What explains the rise of Adolf Hitler?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Nq--qU9Kc
In this talk to his Beijing high school students, Jiang Xueqin explains that Hitler was a manifestation of the German obsession with the unity of will.
After the humiliating defeat of World War I and amidst the economic turmoil of the Weimar Republic, Germans sought salvation and redemption in their civilization, especially the music of Richard Wagner and the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche. They longed for an "ubermensch" to emerge, and Hitler rose to the occasion.
References:
1. The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
2. The Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner
3. The Genealogy of Morals by Frederick Nietzsche
4. Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley
5. The Speeches of Adolf Hitler
This pretty much highlights how it is flat-out logically impossible for WNs to win the ethical debate. If they go with the position that migration is wrong (which they need for criticizing migration by "non-whites"), then they cannot avoid the conclusion that "whites" wronged "non-whites" first, and hence have no authority to complain. The only logical way to avoid incriminating themselves is to go with the position that migration is not wrong, in which case they have no reason to complain. Either way they are screwed.
Their only recourse is to declare that it is OK when "whites" do it but not OK when "non-whites" do it ie. ingroup/outgroup double-standards a.k.a. "It's OK to be white!" In other words, to declare that they do not care about ethics.
Only the weak use arguments. Therein lies the roots of the decline of the White race --- when it decided to justify itself through values approved by reason, rather than allowing its strength, its conquering will, its vitality, its master morality, its grand achievements, to speak for themselves, without justification.
“The same is true of virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in coloring. shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially—that inclination for "commune" for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack—and that the conqueror and master race, the Aryan, is not succumbing psychologically, too?” - Friedrich Nietzsche
National Socialist Nietzsche critics
As early as 1937, Oscar Levy pointed out that the image of Nietzsche was divided under National Socialism. There were critics of Nietzsche who vehemently rejected the philosopher as incompatible with National Socialism.
In Nietzsche heute (1935), Hans Goebel turns against Rosenberg, Giese and Baeumler. He wants to prove that Nietzsche cannot be the mastermind of the Nazi state, since for him there was only the good European. Nietzsche was also an enemy of Christianity and German nationality. Where Nietzsche wants the superman, the Reich promotes "healthy and strong Volksgenossen". Nietzsche lacks any positive conception of the state.
Curt von Westernhagen said that Nietzsche had been wrongly portrayed as a pioneer of Nazi ideas, but rather that the goat had been turned into a gardener. Nietzsche was not only not an enemy of the Jews, but the most skilful lawyer they had ever had. (Westernhagen: Nietzsche, Jews, anti-Jews! Weimar 1937)
Wilhelm Michel, who in Nietzsche in our Century (1939) tries to defend Christianity from the perspective of a Catholic existentialism, comes to a rejection of Nietzsche's philosophy and all attempts to make him the philosopher of the Third Reich. Michel identifies Nietzsche's critique of morality and religion as Nietzsche's Marxist body of thought. (Michel: Nietzsche in our century. Berlin 1939, p. 38)
Martin Löpelmann (Nietzsche National Socialist? In: NSEn, Vol. 2, No. 28 of 23 December 1933, pp. 497f.) rejected Nietzsche as a National Socialist guide or intellectual hero. He knew how to rave about power and strength, because he never had them himself. He blames Nietzsche for hostility towards Germanism, pro-Jewish sentiments and opposition to socialism. He had "never had any understanding for the workers' question."
The philosopher and educator Ernst Krieck explained the National Socialist reception of Nietzsche, quoting an article in the French newspaper Le Temps: "All in all: Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism and an opponent of the idea of race. If one disregards these three schools of thought, he might have made an excellent Nazi." [5]
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In the 1930s, Oscar Levy wrote essays on Nietzsche and National Socialism, partly under the pseudonym Defensor Fidei, in which he distinguished the philosopher from a National Socialist interpretation. Levy pointedly: "With these views, it is quite certain, Nietzsche would be in a concentration camp or in the misery of emigration today" (Oscar Levy [Defensor Fidei]: Ein Nazi contra Nietzsche (1937), in: Levy 2005, p. 260)
...
Nietzsche was rehabilitated in France and Italy in particular. Deleuze, Guattari, Laruelle, Bataille, Montinari, and others stood up for Nietzsche and saw a falsification by the National Socialists. After 1945, German philosophy had a hard time with Nietzsche. From the 1980s onwards, a new Nietzsche boom began, which made Nietzsche the philosopher about whom the most published is today. Current Nietzsche research in Germany almost unanimously assumes that Nietzsche was misused, e.g. Hans-Martin Gerlach.
