Chapter Twelve: Everyone Wants Someone to be a Hitler Youth

The Canadian Manifesto: How the American Neoconservatives Stole My Country

The term 'Hitler Youth' has become a popular accusation against any group of young people deemed to be radical, and used by both the left and the right.

Glenn Beck called the victims of Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik, Hitler Youth because they were at a camp sponsored by Norway's Labour Party. "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing." (1).

And yet Beck himself helps to run youth indoctrination camps, though he prefers to call them "schools".

The Louisville, Kentucky Courier Journal ran a story about the Vacation Liberty School in Danville, Ky., the latest of an expanding roster of "volunteer-run programs for children mostly aged 10-15 that resemble a mix between vacation Bible school, U.S. history and tea party-style conservative ideas that supporters say aren’t taught in public schools." The schools, the story added, are run by Glenn Beck’s Tea Party-friendly 9/12 Project. (2)

And to show that they have not changed their attitudes since the Conservative Movement began, at another in Tampa, Florida: "Children win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the 'banker' will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value." (3) Of course you could also conclude that the gold standard will rot your teeth.

Faytene Grasseschi (Krystow) shocked people recently when she claimed that she wanted her youth movement to be like the Hitler Youth, only this time for good not evil. It might surprise her to know that those German youth also fought against what they saw as moral deprivation, including abortion.

At the time, any woman wanting to terminate a pregnancy, could obtain a pill from a chemical plant (probably Bayer) for 50 marks, so abortions were on the increase. (4)

Even Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had such a huge impact on Jason Kenney, and is now Pope Benedict XVI, was a former member of the Hitler Youth. (5)

The image to the left is from a front page of the Nazi publication, Der Stuermer.

The headline reads, "Declaration of the Higher Clergy/So spoke Jesus Christ: You hypocrites who do not see the beam in your own eyes. (See Matthew 7:3-5)"

The cartoon depicts a group of Hitler Youth marching forth to drive the forces of evil from the land. The caption under the cartoon reads, "We youth step happily forward facing the sun... With our faith we drive the devil from the land."

Indoctrination of children, is indoctrination of children.

If it Was Good Enough for Baden-Powell

In November of 1922, a Mr. K. Friedrich visited Harvard University to speak to their Liberal Club about post-war Germany.  He gave an animated account of a new phenomenon: the "Youth Movement" or "Gugenelbewegung."

"'The Youth Movement' expresses the new spirit in Germany. It feels that the old life was cold, hard and unprofitable, stifling all the better instincts of the young people of the nation. The old militaristic system could not be called culture.

"It was merely a mechanical perfection, wholly lacking in spontaneity. The 'Youth Movement' is embracing a different theory of values in the educational standard. The tendency is constantly towards a more liberal ideal. Its studies are more and more in the realm of Philosophy, Literature and Religion. The old shackles are being cast off by a new and spontaneous enthusiasm." (6)

When we think of a German Youth Movement, we automatically think of the Hitler Youth, and the disturbing images of indoctrinated children proudly giving the infamous salute.  However, the youth movement actually began before the War, as a vehicle for young people to commune with nature and escape the oppressive regime of Wilhelm II. Their hikes were intellectual and cultural endeavours, as they shared poetry; discussed and debated philosophy, current events and politics. And while many groups had uniforms, more common would be musical instruments and books.

During the war, the movement gained momentum, when shortages in essentials, resulted in many schools being closed; so for children and young adults, these hikes provided their education.  After the war, the groups began to organize and many became more political in nature; some even sponsored by political parties.

The German Zionist Youth Movement

Leo Strauss, the German emigre who inspired the neoconservative movement,  would become an active participant in the Zionist Youth Blau-Weiss, then led by Walter Moses.  And while the group enjoyed the typical hikes in the mountains, they were also very militaristic. Strauss would refer to it as pagan-fascism, and indeed Moses liked to imitate Mussolini, who had come to power in 1922.

