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This 15,000-word essay is concerned with the main problems in the West's past -- its 1930-1945 plunge into barbarism and its subsequent statism. It considers the central failing of the Hitler years and uses the understanding to point the West towards a realistically liberal future.

Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?

By CHRIS BRAND

Edinburgh, 2000

INTRODUCTORY QUOTATIONS

"If we were to imagine a great war taking place, say, in 1960, we who too often measure guilt by its consequences might well be wrong in imagining that a tragedy so stupendous could only be the work of some special monster of wickedness."
    Herbert Butterfield (Professor of Modern History, University of Cambridge), 1949, Christianity and History. London : G. Bell & Sons.

"[The Holocaust has not,] as might have been expected, gradually receded with time to the peripheries of American Jewish consciousness. Rather, it seems to become more central every year."
    Hillel Halkin, 1998, Commentary [New York], November 1998.

"Germany and Austria, where Jews had seen their talents ripen into genius, wealth and an apparent bourgeois security -- those very nations instituted a systematic plan for the extermination of the Jews, a plan whose all but completely successful execution remains the astonishment of this century, the final refutation of any European claims to virtue and wisdom."
    From a draft lecture by Nobel recipient 'Bech', a fictional US Jewish author. John Updike, 1998, Bech at Bay. London : Hamish Hamilton.

"The incomparable guilt of Germany in no way exonerates the rest of the world."
    Canon Paul Oestreicher, Observer [London], 8 November 1998.

"The cardinal principle of justice in Ancient Greece involved the allocation of costs where they truly belong."
    Dr David Starkey, BBC Radio 4 UK, 18 November 1998, 20:30.

"I see the entire period of Nazi ascendancy as the product of the coming together of a whole series of quite abnormal factors."
    George Kennan, New York Review of Books, 3 December 1998.

"In 1936, a German Jew could still drive a car, collect stamps, go to football and do well at school. It was hard to despair and leave."
    Niall Fergusson, 1998, Literary Review, December.

"Francis Fukuyama [author of The End of History] believes that the most important question {for the future} is 'the goodness of liberal democracy itself', whether liberal democracy retains internal contradictions that will eventually undermine it from the inside as a political system."
    Paul Bacon, 1999. In S. Chan & J. Wiener, Twentieth Century International History. London : Tauris.

"Eugenics is tainted, presumably irretrievably, by its association with genocide."
    J. W. Burrow (Professor of European Thought, University of Oxford), 1999, Times and Times Higher Millennium Magazine, 31 xii.

 

I  The triumph of liberalism -- even over liberalism

Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," demanded modern America's founding fathers of 1776 as they rejected 'taxation without representation.' "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," cried the Paris mob which stormed the Bastille in 1789. While the English had, by 1688, liberated themselves – and would soon liberate the Dutch -- from their Catholic monarchy, the Americans and the French would inspire the quest for liberty further afield. The liberating principles of democracy and nationalism would replace colonial and priestly authority. Through the nineteenth century, South Americans, Indians and Russians would begin to make the same demands for freedom. In the twentieth century, the USA and the USSR would claim to sponsor world-wide liberation and certainly end Western European countries' empires in Africa, Asia and the Middle East just as Europe's own Holy Roman Empire had itself broken up into relatively 'national' states. One imperial nation-state, Prussia, actually vanished from the map in the process.

Throughout these two centuries, few revolutionaries would do without calling themselves 'freedom fighters' and announcing their quest as being for 'national liberation.' China and Cuba, where guerillas had conquered whole countries, provided the exemplars for the Irish, the Basques and the Kurds. Even the conservatively-minded thinkers who would defend capitalism against Karl Marx's strictures stressed -- at least for public consumption during the Cold War -- the easier-sounding principles of 'free trade', 'free markets' and 'free competition.' By 1980, 'libertarianism' was favoured as much by the political right as by the left and became an alternative title for neo-conservatism. Just as democracy enjoyed universal appeal (however its instantiations varied), so liberty was beyond reproach. Anarchy remained recognized as the horror which it had seemed to the liberal genius, Wolfgang Goethe; but the law-governed constitutional liberties of Western countries were widely appreciated. Exiled intellectuals of the third / developing world made affecting spectacles in Western capitals as they pleaded for liberty for their peoples. Relatively affluent countries like Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq and Nigeria had wrested a freedom from imperialism, the world noticed, without passing on much of that freedom to their own citizens.

Nor would the West itself remain content with the liberties embodied in nation-statehood and in hard-won restrictions on government taxation, economic planning and inflation. By the 1980's, Westerners further voted against versions of socialism that offered substantial redistribution of wealth from rich to poor. Only in highly ethnically cohesive countries like Sweden and the Republic of Ireland did taxation of high incomes remain progressive -- i.e. savage. Likewise, Westerners were indifferent even to the icons of their classical culture. It was not just that advocates of socialism proceeded with caution -- wary of any return to Europe's 1918-1945 period of totalitarian regimes. Even the West's literary canon came under challenge as 'minority' students supposedly preferred to study writers whose own struggle for liberation struck more of a chord with them -- thus conjuring for students their own class-type war of 'disadvantaged' underdogs versus privileged overdogs. Science, the chief arbiter of truth in the post-1945 world, suffered a decrease in popularity among the West's college students; and such a hero of twentieth century liberation as Freud was shunned not only by finicky academics but by students who would once have thought Freud's stress on sex the very height of scientific realism. Even Darwin's ideas made slow progress, outwith science itself, in a world where the remaining Christians and the neo-socialist left were both anxious about the kind of interference with human nature and social convention that practices like abortion, womb leasing, genetic engineering and cloning might involve. After all, both Darwin and Freud had believed in radical differences between the sexes; but one big new demand for liberation came from women.

The demand for liberation from scientific authority was assisted by the widely held belief (popularized by acolytes of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn) that science itself was a socially determined construction having no more merit as an arbiter of truth than did the Christian Church of former times. (Christianity was by this time derided for its past failures in resisting liberation and began a process of grovelling apologies for wars, slavery, genocide and homophobia.) Such liberating doctrine was well suited to a Western world where journalists declined the disciplines of numeracy and spared their readers any notion that the correlations between variables could be handily quantified. The statistics of correlation and partial correlation would have allowed public discussion of scientific results to replace the convenient fiction of an arts/science divide. Instead, even public discussion of which types of schooling produced real gains for children was impossible: initial levels of intelligence could not be adequately measured, claimed the media's favoured columnists; and partial correlations of schooling with outcome after control for baseline intelligence would have baffled readers -- a hundred years after Galton's breakthrough in measuring correlation.

By the end of the twentieth century, even the foundational freedoms of the West, once championed by classical anti-Popery liberals, were themselves under siege. As the left of the 1980's recognized the success of capitalism and dropped socialist agendas for detailed economic management and equalization of post-tax incomes, it became more willing to redress perceived social injustices by other means. In particular, this involved control of 'chauvinistic' men -- widely said to have remained lords of all they surveyed in a still patriarchal world.

By the 1990s, men could be hounded from their jobs for 'sexist' remarks and attitudes. At play, men could find their classical sexual overtures labelled as harassment, date rape or stalking. Adult men -- even pop stars -- found themselves criticized in the media for any sexual involvement with adolescent girls. Few men any longer sought careers or hobbies as school- or scout- or choir-masters or social workers, for the slightest misinterpreted physical affection could find them accused of paedophilia and imprisoned even ten years after alleged offences which had done no visible harm and gone unreported at the time.

Virtually no women had ever been top-ranking intellectuals in any human culture; but universities felt obliged to sport ever-higher percentages of women among their staff. Likewise, progressive endeavour of the kind once focused on helping the working class became concentrated on retaining and promoting ethnic minorities, the physically disabled, the homosexually oriented and the differently gendered [i.e. transsexuals and hermaphrodites] in schools and colleges, in the workplace, and in government service.

'Affirmative action' even reached national parliaments thanks to some political parties setting limits on the percentage of male candidates they would put forward. Whereas the political left had once dealt with inequalities by taxation and redistribution of wealth, it now demanded front-end equality: employers should attend to the balance or diversity of their work-forces before considering the individual merits of job applicants; and the police should not stop and search (Black) minorities with greater relative frequency than they stopped (White) majorities. In the name of multiculturalism, people were treated increasingly not as individuals but according to their sex (or 'gender', as sex was fashionably re-titled) and ethnicity. Through 1970-1995, US universities operated discriminatory racial quotas with virtual impunity to boost their percentages of Afro-American students. To be of 'White Anglo-Saxon Protestant' or even Asian descent in America became a handicap except in so far as it was actually accompanied by above-average ability or serious wealth.

Millions of would-be migrants might find it increasingly hard to enter the welfare states of the West which were understandably reluctant to offer their free-at-the-point-of-use health, educational and social security benefits to those who had not paid their way via taxation and responsible citizenship. Yet as migrants bribed or married their way in, at rates around $50,000 per head, Westerners prided themselves that they practised no visible colour bar -- and indeed prosecuted as racist those who did. Though the world's great religions were weakened forces that could no longer sustain the concept of the brotherhood of man, the West's de-sanctioning of nationalism, homophobia and racism looked liberating to many in the third world who suffered far worse forms of these practices of stereotyping at home than were ever encountered in the West itself. The advance of feminism, too, assisted the creation of a 'global village' atmosphere. Nobody was officially claiming to lord it over anyone else, and familiar patterns of male chauvinism in clubs and trades unions were being conspicuously reversed. America and its allies might enjoy unprecedented world-wide military hegemony, but the new religion of egalitarianism-by-type was designed to forbid the exclusion of anyone. All who could pay student fees, arrange state employment as teachers of their own languages, or obtain citizenship by marriage were welcome in Western countries. A now-godless Western world had mastered the knack of the religions it had superseded: it asserted the brotherhood of man and could thereby justify the pleasant offices and salaries of the ever-expanding numbers of state servants who worked in the name of its increasing world-wide imperium of liberation.

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II

The problem of liberalism: directionlessness

What was the point of all this liberation -- capricious and even destructive of liberal tradition as it could be? What were the guiding principles of the states that developed in this way, or of the citizens in whose names such liberating and anti-hierarchical arrangements were made? The answer was simple. Winston Churchill, the person who had most notably led his own country to bankrupt itself fighting the Continental illiberalism of his own day, once summed up the position of democrats since the American and French revolutions: 'Democracy,' he said, 'is the world's worst form of government -- apart from all the others.'

Admittedly, democracy had sometimes been found in harness with nationalism, socialism and both Mafia-style- and monopoly-capitalism. Yet the principle of granting equal civil rights to all proved acceptable -- at least compared to traditional systems of overlordship and to twentieth-century equalization of incomes. Universal enfranchisement expanded to include non-householders and women by around 1930; and after another half-century the ideal became that no minority group should be less than proportionally represented in the ranks of officialdom. All this was understandable when all civilians were now -- thanks to bombing and terrorism -- front-line troops; and when states since 1939 had spent around 45% of Gross National Product. (Even the USA was threatened by Russian bombing after 1953; and America's need for soldiers to fight its 1942-5 war and to police the resulting settlement of Germany gave Black people new prestige and a claim on social dispensations.)

Official equality was a new religion. Classically, hierarchical societies [having an acknowledged chain of command] had required massive reinforcement from religious belief -- whether in the 'divine right' of kings or llamas to rule, of rabbis to lead, or of the Hindu classes to perform their distinctive life-missions. So it is natural that the modern West should have wanted a tale to tell those on lower incomes whom nobody (not even trade unions) planned to enrich. In rejecting legalized and self-perpetuating overt hierarchy, modern liberation, in its 'politically correct' egalitarianism, avoided breeding the hopelessness that can lead to violent revolution and new tyrannies. Whereas socialism had once aimed to benefit underdogs by redistribution, nationalization or price controls, neosocialism offered state jobs to all minorities -- insisting on female, homosexual and immigrant involvement even in the police and military. By 1990, the necessary jobs could be freed up by shifting 'racist', 'sexist' and otherwise insensitive officials in line with fast-changing humanitarian criteria that turned attitudes, speech and even jokes into sackable offences if not crimes. By offers of early retirement, staff would agree to be bought out rather than face daily intimidation for their politically incorrect sentiments and antiquated mind-sets. Thanks to nuclear deterrence, Western societies no longer required hierarchy for war-fighting. What they needed for internal purposes was the even-handed social control once offered by religion. By insisting that no 'identity' be overtly disparaged, the inequalities between individuals could persist without yielding political revolt. Unable to show that their race, religion, sex, handicap or country-of-origin was being stigmatized, protesters would be unable to make common cause. The working class solidarity that once threatened employers could not be mimicked while the state took affirmative action to help groups -- or at least the elites of groups -- which had, by official agreement, suffered discrimination.

However, a problem remains. Despite the new anti-meritocratic PC tyranny, modern Western states are characterized by a lack of positive direction. Because so many voices have to be heard in minority-sensitive governance, such a state may take no direction at all -- or at least not articulate the direction which it is taking. Especially, the liberal democracies of the West have seen a collapse of nuclear family life that was intended by none of their political parties and which their experts in the social sciences have been powerless to arrest -- though psychiatric medication, along with alcohol, gave consolation to the divorced. No experts in child psychology or sociology ever counselled that forty per cent of Western children should grow up in single-parent families with the state playing the role of father. Anthropologists have actually been on hand to remark the type of society previously best known for this type of arrangement: in matrilineal West Africa, many women live without husbands and men die young. It might be said that totalitarian China, too, has pursued a single-child family policy (since 1970); but the modern West's singleton children lack not only siblings -- no great hardship, many children might say -- but also one of their parents, usually the father.

