7th June
Yesterday I felt strange, like intoxicated with melancholy over Goebbels lamentations. An insight opened up for me, a rare opportunity to peer through the dense thicket to witness at least some of the emotions involved in the rise of the perfect storm. Pure emotions, or feigned? We all know how 1933 changed the game, and I think this is a key fact. Before 1933 and after.
We live in large echoing halls where the walls are so far away they reside in the unconscious realm. They distort the echo, or like leaves, absorb the energy of certain wavelengths returning the remaining spectrum discoloured and foreign to ourselves. The walls change according to proximal events, like taking steps up a staircase. Step by step violence and brutality seems more legit. Step by step our norms and ethics adapt to our situation, which is always relative.
Today after sleeping, a sharpness has returned to my thinking. What about Goebbels’ other articles? Will another personality shine through? When could a Nazi party member with a heart no longer say to himself or herself that they were on the side of justice?
Like everything else, the language contains numerous key words that takes time to unlock. I need to start working on a dictionary, expecting the process to last a long time. The terminology reeks with layers of condensed meaning that has accumulated over the years.
In fact, I think today I will simultaneously consider thoughts much closer to home. I asked at one point “how do we avoid repeating the terrible, unstoppable build-up of Holocaust?” The modern answer is a simplified one: “By recognising surface similarities of state sanctioned racism whenever they occur.”
That answer has some merit. Of course, when a government initiates killing programs, it is obvious what is going on, and likely also quite a bit too late. The noticeable advantage is, though, that we postpone any attack on liberal freedoms to the very last moment. No thought police, no ethical interventions before people have started to die.
However, likely those gas chambers will operate in secret for years, and then it becomes a matter of intelligence to secure their non-existence.
The problem that interwar Germany presents is that it was already being surveilled and monitored. The Versailles Treaty mandated disarmament of the remains of the country. And yet, as years went on, the watchers grew lax. Domestic issues displaced the agenda of the day and soon Germany had many unofficial semi-armies. In later years entire concentration camps could operate for years without intervention.
The nip it in the bud approach may seem to offer a better alternative, but as mentioned, it leaves us in the dark as to what to look out for, unless we foolishly hope to spot outright swastikas.
And worse: The Nuremberg Trial approach is supposed to entail punishment for culpability. It grossly overlooks that the defendants already have stood trial in the first place, the same higher court that compelled them to reshape their country’s future and condemn people they saw as guilty to death. Which court wins?
Nuremberg proved nothing.
No, we need to learn language, both the explicit and implicit. It is the only way.
Warum sind wir Judengegner?
Wir find Judengegner, weil wir Verfechter der Freiheit des deutschen Volkes sind. Der Jude ist Ursache und Nutznießer unserer Sklaverei. Er hat die soziale Notlage der breiten Volksmassen Dazu mißbraucht, die unselige Spaltung zwischen rects und links innerhalb unseres Volkes zu vertiefen, aus Deutschland zwei Hälften gemacht und damit den eigentlichen Grund zum Verlust des großen Krieges auf der einen und zur Verfälschung der Revolution auf der anderen Seite gelegt.
Why do we oppose the Jews?
We oppose the Jews because we are defenders of the freedom of the German people. The Jews are the cause and beneficiaries of our slavery. They abused the social plight of the broad masses to deepen the unfortunate division between the right and the left within our nation, splitting Germany into two halves, and thus created the real reason for the loss of the Great War on the one hand and the falsification of the revolution on the other.
The Jew
The “Jew” is the hardest word to fixate in their vocabulary. I exist several decades on the wrong side of history. All I can do for now is to follow a lot of others. Jews were overrepresented in finance and banking due to historical reasons. As less privileged often envy rich people, stereotyping that into “all Jews” or The Jew was a process that did not meet much obstruction. Much to the chagrin of poor Jewish people of course.
The “rich” serves approximately the same double function today. Both as a designator for a “pure demographics” (almost §a myth in itself) as well as the meaning-carrying term we use to refer to people better off than ourselves. Ironically, the de-mythologicalised version is probably the hardest to maintain. Human cognition attaches layers of significance to anything in the blink of an eye.