It was here that Strauss claimed to have nurtured his authoritarianism, and the concept of a "clique", led by a dictatorial style leader. As early as 1923 he spoke of a preference for a quasi-totalitarianism, and detested “bourgeois” or “liberals” seeking to preserve their lives and comfort.

He would actually try to join the Nazi Party but was turned away because he was Jewish.  Said Strauss of Hitler, his “political theology” was hostile toward “me and my kind”. (7)

You Don't Have to be German to be a Hitler Youth

When civil rights activist, Tom Hayden, (formerly married to Jane Fonda) was a student at the University of Michigan, he became the editor of the Michigan Daily, and one of the founders of  Students for a Democratic Society.  SDS was in direct contrast to Young Americans for Freedom, and the two groups often clashed.

In one article of Hayden's in the Daily, he compared YAF to the Hitler Youth.  They were certainly cult-like, in their attempts to dress and act like William Buckley Jr., and accepted no opposition to any of their arguments, which they like Buckley, were always well prepared for.

YAF responded to Hayden's article in their own newsletter.  "Next to the Twist and barely knee-length skirts, the most fashionable thing of the season is the rousing , vitriolic attack on the so-called 'Extreme-Right'".

Buckley approved of the counter-attack, but privately he worried that  Hayden was right.  The John Birch Society, that was providing funding and moral support to the conservative youth group, had suggested in one of their reports, that if Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 nomination,  they would assemble forces in his [Goldwater's] fascist army. (8)

Leo Strauss would develop a philosophical argument which he called Reductio ad Hitlerum.  What he suggested was that not everything Adolf Hitler did was bad, and using examples like Hitler was anti-smoking, loved dogs and was a vegetarian, we can't automatically think of those things as bad, just because they were associated with Hitler.

Of course Hitler was not a vegetarian, but loved wild game, sausages and caviar, (9) and in 1926, apparently in order to impress Mimi Reiter, a 16-year-old girl, he whipped his dog so savagely that it terrified her. (10)

This does speak to another aspect of neoconservatism. The power to deceive, in order to create a public persona that the masses can get behind.

Strauss is right however, to suggest that not everything Hitler did was bad and in fact the political strategies that the neoconservatives adopted, were like time delayed synchronized swimming.  They followed his path to power, almost to the letter.  I'll be getting into that in more detail, later.

However, Hayden was not off the mark.

Two Burning Images

Undampered by a chilly drizzle, some 40,000 Germans jammed the square between Berlin's Friedrich Wilhelm University and the Opera House looking at a black mass of criss-crossed logs, insulated from the pavement by sand. A thumping band blared out old military marches. Toward midnight a procession entered the square, headed by officers of the University's student dueling corps in their dress uniforms: blue tunics, white breeches, plush tam o'shanters and spurred patent leather jack boots.

Behind them came other students and a line of motor trucks piled high with books. More students clung to the trucks, waving flaring torches that they hurled through the air at the log pile. Blue flames of gasoline shot up, the pyre blazed. One squad of students formed a chain from the pyre to the trucks. Then came the books, passed from hand to hand while a leather-lunged student roared out the names of the authors:

"Erich Maria Remarque [wild cheering]—for degrading the German language and the highest patriotic ideal!" (Remarque wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, against WWI)

"Emil Ludwig—burned for literary rascality and high treason against Germany."

"Sigmund Freud—for falsifying our history and degrading its great figures. . . ."

On he went, calling out the names of practically every modern German author with whom the outside world is familiar: Karl Marx, Jakob Wassermann, Albert Einstein, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger. Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Walther Rathenau.

... While the flames flared highest, up to a little flag-draped rostrum stumped clubfooted, wild-eyed little Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in the Nazi Cabinet, organizer of the great midnight bibliocaust. "Jewish intellectualism is dead!" cried he. "National Socialism has hewn the way. The German folk soul can again express itself!

