The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders:

Nowhere Man in Nowhere Land –

A Segment from Part Ten

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 20, 2016

FASCISM AS “NOWHERE LAND” BEGINS AND ENDS LIKE THIS!

We saw this with the dark charisma of Adolf Hitler, a never do well rabblerouser, poorly educated, but with a genius to identify the pathology of the masses with the rhetorical skills to translate this into a painless ride into Paradise, which turned out to be Nowhere Land.

Hitler built up the reputation as an iron man who stood up to the moneyed politicians with a message that he had the answer to Jewish bankers and industrialists who he claimed were responsible for Germany’s losing WWI. Hundreds then thousands came to his rallies to hear him make his apocalyptic predictions of a new Germany with pat solutions to the people’s most pesky problems. His incoherent and contradictory arguments had one thing in common: his German listeners were eager to hear facile explanations for their mounting misery, and Hitler knew just where to place the blame.

Germany had been stabbed in the back by politicians negotiating the Peace Treaty of WWI at Versailles, politicians that had betrayed the “frontier fighters” in that war, who had died in vain, as they caused Germany to lose the war. He vilified the current German government and ranted that the German Weimar Constitution was illegitimate. He next said that he would annihilate the threat of Communism that was campaigning vigorously to dominate German politics.

He identified Germany’s enemies as Communism on the left and ultra-nationalists and unreconstructed monarchists on the right. The big bugaboo was “Big Capital” and internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. He painted Wilson as a swindler with his unrealized “Fourteen Points” for a peaceful world.   The League of Nations, which Wilson advocated, was created but without the participation of the United States, as the politics of isolation still dominated the country.

Then quick as a dime, Hitler would paint a rosy picture of prewar Germany’s glory days in contrast to the “disgrace and defeat” that currently dominated German politics. He made complicated things seem simple and easily solvable with the right leader, warning his listeners, however, that the times called for firm measures and primitive perhaps even brutal actions.

Hitler’s skill at galvanizing his audience and striking deeper emotional chords than any other politician lay not merely in his demagoguery, but in his ability to see beyond conventional political issues to the underlying themes and yearnings of his listeners. His detractors underestimated his appeal with the confident expectation that the people would see through his diatribe, but of course, the people didn’t.

He called on Germans to reach for something bigger and broader – to embrace a sense of greatness – that lifted the people out of their doldrums and confusion, and buffered them from the reality that they were experiencing. Hitler wrote:

“The question of recovery of the German people is not a question of economic recovery. Rather it is a matter of regaining an inner feeling among the people, the only thing that can lead again to national greatness and, through that, to economic welfare.”

He was selling the goodness and the potential of the German people, not just a stronger mark and fair wages. When he announced the outrages of the Treaty of Versailles, and ranted about the usury against the people, he rhapsodized about creating a German culture single to none.

With his dark charisma, people felt he was talking about them, and the problems with which they could identify on a painful basis, not about abstractions. German self-esteem may have been shattered and offended, but Hitler was offering them a different picture of themselves as strong and honorable, indeed, as members of a master race.

The ingenious of his emotional strategy transformed events into mass entertainments where neither policies nor politics, per se, were on the menu, as these were superseded by an overlay and more dominant religious fervor that resembled a revivalist tent meeting. Consequently, he didn’t have to coerce his audience into being with him, it did so enthusiastically. Likewise, the more critics attempted to derail Hitler movement the more enthusiastically his audience grew in its loyalty to him.

Hitler was on his way to creating a fascistic state, that is, a dictatorial, authoritarian society with total intolerance for opposing views or practices. The government of the German Third Reich controls everything stripping citizens of their individual rights. Hitler’s expansionist policies led to WWII in which tens of millions of people died and many of Germany’s great cities were decimated and turned into rubble.

“It Can’t Happen Here!” (1935) was a novel written by Sinclair Lewis during the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, warning Americans "it could happen here!"

French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931), who lived in the shadow of the rise of Hitler, wrote more than one hundred years ago in The Crowd: The Study of the Popular Mind (1896):


The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.
Two fundamental factors are at the base of this transformation. The first is the destruction of those religious, political and social beliefs in which all the elements of our civilization are rooted. The second is the creation of entirely new conditions of existence and thought as the result of modern scientific and industrial discoveries.

The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still very powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in the process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy.

While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the ERA OF THE CROWD.


We see this in the current American 2016 Presidential Campaign with the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party in Donald James Trump playing to the crowd and the lowest common denominator in American society. We saw this before in the megalomania of Adolf Hitler where he led the great nation of Germany to ruin.

Donald Trump’s supporters don’t seem to care what he says, and how many times he changes his stance on issues, as they are not interested in policies or ideologies. They are only devoted to him, as legions were once devoted to Hitler, that is, until the very end. Hitler proved to be Nowhere Man. Will “the Donald” drive the American electorate into Nowhere Land? We shall see.

THE LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO THE WESTERN NIGHT 

The Western mind has been vulnerable to a demigod as it has a history of being more paranoid than perceptive, more single minded than pluralistic, more arrogant than humble. By attitude or implication, it has conducted its business as if the Anglo-Saxon Caucasian is superior to other races.

Throughout the ages, the discovery of the advantage of this belief has established a cultural truth that the West was destined to first conquer nature, and then impose its collective will on the rest of the world. This “cut & control” extravagance has led to the question: Can the planet earth survive self-indulgent man?

Now, paradoxically, the rest of the world, in an effort to catch up, as if were, is committing the same errors as the West, imitating Western extravagance to realize its own dominance, putting the earth and the 21st century world in further jeopardy.

Not to worry, as with Western boxamania, problems are treated as effects irrespective of the causes. The drumbeat thunders on in celebration of the progress being made, the myriad of problems being solved, failing to realize that the problems being solved are the problems being created. In boxamania, existence is mainly in the cocoon of Nowhere Land failing to see the accumulated waste that excess has created.

It is the nature of Western culture, the character of its society, the slant of its religion, and the take on what it is to be human, free and civilized, that by implication if not by intention that only whites of European lineage have reached that distinction. Is it any wonder that the world resents such arrogance?

The world is moving swiftly away from the shadow the perspective of Nowhere Land and into the full light of a rainbow confederation of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, cultures, and characteristics, where democracy may not resemble the ideas the West clings to so passionately, ideas believed to be the only legitimate approach to world order.

Western man for the past thousand years has been dedicated to changing the world into his own image and likeness, while being disinclined to accept or even acknowledge the world as it is, or would have itself be.

This stubborn solipsistic view of the world persists with the best Western minds as they still hold to the Old Testament messianic concepts on the New Testament “end of day.”

Will reason and love enable man to be one with his fellowman and with nature, preserving his individuality and integrity or will Western man continue to dominate with his amnesia for “what is,” while staying safely in Nowhere Land clinging to beliefs that no longer apply?

There is no question that Western man has dominated with his quest for perfection and his control of historical time. Much of it can be attributed to his faith. As you shall see, Christianity transformed the spiritual into a pragmatic apparatus for social, political, military and cultural dominance of the indigenous peoples of the world.

Western man destroyed many ancient civilizations desecrating their sacred idols and abolishing their traditions replacing them with the Christian God, a God now of science in its ambivalent wisdom and ambiguous forays into the world of the so-called “infidels.” The West acted as if it possessed substantive truth, and in its magnanimity was moved to generously share its wealth and wisdom with the rest of the world. Nowhere Land and Nowhere Man were never more discretely defined. It is quite a story.

NEXT: NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND – PART ELEVEN

THE CHRISTIAN ERA