From
National Socialist Word Number 5 (Winter, 1967):
George Lincoln Rockwell: A National Socialist Life
by Dr. William L. Pierce
On the eighteenth of June, 1945, a little over six weeks after
the death of Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess wrote the following words in a
letter to his wife, from his prison cell:
- You will readily imagine how often during the last few weeks my
thoughts have turned to the years gone by: to this quarter of a century
of history, concentrated for us in one name and full of the most
wonderful human experiences. History is not ended. It will sooner or
later take up the threads apparently broken off forever and knit them
together in a new pattern. The human element is no more and lives only
in memory.
- Very few people have been privileged, as we were, to participate
from the very beginning in the growth of a unique personality, through
joy and sorrow, hope and trouble, love and hate, and all the
manifestations of greatness—and, further, in all the little indications
of human weakness, without which a man is not truly worthy of love ....[1]
Even when one has been privileged to witness the manifestations of
greatness, it may be exceedingly difficult to describe adequately in
words those manifestations and thereby to paint a true picture of a
unique and great personality. When one has not the basis of a
quarter-century of participation in the growth of such a personality,
but less than two years, the task is especially difficult. It would be a
vain hope, then, to expect the pages which follow to reflect the true
greatness of the man. That greatness will be best reflected in the
fruition of his life's work in years to come.
Here, however, we can at least hope to evoke an image of the man,
imperfect and incomplete though it may be, which will serve to inspire
those National Socialists who did not have the privilege of knowing him
personally.
George Lincoln Rockwell was born on March 9, 1918, in
Bloomington, a small coal-mining and farming town in central Illinois.
Both his parents were theatrical performers. His father, George Lovejoy
Rockwell, was a twenty-eight-year-old vaudeville comedian of English and
Scotch ancestry. His mother, born Claire Schade, was a young
German-French toe-dancer, part of a family dance team. His parents were
divorced when he was six years old, and he and a younger brother and
sister lived alternately with their mother and their father during the
next few years.
The young Rockwell passed the greater part of his boyhood days in
Maine, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. His father settled in a small
coastal town in Maine, and Rockwell spent his summers there, attending
school in Atlantic City and, later, in Providence during the winters.
Some of his fondest memories in later years were of summer days spent on
the Maine beaches, or hiking in the Maine woods, or exploring the coves
and inlets of the Maine coast in his sailboat, which he built himself,
starting from an old skiff. Rockwell acquired what was to be a lifelong
love of sailing and the sea during those early years spent with his
father in Maine.
Aside from a bit more traveling about than the average child, it
is difficult to find anything extraordinary in his childhood
environment. He lived in the midst of neither great poverty nor great
wealth; he had an affectionate relationship with both his parents,
despite their divorce; he was a sound and healthy child, and there seems
to be no evidence of prolonged unhappiness or turmoil in his childhood.
If he later recalled with greater pleasure the times spent with his
father than those spent with his mother, this can be attributed either
to the greater opportunities to satisfy his youthful longing for
adventure that life on the Maine coast offered, relative to that in the
city, or to the fact that his mother lived with a domineering sister of
whom young Rockwell was not fond.
And yet, even as a boy he displayed those qualities of character
which were later to set him off from the common run of men. His most
remarkable quality was his responsiveness to challenge. To tell the boy
Rockwell that a thing was impossible, that it simply could not be done,
was to awaken in him the irresistible determination to do it. He has
described an experience he had at the age of ten which illustrates this
aspect of his character. A juvenile gang of some of the tougher elements
at the grammar school he was attending in an Atlantic City coastal
suburb had singled him out for hazing. He was informed that he was to be
given a cold dunking in the ocean, and that he should relax and submit
gracefully, as resistance would be futile. Instead of submitting, he
ferociously fought off the entire gang of his attackers on the beach,
wildly striking out with his fists and feet, clawing, biting, and
gouging until the other boys finally abandoned their aim of throwing him
in the water and retired to nurse their wounds.
Later, as a teenager, he found that the challenge of a stormy sea
affected him in much the same way as had the challenge of the juvenile
gang. When other boys brought their boats into dock because the water
was too rough, young Rockwell found his greatest pleasure in sailing. He
loved nothing better than to pit his strength and his skill against the
wild elements. As the wind and the waves rose, so did his spirits.
Wrestling with tiller and rigging in a tossing boat, drenched with spray
and blasted by fierce gusts, he would howl back at the wind in sheer
animal joy.
[2]
This peculiar stubbornness of his nature—call it a combative
spirit, if you will—coupled with an absolute physical fearlessness,
which led him into many a dangerous and harebrained escapade as a boy,
gave him the willpower as a man to undertake without hesitation ventures
at which ordinary men quailed; throughout his life it led him to choose
the course of action which his reason and his sensibility told him to
be the
right course, regardless of the course those about him
were taking; ultimately it provided the driving force which led him to
issue a challenge and stand alone against a whole world, when it became
apparent to him that that world was on the wrong course. This trait
provides the key to the man.
Two other characteristics he displayed as a boy were an
omnivorous curiosity and a stark objectivity. He attributed his
curiosity, as well as the artistic talents which he early displayed, to
his father, who also exhibited these traits, but the source of his
rebellious spirit and his indomitable will is harder to assign. They
seem to have been the product of a rare and fortuitous combination of
genes, giving rise to a nature markedly different from that of his
immediate forebears.
He entered Brown University in the fall of 1938, as a freshman.
His major course of study was philosophy, but he was also very
interested in the sciences. He used the opportunity of staff work on
student periodicals to exercise his talents in drawing and creative
writing. In addition to his curricular, journalistic, and artistic
activities, he also found time for a substantial amount of skirt chasing
and other collegiate sports, including skiing and fencing; he became a
member of the Brown University fencing team.
While at Brown he had his first head-on encounter with modern
liberalism. He enrolled in a sociology course with the naive expectation
that, just as in his geology and psychology courses he would learn the
scientific principles underlying those two areas of human knowledge, so
in sociology would he learn some of the basic principles underlying
human social behavior. He was disappointed and confused, however, when
it gradually became apparent to him that there was a profound difference
in the attitudes of sociologists and, say, geologists toward their
subjects. Whereas the authors of his geology text-books were careful to
point out that there were many things about the history and structure of
the earth which were as yet unknown, or only imperfectly known, it was
clear that there were indeed fundamental ideas and well-established
facts upon which the science was based and that both his geology
professor and the authors of his geology textbooks were sincerely
interested in presenting these ideas and facts to the student in an
orderly manner, with the hope that he would thereby gain a better
understanding of the nature of the planet on which he lived. In
sociology, he found the basic principles far more elusive. What was
particularly disturbing to him, though, was not so much the complexity
of the concepts as the gnawing suspicion that the waters had been
deliberately muddied. He redoubled his efforts to get to the roots of
the subject or, at least, to understand where the hints, innuendoes, and
roundabout promptings led: "I buried myself in my sociology books,
absolutely determined to find why I was missing the kernel of the
thing."
[3]
The equalitarian idea that the manifest differences between the
capabilities of individuals and between the evolutionary development of
various races can be accounted for almost wholly by contemporary
environmental effects—that there really are no inborn differences in
quality worth mentioning among human beings—was certainly one of the
places his sociology textbooks were leading:
- I was bold enough to ask Professor Bucklin if this were the
idea, and he turned red in anger. I was told it was impossible to make
any generalizations, although all I was asking for was the fundamental
idea, if any, of sociology.
- I began to see that sociology was different from any other
course I had ever taken. Certain ideas produced apoplexy in the teacher,
particularly the suggestion that perhaps some people were no-good
biological slobs from the day they were born. Certain other ideas,
although they were never formulated and stated frankly, were fostered
and encouraged—and these were always ideas revolving around the total
power of environment.[4]
Although he did not clearly recognize it for what it was at that
time, young Rockwell had partially uncovered one of the most widely used
tactics of the modern liberals. When the clever liberal has as his goal
miscegnation, say, he certainly does not just blurt this right out.
Instead he will write novels, produce television shows, and film motion
pictures which, subtly at first and then more and more boldly,
suggest
that those who engage in sexual affairs with Negroes are braver,
better, more attractive people than those who don't; and that opposition
to miscegnation is a vulgar and loutish perversion, certain evidence of
being a ridiculous square at best and a drooling, violent redneck at
worst. But if one tries to pin him down and asks him
why he is in
favor of miscegnation, he will reply in a huff that that is not what he
is aiming at at all, but only "justice," or "fairness," or "better
understanding between the races."
And so when Rockwell naively went right to the heart of the
matter in Professor Bucklin's sociology class, he got an angry
reprimand. The racial equalitarians have gotten much bolder in the last
thirty years, but at that time Rockwell was merely aware that they
wanted him to accept certain ideas without actually bringing those ideas
out into the open arena of free discussion where they would be subject
to attack:
- I still knew little or nothing about communism or its pimping
little sister, liberalism, but I could not avoid the steady pressure,
everywhere in the University, to accept the ideas of massive human
equality and the supremacy of environment.[5]
Typically, this pressure resulted not in acquiescence but in his
determination to stand up for what seemed to him to be reasonable and
natural. He satirized the equalitarian point of view, not only in his
column in the student newspaper, but also in one of his sociology
examination papers! The nearly catastrophic consequences of this bit of
insolence taught him the prudence of holding his tongue under certain
circumstances.
As he began his junior year at Brown, the alien conspiracy to use
America as a tool to make the world safe for Jewry was shifting its
propaganda machine into high gear. National Socialist Germany was
portrayed as a nation of depraved criminals whose goal was the
enslavement of the world—including America. Hollywood, the big
newspapers, and his liberal professors—always the most noisily vocal
faction at any university—all pushed the same line, unabashedly
appealing to the naive idealism of their audience: "Hitler must be
stopped!" And, like millions of other American patriots, Lincoln
Rockwell fell for the smooth lies and the clever swindle, backed as they
were by the authority of the head of the American government. Neither
he nor his millions of compatriots realized that the conspiracy had
reached into the White House, and that its occupant had sold his
services to the conspirators:
- It is typical of my political naivete of that time that when
the propaganda about Hitler began to be pushed upon us in large doses, I
swallowed it all, unable even to suspect that somebody might have an
interest in all this, and that it might not be the interest of the
United States or our people .... It became obvious that we would have to
get into the war to stop this "horrible ogre" who planned to conquer
America, so we were told, and so I believed.[6]
Thus, in March, 1941, convinced that America was in mortal danger
from "the Nazi aggressors," Rockwell left his comfortable life at the
university and offered his services to his country's armed forces.
Shortly after enlisting in the United States Navy, he received an
appointment as an Aviation Cadet and began flight training at Squantum,
Massachusetts. He received his first naval commission, as an ensign, on
December 9, 1941—two days after the Pearl Harbor attack. He served as a
naval aviator throughout World War II, advancing from the rank of ensign
to lieutenant and winning several decorations. He commanded the naval
air support during the American invasion of Guam, in July and August,
1944. He was promoted to lieutenant commander in October, 1945, and
shortly thereafter returned to civilian life, where he hoped to make a
career for himself as an artist.
While still in the navy, he had married a girl he had known as a
student at Brown University. The marriage was not a particularly happy
one, although it was destined to last more than ten years.
The first five years after leaving the navy were spent as an art
student, a commercial photographer, a painter, an advertising executive,
and a publisher, in Maine and in New York.
Then in 1950, with the outbreak of war in Korea, Lieutenant
Commander Rockwell returned to active duty with the United States Navy
and was assigned to train fighter pilots in southern California. There,
almost by chance, the political education of thirty-two-year-old Lincoln
Rockwell began.
It was in 1950 that Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into
subversive activities and treasonous behavior on the part of a number
of United States government employees and officials began to receive
wide public notice. Rockwell, like every honest citizen, was horrified
and angered by these disclosures of treachery. But he was puzzled as
much as he was shocked by the violent, hysterical, and vicious reaction
to these disclosures which came from a certain segment of the
population. Why were so many persons—and, especially, so many in the
public-opinion-forming media—frantically determined to silence McCarthy
and, failing that, to smear and discredit him? McCarthy was an American
with a distinguished record. A war hero, like Rockwell he had entered
his country's armed forces as an enlisted man and emerged as a
much-decorated officer. He had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for
his combat performance in World War II. Now that he was flushing from
cover the rats who had sold out the vital interests of the country for
which he had fought, Rockwell could not understand why any responsible
and loyal citizen should seek to defame the man or block his courageous
efforts:
- I began to pay attention, in my spare time, to what it was all
about. I read McCarthy speeches and pamphlets and found them factual,
instead of the wild nonsense which the papers charged was his
stock-in-trade. I became aware of a terrific slant in all the papers
against Joe McCarthy, although I still couldn't imagine why.[7]
At this time an acquaintance gave Rockwell some anti-communist tracts
to read. One of the things he immediately noticed about them was their
strongly anti-Semitic tone. Although manifest public evidence obliged
him to agree with some of the charges made by the authors of these
tracts—for example, that there were extraordinarily disproportionate
numbers of Jews both among McCarthy's attackers and among the
subversives his investigations were unearthing—he found many of their
claims too far-fetched to be credible. In particular, the charge that
communism was a Jewish, not a Russian, movement seemed ridiculous when
Rockwell considered the fact that Jews were so firmly entrenched in
capitalistic enterprises and always had been; capitalism, supposedly the
deadly enemy of communism, was the traditional Jewish sphere of
influence.
One anti-communist tabloid went so far as to cite various items
of documentary evidence in support of its seemingly wild claims, and
Rockwell decided to call its bluff by looking into this "evidence" for
himself. On his next off-duty day he went to the public library in San
Diego, and what he found there changed the course of his life—and will
yet change the course of world history. In his own words: "Down there in
the dark stacks of the San Diego Public Library, I got my awakening
from thirty years of stupid political sleep ...."
[8]
Rockwell was staggered by the evidence he uncovered in the
library; it left no doubt, for instance, that what had been described in
his school textbooks as the "Russian" Revolution was instead a Jewish
orgy of genocide against the Russian people. He even found that in their
own books and periodicals the Jews boasted more-or-less openly of the
fact! In a Jewish biographical reference work entitled
Who's Who in American Jewry[9]
he found a number of prominent Bolsheviks proudly listed, although by
no stretch of the imagination could they be considered Americans. Among
them were Lazar Kaganovitch, the Butcher of the Ukraine, and Leon
Trotsky (Lev Bronstein), the bloodthirsty Commissar of the Red Army, who
was given credit in the book for liquidating "counter-revolutionary
forces" in Russia.
Another book, written by a prominent "English" Jew, boasted that
the Jews "to a greater degree than ... any other ethnic group ... have
been the artisans of the Revolution of 1917."
[10] An estimate was given in the book that "80% of the revolutionaries in Russia were Jews."
[11]
Musty back issues of Jewish newspapers told the same story, and
they were backed up by official U.S. government records. One volume of
such records, which had been published twenty years previously,
contained ministerial reports from Russia of brutal frankness. Typical
of the material in these records was the following sentence written by
the Dutch diplomatic official, Oudendyk, in a 1918 report to his
government from Russia:
- I consider that the immediate suppression of Bolshevism is the
greatest issue now before the world, not even excluding the war which is
still raging, and unless as above stated Bolshevism is nipped in the
bud immediately it is bound to spread in one form or another over Europe
and the whole world as it is organized and worked by Jews who have no
nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the
existing order of things.[12]
Shocking as were these revelations, Rockwell was even more disturbed
by the fact that the general public was oblivious to them. Why were
these things not in school history texts? Why was he told over and over
again by the radio and newspapers and magazines of Adolf Hitler's "awful
crime" in killing so many Jews, but never told that the Jews in Russia
were responsible for the murder of a vastly larger number of Gentiles?
Other questions presented themselves. He had been told that England's
attack on Germany was justified by Hitler's attack on Poland. But what
of the Soviet Union, which had invaded Poland at the same time? Why no
English declaration of war against the Soviet Union? Could it be because
the government there was in Jewish hands? Who was responsible for the
conspiracy of silence on these and other questions? He grimly resolved
to find out. And, later, as the facts gradually fitted into place and
the whole, sordid picture began to emerge, he saw before him an
inescapable obligation.
An honest man, when he becomes aware that some dirty work is
afoot in his community, will speak out against it and attempt to rouse
his neighbors into doing the same. What if he finds, though, that
most of his neighbors do not want to be bothered; that
many
of his neighbors are already aware of what is afoot but prefer to
ignore it because to oppose it might jeopardize their private affairs;
that
some of his neighbors—some of his wealthiest and most
influential neighbors, the leaders of the community—are themselves
engaged in the dirty work? If he is an ordinary man, he may grumble for a
while about such a sorry state of affairs, but he will adapt himself as
best he can to it. He will soon see there is nothing to be gained by
sticking
his neck out, and he will go on about his business.
Human nature being what it is, he will very likely ease his conscience
by trying to forget as rapidly as possible what he has learned; perhaps
he will even convince himself eventually that there is really nothing
wrong after all—that his initial judgement was in error, and that the
dirty work was really not dirty work but merely "progress." If, on the
other hand, he is an extraordinary man with a particularly strong sense
of duty, he will continue to oppose what he knows to be wrong and bound
to work evil for the community in the long run. He may continue to point
out to his neighbors, even after they have made it clear that they are
not interested, that the dirty work should be stopped; he may write
pamphlets and deliver speeches; he may even run for public office on a
"reform" ticket. But even so, being a reasonable man and no "extremist,"
he will feel himself obliged to give the malefactors the benefit of the
doubt which must surely exist as to their motives. And perhaps their
position is, indeed, not wholly wrong? Surely, some sort of reasonable
compromise which will be fair to all concerned is the best solution. If
the evildoer had been working alone when discovered, hanging would, of
course, be the only admissible solution to the problem: a fitting and
total repudiation by the community of his evil deeds. But when so many
criminals, with so many accomplices, have been engaged for so long in
such an extensive criminal undertaking and have already done such
profound damage, surely the most reasonable solution must be just to
admonish the criminals—if, indeed, it is fair to call them criminals—try
to install a few safeguards against their renewed activity—safeguards
which, to be sure, would not be too grossly inconsistent with the
"progress" (or was it damage?) already wrought—and then, letting bygones
be bygones, try to live with things as they are.
But, it is only one man out of tens of millions—the rare and
lonely world-historical figure—who has, first, the objectivity to
evaluate such a situation in terms of absolute and timeless standards
and, unswayed by popular and contemporary considerations of
"reasonableness," to draw the ultimate conclusions which those standards
dictate; and who then has the strength of will and character to insist
that there must be no compromise with evil, that it must be rooted out
and utterly destroyed, that right and health and sanity must again
prevail, regardless of the commotion and temporary unpleasantness
involved in restoring them.
