Hitler and Anti-Semitism
Historians give us a number of reasons for Hitler's anti-Semitism. Some suggest a pathological approach and try to find an incident that spurred a personal grudge; others take a psychological tack and argue it was cognitive dissonance on the part of a starving artist attempting to justify his poverty in contrast to the wealth of Jewish families around him. Still others blame the early Church, or his father's reputed anti-Semitic beliefs. No answer has been given which has stood up to all critiques.
It is important to understand Hitler's anti-Semitism both to separate man from legends, both positive and negative, and to reconcile our future goals with the knowledge of the past. In doing so, we are presented with an enigma in part because of the late arrival of this belief of Hitler's, which seems to post-date his service in the first world war and only emerge fully in his third decade of life. How do we reconcile the man who did so many good things - anti-cancer, rebuilding economies, environmentalism, stability and prosperity - with what most allege is an illogical and extreme hatred of Jews?
The answer stares us in the face when we look at Hitler in terms of his chosen not as much profession by worldview: that of an artist. The youthful Hitler grew up in a middle-class family where he witnessed the havoc that day jobs wrought upon normal lives. He saw the ugly face of tedium in the kind of form-filling, staid bureaucratic mentality that he later worked to eliminate in Germany (increasing efficiency dramatically). A devotee of Wagner, and one who appreciated both visual form and the pulp Westerns he devoured, Hitler was purely artistic in his use of symbols and characters.
Artists create works - paintings, novels, music - in order to convey an idea, often an emotional impression. To do this successfully requires using realistic surroundings to convey mental perceptions, such as a single moment of an old woman bent over a broom to illustrate the tedium and exhaustion of labor. It would not be successful to have in one's novel three hundred pages of description of sweeping, for in addition to being boring, it would lose sight of the original goal: to contrast the tedium of work to something else. Hitler, as an artist, was familiar with both the language of symbols and that of symbolic gestures or identifications with characters.
Much as in Shakespeare and Wagner Jewish characters symbolize tendencies or dilemmas more than individuals, to Hitler the "Jewish question" was not one of collected people but of the ideas and tendencies their culture and religion encouraged; as one schooled in history as well as empirical observation of his fellow human beings, Hitler knew that heritage more than education/indoctrination determined the future of an individual. For this reason he associated Judaism the philosophy with Judaism the religion with the tribe of Israel, or the genetic incarnation of Judaism.
What did Hitler see in Judaism? First, a philosophy that denied holiness and transcendence in favor of material success and comfort, which is in technical philosophical terms a "materialist" belief and is inherently anti-transcendental (he may have absorbed this from Schopenhauer, whose works he read in the slow hours of WWI). Materialist philosophies can be collectivist, but they are anti-idealistic, and therefore instead of moving with broad heroic strokes tend to assimilate societies by achieving a lowest common denominator, e.g. the modern "What's in it for me?" attitude. They break down heroic ideals; they break down composite cultures; like fast food restaurants, they reduce every aspect of life to its material function and no more. Hitler saw all materialist beliefs as destructive but more pressingly recognized that they were contrary to traditional German heroic-transcendent beliefs as seen equally in Wagner and Goethe.
From this materialism naturally comes an individualism, because if the goal is material comfort of the individual, the individual rapidly becomes only inward-looking and therefore denies any collectivism that does not immediately, tangibly benefit the original. To Hitler's mind, it was this belief that was the cornerstone of modernity. The ancient Greeks he so admired and the ancient Germans and every other traditional society on the planet worked by the opposite principle, the heroic-transcendent, a form of idealism where one did what was "right" according to a cosmic order and only secondarily thought of consequences to self, including mortality (the ultimate end of physical comfort!). Hitler saw modernity as the invading force of this materialistic individualism, and to find a symbol for it, pointed the finger at Judaism.
All of the things detested by Hitler -- Bolshevism, capitalism, modern art, promiscuity, deracinated cosmopolitanism, sodomy -- came from this "Jewish" prioritization of the individual over both collective and ideal. In Judaism, unlike Christianity and Buddhism, one does not esteem what is right but what is beneficial to the individual, without seeming to address the possibility that most conflicts arise from this contrast. To him, it seemed a license toward greed, selfishness, and the less capable people rising up en masse and overwhelming those wiser and smaller in number, as Hitler saw happen in both Russia (1917) and, abortively, in Germany (1918). Unlike most modern thinkers, Hitler saw Bolshevism as a peasant revolt designed to gain more benefit for individuals at the expense to social order as a whole.
