2,409 words
Translated by George F. Held
Editor’s Note:
The following excerpt from Maurice Bardèche’s Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (Nuremberg or The Promised Land) (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1948) argues that the true motive of the Nuremberg Tribunal was to provide retroactive justification for massive Allied atrocities against Germany and its allies. The title is editorial.
Let us note initially, as a starting point, that this legal action against Germany, or more exactly against National Socialism, has a solid basis, a basis much more solid than one generally believes. Only, it is not the one proclaimed. And things, in truth, are much more dramatic than they are said to be: the basis for the charge, the motive behind the charge, is actually much more distressing for the victors.
Public opinion and the prosecutors for the victorious powers affirm that they have set themselves up as judges because they represent civilization. That is the official explanation. But that is also the official sophism, for that is to take as a first principle and a certainty what is precisely under discussion. It is at the end of an open trial between Germany and the Allies that one would be able to say which camp represented civilization. It is not at the beginning that one can say that, and above all it is not one of the parties on trial who can say it. The United States, England, and the U.S.S.R. brought in their most erudite lawyers to support this childish argument. For four years our radios have repeated: “you are barbarians, you were overcome, and therefore you are barbarians.” For it is clear that Mr. Shawcross, Mr. Jackson, and Mr. Rudenko speak no differently at their desks at Nuremberg when they proclaim the unanimous indignation of the civilized world, the indignation that their own propaganda caused, supported, guided, and which can be directed by them at will, like a swarm of locusts, against any form of political life which may displease them. However, let us make no mistake about it, this prefabricated indignation has long been and, all in all, still is the principal basis for the charge against the German regime. It is the indignation of the civilized world which requires the trial, it is that too which supports its conduct, it is in the end everything: the judges at Nuremberg are only the secretaries, the scribes of this unanimity. One puts on us by force some red glasses and then invites us to declare that things are red. Now there is a program with a future for which we have not finished counting the philosophical merits!
But the truth is very different. The true basis for the Nuremberg Trial, the one which no one has ever dared to point out, is, I suspect, not fear: it is the spectacle of the ruins, it is the panic of the victors. It is necessary that the others be in the wrong. It is necessary, for if, by chance, they had not been monsters, how would the victors bear the weight of all those destroyed cities, and those thousands of phosphorus bombs? It is the horror, it is the despair of the victors which is the true motive for the trial. They have veiled their faces before what they were forced to do and, to give themselves courage, they transformed their massacres into a crusade. They invented a posteriori a right to massacre in the name of respect for humanity. Being killers, they promoted themselves to policemen. After a certain number of deaths, we know that any war becomes obligatorily a war of the Right (Droit).[1] The victory is thus complete only if, after having taken over the citadel by force, one also takes over the consciences by force. From this point of view, the Nuremberg Trial is an apparatus of modern war which deserves to be described like a bomber.
We had already tried to do the same thing in 1918, but then, the war having been only a costly military operation, one had been satisfied with palming off on the Germans the aggression card. Nobody wanted to be responsible for so many deaths. We made the vanquished do this by obliging their negotiators to sign a statement that their country had been responsible for the war. This time around, the war having become on both sides a massacre of innocents, it was not enough to obtain that the vanquished recognize themselves as the aggressors. To excuse the crimes committed in conducting the war, it was absolutely necessary to discover some even more serious ones on the other side. It was absolutely necessary that the English and American bombers seem the sword of the Lord. The Allies did not have a choice. If they did not solemnly affirm, if they did not prove by any means whatever that they had been the saviors of humanity, they were nothing more than murderers. If, one day, men ceased believing in the German monstrosity, would they not demand an accounting for the devastated cities?
There is thus an obvious interest on the part of British and American propaganda and, to a lesser degree, of Soviet propaganda, to support the thesis of German crimes. This will become even more obvious if one keeps in mind that, in spite of its publicity value, this thesis obtained its definitive form only rather late.
