Every one either praises or blames the Enlightenment for the enshrinement of equality and cosmopolitanism as the moral pillars of our times. This is wrong. Enlightenment thinkers were racists who believed that only white Europeans could be fully rational, good citizens, and true cosmopolitans.
_____________________________
Read the rest of this scholarly article at Counter-Currents.
by Manu Rodríguez
Translated from Spanish
The Messianic Jewish universalism, the democratic, socialist or social and political ideals, have ended up by reducing to a minimum our identity and our bio-symbolic pride and ethnicity. The Aryan nation (Aryans aware of themselves) is now a minimum percentage of its potential population (all white peoples).
The trans-national, trans-racial, trans-cultural ideal that these ideologies preach us (beyond peoples, races, cultures), and that are the staple food in our schools, our media, our mass culture, our universities, our streets, have managed to finally affect us. There are hundreds of years of the same. Please note that the Jewish Messianism has been spreading its venomous message for almost two thousand years. The communist and democratic universalism are a thing of recent times, but have only come to reinforce the old narrative. These two are the same ideals.
Such ideals (such teachings, such ubiquitous messages), after hundreds of years have achieved their purposes: transforming wolves and bears into kids and lambs. We, our peoples, have become weak, insecure, and timid creatures.
All this comes to mind after some news from Norway, outlined in Gates of Vienna and reviewed by Kevin MacDonald at The Occidental Observer in recent days. It is about a situation where the Norwegians are trapped in neighborhoods or areas with a high number of Asian and African-Muslim population. The starting point is a report on the schools. Apparently Norwegian pupils (boys and girls) are in the minority and are constantly insulted or assaulted by the allochthonous young Muslims. This outrageous state of affairs has generated, apparently, more than individual survival strategies.
It must be noted that this is not happening only in Norway but in France, Germany, England… Clearly these foreigners do not esteem us, nor respect us or fear us. In any of our nations they find nothing but isolated and helpless individuals who can be insulted and attacked with impunity. No one will come to their defense. There will be no response, no retaliation.
Why this lack of response, this silence and resignation? We cannot find, at the individual level (in the cited cases), any valor or pride or self-respect. There is no one to confront them. All seek to escape. That this has happened to the descendants of the fierce and proud Vikings makes one wonder.
Helplessness, weakness, cowardice. This is the result of our upbringing and instruction in the last hundreds of years in the hands of priests of foreign divinities and their universalist and altruistic creeds: a hideous transformation.
MacDonald is right in alluding that individualism and the atomization of white societies and lack of support, is where whites find themselves when they are beaten, intimidated, or violated by foreign groups (Asian Muslims, Africans and others). But such individualism and atomization are just symptoms. Symptoms of a people destroyed, annihilated; of a multitude of uprooted, scattered, isolated, weakened, and lost individuals.
The group conscience among us whites in Europe must be strengthened, yes, and in the Magna Europe. But from where, from which basis or fundamentals? What words, what concepts, what symbolic space will keep us together into a one? On which field will we make roots? What is the best soil?
Group conscience has to include race and culture, which is to say, body and soul. We have been so long away from home (since the Christianization), and with so contrary winds, that we have lost the path, the way, the memory. We’ll have to start from the beginning. We have to ask ourselves who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. We need to reclaim the memory, our memory: a collective self-gnosis of the Aryan peoples.
We must start from the multitude of ethnicities and cultures, from the tree of the peoples and cultures of the world, which is also the tree of life, the purer tree. Recognize, affirm this genuine, pure, natural, genuine multiplicity; watch over her, even protect her. Let us have it as sacred. In this tree we find ourselves, we recognize ourselves.
We are the Aryan or Indo-European branch (a term that refers to our languages and related cultures) of that eternal tree.
The first is the self-consciousness of a people: that individuals and members feel they belong to a people. First of all we have to regain the Aryan consciousness, Aryan memory, the voice, the word, the ancestral and indigenous being, the symbolic and collective identities. This will give us back the pride, dignity, and honor; the moral courage, in short: collective self-legitimation.
When someone insults, attacks, or damages a Norwegian (or a German, or a Frenchman, or an Englishman) the Aryan people are insulted. It is something that overwhelms the entire Aryan community. They humiliate their values, their existence, their being. Those are defeats for our people.
It is all, therefore, about our people, our land, and our cultures. We won’t condone grievances, threats or aggressions directed at our peoples or our pre-Christian or contemporary traditions. They’ll not go unpunished, unanswered. And it will be the same peoples who will respond. We will have a multitude of Aryan voices that will respond with white pride, Aryan pride.
♣
We find no value in these universalistic discourses in which we disappear as peoples and cultures. In this area, on these grounds, it is only possible to speak in the name of “humanity” or “universal man.” In these narratives our existence is not even recognized. The peoples, races, and nations are to be transcended, overcome, denied and become extinct to achieve the new and universal man. This is the eternal universal slogan, the old and the new, that our enemy offers to us, their Trojan horse, their poisoned apple: their insidiousness, their fallacy, their trap, their lie.
Should we expect anything else from the enemy—the old witch, the Jewish community—than “poisoned apples”? We should be wary of all that these misérables have been offering to us for thousands of years: Christianity, Marxism, psychoanalysis… These “productions” have no other function than to destroy: destroy our cultures, our status, our confidence in ourselves; to make us disappear, to eliminate us ethnically and culturally.
It is a very ancient war and so far we know only losses and defeats. With the Christianization of our people we lost our native and ancestral cultures. The modern movements (Marxism, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism) will culminate the termination process initiated by those apostles of European gentility. Nothing differentiates the “Peters” and “Pauls” of the past from Marx, Freud, Boas, Adorno, Marcuse, Derrida of our time. The same purpose, the same intention.
♣
The Aryan peoples ought to be against religious, economic and political ideologies of Semitic origin (Judaism, Jewish Messianism, Islam, Communism); against the major disseminators of these universal creeds whose invention had no other purpose than disseminating discord and dissension within a people, and to divide and confront them.
Against the intricate Semitic network! Against the universal spider! Against universalism, totalitarianism, the homogenization (Messianic Jewish, Muslim, Democrat or Communist) of the planet! Against the destroyers of peoples and cultures! This is the mission. This is our struggle, unser Kampf.
