Nazis is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between June 14, 2021 and July 30, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "most people aren't Nazis"; "Nazis hated IQ research"; "We didn't defeat the Nazis because the Nazis were bad and evil". It most often appears alongside Germany, Hitler, America.
- Article page
- Nazis
- Mention count
- 14
- Issue count
- 14
- First seen
- June 14, 2021
- Last seen
- July 30, 2025
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://beverlypress.com/2024/05/uptick-in-graffiti-paints-a-bleak-picture/
- https://biblehub.com/greek/3646.htm
- https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs
- https://twitter.com/SilverVVulpes/status/1125756632061837313
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
- https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-the-2024-US-presidential-election
Issue trail
- Contra Smith On Jewish Selective Immigration
- Links For October
- Highlights From The Comments On Self-Determination
- A Columbian Exchange
- Moderation Is Different From Censorship
- Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
- Links For July 2023
- Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs
- Your Book Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
- Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
- Some Unintuitive Properties Of Polygenic Disorders
- SB 1047: Our Side Of The Story
- Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House
- My Heart Of Hearts
Source context
If you dismiss every group that does better than whites, then you can tell a story where all inequality is caused by white people controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favor whites. If you don't dismiss those groups, the story becomes harder. Anti-Semites had their own story about problems caused by Jews controlling everything and creating covert structures/institutions that favored Jews. Nowadays we rightly reject that story. But in order to continue rejecting it, we have to come up with strained explanations to make Jewish achievement less interesting, because we've already committed to using the structural racism explanation for every group difference that seems relevant to us. I’m glad most people aren't Nazis, but I would like them to be consistent, principled non-Nazis, who are able to remain non-Nazi for reasons other than that they scrupulously avoid thinking about the parts of their principles that inevitably imply Nazism.
(I realize that the people trying to maintain the Standard Model are also trying to make Nazism less attractive, by denying the existence of successful minorities that people could get angry at and try to persecute. I think this was a potentially reasonable strategy back when you could argue it would distract people away from getting too fired up about racial resentment. But at some point the cost of enshrining as dogma that all high-achieving ethnic groups are oppressors outweighs than the benefit of “they haven’t applied this to us just yet.”)
Greg Cochran explains Jewish overachievement through genetics, although his exact mechanism (individual alleles related to sphingolipidoses) is looking less promising these days. If he's right, I think it suggests genetic engineering. People act like genetic engineering would be some sort of horrifying mad science project to create freakish mutant supermen who can shoot acid out of their eyes. But I would be pretty happy if it could just make everyone do as well as Ashkenazi Jews. The Ashkenazim I know are mostly well-off, well-educated, and live decent lives. If genetic engineering could give those advantages to everyone, it would easily qualify as the most important piece of social progress in history, even before we started giving people the ability to shoot acid out of their eyes.
6: It’s hard to talk about IQ research without getting accused of something something Nazis. But here’s a claim that actually, Nazis hated IQ research, worrying that it would “be an instrument of Jewry to fortify its hegemony” and outshine more properly Aryan values like “practical intelligence” and “character”. Whenever someone tells you that they don’t believe in IQ, consider calling them out on perpetuating discredited Nazi ideology.
Inline links: Nazis hated IQ research
Good article but people make this stuff way to complicated. It's not about morality orethics but simply might makes right, and the victors get to write the history books. We didn't defeat the Nazis because the Nazis were bad and evil, we firebombed Dresden and killed them until they gave up. The answer to the question "Who gets self-determination?" is whoever can take it. If it can't be won peacefully, it must be won through force (see Clausewitz, Carl). Kill more of them then they kill you until they give up. This is the way it has always been and the way it always will be.
Adraste: I think in order for me to accept this, I would need for Columbus the mythical figure to be more clearly differentiated from Columbus the historical reality. Let him fly around the world on his magic caravel on Columbus Day Eve, visiting all the little children. And if they’re nice children who listen to their parents, he brings them gold and spices; but if they disobey, he invades their house, murders their family, and forces them into slavery on his plantations. That would be a mythical figure. Absent something transparently fantastic like that, I think you’re just scheming up a clever way to avoid historical accountability. Nazis can hold rallies hailing Hitler, and when you challenge them, they can claim they’re talking about a mythical Hitler who, mythologically, did good things but not bad things.
