition which are congenital with English life. A nation of poets and thinkers -- in the process of becoming a nation of babblers and persecutors. Every real governor is unpopular among his frightened, cowardly, and uncomprehending contemporaries. And one must be more than an "idealist" to understand even this.

We are still in the Age of Rationalism, which began in the eighteenth century and is now rapidly nearing its close. We all are its creatures whether we know and wish it or not. The word is familiar enough, but who knows how much it implies? It is the arrogance of the urban intellect, which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct, looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the wisdom of ancient peasant stock. It is the period in which everyone can read and write and therefore must have his say and always "knows better." This type of mind is obsessed by concepts -- the new gods of the Age -- and it exercises its wits on the world as it sees it. "It is no good," it says; "we could make it better; here goes, let us set up a program for a better world!" Nothing could be easier for persons of intelligence, and no doubt seems to be felt that this world will then materialize of itself. It is given a label, "Human Progress," and now that it has a name, it is. Those who doubt it are narrow reactionaries, heretics, and, what is worse, persons devoid of democratic virtue: away with them! In this wise the fear of reality was overcome by intellectual arrogance, the darkness that comes from ignorance of all things of life, spiritual poverty, lack of reverence, and, finally, world-alien stupidity -- for there is nothing stupider than the rootless urban intelligence. In English offices and clubs it used to be called common sense; in French salons, esprit; in German philosophers' studies, Pure Reason. The shallow optimism of the cultural philistine is ceasing to fear the elemental historical facts and beginning to despise them. Every "know-better" seeks to absorb them in his scheme (in which experience has no part), to make them conceptually more complete than actually they are, and to subordinate them to himself in his mind because he has not livingly experienced them, but only perceived them.

This doctrinaire clinging to theory for lack of experience, or rather this lack of ability to make experience, finds literary expression in a flood of schemes for political, social, and economic systems and Utopias, and practical expression in that craze for organization which, becoming an aim in itself, produces bureaucracies that either collapse through their own hollowness or destroy the living order. Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of a creator: he dissects and he reassembles; conception and birth are alien to him. Accordingly his work is artificial and lifeless, and when brought into contact with real life, it kills. All these systems and organizations are paper productions; they are methodical and absurd and live only on the paper they are written on. The process began at the time of Rousseau and Kant with philosophical ideologies that lost themselves in generalities; passed in the nineteenth century to scientific constructions with scientific, physical, Darwinian methods -- sociology, economics, materialistic history-writing -- and lost itself in the twentieth in the literary output of problem novels and party programs.

But let there be no mistake: idealism and materialism are equally parts of it. Both are Rationalist through and through, in the case of Kant as of Voltaire and Holbach; of Novalis as of Proudhon; of the ideologues of the Wars of Liberation as of Marx; of the materialist conception of history quite as much as the idealistic, whether the meaning and aim of it is "progress," technics, Liberty," the "happiness of the greatest number," or the flowering of art, poetry, and thought. In both cases there is the failure to realize that destiny in history depends on quite other, robuster forces. Human history is war history. Among the few genuine historians of standing, none was ever popular, and among statesmen Bismarck achieved popularity only when it was of no more use to him.

But Romanticism too, with its lack of a sense for reality, is just as much an expression of rationalist arrogance as are Idealism and Materialism. They are all in fact closely related, and it would be difficult to discover the boundary between these two trends of thought in any political or social Romantic. In every outstanding Materialist a Romantic lies hidden. Though he may scorn the cold, shallow, methodical mind of others, he has himself enough of that sort of mind to do so in the same way and with the same arrogance. Romanticism is no child of powerful instincts, but, on the contrary, of a weak, self-detesting intellect.

They are all infantile, these Romantics; men who remain children too long (or for ever), without the strength to criticize themselves, but with perpetual inhibitions arising from the obscure awareness of their own personal weakness; who are impelled by the morbid idea of reforming society, which is to them too masculine, too healthy, too sober. And to reform it, not with knives and revolvers in the Russian fashion -- heaven forbid! -- but by noble talk and poetic theories. Hapless indeed they are if, lacking creative power, they lack also the artistic talent to persuade at least themselves that they possess it. Yet even in their art they are feminine and weak, incapable of setting a great novel or a great tragedy on its legs, still less a pure philosophy of any force. All that appears is spineless lyric, bloodless scenarios, and fragmentary ideas, all of them displaying an innocence of and antagonism to the world which amounts to absurdity.

