Axis Ideologies German Nazism Discussion

Description

With

this response,

we

seek to better understand the p

olitical

ideologies of the three Axis

P

owers.

1

: Germany,

Japan, and Italy

.

These ideologies were

:.

•

National Socialism

(

“

Nazism

”

in Germany

)

• T

he National Polity

(Japan)

•

Fascism

(Italy)

.

→

If representatives from Italy, Japan, and Germany got together in the late 1930s to set up a

single government, what would they agree on and

where might their visions for the future differ?

Citations.

If you must quote something

(

one quote per essay

!)

simply put the author’s name in

parentheses at the end of the sentence and “use quotation marks for the quoted material” (Smith).

[like

I’ve done above]

Some

• Typed

•

3

–

4 pages

• Double spaced

• 12

–

point font

no outside source, 3 documents + lecture notes

Italy:
Germany:
National Socialist: Blood cut across class lines; Socialist blood/race does not cut across class lines
1929 Germany
Japan
ON NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND WORLD RELATIONS
SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE GERMAN REICHSTAG ON JANUARY 30TH 1937
by Adolf Hitler
FÃœHRER AND CHANCELLOR
Taken from https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/hitler1.htm
[Edited below by MPP]
[. . . ]
Surely nobody will doubt the fact that during the last four years a revolution of the most
momentous character has passed like a storm over Germany. Who could compare this new
Germany with that which existed on the 30th. of January four years ago, when I took my oath of
loyalty before the venerable President of the Reich?
I am speaking of a National Socialist Revolution; but this revolutionary process in Germany had
a particular character of its own, which may have been the reason why the outside world and so
many of our fellow-countrymen failed to understand the profound nature of the transformation
that took place. I do not deny that this peculiar feature, which has been for us the most
outstanding characteristic of the lines along which the National Socialist Revolution took
place—a feature which we can be specially proud of—has hindered rather than helped to make
this unique historic event understood abroad and among some of our own people. For the
National Socialist Revolution was in itself a revolution in the revolutionary tradition.
What I mean is this: Throughout thousands of years the conviction grew up and prevailed, not
so much in the German mind as in the minds of the contemporary world, that bloodshed and
the extermination of those hitherto in power—together with the destruction of public and
private institutions and property—were essential characteristics of every true revolution.
Mankind in general has grown accustomed to accept revolutions with all these consequences
somehow or other as if they were legal happenings. I do not mean that people endorse all this
tumultuous destruction of life and property; but they certainly accept it as the necessary
accompaniment of events which, because of this very reason, are called revolutions.
Herein lies the difference between the National Socialist Revolution and other revolutions, with
the exception of the Fascist Revolution in Italy. The National Socialist Revolution was almost
entirely a bloodless proceeding. When the party took over power in Germany, after
overthrowing the very formidable obstacles that had stood in its way, it did so without causing
any damage whatsoever to property. I can say with a certain amount of pride that this was the
first revolution in which not even a window-pane was broken.
Don’t misunderstand me however. If this revolution was bloodless that was not because we were
not manly enough to look at blood. . . .
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Only in those cases where the murderous lust of the Bolsheviks, even after the 30th of January,
1933, led them to think that by the use of brute force they could prevent the success and
realization of the National Socialist ideal—only then did we answer violence with violence, and
naturally we did it promptly. . . .
I do not know if there ever has been a resolution which was of such a profound character as the
National Socialist Revolution and which at the same time allowed innumerable persons who had
been prominent in political circles under the former regime to follow their respective callings in
private life peacefully and without causing them any worry. Not only that, but even many among
our bitterest enemies, some of whom had occupied the highest positions in the government,
were allowed to enjoy their regular emoluments and pensions. . . .
The main plank in the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberalistic concept of the
individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to substitute therefore the folk community,
rooted in the soil and bound together by the bond of its common blood. A very simple
statement; but it involves a principle that has tremendous consequences.
This is probably the first time and this is the first country in which people are being taught to
realize that, of all the tasks which we have to face, the noblest and most sacred for mankind is
that each racial species must preserve the purity of the blood which God has given it.
And thus it happens that for the first time it is now possible for men to use their God-given
faculties of perception and insight in the understanding of those problems which are of more
momentous importance for the preservation of human existence than all the victories that may
be won on the battlefield or the successes that may be obtained through economic efforts. The
greatest revolution which National Socialism has brought about is that it has rent asunder the
veil which hid from us the knowledge that all human failures and mistakes are due to the
conditions of the time and therefore can be remedied, but that there is one error which cannot
be remedied once men have made it, namely the failure to recognize the importance of
conserving the blood and the race free from intermixture and thereby the racial aspect and