. Verzerrende Darstellung der Philosophie Nietzsches während der NS-Diktatur. Wikipedia.org; Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche-Rezeption_im_NationalsozialismusIn 1864, at the height of the American Civil War, the 19-year-old Nietzsche submitted a valedictory thesis on the Greek poet Theognis of Megara. Extremely learned and at the same time subtly partisan, it was a sympathetic reconstruction of Theognis’ staunchly aristocratic world view, including his racist, segregationist views on forced labour. Slaves, Nietzsche remarked, hailed from “useless and harmful stock” and belonged to an altogether different and invariably subordinate species. Approvingly he cites Theognis’s “very accurate” poem:
Never do the enslaved go upright
But the crooked necked are ever gnarled
Just as a squill does not bear roses or hyacinths
A slave woman does not bear a free child.
These comments echo the arguments of Southern apologists of slavery like William Harper, who insisted on the inherent physiological and psychological differences between Africans and Europeans. In his Memoir on Slavery, Harper maintained that “the Negro race, from their temperament and capacity” were “peculiarly suited” to hard labour, not least because they were significantly less susceptible to physical pain than white men. Nietzsche was convinced that Africans, whose constitution he believed closely resembled that of “primeval man”, felt less pain than white people, especially the white “cultural elite”. In Daybreak he pondered the possibility of importing Chinese workers to Europe to carry out menial tasks, because their “modes of life and thought” made them suitable “industrious ants”.
Like George Fitzhugh, the South’s preeminent pro-slavery theorist, Nietzsche frequently invoked Ancient Greece to argue that slavery belonged to “the essence of a culture” and that in order for there to be a “fertile soil for the development of art”, the “overwhelming majority” had to be “slavishly subjected” in the service of a “privileged class”.
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Throughout his oeuvre, Nietzsche adheres to the view that slavery was, is, and will be needed: for the flowering of Ancient Greek civilisation; for the regeneration of contemporary European culture; for the establishment of a new nobility based on a new social “rank-ordering”; and for the future elevation of “man” into “superman”. Nietzsche consistently formulates his most radical ideas about human flourishing and autonomy in the context of their opposites, what he calls “the danger of servitude” and the “incomplete” humanity of the slave. But slavery, for him, is less a foil to than a condition of human greatness. In The Gay Science, he significantly mentions “subhumans” as the natural attendants of heroes and supermen.
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Among other things, Nietzsche’s justifications of slavery, notably his advocacy of “natural slavery”, provide us with a new perspective on his conception of human nature and psychology. As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, slavery is the “prerequisite for spiritual discipline and cultivation”, a “moral imperative of nature” addressed to “peoples, races, ages, and classes – but above all to the whole human animal, to man.”
Bataille was one of the first to denounce the deliberate misinterpretation of Nietzsche carried out by Nazis, among them Alfred Baeumler. In January 1937, he dedicated an issue of Acéphale, titled "Reparations to Nietzsche", to the theme "Nietzsche and the Fascists.[5]" There, he called Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche "Elisabeth Judas-Förster," recalling Nietzsche's declaration: "To never frequent anyone who is involved in this bare-faced fraud concerning races."[5] Domenico Losurdo ridicules the idea that an "intellectually rather mediocre woman" managed to manipulate and derail interpretations of Nietzsche for decades and inspire political movements encompassing millions of people. He dismisses such idea as unsustainable conspiracy theory noting that "there is no shortage of unsettling and horrific passages in Nietzsche's writings".[150] Due to his complex views and occasionally contradictory comments on these matters, the idea of Nietzsche as a predecessor to Nazism and fascism remains controversial and debated among scholars (see: Nietzsche and fascism). Owing largely to the writings of Walter Kaufmann and French postwar philosophers, Nietzsche's reputation improved and today he usually is not linked to Nazism as he was in the past. Detractors note that authors such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau also had complex views on matters of politics, nation and race that were incompatible with Nazi ideology on numerous points, but their influence on the Third Reich is still not dismissed as a misunderstanding.[151]
Schopenhauer was fervently opposed to slavery. Speaking of the treatment of slaves in the slave-holding states of the United States, he condemned "those devils in human form, those bigoted, church-going, strict sabbath-observing scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them" for how they "treat their innocent black brothers who through violence and injustice have fallen into their devil's claws". The slave-holding states of North America, Schopenhauer writes, are a "disgrace to the whole of humanity".[76]
Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, which is not developed along contractarian lines, but is grounded in compassion with sufferers, concerns itself (not exclusively) with the same relatively powerless and vulnerable groups that his political philosophy overlooks, as evidenced by some of the examples that Schopenhauer himself adduces as confirmation of his moral philosophy, such as the abolition of slavery and the animal welfare movement.
