Nationalism Doesn't Need National Socialism

Response to Joel Davis

I saw a series of Telegram posts by Australian nationalist Joel Davis recently that I feel the need to respond to. Joel argues that rehabilitating the image of German National Socialism and Adolf Hitler himself is essential for the success of a nationalist movement. For a time, Joel and I were very closely aligned ideologically and collaborated a lot together. Our paths diverged somewhat when Joel embraced, for want of a better word, Neo-Nazism. To be clear, I still consider Joel a friend and the smartest advocate of the position he holds, but I think that position is misguided and have wanted to address it for some time.

Joel’s position isn’t exactly niche within nationalist circles now. In the past couple of years, there has been a great opening up of the topic of Jewish influence in the West, and this has brought with it a resurgence in revisionism and outright Hitlerism. This has real world consequences for our movement too. Justin Barrett, the former leader of the Irish National Party, has also chosen to go the route of embracing Hitlerism. Now self-identifying as a Nazi and donning replica SS coats to protests, he has done a tour of livestreams arguing that the only way forward for Irish nationalism is to educate our people on the success of the German National Socialist experiment.

I think this approach is not only misguided, but is leading people to a lot of wasted energy on projects that are doomed to fail, and often outright counter-productive for the growth of our movement. This isn’t to say the people involved don’t do some good work, and Joel’s recent courage in facing down the tyrannical speech codes in Australia is particularly admirable. But the argument that if we can’t rehabilitate Hitler we are doomed to extinction is painfully misguided and needs to be challenged.

Joel says:

There was a long time where I (at least partially) concealed my National Socialist sympathies and tried to pursue ideological projects which could circumvent the negative stigma. I realised these paths wouldn't work, because they all required rhetorical (and often actual) compromises upon racial loyalism.

At the core of the pathologisation of White Nationalism is its association with the spectre of National Socialism as a unique and ultimate evil. It's simply not possible to avoid this association in good faith without damaging the conviction of your own position.

The only solution to this, if you want the White race to survive, is the rehabilitation of National Socialism. There is no other solution. Stop wasting time.

I wanted to respond to this post in particular because it contains most of the common arguments from self-styled National Socialists around this topic, so it’s an opportunity to lay out my alternative case.

First off, Joel says not identifying as a National Socialist requires “compromises upon racial loyalism”. I think it’s quite the opposite. National Socialism was not a generic “pro-White” movement, but a German chauvinist movement bound up with Nordicist racial theory. Central to its project was the planned ethnic cleansing of tens of millions of Slavs, and the destruction of White countries like Poland, Ukraine and Russia. This is not some Hollywood meme history. Hitler expresses his desire to establish lebensraum in the East in Mein Kampf, in his unpublished Second Book, and in his Table Talks. In the Table Talks, Hitler expresses his desire to keep the population of Russia, capable of nothing but “hard work under coercion”, just literate enough to read road signs and serve the German occupiers. He says his plan is to make southern Ukraine “an exclusively German colony”.¹

David Irving on the German treatment of Ukrainians — Hitler’s War, pg. 663

Do we need to rehabilitate that to get people to support nationalism in 2025? The strongest, most patriotic White countries today are found in Eastern Europe. I know nationalists doing excellent work in many of them. Must we force them to change their opinions on German imperialism over their lands? And doesn't the fact that countries like Poland have had some of the strongest national resistance to globalism despite their strong historical opposition to Nazism undermine the whole idea that a positive view of Hitlerism is necessary for the flourishing of a nationalist movement?

Over 100,000 nationalists participated in Poland’s Independence Day march last year — the biggest nationalist gathering in the West.

The response of modern Hitlerists to this is usually denial. Typically, they may say the Table Talks are unreliable, although even revisionist historians like David Irving accept their authenticity and most of the skepticism around them concerns limitations like translation issues, rather than outright forgery. But even if we ignore the Table Talks, the same sentiment about Slavs, and the desire for a project of colonisation in Eastern Europe, is clearly expressed in Mein Kampf and Hitler’s Second Book. Joel has had to engage in some historically flimsy apologetics himself, as when in an interview with Elijah Schaffer he justified the German invasion of Poland as a response to ethnic cleansing of Germans. This relies on little more than Nazi propaganda from the period (for example, Europa: The Last Battle had to rely on attacks on Germans that happened after the German invasion to make this narrative work.) In truth, Nazis won 1933 elections in Danzig and had complete control of the city. Footage from the period shows public buildings and roads lined with Nazi flags. Some German organisations suffered repression to Polonisation efforts, but nothing of the scale required to justify an invasion.

Another response is to separate the concrete history of German National Socialism from the ideology. Anti-Slavic attitudes and German expansion were of a time and particular set of political circumstances, but most National Socialists today have some degree of pan-Europeanism and love their Slavic brothers. The ideology can be abstracted from the history. But at that point, why would National Socialism the historical movement need to be rehabilitated at all? If it just means a set of ideas like racialism, loyalty to folk, pro-natal state policies etc., then these can surely be better rehabilitated by decoupling them from Hitlerism altogether.

