Nazi Ideology Quotes

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.... Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

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

Like Nazis at a Ku Klux Klan rally, they were comfortable ideologically, but not in terms of corporate culture.

There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary. The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems, from African slavery to the Nazi Holocaust. When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous.

People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people.

Totalitarian regimes, they declared, all had at least five things in common: a dominant ideology, a single ruling party, a secret police force prepared to use terror, a monopoly on information, and a planned economy. By those criteria, the Soviet and Nazi regimes were not the only totalitarian states. Others—Mao’s China, for example—qualified too.

Anyone who can’t tell the difference between an ordinary Bernie Sanders supporter and a Stalinist revolutionary, or between Donald Trump’s average voter and a Nazi, is either willfully ignorant or needs to get out of the house more. Today, our public discourse is shockingly hyperbolic in ascribing historically murderous ideologies to the tens of millions of ordinary Americans with whom we strongly disagree. Just because you disagree with something doesn’t mean it’s hate speech or the person saying it is a deviant.

MANY STILL consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around antisemitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews. Only

Another myth of necessity is that killing is an economic imperative. While an economic motive has driven many violent ideologies--the economy of the New World was largely buttressed by slavery, and the plundering of gold and other assests as well as the unpaid labor of Nazi victims financed the German war machine--that doesn't mean the economy would collapse were the killing to cease. It is far more likely that the economic status quo would break down; the carnistic-corporate power structure, rather than the citizenry, would suffer were carnism abolished.

Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.

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.

the only ideological or political factions that have made any attempt at an ethics consistent with Darwinian science, to this point at least, have been the socialist eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and the Nazi movement that sprang from it. Obviously,

Madame la Guillotine" is the younger sister, the ideological sibling of the 2nd Amendment; both were conceived of a need to purge overbearing governments.

It is indeed not enough to say that Nazi ideology was a 'caricature' of Nietzsche, since the essence of a caricature is that it helps us to recognize the original.

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’!

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.

There is, therefore, a temptation to return to an explanation which automatically discharges the victim of responsibility: it seems quite adequate to a reality in which nothing strikes us more forcefully than the utter innocence of the individual caught in the horror machine and his utter inability to change his fate. Terror, however, is only in the last instance of its development a mere form of government. In order to establish a totalitarian regime, terror must be presented as an instrument for carrying out a specific ideology; and that ideology must have won the adherence of many, and even a majority, before terror can be stabilized. The point for the historian is that the Jews, before becoming the main victims of modern terror, were the center of Nazi ideology. And an ideology which has to persuade and mobilize people cannot choose its victim arbitrarily.

The fate of the Jews passes in a black flash, but the racial hatred that forms the core of Nazi ideology is not one of the main issues. Rather, it is Nazi Germany’s aggression, striving for world domination, and crimes against peace that dominate.

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.

But love cannot be ravaged by guns and tanks and evil ideologies. Love cannot be cut off by distance or absence, by hunger or cold, by beatings or degradations. And love can reach out across blood, whatever the Nazis believed, and make connections that are worth a million sick ideologies.

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

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.

The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere ulh, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material’. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.

The experience of the Allies who vainly tried to locate one self-confessed and convinced Nazi among the German people, 90 per cent of whom probably had been sincere sympathizers at one time or another, is not to be taken simply as a sign of human weakness or gross opportunism. Nazism as an ideology had been so fully “realized” that its content ceased to exist an an independent set of doctrines, lost its intellectual existence, so to speak; destruction of the reality therefore left almost nothing behind, least of all the fanaticism of believers.

Here we come full circle to the mutually intensifying effects of war and racism noted by John Dower, in conjunction with the insidious effects of constant propaganda and indoctrination. Pervasive racism and the resulting exclusion of the Jewish victims from any common ground with the perpetrators made it all the easier for the majority of the policemen to conform to the norms of their immediate community (the battalion) and their society at large (Nazi Germany). Here the years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and prior to the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism) dovetailed with the polarizing effects of war. The dichotomy of racially superior Germans and racially inferior Jews, central to Nazi ideology, could easily merge with the image of a beleaguered Germany surrounded by warring enemies.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus. Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his home town in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communist partisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives Conchis, as Mayor, a choice — either Conchis will execute the three partisans himself to set an example of loyalty to the new regime, or the Nazis will execute every male in the town. Should Conchis act as a collaborator with the Nazis and take on himself the direct guilt of killing three men? Or should he refuse and, by default, be responsible for the killing of over 300 men? I often use this moral riddle to determine the degree to which people are hypnotized by Ideology. The totally hypnotized, of course, have an answer at once; they know beyond doubt what is correct, because they have memorized the Rule Book. It doesn’t matter whose Rule Book they rely on — Ayn Rand’s or Joan Baez’s or the Pope’s or Lenin’s or Elephant Doody Comix — the hypnosis is indicated by lack of pause for thought, feeling and evaluation. The response is immediate because it is because mechanical. Those who are not totally hypnotized—those who have some awareness of concrete events of sensory space-time, outside their heads— find the problem terrible and terrifying and admit they don’t know any 'correct' answer. I don’t know the 'correct' answer either, and I doubt that there is one. The universe may not contain 'right' and 'wrong' answers to everything just because Ideologists want to have 'right' and 'wrong' answers in all cases, anymore than it provides hot and cold running water before humans start tinkering with it. I feel sure that, for those awakened from hypnosis, every hour of every day presents choices that are just as puzzling (although fortunately not as monstrous) as this parable. That is why it appears a terrible burden to be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is going on around you, and why most people would prefer to retreat into Ideology, abstraction, myth and self-hypnosis. To come out of our heads, then, also means to come to our senses, literally—to live with awareness of the bottle of beer on the table and the bleeding body in the street. Without polemic intent, I think this involves waking from hypnosis in a very literal sense. Only one individual can do it at a time, and nobody else can do it for you. You have to do it all alone.

