Hitler Ideology Quotes

Godess of peace can walk only in the company of god of war and that every great act of peace must be protected and assisted by force So, we must be in living realization of the duty of each man to sacrifice his life at all times so that his country might live.....

Nazi ideologies continue to the present day behind the veil of supposedly free societies and governments.

Any philosophy, whether of a religious or political nature - and sometimes the dividing line is hard to determine - fights less for the negative destruction of the opposing ideology than for the positive promotion of its own. Hence its struggle is less defensive than offensive. It therefore has the advantage even in determining the goal, since this goal represents the victory of its own idea, while, conversely,it is hard to determine when the negative aim of the destruction of a hostile doctrine may be regarded as achieved and assured. For this reason alone, the philosophy's offensive will be more systematic and also more powerful than the defensive against a philosophy, since here, too, as always, the attack and not the defence makes the decision. The fight against a spiritual power with methods of violence remains defensive, however, until the sword becomes the support,the herald and disseminator, of a new spiritual doctrine.

A childish illusion, fixed in the minds of all children born in a certain decade and hammered home for four years, can easily reappear as a deadly serious political ideology twenty years later.

Kershaw did not minimise the historical role played by his insane, ideological fixations, but he did illustrate that without the readiness of many people to work for the man in charge, there would have been no way he could have achieved his murderous aims.

Unlike most founding dictators—Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler—Mao did not inspire a passionate following through his oratory, or ideological appeal. He simply sought willing recruits among his immediate circle, people who would take his orders.

Being free is not doing what you want, but becoming what you are supposed to be.

One thing is clear: One cannot understand the Nazi vocabulary adequately if one only looks at Germany. What is the “blood disgrace” of which ‘Mein Kampf’ warns – as we have seen – if not the “miscegenation” that is condemned also by the proponents of ‘White Supremacy’? Even the key term of Nazi-ideology ‘subhuman [Untermensch]’ is a translation of the American ‘Under Man’!

It was in Poland that the Einsatzgruppen were to fulfill their mission as “ideological soldiers” by eliminating the educated classes of a defeated enemy. (They were in some sense killing their peers: fifteen of the twenty-five Einsatzgruppe and Einsatzkommando commanders had doctorates.)

The corruption at the heart of Communist ideology lay in the means. Social justice, greater freedom and equality, an end to exploitation and alienation are noble, humane ends. What compromised them fatally was the inhuman methods employed to achieve them. This was as true of Lenin and Trotsky as of Stalin.

Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.* During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they enacted their own sterilization laws.'' The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany. To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more revealing point, however, is when the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not.

The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any ‘membership’ (l’appartenance). While the ideological struggle had formal opponents, entire nations and societies, at least theoretically, were able to select their subject of choice — that of class, racism or statism, or individualism. The victory of liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind. This is when the phenomenon of globalisation entered the stage, the model of a post-industrial society makes itself known, and the postmodern era begins. From now on, the individual subject is no longer the result of choice, but is a kind of mandatory given. Man is freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity,

Carl Schmitt could boast with some justice that the Nazi revolution was orderly and disciplined. But the reason lies not so much within the Nazis themselves as in the lack of an effective opposition. For millions the Nazi ideology did assuage their anxiety, did end their alienation, and did give hope for a better future. Other millions watched passively, not deeply committed to resistance. "Let them have a chance" was a typical attitude. Hitler took the chance and made the most of it.

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. ‘Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.’24

The confused locksmith Drexler provided the kernel, the drunken poet Eckart some of the “spiritual” foundation, the economic crank Feder what passed as an ideology, the homosexual Roehm the support of the Army and the war veterans, but it was now the former tramp, Adolf Hitler, not quite thirty-one and utterly unknown, who took the lead in building up what had been no more than a back-room debating society into what would soon become a formidable political party.

World you won the war against a man but lost the war against his ideology, he is still alive with different names in many faces

The blockade had been in force since early in the war. Over 750,000 German civilians, mainly children and the elderly, perished from malnourishment.2

To Hitler, personal and ideological loyalty was more important than professional aptitude and performance.

How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power? Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food. p. 158

While the Antifascist Action and all opposing groups were banned after Hitler became head of state, the antifa communist ideology never went away. From the ashes of WWII, it was absorbed and institutionalized in the official state ideology of what would become the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. From 1949 to 1990, East Germany existed as a communist state carved out of the Weimar Republic by the Soviet Union, one of WWII’s victorious Allied leaders. For over forty years, the extremely repressive conditions in East Germany exemplified what “antifa” state-building actually looks like.

The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler's the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was rather gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate those sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recognition in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical materialism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti-clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people. To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.

There are times when a society is so totally controlled by an ideology that the greatest need is that someone simply identify a point where he can say a clear no in the name of his loyalty to a higher authority. We have no right to say that those who refused to enroll in the racist crusade of Adolf Hitler should first have been obligated practically or morally to propose an alternative social strategy before they had the right to refuse.

The world, however, is indebted to Germany in a terrifying way, because she demonstrated to everyone what the ultimate conclusions of negative and destructive ideas really are. Ideas which in London or New York are repeated as seemingly harmless abstractions have been shown up by the Germans in all their blood-chilling finality. In this sense Nazi Germany has become the Gorgonian Mirror in which a decadent West could study its own features.

When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he claimed that Germany was the successor to the Holy Roman Empire that had dominated Central Europe for a thousand years. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim the past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.

It all fit. The love of power, the focus on Russia to the exclusion of the rest of the world—with an exception made perhaps only for a Napoleon or a Hitler, whose power trumped even their enemy status but who were made relevant by the fact that they had invaded Russia—this and other survey results added up to a totalitarian mind-set. The only consideration that gave Gudkov pause was what seemed like an utter lack of a concept of the future. He had been taught that totalitarianism presupposed the image of a glorious future. But as he researched both Communist and Nazi ideologies, he came to the conclusion that the appeal of the rhetoric in both cases lay in archaic, primitive images: a simple society, a world of “us,” a tribe. Fromm, in fact, rejected the very idea of an image of the future in Nazi ideology and stressed the “worship of the past.

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.

When she finally and after a series of chance events found herself in Hitler’s presence, she says, it was too late to resist. Today she knows that she let herself be dazzled by him – not by his ideological and political intentions, in which she never took any particular interest, but by Hitler’s personality.

Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas—implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions—from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into their souls without identifying it the various ideological vibrations emanating from school and church and arts and media and mores.

The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.

Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such eccentricities of behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. ‘He always needs people who can translate his ideologies into reality so that they can be implemented,’ Pfeffer is reported as stating. Hitler’s way was, in fact, not to hand out streams of orders to shape important political decisions. Where possible, he avoided decisions. Rather, he laid out – often in his diffuse and opinionated fashion – his ideas at length and repeatedly. These provided the general guidelines and direction for policy-making. Others had to interpret from his comments how they thought he wanted them to act and ‘work towards’ his distant objectives. ‘If they could all work in this way,’ Hitler was reported as stating from time to time, ‘if they could all strive with firm, conscious tenacity towards a common, distant goal, then the ultimate goal must one day be achieved. That mistakes will be made is human. It is a pity. But that will be overcome if a common goal is constantly adopted as a guideline.’ This instinctive way of operating, embedded in Hitler’s social-Darwinist approach, not only unleashed ferocious competition among those in the party – later in the state – trying to reach the ‘correct’ interpretation of Hitler’s intentions. It also meant that Hitler, the unchallenged fount of ideological orthodoxy by this time, could always side with those who had come out on top in the relentless struggle going on below him, with those who had best proven that they were following the ‘right guidelines’. And since only Hitler could determine this, his power position was massively enhanced.

Today we think of fascism’s most famous representative as Adolf Hitler. Yet as I mentioned earlier, Hitler didn’t consider himself a fascist. Rather, he saw himself as a National Socialist. The two ideologies are related in that they are both based on collectivism and centralized state power. They emerge, one might say, from a common point of origin. Yet they are also distinct; fascism, for instance, had no intrinsic connection with anti-Semitism in the way that National Socialism did.

We want to insure the opportunity for the German spirit to evolve, to re-establish the value of personality as an eternal priority; that is, promote the creative genius of the individual. In this way, we want to sever ties with any appearance of a listless democracy. We want to replace it with the timeless awareness that everything great can only spring from the force of the individual personality, and that everything destined to last must again be entrusted to the abilities of the individual personality.

The particular content of the idea was decidedly secondary. The ultimate utility of ideas is not their intrinsic truth but the extent to which they make a desired action possible—in Hitler’s case the destruction of your enemies, the attainment of glory, and the triumph of your race. This is important to keep in mind because Hitler’s ideological coherence left a great deal to be desired. His opportunism, pragmatism, and megalomania often overpowered any desire on his part to formulate a fixed ideological approach.

Thus the pace, justification and mode of implementation of the genocide changed repeatedly from its inception in the summer of 1941. Examining the origins of 'the final solution' in terms of a process rather than a single decision uncovers a variety of impulses given by the Nazi leadership in general, and Hitler and Himmler in particular, to the fight against the supposed global enemy of the Germans. Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist resistance movements and much else besides. What drove the exterminatory impulses of the Nazis, at every level of the hierarchy, was not the kind of contempt that stamped millions of Slavs as dispensable subhumans, but an ideologically pervasive mixture of fear and hatred, which blamed the Jews for all of Germany's ills, and sought their destruction as a matter of life and death, in the interests of Germany's survival.

revolutionaries, though claiming they want to tear down the system to be free, are in fact eager to kneel before the cruelest masters of their ideology. They are destroyers rather than creators. On some profound level they realize this and yearn to be told what role they must play in the new world of their dreams. When they are finished tearing down a civilization, they enslave themselves to Hitler, to Stalin, to any tyrant ascending, and thereafter take a drone’s pleasure in being a faithful servant of the hive, freedom forgotten.

In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His “will” is completely identical with that of the government. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation. Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes. Grünewald writes that he has never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child. Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents—and in puberty even the views by his own parents—because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Furthermore, the teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.

It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist." It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies.

In the 1930s, the Nazis borrowed the frugal image of the one-pot meal, putting it to ideological use. In 1933, Hitler’s government announced that Germans should put aside one Sunday, from October to March, to eat a one-pot meal: Eintopf. The idea was that people would save enough money in this way to donate whatever was saved to the poor. Cookbooks were hastily rewritten to take account of the new policy. One recipe collection listed no fewer than sixty-nine Eintopfs, including macaroni, goulash, Irish stew, Serbian rice soup, numerous cabbagey medleys, and Old German potato soup.

Now in his early thirties, Hitler was an undisciplined but mesmerizing orator. The Iron Cross he had earned while in the military steeled his nerve, and his time on the streets gave him an intuitive sense of what delighted audiences—and it wasn’t abstract theories or objective arguments. He used simple words and did not hesitate to tell what he later described as “colossal untruths.” He sought to incite hatred toward those he considered traitors—the “November criminals” whose treachery had cost Germany the war—and he returned each day to what Nietzsche had called the ideology “of those who feel cheated”: anti-Semitism.

The member of the Nazi hierarchy most gifted at solving problems of conscience was Himmler. He coined slogans, like the famous watchword of the S.S., taken from a Hitler speech before the S.S. in 1931, “My Honor is my Loyalty”—catch phrases which Eichmann called “winged words” and the judges “empty talk”—and issued them, as Eichmann recalled, “around the turn of the year,” presumably along with a Christmas bonus. Eichmann remembered only one of them and kept repeating it: “These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again,” alluding to the “battles” against women, children, old people, and other “useless mouths.” Other such phrases, taken from speeches Himmler made to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen and the Higher S.S. and Police Leaders, were: “To have stuck it out and, apart from exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written.” Or: “The order to solve the Jewish question, this was the most frightening order an organization could ever receive.” Or: We realize that what we are expecting from you is “superhuman,” to be “superhumanly inhuman.” All one can say is that their expectations were not disappointed. It is noteworthy, however, that Himmler hardly ever attempted to justify in ideological terms, and if he did, it was apparently quickly forgotten. What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique (“a great task that occurs once in two thousand years”), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This was important, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on the contrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derived physical pleasure from what they did. The troops of the Einsatzgruppen had been drafted

He was beginning to mull the nature of the postwar world. This was, of course, informed by what he had seen of Hitler and Stalin, and also by his experience in Spain. Early in the war, well before the United States entered it, he was worried about the world that would emerge from the conflict. He suggested in the spring of 1941 that totalitarianism might spread around the world. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not only forbids you to express—even to think—certain thoughts, but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life. . . .

Hitler decided upon the most astonishing political volte-face of the twentieth century.16 In total contravention to everything he had always said about his loathing of Bolshevism, he sent his new Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, to Moscow to negotiate with Josef Stalin’s new Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Placed beside the imperative for Stalin to encourage a war between Germany and the West, and the equal imperative for Hitler to fight a war on only one front rather than two as in the Great War, their Communist and Fascist ideologies subsided in relative importance, and in the early hours of 24 August 1939 a comprehensive Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact was signed. ‘All the isms have become wasms,’ quipped a British official.

Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution. They lacked the ambition of universality. Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination. But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality. And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism. They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force. The consequences were not long in appearing.

Finally, we arrive at the question of the so-called nonpolitical man. Hitler not only established his power from the very beginning with masses of people who were until then essentially nonpolitical; he also accomplished his last step to victory in March of 1933 in a "legal" manner, by mobilizing no less than five million nonvoters, that is to say, nonpolitical people. The Left parties had made every effort to win over the indifferent masses, without posing the question as to what it means "to be indifferent or nonpolitical." If an industrialist and large estate owner champions a rightist party, this is easily understood in terms of his immediate economic interests. In his case a leftist orientation would be at variance with his social situation and would, for that reason, point to irrational motives. If an industrial worker has a leftist orientation, this too is by all mean rationally consistent—it derives from his economic and social position in industry. If, however, a worker, an employee, or an official has a rightist orientation, this must be ascribed to a lack of political clarity, i.e., he is ignorant of his social position. The more a man who belongs to the broad working masses is nonpolitical, the more susceptible he is to the ideology of political reaction. To be nonpolitical is not, as one might suppose, evidence of a passive psychic condition, but of a highly active attitude, a defense against the awareness of social responsibility. The analysis of this defense against consciousness of one's social responsibility yields clear insights into a number of dark questions concerning the behavior of the broad nonpolitical strata. In the case of the average intellectual "who wants nothing to do with politics," it can easily be shown that immediate economic interests and fears related to his social position, which is dependent upon public opinion, lie at the basis of his noninvolvement. These fears cause him to make the most grotesque sacrifices with respect to his knowledge and convictions. Those people who are engaged in the production process in one way or another and are nonetheless socially irresponsible can be divided into two major groups. In the case of the one group the concept of politics is unconsciously associated with the idea of violence and physical danger, i.e., with an intense fear, which prevents them from facing life realistically. In the case of the other group, which undoubtedly constitutes the majority, social irresponsibility is based on personal conflicts and anxieties, of which the sexual anxiety is the predominant one. […] Until now the revolutionary movement has misunderstood this situation. It attempted to awaken the "nonpolitical" man by making him conscious solely of his unfulfilled economic interests. Experience teaches that the majority of these "nonpolitical" people can hardly be made to listen to anything about their socio-economic situation, whereas they are very accessible to the mystical claptrap of a National Socialist, despite the fact that the latter makes very little mention of economic interests. [This] is explained by the fact that severe sexual conflicts (in the broadest sense of the word), whether conscious or unconscious, inhibit rational thinking and the development of social responsibility. They make a person afraid and force him into a shell. If, now, such a self-encapsulated person meets a propagandist who works with faith and mysticism, meets, in other words, a fascist who works with sexual, libidinous methods, he turns his complete attention to him. This is not because the fascist program makes a greater impression on him than the liberal program, but because in his devotion to the führer and the führer's ideology, he experiences a momentary release from his unrelenting inner tension. Unconsciously, he is able to give his conflicts a different form and in this way to "solve" them.

Hans’s personal story was characterized by the nineteenth-century social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or from (village) community to (urban) society. It was experienced by millions of Europeans during the nineteenth century and is now happening in rapidly industrializing societies such as China and Vietnam. The psychological dislocation engendered by the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the divisions and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist. Well before the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, German writers were lamenting the loss of Gemeinschaft and what they saw as the perversions of a cosmopolitan liberal society.

You could be Aryan Nations but not a Skinhead, depending on whether or not you bought into Christian Identity theology. White Supremacists were more academic, publishing treatises; Skinheads were more violent, preferring to teach a lesson with their fists. White Separatists were the guys buying land in North Dakota and trying to divide the country so that anyone nonwhite would be kicked over the perimeter they created. Neo-Nazis were a cross between Aryan Nations and the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons—if there was a violent street gang criminal element to the Movement, they were it. There were Odinists and Creationists and disciples of the World Church of the Creator. But in spite of the ideology that split us into factions, we’d all come together one day of the year to celebrate: April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler.

THE BEGINNING THERE WERE many of us, and we were all different. You could be Aryan Nations but not a Skinhead, depending on whether or not you bought into Christian Identity theology. White Supremacists were more academic, publishing treatises; Skinheads were more violent, preferring to teach a lesson with their fists. White Separatists were the guys buying land in North Dakota and trying to divide the country so that anyone nonwhite would be kicked over the perimeter they created. Neo-Nazis were a cross between Aryan Nations and the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons—if there was a violent street gang criminal element to the Movement, they were it. There were Odinists and Creationists and disciples of the World Church of the Creator. But in spite of the ideology that split us into factions, we’d all come together one day of the year to celebrate: April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler

Nazi ideology was an answer to every dimension of Germany’s vulnerability to the world. Some of this the Nazis spelled out clearly at the time, and it contributed to their popularity. Some of it they only hinted at, or they did not explain the full implications of what they planned to do. Their commitment to withdrawing from the world economy, from trade deals, and from all the financial arrangements that were part of the gold standard, was explicit. As early as the Twenty-Five Points, the Nazis had been clear that noncitizens, including refugees and all Jews, could not count on remaining in Germany after a Nazi takeover or on having any political or civil rights. Even before 1933, the Nazis’ paramilitary forces were deploying themselves covertly for defense of the eastern border. The Nazis left no doubt at all that they would ban the Communist Party and that all Communist activists would be subject to arrest, or worse.

You’ll see the day, ten years from now, when Adolf Hitler will occupy precisely the same position in Germany that Jesus Christ has now. —REINHARD HEYDRICH One sometimes hears that Hitler was a Christian. He was certainly not, but neither was he openly anti-Christian, as most of his top lieutenants were. What helped him aggrandize power, he approved of, and what prevented it, he did not. He was utterly pragmatic. In public he often made comments that made him sound pro-church or pro-Christian, but there can be no question that he said these things cynically, for political gain. In private, he possessed an unblemished record of statements against Christianity and Christians. Especially early in his career, Hitler wished to appear as a typical German, so he praised the churches as bastions of morality and traditional values. But he also felt that, in time, the churches would adapt to the National Socialist way of thinking. They would eventually be made into vessels for Nazi ideology, so it little served his purposes to destroy them. It would be easier to change what already existed and benefit from whatever cultural cachet they possessed. 166

Yet, it was precisely our failure to differentiate between work and politics, between reality and illusion; it was precisely our mistake of conceiving of politics as a rational human activity comparable to the sowing of seeds or the construction of buildings that was responsible for the fact that a painter who failed to make the grade was able to plunge the whole world into misery. And I have stressed again and again that the main purpose of this book—which, after all, was not written merely for the fun of it—was to demonstrate these catastrophic errors in human thinking and to eliminate irrationalism from politics. It is an essential part of our social tragedy that the farmer, the industrial worker, the physician, etc., do not influence social existence solely through their social activities, but also and even predominantly through their political ideologies. For political activity hinders objective and professional activity; it splits every profession into inimical ideologic groups; creates a dichotomy in the body of industrial workers; limits the activity of the medical profession and harms the patients. In short, it is precisely political activity that prevents the realization of that which it pretends to fight for: peace, work, security, international cooperation, free objective speech, freedom of religion, etc.

Contrary to “the mantra,” White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46. At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie[1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, "the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler," whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, "creating an SS vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."   "In

The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism". Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies--we can call them totalitarian for now--attract the same types of people. Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as the economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary". What mattered to him was German identity politics.

More to the point, one cannot understand The Holocaust without understanding the intentions, ideology, and mechanisms that were put in place in 1933. The eugenics movement may have come to a catastrophic crescendo with the Hitler regime, but the political movement, the world-view, the ideology, and the science that aspired to breed humans like prized horses began almost 100 years earlier. More poignantly, the ideology and those legal and governmental mechanisms of a eugenic world-view inevitably lead back to the British and American counterparts that Hitler’s scientists collaborated with. Posterity must gain understanding of the players that made eugenics a respectable scientific and political movement, as Hitler’s regime was able to evade wholesale condemnation in those critical years between 1933 and 1943 precisely because eugenics had gained international acceptance. As this book will evidence, Hitler’s infamous 1933 laws mimicked those already in place in the United States, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Canada. So what is this scientific and political movement that for 100 years aspired to breed humans like dogs or horses? Eugenics is quite literally, as defined by its principal proponents, an attempt at “directing evolution” by controlling any aspect of human existence that affects human heredity. From its onset, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the man credited with the creation of the science of eugenics, knew that the cause of eugenics had to be observed with religious fervor and dedication. As the quote on the opening pages of this book illustrates, a eugenicist must “intrude, intrude, intrude.” A vigilant control over anything and everything that affects the gene pool is essential to eugenics. The policies could not allow for the individual to enjoy self-government or self-determination any more than a horse breeder can allow the animals to determine whom to breed with. One simply cannot breed humans like horses without imbuing the state with the level of control a farmer has over its livestock, not only controlling procreation, but also the diet, access to medical services, and living conditions.

St Alexander, his friends, and mentors opposed National Socialism primarily from the standpoint of their Christian faith. They perceived Nazi ideology as an assault on Truth. In the ambition of the Nazi creed to destroy the existing order of society, in its fierce determination to annihilate Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and all whom it deemed unworthy of existence, the White Rose saw an assault on the very concept of Man who was created in God’s image. It was an assault on God himself. The authors of the White Rose leaflets, Alexander and Hans, ascribe a spiritual significance to their resistance to Nazism, which they call “the dictatorship of evil.”255 In their fourth leaflet, they present this resistance as a struggle against “the National Socialist terrorist state … the struggle against the devil, against the servants of Antichrist.” It is of utmost importance, they continue, to realize that everywhere and at all times, demons have been lurking in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in the order of Creation as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, separates himself from the powers of a higher order and, after voluntarily taking the first step, is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating pace. One must therefore cling to God, as “of course man is free, but without God he is defenseless against evil. He is like a rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air.” The accuracy of the young people’s perception of the fundamental antagonism of National Socialism to Christianity was corroborated by the Nazis themselves (although, like the Communists in Russia, they made efforts to disguise and deny this). In a secret circular of June 9, 1941, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s second in command, divulged the fact that the repressive measures against the Churches of Germany were aimed against Christianity itself. The circular opened with the following words: “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”256 In a private conversation, the head of the dreaded SS, Heinrich Himmler, boasted that “We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity.

another showed him back in Berlin, reviewing a throng of grateful Germans from the balcony of the German chancery. He had led Germany to military glory against all odds. The Third Reich built by his Nazis seemed invincible. Yet the restless erstwhile artist and miracle-working warlord was not finished. In fact, the most ambitious act of Nazi world building was yet to come. In Mein Kampf Hitler had made it abundantly clear that the long-term plan of National Socialism was the elimination of the Jews and the enslavement of the Slavs. Both goals were contingent on the conquest of the Soviet Union. Since a large percentage of European Jewry lived within her borders and those of Poland, a war in the east was necessary. Poland had now fallen, and German military forces were already sweeping through the country rounding up its Jewish citizenry. But the Soviet Union—the heart of “Jewish-Bolshevism”—remained untouched. To overcome the Aryans’ greatest racial enemy and subdue the Slavs, a full-scale invasion was necessary. As 1941 opened, then, Hitler prepared for what came to be known as Operation Barbarossa. Bringing Nazi ideology to fulfillment, it proved to be the greatest invasion in history. Hitler before the Eiffel Tower Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Russia were laid out in a series of meetings and reports during the spring. They were defined by a combination of utopian vision and nihilistic contempt. Gathering his generals before him on March 30, the leader declared that the coming struggle was not merely one of army against army but of culture against culture. It would be a “clash of two ideologies,” he explained. The Communists and Nazis had erected their states on the ruins of Christendom. Both Christianity, with its principle of charity, and humanism, with its celebration of autonomous individual dignity, were bankrupt. Wars in the past, he observed, had accommodated such values. But mercy and chivalry were now dead. Between opposing armies, he declared “we must forget the notion” of sympathy.150 The coming conflict will be “a war of annihilation.”151 Hitler’s generals got the message. One, Erich Hoepner (d. 1944), subsequently declared to his men with a combination of Darwinian objectivity and Nietzschean ruthlessness: The war against Russia is an essential phase in the German nation’s struggle for existence. It is the ancient struggle of the Germanic peoples against Slavdom, the defense of European culture against the Muscovite-Asiatic tide, the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. That struggle must have as its aim the shattering of present-day Russia and therefore be waged with unprecedented hardness.

Year after year, they are joined by a new age group from Germany’s youth, totally educated in accordance with National Socialist principles, forged together by the ideas of our Volksgemeinschaft, and willing to move against anyone who should dare to sin against our fight for freedom. And just as in the time of the party’s struggle for power, our female party comrades, our German women and girls, were the most reliable supports of the movement, so now again the multitude of our women and girls form the strongest element in the struggle for the preservation of our Volk. After all, thank God, not only the Jews in London and New York but also those in Moscow made clear what fate might be in store for the German Volk. We are determined to be no less clear in our answer. This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan but with the extermination of the Jew in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people, even of our enemies. State after state will be forced, in the course of its fight against us, to apply National Socialist theories in waging this war that was provoked by them. And in so doing, it will become aware of the curse that the criminal work of Jewry has laid over all people, especially through this war. As our enemies thought in 1923 that the National Socialist Party was defeated for good and that I was finished with in the eyes of the German Volk because of my trial, so they actually helped National Socialist ideology to spread like wildfire through the entire German Volk and convey the essence of Jewry to so many million men, as we ourselves would never have been able to do under normal circumstances. In the same manner international Jewry, which instigated this new war, will find out that nation after nation engrosses itself more and more in this question to become finally aware of the great danger presented by this international problem. Above all, this war proves the irrefutable identity of plutocracy and Bolshevism, and the common ambition of all Jews to exploit nations and make them the slaves of their international guild of criminals. The same alliance we once faced as our common enemies in Germany, an alliance between the stock exchange in Frankfurt and the “Red Flag” in Berlin, now again exists between the Jewish banking houses in New York, the Jewishplutocratic class of leaders in London, and the Jews in the Kremlin in Moscow. Just as the German Volk successfully fought the Jewish enemy at home as a consequence of this realization and is now about to finish it off for good, the other nations will increasingly find themselves again in the course of this war. Together, they will make a stand against that race that is seeking to destroy all of them. Proclamation for the 23th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Hermann Esser) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1943

Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get. My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago. Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so. Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.' The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious. Utopian faith is a helluva drug.

If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, "fascism is an ideology." The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or "worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology - an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project... It would seem to follow that we should "start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes." Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an "ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing. The other "isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman's business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other's reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville. In a way utterly unlike the classical "isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this. "We [Fascists] don't think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities." The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.

Speech to the German Folk January 30, 1944 Without January 30, 1933, and without the National Socialist revolution, without the tremendous domestic cleansing and construction efforts, there would be no factor today that could oppose the Bolshevik colossus. After all, Germany was itself so ill at the time, so weakened by the spreading Jewish infection, that it could hardly think of overcoming the Bolshevik danger at home, not to mention abroad. The economic ruin brought about by the Jews as in other countries, the unemployment of millions of Germans, the destruction of peasantry, trade, and industry only prepared the way for the planned internal collapse. This was furthered by support for the continued existence of a senseless state of classes, which could only serve to transform the reason of the masses into hatred in order to make them the willing instrument of the Bolshevik revolution. By mobilizing the proletarian slaves, the Jews hoped that, following the destruction of the national intelligentsia, they could all the more reduce them for good to coolies. But even if this process of the Bolshevik revolt in the interior of Germany had not led to complete success, the state with its democratic Weimar constitution would have been reduced to something ridiculously helpless in view of the great tasks of current world politics. In order to be armed for this confrontation, not only the problems of political power but also the social and economic problems had to be resolved. When National Socialism undertook the realization of its program eleven years ago, it managed just in time to build up a state that did not only have the strength at home but also the power abroad to fulfill the same European mission which first Greece fulfilled in antiquity by opposing the Persians, then Rome [by opposing] the Carthaginians, and the Occident in later centuries by opposing the invasions from the east. Therefore, in the year 1933, we set ourselves four great tasks among many others. On their resolution depended not only the future of the Reich but also the rescue of Europe, perhaps even of the entire human civilization: 1. The Reich had to regain the internal social peace that it had lost by resolving the social questions. That meant that the elements of a division into classes bourgeoisie and proletariat-had to be eliminated in their various manifestations and be replaced by a Volksgemeinschaft. The appeal to reason had to be supplemented by the merciless eradication of the base elements of resistance in all camps. 2. The social and political unification of the nation had to be supplemented by a national, political one. This meant that the body of the Reich, which was not only politically, but also governmentally divided, had to be replaced by a unified National Socialist state, the construction and leadership of which were suited to oppose and withstand even the heaviest attacks and severest tests of the future. 3. The nationally and politically coherent centralized state had the mission of immediately creating a Wehrmacht, whose ideology, moral attitude, numerical strength, and material equipment could serve as an instrument of self-assertion. After the outside world had rejected all German offers for a limitation of armament, the Reich had to fashion its own armament accordingly. 4. In order to secure its continued existence in Europe with the prospect of actual success, it was necessary to integrate all those countries which were inhabited by Germans, or were areas which had belonged to the German Reich for over a thousand years and which, in terms of their national substance and economy, were indispensable to the preservation of the Reich, that is, for its political and military defense. Only the resolution of all these tasks could result in the creation of that state which was capable, at home and abroad, of waging the fight for its defense and for the preservation of the European family of nations.

The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.

The basic theme of a hostile environment that seeks to destroy the ideology has many variations. Hitler fought his life-and-death struggle against a coalition (constructed by him alone) of 'Jewish, plutocratic and Bolshevik powers supported by the Vatican'; Ulrike Meinhof's indignation was directed against 'the German parliamentary coalition, the American government, the police, the state and university authorities, the bourgeois, the Shah of Iran, the multinational corporations, the capitalist system'; the opponents of nuclear energy imagine themselves up against a powerful, monolithic alliance of irresponsible corporations, the powers of high finance, and all the institutions that are slave to it: courts, authorities, universities, as well as other research institutions, and political parties.

The typical self-centered goals of a young Midwestern white man were absent. I had no interest in McMansions, Rolexes, or Range Rovers. I just liked to get fucked up and fuck things and other people up.               Maybe I was looking for something to believe in when the planets aligned to set me down that path. I was drawn to racist ideology because I felt like white people were getting shafted. We were the underdogs. It was us against the world in an epic battle for forever. Such romance! Yes, I have a tendency to make it sound that way, which I guess is really just getting back in that moment, because the taint we cast upon reality definitely had that saga feel. And that was by design. Hitler did it with the torch-lit ceremony and iconic swastika. It felt like you were Beowulf, Siegfried, and Conan all rolled into one. Just a big fucking game of Dungeons & Dragons, till death and prison inevitably show up. Then the shit is real. Then comes the real challenge, the true test of will.

To be arrested on ideological grounds - Communism - implied torture and long prison sentences. Moscow propaganda fell on very willing ears in those years when the antisemitism of Hitler had poisoned masses of people in Europe. We felt so lost and hopeless, that we wanted to believe that there was hope for rescue.

