127: Doing Good in Impossibly Bad Times (w/Rebecca Carter-Chand, Mark Roseman & Peter Staudenmaier)
Mark Roseman opens Lives Reclaimed, his compelling history of the “Bund”—a leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jews during the Reich—with a quote from Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table: “That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.” Roseman, a professor of Jewish and German Studies at University of Indiana at Bloomington, joins Matthew to paint a picture of methodical, relational, and spiritual resistance to the speed and terror of fascism. At the center of the conversation is the quandary of how the Bund made generative use of many of the same naturalistic and spiritualist ideals and practices that were central to the physical culture of fascism. Joining the panel are Peter Staudenmaier, professor of modern Germany history at Marquette, and Rebecca Carter-Chand, historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Peter and Rebecca add their expertise on the tangled ferment of religious and ideological passions in the background of Nazism, and how persistent, even through the worst of times, our flickers of altruism and empathy can be.But before all that: we’ll cover the Q-pilled assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi that has left Paul Pelosi in urgent care, and far-right media scrambling to overwrite the facts.Show NotesLives Reclaimed — RosemanDr. Rebecca Carter-Chand — United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumDr. Peter Staudenmaier - History The Futurist Manifesto Filippo Tommaso Marinetti The Awful Truth: Paul Pelosi Was Drunk Again, And In a Dispute With a Male Prostitute Early Friday Morning.Pelosi attack suspect David DePape shared conspiracy theoriesCriminal complaint: David DepapeDepape’s archived sitePelosi attacker was immersed in 2020 election conspiracies
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Collectively, we are still somehow on Instagram at Conspiripod.
We are going to work on getting our old account back, but the gods of, the unseen gods of Instagram, or meta, Continue to evade us.
More importantly, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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At $10 a month, you can get access to our bi-monthly live streams that we're launching this month.
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So check out Patreon if you would like to know more.
And I think, Matthew, you have something on that tip to discuss?
Yeah, Julian and I have been discussing courage to heal in a two-part bonus presentation.
And specifically, the incredible paradox in the response to this 1988 book.
Not unlike the responses to many conspiritualists, although a little bit more nuanced and, I think, evidenced.
We have things like This book saved my life because it was the only resource around for a child sexual abuse survivor like myself at the time.
And then on the other hand, we will also hear this book ruined thousands of lives because it encouraged false accusations of child sexual abuse to be made on the basis of a flawed understanding of how memory works and how it can be tested.
So, what we really zero in on, too, are the dog whistles and outright references to satanic panic content that somehow survived multiple editions of this best-selling book without correction, even though the authors, creative writing instructors—I mean, that's another issue—Ellen Bass and Laura Davis were presented with robust feedback.
Yeah, you did really excellent work here, Matthew, sort of tracing that theme through the different editions in terms of how they're responding to it, how they're managing it, how they're laundering it, and ultimately sort of doubling down by the end.
It's wild.
Yeah, and opening the door between a legitimate support industry for people recovering from trauma and the rest of what we've come to study on this podcast.
In Spirituality 127, doing good in impossibly bad times, with Rebecca Carter Chand, Mark Roseman, and Peter Stoddenmire.
Mark Roseman opens Lives Reclaimed, his compelling history of the Bund, a leftist communitarian group that resisted fascism and protected Jews during the Reich, with a quote from Michael Ondaatje's novel, The Cat Table.
That was a small lesson I learned on the journey.
What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
Rosemann, a professor of Jewish and German studies at University of Indiana at Bloomington, joins Matthew to paint a picture of methodological, relational, and spiritual resistance to the speed and terror of fascism.
At the center of the conversation is the quandary of how the Bund made generative use of many of the same naturalistic and spiritualist ideals and practices that were central to the physical culture of fascism.
Joining the panel are Peter Stottermeier, professor of modern German history at Marquette, and Rebecca Carter-Chand, historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Peter and Rebecca add their expertise on the tangled ferment of religious and ideological passions in the background of Nazism, and how persistent, even through the worst of times, our flickers of altruism and empathy can be.
But before all that, we'll cover the Q-pilled assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi that
has left Paul Pelosi in urgent care and far-right media scrambling to overwrite the facts.
Yeah, so our This Week in Conspiratuality this time around is about how quickly
Q-pilled influencers turned a brutal assault on an elderly man into a homophobic conspiracy theory
that launched a thousand shitposts.
The quick answer to how they did it is, well, or how long it took was that it took about 24 hours after David DePape smashed Paul Pelosi's skull with a hammer Before a far-right conspiracy theory rag insinuated that DePape wasn't out to assassinate the House Speaker, even though he ran into the House shouting, where's Nancy, where's Nancy, but was rather Mr. Pelosi's gay lover.
And then a few hours after that, Elon Musk, not 48 hours into his sole ownership of Twitter, shared that link to 112 million followers.
And within hours after that, I'll also point out that our friend JP Sears just sent out a mailer this morning.
While he didn't explicitly call this out, he's produced two new shirts that feature Elon Musk.
I wonder about the trademarks on that or the legality of that.
How he's championing freedom of speech in America.
So he's now at least inadvertently capitalizing on all of this in a pretty disgusting way as well.
I personally don't think that the propaganda machine had any choice here because the reality of the matter, which was extensively proven by the release of the police report and criminal complaint, is that DePape didn't know Pelosi.
He had arrived at the house with zip ties.
He's shouting, where's Nancy?
And he told Paul, this is all in the police reports, we'll link to it, that he was there to break her knees.
And all of his background and motivation were also plain to see.
So hard right conspiracy theories on his blog, big lie materials, QAnon stuff, posts about groomer schools.
It's all very predictable.
It's pretty straightforward.
So suddenly, the American right wing is face to face with having motivated a hit on the second in line to the presidency, and so they really have to act fast.
To call DePape a leftist and a homosexual because he's Canadian and once did some pro-nudist protesting.
Here's trans bigot troll Matt Walsh with the Insta pivot, which we might notice opens with a hit against being able to know anything at all.
Matt Walsh on Twitter writing, I don't know what the hell happened at Nancy Pelosi's house, and I suspect none of us will ever know for sure, but I do know that trying to paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right-winger is absurd and will always be absurd.
Yeah, I saw that ridiculous tweet with its fallacious reasoning, and I actually replied to it.
We have 120-plus episodes at Conspirituality.net that say otherwise.
I'll also say a number of people tagged us on that thread, and thank you for that.
I don't expect Matt to take us seriously or pay attention, but we do appreciate at least trying to point out his ridiculous statement there.
There have been a couple of strange new Patreon supporters with pseudonyms, though, to the Great Awakeners level, so maybe, I don't know, maybe Matt's listening.
All this entire story, I mean, it made me think of a lot of things, but primarily about the effects of speed.
Because, you know, we talk a lot on the podcast about the thematic overlaps and the technological facilitation behind those thematic overlaps, and the various ways in which fascist thought or neo-fascist thought, leadership styles, and power dynamics are not only on the rise globally, but they are intersectional with the emotional extremism of New Age spirituality.
And we also talk a lot about the nature of charismatic leadership and about how cults create claustrophobic environments of apocalyptic urgency.
We can link these outcomes really sensibly back to the authoritarianism and mystical romance of fascism, but there's another influence that's more aesthetic in nature that predates both German and Italian fascism, and this is the futurism of Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti.
So this guy is born in 1876.
He dies in 1944.
He's the originator of the futurist movement.
And here are a few lines of his manifesto which, by the way, goes on to inform all of the aesthetic aspects of modern fascism that didn't pretend to be living in the bucolic pastoralism of organic farming.
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt.
Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap, and the blow with the fist.
We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed.
A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath.
A roaring motorcar which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace.
Yeah, if only Aubrey Marcus could have taken a writer's workshop with Marinetti.
Very Walt Whitman-esque, too.
Yeah, it is.
I didn't read the numbers as I was going through it, but he numbers each of these as if they're sort of aphorisms in a manifesto, right?
Yeah, it is the futurist manifesto.
Yeah.
Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber.
I can just hear Gavin McGinnis in the background like yelling, cock, cock, cock, right?
And Derek is right, sadly, right?
That this could be like something out of Song of Myself in terms of the cadence and the declarative quality.
Yeah, the rhythm, if not the theme, and if not the textures, for sure.
Now the victory of Samothrace, by the way for history nerds, is the 2nd century Hellenistic marble of winged victory.
It used to sit on an island gazing out over the Aegean, but now it's in the Louvre.
But Marinetti's fetish for speed and power made him very simpatico with Mussolini, and he provided a lot of copy for Italian fascism.
He helped on the Italian Fascist Manifesto, even though he actually didn't like the fascist obsession for ancient institutions.
But for him, speed was everything.
It was the machines, the authoritarian leadership and its immediacy and its urgency, the blitzkrieg, and then also the methamphetamine that helped German tank crews raise each other to objectives in Poland and Russia on zero sleep.
So, does any of this sound familiar as in our present day?
I mean, I really liked what Ben Collins had to say about the sequence of events on CNN.
He had a great line.
He said that misinformation was outpacing reality.
So, the way I see it is that there are many things going on, but two main things that are required for this kind of thing to happen.
There's a structural readiness, social, political, tech mechanisms that have to be primed and ready to go.
And then there's this emotional wound, an almost moral injury that has to make everything feel urgent.
And Derek, you've got a structural analogy drawing on Naomi Klein that you're going to unpack for us, but in that vein, but from an older context, I'm just going to read a response I got from one of our interview subjects today.
This is Mark Roseman.
He's a professor of Jewish and Germanic Studies at the University of Indiana, Bloomington.
I told him that we were covering the de Pape story and its instant reframing, and I asked him, are there notable or standout examples in which the Nazi propaganda machine was able to immediately convert potentially damaging news about an event into an intensification of their conspiracism or scapegoating?
And Mark answered this way.
