10-25-2018, 08:55 AM
(10-25-2018, 05:36 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: Olaf Stapledon on Hitler:
https://olafstapledonarchive.webs.com/be...ch2.html#8
German "National Socialism" is the culmination of the Fascist movement which began in Italy and has appeared in one form or another in every European country. I shall consider only the German form of Fascism, because, in it the true nature of Fascism is most clearly revealed.
National Socialism, or Nazism, seems to rest on a fantastic exaggeration of a fault which appears also in Russian Communism, but far less flagrantly, namely the disparagement of the individual. Another fault of Russian Communism it vehemently rejects, namely materialism; but the thing that it substitutes for materialism is something far worse, a false mysticism based on the false concept of race.
But the emotional source of Nazism is not simply bad. No great movement which gathers to itself the loyalty of millions and spurs them to extreme self-sacrifice is to be dismissed as sheer devilishness.
Eighty years later, Nazism seems literally demonic. If Bolshevism does not wallow in myth, fascism does in every one of its most violent and murderous forms (including Ku Kluxism, which shares much the same objects of hatred, if different myths). Maybe the fascism-lite versions such as those of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg in Austria, Salazar in Portugal, Pats in Estonia, Ulmanis in Latvia, Smetona in Lithuania, Pilsudski in Poland, Metaxas in Greece, and (in the better phases at the time) Horthy in Hungary were benign by contrast.
The emotional desire to extirpate whole peoples from the Earth or to allow them to survive only as slaves is itself evil, and sacrifices on behalf of such a desire is perverse.
Quote:Communists tell us that the whole Fascist movement, of which Nazism is the extreme expression, is simply a clever device by which " big business" seeks to rouse the masses against revolutionary Communism. In their view, Fascism is the last, most desperate effort of "capitalism in decline" to strengthen its waning power. No doubt big business did play an important part in launching Italian Fascism and the corresponding movements in France and Britain. No doubt it financed Hitler, and hoped to use him for its own ends. But the capitalists would not have succeeded as they did, nor would they have found themselves overmastered by the movement that they had supported, if there had not been a deep and wide- spread emotional need for the ideas and values of Fascism.
I have little question that the economic elites of any society would turn to fascism to establish the complete subjugation of the working classes and impose monopolized crony capitalism at the expense of even small-scale capitalists who would be squeezed into poverty and ruin. The United States was no exception in the 1930s and is not now. Fascists cleverly play disgruntled workers against the moderately-successful middle class (often identified as "Jews") on behalf of would-be monopolists and their lavishly-paid retainers known as executives. It is worth remembering that Weimar Germany did not have much of a middle class toward its end in part because the hyperinflation wiped out small savers and holders of insurance policies and pension funds. The German economy was itself extremely polarized between haves and have-nots due to cartels that precluded competition in business. What was much of the middle class was Jewish small-scale entrepreneurs who seemed wealthy because they had desirable wares in their front windows; never mind that the Jewish shop-owners either had those goods on consignment or were themselves heavily in debt to keep their businesses in existence.
The difference here and now in America is that our elites cannot achieve what they most fully want: an economy best described as a modern expression of feudal inequality.
Quote:In considering the causes of Nazism we have to distinguish between those influences which were at work throughout the whole Fascist movement and those which were peculiar to Germany.
Causes which were at work alike in Nazism and in other forms of Fascism, but which worked more violently in Germany because of Germany's suffering after the last war, were: revulsion against laissez- faire and a grossly individualistic social order and culture; revulsion against materialism as a theory about the world and the sources of human behaviour; revulsion against intellectualism; revulsion against the moral ideals of love and gentleness which had been so long preached and so little practised; vague revulsion against a whole civilization which had obviously gone rotten.
Halloween is coming, and it may be an unconventional opinion that the greatest horror movie ever made was Cabaret, which is often better remembered for high-quality music and the display of depraved behavior of those who patronized the cabaret that offered cynicism and sexual sleaze. But the elements of a horror movie are there: freakish characters, a creepy plot line, and bad things happening to good people. The only characters that I can like are the Jews, and we all know what will happen to them if they do not leave when the going is good. Although there are other stage variants that make different emphases, the emcee is a creepy character who shows delight (and a demonic character) at the end as straight-laced people sing "The Future Belongs to Me". The swastikas and Nazi salutes make the sexual sleaze and crass materialism look benign by contrast. The participants in the sleazy entertainment may have been creating resentments among the masses who have endured great hardships and frustrations and consider Hitler the solution to all their problems -- unemployment, economic insecurity, lack of meaning in life, nostalgia for the rural, and wounded national pride -- but they either leave when they can, become conformists in an inhuman order, or die.
