Hitler Sees his Grandchildren and Smiles

The current crisis over the Israeli-Gaza conflict is only the beginning; the culture wars have become hot. Hitler’s grandchildren have announced their arrival. On the streets they harass and persecute Jews, declare their allegiance to authoritarian and racist ideologies, plan and execute terrorist attacks, stage violent demonstrations, shut down city centres and vital infrastructure, attack a priest in his church, workers in bottle shops, prowl the streets bashing gays, publish private details about hundreds of Jewish people in the arts, and interdict and silence all opposition.

Ensconced at Sydney and Melbourne Universities, with the obvious connivance of their administrations and the federal education minister, they intimidate Jewish students, disrupt classes, ‘cancel’ visiting Israeli academics, occupy protest encampments, indoctrinate little children in antisemitic hate, teach them anti-Israeli and anti-Australian slogans, conduct them in pro-Hamas chants, cover the walls with hateful posters, violently harass any opposition and, as Chris Kenny put it in The Australian, “congratulate each other on social  media, order pizzas and stir-fry through Uber Eats, [secure] in nylon tents with security guards watching over them.” And all the while they call for a global intifada against the Western world, demand the destruction of Israel and the eradication of the Jewish people.

Whether they are ‘Gen Y’, ‘Millennials’, ‘Gen Z’, or whatever, they are the direct descendants of the oedipally deranged extremist offspring of the Hitler Youth generation so chillingly portrayed by Jillian Becker in Hitler’s Children: the Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang (1978). Eyes ablaze with fanaticism, their forebears had fervently embraced Nazism and rabid anti-Semitism, and eagerly filled the ranks of the German Student Union that executed an earlier nationwide campaign of anti-Semitism. Directed by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, they targeted the “gutter Jewish literati [and] intellectual filth”. Compounding anti-intellectualism with anti-Ssemitism, they destroyed  tens of thousands of volumes, even entire libraries and bookshops, all the while declaring themselves the unquestioning devotees of Hitler and his promise of a Judenfrei Third Reich that would last a thousand years.

Today, the main difference across generations is that Hitler’s ‘Jew-free’ regime would be ruled by an Aryan super-race, whereas the Judenfrei regime that his ideological grandchildren lust after will be an ultra-repressive theocratic absolutism and kleptocracy in which every aspect of life will be regulated according to Sharia law, women will be whipped in the streets and LGBTIQ folk will face the death penalty.

How to explain the attraction of such a totalitarian and exterminationist ideology across generations? This question has exercised the minds of scholars for decades since such ground-breaking works as Lewis Feuer’s The Conflict of Generations: The Character and Significance of Student Movements (1969). Explanations vary, but it appears clear that there is a perennial need amongst a significant cohort of young people for totalizing explanations that seek to encompass and radically simplify the complexity of the world, reducing it to a few simple factors (e.g., American Imperialism, Zionism, the Jewish World Conspiracy, etc.) that serve to rationalize or justify political positions rooted in deeper psychological pathologies.

It is a feature of the current politico-cultural crisis in the West that this ideological syndrome is now championed as the concept of  ‘intersectionality’, which purports to reduce all forms of alleged oppression, victimhood, and exploitation to a common source (e.g., those listed above, plus capitalism, colonialism, the patriarchy, white supremacism, etc.). It is for this reason that otherwise quite incongruous groups (e.g., feminists and LGBTIQ folk, and misogynistic and homophobic Islamists) feel ideologically comfortable joining together in the present anti-Israel/pro-Hamas coalition of hate. For example, a radical antisemitic, pro-Hamas academic has declared she feels comfortable attacking Israel and Jews because it is her duty “as somebody who fights all forms of oppression and violence [and] who opposes racism, misogyny, homophobia and all forms of oppressive harm.” This was when Hamas still held 130 Israeli hostages taken during the  October 7 massacre and as various Muslim countries make homosexuality a capital crime.