Beroe: And that claim would be either true or false! If none of those Nazis showed the slightest inclination to dislike Jews, I would believe it was true. But this doesn’t seem true of real Nazis - they love their version of Hitler for exactly the same reasons we hate ours. I would rather use the example of Genghis Khan, who really is beloved in Mongolia. He did kill millions of people, but the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
The racket works by pretending these are the same imperative. “Well, lots of people will be unhappy if they see offensive content, so in order to keep the platform safe for those people, we’ve got to remove it for everybody.” This is not true at all. A minimum viable product for moderation without censorship is for a platform to do exactly the same thing they’re doing now - remove all the same posts, ban all the same accounts - but have an opt-in setting, “see banned posts”. If you personally choose to see harassing and offensive content, you can toggle that setting, and everything bad will reappear. To “ban” an account would mean to prevent the half (or 75%, or 99%) of people who haven’t toggled that setting from seeing it. The people who elected to see banned posts could see them the same as always. Two “banned” accounts could still talk to each other, retweet each other, etc - as could accounts that hadn’t been banned, but had opted into the “see banned posts” setting. Does this difference seem kind of pointless and trivial? Then imagine applying it to China. If the Chinese government couldn’t censor - only moderate - the world would look completely different. Any Chinese person could get accurate information on Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square, the Shanghai lockdowns, or the top fifty criticisms of Xi Jinping - just by clicking a button on their Weibo profile. Given how much trouble ordinary Chinese people go through to get around censors, probably many of them would click the button, and then they’d have a free information environment. This switch might seem trivial in a well-functioning information ecology, but it prevents the worst abuses, and places a floor on how bad things can get. And this is just the minimum viable product, the case I’m focusing on to forestall objections of “this would be too hard to implement” or “this would be too complicated for ordinary people to understand”. If you wanted to get fancy, you could have a bunch of filters - harassing content, sexually explicit content, conspiracy theories - and let people toggle which ones they wanted to see vs. avoid. You could let people set them to different levels. Set your anti-Semitism filter to the weakest setting and it will only block literal Nazis with swastikas in their profile pic; set it to Ludicrous, and it will block anyone who isn’t an ordained Orthodox rabbi. Or you could let users choose which fact-checking organization they trusted to flag content as “disinformation”. The current level of moderation is a compromise. It makes no one happy. Allowing more personalized settings would make the free speech side happier (since they could speak freely to one another and anyone else interested in hearing what they had to say). And it would make the avoid-harassment side happier, since they could set their filters to stronger than the default setting, and see even less harassment than they do now. This doesn’t solve all our problems. There are some genuine arguments for true censorship: that is, for blocking speech that both sides want to hear. For example: That it’s a social good to avert the spread of false ideas (and maybe even some true ideas that people can’t handle). People might want to hear these ideas (“What? Joe Biden is a lizard person spy? I hadn’t heard anything about that on the so-called mainstream media!”) but they should not be allowed to.
Inline links: The racket
That people you consider bad (Nazis, Communists, Chinese pro-democracy activists) could discuss their bad ideas with each other, recruit other people, become well-organized, and then overthrow your your society.
Beroe: Eugenics inspired the Nazis (and 1920s Americans) to do very evil things. But Islam inspired Osama bin Laden to do very evil things, and we rightly believe that it’s fine to practice Islam as long as you don’t use it as an excuse to do evil things. Islam isn’t bad, flying planes into buildings is bad. Likewise, eugenics isn’t bad, involuntarily sterilizing people, or sending them to gas chambers, is bad. What’s the argument against forms of eugenics that don’t do this?
Adraste: A brief aside: eugenics, as implemented in the early part of the 20th century, was extraordinarily evil. We might loosely consider the entire Holocaust eugenics, based on Nazi theory of racial purity1, but even if we restrict the label to the Nazis’ specific campaign against the disabled and mentally ill, it caused about 300,000 deaths. And although “Nazis are bad” is already priced in to our moral system, here in the United States we sterilized between 60,000 and 150,000 people. Also - it wouldn’t have been any better if it was scientifically competent, but it really wasn’t2. They sterilized 2,000 people for a form of blindness that wasn’t even genetic.
As far as I can tell, Galton had a reasonable 19th century view of genetics, making a few good guesses while also appreciating how little he knew. His successors were utterly and inexcusably confused about the topic, and conceptualized all negative traits as simple recessive genes; once these were were removed from the population by killing or sterilizing their carriers, nobody would have negative traits anymore. A grim reminder of how wrong they were: the Nazis killed nearly ever schizophrenic in Germany, hoping to eliminate “the schizophrenia gene”. Today, Germany has exactly as many schizophrenics as any other country, because there are thousands of genes involved in schizophrenia, and all the deleterious variants are present in some frequency in the healthy population. But see footnote 4 below.
8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever. In extremely related news, mainstream intellectuals are now romanticizing libertarians. RIP.
