His theories were also in fact "foundational" to the Nazis. If you don't want us to bring up Hitler and what was done under the theories of that guy, don't favorably quote him and indicated you're "open" to his so-called 'scientific' racism and anti-semitism. It's not secret Hitler looked to America and in particular the south for inspiration. Gosh, I wonder why we in 2021 aren't open to those ideas? Can you figure it out? What's the downside of white nationalism?
Well, I doubt that you have ever read
Proper Studies by Aldous Huxley, but if you had you’d know that during the first part of the 20th century there were all kinds of intense ideas swirling around.
Proper Studies in radical in tone and in what it says.
In fact
I am very interested in all those things that get done under all particular theories, as you say. That is one reason I keep my eyes open in respect to Activist Critical Theory.
So I have no problem discussing, say, the various and varied programs of the National Socialists that were intended to build up the people. These were wide and varied and were (nearly) universally admired. As I say, all creativity and all creative acts have a shadow-side. Hitler and his group may indeed have been concerned about eugenics and there appear to have been some strange things done, but that is just one side of a larger coin. And the opposite of eugenics is dysgenics — also a *real thing*.
I feel I must almost apologize for looking at things in *real* terms. Real issues of power and how it is used.
The essential problematic issue in respect to National Socialism is that it put in motion a program of expulsion of the Jewish population. That of itself was intolerable. The Nazi program began as an
expulsion, not as a genocide. Within Jewish history it was just one more of a dozen major ones and in this case an ultra-modern one. If my reading is correct (I gathered what I m saying here when I read the first volume of
The Destruction of the European Jews (Raul Hilberg, considered the *authority*) this is what the National Socialists hoped to achieve: an expulsion. Well, things did not go so well when the war began.
So the question I have asked (myself) has to do with the *right* to do such a thing. I agree that it was an
astoundingly aggressive act, pretty much incomprehensible, but it was
that that was the original crime.
The downside of German nationalism of that era can certainly be examined. And so can the nationalism of any particular people. Yet in its inception I do not see what was so problematic about it. But my larger point is that any creative act, any decisive act in our world, has a ‘positive’ side but the shadow element always accompanies it.
The American project after the WW can be referenced. I accept the *goodness* of American hegemony and world dominion and its directing role. And simultaneously I am aware that it had all sorts of *shadow elements*.
England/Britain was deeply concerned about the German threat since a strong German state, and a potential rival naval power, were a real concern (if my understanding is correct). But the issue in essence revolved around
power, less around altruism. And of course England held India for over 300 years.
I have asked myself if England might not have been served better had she appeased the National Socialists and even aided them in destroying Communist Russia. I have wondered if the states that fell to Nazi occupation could have been held as such. Had England have allowed Germany its breathing room, she’d have been able, for sometime longer anyway, to hold on to her empire.
Vain questions of course, but interesting.
