‘Rockwell was assassinated, not by the Jews, but by one of the dysfunctional nutcases who was a member of his own party and who was upset over Nordicism’. —Hunter Wallace
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Category: George Lincoln Rockwell
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Hitler, 12
Rockwell as Conservative
by Gregory Hood (pic below)
Emphasis in bold & red added
by Ed.; endnotes omitted:
The Left usually understands the Right better than the Right understands itself. In the dominant progressive narrative, conservatives are simply more “respectable” racists that use rhetoric about anti-Communism, free markets, or limited government to disguise their bias. They may not even be aware of it, but American conservatism is, in this telling, an inherently racist ideology.
Commander George Lincoln Rockwell in many ways shared this analysis. His National Socialism was not an ideology so much as a tactic, an attempt to build a fighting conservatism capable of defeating the militant Left. Rather than Nietzsche, Baron Evola, or even Alfred Rosenberg, the greatest influences on George Lincoln Rockwell were Senator Joe McCarthy, Douglas MacArthur, and even William F. Buckley.
His inability to rally the American Right marks a milestone in white political activism, as George Lincoln Rockwell is the bridge between patriotic racial conservatism and revolutionary White Nationalism. Commander Rockwell was above all a tactician, but he failed to reveal some new method for white patriots to achieve political power. Instead, his strategic importance is that he demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, the bankruptcy of American conservatism. Rockwell’s hope for “street fighters of the American conservative movement” was always doomed to fail. One does not need to be a “Nazi” to see that conservatism is designed to lose, not to fight.
George Lincoln Rockwell began his turn to the Right at Brown University, where he dissented against the “blank slate” teachings he encountered in his sociology class. He notes in his autobiography This Time the World, that he was always in conflict with the “liberalism” overflowing at Brown, which he would later connect to Communism. He made the same connection between the “filthy thing” and the chaos and ugliness of modern art that he experienced in his studies after World War II. It’s not surprising in the intense Cold War atmosphere of postwar America that the young naval officer would link cultural degradation to the struggle against the Soviet Union.
Commander Rockwell’s first political activism was on behalf of General Douglas MacArthur, who was fired by President Harry Truman because of his willingness to expand the Korean War into “Red” China. General MacArthur would receive a dedication in This Time the World, and Rockwell would adopt MacArthur’s habit of chewing on a corncob pipe. According to Rockwell, it was in the midst of his efforts to book a hall for General MacArthur that he was introduced to the Jewish question. Further research led him to conclude that Bolshevism had Jewish roots and that there was a preponderance of Jews among Communists in the United States. Thus, Rockwell’s opposition to Jews was rooted in his conviction that “Jewish traitors” were sabotaging the Cold War. However, this did not extend to questioning the American Establishment as a whole—when Commander Rockwell wanted to attend a speech by Gerald L. K. Smith, he first asked the local FBI office for permission.
In the early 1950s, Commander George Lincoln Rockwell served in Iceland, where he met his second wife and obsessively re-read Mein Kampf, as well as other works like the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. He even took his new wife Thora on honeymoon to Berchtesgaden to visit Hitler’s mountain retreat. However, bizarrely, it was after the work of Adolf Hitler “stripped away the confusion” from his mind that Rockwell began his involvement with mainstream conservatism. He worked as an independent contractor for William F. Buckley and his National Review.
Commander Rockwell refers to William F. Buckley as “Bill” in This Time the World and notes that he is “square-dealing” as a man. This exaggerated familiarity explains the wildly different interpretation of Buckley’s character that men who knew him far more intimately have claimed, as in Peter Brimelow’s devastating obituary for him. Perhaps more importantly, even after becoming at least a philosophical “Nazi,” Rockwell says of Buckley that “There is more pulsating brain-power and genius surrounding Buckley than in any place else on earth, where I have ever been” and Buckley himself is “brighter than all the rest.”
After (by his own admission) failing to obtain many subscriptions for the magazine, Rockwell tried his hand at organizing “The American Federation of Conservative Organizations” and a newspaper to be called the “Conservative Times.” At this time, Rockwell believed that conservatives could “sneak up on the Jews” by rallying conservatives behind a militant (but publicly philo-Semitic) organization. Rockwell later mocked his own restrained approach and declared that liberals had to be fought using their own tactics—“force, terror, and power.” He was further disgusted by the “human content of the ‘right-wing’—ninety percent cowards, one-track minds, tightwads, and worst of all, hobbyists” that were unwilling to jeopardize their possessions.
Interestingly, however, Rockwell also credits the John Birch Society with “[doing] what I planned then” (This Time the World, 87). Jewish entertainer Bob Dylan would later mock the Society in “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” wherein the paranoid narrator proclaims that the only “true American” is “George Lincoln Rockwell.” In his own way, Commander Rockwell confirmed Dylan’s intended smear by declaring a shared purpose between the John Birch Society and himself.
Nor was Rockwell alone on the “radical” Right in believing such a strategy could work. Revilo Oliver was a founding member of the Society and admitted that he continued to work for it even after all mention of Jews was eliminated. In the end, Oliver only abandoned the Society because of his contempt for Robert Welch, writing in America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative that “one does not abandon a lost cause before one knows the cause was lost because the general is a traitor” (200). Like Oliver, Rockwell’s chief gripe with the Right wing was that the people involved were flawed and that the American Right was essentially cowardly. Instead, Rockwell would build a fighting faith of Nazism as the only “alternative to communism.”
Even so, Rockwell’s Nazism was still couched in conservative forms for years afterward. Rockwell worked for Russell Maguire of the American Mercury, later writing scathingly about Maguire as someone who was actively hurting the cause. However, as Andrew Hamilton has pointed out, Maguire may well have had good reason for his caution and in any event, was far better ideologically than the “brilliant” William F. Buckley.
Rockwell had fonder memories of his partnership with DeWest Hooker, and notes warmly that he wasn’t a “patriot or a right-winger or a conservative but a fighting, tough, all out Nazi.” Rockwell’s justification for this was Hooker’s creation of the Nationalist Youth League, which rallied “tough kids” in New York City to fight “Jewish Communism” and inspire them with “fanatical loyalty to the United States, the White Race, and Adolf Hitler” (100). Rockwell also quotes Hooker’s retelling of the Jewish role in bringing down Joe McCarthy’s crusade against “Jewish Communism.” Aside from the questionable background of Hooker highlighted by Andrew Hamilton, what is significant is that Rockwell identifies “Nazism” with a militant anti-Communist struggle that simply does not allow Jews.
George Lincoln Rockwell’s “coming out” was his protest to “Save IKE from the KIKES” along with Harold Arrowsmith in May 1958. This led to a minor media frenzy surrounding him after a synagogue was bombed in Atlanta a few months later, when it was revealed that Rockwell had corresponded with the bomber. Rockwell’s response was revealing. His writing shows that he thought that bombing a synagogue was a mistake “because it relates to the religious rather than political.” Rockwell’s focus on “atheist Jews” rather than religious Jews would be a constant of his later career, even while being interviewed in uniform standing in front of the swastika banner. Furthermore, Rockwell issued a statement that “I am anti-Zionist and anti-Communist Jews, and any other form of treason. I’m pro-American republic.”
Also at this time, Rockwell began printing literature for what he called the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists (WUFENS), which shows the Commander’s determination to fit National Socialism into the pro-free market mold of American conservatism. Rockwell denounced fascism as an economic doctrine of state ownership and promoted “international racism” as opposed to “racial nationalism.”
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Editor’s Note: As we will see at the end, this error, typical of American white nationalism (in contrast to Himmler’s Nordicism), cost the commander his life in 1967.
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Rockwell’s pro-Americanism was complemented by his vision of white unity between “Aryan” countries, a precursor to his later strategic contribution of “White Power.” However, Rockwell’s National “Socialism” largely neglected the economic aspects besides repeating general conservative themes. It is revealing that following the failure of WUFENS, Rockwell would create the American “Nazi” Party in 1959 instead of a “National Socialist Party.” Rockwell thus claimed the one term slur of “Nazi” for his own purposes, and said that it “means that we are racists.”
The American Nazi Party was notorious for its flamboyant use of street theater. The Commander had his critics on the Right, with members of the National States’ Rights Party charging that he was simply continuing his father’s “vaudeville” acts. Rockwell justified his tactics on the grounds that he needed to appeal to the masses with spectacle and easy to understand propaganda. Rockwell pointed out Jews on Wall Street funding the Bolshevik revolution, protested the film Exodus, and even staged activism against Sammy Davis Jr. With blacks, he was more creative, as he used “hate buses” to parody the so-called Freedom Riders, created “hatenanny” country songs, and in one notable instance, tried to enroll a monkey in a public school.
Lost in the debate over the appropriateness of the Commander’s tactics was the strategic purpose. In his speeches and writings, Rockwell blasted the “Communist-Negro” revolution, arguing that blacks were simply following the marching orders of their Jewish funders, with occasional independent blacks such as the Nation of Islam breaking free of Zionist control. Rockwell also appealed to spiritual idealism, proudly claiming himself and his followers as “fanatics” because only fanatics can truly create something. However, though Commander Rockwell bemoaned American civilization’s “unwholesomeness, love of money, and love of luxury” as a sign of decline, he rarely (if ever) turned his fire on the American economic or political system per se (William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party [Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999], 212).
If anything, Commander Rockwell had a truly naive faith in certain institutions of the American government. From the time he asked permission from the FBI to attend a Gerald L. K. Smith rally, he kept the Bureau constantly informed of his activities, and even those of his members. According to Frederick Simonelli, author of American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Rockwell “believed—rightly or not—that the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, secretly sympathized with most of his aims” (87).
During a meeting with Ed Fields, Rockwell went so far as to call the FBI while Fields was in the room. Though internal memos credited Rockwell with being “very cooperative with Agents,” it did the Commander no good. FBI reports on the ANP were scathing about Commander Rockwell as a person. More importantly, COINTELPRO specifically targeted the ANP for harassment, sending both Rockwell and his enemies fraudulent letters designed to sabotage the party’s operations. On one occasion, the FBI sent Rockwell a phony letter from a “supporter” designed to make him mistrust a subordinate. Fearing it violated federal law, an unknowing Rockwell promptly reported the letter—right back to the FBI.
The great strategic failure of George Lincoln Rockwell was the assumption that the vast majority of Americans (and especially conservatives) already agreed with him, but they were too cowardly to say so. In a 1965 interview, Rockwell said, “I think the majority of Americans think the same way I do, most of them don’t care to say so. Most of them are fed up with Negro pushing, they’re fed up with the Jewish-communists who have been time and again exposed as selling us out to the Soviet Union; they’re fed up with the cowardice of our administration. I think they’re grateful that we’re finally fighting in Viet Nam, but . . . I think we’ll lay down like we did in Korea and quit. In other words, I think the people are with me. They don’t like the name [Nazi] but they believe what I believe” (Hate, 251).
Campaigns against “peace creeps” were a staple of ANP activities. In November 1965, Commander Rockwell personally ripped a Viet Cong flag from a peace march and tore it to pieces. He recounted the incident with pride in White Power. At the same time this incident occurred, ANP members on the West Coast counter-protested peace marches with slogans like “Kill Reds in Vietnam” and “Peace Creeps Are Traitors.” Commander Rockwell’s slogan, “Not dead, not red, but dead reds!” was also a staple of his rhetoric. Even near the end of his career, Commander Rockwell bragged at campus speeches that he would launch a nuclear attack on Red China and claimed, “I’m going to be the man who pushes the button.”
In 1965, George Lincoln Rockwell ran for governor of Virginia. His platform was firmly focused on race and dismantling Jewish organizations. He advocated teaching “white supremacy” in the classrooms for an hour a day, deputizing white men to carry guns, and outlawing the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP. Insofar as he spoke about economic concerns, Rockwell supported eliminating the income tax (Hate, 250). Rockwell’s focus on abolishing welfare for blacks, condemnation of the federal government, and promises to use the power of the state against Leftist radicals align naturally with the hard Right of the American conservative movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He only won a few thousand votes, as most of the segregationist supporters in the state broke for other third party candidates.
Though Rockwell was scathing in his treatment of “Right-wingers” and launched protests against Barry Goldwater, his writings reveal that he considered them somehow closer to his own positions than any alternative. In White Power in 1966, he bashes Barry Goldwater as the “Zionist-capitalist Jew ‘friend of the [Jewish] Captain’” engaged in a shell game with the “Red Jew labor leader” on the “other side.” He also has a detailed analysis of why “economic conservatives” cannot win, focusing mostly on tactical issues. He points out (accurately) that the masses will not vote for an economic conservative without the issue of race. However, these are essentially tactical criticisms, alternately criticizing conservatives as either being phony or tactically stupid.
In terms of ideology, Rockwell now praises fascism, using the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary definition of fascism as “the movement towards nationalism and conservatism as opposed to internationalism and radicalism.” For Rockwell, race will be the glue that binds together a nationalism and conservatism that can win. Occasionally, Rockwell even made this explicit, with a forlorn hope that conservatives would rally behind him. The Rockwell Report and National Review exchanged barbs, which eventually led to a strange exchange of letters between Commander Rockwell and William F. Buckley. Rockwell challenged Buckley to convince him that he was actually doing harm; in response, Buckley dispatched a priest. During the meeting, Rockwell offered the American Nazi Party as the “street fighters of the American conservative movement” (Hate, 209). Needless to say, Buckley did not take up the Commander on his generous offer.
None of this is to say that Rockwell’s approach did not occasionally pay dividends. In August 1966, Commander Rockwell successfully rallied thousands of blue collar white Chicagoans to resist a desegregation effort led by Martin Luther King, Jr. After giving a well-received speech, Rockwell was showered with applause, as Chicagoans chanted “White Power” and waved the swastika. Overcome with emotion, “Rockwell was moved to tears” (Hate, 291). In September, he would lead a march through the streets of Chicago—though he had predicted 3,000 people, Rockwell’s “failure” still rallied 250 people to march under the swastika and slogan of “White Power.” Clearly, Buckley-style conservatism had nothing to say to blue collar whites fighting to defend their communities, and their rage and fear has only been vindicated by what Chicago has become today.
That said, Rockwell found that he could not capitalize on his tactical successes and that old style “Nazism” was unsuited to rallying white workers of Southern and Eastern European stock. This was an important factor in the transformation from the American Nazi Party to the National Socialist White People’s Party. The new ten points of the NSWPP also included nods to economics and social policy, although it was mentioned far after smashing “Jewish domination,” “Communism,” “Zionism,” “crime,” and “riots.” The ninth point stated “every productive, working American must have a decent job, life-time economic security and wholesome living conditions for himself and his family.”
