National Socialism by Lyle Burkhead (with Economics focus)

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

National Socialism

by Lyle Burkhead

National Socialism is the opposite of international finance capitalism, i.e. the opposite of globalization. Under National Socialism, engineers would not lose their jobs to outsourcing, and great industrial cities would not be disintegrating and turning back to farmland. There would be no such thing as Goldman Sachs, or the Federal Reserve, or big box stores full of merchandise from China. If China were National Socialist too, the Chinese economy would not depend on exports. Instead of a globalized economy, there would be independent national economies. Countries would generate capital internally instead of depending on foreign investment. International trade would still exist (you could still drive a Honda if that's what you want), but it would be a fraction of what it is now. The financial system would be simple and straightforward; there would be no such thing as "derivatives". The economy would be based on industry, not on finance, insurance, real estate, casinos, and prisons.

There would be no dumbing-down policy in the schools or anywhere else.

There would be no TSA pat-downs. No such thing happened in the Reich, nor could it happen. An obscenity like that would be inconceivable. When you go through security at an American airport, the Zionists literally have you by the balls. Under National Socialism, the Zionists would not be running things, with all that that implies for both foreign and domestic policy.

Instead of dying, the oceans would be flourishing. On land, desertification would be reversed. The "cancer industry" would not exist. The environmental and psychological causes of cancer would be addressed, and cancer would be rare. There would be no need to argue about how to pay for health care, because most people would normally stay healthy without "health care" as we know it today.

Students would not have to go into debt to get an education.

Under National Socialism, cities would not be full of drunks and homeless people. There would be no such thing as multiculturalism, or political correctness, or affirmative action. Schools would not teach kids to listen to hip-hop. First world countries would not turn themselves into third world countries. Just the opposite: National Socialism represents the gentrification of the world.

I did not know most of this until recently.

Like most people, I grew up believing that National Socialism was a Very Bad Thing. I thought it was all about war and exterminating people. If that were true, then of course it would be a Very Bad Thing. But in fact that is not what National Socialism is about.

When I was in the 9th grade, my world history teacher gave me an extra credit assignment. She asked me to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, and write a report on it. That was a pretty stiff assignment for a 9th grader. I read the book all the way through and wrote a report, but the report was not very good. She gave me an A, but in my own mind I knew I did not deserve an A. Some of what I wrote was cribbed from Encyclopedia Britannica. My teacher expected a little too much from her star student. At that age I was not quite ready to read a book of that length and density, hold it all in my mind at once, and write a paper about it. I guess that's where this page is coming from. Fifty years later, I am still working on that assignment. Anyway I believed everything in the book. And why not?  It never occurred to me that my teacher might be misinformed, or that mainstream historians such as William Shirer might be lying. I accepted what they told me.

Since then I have discovered that what happened in Germany in the Hitler era was very different from what they tell us. On this page I am going to present some of the facts that my world history teacher should have taught me. This is what every high school student should know about National Socialism.

The question "what is National Socialism" can be approached in two ways - (1) what was Hitler's original idea? and (2) what happened in the Third Reich?

1. The intention

The first question can be answered by going to the source, Mein Kampf.  It is a long book (almost 700 pages). It is not well organized. Much of it is no longer relevant. Here is a very brief overview, with excerpts from four chapters.

Volume Two, Chapter 4: Personality and the Ideal of the People's State -- If you are new to the subject, this short chapter is a good place to start.

Excerpt:

    Accordingly a human community is well organized only when it facilitates to the highest possible degree individual creative forces and utilizes their work for the benefit of the community. The most valuable factor of an invention, whether it be in the world of material realities or in the world of abstract ideas, is the personality of the inventor himself.

    The first and supreme duty of an organized folk community is to place the inventor in a position where he can be of the greatest benefit to all. Indeed the very purpose of the organization is to put this principle into practice. Only by  so doing can it ward off the curse of mechanization and remain a living thing. In itself it must personify the effort to place men of brains above the multitude and to make the latter obey the former.

    Therefore not only does the organization possess no right to prevent men of brains from rising above the multitude but, on the contrary, it must use its organizing powers to enable and promote that ascension as far as it possibly can. It must start out from the principle that the blessings of mankind never came from the masses but from the creative brains of individuals, who are therefore the real benefactors of humanity.


Volume One, Chapter 8: The Beginning of my Political Activity -- another short, fundamental chapter.

Excerpt:

    Thus, the task of the state toward capital was comparatively simple and clear: it only had to make certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation. This point of view could then be defined between two restrictive limits: preservation of a solvent, national, and independent economy on the one hand, assurance of the social rights of the workers on the other.

    Previously I had been unable to recognize with the desired clarity the difference between this pure capital as the end result of productive labor and a capital whose existence and essence rests exclusively on speculation. For this I lacked the initial inspiration, which had simply not come my way.

    But now this was provided most amply by one of the various gentlemen lecturing in the above-mentioned course: Gottfried Feder.

    For the first time in my life I heard a principled discussion of international stock exchange and loan capital.

    Right after listening to Feder's first lecture, the thought ran through my head that I had now found the way to one of the most essential premises for the foundation of a new party.

    In my eyes Feder's merit consisted in having established with ruthless brutality the speculative and economic character of stock exchange and loan capital, and in having exposed its eternal and age-old presupposition which is interest. His arguments were so sound in all fundamental questions that their critics from the start questioned the theoretical correctness of the idea less than they doubted the practical possibility of its execution.

    As I listened to Gottfried Feder's first lecture about the 'breaking of interest slavery,' I knew at once that this was a theoretical truth which would inevitably be of immense importance for the future of the German people. The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital. The development of Germany was much too clear in my eyes for me not to know that the hardest battle would have to be fought, not against hostile nations, but against international capital.


Volume One, Chapter 10: Causes of the Collapse -- a longer chapter that covers many of Hitler's basic ideas.

