Revolution Vs. Reaction
Social-Nationalism & the Strasser Brothers
Many people associate the term "Socialism" with
Left-Wing intellectuals, Communists or members of the Labour Party. The
sad reality is that the internationalist Left has completely highjacked
this word and used it to hide their more sinister motives. "Socialism",
for the average Marxist-Leninist, is the description given to the
promotion of minorities above the larger community as a whole. Left-Wing
organizations are fond to trying to appeal to the working class, or
what they patronizingly refer to as "the Proletariat". The ulterior
objective behind such ideology is based upon a desire to divide and
rule. In other words, whilst these organizations are offering support to
so-called "oppressed minorities", such as homosexuals, Black Power
groups and rebellious middle class students, they are in fact creating
disunity amongst the ordinary members of society by ensuring that they
possess the only banner behind which degeneracy and abnormality can find
a safe haven from the seemingly encroaching rigors of normality. That
society is becoming more degenerate, is merely testimony to the fact
that Communists are regularly able to rally between two and three
thousand protestors at the drop of a hat, as recently happened on a wet
Monday evening at an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in London. By adding
up all the minorities, social inadequates and anyone else with a chip
on their shoulder, these activists can appear to comprise a majority.
But this is minority rule in its most pure and distorted guise.
There is simply no disputing the fact that Socialism
is an integral part of the Nationalist creed. To separate the very
essence of the social sphere from the concept of the nation, is to
ignore the basic fact that it is the People who actually comprise the
nation itself.
Without people there can be no nation, and without a
nation there can be no people. On the other hand, it is quite certain
that we have absolutely nothing in common with the
intellectually-bankrupt legions of the modern Left, but then, neither do
we owe any allegiance to those on the Right. Many so-called
Nationalists are content to describe themselves as being "right of
centre", or even on the “Far Right”, but it must be stated quite
categorically that true Nationalism has absolutely nothing whatsoever to
do with Right-wing politics. To simplify, a Right-winger is no more
‘Nationalist’ than his counterpart on the Left. Both Communism and
Capitalism are two heads of the same beast.
But rather than take a leaf out of the existing books
and attempt to form some kind of a ridiculous halfway ideology,
Revolutionary Nationalists remain unconcerned with philosophical
materialism altogether and reject the middle and both ends of the system
in its entirety. We Revolutionary Nationalists oppose the Reactionaries
and the Reds alike, because we are genuine Social Nationalists.
The doctrine of Social Nationalism was chiefly
propagated by Otto and Gregor Strasser, two brothers who joined the
National Socialist German Worker's Party (NSDAP) during the 1920's. This
organization eventually came to be led by Adolf Hitler, who, in his
selfish lust for ultimate power came to betray the very ideals of Social
Nationalism that had been promoted by the NSDAP from the very
beginning. To many so-called Nationalists, criticism of Hitler is viewed
as heresy. But nobody can ignore the plain and simple fact that Hitler
totally refused to condemn German Capitalists and the Right-wing
Establishment, even allowing the Party to receive funding from wealthy
Jewish financiers in Wall Street. The evidence for this claim can be
found in Anthony Sutton's excellent Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.
The Strasser Brothers, however, who were both
extremely active in the NSDAP before the party came to power in 1933,
were regularly engaged in a war of ideology with Hitler himself, a man
who refused to advocate the decentralization of State power or offer the
normal working people of Germany a stake in both agriculture and
industry. Hitler had actually rejected Otto Strasser's The Structure of German Socialism
in 1925, preferring instead to stick with Gottfried Feder’s 25 Points,
considered by many Party members to be outdated. Even without Strasser’s
radical ideas for a new direction beyond both the Left and Right of the
political spectrum, the 25 Points were still incompatible with Hitler’s
reactionary allegiance to his Capitalist financiers and many of these
basic tenets of National Socialist policy were betrayed. Anyone taking
the trouble to examine Point 11 of this manifesto, for example, will
discover a forthright condemnation of unearned income. However, after
Hitler’s ascension to power, usury continued to infect the German
banking system and no effort was made to prevent wealthy bankers from
charging the German people huge interest on their loans. Indeed, Hitler
placed all financial power in the hands of Hjalmar Schact, a freemason
with connections in Wall Street. Gregor Strasser, however, had this to
say about Capitalism: “The Capitalist system with its exploitation of
those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers’ labour
power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number
of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their
internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and
just economic system, in a word by German Socialism.”
Moving on to Points 13 and 14, the statement of Party
principles called for the destruction of the Capitalist system and its
replacement by family businesses and workers’ co-operatives. Once again,
Hitler had no time for such economic justice and these two articles of
policy were soon forgotten. Otto Strasser, on the other hand, explained
that: “The alternative to the bankrupt alien “solutions” of Communism
and Capitalism, the idea which we present is the political
representation of parties, trades and professions based on our ancient
Guild system.”