In the beginning, nobody believed it. Radio broadcasts endeavored to justify entry into the war. Public opinion indeed feared a German hegemony, but it did not believe in a German monstrosity. During the first months of the occupation the officers said: “They are not going to hit us again with that stuff about German atrocities.” The bombardments of Coventry and London, the first air raids on civilian populations, spoiled this bit of wisdom. And so too, a little later, the submarine war. Then the occupation, hostages, and reprisals. And then with the help of radio broadcasts public opinion managed to reach the first degree of intoxication. The Germans were monsters because they were unfair adversaries and because they believed only in the law of the strongest. Opposite them: the correct nations which were always beaten because they conducted themselves in everything with honesty. But people did not really believe that the Germans were monsters; they saw in all this only the same themes of propaganda which had circulated at the time of the Kaiser and Big Bertha.[2]
The occupation of the territories in the East and, at the same time, the fight undertaken in all Europe against terrorism and sabotage provided other arguments. The Germans were monsters because they were everywhere followed by their killers; the myth of the Gestapo was put on its pedestal: in all Europe, the German armies installed the reign of terror, the nights were haunted by the sounds of boots, the prisons were full, and at each dawn shots rang out. The purpose of this war became clear: millions of men, from one end of the continent to the other, fought for the liberation of the new slaves; bombers were given the name “Liberator.” This was the time when America entered the war. People did not yet believe that the Germans were monsters, but they did already view the war as a crusade for freedom. That was the second stage of intoxication.
But these images did not yet correspond to the voltage of our current propaganda. The retreat of the German armies in the East finally made it possible to give the word. It was the moment that they were waiting for: for the German reflux left wrecks. There was talk of war crimes, and a declaration on October 30, 1943 permitted the public, to everyone’s general satisfaction, to learn of these crimes and to foresee their punishment. This time, the Germans were certainly monsters, they cut off the hands of little children, just as had always been said. It was no longer just force, it was cruelty. From this moment, the civilized world had rights (droits) against them: for in the end there are some delicate consciences who do not admit that one should punish treachery by air raids or that one should regard an authoritative regime as a crime against common law (droit), whereas everyone is ready to punish executioners of children and to place them outside the laws (droits) of war. They were caught in the act red-handed. This idea was diffused and exploited. People started to think that the Germans could very well be monsters, and so they reached the third stage of intoxication, which consists of forgetting what was being done each night in the air-raids by thinking angrily about what was happening each day in the prisons.
This was the military situation which they had desired since the start, in order to be able to manipulate people’s minds. And for this same reason this situation needed to be maintained. It became all the more necessary when, shortly after this date, in December 1943, the methods of bombardment changed: instead of having military targets, the Allied aviators received the order to adopt the tactic of carpet bombing which destroyed whole cities. These apocalyptic destructions required, obviously, a corresponding monstrosity. One felt so strongly the need for this that they set up, as of this date, a powerful organization for the detection of German crimes, whose mission it was to move in on the heels of the first waves of the occupation, just as the formations of police followed the advance of the armored troops into Russia. This analogy is suggestive: the Germans ethnically cleansed, the Americans accused, each went about their business with great urgency. The Allies’ investigations, as one knows, were crowned with success. They had the good fortune in January 1945 to discover the concentration camps of which no one had heard until then, and which became precisely the proof that one needed, an obvious offence in a pure form, the crime against humanity which justified all. They were photographed, they were filmed, they appeared in many publications, they were made known by a gigantic publicity campaign, like a brand of pen. The moral war was won. The German monstrosity was proven to be a fact by these invaluable documents. The people who had invented the camps did not have the right to complain about anything. And the silence was such, the curtain had been so abruptly, so skilfully pulled away, that not a voice dared to say that all this was too good to be perfectly true.
It was thus that German culpability was affirmed at different times by different reasons; and it should be noted that this culpability increased as the bombardments of civilians multiplied. This synchronism is in itself rather suspect, and it is all too clear that we should not approve without scrutiny the charges of governments which have so obvious a need for a currency of exchange.
It is perhaps useful to point out that in technical terms the trial was an admirable production. After having presented our most sincere compliments to the technicians, Jewish for the most part, who orchestrated this program, we would like to be able to see clearly and to find our way around in this pièce à tiroirs,[3] where the accusations arrive just in the nick of time like dramatic reversals in a melodrama. Thus it is to this task that we will stick. And, of course, this small book can only be a first stone. It will contain more questions than assertions, more analyses than documents. But is that not at least something: to put a little order in a matter which they have willfully presented in a confused manner? They have done their work so well that today no one dares any more to call things by their proper names. Everything altogether is called monstrous: the acts, the men, the ideas. People’s minds now are stupefied, they are benumbed, inert, they grope about in a wadding of lies. And sometimes, when they meet truths, they back away with horror, for these truths are proscribed. The first object of our concern will thus be a kind of restoration of the evidence. But this work of correction should not be limited to the mere facts of the case. The Nuremberg Court judged in the name of a certain number of principles, in the name of a certain political ethics. There is a reverse side to all these accusations. One is proposing a future to us, one does so by condemning the past. It is into this future also that we want to see clearly. It is these principles that we would like to look at directly. For we already foresee that these new ethics refer to a strange universe, a universe with something sick about it, an elastic universe where our eyes no longer recognize things: but a universe which is that of others, precisely that of which Bernanos[4] had a presentiment when he feared that one day the dreams, locked up in the sly brain of a small Negro shoeshiner in a New York ghetto, would come true. We are there. Our minds are doped. We have been struck by Circe. We have all become Jewish.
