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What is fascism? Do you know? Should you know? Not really? Yet, how often do you accuse someone of being a fascist. The point is, as a responsible citizen you should know. Here is some help.
This is a mouthful. Let's break it up: Preoccupation with , humiliation, or victimhood community decline. Corrections that are cult like in nature and emphasize unity, energy, and purity. The cult is run by a mass-based party of radical nationalist militants. Its intention is to cleanse their community internally and externally of what it defines as its enemies. Now ask questions, for example: When does a community view itself as humiliated, victimized and in decline? One possible answer is following a major defeat from a war. What would the emphasis on a cult-like unity look like? Well, think of the Nazi party which itself was a religion. It emphasized what it called Volksgemeinschaft, which means a community of more or less homogeneous people. And energy? Well who is most energetic and potentially radical, even violent? Youths, of course. So the Nazis brought in a dictatorship of the young. And purity? Well, if you value the homogeneity of one Volk, then your enemy will be those who you define as not belonging to this Volk? That is what the Nazis did with Jews-and you know the tragedy that resulted.
Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis. London: Routledge, 2005. The book will appear in November. It makes you understand what obsession with humiliation and focusing on youths to get the country out of the post-World War I mess really means. It shows how a co-citizen is turned into an enemy outsider. Above all, it does so by looking at formerly unpublished letters and original documents. You will feel you are there and breathe - aah!!! What is liberalism? Michael B. Gross has written a fascinating and well researched book about nineteenth century liberalism in Germany. Its title is, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 2004, The University of Michigan Press. Building on the work of other scholars, Gross argues that liberalism is:
Gross does not only bring out the qualities of liberalism that many of us value, for example, progress, but he also brings out its dark side, namely, the need to be against something. In fact, it was the simultaneous pro- and anti- stance of liberalism that gave liberals their identity. Furthermore, the anti-Catholicism of nineteenth century German liberalism became the anti-Jewish Christianity of twentieth century Nazis. You might say that my book, New Religions and the Nazis, starts where Gross’ book ends. Liberalism, it seems, can only pursue its affirmation of progress and new rights at the cost of being against the forces that it imagines hinder it, especially, Christianity. Consequently, we cannot avoid asking the question; on what criteria, authority, wisdom, or knowledge can something be judged to be "progressive"? As we saw, what is said to be progressive is a behaviorism or a cultural attitude that is unacceptable to an existing tradition, especially, when this tradition has a certain moral compass. Furthermore, once liberalism has succeeded in undermining major traditions like Christianity, it becomes more radical. Thus we notice even in Canada, that important or sensitive issues are no longer decided democratically by public discussion and vote, but by the supreme or provincial courts. In other words, if the churches can not be undermined, they can be by-passed or muzzled, and the by-pass leads straight to the courts. The dangers of this procedure were made clear with the demise of the Weimar Republic. Under the Nazis the last bulwark against radicalization, namely the state and its law, was simply transformed into Volk and race. Instead of a state based on the rule of law, you now had a Volksgemeinschaft using provisional measures to maintain itself. New Religions and the Nazis shows that National Socialist radicals of the twenties and thirties had at least four views of liberalism: First, those who contributed to making National Socialism a religious worldview, namely, the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, the founder of the German Faith Movement Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, and propagandists Johannes von Leers and Joseph Goebbels, recognized that liberalism led to radical politics. Consequently, Hauer and von Leers defended the contribution of liberalism to the Nazi cause as the springboard to political radicalism. The second view held that it was liberal theologians and their Biblical deconstructions that prepared the way to political radicalism. Thus Rosenberg claimed that the liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack supported the distinction between the original gospel of Christ and its Pauline distortion. Nazis saw Harnack’s work as the triumph of a freer and livelier