The collapse of 'nuclear family' life has been particularly marked among people of African descent. In the 1950's, US Black couples actually had higher rates of lifetime monogamy than Whites. In today's permissive society, however, 85% of Black children grow up in families where their father is not a regular presence (quite often because of imprisonment). This is the pattern which Whites are now imitating as their own males prove only menially employable in a world where tranquillizing drugs, video-surveillance and weapons supply the state's force and where salesmen, politicians and preachers cannot compete with the TV screen. Traditionally, men would at least be desperate for sex and thus marriage; but today's easy-divorce marriages offer little except a way of charitable giving, so prostitution, lap dancing and Internet pornography fill the gap.

In large parts of the Islamic world, affluent men can aim for satisfying lives which include a young wife at virtually any stage and many children who will stay with them despite divorce. In China, too, men have achievable goals: unofficial polygamy is the rule for Communist Party officials; and, for less successful men, abortion, infanticide and the strict faithfulness of wives ensure that every child is a doubly wanted child. By contrast, in the West, the availability of the Pill means that women have few children; divorce typically ends with the adult male separated from his children; and one child in ten is anyhow (according to blood- and DNA-testing in household surveys in Britain, France and the USA) not the biological product of the man it calls Daddy. By age forty, the typical woman of Western European descent now has only one child; and those women who have more are often low in IQ, poor in psychiatric health and unlikely to have made good mothers in either a genetic or an environmental sense.

Adding to the liberal West's problems of increasingly small, fatherless, dysfunctional and state-dependent families, scientific advances are opening up a further range of choices that traditionally liberal and now minority-favouring states are ill equipped to make. The ostensibly minority-tolerant West which takes all diversity to its bosom can pursue no policies that tend generally to support the nuclear family. In rough accord with voting strengths, it must seem to support parenting by single, homosexual, immigrant, transgendered and disabled parents. At least, it must not disparage such ventures; so the easiest way is not to back any particular 'lifestyle.' The liberal-democratic state cannot aim for any particular quantity or quality of children in matters of breeding. It has no standards by which to make such a judgment. Its liberal duty is merely to support its citizens so they do not sink through the floor of basic democratic citizenship; and such support will involve spending more money on precisely those families whose children are unlikely to meet any conceivable eugenic criterion. The modern liberal-democratic state's disbursements are for 'need' -- that is, for poverty. They are not for merit -- which has no place within official egalitarianism. Classically, liberalism freed people from unreasonable power -- especially from the power of foreign religions; but freedom gradually became the cry of those who claimed other people's money and jobs. Vote-seeking politicians hardly asked where such redistribution would lead.

Today, further challenging the West's directionlessness, new possibilities are arising that will require choice. First, genetic engineering will soon be in as much demand as traditional medicine. Parents will wish the best for such few children as they have; and some genetic engineering will involve modification of germ lines so that gains accrue not only for children but for grandchildren. How will self-declared egalitarian states be able to justify such expenses? These states will no longer be meeting immediate medical needs for which compassion can be felt. Rather, they will be conferring long-term advantages on some of their citizens. How will it be decided which families will be allowed state-funded genetic engineering? (For that matter, which families will be allowed to escape engineering? -- For non-engineered families will often impose long-terms costs on state-supplied health care.)

The classic philosophical problems of welfare states are thus about to take an acute form. Some will object to either the state or individuals being allowed to 'interfere with nature.' However, a blanket ban on germline therapy will just leave such genetic improvements in the hands of other countries -- notably of China which already has a huge eugenic programme preventing breeding by people having learning difficulties (low IQs) for a radius of hundreds of miles around Beijing. Simply, the liberal-democratic state will have no choice but to liberalize further: it will have to let people themselves decide about genetically modified grandchildren -- as about genetically modified crops. Since it has abandoned any will of its own in the name of tender-minded adulation of diversity, it will be castrate until it allows people to make their own choices.

Constituting a second challenge to the West's liberalism, reproduction by non-sexual means, by cloning, will bring blessings on which some will be bound to seize. For example, parents will be able to clone a replacement for a dearly loved child who is dying. (Already, in the USA, rich people are paying universities half-a-million-dollar sums to try to replace their pets. -- Many women are now addicted to pets since use of the Pill means they have few children or grandchildren to tend.)

Yet cloning will allow the possibility of children lacking not only an effective father -- as can happen at present -- but also a mother. Since mother love is such a supremely powerful and valued feature of human life (as acknowledged by Christianity), and since step-mothers have through the ages been the bane of the lives of children in fairy tales, to allow people to clone themselves will be a major step into a quite unexplored Brave New World. On the other hand, to ban cloning would also seem strange -- preventing what would otherwise seem a highly desirable replication of Nobel prizewinners, top athletes and filmstars. In any case, the liberal-egalitarian welfare state itself is not capable of making the choices which will be necessary. To allow people to embark on new forms of procreation, the (possibly horrific) casualties of which would doubtless be laid at the door of the state, is absurd. To prevent infertile couples taking the best biological route to having children and passing on their genes would be illiberal and an outrage against the 10% of couples who are infertile. Yet for the state itself to become an actor and regulator in the process would be to violate a taboo that is intrinsic to modern liberalism. This is the taboo against state-organized eugenics over which the Allies of 1939-45 are deemed to have prevailed. According to much of the 'anti-Nazi' left, the Allies' victory was against a range of Nazi programmes -- from euthanasia for the senile and the handicapped through to the Holocaust.

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III

The need to abjure 'Nazism'

The liberated West is now faced with a problem at its core, concerning its forms of family life and breeding. Yet will the West will be able to liberate itself from the grip of the 'Nazi' past? -- Or at least from its own current account of that past?

However the European civil wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 may have arisen, they ended in a fine parade of righteousness. German military and concentration camp personnel, if not executed at Nürnberg as criminals, were offered no amnesty and still tried in the 1990's if discovered by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre; and several countries effectively supplied sacking and censorship for any questioning of the extent of the Nazis' crimes. Since 1990, such efforts have had the force of law in Germany, France and Canada. The latter country even forbids the importation of books -- like one called Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe -- which serve merely to detail not doubts about the Holocaust but the West's egalitarian and PC censorship of books on race and IQ.

Especially as capitalism triumphed over communism in the 1949-89 Cold War, it became important to identify the ground that had been won by the Allies in 1945. In practice, that advance was readily conceived by the West's new empire-builders of the left to involve citizenly equality and freedom from inter-group supremacism. Capitalism may not have been smashed by Russia's victory; but at least it could be pretended -- few cared to contradict it -- that the war had been fought to rescue Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. (In fact, even American entry to the war had been due not to any sudden surge of knowledge or righteousness but to attack by Japan and simultaneous declaration of war by Germany.) Most Western states came to entrench 'human rights' for people so that even the processes of democracy itself could not result in minorities being 'swamped.' To prevent the resurgence of genocidal nationalism, all countries were positively obliged to tolerate internal divisions and to welcome immigration. The nation-demolishing process began in vanquished Germany: this country was divided into Länder which could pursue the religious and educational preferences of their own populations without central interference. Subsequently, under the guise of European 'community', all European countries had to pay their welfare benefits to each other's visiting nationals; and even the relatively centralized United Kingdom came to require 'power-sharing' between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland as a condition of that strife-torn province enjoying a semblance of democracy. Spain, so centralized for 500 years, embarked on a degree of devolution. Despite reassuring noises about a Europe des patries and devolution, the states that had once made world-wide war dissolved themselves and preferred to ignore internal ethnic divisions. Germany began offering citizenship to people lacking German blood; France coped with its de facto apartheid -- including ghettos of Algerians -- by scrupulous maintenance of the facade of La République to which all must subscribe; and the United Kingdom admitted armed terrorists into government. Only the Swiss cantons, the Scandinavian countries and Éire (which had been effectively cleared of Protestants and Jews in the 1920's) remained ethnically cohesive communities of government.

Still more wondrous agreement on the equal value of all citizens and potential immigrants could be discovered. Though differing as to the permissibility of abortion, the socialist left and the Christian right agreed that eugenic policies (approved by the left in the 1920's) would be intolerable. Even to advocate free distribution of the Pill was to risk being labelled as eugenicist and fascist. By the 1990's, any mention of the apparent mental inferiority or continuing social dependency of racial/ethnic groups would attract accusations of Nazism -- as when it turned out that Slovaks had a dim view of gypsies and when Australia's Mrs Pauline Hanson, in Queensland, thought enough money had already been 'thrown at' the persistent problems of Aborigines. No mainstream publisher any longer dared to deliver to bookstores academic works that linked IQ and race; and nobody in the European Parliament at Strasbourg resisted when one of that body's own members (France's National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen) was put on trial, in Bavaria, for suggesting that the figure of 6,000,000 for the Holocaust's murdered Jews might have been a Communist exaggeration (as the sites of concentration camps like Auschwitz were in Soviet hands after 1945).

Whereas the Hitler of 1930-1945 had been widely caricatured as a carpet-chewing Viennese art student who 'only had one ball' and 'hadn't learned from his school that in Russia, it grows cold in winter', the remembered Hitler of the 1990's had become -- despite Hitler's charisma (especially for women), vegetarianism, non-smoking, teetotalism and love of children and animals -- the very personification of supreme evil. Far from the 1939-45 war receding from Western memories, the period came increasingly to be the only fragment of human history that children knew in any detail. This was what many liberal-left politicians increasingly intended, since they had such a struggle arguing against the success of capitalism.

Though only 5% of Europeans voted for fascist parties, to prevent a revival of fascism gave leftists a job to do -- and one for which they could dress themselves in the uniforms of the victorious Allies of 1945. Their only problem was of finding 'oppressed minorities' that needed rescuing -- though emancipated women and newly arrived migrants did not spurn support. In line with what many of the West's intellectuals now thought normal, the people of the post-Holocaust 'future' were constructing for themselves a 'past' that they would fix in memory by intimidating, censoring, ruining and imprisoning doubters. In the worlds of education and the media, Hitler's racism and genocide had become quite simply the twentieth century's main event. Anything that could be associated Nazi beliefs and actions was beyond the pale -- as had long been the fate of the music of Wagner and Sibelius. On university campuses, political conservatives were called Nazis (the label Fascist having been tried but found too feeble); and the right reciprocated by spelling out that Hitler's National-Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (NSDAP) had as its main ingredients nationalism plus socialism, and by describing the more vindictive proponents of feminist orthodoxy as 'feminazis.' Both left and right agreed that one could hardly lock up too many dangerous men whose unreconstructed attitudes to women and minorities could presage a return of Nazi solutions. Even if Black men had to be locked up in large numbers (one million were imprisoned in the USA) rather than transport them, anything was better than to advocate the policies akin to the apartheid of domestic accommodation which most middle-class Americans were in fact practising. Racism was the chief sin (in a list including sexism, homophobism, age-ism and fat-ism) and Hitler was its Beelzebub. The grip of the past was strong. Even to muse about reducing the world percentages of the deaf, dumb, blind or autistic was to risk serious impiety. A Princeton professor found himself in big trouble for saying the lives of some intelligent animals were more worthy of preservation than those of some constitutionally handicapped children; and jokes about minorities could only ever be told by 'victims' themselves.

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IV

The perceived association of Nazism with biological interventionism

By the 1990's, few challenged what had become the central liberal-left thesis: that human biological interventionism (HBI) had been most gruesomely exemplified by Hitler and had been ended accordingly by the Allies. The main doubts about this claim that the Nazis had attempted HBI on a massive scale from eugenic motives were thought to be readily answerable.

• Hadn't the Nazis conspicuously failed to arrange a serious programme of breeding from their blue-eyed blondes? -- Well, perhaps they hadn't had time! (They certainly had a problem while the unmarried and apparently infertile Hitler was himself advertising the Aryan ideal.)
• Hadn't the Nazis sat by as most German Jews (and many other intelligent Germans) left Germany in 1936-39 and thus fatally undermined the eventual German war effort? (German Jews had fought bravely and well in 1914-18, as was known from their higher rate of Iron Cross awards.) -- Well, presumably that was another example of Hitler's madness!
• Hadn't the Holocaust begun only after the suicidal Operation Barbarossa saw long Reichswehr lines to Russia requiring protection from the main opposition in Poland, i.e. from the Jewish Resistance? -- The Jews ceased to co-operate with Hitler after Kristallnacht in 1937. Till then, many Jews had admittedly thought Germany a better home than other European countries; but by 1937 they would have seen what was coming and organized themselves to resist!
• Hadn't Jewish leaders, far from waiting for Kristallnacht, asked for international trade sanctions against Germany as soon as Hitler took power in 1933? Was that not (especially for those times, and given the international financial strength of Jewish groups) an unprecedented act of national sabotage? -- Well, Hitler had written Mein Kampf!
• Hadn't Hitler been correct (and most Germans, including Jews, with him) in blaming international Jewry for arranging the deal in Washington whereby America joined the 1914-18 War in 1917? Wasn't the distinctive post-1918 development of anti-semitism in Germany premised crucially on the belief that the German Jews had been traitors? (Britain, too, had been involved in the 1916/17 deal -- culminating in the Balfour Declaration -- which promised Zionist leaders Palestine if only they could bring about America's war entry. Britain's problem was that President Woodrow Wilson had been re-elected in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of the war." And Britain evidently accepted an estimate Jewish power and influence that could have come straight from anti-Semitic tracts.) -- Well, the Dolchstoss (stab-in-the-back) theory was never proved! [Nor was there proof of any other account of how President Wilson changed his mind. At the centre of the business was the young Franklin D. Roosevelt who was having an extra-marital affair in Washington. As Assistant Naval Secretary, Roosevelt was well placed to persuade President Wilson that Germany was attacking American shipping. News of Roosevelt's philandering did not become known even to leading journalists like the BBC's Sir Alastair Cooke until 1940. – Though the final influence was Britain’s interception and decoding of the ‘Zimmerman Telegram’, from Berlin to Mexico, urging Mexico to attack the USA (Times, 17 x 2005).]
• Aren't the concentration camps that can be seen today largely Russian reconstructions after 1945? And don't the Russians now (at long last) admit having fabricated evidence to blame the Nazis for the execution of the flower of Poland's military caste at Katyn? -- Well, the West's historians almost all agree that the Nazis murdered some six million European Jews (three million of them Polish).
• Why did the Nazis use only the disinfectant Zyklon B in the notorious gas chambers rather than the other, more efficient poisons in their possession? -- Wartime shortages and Nazi lack of grip on science may provide the explanation of this, as of Hitler's inability to develop the atom bomb. Also, IG Farben, the makers of Zyklon B, had Nazi contacts and won the contract without any competitive tendering.
• Why did the Nazis take Jewish slave labourers on extraordinary death marches from the camps -- only shooting them when they refused to obey orders to march any further (often, no doubt, from starvation and thirst)? (It was as if, even in 1945, camp officials doubted they had any licence to shoot except when Jews attempted to escape.) -- Well, even when they took a circular route, the death marches may have been intended to escape the Red Army as it advanced.

