Just as progressivism, (by which I mean anglosphere mainstream leftism) descends from the Puritans, via the infamous and conspiratorial Exeter Hall, the Acorn of its day, and “super protestantism”, looks like Nazism is descended from Lutheranism.
The apple does not fall far from the tree. Lutherans hated Jews, Puritans hated Christmas and men having sex with women.
Mencius argued that Nazism was genuinely right wing because it was not progressivism. This fits the definition of the “right”, that whosoever disagrees with progressivism on any one point of ten thousand points of doctrine, is a rightist (and doubtless a racist also). If however, Nazism is, like progressivism, a child of the seventeenth century holy wars, this accurately describes its extensive commonalities with leftism.
Thus Nazis are rightists, in that they are not descended from puritanism, but leftists, in that they are descended from protestantism.
Thus World War II and denazification may be understood as an atheocratic continuation of the theocratic holy wars of the seventeenth century. Once the Roman Catholics were defeated and the Holy Roman Empire vanished, the protestants turned on each other, since each sect of protestantism disagreed with a different aspect of Roman Catholicism, having little in common except that they deviated from Roman Catholicism on a few issues of a thousand issues.
Theocracy is inherently warlike. The warlike character of theocracy/atheocracy is obfuscated at present by the strategy of progressivism/puritanism to ally with the far enemy, such as communists and Muslims, against the near enemy, ordinary white taxpaying Americans.
Hence the doctrine of democratic peace: Democracies never go to war with each other – provided we define all democracies where progressives lacked the upper hand as undemocratic. If, however, we ignorantly look at things like voting and elections, it looks very much as if democracies frequently do go to war with each other.
How does this line of thought differ from the errors of those who view Christianity itself as the source of all the Universalist excesses? The logic seems identical, which I think reinforces the foolishness of “genealogical research” on the history of ideas.
The most important thing about a movement is what it believes. What answers does it give to the most serious questions? What are it’s goals? How does it talk about itself? Who are it’s enemies? The rest is circumstantial evidence at best. Lutheranism has creeds. Nazi-ism had (informal) creeds. If you’re going to conflate the two, you need to dig in and find similarities. Shared absence from the Catholic Church does not constitute proof of anything.
Was the French Revolution rooted in the Avingon Papacy? Both shared a location, an ethnicity, and an opposition to Rome. Come on. When people do things like this with the history of ideas, they’re revealing more about themselves than they are about the real world. I think the most frustrating part is that this really is a great blog, most of the time.
I should have said that in the course of the pursuit of theocratic power, all ideas that got in the way of the pursuit of power were cast overboard – that progressivism is what Puritanism became as a result of natural selection on memes whose bearers pursued political power
As I have said many times before, but failed to say in this post, Christ was demoted from the incarnation of the lord and the redeemer of mankind, to community organizer in chief, before being ejected altogether.
Genealogical research on the history of ideas is useful, because the framework of memetic selection tells us that the supposed ideas of our enemies are merely instruments for obtaining power, and that their nominal content is empty, that our enemies neither believe or disbelieve in any of this stuff.
From the point of view of memetic selection and evolution, it should come as no surprise that the climategate files revealed total indifference and complete lack of interest in the question of whether Global Warming was in fact true. The geneaology of ideas should have told us that Warmism was believed in the same manner, and for the same reasons, as they opposed fasting during lent and the use of images in churches.
I have not investigated. That is why I said anglosphere leftism. While Voltaire was atheistic, a lot of his contemporary leftists were stridently religious, but I have no idea of their religious roots. The war in the Vendee was obviously more about religion than Royalism. The peasants were fighting for their priests, and pretty much conscripted the nobility to organize their militias, while the Parisian army was fighting to purge the peasant’s priesthood.
The army of the Vendee initially styled itself “The Catholic Army”, and only later styled itself the Royal Catholic Army, and their number one demand was the reopening of the Churches with their former priests – which implies an effort by the new regime to install new priests, which is pretty much a rerun of the Avignon Papacy, though similarity of measures does not necessarily imply continuity of personnel and organization. Indeed, after four centuries out of power, continuity of personnel and organization between Avignon and the new priesthood is unlikely, whereas there is clear continuity of personnel and organization between the puritans and today’s left.