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.

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

...the consequences of this shift of emphasis from the police to the military in the power game were of great consequence. It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially a police force, for the rule and even the conquest of foreign territories, with the ultimate aim of an amalgamation of the army and the police under the leadership of the SS.

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.

Nazism was, at heart, a criminal enterprise, a product of which was the Holocaust. The Nazis were gangsters and thugs. As much as they were ideologically driven, they were also greedy. Pure ideologues don't pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

In his research study Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi, social psychologist Harald Welzer came to the following conclusion: The generation of grandchildren, today’s 30- to 50-year olds, tend to know the facts about the Holocaust and often reject the Nazi ideology even more strongly than the previous generation. Their critical eye, however, is only directed at political issues—not at private affairs. The grandchildren in particular sugarcoat the role their ancestors played: Two-thirds of those questioned even stylized their forebears into heroes of the Resistance or victims of the Nazi regime themselves.

The same ingenious application of slogans, coined by others and tried out before, was apparent in the Nazis' treatment of other relevant issues. When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on the one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of "German" and "Worker" connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives—for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these things at once?

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature. "A gift of life," I responded, "if not to say, a gift of God, such as music, should not have the mocking charge of paradox leveled at it for things that are merely evidence of the fullness of its nature. One should love them." "Do you believe love is the strongest emotion?" he asked. "Do you know any stronger?" "Yes, interest." "By which you probably mean a love that has been deprived of its animal warmth, is that it?" "Let's agree on that definition!" he said with a laugh. "Good night!" We had arrived again at the Leverkühn house, and he opened his front door.

Countries that quash free inquiry, distrust reason, and practice pseudoscience, such as Revolutionary France, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and, more recently, fundamentalist Islamist states, stagnate, regress, and often collapse. Theists and postmodernist critics of science and reason often label the disastrous Soviet and Nazi utopias as “scientific,” but their science was a thin patina covering a deep layer of counter-Enlightenment, pastoral, paradisiacal fantasies of racial ideology grounded in ethnicity and geography, as documented in Claudia Koonz’s book The Nazi Conscience79 and in Ben Kiernan’s book Blood and Soil.80

Works of art were trophies that glorified leaders and the nation. Art would also reflect and legitimize the National Socialist ideals and the new human being. But the actual ideology would be underpinned by books and archives. The future would be built by a control of memory and history, on the basis of the written word. The

The white nationalist, nativist politics that we see today were first imagined and applied by David Duke during the heyday of his Grand Wizardshop, and the time of my undercover Klan investigation. This hatred is never gone away, but has been reinvigorated in the dark corners of the internet, Twitter trolls, alt-right publications, and a nativist president in Trump. The Republican Party of the 19th century, being the party of Lincoln, was the opposition to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist domination insofar as America's newly freed Black slaves were concerned; it is my belief that the Republican Party of the 21st century finds a symbiotic connection to white nationalist groups like the Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads, militias, and alt-right white supremacist thinking. Evidence of this began in the Lyndon Johnson administration with the departure of Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) to the Republican Party in protest of his civil rights agenda. The Republicans began a spiral slide to the far right that embrace all things abhorrent to nonwhites. David Duke twice ran for public office in Louisiana as a Democrat and lost. When he switched his affiliation to Republican, because he was closer in ideology and racial thinking to the GOP than to the Democrats, and ran again for the Louisiana House of Representatives, the conservative voters in his district rewarded him with a victory. In each case his position on the issues remain the same; white supremacist/ethno-nationalist endorsement of a race-centered rhetoric and nativist populism. What change were the voters. Democrats rejected Duke politics while Republicans embraced him.

Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present 'state' [Nazi Germany] in the most effective way, how he can strike it the most telling blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt. The imperialist ideology of force, from whatever side it comes, must be shattered for all time.

Like many who wondered about the rise of the Third Reich, Kelley saw connections between the growth of Nazi ideology and the presence of long-standing barbaric tendencies and prejudices in German culture. From the late nineteenth century through World War I, German leaders had preached the necessity of slaughtering enemies, setting Germans above people of neighboring countries, and recognizing their destiny to conquer others. The Nazis did not have to invent notions of the Führer principle, the folk hero who would rescue the nation, and the existence of an elite who could lead everyone else. They simply tapped into what was already present in the national atmosphere.

If socialist regimes work together, trade together, fight together, collaborate, and have fundamentally equivalent ideologies and tactics, they are genealogically related (a sort of Communist-Nazi brotherhood), which could be regarded as a Fascist-Marxist mindset. Of course, these socialist ideologues also fight each like rival siblings

Some authors have argued that a direct historical line can be drawn to Nazism from the French Revolution of 1789, the Jacobin 'Reign of Terror' in 1793-4, and the implicit idea of a popular dictatorship in Rousseau's theory of the 'General Will,' decided initially by the people but brooking no opposition once resolved upon. The French Revolution was indeed remarkable for its rehersal of many of the major ideologies that bestrode the historical stage of Europe in the following two centuries, from communism and anarchism to liberalism and conservatism. But National Socialism was not among them. The Nazis, indeed thought of themselves as undoing all the work of the French Revolution and rolling back the clock, in a political sense at least, much further to the early Middle Ages. Their concept of the people was racial rather than civic. All the ideologies to which the French Revolution had given birth were to be destroyed. The Nazi Revolution was to be the world-historical negation of its French predecessor, not its historical fufillment.

There is a book in 1935 (by Joachim Prinz, Wir Juden). This is a humanist Zionist who said that Jews should recognize that they should be sympathetic to the Nazis because they have the same kind of ideology we do. Blood and land and so on. We agree with that, if we can only explain to them that we are really on the same side, they will stop persecuting us.

our extraordinary ability to use language and symbols enables us to communicate with others personally, abstractly, over time and place. Language provides the foundation for history, planning, and social control. However, with language come rumors, lies, propaganda, stereotypes, and coercive rules. Our remarkable creative genius leads to great literature, drama, music, science, and inventions like the computer and the Internet. Yet that same creativity can be perverted into inventing torture chambers and torture tactics, into paranoid ideologies and the Nazis’ efficient system of mass murder. Any one of our special attributes contains the possibility of its opposite negative, as in the dichotomies of love–hate; pride–arrogance; self-esteem–self-loathing.2

Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then works toward those goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual, even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the fascists, nazis and communists. Our society uses it too, though less crudely. We see the same phenomenon in armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian organizations, religious or ideological movements. In particular, leftist movements tend to attract people who are seeking to satisfy their need for power.

The fundamental reason for the superiority of totalitarian propaganda over the propaganda of other parties and movements is that its content, for the members of the movement at any rate, is no longer an objective issue about which people may have opinions, but has become as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic. The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime. In Nazi Germany, questioning the validity of racism and antisemitism when nothing mattered but race origin, when a career depended upon an “Aryan” physiognomy (Himmler used to select the applicants for the SS from photographs) and the amount of food upon the number of one’s Jewish grandparents, was like questioning the existence of the world.

The people most in opposition to the rise of the Nazi movement in America has been the left, and the fallout could actually boost the prospects of the Bernie Sanders movement, as revulsion leads to an embrace of its seeming opposite. Incidentally, this is precisely why it is so important for libertarians to speak out with truth and courageous conviction. We simply cannot allow the left to be the only ideological voice of opposition.

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.

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.

It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal irresponsibility are much more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is error-correcting machinery in politics. The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directive, every change in the Prime Rate is an experiment. Every shift in economic policy, every increase or decrease in funding for Head Start, every toughening of criminal sentences is an experiment. Exchanging needles, making condoms freely available, or decriminalizing marijuana are all experiments. Doing nothing to help Abyssinia against Italy, or to prevent Nazi Germany from invading the Rhineland was an experiment. Communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and China was an experiment. Privatizing mental health care or prisons is an experiment. Japan and West Germany investing a great deal in science and technology and next to nothing on defense - and finding that their economies boomed - was an experiment. Handguns are available for self-protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common in Seattle and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. This is also an experiment. In almost all of these cases, adequate control experiments are not performed, or variables are insufficiently separated. Nevertheless, to a certain and often useful degree, such ideas can be tested. The great waste would be to ignore the results of social experiments because they seem to be ideologically unpalatable.

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.

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

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.