The chief argument though, is that White identity is viewed as evil because of its association with the ultimate evil of National Socialism, and so only saving the latter can save the former. It is true that the moral universe of moderns is centered on the satanic archetype of Hitler and all he is associated with. It doesn’t follow though, that the answer is to convince everyone that Hitler did nothing wrong. A lot of intelligent revisionists, such as the head of the Institute for Historical Review Mark Weber, came to the conclusion that as the events of World War Two grow more distant, and the masses lose the most basic grip on the narrative — any narrative — about that war, our energies are better focused on what’s happening here and now. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen the legitimacy of Jewish Zionist power be fiercely undermined by the left, who focused on present day injustices and stepped right over the kind of special pleading for Jews that is centered on the Second World War. The mythos of WW2 that established the post-Nuremberg world order was always going to have a lifespan, and is now dying to apathy and ignorance as Hitler becomes just another historical figure like Napoleon or Genghis Khan to a generation with little sense of connection to the period.

As for the argument that if we don’t rehabilitate National Socialism we can be associated with it in a way harmful to us, that doesn’t matter. The truth is it can simply be stepped over. Leftists have overdone calling everything Nazism to the point of exhaustion, and the dividing lines between nationalists and conservatives are eroding as conservatives are regularly exposed to nationalist arguments from popular commentators, like the defence of White nationalism recently offered by Tucker Carlson to his millions of viewers. The leftists that invoke Hitler to say racism is bad aren’t going to have their mind changed by facts, and conservatives who are afraid to embrace White identity because of the spectre of Hitler are more easily red pilled by other topics anyway.

Very few people become nationalists because they have waded through tens of hours of Bitchute documentaries about the mid-20th Century. Those that do usually become the most forceful advocates of centering our struggle on their history hobby, but make no mistake, they are a minority. If they are honest, almost everyone who finds themselves in the NS camp will find they were moved to nationalism by rather simple arguments and moral appeals about our situation today. If someone is even willing to consider the 12 hours of historical revisionism in Europa: The Last Battle they are probably already pretty open to hearing an honest case for White identity politics. And, as my series on Europa is making clear, the popular Hitlerist narrative on the events of the 20th Century is more riddled with inaccuracies and a product of propaganda than the mainstream view is.

The argument about getting over the stigma is the main argument for rehabilitating National Socialism, but another is that it uniquely has the solution to our problems today. As I said, this is the main criticism the former leader of the National Party now has of its leadership — that National Socialism alone has “the answers” to our predicament today. Helpfully, Joel also lays out the case for this, writing that:

National Socialism is fundamentally the notion that the highest value in politics should be loyalty to one's nation. Its repudiations of both liberalism and (proletarian) socialism, as well as its criticism and overcoming of conservatism, continue to provide a robust ideological orientation within the modern political paradigm. Its existential conception of life as struggle, its cultural racialism, its economic principles.. These all remain just as relevant today.

I don’t see any principle unique to National Socialism that Europeans need to survive and thrive today. As I said, many Eastern European countries have had successful national populist movements that repudiated National Socialism. Every White nation has their own national story and heroes that can be harnessed to these ends. For me as an Irish nationalist, the vision of a comprehensive national idea can be found in our own tradition from the mouths of our own people, in a nationalist movement that predates German National Socialism and is not foreign to us. What did Pearse, Griffith or Mitchel not see that Hitler or Rosenberg did? (To be fair to Joel Davis, he claims to speak only in an Anglosphere context, but there are others who make the same argument for all White countries.)

Let’s go through Joel’s list: my national heroes considered loyalty to one’s nation the highest value in politics, sometimes to the point of martyrdom; they too repudiated liberalism and bolshevism; they too were revolutionaries critical of conservatism; and they provided an ideological paradigm still relevant today. As for the “existential conception of life as struggle”, this is a metaphysical view that is inessential to the success of a nationalist movement, and in conflict with the many Christians who may otherwise support White racial survival. Of course, if you push National Socialists enough, you will often find this principle is what it’s really all about: their National Socialism typically serves as a kind of religion for them based on this principle of eternal struggle and Nordicist racial hierarchies, and they simply wish to proselytise their religion. The arguments about the necessity of this for nationalism in the 21st century are just window dressing. They don’t want to rehabilitate Hitler to promote nationalism, but they want to use nationalism to rehabilitate Hitler.

Finally, as for the economic principles, the Nazis certainly had an enormously successful economic experiment that was essentially an early trial of Modern Monetary Theory. But economics is a practical matter, and I don’t see why any of the principles used there should be treated as sacrosanct either. I think tax credits for large families and stimulus programs are great, but I think you could probably sell people on the merits of those policies without explaining the monetary theories of Gottfried Feder.

So there is really nothing especially novel from National Socialism that nationalist movements need today. And if there were, it would benefit from being disassociated with the negative stigma of Hitlerism anyway. All the political steps I see as necessary to save my people from erasure can be carried through the vehicle of a regular old ethnonationalist movement — one that actually speaks to my people’s history, heroes and heritage.

1. Cameron, Norman, and R. H. Stevens. "Hitler’s table talk." (1988).