Printable View
If you've got a moment, I'd be interested in your views on the Martin Durkin piece Snin linked to on Nazism as a reconstructed Feudalism by the German ruling class.
Link and my thoughts: http://www.awimb.com/fudforum/index.php?t=tree&goto=4013 015&rid=2804&S=8e16a9bf23b111a7734319a1c1afdcf0
Cheers :thumbup:
is not a new concept, at least not here. It's German origins is an interesting study.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2010/10/the_original _environazis.html
We see their glorious outcome in California today. You should check out their sorry 50 year history in managing their water, noy everyone is now ordered to go around stinking for lack of shower. their lawns and plants turn brown as their streets pile up with filth. But they are still running water into the ocean to save the Delta Smelt, a nondescript fish.
70% of their water runs into the ocean. they haven't built a new reservoir in over 50 years. Of course, in their view now capitalism is to blame. You can't make it up.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/07/obamas-objective-nationali ze-californias-government-made-water-disaster/
The way I understand it, National Socialism emerged as a response to capitalism’s excesses and disruptions (to economic and financial crises), labor unrest, the work of organized communist and socialist parties, etc.
The Nazi ideological narrative was precisely an attempt to change something so that nothing would actually change. I agree with that without buying the whole 'wanted to avoid capitalism altogether'-type thing. They precisely wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
Fascism is at its most elementary a conservative revolution. They wanted economic development and modern industry but nevertheless it was a revolution which would maintain or even reassert a traditional hierarchical society which was modern and efficient yet controlled by hierarchic values with no class struggle or other antagonisms.
But of course antagonism and class struggle and other dangers is something inherent to capitalism. Modernization, industrialization -- as we know from the history of capitalism -- means disintegration of old stable relations, i.e. social conflicts; instability is the way capitalism functions.
So the way to solve that problem becomes to create an ideological narrative which explains what went wrong in a society, not as a result of the inherent tensions in the development of this society, but as the result of a foreign intruder. Things were okay, until Jews penetrated the social body. The way to restore the health of the social body is to eliminate the Jews.
They wanted capitalism without capitalism, i.e. retain capitalist productivity without its inherent antagonism.
The dominant fantasy of contemporary 'Green' visions posits nature as a harmonious interdependent system, always tending toward "a balance or equilibrium state" only disturbed by human activity.
If nature is therefore harmonious and in a state of equilibrium then all imbalances can be attributed to humans and especially industrialism and instrumental thinking/rationality which destroys the 'natural equilibrium'. So we basically have a system where everything is 'in order' and 'in place' except for our instrumental thinking and Will to dominate nature. Technology etc. is the foreign intruder, and this seems to be the rationale in an ecological response to environmental crises, dictating that we eschew, for example, the possibility of technical responses to problems produced by technological civilization. So the way to restore the health of the social body is to return to a more 'organic' relationship to the earth.
Seeing nature as a harmonious balanced whole is, of course, just a retroactive illusion (ala the Nazi organic pre-[and-for-them-hopefully-post]foreign-intruder-life-world ), nature is already messed up (see how oil was "produced") and we've done irreparable damage to the environment (only irreparable for us, obviously, nature doesn't give a ****). We need technology more than ever. It's just bad ideology for me, Clive.
Oh and re: your thinking that he's a bit rose-tinted when it comes to capitalism, I'm not sure I agree, if only because he didn't really talk about capitalism at all except in Britain in relation to "the organic community of das Volk" in Germany.
We may like to say that today we have the thrust of Capital which ruthlessly disregards and destroys particular life-worlds, threatening the very survival of humanity. Is this in the cultural logic of capitalism itself, or is it just the predominant thrust of the modern productivist attitude of technological domination over and exploitation of nature?
Or technological exploitation may just be the ultimate expression and realization of the deepest potential of modern Cartesian subjectivity itself. (I don't think so)
I don't think there's anything particularly 'Nazi' about environmentalism and a naive longing for pre-modern organic ways of life. It's just that with the exploitation and domination of nature we invariably end up dominating some aspects of our inner nature as well. The danger is in actually believing that we'll regain* that prelapsarian innonce somehow.
I apologize for not addressing anything relevant.
*'regain' implies that we once had something resembling the Utopian organic community ala Nazism or that nature once was harmonious and in a state of equilibrium. Of course both are retroactive fictions
Here is the gushing over capitalism in England:
"Over in England, through the 18th and early 19th Centuries, capitalism was roaring ahead, liberating and transforming British society."
"Because of capitalism, the serfs, instead of being “rooted†to the land, were now physically and socially mobile."
"In thrusting capitalistic, liberal England, the embittered grumbling of men like Malthus could not compete with the enlightened, thrilling, progressive ideas of men like Adam Smith and David Ricardo."