Twitter thread speculating that the next fight will be over colleges and magnet schools that accept “the top X% of every high school” as a way of getting geographic (and so by proxy racial) diversity. "In the first class admitting using [this policy], the offers made to Asian-American students fell by 19 percentage points, from 73% to 54% of all offers." 23: Chinese drone light show: I feel bad linking this since it’s probably Chinese propaganda to demonstrate their technological superiority, but I think a good compromise would be that Americans are allowed to appreciate their accomplishment, as long as we also get busy finding a way to smuggle in thousands of drones to their next performance that form a giant bald eagle which eats the dragon. 24: Every so often a US city county will go through the motions of “seceding” from the Union to protest some form of mistreatment - the Conch Republic is the most famous, but there are others. When McDonald County, Missouri seceded in 1961 after being unfairly left out of tourism brochures, it caught the attention of some people who considered themselves experts in dealing with secessionists - a local group of Civil War re-enactors. They formed a regiment to defend the Union and marched on McDonald County, leading to the Battle of Noel. 25: The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, although the legislature was eventually able to agree on a solution. 26: The state of Wisconsin is infamous for its very literal line-item veto. This week: a bill increased school funding until the 2024 - 2025 academic year, and the governor line-itemed it to 2024 - 2025 academic year, ie “2425”, thus guaranteeing increased school funding until the year 2425. 27: Did you know: as part of their general program of racial purity, the Nazis banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees. Nazi beekeeping literature (which is apparently a thing that existed) included slogans like "What use is it if one day a Jewish bastard is a genius, but our ethnic purity is destroyed in the process? It is no different with beekeeping!" In 1940, German bees were devastated by an epidemic, which they had insufficient genetic diversity to resist. The government relented and said never mind, please start using impure foreign bees again. "As a result the Old German Dark bee is now considered an endangered sub-species in Germany" 28: Boris Johnson on semaglutide. Posted not because his opinion is especially good (although honestly it’s better than many people’s), but because he’s a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing, and it’s one of those things you have to force yourself to ignore or risk getting mind-captured. 29: This month’s AI links: OpenAI announces Superalignment, a major investment into alignment research which will include co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, the current alignment team led by Jan Leike, and “20% of the compute we’ve secured to date”. At least for me, this is strong evidence that they really care about alignment and aren’t just posturing; this is more resources than would be worth spending on a posture. They’re also hiring for various alignment-related positions; see the link above for more details. And LW discussion here.
Inline links: Twitter thread speculating that the next fight, Chinese drone light show, the Conch Republic, others, seceded in 1961, Battle of Noel, The state of Washington came within a few weeks of accidentally decriminalizing all drugs, agree on a solution, the governor line-itemed it, banned crossing pure native German bees with impure foreign bees, Boris Johnson on semaglutide, Superalignment, LW discussion here
His emotional range spans only from a kind of tired nostalgia to the reckless joy of intoxication, punctuated by his most prized feeling by far, the gleefully murderous “bloodthirst” of mortal combat. So everyone who had read some Jünger, which at the time of publication would likely include most of the German population and definitely most of the Nazis, could see right through the facade of fiction. It is an obvious conceit that made the book just barely publishable, in a time and place where saying outright that the Nazis were disgusting savages would have gotten everyone involved a headshot. After 1945, Jünger did admit that the book was (also) a commentary on the political reality of its time. And that he knew perfectly well that in publishing this “fiction” he was playing with his life. And still he got it published, uncensored, in Germany in 1939, just before Hitler started the second World War. Today the most widely accepted history of the subject is that Jünger was only saved from a grisly fate by the personal intervention of Hitler himself, who loved “Storm of Steel” and presumably wouldn't have liked to admit that his favorite author utterly despised him. And it would have been very tempting to just not admit that, because before the Nazis came to power, Jünger had sympathized with them, although he never counted himself among them. Hitler had sent Jünger fan letters; the responses have unfortunately been lost. Jünger’s many political rants in the 1920s do contain several explicit endorsements of the strength of the Nazis and of their value as allies to Jünger’s vague and contradictory nationalist cause. By the time he wrote the Marble Cliffs, he had stopped endorsing them. But this history made it easy for the Nazis to publicly pretend he had just written a fictional novella, or maybe he was talking about Bolshevism or something, but surely he didn’t mean them. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes situation, where nobody dared to say out loud what everyone could see. Although additional reprints were verboten in 1942, the excuse of a lack of paper due to the war was perfectly plausible and didn’t betray the discomfort with the content that nevertheless is well-documented to have been present among the Nazi ranks. All of that is to say we can safely dispense with the charade entirely and accept that this book is about the Nazis. It makes general points on the nature and fate of tyranny that do apply to Bolshevism, but the Nazis are the immediate and obvious instance of tyranny to which this book clearly reacts. And it is written by someone who had walked among the Nazis, had previously been friends with some of them, exchanged letters with many of the best-informed men especially in the military, and was perceptive enough for his opinions to deserve much of the confidence he states them with. Besides this conceit, the other concession to the political realities Jünger makes is that the book makes no mention of Jews. The world he is describing is fictional, but it is an amalgamation of European cultures that all had some Jews, so this absence is conspicuous. Obviously Jünger couldn't possibly have seen this book published if it depicted Jews in any way that wasn’t extremely negative. I guess he was unwilling to do that. In the 1920s, Jünger had ranted against “globalist” liberal Jews several times, and once even argued that one couldn't be both a Jew and a German. But he saw nothing wrong with being an orthodox Jew, openly admired Zionism, expressed in letters complete revulsion with Nazi antisemitism and had even publicly spoken out against the pseudoscientific racial theories of the Nazis. After writing this book, when serving as an officer again in France, Jünger went on to save a couple of French Jews from deportation and death, at moderate risk to his own life. Later he’d discuss the Kabbalah with Gershom Sholem, the brother of his childhood friend Werner Sholem. For these reasons, I imagine he did not see Jews negatively enough for the Nazis, and was too uncompromising to pretend that even his narrator did. I think this dilemma fully explains why there are no Jews in this book. In 1935, when Winston Churchill for example still publicly admired “the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force” of Adolf Hitler, Jünger claims to have already understood the bottomlessness of Hitler's depravity by noticing he was using the word “Vernichtung” (annihilation) way too much. He was remarkably right, years before most could see it, but even more remarkably his method of understanding was a poet's acute sense of word choice! And from then, even though he agreed with nationalist dictatorship as a goal and method, he distanced himself from National Socialism because he was disgusted with the vile character of the leader of this particular nationalist dictatorship. If that doesn't show you the peculiar kind of man Ernst Jünger was, I don't know what to tell you. The craft and the poetry You all know the wild grief that besets us when we remember times of happiness. How far beyond recall they are, and we are severed from them by something more pitiless than leagues and miles. The “marble cliffs” in the title of this short novella unite senses of beauty, majesty and danger, which is programmatic for this entire book. It begins with a visionary description of life in the traditional society of “the Marina” in an overwhelmingly beautiful state of paradise. The narrator lives on the edge of this society in a “hermitage” with his brother, his housekeeper and his son. The latter has a strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes. This opening act is without question the most elaborate celebration of poetic beauty I have ever read. Superficially it could be dismissed as purple prose. But due to Jünger’s clever use of poetic techniques in what at first appears to be prose text, there’s a rhythm, a density and a lucidity to it that makes it pretty much a very long poem, and gives it an intoxicating quality which is most apparent when you read it out loud. In the autumn we feasted like sages and did honour to the exquisite wines in which the southern slopes of the Marina abound. When in the vineyards between red foliage and dark grape clusters we caught the jocund calls of the vintagers, when in the little towns and villages the wine-presses began to creak, and the odour of the pressed grape skins drew its heady veils round the farms, we would go down to the innkeepers, coopers and wine-growers, and drink with them from the full-bellied jug. And there we would always meet with gay companions, for the land is rich and fair, so that in it flourishes untroubled leisure, and wit and humour are its unquestioned coin. I know this works, because I did an experiment. I read this book aloud, to a room full of people who were smoking pot. The book is short and the plan was to read all of it over the evening. I have read to pot smokers occasionally, but with this book it was different. They were enjoying it very much for the first couple of chapters, and exclaimed many times it was “perfect” for pot. But some hours, chapters and joints in, when the narrator goes on an expedition into a fantastically beautiful forest, they were so utterly overwhelmed by the intensity of the descriptions of nature they asked me to stop. I and the only other sober person in the room were the only ones who were willing to continue. We all had very intense dreams that night. Once we had broken through the thick hedge of dogwood and blackthorn we entered the high forest, territory where the blow of an axe had never resounded. The ancient trunks, the pride of the Chief Ranger, stood gleaming damp like pillars with their capitals hidden by the mist. We walked among them as if through a spacious hall, and, like the magic setting of a stage, festoons of ivy and clematis blooms hung down towards us out of the void. The ground was piled high with mould and rotting branches, in the bark of which fiery red mushrooms had sprung up, so that we felt for a moment like divers wandering among coral gardens. Wherever one of the mighty trunks had fallen from age or struck by lightning, we stepped out on to a little clearing on which the yellow foxglove grew in thick clumps. On the rotting ground the deadly nightshade bloomed in profusion; on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells. It comes as no surprise that Jünger had much practice writing that way, from putting into his diaries a lot of his dreams and his numerous drug experiences. Jünger had long been inclined to deeply poetic descriptions of the real events he described, but this intensity at this length is genuinely new to his writing. Wherever he can use plurals he prefers them over the singular, wherever he can use more melodic and beautiful verbs (like when the characters “step out on” rather than “walk into” clearings) he does. Maybe the pretense of the narrator not being himself allowed Jünger to wallow in his characteristic aestheticism, take it to an extreme and arguably to the point of self-parody. Skip to the next heading if you don’t care about translation The extreme language of this book made me doubt there would be any translation into English that could do it justice. After all, if you throw this last excerpt into DeepL you get: After breaking through a dense fringe of blackthorn and cornets, we entered the high forest, in the grounds of which the blow of the axe had never sounded. The old trunks, which formed the pride of the head forester, stood in the damp glow like columns whose capitals were hidden by the haze. We walked among them as through wide vestibules, and like the magic work on a stage, ivy vines and clematis blossoms hung down on us from the invisible. The ground was covered high with mulm and decaying branches on whose bark mushrooms, burning red cup fungi, had settled, so that a feeling of divers walking through coral gardens crept over us. Where one of these giant trunks was tossed by age or lightning, we stepped out into small clearings where yellow foxglove stood in dense clumps. Belladonna bushes also proliferated on the rotten ground, on whose branches the flower calyxes in brown violet swayed like death bells. It’s still pretty, and it works on a matter-of-fact level. None of it is just wrong. But can you see how it has a lot less of the dreamlike quality? A “fringe” is a geographical feature, while the “hedge” emphasizes its role as an obstacle in a journey. Those “old” trunks are less poetic than “ancient” ones. A “head forester” is a job description, while a “Chief Ranger” is a seminal figure. The “vestibules” are a literal translation of the original, but the English word is used a lot less than German “Vestibüle” was back then. So that’s a word you may need to work to understand, which gets you out of the story’s flow, so “spacious hall” is better. There are even more such nitpicks to be made even in this short paragraph, but my point is these difficulties pervade every single paragraph of the book. ChatGPT very similarly fails to overcome them. Since January, there is a new translation by Tess Lewis, which has the advantage of being available on Kindle. I’ll spare you another repeat of the same paragraph and just say I think DeepL did most of this translation. But Tess Lewis did improve on many of its word choices and I’ll grudgingly concede this translation is good enough. It still sounds too modern for me, too much like prose and too little like poetry. Therefore, all previous and following excerpts are from the Stuart Hood translation, published in 1947, which I was astonished to find does pull it off! Let me assure anyone who doesn’t speak German, or doesn’t study translation, that this one is absolutely exemplary and surely represents years of painstaking work. Stuart Hood was a Scot who knew German very well. Like Jünger he was a veteran officer, and he needed German for his intelligence missions in World War 2. This is his very first published translation of an entire book. It harnesses a considerable talent, which is also evidenced by how Stuart Hood went on to become an accomplished writer himself, a BBC executive, a professor and several other notable things. And it is clearly a labor of intense love — right after the war, while working on it, Hood corresponded with Jünger and even went to visit him at least twice and they talked at length about the art of translation and how to translate specific points of the Marble Cliffs. The end of this last quote, “on its stalk the dark purple calices shook like funeral bells.” exemplifies how precisely Hood has understood Jünger. Why “calices”, not “chalices”? Because that is the old-fashioned form of this word, and using it is unnecessarily peculiar, but it doesn’t make you stop and look into a dictionary. It isn’t even more precise than DeepL’s and ChatGPT’s and Tess Lewis’s “calyxes” for the word “Blumenkelche” in the Original. But it captures precisely how the author was using his German language. This is because on every page of the original, there are choices of individual words that evoke subtleties of mood and allusion that are strictly impossible to translate, because English doesn’t have a similar-enough group of synonyms from which to make the equivalent choice. Some of that must inevitably get lost in translation. But these “calices” are an example of how Hood has the audacity to frequently insert his own new peculiar word choices — which restore exactly the same effect! It might take entire months until AI can do that! Unfortunately the New Directions edition with this translation has been out of print for a while, although I heard from a regrettably less law-abiding friend that the PDF is easy to find. But a few years ago someone bought the UK rights to this translation and republished it. While this edition has several uncorrected OCR mistakes, one of which horrifyingly turns “Flayer’s Copse” into “Player’s Copse”, at least this makes the better translation available (legally) again. What actually happens (spoilers) After six chapters of descriptions of paradise, and of the botanical work the brothers do since they don’t need to make a living, the book continues with a gradual decline of this gorgeous world. This again is much more of a richly detailed description than a story plot. It begins with the introduction of the Chief Ranger. The brothers know him from their military community, from before his takeover begins. There is some debate about whether the Chief Ranger stands for Hitler, Stalin or Hermann Göring. I think this debate is misguided. The character of the Chief Ranger, the antagonist of the narrator and all he holds dear, is never named but only ever referred to by his title. He does not appear to have staff or lieutenants at all, nor any personal history. And Jünger is profoundly uninterested in the personalities of all his characters beneath what they pay attention to (except the narrator’s brother) so even this important figure is roughly sketched at best. Therefore, I believe he is best understood as more of an archetype or