On checking, I find that the French left was continuous with Gallicanism, that Gallicanism was a formally organized religious movement with official doctrines and offices back in 1682, a century before the French Revolution, that this movement claimed continuity of organization, authority, and personnel with the Avignon Papacy, and that the Vendee war, the first real shooting struggle of the French Revolution, was a holy war between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism.
So yes, rooted in the Avignon Papacy.
If that is the most important thing about a movement, why was the first shooting war of the French revolution war with the ultramontanist peasants in the Vendee?
I can’t say I believe this at all. The nazis wanted to garner votes with socialism (and I think Hitler sincerely wanted to help the working Joe alongside whom he fought)…
….wanted to manage capitalism’s occasional zaniness and also I think dampen it as a dynamic or highly vital force (preferring that tradition and the state have high vitality instead)………….. respond to waxing Jewish/bolshi power (including within Germany)………. Respond to the loss of faith in the old nobility and their consequent loss of effectiveness qua ruling class / influential class of rightists or trads.
I see these things as having not a lot to do with the past, they have to do with that day.
You havent mentioned the amorality which is kind of a key thing with the nazis — or more accurately their willingness to inflict almost arbitrarily large amounts of suffering in exchange for being on course for personal and civilizational greatness, excellence, virtue. No doubt Hitler dreamed of future eugeno-Wagners that would be like 10x better than the actual Wagner. And when Savitri Devi waxed rhapsodic it gets really frenetic, it was like, given time why shouldnt armies of millions of Wagners (along with the world at large) be getting like (10^10)^10 better (more violent, disciplined and artistic) per millisecond on a billion different planets in different galaxies.
lozlzolzolzlolzlo
So, they took a really extreme position on that whole question, largely I guess because they proposed that Europe was in extreme peril of dying. Most far rightists would take something more like a compromise position.
To repeat, pretty key point thar for nazism, largely makes it what it is to us and to all. Does it have anything to do with protestant sects? IMO elites were unbelievers and this amoralism, Savitri Devism, hypereudaimonism and hyperviolence have 500 times more to do with Nietzsche — like fascism he was a bit on the hysterical side whilst affecting a staunch classicism at the very heart of his world. I’m not saying he was necessarily an important direct influence on Hitler (he;s usually not thought to be, but consider how we would actually verify that), but Germany veritably bloomed with Nietzsche mania from WWI (he and the bible were the primary government issue in the trenches, i understand), and I dont really blame them at all, Im crazy about the guy though I think he has his excesses. The rest of the West had Nietzsche hypomania, and apparently he made a splash of some sort in Japan rather early on in the timeline of his unveiling (in Germany and neighboring realms he had underground influence in the 80s and considerable influence from the 90s). Consider _Nietzsche, godfather of fascism?_ and various materials from Stephen Aschheim.
> Theocracy is inherently warlike. The warlike character of theocracy/atheocracy is obfuscated at present
Once more I’ll side with the idea that it’s a response to conditions. Nukes, basically. Who could deny that they sure make it a bear to have war.
Well, not knowing German, I cannot trace out a transformation between lutheranism and Nazism, the way I can trace out the transformation between puritanism and modern progressivism, with at each step doctrines that got in the way of the pursuit of power being discarded,and doctrines that advanced the pursuit of power being adopted.
However, I notice that the Nazis nazified the protestant churches, and hit no resistance in so doing, which is evidence that then existent Nazism was not in fact substantially different from then existent Lutheranism.
I think the case for the superprotestants being seriously influenced by christianity, is much better. God knows they are a frightening bunch if we look at MM;s favorite TIME article. Theres still something you can ask which is, are these particular churchmen actually seriously influential in that day or are they mainly an epiphenomenon reflecting our decline, our rot, the rise in PC inanities such as thinking there could be progress despite genetic decline, etc.
> Theres still something you can ask
& i would
> I think the case for the superprotestants being seriously influenced by christianity, is much better.
First of all we know that they were actually a sort of believers, many of them. many others must have been deep believers in christianity without believing in god or jesus.