“Are there rich people?” “Yes.” “What can we say about them?” “They have more money than the average person. For arguments sake, let’s define them as the top 1% income group.” “What do you think, when I say ’the Rich’?” “Rich bastards!” “But that is not entailed in the concept, your emotions towards them.” “No, but that is what I mean when I say ’the Rich’.” “Didn’t you just say that it was just a technical term meaning only the top 1% income group?”
From a certain viewpoint, there is no such thing as fact. Upon utterance, any statement immediately becomes loaded with overtones. In fact, the very positing of a fact is what J. L. Austin would could a performative speech act, stated with intention of accomplishing something.
What is the conclusion? That we simply cannot talk about anything, because every word is or can be contextualised in some regard or other?
I don’t have the answer to that. The Leninists talked about scientific method for generations. “Why do we have two different words, one for science and one for dialectic materialism?” (Them being the same thing is the implied conclusion). The more we believe an idea to be scientifically cleansed of prejudices, the more wary we ought to be. It is exactly because we lower our guards against our own tendency to form tribal prejudices that we ought to mistrust ourselves more.
Actually, if anything it is the phenomenon that we all live like tribal people, but 99% of the world’s population refuse to accept that fact.
We are lousy tribesmen. No gods, no ancestors to limit our territory.
Left and Right
Something of significance happens here.
To these people, their party represents the unification of the impossible: Nationalism and socialism. It would seem they have taken the divisive aspect out of both and attributed its origins to the Jews.
Traditionally we would see socialism as directly opposing capitalism. Here is another Jew-fixation at play: The Jewish intellectual who is somehow not opposed to, but in cahoots with the Jewish capitalist, both concepts with mythological overtones.
In other words, socialism, to Goebbels, is compatible with classes and competition. Marxism and intellectualism at large drove a wedge between the two. Socialism means solidarity between workers, united around their country. There are no ideological forces at play in society, only the collective strength of a people. Marx lied with sinister motives.
Nazism really is a workers’ movement, but not one that theorises about workers’ conditions at all. Such theory is divisive.
Der Jude hat gar kein Interesse an der Lösung der deutschen Schicksalsfragen. Er kann das gar nicht haben. Denn er lebt ja davon, daß sie ungelöst find. Macht aus dem deutschen Volke eine einzige Gemeinschaft und gebt ihr die Freiheit vor der Welt, der Jude hätte keinen Platz mehr unter uns. Er hat also die besseren Trümpfe in der Hand, wenn ein Volk in innerer und äußerer Sklaverei lebt, als wenn es frei, tüchtig, selbstbewußt und geschlossen ist. Der Jude hat unsere Not verschuldet, und heute lebt er davon.
The Jew has absolutely no interest in solving Germany’s fateful questions. He simply cannot have any. For he thrives on the fact that they remain unsolved. Make the German people a single community and grant it freedom from the world, and the Jew would no longer have a place among us. Thus, he holds more trump cards when a people lives in internal and external slavery than when it is free, efficient, self-confident, and united. The Jew is responsible for our misery, and today he thrives on it.
From the last sentence it becomes clear that The Jew is practically a misnomer. It should invariably read “The Intellectual” or “The Administrative Class”. As mentioned history books inform me that jews were disproportionately represented amongst those groups (and banking too, cf. Rothschild etc.)
Frankly I still don’t get it. Yes, I can see how you theoretically can extend from one salient example to a group, but not practically!.
“That storeowner down the road, he is a distant Rothschild.” “Damn Jew. Let’s smash up his little shop.”
Wouldn’t that break down when you saw the shop belonging to the Jew next door, and examined its meagre facilities? When you saw poor Jews?
If we take The Jew to imply “the outward face of the hidden machinations inside government and commerce”, then Goebbels’ articles become an unsystematic analysis of power in Germany. Then much of what he says makes some kind of sense: The management of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and Germany before and after the war was indeed left to a handful of individuals.
Another one for the dictionary:
Schicksal
Schicksal des deutsches Volkes - destiny of the German people
“Right to self determination” - sometimes used the same way Lenin or Woodrow Wilson uses it, sometimes with mythological overtones.
Given that this is the important word “Destiny”, I know that I will have to come back to it later.
Das ist der Grund, warum wir als Nationalisten und Sozialisten Judengegner find. Der Jude hat unsere Rasse verdorben, unsere Moral angefault, unsere Sitte unterhöhlt und unsere Kraft gebrochen. Ihm verdanken wir’s, daß wir heute die Parias der ganzen Welt sind. Solange wir Deutsche waren, war er aussätzig unter uns. Da wir unser Deutschtum vergaßen, triumphierte er über uns und unsere Zukunft.
