The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1398: The Life and Work of Ernst Jünger - Pt. 1 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

59 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas begins a series exploring the life and work of Ernst Jünger.Radio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas' WebsiteThomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support 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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If not, here's a show. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekina show. Thomas, it's been a while since you and I have done something alone. I mean, except for our live streams, of course, but how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for hosting me. Of course, of course. When it came to the topic of a new series, this is one I've wanted to do for a while.

So, yeah, what do you, you know, where do you want to start when it comes to Ernst Younger? When you start with the background of the context, the intellectual tradition, he came to be the standard bearer of. Because that's ill understood, I think. you know, Younger is lumped in with Carl Schmidt, um, house offer, Oswald Spangler, as collectively,

and even Stefan George, they're talked about as the revolutionary conservatives. That doesn't really tell us anything, although I will say, conservative in German, like most things in German, most things in German that have a direct English analog, it has something of a different meaning. Probably traditionalist would be the better way to characterize it.

Because when you think of conservatism in the Edmund Burke, Anglophone sense, it's not what we're talking about. And the thing that distinguished all these people that is mentioned from these reactionary monarchist types, and what have you, or some of these Prussian officers and their counterparts, you know, their Catholic counterparts in Bavaria, was that, you know, they were very, very much right, Higalians. And they viewed the historical process as this perennially dynamic phenomena. and anybody who anybody whose perspective was that time needed to be stopped and the historical process needed to sort of be ossified in some self-contained capacity

that they do there's a fool's errand and that itself derivative of a kind of decadent stagnation within national life you know and youngers miscarriage characterized because he was one of those prolific German writers of the 20th century, despite the fact that he's kind of unknown in this country. That is changing. But he lived to be 102 years old. You know, he bore witness to the entire cycle of the 20th century and participated in every key event of it. He was a renowned naturalist. And he was an expert on wildlife, particularly birds, reptiles, and individuals. sex. There's something like five species

of beetles that he discovered that are named after Ernst Younger. You know, he was the last living recipient of the Blue Max, the Porlamerite. So, Agadim has to deal with him, but they don't know how to. They either cast them as this reactionary

type with fascist sympathies, or they cast him this anti-Nazi who hated Hitler, and both those things are asinine. Younger wasn't at odds with the national socialist regime because he was some anti-Nazi. He held Hitler in tremendous esteem.

He had an aversion of party politics because he thought that the potentialities were limited for impacting the historical process. And he viewed Hitler in quite literal terms as a right-wing counterpart to Lenin. You know, and he respected him. as a fellow front fighter and as a man and as a great man of history, but Younger wouldn't have, he wouldn't have supported any political party. And Younger was openly critical of Hitler, respectfully, on the marble cliff, or at the marble cliffs,

that's a huge critique of Adolf Hitler. So is this book, uh, through the forest. I think it's what it translates to. It's about, there's this forest that's populated by liminal and magical phenomena. And in the story, there's this blue viper. It's the only one of its kind. And it's this kind of magical beast that fascinates the peasantry.

And this forest ranger, who is also, again, obviously Hitler, he's trying to corral the creatures in the forest and capture their mystical aspects to fascinate the body. politic and he's failing and doesn't know why. Okay, Hitler didn't censor Younger. Younger wasn't arrested. This, you know, his books weren't burned. So, I mean, there's that, too. It's like, well, if Younger was this intellectual who not only refused to join the NSDAP, but he openly criticized the regime, I thought the Nazis threw you in a death camp,

if you said anything bad about Hitler, what's going on here? So this doesn't fit the narrative. Okay. there were some very tragedian aspects to the younger family and the Reich. Younger's son was a Kriegsmarine cadet. And, you know, the Third Reich began a totally different place after the July 20th attempt on Hitler. Younger's son, he began openly criticizing the regime and calling for Hitler to be overthrown,