This was coherent with his belief in eugenics: as anyone who has watched a crowd interact knows, we are not equal in intelligence or abilities or judgment skills or even character, with some being benevolent and yet willing to take on necessary warlike (sensu Nietzsche) tasks, even heroic ones to the point of self-sacrifice. From his readings of history, Hitler knew that every great civilization has risen under the dominion of these warlike benevolent nobles. Conversely, every society in decline has seen a replacement of that leadership caste with those who despite having similar abilities, have the outlook and philosophy of peasants -- take whatever you can and worry not about the future of the whole (as peasants are not accustomed to leadership positions). Hitler was a defender of the middle classes against both the ultra-rich and the impoverished audience of Bolshevism.
As can be seen from even this short document, this worldview is not a simple one that can be expressed in pithy sentences like "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry/Edwards." Even a political poster endorsing "transcendental heroism" does not succeed in a democracy. In order to seize power, a leader must construct a simple, linear, binary cosmology in which there is a Goal and things to Avoid. When Hitler began his struggle to come to power in Germany, Jews and Gypsies were the only demographically visible immigrant groups, and Judaism with its material individualistic philosophy was the most clearly identified opposition philosophy to that of National Socialism. Obviously, as a Nationalist movement, National Socialism also sought to remove all foreign influences; as a Socialist movement, National Socialism sought to break the power of nepotistic capitalist oligarchs, of which the Jewish population - represented highly in the media and arts and professions and infamous for its habit of promoting Jews over Gentiles - was the most visible group. During his reign, Hitler removed other oligarchs from power and did his best to eliminate what he saw as degenerate cultural influences, from neurotic modern art to plotless jazz, embarking on these crusades long before a single Jew was imprisioned.
Before he got to that state, however, Hitler had to translate his ideology into symbolic gestures, including the crusade against Jewry. We may look back over history and wonder what would have been had he been able to, as originally intended, export Europe's Jews to Madagascar or Israel (and a good many made it there). We know now that mass arrests of isolation in concentration camps happened only after this became a practical impossibility. From this historical record it seems clear that for Hitler, the acrimony toward Jews was a symbolic translation of an opposition to the materialist individualism of Judaism and the consequent damage it wrought on any upward-moving society.
Socrates tells us (through Plato) that all Democracies promote a kind of individualistic obsession which leads to selfishness, hence the dissolution of coherence in thought into millions of disconnected individual viewpoints, and thus bring about their own collapse and institute totalitarian leaders in their place. Hitler arose at a time when Germans were tired of the constant internal conflict of Democracy (much like the internal dialogue of a neurotic person) and its inconsistent and populist but unrealistic results. The German people made a statement, by electing Hitler, that they were exhausted of this destructive process, and of the destructiveness of philosophies related to those of Judaism. Jewry, through which was intended "Judaism," was merely the symbol.
After WWII, the world was able to witness future horrors which proved Hitler right in a philosophical sense: individualism led to overpopulation to a greedy and neurotic West that is rapidly collapsing on itself, leaving behind environmental devastation and miles of ugly shopping malls. Compared to Stalin, Hitler was both gentle and eminently sane; when Hitler used war or execution, it was a means to a positive end, where the only end Stalin saw was power. Compared to the postwar United States, Hitler was practically an isolationist, being content to secure Europe and call it a day, where the Americans have waged wars on every continent but Australia and the poles. Compared to global warming, Hitler's idea of a less selfish society - the transcendental heroic and thus holistic view as opposed to the materialist individualism espoused by Judaism and other philosophies - seems downright reasonable.
Perhaps, as General George S. Patton suggested, the Allies fought the wrong enemy, as forty-five years of nuclear terror after WWII indicates. Perhaps Hitler as a philosopher was more realistic than any of our thinkers today, and this is the real reason why he is so demonized. We learn things as time goes on. It is worthwhile to study Hitler's motivations not as an incentive toward anti-Semitism, but to understand Hitler's bias against Jewry as a philosophical and symbolic position instead of a literal one. As we prepare to rebuild our failing society today, we should take note of the fact that what Hitler derided through Jews was selfish individualistic belief systems, and there are more of those than Judaism. Future Nationalist organizations can learn from this and recognize the symptoms of this disease (selfishness) instead of its symbol (Judaism), and expand their platforms accordingly. In fact, since philosophies like those of Judaism are so widespread today, it makes sense to stop our excessive concern with our Semitic brethren - although, like all cultures, Judaism is only compatible with itself and is poison in other nations - and focus instead on where our people fall short and embrace philosophies like those of Judaism.
http://www.nazi.org/nazi/policy/anti-semitism/
I'm skeptical but open-minded about this. I still think both obsessing about other cultures and tolerating them mixed among you are errors, and I'd like to avoid future Holocausty type events (then again, looks like the Israelites are busy gassing Arabs today!).
