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Tag: Adolf Hitler

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Lightning and the Sun (book)

The Lightning

and the Sun, 8

There are, in the records of mankind, few things as beautiful as the early history of the National Socialist Movement.

The tremendous will-power, kindled through despair, out of which the latter had sprung, was, as I just said, nothing less than the divine Will to Perfection in its last (or one before last) effort to lead the best up-stream against the fated current of Time and to save through them whatever is yet worth saving in this doomed Creation. The material and moral condition under which the Movement took shape—the miserable, smoky room[1] in which six unknown German workmen sat and discussed with the superman who was soon to guide them, and millions of others, to the reconquest of national greatness these men’s utter poverty, their utter insignificance in the eye of the wide world and specially of those well-spoken of, comfortable politicians and party-leaders whom they were, within few years, to thrust into oblivion; their burning faith and which is more, the fact that their Leader—Adolf Hitler—was in possession of cosmic truth—are highly symbolical. All life begins in darkness. All everlasting things are born in silence and away from the lime-light of publicity; in faith and in truth. And whatever is not born in such a manner, does not last. However noisy and wide-spread be its success, it will not stand the test of time and that of persecution, let alone the terrible impact of the storm in which a Time-cycle comes to its end.

The very early growth of National Socialism as an active, incarnate Idea, was like the growth of a corn-seed within the snow-bound earth; it was like the slow rise of molten rock within the depth of a slumbering volcano: unnoticed and irresistible. It was the outcome of a natural Force, in fact, of the oldest and mightiest of all natural Forces: of Life’s inherent instinct of self-preservation in presence of the Powers of death—the Force that links every Time-cycle to the following one, over almost total destruction. Started in 1919, officially founded in early 1920, it owes that divine Force its impulse which nothing,—not even the disaster of 1945—was able to break.

Throughout the wide world, governments representing sheer finance interests looked with satisfaction upon their latest handiwork: the Versailles peace-treaty, up till then the most infamous official document in history, intended to enslave Germany for all times. And the sheep followed their shepherds. And the parrots repeated the nonsense—and lies—which they had been taught: ‘This Treaty seals the victory of those who fought this war in order to put an end to all wars!’—while frenzied crowds demonstrated in the streets of the French towns howling ‘Germany must pay!’ Never had there been so many speeches, so many sermons, so many articles and books—such a ‘hullabaloo’—about ‘peace.’ And never had victors yet behaved with such calculated barbarity.

In the inconspicuous little room at the back of a café in Munich, however, Adolf Hitler—the Man ‘against Time,’—spoke to the tiny group of German workmen; to the rough men of pure blood and solid virtues, sons of the people among which he—He, the One Who comes back,—had chosen (this time) to be born. And his words were—and his whole life was—the answer to the lies of this advanced Dark Age. They cannot have been much different from those one reads in Mein Kampf although these were written five years later. He said:

For me, as for every true National Socialist, there is only one doctrine: people and fatherland.

We have to fight to secure the existence and expansion of our race and of our people; to enable them to nourish their children and to preserve the purity of their blood; to secure the freedom of our Fatherland, so that our people may be in the position to fulfil the mission appointed to them by the Creator of the Universe.[2]

He said:

Whoever speaks of a mission of the German people on this earth must know that such a mission can only lie in the formation of a State which holds it to be its highest task to preserve and to promote the noblest of all elements which have, in our people, nay, in the whole of mankind, remained unspoilt.[3]

He said:

The German Reich should, as a State, comprise all Germans, and set itself the task not merely to gather and preserve the most valuable original racial elements in that people, but to raise them slowly and surely to a ruling position.[4]

He said:

Men do not go to ruin through lost wars, but through the loss of that power of resistance that lies in pure blood alone.[5]

He was aware of the downfall of the whole of mankind—including Germany—in the present Age. ‘Unfortunately,’ said he, ‘our German people are no longer racially homogeneous.’[6] And aware of the primary cause of downfall: racial mixture, the result of forgetfulness of Nature’s truth. And aware of that truth, expressed in the oldest Book of Aryan Wisdom, the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Out of the corruption of women proceeds the confusion of races; out of the confusion of races, the loss of memory; out of the loss of memory, the loss of understanding; and out of this, all evil.’[7] He was aware of it, not because he had read the Book, (it is doubtful whether he had, at least as early as 1919) but because the impersonal Wisdom of the most ancient Aryans lived in him; because he was He Who has spoken in the Book—the One Who comes back. And he knew that the Wisdom which he preached as the key to earthly salvation ‘corresponds entirely to the original meaning of things’;[8] and that the way he preached—return to that primaeval, cosmic Wisdom in individual and in collective life, in thought and in deed,—was—is—the only way through which the chosen few can survive the last impact of the forces of disintegration and become the founders of the new Age of Truth. And that those chosen few are the best elements of the youngest great Race of our Time-cycle: the Aryan. He knew that too. And while he stressed in his speeches the necessity of freeing Germany, at once, from the immediate consequences of the Versailles Treaty—inflation; unemployment; growing misery,—his ultimate aim remained to raise her to that organised power which, in the light of traditional Wisdom, can only be termed as a ‘State against Time’—nay, the ‘State against Time,’ enabling the best to carry both their privileged biological substance and their unmarred Golden Age ideal through and beyond the last storms of this Dark Age.