In the first weeks of Nazi rule, the foreign press reported on violence against left-wingers, Catholic organizations, Jews, and others, and attacks on Jewish stores by Nazis.
The Nazis then started a campaign against atrocity stories, gruel propaganda from abroad, and put pressure on Jewish organizations to join the campaign.
The Jewish community, worried that the Nazi agitation might lead to more violence, felt themselves obliged to make statements against the false propaganda from abroad.
And Jewish organizations made careful statements, cherry-picking the more exaggerated rumors from abroad to denounce false propaganda, while also referring to worrying real acts at home.
The Nazis then organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish stores, which in the end lasted only one day, April 1st, framed as a warning and a reprisal against foreign atrocity propaganda, the implication being that an international Jewish network was steering the hate-filled reporting about Germany.
Yeah, so basically, yes.
Within weeks of coming to power, they had this well-established engine by which they could spin any damaging news that came down the pipe.
There wasn't a time for any kind of genuine, real democratic response, of course.
Well, you mentioned Ben Collins, and he's been saying, not just for this incident, but for a while, that misinformation just travels faster than truth, or the actual news, and it takes longer for the truth to get out.
We could extrapolate from that and talk about how that also applies to science.
That really is indicative of what social media has done to our understanding of complex topics.
But for a moment I want to look at when you coined the term, Matthew, disaster spirituality and you were paying homage to Naomi Klein's exceptional book, The Shock Doctrine, which I believe impacted all three of us when it was published in 2007.
Her term was disaster capitalism, it's in the subtitle.
And of course there's crossover with the term that you coined, but what really stuck out was this phenomenon that we're discussing today.
That there are people and organizations that don't cause disasters, but they're certainly prepared to capitalize on them when they occur.
And this, as I just mentioned, seems amplified in the social media age.
And she opens the book with an image that burned in my memory ever since I read it, which was Milton Friedman writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and claiming that money earmarked for the reconstruction of public schools after Hurricane Katrina should instead be used to, quote, radically reform the educational system.
Yeah, he made that statement from his deep knowledge of educational, you know, politics and theory, right?
Well, the Republicans certainly are very well educated, as we continue to see.
They're not at all pushing an agenda.
What Friedman actually meant was instituting a voucher system, which really meant handing
over the money to private companies to build for-profit charter schools in districts once
served by public schools, which was an initiative that President Bush at the time supported.
Friedman viewed any state-run school as socialist, and the move to award private companies lucrative
contracts not only made them money, but also threw the city back to the pre-civil rights
era, where an equal education for all would no longer be guaranteed in certain neighborhoods.
Charter schools are also often religious in nature, or at least are able to promote religion
in ways that public schools can't, so there's that tie-in as well.
And sadly, it worked.
At the time of writing in 2007, Klein noted that pre-Katrina, the New Orleans public school system ran 123 schools.
Then two years later, they ran four schools.
God, incredible.
Yeah.
In that time, the city went from having seven charter schools to 31 charter schools.
In par for the chorus for Friedman and the right-wing think tanks that immediately went to work after his op-ed was published, the district's teachers' union was broken up and all of its 4,700 members were fired.
Very few teachers were hired by those charter schools, and those who did accept an offer were paid less money.
So Klein puts the machinery into perspective when she writes, For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been perfecting this very strategy, waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players while citizens were still reeling from the shock.
Yeah, and the 4channers like stockpile memes.
permanent. As she says a bit later, some people stockpile food for crises,
Friedmanites stockpile free market ideas.
Yeah, and the 4chaners like stockpile memes.
Like they're ready to go.
Yeah. Now looking back at this, the timeline, honestly, it almost seems quaint
because Friedman's op-ed wasn't published until three months after Hurricane Katrina.
As you just said, it took like a day for the Paul Pelosi's gay lover brain worm to infect the radical wing of the right, which sadly is growing less radical for the Republicans by the day.
We'll see how that plays out in the midterms next week.
By that you mean is becoming more the mainstream norm of republicanism, yeah?
Yeah, I mean I do appreciate, even though he got a lot of criticism for it when Biden made that speech calling it the MAGA right, I do appreciate that distinction.
It's the same way while I'll say far left because being someone who's left of center I don't always agree with people left of me on things.
So I think that you can Give them some definition, but the problem with the MAGA right, or the far right, whatever you want to call it, is when we look at voting trends, they're winning a lot of districts.
So I don't know how much longer—I still believe traditional conservatives exist.
When we were talking about Ben Collins, I listened to him on Morning Joe, which has a wide range of people, conservative to liberal, but they don't go in the extremes of any direction.
But it's getting harder and harder to Yeah, and I would wonder how much of that has to do with the rise of media like The Daily Wire and PragerU, where you have these very high-profile pundits who are basically far-right propagandists with really good production values.
One thing I'm seeing, sadly, is generally Hollywood and comedy was ruled by more liberal thinking people.
I don't think the right's funny at all, at least the far right, with what they've been doing with the Pelosi memes since.
Matthew posted some from Northrop.
Donald Trump Jr.
also posted that.
Disgusting.
But they have Being outcast, quote-unquote, from the traditional media ecosystem, they have created an entirely alternate system that is now getting stronger and stronger by the day.
And it's built to obscure their true intentions.
And that's going to be one of the hardest things that we have to overcome.
The speed at which it moves through that ecosystem and the power that it has gained now.
Yeah, I really agree with that.
There's a cultural process that we've been watching unfold in which the edginess of being a contrarian right-winger has become cool in a way that politically never used to be the case.
And the big irony is when you look at the Candace Owens and the Ben Shapiro, you know,
who dominate Facebook posts and shares every week, when you look at Matt Walsh, all of
these people are funded by extremely conservative religious foundations who have a very specific
agenda in terms of where they want to take the country, but it's dressed up in this way
that has some kind of edgy appeal.
And then you see organizations like Prager University who are now offering programming
for kids that is directly, I mean, their marketing is this is an alternative to the woke propaganda
of PBS kids.
Well you said it too with the religious aspect that's across this because what I've noticed
is more and more female Christian influencers who very much look like Fox News hosts have
the very same look, kind of like how a lot of people try to look like the Kardashians,
There are certain looks.
And on the male side of that, it's not always necessarily the physical look, but there is that strong impulse toward
their definition of masculinity that defines the muscular Christianity.
So you're seeing this form of muscular Christianity that's dovetailing and intersecting with what
we're talking about here that is across the board and it is becoming hip or attractive
to a lot of people.
Yeah, you even see Ben Shapiro with his much maligned attempts at growing a beard.
He's trying to sort of fit in with that masculine vibe.
Oh, I didn't notice that.
Oh yeah.
So we have these machines, and we have speed, and I think that there's a deep sort of psycho-emotional impact for us all that has to do with a kind of resistance that we wind up building to feeling either empathy or grief.
I think that Matt Walsh and Alex Jones and folks like that, what they've learned to do somehow is to sense tragedy from afar.
And instead of having what I would imagine to be a natural human response of bracing or recoiling or sinking within, these are folks that will stiffen up, they will become defiant, they will disown everything that could identify with the suffering.
And they have like, you know, 4K cameras to shoot them as they do that, as they sort of puff themselves up to meet the moment.
And at the Alex Jones end of the spectrum, I think the reflex for empathy, for what would be empathy, actually can twist into a kind of black-pilled, almost erotic charge.
Like it turns him on to sniff out something tragic and to be able to flip it.
And I think that's a kind of sociopathy, but I'm not sure.
But what seems to happen is that, like, as soon as there's a tragedy, it's an opportunity.
And the grief that I think the influencer feels around them, it seems like it builds a kind of pressure that then becomes the fuel for whatever reversal you're going to attempt.
And it's something that you have to act on really quick.
And I think that the conspiracy theory is kind of a match.
And for whoever came up with the Paul Pelosi conspiracy theory, you know, the options are Or any conspiracy theory in this environment.
The options are the tragedy didn't happen, or it happened for the opposite reasons, or it wasn't a tragedy, or it is a false flag, it's proof of something bigger.
Like those are your basic options.
So you can have those lined up as kind of a pseudo response to what might be an empathetic moment that you've kind of clamped down upon within yourself.
Yeah, surely this doesn't have to do with the spread of misinformation and, you know, insane conspiracy theories from the right.
Surely it must have to do with the crime problem in San Francisco.
It must have to do with all of those illegal Canadians who are causing so much harm to our society.
It must have to do with the fact that San Francisco is well known to be home to a lot of gay people, so maybe that's what it was, that this was really his gay lover.
I mean, it's despicable.
Well, I felt that we need to close down our northern border for a while, and I'm glad it's finally getting the attention it deserves.
Yeah, I mean, I think, Julian, it doesn't matter how the facts get twisted, because I think what the point is, is that the influencer has to dodge within themselves first, and then project that outwards, and then dodge and disown the helplessness, the mourning, the uncertainty, and to do it quickly.
So that no sorrow can begin to well up inside any kind of gap.
No sorrow that, whatever you think of the Pelosi's, I mean an 82 year old man with a hammer in his fucking skull is like, I don't care who that is.
It could easily be your dad.
It could easily be your dad.
It could easily be my father, right.
So the conspiracy theory poster erases grief and doesn't give anybody any space to be in one's feelings.
About something like this, or about a mass shooting in a school.
And the thing is, is that it is contagious, this speed, because before the person who is not ready to repel the facts on the ground, before they have time to grieve, You know, you have to be outraged at the distortions that you're immediately seeing, and you end up spending time arguing against them, or about them, or even responding to them in your head.
Like, I am thinking about an 82-year-old man with his head smashed, and I'm having an internal dialogue with an avatar of Matt Walsh in my head.
And that does something.
That's a moral injury, right?
And I think the gravitas of what has happened just has no time to unfold inside.
And that's important because if it doesn't unfold inside, where are you going to act from?