role, The Tyrant, denuded of the individual traits or histories that make one tyrant a Führer, another a General Secretary and yet another a Great Leader. So, what makes a tyrant? According to Jünger, “wherever free spirits establish their sway these primeval powers will always join their company like a snake creeping to an open fire. They are the old connoisseurs of power who see a new day dawning in which to reestablish the tyranny that has lived in their hearts since the beginning of time.” The Chief Ranger is also “a master of feigning frankness that was full of snares for the unwary.” He has a reputation for wealth and a strong visual brand (a gold-embroidered green coat) that makes sure he always leaves “an imprint on one’s memory”. He exudes a “breath of primitive power” and has a strong charisma that gives an impression of “both cunning and unshakable power — yes, at times even majesty.” As he begins to usurp power, “reports spread from mouth to mouth of infringements of the law and of acts of violence in the neighbourhood, and finally such incidents occurred publicly and with no attempt to concealment. A cloud of fear preceded the Chief Ranger like the mountain mist that presages the storm. Fear enveloped him, and I am convinced that therein far more than in his own person lay his power.” From what I know about tyrants, that sounds about right. For the next seven chapters, the vile followers of the Chief Ranger continually corrupt everything. The sophisticated culture of the Marina is surrounded by the rough herdsmen clans of the surrounding Campagna steppe, beyond which lies the Chief Ranger’s forest populated by lowlifes. The class metaphor is blindingly obvious, and Jünger’s theory of how these lowlifes overcome first the Campagna and then the Marina is not subtle either. After the Alta Plana war, and the defeat, the entire society has been weakened. “Thus in exhausted bodies corruption will set in by way of wounds which a sound man would scarcely notice. The first symptoms, therefore, were not recognized.” Very gradually, law gives way to lawlessness, spreading from and with the lower classes foresters in many different ways. Violent crime grows, in descriptions very reminiscent of the many deadly street fights of the late Weimar republic. Various elements of traditional culture become corrupted. Those who would defend it are intimidated and attacked. The constitutional lawful reaction is too slow, so by the time it manages to convene and have democratic debates, it is already infiltrated. And there’s one paragraph worth quoting in full. Herein, above all, lay a masterly trait of the Chief Ranger. He administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders which were so finely spun in the heart of his woods was that of a power for order; for while his agents of lower rank, who had established themselves in the clans, fostered anarchy, the initiated penetrated into the civic offices and the magistracy, and there won the reputation of men of deeds who would bring the mob to its senses. Thus the Chief Ranger was like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practise on the sufferer the surgery he has in mind. Today this is a mainstream view in German history. In 1939, it could have been prosecuted as high treason and punished with death. On the backdrop of ever escalating mayhem, two old men who are friends of the brothers are described: Belovar, a clan patriarch from the Campagna, and Father Lampros, an eminent Christian monk. In very different ways, they both are very helpful, each both in the botanical work and against the mounting threat. The brothers decide against meeting the violence with violence, delve deeper into their work, become increasingly pessimistic and develop a hope that they can rescue the results of their work into an imperishable afterlife by burning it with an ancient mystical crystal lens that they somehow inherited. The narrator describes continued excursions for rare plants, through the country that is becoming increasingly treacherous and foreboding, until finally, well after the middle point of the book, with one particular excursion for an extremely rare flower, the actual continual story begins. Today we look at the Nazis with horror, but Jünger has dug too many trenches into hills of rotting corpses to be easily horrified. Instead of horror, his feelings towards the Nazis are mostly contempt, seasoned with disgust, and that has been pervading his description of the rise of the Chief Ranger’s henchmen over the last couple of chapters. But he does give one instance of pure horror and it is here, in the very heart of the book, when the two brothers on their excursion happen to discover, in the ill-reputed area of Flayer's Copse, the Chief Ranger’s remote “flaying-hut” of Koppels-Bleek. The original Köppels-Bleek is a German wordplay, about as subtle as a drone base in a sci-fi novel that happens to be called Obamazliez. Koppels-Bleek is where the Chief Ranger has his enemies tortured to death. It has frequently been called a concentration camp, but that is imprecise. It is really a Vernichtungslager, a death camp, which unlike a “normal” concentration camp is built for the express purpose that no torture victim ever gets out alive. This is a prediction, because while Nazi concentration camps were set up starting in 1933, Vernichtungslager were only built three years after the “Marble Cliffs” were published. After an intensely gruesome description of the particulars of this place, the narrator assesses its importance as follows. Such are the dungeons above which rise the proud castles of the tyrants, and from them is to be seen rising the curling savoury smoke of their banquets. They are terrible noisome pits in which a God-forsaken crew revels to all eternity in the degradation of human dignity and human freedom. He is so certain he has captured the very essence of tyranny, “the abode of tyranny in all its shame”, that he puts this climax at the two thirds mark of the book and makes it exceedingly obvious this is where the third and final act begins, as the pace of the book changes entirely. Although the narrator still includes some retrospectives, he is now finally telling a real story. Strikingly, the brothers return to