A. Familiar tones in the fascists’ criticism of the nation’s failure — or: popular arguments for a streamlined state

“Fulfilling one's duty; that means, not being sufficient unto oneself, but serving the common good.

“The fundamental attitude from which such action arises is what we call idealism, as distinct from egoism or self-interest.”

This admonition is not from one of the — increasingly numerous — crisis years of German democracy, when those guiding the nation and advocating its “moral renewal” regularly consider it necessary to send messages of this kind to the people. This lesson about the antagonism between the “common good” and the self-centered materialism of “individuals” can be found on page 327 of Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” (hereafter MK).^[a] The Führer was of the same opinion in those days as his democratically empowered successors are today, being against consumerist thinking, the decline of national morals, constant eternal belly-aching, and for solidarity within society in difficult times. He thought nation and economy, family and child-rearing, national spirit and will to fight for the homeland were in crisis — and to avert the nation’s impending fall and restore its needed strength, he recommended a “turnabout,” a national awakening: he should take power, and the people should show an

“ability and willingness of each individual to make sacrifices for the whole” (MK, p. 167).

The commonalities between fascists’ critique of the state of the nation and the diagnoses put forward when democratic politicians are vying for limited, electoral rule consist in fundamental, generally accepted wisdoms of “political life.” These commonalities should not be overlooked by anyone who is interested in the actual differences between democracy and fascism, and is not making comparisons only in order to make their favored form of bourgeois rule look good.

Both camps are adept at the statesmanlike accomplishment of varying one theme: how successful the enforced community known as the state is, what a lack of its success means for the revered people, and what such success requires — viz., that the majority of citizens be willing to restrict their material interests and live for “values.” Characters called on by Providence to lead a nation are in striking agreement with their rivals for power about how to interpret actual or perceived ills once they consider the nation’s aims endangered. Indifferent to the limits that economic crises impose on the nation’s wealth as a result of consistently applying the standard of the “market economy” — i.e., private gain, the profitable use of capital — and regardless of all the well-known barriers that other governments place in the way of their own plans, bourgeois statesmen are always sure of one thing: in order to clear the way, the people must make certain corrections to themselves. Whether a Social Democrat chancellor has newspapers proclaim the profound insight that the Germans he is governing have been “living beyond their means” (headline “The German people are spoiled!”), or a Christian Democrat head of government wants to put a programmatic end to the “entitlement mentality,” or the same man, having become the first all-German chancellor after reunifcation, demands the people show solidarity by making sacrifices “for unity” — or the Führer finds his compatriots lacking in the “idealistic virtues” that have “taken a position second to the value of money”: those holding or aspiring to state power invariably present the same bill. They simply remind the governed that state power is the condition for life and survival that they are dependent on. From this they derive the imperative that citizens have a duty to be concerned about its welfare and to render the service that those managing the “common good” demand. A calculating focus on getting material benefits is “irresponsible” — this is the essential political message that both fascists and professional democrats have for the people. When they want to win citizens over to their party, they proceed to criticize them.

Criticizing the people in the name of the state

Those who are out to be empowered by voters in times of crisis and national upheaval are skilled in a peculiar way of dealing with citizens’ dissatisfaction. They are well aware of the reasons for it and would not dream of glossing over the living conditions plaguing the “socially deprived.” On the contrary, they bring up all the worries and hardships and hash over all the forms of poverty until the people are finally divided up into as many categories as problem-conscious politicians can make out. For all these areas with their particular failures and duties, people are supposed to make the politicians their advocate. That is why they receive knowledgeable sympathy from those who are fighting for the political power that will be out of citizens’ hands anyway. When the people are surveyed as limited and inflation-damaged “purchasing power,” as “young people without prospects,” as “taxpayers,” “savers,” “tenants,” as members of the social security system that is so badly “in need of reform,” and finally as “the number one problem: unemployment,” this is of course never followed by an appeal to stop putting up with so much and to start seeing about asserting their interests. Both democratic and fascist saviors of the nation instead deliver the message that the bad experiences of so many are evidence that the nation is disintegrating. They are signs of the general state of emergency that primarily the state and economy are in. These suffering entities must be rescued, i.e., strengthened; no one may be a burden to them. The “real” problems are defined by simply pointing to corporate balance sheets “in the red” and growing “holes” in the national budget, and stressing that there are more and more “tasks” to be performed at home and in the world. The entities the hard-pressed have to thank for the unpleasant conditions they have to cope with — “our order” and “our industry” — are beset by burdens and threats, the nation as a “business location” is confronted with “international challenges”! In such a situation, the people prove through their solidarity in making sacrifices that they have understood how dependent they are on the “common good” that has been imposed on them.

When idealism is being propagated like this as a blessing for the enforced community that is the nation, criticizing the people takes the form of explaining who is to blame. If successful governance, if putting the nation back on its feet and overcoming economic crisis require that “each individual” seriously cut back — so the logic of this explanation goes — then the whole mess could have been avoided, then the country could be properly equipped for its tasks, if citizens had only been prepared to strengthen the nation this way in the past! Instead, they have been acting as if the state were a self-service store and thereby bringing about all the problems now assailing them in these “difficult times.” They have slipped into an “entitlement mentality” and entertained the illusion that there was no need to make sacrifices.

Those who proclaim the message of how harmful the people’s materialism is never see this as saying anything about the nature of their statecraft, which is out to accomplish its “tasks” at the expense of those being governed. For example, they demand new sacrifices as a matter of course in order to cope with the consequences of expanding their authority. They are appealing to a “sound civic spirit” that has long since grown used to both the question of who is allowed to do what, and to the answer that the rules on that are a matter for the state leadership to decide and are fine — at least when they affect others and are applied fairly.

When politicians promise to follow through on their preaching of abstinence as soon as they have the power, that is rarely taken to be outrageous cheek. Not because their arguments are so persuasive and one understands them of course — but rather because one accepts one’s practical relationship to political rule. The image of the self-service store, which has to be imagined without a cash register at the exit so that the citizens’ bad behavior can really be appreciated (or should one be sure to remember that one gets nothing from the state even if one obeys and pays?), is just as unconvincing as the image of the cake that has not even been baked yet and people with their entitlement mentality are already taking far too much again. Strictly speaking, the political propaganda stressing how heavy the “burden of responsibility” is relies only on one compelling “argument”: the state’s factual authority, which no one can get away from. It is a fact admitting no discussion that the state determines and enforces what is allowed and forbidden, that it provides the “framework” for dealing with money, wages, profit, and work, that it brings a whole lot of order into the lives of its citizens from the cradle to the grave, thereby making them its people. And for this fact a “consequence” is demanded. Those being governed are to recognize state power as their “basis of business”; they are to leave it to the state to define what is “necessary,” even and especially in bad times; they are thus to act as the basis for their authorities, i.e., act as a people. Citizens may and are supposed to believe that political alternatives are means for them — but they must therefore also know and recognize what they owe their state. Those at the helm tell them everything they have to do and everything they cannot have…

Criticizing politics in the name of the people

Politicians only rebuke the masses for taking too much for themselves and thereby forcing responsible leaders to fight to establish economic, political, and social “reason,” when they have an unshakable trust in the masses’ intact civic sense. Appealing to the virtues of moderation and service, as good leaders do, testifies to their certainty that the citizens they are wooing not only submit to politics but have become accustomed to wanting it to succeed. When politicians rhetorically conjure up a national emergency, they are reckoning with a public who, of their own accord, translate their dissatisfaction into a criticism of “disorder” and “injustice”; who are used to judging whether others are behaving properly, whether everyone really deserves what they are indulging in or whether someone is living it up “at the expense of the general public.” This civic sense, which always calls for the state's regulatory hand whenever it finds something amiss, is what politicians are aiming at when they criticize society’s condition. Both democrats and fascists want to win this civic sense over when they promise to clean up the “mess,” end the “chaos,” combat “unwillingness to work,” and make “the country safe again.”

So those out to save the crisis-stricken nation, adopting the point of view of state order and tough but just action, also allow and spread criticism of politics — the politics of others. They accuse the politicians whose right to power they are contesting of many a dishonorable thing — without any fear that rumblings among the people about the “rascals” so involved in “the dirty business of politics” could lead to difficulties in governing. Those they are addressing and calling upon as virtual judges are the people, i.e., their will to be governed properly; and politicians don’t forget to warn about potential voters becoming “disenchanted with government.” Corruption, cronyism, reckless financial management, half-hearted treatment of criminals and foreigners, encouraging laxity in family life and child-rearing, and undermining military strength: they list the worst possible violations of the sacred tasks of leadership in order to prove one thing: citizens’ failures — ranging from wayward children turning to violence and drugs, to falling wages and rising prices, and job loss — are due to the failures of those in office. This accusation is supposed to make it clear to the people that they have been letting the wrong figures lead them and giving them undeserved trust. No one sees this as sedition, and it is not. It is not based on anti-state ideas or a corresponding political program — how could it be when the new representatives of the people’s will are offering their services?

Whenever dissatisfaction arises among ordinary people, who are prescribed even more hardship, force, and morality in times of crisis or other kinds of upheaval than in days of growing national wealth, this dissatisfaction is pointed by such heated accusations in the right direction. It is politicized, channeled into the need for proper governance. Such politicization is by no means specific to the agitation of the Nazis before they took power. It is one of the basic convictions in the democratic struggle for power that criticism is not to be aimed at the state or the principles it puts into practice for wages and work performance, prices and profit, but rather at bad officeholders misusing sovereign powers and thereby causing a deficit in the exercise of state power. Conversely, it is the — quite successful — custom for vote-canvassing politicians to portray themselves as “trustworthy” and “strong leaders,” “prepared to make unpopular decisions,” willing and able to “put a stop to dangerous social developments,” etc. When a new set of politicians offers to manage a crisis, they do not vie with the old government over promises to improve the material well-being of the “socially deprived.” They cite their predecessors’ failures and the “problems they have inherited” to justify programs that continue their works. Both the new and the old leaders coolly predict millions of unemployed, say who is to blame, and actually advise people to get back into the mindset of the post-war years. Free countries have high regard for virtues such as “determination” and “capacity for action,” and, when a high officeholder strikes the pose of somehow being guided by people’s interests, this is condemned as weakness or populism, as pandering to the masses or submitting to their ignorance. It earns him the accusation of inciting voters to make “unfulfillable demands.” Despite all this, one hardly ever hears the view expressed in the bourgeois public that it is questionable when the standards applying to matters of stability and the unchallenged sovereignty of those in power are the same ones sacred to dictators. Instead, these standards are just differentiated in methodological terms and hashed over in public. There is also little concern that it could cast a bad light on the forces of democracy when they echo the need for a stronger emphasis on national rights and claims that “anti-democratic movements” on the right proclaim, and promise to honor these legitimate concerns themselves. Democrats thus do their bit to “integrate fringe groups” and protect the people and the state from the poison of extremism…

Criticizing politics from the point of view of those affected, asserting the interests that fall by the wayside — this is not provided for in democracy’s “rules of the game.” Those who do so are regarded at best as lacking knowledge of the subject. What is cultivated as the seal of quality and “elixir of life” of democratic rule, by contrast, is every variation of criticism that assesses a government team using the yardstick of state success. This standard is met when “social peace” is maintained despite a few million unemployed, i.e., when the aggrieved citizens refrain from the first kind of criticism. It is met when there is a crackdown on “the flood of foreigners” and “organized crime”; when heads of state and ministers at economic summits take part in deciding the global ranking between rich and poor; and especially when they fearlessly stand up for “market economy and democracy” in foreign countries and continents, and demand that other sovereigns scrap their weapons.

This is of course the kind of criticism that everyone is allowed to indulge in. Looking at politics only in terms of whether it reaches its goals rather than in relation to one’s own “narrow-minded” everyday worries, is precisely what characterizes a “responsible citizen.” Such a product of democratic opinion-forming is a master at separating what the state achieves and requires, on the one hand, from how the government “fails,” on the other. Even though it is no secret to him that both things are to his detriment, objecting to a government’s “mistakes” can never justify rejecting the state. After all, it is in the state’s name that these accusations are being made; it’s the state’s right to succeed that is being demanded! And even when a government is deemed incapable it will still be recognized. Indeed, one only has the right and the competence to judge the holders of state power because one has proven one’s willingness to be governed. A critical citizen denounces his rule and calls for new, better rulers from the point of view and in the name of the people, as the ideal collective victim of inadequate governance. In other words, he is looking to see, and adapting to, what they are going to do for him and what is awaiting him.

When this is the way political judgment and will-formation work, avowed democrats are not seen as cynical when, looking back on the Third Reich, they come up with the critique that that leadership and above all that leader did not deserve the sacrifices that German men and women made…

The consequence fascists draw from bourgeois emergency ideologies: A popular movement to save state power

Advocates of a strong state that is entitled to draw on its subjects’ obedience and services are certainly not hard to find in capitalist societies. For good reason: such societies offer a not-just-ideological breeding ground for rule-makers and rule-followers, for leaders and pawns.

