The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1032: The Work of Ernst Nolte - Pt. 2 - The Sonderweg Debate - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

62 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a short series on the work of historian and philosopher Ernst Nolte. Here Thomas talks about the Sonderweg debate amongst historians.Thomas' SubstackThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777VIP Summit 3-Truth To Freedom - Autonomy w/ Richard GroveSupport Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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Thomas is here, and we're going to jump into part two of a dive into Ernst Nolte. How are you done, Thomas? I'm doing well. There's a context to what became known as the historic or strife? beyond the obvious that needs to be addressed. The kind of first proverbial shots fired across the bow, specifically relating to revisionist

treatments of the Holocaust and historiographical terms, that conversation was started, at least between public intellectuals, and in the Bundes Republic, there was an active community of public intellectuals, not just because of the peculiar and rather tragic conditions that characterize that state, you know, sociologically and politically. But the Cold War meant that these people had a say in policy discussions that they wouldn't otherwise. I mean, that was in any combatant state to the Cold War, and when one considers the ongoing,

status of mobilization and everything else. I don't think it's hyperbole to refer to NATO and their Warsaw Pact ops as combatant states. In every country, thus situated, you had a coterie of of intellectuals who were not just permitted to speak on policy matters, but were expected to do so.

But in Germany, this was particularly, this was particularly visible a tendency, an active kind of discourse. What kicked off the historic strike was, I mean, the immediate catalyst was Reagan's Bitburg speech. For people who are too young to know or I don't remember, the D-Day anniversary, the 40th anniversary in 84, Reagan was in Europe anyway for NATO-related

Summit type diplomatic activities. He spoke at Bitburg, and he went out of his way to say that the Vaffen SS and Vermeck's war dead buried there were victims of the war just as much as the Allied were dead, and they should be respected. He was basically parrot Adnauer said. Adnauer, much as people on the right dislike him, I don't have many nice things to say about Adonauer, but he's a complicated figure, and Adnauer said, he, Adnauer and said, Ednauer insisted that Vermeck veterans get full pension rights. The Bob and SS was not so fortunate, but that's why they established their own, you know, networks to facilitate that kind of thing.

But this sparked out this kind of whole, I mean, obviously the Reds, like the actual Reds who were still, like, very powerful then. Their narrative was, well, you see that this just proves that, you know, that NATO was, you know, that NATO was, just a fascist, like a reconstituted fascistic block that is trying to, trying to halt the advance of history, you know, by, by military arms and the threat of nuclear war. And, of course, they, they find common cause with these dead fascists. You know, these kinds of, these sort of militone social Democrats, they basically parroted that, but for a lot more dishonest and dishonorable reasons. You know, they Reagan was kind of Donald Trump

before there was a Trump, you know, I mean, his, he was a lot more of a significant figure in terms of power political phenomenon of things, obviously, it's because of the world situation, but, you know, the narrative people, Reagan was a man that people love to hate, you know, for the kind of permanently aggrieved opposition, you know,

in America, as well as in the EU. There's a broader context of Bitburg, though that relates to helmet Cole. And like we talked about Cole a lot in these series that we do. Cole was about the only like truly kind of nationalistic

minded consular post war. You know, and that like his final act in that role like we taught about was the unconditional recognition of the independent state of Croatia, which like monkey

wrenched a lot of the designs of Bush and Baker and what they hope to accomplish in Europe after the Cold War. You know, but it wasn't just, it wasn't just placating coal. Like, people have to understand that there was this bizarre situation after detente fell apart. And detain was dead as, as Dillinger, really even before Reagan took the oath of office, okay? and a few things owed to that,

which are kind of outside the scope of our media discussion here. But such that it was, the Cold War was back on in earnest. The Bundes Republic had a military draft. They weren't just expected to participate in the defense of Europe from Warsaw Pact. They were the main line of resistance. Okay, so we were drafting these guys, you know, directly out of high school. school. We were putting them on what was to be the front line of World War III. In nuclear command and control terms, the NATO charter demanded, and what operations protocol was,

was that American nuclear weapons based in the Bundes Republic, warheads would always be in the possession of American forces, but their launch vehicles. would be under control of the Bundes Republic. And in order to be married to those vehicles, there had to be an agreement on a legitimate launch order. So basically, we were relying on these people to essentially commit suicide to stop the Soviet Union when the Warsaw Pact onslaught came. Now, if you're going to do that, while at the same time saying,

Germany is basically a constitutionally evil country, like race of people, and German militarism is the source of all woes in the world. There's a cognitive dissonance there that can't be sustained in policy terms. And that's becoming more and more clear. You know, and for context, the main line of resistance, if Warsaw Pact had in fact assaulted, obviously the Battle of Berlin would have been a maelstrom. The Bundeswehr had to defend, they're expected to defend Berlin, they're expected to reinforce the Benelux and the British and the North German plane, and they're expected to defend the folded gap at all cost to the last man with nuclear weapons if necessary.

