Führerprinzip versus The Organization
In a thread on X, a guy named SwabianSalute made an interesting argument about critiquing Hitler and after my friend Vidar alerted me to it: I thought I would respond from the point-of-view of a dedicated National Socialist.
He writes how the late, great William Pierce’s novel ‘The Turner Diaries’ can be read as a critique of Adolf Hitler and to be honest that is a new and interesting perspective but his description of it as the ‘only known pro-Hitler critique of Hitler known to man’ is simply wrong, however.
A good example of this is the fact that he cites the World Church of the Creator (aka Creativity), but he doesn’t mention that Ben Klassen actually criticised Hitler especially in around race – Klassen being of Ukrainian Mennonite ancestry with both his parent’s families having originally come from Germany – where he argued that Slavs were not an enemy of (and were actually part of) the white race and criticized Hitler’s racial policies in Eastern Europe towards the Slavs with some justification. An earlier criticism of the same type was also made by the pro-Hitler British author James Larratt Battersby in his 1952 ‘The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler’ where he contended that Slavs were actually part of the Aryan race.
In contrast to say Savitri Devi who objected to the entire notion of the ‘white race’ and preferred the Aryan race when writing to George Lincoln Rockwell. Indeed, Savitri Devi openly implies criticism of Hitler in ‘And Times Rolls On’ and it was not uncommon even during the Third Reich for European National Socialists to openly criticise elements of German National Socialism with one such critic being William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’) as Mary Kenny points out in her excellent and broadly sympathetic biography of him ‘Germany Calling’.
So, no Dr. Pierce wasn’t alone in his pro-Hitler criticisms of Hitler and National Socialism but rather was writing – if we read ‘The Turner Diaries’ as such – in a long tradition of friendly criticism which is so essential to the Socratic dialogue that lies at the heart of National Socialism.
SwabianSalute then points out that Dr. Pierce wanted the National Alliance to outlive him as well as prosper and in that he is quite right: he did.
However, he failed in this and as Robert Griffin points out in ‘The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds’ Pierce was acutely aware by the end of his life of where he had failed, and it is sad indeed that the National Alliance fell apart after his death. This especially so because it was so unnecessary – and full disclosure I call (or have called) Pierce’s lieutenants Billy Roper, Bob DeMaris and Fred Streed friends or acquaintances – as Pierce simply picked badly in naming the all-important successor: Erich Gliebe.
In this he made a similar mistake to the Roman Emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius did when he appointed his son Commodus as his heir and the Roman Empire lurched from a period of success and prosperity into a period of retreat, failure and poverty. This mistake was to allow his emotions to get the better of him and not to properly vet and groom his successor. The difference between Pierce and Marcus Aurelius is only a matter of degree of the size of the organization they headed as they both achieved much and lived extraordinarily successful as well as stoic lives. Hence the Roman Empire had far more resources and ability to recover the disastrous situation than the National Alliance did.
SwabianSalute’s point that the National Alliance was ‘opposed to charismatic authority’ is simply cobblers as the organization was run hierarchically like any other but also as an effective organization it was not burdened with James Burnham called the ‘Managerial Revolution’ (aka bureaucratic middle management effectively neutering or disrupting an organization and/or state) because it operated on a flat management structure and thus there was always a direct conduit between Dr. Pierce and the National Alliance’s membership with few people in between or acting as potential gatekeepers.
The National Alliance was largely based around Dr. Pierce’s charisma and leadership style – his ‘American Dissident Voices’ broadcasts, for example, are very much reminiscent of FDR’s similarly successful ‘Fireside Chats’ on the radio in the 1930s – and contending that this was anything other than how it was meant to be is simply a lie given that Pierce mentioned to Robert Griffin how he had learned much from Alan Bullock’s ‘Hitler: A Study in Tyranny’ and part that was certainly Hitler’s leadership style. This would have been reinforced by Dr. Pierce’s time as George Lincoln Rockwell’s principal lieutenant in the National Socialist Movement which was – like the later National Alliance and the original NSDAP – based heavily around the charisma of the leading personality be it George Lincoln Rockwell, Dr. Pierce or Adolf Hitler.
SwabianSalute then moves on to rightly assert that Hitler (and Dr. Pierce and Rockwell for that matter) ‘championed the power of personality, of moving masses with emotional fervour, of top men competing for leadership’ but then promptly makes a false equivalence of claiming these are somehow nullified by the failure of the Third Reich to win the Second World War. This is of course a classic case of arguing in bad faith because the organization of the NSDAP during the Kampfzeit (which is what he is comparing to ‘The Organization’ in the Turner Diaries) has absolutely nothing to do with the failure of the Third Reich’s war effort some twelve years after the NSDAP came to power and the NSDAP party structure had all but faded into the background as a political force compared to Speer’s economic system, Himmler’s SS and Goebbels’ propaganda network.
This suggests that SwabianSalute is probably criticizing Hitler in bad faith albeit with elements of honesty. However, I don’t think this is intentional per se but rather caused by SwabianSalute’s lack of knowledge of the subject matter and apparent penchant for literary flights of fancy.
A good example of which occurs next where he claims that ‘The Organization’ ‘is faceless – entirely devoid of personality. It holds the masses in contempt and practices democratic centralism. All committee decisions are final. The Organization is practically Bolshevik.’
The problem with that is firstly that SwabianSalute hasn’t read all that much about the Bolshevik’s and thinks they were strictly centralised, obeyed the party committees and were ‘devoid of personality’. This is the kind of absurd caricature which has often afflicted anti-Communist writing in general - particularly before, during and for a decade or two after the Stalin era - and was helped by the various memoirs of former leading communists such as Jan Valtin’s (nee Richard Krebs) ‘Out of the Night’ and Louis Budenz’s ‘This is My Story’ and ‘Men Without Faces’.
The reality – as we now know from the opening of the Russian archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union – is that the Bolsheviks often disobeyed the various central committees and that the reconsideration of ideological questions and dissent was quite common (for example Lenin’s ‘War Communism’ and subsequent ‘New Economic Policy’ caused massive dissent and rebellions within the Bolshevik party as well as within the Russian left in general). All this is covered in short form by Francis King’s monograph ‘The Narodniks in the Russian Revolution’ but is also shown in detail by other more popular works such as Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ‘Young Stalin’ and Helen Rappaport’s biography of Lenin during his years in exile ‘Conspirator’.
Nor were the Bolsheviks ‘faceless’ in any way, shape or form but rather were a group led just as the NSDAP were: they ‘championed the power of personality, of moving masses with emotional fervor, of top men competing for leadership’.
Anyone who has studied the Bolsheviks, or the broader history of the twin Russian revolutions of 1917 would know that the Bolsheviks and their rivals all relied on ‘the power of personality’ (hence the cult of Lenin, the cult of Stalin and the dissident cult of Trotsky), of ‘moving masses with emotional fervour’ (Trotsky’s speeches in particular were legendary and he has not unjustly been credited by biographers - such as Isaac Deutscher and Ronald Segal - as being the principle architect/saviour of the Bolshevik Revolution) and ‘of top men competing for leadership’ (Lenin’s war against the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Party comes to mind as does the Trotsky versus Stalin conflict after Lenin’s death as well as the later purges of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev by Stalin).
Aside from SwabianSalute’s implied praise of the Bolsheviks underpinned by his belief in their own apocalyptic revolution mythology – which amusingly contradicts his own condemnation of ‘apocalyptic fantasies’ - we should note that his support for ‘The Organization’s’ ‘faceless’ approach is reminiscent of the kind of ludicrous thinking behind St. Thomas More’s book ‘Utopia’ where everyone is faceless, nameless and characterless leading not to paradise but to purgatory within the state concerned much as there has never been a ‘faceless’ organization. Heck even the anarchists of the nineteenth century – famous for both their ‘leaderless resistance’ approach as well as belief in the ‘propaganda of the deed’ over the ‘propaganda of the word’ – didn’t achieve such a state.
I will also note that SwabianSalute’s idea of ‘Democratic Centralism’ is typically vague and woolly precisely because no one can define precisely what it is – I certainly can’t – but in practice it generally means some kind of rule by committee.