• When a public power makes money the binding standard for “economic life,” when it establishes the antagonism of capital and wage labor and is therefore constantly monitoring “social peace,” when the state’s decisions promote the success of “the economy” that everything depends on, when its laws also bring about the amount of poverty among wage earners that matches the business cycle and serves the state, then there are inevitably plenty of complaints that this or that isn’t fair. It is a standard accusation from all camps in society that government policies are too lenient towards the others, rather than getting down to distributing the burdens to be borne and national services to be performed with full authority and disregard for this or that interest. One favorite bourgeois objection to the way “rich and poor” are dealt with is that the government is too dependent on “big money” and therefore weak in relation to capital — the very capital whose business basis it creates! Another is the ideology that politicians opportunistically want to please the poor and overly demanding majority of voters rather than fulfill their mandate. And there is of course the complaint that the government forgets its own nation and gives away all kinds of social benefits and freedoms to foreigners while keeping its own people short and fleecing them.
• When the obligation to the “market economy” means that the majority are forced to make a living at a well-calculated workplace, but this obligation is organized in the form of a right and a freedom, many people cannot help noticing that this by no means guarantees them an income or advancement — “despite” this right they have. No wonder, then, that they demand rights as a means for them, demanding that rights be realized with all force in their perfect form, as justice. When, on top of that, a state justifies its impositions by constantly citing its “powerlessness” — vis-à-vis economic cycles and ruthless foreign countries, but also vis-à-vis overly cautious businessmen and interest rates — some people are led to wish their nation and its leaders a whole lot of power and glory so that they can set to work with no restraint.
• Finally, when the state charges a certain “price” for its recognized “service” of making sure wage labor and capital interact successfully, in addition to the price people have to pay for that interaction anyway, some citizens at least want to know whether this right of their representative body is really being honored by everyone. For they continue to want their own abiding by the law to pay off, as long as they regard their government, against all experience, as something they need and authorize to secure their “opportunities in life.”

Fascists share these common objections, see them as justified opposition that is never heard, take every dissatisfaction as being the desire to be governed better, and derive one imperative. The “incompetent” and “weak” state power must be eliminated because it is preventing the people from performing their service to the community properly.

Whenever interests are being restricted and those affected complain, protest, or make demands, fascists make out one and the same thing: dissatisfaction with the government that is doing a bad job. In every civic protest they see and focus on that one point: a positive desire for an enforced community in which justice will be done to the aggrieved. On that they insist — against the aggrieved interest itself, and especially, irreconcilably, against the anti-state sentiment that must be at work if the protest involves anything other than a call for a force to establish law and order. Whenever conflicts and disturbances arise, fascists are always ready with the ideal of the class state: the sovereign power that avoids or prevents all damage that might endanger the economy or the nation. They confront the fact that state power is responsible for laying down what is permitted and what is forbidden in all areas of life with the everyday reality of competition — and seeing hardship and unemployment, corruption and speculation, crime and “degenerate” youth, they come to the conclusion that this power has not been used properly. The government has been allowing disintegration and discord, capitulating to special interests, maybe even letting them escalate to the point of class warfare, instead of satisfying the people and securing their unity — and thus giving everyone the place they are entitled to. Fascists accuse the nation of making itself “powerless” by being “dependent” on the world market and the harmful goodwill of other powers. They see that as a surrender of sovereignty, the highest right of the people, claiming that such a renunciation makes unworthy demands on the citizens. Without increasing the people’s energy which they have through the strength of their fatherland, but rather for a policy of “sellout” and “betrayal,” “the peasant class is weakened,” “the worker’s energy” is crippled, and the people’s virtue altogether is stifled.

Those who benefit from the decay that bourgeois politics brings about in fascists’ eyes are seen to be above all the politicians themselves, who have not dedicated themselves to the cause of their high office and “fought” selflessly for the nation at the head of the state, but instead taken the most favorable path of governance for their personal advantage, assumed no responsibility, and opportunistically focused on majorities. But there are also certain capitalists whom they accuse of neglecting the production of useful wealth out of greed for profit, of not even maintaining the people — the basis of the nation — and instead engaging in speculation that brings them profit but is detrimental to the freedom and power of the nation, i.e., merely satisfies personal greed. Capital, they decree, must not be the “master of the nation,” but its “servant” — a policy item that fits above all into the bourgeois anti-fascists’ “system comparison”: how socialist of the National Socialists, as if serving the state spelled doom for businessmen…

The fascist program combines all the “recipes” that highly decent nationalists invent in times of crisis when they are dissatisfied and imagine they are in power. It brings together the entire state-related morality that flourishes particularly in democracies and their mass media, where nationalist sentiment is cultivated in the competition of opinions on the best policy, and the question of who is to blame is in vogue all year round; where anyone who has something to complain about uses only the first person plural; where “our” exports, “German” jobs, and “German” companies are threatened; where “our” currency has to assert itself successfully against speculators and other currencies; where “our” liberal laws, tax money, and social funds are being abused by asylum seekers; where “German” films and “German” soccer are what count…What fascists advocate is nothing but this standpoint of the radical subordinate — but they put it into practice, rather than just entertaining it as a bad opinion of the way their fellow citizens and the authorities behave. Fascists can certainly enjoy the approval of their “passive” compatriots insofar as the latter “think nationally.” After all, they are “only” following through with common ideologies about the state's mandate, trying to change it accordingly.

The fascist movement organizes disobedience toward a state power that is “wrecked” — that puts up with “too much” from other states, is unable to cope with domestic “elements” that are unnational and harm the community, and therefore doesn’t know how to make anything out of the society it rules. The new leadership to take its place is supposed to do away with all the old government's weaknesses and half-measures — i.e., its calculations that have worked out so badly — and commit society to the success of the nation, eliminating those who are unwilling or unable to be part of the community. The way this leadership deals with all sections of the people (previewed by the movement acting in place of the “paralyzed” state, so to speak) realizes a bourgeois obsession. Everything that fascists find in bourgeois society — capital and wage labor, money and credit, public opinion and culture, education and training, family and sport — they want to perfect. They want to free every sphere of bourgeois life from the disturbances and antagonisms peculiar to it, so that it can be devoted solely to serving the nation — the force that unites the people.

B. Radically rectifying the disrupted relationship between the class state and its people

The question of how it could have “come to that,” which people pose in retrospect with a great show of bewilderment, could easily be answered by a closer look at the fascist program and its implementation — if it were a serious question. But democrats, who take nothing more for granted than a concern for the “stability” of governments all over the world, with the associated corpses being collateral damage that “unfortunately” cannot be avoided, refuse to see that a special political movement was taking all those at their word who like to say the state is suffering from a lack of strength. Observers loyal to the system who warn that the country will be “ungovernable” whenever an election turns out a way they don’t like, will never admit that fascism put an end to this “problem” of theirs because it saw the democratic competition for power as constantly weakening effective state leadership. Fanatics of “social peace” who only care about people’s hardships insofar as they might be “social dynamite” threatening the state, are simply unable to see that a fascist is operating on their ideals of political efficiency and using state power to put an end to (supposed or real) crises and the perceived national emergency. Rather than recognizing its own idealism of successful politics in Nazism, the democratic public prefers to indignantly point out that critical journalists were not welcome to warn against the state’s shortcomings in the Third Reich.

Fascism researchers are no less obtuse in arranging their questions and answers. Their problem is why it had to “come to that,” and they never tire of stressing that fascism’s antidemocratic attitude and practice are one big affirmation of the standards of democratic politics. When they set about looking for reasons for the Nazis’ success, they come up with the blanket argument of “Weimar,” i.e., one condition after another that makes that fateful transition known as “the Nazi seizure of power” plausible, at least to them:

• “Torn” between right and left, Weimar democracy proved to be “too weak,” it is found — and no one cares to see that this “reason” accords Hitler’s chief argument the status of historical necessity.
• “Global economic crisis” and “unemployment” inevitably led to “disaster,” say knowledgeable historians, showing their understanding for nationalists among both leaders and followers “concluding” that poor business and a people in need meant the state had to enforce a state of emergency by “purging” itself and society.

From these researchers’ point of view, what led to the “illegitimate” regime’s unspeakable atrocities, eventually the fall of the German Reich, and the political heirs’ “German question” that remained unresolved for more than forty years, was in any case not the explicit political will and national moralism of politicians. To vindicate this profession, the Nazi elite are summarily expelled from the group and put in the category of the mentally ill, subcategory megalomaniacs — as if it was not the greatness of their fatherland they were after. What a state leadership has brought about is supposed to be the work of a defective psyche — as if a few lunatics could ever reach such a level of “public menace” without political power. The same applies to why citizens consented and went along with it. In this area, historical research into causes seeks to offer every conceivable way of excusing the subservient for everything they put up with. They were beguiled into cooperating, and there was little “one” could do by way of opposition anyway. Sometimes a picture is painted of the “good German,” who first understandably saw Nazi propaganda as reflecting his patriotic concern for Germany’s future, and later reluctantly refrained from engaging in the acts of resistance that were constantly on his mind, while instead always being secretly opposed in daily life. This banishes from the discussion once and for all the suspicion that there might actually not be so many differences in people’s subservient mindset before, during, and after the days of the “reign of terror.” Experts do not find any construction too absurd when it comes to keeping both the nation and the people exempt from the criticism deemed appropriate in the name of democracy.

And prominent political figures do their best to support this learned social studies lesson. For example, Karl Carstens, when about to be elected President years ago, replied to those who thought him unsuitable for the office because he had been a member of the Nazi party, simply that he could hardly have studied law without being in the party — and no one accused him of being opportunistic towards an officially condemned regime and trying to join its elite. The “good reasons” for not wanting to fall out with the government of the day are also all too understandable to Helmut Kohl as a man and as a chancellor. The man pointed out he was “lucky to be born late,” putting on record how pleased he was not to have had to decide whether to go along with the Nazis. The chancellor was refreshingly open in promoting the “insight” that a fascist government makes no difference to the “little man” at least in one respect — he has to live within his means and adapt to the requirements his rulers present him with:

“A grandfather should explain to his grandson why he joined the Party back then. Maybe he wanted to be a civil servant in Koblenz. A lot of people join a party nowadays to get certain jobs.”

So from this point of view it is easy to answer the question of who should have prevented and fought fascism: the other parties, of course! They should have called on the services of the people “in difficult times”; they should have shown the required “leadership qualities” and prevented Hitler from seizing power by implementing convincing national policies! For the way to fight fascism is to make it superfluous through the achievements of democratic politics.

However, from this point of view, no one needs to ask so naively what the conditions were for that “calamitous chapter of German history.” They are all too well known. A state lost a world war, the victorious powers dictated quite a few bills to pay and restrictions on its sovereignty, and political parties performed their typical kind of “self-criticism” — the new democratic parties competed to rebuild and rehabilitate the nation. Other countries were politically and economically interested in thwarting its efforts to achieve economic growth and freely use the proceeds from capital to increase its political influence in the world. An economic crisis put business balance sheets in the red, increased the number of unemployed accordingly, and led to widespread frugality in paying those who depend on wages. Democratic governments did their utmost to draw on the people to make what they saw as the necessary corrections to the war outcome — see “Versailles” — and to the results of business competition. In doing so, they never failed to stress that the respective leadership was responsible for the nation's failures if only because they were competing for mandates and power, and they amply fostered the nationalism that comes into its own in elections. They thus wooed their electorate with the same old democratic story that only the right leadership of the state can remedy their disappointments — both the material restrictions and the nonmaterial suffering from Germany’s post-war disgrace. And the Weimar Republic politicians were successful at all this. However, their success did not consist in fulfilling the democratic dream of settling all antagonisms in social peace and putting citizens’ sacrifices to good use under the direction of a political leadership that agrees on all fundamental national issues to provide a modern class state with power and greatness among its peers. It consisted in the rise and victory of a movement and party that measured the democratic state against the idealism of the nation, found a dearth of German wealth and German greatness, and put the blame on those in power. The fascists did not merely use the lie of democratic politics, that the people’s service guarantees national success and thus also an — at least spiritual — reward for them, to win elections as all democratic competitors for power do. They turned this lie against all the democrats in power. They weighed the results of foreign trade, the labor market, the money and credit business, and found them wanting; but they accused the state administrators of being responsible for this desolate state of the country by being irresponsibly weak towards foreign and domestic opponents of the nation, i.e., of bringing about this disgrace. Hitler and the Nazi party promoted and fought for the right use of power by which they promised to free the nation from all its shackles — and this idealism of state power caught on not only with large sections of the people, but ultimately also with professional representatives of German greatness whom Hitler regarded as idiots and opponents.