Like, where are you going to actually make a choice from if you don't feel the thing?
You know, that opportunity is stolen.
So this asymmetry principle that you mentioned, Derek, where it takes way more time and work to actually combat the effects of misinformation than it does to put it out there, it's not just about time and effort.
It's also about emotional labor.
And, you know, that labor is really the private work of reckoning with, you know, terrible and impossible things that I think everybody has to do.
So, yeah, that's what I'm thinking about, that the conspiracy theorist really, you know, intentionally or not, through a reflex or through, you know, just Just through, or maybe through planning.
They steal away time internally, and grief, and empathy.
I mean, even if it's just by a few hours.
And I think what's really difficult about that is I don't think we can think properly if we can't feel.
It's so interesting.
I want to tie what you were just saying back around to where you started, because it seems to me, this is speculative, that there's a psychological function that a certain kind of fascist Golden Age fantasy, and like the piece that we read, this idea of muscularity and speed and aggression and power and no longer being passive, that all of this has a particular kind of psychological tone and it's a way of
Imagining an invulnerable future that somehow looks like an imagined golden past in which the powerful masculine nationalism didn't have to feel in any way threatened by anything or vulnerable to anything or having to have empathy for anything that would sort of reveal our shared humanity.
So coming back around to the conspiracists and the pundits who right away go to that place of we're going to be inhuman and inhumane in our response to this.
Immediately as a reflex.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it's stunning to me because there's a way of behaving as an emotionally sort of mature human being in which you can hold all of your principles in opposition to your enemies and make your arguments Like, you don't lose any of that by being decent.
No.
Nothing is lost by saying, I absolutely completely condemn this, it's completely awful, it's in very bad taste to spread any kind of misinformation or speculative conspiracies about this.
You know, everybody knows I'm no fan of the Pelosi's, but I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy.
Yeah, I think what you lose is the opportunity to take pleasure in radiating the pain outwards, right?
And that's also what we saw is that some, some candidates in the midterms were very
quick to jump on this as an opportunity to make a crack that would get a laugh.
So this panel comes out of an idea that I had during one of many low points in our project.
I can't remember what surge of cursed news it was during.
It might have been the aftermath of January 6th.
I can't really remember, but I basically wanted to start finding stories of things that have worked during difficult times, stories of creativity and renewal and resistance, and That longing started to take shape through an exchange I had with an historian named Rebecca Carter-Chand.
Hello, Rebecca, and thank you.
She works at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and she reached out to me to chat about the Rudolf Steiner episode that we had done, I think it's number 59, because she's friends with Peter Stoddenmare, and he's a professor of modern German history, who specializes in German fascism and especially things like eco-fascism, and I had quoted him extensively from this big long essay on the relationship between theosophy, anthroposophy, and esoteric Nazism.
And so that's what Rebecca and I were talking about.
And then she just sort of out of the blue suggested this book, and it was related to her own research into minority religious groups during the Nazi period.
And she said, you know, you got to look at Lives Reclaimed, a Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany by Mark Roseman, and she sent me a link to it.
So, Rosemann is an historian I've mentioned before, Indiana, Bloomington, and his book Reclaimed Lives is a fieldwork and interview-heavy historical review of an organization called the Bund that was really robust in the early 1930s in Germany, and then it lasted through the war on the strength and passion of its anti-fascist activism.
And there were many bunts, but the one that Roseman studied resisted Nazism and helped Jews in the midst of persecution.
And it really was just a small collective of socialist activists with roots in various back-to-nature projects.
With the exception, and I found this very interesting, that they didn't turn right-wing.
They were led by a charismatic named Artur Jakobs, and he had a vision of social justice that was intertwined with the necessity for spiritual growth and honesty.
So, Roseman's brief description of the Bund is that it was based in the Ruhr and founded by some of the teachers and pupils at Essen's Adult Education Institute.
So, this was a progressive, you know, educational movement that predated The Bund grew to perhaps as many as 200 members, workers, teachers, middle class women with social conscience, and others, among them quite a few Jews.
Through meetings, joint study, physical exercise, and excursions, this new group sought to develop a holistic and uplifting communal life It also reached out to others through adult education, experiments in alternative schooling, gymnastics training, and political meetings.
Its members were hoping to be the crucible for a future better Germany.
They were certainly not preparing for life under a future fascist dictatorship.
Sound familiar?
So, a large part of this interview explores how the naturalistic, biodynamic, holistic ideas that we know are tangled into the roots of modern fascism also had left-leaning proponents right back at the beginning.
So, it's not some contemporary anomaly that the lines between left and right when it comes to ecology and honoring the intrinsic power of the body are blurred.
The politics of holism have always been contested, and so I was interested in finding out how this small group used their spiritual ideas and impulses against the dominant culture.
Now, we've heard a lot about the political apathy, duplicity, and xenophobia of alternative spiritualities in the New Age, and so I view this as an opportunity to learn about how that's not necessarily a foregone conclusion.
Hello, everybody.
Welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Welcome, Peter Staudenmayer.
Thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
Hello, Mark Roseman.
Welcome.
Hi, it's a pleasure to be here.
And thank you so much to Rebecca Carter-Chand for actually connecting us all for this panel.
Welcome, Rebecca.
Hi.
It's lovely to be here.
I wanted to start with an icebreaker.
I've got a story from my Wisconsin past in honor of Peter.
This comes from about two hours drive west of you.
I used to live in a cult in Wisconsin, Dells, and there was some physical culture, yoga, Reiki, nature cure stuff there, some of the things that we'll be talking about today.
But it was mostly bog-standard New Age content.
And part of what broke me out was re-engaging with leftist politics through the Fighting Bob Festival.
It actually got my brain back online in a way, but one of the most engaging speakers I saw in about 2001 or so was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
And back then, his shtick was ecological protection through legal means, especially targeting multinational corporations.
And he was a riveting speaker.
His commitment to ecological renewal was obviously passionate.
He spoke of social justice and racial equality.
And now, he's an anti-vax, faux-populist, charismatic, with strong ties to QAnon, super-reactionary, evangelical demographics.
And I think, like, I wanted to start with that because I think it sums up the historical tangle, or some of it, that we'll be looking at today, but through the lens of the early 20th century, which you're all experts in.
The lines between left and right can be hard to find.
They can be easy to cross.
Charismatic groups gain and lose power.
Some fall into infamy.
And as fascism looms, clear storylines and ideological commitments can become harder to understand.
So I just wanted to start open field question, is this a recognizable story for you all?
The incident you mentioned is a good two decades ago now, and for historians, in a period of political turmoil, which I think is a fair description of the opening decades of the 21st century, 20 years is a really long time.
We might be disappointed and appalled at the direction that that particular individual, that this particular Kennedy, has taken during those past two decades, but we shouldn't be surprised.
Moving from left to right, for that matter, moving from right to left, those are very, very normal things, and especially in a milieu that privileges alternative perspectives on everything, whether it's personal health or or societal organization or what have you, that sort of
political volatility is particularly prominent for better and for worse.
Yeah, I mean we have a sense perhaps or an impulse historically of contrarianism.
And I guess part of the thing that we're going to get at is that that can go in a lot of different directions.
Yep.
I think this move from left to right, and you also see in Germany today that there are sort of the leftists from the 68ers who've moved a long way to the right.
I think that is a distinctive characteristic of our epoch.
And looking back to sort of 19th century and early 20th century Germany, there are certainly shifts, but I would say one's looking more there.
If there's a characteristic move of that epoch, it is of a polarisation, a sharpening of fronts and a radicalisation of differences.
I'm sure there are people who are moving left and right, and of course there are plenty of people under Nazi rule who, after 1933, who are compromising.
So in that sense, they might end up anywhere.
But in terms of the cultural trends of that epoch, is a polarization, I would say, under the shock of certain kinds of external events, whereas I think this shift that you're describing is very much a feature of our epoch.
Rebecca, does this turn up with any kind of familiarity in your own research field?
You know, I would, I am a regular listener of conspirituality, and I love what the three of you have been doing for the past while.
And, you know, on so many episodes, when you're talking about contemporary events, I hear echoes of things from the period that I study.
So I don't have anything particular to add about this story.
But I think there are echoes all the time that are helpful for us.
Well, let's get into exploring them.
We can start with some basics up front.
Mark, can you tell us, with some brevity, what was the Bund?
Yes, it's always a good idea to say to an academic with some brevity at the beginning.
So yeah, this is the group I write about in a book called Lives Reclaimed and they were a sort of left-wing oppositional group that formed after the First World War and survived through the Nazi period despite persecution and One of the things that drew them to me was that they rescued a number of Jews and sort of admirably maintained their sort of autonomy and their identity throughout the Nazi years and into the post-war period, and then were rather disappointed that all they'd done wasn't really recognised after the war.
So there was also that sort of sad decline into old age after the Second World War.
So in some ways they do look recognisable in terms of their commitment to sort of alternative lifestyle, to a sort of community lifestyle.
They were also into physical health, into kinds of bodily movement and so on.
Part of that sort of broad scene that in the early 20th century was often called life reform.
In two ways, they feel a little bit different, I think, from many contemporary similar movements.
One is that they were alongside this commitment to life reform, to bodily movement, to sort of spirituality.
They were also very explicitly political, and they wanted to be part of a fight to create a socialist society, so they linked it to that very explicit political goal.
And the other is that their notion of freedom was as much about being liberated from your own sort of personal desires and recognizing the value of communal living as it was about letting it all hang out.
And in that sense, they were more like some sort of modern, austere religious movements.
of overcoming the individual's whims and getting to a sort of deeper level
than they are understanding, often understanding of liberty,
which is about removing any kind of restriction on your ability to choose what you do.
And in those two ways, they feel a little bit different, I think,
from many contemporary similar kinds of movements.