botany — remember this, it will be important later — and then to their home, where they soon get two conspiring visitors. Braquemart is a competent, racist, nihilistic fellow veteran. The narrator despises him at length for his heartless theory-mindedness. Prince Smyrna is new, young, seems to the narrator to know “the nature of justice and order” but is too weak and inexperienced to shoulder the responsibility he is heroically taking on. The two visitors want to Do Something about the Chief Ranger — what exactly is never said, though a personal confrontation or assassination is implied. They leave for the Chief Ranger's territory. This entire chapter feels very much like a comment on some political acquaintances of Jünger who attempted to challenge the Nazis, and failed. The next day, Father Lampros gives the narrator a mission to arm himself and look for these two men. He goes to old Belovar's farmstead, where he learns of commotion in the direction of Flayer's Copse, and the old clan patriarch goes to war. Before, the book was a dreamy soliloquy; now we see dramatic wartime action. Ernst Jünger has had a lot of practice with writing about that kind of thing, and it shows. Their small but experienced war party with a lot of dogs goes towards Koppels-Bleek and is soon met with two confused, horrific, riveting battles. The narrator stumbles through and finds at Koppels-Bleek the heads of Prince Smyrna and Braquemart. The former strikes him as a symbol of how nobility remains real, and he picks it up. With it, he retreats through mayhem and danger into the complete flaming destruction of the Marina. He marvels at the beauty of the flames — remember this too, it will also be important later — and, with his hunters in hot pursuit, runs to his house. There his son uses his strange power over the local population of poisonous snakes to make them defeat the nearest attackers. The brothers burn down the house, go find Father Lampros and see him die. From an old soldier comrade who owes them a favor they get room on a ship to flee across the water to Alta Plana, where an old enemy who owes them another favor takes them in. There’s an implicit framing story of how the narrator lives to tell the tale of these memories to some unspecified audience, and as it ends it mentions in passing that sometime after these events, a new cathedral has been built on the ruins of the Marina and the head of Prince Smyrna went there as a relic. This small bit still stands out today, and would have stood out even more starkly to contemporary readers, because in the context of everything that happened before, this bit publicly, extremely boldly, and correctly, predicts the eventual fate of the Nazis. Not once in this entire story has the narrator expressed surprise at this progression of events, or given any other indication it is in any way unlikely. The narrator, and the author through him, seems to be saying this is just the way it goes with tyranny, when a society has lost too much of its strength to fight off the bestial attacks of the lowly. I have omitted not just many smaller elements of the story but also a huge number of allusions to ancient history, (German) literature and especially the Bible. I imagine Jünger put them there as prizes for the few who would find them. This is one of the ways that I think On the Marble Cliffs is Ernst Jünger’s Unsong: a vehicle that lets a prolific nonfiction author
They describe the obvious allegorical nature of the book and Jünger's relationship to the Nazis, much like I did above. They vary in how much they emphasize his earlier sympathy with the Nazis or his later revulsion, and often omit one or the other.
To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. The German Catastrophe The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive. And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars. This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers. These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went. Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake. This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went. The author in his time One remarkable witness to this entire catastrophe was Ernst Jünger. In 1938, when he picked up the pen to write Auf den Marmor-Klippen (On the Marble Cliffs), he was 43 years old and a complicated man in a complicated situation. He was first and foremost a highly renowned soldier. He had the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Medal of Honor in the Kaiserreich, which would entitle him to a decent stipend if the Kaiserreich hadn't been gone for twenty years. He was clearly brilliant, especially as a writer, very well connected and exchanged many letters with important men on the political right. He made a living as an author, mostly because his first book, the World War I memoir “Storm of Steel”, was a great success and continually got reprinted. He had followed it up with a string of books, all nonfiction — almost all memoirs, about the war, or both. And he had written a flurry of political articles, mostly in ultraconservative and nationalist magazines. On the Marble Cliffs is his very first fiction novel. Or he claimed it was fiction — but he was fooling nobody. Jünger wrote for an audience that was very familiar with Storm of Steel and, because of the autobiographical nature of all of his preceding work, with him as a person. His books revealed him to be a highly perceptive, highly but coldly intelligent, very erudite, sensation seeking… sociopath. He has masterful eloquence and a keen interest in nature. Even in the trenches of the World War, where he enjoyed “hunting down” enemy soldiers with sniper shots, he seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on. And his protagonist in the Marble Cliffs is both the first-person narrator and almost exactly the same guy! All of the following points are true both for the protagonist of this novel, and the author at the time of writing. He lives with his brother on the edge of a small town in a fairly rural area with an old Christian culture and strong traditional crafts of wine making and fishing, overlooking a large body of water, across which is a mountainous foreign country: Alta Plana in the book, Switzerland in reality.