But it was the same with the unfading "Youths" (]unglinge), with their" old German" coats and pipes -- Jahn and Arndt, even, included. Stein himself was unable to control his romantic taste for ancient constitutions sufficiently to allow him to turn his extensive practical experience to successful account in diplomacy. Oh, they were heroes, and noble, and ready to be martyrs at any moment; but they talked too much about German nature and too little about railways and customs unions, and thus became only an obstacle in the way of Germany's real future. Did they ever so much as hear the name of the great Friedrich List, who committed suicide in 1846 because no one understood and supported his farsighted and modern political aim, the building of an economic Germany? But they all knew the names of Arminius and Thusnelda.

And these same everlasting "Youths" are with us again today, immature, destitute of the slightest experience or even real desire for experience, but writing and talking away about politics, fired by uniforms and badges, and clinging fantastically to some theory or other. There is a social Romanticism of sentimental Communists, a political Romanticism which regards election figures and the intoxication of mass-meeting oratory as deeds, and an economic Romanticism which trickles out from behind the gold theories of sick minds that know nothing of the inner forms of modern economics. They can only feel in the mass, where they can deaden the dull sense of their weakness by multiplying themselves. And this they call the Overcoming of Individualism.

And like all Rationalists and Romantics, they are as sentimental as a street ditty. Even the Contrat social and the Rights of Man are products of the Age of Sensibility. Burke, on the contrary, like a true statesman, argued that on his side of the Channel men demanded their due as Englishmen and not as human beings, and he was right. This was practical political thinking, not the rationalistic issue of undisciplined emotions. For this evil sentimentality which lies over all the theoretical currents of the two centuries -- Liberalism, Communism, Pacifism, -- and all the books, speeches, and revolutions, originates in spiritual indiscipline, in personal weakness, in lack of the training imparted by a stern old tradition. It is "bourgeois" or "plebeian," in so far as these are terms of abuse. It looks at human things, history, and political destiny from below, meanly, from the cellar window, the street, the writers' cafe, the national assembly; not from height and distance. It detests every kind of greatness, everything that towers, rules, is superior; and construction means for it only the pulling-down of all the products of civilization, of the State, of society, to the level of little people, above which its pitiful emotionalism cannot soar to understand. That is all that the prefix "folk" or "people" means today, for the "people" in the mouth of any Rationalist or Romanticist does not mean the well-formed nation, shaped and graded by Destiny in the course of ages, but that portion of the dull formless mass which every one senses as his equal, from the "proletariat" to "Humanity.",

This domination of the rootless urban intellect is drawing to a close. And there emerges, as a final way of understanding things as they are, Scepticism -- fundamental doubt as to the meaning and value of theoretical reffection, as to its ability to arrive at conclusions by critical and abstract methods or to achieve anything by practical ones; Scepticism in the form of great historical and physiognomic experience, of the incorruptible eye for facts, the real knowledge of men which teaches what they were and are and not what they ought to be; the Scepticism of true historical thought which teaches, amongst other things, that there have been other periods wherein criticism was allpowerful and that these periods have left little impress behind them; and the Scepticism which brings reverence for the facts of world happening, which are and remain inward secrets to he described but never explained, and to be mastered only by men of a strong breed who are themselves historical facts, not by sentimental programs and systems. The hard recognition of historical fact which has set in with this century is intolerable to soft, uncontrolled natures. They detest those who establish them, calling them pessimists. Well, but this strong pessimism, with which belongs the contempt for mankind of all great fact-men who know mankind, is quite a different matter from the cowardly pessimism of small and weary souls which fear life and cannot bear to look at reality. The life they hope for, spent in peace and happiness, free from danger and replete with comfort, is boring and senile, apart from the fact that it is only imaginable, not possible. On this rock, the reality of history, every ideology must founder.