Rockwell’s last major work, White Power, shows the Commander caught between Cold War conservatism and a more fully developed National Socialism. The opening of the book is a recitation of various outrages taken from the headlines, from sexual depravity to draft dodging. Most of these could have come from the pages of any conservative magazine of the time. Rockwell also gives an extended treatment to various charges of the Cold War American Right, detailing the “loss” of China to the Reds, the Marxist ties of Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of “our President” John F. Kennedy, and the government’s hesitation in fighting our “deadly Communist enemies” in Vietnam. In his famous “Nightmare” chapter, Rockwell posits a non-white takeover of America where the white police and armed forces are defeated with the help of international Communists from China and Cuba.
At the same time, White Power shows an important evolution in Rockwell’s thinking. Though Rockwell condemned Francis Parker Yockey’s work as a new form of “Strasserism” in 1964, in White Power he predicts an eventual alliance between white Russians and white Americans. Years before the Sino-Soviet split, Rockwell notes the alliance between anti-Soviet Trotskyites and the Red Chinese, Maoism being the preferred form of Communism for campus radicals and non-whites. Going further, Rockwell condemns the repeated “wars of racial suicide,” calling for a white racial unity in foreign policy that transcends even nationalism. This vision of race as the critical basis of identity, loyalty, and state policy, with nationalism as purely secondary, goes beyond anything Rockwell could have taken from German National Socialism. Furthermore, Rockwell writes, “The center of Jewish power and money is here in New York City, U.S.A., not Moscow and not even Jerusalem.”
By the time of White Power, Rockwell is also willing to criticize conservatives for substantive rather than tactical reasons. He goes so far as to say, “there are dozens of ‘socialistic’ operations in any decent nation, operations not for profit, but for the benefit of all.” Rockwell condemns the wealthy, “the managing class,” for neglecting their workers and falling into the Jewish trap of attacking the people they depend on. “The working people of America want ‘social security’; they want ‘medicare’; they want a paternalistic and welfare-conscious government. That is a fact.” This is a more accurate reading of political reality than anything you will get from a well-paid GOP consultant.
Ultimately, however, Rockwell comes off as frustrated with conservatives, rather than seeing them as enemies. He is trying to explain to them why they need different tactics in order to defeat the Left, rather than crusading against them. Though he is critical of economic conservatives, he does not outline an economic alternative with the same passion for detail and documentation that he marshals in chronicling Jewish perfidy. Rockwell sees conservative voters—if not the leaders—as his base.
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Editor’s Note: I get the impression that the administrators of American Renaissance, The Occidental Observer, and Counter-Currents publish articles for a conservative English-speaking audience.
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He writes, “It is a matter of life and death that we find the energy, will, wisdom, and diplomacy to reach the millions of ‘conservatives’ who are spiritually on our side, but who are still blind to the issue on which all the others depend—breed, race” (218).
Whatever his criticisms of conservatives, Rockwell still saw himself as the logical progression of their better ideas, once the reactionary nonsense was cut away. Speaking in California only a few months before his death, George Lincoln Rockwell praised the newly elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan. However, he thought that Reagan might not be Right-wing enough because he was an “ex-pinko.” Rockwell noted in a campus interview, “For a state that could elect Reagan, it’ll be ripe for me in a few years.” (Hate, 318). One of the last street demonstrations Rockwell participated in was a counter-protest of a vigil at an execution of a black cop killer. Rockwell’s sign said “GAS—The Only Cure for Black Crime and Red Treason.” Even in the midst of ideological transformation, Rockwell’s propaganda was much the same as it was in 1967 as it was in 1961.
George Lincoln Rockwell was assassinated in August 1967, cut down by one of his former followers. Ironically, John Patler was a Southern European, one of the non-Germanic whites that George Lincoln Rockwell was working to bring into the “White Nationalist” fold in opposition to the Northern European faction as represented by men like William Luther Pierce.
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Editor’s Note: If Rockwell had been a Nordicist like the eugenicists who flourished in his country before WW2, the mudblood who betrayed him wouldn’t have even entered his ranks!
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The transformation of the swastika from an image of German National Socialism into a rallying point for a pan-European National Socialism is generally regarded as George Lincoln Rockwell’s greatest strategic contribution. Even White Nationalists who have never heard of him unintentionally echo his viewpoint by positing white racial identity as the critical rallying point for anti-System resistance. In America, there is no other way forward.
However, George Lincoln Rockwell was cut down at perhaps the very moment when ideological transformation was most needed on a much deeper level. James Mason writes in Siege that the stormtroopers of Rockwell’s party took beatings to defend the honor of an all but dead Republic. He believes that Rockwell, had he lived, would have eventually adopted the more underground, guerrilla style of leaders such as National Socialist Liberation Front founder Joseph Tommasi. There is little to suggest this would be the case—Rockwell himself confidently predicted that he would be President of the United States by 1972. His writings even through White Power posit that most ordinary white working people and conservatives were secretly on his side.
Rockwell’s critical shortcoming was a failure to understand that even non-Jewish opposition to him was largely sincere. Though Rockwell championed “White Christian America” (though he was agnostic), critics such as Buckley were more likely to use Christianity as a club to attack Rockwell than to defend their supposed faith against Jewish attackers. The American government and its FBI were not besieged anti-Communist bastions but active agents in the effort to destroy Commander Rockwell and his values. As for the conservative movement, groups such as Young Americans for Freedom were far more active in protesting the relatively safe target of George Lincoln Rockwell than they were against Black Panthers.
While Rockwell (accurately) saw the white race as the necessary root of America’s achievements, conservatives identified the secondhand products of Constitutionalism or limited government as paramount. The idea that these values were doomed to destruction in a non-white America simply did not register. Though Rockwell recognized the impotence of the conservative approach, he didn’t have an effective response other than calling them stupid or cowards.
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Editor’s Note: If Rockwell had realised that the primary cause of Aryan decline in North America was Christian morality and what a few years ago I called the ‘One Ring’ (prioritising money over everything else), he wouldn’t have flown the flag of thirteen horizontal stripes and a blue rectangle with fifty white stars.
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Commander Rockwell missed two critical opportunities. First, though he recognized the need for racial and class unity, Rockwell never presented a concrete program that outlined an economic and governmental alternative to American conservatism or progressivism. His National Socialism was almost exclusively focused on race, and his campaign for Governor in 1965 did not offer anything besides a promise to defeat the Civil Rights Movement. Though the later NSWPP program made a nod towards an “honest economy,” George Lincoln Rockwell never gave white workers a reason to support him besides opposition to integration. Attacks on financiers, corporate fraud, and capitalist sponsorship of the Civil Rights Movement were largely missing from his propaganda, which made it easier to paint the party as a publicity student, rather than a serious ideological movement.
Second, George Lincoln Rockwell never broke with the System as such. Even after the fiasco of his 1965 campaign, Rockwell believed that the existing democratic system could be made to work for whites, and that the American people would somehow rally to him en masse. He neglected the long, slow period of growth that the NSDAP experienced during the Kampfzeit and expected a sudden propaganda victory. Even his “Nightmare” scenario posited a foreign invasion of a white America suddenly overcome by Communist forces aligned with non-whites. This is not terribly far removed from the super-patriotism and anti-Communism of Cold War kosher conservatives.
Despite his realization that New York and not Moscow (or Jerusalem) was the center of Jewish power, Rockwell never took this insight to form a critique of the American system of government. Rockwell still wanted to defend the existing American system. The Commander believed that by simply plugging away, members of the NSWPP would somehow manage to seize the machinery of state through legal means and simply dissolve enemy institutions. In the end, white conservatives could eventually wake up and save the country from itself.
What George Lincoln Rockwell failed to understand is that American conservatism is designed to fail. The Commander was a combative conservative. He took Cold War rhetoric seriously, was outraged by moral depravity, and worried about military defeat abroad and even falling standards in the Marine Corps. Indeed, he believed American conservative propaganda more sincerely than the people who came up with it, and they hated him for it.
While liberals contemptuously connected Rockwell to conservatives, they failed to understand that American conservatism by its very nature defends the products of the nation, rather than the nation itself. Conservatives value the existing System and the people in power (regardless of who they are) far more than any eternal principle or ethnic group. Therefore, any “revolutionary” force will inspire more conservative hatred than even the most progressive fanatic, as long as the latter pledges to play by the rules of the system. No matter how rigged the rules of the game, conservatives will keep wanting to play.
Though George Lincoln Rockwell recognized America’s white racial core, he didn’t fully understand the nature of his enemies or the System they employed. The American state was not something that needed to be defended from Communists; it was an aggressor whites needed defense from. The System was already completely in the hands of his foes. Furthermore, American conservatism and its deluded followers cannot be shamed by courage, dissuaded by logic, or cowed by attack. They have to be eliminated by providing a systematic alternative on policy grounds.
Despite uniforms, swastikas, and dedication, George Lincoln Rockwell did not build a real alternative. He talked Revolution, but never broke with the System. He bashed conservatives, but spoke as one of them. He recognized the flaws of capitalism, but didn’t provide another option. He went too far for the conservatives, but not far enough to win anyone else. Finally, he simply didn’t realize the obvious reality—you might eventually get white Americans to fight for their interests as whites, but they’re never going to do it as “Nazis.”
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Editor’s Note: The last, non-bolded words remind me of what Sebastian Ronin said a decade ago. If Ronin was right, that is, if white Americans will never become real Nazis, they are on a path to extinction.
Strikingly absent from Hitler’s thinking immediately following the war, and indeed for some time thereafter, was any serious anxiety about Russian power or the Soviet Union. This is not surprising, given that Germany’s main enemy had been the western allies, and the fact that Russia had been defeated by 1917. Hitler was not even worried about communism as an external threat. The impact of the Baltic emigre and ferocious anti-Bolshevik Alfred Rosenberg during this period was not significant and, in any case, the two men did not even meet until a few months later. Like many Germans, Hitler saw Bolshevism as a disease, which had knocked Russia out of the war, and then undermined German resistance a year later. He did not fear a Soviet invasion, not even after the victory of the Reds in the Civil War. Instead, Hitler fretted that communism would destroy the last vestiges of German sovereignty in the face of the Entente. ‘The threatened Bolshevik flood is not so much to be feared as the result of Bolshevik victories on the battlefields’, he warned, ‘as rather as a result of a planned subversion of our own people’, which would deliver them up to international high finance.
At this point Simms puts endnote 43 of his third chapter, and at the end of the book we can read the sources of Hitler’s words. But as I have said, in these quotations from some passages of Hitler I omit both the endnotes and the bibliographical sources.
Significantly, Hitler wasted no words on the Soviet Union in his early statements from 1919 save to predict that it was set to become a ‘colony of the Entente’. This means that capitalism and communism were not simply two equal sides of the anti-Semitic coin for Hitler. Bolshevism was clearly a subordinate force. Its function in the Anglo-American plutocratic system was to undermine the national economies of independent states and make them ripe for takeover by the forces of international capitalism.
I find Simms’s revisionism in his biography of Hitler so fascinating that just as in ‘Hitler 6’ I interpolated 9,000 words from another author’s book to show my disagreements with Simms (in the sense that even a Jewish scholar shows the genuine motivations of Germans in the face of Jewish subversion), in ‘Hitler 12’ I will interpolate a 4,500-word article by Gregory Hood.
That article, ‘Rockwell as Conservative’, published ten years ago in Counter-Currents, is perfect for understanding the maturity I have undergone in recent years regarding the primary aetiology of white decline.
Rockwellian Nazism was America’s fascist movement par excellence when I was a child. He hated commies as much as US Senator Joseph McCarthy during the late 1940s through the 1950s. Hood shows that George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of Rockwellian Nazism, was ideologically closer to American conservatism than is generally accepted on the racial right.
I would suggest starting the reading of that 2013 article, ‘Rockwell as Conservative’ from the ninth comment in the comments section: the response from Martin Kerr, who inherited the organisation Rockwell created, as well as the brief responses from Greg Johnson.
Just because I am going to interpolate that long article by Gregory Hood into this magnifying glass review of Simms’ book doesn’t mean that I agree with what Hood has said in other articles. On the contrary: Robert Morgan and I have criticised him very harshly because, like other white nationalists, Hood is clueless on the Christian Question.
Nevertheless, his article ‘Rockwell as Conservative’ is great for understanding why Rockwell and the neo-Nazis have failed and will continue to fail. Hood’s POV aside, the continuing failure is because, unlike Hitler, these Americans haven’t transvalued their values.
But even that is another matter. What concerns us for the moment is only Hood’s criticism of Rockwell. Like today’s white nationalists, Commander Rockwell never noticed the major etiological factors of Aryan decline, only the minor ones. Otherwise, he would never have defended, as Hood does, the American flag.
by Martin Kerr
“…It is Life alone that all things must serve.”
—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. I, Chap. 9, p. 215 (Manheim)
INTRODUCTION
A unique and compelling feature of the National Socialist worldview of Adolf Hitler is that, of all the various political movements and ideologies of the modern era, it alone is based solely on the Natural Order. Only National Socialism is grounded in reality, and not in phantasms of human mind.
National Socialists believe that the universe is governed by natural laws, and that for Man to be happy and successful, he must first acknowledge that these laws exist; secondly, he must discover what they are; and thirdly, he must live in accordance with them. This is another way of saying that the universe runs according to the principles of Causality—that is, of cause-and-effect relationships—and that it does not operate on the basis of supernatural forces, or on the mental constructions and wishful thinking of intellectuals and ideologues, or on the religious fantasies of theologians.
Hitler made this clear from the beginning of his career in public life. Writing in his book Mein Kampf in 1924, he stated:
When Man attempts to rebel against the iron logic of Nature, he comes into struggle with the principles to which he himself owes his existence as a man. And so his action against Nature must lead to his own doom… Here we encounter the objection [that] ‘Man’s role is to overcome Nature!’… But Man has never yet conquered Nature in anything, but at most has caught hold of and tried to lift one corner or another of her immense gigantic veil of eternal riddles and secrets, that in reality he invents nothing but only discovers everything, that he does not dominate Nature, but has only risen on the basis of his knowledge of various laws and secrets to be lord over those other living creatures who lack this knowledge… (Vol. I, Chap. 11, Manheim trans., p. 287)
And elsewhere:
Man must never fall into the madness of believing that he has risen to be lord and master over Nature—which is so easily induced by the conceit of half-education—but must understand the fundamental necessity of Nature’s rule, and realize how much of his existence is subject to these laws of combat and upward struggle. Then he will sense that in a universe where planets revolve around suns, and moons turn around planets, where force alone forever masters weakness, compelling it to be its obedient servant or else crushing it, there can be no special laws for Man. For him, too, the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom hold sway. He can try to grasp them, but escape them never. (pp. 244-245)
The goal of National Socialism, then, is to consciously organize human society in accordance with the Natural Order. The postwar Danish National-Socialist Povl H. Riis-Knudsen thus defined National Socialism in a single sentence: “National Socialism is the application of the Laws of Nature to human affairs.”
