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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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The NSDAP was not radically socially conservative in its treatment of gender or sex.

Here is a link https://counter-currents.com/2014/06/heimat/ that discusses Hermann Sudermann's play Madga, and the film made from it. The author claims that the popularity of the film clues us in to what the National Socialist ideology really thought about sexual morality. The article goes into great detail in describing the film. The film is anti-bourgeois propaganda that paints the sexual morality of the time, (play:1893, film:1938) as both rigid and hypocritical; the hero of the piece is the single mother! So the NSDAP is very much not socially conservative.

The author of the 2014 Counter Currents article, Derek Hawthorne, wrote a long and nuanced piece, digging into the weirdness of German culture back then. It is a long time since I read it, and I haven't time to reread it properly to tonight, but it made a big impression on me. The hot take that has stuck with me for nine years goes like this:

There are two sisters. One well behaved sister who conforms. The other sister has a wild side and ends up a single mother. Due to the messed up social conventions of the day, the mediocre, well behaved sister needs her father or other relative to come up with a lot of money for a dowry. Due to the power of the playwrights pen, becoming a single mother make you special and turns you into an opera diva who earns a lot of money and is able to swoop in and save the day by paying her sisters dowry.

A social realist play written for 1893 would have things work out OK/mediocre for the conformist sister and a bit of a disaster for the wild sister because of the social reaction against her getting pregnant outside of marriage. If the playwright wanted to argue for social change, the argument would be the cruelty of the system towards the wild sister. Sudermann's play cheer leads for sexual liberation with a crude propaganda technique: make things work out extra well for the single mother, just because playwrights are writing fiction and can do that. The excellent outcome tends to legitimize single motherhood in the eyes of audience. But it makes no causal connection; it is just crude propaganda.

Back when I first read the article in Counter Currents I still thought that right wing was a single thing, with a core creed. And before the 1960's that creed would obviously include no sex before marriage. Strong families, children need fathers, each child needs their own biological father, not mummies current boyfriend. The social conservative thing. So I'm reading on with wide-eyed astonishment. When do the NAZI's realize that the play is degenerate art? When do we get the theatrical equivalent of the Röhm-Putsch and the banning of Sudermann's Madga? Never happens.

I already knew that the NSDAP was a little bit pagan in spirit. You can see that in the pictures from the time of women athletes in their skimpy attire. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=third+reich+women+athletes&qpvt=third+reich+women+athletes&form=IGRE&first=1

I'm trying to update my views. Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence? Mostly I've stopped believing that "right wing" is an actual thing.

I'm trying to update my views. Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence? Mostly I've stopped believing that "right wing" is an actual thing.

It's split about 50/50 between the two, with Nick Fuentes and his movement representing the Catholic interpretation and the pagan interpretation not really having any movement of similar influence but a lot of individuals who are hostile to Christianity.

Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence?

An interesting note on this point: later Hitler claimed he regretted helping Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and even said they should have helped the 'reds' instead, because they had idealism and vitality and could have made good National Socialists, while Franco and his crew were just a bunch of ossified reactionaries who would never amount to anything. He even excused the leftist attacks on the clergy and church-burnings in Republican Spain as understandable considering how the church had "oppressed the people" for centuries.

Like most writing on Hitler and the NSDAP it seems to take out of context verbal derision as important opinion and a leading guide for the inner workings of both Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, when in reality it was probably just 'Franco wont help in the war effort, what a prick.'

Yes it was probably Hitler just blowing off of steam, but his disdain for "reactionaries" was very real.

I’ve heard this before but is there any good writing on it?

The answer to your question is they don't because contra the last 80 years or so of concerted effort to paper-over history the Nazi's were never particularly right wing. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was always Socialists at its heart. Nor is it a coincidence that when you get progressives to actually describe their Ideal form of government what they come up with is a an explicitly secular and technocratic regime where in the state is all things to all people, IE inter-war period Fascism. I don't think the Wilsonites (as in Woodrow) ever really truly stopped believing in socialism, eugenics, technocracy, or building a "new world order". The Horrors and excesses of World War II just made it a losing proposition to advocate these things publicly. As World War II and what the Nazis were actually about passes from living memory into myth and legend, it is only natural for their stupidity and evil to return. As the old poem goes...

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire