History | How the Nazis won WWII

Everyone gets what they really want, and sometimes what they really want is defeat and humiliation.

Tom X Hart
Sep 7, 2018 · 9 min read

The Nazis believed that Germany, before their rule, was in the grip of a “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspiracy. They claimed that by liberating Germany from this conspiracy she would reach untold heights of power and prestige, and that this prestige would last for at least a thousand years.

What did Germany look like after the Nazis fell from power?

Her eastern half was entirely controlled by the Communists, who went on to form one of the most brutal and invasive police states ever seen in history. Eastern Europe, a region the Nazis claimed they were protecting from Communism, was firmly under Communist rule.

Due to the obscenity of the Holocaust, the fate of the Jewish people and the German people became inextricably intertwined. In practical financial terms, this intertwining was represented by the aid extended by the German state to Israel after war. In the deeper moral sense, generations of Germans have been bound to the Jewish people by a relationship of guilt and shame over what their ancestors did during this unprecedented act of mass murder. The Nazis managed to bind the German and Jewish people together in a perverse union of blood and shame emanating from an event that will surely be remembered as one of the most significant in world history.

I think that, on the deepest level, this was what the Nazis really wanted. This all occurred because they were, as Donald Trump might observe, “losers”. They were the kind of sentimental people who enjoy feeling sorry for themselves and try to make up for their inadequacy with a lot of bombast.

The Nazis wanted to die. This is quite evident in their obsession with the death’s head motif and their general fascination with death as a means to produce meaning in life. They loved marble, the material of tombs that is cold as a corpse to the touch. They were obsessed with rigidity and rigid things are dead, while that which flows and changes is alive and paradoxically, like the river of Heraclitus, never changes even as it always changes.

Read biographies of the SS chief Himmler and the propaganda guru Goebbels, and you will find men who always believed they were being persecuted by some person or force. This is the mark of people who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives and so invent “conspiracies” or “persecutors” to explain why nothing seems to work out for them. The phenomenon is not limited to the Nazis, and we see it manifested in the politics of socialism, feminism, Islamism, and nationalism. Indeed, Goebbels started off as a straightforward socialist before his desperation for a “leader” led him to fall in love with Hitler.

The Nazis, on the deepest level, were desperate for someone to take control of them and, secretly, believed that Germany was not worthy of a place in the world. They engineered, indirectly, a situation where Germany would be subordinated to foreign powers and dismembered. They were taken in hand, as they always wished to be.

Similarly, the Nazis claimed to worship beauty and perfection against ugliness and laxness. But, of course, almost all of the leading Nazis were terribly ugly men who did not remotely approach their physical or mental ideal of beauty. They theoretically worshipped courage of a bullyish sort, but in reality they much preferred to lie to everyone – and lying does not require courage.

In this way, people who are deeply unconscious of their own desires and wishes bring about the situation that they claim to be fighting hardest against. The greatest fanatics for a conscious desire are slaved to their unconscious desires. This tendency often manifests as anger against what they truly desire. We see this sometimes with love affairs, where a person hates another person overtly as a means to express their covert adoration for them.

It is also why we can sometimes say “you wonderful bastard” or “you clever fucker” as a means to express genuine affection, because to actually say “I think you’re great” is very hard to do sincerely. Our expression of admiration must be paradoxical and contained in an insult. It is the ability to convey a true expression of affection in an insult that marks an absence of true affection, because secretly the person is afraid that affection does not exist between them and another person.

On a more mundane level, people who say “I’m going on a diet” or “I’m looking for a job” or something similar almost never do so. The actual expression of a positive intent seems to frustrate our intention. “I am definitely, definitely not going to sleep with that man,” says a woman to her friend, about two hours before she does it. “Don’t worry, I’ve been in treatment and cleaned up. I’m completely in control of everything now,” says the alcoholic, right before he goes out on a booze spree.

We are all aware of this tendency at some level, but it persists because society has disciplined us in such a way that it is unacceptable (or we perceive it to be unacceptable) to express our actual thoughts and desires. We learn to hide these to fit in at school, in our family, at work, and even in our country. But these suppressed desires and thoughts do not, as Jung and Freud observed, go away. And, in the worst cases, they rise up and possess us completely.

We can see a similar process to Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union, a country that became grossly unequal (in power relations, if not in wealth) despite aiming for social equality as its main goal. The USSR also – through a campaign of official atheism – preserved a far stronger element of religion than continues in the West, although that was the side in the Cold War that putatively supported religious feeling.

China also experienced a similar situation to Germany and the Soviet Union. Mao promised to industrialise the country and bring prosperity, but he only brought about famine and economic crisis. It was only when Deng allowed the Chinese people to work in their own interests and be selfish that the country reached the heights of previously unknown prosperity.

And we also see a similar process, much less dramatic, at work in the EU. People who wish to preserve the EU are destroying it, because they are so forceful and arrogant in their assumption that the Union must be preserved that they alienate people.

