*** JdN: The article below is an extremely slanted, hostile, yet, in its facts, largely accurate piece in The Atlantic on how China has quietly adopted national socialism to fuel the meteoric rise of their country from Third World backwater to modern superpower.
The huge difference between NS Germany then and China now is that Beijing is basically crushing all religion, communist-style.
But Adolf Hitler was deeply religious and wanted a new white religion to arise some day soon and replace the philosemitic and partly delusional “Christianity” with a new, credible, dynamizing faith.
As for “crushing dissent,” as I have explained, 90% of criticism is invalid.
Most of it, in the real world, is either funded by a hostile billionaire, or by a hostile foreign power that is out to weaken the government so it can be overthrown….or it is slanders by ambition-crazed rivals for power.
They are criticizing you because THEY want to be president.
It is as simple as that.
Then you have critics who are neither agents nor egomaniacs, but they lack any access to the top-secret information which a leader has from his intelligence services.
Even my dear friend, the late Hans Schmidt of the Waffen-SS, was wrong from lack of information when he told me it was a big mistake for Hitler Germany to occupy the purely Czech part of the former Czechoslovakia in March 1938, after first annexing the German area, the Sudentenland, to the Reich in September 1938. Since that area was not ethnically German, occupying it looked to the outside world like “Hitler is out to conquer all of Europe, not just unite all the Germans.”
But in reality the Czech area had uranium to build The Atomic Bomb! Hitler KNEW the war was coming, and that the Americans, specifically Roosevelt at the urging of Albert Einstein, were working on The Bomb!
The German A-bomb project was top-top-top-secret, just as was the Manhattan Project in the US. But Hans did not have this secret information. So his sincere criticism was off-base. The Germans had The Bomb years before America, in fact.
But Germany had a functioning A-Bomb, not just the uranium. But there were two huge problems…1) the Allies’ threat to poison-gas all of Germany with 14,000 bombers and 2) the early Bomb’s relative lack of blast. In Hiroshima the A-bomb only knocked down wooden houses, not even basic, modern, steel-reinforced concrete buildings. It would NOT have devastated modern US or British cities. But all of Germany, the Allies said to the Germans at a secret meeting in Switzerland, would have been killed by gas.
.
.
.
https://johndenugent.com/english-remembering-rochus-misch-his-honor-was-loyalty-misch-says-hitler-was-against-using-the-atomic-bomb-due-to-allied-poison-gas-threat/So average citizens often have no way of knowing what is really going on behind the scenes.So, in the end, only 10% of criticism is sincere, well-informed, and accurate.
For this valid 10%, we had the Amt Hess, the Rudolf Hess Office. Hess was a Cabinet minister who had Hitler’s ear, and his staff and he got to the bottom of both corruption scandals in Germany and also any valid, constructive criticism of NS policies and methods so as to sincerely make things better.
The little people knew they could always contact the Hess Office. When people sighed in frustration, there was an expression: “Wenn das der Führer wüsste….” (“If only the Leader knew about this…”)
Someone would then say, “Then go to the Hess Office. They will listen.”
December 1924: Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945) receives visitors, including Rudolf Hess (1894 – 1987), (second from right), during his imprisonment in Landsberg jail. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
The fact is that demos-kratia, meaning “the rule of the average Joe,” has never existed. And life would collapse if the Average Joe ruled.
Either a good elite or a wicked upper class will rule you.
As Waffen-SS hero Lé0n Degrelle said in his memoirs, “Hitler for a Thousand Years,” which Margi and I translated,
under this title:
“by six years in, by 1940, 90% of the Germans were Hitlerites.”
Hitler had united the squabbling Germans into a happy, busy nation of brother and sisters.
And what Bismarck said of the headstrong Germans is also true of any nation:
“If we stick together, we can drive the Devil out of hell!”
And Hitler got that 90% approval by
1) saving the country and its economy, and
2) suppressing the 90% of critics who were malevolent, amateurish, ill-informed, and divisive.
Remember, the grandson of Ben Franklin bought a newspaper to trash President George Washington with totally invented lies and slanders for four long years, calling him even a traitor working for Britain (hunh?!) — and many demos-Americans gobbled it up!