which was an incredibly stupid thing to do. so he ended up being deprived of his midshipman status and sent to a penal battalion and he got killed on the eastern front, which by that point was basically a death sentence. But, you know, that comes as no surprise. Younger was on the periphery, according to, people also, oh, yeah, court historians also trying to claim that he was a July 20 plotter, and that's ridiculous too. younger associated with all kinds of people from from people who were involved

in the peasants movement and the back-to-nature movement to out-nought communists to, you know, people who were in literary circles around figures like George Batai you know he

he experimented with drugs because he believed that you know that by achieving altered states you know one could experience patterns of thought that weren't accessible otherwise you know he was a very unconventional

person and and very much an artist you know and um he actually when he um he fought in the Battle of France and he was awarded a second, I sent his Croix's first class.

But that was really the last time he was in action in World War II. After that, he spent the remainder of his time in uniform. He was of Houthman rank. He spent the remainder of his time in Paris an occupation duty until he was cashiered out in 44 in the wake of the July 20 plot. and he'd been approached by some people

and he presented this effort as a thought experiment he devised a plan for a post-war order like a post-Rike order that dealt with the potential military situation in contra to the United States and the Soviet Union and this was an actual document that's supposedly the big

incalbatory document that suggests he was plotting to kill Hitler, which again is ridiculous. But, you know, he and when he deployed to Paris, he definitely had some enemies in the regime. The Fulkecher

Baobacher, you know, which is the official party newspaper. In 1933, they denounced Younger as having communist sympathies. It's younger than said that he'd file a lawsuit if the Vokasher bailbacker ever mentioned his name or ran any of his material.

and he refused to appear on Gerbil's radio programs because he blamed the propaganda ministry for that slander. But he also, and the retaliation he faced was that the Gestapo searched his home when he was deployed to Paris repeatedly, presumably like trying to dig up personal dirt on him. You know, because that's what secret policemen do. but he also he had

he had powerful friends in the Algamine assess including Werner Best and other people so it's complicated you know and again this idea that

I mean one of the reasons why he's just sort of not dealt with it's not just because any any 20th century German intellectual he's either

totally redacted from the record by academe or or he's presented as some liberal. But in Younger's case, you can't, you can't really gloss over him. And, you know, he also stands a testament of the fact that the German Reich wasn't this place where if you uttered, it wasn't the D, it wasn't the D.D.R.

It wasn't this place where if you uttered a joke about Hitler, you were shot in the face. Or if you wrote a book that the party didn't like, you got sent to a concentration camp. That's not how things were. Younger also, he wrote an essay about the threat of Jewish cultural existence to Europe and the European mode of life. But he also, he was profoundly offended when he was in France at the Patan government. he came across two little kids, little girls, and they were wearing the yellow star, as was required, the jury indicating Jewish race,

and that really upset him, not because they were Jews, because they were children. And he said children should never, little kids should never be, you know, forced into that sort of stark political paradigm. You know, he wasn't some naive liberal. You know, younger had killed a hell of a lot of people.

So, you know, he was a complicated guy that can't be pigeonhole. But he also had a huge impact on Heidegger, especially Heidegger's later work. And younger, it kind of is most, if not as most prolific. I think his most sophisticated and intellectually mature work product is what he wrote in the 1950s, you know, and that's when he wrote the Glass Bees, which is probably my favorite younger novel, and it's very much a science fiction

novel, and it, you know, it's very much as, if you read, uh, if you read Heidegger's later stuff and particularly some of the, when he was, when he finally

sort of became rehabilitated, in the European press, the free European press, you'll discern things that are almost word for word, the stuff that Younger wrote about in the decade previously, including the Des Spiegel interview where he talks about the moon landing and, you know, man's confrontation, European man specifically, you know, in the confrontation with technology. Younger was born in Heidelberg, which technically isn't historical sphabia, but it's within that cultural orbit, as I think our German friends on deck among the subs and listeners will confirm. And younger, like Rommel, I think he very much had a sphabian disposition. He grew up in a nominally Protestant household.

