Nationalism vs. Neo-Nazism

Bringing this debate to a close

I wasn’t planning to do a follow-up to my article on national socialism. But then I wasn’t expecting it to spark so much discussion. There was a series of essay responses which went into far more depth than my original did, there were also a lot of attacks on me from the circles I was critiquing that mostly avoided my actual arguments. I’m not really interested in becoming the anti-NS guy, but so much discussion was sparked by this that I’ve concluded I need to do a follow-up piece surveying the discussion and giving my own thoughts.

My original piece was intentionally succinct and avoided getting into the weeds of historical arguments, so I will use this to dump all the context left out of the first piece and present some of the other contributions I found interesting.

Is this all pointless?

The most valid criticism I encountered actually came from people that agree with me, who say this is a topic not worth engaging with since these debates have been had before and everyone serious has long moved on from any association with Nazi LARPing.

That’s true to some extent, but recall that in the first essay I said I was drawn to finally discuss this by the big rise in “noticing” and subsequent rise in apologetics for Nazi Germany in recent years. I’m not trying to intellectually convert Blood Tribe, I am thinking of the many thousands of young White people who are encountering topics like Jewish power and the great replacement for the first time, and seeing this presented alongside a lot of pro-Nazi content. Just recently, UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell was recently subject to a high-profile controversy when he praised Hitler on a podcast. People with much larger platforms than my own regularly engage in apologetics for historical Nazism now, so I feel like I am now commenting on a much larger trend than intra-alt-right strategic debates.

Another counter to my prior essay was “if you really think we should step over national socialism, why are you spending your time arguing about it?”

My response is that I have been nine years making content in these circles, hardly ever raising my issues with NS. If you read my article, you will see it began as a response to Joel Davis arguing that our movement must rehabilitate NS. People can believe what they want about the Second World War. What I resent, and what I will push back against, is them telling our people that they must all focus their struggle on their history hang-up or else whatever they’re doing politically is worthless.

Neo-Nazis piggyback on the popularity of nationalist arguments, they insist we direct any populist energy outside their history hobby back to their history hobby. When we say that’s unnecessary, they accuse us of doing the work of the left by focusing our attention to attacking what’s to our right. This is obviously dishonest. The notion that rehabilitating Hitler is more principled or further right than stepping over Hitler only makes sense within a neoliberal frame in which everybody who opposes Jewish Liberalism is Hitler.

Another optics argument?

Some dismissed my arguments by categorising them as just another attempt at starting a debate about optics. The idea is that I actually agree with these people on everything but just have a distaste for the radical, honest presentation of it.

But none of the arguments I made were really about optics. I said German National Socialism is a foreign, historical movement and not a basis for a 21st Century nationalist movement any more than the American Confederacy would have been a good basis for a German nationalist movement in the 1930s. I said German National Socialism was not a pro-White movement, and included the subjugation and genocide of Slavs and other White groups. I said the average understanding of history anyone has today is so poor that an intelligible conversation about these topics is hardly possible in the first place outside a tiny group, and so the kind of revisionist arguments that get popular are usually discrediting anyway. I said all of the ideas we are told are unique to NS are not — I have philosophical reasons for defending nationalism, a state based around the common good and the uplifting of a sovereign people, pro-natal social policies, etc. that do not require winning any historical arguments. Yes, it is indeed “bad optics” and off-putting to the vast majority of people you should want to reach to be celebrating the Nazi regime, but that wasn’t the focus of my arguments.

The Slavic question

Neo-Nazism is a bait and switch routine where someone invites you into the friendly alley of nationalist socialism for all and then drags you behind the dumpster of anachronistic central European resentment politics.

Never was this more clear than the response to my first essay, when I raised the indisputable fact that German National Socialism was anti-Slavic. Hitler always intended to expand Germany into Poland, Ukraine and Russia, ethnically cleansing millions of Slavs to make way for Germans. I might have expected the response to this to be more focused on denying this history, but even among those that did deny it there was still a lot of justifying German domination over other Whites. This only validates what I initially argued, that you can’t really separate NS from the particularist German movement, which leads to the absurdity of White nationalists justifying the destruction of White countries in the name of German superiority.