Quoting page 56-57: Most important for the content of immigration reform, the driving force at the core of this movement, reaching back to the 1920s, were Jewish organizations long active in opposing racial and ethnic quotas. These included the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the American Federation of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jewish members of Congress, particularly representatives from New York and Chicago, had maintained steady but largely ineffective pressure against the national origins quotas since the 1920s. But the war against Hitler and the postwar movement against colonialism sharply changed the ideological and moral environment, putting defenders of racial, caste, and ethnic hierarchies on the defensive. Jewish political leaders in New York, most prominently Governor Herbert Lehman, had pioneered in the 1940s in passing state antidiscrimination legislation. Importantly, these statutes and executive orders added “national origin” to race, color, and religion as impermissible grounds for discrimination. Following the shock of the Holocaust, Jewish leaders had been especially active in Washington in furthering immigration reform. To the public, the most visible evidence of the immigration reform drive was played by Jewish legislative leaders, such as Representative Celler and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. Less visible, but equally important, were the efforts of key advisers on presidential and agency staffs. These included senior policy advisers such as Julius Edelson and Harry Rosenfield in the Truman administration, Maxwell Rabb in the Eisenhower White House, and presidential aide Myer Feldman, assistant secretary of state Abba Schwartz, and deputy attorney general Norbert Schlei in the Kennedy-Johnson administration.

There are two kinds of Fascists: those who give orders and those who take them. A popular base gives Fascism the legs it needs to march, the lungs it uses to proclaim, and the muscle it relies on to menace—but that’s Fascism from the neck down. To create tyranny out of the fears and hopes of average people, money is required, and so, too, ambition and twisted ideas. It is the combination that kills. In the absence of wealthy backers, we likely would never have heard of Corporal Mussolini or Corporal Hitler. In the absence of their compulsion to dominate at all costs, neither would have caused the harm he did. Most political movements of appreciable size are populist to one degree or another, but that doesn’t make them Fascist, or even intolerant. Whether they seek to limit immigration or expand it, criticize Islam or defend it, lobby for peace or agitate for war, all are democratic, provided they pursue their goals by democratic means. What makes a movement Fascist is not ideology but the willingness to do whatever is necessary—including the use of force and trampling on the rights of others—to achieve victory and command obedience.

Hitler believed in the Aryan ideology, but he wanted the betterment of the whole community and not that of an individual. Which terms contradict each other in themselves.

The true definition of the word Aryan is not far from the ideologies of natural selection taught in Darwinism. The latter is idolized while the former is demonized by society, but they all speak the same language.

was because you had a small penis and the other side had run out of arguments and resorted to third-grade tactics. Every belief was labeled as extreme. Every ideology was decried as far this or far that. Everyone else was either a racist, a misogynist, or a homophobe, Islamophobe, or ammophobe. And everyone was Hitler. Part of the problem was that everyone was an expert on everything so any chance for debate was quashed by superior credentials such as, “I read it on Wikipedia,” or “the TV station that thinks like I do agrees with me and told me everyone else was too stupid to understand.” Opinions were treated like concealed weapons, and every time one was offered it was a showdown. Words turned to sticks and stones and hurt people everywhere. People grew afraid of someone who didn’t agree with them. Friendships were called off, family was ostracized, and we all went to our separate corners to gloat and pout. But even that didn’t help, because the rules of acceptable beliefs within each group became so complex they began to conflict with one another, and it became a choir-to-choir shouting match. Even atheists were trying to prove they were holier than thou. Irony went completely unnoticed. There was no pleasing anyone. In the end it was best if you just didn’t feel anything at all. - An entry from the journal of the Post-Apocalyptic Nomadic Warrior dated “after

Totalitarianism served as the political idea of fascist dictators. Notorious Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy used totalitarianism as an ideological tool to justify their fascist dictatorship. The fascist dictators stamped out even the most elementary democratic freedom and rights of the masses of the working people and enforced unprecedentedly tyrannical policies, behind the misleading name of "national socialism", claiming that for the sake of the whole nation and the whole state no working-class movement and no class struggle could be permitted. The reactionary nature of totalitarianism is that the interests of the working people are sacrificed for the sake of the rapacious interests of the reactionary ruling class under the pretence that the individual should be subordinated to the whole. What is meant by the whole in totalitarianism is not the whole of the popular masses but a tiny handful of privileged circles such as monopoly capitalists, major landowners, reactionary bureaucrats and warlords.

Radical leftists admit their admiration for the radical ideologies of Marxism and Democratic-Socialism. Marxism is the baby of Communism and a form of Democratic-Socialism that molded the manifesto for German Fascism under Hitler. When do we, who love religious freedom and free speech, say, “Enough is enough?” and how can anyone drain a swamp with more alligators than there is water?

ideology, a kind of conversion experience in which the unsettlement of the war, the experience of revolution, and emotional attachment to the idea of the nation created a generation that incorporated the revolutionary message of the National Socialists.

In Germany, there was a romantic tradition in literature and culture that took cities to be the cause of social ills, and the countryside as a purifying element. National Socialist ideology took this to extremes: Pure German values were rural values, realized in peasant life; the cities, by contrast, were sites of racial defilement, where pure Nordic blood was ruined by mixture with others. As Hitler writes in the second chapter of his unpublished Second Book:

And yet, as a Red Army officer, she was heading into a new battle. History was pivoting around her. Before the war, she had spied against fascists and anti-communists, Chinese, Japanese, and German; during the conflict, she had spied against both the Nazis and the Allies; after it, and henceforth, she would be spying against the West, the new enemies in a Cold War. A photograph of the Summertown neighborhood victory party includes a beaming Ursula, happily celebrating Hitler’s downfall. One man is wearing an army uniform. Another raises two fingers in the V for Victory sign. But behind the image of shared relief, triumph, and optimism lay a hidden ideological divergence that would soon erupt in a new conflict. “Everyone hoped for a better world,” she wrote. “But here our visions of the future differed.” — TWO MONTHS LATER, in the remote deserts of New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, in a test code-named “Trinity,” releasing a blast equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT.