Anyhow, none of these questions, however awkward, raises any doubt that a great many Jews were somehow killed by the Nazis and their collaborators; and that this outcome gave a satisfaction to Germans -- a satisfaction different from that which a soldier normally experiences from the death of his enemy in wartime, for these enemies were regarded as singularly if sadly treacherous Untermenschen. Nor do the above queries challenge the classic account that Hitler was badly infected with the anti-semitism that was common in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, and that he surpassed himself in acting horrifically on his beliefs and prejudices. [Just how Hitler personally had become so rabidly anti-Jewish is itself unclear. As an orphaned and impoverished art student in Vienna, he would probably have borrowed money from Jews, and indebtedness is never a sweetener of human feelings. Again, his much-loved mother had died at the hands of a Jewish doctor. Later, during Hitler's 1914-1918 wartime service, he may have been sodomized by a Jewish officer. However, in truth, historians have no serious idea. Hitler showed few signs of anti-Semitism till 1917, when he 28.]

To contemplate HBI as the West arrives at the third millennium is thus pointless. The Nazis' pursuit of 'race-hygiene' and their targeting of eliminatees according to race (not according to individually demonstrated treachery or even pathology) is considered the outstanding crime of the twentieth century. It may seem unfair to discredit because of Hitler the many mild eugenic programmes that have been run in the West -- starting in Indiana in 1908 with the compulsory sterilization of mentally defective girls (allowing these females to mix with men) and continuing through to the 1970's in the hospitals of Sweden, Alberta and a score of other states. Yet the Nazizeit contributes a simply massive input for any who inquire as to the correlation between 'eugenicism' and 'murderousness.'

There have been many non-murderous eugenic programmes. Conversely, the twentieth century has seen mass-murderous programmes under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot that involved less overt racism and no eugenics. Yet people have a feeling that ethnocentrism and murderousness can easily combine with each other to yield horrors like those of Nazi Germany, the Tutsi-Hutu conflict in Africa, the hatreds between Malays and Chinese, and the 'ethnic cleansing' of ex-Yugoslavia. [Many Russians -- Stalin himself not least -- were anti-semitic and cared little for the millions of deaths as they emptied the Caucasus of Muslims lest the latter sided with the German invaders; but most historians accept that the rationale of such operations was largely military -- or at least political, rather than racist.] It is just not worth taking chances, people think. Because of the Nazizeit, the post-1945 assumption has to be that, even in the most civilized Western countries, HBI could spin out of control into genocide, even if that was not intended in the first place. HBI thus remains unthinkable.

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V  What precisely does the West target for condemnation?

Yet what is the attitude of the modern West to genocide itself? -- Genocide is, after all, the horror that rejection of all thoughts of HBI is intended to prevent.

Strangely, some of the events that have been tolerated within the past century suggest that genocide per se has not been considered a supreme evil. Successive armies of volunteer Christian crusaders once used children -- as in today's wars between Africans -- to try to reclaim Jerusalem from Islam. Perhaps such remembered horrors provided a sense of perspective about more recent atrocities.

• The first genocide by a modern European state was that of the Germans against the Herreros of South West Africa, but it went unopposed at the time and is little remarked today, let alone especially deplored. Nor was the West much troubled by similar Belgian atrocities in the Congo.
• In the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century, in 1920, the Turkish murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians (sometimes by gassing, using hardware purchased from pre-Hitler Germany), there was no intervention by any Western power. Some Armenians fled to America and others found refuge in the Soviet Union; but the Western soldiers who had stopped fighting in 1918 were not despatched to the Black Sea.
• At the same time, the slaughter of hundreds (possibly thousands) of unarmed Indians by the British authorities at Amritsar actually drew considerable support from the British people. The man who had ordered troops to open fire on thousands of Sikhs in a confined space, Brigadier General Rex Dyer, an educated man, was condemned by the British House of Commons but exonerated by the House of Lords; and a public subscription for him raised what would in today's money be half a million pounds sterling.
• The understanding by 1943 that there were concentration camps in Nazi Germany, where inmates died rather than lived, was kept from the citizens of the Allied countries. The information was thought unlikely to increase determination to fight Germany; and the knowledge triggered no particular action by the Allies' wartime authorities. A Jewish brigade was raised in Palestine but it took pressure from Churchill himself before it was allowed its own flag.
• From 1973, the Tutsi and Hutu of ex-Rwanda/Burundi resumed their historic massacring of each other at roughly five-yearly intervals, resulting in millions of deaths. Although these events were noted by newspaper journalists in the West at the time, and even shown on television by the 1990's, no military action was taken to arrest or to try the instigators of the genocide. Indeed, France gave Rwanda much support. (The Tutsis [of Burundi] themselves initiated such processes in international law when they gained control of the situation on the ground in Rwanda in 1997.)
• In 1976-8, the Cambodian Marxist, Pol Pot, who had learned his communism at the feet of Jean-Paul Sartre, drove millions of his educated and urbanized population into the countryside where they soon perished. Some forty per cent of Cambodians were killed in a two year period. Within three years, however, the USA was happy enough to negotiate with Pol Pot as to the future of the country, and the murderous dictator finally died in 1998 in his bed.
• In the 1970's, President Assad of Syria and President Pinochet of Chile were both widely believed to have ordered the deaths of thousands of their political opponents. In Syria, new towns were built to cover the graves; in Chile, the bodies of some 4,000 supporters of the Marxist leader, Salvator Allende, were dropped out at sea. These actions attracted no Western intervention -- even though Pinochet was much later, in 1998-2000, detained in Britain with an eye to trial by Spanish legal authorities.
• Through the 1980's and 1990's, the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by Malays in East Timor elicited little more than verbal protests from the West -- though SEATO troops were put in after Dili had been razed. Likewise the West ignored the continuing ethnic conflict between the Tamils and Buddhists of Sri Lanka, in which around 60,000 people died in 16 years of insurrection. 70,000 Algerians were killed in religious strife between 1992 and 1998, and two million people were killed in the Sudan, from 1995 to 1998, without the Western conscience being exercised. The 1998 outbreak of civil war in the Congo and the 1999 siege of Freetown, Sierra Leone, provoked no more than sealed White lips at embarrassing Black-on-Black tribal slaughter that might confirm racial stereotypes.
• In the 1990's, on their own doorstep, the countries of Europe for several years took no action to prevent 'ethnic cleansing' and associated horrors in ex-Yugoslavia -- though NATO troops supervised a cease-fire in Bosnia once considerable population shifts had already taken place (as would happen later in NATO's first colony of Kosovo).

Not all these events involved attempts to eliminate totally the people belonging to a particular racial or ethnic group. However, the Nazis, too, had let many Jews escape: most German Jews reached freedom, even though some of them perished subsequently when handed over to Hitler by French, Czech, Hungarian and Rumanian authorities; and some served in senior Army and SS positions. Anyway, what is to count as genocide is far from clear. In the 1990's, many intellectuals deny the existence of 'races'; and the term 'genocide' has come to be applied by international lawyers to any mass murder of political opponents, as certainly happened in the above cases.

What is clear is that today's abhorrence of Hitler's Holocaust lacks the special target that it usually purports to have.

• In view of prevailing world standards, modern horror at Nazism is out of proportion to the degree of intentional murderousness that was involved. The escape of most of Germany's own Jews from Hitler's 'HBI' is especially remarkable.
• If Hitler had intended principally a sustained HBI in Europe, even including much casualness about human life, he had gone about it in a most peculiar and ineffective way that undermined his own war effort. It seems more likely there was no such pre-war policy in any normal sense of that term.
• Alternatively, assuming Hitler did indeed arrange to transport millions of Jews and other minorities to their deaths but often detained them for months under high security until they were shot or gassed legitimately, this was little more than he did, effectively, to his own soldiers. Confinement in a slave labour camp on poor rations rightly shocks the leisured conscience of today; but for a German to be sent to the Russian front -- where cannibalism and freezing to death were common -- was quite as awful and lethal.
• In so far as Hitler expressly intended 'genocide', he is hardly in a class of his own by world standards; and he proceeded at a surprisingly slow pace.
• If the accusation is that Hitler simply intended to kill large numbers of presumed opponents, he was easily outclassed by Stalin (now believed by the top British twentieth-century empirical historian, Martin Gilbert, to have killed 30 million Russians); probably by the Japanese invaders of Manchuria (who killed 10 million civilians, apart from Chinese troops, during 1937-1945); and by China's own 'Great Leader', Mao Tse Tung.

Why, then, is Hitler so singularly reviled? (At least in the West -- for Japanese and Chinese reserve their own loathing largely for each other.) What precisely was the nature of the moral disaster which Germany must continue to lament -- making ceaseless financial atonement to Jewish survivors as it does so, producing few children of its own, and providing a 'No Entry' signpost to any Western society that might begin to contemplate seriously the future of the family and of the White race that has given the world much of what is meant by civilization?

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VI  Hitler as betrayer

Though it could hardly account wholly for revulsion at Hitler -- for Hitlerabscheu -- one way of characterizing what went so wrong in the Nazizeit derives from Germany's unique position as the leader of European culture early in the twentieth century. Whether in music, literature, science, politics (the arrival of social-democratic ideals) or theology (for it was German biblical scholarship that led Nietzsche to declare in 1870 'the death of God'), Germany had led nineteenth-century Europe. The military achievements of Prussia (against Napoleon) and the cultural flowering of Vienna and Berlin were only the outward manifestations of the change that had occurred as Napoleon's invasion had spurred the quaintly mediaeval Germany to drop the pretence of running the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and to think for itself. For such competent and liberal people -- attracting migrants to join them from France, Scotland and Poland -- to have descended rapidly into godlessness, state criminality, anti-intellectualism, the ending of democracy, and genocide may be thought indicative of a serious underlying problem. At least, such a country, which had squandered its advantages, must afterwards wear a moral dunce's cap. Never again could its leadership be trusted. If so much civilization could not keep Germany from the abyss, something must have been gravely wrong; and others must be warned off any conspicuous German features -- whether humourlessness, goose-stepping, Lederhosen, liking the music of Strauss, or HBI. There can be nothing quite so bad as 'the god that fails' -- for there, but for grace, goes the rest of mankind. Perhaps Germany, during its twelve years of Hitlerism, proved somehow unable to draw on its cultural assets?

Though there is something in this horror at the mighty fallen, it probably contributes little to Hitlerabscheu. First, there is in Western schools today little of the teaching of German turn-of-the-century superiority that this theory would require. Quite the opposite! From the centuries before 1914, the children of other Western countries associate Germany more with the Hunnish invasions of the Roman Empire and with Germany's own sorry civil war (1718-1748) than with the achievements of German nineteenth century universities, engineering firms and orchestras. Secondly, the Western world does not in any case acknowledge much leadership -- not since the Papacy and its allies ceased to wield consistent influence on European states. The children of Europe's countries are not taught the 'wonders' of any empire other than that which was once possessed by their own country -- even though they speak English and adopt American music and clothing styles.

Nevertheless, the idea that there was some flaw in Germany is important. If it is difficult to name an outstanding failure that can be blamed for the final Nazi death toll, an internal weakness, flaw, lie or self-deception could be helpful. In the diversity-accepting world of Western morals, the lie, especially, is one of the few ways in which a failing of character can be made manifest and agreed by others. Tolerant of 'multiple personality' as today's Western philosophers and psychologists may be, there is as yet no tolerance by the public for dual consciousness in politicians -- except perhaps for the 'white' lies that serve partly to protect sexual partners. Things go badly for political leaders if they are caught out in simple discrepancies between what they practise and what they preach; and politicians themselves do not tolerate accusations of lying or deception in parliamentary assemblies.

As it happens, lying itself is a minor vice in which people freely engage -- relying on never being corrected when their lies are 'white', and on being corrected very quickly when their mistakes are made in the course of public argument. It is only in courts of law that people have to commit themselves to telling 'the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.' Certainly, few expect large-scale truth-telling of their personal friends or of commercial advertisers. The problem with deception arises chiefly when there is no mechanism of correction. Moreover, great harm can be done once deception has actually succeeded and becomes a premise on which further life is based.

From about six months of age, children are innately wary of strangers until there is evidence that they can be trusted. Big crimes and similar wrecks of people's lives depend on big betrayals -- involving the creation of whole illusory mini-worlds within which the victim has been lulled into acceptance. Thus it is not the 'honest', or at least straightforward burglar stealing precious possessions who incites ire so much as the paedophile who has wheedled his way into a family's or a child's affections before embarking on his molestations. Girls may admit it to have been 'one of those things' when they get drunk, behave lewdly and are raped by a near-stranger on their way home; but, in today's London, they are positively outraged when a young man who has wined and dined them for an evening, and been invited to sleep in their room on a sofa, attempts to seduce them while they are naked and half-asleep during the small hours of the morning. Rape is a risk girls take if they drink with strangers; but date rape -- though often strictly harmless -- is experienced as a wicked betrayal, the perpetrator of which must be ruined.

Virtually all crime that horrifies involves a degree of deception; and without deception little crime is possible. Uniquely, relationships of power and leadership over less mature or less knowledgeable people convey special opportunities for deception. A favourite sport of Western parents is to deceive their own children as to the existence of Santa Claus -- not just to give innocent amusement, but to teach children to beware of deception by adults. Real hatred of a criminal would probably be well predicted by a multiplicative algorithm of the DECEPTION x LOSS suffered at his hands.

Now, a democratically elected leader of a great nation is in a unique position. He has been especially trusted to look after the interests of all nationals and permitted aliens; but any lack of regular scrutiny of him (at press conferences, or by a parliament) will allow big deceptions that his power can arrange. In the case of Hitler, the assurance was that Germany would not be going Communist; and the assumption was that Germany would pursue its civilizing Drang nach Osten -- even by military means if other countries did not themselves yield (as Austria and Czechoslovakia did) to the understandable post-1918 ambition of bringing Europe's German-speaking, Christian and non-communist communities under one roof. Foreigners and German Jews, examining Hitler's apparent plan, may not have been ecstatic about it; but they implicitly accepted the renewed stress on German nationhood and reflected that conditions even for Germany's unerwünscht (unwished) Jews, excluded from public office and amenities, would surely remain far better than in the still more anti-semitic countries of Eastern Europe. (Jews were well integrated into German city life. Till 1918 there had been less tension between German Jew and Gentile than between Protestant and Catholic.)

Some felt, when seeing or hearing Hitler around 1930, that war was inevitable. Like the budding psychologist, Hans Eysenck, they were shocked by Hitler's rantings and made plans accordingly. But many were deceived, including the leaders of France, Britain and Russia. Though he had been expected to take decisive and nationalistic action, with no favours to the Jews, Hitler in fact:

• delivered a police state modelled on Communist lines
• sidelined the aristocracy and intellectual hierarchy of Germany
• tolerated the 1937 destruction of Kristallnacht (which was unpopular with most Germans)
• concluded the Nazi-Soviet Pact
• broke his word given at Munich to France and Britain
• attacked Poland -- dividing it amicably with the U.S.S.R. and leaving any confrontation with Communism for later.

Without a Kaiser or a constitution to which people felt much commitment, there was no serious way of scrutinizing or restraining Hitler. Moreover, once the elderly President Hindenburg had made him Chancellor and then quickly died, Hitler, who had successfully blamed the 1933 Reichstag fire on his opponents, had the chance to overthrow the Weimar constitution in 1934. British Prime Ministers had always been obliged to contend with the rights of the Sovereign, the Lords and the Commons -- not to mention the Church, the Judiciary, London clubland and Oxbridge. French and American emperors and presidents were hemmed in by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the Declaration of Independence and by the Code Napoléon. On Hitler, from 1934, there were no such pressures for reason, objectivity or even coherence. Although his 1935 Nürnberg Laws were racist, they constituted a definite, discussible and avoidable policy. By 1938, however, irrationality and caprice had circumvened. By 1938, the Nazi regime was breaking most of the understandings with the German people on which it had been given power.

No rousing crowds saw off the Reichswehr in 1940 as its Panzer tanks raced into Belgium, Holland and France; and there was to be even less enthusiasm as Hitler:

• ignored most military advice in invading Russia too late
• astonishingly declared war on the USA (after Japan's attack at Pearl Harbour)
• persisted with the Russian invasion until the total German disaster at Stalingrad.

Some military experts doubtless underestimated the Red Army because the Finns had stood up to it in 1939/40; but by mid-1941 Hitler himself was in a position to know better. The deceptions and ill-considered and minimally discussed policies of Hitler were to result in the sacrifice not only of six million Jews -- who were still being told, if healthy, to report for "labour", bringing three days food supply with them, in Dresden of 1945 -- but in the destruction of Europe's best army. Though Hitler himself appreciated the potential of weapons of mass destruction, he lost the race to develop them yet equally declined to surrender, thus wilfully inviting the flattening of Germany's great cities.

Many Germans only learned the hard way that the special treatment of Jews involved more than banning them from using theatres, parks, florists and barbers; and that soldiers sent to the Eastern front were on missions almost as suicidal as those of Japan's kamikaze pilots. In 1936, a German Jew could still drive a car, collect stamps, go to football and do well at school; so it was hard to despair and leave.

Hitler's betrayal of trust had never been seen from a national leader in the days of Europe's kings -- when royal families could at least be relied upon to aim to survive wars as substantial landholders and with a full retinue of staff. Germany was to pay heavily for the folly of choosing a leader who had no true stake in the country and could thus afford to live in a dream world where only his own fame mattered.

The overthrow of the Kaiser in 1918 -- as of the Russian Czar in 1917 and, indeed, of the French monarchy in 1792-3 -- had yielded a world in which unconstrained democracy was quickly to prove a disaster. In particular, the lack of constitutional balance in Germany after Hindenburg died meant there was so little scrutiny that even subsequent proof that a Holocaust was intended, let alone planned by Hitler, has been hard to find. The Holocaust, like Stalingrad and the exposure of Germany's cities, unfolded in a way that was a deception and a betrayal. Neither involved a 'policy' in the way that princes and assemblymen of Enlightenment Europe would ever have recognized the term.

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VII  Yet wasn't Hitler 'evil'?

Auschwitz?

It is easy to dismiss such an idea until it is recalled that human genocidal activities and aspirations pre-date the Nazizeit. Hitler was far from unique in genocidal aspiration even if, helped by mass deception and modern technology, his grisly achievement was so monumental.

• Notoriously, the Israelites, according to the Bible, had claimed divine ordination for their massacres of their own great rivals, the Canaanites and Philistines (today's Lebanese and Palestinians). Highly successful, perhaps because of eugenic infanticide conducted by their priests [under the guise of appeasing jealous gods, idols or demons -- Psalms 106:34-39], these groups cheerfully massacred each other -- beginning armed and economic ethnic rivalries that continue to the present day.
• Towards the turn of the fourteenth century A.D., Amerindians are known by modern archaeologists to have killed, at Crow Creek (on the Missouri River), an entire community of 500 people of both sexes and all ages. Ninety per cent of the victims were scalped, bodies were decapitated, and extremities were cut from limbs and tongues from throats.
• In Tasmania, settlers from the United Kingdom exterminated the entire indigenous population of Australian Aborigines.
• "Let the white race perish!" declaimed Shawnee Chief Tecumseh to his Creek Amerindians in 1811, evidencing a similarly racial antipathy.
• "I wish I were commander-in-chief in India," wrote the famed humanitarian novelist, Charles Dickens, in 1857, as news of the Indian Mutiny reached Britain. "I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested."

Genocide is no uncommon aspiration or even occurrence in the human species. In all but the most civilized forms of warfare in the West (before the French revolutionaries of 1793 resorted to the levée en masse [conscription]), it has been common for warring parties to engage in large-scale killing of conquered males and their children -- leaving just the more desirable women as slaves and/or concubines. Yet to betray one's own people, and even one's own fighting men, as to the arrangements that will be made for them is different: that is impossible on a Hitlerian scale if there has to exist any clear, open and enforceable contract between a leader and the led.

What Hitler did was to break his implicit contract, as an elected leader of a modern country, to look after the interests of millions of people, including Germany's Jews and military personnel, with all the help that a fully-fledged, modern, tax-funded bureaucracy could provide. German people themselves even managed to restrict Hitler's euthanasia programme in 1938 (when the killing of children who were both handicapped and abandoned was halted); but they could do little once events made Hitler their war leader in 1939. Hitler's contract with Germany became instead an ongoing violation of stewardship -- for Hitler had never talked of resuming the 1914-18 war with Britain, France and the USA. Nor was Hitler any ordinary Chancellor who was just unlucky to preside over a period in which events beyond his control moved towards war. What Hitler had plainly offered was a national salvation from Germany's fate in the 1920's of financial collapse and Communist menace. Thus should be measured the discrepancy between promise and performance in Hitler's case. Thus does the product of DECEPTION x LOSS reach towards that infinity at which it becomes understandable to talk of Hitler as a devil and to abjure any acknowledgement of human inequalities that approximates Nazi ideas.

To some, nothing less than a characterization of Hitler and the Nazis as quite distinct from other men in their evil is alluring. If only something more than a reading in terms of DECEPTION x LOSS could be found -- meaning that Hitler's crimes against humanity could be therapeutically prevented from re-enactment! Yet it is notorious that the constantly renewed searches of historians, psychologists and psychiatrists for a distinct genesis of the crimes of Hitler have been unavailing. It is the sheer normality of Hitler's childhood, of his 1914-18 war record and of his nationalist and socialist beliefs that is striking; and his post-1917 antipathy to Jews shows all the zeal of a convert -- as were many Germans of the time since none would explain to them why America had joined the war against them and their army had rather suddenly surrendered. Certainly Hitler articulated those uncorrected beliefs; certainly his extraordinary sex life left him free as a pseudo-husband for Germany's women whose more immediate menfolk had proved a military and economic dead loss from 1914 to 1934; certainly Hitler was a great if frenetic, not to say frothing orator (he consumed seven pints of water before his speeches); and certainly his ruthless despatch of the homosexual Roehm's opposition in 1934 left him unchallenged and apparently very lazy (perhaps already suffering Parkinsonism). Yet there was nothing more to him that the experts can discover.

No more, indeed, can experts put their finger on that quintessence of evil which some laymen profess to see in child killers whom they have never met like Britain's sadistic and Nazi-fixated 'Moors murderers' of the 1960's, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Here, too, intelligent deception (of a score of children and their parents) was crucial to the crimes. Just as successive British Home Secretaries have had to bow to public demands that Hindley (diagnosed mildly enough as having a 'personality disorder') stay in jail for life, so a British jury once declined to show mercy to multiple-murderer Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Although Sutcliffe's thirteen murders and seven attempted murders of prostitutes involved a paranoid element and Sutcliffe has been diagnosed by all experts who have seen him as clinically schizophrenic, his trial jury was impressed that, whatever his mental illness, he had possessed the wit to deceive police face-to-face for more than a year as his crimes were investigated. It was this deception, on top of his crimes, that led to Sutcliffe being denied a verdict of Guilty but Insane from a jury and thus imprisoned rather than hospitalized. Determination to have others inhabit a world of illusion in which they will come to grief -- this is what convinces human judges that they are dealing with something as close to evil as they are ever likely to encounter. Dishonesty will be the sine qua non and multiplier in any formula by which the existence of evil is calculated. It may assist the deception if the perpetrator is somewhat 'psychotic' and can deceive himself; but the crucial variable must be whether any critical eye can be trained from outside on the incarnating devil. Not for nothing do America and Britain insist that their leaders answer unannounced questions weekly in public (whether from the White House press corps or the House of Commons).

Those who seek more than such 'banality of evil' are so commonly disappointed that it is perhaps time to face the simple truth. The most awesome human horrors have always come from a large dose of deception combined with a rather small dose of evil intent. Unlike the deranged Brady and his girlfriend Hindley, who apparently took pleasure in their murders, Nazi leaders did not show up in the concentration camps to enjoy on the spot the fruits of their crimes. Whether it is the human religions of the past with the massive distortions of reality that they foisted on believers -- involving a world full of witches, warlocks, angels and demons at every turn; whether it is tobacco companies lying about their research results; or whether it is today's science and technology failing to warn of human population growth and ecological catastrophe; in all cases, 'evil' comes primarily from those who manage to deceive -- assisted by those who fail to scrutinize and too easily tolerate temporarily agreeable deceptions. The case of Hitler was no different.

No serious scholars outside Germany gave credence to the theory of the German people being archetypal Aryans imbued with qualities that separated them decisively from the other people of Europe, the middle East and northern India; nor was there ever any objective evidence for Jewish people being a threat to Western civilization -- which was indeed increasingly dependent on Jewish brain-power and financial aptitude, as Hitler found to his cost. Even small deceptions that kill -- the ill-fitting rivets on the Titanic are today's example.

Why is man so peculiarly murderous by comparison with other animals? Is it not because the very capacity for ideas and words allows so easily the construction of illusory and dangerous worlds which some people -- especially when desperate from twenty years of national humiliation -- can be tempted to inhabit? It is an irony that it was the citizens of the sophisticated and liberal Weimar public who would tolerate power passing into the hands of an art student of sado-masochistic and paranoid tendencies. Like the French of 1789, they simply did not realize how their great country could be changed in just five years, and Hitler gave them few clues.