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Schopenhauer is laudably critical of the unjust domination and oppression
of human beings that was happening in his mid-nineteenth-century world – in particular, the
African slave trade and the widespread immiseration of the proletariat.41 The “remote cause”
of both of these evils, Schopenhauer avers, is the dominant classes’ desire for luxury: “as long
as luxury exists on the one hand, then necessarily on the other excessive work and a bad life
must exist, be it under the name of poverty, slavery, of proletarians, or of slaves,” since “in
order for a few people to have what is dispensable, superfluous and refined … a great portion
of existing human powers must be expended upon them and withdrawn from what is necessary”
(PP II, 221-222).42
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Schopenhauer is acutely sensitive to the plight of black African slaves:
in his later works, he regularly refers to the slave trade as the prime historical example of human
depravity. See WWR II, 578; OBM, 218-219, 222; PP II, 193, 228, 231, 315, 320, 533.
42
Nietzsche was an advocate of European colonialism, seeing it as a way to solve the overpopulation problem, pacify the rebellious working class, and rejuvenate the decadent European culture. European expansion and global domination were part of his "great politics". He noted that in colonies, Europeans often act as ruthless conquerors, unconstrained by Christian morality and democratic values, which he saw as a liberated, healthy instinct.[145]
We should note that the German term Nietzsche uses for “predatory nature” [Raubtier-Natur] appears in other Nietzschean contexts without any pejorative sense. In many writings from the 1880s, the beast of prey [Raubtier] is contrasted with the despised herd, the domesticated animal that human beings have become under the leveling influences of the Judeo-Christian heritage and a politics of democracy. We must evaluate similarly Nietzsche’s identification of the good European with the criminal, which also often has a positive valence in Nietzsche’s works.48
Other texts from the 1880s indicate that these colonialist criminals and predators are in fact the “good Europeans.” Sometimes the European colonial project is justified in terms of a biological analogy. In the notebooks from 1888, Nietzsche claims:
The right [Recht] to punishment (or to social self-defense) has in essence become the word “justice” [Recht] only through a misuse: a right is acquired through contracts—but self-protection and self-defense are not based on a contract. A people, at least, ought to consider with just as much justification its need for conquest, its craving for power, as a right, whether it be with weapons, with trade, commerce, and colonization—for example, a right to growth. A society that rejects war and conquest for all times and instinctively is in decline: it is ripe for democracy and shopkeeper regimes. (Nachlass 1888, 14[192], KSA 13.379)
In this passage, Nietzsche contrasts democracy and the shopkeeper mentality—a frequently used derogatory term in Zarathustra—with aggressive colonialism, interpreting European expansion as a natural right to self-preservation. In other remarks, Nietzsche uses a historical view to discuss the desired course for European domination of the world.
We were ready to throw our forces into the scales for the preservation of the British Empire; and all that, mark you, at a time when, to tell the truth, I feel much more sympathetically inclined to the lowliest Hindu than to any of these arrogant islanders. Later on, the Germans will be pleased that they did not make any contribution to the survival of an out-dated state of affairs for which the world of the future would have found it hard to forgive them. We can with safety make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island. - Adolf Hitler, 4th February 1945
Spain, France and England had all weakened, weakened and exhausted themselves in this futile colonial enterprise. The continent from which Spain and England gave birth, which they created piece by piece, has today acquired a completely independent way of life and completely selfish views. Even so, they were just an artificial world, without a soul, culture, or civilization of their own; and judging from that point of view, they were nothing more than dirt. - Adolf Hitler, 7th February 1945
The United States and Australia afford good examples. Success, certainly - but only on the material side. They are artificial edifices, bodies without age, of which it is it is impossible to say whether they are still in a state of infancy or whether they have already been touched by senility. In those continents which were inhabited, failure has been even more marked. In them, the white races have impose their will by force, and the influence they have had on the native inhabitants has been negligible. - Adolf Hitler, 7th February 1945
The white races did, of course, give some things to the natives, and they were the worst gifts that they could possibly have made, those plagues of our own modern world-materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism and syphilis. For the rest, since these peoples possessed qualities of their own which were superior to anything we could offer them, they have remained essentially unchanged. Where imposition by force was attempted, the results were even more disastrous, and common sense, realizing the futility of such measures, should preclude any recourse to their introduction. One solitary success must be conceded to the colonizers: everywhere they have succeeded in arousing hatred, a hatred that urges these peoples, awakened from their slumbers by us, to rise and drive us out. - Adolf Hitler, 7th February 1945
“There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure, even these being extremely rare. What is normal is crossed races, in which, together with a disharmony of physical features (when eye and mouth do not correspond with one another, for example), there must always go a disharmony of habits and value-concepts. (Livingstone¹¹³ heard someone say: 'God created white and black men but the Devil Created the half-breeds.') Crossed races always mean at the same time crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are usually more evil, crueller, more restless. Purity is the final result of countless adaptations, absorptions and secretions, and progress towards purity is evidenced in the fact that the energy available to a race is increasingly restricted to individual selected functions, while previously it was applied to too many and often contradictory things: such a restriction will always seem to be an impoverishment and should be assessed with consideration and caution. In the end, however, if the process of purification is successful, all that energy formerly expended in the struggle of the dissonant qualities with one another will stand at the command of the total organism: which is why races that have become pure have always also become stronger and more beautiful. The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
In mid-1936 the Nationalsocialistische Korrespondenz stated with clarity and authority: "From his deeds one can recognize the Nordic man - not from the length of his nose and the colour of his eyes." In effect this last phase of National Socialist race theory was a complete rejection of Günther's Nordicism.