He converted to Catholicism just before he died at 102 years. years old. Some people speculate he may have long been a, you know, a believing Catholic who just kept that aspect of his life to himself. But that's interesting. You know, he volunteered for the Great War on the day it broke out in 1914. Previously, when he was 16 in 1913, He'd, uh, by 1911, I think, yeah. He'd run away to join the Foreign Legion. Um, he ran away to Verdun. And, uh,

joined the Foreign Legion, and he was briefly sent to Algeria to commence his training, because obviously the Legion was fighting in, you know, North Africa. They were perpetually engaged there, so that's where they'd train that's their training cadres would be sent. But his father persuaded him to return, and then he disclosed his true nationality to the Legion, and he was discharged and without penalty. But, you know, obviously, even as a young kid,

he had an incredible tendency towards this sort of manly adventurism. but he joined the 73rd Fusselaer's he was deployed in October the 73rd went into action immediately after they were after the underwent

you know infantry training he fought in about every major engagement throughout the winner of 1914 and then the subsequent summer

he was promoted the squad leader and then in November 1915 he was a Mustang lieutenant junior officer you know

so the guy was a complete stud he was um he was a platoon leader and he was still a teenager you know he's twice twice wounded um

in his many months convoluted Convalaster turn to the front, was wounded again. You know, he's finally, he's finally discharged just before the final offenses, or the final German offensive. You know, and he has, you know, by that point he held the Knights Cross, the Porla Mirate in a whole pile of other combat. decorations. And his first, interestingly, his first writings, which he began

between about 1918 and 1923, there were these fragmentary memoirs. And younger being an Orientalist who also spent time in Algeria, you know, some of the early, and this is really interesting, what's known about pre-Islamic Arabia and the old gods.

There was this text from about 1,100 AD written by this Islamic scholar, and it translates it as the time of the idols or the time of ignorance. But what's known about that period is that even among a lot of these tribal nomads of North Africa on the Arabian Peninsula, there usually was at least

one man among them who was literate and could read and write. And even when there was no such man present, they'd draw pictograms on these stones. There's these kinds of shale stones come into the landscape of North Africa in some parts of the peninsula. And these like fragmentary prayers would be written out. or acknowledgments of fealty to one god or another you know

and gradually a tendency towards monotheism came to emerge but also this is the way records were kept because if you're constantly moving as a pastoralist tribe living a Bedouin life you'll leave these fragments

as evidence of your people's presence at that loa guy in addition to proffering these things as a testamentary supplication. So there's a sort of long-rank tradition of fragmentary postulists taken together to constitute a narrative that is both stream of consciousness and character as well as very, very concise, you know, concise. about what is intellectual and emotional states in discrete moments.

And younger, obviously, he was trying to structure as early, and some of his final, you know, literary efforts towards that sort of format. And I speculate also some of this derived from, you know, him just kind of finding his voice as a writer. But eventually, when he submitted his memoir for publication, and ultimately that became Storm of Steel. And Storm of Steel was hugely popular among veterans. And it's interesting because it's really the antithesis of Allquite on the Western Front,

which I think is really modeling and self-serving. You know, and Storm of Steel such that it received any attention in the Anglophone cultural sphere. It was cast as a sort of

primitive war-mongering epilogia. It's not that at all. You know, Younger had a very, he had a very, he had a very traditional view of warfare. It arrives like the season. That's not good or bad.

There's things about it that are edifying. There's things about it that are ridiculous and stupid. There's things about it that are terrifying. And there's things about it that are very human in all the most laudable ways. It's not, I mean, it's a value-neutral judgment. You can judge how men behave at war, whether they're brutes or whether they're chivalrous or whether they're cowardice. or whether they're brave, but that's faced a human condition, not warfare, qua warfare.