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VIII  Gains from viewing Hitler as a betrayer

To locate the distinctive genesis of the Holocaust and kindred evil in unprecedented deception -- in the abuse of the trust of almost an entire advanced nation -- may help release key truths of human history, psychology and morals from the vaporous clouds in which the topics of 'evil' in general and of Hitler's 'evil' in particular have been increasingly enshrouded as the twentieth century has proceeded. Three special advantages can be pinpointed.

1.
Apportioning the blame for the Holocaust.  First, to name deception as the rotten core of Nazi Germany is to admit a singular involvement of ordinary Germans in the evil to the extent that they were not deceived. Two considerations are particularly relevant.

• Public discussion of the concentration camps in Germany was restricted and euphemistic. This was due partly to the usual fears in any police state that idle talk and criticism would be punished. However, many adults had some idea that, if conditions and death rates on the Eastern front were atrocious, they would hardly be any better for those who had been detained in the camps by the Nazi state. While fatalities had to be expected among males whose alternative would have been conscription into the German army, at least the subjection of women, children and the elderly to such conditions could have been protested and sabotaged.
• Hitler had written Mein Kampf and thus announced his anti-semitic paranoia; and no-one who read his book could have expected that National Socialism would provide a lenient regime for any whose loyalty to the Vaterland could be doubted. In fairness to Hitler, his rambling account of his own intellectual development does redistribute guilt for what subsequently happened. Mein Kampf provided a degree of warning and helped most German Jews escape to other countries rather than wait to see how Hitler's emotional life would become orchestrated into state policy. But some of that displaced guilt plainly ends up on the shoulders of other Germans of the time.

The guilt of ordinary Germans must itself be mitigated by their unawareness of how the overthrow of their Kaiser had left Germany without much check on an elected dictator. They cannot be expected to have learned what only an Anglo-Irishman, Edmund Burke, a closet Catholic, had articulated previously: that the French Revolution had been a mass-murderous disaster for France's own citizens and that any other such sudden overthrow of all tradition and authority would turn out similarly. Certainly, the Russian people had learned no such lesson, as they showed in 1917 to the immense cost of their own country for the rest of the twentieth century. Yet, to the extent that they were not deceived by the slogans of Arbeit Macht Frei over the gateways to the camps, German people of around 1940 will have to appear at the bar of history.

Presumably, such penitents would stress in any speeches the need for societies to be so organized as not to open fire on political protesters. For that was what the Münich authorities had done on 9 November 1923. Tough suppression of Hitler's protest yielded three crucial results: the martyrdom of Hitler and the seriously injured Goering; the assured subsequent leadership of the fascist right by this pair of disaffected ex-military personnel; and Hitler's opportunity in Landsberg Prison to write Mein Kampf. Penitent Germans might also plead that societies should encourage the reading and discussion of books in universities -- rather than refusing to tolerate expression of opposing views on the pretext that 'a platform' might be given to racists/fascists/anti-Semites etc. (The uncensored Mein Kampf was not taken seriously by many, as is shown by its not being translated into English till 1939.) However, in any peregrinations through Hades in the after-life, Hitler can reasonably hope for a little kindness from German souls whose own unwillingness to ask too closely about the death camps must count as self-deception. Such Germans may not have been 'willing executioners', but they helped hide the execution from discussion and criticism.

2. Preventing a recurrence of Nazism. A second merit of focusing, as this essay's Hitlerkritik does, on Hitler's deception of the German public is to make clear what to avoid in future. Today, there is more consciousness of, hatred for, and guilt about the Holocaust than ever there was in Europe of the 1950's. In those days, Hitler was seriously envisaged by the leading Oxford historian, the left-wing A. J. P. Taylor, to have been merely an instrument of a natural German 'struggle for the mastery of Europe' that would have occurred quite regardless of student Adolf Schickelgrüber's experiences of the prostitutes, pimps and moneylenders of Vienna or views as to the 1917 Jewish Dolchstoss. Yet the subsequent location of supreme evil in the personality of Hitler and in the supposedly corresponding authoritarian / militarist / punitive / racist personalities of Nazi sympathizers has yielded little to prevent the apparent re-emergence of such leaders in the West.

Notoriously, Britain's Mrs Thatcher, the Iron Lady, was considered by the post-Taylor left a cold, 'anal', fanatically anti-communist warrior -- yet she won three general elections with huge majorities. Even when it was widely acknowledged that many everyday communists themselves (at least in communist countries -- spectacularly, Romania's Nicolae Ceaucescu) had 'authoritarian' (etc.) personalities, it was far from clear that favouring statist endeavours of the law-and-order and tax-and-spend varieties came anywhere near the totalitarianism of the Hitlerian or Stalinist varieties. Evidently, 'authoritarian' traits of orderliness and supremacism in leaders are welcomed by many people so long as they are accompanied by views of the desired political colour, whether blue or red; and they provide little explanation of Hitler and his cronies. By the 1980's, many knew the history of sexual perversion among leading Nazis (often homosexual, but including Hitler's own undinism and subsequent murders of girls who had participated in his degradation). Cognoscenti could not by then be anything but amazed at ideas that the Nazis had resembled the blimpish, red-faced and fox-hunting colonels traditionally stereotyped as authoritarians in the modern West. When leading Nazis painted their toenails, took hard drugs, sought out fine art and fought each other over the merits of pederasty versus paedophilia, could they really have exemplified authoritarianism? A prize-winning Canadian social psychologist, Bob Altemeyer, even showed in the late-1980's that the by-then much tested 'authoritarian personality', though slightly deficient in liberal education, had no marked aggressive tendencies and could be expected to respond well to laws prescribing tolerance and respect for minority groups.

A more compelling analysis of the Hitlerzeit, by the Harvard historian, Daniel Goldhagen, has lately switched from blaming the personality either of Hitler or of his fellow Germans for general deficiencies. Rather than indict 'authoritarianism', 'sadism' or even German 'conformity', Goldhagen postulates a quite specific and virulent German hatred of Jews. Goldhagen's claim is that ordinary Germans positively enjoyed baiting and tormenting Jews and virtually took pride in such activities -- sending photos to relatives of elderly Jews whose beards they had set alight or whom they had made to skip and jump in the streets. Nevertheless, it is a striking feature of Goldhagen's work that the German persecution of Jews had invariably to be sanctioned by civil or military command and was usually a rule-governed affair even if pretexts were flimsy (e.g. police searches of houses for 'suspects'). Even at the very end of the war, Jews could not simply be despatched by gunfire. Rather, they had to be force-marched away many miles from the concentration camps until they broke down from hunger or thirst and could then be shot for disobeying orders. Moreover, Goldhagen's postulate of widespread and rabid anti-semitism would be more convincing if the origin of the hostility had been explained. (Strangely, Goldhagen does not explore the German belief in a Jewish Dolchstoss.)

Altogether, the non-personological view of a British historian, Ian Kershaw, is more likely. It was not that the authoritarian / genocidal Hitler gave so many orders to persecute and kill, Kershaw thinks; or that ordinary Germans acted on their own out of a previously unidentified psychopathology. Rather, Hitler proved a listless and lazy, though irascible dictator whose mind was being read -- and indeed imagined and invented from rather minimal clues -- by appointees of his who had every reason to fear him and his rages. Even when in full power from 1934, Hitler felt no obligation to think out or to set out policy in much detail. Indeed, like many dictators before and since, Hitler preferred to establish competing lines of policy, with competing authorities in charge of them. Deception was at the very heart of Hitler's darkness -- including the self-deception that would lose him two million German soldiers. The 'Holocaust revisionist' historian, David Irving, captures the ill-considered delusions of those days from the secretly recorded remarks of a leading Nazi in prison at Nürnberg:

Still more importantly, deception and delusion strangle at birth all but the most determined opposition. In a system of government where no clear policies are tabled, it will be a brave man indeed who tries to query what he can only dimly detect as the main thrust of policy. Some generals did continue to query Hitler even in 1941; but Hitler's own execution of Roehm in 1934 and many similar deaths had ruled out opposition by all but the most decorated of soldiers and the most aristocratic of civilians. Hitler's regime showed the truth of the adage that 'all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'

Yet it was not only Hitler who was corrupted -- becoming a cake-eating, pill-swallowing egomaniac surrounded in his Führerbunker by sycophants. The equally important intellectual corrosion was of the functioning of the many Germans who had once been in a position to oppose him, or at least to temper his policies. Faced with brazen lying, it is hard to work as a scientist or civil servant who carries a brief for truth-gathering. When, additionally, murder lies coiled within the deception of a newly elected democratic leader in a country in crisis, few will see it as their primary duty to insist on the telling of truth -- whether about communism, capitalism, the intellectual value and loyalty to Germany of most of its Jews, or the prospects of a winter invasion of Russia.

The deception at the heart of Nazism is in need of appreciation. Just as dishonesty is the only common hallmark of crime in general -- for rape, robbery, embezzlement and child molestation involve dishonesty as integral features just as much as do larceny, fraud and burglary -- perhaps it is the only true and usable harbinger of state terror. If the past can thus be liberated from the vain ideas of post-1945 searchers for Hitler's 'quintessence of evil', this liberation will show politicians and political scientists how to prevent a recurrence of the horrors of the Hitler era.

Montesquieu grasped an important part of the correct strategy when he saw the need for a continual balancing of powers within the state -- for power to be distributed across diverse institutions, almost regardless of whether these happen to be the monarchy, the houses of a parliament, the judiciary, the church or the universities. Today, benefiting from Sir Karl Popper's analysis of how progress towards truth is achieved -- not by absorptive induction but principally by testing, falsifying and sometimes thus retaining previous theories -- an analysis of the Nazizeit in terms of deception and unfalsifiability will stress that any society needs to contain within in it positions (whether within government or outside it) from which people can speak their minds without fear or favour. Clearly, few men will challenge popularly embraced untruths unless they enjoy the security of property, serious tenure of office and the ability to migrate.

To blow away today's vague talk of Hitler's 'evil' and to concentrate on preventing deception by government would be a more important advance than today's criminalization of 'racist' utterances and 'insensitivity' to minorities. It is sometimes joked that 'the neurotic builds castles in the air, the psychotic lives in them and the psychiatrist collects the rent.' Today, it seems unlikely that psychologists will ever demonstrate the 'madness' of dictators -- especially those as long-serving and popular as Stalin, Mao, Suharto, Castro, Nyerere and Saddam Hussein. But to show people the follies of living in the castles-in-the-air that dictators build would seem a manageable objective. Daydreams can have their merits and be tolerated and encouraged as sources of ideas. But to insist on a clear line between truth and falsehood, between reality and illusion, between safe and dangerous daydreams -- such insistence would seem manageable even if it attracted opposition (hopefully invigorating) from 'postmoderns' who relativistically view all 'truths' as mere social constructions.

In any dissection of 'evil', untruth and deception will arguably be found as the rotten core of the bad apple. Just as ordinary crime cannot be traced by twentieth-century criminologists to any worse trait than stupidity or to any worse circumstance than lack of supervision, so it may be with even the greatest evil that we can currently conceive: that such a phenomenon as Nazism grows at the interstices of human lives where delusion is a possibility -- and a far greater possibility once there is 'no platform' for opposition. In the case of Hitlerism, to free this key point from the obfuscation of subsequent late-twentieth-century Hitlerkritik is an important task. As censorship of 'Holocaust denial' is now being backed in the West by criminal sanctions, and will spawn demands for censorship of talk favouring euthanasia, eugenics and state encouragement of particular forms of marriage, the task is urgent. Perhaps a more clear and distinct understanding of Hitler's evil can be achieved. Perhaps that gruesome past can even now be liberated to reveal its truth to a future that has risked the creation of new delusions by its search for a quintessence of evil.

3. Deciding the West's agenda for the 21^st century.  There is a third advantage in seeing deception, delusion and promise-breaking at the heart of Hitlerism. An analysis of Hitler as a deceiver -- history's greatest deceiver, perhaps, given the enormity of his task with an educated people, and the enormity of the outcome so soon visited upon them all -- would do still more than nurture prudence about the future. The idea that Hitler broke with Germany the greatest contract that a man can ever make -- to advance the interests of an entire people -- is of still wider interest.

Partly because of Hitlerabscheu within Germany, and partly because of the arrival of American global empire since 1945, the peoples of the American imperium -- of most NATO and SEATO countries -- live in liberal-democratic states. These witness no great thrust of policy unless it be to maintain welfare spending and avoid destroying the affluence that even 'socialist' governments attribute largely to the effectiveness of free-market capitalism. Most Western states are now multicultural in composition; and they certainly embrace multicultural definitions of themselves even when -- as in Éire, Scotland and Sweden -- their own ethnic minorities are tiny.

After its independence, the USA found a key to economic, intellectual and cultural progress in insisting upon the tolerance of religious differences that its founding fathers, fleeing from Europe, had once sought. Today, the American empire says states are ill-advised -- as well as perhaps just wrong -- to discriminate against one ethnic group or another, and even against immigrants. Just as America itself opened its own doors successfully to scores of millions of immigrants in the twentieth century, so other countries of the West feel obliged not to depart conspicuously from such generosity of spirit. Of more practical importance, voluntary migrants are typically of higher intelligence than the countrymen whom they leave behind; they provide host countries with a docile and cost-effective work-force which undercuts trade union bargaining power; and they help reduce the impression of the world as being divided the rich, bright and White on the one hand and the poor, dull and Black on the other. There are plainly minor problems that arise as immigrants and their young children constitute special charges on welfare states where they have not yet, by their own earnings, paid the way for others needing state help. Yet the risk has seemed worth taking, especially to Western parties of the left that garner the welfare-needing and welfare-supplying votes.

