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The Congress of Vienna in 1815 had an indisputable and decisive influence on the Germans' decline. Had this assembly never taken place, National Socialism would probably have never come into being. Never had the Germans been closer to conducting a republican revolution on the American model, and never had they reached a higher moral level, than they were during the 1812-15 Wars of Liberation. These wars were not merely a republican uprising against Napoleon's imperialist occupation of the greater part of Germany; above all else, they were spearheaded by a flourishing constitutional movement.
The movement was led, of course, by the Prussian reformers vom Stein, Humboldt, and Scharnhorst, but it drew its vitality from the countless common citizens who were filled with patriotism and inspired by Schiller's dramas and other republican writings. Even at the Vienna Congress itself, vom Stein still cherished hopes that the negotiations would result in a united, sovereign German nation. But that was precisely what the international oligarchy conspired to prevent. With the intrigues and machinations of the English, French, Venetians, the Russian nobility, and especially the wretched Metternich (the man whom, not surprisingly, Henry Kissinger admires the most) arrayed against them, the German republicans did not stand a chance. Cloaked in hypocritical fundamentalism, the Holy Alliance snuffed out each and every shining idea, introducing instead an era of brutal oppression and surveillance. The German population, unable to understand why their heroic and victorious struggle against Napoleon had not led to a nation-state, lapsed to an ever greater degree into an other-worldly Romanticism during the years following the Restoration, drifting later on into outright demoralization. It is only from this standpoint that the influence wielded by Nietzsche and the other demagogues of cultural pessimism becomes comprehensible.....
The Vienna Congress marked the end of republican turmoil in Germany. The oligarchy of England, Russia, France, Switzerland, Venice, and Austria had regrouped their forces, and were determined to leave no openings for the German negotiator, vom Stein. Following 1815, and with a vengeance in the wake of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, there began a long phase of gloomy reaction, with devastating effects on the population. Most citizens were unable to reconstruct in their minds precisely why and how they had been robbed of the fruits of their struggle. As the bigoted narrowness of the Holy Alliance increasingly made itself felt, the clear mind of the world citizen and patriot shrank into the limited purview of the Burschenschaften (student dueling societies) and maudlin German chauvinism. Clear conceptions yielded to romantic Schwarmerei, and the disappointed hopes lapsed into latent cultural pessimism.
This paradigm shift from classicism to Romanticism, however, was no more a "sociological phenomenon" than was West Germany's turn from a belief in progress during the "economic miracle" of the 1960s, to the 1970s' zero-growth ideology and hatred of technology. The subversion, sabotage, and final defeat of the hopeful republican freedom movement at the start of the nineteenth century was the result of the same shift; and all the weapons directed against the humanist conception of man can be summed up under one modern concept: the "Conservative Revolution."...
Romanticism was consciously promoted by the European oligarchy as a movement which advocated the total rejection of reason and humanism, upon which Weimar classicism was based. One of the oligarchy's most influential agents, who supported the young Romantics with body and soul, was Madame de Stael, daughter of the Swiss banker Jacques Necker, who as French finance minister had ruined France for the sake of the Swiss banks. Heinrich Heine has pointedly described how Madame de Stael and her circles were angered that the "republican" culture found in the Weimar classics, in musical soirees at home, or in the great theater houses had begun to spread through large portions of the population. In a blue rage, she attempted to regain her own control of culture by luring young artists into her own salon. These recruits threw themselves into action with the same abandon as today's "beautiful people" or the nobility's "Jet set." Not only did this romantic movement produce the organized terrorism of Giuseppe Mazzini's "Young Europe," but it also spawned the tendency stretching from the turn-of-the-century youth movement to today's counterculture "alternative" movement, along with its ideologues Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, Alfred Rosenberg, and so forth. The Nazis too drank out of this "alternative" trough.....
The most devastating oligarchical attack on the republican spirit, however, was led by the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel in Berlin, who is proven by "check-stubs" to have been a paid agent of Austria's Metternich against the Prussian state, and was therefore working directly for the sinister reaction of the Holy Alliance. It is a sad commentary on the level of our universities, that the holy aura surrounding Hegel has remained intact down to the present day.
When one considers that Hegel finished his Phenomenology of Mind in the year 1806, in the midst of the intellectual climate of the Weimar classics, we can only conclude that his ostensibly dialectical method was nothing but a Jesuitical distortion of the Socratic method so gloriously evident in the dramas of Friedrich Schiller.Hegel's idea of the world-historical individual was indeed drawn from the classics; his "philosopher kings" or "philosophical minds," however, tended to degenerate into mere power-mongers (Napoleon, for Hegel, was the World Spirit on horseback!), and were much closer to the master-race concept of Nietzsche and Hitler. Worst of all, toward the end of his teaching career Hegel not only engaged in the corrupt practice of blocking or spoiling the studies of many young and hopeful students, but also -- in his Philosophy of Right -- he provided the perfect justification for the totalitarian state, which served as source material for Europe's reactionary oligarchical circles, as it did later for the Third Reich.
We could name many more figures and fields which were involved in the Conservative Revolution's attempt to reshape the population's conscious values. In all these cases it can be proven, often in great detail, that these were not "sociological phenomena" or mysterious transformations in the Zeitgeist, but were developments initiated or financed by the oligarchy.
In spite of passing rivalries, the oligarchy's efforts after 1815 were closely coordinated, and they often succeeded in setting into motion movements which crossed national borders, such as Young Europe and the Anthroposophist movement. The direct successors of these movements today are tied to the activities of such supranational institutions as the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, and the Aspen Institute.
The republicans, who could look back upon the American Revolution as their proudest victory, were seriously weakened following 1815 and were later eliminated as a political force. At best, republicans worked on as dispersed, humanistically inclined individuals, who had lost consciousness of the great historical weight of their task. Such individuals reacted to humanist culture solely on the basis of their own personal moral disposition.
While Hegel was providing the totalitarian state with a frightening ideological justification, pointing the way to the Nazis' "everything is permitted" rule, Romanticism was at the same time softening up the general population. The Holy Alliance slowly but surely stifled Germany's soul, and encouraged the emergence of such romantic philosophers as Schopenhauer, who began to deny the power of reason. For Schopenhauer, egoism was the natural disposition of mankind, and life as such was not an adequate affirmation of life. Thus the republicans' cultural optimism yielded to an irrational, immoral pessimism.
The absolute height of Romanticism, or rather the nadir of general culture, where raving folly and emotional infantilism turned into aggressive mania, the welding point between the Romantic muddleheads and the Nazis -- this was the world of Nietzsche, whose works can only be described as the mind running amok.
This self-hating, joyless psychotic could not tolerate the idea of reason; he hated Socrates, Schiller, Beethoven, and Humboldt. In his confused writings he attempted, if incoherently, to rewrite history, emphasizing not the classical and Renaissance periods as the Weimar classics had done, but the Dark Ages, the dionysian and bacchanalian orgies, the dances of St. Vitus and the flagellants. He regarded the scientific mode of questioning as man's arch-enemy, just as the Greens do today. Everything the Nazis later made into reality was already lurking within Nietzsche's tormented brain, darting about with increasing frenzy: the volkisch idea, a deep hatred of industrial progress, the "biological world outlook" of "blood and soil," the idea of a master race, the mystically inspired hatred of Christianity, and its final and ultimate form, the Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche cries out: "Have I made myself clear? -- Dionysus against the Crucified .... "
Nietzsche, celebrated along with Dostoevsky as the prophet of the Conservative Revolution, was the spiritual pathfinder for the nihilism of the National Socialists and the existentialist philosophers.
-- The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
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