Wednesday, August 27, 2014

What Dr. Pierce did before he became radicalized racially


Electrically Induced Nuclear Quadrupole Spin Transitions in a GaAs Single Crystal

Phys. Rev. 129, 1965 – Published 1 March 1963
E. Brun, R. J. Mahler, H. Mahon, and W. L. Pierce

ABSTRACT

The direct induction of nuclear E2 spin transitions in a gallium arsenide single crystal by application of an external oscillatory electric field has been previously reported by some of the authors. This paper gives the results of a further investigation of the same phenomenon. Theoretical expressions are given for the equilibrium nuclear magnetization in a crystalline lattice under the combined influence of a static magnetic field, externally induced electric field gradients, and thermal spin-lattice interactions, for various relative orientations of the applied fields and the crystalline symmetry axes. The theoretical predictions were tested for the three nuclides Ga69Ga71, and As75 by using pulsed nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to sample the equilibrium magnetization in a GaAs crystal at 77°K under the influence of a uniform, externally applied, radio-frequency, electric field. A description of the experimental apparatus is given. The dependence of the quadrupolar saturation on both the electric field amplitude and the crystal orientation was measured. The angular dependence of the saturation was found to be in reasonable agreement with the theory.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRev.129.1965
  • Received 4 October 1962
  • Published in the issue dated March 1963

© 1963 The American Physical Society

Racial loyalty is not rocket science, but it was nice having a bona fide rocket scientist and former Physics professor like Dr. Pierce around to explain the necessity for it to our people in simple yet profound language.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Fichte & the German Nation


Fichte & the German Nation

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of those rare men who are both thinkers and heroes. His challenging Wissenschaftslehre (“doctrine of science”) remains one of the most ambitious attempts to encompass the world and its meaning in a speculative philosophical system. In his elaboration of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of ethical idealism, Fichte achieved a compelling synthesis of the complementary values of freedom and duty. His conception of the world as the material projection of an ultimately all-embracing World-Ego exercised a seminal influence on the Romantic movement, that radical reassertion of Aryan racial values which in Fichte’s time was displacing the shallow rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Yet it is as the hero who called for a regeneration of the German spirit in an epoch-making series of addresses in a conquered Berlin swarming with hostile French troops that Fichte will live on in the memory of his countrymen. In his Addresses to the German Nation, the philosophus teutonicus, as the patriot-poet Ernst Moritz Arndt dubbed Fichte, revealed a vision of his people’s destiny which transcends national boundaries and still beckons to our own and future generations for fulfillment.
In December of 1807, it seemed that Napoleon and his all-conquering French armies had extinguished the last ember of German nationhood. In the year before, the Holy Roman Empire, the only tangible expression of the political unity of the German nation, feeble though it was, had been dissolved. More important, Fichte’s adopted homeland, Prussia, had reaped the fruits of over a decade’s timidity and indifference to the fate of its German neighbors. On October 14, 1806, at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Napoleon’s troops had all but annihilated the once matchless Prussian military machine. After fleeing to Königsberg in East Prussia, the well-meaning but irresolute Hohenzollern, King Frederick William III, had been forced to sign away half his country’s territory in the humiliating Treaty of Tilsit. Prussia was further obligated to pay a crippling indemnity, and Berlin was garrisoned by French troops.
A TRIUMPHANT NAPOLEON leads his troops through the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on October 27, 1806, thirteen days after annihilating the Prussian Army at Jena and Auerstädt. This pro-French painting, by Charles Meynier, scarcely exaggerates the acclaim turncoat Berliners showered on the emperor. Prominent among the supporters of the French conquerors were the members of a race synonymous with treachery. As one historian put it, “Only the Jews were wholeheartedly and unhesitatingly pro-French, since they knew that one of the [French] revolutionary principles was their political and social emancipation . . .”  Fichte, even when he had tended to support the ideals of the French Revolution, pointedly excluded the Jews from consideration as German citizens. In anticipation of the National Socialist program, he advocated their deportation from Germany.
A TRIUMPHANT NAPOLEON leads his troops through the Brandenburg Gate into Berlin on October 27, 1806, thirteen days after annihilating the Prussian Army at Jena and Auerstädt. This pro-French painting, by Charles Meynier, scarcely exaggerates the acclaim turncoat Berliners showered on the emperor. Prominent among the supporters of the French conquerors were the members of a race synonymous with treachery. As one historian put it, “Only the Jews were wholeheartedly and unhesitatingly pro-French, since they knew that one of the [French] revolutionary principles was their political and social emancipation . . .”
Fichte, even when he had tended to support the ideals of the French Revolution, pointedly excluded the Jews from consideration as German citizens. In anticipation of the National Socialist program, he advocated their deportation from Germany.
 