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

The mythology of a people is far more than a collection of pretty or terrifying fables to be retold in carefully bowdlerized form to our schoolchildren. It is the comment of the men of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind, their model for social behaviour, and their attempt to define in stories of gods and demons their perception of the inner realities. We can learn much from the mythologies of earlier peoples if we have the humility to respect ways of thought widely differing from our own. In certain respects we may be far cleverer than they, but not necessarily wiser. We cannot return to the mythological thinking of an earlier age; it is beyond our reach, like the vanished world of childhood. Even if we feel a nostalgic longing for the past, like that of Jon Keats for Ancient Greece of William Morris for medieval England, there is now no way of entry. The Nazis tries to revive the myths of ancient Germany in their ideology, but such an attempt could only lead to sterility and moral suicide. We cannot deny the demands of our own age, but this need not prevent us turning to the faith of another age with sympathetic understanding, and recapturing imaginatively some of its vanished power. It will even help us view more clearly the assumptions and beliefs of our own time

Calvin's theory of predestination has one implication which should be explicitly mentioned here, since it has found its most vigorous revival in Nazi ideology: the principle of the basic inequality of men. For Calvin there are two kinds of people—those who are saved and those who are destined to eternal damnation. Since this fate is determined before they are born and without their being able to change it by anything they do or do not do in their lives, the equality of mankind is denied in principle. Men are created unequal. This principle implies also that there is no solidarity between men, since the one factor which is the strongest basis for human solidarity is denied: the equality of man's fate. The Calvinists quite naïvely thought that they were the chosen ones and that all others were those whom God had condemned to damnation. It is obvious that this belief represented psychologically a deep contempt and hatred for other human beings—as a matter of fact, the same hatred with which they had endowed God. While modern thought has led to an increasing assertion of the equality of men, the Calvinists' principle has never been completely mute. The doctrine that men are basically unequal according to their racial background is confirmation of the same principle with a different rationalization. The psychological implications are the same.

When, then, the Social Democrat worker found himself in the economic crisis which degraded him to the status of a coolie, the development of his revolutionary sentiments was severely retarded by the conservative structuralization that had been taking shape in him for decades. Either he remained in the camp of the Social Democrats, notwithstanding his criticism and rejection of their policies, or he went over to the NSDAP [Nazi party] in search of a better replacement. Irresolute and indecisive, owing to the deep contradiction between revolutionary and conservative sentiments, disappointed by his own leadership, he followed the line of least resistance. Whether he would give up his conservative tendencies and arrive at a complete consciousness of his actual responsibility in the production process, i.e., at a revolutionary consciousness, depended solely on the correct or incorrect leadership of the revolutionary party. Thus the communist assertion that it was the Social Democrat policies that put fascism in the saddle was correct from a psychological viewpoint. Disappointment in Social Democracy, accompanied by the contradiction between wretchedness and conservative thinking, must lead to fascism if there are no revolutionary organizations. For example, following the fiasco of the Labor party's policies in England, in 1930–31, fascism began to infiltrate the workers who, then, in the election of 1931, cut away to the Right, instead of going over to communism.

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.

It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination.

half-century before, at Stalin’s direct order, NKVD executioners slaughtered fifteen thousand Polish military officers and threw the bodies into rows of mass graves. The month-long operation in Kalinin, Katyn, and Starobelsk was part of Stalin’s attempt to begin the domination of Poland. The young officers had been among the best-educated men in Poland, and Stalin saw them as a potential danger, as enemies-in-advance. For decades after, Moscow put the blame for the killings on the Nazis, saying the Germans had carried out the massacres in 1941, not the NKVD in 1940. The Kremlin propaganda machine sustained the fiction in speeches, diplomatic negotiations, and textbooks, weaving it into the vast fabric of ideology and official history that sustained the regime and its empire.

The leftist is always a statist. He has all sorts of grievances and animosities against personal initiative and private enterprise. The notion of the state doing everything (until, finally, it replaces all private existence) is the Great Leftist Dream. Thus it is a leftist tendency to have city or state schools—or to have a ministry of education controlling all aspects of education. For example, there is the famous story of the French Minister of Education who pulls out his watch and, glancing at its face, says to his visitor, “At this moment in 5,431 public elementary schools they are writing an essay on the joys of winter.” Church schools, parochial schools, private schools, or personal tutors are not at all in keeping with leftist sentiments. The reasons for this attitude are manifold. Here not only is the delight in statism involved, but the idea of uniformity and equality is also decisive; i.e., the notion that social differences in education should be eliminated and all pupils should be given a chance to acquire the same knowledge, the same type of information in the same fashion and to the same degree. This should help them to think in identical or at least in similar ways. It is only natural that this should be especially true of countries where “democratism” as an ism is being pushed. There efforts will be made to ignore the differences in IQs and in personal efforts. Sometimes marks and report cards will be eliminated and promotion from one grade to the next be made automatic. It is obvious that from a scholastic viewpoint this has disastrous results, but to a true ideologist this hardly matters. When informed that the facts did not tally with his ideas, Hegel once severely replied, “Um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen”—all the worse for the facts. Leftism does not like religion for a variety of causes. Its ideologies, its omnipotent, all-permeating state wants undivided allegiance. With religion at least one other allegiance (to God), if not also allegiance to a Church, is interposed. In dealing with organized religion, leftism knows of two widely divergent procedures. One is a form of separation of Church and State which eliminates religion from the marketplace and tries to atrophy it by not permitting it to exist anywhere outside the sacred precincts. The other is the transformation of the Church into a fully state-controlled establishment. Under these circumstances the Church is asphyxiated, not starved to death. The Nazis and the Soviets used the former method; Czechoslovakia still employs the latter.

