Sunday, September 25, 2011
Certain Fascist Affinities
by Jeffrey Kuhner
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/11/certain-fascist-affinities/
July 11, 2009
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin achieved one of the greatest propaganda victories of the 20th century. He convinced the West's political and intellectual class that communism and fascism are polar opposites. In fact, the very opposite is true: fascism is a variant of left-wing ideology. Marxism and Nazism are political twins, offshoots of totalitarian socialism.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/11/certain-fascist-affinities/
July 11, 2009
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin achieved one of the greatest propaganda victories of the 20th century. He convinced the West's political and intellectual class that communism and fascism are polar opposites. In fact, the very opposite is true: fascism is a variant of left-wing ideology. Marxism and Nazism are political twins, offshoots of totalitarian socialism.
Admittedly, this insight is not mine. Rather, it is that of National Review's Jonah Goldberg, whose brilliant book, "Liberal Fascism," has just been issued in paperback. Mr. Goldberg's central thesis is that, contrary to leftist myth, there is no such thing as "right-wing fascism."
During its golden age in the 1930s, fascism was widely viewed as a "progressive" ideology that championed economic modernization, active social welfare policies and the Leviathan state. Italian strongman Benito Mussolini and German dictator Adolf Hitler were self-proclaimed men of the left. Both leaders understood that fascism was a form of revolutionary socialism.
What differentiated Hitlerism from Bolshevism was its blood-and-soil ultra-nationalism and emphasis on the primacy of race.
Moreover, fascists sought to tether the private sector to statist social engineering. Fascism competed with Marxist-Leninism to be the successor to parliamentary democracy and capitalism -- widely viewed as moribund.
The only real opponent of fascism has been conservatism, which champions small government, free markets, Judeo-Christian civilization and individual rights. It's no accident Hitler's greatest foe was British Tory Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were national socialists. They were militant pagans hostile to Christianity, religious orthodoxy and tradition. They believed in the cult of personality, mass propaganda and the pseudo-spiritual transformational nature of politics: charismatic leadership as a means of fulfilling people's deepest aspirations. They glorified the state, as well as the subordination of the individual and the family to the collective. They created a corporatist economy that combined big business, big labor and big government. They emphasized the nationalization of key industries, redistribution of wealth, massive public works projects and trade protectionism. They established a so-called "social safety net" through national health care, unemployment insurance and government pensions. They erected a cradle-to-grave welfare state.Fascist social policy was so popular that President Franklin Roosevelt incorporated much of it in the New Deal.
Embarrassed by the horrors of World War II and Auschwitz, the West's liberal elite disowned Hitler and then falsely portrayed him as a reactionary right-winger.
Yet fascism's leftist heritage cannot be denied. It explains Mr. Obama's relentless consolidation of power. He is America's most radical president. At his core, Mr. Obama is a liberal fascist, fusing statism with postmodern multiculturalism.
During his first six months in office, he has expanded government power to an extent unimaginable even a year ago. He is spending hundreds of billions on infrastructure projects. He has nationalized banks, the financial sector and the auto industry. His regulatory policies represent an unprecedented intervention in the economy. He wants to nationalize health care. He supports the House-passed climate bill, which would impose the largest tax increase in U.S. history, enforce crushing environmental mandates on business and industry, and transform America into a "green" economy.
In short, Mr. Obama is slowly erecting a corporatist state that will solidify one-party liberal rule for generations.
Mr. Obama has fostered a cult of personality -- achieving almost mystical celebrity status among his supporters. During his presidential campaign, he constantly put forth a quasi-religious conception of his candidacy and movement: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." To many of his backers, Mr. Obama was simply "The One," a political messiah who at mass rallies often induced crying and hysteria.
Fascists have celebrated racialism and ethnic chauvinism; Mr. Obama's liberal fascism is no different -- except, it has morphed into postmodern identity politics. Take his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. She is an unabashed racialist, who believes in Hispanic cultural supremacy. She also embraces the pernicious doctrine of "inherent physiological and cultural differences" among groups. For her, race, ethnicity and gender trump a common American heritage.
Under Mr. Obama's fascist regime, it is not Jews, Slavs or Gypsies who are murdered, but unborn babies. He is an extreme pro-choice supporter, even opposing the ban on partial-birth abortion. He has vowed to eventually pass the Freedom of Choice Act, which would codify legalized abortion and dismantle all restrictions.
Mr. Obama is not a Hitler or a Mussolini. He is not a crypto-dictator. Nor does he believe in an authoritarian police state or territorial expansionism. But Hitler and Mussolini were men of a different age, time and national culture; their fascism was distinctly German and Italian.
Mr. Obama's fascism is uniquely American. His revolution is not of blood and iron, but of pork and bailouts. His fascism is a potent mix of incremental socialism, messianic liberalism and puritanical environmentalism. It is not the crude militarism of the jackboot but the sugar-coated, forced spoon-feeding of the nanny state.It may be softer, more civilized and sophisticated. But it is just as destructive to economic freedom and individual liberty.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and the President of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank.
The Historical Roots Of Green Fascism
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
This article, which was first published in January 1982 in the German weekly Neue Solidarität, remains the definitive study of the roots of eco-fascism. We publish here the first of two parts, which has been translated from German.
Our hope rests in the young people, who can tolerate high temperatures, since in them, the fresh, festering sore of disgust is consumed.
—Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart, 1929
If, only 36 years after the end of the Second World War, a general uneasiness spreads far and wide, that we are on the edge of a possible third, and therefore probably last world war; that we are already in the midst of a new world economic crisis; that our society threatens to fall apart; that all values seem to be dissappearing, and hardly anyone has the ability to rule out any longer the danger of a new fascism—then it is the best possible time to ask some fundamental questions, and clarify concepts.
It is most urgent to create and clarify once and for all, what fascism really is; from what elements it is composed; and who its representatives were and are. For that, it is necessary to remove the assumption, for example, of countless Anglo-American films, that fascism, or nationalism, is an exclusive problem of Germans. We should also get rid of the linguistic sophistry, that the concept “fascist” does not apply to National Socialism, but instead, describes historical developments in Italy or Spain. Such sophistries only serve as academic rationalizations, when the question is, to fight the danger of fascism everywhere that it appears today.
Just as there is a conceptual prehistory of fascism, there is a conceptual post-history. National Socialism in Germany, and the Holocaust against Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, and Social Democrats, was only one of many expressed forms of fascism, even if, up to that point in time, the most horrible and barbaric. But, from this standpoint, the Pol Pot regime—which, after all, killed 3 million people in three years, and with that, nearly half its own people, is arguably fascist.
An historically well-grounded conceptual clarity is likewise necessary, since frequently, persons and organizations which represent the exact opposite of fascist ideas, are called names by followers of truly fascist movements, only because they advocate building nuclear energy, or an effective fight against the drug plague. It has been proven historically correct, that the glorification of drugs and hostility to technology are prominent features of the fascist worldview.
As a first approximation, let us say that fascism and its forerunners were characterized by the following primary elements: 1) Malthusian or racially motivated genocide; 2) fascist economic policy; 3) a fascist mass movement; 4) a fascist elite, which controls this mass movement, without this movement being conscious of it.
This fascist elite likes to call itself a “conservative intelligentsia,” but it understands the word “conservative” in an entirely specific sense; it looks down at those who are not part of the life of the select movement, with the same arrogance that this social circle in its time looked down on “the Austrian corporal.” Even if they need the fascist masses to accomplish their policy, the introduction of the masses is for them—as elites—a horror. One does not associate with this movement very easily, just as one would not like to be seen with embarrassing distant relatives—but the family bonds cannot be denied.
One need only read the writings of such representatives of the “conservative intelligensia,” to be taken aback by how openly they write about their adversaries and their intentions. Their enemy, which they wanted to annihilate at all costs, is Judeo-Christianity, and its secular forms: concepts of development of all kinds; the idea of mankind’s capacity for perfection; even the idea of progress. They say openly—e.g., Dr. Stephen Mumford recently in the American Humanist Magazine—that the Catholic Church must be smashed, so that the intended reduction of the population can be implemented. Or, they indicate openly, as do the members of the Club of Rome, that it is they who have established the “green” movement in the world. One does well to take these confessions seriously.
The current world economic crisis threatens that the structural problems in the developed nations will become far worse in their extent than those of the 1930s, but the developing nations will be hit on an unprecedented scale. Economic experts do not preclude that a great crash might come even as soon as this Winter.
There are oligarchical circles in London and New York, who quite openly discuss that a new Hitler is needed again, perhaps one without the personality flaws of Adolf Hitler, but someone who can implement the same policy now. In Italy, the press blatantly says that Socialist Party head Craxi might make a very good new Mussolini.
Today the significance of a charismatic Führer-figure is broadly overestimated in discussions of fascism, the more so now that in the television society of the United States, it has been demonstrated that completely synthetic “charismatic” Führers can be produced by the dozen, and out of plastic.
For the rise of National Socialism, as of fascism in general, program and ideology were, and are, very different. If our judges were better trained not only in law, but also in economic theory, history, and philosophy—to say nothing of energy technology—then they would long ago have put on the Index, not only direct Nazi propaganda, but also all writings which contain the same basic ideas, but adopt other confusing connections and use other ways of speaking.
If one wished to pick out every writing which had a great influence on National Socialism, one would have to take at least the following: The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche; The Destruction of the Evening Lands by Oswald Spengler; The Third Reich by Müller van den Bruck; The Foundations of the 19th Century by Houston Chamberlain; The Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg; and naturally Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was by no means the most widely read among these.
What these writings were for National Socialism, are now, for today’s danger of a new fascism, such books as Limits To Growth by the Club of Rome; Global 2000; Global Futures; or the U.S. bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy. Such culturally pessimistic catastrophe theories and mythologies serve now, as then, as justification for the omission and avoidance of those steps which could address the actual catastrophe. That the whole lot of these “theories” are, from a scientific standpoint, quackery, and arise from a primitive Malthusian-Darwinist-nominalist worldview, is not an argument that carries any weight with their adherents: It is exactly the world of reason and scientific thinking, against which they want to hurl their irrationality.
The “green movement” is a fascist movement. The absolute intolerance against other ways of thinking, even if they are held by the majority of people; the emphasis on “the people’s common-sense feelings”; the mystical ennobling of nature; the Romantic flight from the world to a pre-industrial life on the Eco-farm; the apotheosis of a transcendent mystical intoxication about life; the Dionysian character of the rock-drug culture—these are all entirely typical markers of the fascist mass movement.
To be sure, every “Green” is not a hardboiled, conscious fascist, but potentially, tends in that direction, and under conditions of a worsening economic crisis, the unfortunate Green proceeds there rapidly. Punks carry swastikas quite blatantly, and the radicalized part of the Green movement long ago seized upon the methods of the stormtroopers. On this point, the street battles in many German cities, the atrocities and attacks against advocates of technological progress, and the terrorist methods with which the political activities of their opponents are disrupted, speak volumes.
Part of this political movement does not even shrink from political murder, as the killings of Jürgen Ponto, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Siegfried Buback, or Heinz Herbert Karry prove. These all take place in an intellectual climate characterized by the exaltation of irrationality, fully supported by the news media and the film industry. The cult films of a Fritz Lang find their counterparts in a plethora of modern cult films such as Clockwork Orange, The Shining, or New York 1990. And the fact that hundreds of Protestant ministers have placed themselves in the forefront of this movement, also awakens unpleasant memories of the Nazi Ministersbund.
Where does all this come from? The German people must immediately overcome their blocking about history, and examine the past 200 years of their history, in order to prevent disaster.
From the standpoint of the oligarchical elite, the transition from the 18th to the 19th Century was littered with catastrophes, which caused them so many nightmares, that some of them literally went mad over it, such as George III, or Friedrich Wilhelm IV. What the Republicans and humanists welcomed as hope of the advent of the Age of Reason, appeared to the oligarchs as an intolerable danger of their loss of power.
The success of the American Revolution, from which the English nobility has not to this day recovered; the spread of the same ideas in Europe and, in the initial stage of the French Revolution; the wide circulation of humanistic ideas in the German population by the Weimar Classic; and the effects of the Industrial Revolution, becoming ever more clear in the course of the 19th Century in the consciousness of broader layers of the population in many nations—all of this drove these circles to desperation.
In his book The Conservative Revolution, Armin Mohler, the current director of the Siemens Institute in Munich, describes this circle, the agency of this Conservative Revolution, as an effective current in Germany and almost all of the European nations, which has an influence on all the areas of life. Mohler, who himself is to be regarded as in this camp, describes with the insight of someone engaged in the process, that at this time, that worldview has attained victory, which to the Conservative Revolution appeared as the actual opponent.
“We would like to rewrite it [this world] for the present as a world which does not place the immutable in man in the center,” he writes, “but rather believes that it is possible to change the essence of man. It therefore proclaims the possibility of stepwise progress, regards all things, relations, and incidents as intellectually transparent, and tries to isolate and to comprehend each object based only on itself.”
Of course, Mohler—and this is typical for representatives of these circles—does not actually understand the scientific method based on reason, but rather only from the bottom and phenomenally; nonetheless, here he speaks with astonishing candidness. It is the optimistic belief in progress of the 19th Century, against which this right opposition acts, and later against the spirit of the Founding Years [the post-1871 period of German unification] and against that “volatile growth of the economic and military power of Germany.”
No other figure has played such a large role in the ideological realization of fascism as Friedrich Nietzsche. Mohler also says that everything which occurred later in Germany, had to have been conceived by Nietzsche. However, it is worthwhile to reinvestigate, what tradition Nietzsche himself comes from.
The Romantic movement already operated during the Weimar Classic as a counterculture to the Classical-humanist culture. One must absolutely designate some of the leading Romantics as court-ideologues of the oligarchy. Romanticism was characterized by an emotional displacement and a transcendence of all concepts of life, the emphasis on “natural instincts” compared to reason, a mystical fascination with the Middle Ages, in contrast to the Classical and Renaissance periods, and an engrossed escapism. The dictum of Novalis: “The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the world,” is typical of the loss of sense of reality.
It was that which Heinrich Heine, who was the clearest thinker of his time on this point, called the “disgusting mixture of Gothic delusion and modern lie” in the “Romantic School.” This “disgusting mixture” haunted the youth movement, found a ghastly highpoint with the Nazis, and is now alive again in the Green movement.
These circles, which from now on, for the sake of simplicity, we want to call the Conservative Revolution, promoted Romanticism in the same way and for the same reasons as those, who, like Countess Marion Doenhof, systematically sponsored the Greens for around 11 years.
One had to destroy every realistic world-concept, to annihilate every rational view of one’s own people and of foreign peoples, in order to be able to deploy the youth as a battering ram against technological progress. The death wish implanted in Romanticism later came to the Nazis in the nick of time, in order to glorify a heroic death, and to send even children into total war. Unfortunately, with the yearning for one’s own death, contempt for foreign lives also grew, with respect to which nothing has changed since the Romantic movement, which created the recruiting field for Giuseppi Mazzini’s anarchist bands, through the Nazis, up to the Green movement, with slogans like “Yesterday carry-sausage, tomorrow semolina-gruel” make clear.
The most important link in the intellectual pre-history of fascism, between Romanticism and Nietzsche, was Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of Romanticism, which moreover stood in a close intellectual relationship to the British nominalists Hobbes and Locke, and shared their bestial conception of man. Schopenhauer, also an early foster-father of the Greens, emphasized the incapacity of reason to discern the real essence of things. He banalized reason as a mere vehicle, with the help of which, the objectives set by the will could be attained, somewhat in the sense of the old aunts who warn: “Now, just be reasonable!” Also, the roots of the denial of a meaning of life by the modern existentialist philosophers lie with Schopenhauer, for whom life is basically not worth affirming. In the aftermath, this idea grew powerful and bore not a little of the responsibility for the perpetration of genocide by the Nazis.