Joel Davis, while justifying the German conquest of Poles during his debate with Greg Johnson, rhetorically asked where to find the Polish equivalents of Beethoven, Goethe, Nietzsche etc., effectively admitting he believed Germans had a right of conquest over the land due to their superiority. If there was any doubt, in Joel’s Substack response to me he says “the German pursuit of ‘Lebensraum’ was fundamentally its right according to the law of nature”. What does this mean other than Germans are entitled to genocide Poles and Russians due to their innate superiority?

Joel wrote in a Telegram post that “German rule would have been better for Europe than Soviet or American rule.” But of course, Germany didn’t want to just have Poland in a subordinate position in a sphere of influence, it wanted to destroy Poland and populate it with Germans. Expecting Poles to consent to this — telling them their outright erasure is preferable to them being under the influence of a liberal world order today — is absurd.

Joel says Poles should put aside their self-centered perspective and think of the overall good of the White race. How far does this go? Why stop at Poland, wouldn’t it be better for the White race to just populate all of Europe with nordic people then? Again, we are told that it is absolutely necessary to rehabilitate National Socialism to be a nationalist today, and what starts as “don’t disavow Hitler” becomes screeds in defence of subjugating Poles, Russians and Ukrainians. This might have sounded hysterical if I wrote it in the first essay, but now you can just go and read the responses.

Of course, while justifying wiping out Slavic nations for German expansion, this is still softpedalled by claims that German attitudes to Slavs were much friendlier than is now portrayed. For example, Joel writes that:

National Socialism has no inherent animosity towards the Polish or the Slavic peoples in general. The Germans did, due to territorial disputes. But during the course of the war, the Germans allied with myriad ‘Slavic’ nations, many Slavs joined the SS and Hitler’s speeches increasingly framed the war as a battle to save Europe from Bolshevism.

Does Joel seriously think there was no animosity towards Slavs outside a border dispute? Hitler never hid his view of the Slavs as an inferior race. In Mein Kampf, he labels Poles and Russians inferior and deserving of subjugation to Germans. He credits “the Germanic element” for any state-building capacity displayed by the Russian people. Upon the invasion of Poland, when Alfred Rosenberg spoke with him regarding his plans for the conquered East, Rosenberg recounted the Führer telling him:

The Poles are a thin Germanic layer with dreadful material underneath. The Jews are the most horrible thing imaginable. The towns are covered with dirt. He has learned a great deal in recent weeks. Above all, if Poland had ruled over parts of the old [German] empire for just a few more decades, everything would have become lice-ridden and depraved. Now only a purposeful governing hand can rule here.¹

Just a few days after Rosenberg recorded this, Goebbels reported Hitler speaking to him about the Poles in a similar vein:

The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive, stupid, and amorphous. And a ruling class that is an unsatisfactory result of a mingling between the lower orders and an Aryan master race. The Poles’ dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgment is absolutely nil.²

Just a border dispute, right? Martin Bormann made the following note after a meeting between Hitler and Hans Frank, the head of the Government General of occupied Poland:

Once again the Führer underlined that Poles could only have one master, and that was the German. There cannot and should not be two masters. For that reason, all members of the Polish intelligentsia were to be killed. That sounded harsh, but it was a law of life. The Führer has decided that Poland will be a huge reservoir of labour for us, from which he can draw the people we need for menial jobs. We have to get them from somewhere.³

By March 1941, Hans Frank himself recorded that the Führer now intended to expel all Poles from Poland:

The Government General, as we know and have developed it, will be essentially richer and happier. It will experience more support and, above all, will be cleared of Jews [entjudet]. What’s more, it will lose the characteristic look of a lifestyle which is still predominantly Polish, because along with the Jews, Poles will also leave this territory. The Führer has decided to make this area into a purely German land.⁴