The dominant thought-systems of today are uniformly based on the notion of human equality in one form or another: Multiracialism on racial equality; Marxism on economic equality; democracy on political equality; Christianity on spiritual equality. But when Adolf Hitler observed the world of living Nature, he saw that it was not equality, but rather inequality, that was ever-present. To be more precise, he saw that Nature operated according to the principles of structure and hierarchy.
There is structure and hierarchy both among the races of mankind, and also within the races. The hierarchy among the races he denoted as the Principle of Race, and that within each race as the Principle of Personality. He discusses this in depth in Volume II, Chapter 4, of Mein Kampf.
In a speech given in 1928, Hitler gave his own one-sentence definition of the National Socialist worldview: “All life is bound up in three theses: struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in the blood, and leadership is primary and decisive.” Here “blood” symbolizes the Principal of Race and “leadership” the Principle of Personality. “Struggle” is the mechanism by which position in the hierarchy is determined.
The belief that life should be lived in harmony with the Natural Order permeated the whole of Hitler’s Germany, from the top to the bottom. It manifested itself not just in the political structure of the National Socialist state, but in every facet of society, including child-rearing, nutrition, forestry, animal rights, medicine and healthcare. The protection of the environment was a top priority. Truly, National Socialism was the original “green” movement!
The SS had a popular motto: “Know the laws of life and live accordingly.” Another SS saying pointed to the spiritual dimensions of the National-Socialist worldview: “The Divine manifests itself in the order of Nature, not in supernatural miracles.”
The scientific community enthusiastically supported the restructuring of society in harmony with the Natural Order. One example of this was botanist Ernst Lehmann, who characterized National- Socialism as “politically applied biology.” In 1934, only one year into the NS era, he wrote:
We recognize that separating humanity from Nature, from the whole of life, leads to mankind’s own destruction and the death of nations. Only through a reintegration of humanity into the whole of Nature can our folk be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Mankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole… This striving with connectedness, with the totality of life, with Nature itself, a Nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National-Socialist thought. (Biological Will: Means and Goals of Biological Work in the New Reich, pp. 10-11)
It is easy for the unsuspecting or the misinformed to fall victim to the vicious, lying, Hitler-bashing, anti-NS propaganda that is everywhere today. Attempts to discuss the profound and life-giving character of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism often get sidetracked and bogged down in ridiculous and ill-informed debates concerning the conduct of German military operations during the Second World War—as though that subject were more important than our survival as a race!
But one person saw clearly through the miasma of anti-Hitlerism even when it was at its height. The National Socialist philosopher Savitri Devi recognized the magnitude of Adolf Hitler’s achievements, and of the unique value of his teachings—not just to the Aryan race, but to all mankind. In her magnum opus The Lightning and the Sun (1958) she wrote:
In its essence, the National Socialist idea exceeds not only Germany and our time, but the Aryan race and mankind itself and any epoch; it ultimately expresses that mysterious and unfailing wisdom according to which Nature lives and creates: the impersonal wisdom of the primeval forests and of the ocean depths and of the spheres in the dark fields of space; and it is to Adolf Hitler’s glory not merely to have gone back to that divine wisdom … but to have made it the basis of a practical regeneration policy of worldwide scope … (The Lightning and the Sun, pp. 219-220, standard edition; p. 128, Pierce edition)
We live in a civilization and in a society that is about as divorced from the Natural Order as possible. That is why the our race is sick. That is why the our race is dying. Only by once again living in harmony with the Laws of Nature can we regain our racial health. There is only one movement which offers this salvation, and hence there is only one path to racial survival, that of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism.
A SOCIOBIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Sociobiologists divide the animal world into three broad categories, based on whether or not they live in societies, and if they do, their degree of socialization. Animals which live in societies live in groups characterized by (1) hierarchy, and (2) cooperation. The three categories are:
1. Asocial animals, which either live solitary lives as individuals or else they live in groups without hierarchy or cooperation. Most felines (except for the lion) and orangutans are examples of animals who live as individuals. Schools of fish, flocks of birds and Thompson’s gazelle are animals who live in groups that are unstructured and the members of which do not cooperate with each other—basically they are collections of individuals.
2. Eusocial animals (essentially, bees, ants and their relatives) live in communities in which the individual does not exist for practical purposes—only the collective exists.
3. Social animals live in groups known as societies, in which there is hierarchy and cooperation. The individual has rights, but the rights generally are subordinate to the welfare of the society. Most higher primates, including all of the great apes except for the orangutan, and most canines, are social animals. Human beings are social animals. We are not bees (for whom only the collective exists) and we are not tigers (for whom only the individual exists).
In human society, the individual has rights, but these must be balanced against the overall welfare of the group. There is inevitably some tension between the group and the individual, but in successful societies this it is managed so that neither suffers unduly.
National Socialist Germany is the modern society that has done this the best. As a social state, it stands in balanced mid-point between the hive-like, eusocial collectivism of communism (in which the individual exists only to serve the state, and who has no rights at all), and the rootless, naked egoism of asocial libertarianism (in which the good of the whole is subordinate to the desires and whims of the individual).
This balance between the desires of the individual and the good of the racial community is exemplified in the Hitlerian dictum, “The right to personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race.” (Mein Kampf, p. 255). This statement explicitly recognizes that there is a right to personal freedom, but that this right is subordinate to the common racial good.
The word “natural” is only problematic if someone is determined to see it as so. The opposite is “artificial.” The wolf is a canine that is the product of natural selection. The Chihuahua is a canine that is product of artificial selection. The society we live in today is an artificial society that is divorced from Nature. To be healthy as a race, we need a society that is structured in accordance with the world of Nature.
THEORY AND PRACTICE
Writing in 1980, the brilliant Australian National Socialist Dr. E.R. Cawthron, B.Sc. (Hons), noted that, “Just to speak in general terms about the laws of Nature serves little purpose.” Very true! Let us take a look at a specific natural law and its concrete application in National Socialist Germany.
In the above Introduction, it was noted that Adolf Hitler recognized that inequality, not equality, was the norm in living Nature, and that with regard to Man, this inequality manifested itself both between the races, and within each race. As a corollary to the law of racial inequality, Hitler also discerned a law concerning “the urge toward racial purity.” He wrote:
[M]en without exception wander about in the garden of Nature; they imagine that they know practically everything and yet with few exceptions pass blindly by one of the most patent principles of Nature’s rule: the inner segregation of the species of all living beings on this earth…Every animal mates only with an animal of the same species… Only unusual circumstances can change this… (p.284)
He further noted:
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the… lowering of the level of the higher race. (p.286)
And he offered an example:
Historical experience shows countless proofs of this. It shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be the master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall victim to defilement of the blood. (p. 286)
Thus we can see the development of Hitler’s logic with regard to natural law in this instance:
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• He begins by postulating a law or principle that holds true for all of living Nature.
• He further shows how Man is specifically included in this law’s jurisdiction.
• Taking the discussion out of the realm of theory, he gives a concrete example of the expression of this law in the real world.
But it does not stop there. On September 15, 1935, Adolf Hitler, as chancellor of the German Reich, signed a law into effect prohibiting race-mixing between “citizens of German or related blood” and Jews. This act was formally titled the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.”
Mainstream historians have termed this the “Nuremberg Race Law,” and claimed that it was the sinister first step toward the extermination of European Jewry. But it was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was a preliminary and far-sighted attempt to tentatively codify Natural Law as State Law. Adolf Hitler had begun to restructure German society so as to bring it in accordance with Nature—just as he had advocated a decade earlier in Mein Kampf.
LINCOLN ROCKWELL’S ‘LAWS OF THE TRIBE’
George Lincoln Rockwell is the founder of postwar American National Socialism, and one of the foremost disciples of Adolf Hitler’s thought of all time. He is remembered primarily as a man of action, which is unsurprising given the dramatic and dynamic course of his life. Yet he was also a man of towering intellect. In addition to numerous essays and articles, he authored two books, This Time the World (1962), his political autobiography, and White Power, which was published posthumously in 1968.
Like Adolf Hitler, Lincoln Rockwell recognized that Man was a part of the Natural Order, and that he was in no meaningful way separate or distinct from it. In Chapter 15 of White Power, entitled “National Socialism,” he lists five “Laws of the Tribe” that govern the social organization of all social animals (see Part Two). They are true for wolves as well as for elephants, for dolphins as well as for chimpanzees—and for Man as well. In a human context, by “Tribe” Rockwell means Race or folk or ethnicity.
Here are Rockwell’s Five “Laws of the Tribe”:
1, The Law of Biological Integrity;
2. The Law of Territory;
3. The Law of Leadership;
4. The Law of Status; and
5. The Law of Motherhood or Family
In White Power, he discusses four of the five principles or laws in some depth. By Biological Integrity, Rockwell means both the instinctive urge to protect the exclusive gene-pool of the tribe, but also the love-hate dichotomy that this generates. He writes:
The two instincts are equally important. Love is not “good” while hate is “evil” — which is the canard so dearly loved by the Jews, liberals, hippies, queers, and half- wits…
Love, the natural healthy kind, is indeed what makes the world go round, and it is the most beautiful, holy miracle we ever see here on earth.
But without a deadly hate of that which threatens what we love, Love is an empty catchword for hippies, queers, and cowards…
Biological Integrity: absolute, total and uncompromising loyalty to one’s own racial group based on a consuming love, and absolute, uncompromising hatred of any outsiders who intrude and threaten to mix their genes with those of the females of the group. (pp. 445-446)
By “Territory” he means in the first instance the land or real estate that the tribe lives on. In National Socialist Germany, the close relationship between Biological Integrity and Territory was encapsulate in the phrase “Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden). But he also expands this to include the principle of private property. Here Rockwell draws a fundamental dividing line between National Socialism and Jewish, Marxist socialism.
Rockwell specifies “Leadership by the best.” By the best, not by the most popular, nor by the wealthiest, and certainly not by those most eager to kiss Jewish posterior.
“Status” he defines as the natural place or rank of each individual within the tribe. Everyone in the tribe is not “equal” to everyone else—but each person has worth and value, and a role to play in society.
Rockwell does not mention Motherhood and Family, beyond including it in his list of Five Laws. He was writing in the mid-1960s, when everyone in White society still had a healthy appreciation of the traditional family. He apparently thought that it was unnecessary to describe it further. Perversions such as homosexual “marriage” were so far over the social horizon that they were not even visible in 1967. One can only imagine what he would have to say about such manifestations of racial decadence and social decline. The traditional family always has been, remains, and always will be the basic social building block of every healthy White society.
Rockwell was not a trained anthropologist, and in listing the Five Laws, he was deeply indebted to Robert Ardrey, author of books on this subject such as African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative. But although it was outside the field of his formal knowledge, Rockwell was intelligent enough to recognize the truth when he saw it, and to portray it from a National Socialist perspective.
When he first read African Genesis, Rockwell was so taken with Ardrey’s ideas that he wrote the author a multipage letter explaining that National Socialism was nothing less than the political embodiment of Ardrey’s central thesis. When several months passed and the author did not respond to his communication, Rockwell sent him a registered letter asking if he had received his first letter. Again, Ardrey did not reply.
However, Ardrey went on to write another book, The Territorial Imperative, in which he discussed his Law of Territory in detail. In this book, Ardrey takes pains to explicitly distance himself from National Socialism. He does not mention Rockwell by name, nor does Ardrey address Rockwell’s contention that National Socialism is the political embodiment of his ideas—he just wants his readers to know that he was not one of those awful “Nazis.”
Nonetheless, both African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative are great books, and their content is completely NS in their exposition. We recommend both, despite the superficial anti-NS orientation of the second volume.
These Five Laws enunciated in White Power will someday form the basis for the National Socialist New Order which we, the heirs of Hitler and Rockwell, will build in North America.
CONCLUSION
The question that White people must ask themselves is this: Does human existence rest on a biological foundation or not? If it does, then the biological prerequisites that form the basis of our existence must be respected or a great price for ignoring them must be paid.
The wages of racial sin is racial death.
The situation today, in which the Aryan peoples of the world—without exception—live in societies completely divorced from the Natural Order must be viewed from a great historical perspective as a temporary dislocation. It is a sickness, not a permanent condition, and the patient will either recover or die.
National Socialism is the reorientation of human society to once again bring it in accordance with Nature and her iron laws. It is the cure for the disease.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER: A SELECT READING LIST
What I have written here is only an introduction to the topic of National Socialism and the Natural Order. To really grasp it thoroughly and in depth, it needs to be studied. Here are a few texts to get you started on your exploration.
Basic National Socialist texts
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, GmbH, Muenchen, Band I 1925, Band II 1927, 781 pp., index.
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, trans. Ralph Manheim. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943. Index, 694 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0395925034. Reading it the original is always the preferred option, but if you are limited to an English translation, this one is the best.
- White Power by George Lincoln Rockwell. Ragnarok Press, Dallas, Texas, 1967 [1968]. Illustrated, 482 pp. See especially Chapter 15, “National Socialism,” for Rockwell’s discussion of the Natural Order and National Socialism.
- National Socialism: The Biological Worldview by Povl H. Riis-Knudsen. Nordland Forlag, Aalborg, 1987. Frontispiece, 30 pp. Essential.
Books hostile to National-Socialism but still containing valuable information
- Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s Green Party. Kensal Press, 1985, 224 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0946041336. Not pro-NS by any stretch of the imagination, but much less hostile than most mainstream books on Hitler and the Hitler era.
- Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis by Robert N. Proctor. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 1988. Notes, index, bibliography, 43 figures, 414 + vii pp., ISBN 0-674-74580-9. See especially Chapter 1, “The Origins of Racial Hygiene,” and Chapter 3, “Political Biology: Doctors in the Nazi Cause.” Proctor goes out of his way to show that he is anti-NS, perhaps because the subject he investigates are so inherently pro-NS.
- The Nazi War on Cancer by Robert N. Proctor. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 1999. Notes, index, bibliography, figures, 380 + x pp., ISBN 0-691-00196-0. See especially Chapter 3, “Genetic and Racial Theories,” Chapter 5, “The Nazi Diet,” and Chapter 6, “The Campaign against Tobacco.” Even more hostile than Racial Hygiene — but containing even more good information.
- Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Janet Biel and Peter Staundenmaier. AK Press, San Francisco and Edinburgh, 1995. Footnotes, 73 pp., ISBN 1-873176-73-2. Consists of two essays: “Fascist Ideology: the ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and Its Antecedents” by Staudnemaier; and “‘Ecology’ and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-Right” by Biehl.
Anthropology and sociobiology
None of the books listed below is written by a National-Socialist or with an NS or WN audience in mind, but they all show the biological underpinnings of the National Socialist worldview and NS policies.
