Douglas Mercer
November 10 2024
The tale of our lives is tangled yarn, good and ill together
And the truth of the matter, when the final positions of being are arrayed with and against one another, is that the friends and enemies will be of a confusing nature — so much so that any but the most perceptive will not be able to tell for certain who is who and which is which, at least until the masks all come off and the faces appear in their final clarity; that is a peculiar catty corner situation will be in effect. There will be knotty twists and turns, and there will be ever shifting winds of forces and values as cross currents eddy and as the whole thing mixes and swirls about it will be all one can do to keep one’s head.
Sometimes in the late 1960s George Steiner, that classic Middle European Jew Scholar, expressed his extreme distaste of the hippies, he said that when he saw the young bearded men with the rucksacks what he feared above all was the fomenting of a new fascism. To most today, superficial as always, that just seems plain wrong. What could the Summer Of Love have to do with the Cathedral Of Light? The Age Of Aquarius with the Thousand Year Reich? Quite a lot actually and it’s well to recall that it was (sometime) National Socialist sympathizer Carl Jung who popularized the notion of Aquarius and by the late 1960s he was gracing the covers of rock albums and was a bestseller in Bohemian bookstores. Shakespeare said that it was misery that acquaints one with strange bedfellows; but apparently New Thought and the New Age do as well, and figures as diverse as Terrence McKenna and William Pierce believe the universe is realizing itself. For these secret sharers beneath the skin are partakers of that oldest human dream, the millenarian fantasy of the Golden Age, so if it was a reborn Atlantis or a World Ice Theory or dreams of the Sonnenmensch; or if it was a Utopia Of Love or Letting The Sun Shine In or the Food Of The Gods, the dreams was just the same if the vision was starkly contrasted. To be free of the fetters of the machine, to live limitless and free, it is the most libidinal desire of everyone to seek the principle of freedom which knows no bottom. But as always there is a catch, the evil appears nowhere but in the details, and freedom as the old English saw has it, is not free—and thereby hangs a tale.
Words and symbols and meanings shift and vary over time, new contexts cast new light on them and sometimes reverse them or, more often, show how the opposites are combined; though it usually takes more time to see how the unity comes about in division. The classic example of that is the semaphore of the middle and index fingers extended but separated; this V shape is a primal archetype and once it meant victory (which was no victory); and then it meant peace (which was no peace). What it will mean in the future remains to be seen, as we stir this witches’ brew or drink it to the dregs.
What did the National Socialists have in common with the hippies? What did Steiner sense and fear? Recall the Wandervogel, those migratory birds trying to get away from the Dark Satanic Mills which haunted their imaginations. They sensed in their heart of hearts that the Ice Man Cometh and wanted no part of it. Around the beginning of the 20th Century they drew their inspiration from medieval wandering scholars and deep Teutonic lore and a search for the revival of the folk; that is the small bands of youth were groping for that buzzword of the 1960s: authenticity, or to put it in plain Anglo-Saxon: the real. What those youth did was turn their backs on their elders (trust no one over thirty), don their back packs and head to the German Primeval forests looking for independence, a frugal way of life, and an existence outside of normal controls, that is a refusal to compromise with the adult world. For those who think that this freedom lust somehow contradicts the main ideology of National Socialism they need to think again; National Socialism was famous for its distrust of bureaucracy and its always entangling forms—it wanted what is called in the literature a “polyarchy” of power centers, where authority was devolved down to the smallest possible unit. As for the love of nature the National Socialists were famous for it as well, they built their road system according to the landscape, were equally scrupulous about all their infrastructure, they stripped their buildings of asbestos in the 1930s (America was still dealing with in the 1970s), created protections for animals, banned smoking in public places and always applied biology to any situation. So it is not surprising that those roaming birds proved a provided a fertile field for an ideology which was totalizing only in its quest for the real, and the free.
“Even without Hitler’s green predilections with the likes of Goering, Hess, and Himmler no other country could boast of such a green triumvirate at the highest echelons of society. In fact it is highly doubtful that any such concentration of green power has ever existed in any country.”
This is the famous Oak Sacrifice like the seedlings from the Goethe tree, the return to blood and soil to be free of the capitalist machine and all of its over-rationalizing and artificial forms. Stripped of its nomenclature this is a project that would have been near and dear to the heart of any of the sixties generation with its back to nature ethos and its extremes of environmentalism, its Earth Day, and its theories of Gaia. For that the earth and the universe itself is a living breathing and organic organism is the truth that becomes universally recognized by all in the end.
