Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Hindsight and future resolve [Section 40 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 40 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

Part 8. Conclusion: Nazi and Anti-Nazi Philosophies

40. Hindsight and future resolve

We know from historical hindsight that it took a world war to defeat the Nazis. Tens of millions of human beings died in that war. Actual human beings who lived, loved, cried, had dreams—and then were killed. Millions of others had their lives damaged and disrupted seriously. Over and above all that, the economic and cultural costs—the wrecking of people’s homes and possessions, the destruction of works of art, the obliteration of historical artifacts, and so on—those costs are incalculable.

The Nazis lost that war, but it was a close call, and there is no guarantee that it will not happen again.

And this is why it is important that we understand what really motivated National Socialism. By the 1930s, the Nazis had the entire political and economic muscle of Germany at their disposal—but more important than that, they had intellectual muscle behind them and they had a set of philosophical ideals that motivated and energized millions of people. That intellectual and idealistic power more than anything made the Nazis an awesome force to be reckoned with.

History has taught us that the philosophy and ideals the Nazis stood for were and are false and terribly destructive, but we do not do ourselves any favors by writing the Nazis off as madmen or as an historical oddity that will never happen again. The Nazis stood for philosophical and political principles that appealed to millions—that attracted some of the best minds of their generation—and that still command the minds and hearts of people in all parts of the world.

And that means we must face the National Socialists’ philosophical and political ideals for what they actually are—we must understand them, know where they came from, and what intellectual and emotional power they have. Then and only then are we in a position to defeat them. We will be able to defeat them because we will understand their power and we will have more powerful arguments with which to fight back.

Arguing over philosophical and political ideals is often unpleasant. And the issues involved are often abstract, complicated, and emotionally difficult. But there are no shortcuts. Perhaps the best motivation for doing the hard work comes from reminding ourselves regularly and often how much more it costs to settle disputes by war.

We may not like that the Nazis had arguments and positions that many people find attractive. We might find it repulsive to take their arguments seriously. We might find it difficult to get inside their heads to see where they are coming from.

But we have a choice: We either fight those ideas in theory or we fight them in practice. We either fight them in the intellectual realm or we fight them on the battlefield. It might still come to fighting them on the battlefield—but that is always the most terrible option, the most expensive in every possible way, and the one we should avoid if there is any other way to defeat them.

So that means that defeating National Socialism intellectually is the strategy we should follow first. Defeating them intellectually means taking their positions seriously, understanding them, and knowing how to argue against them.

The second rule of politics is: Know your enemy. The first rule of politics is: Know yourself. Know what you stand for and why. Know what matters to you fundamentally and what you are willing to do to achieve it—and, when necessary, to fight to defend it.

That is a very large project, and that is why a culture’s philosophers and other intellectuals do important work—or, if they get it wrong, great damage.

As a beginning to that project, let me indicate a clear direction to start in.

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

Principled anti-Nazism [Section 41 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 41 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

41. Principled anti-Nazism

Philosophically and politically, the Nazis stood for five major principles: They stood for collectivism, for instinct and passion, for war and conflict, for authoritarianism, and for socialism.

National Socialist Principles:

• Collectivism
• Instinct, passion, “blood”
• War and zero-sum conflict
• Authoritarianism
• Socialism

That means we can identify the principles that, in each case, are the direct opposite of what the Nazis stood for:

• The Nazis stood for collectivism. The opposite of that is a philosophy of individualism that recognizes each individual’s right to live for his or her own sake.
• The Nazis stood for instinct and passion as one’s basic guides in life. The opposite of that is a philosophy of reason that has a healthy confidence in the power of evidence, logic, and judgment to guide one’s life.
• The Nazis stood for war and conflict as the best way to achieve one’s goals. The opposite of that is a philosophy that encourages productiveness and trade and the best way to achieve one’s goals in life.
• The Nazis stood for political authoritarianism and top-down leadership. The opposite of that is a philosophy that leaves individuals maximum freedom to live their lives by their own choice and direction, respecting the equal right of other individuals to do the same.
• The Nazis stood for socialism and the principle of central direction of the economy for the common good. The opposite of that is the system of free market capitalism, with individual producers and consumers deciding for themselves what they will produce and what they will spend their money on.

As a start, the principles in the right-hand column are the best antidote to National Socialism we have going. Each of those principles is controversial in our time, and I expect they will continue to be so for generations to come. But they represent the starkest philosophical contrast to National Socialism possible, and they form the first line of defense against future incarnations of Nazism. There is no better place to start than understanding them thoroughly.

I will end on a provocative note: The Nazis knew what they stood for. Do we?

