Hitler as YouTube Star

2,461 words

We truly live in a blessed age, we Internet denizens. Never before has it been so easy for us to share controversial ideas and suppressed facts. The power of cultural elites — whether in television, radio, the press, academia, publishing, etc. — to control the flow of information and representation was once a monopoly. Today this monopoly is broken and their power diminishes every year no matter what they do. They may tighten their grip to keep hold of their influence, but this runs like sand through their fingers . . . 

Finally, we can speak freely to one another, without self-interested intermediaries. This is true even beyond the grave as in that most important case: Adolf Hitler, who now speaks to us in literally millions of online videos, particularly on YouTube. This can be considered Hitler’s posthumous revanche.

Type in “Hitler” into YouTube and you get 5,130,000 hits, far outstripping his wartime rivals. “Roosevelt”: 1,390,000 (this includes Teddy and a contemporary singer). “Stalin”: 1,080,000. “Churchill”: 989,000 (the top three videos being of a Kenyan TV comedy called “The Churchill Show”).

Obviously the bulk of these Hitler videos are likely to be hostile. Their popularity is no surprise: Who wouldn’t want to know what the devil had for breakfast? (But curiously, the Hitlerite devil attracts more fascination than the Stalinian.)

The Second World War was officially fought, among other things, for Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” especially “freedom of speech.” Yet, to this day, one is not free to speak one’s mind about Hitler and National Socialism, who were and are so demonized for limiting freedom of speech, unless one scrupulously respects orthodoxy. The “liberals” are ruthless in their enforcement, persecuting young and old, happily sentencing an 87-year-old German grandmother to ten months’ jail for expressing criminal thoughts and perma-banning the teenage American girl Evalion from YouTube for, among other things, wishing the Führer a happy birthday with swastika-laden crème cupcakes. (Of course, these banned videos are just reuploaded by other users, so to some extent YouTube’s efforts at censorship are futile.)

YouTube has not removed the video of another German grandmother, evidently a bit fragile and reverting to the reflexes of her happy youth, toasting: “Prost! Heil Hitler!” She does so repeatedly despite the admonishments of the effete metrosexual “modern German male” next to her. Often hilarious Downfall parodies are too numerous to mention. All of this is gradually taking the edge off the “Hitler-as-Satan” meme,[1] with the associated notion that any self-assertion among ethnic Europeans will lead to “anuddah Shoah,” which has been carefully, meticulously drilled into our heads since childhood.

“The Greatest Story Never Told,” a six-and-a-half-hour revisionist documentary on Hitler, has over 840,000 views.

YouTube also, and perhaps especially, cannot remove videos of Hitler’s speeches, which are simply historical documents. They too are popular, more popular even in English than either Roosevelt’s or Churchill’s. (Of course, still almost non-existent compared to the degeneracy that tops YouTube’s charts, but that’s another matter.)

This is something of a revolution. Never before, since 1945 and never outside of Germany, have people been able to actually see and hear what Hitler actually said, in his own words. From 1945 to 2005, virtually the only occasion one could see Hitler speeches was in the context of “documentaries,” often edited so as to see nothing more than a menacing man barking incomprehensibly. With very few exceptions, mainstream Hitler documentaries — unlike much of the academic scholarship, which can be quite nuanced — tend to be unbelievably unbalanced and one-sided, if not outright propagandistic in the worst sense. Quotes fabricated or taken out of context, dark ominous music, and a twisted, misleading portrayal of the general atmosphere are absolutely de rigueur, even though these are utterly unnecessary for fair criticism of German National Socialism and Hitlerite rule, for there is much to criticize.

Actually seeing and hearing Hitler’s speeches is perhaps uniquely important in his particular case. As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, the spoken word is psychologically infinitely more powerful than the written, especially over the masses (this is why his book doesn’t really work, the insights being drowned in 600 pages of of sarcasm, invective, and hyperbole). This seems particularly true of the National Socialist style of politics. The books are verbose and often turgid.[2] But the speeches, whether of a Léon Degrelle, a George Lincoln Rockwell, or a William Pierce, even today give us astonishing, compelling testimony of moral seriousness, absolute sincerity, and a genuinely spiritual calling, so rare in our age of nihilism. (Many of these speeches have incidentally been brilliantly edited for the today’s audience by Counter-Currents’ resident video artist, Oscar Turner.)