> Theres still something you can ask which is, are these particular churchmen actually seriously influential in that day
I notice that Exeter Hall was disguising the extent of theocratic church authority, was making the anti slavery/woman’s emancipation movement look considerably more secular than it actually was. We had a multitude of nominally secular do gooder organizations that just happened to have the same postal address (Exeter Hall) as nominally religious do gooder organizations, so the extent of churchmen’s influence is hard to assess.
> Genealogical research on the history of ideas is useful, because the framework of memetic selection tells us that the supposed ideas of our enemies are merely instruments for obtaining power, and that their nominal content is empty, that our enemies neither believe or disbelieve in any of this stuff.
To be sure, you’ve given the most convincing account of the notion that I can imagine. It does make considerable sense, only to my mind the truth is that people dis/believe only moderately ; I don’t think they dis/believe altogether. That’s not to say they actually ‘think’ ; innate components of personality, alone, would seem to control very much of the variance.
Nazism itself may not have been right wing, but the nation of Germany was. It was the German industrialists, military aristocracy, and the very productive middle classes that was engine that made Germany powerful. The same group that would traditionally been called right wing in the US. And just as the progressives cut deals with the american nationalist elements while planing their eventual removal so Hitler eventually planed removing the power of the industrialist and even the military from his government once the war was won.
If German Industrialists and the military aristocracy was right wing, then the Nazis were left wing:
The industrial employers association published an evaluation of Nazism immediately before the 1930 election, in which they concluded the Nazis were totalitarian, terrorist, conspiratorial, and socialist, that they intended a fundamental transformation of the existing economic order; an evaluation that turned out to be entirely accurate.
See Henry Turner’s “German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler” (O.U.P. 1985). page 114.
On page 135 Turner quotes various German big business figures saying that the difference between Nazis and commies is insignificant, an observation rather similar to that made by George Orwell who said anyone who claimed that nazis and commies were very different from each other was always an advocate of supporting one or the other.
Mencius, however, reasonably defines the left as anglosphere progressivism, and any movement that it effectively seeks to use as its tool, by which standard the Nazis were not left.
If, however, we take a genealogical point of view of these movements, and regard their supposed ideologies as mere arbitrary symbols without much significance, then both the similarities and differences are well summarized as that the Nazis were the post Christian spawn of Lutheranism, the commies the post theist spawn of Judaism, and the Americans the almost but not quite post christian spawn of the puritans.
Interestingly enough Nazi economic order was much more medieval than the other progressive systems. They embraced the old catholic church concept that you shouldn’t earn money without working for it and largely outlawed usury and fiscal trading. Their system of industry was that of the state allowed cartel and many small businesses. The system of trade was trade among friendly nations only. They even introduced a trading credit system that guaranteed and equal flow of goods in and out of the nation. It was a very different animal from progressive capitalism.
[…] Nazis and Lutheranism Like this:LikeBe the first to like this […]
“Puritans hated Christmas and men having sex with women.”
They hated Christmas, but no; the puritans hated fornication, not heterosexual married sex.
In fact, rather the opposite; it is well established that spouses who withheld themselves from their spouses, were ill thought of, and sometimes ended up facing excommunication for it!
Here’s some education for you:
http://www.gracebaptist.ws/sermons/notes/PuritanStudy/Puritan2.html
http://hnn.us/articles/406.html
http://www.likesbooks.com/puritans.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/holidays/halloween/features/puritans.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_19575_5-ridiculous-sex-myths-from-history-you-probably-believe.html
You’re welcome.
The puritans tended to blame men, rather than women for fornication, and while they theoretically supported patriarchy, they undermined it, foreshadowing the Victorian abolition of patriarchy.
The puritans opposed fornication by both men and woman, which is a major move leftwards from the patriarchal position.
The patriarchal position is that it is the duty of a woman to resist her sexual impulses, and the duty of father and husband to restrain her, not so much the duty of a man to refrain from tempting her. The puritans were gender neutral in their opposition to fornication, a major step towards the current left wing position of ignoring, and indeed forbidding, differences between the sexes.
I see what you’re saying, and acknowledge it, but they were following the Scriptures in that – the Bible condemns fornication period, without distinction as to sex of the offenders – so I don’t think they could have done, otherwise.