Behold the dragon, the hydra, the eternal enemies of our people and light: Vritra, Typhon, Surt. They are the dark, the gloomy, the sinister. We will make war wherever they are located. Until their extinction. We will get the entire planet rid of this serious pest. In honor of the first Aryan nation, the birth of our nation. In honor of its creator.
Ad maiorem Hitleri gloriam (AMHG).
The “white race” has no one to blame, but themselves.
Throughout the latest two millennia most whites have believed in the message of the gospel, and its moral grammar, right? Contrast Hoeff’s quote with the popular mantra in some nationalist circles, “There is nothing inherently wrong with Whites.”
Before jumping angrily to this thread, please take a look at the discussion in the previous thread, preferably by becoming familiar with some of my linked articles there, including my interpretation of the deranged altruism in Wuthering Heights.
Alternatively, see Ben Klassen’s views on Christianity in general and the Sermon on the Mount in particular. Like Hoeff, Klassen maintained that, ultimately, whites are to blame for our current predicaments.
Extracted from a thread of yesterday’s article at American Renaissance:
Commenter 1:
Even if, as Jared Taylor says, evidence for race differences in IQ becomes obvious in the future it still probably won’t change anything. It won’t necessarily make whites change their minds about immigration. There is something wrong with white people. You can’t reason with them on certain topics. They believe it is immoral to act in white group interests, and IQ tests won’t change their minds.
How come Japan and Israel can preserve their racial majorities? Because they are not insane. White people are insane. Their moral views on race are fixed and these people cannot be reasoned with on moral or intellectual grounds. That’s why I think whites, at least in America, are destined for continued perpetual decline in terms of demographics. Sorry to sound so defeatist.
Commenter 2:
I blame this suicidal mental sickness on “Christianity”. That religion is equivalent to a gulp of deadly poison, which I believe was deliberately poured into our drinking cup by our most deadly enemy.
Commenter 3:
Frankly this view shouldn’t be tolerated amongst Western traditionalists. Remember: Christianity is what conquered pagan Europe and drove back the Muslim barbaric.
Commenter 4:
This race-denying, universalist, “everybody must be equal” cult can corrupt any church, any religion, any political party, any economic system, any think tank. It’s not just Christianity. It is true that the founder of Judeo-Christianity, St. Paul, the former ethno-centric Pharisee Saul of Tarsus, preached race-denying nonsense “that there weren’t any Greeks or Jews”, just those who have accepted Jesus Christ. I look at St. Paul as the first “Neo Conservative” who supposedly “saw the light” on the Road to Damascus.
My 2 cents:
Commenter 3 misses the whole point: No Saul, no Mohamed. No decline of Rome, a decline caused partially by the fact that Constantine delivered Greco-Roman culture to the bishops, no genocidal Mongol conquests over a very weakened West.
Notice also how Commenter 3 uses “pagan” while referring to our pre-Christian, Indo-European world. He has not read the articles by the Spanish writer I have been advertising here (see e.g., this one).
A Christian I do respect
In Hieronymus Bosch’s 1515 painting, each male Jewish face is depicted as a loathsome caricature (except that of Jesus who under Christendom’s eyes did not count as a Jew).
“Why were you so ungrateful to our gods
as to desert them for the Jews?”
—Julian, addressing the Christians
Priscus to Libanius
Athens, March 380
Yes, the edict is well known here. I am not in the least convinced that there is a Divine Oneness at the center of the universe, nor am I susceptible to magic, unlike Julian, who was hopelessly gullible.
As to your publishing project, I am not at all certain that a sympathetic biography of Julian would have the slightest effect at this time. Theodosius is a military politician, impressed by bishops. He might of course sanction a biography of his predecessor simply because Julian is much admired to this day, though not for his philosophy. Julian is admired because he was young and handsome and the most successful general of our century.
But if Theodosius did permit a biography, it would have to avoid the religious issue. The bishops would see to that. And for ferocity there is nothing on earth equal to a Christian bishop hunting “heresy,” as they call any opinion contrary to their own.
Though I am, as you so comfortably suggest, old and near the end of my life, I enjoy amazingly good health. But I have no intention of writing a single sentence about Julian, fond as I was of him and alarmed as I am at the strange course our world has taken since the adventurer Constantine sold us to the bishops.
Julian’s memoir was written during the last four months of his life. It was begun in March 363, at Hierapolis. Nearly every night during our invasion of Persia he would dictate recollections of his early life.
The resulting memoir is something of a hybrid; even so, Julian was often an engaging writer, and if he was not better it is because it is hard to be emperor, philosopher and general all at once.
I have never quite known what to do with his work. When Julian died, I took all his personal papers, suspecting that his Christian successors would destroy them. I had no right to these papers, of course, but I don’t regret my theft. I told no one about the memoir until I was back safe in Antioch, where I must have mentioned it to you the day you read your famous eulogy.
I am now having a fair copy made of the manuscript. You are misinformed if you think that copying is cheaper here than an Antioch. Quite the contrary. The estimated cost will run to eighty gold solidi, which I suggest you send by return post. On receipt of the full amount, I will send you the book to use as you see fit. Only do not mention to anyone that I had any connection with the matter.
Hippia joins me in wishing you good health.
The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire
Chapter XIX
When the two nephews of Constantine, Gallus and Julian, were saved from the fury of the soldiers, the former was about twelve, and the latter about six, years of age; and, as the eldest was thought to be of a sickly constitution, they obtained with the less difficulty a precarious and dependent life, from the affected pity of Constantius, who was sensible that the execution of these helpless orphans would have been esteemed, by all mankind, an act of the most deliberate cruelty.
Different cities of Ionia and Bithynia were assigned for the places of their exile and education; but as soon as their growing years excited the jealousy of the emperor, he judged it more prudent to secure those unhappy youths in the strong castle of Macellum, near Cæsarea. The treatment which they experienced during a six years’ confinement, was partly such as they could hope from a careful guardian, and partly such as they might dread from a suspicious tyrant. Their prison was an ancient palace, the residence of the kings of Cappadocia; the situation was pleasant, the buildings of stately, the enclosure spacious. They pursued their studies, and practised their exercises, under the tuition of the most skilful masters; and the numerous household appointed to attend, or rather to guard, the nephews of Constantine, was not unworthy of the dignity of their birth. But they could not disguise to themselves that they were deprived of fortune, of freedom, and of safety; secluded from the society of all whom they could trust or esteem, and condemned to pass their melancholy hours in the company of slaves devoted to the commands of a tyrant who had already injured them beyond the hope of reconciliation.