- Introduction to Anthropology by Dr. Roger Pearson. Harcourt College Publishers, 1974. Approx. 500 photographs, charts, and maps; glossary; table of languages; index, 616 pp., ISBN-13: 978- 0030915-17-8.
- Sociobiology: The Abridged Edition by Edward O. Wilson. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England, 1980. Bibliography, glossary, index, 366 + ix pp., ISBN 0-674-81623-4. There is a longer version, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, written for scholars, but we recommend the abridged edition for non-specialist readers.
- Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of the Mind. Charles J. Lumsden & Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London England. Endnotes, index, 216 pp., ISBN 0-674-71445-8.
- African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man by Robert Ardrey, Atheneum Publishers, NY, 1961. Paperback edition, 384 pp., index, ISBN 0-553- 10215-X.
- The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations by Robert Ardrey, Atheneum Publishers, NY, 1966. Bibliography and bibliographical key, 355 pp.
- The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal by Desmond Morris. ISBN 0- 070431-74-4, 1967. Says Wikipedia: “[Z]oologist and anthropologist Desmond Morris… looks at humans as a species and compares them to other animals. The Human Zoo, a follow-up book by Desmond Morris, which examined the behavior of people in the cities, was published in 1969.”
- Race by John R. Baker. Oxford University Press, London, 1981, ISBN 0-936396-01-6. 625 pp., 13 appendices, 82 illustrations, bibliography. A comprehensive, exhaustive examination of the biological reality of race and racial differences. Suitable both for specialist and general readership.
Categories
Interview
with NEW ORDER Chief of Staff Martin Kerr
The goal is to apply basic National Socialist principles in an American context, taking into account America’s history, its racial and ethnic demographics, and its geography.
The following is an abbreviated and revised transcript of an interview between New Order Chief of Staff Martin Kerr and Rosmarie Macleod, host of the online broadcast The Voice of National Socialist Reason. This interview took place on November 4, 2018. Posted on Renegade Tribune, it is the first formal interview Mr. Kerr has given since becoming Chief of Staff in 2014.
______ 卐 ______
ROSEMARIE MACLEOD: Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you get involved in the Movement?
MARTIN KERR: I was born in Pennsylvania in 1952. May ancestors were of Scottish, English and German descent, and helped to settle the state. When I was three or four years old, our family moved to New Jersey. I grew up is a small White suburban community about 20 miles outside of New York City. I had a safe and comfortable middleclass existence. I attended public schools and the local Presbyterian church.
I first became interested in National Socialism in 1966, when I was 14 years old. I was aware, through reading the newspapers and watching the news on television, that American society was facing many problems, including racial unrest, the spread of communism and the war in Vietnam. It was also apparent to me that the solutions to these problems did not consist of those offered by democracy, capitalism or the churches—they were the very ones who had allowed the problems to arise in the first place! So I was casting about for solutions.
I read an interview with George Lincoln Rockwell and was very impressed by his honesty. Here was someone who was tackling the problems that we were facing—especially racial problems—in a direct and forthright manner. We didn’t use the term back then, but today we would say that he was “thinking outside the box.” I wrote to Commander Rockwell and asked him if I could join the American Nazi Party. Within a week I had received an answer in the mail, and I promptly signed up in the party’s youth wing, the National Socialist Youth Movement, which was the same as the Hitler Youth.
As you can imagine, my parents were unhappy with this development, and they prevented any further involvement by me in National Socialist politics for the time being. However, I kept my National Socialist faith, and by my junior year in high school I was attending meetings and demonstrations of the National Renaissance Party in New York City.
I was one on the founding associates when party commander Matt Koehl reorganized the NSWPP as the New Order in 1983. In Commander Koehl’s last will, he indicated that he wanted me to follow him as the leader of the New Order. I have been in charge of New Order operations since his death in October 2014. I formally re-affiliated with the NSWPP in 1971. From 1973 through 1977 I served with the Los Angeles Unit of the party. From June 1977 until 1984 I worked at the party’s national headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. My primary responsibility there was public outreach, in particular, editing the party’s written publications.
RM: Different people have different definitions of National Socialism. What does it mean to you?
MK: There are different levels to National Socialism. What most people understand by the term is its superstructure, that is to say its outward policies and form. In that sense, National Socialism is a dynamic racial movement that seeks to safeguard and advance the interests and welfare of White people both here in the US and worldwide.
Using Hitler’s Germany as a model, the New Order seeks to create a National Socialist state for White Americans. Now, it is not the case that we are trying to replicate the Third Reich on American soil, in the sense of copying it identically in every little detail. Rather, our goal is to apply basic National Socialist principles in an American context, taking into account America’s history, its racial and ethnic demographics, and its geography, as well as the unique character of the American personality.
But underneath this political superstructure rests the philosophical basis of National Socialism, which does not change over time, or from one country to the next.
National Socialism is a worldview, or a Weltanschauung, to use the German term. We believe that the Universe is governed by natural laws. For Man to be healthy and prosperous, he must first acknowledge that these laws exist; secondly, he must discern what they are; and finally, he must follow them. This process is true both for individuals and for our race as a whole.
My good friend and comrade Povl Riis-Knudsen, the Danish National Socialist, has devised a one-sentence definition of National Socialism that serves very well: National Socialism is the application of the laws of Nature to human affairs.
RM: What is the New Order? What separates it from other pro-White organizations?
MK: The New Order is a vanguard National Socialist organization. Our doctrine is derived directly from Mein Kampf and other Hitlerian sources.
Here is what we are not:
- We are not White Nationalists;
• We are not White separatists;
• We are not Alt-Right;
• We are not Balk Right;
• We are not Christian Identists;
• We are not Satanists;
• We are not Identitarians;
• We are not National Bolsheviks or Strasserites
Our goal is to promote strict, hardline Hitlerian National Socialism, and not something else. We try to stay on good footing with other pro-White groups that are not National Socialist, and we wish them no ill will. Anything that moves White people in the general direction of National Socialism is worthwhile, in our opinion. But ultimately there is only one movement qualified to lead White people into the future, and that movement is National Socialism, embodied in North America as the New Order.
The New Order traces its organizational descent directly to George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, later renamed the National Socialist White People’s Party. When Commander Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, party leadership devolved to Matt Koehl.
As I mentioned earlier, Commander Koehl reorganized the NSWPP as the New Order in 1983. So our organizational history goes back some six decades.
Also, from our earliest days, commanders Rockwell and Koehl had contact with the remnants of the original Hitler movement in Germany, through comrades such as Arthur Axmann, Otto Remer, Gudrun Burwitz-Himmler, Bruno Ludtke, Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Winifred Wagner, Hans Baur, Florentine Rost van Tonnigen, Hanna Reitsch, Hans Severus Ziegler and others.
No other pro-White or National Socialist group has and organizational pedigree that even comes close to ours.
I mentioned earlier that we are a “vanguard organization.” Our predecessor, the National Socialist White People’s Party, was designed as a mass-oriented political formation. The New Order, in contrast, does not seek to recruit the masses of people into its ranks, or much less to solicit their support in elections.
Rather, we are looking for a small number of highly motivated, exceptional people—an elite—who are fully committed to the National Socialist cause.
RM: What is the New Order’s stand on religion?
MK: The New Order is incorporated in Virginia as a non-profit religious organization. Our leadership views National Socialism as our religion. For us, the tenets of the National Socialist worldview fulfill all of the spiritual requirements for a new religious faith. Sometimes people refer to this as the Hitler Faith or Esoteric Hitlerism.
Our critics sometimes claim that we worship Adolf Hitler as a “god,” but this is a misunderstanding or deliberate distortion of our belief. Our founder, Matt Koehl, put our perception of Adolf Hitler as follows:
There is but one Supreme Being, one Ultimate Source of all causation—one great Primal Power, infinite and eternal—which we recognize. We are all creations of this Power. Once in thousands of years, however, a singular and unique figure appears, whose special mission it is to declare anew the Divine Will and to redefine human history. In so doing, he himself becomes a universal symbol. In recent time, this extraordinary, providential figure appeared in the person of—Adolf Hitler. With his miraculous appearance, a new age on Earth has begun. That is why we honor and revere him.
Thus our attitude towards Adolf Hitler is not one of “worship,” as the term is commonly understood, but rather one of veneration.
So, this is our belief. But we do not attempt to force our religious insights on our followers. How somebody views the Divine is up to them, it’s a matter of personal conscience. Everyone has to find their own path to God.
We have as supporters people who are Christians, or Odinists, or atheists. We even have a few Buddhists. Savitri Devi famously embraced Hinduism. As long as someone is an Aryan and they support National Socialism, they are welcome in our ranks, regardless of religious conviction. Religious intolerance and persecution are un-Aryan.
RM: Does the New Order have a plan? What is its strategy?
MK: For obvious reasons, we are not going to reveal our strategy to the public in any detail, but I can speak about it in general terms.
Broadly speaking, there are two different strategic approaches that hardline pro-Whites have utilized over the years: the mass-approach and the vanguard strategy.
The mass-approach consists on enlisting as many people as possible into the movement as quickly as possible. It is characterized by public demonstrations, publicity seeking, a high media profile and public name recognition. Little or no attention is paid to building a solid infrastructure, nor in ideological development, nor in quality control concerning those recruited.
The mass-approach results in a lot of publicity and attention, and in a relatively larger membership. But the organizations that adopt this approach normally do not last long. They are filled with infiltrators and other troublemakers. The publicity that they receive is almost always negative. Their average existence is about two years, after which they disband or fade away, only to be replaced by similar dead-end organizations. This is not the approach that the New Order is taking.
Instead, we are pursuing a vanguard strategy. This is characterized by slow growth and consolidation, by intensive theoretical development, and by careful attention as to whom we recruit. We have small numbers, a low public profile, and little engagement with the media. We spend most of our effort and resources is building a solid infrastructure. Our public activities are limited. Their goal is to spread our message as far and wide as possible among the broad masses of our racial sisters and brothers.
We have encountered groups which claim that they pursue both strategies simultaneously, that is, a mass strategy accompanied by intenstive infrastructutal development. But realistically, given the limited resources that pro-Whites have at their disposal, you cannot do both at once; you have to choose one to focus on.
Our mid-range goal is to create a nationwide network of local National Socialist communities, which we term folk strongholds. We will have more to say about this in the future. However, as I said before, we do not intend to broadcast our plans to the public. We prefer to boast about our accomplishments after they have been made—not beforehand.
RM: How can people help out if they support the New Order and its beliefs? Where can people go if they want more information on the New Order?
MK: The basic level of affiliation to the New Order is that of Registered Supporter. An RS is someone who states that they are in agreements with our beliefs and who agrees to pay a monthly financial pledge to help support our operations. They have to fill out a registration form which includes a postal address. The New Order is an organization that is based in the real world. We have no Registered Supporters who are anonymous, or who are only known to us online.
If someone still wants to support our work, but they do not want to make the formal commitment of becoming a Registered Supporter, one thing that they can do is to subscribe to out print publication, the NS Bulletin. It has been published continuously since 1967.
Martin Kerr at the NSWPP headquarters
in Arlington, Virginia, 1981.
‘As for the rest: weak Whites will die. Some will be too puny to withstand the storm which will break. Others will die the “second death” of genetic oblivion by mixing their blood with that of non-Aryans. Either way, both groups will perish. And it will be good.’
—Martin Kerr
Address given at the 2016
JdF 127 Hitler Festival
in Detroit, Michigan
by NEW ORDER Chief of Staff
Martin Kerr
In the Table Talk, Adolf Hitler accepts as a matter of course that the figure commonly known as Jesus Christ was an actual historical person. He describes him as the leader of a popular revolt against the Jews of his time. Savitiri Devi, one of the best known and most eloquent of Hitler’s post-war disciples, felt otherwise. In her essay, Saul of Tarsus, she writes that based on her own extensive research, she believed that Jesus (whose name would have been Yeshua bin-Yusef al-Nazarini or something similar in his native Semitic tongue of Aramaic) was merely a fictional character from Christian mythology; that is, he was not an historical person.
It matters little to us today whether or not Yeshua was real, or whether he was as imaginary as Bilbo Baggins and Huckleberry Finn. But, of course, it does matter to the Christians, who have built up an elaborate if perverse theology based on his putative teachings. In fact, so important has he been to the Christian world that all historical dates are routinely calculated from the year that he was supposed to have been born. That practice started around the year 525 by a Christian monk named Dionysis Exiguus. Years after his birth were counted forwards and those before his birth were counted backwards. Traditionally, these designations have been known as AD for Anno Domini (or “Year of our Lord”) and BC or “Before Christ.” For reasons of Political Correctness, these old terms have now been replaced by CE (for “Common Era”) and BCE (“Before Common Era”).
But regardless of what initials are used, the basic method of calculating and enumerating the years of the calendar has remained unchanged, because Jesus—real or not—is held to be someone who “broke history in half.” In the Christian conception of things, there is an absolute rift between what came before him and what came after. In the conventional wisdom, Jesus changed everything.
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In the 1880s, a towering intellectual figure arose in Germany to challenge the accepted dispensation: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche suggested that it was he, Nietzsche, who was the one who would break history in half. Through a process which he called the “transvaluation of all values,” Nietzsche sought not just to supersede Christianity, but to reverse it. Thereby he would lay the foundations for a new European super-civilization. I imagine that in Nietzsche’s scheme of things, future historians would date all history from his, Nietzsche’s coming, and not from the advent of the one whom our Norse ancestors called the “Pale Christ.”
Nietzsche, we note, was completely ignored during his lifetime, except for some cursory interest that he aroused in philosophical circles, which had a negative, dismissive view of his work. That he grandiosely described himself as the man who would break history in half is widely viewed either as sarcasm on Nietzsche’s part, or else as a psychological defensive mechanism to protect his ego from the rejection he suffered from his colleagues.
Perhaps there is a modicum of truth to both of these explanations, but I feel at the heart of things, Nietzsche was being fiercely serious. He recognized the full import and significance of his teachings, even if his contemporaries did not. Today, we National Socialists recognize him as one of the earliest “fragments of the future,” someone who was not the “last of yesterday,” but rather was one of the “first of tomorrow.”
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As it turned out, neither the Christian savior nor Nietzsche was the one who broke history in half. The theology espoused by Jesus was merely a reshuffling of the older Semitic worldview, a prime feature of which was the belief that there is a dichotomy between spirit and matter. Spirit is pure and good, it tells us, while the flesh is impure and corrupt. Nietzsche, for all his genius, was unable to articulate a realistic, systematic alternative to the Christian worldview.
No, it remained to Adolf Hitler to be the man to shatter the dispensation that had held Aryan man in thrall for 2,000 years or more.
I do not know when the realization first entered the Führer’s mind that there is no division between soul and matter, but rather that our flesh is infused with and animated by our spirit, while spirit is given form by our bodies. It must have been at a very young age. Probably, it did not dawn on him all at once, but instead only emerged gradually as he matured intellectually. In any event, by the time that he sat down to write Mein Kampf, his basic worldview was already well-formed and complete.
