Paraguay (pts 13-15)

Nueva Germania, Paraguay: Introduction

[A brief reminder that my book, An Occasional Walker, is available at this link.] 

There was a young man once who joined me and my comrades at our table in the public library for one of our famous weekly meetings in Vancouver, Canada, a table we sat at for four years or so weekly to meet with people from around the world to discuss the nature of things, particularly our developing struggle against Islamic supremacy and Left dhimmi fascism, the latter being the totalitarian Gnostic political religion of modern socialism. One such visitor to our table and discussion was a nasty little creature who was obsesses with a minor political figure in the George Bush presidential administration, Karl Rove. The young man was furious about Rove's supposed machinations against democracy and human rights in the Third World, particularly against so-called Palestinians, and Rove's sympathies toward the Jooos! It was clear the young man had little information about Rove as a person, his only grasp of the man being that of a devil of some sort. That sort of devil is common to the world in the Middle Ages. So too is the young man's presentation of the Jooos. All of it is magical. I insisted that Rove could well sit at the table with us and be as normal a man as any, and the young man would know that by speaking with him. I kept at this point till, as one could see on his face, he understood that Rove is, indeed, just a man. The awareness of my point was devastating to the young man. It was as if he had suddenly lost his faith in God. He knew no longer what his world was about. He was lost and alone in a way that I might have some slight sympathy for. His belief had been destroyed.

If there is one thing I love in life, it is destroying my illusions. I can be as dense as any peasant witch-burning lunatic in the Dark Ages, and pleased with my understanding of the universe in being so. But there are times when I do ask myself if the witches I might burn are really what they seem and what others say they are. It's not that I'm skeptical by nature, and far from it. I am as eager to believe the worse of others as many a nasty fellow. Worse, I often have no chance to actually find out if those I would burn are as bad as I think they must be. I instead allow my imagination to sink into the fever swamps of solitude, making my enemies ever worse than reality could allow for. My imagination is an awful place, and those who live there are terrible creatures of my own making. If I didn't know, for example, too may leftards, they would occupy the seventh level of Hell in my mind. But I do know too many, and I know they are not daemons from the depths of Hell, they are mostly just conformists and most not particularly intelligent. Most live in fear of original thought, clinging to conformity to save themselves from the torment of aloneness. I don't like such people, and I would cast most of them into Hell if I had a chance, being a nasty guy sometimes, but I can't see such people as anything more than weak-minded and cowardly. Those very few who are uniquely evil are very few indeed. But of those I do not know, those in remote places and times, they I can reduce to parody, such as the young man reduced Karl Rove to parody as daemonic.

To be fair, I had no such illusions of the people of Nueva Gemania, Paraguay.

Nietzsche, Mengele, and Me: Reversion to the Mean. (A Day in the Life of Aryan Utopia.)

Most thinking people in the Modern world think of Nazis as the most evil people in the 20^th Century. But there are other thinking people, intelligent, articulate, and rational, those who write and comment at, for example, the web site Stormfront, a neo-Nazi organisation of great sophistication, who find in the Nazi attempt at utopia a highly sympathetic world-view, one which they cling to as an attempt at perfection in this world. To a great degree, and a degree most today will find abhorrent, the neo-Nazis are indistinguishable from the neo-Communists and leftards of all persuasions. The truth, dismissed uncritically and unthinkingly in total, is that there is little difference between the values of Nazi and other socialist, collectivist, utopian anti-Modernists. Nazi, old and new, are not people who see themselves as the world's most evil people. On the contrary, and clearly obvious to those who think it through, Nazis see themselves as the best of people with the best of intentions for people, if not for all people. Nazis see themselves as wanting the good for the greater people, much as do Muslims who want the world to be totally Islamic for the good of all; Communists who wish only to slaughter those who would impede the progress of Communism for the sake of all future generations, and so on. Yes, they will and do small many eggs of the sake of a perfect omelet, but this Utilitarian view of reality is what makes it possible to kill in the first place without much qualm about the morality, if one can call it that, of mass murder. If the purpose and the goal are so superiour to the continued degradation of man, then everything is permitted in the pursuit of a future perfection. Nazis, in short, are the best of people doing the best for mankind, in their opinion, not the worst of people doing the worst against mankind.

