. appearance dot

I don't know where people think I might be coming from with this so here's some helpful handy hints toward interpretation of my position.

I'm an admirer of the Nazi State and its organization. I have been since I became both old and perceptive enough to appreciate such things. It got things done. Whatever else you want to say about the Nazis, love them or loathe them, they got things done. Look around you. Which of your politicians do you trust to get things done? None of them. I feel the same. So do at least 15% of the German population.

The English and the Germans have been at war longer than the English and the French. The English admire the Germans (or, to be accurate, the Prussians) and the Germans like us - which is why there was such a long flirtation between Hitler and the British aristocracy. But the Germans are an apocalyptic people - as one of the Caesars said, they're either at your feet or at your throat. And they themselves do not care which. You either provoke them to attack you with all their powers - or you provoke them to serve you. Despite their current guilt over WW2 (which is ebbing, finally) this basic quality of the German people remains the same.

Perceived weakness incites them to go for your throat. It's a trait I've always admired.

The British are less emotionally volatile. And we admire the German ability to get things done. We always have. Unlike the Germans we have had a long-standing flirtation with authoritarianism (all Monarchies are necessarily authoritarian in nature); whereas the Germans did not flirt, they spread their thighs without a second thought and were righteously fucked by their dictatorial Darling - and enjoyed every minute of it.

I am one of those Englishman to whom authoritarianism makes a profound appeal. I ought to have been a Stalinist - except that I was born too late. I've never had any interest in the racial side of Nazism (every race which seeks independence of the State that gives it political reality should be exterminated) - and if its antipathy toward the Jews were done away with there is nothing, in Nazism per se, that would not appeal to any hard working tax paying American. But I have always had a profound interest in its attitude toward the State, which was largely shaped by Hegel, modified by Feuerbach and Kant (Kant was the evil genius of Nazism, a thinker toward whom intelligent Nazis owed an enormous debt, but a thinker they disavowed with unrelenting fury).

My wife, to tease me, calls me a Communist. I'm not. I'm a Statist with corporativist and socialist leanings. I'm a Hegelian, filtered through Marx and the jurisprudence of Carl Schmitt, the greatest legal and political thinker of the Hitler-dominated years.

Since I see nothing in the religions of men to attract me, and have seen nothing in these religions for many, many years, I long ago turned to their creations as being something more worthy of worship, since such creations are based directly in their interests, rather than in the figments of their religious imagining. This is an attitude I maintained even when a Christian, since I saw in Christ the perfect Sovereign, and it is why I paid far more attention to the politics of Augustine and Aquinas than to their theology.

Hobbes, my all time favorite political philosopher, called the State a mortal god, and it is indeed the nearest thing to god on earth that man has ever devised. The State is endlessly useful. It performs, in a complex society, countless bureacratic and record-keeping functions (especially in relation to money and its movements) without which the world we know could not exist. It provides a framework for the peaceful resolution of civil disputes. It determines what crime is, and punishes it, on behalf of all those who want to live peaceably together. It defends us against external threat. It seeks out and punishes internal malcontents. It is the foundation of Justice and the determining limit of Liberty. Without the State to defend and maintain it there is no Liberty - there is only anarchy and the pursuit of one's own interest supported by strength. I have always found the ideal of the State as expressed by Hobbes and Hegel to be far grander and more appealing than the depiction of the rapaciously rights-hungry individual (rights-hungry and obligation-shy) presented by Liberal Democracy.

What the Germans know, and Hitler exploited with near supernatural cunning, is that Sacrifice (when acknowledged and celebrated as such) is always more appealing to the human animal than base self-interest. No one is willing to die for the profit of the corporation for which they work. Many are willing (at least, in America they are still willing) to die for their country. Their country as an idea and an ideal.

This is something that was close to the surface of German culture, the idea of the blood and the soil of German existence, and its apotheosis in the German Warrior. The triumph of Goebbels lay in his ability to communicate that idea and ideal in language that spoke directly to the deepest and most intimate aspirations of the German character. Goebbels was one who, no matter what he said, spoke soul to soul with those he addressed. Compared to him, and to the incessant political activism of the German State, the most comprehensive attempts toward knowledge of, and predictive ability with regard to, the state of the American soul and its aspirations, is merest amateurism.

