From:
thangolossus@gmail.com
On Fri, 22 Sep 2017 23:01:22 -0700 (PDT), LowRider44M
<
intraphase@gmail.com> wrote:
My new word for the month is Grenzwissenschaft.
Gren Wise N' Shaft
I thought the German "w" was pronounced "v"...as the English will find
out soon enough after Brexit breaks the union.
"Border Science" an elaborate substitute for "pop psychology - poppycock."
The Nazis’ Supernatural Obsession fullscreen
From the cover of Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, by Eric Kurlander (Yale University Press)
Many at the higher levels were Ph.D's or more but hypnotism on top of
a massive losing war does wonders for the need to be led...
The supernatural shit affected those who wanted to be affected.
Nonsense is still nonsense and distilled nonsense is just a rarer more effective form.
I recall around the turn of the 18th century in Crowley's time there
was a social matrix built around theosophy, seances, spiritualism,
levitating tables and displays of ectoplasm. Most of the educated
world was in on that just like Germans English Americans Russians etc
so it wasn't too unusual to have evidently ridiculous theories and
practices in those days. People wanting to be entertained in the age
and day of the pronouncement by Kelvin that everything had been
discovered and only needed to be now measured.
Eric Kurlander provides an exhaustive examination of the supernatural history of the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific
knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to
fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi
leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for
years, Eric
Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, shows that
many others felt much the same way.
It can't be exhaustive because most of the records are gone in the conflagration. It's got to be more join the dots rather than a line
between major events. A good book on this is the Dawn of the
Magicians by Pauwells and Bergier if you can find it. They lived
through the war if I remember correctly.
Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic
feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German
homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian
civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons,
and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque
by the
contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by
Germany during the war.
The seers and psychics still abounded due to the "magic" of the
roaring twenties and the pre-WW1 years. They had not yet been seen
through by everyone. It's easy relatively to hypnotise a willing
subject.
BTW, mostly science was the proven practice of the average German
professional not the supernatural. Porsche made Tiger tanks and
Mercedes planes, half tracks and so on and BMW the same in addition to
the excellent MCs - now they sell to people like us with the brains
enough to make enough money to buy their products. Not a skerrick of supernatural in any Mercedes I've ever been in :)
The refining of deuterium and other isotopes was sheer hard science
but might have looked like magic to some. They made the first jet
aircraft and things like delta winged ifghters but necessity is the
mother of invention.
If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the
meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested
on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual
enemies of an advanced “Aryan”
race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century. Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly
popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers),
and much
more
besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely
smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared
to be
more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”
Well Kurlander is probably an American and if so just needs to read
the history of his nation to encounter "superstition and
pseudoscience" which ran through the settlers' and later thinking
about indiginous indians, black slaves, Chinese and so on, all of
which led to segregation and slavery and cheapening of human life.
All of this is old hat anyhow and there are hundreds of books written
about Heidegger, the Thule Society, Rudolf Steiner, the Vril Society
and all of that.
Hitler picked Jews as scapegoats in one of the most cynical ways ever
recorded. Quite an evil man to do that but it was the fashion in
those days, pogroms everywhere and the Brits had already invented
concentration camps of course for the Boers and others...
I doubt he believed a word of the tripe he hurled at the crowds.
Powered by Kurlander contends that this supernatural dread was genuinely felt by “the Third Reich’s brain trust,” a claim that should be treated with some caution. When it comes to the supernatural, what people believe and what they say they
believe are frequently very different — more so, indeed, than they might themselves
understand. When studying the translation of concepts of such malevolence into the deeds that became the Holocaust, it is easy to make the all too common mistake of treating the Nazis as a case apart, as an unparalleled eruption of evil. And, yes, there
were aspects of the Third Reich — from the particular horrors it devised to an
ideology that was as bizarre as it was sinister — that distinguished it from the other mass-murdering regimes of the last century. But take a step back and the similarities between National Socialism and its totalitarian counterparts on the left
quickly become visible. This is true of their shared “supernatural” dimension. All were
essentially millenarian. Communist revolutionaries (nominally philosophical materialists despite a fundamentally mystical view of historical forces) would not have appreciated the connection, but it was there all right — the religious impulse is hard
to discard — complete with the promise of a merciless sorting, after which the
saved would march to a better world. Untethered to atheism, the Nazis could be more explicitly millenarian, referring to a “thousand-year” Reich. This number has, notes Kurlander (citing another author), “deep biblical overtones,” overtones to
which he pays too little attention — a curious misstep in a history of this type, as is
his relatively cursory handling of the Nazis’ knotty relationship with Christianity.