Nazis are in favour of, among many other things we all seem to think we like, a natural environment in which man is but one part of a greater unity, written of at great lengths by ecologists today, indistinguishable from earlier Nazi ecologists mostly ignored, not only Heidegger but the lowly civil servants of official Nazi Germany. [C.f. my forthcoming A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, vol iii: Oikos I, Earth and Man.] In the Nazi state, one finds today's echo of the vegan, the tree-hugger, the anti-smoking lobby, holistic medicine promoters, hemp-wearing back-to-nature pagans, and so forth, along with guitar-strumming youth adoring hippie nudist hikers and communalist drum circle bangers, the Wandervogel of the early years of the Nazi movement. Nazis were the prime ecologists of their time, dedicated to the preservation of the Earth as a living being of its own self, the pre-Gaia worshippers so much alike to today's followers of an only slightly more sophisticated movement. Yes, there were the runists, the tarot-card readers, the wildlife preservationists, the whole of today's ecology movement, all of them as decent as ever, though Nazis to the core. They meant well.

That the Nazis are blamed for so many ills in our past is ironic in that the Nazis were doing what they saw as the Good, for example, eliminating the unfit from the earth, much the same as eugenicists today attempt to do in providing abortion in Black neighbourhoods in America, in women having abortions in preparation for that one special “designer baby” who will, when one is financially secure and established in a proper career, rise to be one of the elite in charge of engineering society for its perfection in the future.

The Nazis, in spite of what most think of them, were the Good people in an evil world. They did their work for the betterment of mankind and the earth itself. Today, under a different name, good people follow most of the same lines, without acknowledging or perhaps even being aware of their deep ties to Nazi-ism. How can yesteryear's Nazis be so evil when many today believe and act in the same ways for the same reasons? Today's Left is yesteryear's Right, as it were. The name has changed, but the plans are too similar to pretend they are not the same. The average Leftist is simply an old Nazi in new clothing. He is a good person who cares about the nature of the Good. He derives his understanding of the good from ideology, received from geniuses, just like days gone by. Nazis, good people doing good.

Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth went to Nueva Germania not to destroy the good but to create a better world, a dozen or so families from Germany, all good Aryans, intending to create a perfect home for themselves and their children. Her husband killed himself in a hotel room, she returned to Germany and befriended Hitler, and many of the descendants, through an accident of birth, were congenitally blind. One might fault the founders of this Aryan commune for playing at being God, taking it upon themselves to create a better world than the one in which the rest of us make do as well as nature allows. But such will to power in the world is not different in tone and theme from any utopian communalist movement, regardless of the Aryan nature of the hopes. The American thrust today to create a multi-cultural paradise through social engineering and publicising privacy is just one more attempt to do exactly what others have continuously failed to do since at least the time of Plato. [C.f. A Genealogy of Left Dhimmi Fascism, Vol. V.: Gnosis: Intellectuals, Nazi Intellecuals, and Plato.]

Knowing something of the attempt to found a perfect society in Paraguay's jungle at Nueva Germania, and knowing a little about its failure, I was also bound by imagination, trapped in my own thinking about what should be, that all Nazis must be evil, and thus, the settlement, what there is of it over 100 years later, must be the evidence of the worst people on earth in their final moments, evil so gross it could not live any longer than the day I witnessed it in person.

But really, I didn't expect any such thing, in spite of my mocking tones in earlier segments of this essay, and I did not go to Nueva Germania to hate its inhabitants of the tiny roadside village I found in the wilds of Paraguay. I came to see for myself the end of ideology and the reversion to the mean, the contraction of reality back to the norm, the stretching of the possible returning to nature, as it were. The extremes of ideology can only last so long before it kills its adherents or those remaining just sicken of the whole parodic extreme of living a false life. In Nueva Germania, Paraguay I found, I think, in some small way the future of 250 years of ideology, of life at the end of the era of Rousseau and the gnostic rule of intellectuals. In Nueva Germania I think I see a cleansing and a rejuvenation of the life of man, an end to the evil of murder as path to perfection. In Nueva Germania I think I see the future of America, a land rid of the plague of killer visionaries, no reversion to the meanness of man as demigod but a restoration of the norm of ordinary humanness.

Aftermath

In America today there are echoes of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, its freak-show decadence and ours, if not exact, not too dissimilar. The spitting nihilism of the pseudo-intellectual elitists; the confusion and despair of the devastated middle-class longing for order; the strident conformist youth movement, then Wandervogel, today ecologists of the same sort; the Jew-haters; and the occultist cliques of hyper-rich would-be aristocrats financing private armies of storm-trooping thugs who terrorize the masses in the streets, in our case well-shown in Madison, Wisconsin, among other cities; the parallels are numerous, and if it doesn't repeat history, and maybe if it doesn't even rhyme, it's still pretty close to the same ugly scenes we see in Germany prior to the rise of the Nazis. This time, we are the bad guys, the leader-princip state-worshiping conformists who cannot stand the thought of an original thought or perceived deviance from the politically correct norms of the ruling clique. Book-burners, witch-burners, heretic-burners, arsonists burning ecologically unfriendly buildings, they abound in our Modernity today. They are the “progressive Left.” Like the progressive Nazis, they do it for the good of all mankind. If the innocent suffer, it is all for a good cause-- the future perfection of life.