Updated at 10:00 a.m. ET on Dec. 2, 2020.[source: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/12/nazi-china-communists-carl-schmitt/617237/]When Hong Kong erupted into protest this summer against a national-security law imposed by Beijing, the fact that Chinese scholars leaped to the Communist Party’s defense was perhaps predictable. How they argued in favor of it, however, was not.“Since Hong Kong’s handover,” Wang Zhenmin, a law professor at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions, wrote in People’s Daily, “numerous incidents have posed serious threats to Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.”The city, Wang was effectively arguing, was in no position to discuss civil liberties when its basic survival was on the line. Qi Pengfei, a specialist on Hong Kong at Renmin University, echoed those sentiments, insisting that the security law was meant to protect the island from the “infiltration of foreign forces.”*** Partly true
Any critic or movement of dissatified people can be quietly contacted by the CIA, funded by them with more and more money, then gradually taken over, and finally weaponized against any regime the CIA wishes to overthrow.
***
In articles, interviews, and news conferences throughout the summer, scores of academics made a similar case.Though Chinese academics are often circumscribed in what they can and cannot say, they nevertheless do disagree in public. At times, they even offer limited, and careful, critiques of China’s leadership. This time, however, the sheer volume of pieces that Chinese scholars produced, as well as the nature of those arguments—consistent, coordinated, and often couched in sophisticated legal jargon—suggested a new level of cohesion in Beijing on the acceptable scope of the state’s power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has markedly shifted the ideological center of gravity within the Communist Party. The limited tolerance China had toward dissent has all but dissipated, while ostensibly autonomous regions (geographically as well as culturally), including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Hong Kong, have seen their freedoms curtailed. All the while, a new group of scholars has been in ascendance. Known as “statists,” these academics subscribe to an expansive view of state authority, one even broader than their establishment counterparts. Only with a heavy hand, they believe, can a nation secure the stability required to protect liberty and prosperity. As a 2012 article in Utopia, a Chinese online forum for statist ideas, once put it, “Stability overrides all else.”Prioritizing order to this degree is anathema to much of the West, yet perspectives such as these are not unprecedented in Western history. In fact, China’s new statists have much in common with a faction that swept through Germany in the early 20th century.That affinity is no accident.China has in recent years witnessed a surge of interest in the work of the German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Known as Hitler’s “Crown Jurist,” Schmitt joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and, though he was only officially a Nazi Party member for three years, his anti-liberal jurisprudence had a lasting impact—at the time, by helping to justify Hitler’s extrajudicial killings of Jews [yeah-yeah-yeah] and political opponents, and then long afterward.
Schmitt (right) with the highly decorated WWI officer and author Ernst Jünger
Whereas liberal scholars view the rule of law as the final authority on value conflicts, Schmitt believed that the sovereign should always have the final say. Commitments to the rule for law would only undercut a community’s decision-making power, and “deprive state and politics of their specific meaning.” Such a hamstrung state, according to Schmitt, could not protect its own citizens from external enemies.
*** JdN: Weimar and Hitler Germany proved this
Weimar (1919-33) was democratic, chaotic, weak and disarmed, and by 1933 the country was broke and starving. Hitler, by abolishing, as he openly promised voters, multi-party “democracy,” unified his nation, carrying out the genuine popular will, and Germany began to boom in every way conceivable.
***
China’s fascination with Schmitt took off in the early 2000s when the philosopher Liu Xiaofeng translated the German thinker’s major works into Chinese. Dubbed “Schmitt fever,” his ideas energized the political science, philosophy, and law departments of China’s universities.Chen Duanhong, a law professor at Peking University, called Schmitt “the most successful theorist” to have brought political concepts into his discipline. “His constitutional doctrine is what we revere,” Chen wrote in 2012, before adding, of his Nazi membership, “That’s his personal choice.”An alumnus of Peking University’s philosophy program, who asked not to be identified speaking on sensitive issues, told me that Schmitt’s work was among “the common language, a part of the academic establishment” at the university.Schmitt’s influence is most evident when it comes to Beijing’s policy toward Hong Kong. Since its handover to China from Britain in 1997, the city has ostensibly been ruled under a “one country, two systems” framework, whereby it would be part of China, but its freedoms, independent judiciary, and other forms of autonomy would be preserved for 50 years. Over time, these freedoms have been eroded as the CCP has sought greater control, and more recently have been undermined completely with the national-security law.
