Rare Freedom

 

Philosopher Stephen Hicks wrote a book called Nietzsche and the Nazis. He asks how Nazism could have happened, but he believes the prime reason was the wrong set of values that the German intelligentsia embraced, that made them feel righteous and noble.

 

He also writes that in human history a political arrangement favoring democracy and liberty for the people was rare, and that the fact and a tradition of democracy being so new and fragile in Germany allowed it to collapse, and make intellectuals assume that democracy was not the answer.

 

Let me quote Hicks from Page 13 of his book: “What is a culture’s brightest thinkers believe that democracy is a historical blip? What if they come to believe that the lesson of history is that people need structure and strong leadership? What if they believe that history shows that some cultures are obviously superior—superior in their arts, their science and their technology, and their religion? What if they believe that history teaches that we live in a harsh world of conflict and that in such a world strength and assertiveness against one’s enemies are essential to survive? Or even more strong than that—that peace makes people soft and that it is conflict and war that brings out the best in people, making them tough, vigorous, and willing to fight for their ideals and if necessary to die for them?

 

I am suggesting that a set of ideals was primarily responsible for the rise of Nazism. I think those ideals are extraordinarily false and terribly destructive—but that is not how millions of intelligent, educated, even in many cases well-meaning Germans saw them.”

 

My response: Hicks is a most objective, fair, clear thinker. He is prescient in understanding that the long Germanic rejection of Enlightenment values of individualism, democracy, rationalism, capitalism, peace, freedom, tolerance and prosperity led to their idealistic/Hegelian embrace of the emperor/dictator as absolute leader, and the people are to identify themselves collectively as part of the State, and unquestioningly be willing to serve, even die for the state, the fatherland.

 

If you add in Hoffers concept of Naziism as a mass movement, it is not hard to envision how Germans could serve Hitler and burn the world down. Fanatics with bad values seek to gain land, money, converts and power by violence and terror, and there are hell come to earth for what they do to the rest of the world. The right values, Dennis Prager insists, are critical to living well and not spreading evil.

 

Hicks continues on Pages 13 and 114: “But why do I call them a set of ideals? Why not just say the Nazis had some ideas with which to bewitch the masses—but basically they just wanted power and were effective at using those ideas to get power?

 

Well, of course the Nazis wanted power. What politician does not want power? . . . But that describes the Nazis exactly. They did not join the Social Democrats or any established political parties.  They set up their own fringe party, initially based in the south of Germany and away from the center of power in Berlin. They were true believers in a cause. They did not want power if it meant compromising their ideals by joining an established party. They wanted power—but power to be what they took to be high ideals.”

 

My response: The Nazis were idealists, but the most evil, cruel people in the world are collectivist fanatics peddling their cause, Nazism. When religious people pervert a religious ideal, or any high abstraction, into a idol to worship, then they no longer are religious worshipers, but not worship an abstraction, and this idol worship is Satanism. Such people are ferocious and will lie and break any moral rule, surrender all decency, trample anyone to win and spread the scope of their false faith.

 

For the Nazis, not only were their values bad, but the ones that they held, they were willing to use war, the holocaust and terror to spread their cause involuntarily across the globe. Idealism has been reduced to a think justification for moral monsters on the loose, rampaging across the globe

 

On the bottom of Page 15, Hick writes: “A major them of the Program is a stress upon collectivism and a rejection of individualism.”

 

With individualism, we have the values that each individual has natural rights, including the right to be free and think for himself. That will not be tolerated at all by the Nazis. Not nonconformity, no skepticism, no independent thought will be countenanced.