The paradox is neatly summed up in the following aphorism by the obscure reactionary writer Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “The racist is annoyed because he secretly suspects that the races are equal. The anti-racist is annoyed because he secretly suspects that they are not.”

Dávila was, of course, a genius.

This is why, in line with the law he discusses here, almost nobody has heard of him. The men of real character and ability are always obscure, and the men of weakness and low ability are universally celebrated.

In the political sphere of the contemporary West, the furious force with which discussions of race are conducted really represents the neurotic fear that the opposing side might be right (or merely just a bit right).

Therefore, the more overtly a person promotes racial inequality, the more they really feel or think races are the same. Similarly, the neurotic liberal who polices language around race and is afraid that someone might say “the wrong word” or the ”wrong thing” is secretly afraid of their own racial antagonism, or the possibility that the races are not equal.

I also note that, using this logic, Donald Trump will not “Make America Great Again”. He will, instead, act as a force of dissolution and destroy any greatness that America still possesses. He has come to undo an America that is no longer sustainable, possibly so that it may be reborn in a new and fragmented form. We already saw this pattern with Obama, whose slogans were “Yes, we can!” and “Hope and Change”. His tenure was marked by congressional shut downs (“No, we can’t!”) and widespread despair in the American political system (“It’s all hopeless and the same old shit”).

On a more light-hearted note, Bill Clinton famously quipped that “it’s the economy stupid” when discussing what counts in politics. But his entire presidency was defined by and nearly foundered on a sexual matter – whether/how/how often he fucked Monica Lewinsky – that had nothing to do with the economy.

And the liberals, especially the neoconservatives, who attack Islam and Islamism on the grounds that it “mistreats women” are also found to be the same people who support pornography, divorce, single mothers, abortion, promiscuous sex, and any number of policies that cause immense suffering to women in the West (although they are supposedly “liberated”). The Muslims and Islamists, by contrast, simply support marriage and traditional roles in which women and children thrive. Yet they are, of course, demonised as the “persecutors” of women. Indeed, the neo-conservatives repeatedly urge us to bomb Muslim countries so that women there can also experience the “liberation” of fifty sexual encounters, an abortion, alcoholism, and an early childless death.

“Women’s liberation” is merely slavery to corporations and the state. Feminists actually destroy the freedom women enjoy within the family, simply slaving women to a boss who mercilessly exploits their more agreeable nature instead of a husband who puts up with up with them in a vaguely loving way (naturally, the best marriages feature constant low-level bickering).

A more disturbing aspect of this paradoxical thought is to consider if there are men who we are told are good who are not. For example, how “good” was Nelson Mandela, a man celebrated as a secular saint by the mass media? He was also involved with the South African Communist Party in a clandestine way – and this can hardly be “good”. Similarly, a figure like the British politician Enoch Powell is universally demonised by the Western media – even though much of what he said would happen has come to pass.

Is there any answer to this?

I don’t think there’s a final answer, but there is an ongoing answer. This ongoing answer is to bring “up from the depths” all those thoughts and feelings that you push away as unacceptable the daytime – and often haunt people in their dreams.

We get what we really want – one way or the other. But if we delay and push away what we really want or really fear then that thing will manifest itself in a catastrophic or perverse way. There are people, usually fairly extraordinary, who are able to accept the contradictory nature of thought and desire. These are men of great integrity, although we cannot always tell if they are good people or not. Often we will be a little bit afraid of them, since they will seem to be evil and good at the same time. We count among these men Jesus, Buddha, Nietzsche, and Lao Tse.

These were men who had absolute trust in their own natures and remained completely true to the course their life had to take, and consequently became men of enormous power and influence – even today. I am not saying, of course, that the paths they trod were easy – dying on a cross is immensely painful and hard. But their lives were not perverse or distorted. A perverse or distorted Jesus would have died in his late eighties as a successful judge or religious elder, although he would have been utterly wrecked by his hypocrisy.

These men often lived through action and silence more than speech, and so they left little opportunity to become caught in the paradoxical logic described above. They just did what was necessary without speech, since speech and words, as discussed above, can become a prison. When they did speak, they did so paradoxically and almost in riddles. In this way, what they expressed found balance in its expression since it seemed to capture to the contradictory nature of truth in one statement.

The approach is evident in thinkers like Wittgenstein who, in a more rational way, saw that language can be a prison and that there is a beyond to the world that language can point to but cannot describe. The figures of great integrity are people who point the way, though what they point to cannot be described.

We cannot expect to live up to Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, or Lao-Tse in our own lives, but we can see these men of integrity as providing an indication of what is required of us, if we have the courage of our feelings and thoughts.

I know this all sounds childishly simple and it’s certainly not a principle that I live up to in my own life, but I very much think and feel it is the truth.

Tom X Hart

Written by

West Midlands, UK

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