Originally published in Vanguard, August 1991 Print

IS NATIONALISM NAZISM?

In this special VANGUARD feature we show why Nationalism is the enemy, not the ally, of Nazism.

Perhaps the favourite accusation aimed at British Nationalists over the years is that we are at heart 'Nazis' or 'Fascists'. It is an accusation we have in the past tended to dismiss or evade rather than seek to confront, seriously examine and answer. Yet it is not a difficult accusation to rebut, at least for those of us against whom it is wholly without foundation. It is long past time we did so.

To achieve this we must firstly ask: what is 'Nazism'? Or 'Fascism'? Are they enduring ideologies or merely transient historical phenomena? And if they are ideologies, are they our ideology? If so, we ought to spurn the hypocrisy and evasion prevalent in certain circles and forthrightly say so. If not, we must not only say that too, we must justify our statement.

We must say not only that we are not 'Nazis' or 'Fascists' but why we are not. Matters are not helped by the tendency of many on the Left to debase 'nazi' and 'fascist' (generally shorn of the dignity of a capital letter) into mere political swear words. Imprecations to be bayed mindlessly at those of whom such individuals disapprove, including Mrs. Thatcher and even Neil Kinnock!

But nor are they aided by those who openly described, or, usually more covertly, still describe, themselves in such terms, as becomes clear if we glance over the "theoretical writings", if they deserve such a grandiose title, of such movements.

The 'Nazi Bible', Hitler's Mein Kampf, if it is actually read, turns out to be no more than a ponderous, pompously-written account of how the author built a not-very-successful political party in early 1920's Weimar Germany, which is of little wider relevance. Together with a bigoted xenophobic rant not just against "the Jews" but also against such inveterate foes of Europe and the White Race as the French, the Poles, and the Czechs, mingled with a litany of early 20th Century German/Austrian petty national grievances and territorial ambitions.

While the only vision of a New Society we are offered in Mein Kampf is the depressingly old order of a brutal militaristic despotism revelling in tyranny, gratuitous violence and the opportunistic theft of as much surrounding territory as it could get away with. The level of logic or argument throughout appears to owe less to Great Political Thought than to the closing-time rantings of some local Alf Garnett in a Viennese bar circa 1910.

There is little actual ideology or political thought in Mein Kampf at all, and what there is isn't original. One searches in vain for an all-encompassing world-view from which policies in any given situation can be logically deduced. The same is true of other Nazi writings. At best there is mystic anti-rationalist claptrap about Leaders "embodying the Will of the Volk" which actually comes down to "do as you are told and avoid independent thought".

Only Otto Strasser tried to define "the Idea" and he was forced out of the NSDAP for doing so. Otherwise there is simply no such thing as a "Nazi ideology" as there is, however internally inconsistent at times, a Marxist one. It follows, of course, that as there was no Nazi ideology it cannot be ancestral to our ideology!

But perhaps the NSDAP's policy statement, the "Twenty-Five Principles", will give us a better idea of what "National Socialism" is than its Fuehrer's turgid opus?

But these policies are no more than a mixture of the unoriginal - the cold showers, soldierly virtues and "positive Christianity" of the contemporary typical school Speech Day; the unexceptionable - the unification of the nation and the removal from it of ethnic aliens; and the unimplemented. The latter comprised sundry worthy ideas about profit sharing, dismantling monopolies, encouraging small businessmen and basing education on ability, not wealth.

Other worthy ideas were expressed in early Nazi writings. Notably ruralist and distributist "Blood and Soil" concepts, and a genuinely positive and radical "National Revolutionary" programme. But such ideas were not in the event implemented, whilst those who seriously expected them to be were murdered (Gregor Strasser and - for his political ideas, not his private habits - Ernst Roehm), driven into exile (Otto Strasser), or at best marginalised into irrelevance (Walther Darré).

OTTO STRASSER -

Led the only effective resistance to Hitler in Germany in the Thirties, and made a genuine contribution to radical patriotic thought.

Their actions in power merely reflected their poverty of theory in a poverty of practice. Lacking a coherent ideological framework, the Hitler regime was forced to make policies up as it went along. Policies even its modern worshippers have the wit to reject.

Economically, the banks were not nationalised, the Stock Exchange was not abolished, the money supply was not reformed. Mass unemployment was simply soaked up in best Keynesian style by massive public spending, mainly in military-related areas.