Anyone who advocates rule by committee rather than rule by consensus – the latter is both not and truly democratic at the same time incidentally - is quite frankly a fool because any committee is always the slave either of the one person who invariably actually does the work (as reading the autobiography of any long-serving leftist and trade unionist could tell you; for example, see Denis Hill’s entertaining ‘Seeing Red, Being Green’) not the other members who try to take the credit or it is the servant (or slave) of the dominant personality with Robespierre’s leadership of the ‘Committee for Public Safety’ during the French Revolution being an obvious example of the reality rather than theory of rule by committee.
What both Robespierre and Hitler rightly understood is that men and women (or ‘the masses’ if you prefer) ache to follow and be led by strong men who will take the bull by the horns and do what must be done.
No one follows ‘a committee’.
No one dies for ‘democratic centralism’.
People follow a Robespierre.
People die for a Hitler.
In fact, people millions of people followed Robespierre and millions died for Hitler.
No group of people has ever died for an idea per se, but they have died for personalities who have become popular heroes as Thomas Carlyle rightly argued in ‘Heroes and Hero Worship’ and both Ragnar Redbeard and Friedrich Nietzsche suggested in their works on philosophy. Heck if you want to put it that way millions upon millions of people have died for Jesus Christ but not for Christianity.
People die for personalities; they don’t die for ‘the idea’ in spite of multitude of political theorists and would-be philosopher-kings who scribble out page upon page of verbose twaddle assuming someone else will put them on the throne.
SwabianSalute then proceeds to go on to lionize ‘The Organization’s’ ethos by writing:
‘Membership at a certain stage of the struggle is reserved for killers. Aspirants must earn their place in the New Society by shedding blood. Unlike other apocalyptic fantasies, the protagonists initiate the millennium instead of seeking to endure it.’
In this we can see that SwabianSalute has forgotten that ‘The Organization’ is literary fiction where-as the NSDAP is historic fact. What he is suggesting sounds all nice but how is it any way practical or feasible?
He is assuming that man can behave – as he later says it – with the ‘purity of machine’ and by necessary implication supersede their humanity by absorbing it within the broader universality of ‘The Organization’ without having the force and power of a state and its power to enforce relative ideological conformity.
Few people will be ideologically willing or able to ‘perform a nuclear suicide mission as atonement for not committing suicide to avoid capture’ let alone enforce such a dictum nor are the logistics behind running such an organization feasible without having the power of a state behind you (remember he is criticizing the NSDAP in the Kampfzeit period by contrasting them with Dr. Pierce’s fictional group ‘The Organization’ in ‘The Turner Diaries’).
The best modern examples of the difficulty of SwabianSalute’s idealized model would be the drug cartels of Central and South America which operate close to ‘The Organization’s’ model but yet work as a series of self-governing corporate entities controlled by the use of violence and money. Yet even these are unable to create the ‘purity of machine’ or absorb the personality totally into an organization and nor they controlled by committee but rather by charismatic leaders that lead from the front and who then become heroes to their people in the same way that Hitler became a hero to the German people before 1933 and stayed that way till ‘de-Nazification’ began in earnest in 1945.
Now to come back to my point about the power of a state being required for this level of ideological saturation of an individual to make suicide attacks particularly feasible and thus enable to personality of the individual to be subsumed in the ‘purity of the machine’. The only time we see suicide attacks historically is when states or small relatively cut off groups so saturate their individual followers with ideology that they are prepared to undertake these kinds of missions which is a rarity rather than an exception and attempts to create these kinds of groups - such as the German Werewolves in 1945 and Ukrainian OUN from 1942 to 1956 - has often failed and the personnel who did risk their lives in such work often failed due to lack of popular and/or state support not for any want of enthusiasm.
SwabianSalute then proceeds to engage in a further flight of fancy when he declares that: ‘All this is achieved via Weberian rational-legal authority.’
This of course is simply words and is a silly way of just saying ‘all this is achieved by a bureaucracy passing laws and people have to obey them’ which of course is just absurd. I mean ‘The Organization’ is an insurgent group but then this same organization is envisaged by SwabianSalute as passing laws as a ‘democratic centralist’ bureaucratic entity that individuals slavishly subsume themselves within and behave like… well… ants rather than people.