That is why we, as nationalists and socialists, are enemies of the Jews. The Jew has corrupted our race, corrupted our morals, undermined our customs, and broken our strength. We owe it to him that we are now the pariahs of the entire world. As long as we were Germans, he was a leper among us. Because we forgot our Germanness, he triumphed over us and our future.
Rasse / Moral / Sitte / Kraft
“Unsere Kraft gebrochen”, that is key. Some deep insight about the human spirit is revealed here.
What are we? Active, busy, industrious, happy people working on each of our plans, taking care of our families, seeing the dreams of our lives thrive. Days in good health well spent. The grand puppeteer is happily pulling our puppet strings in a good fashion. The spirit of benevolence fits the glove of mortal existence. An almighty breeze of history sweeps through our mortal bodies, picks us up and makes sense of our lives.
We are social people too, in the cumulative sense: If I am happy and all I know are happy, then Luck, Blessing shines upon our little island. I can experience a personal tragedy, and that may remove me from my otherwise healthy society for a while. But often, such an individual can return to welcoming hands.
But if someone poisons the well? If all your surroundings seem to have succumbed to the Blutvergiftung? Then no matter how much strength you can muster alone, one healthy individual cannot remove the constant feeling of drowning. The enemy is no longer man-to-man, on an individual level. The only remedy is to become a member of a collective force. Collective forces identifying and attacking collective forces.
Der Jude ist der plastische Dämon des Verfalls. Wo er Unrat und Fäulnis wittert, da taucht er aus dem Verborgenen auf und beginnt sein verbrecherisches Schächtwerk an den Völkern. Er kleidet sich in die Maske derer, die er betrügen will, tut gut freund mit seinen Opfern, und ohne daß der Arglose es merkt, hat er ihm schon das Genick gebrochen.
Der Jude if unschöpferisch. Er produziert nicht, er handelt nur mit Produkten. Mit Lumpen, Kleidern, Bildern, Edelsteinen, Getreide, Aktien, Kuren, Völkern und Staaten. Und alles, womit er handelt, hat er irgendwo und irgendwann gestohlen. Solange er gegen einen Staat Sturm läuft, ist er Revolutionär, sobald er im Besitz der Macht ist, predigt er Ruhe und Ordnung, um in Gemächlichkeit seinen Raub verzehren zu können.
The Jew is the vivid demon of decay. Wherever he senses filth and decay, he emerges from the shadows and begins his criminal work of slaughtering the people. He disguises himself as those he wishes to deceive, befriends his victims, and without the unsuspecting one noticing, he has already broken their necks.
The Jew is uncreative. He does not produce, he only trades in products. In rags, clothes, paintings, precious stones, grain, stocks, cures, peoples, and states. And everything he trades in, he has stolen somewhere and at some point. As long as he is attacking a state, he is a revolutionary; as soon as he is in power, he preaches peace and order so that he can consume his plunder in leisurely fashion.
The flu is easy to cope with: For a week or two we can sense how we have been compromised, we are frail, need extra heat, blankets, protection. The illness subsides and given a handful of weeks more, we are once again strong.
But what if your mental health is weak for years on end, with no end in sight? Hands lay idle, spirits are dulled? A breakdown of social norms renders all actions that were once fruitful and useful completely unproductive. What used to be a remedy against hunger and poverty no longer works.
And all you see is a face in the newspaper. Then more faces.
As time goes, you see in that face the contours of dishonesty, the wrinkles of inauthenticity. The flaw in character that inevitably lead to an empire crumbling. All the gold that the harvest of a strong people brings each year, lost on the ground.
Was hat der Antisemitismus mit dem Sozialismus zu tun: Ich frage umgekehrt: was hat der Jude mit dem Sozialismus zu tun: Der Sozialismus ist die Lehre von der Arbeit. Wo sah man ihn denn je arbeiten und nicht vielmehr plündern, stehlen, schmarotzen und von dem Schweiß der anderen leben: Wir sind als Sozialisten Judengegner, weil wir im Hebräer die Inkarnation des Kapitalismus, das heißt des Mißbrauchs mit den Gütern des Volkes sehen.