- Hitler prepared for battle by infiltrating Frances airwaves. Germany hired native-French broadcasters to unsuspecting listeners to tune in to amusing radio shows and music. Many listeners were oblivious to the propaganda was subtly included. These radio commentators expressed worry over the German army’s dominance and military strength, and predicted that France could not withstand an attack, The doubt Hitler’s radio programs planted in French minds quickly spread. Edmond Taylor, a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune who lived in France during this period, witnessed Hitler’s intricately choreographed propaganda campaign and how it crumbled Frances resolve. Describing it as a “strategy of terror,’ Taylor reported that Germany spent enormous amounts on propaganda and even bribed French newspapers to publish stories that confirmed the rumors of Germany’s superiority. According to Taylor, Germany’s war of ideas planted a sense of dread “in the of France that spread like a monstrous cancer, devouring all ocher emotional faculties [with] an irrational fear [that was] … uncontrollable.” So weakened was the confidence of the French that something as innocuous as a test of Frances air-raid-siren system generated ripples of panic; the mere innuendo of invasion somehow reinforced the idea that France would undoubtedly be defeated. Although the French government made a late attempt at launching an ideological counteroffensive by publicizing the need to defend freedom, it was as effective as telling citizens to protect themselves from a hurricane by opening an umbrella. When the invasion finally did come, France capitulated in six weeks. By similarly destroying the resolve of his enemies before invading them, Hitler defeated Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway. Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in addition to France, all in under a year. Over 230 million Europeans, once free, fell under Nazi rule.

Here are the ominous parallels. Our universities are strongholds of German philosophy disseminating every key idea of the post-Kantian axis, down by now to old-world racism and romanticist technology-hatred. Our culture is modernism worn-out but recycled, with heavy infusions of such Weimarian blends as astrology and Marx, or Freud and Dada, or “humanitarianism” and horror-worship, along with five decades of corruption built on this kind of base. Our youth activists, those reared on the latest viewpoints at the best universities, are the pre-Hitler youth movement resurrected (this time mostly on the political left and addicted to drugs). Our political parties are the Weimar coalition over again, offering the same pressure-group pragmatism, and the same kind of contradiction between their Enlightenment antecedents and their statist commitments. The liberals, more anti-ideological than the moderate German left, have given up even talking about long-range plans and demand more controls as a matter of routine, on a purely ad hoc basis. The conservatives, much less confident than the nationalist German right, are conniving at this routine and apologizing for the remnants of their own tradition, capitalism (because of its clash with the altruist ethics)—while demanding government intervention in or control over the realms of morality, religion, sex, literature, education, science. Each of these groups, observing the authoritarian element in the other, accuses it of Fascist tendencies; the charge is true on both sides. Each group, like its Weimar counterpart, is contributing to the same result: the atmosphere of chronic crisis, and the kinds of controls, inherent in an advanced mixed economy. The result of this result, as in Germany, is the growth of national bewilderment or despair, and of the governmental apparatus necessary for dictatorship. In America, the idea of public ownership of the means of production is a dead issue. Our intellectual and political leaders are content to retain the forms of private property, with public control over its use and disposal. This means: in regard to economic issues, the country’s leadership is working to achieve not the communist version of dictatorship, but the Nazi version. Throughout its history, in every important cultural and political area, the United States, thanks to its distinctive base, always lagged behind the destructive trends of Germany and of the rest of the modern world. We are catching up now. We are still the freest country on earth. There is no totalitarian (or even openly socialist) party of any size here, no avowed candidate for the office of Führer, no economic or political catastrophe sufficient to make such a party or man possible—so far—and few zealots of collectivism left to urge an ever faster pursuit of national suicide. We are drifting to the future, not moving purposefully. But we are drifting as Germany moved, in the same direction, for the same kind of reason.

Orwellian over-use of the terms “Nazi” and “Fascist” and “Third Reich” is a deceitful lesson to trick students into supporting the word that Hitler DID use in a glowing manner to describe his own ideology: SOCIALISM.

In their own way, the Hungarian troops were as brutal as the SS. Most of the officers were well groomed, with pomaded hair, and had instilled in their mostly illiterate men an anti-Semitic fascist ideology that was on par with anything the SS could provide. They were callous and apt to shoot inmates for entertainment. Their main duty was to protect the kitchens, and they would stand in the square between the barracks taking shots at the prisoners foraging for scraps, killing dozens of them.9 Some retained a mystic devotion to the Nazi cause. One told a Jewish woman that he regretted the work of exterminating her people remained incomplete, telling her that Hitler would surely return, “and again we shall fight side by side.

Hitler did not refer to his movement as “Nazism,” nor as “Fascism,” nor as the “Third Reich.”[2]  Orwellian over-use of the terms “Nazi” and “Fascist” and “Third Reich” is a deceitful lesson to trick students into supporting the word that Hitler DID use in a glowing manner to describe his own ideology: SOCIALISM.

His success as a demagogue lay in his ability to say what the disaffected masses wanted to hear, to speak their language – to capture and exploit a psychology of despair and invest it with new hope for a phoenix-like resurgence of the nation. He was able as no one else to give voice to popular hatreds, resentments, hopes, and expectations. He spoke more stridently, more vehemently, more expressively and appealingly than any of those with a similar ideological message. He was the mouthpiece of the nationalist masses at a decisive time of all-embracing national crisis.

most revolutionaries, though claiming they want to tear down the system to be free, are in fact eager to kneel before the cruelest masters of their ideology. They are destroyers rather than creators. On some profound level they realize this and yearn to be told what role they must play in the new world of their dreams. When they are finished tearing down a civilization, they enslave themselves to Hitler, to Stalin, to any tyrant ascending, and thereafter take a drone’s pleasure in being a faithful servant of the hive, freedom forgotten.

The blindness of the weeklies towards Nazism was the blindness of liberalism. At the core of Nazi ideology stood the concept of race; it interpreted history as a necessary and perpetual conflict of races; and it conceived of morality as a function of racial well-being. Such doctrine was directly antithetical to the precepts of liberalism. Liberals flatly denied its truth and refused to believe that a 'civilised' nation of 70 millions could subscribe to it, let alone base domestic and foreign policies upon it. When faced with the evidence of Hitler's rule, many looked on with despairing and total incomprehension.

We should recognize that the main struggle may no longer develop between the two seemingly so logical antipoles of “Left” and “Right” (which, in themselves, are already outdated nineteenth-century designations) but between two divergent forces of the so-called “Right.” We should hberate oiuselves from accustomed ideological categories as we observe Europe in the last hundred years. The most outstanding figures have been men of the “Right”: a Bismarck, a Churchill, a Mussolini, a Hitler, perhaps an Adenauer, a De Gaulle; so were most of the outstanding thinkers, from Nietzsche to Ortega; artists, poets, writers, historians, from Wagner to Yeats, from Ibsen to Orwell, the great anxious talents moved steadily “rightward” during their lifetime; and for the first time since the Counter Reformation conversions have been flowing almost unilaterally toward Catholicism. Of course it is true that meanwhile the European aristocracies, and with them all class difiFerences, have gradually disappeared, that the practices of popular sovereignty, of universal suffrage, of universal education have become accepted everywhere as part and parcel of the modem welfare state; that, therefore, the structure of European society has become more and more social and democratic. But this structural development is not specifically European but global. What is specifically European within it is a spiritual movement to the “Right,” a movement which is, at its best, instinctively conservative and which, at its worst, has been shot through with disgust against the tiring regimen of Reason. It is within these divergences that the meaning of the European Revolution appears.