More ominous than the military collapse of Prussia and the other German states was the concomitant decline in German morale. The purely dynastic patriotism which the various German princes had attempted to foster among their subjects had proved no match for the intense nationalism which spurred the French invaders. Although, predictably, Germany’s Jews had accorded Napoleon his most enthusiastic welcome, many a Berlin burgher had also cheered the triumphant entry of the French imperial army. Prominent citizens sought audiences with the emperor, and sycophantic writers wrote panegyrics to his genius.
In pointed contrast to Napoleon’s effusive admirers, German patriots had fallen silent, content to denounce the foreign oppressors only to their most trusted friends in the privacy of their drawing rooms. There was ample justification for their timidity. French spies and German informers in their service were everywhere, and the French censors had more than blue pencils at their disposal.
Little more than a year before, Johannes Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller, had been arrested in connection with the writing and circulation of an anonymous anti-French pamphlet entitled Germany in Her Deepest Humiliation. He had been betrayed to the authorities by a German policeman. On August 26, 1806, Palm had been shot in the little Austrian town of Braunau-on-the-Inn (which, 83 years later, was to acquire even greater cause for the veneration of German patriots).
In these desperate circumstances, the philosopher Fichte resolved to speak out publicly in the cause of the German nation. He had accompanied the Prussian court and the remnants of Prussia’s battered army to Königsberg in 1806. There, his reputation for radicalism had frustrated him in his attempts to be appointed field preacher to the troops. Disappointed but still overflowing with determination to rekindle the German spirit, Fichte returned to Berlin in August 1807.
He took up residence with his family in the secluded Georgengarten, in a section of Berlin rarely frequented by the French soldiers. In the following months, he immersed himself in the writings of Machiavelli and the Swiss educator Pestalozzi, but above all in the Annalsof Tacitus, in which the heroic deeds of Hermann the Cheruscer against the Roman legions find their echo.
Drawing on these writers for inspiration, Fichte began to compose a series of lectures which incorporated the spirit of Machiavelli’s and Hermann’s fervent patriotism, and drew on Pestalozzi’s concrete proposals for educational reform. Professor Fichte (who was at that time a member of the faculty of the University of Erlangen) announced the addresses in a brief notice in the Vossischer Zeitung, one of the leading Berlin newspapers of the day. According to the announcement, the lecture series was to be the continuation of a popular course Fichte had delivered in Berlin three years before, which he had titled The Characteristics of the Present Age.
The Berliners who crowded the amphitheatre of the Academy of Sciences at noon on Sunday, December 13, 1807, were doubtless drawn by more than intellectual curiosity. Fichte had never shrunk from controversy, particularly in addressing the vital questions of the day, nor did he show any qualms in skewering his intellectual opponents on the sharp prongs of his scathing polemics. Would he be as forthright in dealing with the French?
There was also the problem of continuity with the previous lecture series. Attentive students of Fichte could recall that in his Characteristics addresses, the philosopher had represented himself as something other than the fervent patriot he had revealed himself to be in the intervening years. In fact, Fichte had proudly boasted of a cosmopolitanism in which “we ourselves and our descendants can remain indifferent forever to the affairs and fates of nations and states.” How were these sentiments to be reconciled with Fichte’s present stance?
Fichte was not unmindful of Palm’s fate. Later, during the course of his lectures, he wrote to his friend, the Prussian counselor Beyme: “I know full well what I am risking; I know that I can be shot just like Palm. But I have no fear, and would gladly die for the realization of my goal.”
Elsewhere Fichte wrote: “The only decisive factor is, can you hope that the good to be accomplished is greater than the danger to be risked? That good is inspiration, exaltation. My personal danger doesn’t matter; rather, it could be extremely advantageous. My family and my son would not lack the nation’s assistance; my son would reap the benefits of his father’s martyrdom. That would be the best outcome. I couldn’t make better use of my life.”
Fichte dedicated his life not only to finding the truth but to proclaiming it to the world, regardless of the consequences. His stirring Addresses to the German Nation, delivered at the risk of arrest or even death at the hands of the French authorities, marked the dramatic high point of his public career, but his contributions to the philosophical basis of the Romantic movement were even more valuable to his posterity. Fichte stressed the importance of intuitive knowledge, that deep wisdom which lies in the race-soul and is sustained by the Universal Consciousness.
