Central to Nazi ideology was the “Fuhrer Prinzip“, the “principle of the leader“, an idea also central to Marxism (the “dictatorship of the proletariat“). “Representative Democracy” is not much removed from that (as Nazis themselves pointed out). Who ponders this?
The leader of the so-called Islamist State, a terrorist organization (forget the pleonasm!), blew himself up, with three innocent children of his, rather than surrendering to US Special Forces. He was whimpering, crying and screaming according to Trump, which I don’t doubt, because he was a coward, that was the entire ideology of the Islamist state, and I don’t doubt it because his assassination of children is proof enough. And the Islamist State, just like Nazism has demonstrated, again and again to be an evil ideology… Which makes it plutocratic by my definition: evil-rule being pluto-kratia in Greek.
Hitler loved Islam, he said it himself, more than once. Yes I have read Hitler thoroughly, he is one of my preferred authors… not because I esteem him, I actually thoroughly despise him and those sharing most of his ideology, and this is precisely why I read him so much, he is an excellent lab rat for someone researching evil.
Of this today I talk.
Nowadays “Nazism” and “Fascism” are brandished, by those who know too little… and often unwittingly practice what they preach against.
Is fascism alive? In the most general sense, any time individuals brandish ill supported aggressive slogans, intellectual fascism is alive and well. It is a neurohormonal attitude. What this neurohormonal complex is applied to is just a detail.
Who is a Nazi? The question can be answered only after defining Nazi ideology first. One can go for a broad scope of the term “Nazi”, or concentrate on the original meaning. Broadly, one could define “Nazism” as any extreme nationalism mostly founded upon the hatred of some other group(s), and be done with the notion. That’s a perfect definition, and those uninterested by the peculiarities of German Nazism and its source in old European hatred can stop there.
Nazi storm troopers guarding a Jewish-owned business in Vienna shortly after the Anschluss in 1938. The graffiti on the store window reads, “You Jewish pig, may your hands rot off!”
German Nazism is often reduced to anti-Judaism. Many confine Nazism to the hatred of Jews, and then, self satisfied with their self-declared “Anti-Nazism”, because they don’t hate Jews, then proceed to boldly embrace the rest of Nazi ideology… without knowing (even US Jews such as Paul Krugman do this… when they embrace their hero Keynes and his major notions in his major book:”The Economic Consequences of Peace”).
Such reducers of Nazism to its simplest expression, anti-Judaism, are oblivious to the entire universe of knowledge beyond their small and pathetic cognitive horizon, another way in which they get to be Nazis, without knowing… Ironically by not giving the concept of Nazism its full meaning…
When talking crocodiles, one better observe crocodiles first. Hitler started Mein Kampf by accusing the French. He switches to the Jews only later. So one may suspect that any anti-French sentiment is even more Nazi than anti-Judaism sentiment (yes, Hitler wanted to exterminate the French too, and said it for example after losing the crucial battle of Bir Hakeim, against the French, in July 1942. However, differently from the Jews, the French had a country and the laws of war were supposed to apply, something most of the Nazi army approved of… in France… NOT in the Soviet Union!)
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Why is Nazi Ideology still alive and well? Too little facts known, including about Nazism itself:
Are there people who are Nazis, in the sense that they embrace most of Nazi ideology, and don’t even know it?
Heiko Kallweit, who has a PhD in archeology wrote to me: “In 1939, people were still around recalling the memory to French revenge in 1919. A French policy of hate and the wish, to humiliate and destroy Germany. Some people, especially those living close to a border with France, recalled stories told by grandmothers and fathers, about what the French and Napoleon brought besides the metric system or the Code Napoleon. They brought plundering and destruction, war and again humiliation and domination.”
Ideas, to be cogent, need to rest on true facts, not fake facts. How are fake facts determined? By knowing enough significant facts to build NETWORKS OF PLAUSIBILITY. In a network of plausibility, an emotional-logical category is established, where truth flows. If a fact sticks out, no truth leading to it, no truth emanating from it, then it has to be examined carefully.
Coucy was the largest, tallest Medieval Castle, in the world. It took 28 tons of dynamite for the Germans to bring down the Donjon, and ten tons for dynamite to destroy each tower. The destruction of Coucy by the Germans in WWI is exemplary of the wanton criminal acts of destruction committed by the Germans in WW!, unrepaired to this day. The French have been rebuilding the castle for a century. It used to be the third most visited monument in France, after Versailles and the Mont Saint Michel… So Nazism, in the general sense was not invented by Hitler, and talking of extreme, devastating, reparations imposed by the French on the Germans, which would have caused Nazism, just a superposition of lies. North East France is still injured by the devastation caused by the fascist war criminal invaders from the tyranny to the east in 1914-1918.