What does antisemitism have to do with socialism? I ask the other way around: what do the Jews have to do with socialism? Socialism is the doctrine of work. Where has one ever seen them working, rather than plundering, stealing, parasitizing, and living off the sweat of others? As socialists, we are antisemites because we see in the Hebrew the incarnation of capitalism, that is, the abuse of the people’s property.
Socialism
Socialism as a developed Volksgemeinschaft, and as such opposed to Marxism’s awareness of class differences.
Marxism hold some kinship with the modern idea that we must learn to see race again in order to dismantle the structural differences between races, before we can once again disband of the awareness of separation.
Socialism in the Nazi sense clearly wants to retain unity within the nation, and the class struggle prevents that unity.
I can already hear the question in my ear: If nazism stresses unity and Trumpism today stresses unity, does that mean that I see a parallel between the two? They are both trying to rally the people around national coherence, while fighting against divisive mentalities.
No, I don’t see a parallel, I can honestly answer.
But let me stress something: Goebbels could not have caused the Holocaust. It required something of a different nature. Goebbels reached for health. The German obsession with health makes sense given what I wrote earlier.
Trump is only socialist in the sense that Goebbels is: He wants workers to be happy, but he does not want class struggle. Well, perhaps that is even contested. Given a choice between helping hard working people or capitalism, I think one ought to think twice before answering quickly. Likewise with Goebbels.
Politicians urging solidarity across classes is hardly unique to anybody.
No, we have yet to see the worst part.
Anger is the transformative force.
Hate is the resulting self-immolating calcification of that anger. It burns everything around it, but ultimately consumes the self. The Whole Self.
Was hat der Antisemitismus mit dem Nationalismus zu tun: Ich frage umgekehrt: Was hat der Jude mit dem Nationalismus zu tun: Der Nationalismus ist die Lehre vom Blut, von der Rasse. Der Jude ist der Feind und Zersetzer einer blutsmäßigen Einheit, der bewußte Zerstörer unserer Rasse. Wir sind als Nationalisten Judengegner, weil wir im Hebräer den ewigen Feind unserer nationalen Ehre und unserer völkischen Freiheit sehen.
What does antisemitism have to do with nationalism? I ask the reverse question: What do the Jews have to do with nationalism? Nationalism is the doctrine of blood, of race. The Jew is the enemy and destroyer of blood-based unity, the conscious destroyer of our race. As nationalists, we are enemies of the Jews because we see the Hebrew as the eternal enemy of our national honor and our ethnic freedom.
Blood / Race
Nationalism is just a veneer for the notion of Blut or Rasse.
I can’t crack it, not yet. This is a very packed symbol, I can see that. It has a longer history, but I must be patient.
Many nationalist movements were undergirded by the idea of a shared past and a shared culture in addition to the obvious shared ethnicity. But the way Blood is used in the literature suggests some other exegesis is necessary.
As suggested earlier, one can look at the obsession with health is a powerful allergic reaction to the breakdown of order and subsequent loss of direction and meaning. These new social forms were masterfully exacerbated by both the loss of a war (which propelled the change in the first place) and the Weimar Republic cracking under the weight of war reparations.
If that reaction shapes all other ideas, then perhaps I can see why Blood became the next evolution of the social urge to isolate foreign elements.
It explains the description of the Jewish (i.e. intellectuals’) appearance as a Leper when German “health” rules. It also explains the harshness employed in concentration camps against advocates of Marxism or other doctrines.
The powerful suggestive imagery of the human body and its intricate immune system persuasively latched on to the Nazi mind.
“Der Jude ist doch auch ein Mensch.” Gewiß, und niemand von uns hat das je bezweifelt. Wir bezweifeln nur, daß er ein anständiger Mensch ist. Er paßt nicht zu uns. Er lebt nach anderen inneren und äußeren Gesetzen als wir. Daß er ein Mensch ist, das ist für uns nicht Grund genug, uns von ihm in der unmenschlichsten Weise unterdrücken und kujonieren zu lassen. Er ist ein Mensch, allerdings — aber was für einer. Wenn jemand deine Mutter mit der Peitsche mitten durchs Gesicht schlägt, sagst du dann auch: „Danke schön, er ist auch ein Mensch?" Das ist kein Mensch, das ist ein Unmensch. Wieviel Schlimmeres hat der Jude unserer Mutter Deutschland angetan und tut es ihr heute noch an!