Notes
[1] The word “droit” occurs 154 times in this text; it usually means “law” or “right” (in the sense of “a legal or moral right to do something”). Le droit also sometimes, as here, seems to mean “the right” in the sense of “what is right,” i.e., what is both legally and morally right (a sense not exactly recognized in the dictionaries). It is not always easy to determine which of these three senses of droit is appropriate. For that reason I have sometimes indicated in the translation, as here, where droit occurs: the reader can then decide for himself which is the appropriate meaning. (Il diritto in Italian and das Recht in German carry the same meanings as le droit and have greatly factilitated the work of Bardèche’s Italian and German translators.) The word loi, which also means “law,” occurs 49 times in the text. For the sake of clarity, I have sometimes also indicated in the translation where it occurs.
[2] Big Bertha the biggest German artillery gun in World War I, with a caliber of 420 mm. (16.5 in.).
[3] pièce à tiroirs an “episodic play,” usually with a light theme.
[4] Bernanos Georges Bernanos, French right-wing Catholic writer, best known for his novel, Diary of a Country Priest (1936).
26 comments
One has to look at the First World War Allied propaganda to understand how successful this propaganda campaign would be in 1945. A firm basis for the atrocious “Hun” had been laid down by incessant, repeated stories of war crimes by the Germans (the reference to the hands being cut off in the article refers to an outrageous charge in WWI that the Germans cut off the hands of Belgian children). German propaganda, in both conflicts, simply couldn’t match the mendacity of the Allies.
Bardeche saw early on the devastation that would follow the rejection of humanity by the Nuremberg court proceedings. I think that most people at the time thought that the world had the capacity to return to a normalcy that would eventually blot out the stain of atrocity propaganda, demonization of the enemy, the killings from the air by “fighters” who only had to open the bomb bay and fly back to their warm bed and hot coffee at home base. Some foresaw, amongst them Bardeche, that the conduct of the war was so inhumane, the mindset of the command so depraved, the consequences-to-be of the military campaigns, arrived at over laughter and joking and called peace settlements, that those responsible wanted this erased from comprehenson through yet bigger horrors, and so the all-time low of human behavior was instituted at Nuremberg. Those judges only had to look outside to see as one of 100000 examples the heap of rubble this military triumph had caused and with which to consciously dispose they were charged. Such acting against one’s deeper knowledge of what is truth must lead to an early death of the soul, but this consequence was accepted and even passed on to the next generations; and these younger generations all wither early on now, can’t create anything but infantile objects and ideas anymore, kill their unborn children, dress like bums, look with incomprehension at their forebears’ ideas, their manifestations in art, architecture, organization and conduct of life.
The Second War was a tragedy in human terms, but it was made into a tragedy in moral terms by the Nuremberg Proceedings. It was the death sentence for Western Man.
Together with the gratifying tribute to Francis Yockey Parker, this excerpt from Bardeche’s writing reminds us that the terrible foreknowledge of the fate of our world was also there amongst the victors. The next war wouldn’t need intense atrocity propaganda anymore to motivate the fighting men, as death and destruction can now be made to come by a simple push of a button, a consequence fully entailed by the self-degradation brought about by the Second War.
“It is the horror, it is the despair of the victors which is the true motive for the trial.”
Indeed. The defense of the Germans ‘just following orders’ is what the allies use also, but avoid facing it by making the Germans monsters. I do think it is called projection. To think this was written in 1948 is quite amazing.
Does anyone have any information on that stunning B/W photo on the cover of this book?
Do you mean the photo on top of the page? It is from Dresden after the bombing.
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/dresden-destroyed/
The angel of kindness.
A picture of the town of Wesel should perhaps also be counted as “iconic”, a strange term used for images of death and devastation.
I found it on a Wikepedia article on it, together with Montgpmery’s statement that the bombardment of Wesel ( a town of 25000 inhabitants before less than 2000 after the bombing) was a masterpiece.
Since the picture is authentic, I’ll give the link for this article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wesel_in_World_War_II
Thanks to your help I found information on how I can purchase a photo of “The Angel of Kindness” from a German Museum. The aftermath of the Wesel attack is also astonishing. I’ve never seen any of these photos before.