Chen, who has written extensively on Hong Kong policy since 2014 and, according to The New York Times, is a former adviser to Beijing on the issue, cited Schmitt directly in defense of the concept of a national-security law back in 2018. “The German jurist Carl Schmitt,” he argued in an article, distinguishes between state norms and constitutional norms..“When the state is in dire peril,” Chen wrote, citing Schmitt, state leaders have the right to suspend constitutional norms, “especially provisions for civil rights.”.Jiang Shigong, also a law professor at Peking University, has made a similar case. Jiang, who worked as a researcher in Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong from 2004 to 2008, employs Schmitt’s ideas extensively in his 2010 book, China’s Hong Kong, to resolve tensions between sovereignty and the rule of law in favor of the Communist Party.*Jiang is also widely credited with authoring the 2014 Chinese-government white paper that gives Beijing “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong. In a nod to Schmitt, the paper claims that the preservation of sovereignty—of “one country”—must take precedence over civil liberties—of “two systems.” .Using Schmitt’s rationale, he raises the stakes of inaction in Hong Kong insurmountably high: No longer a liberal transgression, the security law becomes an existential necessity.
Chen and Jiang are “the most concrete expression thus far of [China’s] post-1990s turn to Schmittian ideas,” Ryan Mitchell, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote in a paper in July. They are the vanguard of the statist movement, which supplies the rationale for the authoritarian impulses of China’s leaders. And though it is unclear precisely how powerful they are in the upper echelons of the party, these statists share the same outlook as their paramount leader. “Xi Jinping’s big project is on reinventing and revitalizing state capacity,” Jude Blanchette, China chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “He is a statist.”
Why has a Nazi thinker garnered such a lively reception in China? To some degree, it is a matter of convenience. “Schmitt serves certain purposes that Marxism should have done, but can no longer do,” Haig Patapan, a politics professor at Griffith University in Australia who has written on Schmitt’s reception in China, told me. Schmitt gives pro-Beijing scholars an opportunity to anchor the party’s legitimacy on more primal forces—nationalism and external enemies—rather than the timeworn notion of class struggle.
Ideology is only part of the story, though. Another explanation is found in China’s history. In the 1930s, the country’s then-leader Chiang Kai-Shek developed a deep admiration for Nazi Germany. “[Germany] was a country like China that had unified itself late,” William Kirby, a professor of China studies at Harvard University and the author of Germany and Republican China, told me.
For China, a nation flanked by foreign adversaries, the German example of rapid modernization seemed exemplary. In 1927, Chiang would hire the German artillery expert Max Bauer to be his military adviser; his own son, Chiang Wei-Kuo, would serve in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi military arm, during the 1938 invasion of Austria.
One lesson from Chiang’s rule is that threats from abroad can stoke authoritarianism at home. And for almost a century, even as power transferred from Chiang’s Nationalists to Mao Zedong’s Communists, fear of “enemy” infiltration—the seedbed for fascism—lingered in China’s national psyche. “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?” Mao asked in the very first line of his Selected Works. Later, from 1989 to 1991, 500 articles in the People’s Daily, the state-controlled paper, contained the phrase “hostile forces.”The perceived threat of invasion, or at minimum suspicion of outsiders, continues to inform contemporary politics. Such anxiety lends credence to the anti-liberal theories of Carl Schmitt, who once proclaimed that all “political actions and motives can be reduced [to that distinction] between friends and enemies.”The pandemic has further ensconced statists’ views. That China has gotten rid of the virus, which President Donald Trump called “the invisible enemy,” while the United States remains hobbled by it, is portrayed among Chinese statists as a triumph for the Schmittian worldview.“Since Xi Jinping became China’s top leader,” Flora Sapio, a sinologist at the University of Naples, wrote, “Carl Schmitt’s philosophy has found even wider applications in China, in both ‘Party theory’ and academic life.” This shift is significant: It marks a move from what had been an illiberal government in Beijing—one that flouts liberal norms as a matter of convenience—to an anti-liberal government—one that repudiates liberal norms as a matter of principle.