3

As regards the international situation of the moment, we are all in danger of misreading it. After the American Civil War (1861-5), the France-German War (1870-1), and the Victorian Age, existence and progress among the White races ran so incredibly calm, secure, peaceful, and care-free that one may search in vain through the centuries for anything analogous. Anyone who has lived through that period, or even heard about it from others, is always liable to regard it as normal and the wild present as a disturbance of this natural state of affairs, and to wish that things may soon "look up again." Now, that will not be the case, and we shall never see that kind of thing again. We do not realize what led up to this, in the long run, impossible situation. There was the fact that standing and expanding armies rendered a war so incalculable that no statesman any longer dared to make one; the fact that technical economic development was in a feverish condition which was bound to come to a speedy end because of its dependence on rapidly vanishing conditions; and, finally, the resultant fact that the grave unsolved problems of the time were being pushed more and more into the future, loaded as an unavowed commitment on to the shoulders of the heirs and heirs' heirs, so successfully that men ceased to believe in their reality although they were looming out of the future with steadily growing insistence.

If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace. This peace period from 1870 to 1914, and the memory of it, rendered all White men self-satisfied, covetous, void of understanding, and incapable of bearing misfortune. We see the result in the Utopian conceptions and challenges which today form part of every demagogue's program; challenges to the age, to the State, to parties, and in fact to "Everyone else," in complete disregard of the limits of possibility or of duty, doing, and forgoing.

This all too long peace over a period of growing excitement is a fearful inheritance. Not a statesman, not a party, hardly even a political thinker is today in a safe enough position to speak the truth. They all lie, they all join in the chorus of the pampered, ignorant crowd who want their tomorrow to be like the good old days, only more so--although statesmen and economic leaders at least ought to be alive to the frightful reality. Only look at our leaders of today! Once a month their cowardly and dishonest optimism announces the "up-branch of the cycle " and "prosperity," on the strength of a mere flutter on the stock exchange caused by building-speculations : the end of unemployment, from the moment that a hundred men or so are given jobs, and as the climax the achievement of "mutual understanding between the nations," as soon as the League -- that swarm of parasitic holidaymakers on the Lake of Geneva -- has formulated any sort of a resolution. And in every conference and every paper the word "crisis" is bandied about in connexion with any passing disturbance of the peace. And thus we deceive ourselves, blind to the fact that we have here one of those incalculable great catastrophes that are the normal form in which history takes its major turns.

For we live in a mighty age. It is the greatest that the Western Civilization has ever known or will know. It corresponds to the Classical Age from Cannae to Actium, to the age illumined by the names of Hannibal, Scipio, and Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, and Caesar. The World War was but the first flash and crash from the fateful thundercloud which is passing over this century. As then, at the commencement of the Imperium Romanum, so today, the form of the world is being remoulded from its foundations, regardless of the desires and intentions of " the majority" or of the number of victims demanded by every such decision. But who understands this? Who is facing it? Does one of us consider himself lucky to be there to see it? The age is mighty, but all the more diminutive are the people in it. They can no longer bear tragedy, either on the stage or in real life. They crave happy endings of insipid novels, so miserable and weary are they. But the destiny which pitched them into these decades now takes them by the collar and does with them what has to be done, whether they will or no.

The coward's security of 1900 is at an end. Life in danger, the real life of history, comes once more into its own. Everything has begun to slide, and now only that man counts who can take risks, who has the courage to see and accept things as they are. The age is approaching-- nay, is already here --which has no more room for soft hearts and weakly ideals. The primeval barbarism which has lain hidden and bound for centuries under the form-rigour of a ripe Culture, is awake again now that the Culture is finished and the Civilization has set in: that warlike, healthy joy in one's own strength which scorns the literature-ridden age of Rationalist thought, that unbroken race-instinct, which desires a different life from one spent under the weight of books and bookish ideals. In the Western European peasantry this spirit still abounds, as also on the American prairies and away in the great plains of northern Asia, where worldconquerors are born.