Historians give us a number of reasons for Hitler's anti-Semitism. Some suggest a pathological approach and try to find an incident that spurred a personal grudge; others take a psychological tack and argue it was cognitive dissonance on the part of a starving artist attempting to justify his poverty in contrast to the wealth of Jewish families around him. Still others blame the early Church, or his father's reputed anti-Semitic beliefs. No answer has been given which has stood up to all critiques.
It is important to understand Hitler's anti-Semitism both to separate man from legends, both positive and negative, and to reconcile our future goals with the knowledge of the past. In doing so, we are presented with an enigma in part because of the late arrival of this belief of Hitler's, which seems to post-date his service in the first world war and only emerge fully in his third decade of life. How do we reconcile the man who did so many good things - anti-cancer, rebuilding economies, environmentalism, stability and prosperity - with what most allege is an illogical and extreme hatred of Jews?
The answer stares us in the face when we look at Hitler in terms of his chosen not as much profession by worldview: that of an artist. The youthful Hitler grew up in a middle-class family where he witnessed the havoc that day jobs wrought upon normal lives. He saw the ugly face of tedium in the kind of form-filling, staid bureaucratic mentality that he later worked to eliminate in Germany (increasing efficiency dramatically). A devotee of Wagner, and one who appreciated both visual form and the pulp Westerns he devoured, Hitler was purely artistic in his use of symbols and characters.
Artists create works - paintings, novels, music - in order to convey an idea, often an emotional impression. To do this successfully requires using realistic surroundings to convey mental perceptions, such as a single moment of an old woman bent over a broom to illustrate the tedium and exhaustion of labor. It would not be successful to have in one's novel three hundred pages of description of sweeping, for in addition to being boring, it would lose sight of the original goal: to contrast the tedium of work to something else. Hitler, as an artist, was familiar with both the language of symbols and that of symbolic gestures or identifications with characters.
Much as in Shakespeare and Wagner Jewish characters symbolize tendencies or dilemmas more than individuals, to Hitler the "Jewish question" was not one of collected people but of the ideas and tendencies their culture and religion encouraged; as one schooled in history as well as empirical observation of his fellow human beings, Hitler knew that heritage more than education/indoctrination determined the future of an individual. For this reason he associated Judaism the philosophy with Judaism the religion with the tribe of Israel, or the genetic incarnation of Judaism.
What did Hitler see in Judaism? First, a philosophy that denied holiness and transcendence in favor of material success and comfort, which is in technical philosophical terms a "materialist" belief and is inherently anti-transcendental (he may have absorbed this from Schopenhauer, whose works he read in the slow hours of WWI). Materialist philosophies can be collectivist, but they are anti-idealistic, and therefore instead of moving with broad heroic strokes tend to assimilate societies by achieving a lowest common denominator, e.g. the modern "What's in it for me?" attitude. They break down heroic ideals; they break down composite cultures; like fast food restaurants, they reduce every aspect of life to its material function and no more. Hitler saw all materialist beliefs as destructive but more pressingly recognized that they were contrary to traditional German heroic-transcendent beliefs as seen equally in Wagner and Goethe.
From this materialism naturally comes an individualism, because if the goal is material comfort of the individual, the individual rapidly becomes only inward-looking and therefore denies any collectivism that does not immediately, tangibly benefit the original. To Hitler's mind, it was this belief that was the cornerstone of modernity. The ancient Greeks he so admired and the ancient Germans and every other traditional society on the planet worked by the opposite principle, the heroic-transcendent, a form of idealism where one did what was "right" according to a cosmic order and only secondarily thought of consequences to self, including mortality (the ultimate end of physical comfort!). Hitler saw modernity as the invading force of this materialistic individualism, and to find a symbol for it, pointed the finger at Judaism.
All of the things detested by Hitler -- Bolshevism, capitalism, modern art, promiscuity, deracinated cosmopolitanism, sodomy -- came from this "Jewish" prioritization of the individual over both collective and ideal. In Judaism, unlike Christianity and Buddhism, one does not esteem what is right but what is beneficial to the individual, without seeming to address the possibility that most conflicts arise from this contrast. To him, it seemed a license toward greed, selfishness, and the less capable people rising up en masse and overwhelming those wiser and smaller in number, as Hitler saw happen in both Russia (1917) and, abortively, in Germany (1918). Unlike most modern thinkers, Hitler saw Bolshevism as a peasant revolt designed to gain more benefit for individuals at the expense to social order as a whole.
