Neo-Nazism

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Neo-Nazis among the alt-righters, white nationalists and Ku Klux Klansmen at Unite the Right. One of them is carrying a Nazi flag.
A lunatic Chaplin imitator
and his greatest fans

Nazism
Icon nazi.svg
First as tragedy
Then as farce
What the world needs is more Nazis

Like it needs a hole in the head

Your future is not safe at all 'til this disease is dead
—Roger Taylor, Nazis 1994Wikipedia

Neo-Nazism is a modern movement which seeks to preserve and implement the failed goals and ideals of the Nazis. Neo-Nazis are most prominently characterized by a belief in white racial superiority, homophobia, misogyny, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and praising Adolf Hitler. Examples of neo-Nazism include some skinhead subcultures. The term is often used for any racist or far-right movement, regardless of whether they explicitly espouse the views historically held by the Nazi Party.

Many European countries have banned Nazi imagery in an attempt to curtail neo-Nazism, especially in modern-day Germany where almost all Nazi symbols, such as the swastika and SS bolts, for example, have been outlawed, aside from a couple of exceptions such as the Parteiadler (sans swastikas) and the Black Sun.[1] Neo-Nazi ideology is becoming a terrorist threat in many areas, such as the United States, Canada, and even Asia.[2] A perfect example is the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group with bases in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Modern neo-Nazism[edit]

Neo-Nazis often promote a martial, survivalist, "macho" lifestyle among their adherents. They promote anything that keeps the suckers in a suitable frenzy of hatred against the "racial enemies"; notable examples include genres of music such as Nazi punk, National Socialist black metal, and (most recently) variants of the non-political Vaporwave and Synthwave called Fashwave and Trumpwave amongst the alt-right. Typically neo-Nazis are either mainstreamers where they attempt to gain political power like Andrew Anglin's The Daily Stormer and Jeff Schoep's National Socialist Movement (NSM); or vanguardists seeking change through violent and radical means like the Atomwaffen Division and Antipodean Resistance.

According to Vladimir Putin and friends, Ukraine has become a hotbed of neo-Nazism crying out to be cleansed (hence, for example, the Russian "special military operation" in Ukraine in 2022). This line of thought can point to the Azov Battalion (which has — somewhat tenuous — Nazi links), but otherwise relies largely on associating Ukrainian nationalist enthusiasm with the memory of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959),[3] who made the misstep of taking his eye off Ukrainian ultra-nationalist anti-Sovietism and alleged terrorism to flirt briefly with collaboration with Nazism (1941, 1944) during the 1941-1944 Axis occupation of Ukraine.

What neo-Nazis fail to understand is that, with the level of human dispersal and general intermingling of cultures, race groups, nations and various other things, a pure "Aryan" would be virtually impossible without a severe amount of inbreeding, resulting in a drooling imbecile.

This says more than enough about the people proposing it.

Views on religion[edit]

American conservatism, including such "traditional" racist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Council of Conservative Citizens, has a strongly Christian character, particularly Protestant (with anti-Catholicism having once been a major force on the paranoid right). In recent years, this has gravitated toward evangelical Christianity. Many neo-Nazis, however, reject Christianity as a derivative of Judaism and are instead interested in various forms of mysticism and Nordic neo-paganism. Wotanism (otherwise known as Wotansvolk) and Odinism, white-supremacist variants of the non-racist Germanic neo-pagan religion Asatru is popular among neo-Nazis, finding a notable proponent in David Lane, author of the "Fourteen Words". William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries and founder of the National Alliance, was also the leader of an outfit called the "Cosmotheist Community Church." Another example of a non-Christian religion that's popular among neo-Nazis is Creativity founded by Ben Klassen in 1973 which has a flag in Nazi red, white, black, has emphasis on the survival of the white race, Rahowa (short for racial holy war), and hatred of Jews, "niggers", and non-white "mud races".

However, there are neo-Nazis who do follow Christianity, such as Aryan Nations and the Traditionalist Workers Party, either the orthodox sort, Kinism (a version of Christianity that is white nationalist and opposes racial integration and miscegnation), or heretical variants like Christian Identity. Many Christian neo-Nazis reconcile their anti-Semitism with their following of the teachings of Jesus by subscribing to the Khazar myth, claiming that modern Jews (particularly Ashkenazi Jews) are impostors to the claim of being descended from the ancient Israelites, that they are instead descended from converts from the Khazar people north of the Caucusus, and that white Europeans are the true heirs of Israel.