Rockwell had seen the facts. To him, it was unthinkable to
attempt to wriggle away from the conclusion they implied. And, as he
realized the frightening magnitude of the task before him, instead of
attempting to excuse himself from the responsibility which his new
knowledge carried with it, he felt rising within him his characteristic
response to a seemingly impossible challenge.
It was a straightforward sense of commitment which had led him to
volunteer for military service in March, 1941, as soon as he had been
tricked into believing that Adolf Hitler was a threat to his country,
instead of waiting for Pearl Harbor. And in early 1951, when he began to
understand that he had been tricked in 1941 and when he began to see
who had tricked him and what they were up to and the terrible damage
they had done to his people and were yet planning to do, that same sense
of commitment left only one course open to him, namely, to fight! He
did not stop to ask whether others were also willing to shoulder their
responsibility; his own was perfectly clear to him.
But how to fight? Where to begin? What to do? The name of one man
who had done something naturally came to his mind: Adolf Hitler.
Rockwell has described what happened next:
- I hunted around the San Diego bookshops and finally found a copy of Mein Kampf hidden away in the rear. I bought it, took it home, and sat down to read.
- And that was the end of one Lincoln Rockwell ... and the beginning of an entirely different person.[13]
He had not, of course, spent nearly thirty-three years completely
oblivious to world events. Many things had bothered him deeply, and he
had spent years of frustrating effort trying to fathom the apparently
meaningless chaos into which the world seemed to be descending. It
seemed to him that there must be some logical relationship between the
events of the preceding few decades, but he could not find the key to
the puzzle:
- I simply suffered from the vague, unhappy feeling that things
were "wrong"—I didn't know exactly how—and that there must be a way of
diagnosing the "disease" and its causes and making intelligent,
organized efforts to correct that something wrong.[14]
Adolf Hitler's message in
Mein Kampf gave him the key he had been seeking, and more:
- In Mein Kampf I found abundant "mental sunshine," which
bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and
understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the
darkness like thunderclaps and lightning-bolts of revelation, tearing
and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness,
brilliantly illuminating the mysteries of the heretofore impenetrable
murk in a world gone mad.
- I was transfixed, hypnotized. I could not lay the book down
without agonies of impatience to get back to it. I read it walking to
the squadron; I took it into the air and read it lying on the chart
board while I automatically gave the instructions to the other planes
circling over the desert. I read it crossing the Coronado ferry. I read
it into the night and the next morning. When I had finished I started
again and re-read every word, underlining and marking especially
magnificent passages. I studied it; I thought about it; I wondered at
the utter, indescribable genius of it ....
- I reread and studied it some more. Slowly, bit by bit, I began
to understand. I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic
world view of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific racial
idealism—actually a new religion ....[15]
And thus Lincoln Rockwell became a National Socialist. But his
conversion to the new religion still did not answer his question, "What
can be done?" Eight long years of struggle and defeat lay ahead of him
before he would gain the knowledge he needed to effectively translate
his new faith into action and begin to carry on Adolf Hitler's great
work once again. While he still lacked the wisdom that could only come
in the years ahead, he lacked nothing in energy and determination. For a
year he continued to explore the ramifications of the new world view he
had adopted and also continued his self-education in several other
areas, including the Jewish question.
Then, in November, 1952, the Navy assigned him to a year of duty
at the American base at Keflavik in Iceland, where he was executive
officer and, later, commanding officer of the Fleet Aircraft Service
Squadron there, "Fasron" 107. His promotion to commander came in
October, 1953, after he had requested an extension of his Icelandic
assignment for another year. He also met and fell in love with an
Icelandic girl, who became his second wife in the same month he was
promoted. This marriage was far happier than his first.
The relative isolation and solitude he enjoyed in Iceland gave
him a further opportunity to consolidate his thoughts and to plan a
campaign of political action based on his National Socialist philosophy.
Feeling that his most urgent need was some medium for the dissemination
of his political message, he considered various ways in which he might
enter the publishing business. He needed to establish a bridgehead in
this industry which would provide him with operational funds and living
expenses as well as give him a vehicle for political expression.
He finally decided to begin his career with the publication of a
monthly magazine for the wives of American servicemen, primarily because
the complete absence of any competing publication in the field seemed
to offer an excellent business advantage. He felt that he could not only
capture this market, thus assuring himself a steady income, but that
service families would provide a particularly receptive audience for his
political ideas.
His idea was to employ the utmost sublety, disguising his
propaganda so carefully that he would not jeopardize any Jewish
advertising accounts the magazine might acquire. He naively thought that
he would deceive the Jews and move the hearts and minds of his readers
in the desired direction simultaneously.
Rough plans had been laid by the time his service in Iceland was
over. His return to civilian life came on December 15, 1954. Nine months
of more planning, hard work, fund raising, and promotion led to the
realization of his ideas with the publication of his new magazine, for
which he chose the name
U.S. Lady, in Washington, in September, 1955.
At the same time he was getting his magazine underway, he began
making personal contacts in right-wing circles in the Washington area.
He attended the meetings of various groups and then began to organize
meetings of his own. Before he could put his magazine to use as a medium
for disguised propaganda, however, he found himself in serious
financial difficulties, due to his lack of capital, and he was forced to
sell the magazine in order to avoid bankruptcy.
With undiminished enthusiasm, he continued his organizing efforts
among the right wing. Making the same mistake that nearly every other
beginner makes, he assumed that the proper way to proceed lay in
coordinating the numerous right-wing and conservative organizations and
individuals—bringing them together into a right-wing superstructure
where they could work effectively for their common goals. He felt that
such a coordination could make an almost miraculous transformation in
the strength of the right-wing position in America.
To this end he bought radio advertisements, spoke at dozens of
meetings, wrote numberless letters, and devoted every waking hour to the
promotion of his plan or unity. He created a "paper" organization, the
American Federation of Conservative Organizations, and continued his
tireless efforts to inspire and mobilize even a few of the hundreds of
right-wing groups and individuals with whom he had established
contact—but to no avail: "Our meetings were better and better attended,
but there was no result at all—nothing accomplished."
[16]
He sadly learned that all the right-wing groups had one weakness
in common: their members loved to talk but were incapable of action. A
substantial portion of them were hobbyists-escapists obsessed with
various pet projects and absolutely invulnerable to reason, or
masochists who delighted in moaning endlessly about treason and decay
but who were shocked at the suggestion that they should help put an end
to it. Many were so neurotic that the idea of engaging them in any
prolonged cooperative effort was untenable. Some were simply insane.
Virtually all were cowards. Years of inaction or ineffectiveness had
drained the ranks of the right-wing of the type of human material
essential for any serious undertaking. Very little was left but the sort
of dregs with which nothing could be done.
Unfortunately, he had failed to heed the Leader's warning that
eight cripples who join arms do not yield even one gladiator as a
result:
- "And if there were indeed one healthy man among the
cripples, he would expend all his strength just keeping the others on
their feet and in this way become a cripple himself ....
- "By the formation of a federation, weak organizations are never
transformed into strong ones, but a strong organization can and often
will be weakened. The opinion that strength must result from the
association of weak groups is incorrect ....
- "... Great, truly world-shaking revolutions of a spiritual
nature are not even conceivable and realizable except as the titanic
struggles of individual formations, never as the undertakings of
coalitions."[17]
It has been said that experience keeps a dear school, and in
Rockwell's case it was dear indeed. He had exhausted all the money left
from the sale of
U.S. Lady by the time the last meeting of his
American Federation of Conservative Organizations, on July 4, 1956,
failed to produce any concrete results. He had to find a new source of
income and considered himself fortunate to obtain a temporary position
as a television scriptwriter.
This lasted only a few months, however, and then he took a position on the staff of the New York-based conservative magazine,
American Mercury,
as assistant to the publisher. He had learned the futility of trying to
achieve effective cooperation between the various right-wing groups and
had resigned himself to forming a new organization. Rockwell still had
two bitter lessons to learn in the school of experience, however—lessons
which the Leader had set forth clearly in his immortal book, but which
Rockwell, for all his careful study, had failed to take to heart, just
as with the admonition against hoping to gain strength by uniting
weaknesses. He still believed that the enemies of our people could be
fought effectively by the "respectable" means to which conservatives
have always restricted themselves. He thought to avoid the "stigma" of
anti-Semitism by working silently and indirectly against treason and
racial subversion. This method had the great advantage of not provoking
the enemy, so that one could proceed peacefully and safely with one's
"silent" work. Thus, while working at
American Mercury he began
to formulate plans for an underground, "hard-core" National Socialist
organization, with a right-wing front and financing by wealthy
conservatives. Since the organization was to be, in effect, National
Socialist, with National Socialists at the helm and carrying out the
significant activities, and the conservative front only a disguise, he
happily thought he had a plan which would not be subject to all the
flaws of those of his conservative efforts of the past. His new project
rapidly foundered on the shoals of reality, however. First he found that
wealthy conservatives suffered from most of the character defects that
he had already observed in not-so-wealthy conservatives. Money could be
gotten from them for "pet" projects—but not for any serious effort which
smacked of danger, particularly danger of exposure. A more fundamental
weakness of the "secret" approach, however, lay in the fact that it is
the surface disguise, the front—not the hidden core—which determines the
quality of the personnel attracted to an organization. Thus, when his
anticipated source of funds balked and his one National Socialist
recruit became discouraged and left, Rockwell was faced with the
prospect of scrapping his new idea and starting again from nothing.