Incidentally, Schopenhauer’s ascetic conception recalls the masochistic “self-denial” of our Greens of today, who prefer to eat grain and to heat their homes with coal-burning stoves (and thus to pollute the environment). Schopenhauer is the first who made pessimism into a system, but this pessimism is irrational and amoral. Since there allegedly is no progress in the possibility of rational cognition and action, and he excoriates the Platonic or Christian doctrines of virtue to an equal degree, the necessity of one’s own moral action is dispensed with.
You have to agree with Mohler that everything which happened subsequently in Germany, must be understood from the standpoint of Nietzsche. Only he is surely not the “grand judge of time,” as Mohler admiringly calls him, and Mohler identifies him as the “historical-intellectual founding figure” who stood as the “great” of the Conservative Revolution. If you read Nietzsche’s books, you get, above all, the suspicion that the insanity which allegedly overcame him later—apparently in the last phase of his syphilitic disease—had controlled him throughout his whole life.
Nietzsche, whose favorite philosopher was Schopenhauer, hated humanism in all its manifestations, in a certain pathological way, especially if it had to do with Plato, Schiller, or Beethoven. He was an outstanding example of the intellectual current which was interested in the dissolution of scientific thought, after the unity of artistic knowledge and natural science had been brilliantly demonstrated by the work of the two Humboldt brothers.
It is not surprising that the pair Johann Strauss and Klaus Traube, in their book Ecology and Economy, came to the conclusion that the “progressive” left-ecology movement must not only rehabilitate Romanticism, but must take up clear opposition to the “three great revolutionaries” of the principle of progress. These were, first, the Greek-Christian intellectual revolution; second, the Renaissance, and third, the Industrial Revolution.
Nietzsche went so far as to totally deny the scientific and humanistic explanation of the unity of human development, and was therefore the forerunner of Spengler, Rosenberg, and the Green ideologues. He came to a “biological worldview,” which showed itself in such mystical concepts as “blood and soil,” “race,” and “symbol.” Such a “biological worldview” also logically lies at the heart of today’s turned-inside-out “environmental protection,” in the sense of “ecology,” “bioethics,” and so forth.
Nietzsche is therefore a turning point, because he, with this anti-morality, helped tear down the constraints, even to the point of the famous “all is permitted” of the Nazis, or to the point of the belief of the outrageous sections of the Greens, that everything is permitted in order to carry out their irrational will against the majority.
That which was later carried out so abominably from the worldview of the Nazis, Nietzsche expressed thus:
“Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, decadence, miscarriages, of exhausted and weakened instincts? ... Is there a pessimism of the strong? An intellectual obeisance to the difficult, the horrid, evil, the problematique of existence? Is there perhaps a disease from superabundance itself? A seductive bravery of the harshest whoremonger, who desires the dreadful, such as the enemy, the worthy enemy, on whom he can test his strength?”
In the history of thought, these notions point directly to Spengler, to the Nazis, and emerge again in the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
For Nietzsche, the scientific formulation of questions, which he correctly traced back to Socrates, was the arch-enemy of any culture. In order to shatter this “Socratic spirit,” he went so far as to rewrite history, as it had been described by Schiller, Humboldt, and other humanists, and to give a new interpretation to Classical antiquity.
He contrasts the “Socratic” with the “Dionysian,” and then stresses exactly the phase of history in which irrationalism, in organized form, creates a revolt. This Dionysian, he says, can be comprehended by man most readily through the analogy of delirium.
“Either through the influence of narcotic drinks, of which all primeval men and races speak in their hymns, or through violence, all of nature, joyfully full of the piercing approach of Spring, awakens every kind of Dionysian stimulation, through whose rise the Subjective vanishes in total self-dissolution. In the German Middle Ages, under the same Dionysian power, an ever-growing band tramped, singing and dancing, from place to place: In these St. John and St. Vitus dances, we again recognize the Bacchanalian choruses of the Greeks, with their pre-history in Asia Minor, up to Babylon, and the orgiastic sacraments.”
Then he added, not totally without self-reflection:
“There are people who turn away, out of lack of experience or stupidity, from such phenomena as if they were a common sickness, mocking or deploring them; the poor cheerfully don’t pay attention to how pale and ghostly even health appears, when the glowing life of Dionysian swarms flows over them.”
So pale and ghostly must the anti-fascists in Germany have felt, when the Nazis stormed through the streets and exerted their Dionysian frenzy, for which the Berlin Sports Palace has become forever a shameful name. And such a ghostly feeling would also set in when, in a short time, a hundred thousand street opponents of the [Frankfurt] airport runway [in the 1980s], waving banners and with drumrolls, stormed through Wiesbaden. And Mohler knowingly writes:
“The popular national picture of the nihilists [which is taken from Nietzsche’s thought—HZL] shows them as an unruly mob, which tramples to pieces a malleable world under its rhythmic song.”
One of the most important characteristics of fascism is that irrationalism takes over in an organized, often paramilitary or military way. A specific irrational person is not necessarily a fascist, per se, but at best gets on the nerves of his neighbors. But irrationality in organized form, or en masse, belongs very appropriately in the pre- or post-history of fascism, primarily when it has forced violence and terror upon those who think differently.
The “rise of the Subjective to total self-dissolution” is unfortuntely today the ideology of the rock-drug counterculture, which a majority of the youth in many countries adhere to.
Nietzsche expands on the point:
“Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the tie between man and man come together again; also the alienated, hostile, or suppressed nature again celebrates its reconciliation with its lost sons, mankind. Freely the Earth gives her gifts [Have the anthroposophs and ecological farmers been written off by Nietzsche?—HZL] and peacefully the beasts of prey approach the cliffs and the deserts. With flowers and garlands the cart of Dionysus has been showered, under whose yoke walk the panther and the tiger [Now we finally know why the peace movement can stop war.—HZL]
“One transforms Beethoven’s joyful song ‘On Joy’ into a picture and does not come up to his power of imagination, if millions sink with dread into the dust. [Did Nietzsche write under the influence of drugs?—HZL] Now the slave is a free man, now all smash the rigid, hostile boundaries which necessity, free will, or ‘shameless custom’ have erected among men. Now, according to the evangelists of world harmony, everyone feels not only united, reconciled, and fused together with his neighbors, but one, as if the veil of the Maja were ripped apart, and only flutters about in shreds of the mysterious Primal One. When singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has learned the walk and talk, and is on the way to flying and dancing in air....”
This becoming one with the other is the longing which the adherents of today’s youth movement have fallen for, the mystical overcoming of separation. And there is unfortunately no doubt that this participation in a “higher community” was not only the glue which tied the Nazis into a common frenzy for “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” but also describes the exact life-feeling that ties together the adherents of the “Aquarian Conspiracy” in the thus-titled book by Marilyn Ferguson.
The development into a higher community which Nietzsche mentions, naturally stands in total contrast to the humanistic educational idea of the German Classic and Wilhelm von Humboldt, which emphasizes the elevation to reason, along with the formation of the character and the personality of the individual. Nietzsche forthrightly attacks the idea of the humanist gymnasium [secondary school] and historical education. One of the spiritual students of Nietzsche, the former leading OECD official and founding member of the Club of Rome, Alexander King, is primarily responsible for the fact that, through the so-called education reform in all OECD countries, the idea of humanistic education has been discarded. The result of that is the youth movement, which we see today.
Nietzsche detested the state (as the Greens do today), as the bearer and transmitter of education. He was the forerunner of the Volk-like, or of the healthy Volk-like feelings, of which the Greens speak so much; he hates rationality, which was connected with the oncoming industrial age.
Our society today has unfortunately come to the point that there appear to be no clear values any more, and the root of this becomes clear if you read from Nietzsche:
“Can you not twist all values? And is good perhaps evil? And God only an invention, and refinement of the Devil? Is everything perhaps false in the last analysis? And if we are perplexed, are we also in the same sense deceivers? Must we not also be deceivers?”
If you discuss today with the Greens about nuclear energy or on the way to achieve peace, you must agree with Nietzsche that at least among this group, the twisting of all values has been achieved.
His explanation of why men behave as they do, is not original; it is the very same hedonistic, amoral principle of Jeremy Bentham or David Hume, by which human behavior is only motivated by the search for pleasure or the avoidance of pain. There is only pleasure or pain, but no good and evil. Peter Bruckner or the Sigmund Freud Institute argue similarly.
Nietzsche’s idea of the “eternal return of the same,” in which the individual is only an ephemeral, develops later into a justification for terrorism:
“The most extreme form of nihilism is the understanding that every belief, everything taken as true, is necessarily false; because a true world does not exist. But a perspective appearance.... We think these thoughts in most terrifying form; existence, such as it is, without reason or goal, but inexorably repeating, without a conclusion, into nothingness; the eternal repetition. That is the extreme form of nihilism: eternal nothingness (the meaningless).”
One of the hack writers, who was influenced by Nietzsche and who contributed significantly to the spiritual destruction of the Weimar Republic, was Hermann Hesse and his book Steppenwolf, which, by the way, is again very popular among today’s youth movement in Germany and the U.S.A. It was written in 1827 with the intention of seducing disoriented youth into prostitution, homosexuality, sex orgies, drug use (from hashish to LSD), and into terrorism against the world of machines, and against the civilized world order generally.
The narrative builds slowly from a description of Nietzsche’s world-pain, of the schizophrenic splintering of the chief character, Haller, into a human half and a wolf half, into sex and drug orgies, up to a senseless murder. “When the wolf comes out,” Hesse writes, in the following passage:
“Thereupon there burns in me a wild lust for intense feelings, for sensations, a rage at this shadowy, shallow, normal, and sterile life, and a furious frenzy to beat something into oblivion, either a warehouse or a cathedral or myself, to commit daring stupidities.... To seduce a young girl, or to wring the necks of several members of the civilized world order.”
Hesse expressed the suspicion (as the Club of Rome’s Aurelio Peccei does today), that probably all of human life is an utter mistake, a violent and unfortunate abortion of the Primeval Earth Mother, a wild and hideously disappointing experiment of nature.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who denies a reason for being, was also (not without a connection to his theory) a sympathizer with the Baader-Meinhof gang, and visited Andreas Baader in prison. The punks perhaps make clear where the loss of reason can lead, in the most horrifying way; they are fundamentally the most miserable victims of the oligarchical elite, still children, but already spiritually dead, and with lifestyles which one can’t even really call bestial, because no normal animal would conduct itself so.
Exactly as the Fascist International today believes it must destroy the moral authority of the Catholic Church in order to be able to carry out its genocide, and thus carries out an assassination attempt against the Pope [John Paul II], so the fascist Nietzsche knew that Christianity and the idea of the participation of the human in the divine represented his greatest problem. So he placed the chief emphasis on the assertion which demonstrated his tremendous insanity most laughably, namely, that God is dead. And now he can say what the Greens later would rejoice about:
“First the greatest outrage was the outrage against God, but God died, with him also died these sacrileges. To commit crimes against the Earth is now the most terrible thing, and to respect the bowels of the inscrutable, higher than the understanding of the world.”
Who could doubt that the militant opponents of the Frankfurt Airport runway consider a crime against a tree as more important than a crime against a man?
Nietzsche’s effect on history must be investigated on two levels: first, the Dionysian, which includes the popular movements and youth movements, the “masses in ecstasy,” and the second, the Apollonian, that is, the so-called elite figures of the Conservative Revolution. There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s concept of Übermenschen not only established the basis for the Nazis’ “Master Race,” but also, in spite of small differences, made an impression on the elitist thoughts of Chamberlain, Spengler, George, and the Junger brothers. Who was this elite, which merits this name only in a extremely negative sense, and what role do they play today?
Although anyone who knows the proverbial “corridors of power,” knows that in political life hardly anything happens without unwritten deals over common purposes, plans, and methods, and although it is also understandable that certain persons have more influence than others, yet often a great scream arises as soon as you note that there is a “stringpuller” behind certain events. Just because the Nazis brought the racist bogeyman of a “Jewish conspiracy” onto the scene, doesn’t mean that it can be generally denied that there are conspiracies. Yes, you can go so far as to say that nothing significant happens—good as well as evil—without a conspiracy standing behind it—that is, a purposeful plan has been carried out.
For that, you don’t need to put forward any shaky hypotheses. The oligarchical elite is sometimes so arrogant that it itself describes this conspiracy. Thus the Jesuit Carroll Quigley wrote in his book Tragedy and Hope, in which he disclosed much amazingly accurate material about the ominous intent of monetarist oligarchical circles, that such publicity could hardly harm their goals, because this grouping has taken power so thoroughly that any resistance against it would be senseless. Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy expresses almost exactly the same thing, as does H.G. Wells, who speaks of an “open conspiracy.”
One of the most remarkable books in this respect is the already cited book by Armin Mohler, Conservative Revolution. Not only because he had the boldness to “reawaken” fascist thought as early as 1950, but also because it throws some light on the corporate policy of the Siemens Company. If you consider that Peter von Siemens belonged to the Anthroposophs, and Armin Mohler, as chairman of the Siemens Foundation, is a prophet of the “Conservative Revolution,” then there’s no reason to wonder at the dubious role the Siemens family is playing against technological progress, especially in the area of nuclear energy.
Mohler leaves no doubt in this book—a barely revised dissertation published by Karl Jaspers in 1949—of what he speaks: “Conservative revolution” is a synonym for what is commonly recognized as fascism.
The Conservative Revolution, according to Mohler, is comprised of small, intellectually active circles, highly disruptive sects, and, in the background, the remaining loose elite alliances. Mohler does not try to hide his disdain for the “masses.”
“The great party holds its masses together through organizational ties adapted to the average person and a narrow doctrine of catchwords, and only offers space for superior minds to the extent that they concern themselves with the restraint of the masses, and keep their mental capabilities in reserve, for the esoteric realm. But the majority of the above-average intelligences gather in small circles, which oscillate in constant mental stress, believe themselves to be the only ones with the true knowledge, and accuse the mass party of Realpolitik, betrayal of the “idea.”
If you break through the Babylonian verbal confusion in today’s political life, if you take into account the confession of the numerous members of the “Conservative Revolution,” there is really no difference between “right” and “left,” as the ostensibly politically diverse people like Mohler, Möller van der Bruck, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Oscar Negt admit. For them, the contrast between “Socialism and National Socialism” as well as “right” and “left” has been lifted.
So you should not let yourself be deluded into thinking that some “Conservative Revolutionaries” have either distanced themselves from the Third Reich, or even were disdained or persecuted by it. Even though, according to Mohler, at the end of the 20th Century, it became evident to them that a successful National Socialism “would falsify their goals as much as a successful communism,” they remain the spiritual mentors of fascism, then, as today.
The title “Conservative Revolution” certainly goes back to Hugo von Hofmannsthal for its first formulation, and then back to Möller van der Bruck, but it is in no way a specifically German thing. Mohler names the following names in this connection: Hans Grimm, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, C.F. Jünger, Albrecht and Karl Haushofer, Schultze-Boysen, Möller van der Bruck, Hugo von Hoffmannthal, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Stefan George, and other in Germany. But, for example: Dostoevsky and the two Aksokovs for Russia; Sorel and Barres for France; Unamuno for Spain; Pareto and Ebola for Italy; Lothrop Stodart, Madison Grant, and James Burnham for the United States. These “thinkers,” who did not actually come from oligarchical families themselves, are like their modern followers: Peccei, Forrester, Meadows, Jungk, Cruhl, Gvishiani, Frolov, King, etc., to a certain degree the court ideologues of these families. Today, they work predominantly with think-tanks and foundations, or as controllers of “movements” and terrorists. They carry out what Mohler calls “restraint of the masses.”