Given the availability of this readily radicalized cohort, the task for the radical ringmasters is to mobilize it around the desired political objectives (i.e., anti-Western and antisemitic rage) and this requires leadership and direction. And this involves the same well-organized and trained militant cadre that has appeared, sometimes as if from nowhere, during such campaigns as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the Voice, anti-Australia Day, Anti-Anzac, Extinction Rebellion, and in previous radical upsurges dating back to the 1960s. Usually associated with far-left groups like Socialist Alternative (The self-proclaimed “largest left-wing revolutionary group in Australia …with a national presence and an expanding membership.”), such militants follow the strategy of entryism and are embedded, along with their foot soldiers, supporters and enablers, within the ALP, the Greens, the universities and schools, the intelligentsia, arts and the media (especially the ABC), the unions (e.g., the NTEU), the public service and various government agencies (e.g., the AHRC, the ARC, the eSafety Commissioner), the social services, ministerial and electoral offices, the expansive NGO sector, and increasingly in corporate positions.

Meanwhile, many of the familiar faces amongst the foot soldiers at protests are happy to survive on government handouts via Centrelink, the NDIS, the Australia Council, etc. Ironically, this cadre is also happy to disclose its insurrectionist strategy, as we will see shortly, content in the knowledge that their activity, being of the left, faces little or no sanction from a complicit political elite and compliant police forces, all overseen by ALP governments.

Their arrogance, self-conceit, and sense of invulnerability are also encouraged by the manner in which our security services have been deliberately hamstrung by the present Federal Government, an administration dominated by career politicians who cut their teeth in university politics where they imbibed this far-left, anti-Western and antisemitic ideology. Its connivance in the explosion of antisemitism and Islamist extremism is exemplified by the exclusion of the Director-General of ASIO from the Australia’s National Security Committee of Federal Cabinet, and by the fact that the government, as Peter Jennings of Strategic Analysis Australia writes, “has no interest in strengthening the police or intelligence agencies in the counter-terrorism work because they worry it would counter their pandering to the Muslim vote in Sydney and Melbourne and lose progressive support to the Greens.” Indeed, the Federal Education Minister is completely beholden to the 60,000 Muslims in his electorate, and the ALP’s subservience to this ‘entitled’ constituency was reflected in the latter’s righteous indignation at the temerity of the Counter-Terrorism Taskforce in not consulting them prior to a series of pre-emptive raids and arrests of a large number of juveniles on very serious terror-related charges.

The convergence of militant Islamism with various neo-Marxist organizations began in the Sixties (c.1965 to 1974), an extremely important era of social, cultural and political turmoil whose importance in the genealogy of the current crisis is presently being assessed in several important works (e.g., Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, 2023). Exploding at the height of the Cold War, it was characterized by the anti-war movement, the massive expansion of tertiary education, and the rise of the neo-Marxist New Left. For a time, a vast range of possibilities appeared to open up, but paradoxically a significant cohort exploited this period of unprecedented liberty to embrace extremist ideologies that promoted the radical overthrow of the very system that provided this liberty. Led by the New Left and the ‘Adversary Culture’ centred on the rapidly expanding university sector and fed by the very efficient agit-prop activity of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and their epigones and domestic agents, fellow travelers and useful idiots, the period entrenched an intense and militant self-hatred in liberal democratic societies, the fruit of which can be seen in our universities’ absurdly self-righteous refusal to accept many millions of dollars from the Ramsay Centre to establish courses on Western Civilisation, while, e.g., the ANU accepted $2million each from Dubai, Iran, and Turkey for a Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.

At the broadest strategic level, this ‘unholy alliance’ of Islamism and neo-Marxism aims not at forcing concessions from liberal democratic society but seeks instead to undermine its core values and destroy its basic social and cultural fabric. Its ultimate aim is the  extinction of liberal democracy, and to that end it regards its political enemies not as rivals for power within a shared and respected constitutional regime, but as representatives of an intrinsically evil and corrupt system that has no right to exist and must be ‘cancelled’ and eventually eradicated. It is the dark legacy of the ‘Sixties  that the radical cohort described above embraces this worldview.

The unholy alliance occurred at a time when the Western revolutionary tradition had reached an impasse in its search for a viable Revolutionary Subject to lead the total social transformation it has always desired. Over the past two centuries this agent has variously been identified with the people; the nation; the industrial proletariat; the peasantry; the lumpenproletariat; the intelligentsia; the oppressed masses of the Third World; and, since the Sixties, various coalitions of students, artists, writers, blacks, women, the LGBTQI community, and various ‘victims’ groups, and now, as we are seeing, radical Islamist groups, represented by al Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas. Despite their extremely reactionary nature, the contemporary left is attracted to these Islamist groups because they are perceived to be the latest incarnation of the revolutionary force that will transform their world.