And what do we learn by listening to the Führer speak? First there are the more common speeches with video footage. These are shorter and typically have English subtitles. At first one resists. One picks holes in Hitler’s arguments. One’s ears perk at the promise of authority and struggle, apparent premonitions of abuse. But then one learns to listen, to understand the logic of these speeches. After all, here is a man who, unlike our current crop of bourgeois “democratic politicians,” was actually trying to do something. And here he is, au sommet de son art.

A number of themes emerge. Hitler praised meritocracy above all, the dignity of workers and farmers, the rejection of class warfare. Hitler sounds most like a Leftist in urging his youth to reject classism: Do not let such prejudices take root in your hearts! In establishing a new ideological order, Hitler founded the new spiritual community upon the exclusion of the designated wreckers: the “November criminals” of 1918, the Marxists, and, to a less explicit extent, the Jews.

Most famous of course are Hitler’s two speeches in Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary being too iconic and innovative for cinematography to ignore. The concluding speech is perhaps the definitive case made for a holistic nationalist dictatorship, instilling a sense of sacred duty among the Party faithful, “like a Holy Order”: A government of the most willful and nationalistic segment of the German people — the fighting elements of a people “at all times, have amounted not to a majority, but to a minority” — rather than the shifting chaos of parliamentary politics, Party and Army as joint educators of the German people in manliness and patriotism: “It is our wish and will that this state and Reich will endure for millennia.”

Personally, I find Hitler’s speech to the youth from the preceding year, in Victory of Faith, to be the more powerful:

My German youth. Just as we are gathered here, my comrades, as part of the life of the people, so must the entire people also be gathered here. It was, alas, not always so. People did not want to understand each other. Each thought only of himself. At best, his class alone. We have been witnesses to the consequences of this aberration of the spirit.

In your youth, you must safeguard what you possess: The great feeling of comradeship and togetherness. If you hold on to this no power in the world will be able to take it from you. You will be one people bound together as tightly as you are now. As German youth our only hope — the courage and faith of our people.

You, my youth, are indeed the living guarantee of Germany’s living future. Not an empty idea, not an empty formalism nor an insipid plan. No! You are blood of our blood, flesh of our flesh, spirit of our spirit. You are the continuation of our people. May Germany live and may her future which lives in you be praised. Germany, hail!

These Hitler speeches have also been edited together in various “best of” compilations which really give a sense of National Socialism’s mass appeal as one fundamentally of idealism. There is for instance Hitler’s impassioned plea for public welfare:

A new folk-community is being built in Germany and it is our most beautiful goal and aim. Those who can’t even see past their own nose deserve our pity more than anything else. [. . . ] Our social welfare system is so much more than just charity. Because we do not say to the rich people: Please, give something to the poor. Instead we say: German people, help yourself!

Everyone must help, whether they are rich or poor. Everyone must have the belief that there’s always someone in a much worse situation than I am, and I want to help this person as a folk-comrade. [. . .] When you sacrifice for your folk-community, then you can walk with your head held up high.

Our belief in Germany is unshakeable! And our will is overwhelming! And when will and belief combine so ardently then not even the heavens will deny you. And I expect every German with a sense of character and decency to march with us in our columns!

There is a sincerity and earnestness which is simply unfathomable to the bourgeois mind.

There are also surprising admissions of Germany’s smallness and vulnerability in the face of the menacing world-empires:

We don’t have their colonies. We don’t have all the opportunities of international world connections which these states and peoples possess. Our Reich, which is so crammed, and which  has so few of the necessities of life, needs to be carefully and thoughtfully cultivated and worked.

Film of Hitler’s speeches are really only the tip of the iceberg. Hour-long speeches without video are also available, not always with English subtitles (there is also much else in German from Hitler’s colleagues). Significant among these are Hitler’s statements and justifications for war: Concerning Poland, Britain and France, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America.[3]

In another genre, there is the famous ten-minute recording of Hitler’s talks with Finnish Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim in June 1942, the only audio of his normal private conversation (for which we have Finnish subversion and SS tolerance to thank). Here Hitler, even with a foreign statesman, engages in one of his notorious monologues, this time concerning his difficulties in the Soviet Union, projecting his will, rationalizing his situation, painting an awesome picture. One is tempted to think Hitler was speaking here just as he had spoken throughout his life, from his youthful friend August Kubizek, to his confidant Otto Wagener, and to the entourage from which the Table Talk is recorded.