Other countries, including our own, applied much the same medicine without the totalitarian trimmings. It proved a cure for mass deflationary unemployment - there have been no more Thirties-style slumps. Instead it lands you on the inflation/unemployment see-saw, on which Western economies have been wobbling up and down for decades.

More radical ideas were available, proposed by the likes of Gottfried Feder. But as with almost all genuine principled radical nationalist ideas, Hitler rejected them. Adolf Hitler clearly saw how little he had in common with the ancestors of modern racial nationalism, even if our opponents today don't!

Externally, the worthy aim of uniting all the Germans by consent into one nation rapidly gave way to unworthy aims of imperialistic theft of other European peoples' homelands. Which, of course, led other nations which could have accepted a limited, visibly-defined objective of uniting the Germans, to band together and fight a seemingly infinite expansionist imperialism, buttressed by a muddle of confused, half-baked and unscientific Nazi "racial theories". According to which Japanese were White and Poles and Russians weren't, for example! Classically Nordic Eastern Europeans were classed as "racially inferior" to the fat little Alpine Austrians whence Der Fuehrer sprang.

As a result of this twaddle brown-skinned, slant-eyed Turkoman tribesmen in SS uniforms and Islamic fezzes hanged blue-eyed, blonde-haired Russian schoolgirls in European village squares whilst grinning Negroes hawked 'German Cameroons' bananas on the streets of Berlin and beturbanned Sikhs strutted about in the uniforms of the 'ethnic European elite' Waffen-SS.

Whilst modern racial nationalists have a coherent, humane policy grounded in the scientific realities of race, the Nazis merely talked a lot of nonsense on the subject, in the process making subsequent rational discussion of racial questions very difficult.

Anti-European German imperialism and lies about supposed 'Slavic sub-humans', far from 'uniting Europeans against Communism' as contemporary Nazi propagandists and subsequent apologists proclaimed, succeeding in uniting Europeans with Communism.

In the face of an invader who behaved like Genghis Khan's Mongols, even Stalin was enabled to pose as a patriot and enlist the support of peoples who had been shown still a worse master than the Dark Lord of the Kremlin. Hitler won himself the dubious distinction of being the only man who could have invaded Stalin's Empire in 1941 and lost.

Hitler's Russian disaster was yet again a reflection of the total ideological ignorance and political bankruptcy of Nazism which damned him to defeat.

Worse, it damned half Europe to forty years of Marxist tyranny. Our nationalism is founded in a respect for the right of all other nations to their freedom too. Hitler's imperialism was based on contempt for every people unlucky enough to share a border with his. The two positions have nothing, really, in common.

The essence of Nazism, one is compelled to conclude, consisted simply of obeying Adolf Hitler's orders. Somewhat difficult to do nowadays! Obeying some mediocre pseudo-Fuehrer offers today's Faithful, at best, a poor substitute.

(Insert 'See on Evil' pic here)

See no evil in Hitler, hear no evil in Hitler – the modern Third Reich apologist is nothing new...

Judged by every, one of his own criteria, Adolf Hitler was not a hero but a total failure and calamity. He set out to strengthen Germany. He left it divided and devastated. He set out to defeat Communism. He left it stronger than ever, master of half Europe. He set out to defeat "American Capitalism". He left that stronger than ever too, master of the other half of Europe. He set out to defeat "the Jews". He left them stronger than ever, effectively immune to any criticism in a way they had never been before.

He set out to "purify the European race". He left Europe to be invaded by millions of Coloured Immigrants: criticism of this invasion was discredited by association with his brutal policies.

He set out to strengthen the idea of Race. He left it unable to be mentioned in polite circles thanks to the unscientific drivel the Nazis perpetrated on the subject.

He left the movement he led not merely tainted with defeat - which can be lived down - but fouled by sickening atrocities which damned it forever. But they need not damn us. We really have little in common with any of this.

For in the end no-one, as we have seen, including the Nazis and Fascists themselves, seems to know what Nazism and Fascism were, beyond militaristic dictatorships pursuing aggressive foreign policies. We, on the other hand, know what we believe in and what we seek.

We do not seek a restriction of democracy but its extension. Not the whims of a 'Leader' but the Will of the People must prevail: nationally, by the implementation of the people's will on such issues as immigration and capital punishment. Economically, by encouraging direct ownership and control, through workers' co-operatives and small businesses, by the people of their workplaces. And socially, through aiming toward a society in which people live in genuine local communities, be they rural villages or urban neighbourhoods, which run as many of their own affairs as possible through direct debate and decisions at meetings open to all in the community.

