The Road to Serfdom, Hayek continued

The chapter on Nazism is the only chapter I've read three times. Each time I read it the thinking in it is refined.

Called "The Socialist Roots of Nazism," Hayek explores how far left and far right in Nazi Germany dovetailed in the years running up to Hitler's takeover.

He probably could not do justice to this complex dovetailing in the 11 pages he allots to the issue, and I can't in turn do justice to his 11 pages.

In addition to Marx there is a prevalent notion that the German nation needed to act as one, and that individualism of every kind needed to be suppressed. Hayek goes so far as to say that the Germans saw the war with England in WWI as a battle between the corporate state, and the individualist state. And they didn't know why they lost, and wanted a rematch.

"Before 1914 all the true German ideals of a heroic life were in deadly danger before the continuous advance of English commercial ideals, English comfort, and English sport. The English people had not only themselves become completely corrupted, every trade-unionist being sunk in the 'morass of comfort,' but they had begun to infect all other peoples. Only the war had helped the Germans to remember that they were really a people of warriors, a people among whom all activities and particularly economic activities were subordinated to military ends. Sombart knew that the Germans were held in contempt by other people because they regard war as sacred -- but he glories in it. To regard war as inhuman and senseless is a product of commercial views" (184).

Hayek goes on to indicate that liberalism itself comes out of a commercial mentality, and that the Germans across the board (with the exception of the educated German bourgeoisie) hated English liberalism, and saw it as their enemy.

Why was this the case?

It seems that a similar hatred of liberalism operates now in American academia in which German thought predominates (Marx, and the Frankfurt school, have now relocated into America, and spread their spores, repopulating their totalitarian ideals throughout the American higher education system).

Many of the socialists who came to America because they were Jews were nevertheless totalitarians in much the same way as Hitler was, Hayek argues, with the sole exception that they had been marked as vermin for their genetic background.

"We should never forget that the anti-Semitism of Hitler has driven from his country, or turned into his enemies, many people who in every respect are confirmed totalitarians of the German type" (196).

This thinking of Hayek's might be condemned as anti-Semitic, except that he consciously draws from other German Jews who were liberals. (Someone named Rathenau is mentioned.)

Hayek argues that for the great majority of German intellectuals across the spectrum of political beliefs totalitarianism had triumphed over any form of individualism.

And those ideas had by then (1944) leaped across the Channel, into English and American thought, and were beginning to reproduce.

Someone named EH Carr, as well as Arnold Toynbee, and others, he says, have begun to believe in the totalitarian model. He cites Carr, "the mass production of opinion is the corollary of the mass production of goods" (198).

Churches had to be dismantled, pastors who didn't obey had, like Bonhoeffer, to be arrested, newspapers had to have friendly editors put in, radio had to be controlled, and uniformity imposed in the universities. Heidegger had to replace Husserl (Husserl was a Jew). The totalitarian system could not brook individuality of opinion. Individualism and individualists had to be destroyed. Humorists had to be destroyed. People from other viewpoints (Jews, gypsies) had to be destroyed. National socialism was just that. Anyone who wasn't part of the final solution had to be considered an ideological enemy and terminated.

It took just six years from the beginning of hostilities (Poland in 1939 until the invasion of Berlin in summer 1945) to roll back this oppressive ideology and begin to replant liberalism within Germany. In the Soviet Union, it took another forty-five years (Christmas 1989) until liberalism began once more to breathe under the name of Glasnost. And yet, Russia under Putin appears to be going back to a form of virulent nationalism, and to the disappearance of journalists, and critics, with very few able to survive liquidation (Garry Kasparov being one of those few, who continues to stand for liberalism).

In America, Fox News is one of the last holdouts of liberalism, and individual opinion, where Christianity is still permitted (Protestant Christianity as the ultimate liberalism, the ultimate individualism, in which each person has access to God, and to revelation, and to total freedom of inquiry). Even at Fox there are no prominent Protestant from the mainstream religions. Hannity and O'Reilly are Catholics, while Greta Van Susteren is a Christian Scientist. Beck is himself a Mormon. On the Supreme Court the last Protestants have been expunged. There are no longer any prominent Protestants on the national scene. The Wall Street Journal is perhaps the last bastion of the free press where individual viewpoints are honored and yet even there one never reads a column by a prominent Protestant thinker. We have been banned. Our churches are still permitted to exist, although many of them have been taken over from within and more and more mirror the socialist zeitgeist in which equality matters more than individualism.

How long will this situation last? It all depends on what happens in November, 2010. If Obama can get his goons to steal elections again, as they almost certainly did in Minnesota with the election of Franken, the situation may worsen for freedom of thought, and for the Protestant spirit of free inquiry.

Hayek argues that free enterprise leads to freedom of opinion. As more and more are on the government payroll however (the totalitarian Germans and Russians wanted everyone on the government payroll), the ability to feed oneself became linked to one's ability to nod at the government and say, "Yes, massa." Anyone who couldn't do this died in the concentration camps, or the Gulags. Solzhenitsyn's Ivan D. arrested and put to eight years of hard labor for making a joke that indicated he was not with the pogrom.