And to reinforce and reconstitute forces there, basically until they could no longer do so. So they're talking about a million dead Germans within a few days. and again you can't if that's if that's standing policy and you're public about that policy because that's the only way that you can maintain credibility contra opt for you've got to be willing to back it up politically and if you're Ronald Reagan that means you can't go to Bitburg and say that these men buried here who died resisting communism I might add you know, are the scum of the earth and they're evil and we must never let them rise again. I mean, this should be obvious to anybody, but, you know, one of the perverse ethics of the Cold War, I think, was that there was a, there was an aspect of the left who were truly like Warsaw like sympathizers. I mean, obviously. I mean, though that element was always far stronger and more organically constituted in Europe and it was in America.

but there was some of that in America even after the 68 kind of schism but like a lot of these people were just I mean they were just they were just disengaged morons like they had no like it's like it didn't compute that right or wrong with America was in the Cold War it couldn't just be stopped you know I mean unless um unless America was gonna call it off or seed you know the internet German border to the communists. I mean, this, the, uh, not just the, the mainland resistance in the share park of NATO's military capability, but also the political will to resist Warsaw Pact, in political terms, you know,

came down to Germany's continued willingness to contribute. you know so this is kind of an open the door to what became known as you know the historicer strife and I made the point in the first episode the reason why I deep dive so much in an oldies background it's not just because I've got my own interests in political theory and philosophical things it's because the reason why Knowlesties want in with you know all revisionists. So they're talking about people like Fred Leichter or Ernst Zundel or

David Irving. Like basically everyone just lumped into the revisionist camp if they reject this claim that the German people are this adivistic

population that is prone to homicidal racial hatred at scale. That the Third Reich was the spontaneous, unprovoked criminal conspiracy to carry out those aforementioned tendencies against a scapegoated population, again, for no particular reason other than hostility, like ambiguous hostility. And also that the reason why the 20th century was characterized by these deep crises

that culminated in you know, two global conflagrations and then a half century of nuclear brinksmanship is because of some sort of Sondervig within Germany's cultural trajectory that makes them prone to militarism.

Like none of that makes any sense. Okay, I mean, that should be clear to anybody who's at all sophisticated on political or military matters, this is not how populations behave at scale. And politically, that's just not how things work. And Nalti's starting point was basically, like, long before 80, 45, 86, when the historic of strife really jumped off in earnest. Like, Nolte made that point in his earlier book.

He said, if you're going to claim that national socialism was just this sort of, was just sort of like the private prejudices of Adolf Hitler as policy, he's like, well, pretty much every German executive, whether you're talking about, you know, Karl Lugar, the mayor of post-Hafts for Vienna, whether you're talking about Bismarck, or they're talking about Hindenburg, like none of these people could have had like liked Jews or like not dislike Jews categorically

the idea there isn't some weird thing in policy terms that people hadn't heard before but all deeply felt that doesn't make any sense and secondly again that's just not because racism isn't that's not an explanation and that's just not how politics

are conducted And finally, as I've said before, some of this has deliberately misconstrued. Some of it's because people are remote enough from the epoch. They don't really understand this. The Germans weren't obsessed with race in a way that other people weren't. Germans talking about Jews as this race that's different than them. That's the way everybody thought. Like not necessarily about Jews, but that's what they thought about human behavior.

You know, human behavior is biological. If you want to understand, you know, political behavior, it's racial. You know, what makes it possible where people live among each other is this kind of like blood compatibility. You know, so, oh, obviously there's tension between Germans and Jews, or between Poles and Jews or Poles and Russians, because they're different races. That's what they meant. They weren't saying Jews are this evil race that's different than us because we're obsessed with race. and we figured this all out.

That's the way everybody talked. That's the way everybody thought. And that doesn't make any sense. And that's weird. Like, I'm not saying it's not racial differences between people. I'm saying in those terms, that's not the way people think about politics anymore. That's the way everybody thought about politics in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

America was singly obsessed with this idea that, you know, eugenics could, in selective intervention, whether it's sterilizing people who are deemed to be criminal incorrigibles, or whether it was, you know, facilitating, you know, large families among high IQ people. People weren't convinced that this was going to usher in some utopia. Okay. So that's not an explanation to say that like, oh, Germans had race on the brain and just decided they didn't like Jews because they were an impure race or something. That's totally the wrong way to look at it. Like you can say that that kind of thinking is bullshit and it's nonsense.