The movie is styled much as a horror movie. What could be a greater horror than the rise of the most demonic figure of history destroying a shaky democracy?
Quote:The Germans had suffered more from the rottenness of western civilisation than any other European people, and therefore their disgust with it was peculiarly violent. The economic collapse after the last war spread a profound distrust of the system of free buying and selling. It also roused a strong suspicion that high finance was based on superstitious veneration for merely man-made economic laws. It prepared men for a movement which would triumphantly violate all the recognized principles. The treatment which Germany suffered from the Allies after the military defeat turned the German people against the whole civilization which the Allies claimed to be leading. The post-war orgy of sensuality and every kind of self-indulgence disgusted the more earnest kind of German, and made him seek some kind of firm moral standards.
The German economy was excellent at producing fine wares; German culture was rich and creative in ways that it would never be again; German universities were excellent; German science and technology were enviable. What Germany was not good at during the Weimar Republic was in sharing the prosperity that only a few got to enjoy. Such fostered a strong, violent, and large Communist movement that wanted to establish a German version of the Soviet Union. Germany was a rich country whose people were poor because the aristocratic elites owned the land and a few plutocrats controlled the industry.
Hitler was excellent at stirring resentments even if he had no good economic solutions for most people.
Quote:Two causes of Nazism were peculiar to Germany. One, no doubt, was the long-established and powerful German tradition of opposition to the civilization of Western Europe. Normally this impulse was kept in abeyance by the many great and truly civilized leaders of German culture; but the post-war situation enabled it to break out and set the tone of the new movement. This impulse to reject the established values of civilization took the form of a reversion to the old Teutonic impulse to glorify ruthless might instead of Christian loving-kindness, and to trust superstition, or "thinking with the blood", instead of Greek reasoning.
The other specially German cause of Nazism was the fact that this great people, with its recurrent dream of becoming the acknowledged "Herrenvolk" of the world, had suffered a decisive defeat in war. This disaster combined with the effects of economic collapse to produce a general social neurosis, a national inferiority complex with all the typical symptoms of arrogance and vindictiveness.
Hitler loved the most modern technology, especially for creating his war machine. He had no problem with appealing to the basest drives in people while sponsoring a mindless and cruel sort of heroism.
Quote:Though these specifically German causes had a great effect in exaggerating the Fascist movement in Germany, it must never be forgotten that the main causes were at work in every country and had produced everywhere the symptoms of Fascism. Everywhere there was a deep sense that civilization had somehow gone bad and was stinking. Everywhere masses of men and women found themselves in abject poverty or desperate insecurity while a few flaunted their luxury. Everywhere the unemployed rotted in idleness. No one needed their service. No one cared for them. Masses of men in every European country were feeling that, since civilization did not want ,them, they did not want civilization. There was widespread disgust with licentious individualism and the ennervating doctrines of materialism. There was a longing for a new and bracing idea to save man from his directionless, self-indulgent way of living.
And as the old pattern of people getting industrial jobs and getting to enjoy an indulgent consumerism comes to an end, we find out anew what Karl Marx had to say of the proletariat: it has nothing to offer but its toil. Raw labor is losing its value everywhere, but the economic elites are even more indulgent than ever. Capitalism never offered anything other than material indulgence in return for subjection to ownership and management. Now that the material indulgence is no longer a perquisite of toil, many American shave nothing. Their old beliefs are shattered, and a crass demagogue offers contempt for people different from them, vague promises of national greatness abandoned in recent decades, and pretexts for violence against class enemies and people having the 'wrong' religion or ethnic origin -- or being a member of the educated middle class.
At least Hitler never excoriated Goethe, Schiller, Bach, and Beethoven. Trump's supporters do.