This was coherent with his belief in eugenics: as anyone who has watched a crowd interact knows, we are not equal in intelligence or abilities or judgment skills or even character, with some being benevolent and yet willing to take on necessary warlike (sensu Nietzsche) tasks, even heroic ones to the point of self-sacrifice. From his readings of history, Hitler knew that every great civilization has risen under the dominion of these warlike benevolent nobles. Conversely, every society in decline has seen a replacement of that leadership caste with those who despite having similar abilities, have the outlook and philosophy of peasants -- take whatever you can and worry not about the future of the whole (as peasants are not accustomed to leadership positions). Hitler was a defender of the middle classes against both the ultra-rich and the impoverished audience of Bolshevism.
As can be seen from even this short document, this worldview is not a simple one that can be expressed in pithy sentences like "Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry/Edwards." Even a political poster endorsing "transcendental heroism" does not succeed in a democracy. In order to seize power, a leader must construct a simple, linear, binary cosmology in which there is a Goal and things to Avoid. When Hitler began his struggle to come to power in Germany, Jews and Gypsies were the only demographically visible immigrant groups, and Judaism with its material individualistic philosophy was the most clearly identified opposition philosophy to that of National Socialism. Obviously, as a Nationalist movement, National Socialism also sought to remove all foreign influences; as a Socialist movement, National Socialism sought to break the power of nepotistic capitalist oligarchs, of which the Jewish population - represented highly in the media and arts and professions and infamous for its habit of promoting Jews over Gentiles - was the most visible group. During his reign, Hitler removed other oligarchs from power and did his best to eliminate what he saw as degenerate cultural influences, from neurotic modern art to plotless jazz, embarking on these crusades long before a single Jew was imprisioned.
Before he got to that state, however, Hitler had to translate his ideology into symbolic gestures, including the crusade against Jewry. We may look back over history and wonder what would have been had he been able to, as originally intended, export Europe's Jews to Madagascar or Israel (and a good many made it there). We know now that mass arrests of isolation in concentration camps happened only after this became a practical impossibility. From this historical record it seems clear that for Hitler, the acrimony toward Jews was a symbolic translation of an opposition to the materialist individualism of Judaism and the consequent damage it wrought on any upward-moving society.
Socrates tells us (through Plato) that all Democracies promote a kind of individualistic obsession which leads to selfishness, hence the dissolution of coherence in thought into millions of disconnected individual viewpoints, and thus bring about their own collapse and institute totalitarian leaders in their place. Hitler arose at a time when Germans were tired of the constant internal conflict of Democracy (much like the internal dialogue of a neurotic person) and its inconsistent and populist but unrealistic results. The German people made a statement, by electing Hitler, that they were exhausted of this destructive process, and of the destructiveness of philosophies related to those of Judaism. Jewry, through which was intended "Judaism," was merely the symbol.
After WWII, the world was able to witness future horrors which proved Hitler right in a philosophical sense: individualism led to overpopulation to a greedy and neurotic West that is rapidly collapsing on itself, leaving behind environmental devastation and miles of ugly shopping malls. Compared to Stalin, Hitler was both gentle and eminently sane; when Hitler used war or execution, it was a means to a positive end, where the only end Stalin saw was power. Compared to the postwar United States, Hitler was practically an isolationist, being content to secure Europe and call it a day, where the Americans have waged wars on every continent but Australia and the poles. Compared to global warming, Hitler's idea of a less selfish society - the transcendental heroic and thus holistic view as opposed to the materialist individualism espoused by Judaism and other philosophies - seems downright reasonable.
Perhaps, as General George S. Patton suggested, the Allies fought the wrong enemy, as forty-five years of nuclear terror after WWII indicates. Perhaps Hitler as a philosopher was more realistic than any of our thinkers today, and this is the real reason why he is so demonized. We learn things as time goes on. It is worthwhile to study Hitler's motivations not as an incentive toward anti-Semitism, but to understand Hitler's bias against Jewry as a philosophical and symbolic position instead of a literal one. As we prepare to rebuild our failing society today, we should take note of the fact that what Hitler derided through Jews was selfish individualistic belief systems, and there are more of those than Judaism. Future Nationalist organizations can learn from this and recognize the symptoms of this disease (selfishness) instead of its symbol (Judaism), and expand their platforms accordingly. In fact, since philosophies like those of Judaism are so widespread today, it makes sense to stop our excessive concern with our Semitic brethren - although, like all cultures, Judaism is only compatible with itself and is poison in other nations - and focus instead on where our people fall short and embrace philosophies like those of Judaism.
http://www.nazi.org/nazi/policy/anti-semitism/
I'm skeptical but open-minded about this. I still think both obsessing about other cultures and tolerating them mixed among you are errors, and I'd like to avoid future Holocausty type events (then again, looks like the Israelites are busy gassing Arabs today!).