At length, however, the emergencies of the state compelled the emperor, or rather his eunuchs, to invest Gallus, in the twenty-fifth year of his age, with the title of Cæsar, and to cement this political connection by his marriage with the princess Constantina. After a formal interview, in which the two princes mutually engaged their faith never to undertake any thing to the prejudice of each other, they repaired without delay to their respective stations. Constantius continued his march towards the West, and Gallus fixed his residence at Antioch; from whence, with a delegated authority, he administered the five great dioceses of the eastern præfecture. In this fortunate change, the new Cæsar was not unmindful of his brother Julian, who obtained the honors of his rank, the appearances of liberty, and the restitution o fan ample patrimony.
The writers the most indulgent to the memory of Gallus, and even Julian himself, though he wished to cast a veil over the frailties of his brother, are obliged to confess that the Cæsar was incapable of reigning. Transported from a prison to a throne, he possessed neither genius nor application, nor docility to compensate for the want of knowledge and experience. A temper naturally morose and violent, instead of being corrected, was soured by solitude and adversity; the remembrance of what he had endured disposed him to retaliation rather than to sympathy; and the ungoverned sallies of his rage were often fatal to those who approached his person, or were subject to his power. Constantina, his wife, is described, not as a woman, but as one of the infernal furies tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood. Instead of employing her influence to insinuate the mild counsels of prudence and humanity, she exasperated the fierce passions of her husband; and as she retained the vanity, though she had renounced, the gentleness of her sex, a pearl necklace was esteemed an equivalent price for the murder of an innocent and virtuous nobleman.
The cruelty of Gallus was sometimes displayed in the undissembled violence of popular or military executions; and was sometimes disguised by the abuse of law, and the forms of judicial proceedings. The private houses of Antioch, and the places of public resort, were besieged by spies and informers; and the Cæsar himself, concealed in a plebeian habit, very frequently condescended to assume that odious character.
Every apartment of the palace was adorned with the instruments of death and torture, and a general consternation was diffused through the capital of Syria. The prince of the East, as if he had been conscious how much he had to fear, and how little he deserved to reign, selected for the objects of his resentment the provincials accused of some imaginary treason, and his own courtiers, whom with more reason he suspected of incensing, by their secret correspondence, the timid and suspicious mind of Constantius. But he forgot that he was depriving himself of his only support, the affection of the people; whilst he furnished the malice of his enemies with the arms of truth, and afforded the emperor the fairest pretence of exacting the forfeit of his purple, and of his life.
As long as the civil war suspended the fate of the Roman world, Constantius dissembled his knowledge of the weak and cruel administration to which his choice had subjected the East; and the discovery of some assassins, secretly despatched to Antioch by the tyrant of Gaul, was employed to convince the public, that the emperor and the Cæsar were united by the same interest, and pursued by the same enemies. But when the victory was decided in favor of Constantius, his dependent colleague became less useful and less formidable. Every circumstance of his conduct was severely and suspiciously examined, and it was privately resolved, either to deprive Gallus of the purple, or at least to remove him from the indolent luxury of Asia to the hardships and dangers of a German war.
The death of Theophilus, consular of the province of Syria, who in a time of scarcity had been massacred by the people of Antioch, with the connivance, and almost at the instigation, of Gallus, was justly resented, not only as an act of wanton cruelty, but as a dangerous insult on the supreme majesty of Constantius. Two ministers of illustrious rank, Domitian the Oriental præfect, and Montius, quæstor of the palace, were empowered by a special commission to visit and reform the state of the East. They were instructed to behave towards Gallus with moderation and respect, and, by the gentle starts of persuasion, to engage him to comply with the invitation of his brother and colleague. The rashness of the præfect disappointed these prudent measures, and hastened his own ruin, as well as that of his enemy.
On his arrival at Antioch, Domitian passed disdainfully before the gates of the palace, and alleging a slight pretence of indisposition, continued several days in sullen retirement, to prepare an inflammatory memorial, which he transmitted to the Imperial court. Yielding at length to the pressing solicitations of Gallus, the præfect condescended to take his seat in council; but his first step was to signify a concise and haughty mandate, importing that the Cæsar should immediately repair to Italy, and threatening that he himself would punish his delay or hesitation, by suspending the usual allowance of his household. The nephew and daughter of Constantine, who could ill brook the insolence of a subject, expressed their resentment by instantly delivering Domitian to the custody of a guard. The quarrel still admitted of some terms of accommodation. They were rendered impracticable by the imprudent behavior of Montius, a statesman whose arts and experience were frequently betrayed by the levity of his disposition.
The quæstor reproached Gallus in a haughty language, that a prince who was scarcely authorized to remove a municipal magistrate, should presume to imprison a Prætorian præfect; convoked a meeting of the civil and military officers; and required them, in the name of their sovereign, to defend the person and dignity of his representatives. By this rash declaration of war, the impatient temper of Gallus was provoked to embrace the most desperate counsels. He ordered his guards to stand to their arms, assembled the populace of Antioch, and recommended to their zeal the care of his safety and revenge. His commands were too fatally obeyed. They rudely seized the præfect and the quæstor, and tying their legs together with ropes, they dragged them through the streets of the city, inflicted a thousand insults and a thousand wounds on these unhappy victims, and at last precipitated their mangled and lifeless bodies into the stream of the Orontes.
After such a deed, whatever might have been the designs of Gallus, it was only in a field of battle that he could assert his innocence with any hope of success. But the mind of that prince was formed of an equal mixture of violence and weakness. Instead of assuming the title of Augustus, instead of employing in his defence the troops and treasures of the East, he suffered himself to be deceived by the affected tranquillity of Constantius, who, leaving him the vain pageantry of a court, imperceptibly recalled the veteran legions from the provinces of Asia.