He spoke with the compelling eloquence of faith, knowing that he was right—that the endless future of the Universe (not merely of Germany and Europe) would glaringly prove how right he was. He spoke with the wild eloquence of emergency, knowing also that the struggle he was about to start had to take place then or never; that there was not an hour to waste.

And the sombre faces of the hungry, embittered men, who had fought and suffered, and yet lost, gazed at him with that unconditional admiration and confidence that is the essence of worship—the faces of the six, and, soon, of many more; of; hundreds, in ever broader meeting-halls, always too small to contain them; of hundreds of thousands under the open sky.

‘Men do not go to ruin through lost wars…’ The magic words—these, and others, meaning the same,—rang throughout defeated Germany. And the hundreds of thousands no longer felt defeated. They now knew they had been betrayed. And they roared against the traitors and against the dark powers at the back of them—the dark powers that they (the German people) would one day crush. They felt strong; they felt young;—invincible and immortal. They felt what the best among them really were—had been, from the beginning of Aryan history, appointed to become—the masters of an unheard-of future; the proud founders of a new world (Only they did not—yet—know through what a terrible Via dolorosa they actually were to fulfil that staggering destiny). They gathered, more and more numerous, round the Man whose inspired speech quickened in them the highest possibilities of joyous heroism—and made them see old forgotten truths in a glaring new light; whose magic radiance filled them with self-assurance: whose love for them was limitless and gratuitous, like the love of a God. They beheld in him the Leader, the Avenger, the Saviour—the living embodiment of their unvanquished collective Self, which indeed he was. And they followed him blindly. Their love carried him to power; their love, and their hatred for those whom he rightly pointed out to them as the promoters of the humiliation of 1918 and of all the subsequent misery: the Jews, and the servants of Jewry, agents of the Dark Forces by nature or by choice, Germany’s—and the world’s—real enemies.
 

__________

[1] Mein Kampf, p. 240 and following.

[2] Ibid., p. 234.

[3] Ibid., p. 439.

[4] Ibid., p. 439.

[5] Ibid., p. 324.

[6] Ibid., pp. 436-437.

[7] The Bhagavad-Gita, I, verse 41 and following.

[8] Mein Kampf, p. 440.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The Lightning & the Sun by Savitri Devi (Counter-Currents Publishing, 2014, unabridged edition) can be ordered here.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Kalki

Hitler, 49

While Hitler tried to reduce his exposure to petty party disputes in prison, it is striking that he tried to maintain engagement with the wider world, especially potential ideological sympathizers and funders in Italy and the United States. Despite the fact that he allowed Göring to find sanctuary in Italy after the Putsch, Mussolini was careful to keep the Nazis at arm’s length.

That left America. In early January 1924, not long after the start of his incarceration at Landsberg, Hitler penned a letter of accreditation for his envoy Kurt Lüdecke. He asked Lüdecke ‘to promote the interests of the German freedom movement in the United States and especially to collect money for them’.

At the end of January, Lüdecke set off with Winifred and Siegfried Wagner to Detroit. Despite Lüdecke’s invocation of the ‘solidarity of white men’, and his offer to promote the kind of international anti-Semitism demanded by the Dearborn Independent, he was unable to persuade Ford at their meetings to provide any funding for the movement. Lüdecke repeatedly visited Hitler in Landsberg in May and June 1924. In 1924, a National Socialist Ortsgruppe was founded in the German quarter of Chicago, and there also appears to have been some sort of presence in New York City; a year later, Hitler personally thanked one of his activists in America for sending back money for the movement. In general, however, the attempt to reach out to the United States was a failure.

Hitler was under no illusions about the timescale for the national and racial regeneration of Germany. The failure of the coup had cured him of any vanguardism. He was now thinking in terms not of years, or even decades, but of centuries. In late June 1924, he made a public announcement that ‘the re-establishment of the German people is by no means a matter of the acquisition of technical weapons, but rather a question of the regeneration of our character’.

‘Spiritual renewals,’ Hitler continued, ‘require, if they are to be more than just a passing phenomenon, many centuries [emphasis in the original]’ to be ‘successful’. Five months later, Hess recorded that Hitler ‘is under no illusions about the extent to which the “idea” can be implemented by him’. ‘The ripening of ideas, the adapting of reality to the idea and the idea to reality,’ he continued, ‘will probably require many generations.’

Hitler, Hess went on, saw his own role as merely ‘setting up a new marker in the distance’, ‘loosening the soil’ around the existing pole, which ‘represented a major era in the development of mankind’. The task of ‘ripping out’ the pole and advancing it some way towards the goal, by contrast, would be the task ‘of another, a greater man yet to come’. In other words, after the certainty of 1923, Hitler was once again unsure whether he was the messiah himself rather than just John the Baptist, the ‘drummer’ of 19 19-20.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s 2 ¢

According to Vaishnava cosmology, Kalki is destined to appear at the end of the Kali Yuga, the last of the four ages. His arrival will mark the end of the Kali Yuga and herald the beginning of the most virtuous age.

This is most interesting. Post-1945 European National Socialism is best represented by the philosophy of Savitri Devi, who by the end of her books used to invoke the Hindu archetype of Kalki in the sense—translated into Christian metaphors—that Hitler had been a sort of John the Baptist and that the Aryan leader who would really vindicate his people in the darkest hour would use many more ‘lightnings’ than Uncle Adolf had used; that is, he would be an exterminationist (something we could visualise with William Pierce’s novel The Turner Diaries).