...Hitler disapproved of such [racial] comparisons. He especially opposed reference to physical contrasts of stature, coloring, or physiognomy among German ethnic groups. In 1930 he told an aid, “Discussions about the race problem will only divide the German people further, incite them against one another, atomize them, and in this way make them inconsequential with respect to foreign affairs.” He admonished senior officials of the party to avoid the subject of ethnic diversity in speeches and articles: “Everything that unifies and welds the classes together must be brought forth, what divides them, what re-animates old prejudices, must be avoided. . . .They are the surest way to destroy a community.” He remarked that people should be selected for leadership roles “not according to outward appearance, but by demonstrating inward ability." Goebbels, himself a diminutive man with a slight limp, recorded in his diary in October 1937, “Discussed race policy with Dr. Gross. I reproached him for our flawed standards for making selections. According to them, practically every officer today would be dismissed."
...the concept of keeping the race pure can never be transferred from the Jewish example to, for example, the Aryan.
“Much as I gaze in awe at the Jews’ laws for maintaining and preserving the purity of their race, I must nevertheless proceed from my belief that racial theories, should they become the subject of public discussion, may prove a national disaster rather than a blessing.
“We must accept the mixing of blood as it is. We must not call one blood worse than another, one mixture better than another. Rather, we must employ other means to breed a higher form from this gray mass. We must try’ to bring to the surface the valuable traits of the people living in Germany, to cultivate and to develop them, and we must find ways and means to prevent the propagation of all the bad, inferior, criminal, and decadent tendencies and all the congenital diseases so damaging to the Volk.
What is frustrating about this morass is that Beiner has, in fact, stumbled onto something significant. Beiner is absolutely right that it’s possible to offer a coherent Nietzschean defense of liberal capitalism, with Weber as one model. Beiner points toward a centrist liberalism that can be distinguished from ultra-rightism only by a decision about values, rather than a difference in underlying worldview. That doesn’t bother Beiner too much. He seems confident that the good guys can stick, indefinitely, to the basically nonrational commitment that separates them from the bad guys. Or at least that it’s the best hope we’ve got.
But if we were to do what Beiner asks us to do in the introduction — take a closer look at the history of actually existing Nietzscheanism or Heideggerianism — it might prove harder to keep the faith. We would find it disturbingly difficult in practice to separate the liberal wheat from the far-right chaff.
Take Max Weber, for instance. He ends up as the unlikely hero of Dangerous Minds, capable of seeing the “iron cage” of modernity as clearly as Nietzsche and Heidegger and “affirming” it anyway. “Because it doesn’t rest upon the entertaining of fantasies about the transcendence of modernity,” Beiner eulogizes, “Weberian nobility is ultimately more noble than Nietzschean nobility.” And yet an ardent German nationalism ran throughout the work of this “very pessimistic liberal” like a red-and-black thread. Read against the grain, Weber’s work shows less a stoic resolve in the face of modernity’s inevitability, and more a terror at its precarity, at least in its German-imperial incarnation.
