Anyone watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will with its rows and rows of marching soldiers with their swastikas would realize that Nazi society was highly collectivistic. One could rightly observe that the German people during the Third Reich were a large cult with Hitler as the charismatic leader at the top. Neo-Nazis are often heard to say that if we do not hang together we will hang separately. I am not sure of the origin of that saying but it is representative of the thinking of many of those today on the radical right. Collectivism is currently very much in vogue on the left also. But it takes on the form of a politically correct multiracialism. A very nice lady I worked with several years ago who was Bahai in faith would wear a sweatshirt that read : There is only one race–the human race. I am currently listening to a lecture series on DVD entitled: Big History. The lecturer claims that what makes human beings distinctive and a separate species is collective learning. That would mean that a collectivistic society is an essential manifestation of our humanity. Political correctness is supressing contrarian ideas about important subjects like race, intelligence and the Holocaust with a fierceness that is remniscent of the persecution of heretics in the Middle Ages. Yes, the past has been collectivist and collectivism is still with us. Although I am sympathetic with many aspects of Nazism I shudder at that thought of living in collectivist society even if it is a Fourth Reich. I believe that individualism is responsible for the great leaps of mankind. It is the freedom to disagree with the conventional wisdom that has made paradigm shifts possible. We are currently celebrating the bicentennial of Charles Darwin and his idea of natural selection as the basis of evolution. He is just one example of a thinker who radically changed science with a contrarian idea. The classic exposition on the importance of individualism in human advance is Ayn Rand’s 20th century work Atlas Shrugged. I am on my third reading of this pathbreaking book. It has influenced me more than any work other than the Bible. It is a story of inventors in our society disappearing into an enclave to form their own society-a society that is favorable toward innovators and other achievers. The basic premise of the book is that: We are not all in this together. In this work specifically the productive people abandon the unproductive people. The reader may go beyond the thesis of the book in taking the extrapolated position that white gentile people, an inventive people in their own right, do not need Jews and the people of color–as many on the radical right do. We are capable of running our own society. If this day of white separatism ever comes I am hoping that our new White society will be free, rewarding of individual initiative and individualistic. I wish that those I know on the radical right would take the time to read Atlas Shrugged and rethink the collectivistic position of the Nazis and the Neo-Nazis.
Is Nazism collectivistic?
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