Younger didn't feel comfortable in a peacetime army. He felt it was pointless. He came to associate with various Free Corps formations, you know, not just because he sympathized with a lot of their ambitions. You know, and to be clear, different Frye Corps militias and different ideological sympathies. But, you know, he, any vestigeal need for combat action and violence,

a veteran discharged and still serving could find that in the Frye Corps. You know, a peacetime army, particularly the, the Reichsville, of the Weimar era was really an army in name only. And it was around that time, he developed a political consciousness. And some of the men are credited with being the progenitors of

the original national Bolshevik movement, like Ernst Nekish, were some of Younger's early associations but again that owed more to a hegelian understanding

of the development of the historical process there were the sort of seminal archetypes that Younger devised that he wrote he dedicated discrete volumes to you know one is the front line soldier what is the worker, their arbiter, the final,

one is the rebel or the revolutionary, and archetypal man who represents the most developed consciousness is obviously the anarch, but, you know, his association with some of these strassarist types and national Bolshevik figures owed to the fact that this was a meaningful political tendency

on the Weimar Street and I mean even as I've made the point before the Berlin NSDAP I mean they collaborate in general strike with the KPD you know the reality is that the

labor socialism and revolutionary imperatives therein, I mean, that's what was a stride to zeitgeist. You know, the centrality of the workers' movement and identitarian features relating to the life of the industrial labor were at the core of Vimar politics. and younger himself too, even as a very young man, he viewed the right and left distinction as essentially meaningless and particularly as some sort of indicator of enmity or allegiance.

You know, the problem with, the problem with Marxist-Leninism and revolutionary communism was the same problem with the same problem with what he viewed as the, you know, the, like, Jewish capitalist Americanism. The issue wasn't that, you know, one was left-wing contra some

categorical antithesis. That's not the way politics develops. And Younger also, one of the reasons he respected Hitler, Hitler didn't embody the person of the anarch. But what Hitler was was, he viewed it, younger viewed figures like Hitler is dominating the historical process,

because they both embody it but are also aloof from it. Think of a man situated in the eye of a hurricane, but unencumbered by its... destructive momentum, or maybe a better example would be, imagine somebody like Noah riding the crest of a tsunami as the deluge engulfs the world. So if you're talking about a self-contained sovereign individual, particularly a man who is of a heroic type in the Carlisle sense, who's directing historical events by embodying the zeitgeist.

You know, you're, it's meaningless to talk about whether that man is right-wing or left-wing sympathies. That's the way that people who aren't, you know, the subject of the historical process, that's the way they interpret these phenomena and that affects them, but that they have no real meaningful role in other than as, you know, one almost sort of monadic or cellular aspect within the national organism. And that's fine. It doesn't bespeak of some inferiority. That's just the way men are.

And the way, particularly in a technologically driven era of total politics, that's just the way human lives function in discrete capacities within these wider constellations of causal phenomena of a of a humanist sort. And politics obviously is the zenith of human activity in terms of the willful application of power. You know, and the Younger's old point, too, was that, you know, and this is something that, He found common cause with Schmidt and people like Charles Moross. Do you misunderstand the revolutionary conservative tendency as being either atheist or agnostic or pagan? It's really none of those things.

You know, the understanding that God is dead and resort to the, resort either to, you know, the forms conferred by the Roman church or to the, soterological aspects of the Bible in continental Europe that that was that had been totally upended not because people deliberately revolted against God

I mean they did in France and in the Soviet what began the Soviet Union but even outside of very narrow environments you know like

Romania like Slovakia like Croatia, well, his belief of a conventional sort didn't have the power to animate politics anymore. That's just not the way people thought. Anyway, it was the age of true materialism. And people like Younger did not think that was a good thing, but that was the reality. However, like Maras, like Younger, like Murcia El-Iotti, theological concepts never really went away in Younger's opinion. You know, and the sort of the destruction of the European mode of life in 1789, it had odd consequences, you know, because on the one hand, that kind of repudiated the idea that,

you know, constitutional democracy and rule of law and civil society, clearly all those things were obsolete if a cadre emerges, it has the will. and the ruthlessness and the directed motivation to categorically murder their enemies that's the rule of law being meaningless. You know, and that level of violence

and that level of truly fervent commitment that was something sight unseen probably since the crusader era. So Apollo took us took on this mythological character. You know, And Younger was constantly talking about, you know, we'll get atheist Russia.

