History of Political Thought

National Socialism, and Fascism

“The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.”

-- Mein Kampf, I, xii

Overview

• The State

• Race and the Volk

• The Individual

The State

“Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence...”

The State

• All political philosophies describe the relationship between the individual and the state– Liberals: individuals have primacy over the

state– Socialists/Communists: individuals and the

state are co-equal– Fascists: the state has primacy over individuals

The State

“It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people.”

The State

“Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of that abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic Liberalism...”

The State

• Because fascism emphasizes the priority of the state, its discussion of liberty is very different from that found in liberalism

• Where liberals believe in freedom for the individual -- in rights -- the fascists argue for the rights of the state over the individual:

The State

“Fascism is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State...”

-- Benito MussoliniThe Theory of Fascism

The State

“In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.”

The State“The Fascist State, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is a force, but a spiritual force, which takes over all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of man. It cannot therefore confine itself simply to the functions of order and supervision as Liberalism desired. It is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual. It is the form, the inner standard and the discipline of the whole person; it saturates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, the central inspiration of the human personality living in the civil community, pierces into the depths and makes its home in the heart of the man of action as well as of the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist: it is the soul of the soul.”

-- Benito MussoliniThe Theory of Fascism

The State

• The state, although it embodies the people, is not democratic

• Rather, the state should be led by the best and brightest among the people

The State

“A philosophy of life which endeavors to reject the democratic mass idea and give this earth to the best people-- that is, the highest humanity - must logically obey the same aristocratic principle within this people and make sure that the leadership and the highest influence in this people fall to the best minds. Thus it builds, not upon the idea of the majority, but upon the idea of personality.”

The State

“The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of diplomats. The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their sentiments more to the world of feeling. That is where their positive or negative attitude lies.”

The State

“For me and all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and fatherland...

The State

• The broad masses of humanity, even those of the master race, are unable to rule effectively

• The role of the state, then, is to have the best and brightest, the chosen, rule in the interests of the “people”

• Part of that rule, though, includes protecting and fostering the purity of “the people”

The State

“What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood...”

The State

“the freedom and independence of the fatherland so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe.”

-- Mein Kampf, I, viii

And that mission is…

The Race

“Thus, the highest purpose of a folkish 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.”

-- Mein Kampf, II, ii

The Race

“Thus for the first time the state achieves a lofty inner goal. Compared to the absurd catchword about safeguarding law and order, thus laying a peaceable groundwork for mutual swindles, the task of preserving and advancing the highest humanity, given to this earth by the benevolence of the Almighty, seems a truly high mission.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

• If racial purity and protecting the blood is the true role of the state, then we need to ask how to accomplish these tasks?– Control anything connected to this task:

• education

• media

• family

The Race

“The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief. It must particularly exercise strict control over the press; for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating, since it is applied, not once in a while, but over and over again.”

The Race

“Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and stimulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, our vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food particularly for the youth.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

“He must clear away the filth of the moral plague of big-city ‘civilization’ and he must do this ruthlessly and without wavering in the face of all the shouting and screaming that will naturally be let loose.”

The Race

“It is a half measure to let incurably sick people steadily contaminate the remaining healthy ones...The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

“The generation of our present notorious weaklings will obviously cry out against this, and moan and complain about assaults on the holiest human rights...”

The Race

“No, there is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same time the holiest obligation, to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler development of these beings.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

The Nazi state 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; that there is only one disgrace: ...”

The Race

“Despite one’s own sickness and deficiencies, to bring children into the world, and one highest honor: to renounce doing so. And conversely, it must be considered reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation...”

The Race

“It must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice...”

The Race

“Conversely, it must take care that the fertility of the healthy woman is not limited by the financial irresponsibility of a state regime which turns the blessings of children into a curse for the parents.”

The Race

“The folkish philosophy of life must succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men no longer are concerned with breeding dogs, horses and cats, but in elevating man himself, an age in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, the other joyfully sacrifices and gives.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

“The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man.”

The Race

“The clothing of our youth should also be adapted to this purpose. It is truly miserable to behold how our youth even now is subjected to a fashion madness which helps to reverse the sense of the old saying: ‘Clothes make the man’ into something truly catastrophic...”

The Race

“For we must exploit ambition and, we may as well calmly admit it, vanity as well. Not vanity about fine clothes which everyone cannot buy, but vanity about a beautiful, well-formed body which everyone can help to build....

The Race

“And marriage cannot be an end it itself, but must serve the one higher goal, the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.”

The Race

“The girl should get to know her beau. If physical beauty were today not forced entirely into the background by our foppish fashions, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible. This, too, is in the interest of the nation: that the most beautiful bodies should find one another, and so help to give the nation new beauty.”

The Race

“A man of little scientific education but physically healthy, with a good, firm character, imbued with the joy of determination and will-power, is more valuable for the national community than a clever weakling...

The Race

“A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed, they will not even be able to safeguard their existence on this earth.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

“The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity.”

“From time to time illustrated papers bring it to the attention of the German petty bourgeois that some place or other a Negro has for the first time become a lawyer, teacher, even pastor, or something of the sort. While the idiotic bourgeoisie looks with amazement at such miracles of education, full of respect for this marvelous result of modern education skill, the Jew shrewdly draws from it a new proof for the soundness of his theory about the equality of man that he is trying to funnel into the minds of the nations. It doesn’t dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; ...”

that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundred and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate into the proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions. For this is training exactly like that of the poodle, and not scientific ‘education.’”

-- Mein Kampf

The Race

“Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit.”

-- Mein Kampf

The Individual

“The world seen through Fascism is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself, and in which he is governed by a natural law that makes him instinctively live a life of selfish and momentary pleasure...”

The Individual“The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space: ”

The Individual

“a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.”

-- Benito MussoliniThe Theory of Fascism

The Individual

“The right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race.”