Most poignant is Hitler’s last speech to the nation, from January 30, 1945. The voice on the radio is immeasurably burdened: “German folk-comrades, men and women, National Socialists . . .” One can hear the lonely pages turn. He seems almost to be seeking to convince himself that the disaster was inevitable, as he gives voice to the peace camp: “It is hardly necessary to argue with those eternal blockheads who maintain that an unarmed Germany would, owing to its impotence, not have become the victim of this Jewish international world plot. Such reasoning would amount to a reversal of all laws of nature.”

All these speeches are naturally open to being enhanced, remixed, edited, and otherwise exploited by the multitude of YouTube artists. A very early example of this was from Dan Hauser’s mysterious, sometimes plaintiff, at times epic musical rendition of Savitri Devi’s revelations.  Strange images come to one’s mind: forgotten pagan temples, the blazing sun upon the endless steppes, intuitions of primordial Aryan heroes. The rendition concludes with thunderous voice — in a foreign language yet the meaning strangely clear — bellowing like a god: “VIR VOL-TEH!”

One video ably splices Hitler’s case against the “liberal democracies” with modern footage of U.S. politics, and an inspiring crescendo of music, as nothing but the mask for “the small, rootless international clique” which controls the mass media and finances the political parties (a man in the audience clarifies: “Juden!”).

Another does much the same with Hitler’s last speech, vindicating his warning from history — “Jewry began the systematic breakdown of our nation” — rising to the sublime exaltation of the score of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.

Another puts Hitler speeches together (including one from a fictional film) to the magnificent tune of Finnish cello metal band Apocalyptica’s “Farewell” under the somewhat incongruous title “Love live the sacred nations of Europe.” Thus Hitler the German chauvinist is rewritten to suit the needs of White Nationalists and European Identitarians. But is that so strange or inappropriate? Céline remarked, whatever Hitler’s own feelings, that his defeat at Stalingrad meant the end of the white race. And Nicholas Wade has emphasized that all the founders of religions are basically mythologized into a form potentially completely unlike their real being: There are no contemporary records of Buddha, Moses and possibly Mohammed (!) never existed, and Jesus was in fact a very Judeocentric rabbi rather than a universalist.

Hitler announces the vanguard: “We know that around us is Germany, in us Germany marches, and behind us Germany follows!”

Another kind of mourning and remembrance is apparent in when private images of a very sensitive, loving Hitler — mostly from Eva Braun’s home videos — are paired with the pop balad “An deiner Seite.”

Triarii, a martial industrial band, is another favorite for very European soundtracks.

“The Lion of Europa” gives striking footage of European decline and struggle, concluding with Hitler:

The most precious possession you have in this world is your own people. And for this people, and for the sake of this people, we will struggle and fight. And never slacken, and never tire, and never lose courage, and never lose faith.

Whose heart can remain insensitive to all this, witnessing the death of our people, and hearing the call for sacrifice?

We get a sense of what attending a Hitler speech must have been like for many pious National Socialists and ordinary Germans: amidst the inevitable drudgery and apparent meaninglessness of every day life, an empowering connection to something larger, inscribing one’s work and being into an epic national and world-historical struggle, an exalting link between one’s individual self and the very essence of our Natural universe.

So we should all personally thank Susan Wojcicki, Sergei Brin, and all the other people at YouTube who have made this living history and this opening of the human mind possible. Despite YouTube’s ethnically- and politically-motivated censorship, the new generation of “digital natives” is really producing its own culture, as the very name “YouTube” suggests. Hostile elite media power will decline to a low not seen since at least the 1920s. We cannot predict the long-term effects of this accelerating cultural revolution. I for one have faith in our youth.

Even in death, beyond the grave, Hitler’s volcanic charisma has power still. Historically, a great man like Charles de Gaulle was a ripple upon the pond. Bourgeois “democratic politicians” in general are but flotsam washed in with the tide. What then was Hitler? I don’t know. Perhaps indeed a volcano, so dangerous he and all he stood for had to be ruthlessly smothered into oblivion . . . but who cannot hear the muffled rumble of another coming explosion? Perhaps anti-matter: Something from another world, explosive, world-rending, intoxicating energy. Go ahead, touch it, feel your arm shatter . . .

Notes

1. Andrew Anglin’s website and community, The Daily Stormer, is working to the same end, and appears to be achieving a breakthrough.

2. I do not think it is a coincidence if Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries have for so long been promoted by the American cultural establishment as the definitive statements on racial nationalism, to better repel most people.

3. By way of comparison, consider Roosevelt’s declaration of war against Japan, which literally concludes with the audience hooting like a bunch of monkeys. And I thought this kind of indignity on such a solemn occasion, now so common, was limited to our era! Evidently America was already very decadent.