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David Irving Holocaust Videos

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‘Talking frankly’ (five videos)

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Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychology

Narcissism, 3

I would not have fully understood Marco without noticing that there were a considerable number of YouTube channels talking about narcissism. But there is a fundamental flaw in all of them. Unlike Silvano Arieti’s treatise which helped me so much to understand serious mental disorders (my summary here), these youtubers don’t illustrate their knowledge with specific cases. Perhaps they do so out of cowardice, as there are quite a few people like Marco in the world. They don’t even have to use real names but pseudonyms, so why they don’t use real-life cases to illustrate their theories is a mystery.

Quite independently of such an obvious flaw, I was impressed that these youtubers say that the malignant narcissist can be distinguished by his or her lack of empathy. As we saw in the previous post, Marco showed me off his cobwebbed house that reminded me of vampire castles without noticing that I watched in horror as the thick layer of dust also covered the armchairs in his living room. In fact, I had to turn over one of the cushions of one of his armchairs so that I could sit in his living room and not get dust on my trousers. To show off his house to me without realising that I was horrified, is to lack the most basic empathy.

Youtubers also talk a lot about the gratuitous rage of narcissists, who explode at the drop of a hat. As we also saw, Marco exploded in anger when the taxi driver and I couldn’t easily find his house without a street number. These youtubers also talk about paranoia, which I witnessed in that September call last year with his claim that his relatives craved to steal his house. Another thing the youtubers say that portrays Marco is that those who suffer from malignant narcissism have fluid contours in their ego, so they treat people as egoic objects. This is so surreal that I must illustrate it with an anecdote.

In the previous entry I had promised to explain why we didn’t meet in a mall last year. The answer is that Marco had told me he would meet me outside a restaurant. However, given the unpunctuality of Mexicans, I have been in the habit of meeting them inside a restaurant on my appointments. This allows me to bring a book and entertain myself if the Mexican in question is unpunctual. I told Mexican Marco a couple of times that I would wait for him inside the restaurant. In a Sam Vaknin video I saw yesterday, he said that the narcissist only registers what you say if it goes along with the narcissist’s narrative. It seems incredible, but even in something as prosaic as the location during an appointment Marco didn’t hear what I said more than once: he heard his original voice that he would look for me outside the restaurant.

The result was that we didn’t meet. It was very frustrating in that, although Mexico City is as large as Houston, with fifteen million more people and far fewer freeways it is very difficult to get around. I chose a Sunday for the appointment at the mall far north of the city because there is not much traffic on Sundays and the taxi driver only made an hour’s drive along a freeway from my house to the mall. Marco had arrived by public transport, so it took him an hour and a half to get to the mall. Counting the return trip for both of us, it was five hours of wasted transport, plus the hour and a half wasted in the mall thinking we had both been stood up. All because Marco didn’t want to register in his mind what I told him: that I would wait for him sitting down, inside the restaurant.

A trivial case you might say, but perfect to explain what it means to treat others as egoic objects: the will of the other guy becomes invisible, and one only deals internally with one’s own will, despite the calamity that Marco had to suffer (Perinorte, the mall referred to, is very notorious because the cell phone signal there is very poor, so we couldn’t communicate when we were in and out of the restaurant). But what causes a ‘narcissism’ that it is not even possible to convey such a simple idea as that we will wait for a friend inside a restaurant?

Thanks to the visit of Marco’s first cousin at my house, who had known him since he was a small child, I tied up some loose ends. I already knew that Marco had been raised by a slightly mentally retarded mother, who apparently had been raped: Marco’s absent father. What I didn’t know, and only learned from what the cousin told me, was that Marco had been raised exclusively by his mother. (Before his visit, I had been left with the idea that an aunt and grandmother, in addition to his mother, had been Marco’s guardian figures; I didn’t know that, from an early age, the mother had migrated from some villages to the capital, where Marco grew up.)

Now that single mothers are in vogue in the West, it is becoming clear what havoc some of them wreak on their offspring, especially boys, who have never had a father figure to attach themselves to. Marco, according to his cousin, suffered an absolute mental breakdown the day his mother died, to the extent that his cousin had to make all the arrangements for her funeral and burial while Marco was mentally blocked. I conjecture that this is when Marco’s depression began, as there was no longer the real source where the mother’s only child could settle accounts.
 

