Nancy's Nazis

American Thinker ^ | August 08, 2009 | James Lewis

[neverdem]

Nancy Pelosi has a very florid imagination. In her mind's eye she is seeing people "carrying swastikas" at Town Hall meetings to protest Obama's Central Plan for American medicine. Which makes me wonder why all the swastika-carrying nutsies -- or Nazis? or just nasties? --  in Ms. Pelosi's imagination are not in favor of Obama's plan to control US medicine. It's a control freak's dream, after all, and the Nazis were totalitarian control freaks.

Can we get serious? One of the painful things today is the massive failure of history teaching in the schools and colleges, so that kids confuse Hitler's Nazis with the people who fought for freedom against them. Stalin and Hitler forged an alliance in 1938. Had Hitler not gone mad and invaded Stalin's Soviet Union, the Nazis and Soviets would have gone to war against the West together. And they would have won.

The Nazis were totalitarian romantics. That is why Hitler imitated and glorified Richard Wagner, the Siegfried mythographer who marked the very height of German Romanticism.  That is also why the Nazis hated both Jews and Christians, and promoted a neo-pagan religion based on the Nordic gods and the glorification of killing and war. The Nazis were romantics -- just like the hippies in the Sixties. They loved going "back to nature," "the noble Savage," nudism, and the destruction of marriage and traditional families.

Obama's former good buds Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are prototypical anarchist Romantics, people who are quite willing to kill for their cause. Hitler's Nazis were emotional revolutionaries with an endless craving to attack, subvert, control and co-opt all the existing structures of society. Oh, and yes, they had a Mass Cult of the Leader not unlike the idolatry whipped up for Barack Obama today. Obama's "Citizens of the World!" speech in front of 200,000 cheering Berliners had that very familiar look to it. That was not an accident, but a deliberate PR stunt.

The best explanation of Nazism ever written is Peter Viereck's Metapolitics: The roots of the Nazi mind. If you only give your kids one book this year, that should be the one. Viereck's Metapolitics was written in great fear and passion during the early days of Hitler's rise, when the author was a still graduate student of German history, and then revised two decades later. But it's one of those books that remains relevant because it hits the nail on the head. You can't get more accurate than Viereck did. A few years later Thomas Mann wrote an Epilogue to Viereck's book, endorsing its main conclusions. They both understood how deeply the Nazis were rooted in German history.

"Metapolitics" is the name the Nazis gave to their brand of politics, because in their minds they were trying to change the entire world, not just be another political party. Marxism is metapolitics; Nazism is metapolitics. And yes, some of today's political fantasists dream the same dreams. (Hint: Who do you think wants to revolutionize the world today?)

Metapolitics was very controversial even after World War Two, because it criticized European Romanticism, beloved by European and American scholars and writers. But Peter Viereck was right and his critics were wrong. German Romanticism of the totalitarian variety survived the Nazis, and just re-emerged as the Green movement in Europe. Nazism was always a "back to nature" movement anyway. After the Nazis were defeated, all the Wagnerian Romantics turned into Socialist Romantics. Often they were the very same people, like Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and even Jean-Paul Sartre.  The 1968 student riots in Europe, which ultimately brought the Greens to power, were run by anarchists identical to the Nazi rioters of the Munich beer halls. Some of them have realized as much since that time.

Post-modernism is an attack on Western rationalism, democracy, capitalism, free speech and free thought. It's called "Post-Modernism" because it wants to kill modernism. Modernism stands for science, technology, democracy, medicine and yes, bourgeois capitalism: The keys to modern prosperity and well-being. That is why "Post-Modernism" became so popular in our college English and History departments. That is also why we have the "global warming" fraud, the anti-science movements, the anti-nuclear power campaigns, the "post-modern" media -- run by propaganda artists who were taught in college that lying for a "good cause" was better than telling the truth. Those are the mediots who are running our media today.

Culturally, the Nazis would have felt right at home with that attack on Western rationalism, capitalism, and freedom of thought. It was exactly what they wanted. The Nazis were Post-Modernists. Modernity was their enemy. Hitler characteristically called Albert Einstein's relativity theory "Jewish science." Back in Moscow, Jozef Stalin promoted an attack on science by peddling fraudulent agricultural genetics. Stalin thought he could discipline his marching ranks of wheat stalks to grow taller by force, encouraged by his fraudulent "geneticist" Trofim Lysenko.   Both Hitler and Stalin hated real science. They had real scientists sent to concentration camps.

The reason is of course that real science is about telling the truth. That is why "global warming" is also a totalitarian scheme; it's fraudulent science. It is also why the Left cannot openly debate the pros and cons of Central Planning in American medicine. They are not happy with searching out the truth.

And I'm afraid, that is also why Nancy Pelosi has to imagine "people with swastikas" flooding the Town Hall meetings in America, to fight against all the Good and Noble people like herself. Nancy is a certifiable airhead, but the beliefs echoing in her head come from decades of ideological indoctrination -- of the Totalitarian Romantic kind. People like Ms. Pelosi have been given all the answers by the ideologues of the Left. That is why their minds are shut so air tight. 

Let's not call them names, our Totalitarian Romantics of today. 

But let's not forget their historical antecedents either.

Hint: It's not Washington, Madison, Jefferson or Lincoln.