But to characterize it as like evil German thought or some crazy thing German people thought. thought, you know, that was exclusive to their cultural cathologies or something. That's complete nonsense. So there's that, too. It's survived. I mean, you see it today with this whole Candice Owens' Daily Wire thing. You know, you even have people who you never would have thought come out and say things like the cause of anti-Semitism is Jewish behavior.

Yeah. Yeah. What tells us even the term itself, too, like, why? So, there's tension between Germans and Jews because Germans hate Semitism. Like, what do they even mean? Like, what the fuck is Semitism? You know, like, that's like saying, um, that's like saying, like, yeah, you know, the Koreans and the Chinese are, they, they dislike each other because of epicantic foldism.

Like, I mean, it doesn't, like, uh, it suggests that there's some immutable trait, like, unrelated to politics that, that people just, you know, somehow decide that it's a basis for animosity. And, like, it's not, that's not the way things work. You know, um, that's why, that's why I discouraged be able from using that term.

Like, anti-Semitism is even more meaningless than racism. I mean, at least like, at least, like, I mean, race obviously exists and it's conceivable that, like, you know, there's people who, for no particular reason, you know, just have certain preferences and prejudices, you know, and race is an essentially,

even characteristic. And we're talking about humans. Like, that makes sense. Like, you know, Germans just opposed Semitism. But the fact is that Palestinians are anti-Semitic. So, like, they're anti-themselves.

I mean, like, I don't think, like, it's literally retarded. But anyway, but Nalti, Nalti was basically, I mean, I think he was a remarkable guy. I mean, that goes out saying. and he had a far more

he had a far greater aptitude for analysis of the historical process than most people even even kind of of his class and caliber but his view of Germany's sort of

tragedy and heritage that's basically like a right Hegelian view. It's not this like outlandish thing. And one of the reasons why he was so sort of savagely excoriated

by his enemies, you know, the degree to which legal reasoning becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I invoke Alder Wendell Holmes a lot, who I think Oliver Holmes Jr. I think a lot of people want to read because I, maybe it's because I was a lawyer and like a

I spent a lot of time with legal theory and case law and things. People have this idea that Holam Jr. was like this big liberal or something. Like they don't... Homes will point out legal realism is that there's no such thing and that the law is not a science.

It's not this process by which you know, a kind of like science of ethics can be discovered or by which, you know, outcomes can be guaranteed that on a long enough timeline or assuming good faith among actors,

potential actors, to the controversy at Barr, you know, the best possible outcomes for all parties can be realized. His whole point was that all the law is is political preferences that are totally arbitrary in any given epoch, you know, dressed up as some sort of logical, like, as some sort of imperative base on a science of logic and this complete horseshit. And because world order, was so much structured according to the letter of

according not just not just a letter of rhetoric but to but like legitimacy was so much bound up with language you know laid down by supposedly by supposedly objective international tribunals first of course in Nuremberg this idea that oh this is just an absolute truth

you know that obviously you know there was there was this there's this massive conspiracy to murder Jewish people for no reason hatched in 1923 by this by this criminal cadre. I mean, the court said so. You know, and if you're going to base what succeeded the moral consensus as regarded war and peace

on what amounts to an ideological statement dressed up as a criminal court decision that kind of tortured logic and sort of like non-reasoning is going to take on this outside significance. So that's part of it. You know, so pointing out obvious and not so obvious, but troubling facts of history related to the reality of, you know, kind of the anthropological and sociological origins of conflict at scale, this is like outraged people because, you know, they, like the simpleton's intellectual sanctuary is always legalism.

You know. And I'm at the point too that by the time a strategic parody had set in I mean even beforehand, probably by the time the single integrated operation plan which is America's strategic warfighting doctrine, I mean by the time like that, just became openly accepted.

that to fight and win a nuclear war we're going to kill 80 million people I mean like it you know you you know you know we're going to invoke this kind of faux moral outrage about anything that went on in World War II and you certainly can't declare that you know that men who devise the technologies of mega death or who implement them at scale and exactly capacities or or somehow the enemies of humanity. I mean, like, nobody, even a little that child can see, like, why that's ridiculous. But, but that's why that, that, that, that, that was the context. Um, and that's what's interesting today, too, because people still try to tear down

noot these, um, postulates, but they increasingly, they can't do it. I mean, first of all, I mean, there's just, people in ac and deem are just lacking. And they're not built for it, but there also, there's not like really a context anymore. You know, like they can't, there's like without the without sort of the Cold War, you know, not just as an existential

