Hitler Youth and Other Young Radicals

The Canadian Manifesto: How the American Neoconservatives Stole My Country

In November of 1922, a Mr. K. Friedrich visited Harvard University to speak to their Liberal Club about post-war Germany.  He gave an animated account of a new phenomenon: the "Youth Movement" or "Gugenelbewegung."

"'The Youth Movement' expresses the new spirit in Germany. It feels that the old life was cold, hard and unprofitable, stifling all the better instincts of the young people of the nation. The old militaristic system could not be called culture.

"It was merely a mechanical perfection, wholly lacking in spontaneity. The 'Youth Movement' is embracing a different theory of values in the educational standard. The tendency is constantly towards a more liberal ideal. Its studies are more and more in the realm of Philosophy, Literature and Religion. The old shackles are being cast off by a new and spontaneous enthusiasm." (1)

When we think of a German Youth Movement, we automatically think of the Hitler Youth, and the disturbing images of indoctrinated children proudly giving the infamous salute.  However, the youth movement actually began before the War, as a vehicle for young people to commune with nature and escape the oppressive regime of Wilhelm II. Their hikes were intellectual and cultural endeavours, as they shared poetry; discussed and debated philosophy, current events and politics. And while many groups had uniforms, more common would be musical instruments and books.

During the war, the movement gained momentum, when shortages in essentials, resulted in many schools being closed; so for children and young adults, these hikes provided their education.  After the war, the groups began to organize and many became more political in nature; some even sponsored by political parties.

The German Zionist Youth Movement

Leo Strauss, the German emigre who inspired the neoconservative movement,  would become an active participant in the Zionist Youth Blau-Weiss, then led by Walter Moses.  And while the group enjoyed the typical hikes in the mountains, they were also very militaristic. Strauss would refer to it as pagan-fascism, and indeed Moses liked to imitate Mussolini, who had come to power in 1922.

It was here that Strauss claimed to have nurtured his authoritarianism, and the concept of a "clique", led by a dictatorial style leader. As early as 1923 he spoke of a preference for a quasi-totalitarianism, and detested “bourgeois” or “liberals” seeking to preserve their lives and comfort.

He would actually try to join the Nazi Party but was turned away because he was Jewish.  Said Strauss of Hitler, his “political theology” was hostile toward “me and my kind”. (2)

You Don't Have to be German to be a Hitler Youth

When civil rights activist, Tom Hayden, (formerly married to Jane Fonda) was a student at the University of Michigan, he became the editor of the Michigan Daily, and one of the founders of  Students for a Democratic Society.  SDS was in direct contrast to Young Americans for Freedom, and the two groups often clashed.

In one article of Hayden's in the Daily, he compared YAF to the Hitler Youth.  They were certainly cult-like, in their attempts to dress and act like William Buckley Jr., and accepted no opposition to any of their arguments, which they like Buckley, were always well prepared for.

YAF responded to Hayden's article in their own newsletter.  "Next to the Twist and barely knee-length skirts, the most fashionable thing of the season is the rousing , vitriolic attack on the so-called 'Extreme-Right'".

Buckley approved of the counter-attack, but privately he worried that  Hayden was right.  The John Birch Society, that was providing funding and moral support to the conservative youth group, had suggested in one of their reports, that if Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 nomination,  they would assemble forces in his [Goldwater's] fascist army. (3)

Leo Strauss would develop a philosophical argument which he called Reductio ad Hitlerum.  What he suggested was that not everything Adolf Hitler did was bad, and using examples like Hitler was anti-smoking, loved dogs and was a vegetarian, we can't automatically think of those things as bad, just because they were associated with Hitler.

Of course Hitler was not a vegetarian, but loved wild game, sausages and caviar, (4) and in 1926, apparently in order to impress Mimi Reiter, a 16-year-old girl, he whipped his dog so savagely that it terrified her. (5)

This does speak to another aspect of neoconservatism. The power to deceive, in order to create a public persona that the masses can get behind.

Strauss is right however, to suggest that not everything Hitler did was bad and in fact the political strategies that the neoconservatives adopted, were like time delayed synchronized swimming.  They followed his path to power, almost to the letter.  I'll be getting into that in more detail, later.