Excerpt:

    The cure of a sickness can only be achieved if its cause is known, and the same is true of curing political evils. To be sure, the outward form of a sickness, its symptom which strikes the eye, is easier to see and discover than the inner cause. And this is the reason why so many people never go beyond the recognition of external effects and even confuse them with the cause, attempting, indeed, to deny the existence of the latter...

    Even before the turn of the century an element began to intrude into our art which up to that time could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown. To be sure, even in earlier times there were occasional aberrations of taste, but such cases were rather artistic derailments, to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no longer of an artistic degeneration, but of a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit. In them the political collapse, which later became more visible, was culturally indicated. [A clearer translation of this paragraph is given below.]

    Art Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole.

    Anyone to whom this seems strange need only subject the art of the happily Bolshevized states to an examination, and, to his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men, with which, since the turn of the century, we have become familiar under the collective concepts of cubism and dadaism, as the official and recognized art of those states. Even in the short period of the Bavarian Republic of Councils, this phenomenon appeared. Even here it could be seen that all the official posters, propagandist drawings in the newspapers, etc., bore the imprint, not only of political but of cultural decay.

    Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic 'experiences' would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly looked on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the general view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable.


Volume Two, Chapter 15: The Right of Emergency Defense -- the last chapter of the book.

Excerpt:

    As the leadership of our destinies has, since the end of the War, been quite openly furnished by Jews, we really cannot assume that faulty knowledge alone is the cause of our misfortune; we must, on the contrary, hold the conviction that conscious purpose is destroying our nation. And once we examine the apparent madness of our nation's leadership in the field of foreign affairs from this standpoint, it is revealed as the subtlest, ice-cold logic, in the service of the Jewish idea and struggle for world conquest.

    If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.

    The strength of a nation lies primarily, not in its weapons, but in its will, and before foreign enemies are conquered, the enemy within must be annihilated... A Germany saved from these mortal enemies of her existence and her future would possess forces which the whole world could no longer have stifled. On the day when Marxism is smashed in Germany, her fetters will in truth be broken forever. For never in our history have we been defeated by the strength of our foes, but always by our own vices and by the enemies in our own camp.


That is the end of the excerpt. Please note that there is an epistemological point here:  instead of telling  you what he said, I showed  you. I let him speak for himself. Instead of telling you what to think about it, I am just showing you his words, and you can decide for yourself what to think about it. This is not the way National Socialism is usually discussed.

I have been quoting from the Manheim translation. The Murphy translation is also available. Sometimes Murphy is clearer than Manheim, sometimes not. For example, compare Murphy's rendition of this statement with the way Manheim phrased it, above:

    The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence.

Compare Murphy's translation of Hitler's statement about art with Manheim's:

    At the turn of the last century a new element began to make its appearance in our world. It was an element which had been hitherto absolutely unknown and foreign to us. In former times there had certainly been offences against good taste; but these were mostly departures from the orthodox canons of art, and posterity could recognize a certain historical value in them. But the new products showed signs, not only of artistic aberration but of spiritual degeneration.  Here, in the cultural sphere,  the signs of the coming collapse first became manifest.

In this case Murphy is definitely better. When you read Manheim's version of that paragraph, your eyes probably glazed over. Manheim tries to keep long German sentences in more or less their original form. Murphy breaks them up into shorter sentences, which works better in English. Not only that, Murphy seems to "get it" in a way that Manheim doesn't. Murphy usually conveys the meaning better.

The Murphy translation can be found here (text file) and here (PDF file).

The German text of Mein Kampf can be found here, at least for the time being. In the past I have linked to sites that had Mein Kampf, but when I checked back a few months later the links were dead. I don't know why people go to the trouble of putting up a website and then abandon it. In any case, if these links don't work, a bit of search engine sleuthing should turn up English and German versions of Mein Kampf. It will always be available somewhere. The Manheim translation is available in bookstores. It's better than nothing.

There is another translation, called the Ford Edition, but I have not read it. What we really need is an entirely new book, a sequel that brings Mein Kampf up to date. A lot of what Hitler said about Germany in the 1920's does not apply to our situation today, but some of it does. Some of what he said was wrong even at the time. We need to think it through and sort out what is still valid from what isn't.

In addition to Mein Kampf,  The 25 points of the NSDAP Program should also be consulted, if you are new to the subject. The 25 points can be taken as a brief definition of National Socialism. This is how it was presented to people at the time. When people joined the party, especially in the early years, this is what they were joining. The NSDAP was the party that intended to put this program into action. I say intended, because some of the points were never implemented.

The Program of the NSDAP (pdf file). This is a booklet by Gottfried Feder which goes into more detail. The link is to a photocopy of Feder's booklet (in English).

Nazi-Sozi: Questions and Answers for National-Socialists (pdf file)

Finally, there is this booklet by Goebbels, written in 1931. It is a dialogue between him and an interested but skeptical worker. Unfortunately, there is no indication of who is saying what. You just have to figure it out as you go along. Usually it is obvious which voice is speaking, but sometimes you have to stop and think. Keeps you on your toes. This was how the NSDAP explained itself in the two years leading up to 1933. Those years were the time when they broke through to a mass audience, an audience of millions. The ideas in this booklet are what appealed to those millions (leaving aside the appeal of the Fuehrer himself). The word "Nazi" only occurs in the expression "Nazi-Sozi," and only on the cover. They did not call themselves "The Nazi Party." They were basically the German WORKERS Party. Their philosophy was not "Nazism" - they did not use that word - it was National Socialism.

Here are excerpts from the booklet:

    Our platform  is concise: the liberty of the working German people. The way to achieve it  is clear and simple: the liberation of the German worker, and his reintegration into the national framework.