Fichte dedicated his life not only to finding the truth but to proclaiming it to the world, regardless of the consequences. His stirring Addresses to the German Nation, delivered at the risk of arrest or even death at the hands of the French authorities, marked the dramatic high point of his public career, but his contributions to the philosophical basis of the Romantic movement were even more valuable to his posterity. Fichte stressed the importance of intuitive knowledge, that deep wisdom which lies in the race-soul and is sustained by the Universal Consciousness.
It was in this spirit that Fichte inaugurated his Addresses to the German Nation. On the podium of the packed amphitheatre, he presented a commanding appearance. Short but robust, his sharp features radiated firmness of purpose. As Immanuel Hermann Fichte, his son and biographer, later wrote, “Fichte’s words in his lectures sweep along like a storm cloud that sheds its fire in separate strokes. He does not move, but he uplifts the soul.”
Fichte immediately established the connection with his lectures on The Characteristics of the Modern Age. In the Characteristics, Fichte had developed a scheme of five successive ages, somewhat similar to that propounded by the great German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing some years before. According to Fichte, human history was a process of evolutionary progress, yet during the Enlightenment the all-too-rapid supersession of the age of blind faith and obedience by a human reason not yet anchored in a foundation of a real knowledge had ushered in an age of “completed sinfulness.”
Now, Fichte proclaimed, the age of completed sinfulness had come to an end, and it was the task of the Germans to lead all mankind to a new epoch of liberation. Despite his universal aims, Fichte made clear that he spoke “only of Germans and only for Germans.” It was only the German people who had the qualities of character demanded for initiating the new era. But first it was necessary “to avert the downfall of our nation, which is threatened by its fusion with foreign peoples, and win back again an individuality that is self-supporting and quite incapable of any dependence on others.”
From time to time as Fichte spoke, the blare of martial music reached the ears of his listeners. The broad Berlin avenue Unter den Linden ran past the Academy of Sciences, and Napoleon’s officers staged frequent parades to maintain the élan of their troops.
Within the amphitheatre itself there were Berliners whose attentiveness was neither the product of patriotic ardor nor of a thirst for philosophical enlightenment. They were well known to be informers to the French authorities, and they pricked up their ears to catch any hints of rebelliousness against the rule of the heralds of the “Rights of Man.”
Fichte had cleverly anticipated them. It was not his purpose to castigate the French so much as to promote a German national revival. Besides, as he pointed out, it was not at that time possible to dislodge the conquerors by merely military means. Despite his surface disavowal of anti-French aims, however, Fichte never missed an opportunity, all through the Addresses, to belabor the French and, indeed, Napoleon himself, with a characteristically French irony, which evidently eluded the French military government’s journeymen snoops.
The solution which Fichte offered to the ills which beset the German nation, both at the hands of the French and in the context of the self-seeking which had pervaded all classes in Germany even before defeat, was “a total change of the existing system of education.” In its place was to be instituted a system of national education (Nationalerziehung), to apply to “every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its individual members.”
Fichte concluded his first address with an inspirational evocation of his purpose in speaking out: “The dawn of the new world is already past its breaking; already it gilds the mountaintops, and heralds the coming day. I wish, so far as in me lies, to catch the rays of this dawn and weave them into a mirror, in which our grief-stricken age may see itself; so that it may believe in its own existence, may perceive its real self, and, as in a prophetic vision, may see its own development, its coming forms pass by.”
Fichte’s own life and intellectual development uniquely qualified him for his role as herald of Germany’s awakening. The philosopher’s career provides ample evidence of his own possession of those qualities of mind and will which he sought to instill in others, in sharp contrast to certain other world-betterers (Rousseau and Marx spring to mind).
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on May 19, 1762, in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia, in what was then the electorate of Saxony. His origins were humble. His father was a weaver, his mother a woman of simple piety. When Fichte was nine, his quick intelligence caught the eye of a local nobleman, Baron von Miltitz, who decided to sponsor his education. After two years of instruction at a neighboring parsonage, Fichte was enrolled in the renowned Schulpforta, a private boarding school which today numbers, in addition to Fichte, the poet Klopstock, the historian Ranke, and the philosopher Nietzsche among its illustrious alumni.
The education which Fichte acquired at Schulpforta qualified him for membership in Germany’s intellectual elite without estranging him from a consciousness of himself as a man of the people. When Fichte was forced to abandon his university studies after only a year, due to his patron’s death, his democratic feelings were reinforced by nearly a decade’s experience as a tutor to the sons of the noble and wealthy. Treated as little better than a servant by his wealthy employers, Fichte gained a life-long contempt for the aristocracy.