However, Hayden was not off the mark.

Two Burning Images

Undampered by a chilly drizzle, some 40,000 Germans jammed the square between Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University and the Opera House looking at a black mass of criss-crossed logs, insulated from the pavement by sand. A thumping band blared out old military marches. Toward midnight a procession entered the square, headed by officers of the University's student dueling corps in their dress uniforms: blue tunics, white breeches, plush tam o'shanters and spurred patent leather jack boots.

Behind them came other students and a line of motor trucks piled high with books. More students clung to the trucks, waving flaring torches that they hurled through the air at the log pile. Blue flames of gasoline shot up, the pyre blazed. One squad of students formed a chain from the pyre to the trucks. Then came the books, passed from hand to hand while a leather-lunged student roared out the names of the authors:

"Erich Maria Remarque [wild cheering]—for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal!" (Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, against WWI)

"Emil Ludwig—burned for literary rascality and high treason against Germany."

"Sigmund Freud—for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures. . . ."

On he went, calling out the names of practically every modern German author with whom the outside world is familiar: Karl Marx, Jakob Wassermann, Albert Einstein, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger. Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Walther Rathenau.

... While the flames flared highest, up to a little flag-draped rostrum stumped clubfooted, wild-eyed little Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in the Nazi Cabinet, organizer of the great midnight bibliocaust. "Jewish intellectualism is dead!" cried he. "National Socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can again express itself!

"These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old etra, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. . . . The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts. ... As you had the right to destroy the books, you had the duty to support the government. The fire signals to the entire world that the November revolutionaries [German Revolution that overthrew the Kaiser] have sunk to earth and a new spirit has arisen!" All over Germany similar pyres blazed with similar books. (6)

The Nazi youth were driven by anti-communism and anti-liberalism.  The anti-Semitism came about because of the popular belief that the Jews were working with the Communists to take control of Germany.

The conservative youth in the early days, were also fuelled by anti-communism and and anti-liberalism, but while they didn't resort to book burning, an  Indiana chapter of YAF, did make a very public display of burning baskets, alleged to have been manufactured behind the Iron Curtain.

However, there is more than one way to burn a book, or even a basket.  An affiliate of YAF, the Intercollegiate Society Institute, formerly the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, a paleonconservative think tank created by William Buckley Jr., publishes a list of the 50 worst and the 50 best books.

When describing the 50 worst, they use similar language to that of the young Nazis feeding the flames.

Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male -  "A pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is "statistically" normal."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958) - "Made Americans dissatisfied with the ineradicable fact of poverty. Led to foolish public policies that produced the hell that was the 1960s."

Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) - "[The Church] should therefore strengthen the existing communistic institutions and aid the evolution of society from the present temporary stage of individualism to a higher form of communism." Eek!

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) - "The hollow soul of liberalism elaborated with a technical apparatus that would have made a medieval Schoolman blush." (7)

And the list goes on.  Can't you just picture them being thrown into the fire?

Even those they don't metaphorically burn, they still use to take jabs at liberal tradition. From their Best list:

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947) - "... reveals the true intent of liberalism"

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) - " ... her account of the peculiarly modern phenomenon of "totalitarianism" forced many liberals to consider the sins of communism in the same category as those of fascism, and that is no small achievement."

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) - Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better? No, and Butterfield provides the intellectually mature antidote to that premise of liberal historiography." (8)

Book Burning Canadian Style

[Mark] Tushingham was just about to give a presentation on the science behind his novel Hotter Than Hell at the National Press Club. Released last November with little fanfare, it's about the Earth becoming so hot from climate change that America and Canada are at war over water. "I was entering the elevator 15 minutes before the event when I got a call on my cellphone," says Tushingham's publisher, Elizabeth Margaris at DreamCatcher Publishing. "[Tushingham] said, 'I've got bad news. I can't go.' He was told [by the Environment Minister's office] not to appear." While Tushingham himself was not available for comment, Margaris told Hour, "This is just outrageous. Mark can't talk but I can. They can't fire me. They can't gag me." (9)

Conservative MP Rona Ambrose forbid any promotion of the book by Tushingham, who worked for the Ministry of the Environment.  The book was fiction, though based on the results of inaction to address climate change, something the Harper government refused to admit was real.  Abrose was a former consultant for the Tarsands, so was protecting her clients.

