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Category: Biography

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) 1st World War Adolf Hitler Biography

Hitler, 2

The second chapter of Brendan Simms’ book is entitled ‘Against a World of Enemies’. Although I will follow the prose of his abridged paragraphs closely, in order not to violate the copyright of his book I will be rephrasing it (and perhaps I will do the same with the rest of the book Hitler: Only the World Was Enough). Although my paraphrases closely follow Simms’ abbreviated paragraphs, only when I quote him verbatim will I indent the quotations.

This latest Hitler biographer, who as I said in a previous post published his book in 2019, begins his chapter by saying that the young Adolf reacted enthusiastically to the outbreak of the First World War, and although he doesn’t publish the following photograph, he mentions it:

Adolf Hitler attends a rally in the Odeonsplatz
to celebrate the declaration of war in 1914.

The enthusiastic Hitler volunteered to fight with the Bavarian army and was drafted into a regiment known as the List Regiment, the name of its commander, which included not only volunteers but also forced recruits. During weeks of training, Hitler learned to use the regulation rifle and was then sent to reinforce the German advance through Belgium and northern France.

Hitler did not, in other words, react to the outbreak of war by disappearing. Instead, he immediately volunteered for the German (technically, the Bavarian) army, an unusual choice. In August 1914, therefore, Hitler definitively turned his back not just on Austria-Hungary, but opted decisively for Germany. It was his first major documented political statement.

But the curious thing is that, at this point, Hitler’s main enemy was England. The first letter on record after enlistment announces his hope that he ‘would get to England’ apparently as a German invasion force. The target was not the Tsarist Empire, although the Russians were at that time a danger to Prussia.

The List Regiment did indeed encounter the British at Geluveld, Wytschate and Messines in the Belgian region of Flanders. Hitler took part in several frontal attacks. He himself refers to ‘heaviest battles’. Despite an initial triumph, the Bavarians were eventually driven out of Geluveld. Hitler was promoted to Gefreiter, Private First Class. Since then he claimed ‘I can say that I risked my life daily and looked death in the eye’. On 2 December Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. ‘It was’, he wrote, ‘the happiest day of my life’.

In a letter of February 1915, Hitler lamented the loss of life in a struggle against a ‘world of international enemies’ and expressed the hope not only that ‘Germany’s external enemy’ would be crushed but that her ‘inner internationalism would disintegrate’. These were times when the word globalisation wasn’t yet in use. In the following letter from mid-1915 Hitler recounted a bomb hit from which he was ‘rescued as by a miracle’, and rejoiced that Germany was ‘at last mobilising opinion against England’, further evidence of his concern about Great Britain.

Hitler’s next major battle, in March 1915, was preceded by even more massive bombardments by the British, followed by the first encounter with Imperial troops from the Indian Army. A month later Hitler had to face more Empire units, especially Canadian ones. In time, the array of exotic helmets in the enemy trenches—including turbans and beaked hats—gave the men of the List Regiment the sad impression that the world was up in arms against them (something that would be repeated in the Second World War). This truthful impression was reinforced the following year. Hitler was back in action in French Flanders in May-June 1916. This time the List Regiment had to face Australians and New Zealanders.

The Bavarians were once again discouraged to find themselves grappling with men who had travelled from the far side of the world to fight them in Flanders. Worse still, as Hitler’s comrade Adolf Meyer recalled, some of the Australians were of German descent. One of his captives ‘not only spoke excellent German, but wore my own name of Meyer into the bargain. Understandably: His father was a German, who had immigrated to Australia as a child with his parents and later married an English woman there’.

Subsequently, the List Regiment suffered the final stages of the Battle of the Somme. Hitler’s bunker was hit by a British artillery barrage, wounding him in the left upper thigh. While the wound wasn’t life-threatening, it was serious enough for him to be evacuated. Hitler was sent to the Beelitz military hospital in Berlin to recover.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Adolf Hitler Biography

Hitler, 1

Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, i.e. he was a year younger than my paternal grandmother, with whom I lived for a while (that means that if it hadn’t been for the Allied dogs, I might even have met him!). He was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria. Hitler would later call himself a Bavarian on several occasions.

At the beginning of the first part of his book, Brendan Simms informs us that the first three decades of Hitler’s life were characterised by obscurity and various deprivations; his father and mother died, the latter after a traumatic illness, and his artistic talent went unrecognised in Vienna. Those were times, and we are talking before his twenty-fifth birthday, when the young Adolf didn’t yet show any signs of politicisation.

Today I can say that of all the post-1945 writers, I have the closest rapport with Savitri Devi—by far. But before I discovered white nationalism, and I’m talking about how I thought from 2002 to 2009, Alice Miller, the first author in history to take the side of the child abused by his parents was, intellectually, my Beatrice. It’s interesting what Simms says at the beginning of his biography: that there is no evidence that Alois, Hitler’s father, was violent to his children; because Miller, who suffered in the Warsaw ghetto, defamed Hitler by speculating that he had indeed been abused by his father Alois.

Hitler had an older half-brother, Alois Junior, and a half-sister, Angela, born from his father’s first marriage. After the death of his first wife, Alois married his cousin Klara Pölzl, with whom he had six children, only two of whom survived: Adolf himself and his younger sister Paula. Two of Hitler’s four siblings died before they were born, and another when Hitler was ten years old.

At school, the boy Adolf only got good marks in drawing and sport, but he was such a bad student that he failed one year before leaving school for good at the age of sixteen, about the age at which I, too, left school and for the same reasons (it’s all brain-washing bullshit what the System teaches us there). Simms informs us:

Hitler’s main preoccupations after leaving school were his financial security, his emotional life, pursuing a career as an artist and the health of his mother. The first known letter by Hitler was penned in February 1906, together with his sister Paula, asking the Finanzdirektion Linz for payment of his orphan’s pension.