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Democracy Quotable quotes Real men

Hitler on democracy

‘This is the expression of an authoritarian state –not of a weak, babbling democracy [like the American one]–, of an authoritarian state where everyone is proud to obey, because he knows: I will likewise be obeyed when I must take command’.

—Speech at Nuremberg, September 14, 1935 (see Savitri’s Memoirs pages 172-177 to fully grasp this point).

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Welfare of animals

AH & Animals

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Art Neanderthalism Welfare of animals

‘Emergency’

I was going to post another Might is Right instalment today but I got to thinking about my recent exchanges with Benjamin in various threads, and I feel I should say a few things.

I sometimes check the number of comments on old threads, back when WDH was hosted for free by WordPress, and I’m surprised that there were threads with dozens of comments. Since I started criticising American white nationalism, calling it deficient compared to German National Socialism, and shifting my paradigm from regarding the Christian problem as infinitely more serious than the Jewish problem, the visitor traffic has collapsed.

This is compounded by the fact that, as an immense admirer of Hitler myself, the German Chancellor’s sensitivity to art and animal welfare is something that simply doesn’t exist on the American racial right.

The immense dilemma I find myself in is that this sort of thing cannot be explained by pure reason, say, by solid race realist articles like the ones Jared Taylor has been publishing for decades. It has more to do with what we might call emergent psychogenics, which I have already discussed in Day of Wrath (a book that is nothing more than a translation of some chapters of my trilogy).

Psychogenic emergency is either felt or not. Or rather: either one belongs to a higher psychoclass, or one doesn’t belong to it. As I said, it is not something that can be demonstrated by pure reason. On seeing a work of art, such as the Lorraine canvas I saw on my last trip to London, the museum visitor either feels the emergent aesthetics compared to the architectural Neanderthalism of the largest city in Europe, or he feels nothing at all. Those 18th-century Englishmen like Henry Hoare who were aesthetically emergent even designed their gardens in imitation of the Italian painter’s architecture. Either you feel art or you don’t.

Incidentally, the bridge in Stourhead’s garden whose image I posted in June in this article was also used by Kubrick in one of the scenes in Barry Lyndon: a film whose images were inspired by canvases of the period like very few films I have seen. (Perhaps the sole exception is 1956’s Lust for Life in which the director used the actual sites in Holland, Belgium and the French countryside where Vincent van Gogh lived.)

The fourteen words have to do with aesthetics, in that the white race is the only truly beautiful race from the point of view of the Gods of Olympus. The other issue is ethics, the four words, Eliminad todo sufrimiento innecesario. Like great art, you either feel the four words or you don’t. Either you are a Neanderthal (Benjamin sent me an email today describing experiments on rabbits that I don’t even want to describe) or you are an overman like Hitler, and Göring who forbade tormenting those animals.

The sad truth is that most American racialists have not reached the psychogenic level of the Führer in terms of ethics and aesthetics, and that those emergent qualities cannot be induced by arguments, criticisms or diatribes like the ones I have used in this blog. Either you start psychogenically emerging as a child or an adolescent (cf. Kubizek’s memoirs of Hitler when they were both teenagers) or you won’t.

Categories
Lightning and the Sun (book) Mein Kampf (book)

The Lightning

and the Sun, 7

Adolf Hitler’s second and even more shattering experience of the horror of the present Age began on the 10th of November 1918, as he stood, half-blind from the effects of poisonous gas, among his wounded comrades in a hospital hall at Pasewalk in Pomerania, and heard from the clergyman the latest news: the ‘November revolution’ and Germany’s capitulation; the tragic end of the first World War.

More than four years before, he had joined the war with enthusiasm, as a volunteer in a Bavarian regiment, not in an Austrian one, clearly showing thereby that he was prepared to die anytime for the German people and ‘for the Reich that embodied them,’[1] though not for ‘the State of the Habsburgs’—that artificial State of many nationalities. For he considered the war in no way as an Austrian concern, but as a struggle of the German people (including, naturally, those of Austria) ‘for their existence’[2]—as a just war. And, he had done his duty thoroughly; faithfully. And although he had, for months already, (especially since the general strike of 1917) been fearing —feeling—that some diabolical traitors’ intrigues were being carried on to rob the German front-soldier of a victory which he well deserved, yet he had not expected such an end, and so suddenly….

The grief, the indignation and temporary despair that took him over as he abruptly acquired ‘the most horrible certitude in his life’[3] are so eloquently described in Mein Kampf that nothing can throw more light upon the future, Führer’s state of mind than an extensive, quotation of his own words:

I could not remain any longer’ (i.e. remain hearing the news). ‘While my eyes once more stared into darkness, I sought my way back to the dormitory, threw myself upon my bed, and buried my burning head under the quilts and pillows.

Since the day I had stood before my mother’s grave, I had not wept. When, in my youth, Destiny had been mercilessly harsh to me, I had faced it with growing defiance. When during the long years of the war, death had taken many a dear comrade and friend of mine from our ranks, it would have seemed to me nearly a sin to complain—for they had died for Germany. And when, in the days of the terrible struggle, the slowly advancing gas had taken me in its grip, and begun to gnaw into my eyes, and when the fear of becoming blind for ever had made me feel, for a second, as though I would weaken, the voice of conscience had thundered to me: ‘Miserable wretch! You feel like weeping, while thousands are faring worse than yourself!’ And I had put up with my lot in silence. But now I could not help weeping. Now I experienced how completely every personal suffering fades away before the misfortune of one’s Fatherland.