"In economics, the democratic, freedom-loving English Classical Liberals were opposed by the Statist, elitist German Historical School. In art, while the English were enjoying the bright, funny, civilised novels of Jane Austen, the Germans were producing the absurd, leaden, melancholic, crumbling castles and gargoyles of Sturm und Drang and gothic Romanticism, and the ridiculous pagan fantasies of Richard Wagner. In philosophy the early enlightened rationalism of men like David Hume was later countered by the dark German irrationalism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. "
And in Germany after the mid 19th century:
"The former humble obedient serfs were quickly becoming assertive towns-folk with money in their pockets. They could move jobs to find higher wages, they could gain promotion, they were courted as consumers, they could save and they could borrow, they could start a business."
and eventually he argues:
"The proletariat and the bourgeoisie was a common enemy. They shared a world-view which was commercial and extended beyond borders. (In this respect, Volkish right-wing anti-capitalism was a more accurate portrayal of reality than its Marxist offshoot)."
What do you think he means by describing Marxism as an 'offshoot' of Volkish right-wing anti-capitalism? There's nothing Volkish about historical materialism imo.
but without the instability and internal conflict. I recognise that view as a more conventional argument than Durkin's but it does dismiss the Volkish DNA thing, supposedly intrinsic to the entrenched feudalism of the German aristocracy with its resistance to commerce and the two dangerous new classes.
If you believe that the Nazis did want industrialism, then it must follow that there will be all the trappings of it, which means the end of the rural idyll, but the evidence is there that they were very actively 'green' with their policies on environment, animal rights and so on.
Your analysis can be seen, though, to agree with Durkin's that the traditional ruling class saw, in fascism, its own reinvention as a bureaucratic, governing class enjoying its traditional superiority.
However, what I thought you might argue was the view of Nazism as a degenerate form of capitalism as a response to the economic collapse that preceded it. ie - the only way for the capitalists to survive in the chaos and with a very real threat of communism, was to militarise society in a nationalist dictatorship, using a racial scapegoat.
Which brings us to the Joos. They got (and still are) blamed for both capitalism and communism, but in the article Chief posted (or one of the many links from it - http://www.aim.org/aim-report/hitlers-green-killing-machine/) we get the idea from Mein Kampf of a Jewish desire to control nature, via capitalism and communism. Now I know that controlling nature is a Marxist idea, but if Hitler thought it was a Jewish one it reinforces the green nazi theory.
(btw, I agree with your point about Greens eschewing the possibility of technical responses to problems produced by technological civilization, but it's not directly relevant)
Amongst other things, I now know something about John Heartfield, and where all those punk bands like the DKs got their cover-art style from. :hehe:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3042/...0258e35c_b.jpg
:hehe:
actually did promote animal welfare, vegetarianism, environmentalism, and whether this 'rural idyll' was merely an ideological ploy or not. I recently read Heidegger, and it all fits a bit too nicely :hehe:
Quote: However, what I thought you might argue was the view of Nazism as a degenerate form of capitalism as a response to the economic collapse that preceded it. ie - the only way for the capitalists to survive in the chaos and with a very real threat of communism, was to militarise society in a nationalist dictatorship, using a racial scapegoat.
I did by saying that it emerged as a response to capitalism’s excesses and disruptions (to economic and financial crises), labor unrest, and the work of organized communist and socialist parties.
And the whole necessity of the ideological figure of the paradoxically parasitic, rat-like, filthy, disgusting and manipulative and controlling high-society-and-looks-just-like-us Jews.
I have a feeling you're eager to dispell that notion? :hehe:
It would very much surprise me if they did not want modern industry and economic development, it would be all too naive at that stage to think you'd be able to revert to anything resembling pre-industrial. The dialectical movement was well and truly in motion.
Let's hope the Doctor has a less conventional understanding than me :thumbup:
but I think the difference is that you were suggesting that the Nazis wanted to use a limited, controlled version of capitalism to achieve their vision, whereas the other theory has the capitalists using Nazism as a vehicle to prop up their failing system. So which is the cart and which is the horse?
state had existed for less than a century when the Nazis came along, appealing to the idea of 'Germany' was a non-starter. The parochial regionalism of the country mitigated against a clear conception of statehood in the way the English or French have it. So instead, the concentration was on 'Germanness' - a racial idea of the Volk that harked back to a more ancient history of a people who had lived in the forests and defied effete southern European 'civilisation' in the form of Rome. Needless to say, of course, this ideal was exclusive of other peoples - not least the Jews.
This idea of Germanness was inextricably linked to nature and man's place therein. This can be seen in pre-Nazi German art such as Caspar David Friedrich, the brothers Grimm and Wagner. The symbolism of pre-civilisation paganism is widely used in Nazi regalia (from the oak leaf cluster of the Iron Cross to the runic script used by the SS). This backward-looking worship of nature, the forest and the pre-Christian, pagan past inevitably chimed with environmental and naturist tendencies, which shared with Nazism a desire to shrug off the constraints and 'corruption' of modern Christian civilisation and return to a supposedly better, purer (oh, such a loaded word!) time.
the whole controlling Europe thing.
stuff (the swastika, ffs?). However, the unifying theme was that of the pagan. Christianity never got a look in.