Now, Peter, some of what Mark is describing, I think rhymes in some ways with some ideas
that begin to motivate and animate the fascism So, I wanted to ask you briefly, how did fascism, particularly in Germany, use and abuse concepts like holism and alternative living?
That's a good question.
The group that Mark studies, the group that your book, Mark, is about, the 2019 book, is a fascinating example of the different directions that this sort of political emphasis on the body and on community can take, in the example of your book, in a left-wing
direction, in an openly anti-fascist direction, whereas the groups that I tend to study usually
represent the opposite pole.
And that's one of the fascinating things about fascism, to use the term that Matthew just
mentioned, and also one of the vexing things about fascism is its historical ability to
draw from both the left and the right.
And not just to pay lip service, but to actually draw some of its energies from genuinely left-wing
sources and obviously from far-right sources.
Historians think of fascism as being a far-right phenomenon, which is accurate.
In my view, but it's the kind of far-right phenomenon that has no compunctions whatsoever about adopting ideas, elements, practices from the left and even from the far left.
So it makes fascism a really difficult thing to pin down either from a political science perspective or sociological perspective or A historical perspective.
If you look at the most famous or infamous, if you will, fascist movements, the ones that actually established themselves as regimes, which most fascist movements did not.
Most fascist movements, I would say, thankfully, have never formed regimes.
But the two classic ones that did in the 1920s and 1930s, Italian fascism and National Socialism in Germany. Both of those groups drew,
especially in their early years, drew significantly from radical sources, from left-wing
sources.
Mussolini was a prominent socialist, a very important socialist, and a radical, so at the left end of the
then spectrum of Italian socialism, before he became a fascist, the
Technically, the name of the Nazi party is the National Socialist German Workers' Party, where they're mixing left and right, all jumbled together.
So that is, for better or worse, that is part of the whole phenomenon of fascism and has been for a century now.
And it's one of the things that makes it hard for those of us who are trying to understand and explain those phenomena historically.
It makes it really hard to tease through the complexities and the nuances involved.
You know, I wanted this to be a lightning round, but I need to follow up with that before I get to Rebecca, because you said that what you describe, Peter, actually is a really efficient kind of opportunism within fascism that is able to co-opt whatever it seems to desire.
And I'm wondering, could you categorize broadly What it wants to ensnare, like when it sees something in a political landscape, what are its textures, like what are its energies?
Can we categorize that?
Because it's not about ideology necessarily.
It would seem to be about aesthetics or something somatic or something that pulls on group psychology or something.
That's a good point.
I might argue, and I have to think this through, but I might argue that those things are themselves ideologically imbued, and that at a certain level, if we work hard enough, we might be able to tease out what are the ideological commitments, often unstated, what are the ideological commitments involved.
But I would say that fascists in general, then as now, are ideological omnivores.
They are more than happy to go hunting around whatever's available in the culture at large, track down the elements that they think will be effective.
You use the word opportunist.
That's a pretty good description.
Whatever elements they think will help them build a more powerful worldview that captures a larger group of people, things that will help them build a movement.
Fascists are very committed to the notion of a movement.
That's the That's one of the main aspects of fascism, historically speaking.
So if you want to build a movement, you need to draw on elements that are going to ignite people's passions.
Not just policy proposals that people will find convincing, but things that will actually get people, you know, you want to rev people up, get them involved.
That's one of the reasons why fascists typically draw on Youth symbolism and youth rhetoric often sincerely draw on it.
It's true that they're opportunists, but they're also often telling the truth about themselves.
They're often youth-driven movements.
If you look at today's so-called alt-right, which some people view as a 21st century variant of fascism, it's a really good example of a movement that is driven by youthful ideals, youthful outlooks, and a youthful Urge to break taboos and transcend boundaries.
A lot of those energies are the kind of thing that get bundled into fascism in its various forms.
I would add to that youthfulness description, perhaps mystical idealization as well.
And Rebecca, turning to you, Mark has said that the Bund has a very sort of intense religious or spiritual heart running through its activities, and you study minoritarian religious groups during the Nazi period.
What are the groups that form some kind of opposition to fascism during that time, and how do they do it, and maybe where does the Bund fit within that landscape?
Yeah, so I think right off the top, I'd like to just make it very clear that not all religious minorities were opposed to fascism.
The groups that I study are generally those groups that are part of Christianity, broadly speaking, or have their roots in Christianity.
There were hundreds of small religious groups, philosophical, esoteric groups in Germany.
But just over 95% of Germans belong to the two main Christian churches, the Protestant churches or the Roman Catholic Church.
So we're talking about pretty small numbers, like less than 1% of Germans belong to these other groups, which could be anything from Baptists, Methodists, Mennonites, Seventh-day Adventists, Latter-day Saints and then there were other very small numbers of people who belong to the Baha'i community or were Muslims and or other groups like that and there's really such diversity among all of these groups so I find it hard to to answer just in a you know in a generalized way.
Most of them I'd say found a way to survive or even thrive under Nazism It did require compromise on their part, but I think for the most part they managed to do it, and only a handful openly opposed the Nazi regime.
But your question is about those who did, so that was all preamble.
Among those who did oppose Nazism Oftentimes it had to do with public demonstrations of loyalty to the regime or nationalism expressions of nationalism and military service and being willing or not willing to do those things.
Everything from flying the flag to giving the Hitler salute to sending your kids to the youth organization and of course military service and male conscription was reintroduced in 1935 so that became a big issue for for some of these groups.
Although maybe not All the ones that you usually associate with pacifism.
So these all of these things might have come out of religious conviction, but the conflict really came in the realm of everyday life.
So the Nazis didn't care about these groups like view of the Trinity or like things like that.
It was not theological concepts, but they still were, you know, the opposition to showing allegiance to a worldly government for the Jehovah's Witnesses.
That was a religious conviction.
So I just wanted to make that distinction.
Right.
We'll come back to some of those groups as well, especially I think the Quakers I have a couple of questions about.
But going back to Peter's comments about the youthfulness of fascist movements in general, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Wandervogel.
I don't know if I'm saying that well.
But it's a 19th century, romantic-tinged, anti-industrialist, anti-urbanization youth movement.
These are groups of high school and college kids who go off hiking and communing with nature, many of them inspired by the romantic philosophies of Self-actualization.
Mark, they provide a kind of backdrop for some of the impulses that we see emerge in the Bund, but what's the basic history of the Wundervogel, and how did it connect with other anti-modernity movements?
The formal sort of roots are normally seen around the turn of the century, so just after the very beginning of the 20th century, though, as you say, it draws on sort of longer 19th century traditions, in some ways you could say they're sort of modern avant la lettre because you know they're the sort of environmentalist, they're sort of challenging the negative sides of urban life in line with sort of middle class social reformers which would become stronger in the 20th century.
So in those ways I think perhaps some of the way we used to see them as anti-modern, now we recognize that they're the forerunners of sort of currents of modern life, environmentalism and so on.
They're pretty small up to the First World War.
But they're influential in terms of setting a style, and in the 20s, almost every political movement picks up on some of their appeal for its youth movements.
Above all, the idea that young people should lead themselves, so people slightly older leading people who are slightly younger.
The idea that young people form their own communities, so rather pulling out of family life and creating a new kind of family.
And after the First World War, the youth movement transforms a bit, and this notion of the Bundish youth, which became very strong, all sorts of movements sort of become a little bit more tighter, organized, a little bit more focused on discipline.
But again, Politically pulling in all sorts of, on all sorts of different directions.
So I wouldn't, I wouldn't just put them in the sort of corner of the sort of worryingly right wing.
Although certainly there's a strong nationalist tinge to them.
But the precedent that they set, I think, is mobilized in all sorts of directions.
And actually a lot of the groups are sort of fairly self-consciously anti-political, certainly anti-party politics.
And that's one reason why it then becomes quite easy for the Nazi Party to fold a lot of them up into the Hitler Youth once Hitler comes to power.
I suppose because there will always be a connection between an anti-political stance and kind of an apathy towards democracy itself.
So, you know, if you're not participating, then if something very structured and orderly comes around that feels like it's so large that it's part of the natural order, it will sweep you away and that will just be that.
That's really true.
Yeah.
Now, Peter, is there, with the interests of these early environmentalists but also proto-nationalist groups as well, is there kind of a chicken and egg story to tell about the relationship between The back-to-nature sentiment and perhaps even worship and the eco-fascism that begins to develop into the Nazi period.
I mean, do we have here an earnest love for the natural world that begins to curdle into some kind of blood and soil nationalism?
Or is there, you know, a pre-existing xenophobia that needs to invent or appropriate a kind of spirituality for itself?
I think we have both of those things.
That's my best attempt at a chicken or egg answer.
It's both the chicken and the egg.
Right.
You have, especially in those first, let's say the first two and a half decades of the 20th century, keeping in mind that that period is itself cut in half by the First World War.
That's actually important to the German movements that all three of us study.
Things before 1914 are radically different in many ways from things after 1918, even when it's the very same people.
But in any case, what you have in those fateful decades of the early 20th century is both a genuine commitment to nature, and I want to stress the genuine part.
Some of my colleagues and some of my activist comrades, I'm involved in the environmental movement, also being a historian of environmentalism, Some of my colleagues and my comrades tend to dismiss right-wing versions of ecology as nothing but lip service, as fake versions of ecology.
I think that's absolutely mistaken.
I might wish it were true, but it emphatically is not true.
From a historical point of view, what some of the folks that I study were saying circa 1908 or 1926 were very sincere versions of a commitment to nature as they understood it.
Why is it important to get that right?
Oh, many reasons.
The historian in me would say it's important because it's true.
We're just not going to understand these movements if we falsely fall into the maybe reassuring notion that they didn't really mean it.
That they were just drawing on ecological metaphors as a way to make Public headway, but they didn't really believe in it.
That would fundamentally misunderstand the situation.
