Can a European people, or the greater part of it, find the Truth of itself today ... its living, unchanging ethnic person, its relational wholeness, its belonging to the land and to past, present and future? Even at this hour, filled with error and confusion and rampant wickedness as it is, can such an awakening … some might call it a rebirth … be achieved?  Or sufficiently achieved to, at a minimum, preserve our existence?  Those are the questions with which Part 1 of this series concluded.  A century ago Germans faced another ethnic crisis – not the same as ours or so acute, but very urgent in its way.  So the precedent exists.  What can it teach us?

THE WAGES OF CONFECTION AND IMITATION

Once upon a time in a land far away (or these days about 1 hr 40 min from London by passenger jet) the great mass of a defeated and despairing people gave their love and their allegiance to a messianic little man with a toothbrush moustache.  They believed in him and in his power to lift the heavy moral and economic burden on them, give them inspiration, bring them light.  They believed as no other European people believed before or since.  But it was not an irrational belief.  There were reasons for it.  Among other things, he had a plan to Macht Deutschland wieder groß, and he made good on it.  He spoke to the people as his people, his blood.  He spoke of belonging and uniqueness, and of honour, heroism and destiny.  He did it with a near religious fervour, and in an oddly histrionic but mesmerising way which gripped all who saw and heard him.  It was easy to believe in the messianic image which he had himself carefully engineered over many years.  Everything from his table talks to his set-piece public appearances and pronouncements was calculated and theatrical, nothing more so than those at the stupendous and dramatic parade ground that his party had built in Nuremberg.

An image not lost: the Cathedral of Light at one of NSDAP’S Nuremberg rallies.

On top of all that he had a highly competent Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  And his Reichsminister had a sophisticated understanding of how to sway and inspirit the Volk.  The inspiriting part still hold a general truth for racially European peoples today, much-abused as we all are.  But too much of what was said and done in the NSDAP years was not true at all.

For example, the little man with the toothbrush moustache opined that:

The efficiency of a truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy.

Just by that choice of words we can infer that he identified attention as the means to ethnic self-awareness, and grasped at least something of its polarities and dynamics.  Of course, he did so not as an ethnic nationalist and identitarian but as an “Aryan supremacist”, German imperialist and hammer of the Jews, each of which array negatively against someone somewhere.  But, with the possible exception of Jews, a group identity which reifies and defines itself against an Other, even in part, will always be distorted by some or other non-essential element.  Indeed, in general sameness is a stronger reference and rallying point than difference – ask any identical twin.  More specific to race and ethnicity, what is shared is stronger than what is unshared, and that is true whether we are speaking of peoplehood, genes, land or any other shared natural interest, the defence of which is always more necessitous than is the attack upon the being and interests of an Other.  In other words, defensive or life-preserving interests possess a greater import and urgency than expansive or resource-acquisitional interests.

From the life-preserving perspective, then, we can endeavour to order shared interests along the lines of the table below.  I compiled it some time ago with the intention of distinguishing such interests by type in the ethnic European case:

I don’t know if any such formal categorisation has been produced elsewhere by salterians ¹.  Perhaps this is the first, but in any case the categories remain strictly propositional and the ordering a work in progress.  It is a fine point, for example, as to whether to order determinant interests above or below proximate interests.  But that aside, the point is to trace the logical thread running downward from absolute interest to the emergent level, where we enter the sociobiological realm and then shift into its manifestations in the life we collectively live.  The argument of this identitarian essay is that political and philosophical movements which affirm and express all elements of interest will be vastly more successful in turning a people’s attention towards its truth and its existential condition than movements which act in ignorance of such interests and/or which farm the people for something confected and alien.

The New Aryan Man

National Socialists were obviously interest-wise.  But much in their programme for identity was assumed and much was confected.  Examples of the latter were the militarised Nietzscheism and steroidally assertive racial nationalism of the organisation which, in 1926, became the Hitler-Jugend.  NSDAP had operated a youth wing since 1922.  By the time membership became mandatory in 1936 the Hitler-Jugend had five million members.  By the second year of war it had eight million.  At this point there were men in Germany who had experienced NSDAP’s early youth project and who were then in their mid-thirties.  The thinking behind such policy was not merely party political. Its object was not merely the production of a body within the population which would be imbued with the movement’s aims and values, and give it longevity.  Hitler had stated that:

The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute for them the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood.