sort of reality around which things just orbit, you know, politically and sociologically in existential terms. You know, there's not, there's not a contextual focus in order to kind of provide people with um, ethical,

like, like long ontological sort of poll stars is where like the situate themselves or like what the starting point should be for um for such a discussion but um so i think i wanted to get into a little bit too um is uh you know the um the historians who did who were basically viewed as as sympathetic to the bundesphere um as uh like as an institution and its political and military mission. These were guys, I'd say the guy who kind of most exemplified that position

with Yakum Fest. And it shows you how sort of like perverted discourse had become and remains, although thankfully it's not quite as bad. Around the issue of Germany and German, the German historical experience. Like, Fest, his father was this

anti-government extremist in the Third Reich best actually he either served in the Vermonach to the Vaffin SS in the final days of the war which I think is quite heroic but he hid this fact until the day he died

he was this big anti-fascist he was definitely a proponent of the Sondervig or a special way or special path theory of German historical development but he also acknowledged that

the German people were facing oblivion, not just psychologically and culturally, but biologically. He was very anti-Soviet. You know, when he cast, he said Hitler basically was almost like a shamanistic sort of figure who reflected the will of the body politic. You know, he wasn't simply leading people astray or something.

That's a pretty weak argument and a milk toast argument. But that was considered to be this kind of extreme epilogia, or like some sort of like a hard-right, dangerous idea. I mean, which is totally insane. AJP. Taylor, he's another guy, and he's well worth reading. He's a typical kind of German-hating Englishmen of the epoch. He's got this irrational hostility to all to German, the German. But his

take was that you know, Churchill brought the war in the West out upon himself and upon his country. Why on earth with the Germans want a war in the West, which obviously they didn't. I mean, the fact that that was viewed as some sort of

minority take is absurd too, but his, uh, he had a unique kind of, or he had a, rather, he had, um, he had his own kind of discreet understanding of Sonderveg

and that it was there was a unique German trajectory in the modern era that became aggravated in earnest after 1848

and particularly after unification in 1879 but that you know Hitler in geostrategic terms acted like any other German executive would you know and again he had a punitive view of the Germans as a people but he completely rejected this idea that you know Hitler was his evil madman and just some kind of some kind of outlier and um interestingly one of the um one of the one of the one of the contributors

was then pretty you i think it was um i think it was uh a camera's name when the guy in 2008 he wrote a pretty he wrote a he wrote a very good biography of Vladimir Putin which of course was like you know was like hysterically was hysterically attacked by these people who see Russians under their bed and and think that Vladimir Putin is an evil madman for not inviting NATO to point nuclear weapons at him at decapitation range but I I can't remember the guy's name was it Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson? What's that? Was it Dr. Matthew Raphael Johnson?

No, he was a German guy. Oh, okay. And he was what the historic The historic astray in total constituted about like two of the academics like on the right or the left.

Nolte and Habermas like contra Habermaz were the primary kind of theorists that people associate with it. there's a lot of people and some pretty diverse opinions forwarded, but this guy's name will come to me, but um,

the, uh, if they're descending of a quorum of guys to Fritz Fisher, among them, uh, he, uh, he had a, a functionalist, the viewpoint of things. Um,

and this was in vogue, but it was like neo-realism, you know, like traditional realism, realpolitik. emphasizes anthropological and organic, you know, causes of conflict and of state behavior and human behavior at scale, you know, really from the 60s onward, it became invoked, you know, talk about institutional behavior, you know, how, you know, structural phenomenon

and, um, alternatively and sometimes concomitantly functionalist explanations. you know, are, you know, reveal, reveal data, meaningful data about, you know, war in peace, but also, you know, political behavior scale. You know, and of course, too, that, um, that, that, that, that, um, that shares some common ground with, you know, some of these moderate left to galeings and things, but in other ways, you know, they objected to that too. So there was some interesting opinions being bandied bagging forth, but the reason to became this censorious controversy was for all the wrong and most predictable reasons.

