114 Ibid., 267.
115 Ibid., 257.
363
lovers of sophia
and onto-theological understanding of apparently dehumanizing
Technology as a fateful expression of a uniquely perilous and
promising human existence. They felt that applying their positivistic
techno-scientific knowledge could be integral to the project of
forging a new world civilization, rather than their being agents
of a force that is merely corrosive to old forms of life. These were
people who understood that the destructive force of technological
instrumentalization was such that nostalgia for undermined
traditional communities was futile and so instead they longed for
the revolutionary advent of a new Volksgemeinschaft of the future.
Julius Evola concurred with Ernst Jünger’s metaphysical
interpretation of the essence of Technology. In The Path of Cinnabar, Evola offers this affirmative explication of the positively destructive force of technology as it had been “revealed” to Jünger and other
German visionaries amidst the mechanized slaughter of the First
World War:
Technology in its elemental aspect operated like a non-human
force awakened and set in motion by Man. He must face up to
this force, become the instrument of the machine, and yet at the
same time master it, not just physical y, but spiritual y. This is
only possible if human beings make themselves capable of a new
form of existence, forging themselves into a new type of human
being, who, precisely in the midst of situations which are lethal
to anyone else, is able to derive from them an absolute sense of
being alive. To this end it is, however, necessary to transcend
entirely the way of being, the ideals, the values, and, the whole
world view cultivated by the bourgeoisie.
The destruction of traditional values and the rise of the bourgeoisie, which began with the birth of Cartesian subjectivity and culminated
in the French Revolution, did not lead to a rational ‘Enlightenment’
as it was supposed that it would. The Enlightenment thinkers,
especial y the most radical y atheistic ones who prepared the way
for the revolutionary Cult of Reason, were deluded in thinking that
after dynamiting the edifices of centuries of tradition they would
364
jason reza jorjani
reach a solid bedrock of rationality – the Laws of Nature, Human
Nature, and so forth – on which to build a new order. Once this
foundation was, at least subconsciously, discovered to be lacking,
the anti-traditional character of the Modern embrace of technical
innovation became expressive of a merely passive nihilism.
In response to this, modern ist progenitors of postmodernity
such as Friedrich Nietzsche called for an active nihilism of creative destruction. This meant the affirmative embrace of the destruction
of traditional values or at least an active encouragement of the
disintegration of the decayed sacred canopy that they had held
together to shield human life from the terrifying boundlessness of a
‘Cosmos’ that may truly be a Chaos. However, this affirmation would
now be coupled with a sober realization of the groundlessness of our
existence and yet, in the face of the ineradicable human need for
meaning, it would also rise to the demand to create new values and to write a new mythic history on the basis of which one could build
a new world as one creates a work of art.116
II.
That a group of aspiring artists and esoteric occultists would seize
power in some fourth world wasteland would not be so incredible.
The Third Reich was, however, no cult contrived in the midst of a
jungle or on some desert island. In the early 20th century, Germany
was the most scientifical y advanced country on the face of the
Earth. The Technische Hochschulen and Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes
were widely regarded as the best scientific research centers in the
world. The submarine or U-boat, which spectacularly sunk the
Lusitania, was the first wonder weapon to be yielded by this superior
technical establishment. The original Volkswagen, a car designed to
turn the motorway into a mass transit system, was so sleekly crafted
that it has since been celebrated as a paragon of modernism.117 Nazi
116 Ibid., 59–60.
117 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 337.
365
lovers of sophia
“macro-planning” for modernization of the Reich was decades
ahead of its time with its projected infrastructure to accommodate
9 million private cars while routing motorways in a nature-sensitive
way and providing for pedestrian zones and cycle-lanes within
vast ‘cities of the future.’118 Socialistic aspects of German National Socialism included dramatical y improved sports and public
recreation facilities, subsidized holidays, and “hygienic” factory
conditions and housing estates.119
In 1936 Hitler broadcast the Berlin Olympics to televisions
set up in public places. This was the first wireless transmission
of moving images in recorded history. By 1939, at a cost of 650
Marks the Fernseh–Volksempfänger became the first television
set available for private use. It made its entrance at the 16th Great
German Wireless Exhibition, where only two years later – in 1941! –
color TV transmission was demonstrated.120 By 1939, German rocket technology was a full generation ahead of similar developments
anywhere else. The Horton Brothers Flying Wing incorporated
most of the essential design principles of the Northrop B-2 Stealth
Bomber, some thirty years before its time. Nearly all of the leading
quantum physicists of the early twentieth century were of German
extraction: Max Planck, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin
Schrödinger.