The indulgence, and with it the corruption, which many older people today show toward the “Greens,” goes together with minimization of the significance of their own early membership in an old youth movement. Now, surely, not every Wandervogel [wandering bird, the “green” youth movement of the 1920s and ’30s] later became fascist, just as all Greens are not unsalvageable, but the old youth movements were the transmission belt for the later fascist leadership. They were, just like today, a “revolt against the world of the father,” against the “world of appearance,” and of the “artificiality” of the cities and factories, which threaten to suffocate everything.
In addition, the different phases, unions, splits, and new formations point to strong parallels with today. Mohler speaks of a first wave, the “Wandervogel,” which was shapeless and anarchic, and a second phase, of the Free German Youth. Both had taken effect in the Weimar Republic in almost all the conservative-revolutionary groupings, when their leaders were transformed, for the most part, into paramilitary forms of the youth movement.
After the First World War there arose out of a mixture of the Freikorps, youth groups, and then “dropouts,” a “new revolutionary type,” which was “nihilistic,” totally in the Nietzschean sense. Mohler points insightfully to the fact that these “revolutionaries” would have increased their dangerousness and clout, but for their non-involvement, which is also true for today’s dropouts.
Because today there is the well-founded suspicion that these right or left extremist movements may indeed tend toward violent acts themselves, but are only providing a cover for the professional political murder of the champions of technological progress.
The forerunner of the Murder, Inc. “Permindex,” which was responsible for the assassination of [John] Kennedy and the attempts against de Gaulle, or, in recent times, the attempts on Reagan and the Pope [John Paul II], was, in the early 1920s, the secret organization OC (Organization Consul), which was responsible for a series of assassinations, among them, German Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau.
The OC was controlled by the Thule Society. Around the Thule Society there was an elite secret organization, to which belonged Prof. Karl Haushofer, Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Countess Westarp, Baron von Seydlitz, von Sebottendorf, Scheubner-Richter, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg. This organization had available extensive financial resources and the best connections to the leading noble families and intelligence services. The Thule Society functioned as the “mother organization” of a plethora of parties, societies, paramilitary units, and terrorist organizations. The most momentous creations of the Thule Society are those of the NSDAP [Nazi Party], which it founded, and Adolf Hitler.
If an ordinary person gets involved with the cult-ideas of different currents in the fascist environment, he is generally surprised about the depth of pathological hell which opens up before him. Although it is not pleasant to study these outpourings, an investigation of the history of this illness is surely necessary.
Supporters of the Conservative Revolution have different views on certain topics, and it would actually raise suspicion about them if they all agreed with one another. So it is with the “criticism” of the Conservative Revolution by Romano Guardini, to whom Mohler significantly concedes a “flair for distant thrill.” Guardini, former collaborator of the Action Circle, founder of the Quickborn Movement, and of the foundation named after himself, has brought himself under suspicion with his writings, of being one of the “Christians who are not Christians.”
Christian heretics like [Hans] Küng, the Jesuits, but also the likes of Guardini, to begin with, want to soften the ontological, universal truth of Christianity, when they describe it as a religious mode of interpretation like many others. In short, they deny that there is one truth and along with it, error, and they deny the provability of this truth in the physical universe.
You can unquestionably recognize those who want to destroy the “Christian view of the world,” because they want to change Christian doctrine on the decisive point whose absence would rob it of its life’s breath. That is the Filioque, the idea that Christ is simultaneously God and Man, and thus divert from the fact that every human being participates in the Divine through the redemption of Christ. As Mumford correctly noted, this human participation in the Divine is the moral barrier to genocide.
In considering the enormous political consequences of this, the role which Christianity has played over the last 2,000 years must be underscored yet again. And in this connection, the recent encyclical, Laborem Exercens, by John Paul II, as well as his pastoral letter “Familiaris Consortio,” have primary strategic significance.
In these documents the Pope stressed unmistakably the character of man in the “image of God,” and that the mission of man to subdue the Earth, obtains for all time. The encyclical is, from an epistemological standpoint, the most comprehensive, because it proceeds from the coherence of the lawfulness of the universe, of man, and of mind, and thus accepts the process of continuous perfection. The process of creation continues through man on Earth, and with the help of technology, which explicitly is called the ally of man. Yes, the Pope explicitly demands political and legal reforms so that the world’s political order is adjusted and corrected to cohere with this lawfulness. Concretely, that means massive transfer of technology to the Third World, and with it, the comprehensive breakout which the Conservative Revolution fears the most.
In a chapter with the not-mathematical, but mystical title, “Lines and Spheres,” Mohler expresses his fear: The idea of ceaseless progress at a certain point devalues the present in favor of a better future. Therefore, it would make no real difference whether it means a step forward toward the Christian Kingdom of God, or a classless society or some other goal.
Because Mohler constantly uses the term “linear” in connection with this (constant) progress, you must certainly acknowledge that he does not know his enemies as well as he thinks. Neither the Platonic idea of constant perfecting, nor the Christian or scientific ideas of progress is meant linearly, but strives for higher orders, and are thus negentropic, and of growing complexity. So much for Mohler’s understanding.
“In any case, Christendom has become fatefully decisive for the Occident. Together with its secularization, progress in every area, it has created the ‘modern world,’ against which the conservative-revolutionary revolt has taken aim.”
And then he again cites Guardini with a passage which exposes the current danger to the Pope:
“Nothing is more false than the idea that the modern mastery over the world in knowledge and technology must have been achieved in opposition to Christianity, which would keep man in indolent servility. The opposite is true: The enormous adventure of modern science and technology, whose scope we experience in the most recent inventions with deep uneasiness, was only made possible because of the personal independence which Christ has given to man.”
At this point, it is appropriate to once again point out that the members of the Conservative Revolution are at least right on one point: that the “right” and the “left” ultimately become the same, when “nationalism” and “socialism” collapse into one; that right and left are rather useless, if it matters, to describe political opposites. The fundamental opposition lies between Christianity and the idea of progress on the one side, and the Conservative Revolution on the other.
And so Mohler broods already in 1949, when every normal person in Germany is concerned about building up the country again from the rubble:
“Our time offers a strange spectacle. On the one side, the linear world of progress, by harnessing nuclear power, is speeding toward its high point, and seeks to cover the last free spot on Earth with its network of chimneys, railroads, and cables. But on the other side stand spokesmen who are witness to a world of midday-like stillness.”
In 1927 Hermann Hesse wrote in his Steppenwolf:
“Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.... A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through, alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.”
Unfortunately, the members of the Conservative Revolution are not satisfied with tolerating this dual power situation, but they want to win (even if the world should perish as a result).
Thus Ernst Jünger already remarked:
“We stand at the turning point between two ages, as with the change between the Stone and Bronze Age.”
Therefore, a kind of interregnum, for which otherwise the “great” Nietzsche has represented allegedly the absolute turning point.
Whoever currently would argue that this has nothing to do with the Greens, now can grasp the proof that there is at least a great similarity. Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Age of Aquarius, which was only the popular, expanded version of a study by the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, should be referenced once again.
This institute must be considered one of the most important planning centers of the Conservative Revolution. Out of there came not only various experiments with drugs, but also all conceivable “alternative life-styles” were developed. What Ferguson describes in her book, is the undermining of society, above all the youth, through the “Aquarian Conspiracy.” The age of Christianity and scientific rationality—characterized by her as the Age of Pisces—will now be cut off by the Age of Aquarius. Here it is feeling, not reason, that matters, and all the conspirators would participate in a common cosmic consciousness, would recognize one another, and would advance in all realms of life, including the military itself. Ferguson in other respects proceeds to praise conservation and all forms of alternative life-styles.
In Steppenwolf it says:
“I have also lived austerely for years, and also fasted for long times, but at the time I stood again under the sign of Aquarius, a dark and moist sign.”
Mohler, in describing the change desired by the Conservative Revolution, writes in 1949:
“In others, this idea even condenses into the image of a succession of one age to a new one.... Knut von Ermsen, for example, sees this change in connection with cosmic changes: We stand at the edge of the change from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. That, for him, is National Socialism, whose temporary dominance he, in his 1932 book Adolf Hitler and the Coming Age, had stated as fact, only one of the first fever blisters, which announce such changes. That the fish is a symbol of Christ, served him well in this connection.”
The Age of Aquarius, could also be translated as the dominion of Dionysus. For Nietzsche it is the Christian God that is dead, not the “god” of reappearance, whether it is named Dionysus, Mithra, or something else.
When it becomes clear to anyone that the American high-interest-rate policy is bringing not only the American economy itself, but also the rest of the world, into depression, the normal reaction would undoubtedly have been a lowering of interest and building up of production through cheap credits. A frequently heard argument was: “But it is not in American interests to ruin their own economy!” Arguments like that disregard the fact that there are certainly people who not only reject reason, but even desire chaos. Ernst Jünger writes thus, quoted by Mohler:
“We march towards a magical point zero, which we will only overcome, when we have other, invisible sources of power at our disposal.”
“Thus, with this magical point zero,” Mohler writes, with evident fascination, “we enter the inner circle of German nihilism.” It is the belief in absolute destruction, that turns into absolute creation. For, ‘decay’ does not occur in the essential core.... Our hope is attached to what remains,” he quotes Jünger again.
The reader of this article is, perchance, acquainted with the fact that people today who look to the “Conservative Revolution,” and who are responsible for the current crisis, seriously believe, that in the event of a nuclear war, they could go to Argentina—and have already set up residences and bank accounts there.
How criminal and close to today’s terrorism this way of thinking is, is plainly laid out in another Jünger quotation, in which the state of mind of “heroic realists” is expressed by him, as, “He, who with pleasure can blow himself up, and who, in this act still sees a confirmation of order.” What else should motivate terrorists today?
In Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the union between green terrorism, and an “inner joy” over genocide, was already present:
“The inscription, ‘Off to the Merry Hunt! The Great Automobile Hunt!’ appealed to me.... I grasped at once that it was the long-prepared, long-awaited, long-feared war between man and machine, now finally broken out. On all sides, lie bodies dead and torn to pieces.... On every wall, wild and stirring posters, demanding, in gigantic letters, that flamed like torches, to finally mobilize man against the machine; at last, to strike dead the oily, beautifully clad, perfumed idle rich, who, with the help of the machine, have squeezed the fat from the bodies of others, by means of their great, coughing, terrible, snarling, devilish, confining automobile. At last, to set the factories afire, and depopulate the soiled Earth a little bit! With that, grass can grow again; out of the dusty, cement world, something like woods, meadows, heath, brook, and moor may grow again.
“It was war, which was not concerned with a Kaiser, a republic, national borders, flags, or colors, but where anybody, for whom the air had become too close, and for whom the land no longer tasted right, gave hard-hitting expression to his anger, and tried to initiate the general destruction of this metallic, civilized world. I saw how the lust to kill, to destroy, smiled in everyone’s eyes, and to my own self, these wild, red flowers also bloomed on high.”
And finally,
“Yes, there are indeed too many people in the world today. Before, one did not notice it. But now, where everyone does not have pure air to breathe, but instead, each wants an automobile—now one notices it. Of course, what we are doing is nonsense, not rational, as the war was also massive nonsense. In time, mankind will have to learn to check its increase by rational means. Meanwhile, we respond to an unbearable situation rather irrationally—however, we basically do what’s right—we reduce.”
For a normal person, this is difficult to comprehend, but this camp does not claim to be rational in the least. Mohler concedes that there are many contradictions in cyclical thinking. The Conservative Revolution in fact would distrust any system that makes sense. Logic, for them, is only a tool for processing insights attained by other means.
“The Conservative Revolution believes, that ideas that ‘add up,’ occur in a space devoid of reality: Only thus, in unopposed emptiness could better elements be joined together in a continuous construction.” Here lies the probable reason, why the members of the Club of Rome do not themselves believe their prognoses.
For what Mohler writes here, certainly applies to the manipulative pseudo-knowledge of global systems analysis, but not to reality. But that already gives these people too much credit. Another “conservative revolutionary” by the name of Quabbe acknowledges: “For the conservative, reflection on the bases of his own worldview is a kind of profanity ... the reduction of an irrational value to a rational standard, a secularization of the Divine for which the attraction of the inexplicable is taken....”
Mohler rushes to dispel any possible awkward misunderstandings, and acknowledges that in the name “Conservative Revolution,” the word “conservative” was an unfortunate choice. “Preserving” and “maintaining” would indeed involve the idea of influencing events as a whole, which would be the position of the party adverse to progress.
That there are additional points of contact between the conservative revolution and the Greens, is revealed in their common worship of wilderness. Nature, which is often ennobled much more beautifully through man, is not enough for them: there must be wilderness. “It is above all the wilderness, which becomes an image of poetry for the followers of Nietzsche—wilderness not seen from the ‘linear’ world as destruction, but as a wound-healing sleep,” says Mohler.
Yet Mohler expresses himself even more plainly:
“In the wilderness, the laws of economics do not apply. The wilderness is the background before which the global emotion unfolds, which we want to describe here: whence it goes out, it always returns.”
In case someone still requires proof that the Greens march in fascist footsteps, then one should refer to the modern identity of the argumentation of Friedrich Georg Jünger in The Perfection of Technology, written in 1939, and Robert Jungk’s The Atom State.
What Jünger says in the book itself, is certainly clinically interesting. He warns of the dangerous illusions that are associated with technological progress. In almost the same manner, all the Greens after him spoke out, including [Aurelio] Peccei, who recently proclaimed that science cannot “magically” solve all problems. Not magically—but rationally.
Jünger is not even original, when he argues that science has nothing to do with the creation of wealth; he simply repeats the well-worn arguments of the Physiocrats, who belatedly provided the East India Company with justification for the exploitative methods of British colonialism. From a scientific standpoint, Jünger’s views are really outrageous. He thus maintains that all industrial operations are entropic:
“Thus, the smallest technical operation requires more energy than it generates. How then should a surplus be created through the sum of these procedures?”
We now propose, that people who think this way, be consistent, and eat grass with the aid of clods of ore, instead of still hypocritically making use of the results of technology. Or even better, stop eating altogether, since, according to their “theory,” energy can be saved in this way.
All the others have copied from Jünger—directly or indirectly—Jungk or Gruhl (in Gruhl’s A Planet Is Plundered, whole passages on the depletion of nature are shamelessly copied). Jünger wrote “Global 2000” 40 years before [Social Democratic Party leader] Erhard Eppler and Jimmy Carter:
“[Technology] fills the air with smoke, pollutes the water, destroys forests and animals. This leads to a condition, in which Nature ‘must be protected from rational thought.’ ”
The direction this wind is blowing, becomes clear in the next passage:
“[The technician] ruins factory owners through inventions which are not anticipated. The wealth and ruin of the capitalists is as indifferent to him as that of the proletariat. For him, there is neither debt and interest, nor the sustenance of life....”
That is a deeply anti-capitalist, monetary mindset, which is characteristic of fascism. And the magic word—the sacred cow of the oligarchy—is stated: Technological progress ruins interest!
In all respects, this book teems with mere monetary truisms, which, as all arguments of the oligarchy, are nothing but cheap, deliberate lies; as, for example, that progressive technology is responsible for inflation! The International Monetary Fund dishes out the same garbage, solely for the purpose of keeping developing nations, which want to proceed with their industrialization, under the yoke of colonialism.
On the one hand, Jünger is obliged to concede, that “technological thinking is rational,” but then, on the other hand, he speaks of “demonic trends in technology.” Thus, evidently, rationality is, for him, somewhat horrible. He goes to the extent of arguing, that industrial accidents with progressive technology have turned out to be so numerous, that they equal the frequency of military casualties. But, there are many more people killed during bear-hunting than working in the laboratory.
The theses proposed at the beginning, that the members of the Conservative Revolution are the most elite, most evil species, is confirmed by Jünger in the following way:
“We must recognize that technological progress and the education of the masses go hand in hand.... Technological progress is most powerful in that realm, where education of the masses is the most advanced [emphasis added].... They [the masses] are the most useful, most pliant material for the engineer, whose work plans could not be implemented at all without them....” And, “We associate with the conception of the masses, notions of ponderousness, weight, and dependency. Vulgarization.”