If their descendents had stayed faithful, we wouldn’t have ended up with liberalism, and with their greater ‘egalitarianism’ turning into the egalitarianism of our day. I’m not prepared to blame puritanism’s deformation on puritanism…
Yes, the early Puritans were scripturally correct, unlike their successors, who tended to adapt the bible to whatever furthered getting power, and eventually tossed it overboard altogether.
But they were not all that scripturally correct. They themselves sacrificed truth for power. As Mencius colorfully put it, spoke power to truth. For example in Cromwell’s England, and in the puritan colonies in the Americas, most of the crimes and punishments concerned not crimes against property and the person, but crimes against the puritan interpretation of scripture, the most infamous such enforcement being the war on Christmas.
The puritans objected to Christmas supposedly because it was impure, being a pagan festival thinly spray painted with Christianity, with the underlying paganism quite visible under the spray coat of Christianity.
But here is what Paul has to say on this topic: Romans 14:
The puritans believed that being holier than the next person, they were entitled to exercise power over the next person – which attitude is the essential core of leftism, and as gross a violation of scripture as anything their successors did. Had they truly stuck to scripture, they would have known that Christmas can be 99% pagan, and still be 100% Christian if the person celebrating what once were pagan rituals, what would still be pagan rituals if a pagan celebrated them, celebrates Christmas to the Lord, and giveth God thanks.
Since being holier about sex and Christmas proved violently unpopular, their successors instead started being holier on slavery and female emancipation, which was more popular but violently unscriptural, and, being violently unscriptural, eventually led them to ditch the bible altogether, becoming the progressives we now know and detest.
But the original sin of leftism was present in the original puritans.
When in the restoration they were purged from governmental and quasi governmental institutions, for example universities and the Anglican church, they were replaced by Latitudinarians.
Before the restoration, the attitude was that each sought to prove he was holier than the other. One might suppose that with a religious purge, a new version of holiness would be imposed, but instead we got the attitude “So, I am not all that holy. Big deal.” What was purged was theocracy itself.
Fair enough; I certainly condemn the totalitarian impulses and actions of the Puritans – as I have made clear in my post – and insofar as their doing such things and having such a mindset, paved the way for their secular descendents to do likewise with social liberalism, I’m prepared to apportion blame to them in the first place, too.
(The post I referred to above as my post, is here.)
[…] I noticed this usual smear against them come up once again in the blogosphere, in this post. […]
Well… the process of modernization (functional specialization, division of labour) began a long time ago (at least 1000 years in the West) – and protestantism/ puritanism does lie on that *general* path.
Nazis were seen, at the time, by most people, as a step back from modernization – which is why someone such as Heidegger liked it – he envisaged a return to an agrarian, medieval type society.
In the end, and under pressure of war, National Socialism became pro-modernization in its net effect – seeking power by specialization. It also became anti-Christian – which is a progressive (Leftist) phenomenon.
(I’m assuming here that the pure expression of the right is indeed religious – and that the ‘secular right’ is merely a metastable hobby of intellectuals)
But Nazis coming from Lutheranism? While of course there are a few common features, surely not in any significant way.
Lutherans elsewhere in the world did not go in that direction. And the Nazis power base was in Catholic Bavaria, wasn’t it?
It just strikes me as a wrong mode of reasoning – not going anywhere.
But then I don’t think that anybody *can* reason rightly from an atheistic utilitarian perspective, because you cannot expose your assumptions to your own critique.
As I have said many times, I am not a utilitarian, very few atheistic libertarians are utilitarians, and not many atheistic right wingers.
Utilitarianism logically leads to left wing and/or statist conclusions, in that utilitarianism demands that the state maximize utility by sacrificing some people for other people, and it emotionally leads to left wing conclusions, in that anyone who says he would hold a child in the fire to cure malaria, will hold a child in the fire and forget he was trying to cure malaria.
I don’t buy that leftists are utilitarian in nature. They use a lot of utilitarian arguments when trying to sway people but they don’t believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If they did they would be advocating removing all blacks and Mexicans from america to improve everyone’s quality of life.
