Reflections Beneath A Dark Sun: Myth, History, Politics and Paganism
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.
3 Only God Can Save Us Now (25 March 2008)
I Gave this a miss, partly cos I was broke, partly as it was about Heidegger (<Twat)
I include it here for completeness. A curious examination of Jungian archetypes and the philosophy of Heidegger,and their support of Nazism. The return of the Gods, with special reference to Wotan.
4 Blood and Soil (1 April 2008)
For me this was the best talk of the series so far. It examined the Bio-fascist aspects of Nazism, with its Eco-Mysticism, and its Racial Nationalism, as well as the slogans and manipulation of language deployed to engrain these into the German mind.
The talk opened with an attack on the Nazi assault on the German language turning it from a poetic and sophisticated tongue to the language of barbarism. It was argued the new terminology and brutal mode of discourse introduced by the Third Reich’s propaganda bastardised the German language, possibly irrevocably, and revealed the true nature of the Nazi mind. Could there be any poetry after Auswitz? Adorno had denied it.
Key words in the Nazi vocabulary were Blood and Soil:
Blood signified the unique Racial Nationalism of the Third Reich. Previous Nationalisms had been defined in terms of culture, even anti-Semitism was an attack on a religious and cultural group. But Nazism redefined National and Ethnic identity purely in terms of a pseudoscience of Race, a permanent identity which only death could erase. Largely the product of distorted Social and Evolutionary Darwinism and Eugenics, this was none the less also justified by Theosophical concepts of Root Races and their historical role. The Blood of the nation needed to be pure to fulfil its destiny.
Soil signified the Ecocentrism of Nazism. Nature was described as an organic whole, often a mystical one, its fundamental body was the Soil. Those who worked the Soil for generations had a special relationship with it, thus German Blood and German Soil were mystically linked and part of one ideal holism which could be damaged by contamination or separation. Germany was for Germans rooted in their own Soil. It matter not that this made no sense in the irrational culture of the Third Reich, this was a ‘necessary myth’ and its constant repetition was enough to induce the hypnotic state required to accept it.
In contrast to the Soil and its Roots was Asphalt and the Rootless which were the separators from Nature, thus the Urban, the Intellectual and the Nomadic were allthe promoters of alienation and sickness.
This was also linked to the emergence of Bio-Power (as Foucault called it), the control not just of the fate of individuals through the power of death, but the control over society as a whole, as a biological group, through the control of life. This involved talk of the ‘health of a nation’ and its ‘fitness’. The Nation was seen as a Species under a distorted Darwinian perspective, that needed to survive and grow, purification, competition and conflict were essential. Linked to this was the languageof strife, fanaticism, conquest, domination and submission, brutality and the glorification of bestial cruelty.
Despite this image of Nature as savage competition and ‘tooth and claw’, the Nazis did value the harmony that they thought resulted from this and sought ecological balance, thus great reforms were achieved in Germany and much farmland returned to forest.
On the other hand it was observed that it was only a minority of Nazis that really went for the Soil aspect of the Ideology, and tellingly this was the Neo-Pagan contingent, like Hess. Even an occultist like Himmler was far more interested in German Blood than German Soil, and obsessed with purifying it. These people preferred the ideal of the new Metropolis and it high technology, to any rural idyll.
Again much of this was blamed on Neo-Pagans, and despite well expressed protestations of individualist, libertarian and diversity based Ecologism within an outsider community, which was fully accepted by the speaker, he insisted on the significance of a dangerous fascist strain within the community, using the manifestos of the Heathen movement as an example. He challenged the pagan audience to justify this archaic, irrationalism in their midst.
Another interesting counter to this was the identification of a Heathen shadow in revolt against the Rationalist egoism of Capitalism, which could swamp the expression of a liberated Pagan unconscious.