The schizophrenogenic mother

The word schizophrenogenic, which I abbreviate to schizogenic, never appears in the videos of the youtubers who talk about malignant narcissism. It doesn’t even appear in Vaknin’s videos when he openly blames those mothers who undermine the individuation process of their children. I sometimes use the term because it inverts the values of biological psychiatry to the trauma model of mental disorders. (Anyone who has not read what I have written about psychiatry in Daybreak, and still believes that psychiatry is a science, might now read ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’ on pages 105-127 of my book.)

Once we reject biological psychiatry and see it for what it is, a pseudo-science, it is easier to see that Vaknin fails by using so many diagnostic categories. I reject not only biological psychiatry, but the hundreds of diagnostic categories of psychiatrists and even clinical psychologists. The reason for this is simple. Even in the videos of Vaknin, who uses a plethora of diagnostic categories, it is clear that sometimes a subject deteriorates from a basically neurotic narcissism into a psychotic one where Vaknin already uses terms like ‘mood disorder’ and even ‘schizoid’. In other words, unlike somatic diseases where a heart condition doesn’t degenerate into a condition of, say, the thighs, in mental disorders everything is very fluid. Contrary to psychiatric claims, neuroses, which even normal people generally suffer from, can degenerate into psychosis (what happened to poor Marco).

What Vaknin does get right in his videos is that the infant internalises the gaze of his mother. When the infant is mistreated by a mother, he cannot say that the mother is bad but blames himself because of a sort of Stockholm syndrome (cf. these pages of my book Day of Wrath). The schizogenic mother, from the fluid contours of her ego, sends her infant an unconscious message: I cannot love you as you are; only when you suppress your individuality, your desires, your will that doesn’t agree with mine and your independence and separation from me. I love you not as a separate entity but as part of me forever, symbiosis, womb: mother and child forever united.

With this engulfing behaviour, the child’s internalised morality begins to turn towards self-denial. The infant seems to internalise a message: To function not only in the family, but in society at large, I mustn’t be myself. Thus the future narcissist begins to be engendered, someone with fluid contours of his ego with the environment. If mother rejects me, it is because I am a bad, spoiled, stupid, ugly child. Some psychologists call this a ‘bad object’ and this object, because it is so bad, has to be expelled. Thus the child projects this bad object, externalises it and turns himself into its antithesis, what some call ‘split’. By projecting it outwards the child purges the bad object from himself, cleanses himself; but at the cost of projecting it onto others.

Marco’s cousin cried when, suffering from paranoia that he and his son wanted to steal his second house, enraged, Marco ran him out of his main house. What the cousin ignores is that Marco has internalised the bad object instilled in him by his mother and now wants to expel it symbolically, by projecting it onto others. What many youtubers call ‘narcissistic abuse’ is nothing more than the unravelling of this long-standing, unresolved dynamic with the real mother.

When a narcissist is confronted with a relative who really loves him or her, like Marco’s first cousin, the narcissist doesn’t know how to cope. It was very stressful for him. Paradoxically, he perceives this love, now really brotherly love (not like the manipulative love of his mother) as manipulation and mistreatment. This sibling love is perceived as dangerous, and the narcissist falls apart and resorts to so-called narcissistic abuse: treating the cousin precisely as he couldn’t treat his biological mother because, as an infant, he was one hundred per cent at her mercy.

But why such a twisted dynamic, in which the grown-up narcissist then tries to act out theatrically with other adults? Because the infant had been conditioned to associate love with betrayal. When the infant, who will become a narcissist, is confronted day by day with this mixture of love and all the negative emotions of the devouring mother—shame, fear, guilt, anger, frustration—he learns to associate love with these negative affects. The abused infant seems to internalise the following: Love is bad, it means that I will be betrayed. Even an eighteen-month-old infant who is treated with this sort of behaviour already feels anger about it. But given the absolute power the mother has over him, he internalises that it is illegitimate to be angry with her. It’s even dangerous. So getting angry with mom must be buried in the mind. But what happens to the infant who buries his emotions?

The anger is internalised as long as it can’t be directed towards mom. The child redirects it to himself. But anger redirected to the internal self, rather than to the original source, transmutes into depression: which is what has happened to Marco since his mother died, with his house so spider-webbed that it reminded me of Nosferatu’s. Just compare what Marco did with his mind with my Hojas susurrantes, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Letter to mom Medusa’ where I direct the anger outwards, towards the original perpetrators. That’s why I never suffer from depression! In contrast to the vindictive autobiographer, depression is a form of self-directed aggression (see ‘On Depression’, pages 27-41 of my book Daybreak).

