Libertarian National Socialist Green Party

Modern society has produced instant experts in the same way it makes a full meal out of a thirty-second hamburger and fries. This emphasis on quantity over quality allows us to believe that each statement made by a person is an "opinion," and that they're all equally valid or at least equally likely to be true. Naturally, this makes no sense, and only exists to cover up the fact that all but a few people are misinformed and incapable of a coherent statement on anything but the most mundane of topics.

This doesn't stop them, especially when talking about controversial topics, because everyone wants to be important and have fifteen minutes of fame as an expert. They each howl out their inspired statement, usually a chaotic mixture of things they have heard in movies and their own application of ideas from other disciplines. The result is a human ferment of misinformed but fervent dialogue. Nowhere is this more evident than in the discourse about National Socialism, where every possible source makes conjectures but few go to the simplest source document possible: The Programme of the NSDAP (German National Socialist Worker's Party), commonly known as Hitler's 25 Points.

Composed by Anton Drexler and Adolf Hitler, the 25 Points summarized German National Socialism, which was a fusion of older _volkish_, or pagan, naturalist conservatives and the newer modernist movements which arose after the horrors of World War I and Germany's Communist uprising of 1918. This new movement recognized what previous conservatives and liberals alike had not, that Germany was beset by larger political forces externally and cultural decay within, and united both leftist and rightist elements toward a more realistic social structure. It is traditional in its values, and liberally modernist in its desire to do away with class warfare and corporation domination by multi-national corporations.

It is to the discredit of our modern time that few, whether inside National Socialist "and related" movements or opposed to them, have taken the time to study the single most comprehensive statement of National Socialist thought. Most anti-fascists understand National Socialism only as "racism," and many post-war converts have little further information, preferring to get their viewpoints from a few pithy rants in _American History X_ or _Save the Last Dance_. We must not be a society of readers, or more likely, people seek identities in political viewpoints more than they seek solutions.

The 25 Points

Looking through the "25 points of the NSDAP Program," we can identify several strains of National Socialist thought:

Points 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8: What is stated here is fundamental nationalism, or the idea that each society can be defined as an organic entity composed of people sharing an intersection of the same language, the same culture, and the same heritage. Germany for Germans; nothing is said here about eliminating all other races in the world, because this was not what National Socialists believed. They wanted a country of Germans, run by Germans, independent of other nations (avoiding the treacherous alliances that started the first world war) in which Germans were placed first.

As part of this impetus, of course, it was necessary to exclude non-Germans from positions of importance. In this vein of thought the words "no Jew may be a member of the nation" are employed, and while modern people may twist this into "anti-Semitism," it was a simple statement of exclusionism: only German values are needed, and only ethnic Germans have them. As the option would be to require Jews to give up their own cultural and ethnic values, this is the only statement that is respectful to both parties.

Much has been said about the National Socialist attitude toward Jews and Judaism, but when we study it from this perspective, two thoughts emerge. First, Jews and Gypsies represented the only foreign populations of any statistically significant number at the time (the NSDAP expelled 900 people of African or partial African heritage, where Jews numbered in the millions and Gypsies nearly so). Second, when formulating a German worldview, the NSDAP was recognizing that traditional German values were of a transcendent and idealistic bent, placing the individual secondary to not only the group but the values of that group, where Judaic thought stresses individualism, materialism (in the philosophical sense, material comfort being more important than ideas or heroic acts) and humanism, or an emphasis on saving lives and preserving individual freedom instead of collective action.

To the NSDAP, Jews were an intruding foreign population that needed resettlement, and a convenient way of summarizing the anti-German values of cosmopolitanism, capitalism, and modern junk culture. While many will try to convince you that the first and foremost agenda item of the National Socialist government was to exterminate and humiliate Jews, we can see here that the truth of the matter was simpler. The NSDAP recognized the necessity of German ethnic-cultural autonomy first, and as part of that impulse needed to exclude all other tribes. Further, in finding an example of this incompatibility, they chose the Jewish culture because a greater polar opposite of German culture would be hard to find. There is nothing in the 25 Points that indicates a pathological hatred of Jewry, or anything but an attitude of exclusionism.

Points 7, 9, 10, 13, 14 and 17: These points address the need to take society from a profit center to being a caretaker of its citizens from birth to death. The revolutionary statement "We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens" is a refutation of the idea of nation-state as provider of economic system, and a rejection of both capitalism and communism. National Socialism is a socialist competitive economy based on nationalist principles, meaning that cultural values come first, and economics is used to achieve those, not as a competing force of leadership. No other nation before or since has taken on such an ambitious statement.