conception of theology because it denied the Godhead of Christ and was hostile toward systematic theology that smothered the true element in religion. To Harnack the “power of the personality” and religious “experience” were the motor behind religious breakthrough. This is precisely the ground, namely liberal theology, in which Nazi philosophy of religion is rooted. Not only Rosenberg, but Dietrich Klagges (1891-1971) too was an important ideologue of National Socialism who took liberal theology to its ultimate conclusion. In order to strip the Bible of all Jewish distortion, he reduced it to the gospel of Mark. From his free religious position, he blended politics and religion to postulate that the Gospel of Mark was the Ur-gospel. Why did Klagges reduce the Bible to what he assumed to be the original gospel? Because, he argued, Mark appeared to be innocent of Jewish distortion and, therefore, was worthy of being the foundation of a new German Faith. Like Hauer, Klagges then founded the Working Community of German Christians whose task it was to show that the real Jesus was un-Jewish and Indo-Germanic whose true identity was distorted by later apostles who were under the spell of Jewish intellectual power. The aim of German Christians was to unite Christianity with National Socialism turning it into a “positive Christianity” as per Article 24 of the NSDAP Party Program. While the German Christians became a popular phenomenon in the 1930’s the idea is older. Ernst Mortiz Arndt (1769-1860) talked about German Christianity and a German Church in 1815 following the Napoleonic wars. Third, once radical politics was in place, liberalism became irrelevant. Especially disliked were its universal values. Since fascists saw universalism as an abstraction intended to serve arbitrarily special interests, it was rejected. Nazism was ultimately mythological in character. It despaired of any absolute or ultimate truth, disowned abstract metaphysical truth, and instead embraced concrete, organic and personal truth as epitomized by the myth of a race-specific culture and a personal faith in its organic leader, Hitler. Rosenberg, Hauer, and Goebbels tied together scientific and religious dogma and biologized religious language until the Darwinian biological struggle became a racial struggle, and the political goal became a new Nazi religion, one that was particularistic rather than universalistic. Universal law, one of the pillars of liberalism, was anathema. Hauer perpetrated the myth that scripted law is unGerman. In fact, however, Hauer’s SS colleague Werner Best deliberately re-scripted law especially pertaining to human and people’s rights or the rights of nations. Best rejected every form of codified rights of nations that was in some way based on universal values. Instead of an effete universalism, Nazis valued reality (Wirklichkeit), by which was meant the existence of actual power differences within society and among nations. And on these actual power differences they based their morality of might is right. Fourth, liberalism was contemptible to fascists because, along with Christianity, Marxism, and Materialism, economic liberalism was seen as a Jewish faith propagating Jewish imperialism that had to be destroyed. Guided by founders of new religions and other propagandists, the young did not find it difficult to see in Weimar and Versailles potent symbols of economic liberalism. To Goebbels the liberalism of the Weimar Republic was in a mudslide. And there were no authoritarian institutions, except perhaps the Catholic Church, to stop its slide. To conclude, as Gross argued that anti-Catholicism was “a central theme in nineteenth-century German politics, society, and culture” (p.28) so I argue that anti-Jewish-Christianity, was the central theme in twentieth-century National Socialism. Both have their source in liberalism. What is neo-paganism? Neo-paganism is a collective term. German has an interesting word, Sammelsurium that expresses the medley of things and qualities held by it. People who belong to new religions or new religious movements use the notion of neo-paganism to legitimize their supposed roots in a pre-Christian past. It implies worship of godliness in the human being through his or her direct connection to nature, culture, and/or a race specific ancestry. Whatever variations there are within neo-paganism and being both syncretistic and locally specific there are many, on one matter all neo-pagans are agreed: Christianity must be, if it is not already, overcome. As New Religions and the Nazis shows, being neo-pagan in the twenties and thirties meant being against the whole Jewish-Christian Geist. Neo-paganism has a long tradition. In his book about the Enlightenment, Peter Gay (1966) noted that philosophers, including Hume (1711-1776), brooded their way to paganism. Indeed, the Enlightenment was a movement that struggled to