And compare also what I do literarily with what Marco advised me: to stop writing my autobiographical books and forget about the past! The very Christian Marco is simply following the accepted wisdom: forgive and forget. But since the unconscious can’t be fooled, look at how my old buddy ended up: mad as a hatter! In other words, not only Christian values must be transvalued as far as Hitler and National Socialism are concerned, but also the Christian ethics of forgiveness, and the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent whatever she or he does. Marco, who offended me in his last phone call by subtly advising me to join a Christian church went the opposite way and, as Vaknin says in one of his videos, that can lead to schizoid depression: which is exactly what happened to him.

See for example the five minutes from this point in another of his videos, and especially what he says after minute seventeen when he talks about the work with children of Margaret Mahler, who said: ‘Interpersonal relationships become internalised within the ego, or the self’. Mahler also said that what we call the ego or the self is simply a reflection of our relationships with others, and that all mental illnesses are related to interpersonal problems. It is an important video that Vaknin uploaded twice with different titles. And here Vaknin uses a word I’ve used a lot on this site, introject, about which I’ll say a few things in my next post.

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Autobiography Psychology

Narcissism, 2

In this article I would only like to talk about the bare facts. The psychological interpretation will come in the next entry.

Almost half a century ago, in 1975, I met Marco on the chess benches in Mexico City’s Parque de las Arboledas, in Colonia Del Valle (cf. my little book on my chess misadventures). Those were times when the teenager I was didn’t want to be in an abusive home and school, but undisturbed by them in a park. The first game we played, by the way, was won by Marco with the black pieces, and I seem to remember that, against my chess habits, I opened the game with the queen pawn and if I remember correctly he replied 1…f5. Apart from the fact that I lost that first game (in subsequent days I would beat him), the only thing I remember is his rather surly face, and we hardly exchanged words before or after playing. In fact, in the 1970s I didn’t get on with him much more than I interacted with other players in the park, although I eventually discovered that Marco was a good reader of literature, especially the great Russian writers.

It was in the first half of the 1980s that I began to get along more with Marco; when, after playing chess or watching some of the other parkgoers play, he and I would walk around the perimeter of the park talking about philosophical issues. Sometimes, taking into account that he worked and I didn’t, he would invite me to lunchtime meals in the proletarian restaurants of Colonia Del Valle or Narvarte (Marco belonged to a different social class), and we would continue our conversations. Eventually I even asked my grandmother to rent him the maid room on the roof of her house, which was near the park.

In short, that was basically my dealings with Marco, whom I stopped seeing when I went to work for a few years in California in 1985. That image, of a friend with whom I could talk to about interesting topics, was the image I had kept of him from those years.

By the time I returned from the United States in 1988, I had lost track of Marco. Since I grew up in Colonia Narvarte, in 2003 I went to live in a guesthouse very close to my beloved childhood and early teenage home. I used to pass by Concepción Béistegui Street, when Marco no longer lived on that street. In late 2004 I saw his aunt coming out of the house where Marco had lived and I asked her about him. She gave me his mobile phone, and I spoke to him. Those were times when Marco worked in the neighbouring Mixcoac and we met only once in that zone on one of his lunch breaks. Since I kept many documents, diaries, and have classified some of my emails to write an autobiography over the decades, I am able to report that from his work office, Marco answered my email on January 7, 2005, and we didn’t see each other again for many years, although I already had his mobile phone in my phone book.

Remembering the old friend from the park, it wasn’t until 2019 that it occurred to me to talk to him again and we arranged to meet outside the Palace of Bellas Artes. We met there on the 27th of May and then went to one of those proletarian restaurants in the centre of the metropolis that Marco likes to eat at. Then we said goodbye. So far, nothing extraordinary had happened, and you can see that my diary entries about Marco were very laconic, in that there was nothing relevant to report. What began to obsess me about Marco’s mind was due to what happened next.

Two years after our relatively brief encounter in the city centre, I phoned him. I was interested in recovering two books of mine that I had given him decades before, including a splendid edition of poems of the Castilian language that my uncle Julio had given me, and a book of the chess champion Alekhine that my father had given me before the tragedy that struck my family.

So, without telling him that my real interest was in the books I wanted to get back, I told him on the phone that I wanted to see his house. With the help of a taxi driver we arrived on 30 May 2021 (remember I have diaries). On entering his house I was astonished at the level of Marco’s neglect by the dusty cobwebs and thick layers of dust throughout his house. I had only seen old cobwebs dusting the door frames in vampire castle movies!