You know, it, and obviously any German who's truly right-wing, you know, not even particularly pro-national socialist, but remotely patriotic, or unwilling to kind of take a knee before, you know, proverbially, before, you know, NATO and Zionist interests and things, they were going to view the Sonderwebac conception as well as, you know, the, the, um, functionalist explanations as, it's basically, you know, left wing in nature and, and intrinsically punitive, which they were, you know. But it's also, again, you know, by the, by the mid-1980s,

you know, you're talking about four decades having, even if the Third Reich had been this totally brutish regime and even if its fur had been the second coming of Dracula or something it's like well again you know if you're expecting us us being us being the German people

you know to take a million dead in 72 hours you know fighting off the Ivans and you expect our land which you know for the record has been occupied now for 40 years it's the designated nuclear battlefield of World War III you know so you want you want it's basically to be you know like kind of the holy warriors

of what you consider civilization against communism but then you're going to turn on to say that you know we're evil pieces of shit like that doesn't that doesn't tread you know um but it's also um

I think uh and Noli himself made this point you know as I get a lot of haymail for a lot of reasons and a lot of which surprisingly relates to the Vietnam War I think Americans are supposed to get an older American is they feel they've got they got strong emotions bound up with this and I understand that

I invoke the Vietnam War for comparative purposes not not not for some cynical reason but for the reason Nolte did if you want to understand in the ethical terms set out by the victors in World War II and by their ethical metrics and by what was considered until the end of the Westphalian era

to be sort of the moral consensus of the laws and customs of war the Vietnam War made hash with that all those things as much as the Second World War did and the internal logic of a free fire zone is not any different than that of

the mandate of an insets group and formation saying that you know designating an area a free fire zone and saying that there are no civilians here and regardless

of age sex overall health everybody is a fair target because anybody who remains here after this you know they've been put on notice and given opportunity to be evacuated is obviously you know

an active communist or a sympathizer with the enemy idea and because, you know, as the mentioned material that is literally the what, you know, the bearer of that idea, it's got to be annihilated, it being human beings. Welcome to the Welcome to warfare of the 20th century where all wars are total wars. And all total wars are ideological war. you know so when you've got every week America dropping you know the body count as their victory metric like literally measuring measuring measuring whether we're winning the Cold War where

it's gone hot and mountains of corpses we're counting you know when the victory metric of nuclear war is can we kill an enemy society you know by annihilating 80 million of its people when um you've got the child Chinese who, after 68, according to a lot of these same academics were doing things like raking noldy of the colds,

this was kind of the true progressive regime that was, you know, realizing communism, they were deliberately killing off tens of millions of their own people as useless eaters. Okay, you can't, it's laughable to turn around then

and start, and start spitting like Nirmir-wise. or trying to declare that, you know, yes, the world is a wicked place and war is terrible, but, you know, those Germans, you know, they're, they're just, you know, they're, they're, they're just in league with Lucifer and, you know, we can never forgive them for this. So, I mean, I think it was all those things, you know, um, no, that doesn't, that's not to say that, I mean, Obviously, it's not to say that what sort of political biases, you know, gain momentum and become like consensus, consensus reality in conceptual terms has any kind of bearing on unreasonable things or reasonableness itself or anything like that. But, you know, we're not, we weren't talking about, you know, some sort of argument between the Hoy-Ploy, or we weren't talking about some policy initiative that elected officials trying to convince people of.

through television media or something. We were talking, this was a very, this was an argument between, this was like a controversy between, you know, like a very narrow quarterly of academics who, you know, all of whom knew better than what they were alleging.

Those contra nullity, I mean. So that's important, um, that's important to, to keep in mind. and I'll also say, and I actually wrote about this, and I really am jumping around a bit, but just, I mean, for clarity too, here's what, these are the four questions, or the four like Conjurries, according to,

according to Nolte himself, as well as Habermas, and according to, according to the people who populated most of these forums where these debates are being had between, you know, 84, 85 and like 89. It was, were the crimes of the Third Reich uniquely evil? Or were they comparable, you know, to the scaled violence of the Soviet Union and other communist countries? secondly what is Sonder vague a meaningful concept at all okay was the violence of the Third Reich or crimes if you want to abide Nuremberg logic a reaction you know to the Soviet violence like an equal and opposing reaction okay and finally you know should the Germans like as a people or

as a national group, like bear some generational burden of guilt, you know, for the supposed national socialist crimes, or should they be permitted, you know, to participation in some sort of, you know, cultural and national life? And that really, I mean, regardless, like, even if one accepts the kind of, I mean, homer preposterous, the, you know, the aforementioned postulists,

this idea that this idea that conflicts that are global in scale can just be caused by some national group of bad actors I mean that's the way a child would think you know I mean that's just it's on his face that's just it's just incredibly stupid

you know I emphasize that again and again like it's not even you know just not that's not a serious people or irrational adults talk about historical cause and effect or or discuss political concepts you know whether you know

whether the praxis or you know matters of pure theory such as pure theory can exist in a in discussion of politics but you know Nolte one of the reasons I respected him is he

or one of the reasons I he got my attention initially. I mean, even like pre-internet I'm talking. Even before I became a lawyer, I put a lot of stock in direct testimony and discrete psychological aspects of within, you know, the mind of

the key decision makers. And, you know, Naltese cited Hitler's table talk you know, where Hitler would talk about repeatedly the rat cage torture. you know, and saying in the context of, you know, this is what the communists do to people. And, you know, also talking about his own fate, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to let the communists capture me and subject me to the rat cage torture. Now, people like Habermost said, oh, this is absurd. This is, this is just Hitler suggesting that, you know, that you deal with Bolshevik enemy that apparently, you know, according to people like Habermaz existed, only in Hitler's imagination, were prone to these barbaric acts.