I will be omitting the numbers and endnotes throughout my quotations of Simms’ book.

He visited Vienna on a number of occasions and soon moved to the imperial capital. There he pursued an interest in the operas of Richard Wagner. In the summer of 1906, Hitler saw Tristan and Isolde as well as The Flying Dutchman. He also attended the Stadttheater. He was engrossed by not only the music but especially the architecture of opera. A postcard of the Court Opera House Vienna records that he was impressed by the ‘majesty’ of its exterior, but had reservations about an interior ‘cluttered’ with velvet and gold.

I know that many visitors find it bothersome that, whenever I can, I take the opportunity to denigrate white nationalism. But I must. Savitri hits the nail on the head in her book when she points out that the Hitler phenomenon can only be understood if we see that he was a kind of initiate. And the initiation was art! It seems easy for me to understand this because, coming from parents who were artists, it seems obvious to me that this is what motivated me to seek a different path from the crap that conventional schooling offers us (everything looks like pork to someone who understands Beauty as a child). In other words, if contemporary racialists fail to initiate themselves into art, they won’t be able to save their race. I will not repeat Savitri’s reasons: that is why we abridged her book and translated that abridged version here. Simms continues:

In early 1907, Hitler’s mother was diagnosed with cancer and operated on without success. She had no medical insurance, but bills were kept low by the kindness of her Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch. Hitler helped to look after his mother during her illness and he seems to have been devastated by her death in late December 1907.

He was eighteen years old.

It is certain, in any case, that Hitler neither blamed Bloch for his mother’s death nor became an anti-Semite in consequence. On the contrary, he remained in friendly contact with Bloch for some time after and even sent him a hand-painted card wishing him happy new year. Much later, Hitler enabled Bloch to escape from Austria on terms far more favourable than those granted for his unfortunate fellow Jews.

The young Hitler’s interests were above all musical and architectural, like the layout and architecture of Linz. He confessed to leading a hermit’s life and was plagued by bedbugs. These were times when he was on good terms with August Kubizek, another teenager. Savitri recounts some very revealing anecdotes of this friendship in her book. Simms ignores them in his biography Hitler, although he writes the following:

He certainly seems to have experienced a period of poverty, telling Kubizek that ‘you don’t have to bring me cheese and butter anymore, but I thank you for the thought’. He was not too poor, however, to miss a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin.

Shortly, afterwards, Hitler left the Stumpergasse and was swallowed up by the city for more than a year. He lodged with Helene Riedl in the Felberstrasse until August 1909. His only known activity during this period was a second and equally unsuccessful application to the Academy. Hitler then lived for about a month as a tenant of Antonia Oberlerchner in the Sechshausterstrasse, leaving in mid September 1909. Even less is known about what came next. He certainly underwent some sort of economic and perhaps psychological crisis, leading to a descent from respectability.

Der Hauptplatz in Linz

A few years later, well before he was famous, Hitler told the Linz authorities that the autumn of 1909 had been a ‘bitter time’ for him. According to a statement he gave to the Vienna police in early August 1910, he spent a time in a sanctuary for the homeless at Meidling. How Hitler extricated himself is not known, but he was able to pay for a bed at the more respectable men’s hostel in the Meldemannstrasse in Vienna-Briggitenau from February 1910. There he started to paint postcards and pictures which his crony and ‘business’ partner Reinhold Hanisch would sell to dealers; this relationship soured when he reported Hanisch to the authorities for allegedly embezzling some of the money.

Now that I posted a review of The Godfather, I’ve been watching videos about the real-life mafia. One YouTubber said that what these people really loved was the American dollar. Those gangsters were slaves to Mammon, just like Hitler (and I) are slaves to the Goddess of Beauty. Simms ends his first chapter with some of these passages:

All we know for sure is that Hitler had to mark time in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until he was twenty-four so as to keep collecting his orphan’s pension. It did not help that he fell out with his half-sister Angela Raubal over their inheritance, and was forced to give way after a court appearance in Vienna in early March 1911…

In the spring of 1913, Hitler collected the last instalment of his pension. There was nothing to keep him in Vienna. When Hitler went to Munich in May 1913 his worldly possessions filled a small suitcase…

He lived happily for nearly a year under the roof of Czech spinster, Maria Zakreys, and betrayed no irritation at her limited command of German. His documented interests were architecture, town planning and music, particularly the connections between them. There was surely much more going on inside his head, but we cannot be certain what it was.

Hitler’s self-description varied, but the common denominator was creativity. He registered himself as an ‘artist’ in the Stumpergasse in mid February 1908, as a ‘student’ in the Felberstrasse in mid November 1908, as a ‘writer’ in the Sechshausterstrasse in late August 1909, and as a ‘painter’ at the Meldemannstrasse in early 1910 and again in late June 1910…

He was eventually mustered in Salzburg by the Austrian authorities, in early February 1914, and found to be physically unfit to serve. In the meantime, Hitler continued to make his living by selling pictures, just as he had in Vienna.

All this makes our picture of the young Hitler closer to a sketch than a full portrait. To be sure, he was already more than a mere cipher: his artistic interests were already well established; his hostility to the Habsburg Empire, though not the reasons for it, was a matter of record… There is no surviving contemporary evidence that he was much aware of France or the Russian Empire or the Anglo-World of the British Empire and the United States. That was about to change. If the Hitler of 1914 had as yet left almost no mark on the world, the world was about to make his mark on him.

Categories
Biography Caligula

Caligula, 2

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

 

Foreword: Caligula, A Historical Enigma

by José Manuel Roldán

Thirty stab wounds ended the life of Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus on 24 January 41, barely four years after he succeeded Tiberius, Augustus’ heir to the imperial throne. He had not yet reached the age of thirty, which was, however, more than enough time for his memory to be stigmatised forever as a paradigm of cruelty, under the nickname that his father’s soldiers had given him in his childhood: Little boot.