I deduced that the old friend had been suffering from depression for years, if not decades. That had been the same day that Marco had given the taxi driver and me, as a reference point to locate his house, the electricity pylon without realising that there was a row of pylons; and that the real reference point to locate his house was a dumpster. The very rude manner in which he greeted us because we struggled to find his house without a street number was such that I promised myself that this would be the first, and last, time I visited him. Nevertheless, I repressed my anger and handed him the two illustrated books on the Aztecs and the Mayas that I had planned to give him before the trip.

That was the last time I saw Marco. I must say that, when I was dealing with him in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Marco had never been so rude to me, but what happened afterwards was key to understanding him.

Although we didn’t quarrel (I repressed my anger), since I wasn’t going to visit him a second time at his house, Marco, who surely remembered our philosophical conversations of yesteryear, kept calling me on the phone to visit him again (he didn’t have my mobile number, that I almost never used anyway). My diary records phone calls to my mother’s house on 7 and 28 July, 11 August and 18 December 2021; although he may have spoken at other times. These were times when she would answer the phone and then pass the message on to me. By 2022 Marco gave up phoning to my mom’s place.

In 2023, on 22 May to be exact, remembering his love of literature, I thought of calling Marco to give him, outside his house to which I had promised not to return, a copy of my book Hojas susurrantes (Whispering Leaves). We made an appointment and Marco chose the large mall called Perinorte as the meeting point. It was a disappointment because we didn’t see each other at the Sanborn’s restaurant for reasons of his mental illness, which I will explain in the next entry. But the important thing was what happened next.

Until then I hadn’t had any real problems with Marco. The problems started the next day after our failed meeting. I phoned him to ask him to give me a postal address so that I could send him Whispering Leaves by post, since I was unable to deliver the book to him personally at the mall. With that seemingly innocent phone call on 29 May last year began my morbid curiosity to try to decipher a new Marco I hadn’t known before.

In the phone call to get his postal address, Marco suddenly told me something that stunned me: he wanted to give me his second house, and added that he had an account in the BBV Bank whose funds he wanted to give me as soon as he unfroze them! I was flabbergasted by this, as my friendship with Marco had been relatively superficial; we had never been really close friends. A few months later I learned that he had made the same offer to his first cousin, Marco’s only close human contact with the outside world since he secluded himself in his vampiric castle, so to speak. To offer me money when I knew that Marco, though he has two properties, didn’t have a penny was so grotesque that I wrote in my diary that it was pure blackmail to get his cousin, or me, to visit him. Those were times when I hadn’t yet met his cousin, although I had heard of him.

Then, in that same phone call on 29 May, after those bizarre offers to give me his second house and the funds in his bank, Marco spoke wonders of a train arriving near his house ‘with a broken voice, almost in tears’ says my diary, as if begging me to visit him. I told him that I didn’t want to suffer the hours-long bus odyssey to visit him (Marco and I live at opposite poles of the great metropolis), as I didn’t want to take my car to such a distant zone, and wasn’t going to pay taxis. So, during the same phone call whose only intention on my part was to get his mailing address, Marco had transformed the casual call into a discussion in which he had offered me his house and the phantom money in a bank account. Seeing that I would still not go to visit him by public transport, he scolded me that I was suffering from snobbishness, and that I should open up to a more proletarian lifestyle. Needless to say, I didn’t acquiesce to his demand to visit him despite his fantastic gambit.

The following month, on 9 June, the book I had written reached Marco through the mailman. By 18 July he had read it. He spoke to me and showered me with praise. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever praised what I wrote in Hojas susurrantes so highly. Two days later, my mother died. On August 2, my second book analysing my family, ¿Me ayudarás?, which I had also mailed to him, reached Marco and he sent me his condolences, since I had inscribed a few words on the first page: that I was sending him the book on the very day of my mother’s passing. Then Marco’s cousin contacted me for the first time and we talked on the phone for a while.

By September, the surreal situation with Marco was back. Those were the days when I had arranged with his cousin that I would invite Marco to clear up the bizarre offer that no less than I, whom Marco hadn’t dealt with for four decades, would inherit his second house; and we wanted the three of us to be here. On the 3rd of that month I decided to speak to Marco on the phone to arrange the invitation but he was in a state of extreme paranoia against his cousin. He believed that he and his son, Marco’s nephew, wanted to steal his second house. He forbade me outright to speak to his cousin again, and started saying very nasty things about my siblings. But Marco doesn’t know a single one of them. In fact, he never entered my family’s house. My diary says that Marco spoke badly about my siblings in the context of his demand that I leave the house where I live to go to his second house which, according to his cousin, is unfinished (there’s even a big hole on the roof)!