Perfection is an idea of a sort, one broad and undefinable but defined nonetheless by theorists and engineers of the utopian future of social justice and the clerks who work with enthusiasm if not any genuine sense of more than the rules; the rules, yes, in myopic detail, but the game itself mostly escaping them. Perfection, the new man, the future. It all makes so much sense if only only. So some must die and some must be killed and most must suffer so that all will someday be happy. There must be order, there must be rules, there must be more regulation, all in the name of social justice and equality for all who are worthy of it. The masses. They are why the clerks of death do such work, sacrificing themselves for us all. For us, the mass-men. It is a religious calling, the work of the Moral. Those who resist, they are Satanic. They must be destroyed. Those sinners must burn.

America, known to the ignorant as the most evil nation in history, responsible for the annihilation of Native Indians, for colonialism in the Third World, for the bombing of Dresden, for the terror of 9-11, it is-- to the leftard of our time-- the worst of places in the worst of times, the authentic alternative being the purity of the Middle Ages, a time of genuine authenticity and true living for the communal man whose time is yet to come in the Post-Modern utopia of a Green World. That this is the same programme the Nazis attempted is lost on the Left today-- for the most part. That this is easily known is indicative of the aggressive idiocy of the intelligentsia and the innate fascist longings of conformity hippies who allow such anti-humanism to become and to remain the ruling-class ethos in the Modern world today. We've seen it all before, the philobarbarism of the Nazis and their adulation of the “Man of Action” who cares not for life itself but for the immediacy of the now in a grand gesture of death worship, in our case the Muslim homicide bomber who “uses his own body as a weapon”; the polishing of the fruits of decadence, the hedonism of the aborting classes, the wealthy designer-baby mothers; the privilege of the freak-show itself, its outcasts pretending to freakness in order to find a place within the norm, the metro-sexual who cries for acceptance, character being an unknown, and if known an unliked quality. The hierarchy of the freak-show too is set in stones one on the other as if building anew the Tower of Babel, light to dark, male to female, straight to queer, rich to poor, and so on. But to complete the freak-show one must acknowledge the elite themselves and their eugenic programme of superior man atop all others, a cleansing of the idiots from the earth, the purity of the human race forever rid of the Jooos, Christians, the rich, “traditional males,” the sexist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and rightwing conservative neo-colonialist “one percent.” That is only three millions, a mere half the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. Then life will again be perfect, man living in harmony with nature, communal, sharing, caring, and governed by “wise Latina women.” Rule by philosopher kings. Rule by those, and he, “A sort of god.” Imagine.

In the Paraguayan jungle distritio of San Pedro, north of Asunción by 300 kilometers, there stands on the roadside a tienda made of stone aggregate and aluminum and sparkling glass, cold soda for sale to thirsty travelers, candy bars for the hungry, all of this Modernity feet from a four lane concrete highway that leads to anywhere on earth a man chooses to venture onward into. This is Nueva Germania.

I could have accepted slack-jawed and rickety-limbed farm boys in blue denim coveralls patched with red on white polka-dot cloth; boys absently sticking a pitchfork into a rotting carcass of a dog hanging from a peg on an unpainted barn door; straw-haired, buck-toothed idiots in the shade of a weathered 30 foot high imperial German eagle carved generations ago by master craftsmen from wood from the surrounding jungle; faint music from a tattered accordion playing polka tunes in the distance; the stench of human flesh wafting its way across the fields from the smoke of a cottage stove. Yes, I averted my eyes from the sign seen earlier of the local dentist. And yes, I would have called the police had I witnessed anything like anything above. But no, such things are not possible outside my imagination. Not in Paraguay. Not now. Even then, not so much.

What I did not expect was the six foot tall 30ish beauty who greeted me at the modern tienda at the edge of the highway, her beauty being remarkable in the nation, rich brown hair and blue-grey eyes filled with warmth and delight at seeing a strange with whom to pass a few moments in friendly conversation. Thus was my welcome to Nazi-ville, Paraguay.

I had bused 300 kilometers to the interior of Paraguay to see for myself the remains of Neitzsche's sister's failed proto-Nazi Aryan commune in the jungle; past home of world-historic mass murderer Dr. Joseph Mengele; rest-stop of Dag Walker, traveler. I wanted to see for myself, to touch the ground and smell the air and know the land and the sky and the people there, however superficially, however briefly, if only for a day, to see what my imagination had created in contrast to what the world of the living actually made.