But as it still appeared dangerous to arrest Gallus in his capital, the slow and safer arts of dissimulation were practised with success. The frequent and pressing epistles of Constantius were filled with professions of confidence and friendship; exhorting the Cæsar to discharge the duties of his high station, to relieve his colleague from a part of the public cares, and to assist the West by his presence, his counsels, and his arms. After so many reciprocal injuries, Gallus had reason to fear and to distrust. But he had neglected the opportunities of flight and of resistance; he was seduced by the flattering assurances of the tribune Scudilo, who, under the semblance of a rough soldier, disguised the most artful insinuation; and he depended on the credit of his wife Constantina, till the unseasonable death of that princess completed the ruin in which he had been involved by her impetuous passions.
The 2011 biography authored by R. H. S. Stolfi on Adolf Hitler mentions that Caesar perpetrated a genocide of whites in Gaul, something that I discussed in my previous post. Greg Johnson’s recent review of Stolfi’s biography merits reproduction below:
Russell Stolfi (1932–2012)
Adolf Hitler was clearly the man of the 20th century, whose shadow grows taller as the sun of the West sinks ever lower. Sadly, though, there is no biography worthy of Hitler.
If great men are those who leave their stamp on history, then Hitler was a great man. But great men present great problems for biographers. Great men are not necessarily good men, and even good men, when they hold political power, often find it necessary to kill innocent people. Evil men do not find this difficult, but good men do. Thus a good man, if he is to be a great man, must also be a hard man. But it is difficult for biographers, who are ordinary men, to sympathize with great men, especially men who are unusually bad or hard.
But biographers must at least try to enter imaginatively into the minds of their subjects. They must feel their feelings and think their thoughts. They must feel sympathy or empathy for their subjects. Such sympathy is not a violation of objectivity but a tool of it. It is a necessary counter-weight to the antipathy and ressentiment that hardness, cruelty, and greatness often inspire. Sympathy is necessary so a biographer can discover and articulate the virtues of intellect and character necessary to achieve anything great in this world, for good or ill.
Of course, one’s ability to sympathize with great men depends in large part on one’s moral principles. A Nietzschean or Social Darwinist would, for instance, find it easier to sympathize with a human beast of prey than would a Christian or a liberal democrat. Even so, it has been possible for Christians and liberals to write biographies of such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon without whipping themselves into thousand-page paroxysms of self-righteous moralistic denigration.
Hitler, of course, provides even greater problems for biographers, because his demonization is a prop of contemporary Jewish hegemony, and there are consequences for any writer who challenges that consensus.
R. H. S. Stolfi’s Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is one of my favorite books on Hitler. It is not a biography of Hitler, although it is organized chronologically. It is, rather, a kind of “meta-biography,” an essay on the interpretation of Hitler’s life. Stolfi’s project has both positive and negative aspects: Stolfi critiques the existing interpretations of Hitler’s life as a whole and of specific episodes in Hitler’s life, and Stolfi sets forth his own interpretations.
Stolfi’s criticism of Hitler biographies focuses on the work of those he calls the four “great biographers”: John Toland (Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, Alan Bullock (Hitler: A Study in Tyranny), Joachim Fest (Hitler), and Ian Kershaw (Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis). In Stolfi’s words, “the penchant of [Hitler’s] biographers for gratuitous sarcasm, strained skepticism, and writing from preconceived heights of antipathy has left the world with a dangerously inaccurate portrait of Hitler” (p. 54). (Judging from the reception of David Irving’s Hitler’s War and The War Path, the existing establishment regards an accurate portrait of Hitler more dangerous than an inaccurate one.) Four examples of this bias will suffice:
(1) Ian Kershaw claims that outside of politics, Hitler was an “unperson,” a nullity, which completely ignores Hitler’s voracious reading, serious engagement with and understanding of philosophers like Schopenhauer, love of painting and fine art, remarkable architectural knowledge and skill, and love of classical music, including a connoisseur’s knowledge of the operas of Richard Wagner that impressed the Wagner family and other highly discerning individuals.
(2) Hitler’s biographers invariably denigrate his humble, common origins, coming off like parodies of the worst forms of social snobbery. But of course the same authors would wax sodden and treacly in describing any other man’s rise from poverty and obscurity to fame and fortune. Jesse Owens, for instance.
(3) Stolfi rebuts one of Joachim Fest’s most outrageous liberties as follows: “The great biographers all debunk Nazi theories of racial differences, which they characterize as pseudoscientific and based on unredeemed prejudice, yet one of them [Fest] could claim confidently, without hint of countervailing possibility, that the subject of his biography had ‘criminal features’ set in a ‘psychopathic face’” (p. 268).
(4) The great biographers regularly slight Hitler’s service as a soldier during the First World War, yet as Stolfi points out, Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class, the Iron Cross Second Class, and a regimental commendation for bravery. He was also seriously wounded twice. Hitler never spoke much about what he did to earn these commendations, partly out of his characteristic modesty and reserve, but also probably because he did not wish to relive painful experiences. But even this is twisted by his biographers to cast aspersions on Hitler’s bravery and character. Stolfi notes that with no other historical figure do biographers feel entitled to take such liberties.
Kershaw is the most tendentious of the great biographers, repeatedly characterizing Hitler as an “unperson,” a “nonentity,” a “mediocrity,” and a “failure.” These epithets must surely feel good to Kershaw and like-minded readers, but if they are true, then Hitler’s career is utterly incomprehensible. Stolfi is acerbic, witty, and tireless in skewering the great biographers—although some of his readers might find it tiresome as well.
In addition to offering fascinating interpretations of particular events, Stolfi argues for three overriding theses about Hitler: (1) Hitler cannot be understood as a politician but as a prophet, specifically a prophet forced to take on the role of a messiah; (2) Hitler cannot be understood as an evil man, but as a good man who was forced by circumstances and his own ruthless logic and unemotional “hardness” to do terrible things; and (3) Hitler must be understood as one of the great men of history, indeed as a world-historical figure, who cannot be grasped with conventional moral concepts.