For the oligarchy, educated masses—numerous educated people—-is a horrible idea, because they would end their privileged, elitist position as oligarchs, who are happy to rule over uneducated masses.
The idea of republican nation-states, based on technological progress, is horrible for the Conservative Revolution on exactly the same ground. Friedrich Hielscher, a “Conservative Revolutionary” from the Jünger circle, thus demanded the breakup of nation-states into “tribes” and “rural areas.” Another subdivision of the Conservative Revolution, the Pan-European Union of Otto von Habsburg, also consistently demands the creation of a “Europe of the Regions.” It ought, in turn, no longer be astonishing, if now left-Socialists demand the strict decentralization of nation-states and militantly precipitate attempts at autonomy by all conceivable minorities. Even less surprising is the fact, that from this narrow angle, the developed national languages are criticized, in favor of slang and regional dialects. In contrast to this, the pathological hatred which the Club of Rome bears toward the idea of the nation-state is really significant and dangerous. Typical is Aurelio Peccei’s speech before the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Spring 1981, in which he declared the nation-state bankrupt, and called it the main obstacle to a global technical correction culminating in a “new world order.”
That Peter Siemens, as the director of a company which controls almost the entire nuclear energy area of the Federal Republic, and which has been characterized as a “state within the state,” is an anthroposoph, would in itself be alarming enough.
Citizens must immediately be enlightened, as to what is hidden behind the allegedly harmless façade of health food stores and Waldorf schools: the writings of Rudolf Steiner, a fanatical cultist. Steiner believed not only in the reincarnation of man; he promoted the worship of Lucifer! That alone would indeed be revealing, but might seem to be the private affair of Mr. Siemens. Unfortunately, that is not so.
Armin Mohler did not write his thesis on the Conservative Revolution, for example, in youthful levity, but rather still today, he thinks essentially the same way, while being the director of the Siemens Foundation. This becomes clear from a Mohler brochure, which has now been mailed out by the Association of German Electrical Engineering Technicians (Regional Association of North Bavaria) as “talking points.”
In the brochure, “The Dream of the Natural Paradise,” Mohler speaks somewhat pathetically about the “ecological woe” which has already stormed the bastion of public opinion. He poses it simply there, indeed even says that a world outlook, which has achieved such a position—is hardly challenged any more “from the outside,” but rather only “from within.” If Siemens were really a company that wanted to promote technological progress, what should prevent Mohler from assailing the ecological movement “from the outside”?
Thus, in 1981, Mohler “criticizes” the green movement “from within,” and then also reiterates in essence his earlier theses, that the rise of the “ecological woe” is associated with the de-Christianization of the modern world. It is extremely noteworthy, that Mohler’s conception of Christianity is presented here very much “from the outside.” He apparently does not know the neo-Platonic, Augustinian tradition.
For a person who knows of Mohler’s Conservative Revolution of 1949, it is extremely informative, that he calls the ecological ideology a “salvation doctrine,” thus equating it with his earlier observations of cults. He even sketches the path “from Rousseau to the current ecological woe,” via the intermediary of Romanticism. “Thus, according to the example of the archetypal plant, ‘nature’ turns into a kind of personal entelechy, against which one can sin as against a lady.” At the same time, the comparison throws an interesting light on the fantasy life of Mr. Mohler.
After this brief introduction, the actual criticism “from within” now takes place. Mohler lets the cat out of the bag: The new youth movement has a forgotten “demanding taskmaster”—“founding father” Friedrich Georg Jünger. He has gone far ahead of the youth movement, so that that which was formulated by him could become a casually wielded, anonymous commodity. Jünger, however, had already formulated everything better and more tightly.
The “criticism” which Mohler makes of the Greens, is limited to the fact that they have constructed an incomplete thought-model, in which creation only took place once, right at the beginning—and since then only destruction. In contrast, Mohler places the Conditia humana (human condition), being fixed between birth and death, between new creation, which always reoccurs, and destruction, which likewise recurs. And although Mohler expresses himself here cautiously, we are already once again at the yo-yo principle of the “eternal return of the same.”
If an organization which deals with advanced technology, offers its members nothing better than such “talking points,” then that is disconcerting. What Mohler does here, is typical of the modus operandi of the Club of Rome: An illusory debate is set up, as to who is now the better “Green,” the “right-wing” Jünger, or the “left-wing” ecologist. That both, “from outside” reason, are quacks, had to have been said and proven. But, as Mohler says in the epilogue of the new edition of his Conservative Revolution of 1971, the new youth movement is quite close to the Conservative Revolution, and this does not surprise him, but rather only confirms the “inevitability” of such processes. The yo-yo principle also here.
But whence does it arise, that someone, who, as the director of the foundation of a company which is predominantly engaged with technology, would have to have access to modern scientific expertise, either does not have this or does not use it? Is it then not known to the Siemens Foundation, that in the meantime, the empirical proof has also been produced in many scientific areas, that the universe is organized in a non-entropic manner and not according to the yo-yo process (this is proven for plasma physics, biology, astrophysics and the pre-human evolutionary process), and that therefore, and for many other reasons, ever higher energy densities and organizational states are necessary in the production process, if a drastic lowering of the sustainable population—genocide—is not to be the consequence?
Why is Mr. Mohler of the view, that it is only possible to argue “from within”?
It is worthwhile to return once again to Mohler’s Conservative Revolution, in which he cites the book penned by a certain Schauwecker, Germany Alone, of 1931. Schauwecker writes there, that the world of progress could only be attacked with its own weapons:
“For this period is only worth being destroyed. But in order to destroy it, one must first know it accurately. Otherwise one succumbs to it. One had to completely subdue the technology, while one developed it fully. Then it was no longer a problem, but rather a foregone conclusion, about which one was no longer astonished. The admiration for machines, that was the danger. They deserved no admiration at all, they only had to be used, nothing more.”
And Mohler added without pausing:
“The words of Schauwecker show, that the national revolutionaries do the same as the adherent of progress, and yet mean it completely differently.”
Now, why has Siemens created a situation in many areas under the utilization of the patent law, where real technological progress, for example in the postal system, is blocked, because no one can get around Siemens? Or, why, for example, is Siemens now against the construction of the high-temperature reactor? Or what is the cause of the obvious failure of the Siemens firm in the area of advanced computer systems?
Every time the oligarchs are certain that they have already won, they openly acknowledge, that they are the real leaders of this movement. Thus, the president of the Italian World Wildlife Fund, Fulco Protesi, proposed in November 1981, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Mondo, that either the chairman of the Club of Rome, Peccei, or Bussati Troverso, the president of the European Society of Culture, should become the chairman of a new oligarchical mass party in Italy. The choice between Peccei and Troverso, that would be the choice between NATO/intelligence and the “Global 2000” faction of the U.S. Administration, or of an extremely influential “intellectual” elite combination of the old Venetian oligarchy. Both merely represent different nodal points of the same network.
Such a nodal point earlier in history was the circle around the magazine Die Tat.
Under the concept of an “action circle,” that group of influential German intellectuals, “Conservative Revolutionaries,” which, from 1908, gathered around the publisher Diedrich, and set up the monthly Die Tat as the organ of anti-Christian, geopolitical, mystical-Arian and later, openly fascistic movements. Diedrich himself was the publisher of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitics (Magazine for Geopolitics), founded by Karl Haushofer, which helped prepare intellectually for the later Drang nach Osten (Push Towards the East), and which included as a collaborator Friedrich Wilhelm von Oertzen, the father of today’s Hanover SPD Chairman Peter von Oertzen.
In the development of Die Tat, perhaps three phases are to be identified: From the founding of the magazine in the year 1908 by Ernst and August Horneffer, both employees of the national Nietzsche Archives in Weimar, until approximately 1914, articles were mostly about the “neo-Christian” movement in the framework of the “youth movement” massively promoted by Diedrich. The Horneffer brothers promoted a new “Christendom in Action,” which, in essence, constituted a turning away from Christian humanism, and a turning towards mysticism and the theosophy of the anthroposoph Rudolf Steiner.
After the end of World War I, this policy was resumed by Die Tat and also introduced into the Catholic Church via the above-mentioned anti-technology philosopher Romano Guardini.
From 1928, Die Tat experienced a radical about-turn in the direction of the fascist mass movement, when Hans Zehrer, Giselher Wirsing, and Ferndinand Fried purchased the magazine. By 1932, Die Tat became the most-read monthly of the Weimar period, with a strong pro-fascist, geopolitical orientation—its circulation exceeded that of the Weltbühne (World Stage).
It is also important, that the Horneffer brothers were connected to the notorious Thule Society. Karl Jaspers also belonged to the group around Die Tat. He was the doctoral advisor to the current Lower Saxony Governor Ernst Albrecht, who helped another member of the Club of Rome, Eduard Pestel, obtain a ministerial position. One should not forget, that it was Albrecht, who prohibited the nuclear reprocessing facility at Gorleben; no one but he was the reason for the “political unenforceability” of this project. Finally, Karl Jaspers was the mentor of Armin Mohler, after Mohler had briefly—as a Swiss citizen (!)—requested membership in the SS, before he became the secretary of Ernst Jünger.
If one adheres to the self-definition provided by the Conservative Revolution, many connections become clear. Then one is not amazed that such an ostensibly “left,” radical “green” politician as Mencke-Glückert, the FDP Ministerial Director in the Interior Ministry, maintains contact, on the one side, with a—mildly expressed—extreme “conservative” institute such as the European Cultural Foundation, and on the other side, with—also mildly expressed—such extreme “left” circles as the Pressedienst Demokratische Initiative (Democratic Initiative News Service, PDI). In turn, besides Robert Jungk (“The Atom State”), also such friends of the Berlin-squatter-scene as Ingeborg Drewitz, who not accidentally is regarded as an expert on the Romantic movement of the 19th Century, works in the PDI.
Robert Jungk in turn collaborates with Mencke-Glückert via the Futures Group, one of the most evil think-tanks in the U.S.A., which has specialized in teaching the so-called “Delphic Method” to management and politicians. By this is meant the capability, according to the Greek Oracle of Delphi, of generating, with the help of the media and through ostensibly “contrary” positions, an illusory debate for the public, which is supposed to forget that reality looks entirely different.
Another specialty of the Futures Group is intellectual and psychological conditioning by means of computer-simulation. The target groups in such “courses of instruction,” in addition to the economic and political executives, are, above all, the representatives of the nations of the Third World. Computer simulations, which are based on the systems-analysis model of the Club of Rome or “Global 2000,” are put in front of the participants in the courses of instruction. Accordingly, it is only a matter of the unbridgeable contrast between overpopulation and limited resources. Now the participants in the courses of instruction are permitted to change the variables—within the pre-determined program of course. In doing so, one shows greater appreciation of “ethnic concerns” respecting the reduction of the population. The game, of course, ends with the fact that every “positive change” of the variables only aggravates the overpopulation/limited resources problem and completely demoralizes the participants in the course of instruction.
To return to the initial thesis: The disaster can only be averted if it is worked through, in Germany and in other parts of the world, from a conceptual standpoint of the history of where the roots of fascism lie, and of what its subsequent history is.
In other locations, we have developed in detail, what the theoretical economic foundations of fascism are, and as well, we have thoroughly documented the danger that leading financiers would react today to the world economic crisis with fascist economic policies. We only footnote here, that without a new world financial system for the financing of broad technology transfers for the industrialization of the Third World, as a war-avoidance strategy, no actual solution could be found.
As far as the subjective side is concerned, the danger of fascist mass movements, a conceptually historical consideration is also indispensable, because only in this way can the emergence of a new, differently colored species of sheep in the same pasture be prevented.
If one applies the conceptual apparatus which we have undertaken to develop here, to the present, it becomes clear where the fascist potential lies. The characteristics are—and this is no “German” problem—the cult of irrationalism, the assault on scientific thought, which Nietzsche termed the “Socratic dialogue.” Further characteristics are, that irrationalism takes organized forms, and that its adherents try to force their irrational will by violence, on those who think differently.
From this standpoint, it can be said that terrorism is generally fascist, as indeed was demonstrated by the “P-2” scandal in Italy: The fascist international controls both “right” and “left” terrorism, through the logistical support of the mafia.
Fascists, irrespective of the nationality or era to which they belong, deny the perfectibility of man. They have often termed this the “dictatorship of reason.” What they want, is the Dionysian, existentialist living-out of feelings, the undisturbed fulfillment of “needs,” at the expense of everyone else.
If this spiritual attitude is viewed from a Neoplatonic or a Christian standpoint, therefore, from the threefold division of the human consciousness into sensual desire, understanding, and reason, then this lowest condition corresponds to sin, in the Christian view, or seen from the humanistic standpoint, to extreme infantilism, which manifests itself, in its organized form, as fascism.
If a two-year-old wants to live out his sensual desires, this is normal, and requires only compassionate education by his parents. However, if ostensible adults express the same mental condition, then they are spiritually underdeveloped. So it is no coincidence, that these infantile adults, if they come into contact with a complex reality which upsets their infantile fantasies, react in a paranoid fashion.
Paranoia, the wild fear about the inadequacy of one’s own self, is a very important marker of fascism—paranoia over an inner emptiness, mixed with the “green discharge of nausea,” which must be overcome in a Dionysian frenzy. Paranoia is the completely normal consequence, if reason goes into decline.
It is highly revealing, that in the London Tavistock Institute for psychological warfare, studies of the phenomenon of “U.S. Cowboys” as a psychological type were undertaken, and the not-surprising fact was discovered, that the chief characteristic of the “cowboy” is his paranoia. Normal cooperation or collaboration is impossible, and the “cowboy” must either be “on top,” or somebody is “on top of him.”
This paranoid form, which unfortunately has often decided American foreign policy, can, in an unfavorable strategic constellation, lead to war, because the reality principle is rejected, and everything is only viewed by this standard of “who is on top?”
The idea that fascism is not possible in the U.S.A., is, there, very widespread indeed, but unfortunately, is completely false. Once rejecting a certain open genocide-promoting part of the last administration—look at “Global 2000”—America is already, to a startling degree, a “programmed society.” The average television consumption of five hours per day, per capita, is more conducive than anything else to banishing every sense of reality, and engendering a basic paranoid mood in the population. Goebbels’ propaganda machine and its popular reception is pushed far into the shadows by today’s U.S. television.
If the emergence of “freaks” in America represents a new version of the Weimar counterculture and youth movement, the current emergence of a country-and-western cult promoted by the entertainment industry is a new version of the “people’s movement.” The country-and-western-cowboy cult is not only a banalization of human sensibility to an extremely low level; it also has all the cultish elements of every “blood-and-soil” cult, opening the floodgates.
Since the entertainment mafia, which moreover is closely interwoven with the drug mafia, has in recent years led frustrated mainstream America—in a reaction against the wave of rock-music programming—unconsciously toward “truly American culture,” namely, cowboy and western schmaltz, and has now introduced a new phase. Now that America’s youth is vastly corrupted through rock, disco, and drugs, the rest of the population now has to be pulled away from their belief in the “American Way of Life,” that being the belief in the unbounded possibility of solving the world’s problems through technological progress. Slowly, the cowboy cult will fuse with the “green” movement, and to this end, the New York Times recently brought out a stirring history of the virgin American West, which must be shielded from the evils of industry.
As part of the psychological affliction of fascism, and as part of the fundamental outlook of cultural pessimism, are also the sensations of anxiety, grief, and woe, and Kirkegaard saw the world as meaningless and shattered, and expressed the opinion that anxiety and doubt must be the necessary consequence of that. The “grief” of Heidegger, which is so often and so deeply felt by the Greens, is nothing other than the paranoid reaction to problems which are only susceptible to being solved with rational methods. And finally, the “ecological woe” is plainly a lie. Whoever actually strives for improved environmental protection, doesn’t lament, but becomes an engineer or a scientist, in order to overcome obsolescence of old technology with better, new technologies.