"These flames do not only illuminate the final end of the old etra, they also light up the new. Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past. . . . The old goes up in flames, the new shall be fashioned from the flame in our hearts. ... As you had the right to destroy the books, you had the duty to support the government. The fire signals to the entire world that the November revolutionaries [German Revolution that overthrew the Kaiser] have sunk to earth and a new spirit has arisen!" All over Germany similar pyres blazed with similar books. (11)

The Nazi youth were driven by anti-communism and anti-liberalism.  The anti-Semitism came about because of the popular belief that the Jews were working with the Communists to take control of Germany.

The conservative youth in the early days, were also fuelled by anti-communism and and anti-liberalism, but while they didn't resort to book burning, an  Indiana chapter of YAF, did make a very public display of burning baskets, alleged to have been manufactured behind the Iron Curtain.

However, there is more than one way to burn a book, or even a basket.  An affiliate of YAF, the Intercollegiate Society Institute, formerly the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, a paleonconservative think tank created by William Buckley Jr., publishes a list of the 50 worst and the 50 best books.

When describing the 50 worst, they use similar language to that of the young Nazis feeding the flames.

Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male -  "A pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is "statistically" normal."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958) - "Made Americans dissatisfied with the ineradicable fact of poverty. Led to foolish public policies that produced the hell that was the 1960s."

Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) - "[The Church] should therefore strengthen the existing communistic institutions and aid the evolution of society from the present temporary stage of individualism to a higher form of communism." Eek!

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) - "The hollow soul of liberalism elaborated with a technical apparatus that would have made a medieval Schoolman blush." (12)

And the list goes on.  Can't you just picture them being thrown into the fire?

Even those they don't metaphorically burn, they still use to take jabs at liberal tradition. From their Best list:

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947) - "... reveals the true intent of liberalism"

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) - " ... her account of the peculiarly modern phenomenon of "totalitarianism" forced many liberals to consider the sins of communism in the same category as those of fascism, and that is no small achievement."

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) - Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better? No, and Butterfield provides the intellectually mature antidote to that premise of liberal historiography." (13)

Sources:

1. Glenn Beck On Norway Killings: Children Like 'Hitler Youth', Huffington Post, July 27, 2011

2. Glenn Beck Group Bills Youth Propaganda Camps as Schools, by Arthur Goldwag, August 9, 2011

3. Glenn Beck hits 'new low'; compares Norway victims to Hitler Youth, The Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2011

4. Germany After the First World War, By: Richard Bessel, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1993, ISBN: 0-19-821938-5, p. 248

5. Papal hopeful is a former Hitler Youth

6. MR. FRIEDRICH TELLS OF "YOUTH MOVEMENT" IN GERMANY, the Harvard Crimson, November 22, 1922, London Times, April 18, 2005

7. Enmity and Tyranny, By: Alan Gilbert, March 5, 2010

8. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, By Rick Perlstein, Nation Books, 2001, ISBN: 0-8090-2858-1, p. 154

9.  Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover, By: Ryn Barry, Pythagorean Books, 2004

10. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler, By: Robert G.L. Waite, Basic Books, 1977, ISBN-10: 0306805146

11. Bibliocaust, Time Magazine, May 22, 1933

12. The Fifty WORST Books of the Century, Intercollegiate Society Institute

13. The Fifty BEST Books of the Century, Intercollegiate Society Institute

Paleoconservatives and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists

The Canadian Manifesto: How the American Neoconservatives Stole My Country

(The above photo shows Ronald Reagan at an ISI Alumni Meeting in 1977, building support for his presidential run.  The group played an important role in Barry Goldwater's 1964 victory at the Republican National Convention, but were unable to propel him to the White House.  They had better luck with Reagan)

In the 1960s, college and university campuses, known for their apathy, began to erupt into political activism.  Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to move to the back of the bus, inspired many to stand up, or perhaps more appropriately, "sit-in", for racial equality.  Her actions had sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and a young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., who led the boycott, wrote a book: Stride Toward Freedom. 