However, there is a problem with liberal capitalism. While it frees people into the making of many intelligent choices that themselves stimulate economic growth, these choices do not include basic features of lifestyle. People in the West are free to own property in conditions of unprecedented historical security Especially in the USA, they have increasingly sought compensation for all kinds of breaches of implicit contract -- in one case claiming a $1million medical bill from a private club in the grounds of which an aggrieved member had been stung by a wasp, and in another charging a girlfriend's unexpected pregnancy as 'sperm theft.' Yet there are large areas of modern Western life in which the formation and honouring of contracts are most uncertain matters -- quite as uncertain as was the repayment of debt in the days when the Christian church officially forbade usury.

Because of the criminalization of recreational drugs and sexual behaviour, many young people now find themselves delinquents in early adolescence who could face serious penalties later if fellow cannabis smokers or sexual partners mention their names to the police. Likewise, the extension of 'speech codes' in higher education and the workplace means that people can face expulsion and firing not for causing demonstrable physical harm or financial loss to others but for 'insensitivity' that has resulted in subjective harm to which only the 'victim' can testify in some cranky tribunal composed of PC office-holders. Sharing one's thoughts frankly with a colleague can easily result in dismissal in today's West -- and even the making of jokes is fraught.

Again, many people now have to be extremely wary about the workplace specialization of their labour skills. Much as they might like to specialize, their dismissal from one firm in middle age can mean that they are virtually unemployable -- at least near the homes which give their children easy access to the few 'good' (i.e. meritocratic) state schools. Nor can family life be conducted as a developing contract between participants: parents who fall out with their children for any reason can find those children recovering memories for 'child abuse' of long ago.

Lastly, since downloading pornography is often a crime, a person who leaves a computer unsupervised in his office or home can easily be brought under police and media scrutiny that will quickly destroy his family life and career prospects even if he is not jailed. People are having to tread warily, quite as much as in days when the local church provided behavioural monitoring and coercion -- and in the West's past there was at least some individual choice of the church denomination to which people belonged. Nor can people today insure themselves against the chance of being found guilty of drugs, teen sex, 'abuse', insensitivity or pornography allegations. They are permitted to insure against massive accidental damage that they may cause to themselves or others while driving a motor vehicle; but they cannot insure against capricious campaigns that may cast up events of years ago which they can barely recall. Not even affluence can allow much privacy or choice of lifestyle when a person's wife, children and home computer can all be used in evidence against him.

Above all, people have little choice -- unless they are mega-rich Hollywood filmstars -- about the type of marital contract that they make. Though multiculturalism would seem to require subscriber countries to recognize different types of marriage so as to accommodate Islam (polygyny), Buddhism (polyandry) and Hinduism (under-16 marriage), the West makes virtually no such concessions. Equally, the West does not allow marital partners to make limited-term contracts, to specify the earning levels that each partner must maintain, or to stipulate that a union will become null and void if no children result or if either partner commits adultery. People can set up trusts whereby they exempt their wealth from taxation and even from sequestration as the proceeds of crime. Yet they cannot make an agreement to have a night of dancing and drinking without risk of a 'date rape' allegation; they cannot -- no matter how agreeable their parents -- legally agree to the slightest sexual contact before age 16 [or whatever is the local age of consent -- in California 18]; they cannot require that a husband must share the housework, or that the wife must not be drunk or out on another spending spree when the man returns home.

More seriously, a man cannot regularize any mistresses that he maintains, or the resulting children; so the occurrence of divorce means that he will almost certainly be separated from some or all of his children -- who will thus grow up without the male role models deemed important by all child care experts until the arrival of mass single-parenting in the West around 1990. Still worse, since a woman cannot ensure any very definite level of income from a man, she relies on divorce arrangements that will cripple him just when the marriage is breaking up and diplomacy should be focusing on the father maintaining reasonable and affectionate contact with his children. On the societal level, people cannot make their own contracts with the state as to what their health care will cost if they agree to lead healthy lifestyles involving teetotalism, monogamy and abstention from tobacco. Again, there is no way in which even the most responsible citizen can insure himself to pay the full costs of any crimes that he may commit. As a result, when people are found guilty of crimes it invariably turns out they have insufficient funds to pay for their misdeeds and so must be jailed. Finally, there is no way in which people can contract responsibly for the care which their future children may eventually be deemed to require -- whether in education for 'special needs', in repeated surgery and nursing care, or in probationary and custodial measures.

Thus, in a complex world in which most of the excitements and serious interests are of a social nature, people cannot in their dealings with others make enforceable contracts. Instead of arranging their own affairs in freedom and with foresight, people are forever dependent on discretionary government action. If they could only choose, their individual choices would provide the sort of diversification and growth that occurred as national courts swept past the Church in the sixteenth century and allowed the development of economic individualism based on well-considered agreements.

Only when it is realized that the past failures of humanity derived essentially from non-existent or positively dishonoured contracts will the modern West will be able to see its way forward. Over the past four hundred years, the battle has been won in the West to let people do largely what they like with some 60% of their own income -- including to loan it at interest or to invest it abroad. Now, in the post-Christian era, people must have more freedom to arrange their own lives. Currently the West chooses to be horror-struck by the 'fascism' and Nazism of the past; but it fails to see that even the worst evils of the past arose crucially because of the failures of participants and victims at the time to make and honour explicit contracts. Even regular press conferences at which Hitler could have been questioned would probably have served to ring the necessary warning bells in his own country and elsewhere. Appreciating that past follies and horrors arose because of absences and failures of contract will free the future from the statism that disfigured the twentieth century. It will liberate the West into a new golden age.

--

Today, it is agreeable to think that the Western world has liberated itself from many great evils of the past. In fact, the liberation that began as the dominating dogmas of Christianity were challenged and relaxed has still to be completed; and the new dogma of PC has scrambled into the saddle just as Christianity seemed on its last gasp.

There must be many mistakes on the way to intelligent and responsible forms of liberty. But the greatest of these mistakes is to have made the past a captive to imaginary ideas of its central evils; and to have allowed that conception of past evil to arrest the liberation into new choices and responsibilities that a civilized world now requires. The way forward is simple: the past must be liberated from the future. Our hysterically 'evil'-detecting present that shuns any talk of eugenics and personal responsibility must stop re-inventing the past or even scouring it for a quintessence of evil that will never be found; and the future -- our present -- must now be liberated from the state-enforced religions of the past and their natural culmination in an uncriticized ersatz-emperor who could rule without a serious court, parliament, cabinet or press corps. Hitler, who now represents most of what constitutes 'history' for grandchildren of the Anglo-American victors of 1945, is blamed for having planned a 'master race.' In fact, Hitler should be blamed for having broken his contract with Germany. Until the modern West appreciates the key dishonesties of the past -- crucially unchecked by critical intelligence -- it will be unable to enjoy the honest freedoms that beckon from what should be its future.

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RESUME and OUTLOOK

As many movements of liberation and liberal thought testify, liberty has proved a popular political ideal -- at least since 1776. Today, when slavery and the 'working class' have ceased to present problems in the West, the stress of reformers is on freeing or at least lightening the burdens of all kinds of minority groups -- notably women, the handicapped, the homosexual and ethnic minorities from the third world.

Nevertheless, modern liberal democracies that rejoice in tolerance and equality have a problem of lack of direction in public policy. Unlike China (for example), they have no big plans for the future. Especially, they cannot face or resolve pressing questions about family life and about the quality and quantity of their citizenry in the next generation. The problem will not go away. The Western family has gone into massive decline since 1985 -- a development unwished by experts of any political colour; and the arrival of genetic engineering means that demographic choices will need in future to be made quite consciously, whether by individuals or by governments.

The main obstacle to discussion of the West's future arises from the association of biological and eugenic objectives with Nazism. However, apart from doubts as to what the Nazis' 'human biological initiative' actually involved, it is not obvious that any plans at all provided the genesis of the evils of the Nazizeit. Rather, the key feature that allowed Hitler's militarism, totalitarianism and racism to proceed was the deceit and delusion that the 'Third Reich' replacement for the Weimar Republic involved any remotely normal form of government.

In fact, instead of policies being presented, discussed and criticized, Hitler's method of operation was capricious and chaotic and a betrayal not only of German Jews and other minorities but of German servicemen and their families. There was never any proper agreement as to what National Socialism would involve; and Hitler's rule was a betrayal of his implicit contract of government (and of his explicit contract with Franz von Papen, who made him Chancellor). Although Hitler's Mein Kampf had given some warning, few could have expected the destruction of governmental processes that took place quite suddenly between 1935 (Nürnberg Laws) and 1938 (Kristallnacht).

Germany's rapid descent into government by an equal mixture of caprice and paranoia makes three points of great relevance to the West's problems today. First, the Nazizeit can be blamed to some extent on those Germans who saw it coming and did little except escape it -- as did most of Germany's own 400,000 Jews. Secondly, the Nazizeit shows the key role of governmental contracts and constitutions as bulwarks against deception. Third, the appreciation that what happened was fundamentally a betrayal -- a breach and failure of contract -- should result in resolve for the West's future to encourage people to make the contracts that they wish.

Personally chosen contracts, however idiosyncratic, should be open and enjoy a serious prospect of enforcement. It is better that people's intentions be seen and criticized than obscured; and to liberate individual initiative into the development of self-chosen life-styles and communities is what the West now needs. Only such a commitment will prevent the West becoming moribund and a prey to the ever-present mass-tyrannical and authoritarian tendencies even of liberal-democratic states themselves (which can too easily become democratic dictatorships).

By encouraging, rather than resisting contracts, the West can restore the Enlightenment idea of progress but reconcile it with Ancient Greek ideas of justice and personal responsibility and with modern ideas of maximising true human liberty. The Nazizeit itself needs to be liberated from artificial modern attempts to identify in it some quintessence of evil. Rather, human evil results principally from failures -- especially from failures of honesty. Proper understanding of the Nazizeit should yield a new stress on open contract-making. The Hitler period should be seen as a period of normal, not exceptional human folly; and sensible plans should be made to expose all politicians to scrutiny before unconstrained folly turns into horror.

A move towards accepting honest contracts -- rather than searching for imagined evil and utopian answers to it -- would liberate the West's future from its past. It would do so by liberating that past from what has, in the form of increasing hysteria about Hitlerism, become its future. To install voluntary and open contracts as the stuff of social and political life would inspire the rest of the world -- in which corruption is quite the biggest problem, often because lawful forms of contract are impossible. Such neoliberalism would show that the West is capable of optimistic realism and respect for the individual as much as of the melancholic idealism which has dogged it since 1945. The West's guilt about its own racist, sexist and inquisitioning past now threatens the rest of the world in the form of human rights demands that show contempt for others' sovereignty. Instead, the West needs an agenda that will at once allow creativity and respect others' own wishes.

The new approach might be called neoliberealism. It would take classical liberalism beyond economics and accept biological realities that will always leave inequalities unless these themselves are engineered out by human choice -- hopefully under open and enforceable contracts; and it would accept the historical reality of competition between nations and let the dead bury their dead. In particular, it would end the bizarre Western propitiation of minorities which themselves had as much responsibility for their past fates as did their oppressors and whose sufferings have anyhow been more than compensated by half-a-century of life in the prosperous free West. It would release creativity -- making new human relationships, families, societies and cultures just as twentieth-century capitalism was able to stimulate economic activity. It would make individuals and their chosen communities -- not the religions of the first Christian millennium or the governments of the second -- masters of history. It would liberate the future from the past, and the past from the future.

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I am grateful to readers of the McDougall NewsLetter, and especially to Graham Asher, for helpful criticisms and encouragement. -- Chris Brand.

An earlier version of this essay was submitted by Chris Brand, Edinburgh, for the International Essay Prize Contest of Lettre Internationale in co-operation with Germany's Goethe-Institut, 1998/9.

Edinburgh, 5 i 2000

================================



ACADEMIC EXTRAS

Re Ron ROSENBAUM, 1998, Explaining Hitler. Random House (Paperback 1999).


There are two main schools of thought about Hitler and the Holocaust among historians (New York Review of Books, 17 xii '98, John Gross). Intentionalists believe that Hitler pretty fully intended the scale and timetable of the Holocaust. Lucy Dawidowicz (who died in 1990) believed Hitler must have been an exception to the general modern idea that 'there is no such thing as evil'; Claude Lanzmann (who made the influential film Shoah) normally refuses to speak to anyone seeking, let alone offering 'explanations' of the Holocaust; and Emil Fackheim said simply "nothing can make Hitler explicable." Intentionalists accept Baudelaire's advice that 'the Devil's cleverest trick is to persuade people that He doesn't exist.' By contrast, functionalists think there just must have been something -- whether psychological, sociological, political, economic or a complex interaction effect. (Ian Kershaw's recent volume is essentially functionalist, stressing that 'things just developed' once Hitler was in power -- with Hitler's minions guessing or imagining what the Führer wanted while Hitler himself led a leisurely life revising his architectural plans.) Ron Rosenbaum steers a path between these two extremes. On the one hand, he provides the impressive evidence, from the Jewish doctor who was G.P. to the Schickelgruebers, and whom Hitler allowed to emigrate to New York, that the young Adolf had been "a nice, pleasant youth". (The doctor told this to inquirers in New York of 1942, after Germany had declared war on the USA following Japan's attack at Pearl Harbour, 1941. He threw in a contradiction of Allied propaganda up to that point: Hitler had two normal testicles, he said.) On the other hand, Rosenbaum accepts Hitler's own account that he had a 'vision' after being hospitalized in Pasewalk, Pomerania, 1917, for a mustard gas attack. Rosenbaum notes the extent of Hitler's paranoia was such that, even in speeches of 1942, he still complained that Jewish people were 'laughing at him.'