The turning point in Fichte’s life came with his introduction, by a university student whom he was tutoring, to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Fichte immediately embraced Kant’s rejection of the shallow rationalism and materialism in vogue in German and French philosophy during the 18th century, as well as his “intuitive” justification of God and the immortality of the soul. Fichte quickly mastered Kant’s philosophy and in 1791, with Kant’s approval, anonymously published A Critique of All Revelation, which was immediately taken to be Kant’s own work. When Fichte’s authorship became known, his reputation was assured. Shortly thereafter, at the urging of Goethe, Fichte was appointed a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena in Saxe-Weimar.
While at Jena, Fichte evolved his Wissenschaftslehre, in which he dispensed with Kant’s concessions to a reality capable of being objectively apprehended in favor of a world view based entirely on the supremacy of the mind and the will. Among the students he decisively influenced were the poet Novalis, the philosopher Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers, who were both to become outstanding philologists.
In 1799, Fichte was forced out of Jena following a controversy worked up by his opponents around the specious charge that Fichte was an atheist. Departing the allegedly tolerant Saxe-Weimar, he found a ready reception in absolutist Prussia.
In Prussia, Fichte began to develop his philosophy in a direction which took more cognizance of the importance of the nation and the state in providing the conditions under which knowledge and virtue might be attained and cultivated. In 1800 he wrote The Closed Commercial State, which sought to harmonize the exigencies of economic justice and the needs of the state. As the first description of a national socialism in other than utopian terms, The Closed Commercial State had no small influence on future political thought in Germany.
By 1806 Fichte had evolved the essentials of the ideology of German nationalism which animated the Addresses to the German Nation.
Despite Fichte’s situation of the Addresses in the context of his complex Wissenschaftslehre, their central thesis—that Germany’s rebirth was to be accomplished through a program of “national education”—is relatively easy to grasp. The ideas which underlie this thesis, however, require a certain amount of elucidation, especially for the modern reader.
Those who approach the Addresses in anticipation of a supercharged distillate of anti-French, patriotic fustian will doubtless be disappointed. Fichte’ s purpose in delivering the Addresses was not so much to excoriate the Corsican tyrant and his French (and German) minions as to galvanize his fellow Germans into effective thought and action.
Americans weaned for two generations on propaganda depicting the Germans as frenzied chauvinists will have difficulty in visualizing the degree of indifference to Germany’s political fortunes which prevailed among German intellectuals in Fichte’s time. During the previous 50 years the leading writers and thinkers of Germany had emancipated the nation’s literature and philosophy from their slavish imitation of French models. Yet, in the political sphere, the ideal of men such as Goethe and Kant remained a hazy cosmopolitanism.
Goethe, in particular, affected an Olympian detachment, going so far as to receive Napoleon cordially when the emperor passed through Weimar. As we have seen, even Fichte was long able to delude himself in the notion that he, too, was a “citizen of the world.”
The special task which Fichte set himself in the writing the Addresses to the German Nation was to imbue educated Germans with a sense of national mission. To that end, he played on the feelings of cultural and linguistic pride which German intellectuals had developed over the preceding decades.
Fichte argued that the German Volk was superior in character to those peoples in Europe, often originally German, who had abandoned their original languages for new ones derived from Latin. Drawing heavily on the theories of the philologist and literary critic August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Fichte differentiated between German, a “living language” or “original language” (Ursprache), able to form an intellectual and philosophical vocabulary from its own roots, and the Romance languages, which were forced to draw their scholarly words from a dead language.
According to Fichte, this reliance (in the case of the German language) on native words with concrete connotations to depict the “supersensuous” insured a clarity and honesty of expression sadly lacking in such languages as French and Italian. In fact, the Germans owed their “honest diligence and earnestness in all things” solely to their language.
Unwieldy as this sort of bold reductionism strikes us today, Fichte made good use of it in stirring national pride. Despite his ignorance of the biological factors underlying group differences, Fichte was unerring in delineating the strong points of the German character. In a memorable passage, he described the German spirit as “an eagle, whose mighty body thrusts itself on high and soars on strong and well-practiced wings into the empyrean, that it may rise nearer to the sun whereon it delights to gaze,” in contrast to the less inspired Latin peoples, whose genius he likened to “a bee, which with busy art gathers the honey from the flowers and deposits it with charming tidiness in cells of regular construction.”
