Lonely Nazis Among Us

Gary North - October 07, 2015

Within the far Right, there are Nazis. Real ones.

I received this email on October 6:

Since no one will say this, I will.
Europe desperately needs another Adolf Hitler.
And so does North America.

Karen C.

Think of this lady's situation. She sees herself as all alone. I hope that her assessment is correct.

The world around her scares her. She imagines that the European Union needs another Hitler. Not just a German one -- a continent-wide one. Lebensraum at last!

This assumes that the nations of Western Europe are agreeable to having one leader. "One Volk!" The problem is this: Hitler was a nationalist and a racist. How does Western Europe as a whole conform to that image? It doesn't.

America needs one, too, she says. I assume that we don't need the European one.

As to what the remaining 170 or so nations desperately need, she did not say.

There are those who would like to surrender to a national leader.

Karen longs for deliverance. She longs for a national leader to stand before an adoring crowd, arms extended. She longs to hear: "Salvation [heil], Leader!" What's that? You say you never read what "Heil, Hitler" really meant? You probably also did not read that the French word for safety ("salut") is also salvation, as in Robespierre's Committee on Public Salvation. I never saw a reference to this this until I read Robert Nisbet's book The Sociological Tradition (1967) (p. 34). It is conveniently skipped over in books on the French Revolution.

There are worshippers of state power among us. I mean real, live worshippers. They see politics as healing, as redemptive. That was the heart of Nazism, or as it ought to be known, National Socialism. His party was the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) -- Nazi, in its short form. (Textbooks prefer the term Nazi, to avoid the obvious: identifying this as a Leftist socialist party.)

How is it that people still believe in the centralization of state power as the way of restoration, or redemption, in history?

How is it that we find fringe statists reading Lew Rockwell's site, which ran my article on Europe?

Here is what Karen added:

MSM propagandists and court historians have twisted and lied about the real history of Europe. You should know this.

It is tragic that most people believe their lies. Europe is dying because of this terrible reality that even you will not see. . . .

You've taught me a valuable lesson. I thought the Libertarians were knowledgeable about the real history of Europe.

I can see I was wrong. You are nothing but a court historian catering to the banksters.

She thinks of herself as a libertarian -- a National Socialist libertarian.

Within the American Right there is a wide array of fringe positions. That I could receive an email from a National Socialist in 2015 is indicative of how little education accomplishes in persuading people. They hold positions based on emotion.

That there are defenders of Hitler's racial policies, enforced by the nation-state, is amazing. But of course it isn't amazing. People think that redemption is by politics. The content of this politically redemptive process is less important than the process.

What would motivate Karen C. to send me her solution to Western Civilization's problems? Why would she imagine that I would regard her as anything but a nut-case?

What degree of loneliness, of total social isolation, is required to drive someone to this? She perceives that she is alone. How does someone maintain this degree of social marginalization? She reads LewRockwell.com. She mentally interacts with the world around her. But her response to this information is to affirm the legitimacy of one of the great aberrations in world history: the Nazi movement.

We must guard against letting fringe ideas lead into this degree of social isolation and impotence. A good way to guard against this is to be involved in charitable projects of various kinds. If you are offering help to someone who needs it, you maintain a social connection. You have a sense of positive creation.

Isolation is a high-risk condition. Avoid it.