ADOLF HITLER

Curious that Hitler, for all his faults and Nordic shortcomings, should have appertained or, at any rate, struck me as appertaining to a crude approximation to the Second Coming in the world ... in the face of antichristic communism. Few people in the democratic West seem to realize that the real barbarism and evil afoot at that time was Soviet Communism, and I suspect one could cite the extent of Western decadence as if not an honourable factor in this respect, then at least an extenuating one. For the West was far gone in decadence even then, and when you get a falling away from realism towards materialism in a democratic context, it is almost inevitable that sooner or later a counterbalancing idealism will emerge to attempt to stem the decadence and save what remains of the soul from the jaws of ravenous materialism.

In England, people have long been conditioned to regarding National Socialism as an ideological manifestation of the Devil, purely and simply, with the denigratory epithet 'Nazi' reserved for all those who succumbed to what is perceived to have been one of the worst manifestations of barbarism of all time. Now, admittedly, to the extent that we take the title 'National Socialism' literally, there would be adequate grounds for considering it an indication of materialist barbarism. Yet the fact remains that, whilst a degree of literal nationalistic socialism may have accrued to the ideology, Hitler and most of his closest followers in the Party never took the idea of socialism too seriously, but, on the contrary, constantly fulminated against it in the name of idealistic values, values which diametrically opposed socialist materialism ... as represented, in particular, by the Soviet Union; communism being identifiable, in Hitler's mind, with out-and-out barbarism, an ideology only fit for those who stood lowest in the scale of civilization, the 'chalk' with which no mixture of fascist 'cheese' was possible, the German people no less racially superior to the Russians, in Hitler's eyes, than ideologically superior, no democratic-type compromise being possible between idealistic ürbermenschen and materialistic untermenschen, the Slavs having put themselves beneath the realistic pale through communism and therefore not being entitled to the more lenient, educative treatment accorded to defeated Westerners.

How, then, can one equate this National Socialist ideology with barbarism? And how explain why a people long regarded as one of the most cultured in Europe should suddenly descend, as though by wilful decree, into wanton barbarism? Is there not surely a contradiction here, a refutation of German tradition and reputation, such as all-too-many Western historians have been only too willing to overlook or, no less inexcusably, take for granted? Surely, if the facts of German tradition are properly taken into account, it is precisely this cultural and moral superiority over their decadent democratic Western neighbours which led to the German people adopting National Socialism when they did, and in conjunction, one might say, with the Italian people's adoption of Fascism - the brother idealism of a no-less culturally superior nation. They were in a position to adopt it because democracy had never run that deep or had time to get a grip on the necks of the German people, thanks in large measure to autocratic tradition and the correlative absence, at least to any appreciable extent, of an overseas Empire, the very thing that, certainly in the case of Britain, encouraged the growth of liberalism by requiring the adoption of trade tariffs and, later, laissez faire in order to protect home goods and further exports. Paradoxically, it was the Empire which was the chief cause of Britain's moral undoing, and now that by far the greater part of it has gone ... the fruit of liberalism remains ... in a manifestation far more radical and ideologically damaging than could have been envisaged during the heyday of laissez faire.

Coming late to Empire and losing what little it had acquired to the victorious Allies following World War One, Germany was in a position, like no other country on earth, to adopt an idealistic stance in the face of decadent realism on the one hand and barbarous materialism on the other, and, inevitably, it turned against both with all the vengeance of legitimate hatred. In Hitler it had found its saviour. But the ambitious Führer was unable to prevent the eventual defeat of the German people under the combined weight of the overwhelming forces massed against them. Democracy won the day and, until comparatively recently, the Antichrist sat enthroned not only over the former Soviet Union, but over much of Eastern Europe as well!

There was, however, a certain truth in one of Hitler's last statements, where he claimed to have been ahead of his time. For idealism, in the guise of National Socialism, was no match for the combined opposition of democratic realism and communist materialism, the former of which still holds the day. As remarked earlier, Hitler seems to me to have been a crude approximation to the Second Coming, the first attempt by idealism to challenge the forces of materialistic disintegration and, like most first attempts at anything, it was doomed to failure, an early crack at the bull's-eye, so to speak, that was bound to miss the central target, if only because further practice and rethinking of policy were inevitably required.

When Hitler also claimed that National Socialism would one day rise again, he was approximating to the truth, necessarily from his own doomed point-of-view, but nevertheless in the broader and higher sense that idealism could never be written-off or entirely vanquished from the world, since idealism was the key to the future defeat of materialism and banishment of the Antichrist from the world in the name of the Second Coming, in order that the 'Kingdom of Heaven' could be established on earth, to lead mankind towards a transcendent salvation.

As before ... so again, materialism is but a passing phenomenon destined for liquidation from God's transcendental point-of-view, whether we are referring to the 'before' of the lower supernaturalism in the Roman Catholic culture of the Middle Ages, which superseded the materialist barbarism of the Dark Ages, or to the 'again' of the coming higher supernaturalism in the Social Transcendentalist culture of the future free-electron age when, no less surely, the second 'Dark Ages' of communist/liberal barbarism will be globally superseded by the light of ultimate truth - the supertruth of the more genuine manifestation of the Second Coming, though not, in all probability, without a global struggle.

Yes, idealism will eventually rise-up again, but Hitler couldn't have foreseen exactly how or in what guise, given his National Socialist limitations, his misfortune to have been chosen by fate as a forerunner and not literal embodiment of the Second Coming, to have been born into a people who, despite their high cultural reputation, could not have served as a true 'chosen people' for the development of idealism towards the supertheocratic level of the true religion of ... Social Transcendentalism.