Adolf Hitler believed that the universe was governed by natural laws, and that for man to be happy and successful, he must first acknowledge that these laws exist; secondly, he must discover what they are; and thirdly, he must live in accordance with them.
This is another way of saying that the universe runs according to the principles of Causality—that is, of cause-and-effect relationships—and that it does not operate on the basis of supernatural forces, or on the mental constructions and wishful thinking of intellectuals and ideologues, or on the religious fantasies of theologians.
But at the same time, he knew that the human soul or spirit was a reality. His consistent use of religious language and imagery, plus specific comments recorded in Table Talk, reveal the Führer to be a deeply religious man, even if his spiritual outlook was diametrically opposed to that of Christianity.
Rather than believing that Man is born as a sinful being who can only be rescued from eternal hellfire and damnation by accepting the good lord Jesus as his personal savior, Adolf Hitler believed that Man was born into a state of grace with the Natural Order. In the Hitlerian worldview, we are all holy beings at birth. It is through being raised with false beliefs, and thrown into a society out of synch with the Natural Order, that we lose our state of natural grace and holiness.
Matt Koehl once discussed the Christian conception of original sin with me, contrasting it to the Hitlerian outlook. “If you look at a newborn baby in its cradle, what do you see?” he asked. “The Christians see an evil being born in sin, and doomed to Hell and torment without the intervention of their savior. But as a National Socialist, I see an innocent and holy being, born into a state of harmony and grace with the Natural world.”
This is the Führer’s great gift to Aryan man—and, indeed, to the whole world: he has restored us to a state of grace with the Natural Order. Hitler made us holy again, and only the Gods have the power to sanctify.
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As Aryans, we may be endlessly, sincerely, and profoundly thankful on a personal level for such insights. But unlike the Christians, as National Socialists, we are committed not just to our own personal salvation, but to the salvation and resurrection of our Race.
How do we incorporate our fundamentally religious perception of National Socialism into the practical work of building Adolf Hitler’s earthly movement? We struggle with these issues today—but we are not the first to have raised such questions.
Our great forbearer, George Lincoln Rockwell, wrestled with this question as well. During the final year of his life he prepared to transform his tiny, noisy band of political dissidents into a mighty mass movement. In a passage from his book, White Power, he gives us his thoughts on the future religious or spiritual orientation of the movement:
National Socialism, as a PHILOSOPHY, embodies the eternal urge found in all living things—indeed in all creation—toward a higher level of existence—toward perfection—toward God.
This “aristocratic” idea of National Socialism—the idea of a constant striving in all Nature toward a higher and higher, more and more complex, and more and more perfect existence—is the metaphysical, supernatural aspect of our ideal.
In other words, concepts of social justice and natural order are the organs and nerves of National Socialism, but its PERSONALITY, its “religious” aspect—the thing that lifts it above any strictly political philosophy—is its worshipful attitude toward Nature and a religious love of the Great gifs of an Unknown Creator.
Christianity, for instance, is a far higher thing than its rituals, the words of its prayers, or any of its creeds. It is a SPIRITUAL STRIVING toward the believer’s ideals of spiritual perfection.
National Socialism is the same sort of striving toward even higher and higher levels here on this earth, while Christianity is striving toward a future and later life not of this earth.
For the ordinary “soldier” in our “army”, building and fighting for Natural Order—National Socialism—it is sufficient that they respect and obey the laws and doctrines established by the lofty ideals of our philosophy with merely an instinctive love of those ideals, perhaps not with the complete understanding of the highest forms of our philosophy.But just as the greatest Christian leaders have been those not preoccupied with details and rules but rather those who were “God intoxicated” with the highest ideals of the religion, the leaders among our National Socialist elite must share this fundamentally religious approach. For them the true meaning of our racial doctrine must be part of their idealistic “striving toward God.” [1]
Through total identification of ourselves with our great race, we partake of its past and future glories. When we contribute in any way, especially by self-sacrifice, toward helping our race along the path toward higher existence, we reach toward God—the Creator of the Master Race.
In short, while the mechanics and rules of National Socialism, as codified and set forth here, are sufficient for most of us, for the few idealists ready and willing to sacrifice their very lives in the cause of their people, National Socialism must be a very real religious ideal—a striving toward God.
We should all keep Commander Rockwell’s words in mind as we go forth into the world in the coming Jahre des Führers 127. We should endeavor to bring every single racially conscious White person into our Movement. But at the same time, we must maintain the ideological purity of our Cause by seeing to it that only those with a clear understanding of the spiritual, religious character of our worldview become Movement officers. And this is especially true with members of the senior leadership corps.
In this way, we will guarantee that we, too, are “breaking history in half,” in keeping with the Führer’s mission.
HEIL HITLER!
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[1] From White Power, chapter XV, pp. 455-457.
Or
A response to an anonymous commenter
It is doomed because it provides a self-righteous and self-serving worldview where the US and Christianity seldom appear in the dock (only the Jews). My recent experience in the comments section of The Unz Review is that racialist Christians are a lost cause. One Christian went so far as to blame Hitler for the Hellstorm perpetrated on the Germans by the Allies (which includes the country of the commenter in question).
Patriotardism applies even to the American I have considered the noblest of all. As Bolton said in the long article I have reproduced this morning: ‘Yockey was not well received by American National Socialist George Lincoln Rockwell, who condemned “Yockeyism” as “dangerous” and “evil”.’ Bolton added:
The cultural front remains pivotal to the expansion of American global hegemony, the spreading of cultural pathology being far more insidious and intrusive than bombs or even debt, as Yockey was among the first to warn, while much of the rest of the “Right” including Rockwell’s American Nazis aligned themselves with the US Establishment vis-à-vis the USSR and American hegemony.
This thing about the ‘cultural front’ and the ‘expansion of American global hegemony’ reminds me of something. Although he is another patriotard, I have recently been linking to the lectures of John Mearsheimer because his view of relations between states is—unlike the liberal hallucinations—very realistic. See for example what Mearsheimer says about his country’s hegemony in minutes 22 to 28 starting here.
What strikes me about Kerry Bolton’s essay, which was published a dozen years ago, is that Yockey was more Cassandra than our contemporary Bolton about Russia’s relationship with China:
He saw a resurgent Islam as providing a bloc that diminished World Zionism without augmenting “Russian-Chinese power.” Here Yockey was significantly in error in seeing China-Russia as a bloc. There was no Sino-Soviet bloc during Yockey’s time, and there is not one now, despite a temporary pragmatic alliance. The US and China will more likely form a bloc to contain Russia, just as they did during the 1970s. Such a conclusion is within the scope of cultural morphology, although the Russo-Chinese conflict only became apparent shortly after Yockey’s death… The world situation as it now stands has changed since Yockey’s time, but Yockey’s analytical method remains legitimate, even if it leads to conclusions regarding Russia, China, and the US that differ from Yockey’s own.
Now, after what just happened in Ukraine thanks to Putin’s decision, we see that Yockey—who died in 1960!—had a perfect grasp of international relations. He also understood what the US represented. Surprisingly, Bolton, who is a couple of years older than me, is based in New Zealand and holds doctorates in Historical Theology and Theology. Is he aware of the real history of Christianity, or that Jesus didn’t even exist? I don’t know if he is still a Christian but yesterday, at Occidental Dissent, a commenter said:
Most White people are Christian whether they practice or not. It is the foundation of Western society from Rome on. Henrik and Lana are extremely respectful towards the Faith and I will stand with any Pro White pagan as my brother and sister. The moment you go anti-Christian you are either a plant or a bad actor who I have no use for.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it never answers the serious accusations that for a century have been made against the religion of our parents from the viewpoint of racial preservation. When has one of these guys ever deigned to say a word, for example, about the essay we have labelled the ‘masthead’ of this site, which is about the fate of ‘Western society from Rome on’? Robert Morgan has providential patience for arguing with the semi-normie Christians of The Unz Review. I don’t claim I have such patience, though I would like to say something about the Anon who a couple of days ago responded to me with these words:
Dr. Morgan, while wrong about Christianity, is right about one thing: Anti-Christian white nationalists will get nowhere in the US for the obvious reason that most American whites consider themselves at least nominally Christian.
These anti-Christian white nationalists do more than just silo themselves off in an echo chamber. They positively beg to be disliked with their insulting language about “a kike on a stick”, “that sky fairy you believe in”, “Christcuck”, etc. It’s hard to imagine a group more committed to self-sabotage.
You’d think they would know better. Their ideological forebears—David Duke, George Lincoln Rockwell, Tom Metzger and Harold A. Covington—did not make this mistake. They had enough education in history—which is the chief missing ingredient in white nationalism today—to know 1) that Christianity was more friend than foe, and 2) that attacking it would get them nowhere.
This portrays things like a photographic negative. If Christian ethics is the central aetiological factor in white decline, those of us who are aware of it mustn’t keep quiet: it is American Christians who must become apostates.
David Duke is a nominal Christian, isn’t he? Savitri Devi immediately realised that Rockwell was making a mistake in praising Christianity in his pamphlets, as we recently saw in instalment #13 of Savitri’s book. As for Tom Metzger and Harold Covington, old-fashioned racists that died not long ago, neither knew the real history of Christianity, of which we recently translated #141 of Deschner’s abridged books. Obviously, Anon hasn’t read a single line about Christianity’s real history either.
Even in the comments section of this site, this morning I had to repeat what I have said a million times because racist Americans, who don’t want to break with the double helix that’s killing them,* still don’t pay attention to what we have been saying. There is no excuse for this, as the books linked on the sidebar provide a comprehensive overview of a new paradigm in which the CQ—not the JQ—explains perfectly white decline.
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(*) By double helix I refer to their nation’s project—read ‘Bolton on Yockey’ that I posted today!—plus Christianity.
On the other hand, the old bond of affection which so often linked man to his horse or ox—his faithful working companion—exists less and less. The French peasant, whose attachment to his oxen was sung by Pierre Dupont not so long ago,[1] now uses a tractor. The European farmer has either preceded or followed him in this ‘progress’. The farmer in the ‘underdeveloped’ countries will sooner or later follow him, thanks to technical assistance from the USA or the Soviet Union, and intensive propaganda. Beef will be used less and less, except as a beast of slaughter. The horse too, alas!
Of course, the ‘good old days’ allowed for many cruelties. I clearly remember the indignation (and hatred of man) that I felt as a child at the sight of the brutality of certain carters, both in the city and in the country.
And venerable antiquity—including ancient Egypt, the gentlest, along with that of India—has left us some examples of scenes which have nothing to envy to those which, between 1910 and 1920, provoked, at the same time as my impotent anger, my mother’s verbal and often also legal intervention. Among the images of daily life that are spread out on the walls of an Egyptian tomb from the 28th century BC, there is one that represents a man beating a poor donkey that, with its long ears flattened back, its large eyes full of terror, seems to be begging him. The 28th century was already the Dark Ages, despite all the science implied at the time, among the elite, for the construction, relatively recent, of the Pyramids of Giza.
I alluded above to the hunts of antiquity and the bloody games in the Roman circuses, as well as to the vivisection practised, as far as I know, as early as the 6th century BC at the instigation of the ‘scientific curiosity’ of certain Greeks. And the world has, on the whole, throughout this cycle gone from bad to worse.
Apart from the great misery of donkeys and dogs in Eastern countries, and in particular in Muslim countries—a misery which continues—we could mention the horrible treatment inflicted on cats, and especially black cats, in Western Europe in the Middle Ages and up to the 18th or even 19th century—a long practice of nameless abominations,[2] whose effect in the invisible has been, perhaps, to render the continent, collectively, responsible and unworthy of any recovery during this cycle—in particular, unworthy of Hitlerism, which could have delayed, by a few decades, the degeneration.
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Editor’s note: ‘Whose effect in the invisible…’ Really, after the 1945 catastrophe, Savitri has been the most insightful person.
Today, for example, I spent much of the morning looking at the countless comments on The Unz Review about Anglin’s article that I linked to on this site yesterday. Although I liked some of them, for example the criticism of Steve Sailer, the thought came to me that–unlike Savitri’s prose—all this verbal diarrhoea only confuses the honest normie who wants to cross to the other side of the psychological Rubicon. We need to become more like the laconic Spartans and less like the Judaised whites (remember: it is the Jew who uses insipid farrago to say things that can be said with few words).
Savitri was even above Pierce in that Pierce abandoned honouring Hitler and his Reich after Rockwell was murdered; and even above Rockwell himself in that he wanted to mix the unmixable: American patriotism and fair tolerance of Judeo-Christianity with National Socialism.
I still haven’t received Savitri’s magnum opus, which cost me 70€, left me broke and I can only hope it won’t get lost in the corrupt Mexican postal system. But I’ll certainly be reading, when I finish her Reflections, other of her texts until I understand her better. It doesn’t matter that we don’t agree on everything.
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[1] One remembers the well-known song: ‘I have two big oxen in my stable, two big white oxen, marked with red…’
[2] See Dr Fernand Méry’s books, His Majesty the Cat and The Cat, in which it is recalled that the unfortunate so-called ‘diabolic’ animals were ‘crucified, flayed alive, thrown screaming into the braziers’.
The National Socialist White
People’s Party (1967-1982)
Second day of the sixth congress of the NSWPP and the
World Union of National Socialists, Milwaukee, 1975.
A telephone call came into the national headquarters of the National Socialist White People’s Party about half-past noon on August 25, 1967. National Secretary Matt Koehl took the call. It was a person claiming to be a reporter. He wanted the party’s comment on the assassination of NSWPP founder George Lincoln Rockwell. Koehl hung up without replying; he assumed it was one of the dozens of prank calls that the headquarters received each day. He knew that Rockwell was alive, as he had spoken to him in person some 40 minutes earlier; now he was impatiently waiting for the Commander’s return from the local laundromat so that he could use the vehicle that Rockwell had taken for a party activity.
Moments later the phone rang again, and once more it was someone else who said he was a reporter, asking for a comment on Rockwell’s death. Again Koehl hung up. Within seconds there was a third call – but this time, before Koehl could slam down the receiver, he heard the caller say the word ‘laundromat’.
‘It was as if an icy-cold hand gripped my hear’, he later said.
Koehl quickly dispatched a trooper on foot to run down to the laundromat, about a quarter-mile away, to see if Commander Rockwell was all right. Shortly afterwards, the trooper returned. He was out of breath and drenched in sweat from running in the 90-degree summer heat. Commander Rockwell had been shot, he reported. His body was laying on the parking lot pavement, surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers who were being held back by the police.
‘I instantly knew two things’, Koehl later recalled. ‘First, that he had been killed to stop his life’s work, and second, that I would not let that happen’.
The era of George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party was over, and the era of Matt Koehl and the National Socialist White People’s Party had begun.