Stalin is a great Khan. He's like a god. You know, the Soviet Union is many things, but it's not atheist. You know, it might be practicing a perverse kind of political theology. It might be evil. But you can't say that people who worship Stalin like he was Genghis Khan or people who were abiding some secular humanist perspective. of rationalism. That's ridiculous. You know.

And Eliati's point, the way he perceived it, you know, and obviously he was very much a believing Orthodox Christian. You know, he served in the Iron Guard. You know, he was like a Christian Mujahideen, or Mujaheed. The, uh, his notion was that, well, you know, this is an effort to, uh, what's going on in the Soviet Union and what happened in in France in 1789

it was as ever to stop historical time you know and find some sort of reference point for you know what amount of to do the apocalyptic conditions

driven by the political situation um you know and interestingly Markuza who was this Freudo Marxist who I think in a lot of ways

had an even broader impact on academic discourse than most of the Frankfurt school people but I mean I think that that influence is overstated but

you know he he wrote an essay about the basic rudderlessness of liberalism and the absence of some sort of meaningful political theology to ground it

is one of the reasons why you know Stalinism takes on a certain appeal within certain political cultures you know obviously too the race of the nation you're talking about and its own discreet heritage and psychological aspects has a positive influence as well and I mean Marcuse, even Marcoza wouldn't have denied that,

but you know, the Marcusa's big criticism of the right and he viewed the right is inherently totalitarian and like a lot of, you know, schismatics within the communist movement. He viewed Stalin as not just presenting over a de foreign worker state, but he viewed him as some sort of, you know, as some sort of quasi-fascist dictator. You know, the notion was that, well, you know, these fascist and quasi-fascist totalitarians, they're trying to stop historical time. by appeal to a deformed political theology, you know, because, of course, to a leftagalian, you know, the historical progress is God. And, you know, the achievement of a Tulleric utopia to come is the stand-in for, you know, a soterological belief structure.

You know, and that's why to the National Socialists, and one of the things that alienated people like younger and Eliotty and some other adjacent but not truly committed elements within the German Reich or, you know, other access states, you know, they, the over emphasis on the Blutkaimanschaft,

you know, the blood community in lieu of the historical community, you know, and that there was a lot, there was, I mean, national socialism wasn't just a biological theory of social Darwinism, I mean, at all. It's not, you can't reduce it to that. But those characteristics were front and center. particularly in party propaganda disseminated for mass consumption. So this idea of, you know, this sort of appeal to the spirit of the age and the materialist biological zeitgeist, you know, this idea that, well, you know,

you're a European because of your race, or you're a Jew because of your blood. You know, not not because of metaphysical criteria. or historical phenomena, which, like all truly ancient institutions, you know, its origins are mysterious. You know, people simply just are what they are because of essential characteristics of, you know, physical biology. You know, and Younger's point was that you can't, you can't build a dialectic on that. And to be fair, I mean, a lot of a lot of national socialism derived from the Sorrelian view of, you know, a virile Aryan warrior mythology. And I think that that's what animated it ethically in the way that Leninism was really the fuel or the accelerant that allowed Marxist praxis to become this incredibly effective and

dangerous revolutionary modality. But at the same time, what the National Socialists were correct about, even if their criteria was inadequate for defining essential aspects of. of the subject matter of human race, what they were correct about is that, you know, there is no universal man that doesn't exist. That belongs to a category of mind, not a category of reality.