So, it had all been in vain! In vain all our sacrifices, and all the hardships we had endured; in vain, hunger and thirst, for months without end; in vain, the hours in which, facing the terror of death, we had yet done our duty; and in vain, the death of two million men! Would not the graves of the hundreds of thousands who had gone forth full of faith in the Fatherland, never to return, break open and release the dumb heroes covered with mud and blood,—release them as revengeful spirits among the people at home, who had treated so disdainfully the highest sacrifice which a man can offer his country? Had they died for that, the soldiers of August and September 1914? Had the regiments of volunteers, in the autumn of the same year, followed for that the elder comrades? Had those boys of seventeen sunk for that into Flanders’ earth? Was that the object of the sacrifice that German mothers had brought the Fatherland when, with a grieving heart, they had sent the boys to their duty, never to see them, again? Had all that happened in order to enable, now, a handful of criminals to set their grip upon the Fatherland?!! … The more I tried, then, to think clearly about the monstrous event, the more my forehead burnt with indignation and shame. What was all the pain I felt in my eyes, compared with this wretchedness?

What followed, were appalling days and still worse nights. I knew that all was lost. Only fools—fools or … liars and criminals—could put their hope in the enemy’s mercy. During those nights, hatred grew in me, hatred against the originators of that deed.

In those days, I also became aware of my destiny. Now, I could only laugh at the thought of my own future, that had caused me such bitter worry only a short time before. Was it not ridiculous to build houses upon such foundations as this? At last it was clear to me that the very thing which I so often already had feared, without ever being able, in my heart, to believe it, had now happened.

Emperor William the Second had been the first German emperor to hold out his hand to the leaders of Marxism, in a gesture of reconciliation, without knowing that rascals have no honour. While they still held the Emperor’s hand in one of theirs, their other one was already seeking for the dagger.

With Jews, no pactising policy is possible, but only that of the hard ‘either—or.’

‘I decided to become a politician.’ [4]

This heart-rending autobiographical account could—historically—be described as: the passage of National Socialism from the stage of an expectant or latent incarnate Idea, to that of an active one.

Surely the incarnate Idea is, when not as old as Adolf Hitler himself, at least as old as his earliest awakening to socio-political, nay, to philosophical consciousness in general. And that took place very early: already in Linz, when not before. Yet, then, and in Vienna, although his interest in social and political problems grew and grew with the daily experience of injustice and misery, and still in Münick, after 1912, the future ruler continued to think of himself primarily as of a future architect. There may have been moments, of course, in which he thought, or at least felt, differently. There were such moments—one such moment at least, and a great one,—already in his life in Linz, if we are to believe Kubizek’s account of it.[5] But the artist’s immediate goal soon reappeared. Horrible as—in Vienna, at any rate—many of them doubtless were, the experiences of daily life were not sufficiently appalling to push it out of sight altogether. Nay, during the war, when more and more aware of the necessity of opposing to the forces of international Socialism a national organisation which would be free from the weaknesses of the Parliamentary system, Hitler had begun to think seriously of becoming politically active, he had merely visualised himself speaking in public ‘while carrying on his profession.’[6] Now, his profession, nay, his art,—for he still was, and could but remain, fundamentally, an artist,—was out of question. Every activity which was not to contribute directly and immediately to free Germany from the consequences and specially from the causes of defeat, was, out of question; and that, not merely because Adolf Hitler loved Germany above all things, but because that more-than-human intuition that classes him among the few great seers of mankind, told him that Germany’s real, deeper interest was—is, absolutely,—the real interest of Creation;—the ‘interest of the Universe,’ again to quote the immortal words of the Bhagavad-Gita. (And it is not an accident,—not a mere coincidence,—that I, a non-German Aryan intimately connected with England, Greece and India, should stress this fact. It is a sign; a symbol; the first expression of the homage of worldwide Aryandom to the latest Man ‘against Time’ and to the truly chosen Nation).

Out of the abyss of powerless despair—from that bed of, suffering upon which the nameless corporal Adolf Hitler lay weeping over Germany’s fate while his blinded eyes burned in their sockets, like red-hot embers; out of his appalling certitude that ‘all was lost,’ that ‘all had been in vain’—rose the defiant Will to freedom and Will to power of an invincible people and, beyond that, and greater than that, the perennial cosmic Will to Perfection in all its majesty; the will of the German soldier who had fought in Flanders and—identical to it; expressing itself through it,—the impesonal and irresistible Will of the eternal Warrior and Seer above Time and ‘against Time’; the Will of Him Who comes back age after age, ‘when all is lost,’ ‘when evil rules supreme,’ to re-establish on earth the reign of Righteousness.