As for Joel’s other argument, I’ve always thought it’s a bit of a ridiculous argument to point out how Germany allied with Slavic nations while fighting an existential war to act like they were seen as equals. Why would they not want to send inferior peoples to fight and die for them against Red Army hordes? And regarding the admission of Slavs to the SS, Hitler himself was always critical of allowing non-Germans in the ranks, and Himmler only viewed it as acceptable because these volunteers were never considered true members of the SS:

Right from the start of the recruitment programme Himmler had made a sharp distinction between full Waffen-SS divisions, whose members had to satisfy the same ‘racial’ criteria as all other members of the SS, and volunteer units composed of foreigners who did not have to satisfy these criteria. In his view, the big increase in the Waffen-SS must not be allowed to lead to a dilution of the racial criteria for acceptance into the SS. Himmler made it clear, for example, that one should not speak of a Ukrainian SS man, but only of ‘Ukrainians serving in armed units of the SS’. The ‘term SS man, which means so much to us and which we regard so highly,’ should not be used for ‘the numerous members of alien ethnic groups which we are now organizing under the command of the SS’.⁵

Regarding that “natural right of conquest” Germans supposedly had over Slavs, it’s funny how modern National Socialists never apply this logic consistently the way Hitler himself did.

Someone named Richard Parker wrote a piece for the Occidental Observer on the problems of Hitlerism that I believe was in response to this debate. Parker correctly remarks regarding Hitler’s Nero Decree — which called for the complete destruction of all German civillian infrastructure which could be of any use to Germany’s occupiers — that carrying out this plan meant Hitler “would practically have carried out the Morgenthau Plan on his own, saving the Jews the trouble of doing much of the dirty work themselves”. Albert Speer’s account of Hitler’s reasoning is as follows:

If the war were lost, the nation would also perish. This fate was inevitable. There was no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people would need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it would be better to destroy these things ourselves, because this nation will have prove[n] to be the weaker one and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. Besides, those who would remain after the battle were only the inferior ones, for the good ones had been killed.

It’s quite the irony when Hitler himself deemed the Germans to have failed the test of nature, and be thus worthy of complete destruction to the victorious “eastern nations”, that modern neo-Nazis still use the same reasoning to argue for the losing side of the war.

What is National Socialism?

Elsewhere in his essay, Joel writes that:

Keith’s claim that National Socialism’s only defining feature is “German chauvinism” is laughably ridiculous.

Well, I never made this laughably ridiculous claim. What I did say is that none of the individual principles described as features of National Socialism are unique to it, and any of them could be abstracted and more easily defended on their own grounds, without arguing about the German’s right to living space in Eastern Europe.

Joel lists the following as the features of NS ideology:

National Socialism very clearly embraced dictatorship in repudiation of parliamentarianism, revolution against reformism, the stripping of citizenship from all non-Germans, the nationalisation of finance, autarkic militarism, the most radical eugenics program in political history, a comprehensive project of cultural renewal according to ‘Volkisch’ principles and Aryan ideals, the criminalisation of freemasonry, the total eradication of organised Marxism, the total subordination of the individual to the nation, and the total exclusion of Jews from public life.

Right off the bat I find some divergence. I agree with classical political philosophers like Aristotle in favouring a classical republican regime over a dictatorship, so evidently this is a difference in ideology, not just a disagreement about optics. When we read things like “autarkic militarism”, this is clearly something specific to mid-century Germany and shouldn’t be a universal principle for a nationalist movement today. If Joel removed the aspects specific to Germany here, you would basically be left with “a nationalist dictatorship with eugenics”, which seems rather more generic. In his response to this debate titled “Why I’m Not a National Socialist", Nativist Concern responds to this claim that National Socialism is the “pure” expression of nationalism with the following:

National Socialism is perhaps the pure expression of German Weltanschauung: the militarism and will to expansion as described by Spengler, but it is particular to that state in the middle of Europe surrounded by the great powers of France, Russia and Poland. It's will to dominate represents only one nationalism at the expense of its neighbours and their identities. The notion that the ideology of National Socialism is as universally replicable as philosophy or democracy is patently absurd. Folkishness or socialist economics are, but not the essential belief in a hierarchy of European ethnicities and ingrained militarism with designs of conquest. That would end up in something like the Thirty Years War.