Otto Strasser, who was once described as “a dauntless
man of compelling sincerity and charm” by the English anti-Capitalist
A.K. Chesterton, then went on to propose a three-point programme for
industry and the workers:
- There will come into being, in contradistinction to the extant “class” of Capitalist, an “estate” of managers, which, regardless of wealth or origin, will constitute a functional aristocracy that, thanks to the very methods of its selection, may be said to be made up of “captains of industry” or “commissioned officers of economic life.”
- The dispossessed “class of proletarians” will vanish, its place being taken by an “estate” of fully privileged workers, directly and indirectly participating in and therefore interested in their “workshop”. They will no longer be objects of the economy, but its subjects.
- The relations between State and economic life will be radically altered. The State will not be the “night-watchman and policeman” of Capitalism, nor will it be a dictator whose bureaucracy cracks the whip that drives the workers to the bench and spurs them to their tasks; but it will be a trustee of the consumers, and as such it will have much influence, but only within and beside the self-determination of the working producers, namely of the management and the staff of workers (consisting in appropriate proportions of clerical and other intellectual workers, on the one hand, and manual operatives, on the other).
In Point 17, it was explained that there would be an end to the rule of the big landowners, and that there would be a resettlement of the expanded peasantry. During the 1920’s, over 20% of Germany was owned by fewer than 19,000 people and the peasants were looking to the NSDAP to provide a brighter future in the face of their ever-worsening predicament. Unfortunately, they were to receive little assistance from Hitler. Although Agricultural Minister Walter Darre appeared to do much to safeguard the role of the peasantry, there was no attempt to redistribute the land. Even when Darre passed the Hereditary Peasant Holdings Act, the draft itself was provided by his deputy, Ferdinand Fried - the secret leader of Otto Strasser’s Black Front. So what answer did Strasserism provide to combat the unholy alliance of Capitalists, landowners and Hitlerites? Otto Strasser provided a truly just argument to the complexities of agriculture in his Structure for German Socialism:
The object of agriculture is to make sure that the
community will be fed. The land available for the use of the community
is owned exclusively by the nation, for it was not by any individual but
by the community at large that the land was acquired, by battle or by
colonization on the part of the community, and by the community it has
been defended against enemies. The community as owner puts the land at
the disposal of the nation in the form of “entails” to those able and
willing to use them for husbandry and stock-raising. This will be
undertaken by self-governing corporations of local peasant-councils. The
size of the farms will be limited in accordance with the local
qualities of the land: the maximum being determined by the principle
that no one may hold in "entail" more land than he is able to farm
unaided; and the minimum being determined by the principle that the
landowner must have enough land to provide, not only food for self and
family, but a superfluity by the disposal of which he will be able to
obtain clothing and shelter for his family.
The maximum limitation will result in freeing large
quantities of land for settlement by peasants, particularly in Eastern
Germany. This peasant settlement is all the more necessary because the
existence of an abundance of peasants thus settled on their own farms
furnishes the best guarantee for the maintenance of public health and
public energy.The landholder who thus receives a farm for "entail" will
pledge himself to manage this farm for the best advantage of the
community and to use his utmost endeavors to make sure that the land
shall be farmed to supply the food of the community. He will therefore
have to pay a land tax, a tithe rent, to the community. This will be
payable in kind, the amount being fixed in accordance with the area and
quality of the land. No other taxes will be payable by the peasant.
Should the holder of an "entail" die, the farm will pass to a son able
and willing to carry it on. If there are no male children available, the
"entail" will revert to the community, and will be allotted by the
local peasant-council.
In the event of bad farming, an "entail" will also
revert to the community, the decision upon this matter resting with the
local self-governing body (peasant-council) in agreement with the state
(represented by the circle president). The introduction of "entail" into
German agriculture will be in such manifest conformity with German
tradition and with the right and necessary ideas of peasant
possessor-ship, that neither psychological nor material difficulties are
likely to ensue.
The sad motive behind Hitler's blatant refusal to
listen to Otto and Gregor Strasser, was power. Whilst Hitler saw power
as the objective, the group of people who were gathered around these
visionary brothers - commonly known as the Strasser-Circle - saw power
merely as the means to implement their Social Nationalist programme.
Once again, the common people paid the price for the selfishness of a
reactionary. In 1930, things finally came to a head and Otto Strasser
began to clash with Hitler on a regular basis. His newspaper, the Arbeitsblatt,
which was based in Berlin and which served as the Party's official
northern publication, became a constant irritant to Hitler. Finally, in
April of the same year, trade unions in Saxony declared a general strike
and Otto Strasser announced his total support for the German workers.