The Nazis specified that every citizen should work, physically or mentally, and that non-productive or destructive labor was forbidden. "The activities of the individual must not clash with the general interest, but must proceed within the framework of the community and be for the general good." The invisible hand of Adam Smith is rejected as is the idea of the omnipotent State for which citizens labor. In the National Socialist worldview, citizens worked to support themselves and others as an organic whole, a people (Germans) and not a political entity (liberal democratic society that rules over Germany). The Socialist aspects of this, including profit-sharing of large industry and nationalization of corporations, is designed to prevent financial interests from using the citizen to generate their income.

The NSDAP objected strongly to the exploitation of the worker, especially as happened when foreign-owned companies began viewing Germany and the German workers as "properties" used to generate return on investment. The alternate model proposed by the NSDAP was that the state existed for the citizens' wellbeing, and for that reason, did not permit their labor to be bought cheaply and massive profits transferred to some central entity with no interest in Germany except as a profit generator. Strangely, this aspect of National Socialism is never mentioned in American propaganda, although it would seem an easy way for a market-driven capitalist nation to critique NS Germany.

Point 11: The crux of National Socialist attitudes towards the economics of modern society can be found here: "The breaking of the slavery of interest" through "abolition of incomes unearned by work" is a strike against modern international capitalism and its distinguishing feature, the ability to speculate a value for a property based on perceived value instead of actual value. Upon gaining power, the NDSAP re-financialized Germany based on the production value of the German worker instead of speculative value (based on interest-bearing investments) or a non-growth valuation like the gold standard.

When lending for interest is allowed, properties gain value based on the predicted return of that interest, and new ways of making profit through speculative investment arise. The National Socialist view was that such speculation both depleted the wealth of the nation by dividing it internally instead of generating new stable sources of wealth, and that it left the workers in the middle between investors whose intent was not to make companies better or life better for the workers, but to extract more profit through interest and the sale of stock empowered by interest. Hitler presented these 25 points on February 24, 1920, almost a decade before the "Black Tuesday" stock market crash of October 29, 1929 which bankrupted many in the West and plunged it into a worldwide depression -- thanks to the overinflated value of interest-bearing speculative investments.

Point 16: Although a Socialist party, the NSDAP wanted to preserve the competition of economics which kept quality of products and services high for the citizen. Further, they believed that the middle class, not the rich or the poor, was the foundation of a healthy nation. These were the people, Hitler reasoned, who worked hard and took pride in their work, but lacked a pathological desire for money as the new wealthy classes did. Hitler saw a solution to class warfare in providing quality public services but giving the middle class a fighting chance, so that decent Germans could have reasonable jobs and be well-enough rewarded to have happy families and be insulated from the greed of others.

Governments at the time viewed the middle class as something of an impediment because its demands were not for dynamic economic growth but a chance to enjoy the stable and "boring" life of family, getting better at a task, and the like. The Wall Street "career man" was the antithesis of this, often rising from a humble background to super-riches, and equally often through devious acts. America especially liked to brag about rags to riches stories, but the NSDAP found it more important that most could lead normal lives than that economic competition unsettled everyone and forced them to work longer hours for a few inspiring "rags to riches" stories.

Points 12, 18: In these points, Hitler defined and specified the removal of those who engaged in parasitic business practices. While war profiteers loomed large in his own experience, he used those and other examples (criminals, usurers, profiteers) to set the pace of National Socialist values: hard honest work was expected and rewarded, but those who acted destructively even if legally were to be killed -- equally ("whatever their creed or race"). The NSDAP recognized that not all Germans had German souls, and that bad apples exist even in the best orchards, and their intent was to remove these people who had no moral qualm about making a living by deceiving others. This was one of many reforms designed to protect the average worker from the slick predation of others.

Points 15, 20, 21: Although we are told by mass media to expect rants about racial supremacy from the NSDAP, these articulate points address the need for a higher quality of public service. Under onslaught financially, governments had been decreasing public services, something the NSDAP saw as not only prone to cause long-term social decay but a legitimization of the role of government as enabler to profiteers, not protector of its citizens. Insurance, education and health care are addressed here, and these reforms did occur with positive results, some of which were only evident in the years after the war.

Points 20, 23, 24, 25: Although primarily about education, Point 20 includes another aspect that appears in other points as well. The National Socialists believed that the State, as the representative of the organic national population as a whole, had an obligation to regulate what media and academic ideas were fed into the population. It did not specify these must be banned, only that illusory concepts not be taught or spread through mass media. This is parallel to Socrates' questioning in The Republic of what a government should tolerate, knowing that most of its citizens could not fully understand the consequences of the ideas shown to them only as a promise of better consequences.