Transition and survival
Technically, the era of the American Nazi Party had ended some nine months earlier, when Rockwell had renamed the group as the NSWPP. The name change was only one component of a sweeping program he had announced to transform the noisy band of political dissidents he had gathered around himself into a serious political movement for angry American Whites. The transition of the party from a group specializing in street theatre to one engaging in legitimate grass-roots activism had only just begun when Rockwell was killed. It fell on Koehl and his co-workers to carry it out as best they could.
But Koehl had a more-pressing priority before him: the very survival of the party itself.
In the tumultuous days and weeks following the assassination, the party initially rallied behind Koehl as its new leader. At first, Koehl refused to assume the title of ‘commander’, although as Rockwell’s designated successor he was entitled to do so.
Instead, he called himself ‘National Leader’. He imposed a two-year probationary period on himself. At the end of that time, he said, he would consult the party’s membership, and if they were satisfied with the job he was doing, then he would continue as ‘commander’. Otherwise, he would step aside.
But the initial surge of party solidarity that followed Rockwell’s death soon evaporated, and fissures in its organizational structure emerged. Part of the problem was that Koehl, then 32 years old, had a very different personality from Rockwell, who was 49 at the time of his death. The 6’4’ Rockwell was gregarious and dramatic and dominated the gathering whenever he entered a room. All eyes were on him. The younger, smaller Koehl, on the other hand, was quiet and introverted. Some in the party mistook his low-key personality as a sign of weakness. They thought that it would be easy for them to control him. All bookishness aside, however, Koehl possessed an iron will and a clear vision of what needed to be done to build National Socialism in America. Soon, his critics were gone, either having been expelled for insubordination or having voluntarily resigned. Some of them convinced that they could do a better job than Koehl, set up their mini versions of the ‘American Nazi Party’. We will discuss some of these splinter groups in the next instalment of this series.
So, despite the unprecedented avalanche of free publicity that followed the assassination, the NSWPP soon found itself short of manpower and money. The party headquarters in Chicago and Los Angeles were shuttered, and key personnel were transferred to Arlington. The NSWPP’s printing plant in Spotsylvania, Virginia, was also closed, and the group lost its mail-order operation in Dallas, Texas. By the end of 1967, it had been evicted from its famous ‘Hatemonger Hill’ headquarters in Arlington. Enemies of the party gleefully predicted that its end was at hand. The New York Times published a lengthy obituary for the NSWPP, entitled ‘Rockwell’s Nazis Lost without Him’.
But Koehl refused to let the party die. By the middle of 1968, a small brick-and-stone building had been purchased to serve as the new headquarters. An impressive, hardcover edition of Rockwell’s posthumous book, White Power, was published. The new party tabloid newspaper, also called White Power, began to appear although on an irregular basis at first. Soon, the party opened a second facility in Arlington, the ‘George Lincoln Rockwell Bookstore’.
The new momentum was partly due to two officers whom Koehl had recruited: Dr William L. Pierce and Robert Lloyd. Pierce had been a behind-the-scenes consultant to Rockwell during the mid and late 1960s; now in the hour of need, he stepped forward to play a more prominent role. He became the party’s National Secretary and public outreach officer. Pierce brought a new level of professionalism and intelligence to the party’s publications. He also pioneered new outreach forms, such as the ‘White Power Message’. This was a three-minute telephone recording on various topical issues that was changed periodically. Thousands of listeners called the service weekly, including many who were otherwise unwilling to contact the party.
Lloyd had been a captain in Rockwell’s Stormtroops but had drifted away in the year before the assassination. Now, he returned as the group’s National Organizer, charged with recruitment, public activities and with forming new party units throughout the country.
On Labor Day weekend, 1969, some two years after Rockwell’s death, the party held its first-ever national congress, attended by over 120 delegates. The congress included a closed session for full members and officers only. At this time, Koehl’s leadership was unanimously reconfirmed, and he officially became the party ‘commander’.
Yet all was not well within the group. In June 1970, Pierce made a bid to oust Koehl as the party’s supreme leader. Instead, he demanded that the party be run by a committee chaired by himself. Under this scheme, Koehl would stay on as the Movement’s figurehead but would have no power.
Once again, Koehl’s opponents underestimated him. By August 1970, Pierce was gone, as was Robert Lloyd, who had supported Pierce’s power-play. Pierce later admitted that his effort to supplant Koehl had been an error. To use a contemporary term, both men were ‘alpha males’. Each had his vision on where to lead the Movement, and neither was inclined to take orders from the other. Pierce went on to form his group, the National Alliance, which will be discussed in the next instalment of this series.
Happily, despite the ill feelings that accompanied the split, by the end of the decade, Koehl and Pierce were again on speaking terms. As the saying goes, they ‘agreed to disagree’ on the best way forward for our Race. Still, Pierce’s departure was a major setback for the Rockwell movement.
But the ‘Pierce mutiny’ (as it was called within the NSWPP), was only the first in a decade-long series of similar episodes. Time and again, Koehl would build the NSWPP up to a certain level, only to have all of the progress undone by internal difficulties.
Koehl as a leader
Both inside and outside the party, people measured Koehl as a leader against their memories of Rockwell. And at first, Koehl made the same comparison himself. By such standards, he fell far short. For one thing, he lacked Rockwell’s charisma and exuberance. At the beginning of his tenure, Koehl’s speaking ability was poor. He did not have Rockwell’s ability to improvise before an audience. Instead, Koehl would read his speeches from a typewritten text, only rarely looking up. Over time, he developed into an impressive and dynamic speaker – but that is not how he started.
His effort to be an imitation of Lincoln Rockwell was a failure. He later told me that just as each of us has a unique personality, so each leader must find his unique style of leadership. It was a mistake, he said, for him to try and copy Rockwell’s style, as his personality and talents were far different. But in time he found his leadership style. It included careful forethought, methodical preparation and scrupulous attention to detail. He used the organizational sections of Mein Kampf as an inflexible guide to party-building and operations. But like Rockwell, he also led from the front. He was injured and arrested numerous times on party activities, although as commander he could have held himself aloof from danger. Above all, he never asked his men for something that he was not willing to do.
A famous example of this took place in Miami, Florida, on August 20, 1972, when Koehl spearheaded 23 Stormtroops in civilian clothes in a raid on a Marxist encampment in Flamingo Park. Koehl led the National Socialists in capturing the speakers’ platform, which the ST men then defended for two hours against repeated assaults by hundreds of communists before finally being overrun and forced from the park. The event, which took place near the site of the Republican presidential convention, garnered the NSWPP worldwide news coverage.
Gradually, a corps of Koehl loyalists emerged, both in Arlington and local units scattered across the country. These were men and women who understood and appreciated his disciplined leadership style in itself, as different as it was from Rockwell’s freewheeling, impromptu leadership of the previous decade.
Rockwell’s strategy had been based on what we may call ‘punctuated equilibrium’: long periods of stasis interspersed with dramatic breakthroughs. Koehl, on the other hand, worked on the theory of slow growth and consolidation:small, incremental gains that added up over a long period.
At first, Koehl, adhered to Rockwell’s Four-Phase program (discussed previously) as closely as he could. But over time, he began to diverge from it, only a little bit at first, and then more and more as time went on. Instead, he made practical progress in building the party whenever he could, with no real thought to a long-term NS ‘seizure of power’.
The NSWPP in the 1970s
Under Koehl’s leadership, the NSWPP grew into an impressive, nationwide organization with headquarters and bookstores in major US cities, such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and elsewhere. For a while, it had a 15-minute program of news commentary on AM radio, entitled The Future Calls. The White Power newspaper was published monthly, and an internal newsletter, the NS Bulletin was issued twice a month. In addition, the party published a theoretical journal on behalf of the World Union of National Socialists. But it was not its publications for which the Party was best known, but rather for its relentless, high-energy, high-profile public activism.
Full membership in the party was restricted to those comrades who had proven their full commitment to the cause. Those who applied for membership were vetted. After a probationary period lasting from one to two years, they had to pass an interview before a panel of party officers. As a minimum, members were expected to tithe ten per cent of their net income to the party, to purchase and distribute fifty copies of White Power each month, and attend all private and public party activities in their area.
In addition to the party itself, there were three auxiliary formations. The best known was the paramilitary Stormtroops (ST). There was also a women’s auxiliary (the National Socialist Women’s Organization or NSWO) and a youth group (the National Socialist Youth Movement or NSYM). The NSW did not take part in public demonstrations but served behind the scenes in a support capacity. The NSYM provided National Socialist training for young men 14 through 17, who then normally went on to join the ST.
The party reached its numerical peak during the mid-1970s. At that point, it had approximately 600 Official Supporters and another hundred full and probationary members. The ST numbered approximately 200 men nationwide. The NSWPP routinely conducted uniform demonstrations with fifty to a hundred participants and on a few occasions, the number of troopers was over a hundred. In 1973, at the fifth NSWPP national congress in Cleveland, Koehl led 126 uniformed Stormtroops in a public march down Euclid Avenue. The police were present but kept their distance – as did a dispirited gaggle of ‘anti-Nazi’ protestors. In contrast, Rockwell had never been able to field more than two-dozen or so troopers on any single occasion.
(Commander Matt Koehl leading a march at the Fifth NSWPP Congress, September 1, 1973.) Some NSWPP activities may seem startling by the standards of 2018. In 1976 and 1977, a contingent of uniformed Stormtroops, led by three drummers and a flag bearer, marched in the annual Arlington, Virginia, Fourth of July parade, along with the high school band, the VFW, the Rotary and other non-controversial participants. As I can personally attest, the National Socialists received both cheers and catcalls from onlookers along the parade route.
Other activities were less peaceful and ended in violence when party personnel were attacked. One such dramatic episode took place in December 1977, when a half-dozen ST men repelled an attack on the Arlington headquarters by 40 communists armed with rocks and clubs. One ST man and four Reds were hospitalized from injuries they received in the brawl.
Beginning in 1975, the NSWPP began running candidates for local office as open National Socialists in areas where it had a strong organizational presence. Typically, the candidates would run for the school board or mayor. Party candidates never won less than 5.5 per cent of the vote, and on a few occasions they received nearly 20 per cent. In some instances, the percentage of the White vote was upwards of 30 per cent.
The strongest results for the party came in the February 1977 primary race for the Milwaukee school board. The NSWPP fielded two candidates, Sandra Osvatic and Sandra Enders. Both were members of the NSWO and had husbands in the ST. Both women received about twenty per cent of the vote cast; Comrade Enders, with 7,710 votes, came within 300 votes of winning her seat. In contrast, Lincoln Rockwell had garnered only 5,730 votes – barely one per cent – when he ran for governor of Virginia in 1965.
These election results amazed political observers. If a minimum of five per cent of the voters nationwide were prepared to vote for the NSWPP, this indicated that the party had a potential base of support in White America of 10 million people.
Theoretical development
Rockwell had deliberately kept the program and outreach of the party very simple. For him, just displaying the Swastika and images of Adolf Hitler was sufficient to establish the Movement as National Socialist. To the degree that there was an ideology, it was a mélange of basic NS racialism, common sense, and traditional American right-wing policies. Rockwell himself had a penetrating and profound understanding of Hitlerian National Socialism, but he thought that an appeal based solely on the ideas embodied in Mein Kampf and practised in the Third Reich would be impossible to sell to American Whites. Consequently, he put forth a simplified version of National Socialism that he hoped would resonate among his fellow countrymen.
(Matt Koehl in 1978.) Koehl’s outreach, on the other hand, hewed more strictly to the German model of National Socialism. Unlike Rockwell, Koehl did not have a personal background in the American right, and he had no sympathy for its fixations. He strongly supported the socialist elements in National Socialism. Unlike Rockwell, he did not champion ‘Western Christian civilization’. Rather, his spirituality had a more heathen cast to it. Above all, Koehl stressed the centrality of Adolf Hitler to the National Socialist cause.
In 1980, thirteen years after he had assumed command of the party, a new, formal NSWPP program was issued. It was written jointly by Koehl and his chief of staff, Martin Kerr.
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Editor’s note: I was unaware, until today, that Martin Kerr, the author of this series, held this position in the noblest association that has existed in the US since the American government annihilated the Bund!
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The new program was known as the ‘Twelve Points’. It presented a comprehensive outline for an American NS state. It included sections on the economy, education, agricultural policy, eugenics, culture, science, ecology and energy, as well as the expected call for racial unity and Aryan sovereignty.
A major theoretical development came in 1980, with the publication of Koehl’s groundbreaking essay, ‘The Revolutionary Nature of National Socialism’, Previously, the stated goal of National Socialism (going back to the era of NS Germany) was the defence of Western civilization. In this new work, however, Koehl declared that Western civilization had declined past the point of any rescue or recovery. Consequently, the proper goal of National Socialism was to prepare the way for a post-Western Aryan civilization. In retrospect, it can be seen that this essay was an ideological precursor to the 1983 transition from the NSWPP to the New Order, which will be discussed below.
The World Union of National Socialists
Koehl’s NSWPP continued participation in the World Union of National Socialists which Rockwell had helped to form a decade earlier.
In 1975, he made a successful organizational tour of Europe, where he contacted many Oldfighters of the NSDAP. Although some German National Socialists held the US movement in low regard, Koehl had built the NSWPP up to a point where they began to consider it in a more serious light.
Among those with whom he established connections were former Hitler Youth leader Arthur Axmann, Dr Hans Severus Ziegler, and Florentine Rost van Tonnigen (wife of the martyred Dutch NS leader). He also became friends with the NS pilots Hans Baur, Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Hanna Reitsch. Significantly, Koehl was the only American present at the funeral of the famous SS commander Otto Skorzeny.
Especially important, both to Koehl personally and the Movement, was the friendship that he established with Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the renowned composer Richard Wagner and an early and continuing supporter of Adolf Hitler.
The decline of the NSWPP
In 1978, the party began another period of contraction. It was not that the party was doing anything differently, but rather that the mood of the country had changed. The social and political upheaval that had characterized the 1960s and early 1970s had faded away. That period had included such phenomena as Black rioting and ‘civil rights’ demonstrations; massive protests against the unpopular Vietnam War, the rise of the drug-oriented youth subculture and a general breakdown of traditional White society and values. This unrest and ferment alarmed many Whites and thus provided a fertile field for the growth of the NSWPP. But as the mood of the country shifted, the fortunes of the NS movement began to wane.
The election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980 only intensified the deradicalization of White America. Many American Whites foolishly believed that Reagan would turn the clock back and reestablish White supremacy and traditional White values. Hence, some people who had previously supported the party now felt that the need for an extreme ‘Nazi’ alternative to the established order was unnecessary: they mistakenly believed that the System had fixed itself.
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Editor’s note: Exactly the same mistake that the more recent internet movements (‘race realism’, ‘white nationalism’, ‘alt-right’ or ‘alt-lite’, etc.) has been committing for decades!
