[This is Section 9 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
9. Nationalism, not internationalism or cosmopolitanism
This raises a question. So far the Nazi Program emphasizes that collectivism and socialism take priority over the individual—but which collective or social grouping has priority? Here the Nazi Program emphatically defines its collectivism and socialism in nationalistic terms. Individuals belong primarily to their ethnic and racial groups, those ethnic and racial groups giving them their core identities.
In the 1920 Program, seven of the twenty-five points speak directly to this issue. This issue is moderately complicated, because the Nazis have three enemies in mind against whom they want to distinguish themselves.
First they reject Marxist socialism or any socialism that puts economic groupings first. As much as the Nazis hate capitalism, they do not see the world as a battle between economic groups. The Marxists, as they see it, are obsessed with and too narrowly focused on money. To the Nazis money is only part of the battle—the major battle is between different racial and cultural groups with different biological histories, languages, values, laws, and religions. The battle is between Germans—with their particular biological inheritance and cultural history—against all other racial cultures.
Second, the Nazis reject cosmopolitanism, an ideal of Western liberals who believe that all humans are essentially the same wherever one travels in the world, and who believe that one should strive to be a citizen of the world, someone who can be at home anywhere.
The Nazis are nationalists, by contrast, and they reject any form of internationalism or cosmopolitanism.[16]
These themes explain the design of the Nazis’ swastika flag, as a symbolic integration of the socialism and the nationalism. Red is symbolic of socialism, white is symbolic of Nationalism, and the swastika is, according to Hitler, representative of the Aryan struggle for racial and cultural supremacy against those who are trying to destroy the Germans.
Consequently, in the Nazi Program of 1920 we find many points about German national identity and asserting German needs and goals.
Point 1 demands the unification of all ethnic Germans into a greater Germany.
Point 8 demands that immigration by non-Germans be halted and that all those who have immigrated recently be expelled from the country.
Public offices can be open only to citizens, and Point 3 defines citizenship in terms of the possession of German blood.
And the possession of German blood is defined carefully to reject a third target of the Nazis, those whom they hate even more than the Marxists or the liberal capitalists—and that is the Jews.[17]
Point 3 of the Program denies that Jews can be racial comrades of Germans, and this in combination with the other points in the Program effectively shuts the Jews out of German life.
A widely-used Nazi propaganda poster displayed a dragon with three heads wearing hats representing the communist, the international capitalist, and the Jew—the enemies the pure German warrior must defeat.
From the beginning of the Party in 1920, then, the pro-German nationalism and the strong anti-Semitic themes are, like the collectivism and the socialism, core Nazi themes.
While the 1920 Program only mentions the Jews twice and seems to advocate only that the Jews be forced to leave Germany, within a few years the Nazi leadership had clearly begun to consider harsher measures. In 1925, for example, Hitler published Mein Kampf, a book that sold increasingly well as the Nazis rose to power. Hitler variously describes the Jews as an “octopus,” as “a parasite on the body of other nations,” as a “vampire,” as a “spider” that was “suck[ing] the blood out of the people’s pores,” and as having taken over the German state. To free the German Volk, consequently, Hitler calls for the “elimination of the existing Jewish one” and “the end of this parasite upon the nations.”[18]
References
[16] As Goebbels put it in his 1929 Michael, which sold well and went through seventeen editions: “Race is the matrix of all creative forces. Humanity—that is a mere supposition. Reality is only the Volk. Humanity is nothing but a multitude of peoples. A people is an organic entity” (Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 106).
[17] Michael Mack’s German Idealism and the Jew (University of Chicago Press, 2003) is a study of the role German philosophers, historians, and other intellectuals, including Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others, played in developing and promoting anti-Semitism. See Appendix 3 for further quotations.
[18] Hitler 1925, pp. 623, 305, 327, 193, 453, and 327.
[Bibliography.]
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Posted 2 years, 2 months ago at 10:01 am. Add a comment
[This is Section 10 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
10. Authoritarianism, not liberal democracy
So far we have three major themes in the Nazi Program: collectivism, socialism, and nationalism. The next question is: How do the Nazis believe this is to be achieved?
As early as 1920 the Nazis are clear that they are no friends of democracy, liberalism, or republicanism. They favor strong authoritarianism and centralized power.
Point 23 calls for censorship and government control of all newspapers.
Point 24 suggests limitations on religions that do not fit the Nazis’ goals.
Point 25 calls for centralization and unconditional power: “we demand the creation of a strong central power in Germany. A central political parliament should possess unconditional authority over the entire Reich, and its organization in general.”
These points in combination with the economically socialist points earlier are to give the government total control over all aspects of society.