Computer technology in Nazi Germany was far in advance of
that of any other industrial nation. Alan Turing’s breakthroughs
in the field, which culminated in his seminal 1950 paper on
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, were largely driven by his
services in the effort to break the code of the Enigma Machine used
by the Germans for encrypted communications during the war.121 In
1945 advancing allied forces discovered, in a hidden cel ar in a small Bavarian vil age, the fourth prototype of the first ful y operational
modern program-controlled electronic computer manufactured
118 Ibid., 328, 337.
119 Ibid., 331.
120 Ibid., 314.
121 Ibid., 310–311.
366
jason reza jorjani
in 1941 by Konrad Zuse.122 The particular model discovered by the
allies had been funded by the Third Reich’s military-industrial
Aerodynamic Institute for stress testing vibrating airframes, such as
those of the aforementioned exotic aircraft being developed by the
Luftwaffe.123
What had initial y driven German scientists to lead in the
development of electronic computers, as opposed to glorified
mechanical calculators, was the need to draw the solution curve
for problems of quantum physics – another cutting-edge scientific
field where, as note
d above, almost all of the leading contributors
were German.124 In the same year, nearly a decade before Turing’s
paper, the May 18, 1941 issue of Koral e – a magazine for ‘Knowledge, Entertainment, and Lebensfreude’ that was something like Wired for Āryan households – ran a lead article on Artificial Intelligence
under a headline asking “Can Machines Think?”125 The darkest side
of computer technology development in the Reich was punch card
sorting equipment custom designed by Dehomag, the German
subsidiary of IBM, on commission for the SS. Billions of special y
printed punch cards were used to keep track of the millions of
prisoners and slave laborers of the Reich.126 All of the sophisticated equipment developed for this purpose was subsequently moved
to IBM New York, which had consistently made millions of
Reichsmarks on its subsidiary’s work for the SS.
In the late 19th century Nikola Tesla laid the groundwork for
wireless or remote radio control of mechanical devices, including
a remote-controlled motorboat armed with torpedoes that he
unsuccessful y tried to sell to the US military.127 Instead, it would be the Germans who, two decades later, in 1916 first deployed Tesla’s
122 Ibid., 311.
123 Ibid., 312.
124 Ibid., 311.
125 Ibid., 310.
126 Ibid., 312.
127 P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 46.
367
lovers of sophia
technology in unmanned systems in order to compensate for their
being outnumbered by their enemies.128 The Germans also led the
use of robotics for warfare during the Second World War when their
Goliath robot of 1940 became the first battlefield-deployed device
capable of taking out enemy tanks and bunkers with the 132 pounds
of explosives carried by each unit. The Germans fielded 8,000 of
these on the Eastern Front where their troops were outnumbered
3-to-1 on the way to Moscow.129
The Goliath is remarkably close in design to the Foster-Miller
Corporation’s Talon robot, despite preceding it by six decades.
Remember that the Germans deployed the world’s first cruise missiles
(V-1), ballistic missiles (V-2), and jet fighters (Me-262).130 Then
it should not come as a huge surprise that the very first remotely
piloted drones, the FX-1400 also known as “the Fritz”, was a German
designed 2,300 pound bomb driven by a rocket motor, propelled by
four small wings, and fitted with tail controls.131 The device, which
was radio controlled by a remotely located operator using a joystick,
was released from out of a plane flying at a high enough altitude, a
far enough distance from the target, and at an angle that deceptively
convinced the enemy that it was not a bomber coming in for a strike.132
The first drone strike using the Fritz system was on the Italian
battleship Roma that tried to defect to allied forces in 1943.