character which are God’s gift and God’s handiwork. It is not for men to discuss the question of
why Providence created different races, but rather to recognize the fact that it punishes those
who disregard its work of creation.
Unspeakable suffering and misery have come upon mankind because they lost this instinct
which was grounded in a profound intuition; and this loss was caused by a wrong and lopsided
education of the intellect. Among our people there are millions and millions of persons living
today for whom this law has become clear and intelligible. What individual seers and the still
unspoiled natures of our forefathers saw by direct perception has now become a subject of
scientific research in Germany. And I can prophesy here that, just as the knowledge that the
earth moves around the sun led to a revolutionary alternation in the general world-picture, so
the blood-and-race doctrine of the National Socialist Movement will bring about a revolutionary
change in our knowledge and therewith a radical reconstruction of the picture which human
history gives us of the past and will also change the course of that history in the future.
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And this will not lead to an estrangement between the nations; but, on the contrary, it will bring
about for the first time a real understanding of one another. At the same time, however, it will
prevent the Jewish people from intruding themselves among all the other nations as elements of
internal disruption, under the mask of honest world-citizens, and thus gaining power over these
nations.
We feel convinced that the consequences of this really revolutionizing vision of truth will bring
about a radical transformation in German life. For the first time in our history, The German
people have found the way to a higher unity than they ever had before; and that is due to the
compelling attraction of this inner feeling. Innumerable prejudices have been broken down,
many barriers have been overthrown as unreasonable, evil traditions have been wiped out and
antiquated symbols shown to be meaningless. From that chaos of disunion which had been
caused by tribal, dynastic, philosophical, religious and political strife, the German nation has
arisen and has unfurled the banner of a reunion which symbolically announces, not a political
triumph, but the triumph of the racial principle. For the past four-and-a-half years German
legislation has upheld and enforced this idea. Just as on January 30th, 1933, a state of affairs
already in existence was legalized by the fact that I was entrusted with the chancellorship,
whereby the party whose supremacy in Germany had then become unquestionable was not
authorized to take over the government of the Reich and mould the future destiny of Germany;
so this German legislation that has been in force for the past four years was only the legal
sanction which gave jurisdiction and binding force to an idea that had already been clearly
formulated and promulgated by the party.
When the German community, based on the racial blood-bond, became realized in the German
State we all felt that this would remain one of the finest moments to be remembered during our
lives. Like a blast of springtime it passed over Germany four years ago. The fighting forces of our
movement who for many years had defended the banner of the Hooked Cross against the
superior forces of the enemy, and had carried it steadily forward for a long fourteen years, now
planted it firmly in the soil of the new Reich. . . .
May we not speak of a revolution when the chaotic conditions brought about by parliamentarydemocracy disappear in less than three months and a regime of order and discipline takes their
place, and a new energy springs forth from a firmly welded unity and a comprehensive
authoritative power such as Germany never before had?
So great was the Revolution that its intellectual foundations are not even yet understood but are
superficially criticized by our contemporaries. They talk of democracies and dictatorships; but
they fail to grasp the fact that in this country a radical transformation has taken place and has
produced results which are democratic in the highest sense of the word, if democracy has any
meaning at all.
With infallible certainty we are steering towards an order of things in which a process of
selection will become active in the political leadership of the nation, as it exists throughout the
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whole of life in general. By this process of selection, which will follow the laws of Nature and the
dictates of human reason, those among our people who show the greatest natural ability will be
appointed to positions in the political leadership of the nation. In making this selection no
consideration will be given to birth or ancestry, name or wealth, but only to the question of
whether or not the candidate has a natural vocation for those higher positions of leadership. . . .
The National Socialist Revolution has not aimed at turning a privileged class into a class which
will have no rights in the future. Its aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that
hitherto were denied such rights. We have not ruined millions of citizens by degrading them to
the level of enslaved workers. Our aim has been to educate slaves to be German citizens. One
thing will certainly be quite clear to every German; and this is that revolutions as acts of terror
can only be of short duration. If revolutions are not able to produce something new they will
end up by devouring the whole of the national patrimony which existed before them. From the
assumption of power as an act of force the beneficial work of peace must be promptly
developed. But those who abolish classes for the purpose of putting new classes in their place
sow the seeds of new revolutions. The bourgeois citizen who has the ruling power in his hands
today will become a proletarian if he is banished to Siberia tomorrow and condemned to
enforced lab our there. He will then yearn for his day of deliverance, just as did the proletarian of