That is to say, in that September call Marco was angrily demanding that I move out of my late mother’s mansion and into his uninhabited second property, in disrepair. (Just to give you an idea of my mother’s mansion, during yesterday’s move they took out a grand piano and an upright piano that were here as my siblings plan to sell the house, and there is still another piano in the other house, after the garden on the same family property.) Why did Marco surmise that I was getting on so badly with my siblings? To give me fatherly advice; to get me out of this mansion and to invite me to move to his second property in a poor neighbourhood. Marco’s tone was like he was advising me wisely…

I was so alarmed by that crazy phone call that I kept insisting to his cousin that he come to my house to meet me and in October, finally, his cousin and I met at my late mother’s mansion. Since the day Marco had exploded in paranoia that he and his nephew wanted to steal the house he wanted to give me as a gift, Marco and I hadn’t spoken on the phone. But on 8 December last year he phoned me. Unlike the furious paranoid of the September phone call, he began his remarks in a very cordial manner, albeit in an omniscient tone. Yours truly was the object of his ‘wisdom’ in the form of unsolicited advice. The paternal advice was so grotesque, so damaging to my self-esteem and self-image, that it explains why I became obsessed in my diaries with psychoanalysing him. Without arguing with him, because by then I saw him as a disturbed man, I wrote down his words as Marco said over the phone: ‘I want to advise you to stop writing. The house you are going to occupy…’

Marco still didn’t register the fact that I had told him several times that I wasn’t going there, and to boot I had to stop being a writer! He just continued to treat me as an extension of his mind. During that phone call, when I wanted to rebel against the change Marco was proposing (leaving my mother’s comfortable mansion for a house in a poor neighbourhood), at one point in the discussion he said emphatically ‘You’re giving me a lot of crap…!’ (my Spanish-English translation). It was so insulting that I was going to live in his second property, still in structural work, abandoning the mansion where I live, that I let him speak during that last phone call just to record verbatim what he said.

I won’t phone him again. When I met Marco so long ago, he had the same angry character, but he didn’t get out of touch with reality. Now, at his age of seventy-three, I see that he has stepped out of reality. Marco has also wanted his nephews, i.e. his cousin’s children, to live in his second house and set up the restaurant there that Marco couldn’t set up because he squandered all his pension money. But even when his cousin or nephews tell him that they don’t want to move to such a remote neighbourhood, Marco doesn’t come back to his senses. He is under the impression that, sooner or later, someone—for example me—will follow his wise advice.

It’s impossible to convey how perplexed I was when, decades after dealing with him, I came across a new person: a deluded Marco. It was only from the videos I saw on YouTube that I realised that it is fashionable to analyse his symptoms under the curious tag of ‘narcissism’. In this entry I can only add that, unlike those youtubers, who in most cases treated people with this condition because they were romantically involved with them, I cut Marco off from the beginning of his delusions. (Only to loved ones, such as my late sister, have I tolerated her delusions, sometimes directed against me, to the extent that I never broke up with her until she died.)

In the next entry I would like to talk about Sam Vaknin’s interpretation of this kind of psychopathology: not being able to conceive that a close friend, a relative or a partner has a will of his or her own.

Categories
Psychiatry Psychology

Narcissism, 1

A diabolical idea occurred to me today.

You may recall that last month I discussed Sam Vaknin in my short posts ‘Mr Darcy’ and ‘Five Minutes’ in the context of what is now fashionable to label ‘narcissism’ on various YouTube channels. I would prefer the term ‘malignant egomania’ or something along those lines, but there are so many videos on various YouTube channels that if I want any traffic to flow to my opinion on the subject, I have no choice but to use the popular expression.

As I have already said, the fundamental flaw of all these channels is that they expose the subject academically, without concrete examples; and they rarely talk about ‘narcissistic’ parents, those suffering from malignant egomania: a condition that compels them to destroy the minds of their children.

The correct way to expose this pathology would be, in the ancient world, as it was done in Greek tragedy: where tragedies were events of a family, even if they used fictitious characters. It is also possible to use real-life people. Those who have read Stefan Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daimon about the Germans Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche will know that it was a tragedy that Kleist burned his History of My Mind before committing suicide. That missing work would, it seems, have marked the beginning of an authentic depth psychology—unlike the epistemological error that reigns in the universities (for example, the Jew Vaknin pays obeisance to the Jew Freud, whom we have roundly exposed on this site).