But I also think, from a present-day point of view, from right here in the year 2022, we're not going to understand contemporary forms of radical right environmentalism if we don't recognize the extent to which they are 100% sincere in their own understanding.
100% distorted, from my point of view, but also entirely genuine.
Rebecca, how did groups like the Quakers and other minoritarian groups that were trying to find their own sort of foothold against fascism, did they have orientations towards the health and wellness culture that we're talking about?
Yeah, so where I see the intersections for the groups that I study is that a lot of these groups historically forbid the use of alcohol and tobacco We're very involved in the temperance movement in the Anglo-American context, so we're talking Quakers, Salvation Army, Adventist, Christian Science, Latter-day Saints, and others.
It's really quite a lot of them.
It plays out in different ways.
For some, I think the connection, there was a big connection between physical and spiritual wellness.
So Adventists are historically vegetarian as well, and their founder, Ellen White, taught that the human body was a temple and it should not be abused.
So that was sort of their early reasoning.
Slightly different for the Salvation Army in this period, they saw, you know, they had a big emphasis on on social reform and charity work, especially in urban contexts.
And they saw the roots of poverty in people's behavior and character more than in broader systemic explanations.
So they really emphasized what they considered to be habitual sins and linked physical healing from say alcohol abuse with spiritual salvation.
So that's why it was important to not drink alcohol.
It was connected also to spiritual salvation.
Slightly different approaches, but the thing that draws them together is they all saw the Weimar Republic, the new democratic government, after the end of World War I, they saw this as decadent and promoting sin.
And when Hitler comes along with many of the same critiques of Weimar society, and Hitler himself has this public persona of abstaining in alcohol, this was a point of connection with all of these groups, which, you know, I don't want to overstate, you know, they didn't all just like join up to be Nazis because of that, but it definitely was a point of connection.
And I imagine for some of the more pacifist minded, you know, Adventists, for example, it might have been, it might have provided a certain amount of cover as well.
So, if you belong to a group that is vegetarian and teetotaling, and that seems to be aligned with certain aspects of Nazi leadership, maybe they won't be harassed as much?
Right, that was the hope.
Although with the Adventists, they also worried that their dietary practices might seem a little too aligned with Judaism because it kind of mirrors kosher laws, plus the fact that they worship on Saturdays.
They felt a little vulnerable on that front, but yes.
It's such a tangle, oh my gosh.
I'm anticipating your next question to us.
I'm picking up on something that Peter said.
I just want to slightly challenge this notion of modernity and anti-modernity that you're using with us, which I think in some ways, it doesn't quite capture where people were in particularly the post-First World War Period.
On the one hand, look, this was a world which had unleashed mass destruction in the First World War.
So something about where the modern world had taken, was clear to everyone, was disastrous.
It was a world in which the Russian Revolution had taken place and shown the energy and, for many, the threat to the established order.
And so, whatever you had to find to make things work, it had to feel and look a bit different.
And that's when you asked about the eclecticism of the fascists, I mean, they're really responding to this sense of the urgency of trying to find something that's strong enough.
To stand up to the appeal of a revolutionary movement.
And I think, you know, we, for example, we used to see a lot of things as anti-modern, which we would now see as troublingly part of people who are embracing the modern.
And one example I use my students is If one looks at the Encyclopædia Britannica between 1911 and 1945, its entry for civilisation includes the sort of assumption that in the future the modern society will be the one that breeds out those who are unfit and doesn't just allow it to nature to decide who is fit.
So that was sort of mainstream enough for the Encyclopedia to have in its definition of civilization, and we know all sorts of progressive figures who were sort of linked to the eugenics movement, for example.
So I just feel that to capture the moment, and maybe this is true today too, that some of those categories that we have of what constitutes what's modern, even if it's disturbing, it may not be, you know, necessarily anti-modern or simply reactionary.
It may be people thinking Constructively about where they want to go.
It's just that we're very troubled by the answers that they come up with.
This actually relates to a question that I didn't preview to you.
I didn't work on it before, but it's occurring to me that part of what you're describing, especially in the interwar period, is a kind of vacuum of meaning and organization.
And specifically, there's something, I don't quite know if I can articulate this well, but when Peter's talking about how youth-dependent fascist ideology and aesthetics are, and I think Mark, you were talking about how the van der Wogel are also They're youth-led, and I'm thinking about what that might mean in the interwar period, where what's that generation called?
The silent generation?
The lost generation?
It's the generation where so many men have been killed in the First World War, that There are these emergent structures that are very vertically oriented, they're very charismatic, and yet they're also very young.
There's not a lot of older men there, and the whole thing makes me have this sense of sort of disorganized vacuum that I can imagine people reaching for anything that they think will work in order to put their Their minds at ease and what they feel is some sort of order back into their national relations.
And at times it ends up creating things that are anti-authoritarian and anti-patriarchal and gender non-conforming and it's a fascinating period that spins out in 30 different directions at once.
Well, maybe let's land on this particular point by just exploring what you believe the main social and historical contingencies are that push these early ideas of ecology and holism and, you know, stress around modern developments and war.
What are the contingencies that push those sentiments either towards the left or the right?
There are two obvious major events that transform and polarise.
One, as I say, is the Russian Revolution after the First World War, which has a massive impact on politics and makes, in Italy and in Germany, looks old-style, sort of notable politics just look impossibly weak as a way of sustaining the political scene.
The second is the slump, the Wall Street crash and the Depression, which hits sort of recovering nations and cultures that are perhaps evolving, as Peter says, in the multiple ways that sort of interesting things that were happening in the 1920s.
And nobody seems to have an answer as to how you pull out of this global mess.
And that then, of course, creates a polarisation on the political scene in many places.
The right moves to the right.
The communists abandoned their earlier sort of cooperative policy and move towards a more separatist
revolutionary policy and an awful lot of people are worried about what a communist appeal
might mean.
And so that creates some pretty stark choices. I was going to say there's a tremendous book about
the Weimar Republic by a historian who's long since passed away, Ditliff Poikert is his name,
and it's available in English.
I'm afraid I'm forgetting the title.
Weimar Republic, The Crisis of Classical Modernity?
Either of the other two, you remember this?
Do you mean Detlef Poikert's book?
Exactly.
Wonderful book.
It's embarrassing I can't remember the title exactly because I teach this book in my undergraduate courses.
Superb analysis of everything that went wrong and many things that went right.
During the Weimar era, and one of his arguments is, if I can simplify his much more complex argument, one of his arguments boils down to saying the crises that things like the nation-state and things like capitalism routinely produce were also produced in Germany in the 1920s, just as they were in dozens of other societies around the world, but they took on particularly acute forms in that time and in that place, in part because, as Mark just mentioned, Virtually nobody in Germany was able to offer meaningful answers to those very real problems.
One of the several reasons why fascists are able to gain a foothold in the historical situations where they do gain footholds and eventually take power One of the reasons for that is they are able to outmaneuver the other political forces because all those other political forces are failing to answer people's very real problems in their lives that they're experiencing, whether those are economic problems or social problems or problems of meaning, a crisis of meaning.
If the liberal parties fail to do that, which they did in Weimar, for all the credit that Few liberals who were left by the end of the Weimar period deserve, they just failed to answer those questions, when even the German socialist movement, which had been the pride of international socialism for decades on end, when even the Social Democrats in Germany are failing to offer convincing and meaningful answers to the way the world seems to have turned itself upside down
On every German family, on every German individual by the late 1920s, when no other group is available that can try to both explain what's going on and here's a way out of it, that's where fascists are able to step in and say, forget all those other traditional political parties, their failures, we have the way out of this terrible situation that we're all trapped in.
All right.
So, getting a little bit more specific and detail-oriented and into the lives of our characters a little bit.
Mark, the cover of your book, Lives Reclaimed, subtitled is A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany, it really took me aback when Rebecca sent it to me.
I saw six Bund members in something like a yoga pose in a group class.
I think they're on a windswept hill or something like that, and they're in black athletic uniforms that show off pretty ripped musculature.
And at first glance, it reminded me of the typical physical culture images of the era, which reached their aesthetic apex with Riefenstahl's Olympia film in 1938.
But I looked closer, I found some differences.
Can you tell us a bit about that picture and the role of physical culture in the life of the Bund?
Yeah, no, I agree.
I had the same reaction.
And I think part of the challenge that we face when we're looking at a movement like this is wondering whether there's something inherent in the physical practice itself that takes you in a political direction, or whether it just happens there's some other Some other set of ideas or currents that mean that the people who are interested in physical movement happen also to be signed up for one political party or another.
You have just sort of articulated the thesis problem of our podcast, actually.
In fact, yeah, because that's about it, is that we study how conspiracy theories that tend towards far-right politicization emerge out of and proliferate through wellness and yoga movements.
And so, yeah.
All right.
Sorry to interrupt.
Not at all.
And this was something when I was working in the group I wrestled with because, you know, I interviewed some surviving members and one in particular who And it was quite remarkable that this was even possible, actually came into the orbit of the group in the Nazi era, which is quite something.
And did so via having studied this Eurythmic Gymnastics with the co-founder, Dora Marcus.
And then said to me, you know, and as I sort of engaged with this form of movement and so on, I realized I could do no other than commit myself.
So in other words, there was a sort of description of a revelation that came through the movement and ended up being A political participant in the group.
So for her, there was a logic between the way in which one committed one's whole body to exercise and also to this sort of group movement that they did.
So I think it's partly the individual relationship to the body, but it's also finding your place in the group.
And the politics.
I was less sure.
I mean, I had no doubt that what she said was sincere.
I was less sure that she couldn't have gone in another direction.
I do think that they, and so one last point, and then I do think that they were, whilst they were very much about finding your natural organic place in the physical movement in a group, and in that sense they were hierarchical and they had Notions of an organic community, which one also finds on the right.
They were not, in their movement, they were very much an emphasis on naturalness rather than regimentation.
