Moscow and the Nazi International

Commentary for 8 June 2015

Alexander Dugin, the Russian geopolitical theorist and advisor to President Putin, has said that the twentieth century was “the century of ideology.” It was, as Nietzsche predicted, a century in which ideas (and ideologies) warred against one another. The three warring factions were, in order of their appearance: liberalism (of the Left and Right), communism (as well as social democracy), and fascism (including Hitler’s National Socialism). These three ideologies fought each other “to the death, creating, in essence, the entire dramatic and bloody political history of the twentieth century.” According to Dugin, liberalism came out the winner. Yet victories of this kind are rarely permanent. In fact, Dugin tells us that liberalism has already disintegrated into “postmodernity.” With its focus on the individual, Dugin argues that liberalism has led to globalization, and globalization means that man is “freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity….” This happened because a mass of human beings, “comprised entirely of individuals, is naturally drawn toward universality and seeks to become global and unified.” Even now this impetus toward globalization coincides with the glorification of total freedom “and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, morality, identity … discipline, and so on.” The result, says Dugin, is Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History.” But let us not be fooled, Dugin explains. History doesn’t really end. What has really happened, in fact, is the realization that liberalism’s triumph has been a disaster for humanity. It is a disaster for the individual because the individual has lost his moorings. It is a disaster for freedom, because we are now under the “tyranny of the majority.” It is a disaster for our economy, because spoliation is the emerging market principle. And those who wish to preserve their racial, national, or religious identities are set down as enemies by a political correctness as deluded as it is bloodless.

Here Dugin seems to be echoing James Burnham, who once explained that liberalism was “the ideology of Western suicide.” Liberalism destroys, as Joseph Schumpeter argued, its own “illiberal supports.” Dugin’s book, The Fourth Political Theory, on which Russia’s strategy now depends, is actually an updated version of an old strategic formula which once took shape under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It is an attempt to revive and merge the defeated ideologies of communism and fascism for a final battle. By uniting all the communists and the fascists (and Islamo-fascists) at the moment of liberalism’s strongest suicidal impulse, Dugin and his Russian bosses hope to build an unprecedented global coalition. It is worth noting that Dugin cannot have invented this “new” totalitarian approach, because its elements were present in Soviet strategic thinking and planning before Dugin was born. Stalin was using the Fourth Political Theory in August 1939 when he sent the British and French delegations packing in order to sign a pact with Hitler.

It is reported that Stalin often said, in perfect seriousness, “I could have conquered the world with Hitler.” Why did he say this? Because the Nazis knew how to mobilize public support for their cause and the communists did not. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once warned that raw force was insufficient. He said, “It is better to make the people love you.” Nazism wasn’t merely about hate. It was also about love – love of the Führer, love of the Fatherland, etc. It is what made Hitler so dangerous. He could get people to love things, and die for things, and also to kill. In 1940, as Stalin plotted to stab Hitler in the back, he made the mistake of underestimating the Nazis. The subsequent Soviet military disasters, which occurred through the summer and fall of 1941, were unprecedented in the history of warfare. The titanic armed struggle between communism and Nazism which took place from 1941-45 saved Western liberalism. 

There is another point to consider, as well. Stalin’s successors have had years to recognize the weaknesses of their own political system and the advantages of Hitler’s system. Therefore, we should not think it strange that the communist bloc began experimenting with aspects of National Socialism long ago. By preserving certain traditions, and by appealing to nationalism, people can be motivated to fight – and this is what Alexander Dugin is attempting to exploit with his Fourth Political Theory. The rebirth of Nazism (in altered form) and a flowering of anti-Semitism have been anticipated by Moscow for a long time, and Dugin has given this rebirth a wink. After all, the political pendulum is always swinging back and forth between extremes. It is well understood that men recycle their ideas even as they recycle their fashions. For three generations we have heard about the Holocaust and the wickedness of Hitler. In response to this, Russia’s analysts have long expected to see the triumph of Holocaust denial and the deification of Hitler through a contrarian shift in mass European opinion.  