Sadly he re-read the words the Leader had written more than thirty years previously:
"A
man who knows a thing, recognizes a given danger, and sees with his own
eyes the possibility of a remedy, damned well has the duty and the
obligation not to work 'silently', but to stand up openly against the
evil and for its cure. If he does not do so then he is a faithless,
miserable weakling who fails either from cowardice or from laziness and
incompetence .... Every last agitator who possesses the courage to
defend his opinions with manly forthrightness, standing on a tavern
table among his adversaries, accomplishes more than a thousand of these
lying, treacherous sneaks."[18]
It had taken two years of repeated discouragements and failures
to bring this lesson home to him, but now he understood it. He had
finally seen the fallacy underlying the conservative premise. In his own
words:
- Although it is made to appear so, the battle between the
conservatives and liberals is not a battle of ideas or even of political
organizations. It is a battle of force, terror, and power. The Jews and
their accomplices and dupes are not running our country and its people
because of the excellence of their ideas or the merit of their work or
the genuine majority of people behind them. They are in power in spite
of the lack of these things, and only because they have driven their way
into power by daring minority tactics. They can stay in power only
because people are afraid to oppose them—afraid they will be socially ostracized, afraid they will be smeared in the press, afraid they will lose their jobs, afraid they will not be able to run their businesses, afraid
they will lose political offices. It is fear, and fear alone, which
keeps these filthy left-wing sneaks in power—not ignorance on the part
of the American people, as the conservatives keep telling each other.[19]
Beyond this however, he was coming to the even more fundamental
conclusion: Not only were conservatives wrong in their evaluation of the
nature of the conflict between themselves and liberals and wrong in
their choice of tactics, but their motives were also wrong; at least, he
was beginning to see that their motives differed fundamentally from his
own. Basically, the conservatives are
aracial. Their primary
concerns are economic: taxes, government spending, fiscal
responsibility; and social: law and order, honest government, morality.
At worst, their sole interest is the protection of their standard of
living from the encroachments of the welfare state; at best, they are
genuinely concerned about the general decay of standards and the trend
toward mobocracy and chaos. But, as whole, they show very little concern
for the
biological problem of which all these other problems are only manifestations.
Certainly the right wing was preferable to the left wing in this
respect. At least conservatives tended to have a healthy anti-Semitic
instinct. But as long as their inner orientation was
economic-materialistic rather than racial-idealistic, they would remain
primarily interested in the defense of a system rather than a race, they
would continue to look for easy and superficial solutions rather than
fundamental ones, and they would continue to lack that spirit of
selfless idealism essential to ultimate victory.
Thus, as the year 1956 drew to a close, Rockwell was certain of
one thing: Conservatives would never, by any stretch of the imagination,
be able to offer any effective opposition to the forces of degeneration
and death. As he wrote later, anyone, when he first discovers what is
going on, might be forgiven a certain period of nourishing the delusion
and hope that there is a safe, easy, and "nice" solution to the problem.
But to pursue the same fruitless tactics year after year is evidence of
something else:
- Conservatives are the world's champion ostriches, muttering to
each other down under the sand "in secret", while their plumed bottoms
wave in the breeze for the Jews to kick at their leisure. They are
fooling nobody but themselves.[20]
The answer would have to be found elsewhere—but where, how?
The years 1957 and 1958 were difficult ones. As a representative
of a New York management-consultant firm, he spent most of 1957
travelling, in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, writing and
consolidating his thoughts whenever he could find time. The winter of
1957-58 saw a brief interlude in Atlanta, where he sold advertising.
During this period, Rockwell had an experience about which he has never
written and which he related to only a few people. Always a skeptic
where the supernatural was concerned, he was certainly not a man to be
easily influenced by omens. Yet there can be no doubt that he attached
special significance to a series of dreams that he had then. The
dreams—actually all variations of a single dream—occurred nearly every
night for a period of several weeks and were of such intensity that he
could recall them vividly upon waking. In each dream he saw himself in
some everyday situation: sitting in a crowded theater, eating at a
counter in a diner, walking through the busy lobby of an office
building, or inspecting the airplanes of his squadron at an airfield
hangar. And in each dream a man would approach him— theatet usher, diner
cook, office clerk, or mechanic—and say something to the effect, "Mr,
Rockwell, there is someone to see you." And then he would be led off to
some back room or side office in the building or hangar, as the case may
have been. He would open the door and find waiting for him inside,
always alone—Adolf Hitler. Then the dream would end.
One can most easily interpret these dreams as a case of
autosuggestion, but in the light of later developments Rockwell
considered them as a symbolic summons, a beckoning onto the path for
which he was then still groping, whether that beckoning was the
consequence of an internal or an external stimulus.
Early in 1958 he returned to Virginia. His first effort there was
in Newport News, where he produced political cartoons in collaboration
with the publisher of a small racist magazine—which shortly went
bankrupt. In Newport News, however, he met a man who was to play a
critical role in changing the course of his political career: Harold N.
Arrowsmith, Jr. Arrowsmith was a wealthy conservative with a "pet"
project—but he was not like any other wealthy conservative Rockwell had
met. Independently wealthy as the result of an inheritance, he had
formerly been a physical anthropologist. He had stumbled into politics
rather by accident when a friend on the research staff of a
Congressional investigating committee had asked him for some help with
some library research connected with a case under investigation. In the
course of this work he had, to his surprise, come upon some of the
documentary material that had so startled Rockwell a few years earlier
in San Diego. Being a trained scholar, a linguist with a dozen languages
at his disposal, having access to all the major libraries and archives
of the Western world—and with unlimited time and money—he was able to
follow up his initial discoveries and soon had unearthed literally
thousands of items of evidence. The story they told was a shocking and
frightening one: world wars and revolutions, famines and massacres—not
the caprices of history, but the results of deliberate and cold-blooded
scheming.
Although he had filing cabinets bulging with military
intelligence reports, court records, photostats of diplomatic
correspondence, and other material, he had not been able to publicize
any of his finds. Scholarly journals returned his carefully written and
documented papers with rejection slips, and it soon became apparent that
no publisher of general periodicals would accept them either. He
approached Rockwell with the proposition of printing, publishing, and
distributing some of his documentary material, with full financial
backing.
They formed the "National Committee to Free America from Jewish
Domination," and Rockwell moved to Arlington, Virginia, where Arrowsmith
provided him with a house and printing equipment.
Rockwell had already reached the conclusion that if any progress
were to be made, it was necessary to break out of the right-wing milieu
into fresh territory. Right-wingers had been exchanging and reading one
another's pamphlets for years, with no noticeable results. They always
used the same mailing lists and sent their propaganda to people who, for
the most part, had already heard at least a dozen variations on the
same theme. What was needed was mass publicity, so that some fresh blood
could be attracted into the "movement." As the normal channels of mass
propaganda were closed to most right-wingers—and certainly to anyone
whose propaganda might prove distressing to Jews—Rockwell had decided
that radical means must be used to force open those channels. He placed
this objective before all others. For, he reasoned, if one is to
mobilize men into an organization—"secret" or otherwise—for the purpose
of gaining political power, one must first let those men know of one's
existence and communicate to them at least a bare outline of one's
program. Until a mass of new raw material—potential recruits—could be
stirred up by making a really significant impact on the public
consciousness, there was simply no sense in proceeding further; he had
already spent too much time doing things the old way. He was, in fact,
prepared to take the next-to-last step in his progress from just another
goy to the heir to Adolf Hitler's mighty legacy. He decided on
public agitation of the most provocative sort—agitation of such a
blatant and revolutionary sort that the mass media could not ignore it.
In May, 1958, Eisenhower had sent U.S. marines to Lebanon to help
maintain the government of President Chamoun in power, against the
wishes of the Arab citizens of that country. The Lebanese Arabs desired
closer cooperation with the other Arab states, but Chamoun, much to the
pleasure of the Jews, did not. The threat of the overthrow of Chamoun
and of a pro-Arab government coming into power in Lebanon, thus adding
another member to the Arab bloc opposing the illegal Jewish occupation
of Palestine, led U.S. Jews to press the course of U.S. intervention
upon Eisenhower, always their willing tool. The issue was much in the
public eye during the summer of 1958, and Rockwell decided to use it as
the basis of his first public demonstration—a picket of the White House.
Calling on many of the contacts he had made around the country during
the past few years, he was able to arrange for a busload of young
demonstrators to come to Washington and also to organize protest groups
in both Atlanta, Georgia, and Louisville, Kentucky. Then on Sunday
morning, July 29, 1958, Rockwell led his group of pickets to the White
House, while the groups in Atlanta and Louisville began their
demonstrations simultaneously. Carrying large signs which Rockwell had
designed and printed himself, these three groups made the first public
protest against Jewish control of the U.S. government since the Jews had
silenced their critics in 1941. It was indeed a momentous occasion: not
yet an open National Socialist demonstration, but a vigorous slap in
the face for the enemy—a slap which could not be ignored, as all the
"secret" right-wing activity had been for years.