As Kurlander makes clear, the Nazis’ racial and occult obsessions did not come out of nowhere. The party that evolved into the National Socialists had roots in the Thule Society, a group formed in early 1918, focused on the occult, anti-Semitism, and,
as Germany descended into defeat, politics. Its members sported a swastika in homage to the Aryans’ supposed Indo-European heritage — an important, if counterintuitive, theme that ran through much of esoteric German racism and was
associated with the admiration for “Eastern” spirituality of the sort later
felt by quite a
few leading Nazis. The Thule Society (the name is a reference to a “Nordic” interpretation of the Atlantis myth) had in turn emerged out of a broader Germanic intellectual community that had wallowed in a swamp of Grenzwissenschaft (or “border science,” to give this nonsense — astrology, anthroposophy, “natural”
medicine, parapsychology, radiesthesia, theosophy, and all the rest — a kinder name than it
deserves), Aryan
fantasy, and racial hysteria for decades. There is no “right” side of history, no law that makes what we call progress inevitable. Other parts of Europe were also doing their bit to let the Enlightenment down. As Kurlander points out, it was a
Frenchman, Arthur de Gobineau, who, writing some 40 years before the beginning of the
Dreyfus Affair, did much to popularize the idea of a superior Aryan race. Anti-Semitism was far from being solely a Teutonic vice.
Kurlander accepts that border science had scant respect for borders but maintains (without satisfactorily explaining why) that Germans were more despairing of the growing ascendancy of scientific materialism than most Europeans, and therefore more prone
to succumb to the “re-enchantment” offered by border science. If that was true
before 1914, it was even more so after a war that shattered any illusions about
modernity — and a defeat that brought humiliation, chaos, and revolution in its wake. As Kurlander tells it, “hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians” bought “
occult and New Age literature,” read “border scientific journals,” and participated in
“astrological and theosophical societies, séances and spiritualist experiments.” A key element in this collective derangement was the suspicion — still flourishing in the West today — that modern science had torn apart the harmony that had
allegedly once existed between man, nature, and the divine, a breach that could
be restored
by a more spiritual, holistic approach. More often than not, the results — such as “biodynamic” agriculture (a more straightforwardly superstitious variant of organic farming) — were largely innocuous, but the fact that there
was a biodynamic “
plantation” on the grounds of Auschwitz is a reminder of where the retreat from reason
can lead, a lesson that, judging by our own overly relaxed response to resurgent pseudoscience (the anti-vaxxers come to mind) or political attacks on
the scientific method, has not been learned.
The dream of restoring a lost whole — even one that had never seen the light
of day — was particularly toxic when applied to ethnicity. Imagining a heroic
national past (even one with mythic or supernatural undertones) was not confined to Germans,
nor was a sense of being a cut above other races, but in Germany, such prejudices
were unusually intense. Kurlander never specifies quite why, but the comparatively late (1871) creation of a unified German state — a state then partly unraveled by the Treaty of Versailles — must have increased the pressure on Germans, including, in
different ways, their kin in the multiethnic Austria-Hungary of Hitler’s youth or
the truncated Austria that was left after World War I, to define who they were.
Among the ways they responded was by emphasizing who was not German, most notably the Jews, reviled for the threat they were meant to represent to the unity of the Volk: They
were an Other that could have no place in a nation that wished to survive as a >nation. Even if he might occasionally exaggerate the contribution of the specific outlandish beliefs he describes to the catastrophe that unfolded, Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has
probably scared away some of the serious research it merits.
In remedying that, Kurlander offers a strikingly different and deeply disturbing perspective on the rise and subsequent trajectory of the Third Reich, and, most unsettling of all, on the numinous appeal of its Führer. Hitler both shared and channeled (
some contemporaries referred to him as a medium) the discontents of a people so drastically detached from reality that they were seduced by a conjuring trick, albeit one in which the conjurer himself may well have believed. It was a dark magic so potent that it took an apocalypse to break the spell.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451656/eric-kurlanders-hitlers-monsters-andrew-stuttaford-reviews
There's some sort of thesis hidden in amongst all that and a review
simply won't do, all you are reading is the opinion of one person
about the writings of another. You need to read the book and then,
have a lot of knowledge about the period and times which means you
need to read a lot of other books and then balance up what you think
is the truth (facts) as opposed to recollections, statements,
declarations, hypotheses and so on. History is far more settled than
science because after the discovery of the quantum nature of reality
nothing in science can ever be 100% certain, just proven to a
magnitude as close as we can to unity. History is just a compilation
of facts and opinions on those facts will never do. The facts have to
be derived by you and even books are just pointers in that regard. The
best historians learn the language of the place in which the events
occurred and then access local museums, libraries, city records,
personal records and so on and build up their best works based on
facts.
I don't trust a work with an evocative title either, a bit like a
snowstorm if you get my meaning.
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