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Dr.
William L. Pierce Adolf
Hitler – The Measure of Greatness National
Vanguard editorial from 1989 April 20 of this year is the 100th
anniversary of the birth of the greatest man of our era -- a man who dared
more and achieved more, who set his aim higher and climbed higher, who felt
more deeply and stirred the souls of those around him more mightily, who was
more closely attuned to the Life Force which permeates our cosmos and gives
it meaning and purpose, and did more to serve that Life Force, than any other
man of our times. And
yet he is the most reviled and hated man of our times. Only a few tens of
thousands of men and women, in scattered groups around the world, will
celebrate his birthday with love and reverence on April 20, while all of the
scribblers and commentators of the controlled news media, the controlled
politicians, and the controlled churchmen will pour out their hatred and
venom and lies against him, and those lies will be believed by hundreds of
millions. What
is the measure of greatness in a man? Only
the most vulgar and doctrinaire democrat would seriously equate greatness
with popularity -- although in any polling of average citizens on their
choice for the greatest man of the century there are certain to be
substantial numbers of votes for Elvis Presley, John Kennedy, Billy Graham,
Michael Jackson, and various other high-visibility lightweights: charismatic
entertainers on the stage of politics, rock concerts, spectator sports, or
what have you. More
serious citizens would pass by the lightweights and choose men who have
changed the world in some way. We would hear choices like Franklin Roosevelt (“he
saved the world from fascism”), Albert Einstein (“he taught us about the
nature of our universe”), and Martin Luther King (“he helped us achieve
racial justice”), depending upon whether one’s
personal inclinations lay more in the direction of politics, science, or
racial self-abasement, respectively. But
if the poll asked instead for the most evil man of the century, or the most
hated man, or the man having the most negative influence, at least three-quarters
of the blue-collar and the white-collar pollees
alike would name one man: Adolf Hitler. This, however, would be merely a
reflection of the role assigned to him by the controlled mass media, rather
than a truly informed and reasoned choice. All
of this raises several very interesting issues. There is, for example, the
question of how we came to the preposterous state of affairs prevailing
today, wherein we place the destiny of our nation, our planet, and our race
in the hands of a mass of voters whose powers of judgment are manifested in
such things as the type of television entertainment their preferences have
pushed into prime time and the type of men they have elected to public office.
And there is the equally weighty question of how, knowing the ease with which
this mass is misled, we permitted virtually all of the media of mass
information and entertainment to fall into the hands of a race whose
interests are so diametrically opposed to our own. Perhaps
even more pertinent to a consideration of human greatness, however, is the
question of how our system of values came to be turned on its head, so that
Franklin Roosevelt is regarded as a hero and Adolf Hitler as a villain, not
only by the stolid and stunned masses, but also by a majority of the
supposedly “educated” elite, many of whom pride themselves on their
intellectual independence. Whether
we judge the greatness of a man by his intrinsic qualities of character and
soul or by his accomplishments, Adolf Hitler had greatness of a very high
order -- if we use the standards which have been traditional in our race. We
cannot, of course, make comparisons with all the “mute, inglorious Miltons” whose lack of notable accomplishment has made
them anonymous, despite the sterling inner qualities they may have possessed.
But when Hitler’s character is held up beside those of other 20th-century
political leaders, he stands as a giant among pygmies. At
the prosaic level, we can note his ascetic personal habits, compared with
Winston Churchill’s habitual drunkenness and notorious self-indulgence; or
his personal loyalty to those who had been his comrades in the days of
political struggle, compared with Joseph Stalin’s habit of murdering his
former comrades by the dozen, as potential rivals, as soon as he no longer
needed their services; or his direct, frank, and straightforward manner,
compared to the cunning deviousness which was Franklin Roosevelt’s trademark. At
the spiritual level, the inner differences between Hitler and his
contemporaries are even more striking. Hitler was a man with a mission, from
the beginning. The testimony of his closest associates, from his boyhood days
to the end of his life, agrees with the observations of more distant and impartial
observers: Hitler had a mystical sense of destiny, a sense of having been
singled out and called by a higher power to devote his life to the service of
his race. His
childhood companion August Kubizek has related
extraordinary evidence of this when Hitler was only 16 years old.<August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (Graz, 1953), pp. 127-135> Twenty years
later, while he was in prison after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the
government, Hitler himself wrote of his motivation in a way which suggested
the range of his vision: “What
we must fight for is the security of the existence and reproduction of our
race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the maintenance of
the purity of our blood . . . so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted them by the Creator
of the universe. Every
thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this
purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or
rejected according to its utility. Then no theory will stiffen into a dead
doctrine, since it is life alone that all things must serve. . . . .
. . [T]he National Socialist philosophy finds the importance of mankind in
its basic racial elements. In the state it sees on principle a means to an
end and construes that end as the preservation of the racial existence of man.
. . . And
so the National Socialist philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost
will of Nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to
a continuous mutual higher breeding, until finally the best of humanity,
having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free play for activity
in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it. We
all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which
only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and
possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome. . . . Thus,
the highest purpose of a National Socialist state is concern for the
preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and
create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can
conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality which not
only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of
its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom. . . . A
National Socialist state must begin by raising marriage from the level of a
continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an
institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not
monstrosities halfway between man and ape. . . . It
must set race in the center of all life. It must
take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious
treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget
children . . . . The
National Socialist state must make certain that by a suitable education of
youth it will someday obtain a race ripe for the last and greatest decisions
on this earth. . . . .