    To get to the bottom of this question: what is the nature of the social problem? Seventeen million workers are unconditionally at the mercy of Capitalism, which has complete control over all methods of production; they are thus forced to sell their own, their only capital - their power of work - at the lowest possible price. And for this reason, they rightly feel cast-out from a society (by whatever name: people, state, or nation) which silently tolerates the situation.

    The solution to the social problem is therefore nothing more or less than the social reintegration of a part of the population, its decisive involvement in all matters of political and economic importance, and, in this way, the reintegration of our nation into the grand course of history.

The expression "working people" is not synonymous with "unskilled labor." The concept "worker" includes anyone, at any skill level, who is at the mercy of capitalism. In recent years engineers, including software engineers, have discovered that they too are part of this group. Even entrepreneurs may be workers in that sense, especially when they are starting out.

I have tried to just let Hitler and Goebbels speak for themselves, but I want to insert some of my own comments here. Without capitalism the entrepreneurs could not function, except in a primitive way, and the engineers' jobs would not exist. The "social problem" is not as simple as Goebbels makes it out to be. Capitalism has two sides (more than two, actually).

I would feel better about the whole thing if they conceived it as the German Entrepreneurs Party instead of the German Workers Party. It almost amounts to the same thing, but the emphasis is different. It may be true that entrepreneurs could think of themselves as workers, since they do something productive and they are not part of the financier/rentier class, but I would rather teach the workers to think of themselves as entrepreneurs or inventors. That is the logical conclusion of the anti-dumbing down policy.

The essential thing is for business owners, professional employees, and blue-collar employees to reframe the situation and see themselves as allies against the banksters. This requires all concerned to widen their horizons and take a larger view of things. When I say business owners, I am talking about companies run by individual proprietors. Large corporations are a different kind of beast. They almost inevitably have an adversarial relationship with their employees and with society in general. The challenge for the government (assuming the government is on the right side) is to somehow persuade the corporations (including banks) to act in the interest of society, which means acting against their own interest to some extent.

The following statement is absolutely fundamental and cannot be emphasized too much:

    Mannheim: The sharp separation of stock exchange capital from the national economy offered the possibility of opposing the internationalization of the German economy without at the same time menacing the foundations of an independent national self-maintenance by a struggle against all capital.

    Murphy: The absolute separation of stock-exchange capital from the economic life of the nation would make it possible to oppose the process of internationalization in German business without at the same time attacking capital as such, for to do this would jeopardize the foundations of our national independence.

In other words this requires a delicate balancing act. You have to somehow keep the economy independent of international capitalism - what we call globalization now - without eliminating capitalism altogether. This is where Hitler disagreed with the Strasser brothers, who wanted outright socialism. Hitler said no, that would destroy the national economy. You have to have privately owned businesses, and there has to be some kind of financial market where they can raise capital. But you don't want to let the financial markets take over the country.

As Hitler said in Mein Kampf, the task of the state is to "make certain that capital remain the handmaiden of the state and not fancy itself the mistress of the nation." Easier said than done. That is what Hitler tried to do in the Third Reich. The result is described below.

In 2008, during the financial crisis, the President of France said "We want a new world to come out of this. We want to set up the basis for a capitalism of entrepreneurs, not speculators." That is the basic idea here. It's not really about socialism as that concept is usually understood.

The international financial system is nobody's friend.  We have to find some way to control it so we can get on with our lives. That is what Hitler tried to do. The task remains unfinished in our time.


William N. Goetzmann, Financing Civilization - When Hitler heard Feder's lecture about the breaking of interest slavery, things started to fall into place in his mind, and the concept of National Socialism was born. He may not have understood what he was up against. He set out to overthrow a deeply rooted system with a very long history. William Goetzmann describes how it started. Here is a very short excerpt (not a substitute for the whole thing):

    Second Millennium Ur may have been an early hothouse of capitalistic enterprize, but what of the borrowers mired in debt? The government may actually have preferred them this way. A study by the economist M. Darling of the rural economy of the Punjab in modern times suggests a disturbing thing about human nature -- people work harder and produce more when they are in debt. Darling found that crop yields for farmers in debt typically exceeded yields from unencumbered farmers. Farmers in the Punjab may have faced foreclosure, but for the ancient inhabitant of Ur, the motivation was even greater. Debtors were often forced to sell themselves into slavery.

    It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, while the first loan contracts and the legal system that enforced them may have been good for the Mesopotamian economy, they made life miserable for the working man and woman. If lending began, as historian Paul Millet believes, as a process of neighborly reciprocity in rural societies, then it evolved into something quite different. In Babylonian times, short-term debt was a tool used to extract taxes from the population, and to increase the productivity of temple lands. It is almost as though the government had found a way to extract the residual "goodwill" from the economy, by allowing individuals to shift financial obligations into the future. Lending in ancient Ur was mostly for emergency purposes -- where the government created the emergency! The other side of the coin is that certain entrepreneurs such as Dumuzi-gamil achieved economic upward mobility through borrowing. Thus, while the system was harsh on the populace, it encouraged creative and productive enterprise. For those with the imagination to exploit it, the financial system of Ur offered limitless possibilities.

Does this sound familiar?  It was more than 3,000 years ago. The premise of national socialism is that it is possible to get out of this.

David Graeber, Debt: The first five thousand years - as before, this snippet is not a substitute for the whole thing.

    The Mesopotamian economy was dominated by large public institutions (Temples and Palaces) whose bureaucratic administrators effectively created money of account by establishing a fixed equivalent between silver and the staple crop, barley. Debts were calculated in silver, but silver was rarely used in transactions. Instead, payments were made in barley or in anything else that happened to be handy and acceptable. Major debts were recorded on cuneiform tablets kept as sureties by both parties to the transaction.