But the Soviets actually did that. You know, people, Orwell, I assume college kids, they'll still read. That's quite literally a plot, like a major plot point of 1984. You know, Smith sells out Julia and his comrades. And what breaks his mind is that O'Brien threatens to rat cage him. You know, so this idea that there's something that Hitler made up or was, you know, the sort of fevered dreams of a madman. I mean, that's the entire point of doing

things like the rat cage torture. You do something like that for one of two reasons. Either you're a disgusting sadist who likes to torture people or you're devising things that are so terrifying to the human being kind of universally, regardless of

sex or background or national or like ethnic psychology. You divide things that are so horrible to human beings. that, you know, people instinctively will kind of bend to your will. And obviously, you publicize those things to terrify people at scale. Like, that was the whole point.

You know, and it's this idea that, you know, and Robert Conquest, who I'm relying a lot upon for my own writing on this topic. You know, the Soviet Union had death camps decades before shot was fired in World War II. You know, they annihilated 10 million of their own people as of September 3rd, 1939.

I mean, like, you can't get away from this. And the idea that, oh, well, Hitler couldn't have known about that. That's nonsense. You know, on my own, um, Substack, I wrote about Max von Schuvener Richter. He fell at the Munich pooch. Like he'd actually, when the National Socialist charged the police court on, he'd locked arms of Hitler, and he got shot.

And he died instantly, like his heart got pierced. And when Richter fell, he had actually dislocated Hitler. Hitler's shoulder. And Hitler later said, he said, Richter was the, he's like, he's the only man we couldn't afford to lose at Munich.

You know, he's like, our party, the party, like, never recovered. Now, I wrote a whole series on Richter because he was where he was a Baltic German, like Rosenberg, okay? And the Baltic Germans were instrumental and kind of shaping the early, like, the post-Drexler party.

The post-Drexler, but pre- but pre electoral path National Socialist Party, okay, when it was still in a very revolutionary phase, but a phase that nonetheless was being shaped by Hitler, you know, doctrinally.

He was a free corps veteran who'd, you know, been fighting, he'd been fighting the communists in the Baltic. But he also, he was a lesser, aristocrat of some were known he was in Turkey when

the Armenian genocide jumped off and the way the world came to know of it was Richter was issuing these dispatches back to Berlin from the German diplomatic mission and the Kaiser's

representative finally said you got to stop doing this you know we need we need to we need to try and get these people, these people being the terms, like back in the war, and whatever government succeeds, assault in it, we've got to have good offices with them. But, so Richter went to the Red Cross,

and he started publicizing what he was seeing to anybody who would listen, and he was directly responsible for helping to rescue a lot of vulnerable persons among this population and targeted people, you know, like women, elderly, little children. So the Nantzelsus party, supposedly the only reason it convened, the only reason it constituted itself, the only reason the guys like Richter collected with Hitler was because they were racist who wanted to devise a criminal conspiracy to murder Jews.

But Richter, like, he spent his spare time, like, worrying about ethnic cleansing. I mean, like, what was you doing that just for show? Like, did you just really, really like Turkish people? I don't, I mean, this doesn't track. Like, none of this tracks. You know, um, and that's what's important, okay, is that's what the big lie is.

You know, the big lie is about stuff like Sunderbeg. It's about stuff like, you know, making Adolf Hitler, some sort of stand in for Lucifer and this, like, secular religion. It's this idea that, um, the Germans,

unlike every, you know, exclusive to themselves, unlike everybody else on this plane. planet we're obsessed with race and or which really decided Jews are a bad race. Like that's what matters. Instrumentalities of homicide don't matter. Like, arguing about, like, did 4 million people die or 8 million people die? That's, I mean, that's literally demented.