The life and reign of Caligula have been a topic of unresolved debate and controversy since antiquity, although it seems impossible to banish from the popular imagination the gloomy and disturbing image that his name alone arouses. And yet, this image of an inept, bloodthirsty, unpredictable and monstrous tyrant that tradition has handed down to us seems more like a melodramatic and simplifying label, invented not so much to define the character as to avoid a coherent explanation of the apparent contradictions in his behaviour: a simplification that has pontificated with the diagnosis of madness the many nooks and crannies of a complex personality.

This diagnosis has served to ‘explain’ the dozens of anecdotes with which the ancient literary tradition has traced the outline of the emperor, converted into as many examples of erratic and perverse behaviour, as support for a trivial stereotype: the bloodthirsty monster, capable of any outrage, about whom there has been no scruple in inventing even imaginary crimes to give greater consistency and morbidity to the character, already condemned from the beginning to play this role. Examples are the descriptions offered by Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, later plastically recreated in a well-known BBC television series; the image of the emperor in a 1953 film, The Robe; Albert Camus’ drama Caligula; Pepe Cibrián’s Argentine musical Calígula; or the shameful monstrosity of Tinto Brass in a pornographic film produced for Penthouse. Titles and titles of so-called ‘historical’ novels have piled up with Caligula as the protagonist. Thus, Calígula, una novela sobre el perverso emperador romano, by P.J. Franceschini and P. Lundel; Calígula, el dios cruel, by S. Obermeier, or Calígula, by M.G. Silato, to offer only examples published in Spanish.

The label, on the other hand, was quite simple. It was hard enough to follow faithfully the outlines drawn by the Roman literature of the imperial period itself, which was unanimous in its vilification of Gaius. But are these sources reliable? A preliminary step, therefore, in approaching the life of Gaius would be to take this tradition into account and look into it objectively. Only two authors knew Caligula during his lifetime: the writer Seneca and Philo, a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria. The former, an intriguing and quarrelsome courtier, was nearly condemned to death by Gaius; the latter went to Rome as spokesman for a delegation of Alexandrian Jews to the emperor and left his impressions in the pamphlet Embassy to Gaius. The rest wrote their works after Caligula was dead: Flavius Josephus, a Pharisee Jew of the Flavian period, included in his Antiquities of the Jews, published in 93, numerous facts about the reign, though in connection with problems of his people; the Annals of the great historian Cornelius Tacitus, a few years later, can only be used to illustrate the youth of Gaius, because the books on his reign—VII and following—have been lost; the Life of Gaius, by Suetonius, secretary for a time to the emperor Hadrian, is the only complete biography of Caligula, but its tendency to sensationalism forces many of its facts to be called into question; finally, Dion Cassius, the Anatolian writer, between the 2nd and 3rd centuries, in his Roman History, while providing a good deal of information about Caligula’s rule, is too far removed from the events and therefore influenced by the sources he used in his account.

But in the analysis of these sources one decisive point must be borne in mind: by whom they were written and for what audience. Except for the two Jewish writers, Philo and Josephus, whose interlocutors were their fellow countrymen in Alexandria and Jerusalem respectively, the rest wrote mainly for the Roman social elites and, more specifically, for their most influential representatives, the members of the Senate, to which they all belonged, except Suetonius, otherwise closely linked to the circle of a conspicuous senator of the Trajanic period, Pliny the Younger. In the case of a clearly anti-senatorial figure like Caligula, this finding is highly significant. The audiences of these writers would not have entirely accepted a representation of Gaius that portrayed him in a positive light. A sentence from Tacitus’ Annals is illuminating in this respect: ‘The deeds of Tiberius and Gaius, as well as those of Claudius and Nero, were falsified out of fear while they were alive; and written, after their death, with hatred still fresh’.

But at the same time, regardless of the true intentions of their authors, these sources are an invaluable source of evidence for understanding the emperor’s views. Views, as we shall see, marked by the aspiration to move away from the elaborate, but also mistaken, political construction devised by Augustus—an autocracy disguised in republican garb in favour of open monarchical domination. All the emperors who tried to advance in the logical deployment of the powers implicit in the Principate were stigmatised, as opposed to those who prudently maintained the fiction of separation, however illusory, of powers between the prince and the Senate. Thus was born the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors, which, overcoming the barriers of antiquity, still continues to influence our own judgement.

Caligula undoubtedly occupies a prominent place in the second group, not so much for his governmental action as for his manifest hostility towards the senatorial collective, which took revenge, after his death, by heaping rubbish on his memory and denying him the essential element that distinguishes the human being: reason. Caligula was treated as a madman for persecuting the aristocracy. But his successor, Claudius, who tried to respect the aristocracy, was considered an imbecile.

Nevertheless, and as a predictable reaction, since the beginning of the 20th century historical research, aware of the partiality of the documentary sources, has tried to correct this negative image. A long article by H. Willrich, published in 1903, first drew attention to the positive aspects of Caligula’s work and his motivations, over and above the simplistic label of madness. Subsequent studies have taken up this point of view, with new or more substantiated arguments, to become, on occasions, veritable apologies, as far removed from the historical truth as the very sources they seek to correct. Thus, it is not surprising that there is also no shortage of works which, while accepting Gaius’ madness without further ado attempt to explain it using psychoanalysis or clinical points of view, thereby indirectly recognising the reliability of the ancient sources.