    Certainly, markets did exist. Prices of certain commodities that were not produced within Temple or Palace holdings, and thus not subject to administered price schedules, would tend to fluctuate according to the vagaries of supply and demand. But most actual acts of everyday buying and selling, particularly those that were not carried out between absolute strangers, appear to have been made on credit. "Ale women", or local innkeepers, served beer, for example, and often rented rooms; customers ran up a tab; normally, the full sum was dispatched at harvest time. Market vendors presumably acted as they do in small-scale markets in Africa, or Central Asia, today, building up lists of trustworthy clients to whom they could extend credit. The habit of money at interest also originates in Sumer – it remained unknown, for example, in Egypt. Interest rates, fixed at 20 percent, remained stable for 2,000 years. (This was not a sign of government control of the market: at this stage, institutions like this were what made markets possible.) This, however, led to some serious social problems. In years with bad harvests especially, peasants would start becoming hopelessly indebted to the rich, and would have to surrender their farms and, ultimately, family members, in debt bondage. Gradually, this condition seems to have come to a social crisis – not so much leading to popular uprisings, but to common people abandoning the cities and settled territory entirely and becoming semi-nomadic "bandits" and raiders. It soon became traditional for each new ruler to wipe the slate clean, cancel all debts, and declare a general amnesty or "freedom", so that all bonded labourers could return to their families. (It is significant here that the first word for "freedom" known in any human language, the Sumerian amarga, literally means "return to mother".) Biblical prophets instituted a similar custom, the Jubilee, whereby after seven years all debts were similarly cancelled. This is the direct ancestor of the New Testament notion of "redemption".

    Historically, as we have seen, ages of virtual, credit money have also involved creating some sort of overarching institutions – Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place some sort of controls on the potentially catastrophic social consequences of debt. Almost invariably, they involve institutions (usually not strictly coincident to the state, usually larger) to protect debtors. So far the movement this time has been the other way around: starting with the '80s we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system, operating through the IMF, World Bank, corporations and other financial institutions, largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.


Along with Steve Keen and Cullen Roche, Michael Hudson is one of the best critics of mainstream economics. More of his ideas can be found on Globalresearch, Counterpunch, and his website. Here is Michael Hudson on debt:

    I've spent much of my time looking through history to read up on how the failure to wipe out the debt overhead led to the collapse of Rome's imperial republic, and to the Ottoman Empire as what was known as "the spoiling of Egypt" and "the ruin of Persia" toward the end of the 19th century. I've also published a series of four colloquia by assyriologists and archaeologists describing how earlier, from about 2500 to perhaps 300 BC, Babylonian and other Near Eastern rulers kept their citizens free and preserved their landholdings by annulling personal and agrarian debts when they took the throne – a true "tax holiday" – or when economic or military conditions warranted a general Clean Slate.

    These Clean Slates were adopted literally, almost word for word, in the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25. Even the same Hebrew word, deror, was used for the Babylonian andurarum proclaimed by rulers of Hammurapi's dynasty from 2000 to 1600 BC. So it is remarkable to me that men claiming to be Christian leaders today should ignore the fact that in the very first sermon that Jesus gave, in Nazareth (Luke 4:14-30), he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah 61 and promised that he had come "to proclaim the Year of the Lord," the Jubilee Year. That was the literal "good news" that the Bible preached, as the Dead Sea scrolls have abundantly illustrated.


Ellen Brown, "Thinking Outside the Box: How a Bankrupt Germany solved its Infrastructure Problems"

    When Hitler came to power, the country was completely, hopelessly broke. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed crushing reparations payments on the German people, who were expected to reimburse the costs of the war for all participants — costs totaling three times the value of all the property in the country. Speculation in the German mark had caused it to plummet, precipitating one of the worst runaway inflations in modern times. At its peak, a wheelbarrow full of 100 billion-mark banknotes could not buy a loaf of bread. The national treasury was empty, and huge numbers of homes and farms had been lost to the banks and speculators. People were living in hovels and starving. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before - the total destruction of the national currency, wiping out people's savings, their businesses, and the economy generally. Making matters worse, at the end of the decade global depression hit. Germany had no choice but to succumb to debt slavery to international lenders.

    Or so it seemed. Hitler and the National Socialists, who came to power in 1933, thwarted the international banking cartel by issuing their own money. In this they took their cue from Abraham Lincoln, who funded the American Civil War with government-issued paper money called "Greenbacks." Hitler began his national credit program by devising a plan of public works. Projects earmarked for funding included flood control, repair of public buildings and private residences, and construction of new buildings, roads, bridges, canals, and port facilities. The projected cost of the various programs was fixed at one billion units of the national currency. One billion non-inflationary bills of exchange, called Labor Treasury Certificates, were then issued against this cost. Millions of people were put to work on these projects, and the workers were paid with the Treasury Certificates. This government-issued money wasn't backed by gold, but it was backed by something of real value. It was essentially a receipt for labor and materials delivered to the government. Hitler said, "for every mark that was issued we required the equivalent of a mark's worth of work done or goods produced." The workers then spent the Certificates on other goods and services, creating more jobs for more people.


Henry C K Liu, Nazism and the German Economic Miracle

    The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, at a time when its economy was in total collapse, with ruinous war-reparation obligations and zero prospects for foreign investment or credit. Yet through an independent monetary policy of sovereign credit and a full-employment public-works program, the Third Reich was able to turn a bankrupt Germany, stripped of overseas colonies it could exploit, into the strongest economy in Europe within four years, even before armament spending began. In fact, German economic recovery preceded and later enabled German rearmament, in contrast to the US economy, where constitutional roadblocks placed by the US Supreme Court on the New Deal delayed economic recovery until US entry to World War II put the US market economy on a war footing.


Jonathan Tennenbaum, The Isotope Economy (pdf file) - This article describes what the economy might look like if it were based on real industry, not on finance, real estate, etc. This is what the Third Reich would be doing if it had survived into the 21st Century.