I don’t think that anyone really believes in utilitarianism in their hearts. It just is not in the human potential. But because utilitarianism tends to give left wing conclusions, leftists tend to come up with utilitarian rationalizations for stuff that they believe in for other reasons, often reasons that are quite unspeakable and unthinkable.
IMO almost no rightist is mostly utilitarian.
–Of course, as I once mentioned, there is a complex dialectic surrounding ethics, with Epicurus being ‘ultimately’ a lot more like a virtuist or Aristotilean than a sybarite or indulger, even though he believed pleasure was the only intrinsic good. Perhaps he is still a utilitarian in some literal sense, for all that — thus I feel that the gestalts, attitudes, instincts, are about as meaningful as the proper propositional content of one’s outlook.
Your suggestion that secular rightism is unsatisfactory or unworkable, while debatable, is much more understandable than the idea that we secular rightists and right-libertarians are all utilitarians.
For one thing, the most important single figure in secular rightism is Nietzsche, who created pretty much the first great ‘old’/’new’ rift within the right, scandalizing all stalwart ‘old’ rightists with his every utterance. (For a while he was received primarily by leftish bohemians, before going on to vastly influence the fascist ferment.) Nietzsche famously scorned pleasure (while praising a soldierly sort of cheerfulness) in favor of personal and cultural progress (‘self-overcoming’). He was inequalitarian to a fault — repeatedly suggesting that the well-being of the great bulk of mankind, the chaff, should be very largely disregarded — in contrast to pretty much all utilitarians. In brief, his ethical outlook, along with that of fascism, could be considered a rather hystericized version of the classical Greco-Roman value system of virtuism — or the worldwide value system of malthusian life at large. This value system, for obvious reasons, drastically privileged warriors, battlefield virtue, and to some extent other virtues and their bearers over non-virtuous persons, and treated human life as cheap.
We rightists continue to find meaning in ourselves, our own societies/races, and the superior (66% | 20% | 1% | 0.001%) of mankind worldwide — and the disciplined cultivation thereof — despite the slackening of forces like malthusian hunger, which obviously makes (made) ‘perpetual peace’ unthinkable, if it is ever thinkable. Of course many individuals, such as all of my old friends, want precisely this, but fail to understand themselves and/or where leftism flows to: “if this sort of humanity shall prevail, then I fear that the world will at last become a great hospital, and each the other’s humane nurse”. That is, leftism favors an (ever-increasing) maximum of indulgence — utilitarianism, basically — while rightism favors virtue, and distinction between superior and inferior persons and races. My friends (ultra-bohemian types) always felt sharply superior to others, only they allow themselves to be convinced that the main problem in society is bourgeois narrow-mindedness, an easy sell when we are all very high-O personalities — and like all people, eager to attribute superior aspects of our natures to acts of will, i.e. eager to believe that all people could be like us if they wanted to be.
The fact that nazism is mostly a rightism is a pretty trivial corollary to my general points.
However, like the thing with Epicurus, ‘left’ and ‘right’ end up being reflected through dialectics of two, five, a dozen mirrors, so that the concepts and the attempt to apply them wind up being pretty empty in countless cases. It is generally better to skip left and right and proceed directly to an examination of the actual content of an ideology — what are nazism’s or communism’s or Atlanticism’s economics, what is its take on Christianity, how does it balance virtue vs ‘utility’………….. and to what extent is each element meant for action, real purposive action, rather than for show.
You inmidiately reminded me of this article in a Spanish communist magazine of recent creation, which makes the same point, Jim:
“From Luther to Hitler”
https://www.larazoncomunista.com/post/4-7-desde-lutero-hasta-hitler
Maybe you can run Google translator over it and get some interesting things.
The agreement is almost accidental. They are ignorant of the beliefs that they demonize, and see everything through the lens of class struggle, something that was largely irrelevant to the people that they are talking about.
The implication of the theory that all today’s ideologies are lineal descendants of ideologies/religions (same thing) that have a continuous independent existence from the distant past doesn’t give much hope of a truly new ideology replacing Progressivism.
Which is not a reason for the theory to be wrong. But it is troubling.