For Weber, the iron cage was always under threat from some non-German menace. In his 1895 Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg University (where Heidegger would later become rector under the Nazi regime), it was Polish farmers. They were migrating into eastern Prussia and threatening the livelihood of native German workers with their racially determined willingness to labor under more degrading conditions. The solution that Weber proposed in 1893 was nothing less than the “absolute exclusion of the Russian-Polish workers from the German East.” Near the end of his life, the threat was the racially debased forces fighting Germany in World War I. He warned an audience in 1917 “that Germany is fighting for its very life against an army in which there are negroes, Ghurkas, and all manner of barbarians who have come from their hiding places all over the world and who are now gathered at the borders of Germany, ready to lay waste to our country.”
In between, Weber developed an elaborate theoretical account of the “elective affinity” between capitalist modernity and the unique cultural traits of Europeans. Capitalism didn’t just happen to develop in Europe. It was born out of Europeans’ distinctive religious-cultural capacity for discipline and instrumental rationality, as opposed to what Weber called the “boundless greed of Asians.” Weber’s belief in the world-historical “destiny” of the German state was not, as Beiner claims, an aberration, but a logical extension of the core of his thought.
Weber is hardly the only Nietzschean “liberal” to have played sustained footsie with the authoritarian or nationalist right. Scholars have noted a similar trajectory in the history of the Austrian school of economics, the intellectual cornerstone of the twentieth-century neoliberal movement. The political theorist Corey Robin elicited a storm of controversy in 2013, mostly from libertarian writers, for an essay highlighting parallels between Nietzsche and the Austrians. But some similarity is plain as day, not only (or especially) with respect to Nietzsche personally but to the subsequent Nietzschean tradition.
Weber, for instance, was an interlocutor of the school’s early twentieth-century leader, Ludwig von Mises, and an inspiration to younger members such as Alfred Schütz and Joseph Schumpeter. The most important twentieth-century Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek, issued denunciations of “rationalism” as strong as any to be found in Nietzsche or Heidegger. (The political theorist Michael Oakeshott, to whom Hayek is often justly compared, has been called the “English Heidegger.”)
More recently, there was Don Lavoie, a mentor to many influential US Austrian school adherents and, at the time of his death, the Charles Koch Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Lavoie spent his career arguing for an affinity between Austrian school methodology and the “hermeneutic” philosophy of Heidegger and his follower Hans-Georg Gadamer.
The strongest point of contact between many Austrian liberals and Nietzscheans such as Heidegger is a shared conviction that political authoritarianism can be tolerable or even necessary in the face of advancing leftism. Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks show the extent to which his support for Nazism was related to his terror of creeping “Bolshevism,” which he saw (of course) as powered by world Jewry. Similar considerations, sans antisemitism, drove Ludwig von Mises to declare in 1927 that fascism “has, for the moment, rescued European civilization” by suppressing communist uprisings in Italy. “The merit that fascism has thereby acquired for itself will go on living in history eternally,” he pronounced.
The historian Quinn Slobodian has demonstrated how this logic continued to underpin neoliberal support for authoritarian regimes in apartheid South Africa and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Whether motivated by the economist Wilhelm Röpke’s horror at the prospect of majority rule by black South African “cannibals,” or dismay at the popular support enjoyed by Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende, the Austrian tradition has proved more than willing to make its peace with the idea of a “liberal dictator,” as Hayek once called Pinochet.
So it’s less surprising than it might initially appear that Ludwig von Mises has joined Nietzsche and Heidegger in the pantheon of today’s alt-right. Richard Spencer has recommended that his acolytes read von Mises and his American student Murray Rothbard. Mencius Moldbug, the preferred brand of pseudo-highbrow neofascist leaders, agrees: “Mises is a titan; Rothbard is a giant,” he has written. The chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LVMI) in Auburn, Alabama, is Lew Rockwell, whom you might remember for ghostwriting all those racist Ron Paul newsletters. The LVMI’s most notorious affiliate is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, whose 2001 screed Democracy: The God That Failed has become something of a bible for the alt-right movement.
It’s not just capitalist liberals backsliding into fascism, in other words. The fascists have a hard time staying away from capitalist “liberalism” as well.
Nietzsche is obsessed with pacifying the movements which he views as being in favor of leveling and equality.
Throwing out egalitarianism from leftist thinking is what we are here to do. True Leftism still believes in superiority and inferiority; the difference is that we believe the superior can be (and in reality are more often than not) defeated by the inferior in worldly competition (the colonial era being one example). In other words, True Leftism is divergence of the moral hierarchy from the natural hierarchy.
Socialism is then the attempt, given awareness of the above, to set things up in practice so as to help the superior (but less competitive) defeat the inferior (but more competitive).
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