Jonathan Tennenbaum most definitely does not consider himself to be describing National Socialism. Neither does Michael Hudson. I don't know of any discussions of economics from an explicitly National Socialist viewpoint - with the possible exception of Ellen Brown's article, and even she says (rightly) that Hitler deserves the opprobium he gets for starting the war - so I have just linked to some pages that I have found enlightening and relevant. The point is, these articles indicate what National Socialism is about. Contrary to what they keep telling us, it's not about "white power."

Just creating a new monetary system is not enough. However, even though it is not sufficient, it is necessary. You have to get economics right, or else whatever you do will come to nothing.

I also want to mention Zero Hedge and The Automatic Earth. These are good sites to keep up with ongoing developments in the financial system. There is a lot of survivalist bullshit on both these sites, and a lot of stupid clichés about Keynes, written by people who have never read a page of Keynes. Nevertheless they are both indispensable. I am recommending TAE for the articles, not the comments. On ZH, the signal to noise ratio is not always high, but on a good day the comments are very good. Maybe some of my readers will join the fray. (A few months later - after reading this thread, I have pretty much given up on ZH. They are getting farther and farther out of touch with reality. I may just remove this paragraph.)


I have been quoting Hitler and Goebbels, as if they meant what they said. I need to pause here and consider their sincerity.

Just about all students are taught that Hitler and his associates were openly dishonest, and that they used the "Big Lie" as one of their main techniques, both before and after they came to power. For example, if you look up the Wikipedia article about George Orwell's book, 1984, you find two alleged quotations, one from Hitler and one from Goebbels.

    "The broad mass of the nation ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." — Adolf Hitler, in his 1925 book Mein Kampf

This alleged quotation is repeated over and over. One of the things "everybody knows" about Hitler is that he cynically advocated lying as a basic principle. Well, let's look at the whole thing in its original context. This is what he actually wrote (Mein Kampf, page 231):

    This most of all shows the assertion that the lost War was the cause of the German collapse to be a lie. No, this military collapse was itself only the consequence of a large number of symptoms of disease and their causes, which even in peacetime were with the German nation. This was the first consequence, catastrophic and visible to all, of an ethical and moral poisoning, of a diminution in the instinct of self-preservation and its preconditions, which for many years had begun to undermine the foundations of the people and the Reich.

    It required the whole bottomless falsehood of the Jews and their Marxist fighting organization to lay the blame for the collapse on that very man who alone, with superhuman energy and will power, tried to prevent the catastrophe he foresaw and save the nation from its time of deepest humiliation and disgrace. By branding Ludendorff as guilty for the loss of the World War they took the weapon of moral right from the one dangerous accuser who could have risen against the traitors to the fatherland.

    In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick - a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.

    The foremost connoisseurs of this truth regarding the possibilities in the use of falsehood and slander have always been the Jews; for after all, their whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race - and what a race!  One of the greatest minds of humanity [Schopenhauer] has nailed them forever as such in an eternally correct phrase of fundamental truth: he called them 'the great masters of the lie.' And anyone who does not recognize this or does not want to believe it will never in this world be able to help the truth to victory.

Hitler was not advocating the Big Lie, he was complaining about it.

Wikipedia also gives us this alleged quotation by Goebbels:

    "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." — Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels

Please note that Wikipedia does not give a citation for this. Nobody ever does, because there is no source for it. Nevertheless everybody keeps repeating it over and over.

What Goebbels actually said can be found, in great detail, on the Nazi and East German Propaganda Guide Page of the Calvin College website. If you do a Google search for "tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it" you get more than 20,000 results. But if you do this search

    "tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it" site:www.calvin.edu

you get zero results. In other words, that expression is not found in any of the documents collected in their Propaganda Guide Page. Of course it is possible that the statement occurs in some document that is not included in the Propaganda Guide Page. I cannot be absolutely certain that he never said any such thing. However, judging by what I know about Goebbels, the statement is totally out of character, and I would bet 100-to-1 that he never said it.

[Note added years later: Now the expression "tell a lie big enough" can be found on the Calvin site. It is on a page of false quotations. Randall Bytwerk, the author of the Calvin site, is honest enough to have such a page. I am impressed.]

The alleged Goebbels quotation is itself an example of a lie that has been repeated so many times that everybody believes it.

In other words, to spell this out as clearly as possible, when people accuse Hitler and Goebbels of advocating the Big Lie, they are lying.  They are turning the situation upside down. The alleged Hitler quotation is taken out of context so it appears to mean the opposite of what Hitler intended. They are accusing Hitler and Goebbels of doing what they themselves are doing. This is the kind of lie Hitler was complaining about. It is exactly the kind of falsification of history and destruction of language that Orwell was complaining about. And they put these lies in an article about 1984, of all things.

This is perfectly Orwellian. It just doesn't get any better than this.

2. The reality

What difference does it make?  What is at stake here?  This brings us to the second question, what happened in the Third Reich?  This question is a lot more difficult to answer. There is an enormous amount of disinformation about the Third Reich. Finding out what happened is not easy, because almost everybody thinks it's all right to lie to make a point against the evil Nazis.

Matt Koehl gave a talk in which he summarized National Socialism very well. I am going to quote some of his introductory remarks:

    This morning I would like to talk about the good society. More specifically, I would like to discuss the economic and social aspects of a good society.

    Among other things in such a society, we would want a stable and prosperous economy, one with full employment and living wages. We would want affordable housing, whether in the purchasing or renting of a home. We would want a system of health care accessible to everyone, regardless of economic circumstance. We would want generous provision for disability, maternity leave and retirement. We would want free access to college education and vocational training for any qualified applicant. We would want a healthy farming community, one which favors small family farms over large agribusiness conglomerates.

    We would want the kind of public safety where one didn't have to live in gated communities to feel secure, and where one could walk down the street of any city at any time, day or night-without fear of being mugged, assaulted, or worse. We would want rigorous protection of the environment under a regime that is more concerned about the condition of our forests, our earth, our air and our waters than about corporate profit and pollution.

