“Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture: otherwise it is of no interest to me.” - Heinirch Himmler, Posen Speeches.
I’m not a person with a particular interest in the Nazis being evil. Given that the Nazis are the Satan figure of the modern world, it would be terrific fun, to denounce the modern world by embracing their Satan. To put it this way, I don’t merely take culture’s word for it that the Nazis were evil. However, the more I read into Nazism, the more I find that the public image of them, far from being a demonization, is a sanitization, of the intensely corrupt Nazi spirit.
I think one problem is perhaps our overreliance on the Holocaust as a testament to Nazi atrocity. In terms of sheer body count, Stalin beats Hitler and Genghis Khan beats them all. Genocide is a great evil, but one hardly unique to Hitler. And so for a time I thought that while the Nazis were certainly evil, they were hardly deserving of the title of Satan, any more than Stalin or Genghis were.
This is coupled with the ambiguity of the word Fascism. The Catholic regimes of Augusto Pinochet, Salazar, and Franco are generally admired among most on the Dissident Right, and even (quietly) by a few on the moderate right. The more I looked into Italian Fascism or Japanese Imperialism, I found a lot I despised, but there was also honour and nobility because they were organic, pagan ideologies, and contained much of what was good with paganism but also much that was evil with it.
This is most certainly not the case with Nazism. The more I read about the more it seemed like a black stamp of wickedness on the human soul. And I found myself becoming far more sympathetic to progressives, on this issue.
The first myth that must be dispelled, on the right, is that Nazis were merely a group of strong anti-commies who wanted to protect Europe from Bolshevism, I simple tour of Nazi statements will be enough to dispel the myth of this one, “SS men must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood and nobody else…” says Himmler, “What happens to a Russian and a Czech does not interest me in the least.”
There is no notion of ‘A brotherhood of all Europeans’ (a mere precursor and anticipator of the ‘Brotherhood of all mankind)’. The Nazi Reich did not care what happened to the French, or Belgians or English. Of course, this is obvious in their foreign policy, which recklessly broke treaties, drafted foreign labor force, and (in a sort of inconsistent manner) was borderline exterminationist in its relationship with the Slavs. But to hear it from their own leaders was another thing. Nazism was not merely exterminationist out of a misguided sense of pragmatism. For it, the only humans in the world were Germans. Every other group merely existed as tools or slaves for is purposes.
This is, of course, to say nothing of how it treated the Jews. “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.” Sounds like a guy who was okay with Jewish people so long as they were in Jerusalem, right? Of course not. Nazism from the beginning employed the rhetoric of fullscale murder if only anyone had been willing to listen. With attitudes like this employed, there is no reason to doubt the Holocaust numbers.
The second myth that must be dispelled is that it had any notion of liberty. The Right, as it exists today, is an American project. As it exists in Europe, much of its current ethos is French. Both the Americans and the French have long traditions of liberty and the sovereign right of the individual, and by using the catch-all phrase ‘right wing’ to describe Nazism one might be misled into thinking that Nazism had some respect for the individual.
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation,” said Hitler in his speech at Bueckeburg. The full terror of Nazi ideology involved the deification of the Nation-state. There is a belief in some corners of the world, that only Bolshevism believed in the full subjugation of the individual to the collective. But we can see here the same desire to obliterate the individual as a cornerstone of Nazi thinking. The German state mattered, and not German individuals.
The third accusation is that it was a Eugenicist movement, this is not really unique, since much of the rest of Europe was under the sway of Eugenicism during the 30s, but none really went all in for it like the Germans did, since their absolute Eugencisim was combined with an absolute collectivism. Sterilization that the US had employed turned to mass killings of the ‘infirm’ or ‘feebleminded’. Which shows us, really, that while Nazism cared ever so much about /Germany/ it was perfectly ambivalent to the needs of Germans. Germans were just cattle to breed a better, more perfect Germany.
Finally, the fourth accusation to bring against Nazism was that it was genuinely both Cultish and Occultish in its understanding of the world. There are multiple downright blasphemous statements that you can find in their speeches.
“'Führer, my Führer, given me by God. Protect and preserve my life for long. You rescued Germany from its deepest need. I thank you for my daily bread. Stay for a long time with me, leave me not. Führer, my Führer, my faith, my light. Hail my Führer.” says a Hitler Youth where they recite a bastardized, blasphemous version of the Lord’s prayer.
Creepier still is Mussolini's recounting of a time where Hitler told him he had been possessed, not by a demon, but a ‘spirit of Aryan Prehistory’. This together with Himmler’s Occultism and other dark cultish sides of Hitlerism makes it clear to me that Nazism was not merely pagan, but Satanic in its nature.
And there’s yet more to talk about here that I haven’t gone into. The fact that nearly the entire Nazi Reich was manically addicted to methamphetamines. The decadence and orgies of its upper staff. Its terrifying embrace of police state under the SS. It’s belief in the gra\dual abolition of Christianity. It’s hatred of compassion, even at a personal level. Goring’s boasts about how he had deluded the German people with his statecraft. Hitler’s belief that lies were superior to truth. It was a murderous, satanic, collectivist, mechanist worldview that cared for nothing but its own eventual triumph over its enemies.
There are types, like Buchannan, who believe that the US should have stayed out of the war. Personally, I am grateful that this hideous beast is largely extinct. Our world is a better one for it. Had it been allowed to survive it would have lent credence to its ultimately horrific worldview.