These sources are certainly full of inconsistencies and difficulties in their correct interpretation, but it is also true that it is not possible to do without them as a guiding thread. It is the task of the historian to winnow out the fictional elements they contain, to separate them from the consistent data with which a plausible picture can be reconstructed. Plausible, but not authentic. And that is precisely the greatness and the misery of the historian.

Potsdam

______ 卐 ______

 

Editor’s note: Emphasis is mine. It perfectly portrays what I meant in the last paragraph of my previous post on Caligula.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Adolf Hitler Biography

Simms’ book

On Sunday I had to get out of my house to avoid the music at a party my nephew was throwing. I had nothing better to do than spend a few hours at the most prestigious bookshop south of the city. I had originally planned to buy some of Plutarch and Xenophon on Sparta, but there were no good editions. I leafed through Darwin’s autobiography and was surprised that his wife censored a sentence of earlier editions where Charles said that the doctrine of eternal damnation was odious (in my diary I noted that this is why white people are dying out: it wasn’t even possible for these 19th-century little women to rebel against the most odious thing!). I was also browsing through a new study on the painter Giorgio de Chirico, of whom I have collected several paintings on this site. Finally, I stumbled across a new 2019 biography of Uncle Adolf: Hitler: Only the World Was Enough by British author Brendan Simms.

Although the authors of Dominion and Criminal History of Christianity are normies, I have been using their books to illustrate precepts of ours that have nothing to do with the liberalism of Tom Holland or Karlheinz Deschner, and I did the same with Richard Weikart’s Hitler’s Religion. The point is that people like us are never published by the System. And when we use a public platform, as I did with the books that appear in ‘Our Books’, the System simply cancels our accounts. Then there is the issue that all these normie authors, approved by the System, are thus capable of writing super-erudite treatises, like Hitler: Only the World Was Enough by Simms.

Brendan Simms, professor of history, University of Cambridge.

I bought his book because we are informed that, according to the author, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, primarily the United States, was Hitler’s main enemy, not Jewry. The premise is fascinating, but unlike the writings of people on our side, such as Francis Parker Yockey who held a similar premise, Simms has to utter the hackneyed anti-Hitler duck-speak from the first few pages of the book and the final chapter, to receive the imprimatur of a good publishing house. Nevertheless, like Weikart’s book on Hitler’s pantheistic religion, such normie authors provide a plethora of new research that is easy to use for altogether different purposes.

Unlike Holland’s Dominion, I won’t be able to quote from Simms’s book because the 2021 copy I bought is a Barcelona translation of the English original. Nevertheless, this Simms interview sheds some light on Hitler’s view of Anglo-America.

Of course, Simms repeats the religious figure of six million holocausted Jews ignoring videos, which can also be seen on YouTube, of how the Jewish press was already playing with the 6-million figure when talking about Russian pogroms before the Third Reich.

Categories
Biography Cicero Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Literature Mexico

Krauze and the JQ

Last Friday I added a short piece on Spinoza in Mexico Park: a book by the Mexican-Jewish Enrique Krauze that I had just bought. Now that I’ve been reading it, I couldn’t resist the urge to write a critical review of it for The Occidental Observer (TOO). My book review has just been published in that webzine for JQ connoisseurs—click: here!

The following is a passage (my translation) of Spinoza in Mexico Park that I could have quoted in my TOO article:

José María Lassalle: In our last conversation we had covered a decade in your intellectual life: that of your integration into Mexican culture as a historian and as editorial secretary of the magazine Vuelta… The one you described in the first conversation with great detail and love: your culture of origin, Jewish culture. I was very surprised by everything you said. I didn’t know that this root was so deep. It almost covered everything… I understand that you wanted to belong to Mexico and to the Hispanic world, and all your life you have worked to achieve it. But secretly you were driven by that initial impulse, by that root. That root is Judaism: the tree grew in Mexico, in Mexican soil, and bore Mexican fruit, but the root and the trunk were Jewish.

Enrique Krauze: What I did was to build that Jewish compound in Amsterdam [obliquely, Krauze is referring to Spinoza, who was born in Amsterdam]… And I began to build a library of Jewish subjects from all eras. A library, above all, of characters and ideas. [pages 419-420]

Latin Americans idolise their intellectuals and writers, so there are a couple of things I’d like to add to what I wrote in the TOO review.

Besides having enormous fame in the Spanish-speaking world, Krauze is one of those serene-speaking ethnic Jews with subtle but toxic messages for the white world. For example, he hasn’t only translated Susan Sontag for the cultural magazines in Spanish he has edited (I have read Krauze since 1990). In Spinoza in Mexico Park, where he talks a lot about WW2, the historian Krauze doesn’t mention David Irving once. Moreover, Krauze writes ‘Holocaust’ in a capital letter and ‘gulag’ in a lowercase in spite of the fact that far more Gentiles died in the Gulag than Jews in the so-called holocaust!

In the TOO piece I only mentioned a few names of the Jewish authors that influenced Krauze, but Spinoza in Mexico Park is replete with other names of historical Jews, from cover to cover. (There is no notable writer in the Spanish-speaking world to point these things out. That’s why I have been calling Latin America the ‘blue pill’ subcontinent.)

On the dilemma that plagues every Westerner—Athens or Jerusalem?—Krauze wrote the following (my translation) about the Greco-Roman world, in the context of Jewish writers of antiquity, such as Josephus and Philo:

[Jewish historian Arnaldo] Momigliano argues that Jerusalem resisted Athens because of the radical religious obstinacy of the people. The Jewish people remained faithful to the priests, the guardians of orthodoxy. For them, Greek culture was synonymous with idolatry, vain pleasures, frivolous comedies, and pagan myths… The Alexandrian Jews tried to persuade the Greek world of the goodness of their faith… One text points to the excesses of a certain Flaccus, the Roman governor in Egypt, who unleashed a veritable pogrom in that city. Even then, this persecution took on the dramatic forms and dimensions that were to be seen many centuries later in the Middle Ages. The profile he [the Jew Momigliano] draws of the delirious Caligula is a jewel worthy of Suetonius [Spinoza in Mexico Park, pages 430-431].