Propaganda is not evil. Chevrolet commercials are propaganda. The will to control is not evil - anyone who participates in an election and holds office as a result engages with the will to control. The edifice of the State is not evil, because it is a mortal god and the nearest thing (notwithstanding its failures and follies) to God on earth. It is our single greatest political achievement, and every contemporary political indicator suggests we will never surpass it.

And to revert to the topic of the original linked article, I understand what drove Adolf's Children to do what they did. Just as I understand the political longing for the Fuhrer's Return. I do not trust the Masses, and I do not worship the Working Man. I trust the machinery that keeps their worst excesses in check. Would I be willing to torture, maim, and kill in the name of that Order? Yes. Would I be willing to die for the only thing greater than myself? Yes.

I have been here three years. American politics is surreal to a point almost beyond description. Only your attitudes to sex and religion are stranger. But, though an immigrant, I am already a loyal son of the Republic: long live the bizarre political compromises that constitute the unity of the Union of the Republic of the United States of America. Could I wish that this Union had in it some of the passion, conviction, and willingness to go to an extreme that is typified by the actions described in the linked article?

Yes.

So conversely, 85% would prefer a weak leader?

I'm not sure but strong leadership generally gives people a better secure feeling if not perception of a strong country, strong economy, strong moral values lol. All of that. Whereas, weak leadership the opposite.

Or they're laying down hardcore heavy metal or industrial dance. They're not a very subtle people.

They're not a very subtle people.

No. But terribly efficient and effective.

To: cactoblasta

What was the last war they won?

I could reply "What was the last war America won?" The invasion of Grenada? A wonderful testimony to the power and efficiency of American military might, to be sure - much like using nukes to kill mosquitos.

Actually I was making reference both to their post-WW2 recovery, as well as to the organization of the so-called Final Solution - the application of industrial technique to the production of death.

To:

cactoblasta

Your definition of war is too old-fashioned. America crushed the USSR in the Cold War in a particularly complete victory.

Mine may be old fashioned but yours is incoherent. There never was a war between the USA and the USSR. There were conflicts fought by proxy; and there was an ideological and economic struggle between the two States - but there never was a war in the sense of a shooting conflict. Nor was the USSR defeated - it was rendered subject to the internal contradictions of its system of economic organization via the arms race, and exhausted to the point at which its ruling ideology was exposed as just that - an ideology that lost its hold upon the people as the miseries inherent in its structure bit into the life of the citizens of the Soviet Union. The USSR was not defeated in armed combat - by the USA or anyone else. Its structure unravelled to a point at which it was no longer sustainable as a viable polity, under the twin pressures of the arms race and its inability to provide basic necessities for its citizens. Certainly this was a conflict - but it was not a war.

As to the Japanes. There could not be two political organizations more different than those of Nazi Germany and the resurgent Imperial Japan of WW2. The guiding ethos of the militarist caste governing Japan during WW2 was Bushido, the 'way of the warrior' associated with the ancient cult of the Samurai. Bushido emphasised the personal service and sacrifice of the individual warrior to his Lord and to his Emperor. Nazism was a variant of corporativism with a radical emphasis upon the Leader as both avatar of the blood of his people and the expression of the Volksgeist of the German people. There was no association of feudal loyalty to the Fuehrer as there was to the Japanese Emperor - and the cruelties visited upon defeated enemies were perpetrated to both punish and exemplify the inferiority of such defeated enemies.

The Germans, on the other hand, utilized both the techniques and organizational structure of industrial production in the impersonal creation of a Machine within the machinery of State, the sole purpose of which was the production of a highly valued commodity - the death of the Jews. The Burmese railway and its horrors was a result of the mass application of captured labor to a single straightforward project - the building of a strategically useful railway. You can no more compare the two than you can compare apples and oranges.

As to the post-war successes of either... Does that have something to do with what I was talking about? If so, perhaps you can explain the link.

Emp: You're right. My argument was a little incoherent. I still think the only measure of success for an ideology or a people is the long-term survival of an ideology or a people, but you have me on both points there.

Have you read the theories of biopower by Foucalt and his successors? If you haven't I really suggest you do. It seems like something you might find interesting. It's not technically the same as state control over death, but in terms of the biological approach of the Nazi state it's fairly relevant. You've probably already covered it in your university career, but if you haven't check it out. There's been a few papers in the last few years that have developed the concept in line with theories of violence and terror, particularly in dictatorial states like China and Singapore.