The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 185
The Nazi Experiment wasn’t just an idea. It was an idea put into practice. Putting that idea into practice started with a movement, but it required a totalitarian state apparatus to fully implement, to tremendous disaster. What was Adolf Hitler’s real vision for the Nazi State? He makes it plain: the primary, if not sole, purpose of the state is to protect and improve the race. That is, Hitler’s state wasn’t ethnonationalist as a matter of happenstance but centrally, by design. In that regard, given the realities of Europe and the world, the Holocaust, and additional such racially motivated purges, were completely predictable all the way back to the mid-1920s in Mein Kampf. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay continues his “Nazi Experiment” podcast series with its tenth volume, reading from the second chapter of the second volume of Mein Kampf to show you the horrible reality of the intended Nazi State apparatus in Hitler’s own words. Join him for a shocking listen.
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1 comment
Hi James,
Great admirer of your work over here in the UK. Your reading of Mein Kampf is excellent but there are huge areas of influence on Hitler that you’re overlooking because, I suspect, you believe (quite correctly) that fascist-racism, as such, was a relatively recent development and response to global economic conditions in post-first-world war Europe. That its novelty dated back to Mussolini’s coinage. In the Italian tradition, that’s probably true but in Germany’s tradition it goes far deeper into late-18th-century Germanic responses to Napoleon. I was struck by your aside on what I’ll call “tradition” because I think it’s elemental to the distinctions between Marxist and Fascist responses to modernity. You know, the bit where you notice that Communists have little regard for the traditional whereas Nazis and Fascists kinda do? All of that–I mean absolutely all of that–goes back to Johann Gottfried von Herder concept of the Volk and its role in universal history and possibly before him to Robert Lowth’s ideas of scriptural tradition. It is an absolute given of a conservative view of history that the river of tradition is purest, nearest to its source. And you’re so right to notice how many on the right in America are doing a John Henry Newman, at the moment, for the same reasons. It’s a huge conversation but Herder’s ideas run like wine through Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf.