10-25-2018, 05:36 AM
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 themselvesmin 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 themselvesmin 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.
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.
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.
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.