Führers and Fathers

Mr Coulombe examines the perceived threat that many young men in America are turning to National Socialism and its associated ideologies.

From Crisis

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

Either we begin to take fatherhood very seriously, or we will have to face off with a future Führer.

O holy land, O land of our ancestors,
their sweat and their blood have molded you,
and far and near their pious sons will know how
to honor and expand the Fatherland.
If some brothers depart, there are thousands more
who, faithful guardians, will defend your homes.
—“Toward the Future,” Belgian patriotic song 

Recent weeks have seen all sorts of folk jumping up and down about a “Nazi revival” among young conservatives in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Among the many villains pointed at by older folk on the rampage is young Nick Fuentes—who has, however, made up his feud with Tucker Carlson. Perhaps typical—and well written—is this piece by Rod Dreher.

Now, much as I respect Mr. Dreher, I have to admit that I am not as upset by the phenomenon as he is. Mind you, I have had a great many youngsters get upset at me for attacking National Socialism on 𝕏, Instagram, and Facebook, and for praising such figures of the resistance as Claus von Stauffenberg. Indeed, I gave up using the term “Nazi” in response to one silly person’s comment regarding my use of it: “Jew slang detected, opinion ignored.” Indeed, on reflection, I became happy to do so.

That, in turn, leads to my somewhat different view of the issue from Mr. Dreher. As a junior member of the Boomer Generation, I am only too aware of how much youth enjoys shocking age with buzzwords. I doubt many if any of my self-appointed antagonists online belong to the Washington elite that Mr. Dreher worries about. The likelihood that their knowledge and belief in National Socialism is deeper than Wikipedia is doubtful. But having been produced by an educational system that conflates pride in one’s own gender and race with National Socialism—while conveniently overlooking the far higher body count amassed by Stalin and Mao—it would be very strange if they did not react as they do.

Beyond their miseducation, a great many have been raised without fathers, or else ineffective ones; there have been few if any masculine figures in their lives able to both earn their respect and provide that common sense which was a stereotypical attribute of the male gender. Of course, thanks to World War I, there was a similar paternal deficit in interwar Europe. As in that time and place, male youth today have to face daunting economic and cultural futures with a minimum of sane and relevant male mentoring. 
The fact that they cannot afford the crushing burden of debt with which they have been saddled or afford to buy houses or start families seem to be things in which older people simply are not interested. That our Near Eastern policy has always been entirely slanted in favor of Israel and that the establishment desires to import cheap labor from abroad to make up the birth deficit in the native born are realities which likewise are ignored. For our young friends, this refusal to look at their pressing realities, while coupled with a demand for ideological purity, cannot help but seem to be the deepest hypocrisy—a crime youth is, in every era, always ready to impute, and not without cause.

But how are we elders to deal with it all? It seems to me that a huge change of tactics is necessary. The first thing to do is realize that we have, in a real sense, created the problem—not least by consistently lying to ourselves as well as to the younger folk. We must assume responsibility and begin telling the truth. 

At the very bottom of it lies the havoc contraception and abortion have wreaked upon the economy; the price for our free love was their future. The unborn murdered in every developed country—quite apart from whatever rare geniuses may have been among them—are millions of native-born workers, consumers, and taxpayers who would be keeping our economies healthy and our pensions paid quite handily. Because they are not with us, our various pension schemes have become generational pyramid scams; given the moral sense and age shift with our various national leaderships, euthanasia has come to seem an eminently sensible way of dealing with that problem.  

In the same manner, ever-heightening immigration is supposed to make up for the loss of native labor. This, of course, has caused a great many concomitant problems that anyone with a brain would have foreseen. The young resent the newcomers who are given resources and assistance that they themselves are ineligible for. As the religious and cultural differences—and the crimes sometimes arising therefrom, sometimes not—continue to rise, so, too, does popular and particularly youthful outrage. When the various regimes treat that reaction as more criminal than the outrages perpetrated by the newcomers, one has a horrible recipe for further alienation.

As far as the Jewish issue is concerned, I fear that it is a bit reminiscent of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. For most of my life, any criticism of Israeli government policy or expression of a desire to convert the Jews was greeted with cries of anti-Semitism. Even resistance to the attempts to drown “Christmas” in a sea of “Holiday” observances could be so attacked. 

As earlier mentioned, American interventions in the Near East have always been one-sided. Rightly or wrongly, this is linked by young people with Jewish influence in American life in general. That such influence is very strong cannot be denied—but a refusal to discuss it leads to a monstrous oversimplification of the whole question. Young people, who certainly cannot remember World War II and its aftermath, cannot be expected to understand why things are the way they are. By the same token, it must be admitted that in the formation of the State of Israel, a huge injustice was done to the local inhabitants; but by the same token, “driving the Israelis into the Sea” today would be as great an injustice.