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

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.

Only after the rise of the Nazi party and the atrocities of the Holocaust was racial science widely rejected. Subsequently, many earlier proponents of racial science began to retract or modify the claims of their previous work, and by the end of World War II, scholarly interest in race had shifted from “proving” the science of race to challenging its ontology and examining the root of racial prejudice. Then, in the 1960s, as the civil rights movement drew widespread visibility to southern racism, many Whites attempted to distance themselves from the image of the “mean racist” by abandoning any mention of race altogether. This was especially the case with respect to whiteness. Having thoroughly identified whiteness with White supremacists, many Whites simply stopped thinking of themselves as White. They crafted a color-blind racial ideology that reinforced the idea that noticing, acknowledging, or talking about race was undesirable. Likewise, noticing, acknowledging, or talking about racism was also undesirable.

When public attention was equally focused on nationalism on one hand and socialism on the other, when the two were thought to be incompatible and actually constituted the ideological watershed between the Right and the Left, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” (Nazi) offered a synthesis supposed to lead to national unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of “German” and “Worker” connected the nationalism of the Right with the internationalism of the Left. The very name of the Nazi movement stole the political contents of all other parties and pretended implicitly to incorporate them all. Combinations of supposedly antagonistic political doctrines (national-socialist, christian-social, etc.) had been tried, and successfully, before; but the Nazis realized their own combination in such a way that the whole struggle in Parliament between the socialists and the nationalists, between those who pretended to be workers first of all and those who were Germans first, appeared as a sham designed to hide ulterior sinister motives—for was not a member of the Nazi movement all these things at once?

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.

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.

We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any. It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past -- Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens -- inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and lumsy to our contemporary percetption. The trouble lies in the way these classical evildoers are pictured. They recognize themselves as evildoers and they know their souls are black. And they reason: "I cannot live unless I do evil. So I'll set my father against my brother! I'll drink the victim's sufferings until I'm drunk with them!" Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no; that's not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human beingto seek a justifaction for his actions. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they have no ideology. Ideology-- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad and in his own and other's eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will received praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their weills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Mother-land; the conolizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

Dehumanization has fueled innumerable acts of violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocides. It makes slavery, torture, and human trafficking possible. Dehumanizing others is the process by which we become accepting of violations against human nature, the human spirit, and, for many of us, violations against the central tenets of our faith. How does this happen? Maiese explains that most of us believe that people’s basic human rights should not be violated—that crimes like murder, rape, and torture are wrong. Successful dehumanizing, however, creates moral exclusion. Groups targeted based on their identity—gender, ideology, skin color, ethnicity, religion, age—are depicted as “less than” or criminal or even evil. The targeted group eventually falls out of the scope of who is naturally protected by our moral code. This is moral exclusion, and dehumanization is at its core. Dehumanizing always starts with language, often followed by images. We see this throughout history. During the Holocaust, Nazis described Jews as Untermenschen—subhuman. They called Jews rats and depicted them as disease-carrying rodents in everything from military pamphlets to children’s books. Hutus involved in the Rwanda genocide called Tutsis cockroaches. Indigenous people are often referred to as savages. Serbs called Bosnians aliens. Slave owners throughout history considered slaves subhuman animals. I know it’s hard to believe that we ourselves could ever get to a place where we would exclude people from equal moral treatment, from our basic moral values, but we’re fighting biology here. We’re hardwired to believe what we see and to attach meaning to the words we hear. We can’t pretend that every citizen who participated in or was a bystander to human atrocities was a violent psychopath. That’s not possible, it’s not true, and it misses the point. The point is that we are all vulnerable to the slow and insidious practice of dehumanizing, therefore we are all responsible for recognizing it and stopping it. THE COURAGE TO EMBRACE OUR HUMANITY Because so many time-worn systems of power have placed certain people outside the realm of what we see as human, much of our work now is more a matter of “rehumanizing.” That starts in the same place dehumanizing starts—with words and images. Today we are edging closer and closer to a world where political and ideological discourse has become