Regular visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour know that this site has a masthead, a guide that allows us to navigate the seas of history. Compare Krauze’s Jewish POV quoted above with the Aryan POV of our ‘masthead’ (pages 33-123 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, linked in our featured post):

In 62-61 b.c.e., the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 b.c.e., which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

‘The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold… I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite those people against me and against every eminent man, and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under the pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…’

From these phrases, we can deduce that already in the 1st century b.c.e., the Jews had great political power in Rome itself and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Thus spake Cicero (brown letters) before the senate. The story of the Flaccus family doesn’t end there. In the masthead we then see what happened to another Flaccus[1] in the section about Caligula: another historical figure maligned by Jews and Christians, including the historian Krauze.

Incidentally, I’m in the final proofreading of the November 2022 edition of On Exterminationism, so I won’t be adding more entries here while I work on it. But I’ll answer any questions I am asked about Krauze, whom I met personally—even shook hands with him in 1993!—when he and Octavio Paz published a book by Cuban dissident Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

________

[1] Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed praefectus of Roman Egypt from 33 to 38 c.e.

Categories
2nd World War Biography David Irving Free speech / Free press

The remarkable historiography of David Irving

by Ron Unz

 
I’m very pleased to announce that our selection of HTML Books now contains works by renowned World War II historian David Irving, including his magisterial Hitler’s War, named by famed military historian Sir John Keegan as one of the most crucial volumes for properly understanding that conflict.

With many millions of his books in print, including a string of best-sellers translated into numerous languages, it’s quite possible that the eighty-year-old Irving today ranks as the most internationally-successful British historian of the last one hundred years. Although I myself have merely read a couple of his shorter works, I found these absolutely outstanding, with Irving regularly deploying his remarkable command of the primary source documentary evidence to totally demolish my naive History 101 understanding of major historical events. It would hardly surprise me if the huge corpus of his writings eventually constitutes a central pillar upon which future historians seek to comprehend the catastrophically bloody middle years of our hugely destructive twentieth century even after most of our other chroniclers of that era are long forgotten.

Carefully reading a thousand-page reconstruction of the German side of the Second World War is obviously a daunting undertaking, and his remaining thirty-odd books would probably add at least another 10,000 pages to that Herculean task. But fortunately, Irving is also a riveting speaker, and several of his extended lectures of recent decades are conveniently available on YouTube, as given below. [Editor's note: They have already been censored on YouTube, but can be viewed on BitChute.] These effectively present many of his most remarkable revelations concerning the wartime policies of both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, as well as sometimes recounting the challenging personal situation he himself faced. Watching these lectures (here and here) may consume several hours, but that is still a trivial investment compared to the many weeks it would take to digest the underlying books themselves.

When confronted with astonishing claims that completely overturn an established historical narrative, considerable skepticism is warranted, and my own lack of specialized expertise in World War II history left me especially cautious. The documents Irving unearths seemingly portray a Winston Churchill so radically different from that of my naive understanding as to be almost unrecognizable, and this naturally raised the question of whether I could credit the accuracy of Irving’s evidence and his interpretation. All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?

Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question.

Irving is an individual of uncommonly strong scholarly integrity, and as such he is unable to see things in the record that do not exist, even if it were in his considerable interest to do so, nor to fabricate non-existent evidence. Therefore, his unwillingness to dissemble or pay lip-service to various widely-worshiped cultural totems eventually provoked an outpouring of vilification by a swarm of ideological fanatics drawn from a particular ethnic persuasion. This situation was rather similar to the troubles my old Harvard professor E.O. Wilson had experienced around that same time upon publication of his own masterwork Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, the book that helped launch the field of modern human evolutionary psychobiology.

These zealous ethnic-activists began a coordinated campaign to pressure Irving’s prestigious publishers into dropping his books, while also disrupting his frequent international speaking tours and even lobbying countries to bar him from entry. They maintained a drumbeat of media vilification, continually blackening his name and his research skills, even going so far as to denounce him as a “Nazi” and a “Hitler-lover,” just as had similarly been done in the case of Prof. Wilson.

During the 1980s and 1990s, these determined efforts, sometimes backed by considerable physical violence, increasingly bore fruit, and Irving’s career was severely impacted. He had once been feted by the world’s leading publishing houses and his books serialized and reviewed in Britain’s most august newspapers; now he gradually became a marginalized figure, almost a pariah, with enormous damage to his sources of income.

In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt, a rather ignorant and fanatic professor of Theology and Holocaust Studies (or perhaps “Holocaust Theology”) ferociously attacked him in her book as being a “Holocaust Denier,” leading Irving’s timorous publisher to suddenly cancel the contract for his major new historical volume. This development eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court.

That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

In real life unlike in fable, the Goliaths of this world are almost invariably triumphant, and this case was no exception, with Irving being driven into personal bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of his fine central London home. But seen from the longer perspective of history, I think the victory of his tormenters was a remarkably Pyrrhic one.

Although the target of their unleashed hatred was Irving’s alleged “Holocaust denial,” as near as I can tell, that particular topic was almost entirely absent from all of Irving’s dozens of books, and exactly that very silence was what had provoked their spittle-flecked outrage. Therefore, lacking such a clear target, their lavishly-funded corps of researchers and fact-checkers instead spent a year or more apparently performing a line-by-line and footnote-by-footnote review of everything Irving had ever published, seeking to locate every single historical error that could possibly cast him in a bad professional light. With almost limitless money and manpower, they even utilized the process of legal discovery to subpoena and read the thousands of pages in his bound personal diaries and correspondence, thereby hoping to find some evidence of his “wicked thoughts.” Denial, a 2016 Hollywood film co-written by Lipstadt, may provide a reasonable outline of the sequence of events as seen from her perspective.