We advocate not the restriction but the strengthening of traditional British rights of free speech by enshrining them in law in a Bill of Rights. We avow freedom in principle. But we also recognize that tyranny is stupid and inefficient in practice. Any government which cannot keep the willing support of the people, which has anything to fear from free and frank criticism, which needs to hide behind a secret police or concentration camps, deserves to lose power.

We believe that our ideology is based on a better understanding of human nature than its rivals. We believe that from that understanding springs not only policies which better serve our people than the alternatives, but which they themselves will prefer anyway. As the existing powers that be evidently suspect and fear anyway.

Or why bother suppressing debate on such issues as Race? Why seek to deny our views a platform? If - given a free and fair hearing of what we have to say - the people don't want us that is our fault, not theirs. It means our ideas need rethinking, rather than our critics requiring incarcerating or shooting.

Finally we reject the Nazi, Fascist (and Communist!) vision of personal dictatorship because it simply doesn't work. Leaving aside their failures when in power, totalitarian dictatorships do not long outlive their founders. Look at Spain, Russia, or Yugoslavia. Francoism died with Franco. Stalinism did not long outlive Stalin, nor Titoism Tito. How long would Hitlerism have outlived Hitler, Fascism Mussolini?

The will of one man, however able or otherwise, is simply not broad enough a base on which to found an enduring social order. Only the will of the people as a whole offers a firm enough foundation for any lasting achievement. As last our achievement must. We work to save our Nation and Race not for a generation or a lifetime but for ever.

Most fundamentally, we reject the anti-rationalism, absence of clear thought and sheer incoherent nonsense at the heart of Nazism and Fascism. As they conspicuously did not, we have the basis of a clear, comprehensively thought out ideological world-view, buttressed by the very latest in scientific evidence. This ideology needs to be, and is being, further developed and expanded upon. But already it has given rise to clear, coherent policies upon matters such as the structure of the economy, the monetary system, the ownership of industry, agriculture, social services etc. upon which the Nazis and Fascists were, in practical terms, silent.

The lack of this proper ideological foundation was not all, in fairness, the Nazis' and Fascists' fault, any more than it was Karl Marx's. Decades before Lorenz, Eysenck, E.O. Wilson, Hamilton, Dawkins and the rest had laid the factual basis for a rational understanding of the sociobiological and behavioural nature of Man and Society, one of the vital planks upon which to base such an ideology was simply not yet available. It was therefore inevitable that any attempt at formulating one would now be clearly inadequate and obsolete, although not necessarily without some useful insights which could be embodied in the modern synthesis, as Marxism has proved.

But by and large the Nazis and Fascists never even tried to formulate a coherent, self-consistent ideology. Had they done so, keeping it alive now would still be absurd, the intellectual equivalent of pitting a Messerschmidt Me 109 in a dogfight against a Tornado or an F16. But in fact the Nazis and Fascists rejected reason and thought, the one advantage the modern civilized European has over the jungle savage.

Our ideology owes more to the early British Socialists such as Jack London and William Morris, to the Catholic Distributists such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, to patriotic strands in conservative thinking, and, if a foreign contribution must be sought, to Otto Strasser, who led the German Resistance against the Nazis throughout the 1930's, than it does to the confused intellectual bankrupts around Hitler and Mussolini.

So, in conclusion, we have nothing whatsoever in common with Nazism and Fascism. They are not political ideologies in any coherent sense, and if they were they would be outdated, irrelevant and unrelated to our own. They failed, and deserved to fail, and in their failure endangered not just their worthless selves but the survival of the nations and the peoples of Europe.

Nazism and Fascism deserve only our unreserved condemnation. They are nothing to do with us. We offer not slavery but freedom, not mindless obedience but informed action, not the rejection but the application of Reason, not slaughtering our fellow White men but saving our common White race, not genocide but repatriation, not bigotry but mutual cultural respect for other peoples and races, including the Jews, who have a right to freedom in their own lands as we have to freedom in ours.

We are not Nazis offering a foreign past, history repeated first as tragedy then as farce. We are Nationalists offering a British future. It is our dream, no-one else's. Join us in making it come true...