Instead of democratic decay: Leading and fighting

Fascists hold democracy in contempt without taking any interest in what democratic procedures achieve. They do not realize that a publicly organized dispute over the best possible representation of national interests, culminating in an election, gives a government sovereignty as an explicit act of will on the part of those affected by its actions. They fail to see that by this kind of empowerment the majority hand over the management of their interests that take more than a few knocks in economic competition, and are left with the duty to make a living utilizing solely the — not overly suitable — means that the state leadership imposes on them by way of the law and the “social order.” Fascists do not see through this emancipation of political rule from the demands of those being ruled, even though they know the result and turn it into two accusations. The first is that the mass misery is a consequence of the government neglecting its duties towards the people, and the second is that this inevitably leads to strife and discord in the nation.

A fascist is not about to believe that bourgeois politicians really go into parliament and the cabinet — at least “in principle” — to promote the well-being of the masses entrusted to their care, and might fail and discredit themselves in that mission. However, he considers it a mistake altogether when they affirm all the conflicting needs, instead of insisting that all interests are equally valid/irrelevant before the sovereignty of state control — as if the “general welfare” that national politics is about could ever fit so many individuals with their antagonistic demands, i.e., benefit them. He takes this affirmation as merely reinforcing the antagonisms between the many different particular opinions and interests; and that this could benefit the people is out of the question for a fascist — after all, the people’s main affliction is their inner division. So it is irresponsible and dishonest, to boot, the way the competing bourgeois politicians are so blatantly opportunistic in pandering to everyone’s demands and including them in their election programs in their “concern for the next election”:

“So the commissions meet and ‘revise’ the old program and draw up a new one (the gentlemen changing their convictions like soldiers in the field change their shirts, namely whenever the old one has lice!) in which everyone gets his due. The farmer gets protection for his farm, the industrialist protection for his goods, the consumer protection for his purchases, teachers get higher salaries, civil servants get better pensions, widows and orphans are to be amply provided for by the state, trade is promoted, tariffs are to be lowered, and taxes actually more or less abolished. Sometimes it happens that they have forgotten some social group or never heard of some demand circulating in the people. Then they hastily insert whatever has room until they can safely hope they have pacified the army of run-of-the-mill petty bourgeois along with their women and see them highly satisfied” (MK, p. 410 f.).

This is how Hitler criticized "populism”: politicians sweet-talking private individuals with their special interests remote from the state, the “bourgeois” who think only about themselves, although it is the affairs of state that count, citizens are called on as “citoyens,” and class society as a people and nothing else. Hitler’s indignant remarks on the technique of democratic electioneering do not lead up to the customary democratic accusation of “cheating voters” — seeing voters as “petty bourgeois along with their women” he is hardly going to criticize democracy in their name. He is denouncing the way democratic power is acquired because the holders of the highest offices make themselves dependent on a majority decision, first of the voters and then the of elected representatives. This detracts from the freedom of a national leadership that has to take care of national concerns but is always dependent on the consent of people who are interested in anything but:

"Is this the criterion for a statesman, that he master the art of persuasion to the same high degree as that of statesmanlike wisdom in defining great directives or making great decisions? Is a leader’s incompetence proven when he does not succeed in winning over to a certain idea the majority of a mob thrown together by more or less tidy coincidences?…

“But what is the statesman to do if he does not succeed in flattering this mob into favoring his plans?

“Should he buy their favor?

“Or should he give up trying to fulfill the tasks he recognizes as vital necessities and withdraw in view of the stupidity of his fellow citizens, or should he stay despite it?" (MK, p. 86 f.).

These skillfully posed questions are all answers. No, sovereign statecraft cannot coexist with “vital necessities” being questioned by the “parliamentary majority principle.” The latter demolishes the “leader idea” — which very openly presents its other side. True to the quotation from Schiller, “Majority is nonsense, good judgment has always been confined to the few,” the future Führer reveals a basic “insight” that all fascists share:

“By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the number of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic idea of Nature, although the natural view of nobility need by no means be embodied in the decadence of our upper ten-thousand today” (MK, p. 87).

Nature, with its “basic idea,” accomplishes a number of things here that it is also invoked for by staunch supporters of democracy — but it additionally provides proof of the “absurdity” of democracy. Firstly, democracy creates important differences between people, but not natural ones. Secondly, it separates the “fellow citizens” who are characterized by “stupidity” and lack insight into the “vital necessities” from the others who are exactly the opposite. And this elite of “creative minds,” “who must therefore in reality be regarded as benefactors of the human race” (MK, p. 97), is destined to take the fate of the state into its own hands, and is well advised to be duly ruthless in view of the others’ stupidity. A fascist thus sees the clash of interests between statesmen and citizens to be at work in elections, of all things, and he attributes this clash to the presence or absence of historical insight — in order to give to those who know what the state’s objectives demand the task of making clear to the others which “vital necessities” are on the agenda. The negative effects of national policy on the majority of those subjected to it have to serve as current proof that voters have been letting the wrong people govern them due to false calculations. The results of democratic empowerment that are pretty unpleasant “for everyone” are supposed to give to the many people who are condemned — by nature — to be deluded the “insight” that they are always electing the wrong leaders to head their nation. They are virtually provoking a lack of principles in their politicians by handing over power to them on the condition that they, “parliamentary bedbugs” that they are, go by the incompetent judgment of the voters. So — according to the fascist — they need not be surprised if they put downright parasites rather than leaders in positions of “responsibility,” which those “up there” hate. The politicians take shelter behind their powerlessness vis-à-vis the “wavering majorities” that they need for making any decisions, “fatten on the foliage of state life ” (MK p. 412), and have no intention of fighting for what their office represents:

“In the same measure as the leader ceases to believe in what he says, his defense becomes shallow and flat, but vile in his choice of means. While he himself has given up all idea of seriously standing up for his political revelations (a man does not die for something which he himself does not believe in!), his demands on his supporters become correspondingly greater and more brazen until he ends up by sacrificing the last shred of leadership and turning into a ‘politician’; in other words, he becomes the kind of man whose only real conviction is lack of conviction, combined with offensive impertinence and an often shamelessly developed art of lying” (MK, p. 71 f.).

The source of this damning verdict on the calculating way of treating the people, the careerism, that the democratic principle opens up, is not that the “wretched cowards” in office in all their contortions continually restrict the masses, who by the force of the law — no matter how shifty the figures are among the changing legislators — bear the lifelong “lot” of keeping themselves available for the growth of capital, poor and honest, without even being sure they will be used and paid. This is seen quite differently by a fascist, for whom the “distribution of tasks” and the “hierarchy” as well as the various “strata” among the people are no less a dictate of nature. The party men’s opportunism he laments is to him an offense against the office; he does not want to see the leadership of the state degraded to a plaything of particular interests. He is distrustful and hostile whenever bourgeois politicians relativize what supposedly has to be done — whether they are “subordinating” their duty to preserve the enforced community to seek the public’s favor to further themselves, or they are invoking “objective” limits to their power:

“No resurgence of the German people can occur except through the recovery of outward power. But the prerequisites for this are not arms, as our bourgeois ‘statesmen’ keep prattling, but the forces of the will. The German people had more than enough weapons before. They were not able to secure freedom because the energies of the national instinct for self-preservation, the will for self-preservation, were lacking” (MK, p. 365).

Nor does a fascist accept the argument that political power is based on the economic success that it brings about and uses. He fights the ideology that there are “economic necessities” the state has to obey — but again not by arguing that those in power shamelessly portray the state’s interests as an objective constraint they are “powerless” in the face of, in order to impose services and deprivations on the masses for capital in the name of almighty “economic growth,” as if the production and distribution of wealth had nothing to do with the politically instituted system. He criticizes this ideology in exactly the opposite way: for him, economic performance is also based entirely on state power, on the nationally organized will of the people; so he sees talk of “objective constraints” only as yet more proof that political leaders lack insight into the primacy of state power and lack the will:

“With the victorious march of German technology and industry, the rising successes of German commerce, the realization was increasingly lost that all this was only possible on the basis of a strong state. On the contrary, many circles went so far as to put forward the conviction that the state owed its very existence to these phenomena, that the state itself was primarily an economic institution, that it should be governed according to economic requirements, and that its very existence depended on the economy, a state of affairs which was regarded and glorified as by far the healthiest and most natural” (MK, p. 164).

In the “convictions” he considers unacceptable, the fascist statesman is also criticizing the practical conditions the state sees itself bound to when “recovering” and expanding its power. For him, it is a sign of weakness to take the available means of politics into consideration, to plan with an eye to competing foreign countries, both their power and their wealth; also to be guided by the performance and profits of national business, and aim state decisions at promoting it. Consistent leadership is identical with not hesitating to clear away any obstructions there are and create any conditions that are lacking. Thus the fascist is pursuing the unconditional materialism of the state: every interest must bow to its demands and be judged by whether it will prove its worth as serving a strong state.

The fascist’s struggle for power is therefore indeed different from what his bourgeois competitors are planning. Firstly, from the outset he does not rely on the “beguiling techniques” of canvassing for votes. To win supporters for his movement he finds it fairly important to demonstrate the use of force. This convinces the target voter, the disappointed nationalist, that there are people at work who stand up for their ideals and are not like those cowards who only want to benefit from the state and shy away from personally fighting for it. In addition, it proves that this idealism put into practice is capable of dealing with the state’s opponents, unlike the holders of public power caught up in the “muck of republican corruption.” On their own initiative the fascists fight the leftists the state is shamefully neglecting, and on behalf of a sluggish government they enforce on foreigners the judgment that they do not fit into the national community. And finally, fascists also know how to apply terror strictly as a method: in assassinations, which they stage as cruelly as possible, they show their fellow citizens quite fundamentally that they are “too well-off” in their soft lives and there is a fight to be waged. Anonymous attacks blamed on the other side serve to reinforce the existing and/or desired call for a “strong hand.”

Secondly, the struggle for power is not just about power, it is about correcting the way the state deals with its subjects. When state leadership is watered down to cater to petty bourgeois interests, on the one hand, and to somewhat greater “economic concerns,” on the other, fascists condemning this have to make it fundamentally clear that all these interests can only be realized to the extent that “the prerequisite of a strong state” makes possible. According to the converse idea, which you don’t have to be a Nazi to proclaim, any special interests that are asserted within the state and not rejected by it corrode power. This “leads” the fascist to formulate his highest imperative, which demands that leaders and led — everyone “in their own way” — devote themselves solely to serving the state, because nothing works without it. As “proof,” he mockingly reminds his fellow citizens how little they gain from submitting to the bourgeois state, which prostitutes itself to them or that other group and yet guarantees nothing. As an alternative, he recommends himself and his movement — promising those whose livelihood is based on wage labor, but not granted them by egotistical capitalists, the fascist state as their means of life. He depicts — and fits out — the enforced community as a home that one belongs in regardless of and beyond one’s own economic position in it, as if the state itself established this position, materially endowed the associated rights and duties, and thus distributed “life’s opportunities”! Submitting to this “home” vested with the authority to use force, serving its power, is a duty that man has by nature and that is repaid by his sheer existence:

“But the state has nothing at all to do with any definite economic conception or development. It is not a collection of economic contracting parties in a definite delimited living space for fulfilling economic tasks, but the organization of a community of physically and psychologically similar living beings for better facilitating the maintenance of their species and the achievement of the aim of this species’ existence which has been allotted to it by Providence. This and nothing else is the purpose of a state. The economy is only one of the many instruments required for achieving this aim. It is never the cause or the purpose of a state unless this state is based on a false, because unnatural, foundation to begin with” (MK, p. 164 f.).

This metaphysics of the national community stemming from nature, which draws its “ideas” from Providence this time, also manages quite well without proof. It legitimizes the common bond that the modern state produces in all those who are subject to its power, on the basis of their will to prove themselves in dependence on their state. In this obedience to one state there is one people at its command which is truly free of any differences or antagonisms. The antagonisms that actually exist and are noticeable are deemed to be characteristics that are absolutely nonessential to the people, since otherwise the community, which definitely exists, could never have come about. All “social” theories about the purpose and origin of the state are thus declared absurd or subversive: the unity that the people give themselves in the state gives voice to blood — which the state is out to preserve through a whole lot of soil for the species to thrive on…

The Nazis put this idealism into practice. Their arguments ranged from the usual nationalist criticism of the disintegrating state, from crisis ideology with its search for who is to blame, to mobilizing the righteous anger of a people defeated in war wrongly and only by back-stabbing criminals, and the racist doctrine of an Aryan mission. ”The economy” — “one of the many instruments” — was something they could readily take over from their predecessors, being free from prejudice towards the antagonistic classes, which were all given their due tasks within the people’s program. No revolution was required in any case for gearing the use of capital and labor toward regaining national greatness. It was only required for purging the state and the people. And as for the use of force, they got hold of the state’s, after accomplishing their “most significant achievement” with their arguments and the “transformation of a general, philosophical, ideal conception of the highest truth into a definitely delimited, tightly organized political community of faith and struggle, unified in spirit and will” (MK, p. 419). The reason why they succeeded in “seizing” and exercising power with their party and fighting community was definitely not that their ideas of a thousand-year Reich were the opposite of what democratic politicians and citizens thought. In any case, neither one group nor the other refuted the assessment of the people’s political will and their virtues that Hitler had concocted:

“Every national body^[b] can be divided into three great classes: into an extreme of the best humanity on the one hand, good in the sense of possessing all virtues, especially distinguished by courage and self-sacrifice; on the other hand, an extreme of the worst human scum, bad in the sense that all selfish urges and vices are present. Between the two extremes there lies a third class, the great, broad, middle stratum, in which neither brilliant heroism nor the basest criminal mentality is embodied” (MK, p. 580 f.).