It wasn't utterly stretching the body to its limits.
It was about finding and improving your approach to movement, mobilizing the energy in the body.
And that, whilst that might echo some of the movements that you look at in the present day, Matthew, at the time, this did put them at odds with the physical style of the Nazis.
Well, one of the origin points for this podcast and some of my own research is the fact that the more fascist-oriented approaches towards bodily movement, especially an emphasis on purity and purification and You know, tests of endurance and how the perfection of the body ends up being the microcosm of the perfected state or whatever.
That actually survives in kind of a covert way into the present day in certain forms of neoliberal fitness.
And we can feel it in our bodies, even though the culture is depoliticized and we don't really talk about it openly.
But what I did notice, I said that in that photograph, I noticed some differences between what you would see in that context and what you see produced by Leni Riefenstahl.
And the differences are there are different body types represented.
It doesn't look like everybody's a carbon copy or cookie-cutted.
And there Nobody's sort of moving out of their natural range of motion.
I don't think that anybody is testing themselves against pain.
And so, yeah, I can see the emphasis upon naturalness and the mobilization of some sort of inherent internal power rather than the perfection of something that might otherwise, I don't know, remain impure or something.
Yes, I think that's very well observed.
I guess the follow-up is, Did the Bund members know that while they were – I mean, the person that you talk about comes into the Bund during the Nazi era through Eurythmic Dance, which I think comes out of Steiner, yeah?
Different path.
There's a guy called Jacques Delcroze, so not Steiner.
Okay.
And in fact, they already were very consciously politically at odds with other elements of the sort of Eurythmic community.
There was an understanding of Rhythmic, which was already Much more sort of nationalist and right-wing, which they were very opposed to.
So they had a sense of themselves as a... They had a sense of political directionality already before the...
The Nazis came to power.
But of course, that's the group leaders.
The implication of your question, which is the trajectory of an individual who then encounters the movement, I think is right, because I don't think that she came in with a clear sense of political direction, except maybe a vague sense that she felt at odds with her Parents' adherence to Nazism and felt it didn't pass the smell test.
But I think for her, it's a transformative process which is not pre-determined.
Now, would she have been aware that physical culture, bodybuilding, calisthenics, this other form of Eurythmics that you're talking about, were also being branded as central elements to the body politics of fascism?
Did they see the overlap between these two contexts?
Absolutely, but they felt that what they were doing was different.
I mean, I think they felt that they had a sort of a human-focused naturalness, an unregimented, organic quality, as they would put it, that was entirely at odds with the regime.
And they would have disputed the points of contact that perhaps to us look more obviously visible.
They were doing it correctly, in other words.
Rebecca, I wanted to bring you in to ask whether physical culture pursuits were employed by some of the religious movements that you study at the time.
I mean, you've mentioned diet and teetotaling, but what about movement and various forms of calisthenic or expressive dance?
I have not come across expressive dance or other kinds of exercise or physical movement.
I think that really highlights, you know, the special nature of this group that Mark has written a book about and has spoken about in so many contexts and why that is such a compelling story, I think, because, you know, it's a bit of a It's not very common.
So, I haven't come across that in the groups that I study, but there was The groups that I look at are much more urban and they're all very concerned, and this goes back to the 19th century, very concerned with the dangers of the city, the corrupting influence of urbanization and all of the dangers that go along with that.
And so there was this emphasis on going out into the countryside for fresh air and rejuvenation and they would make an effort to, you know, Send families for a summer holiday in the country.
And it was explicitly, you know, it was a response, I think, to the fear of the dangerous influence of urbanization.
And so many of their other activities were also to address that, but they were in an urban context and had more to do with social reform and addressing poverty and, you know, things like that.
I guess my small experience of Quakerism in my own life is that it's always seemed to be drawing heavily upon, you know, a liturgy of naturalism, you know, that the world bears witness in the same way that you bear witness to your neighbor and that there are always kind of like bucolic and nature-oriented allusions being made.
And I'm wondering if that's a point of connection as well, too.
Sure, I think for groups like the Quakers and some others, there would be, yes, built into their spirituality would be a tradition of not just hearing God or recognizing truth from only the Bible, but also through nature.
That was emphasized a lot more in some of these groups than they would be in some other high church traditions.
Now, you study mainly Christian groups, but I'm wondering whether you know of Jewish communities as well at the time that were engaged in physical culture.
I know that muscular Zionism is a thing of that period.
Yeah, so I mean, I don't know a lot about this.
The man who coined the term muscular Judaism, Max Nordau, was a Hungarian Jew, but he lived all over Europe.
And yes, this was the exact same time period that muscular Christianity was very popular, saying, yes, you know, Religious folk don't need to be and ought not to be sort of weak physically and otherwise.
And so there is an emphasis on sport and robustness and health.
And I mean, the counterpart in the Christian world is really the YMCA.
Yeah, I was just going to echo what Rebecca said and say that, I mean, in the Jewish youth groups, we're all influenced by this and they're all into physical fitness and like, you know, youth movements across the spectrum, they're very much emphasizing Moving out of the cities and recovering the physical health and so on.
On top of that, there was a strong sense in the Jewish community that one reason for antisemitism was that the occupational profile of the Jewish community was skewed and you needed more Jewish craftsmen and more Jewish farmers and so there was a sort of attempt to encourage young people to take up some more physical
professions.
And then of course there was the Zionist element, there was the Zionist youth movement, Blue White,
where there was a sort of belief that at least some young people
should train as farmers and so on.
And obviously, this is not necessarily just dance, but it's also about physicality, as you say, recovering the muscular Jew from the pious, studious Jew, changing the nature of Jewish manhood and, to a certain extent, also Jewish womanhood.
And supporting the project in Palestine.
You know, it's incredible because what you're describing is many of the political positions or at least cultural positions that somebody like Eugene Sandow takes with regard to urbanization and office work making.
people in Northern Europe week all the way down the line.
It's kind of incredible how groups from left and right and, you know, according to various religious traditions and cultural backgrounds are borrowing from so many similar strains.
Peter, I've asked Mark, did the members of the Bund know that they were using physical culture in the correct way. And he said, he
said, yes, pretty much. But I'm wondering that when he points out that when Bundt homes
and businesses were raided by the SS, the SS would kind of like shrug sometimes and
leave if they found gymnastics equipment.
It's a very good question.
And so I'm wondering if Nazis of the time just generally assumed that everyone who was into physical culture at the time was doing so in accordance with their own values.
That would not have been the operative assumption for SS agents, for example, and especially for SD agents.
I know it's an arcane distinction, but technically the intelligence arm of the SS, the people whose job it was to keep tabs on all the groups that the three of us study, those folks, their operative worldview was based on paranoid premises. Everybody was a potential enemy of Nazism,
including dive-in-the-wool Nazis.
So the assumption certainly would not have been, from an SD perspective,
the assumption certainly would not have been, oh, gymnastics, they must be doing
our Nazi kind of gymnastics. I think most likely the assumption was gymnastics.
Who the hell cares?
Everybody does that.
The left does that.
The right does that.
We do that.
That's just not a big deal.
That would be my hunch in those situations.
For what it's worth, there were very well-developed physical culture elements.
Tightly woven into parts of the SS, only parts of it.
There's a magazine that they published for years, up until 1943, which is pretty late for the kinds of things that I study, called Leib und Leben.
I don't even know how to translate that, but it's all about physical culture in a very, very broad sense.
If you include things like breath exercises, does that even count today as a form of physical culture?
For sure it does.
Absolutely it does, yeah.
If that's true, then I would expand a little bit on what Rebecca said a couple minutes ago.
I would point out that there were a number of alternative spiritual groups, not necessarily Christian, more in the neo-pagan direction, that did invoke those, certainly the breathing exercises and maybe forms of dietary strictures.
The Mazda-Zahn movement is one of the better known, regionally strong, a big deal in Saxony
and Switzerland and not much of a big deal elsewhere.
So there are movements like that, and some of those elements, only some of them, then
get taken up after 1933 into the officially sanctioned Nazi life reform apparatus.
There was an actual Nazi life reform apparatus.
Those are the folks who published Leib und Leben, the journal that I mentioned.
So my hunch would be that if Gestapo officers stumble across something that suggests that
people are doing physical culture, their response would be a shrug of indifference.
Not because they assume it must be the Nazi version, but because those things are so widely spread, so widely practiced, that it seemed unimportant to them.
So, you're describing a kind of, again, an opportunistic collation of life reform techniques that they bring into this manual, but at the same time, we're talking about, you know, Military divisions and policing divisions that are also increasingly drug-addled, and they're speaking about holism, and they're wondering and praising about how to get back to nature.
What about the hypocrisy?
Nazis of the time square their eco-fascist ideas with the fire and steel of their war.
They didn't, would be my answer, in part because Nazism never, never, thankfully, never had a chance to really solidify or sort out its own internal problems.
They thought they were going to win the war.
And once they, obviously, they thought that you don't start a war that you think you're going to lose.
So they expected to win the war.
And there were these all sorts of plans, radically contradictory plans from Eighteen different directions about how the new Nazi-dominated Europe is going to grow its food.
Will it be fully organic and life-affirming and protect nature, or will it be fully mechanized and chemicalized?
There's so many different Nazi perspectives that never sort themselves out because the slogan from 1939 onwards, the slogan was, after the war, that's when we'll settle those questions.
For now, We just need to win.
So the contradictions simply never get resolved, the internal contradictions within Nazism.
I've never thought about that, actually, and I'm wondering if there are, you know, novelists who have taken a crack at visualizing how that would have fallen out from the post-war period on, because that is kind of incredible that they don't have any time to actually organize a plan.
They don't have a plan.
There is no plan, actually.
There's so many contradictory plans that are utterly incompatible with one another, and the smarter Nazis are fully aware of that, and each of them are siding with the faction that they think is going to get the upper hand once we win the war, and then that never happens.