True depth psychology, which I conjecture would have begun with Kleist, would begin with those who devised the trauma model of mental disorders. Before that, all we had about tormented souls was Zweig’s approach, illustrating it with 19th-century biographical cases. More evolved is to enter the world whose door Alice Miller opened in the second half of the 20th century.

Since, unlike the YouTubers, I have entered the world whose door Miller opened for us (cf. my trilogy), the diabolical idea I came up with means analysing the former friend I talk about in ‘Mr Darcy’ to illustrate what malignant egomania is. In this way I circumvent, one hundred per cent, the fundamental flaw of every vlogger who talks about it: none of them dares to give concrete examples through life cases of real people!

It could be objected that this has nothing to do with the darkest hour of the West. I differ because biography and history are two sides of the same psychological coin. The ethnosuicidal psychosis from which virtually all Western Aryans currently suffer must be analysed. And to solve inexact problems (not mathematical, computational or chess problems), it is important to limit the scale of the problem to avoid confusing ourselves: what has happened to the mental health professions, especially psychiatry (my original contribution to the unmasking of this pseudo-science can be read here). Only then can we hope to solve our inexact problem, or at least come closer to a theoretical solution.

Instead of a pretentious (and failed) metahistorical work like Oswald Spengler’s, limiting the scale means simply understanding ourselves and our neighbours to, from this limited scale, jump into trying to solve the white man’s ethnosuicidal passion. Youtubers cannot do this because they aren’t even able to use the real names of their parents and close ones, as I do in my books.

Whoever criticises his father with his real name will be able to criticise anyone. However, as the person I have analysed is still alive, I will only use his first name, omitting his surnames. (I use the plural because in the Spanish-speaking world not only the father’s surname is used, but also the mother’s. For example, the current president of Mexico is known by his surnames ‘López Obrador’.)

As soon as I can start the series, I will do so, and I will show how understanding a particular case of narcissism can help us to understand the crazy West that, after 1945, only thinks of ethnosuicide.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 21

Munich was thus an ambivalent habitat for the young NSDAP. It was stony ground for the Nazis not only politically and culturally, but also physically. The authorities began to take an ever dimmer view of Hitler’s activities, especially when these disturbed public order. He spent two stretches in prison. He lost an important ally with the resignation of Ernst Pohner as president of the Munich Police in September 1921. A month later, Hitler was summoned to police headquarters for a serious caution following a series of street brawls and beer-hall battles.

The Volkischer Beobachter was repeatedly banned for publishing inflammatory articles. In March 1922, after his conviction for a breach of the peace, the Bavarian minister of the interior, Dr Franz Schweyer, seriously considered deporting Hitler to Austria, and the minister president, Count Lerchenfeld, made it clear to Hitler that he was in Bavaria on sufferance. The police watched Hitler closely.

Hitler remained determined to establish himself in Munich, but only as a beacon to inspire the rest of Germany and as a base from which to take over the Reich as a whole. ‘Munich must become a model,’ he wrote in January 1922, ‘the school but also the granite pedestal’ of the movement. ‘We do not have a Bavarian mission today,’ Hitler announced six months later, ‘rather Bavaria has the most important mission of its entire existence.’

Bavaria, on this reading, was not separate but rather ‘the most German state in the German Reich’. Munich was a sanctuary and a bulwark, certainly, but above all it was a sally-port. The special role Hitler envisaged for Bavaria in Germany was thus not as a separate or autonomous entity, as the federalists and particularists wanted, but as the vanguard of national renewal. ‘Not “away from Berlin”,’ Hitler intoned when discussing the relationship between Bavaria and the Reich, ‘but rather “towards Berlin”’ in order to ‘liberate it from the seducers of the German people’.