    These are some the things we would want - for every citizen of our good society.

    Today, we have NONE of these things. Why? Do these expectations of a good society sound unreasonable, or utopian?

    I say to you that they are not - as is proven by the fact that there once was a society which had all of these things and more.

That society, of course, was the Third Reich. At a time when America and most of Europe were mired in depression, National Socialist Germany had a quality of life that few places have even now. This is how it happened:

The first years of the Reich by Leon Degrelle

    "We have the power. Now our gigantic work begins."

    Those were Hitler's words on the night of January 30, 1933, as cheering crowds surged past him, for five long hours, beneath the windows of the Chancellery in Berlin.

    His political struggle had lasted 14 years. He himself was 43, that is, physically and intellectually at the peak of his powers. He had won over millions of Germans and organized them into Germany's largest and most dynamic political party, a party girded by a human rampart of hundreds of thousands of storm troopers, three fourths of them members of the working class. He had been extremely shrewd. All but toying with his adversaries, Hitler had, one after another, vanquished them all.

    Standing there at the window, his arm raised to the delirious throng, he must have known a feeling of triumph. But he seemed almost torpid, absorbed, as if lost in another world.

    It was a world far removed from the delirium in the street, a world of 65 million citizens who loved him or hated him, but all of whom, from that night on, had become his responsibility. And as he knew -- as almost all Germans knew in January of 1933 -- this was a crushing, an almost desperate responsibility.

    Half a century later, few people understand the crisis Germany faced at that time. Today, it's easy to assume that Germans have always been well-fed and even plump. But the Germans Hitler inherited were virtual skeletons.

    During the preceding years, a score of "democratic" governments had come and gone, often in utter confusion. Instead of alleviating the people's misery, they had increased it, due to their own instability: it was impossible for them to pursue any given plan for more than a year or two. Germany had arrived at a dead end. In just a few years there had been 224,000 suicides - a horrifying figure, bespeaking a state of misery even more horrifying.

    By the beginning of 1933, the misery of the German people was virtually universal. At least six million unemployed and hungry workers roamed aimlessly through the streets, receiving a pitiful unemployment benefit of less than 42 marks per month. Many of those out of work had families to feed, so that altogether some 20 million Germans, a third of the country's population, were reduced to trying to survive on about 40 pfennigs per person per day.

    Those still lucky enough to have some kind of job were not much better off. Workers and employees had taken a cut of 25 percent in their wages and salaries. Twenty-one percent of them were earning between 100 and 250 marks per month; 69.2 percent of them, in January of 1933, were being paid less than 1,200 marks annually. No more than about 100,000 Germans, it was estimated, were able to live without financial worries.

    During the three years before Hitler came to power, total earnings had fallen by more than half, from 23 billion marks to 11 billion. The average per capita income had dropped from 1,187 marks in 1929 to 627 marks, a scarcely tolerable level, in 1932. By January 1933, when Hitler took office, 90 percent of the German people were destitute.

    ...

    Hitler knew that the task he had set himself would be immense and difficult to accomplish, that he would have to transform Germany in practically every respect: the structure of the state, social law, the constitution of society, the economy, civic spirit, culture, the very nature of men's thinking. To accomplish his great goal, he would need to reestablish the equilibrium of the social classes within the context of a regenerated community, free his nation from foreign hegemony, and restructure its geographic unity.

    Task number one:  he would have to restore work and honor to the lives of six million unemployed. This was his immediate goal, a task that everyone else thought impossible to achieve.

    After he had once again closed the windows of the chancellery, Hitler, with clenched fists and resolute mien, said simply: "The great venture begins. The day of the Third Reich has come."

That was the starting point. Just a few years later, Germany was not only back on its feet, it was the most dynamic country in the world. Skipping ahead to a later point in the article,

    Hitler's tremendous social achievement in putting Germany's six million unemployed back to work is seldom acknowledged today. Although it was much more than a transitory achievement, "democratic" historians routinely dismiss it in just a few lines. Since 1945, not a single objective scholarly study has been devoted to this highly significant, indeed unprecedented, historical phenomenon.

    Similarly neglected is the body of sweeping reforms that dramatically changed the condition of the worker in Germany. Factories were transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers, with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields. Hundreds of thousands of attractive houses were built for working class families. A policy of several weeks of paid vacation was introduced, along with weekend and holiday trips by land and sea. A wide-ranging program of physical and cultural education for young workers was established, with the world's best system of technical training. The Third Reich's social security and workers' health insurance system was the world's most modern and complete.

    This remarkable record of social achievement is routinely hushed up today because it embarrasses those who uphold the orthodox view of the Third Reich. Otherwise, readers might begin to think that perhaps Hitler was the greatest social builder of the twentieth century.

    Because Hitler's program of social reform was a crucially important - indeed, essential -- part of his life work, a realization of this fact might induce people to view Hitler with new eyes. Not surprisingly, therefore, all this is passed over in silence. Most historians insist on treating Hitler and the Third Reich simplistically, as part of a Manichaean morality play of good versus evil.

    Nevertheless, restoring work and bread to millions of unemployed who had been living in misery for years; restructuring industrial life; conceiving and establishing an organization for the effective defense and betterment of the nation's millions of wage earners; creating a new bureaucracy and judicial system that guaranteed the civic rights of each member of the national community, while simultaneously holding each person to his or her responsibilities as a German citizen: this organic body of reforms was part of a single, comprehensive plan, which Hitler had conceived and worked out years earlier.

To find out exactly how Hitler did it, you have to read the whole article. The importance of this article cannot be overstated. I am tempted to dispense with my own National Socialism page and put Degrelle's article here in its place. It's that good. If you want to know what the Third Reich was about, you have to read it. (BTW, there are some strange typos in this article. When you come to a word that doesn't make sense, try adding 'end' to it. For example, 'amed' becomes 'amended'.)

