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by Steve Mizrach
Today, we ponder the applicability of the label to our own politicians. Is Pat Buchanan a fascist? What
about Lyndon LaRouche, Jacques Le Pen, Leonard Jeffries, or David Duke, whose attacks on
affirmative action closely parallel that of the 'mainstream' Republican party? Is fascism necessarily
racist, anti-Semitic, or religiously biased? Was Barry Goldwater calling for fascism when he said
“"extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?"” How about politicians who run on a "law and
order" or "America First!" plaform- some of whom are assumedly liberal Democrats? German Nazism
as a particularly unique brand of fascism must be closely examined and understood and its historical
geneaology traced. It will not do to go after "fascism" with a wide sociological lens (which is, not
suprisingly, unfocused) and tar all right-wing thinkers with the same brush. And one of the important
roots of German Nazism is, in fact, the existence of certain high-profile occult societies who operated
in the period between the wars- the Germanorden, the Thule Gellenschaft, Ariosophy, and the
Neo-Templars3.
There are others often mentioned in this occult cast of villains. Jung is blamed for reviving interest in
mythology and the workings of the racial unconscious, and for originally supporting the Nazis
because of their attempts to revive Teutonic ritual and mythic thinking. Yet, when Jung discusses that
the dreams of many patients in the 1930s reveal the archetype of a "great blond beast," he issues it as
a warning, not as a herald of good fortune6. Jung himself described Nazism as the type of mass
psychosis that afflicts a society when its leader becomes 'possessed' by one of the archetypes of the
unconscious. Gurdjieff and Crowley are also mentioned as possible Reich supporters, which is
astounding based on the evidence that both may have well been working clandestinely for the
Resistance movements in France and England. Many occult groups, such as the Prieure du Sion, seem
to have acted as infiltrators, aping the Nazi party line while passing on important information to its
enemies in their journal Vaincre. In places like Vichy France, occult groups might have had no choice
but to appear firmly in the Nazi fold7.
Guido von Liszt (founder of the Germanorden) may not have been as important in the Nazi pantheon
as Oswald Spengler and Alfred Rosenberg, who both advanced the belief that the West was in decline
from the onslaught of "Magianism" or the "World Cavern" philosophy of the Oriental Semites, which
was in direct contrast to the Apollonian or Faustian guiding principle of 'no limits' which governed the
European/Aryan races9. Both reacted in horror to the "primitive" African, Latino, and Polynesian
elements that artists like Picasso and Gauguin were importing into Western art, a clear sign of
'degeneration.' Not unlike some anti-rock music phillistines today, they heard the "savage jungle beats
of the tom-tom drum" in jazz and much of modern music, and found the soaring Wagnerian operas
much more to their liking. The German mystical societies essentially saw a coming struggle between
the forces of materialism and relativism and that of true, Aryan, spiritual civilization - a struggle that
would be apocalyptic and where there could be no quarter whatsoever afforded for the enemy. Therein
lay the roots of Nazism and the Holocaust.
When George Bush used the phrase "New World Order" in 1990, conspiratorialists all over the world
went nuts. They know that as the code phrase for OWG (One-World Government), but others also
remember that it was one of Hitler's names for his coming Thousand Year Reich. The phrase has been
associated for a long time (long before Robert Anton Wilson, anyway) with the Illuminati and their
supposed design for world control10. Certainly the Nazis themselves believed that the Jews,
International Bankers, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks had their own plan for taking over the world -
wasn't it all laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This is a pattern repeated throughout
history - various conspiratorial organizations are formed to combat real or fictitious 'subversive'
conspiracies. A notable example is the Holy Vehm, a vigilante organization in the Middle Ages that
wore hoods to conceal their anonymity, and rounded up and executed what they believed to be a
conspiratorial band of witches and heretics opposed to the king. Hitler often made reference to the
Vehm in some of his writings.