Surely by now you are thinking that our author must be some sort of “discredited,” “marginal,” outsider historian like David Irving, or even a dreaded “revisionist.” So who was Russell Stolfi? Born in 1932, Stolfi is to all appearances an established, mainstream military historian. He was Professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a Colonel in the US Marine Corps Reserve. He is the author of three other books: German Panzers on the Offensive: Russian Front–North Africa 1941-1942 (Schiffer Publishing, 2003), Hitler’s Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted (University of Oklahoma, 1993), and NATO Under Attack: Why the Western Alliance Can Fight Outnumbered and Win in Central Europe Without Nuclear Weapons (with F. W. von Mellenthin, Duke University Press, 1983). I first read Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny in May of 2012, and I was so excited that I tried to contact Stolfi for an interview only to learn that he had just died in April.
Politician or Prophet?
Adolf Hitler was a formidable political organizer who took over a minuscule Bavarian debating club and turned it into the largest political party in Germany. After being imprisoned for an abortive Putsch, Hitler decided to attain power legally, through electoral politics. To that end, he virtually created the modern political campaign, traveling tirelessly by automobile and airplane and masterfully employing the mass media of his time. When he became Chancellor, Hitler proved a formidable statesman, transforming Germany with a virtually bloodless revolution and recovering German lands and pride through a series of deft foreign policy triumphs until the British and French started a World War to stop him.
Yet for all that, Stolfi argues that Hitler’s personality, goals, and grand strategy were more like those of a religious prophet, specifically an armed prophet like Mohammed.
Politicians presuppose a common political system and climate of opinion. They generally avoid contesting fundamental principles and instead deal with essentially quantitative differences within the same political and ideological continuum, hence their ability to compromise and their susceptibility to corruption. Stolfi points out again and again that Hitler refused to behave like a politician.
Hitler never compromised on basic principles. He took dangerously unpopular stands (p. 225). He refused to soften the party’s message to appeal to squeamish and lukewarm people. He was no demagogue: “A demagogue tells his audience what it wants to hear. A messiah tells his audience what he wants it to hear” (p. 248). Hitler never worried that his radical views would “discredit” him in the eyes of the public, whose minds were mostly in the grip of his enemies anyway. Instead, Hitler was supremely confident of his ability to lend credit to his ideas through reason and rhetoric. He wanted to elevate public opinion toward truth rather than condescend to pander to ignorance and folly.
Hitler also refused to enter common fronts with enemy parties, especially the Social Democrats, even when they took patriotic stands.
Hitler was, moreover, utterly incorruptible. He refused to make special promises to businessmen and other interest groups. He just handed them the party’s platform. In the end, he was offered the Chancellorship simply because his opponents knew he could not be bought off with anything less.
Revolutionaries deal with fundamental issues of principle, which is why they seek to overthrow existing systems and begin anew. Hitler was, of course, a political revolutionary. But he was something more. He saw himself as the exponent of a whole philosophy of life, not just a political philosophy. He placed politics in a larger biological and historical perspective: the struggle of Aryan man against Jewry and its extended phenotypes Communism and Anglo-Saxon capitalism. He believed the stakes were global: nothing less than the survival of all life on Earth was in peril. And having miraculously survived four years of slaughter and two serious wounds in the trenches of World War I—including an experience that can only be described as supernatural (p. 95)—Hitler believed that he enjoyed the special protection of Providence.
Hitler had a number of heroic role models. As a child, he was transported by Germanic myths and sagas. As a teenager, he identified with the hero of Wagner’s opera Rienzi, based on the story of Cola di Rienzi, the 14th century popular dictator who sought to restore Rome to its Imperial glory but who was undone by the treachery of the aristocracy and church and finally murdered. Hitler prophesied that he would become a tribune of the people who would rise and fall like Rienzi, and he did. Hitler also identified with Wagner’s Lohengrin and Siegfried. Although Hitler himself had little use for the Bible, his later career as armed prophet brings to mind the Hebrew prophets and lawgivers as well. Stolfi’s analogy between Hitler and Mohammed is quite apposite and revealing.
Savior of Germany – and Europe
Hitler, however, apparently did not think of himself as a messiah figure, but more as a John the Baptist, preparing the way for someone greater than him. But, as Stolfi documents, many of Hitler’s closest followers—all of them intelligent men, ranging from mystics like Hess to consummate cynics like Goebbels—as well as some of his more fair-minded enemies, did see him as a messiah figure, and in the end, he was forced to take on that role. Reading Stolfi makes Savitri Devi’s thesis in The Lightning and the Sun that Hitler was an avatar of the god Vishnu seem a little less eccentric. (Savitri did not originate that thesis. It was a view that she encountered widely among educated Hindus in the 1930s.) There was something messianic about Hitler’s aura and actions, and people around the world understood it in terms of their own cultural traditions.
Stolfi does not mention it, but there is a sense in which Hitler was the savior of Germany and all of Western Europe, although his accomplishments fell far short of his ambitions, consumed his life, and devastated his nation. When Hitler launched operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Soviets were poised to launch a massive invasion of all of Central and Western Europe. Hitler pre-empted that invasion, and although he failed to destroy the USSR, the Third Reich was destroyed instead, and Stalin conquered half of Europe, the outcome would have been much worse if Stalin had been able to launch his invasion. Stalin could have conquered all of Europe. At best he would have been repulsed after unimaginable devastation and bloodshed. Thus every Western European who has lived in freedom from want and terror since 1941 owes a debt of thanks to Adolf Hitler, the German people, and their Axis partners.
(See on this site [Counter Currents] Daniel Michaels, “Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe” and the National Vanguard review of Viktor Suvorov’s Icebreaker; for more recent literature on this subject, see Viktor Suvorov’s definitive statement of his research has been published as The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II [Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008] and Joachim Hoffmann, Stalin’s War of Extermination, 1941-1945: Planning, Realization and Documentation [Capshaw, Al.: Theses and Dissertations Press, 2001].)
The Question of Evil
In today’s climate of moral relativism and rot, Adolf Hitler is probably the only human being that even liberals will denounce as evil. Hitler is the modern world’s paradigm and embodiment of evil. But of course other people can be evil if they are “like Hitler.” Thus the most radical thesis of Stolfi’s book is that Adolf Hitler was not evil.
There are many dimensions to this argument.