In March of 2010, Senator Mike Duffy attacked the University of King’s College and other Canadian journalism schools for exposing students to Noam Chomsky and critical thinking. “When you put critical thinking together with Noam Chomsky, what you’ve got is a group of people who are taught from the ages of 18, 19 and 20 that what we stand for, private enterprise, a system that has generated more wealth for more people because people take risks and build businesses, is bad,” said Duffy (10)

King's College responded by saying that books like Manufacturing Consent were not  "part of the curriculum, though students do read some Chomsky."  What they should have said was that what journalism students read was none of his damn business.  How can we hope for future balance in the media, sorely lacking today, if students are only taught to think one way?

From their concerted attacks on Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor to Stephen Harper trying to stop the publication of Tom Flanagan's book Harper's Team (he was forced to edit out half of it), Canada's conservative movement is attempting to change the way we view ourselves and our place in the world, while creating a false public persona.

Critical thinking out.  American style conservative indoctrination in.

Sources:

1. MR. FRIEDRICH TELLS OF "YOUTH MOVEMENT" IN GERMANY, the Harvard Crimson, November 22, 1922

2. Enmity and Tyranny, By: Alan Gilbert, March 5, 2010

3. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, By Rick Perlstein, Nation Books, 2001, ISBN: 0-8090-2858-1, p. 154

4.  Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover, By: Ryn Barry, Pythagorean Books, 2004

5. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, By: Robert G.L. Waite, Basic Books, 1977, ISBN-10: 0306805146

6. Bibliocaust, Time Magazine, May 22, 1933

7. The Fifty WORST Books of the Century, Intercollegiate Society Institute

8. The Fifty BEST Books of the Century, Intercollegiate Society Institute

9. Tories muzzle environmental scientist: Catch a fire, by Julie Fortier, The Hour – April 20, 2006

10. Mike Duffy slams journalism schools for thinking critically, By Paul McLeod, Metro Halifax, March 16, 2010

Youth For Western Civilization

The Canadian Manifesto: How the American Neoconservatives Stole My Country

The group, Youth for Western Civilization, is a spin-off of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists; both spin-offs of Young Americans for Freedom, and all connected to Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute.  In fact, YFC is financed by the Institute through their Campus Leadership Program. The financing must be substantial, since when they made their debut at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), they were actually one of the major donors of that year’s event.

YWC was created to perform stunts that the seemingly more respectable Republican youth groups might shy away from.  Or as they say at the institute:  "You can get away with stuff that you would take a lot of flak for doing in the College Republicans ..."  (1)

For instance, they  held a muffin sale at several campuses, where the price of the muffin was determined by your race.  Whites paid $2.00, Asians: $1.50, Latinos: $1.00, Black/ African American: $0.75, Native American: $0.25 and Illegal Immigrants FREE.  Obviously this an attempt to incite, as whites are penalized just for being white and illegal immigrants get a free ride, while everyone else is subsidized. 

However, many of the actions of WYC are more dangerous, as they go after what they call "liberal" professors.  One who had been targeted by the group, was being harassed to the point where he emailed a friend stating that he had a gun and knew how to use it.  YFC hacked into his email account, took the message to the public and the professor was fired.  He shouldn't have said what he did and the university was right to let him go, but these are the kinds of activities that the group engages in.

Retired university professor Michael Yates says he's glad to no longer be in academia.  "At least I did not have to face the nasty right-wing students who spy on their professors and do the bidding of the professional witch hunters who spew hatred on radio talk shows, and television programs."  Others are not so lucky.

Everybody Draw Muhammad Day

When the South Park cartoon depicted the prophet Muhammad as a bear, or at least as someone dressed up in a bear costume, the show's producers began to receive death threats.  This prompted Seattle artist Molly Norris, to establish an Everybody Draw Muhammad Day, in protest of censorship.