Yet it might be a mistake to see Nazism as merely a reaction against scientific materialism and
modernity. The Nazis advocated the Promethean power of science and often promoted the Hindenburg
and the V2 base at Peneemunde as signs of the triumph of German science. They pursued researches
into atomic energy and radar as vigoruously as the allies. (They may have been hindered in their
pursuits, one might note, by exterminating or banishing the main sector of the German intellegentsia -
Jews, such as Einstein.) Eugenics, the "science" of breeding better babies and carrying out applied
Social Darwinism, had gained considerable respectability by the 1930s, and there were many
'respectable' medical societies promoting eugenics programs here in America, involving such aspects
as forced sterilization of the lower classes and the handicapped, banning of marriages with southern
and eastern Europeans, and denial of immigration to 'lower' races12. The extermination program of the
Nazis was carried out with industrially and scientifically efficient methodic precision - the Nazis kept
genealogical records tracing back seven centuries and were able to make their trains run on time.
The Nazi doctors, for example, were interested in the answers to purely rational questions of medical
science: what happens to German pilots who are downed and must live on salt water or are trapped in
frozen climes? Can we transplant skin from one patient to another? They sought the answers by taking
Jews, Gypsies, and other groups and performing inhumane experiments on them- experiments
justified by the belief that such groups were 'subhuman' anyway. What they lacked was not reason but
values, compassion, and humanity13. In many ways, their experiments epitomized one of the prime
problems of 20th century science: its advances far outstrip man's moral and social evolution. From
Tuskeegee to Edgewood, scientists have done horrible things to people - forget the animals who anger
the anti-vivisectionists - in the name of the science which is supposedly to benefit their lives. In many
ways, the Nazi state merely took many of the features of the modern 'Enlightenment' nation-state to
their logical extremes; they could be said represent the apotheosis, not the interruption, of modernity.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Hitler modelled his S.S. troops on the Templars and other Crusader orders,
and the Jesuits and the Masons. There is a famous poster from 1937 showing Hitler as a Templar
Knight, in holy armor, preparing to do battle with Satan. While Nieztsche felt nauseous from Wagner's
Parsifal (for its caving into the 'sickening' ideals of Christian chivalry), the Nazi cadres seem to have
vigorously promoted it. Otto Rahn was searching for the Holy Grail in the south of France in 1938,
though he did not appear to think that what he was looking for was a wine cup from the Last Supper
or the blood of Jesus. Instead he claimed it was “"a power source of indescribable magnitute."”15 It is
not known whether the Nazis really ever searched for the Ark of the Covenant, though there are
tantalizing hints that they may well have been laying out blueprints for a search of northern Africa and
Egypt for that Jewish relic. Why they thought they might enlist the gods of their enemies in their
destruction is not clear.
But what captivated Hitler's interest most of all was his interest in hypnosis or the occult powers of
'fascination.' Witnesses of the Nuremberg rallies claim that people there were in a trancelike state,
glassy-eyed and open mouthed with awe. Hitler claimed to have studied the mystical charismatic
powers of earlier leaders, and read a great deal about the Jesuits' psychological techniques of focused
concentration and devotion. It is certain that Hitler's minister Goebbels did employ carefully crafted
techniques of social control - lighting, the tenor of the voice, and crowd psychology - for maximum
propaganda value. But Trevor Rayvenscroft and others are of the opinion that the Nazis may have
been more than just master propagandists; they may have been true sorcerous mesmerists, possessing
the minds of thousands of people. Some people maintain the CIA's MKUltra mind-control
experiments may have been derived from Nazi researchers smuggled into this country through
Project Paperclip17.
The Surrealists (Andre Breton, etc.) also wanted to get 'in touch' with man's unconscious or
'nonrational' side, and most of them fled Germany early on, when the Nazi canon of naturalist realism
in art took hold. Heidegger, Thomas Mann, and other metaphysical philosophers may have been
initially flirtatious with Nazi ideas, but they eventually came to repudiate them as well. The
relationship between occultism and 'irrationalism,' however vaguely defined, and other attempts at
resistance to the unwanted tendencies within the urban-industrial nation-state, are not as clearcut as
some might have us think, and the relationship of all these ideologies to Nazism is highly complex. It
is simply unfair and simplistic to see the Nazis only as a revolt against science, reason, technology,
the Enlightenment, and Western Judeo-Christianity, and by extension accuse other social movements
that are against the notion of 'progress' (e.g. environmentalists, postmodernists, or punk rockers) of
being Nazis. For the record, it should be noted that a little-known journal of irrationality, Doubt ,
never carried one pro-Nazi editorial, despite all its anti-Roosevelt diatribes.
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