Yet despite such massive financial and human resources, they apparently came up almost entirely empty, at least if Lipstadt’s triumphalist 2005 book History on Trial may be credited. Across four decades of research and writing, which had produced numerous controversial historical claims of the most astonishing nature, they only managed to find a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation, most of these ambiguous or disputed. And the worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short “racially insensitive” ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a “racist.” Thus, they seemingly admitted that Irving’s enormous corpus of historical texts was perhaps 99.9% accurate.

I think this silence of “the dog that didn’t bark” echoes with thunderclap volume. I’m not aware of any other academic scholar in the entire history of the world who has had all his decades of lifetime work subjected to such painstakingly exhaustive hostile scrutiny. And since Irving apparently passed that test with such flying colors, I think we can regard almost every astonishing claim in all of his books—as recapitulated in his videos—as absolutely accurate.

Aside from this important historical conclusion, I believe that the most recent coda to Irving’s tribulations tells us quite a lot about the true nature of “Western liberal democracy” so lavishly celebrated by our media pundits, and endlessly contrasted with the “totalitarian” or “authoritarian” characteristics of its ideological rivals, past and present.

In 2005, Irving took a quick visit to Austria, having been invited to speak before a group of Viennese university students. Shortly after his arrival, he was arrested at gunpoint by the local Political Police on charges connected with some historical remarks he had made 16 years earlier on a previous visit to that country, although those had apparently been considered innocuous at the time. Initially, his arrest was kept secret and he was held completely incommunicado; for his family back in Britain, he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and they feared him dead. More than six weeks were to pass before he was allowed to communicate with either his wife or a lawyer, though he managed to provide word of his situation earlier through an intermediary.

And at the age of 67 he was eventually brought to trial in a foreign courtroom under very difficult circumstances and given a three-year prison sentence. An interview he gave to the BBC about his legal predicament resulted in possible additional charges, potentially carrying a further twenty-year sentence, which probably would have ensured that he died behind bars. Only the extremely good fortune of a successful appeal, partly on technical grounds, allowed him to depart the prison grounds after spending more than 400 days under incarceration, almost entirely in solitary confinement, and he escaped back to Britain.

His sudden, unexpected disappearance had inflicted huge financial hardships upon his family, and they lost their home, with most of his personal possessions being sold or destroyed, including the enormous historical archives he had spent a lifetime accumulating. He later recounted this gripping story in Banged Up, a slim book published in 2008, as well as in a video interview available here.

Perhaps I am demonstrating my ignorance, but I am not aware of any similar case of a leading international scholar who suffered such a dire fate for quietly stating his historical opinions, even during in darkest days of Stalinist Russia or any of the other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Although this astonishing situation taking place in a West European democracy of the “Free World” did receive considerable media exposure within Europe, coverage in our own country was so minimal that I doubt that today even one well-educated American in twenty is even aware it ever happened.

Categories
Autobiography Biography Child abuse Laurent Guyénot

Don’t transfer your wrath onto Steve!

I have been reproducing most of the text of the article ‘The Holy Hook’.

‘Christianity without the Old Testament?’ is the last section of that essay by Laurent Guyénot. It consists of 900 words. I don’t want to reproduce it here but you can read it in The Unz Review.

In that last section, Guyénot falls into the same errors we have seen time and again in the racial right that desperately wants to save the religion of our parents despite its roots. Since, as we saw in David Skrbina’s book, the New Testament was written by Jews for Gentile consumption, it cannot be sanitised from the point of view of the fourteen words. However, what we have read in the previous instalments of ‘The Holy Hook’ is important to better understand the psyop represented by the forced conversion of the white race to the god of the Jews. But what Guyénot lacked, which Skrbina didn’t lack, was to assimilate the legacy of Nietzsche.

For the rest of this article I would like to talk about issues that I have touched on in recent posts. In the video Gonzalo uploaded today we no longer see him mocking with his typical black humour, because things are getting very ugly in Ukraine, where he is trapped, and perhaps we will see an October surprise before the US mid-term elections next month.
 

The Dahmer case—again!

Another issue I recently touched on and have given some more thought to is the Dahmer case. As you may recall, at the end of last month I confessed that I had watched the miniseries by pressing the forward button to avoid watching the morbid stuff Netflix shows us. But yesterday I saw, without pressing that button, a couple of scenes based on the real-life Dahmer family that caught my attention.

Jeffrey’s father, once with his new wife and the other time right after Jeff was sentenced, blames both his first wife—Jeff’s mother—and himself, for creating a monster because of how Jeff was mistreated as a child. And after the sentence, the mother writes a confession in which she feels guilty about the way she treated her son before turning on the gas tap in an attempt to kill herself. Having pressed the forward button so many times in the past month, I hadn’t thought about this pair of revealing scenes which, as I said, are apparently based on real-life anecdotes.

As a teenager I had, to some extent, a mother like Jeffrey’s, so I know how one internalises the verbal abuse of what Jung called ‘a dragon mother’. What hurt Jeff the most as a child is that his dad, who should’ve been the countervailing force, left him alone with the dragon and literally walked out of the home. It was in that house that Jeff committed his first murder and precisely when his young victim, Steven Mark Hicks (pictured below) wanted to leave the house.

After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Steve ‘wanted to leave and I didn’t want him to leave’. Dahmer struck Steve from behind with the dumbbell while Steve was sitting in a chair. When he fell unconscious, Dahmer choked him to death with the barbell bar.