This “class analysis” was made from the perspective of the fascist struggle program. It classifies the expected supporters and opponents as “good” or “evil,” applying this neatly to the population of the realm. The “evil” section (meaning leftists, Jews, and subversive intellectuals) was earmarked for annihilation — a plan to be realized by the “good” section.

As far as the “third class” is concerned, Hitler was unfortunately not wrong in his expectations in terms of national conformism:

“When the best people dominate, the broad masses will follow them… (MK, p. 581).

This is probably why the “worst people,” the communists, asked themselves at their 1935 Seventh World Congress why the masses had not followed them as broadly as hoped and why the fight against the fascists had failed. They supplied the answer there and then. It was, unfortunately, that two and a half years after Hitler came to power they still did not know how to criticize radical nationalists, how to dissuade a working class from hoping for “politics for the people,” how to convince them that class struggle was the way to go, and how to organize it. Instead of explaining what fascism was about, they preferred to compete with the fascists for the monopoly on representing true socialism and patriotism. They made passionate pleas for a good, because alternative, nationalism to counter the suspicion of having a low opinion of the fatherland — their enemies had an extremely low opinion of that.

These enemies were meanwhile already busy reshaping “political life” in Italy and Germany according to plan, thereby revealing the script of the fascist “seizure of power” and “Gleichschaltung” (forcing people into line):

• The principle of “leading and fighting” took the place of the democratic back-and-forth — which couldn’t be done without “dissolving” the old parties. After democratic officeholders deemed Hitler a suitable ruler in an act motivated by concern for the nation, he made it clear that acts of state would no longer be carried out democratically.
• The party’s stormtroopers became instruments for establishing and securing national unity. The ideal of a united nation not allowing its might to be corroded by strife inspired its supporters to commit bloody deeds. Criticism and opposition were consistently dealt with by purging all civic institutions of anyone not properly serving the people and their leader. If someone was suspected of trying to evade Gleichschaltung, that suspicion was confirmed without much ado by his past political activity, relationships with convicted enemies of the people, a wrong remark about party or leader. And with every day that the slogan “One people, one Führer!” was repeated, the number of those actively fulfilling it grew.
• The minority who refused to accept the new state ended up in prisons and concentration camps; Jews and others were “dealt with,“ true to their definition as “vermin” and “foreign bodies” within the Aryan people. In contrast, the majority now had the “opportunity” to go along with things under the new conditions. On the one hand, they were expected to be willing to carry on as before in the hierarchy of jobs and professions and make the Nazi salute a habit. On the other hand, they were expected even more to want to fulfill the new requirements for getting ahead in all areas: demonstrating their commitment to the party, joining it, supporting it in sports clubs, at church, at the office. All such practices became the key to making a career for otherwise quite ordinary national comrades. This key was used extensively when competing for position, pay, and recognition, as was the prospect that arose separately from ordinary work in the factory, workshop, or office: taking part in leading and fighting. This is how someone remembered by classmates as a “failure” and by work colleagues as a “slacker” was suddenly a gauleiter, a high-ranking official. And some followers looking back on the Third Reich took pleasure in noting, with their dubious anti-fascism, that not only Hitler but many party comrades and superiors of that time by no means lived up to their portrayal of themselves as noble exemplars of humanity, determined to lead…

This is of course no different with democratic politicians. They connect with and woo the people with the tasks and virtues under which politics presents itself, the labels that representatives of state power pin on themselves and have the public pin on them, ranging from “credible” and “knowledgeable” to “willing to use a firm hand.” Although such labels say something about the character of those who use them to tout themselves as the right people for wielding power over others, they are of precious little use for judging the deeds they do in office. With fascist leadership personalities it is the same. They are not interested in power per se for making others feel it; nor in parading their own person and their convictions — such things are accessories and means of politics, but not its substance and purpose. Despite all the “leading and fighting” idealism, it was always about making use of the people for a state purpose.

That is why fascists, too, when handling that “one instrument,” “the economy,” are never in doubt that the people they call one constitute in fact a class society.

How the fascist state deals with the classes

Even a fascist will concede that the state is faced with an “economy” that functions according to certain laws of its own and succeeds on the basis of what various production agents do. Like his bourgeois opponents, he assumes that the laws of the “market economy” owe their validity to nature, not to state power. And he also agrees with all bourgeois ideologues that a state can at times make economic matters more or less fair, that it should put a stop to the misuse of economic power, and is called upon to prosecute violations of economic “rationality.” It would never occur to him that a product will not become a commodity, a human being will not become a worker subjected to a “market,” and a means of production or piece of land will not become a source of income, unless a public power forces individuals to recognize property as unquestionable and guarantees its abstract measure, money. He shares that with all other social critics, who only ever make out a “class state” when wealthy citizens come to an arrangement with politicians that benefits both sides, thereby allegedly betraying a higher purpose of politics. For the fascist, capitalist wealth is the same as personal creative power — how could someone who views the world according to the “aristocratic” model of people and leadership not value precisely the exclusionary and extortionate nature of private property as the supreme economic virtue!

However, a fascist does depart from the usual bourgeois view when it comes to dealing with “the economy.” Nowadays identified with democracy, economic and social policy in a “market economy” bases itself on the state-instituted competition between classes in accordance with private property, and relies on this competition being the means that the state needs for equipping its rule and projecting its power beyond its borders. Market economy policy also adapts to the boom-and-bust cycles of this means, recognizes “constraints” in view of the “necessities” this means involves, and regulates and renews the conditions for business — not at all squeamishly — at the expense of the wage-dependent majority. In contrast, the radical nationalist takes the liberty of criticizing the economic “base” of the nation because and insofar as it has failed as a “base.” In principle, he sees nothing wrong with the equation that just as capital must serve the state, the state has to set up the world as a condition for capital to succeed. He merely sees that it does not work out, because the money-earning citizens have failed to render their services to a weak state. Measured against what the interaction of capital and labor should really do for the state, some elements of “the economy” seem simply intolerable to a fascist. So he decides to adjust the means; to take measures that have subsequently been cited as proof of how reprehensible state “interventions” in economic activities are — unless they were incorporated into the toolkit of modern economic policy.

a) State and wage labor: Honor the good servants!

In view of the poverty that is common in capitalist nations and customarily reaches unusual proportions in times of crisis, fascists address the “social question” with statesmanlike thoroughness. The “sharp contrast” between rich and poor is repugnant to them; they are concerned about national cohesion. They by no means regard impoverishment of the people as an automatic “argument” for right-wing radicalism; they see it on the contrary as an understandable reason for abandoning nationalist convictions, which to them are essential for “regaining” national greatness. For it is clear to them that such a project cannot be realized with a few loyal supporters and financial backers, but only if the people are willing to make themselves useful. And in the fascists’ opinion, they cannot show this willingness as long as the “question of providing the necessary daily bread” has not been resolved:

“Poverty and frequent unemployment began to play havoc with people, leaving behind dissatisfaction and bitterness as a memento. The consequence of this seemed to be political class division” (MK, p. 255).

The fact that Hitler speaks of political class division makes it clear that he has next to no objection to class antagonism as long as its consequences do not cause the less well-off to withhold their services from restoring the nation’s greatness and disturb its harmony:

“Organizing the broad masses of our people, who are today in the international camp, into a national people’s community does not mean renouncing the defense of justified class interests. Divergent class and professional interests are not synonymous with class division, but are a natural consequence of our economic life. Occupational grouping is in no way opposed to a true national community, for the latter consists in the unity of a nation in all those questions that concern this nation as such” (MK, p. 372 f.).

The fascist advocate of a firmly nationally-minded and useful people sees only one chance for realizing this ideal of settling the “natural” conflicts in a socially peaceful way to preserve the “true national community”: wage earners must get their “work and bread.” A proper state guarantees the broad masses service and sustenance; this requires it to make “economic sacrifices,” but it is “paving the way” for a “national education of the broad masses” “indirectly through a social uplift.” He does not forget to specify the limits of a “social uplift”:

“Thus a movement that intends to give the German worker back to the German people must realize that economic sacrifices play no role at all in this question as long as they do not threaten the preservation and independence of the national economy” (MK, p. 370).

This criticism of an “economy” that treats workers’ wages as a cost can certainly not be interpreted as any great promise. Faced with a calculation that aims to make labor more productive and cheaper at the same time, so that the criterion of profitability regularly makes workers superfluous, what occurs to this champion of justice is that the mass victims of state-protected business practices are not too thrilled with the community they belong to — and that, conversely, the community does not benefit from them too much. Although they are a “cornerstone” of the nation in their capacity as workers — as the objection from the point of view of the national community goes — they are denied the opportunity to increase the nation’s wealth through their service and prove themselves as useful members of the people. Due to the “greed and ruthlessness” of the propertied class, which only makes limited use of the poverty of wage laborers, the latter forget their natural common bond and the shared concerns of the German people and fall for anti-national, divisive agitation. Compelled to fight for their existence, they even turn against the German economy and damage their state, which they no longer feel committed to.

As little as a fascist objects to “the economy” making its earnings the condition of existence for wage earners at every workplace with its demands and wage stipulations; as coolly as he welcomes the “productive energy” this forces on them, with its manifestations that are conducive neither to the working class’s health nor to their enrichment — so reprehensible seems to him this treatment of “German workers” when they are denied their struggle for existence in their ancestral homeland, i.e., by performing work. A radical representative of the state as an enforced community sees the mass of unemployed as a scandal — as a violation of the nation’s right to the active service of all able-bodied workers, and the able-bodied population’s right to be made use of. He therefore does not content himself with calling for more “growth,” which he expects to provide “employment,” but demands that both the nation and the working people receive the benefit of work that each are entitled to — beyond the criterion that applies to such benefit in capitalism. He insists on the usefulness of poverty and, as a fanatic of the “right to work,” promises neither an alleviation of poverty nor prosperity for all, but sheer existence in the bosom of the national community as the reward for serving it.

This common-good idealism already sums up the anti-capitalism of the fascist program, according to which a state recognizes the growth of private money-measured wealth as its material basis whenever this basis functions in keeping with the state’s demands, but declares a crisis of this business to be a betrayal of the state’s rights, insisting that its basis has to be useful independently of economic calculations. If work is not providing any benefit any more, such calculations are seen as simply being the socially harmful self-interest of unscrupulous profiteers. It is no secret that a state that is after unconditional service to the national community does not offer attractive prospects even to the jobless — it is offering employment and subsistence level under political command. Hitler, at any rate, made no bones about it when rejecting a politics that relies on “the economy,” since what counted was to procure “daily bread,” which could only be guaranteed by “acquiring new soil.” However, understanding is shown for the Nazis making such corrections to capital’s businesslike way of treating usable and redundant labor, and for many victims of capital voting for the Nazi party, by all those people who see the political power that guarantees the causes for all “social ills” and regulates their management, in any case as the entity in charge of remedying them. And not even left-wing supporters of an ideal welfare state are willing to recognize that it is a philosophical/statesmanlike exaltation of serving others’ wealth when fascists see fit to deliver a praise of work that invokes the abstract general benefit of all, thereby already signaling material restriction for “individuals”:

“Fundamentally, the value of all work is twofold: a purely material value and an ideal value. The material value resides in the importance, that is to say, the material importance, of a piece of work for the life of the totality. The more national comrades draw profit from a certain achievement performed, including direct and indirect profit, the greater the material value is to be estimated. Contrasting with this purely material value we now have the ideal value. It does not rest in the importance of the work performed measured materially, but in its necessity in itself. As surely as the material profit of an invention can be greater than that of an everyday handy-man’s service, just as surely does the totality need the small service just as much as the great one. It may make a material distinction in evaluating the benefit of the individual piece of work for the totality, and can express this by a corresponding reward; in an ideal sense, however, it must recognize the equality of all as long as every individual endeavors to do his best in his field, whatever it may be. It is on this that a man’s esteem must be based, and not on his reward” (MK, p. 483).