It is said that in the 1950s that Germany retreated to the cozy world of domesticity, of Church and Home, and that this was a regression to the National Socialist mean just under another name, but nothing could be further from the truth. Hitler after all was an artist and writer at heart, the famous Bohemian Corporal of legend, who stayed up all night musing philosophically and sleeping through the morning. The inner core of National Socialists were opposed to the nuclear family; Hitler called the family a bourgeois hangover from the hypocritical 19th Century, a relic that was well past its use by date. The most famous filmmaker in National Socialist Germany was Veit Harlan and in all of his movies is the same theme and paradigm: the threat of the home and that of domesticity; there is always a wild woman in the offing who represented freedom from stifling routine; the movies of the Reich that Goebbels oversaw often showed marriage as inhibiting and shots of the husband and wife were in claustrophobic rooms, but the man and his mistress were shot in sunlit nature; the uptight bourgeois was a figure of ridicule, and the adulterous female was the heroine; the wife was frigid and cold, possibly to be re-sexualized by the threat of the mistress. Harlan always starred his Swedish Valkyrie like wife Kristina Soderbaum, usually taking her clothes off on film, often portraying her on horseback wading through the surf, or shooting arrows like an Amazon. For him domestic life was not life; life was the uninhibited freedom of nature. In a stage production as an actor for the State Theater in 1926 a writer said that Harlan exposed the foolishness of the so-called home, and the mortal threat of domesticity was prevalent throughout all his films. That is, to borrow a phrase from a later time, the Germans wanted to let the sun shine in and so like a double helix form the strands of history entwine one another in a fatal embrace (see The German Revolution, White Biocentrism, June 27 2021)
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The America of the 1950s mirrored that of the Germany at the same time. A era of passive conformity and orderly boredom epitomized by that famous Man In The Gray Flannel Suit. Later this was parodied by the Stepford Wives where the women became automatons of supposed perfection. But for every action there is a reaction; and when you shut the genie up in a bottle it will escape; and when it is shut too tight the explosion is enormous and try getting it back in then. As late as 1971 in the Last Picture Show Cybil Sheppard appeared in her underwear and for the fights and the reaction you would have thought the world had ended when really the vision was quite pedestrian. Lady Chatterley is a book of jaw locking dullness but its release was heralded as some kind of triumph of freedom, when really under ill auspices it was all the devils being set loose. What this represents is a nation that has lost its way and would soon lose its mind. The National Socialists had squared this circle long before and were on the way to the freedom that was born in their forests, a freedom which had measure and proportion and so was perfected; but by a trick of fame or fate it was averted when the Battle Of Stalingrad went the wrong way.
No sooner had America defeated the “dreaded” National Socialists in the Battle Of The Titans than it retreated and regressed into an infantile state. For a nation that puts its kids in Mickey Mouse hats and has them sing why because we like you is as babyish as a generation lost in space wallowing and fornicating in the mud, these being two sides of the same debased coin. There were still the Knights Of Old preparing to fly through the stars but nearly everything else was shut tight; there were the Beats with their Howls but these were bootless cries; and then there was that fabled efflorescence of magic and imagination that came a cropper on equally fabled and mud filled fields.
The nexus or interface between the two lost ways as always was that notion of liberation—what is it? The hippies and their various straggling New Age successors always put the cart before the horse; for first comes iron discipline and order, the only soil out of which true freedom can ever emerge. The pursuit of happiness is as American as apple pie and even wormed its way into the founding document. This will always devolve into dog’s breakfast of doing one’s own thing, and a Me Decade, and key parties. But this is only personal and personal freedom is that most trivial of things, but the old freedom, the freedom of the forests is won by hard work and courage and loyalty and is always in the offing for any coming race. For do what thou wilt, under love or under anything, is not a flirting with disaster but is making love to it. You might as well spike the water supply with LSD-25 and have everyone on the roof and the Golden Gods will jump; for imagination is a potent drug, the most potent there is, but when reality sets in the learning curve from roof to ground is straight down. No, the National Socialists had it right, they were the cool headed logicians who had the correct course to steer between the rock of conformity and the whirlpool of license, and they were set to patiently work it out and would have, had not Stalingrad gone the other way. The triumph of the will will be no free for all, but will evolve in an orderly way and at the heights of the Ivory Tower on clear days we will see forever. From the twisted contraries and interlocking evils has come the radioactive fallout of a civilization in distress due to antiquated notions. Can the flotsam and the jetsam of the degraded culture we see around us be the start of that storied coming race? To all appearances no, but then appearances are often deceiving, and who is who and what is what is not always clear on foggy mornings; and history it does nothing but fool us by our vanities and the cunning passages are purple ones where the narrative picks up speed. Which is what will happen once we have drunk this witches’ brew to the bitter dregs and had our fill of the evil, until a deeper call resonates, and as no less person than Tolkien warned us, the monster it comes home.