Significant facts about German Criminal Insanity Starting in the 18th Century, the culmination of which was Nazism in the strictest sense of the term:
1) “Germany” was created in 1871 in Versailles France. Actually “Germany” called itself the “Second Reich”, the idea being that the first empire was created by… Charlemagne, a Frankish king ointed in Reims, Francia (as France was then called). Actually the Franks talked about Renovatio Imperium Romanorum (Renovation of the Empire of the Romans).
2) I hate Napoleon, who was a bloody dictator, a glorified mafioso, who hijacked the revolution, and I despise those who have googoo eyes for him. His body should be removed from the Invalides, and thrown into the Seine, or send back to Corsica. The Grand Army which seized Moscow had been decimated by typhus, invading Russia wasn’t smart, they got the coldest winter, Napoleon himself was sick, etc. However, Napoleon’s Grand Army invading Russia was mostly made of German and Polish speaking youth (as Napoleon himself pointed out to Metternich after the debacle).
3) The French invasion of Mittel Europa has to be looked in context: it was itself a counterstrike from an earlier invasion of France, that one deliberate, and unprovoked. A coalition of all European plutocrats attacked the French Constitutional Monarchy in July 1792, led by Prussia and Britain, the overall commander the Duke of Brunswick threatened all of Paris with “military execution”. One could not imagine a more infamous context: the European plutocrats attacking France could not have been alarmed by the French King, the same Louis XVI who ruled over France for more than 20 years. No, what alarmed them was “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” of 1789: all men are equal, etc.. . Plutocrats hate equality.
4) The French freed the Jews and the Poles from the slave status and racial oppression the racist, invasive kingdom of Prussia had brought much of Europe, and especially Poland. Prussia more than doubled its size by initially grabbing Silesia from Austria. Prussia had been also bankrolled earlier in the seven year world war of 1756-1763 by… Britain. Prussia and Russia destroyed Poland, an older nation than themselves, and long much larger.
5) After 1815, the Prussians and Austrians ruled Europe, with the Russians, and dismantled Poland again, and made Jews and Poles into slaves, racially inferior. People were barred on racial ground to exert some higher professions, such as lawyer and doctor.
6) The Second Reich decided to deliberately attack the world in July 1914. The immediate pretext was the Sarajevo assassination. That assassination was also an enabling factor: the Archduke was the Kaiser’s only friend and a partisan of peace at nearly any cost. Had the Archduke been alive, it’s unlikely the Kaiser would have allowed the attack upon the world, planned December 11, 1912. Things fell in place when the right arm of fanatical racist US president Woodrow Wilson saw the Kaiser June 1, 1914, and proposed an alliance with Britain against the “racially inferior French”. This is why the USA, happy to weaken France and Britain, initially supported the Second Reich by breaking the Franco-British blockade, by using the “neutral” Netherlands. It was good money for Netherlands and US.
7) Attacking the world is per se, a war crime of the highest order. On that ground again, all the top commanders of the “Second Reich” should have been executed, including the Kaiser and the conspirationists of Dec 11, 1912. Generals such as Ludendorff, who personally ordered war crimes during the siege of Liege, should have been executed (he was for many years, the most important Nazi: one less Nazi). Thousands of war crimes were committed in August 1914 by invading German troops, including that of a two year old belgian girl, thoroughly documented, never punished. Besides her da, many civilians were killed just that day in that particular village. The Germans had been driven insane by the violence of a French counterattack (where 23.000 French soldiers died). That was August 23, 1914. At least, those crimes should be retrospectively condemned: then today’s people, around the world can learn why plutocratic dictatorship can rendered even people in some ways very educated as the German, criminally insane.
8) German war crimes were committed throughout the war, but especially when it became klar that the Second Reich was losing. The entire north east area of France, her industrial core was utterly destroyed, from exploded, flooded mines, to flattened factories, to even telephone poles, cut and burned. The French actually invaded the Ruhr in 1923 after the Germans claimed they could not replace the telephone and power poles they had destroyed in France, 5 years earlier.
Even castles got destroyed.