It was, of course, the industrial proletariat that was to be in the vanguard of the revolution, and its failure to fulfil this role led the New Left to conceive of itself as embedded within a seamless system of total and malevolent power that totally encompassed Western society. It therefore looked to external agents of revolutionary change and came to support various campaigns of decolonization and anti-imperialism, and romanticized Third World revolutionary movements and figures, coming to believe that their theories of revolutionary action could be pursued within advanced industrial societies. This shift involved the adoption of a neo-Marxist model of political economy that sought to analyze the global economy in terms of the ‘exploitation’ of the Third World by the central capitalist powers of the West. Some version of the  ‘external proletariat’ located in the Third World therefore became the new Revolutionary Subject, while the enemy and the principal agents of oppression were seen now as Western societies in their totality. These were viewed as inherently corrupt and therefore legitimate targets for radical political action, including mass systemic disruption and terrorism targeting ordinary people and civil society (cf. M. Bendle, “Existential Terrorism: Civil Society and its Enemies,” Australian Journal of Politics and History. 52(1), 2006).

Various statements of this radical ideology can readily be found on-line and in inner-city bookshops (e.g., Gleebooks in Sydney and Readings in Melbourne), but a succinct and revealing statement is provided by The Coming Insurrection, 2009) Attributed to ‘The Invisible Committee’, The Coming Insurrection appeared in French in 2007. Epitomizing the above worldview, it depicts every area of modern life as a site of desolation, oppression, and exploitation, while reducing the complexities of the modern world to simple slogans and ‘sound bites’. Nevertheless, a review of its English translation (2009) in the leftist New Statesman, declared it to be “without a doubt the most thought-provoking radical text to be published in the past ten years. It deserves to be read and discussed”, while the New York Times sympathetically portrayed its view of the West as a “diseased and dehumanizing civilization that cannot be reformed but must … be torn apart and replaced”. Consequently, it quickly became influential in various neo-Marxist, Trotskyist, anarcho-autonomist, anti-colonialist, anti-globalization, BLM,  antisemitic, and related movements.

Like The Communist Manifesto, upon which it models itself, The Coming Insurrection is explicitly apocalyptic in its analysis of Western Civilisation, which it despises as “clinically dead [and only] kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere”. Consequently, “what we’re facing is not the crisis of a society but the extinction of a civilization … its clinical death”, and what is required of radicals is “to decide for the death of civilization”, and to then commit themselves to its extinction by joining in direct revolutionary action against the entire system.

The new manifesto claims to speak for an alienated generation that “has known nothing but economic, financial, social and ecological crisis”, and it then itemizes the various components of what it sees as a quickly evolving revolutionary situation: the global financial crisis and associated crimes and scandals; environmental destruction and climate change; political incompetence and corruption; booming unemployment; urban degradation and riots; the failure of the educational system; irreversible demographic shifts; ethnic conflict and anti-migration sentiment; the war on terror; the alienation of youth; inter-generational conflict; the collapse of the welfare state; anti-globalization violence; and chaos in various parts of the world, most especially in the Middle-East.

This apocalyptic scenario is embraced as the final systemic crisis that will overwhelm liberal democracies and open the path for successful revolutionary action against what The Coming Insurrection depicts as a global system of domination exercised by a vast transnational ‘Empire’, a planetary apparatus of exploitation led by the United States and ‘the Jews’. Opposing this will be the ‘Insurrection’, as the alienated masses exploit “the truly revolutionary potentiality of the present”, and implement a new regime of liberation, conceived as “the matrix of a meticulous, audacious assault on domination”, led by the marginalized groups noted above and insurgent Islamist movements. In the face of this revolt, “the future has no future”.

As we are seeing, the front line in the coming insurrection will be the modern metropolis, “one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed”, and a system particularly susceptible to a “brutal shutting down of borders … a sudden interruption of supply lines [and] organized blockades of the axes of communication”, so that “the whole façade crumbles [as it] can no longer mask the scenes of carnage haunting it from morning to night”. The manifesto stresses the central role that terrorist attacks on communications and other forms of infrastructure can play in the urban guerrilla warfare that will characterize the coming insurrection.