Our political system today does not engage the best minds in our country to help us get the answers and deploy the resources we need to move into the future. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve the problems we face, before it’s too late. Our goal must be to find a new way of unleashing our collective intelligence in the same way that markets have unleashed our collective productivity. “We the people” must reclaim and revitalize the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills. In an age where information has more economic value than ever before, it is obvious that education should have a higher national priority. It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education. Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well-educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different, one from the other. It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed. In the 1930s and 1940s, many members of the Nazi Party in Germany were extremely well educated—but their knowledge of literature, music, mathematics, and philosophy simply empowered them to be more effective Nazis. No matter how educated they were, no matter how well they had cultivated their intellect, they were still trapped in a web of totalitarian propaganda that mobilized them for evil purposes. The Enlightenment, for all of its liberating qualities—especially its empowerment of individuals with the ability to use reason as a source of influence and power—has also had a dark side that thoughtful people worried about from its beginning. Abstract thought, when organized into clever, self-contained, logical formulations, can sometimes have its own quasi-hypnotic effect and so completely capture the human mind as to shut out the leavening influences of everyday experience. Time and again, passionate believers in tightly organized philosophies and ideologies have closed their minds to the cries of human suffering that they inflict on others who have not yet pledged their allegiance and surrendered their minds to the same ideology. The freedoms embodied in our First Amendment represented the hard-won wisdom of the eighteenth century: that individuals must be able to fully participate in challenging, questioning, and thereby breathing human values constantly into the prevailing ideologies of their time and sharing with others the wisdom of their own experience.

In the years leading up to Hitler, many völkisch groups appeared in Germany; the English equivalent “folk” doesn’t quite convey the blend of mythology, folklore, legend, and nationalism that the German term suggests. Jung’s emphasis on history and myth, as well as his rejection of scientific materialism, made these groups sympathetic to his work, as opposed to Freud’s which, along with being Jewish, was reductionist. Although much has been made of it,29 Jung’s own connection, if any,30 to the völkisch movement is unclear. The only strong link is his friendship with the German indologist J. W. Hauer, who founded the German Faith Movement in 1932, a religious society aimed at replacing Christianity in German-speaking countries with an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic modern paganism based on German literature and Hindu scripture. Hauer, an ardent Nazi, hoped his movement would become the official religion of the Reich. Hitler, however, thought little of Hauer and laughed at his followers who “made asses of themselves by worshipping Wotan and Odin and the ancient, but now obsolete, German mythology,”31 a remark that says much about Hitler’s cynicism toward the völkisch ideology he nevertheless exploited to gain power.

It is just because we live in an active and responsible time that we need more consciousness and self-reflection,” otherwise we will be “unconsciously swept along by events.” “Mass movements,” Jung told his Nazi interviewer, “have the peculiarity of overpowering the individual by mass suggestion and making him unconscious. The political or social movement gains nothing by this when it has swarms of hypnotized camp followers.” And when Weizsäcker remarked that “in Germany today psychology is suspect . . . precisely because it is concerned with the self-development of the so-called individual,” and asked how “when the collective forces of the whole community have taken the lead in moulding our way of life, are we to assess the efforts of psychology,” Jung replied that “the self-development of the individual is especially necessary in our time” and “only the self-development of the individual, which I consider to be the supreme goal of all psychological endeavour, can produce consciously responsible spokesmen and leaders.”45 Nazism, as is well known, had no use for individuals, and Jung’s emphasis on the importance of individuals and their self-development was an outright attack on Nazi ideology. Most critics of Jung, however, fail to point this out.

by the fact of his own election, that audacity does not appear to challenge the system of power which has brought the nation an endless war, bankruptcy, recession, and high unemployment. Change aplenty and all feeding the drift toward the system described in the pages that follow. July 2009 Preface As a preliminary I want to emphasize certain aspects of the approach taken in this volume in order to avoid possible misunderstandings. Although the concept of totalitarianism is central to what follows, my thesis is not that the current American political system is an inspired replica of Nazi Germany’s or George W. Bush of Hitler.1 References to Hitler’s Germany are introduced to remind the reader of the benchmarks in a system of power that was invasive abroad, justified preemptive war as a matter of official doctrine, and repressed all opposition at home—a system that was cruel and racist in principle and practice, deeply ideological, and openly bent on world domination. Those benchmarks are introduced to illuminate tendencies

Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform. It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of a political ideology.4

We are so beguiled with ideology, we miss the fact that jihadis and neo-Nazis have a lot in common,” said John Horgan, the author of “The Psychology of Terrorism” and director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Now the leaders of the Nazi Third Reich regarded war as the natural state of human society and extermination as a desirable way of establishing the dominance of their national organization and their ideology over rival systems. The enslavement or extermination of inferior groups or nations thus became the appointed duty of those who accepted their doctrine of 'Aryan' superiority. Only in the atmosphere of constant war could totalitarian leaders command the absolute obedience and unqualified loyalty necessary for the smooth operation of such a megamachine. In conformity with these aberrations, systematic violence, brutality, torture, and sexual corruption were treated as normal, even desirable accompaniments of the 'new order.' And though all these features were openly present from the beginning, many otherwise decent people, in other countries besides Germany, openly hailed this regime as 'The Wave of the Future,' though when one examines either its doctrines or its acts, one can find in Nazism only the sewage-laden backwash of the past.