Are there any English translations of Bardeche’s political writings? On bookfinder.com I didn’t find any, only some other titles, e.g. History of motion pictures.
Just Nuremberg or The Promised Land and a brief excerpt on Counter-Currents: https://counter-currents.com/2010/06/bardeche-six-postulates-of-fascist-socialism/
In the future, Counter-Currents will publish more translations of Bardeche. I am particularly interested in translating his book What is Fascism? and a collection of the best essays from his journal Defense of the West.
Thank you for that information. Bardeche understood from the very beginning the nature of this struggle for a new world order, the opposing forces of restauration and revolution and the motivation of the command in both camps. The revolution had the better people, the restauration could muster more resources to overcome its foe. For Bardeche and like-minded people this carried enormous risk, considering the French “epuration” by means of the firing squad.
The manuscript of What is Fascism? seems particularly interesting.
In What is Fascism? Bardeche states flatly, “I am a fascist intellectual.”
The bombing of German cities was dreadful, but so was the blitz of other peoples’ cities by the Luftwaffe, notably Guernica, Rottedam, London, Coventry, Warsaw, Wielun, Frampol, and Stalingrad. War is a dreadful thing but breaking the morale of the enemy is a good thing to from the perspective of someone who wants to win. The loss of innocent life and the destruction of beautiful and historic architecture etc. is obviously deplorable. But it would be dishonest to make out that Germans were made to take any medicine they were not happy to dish out to others. The policy of blasting German towns and cities to rubble was what facilitated the Allied advance with minimal opposition encontered, and it spared allied lives. This was the chief consideration from the Allied standpoint, by that time.
It is not ‘pro-white’ to portray the Germans of the 1930s and 40s as holy innocents and to blacken the reputation of the other white peoples against whom they pitted themselves. There is a current of Anglophobia in certain supposedly pro-white circles that I find rather sickening. As noted Britain suffered enough from German bombing, and fair and historic provincial towns and cities from Exeter to York were turned into blazing infernos courtesy of the Luftwaffe. The suggestion, meanwhile, that the Allies invented the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the Jews as some kind of post-event justification for bombing the German cities is absurd. There is no reasonable doubt, as far as I can see, that the Nazis were attempting to exterminate the Jews (as well as to subjugate other European peoples whom they deemed inferior to Germans). One can accept that fact and still be wary and critical of the Jews and of Zionist political influence.
People interested in advancing the cause of the European races need to stop chewing over events of WWII and move on. We need to spend our energies on issues that affect our people in the here and now, rather than re-fighting an old conflict, and opening old wounds continually.
AlbionMyWay in blockquote:
What do you think the world would look like today if the British had accepted any of Uncle Wolf’s NINE peace proposals, all designed to favor the British Empire, before the onset of hostilities?
Do you think Broke Britain, with its capital city of Londonistan, would be part of that future? Would the Other Britain populated by their heirs of Brunel, or the heirs of Daisy and Onslow, chavs, at best.
Sun Tzu had it right: the best way to win the war is to avoid the war, and resolve conflicts to mutual benefit. THAT is the most astute level of generalship.
That seems a simplistic understanding of the Allied viewpoint, whose military leaders had little fear of sparing the lives of their soldiers, in either World War. The Americans wanted to control the world in a de facto co-dominium with the Soviet Union. The European Empires had to be gelded, and removed from the state of play.
Refresh my memory. Who declared war on whom? “Dunkirk” seems to ring a vague bell, somehow. Who let the Allied Expeditionary Force leave the beaches to return home? Should we apply Savitri’s formulation to Uncle Wolf: “It’s not that he was ruthless; it’s that he was not ruthless enough.”
There is no doubt, as far as I can see, that Uncle Wolf offered the Jews an entire island, Madagascar, and offered to pay them to resettle and would build communities on Madagascar for the Jews who chose to leave under their own power.
Hardly an “exterminationist” policy, that.
Continuing after the truncation:
AlbionMyWay in blockquote:
Hobbes defined the first and greatest power of the Sovereign as the power to Define, and (implicitly) to effectively enforce his definitions.
The adversary spiritual forces behind both world wards were supporting the destruction of the European races, and, indeed, Western Civilization, itself. Divide and conquer, followed by divert and control. Alex Linder has this right: all they have to do to win is to stop us from asking the right questions.
And, “the events of World War II” were the founding events of modern Europa; perversion of Europa it has become in large part, we can no more ignore the role of World War II in forming contemporary Europe than we can ignore the role of the Revolutionary War in the forming of the United States of America.