Whole-system philosophies must generate a politics of epochal change or they will be unrealisable; and because human beings are enworlded creatures such change must deliver a world not only free from the trespasses and debilitations of the old one but replete with entirely new predicates and possibilities.  The difference between a politically inactive philosophy such as Völkischness and an active one such as National Socialism is precisely that activity means the engendering of a “New Man” who will force his own world into being.  That is the order of things.  Politically inactive philosophies function in reverse, appealing to reactionary thinking perhaps, or to tradition or just common sense.  It is expected by that means to shift into the new world, if one is required.  But more often than not it is enough just to repair the old one.  Hence such philosophies lack historical agency, and do so, ultimately, because they mechanically accept and respect the Man of his time as what he must and can only be.  They do not know that he, too, was “new” once.  So they do not meddle in his constitution.  National Socialism, however, had no such reservations.  It was politically hyper-active.  It wholly identified its own agency with the creative act of its, let us call him, New Aryan Man.

But its New Aryan Man was a fabrication.  The Nietzschean life of glory is not a product of the northern European sociobiology.  The shining, poetic image of the Teutonic past was not an historical reality.  The Herrenrasse ² was not an evolutionary reality.  The vision of “the folk community, rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood” did not give a full and adequate account of German people’s nature.  It ignored the personal, and thus it ignored that individuality which inheres in all Europeans actually, and which is the parent of the sense of fairness and tolerance which also mark us – indeed, ennoble us - and which we cannot cast off.  The militarisation of German society and the weaponisation of German law and the courts likewise did not remotely suit the German temperament.  Germans, like the rest of us Europeans, do not fit well in a straitjacket; and Nature will eventually out.  There would always come a day when the New Aryan Man would be falsified.

One can see why, after WW1, German nationalists were drawn to such radicality.  In a nation with such a fragmented historical and ethnic character the problem was always how to unify the population and develop political impetus.  The needs of the hour were desperate.  The Völkisch Movement had the prior claim to the simple and true principles of home and land but, as previously stated, even those referentia had not facilitated its development into a national political force.  The National Socialists, meanwhile, were a hard-edged street-fighting machine for whom a blame-based rejection of the out-group in the form of the communist left, Slavs, or Jews held the prospect of a clamorous unifying energy and a wild advance under the sign of power and conquest.  National Socialism’s historical account therefore commended the most virulent rejection.

The movement had a relatively impoverished philosophical and intellectual base, much focussed on matters of Aryanism, German-ness, and the Jews as if the great quests of philosophy … what it is to be … how we know the real … how to live well … held no interest because they were automatically answered by the words “race”, “folk” and “nation”, and so could be safely left to any and every other understanding of Man.  The omission effectively put nationalist thinking into a collectivist box from which it has not escaped to this day, making it easier both for its advocates to grow more extreme and for its opponents to vilify it.

The only mainstream philosophical influence on National Socialism was the near inescapable thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, though even that was heavily weighted towards the lumpen and reductive re-telling of it by his sister.  Otherwise, there was Arthur de Gobineau and, half a century later, Houston Stewart Chamberlain - the latter much influenced by Wagner and by the Hindu canon, but seemingly not by Nietzsche.  The influence of de Gobineau and Chamberlain and of a clutch of minor racial theorists and ideologues flowed initially into the Völkisch Movement, joining that of folklorists such as Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl, and thence onward to National Socialism.  Other influences included the revolutionary conservatives, especially Oswald Spengler and his two volumes on decline published in 1918 and 1922.  In that latter year Mussolini’s fascists marched on Rome.  No doubt the statist and corporatist line of Giovanni Gentile’s conflicted thinking marched across the Alps and north to Munich and Berlin, leaving his subjective neo-Hegelianism at home in sunny Florence.  Ultimately for NSDAP, of course, the worth and utility of Italian fascism was limited by its rejection of racial and anti-Jew policies; and there was always the nagging logic that categorically excluding Slavs from the company of Aryans, and derogating them as untermenschen, demanded the same treatment of Mediterranean peoples.