Dugin did not befriend the white nationalists and proto-Nazis of Europe out of a sincere desire to help their cause – any more than Stalin aligned himself with Hitler in 1939 because he agreed with Mein Kampf. Dugin is cautious, and avoids an outright embrace of overt racism. He says that real racism is American racism. And so, his encouragement of the White Nationalists and National Socialists has been very sly, and quite indirect. His purpose was and is to smash the liberal free market system in the West by getting all anti-liberal forces to oppose American capitalism and, by default, to support Moscow. Once upon a time the Nazis were a rising power and their energy was harnessed by Stalin to attack the West. Today Moscow sees another wave approaching, and once again hopes to harness the power of that wave – as dangerous as it might be.

Many years back, the ever insightful Claire Berlinski wrote Menace in Europe. She realized, on a very deep psychological level, that anti-Semitism and Nazism had never really died. These impulses merely became dormant, and could reappear in the future. The de-Nazification of postwar Germany therefore only appears to have succeeded. With the admixture of multiculturalism, homosexual advocacy, feminism and more, Europe has been served a cocktail which seems designed for one thing: namely, to revive a new type of Nazism. Add Muslim immigration to this witch’s brew and what do you have? You have a white nationalist reaction.

Alexander Dugin and his Kremlin bosses are watching Europe. They know that liberalism is going to be blamed for a series of emerging problems.  And so it is important that they demonstrate openness to the Front National in France, and the Golden Dawn in Greece. And why shouldn’t they? These organizations were targeted for infiltration and manipulation by Russian agents a long time ago. Here is where it helps to know the real history of the fascists and Nazis in Europe. These are not true anti-communists, but have been potential satellites of communism for decades. There is, indeed, in the history of the Second World War, a mass of unexamined questions and misunderstood moves that continue to haunt Europe. Even the simplest facts about this war have been misunderstood. And Moscow would like to keep it that way, preserving at all costs our false assumptions. 

Let us take one simple event from the war, and show how indifferent our best historians have been. Countless books have been written about Hitler’s death, but none have asked the right questions. It is well-known that the Soviet Union withheld all hard evidence of Hitler’s demise from the rest of the world. What historian has had the sense to ask why? In fact, Stalin himself encouraged the rumor that Hitler escaped from Berlin in April 1945. More recently the Russians presented a woman’s skull as belonging to Hitler, with the bullet hole in the wrong place. Why did they do this? It is very simple. From a strategic standpoint, the myth of Hitler’s survival was strategically useful to the Kremlin and, as we shall see, this had to do with the fact that Moscow had acquired control of the Nazi International before the end of the war. Pete Bagley, a former CIA official with access to a KGB generals papers, wrote: “The ugly fact is that … the KGB secretly infiltrated [the] Nazi exodus from Germany [in 1945], took control of one or more Nazi exile organizations, and manipulated them in a classic ‘false flag’ operation as unwitting tools in its Cold War against the West.” (Spymaster, p. 145) Bagley tells us of a clandestine meeting near Vienna between KGB officers and former Gestapo Chief Heinrich Mueller in 1955. According to Bagley’s information, Mueller had been picked up by the Soviets at the end of the war, “but instead of punishing him as the worst of war criminals,” wrote Bagley, “[they] took him for clandestine work and moved him to South America.”

 Those who are interested in recent South American developments should take special interest in this. Today’s inexplicable alliance between communists and Nazi in South America is best understood as a complex game tracing back to the penetration of the Third Reich by Soviet agents during the war. To understand the depth of these penetrations it is useful to examine the testimony of the leading Nazi spymaster, Walter Schellenberg, head of Nazi foreign intelligence (Ausland-SD) from 1941 to 1945. According to Schellenberg, after the defeat of Sixth Army at Stalingrad, there came into existence within the Nazi hierarchy, a powerful “eastern camp.” These were Nazis who knew the war was lost, and who decided to begin secretly working for the Soviet Union as a way to assure their future survival. One of the most prominent of these turncoats, from Schellenberg’s vantage point, was Hitler’s right hand man and Party boss, the indispensable Martin Bormann. Another was Gestapo Chief Heinrich Mueller, who may have worked for Moscow as early as 1937.