Fundamentally, this state-derived doctrine of the value of labor rejects any inquiry into the relationship between wages and performance as a matter of little consequence, so there is no occasion for misguided thoughts about the “general” benefit guaranteed by the price of labor. The fascists’ worldview turns the rather uncomfortable role imposed on labor of acting as the source of value and thus as the source of the capitalist form of wealth, and the wage laborer’s subjugation to business-oriented calculations involving his labor power, with its profitable use being organized at the workplace as a quasi-technological matter: this is turned into the “totality” being supplied quite “naturally” with useful works. A leader of the totality wants this “importance” of work to be honored by the “material wage” — those who make themselves useful in this way deserve to be paid. In this respect, all is basically well with the world and the exchange between “material importance of work” and “daily bread” is fair. This is not altered by the fact, which fascists know well, that the benefit of work for the person performing it is inversely proportional to the “importance” that is given to his works and gleams at him in public in the form of other people’s wealth. Provided he really does not shirk fulfilling his duty, his useful poverty is amply compensated by his ideal, nonmaterial reward.

Anyone in the hierarchy of wage and performance can basically enjoy this “esteem” as long as they “fulfill the task entrusted to them by the community” (MK, p. 484). And such a higher task is always involved even, and especially, when someone has hit on wage labor as his occupation of choice. Hitler brilliantly combines the modern alternatives of nature and nurture theory to prove that everyone ends up in the place he belongs in his national community. Firstly, national comrades’ abilities are “in principle not acquired, but innate,” “hence a gift of Nature” — i.e. not an “achievement of man.” Secondly, his work is not only “attributable to his birth” but this natural gift also entails training that everyone “has received through the community” — in other words, a second gift one has to be thankful for. So a national comrade has a lot to do once he has become aware of his innate abilities and the state’s nurturing of them; he should

“develop and ennoble himself as a man, but he can do this only within the framework of his cultural community which must always rest on the fundament of a state. He must make his contribution to the preservation of this fundament. The form of this contribution is determined by Nature; his duty is only to return to the national community with honest industry what it has given him. Anyone who does this deserves the highest estimation and the highest respect” (MK, p. 484).

What is presented here as overcoming bourgeois, even philistine prejudices — the “present era … sees in material reward the expression of a man’s worth” — is the banal, anti-materialist core of ethno-nationalist ideology, which claims the state has an unconditional right of disposal over its subjects. When grandly proclaiming its theoretical indifference to the classes, it never denies they are to be co-opted in practice. As a fanatic of equality, a fascist even divulges the open secret of equality that democratic supporters of this “idea” never want to admit: it is not an idea at all, but the rather uncomfortable subjection of individuals having different means to one and the same rule and the demands it imposes by force.

What distinguishes the fascist program from the good old bourgeois way of managing the class antagonism and its yield is the fascists’ critique of the competition between and within the classes in both theory and practice. They do not want to rely on everyone promoting the growth of capital while pursuing their “special” interests — on the basis of the business and working conditions secured and constantly redefined by the state — and thereby economically creating the basis for state power. The “dull compulsion” of economic relations appears to them to be an uncertain source of national success because, and as soon as, it idles workers, i.e., fails in the task of mobilizing the entire people’s willingness to make sacrifices. Faced with the manifestations of economic crisis and its real and supposed consequences for social peace and the nation’s might, faced with both the internal conflicts and the pressure of foreign hostility, they draw the conclusion that it would be dangerous to even partly release competitive interests within their national unity. According to their will, serving the totality should not be the result that class society achieves by competition and in addition to it, but should completely replace the citizens’ materialism thus watered down:

“What applies to work as the foundation of human sustenance and all human progress is true to an even greater degree for the defense of man and his culture. In giving one’s own life for the existence of the community lies the crown of all sense of sacrifice” (MK, p. 327).

Fascist statesmen carrying out this program rely neither on nature, whose efforts to “preserve the species” reveal “the first, albeit infinitely simple, forms of a sense of sacrifice,” nor on the “Aryan,” who has developed the greatest “willingness to put all his abilities in the service of the community.” And the observation, considered so instructive, of the “poverty and frugality” of people who “are able to bear up faithfully under a scanty life” apparently leads fascists to interpret misery as an expression of the “idea of self-sacrifice” only in their theory of the state:

“Every worker, every peasant, every inventor, official, etc., who works without ever being able to achieve any happiness or prosperity for himself, is a representative of this lofty idea, even if the deeper meaning of his activity always remains hidden from him” (MK, p. 327).

When running their state, however, they by no means do without the abundant use of force. Statesmen themselves create the basis for the idealism they so readily praise their industrious subjects for: they make use of the state apparatus of force to turn the lives of the national comrades they govern into nothing but an existential struggle of the national community. As realists in their business, which demands selfless commitment to the nation, they turn sheer subsistence into a workers’ welfare program, replacing the existing capitalist misery by a state-imposed minimum subsistence level, and having the members of the national body who are being fed and are thus at least fit for service and combat fall in to take part in that program. The unemployed that capital produces are promoted to soldiers of labor.

The way the “national movement” assesses and treats the trade unions obeys the same logic. A fascist has a lot of understanding for the trade unions’ struggle since hardship, while generally the mother of virtue, no longer guarantees active commitment to “ideas” once it exceeds a certain level:

“For to call the trade-union movement in itself unpatriotic is nonsense and untrue to boot. Rather the contrary is true. If trade-union activity strives and succeeds in bettering the lot of a class which is one of the basic supports of the nation, its work is not only not unpatriotic or seditious, but ‘national’ in the truest sense of the word. For in this way it helps to create the social premises without which a general national education is unthinkable. It wins the highest merit by eliminating social cankers and thereby attacking both intellectual and physical germs, thus contributing to the general health of the national body” (MK, p. 49).

Hitler decided it was impossible to “nationalize” the people as long as “social conditions” for the working class consisted of sheer pauperism after he had his “object lesson” in Viennese poverty. In this he detected mainly one thing: no respect for God or anything else but instead a school of vice, which he immediately identified with “national indifference.” He condemns the extremes of poverty and recognizes the necessity of workers’ coalitions and their struggle from his statesmanlike point of view that the “masses of our workers” should be the reservoir for the national movement. At the same time, a radical advocate of labor service knows from the outset that workers must temper their struggle so as to “preserve an independent national economy” and must not start raising “demands of the most senseless kind.” He of course couldn’t case less about people having a pleasant life for which they work, or that such a thing is incompatible with what the state and capital demand of the masses, who have to order their lives around work to benefit business. His premise is that the “health of the nation” is achieved when work and wages make the masses fit for the nation’s mission — which certainly requires no life of luxury, on the contrary. That is why the supporters of nationally beneficial social conditions leave no doubt that under their control the rights of trade unions stand and fall with the double duty of generating the economic ability and the political will to fulfill the state’s mission:

“If the German unions had ruthlessly guarded the interests of the working class during the War, if even during the War they had forced the dividend-hungry employers of those days by a thousand strikes to approve the demands of the workers they represented; but if they had been just as fanatically committed to their Germanness in matters of national defense; and if they had been equally ruthless about giving the Fatherland its due, the War would not have been lost. And how trifling all economic concessions, even the greatest, would have been compared to the immense importance of winning the War!” (MK, p. 370).

That would have been something: a strike in the midst of the war, directed merely against the dividends and not against the dividend-rich production of goods important for the war effort, in order to boost the workers’ nationalist spirits; a strike that did not jeopardize the supplies for the front, but rather promoted them…This was a trade-union program the existing trade unions in any case violated, however nationally-minded they may have been. It was clear to Hitler that the trade unions were misusing their power. For fascists this is always the case when workers’ organizations fail to show the second kind of “ruthlessness,” the patriotic kind. Then even the most ruthless actions for the “interests of the workers” become a crime — which fascists, not without cynicism, like to prove with the fact that workers’ concerns fall by the wayside especially when trade unions have no interest in being “ruthless” when it comes to wages… Being totally dependent, they suffer — most of all — from the weakening of the German economy, which fascists think the organized labor movement is always aiming at. The misery of the Weimar period was Hitler's proof:

“By the turn of the century, the trade-union movement had long since ceased to serve its former function. From year to year, it had fallen more and more under the spell of Social Democratic politics, and finally had no use except as a battering ram in the class struggle. The purpose was to cause the collapse of the whole arduously constructed economic edifice by persistent blows, thus, the more easily, after removing its economic foundations, to inflict the same fate on the edifice of state. Representing all the real needs of the working class thus came less and less into play, until political prudence finally made it seem quite undesirable to alleviate the social, and indeed cultural, distress of the broad masses since otherwise one ran the risk of no longer being able to keep using them, with their desires satisfied, as a docile fighting force forever” (MK, p. 51 f.).

The root of the problem is identified as being the trade unions’ international leadership and attitude that are “hostile to the people and the fatherland,” the social-democratic, un-German, “therefore” Jewish, control of an otherwise honorable corporatist representation of interests. This conversely maps out the program of a state-run trade union. The latter must make it its goal and the criterion of its work from the outset to subordinate workers’ interests to the requirements of the nation. It must pursue in a positive way the organizational purpose of using the workers it represents as the “productive force of the nation”:

“In the face of this, the National Socialist trade union must, by organizationally embracing certain groups of participants in the national economic process, increase the security of the national economy itself and intensify its strength by the corrective elimination of all those abuses which in their ultimate consequences have a destructive effect on the national body, injure the vital force of the national community, and hence also of the state, and last but not least bring disaster and ruin to the economy itself” (MK, p. 675 f.).

Unfortunately, when the “internationally-” and “Marxist-” oriented trade unions were dissolved after the seizure of power and replaced by the state-founded “German Labor Front,”^[c] the way they responded did not confirm Hitler’s suspicion that they were all about class struggle and opposing the class state. Functionaries and activists who the fascists were sure were hostile to the state — whether rightly or not is really irrelevant — were persecuted without the many union members putting up a fight, as workers would when convinced that losing their organization meant losing the means to improve their working and living conditions. On the contrary, millions of Social Democrat and KPD^[d] voters furnished the “proof” for the Führer’s conviction that, as Germans led astray, they were by no means among the lost children of the Reich. In any case, the majority were willing to go along with things and keep quiet — and today’s popular interpretation that they were victims of Nazi rule who were “secretly” resisting and “only” doing their duty registers this sad fact by trying to vindicate the good German people in order to ease their bad conscience.

Not that the Germans’ post-fascist conscience is that bad. They “explain” the majority’s going along with things also by pointing to the “socialist” elements of “Nazi demagogy,” that critical treatment of capital that Hitler propagated and put into practice — albeit without harming business owners. The “persuasive power” of the “social benefits” of forced labor was accompanied, according to this way of looking at it, by “anti-capitalist agitation,” so to speak as an effective means for the fascists to appeal to the widespread — likewise “anti-democratic” — mindset in the Weimar Republic, which was allegedly responsible for wreaking havoc at the other end of the political spectrum.

b) State and capital: On the responsibility of property

The result of applying the motto, “The National Socialist state knows no ‘classes’” (MK, p. 675), was that wage earners had not only their customary, poorly paid work for the business world, which they now had to do in the German Labor Front, but also various national labor deployments and a labor service.^[e] For when fascists say they are determined to disregard the classes they do not mean to deny that there is a certain kind of people who exist to work. What they are dissatisfied with is everything that gets in the way of utilizing this class. And that includes not only workers’ will to fight for their existence, which the fascists too often see as harming the state. They also see working people being improperly treated by “unworthy employers,” whose greed for money plunges wage earners into misery and pushes them toward illegal actions:

“Just as surely as a worker sins against the spirit of a true national community when, without regard for the common good and the survival of a national economy, he uses his power to raise extortionate demands, an employer breaks this community to the same extent when he conducts his business in an inhuman, exploitative way, misuses the national labor force and makes millions out of its sweat. He then has no right to call himself national, no right to speak of a national community; no, he is a selfish scoundrel who induces social unrest and provokes future conflicts which one way or another must end in harming the nation” (MK, p. 374).

