National Socialism: A Philosophical Appraisal

Several decades after the physical defeat of National Socialist Germany in the outcome of her heroic struggle against the overwhelming array of men and materials marshalled against her by the Bolshevist-democratic alliance, the appearance of this reappraisal reflects the revival of National Socialism which is a feature of the day.

(National Vanguard)

That the creed should live on and manifest itself as it does now, after being subjected to decades of the greatest campaign of defamation which the world has ever known, is a proof of its continuing validity and appeal and its worthiness for the future. It has survived the flames of war and the tempest of vilification because, when war has done its worst and vilification run its entire gamut, National Socialism remains, in the final analysis, synonymous with higher man’s will to survive, his instinct for health and strength, and his desire for beauty in life; and as long as that will, that instinct and that desire remain on this earth, the creed of National Socialism will remain indestructible.

Beyond and behind all the minutiae of political implementation and the particularities of time and place, National Socialism, properly understood, is nothing less than an orientation of the mind, the dominant impulse of which is to live to the full, through the development of one’s potentialities and the satisfaction of one’s needs, under conditions of natural competition and selection, reconciled to cooperation, within the organised community of the folk.

In this its roots go back to Plato’s Greece and his conception of a natural life, consisting in the full realization of man’s true nature through the conducive power of government within his native community.

It echoes the Roman notion of dutiful citizenship: the notion that the good and noble life consists in stoic service to the state.

It revives the blood feelings and sense of community of the Nordic tribes of early Europe: the feeling that man is essentially a member of the folk, and that all members of the folk are bound together closely with reciprocal duties and obligations.

National Socialism, in this way, reaches back to the old, healthy, organic values of life in revolt against the whole structure of thought of liberalism and democracy, with its cash nexus; its excessive individualism; its view of man as a folkless, interchangeable unit of world population; its spiritual justification in a debased Christianity embracing a sickly “humanitarianism”, which will always tolerate a greater harm for the sake of avoiding a lesser one; and its fraudulent contention that the artificially induced and numerically determined wishes of the mass are all-important criteria.

History is a saga of social decay and renewal. National Socialism is the twentieth century’s remedy of renewal for the great degeneration of modern times under the disintegrating, debasing, and emasculating thought and practice which emerged with the disruption of the old medieval order of stability by the developing forces of capitalism and the industrial revolution; flourished under the laissez-faire liberalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; came to a climax under the democracy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and will result in the world triumph of communism by the end of this twentieth century unless National Socialism comes to power in time, over a sufficient area of the globe.

National Socialism, therefore, is immensely more than a transitory political scheme. It is a historic tendency of rebirth: our age’s movement of renaissance, a movement revolutionary in scope and spirit, seeking no compromise with the present order, its pernicious practices, and its false values, but their complete replacement.

As such it is worldwide and it is life-wide. It is worldwide in that, in its essentials, it is valid and vital universally, qualified only by the fact that it is Aryan in its emanation and tradition, and upholds and depends on qualities that are to be found par excellence in the Aryan people.

It is life-wide in that it is not an aspect of life, but the whole of life seen from one aspect. It is an attitude of mind expressible in respect of virtually anything and everything. National Socialism stands relentlessly opposed to every manifestation of ill health, ugliness, and degeneracy in the cultural and spiritual, no less than in the political and economic spheres. In fact, it constitutes a way of life. A man does not call himself a National Socialist as a mere label of intellectual endorsement. He is born with a propensity to National Socialism, his mind aesthetically craving the discernment and fulfillment of a healthy pattern of life, and he not only thinks and feels, but acts as a National Socialist, if he is really and entirely one.

Total in its scope and thought, National Socialism amounts to a philosophy and a faith. It evaluates good and bad, right and wrong, as that which benefits or harms the folk; and, in place of the sentimental debility of the democratic mind, accepts that the end justifies the means, providing the means do not contradict the end. It sets a meaning and purpose of cosmic dimension to life as a personal fulfillment, within the continuity and development of the folk, between germination in the womb out of the bloodline of the folk, and the metamorphosis of the grave, with its physical redistribution to the universe.

The basic criterion and primary value of National Socialism, from which all else springs, is, as Adolf Hitler makes clear in Mein Kampf, its concept of the folk, seen as man’s essential environment and indeed, his extension of personality.