Readers were drawn to publications that confirmed their own ideological leanings, not to those that challenged them. The Berlin-based Vossische Zeitung touted liberal views that appealed to intellectuals and other elites.

Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.6

To most Liberals, the concept of political ideology was both alien and abhorrent. Liberalism rejected the rule of dogma and absolutes in politics; it refused to believe that unswerving doctrine should or could be translated into policy. It therefore attempted, in the thirties, to dismiss the notion that Germany under Hitler was in fact governed by the ideology and precepts embodied in Mein Kampf. Even years of Hitlerite persecution at home and Nazi aggression abroad failed to convince many that here indeed was an ideology on the path of fulfilment. No doubt, the refusal of many Britons to admit this stemmed in some measure from a realization of the consequences if it were indeed true: if Nazi ideology was as malign as its detractors contended, and was being enacted, then the prospects for Europe were indeed bleak.

World you won the war against Man called Hitler But You lost the War against His ideology. He's still alive in different faces with different Name

The Reformation is one root of the idea of human freedom and autonomy as it is represented in modern democracy. However, while this aspect is always stressed, especially in non-Catholic countries, its other aspect—its emphasis on the wickedness of human nature, it insignificance and powerlessness of the individual, and the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside himself—is neglected. This idea of the unworthiness of the individual, his fundamental inability to rely on himself and his need to submit, is also the main theme of Hitler's ideology, which, however, lacks the emphasis on freedom and moral principles which was inherent to Protestantism.

The demolition of the wall of silence, against which the theme of child abuse constantly runs up, marks only the beginning of a long overdue development. It creates the conditions that make it possible to free the truth from the prison of misleading opinions and well-established lies. But for the full unfolding of the truth and its deployment in the service of life, more is required than a merely statistical grasp of the facts. Some people may, for instance, say, "Yes, I was often spanked as a child," while remaining, emotionally, miles from the truth—because they cannot feel. They lack the consciousness, the emotional knowledge, of what it means, as small, defenseless children, to be beaten and shoved around by incensed adults. They say the word "spanked" but thereby identify with the mindless, destructive behavior of the adult who violates, abuses, and destroys the child without the slightest knowledge of or concern for what he is doing and what it may result in. Even Adolf Hitler never denied that he had been beaten. What he denied was that these beatings were painful. And by totally falsifying his feelings, he would become a mass murderer. That would never have occurred had he been capable of feeling, and weeping about, his situation and had he not repressed his justifiable hatred of those responsible for his distress but consciously experienced and comprehended it. Instead he perverted this hatred into ideology. The same holds for Stalin, Ceausescu, and all the other beaten and humiliated children who later turn into tyrants and criminals.

War is incidental to ideology, and this was certainly true for the war instigated by Adolf Hitler. Historians have aptly documented that Hitler knew he needed the fog of war and a radicalized population in order to enact the most extreme policies. This was equally true for both Germans and the people of their conquered territories. The war allowed Hitler the cover and justification to radicalize the T4 Euthanasia program against those lives deemed “not worth living” by pointing to the costs of maintaining those “useless eaters” during a time of war. It allowed license for Karl Brandt to “clear hospital beds” in the name of the war effort. The war’s conquered territory also brought conquered populations and increased the number of “unfit” and “undesired” population, including the Jewish population of Eastern Europe. The methods and technology of the T4 Euthanasia program were subsequently transferred from the German hospitals to the extermination camps, doctors, nurses, equipment, and all. This transference and repurposing of resources was all decided in the infamous Wannsee Conference, which we now know was the beginning of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”:“The aim of all this was to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner.” (From the text of the Wannsee Protocol)

has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers, i.e., philosophically produced criminals—which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal. The intellectuals of the West today (as at the time of Hitler) are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did (though in different variants). Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it.

It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in the industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family...and restore the 'good old values' which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity.

By the end of that decade, Hitler’s ideological vision that had existed unchangingly from the time of Mein Kampf onwards had come sharply into focus; it had been transmuted from a distant, utopian goal into a conceivable, practical objective. As we saw, within weeks of the conquest of France, Hitler’s eyes had turned to the east, to the war he knew he had one day to fight.

No nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay. No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler", writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought". Bismarck's "top-down socialism", which delivered the eight-hour workday, healthcare, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old", he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward", he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.

In Hitler’s mind, the decisive factor was no longer professional military ability but ideological fanaticism, with which all energies should be rallied for the “final battle.

Gus came to a wrenching realization: his father was indeed a Nazi. It was difficult to fathom, but impossible to deny. The realization tore at him. He still found it too hard to believe that his father, a dispassionate man who had never said an anti-Semitic word and married a half-Jewish woman, was driven by pure Aryan ideology and genocidal rage. Instead, Gus came to view his father as a shrewd, amoral opportunist.

Gus came to a wrenching realization: his father was indeed a Nazi. It was difficult to fathom, but impossible to deny. The realization tore at him. He still found it too hard to believe that his father, a dispassionate man who had never said an anti-Semitic word and married a half-Jewish woman, was driven by pure Aryan ideology and genocidal rage. Instead, Gus came to view his father as a shrewd, amoral opportunist. Whether he was chasing German gold in Palestine, closing a business deal in America, or writing strategy memos for Adolf Eichmann, his father would see an opportunity and run to it. He seemed driven only by personal success. Morality was never a concern.

Rightful King (The Sonnet) The rightful king is one who dissolves the kingdom. The rightful politician is one who dissolves the party. The rightful ruler is one who wants only to serve. The rightful citizen is always steadfast in accountability. Long live the Queen and Heil Hitler are one and the same, For both are sign of absolute allegiance without question. Allegiance to king and country keeps a land uncivilized, Allegiance to ideology and tradition destroys all ascension. Let there be no king and queen, let there be no kingdom, Let there be no party and let there be no authoritarianism. The force that builds a world doesn't come from bloodline, For character is beyond the grasp of our puny sectarianism. In a civilized society we are all king, we are all policymaker. The world advances when we advance as its fervent keeper.

Stalin and Hitler shared much in common: difficult relations with their fathers, an early interest in the priesthood, immersion in ideologies which supported oppression in the achievement of political goals, a willingness to engage in violence and brutality, and phenomenal egos that convinced them they were the saviors of their nations.

Ideological muddle-headedness, political