The 1981 Christmas message from Pope John Paul II is, against this background, an extraordinarily political intervention. In it, he presents the idea that hedonistic forces have undermined the morality of the so-called “developed sector” to a level of moral senility. This moral decay, this cultural pessimism, has made necessary an intervention by the Church for the benefit of the intangible, of the value of human life—for which the Pope nearly had to pay with his life. The tracking of the assassins behind this attempt on his life would lead Sadat and Reagan back to the forces behind destabilization.
If we would prevent the danger of a new fascism, this time worldwide, and of a new world war, then the track of those who targetted the Pope must be investigated, and the guilty must be called to account.
Therefore, if the question is posed, how it could happen, that Hitler came to power in Germany, although the majority of citizens were against him, then something becomes clear about today’s situation. The majority of Germans were not fascists, but “small people,” who said, “Oh, what could I do about it?” or, “Actually, things aren’t so bad, and everything will get better.”
Today, if one looks at how the [Willy] Brandt sections of the SPD, the FDP, and the CDU-CSU are getting in bed with the Greens, on grounds of election tactics, then he would have to be afraid that these politicians haven’t learned anything from history. What price did all the democratic politicians pay, who tolerated the Nazis, with their “tactical” alliances, citing “reasons of advantage”?
Then, as now, no cooperation with fascists ought to be tolerated. If a Hasselmann and a Biedenkopf, and others, propose collaboration with the “black” Greens, the CDU ought to consider very seriously whether they should even tolerate these people. The same goes for party functionaries in the SPD, concerning Eppler and the defenders of Brandt.
Perhaps there is still time to overcome the cult of irrationalism. One of the most important prerequisites for doing that it to reform the “reform,” which is to a large degree responsible for the current “youth movement”: the so-called “school reforms” of the 1970s.
A humanistic education in the spirit of the Classics and of Socratic dialogue, which the reactionaries so fear, is the best antidote against the forces of irrationalism. Throughout the history of human society, the very concepts we need today are those which Christianity and humanism have advanced, without which there would not have been progress. We should employ them, with that optimism which so annoyed Nietzsche’s “Steppenwolf.”
This article, which was first published in January 1982 in the German weekly Neue Solidarität, remains the definitive study of the roots of eco-fascism. We publish here the first of two parts, which has been translated from German.
Our hope rests in the young people, who can tolerate high temperatures, since in them, the fresh, festering sore of disgust is consumed.
—Ernst Jünger, The Adventurous Heart, 1929
If, only 36 years after the end of the Second World War, a general uneasiness spreads far and wide, that we are on the edge of a possible third, and therefore probably last world war; that we are already in the midst of a new world economic crisis; that our society threatens to fall apart; that all values seem to be dissappearing, and hardly anyone has the ability to rule out any longer the danger of a new fascism—then it is the best possible time to ask some fundamental questions, and clarify concepts.
It is most urgent to create and clarify once and for all, what fascism really is; from what elements it is composed; and who its representatives were and are. For that, it is necessary to remove the assumption, for example, of countless Anglo-American films, that fascism, or nationalism, is an exclusive problem of Germans. We should also get rid of the linguistic sophistry, that the concept “fascist” does not apply to National Socialism, but instead, describes historical developments in Italy or Spain. Such sophistries only serve as academic rationalizations, when the question is, to fight the danger of fascism everywhere that it appears today.
Just as there is a conceptual prehistory of fascism, there is a conceptual post-history. National Socialism in Germany, and the Holocaust against Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Communists, and Social Democrats, was only one of many expressed forms of fascism, even if, up to that point in time, the most horrible and barbaric. But, from this standpoint, the Pol Pot regime—which, after all, killed 3 million people in three years, and with that, nearly half its own people, is arguably fascist.
An historically well-grounded conceptual clarity is likewise necessary, since frequently, persons and organizations which represent the exact opposite of fascist ideas, are called names by followers of truly fascist movements, only because they advocate building nuclear energy, or an effective fight against the drug plague. It has been proven historically correct, that the glorification of drugs and hostility to technology are prominent features of the fascist worldview.
As a first approximation, let us say that fascism and its forerunners were characterized by the following primary elements: 1) Malthusian or racially motivated genocide; 2) fascist economic policy; 3) a fascist mass movement; 4) a fascist elite, which controls this mass movement, without this movement being conscious of it.
This fascist elite likes to call itself a “conservative intelligentsia,” but it understands the word “conservative” in an entirely specific sense; it looks down at those who are not part of the life of the select movement, with the same arrogance that this social circle in its time looked down on “the Austrian corporal.” Even if they need the fascist masses to accomplish their policy, the introduction of the masses is for them—as elites—a horror. One does not associate with this movement very easily, just as one would not like to be seen with embarrassing distant relatives—but the family bonds cannot be denied.
One need only read the writings of such representatives of the “conservative intelligensia,” to be taken aback by how openly they write about their adversaries and their intentions. Their enemy, which they wanted to annihilate at all costs, is Judeo-Christianity, and its secular forms: concepts of development of all kinds; the idea of mankind’s capacity for perfection; even the idea of progress. They say openly—e.g., Dr. Stephen Mumford recently in the American Humanist Magazine—that the Catholic Church must be smashed, so that the intended reduction of the population can be implemented. Or, they indicate openly, as do the members of the Club of Rome, that it is they who have established the “green” movement in the world. One does well to take these confessions seriously.
Old Ideas in New Clothes
The current world economic crisis threatens that the structural problems in the developed nations will become far worse in their extent than those of the 1930s, but the developing nations will be hit on an unprecedented scale. Economic experts do not preclude that a great crash might come even as soon as this Winter.
There are oligarchical circles in London and New York, who quite openly discuss that a new Hitler is needed again, perhaps one without the personality flaws of Adolf Hitler, but someone who can implement the same policy now. In Italy, the press blatantly says that Socialist Party head Craxi might make a very good new Mussolini.
Today the significance of a charismatic Führer-figure is broadly overestimated in discussions of fascism, the more so now that in the television society of the United States, it has been demonstrated that completely synthetic “charismatic” Führers can be produced by the dozen, and out of plastic.
For the rise of National Socialism, as of fascism in general, program and ideology were, and are, very different. If our judges were better trained not only in law, but also in economic theory, history, and philosophy—to say nothing of energy technology—then they would long ago have put on the Index, not only direct Nazi propaganda, but also all writings which contain the same basic ideas, but adopt other confusing connections and use other ways of speaking.
If one wished to pick out every writing which had a great influence on National Socialism, one would have to take at least the following: The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche; The Destruction of the Evening Lands by Oswald Spengler; The Third Reich by Müller van den Bruck; The Foundations of the 19th Century by Houston Chamberlain; The Myth of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg; and naturally Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which was by no means the most widely read among these.
What these writings were for National Socialism, are now, for today’s danger of a new fascism, such books as Limits To Growth by the Club of Rome; Global 2000; Global Futures; or the U.S. bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy. Such culturally pessimistic catastrophe theories and mythologies serve now, as then, as justification for the omission and avoidance of those steps which could address the actual catastrophe. That the whole lot of these “theories” are, from a scientific standpoint, quackery, and arise from a primitive Malthusian-Darwinist-nominalist worldview, is not an argument that carries any weight with their adherents: It is exactly the world of reason and scientific thinking, against which they want to hurl their irrationality.
The “green movement” is a fascist movement. The absolute intolerance against other ways of thinking, even if they are held by the majority of people; the emphasis on “the people’s common-sense feelings”; the mystical ennobling of nature; the Romantic flight from the world to a pre-industrial life on the Eco-farm; the apotheosis of a transcendent mystical intoxication about life; the Dionysian character of the rock-drug culture—these are all entirely typical markers of the fascist mass movement.
To be sure, every “Green” is not a hardboiled, conscious fascist, but potentially, tends in that direction, and under conditions of a worsening economic crisis, the unfortunate Green proceeds there rapidly. Punks carry swastikas quite blatantly, and the radicalized part of the Green movement long ago seized upon the methods of the stormtroopers. On this point, the street battles in many German cities, the atrocities and attacks against advocates of technological progress, and the terrorist methods with which the political activities of their opponents are disrupted, speak volumes.
Part of this political movement does not even shrink from political murder, as the killings of Jürgen Ponto, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Siegfried Buback, or Heinz Herbert Karry prove. These all take place in an intellectual climate characterized by the exaltation of irrationality, fully supported by the news media and the film industry. The cult films of a Fritz Lang find their counterparts in a plethora of modern cult films such as Clockwork Orange, The Shining, or New York 1990. And the fact that hundreds of Protestant ministers have placed themselves in the forefront of this movement, also awakens unpleasant memories of the Nazi Ministersbund.
Where does all this come from? The German people must immediately overcome their blocking about history, and examine the past 200 years of their history, in order to prevent disaster.
From the ‘Romantic’ Movement to the Greens
From the standpoint of the oligarchical elite, the transition from the 18th to the 19th Century was littered with catastrophes, which caused them so many nightmares, that some of them literally went mad over it, such as George III, or Friedrich Wilhelm IV. What the Republicans and humanists welcomed as hope of the advent of the Age of Reason, appeared to the oligarchs as an intolerable danger of their loss of power.
The success of the American Revolution, from which the English nobility has not to this day recovered; the spread of the same ideas in Europe and, in the initial stage of the French Revolution; the wide circulation of humanistic ideas in the German population by the Weimar Classic; and the effects of the Industrial Revolution, becoming ever more clear in the course of the 19th Century in the consciousness of broader layers of the population in many nations—all of this drove these circles to desperation.
In his book The Conservative Revolution, Armin Mohler, the current director of the Siemens Institute in Munich, describes this circle, the agency of this Conservative Revolution, as an effective current in Germany and almost all of the European nations, which has an influence on all the areas of life. Mohler, who himself is to be regarded as in this camp, describes with the insight of someone engaged in the process, that at this time, that worldview has attained victory, which to the Conservative Revolution appeared as the actual opponent.
“We would like to rewrite it [this world] for the present as a world which does not place the immutable in man in the center,” he writes, “but rather believes that it is possible to change the essence of man. It therefore proclaims the possibility of stepwise progress, regards all things, relations, and incidents as intellectually transparent, and tries to isolate and to comprehend each object based only on itself.”
Of course, Mohler—and this is typical for representatives of these circles—does not actually understand the scientific method based on reason, but rather only from the bottom and phenomenally; nonetheless, here he speaks with astonishing candidness. It is the optimistic belief in progress of the 19th Century, against which this right opposition acts, and later against the spirit of the Founding Years [the post-1871 period of German unification] and against that “volatile growth of the economic and military power of Germany.”
No other figure has played such a large role in the ideological realization of fascism as Friedrich Nietzsche. Mohler also says that everything which occurred later in Germany, had to have been conceived by Nietzsche. However, it is worthwhile to reinvestigate, what tradition Nietzsche himself comes from.
The Romantic movement already operated during the Weimar Classic as a counterculture to the Classical-humanist culture. One must absolutely designate some of the leading Romantics as court-ideologues of the oligarchy. Romanticism was characterized by an emotional displacement and a transcendence of all concepts of life, the emphasis on “natural instincts” compared to reason, a mystical fascination with the Middle Ages, in contrast to the Classical and Renaissance periods, and an engrossed escapism. The dictum of Novalis: “The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the world,” is typical of the loss of sense of reality.
It was that which Heinrich Heine, who was the clearest thinker of his time on this point, called the “disgusting mixture of Gothic delusion and modern lie” in the “Romantic School.” This “disgusting mixture” haunted the youth movement, found a ghastly highpoint with the Nazis, and is now alive again in the Green movement.
These circles, which from now on, for the sake of simplicity, we want to call the Conservative Revolution, promoted Romanticism in the same way and for the same reasons as those, who, like Countess Marion Doenhof, systematically sponsored the Greens for around 11 years.
One had to destroy every realistic world-concept, to annihilate every rational view of one’s own people and of foreign peoples, in order to be able to deploy the youth as a battering ram against technological progress. The death wish implanted in Romanticism later came to the Nazis in the nick of time, in order to glorify a heroic death, and to send even children into total war. Unfortunately, with the yearning for one’s own death, contempt for foreign lives also grew, with respect to which nothing has changed since the Romantic movement, which created the recruiting field for Giuseppi Mazzini’s anarchist bands, through the Nazis, up to the Green movement, with slogans like “Yesterday carry-sausage, tomorrow semolina-gruel” make clear.
The most important link in the intellectual pre-history of fascism, between Romanticism and Nietzsche, was Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of Romanticism, which moreover stood in a close intellectual relationship to the British nominalists Hobbes and Locke, and shared their bestial conception of man. Schopenhauer, also an early foster-father of the Greens, emphasized the incapacity of reason to discern the real essence of things. He banalized reason as a mere vehicle, with the help of which, the objectives set by the will could be attained, somewhat in the sense of the old aunts who warn: “Now, just be reasonable!” Also, the roots of the denial of a meaning of life by the modern existentialist philosophers lie with Schopenhauer, for whom life is basically not worth affirming. In the aftermath, this idea grew powerful and bore not a little of the responsibility for the perpetration of genocide by the Nazis.
Incidentally, Schopenhauer’s ascetic conception recalls the masochistic “self-denial” of our Greens of today, who prefer to eat grain and to heat their homes with coal-burning stoves (and thus to pollute the environment). Schopenhauer is the first who made pessimism into a system, but this pessimism is irrational and amoral. Since there allegedly is no progress in the possibility of rational cognition and action, and he excoriates the Platonic or Christian doctrines of virtue to an equal degree, the necessity of one’s own moral action is dispensed with.
Nietzsche, Progenitor of the Counterculture
You have to agree with Mohler that everything which happened subsequently in Germany, must be understood from the standpoint of Nietzsche. Only he is surely not the “grand judge of time,” as Mohler admiringly calls him, and Mohler identifies him as the “historical-intellectual founding figure” who stood as the “great” of the Conservative Revolution. If you read Nietzsche’s books, you get, above all, the suspicion that the insanity which allegedly overcame him later—apparently in the last phase of his syphilitic disease—had controlled him throughout his whole life.
Nietzsche, whose favorite philosopher was Schopenhauer, hated humanism in all its manifestations, in a certain pathological way, especially if it had to do with Plato, Schiller, or Beethoven. He was an outstanding example of the intellectual current which was interested in the dissolution of scientific thought, after the unity of artistic knowledge and natural science had been brilliantly demonstrated by the work of the two Humboldt brothers.
It is not surprising that the pair Johann Strauss and Klaus Traube, in their book Ecology and Economy, came to the conclusion that the “progressive” left-ecology movement must not only rehabilitate Romanticism, but must take up clear opposition to the “three great revolutionaries” of the principle of progress. These were, first, the Greek-Christian intellectual revolution; second, the Renaissance, and third, the Industrial Revolution.
Nietzsche went so far as to totally deny the scientific and humanistic explanation of the unity of human development, and was therefore the forerunner of Spengler, Rosenberg, and the Green ideologues. He came to a “biological worldview,” which showed itself in such mystical concepts as “blood and soil,” “race,” and “symbol.” Such a “biological worldview” also logically lies at the heart of today’s turned-inside-out “environmental protection,” in the sense of “ecology,” “bioethics,” and so forth.
Nietzsche is therefore a turning point, because he, with this anti-morality, helped tear down the constraints, even to the point of the famous “all is permitted” of the Nazis, or to the point of the belief of the outrageous sections of the Greens, that everything is permitted in order to carry out their irrational will against the majority.
That which was later carried out so abominably from the worldview of the Nazis, Nietzsche expressed thus:
“Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, decadence, miscarriages, of exhausted and weakened instincts? ... Is there a pessimism of the strong? An intellectual obeisance to the difficult, the horrid, evil, the problematique of existence? Is there perhaps a disease from superabundance itself? A seductive bravery of the harshest whoremonger, who desires the dreadful, such as the enemy, the worthy enemy, on whom he can test his strength?”
