Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology

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Nearly half a century after the defeat of the Third Reich, Nazism remains a subject of extensive historical inquiry, general interest, and, alarmingly, a source of inspiration for resurgent fascism in Europe. Goodrick-Clarke's powerful and timely book considers the intellectual roots of Nazism. He traces these back to a number of influential occult and millenarian sects in the Hapsburg Empire during its waning years. These sects combined notions of popular nationalism with an advocacy of "Aryan" racism and a proclaimed need for German world-rule. They drew their political appeal out of the social upheavals and political unrest of the period - from the sudden and forced exclusion of Austria from Bismarck's Second Reich in 1871 and the consequent loss of German prestige within the newly established Austro-Hungarian monarchy; the strains caused by rapid industrialization in Central and Eastern Europe that led directly to a large influx of unassimilated Eastern Jews into the capital city of the monarchy, Vienna; and, last but not least, a politically potent and highly romanticized nostalgia for a supposedly happier past that was marked by the cultural rise of an aggressive Social Darwinism. These ideas and symbols all ultimately filtered through into mainstream Nazi ideology. In his book, Goodrick-Clarke discusses the myths, symbols, and fantasies of what became the particularly reactionary and authoritarian Nazi style. Many have persuasively argued that politics and historical change are driven primarily by material interests, but Goodrick-Clarke insists and here clearly demonstrates that fantasies, once institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups, have the ability too to affect history dramatically. Provocatively illustrated, the book examines the range of fantasies generated within an extreme right-wing movement, concerned, as this was, with the creation of a superman elite, the intellectual denunciation of "lesser beings" - leading eventually to a j

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