The significance of the folk is, primarily, that of a racial community. It is the ethnical enlargement of the family. Man is not a self-contained unit and an end in himself, as the sages of liberalism and democracy assert. He belongs to his folk. His life, as a part, is interwoven with the life of the whole, not only present, but past and future, for while men come and go the folk lives on, continuous, eternal, providing its members perform their duty to it. Thus, in identifying himself with his folk, man prolongs himself through the multiplicity of his ancestors and his descendants, and thereby attains immortality.

The folk exists in smaller and larger forms, ranging from the family, to the clan, to the tribe, or regional community, thence to the nation, and beyond to the race. In modern times, the conception of the folk has become too largely identified with the nations of the contemporary states. The feeling of kinship and community, which rightly expanded from the tribe and petty kingdom to the modern nation-state, has, however, become far too concentrated at this level. The lower and smaller, but equally important, communities within the nation-state have been disrupted and deprived of vitality, while the expansion of folk consciousness from the level of the nation-state to that of the entire race has been checked. Yet folk feeling, to be wholesomely potent, must flow from its roots through the local and provincial communities to the limits of the race, because the full security and prosperity of the parts can only be found in that of the whole.

Today, and in the future, National Socialism must embody this essential extension of the feeling of kinship and community beyond the bounds of the contemporary nation-state and conventional nationalism, so that the nation-state becomes an intermediate unit in the structure of the folk, and its nationalism and racialism become integrally subordinate to a nationalism of the whole race.

At the same time, the local communities require to be revived, the provincial sub-nations recognized and respected, and peoples subject to an undesired, alien rule given their ethnic freedom by separation.

National Socialism’s belief in the folk as a basic value and its totality of outlook result, figuratively speaking, in thinking with the blood on all questions.

This immediately and inevitably gives rise to the definition of citizenship as a matter of race: only those who are members of the folk are members of the nation, and only those who are members of the nation can be citizens of the state – to paraphrase the fourth of the Twenty-Five Points of Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP.

It also generates the belief that it is necessary not merely to preserve the racial character of the folk, but also, by eugenic measures, to improve the quality of the folk. It is National Socialism’s revolutionary contention that the way of real progress lies in the breeding of better human beings.

Since all citizens are of the same race, they have a transcendent bond of kinship uniting them as blood brothers above all sectional and class differences and personal distinctions. National unity, i.e., cohesion and corporate life in place of the class warfare of Left and Right, is one of the great secondary principles of National Socialism. All occupations and pursuits, all manner of persons and all fields of activity, must be integrated into the corporate life of the community.

The social feeling of oneness must find practical expression in, and in turn be stimulated by, a sincere and profound concern for social and economic justice. Consciousness of kinship and care for the collective good of the folk demand that every citizen must have an equal opportunity to develop and exercise his talents and rise according to his merits; and that every citizen must receive a fair return for his services to the community, and even the simplest worker an assurance of the necessities of life.

Thus we arrive at the socialist element in National Socialism. This is not the Marxist socialism of state ownership of the means of production and distribution, which is the economic over-government of the ant heap and is as objectionable as the predatory individualism of the capitalist system, which is the economic under-government, or anarchy, of the jungle. Instead it is Folk Socialism, or the regulation of private enterprise for the equitable division of its fruits, under equitable conditions. The economic injustices and social evils of capitalism have fostered Marxism, with its pernicious form of public control of the economy, and the alternative to both lies in National Socialism.

The folk ideal, which entails the defense of the race, the unity of the nation, and the welfare of the people, engenders National Socialism’s principle of leadership and an elite in the service of these objectives. Its conception of a natural order is one which not only ordains that men are born in the folk for a life within the folk, but also that they possess hereditary differences of capacity to serve the community.

Accordingly, for the maximum good of all, the superior must lead the inferior. The natural leaders must be selected, established as a hierarchic elite under a supreme leader, and empowered to fulfill their functions.

Unlike liberalism, National Socialism does not regard the directive power of the state as something essentially repressive, but instead as a great, beneficial power of guidance and arbitration, encouragement and protection. It upholds the dictum: “All for the folk and the folk for all.” It sanctions whatever means are necessary, in whatever fields, to ensure that everyone and everything in the community is in harmony with this.

It sees the duty of National Socialist government as the representation of the will of the folk, conceived not as the transitory whim of some democratic mob, but as the higher interest of the community, viewed in historical perspective as a continuity of purpose, embracing not only the general good of the present, but the heritage of the past and the needs of the future as well.

Source: Racial Idealism

Found at https://web.archive.org/web/20210619092459/https://dailyarchives.org/index.php/opinion/3030-national-socialism-a-philosophical-appraisal