There's not just this, there's not just this being called man. You know, there's Germans, there's Frenchmen, there's Japanese, there's Russians. You know, and the... the inner experience of being those things is basically mutually exclusive. You know, that's why even you can create, you can strip everybody of their ability to live historically, you know, which obviously is what the regime aims to do,

and teach everybody to speak in this sort of diminished Esperanto that doesn't really describe anything. but then really all you're doing is homogenizing everybody into some sort of subhuman category. You're not actually creating a universal man. You know, it's like, it's the equivalent of lobotomizing somebody to cure them of of their anxiety. It's like, okay, well, yeah, if you make somebody a mentally retarded vegetable,

they're not anxious anymore, but you know, they also defecate in their pants and, you know, are incapable of thought beyond that of a reptilian aspect. You know, so in the final analysis, you know, younger, like Ebola,

like, uh, like Carl Schmidt, like Murcia Liyadi, you know, national socialism was intrinsically inadequate to address historical phenomena and the ongoing crisis of Western civilization, but by what it identified as the source of the Malays was correct.

And what it objected to were the lies promulgated by the, you know, the anti-human utopianism of 1780. dying and other Bolsheviks and other you know, Judeo liberals and the and their Anglophone allies. You know, they weren't wrong about those things. What they were wrong about was the conceptual

picture that they were presenting as a media alternative. Younger also saw potentiality in mass society. Yeah, it's dehumanizing. Yeah, it crushes individualism. Not individualism in the liberal democratic sense,

but the ability to establish a discreet identity and understand the self, you know, independent of collective forms of association. collective, I'm not communitarian. But at the same time, you know, the driving engine of actual progress is the ability to mobilize human capital and the service of grand historical projects. And what younger experienced at the front and, you know, working in a... a steel foundry and the like was, well, now literally tens of millions of people can be mobilized towards modalities of creative destruction and industrial progress that is truly godlike.

you know and within those conditions man will basically adapt or die so a harder strain of person will emerge number one number two there are dehumanizing aspects to assimilating man into the technological apparatus and younger saw in the far future that would literally happen it was happening figuratively with making human bodies act like machines and work in concert with machines at a machine pace. But he also thought, you know, eventually, we'll get into this as we get into his body of work, but he had foresighted, he understood technology very, very well and very thoroughly. And he had an understanding of cybernetics that most soldiers of, you know, kind of middle class

semi-rural stock wouldn't. But, you know, you did this idea that everything about the technological age is bad, I mean, is ridiculous. And one of the big reasons why liberalism causes racial suicide

and precludes value creation is because the highest good is eradicating danger. You know, and you see this today. That's why if you ask, if you ask some deracinated European or some Canadian, like why, what's the use of government? They'll talk about how there's this wonderful health care system where you can go get a shot so you don't get sick.

I mean, that shouldn't even occur to you. You know, I, it, and people who's, people who are oriented that way, obviously are not capable. anything because everything in life is risky. I mean, even everything from being, I mean, everything from buying a used car, you want to fix up in your garage to being intimate with a pretty girl to, you know, purchasing stocks with money maybe you can or can't afford to lose. I mean, these are all comparably prosaic things, but all those things carry risks. you know, if your, if your pole star

is that danger needs to be avoided and it must remain safe at all costs you're not even a natural slave, you're nothing. You know, slaves do essential things and slaves take a lot of risks

and a lot of slaves exhibit tremendous bravery. Spartacus was a slave. You know, I mean, I there's an endless litany of slaves who've done incredibly heroic things. You know, so also to I'm getting a little bit ahead

but this is important to while we're on this particular aspect of the subject matter. The anarch can only emerge from technological society because he's neither master nor a slave. He's a self-containative individual

who he's got to be able to fight and he's got to be able to handle modern weapons. He's got to be able to operate and fix machines. He's got to be able to do comparatively complex calculations in his head. He's got to be able to read and write and comprehend complex subject matter. He's got to be able to keep up with the machines that are essentially dictating the pace of work or combat. You know, that and people who can't will die. You know, they just want to be. cease to exist. So you're creating conditions where the men and women who emerge are you know, it's like an egalitarianism emerges,

but it's an egalitarianism of the elite. You know, um, and younger viewed that as truly remedial. You know, and again, too, even if, um,

even if people's interpretation of God becomes deformed. You know, the ongoing, the kind of stern and drawing of a of the dialectical process and historical existence

