The Square and the Tower
Networks, Hierarchies and the struggle for global power
Niall Ferguson
Chapter 37, page 222, The Leader Principle

Most fascist regimes started out by royal or aristocratic appointment, then swiftly centralised power. Nazism was different. In terms of votes, fascism was a disproportionately German phenomenon. Within Germany it attracted support across the geographic (including city vs country), social and conventional political spectrum, in an almost fractal geographic pattern. The Catholic centre party was more resilient than the parties previously supported mainly by protestants. The author describes Hitler as "going viral". From the book:

To many observers it seemed like a religious awakening. One Sturmabteilung serrgeant explained: 'Our opponents therefore committed a fundamental error when equating us as a party with the Economic Party, the Democrats or the Marxist parties. All these parties were only interest groups, they lacked soul, spiritual ties. Adolf Hitler emerged as bearer of a new political religion.' The Nazis developed a self-conscious liturgy, with November 9 (the date of the 1918 Revolution and the failed 1923 Beer Hall putsch) as a Day of Mourning, complete with fires, wreaths, altars, blood-stained relics and even a Nazi book of martyrs. Initiates into the elite Schutzstaffel (SS) had to incant a catechism with lines like "We believe in God, we believe in Germany which He created ... and in the Führer ... whom He has sent us.' It was not just that Christ was more or less overtly supplanted by Hitler in the iconography and liturgy of 'the brown cult'. As the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps argued, the very ethical foundation of Christianity had to go too: 'The abstruse doctrine of Original Sin ... indeed the whole notion of sin as set forth by the Church ... is something intolerable to Nordic man, since it is incompatible with the “heroic” ideology of our blood.'8 The Nazis' opponents also recognized the pseudo-religious character of the movement. As the Catholic exile Eric Voegelin put it, Nazism was 'an ideology akin to Christian heresies of redemption in the here and now ... fused with post-Enlightenment doctrines of social transformation'. The journalist Konrad Heiden called Hitler 'a pure fragment of the modern mass soul' whose speeches always ended 'in overjoyed redemption'. An anonymous Social Democrat called the Nazi regime a 'counter-church'. Yet Nazism was not literally religious: the institutional seedbed from which it sprouted was the existing network of secular associational life in Germany.  The denser the associational life in a town, the faster the Nazi party grew.

Like a church and like the Bolshevik party before it, the Nazi party became more hierarchical as it grew.

Where Stalin favoured obsessive-compulsive control, Hitler preferred a more chaotic style of government, in which the old hierarchy of the Reich government competed with the new hierarchy of the party and, later, the even newer hierarchy of the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst). Historians have sometimes represented the system as one of 'polycratic chaos', whereby ambiguous orders and overlapping jurisdictions gave rise to a 'cumulative radicalization', as rival individuals and agencies competed to carry out what they took to be the Führer's wishes. The result was a mixture of inefficiency, egregious corruption and escalating violence against all groups deemed to lie outside the 'ethnic community' – the Volksgemeinschaft – especially the Jews.

Brian Ross wrote on Aug 28^th, 2020 at 10:38pm:


Did they teach you that it was a logical fallacy in your doctor of divinity?

Can you share your reasoning?

Is this a valid comparison?

http://ozpolitic.com/wiki/index.php?title=Islam_vs_Nazism

Frank wrote on Aug 29^th, 2020 at 3:56pm:


Or Christianity, or Judaism or Hinduism or Shintoism or Daoism or any other religion, Soren.  All are totalitarian in that they seek to control all aspects of life and thought.  Islam is no different.   Muslims like Christians like Hindus like Shinto and so on however vary as to how much they believe and they obey the dictates of the religion they claim to believe in.   Some do it more than others, some do it less.  You, like most Islamophobes appear to believe all Muslims are 100% believers and 100% obeyers of what the Koran says.  Tell me, do Christians do what the Bible tells them to do?  No?  Does that make them less Christian then?  What then of the Muslims who don't do what the Koran preaches?  Are they less Muslim?  Yes?   

Brian Ross wrote on Aug 29^th, 2020 at 4:52pm:



Christ was saintly, Mohammed a monster.

Frank wrote on Aug 29^th, 2020 at 6:14pm:


Approximately 1.6 million people believe otherwise, Soren.  You are one man, you have a warped opinion.  QED.   

Frank wrote on Aug 29^th, 2020 at 10:10pm:


You appear to have problems with understanding that 1.6 billion people is a whole of believing, Soren for you to counter with your own views.  Tsk, tsk.   

Wasn't Nazism just Germany's way of trying to be like the USA - but in Europe?
Britain had to win, because it's the USA's 'representative' in Europe, not Germany.
A Europe - that is moving away from the old destructive Politics, Military and Religious influences.
Medicine and Music is proving to be some that take Europe into the future - while Politics, Military and Religion hold Europe in the past.