Aryans are not ants.
Or as Edward Wilson wrote in his epoch-making ‘Sociobiology’: ‘Wonderful idea, wrong species.’
It is that simple.
If we must look to Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’ here then we should note that the traditional form of Aryan authority – and the one that Hitler and just about every other insurgency and state has practised with both complete and limited success – is so-called ‘Charismatic Authority’ which is precisely what it says on the tin. It works on the fact that in human – as well as most animal – groups there is a requirement for dominance – what we like to call charisma – and this is what makes men charge towards a machine gun nest not ‘Weberian rational-legal authority’.
Men and women follow good leaders who don’t ask others to do what they will not, and good leaders follow popular heroes. No one has ever died for ‘Weberian rational-legal authority’, but they have died in their millions for their friends, hard-working superiors and more importantly heroes who actually fought on the front line like Adolf Hitler.
The claim that SwabianSalute makes is that heroism is ‘increasing unreliable’ but offers no justification or logic behind such a sweeping dismissal, but his claim is also illogical. After all no one has ever said that heroism all by itself wins the day and to blame it for the lack of success of National Socialism post-1945 is plainly ridiculous in the same way that you cannot blame Che Guevara’s heroism for his failure and death in Bolivia in 1967 but rather a multitude of other factors some of which were Che’s fault and others not were the cause of his failure and death.
And just to round off the fact that SwabianSalute is engaging in a bad faith flight of political fancy based on… well… literary criticism. Is that he ends his X thread with a weird nod to Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ – without understanding the problems associated with it I would wager – by praising the lack of uniforms, symbols or aesthetic attributes of ‘The Organization’ but fails to understand in the real world this lack of what marketing calls ‘branding’ fails to achieve anything and instead renders ‘The Organization’ into an amorphous bland entity with no overt ideology and no branding which then allows the enemies of ‘The Organization’ to both attribute non-Organization attacks to ‘The Organization’ without it being able to reply (like Al-Qaeda and Islamic State have often done) and to portray ‘The Organization’s’ ideology as being something it isn’t.
This then hinders if not outright prevents further recruitment into ‘The Organization’s’ ranks and then – as with Socialist Revolutionary Maximalists between 1905 and 1907 – it will be utterly decimated by arrests, deaths and organizational interference since it has rendered itself vulnerable to such counterblows because ‘it sounds cool’.
The reality of the situation is that ‘The Turner Diaries’ of Dr. Pierce have such an odd ending because Dr. Pierce didn’t really know how to end his first novel and ended up writing an apocalyptic end scenario as a way of getting out of his literary jam as is alluded to by Robert Griffin in ‘The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds’.
The idea of ‘Democratic Centralism’ still requires disciplined and self-sacrificing leaders and it doesn’t do away with the reality of ‘Charismatic Authority’ and Führerprinzip but rather masks it behind ‘the committee’ in the same way that Stalin was technically merely the voice of the Soviets and Augustus was merely the first citizen of Rome not its first Emperor.
Given that it is hard enough to find a man qualified to be the hero of the twenty-first century and how hard it was to find the hero of the twentieth century Adolf Hitler. Then how on earth are we going to find multiple heroes to form the committee required for said ‘Democratic Centralism’ to be enacted and then you have the fact that you’ll need to find them all at once.
We can thus see this is next to impossible and that Adolf Hitler’s view – as embodied by Führerprinzip – that we must not seek the ‘purity of the machine’ to find good leaders and the hero of the twenty-first century but rather look back to the ‘purity of nature’ to find them. Only by the struggle of war, evolution and chaos can such leadership both present and prove themselves to be worthy to lead the Aryan race into its future rebirth and revival.
If we follow Savitri Devi’s mystical musings, then the Adolf Hitler is one before the ‘final avatar’ of Kalki – who will be the hero of the twenty-first century – and purge the world of the enemies of the Aryan race once and for all but they have to engage in the so-called ‘hero’s journey’ before they present themselves to the Aryan race for acceptance as the new Führer.
The future is not deus ex machina but rather deus sive natura.