If this is "Pessimism," then he who feels it to be so must be one who needs the pious falsehood or veil of ideals and Utopias to protect and save him from the sight of reality. This, no doubt, is the refuge resorted to by most white men in this century -- but will it be so in the next? Their forefathers in the time of the Great Migration and the Crusades were different. They contemned such an attitude as cowardly. It is from this cowardice in the face of life that Buddhism and its offshoots arose in the Indian Culture at the corresponding stage in time. These cults are now becoming fashionable with us. It is possible that a Late religion of the West is in process of formation -- whether under the guise of Christianity or not none can tell, but at any rate the religious Revival" which succeeds Rationalism as a world philosophy does hold quite special possibilities of new religions emerging. People with tired, cowardly, senile souls seek refuge from the age in something which by reason of its miraculous doctrines and customs is better able to rock them into the sleep of oblivion than the Christian churches. The credo quia absurdum is again uppermost. But the profundity of world-suffering -- a feeling that is as old as the brooding over the world itself, the moan over the absurdity of history and the cruelty of existence -- arises not from things themselves, but from morbid reflection on them. It is the annihilating judgment upon the worth and the strength of men's own souls. A profound view of the world need not necessarily be saturated with tears.

There is a Nordic world-feeling, reaching from England to Japan, which is full of joy just because of the burden of human destiny. One challenges it for the sake of conquering it, and one goes under proudly should it prove stronger than one's own will. This was the attitude depicted in the old, genuine parts of the Mahabharata which tell of the fight between the Kurus and Pandus; in Homer, Pindar, and AEschylus; in the Germanic sagas and in Shakspere; in certain songs of the Qbinese Shu king, and in the world of the Samurai. It is the tragic view of life, which is not yet dead, but will blossom anew in the future just as it blossomed in the World War.

And the very great poets of the Nordic Cultures have been tragedians, and tragedy, from ballad and epic onward, has been the deepest form of this brave pessimism. The man who is incapable of experiencing or enduring tragedy can never be a figure of world significance. He cannot make history unless he experiences it as it really is -- tragic, permeated by destiny, and in consequence meaningless, aimless, and unmoral in the eyes of the worshippers of utility. It marks the parting of the ways between the superior and the subordinate ethos of human existence. The individual's life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. History recks nothing of human logic. Thunderstorms, earthquakes, lava-streams: these are near relatives of the purposeless, elemental events of world history. Nations may go under, ancient cities of ageing Cultures burn or sink in ruins, but the earth will continue to revolve calmly round the sun, and the stars to run their courses.

Man is a beast of prey. I shall say it again and again. All the would-be moralists and social-ethics people who claim or hope to be "beyond all that" are only beasts of prey with their teeth broken, who hate others on account of the attacks which they themselves are wise enough to avoid. Only look at them. They are too weak to read a book on war, but they herd together in the street to see an accident, letting the blood and the screams play on their nerves. And if even that is too much for them, they enjoy it on the film and in the illustrated papers. If I call man a beast of prey, which do I insult: man or beast? For remember, the larger beasts of prey are noble creatures, perfect of their kind, and without the hypocrisy of human moral due to weakness.

They shout: "No more war" -- but they desire class war. They are indignant when a murderer is executed for a crime of passion, but they feel a secret pleasure in hearing of the murder of a political opponent. What objection have they ever raised to the Bolshevist slaughters? There is no getting away from it: conflict is the original fact of life, is life itself, and not the most pitiful pacifist is able entirely to uproot the pleasure it gives his inmost soul. Theoretically, at least, he would like to fight and destroy all opponents of pacifism.

The further we advance into the Cresarism of the Faustian world, the more clearly will it emerge who is destined ethically to be the subject and who the object of historical events. The dreary train of world-improvers has now come to an end of its amble through these centuries, leaving behind it, as sole monument of its existence, mountains of printed paper. The Caesars will now take its place. High policy, the art of the possible, will again enter upon its eternal heritage, free from all systems and theories, itself the judge of the facts by which it rules, and gripping the world between its knees like a good horseman.

This being so, I have only to show here the historical position in which Germany and the world now stand and how this position is the inevitable outcome of the history of past centuries, and will just as inevitably pass on to certain forms and solutions. That is Destiny. We may deny it, but in so doing we deny ourselves.

Taken from Tradition & Revolution (http://www.geocities.com/integral_tradition/)