sofiechan home

Short Review of National Socialism - Its Principles and Philosophy by Carlos Videla

anon_hony said in #4881 2w ago: received

A friend asked me to read National Socialism, here's a collection of short thoughts:

The book reveals the extent of the National Socialists' objectives and the depth of planning behind their actions. A review of the secondary literature on the subject doesn't really do the philosophy justice. When you read modern literature (even right wing) you come away with the impression that either 1) the system was an ad-hoc collection of ideas designed to fight judeobolshevism or that 2) the system simply a Hitlerian cult of personality. The book quickly dispels those notions. National Socialism was a spiritual and philosophical framework (which the book calls “life laws”) that had expressions in various domains like race policy, economic policy, and foreign policy. National Socialism is at its strongest when it discusses the philosophical underpinnings of the worldview. It's hard to contest the idea that the world is an environment of struggle. It’s hard to contest the notion that the world is full of selective processes for deciding which species, races, cultures, and civilizations rise and fall. The book posits an ideal: a civilization that is conscious of these selection processes and enacts policies designed to preserve and propagate that civilization.

I enjoyed the discussion of the Schutzstaffel, the creation of an elite group of men: physical, mental, and spiritually exceptional individuals all aligned around a shared mission. The fact that any German (and even some non-Germans) could distinguish themselves and be selected into this order of exceptional men is inspiring and should be emulated. While the book covered that SS men were expected to have six kids and that somehow their wives should be of exceptional quality as well, their selection process was given very short shrift. The book was also light on how the SS could have maintained itself for thousands of years. The book said that having an SS man as a parent was not sufficient to become SS, but how would it have resisted the temptation to ossify and lose the circulation of elites necessary to remain in power?

The other piece that I really liked was the concept of counter-selection, the idea that civilization and urbanization plant the seeds of their own undoing by selecting for the wrong characteristics. This is a concept that needs explication. Authors like Gregory Clark and Gregory Cochran have done a great job of explaining the selection processes that lead to the rise of highly successful empires, but very few other than NS racial thinkers have really thought about the processes that lead to the degeneration of civilizations. The concept of the thousand year Reich, was not that they would simply win WWII and hold onto power for a thousand years, but that their ideology would lead to continuous improvement in the German ruling elite which in turn would give them a thousand years to get better and better.

The two areas where I was the least impressed were the detailed explanation of NS religion and NS economics. NS philosophy drew on Hericlites and Nietzsche and seems to have hated Plato, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Locke and Hume. Philosophy is probably my weakest area, so I can’t really critique this section. The section on NS economics was also pretty weak, that said, we only have a 12-year laboratory (half of which was during wartime) to assess the merits. I think many thinkers on the right focus on unemployment statistics and factory production statistics and say that NS economics was a smashing success, but I think you could look at the statistics of FDR, Mao, and Stalin and come to similar conclusions about the New Deal, Maoism, and Stalinism. Tank production numbers are up 1000% comrade! Maybe it’s my austro-libertarian roots, but I think abandoning the price mechanism and instead using Zentralplanung might have worked well during World War 2, but its shortcomings would have been quickly evident had Germany prevailed in the war.

referenced by: >>4886 >>4916 >>4960

A friend asked me to received

anon_hony said in #4884 2w ago: received

Would Germany have de-cartelized its economy and developed an economic system capable of competing with the United States? It’s possible, but the German antipathy towards capital, banking, and dog-eat-dog competition makes it unlikely. That said, if China had a Deng Xiaoping, so Nazi Germany might have elevated Ludwig Erhard and experienced Wirtschaftswunder anyway.

That said, it’s unclear whether, even if Great Britain and the Soviet Union had surrendered, the war would have ended. NS theoreticians saw war as a kind of spiritual proving ground for young men, where the best of the best could be observed, selected, and elevated. I have some reservations about perpetual war. While war is pretty successful at distinguishing successful civilizations from unsuccessful ones at the societal level, I’m not convinced it is at the individual level. I think NS ideology posits that the most heroic and energetic are ultimately the survivors of war. It seems to me that World Wars I and II were probably dysgenic, not eugenic. I think the brave were the ones who were likely charging pillboxes and leaping onto hand grenades. I think the cowards were perhaps the ones hiding in foxholes. Difficult to say whether or not you want modern warfare to be a sieve for the men of your civilization

The book takes an interesting turn when it becomes clear to the Nazis that they were going to lose the war. They tried extremely hard to incorporate NS values and philosophy into their people to enable its rebirth. That project can be seen as a complete failure. One section I found very interesting was that every textbook covers the NS's censorship of “deviant literature” during their rise to power. The censorship by the allies, which, if anything, was a hundred times more radical and comprehensive, was airbrushed entirely from history. The tens of thousands of books, journals, papers, and magazines extirpated from the historical record essentially require a successor to NS to be reinvented from first principles.

