Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

In light of George L. Mosse's book The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, which I'm working on.

I underestimated the importance of Volkish ideology and the Blood and Soil current of thought, which add a whole 'nother level of insanity to an already insane current.

In a nutshell, these two things add up to the most radical negation of modernity which is probably conceivable; how genocide, which no matter the extremity of fascism was only associated with fascist movements which took their cues from Nazism, came about becomes understandable in light of these two movements.

After all, if you're trying to turn back the clock to a pre-modern, pre-Christian, pagan society then there isn't anything in your value system which would stop a person from eliminating a rival tribe, totally. Their idea was that the rural German landscape and the German people were possessed of the same energy and were in a sense fused due to occupation of the landscape for centuries. That which was foreign to this cultural physical, racial, landscape was a threat to it which the Nazis wanted to eliminate. This is the Volkish ideology and the Blood and Soil belief. Blood and Soil because they believed that the spiritual/material, in their words racial, essence of the rural German people was the same essence in some way which flowed through the soil which they lived on.

So everything foreign to this primitive communal essence had to be purified out of the system. That's what caused the mass genocide. Gypsies fell into this category, Jews, as well as the disabled and gays, who were seen as genetic aberations which needed to be purified out of the Blood of the German branch of the Aryan race, which was conceived of as holding the future for the most progressive racial development in Europe.

All of this was of course bullshit, I'm just repeating the arguments.

The profound violence of this worldview is something that I was not prepared for. Literally, there's nothing which would hold any sort of check on people; anything would be approved of, and was. The SS was conceived of as the Warrior leadership of the new, renewed, German society, based on primitive Volkish principles.

Human rights are a recent phenomenon. These people wanted to turn the clock back to German society as it was after the fall of Rome but before the mass conversions to Christianity, when only a few centuries before Julius Caeser could condemn a tribe which resisted him, the Helvetii, from modern day Switzerland, to mass extermination without giving it a thought.

How do you counter something like that, something which doesn't admit any modern standards whatsoever, which doesn't bow before any accepted standards of conduct but just goes on with the brutality with no check?

Blood and soil beliefs do have something in common with the worldview of rural Anglo-Saxons in the United States; as much as this exists, it's a threat to all standards of civil behavior in the United States and in U.S. foreign policy.

Just because you've occupied a piece of land for a long time does not mean that you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want.

The type of rhetoric which draws on this current of thought, unconsciously or not, is very comforting to those who are already privileged by their skin color in society, because it says that they don't have to consider anything beyond their experience, they don't have to give a damn about anyone who looks different than they do or who believes something different than they do, they don't have to care about international affairs, or about having some decent standard in the international dealings of the U.S. It is an ultimate and total refusal to have any truck whatsoever with the world outside their little bubble.

And it's just as dangerous here in the U.S. as it would be in any other country.