Germany should have paid and replaced all it destroyed in France. To this day, that’s not done. The Coucy castle, destroyed by the Germans in 1917, the largest, strongest, tallest Middle Age castle destroyed by the blood thirsty robotic servants of German plutocracy in 1917 is still a field of ruins. The French have been rebuilding it for more than a century! [1]
9) As far as humiliation and domination is concerned, the Germans imposed that to themselves by being ruled by criminals such as Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler. Or, for that matter, in the case of Prussia, the racist Frederik der Grosse. To claim that’s the fault of the French that Prussians and Austrians enacted racist laws, occupied countries, and tried to destroy them, and then attacked the world, is sheer insanity, the sort of insanity the Nazis were famous for.
10) Heiko wrote: “In 1939, people were still around recalling the memory to French revenge in 1919. A French policy of hate and the wish, to humiliate and destroy Germany.” then you go on with details. This is an excellent abstract of the first six pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Yes, I read all what Hitler wrote, including his second book published post-mortem, and much of what Hitler said, and more than once. I study evil, you see. I also have a personal interest: not only was my family in the resistance and an uncle in the French military as an officer, fighting for six years (Oncle Edmond), not only my father saw combat twice against the Nazis, but an other (French) uncle (Tonton Daniel) was married to the (German) daughter (Tante Annie) of the main artisan of World War One, Von Molkte! I also had one family member who were pro-Nazis (born after the war). When I was six, this cousin explained to me all the bad things which happened to Germany were just caused by one bad man, Hitler.
No. Would something like the rule of Nazism have happened without the individual Hitler? I don’t know. But there were Freikrops before Hitler became noticeable and many extremely German hyper nationalistic nasty politics violating the Versailles Treaty (including rearming Germany, with the help of Stalin, Portugal) were launched when the Nazis were not politically important. The idea that the Versailles Treaty was “revenge” because it freed Eastern Europe from German domination, was rampant… And is prominent in Keynes’ work (so all the plutocrats loved that theme.
Hitler was animated by an ideology. Much, if not most of it, is still alive and well, in all too many places…
In the most general sense of the term, Nazism, and more generally Intellectual Fascism are servants and thus friends of plutocracy. Thus plutocracy love hard core Islam: question that set of (mostly) idiocies, some of them admittedly very beautiful, and you will die. Be suspected of questioning same set, die just the same. Be viewed as having disparaged the Rophet, die, and so on. Thus thinking, under hard core Islam is a difficult, not to say lethal, thing, and this is why it didn’t happen (most Islamist thinkers were just glorified parrots: the real iconoclasts were in Western Europe, suggesting as early as the 11 C, as Berengar did, that god was just reason…)
As we live in times of increasing plutocracy (not just from accumulated wealth, but also from accumulated evil: consider the ongoing mass extinction), having only a few thoughts and feelings aggressively bound around the ax of violence, is exactly what works best, as far as our masters are concerned.
And that is why stupidities kept on being repeated about World War One and the Versailles Treaty… Thus France. By attacking France the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen gets attacked… and thus the core of the World Republic and Empire of Goodness the United Nations is supposed to foster… is getting attack, to the benefit of global plutocracy.
One must crush infamy, but one should first know what it is. Voltaire had not figured it out completely, or persuaded himself it didn’t matter. We have to do better.
Patrice Ayme
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P/S: Voltaire finished his letters with “Il faut écraser l’infame” (One must crush infamy). By this he mostly meant the Catholic church, an excellent idea, but plutocracy in general is infamy, not just the superstitious religions, not just abusive kings…
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[1] During their occupation of north-east France, the Germans turned the formidable Coucy castle into a military outpost and a residence of German dignitaries, including fascist world aggressor Emperor Wilhelm II himself. In March 1917 the retreating German army, on order of the unpunished war criminal General Erich Ludendorff, future principal of the Nazi Party, destroyed the keep (donjon) and four of the giant towers. This wanton destruction caused so much public outrage in France that in April 1917 the ruins were declared “a memorial to barbarity“. Although Germans of the Nazi type always whine about the tiny reparations they made for the enormous destruction they committed in 1914-1918 (meaning truly that they would still want the Slavs as slaves, and the Jews as Untermenschen), we don’t see them offer to rebuild Coucy. On the positive side, the French can contemplate its ruins, and see what happens when not enough smart effort is made to defend the Republic…
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, Einstein’s Cosmological Constant (Dark Energy?). As I said, the cosmological large structure formation is dominated by cold (non-relativistic) dark matter.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 