Ten weeks later, on October 12, a synagogue in Atlanta was
mysteriously blown up. Police immediately swooped on Rockwell's men in
Atlanta who had demonstrated in July. Newspapers around the world
carried front-page stories implicating Rockwell and Arrowsmith in the
bombing. Arrowsmith, who felt he was getting more involved in politics
than was comfortable, retrieved his printing equipment and withdrew
Rockwell's financial support. For the first time, Rockwell began to get a
taste of the difficult times which lay ahead. Hoodlums, instigated by
the newspaper publicity, attacked his home. Windows were broken, and
stones and firecrackers were thrown at his house late at night. Both by
day and by night he and his wife received obscene and threatening
telephone calls. Finally, for the sake of their safety, he felt obliged
to send his family to Iceland.
With its financial backing gone, the "National Committee to Free
America from Jewish Control" was no more. The last of Rockwell's
conservative friends evaporated in the harsh glare of newspaper hate
propaganda which was heaped upon him. As the new year, 1959, came in, he
found himself alone in an empty house, without friends or money or
prospects for the future. He had dared to seize the dragon by the tail
and had survived. Yet, in the bleak, cold days of January and February,
1959, this gave him little comfort as he faced an uncertain and
unpromising future:
- ... As I sat alone in that empty house or lay alone in that
even emptier bed in the silent, hollow darkness, the full realization of
what I was about bore in upon me with fearful urgency. I realized there
was no turning back; as long as I lived I was marked with the stigma of
anti-Jewishness.
- ... I could never again hope to earn a normal living. The Jews
could not survive unless they made an example of me the rest of my life,
else too many others might be tempted to follow my example. My Rubicon
had been crossed, and it was fight and win-or die.[21]
And then something happened which, in its way, was to be as decisive
in his life as had been his finding Adolf Hitler's message in
Mein Kampf,
eight years before, in San Diego. Again, it was like a guiding hand
reaching to him from the twilight of the past—from a charred,
rubble-filled bunker in Berlin—and showing him the way. Waiting for him
at the post office one morning at the beginning of March was a large
carton. In it, carefully folded, was a huge swastika banner, which had
been sent by a young admirer. Deeply moved, he carried the banner home
and hung it across one end of his living room, completely covering the
wall. He found a small, bronze plaque with a relief bust of Adolf
Hitler, which had been given to him earlier, and mounted it in the
center of the swastika. Then he found three candles and candle holders,
which he placed on a small book-case he had arranged just below the
bronze plaque. He closed the blinds and lit the candles: "I stood there
in the flickering candlelight, not a sound in the house, not a soul near
me or aware of what I was doing—or caring."
[22]
On that cold, March morning, alone before the dimly lit altar,
Lincoln Rockwell underwent an experience of a sort shared by few men in
the long history of our race—an experience which comes seldom to this
world but which may radically alter the course of that world when it
does. Nearly fifty-three years before, a similar experience had befallen
a man—that time on a cold, November night, on a hilltop overlooking the
Austrian town of Linz.
[23]
It was a religious experience that was more than religious. As he
stood there he felt an indescribable torrent of emotions surging
through his being, reaching higher and higher in a crescendo with a peak
of unbearable intensity. He felt the awe-inspiring
awareness for a few moments, or a few minutes, of being more than himself, of being
in communion
with that which is beyond description and beyond comprehension.
Something with the cool, vast feeling of eternity and of infinity—of
long ages spanning the birth and death of suns, and of immense, starry
vistas—filled his soul to the bursting point. One may call that
Something by different names—the Great Spirit, perhaps, or Destiny, or
the Soul of the Universe, or God—but once It has brushed the soul of a
man, that man can never again be wholly what he was before. It changes
him spiritually in the same way that a mighty earthquake or a
cataclysmic eruption, the subsidence of a continent or the bursting
forth of a new mountain range, changes forever the face of the earth.
Slowly the storm subsided, and Lincoln Rockwell—a
new
Lincoln Rockwell—became aware once again of the room about him and of
his own thoughts. He has described for us his feeling then:
- ... Where before I had wanted to fight the forces of tyranny and regression, now I had
to fight them. But even more, I felt within me the power to
prevail—strength beyond my own strength—the ability to do the right
thing even when I was personally overwhelmed by events. And that
strength has not yet failed me. Nor will it fail ....
I knew with calm certainty exactly what to do, and I knew, in a
hard-to-explain sense, what was ahead. It was something like looking at a
road from the air after seeing only the curve ahead from the ground
....
Adolf Hitler had shown the way to survival. It would be my task
on this earth to carry his ideas ... to total, world-wide victory.
I
knew I would not live to see the victory which I would make possible.
But I would not die before I had made that victory certain. [editor's italics]
[24]
And just as Adolf Hitler had said of his experience on the Freinberg, "
In that hour it began,"
so in that hour it began for Lincoln Rockwell also. He did not realize
it then, of course, but this climactic event had come almost exactly in
the middle of his political life; he had run just half the course from
that fall day in 1950, in the San Diego Public Library, to a martyr's
death in Arlington in the late summer of 1967.
Before, he had been a right-winger, a conservative, albeit a more
and more openly anti-Jewish one; before, he had felt the need to keep
his National Socialism concealed; before, while he had admired Adolf
Hitler as the greatest thinker in the history of the race and
Mein Kampf as the most important book ever written, they had not been wholly
real
to him—and this attitude had resulted in his failure so often to apply
the Leader's teachings to his own political efforts. Now, however, he
was no longer a conservative, but a National Socialist, and he would
bear witness for his faith before the whole world; now, at last, he
recognized in Adolf Hitler not just an extraordinarily great mind and
spirit, but something immortal, transcendental, more than human; now he
saw the Leader as an embodiment, in a way, of that Universal Soul with
which he had briefly communed; now he was prepared to follow the
Leader's teachings without reservation, in all things.
At the same time that these fundamental changes in his outlook
took place, he saw the need for a fundamental change in his political
tactics. He recalled the Leader's words:
"Any man who is not attacked
in the Jewish newspapers, not slandered and vilified, is ... no true
National Socialist. The best measure of the value of his will is the
hostility he receives from the mortal enemy of our people ....
"Every Jewish slander and every Jewish lie is a scar of honor on the body of our warriors.
"The man they have most reviled stands closest to us, and the man they hate worst is our best friend.
"Anyone who picks up a Jewish newspaper in the morning and does
not see. himself slandered in it has not made profitable use of the
previous day; for if he had, he would be persecuted, reviled, slandered,
abused, befouled. And only the man who combats this mortal enemy of our
nation and of all Aryan humanity and culture most effectively may
expect to see the slanders of this race and the efforts of this people
directed against him."
[25]
And further:
"It makes no difference whatever whether they
laugh at us or revile us, whether they represent us as clowns or
criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern
themselves with us again and again, and that we gradually ... appear to
be the only power that anyone reckons with at the moment. What we really
are and what we really want, we will show the Jewish journalistic
rabble when the day comes."[26]
Rockwell had already recognized the need for gaining mass
publicity by radical means, but he had flinched at the thought of the
slander and vilification, the misrepresentation and ridicule which must
inevitably accompany any publicity he received through the
alien-dominated mass media. He had been living in the conservative dream
world and had shared with other right-wingers the comfortable illusion
that one can keep the enemy fooled—even make him think one is his
friend—and fight him effectively at the same time.
Even as he gradually became more forthright in his statements
with respect to the Jewish question, he retained the feeling that to
speak out openly for Adolf Hitler's National Socialist world view would
be nothing short of suicide.
Thus he had fallen between two stools after his demonstration of
July 29, 1958. He had been numbed by the virulence of the hatred
unleashed against him, and at the same time found himself crippled by
self-imposed limitations in his own campaign.
Now, however, he had decided that not only would he never again
flinch under the torrent of abuse and slander which his activities were
sure to bring down on him, but he would provoke such attacks by the
enemy, looking upon each one as a "scar of honor" and also as another
small step toward his eventual general recognition as
the
opponent of everything the enemy stood for, as "the only power with
which [that enemy] reckoned." And he saw that an open avowal of his
National Socialism was not only the strongest irritant he could bring to
bear against his enemy, but it was the only realistic basis for
gathering around himself those elements of the population needed to
build a viable and lasting movement with which eventually to destroy
that enemy and restore his own race to the position of strength and
health and honor from which it had abdicated.
Actually, he carried the Leader's counsel about the use of the
enemy's own propaganda to its logical extreme. Looking at the task
before him realistically for the first time, he saw that the problems he
faced were so severe that, in order to make any progress against them,
he would be obliged to concentrate all his energies upon one aspect of
those problems at a time. The first step was general recognition. His
earlier conviction that that goal must be attained at the expense of
every other consideration was now stronger than ever. Thus, instead of
following the natural urge to dissociate National Socialism from the
Hollywood image that Jewry had been building for it for more than three
decades, he temporarily threw all hopes of "respectability"—
even among other National Socialists—aside
and set about turning to his own advantage all the Jews' previous
efforts. Toward this end he deliberately pinned on himself the label
"Nazi," rather than "National Socialist," using this bit of journalistic
jargon which had been coined by the enemy during the early days of
struggle in Germany, a term looked upon by National Socialists with
about the same feeling that convinced Marxists must look upon the
designation "commie," or "pinko." Behind this step—one which was to
cause much misunderstanding and suspicion in days to come—was the
cold-blooded realization that a strutting, shouting, uniform-wearing,
Hollywood-style "Nazi" was vastly more newsworthy, had vastly more
"shock value," than any mere National Socialist.