Also worth noting, but left out of this debate so far, is the fact that German National Socialists themselves never saw their ideology as a universal nationalist ideology or anything that could be practiced outside Germany. In the words of Goebbels:

National Socialism confines itself to Germany and is not a product for export, either in its abstract or practical characteristics.

I think the members of the actual NSDAP would find it more strange than anyone if they came back today and saw modern non-Germans, even non-Europeans, making arguments for centering their countries’ politics around their movement. Joel writes of the necessity for the package of principles he outlined:

Ethnonationalism without any of these National Socialist elements leaves itself no mechanism to seize full control of the state, crush its enemies, and then assert itself over our civilization. Without rehabilitating National Socialism and bringing these elements back into its arsenal, nationalism will remain cucked by liberalism until there are no longer any White nations to save.

Well, if we’re talking about how to save White nations, one thing that would be absolutely doomed to fail is a modern Nazi movement promising an autarkic military dictatorship. Insofar as individual elements of NS are needed, if they are, they can be justified on their own grounds. I wrote a whole book defending ethnonationalism. I believe all those arguments stand on their own, and are enough to convince intelligent, honest people. “But the Nazis” isn’t a coherent objection to any of them. In fact, to respond to a “but the Nazis” argument by relitigating the whole 20th Century is to concede to your opponent that nationalists today should be held accountable over the crimes of other nationalist regimes.

“Step over it” doesn’t mean desperately avoid this topic because you might be called a Nazi, it means the whole premise of this — that German expansionism shows an inherent problem with nationalism, or that Europeans today are responsible for any of this, or that it will make for a more peaceful and harmonious world if we flood White countries with foreigners — this can all be rejected. The religious aura around WWII fading aids in stepping over that, of course, but as I argued previously, that is largely something that’s happening inevitably due to generational ignorance and apathy, it’s not something that requires us expending our political energy on, especially when none of our arguments logically require a different telling of history.

The NS fandom

I’ve always enjoyed the writing of Hunter Wallace, and he did a series of articles in respone to this debate. Hunter makes some interesting observations about the culture surrounding modern NS, something he views more as a fandom than a real political movement:

The force that drives that keeps driving the creation of these groups is nostalgia and a desire to shock and cryptkeep and reenact the past of a foreign country. This isn’t the force that led to the creation of National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s which was based on a unique set of historical circumstances like the Italian precedent, the backdrop of World War I, the intellectual atmosphere of the early 20th century, the crushing Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany, etc. As such, it doesn’t resonate with anyone beyond activists who have a narrow interest in history. It doesn’t grow beyond that

…

I think of “NS” as a fandom like Swifties or Trekkies or Harry Potter, not as a political movement. These people are not engaged in political activity. “NS” fans *discourage* political activity. There is no “NS” political party to join. There are no “NS” candidates contesting power. There is no “revolutionary” organization that plans to resort to violence to join. “NS” people believe that the system is hopelessly corrupt and their principles preclude them from engaging with it to capture state power. Many of them prefer to focus their attention on “telling the truth about World War II.”

…

Like other more familiar fandoms, “NS” has meet ups or conventions. “NS” people dress up like Trekkies and parade through the streets in uniforms and with flags. “NS” fans create and consume content. “NS” has forums and podcasts like Trekkies where people get into hairsplitting arguments over canon and lore. It attracts history nerds who master the canon and the lore. It is a subculture that doesn’t appeal to the rest of society. Just like Trekkies, alienated people find comfort and belonging in the fandom. It is not uncommon for couples to meet and get married to other people who are part of the fandom. You will find lots of people in the “NS” fandom who are doing comedy or entertainment, but not politics, as no one really believes it is even possible to challenge our all-powerful Jewish overlords.