One suspects that no such concerns inwardly troubled the social darwinist and racial uber-theorist Alfred Rosenberg, whose virulent hostility to Jews would see him hang a year after the Allies’ victory.  He had been there at the beginning, and he was there at the end.  His Myth, published in 1933, was influential but its unrelenting narrowness speaks of a closed circle of lower-order intellectuals like him, feverishly concerned to construct facts and theories to justify their politics.  His work on Positive Christianity goes to the point.  Any neutral observer would have seen the total absurdity of diligently reworking the Nicene Creed and the New Testament itself to make the content anti-Jewish.  But to Rosenberg it appeared not just desirable but necessary for National Socialism to invade and conquer the Catholic and Protestant churches for lebensraum.

In 1927 the jurist - and genuine intellectual - Carl Schmitt published “The Concept of the Political”, with its focus on the friend–enemy distinction and its telling critique of liberalism and utopianism.  It is still studied today, particular among left-academics, but for its treatment of “the exception”.  Fatefully, in 1932 Schmitt used “the exception” to provide constitutional authority for Hitler’s monopoly of state power.  He joined NSDAP the following year, as did Martin Heidegger.  And what of him?  In the National Socialists, Heidegger thought he saw an engine of change that might, under his benign influence, effect the epochal shift his writings portend.  Joining the party was to facilitate, as he later put it, “a conversation about being”.  As rector at Freiburg he donned the party uniform.  He adjusted his language somewhat to accommodate himself to the new zeitgeist of power.  He spoke of the spirit of the people and their destining.  But he quickly came into conflict with party officials in the education ministry in Berlin, and his overtures were snuffed out.  He maintained his party membership to the end.  But there would be no Heideggerian dawn.

In imitation of Judaism

In any case, by then the influence of Dietrich Eckhart had already been decisive for a decade and a half, particularly in regard to the Jewish Question.  So we come to National Socialism’s second impost upon the German life of something confected and alien: three principles at the heart of Judaism.

Eckhart himself died in 1923.  But over the final four years of his life he personally mentored Hitler, beginning when, aged thirty, the latter was still just a rising star in the movement.  The creation of a German leader for the age was Eckhart’s work.  The only reason so little was made of Eckhart’s contribution afterwards was because Hitler had to present himself to the German public as a perfect but self-created being who had arrived in the life of his people like Athena emerging pristine from the waves, all arrayed in shining armour.  The armour had to be his.  He had to be untouched by other men’s thinking and unsullied by their ambitions and agendas.  Nothing outside him must hold sway over him at any time.  His had to be be an immaculate intellectual and political conception.

The standard explanation is that the leading National Socialists were long intent upon reforming Christianity to bring faith expression within the confines of party ideology and, indeed, to make the party itself synonymous with the Church.  This was a moment in history when Rosenberg felt able, in all seriousness and quite literally, to title Adolf Hitler “the German Messiah”.  In 1937 Hans Kerrl, the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, could state that “The Führer is the herald of a new revelation”, which religionises not only the politician but his message of coming good.  Even if generally supportive of NSDAP on social conservative or nationalist grounds, practising Christians cannot have been much pleased to learn that the sacred heart of their faith was to be invaded and colonised by the party. They seem to have kept quiet, though, and no doubt reassured themselves that their living God was eternal while, thankfully, politicians come and go.  In public, at least, the bishops went along with it, some offering tentative Roman salutes when required.  Even these latter must have distinguished between Jesus Christ the spiritual leader and Hitler the political one.  Further, long ago in their calling they will have distinguished between Christ the spiritual leader and Judaism’s returning Moshiach the political one.

If, then, the Führer Principle stood in for Moshiach then the Herrenrasse stood in for G-d’s Covenanted tribe and the literally millenarian Thousand Year Reich for the final this-world political solution that is Olam Ha-ba.  Each was too striking a transposition and, taken together, too comprehensive to be explained by coincidence.  Neither could the explanation be some hitherto undiscovered universal psychological template by which the three arise as religious correlates to ethnic competition.  They do not appear together in any prior European religious or political form, not when peoples have been exiled from their homelands, not when peoples have been subjected to genocide.  Excepting the essential figure of Christ, they do not appear in the spiritual exegesis of any European Christianity.  Quite the contrary, the Christian faithful are required to be spiritually individualist and morally universalist, and focussed on the “other” world, not this one.  However improbable it sounds, we can only be dealing here with Abraham in lederhosen.