Meanwhile, the powerful industrialists themselves put pressure on Hitler
to condemn the views of Strasser and bring the strike to a halt. Hitler
called Otto Strasser to a private meeting at his hotel the following
day, where he attempted to bring him into line by ordering him to submit
to his authority. During a heated debate, Hitler accused him of
promoting "bombastic nonsense" by placing emphasis on the Ideal rather
than the Leader. Strasser was right, of course, but Hitler was only
interested in personal power and chose to put himself before the
economic freedom of the German people. Otto Strasser went on to rightly
accuse Hitler of trying to: "…strangle the social revolution for the
sake of legality and your new collaboration with the bourgeois parties
of the Right."
Hitler angrily denied this and tried to condone what
modern Capitalists today like to call "free enterprise". He also went on
to endorse the Capitalist philosophy that "might is right" and only
“the strong survive”, whilst the weakest must inevitably “go to the
wall”: "The Capitalists have worked their way to the top through their
capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves
their right race, they have a right to lead."
This statement alone is testimony to Hitler's
allegiance to Capitalism and Big Business, and reveals the unbridgeable
gulf that exists between reaction and revolution. Hitler, after failing
to come up with any real argument against the genuinely Socialist
principles of Otto Strasser, eventually wrote to Goebbels and instructed
him to drive Strasser and his supporters from the Party. Otto Strasser
remained true to his beliefs and, as a result, was expelled from the
NSDAP soon afterwards, setting up a group known as the Union of
Revolutionary National Socialists - the forerunner of the Black Front.
Otto Strasser was finally interned by the SIS-OSS and became a
broken-hearted exile in Canada, where he was forced to live as a
non-person until 1955. He eventually managed to return to his beloved
Germany, but only after some very determined campaigning by the English
journalist Douglas Reed. Meanwhile, despite the fact that Gregor
Strasser had bowed to Hitler’s authority and remained in the party in
the hope that the Fuhrer would realize the error of his ways, he was
brutally murdered in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse prison during a Hitlerite
purge in June 1934, now known as the infamous Night of the Long Knives.
Even Hitler was forced to admit some years later, that Gregor
Strasser’s murder had been “a mistake”.
Before this essay is brought to a conclusion, it must
be pointed out that Strasserism is totally incompatible with Marxism and
the alleged “Socialism” of the Left. Here are a few excerpts from Otto
Strasser’s polemic comparison of the two ideologies:
How German Socialism differs from Marxism:
- The personal initiative of the responsible managers is preserved, but it is incorporated into the needs of the community.
- Within the systematically planned management of the whole national economy by the State (organically safeguarded by the equal third of influence which the State has in every industrial enterprise) the wholesome rivalry of the individual enterprises is maintained.
- The treatment of State and economic enterprise, that is to say of official and industrial manager, on an equal footing is avoided; so is the arbitrary power of the State which deprives the worker of his rights.
- Everyone engaged in an enterprise is, by virtue of his being part-possessor as a citizen, one of the immediate and influential possessors of his enterprise, his “workshop”, and can exert this possessive right in full measure on the supervisory council of the concern. The form of the factory fellowship, founded upon the legal idea of the fief, and given life by the great self-governing body of the workers’ and employees’ councils, on the one hand, the industrial and trades’ councils, on the other, constitutes the new economic system of German Socialism, which is equally remote from Western Capitalism and Eastern Bolshevism, and nevertheless complies with the requirements of large scale industry.
Recommended Reading:
- Otto Strasser:
- Hitler and I (translated by Douglas Reed)
- A History in My Time (translated by Douglas Reed)
- Germany Tomorrow (translated by Douglas Reed)
- Gregor Strasser (written under the pseudonym of “Micheal Geismeyer”)
- We Seek Germany (written under the pseudonym of “D.G.”)
- Whither Hitler? (written under the pseudonym of “D.G.”)
- Europe Tomorrow (written under the pseudonym of “D.G.”)
- Structure of German Socialism *
- The German St. Bartholomew’s Night *
- European Federation *
- The Gangsters Around Hitler [Please note that this book cannot be regarded as an entirely accurate work, due to the fact that it has been doctored by a number of Jewish exiles. This was Otto Strasser’s last manuscript and may simply be of interest to the collector, rather than taken as a reliable example of factual history]
- Gregor Strasser:
- Struggle for Germany
- Douglas Reed:
- Nemesis: The Story of Otto Strasser
- The Prisoner of Ottawa: Otto Strasse
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