Motivated by King's words, on February 1st, 1960; four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical School, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil, sat down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ordered coffee.  Following store policy, the lunch counter staff refused to serve them.

The next day, 27 young people appeared at that lunch counter to protest the store's actions, and engaged in a "sit-in".  The third day there were 60, and the fourth, more than 300.  Their actions ignited a wave of student sit-ins and protests across the South, and despite beatings, arrests and the sting of fire hoses, the protests continued to grow.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned on the need for a strengthened Civil Rights Act.  This caused a great deal of alarm to movement conservatives, so they began to launch a counter-attack, hoping to halt the growing Civil Rights Movement.

So while hordes of youth led JFK to the White House, a different horde rallied around the Republicans, with a contrary message.  By 1961, Time magazine was reporting on the new "involvementism"  trend, saying that the most startling part of it was a sharp turn to the political right. (1)

Nonetheless, Kennedy presented his Civil Rights bill in 1963, passed soon after this death, which made discrimination in public places illegal and required employers to provide equal employment opportunities. 

Intercollegiate Society of Individualists

The America First Committee, established to protest interventionism and limit the powers of the president, had started a small publication called Human Events, and in the summer, sponsored a journalism school for young right-wing thinkers, in an attempt to tap into the fervour of youth.

Two young men who attended the school in 1957, David Franke and Douglas Caddy, would become key figures in the conservative movement.  Taking what they learned at Human Events, they looked for the necessary wave of discontent to launch a campaign, and found it in the space race.

The Soviets were winning in 1957, prompting the U.S. government to create the National Defense Education Act, designed to enrich math, science and engineering at colleges and universities, where they could draw from a talent pool, for their own space exploration.

However, at the time, anyone working on government projects of a sensitive nature, were forced to take a loyalty oath, swearing that they did not belong to, nor would they join, "any organization that believes in or teaches the overthrow of the United States government ..."  So soon after McCarthyism, the oath did not sit well with many people and in 1960, Senator Robert Kennedy, drafted a bill to drop it.

This was just what Franke and Caddy were looking for.  McCarthy supporters and William Buckley Jr. clones, they sprang into action.  Working through the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, formed by Buckley and company in 1953, they rallied the masses against the abolishment of the oath.

With petitions from 30 college campuses, including Harvard, (though the first two signatories at the Ivy league school were Atilla the Hun and Adolf Hitler (2)), Congress had to take them seriously.  But not seriously enough, given that 153 schools supported dropping the oath, and they prevailed.

Caddy and Franke would go on to create Young Americans for Freedom, with Caddy acting as their first president, and both would be active in Youth for Goldwater. 

In 1962, Young American for Freedom, bestowed its “Freedom Award” on arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. This is because in the conservative/libertarian orthodoxy prevailing in the 1960s, freedom meant white people’s freedom from federal efforts to interfere with racial discrimination, not black people’s freedom from racism. When Kennedy's landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Congress, the vast majority of congressional Republicans supported it, but Barry Goldwater did not, and he, with strong backing from YAF and other conservative movement organizations,  captured the ’64 Republican Party presidential nomination.

Paleoconservatives

The Intercollegiate Society of Individualists is still in operation, though they've since changed their name to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc.  They are part of the Paleoconservative or "traditional" conservative thinker movement,  attempting to uphold their European, Judeo-Christian heritage.  The organization also fights what it perceives as political correctness and liberal bias, that they believe is destroying their "freedom".