It's also retarded. You know, I mean, besides, even if that is, even if that is something that people, I mean, people can research for nothing they want. But, I mean, if that is kind of like your, your emphasis. you should be reading people like Conquess you should be reading about the logic of the free fire zone in the Vietnam conflict you should be reading about you know the Soviet death camp system you know and like Nolte himself said if you accept if you accept everything alleged by court history in total including this idea idea of, you know, homicidal gas chambers. The Soviet Union literally did everything that the Third Reich allegedly did, you know, a decade beforehand, with a possible exception of utilizing nerve gas at scale, which I hardly think matters. I'm not saying it doesn't matter if people die. I'm saying, you know, that we're talking about, you know, the preferred instrumentality of, of, um, of murderous scale. You know, we're not talking about something of grand, like substantive import, you know, so. A lot of people are, a lot of people are just kind of like tripping over themselves, not just by allowing the opposition to define the parameters of discourse, but also define, like, what is important.

You know, so it's like, you don't, court historians and people sympathetic to Zionism or whatever, or people who have some kind of, like, peculiar fixation with this idea that Third Reich is the epitome of evil. They don't get to decide, you know, what is, what, what the, terms of discourse are. They don't get to decide what the parameters are of research. They don't get to decide what needs to be proved or rebutted, you know, as if they're, you know, they're like the judge in a case at bar or something, you know, dictating the litigants, you know, what the

what their respective burdens are and things like that. It, um, the, uh, and it's also, I mean, what, at the end of the day, at the you know an ultimately at this point too at the end of the day like the past becomes the past at some point you know I mean I this is all I do is this study political theory and you know the historical process and things and it is you know it's it's I mean I'm the last person obviously would say like oh you know it's studying the historical process doesn't matter but it's idea that even if you know you know it's you know it's a little you know even if truly horrible things occur that they can't be justified by any exigency or by any appeal to anything other than, you know, the kind of universal depravity of man. I mean, it's kind of a so what. I mean, we don't spend, we don't spend decades of centuries wringing our hands because we inherited some guilt because people are bad, you know, or our ancestors are bad. That's just not, that's not the way we do things in the West, among other things.

You know, I mean, yeah, obviously, an unrepent sinner is, there's a few things kind of more obtuse and ugly than that, but, you know, one sin isn't greater than another sin or less than another. You know, it's just not, it's a bizarre way to look at the world, as if, you know, some sins are worse than others, some historical events or criminal offenses, others are just, you know, spontaneous occurrences. And certain ones, you inherit a kind of liability for them that you have to atone for symbolically or ritually. Like, that's really, really, really strange conceptually. You know, and I put that to people, too. Like, even if, even if, even if these people like Habermas, or are these people like kind of poor little unfortunate Debbie Lipstadt? he's incredibly stupid I mean however russ wasn't stupid but I mean she is but even if everything she said was true I mean it'd be kind of a big so what you know

I mean am I supposed to jump off a building because my answer's just the bad things I might just should I should I wear a hair shirt when I go to sleep or something or should I give like half of my money as a teeth to like the the local synagogue like I don't I don't what exactly do people want you know um But I'm not just being uptoos. I've actually put this to people and they look at me like I'm an alien. They pretty much tell you what they want. They want you not to just say that you know what happened was bad and that it was the worst thing that ever happened.

But they want you to go out of your way to say the evil that was done to them was unique above what every other evil. ever done in history was. No, legit. But then that plus $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks. You know what I mean? It's just it just doesn't I mean, you can give in sibilts of things like that.

And, um, but where the rubber meets the road, I mean, that doesn't really that doesn't really matter. Even in the president, I mean, that's the point to make the people who go nuts about Israel and stuff. It's like even if you're, even if you're some like impassioned Zionist or some, or somebody with a slave mentality. He's like not Jewish,

but just decided to like take on those prejudices for some unconscionable reason. I mean, it's like okay, like, you know, the Palestinians, the Hisbalah, your ops aren't, they're not all going to like put down their clashing across and be like, you know what, you're right.

You're the special victims of history. I'm a terrible person. I'm going to stop now. You can convince like a billion rogues and you know, the rest of the world that you're right. That's great. That being right doesn't win wars. Yeah, you're, you're gonna, it's easy to get people who live in a first world country who,

you know, can have food, you can have food delivered to them to be, to adopt these things because, you know, they don't really have anything bad going on in their life. But when you have people in other countries who have, in Arab countries who have real problems, they're like, well, fuck you. Well, it's just a weird, yeah. I mean, it's somewhat, it's somewhat a, it's somewhat a, well people also like it's nuts that uh you know i'm like i'm around a lot of like non-white people i mean it's kind of like where i live obviously um but like some of these guys i like record with and stuff um and i'm happy like let me record with them you know because they have interesting stuff to say and like if people are interesting you know i i i feel lucky if they let me record

what they got to say but there's like all these weirdos that send me hate mail and even if something who aren't so much haters, but they're just like, you know, how are there with people possibly let you in their house? I'm like, why would they care what I'm into? Like, that's not the way normal people think. It's like, you think that way because you're a weirdo. It's like if you like, if you think that like black people, like look at some guy like, oh, that guy's got a Nazi shirt on. I can't let him in my house. Like no one thinks that way but total weirdos. You know, or like bitch made like, like suburbanite people who live through their television or something. Like I don't even know. It's like.

