The Rise and Fall of the Sturmabteilung

By Benjamin Welton

Editor's note: There is a faction of the contemporary left which denounces anyone who disagrees with them as fascists, Nazis, or “literally Hitler”. I figure that if we will be called such names anyway, then we have nothing to lose by studying real Nazis to see what lessons can be learned from their example.

One of the problems that has long deviled the Western Right is that of creating alternatives to the Leviathan state. For the Left, there is no such problem. West German communist Rudi Dutschke told his followers that, in order to win, the Left must take over the institutions of power. The Dutschke model has succeeded in the United States. To see how the Left has overrun American human resources and marketing departments, one need only consider the existence of “woke” corporate capital or the recent banning of Alex Jones for ill-defined “hate speech”. In Europe, the situation is even more dire thanks to the legal reality of “hate speech” laws and the existence of left-wing bureaucracies that think it is a good idea to provide former jihadists with housing and jobs. A mostly disarmed European populace also makes resistance all but impossible, thus giving the Left in Europe safety to pursue their desired population engineering.

The Right, on the other hand, always finds itself on the blunt end of the stick when it tries to organize because the Cathedral always views right-wing activism as much more serious threat to its power. This is arguably the most terrible legacy of the 1930s, when mass movements in Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, and Poland seized power and established right-wing dictatorships. For opponents of the Western Right, any mobilization of supporters is seen as one step away from extermination campaigns.

Taken together, they belie the inherent weakness within democracy. As Hoppe writes,

“As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society.”[1]

Unless egalitarianism is stamped out, countries will inevitably decline into avarice, sloth, and patterns of elite-backed racial guilt-mongering. Western countries that accept egalitarianism will come to resemble modern France, where government debt to GDP and government spending to GDP are both well over 50 percent. Philosopher Guillaume Faye recently made the point to interviewer Gregoire Canlorbe that “[France] is today more communist than the Soviet Union ever was.” In a country that represents less than one percent of the world's population, Faye notes that “France represents 15 percent of the world's welfare state redistribution.” The reason why France's natural elites (the descendants of those not guillotined in the Revolution) do not rebel is because the French state provides then with the “good life”—wine, cheese, world-class food, and plenty of Internet pornography. In his book The Returned, French journalist David Thomson says that besides its nightmarish immigration policies, France's problem with Islamic terrorism stems from the fact that the Fifth Republic is the archetype of the decadent and amoral Western “pleasure dome”.

The fact that democracies inherently accept egalitarianism, especially mass democracies like the ones currently ruling the United States and Europe, renders them pathologically incapable of expunging communism, whether overt or covert, from their bodies politic. After all, both communism and liberal democracy are predicated on the idea that all men are equal, should be afforded the same rights, and should never be under the thrall of a natural elite. As such, both are revolts against nature. As Murray Rothbard noted in his essay “Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature”, the reason why the Left enjoys such power is because they have been conceded “to have morality, justice, and 'idealism'” on their side.[2] The Right, because it opposes the Left, is therefore rendered morally repugnant and the enemy of an ill-defined “progress”. The Left gets away with such easy moralizing because they rule over an unnatural state and have convinced the masses that what is unnatural is natural.

What is to be done? For both Hoppe and neoreactionaries, the answer lies in creating or restoring a new elite. This makes sense initially, but how can one find such an elite in a society so thoroughly imbued with an egalitarian, democratic ethos? One answer may lie in the history of Germany between the World Wars. During this age of great instability, several right-wing movements came to the forefront via violence, demonstrations, and ingenious political intrigue. Eventually one group, the National Socialist German Workers Party, seized power in 1933 and ultimately drove their nation and many others into the worst war in human history.

Despite this horrific end, and despite the hue and cry of the left-wing intelligentsia, the story of these Weimar-era groups in general and the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) in particular can teach the Western Right quite a bit about organizing for victory. It is necessary to learn from what they did right. Even more importantly, we need to study what went so terribly wrong.

Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com

References:

1. Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (2001). Democracy–The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. New Brunswick: Routledge. p. 218.
2. Rothbard, Murray (2000). Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature And Other Essays, 2nd ed. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute. p. 1.
3. Hoppe, p. xiii
4. Jones, Nigel (2012). A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis. London: Hachette Book Group. p. xii.
5. Ibid., p. xiii
6. Ibid., p. 192
7. Weber, Thomas (2017). Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 61.
8. Ibid., p. 66.
9. Ibid., p. 102.
10. Ibid., p. 101.
11. Siemens, Daniel (2017). _Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts. _New Haven and London: Yale University Press. p. 59.
12. Ibid., p. 125.
13. Weber, p. 190.
14. Ibid., p. 300.
15. Ibid., p. 158.