Thursday, December 29, 2016

'Man in the High Castle': sometimes it's good to be bad




The Amazon TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Man in the High Castle (1962), has attracted a great deal of interest in nationalist quarters. The series - depicting a fantasy alternate reality in which the Axis won WWII and conquered America - portrays a German-occupied America, and the National Socialists, in a good light, and unintentionally so. The show wants to make an America under fascist rule to be a dystopia, but instead we see a rather pleasant post-war society which resembles clean, prosperous and smartly-dressed America of Mad Men albeit with jackboots and uniforms. As one commentator on 8Chan put it, the show uses ill-fitting uniforms and some awful pseudo-Nazi architecture; it doesn't exhibit any understanding of National Socialist ideology; but it still makes the Nazis look good.

I am a quarter of the way through Dick's novel. It contains the usual anti-German propaganda bilge we'd expect from an American - the author has swallowed the gas chamber propaganda whole, for instance - but I find the book fascinating for a number of reasons. One of these is that it shows a world in which the Germans won, are good administrators of the countries they occupy (including America and the Soviet Union) and are building a sustainable social, political and economic order. This is reassuring to many Hitler sympathisers. In their subconscious, they believe that Germany lost because it wasn't meant to win: like Knut Hamsun, they believe that Hitler was too good for this barbaric age. As well as that, for them seventy years of Allied and Soviet brainwashing - to the effect that Germany would have brought disaster to the world had it won, or at the least, would have botched the job - has had an effect; again, in their subconscious, this notion holds sway. How refreshing, then, to read of a novel where grateful Americans under German occupation are praising their rulers for 'helping America recover economically' from the war. Germany is the one standing in a superior position to the Americans after the war, and Germans are such bountiful economic producers that they are capable of largesse to defeated nations. What's more, they undertake great feats: in the novel, they are on the way to colonising Mars.

The trailer of the series shows the American 'Nazis' doing some bad things: kidnapping, torturing and killing people, and generally behaving in a brutal and barbaric way. I think that this mirrors the liberal view of what 'Nazis' and 'Nazi' rule to be like. We revisionists know, of course, that the writers of the show are engaging in what Freud called projection. The Allies and their collaborators - e.g., the French Resistance - did exactly these things to the helpless peoples of the countries they liberated. The more we Hitler sympathisers read of these atrocities, the more fearful we become: what if the Americans and the British do it again? I myself don't want to end up like Julius Streicher, who was garroted at Nuremberg - by a Jewish hangman - for the crime of writing an anti-Semitic children's book. Liberals, American liberals, organised that. But, as it turns out, those liberals are more afraid of us than we are of them. The closer any 'Neo-Nazi' politician nears to power, the greater the liberal hysteria will be.

The experience of ages has shown that fear can be a useful weapon, politically speaking. Having your political opponents fear you, and 'what you'll do' once you get into power, can be a wonderful thing.

For the past seventy years, the Far Left - and liberals - have used the 'Nazis' and 'Nazi horrors' as a stick to beat the Far Right with. But when used on the Alt Right, it hasn't worked. The Left will accuse them of being 'Nazis' who 'want to gas the Jews', just like the wicked 'Nazis' in Man in the High Castle. The Alt Right answers back: 'You're correct - that's exactly who we are and that's exactly what we want to do!'. The Left takes this at face value and goes into a hysterical overreaction. It helps that the Left perceives us as being stronger politically than we are and holds to the thesis - especially so since Trump's election - that 'fascism' and 'reaction' are on the march everywhere and are winning.



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