As he pondered over his soul-stirring experience and began to lay
new plans for the future during the next few days, events began flowing
in the new channel marked out for them by the finger of Destiny. Three
men, a right-wing acquaintance and two other men who were strangers to
Rockwell, dropped in to see him one evening. Initially shocked and
repelled by the swastika banner in his living room, they were soon won
over by his passionate exposition of the new cause. Two of the three
remained to become his first disciples.
Then he opened the blinds on his windows, making his swastika
banner visible from the street. He issued swastika armbands to his two
recruits, and the three of them swaggered about the house wearing
holstered pistols. Later he mounted an illuminated swastika on the roof.
The crowds came to laugh and jeer and throw rocks—but a few
remained to listen. His "stormtroopers" grew in number from two, to
four, to ten.
These March days in 1959, which witnessed the first genuine
rebirth of National Socialist activity after nearly fourteen years of
terror and total suppression, marked the beginning of the stormiest and
most difficult times Rockwell faced. Harrassed by the police with
illegal searches and confiscation of his property and materials,
assaulted by thugs and vandals whom the police made no efforts to
apprehend, he and his small group of followers printed and distributed
tens of thousands of leaflets and talked to throngs of curious and
hostile visitors who came to see the "American Fuehrer," as the
newspapers laughingly called him. He first chose the name "American
Party" for his embryonic organization, but soon changed the name to
"American Nazi Party."
Keeping his initial objective foremost in his mind, he
concentrated the activities of his small group primarily on the
distribution of inflammatory leaflets, on creating public incidents, on
haranguing crowds under circumstances especially chosen to provoke
violent opposition—anything and everything, in other words, to gain mass
publicity, to become generally recognized as
the opponent of the
Jews and everything they represented, from Marxism to unprincipled
capitalism, from racial degeneration to cultural bolshevism.
His first soapbox-style public address was delivered on the Mall,
in Washington, on Sunday, April 3, 1960, and became a regular
occurrence for some time thereafter.
A letter he wrote to his mother during this early period of public speaking gives an idea of a few of the difficulties he faced:
- 7 July, 1960
- Dear Mother:
- Thank you for the letter and the help. It is much appreciated ....
- Don't pay too much attention to what the papers say, Mother; they lie unbelievably ....
- Last week they tried to murder us again on the Mall here and
almost killed Major Morgan, whom you met, when they dragged him out—ten
of them —and stomped him and left him for dead. But we prevailed, and
even though the police, much against their will, were forced to arrest
us for "disorderly conduct" (for being attacked by a murderous mob!),
the people are with us. This sort of thing is inevitable, and it will get worse.
- Now they have tried—yesterday—to have me heaved in an insane
asylum to shut me up, but they were surprised, as I was relieved, when
people rushed forward to offer the huge cash bond they set for me, and I
will have a psychiatrist of my own choosing deliver a report, instead
of the two Jews they planned for me.
- Do not worry about all this. It is dangerous, painful, and
bitter when our own people do not understand what we are doing and
suffering for them, but I am sure that the Lord will not permit liars
and villains to win in the end. You will yet be mighty proud ....
- Love,
- Link
In May, 1960, the
National Socialist Bulletin[27] made its appearance as the first periodical published by the American Nazi Party. It evolved into the
Stormtrooper
magazine after eight issues.
Meanwhile, on February 5, 1960, the United States Navy, under pressure
from Jewish groups, forced Rockwell to accept a discharge from the Naval
Reserve.
Despite the news quarantine imposed on him, despite beatings and
jailings, despite a chronic lack of funds, despite serious personnel
problems, and despite a thousand other troubles and difficulties, his
campaign to gain public recognition made steady progress. Newspapers
found it impossible to completely avoid mentioning his brash and daring
exploits; editors and columnists found irresistible the temptation to
denounce or "expose" him. Even radio and television emcees, ever on the
prowl for sensation, yielded to temptation and defied the ban on
publicity for Rockwell.
The image of George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party
created by the mass media for public consumption was, of course, a
grossly distorted one. Rockwell had succeeded in forcing the media, more
or less against their will, to give him publicity. Unfortunately, he
could not force them to be impartial in their treatment, or even to be
truthful. An interview with him published in the popular magazine,
Playboy,
was prefaced with such editorial remarks as: "Unlike controversial past
interviewees ... Rockwell could not be called a spokesman for any
socially or politically significant minority .... But we felt that the
very virulence of Rockwell's messianic master-racism could transform a
really searching conversation with the 48-year-old
Führer into a revealing portrait of both rampant racism and the pathology of fascism."
[28]
Another commented: "The question of George Lincoln Rockwell boils
down, then, to the question of how far can America let the hate-mongers
go. Will an unsound branch on the tree of American democracy fall off
or will it poison the organism?"
[29]
The really ambitious writers, editors, and reporters did not
restrict themselves to such mildly prejudicial remarks but vied with one
another in concocting outrageous lies about Rockwell. He was accused of
cowardice, sadism, selfish gormandizing, even kidnapping: "Like the
late Adolf Schickelgruber, on whom he models himself, he believes in
leading from behind—as far behind as possible."
[30] In one magazine, he was "quoted" as boasting that he had once "castrated a heckler with his bare hands,"
[31]
and another reported: "George Rockwell's hysterical raving has already
whipped up the lunatic fringe to the breaking point. Last summer three
of his stormtroopers decided to please the Fuehrer by kidnapping a small
Jewish child in Washington, D.C., and holding him at the Party
Headquarters for several hours. How many more innocent citizens will be
subjected to harrassment before Robert F. Kennedy and the Justice
Department move in?"
[32]
Topping them all was the story that: "Like a true Nazi top dog,
he avails himself of top-dog privileges and orders private meals served
in his room. He partakes of such fancy fare as turtle soup, lobster, and
steak while the men eat hash. Between meals he enjoys sucking
kumquats."
[33]
This last flight of fancy is reminiscent of articles published in the
"German" press (before 1933) which portrayed Adolf Hitler as a drunken
profligate and lecher who dissipated the contributions of his followers
in high living, champagne parties, and whoring.
Rockwell accepted these lies and slanders philosophically, for
the alternative to this Jew-designed public image was no public image at
all. As a matter of fact, the Jews—and non-Jewish publicists anxious to
demonstrate their affection for the Jews—cannot be given all the blame
for this poor image. Rockwell himself lent a conscious hand to its
creation, as he admitted when he said, "... when I have the rare
opportunity to use some mass medium, as was recently the case when I
gave an interview to
Playboy, I am forced to walk a careful line
between what I should like to say and what the enemy would like to hear
me say. Unless I deliberately sound at least halfway like a raving
illiterate with three loose screws, such an interview would never be
printed."
[34]
The price he paid for becoming generally recognized as "Mr. Nazi" was a
high one indeed. Other men with sound racial instincts but without
Rockwell's understanding of political realities were, naturally enough,
appalled by what seemed to be Rockwell's ridiculous antics. Most people,
even relatively sophisticated ones who talk knowingly about "managed
news," simply find incomprehensible the Jewish "big-lie" technique.
These sound but simple citizens all too often jumped to the
not-implausible conclusion that Rockwell was a kind of
agent provocateur,
a traitor hired by the enemy to discredit honest racists and patriots.
His correspondence with some of them displays a mixture of impatience
with their inability to perceive the essence of the real problems facing
our race, and a sincere desire to evoke understanding. The following
extracts from a letter to a member of a snobbish racist group calling
itself the "European Liberation Front" are typical:
- Dear Mr. ...:
- ... I realize that I am only a stupid, silly American, but I do
love this country, in spite of your denunciation of it. What you hate
about it is what the Jews have done to it, and you are like a man who
permits his wife to be debauched by rapists and then tosses her in the
garbage can for it. Shame on you! What you call the "American" influence
on Europe is not American at all, and you damned sure should know it.
The real American influence was Henry Ford, our West, and the like.
- Europe is a tired old man—more like a tired old lady—and if
Western culture is to be saved, it will be saved by the last Western
barbarians, the American barbarians I love. Men like you, suave,
polished, educated, supercilious, and "above" nasty physical violence,
cannot save themselves, let alone a nation, a culture, or a race.
- You people with your "European Liberation Front" are going at
it backwards. You can't liberate Europe any more with Europeans, Hitler
gave that effort every bit of holy genius within him, and he was mashed
by the American barbarians. You and your egghead gang of dandies are in
love with what is gone and insist on ignoring what is here. Rome is no more.
You keep trying to resurrect it, and you can't, because there are no
more noble Romans over there, at least not enough to make a real fight
of it. Europe is like one big France—all empty shell, fine words, pretty
songs, and dead men. We helped kill Europe. If you did liberate it, like France was "liberated," it would sink into degeneracy again in a century ....
- There are, of course, good, vigorous fighting men in Europe,
but they are swamped by the human garbage left in the wreckage of two
wars promoted by Jews and fought by Americans.
- I am building National Socialism here, by such expedients and methods as may be possible, and I am succeeding, in spite of your looking down your nose at me ....
- Whenever I can get some or the other of you to ditch the "We're-the-real-National Socialists" game and start being
National Socialists, I give strength to the cause to which I have given
my life, my family, my comfort, and everything else I have to give, no
matter what you may have been told ....
Frankness, not diplomacy, was his strong point.