"All the original bunkers at Dachau had been razed. One exact replica was rebuilt when Dachau became a museum. How ironic, a model within a model. After all, Dachau was Hitler's first and oldest concentration camp. A model used in propaganda films to sell the idea of mass extermination to his minions. The bunker was pristine, as were the gas chambers. The ovens suffered from no wear and tear and looked like they hadn't even baked a loaf of bread, much less had been used to incinerate thousands of Nazi victims."
Michael D. BRAUN, 1999, 'A journey into the heart of darkness.' Jewish World Review 13 iv (http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0499/darkness.html).

A U. S. Office of Strategic Services psychological report by Walter C. Langer, later published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler, says that the young Hitler was befriended by Jewish art dealers who "paid generously for his mediocre watercolors." Because of his financial situation, a Jewish landlady charged him only a nominal rent, and even moved out of her apartment on one occasion so that Hitler and a friend could have more room. A Jewish used-clothing dealer gave him a long black overcoat, which he wore constantly. When he was a lance-corporal during World War I, Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross (First and Second Class), a rare honor for a soldier of such low rank, who hadn't really done anything to deserve such a distinction. He learned later, that the commendation was the result of the "efforts of the regimental adjutant, Hugo Gutmann, a Jew."

    When he became Führer, Hitler hired a Jewish maid to do his cooking. On one occasion, when it was suggested that he get rid of her, he became furious. Dr. Eduard Bloch, a Jewish physician, had been the Hitler family doctor since Hitler was a child. Bloch had treated Hitler's mother when she was dying of cancer. After her funeral, Hitler accompanied his sisters to thank him, and said: "I shall be grateful to you forever." He sent the doctor two postcards, one that he handpainted. Both of them said: "From your ever grateful patient, Adolf Hitler."

    Hitler had even wondered if he himself was Jewish. This idea stemmed from the fact that Hitler's father, Alois, was illegitimate, and the identity of his grandfather had never been established. During Hitler's rise to power, his half-brother's son threatened to reveal that Hitler was of Jewish ancestry. One investigation discovered that Hitler's grandfather had been the son of a Jewish family called Frankenburger, in Gratz, who employed Hitler's grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgrueber, as a maid. She had become pregnant by their son, while she was working in their home. The family sent her money for a year and a half to help support the child. Another investigation said that Alois was conceived in Vienna, where Hitler's grandfather was employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild. Maria was sent home to Spital, where Hitler's father was born.

    In Hitler's War, written in 1977 by British author and historical revisionist, David Irving, it was claimed that Hitler didn't order the Jewish massacres, and didn't find out about it until late in the war. There is no record of Hitler ever visiting a concentration camp, although he did watch films and see photographs. So what turned Hitler against the Jews, if indeed he was; or was there someone else making decisions for him?

    As early as 1919, he spoke of removing Jews altogether; and in his book Mein Kampf, written while he was in prison in 1924, for the "Beer Hall Putsch", spoke of the overthrow of "world Jewry": "I believe that I am today acting according to the purposes of the almighty Creator. In resisting the Jew, I am fighting the Lord's battle." On January 30, 1939, he said in a speech to the Reichstag: "Today I want to be a prophet once more: if international finance -- Jewry inside and outside of Europe -- should succeed once more in plunging nations into another world war, the consequence will not be the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." In a public speech in Munich, on November 8, 1942, he said that "International Jewry will be recognized in its full demonic peril; we National Socialists would see to that."

The privations through which Hitler put millions of his own soldiers are affectingly documented in Antony BEEVOR, 1998, Stalingrad, London:Viking. Hitler standardly risked his troops in engagements where they were outnumbered by 20 to 1.

------

From McDougall NewsLetter 17 viii '99 (http://www.crispian.demon.co.uk/McDNLArch8b.htm)

NaziZeit

The idea that Hitler's aides had often to 'make up the mind of the Fuehrer' has lately appealed to historians (notably to Britain's Ian Kershaw* -- see color:maroon;McDNLs Autumn '98). Now it transpires this may have been all too literally true. Medics are growing bolder in venturing that Hitler suffered Parkinsonism** from 1934 (Journal of the American Medical Association 282, 547-553 [1999]).

Reuters Health

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Hitler's Parkinsonism may have played a role in WWII

VANCOUVER  --  Symptoms of advanced Parkinson's disease, including ``mental inflexibility and inability to handle contradictory reports,'' may have affected Hitler's judgment and contributed to ``the defeat of Germany at the Battle of Normandy'' and the eventual fall of the Third Reich, a Texas researcher told participants attending the 13th International Congress on Parkinson's Disease. Hitler had Parkinsonism as early as 1934, but his aides helped him to conceal the symptoms of the disorder, including tremor and slowed movement, said Dr. J. T. Hutton of the Neurology Research and Education Center in Lubbock.

Hutton and colleague Dr. J. L. Morris compared the characteristic cognitive deficits, or thinking problems, of advanced Parkinsonism with descriptions in historical documents of Hitler's behavior toward the end of WWII. They note that Hitler's physician reported during interrogation after the war that Hitler's movements and reactions had become increasingly slow and that he exhibited marked tremors. The researchers also note that Colonel-General Guderian said that by February 1945, Hitler ``seemed absent-minded and unable to concentrate. He was exhausted and could barely move around. He still sensed the essence of contradictory reports, but had lost his mental flexibility and imagination.''

Hutton and Morris suggest that this mental inflexibility and the loss of the ability to react quickly, which are characteristic of Parkinsonism, ``arguably determined the outcome of the Battle of Normandy.'' The situation was compounded by Hitler's sleep disorder, another characteristic of Parkinsonism. He was asleep when an urgent request for reinforcements at the battlefront came, but due to his temper, aides were afraid to wake him, according to the researchers. When Hitler was informed of the situation, reports indicate that he had difficulty absorbing the fact that the battle was occurring in Normandy rather than Calais, as he had expected. As a result, the Germans did not mount a counterattack to the Allied invasion until 2 days later. ``Hitler's slowness to counterattack at Normandy may have been secondary to mental inflexibility and difficulty in shifting concepts due to Parkinsonism,'' Hutton and Morris conclude. Thus the disease appears to have ``impacted the outcome of World War II.''

\\\\\\

*  Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris. London : Allen Lane (The Penguin Press). 845pp. £UK20-00. {See e.g. McDNL 29 ix '98.} The latest review, a very favourable one, is by Wolfgang Mommsen of the Heinrich Heine University at Düsseldorf ('Working towards the Fuehrer', London Review of Books 19 viii '99). Mommsen very much agrees as to Hitler's lack of initiative and sees him as letting others push ahead and favouring approaches that seemed to be working while the machinery of government itself disintegrated for lack of straightforward demand and control from the centre. It is an extraordinary picture that emerges of the world's most famous tyranny. Says Mommsen: "It is difficult to see how a man of such absurd and insubstantial views could ever have taken charge of a European nation with a sophisticated culture and a firmly established legal order. ….Hitler did not direct affairs in a straightforward manner; ….he was reluctant to make ideological commitments. ….The initial pogroms against the Jews and a whole series of opposition groups….had to be stopped or in some way regulated. ….Hitler remained aloof from day-to-day business. [He was merely an umpire of competing groups of followers having very different ideas from each other.] His power depended on the progressive disintegration of the traditional government apparatus and the ensuing struggle for a share of power among his subordinates."

    Biographer Ian Kershaw apparently dates Hitler's anti-Semitism back to 1909.

**  Parkinsonism -- which can result from treatments with phenothiazines for schizophrenia, in wide use from 1955 -- involves stiffness of the arms and legs, a flat and dull facial expression, and tremors, especially in the hands (D.L.Rosenhan & M.E.P.Seligman, 1984, Abnormal Psychology). Patients tend to have spasms of the limbs and to shake; but they may also have akathisia, a peculiar 'itchiness' in the muscles which results in inability to sit still and an urge to pace up and down. One per cent of people over 50 suffer Parkinson's. Treatment with L-DOPA (which is converted into dopamine to rectify a deficiency in the brain's basal ganglia) can induce symptoms of schizophrenia.

Hitler suffered gas attack during the First World War and was admitted to a field psychiatric hospital in a disturbed state. Historian Ron Rosenbaum (1998, Explaining Hitler. Random House) accepts Hitler's own account that he had a 'vision' after being hospitalized in Pasewalk,

Certainly, Germany can be argued to have plunged into its Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht and its 1939 opening of World War because Hitler broke his poorly monitored contract with the German people. No great 'evil intent' is necessary to explain what happened; and presumptions of 'evil' are unhelpful in suggesting preventive measures for the future.

If German hostility to the Jews is traceable to the Dolchstoss of 1917 and the Jewish declaration of trade war on Germany from 1933, the descent of Europe into the horror of 1939-45 must really be blamed on the initial commencement of hostilities between nation states in 1914. The idea that Britain had some special responsibility for the Great War -- by deciding to back France and Russia against Germany -- is developed especially by Niall Fergusson in his 1998 book The Pity of War (see McDougall NewsLetters 10 xi '98 and 9 xi '99

Likewise, Britain shared a 50% responsibility for the Dolchstoss -- while at the same time shouldering much of the suffering of the First World War and enjoying most of the credit for standing up to Hitler through 1940-41. The equal involvement of the Austrians, British, French, Germans, Jews and Russians in setting Europe ablaze is a further reason for tracing the problem not to any essence of evil in any one nation or person but to failures of processes of consideration, criticism and contract. Properly, America's President Woodrow Wilson tried to rectify these problems by setting up the League of Nations -- but this idealistic effort proved inadequate to meet French demands for revenge, so the problem of competing national interests was finally squashed by the imposition of American and Russian hegemony in 1945. Today once more, whether in the Balkans, the Caucasus or the 'Celtic fringe' of the UK, Europe faces questions of how to allow a degree of national/ethnic/local self-determination without risking a descent into military confrontation. How to let people form their own 'constituencies' -- whether remaining within or breaking away from existing nation states -- was considered in McDNL 11 v '99 '

---------------

Christopher Brand is the author of The g Factor -- the 1996 book on the psychology of intelligence that was favourably reviewed in the top science magazine, Nature, but suddenly withdrawn as "repellent" by its own New York publisher, Wiley Inc. After causing controversy in Britain by explaining his hereditarian views on race, class, IQ, eugenics, feminism and paedophilia, Brand was fired as "disgraceful" by Edinburgh University in 1997 after 26 years of unblemished service; but in a 1999 moral victory he was paid £12,000 by Edinburgh University, equal to the maximum sum that can be won from courts in the United Kingdom for unfair dismissal (Times [London] 29 x '99, p. 2). Edinburgh University said it was paying out "to prevent the airing of Brand's opinions and views at public expense" (Times Higher 5 xi '99, p. 2) -- an astonishing attitude for a university. At no point through 1996-99 would Edinburgh's Principal Sutherland agree to read Brand's book; nor did any UK academic mount any public challenge to debate Brand's views. Brand has published extensively as a personality theorist, is well known as a reviewer for Personality and Individual Differences, Nature and Times Higher, and is a Fellow of the Galton Institute.

    Brand's weekly newsletter concerning differential psychology and its politics has included a review of David Duke's My Awakening and many proposals for extending neoliberalism (and neoliberealism) in the West. Brand's 1999 essay, 'Sex and the Twenty-first Century' , discusses changing sexual mores and neoeugenics and the increased liberation (and personal responsibility) which they must bring. News of the High Court 'Historiker' trial, David Irving versus Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, will appear in Brand's newsletter, e.g. 11 i 2000.

---

Last modified: 9 i '00.

http://search.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/3/0,5716,118863+9,00.html :

The fact that Matthias Erzberger, who was a civilian politician rather than a soldier, headed the German armistice delegation became an integral part of the legend of the "stab in the back" (Dolchstoss im Rücken). This legend's theme was that the German Army was "undefeated in the field" (unbesiegt im Felde) and had been "stabbed in the back"--i.e., had been denied support at the crucial moment by a weary and defeatist civilian population and their leaders. This theme was adopted soon after the war's end by Ludendorff himself and by other German generals who were unwilling to admit the hopelessness of Germany's military situation in November 1918 and who wanted to vindicate the honour of German arms. The "stab in the back" legend soon found its way into German historiography and was picked up by German right-wing political agitators who claimed that Allied propaganda in Germany in the last stages of the war had undermined civilian morale and that traitors among the politicians had been at hand ready to do the Allies' bidding by signing the Armistice. Adolf Hitler eventually became the foremost of these political agitators, branding Erzberger and the leaders of the Social Democrats as the "November criminals" and advocating militaristic and expansionist policies by which Germany could redeem its defeat in the war, gain vengeance upon its enemies, and become the preeminent power in Europe.

http://www.amherst.edu/~mbkolodn/thesis/Chapter_Three.html :

On the eve of World War I, the Zionist movement began to search for a patron among

the European powers, having failed to gain the approval of the Ottoman Sultan. Contacts

with imperial Britain eventually bore fruit.

