Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis by John Gray Page A

known, James Rhodes has provided a systematic examination of Nazism as a modern millenarian movement. Like the Anabaptists and other medieval millenarians, the Nazis were possessed by a vision of disaster followed by a new world. Seeing themselves as victims of catastrophes, they experienced sudden revelations that explained their sufferings, which they believed were the work of evil forces. They believed they had been called to struggle against these forces, to defeat them and rid the world of them in short, titanic wars. 59
    This millenarian syndrome of impending catastrophe, the existential threat of evil, brief cataclysmic battles and an ensuing paradise can be seen in many modern political movements (including the Arma-geddonite wing of the American Right). It fits the Nazis closely and shows the poverty of any account of Hitler’s movement that sees it simply as a reaction to social conditions. Nazism was a modern political religion, and while it made use of pseudo-science it also drew heavily on myth. The
Volk
was not just the biological unit of racist ideology. It was a mystical entity, which could confer immortality on those who participated in it. Using the Kantian term ‘Ding-an-sich’, which means ultimate reality or the thing-in-itself, Goebbels declared that ‘Ding-an-sich is the
Volk’
, and produced a poem in which the semi-divine qualities ascribed to the
Volk
are clear:
    I arise, I have power
To wake the dead. They awakened out of deep sleep,
Only a few at first but then more and more. The ranks fill up, a host arises,
A
Volk
, a community. 60
     
    Without the vengeful war reparations of the Versailles settlement and the chaos of the interwar German economy, the Nazis would most likely have remained a fringe movement. They remained popular for as long as they did because they delivered material benefits tolarge sections of the German population. The efficiency of Hitler’s war machine may have been exaggerated, but Nazi economic policies were not dissimilar to those advocated by Keynes (as Keynes himself recognized) and delivered full employment in the run-up to the war. The popularity of the Nazis was sustained in the first years of the war by military success and the orgy of looting that it permitted in occupied Europe. Delivering these benefits to the German population was a major part of the Nazis’ strategy to gain and maintain power.
    At the same time the Nazis mobilized a potent mix of beliefs. Nazi ideology differs from that of most other utopian and millenarian movements in that it was largely negative. Nazi eschatology was a debased imitation of pagan traditions that allowed the possibility of a final disaster without any prospect of future renewal. This negative eschatology was linked with a sort of negative utopianism, which focused on the obstacles to future paradise more than on its content. The Nazis’ eschatology may have been less important than their demonology, which came from Christian sources (not least the Lutheran tradition). The world was threatened by demonic forces, which were embodied in Jews. The present time and the recent past were evil beyond redemption. The one hope lay in catastrophe – only after an all-destroying event could the German
Volk
ascend to a condition of mystical harmony.
    The name of the Nazi regime derived from Christian apocalyptic traditions. The ‘Third Reich’ comes from Joachim of Flora’s prophecy of a Third Age, passed on to modern times by Anabaptist Christians and popularized in interwar Germany by Moeller van den Bruck in his book
Das Dritte Reich (The Third Empire
, 1923). A ‘revolutionary conservative’ in the manner of Oswald Spengler (whose book
The Decline of the West
had a huge impact in the 1920s), van den Bruck believed that the problems of interwar Germany were not only political and economic but also cultural and spiritual. He had a strong interest in Dostoyevsky, co-editing a German translation of
The Brothers Karamazov
with