(1) Stolfi points out that there is no evidence that Hitler had psychopathic or sociopathic personality traits as a child. He did not torture animals or steal, for instance. He was polite, serious, and reserved.
(2) Stolfi also points out that Hitler was not primarily motivated by hate or ressentiment. He arrived at his two great enmities, namely against Jewry and Bolshevism, based on personal experience, current events, and extensive research. But when he was rationally convinced of their enormity, he naturally hated them with appropriate magnitude and intensity. As Stolfi writes, “It is difficult to imagine Hitler either as messiah or otherwise and not hating the enemy. Did Jesus the Christ or Mohammed the Prophet hate Satan or merely disapprove of him?” (p. 233).
(3) Calling Hitler evil, like calling him “crazy,” is mentally lazy, because it exempts us from trying to understand the reasons for Hitler’s actions: both his thought processes and objective events that prompted him to act. Hitler had his reasons.
(4) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s character, goals, and actions were not evil. Hitler did what he thought was right, and he was hard enough to spill oceans of blood if he thought it was necessary to advance the greater good. A Socratic, of course, would claim that it is an empty claim, as nobody does evil as such but only under the guise of a perceived good. The evil of an act is in its outcome, not its motive. We all “mean well.”
(5) Stolfi hints that Hitler may have, in a sense, been beyond good and evil, because his goal was nothing less than the creation of a new order, including a new moral order, and it begs the question to subject such men to the moral laws they seek to overthrow. This points us back to Stolfi’s thesis that Hitler has to be seen more as a religious than a political figure and forward to his third major thesis, that Hitler was a world-historical individual.
Russell Stolfi deals with a number of episodes in Hitler’s life that are adduced as evidence of evil. Stolfi argues that some of these acts are not evil at all. He others that others were necessary or mitigated evils. And he claims that still others were no more evil than the actions of other great men of history who nevertheless manage to receive respectful treatment from biographers. Finally, Stolfi argues that all of these acts, even the evil ones, do not necessarily make Hitler an evil man, for even good men can commit horrific acts if they believe they are necessary to promote a greater good.
(1) Stolfi argues that Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch and other violations of the laws of the Weimar Republic are somewhat softened by the fact that he believed that the Weimar Republic was an illegitimate and criminal regime. Hitler’s early attempts to defy it and replace it are not, therefore, “evil,” unless all acts of disobedience and revolution against governments as such are evil. In any case, after his release from prison, Hitler adopted a policy of strict legality: he pursued the Chancellorship through electoral politics, and he won.
(2) Stolfi argues that the creation of the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops) was not motivated by a desire to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power. Instead, the SA was formed in self-defense against organized Communist efforts to violently intimidate political opponents and seize power, violence that had effectively suppressed the ability of all Right-wing parties to assemble. The SA did not merely assure the NSDAP’s freedom to assemble and organize, it broke the Red terror and restored political freedom to all parties.
(3) Stolfi argues that the Röhm purge was necessary because there was ample evidence that Röhm himself was plotting a coup, and, true or not, Hindenburg, the leaders of the military, and Hitler’s top lieutenants all believed it to be true. Hindenburg threatened to declare martial law and have the army deal with Röhm if Hitler would not. Hitler had to act, because if he didn’t, he would be effectively deposed: he would be abdicating the sovereign function to decide and act for the good of the people to Hindenburg and the army. Even so, Hitler temporized to the last possible moment.
Stolfi claims that Röhm’s death was a kind of apotheosis for Hitler: “By June 1934, Hitler stood poised to pass beyond friendship with any man into the realm of the lonely, distant Leader. But Hitler could never pass into that realm with Röhm alive and serving as a reminder of Hitler’s own historical mortality. Röhm had to die, and Hitler had to kill him” (p. 306). But this was not, of course, Hitler’s motive for killing him.
Ultimately, Stolfi judges Röhm’s death to be politically necessary and morally excusable. He describes it not as a cool, premeditated murder but as a “crime of passion” of a man faced with the infidelity of a sworn confidant (p. 309). Of course, the Röhm purge was the occasion for settling a number of other old scores, which complicates Stolfi’s moral picture considerably.
(4) Stolfi evidently thinks there was nothing evil at all about Hitler’s assumption of dictatorial powers—through a provision in the Weimar constitution—or his suppression of a political movement as destructive and implacable as Marxism. But he praises the relative bloodlessness of Hitler’s legal revolution.
(5) As for the concentration camps off to which Hitler packed the leaders of the Marxist parties and other subversive groups: in 1935, when the German population stood at 65 million, the concentration camp inmates numbered 3,500, most of them Communists and Social Democrats. The camp system and its mandate were expanded to house people in protective custody for being social nuisances, including beggars, drunks, homosexuals (homosexuality was criminalized under the Second Reich, remained criminalized under Weimar, and was criminalized in the liberal democracies too), gypsies, and habitual criminals—by 1939 there were 10 camps with 25,000 inmates in a country of 80 million people. That doesn’t seem quite as evil as it was cracked up to be. Furthermore, since Himmler and Heydrich certainly did not lack persecuting zeal and organizational skill, we can conclude that the camp system was exactly as big as they thought it should be.
To give some context, according to Wikipedia—where statistics about Soviet atrocities tend to be on the low end due to Marxist policing—in March of 1940, the Soviet Gulag comprised 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in which approximately 1.3 million people were interned out of a population of 170 million. Whatever the real size, it was exactly as big as Stalin wanted it to be.
Although I have not been able to find records of similar forms of internment in liberal democracies for political dissidents and social nuisances, these surely did take place. But even in the absence of these numbers, it seems clear that Hitler’s camps were far more similar to the prisons of liberal democracies than the Soviet Gulag to which they are always likened.
Of course, these were peacetime numbers. Under the exigencies of war, Hitler’s camp system expanded dramatically to house hostile populations, prisoners of war, and conscript laborers, which is another topic.
(6) Hitler’s anti-Semitism is often put forward as evidence of evil. Hitler himself thought that certain forms of anti-Semitism were repugnant if not outright evil: religious anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism based on ressentiment, gutter populist scapegoating, etc. His repugnance for such phenomena prejudiced him against anti-Semitism as such. But his personal experiences in Vienna, combined with serious reading eventually led him to a dispassionate, scientifically based, and historically informed anti-Semitism.