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Party membership dropped off, donations declined, and it became harder to recruit qualified personnel for headquarters staff. Demonstrations became smaller and smaller, and it was more difficult to find candidates to stand for public office. Whether by coincidence or design, this period of party weakness also saw a rise in attacks on the Movement by the federal government. In particular, an effort was made by the Internal Revenue Service to bankrupt the NSWPP and seize its assets. Ultimately, Koehl was able to turn back these attacks, but only at an enormous cost that left the party drained of financial resources and energy.
Transition to the New Order
Koehl began to question whether the whole idea of gaining power under the banner of National Socialism was actually possible. It is true that he could build up the party – but only to a certain level. Rockwell’s original plan was for a sprint to power: he had hoped to become president by 1972. Now it was apparent that building an NS America was going to be more of a marathon race than a 50-yard dash. Consequently, a new approach was needed.
Matt Koehl was not just the leader of a movement on the fringes of polite society. He was also a thinker and theorist with a powerful intellect. Decades of reading and studying had convinced him that the problems facing the White nations of the world were deeper than even most National Socialists realized. It was not just a matter of the Jewish subversion of White society and the corrupt nature of the White elites. Rather, he felt, the very basis of Aryan society had been infected with alien spiritual values.
Consequently, efforts to gain political power by the Movement were ill-conceived. Even in the highly unlikely event that the party was able to outmanoeuvre and overpower its enemies, he reasoned, the diseased roots of White society would prevent the construction of a healthy NS state.
Western civilization was doomed, he believed, and there was no way that it could be rescued or saved. Rather, he felt, the proper focus for the National Socialist movement was to prepare the foundations for a post-Western Aryan civilization.
On January 1, 1983, Koehl dissolved the National Socialist White People’s Party and reorganized it as the New Order. While the NSWPP had been a political formation, the New Order was to have a spiritual or religious focus. In essence, Koehl was seeking to establish a whole new religion for Aryan humanity, which would provide a healthy basis upon which a future White civilization could be built.
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Editor’s note: During the West’s darkest hour this step was understandable. Perhaps what Koehl lacked was the new information about the true origins of Christianity, a true apocalypse for whites (see our masthead)?
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The transition to the New Order was highly unpopular with many NSWPP comrades, and it led to a mass exodus from the Movement. Nevertheless, Koehl was convinced of the correctness of his decision and did not back down from implementing it, regardless of its popularity (or lack thereof) among his base of support. He strongly believed that it was his sacred duty to lead the Movement in the direction that he thought best, even if some comrades did not fully agree or understand.
Summing up the NSWPP
Even more so than the German-American Bund of the 1930s, Koehl created an organization that was a miniature American version of the NSDAP. But, paradoxically, that was both its strength and its weakness. What drew its members to it was a love and appreciation for Hitler and Hitler’s Germany. But this same focus on the past kept it from appealing to a wider audience.
The NSWPP had a split personality: On one hand, it was a highly ideological vanguard organization that demanded the utmost commitment from its members; on the other hand, it spent an enormous proportion of its slim resources appealing to the ordinary American Whites, who had no interest in Hitler or NS Germany. This was a contradiction that Rockwell had been attempting to resolve at the time of his death, but he had made only a tentative beginning in fixing it.
An example of this paradox was the stormtrooper uniform and the accompanying stormtrooper demonstrations. Certainly, the uniform was a force multiplier (to use a military term): a handful of troopers in uniform attracted many times more attention than the same number in civilian clothes. The publicity that the party received allowed the NSWPP to project itself in the public eye far beyond what its numbers would have otherwise allowed. But at the same time, the uniform was a barrier in terms of recruitment, as most Whites who were sympathetic to the party’s core message were unwilling to take part in uniformed public activities. The same could be said for the party’s outreach overall: only a tiny fraction of those Whites who agreed with the party were willing to join or participate because of its ‘Nazi’ image. Thus, the NSWPP was never able to actualize its full potential as a mass organization.
At the same time, focusing its energies and resources on spreading its message to a mass audience prevented the party from maturing as an elite vanguard formation. For one thing, many of those who did join up had unsuccessful lives or marginal personalities – that is, people who had nothing to lose. Such types were the opposite of an elite. They were allowed in, however, because they were the ones who were willing to participate in unformed demonstrations.
In its final years, the party did put an end to uniformed demonstrations. But it struggled to find activities to replace what had been its propaganda mainstay for over twenty years.
In some respects, the 1970s NSWPP was the high point of post-World War II American National Socialism. Other organizations with a belief system sympathetic to National Socialism have been larger, such as the White Patriot Party in the 1980s or the National Alliance in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But in terms of being a complete, open NS movement, none have surpassed the NSWPP.
As mentioned above, there were other NS, pro-NS or semi-NS organizations active in the United States during the same period that the NSWPP existed. These other groups combined had perhaps ten per cent of the strength of the NSWPP in terms of manpower and financial resources. With one exception, these groups were formed as a breakaway splinter of the NSWPP. Nevertheless, no survey of American National Socialism would be complete without mentioning them. These splinter groups will be the subject of the next instalment in this series.
The Rockwell years (1959-1967)
When discussing Movement history, the period 1959-1967 is commonly referred to as ‘The Rockwell Years’, and rightly so. George Lincoln Rockwell first raised the Swastika banner in Arlington, Virginia, on March 8, 1959, and he was assassinated there on August 25, 1967. There were indeed other NS and pro-NS organizations on the scene during these years. Some of these were older than Rockwell’s party, such as the National States Rights Party and the National Renaissance Party, which we have previously discussed. Others arose as splinters or rivals of Rockwell’s movement, such as the White Party of America and the American National Party. For their part, the NSRP and the White Party were larger than Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.
But it is Rockwell who dominated the scene in every sense: he led the way in public awareness of the Movement, and forged a new path in the theoretical development of National Socialism. Abroad, he provided the initiative for the formation of the World Union of National Socialists and at home, he set a precedent for mass NS action with the Chicago White people’s rebellion of 1966. While his competitors in the pro-White movement laboured in obscurity, Rockwell was a household name. And everywhere his dynamic personality was felt: he was the standard against which other leaders and organizations were judged.
Getting started
In terms of resources and manpower, Rockwell started from zero; he was alone, without even the comfort of his wife and children. The lease would soon expire in the house in which he lived, and the small offset printing press in the basement would also be taken away from him at that time. The political contacts he had in the pro-White movement were scattered across the country, and for the most part, they were already committed to various mini-parties and were not looking for something new. Financially, he was broke. But what he lacked externally he more than made up for with his internal resources: in courage, intellect, imagination and drive.
He hung the huge Swastika banner on his living room wall. The house / headquarters was located on a busy street, and the flag was visible through a picture window to passing motorists and pedestrians. He opened his doors to the curious, and he spent every evening in discussion and debate with those who showed up. Word of the anti-Jewish naval commander with the Swastika flag on his wall spread quickly, and within a few weeks, Rockwell had his first followers. Newspaper publicity followed, and the Rockwell movement was born.
The name he chose for the new party was long and cumbersome. He called it, the ‘American Party of the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists’. The ‘American Party’ was the name of a nativist political party of the 19th century, which espoused a sort of proto-racial nationalist ideology. The term ‘Free Enterprise’ was a reflection of Rockwell’s initial unease with the socialist component in National Socialism. Those whom he first recruited almost uniformly came from what the media called the ‘far-right’ in which ‘socialism’ is a dirty word. Rockwell designed a basic khaki uniform for his members, similar to the US class A naval uniform. A Swastika armband was worn on the left arm. A Rockwell innovation was to place a small blue circle in the centre of the Swastika. This symbolized the globe, and thereby the international character of Rockwell’s racialism. Almost immediately, the initial name of the party was shortened to simply the ‘American Nazi Party’. This is the designation by which it would be known throughout Rockwell’s lifetime, and by which American National Socialism is still known today in the popular mind.
Rockwell’s strategic plan
Rockwell had spent his entire adult life in the US navy. He had served in World War II and the Korean War. For a time, he was on the staff of the US Naval Mission to Brazil. Consequently, he knew something about military operations and strategic planning. Unlike many movement leaders, who charge off blindly into the political arena with little or no idea of what they are doing, Rockwell had a plan.
He called it the ‘Four Phase Plan’, and it was designed to take Rockwell and the ANP from complete obscurity and impotence on the utmost fringes of the American political spectrum, to the White House. Here are the four phases:
PHASE ONE: Through agitation of all sorts, make the ANP a household name known to every White American. Rockwell was aware that racial nationalist formations were routinely ignored by the mass media. Consequently, they and their programs were completely unknown to the general population. But, he correctly surmised, by proclaiming himself to be an open ‘Nazi’ complete with Swastikas, praise for Adolf Hitler and a program that included gas chambers for ‘Jew traitors’, he could craft a public image so outrageous that the media could not ignore him. He would force the Jewish-controlled media to give him the publicity he desired, despite themselves. The downsides of this approach were two-fold: (1) The image that he projected to the public was not one of serious National Socialism, but rather an exaggerated caricature or cartoon version of the real thing; and (2) The publicity that the Party received was always hostile, to the point that it distorted Rockwell’s message even further.
PHASE TWO: Education. Once he had attracted the attention of the general public, he would correct the false image of National Socialism that had been projected to them and instead educate them as to the true nature and belief system of the NS worldview.
PHASE THREE: Organization. Once he had an educated cadre of trained party leaders and a base of support among the population, he would organize the White masses into what he termed a ‘powerful political machine’.
PHASE FOUR: The ultimate phase of Rockwell’s plan was to use the White, NS political machine that he had built to take national power.
He always spoke of taking power legally, through elections. However, as a political realist, he privately conceded that he would use whatever means necessary to secure the existence of the White race: no options were off the table.
Anyone wishing to examine Rockwell’s Four-Phase Plan in further detail should consult the last chapter of his political autobiography, This Time the World (1962), in which he explicates it in depth (pages 416-422 in the standard edition).
Rockwell discussed the plan frequently and publicly. This was a calculated risk on his part: normally, one does not divulge one’s plans to the enemy but instead keeps them secret. By making his plan public, he sought to reassure the authorities (especially the FBI) that he was not seeking to subvert and overthrow the government by force, which is illegal, but instead was seeking to make changes in a legal and peaceful manner. At the same time, he was trying to explain the disreputable and outrageous nature of his propaganda to serious-minded potential recruits who might otherwise be put off by the vulgar language, provocative street theatre and talk of gas chambers.
Phase One operations
In the last nine months of his life, Rockwell began to transition the party from Phase One to Phase Two. But for the preceding eight years he had been pushing Phase One as hard as he could, and so it is Phase One activities and propaganda for which he is best remembered.
This included street theatre, in which a handful of uniformed stormtroopers (usually between a half-dozen and a dozen) would march or picket. In addition to displaying the Swastika, they would carry deliberately provocative signs, such as ‘Who Needs Niggers?’, ‘Gas Jew-Communist Traitors’ and ‘Back to Africa’. The sole goal was to draw publicity to the party. Sometimes there would be a fight and arrests. So much the better, Rockwell reasoned, for that would guarantee the notoriety he sought. When he was allowed to present his ideas to a mass audience, as in his famous 1966 interview in Playboy magazine, he would consciously make himself out to be thuggish and buffoonish: he knew if he came across as too sharp and too persuasive, such interviews would never see the light of day.
ANP printed material was likewise designed to be outrageous. Towards the end of Phase One, he wrote: ‘When I began, I purposely made my propaganda as brutal and shockingly rough as I could, simply to force attention. And I have kept everlastingly at the business of building a simple and direct image of all-out hostility to “Jews and niggers” in the minds of millions of Americans, regardless of the costs in other respects’.
The important thing to remember about this approach is that it was a deliberate tactic, crafted to force a hostile news media to give him publicity–any publicity–which he described as ‘the lifeblood of any political movement’. He knew that what he was doing was not a reflection of serious National Socialism; it was a temporary expedient that he intended to abandon as soon as it had achieved its goal of making George Lincoln Rockwell and the ANP household names.
Proof of concept: the advent of William Pierce
Throughout his career, Rockwell spoke to many dozens of audiences at colleges and universities. This was an activity that fell into the Phase Two category–education–rather than Phase One. On these occasions, Rockwell could speak directly to the people he wanted to reach; he was not dependent on the media or any other third party. Consequently, he could explain National Socialism to his audience straightforwardly and seriously, without the outrageous slogans and provocative regalia that accompanied ANP street demonstrations. Another benefit of a speaking engagement is that the institution would pay Rockwell an honorarium of a few hundred dollars. The ANP operated on a month-to-month, shoe-string budget, with the staff at the Arlington headquarters were sometimes reduced to a near-starvation diet. The income from the colleges helped keep the party afloat financially.
One such speaking engagement took place at San Diego State College in California, on March 8, 1962. Rockwell, dressed in a suit and tie, spoke respectfully to an audience of some 3,000 students, explaining to them the ANP and its platform. Partway through his presentation, a Jewish student bolted from his seat and jumped up on the stage, attempting to wrest the microphone from Rockwell. Rockwell pushed him away, and as he squared off to fight with the attacker, the Jew punched him twice in the face, breaking his sunglasses. Before Rockwell could respond, two of his security men tackled the Jew from behind and threw him to the ground, pummeling him into submission. Other troublemakers in the audience then jumped up and began shouting, and the rest of Rockwell’s talk was cancelled.
On the surface, it appeared as though his enemies had won that round: they kept Rockwell from speaking. But the Jews had unwittingly played right into his hands. The fracas generated nationwide media coverage for Rockwell. One of those who saw the news reports was Dr William L. Pierce, a 29-year-old physics professor at Oregon State University. The report he saw on the evening news of the debacle in San Diego did not tell him much of what Rockwell had to say, but it gave him enough details that Pierce was intrigued. He dug out the ANP mailing address from a book at the school library and wrote Rockwell a letter.
The two men began corresponding, and in 1964 Pierce left his teaching position and moved across the country to help Rockwell out. This was proof of concept for at least part of Rockwell’s plan: the publicity that he received attracted the attention of a like-minded person of quality who recognized that Rockwell had a serious message to convey, even if his public image was disreputable and semi-comedic.
Pierce was a brilliant man with great moral courage, and in the years and decades to come, he would play a major role in the development of the Movement in the US. His service with Rockwell as a young man was a sort of basic training for him. Pierce never formally joined the ANP, although Rockwell asked him to sign up on several occasions and offered him an officer’s commission in the organization. One problem was that Rockwell insisted that if he were to join, that he would have to participate in at least one or two stormtrooper demonstrations each year. ‘Otherwise’, Rockwell explained, ‘the men will not respect you’. But demonstrations and the whole ‘Nazi’ image were not in keeping with Pierce’s outlook and personality, and so he declined to join. In the short term, this hobbled his Movement career. But the absence of news photographs showing Pierce parading in a ‘Nazi’ uniform meant that doors would be open to him in the years ahead that would not have been open had such photos existed.