Throughout the 1920s the Nazis are unapologetic about wanting to eliminate liberalism, democracy, and republicanism. Goebbels for example put it bluntly and publicly: “Never do the people rule themselves. This madness has been invented by liberalism. Behind its concept of the sovereignty of the people hide the most corrupt rogues, who do not want to be recognized.”[19]
In Mein Kampf, Hitler agreed entirely: “There must be no majority decisions.” Instead, “the decisions will be made by one man.”[20] So, Goebbels continued, “We shall create a power-group with which we can conquer this state. And then ruthlessly and brutally, using the State’s prerogatives, we shall enforce our will and our programme.” Again from Goebbels:
“History has seen repeatedly how a young, determined minority has overthrown the rule of a corrupt and rotten majority, and then used for a time the State and its means of power in order to bring about by dictatorship … and force the conditions necessary to complete the conquest and to impose new ideas.”[21]
The Nazis were very clear from the outset what they were in favor of, what they opposed, and how they planned to exercise power once they achieved it: socialism, nationalism, racial identity and purification—and a strong, centralized power to make it happen.
References
[19] Goebbels 1929, in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 105.
[20] Hitler 1925, p. 449.
[21] Goebbels 1927, quoted in Irving 1999, p. 117.
[Bibliography.]
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[This is Appendix 3 of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Sources for the quotations are at the end of this post.]
Appendix 3: Quotations on German anti-Semitism
Martin Luther (1483-1546): “The Jews deserve to hang on gallows, seven times higher than ordinary thieves.” And: “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.”[189]
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): The Jews are by nature “sharp dealers” who are “bound together by superstition.” Their “immoral and vile” behavior in commerce shows that they “do not aspire to civic virtue,” for “the spirit of usury holds sway amongst them.” They are “a nation of swindlers” who benefit only “from deceiving their host’s culture.”[190]
Kant: “The euthanasia of Judaism is the pure moral religion.”[191]
Johann Herder (1744-1803) quoting Kant from his lectures on practical philosophy: “Every coward is a liar; Jews, for example, not only in business, but also in common life.”[192]
Johann Fichte (1762-1814): “A mighty state stretches across almost all the nations of Europe, hostile in intent and in constant strife with all others … this is Jewry.” Also: “As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I for one see no remedy but that their heads should be all cut off in one night and replaced with others in which there would not be one single Jewish idea.”[193]
Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860, professor at University of Bonn). Arndt was a poet, a historian, a deeply-religious Lutheran, and post-Kantian philosophical idealist whose hero was Arminius, who defeated the Romans in 9 C.E., thus saving the pure German soul from “contamination” by Latin races. According to Arndt, the Jews were “a rotten and degenerate race” that had “evil and worthless drives and desires.”[194]
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831): Germany cannot assimilate the Jews because the Jews live an “animal existence that can only be secured at someone else’s expense.” Also: “Spirit alone recognizes spirit. They [the Jews] saw in Jesus only the man … for He was only one like themselves, and they felt themselves to be nothing. The Jewish multitude was bound to wreck His attempt to give them the consciousness of something divine, for faith in something divine, something great, cannot make its home in a dunghill.”[195]
Johann Fries (1773-1843), professor at University of Heidelberg: Fries was a Kantian logician, a disciple of Fichte, and influential among student nationalist societies. He called the Jews “rotten,” “worthless cheats,” “bloodsuckers,” a “diseased people,” argued they should be required to wear special signs indicating to others their race, and called for their “extermination.”[196]
Karl Marx (1818-1883): “Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew—not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time. … We recognize in Jewry, therefore, a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through historical development—to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed—has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry.”[197]
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): “I have not met a German yet who was well disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditionally all the cautious and politically-minded repudiated real anti-Semitism, even this caution and policy are not directed against the species of this feeling itself but only against its dangerous immoderation.”[198]
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in 1925: “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.” And in 1931: “The Jewish problem is a highly complex matter … our ideology is opposed to the interests of the Chosen Race in that we abominate their dance around the Golden Calf. For racial and financial reasons the Jews are basically opposed to communism.”[199]
Hitler: “Anti-Semitism is a useful revolutionary expedient.”[200]
Sidney Hook (1902-1989), a socialist philosopher: “anti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism.”[201]
References
[189] Luther, quoted in Murphy 1999, p. 9.
[190] Kant, quoted in Weiss 1996, p. 67.
[191] Kant, Streit der Fakultaten, in Werke 11:321, quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990), p. 96.
[192] Herder, quoted in Mack, 2003, p. 5.
[193] Fichte, quoted in Weiss 1996, pp. 72 and 68.
[194] Arndt, quoted in Weiss 1996, p. 74.
[195] Hegel, quoted in Weiss 1996, pp. 67 and 66.
[196] Fries, quoted in Weiss 1996, p. 74.
[197] Marx, “On The Jewish Question,” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/. Viewed September 17, 2007.
[198] Nietzsche, BGE 251.
[199] Hitler, in interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “Second Interview with Hitler,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews. New York: John Day Co., 1971, p. 86.
[200] Hitler, in Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction: Hitler Speaks, as quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts. New York: Ballantine, p. 186.
[201] Hook, “Home Truths About Marx,” Commentary (September 1978) reprinted in Marxism and Beyond. Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983, p. 117.
[Bibliography.]