will ultimately reveal you know, the truth of providential design and the cutting of reason. You know, God's not in danger of being eradicated by you know, the

conspirator. territorial designs of man. And, you know, this is a... You know, and that's why, like I said, this guy at the top of the hour, I said, it's something of a... It's something of a malapropism to refer to this tendency

as revolutionary conservatism. Because, you know, and again, in German, conservative means something different, but there's also to, you know, to bring it back to because I spent most of the hour talking about what was wrong with the National Socialist Velfen Shong,

but even the Himmler and, you know, the SS and in Arabah, and in Arabah, they had a strong interest in this subject matter. Himmler wasn't an intellectual, but he, you know, the cyclical process of history and how this was perceived, particularly in Oriental civilization, which if you abide of the Bronze Age theory of this Aryan culture-bearing element, emerging from, you know, the Kergan mound, heartland, the Caucasus, you know, a lot of what we view as Oriental was in fact of Aryan derivation. So this isn't really some fetishization of some alien cultural modality.

It's a return to a previous understanding of a less developed monotheism that nevertheless was what framed Western metaphysics, particularly on the continent. The UK is different. Well, that's a subject for another day. But the reason why Himmler was, and people like Werner Best were pushing these expeditions to India and China and Afghanistan, I mean, that's what they were in search of. And a lot of these, at some point, we should do a series on the Baron Ungerman von Sternberg, who was very much a proto-national socialist. You know,

the Third Reich didn't emerge in a vacuum, and it wasn't just this derivation of anti, of, you know, what was coming out of anti-communist dialectic and the romantic musings of people like Dietrich Eckert.

I think Dietrich Eckert was a, was a brilliant guy. I'm not trashing him, but I don't think he was I don't think poets and literary types generally understand power politics, but you know,

Younger was very situated within that same tendency. You know, although obviously he didn't he didn't abide the views of people like Himmler who was an eccentric

individuals at least. But, you know, and that's But it's also to, and I'll wrap it up in a second. One of the things everybody understood, even people who didn't abide the National Socialist program in part or in total. To resist the momentum of communism, which was truly astride the historical process, you can't resist it with NATO and the promise of Americanism and everybody making money. you know, there's got to be a countervailing tendency that is just, at least, just as powerful, to hold it bay.

You know, and Younger realized that. You know, and that's part of his admiration for Hitler derived from that reality. I think I got, yeah, here's what Younger relayed years later about the first time he saw Hitler. and then later they had a correspondence. And Hitler loved Storm of Steel. And he made that known. So he sent

Younger an autograph copy of Mind Kampf and Younger thanked him and then Younger sent him a copy of Storm of Steel and he addressed it to Adolf Hitler the fur of the German people. And here's what Younger said

on his first impression at Hitler. He said, quote, I barely knew his name when I saw him in a Munich amphitheater when he delivered one of his very first speeches.

I was captivated as if I were undergoing some sort of purification. Our immeasurable efforts during those four years of war had led not only led to our undoing

but also the humiliation. Our now disarmed country was surrounded by dangerous neighbors who were armed to their teeth. It was fragmented, pillaged, bled dry. It was a sinister vision, a vision of sheer horror.

And now he looked on as a stranger rose up and told us what had to be said. Anyone felt that he was right. And it wasn't a mere speech he was giving. He embodied a manifestation of the elemental. And I had been swept away by it. I mean, does that sound like a guy who hates Hitler and is some liberal anti-fascist who's just abiding convention and appearances so he doesn't get, thrown in a death camp apparently not but yeah we can go ahead obviously not yeah yeah yeah we'll continue this series um i hope i hope the sods are finding this informative and helpful and uh we'll we'll get into that we'll get into the younger's body of work as we move on and i need time

to refresh my recollection on some of this stuff i haven't read in you know like a decade but i'm happy to do it absolutely thank you um i will make sure to link to everything, your substack, and, you know, your website. And yeah, go support Thomas. Thank you, Pete. All right. Thanks a lot, Thomas. Appreciate you.