It seems obvious to me that the eighteen-year-old Jeff displaced pent-up anger towards the father in a sort of ‘Now you’re not leaving!’ From my own experience I know that resentment towards the passive father who didn’t stop the abuse is far more serious than resentment towards the dragon mother, insofar as he could have saved us and did nothing.

Of course, regarding his psychic wounds Jeff’s twist was very different from mine. He began to recreate his impotent rage with scapegoats, starting with Steve, and the betrayal he had been subjected to at home never crossed his conscience (transferred, unconscious hatred is infinite, since it’s not directed toward the real perp). I preferred to leave a legacy to humanity with my autobiographical confessions—see the only comment in the featured post.

Having been watching so many YouTube interviews with the real Jeff Dahmer, I realised that what trauma researchers say is true. To the extent that the subject doesn’t know himself—Jeff didn’t know himself—he will displace his unconscious rage on others. Bringing to consciousness the horrors of our childhoods (or adolescence in my case) prevents mental disorders, or our taking it out on innocent Steves.

Categories
Biography David Irving Heinrich Himmler True Himmler (book)

True Himmler, chapter 3

 
Editor’s Note: Below, excerpts from the third chapter, ‘A Witch in the Family’, of David Irving’s book on Heinrich Himmler (available through Irving’s bookstore here).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Himmler’s missing 1940 diary appeared on the auction block in Munich in 2006; we were languishing that year in a Vienna prison cell, convicted of ‘reviving the Nazi Party’ through views expressed sixteen years earlier. The original is now deposited under glass, like a rare poisonous beetle, in the museum of a medieval castle called Wewelsburg, of which we shall eventually hear more. We know that Professor Michael Wildt worked on Himmler’s 1937 diary in Moscow, and we obtained copies of the 1941 and 1942 diaries from the NA and the same archives.

There is one other trove to be mentioned: the papers of Himmler’s wife and daughter. Years ago, an Englishman won them at an auction in New York. Chaim Rosenthal, a crooked cultural attaché at the Israeli consulate, offered to the naïve Englishman to convey these to the U.K., but hastened back to Tel Aviv instead. He donated them to Tel Aviv university. Upon realising that they were twice-stolen property, the Israeli university quiet properly returned them, though to Rosenthal and not their rightful owner.

* * *

Not every child is blessed to have a school headmaster as a father, although Heinrich Himmler may not have considered it good fortune at the time. Heinrich had been born into such a teacher’s family in Munich, just two hundred and eighty days into the Twentieth Century upon which he was to leave such an indelible mark; some of his ill-starred contemporaries including Hans Frank and Martin Bormann were also born in 1900…

Their ancestral line stretched back over the centuries, its nodes and gridlines populated by a motley cast of businessmen, gendarmes, and schoolmasters. Heini’s own experts would trace them back to before Charlemagne. One of Heini’s female ancestors named Passanquay had been burned at the stake as a witch. Reinhard Heydrich would derive satisfaction from informing him in May 1939 of another unfortunate, Margareth Himbler, of Markelsheim, burned as a witch on Apr 4, 1629…

Having retired at sixty-five with the venerable rank of Geheimrat, or privy counsellor, the professor would die on October 29, 1936, before Heini’s fame had turned to infamy. His wife, Frau Geheimrat Anna, was remembered as a gentle little woman, a churchgoer. ‘She could not have hurt a fly,’ said one who knew her. They had been living on the second floor of No. 6, Hildegard Strasse, when she produced Heini, their second boy, on October 7, 1900… A few months later, in March 1901, they moved to a new apartment above a pharmacy in Liebig Strasse, in a genteel area of Munich.

A tall carved statue of Christ stood in the entrance hall—an heirloom left to their mother, and the boys crossed themselves each time before it, just as their parents did. Heini set up an Ahnen-Zimmer, an ancestral shrine, where he spent hours studying his ancestors… The photos show him already wearing the round-eyed glasses which were to become iconic later in his life.

He made many friends at the Gymnasium. One was Wolfgang Hallgarten, three months his junior and son of a New York Jew (but raised as a Lutheran). Heini occasionally visited their home; the boys’ governess Luise Essert discovered his passion for hot chocolate. It was a wealthy, enlightened household. Thomas Mann and Bruno Walter the conductor were among other guests, and the young physicist Werner Heisenberg played his cello within its walls. ‘We knew him from 1910 to 1913,’ wrote Hallgarten of Heinrich Himmler, rising rather notably to his defence in the 1950s, ‘the years when we were all students at the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich’… ‘I for my part failed to discover the slightest anti-Semitic streak in him’, reminisced Hallgarten, referring to those shared childhood years at school. For many years he assumed that the fearsome Himmler that people spoke about was a brother, and not the boy he had known…

An older brother, named Gebhard like their father, had been born toward the end of the century which the world had left behind—on July 29, 1898 to be precise. A third son, little Ernst Hermann Himmler, arrived five years after Heini. He was born two days before Christmas in 1905. ‘Ernstl,’ as they called him, married Paula during World War Two, and would disappear on its last day, killed in action. Ernst had joined the Volkssturm, Germany’s ‘Home Guard,’ and when the Soviet Army attacked Berlin’s Charlottenburg district he went out, rifle in hand, to defend the Radio building with the rest of his staff and was not seen again…

‘If my parents’ house was an extraordinarily liberal, free, quiet one,’ recalled Karl, on trial for his life half a century later, ‘then the Himmler house was that of a strong orthodox Catholic schoolmaster, whose son was brought up strictly and kept very short of cash.’ Karl Gebhardt would accompany Heini throughout his life…