The Balfour Declaration and the British in Palestine

In November 1917, just before Britain captured Palestine, the British government issued the most important single declaration relating to the Zionist cause. The Balfour Declaration stated:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.[6]

This was a promise by the British government to aid the Zionist endeavor. The British were careful, however, to only promise the creation of a "national home," not necessarily a state, "in Palestine,"[7] not necessarily promising the entire area.

http://www.edunltd.com/empire/maproom/palestine.htm

To complicate the diplomatic waters, the British entered into an agreement with the French and Russians to divide the entire Middle East into areas of influence for each of the imperial powers but leaving the Holy Lands to be jointly administered by the three powers. This was a secret arrangement that was known as the Sykes Picot agreement of 1916. It directly contradicted many of the promises made to the Sharif of Mecca Indeed, the waters were even further muddied by a third commitment entered into by the British in 1917. the British government made a promise to prominent Jews in Britain that the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be looked on with favour by the British. The reason for this pledge is not exactly clear, but it seems to have been made for two reasons. The first was to secure financial support from prominent Jewish financiers in Europe. The second seems to have been a way of breaking their own secret arrangement with the French and Russians by promoting their own influence into Palestine at their expense. Whatever the reason for this diplomatic chicanery, the diplomatic timebomb of these conflicting promises was about to explode as a direct result of the Russian revolution. The newly formed Bolshevik government took great pleasure in releasing the imperialistic designs of the British and French governments by publishing the Sykes-Picot agreement publicly and in full. The idea was to expose these capitilastic nations as morally bankrupt in their prosecution of the war and these secret agreements seemed to confirm that fact.

http://uahc.org/rjmag/399da.html (David Arnow, Ph.D. is a psychologist, research fellow at CUNY's Center for Jewish Studies, and director of Jewish Communal Relations at the New Israel Fund.)

Article in Reform Judaism explaining how Jewish state pre-dated Holocaust. Better for Jews to think of selves as historic, planful nation rather than rely on Shoah.

http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zionfraud.html ('The fraud of Zionism', by Wilbur Sensor)

The Zionist claim to Palestine has always rested on Lord Arthur Balfour's letter of November 2, 1917 promising British support for a "Jewish national homeland" in Palestine. This letter was issued nearly two years after Sir Henry McMahon's pledge of October 25,1915.

A MOVEMENT WHICH WROTE ITS OWN TITLE

Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothchild

"I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the cabinet. "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a National home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

This document is the grant deed which planted Zionism in the Near East. It is the most discreditable document ever issued by a major power. It was written by those to whom it was addressed and was the payoff for a shameless political manipulation. The British government did not abandon its pledge to the Arabs because of altruistic concern for a "Jewish national homeland". The real reason was stated by David Lloyd George, Britain's wartime Prime Minister:

"There is no better proof of the value of the Balfour Declaration as a military more than the fact that Germany entered into negotiations with Turkey in an endeavor to provide an alternative scheme which would appeal to Zionists. A German-Jewish Society, the V.J.O.D. was formed, and in January 1918, Talaat, the Turkish Grand Vizier, at the instigation of the Germans, gave vague promises of legislation by means of which "all justifiable wishes of the Jews in Palestine would be able to meet their fulfillment".

"Another most cogent reason for the adoption by the Allies of the policy of the Declaration lay in the state of Russia herself. Russian Jews had been secretly active on behalf of the Central Powers from the first; they had become the chief agents of German pacifist propaganda in Russia; by 1917 they had done much in preparing for that general disintegration of Russian society, later recognized as the Revolution. It was believed that if Great Britain declared for the fulfillment of Zionist aspirations in Palestine under her own pledge, one effect would be to bring Russian Jewry to the cause of the entente." "It was believed, also, that such a declaration would have a potent influence open world Jewry outside Russia, and secure for the entente the aid of Jewish financial interests. In America, their aid in this respect would have a special value when the Allies had almost exhausted the gold and marketable securities available for American purchase. Such were the chief considerations which, in 1917, impelled the British Government towards making a contract with Jewry." (Memoirs of the Peace Conference, David Lloyd George, p. 726.)

The eminent Mr. Lloyd George's opinion is confirmed by numerous other sources, especially by Mr. Samuel Landman in his work Great Britain, The Jews and Palestine, Mr. Landman was a very well known English Zionist whose positions included honorary secretary of the Zionist Council of the United Kingdom in 1912, editor of The Zionist, 1913-1914, solicitor and secretary of the Zionist Organization, 1917-1922, and author of several Zionist publications during World War One. His opinion is thus an official one which is completely consistent with that of Lloyd George.

"Mr. James A. Malcolm... spontaneously took the initiative, to convince first of all Sir Mark Sykes, Under-Secretary to the War Cabinet, and afterwards M. Georges-Picot, of the French Embassy in London, and M. Gout of the Quai d'Orsay (Eastern Section), that the best and perhaps the only way (which proved so to be) to induce the American President to come into the War was to secure the co-operation of Zionist Jews by promising them Palestine, and thus enlist and mobilize the hitherto unsuspectedly powerful forces of Zionist Jews in America and elsewhere in favor of the Allies on a quid pro quo contract basis..."

"The Balfour Declaration, in the words of Prof. H.M.V. Temperley, was a 'definite contract between the British Government and Jewry' (History of the Peace Conference in Paris, vol 6, p.173). The main consideration given by the Jewish people (represented at the time by the leaders of the Zionist Organization) was their help in bringing President Wilson to the aid of the Allies." (Great Britain, The Jews and Palestine, pp.3-6.)

Thus, according to the documented statements of both parties the British betrayed their war time ally, the Arabs, in deference to Zionist manipulation in bringing the U.S. into the war on Britains side.

Zionists and Hitler's Germany maintained cordial relations in the 1930's and the Jews made their own mistakes as to what the future could hold (http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zionfraud.html):

Zionism enjoyed the official favoritism of the Hitler government. Numerous articles praising Zionism appeared in the German press. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister, commissioned a special medallion commemorating Zionism. The Zionist blue and white flag was the only national symbol permitted to fly in Germany other than the swastika. More importantly, special Zionist training camps existed in Germany to train German Jews for agricultural work in Palestine. On at least one occasion, Chaim Weizmann the future first president of Israel vetoed the Rublee-Schact plan of January, 1939 which would have removed all Jews from Germany within a five year period. Weizmanns reason for so doing? He felt it was preferable to leave the Jews under German control so that they could later be sent to Palestine, rather that allow them to choose their own destination. In this regard Weizmann endorsed the thinking of his political rival, David Ben-Gurion: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel." (Yoar-Gelber, Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42), Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII,p.199.)

http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zizad/zizad3.html argues that German Jews under Weimar declined to see themselves as German, going along with Hitler's idea they were a different race and hoping for multicultural toleration if they did not interfere in German affairs. Other Jews who rejected Zionism nevertheless failed to make liaisons in German politics. The whole problem blew up suddenly in the depression -- Nazi voting had been declining till 1928.

"The Encyclopaedia of Zionism and Israel tells us, very vaguely, that the German Zionists tried to persuade Chancellor Bruning to issue a strong declaration against Nazi anti­ Semitism by 'stressing the influence of Zionists upon the governments of various nations'."

In Germany itself the ZVfD never tried to bring the Jews out into the streets, but the Rundschau felt free to threaten that the Jews would come out-in New York.

But "Weizmann, the prestigious scientist and President of the World Zionist Organisation, who was well connected in London, did next to nothing for German Jewry." He thought Germany had too many Jews and the emigration was inevitable.

http://ihr.org/jhr/v01/v01p-43_App.html

….Anglo-American propaganda has managed to represent the Entente or the Allies as the "good guys" and the Germans and the Axis as the "bad guys." This is to fool the people and foul up the peace. The intrinsic reason America intervened in European wars to destroy Germany was not ethics but power politics. When America saw that Germany was clearly the strongest nation in Europe, the U.S. began to side with the second--strongest there, Britain.

But the American people preferred neutrality. Therefore they had to be exposed to horrendous atrocity propaganda, such as that the Kaiser wanted to rule the world, that Germans cut the hands off Belgian babies, that submarine warfare made all Germans criminals. Even so, a third factor had to be mobilized to grease America's entry into World War I. That factor was the Balfour Declaration.

Jews had for centuries been best treated by Germany and Austria and felt most congenial there, even to adopting Yiddish as their language. Consequently for the first two years of World War I American Jews were sympathetic to the Central Powers, and certainly against Czarist Russia. The British War Cabinet, in the face of German victories, decided to change the "very pro--German tendency among the wealthy American Jewish bankers and bond issuing houses" (See Conrad Grieb, The Balfour Declaration, N.Y., 1972, p. 3). The Zionist quid pro quo was for Britain to establish "a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine" and the Zionists to get America into the war on the side of Britain. The Balfour Declaration followed, dated 2 November 1917.

Perverting the American Jews from neutrality to intervention against the Central Powers had been pushed for a year or more -- with success. What helped to make moralistic Wilson a rabid interventionist was the illicit affair he had had with a colleague's wife, Mrs. Peck (remarried, Mrs. Hulburt). Her stepson needed $40,000 to keep him out of jail. The stepmother asked President Wilson for the money, in exchange for which she would return to him the packet of love letters he had written her. When Wilson could not pay this amount, Samuel Untermeyer rushed to the rescue: If President Wilson would appoint a Jew to the next vacancy on the Supreme Court, Untermeyer would settle Mrs. Peck's claim. Thus it happened that America was "blessed" with its first Jew on the Supreme Bench, and the interventionists on 18 January 1916 got a radical Zionist in a prestige position to help get America into World War 1.

On 2 April 1917, using as a pretext the sinking of the Sussex (which in fact had not been sunk), Wilson asked Congress on 2 April 1917, for a declaration of war against Germany. Dr. E.J. Dillon, in his The Inside Story of the Peace Conference, wrote, "Henceforth the world will be governed by the Anglo-Saxon peoples, who in turn are swayed by their Jewish elements" (See Grieb. op. cit., p.7).

….When Hitler became Chancellor his Third Reich government was the victim of every possible worldwide resistance and smear. It was an indiscriminate opposition on the part of world Jewry, not only where Hitler was or might have been wrong, but also where he was obviously right, as when he demanded the self--determination for Austria, the Sudetenland, and Danzig which the victors in 1919 had denied. As early as 1933, before Hitler had harmed a single Jew, an International Jewish Boycott Conference, presided over by Samuel Untermeyer, the same who had paid Wilson $40,000 to appoint Brandeis Supreme Court justice in 1916, declared a crippling boycott on the Third Reich, while it was still in the throes of the inhuman reparations imposed at Versailles.

The boycott included not only the United States but some eight or more other countries. Simultaneously the anti--German propaganda of World War I was revived. And be it noted the International Jewish Boycott did not exempt the Jews of Germany from this hostile action. Nor did it keep it merely a Jewish action, but succeeded in pressuring the United States to cooperate with it: it imposed a general tariff against German goods as against the "most favored" status for all other nations, while International Financial interests tried to "call" sufficient German treasury notes to "break" Germany (see John Beaty, The Iron Curtain Over America, 1951, p. 63). The fact is that U.S. foreign policy from 1933 on was directed more to further Zionist interests rather than those of the U.S. or of the American people.

At Versailles the peace dictators had violated the right of self--determination of Austria, of the Sudeten Germans, and of the Corridor and Danzig. Germany had the right and the duty to champion this right for these people. Hitler did this, and was on the point of settling for a road through the Corridor and the return of Danzig, an ancient German city of 400,000.

What honest historians call the Unnecessary War broke out over this last injustice of Versailles, the worst and most costly war in history. Why did Poland refuse to negotiate? Because Britain guaranteed to go to war for Poland. Why did Britain give this foolish and tragic promise? Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, as related in the Forrestal Diaries, 27 Dec. 1945, reveals that the war broke out over Roosevelt's catering to Zionist interests, not to America's, nor even Britain's. We read: "Neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington ... Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into war."

Even worse, though the American people overwhelmingly wanted us to avoid the stupidity of intervention against Germany as in World War I, the same forces, Roosevelt and the Zionists, used every strategy to involve us. The insults and calumnies Zionist publicists hurled at Hitler, while the U.S. was still neutral, and before anyone had invented the atrocity story of the six million Jews "gassed", might have provoked any sovereign nation to hit back. Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes wrote that there is "No greater paradox in history than a war in behalf of Poland on the basis of the Jewish issue. There were in Poland, in 1933, six times as many Jews as in Germany, and they were surely treated as badly as were German Jews under Hitler." (See Blasting the Historical Blackout, p.35)

Hitler made his last speech to the Reichstag in April 1942, after that assuming total power. -- D. IRVING, Rommel.

http://ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n4p29_Weber.html

Herzl [Zionist leader] hoped for "a final solution to the Jewish question." Much co-operation with Nazis 1934-40. SS especially keen, though German F.O. not want full statehood, just a Jewish homeland in Palestine under British control. 1933 Transfer Arrangement allowed cash to be taken -- in German equipment for Palestine settlements. (Arthur Ruppin, a Zionist Organization emigration specialist who had helped negotiate the pact, pointed out that "the Transfer Agreement in no way interfered with the boycott movement, since no new currency will flow into Germany as a result of the agreement. . . .") Between 1933 and 1941, some 60,000 German Jews emigrated to Palestine through the Ha'avara and other German-Zionist arrangements, or about ten percent of Germany's 1933 Jewish population. In early January 1941 a small but important Zionist organization submitted a formal proposal to German diplomats in Beirut for a military-political alliance with wartime Germany. The offer was made by the radical underground "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel," better known as the Lehi or Stern Gang.

‘Decline and fall.’ Guardian (Review), 22 iii, pp. 4-6.

Hitler took as many as 16 pills per day and was “a fizzing cocktail of competing chemicals. His chief doctor, Dr Morrell was himself a morphine addict and gave Hitler secret injections. Hitler’s mood swings “exhibit all the signs of morphine dependency.

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