How are these ideologies generated? How might this mechanism apply to our future? If we believe that the Avignon Papacy and the late Christianization of Germania etc. are the origins of the French Revolution and Naziism – in other words impossibly ancient and irreplicable – how do we reverse the Progressive victory without Progressivism fully burning itself out? Especially if multiculturalism successfully annihilates the inheritance of the present from the past?
Progressivism burns itself out and we revert to a highly localized tribal society where people inclined to steal, break, burn, or spray-paint things quietly disappear into shallow graves and dog stomachs. Tribalism solves the woman problem, the fag problem, the nigger problem, and the Jew problem in one fell swoop, but it cannot launch space probes, discover new cancer drugs, or maintain paved roads outside city limits.
@Oliver Cromwell
Whatever form the future religion would take, it would be highly adapted against Progressivism. Just as Progressivism is highly adapted against American Christianity and Constitutional structure. And just as Islam was highly adapted (almost “designed” to take advantage of) against Eastern Roman Christianity.
It would also be highly patriarchal. All long term successful religions are patriarchal (Progressivism, because of its feminism, relies on host religions for recruits. Christianity and Islam being the main host religions). And not only that, feminism is the #1 most hated aspect of Progressive rule. The new patriarchal religion would take advantage of that.
As you said, new religions would be descended from older religions (Christianity is a descendant of Jewish mysticism and Greek Philosophy). The new religion will be a surprise. Even more so if Elon Musk is successful with Starship and there’s settlements on Mars.
Occasionally new things show up but for the most part there is one thing that works for each one people. The Christianity of Christ speaking to the Judeans was different to the Christianity of Christ speaking to Constantine. Ideology adapts to justify behavior, whether that be to seize power or hold stable power. There are two broad forces, that we can call Order and Chaos, or Good and Evil. Both are engaged in a memetic evolutionary race. What works to keep a people healthy, happy, and productive is Good/Order, and absent a drastic change in the character of those people, that stays mostly constant. Once you get away from what works for them, it is Evil/Chaos, and it is also characteristic of the people in which it resides.
Since this old thread is showing up in the comments I’ll voice my objection to this (I know Jim’s heard it).
The top Nazis almost to a man were lapsed Catholics, Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann Ley (not sure he was catholic but came from the Rhineland), Seyss-Inquart. Goering and Hess are the only exceptions I can think of (and Goering was not an ideological type and Hess was ideologically an open dissident as Hitler was going towards war). Its hard to imagine its derived from Lutheranism when almost none of the top Nazis were Lutheran and they did not grow up around Lutherans.
Valid point. Maybe I am wrong. Only one who reads German and reads old German books could speak authoritatively on this.
On the other hand, Nazifying the Lutheran churches went down smoothly, Catholic Churches not so much. Maybe the top Nazis lapsed from Catholicism by converting to a Lutheran heresy – the converts are always more zealous. Much as Marxists are believers in a Jewish derived heresy, but Jewish progressives are conversos, often alarmingly and self destructively zealous converts, to a puritan derived heresy.
Not knowing German, cannot tell you that with confidence, but it is plausible.
Hitler loathed the Catholic Church like poison and tried to destroy it within Germany using paedophile scandals. The senior Nazis were lapsed Catholics because they hated Catholicism; hence they were happy to imbibe Lutheran critiques of the Church–and this fitted very neatly with their hostility to the Jews, since Luther roused the rabble against the Jews in his time. If you push Lutheran thought far enough you go back to paganism; Nietzsche was from a long line of Lutheran pastors: the ultra-Lutheran eventually went pagan, back to nature worship–similar story with Nazi paganism.
In short, lapsed Catholics are going to be sympathetic to Lutheran critiques of Catholicism and will push on to paganism. There is no contradiction between a Nazi appeal to Lutheran areas and the leadership being ex-Catholics.
Hitler hated christianity in general though he did not speak about this publically he did not seem to have any special hostility to roman catholicism. Bormann seemed to not like the RCC.