The Himmlers were a church-going family. They prayed together, and stayed together. His parent’s influence remained overbearing. Heinrich was received into the Catholic church on April 1, 1911; he placed in his private papers a printed ‘First Communion’ certificate based on a painting of Christ at the Last Supper; he went frequently to Mass and received Holy Communion kneeling at his father’s side, he celebrated his own family name-days and those of the Bavarian royal family. When Gebhard fell dangerously ill with pleurisy in 1914, they promised a pilgrimage to Burghausen and a special Mass if he recovered, and they kept their promise. Heini went to church every morning, and mentioned each visit in the diary in case the Lord had not caught sight of this little lamb attending His House…

This was not without its effect on the impressionable youngster. How he envied Gebhard when he turned on July 29 and signed up for the Landsturm, the reserve: ‘O, to be out there with the rest of them!’—meaning the fighting front. Instead he stayed behind, teaching Ernstl to swim, and went for walks to more churches and monasteries with his pious mother. Once they climbed up to see the church atop the Marienburg; Heini counted the steps on the way down, to where in 1143 a Cistercian monastery had been founded: 265 steps, he found. He entered the number in his diary…

* * *

Young Heini applied for a commission in the navy, we are told, but the navy turned him down, because of his poor eyesight… As Germany’s war fortunes declined, the request was refused. Heini left school on October 8, 1917 and began training as a Fahnenjunker with the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment ‘Von der Tann’ in Regensburg. He formally entered military service on January 2, 1918. Still of indifferent physique, he found the training demanding…

With the war over… his godfather Prince Heinrich had been killed in action. In Bavaria the Communists had seized power, overthrown the Wittelsbach monarchy, and established a republic under the Jew Kurt Kamonowsky, better known as Kurt Eisner.

He began to sport a small toothbrush moustache, and this was no accident. Men who had entered the war with handlebar moustaches had trimmed them to fit the gasmask issued after they came under mustard-gas attack. The toothbrush moustache became the unstated badge of the western front veteran… He moved to Munich, where he would start his further education and eventually become involved, much against his will, in politics.

* * *

As for his father, we have a final glimpse of this extraordinary pedagogue. By now nicknamed Quince Face by his pupils, because of his jaundiced pallor, he retired with high honours aged sixty-five in 1930. In 1989 the writer Alfred Andersch published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Father of a Murderer. It was a fictional account of a school class dominated by a terrifying and sadistic Old Man Himmler, a class ending with Alfred’s summary expulsion…

Heini’s father died in 1936. He had never been the pedagogic sadist depicted by Andersch and his profitable pen, but a stern man of quiet discipline and abiding religious fervour, inspired by a genuine pietas bavarica. The Germans however like their comfortable stereotypes: The Andersch novel was filmed and is now required reading for German schoolchildren.

Stereotypes will continue to blur the image of Heinrich Himmler, confusing though it is. They choke history like bindweed in a jungle, through which we have first to hack and clear a path.

Categories
Biography

Metapedia’s articles

Last year I found out about an article of Metapedia on me in German (here). Now, a certain Herman started one on me in English (here).

Categories
Biography William Pierce

The Fame, 7

WLP

From The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
An Up-Close Portrait of William Pierce
by Robert Griffin


 
“I’m William Pierce. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Pierce looked to me to be around sixty years old. He is a couple inches taller than I am, which would make him about 6’3” or so. He has a large head and graying and thinning conventionally cut hair parted on the left side. His hair was long enough so that it curled up in the back. He is a bit hunched, and his head nestles down into his shoulders and thrusts forward. What stood out to me about his face were his large forehead and mouth. His face is unlined, his nose is straight and unremarkable, and his small ears protrude some. His eyes were blue behind the thick lenses of the conservative plastic-framed glasses he had on.

That day, Pierce had on a jeans jacket over a dark blue T-shirt with a pocket in which he had what appeared to be a white index card. His faded blue jeans hung straight down in the back in the way they do with older men. He had on brown workboots. Around his waist was a pistol belt. A holstered weapon was on his right and more to the back than to the side. The weapon wasn’t visible because he had pulled his T-shirt over it.

Pierce’ s basic appearance is long and lean, but when I shook hands with him I was taken by the size and strength of his hands and forearms which showed beneath his rolled-up jacket sleeves. His handshake was firm and confident. I had read that Pierce, as it was phrased, “doesn’t have a very dynamic presence.” That certainly wasn’t the impression I was getting. He had the air of somebody important and as being the kind of person who very much fills up the space they are in.

“Come on in,” Pierce said, motioning with his left hand toward the building to my right. I turned and for the first time got a good look at the National Alliance headquarters building. It is two stories tall and perhaps sixty feet wide.

The most prominent feature of the building is a ten-foot-high dark brown symbol attached to the building above the door. I couldn’t tell whether it was made of metal or wood. It looks something like a Christian cross except that the crossbar is longer and instead of going straight across from nine o’clock to three o’clock, it is as if it were cut at the mid-point and the two pieces, still attached to the vertical bar, are pointed upward toward ten-thirty and one-thirty. I later learned that this is called a Life Rune and that it is the symbol for the National Alliance. I remember having an emotional charge that first time I took in this Life Rune image, so large and dominating. Especially in this setting, so removed from everywhere, it seemed alien, something out of Brave New World or 1984…

Pierce has a Ph.D in physics, and this room is where he goes to get away from it all. One other thing on the second floor: a television set next to the back wall amid boxes of books. I believe it is the only one on the property. It turns out that Pierce and those around him are down on television, seeing it as a reality-distorting and mind-warping force in the hands of their adversaries. Pierce isn’t about to get the cable, and the only station that reaches this remote area is an NBC affiliate—barely reaches, the picture is snowy and doesn’t qualify as being in color. Pierce is a faithful watcher of the NBC evening news. As far as I know, that is the extent of his television viewing other than tapes friends and followers send him, and I don’t believe anyone around him watches television at all.