So true! There was a lot of paganism and folklore for good measure. And don’t forget the openly homosexual Nazis like Ernst Rohm, leader of the S.A., at least until the Night of the Long Knives…which brings to mind individuals like Milo Yiannopoulos…The genius of ultra-nationalism is that it masquerades as the ultimate inclusion, so long as you don’t think too much and are not one of the scapegoated groups of course…Germany’s religious right supported National Socialism as a bulwark against godless Communism, whilst the Nazis offered the ritual and pageantry of a new quasi-religious movement to the unaffiliated and more secularly inclined. There is no doubt Hitler applied what he had observed as a Roman Catholic choir boy to his bastard creation; if you watch Triumph of the Will you can see in full colour the breathtaking (and ostensibly inclusive) religious ritual on display. First and foremost Nazism gave a people shaken my war, industrialization and globalization a new form of tribal belonging. The Nazis used words like ‘Volksgemeinshaft’ (‘common community’) to convey this idea. We forget these lessons at our peril. The more I write about it, the more the parallels are striking goddamnit…
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