Religion in the Third Reich[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Nazism § Religion in Nazism

As for Adolf Hitler and the original Nazis, their relationship with the faith was conflicted, but Hitler described himself as Christian (at least publicly; in private, Hitler condemned Christianity in Hitler's Table Talk and in the Goebbels Diaries). In Mein Kampf in the chapter "Weltanschauung and Party" (or another title depending on the translation), Hitler stated about Christianity, "Each one of us to-day may regret the fact that the advent of Christianity was the first occasion in which the spiritual terror was introduced into the much freer world…" (or a variation of the same line in other translations). For a while, he and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg promoted a Nazified brand of the faith known as Positive Christianity and attempted to unite Germany's Protestant churches under its banner, but they ran into stiff opposition from the Confessing Church movement, which was repulsed by the Nazis' attempts to force their ideology into the pulpit coupled with the Roman Catholic Church condemnation of the Nazis in "Mit Brennender Sorge" ("With burning concern" in German), and so they largely gave up after 1935 and throughout the latter parts of the 1930s and the 1940s would instead try to replace the religion with a mix of Hitler worship with elements of Norse paganism. Although atheism was never outright banned, atheist groups were, and atheism was generally frowned upon. Esoteric, neo-pagan, and occultist movements[note 1] were tolerated, but all occult secret societies were banned, though this had less to do with anti-occult activism and more to do with the fact that Hitler just didn't trust secret societies.

Naturalism[edit]

Some neo-Nazis are naturalists, even atheists, basing their racial prejudice not in religious premises but rather in so-called "racial realism", usually with non-Jewish whites at the top of the hierarchy of ideal innate propensities, a convenient "fact" given the racial demographics of neo-Nazism. They often concede, however, that East Asians and even Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQ scores than white people. These points are, however, often minimized by hypothesizing compensatory innately weird traits or dispositions in Asians, or just being part of being "evil" in Jews, or yet, being just a fraud from a conspiracy of Jewish scholars while using mental gymnastics to avoid the question of how a "dumb" people could defraud the majority. While it could be that ancestral populations wouldn't necessarily share the same average frequencies for eventual genes influencing behavioral dispositions or abilities, the range of actually realistic possibilities is not in accord with what usually comes under the dishonest misnomer of "racial realism". Not only is the epic-fantasy doomsday scenario false, but it still could be that, in the end, it's some other race that would be on "top" of this meaningless, arbitrary hierarchy.

Views on Israel[edit]

A large number of neocons not only support the existence of the state of Israel, but also believe that it is justified in its occupation of the territories given to the Palestinians in the 1947 partition. Some religious supporters, known as Christian Zionists, view the existence of Israel, and more specifically the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem,Wikipedia as a prerequisite for the fulfillment of end times prophecy and the Second Coming, while more secular conservatives view Israel as a key ally in the unstable Middle East (and, formerly, as a bulwark against communism). For example, the German neo-Nazi website called "PI news" (Politically incorrect news) sharing pro-Israel and pro-American contents by virtue of their anti-Islamic views of the world.[4][5]

Neo-Nazis, needless to say, have the exact opposite view, treating Israel and pro-Israel groups as their greatest enemies. Many neo-Nazis have sought common cause with radical Islamist and Palestinian groups in opposing Israel and the Jews. Some have even shown an interest in Islam, especially the Shi'a Islam practiced in Iran, as an anti-Semitic vehicle.[6] On the other hand, other neo-Nazis find Muslims to be just another non-white threat, as evidenced by Wade Michael Page, a neo-Nazi who shot up a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, having mistaken it for a mosque.[7]

See also[edit]

External links[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. A case in point was the Thule Society,Wikipedia an occultist group that sponsored the original German Workers' Party before it became the Nazis. Its membership has been described as a "who's who" of early Nazi figures and sympathizers, including Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg. However, Hitler himself, despite what Wolfenstein 3D may have told you, was not only never a part of the group, but had it outlawed in 1933, not long after he came to power. SS Reichsfurher Heinrich Himmler, on the other hand, had a far more enthusiastic view of the occult than Hitler did, and is believed to have incorporated elements of the Thule Society into the SS. This goes to show that, much like the Founding Fathers and the editors of the Bible, the leaders of the Nazi Party were individuals with a fairly conflicting set of views that can't really be used to support or oppose one cause or another.

References[edit]

  1. Werner Bergmann; Rainer Erb (1997). Anti-Semitism in Germany: The Post-Nazi Epoch Since 1945. Transaction Publishers. p. 91. ISBN 978-1-56000-270-3. OCLC 35318351.
  2. The White Supremacist Terrorist Threat to Asia
  3. See the Wikipedia article on Stepan Bandera.
  4. Politically incorrect homepage [1]
  5. Israel - Politically Incorrect [2]
  6. Eldridge, Lance. "Strange Bedfellows: The neo-Nazi movement and radical Islam." PoliceOne, 15 Aug. 2012.
  7. Leitsinger, Miranda. "Experts: Alleged temple gunman Wade Michael Page led neo-Nazi band, had deep extremist ties." NBC News, 6 August 2012.