While we in liberal democracies are reared, and repeatedly told by our mass media, that any such government action takes away our "freedom," we also see the results every day of children seeing mass media and acting out its sexual, social, drug-related and violence-related ideals to disastrous consequences. We see how newspapers and television dilute culture with fast easy promises that turn out to be empty, and how our academics fill our children's heads with unworkable but emotive solutions, luring them away from the lives they will find most fulfilling. This is a difficult moral question that should be tackled elsewhere, yet what we must remember is that the NSDAP did not say "ban these ideas" but "do not teach them as fact, whether through academia or the media."

When touching on religion, the Nazis made another important point, which was that German values must pervade all other areas of society as an underlying philosophy. For this reason, they endorsed religious freedom ("We demand freedom for all religious denominations in the State, provided they do not threaten its existence not offend the moral feelings of the German race") in the context of compatibility with German values. Once again, the State was being peeled back from its role as a profit-enabler and becoming more of a defender of its people, even where they themselves were not aware of the need. It had been seen how easily the average person allowed themselves to be taken advantage of, and then in the name of a stiff upper lip and moving forward, kept going despite being cheated out of their wealth, time and often homes.

In the final point of this program, the NSDAP asserted the need for a strong State as guardian of its citizens. In doing so, it emphasized that the State and its Corporations served the people in a role as protector. The corporation was no longer a goal in itself, but a means to the end of supporting the German people. Neither was the Reich beyond obligation to its people, as it might have been in a Communist state, but it as well was an instrument of the welfare of the people. To underscore this, the NSDAP leaders pledged their lives toward achieving these aims.

Point 19: As important as Point 11, "The breaking of the slavery of interest," is Point 19, the replacement of Roman law with "a German common law." Roman law was the use of systematic legal codes to regulate the material abilities of its population, and fused economics with leadership, meaning that society was guided by what was profitable and this was assumed to create the common good. Roman law was civil law: it functioned by assigning values to actions and penalizing those who acted against sources of value. It was the primary influence on European legal systems until National Socialism, and barring that obstruction, remains so to this day.

Roman law facilitated the idea of the nation-state as a marketplace whose job was to protect the ability of its citizens to earn a material living. As such it replaced leadership, or doing what was right for the society as a whole, with the idea of each individual defending his or her own interests. It addressed material concerns and not moral or cultural ones, which was fitting to Rome as an empire composed of disparate cultures (a condition to which in part its downfall might be attributed, according to Roman historian Edward Gibbon). From this utilitarian view of government emerged systems of power that measured material popularity, including liberal democracy and speculative investment, contributing to Rome's fall. The NSDAP wished to reverse this course of society.

Conclusion

The concept of the NSDAP was a fusion of ancient values with modern technique. Ancient values were seen as eternally true because they concerned the behaviors that strengthened human beings from within and provided a lifelong sense of purpose and enjoyment, and modern techniques were necessary to survive in a machine age. The primary difference in the NSDAP's modernism was that in it, all implements of society were a means to an end, and even the State was a means to this end, which was the growth and prosperity of a native population in both material and intangible ways. In this the NSDAP was the antithesis of every modern state before or since its brief reign.

Inherent to this outlook was the idea of reversing the order of society as it had become in adapting to mercantilism, of which cosmopolitan peoples like the Jews were a symbol to Adolf Hitler. Instead of thinking materially and making society a marketplace which provided opportunity for those with aptitude at trade, the NSDAP designed a society in which healthy existence was itself the goal, and trade supported that existence as manifested in its longest term values like culture and family and a brotherhood of those sharing culture, language and heritage.

Through this avenue, the NSDAP avoided the class warfare and worker exploitation of the capitalist liberal democracies, as well as eschewing the equality-driven normative tendencies and uniformity of Communist systems, a fine line on which to walk as it alienated both superpowers to be. Much as a crowd of bitter people detests the few who attempt to rise above its addictions and failures, the rest of the industrialized world found Hitler threatening because he attempted to undo the marketplace system of material law which manipulated people in all of these nations. Consequently, it fought him in the name of "freedom" and after the war (1946) brought out stories of atrocities and megalomania and attributed them to Hitler.

Both those who oppose National Socialism and those who want to use it for their own petty ends hope to obscure what the "25 points of the NSDAP Program" say in plain text, which is that National Socialism was not another political option in a modern time, but a system entirely separate from the way modern states are run. For this reason it remains both a threatening document, and the single most potent argument for National Socialism that we possess as modern inheritors of this ideal.

Originally written for ANSWP magazine by Chris Stevens of CORRUPT