What was done by Hamas on October 7 was an atrocity—as is the ongoing abuse of Palestinians, to say nothing of the attack on the church in Gaza. We must be prepared to be honest about just how messy a situation it is, with plenty of guilt to go around. Were we honest, of course, we would say that the welfare of the area’s Christians, safety of the Holy Places, and an end to slaughtering innocents of whichever nationality should be our primary goals in a region singularly bereft of “good guys,” where, historically, peace has always had to be imposed from outside.

Beyond that, of course, there is the question of the realities of National Socialism itself. Growing up, people of my generation in major metropolitan areas usually knew a great many European and Russian survivors of the two World Wars and accompanying revolutions and civil wars, which helped ground one in reality of a sort—Hitler killed many, Stalin killed more, and Mao killed the most. But even then, Hitler’s evils were always magnified in school over that of his two competitors, and he and his creed were cast as Right Wing. That was wrong then, and it is wrong now. 

We ought to have had the greatest disgust for Mao; but the vast majority of his victims being Chinese, they did not really matter to the educational industry; and toward the end of his life, we began to make money out of him. Stalin, of course was our ally in the fight against Hitler—and many a modern youngster questions whether or not that calls into question the whole morality of our role in the conflict—resulting in an almost five-decade-long horror for Central Europe, whose effects are still with us today.

More truths must be told. Many of the young have fallen into the trap of the Holocaust numbers game; if Hitler could not or did not kill 11 million people, the reasoning goes, he could not be the monster he is portrayed as being. The point must be made that the National Socialists, had they killed only six instead of six million would have been evil, if those six were just St. Maximillian Kolbe, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, St. Titus Brandsma, Bl. Eduard Müller, Bl. Karl Leisner, and Bl. Bernhard Lichtenberg. A decent regime does not create canonized and beatified martyrs. It is, by definition, an impossibility.

But we must place the National Socialists in their correct place historically and ideologically. Theirs was a movement not of the Right, but of the Left. “Brown-Shirted Bolsheviks” was a not inaccurate summation of them. It must also be insisted upon that—until the invasion of Russia in 1941—the Communists of each country invaded by Germany and its allies collaborated with the occupiers. It was only with the German attack on the Soviet Motherland that the local Communists suddenly decided they were really patriots and joined the resistance—then attempting to dominate it.  

The very nature of that resistance in each country of Europe, especially Germany and Austria, sheds a great deal of light not only on National Socialism but on all of our current regimes. Socialists tended to collaborate—especially in Austria, where Karl Renner led them as arch-collaborator. The heart and soul of the opposition to the National Socialists in Germany and the occupied countries was primarily made of conservatives—monarchists, Catholics, Christians, and various remnants of the pre-war Right. Members of the latter who did collaborate initially often switched sides as the true nature of National Socialism became apparent.

As a result of this, modern governments—which, as John Lukacs so bitingly points out in The Hitler of History, really share many or most of the same first principles with the National Socialists—are very ambivalent regarding the memory of the non-leftist majority of the Resistance. While the deeds of such as von Stauffenberg, Fr. Heinrich Maier, Engelbert Dollfuss, Kaj Munk, and Colonel de la Rocque are grudgingly praised as heroic, their beliefs are dismissed—and many more such figures are ignored completely. All of them need to be taken out of obscurity and their beliefs examined on their own terms, even if our current arrangements look bad in comparison—and more Hitlerian than we would like to admit. 

Whether or not the United States should have entered the Second World War is perhaps as hotly debated now as it was before Pearl Harbor. Having so grievously disrupted the European polity in 1918—as Churchill famously put it, “Had the Allies allowed a Hohenzollern, a Wittelsbach, and a Habsburg to return to the throne at the peace negotiating table in Versailles, there would have been no Hitler”—Wilson created a system that could not sustain itself without continued American dominance. Having in a sense created Hitler, it might be argued we were obligated to stop him; whether that excuses FDR’s pushing Japan toward conflict when our violations of neutrality failed to sufficiently rouse German ire is another question. 

One other point that should be honestly looked at is our stated position of “unconditional surrender.” Had we offered the Axis Militaries negotiated peace in return for regime change, the war might very well have ended in 1943, and countless lives been saved—as well as the atomic bomb drop avoided.

But in, with, and under historical and political honesty, if we do not wish to see the rise of real or would-be Führers, we need a massive revival of fatherhood. As touched upon earlier, the overthrow of the dynasties on the one hand and the wholesale slaughtering of an entire generation’s fathers on the other played a huge part in the tragedy of 1933-45. But monarchy—political fatherhood, to be sure—put to one side, one of the strongest inhibitors to the rise of irrational leftist politics is the widespread presence of strong father figures. This is one of our greatest needs. 

My dialogues with young, self-proclaimed National Socialists online, with their pseudo-feminine shrillness and irrationality—for which they cannot be held accountable—is due to a lack of stabilizing paternal masculinity in their lives. The unconscious search for some sort of substitute for this, coupled with their lack of any real knowledge of the era that so entrances them, is a large part of the phenomenon. I do not think, to be honest, that they pose nearly as great a danger to us as does the establishment which unwittingly created them. The great question is what shall replace it—and how unpleasant shall that process be?