former times, who now thinks that his turn has come to play the despot. Therefore the National
Socialist Revolution never aimed at bringing in one class of the German people and turning out
another. One the contrary, our objective has been to make it possible for the whole German
people to work, not only in the economic but also in the political field, and to guarantee this
possibility by organizing the various classes into one national unit.
The National Socialist Movement, however, limits its sphere of internal activity to those
individuals who belong to one people and it refuses to allow the members of a foreign race to
wield an influence over our political, intellectual, or cultural life. And we refuse to accord to the
members of a foreign race any predominant position in our national economic system.
In this folk-community, which is based on the bond of blood, and in the results which National
Socialism has obtained by making the idea of this community understood among the public, lies
the most profound reason for the marvelous success of our Revolution.
Confronted with this new and vigorous ideal, all idols and relics of the past which had been
upheld by dynastic interests, tribal affiliations and even party interests, now began to lose their
glamour. That is why the whole party system of former times completely collapsed in a few
weeks, without giving rise to the feeling that something had been lost. They were superseded by
a better ideal. A new movement took their place. A reorganization of our people into a national
unit that includes all those whose lab our is productive simply pushed aside the old
organizations of employers and employees. . . .
There could be no more eloquent proof of how profoundly the German people have understood
the significance of this change and new development than the manner in which the nation
sanctioned our regime at the polls on so many occasions during the years that followed. . . .
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. . . . The people—the race—is the primary thing. Party, State, Army, the national economic
structure, Justice etc, all these are only secondary and accidental. They are only the means to the
end and the end is the preservation of this nation. These public institutions are right and useful
according to the measure in which their energies are directed towards this task. If they are
incapable of fulfilling it, then their existence is harmful and they must either be reformed or
removed and replaced by something better. . . .
The National Socialist Movement has laid down the directive lines along which the State must
conduct the education of the people. This education does not begin at a certain year and end at
another. The development of the human being makes it necessary to take the child from the
control of that small cell of social life which is the family and entrust his further training to the
community itself. . .
The National Socialist Revolution has clearly outlined the duties which this social education must
fulfil and, above all, it has made this education independent of the question of age. In other
words, the education of the individual can never end. Therefore it is the duty of the folkcommunity to see that this education and higher training must always be along lines that help
the community to fulfil its own task, which is the maintenance of the race and nation. . . .
On this historic occasion I must once again thank all those millions of unknown Germans, from
every class and caste, profession and trade and from all the farmsteads, who have given their
hearts, their lives and their sacrifices, for the new Reich. And all of us, gentlemen and members
of the Reichstag, hereby join together in tendering our thanks to the women of Germany, to the
millions of those German mothers who have given their children to the Third Reich. During these
four years every mother who has presented a child to the nation has contributed by her pain
and her joy to the happiness of the whole people. When I think of that healthy youth which
belongs to our nation, then my faith in the future becomes a joyful certainty. And it is with a
profund [sic] feeling that I realize the significance of the simple word which Ulrich von Huten
wrote when he picked up his pen for the last time — Deutschland.
5
From Sources of Japanese Tradition, edited by Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur L.
Tiedemann, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 968-969, 975. © 2005
Columbia University Press. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Excerpt below taken from http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/japan/kokutai.pdf and modified by
mpp; notes in [ ] by mpp.
Kokutai is a notoriously slippery term, sometimes translated into English as “national polity” and
often as “national essence.” Kokutai, which was hotly debated in Japan starting in the late
Tokugawa period, might be best understood as those qualities that make the Japanese
“Japanese.” In the mid-1930s, a time of social ferment and rising nationalistic thought, the
Ministry of Education commissioned a group of prominent academics to write a treatise on
kokutai that would establish an orthodox interpretation of the “national essence” for the
Japanese people. The resulting 156-page pamphlet, Kokutai no hongi, was published in March
1937 with an initial print run of 300,000 copies, although more than two million were eventually
distributed in Japan and the empire. Kokutai no hongi was the most important of a series of
documents produced by the Japanese government that sought to articulate an official ideology
for a nation on the brink of total war.
Selections from the Kokutai no hongi (Fundamentals of our National Polity [state]), 1937
The various ideological and social evils of present‑day Japan are the result of ignoring the
fundamental and running after the trivial, of the lack of judgment and the failure to digest
things thoroughly. This is because since the days of Meiji, so many aspects of European and
American culture, systems, and learning have been imported and too rapidly. As a matter of fact,
the foreign ideologies imported into our country are mainly ideologies of the Enlightenment