The national-community fanatic is well aware of the practice of modern exploitation; but he is not interested in the fact that it obeys the standard of capitalist returns, which demands frugality when it comes to wages along with lavish use of human labor material. According to his doctrine, those national comrades who are workers are ruined due to the excesses of employers who are only interested in enriching themselves, instead of making a contribution to the national economy that would justify their private wealth as a reward for services rendered to the community. Their lack of responsibility towards the master of capital too, the state, has supposedly led the propertied classes to neglect the needs of the nation — as if these needs were not assessed and tallied in money, i.e., didn’t populate the market in the form of private property! To a fascist, the ups and downs of business always reveal the profit hunger of “selfish scoundrels” when the results of capitalist competition do not meet his national demands; then he wishes for the responsibility of the “employer” who knows “that the happiness and contentment of his workers is the premise for the existence and development of his own greatness” (MK, p. 676). Thus, in the midst of an economy based on the accumulation of capital, he arrives at a critique of money, the “god” that destroys all “virtues”; not in order to abolish this “idol Mammon” and attack private property, but to press capital to continue creating wealth and “daily bread” for the national comrades destined to work even when it doesn’t pay off according to the calculations of the business world. To the radical leader of the national community, economic life is not a mass of “objective necessities” that — once brought into being by state force — bind the state, too, to the criteria of their success. The fascist politician has no use for the standpoint of competition with its laws of business success, because he regards the economy as a state project which assigns the business world a task: to apply private property unconditionally so that the country and its people function as a source of national might. If the “work and bread” program for the broad masses, having become synonymous with “justice,” keeps so obviously failing to work out, this must be due to property being misused. To a fascist, the “social question” is a result of the unscrupulous wheeling and dealing by which the propertied shirk their duty to provide jobs.

On the basis of this ideal of community-serving cooperation, in which each social class does “its part,” Hitler not only outlined his idyllic symbiosis of master and servant:

“In rural areas there could be no social question, since master and servant did the same work and above all ate out of the same bowl” (MK, p. 348).

In the spirit of this ideal, he also went on to differentiate between good and bad capital, distinguishing “pure capital” as the “end result of productive labor” from “capital whose existence and essence rest exclusively on speculation” (MK, p. 228). This diagnosis conveys to the good people who are dependent on making a living through work that the calculating handling of wages and performance is not at all the doing of those who give them jobs, or do not. Strictly speaking, they are not victims of capitalist business at all, but of its degeneration, under which their employers suffer just as much and “the nation” for sure and more than anyone:

“A grave symptom of economic decay was the slow disappearance of personal property rights, and the gradual transference of the entire economy to the ownership of stock companies.

“Only then had labor really sunk to the level of an object of speculation for unscrupulous hucksters; but the alienation of property from the wage-worker was increased ad infinitum. The stock exchange began to triumph and prepared slowly but surely to take the life of the nation into its guardianship and control” (MK, p. 256 f.).

“However, he (that is, “the Jew,” who stands for all the evil of bank capital here) also destroys more and more thoroughly the foundations of any economy that will really benefit the people. By way of stock shares he pushes his way into the circuit of national production which he turns into a purchasable or rather tradable object, thus robbing factories of the foundations of a personal ownership. Only then does that inner estrangement between employer and employee arise which later leads to political class division” (MK, p. 344 f.).

The Führer definitely did not miss the fact that credit in all its forms provides a businessman with the freedom to apply labor profitably in ways that exceed what his personal property allows; that interest is the price that is paid for money whenever it pays off; that stock companies also enabled his favorite industries to attain the size he so masterfully made use of for his project of regaining Germany’s might; etc. Nor did he destroy the capitalist credit superstructure and convert the banks to centers for physical drill. On the contrary. His critique, which declared the

“fight against international finance and loan capital … [to be] the most important item in the program of the German nation’s struggle for its economic independence and freedom” (MK p. 233)

was not so much due to the “discovery” that speculators on the capital market were subjecting industrialists to a terrible and unbearable “debt bondage.” Rather, this program item was based on the observation that capital’s business successes, which it even had in times of global economic crisis, by no means coincided with the might of the Reich; it had to be that the failures of German “workmanship” conversely stemmed from restrictions that other nations — the victors of the last competition of arms — were able to dictate. From this Hitler drew the conclusion that there could be no reliance on success in economic terms.

What fascists fundamentally have to say about the relationship between politics and the economy is nothing but the imperialist truth that a country’s economy contributes to its power in the world exactly as much as that nation can use its force to pave the way for it. The converse fact, that a nation’s means of power very much depend on its economic capacities, always means only one thing to them, as it does to all world economic leaders: these capacities have to be created and exploited. They see a need to take up the fight against international “finance and loan capital” as soon as the world market, with its branches of commodity trade, capital flow, and the stock exchange, works to their nation’s disadvantage. National credit was developed to its peak by Hitler, too. The “financial geniuses” of the Third Reich, just like the Führer himself, understood that the money and credit system was based on the state’s sovereign guarantee within its borders and encountered real doubts only in international business. That is why they did not abolish national credit, but largely removed it from cross-border comparison and supplied the business world with it — that was their battle program, because it promised to liberate the national economy from dependencies arising from the might of foreign sovereigns.

Hitler fixated on “the Jew” in this connection as well. True to the logic that was applied in the trade union question, when it came to what was preventing German economic might he had to “conclude” that anti-national beneficiaries of German labor were securing its fruits at the expense of good German companies; “bank Jews” exorbitantly demanding that their money multiply were hindering German industry from profitably operating at full capacity and expanding. So he combated the nationally inadequate yields of capitalism in the Reich firstly by targeting its un-German representatives, and secondly by means of an employment program whose stratagems have also served as a guide for concerned global economic policymakers of non-fascist persuasion. Alongside forced labor, which served immediate state purposes and was supposed to produce not-at-all-obscure use-values, there were a considerable number of public contracts awarded to “the economy.” These were financed by state debt, which “solved” the “problem” of limited purchasing power — and ensured that profits were recorded.

Companies’ import needs challenged the purchasing power of domestic buyers and banks and ran up against the export barriers aimed at the Reich. The Nazi state accommodated this by subsidizing foreign trade, in accordance with its interest in supplying its war industry with “vital” goods that were not available domestically. The means for doing this again came from state debt, here used in such a way as to ensure the business was profitable for the “partners.” Their profit calculation, and thus such business, was always at risk since the German Reichsmark was not exactly a reliable currency in view of the state's free use of its credit-money. So the government decided to tamper with the Reichsmark’s exchange rate in all sorts of ways, splitting it up according to the partner and business terms, and providing itself with a gold reserve for certain transactions — and financing the losses with loans.

At home, where the sovereign guarantee of legal tender was undisputed, more and more notes came into circulation every year. All kinds of bonds and bills of exchange, later also tax vouchers and the like, provided the economy with “liquidity.” Here they could serve the business world as money and capital. While there is a capitalist imperative that the value of national credit-money must by no means be endangered by being inflated, this was flouted by the fascists but in a way that was actually quite productive in market-economy terms. They also added suitable stabilizing measures: the price-based competition for the purchasing power of competing needs was regulated and controlled by the authorities; wage increases were out of the question.

For brisk consumption was not part of the Nazis’ economic program. The farmers, now declared the “Nährstand,”^[f] were tasked with supplying provisions. Their national duty was fulfilled as long as there was bread, the farms were preserved as family holdings, and master and farmhand maintained the modest social peace of rural life. The state provided farmers with support from laborers who acquired the right to be fed by performing a compulsory year of service.

In other sectors of the economy, the state's demand for available use-values was considerably higher. Fascist economic policymakers are not terribly interested in the crucial condition that a capitalist economy expects to be fulfilled if it is to produce, i.e., that production and trade yield sufficient profit. That is to say, they do not base their plans on their industry proving it is competitive, or commit state power to employing every means to ensure such competitiveness. They nullify this condition by guaranteeing its fulfillment. They do not want to rely on the calculations of capitalists who make the best of the means and limits of competition and credit in their own interests. When it came to the belief that the

“dependence of capital on the independent free state will therefore force capital in turn to champion this freedom, power, strength, etc., of the nation” (MK, p. 228),

Hitler called it an illusion. His program to induce capital to “serve” ignores much-cited “economic reason” because it is precisely from the standpoint of the sovereignty of power against all “objective constraints” that it wants to make business coincide with strengthening the state. Crises of capital demonstrate to a fascist statesman how successful the international moneyman’s egoism has been, and how the national class entrusted with production and employment has failed. However, the resulting dictate to utilize the nation’s productive power need not worry the business world for long. In the Third Reich it turned out to be by no means a “wrong approach” that would inevitably have led to “collapse,” but rather an unparalleled offer — no wonder that “big business” took a liking to Hitler. Even those who benefited from the accumulation of interest-bearing paper, after having certain doubts about the advantages of state regulations on share transactions and dividends, could not overlook the fact that credit business was not prevented but guaranteed by the state. And the owners of productive capital did not need to fear the limits they found in the country’s borders. The boundless idealism of this state, which considered the “persuasive power” of economic strength to be demonstrably small in international competition, and relied very realistically on the threat and use of force, also promised international profit from expanded spheres of access and investment. Everyone could see from Hitler’s armaments production what his idea was of the path to true sovereignty of the Reich and a sustainable “upswing” based on it. His standpoint was the imperialist truth that the restrictions Germany had to endure after losing the war put the kibosh on the ideal of a recovery being achieved through economic performance in competition against other nations. His ideal was an economy that provided its state as quickly as possible with the means allowing it to take action against the shackles on his nation and the freedoms of other nations. And he considered capitalists to be bad representatives of their profession when, in their pursuit of money, they were always adapting to the prevailing business conditions, i.e., also opening themselves to the power relations on the world market. He reminded them, and all other good Germans, that the force the state uses is the midwife of capital and that without it, business success would be feeble anyway:

“The talk about the ‘peaceful economic’ conquest of the world was probably the greatest nonsense that has ever been elevated to be the guiding principle of state policy… England, in particular, should have been recognized as the striking refutation of this theory; for no people has better prepared its economic conquests most brutally with the sword, and more ruthlessly defended them later, than England. Is it not precisely the distinguishing feature of British statesmanship to draw economic acquisitions from political strength, and to immediately transform every gain in economic strength into political power?” (MK, p. 158).

It was with a prewar program that the Nazi state carried out its criticism of the democratic way of overcoming a lost war. It thereby provided new business conditions at home that no industrial magnate, banker, or craftsman could resist endorsing. This economic policy was not designed for modestly getting by in difficult postwar times; the ideal of autarky, of national economic self-sufficiency, paid off and could not be mistaken for renouncing profit. The service to the state that was being demanded of property could easily be provided by its owners — the advantages were obvious.

C. The right of a righteous nation to the whole world, or: War — what else?

According to a rather old anti-fascist doctrine, Hitler’s accession to power marked the beginning of “the openly terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital”^[g] (G. Dimitrov, 7th World Congress of the Communist Third International, August 1935). A leader commanding a nation to wage a war that cost the lives of some 60 million people is supposed to have been, in reality, a “lackey” of big money, a “stooge,” who served the profit interests of his masters through bloodshed by suppressing workers’ unrest at home and waging a revenue-boosting war abroad — possibly with a few unforeseen tendencies, especially in the later years of the war, to reverse the relationship and neutralize the financially powerful “sponsors behind” his “movement.” Evidence is provided that men of capital were instrumental in Hitler’s success and that the war economy he ordered up in no way violated their interest in profit — the armaments companies made handsome money — to prove that, properly considered, the financially powerful mafia had instructed the state to order weapons from it. The class nature of politics lies in its having itself financed in order to — in turn finance its sponsors’ profits. The economy of capital consists in speculating on the state’s artfulness in redistribution…

This way of thinking denies the sovereignty of the class state — before and after the Third Reich, but especially during it. The far-reaching and never-ceasing efforts of well-heeled party donors to gain influence on politics actually bear witness to the fact that state power is important to the course of business by being separate from it. As the power that creates and maintains the split between labor and property, and as the authority representing the resulting public interest, the state knows no other “rationale” than the demands of capital. So it is generally open to what individual capitalists ask for, but can only comply more or less. A state has alternatives to choose from that by no means arise from the wishes and requests of those who have sponsored whoever is in office, but are based on points of view of a different sort: how to obtain taxes that grow without harming business; how to handle its finances efficiently, how tariffs affect imports and exports, how to take care of a national credit strained by extensive use of the state’s monetary sovereignty, with quite contrary effects coming about in all cases; how to regulate competition and credit so that they remain means of business without unduly restricting it; how to strengthen social peace, domestic security and national defense… And, finally, a decision might also be steered by an officeholder’s calculation of how carrying out these tasks will help him stay in power. This entire program of seeing to a class society has the sole aim of promoting the growth of capitalist wealth while managing the associated collisions and eliminating disruptions — and exactly the right thing to have for that purpose is a monopoly on the use of force: the freedom to set the conditions for business. This freedom also includes the power to decide on right and wrong, therefore also on war and peace — which hardly matches the image of bought-and-paid-for lackey types.