Adolf Hitler is the center of the fandom like Taylor Swift or Star Trek or Harry Potter. Historic National Socialism was an actual viable political movement, but the “NS” fandom is something completely different. The National Justice Party was a classic example of the “NS” fandom. It was an organization that was created for fans of Hitler and National Socialism, but which never engaged in political activity. As far as I am aware, members paid dues, engaged in activism and had meet ups and consumed TRS content, but no one actually ran for any office as a National Justice Party candidate. It was a “party” which people joined which didn’t engage in politics whose members were satisfied by just talking about Jews, “telling the truth” about World War II, bonding with other history lovers. It is similar to people who go to Star Trek conventions dressed up like Klingons and who like speaking in Klingon. The appeal of it is the experience of playing the character … the act of being and feeling “NS” or Klingon and affirming your own personal identity.

…

Nationalism doesn’t need the apolitical “NS” fandom to succeed. To the extent that people become wrapped up in this subculture, they tend to disengage from politics and encourage others to do so. If people actually tried to do what the historic NSDAP did which was contest state power and win offices all over Germany on behalf of their own ideology, the “NS” fandom would oppose this because that would require engaging with the system and a sense of political realism.

There is a lot to this. Engaging with modern neo-Nazis, you realise that for many their arguments are so hamfisted that it is a much deeper emotional attachment they are defending. They often talk of having epiphany-like experiences watching Europa: The Last Battle or The Greatest Story Never Told about how they’d been lied to their whole lives. These documentaries give them a meaningful narrative about history, with a simple truth they can share that entirely flips popular history and allows them to incorporate any other entertaining conspiracies or heterodox political beliefs — there’s a libertarian Hitler who only reluctantly entered politics because the Jews wouldn’t let him be, a pagan Hitler who was the incarnation of Wotan, a Christian nationalist Hitler, a nazbol Hitler, I’ve even seen large accounts on X argue Hitler was anti-racist and only had an issue with Jews. Much like liberals, Hitler is a symbol to these people rather than a real historical figure. Their celebration of Hitler becomes a cathartic, absolutely rejection of all the trends of White erasure they observe in their life. The problem with treating this like anything but a performative revolt against liberal norms and actually trying to argue the case for Hitler is none of these people really care about the real history, they are the equivalent of atheists acting out by desecrating a religious icon.

Most of these people are at least earnest, but they often become fodder for more cynical leaders. Hunter Wallace mentioned the TRS Network and their failed National Justice Party, which is a good example. Since Hunter responded to them, I saw they had been critical of my first essay. Predictably, they presented it as proof I was attempting to ‘sell out’. Of course, if that were really my goal I wouldn’t be engaging in any capacity with anyone who defends National Socialism, I would just ignore them.

For the record, even though I now reach tens of millions of people every month and am one of the most widely read politics authors on Substack, I actually make less as a content creator than I did when I had a smaller audience but a paywalled podcast. That’s because almost all of my work is free to the public. When TRS ran the failed National Justice Party, they not only paywalled all their podcasts, they even paywalled videos of their party’s activism, and had a weekly “NJP Report” advertising the party’s work that was also kept behind a paywall. Part of their strategy to steward everyone into their paywalled echo-chamber was to attack anyone outside their group as some sort of subversive or sellout, which is why they originally began attacking me for encouraging people to spread our message on a less-monitored Twitter.

I mention this only to make a point that there is more than one way to grift in these circles. One is the more recognisable way of latching onto the larger conservative movement trends and tapping into a large and gullible audience to sell to. But another is to cultivate an audience of radicals, make a spectacle of being the most edgy and most pure ideologically, and convince your followers that anything outside your pure message is worthless. With this method, instead of seeking to grow your audience, you milk an existing audience for more by convincing them you’re their only hope.

This is why those guys had to launch a fake political party based around a half-hearted Nazi LARP and pretend to their audience they actually believed they were going to win — you can’t really complain about everything being politically ineffective while completely abstaining from politics. Only, when they pulled the plug on the party because they deemed it was harming their subscription numbers, they went back to doing exactly that.