The Muslim religion does not allow depictions of the prophet, anymore than Christians would tolerate Jesus drawn in a disparaging fashion, or Jews, Abraham.  It's blasphemy.

To Youth for Western Civilization, this was a perfect opportunity to stir up a bit trouble, so they promoted the artistic endeavour on several U.S. campuses.  It was petty and mean, but that's what defines them.

The Marcus Epstein Affair

Thomas Tancredo is a former Republican congressman and now the honorary chairman of Youth for Western Civilization.  In his younger days, he was a member of Young Americans for Freedom, and was rewarded with a job in the Reagan administration.  Tancredo ran for President in 2008, under the new Constitution Party banner, on an anti-immigration platform.  An outspoken critic of immigration and multiculturalism, he has earned a reputation as a bigot. 

Marcus Epstein is the executive director of Tom Tancredo's Team America PAC, an immigration panel at CPAC, financed by YWC, discussing the imminent demise of the white race.  “No more of this multiculturalism garbage,” Tancredo said, adding that “the cult of multiculturalism has captured the world” and is “the dagger in the heart” of civilization. (2)  Stephen Harper, in a 2003 speech to the Institute for Research on Public Policy, claimed that "multiculturalism" was "a weak nation strategy", and to ensure that Canada is "never again" perceived as a potential source of threats, he called for a "long-overdue" reform of our refugee programs. (3)

Epstein also runs Pat and Bay Buchanan's The American Cause, another group established to end non-white immigration.  Says Buchanan:  "The central objection to the present flood of illegals is they are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe; they are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean." (4)

Founder of the National Citizens Coalition, where Harper has been a member for more than three decades and once acted as its President, Colin Brown, when asked why letting in Hungarians fleeing communism after the Soviet crackdown was justified, but letting in Vietnamese boat people fleeing communism was not. “I think the Hungarians have made marvelous citizens, but the bloodlines run the same way. We all come from Europe so they fit in. You wouldn’t know if the people next door to you are Hungarian or not. They don’t all go and gather in a ghetto.”

All those involved in the conservative movement, on both sides of the border, sing from the same hymnal.

Back to Epstein. 

Not exactly white himself, but Korean-American, he writes for Human Events, The American Conservative, The Washington Examiner, the anti-Semitic Taki's Mag, and racist/anti-immigrant site VDARE.  He also claims that he is not a racist, and yet according to the Washington Independant:

On July 7, 2007, Marcus Epstein had too much to drink and stumbled onto Georgetown’s scenic, shop-lined M Street, walking in no particular direction. At 7:15 p.m., he bumped into a black woman, called her a “nigger,” and struck her in the head with an open hand. An off-duty Secret Service agent was watching. Epstein “jogged away,” according to the agent’s affidavit, and when Epstein was finally chased down, he “continued to flail his arms while being taken into custody.” ... He faces a maximum punishment of 180 days in jail and a $1000 fine. He’s under a restraining order to stay away from the couple involved, has agreed to seek mental health treatment, complete an alcohol treatment program, write a letter of apology to the victim and donate $1000 to the United Negro College Fund. (5)

A Circle of Hate

According to the Anti-Defamation league, YWC has many ties with White Supremacists. 

Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) may have standing in the mainstream conservative world but from its inception, white supremacists have enthusiastically embraced the group.  In April 2011, YWC received direct help from white supremacist Jared Taylor,who runs the racist magazine American Renaissance. Taylor and YWC joined forces that month to create a fund-raising packet that Taylor mailed to his supporters on YWC's behalf. Taylor is a strong supporter of YWC because of his own racist convictions. He introduced race as a crucial issue in his fund-raising letter for YWC by writing, "Race is an important aspect of individual and group identity. Of all the fault lines that divide society—language, religion, class, ideology—it is the most prominent and divisive. Race and racial conflict are at the heart of the most serious challenges the western world faces in the 21^st century." (6)

ADL is also concerned with YWC's founder, Kevin DeAnna, who Taylor says  "knows how important our cultural identity is" and "has agreed to continue our struggle on college campuses throughout the nation and dedicated himself to reaching our children and grandchildren."

DeAnna is also linked to Richard Spencer, who runs a site called Alternative Right.  Spencer writes articles for Taylor's American Renaissance and The Occidental Observer, an anti-Semitic and racist publication, and is the executive director of the National Policy Institute (NPI), a white supremacist think tank. Spencer once remarked, "I'm very lucky to be friends with Kevin DeAnna of Youth for Western Civilization. I think this group is extremely important for our side." (6)

The H.L. Mencken Club for Mice

H. L. Menken (1880-1956) was an American author best known for his satirical essays on the famous Scopes Trials (evolution), which he referred to as the "monkey trials".  Though not really a racist, he was an elitists, who scorned a democratic system that allowed lesser men to rule their superiors.  He was also critical of Roosevelt's New Deal.

The H. L. Mencken Club came into existence in 2008, and according to their website is "an organization for independent-minded intellectuals and academics of the Right."  The Club hosts an annual conference that attracts speakers and guests from around the world, including paleoconservative Peter Brimelow, Pat Buchanan of The American Cause, YWC's Kevin DeAnna and his friend Richard Spencer.

If these people represent intellectuals and academics of the Right, then the Right is in serious trouble.

Peter Brimelow has a Canadian connection through the Reform Party, now called the Conservative Party of Canada.  He is an author and former right-wing journalist for Conrad Black's Financial Post and William Buckley's National Review.  In his book The Patriot Game, he attacks Quebec, bilingualism, the Canadian flag and the Canadian national anthem, which he sees as pandering to Quebec.

According to a college friend, after Stephen Harper read the Patriot Game, he became so enthused that he went out and bought ten copies to give to friends. (7)  I've read the book and in many ways, it formed the basis for much of Harper's and the Reform Party's philosophy.

Brimelow was an acquaintance of Canada's Paul Fromm, who founded the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform (C-FAR), which opposes foreign aid to Third World countries.  Fromm was allowed to sell memberships to C-Far at a Reform Party assembly, in exchanging for getting Peter Brimelow to speak.

Brimelow, along with other speakers at the H.L. Menken conference, Paul E. Gottfried and Steve Sailer, operate V-Dare, an anti-immigration, pro-white hate group. The Southern Poverty Law Centre covered the inaugural event in 2008, where much of the talk was about "how the GOP could regain power by more fervently courting the white vote."

[Said Brimelow]  “The way to win is to get white votes. If [Republicans] did that, even without actually cutting off immigration, they could continue to win national elections for quite a long time.”  Look at Alabama ... with whites only comprising 65 percent of the electorate, they’re in worse shape than American whites generally. Yet McCain easily won that state, in large part because of support from 88 percent of white voters  ...  It seems like an implicit thing that everybody in the South understands how things are and they all vote Republican."

Brimelow even suggested that McCain should have said that Obama was the affirmative action candidate. “It would have been so easy. All he had to do is get up and say it.”

Fortunately, I think McCain had a bit more class.

Most of these groups who use terms like "Western", really mean "White".  When you trace their funding, they all dip from the same pool, promote each others think tanks, and organizations, and deliver the same message.

This was the message that the Reform Party presented and it did not disappear when they bought out the rights to the Tories.  It's still there under the surface.  The media just no longer covers it.

Sources:

1. My Right-Wing Degree, By Jeff Horwitz, May 24, 2005

2. CPAC Immigration Panel: Readying the Fight to Save the GOP and White America, By Brian Tashman, Right-Wing Watch, February 11, 2011

3. Too Close for Comfort: Canada's Future Within Fortress North America, By Maude Barlow, McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2005, ISBN: 0-7710-1088-5, p. 19-24

4. Into the Mainstream, By Chip Berlet, Southern Poverty Law Centre

5. Tancredo, Buchanan Bruised by Racist ‘Karate Chop’, By David Weigel, The Washington Independant, June 2, 2009

6. Youth for Western Civilization:  Ties with White Supremacists, Anti-Defamation League, May 23, 2011 

7. Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada, by William Johnson, McClelland & Stewart, 2005, ISBN 0-7710 4350-3