From then onwards, the age-old Struggle for Truth—the Struggle ‘against Time’—was, in the West, to enter a new phase. It was to identify itself with the political struggle to free Germany from the bondage imposed upon her by the victors of 1918, no less than with the more-than-political one against the causes of physical and moral decay that were—and still are—threatening the existence of the natural aristocracy of the Aryan race. And the National Socialist German Labourers’ Party—the famous N.S.D.A.P., which Adolf Hitler soon evolved out of the tiny group of idealists (seven, including himself) originally called Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, which he joined in 1919—was to be the one agent of the everlasting Force of Light and Life amidst the growing darkness of the Dark Age. I say: the one; for, contrarily to all other so-called movements of regeneration, religious and secular, this political and yet infinitely more than political Movement, attacked the very root of historical decay as such: biological decay, consequence of sin against the primary natural Commandant of blood purity; in other words (from the standpoint of original Perfection), sickness; tangible, physical untruth and that moral untruth (that false conception of ‘man’) which stands to the back of it.
 

________________

[1] Mein Kampf, p. 179.

[2] Ibid., p. 178.

[3] Ibid., p. 222.

[4] Ibid., pp. 223, 224-225.

[5] Kubizek, pp. 140 and following.

[6] Mein Kampf, p. 192.

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Mein Kampf (book)

Hitler, 48

Chapter 5

Anglo-American power and German impotence

 
The main reason why Hitler withdrew from party management was his plan to write a ‘large book’, which he stated clearly in the declaration announcing his decision. This project began as a quasi-legal defence of his actions for the court. It soon developed into the idea of producing, as Hitler told Siegfried Wagner in early May 1924, a ‘comprehensive settlement of accounts with those gentlemen who cheered on 9 November’, in other words Kahr, Lossow and Seisser. No doubt hopeful of signing a sensational book with high sales, various publishers offered their services to Hitler, either in person or by letter. In time, however, the emphasis of the work changed again, probably in part thanks to some sort of explicit or implicit bargain with the Bavarian state to let sleeping dogs lie in return for a mild sentence. There were also positive reasons, however, for the new approach. Hitler wanted to use the relative peace of Landsberg to write a much broader manifesto elaborating the principles of National Socialism, charting a path to power for the movement and showing how Germany could regain her independence and great power status. The first volume of Mein Kampf, most of which was written or compiled in Landsberg, seems to have been largely a solo effort, with relatively little input from others. Julius Schaub, another inmate who later became his personal adjutant, recalled that Hitler wrote Mein Kampf ‘alone and without direct input from anyone’, not even Hess, who had joined him in Landsberg. Hitler typed the book himself, reading out or summarizing large sections to his fellow prisoners, who constituted an appreciative or at any rate a captive audience. Sometimes, he was moved to tears by his own words.

Incarceration gave Hitler a chance to read more widely and gather his thoughts. One of his main preoccupations in Landsberg was the United States, which he was corning to regard as the model state and society, perhaps even more so than the British Empire. ‘He ‘devoured’ the memoirs of a returned German emigrant to the United States. ‘One should take America as a model,’ he proclaimed. Hess wrote that Hitler was captivated by Henry Ford’s methods of production which made automobiles available to the ‘broad mass’ of the people. This appears to have been the genesis of the Volkswagen. Hitler envisaged that the automobile would further serve as ‘the small man’s means of transport into nature—as in America’. He also planned to apply methods of mass production to housing, and experimented with designs for a Volkshaus for families with three to five children which would have five rooms and a bathroom with a garage in large terraced settlements. He was equally determined not be outdone in the construction of ‘skyscrapers’, and looked forward to the consternation of the ‘Deutsch-Völkisch’ elements by putting the party headquarters into such an edifice. Quite apart from showing that Hitler had an interest in vernacular architecture, and not just in monumental public buildings, these plans prove that he was thinking of elevating the condition of the German working class through American­ style suburban and metropolitan modernity. This was the model of an ideal society against which he wrote Mein Kampf.

Modernity was not an end in itself, but a means by which the German people, especially the German working class and German women, could be mobilized in support of the project of national revival. Hitler exalted technological development—aeroplanes, typewriters, telephones and suspension bridges, and even domestic appliances. These would free German women from drudgery and enable them to be better wives producing more children. ‘How little our poor women benefit from progress,’ he lamented, ‘there is so much one can do to make [a woman’s life] easier with the help of technology! But most people still think today that a woman is only a good housewife if she is constantly dirty and working from early until late.’ ‘And then,’ Hitler continued, ‘one is surprised when the woman is not intellectual enough for the man, when he cannot find stimulation and recuperation.’ Worse still, he went on, this was ‘bad for the race’ because it was ‘obvious that his overtired wife will not have as healthy children as one who is well rested, can read good books and so on’. The link between what Hitler would later call the racial ‘elevation’ of Germany, technological progress and maintaining the standard of living is already evident here.

Part and parcel of this programme of racial improvement was Hitler’s support for what we would today call ‘alternative’ technology. ‘Every farm,’ he demanded, ‘which does not possess any alternative source of energy’ should set up a ‘wind motor with dynamo and rechargeable batteries’. This might not be possible in the current economic climate, Hitler continued., but it would be a viable long-term investment. He rejected the idea that technological change took the romance out of farming. ‘I couldn’t care less about a romanticism,’ he exclaimed, ‘which puts people behind frosted windows in the twilight, [and] which lets women age prematurely through hard work’. Hitler therefore sneered at the city folk who went into the country for a day, enthused about the scenery and then returned to their modem and efficient homes in the city. Hitler claimed to support ‘the preservation of nature’, but in his view it should take the form of national parks in the mountains. ‘Here too,’ Hitler concluded, ‘the Americans have made the right choice with their Yellowstone Park.’

