A NUMBER of socio-political commentators have noted the stark similarities that exist between the chaos of Weimar Germany and the numerous challenges that face Europe today, and I came across an interesting statement by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) that reinforces this view and which also inadvertently sheds light on the clandestine forces that are seeking to take advantage of our current malaise.
The hyperinflation that affected Germany during the second decade of the twentieth century saw the exchange rate spiral out of control. In the wake of the First World War, German currency stood at 14 marks to the American dollar, although by July 1921 it had fallen to 77 marks. In January 1922 there were 191 marks to the dollar and, by the summer, a total of 493 marks. Incredibly, by January 1923 the rate had been transformed into 17,972 marks and the price of a loaf of bread had gone from 2.80 marks in 1919 to a staggering 399 billion marks in December 1923 when hyperinflation entered its worst phase.
At this time Walter Benjamin had left his native Berlin and was living on the Mediterranean island of Capri, but in December 1933 when he finally came to discuss his impression of those terrible days, exactly one decade later, he not only described the debilitating poverty and hopelessness that had affected the long-suffering German people but also made some interesting remarks about the accompanying factors that he believed made such a startling impact on this period:
“With this tremendous development of technology, a completely new poverty has descended on mankind. And the reverse side of this poverty is the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been spread among people, or rather has swamped them entirely – ideas that have come with the revival of astrology and the wisdom of yoga, Christian Science and chiromancy, vegetarianism and gnosis, scholasticism and spiritualism. For this is not a genuine revival but a galvanisation.”
Sadly, by this time the man who had started out as a precocious young intellectual with his own ideas had since been seduced by Marxism and this explains his derogatory comment about public ‘galvinisation’. Germans were indeed trying to weather the storm of economic catastrophe, but to dismiss the spiritual and counter-cultural permutations that sought to counteract the overall process of decline was an error on Benjamin’s part. The reasons for this wholesale dismissal of such forces came to light during the course of a letter sent to his close friend and fellow Jewish thinker, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), when he explained that his 1920s love affair with a Latvian Marxist called Asja Lācis (1891-1979) – who had spent time in the Soviet Union – had provided him with “an intensive insight into the actuality of radical communism” and that he had seen
“the political practice of communism (not as a theoretical problem but, first and foremost, as a binding attitude) in a different light than ever before.”
This reference to the unifying nature of communism – which, as we know, is highly repressive in practice – is a clear indication that Benjamin had rejected Germany’s diverse proliferation of spiritual ideas on account of their uncontrollable, anarchic nature.
In the twenty-first century, when technological development has once again brought into play a vast multitude of religious and cultural forces, the “binding attitude” that swept aside this great diversity in Soviet Russia is once again on the prowl. The modern-day globalists, just like Walter Benjamin, will not tolerate that which they are unable to control and this is precisely why National-Anarchism has the perfect formula to ensure that the ties which seek to force us into a single political, social and economic unit are cut loose. At the same time, National-Anarchism’s ability to bring people together beneath a principled banner in the ultimate quest for mutual sovereignty and decentralisation is absolutely essential.
As Benjamin eventually discovered to his cost, that same “binding attitude” and hostility towards any “wealth of ideas” was later utilised by Nazi Germany and the populist nationalism of the Right soon proved to be just as ruthlessly intolerant as the mass proletarianisation and collectivism of the Left.