Wagner was Hitler’s religion. Wagner created a kind of national Christianity that combined Schopenhauerian pessimism and elements of Buddhism—-and then he garnished it with hostility towards the Jews. This was the basis for Hitler’s idea of a national Christianity, with a special emphasis, per Wagner’s operas, on knights questing for the holy grail (cf Indiana Jones). Aside from this, Hitler, like many contemporary Westerners, believed in a kind of Providence or Destiny for nations and people (similar to the US Manifest Destiny). He doesn’t seem to have believed in a personal God, and he was otherwise Machiavellian calculator who believed in simplified scientific doctrines, like Spencer’s “survival of the fittestâ€, that any literate man could imbibe in the popular press of the day.
Hitler grew up in Catholic Austria, but he identified with Protestant Germany. For Hitler, Austria, particularly Vienna, represented everything that was wrong with the world: Vienna was the centre of a multinational, polyglot empire and the city itself contained many Marxists and, at the time Hitler knew it, was receiving large amounts of Jewish immigration from the East. The Habsburgs who oversaw all this were Catholics. Catholicism is itself a universal Church that stands above the nations, so, along with Judaism and Marxism, Hitler, as an ultra-nationalist, was bound to hate it.
Aside from promoting paganism, the Nazis aimed for a kind of national Christianity similar to the kind envisaged by Wagner. The Catholic Church was a block for the fascists in Italy and Germany because it controlled its own education system and was itself a total universal and transnational belief system; for would-be totalitarians like Hitler and Mussolini, the Church was a block to fully implementing totalitarianism and ensuring complete national coordination.
Hitler was likened to Luther in Nazi propaganda: Luther was a German hero from a humble background who challenged a powerful foreign organisation, the Catholic Church, in the name of regeneration—notably over financial issues like paying indulgences; he was also notoriously anti-Jewish. The Nazis drew a parallel to Hitler’s complaints about war reparations and Luther’s campaigns against the Catholic Church and its financial corruption: the themes of national renewal, freedom from foreign domination, and hostility to the Jews are common to both men.
I think the link between Nazism and Lutheranism is solid, even if the Nazis were going beyond Luther.
Did you read the table talks Hitler did not like Christianity period, in the long term i think he planned to replace it but its not clear with what as Hitler did not think much of the neo pagan larpers in the party either. His own beliefs were in a sort of deistic Providence.
To the extent he particularly disliked Catholicism because of its internationalism he was right but i didn’t get that sense reading the Table Talks. Hitler was sort of an internationalist of people he considered Western Germanics anyway… Russia was to be colonized not just by Germans but by Western Europeans in general the New Order was to have a kind of European Union of course it would be a puppet of him and his successors though.
Yes, I read it. If the Nazis won WWII the fate of the churches would have been roughly the same as the fate of the churches under our progressive regime. Hitler would never have extirpated Christianity completely, for two reasons: firstly, too many German heroes died for the faith; and, secondly, you need to understand Christian symbolism and concepts to appreciate the majority of German culture—above all, to understand Wagner.
When I walk past a Church of England church I see an LGBT flag and, inside, there is probably a female vicar who gives sermons about how Christ was the first feminist. If the Nazis won, it would be a swastika outside and the male priest would give me a lecture about Hitler as a Christ-like figure.
In our world, practising Christianity as it was practised up to the mid-19th century is low status and, in some respects, de facto illegal. It would have been the same deal if the Nazis won. Today, practising Christianity as it has been practised for most of its history is called fundamentalism and we are led to believe only rubes and morons follow that tradition. When it is depicted on TV you see the Phelps family, a family selected for promotion as the paradigmatic Christian family precisely because they are the worst possible examples of sincere Christians—being both stupid and obnoxious. The Nazis would do the same thing. Christianity would never be outlawed by the Nazis, it would just seen as low status (possibly borderline treasonous) to sincerely believe and practise it in the old way; if you got too serious, the Gestapo would visit.
Progressives keep the Christian legacy alive because they parasitise its residual cultural capital and prestige—and also to control religious opposition to their regime. The motivation for retaining a residual Christianity is the same as Hitler’s motivation: you can’t understand Western cultural achievement since 1000AD (when things started up again after the Dark Ages) without some knowledge of Christian concepts and symbolism. So you need to give people (educated people, anyway) the basic understanding of Christianity, if only so when they watch Henry V—Henry being, in line with the correct interpretation of Shakespeare, a black transsexual—they understand why he shouts: “God for Harry, England, and St. George!â€. They need to understand that St George was a Christian military saint and what a saint is; they will also have been informed that he was the first Palestinian freedom fighter—the correct interpretation of his life for the regime’s political purposes.