that have come down from the eighteenth century, or extensions of them. The views of the
world and of life that form the basis of these ideologies are rationalism and positivism
[knowledge derived from observation and experience—math and science stuff], lacking in
historical views, which, on the one hand, place the highest value on, and assert the liberty and
equality of, individuals and, on the other hand, place value on a world by nature abstract,
transcending nations and races. Consequently, importance is given to human beings and their
groupings, who have become isolated from historical entireties, abstract and independent of
one another. …
Paradoxical and extreme movements such as socialism, anarchism, and communism, all are
based, in the final analysis, on individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental [Western]
ideologies and of which they are no more than varied manifestations. Yet even in the Occident,
where individualism has formed the basis of their ideas, when it has come to Communism,
[nations like Italy and Germany] have found it unacceptable; so that now they are about to do
away with their traditional individualism, and this has led to the rise of totalitarianism and
nationalism and to the appearance of Fascism [Italy] and Nazism [version of fascism in
Germany]. That is, it can be said that in both the West [Europe / America] and our country, the
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deadlock of individualism has led alike to a season of ideological and social confusion and crisis.
…
This means that the present conflict in our people’s ideas, the unrest of their modes of life, the
confused state of their civilization, can be put right only by a thorough investigation by us [. . . ]
of our national polity [meaning “the state”—the way things are organized politically]. Then, too,
this should be done for the sake not only of our nation but also of the entire human race, which
is struggling to find a way out of the deadlock created by individualism.
Loyalty and Patriotism
Our country is established with the emperor, who is a descendant of Amaterasu
Ã…Å’mikami, as its center, as our ancestors as well as we ourselves constantly have beheld in the
emperor the fountainhead of her life and activities. For this reason, to serve the emperor and to
receive the emperor’s great august will as our own is the rationale of making our historical “life”
live in the present; and on this is based the morality of the people.
Loyalty means to revere the emperor as [our] pivot and to follow him implicitly. By implicit
obedience is meant casting ourselves aside and serving the emperor intently. To walk this Way
of loyalty is the sole Way in which we subjects may “live” and the fountainhead of all energy.
Hence, offering our lives for the sake of the emperor does not mean so‑called self-sacrifice but
the casting aside of our little selves to live under his majestic grace and the enhancing of the
genuine life of the people of a state. . . .
When we trace the marks of the facts of the founding of our country and the progress of our
history, what we always find there is the spirit of harmony. Harmony is a product of the great
achievements of the founding of the nation and is the power behind our historical growth.
It also is a humanitarian Way inseparable from our daily lives. The spirit of harmony is built on
the unity of all things. When people determinedly [see] themselves as masters and assert their
egos, there is nothing but contradiction and the setting of one against the other; harmony is not
created. In individualism it is possible to have cooperation, [. . .] but in the end there is no true
harmony. That is, a society of individualism is one of clashes between [masses of] people. . . [. . .]
Social structure and political systems in such a society, and the theories of sociology, political
science, statecraft, and so on, which are their logical manifestations, are essentially different
from those of our country, which makes harmony its fundamental Way. . . .
Conclusion
To put it in a nutshell, while the strong points of Occidental [Western / European] learning and
concepts are their analytical and intellectual qualities, the characteristics of [Asian / Japanese]
learning and concepts are their intuitive and aesthetic qualities. These are natural tendencies
that arise through racial and historical differences; and when we compare them with our
national spirit, concepts, or mode of living, we cannot help recognizing further great and
fundamental differences. Our nation has in the past imported, assimilated, and sublimated
Chinese and Indian ideologies and has thereby supported the imperial way, making possible the
establishment of an original culture based on its national polity . . . .
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In introducing into our country modern industrial organizations that had developed in the West,
as long as the spirit of striving for national profit and the people’s welfare governed the people’s
minds, the lively and free individual activities did much to make Japan wealthy.
But later, with the spread of individualistic and liberal ideas, there gradually arose a trend to
openly to justify selfishness in economic management and operations. This tendency created a
chasm between rich and poor and finally gave rise to ideas of class warfare [think Marx and
Engels here]. Later, the introduction of Communism brought about the erroneous idea that
economics was being the basis of politics, morality, and all other cultures and considered that by
means of class warfare alone an ideal society could be realized.
The fact that self-centeredness and class warfare are opposed to our national polity needs no
explanation. Only where people one and all put heart and soul into their respective occupations,
and there is coherence or order in each of their activities, with their minds set on guarding and
maintaining the prosperity of the imperial throne, is it possible to see a healthy development in
the people’s economic life.
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