*An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified when the book China’s Hong Kong was published. The initial, Chinese, edition was published in 2010. The English edition was published in 2017.
CHANG CHE is a writer. He has previously been published in The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
2 Comments
National socialism = European heathenism in ‘modern’ form. I believe it’s the future.
“Hitler’s defeat may have caused the decline of the West, […]”. What a statement!
On the one hand, the background powers have effected that Satan and evil are now called “Nazi” and “Germany”, this ubiquitously especially in the Anglosphere. On the other hand, they simply don’t understand that especially now, in the final phase of the NWO, more and more people start to wonder if the Nazis might have been right after all … and whether history might not have gone the way we’ve been told for a long time.
And although it may be beside the point, a note on the above news clipping with the Hitler photo: the uniforms are and will remain timelessly elegant! 😀
All over the world this has been noted, that the uniforms are visually appealing and harmonious. Truly a timeless elegance. For many actors who played “Nazis” and Wehrmacht soldiers, it is true: Secretly, they are proud that they were portrayed that way, in photos and in movies. As one German presenter put it, “The Nazis were [politically correct distancing], but the uniforms were awesome somewhere!”[1][2]
No matter what rank or level, visual elegance was everywhere, even among lowly ranks. Article with many photos:
… how is it that this era and these people, of all things, are so popular? Why not the English or the Americans or the Russians? Are there nations and peoples anywhere in the world that celebrate English, American or Russian soldiers in parades? Could it perhaps be that people intuitively feel who fought on the right side and feel to whom, therefore, veneration is due? Were the good guys perhaps not the good guys at all, and were the bad guys perhaps in fact the good guys? … Questions about questions … 🙂
National socialism = European heathenism in ‘modern’ form. I believe it’s the future.
“Hitler’s defeat may have caused the decline of the West, […]”. What a statement!
On the one hand, the background powers have effected that Satan and evil are now called “Nazi” and “Germany”, this ubiquitously especially in the Anglosphere. On the other hand, they simply don’t understand that especially now, in the final phase of the NWO, more and more people start to wonder if the Nazis might have been right after all … and whether history might not have gone the way we’ve been told for a long time.
And although it may be beside the point, a note on the above news clipping with the Hitler photo: the uniforms are and will remain timelessly elegant! 😀
All over the world this has been noted, that the uniforms are visually appealing and harmonious. Truly a timeless elegance. For many actors who played “Nazis” and Wehrmacht soldiers, it is true: Secretly, they are proud that they were portrayed that way, in photos and in movies. As one German presenter put it, “The Nazis were [politically correct distancing], but the uniforms were awesome somewhere!”[1][2]
No matter what rank or level, visual elegance was everywhere, even among lowly ranks. Article with many photos:
https://de.metapedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Uniformen_im_Zweiten_Weltkrieg_(Bildergalerie)
Shocking video footage! 🙂 :
“High school in Taiwan puts on Nazi-themed Christmas parade”, TRT World, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqa3QSzNiJ4
(“Student lashes out against criticism and penalties heaped upon class cosplaying Nazis”,
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3058253 )
Indonesia 2013: “Soldatenkaffee”, photo:
http://www.studiolum.com/wang/russian/soldatenkaffee/indonesia-4.jpg
… how is it that this era and these people, of all things, are so popular? Why not the English or the Americans or the Russians? Are there nations and peoples anywhere in the world that celebrate English, American or Russian soldiers in parades? Could it perhaps be that people intuitively feel who fought on the right side and feel to whom, therefore, veneration is due? Were the good guys perhaps not the good guys at all, and were the bad guys perhaps in fact the good guys? … Questions about questions … 🙂
[1] “Nazometer – Schmidt & Pocher – Erste Sendung” (at minute 1:52), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9YRbIjrF88
[2] https://de.metapedia.org/wiki/Schmidt,_Harald