A bit like energy, religion can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only change form or be forced to the margins—even in Christianity there are tons of pagan themes and symbols because Christianity could only displace and absorb paganism, not destroy it. Christianity will never fully disappear, even if it largely transmutes into something else.
>Hitler was sort of an internationalist of people he considered Western Germanics anyway…
The Waffen-SS was one of the most international fighting forces in history, but I think this was pragmatism. Just like how in a Nordicist ideology less Nordic Germans attacking more Nordic Norway does not really compute… I think Hitler considered conquest and winning more important than Nazi ideological purity. And power. Like killing the Polish aristoi just to prevent resistance – even though those guys tended to be Germanic rather than Slavic.
Hitler was not a traditional nationalist, he was a socialist and socialists never are.
Hitler’s problems with Hapsburg International Imperialism was he considered it to be the higher races in service to the lower races, Hitler’s real whole aim was to reverse this.
I wish I could find the quote by Goebbels disparaging the Nation State but I cannot right now.
The demographic situation in western poland had been polish serfs and woodland hunters and fishermen, german farmers and burghers, polish millitary nobility, since the german eastward reexpansion with their new game changer tech, the plow. Polish village tribes didn’t have proper farms or cities, but did have warriors, so kept on ruling over the germans, establishing proper agriculture and cities, but not conquering.
How the german/polish blood ratio in the nobility had shifted during the 1500 years since then i do not know, but they had kept polish names, while burghers largely had german names.
(And it sounds like self flattery that the polish high function must have been german in origin – very large portions of german blood was west slavic in origin, not germanic. German anti-polish sentiment was based on the lowest class of poles, which was lower than the lowest class of germans, and evidently unreasonable looking at the polish nation as a whole. Germany had had a pretty good time for a pretty long time, poland had been gangbanged by everyone at every turn forever. Worse starting point, doing good headway. Poles also treated their germans like shit so there’s that.)
In principle NS did not care about language or state borders, so Aryans living in other countries were just as eligible for full community membership in principle. On the other hand, Hitler was the Fuhrer of everyone, and Germans were his most important constituency.
One thing that Moldbug gets right, and most modern histories get wrong, is how much the NSDAP cared about public opinion right to the end of the war.
The deep ideological origin of the Nazis seems to have been the Thule Society, not the birth churches of the political leaders. It’s difficult to get a good survey of the religious beliefs of a new age secret society, though Dietrich Eckart also had a Catholic background.
Hitler claimed that his dislike of the confessions (and Jews) originated in pre-WWI Austro-Hungarian politics. Maybe.
See my reply to the commenter above, you’re right about the Austrian-Hungarian angle.
The Völkisch organisations (like Thule) paved the way for the Nazis, much in the same way as the Tea Party paved the way for Trump: a nostalgic movement, reaching back to the founding myth of America, eventually gave birth to a political movement to regenerate America, MAGA; however, MAGA is not exactly the same as the Tea Party and the Völkisch organisations were not exactly the same as Nazism. Take this neutrally: I am not saying Trump is a Nazi, just that the same social processes were at work.
The Völkisch organisations were interested in paganism, Theosophy, and the occult. Hitler doesn’t seem to have taken these things seriously, and thought such concerns were silly, or, in his lower middle class way, too oddball—as a Machiavellian realist he perhaps thought it was all too weird for the purposes of rule. However, Wagner’s national Christianity intersected with some Völkisch beliefs, notably in the link between Theosophy and Buddhism—the latter being of interest to Wagner.
In short, this kind of thing only interested the most ideologically radical kind of Nazis; the real true believers, such as Himmler. Hitler was trying to win over the more conventional strata of society—aristocrats, the army, religious traditionalists who pragmatically backed him as an anti-Communist—so he couldn’t afford to go down that avenue, even if he wanted to. Besides, he basically believed in Wagner; he was going to adapt Christianity and Christian myth into a more pagan and national form, but wouldn’t ditch the Christian mythos altogether.