While many on the right have advanced theories of government that they believe will lead to good governance, our future should involve creating a metatheory that leads to a civilization capable of persisting for thousands of years. Also, while I think Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, and Dollfuss’ Austria could be called somewhat successful experiments, Hitler and NS philosophers saw Catholicism as an alien set of beliefs that had to be tolerated until the people discarded it and accepted NS as their philosophical operating system. As a Catholic, I would clearly not be “SS material.”

referenced by: >>4916

Would Germany have d received

anon_wevu said in #4886 2w ago: received

>>4881
Thanks for the review. Is the book you're talking about the one published in 2025, by Jake Leone?

I've also always found it hard to reconcile with the NS belief in perpetual war. I agree with their conception of the human condition as a constant struggle, with war being the most distilled and "truest" form of that struggle, almost sacred. But it's very hard to see how mechanized, modern warfare could ever be anything but completely destructive and even counter-productive; like you said, it seems to be dysgenic.

And once you conquer the entire planet, what then? Sure, you could try to re-orient your civilization toward space travel and colonization, but that's not the same thing at all, and it seems more likely that your global empire - even if entirely monoethnic and homogenous - would collapse onto itself in brutal civil war (maybe this is okay and to be expected...?)

It's always been the nagging hang-up for me with NS. In defense of NS, it's one of the few (only?) "philosophies" that at least honestly engages with the reality of the human condition (that the human condition is a struggle between groups of biological creatures). If it's true that there's no solution to this problem within NS ideology, all it means is that there doesn't seem to be any solution at all to the problem within any known (possible?) ideology, and that NS at least gets us "halfway there" more than any other worldview does.

referenced by: >>4887 >>4925

Thanks for the revie received

anon_wevu said in #4887 2w ago: received

>>4886
Whoops I somehow didn't read the full thread title. Will check it out, thanks.

Whoops I somehow did received

anon_napy said in #4916 2w ago: received

>>4881
>>4884
It's a good book. I read it and recommended it to a number of people. I think basically everyone of philosophical character on the right should read it.

>I think abandoning the price mechanism and instead using Zentralplanung might have worked well during World War 2, but its shortcomings would have been quickly evident had Germany prevailed in the war.
For what it's worth, Hitler was a free markets guy, with some limits. He wanted to change the rules around to eliminate low-effort rental income, impersonal limited liability, etc, and add robust socialism of the community mutual support type, but his economics definitely believed in competition and the individual. The wartime techno-totalitarian economy was a sort of exogenous historical condition that you'll notice the book emphasizes was actually problematic for Nazi doctrine, which was much less about industrial planning than the war required.

I think the best modern analogue of what would have become of Nazi economics, just extrapolating their theory and practice, is modern China. China's economy since Deng is approximately National Socialist. China is not a National Socialist state at all, because they lack the quality-oriented racial consciousness and that whole main part of the ideology. Economics is incidental to NS. It is maybe better to say both China and Nazi Germany were pragmatic developmentalist on economics. But "pragmatism" first requires breaking the power of the capitalist class and labor unions in a distinctly revolutionary way so it's not a great label either.

>It seems to me that World Wars I and II were probably dysgenic, not eugenic.
This is definitely true, but I don't think NS was about war any more than it was about the jews. Both of those foci were the result of particular exogenous historical circumstances that NS was responding to. They had a total war to fight, much more total than the war that the US or Britain fought. Of course they had to interpret the world through the lens of a National Socialist war. But Hitler said he was not put on earth to fight wars, and he wasn't.

>That project can be seen as a complete failure.
Partially. We're all here reading them and the entire moral cosmology of the West revolves around Adolf Hitler despite the comprehensive and unprecedented censorship. We lost a lot of books, but the essential truths remain. Anything reinvented from first principles would be recognizably NS-associated, at least as an esoteric doctrine.

> As a Catholic, I would clearly not be “SS material.”
This is not strictly true. You had to be gottglaubig and not jewish, but catholicism wasn't banned even for the SS. It was just political catholicism that was suppressed, though of course the NS worldview is at the end of the day also incompatible with Christianity as taught by the church, and expected to replace it.

The part I find the most interesting is the moral and cosmological core of the worldview in wanting to build a society that racially self-improves by consciously integrating the life laws. That's a first rate teleology for civilization. The only other serious contenders in the west are basically rawlsian utilitarian liberal progressivism, and christianity. I find it much more compelling on every point than both. There are pieces missing, but here is a philosophical grand quest.