[Domangart]

The reason she sees them is that they are stamped on her contacts.

[rawcatslyentist]

>"In her mind's eye she is seeing people "carrying swastikas" at Town Hall meetings to protest Obama's Central Plan for American medicine."

That sounds fishy to me. Better "Report" it on 0b0z0's Gestapo page at whitehousedotgov.

[backhoe]

Hattip: The American Spectator:

[haroldeveryman]

Great Article! The writer does a great job of explaining why totalitarian governments cannot tolerate the dispassionate quest for truth that has been the hallmark of free capitalist societies.

If you want to pursue these ideas further, get M. Stanton Evans’ book “The Theme is Freedom” (along with some subtitle I forget) , written in the 1990’s. It covers this ground at length. It includes a discussion of these quirky tendencies of the left such as the fondness of leftist ideologues for “superhero” political personalities, pagan religions (and intolerance for Christianity) , “back to nature” movements, junk science, etc). Stanton’s basic premise is that it was the replacement of the ancient concept of superman-like pagan gods and demons with the Christian idea of an all powerful, transcendent “One God” that is responsible for the idea of limited government and the development of freedom.

[AmericanVictory]

You obviously don’t understand that mathematics and technology were invented by Africans and stolen by Europeans.

[Happy Rain]

Stolen?

Thats a bit harsh—and very disingenuous.

I suppose the concept of the automobile was “stolen” from the caveman's wheel.

Africa was the birthplace of the human but it has been a mathematical and technological (and everything else) basket case ever since the Europeans created modern science and the most efficacious societies (with a few stumbles,of course) man has yet produced.

Use your jungle drums while I twitter.

[AmericanVictory]

What, you doubt Yoruba mathematics. You’re obviously a European. We’ll have you know that the first space program was in Africa, consisting of a giant sling shot that propelled a man 500 feet in the air. And what of the all those codes of law that came out of ancient Africa? You probably think that a written language is important.

[Happy Rain]

Oops,I forgot the Yoruba math.

Fineman’s quantum thermodynamic equations would have been impossible without it not to mention the Zulu contribution to small arms technology,Kikuyu advancements in post-colonial administration of Kenya,Bantu control of a new and improved Congo and the Xhosa running a once world power like South Africa.

But seriously,the roots of English composition,the supreme accomplishment of written language,from Islamic North Africa script is nothing to sneeze at.

But when those who invented the characters we so eloquently use and abuse can write nothing more profound than death to the infidel,I find it hard to be grateful.

[AmericanVictory]

Yes, but in most of Africa for hundred of years there was no written language. And the North Africa of the days of the Roman Empire was taken over by the Islamic sword as an existing situation in terms of its advanced civilization for the day. We are also constrained to point out that under the caliphates a very large number of the leading scholars were not themselves Muslim or were not orthodox Muslims. There was much more tolerance than we see today.

[Happy Rain]

I remember when King Faisal in “Laurence of Arabia” stated that Damascus had public lighting when London was but a village.

What happened?

Unfortunately,America's glory days are now going the way of the Islamic golden age—and at the hands of a Muslim named president.

I could just die from the evil irony.

And we just may.

[AmericanVictory]

Some leadership, don’t you think? We could have taken the oil weapon away, without the delusions of a “green economy,” at by at least 15 years ago and we still haven’t. We could point out that without the illusion of wealth created by the one-crop economy of oil we could actually have the honesty to say that Shari’ia law does not work, but we won’t.

[Happy Rain]

Thirty years ago there was a popular comic strip called,”Duke.”

It was about a big intellectual dog giving sage and witty advice,axioms and insights to clueless humans.Some say “Duke” was an inspiration for Calvin and Hobbs.

In one strip,they were debating God,and if He was a practical joker.Duke won the theological discussion nicely by simply stating that the Lord put the oil underneath the sandy sandals of the Arab.

Duke could have continued with God putting the oil in an America infested with environmentalist misanthropes,but that would,I guess,been redundant.
America hating bozos are all the same.

[GBA]

Read this pint to self

[grey_whiskers]

Remember, George Soros collaborated with the Nazis as a teenager.

Someone remind me, who is he siding with right now, again?

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Weirdad]

big bump to the whole article and discussion

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

It's called "Post-Modernism" because it wants to kill modernism. Modernism stands for science, technology, democracy, medicine and yes, bourgeois capitalism: The keys to modern prosperity and well-being. That is why "Post-Modernism" became so popular in our college English and History departments. That is also why we have the "global warming" fraud, the anti-science movements...

I'm reminded of the aging Charles Lindbergh, who glorified contemporary savages and put "nature" ahead of humanity and was the Algore of the times (1960's), except unlike Algore he once actually accomplished something laudable.

The Rousseau movement never dies out, someone always has it, like leprosy.

[Tainan]

BKMRK...of course...image file

[Tainan]

BKMRK...of course...image file

[ripley]

“You obviously don’t understand that mathematics and technology were invented by Africans and stolen by Europeans.”

There are mathematics books all over the place, libraries in abundance, nuts, screws, bolts, materials, technical manuals and tools everywhere and you say mathematics and technology were stolen.

Do you mean to take everything back,rescind progress, and give all back to its rightful owners? Will there be an indictment of all who stole mathematics and technology?

Just asking.

IMHO