Having established at length the worth of German culture and character, Fichte emphasized that the German language, the basis of character and culture, was in danger of disappearing in a Germany dominated by aliens. (“Where a people has ceased to govern itself, it is equally bound to give up its language and coalesce with its conquerors, in order that there may be unity and internal peace and complete oblivion of relationships which no longer exist.”)
The system of national education which Fichte proposed to insure the future survival of the German language—and, thus, of the German people—embodied a far more radical conception than is perhaps evident at first glance. The idea of inculcating in an elite a virtue which can only be acquired through knowledge goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic. Fichte revised this idea by boldly mandating such an education for the entire youth of the nation.
In the words of Fichte, “So there is nothing left for us but just to apply the new system to every German without exception, so that it is not the education of a single class, but the education of the nation, simply as such and without excepting any of its members. In this, that is to say in the training of man to take real pleasure in what is right, all distinction of classes which may in the future find a place in other branches of development will be completely removed and vanish. In this way there will grow up among us, not popular education, but real German national education.”
The educational system which Fichte envisioned was indebted to the theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss who had made his life’s work the education of the children of the poor. In contrast to the force-feeding of the intellect which was the staple of rationalist educational practice, Pestalozzi laid stress on the development of the child’s character. To this concern Fichte added a special emphasis on the training of the will, which he felt had long been greatly neglected by German educators. Briefly, Fichte’s conception of national education was “the art of training the whole man completely and fully for manhood.”
According to Fichte, “When once the generation that has been formed by this education is in existence—a generation impelled by its taste for the right and the good and by nothing else whatever; a generation provided with an understanding that is adequate for its standpoint and recognizes the right unfailingly on every occasion; a generation equipped with full power, both physical and spiritual, to carry out its will on every occasion—when once this generation is in existence, everything that we can long for in our boldest wishes will come into being of itself from the very existence of that generation, and will grow out of it naturally.”
Fichte concluded the Addresses with some of the most stirring oratory in the German language. He threw down a challenge to his German hearers in these words: “Review in your own minds the various conditions between which you now have to make a choice. If you continue in your dullness and helplessness, all the evils of serfdom are awaiting you; deprivations, humiliations, the scorn and arrogance of your conqueror; you will be driven and harried in every corner, because you are in the wrong and in the way everywhere; until by the sacrifice of your nationality and your language, you have purchased for yourselves some subordinate and petty place, and until in this way you gradually die out as a people. If, on the other hand, you bestir yourselves and play the man, you will continue in a tolerable and honorable existence, and you will see growing up among you and around you a generation that will be the promise for you and for the Germans of most illustrious renown. You will see in spirit the German name rising by means of this generation to be the most glorious among all peoples; you will see this nation the regenerator and re-creator of the world.”
As is well known, Fichte’s Addresses helped fan the dying embers of German national feeling into a raging inferno which swept the French invaders from the fatherland in the Wars of Liberation five years later. Yet Fichte’s radicalism in demanding a united Germany organized along the lines spelled out in his Addresses waited a century and a quarter for its brief realization. In the short period of Germany’s resurgence under National Socialism, Fichte’s ideal of a generation of German youth steeled in character and will first began to take shape.
Fichte’s courage in saying what had to be said at the risk of his own life in 1807 should serve to embolden White men and women in possession of the truth today to speak out unhesitatingly. The philosopher’s vision of a national education cutting across class lines and embracing the whole people to mold young men and women into principled members of their nation and race will remain a beacon urging us on to the future reality.
Originally published in National Vanguard, no. 58, 1978; reprinted in The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid, ed. Kevin Alfred Strom (National Vanguard Books, 1984). This format from: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/06/fichte-and-the-german-nation/#more-40286


Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Knut Hamsun and the Cause of Europe


From National Vanguard magazine, Issue No. 116, 1996

By Mark Deavin


Knut Hamsun
Knut Hamsun
After fifty years of being confined to the Orwellian memory hole created by the Jews as part of their European "denazification" process, the work of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun -- who died in 1952 -- is reemerging to take its place among the greatest European literature of the twentieth century. All of his major novels have undergone English-language reprints during the last two years, and even in his native Norway, where his post-1945 ostracism has been most severe, he is finally receiving a long-overdue recognition. Of course, one debilitating question still remains for the great and good of the European liberal intelligentsia, ever eager to jump to Jewish sensitivities. As Hamsun's English biographer Robert Ferguson gloomily asked himself in 1987: "Could the sensitive, dreaming genius who had created beautiful love stories ... really have been a Nazi?" Unfortunately for the faint hearts of these weak-kneed scribblers, the answer is a resounding "yes." Not only was Knut Hamsun a dedicated supporter of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist New Order in Europe, but his best writings -- many written at the tail end of the nineteenth century -- flow with the essence of the National Socialist spirit and life philosophy.

Born Knud Pederson on August 4, 1859, Hamsun spent his early childhood in the far north of Norway, in the small town of Hamaroy. He later described this time as one of idyllic bliss where he and the other children lived in close harmony with the animals on the farm, and where they felt an indescribable oneness with Nature and the cosmos around and above them. Hamsun developed an early obsession to become a writer and showed a fanatical courage and endurance in pursuing his dream against tremendous obstacles. He was convinced of his own artistic awareness and sensitivity, and was imbued with a certainty that in attempting to achieve unprecedented levels of creativity and consciousness, he was acting in accordance with the higher purpose of Nature.

In January 1882 Hamsun's Faustian quest of self-discovery took him on the first of several trips to America. He was described by a friend at the time as "tall, broad, lithe with the springing step of a panther and with muscles of steel. His yellow hair ... drooped down upon his ... clear-cut classical features."

These experiences consolidated in Hamsun a sense of racial identity as the bedrock of his perceived artistic and spiritual mission. A visit to an Indian encampment confirmed his belief in the inherent differences of the races and of the need to keep them separate, but he was perceptive enough to recognize that America carried the seeds of racial chaos and condemned the fact that cohabitation with Blacks was being forced upon American Whites.

Writing in his book On the Cultural Life of Modern America, published in March 1889, Hamsun warned that such a situation gave rise to the nightmare prospect of a "mulatto stud farm" being created in America. In his view, this had to be prevented at all costs with the repatriation of the "black half-apes" back to Africa being essential to secure America's future (cited in Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, London, 1987, p.105). Hamsun also developed an early awareness of the Jewish problem, believing that "anti-Semitism" inevitably existed in all lands where there were Jews -- following Semitism "as the effect follows the cause." He also believed that the departure of the Jews from Europe and the White world was essential "so that the White races would avoid further mixture of the blood" (from Hamsun's 1925 article in Mikal Sylten's nationalist magazine Nationalt Tidsskrift). His experiences in America also strengthened Hamsun's antipathy to the so called "freedom" of democracy, which he realized merely leveled all higher things down to the lowest level and made financial materialism into the highest morality. Greatly influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hamsun saw himself as part of the vanguard of a European spiritual aristocracy which would reject these false values and search out Nature's hidden secrets -- developing a higher morality and value system based on organic, natural law. In an essay entitled "From the Unconscious Life of the Mind," published in 1890, Hamsun laid out his belief:
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.
Hamsun expounded this philosophy in his first great novel Hunger, which attempted to show how the known territory of human consciousness could be expanded to achieve higher forms of creativity, and how through such a process the values of a society which Hamsun believed was increasingly sick and distorted could be redefined for the better. This theme was continued in his next book, Mysteries, and again in Pan, published in 1894, which was based upon Hamsun's own feeling of pantheistic identification with the cosmos and his conviction that the survival of Western man depended upon his re-establishing his ties with Nature and leading a more organic and wholesome way of life.In 1911 Hamsun moved back to Hamaroy with his wife and bought a farm. A strong believer in the family and racial upbreeding, he was sickened by the hypocrisy and twisted morality of a modern Western society which tolerated and encouraged abortion and the abandonment of healthy children, while protecting and prolonging the existence of the criminal, crippled, and insane. He actively campaigned for the state funding of children's homes that could take in and look after unwanted children and freely admitted that he was motivated by a higher morality, which aimed to "clear away the lives which are hopeless for the benefit of those lives which might be of value."