Religious fanatics, maniac visionaries, life-haters, Gnostic demi-god ideologues, fugitive murderers, wandering exiles, I had come to see for myself what kind of people would live in such a place and who they would be now that time has ground them into reality.

Mengele would be at home today in San Francisco, California. He could be a doctor practicing exotic experiments on rich patients who want blue eyes and twins. He could remove and preserve tattooed skin made into designer lampshades, and he could easily stand on the sidewalk selecting those who receive abortions and those who are allowed to have children, the modern eugenicist at work and play. He could rise to the top of his profession and conduct research into the nature of the Jooos and their noses and their natural inferiority that compels them to oppress The! Palestinian! People!, and he could organise boycotts of Israeli medical professionals world-wide. He could even join a death panel to announce that this and that person are life unworthy of life, euthanasia panels, limiting the sick and disgusting to those among his friends, killing the others, being rewarded for his efforts, lauded as a savior of socialised medicine, a scare resource meant only for the fit and super. One might go so far as to claim that today in San Francisco that Mengele could be a serial murderer and more or less get away with it, legally, by practicing Islam, sending young Muslim men to foreign nations to wage jihad against the Jooos. He could go himself, and the leftards might well cheer his internationalism and commitment to human rights. With minor adjustments of style, Mengele could well be a happy man in San Francisco today.

But he would not be at home today in Nueva Germania. How could he cope with dozens of boys and girls on Japanese-made motorcycles, an unshaven man on a scooter, two girls and a poodle behind him, all of them with their tongues hanging out, a cooler of beer hanging from the back, off to sit with friends in the heat of the night and the smell of cow dung thick in the air? Mengele could not easily torture the burnt-black town drunk passed out on the roadside by a litter of puppies as their mother forages for food down the track, a four-lane road used by farmers in Korean flatbed trucks bringing fodder to their cattle lazing by the lagoon, soaring bent birch trees filled with long-tailed birds chirping as the stars emerge in the purple-black sky? Someone would shoot him. Modernity cannot stand such a man, and would not allow him to emerge among men. Only in the realm of the post-modern could such a creature today flourish, hidden behind curtains of obfuscation and occult babble. He could not remain hidden in a world of international cattle markets and credit and loans payable at American-owned banks in debt to Saudi Arabians. In the jungles of post-modernism, yes, there he could survive and do nicely. Among working-class people, not at all.

In spite of the efforts of some of Europe's finest minds to destroy Modernity in favor of a neo-feudalist Order of philosopher kings ruling the masses for apanage, in a small town in the jungles of Paraguay there is no place for a philosopher king. Here, all the Nazis dies out or wandered off, hunted and killed by people who preferred a world of work and fair exchange, people tiring of the over-heated phantasies of Paradise, of the bloody visions and slaughter by religious fanatics. Once that fever had died, people re-emerged and worked again for a living, reverting to the normal routines of daily doings, unconcerned by the harangues of lunatics and the perfect world to come, the intellectuals and their visions falling on the ground under the feet of cattle and imported trucks on the way to the marketplace.

Nietzsche's Aryan utopia of blind retards? Gone. In its place I met a family, three generations, happy, obese, friendly, curious about me, skeptical about my intentions in visiting their little village, accusatory, hostile, angry, and relieved that I had not come to hate them, to accuse them of evils they have no part of, only distant memories handed down mostly by the likes of travelers such as myself. I didn't come to hate the people, I came to see for myself the reality of others I might have hated had I not met some of them and found them all too human, much like myself but settled and decent.

“Ideas” died in Nueva Germania generations ago, and now fat ladies make dinner and sit smoking cigarettes in the evening while men drink beer and talk about cattle. Boys chase girls who pretend coyly to be uninterested. Babies wake up from sleep in the hammock hanging under the awning, look around, and cry at the sight of a stranger sipping coffee at a rough wooden table on the veranda.

Having come to such a place in search of reality I left behind the swamps of my imagination for the bovine air of the jungle, a sweet smell to back-woods boys such as myself. Though my own town is larger, its people are much the same here as there. I was as at home as I will ever be, unknown, unloved, alien and adrift among people who work and live in homes with families among friends, private lives lived in quiet isolation from the hurly-burly of the personal as the political, the state as God.

It could be that Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and Mengele have actually left their visions intact and flourishing in spite of all the normal small town scenes one sees at Nueva Germania. For every hard won pasture and carefully tended field where cattle graze and men toil for their living one sees two and three foot high, for as far as the eye can see, unmistakably successful and thriving, the perfection of the utopian collectivist order....

Ant Hills