Schellenberg wrote in his memoirs: “My first serious suspicions about the sincerity of [Mueller’s] work against Russia were roused by a long conversation I had with him in the spring of 1943…. I imagined because it was so late, that he had been drinking when he said he wanted to have a talk with me.” In context, it is worth noting that Schellenberg was not a drinker, and he was Mueller’s bureaucratic rival. At the beginning of this “conversation,” Mueller reminded Schellenberg that Soviet influence did not exist within the working class alone. It was also strong among educated people. Mueller then said, “I see in this an inevitable historical development of our era, particularly when you consider the spiritual ‘anarchy’ of our western culture, by which I mean to include the ideology of the Third Reich.”

Schellenberg was taken aback. “Mueller was talking like a book.” And Mueller supposedly didn’t read books. But the next statement of Mueller’s was even more surprising because it was treasonous. “National Socialism,” said Mueller, “is nothing more than a sort of dung on this spiritual desert [of western Europe]. In contrast to this, one sees that in Russia a unified and really uncompromising spiritual and material world revolution offers a sort of positive electrical charge to western negativism.”

As Schellenberg explained, “I sat opposite Mueller that night deep in thought. Here was the man who had conducted the most ruthless and brutal struggle against Communism in all its various forms, the man who in his investigation of [the] Red Orchestra had left no stone unturned to uncover the last ramifications of that conspiracy. What a change was here!”

What change, indeed! Mueller was probably giving this same recruiting pitch to other high-level Nazi officials. And who would dare report him? He was the head of the Gestapo! He could deny the conversation, or say that he was testing their loyalty. Schellenberg was astonished. “You know, Schellenberg,” Mueller said to the SS spymaster, “it’s really too stupid, this thing between us. In the beginning I thought we would hit it off very well in our personal and our professional relationship, but it didn’t work out. You have many advantages over me. My parents were poor, I’m self-made; I was a police detective; I began on the beat and I learnt in the hard school of ordinary police work. Now, you’re an educated man; you’re a lawyer, you’ve got a cultural background, and you’ve traveled. In other words you’re stuck fast in the petrified system of a conservative tradition. Take, for instance, men like those you know from the Red Orchestra – Schulze-Boysen or Harnack – you know, they were intellectuals too, but of an entirely different kind. They were pure intellectuals, progressive revolutionaries, always looking for a final solution; they never got bogged down in half measures. And they died still believing in that solution. There are too many compromises in National Socialism for it to offer a faith like that; but spiritual communism can.”

During his speechifying Mueller also referred to Martin Bormann as a man “who knows what he wants.” Previously, Mueller had referred to Bormann as nothing but a criminal. Schellenberg was becoming nervous as Mueller knocked back one brandy after another, describing the decadence of the west in the crudest of terms. Schellenberg must have realized that Mueller had compromising information on all the top Nazi leaders. Having phone taps everywhere, Mueller knew everyone’s dirty secrets. Schellenberg’s apprehension grew as he thought to himself: “What did [Mueller] want, this man who was so full of bitterness and hatred, suddenly talking like a book?” To break the monologue Schellenberg fell back on humor. “All right, Comrade Mueller, let’s all start saying ‘Heil Stalin!’ right now – and our little father Mueller will become head of the NKVD.”

Mueller then looked at Schellenberg with a malevolent glint in his eyes. “That would be fine,” he said, “and you’d really be for the high jump, you and your diehard bourgeois friends.” The high-jump, of course, referred to plunging from the gallows with a rope around your neck. Schellenberg concluded that Mueller was a Soviet agent. The Gestapo chief’s concept of the state and the individual, he reasoned, “had from the beginning been neither German nor National Socialist, but in truth communistic. Who knows how many people he influenced at this time and pulled over into the eastern camp?”

And so we must view the latter-day revival of Nazi ideas, of anti-Semitism, of white nationalism – of the so-called New European Right and New North American Right – as a possible adjunct to Russian power. For in this phenomenon we may not merely be dealing with a Nazi revival. We may be dealing with a Russian false flag operation with enormous untapped terrorist potential. There is the possibility, of course, that this “movement” could get away from the Russians. But then we must consider the meaning of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in 1939. Whatever else it was, Nazism was the enemy of America in the same sense that Islamic fundamentalism is. When Alexander Dugin proposes his Fourth Political Theory, he is proposing nothing less than the blending of all anti-American forces into one clenched fist.

More on this subject to follow