Such an “approach” of explaining Nazi “atrocities” in terms of financiers eager to buy politicians or subsidize certain businesses, and the resulting sequence “capitalism — fascism — war,” can now be considered done and dusted. However, this is not because the above criticism has become common knowledge. On the one hand, the great majority of democratic practitioners of ‘coming to terms with the past’ have always found that explaining fascism and war as Hitler’s contract work for big capital casts far too negative a light on ‘the economy.’ After all, the modern democratic state is no less dependent on the economy’s performance than the fascist Reich, so business is entitled to meddle in politics and the authorities are definitely right to serve and further it. On the other hand, after the end of the Soviet system no responsible person can see any alternative to the mutually beneficial symbiosis of market economy and democracy any more, so theoretically linking profit interests and fascism now all too easily casts too positive a light on the Nazi era. Hitler, as a guardian of “big money,” successful promoter of “growth,” and chancellor of capital-friendly deficit-spending, would practically be a role model for his democratic descendants — and that much rehabilitation is out of the question, on grounds of democratic hygiene. So the best way to explain the man and his system is not at all, i.e., he was an unfathomable triumph of evil, and his course toward world war was born of an obsession, definitely as unpolitical as it was amoral, on the part of the mentally disturbed private individual, Adolf H.

In reality, the Nazis spared no effort in providing political and moral justification for their war. Not only did they, like every other warring party in world history, grant themselves the bonus of being the challenged defender — their war, too, began with their having to “shoot back.” Hitler was also able to cite a literally vital national interest that made his war inevitable just like every “military intervention.” He saw the madness entirely in his pacifist opponents — in this, too, he was just like any politician demanding that his nation be ready for war:

“Due to the rapid increase in the German population before the War, the question of providing the necessary daily bread came to the forefront of all political and economic thought and action in an ever sharper way. Unfortunately, those in power could not make up their minds to go through with the only correct solution, instead believing they could reach the goal in a cheaper way. When they decided not to acquire new soil but instead imagined they could conquer the world economically, this had to end in an industrialization that was as unrestrained as it was harmful” (MK, p. 255).

World-market experts and those who have seen a deutschmark toughened by decades of export success can only shake their heads at such an antiquated agrarian political economy and contempt for industry. The Nazis of course realized that Germany had already accumulated far more wealth through its industry than with the plow in Weimar times. And if they felt cramped in too small a space with their numerous German people, it was not because they had achieved staggering yield figures by multiplying arable land with fertilizers. What they saw was their great nation being fundamentally deprived of the imperialist right to make use of the rest of the world, or at least significant parts of it, as a resource for the “daily bread” of state power — and that requires far more than a “national body” adequately nourished to survive a blockade. Hitler did not doubt that his ‘indecisive’ bourgeois rivals and predecessors had the intention of overcoming this hardship — just as his democratic successors have no doubt that he and the Kaiser were pursuing a valid national cause, with world war just proving to be an unsuitable way to get it:

“…beyond our borders we have to achieve something that we failed at twice before: to find a role, in harmony with our neighbors, that fits our wishes and our potential” (K. Kinkel, German Foreign Minister, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 3, 1993).

Only, the Nazis in their day could not fail to see that the Reich was denied the path to success of “conquering the world economically.” The victors of World War I, instead of setting up a Marshall Plan to turn the defeated enemy’s resources into a sphere of dollar accumulation, transported surpluses and productive capacity out of the country in order to repair their own war damage. Germany’s capitalists in that post-war period were hindered from accessing foreign goods and markets, instead of being allowed to start competing for export successes and dollar earnings in an imperialistically arranged Free World and especially on the large US market, competing even to the point of damaging America’s world-money. Hitler found it totally wrong to even look for a peaceful “solution” to the “problem” of German resurgence in this situation, to even consider the “alternative,” world power or nothing! In his righteous indignation he could only interpret such a misguided attempt as stemming from the reprehensible attitude of those responsible:

“To the same extent that the economy rose to become the determining master of the state, money became the god that everything had to serve and that everyone had to bow to. More and more, the heavenly gods were put aside as obsolete and outdated and incense was burned instead to the idol Mammon. A truly terrible degeneration set in, terrible especially because it occurred at a time when the nation needed the highest heroic spirit … more than ever. Germany had to prepare itself to answer with the sword one day for its attempt to secure its daily bread by means of ‘peaceful, economic labor’” (MK, p. 255 f.).

“The extent to which this 'economization’ of the German people had succeeded is probably most evident from the fact that after the War one of the leading figures of German industry, and above all of commerce, was finally able to express the opinion that the economy as such was alone in a position to put Germany back on its feet” (MK, p. 257).

The logic used here by an aspiring statesman to take his nation’s imperialist failure as proof that his reform project is without any alternative, is, incidentally, the same logic used by the civilian chancellors of the second German postwar period. Military power did become available to them, but only by way of participating in the Western alliance system and according to its strategic options. They took advantage of the license likewise granted them to make “global economic conquests,” declared the strong deutschmark to be the nation’s only honorable recipe for success — and for decades liked to style their foreign policy as nonviolent and peaceful. Not a word of this demonstrative refusal to “militarize” German politics was true. And just as the postwar chancellors were never too busy rising to “world export champion” to neglect their NATO contributions as their necessary “condition for business,” the fascists — “Mammon” or not — hardly disregarded the contribution that national industry with its “unrestrained” growth was making to their project of emancipating Germany militarily from all external restrictions. Their political criticism of the standpoint of “the economy,” the “economization” of the nation, was not only no “critique of political economy”; it was no attack on capital and its right to profit; it was a plea for the nation’s right to have “the economy” at its disposal. This was obstructed by the calculating way businessmen dealt with the restrictive international business conditions set by the victorious powers. Under these circumstances, German capital could not become cosmopolitan so as to promote the cause of the nation. So the fascists prohibited German business from making any such attempts; the German economy had to gear itself to meeting the needs of the state and comply with the mobilization it ordered.

This could of course only be implemented with “administrative intervention” in companies’ freedom of calculation. The Third Reich was not in the luxurious position of being able to implant an entire armaments industry into its economy as a high-tech growth driver. This is why Hitler emphatically refused to take his industrialists’ competitive concerns into account while systematically reorienting goods production and trade for a war economy. Obviously, national rearmament and supplying military needs was not supposed to end up harming them anyway; and “liberating” Greater Germany also meant winning freedom for the nation’s businesses from all restrictive competitive conditions. Hitler, too, wanted the outcome of the war to be a peace enabling the nation “to secure its daily bread by means of ‘peaceful, economic labor’.”

Nevertheless, post-defeat generations find it easy to deny this undertaking any moral recognition in retrospect. Now that the nation has finally stopped being an isolated loser dissatisfied and at odds with the rest of the world, but is firmly settled on the winning side in a world order that has so far fulfilled one German global political need after another, it can no longer understand why Hitler would offensively resort to “violence as a means of politics” between free and sovereign nations. Yet the good reasons and pressing occasions for using military means to break another state’s will have done anything but die out. They continued to exist without interruption in the form of an enemy of the system, and since its demise they have multiplied enormously. And it is no secret that today’s military interventions are always justified, on the basis of international law, by citing a need to protect national interests. It is equally well-known that nationalistic democracies, from the start, calculate their readiness for war in terms of the military means of all the world’s states, i.e., count every single armed engagement as a contribution to preserving or creating a world order.

The difference compared to Hitler’s policy, which expert commentators on modern history turn into a supposed opposition to it, is once again one of “situation,” of “power relations” — the means that competing nations have at their disposal and resort to and want to rely on when dealing with each other. Every use of force is worth it in pursuit of interests that have earned recognition in the global-market order, but that regularly end up damaging other nations, which see that as a violation of their equally legitimate national interests. Their attempts to improve their balances — in terms of both their economy and their power — are always blocked. This is done through constant supervision and “interference” accompanied by threats of force, but above all through war when they dare to use force to alter borders. Today, such actions are considered “infringements of international peace and law” — unless they are being done by the masters of the world order themselves. These powers are quite familiar with legitimate special cases for “altering borders,” which they prohibit others from doing. In a world of states where the outcome of armed conflicts is the basis for allocating competences, where some make the decisions regarding the politico-economic system and others have no alternative but to follow the given rules and open up to “peaceful economic conquest,” successful nations always ever use force only to protect their legitimate “vital interests.” Their military apparatus enjoys the good repute of existing solely to maintain the “rule of law,” and its use is always provoked by others who are guilty of a violation — of the peace and the entire system of international relations. Conquering land to live on is seen to be a doubly reprehensible undertaking. Hitler had his Germans march out to break the restrictions on German power imposed by the world powers’ superior imperialism, to thoroughly revise the ranking of major nations — in other words, to overturn “the order” the victorious powers had established in Europe. Though this order was nowhere near as stable as that in the next postwar period, it was enough for condemning Hitler’s goal — and, conversely, unmasking every aspiring potentate who has since challenged the world order as a “new Hitler.” For his attempt at correction the German Führer moreover used a means — occupying foreign countries by force — that reveals anything but the kind of imperialist strength that entitles a modern nation to use force for influencing the relations of force on the globe and to compete for world domination. The fascist state was lacking a successful accumulation of capital, business interests established all over the world, the resulting duty and ability to apply superior force when rogue actors or foreign powers get in the way and the competition of arms has to decide on right and wrong. The Nazis wanted their conquests to actually create the basis for all that. It was to that end that they transformed a deficient capital accumulation into a war economy, launched an economic program as un-capitalist as the struggle for autarky, chose such unusual spoils as “breadbaskets.” “Greater Germany’s war of liberation” was waged over the prerequisites of world domination, which successful capitalist states know how to defend.

However, the other nations saw Hitler’s war aims from the outset as an attempt to repartition the world, and thus as an irrefutable reason to overturn their national agendas. From now on, the weapons of competition had to stand aside for the expected competition of weapons, or had to be made fit for it. Hitler’s policy was a challenge for his opponents: they had to take part in dividing up the world. Their considerations when it came to declaring war and entering it at least show that it was not so much antifascist sentiment as imperialist calculation that guided the military decisions that were ultimately made. This also applies to the Soviet Union, in a different way. On the one hand, Hitler left the Soviet Union no choice when he overran it with war. But on the other, the Russian state socialists under Stalin’s leadership made common cause with the imperialists’ calculations and, with their successfully waged “Great Patriotic War,” took part in repartitioning the world. Instead of advancing “world revolution,” they turned their Soviet country into a world power, which was not only increasingly seen as a disruptive rival for power by the other victors, but also saw itself as such. As far as the Western allies of then and now are concerned, fascism is not in itself a reason to criticize a state and avoid good relations, let alone to fight it. On the contrary, Hitler’s decision to march eastward actually earned the Reich some mitigating circumstances, as later guardians of human rights would judge. This change to the “map” would evidently not have been as great a grievance as the change that resulted became. After that, the good world power and its allies were faced for decades with an evil one. And when democratic antifascists list the misfortunes that Hitler’s war brought upon the world, they mention on a par with all the people who were killed the “division of Germany,” which was happily overcome only after more than forty years. These are the same people who, when looking back on the Third Reich, ask whether Germans were able to notice any war economy, labor service, “blood and soil”^[h] — or whether the war program could only show itself to them when Germany was defeated at Stalingrad…

D. Justice — or: The fascist state carries out its selection via racism, killing Jews, euthanasia, Lebensborn^[i]

The standard the people were held to was the war program and the services it required, which the Führer quite justly demanded from each social class according to its capabilities. All the Nazi state’s “confused views” and “acts of madness” that humanitarians looking in wonder at the Third Reich so like to collect and document, in order for their indignation at such “inhumanities” to create a little admiration for the humanity of the democratic alternative — they are all based on this principle. The Nazi state was simply judging and condemning everyone in terms of the all-important question of who was ready to go along with this state program.

When readiness is required, the first thing is people’s will. To a fascist statesman, it is not enough for his citizens to go about their jobs as loyal subjects, comply out of self-interest with a state mandate known as market economy, and honestly pay taxes. He also takes for granted that their patriotic partisanship and the national “we” standpoint has become “second nature.” Anyone who does not take a positive stance toward what they are supposed to live and fight for is suspected of being an enemy. All have to prove that they are not just running around as citizens according to their passport, but that they belong to the people, whose right to live the state must fight to enforce as its foremost duty. A fascist statesman is not out to be an advocate of social interests, much less economic ones dividing the national community, or merely to administrate an order that all competing parties must adhere to. He insists that his subjects’ political will must reveal their political nature: they must show themselves to be the people for whose preservation no sacrifice is too great.