In doing so they would have been closely following the strategy of previous generations of European ultra-left urban guerrilla and terrorist groups, including the first of ‘Hitler’s Children’, i.e., the German Red Army Faction, which carried out a program of assassinations and bombings in the 1970s and worked closely with the PLO, the PFLP, the PFLP-GC, and Fatah, etc.  Similar forerunners include the Italian Proletarian Action Group, whose founder, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, was killed while trying to blow up high-voltage power lines near Milan in 1972; and the Italian Red Brigades, which launched a major campaign of assassination, violence, and destruction against Italy in the 1970s, nearly destroying democracy in that country.

The political and theoretical influence of such groups on The Coming Insurrection is obvious from its violent and hysterical language, radical arguments and concepts, anti-Western extremism, and its advocacy of direct action. It is also revealed in Introduction to Civil War, a manifesto published in Tiqqun, a neo-Marxist philosophy journal founded in 2005 by Julien Coupet, a failed doctoral candidate and probable principal author of The Coming Insurrection. Intended to supplement The Coming Insurrection, this new tract depicts liberal democratic society as already in a state of disintegration, and as held together only by the increasingly intrusive and oppressive activity of the capitalist state which acts as the local administrative arm of ‘Empire’. Out of this chaos will emerge a state of civil war, which radicals should embrace as an opportunity to establish a new form of libertarian communism.

These tracts showcase the tradition of radical French irrationalism shaped, e.g., by such influential theorists of postmodernism and deconstructionism as Michel Foucault, Giles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Félix Guattari, etc., but the references to ‘Empire’ also directs attention to the work of  the far-left Italian philosophers, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, particularly the latter’s extremely influential radical diatribes against the West, (co-authored with Michael Hardt) Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and ‘Empire: Twenty years On’ (2019) These works depict the global ‘Empire’ in terms of a pyramid of power that must be attacked. At the top, wielding ‘monarchical’ domination over the world, are ‘the Jews’, America, NATO, the G8, IMF, WTO and similar agents of global capitalism, which are to be targets of direct action, sabotage, terrorism, etc. Beneath them is the economic oligarchy of multinational corporations and subservient nation-states. Incredibly, it is claimed that ‘true’ democracy exists only in the political realm dominated by unrepresentative bodies like the United Nations and various international NGOs, such as Greenpeace, with parliamentary democracy rejected as a sham that merely perpetuates capitalism. This set of ideas is quite influential throughout the Australian left.

Negri’s role has been crucial in the development of this extremist tradition. He was the leading ideologue of the Red Brigades when the group carried out its most notorious terrorist action – the kidnapping of former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, and the murder of his five bodyguards. Moro was held for weeks while the Red Brigades telephoned his family to taunt them, before finally murdering him and dumping his body. The telephone voice was linked to Negri, and he was subsequently convicted in connection with this and other terrorist murders. However, he escaped to France where he remained for 14 years, teaching at leading universities with the theorists noted above. Terrorism associated with the Red Brigades occurred in waves regularly after the 1970s and The Coming Insurrection signaled the appropriation of its underlying ideology by Hitler’s grandchildren as they indulge in their ultra-left, antisemitic onslaught on Western society.

Nowhere is this rhetorical hyperbole more obvious than in the tract’s indictment of the modern self, which it depicts as operating “in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse”. The author laments desperately that “everything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity”, but merely an existence within a system that wants only to control, regulate, and placate a population that has become “the paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis … sickness, fatigue [and] depression”, as “the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack”. Mental life in such a world is characterized by “individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampart depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact”.

Such references to mental disease, dissociation, depression, and the disintegration of identity recur throughout the book, and it is impossible to ignore the impression that it reflects the turmoil of very troubled minds. For all its revolutionary fervour the entire tract, along with the appalling claims once more being made on the streets and in the schools and universities about ‘the Jews’, may best be read as a gigantic exercise in projection, with their frenzied hatred betraying a deep inner conflict. Certainly they exhibit a pathological vision and for anyone to embrace this insurrectionary fantasy-world would be to step literally into insanity and mindless violence.

Tragically, as the murderous and destructive history of extremism over the past half-century shows, and as we now see in our streets and universities, this is no barrier for Hitler’s grandchildren.