In the history of thought, these notions point directly to Spengler, to the Nazis, and emerge again in the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
For Nietzsche, the scientific formulation of questions, which he correctly traced back to Socrates, was the arch-enemy of any culture. In order to shatter this “Socratic spirit,” he went so far as to rewrite history, as it had been described by Schiller, Humboldt, and other humanists, and to give a new interpretation to Classical antiquity.
He contrasts the “Socratic” with the “Dionysian,” and then stresses exactly the phase of history in which irrationalism, in organized form, creates a revolt. This Dionysian, he says, can be comprehended by man most readily through the analogy of delirium.
“Either through the influence of narcotic drinks, of which all primeval men and races speak in their hymns, or through violence, all of nature, joyfully full of the piercing approach of Spring, awakens every kind of Dionysian stimulation, through whose rise the Subjective vanishes in total self-dissolution. In the German Middle Ages, under the same Dionysian power, an ever-growing band tramped, singing and dancing, from place to place: In these St. John and St. Vitus dances, we again recognize the Bacchanalian choruses of the Greeks, with their pre-history in Asia Minor, up to Babylon, and the orgiastic sacraments.”
Then he added, not totally without self-reflection:
“There are people who turn away, out of lack of experience or stupidity, from such phenomena as if they were a common sickness, mocking or deploring them; the poor cheerfully don’t pay attention to how pale and ghostly even health appears, when the glowing life of Dionysian swarms flows over them.”
So pale and ghostly must the anti-fascists in Germany have felt, when the Nazis stormed through the streets and exerted their Dionysian frenzy, for which the Berlin Sports Palace has become forever a shameful name. And such a ghostly feeling would also set in when, in a short time, a hundred thousand street opponents of the [Frankfurt] airport runway [in the 1980s], waving banners and with drumrolls, stormed through Wiesbaden. And Mohler knowingly writes:
“The popular national picture of the nihilists [which is taken from Nietzsche’s thought—HZL] shows them as an unruly mob, which tramples to pieces a malleable world under its rhythmic song.”
One of the most important characteristics of fascism is that irrationalism takes over in an organized, often paramilitary or military way. A specific irrational person is not necessarily a fascist, per se, but at best gets on the nerves of his neighbors. But irrationality in organized form, or en masse, belongs very appropriately in the pre- or post-history of fascism, primarily when it has forced violence and terror upon those who think differently.
The “rise of the Subjective to total self-dissolution” is unfortuntely today the ideology of the rock-drug counterculture, which a majority of the youth in many countries adhere to.
Nietzsche expands on the point:
“Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the tie between man and man come together again; also the alienated, hostile, or suppressed nature again celebrates its reconciliation with its lost sons, mankind. Freely the Earth gives her gifts [Have the anthroposophs and ecological farmers been written off by Nietzsche?—HZL] and peacefully the beasts of prey approach the cliffs and the deserts. With flowers and garlands the cart of Dionysus has been showered, under whose yoke walk the panther and the tiger [Now we finally know why the peace movement can stop war.—HZL]
“One transforms Beethoven’s joyful song ‘On Joy’ into a picture and does not come up to his power of imagination, if millions sink with dread into the dust. [Did Nietzsche write under the influence of drugs?—HZL] Now the slave is a free man, now all smash the rigid, hostile boundaries which necessity, free will, or ‘shameless custom’ have erected among men. Now, according to the evangelists of world harmony, everyone feels not only united, reconciled, and fused together with his neighbors, but one, as if the veil of the Maja were ripped apart, and only flutters about in shreds of the mysterious Primal One. When singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has learned the walk and talk, and is on the way to flying and dancing in air....”
This becoming one with the other is the longing which the adherents of today’s youth movement have fallen for, the mystical overcoming of separation. And there is unfortunately no doubt that this participation in a “higher community” was not only the glue which tied the Nazis into a common frenzy for “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” but also describes the exact life-feeling that ties together the adherents of the “Aquarian Conspiracy” in the thus-titled book by Marilyn Ferguson.
The development into a higher community which Nietzsche mentions, naturally stands in total contrast to the humanistic educational idea of the German Classic and Wilhelm von Humboldt, which emphasizes the elevation to reason, along with the formation of the character and the personality of the individual. Nietzsche forthrightly attacks the idea of the humanist gymnasium [secondary school] and historical education. One of the spiritual students of Nietzsche, the former leading OECD official and founding member of the Club of Rome, Alexander King, is primarily responsible for the fact that, through the so-called education reform in all OECD countries, the idea of humanistic education has been discarded. The result of that is the youth movement, which we see today.
Nietzsche detested the state (as the Greens do today), as the bearer and transmitter of education. He was the forerunner of the Volk-like, or of the healthy Volk-like feelings, of which the Greens speak so much; he hates rationality, which was connected with the oncoming industrial age.
Our society today has unfortunately come to the point that there appear to be no clear values any more, and the root of this becomes clear if you read from Nietzsche:
“Can you not twist all values? And is good perhaps evil? And God only an invention, and refinement of the Devil? Is everything perhaps false in the last analysis? And if we are perplexed, are we also in the same sense deceivers? Must we not also be deceivers?”
If you discuss today with the Greens about nuclear energy or on the way to achieve peace, you must agree with Nietzsche that at least among this group, the twisting of all values has been achieved.
His explanation of why men behave as they do, is not original; it is the very same hedonistic, amoral principle of Jeremy Bentham or David Hume, by which human behavior is only motivated by the search for pleasure or the avoidance of pain. There is only pleasure or pain, but no good and evil. Peter Bruckner or the Sigmund Freud Institute argue similarly.
Nietzsche’s idea of the “eternal return of the same,” in which the individual is only an ephemeral, develops later into a justification for terrorism:
“The most extreme form of nihilism is the understanding that every belief, everything taken as true, is necessarily false; because a true world does not exist. But a perspective appearance.... We think these thoughts in most terrifying form; existence, such as it is, without reason or goal, but inexorably repeating, without a conclusion, into nothingness; the eternal repetition. That is the extreme form of nihilism: eternal nothingness (the meaningless).”
One of the hack writers, who was influenced by Nietzsche and who contributed significantly to the spiritual destruction of the Weimar Republic, was Hermann Hesse and his book Steppenwolf, which, by the way, is again very popular among today’s youth movement in Germany and the U.S.A. It was written in 1827 with the intention of seducing disoriented youth into prostitution, homosexuality, sex orgies, drug use (from hashish to LSD), and into terrorism against the world of machines, and against the civilized world order generally.
The narrative builds slowly from a description of Nietzsche’s world-pain, of the schizophrenic splintering of the chief character, Haller, into a human half and a wolf half, into sex and drug orgies, up to a senseless murder. “When the wolf comes out,” Hesse writes, in the following passage:
“Thereupon there burns in me a wild lust for intense feelings, for sensations, a rage at this shadowy, shallow, normal, and sterile life, and a furious frenzy to beat something into oblivion, either a warehouse or a cathedral or myself, to commit daring stupidities.... To seduce a young girl, or to wring the necks of several members of the civilized world order.”
Hesse expressed the suspicion (as the Club of Rome’s Aurelio Peccei does today), that probably all of human life is an utter mistake, a violent and unfortunate abortion of the Primeval Earth Mother, a wild and hideously disappointing experiment of nature.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who denies a reason for being, was also (not without a connection to his theory) a sympathizer with the Baader-Meinhof gang, and visited Andreas Baader in prison. The punks perhaps make clear where the loss of reason can lead, in the most horrifying way; they are fundamentally the most miserable victims of the oligarchical elite, still children, but already spiritually dead, and with lifestyles which one can’t even really call bestial, because no normal animal would conduct itself so.
Exactly as the Fascist International today believes it must destroy the moral authority of the Catholic Church in order to be able to carry out its genocide, and thus carries out an assassination attempt against the Pope [John Paul II], so the fascist Nietzsche knew that Christianity and the idea of the participation of the human in the divine represented his greatest problem. So he placed the chief emphasis on the assertion which demonstrated his tremendous insanity most laughably, namely, that God is dead. And now he can say what the Greens later would rejoice about:
“First the greatest outrage was the outrage against God, but God died, with him also died these sacrileges. To commit crimes against the Earth is now the most terrible thing, and to respect the bowels of the inscrutable, higher than the understanding of the world.”
Who could doubt that the militant opponents of the Frankfurt Airport runway consider a crime against a tree as more important than a crime against a man?
Nietzsche’s effect on history must be investigated on two levels: first, the Dionysian, which includes the popular movements and youth movements, the “masses in ecstasy,” and the second, the Apollonian, that is, the so-called elite figures of the Conservative Revolution. There is no doubt that Nietzsche’s concept of Übermenschen not only established the basis for the Nazis’ “Master Race,” but also, in spite of small differences, made an impression on the elitist thoughts of Chamberlain, Spengler, George, and the Junger brothers. Who was this elite, which merits this name only in a extremely negative sense, and what role do they play today?
The Fascist International
Although anyone who knows the proverbial “corridors of power,” knows that in political life hardly anything happens without unwritten deals over common purposes, plans, and methods, and although it is also understandable that certain persons have more influence than others, yet often a great scream arises as soon as you note that there is a “stringpuller” behind certain events. Just because the Nazis brought the racist bogeyman of a “Jewish conspiracy” onto the scene, doesn’t mean that it can be generally denied that there are conspiracies. Yes, you can go so far as to say that nothing significant happens—good as well as evil—without a conspiracy standing behind it—that is, a purposeful plan has been carried out.
For that, you don’t need to put forward any shaky hypotheses. The oligarchical elite is sometimes so arrogant that it itself describes this conspiracy. Thus the Jesuit Carroll Quigley wrote in his book Tragedy and Hope, in which he disclosed much amazingly accurate material about the ominous intent of monetarist oligarchical circles, that such publicity could hardly harm their goals, because this grouping has taken power so thoroughly that any resistance against it would be senseless. Marilyn Ferguson in The Aquarian Conspiracy expresses almost exactly the same thing, as does H.G. Wells, who speaks of an “open conspiracy.”
One of the most remarkable books in this respect is the already cited book by Armin Mohler, Conservative Revolution. Not only because he had the boldness to “reawaken” fascist thought as early as 1950, but also because it throws some light on the corporate policy of the Siemens Company. If you consider that Peter von Siemens belonged to the Anthroposophs, and Armin Mohler, as chairman of the Siemens Foundation, is a prophet of the “Conservative Revolution,” then there’s no reason to wonder at the dubious role the Siemens family is playing against technological progress, especially in the area of nuclear energy.
Mohler leaves no doubt in this book—a barely revised dissertation published by Karl Jaspers in 1949—of what he speaks: “Conservative revolution” is a synonym for what is commonly recognized as fascism.
The Conservative Revolution, according to Mohler, is comprised of small, intellectually active circles, highly disruptive sects, and, in the background, the remaining loose elite alliances. Mohler does not try to hide his disdain for the “masses.”
“The great party holds its masses together through organizational ties adapted to the average person and a narrow doctrine of catchwords, and only offers space for superior minds to the extent that they concern themselves with the restraint of the masses, and keep their mental capabilities in reserve, for the esoteric realm. But the majority of the above-average intelligences gather in small circles, which oscillate in constant mental stress, believe themselves to be the only ones with the true knowledge, and accuse the mass party of Realpolitik, betrayal of the “idea.”
If you break through the Babylonian verbal confusion in today’s political life, if you take into account the confession of the numerous members of the “Conservative Revolution,” there is really no difference between “right” and “left,” as the ostensibly politically diverse people like Mohler, Möller van der Bruck, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Oscar Negt admit. For them, the contrast between “Socialism and National Socialism” as well as “right” and “left” has been lifted.
So you should not let yourself be deluded into thinking that some “Conservative Revolutionaries” have either distanced themselves from the Third Reich, or even were disdained or persecuted by it. Even though, according to Mohler, at the end of the 20th Century, it became evident to them that a successful National Socialism “would falsify their goals as much as a successful communism,” they remain the spiritual mentors of fascism, then, as today.
The title “Conservative Revolution” certainly goes back to Hugo von Hofmannsthal for its first formulation, and then back to Möller van der Bruck, but it is in no way a specifically German thing. Mohler names the following names in this connection: Hans Grimm, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, C.F. Jünger, Albrecht and Karl Haushofer, Schultze-Boysen, Möller van der Bruck, Hugo von Hoffmannthal, Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Stefan George, and other in Germany. But, for example: Dostoevsky and the two Aksokovs for Russia; Sorel and Barres for France; Unamuno for Spain; Pareto and Ebola for Italy; Lothrop Stodart, Madison Grant, and James Burnham for the United States. These “thinkers,” who did not actually come from oligarchical families themselves, are like their modern followers: Peccei, Forrester, Meadows, Jungk, Cruhl, Gvishiani, Frolov, King, etc., to a certain degree the court ideologues of these families. Today, they work predominantly with think-tanks and foundations, or as controllers of “movements” and terrorists. They carry out what Mohler calls “restraint of the masses.”
The indulgence, and with it the corruption, which many older people today show toward the “Greens,” goes together with minimization of the significance of their own early membership in an old youth movement. Now, surely, not every Wandervogel [wandering bird, the “green” youth movement of the 1920s and ’30s] later became fascist, just as all Greens are not unsalvageable, but the old youth movements were the transmission belt for the later fascist leadership. They were, just like today, a “revolt against the world of the father,” against the “world of appearance,” and of the “artificiality” of the cities and factories, which threaten to suffocate everything.
In addition, the different phases, unions, splits, and new formations point to strong parallels with today. Mohler speaks of a first wave, the “Wandervogel,” which was shapeless and anarchic, and a second phase, of the Free German Youth. Both had taken effect in the Weimar Republic in almost all the conservative-revolutionary groupings, when their leaders were transformed, for the most part, into paramilitary forms of the youth movement.
After the First World War there arose out of a mixture of the Freikorps, youth groups, and then “dropouts,” a “new revolutionary type,” which was “nihilistic,” totally in the Nietzschean sense. Mohler points insightfully to the fact that these “revolutionaries” would have increased their dangerousness and clout, but for their non-involvement, which is also true for today’s dropouts.
Because today there is the well-founded suspicion that these right or left extremist movements may indeed tend toward violent acts themselves, but are only providing a cover for the professional political murder of the champions of technological progress.
The forerunner of the Murder, Inc. “Permindex,” which was responsible for the assassination of [John] Kennedy and the attempts against de Gaulle, or, in recent times, the attempts on Reagan and the Pope [John Paul II], was, in the early 1920s, the secret organization OC (Organization Consul), which was responsible for a series of assassinations, among them, German Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau.
The OC was controlled by the Thule Society. Around the Thule Society there was an elite secret organization, to which belonged Prof. Karl Haushofer, Princess Maria von Thurn und Taxis, Countess Westarp, Baron von Seydlitz, von Sebottendorf, Scheubner-Richter, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg. This organization had available extensive financial resources and the best connections to the leading noble families and intelligence services. The Thule Society functioned as the “mother organization” of a plethora of parties, societies, paramilitary units, and terrorist organizations. The most momentous creations of the Thule Society are those of the NSDAP [Nazi Party], which it founded, and Adolf Hitler.
The Epistemology of Fascism and Christianity
If an ordinary person gets involved with the cult-ideas of different currents in the fascist environment, he is generally surprised about the depth of pathological hell which opens up before him. Although it is not pleasant to study these outpourings, an investigation of the history of this illness is surely necessary.