It would soon become clear that was a very different agenda to that of the generally monarchist and particularist Bavarian military and political elites.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Racial right Sturmabteilung (SA)

Hitler, 19

In August 1921, Hitler established a formal party paramilitary formation, which was named the SA or Sturmabteilung on 5 October 1921, with headquarters in 39 Schellingstrasse, Munich. The first commander was Emil Maurice, who had already distinguished himself in brawling at Hitler’s side, or on his behalf. The main task of this new force was to protect NSDAP meetings and disrupt those of the other side. Cyclist, motorized and mounted sections were established, with weapons and training being provided by the Reichswehr. The latter hoped to draw on the SA, as on other right-wing groupings, in the event of civil unrest or a French invasion. The initial growth of the Sturmabteilung was modest, reaching about 700-800 men in twelve months, and about 1,000 at the beginning of the following year…

As far as modern Western nations are concerned, all patriotardism is grotesque. Compare this tolerance of Weimar Germany with what happened not long ago in Charlottesville! People like Gregory Hood and Jared Taylor have been patriotards incapable of seeing something so elementary as far as the US is concerned. And let’s not talk about the UK, where the three racialists who had forums and whom I met on my last trip were jailed for thoughtcrime! (In addition to the two mentioned in my previous posts, Jez Turner, who served a thirteen-month sentence for ‘anti-Semitic’ pronouncements, has apparently been released although he hasn’t replied to my latest emails.)

In some ways, Bavaria was a congenial habitat. It considered itself a ‘centre of order’ in the Weimar chaos, an arcadia of conservative and patriotic values. Hitler was protected and supported by the Bavarian Reichswehr, which only loosely acknowledged the precedence of the national authority at this time, and whose loyalties lay firmly in Munich rather than Berlin. The president of the Munich Police, Ernst Pohner, and the Chief of the Political Police, Wilhelm Frick, were NSDAP supporters…

This was George Lincoln Rockwell’s big mistake: believing that American politicians, like the FBI director, were on his side. The US is not Weimar Germany! I must admit that on this issue Gregory Hood was right, as we saw in ‘Hitler, 12’.

Incidentally, the only post in this series that is not linked to the category ‘Hitler (book by Brendan Simms)’ is precisely Hitler, 12: where I quote Hood’s article on Commander Rockwell in full. I didn’t put the category for the simple reason that I don’t quote Simms’ book there. But I thought it was important to include Hood’s article in this series about Hitler’s biography because it is vital to understand why NS failed on this side of the Atlantic. Simms continues:

Gregor Strasser joined the party in October 1922. That same month, Hitler first met Hermann Goring, a charismatic and well-connected fighter ace, who opened many doors to business and high society.

Hitler and Gregor Strasser.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 17

(Left, NSDAP membership book.)

The NSDAP, he [Hitler] claimed, had been established on ‘the basis of an extreme racial outlook and rejects any form of parliamentarism’, including its present-day incarnation. It was intended to be quite different from all other ‘so-called national movements’, and so constructed that it would best serve to wage ‘the battle for the crushing of the Jewish-international domination of our people’. The NSDAP was also a ‘social or rather a socialist party’, whose statutes laid down ‘that the seat of its leadership was Munich and must remain Munich, now and for ever’.

This programme, Hitler continued, had been agreed as ‘immutable and inviolable in front of an audience of a thousand people, and invoked as a granite foundation in more than a hundred mass meetings’. Now, Hitler claimed, these principles had been violated by plans to merge with another party, by the agreement at Zeitz to move the headquarters to Berlin and by the prospect that they would be abjured in favour of the programme of Otto Dickel, which he condemned as a ‘meaningless, spongy [and] stretchable entity’. Specifically, Hitler objected to Dickel’s belief that Britain was emerging from under the thumb of the Jews and to his admiration for the Jew Walther Rathenau. He was interested in propaganda, not organization, and the power of ideas, not bureaucratic power…

Hitler averred that he made these demands ‘not because I crave power’ but because he was convinced that ‘without an iron leadership’ the party would soon degenerate from a National Socialist Workers Party into a mere ‘Occidental League’. Hitler had originally wanted to control the message rather than the party, but he now realized that he could not do the former without ensuring the latter.

It is not quite clear whether Hitler resigned with the intent of forcing the leadership’s hand, or whether he left in despair and decided to lay down the law only after attempts to win him back showed the underlying strength of his position. Even then, his demands were more modest than they sounded, being subject (as the law required) to membership vote. The ‘dictatorial powers’ were not requested for the running of the party in general but limited to the sphere that Hitler was primarily concerned about, namely the re-establishment and maintenance of ideological coherence. This is what underlay his demand to purge deviators, to oversee the absorption of other groups and the retention of Munich as an ideological ‘Rome’ or ‘Mecca’. The outcome, in any case, was the same. Hitler triumphed all along the line. Drexler caved in…

Hitler’s struggle with Drexler is common to most emerging political movements: the clash between the need for growth and the maintenance of ideological purity, which was the side which he took with such vigour. In July 1921, Hitler won his first political battle. He had become a politician. Whether Hitler had sought leadership or had leadership thrust upon him, it was clear that he now was increasingly not merely the de facto but the formal chief of the NSDAP. If he had once seen himself as a mere ‘drummer’ of the movement for the new Germany, he now aspired to be its leader.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 16

During this period Hitler collaborated with a range of figures, not all of whom were party members, in an informal and often non-hierarchical way. His closest associate was Rudolf Hess, a First World War veteran who had grown up in Egypt; the date of their first encounter (which was probably in May 1920) is disputed, but we know for a fact that he joined the NSDAP in July 1920.