In order to allay hostility and suspicion as much as he could, he
was soon obliged to divert some of his energies from agitation and
publicity garnering to a more sober exposition of his ideas. His first
major effort in that direction was the publication of his political
autobiography,
This Time the World. Written hastily in the fall
of 1960 between speaking engagements, court appearances, street brawls,
and desperate attempts to raise money to sustain his small group, he was
not able to publish it until a year later. The printing and binding of
the book were done entirely by his untrained stormtroopers, and their
only machinery was a tiny, office-style duplicator. The absolute
sincerity of its tone failed to convince few of its readers, but the
difficulties of distribution, due to the Jewish "quarantine," limited
its circulation to a few thousand copies.
In October, 1961, the first of his
Rockwell Reports appeared. Varying in length from four to thirty-six pages, the
Rockwell Report
appeared semi-monthly at first, then monthly, occasionally lapsing into
bi-monthly publication during particularly difficult periods. The
Rockwell Reports
contained a lively mixture of National Socialist ideology, current
political analysis, prognostication, political cartoons and drawings,
reproductions of pertinent news clippings, and photographs of Party
activities. They all bore his unique stamp and, more than any other one
thing, were responsible for drawing to him the idealistic young men who
formed the cadre of the growing movement. One of these young idealists
was a twenty-seven-year-old Marine Corps veteran and university student
who came to Arlington in 1963 to take over the internal administration
of the Party as National Secretary. His name was Matt Koehl.
From the beginning, Rockwell had understood the necessity for the
National Socialist movement eventually to operate from a worldwide
basis. For the ultimate
political goal of the Movement was the establishment of an Aryan world order, a
pax Aryana,
as a prerequisite for the attainment of the long-term racial goals of
the Movement. From the spring of 1959, this concept had existed on paper
as the "World Union of Free-Enterprise National Socialists," but until
the summer of 1962 it was not implemented beyond an exchange of letters
with individual National Socialists in Europe. In early August, 1962,
Rockwell met with National Socialist representatives from four other
nations in the Cotswold Hills, near Cotswold, England, and the World
Union of National Socialists formally came into existence. On the fifth
of August the protocol now known as the Cotswold Agreements was drawn
up, pledging the National Socialist movements of the United States,
Great Britain, France, Germany (including Austria), and Belgium to a
common effort. Annual meetings of the World Union of National Socialists
were originally envisaged, but Fate and circumstances prevented this.
Rockwell was under increasing pressure in America during the next five
years, as the situation there grew steadily more turbulent.
Rockwell's original program was divided into three phases. The
first phase, beginning in March, 1959, was to be a phase of provocative
but essentially non-constructive activity, intended to generate
publicity and build a public image, no matter how distorted. The second
phase was to be a cadre-building phase, during which a strong,
disciplined, effective,
professional National Socialist
organization was to be built and capabilities in propaganda and
organizing developed to a high degree. The third phase was to be one of
mass organization.
Phase one was masterfully executed. Rockwell proved himself an
outstanding tactician in the rough-and-tumble game of smashing through
the Jewish blackout barrier. With cool objectivity, he watched the press
heap bucket after bucket of lies and filth on his image, provoking them
to renewed activity whenever they tired. With keen insight he analyzed
the Jewish situation. He understood that though they occupied the key
positions of control in the public-opinion-forming networks, they were
constrained to a large extent by the fact that that control must remain
hidden from the public.
Furthermore, he understood the fact that a very
substantial portion of the reporters, editors, columnists, newscasters,
and even many individual newspaper and broadcast-station owners are not
Jews, and, barring direct and categorical orders to the contrary from
the key Jews, these people can be counted upon to react in a
more-or-less predictable way to a given stimulus. Thus, by taking a
position and making statements which seemed extreme and even ridiculous
to the "average citizen," he could entice publicists to quote him
widely, thinking thus to discredit both the man and the philosophy with
these average citizens. What they failed to understand was that before
the Movement could profit from any mass appeal, it had to appeal to a
large number of very
un-average citizens—fearless idealists who
could form the National Socialist cadre. And these men responded in a
very different way to Rockwell's message than did the liberal publicists
or their "average" audience. They saw beyond the superficial
"ridiculousness" of his message to the kernel of deep truth that it
contained. While the average citizen, incapable of thinking beyond the
immediate problems of the day, found Rockwell's message "too extreme,"
just as the publicists intended, those who could extrapolate in their
minds the developments of the present to the consequences of
tomorrow—and of a century hence—saw the compelling necessity of his
demands. But such men are rather sparsely distributed throughout the
population, and to reach them Rockwell needed to cast his net very wide;
this the publicists helped him do while they thought to "smear" him.
Rockwell also understood that the image of him being erected in the
minds of the masses, while a liability now, had a value for the future,
when conditions had ripened so that at least some of those masses were
ready for an "extremist."
Phase two—cadre building and organizational development—in a
sense was co-extant with phase one, for from the very beginning
Rockwell's publicity began to attract a few of the idealists needed for
phase two, and these men began to constitute the skeleton of the
organizational structure which was later to be filled out. Even a bit of
phase three entered the picture during the first phase, when Rockwell
conducted a campaign to become governor of the state of Virginia in
1965. This election campaign proved to be a period of extremely valuable
training not only for Rockwell but for the leadership personnel of his
entire Party. Realizing the eventual need to develop proficiency at mass
campaigning, Rockwell decided to begin acquiring experience in that
direction soon rather than late. As he later admitted, after winning
less than 1.5% of the votes cast, the campaign also provided a more
fundamental lesson and helped him to realistically re-evaluate the
entire status of the Movement. Before, he had taken the overly
optimistic view that the Movement would begin to pick up substantial
mass following as soon as it had gained sufficient publicity through his
phase-one activities; that is, he believed that phases two and three
would be largely concurrent. After the Virginia campaign, having been
reminded once again of the stupendous inertia of public opinion, he
realized that phase two would be much longer than originally
anticipated, and that the beginning of any substantial success from
phase-three activity would have to await two things: a considerable
internal strengthening of the Movement and a considerable worsening of
the general racial-social-economic situation.
With this first thing in mind, he made the decision in 1966 to
inaugurate a general reorientation of Party activity. As mentioned
before, the first two phases of Party activity overlapped to a large
extent, and the transition between the two was marked primarily by a
shift of emphasis. Phase one was the "Nazi" era of the Movement. Phase
two is the beginning of the National Socialist era. In line with this
re-emphasis, the American Nazi Party officially became the National
Socialist White People's Party on January 1, 1967, and that date can
reasonably be considered to mark the transition. Six months earlier, the
appearance of
National Socialist World was a major step in this
direction. And six months after that date—in June, 1967—a historic
reorganizational conference of the Party leadership was held in
Arlington. There Rockwell set the Movement on its new course, explaining
the need for a total professionalization of every activity, from fund
raising to propaganda writing, in order to meet the severe demands to be
expected during the long period of growth and struggle ahead.
He was now forty-nine years old. For the past eight years he had
been working an average sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. The
strain on his physical and spiritual resources had been severe. Usually
he was obliged to concentrate on several tasks simultaneously. There was
always a demonstration to be planned, a speech to be prepared,
propaganda to be written, a court case to be fought, money to be raised
... and everything to be done under nearly impossible working
conditions, with incessant interruptions. Only the immense vitality of
his rugged, six-foot-four-inch frame and a deep reserve of spiritual
strength had sustained him in the past. The course that lay ahead would
certainly be no easier; on the contrary, in addition to the old tasks
connected with agitation and publicity, there would be many new problems
to be faced as the Movement continued into its new phase of activity.
Other men—strong men—might have yielded to the temptation to
remain with a prescription to which they had become accustomed and not
venture from a beaten path into strange and difficult territory. The
slightest trace of subjectivity would allow them to bring forth a
hundred reasons for not changing a
modus operandi which they had
found successful in the past. And yet it was characteristic of Rockwell
that he did not hesitate for an instant. When he saw that the time had
come for the Movement to change its tactics and accept a different set
of challenges, he set himself to the new task with the same
determination that he had shown throughout the first phase.
Now it was necessary to build up a whole new public image for the
Party, or, rather, gradually to transform the grossly distorted image
he had induced the enemy to build for him to one closer to the truth. It
was a demanding task, and he spent the summer of 1967 in laying plans
for the future and in finishing his new book,
White Power.
In one of his last letters, written in August to two faithful
Party comrades, man and wife, he reveals a little of the introspection
which occupied his mind at this decisive time:
- Dear ...:
- By no means do I get the solid feeling that ... [you] are clear
in your own minds on what has been done, what should be done now, and
what might be done (or not done) in the future.
- For this reason, after much of my favorite recent hobby—tossing
and turning—I have arisen as dawn is creeping over this benighted city
to set forth on paper some thoughts which might help. (And often I find
that such efforts to help others, help me in the process.)
- There is no plan or overall approach in this letter; it's just
jewels, pearls, and clinkers from a mind which seems to be in a state of
near-collapse and rebellion.
- First let me present an insoluble problem within me. Doing my
best to learn from history, I am aware of a fact of all great struggles.
There have been millions of causes, battles, and so on, almost all of
them lost. History rarely records the losers, except when they get
hacked up in a particularly interesting and dramatic manner.
- But there are some winners, who do get recorded in history, I
have examined these pretty carefully (wishing someday to join their
exalted ranks) to see if there is any common pattern to their activity
on this planet which might be a key to why they won, when almost
everybody loses.