When Hitler took power, Germany had a relatively small Jewish population. His basic policy was to prevent any further German-Jewish genetic admixture, remove Jews from positions of power and influence, and encourage Jews to emigrate. By the outbreak of the Polish war, Germany’s Jewish population had been dramatically reduced. But due to Hitler’s war gains, millions of new Jews fell into his remit. More about this anon. Stolfi is somewhat circumspect in passing judgment about Hitler’s peacetime Jewish policy. But we can safely say that it was no more evil than, say, the British treatment of Boer non-combatants or the American treatment of the Plains Indians.
(7) Regarding Hitler’s foreign policy exploits as Chancellor—including rearmament, pulling out of the League of Nations, remilitarizing the Rhineland, the annexation of the Sudetenland and Austria, the annexation of Bohemia, and the war with Poland—Stolfi writes, “every international crisis that involved Hitler in the 1930s stemmed from an iniquity on the part of the Allies in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919” (p. 316). According to Stolfi, in all of these crises, morality was on Hitler’s side, and he lauds Hitler for conducting them with restraint and relative bloodlessness—at least up until the Polish war.
These were hardly the outrageous, unendurable moral provocations of Allied propaganda that justified Britain and France starting a World War because Hitler, having exhausted diplomatic negotiations, started a war with Poland to recover German lands and peoples subjected to horrific Polish oppression. The British and French simply could not grasp that, in Stolfi’s words, “a world-historical personality had marched, outraged, out of the desert of shattered Flanders fields, and the former Allies had not even superior morality to shield themselves from him” (p. 317).
(8) Stolfi interprets Operation Barbarossa against the USSR as a colonial war of conquest as well as a crusade to rid Europe of the scourge of Bolshevism. From an ethnonationalist perspective, of course, Hitler’s aim to reduce Slavs to colonized peoples was evil. Furthermore, it was more evil than British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian, American, and Russian imperialism directed at non-European peoples, because it is always worse to mistreat one’s own blood than foreigners. But it was certainly not uniquely evil in the annals of human history. If Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame can be the subjects of objective historical assessments, then Barbarossa does not disqualify Hitler.
Stolfi does not treat Barbarossa as a necessary war to preempt Stalin’s planned invasion of Europe. I wanted to ask Stolfi his thoughts about the thesis defended by Viktor Suvorov and Joachim Hoffmann in an interview, but that was not to be. If they are right, of course, then there was no evil at all in launching Barbarossa, although one can justly criticize the excesses of its execution.
(9) According to Stolfi, Hitler’s darkest deeds are the massacre of 3.1 million Soviet POWs captured in the opening months of Barbarossa and the killing of 4.5 million Jews in what is known as the Holocaust. Stolfi is certainly a Hitler revisionist, but I do not know whether he is a Holocaust revisionist or not, since I am unsure if it is legal for him to think that “only” 4.5 million Jews were killed by the Third Reich. I had not even heard of the 3.1 million Soviet POWs, which Stolfi mentions only a couple of times in passing. But of course I have heard of the Holocaust, to which Stolfi dedicates the last two paragraphs of the book (pp. 461-62). Such a brief treatment may itself constitute revisionism, at least in France, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined for saying that the Holocaust was only a footnote to the Second World War. Given that some footnotes are longer than the paragraphs in question, Stolfi might have gotten in trouble in the land of liberté. Stolfi’s treatment, however, is a welcome corrective to the Jewish tendency to treat World War II as merely the backdrop of the Holocaust.
Of course, just as Hitler is our age’s paradigm of an evil man, the Holocaust is the paradigm of an evil event. Stolfi does not dispute that the massacre of 7.6 million people is evil. But he does not think it is uniquely evil in World War II or the annals of history in general. Winston Churchill, for example, was responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians whose food was seized for the war effort. He was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German non-combatants in strategically unnecessary terror bombings of German cities. He was responsible for the expulsion of 14 million Germans from their homes in Eastern and Central Europe, up to two million of whom died. Was Churchill evil? His apologists, of course, would argue that his actions were necessitated by the exigencies of war and the pursuit of the greater good. But Hitler’s apologists, if there were any, could argue the very same thing and be done with it. If Churchill, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Julius Caesar, and other members of the Million Murder club can receive fair treatment in a biography, then why not Hitler?
Stolfi compares the Holocaust to Julius Caesar’s ten year conquest of Gaul, in which he killed more than a million armed men and reduced another million to slavery. One million civilian non-combatants were also killed or reduced to slavery. Some particularly troublesome tribes were entirely exterminated because they were “irreconcilable, menacing, and useless either as allies or slaves” (p. 38). Stolfi points out, however, that Caesar’s acts “revealed harshness of almost incredible proportion,” but his acts were “based on realism and prudence in the face of perceived danger—scarcely sadism and cruelty” (p. 38). Likewise, Stolfi argues that “Hitler took the action of pitiless massacre as a last resort in the face of a perceived irreconcilable enemy” and his actions “showed virtually nothing that can be interpreted as sadism, cruelty, or ingrained hate as opposed to temporary fury in the carrying out of the action” (p. 39).
Hitler’s massacres, terrible though they may be, do not prove that he is an evil man, since even good men might resort to such measures in direst extremity. Moreover, even if they were expressions of evil, they were not unique expressions of unique evil but all too common in the annals of history. But, again, only in Hitler’s case are they treated as insuperable objections to serious historical treatment.
In sum, Stolfi argues that Hitler cannot be seen as evil if that means that he was motivated by sadism, psychopathy, hatred, or a neurotic need for power and attention. Instead, Hitler was motivated, first and foremost, by love of his people, beyond which were wider but less pressing concerns with the larger Aryan race, European civilization, and the welfare of the world as a whole. Because Hitler believed that the things he loved were imperiled by Jewry, Bolshevism, and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, he fought them. And when the fight became a world conflagration, he fought them with a remarkable hardness and severity. But his essentially decent character and positive ends remained unchanged. Thus for Stolfi, Hitler is a good man who did some bad things as well as good things—a good man who made many good decisions and some catastrophic mistakes.
