Treadwell’s Bookshop, Tavistock St W1 (www.treadwells-london.com)
In this challenging but entertaining series of talks Stephen Alexander has been speaking on the relation between fascism and occultism, and the response to nihilism, from his usual position of a post-modern provocateur.
1 Crackpot Histories and the Politics of Despair (11 March 2008)
I missed this opening talk but was fortunate enough to be given a transcript of it. In summary it looked at the philosophical and cultural influences on the Nazism through the figures of Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck, and 'how their work significantly shaped a Germanic ideology which in part provided the intellectual and emotional foundations of Hitler’s Third Reich'. What united these figures was a common, romantic rebellion against modernism in all its forms, combined with a new anti-rationalism and a call for a return to Germanic (i.e. Anti-Modern) tradition, together with the then popular trends of illiberality and anti-Semitism.
Lagarde was characterised as an ultra-conservative theologian disillusioned with Christianity, who sought to revive his nations spiritual life with a new Germanic Religion, to purify its culture from foreign influence, and set it on a path of a new imperialism. His religious ideal was to combine Roman Christianity with German Paganism.
Langbehn, a bohemian disciple of Lagarde, was revealed as a major influence on the ideology of völkisch nationalism, and its call for a new Fatherland. But he was also the first to marry Lagarde’s theology with some of the increasingly popular ideas of Nietzsche, creating a bizarre cocktail of religion and individualistic revolt.
Moeller van den Bruck was portrayed as a slightly saner, secular figure, who introduced the full force of Nietzschean philosophy and critique to the emerging ideology. He was however also largely responsible for the distortion of Nietzsche’s ideas typically found in Nazism, making them appeal to the discontented, men of resentiment, who Nietzsche targeted as major part of history’s troubles.The ideology these men created was proposed as the ‘respectable’ bedrock on which others would build ‘crackpot’ occult theories and mythical histories.
The summary of this talk proved more controversial, with Alexander claiming that the project of ‘reterritorialisation’ of culture with mythic narrative was always difficult and dangerous, and now impossible under the conditions of postmodernity, arguing the hopelessness of this was intuitively apparent even to those who undertook it, leading to the typical repressed hatred found in all idealistic moralism. He provoked his audience by suggesting that to a lesser degree this was also true of neo-paganism in general, and that in some quarters this subculture was also contaminated with both blatant and crypto fascism. He ended with an over simplistic post modern assault on myth and magical thinking that has inspired me to write a counter essay in response.
2 From Ariosophy to National Socialism (18 March 2008)
This was a simpler talk drawing on the work of Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke, outlining the subsequent occult developments within what became National Socialist Ideology. It proved to be a clear and succinct account that well related these ideas back to the mainstream ideology explored in the previous talk. However puzzlement was expressed at the influence that such ’insane’ ideas had had on a major political movement, speculatively linking this to the hypnotic ‘glamour of fascism’ and its essential irrationality. Nothing was said of the obvious role of ‘secret societies’ in spearheading clandestine Nazi operations, or the role of such groups as financial channels from Capitalist sponsors. But a more measured stance was taken, when he observed that the influence of these groups was actually quite limited, with only a few high ranking Nazis (such as Himmler and Hess) taking them particularly seriously, but none the less maintained they had a crucial effect. While Hitler had read the occult magazine Ostara as a youth, by the time of Mein Kampf he had no interest in the occult at all, even though some passages in the book sound mystical, as one audience member pointed out. A strange alliance of reactionary ideas was alluded to and the perverse influence of Wagner. To this point another observation was made from the audience that Hitler was in fact a Catholic and motivated by a sense of Christian piety, later persecuting occultists. This was acknowledged but not explored further, as Alexander was determined to point to the occult connection as an important catalyst in the development of Nazism’s unique characteristics. For those unfamiliar with Goodrich-Clarke’s work
a good summary can be found at www.ewtn.com/library/NEWAGE/NAZIOCCU.TXT
The discussion after explored many of these issues and included an interesting debate on whether Nazi glamour was still a danger or now merely a joke (its presence in fetish clubs etc was described by one commenter as pantomime). To this Alexander retorted that Nazism was still a threat and that the Order of the New Templars had been recently revived in Austria by a former SS officer!
To Be Continued…..