This opportunistic shift from Nazis to communists, both typically depicted as producing terrorized and mindlessly conformist hierarchical societies, suggests that the propaganda and ideology of the period generated and played upon deep-seated anxieties about regimentation and dehumanization, the sources of which can as easily be found in Eisenhower’s placid decade.

Neither Fascist Italy nor Spain adopted eugenics as an ideology central to their form of government the way the National Socialist did. However, socialist and progressive nations such as Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway did adopt and implement eugenics. This is because eugenics is the safety valve of a centrally planned economy. Central planners like John Maynard Keynes fear a population that is not as meticulously planned as the economy. They fear the unproductive sectors out-breeding the productive sectors of the population. This is also why Keynes was a lobbyist for the British eugenics movement both before and after The Holocaust.

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)

If there were a cultural issue around which, in 1945 itself, a large measure of agreement existed, it was that the new cinema in Europe should be democratic and the inema should never again be allowed to be used, as it had been in Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent Fascist Italy, as an instrument of totalitarian ideology. Over this question it was the Americans who took the lead. Following the Allied combat troops into Italy and France came the spiritual crusaders of the Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), armed not with guns but with movies, mostly documentaries but also a handful of features, designed to re-educate the peoples of formerly Fascist and occupied Europe about the virtues of democracy.

The frenzy of the cheering at the Cow Palace was reminiscent of Nazi times. . . . They [the Goldwater supporters] are the middle class gone rampant: the technocrats, the white collar workers impelled by an almost fanatical zeal. They are the result of a generation of liberal debunking, of the smug self-righteousness of so many intellectuals. . . . They have a faith not a party. The delegates walking around with stamp out Huntley and Brinkley* buttons are a new phenomenon. The delegate who said to me I am sorry the button is not big enough to include Howard K. Smith and all Eastern newspapers was a new form of delegate. This group once organized will be hard to dislodge. It will try to become the residuary legatee of all crises that are likely over the next decade. . . . The Goldwater victory is a new phenomenon in American politics—the triumph of the ideological party in the

During a world war, when fascist ideology idealizes strength and ruthlessness, Eddie represents an entirely different worldview and moral code. He is not an example of the survival of the fittest, but instead is a weak man who overcomes the overwhelming odds set against him. A greater failure than any other character Brennan ever played, Eddie draws strength from Harry and is redeemed. He is the common man, the little man, the derelict, the hanger-on, the socially marginal—in short, everything the Nazis deemed worthy of extermination. He is a fool attached to a wise man. Eddie is the underside of society that fascist ideology dismissed as unworthy to exist. He is unhealthy and dependent on charity, and yet he is an indispensable part of the humanity that Harry Morgan cannot detach himself from.

Nazi ideology was thoroughly and unabashedly self-centered.

- 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.

The Nazis were louder, growing bolder, and most of them were youths, empty of life experience and pumped full of ideology.

[Erich] Fromm observed no logic whatsoever in the ideology [of fascism]: 'Nazism never had any genuine political or economic principles. It is essential to understand that the very principle of Nazism is its radical opportunism.' What Nazi ideology and practice did have, according to Fromm, was ritual that satisfied the audience's masochistic craving: 'They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power.' And for the sadistic side of the authoritarian character, the ideology offered 'a feeling of superiority over the rest of mankind' that, Fromm wrote, was able to 'compensate them - for a time a least - for the fact that their lives had been impoverished, economically and culturally.

Pour Arendt, le succès des projets politiques bolcheviques et nazis vient du fait qu’ils s’appuyaient tous deux sur de nouvelles formes étatiques postnationales adaptées aux dimensions de l’économie mondiale : un État soviétique s’appuyant sur un vaste territoire eurasiatique, mêlant le panslavisme et le messianisme communiste au niveau mondial ; et un État nazi s’appuyant sur un Reich de dimension européenne, fondé sur le pangermanisme et un projet d’organisation hiérarchique et racialisé du monde, désormais dirigé par les plus capables. Chaque projet promet à son peuple une société sans classes, dont tous les ennemis auraient été exterminés, à la différence près que leVolksgemeinschaft nazi permet à chaque Allemand de s’imaginer propriétaire d’usines (à l’échelle mondiale), alors que le bolchevisme propose à chacun de devenir ouvrier (membre du prolétariat universel). À l’inverse, l’échec des sociaux-démocrates serait dû à leur incapacité à penser des formes fédérales nouvelles, et au fait de s’être contenté d’un internationalisme de façade, alors que la réalité de leur projet politique et de l’État social et fiscal qu’ils entreprenaient de bâtir demeurait cantonnée dans les limites étroites de l’État-nation.