A key interlocutor was the Reichswehr officer Ernst Rohm, whose meetings are documented from early 1920, though the first contacts may have taken place a lot earlier.

Hitler had frequent dealings with the staff of the Völkischer Beobachter, especially its executive editor, the playwright Dietrich Eckart, and his deputy Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German refugee from the Russian Revolution, who would influence Hitler’s view of the Soviet Union; the editor was his old regimental comrade Hermann Esser. In a rare gesture, Hitler explicitly acknowledged his debt to Eckart for his help with the Völkischer Beobachter, and to Rosenberg for his ‘theoretical deepening of the party programme’.

In late 1920, Hitler met Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who had witnessed and been appalled by the massacre of the Armenians as a German consul in the East Anatolian town of Erzurum during the First World War. It was probably from him that Hitler got his determination that the Germans should not become a ‘people like the Armenians’, that is, the butt of foreign oppressors.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 15

Hitler giving a speech to supporters in a beer cellar, by Hermann Hoyer.

Over the next fifteen months, Hitler engaged in an intense programme of speeches in the major Munich beer halls; he practised his poses in front of a mirror.

By the end of the year, he had made twenty-seven appearances in Munich, and twelve outside, including Bad Tolz, Rosenheim and even Stuttgart. The audiences ranged in number from 800 to about 2,000. During late September and the beginning of October 1920, Hitler made repeated trips to Austria and to support the National Socialist Party in neighbouring Wurttemberg in their election campaign. In early 1921, a speech on Versailles at the Zirkus Krone was heard by about 5,600 people. One eyewitness, his first biographer Konrad Heiden, recalled that the secret of the success of his speeches was that the audience became ‘participants’ rather than ‘listeners’.

There were some missteps. Hitler’s opportunistic attempt to address a Munich crowd of 20,000 or so uninvited at a general rally outside the Feldherrnhalle in February 1921 was drowned out by the massed bands who struck up as he began to speak. It is also worth remembering that many members had never seen or heard Hitler in person. In general, though, his profile grew steadily, and he began to overtake the best-known orators, such as Gottfried Feder and Dietrich Eckart, as the public face of the party. Despite his somewhat mysterious aura—Hitler refused to allow any photograph of him to be taken—he had become a recognizable ‘name’ in Bavarian politics . His relationship with the Reichswehr in Bavaria, which had effectively incubated him, remained good even after he had left the ranks.

In mid May 1921, Hitler met with the prime minister, Gustav von Kahr, marking his political recognition by ‘official’ Bavaria. He had ‘made it’.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 13

For now, Hitler regarded the Slavs as the victims of Jewish capitalism, a fate they shared with the Germans, and hoped for the restoration of the ‘true’ Russian spirit in the Soviet Union. There was no sign yet of any territorial ambitions in the east. Pity, not hostility, was Hitler’s main sentiment towards Russians at this point .

At the end of March 1920, Hitler took off his army uniform for good. By then, some of the main outlines of his world view, expressed consistently in private correspondence, public meetings and newspapers articles alike, were clearly visible: fear of the western allies, especially Britain, a profound demographic anxiety about the United States, a violent hostility to international capitalism, a sense of the subversive effects of socialism and communism, and, of course, a virulent anti-Semitism.

None of these sentiments were visible before 1914. Fear of Britain and the ‘world of enemies’ was first expressed at the start of the conflict. The rest were a response not to defeat as such, or even to the revolution, but to the consequences of defeat. It was the Versailles settlement which brought home the meaning of November 1918. This was the subject of his first known political speech and its consequences dominated his later thinking. Unlike for most nationalists, territorial losses were the least of Hitler’s concerns: as we have seen, he was far more worried about the long-term impact of perpetual debt bondage, the continued blockade and a resulting surge in emigration.

In other words, it was not the war that made Hitler, or even the revolution, but the peace.