Folk and Nation
“Is it blood? Blood is a common possession, but that has not prevented men who spoke one language to have been at loggerheads with each other for centuries. Is it our common economic interests? But that has not prevented the hardest struggles from taking place precisely in this sphere. Is it our history? We know it only too well: a sad tale of war and dissension. Is it religion which is common to us all? No, here too we have fought and disputed with each other … In the same way it is not common customs nor common usages. No, it is something quite different which not merely brings us to this community but even makes it inevitable. It is our common fate, that common fate which none can escape and which is the lot of all life upon this earth.” – Adolf Hitler
Nation
A nation is a people with a common past. A folk is a people with a common future. As such, a nation is not automatically a folk, nor is a folk necessarily restricted to a nation. But a folk of whatever origins that has operated as a folk for some time is likely to take on the attributes and structure of a nation in its own right, since it now also possesses a common past. National Socialism has the capability to inspire a folk out of a starting population of any composition, and convert it into a nation of Aryan ideals. In Hitler’s own words: “The National Socialist theory is to make use of all forces, wherever they may come from.”
Quality, Not Ethnicity
“The question of nationality just does not arise any more as in the old days. Rather, there is a singleness of spirit, a commonality in pursuit of the same ideals and goals.” – Arno Breker
The nationalist proclaims that most people prefer the company of other people similar to themselves, and that this preference must be observed if trust is to be built in society. The folkist agrees. Moreover, both the nationalist and the folkist believe in biological heritability of traits. Where the two diverge is that the nationalist values ethnic similarity (racial identity) whereas the folkist values qualitative similarity (racial idealism). For a folkist, those similar to himself are those who share his ideals without needing to be indoctrinated into doing so ie. those who possess such ideals genetically, irrespective of ethnic origin. To the nationalist who claims a nation is an extended family, the folkist responds that most of us have close family members whom we cannot stand and unrelated friends/spouses with whom we would gladly spend our lives, and the same applies to society as a whole. What is important is not crude relatedness, but similarity where it matters.
Folkism demands that each person be judged individually by quality of character, but the method of judgement is not to be based on the individual’s prosperity in the existing world. Instead, the folkist way to judge a person is to ask: what would the world be like if everyone in the world were like that? The superior individual is the one whose behaviour produces a good outcome only if unanimous, whereas the inferior individual is the one whose behaviour produces a better outcome when not unanimous.
External link: Prisoner’s Dilemma
Purpose, Not Culture
“We are sorry, not because these brothers of ours have adopted a new faith … but because they think that their new faith is a barrier between themselves and us.” – Savitri Devi
The nationalist proclaims that societal friction is caused by cultural differences. The folkist maintains that societal friction is caused by absence of purpose. Purposeful people perceive that which unifies them towards manifesting that purpose, in the same way that the different parts of a healthy body are relaxed and coordinated in athletic performance. Purposeless people exaggerate that which divides them, in the same way that different parts of an unhealthy body stress and strain against each other and cause injuries. The nationalist wants to prevent an unhealthy society from getting injured, whereas the folkist wants society to be healthy. (Which would the enemy prefer to deal with: an unhealthy hypochondriac or a healthy athlete? But that is another story.) The key is not what culture a person practices, but whether there is a common purpose for every culture to express.
(Hitler called Jews the anti-folk for the reason that Jewish culture is used not to express purpose, but to camouflage it (e.g. the religion of Judaism being used as a cover for Jewish racism towards all non-Jews).)
Myth, Not History
“Honour is the foundation of the folk community.” – Joseph Goebbels
The nationalist proclaims that a society must be unapologetic about its history in order to be strong. The folkist recognizes the moral superiority of myth over history for this function. Frankly, the history of every civilization in the world is a depressingly consistent chronicle of general greed, hubris, selfishness and cruelty, puncutated by only a few noble individual exceptions. To encourage a people to be proud of such a history is to encourage it to celebrate its own ugliness. Positive inspiration should rather come from prehistoric or otherwise romantic myth, which reflects how people would like their civilization to be, and hence can depict genuinely admirable qualities for people to aspire towards.
Also of importance is that for every national conflict, each side of the conflict writes a version of history from its own perspective that often disagrees with versions written by other sides, thereby dividing those raised on different versions. In contrast, a local myth is above parochial biases and bound solely to the land itself, accessible to all who live there (irrespective of origins) and who are willing to be inspired by it.
Only by honestly admitting and struggling to overcome the human shortcomings so abundantly evident in all our histories, and only by an entire folk willing to immerse itself completely in the local myth of its homeland, will we have a chance to one day live this myth in reality once again.
The Last Battalion
“I asked myself: Are these men worthy of belonging to a great people? The question was profoundly disturbing; for if the answer were ‘Yes’, then the struggle to defend one’s nationality is no longer worth all the trouble and sacrifice we demand of our best elements if it be in the interests of such a rabble. On the other hand, if the answer had to be ‘No – these men are not worthy of the nation’, then our nation is poor indeed in men.” – Adolf Hitler
The concept of folk is one of the most crucial concepts to be understood if there is to be any semblance of the unity that is so desperately needed in our current times. If we understand folkism, then our understanding of folkism itself becomes one of the factors uniting us. When it became clear in 1945 that National Socialist Germany was to fall, Hitler predicted a Last Battalion that would one day appear in the world and complete his unfinished revolution. In effect, he then already offered a vision of the future for us to share, planting the folkish seed inside our hearts before most of us were even born.
Folk
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