There is no conflict of Visions here. We need to do both. Old wounds must be opened from time to time to insure they are healing correctly. The greatest of wounds to the Truth is indifference to the Truth. Lies prevail fairly easily in that environment.
Ignorance is free. Truth isn’t. The price of Truth, and its transformation into Wisdom, is the painful shedding of illusions the Ego has become attached to. A good way to pay that price painlessly – up to a point – is to contribute to counter-currents, each and every month.
Would any of our readers like to add some context?
Please read Bombing Vindicated by J.M.Spaight, now available as re-print from Ostara Publications.
Spaight is quite proud of the “splendid decision” (his words) to bomb German cities, and the proposals of Adolf Hitler to outlaw attack on civilians and bombardment of cities as a means of warfare from 1935 onwards he brushes aside as a.:) being not imaginative as to the possibilities of air power and clinging to conventional ideas of warfare, b.:) dishonest. How did they know that propsals to equitable disarmament by Adolf Hitler were dishonest?
It is obvious that Germany had to deal with people of unimaginable evil who forced their war on Germany and then decided on the most evil way of conducting it. Spaight finds Hitler’s abhorrence to deliberately bombing civilians as waging war against women and children quite amusing.
The bombing of Warsaw or Rotterdam cannot be compared to the bombing of Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Königsberg,Dresden-in fact a l l German cities with more than 50000 inhabitants, as they were in the sphere of the front line. The bombardment of Rotterdam was the unfortunate outcome of interrupted communications, as the city capitulated and not all the bombers could not be re-called. Regrettable, but the 800 victims in Rotterdam became a daily occurrence in German cities after Churchill could live his nightmarish dreams of death and destruction.
Guernica is a staple atrocity piece , yet it has been so many times repeated that the object of the bombing was a bridge, and not “terror bombing”. It is a difference whether one is deliberately throwing bombs on a city for the sake of killing civilians and causing terror, and following a tactical objective to dislodge enemy troops.
At the end one should also not forget who declared war on Germany: England and France. Why would they do something so foolish that could even in the event of their victory only lead to their own demise and which even now makes them invent ever -newer reasonings for what they did. These reasons look increasingly as though laden with the psychology of a fatal guilt complex.
There were more peace proposals during and after Poland and after the conquest of France. And then there was Hess? peace mission in 1941.
Guernica was mentioned. Even The Telegraph rejects THAT atrocity charge:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/6004986/Picassos_Guernica__the_canvas_fraud_that_reflects_the_lie_it_proclaims/
On British and German bombing policies in general see the books Bombing Vindicated and Advance to Barbarism. As is well established, Hitler was very reluctant to bomb British cities and allowed Churchill to goad him into it by bombing German cities. Rotterdam was another bum charge, an error that caused relatively few casualties by WW2 standards. A couple Polish border cities were destroyed in the initial phase of the 1939 advance-the situations were murky and the Germans were of course assumed automatically guilty. By the time we get to the Russo-Soviet War we’re out of the realm of the Western laws of war by most standards. Stalin said that all Red Army soldiers
who surrendered were no longer members of the Soviet “community” and no longer existed as far as he was concerned.
What about the Baedeker blitz? What about the ordered destruction of Paris? Please! Hitler could have spared all the German cities if he had surrendered at any point after D-Day. It seems odd not to condemn the German leadership for continuing the war when it was futile, while bitching about Britain’s decision to fight on after Dunkirk.
If Britain had thrown in the towel in 1940 it would only have delayed Britain’s eventual destruction/relegation to obscurity. It’s not like the Nazis didn’t have a design for a New World Order of their own… Hitler has his eye on Suez, and on a large part of Africa. Plans were mooted to join with the Arabs in a wider extermination of Jews, as the later testimony of the Mufti of Jerusalem indicates. Incidentally the Mufti recorded being told by the Nazis, during his Berlin visit of 1941, that they had already killed 3 million Jews, which makes the final, generally accepted figure of 6 million seem not incredible. I recently read mention of the fact that the Germans were busy ‘not only persecuting Jews but exterminating them’, in a George Bernard Shaw’s, ‘Everybody’s Political What’s What’, written in 1944 (p. 37). This disproves the theory that the extermination claim was made up at a later time.