In 1920, the DAP added two words to its name and became the National Socialist German Workers' Party or, as its enemies would call it derogatorily, the Nazi Party. At the same time, Hitler quit his army job to focus on growing the movement. Drawing on his artistic experience, he designed an emblem for the party to rally around: the now-familiar black swastika in a white circle on a red field.
I’d divide Shirer’s book into four main sections2. The first traces the ascension of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany; the second follows Nazi Germany’s gradual rise to European dominance; the third concerns the beginning of the war and the early Nazi victories; and the fourth considers how things began to unravel for Hitler until he and his regime were finally obliterated. This review will focus exclusively on the first part of the book3.
Hitler worked so hard to grow the party that he nearly became the party. Concerned by his burgeoning influence, the other members of the Party’s committee decided to take Hitler down a peg. They investigated whether they could ally with other parties to dilute Hitler’s absolute control. On discovering these plans, Hitler threatened to resign from the Party. This would have been disastrous for the Nazis: Hitler’s electrifying speeches brought in most of the Party’s funds. The committee refused to accept Hitler’s resignation. Sensing his bargaining power, Hitler turned the tables on the committee—if they wanted to keep him, they would need to formally acknowledge him as dictator of the Nazi Party.
Nietzsche wanted to rehabilitate pagan master morality, and Girard interprets Nazism as trying to enact this project. Victimize a bunch of innocent people - kill them, horribly, in a way totally anathema to Christian morality - to announce that victimizing people is back in fashion. Obviously this isn’t what the Nazis said they were doing, but Girard is a Continental philosopher and allowed to posit subtle psychological undercurrents, I guess.
So, since the Nazis are bad, we should stick with slave morality, and view the increasing concern with victims as good, right? Girard is uncomfortable with this conclusion. He’s a conservative Christian, so he has to be against wokeness. But he identifies wokeness as increasing fidelity to the Christian imperative to care for victims. So he has to support something like “increasing concern with helping victims was good until about 1950, and then went too far and became bad”. This is a totally coherent philosophy that might very well be true. It’s just sort of awkward, and less elegant than his other claims, and he never really says it outright. A hostile reader would naturally accuse him of being a naive conservative: social progress was good right up until the point where it produced the society I grew up in, and then after that, it became bad.
The Nazis ran a eugenics program that killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, eliminating their genes from the gene pool. But the next generation of Germans had a totally normal schizophrenia rate, comparable to pre-Nazi Germany or any other country.
What about the second argument, the one about the Nazis’ eugenics program?
How can this be? The lowest genetic risk score of a person who nevertheless developed schizophrenia was 0.915. In our sample of 2000 people, we should expect about 183 people to be at or above that threshold. The simulated Nazis killed off 20 in the last generation. There are still 163 left. These are people who didn’t get schizophrenia because they had a positive environment, but could have gotten it if their environment had been worse. They outnumber schizophrenics by almost 10 to 1. When we bring their genes forward into the new generation, some of their descendants get bad environments, and so get schizophrenia. I think you should expect very slightly fewer schizophrenics in the new generation, but the effect size wasn’t noticeable in this small granular simulation - nor, apparently, in Germany2.
Inline links: 2
Dean Ball calls this strategy “an unholy alliance with the unions and the misinformation crusaders and all the rest”, and equates it to selling our souls. I admit we have many cultural and ethical differences with socialists, that I don’t want to become them, that I can’t fully endorse them, and that I’m sure they feel the same way about me. But coalition politics doesn’t require perfect agreement. The US and its European allies were willing to form an “unholy alliance” with some unsavory socialists in order to defeat the Nazis, they did defeat the Nazis, and they kept their own commitments to capitalism and democracy intact.
Then the Nazis took power in Germany. The socialist Bauhaus architects fled the country. Many came to America, where we colonial yokels responded with star-struck awe. Wolfe, writing before political correctness limited our stock of acceptable metaphors, says:
Thomas Cotter asks why people think “consistency” is an important moral value. After all, he says, the Nazis and Soviets were “consistent” with their evil beliefs. I’m not so sure of his examples - the Soviets massacred workers striking for better conditions, and the Nazis were so bad at race science that they turned against IQ research after Jews outscored Aryans - but I’m sure if he looked harder he could find some evil person who was superficially consistent with themselves.
Inline links: Thomas Cotter asks