In 1916 Hamsun began work on what became his greatest and most idealistic novel, Growth of the Soil, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921. It painted Hamsun's ideal of a solid, farm-based culture, where human values, instead of being fixed upon transitory artificialities which modern society had deemed fashionable, would be based upon the fixed wheel of the seasons in the safekeeping of an inviolable eternity where man and Nature existed in harmony:
They had the good fortune at Sellanraa that every spring and autumn they could see the grey geese sailing in fleets above that wilderness, and hear their chatter up in the air -- delirious talk it was. And as if the world stood still for a moment, till the train of them had passed. And the human souls beneath, did they not feel a weakness gliding through them now? They went to their work again, but drawing breath first, for something had spoken to them, something from beyond.
Growth of the Soil reflected Hamsun's belief that only when Western man fully accepted that he was intimately bound up with Nature's eternal law would he be able to fulfill himself and stride towards a higher level of existence. At the root of this, Hamsun made clear, was the need to place the procreation of the race back at the center of his existence:
Generation to generation, breeding ever anew, and when you die the new stock goes on. That's the meaning of eternal life.
The main character in the book reflected Hamsun's faith in the coming man of Europe: a Nietzschean superman embodying the best racial type who, acting in accordance with Nature's higher purpose, would lead the race to unprecedented levels of greatness. In Hamsun's vision he was described thus:
A tiller of the ground, body and soul; a worker on the land without respite. A ghost risen out of the past to point to the future; a man from the earliest days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine hundred years old, and withal, a man of the day.
Hamsun's philosophy echoed Nietzsche's belief that "from the future come winds with secret beat of wings and to sensitive ears comes good news" (cited in Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century). And for Hamsun the "good news" of his lifetime was the rise of National Socialism in Germany under Adolf Hitler, whom he saw as the embodiment of the coming European man and a reflection of the spiritual striving of the "Germanic soul."The leaders of the new movement in Germany were also aware of the essential National Socialist spirit and world view which underlay Hamsun's work, and he was much lauded, particularly by Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg paid tribute to Hamsun in his The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, declaring that through a mysterious natural insight Knut Hamsun was able to describe the laws of the universe and of the Nordic soul like no other living artist. Growth of the Soil, he declared, was "the great present-day epic of the Nordic will in its eternal, primordial form."

Hamsun visited Germany on several occasions during the 1930s, accompanied by his equally enthusiastic wife, and was well impressed by what he saw. In 1934 he was awarded the prestigious Goethe Medal for his writings, but he handed back the 10,000 marks prize money as a gesture of friendship and as a contribution to the National Socialist process of social reconstruction. He developed close ties with the German-based Nordic Society, which promoted the Pan-Germanic ideal, and in January 1935 he sent a letter to its magazine supporting the return of the Saarland to Germany. He always received birthday greetings from Rosenberg and Goebbels, and on the occasion of his 80th birthday from Hitler himself. 

Vidkun Quisling 






Quisling in Nasjonal Samling poster

 Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Hamsun was not content merely to philosophize in an ivory tower; he was a man of the day, who, despite his age, strove to make his ideal into a reality and present it to his own people. Along with his entire family he became actively and publicly involved with Norway's growing National Socialist movement in the form of Vidkun Quisling's Nasjonal Samling (National Assembly). This had been founded in May 1933, and Hamsun willingly issued public endorsements and wrote articles for its magazine, promoting the National Socialist philosophy of life and condemning the anti-German propaganda that was being disseminated in Norway and throughout Europe. This, he pointed out, was inspired by the Jewish press and politicians of England and France who were determined to encircle Germany and bring about a European war to destroy Hitler and his idea.