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[This is Appendix 1 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
36. Appendix 1: NSDAP Party Program
Program of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party
The Program of the German Workers’ Party is a limited program. Its leaders have no intention, once its aims have been achieved, of establishing new ones, merely in order to insure the continued existence of the party by the artificial creations of discontent among the cases.
1. We demand, on the basis of the right of national self-determination, the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany.
2. We demand equality for the German nation among other nations, and the revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain.
3. We demand land (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our excess population.
4. Only a racial comrade can be a citizen. Only a person of German blood, irrespective of religious denomination, can be a racial comrade. No Jew, therefore, can be a racial comrade.
5. Noncitizens shall be able to live in Germany as guests only, and must be placed under alien legislation.
6. We therefore demand that every public office, no matter of what kind, and no matter whether it be national, state, or local office, be held by none but citizens.
We oppose the corrupting parliamentary custom of making party considerations, and not character and ability, the criterion for appointments to official positions.
7. We demand that the state make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, the members of foreign nations (noncitizens) are to be expelled from Germany.
8. Any further immigration of non-Germans is to be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany after August 2, 1914, be forced to leave the Reich without delay.
9. All citizens are to possess equal rights and obligations.
10. It must be the first duty of every citizen to perform mental or physical work. Individual activity must not violate the general interest, but must be exercised within the framework of the community, and for the general good.
THEREFORE WE DEMAND
11. The abolition of all income unearned by work and trouble.
BREAK THE SLAVERY OF INTEREST
12. In view of the tremendous sacrifices of life and property imposed by any war on the nation, personal gain from the war must be characterized as a crime against the nation. We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13. We demand the nationalization of all business enterprises that have been organized into corporations (trusts).
14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.
15. We demand the generous development of old age insurance.
16. We demand the creation and support of a healthy middle class, and the immediate socialization of the huge department stores and their lease, at low rates, to small tradesmen. We demand that as far as national, state, or municipal purchases are concerned, the utmost consideration be shown to small tradesmen.
17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national needs, and the creation of a law for the expropriation without compensation of land for communal purposes. We demand the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.
18. We demand a ruthless battle against those who, by their activities, injure the general good. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished by death, regardless of faith or race.
19. We demand that Roman law, which serves a materialist world order, be replaced by German law.
20. To open the doors of higher education—and thus to leading positions—to every able and hard-working German, the state must provide for a thorough restructuring of our entire educational system. The curricula of all educational institutions are to be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. As soon as the mind begins to develop, the schools must reach civic thought (citizenship classes). We demand the education, at state expense, of particularly talented children of poor parents, regardless of the latters’ class or occupation.
21. The state must see to it that national health standards are raised. It must do so by protecting mothers and children, by prohibiting child labor, by promoting physical strength through legislation providing for compulsory gymnastic by the greatest possible support for all organizations engaged in the physical training of youth.
22. We demand the abolition of the mercenary army and the creation of a people’s army.
23. We demand legal warfare against intentional political lies and their dissemination through the press. To facilitate the creation of a German press, we demand:
(a) that all editors of, and contributors to, newspapers that appear in the German language be racial comrades;
(b) that no non-German newspaper may appear without the express permission of the government. Such papers may not be printed in the German language;
(c) that non-Germans shall be forbidden by law to hold any financial share in a German newspaper, or to influence it in any way.
We demand that the penalty for violating such a law shall be the closing of the newspapers involved, and the immediate expulsion of the non-Germans involved.
Newspapers which violate the general good are to be banned. We demand legal warfare against those tendencies in art and literature which exert an undermining influence on our national life, and the suppression of cultural events which violate this demand.
24. We demand freedom for all religious denominations, provided they do not endanger the existence of the state, or violate the moral and ethical feelings of the Germanic race.
The party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, without, however, allying itself to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can be achieved only from within, on the basis of
THE COMMON INTEREST BEFORE SELF-INTEREST
25. To implement all these points, we demand the creation of a strong central power in Germany. A central political parliament should possess unconditional authority over the entire Reich, and its organization in general.
Corporations based on estate and profession should be formed to apply the general legislation passed by that Reich in the various German states.
The leaders of the party promise to do everything that is in their power, and if need be, to risk their very lives, to translate this program into action.
Munich, February 24, 1920.
[Bibliography.]
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Posted 2 years, 3 months ago at 8:36 pm. 4 comments
While the 1920 Program only mentions the Jews twice and seems to advocate only that the Jews be forced to leave Germany, within a few years the Nazi leadership had clearly begun to consider harsher measures. In 1925, for example, Hitler published Mein Kampf, a book that sold increasingly well as the Nazis rose to power. Hitler variously describes the Jews as an “octopus,” as “a parasite on the body of other nations,” as a “vampire,” as a “spider” that was “suck[ing] the blood out of the people’s pores,” and as having taken over the German state. To free the German Volk, consequently, Hitler calls for the “elimination of the existing Jewish one” and “the end of this parasite upon the nations.”[18] 