None of the British fought the Nazis in the name of multiculturalism. London was able to weather the Blitz because of relative homogeneity and unity. It doesn’t help in the establishment of a pro-white hegemony, to bicker about WWII, but one is obliged to defend one’s national honour if it is unjustly impugned. Germany did start the war, since it invaded Poland knowing that Poland had a defensive treaty with Britain and France that would oblige these nations to declare war on Germany if Poland was attacked by Germany. This is not a matter of controversy, complexity or ambiguity. Hitler had pushed his luck and been appeased up until that point. He’d also deprived the Germans of their democratic liberties, but they were intoxicated by the apparent successes of the regime (and mesmeric propaganda, parades and pageants) so few noticed. Much of Germany’s economic success was due to military build-up, and you don’t build up your military unless you’re planning a war some time. (By contrast, Britain was scaling down, militarily, in the 1930s, including cutting the Royal Navy by 60%, while America was still making plans for a war with Britain- War Plan Red as it was called.).
A conscientious nationalist has to apply the principle of self-determination to all nations. Poland had a right to be Polish in 1939. It will always have a right to be Polish. Germany has a right to be German now, Britain has a right to be British, France to be French, etc. We don’t have to meekly submit to being colonised from outside, least of all by barbaric peoples from Islamic hell-holes, and an interest in national self-preservation, and ethnic European solidarity where it matters, shouldn’t be tethered to a revisionist agenda as regards WWII.
We can learn lessons from it all. We can be wary of manipulation, and of Leftist exploitation of an over-reaction against all the things that the Nazis embraced.
I am all for taking our own side as European people, and regretting the mutual destruction and fratricidal slaughter of previous wars- not just those in the last century. But it would not be patriotic to disown the achievements and to disregard the suffering of my grandparents and their generation, the Britons who fought on against a militaristic, totalitarian dictatorship that had successfully subdued the whole continent.
I had similar views as you back in the day, but Irmin Vinson’s “Some Thoughts on Hitler and Other Essays,” changed my mind and deeply radicalized the way I viewed mainstream WW2 interpretations. I highly recommend you read this work before jumping so adamantly towards criticism of NS Germany, let alone saying we should simply ignore this elephant.
If you want to critique WW2 Germany on the idea of it as an ethno-nationalist, totalitarian and war hungry society on a rampage, fair enough. However, today’s moral and historical interpretation of the war isn’t similar to that view it all; instead, cowards and sycophants have turned it into something vastly more sinister.
The vilification of Nazi Germany must be fought tooth and nail, because its primary purpose is to erect the entire moral foundation of anti-European ideology. Hitler’s Germany is no longer an example of the dangers of dictatorship and war: it is now a fantastical caricature of what all White racialism leads to in the eyes of our Jewish and leftist elite. Now, when any European man speaks of “his people,” he is seen as just the first step in breaking the most holy of commandments: “never again.”
Remember, German National Socialism is not considered a political movement of certain time to these people. It is a considered a blight of the soul, a state of mind, an dangerous instinct within the blood of gentile White men, no matter what platitudes they speak against Hitler and his German state.
Even Patrick Buchanan, with his catholic-American old republicanism a far-cry from an NS intellectual like Rosenberg, had his presidential speech described as “it sounded better in the original German.”
The attacks of Leftists and Jews who seek to vilify European nationalisms by association with Nazi Germany can be countered (and ridiculed) using at least three logical lines of reasoning.
1. Leftism led to the mass killings seen under Communist regimes, perhaps totalling over 100 million victims globally, so egalitarian leftists have no moral high-ground over nationalists. If white racial consciousness ‘leads to Auschwitz’, (which is a silly claim) then equalitatrianism and internationalism leads to the Gulag of Siberia and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
2. Jews vindicate the principle of nationalism by insisting on having a nation state for their own protection and the perpetuation of their culture. The fact that they have ethnically cleansed the Palestinians also deprives them of any lofty moral position to argue from. (Support for the Palestinians, which is common among Leftists, also tends to rely on principles that can easily utilise to vindicate European nationalism. So whether the adversary supports Israel or Palestine, they must concede points that help our case.)
3. During WWII, many of the opponents of Nazi expansionists were themselves nationalists and most were patriotic white peoples. The Polish, Greek French resistance etc. was full of nationalists. Nazi Germany, rather than being purely nationalistic, was imperialistic and supremacist – it did not recognise the sovereignty of other nations. If the invasion and occupation of other nations by Germany was wrong then this supposes that different peoples have the right to independence, hence supports nationalism!
“Baedeker blitz” ? Paris was not destroyed, neither was Rome. When Paris was taken, no bombing took place with the objective to destroy wholesale and to kill French “Boche” (I am writing this word “swine” in quotation marks, while Portall, the British bomber, stated that the British moral bombing (is there irony?) was to “kill boche” (the Germans didn’t have such names for their enemies: French = der Franzose or Franzmann; the English = der Tommy; Russian = der Iwan; Amerikans = der Amerikaner or Ami). Did Hitler have his eyes on large parts of Africa? Is that so? You are saying many things which must be news to many who have studied this period quite thoroughly.