It's a good book. I received

anon_ryfo said in #4924 2w ago: received

Interesting review, thanks. I'm curious about how race and civilization interact in their thinking. The jews were some of their smartest. Many were patriots and fully assimilated. The holocaust was certainly dysgenic. Why in their thinking was racial purity necessary for the propagation of their civilization.

referenced by: >>4926

Interesting review, received

anon_wevu said in #4925 2w ago: received

>>4886
I finished the book, pretty interesting read. But my same fundamental question about NS, described above, remains unresolved.

The author and his selected sources take great pains to stress that NS was firmly against internal, intra-societal individualist competition, leading to selection pressures at the individual level. In fact, they explicitly shunned it, and worked to prevent it via egalitarian socialist policies. They believed that *every* citizen should be fertilitymaxxing, even the "inferior" ones. The logic was that the more aggregate reproduction you have, the larger the repository of genes to draw from in order to breed geniuses, who pair off with and beget other geniuses, which elevates the collective people to a higher level, etc. This makes sense. But I'm pretty skeptical that a society who genuinely believed the NS Worldview would be okay with obvious undesirables being encouraged (or even permitted?) to fertilitymaxx just like everyone else. It's just too much of a glaring contradiction.

And so the question immediately suggests itself, to me at least: okay, but what happens when your population explodes due to everyone being exhorted to fertilitymaxx as the highest moral imperative? Well, you need more living space, and you need more resources. The author points out that historically, NS Germany only went to war because they felt like they had to due to external pressures (I think this is a fair and accurate historical assessment). But even without those particular historical circumstances, it seems clear to me that a NS society would very rapidly be forced to engage in aggressive, expansionist foreign policy to satisfy the conditions created by its own Worldview. Not to mention that a society built on the foundation of "Life Is A Struggle, Embrace it, Do what it takes to win" is inevitably going to be warlike in practice.

So my question remains: once you conquer the planet, and your kind has displaced all its competitors, what then? Maybe this question seems silly to others, but I've never been able to get it out of my mind when thinking about NS. I would guess that the most likely outcome would be civil war on a global scale. But in the modern world of increasingly destructive and horrific weapons, this doesn't seem like it would end very well, or it at least wouldn't end in an outcome consistent with eugenic NS goals. It's easy to see why the NS Worldview was aggressively "banned" by the rest of the world after WW2 - it was essentially an "overpowered" civilizational strategy that everyone feared would destroy the entire planet. Much safer for everyone to economymaxx as a proxy for warfare (unfortunately this doesn't work and just makes everything fake and gay and nobody even wants to have kids at all anymore).

With this in mind, it seems to me that the NS Worldview is much more realistic on smaller scales than it is at the nation-state level, especially a nation-state as large as the current US (aside from the US's heterogeneity issue). It's actually possible to imagine a NS micro-society forming and thriving somewhere in the present day, gradually growing and expanding and strengthening. Like Mormons but sane, not cucked, and without all the maladaptive religious baggage. Hopefully some people give it a try before the entire species degenerates into AI-dependent Eloi hominid biomass.

I finished the book, received

anon_napy said in #4926 2w ago: received

>>4924
One of the most important things Videla does in that book is dispel the jew obsession of modern commentators on the nazis. National Socialism isn't about jews. Yes some jews were patriotic germans, and some of them got recognized as honorary aryans. But peace was very difficult at that time between Germany and Judea. Especially so with National Socialist Germany for a very long list of reasons that have nothing to do with irrational antisemitism.

NS views civilization as a product of race and worldview. They wanted to get both right for the birth of a new civilization to succeed "western civilization" (a recent term invented to include jews in what was more properly called European Christendom). Race bears a lot of "spiritual" content, so they wanted to first secure the position of their own race to pursue its telos without interference. They were pragmatic about the matter of "racial purity" given that Germany itself let alone the rest of Europe is already a mixture of different subraces, but they made up for that by getting serious about breeding and selection environment going forward to become the race they wanted to be. But it was essential to their project to expel alien populations who were not assimilated, if only to consolidate power and get their own domain under control.

Then we have the matter of worldview: NS pursues a scientific natural law based view of man and the world rooted somewhat mythically in the concepts of the pre-Christian Aryan worldview. This is at odds with the Abrahamic or progressive worldview which postulates all these mystical phenomena like the immortal soul, sin, salvation, equality, human rights, incarnation, miracles, world peace, and so on. National Socialism is rigorously about this world, and in particular about blood, work, struggle and selective breeding. Videla does a good job summarizing the NS worldview if you are interested. For a less "scientific" take, see Savitri Devi's The Lighting and The Sun. For a more religious angle, Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th Century is informative but was somewhat repudiated by Hitler later on.