This was the standard the Nazis laid on their Germans — and they by no means despaired at the sight of an “economized,” “dissolute,” “decadent” people bereft of all virtues. After all, they were sure of their mission of being the leaders of a great people entitled and able to preserve itself in a struggle for life. And they knew how to differentiate. Was not much of what they disliked about their countrymen’s morals, about every social class’s sins, due to their lacking the right leadership for so long? Someone who decides to take on the task of bringing millions to live by the right values, guiding them to achieve “highest humanity” as befits them, i.e., who wants to exercise “spiritual leadership” (referring here not to Helmut Kohl who used the same phrase, but to Adolf Hitler, MK p. 482) while constantly claiming to be enabling the national community to find their own fulfillment, such a person cannot lightly doubt that the masses he needs for the struggle are up to it. He is taking it upon himself to (re)awaken them. That of course requires a little more than “political persuasion,” or whatever democrats call their agitation for more patriotism and for themselves to manage it. When fascists proclaim national unity that knows no classes, when they talk about everyone sitting in the same boat with their equal rights and duties as a sworn community of fate, etc., this is the prelude to subjecting actually existing citizens to critical scrutiny to see who really belongs to the ethnic-national collective. It is necessary to examine whether and in which cases their subjects’ political “nature” is due to the not-at-all ethnic environment of a disrupted state system, and in which cases it is based on heredity, i.e. comes from their nature. And a conscientious selection is required, which proceeds fairly, without regard to the person — having met a personally likable enemy of the people is not an excuse for anyone. The Nazis’ racism is not an implausible false teaching that is unsupported by biological evidence, much less refutable by looking at its objects. It is a very plausible state-based moral view of how fit or unfit a person is for a state program. And going from having a low opinion of individuals, families, clans, or ethnic groups who do not meet one’s expectations to deciding that is the way they are, is something American Christians and Iranian Muslims, but also those German democrats who are notoriously friendly to foreigners, do just as readily as the Führer did. The fact that he put this ideology into bloody action as leader of the German Reich earned him the reputation of not having been a respectable statesman. But during his lifetime he was one, just like others who occasionally punish thousands and millions for having a wrong ruler, i.e., for being enemies.

“The Jew”

reared his ugly head wherever the Nazis looked. In every area of the capitalist society they had taken over, they could find people who were sinning against the ideal of the national community and thus showing an ethnic-nationalist onlooker where their sympathies really lay.

• Activists pursuing purely material-minded egoism and anti-community class interests were to be found in the ranks of those with property, where they speculated at the expense of the people’s productive vitality, hindered the responsible use of property, and created a debt bondage that prevented the nation’s employers from fulfilling their mission — to provide the people with bread and work. This weighed on the national community, harmed the nation — until Providence decided to put a leader into office who would put a stop to money being used in a cosmopolitan way, i.e., by un-German capitalists. Un-German and yet active in Germany — that meant advocates of a foreign nation, members of a foreign people, were living in the midst of us; they weren’t operating where they belonged, as they were not willing to create their own nation; or even capable of doing so, because they had instead long since embedded themselves in foreign peoples as parasites harming them.
• In the ranks of the workers there were likewise people to be found who were not at all interested in doing for the community what this social class should do. They were opposed to service being done by people who were poor but indispensable to the nation, and thus honorable. That such enemies of selfless industry should find favor with the good folks of the Labor Front is actually unthinkable, in terms of the ethnic-national concept of work — to toil in the service of the community. But it does happen, when the selfless industrious are prevented from getting to exert themselves for the nation by the ethnically alien exploiters among the nation’s capital owners, the first kind of parasites. Then the workers must not only live for work, but also fight for it; and un-German elements, outsiders neither loyal to the nation nor truly part of it, were able to misuse this struggle for bread again — to strengthen their international power, thwarting the recovery of the fatherland, and to divide the national body, which was not their own.
• The fact that such machinations were not immediately stopped by the responsible politicians, but the parasites among the capitalists instead even courted, and their accomplices among the workers tolerated, allowed only one conclusion: the administration of the state was itself infiltrated — “obviously” once again by un-German anti-statesmen, who had no interest in maintaining a “well-fortified democracy,” namely, a fighting people, but all the more in pacifist enfeeblement.

International business and international class struggle, Bolshevism and securities trading — and a liberalism to boot that put state power at the mercy of these forces: this could not be anything other than a conspiracy to harm the nation. Both the alleged and the real effects of what people were doing were blamed on them individually. Once negative effects of their actions were detected, these effects were declared to be the inevitable result of some natural characteristic of the perpetrators. According to this familiar pattern of moral common-sense, the Nazis identified pests, alien elements undermining the national body. Foreign blood was standing against the nation, which defends its blood and knows what it has to do. It was therefore no longer necessary to furnish proof that someone was actually going against the people and the state. The unsuitability of their character for the national mission was settled by their belonging to an un-German national character, which was to be determined by family tree, so that one’s bloodline proved one’s guilt. When it was decided that the main enemy was internationalist finance-capitalist Bolshevism, that meant its entire “fifth column” within the country had to be eliminated. This cost millions of Jews their lives, even though they never even thought of resisting the new rulers.

“The intelligentsia”

The fascists hated “the intelligentsia” for both their intellect and their social role.

The social class by this name already provoked the deepest mistrust because of the mere attitude of people who habitually form a good or bad opinion about what is happening in the world. Not because of the “possibility of error” that modern thinkers are so eager to admit, and which they make the touchstone of a democratic, i.e., contemporary, mindset. People cannot really be relied upon when they seek to arrive at their truth beyond the state’s necessities and the officially established directives for life. The fact that “knowledge,” of whatever kind, is a view based on reasons, so that it has be revoked as soon as one sees good reasons for another view, while faith holds steadfastly to principles once it has embraced them, made Hitler and his team fans of the latter. However, fascists do not advocate just any faith, only the ethnic-national one. These radical state thinkers and leaders specialize the bourgeois way of equating the quality of a thought with its morality by elevating the German person’s purpose, goodness, honor, and mission to the defining feature of every useful thought. Anything else is harmful, anti-national thinking, whose proponents, if they were lucky, were regarded under the Nazis not as enemies but as pitiful weaklings and half-hearted guardians of the intellect:

“These are those over-bred intellectuals who have no idea how ultimately to make a people willing to stand tall even when the storm begins to rage…” (Hitler in a speech to the German press on November 10, 1938).

Critics of the state calling on it to crack down, conservatives warning of or prophesying “downfall,” could also earn the contempt of Germany’s renewers: they were appealing to the wrong people and were not man enough themselves to stage a movement and stand up for their cause —

“...the same people who brandish Old-German-style decorative swords in the air, wearing tanned bearskins with bull horns over their bearded heads, always only advocate fighting with intellectual weapons for the present day” (MK, p. 396).

Idealistic reformers insisting that the law be seen, even in trace amounts, as a means protecting citizens in their conflicts with the state could be sure of being suspected of Marxism — yet another opportunity for Hitler to identify Jews as subversive elements. As for the academic world, the Nazis conducted a thorough inventory of it, reliably distinguishing the desirable from the undesirable in dissertations and lectures. It was important to them that there be confirmation everywhere of the “doctrine,” the moral of German history in relation to people, living space, race, mother, and Providence. And they did not fare badly with the Republic’s bread-and-butter scholars, who were extremely good at the translation job now required of them. After all, the new criterion was not all that new, as they had always been busy doing comparisons and evaluations of tradition and nation, language and culture, being and time, life and death, the Faustian and the family, God, and other educational ideals. They seemed to have a need for clarity due to their usual form of partisan thinking itself, so that the strictly organizational handling of dissenting opinions could be limited to a minority. Moreover, a lot of inner emigration was in vogue, and when these people justified themselves afterwards by claiming they had been intimidated by official measures and militant appearances by fascist youth squads, this must have something to do with the fact that their need to teach could not be stifled either by gagging or by certain modifications in what was to be taught. “Science as a vocation” (Max Weber) seems to have its own ethos.

Their subjected people’s faculty known as “intelligence” is also a source of vexation for fascists. Simply because it is not something else: not virtue, commitment, diligence, willingness to make sacrifices, in short, not the things that a few decades after Hitler, democratic educators again find lacking in the school system and call for in order to provide “orientation in a society uncertain of its values.”^[j] Not to mention the way thinking involves neglecting one’s body, as fascists always assume. When a state is out to assert itself against other states, demanding unconditional service and firm support for the greatness of the nation, it expects its subjects to be fit in the fundamental Aryan way, which is thoroughly Roman: the mind is the will to “grasp,” i.e., to accept the national mission, a “struggle against the poisoning of the soul,” a will that has to eliminate the “need for sensual gratification” and considers the fist more important for life than food for the mind. For both individuals and the general public, fascists provide the diagnosis:

“Not infrequently, the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses.”

The therapy is the reverse. History teaches us “that the bloodiest civil wars have often given rise to a steel-hard, healthy national body, while artificially cultivated states of peace have more than once produced a rottenness that stank to high Heaven” (MK p. 773).

Education of the people

was altogether highly valued by the Nazis.

The democratic education system “prepares” young people for “life” with its “vicissitudes,” by organizing a competition for successively excluding them from further qualification to distribute them over the hierarchy of jobs and social positions that is inherent to class society. Fascists take this function as much for granted as they do this hierarchy itself. But they demand far more of it, for really selecting the best and toughening the people as required. Unbridled bourgeois competition even leads to harmful results, branding those it relegates to the lower rungs of the social ladder as losers, and thereby contradicting the egalitarian principle of the national community, in which the lower social classes, too, are supposed to prove themselves as full members with equal rights. Moreover, it merely distributes national comrades over the various jobs, thereby violating the aristocratic principle according to which the national community is held together by the “personal” virtues of leading and being led, requiring the natural differences in character between people to be brought out, ‘natural’ referring to the nature of life in the national community. The state owes its people such measures, as a prerequisite for successfully waging the national struggle for existence — and what that is about is not concealed by a fascist behind the murk of sociological abstractions. In the Nazi state, curriculum and pedagogical evaluation promised throughout the school year that one had to prove oneself as a soldier sooner or later, in fact, always. The education that was dispensed in higher-level institutions to future co-leaders for them to pass on consisted of familiarizing the elite with time-tested examples of soldierly state wisdom: “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori,” “Mens sana in corpore sano,” where is an Augean stable for us to clear out, Trojan horse and betrayal of the fatherland, Hannibal ante portas, Frederick the Great.^[k] What is known as a humanistic education.

Hitler made sure his purebred Germans had plenty of opportunities to prove themselves as genuine Aryans.

“Racial hygiene”

seemed absolutely essential to the Nazis. The nation’s health was of paramount importance to them, and they left no doubt that this did not refer to any medical findings that someone was physically all right. A healthy people has passed the inspection to see if it is fit for the state’s plans. “Defective people” are unfit, “defective offspring” fail to meet the community’s legitimate demands; there is accordingly a difference between ‘life unworthy of living’ and its opposite. “Triage” was required — after all, the fascists had a national emergency to deal with and therefore rejected the other kind of cynicism, the one relying on the idea that success will prove the right people right and what is ‘healthy’ will prevail on its own. They executed this state-of-emergency morality, passing and enforcing judgments on the “right to life” that every state power grants, i.e., attaches conditions to. This can only be found to be immoral by people — who there are of course a lot of — who adopt the (government’s) standpoint of “universal legislation” themselves. That is, they provide firm rules of conduct for everything people do, or better still — for they always humbly include themselves among those their maxims are aimed at — everything a human being does. So they also have a judgment about where the motto “live and let live” has to have its limits. Guardians of morals have enough to do condemning the “atrocities” by which the Nazi state performed a selection that states always carry out or decline to carry out on grounds of expedience. In fact, every citizen sharing in their leaders’ responsibility for the weal and woe of the “community” is quite familiar with this kind of selection, as a need that their political rule has. It is regarded as a just concern or as a temptation, depending. No sooner does genetic engineering present all those truly or only morally responsible with the prospect of breeding virtuous human material, implanting resistance to cancer and crime, identifying and eradicating a genetic predisposition to terrorism, however it is being officially defined, and other such things, then begins a lively debate about what is and what is not permitted, ending in a call for laws. And all the debaters assume their authorities capable, for better or worse, of doing everything the Nazis tried their hand at, using merely family trees and Mendel’s laws, and force after the “misfortune” occurred.

A moral person at least still has the option of insisting that the people’s democratic advocates consider the “natural selection” of free competition to be an arrangement that meets their demands — an arrangement that, firstly, they have nothing to do with and, secondly, they can appeal to whenever they want proof of which members of society are good or bad, fit or unfit. When people, who are being successfully used because they are subject to the conditions such use requires, sort themselves into the achievers and the unfit, there is no need for a Lebensborn’s breeding efforts, which were intended to more effectively preserve and entrench the healthy stock identified by the state.

War

was for the fascists the purpose, the means, the standard, and altogether the final and decisive arbiter of selection. The result of this contest between representatives of one and the other breed of people must irrefutably be right. For how is it decided if not by the will and ability — in terms of both the economy and guns and rocket technology — of the human material, i.e., by a nation’s nature?

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