If you really are on the same side as the European people and their branches on other continents in their fighting expression of their will to live then you cannot accept the story that Hitler wanted to cause a world war; on the contrary, he did everything possible to avoid a war, while Churchill and Roosevelt deliberately were working towards a war against Germany, pulling all registers of evil propaganda to demonize their chosen enemy, making sure that the local conflict Germany-Poland would expand.
There was a real conflict between Poland and Germany which Adolf Hitler wanted to be resolved; why would Britain (and the US) work against the resolution of existing problems reaching back to the arrogant treatment of Germany in the Diktate of Versailles?
How do you know that “Nazi” Germany was supremacist and imperialistic? If you read a time-line of evolving events you will see that Germany had no imperialistic designs on its neighbors. How should Germany have reacted to the declaration of war by England and France and their unwillingness to even consider a resolution of the real problems existing between Germany and Poland? The resistance in France was instigated by the communists and Churchill’s England, there was practically none until 1942.
The sacrifices of your grandparents were real on a personal level, but in the context of their meaning, they helped destroy their very future by enlisting in a war they had no stake in.
The Baedeker blitz was ordered bombing raids targeting historic and picturesque English towns rather than strategic ones, for purposes of damaging morale. (Rumour was that the Germans were selecting targets from a Baedeker tourist guide.) The destruction of Paris was ordered by Hitler, before its abandonment, according to the German military governor of the city Dietrich von Choltitz. It seems Hitler didn’t want the Allies to liberate more than a pile of rubble.
Hitler’s plans for Africa apparently involved letting Italy dominate the North, having the middle part (Mittelafrika) colonised by Germany and the South in the hands of pro-German Boers.
Churchill saw war coming and argued for readiness. He was in the political wilderness through most of this period, so can hardly be accused of starting the war. It’s quite obvious Chamberlain did everything he could to prevent a war, and that the declaration marked a failure of government policy (diplomacy and concession). Poland had a defensive treaty with Britain and France, so by invading it Hitler was ensuring the expansion of the war. There is no way around that. If you can’t see how this aggressive conquest and the subsequent treatment of the Slavic inhabitants justifies the use of the terms imperialism and supremacism then I can’t help you.
The conventional theory on the origins of WWII really makes no sense:
http://buchanan.org/blog/did-hitler-want-war-2068
You are not counting the fact that Germany did not want this war. Adolf Hitler wanted to come to terms with all of Germany’s neighbors in a peaceful manner, including Poland which had occupied large swaths of German territory after the 1. war.
England used the Poles to bring to an end the peaceful revision of the Versailles Diktate. Adolf Hitler made very reasonable suggestions to resolve the Corridor Question but they were rejected with all the possible encouragement given by England.
Why was England not reacting to the Italian initiative of the 2. of September to end the military operation in Poland, immediately acceded to by Germany, initially also by France but then withdrawn after an English intervention?
Strategically, England wanted to annihilate Germany; Germany defended itself tactically. I have come to understand a lot by reading the Rommel Papers – I understood why there were German troops in North Africa. It has nothing to do with colonization of Africa or world conquest or any other fanciful propaganda piece: It was because of the military defeat of Italy in North Africa and the developing threat from English troops to the south of Europe. Do you remeber when the “West” was ready to destroy the communist east of Europe? The threat Adolf Hitler recognized from the Bolshevic camp was also recognized by the western victors after the defeat of Germany. Is it not obvious that Germany was driven into a position that left no alternative than to take up arms?
The whole Allied reasoning for fighting this destructive war reminds me of those disturbed people who set fire to a house so that they can come as rescuers.
There was no reason for this war to occur.
Does it not disturb you that a country like England, an island, safe in its borders, so easily finds reasons to wage war?
Just to add my own general perspective on the matter, personally, I must say, I think the perspectives on the matter of World War II and National Socialism need to be more balanced on Counter-Currents. It is incredible how most people in the Right today seem to either want to make Hitler look like a teddy bear, or they simply take the mainstream view and are wholly against him. I think some people are justified in objecting to what can be seen as one-sided apologism. On the one hand, the Third Reich (and the Axis in general) had some positive characteristics or is at least understandable to an extent.