Instead, he helped Rockwell in other ways, working on various low-key projects and advising him. In 1966, at his initiative and largely at his own expense, Pierce launched a theoretical journal for the ANP and its international affiliate, the World Union of National Socialists. It was entitled National Socialist World. The journal provided a platform for serious NS exposition on a high intellectual level. It gave a certain heft and gravitas to Rockwell’s movement that it had previously lacked. NS World included both translations of writings from the Third Reich era, and new, post-War material. Among the authors who wrote for it were, in addition to Rockwell himself, British NS leader Colin Jordan, Matt Koehl, Bruno Luedtke (a former Hitler Youth officer and NSDAP member) and Indo-European NS philosopher Savitri Devi. Pierce provided an editorial for each issue.
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Editor’s note: This was the right path to go but, alas, Pierce stopped publishing National Socialist World the next year after the assassination of Rockwell.
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Development of NS theory under Rockwell
In addition to being a man of action, Rockwell was a serious thinker. During his university days, he had majored in philosophy. Rockwell studied Mein Kampf and other original NS materials. He realized that Hitler’s teachings regarding, Nature, Race, Society, Marxism and the Jews were fundamentally correct. At the same time, however, he saw that Hitler’s defeat in 1945 had changed the world forever. The geo-political realities that were obtained before the War had been permanently altered. Before the War, the perception in NS and related circles was that each Aryan nation was menaced internally by Jewish Capitalism, and externally by Soviet-based Jewish-Bolshevism. Accordingly, it was up to each separate Aryan folk or nation to defend itself, or, as Hitler put it, to ‘devise its form of national resurrection’.
In the post-1945 dispensation, Rockwell realized, this had changed. It was not the individual Aryan countries that were threatened, but rather the Aryan race as a whole that was under attack – and in danger of complete extinction. It was only logical, he reasoned, that a race-wide threat required a race-wide response. So, for Rockwell, the political focus was on race, with national concerns being secondary, whereas, in Hitler’s conception, the good of the nation came first.
Rockwell’s almost-exclusive focus on Race as the primary issue had the side effect of marginalizing almost all other NS concerns, especially in the social and economic spheres. The party program made good faith nods at economic theory and social reform, but such issues were never fleshed out, nor were they the focus of party outreach. Exacerbating this neglect was the fact that the ANP was considered – and considered itself – as a far-right organization. Among the right, efforts at social reform and economic justice were considered the purview of the left. The people Rockwell targeted and whom he attracted had little or no concern with such issues.
Another problem was that the confrontational racial nature of ANP outreach made it impossible on a practical level to build bridges to Black nationalists and other non-Whites who shared the National Socialist position on racial separation. Much has been written on Rockwell’s effort to forge a link with the Nation of Islam and other Black separatists, but in fact, nothing concrete was ever achieved on this front, although theoretically trans-racial alliances between National Socialists and non-Whites are certainly possible.
World Union of National Socialists
A practical manifestation of Rockwell’s promotion of National Socialism as an international pan-Aryan movement was the World Union of National Socialists. As previously noted, the concept of a ‘World Union’ was already present in his thinking when he founded his party in 1959 under the name ‘World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists’. But for the first three years of the ANP such a formation was only an idea, not a political reality.
Rockwell’s ANP, however, inspired other National Socialists throughout the world to form similar parties. One of these was the National Socialist Movement, founded in Great Britain by Colin Jordan in April of 1962. In August of that year, Jordan and the NSM hosted a camp in the Cotswold region of England. It was attended by National Socialists from across the globe, including Rockwell.
Among those who participated, besides Rockwell and Jordan, were Bruno Luedtke from Germany, Savitri Devi, John Tyndall and Roland Kerr-Ritchie as well as delegates from Austria, Belgium and France. By the end of the gathering, the assembled comrades had agreed on a preliminary set of guidelines for the ‘World Union of National Socialists’ (Rockwell agreed to drop the term ‘Free Enterprise’ under pressure from the European comrades). The guidelines were known as the ‘Cotswold Agreements’. They named Colin Jordan as the International Leader, Rockwell as the Deputy International Leader, Karl Allen of the ANP as International Secretary, and John Tyndall of the NSM as Assistant International Secretary. The document stated that it was provisional, contingent on its ratification by a ‘World Nazi Congress’ scheduled for the next year.
The 1963 congress never took place. Jordan was imprisoned for political offences shortly after the gathering, and Rockwell became the International Leader. When Karl Allen left the ANP in 1964 after a failed mutiny, Matt Koehl become the International Secretary. The ‘provisional’ declaration, in effect, was made permanent.
The World Union provided for international strategic cooperation for its affiliated organizations (limited to one for each country), as well as participation by individual National Socialists in countries without a formal WUNS affiliate. Eventually, Jordan reorganized the NSM as the British Movement and withdrew from the World Union.
WUNS was never as effective in coordinating international NS operations as Rockwell had hoped. Eventually, after his death, it withered away until it was only a letterhead or symbolic organization. But it was important, nonetheless, for it established National Socialism in practice as a pan-Aryan internationalist movement, and not a movement embodying a racialist version of 19th-century petty nationalism.
The precedent of mass action in Chicago
Another precedent established by Rockwell was that of National Socialism as a mass movement for American Whites. In the summer of 1966, the west side of Chicago was rocked by a series of riots by working-class White ethnics who were opposed to the forced integration of their neighbourhoods. Spearheading the effort to break up all-White neighbourhoods was a young Jesse Jackson, who was soon joined by Martin Luther King.
The Whites felt abandoned by the politicians whom they had elected, and by the police, who were protecting Black ‘civil rights’ marchers invading their territory. The churches likewise sided with the Negroes. The media put out a steady stream of anti-White, pro-Black propaganda. Unsurprisingly, Chicago’s powerful Jewish community sided against the Whites. Special hatred was reserved by the White workers for the real estate agents – most of whom were Jews – who were trying through every means, openly and underhanded alike, to sell homes to Blacks in all-White neighbours. Everyone was against them. Who would stand up for the White Man?
The ANP maintained a small storefront office in the White neighbourhood of Gage Park, which had a large population of Italian origin. To the south of Gage Park was the neighbourhood of Marquette Park, which had a large population of Lithuanians and other Baltic peoples. Rockwell instructed his men to offer whatever aid they could to the embattled Whites. What began as noisy White counter-protests turned into violent White riots. A new Rockwell innovation, signs bearing the Swastika and the words ‘White Power’ were quickly adopted by the angry Whites as their emblem.
On August 21, Rockwell and his troopers (dressed in civilian clothes) held a mass rally in Marquette Park. Thousands of Whites cheered Rockwell’s call for White unity and White power under the Swastika. Upon the completion of his speech, Rockwell walked through the crowd, which hailed him as a conquering hero showered him with cash donations.
The enemies of the White workers – city hall, the police, the media, the clergy, the Black agitators, and above all the Jews – were shocked by the enthusiastic embrace of Rockwell by the angry Whites. Within days, King and his cohorts had wrapped up a hasty ‘desegregation’ agreement with the politicians and called off all further marches and other provocations. Indeed, King was so embarrassed that he left Chicago, never to return.
On September 10, Rockwell led a ‘White People’s March’ through White neighbourhoods and into the Black ghetto. Some 300 local citizens joined in. More would have participated but were turned back by police cordons. The authorities were once again flabbergasted by grassroots support for Rockwell and the ANP.
Within a year Rockwell was dead, and his vision of building a powerful base of support for the Movement in the areas in which he had had success was never fulfilled. But he had set the precedent for mass action. He had proved that ordinary American Whites will accept National Socialism and NS leadership when the conditions are right.
Rockwell’s final year and the transition to ‘Phase Two’
In the months immediately following the events in Chicago, Rockwell reviewed the state of his party and the progress that it had made. He concluded that it was time to begin to put aside the Phase One activities and concentrate on building a movement with a more serious image and focus. Effective January 1, 1967, he renamed the American Nazi Party as the National Socialist White People’s Party and began to institute other changes. The salutation ‘Sieg Heil!’ was replaced by ‘White Power!’, while ‘Heil Hitler!’ was to be used only within the party and never in public. New literature was written and designed, and older items that had been deliberately scandalous were phased out.
In June, a national leadership conference was held at the party’s national headquarters in Arlington, to brief local leaders from across the country on the movement’s new focus. A new monthly tabloid, entitled White Power: The Newspaper of White Revolution appeared in August, and Rockwell worked feverishly to complete a new book, also entitled White Power.
The specific goal of the new outreach was to recruit and build a base of support among the White middle class, as well as among White service personnel and police officers. Small businessmen were to be specially targeted.
It was at this point that Rockwell was assassinated. His deputy Matt Koehl took over leadership, and with the help of other party old fighters, he attempted to proceed with the changes Rockwell had outlined. How Koehl fared in this endeavour will be discussed in the next instalment of this series. But for now, let us note that in the minds of many people, Rockwell’s reputation, unfortunately, remains linked to the first phase of his program, and not to the next phase, which he was never able to fully implement.
Black Friday: August 25, 1967
On the afternoon of June 28, Rockwell and a supporter were returning to the headquarters, when they found the entranceway blocked by a pile of debris. As the makeshift barricade was being cleared, two shots rang out from the woods to Rockwell’s left. With characteristic courage, Rockwell, who was unarmed, charged his attackers. He gave chase for a quarter mile or so until the two men jumped in a vehicle and drove off. A report was filed with the Arlington County police. A few weeks later, Rockwell applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon – and was turned down. He privately told his colleagues that from behind one of the men resembled John Patler, a former ANP officer whom he had recently expelled from the party for dereliction of duty and spreading dissension within the ranks.
Two months later, Rockwell was shot dead from an ambush at a local shopping centre. A suspect matching Patler’s description was seen running from the site of the crime, and indeed, Patler was subsequently arrested while waiting at a bus stop some distance away. In 1968, Patler was convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to twenty years in prison of which he served seven years. As of this writing, he is still alive and living in New York City.
It was a tragic but foreseeable end to Rockwell’s life. As early as 1962, he had predicted his assassination, writing, ‘I knew that I would not live to see the victory which I would make possible, but I would not die before I had made that victory certain’.
The Carto connection
So far, we have limited the discussion of American National Socialism in the 1960s to Rockwell and his party. As we previously explained, Rockwell’s presence during that period loomed so large that it overshadowed all other groups and efforts to spread the NS message. But no account of the Movement in the Sixties would be complete without mentioning Rockwell’s more mainstream counterpart: Willis Carto. While Rockwell was the face of the hardcore Hitlerian movement, Carto attempted to build support for it in a less-controversial manner.
Like Rockwell, Carto was a World War II veteran who was unhappy with the course that the country had taken in the postwar period. He felt that the government had been infiltrated with communists, and that, further, it was the Jews who were behind communism. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Carto launched a series of publications and business ventures designed to awaken American Whites to the danger that threatened the republic. But unlike Rockwell, Carto resolved to work within the system, and in particular, within the extreme right-wing of the Republican party.
Beginning in 1960, Carto and Rockwell would meet privately to coordinate their efforts. Carto began by publishing an article by Rockwell explaining the ANP and its approach in his publication Right! For this, he was roundly condemned by respectable conservatives who felt that support for Rockwell was beyond the pale of acceptance – whether Rockwell was right or not. Carto brushed off these criticisms by his more-timid colleagues.
Later Carto started a publishing company called Noontide Press (which still exists today). While not openly advocating National Socialism, Noontide produced books and other publications on race and revisionist history that espoused an essentially NS viewpoint. One of these books was a mass-market edition of Imperium: The Politics of Philosophy and History by Francis Parker Yockey. Yockey was a Fascist rather than a National Socialist, but he dedicated his tome to Adolf Hitler, whom he called ‘the Hero of the Second World War’. Carto also lobbied congress, and in other ways spread a message fundamentally the same as Rockwell’s to a mainstream audience.
Other groups
The National States Rights Party founded two years before the ANP was the largest pro-NS group in the country during the Sixties. Although based in the south, it had members and units throughout the US. In 1960, Rockwell was working as hard as he could to stay out of jail and bring in enough money to keep the lights turned on at his headquarters. That same year, the NSRP contested the presidential election, fielding former Arkansas Governor Orville Farbus for president and retired admiral John Crommelin for vice president. The NSRP ticket was on the ballot in five states and won a total of 300,000 votes.
At its height, the NSRP tabloid, The Thunderbolt: The Whiteman’s Viewpoint, had about 25,000 subscribers. Rockwell’s mailing list, in contrast, topped off at about 3,000. And yet, it was Rockwell who had the wider and more lasting impact for the decades.
The debate still rages today whether open advocacy of National Socialism or a slightly modified ‘Americanized’ approach is most effective. Certainly, in day-to-day operations, a concealed approach offers immediate advantages. But the evidence provided by Rockwell’s example suggests that over the long run, an honest, above-board strategy yields the greatest results.
James Madole’s National Renaissance Party was also active throughout the Sixties. However, it became, to a degree, a pale imitation of the ANP. Despite using the thunderbolt instead of the Swastika, and despite using a grey shirt instead of a brown shirt for its activist arm, it never had either the appeal or the success which Rockwell enjoyed.
A splinter of the ANP, called the White Party of America popped up in the middle of the decade. It was led by Karl Allen, former deputy commander of the ANP. The White Party, as it was commonly known, attempted to ape Rockwell’s policies and tactics, but without using the Swastika or referencing Adolf Hitler or National Socialism. It attracted activist types who were put off by Rockwell’s ‘Nazi’ image. In terms of membership, it quickly overtook the ANP. But like the NRP, it never had the impact or influence that Rockwell had.
Rockwell invited Allen and the White Party leadership to the June NSWPP conference mentioned previously. He hoped to merge the two groups or at least ally with them. However, as the conference began, Allen picked a quarrel with Rockwell, and the White Party delegation stormed out. Later, after it was revealed that Allen’s employer was an official of a Jewish dirty-tricks outfit, the White Party disbanded. Some suspect that it was a false flag operation all along, designed to draw manpower and economic support from people who would have otherwise supported Rockwell.
Summing up the Sixties
For American National Socialism, the 1960s was a time for both renewal and experimentation. When the Second World War ended in 1945, it was widely assumed that National Socialism was dead and gone forever, especially in the US, where it had never been that strong, to begin with. But through the courage, genius and Herculean effort of one man, National Socialism was reborn. Although the Rockwell movement did not amount to much in terms of numbers during his lifetime, Rockwell laid the groundwork for the continued existence and growth of his Cause into the future. It was then up to those who took up the mantle of his leadership to determine whether the potential that Rockwell had uncovered would be realized or not.