Arthur de Gobineau is another good read on how race and civilization interact, though not a Nazi.

referenced by: >>4928

One of the most impo received

anon_home said in #4928 2w ago: received

>>4926

> "western civilization" (a recent term invented to include jews in what was more properly called European Christendom)

Nah this is cope. Western Civilization was very clearly created by the Greeks and brought to full fruition by the Roman Republic. Both the Renaissance and the American Founding precipitated new high water marks for civilizational achievement in the West, and both were accomplished by young high energy men with deep knowledge and respect of the Grecoroman origins. Two of the most central Founders, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, were in fact post-Christian Unitarians.

Attributing Western Civ to Christianity is stolen valor, plain and simple.

referenced by: >>4932

Nah this is cope. We received

anon_napy said in #4932 2w ago: received

>>4928
I'm not saying Christianity created our civilization. Obviously our cultural and racial roots run much deeper than that in the heritage of Romans, Greeks, and Germanics. But "Western Civilization", which is usually counted distinct from classical civilization, refers to the period of European Christendom from Charlemagne to the 20th century characterized by European blood under the influence of a Christian worldview. As a term it was popularized partially by 20th century Jewish emigres from Europe trying to articulate what they thought they had in common with the Anglosphere, which may before that have simply thought of itself in more specifically English terms. I agree about stolen valor. I'm just trying to point out that the term itself is something of a distortion. In any case I understand that the Nazis saw themselves as distinct from it and superseding it.

I'm not saying Chris received

anon_kymu said in #4960 1w ago: received

>>4881
https://web.archive.org/web/20120505203710/http://www.geniebusters.org/what-is-national-socialism.htm
Posting this here for now as it’s topical and was the beginning of my true education regarding National Socialism.
I wouldn’t agree with everything now, but it quickly puts an end to the ridiculous phantom it has become in the western imagination, which is useful enough, and provides insight into little-covered cultural uniquities.

Posting this here fo received

anon_hony said in #4967 7d ago: received

Wanted to thank the posters making this thread stimulating.

There's much to respond to.

I do think wevu gets the NS war issue better than napy... It very much reads like NS ideology saw war as a crucible for drawing the best out of a people AND securing more living space for their exploding population. Once science, which the NS clearly believed in solves early childhood mortality, when you have a TFR of 6-7, you WILL eventually hit the carrying capacity of your land, eventually. At some point, you will need more space. I'm not a malthusian by any stretch, but if WWII hadn't happened but Germany did hit a TFR of 7, it would have hit a billion people by 2007. I don't think a billion people in Germany would work. The entire country would be a megalopolis with the population density of Baltimore, Maryland

referenced by: >>4974

Wanted to thank the received

anon_wevu said in #4974 6d ago: received

>>4967
Yeah. And it's not just strictly about carrying capacity at the limits, too. In order to live a good and desirable life, you need space. Because of their geographic and historical circumstances, Germans have always been particularly sensitive to this reality - they've always been surrounded on all sides in a hyper-competitive European environment.

The NS leadership was also very pro-rural, pro-agricultural life, and they wanted to preserve it as much as possible, which meant an even greater need for living space. According to this book, they saw it as a "state of nature" petri dish environment for natural selection. That was new info for me. But I don't think that this really makes much sense in a modern world that has completely and utterly conquered Malthusian pressures. And modern warfare seems straight up dysgenic, as has already been discussed.

A society run according to the NS Worldview needs some kind of mechanism for selection, but neither of the above two methods seem like they could work in the modern world. So you're left with the option of actively preventing less fit genes from propagating, as the NS's American contemporaries espoused at the time. This is, of course, heckin not okay in the eyes of virtually everyone in the modern world. Although we're now in the bizarre situation of voluntary fertility collapse, so we actually *are* getting selection - just....not the kind of selection that "we" probably want.

Like I said above, I do think a "genuine" NS society would be possible at the micro level today. I think that you'd need to restrict reproduction in some way for those with obviously less desirable genes. Maybe you could give them some other kind of status/privileges to compensate. I don't think that kicking them out Mormon-style would work, because this kind of society needs everyone's buy-in or it wouldn't function at all.

Personally, I find the NS Worldview to be more or less Objectively True. It's pretty much just the Law Of Gnon, which is the best arbiter for 'Truth' that we have for the condition of biological life. Imo the difficulty isn't in comprehensively parsing the rules and implications of the Worldview, or concocting sufficiently convincing apologetics for it, but in figuring out how to actually apply it in real life practice in the present day at the societal level. At the individual level it's easy: just have as many kids as possible. And maybe that's the best we can do. But it doesn't hurt to dream bigger.

Yeah. And it's not j received

You must login to post.