First, to present a few criticisms of the Third Reich, I do believe the National Socialist state was totalitarian and imperialistic in nature. I think AlbionMyway is justified in objecting to all the usual National Socialist revisionism, which can be rather flimsy in many cases. It is an obvious fact that Hitler had imperialistic aims, as it is written in many National Socialist books and documents that the Germans planned to conquer and colonize Slavic lands. There are also many questionable moves Hitler made during 1938 and 1939 in regards to conquering other nations. For example, it can be argued that he had no justification for invading Austria was, which actually had a rather benevolent “Fascist” (using the term very generically) regime in power prior to the Anschluss.
Furthermore, the invasion of Czechoslovakia was completely unnecessary since he had already received the Sudetenland prior to the invasion (which is what he complained he deserved from Czechoslovakia), and that merely ruined his reputation in the eyes of Britain and France (and, frankly, I always found it funny how National Socialists tried to use Hitler wanting the Polish corridor as an excuse for invading Poland, because why would you invade the whole of Poland for merely a tiny strip of land?).
Lastly, I find that people also forget that the National Socialists seriously mistreated most of the peoples they conquered, especially the Slavic peoples (many of these endured a completely unjustifiable oppression and massacres), of which we see the testimony of the people who lived in such countries as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, and Russia after they were conquered by the Third Reich. We can see the way certain key Third Reich leaders thought of Slavs from statements such as: “The right thing is to leave the Poles to their own devices and to encourage their weakness and corruption. This is the best way to rule inferior races. Like the English in India. Set up many small centers of authority and play them off against each other. The same method should be used to deal with the situation in the Protectorate. And never compromise” (Joseph Goebbels, “The Goebbels diaries, 1939-1941,” p. 36); and also from Heinrich Himmler’s Posen Speech, the statement “whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.” More commentaries on this problem have been made by Alfred Rosenberg in his “Memoirs” (Rosenberg was generally more pro-Slavic than most other National Socialist leaders).
As for totalitarianism, an objective analysis of history makes it clear that the Third Reich was indeed totalitarian (which is, for me, an undeniably negative feature); even Right-wing thinkers sympathetic to National Socialism, like Spann, Spengler, and Evola, faced censorship. Finally, I find it rather despicable how Hitler sometimes put down fellow Right-wing Nationalist movements, the most notable and troublesome case being Hitler’s betrayal of the Romanian Iron Guard (he betrayed the Iron Guard, a movement allied to him, merely to put a subservient dictator [Antonescu] in power so that he could have Romania strictly under his control).
In contrast, to provide a few positive points for the existence of the Third Reich, it is easy to forget that England and France seriously mistreated and abused the German nation after the First World War, especially with the demands of the Versailles Treaty; this unfair treatment is one reason for which Germans had extreme reactions and behavior. We cannot speak of the “achievements” and “suffering” of Britons, or of the supremacism of the Germans, without thinking of the fact that Britain and France purposely abused Germany after WW1 and used the conditions of the Versailles Treaty to feed off of Germany and its people – impoverishing, humiliating, and torturing the population as if they were little more than a group of despised Africans who deserved to be slowly destroyed by endless poverty. At the end of the day, Britain and France were also supremacist and wanted to “subdue the whole continent,” merely by different means. When we speak of Britain during WW2, we must also remember that that is the same nation which bent its laws in order to put a great man and leader like Oswald Mosley in prison without any legitimate reason (the true reasons were obviously solely that the British government simply ideologically disapproved of Mosley rather than having a legal reason for arresting him).
For some closing remarks, I will add that although there are many criticisms to be made of the Third Reich and the various “Fascist” states composing the Axis (as I have mentioned in the past, I personally do not find totalitarian government appealing), it is not unreasonable to argue that there would have been many benefits for Europe if the Axis won World War II. Of course, there would have been many negative consequences, including prolonged totalitarian government, the deaths of a great many Europeans, and also the extermination of the Jews (I do not doubt that something of the sort was occurring by the late years of the war, considering the statements of Himmler’s Posen Speech and Hitler’s radical speech about “destroying the Jewish race in Europe” [I realize, of course, that the Jews were a problematic people, but something like extermination should never be thought of as a solution to the Jewish Problem]). However, it could be countered that the situation could have improved over time, and we also know from hindsight that there were many negative consequences to the Allied victory. I would recommend reading Rosenberg’s “Memoirs” if one wants to develop a more balanced perspective of the Third Reich, especially for those who are biased in favor of it. Finally, I should add that even though we can argue that it would have been better if the Axis won the war, it is futile and almost reactionary to keep going on about the issue all the time; rather we should move beyond old battles and movements and look to the future, developing a truly New Right movement with its own unique nature.
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