There were even conservatives who, though they went along with Hitler’s nationalist goals and his anti-Weimar fulminations, opposed him because they couldn’t abide his populism—to them, he was too democratic. These individuals could be as ferocious in their opposition as any Communist. A pertinent example of the type was Friedrich Reck, a popular novelist and friend of Oswald Spengler and Gregor Strasser. He was a confirmed reactionary—a rueful monarchist and an unapologetic elitist (“increased life expectancy,” he said, “is largely due to the incubation of basically unfit children”). But to him, Hitler was the plebeian embodiment of “mass man,” “a deeply miscarried human being,” a “poor devil sprung out of a Strindbergian excremental Hell.” Reck shared many of the premises of Hitler, but no one outdid him in his detestation of “that power-drunk schizophrenic,” the “Prince of Darkness himself.” To those conservatives who grudgingly went along, the Nazis may have been a threat to law and order at the time of the putsch but not after. The greater threat, the long-term threat, was Marxism. Even if Hitler was extreme, even if he was vulgar, even if his anti-Semitism was pathologically obsessional, he remained a German nationalist of obvious talent and a useful tool in the battle against Communism. And so he would never lack for sympathizers in high places, like the judges at his treason trial, even if they looked down on him and didn’t take him as seriously as they should have. Hindenburg’s own dislike of Hitler had less to do with ideology than with simple snobbery—here was a revered German general being compelled to deal on a level of equality with an anonymous German corporal. This conservative tolerance for the Nazis (which always had the potential, as conditions worsened, to shade over into extreme nationalism and then into war crimes) finds an echo in Joachim Fest’s observation that down to 1938, Hitler could be considered a great German statesman, as well as in Henry Kissinger’s opinion that Hitler’s intentions were ambiguous—until they weren’t.

The Social Democrats wanted to believe that Marxism did the same for them, since the self-interest of workers was considered to be the engine of broad social progress. So when they promised to safeguard the economic concerns of their constituents, they were able to tell themselves that they were preaching a universal message. In reality, the Social Democrats’ Marxist ideology turned their party into one large special-interest group with no way of reaching beyond the closed circle of the working class. If you weren’t a Marxist, the Social Democrats had little or nothing to offer you, certainly not compared to the utopian allure of the Nazis. As one observer wrote, “They are incapable of issuing exciting slogans or making promises about an exciting future.

Anti-Semitism is akin to nationalism and its best ally. They are of a kind because a nation that, without territory or state power, has wandered through two thousand years of world history is a living refutation of the whole nationalist ideology that derives the concept of a nation exclusively from factors of power politics. Anti-Semitism has never had roots among workers. It has always been a middle-class and small-peasant affair. Today, when these classes face their greatest crisis, it has become to them a kind of religion, or at least a substitute for religion. Nationalism and anti-Semitism dominate the German domestic political picture. They are the barred organs of fascism, whose pseudo-revolutionary shrieks drown out the softer tremolo of social reaction.

I once welcomed the passing of Christendom and found Richard John Neuhaus's demurrers misplaced; but now, as I earlier mentioned, I am having uncomfortable second thoughts. The waning of cultural Christianity might be good for the churches, but what about society? To my chagrin, I find myself thinking that traditionally Christian lands when stripped of their historic faith are worse than others. They become unworkable or demonic. There is no reason to suppose that what happened in Nazi Germany cannot happen in liberal democracies, though the devils will no doubt be disguised very differently. From this point of view, the Christianization of culture can be in some situations the churches' major contribution to feeding the poor, clothing the hungry and liberating the imprisoned. So it was in the past and, given the disintegration of modern ideologies, so it may he at times in the future. Talk of `Christian America' and John Paul II's vision of a `Christian Europe' make me uncomfortable, but I have seen a number of totally unexpected improbabilities come to pass in my lifetime, such as Roman Catholic transformations and communism's collapse, and cannot rule these out as impossible.

Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit. The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf.” The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both. Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists” who deserved it. Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, frontsoldiers,” and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another.” Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’” The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too. But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists” and “enemies of the people.” A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

He opposed the militaristic nationalism of the new Germany, rooted in “blood and soil,” even as the German Evangelical Church and most of its leaders succumbed to the new ideology. By the early period of the war, the embrace of Nazi ideology at all levels of society had led to the complete corruption of social and personal ethical behavior among most Germans.

The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus” labor who were then “free” to work in its precocious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order. To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful. Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.