- There is absolutely no doubt about it; there is such a pattern,
even though the causes and struggles vary in content or aim from
Lenin's Bolshevism to Adolf Hitler's National Socialism, from a little
old lady set on running her neighbor out of town to Genghis Khan and his
human-hamburger machine. The winners in every case have been more
determined, more fanatical in their ruthless refusal to quit, than their
competitors. This would seem to indicate that victory is given to him
who is most persevering.
- But this has not been true, either. History abounds with
persevering nuts who have repeatedly hopped off hills and buildings
wearing "wings" and just as repeatedly landed on their behinds until
there was nothing left ....
- The conclusion I reach from all this is that it takes three
things to make a winner: a good cause, i.e., a cause which is in time,
in phase, and needed; a leader who is unshakeable in his
determination to fight as long as he has a couple of stumps for legs and
who can inspire that same will in his troops; and some plain good luck.
- As I examine my own cause, leadership, and luck, I find that it
is absolutely impossible for me to make a detached judgment on whether I
am one of the fanatics hopping off a hill with a pair of Woolworth,
glue-and-feathers wings, or whether I am one of the guys who gets
modelled into stone images for the benefit of pigeons ....
- I do not think either of you knows the answer to that one,
either. However, I have the advantage over both of you in that I long,
long ago made up my mind that the best thing I can do with my
life—what's left of it—is to take aim, do my best to control the
inevitable shaking, and never take my eye and heart off the target until it goes down ....
On the twenty-fifth of August, a Friday, at two minutes before noon,
near his Arlington headquarters, an assassin's bullet struck him down.
The murderer, a man whom Rockwell had expelled from the Party a
few months earlier for his repeated attempts to inject Marxist ideas
subtly into party publications and for publicly expounding a doctrine of
racial bolshevism, had lain in ambush atop a nearby building and fired
into Rockwell's car as it drove by. Ironically, Rockwell had rescued
this puffed-up little Bolshevik from the gutters of New York City eight
years before, and he had taken an almost fatherly interest in him ever
since. He had never given up his repeated attempts to instill a little
decency and sense of honor into him, despite overwhelming evidence that
the man was a compulsive liar and thief and an incurable conspirator.
All his well-meant efforts in this direction were rewarded only with
heartache after heartache over the years—and finally with death, when
the vicious little punk he thought he could make into a man found a
chance to "get even" for being expelled from the Party.
Following a denial by the United States government of Commander
Rockwell's right to burial in a national cemetery, his Party comrades
had his body cremated, and a National Socialist memorial service was
held in Arlington on the afternoon of August 30. Matt Koehl, new
National Leader of the National Socialist White People's Party and
Acting Commander of the World Union of National Socialists, delivered
the brief eulogy below:
"National Socialist comrades! Fellow white Americans! Today we
take upon ourselves the sorrowful task of laying to rest the mortal
remains of our beloved Commander, Lincoln Rockwell, martyred by the
bullet of a cowardly assassin. To those of us who worked with him every
day, to those Party comrades all over America, and to dedicated National
Socialists throughout the world the staggering loss imposed by his
death will only be fully felt in the days and years of struggle which
lie ahead of us all. His inspiration and his will, the depth of his
wisdom and the heroism of his spirit—these are the things which gave us
the motivation and the guidance we sorely needed to keep up the fight on
so many dark days in years past.
"The stunning suddenness of his departure and the ensuing turmoil
of the last few days have kept us from yet assessing the magnitude of
our loss. But even harder to bear than this, perhaps, has been the
utterly shabby—the despicably shameful—treatment of our fallen Commander
by a government of the nation he served so faithfully throughout all
the years of his manhood. George Lincoln Rockwell gave his life in the
struggle against Bolshevism at a time when thousands of other American
fighting men on the other side of the world are also falling victims to
that same Bolshevism—and yet an American government has denied his
request to be laid to rest in the place of his choice.
"George Lincoln Rockwell served America for twenty years and
through two wars, risking his life again and again in defense of the
land and the people he loved so well. He was no armchair soldier, but he
chose of his own will that soldierly profession demanding the very
highest order of courage and skill: he was a fighter pilot. His
dedication to duty, his daring, his proficiency led him from the rank of
Seaman to that of full Commander, gave him the leadership of three
squadrons, and earned him nine decorations. And an American government
does not hold him fit to be buried beside his fellow fighting men.
"George Lincoln Rockwell has sacrificed more and fought harder
for the things he held dear—his native land, his fellow countrymen, and
above all his race—than any man now living. He saw his duty and
unflinchingly did it, even when that duty led him into opposition to
nearly all those around him. He saw further than other men, and he
fought harder. Indeed, in this latter regard he cherished the maxim of
the great Leader whose philosophy molded his own thoughts:
Those who
want to live, let them fight; and those who do not want to fight in
this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.
"He fought, and he died. And yet Lincoln Rockwell is not really
dead, for he built a Movement and he spread an idea, and that Movement
was not destroyed nor that idea silenced by the bullet that struck him
down. And so long as that Movement remains and that idea continues to
fill the hearts and minds of men, the spirit of Lincoln Rockwell lives
on.
"The ashes of the martyr lie here before us, and we cannot help
but be filled with a solemn sense of tragedy. Yet we are not really here
to mourn him, but to honor him and to rededicate ourselves to the Cause
which he served. In the times ahead we must redouble our efforts, so
that he will not have died in vain. We must let his great sacrifice
serve to inspire us onward in our struggle toward victory—the victory of
our people, of our great White race, over the disease which now
afflicts it and the enemies who now oppress it. Indeed, at this moment
we must bear in mind that old saying which the Commander paraphrased for
us: 'The stones and mortar of our Movement are the bones and blood of
its martyrs.' It is this aspect of his death that he would now want us
to keep uppermost in mind, forgetting our sorrow and filling ourselves
with pride at the knowledge we followed such a leader.
"For it was he, Lincoln Rockwell, who again picked up the torch
which fell to earth twenty-two years ago. Adolf Hitler founded our great
Movement and will forever fill a unique position in the sagas of our
race; but had it not been for Lincoln Rockwell, Adolf Hitler's mighty
work might well have been in vain. It was Lincoln Rockwell who set us
once again on the upward path when we had faltered and wanted to go back
again. It was his example which inspired us to do what we knew we
should do rather than that which was easiest to do. It was his hand
which led us out of the maze of defeat and degeneration and despair, and
pointed the way toward higher things; and his voice which reminded us
over and over again that we must continue the struggle for our race.
"As we lay to rest the mortal remains of Lincoln Rockwell, it is
appropriate to read once again that passage from the Leader's book which
he loved best. I shall read from chapter twelve of the first volume of
the Commander's personal copy of
Mein Kampf:
"'When human hearts break and human souls despair, the great
vanquishers of distress and care, of shame and misery, of spiritual
slavery and physical duress look down upon them from the twilight of the
past and hold out their eternal hands to fainthearted mortals. Woe to
the people that is ashamed to grasp them!'"
Notes
- ↑ Ilse Hess, Prisoner of Peace (in the German original: England-Nürnberg-Spandau), transl. by Meyrick Booth (London, 1954), pp. 48-9.
- ↑ Both these boyhood experiences are described in his autobiography, This Time the World (privately published), chap. 1.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 65.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 66.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 71.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 135.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 141.
- ↑ Edition of 1938-39, ed. by John Simons (New York, 1938).
- ↑ Angelo S. Rappoport, Pioneers of the Russian Revolution (London, 1918), p. 228.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 252.
- ↑ Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918, Russia
(United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1931), Vol. 1,
pp. 678-9. See also "Documents on the 'Russian' Revolution," National Socialist World, 2 (Fall, 1966), pp. 37-81, for a selection of photo-copies of documents dealing with the same topic.
- ↑ George Lincoln Rockwell, This Time the World, p. 154.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Ibid., pp. 154-5.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 197.
- ↑ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, II, chap. 8.
- ↑ Ibid., I, chap. 12.
- ↑ Rockwell, op. cit., p. 195.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 199.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 308.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 309.
- ↑ August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund
(Graz, 1953), pp. 133-4. An English translation of Kubizek's
description of Adolf Hitler's experience on the Freinberg is given in National Socialist World, 1 (Spring, 1966), p. 84.
- ↑ Rockwell, op. Cit., p. 310.
- ↑ Hitler, op. cit., I, chap. 12.
- ↑ Ibid., II, chap. 7.
- ↑ Not to be confused with the current NS Bulletin,
which, as the official internal organ of the National Socialist White
People's Party, was first published in January, 1967, under the
editorship of Matt Koehl.
- ↑ "Playboy Interview: George Lincoln Rockwell," Playboy (April, 1966), p. 71.
- ↑ Charles Krause, "George Rockwell: A Myth or Real Threat to America's Peace," Private Affairs (June, 1962), p. 52.
- ↑ Jack Anderson, "Why I Quit the American Nazi Party," Parade (December 6, 1964), p. 29.
- ↑ Charles U. Daly, "The Man Who Would Bring Back Hitler," Cavalier (June, 1961), p. 56.
- ↑ Krause, loc. cit.
- ↑ Anderson, loc. cit.
- ↑ George Lincoln Rockwell, "From Ivory Tower to Privy Wall: On the Art of Propaganda" National Socialist World, 1 (spring, 1966), p. 11.
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