Boy, oh boy, it sounds very familiar, actually.
It sounds very familiar.
I don't know what I'm thinking of right now, but Mark, let me turn to Artur Jakobs, or Jakobs?
Jakobs.
Jakobs, he's the founder of the Bund.
How did he lead it?
Well, I mean, I think this picks up on something you said earlier about how the sort of the spirit of the youth movement, what one finds in sort of different kinds of political parties, because this, the idea of the charismatic leader who by dint of personality and their qualities becomes the sort of the father, and it's usually a man, Yeah, of the movement.
It's something that we find in the Nazi Party, but it's something also that we find across the spectrum in sort of youth-dominated movements.
And so it was here in the Bund, on this particular Bund that I look at, the word just means League or Federation.
Or can also mean covenant.
But Arthur had been teaching classes in the new adult education system after the war and had gathered a sort of group of acolytes around him who were kind of inspired by his vision.
And out of that relationship emerges than the group.
So it wasn't a dictatorship, it was a sort of... The whole model of the charismatic-led youth group was a voluntary subordination.
But nevertheless, there is in the climate this sense of a search for the personality who will provide guidance and leadership and create the apex of a...
And it makes some pretty intrusive decisions.
but natural, this notion of the organic community was very strong across the political spectrum.
And that's how it works.
Then there is a sort of inner committee which makes leadership decisions.
And it makes some pretty intrusive decisions.
I mean, the members go to it to make sure that their partners are suitable and they can marry.
And it institutes this kind of test marriage in which people would be observed as partners
to make sure that they have the right kind of equality and so on in their partnerships.
There's an interesting mixture of hierarchy and equality in their philosophy.
Yeah, and that mixture makes a lot of alarm bells go off for me as a cult researcher because there were a couple of details you have about Jacobs that I wanted to ask about.
There's this early scandal in his career involving an overnight dormitory stay with seven girls, teenage girls, and then he marries one of them, Dor or Dore?
Dora, yeah.
Now, she's 14 years his junior, and in 1928 you report that Dora writes that the Bund leader should stand above all others because democracy will fail the movement.
And as you just mentioned, the Bund is pretty intrusive in marriages and family lives.
Now, so in terms of sort of functional resistance to fascism, Do you feel that these kinds of organizational structures were just in the air?
Were they going to be effective in their aims?
Or did they actually mirror some of the politics that they were opposing?
Well, those two things are not necessarily contradictory.
Because their movements survive often, which have the discipline and hierarchy and the trust and authority which gives them the strength, be they Jehovah's Witnesses, be they Communists, be they the Bund, which gives them the strength to withstand Uh, the enormous pressures, uh, cultural, intellectual and security direct threats to the body that, uh, that Nazism represents.
So in that way, um, the, the, the certain kinds of symmetries, it doesn't, doesn't, doesn't, it doesn't mean that they're going to be absorbed, but it can be the prerequisite for them being able to withstand separately.
Part of their tragedy after the war was that the young people that they were trying to win over as new members after the war were actually rather conscious of what they saw as the cemeteries and didn't want to subordinate themselves to something that was going to be hierarchical in a way that they thought they'd just escaped from.
And in that sense, part of their tragedy was that they were sort of tired of the brush, of the group that they'd so Of the political movement that they had so courageously stood up against.
So I think you've captured a certain kind of paradox there.
Well, and for those erstwhile supporters who are moving away from the movement, there's two strikes because, you know, they haven't, I mean, obviously the war has been a disaster.
It's very difficult to measure the success of one's resistance.
And then, yes, there's this rhyming organizational structure, again, that seems vertical and authoritarian, and it's just going to have some probably negative echoes to it, I imagine.
Rebecca, how did the groups you study navigate this problem of charisma and leadership?
That might be a really broad question, but maybe particularly for the groups who posed substantial cultural and political resistance during this time.
I can only answer that question by speaking to one group at a time because they all responded so differently.
But a good example would be the Adventists, and this is actually a rare example of a charismatic woman leader in this time period.
Her name was Hulda Jost, and she was the head of the German Adventist Welfare Organization.
And she was sent on this speaking tour across North America in 1936, spoke to dozens and dozens of Adventist meetings, but also other types of meetings, women's clubs and German clubs and university groups and all manner of things.
It was supposed to be a speaking tour about German social welfare and how advanced that was.
This is what she was an expert in.
It was also supposed to be about Adventist spirituality.
Unfortunately, she kind of went off script, at least what the Americans were expecting.
It turns out that her tour was partly funded by the German government and that this was very much a propaganda tour.
And so in many of these meetings, she would speak positive messages about Germany.
For specifically for this American audience.
And it seems, you know, you can you can hear her words coming through in the news reporting.
It's clear she's a very forceful kind of person.
She said, you know, in very strong terms, things like, OK, this example is from the Detroit Free Press.
You know, Hitler wants peace with all nations, but he wants to return to Germany and the German people the mantle of self-respect, which they lost at the close of the Great War.
This is a classic speaking note.
The Oregon Journal from a few weeks later reports that she likened acts of violence against Jews in Germany to the lynchings of American Negroes.
This, of course, is the language that was in the newspaper at the time.
She said, President Roosevelt does not want the Negroes to be lynched, and neither does Hitler want the Jews to be persecuted.
Basically, there's bad guys in every country.
So these were all sort of classic Nazi propaganda messages at the time.
And the thing about where the charismatic leadership comes into conflict is that some of her fellow Adventist Americans were very troubled when she saw that these talks were much more political than they were expecting.
And yet they were all part of the same spiritual community, supposedly all fellow Adventists, and felt a really very strong bonds with each other.
And so It was, I think, very difficult for them to navigate, like, what do we do in the moment?
Like, the rest of the tour is booked, she's consistently going off script, but, you know, how do you deal with that?
I think was very difficult for them.
Mark, part of your definitional matter on the bunt includes the lines, the German word bunt is also a term for biblical covenant, and this was no doubt part of its appeal for many.
In Artur's bunt, the spiritual element was particularly marked given the group's festival of light, its search for inner truth, its use of the word zendung or calling, its describing its mission, its asceticism and its sense of Now, did this interior focus spiritually imply or command a commitment to pacifism?
No.
No.
They were, in that sense, they were very hostile to what they saw as sort of utopianism that was sort of unaware of the realities of power and inequality.
So, they saw themselves as part of a A socialist struggle that might involve a real transformation.
And whilst they became hostile to Stalinism, they were very interested in the Russian Revolution.
They also did not, unlike the Jehovah's Witnesses, they did not force their members to resist the call to conscription under Germany.
Now that's not, of course, not because they thought it was okay to serve in the German army, but they didn't have such a kind of spiritual commitment to anti-militarism that they thought it worth their while being sent to a concentration camp in order to avoid being conscripted.
So, no.
Which was the option.
Which was the option, yeah.
So it sounds like they managed to hold two very strong positions at the same time, which is a firm materialist analysis of power and how it works in the world.
And then, as you describe, this kind of pietist internal view of personal dignity.
Is that unique in your view?
And maybe, Rebecca, you can answer as well.
Are there other examples of groups that are able to hold these two seemingly contradictory or perhaps even tense ideas together?
Well, I think there are a lot of small groups on the left that have both sort of highly developed sense of wanting
to develop human potential, but at the same time committed to the idea that some sort of form
of political struggle will be necessary to attain the better, the sort of socialist society
of the future.
So in that sense, as soon as you try to combine personal philosophy with an ambition
of collective transformation, at some level, you had to be, I think, awake to the idea
that some kind of forceful and energetic transformation was going to be involved.
I mean, I would say that a lot of the time, they were fairly, in fact, fairly naive in their belief that if only they could educate others and reach out and so on, a social transformation would follow.
So, although they...
Formally, not averse to revolutionary activity.
In actual fact, I think in their practice, they were much more sort of peaceable and pietistic than they claimed.
But philosophically, they recognized that transforming the world would require some forceful intervention.
You know, Rebecca, this reminds me of this passage in the chapter that you sent me, which we'll also refer to in the show notes, about how there is a meeting at some point in the late 1930s between English Quakers who come to visit some German Quakers in Germany.
And there's a point at which the English are, I guess, encountering The anti-Semitic rhetoric of certain political functionaries around them, and they proposed to their German counterparts that they invite the fascists to lunch and talk to them about how they might change their perspectives.
And how did that turn out?
Yes, this is a great story that's told.
So this was at one of their annual meetings and so, yes, they had these English guests and, you know, they had to kind of tactfully explain to their English friends, like, that would be a bad idea.
It would also be rather dangerous, not only for those German Quakers, but because they had created an environment that, in their language, there were non-Aryans among them.
So there were Jews or people who were And that, you know, what they were trying to do is not make a big statement, but that they were trying to go about doing what little they could in the practical realm to show solidarity and create community for Jews who were at that time, you know, losing much of their communal life.
Peter, I have a similar question about the apparent tensions or contradictions within spiritual approaches about fascists, but I think I know the answer already, which is that contradictions don't have the time to work themselves out.
But I did want to just mention and ask you that, you know, Himmler carried around a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
He was an indefile.
He adored his particular brand of Orientalist mysticism.
But it was also for him a book-length spiritual justification for war, and so I'm wondering if there was any sense that he or any other Nazi who was into yoga, whether they dealt with that other stream of Indian wisdom traditions that preached nonviolence.
That's a good question, and I don't think I know the answer, unfortunately.
That's not the For better or worse, that's not the aspect of those folks that I study, but I know people who do.
I could ask them.
I mean, it might just never have come up.
I'm pretty sure it came up.
It's the kind of thing where I know there's a literature out there on it that I haven't read yet, and I wouldn't be able to give you an informed answer to that great question.
I know answers to that question in the Italian context, in the context of Italian fascism, Better than I know it in the context of Nazism.