In a 1989 speech to the Heritage Foundation, the ISI President, T. Kenenth Cribb Jr. stated:

We must...provide resources and guidance to an elite which can take up anew the task of enculturation. Through its journals, lectures, seminars, books and fellowships, this is what ISI has done successfully for 36 years. The coming of age of such elites has provided the current leadership of the conservative revival. But we should add a major new component to our strategy: the conservative movement is now mature enough to sustain a counteroffensive on that last Leftist redoubt, the college campus...We are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming. (3)

Morton Blackwell of the Leadership Institute, on which Preston Manning's centre for destroying democracy was based, shares those views (Blackwell was also a member of ISI in his youth and the youngest delegate at the Republican convention that won the leadership for Goldwater).  He called universities the last bastion  of the Left.

But what exactly is a Paleoconservative?  The prefix suggests something ancient like the study of dinosaurs.  They only claim to have a "sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal." 

However, given the religious element in the group, this is probably Biblical, relating to the "curse of Ham", son of Noah.   Noah, upset over an indiscretion of  Ham, who was supposed to be black, cursed all the descendants of Ham's son Canaan. They were to be slaves for eternity and were to serve the other six-sevenths of the population.  Canaan's descendants were said to have populated Africa, meaning that it was the divine decree of God that gave the black people the liability of being enslaved by white people and justified the degradation of the entire race.
 
Andre Horn, a 13th century Chamberlain of London, said, "Yet 'serfage' in the case of a black man is a subjugation issuing from so high an antiquity that no free stock can be found within human memory." And for the Judeo part of the heritage espoused by Paleoconservatives,  the Babylonian Talmud states that "negroes were the children of Ham, who was cursed with blackness."
 
The Religious Right movement, was created to oppose desegregation, and the Conservative Movement was very much the revenge of the white man, which is why arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, was given a "freedom" award.
 
In 1996, a member of Stephen Harper's  Reform Party,  Bob Ringma, stated in a newspaper interview that store owners should be free to move gays and "ethnics" "to the back of the shop", or even to fire them, if the presence of that individual offended a customer.
 
Reform was very much an "Anglo" party, which is why they always took such a tough stand against Quebec and immigration. 

"... the notion that some Reform members may have strong Anglo-Saxon nativist inclinations is supported by more than merely the background profiles of its leaders, members and supporters. It is supported also by the words of many of its ideological mentors who depict Canada as not only historically an Anglo-Saxon country but also part of a wider Anglo-Saxon culture that is in need of recognizing and re-establishing its heritage."  (4)

When it was discovered by the media that Neo-Nazis had "infiltrated" the Party, the biggest surprise came from the infiltrators, who were shocked that they were being expelled.  White supremicist Al Overfield,  insisted that he told the Reform Party leadership, and was assured that they had no problem with it.  Overfield stated that Reform Party member Harry Robertson admitted him to the Party and that Stephen Harper was well aware of Overfield’s past involvement in far right groups. (5)

Another group angry over their expulsion was the Heritage Front, led by former KKK boss Wolfgang Droege.

"The expulsion enraged the Heritage Front, which saw the Reform Party's policies as very similar to, if not indistinguishable from, its own. How could a party that went on record opposing immigration policies that "radically alter" Canada's ethnic make-up turn around and shun a group like the Heritage Front, Droege asked, when the Heritage Front supports the very same approach? Privately, spokesmen for B'nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress admitted that Droege had a good point."  (6)

It would not be a stretch to refer to the present Conservative Party of Canada, as Paleoconservatives.  They too seek to uphold their European, Judeo-Christian heritage.

 Sources:

1. Education: Campus Conservatives, Time Magazine, February 10, 1961

2. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, By Rick Perlstein, Nation Books, 2001, ISBN: 0-8090-2858-1, p. 69-70

3. Kenneth Cribb: Conservatism and the American Academy: Prospects for the 1990 's, Heritage lectures #226, December 7, 1989.

4. Of Passionate Intensity: Right-Wing Populism and the Reform Party of Canada, By Trevor Harrison, University of Toronto Press, 1995, ISBN: 0-8020-7204-6, p. 170

5. Report to the Solicitor General of Canada Security Intelligence Review Committee, December 9, 1994

6. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, ISBN: 978-0002550741, p243-44