Supporters of the Conservative Revolution have different views on certain topics, and it would actually raise suspicion about them if they all agreed with one another. So it is with the “criticism” of the Conservative Revolution by Romano Guardini, to whom Mohler significantly concedes a “flair for distant thrill.” Guardini, former collaborator of the Action Circle, founder of the Quickborn Movement, and of the foundation named after himself, has brought himself under suspicion with his writings, of being one of the “Christians who are not Christians.”
Christian heretics like [Hans] Küng, the Jesuits, but also the likes of Guardini, to begin with, want to soften the ontological, universal truth of Christianity, when they describe it as a religious mode of interpretation like many others. In short, they deny that there is one truth and along with it, error, and they deny the provability of this truth in the physical universe.
You can unquestionably recognize those who want to destroy the “Christian view of the world,” because they want to change Christian doctrine on the decisive point whose absence would rob it of its life’s breath. That is the Filioque, the idea that Christ is simultaneously God and Man, and thus divert from the fact that every human being participates in the Divine through the redemption of Christ. As Mumford correctly noted, this human participation in the Divine is the moral barrier to genocide.
In considering the enormous political consequences of this, the role which Christianity has played over the last 2,000 years must be underscored yet again. And in this connection, the recent encyclical, Laborem Exercens, by John Paul II, as well as his pastoral letter “Familiaris Consortio,” have primary strategic significance.
In these documents the Pope stressed unmistakably the character of man in the “image of God,” and that the mission of man to subdue the Earth, obtains for all time. The encyclical is, from an epistemological standpoint, the most comprehensive, because it proceeds from the coherence of the lawfulness of the universe, of man, and of mind, and thus accepts the process of continuous perfection. The process of creation continues through man on Earth, and with the help of technology, which explicitly is called the ally of man. Yes, the Pope explicitly demands political and legal reforms so that the world’s political order is adjusted and corrected to cohere with this lawfulness. Concretely, that means massive transfer of technology to the Third World, and with it, the comprehensive breakout which the Conservative Revolution fears the most.
In a chapter with the not-mathematical, but mystical title, “Lines and Spheres,” Mohler expresses his fear: The idea of ceaseless progress at a certain point devalues the present in favor of a better future. Therefore, it would make no real difference whether it means a step forward toward the Christian Kingdom of God, or a classless society or some other goal.
Because Mohler constantly uses the term “linear” in connection with this (constant) progress, you must certainly acknowledge that he does not know his enemies as well as he thinks. Neither the Platonic idea of constant perfecting, nor the Christian or scientific ideas of progress is meant linearly, but strives for higher orders, and are thus negentropic, and of growing complexity. So much for Mohler’s understanding.
“In any case, Christendom has become fatefully decisive for the Occident. Together with its secularization, progress in every area, it has created the ‘modern world,’ against which the conservative-revolutionary revolt has taken aim.”
And then he again cites Guardini with a passage which exposes the current danger to the Pope:
“Nothing is more false than the idea that the modern mastery over the world in knowledge and technology must have been achieved in opposition to Christianity, which would keep man in indolent servility. The opposite is true: The enormous adventure of modern science and technology, whose scope we experience in the most recent inventions with deep uneasiness, was only made possible because of the personal independence which Christ has given to man.”
Once Again: Fascist Epistemology
At this point, it is appropriate to once again point out that the members of the Conservative Revolution are at least right on one point: that the “right” and the “left” ultimately become the same, when “nationalism” and “socialism” collapse into one; that right and left are rather useless, if it matters, to describe political opposites. The fundamental opposition lies between Christianity and the idea of progress on the one side, and the Conservative Revolution on the other.
And so Mohler broods already in 1949, when every normal person in Germany is concerned about building up the country again from the rubble:
“Our time offers a strange spectacle. On the one side, the linear world of progress, by harnessing nuclear power, is speeding toward its high point, and seeks to cover the last free spot on Earth with its network of chimneys, railroads, and cables. But on the other side stand spokesmen who are witness to a world of midday-like stillness.”
In 1927 Hermann Hesse wrote in his Steppenwolf:
“Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.... A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through, alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.”
Unfortunately, the members of the Conservative Revolution are not satisfied with tolerating this dual power situation, but they want to win (even if the world should perish as a result).
Thus Ernst Jünger already remarked:
“We stand at the turning point between two ages, as with the change between the Stone and Bronze Age.”
Therefore, a kind of interregnum, for which otherwise the “great” Nietzsche has represented allegedly the absolute turning point.
Whoever currently would argue that this has nothing to do with the Greens, now can grasp the proof that there is at least a great similarity. Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Age of Aquarius, which was only the popular, expanded version of a study by the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, should be referenced once again.
This institute must be considered one of the most important planning centers of the Conservative Revolution. Out of there came not only various experiments with drugs, but also all conceivable “alternative life-styles” were developed. What Ferguson describes in her book, is the undermining of society, above all the youth, through the “Aquarian Conspiracy.” The age of Christianity and scientific rationality—characterized by her as the Age of Pisces—will now be cut off by the Age of Aquarius. Here it is feeling, not reason, that matters, and all the conspirators would participate in a common cosmic consciousness, would recognize one another, and would advance in all realms of life, including the military itself. Ferguson in other respects proceeds to praise conservation and all forms of alternative life-styles.
In Steppenwolf it says:
“I have also lived austerely for years, and also fasted for long times, but at the time I stood again under the sign of Aquarius, a dark and moist sign.”
Mohler, in describing the change desired by the Conservative Revolution, writes in 1949:
“In others, this idea even condenses into the image of a succession of one age to a new one.... Knut von Ermsen, for example, sees this change in connection with cosmic changes: We stand at the edge of the change from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. That, for him, is National Socialism, whose temporary dominance he, in his 1932 book Adolf Hitler and the Coming Age, had stated as fact, only one of the first fever blisters, which announce such changes. That the fish is a symbol of Christ, served him well in this connection.”
The Age of Aquarius, could also be translated as the dominion of Dionysus. For Nietzsche it is the Christian God that is dead, not the “god” of reappearance, whether it is named Dionysus, Mithra, or something else.
When it becomes clear to anyone that the American high-interest-rate policy is bringing not only the American economy itself, but also the rest of the world, into depression, the normal reaction would undoubtedly have been a lowering of interest and building up of production through cheap credits. A frequently heard argument was: “But it is not in American interests to ruin their own economy!” Arguments like that disregard the fact that there are certainly people who not only reject reason, but even desire chaos. Ernst Jünger writes thus, quoted by Mohler:
“We march towards a magical point zero, which we will only overcome, when we have other, invisible sources of power at our disposal.”
“Thus, with this magical point zero,” Mohler writes, with evident fascination, “we enter the inner circle of German nihilism.” It is the belief in absolute destruction, that turns into absolute creation. For, ‘decay’ does not occur in the essential core.... Our hope is attached to what remains,” he quotes Jünger again.
The reader of this article is, perchance, acquainted with the fact that people today who look to the “Conservative Revolution,” and who are responsible for the current crisis, seriously believe, that in the event of a nuclear war, they could go to Argentina—and have already set up residences and bank accounts there.
How criminal and close to today’s terrorism this way of thinking is, is plainly laid out in another Jünger quotation, in which the state of mind of “heroic realists” is expressed by him, as, “He, who with pleasure can blow himself up, and who, in this act still sees a confirmation of order.” What else should motivate terrorists today?
In Hesse’s Steppenwolf, the union between green terrorism, and an “inner joy” over genocide, was already present:
“The inscription, ‘Off to the Merry Hunt! The Great Automobile Hunt!’ appealed to me.... I grasped at once that it was the long-prepared, long-awaited, long-feared war between man and machine, now finally broken out. On all sides, lie bodies dead and torn to pieces.... On every wall, wild and stirring posters, demanding, in gigantic letters, that flamed like torches, to finally mobilize man against the machine; at last, to strike dead the oily, beautifully clad, perfumed idle rich, who, with the help of the machine, have squeezed the fat from the bodies of others, by means of their great, coughing, terrible, snarling, devilish, confining automobile. At last, to set the factories afire, and depopulate the soiled Earth a little bit! With that, grass can grow again; out of the dusty, cement world, something like woods, meadows, heath, brook, and moor may grow again.
“It was war, which was not concerned with a Kaiser, a republic, national borders, flags, or colors, but where anybody, for whom the air had become too close, and for whom the land no longer tasted right, gave hard-hitting expression to his anger, and tried to initiate the general destruction of this metallic, civilized world. I saw how the lust to kill, to destroy, smiled in everyone’s eyes, and to my own self, these wild, red flowers also bloomed on high.”
And finally,
“Yes, there are indeed too many people in the world today. Before, one did not notice it. But now, where everyone does not have pure air to breathe, but instead, each wants an automobile—now one notices it. Of course, what we are doing is nonsense, not rational, as the war was also massive nonsense. In time, mankind will have to learn to check its increase by rational means. Meanwhile, we respond to an unbearable situation rather irrationally—however, we basically do what’s right—we reduce.”
For a normal person, this is difficult to comprehend, but this camp does not claim to be rational in the least. Mohler concedes that there are many contradictions in cyclical thinking. The Conservative Revolution in fact would distrust any system that makes sense. Logic, for them, is only a tool for processing insights attained by other means.
“The Conservative Revolution believes, that ideas that ‘add up,’ occur in a space devoid of reality: Only thus, in unopposed emptiness could better elements be joined together in a continuous construction.” Here lies the probable reason, why the members of the Club of Rome do not themselves believe their prognoses.
For what Mohler writes here, certainly applies to the manipulative pseudo-knowledge of global systems analysis, but not to reality. But that already gives these people too much credit. Another “conservative revolutionary” by the name of Quabbe acknowledges: “For the conservative, reflection on the bases of his own worldview is a kind of profanity ... the reduction of an irrational value to a rational standard, a secularization of the Divine for which the attraction of the inexplicable is taken....”
Mohler rushes to dispel any possible awkward misunderstandings, and acknowledges that in the name “Conservative Revolution,” the word “conservative” was an unfortunate choice. “Preserving” and “maintaining” would indeed involve the idea of influencing events as a whole, which would be the position of the party adverse to progress.
That there are additional points of contact between the conservative revolution and the Greens, is revealed in their common worship of wilderness. Nature, which is often ennobled much more beautifully through man, is not enough for them: there must be wilderness. “It is above all the wilderness, which becomes an image of poetry for the followers of Nietzsche—wilderness not seen from the ‘linear’ world as destruction, but as a wound-healing sleep,” says Mohler.
Yet Mohler expresses himself even more plainly:
“In the wilderness, the laws of economics do not apply. The wilderness is the background before which the global emotion unfolds, which we want to describe here: whence it goes out, it always returns.”
From F.G. Jünger to Eppler
In case someone still requires proof that the Greens march in fascist footsteps, then one should refer to the modern identity of the argumentation of Friedrich Georg Jünger in The Perfection of Technology, written in 1939, and Robert Jungk’s The Atom State.
What Jünger says in the book itself, is certainly clinically interesting. He warns of the dangerous illusions that are associated with technological progress. In almost the same manner, all the Greens after him spoke out, including [Aurelio] Peccei, who recently proclaimed that science cannot “magically” solve all problems. Not magically—but rationally.
Jünger is not even original, when he argues that science has nothing to do with the creation of wealth; he simply repeats the well-worn arguments of the Physiocrats, who belatedly provided the East India Company with justification for the exploitative methods of British colonialism. From a scientific standpoint, Jünger’s views are really outrageous. He thus maintains that all industrial operations are entropic:
“Thus, the smallest technical operation requires more energy than it generates. How then should a surplus be created through the sum of these procedures?”
We now propose, that people who think this way, be consistent, and eat grass with the aid of clods of ore, instead of still hypocritically making use of the results of technology. Or even better, stop eating altogether, since, according to their “theory,” energy can be saved in this way.
All the others have copied from Jünger—directly or indirectly—Jungk or Gruhl (in Gruhl’s A Planet Is Plundered, whole passages on the depletion of nature are shamelessly copied). Jünger wrote “Global 2000” 40 years before [Social Democratic Party leader] Erhard Eppler and Jimmy Carter:
“[Technology] fills the air with smoke, pollutes the water, destroys forests and animals. This leads to a condition, in which Nature ‘must be protected from rational thought.’ ”
The direction this wind is blowing, becomes clear in the next passage:
“[The technician] ruins factory owners through inventions which are not anticipated. The wealth and ruin of the capitalists is as indifferent to him as that of the proletariat. For him, there is neither debt and interest, nor the sustenance of life....”
That is a deeply anti-capitalist, monetary mindset, which is characteristic of fascism. And the magic word—the sacred cow of the oligarchy—is stated: Technological progress ruins interest!
In all respects, this book teems with mere monetary truisms, which, as all arguments of the oligarchy, are nothing but cheap, deliberate lies; as, for example, that progressive technology is responsible for inflation! The International Monetary Fund dishes out the same garbage, solely for the purpose of keeping developing nations, which want to proceed with their industrialization, under the yoke of colonialism.
On the one hand, Jünger is obliged to concede, that “technological thinking is rational,” but then, on the other hand, he speaks of “demonic trends in technology.” Thus, evidently, rationality is, for him, somewhat horrible. He goes to the extent of arguing, that industrial accidents with progressive technology have turned out to be so numerous, that they equal the frequency of military casualties. But, there are many more people killed during bear-hunting than working in the laboratory.
The theses proposed at the beginning, that the members of the Conservative Revolution are the most elite, most evil species, is confirmed by Jünger in the following way:
“We must recognize that technological progress and the education of the masses go hand in hand.... Technological progress is most powerful in that realm, where education of the masses is the most advanced [emphasis added].... They [the masses] are the most useful, most pliant material for the engineer, whose work plans could not be implemented at all without them....” And, “We associate with the conception of the masses, notions of ponderousness, weight, and dependency. Vulgarization.”
For the oligarchy, educated masses—numerous educated people—-is a horrible idea, because they would end their privileged, elitist position as oligarchs, who are happy to rule over uneducated masses.
The idea of republican nation-states, based on technological progress, is horrible for the Conservative Revolution on exactly the same ground. Friedrich Hielscher, a “Conservative Revolutionary” from the Jünger circle, thus demanded the breakup of nation-states into “tribes” and “rural areas.” Another subdivision of the Conservative Revolution, the Pan-European Union of Otto von Habsburg, also consistently demands the creation of a “Europe of the Regions.” It ought, in turn, no longer be astonishing, if now left-Socialists demand the strict decentralization of nation-states and militantly precipitate attempts at autonomy by all conceivable minorities. Even less surprising is the fact, that from this narrow angle, the developed national languages are criticized, in favor of slang and regional dialects. In contrast to this, the pathological hatred which the Club of Rome bears toward the idea of the nation-state is really significant and dangerous. Typical is Aurelio Peccei’s speech before the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Spring 1981, in which he declared the nation-state bankrupt, and called it the main obstacle to a global technical correction culminating in a “new world order.”
The Siemens Problem
That Peter Siemens, as the director of a company which controls almost the entire nuclear energy area of the Federal Republic, and which has been characterized as a “state within the state,” is an anthroposoph, would in itself be alarming enough.
Citizens must immediately be enlightened, as to what is hidden behind the allegedly harmless façade of health food stores and Waldorf schools: the writings of Rudolf Steiner, a fanatical cultist. Steiner believed not only in the reincarnation of man; he promoted the worship of Lucifer! That alone would indeed be revealing, but might seem to be the private affair of Mr. Siemens. Unfortunately, that is not so.
Armin Mohler did not write his thesis on the Conservative Revolution, for example, in youthful levity, but rather still today, he thinks essentially the same way, while being the director of the Siemens Foundation. This becomes clear from a Mohler brochure, which has now been mailed out by the Association of German Electrical Engineering Technicians (Regional Association of North Bavaria) as “talking points.”