. .[A]nyone who wants to
cure this era, which is inwardly sick and rotten, must first summon the
courage to make clear the causes of this disease. And this should be the
concern of the National Socialist movement: pushing aside all narrow-mindedness,
to gather and to organize from the ranks of our nation those forces capable
of becoming the vanguard fighters for a new philosophy of life. . . . We
are not simple enough to believe that it could ever be possible to bring
about a perfect era. But this relieves no one of the obligation to combat
recognized errors, to overcome weaknesses, and to strive for the ideal. Harsh
reality of its own accord will create only too many limitations. For that
very reason, however, man must try to serve the ultimate goal, and failures
must not deter him, any more than he can abandon a system of justice because
mistakes creep into it, or any more than medicine is discarded because there
always will be sickness in spite of it. We
National Socialists know that with this conception we stand as revolutionaries
in the world of today and are branded as such. But our thoughts and actions
must in no way be determined by the approval or disapproval of our time, but
by the binding obligation to a truth which we have recognized.”<Adolf
Hitler, Mein Kampf> Hitler’s
opponents, Churchill and Roosevelt, were party politicians, with the minds
and souls of party politicians. Great, impersonal goals, just as truth, meant
nothing at all to them. The only thing that counted was the approval or
disapproval of their times: the outcome of the next election, a good press
claque, votes. Only Stalin shared in any way Hitler’s
disdain for approval; only Stalin was motivated to any degree by an
impersonal idea. But the idea that Stalin served was the alien, destructive
idea of Jewish Marxism. And while Hitler served the Life Force with the
instincts of a seer, Stalin served Marxism with the instincts of a bureaucrat
and a butcher. A
comparison of careers leads us to a similar ranking of greatness of soul. Churchill
and Roosevelt were born into the political establishment. They fed at the
public trough for years, in one office after another, grabbing greedily at
opportunities for a bigger serving of swill. But it was circumstance, not
their own efforts, which thrust them onto the stage of world history. Stalin
hacked out his own niche in history to a much greater extent than his western
allies, and he was an incomparably stronger man than either of them. He was
tough, ruthless, infinitely cunning, and utterly determined to prevail, no
matter what the obstacles. Even so, his struggle for prominence and power was
entirely within the Bolshevik party and its predecessors. He was the
consummate bureaucratic infighter, not the innovator or the lone pioneer. Only
Adolf Hitler started literally from nothing and through the exercise of a superhuman
will created the physical basis for the realization of his vision. In 1918,
recovering from a British poison-gas attack in a veterans’ hospital, he made
the decision to enter politics in order to serve that vision. He was a 29-year-old
invalid, with no money, no family, no friends or connections, no university
education, and no experience. Liberals, Jews, and communists ruled his
country, making him and all those to whom he might appeal for support
outsiders. Five
and one-half years later he was sentenced to five years in prison for his
political activity, and his enemies thought that was the end of him and his
movement. But less than nine years after being sentenced he
was Chancellor of Germany, with the strongest and most progressive nation in
Europe at his command. He had built the National Socialist movement and led
it to victory over the organized opposition of the entire Establishment: conservatives,
liberals, communists, Jews, and Christians. He
then transformed Germany, lifting it out of its economic depression (while
Americans, under Roosevelt, continued to line up at the soup kitchens),
restoring its spirit (and much of the territory which had been taken from it
by the victors of the First World War), stimulating its artistic and scientific
creativity, and winning the admiration (or, in some cases, the envy and
hatred) of other nations. It was an achievement hardly paralleled in the
history of the world. Even those who do not understand the real significance
of his creation must concede that. And
what was the real significance of Hitler’s work? One of his most earnest
admirers in India, Savitri Devi,
has given us a poetic answer to that question. She wrote: “.
. . [I]n its essence, the National Socialist idea exceeds not only Germany
and our times, but the Aryan race and mankind itself and any epoch; . . . it
ultimately expresses that mysterious and unfailing wisdom according to which
Nature lives and creates: the impersonal wisdom of the primeval forest and of
the ocean depth and of the spheres in the dark fields of space; and .. . it is Adolf Hitler’s glory not merely to have
gone back to that divine wisdom -- stigmatizing man’s silly infatuation for “intellect,”
his childish pride in “progress,” and his criminal attempt to enslave Nature --
but to have made it the basis of a practical regeneration policy of worldwide
scope, precisely now, in our overcrowded, overcivilized,
and technically overevolved world, at the very end
of the dark age.”<Savitri Devi,
The Lightning and the Sun (National Socialist World No. 1, p. 61)> More
prosaically, Hitler’s work, in contrast to that of his contemporaries, was
above politics, above economics, above nationalism. He had mobilized a
powerful, modern state and placed it at the service of our race, so that our
race might become fit to serve as an agent of the Life Force. Perceptive
and idealistic young men from every nation in Europe -- and from many nations
outside Europe as well -- recognized this significance, and they flocked to
serve him and to fight for his cause, even at the cost of censure and
ostracism from their more parochial and narrow-minded countrymen. There was
never before an elite fighting force to match the SS, which by the end of the
Second World War had more non-Germans than Germans in it. The
war, of course, is counted as Hitler’s great failure, even as the proof of
his lack of greatness, by his detractors. It merely proves that he was a man,
not a god, even if a divine will worked through him, and that he could not
perform miracles. He could not defend himself forever, with the governments
of nearly the whole world allied in a total war to pull him down and destroy
his creation, so that they and the interests they served could return to “business
as usual.” Even so, he gave a far better account of himself than any of his
adversaries. And
what will count in the long run in determining Adolf Hitler’s stature is not
whether he lost or won the war, but whether it was he or his adversaries who
were on the side of the Life Force, whether it was he or they who served the
cause of Truth and human progress. We only have to look around us today to
know it was not they. This
article was originally published in NATIONAL VANGUARD Magazine, PO Box 330,
Hillsboro WV 24946 USA. Fax # 304-653-4690 |
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