“The Jew is a human being too.” Certainly, and none of us has ever doubted that. We only doubt that he is a decent human being. He doesn’t fit in with us. He lives by different internal and external laws than we do. The fact that he is a human being is not reason enough for us to allow himself to be oppressed and bullied by him in the most inhumane way. He is a human being, indeed—but what a human being. If someone whips your mother right across the face, do you still say, “Thank you, he’s a human being too?” That is not a human being, that is an inhuman being. How much worse has the Jew done to our mother Germany and is still doing to her today!
Inhumanity
We as a culture have a major problem here: We both condemn Goebbels for speaking about inhumanity and constantly employ the same tactics in colloquial debate.
Taking this expression as sign of an approaching holocaust is almost impossible to justify.
If we believe that the term ‘inhuman’ will unleash racist violence, we shouldn’t look hard for modern equivalents. Left and right outer wing violence is often seen. Donald Trump can count more than one armed assassination attempt which is easy to connect to the perennial accusation of him being Hitler.
The difference may simply be between slander and belief, between cruel remarks with intention of hurting and a hardening of racism.
“Es gibt auch weiße Juden.” Gewiß, es gibt Schweinehunde genug unter uns, die, obwohl sie Deutsche sind, nach unsittlichen Methoden ihre eigenen Volks- und Blutsgenossen unterdrücken. Aber warum nennst du sie weiße Juden: Du versteht also unter Judesein etwas Minderwertiges und Verachtenswertes. Genau so wie wir. Warum fragst du uns, warum wir Judengegner sind, der du, ohne es zu wissen, selbst einer bist?
“Der Antisemitismus ist unchristlich.” Das heißt also, christlich ist demnach, den Juden weiter schalten und walten zu lassen, zuzuschauen, wie er aus unserer Haut Riemen schneidet, und zum Schaden noch den Spott einzustecken. Christ sein heißt: liebe deinen Nächsten wie dich selbst: Mein Nächster ist mein Volks- und Blutsgenosse. Liebe ich ihn, dann muß ich seine Feinde hassen. Wer deutsch denkt, muß den Juden verachten. Das eine bedingt das andere.
“There are also white Jews.” Certainly, there are enough bastards among us who, although they are German, oppress their own people and genetic family using immoral methods. But why do you call them white Jews? So you understand being Jewish as something inferior and despicable. Just like us. Why do you ask us why we are anti-Jews, when you, without knowing it, are one yourself?
“Antisemitism is unchristian.” This means, then, that it is Christian to let the Jews continue to do as they please, to watch them cut thongs out of our skin, and to endure the ridicule on top of the damage. To be Christian means: love your neighbor as yourself: My neighbor is my fellow countryman and my comrade. If I love him, then I must hate his enemies. Anyone who thinks German must despise the Jew. One leads to the other.
Schweinhunde. This is bitter anger from an otherwise articulate writer.
Goebbels’ logic is somewhat pedestrian here. Trivial and dismissible. The fact that he presents it at all indicates it was a common refrain at his time.
Auch Christus sah einmal, daß man mit der Liebe nicht auskommt in allen Lebenslagen. Als er im Tempel auf die Jobber und Schieber stieß, da sagte er nicht: Kindlein, liebet einander!, sondern er nahm die Peitsche und trieb das Pack zum Tor hinaus.
Wir sind Judengegner, weil wir uns zum deutschen Volk bekennen. Der Jude ist unser aller großes Unglück.
Das soll anders werden, so wahr wir Deutsche sind.
- Juli 1928.
Christ, too, once saw that love alone is not enough in all situations. When he encountered the jobbers and profiteers in the temple, he didn’t say, “Little children, love one another!” Instead, he took the whip and drove the pack out the gate.
We are anti-Jews because we profess our allegiance to the German people. The Jew is the great misfortune of us all.
That must change, as true as we are Germans.
July 30, 1928.
There are further and further between moments where we can sense his true emotions. Slowly and steadily everything natural in the Nazi biosphere is being replaced with a dogmatic, programmatic plastic version.
Compared with his eulogy on Horst Wessel which I read yesterday, the deeper and more sensitive emotions seem like cold fires in the past.
The ideological porous rock that remains after everything human - even anger and pain - has been substituted with stern party resolutions, is unable to sustain any other life than the most primitive.
PARADISE LOST