No one thinks that way, man, like in the real world. You know, I guess that's like my point. You know, let's say you can the, what the, and in mind, that's the point I was made to be able to, like, part of the same is a novelty. It's that what it's not, what, what the way you judge these things, the way you judge kind of like what's shaping the conceptual horizon. It's not what, it's not what Ben Shapiro's saying or tweeting out. It's not what MSNBC is saying.

It's not like how things are being presented in Hollywood movies. You know, it's like a matter of zeitgeist. And once things lose their kind of evocative power and lose their like monumental power, like they're done. It can't be like recaptured. You know, and like nobody, like no serious historian would take something like Schindler's list like seriously today. You know, like that that's not going to change. It's not coming back. You know, and nobody's people like people, like people,

basically unless you're a unless you're one of these kind of like weird zip codes where where people attend some some crazy like like non-denom church that like worships Israel or unless you're you know like in Skoky Illinois like basically like nobody likes Israel and like that's not going to change that's not going back to the way it was you know 20 years ago you know like this can't the like zeitgeist um when the when the preceding The sort of conceptual structure, like psychological constitution is gone, like it's gone. You know, and everything is different now. I mean, that's why I always emphasize the people who say that things are so terrible today.

That it's practically, like, mainstream to be somewhat right-wing. You know, like, that's a sea change from 30 years ago. That was, like, unthinkable 30 years ago. You know, and things are never going to go back to the way they were. You know? and that's the way to look at it. It's not what people who have access to remains of the bully pulpit are like shouting out into the abyss or whatever just to hear their own echoes.

I don't know. The book you were trying to think of earlier was that Putin and the Rise of Russia by Michael Sturmer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's well worth reading. And it's actually a very balanced biography. It's not some like Putin hagiography. I don't understand how people like, speaking of bizarre sort of conceits, like deciding you randomly hate Vladimir Putin is incredibly strange.

Especially when you consider he's like a moderate liberal, if anything, like a typical cop, which is what he was. He's like obsessed with, you know, kind of the appearance of abiding the rules-based order. But it's actually a really interesting book. And yeah, that Mueller or Miller was, he wasn't a leading light like Nolty, but he's a guy who, during the historical strife. He was a younger academic and interesting things to say. Oh, a book, RHS Stofley, who wrote that book, that biography of Hitler that I think is so great. Hitler, Beyond Evil and Tyranny.

he wrote this book with this retired Vermeck, the general officer called NATO under attack. It was published in 1984 and it got a lot of attention from war college types like the sub title was

how NATO can win in Europe without nuclear weapons and if you're a late Cold War geek like I am I find it reemergence of conventional force structures as a major this positive variable. It would be fascinating

just because it's cool. But this relates very much on what we're talking about and how as the Tant ended in the final phase of the Cold War really heated up. You know,

this sort of punitive view of the Vermaq and the Germans as a people just could no longer be abided. That's, I mean, it's just like a fascinating kind of like period piece about what war planter types were thinking

and Stofley was a really freaking smart guy and who grasped political and historical the way he grasped the philosophy of history and political theory in a way mostly military types don't

but he he also was a very brilliant like you know military writer but um yeah that's uh I'm gonna ask to wrap a minute um yeah you want to

You want to end it and get plugs and get out of here? Yeah, yeah, and I'll, in part three, I'll, uh, I'll take up. I know people, because they've been asking me, they've been asking me what, if any relationship there is between, like, Nolte and like some of these, some of these guys I mentioned, like David Irving, like Fred Loiker,

um, like even Zundo, who people think I'm too punitive on, but that's, we'll get into the kind of revisionism generally, and like Nolte's sort of like place in it. Um, in the third episode.

Yeah, you can you can always find me on Twitter or not always. I mean, I think they've gotten tired to like nuking me there. It's real capital REL underscore number seven

HMAS 7777. My substack has been popping a lot lately. I really appreciate that. People are very generous in signing up and throwing me a lot of love, not just in the form of like subscriptions and donations, but you know, send me encouraging emails and stuff and I actually really do appreciate that I mean I'm not trying to

sound like some sentimental slob but you know I I I feel very mood to get that kind of love from people you can always find my content at my website it's number 7h MAS 777.com I'm on Tgram I'm on Instagram you know I'm here there seeking each you'll find Until part three. Thank you very much, Thomas.