A Dark World Historical Personality
But there is a sense in which Stolfi thinks that Hitler is beyond the very categories of good and evil, at least as far as historians should be concerned. Stolfi argues that Hitler was a great man, like such great conquerors as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon. (Stolfi makes scant mention of unarmed prophets like the Buddha or Jesus.) According to Stolfi, if one were to freeze Hitler’s life at the end of 1942, he would have to be considered one of history’s greatest statesmen and conquerors. And even if one plays the film all the way to the end, Stolfi argues that the Allies did not win World War II so much as Hitler lost it, which itself underscores his greatness and the relative nullity of his opponents.
Indeed, Stolfi argues that Hitler was more than just a great man but one of Hegel’s “world-historical individuals,” who inaugurates a new stage in human history and cannot be judged or comprehended by the standards of the previous stage. Stolfi, it seems, detaches this concept from Hegel’s overall view that world-historical individuals advance history toward the Providential goal of universal freedom, a goal that Hitler, of course, rejected in favor of particularisms of race and nation. Sadly, though, Hitler may have advanced the universalist agenda in defeat, through no intention of his own.
But, as another prophetic figure once said of World War II, “the war’s not over as far as I’m concerned,” meaning that history is still unfolding, including the consequences of Hitler’s actions. So it remains to be seen whether Hitler will contribute to the victory or defeat of universalism. If racial nationalism—of which Hitler is an inexpugnable part—defeats the drive toward a homogeneous global society, then Hitler would be a world historical figure of an entirely new order: not an agent of “progress,” but of its termination; the man who ended the “end of history” and started the world anew; the man who took the ascending line of progress and inscribed it within a cyclical view of history, whether interpreted in the widely variant Traditionalist or Spenglerian senses.
♣
Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny is a remarkable book that I recommend to all my readers. Stolfi executes his audacious project with clarity and dry humor. Sometimes Stolfi seems to go a bit too far, perhaps just to test his dialectical skills. For instance, he even defends Hitler as a painter. He does a surprisingly good job, but I will still not budge from my conviction that Winston Churchill was Hitler’s superior in this—and only this—regard.
This book is even more remarkable because it is the work of a mainstream military historian, and it clears the way for other genuinely historical studies of Hitler and the Third Reich. This really is an inevitable development as the generations that lived through the war die off. Furthermore, we are now living in a multipolar world with new rising powers—Russia, China, India—that are free of Jewish cultural and political hegemony and hungry for a genuine understanding of Hitler and the Second World War.
White Nationalists should especially welcome Stolfi’s book because it works to dispel the cloud of moral hysteria and denigration that surrounds Hitler, taking some of the sting out of the inevitable accusation that we are “just like Hitler,” which turns out to be an undeserved compliment.
Painting of the day:
Jacques-Louis David
The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons ~ 1789
Louvre
An interesting debate followed Matt Parrott’s recent article at Counter Currents about the pros and cons of fascism for the coming ethnostate.
I admire both Julian and Hitler, who ruled without a system of checks and balances. But at the same time we must avoid blundering on colossal scales (Julian’s invading Persia; Hitler’s invading Russia). That’s why at Counter Currents Trainspotter asked me a most pertinent question about the concept of the Two Roman Consuls to avoid such civilization-destroying blunders.
This is the lead paragraph of the current Wikipedia article on Roman consuls:
A consul served in the highest elected political office of the Roman Republic. Each year, two consuls were elected together, to serve for a one-year term. Each consul was given veto power over his colleague and the officials would alternate each month.
However, after the establishment of the Empire, the consuls were merely a figurative representative of Rome’s republican heritage and held very little power and authority, with the Emperor acting as the supreme leader.
If someone deserves to be compared to LOTR’s Isildur he was Julius Caesar. We are barely taught at school the history of the Aryan people called the Celts. Studying their tragic history ought to change our idealized image about Caesar and the beginning of the Roman Empire.
Caesar betrayed the Republic and started what became known as the Roman Empire. The empire fell under the spell of the One Ring, “economics over race,” especially considering that the conquered Celts were whiter than the Romans. (It was the Romans, not the Celts, the ones who by the times of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul had started to miscegenate.)
Last year I was shocked to learn that Caesar practiced a sort of exterminationist anti-whitism. You see nothing of this barbarism in TV series like Rome or the other idealized series on the fall of the empire. But the grim fact is that Caesar killed… one of every four Gauls!
For instance, when his troops occupied the Gaulish town of Avaricum Caesar ordered all 40,000 inhabitants put to death. His conquest of Gaul was exterminationist, with whole tribes, including pure Aryan women and children, being slaughtered.
In William Pierce’s history of the white race we are told that by the autumn of 54 B.C. Caesar had subdued Gaul, having destroyed 800 towns and villages. More than three million (!) Celts were enslaved. And what is much worse, “behind his armies came a horde of Roman-Jewish merchants and speculators,” with “hundreds of thousands of blond, blue-eyed Celtic girls” that marched south in chains. They were “pawed over by greasy, Semitic flesh-merchants in Rome’s slave markets.”
So the century when we were born was not the first time that a “Hellstorm,” which we could define as whites’ enslaving and genociding the cream of their own race, happened in Europe.
From the time of Caesar’s abolition of the Two Consuls system, the fate of Rome was sealed. No Roman Emperor after Caesar ever shared power. All became absolute dictators. No Consul had veto powers. Miscegenating Romans started to forget the republican principles that had made them so strong—disciplina potestas, probitas, severitas, gravitas, pudicitia, pietas and especially the principle that the common good is the highest law: salus populi suprema lex. Instead, they started to behave like American pigs or, to use a Petronius term during the reign of another mad emperor, Caligula, like Trimalchios.
Marble bust of Brutus
Not Caesar but Brutus should be our model. And the history of Brutus’ ancestors, the founders of the Roman Republic, should be studied starting perhaps with Lucius Junius Brutus.
I told Trainspotter that throughout Plato’s Republic runs the fear that the degenerative Ionian and Athenian lifestyles could potentially ruin the state, and that this propensity of whites to behave like miscegenating pigs in the later stages of civilization could only be prevented by a tough Dorian discipline.
In a nutshell, the coming Fourth Reich must adopt the Two Consuls principle and repudiate all sorts of Caesarism.