In Landsberg, Hitler did not abate his ferocious hostility to international finance capitalism. He did, however, qualify some of his earlier ideas about ‘national’ economies. Significantly, he rejected the demands of the German automobile manufacturers to be protected against competition from Henry Ford through higher tariff barriers. ‘Our industry needs to exert itself and achieve the same performance,’ Hitler remarked. Once again, the United States was the explicit model.

Hitler was also taking on board the concept of Lebensraum. This was one of the key ideas of Hess’s teacher and patron Karl Haushofer, the doyen of German Geopolitik. He visited Hess in prison, bringing him copies of Clausewitz and Friedrich Ratzel’s ‘Political Geography’, one of the seminal geopolitical texts. While there is no hard evidence that Haushofer met Hitler on those occasions it is highly likely he did so, or at any rate that his ideas found their way to him. In mid July, there was a debate about Lebensraum at Landsberg, which began with some good-natured joshing in the garden and ended with Hitler’s ‘marvelling’ inner circle being provided with a lengthy definition of the term by Hess. Its essence was simple: every people required a certain ‘living space’ to feed and accommodate its growing population. The idea seemed to provide the answer to the main challenge facing the Reich, which was the emigration of its demographic surplus to the United States. This was part of an important shift in Hitler’s thinking, away from a potential Russo­ German alliance and the prevention of emigration through the restitution of German colonies, towards the capture of Lebensraum in the east, contiguous to an expanded German Reich. It had less to do with hatred of Bolshevism and eastern European Jewry, and more to do with the need to prepare the Reich for a confrontation or equal coexistence with an Anglo-America whose dynamism mesmerized Hitler more than ever.

Categories
Kali Yuga Lightning and the Sun (book)

The Lightning

and the Sun, 6

Editor's Note: Bold emphasis is mine.

As I have previously stated, Adolf Hitler was from early adolescence, and probably from childhood, conscious of the shocking disparity that exists between ‘real life’—life under Dark Age conditions—as it drew his attention through thousand and one details, and his own conception of earthly perfection, a living reflexion of which he sought in the world of the old Germanic Sagas (transfigured, for him, in Wagner’s musical dramas) and—Kubizek tells us,—in the stately blonde young maiden to whom he never spoke, but whom he idealised from a distance as the resplendent embodiment of perfect German womanhood.[1] Instances of human misery, nay—and the importance of this can never be sufficiently stressed— instances of the age-old exploitation of animals by man,[2] which another person would have deplored, but judged unavoidable, or looked upon as trifling, or not noticed at all, provided him with an opportunity to feel indignant and to crave for entirely new conditions of life. But it is during the years of grinding poverty and complete moral solitude, which he spent in Vienna as a young man, that the experience of the wretchedness and ugliness of this present Age imposed itself upon him for the first time in all its tragic horror. He has described it in immortal words.[3] And, more than the daily contact with material misery itself (with material misery which he, by the way, not merely beheld, but actually shared), the sight of the degrading effects of that misery upon his people and upon their young children was unbearable to him.

Two facts should, at that stage of Adolf Hitler’s life, retain the attention of whoever wishes to understand him and the Movement he was to start ten years later, obviously as a political Movement for the assertion of Germany’s rights, in reality, also as the moral and metaphysical basis of a new civilisation: first, the aloofness in which he lived, amidst the surrounding misery and degradation; and then, the thoroughness and detachment with which he studied the latter, traced its deep causes under the immediate, superficial ones, and became, through that clear knowledge, more and more aware of his own predestined role in this Age of Gloom. ‘One cannot ‘study’ the social question from above,’ writes he, in Mein Kampf.[4] One has, one’s self, to experience the same perpetual insecurity of life, to be acquainted with the same pangs of hunger, to dwell in the same over-crowded, dirty, noisy surroundings as the disinherited classes, in one word, to live the wretchedness that gnaws into them and degrades them, in order to know what social misery means. The future German Führer has lived it, and suffered from it, personally, day after day, for months, for years, without it ever degrading or even changing him. He preferred to ‘exist’ on hunger rations, rather than sacrifice his independence or sell more than it was absolutely necessary of the precious time he needed to study both books and men and to think. And when he had earned a little money, he preferred to buy himself a seat in the theatre—two or three hours’ holiday in the beautiful world of the old Sagas, to the accompaniment of Wagner’s solemn music, away, far away from the daily dreary wretchedness that seemed to be his lot for ever,—rather than treat himself to a substantial meal.[5] He refused publicity—and money—rather than to allow a story which he had written to he printed by a Jew.[6] Nobody can understand him save a true artist who is, at the same time, a true revolutionary: a person of one dream and one aim, like himself. But how well every such a one—every creator and fighter of his type, when surely not of his magnitude, i.e. every person ‘against Time’—does understand him!