When Degrelle talks about factories "transformed from gloomy caverns to spacious and healthy work centers, with natural lighting, surrounded by gardens and playing fields," and the holidays, and the physical and cultural education, and so forth, he is describing the Strength Through Joy program. This is the heart of National Socialism.

National Socialism is cornucopian. The idea is for everybody to have an abundant life, with plenty of headroom. It's kind of like the American Dream, of generations past, the dream that has been abandoned.

Many people think that if we abolish the Fed, and go back to the gold standard, that would set everything right. No, it wouldn't. Other people think that if we could just go back to Franklin's paper money, or Lincoln's greenbacks, that would fix everything. No, it wouldn't. As long as we have the same crew in New York and Washington running things, it doesn't matter what we do about the Fed, or the monetary system in general. Hitler himself said that just fiddling with the financial system is not enough.

Franklin's paper money or Lincoln's greenbacks will only work if Franklin or Lincoln is at the helm. Even then, it is not clear to me that the greenback system is stable. It may work for a few years, but how long will it last?

The problem is not capitalism per se, but crony capitalism. There is such a thing as crony socialism, too. I see the same thing happening everywhere - the US, Russia, China, etc. Insiders game the system (any system) and make off with the loot. Politics is not about isms, it's about people.

When communism was collapsing, and people were talking about establishing democracy in Russia, somebody wrote an article in which he posed the question: How can you have democracy in Russia - where is the human material for it?  In other words, how can you have democracy in a country of thugs and crooks?  You can't.

The same thing applies to Germany, the United States, and everywhere else. How can you have a government that acts in the public interest, in a country where there is a complete lack of public spirit among the people?

"Neither the wisest Constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." - Samuel Adams

Let me repeat something Degrelle said, for emphasis:

    Hitler knew that the task he had set himself would be immense and difficult to accomplish, that he would have to transform Germany in practically every respect: the structure of the state, social law, the constitution of society, the economy, civic spirit, culture, the very nature of men's thinking.

That is what it takes to have National Socialism. Nothing less will do.

The Nuremburg Rallies

I saw a series of movies from the Third Reich. After seeing 18 movies, I came away with the realization that daily life was still daily life in the Nazi era. It was not one ecstatic rally after another. Most of the time people just went about their business. However, the rallies were an essential part of the Third Reich. Without the esprit de corps generated by the rallies, the transformation of Germany described above could not have happened.

What follows is from another Degrelle article, although some of it consists of quotations from others.

    Nothing has been omitted to obtain the desired effect, a parade of a hundred thousand SA, pounding the pavements of the town for five hours, a forest of standards in which the blood-red emblems and the eagles of the party dominate, deafening fanfares, salvos of artillery, torchlight tattoos uncoiling their serpent of fire between the illuminated facades of the medieval town, batteries of searchlights aimed skyward, weaving a vault of light above the Luitpoldshain amphitheater: everything contributes to create an impression of ordered power from which the most skeptical visitors return astounded. It is impossible to resist this swirl of colors and songs and light whose intensity no report, no film will ever reproduce. For nearly a week the crowd has been swimming, rolling in a tidal wave of emotion.

    The stadium itself was gigantic, surrounded by columns three times as tall as those of the Acropolis. The columns were surmounted by eagles of granite and joined together by tens of thousands of flaming banners with swastikas turning in their solar disks. Streams of blue vapor rose from tall basins.

    Hitler had even invented an entirely new form of architecture that was made not of stone but of light. He'd had hundreds of air defense beacons installed on the four sides of the giant site. Their beams of light rose up very high and very straight in the night like the pillars of an unreal cathedral. It was quite a fabulous imaginary construction, worthy of Zeus, master of light and of the night of the heavens. Then, like a prophet, Hitler came forward.

    Here's the man now standing upon the rostrum. Then the flags unfurl. No singing, no rolling of the drums. A most extraordinary silence reigns when, from the edge of the stadium, before each of the spaces separating the brown shirt groups, the first ranks of standard-bearers emerge. The only light is that of the cathedral, blue and unreal, above which one sees butterflies spiraling: airplanes perhaps or simply dust. But a spotlight beam has alighted on the flags, emphasizing the red mass of them and following them as they advance.

    The beams of 150 gigantic searchlights pierced the overcast sky of a gray-black night. High in the air, on the surface of the clouds, the shafts of light came together to form the figure of a square... The image is gripping... Stirred by a light wind, the flags framing the stands tremble slightly in the sparkling light. The main speaker's platform comes into view in a blaze of light... To the right and to the left, flames shoot out of immense cups supported by pillars. From the opposite stands, on command, a flood of more than 30,000 flags pours toward the center, the tips of the staffs and the fringes of silver glittering in the illumination of the searchlights.

    As always, Hitler was the first victim of this production made of light, of crowds, of symmetry and of "life's tragic awareness." It was precisely in these orations made before the "first militants" and after the minute of silence observed in honor of the dead that Hitler frequently found his speech marked by a sort of exaltation and rapture: on these occasions and in a few extraordinary words, he has celebrated a sort of mystic communion before the spotlights sweep down on the center of the stage, and the flags, uniforms and musical instruments come ablaze in flashes of red, silver and gold.


Life in the Third Reich - a speech by Friedrich Kurreck. There is a certain body language and mindset associated with National Socialism. It is the opposite of depression, and also the opposite of the "slacker" mindset. Herr Kurreck describes it thus:

    The German Folk-Community Spirit Survived the War - Here is an example: The postwar Ruhr district was a huge heap of rubble as the English took away its remaining undamaged machinery to England as reparations. As you know, the Soviets did the same.

