Voices from the Past: "Hitler, or the Lie as a Political System" by Rudolf Rocker (1943)
In 1933, with Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany, Rudolf Rocker—one of anarchism's sharpest minds and most influential voices—narrowly escaped the tightening grip of the Nazi regime. He and his wife found refuge in the United States, where Rocker resumed his life’s work, delivering lectures and writing tirelessly.1 Amid this new chapter, he completed Nationalism and Culture, his seminal exploration of nationalism’s roots, challenging the notion that nations and nationalism are somehow intrinsic. Instead, he argued, they are socially constructed and ultimately authoritarian forces.
As World War II erupted, Rocker took an unexpected turn. Though a staunch pacifist during World War I, he openly supported the Allied fight against fascism, a stance that divided his fellow anarchists. “To assert that to us it is all the same who is victor in this terrible conflict,” he wrote in 1941, “means to aid the cowardly murderers and to prepare the world for the ‘blessing’ of Hitler’s ‘New Order.’” He insisted, “The first duty of our time is the struggle against totalitarian slavery and its bestial achievements.”2
Responding to wartime editors' calls, Rocker wrote extensively on the war for two anarchist newspapers. These essays were later published as La Segunda Guerra Mundial: Interpretaciones y ensayos de un hombre libre (Buenos Aires, 1943). The following essay, translated here, speaks with a striking relevance to the political storms of today.
And now, I present to you—Rudolf Rocker...
Hitler, or the Lie as a Political System (1943)
Helmuth von Gerlach, a sincere German democrat, called the period of the last world war the “great age of the lie.” He was right. But ultimately, every war is a period of mystifications. Even if only because the adversary rarely values the enemy justly. To wage war requires hatred, and hatred has never been a friend of the truth. Hatred is blind. It often believes it expresses a truth, but it is only a lie. One can lie without being a liar. In the man who hates, concepts become obscured; he cannot distinguish the just from the unjust, and for that reason, he often becomes a liar to himself and to others.
But the current world war is not “the period of the great lie,” but “the age of the great deceivers,” of deceivers who lie with full awareness and have made a religion of lying. Hitler is the organizer of the lie, the man who lies by principle because the truth is his worst enemy. In his book Mein Kampf, he outlined an entire system of lies and recommended to his followers to always use great lies, because small ones wear out quickly and lose their effectiveness. But the great lie triumphs by its monstrousness; it confuses men to such an extent that they end up not asking for proof and are simply crushed by the magnitude of the lie. One can deny Hitler any superior quality, but it would be unjust to dispute the glory of having been the greatest liar of all time. Every word spoken by him arose from the swamp of lies; every promise he made was a conscious and premeditated lie; every handshake exchanged with his allies was imbued with the pestilential breath of deceit. He was the man who wrote in his book:
Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common criminals stained with blood, who are like the dregs of humanity, who, favored by the conditions of a tragic hour, seized a great state, strangled millions of leading intellectuals with a savage thirst for blood, and have exercised, for nearly ten years now, the cruelest tyrannical regime of all time. Do not forget either that the leaders belong to a people that combines in a rare mixture bestial cruelty with an incomprehensible art of lying, and that they feel more than ever called to impose their bloody oppression on the whole world. Do not forget that the international Jew, who today absolutely dominates Russia, sees in Germany not an ally, but a state dedicated to the same fate.
But one does not make agreements with a partner whose only interest lies in the extermination of the other. One does not make agreements with individuals for whom no pact would be sacred, for they do not live in this world as representatives of honor and truthfulness, but as representatives of lies, deceit, theft, pillage, and assault.
And the very man who wrote these lines made a pact3 with the “liars, criminals, thieves, assailants, Jews” who had read his words, an agreement against the “imperialist powers” of the West, who wanted to “seize world domination under the direction of the Jews.”
And he shouted at the “English pirates”:
The relations between Germany and Russia are firm and based on a line clearly defined by Russo-German interests. All of England's hopes for a tension between Germany and Russia are simply childish. I have resolved the limits of the spheres of interest of our countries with Stalin once and for all.
The pact with the “representatives of lies, deceit, theft, pillage, and banditry” was a sacred pact, before which “the world domination of Judaism” was to succumb.
A few years later, Hitler's armies penetrated Russia and began the holy war against “those for whom no treaty would be sacred,” as Hitler said, the only one who knew how to appreciate the sanctity of agreements. “Man always returns to his first love,” says a French proverb. Hitler returns to the “crusade against Bolshevism.” From Berlin, it resounds throughout the world: “We fight for the Christian civilization of the West against the atheism of Soviet Russia.”
Fanaticism is one of the worst phenomena of the spiritual life of man; but while it is driven by a sincere conviction, it is highly understandable, just as an illness against which certain remedies can be applied. But the heroes of the so-called Third Reich are not even sincere fanatics, but cold representatives of the principle of power, for whom any means is good if it helps them achieve their ends. In the books and articles of the so-called racist theorists, the Japanese were referred to as “yellow monkeys of Asia”; but when those “yellow monkeys” became important for Hitler's politics, the “racist scholars” discovered that the Japanese descended from an Aryan people and were therefore destined to take in their hands, in the new order of things, the leadership of Asia. We do not speak of the large masses of lost men, drawn to such a movement or forced into it. But there has never been in history a movement whose spiritual spokesmen lived so fully in lies as the representatives of the Third Reich.
Hitler has never spoken a truth in his life, not even in dreams. He began his reign with the lie of the Reichstag fire; he exalted the philosophy of lying as a political means against his supposed enemies. He was mystified against Röhm and against all those who had helped him rise to power. He has a whole army of professional mystifiers like Goebbels, Rosenberg, Ley, Himmler, Streicher, Esser, Kube, and hundreds more soldiers around the world; but of all the liars, he was always the most perfect. His entire policy, both domestically and internationally, was a single lie. He has always lied in the most repulsive manner when the “spirit of truth” reached him. Everyone to whom he made a promise was marked by fate. The entire Third Reich is a kingdom of lies and liars. The immoral caprice of Goya: “Truth has died,” seems drawn for him. Hitler's Third Reich was born of a lie. Its last breath will be a lie, and it will be suffocated by it.
Rocker, “The Order of the Hour,” Fraye Arbeter Shtime, 28 November, 1941.
The German-Soviet Nonaggression Past of August 23, 1939.