Know yourself, know your enemies. A thousand battles, a thousand victories. — Sun Tzu
By Stephen Gowans
March 1, 2022
Few people read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, but it ought to be required reading, along with the other canons of conservatism. How can the enemy be fought, without knowing how it thinks or what it seeks or even who it is?
I was thinking about Mein Kampf this morning after reading a New York Times’ story titled “Threats Emerge in Germany as Far Right and Pandemic Protesters Merge.”
Reporter Katrin Bennhold had interviewed a 57-year-old accountant named Betina Schmidt at an anti-Covid restrictions rally in Dresden. Schmidt told Bennhold that “she was not just protesting government plans for a general vaccine mandate — but also a broader conspiracy by powerful globalists to ‘destroy the German nation.’”
The idea of powerful globalists conspiring to destroy the German nation is straight out of Mein Kampf.
In Hitler’s view, the Jews were the original globalists. They were a nation without a country, a reality that inclined them toward globalism and a preference for one world government. This was before Zionists created a national territory for Jews (or in their parlance “recovered” one) by stealing the land of Arabs in Palestine and parts of Syria (Golan).
As a “nation” without a country, Jews, in the National Socialist leader’s view, gravitated toward and controlled international business, with its globe-girding mission, and also gravitated toward and controlled Marxism, with its bold declaration that “The working men have no country” and its call for workers to unite across national lines.
Globalism, of both the bourgeois and proletarian kinds, was a bugbear for the Fuhrer. The idea of world Jewry controlling the globalization of business and, through its Marxist apostles in the working class movement, undermining the proletariat’s attachment to patriotism, fit into a theory that Jews were secretly conspiring to create a world government over which they would rule.
The idea among Covid-denialists that globalists are plotting to create a world government and destroy nations is “the clearest indication yet,” reported Bennhold, “that a protest movement against Covid measures that has mobilized tens of thousands in cities and villages across [Germany is] increasingly merging with the far right, each finding new purpose and energy and further radicalizing the other.”
But the merger of Covid-denialism with the far-right isn’t a purely German phenomenon.
“The dynamic is much the same whether in Germany or Canada, and the protests in various countries have echoes of one another. On the streets of Dresden one recent Monday, the signs and slogans were nearly identical to those on the streets of Ottawa: ‘Freedom,’ ‘Democracy’ and ‘The Great Resist.’”
Bennhold continues:
“Like many others, Ms. Schmidt cited ‘The Great Reset,’ a book by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which Ms. Schmidt says reads like ‘a script for how a group of powerful globalists plan to destroy the German nation and create a mishmash of people that can be led easily.’”
I recall watching a pandemic protester in Ottawa earnestly tell a police officer that “this has all been planned—it’s called the Great Reset.”
Not only is the idea of a global conspiracy to destroy nations and create a mishmash of people straight out of Mein Kampf, it’s also straight out of a small online publication by Michel Chossudovsky, titled The 2020-22 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset.”
It’s very likely that Chossudovsky’s writings inspired the Ottawa pandemic protester who thought he could bring the police to his side by citing a Klaus Schwab paper. The former University of Ottawa economics professor has dedicated his pamphlet to what he calls a “Freedom Convoy”, whose collection of white nationalists, Islamophobes, and far right People’s Party supporters denied Ottawa residents their freedom for three weeks last month, blocking roadways, refusing to comply with public health rules, browbeating residents who wore masks, and forcing the shutdown of businesses.
Chossudovsky makes Hitler’s globalist conspiracy theory palatable by giving it a 21st century gloss and removing its anti-Semitism. Gone are the Jews, replaced by a conspiracy of billionaires, led by the “diabolical” Klaus Schwab (yes, Chossudovsky really uses that word.) Whereas in Hitler’s febrile imagination, the Jews controlled both the international bourgeoisie and their opposition (the trade unions and Marxist political parties), in Chossudovsky’s conspiratorial delirium, it is a cabal of World Economic Forum billionaires that does the same. Covid-19, along with climate change, and identity politics, are presented by Chossudovsky as fabricated crises and plots to divide people, engineered by a complot of billionaires to carry out “a diabolical project of Global Capitalism.”
Reading Chossudovsky is like reading what I imagine Mein Kampf would be like had it been published by The Weekly World News. “The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset consists in installing a Worldwide totalitarian regime,” thunders Chossudovsky. “What is contemplated is a system of ‘Global Governance’,” he rails, shouting out for a string of exclamation marks, suitably in bold. “190+ UN member nation states are slated to be weakened and undermined.” Note the word “slated,” as in, this has all been planned by a cabal of Jews (1925) or cabal of billionaires (2022).
If you’re alarmed, there’s cause for more alarm. The “diabolical plot” won’t be stopped by the Left. That’s because the Left is controlled by the globalist billionaires, just as, to Hitler, it was controlled by the globalist Jews. The unions, community organizations, and communist and socialist parties that have organized against the truckers’ convoys—the “lockdown Left” as a Chossudovsky-simpatico Max Blumenthal calls it—are mere tools of the diabolical Schwab and his coterie of ultrarich globalists.
Unfortunately, Hitler is understood these days as an aberration, yet he is anything but. Mein Kampf, beyond the biographical details, is a synthesis of ideas culled from the Western conservative tradition dating to Burke and de Maistre and shared by the moustachioed Austrian’s conservative contemporaries, including Churchill. Because so few have taken the time to acquaint themselves with Hitler’s thought, and because his thinking is erroneously understood today as sui generis, it’s impossible to use the shorthand “this idea is straight out of Mein Kampf” without being accused of resorting to rhetorical hyperbole.
All the same, the reality is that one of the central ideas that animates the Covid-denialist movement comes straight out of Hitler’s autobiography, though with a few nips and tucks here and there to bring the style up to date. Small wonder, then, that as Chossudovsky supplies pandemic protesters with a Hitler-inspired conspiracy theory, a movement calling itself patriotic socialism—evoking obvious parallels with the national socialism of Hitler—rhapsodizes about the truckers’ convoys, celebrates Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, and promotes the thought of Russian reactionary Alexander Dugin.
Know your enemies.
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