As in how Julius Evola would have maybe squared that circle.
Yeah, well he's the classic example.
Evola thought that the Kshatriya, technically the second caste, below Brahman's.
Right.
Evert would believe that that was all mixed up.
A society run by Brahmans was a disaster.
Right.
It should be run by the so-called warrior caste.
He believed that warrior kings were the ancient hyperborean inheritance that still lived on in the Aryan race today.
He thought he could read all of that stuff out of ancient South Asian texts.
Right.
he was wrong about that, but because I'm, I don't know Sanskrit, I'm not...
I'm not an expert in that.
I think it was a classic Orientalist mistake that he fell for, but he and Himmler are both symptomatic of their times in that regard.
They were hardly the only prominent far-right political figures to be deeply interested, even if naively interested, in what they understood as South Asian intellectual traditions and spiritual traditions.
You know, I have a question under the category of hopes and dreams that I want to finish with, but before we go into happier territory, I just want to note that currently we're watching Georgia Maloney rise to power.
And it's reminded me and a lot of people, I think, of the very lucid but also traumatized analysis of fascist rhetoric that gets handed down from people like Umberto Eco and Sartre, who point out that in linguistic terms, fascism heralds the end of meaning and sense-making, because fascism does not have to make a considered argument to persuade you.
It only has to demonstrate raw power.
So, you know, every reflective, progressive, generative spirituality I can think of, even if these are idealizations, uses language in exactly the opposite way to the Or the rhetoric of power, often to the point of trying to understand and even forgive sinners and political enemies.
And so, I'm wondering if you see a way in which the spirituality that we see in the Bund and in movements like Quakerism.
Can it provide, can it answer this language, and can it provide more than internal relief to those who are practicing it?
Absolutely it can.
The question in my mind is, in which of its variants has it pulled that off?
historically, which is one of the things that I love about Marx.
Marx's research forces me to re-examine some of my own assumptions
because I generally look at alternative spiritual movements that
absolutely failed.
Right.
But that's not preordained. There's nothing, there's nothing that's not destined to happen.
Those things happen because individual human beings, under particular historical conditions,
make specific choices that end up being disastrous in the cases that I study,
and every once in a while that end up being little beacons of hope in an extraordinarily
Bleak time.
So it's absolutely possible for all those for your listeners out there who are positively drawn toward alternative forms of spirituality.
There is no reason in my view to entirely give up on those things that you find appealing and attractive.
But if you're going to make that work out in the in the societal crises that we're all facing, you're going to have to eventually think long and hard about the political implications of the particular form of alternative spirituality that you're drawn to.
If you don't think those things through, you're just leaving yourself wide open for misuse and appropriation.
I think the story of the German Quakers sort of puts that into really concrete form of what Peter was just talking about, because they really wrestled with what to do and how best to go about navigating the Nazi regime.
And they decided, you know, in Quaker style, to leave it up to each person to decide on their own.
They didn't decide on a top-down approach.
And they didn't do what a few other groups did.
Well, I'm thinking of the Bruderhof.
This is a very small community that tried to go back to its Anabaptist roots.
And the leader just wrote a few different letters, quite detailed letters, explaining exactly what they thought about Nazi ideology.
And this is what we're on board with.
This is what we cannot agree to.
And they sent it off to the You know, top the right chancellery and the head of the Gestapo.
And then, you know, they made their position very, very public.
And the Quakers decided exactly the opposite, to not broadcast their opposition.
Leave it up to each person.
And so what ended up happening was that the Quakers actually did more, I think, than any other small Christian group to show solidarity with Jews, to give practical assistance.
And there are reasons why they I would argue that they were treated less harshly than some of the other groups, and I think that has to do with the really high reputation of Quakers in Germany, which has to do with the American and British, American Foreign Service Committee and British Foreign Service Council, who came in after World War I and did massive feeding programs for people at the end of the war.
Every German knew about Quakerism and had a very good reputation, even though we're talking about only probably 300 Quakers in Germany in this time period, so very, very small.
So they were actually able to do practical, positive work in this period.
However, after the war, some of them really wrestled with that fact.
They wrestled with the fact that, you know, should we have spoken out on principle?
Was it wrong to actually go under the radar?
Are we somehow complicit in You know, promoting Nazism because we didn't speak out.
And that's, you know, of course, looking at it from a 21st century perspective, I feel like, oh no, my goodness, you did the right thing.
But that's, you know, in hindsight.
I thought those were two great answers.
I'd just like to make a distinction.
I mean, one is, are there kinds of spirituality, are there kinds of positions in relation to oneself and so on, that can create a space to resist a dictatorship?
And I think both, you know, Peter and Rebecca have said, have shown absolutely that there are, and they can take And they can take different forms and they can sometimes lead to more pragmatic behaviour which is constructive and helpful and sometimes they can lead to very principled things which may in the end be self-destructive but convey a real moral stance of not being absorbed into the dictatorship.
But the other side of it, when you talk about Maloney, is whether or not in a situation where we're not resisting a dictatorship, where you're making choices in a pluralist society, whether or not there are these spiritual positions that lead you in the right direction.
And there I think the, I have to say, I don't, I'm sure that it's, as always, it's perfectly possible to hold a whole range of positions, but I feel like it's the absence of, it's the destruction of pluralism, it's the loss of concern or even the ability to recognize facts and evidence in terms of what people claim, it's the destruction of certain spheres of communication, those kinds of things.
I feel much more than one's spiritual practice which feels so important and so fragile now in our current situation.
Maloney hasn't demonstrated fascist power, but just like Peter was saying about The situation in the 1930s.
She's the one person who wasn't part of the governing coalition before.
And so she's the one person who sort of can present herself as being outside and she has the answers.
But the rhetoric is vague and amorphous and obviously it's now quite unclear exactly what What they're going to stand for.
And it's that ability to communicate, to understand, to test that I so worry about.
And that seems to me a current, a real challenge.
Well, to allay worries, but also to speak for true outsiders, let's finish, Mark, with your favorite Boone story of resilience.
It's not quite a story of resilience, but it's a story of humility, a wonderful story of humility.
When Arthur Jacobs One of the things they did was they helped, because they couldn't prevent people from being deported, but they tried to provide the support and help they could before Jews from the local communities were deported.
They gave them goods, because they didn't know what was going to be at the other end, so they helped get away.
To get stuff together that might help them in wherever they were being sent to.
They provided kind of moral support so they knew there were people who were assisting.
They assisted in getting their stuff to the station and so on.
And one woman turns to Artur before getting into the dance and says, you know, thanks
you so much.
You don't know what your words mean to me.
There's gestures of moral support.
And Artur says, thank you, because it's only through you that we, and our ability to connect
to you, that we have some sense of our burden of guilt being even slightly lifted.
And that's not a post-Hoc memory.
This is a contemporary diary entry that he records this conversation and that insight that everybody, even those who are against, were implicated and you had to act to overcome the moral burden of your implication.
Even if there were small gestures, I thought that was an astounding insight.
Peter, you've been involved in anarchist and ecology groups.
What works in impossible times?
Besides a lot of meetings, a lot of discussions.
A lot of Robert's Rules meetings.
Or not.
Or meetings without any rules whatsoever.
Right.
What works?
What works is what you can make work in your historical situation.
I wish I had a better, more universally applicable answer to that, but I just don't think there are such answers.
What works in Wisconsin in October 2022 is radically different from what might have worked in Italy in October 19.
The stakes are different.
The people involved are different.
The play of forces is going to be different.
If there is a generalized universal answer to that question, It's going to, I think, come down to being honest with ourselves about what we can actually achieve in the current historical movement and where we need to actually become more pull back into ourselves and make sure that things don't keep getting worse
And they currently are, they're bad enough right now, but the things don't keep getting worse.
And if you can somehow find the boundary between those things, don't give up on your hopes for a genuinely new society, for genuinely new forms of community, for genuinely new forms of social organization.
Never give up on those hopes, but be honest and clear-sighted about what you can actually implement now and what you might have to wait for future generations and future opportunities.
Rebecca, the final word to you, what is your favorite story about what spiritual community offers in response to terrible times?
It's a really great question because I never frame my questions in that way.
I am more used to asking, you know, what are the dangers that come out of spiritual community during times of fascism or dictatorship?
Because often these church groups or spiritual communities would have said at the time that just by continuing to do what we do, That is, you know, the best that we can do in difficult times.
That's the ultimate good.
Right.
So by going about our business and even just continuing to exist is a positive force.
And so as a historian, I look back at that and I say, yes, but, you know, so the Salvation Army continued to do the same sorts of charity work.
provide free meals to people in shelters, homeless shelters.
Yes, but the landscape of who was, you know, in need looked radically different after Jews began to be persecuted and they don't address that at all.
So, you know, I have a lot of questions about that, but I will try to answer your question in a more positive way.
I do have a story that sounds very similar to the story that Mark just told.
And this is really remarkable because Most Jews in Germany, you know, weren't deported until later.
So the story is from 1942, when in the town of Bad Pyrmont, where the German Quakers were headquartered, the Jews of the town were rounded up for deportation, but they were kept at the local train station for 48 hours or so before they were deported.
And during that time, the Quakers, very much out in the open, publicly, went down to the train station, spent time with them, brought them sandwiches, talked with them, comforted them, you know, very similar to what Mark just described.
So it was, it was in many ways very ordinary sort of Thank you all so much for your time and for your insight.
Thank you for dealing with a very broad range of issues in a fairly compressed time.
But the fact that it was public in 1942 in Germany, I think that is really significant
and really rare that German citizens would be showing that kind of solidarity.
Thank you all so much for your time and for your insight.
Thank you for dealing with a very broad range of issues in a fairly compressed time.
Mark, thank you so much.
Thank you for all that you do.
Thank you, Peter.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you, Rebecca.
Yeah, thanks for the invitation.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality Podcast.