    A general strike was called by the newly established union to prevent the removal of a large 10,000 ton forging press. This was the biggest press in the world and it could have brought us economic advantages. I would also like to add that the union leader still thought as a German. This matter concerned the preservation of remaining jobs and the preservation of our people. This rally also found representatives of the Ruhr business in attendance. After the many fighting speeches had been made by the union side, a businessman asked to speak. He declared: "Let them take the old thing. We used it to make our entire war production. We shall build new ones that are bigger and better!" At one stroke came the determined decision: "Yes, yes, yes!" was the answer. He had said the magic words. The old spirit of the folk-community was still alive and discoverable!


Ministry of Illusion: Nazi movies as a window into Nazi Germany

In the winter of 1995, I saw a series of German films from the Hitler era. That was a turning point for me. That was when I knew that they are lying to us about what kind of place Germany was in the National Socialist era. The story we are told about the Third Reich is no more accurate than the story Islamic students are told about America, "the Great Satan."

The Germans recognized themselves in movies like Request Concert and The Great Love. That's how they saw themselves, and that's how the German government wanted  them to see themselves. The characters in those movies are anything but blond beasts, and anything but cult zombies. The movies have absolutely nothing in common with Castle Wolfenstein or any other caricature of National Socialism, including the Third Wave.

Request Concert was the most popular movie of the Nazi era. It is the definitive Nazi movie. The main characters are soldiers. They are reminiscent of Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. When they discover that they are in love with the same girl, there is no alpha-male confrontatation. They let her decide. They bend over backwards to give each other a fair chance.

Skinheads would not recognize themselves in any of the movies I saw from the Third Reich. There is nothing remotely resembling a skinhead in the entire series of 18 movies.

The Germany of our imagination has very little to do with the Germany that actually existed. The strangest thing about this is that some people like the postwar caricature of National Socialism, and they call themselves "neo-Nazis"!  The Germans who lived in the Reich, the ones who watched these movies, would not have much use for today's neo-Nazis, and conversely, neo-Nazis would not like the Reich that actually existed.

These movies don't show us a complete picture of Nazi Germany, any more than Norman Rockwell's paintings show us a complete picture of America. Americans recognized themselves in Rockwell's paintings (or at least they thought they did, which amounts to the same thing), but the way life was actually lived in America, even in the most idyllic small towns, was very different. That must have been true in Germany too.

Nevertheless the Ministry of Illusion movies are an indispensable reality check. There was a jarring contrast between what I saw and what I expected to see. If the Germans were who I thought they were, they would not have watched movies like this.

A serious student of history who wants to know what really happened in the Third Reich (assuming any such students exist) should make a point to see some of these films. When you watch the same movies that the Germans watched at the time, it's almost like being there.


Peter Staudenmaier, Fascist Ecology: The "Green Wing" of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents - a hostile but informative article which, as the author says, "presents a brief and necessarily schematic overview of the ecological components of Nazism, emphasizing both their central role in Nazi ideology and their practical implementation during the Third Reich."


Gun control in the Third Reich

If you read political discussions on the internet, hardly a week goes by without somebody saying "They are going to confiscate our guns, just like Hitler did!"

In fact no such thing happened. This priceless document describes the policy about guns in the Reich. The author is Heinz Weichardt, whose father was Editor of the Berliner Morgenpost, and whose mother was Jewish.

    Since my early teens I had been an avid gun lover. In Austria, where we lived at the time, there were in effect no restrictions on the possession of handguns or rifles. If there were, they certainly were not enforced. At the age of fifteen, I could walk into one of the finest gunshops in Vienna and purchase any weapon in the store, as long as I had the necessary money.

    Unfortunately I didn't, but after some time I had scraped together a sufficient amount to start my modest collection by acquiring three low-priced handguns. Shortly thereafter, in 1929, we moved to Berlin.

    In Germany, under the Weimar Republic, one had to register each gun with the police. There were no restrictions on possession except if you wanted to carry them. In this case you had to have a hunting licence which required a lengthy course in gun handling, marksmanship, game laws and the handling of bagged game.

    The police had absolutely no say or power to refuse you the ownership of your guns when you came to register. It was a purely bureaucratic measure which enabled the police to trace a gun involved in a criminal action.

    My guns were registered in the name of my (Jewish) mother, who had contributed the money for their original purchase, because I was only fifteen years old and could not own firearms until I reached maturity (21 years).

    After Hitler came to power, nothing was changed in the existing gun regulations; nobody had to turn in the registered guns - period.  My mother still had them on the day of her immigration to the US (May 1941) and gave them to a friend of mine because importation of firearms was prohibited under US law.

It gets better. You just have to read the whole thing, including his description of the Gestapo raid after word got around the neighborhood that he was planning to buy 100 Parabellums.


What do the Jews have to do with globalization? Good question. The short answer is that I don't really know. But they know. I bought a copy of the Jerusalem Post (issue of April 5, 2002), because I wanted to get another view of what's happening in Israel (i.e. another view besides the one I get from my usual news sources). I found something that bears on our present subject.

There is an editorial by Amotz Asa-el about the Jewish idea of tikun olam, which means "mending the world." He says that Jews should stop trying to change the world, and just think about how to escape from it or insulate themselves from it. In the course of this discussion, he mentions George Soros, who, he says, is "in the habit of shedding crocodile tears over capitalism's wrongs." He goes on to say:

    ...the day is near when those who today hide behind the amorphous of definition [sic] of "anti-globalization activists" will come forth with conspiracy theories linking the excessively high profile and world-mending Soros with other global Jewish economic players, like the IMF's Stanley Fischer, the World bank's James Wolfensohn, the US Federal Reserve's Alan Greenspan.

Until I read this, it had not occurred to me to make that connection. I didn't even know Wolfensohn was a Jew. But Mr. Asa-el thinks it's self-evident that being against globalization amounts to the same thing as being against the Jews. Amotz Asa-el thinks this is