There is more. Not only did he live in uncompromising faithfulness to his ideals, inaccessible to the lure of material comfort and social advantages, but he shared none of the weaknesses of average mankind, not to mention the vices of that underworld into which fate had pushed him or, by the way, those of the so-called ‘better classes’ of this fallen humanity. He rigourously abstained from alcohol and tobacco; and even when, occasionally, he could afford a diet other than his usual bread and milk, he ate pastry and fruits, not meat. His deeper instinct inclined him naturally towards that sort of food which people, in whose life an immemorial Tradition still plays a great part, call ‘pure.’[7] And the dictates of serious reflexion merely confirmed in him those of deeper, healthy instinct. Adolf Hitler was, in course of life, to become a more and more convinced vegetarian; and though disaster robbed him of the opportunity of attempting ‘after the war,’ to give his views, gradually, the force of law, he remains, to my knowledge, the only ruler in the West who, both on hygienic and moral (and aesthetic) grounds, ever earnestly considered the possibility of suppressing meat-eating, and of abolishing thereby the standing horror of the slaughterhouses. This is reported by Dr. Goebbels in his ‘Diaries,’[8] and brilliantly confirmed by numerous statements ascribed to the Führer himself in the ‘Dinner-time talks,’ also printed after 1945 by the bitterest enemies of National Socialism, certainly not with the intention of exalting him.

As a young man, and nay, a very attractive one, Adolf Hitler withstood the manifold temptations of the corrupt metropolis—ignored the solicitations of women, rejected with disgust those of men, and kept the sacred ‘flame of Life’ (to use the word Kubizek quotes) pure and strong and constantly under control within himself. He did so without the slightest intention of ‘mortifying the flesh’; without the slightest desire of ‘acquiring merit’ for the salvation of his soul; simply because he respected that energy given to man for a higher purpose, and looked upon every wanton waste of it as a sin against the Race at the same time as a profanation of the divinity of Life. The ‘flame of life,’ felt he, was to be dedicated to the selfless service of the Race, visible Vehicle of Life eternal. It was to be used, like man’s whole physical and moral energy, ‘in the spirit of the Creator,’ i.e., in view of the attainment of perfection on earth. The entire National Socialist teaching concerning sex and sexual relations, with its well-known stress upon absolute health and racial purity, as laid down in Mein Kampf,’[9] has its origin and its basis in that truly religious (although anything but ‘other-worldly’) attitude; in that standpoint of the ‘Man against Time’ seeking, in defiance of the corruption of the Dark Age, to re-establish, here and now, the biological—i.e. fundamental—conditions of the earthly paradise; preparing the privileged, natural élite of mankind for the part it has to play in the formation of the god-like Race of the new earth, that will thrive in peace after this Dark Age has come to an end.

And all Adolf Hitler’s positive measures in view of the physical and moral protection of his predestined people, natural leaders of Aryan man, after he came to power: his admirable laws for the welfare of mother and child; for the creation of ideal living conditions for workmen’s families; for the education of a healthy, self-confident and self-reliant, proud and beautiful youth; and his famous ‘Nüremberg Laws,’ forwarding the growth in Germany of a pure-blooded Germanic race (forbidding sexual relations with Jews and, in fact, with non-Aryans of any description), have no other origin and no other meaning. Their aim—nay, the practical aim of National Socialism as such—was and remains not merely to improve the material lot of the German labourers (however important a part this immediate aim doubtless played in the success of the Hitler Movement in Germany, after the first World War); not merely to make the new State, comprising all people of Germanic blood—that ‘holy Reich of all Germans’[10] of which Adolf Hitler already spoke in his adolescent’s conversations with August Kubizek—a strong and prosperous State, but to regenerate the German people—the most conscious among the Aryans of the West—radically, and to organise them, in all walks of life, so as to create out of them the only dam capable of withstanding and thrusting back the threatening tide of inferior humanity, whose rise is, in this as in every Time-cycle, the increasingly tragic sign of an advanced stage of the Dark Age; capable of thrusting it back and of carrying, beyond its defeat, (and its destruction, at the very end of the Age of Gloom) the treasure of god-like life into the glory of the new Beginning.

As I said before, it is difficult to state how far Adolf Hitler could have explicitly given expression to this point of view. It was, nevertheless, in reality, his point of view. In particular, he was and remained all his life vividly aware of the compelling necessity of preserving, nay, of forwarding, at any cost the racial aristocracy of mankind—the best elements of the Aryan race,—if this planet is not, after an appalling period of chaos, (after the end of the present Time-cycle) ‘to go its way, void of human beings, through aetherial space, as it did millions of years ago.’1 Standing alone, personally untouched by Dark Age conditions at their worse, although deeply and painfully acquainted with them, he observed their effects upon the people in whom his unfailing intuition forced him to recognise, in spite of all, the predestined biological substance of an infinitely better mankind: the ones who are not yet, but who (to quote Nietzsche’s words) are ‘becoming,’ or at least are capable of becoming supermen: his own German people. And, with serenity and with realism, he sought the causes of physical and moral wretchedness; the many causes: selfishness of the owning classes; indifference or cowardice of men in power; the grip of international high finance upon national economy; the influence of Jewry upon the national body and soul, etc.; etc., but under those many causes, the one cause: the rule of false values; the exaltation of untruth, which is synonymous of sickness; in all domains, rebellion against the spirit of the divine Order of Nature. That is what he had come to fight, so that the ‘reign of Righteousnes’ be re-established.

__________

 

[1] Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, p. 76 and following.

[2] Ibid., p. 61.

[3] Mein Kampf, pp. 23; p. 32 and following.

[4] Ibid., p. 26.

[5] Kubizek, p. 37.