With the outbreak of war Hamsun persistently warned against the Allied attempts to compromise Norwegian neutrality, and on April 2, 1940 -- only a week before Hitler dramatically forestalled the Allied invasion of Norway -- Hamsun wrote an article in the Nasjonal Samling newspaper calling for German protection of Norwegian neutrality against Anglo-Soviet designs. Hamsun was quick to point out in a further series of articles soon afterward, moreover, that it was no coincidence that C.J. Hambro, the president of the Norwegian Storting, who had conspired to push Norway into Allied hands and had then fled to Sweden, was a Jew. In his longest wartime article, which appeared in the Axis periodicalBerlin-Tokyo-Rome in February 1942, he also identified Roosevelt as being in the pay of the Jews and the dominant figure in America's war for gold and Jewish power. Declaring his belief in the greatness of Adolf Hitler, Hamsun defiantly declared: "Europe does not want either the Jews or their gold."

Hamsun's loyalty to the National Socialist New Order in Europe was well appreciated in Berlin, and in May 1943 Hamsun and his wife were invited to visit Joseph Goebbels, a devoted fan of the writer. Both men were deeply moved by the meeting, and Hamsun was so affected that he sent Goebbels the medal which he had received for winning the Nobel Prize for idealistic literature in 1920, writing that he knew of no statesman who had so idealistically written and preached the cause of Europe. Goebbels in return considered the meeting to have been one of the most precious encounters of his life and wrote touchingly in his diary: "May fate permit the great poet to live to see us win victory! If anybody deserved it because of a high-minded espousal of our cause even under the most difficult circumstances, it is he." The following month Hamsun spoke at a conference in Vienna organized to protest against the destruction of European cultural treasures by the sadistic Allied terror-bombing raids. He praised Hitler as a crusader and a reformer who would create a new age and a new life. Then, three days later, on June 26, 1943, his loyalty was rewarded with a personal and highly emotional meeting with Hitler at the Berghof. As he left, the 84 year-old Hamsun told an adjutant to pass on one last message to his Leader: "Tell Adolf Hitler: we believe in you."

Hamsun never deviated from promoting the cause of National Socialist Europe, paying high-profile visits to Panzer divisions and German U-boats, writing articles and making speeches. Even when the war was clearly lost, and others found it expedient to keep silence or renounce their past allegiances, he remained loyal without regard to his personal safety. This was brought home most clearly after the official announcement of Hitler's death, when, with the German Army in Norway packing up and preparing to leave, Hamsun wrote a necrology for Hitler which was published in a leading newspaper:
Adolf Hitler: I am not worthy to speak his name out loud. Nor do his life and his deeds warrant any kind of sentimental discussion. He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet of the gospel for all nations. He was a reforming nature of the highest order, and his fate was to arise in a time of unparalleled barbarism, which finally felled him. Thus might the average western European regard Adolf Hitler. We, his closest supporters, now bow our heads at his death.
This was a tremendously brave thing for Hamsun to do, as the following day the war in Norway was over and Quisling was arrested. Membership in Quisling's movement after April 8, 1940, had been made a criminal offense retroactively by the new Norwegian government, and the mass roundups of around 40,000 Nasjonal Samling members now began in earnest. Hamsun's sons Tore and Arild were picked up within a week, and on May 26 Hamsun and his wife were placed under house arrest. Committed to hospital because of his failing health, Hamsun was subject to months of interrogation designed to wear down and confuse him. As with Ezra Pound in the United States, the aim was to bring about a situation where Hamsun's sanity could be questioned: a much easier option for the Norwegian authorities than the public prosecution of an 85-year-old literary legend.

Unfortunately for them, Hamsun refused to crack and was more than a match for his interrogators. So, while his wife was handed a vicious three-year hard-labor sentence for her National Socialist activities, and his son Arild got four years for having the temerity to volunteer to fight Bolshevism on the Eastern Front, Hamsun received a 500,000-kroner fine and the censorship of his books. Even this did not stop him, however, and he continued to write, regretting nothing and making no apologies. Not until 1952, in his 92nd year, did he pass away, leaving us a wonderful legacy with which to carry on the fight which he so bravely fought to the end.