become (neo)-pagan in the sense that it shed or repressed Christianity, admiring instead antiquity which it merged with the modern (p. 59, 64). No pagan can be simply pagan, that is live in antiquity as if history stood still. Hence the word neo-pagan and the notion of merging an imagined antiquity to a preferred present and desired future. On his visit to the synagogue in Cologne Friday, 19 August 2005, Pope Benedict XVI said: “And in the twentieth century, in the darkest period of German and European history, an insane racist ideology, born of neo-paganism, gave rise to the attempt, planned and systematically carried out by the regime, to exterminate European Jewry.” Was he right to say that Hitler’s worldview was born of neo-paganism? The answer is absolutely yes. What is refreshing about the new Pope is not only that his views are well reasoned and researched, but that they are also based on his personal experiences of Nazism as a child and youth. Thus the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (1998) remembers that during the struggle of National Socialists against the Confessional Church the aim was to break the connection between school and church in order to make the “Führer’s” ideology the foundation of all learning (p.18). Or he remembers a young teacher who thrilled by the new ideas, composed a sort of prayer that he attached to the maypole to symbolize the power of life. The maypole was intended to reproduce a piece of Germanic religion in order to repress things Christian because Christianity was denounced as alienation (Entfremdung) from one’s own great Germanic culture. In the same sense, this young teacher organized a midsummer festival (Sonnenwendfeier), again as a dedication to holy nature and local heritage instead of the foreign ideas of sin and salvation, which were seen as forced upon Germans by the Jewish and Roman foreign-religion (Fremdreligion). Neo-pagans seem to see themselves as godly, free, and heroic. But as Goethe said in his conversations with Eckermann: “If we grant freedom to man, there is an end to the omniscience of God; for if the Divinity knows how I shall act, I must act so perforce.” Goethe continued, “I give this merely as a sign how little we know, and to show that it is not good to meddle with divine mysteries.” But Hauer emphasized “I must act so perforce”, which is to say he emphasized fate (Schicksal). In The Ratzinger Report (1985), Ratzinger discusses “a dubious christology” with his interviewer, Vittorio Messori, “where the human nature of Jesus is unilaterally stressed and the divine, which is united in the same person of Christ, is obscured, passed over in silence or insufficiently expressed” (p. 77). Is this important and what does it have to do with National Socialism and its neo-pagan roots? The answer is everything. One of the key street “philosophers” who was admired by Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, for example, was Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Chamberlain was married to the daughter of the famous composer Richard Wagner. In 1921, Chamberlain wrote a book, Mensch und Gott: Betrachtungen über Religion und Christentum (Human Being and God: views about religion and Christianity). In it he argues that Jesus was human, while the notion of a triune God has its origin in Greek gnosticism (p: 236, 244). He does this to separate a faith in the human being Jesus, which in Chamberlain’s mind constitutes a genuine Christianity, from a faith in a triune God, which constitutes a coercive belief. Many scholars, knowing Chamberlain’s influence on German Christians and National Socialists, argue that Chamberlain, and therefore the Nazis, were genuine Christians who simply disliked the Church when, in fact, what was disliked was Christianity period. Chamberlain plays with different scenarios all in an effort to argue Christianity out of existence: he separates a churchly development of Christianity from a religion of Jesus (p.252). In the event church Christianity should be abandoned. Or he postulates a Jesus as God only thereby destroying the historical personality of Jesus. In that event Christianity would fall as well (p.253). In the end, what he wants to say is what he has Kant say, which is agreeable to neo-pagans, namely, that the church as Christianity robs human beings of their moral freedom (p.256). And it is that “moral freedom” that National Socialists snatched from the grasp of the church, so to speak, and put into practice. A simple way of summarizing these paragraphs is to say that neo-pagans are people who wish Christianity had never reached Europe. The fact is it did. It gave us a moral conscience that neo-pagans within and without the church of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany saw fit to discard – at great human cost. Watch this page for more questions. |
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