[6] Ibid., pp. 298-299.

[7] In Sanskrit: sattwik.

[8] See The Goebbels Diaries, entry of the 26th April, 1942.

[9] Mein Kampf, p. 444-446.

[10] Kubizek, p. 109; Mein Kampf, p. 439.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 47

In late February 1924, Hitler was brought to stand trial before the Volksgericht in Munich in the old Infantry School on the Blutenburgstrasse. He was allowed to appear in a suit rather than prison clothes and sporting his Iron Cross. Security was strict, and the press interest, including from abroad, was intense. Hitler would no doubt have been pleased to know that ‘one heard particularly many English voices’. The Reich government had wanted the trial to be held in Leipzig, but the authorities in Munich were determined to keep it local, almost certainly because they feared what might otherwise emerge about their complicity in the various plots. Berlin gave way in the context of a broader rapprochement with Bavaria. In mid February 1924, about a week before the trial began, the Bavarian Reichswehr submitted once again to command from Berlin, thus reversing Kahr and Lossow’s position in November 1923; Kahr resigned.

Hitler famously used the courtroom as a platform from which to expound his world view… The trial lasted just over a month, from 26 February to 27 March 1924… He did not deny the substance of the charges, but argued that he had acted at all times in the greater interest of Germany… Sometimes Kahr appeared so overwhelmed that his voice dropped to a whisper as the courtroom audience strained to hear him. The rampant Hitler, by contrast, was repeatedly told to lower his voice by the trial judge.

Hitler’s final speech was a triumphant reiteration of his beliefs and sense of mission. If he was a traitor, then so were Bismarck, Atatürk and Mussolini, whose treason had been ratified by success. Hitler decried that there was ‘self­ determination for every Negro tribe’, but that ‘Germany did not belong to the Negro tribes but stood under them’. The root of the German predicament, he continued, lay in Germany’s exposed geopolitical position in Europe. ‘The German people’, Hitler argued, ‘has perhaps the worst location of all nations in military-political terms. It is geographically extraordinarily badly located, surrounded by many rivals’. It was menaced by France’s determination to ‘Balkanize’ Germany and to reduce her population. In this context he referred to ‘Clemenceau’s [alleged] aim to exterminate 20 million Germans in Europe, to break up Germany into individual states and to prevent the emergence of another united large Reich’. It was also threatened by Britain’s supposed much broader policy of Balkanizing Europe as a whole in order to maintain the balance of power. There was no economic solution to this predicament, Hitler stressed, but only a powerful foreign policy based on the highest level of internal mobilization. Germany would need to get rid of ‘international Jewry’, which was coordinating the global forces against her. She would also need to pursue the related struggle against international capitalism. ‘The battle against international stock exchange enslavement’ and against the ‘trustification’ of the ‘entire economy’, Hitler demanded, must be taken up.

These were all familiar themes from Hitler’s previous statements, but this time he had the eyes of the German and even some of the international press upon him. His dosing speech concluded with a resounding statement that though the court might secure a conviction, posterity would surely acquit him. In an obviously choreographed sequence, the other accused said they had nothing to add, with the result that Hitler’s resonant last words were left ringing throughout the courtroom and shaped the story of the trial. He turned the defeat and humiliation of 9 November 1923 into a victorious narrative…

Hitler was now a hero not merely to the Bavarian right, but to many nationalists throughout Germany. What had begun in the public mind as the ‘Ludendorff Trial’ ended as the ‘Hitler Trial’. ‘I am occupying myself with Hitler and the National Socialist movement,’ the Rhenish student Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in early March 1923…

On his return to Landsberg to serve the rest of his sentence, Hitler was confronted with some serious strategic questions… Ernst Röhm began to revive the SA, under the cover of a front organization, and went to confer with Hitler at the very end of May 1924. Perhaps anxious not to provoke the authorities, and mindful of his inability to seize power by force, the Fuhrer insisted that the SA keep a lower profile…

Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff strongly supported amalgamation with the DVFP to create a new National Socialist Freedom Party (NSFP). Hitler reluctantly agreed in broad terms but insisted that the main base and focus of the party remain in Munich….

Gottfried Feder remarked after visiting him that Hitler was ‘depressed [and] wants to withdraw completely from the movement’ in order to ‘work’, that is, ‘write’ to earn money. Over the next two months, Hitler repeated his message publicly on a number of occasions. He was acting partly because he was disenchanted with the way in which the various mergers and collaborations were turning the party into a purely bourgeois organization, and partly because he had no real power to turn things around from prison…

One reason why Hitler wanted to lie low was fear of having his release delayed, or of being deported to Austria. The Bavarian authorities had long hoped to do the latter, and in early May 1924, the Polizeidirektion in Munich told the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior that ‘Hitler constitutes a permanent threat to the internal and external security of the state’. In late April 1924, the Austrians agreed to accept him in principle. Hitler managed to avoid deportation, but after being refused probation he failed to get out by 1 October as he originally hoped. On 16 October he made a statement that he should be allowed to stay, ‘because I never felt myself to be an Austrian citizen but only a German’. ‘My affection for my Austrian homeland is great,’ Hitler continued, ‘but so is hostility of the Austrian state’, in which—like the ‘earlier Habsburg state’—he could only see ‘an obstacle for the unification of the German people’.

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Quotable quotes

H-man quote