06. NAZISM, RACISM AND SATANISM
by: Jeffrey Deboo
This article appeared in The Burning Ground, Volume 1 Issue 1,
1994, (DUNGEONS OF DARKNESS 5 Rue Gabriel Pierné, 57000 Metz, France, Enclose
an IRC for reply) and has also appeared in numerous other publications. [It
also appeared in The Black Flame Vol.3, Num.1 & 2, along with
other similar articles by Mr. DeBoo. Ed.]
In some occult circles, it has become fashionable to express a
certain affinity with Nazism, and even to look upon it as a kindred ideology.
But how valid is this?
Satanists who feel this way would well be served by reading Mein
Kampf. Hitler indeed recognized that the masses are sheeplike - but rather than
deploring this, he applauded it, glorifying conformity, obedience, group identity,
and self-sacrifice. He condemned individualism, attributing it to the contamination
of the German "race" by "inferior" races:
"This self-sacrificing will to give one's personal labor and if
necessary one's own life for others is most strongly developed in the Aryan...
Not in his intellectual gifts lies the source of the Aryan's capacity for creating
and building culture. If he had just this alone, he could only act destructively,
in no case could he organize; for the innermost essence of all organization
requires that the individual renounce putting forward his personal opinion and
interests and sacrifice both in favor of a larger group."
"In so far as they directed foreign blood into our national body,
they contributed to that catastrophic splintering of our inner being which is
expressed in German super-individualism - a phenomenon, I am sorry to say, which
is praised in many quarters."
"This co-existence of unblended racial elements of the most varying
kind accounts for what is termed hyper-individualism in Germany. In peaceful
periods it may sometimes do good services, but taking all things together, it
has robbed us of world domination. If the German people in its historic development
had possessed that herd unity which other peoples enjoyed, the German Reich
today would doubtless be mistress of the globe."
Take another look at some of those old German Nazi rally films.
Try to see past the quasi-occult symbols and sharp black uniforms, and observe
what is really being depicted. Great regimented masses of men, standing or marching
in rigid formation. No individuality, no questioning, no thought permitted.
And the jackbooted pontiff whose mesmerizing voice holds this flock in thrall?
No La Vey or Crowley challenging each man to live for himself and take his own
vital existence as his highest goal, but rather a tyranny demanding blind obedience
and self-sacrifice for the good of the mass - a pied piper using his followers'
unreason and self-deceit to lead them down the road to catastrophe. And then
there is the whole "race" business.
Racism is a belief system which allows any person belonging to
the "higher" race, no matter how stupid, lazy, or incompetent he may be, to
feel somehow superior to any person of a "lower" race, no matter how clever,
productive, or talented.
What kind of person feels the need for such a belief system? Obviously
one who has nothing to take pride in as an individual, and must clutch at a
group identity as a source of self-esteem and worth.
Indeed, Hitler's first followers, his Brownshirts, were recruited
from the trash of Germany, the failures and brawlers of the streets who resented
the creative and successful people in their own society. And the pathetic self-styled
Nazis in America today are mostly the same type of people.
The Nazis also preached eugenics, wherein some find an echo of
the Satanist emphasis on natural selection and the survival of the fittest.
There is, however, an important difference.
Natural selection means that there is continuous competition between
organisms, in which the fittest, because they are the fittest, are most likely
to survive, and the unfit, because of their innate inferiority, are less likely
to survive. Thus the species is continuously improved. There is no overall control
or guidance of the process by any conscious power. This is how life evolved
from the earliest primitive forms billions of years ago to the sophisticated
organisms which exist today.
Part of the reason we judge Christianity to be "evil" is that it
negates natural selection by imposing upon the strong an obligation to help
the weak. We believe superior individuals should use their talents for their
own benefit and not worry about inferior individuals. This is basic Satanist
thinking.
Both medieval Christianity and German Nazism were also "evil" in
that, as conformist ideologies, they systematically murdered anyone who dared
oppose the established order of things in the societies they ruled. Thus the
most creative and independent minds (the truly superior individuals) in medieval
Europe and Nazi Germany were either killed or forced to flee. These ideologies
reversed natural selection; they preserved the obedient conformists and destroyed
the individualists.
Before the Nazis, Germany had for generations produced many of
the world's greatest figures in philosophy, literature and science. Nazism was
a revolt of the street trash which wiped out or drove away most of the country's
true elite. Germany has still not really recovered from this; it has never regained
the leading role in intellectual fields which it held before the Nazis.
And, of course, if anything resembling real modern Satanism - with
its rebellious individualistic spirit and rejection of all orthodoxy and external
authority - had ever appeared in Nazi Germany, the authoritarian Nazi regime
would immediately have tried to stamp it out.
Eugenics is not the same thing as natural selection. Eugenics means
that some authority is selecting for the qualities which that authority considers
superior. We all must trust this authority with the awesome power to choose
which qualities should be favored and which ones should be eliminated - as cattle
meekly submit to being selectively bred by the herdsman. And this is supposed
to be compatible with Satanism? Such power would end up being abused to select
in favor of characteristics which merely conform to the prejudices of the group
in charge, but which have nothing to do with real superiority (and this is exactly
what the Nazis did).
Natural selection by itself has done fine without conscious guidance
for four billion years, and should be allowed to go on doing so.
Nazis advocate killing off or sterilizing entire categories of
people. Satanists believe that everyone should have the chance to survive, or
fail to survive, by their own efforts. The fit would prove their fitness by
surviving. The unfit would prove their unfitness by failing to survive. Only
thus could we truly tell which were which.
Racism is antithetical both to natural selection and to real eugenics.
The so-called Nazi "eugenics" used superficial characteristics such as hair
and eye color, and ethnic background, as its criteria of superiority. This was
not even eugenics; this was pure idiocy.
All races include both inferior and superior persons, both sheeplike
and individualists. A Satanist judges each human being to be superior or inferior
on the basis of individual qualities, not on the basis of skin color or eyelid
shape.
I have known and worked with people of a great variety of races.
I know from personal experience that race is not correlated with talent or personality
type, or at least not strongly correlated enough for it to be noticeable.
Racism has been an excuse for more stupid herd behavior than anything
else in history besides Christianity and Marxism.
Racist groups such as the UNITED STATES NAZI PARTY and the KU KLUX
KLAN have tried to form alliances with the CHURCH OF SATAN at various times,
but La Vey has always rejected them with contempt. In doing so, he was defending
the integrity of the Satanic philosophy.
A herd ideology does not stop being a herd ideology merely because
it happens not to be in power. Nazism is not Satanic. Racism is not Satanic.
Anti-Semitism is not Satanic. These concepts are as pathetic, outmoded, and
collectivist as Christianity itself. Any acceptance of, or compromise with them,
will derail the Satanist movement into the junkyard of failed ideas and missed
opportunities.
Copyright 1999-2004 by Jeffrey Deboo