
Le Serment du Jeu de paume by Jacques-Louis David (c. 1791), depicting the Tennis Court Oath.
More immediately relevant to Germany’s predicament were the dramatic recent examples of national revival, where peoples had bounced back from decline or catastrophic defeat. Perhaps surprisingly, Hitler was open to inspiration from France. ‘The French Revolution was national and constructive,’ he argued, ‘whereas the German one wanted to be international and to destroy everything.’ Hitler took a similarly positive view of later French radicalism. ‘When France collapsed at Sedan,’ he wrote, ‘one made a revolution to rescue the sinking tricolour!’ ‘The war was waged with new energy,’ he continued, and ‘the will to defend the state created the French Republic in 1870’, thus restoring ‘French national honour’. This shows that Hitler’s fundamental objection was not to the ‘ideas of 1789’, which he hardly ever mentioned. His real trauma—to which we will return later—was the fragmentation of Germany beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
The way I quote from Brendan Simms’ book may seem strange. I read through it and, when I come across a passage that requires comment, I pause and comment on it here.
The passage above, for example, strikes me as remarkable because it shows us a young Adolf who was unaware that the egalitarian ideas of 1789 were already symptomatic of a cancer in which Christian ethics were secularised to be metastasised in subsequent centuries. Recall that the French had been inspired by the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783 and that in turn these American ideals were inspired by Protestant ethics (those who haven’t read Tom Holland’s Dominion should at least read our excerpts now). The young Hitler, naturally, didn’t have all this in mind. He was first and foremost a politician, not exactly a philosopher and certainly not, to use my metaphor, a visionary who sees the remote past in a cave north of the Wall (for example, to realise that Protestantism is behind today’s mass psychosis if we psychoanalyse the West from the remote past).
One of the things that distinguishes me compared to the American organisation founded by George Lincoln Rockwell is that, unlike the Commander, I am convinced that National Socialism must be understood as an organism in continuous development. And NS is developing even in the darkest age of the West in which Savitri Devi used the metaphor of ‘gold in a furnace’, in the sense that all the chaff burns in the burning furnace and only the element gold, which being a chemical element cannot burn there, will survive it.
Although Savitri came up with this metaphor at a time when the denazification of Germany was in full swing, in our time it could be said that the fire of that furnace has already burnt up all the chaff, except for people like us who continue to believe in Uncle Adolf’s ideals.
But Uncle Adolf couldn’t have known what we now know! His untimely death in 1945 prevented him from realising the levels of anti-white delirium to which the white man would fall after the decades-long process of trying to demonise NS throughout the West!
A mature NS man has to take into account the darkest hour for the white man and explain it. One oblique way to do this is to realise that American white nationalism has gone astray. It is at a dead end, as I said this morning in this thread.
It is high time to be humble; to retrace our steps from that alley, and return to the main avenue leading us to a National Socialism of the 21st and 22nd centuries. But I don’t see that humility anywhere on the racial right…