This peculiarity likely arrived in whole by way of Eckhart, possibly deriving from the anti-Judaic thinking of his early hero, the Christianised but unstable Jew Otto Weininger (who committed suicide in 1903 aged just 23).  Given NSDAP’s pervasive and ferocious anti-Jewish feeling no other path makes sense.  If the prescription for gentiles since the confection of the Christian soul had been “Individualism for thee, tribalism for me”, National Socialism’s new semiotics were a bastardised inversion of it. Jews must have understood this, and heard a message to the effect that “We are taking your ideology for ourselves, and we are turning it against you.”

But for Jews these instruments, and those of Judaism generally, constitute a perfectly fitting ethnic-competitive strategy.  It is a successful strategy for Jews, no doubt, but it is wholly unique to them.  No part of it features in the sociobiology of another group, and certainly not in Germans (or any Europeans).  The environment of evolutionary adaptiveness which fixed, among other qualities, their hyper-ethnocentrism and assertive orientation towards the out-group was fifteen centuries of misery in the form of repeated tribal warfare, defeats, exiles and captivities, enslavements, desert wanderings, constant foreign dominion, scattering, et al.  In contrast, the German people after WW1 were subjected to fifteen years of the humiliation of defeat, the impoverishing ravages of inflation, unemployment, the threat of Bolshevism, and the decadence of Weimar; all of which passed far too rapidly to produce any meaningfully operative environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.  Hence the Judaic instruments could not evolve in or even transfer to the German sociobiology.  At most, they could influence the culture of the time, ie, the surface of the lived life, and never the deep layers of instinct and nature beneath.

For government to force such an alien and extreme ethnic-competitive strategy onto Germans after 1933 was bound to incur psychological costs in the form of false identity, mass ignorance and delusion, cultism, pathological arrogance and aggression towards the out-group, and so forth.  But these were the wages of National Socialism.  The identitarian water in the German rocks was sweet enough without any of it.  Then after the war everything was ripped away by the Allies’ violently determined and far-reaching denazification programme, and replaced with not a whit more truth.  In short order Germans were stripped of all moral standing and good self-opinion, and committed to decades of self-abasement and shame.  That great nation has been reduced beyond all vestiges of post-war justice and necessity, and has not recovered its balance even today.  Nor will it do so while the liberal disposition still obtains, for there is no human truth to be found in that, either.  And yet all of us Europeans need the German people to come truly home.

So, to return to the question with which we began: what can all this teach us?  That authenticity in identity and in the lived life will unfailingly steer a people in its own ethnic home towards all truth and good, all that leads to life and not away from it.  Let Martin Heidegger’s voice finally be heard.  In Germany and all across the European world.

¹ On Salter I am always open to correction by the redoubtable and expert EGI Notes, aka Ted Sallis, who has doubtless forgotten more than I will ever know about these matters.

² One might be tempted to connect the Herrenrasse to Nietzsche given his psychological theory of master-slave morality, were one obtuse enough to rip it from its individualist mooring and apply it wholesale to racial theory.  Similarly, one could point towards de Gobineau’s insistence on the inequality of the races.  But he was no racial supremacist, arguing instead for the supremacy of the aristocracy.  The elitist reactionary Julius Evola was the more authentic heir to de Gobineau, rather than the progressives and modernists of NSDAP.  Chamberlain, on the other hand, actually met Hitler, and some of his racial theories certainly influenced National Socialist ideology.  He published his seminal work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899, arguing among other things that the “noble” Aryan race was the moral and spiritual superior of the other races.  Though trained in biology he historised culturally, despising the material certainties of Darwinism and of social darwinism along with it.  From his cultural vantage point he drew the racial boundaries broadly to include Slavs, Greeks and Berbers, and more or less extended an honorary membership to Indians.  NSDAP’s foray into a hard race science portrayed Aryan Man with no such broad brush, and definitely relied on a eugenic reading of Darwin.  Aryan Man’s perfection and superiority was required to be physical and not simply or only cultural.