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

Marxism = Nazism (another datum)

Baader-Meinhof was a far Left terrorist group, and one of the most violent, killing dozens and maiming more during the 1970s. Its “official” name was Rote Armee Fraktion (”Red Army Faction”). The logo shows a nice big socialist red star with a Heckler Koch submachine gun.

The group’s two most prominent members were Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Here is one of Meinhof’s explanations:

“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were: money Jews. Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews … Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.” [Source.]

Which is of course right out of Karl Marx: “What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.
“As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible … The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.” [Source: “On the Jewish Question” (1843), in The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 48, 52.]

Which is what Hitler agreed with: “Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers, inside and outside Europe, succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” [Source: Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939.]

As did Goebbels, in speaking of “the money pigs of capitalist democracy”: “Money has made slaves of us.” “Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.” [Sources: Goebbels, 1929, quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 87 and Goebbels 1929, quoted in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 107.]

[Bonus question: Who said this?

“The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”

Answer: Joseph Goebbels, in his 1932 “Those Damned Nazis” pamphlet.]

Related post: Heidegger, anti-humanism, and the Left

1789’s importance

While the world watched France’s revolution, an equally important cultural phenomenon was occurring across the Rhine:

“In the year 1789 … nothing else was talked of in Germany but the philosophy of Kant, about which were poured forth in abundance commentaries, chrestomathies, interpretations, estimates, apologies, and so forth.” That’s Heinrich Heine, who also wrote, “Our German philosophy is really but the dream of the French Revolution … Kant is our Robespierre.”

More soberly, German historian Friedrich Meinecke connected the philosophical “dream” to politics this way: “In the 1780s the critique of pure reason had conquered all minds, but in the following decade Kant’s thoughts on practical reason became the catalyst for a genuine social movement” (The Age of German Liberation, 25).

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a very different kind of intellectual and political revolution had come to fruition in the 1780s.

Kant/Robespierre or Locke/Washington. It’s still our choice.

Authoritarianism [Section 38 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 38 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

38. Authoritarianism

A fifth and final set of themes link Nietzsche with the Nazis. Both were anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-liberal.

The Nazis were not friends of democracy, but they were extremely effective players of democracy. They announced from the beginning, in their 1920 founding Party Program, their authoritarian principles. Nonetheless, finding themselves in the democratic system that was the Weimar republic, they played mostly by the rules and out-democracied the other political parties. They used democracy to achieve anti-democratic ends.

Nietzsche’s political views are less developed and more ambiguous, but it is clear he favors some sort of aristocracy. “What is serious for me,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, is “the ‘European problem’ as I understand it, the cultivation of a new caste that will rule Europe.”[130] Again, while Nietzsche is unspecific, he does not necessarily mean an official political aristocracy—he more likely means the de facto rule by an exceptional few, whatever the formal and official political structures are. In this way, even though Nietzsche despises the impulses that give rise to democracy, he does not worry much about the actual political dominance of democratic forms of government. Those forms of government, he believes, will simply become instruments through which the exceptional individuals, most likely from behind the scenes, will achieve their goals. As Nietzsche puts it, democracy will be a tool of “a master race, the future ‘masters of the earth’ … philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants” who will “employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.”[131]

Nietzsche is not programmatic about what form the new aristocratic class will take or what specific goals it will pursue. He believes that will be up to the overmen themselves—they will create their own values and shape the vehicles of their realization. And Nietzsche did not think of himself as an overman—merely as a herald of their coming. But Nietzsche is extremely clear that any social method, however brutal, will be legitimate should the new aristocrats desire it. A healthy aristocracy, he puts it forcefully, “accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.”[132]

That is certainly anti-liberal and fits well with Nietzsche’s self-assessment that he is “not by any means ‘liberal’.”[133]

In addition to dismissing liberalism, Nietzsche dismisses capitalism as a dehumanizing economic system[134] and rejects individualism when it comes to matters of marriage and procreation. Marriage, he thought, should not be based on “idiosyncrasy”—that is, upon love and personal sexual attraction.[135] Rather, he suggested, marriage should be state-organized for breeding purposes.[136]

On all those points, the Nazis can and did find inspiration in Nietzsche.

References

[130] BGE 251.

[131] Note for BGE, quoted in Hunt 1991, p. 39.

[132] BGE 258.

[133] GS 377.

[134] D 2 6.

[135] TI 9:39.

[136] BGE 251.

[Bibliography]

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

Summary of the five similarities [Section 39 of Nietzsche and the Nazis]

[This is Section 39 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

39. Summary of the five similarities

Again to summarize: we have five significant connections between Nietzsche and the Nazis:

1. The Nazis were strongly collectivistic, and Nietzsche, with some qualifications, also advances strongly collectivistic and anti-individualistic themes.

2. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis see zero-sum conflict as inescapable and as fundamental to the human condition.

3. Both are irrationalists in their psychological theories, downplaying radically the role that reason plays in life and emphasizing the power and the glory of instincts and feelings.

4. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis accept willingly—even longingly—that war is necessary, healthy, and even majestic.

5. And finally, both Nietzsche and the Nazis are anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-liberal—and so, come the 1930s, the Nazis were in fundamental opposition to those nations to the West that were still broadly committed to democracy, capitalism, and liberalism.

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

Empires of conquest and empires of commerce

In this post-colonial era, what explains the dramatically different levels of prosperity in nations after they become independent of their colonizing powers?

Why, for example, has the prosperity of North America been consistently higher than that of Central and South America? Both are rich in natural resources, both involve nations started from scratch, both imported (or had imported) lots of culture from Europe, both have a large ocean buffer between them and the Old World, and so on.

One major factor is colonial legacies. Colonizing powers bring with them differing economic, political, legal, and cultural institutions. When they leave, the now-independent nations inherit institutional frameworks. For example, they inherit policies, practices, and attitudes in these areas:

* Economics: property rights, contract rights, trade policies, attitudes towards manual work
* Politics: constitutions, democratic and republican practices, degrees of centralization or decentralization of power
* Law: codes of law, jury systems, independent (or not) judges
* Religion: freedom, tolerance, separation (or not) from politics
* Demography: treatment of indigenous populations, policies with respect to slavery, the status of women, openness (or not) to immigration

I’ve started reading J. H. Elliott’s 2006 Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006). Elliott is vastly read on the subject and he writes with his academic colleagues in mind, and I was struck by this formulation of a big-picture explanatory hypothesis:

Spain’s empire in America was an “empire of conquest” while Britain’s was an “empire of commerce” (p. xv).

Thoughts?

Instinct, passion, and anti-reason

[This is Section 36 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]

36. Instinct, passion, and anti-reason

Hitler was fond of saying, in private, “What luck that men do not think.”

Another significant point of agreement exists between Nietzsche and the Nazis: Both agree that the great conflicts will not be solved rationally, through the processes of discussion, argument, persuasion, or diplomacy. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis are irrationalists in their view of human psychology—and this has important social and political implications.

Think about democracy for a moment. In particular, think about how much confidence in the power of reason that democracy requires. Democracy is a matter of decentralizing political power to individuals by, for example, giving each individual a vote. The assumption of democracy is that individuals have the ability to weigh and judge important matters and cast a responsible vote. The expectation is that members of democracies will have ongoing discussions and arguments about all sorts of issues, and that they will be able to assess the evidence, the arguments and counter-arguments. And they will be able to learn from their mistakes and, when appropriate, change their votes the next time around.

It is not an accident that neither Nietzsche nor the Nazis were advocates of either democracy or reason.

Hitler considered a highly-developed intellect to be a weakness and too much reliance on reason to be a sickness. Germany’s recent problems, he believed, stemmed from too much thinking. “The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.” What Germany required was passion, a storm of emotion arising from deeply rooted instincts and drives: “Only a storm of glowing passion can turn the destinies of nations, but this passion can only be roused by a man who carries it within himself.”[119] Consequently, German training and propaganda were not directed toward presenting facts and arguments but rather to arousing the passions of the masses. Reason, logic, and objectivity were beside the point. “We are not objective, we are German,” said Hans Schemm, the first Nazi Minister of Culture.[120]

Here again there is an important connection to Nietzsche. Nietzsche too sees an opposition between conscious reason and unconscious instinct, and he disparages those who stress rationality—those who engage in what he calls the “ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness.”[121] In his own words, it is “‘Rationality’ against instinct,”[122] and he believes that rationality is the least useful guiding power humans possess. Humans came out of a long evolutionary line that relied on drives and instincts—and those drives and instincts served us well for millennia. Yet men eventually became settled, tamed, and civilized, and they lost something crucial:

“[I]n this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ!”[123]

Note that Nietzsche says our unconscious drives are infallible, if only we can find them within ourselves again. It is our strongest, most assertive unconscious instinct that we should let rule our lives: “‘instinct’ is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent.”

And on this score, Nietzsche and the Nazis are in agreement: Both are fundamentally irrationalists—they do not think much of the power of reason, and they urge themselves and others to let their strongest passions and instincts well up within them and be released upon the world.

References

[119] Hitler, quoted in Langer.

[120] Schemm, quoted in Mosse 1966 xxxi.

[121] GS 11.

[122] EH: “The Birth of Tragedy” 1.

[123] GM II:16.

[124] BGE 218.

[Bibliography]

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]