In the brochure, “The Dream of the Natural Paradise,” Mohler speaks somewhat pathetically about the “ecological woe” which has already stormed the bastion of public opinion. He poses it simply there, indeed even says that a world outlook, which has achieved such a position—is hardly challenged any more “from the outside,” but rather only “from within.” If Siemens were really a company that wanted to promote technological progress, what should prevent Mohler from assailing the ecological movement “from the outside”?
Thus, in 1981, Mohler “criticizes” the green movement “from within,” and then also reiterates in essence his earlier theses, that the rise of the “ecological woe” is associated with the de-Christianization of the modern world. It is extremely noteworthy, that Mohler’s conception of Christianity is presented here very much “from the outside.” He apparently does not know the neo-Platonic, Augustinian tradition.
For a person who knows of Mohler’s Conservative Revolution of 1949, it is extremely informative, that he calls the ecological ideology a “salvation doctrine,” thus equating it with his earlier observations of cults. He even sketches the path “from Rousseau to the current ecological woe,” via the intermediary of Romanticism. “Thus, according to the example of the archetypal plant, ‘nature’ turns into a kind of personal entelechy, against which one can sin as against a lady.” At the same time, the comparison throws an interesting light on the fantasy life of Mr. Mohler.
After this brief introduction, the actual criticism “from within” now takes place. Mohler lets the cat out of the bag: The new youth movement has a forgotten “demanding taskmaster”—“founding father” Friedrich Georg Jünger. He has gone far ahead of the youth movement, so that that which was formulated by him could become a casually wielded, anonymous commodity. Jünger, however, had already formulated everything better and more tightly.
The “criticism” which Mohler makes of the Greens, is limited to the fact that they have constructed an incomplete thought-model, in which creation only took place once, right at the beginning—and since then only destruction. In contrast, Mohler places the Conditia humana (human condition), being fixed between birth and death, between new creation, which always reoccurs, and destruction, which likewise recurs. And although Mohler expresses himself here cautiously, we are already once again at the yo-yo principle of the “eternal return of the same.”
If an organization which deals with advanced technology, offers its members nothing better than such “talking points,” then that is disconcerting. What Mohler does here, is typical of the modus operandi of the Club of Rome: An illusory debate is set up, as to who is now the better “Green,” the “right-wing” Jünger, or the “left-wing” ecologist. That both, “from outside” reason, are quacks, had to have been said and proven. But, as Mohler says in the epilogue of the new edition of his Conservative Revolution of 1971, the new youth movement is quite close to the Conservative Revolution, and this does not surprise him, but rather only confirms the “inevitability” of such processes. The yo-yo principle also here.
But whence does it arise, that someone, who, as the director of the foundation of a company which is predominantly engaged with technology, would have to have access to modern scientific expertise, either does not have this or does not use it? Is it then not known to the Siemens Foundation, that in the meantime, the empirical proof has also been produced in many scientific areas, that the universe is organized in a non-entropic manner and not according to the yo-yo process (this is proven for plasma physics, biology, astrophysics and the pre-human evolutionary process), and that therefore, and for many other reasons, ever higher energy densities and organizational states are necessary in the production process, if a drastic lowering of the sustainable population—genocide—is not to be the consequence?
Why is Mr. Mohler of the view, that it is only possible to argue “from within”?
It is worthwhile to return once again to Mohler’s Conservative Revolution, in which he cites the book penned by a certain Schauwecker, Germany Alone, of 1931. Schauwecker writes there, that the world of progress could only be attacked with its own weapons:
“For this period is only worth being destroyed. But in order to destroy it, one must first know it accurately. Otherwise one succumbs to it. One had to completely subdue the technology, while one developed it fully. Then it was no longer a problem, but rather a foregone conclusion, about which one was no longer astonished. The admiration for machines, that was the danger. They deserved no admiration at all, they only had to be used, nothing more.”
And Mohler added without pausing:
“The words of Schauwecker show, that the national revolutionaries do the same as the adherent of progress, and yet mean it completely differently.”
Now, why has Siemens created a situation in many areas under the utilization of the patent law, where real technological progress, for example in the postal system, is blocked, because no one can get around Siemens? Or, why, for example, is Siemens now against the construction of the high-temperature reactor? Or what is the cause of the obvious failure of the Siemens firm in the area of advanced computer systems?
The Arrogance of the Oligarchy
Every time the oligarchs are certain that they have already won, they openly acknowledge, that they are the real leaders of this movement. Thus, the president of the Italian World Wildlife Fund, Fulco Protesi, proposed in November 1981, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Mondo, that either the chairman of the Club of Rome, Peccei, or Bussati Troverso, the president of the European Society of Culture, should become the chairman of a new oligarchical mass party in Italy. The choice between Peccei and Troverso, that would be the choice between NATO/intelligence and the “Global 2000” faction of the U.S. Administration, or of an extremely influential “intellectual” elite combination of the old Venetian oligarchy. Both merely represent different nodal points of the same network.
Such a nodal point earlier in history was the circle around the magazine Die Tat.
Under the concept of an “action circle,” that group of influential German intellectuals, “Conservative Revolutionaries,” which, from 1908, gathered around the publisher Diedrich, and set up the monthly Die Tat as the organ of anti-Christian, geopolitical, mystical-Arian and later, openly fascistic movements. Diedrich himself was the publisher of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitics (Magazine for Geopolitics), founded by Karl Haushofer, which helped prepare intellectually for the later Drang nach Osten (Push Towards the East), and which included as a collaborator Friedrich Wilhelm von Oertzen, the father of today’s Hanover SPD Chairman Peter von Oertzen.
In the development of Die Tat, perhaps three phases are to be identified: From the founding of the magazine in the year 1908 by Ernst and August Horneffer, both employees of the national Nietzsche Archives in Weimar, until approximately 1914, articles were mostly about the “neo-Christian” movement in the framework of the “youth movement” massively promoted by Diedrich. The Horneffer brothers promoted a new “Christendom in Action,” which, in essence, constituted a turning away from Christian humanism, and a turning towards mysticism and the theosophy of the anthroposoph Rudolf Steiner.
After the end of World War I, this policy was resumed by Die Tat and also introduced into the Catholic Church via the above-mentioned anti-technology philosopher Romano Guardini.
From 1928, Die Tat experienced a radical about-turn in the direction of the fascist mass movement, when Hans Zehrer, Giselher Wirsing, and Ferndinand Fried purchased the magazine. By 1932, Die Tat became the most-read monthly of the Weimar period, with a strong pro-fascist, geopolitical orientation—its circulation exceeded that of the Weltbühne (World Stage).
It is also important, that the Horneffer brothers were connected to the notorious Thule Society. Karl Jaspers also belonged to the group around Die Tat. He was the doctoral advisor to the current Lower Saxony Governor Ernst Albrecht, who helped another member of the Club of Rome, Eduard Pestel, obtain a ministerial position. One should not forget, that it was Albrecht, who prohibited the nuclear reprocessing facility at Gorleben; no one but he was the reason for the “political unenforceability” of this project. Finally, Karl Jaspers was the mentor of Armin Mohler, after Mohler had briefly—as a Swiss citizen (!)—requested membership in the SS, before he became the secretary of Ernst Jünger.
If one adheres to the self-definition provided by the Conservative Revolution, many connections become clear. Then one is not amazed that such an ostensibly “left,” radical “green” politician as Mencke-Glückert, the FDP Ministerial Director in the Interior Ministry, maintains contact, on the one side, with a—mildly expressed—extreme “conservative” institute such as the European Cultural Foundation, and on the other side, with—also mildly expressed—such extreme “left” circles as the Pressedienst Demokratische Initiative (Democratic Initiative News Service, PDI). In turn, besides Robert Jungk (“The Atom State”), also such friends of the Berlin-squatter-scene as Ingeborg Drewitz, who not accidentally is regarded as an expert on the Romantic movement of the 19th Century, works in the PDI.
Robert Jungk in turn collaborates with Mencke-Glückert via the Futures Group, one of the most evil think-tanks in the U.S.A., which has specialized in teaching the so-called “Delphic Method” to management and politicians. By this is meant the capability, according to the Greek Oracle of Delphi, of generating, with the help of the media and through ostensibly “contrary” positions, an illusory debate for the public, which is supposed to forget that reality looks entirely different.
Another specialty of the Futures Group is intellectual and psychological conditioning by means of computer-simulation. The target groups in such “courses of instruction,” in addition to the economic and political executives, are, above all, the representatives of the nations of the Third World. Computer simulations, which are based on the systems-analysis model of the Club of Rome or “Global 2000,” are put in front of the participants in the courses of instruction. Accordingly, it is only a matter of the unbridgeable contrast between overpopulation and limited resources. Now the participants in the courses of instruction are permitted to change the variables—within the pre-determined program of course. In doing so, one shows greater appreciation of “ethnic concerns” respecting the reduction of the population. The game, of course, ends with the fact that every “positive change” of the variables only aggravates the overpopulation/limited resources problem and completely demoralizes the participants in the course of instruction.
The ‘Movements’ Today
To return to the initial thesis: The disaster can only be averted if it is worked through, in Germany and in other parts of the world, from a conceptual standpoint of the history of where the roots of fascism lie, and of what its subsequent history is.
In other locations, we have developed in detail, what the theoretical economic foundations of fascism are, and as well, we have thoroughly documented the danger that leading financiers would react today to the world economic crisis with fascist economic policies. We only footnote here, that without a new world financial system for the financing of broad technology transfers for the industrialization of the Third World, as a war-avoidance strategy, no actual solution could be found.
As far as the subjective side is concerned, the danger of fascist mass movements, a conceptually historical consideration is also indispensable, because only in this way can the emergence of a new, differently colored species of sheep in the same pasture be prevented.
If one applies the conceptual apparatus which we have undertaken to develop here, to the present, it becomes clear where the fascist potential lies. The characteristics are—and this is no “German” problem—the cult of irrationalism, the assault on scientific thought, which Nietzsche termed the “Socratic dialogue.” Further characteristics are, that irrationalism takes organized forms, and that its adherents try to force their irrational will by violence, on those who think differently.
From this standpoint, it can be said that terrorism is generally fascist, as indeed was demonstrated by the “P-2” scandal in Italy: The fascist international controls both “right” and “left” terrorism, through the logistical support of the mafia.
Fascists, irrespective of the nationality or era to which they belong, deny the perfectibility of man. They have often termed this the “dictatorship of reason.” What they want, is the Dionysian, existentialist living-out of feelings, the undisturbed fulfillment of “needs,” at the expense of everyone else.
If this spiritual attitude is viewed from a Neoplatonic or a Christian standpoint, therefore, from the threefold division of the human consciousness into sensual desire, understanding, and reason, then this lowest condition corresponds to sin, in the Christian view, or seen from the humanistic standpoint, to extreme infantilism, which manifests itself, in its organized form, as fascism.
If a two-year-old wants to live out his sensual desires, this is normal, and requires only compassionate education by his parents. However, if ostensible adults express the same mental condition, then they are spiritually underdeveloped. So it is no coincidence, that these infantile adults, if they come into contact with a complex reality which upsets their infantile fantasies, react in a paranoid fashion.
Paranoia, the wild fear about the inadequacy of one’s own self, is a very important marker of fascism—paranoia over an inner emptiness, mixed with the “green discharge of nausea,” which must be overcome in a Dionysian frenzy. Paranoia is the completely normal consequence, if reason goes into decline.
It is highly revealing, that in the London Tavistock Institute for psychological warfare, studies of the phenomenon of “U.S. Cowboys” as a psychological type were undertaken, and the not-surprising fact was discovered, that the chief characteristic of the “cowboy” is his paranoia. Normal cooperation or collaboration is impossible, and the “cowboy” must either be “on top,” or somebody is “on top of him.”
This paranoid form, which unfortunately has often decided American foreign policy, can, in an unfavorable strategic constellation, lead to war, because the reality principle is rejected, and everything is only viewed by this standard of “who is on top?”
The idea that fascism is not possible in the U.S.A., is, there, very widespread indeed, but unfortunately, is completely false. Once rejecting a certain open genocide-promoting part of the last administration—look at “Global 2000”—America is already, to a startling degree, a “programmed society.” The average television consumption of five hours per day, per capita, is more conducive than anything else to banishing every sense of reality, and engendering a basic paranoid mood in the population. Goebbels’ propaganda machine and its popular reception is pushed far into the shadows by today’s U.S. television.
If the emergence of “freaks” in America represents a new version of the Weimar counterculture and youth movement, the current emergence of a country-and-western cult promoted by the entertainment industry is a new version of the “people’s movement.” The country-and-western-cowboy cult is not only a banalization of human sensibility to an extremely low level; it also has all the cultish elements of every “blood-and-soil” cult, opening the floodgates.
Since the entertainment mafia, which moreover is closely interwoven with the drug mafia, has in recent years led frustrated mainstream America—in a reaction against the wave of rock-music programming—unconsciously toward “truly American culture,” namely, cowboy and western schmaltz, and has now introduced a new phase. Now that America’s youth is vastly corrupted through rock, disco, and drugs, the rest of the population now has to be pulled away from their belief in the “American Way of Life,” that being the belief in the unbounded possibility of solving the world’s problems through technological progress. Slowly, the cowboy cult will fuse with the “green” movement, and to this end, the New York Times recently brought out a stirring history of the virgin American West, which must be shielded from the evils of industry.
As part of the psychological affliction of fascism, and as part of the fundamental outlook of cultural pessimism, are also the sensations of anxiety, grief, and woe, and Kirkegaard saw the world as meaningless and shattered, and expressed the opinion that anxiety and doubt must be the necessary consequence of that. The “grief” of Heidegger, which is so often and so deeply felt by the Greens, is nothing other than the paranoid reaction to problems which are only susceptible to being solved with rational methods. And finally, the “ecological woe” is plainly a lie. Whoever actually strives for improved environmental protection, doesn’t lament, but becomes an engineer or a scientist, in order to overcome obsolescence of old technology with better, new technologies.
The 1981 Christmas message from Pope John Paul II is, against this background, an extraordinarily political intervention. In it, he presents the idea that hedonistic forces have undermined the morality of the so-called “developed sector” to a level of moral senility. This moral decay, this cultural pessimism, has made necessary an intervention by the Church for the benefit of the intangible, of the value of human life—for which the Pope nearly had to pay with his life. The tracking of the assassins behind this attempt on his life would lead Sadat and Reagan back to the forces behind destabilization.
If we would prevent the danger of a new fascism, this time worldwide, and of a new world war, then the track of those who targetted the Pope must be investigated, and the guilty must be called to account.
Therefore, if the question is posed, how it could happen, that Hitler came to power in Germany, although the majority of citizens were against him, then something becomes clear about today’s situation. The majority of Germans were not fascists, but “small people,” who said, “Oh, what could I do about it?” or, “Actually, things aren’t so bad, and everything will get better.”
Today, if one looks at how the [Willy] Brandt sections of the SPD, the FDP, and the CDU-CSU are getting in bed with the Greens, on grounds of election tactics, then he would have to be afraid that these politicians haven’t learned anything from history. What price did all the democratic politicians pay, who tolerated the Nazis, with their “tactical” alliances, citing “reasons of advantage”?
Then, as now, no cooperation with fascists ought to be tolerated. If a Hasselmann and a Biedenkopf, and others, propose collaboration with the “black” Greens, the CDU ought to consider very seriously whether they should even tolerate these people. The same goes for party functionaries in the SPD, concerning Eppler and the defenders of Brandt.
Perhaps there is still time to overcome the cult of irrationalism. One of the most important prerequisites for doing that it to reform the “reform,” which is to a large degree responsible for the current “youth movement”: the so-called “school reforms” of the 1970s.
A humanistic education in the spirit of the Classics and of Socratic dialogue, which the reactionaries so fear, is the best antidote against the forces of irrationalism. Throughout the history of human society, the very concepts we need today are those which Christianity and humanism have advanced, without which there would not have been progress. We should employ them, with that optimism which so annoyed Nietzsche’s “Steppenwolf.”
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