In Hunter’s follow up article Loser Pilled, he writes about what the pattern of failure of people like this historically:

Historic National Socialism was a viable political movement in Germany. The NSDAP was a political party like other political parties. It was the political vehicle of a faction in German society that competed with other factions for state power. It had a political program. It elected people all over Germany starting in Bavaria and spreading outwards. Hitler worked within the system to rise to power.

The “NS” fandom admires historic National Socialism, which was the original act, like other fans who admire Harry Potter, The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. In particular, the fandom loves the National Socialist aesthetic and cosplay, which has been adopted by fans like Marilyn Manson. The fans imitate the NSDAP by creating “parties” with members like the National Justice Party, but which are fake in that the vast majority of these “parties” do not bother to participate in the political system.

George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, ran for governor of Virginia in 1965 as an independent write in candidate and won 1% of the vote. Glenn Miller ran for U.S. Senate in Missouri. These are exceptions to the rule in the “NS” fandom. Generally speaking, the fans are content with belonging to “parties” which do not engage in political activity. The most striking difference is that many of the loudest voices in the fandom are quietists who advocate total political disengagement or even going so far as to advocate empowering the Left which was unthinkable to the original movement.

I believe a political movement is only as strong as its members. The NSDAP was full of intellectuals and decorated ex-soldiers. Joseph Goebbels had a PhD in German literature; Alfred Rosenberg had a PhD in architecture; Walther Funk, the German minister of economics during WWII, earned a PhD in economics the same year he joined the party; Hermann Goering was a celebrated ace pilot in WW1. Their aesthetics and their ideology was new and forward thinking. Modern NS is backward looking and recycles aesthetics that are a century old. For decades, the NS subculture has attracted the dregs of White society.

The NS subculture is associated with criminality and misanthropy not just because of Jewish media representation, but the actual history of these movements. Why is that? Is it just because the system fears NS so much that it is bound to only attract people with little to lose? Partly. But it’s also true that identifying as NS today is analogous to identifying as a satanist in a Christian society. It’s no surprise then that it attracts the same anti-social types that were attracted to satanism in previous decades, and there is even a crossover between some NS subcultures and satanism, as well as other extreme anti-social subcultures like people who celebrate mass-shooters.

I’m not suggesting everyone involved has these tendencies, but I am arguing it is an inevitable outcome of building your politics around a Hitlerist subculture. We should want to attract reasonable people with a strong moral sense. If people don’t find a movement based around winning support for nationalist policies and restoring White homelands exciting enough without an attachment to a Hitler fandom, then they simply do not care enough about the existential challenge facing our people, and should be filtered out.

Last words

With this addition, I feel satisfied that I’ve said all of what I need to say on this topic. I don’t want to spend a lot of time arguing with other nationalists, so I expect to return to writing on other subjects after this. I am pleased with the volume of interesting discussion this has produced though, and I will conclude by linking all the other pieces that contributed to this debate for anyone that wants to review it in its entirety.

All essays in this debate:

Nationalism Doesn’t Need National Socialism — Keith Woods

Why Nationalism Needs National Socialism — Joel Davis

Keith Woods: Nationalism Doesn’t Need National Socialism — Hunter Wallace

Loser Pilled — Hunter Wallace

Why I’m Not A National Socialist — Nativist Concern

Denouncing Hitler for Very Different Reasons — Richard Parker

The Cloud — Greg Johnson

The Restoration of White Self-Belief — Zander

1. English translation of H.G. Seraphim, Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs aus den Jahren 1934–35 und 1939–40 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1964), p. 98–100.

2. Goebbels, Joseph, and Fred Taylor. "The Goebbels Diaries: 1939-1941." (1983). Pg. 16.

3. Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume II: Downfall 1939-45. Vol. 2. Random House, 2020.

4. Hans Frank’s Official Diary, entry of 25 March 1941. Federal archive, Berlin. R 52 II / 181

5. Breitman, Richard. "Peter Longerich. Heinrich Himmler." (2013)