Quote:This was the social situation which bred the exasperated, neurotic condition favourable to Fascism and Nazism. The more positive motives which created it were broadly of two kinds, self-regarding and spiritual. Very powerful, no doubt, were motives of anxious self-regard and family responsibility in a crumbling and precarious society. Personal anxiety of this kind made men susceptible to any movement which condemned the existing order and promised security, and incidentally satisfied the craving for vengeance. But there was another kind of motive at work, connected with man's deep but often unwitting need to serve the spirit. To attribute any such motive to the Nazis may sound fantastic. And indeed it may well be that in the great mass of Nazis, both leaders and led, the hunger for the spirit was but a very minor factor. Certainly, crude self-interest, in the form of craving for security or craving for power and self-display, has been the main consideration with most of the Nazi leaders and many of their supporters. But I find it impossible to believe that this was all. The gravely wounded captive German airman who preferred to die rather than receive into his veins the blood of donors who were not German could not have been moved merely by self-regard. He believed his blood to be sacred, to be a vessel of the spirit. And he felt it his moral duty not to let it be contaminated. Similarly in the great mass of earnest young Germans who are ready to fling away their lives for the Nazi cause, who sometimes, it seems, actually long to do so, the ruling motive is obviously a sincere though hideously perverted loyalty to the spirit.
Nazi racism, like all racism, is superstitious, irrational, and pseudoscientific. Today we have genetics, but it too can mix with superstition and pseudoscience. "Blood" as ancestry is now strictly an archaic metaphor. But racism thrives today because resentments make it a vehicle for salving the injured ego.
Quote:This passion of loyalty to the spirit has certainly been tragically misguided. Its expressions have been very far from spiritual in the true sense. Revulsion from individualism sprang from a spiritual motive, the feeling for community; but the feeling expressed itself in the form of mere brutish self-surrender to the tribe, mere surrender of individuality, mere surrender of individual conscience and intelligence into the keeping of the mob-leader. The essence of community was utterly missed, namely that it is a relationship between clearly self-conscious and other-conscious individuals bound together in mutual respect and mutual responsibility. Further, the groping desire for the spirit was misled into a cult of the primitive. Because sophisticated values had gone bad on men's hands, primitive values acquired a fresh attraction.
What is spirit, anyway? This said, many people are obliged to leave their communities for economic survival. They will have to trade their paid-for Appalachian hovels that they are likely to lose for taxes and go to places where half their pre-tax income will go to rent to be paid to rapacious landlords (of which Donald Trump is himself an example) so that they can live where the well-paying jobs are. America today is the purest plutocracy in the world except for those countries in which the royal family owns the oil reserves that are the basis of the national economies or countries run by rapacious shysters and scammers. The capitalist or executive at his worse is no better than the feudal lord who demands that people suffer for his rapacious greed or die horribly. In medieval times death for rebellion from the demands of the economic elites could get one burned at the stake or subjected to the Iron Maiden. Here one has the prospect of slow starvation should the welfare system be abolished.
It is easy for people who still have early-modern or earlier ideas of propriety to see something wrong with abortion, homosexuality, contraception, interracial marriage, and erotica. Reproductive norms (a/k/a, sexuality) are much of the concern of people with primitive ideas, and many Americans have their minds in the 14th century and their bodies in the 21st. For some, sex is strictly for procreation and not for recreation. Guess who else was opposed to abortion, homosexuality, contraception, interracial marriage, and erotica. Nazis! "Interracial" sex could refer to sex between "Aryans" and "Jews", let alone blacks and "Asiatics". Sex is a very low drive intellectually, and it is easily exploited in gutter politics.
Quote:But though Nazism is a sorry perversion of the will for the spirit, we must avoid supposing that it is wholly bad and that it has nothing to teach us. It can at least teach us that the ideas and values which dominated the democracies during the period of advancing industrialism are not the final, inevitable and emotionally satisfying truth.
We are at the end of the era in which simply making more stuff will itself make us happier. We have an environment to protect, and we need Zero Population Growth just to keep life tolerable just to allow a comparatively few of us to live with middle-class norms. The alternative is a wrecked world of urban sprawl in a ravaged environment in which we devote more of our resources to avoiding the consequences of pollution. We will find the joys of life increasingly artificial and numbing. Life was easier when we had fewer people; the traffic jams were fewer, commutes were shorter, and real rents and taxes were lower.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.