Germany was also on the cutting edge in the fields of Psychiatry
and Medicine. The world’s most prestigious research center for the
mind sciences was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychiatry in
Munich. The medical establishment of Nazi Germany was home
to the most high quality epidemiological research in the war
on Cancer. The Nazis waged an aggressive anti-smoking public
information campaign in an effort to decrease incidents of lung
128 Ibid., 47.
129 Ibid., 47.
130 Ibid., 48.
131 Ibid., 48.
132 Ibid., 48.
368
jason reza jorjani
cancer.133 They were at least two or three decades ahead of the rest
of the Western world in this respect. It is a little known fact that the Nazis were quite interested in holistic herbalist and homeopathic
alternatives to reductionist modern medical practices.134 Himmler
was receiving reports from a certain army captain, Emmerich
von Moers, who had been sent to live with various tribes in the
Amazon basin so as to learn what rainforest plants could be used
as cures for malaria, syphilis, and serious skin conditions, as well
as in the creation of aphrodisiacs and natural sweeteners. Himmler
declared that organizing an SS expedition to Amazonia in order
to conduct extensive field research and bring back resources for
pharmacological development ought to be “one of the first tasks to
be undertaken in peace time.”135 This was justified on account of the
supposedly “enormous” economic advantage that would accrue to
Germany for making scientific breakthroughs in pharmacology.136
So Eugenics is not the only biomedical field in which Nazi
Germany took the lead, although that is also worth mentioning –
since, at the time, Eugenics was widely regarded across the Western
world as a progressive techno-scientific project. What was different
about Nazi Eugenics was that the structure of the regime allowed
for the same ideas that predominated among the Western political
elite in general at the time to be much more ruthlessly and efficiently implemented in Germany than in liberal democracies.137 With
programs such as Lebensborn the Nazis could accomplish what
Winston Churchill could not when, in his term as British Home
Secretary, Churchill introduced a Eugenics bill into Parliament that
included enforced sterilization. The concerns that led him to do so
are summarized in this passage of a memorandum that Churchill
had written to Prime Minister Henry Asquith:
133 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 267, 337.
134 Ibid., 258–259.
135 Ibid., 259, 337.
136 Ibid., 259.
137 Ibid., 330.
369
lovers of sophia
The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-
minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady
restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks,
constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to
exaggerate. […] I feel that the source from which the stream of
madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another
year has passed.138
That within less than a decade, the National Socialists were able
to transform an economical y bankrupt, social y humiliated, and
political y dysfunctional Germany into the world’s leading techno-
scientific and industrial power is a testimony to their futuristic
ethos.139 Conservative luddites would never be capable of such an
accomplishment. One should not make the mistake of thinking that
the military defeat of Nazi Germany is any indication of American
military-industrial superiority. The Nazis were defeated only by the
United States and the Soviet Union together. Stalin’s totalitarian state sacrificed thirty mil ion Russian lives to resist and final y overcome the Germans on the Eastern Front. Had we in the United States
shared a border with the rapidly expanding Reich, as Russia did, the
war might have ended very badly for us. From the audacious launch
of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 through to the Battle of Berlin in
1945, Nazi Germany simultaneously fought against both of the tw
o
“superpowers” that divided the Earth between themselves in the
second half of the 20th century.
Furthermore, the rise of the United States to a position of
techno-scientific global dominance from 1945 and onwards is
largely a function of the willingness of the American Intelligence
establishment to seek out and recruit the brightest Nazi German
“war criminals” in violation of both domestic US law and the Allied
Potsdam and Yalta agreements with the Soviet Union.140 Those who
138 Ibid., 329.
139 Ibid., 319.
140 Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990 (St Martin’s Press, 1991).
370
jason reza jorjani
were tried and punished for war crimes at Nuremberg were not the
worst Nazis – they were simply the most dispensable. Beginning
in May of 1945, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency under the
auspices of the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the CIA) began recruiting Nazi rocket scientists, engineers, psychiatrists and
doctors to continue their research in the United States. With their
corporatist background, these scientists and technicians were far
more amenable to striking a deal with American capitalists than
they were with Soviet communists who also had a more profound
hatred of Germans for having invaded their homeland and spilled so
much Russian blood.
The project was codenamed “Operation Paperclip” in a reference
to the paperclips used by American intelligence to attach almost
whol y fabricated employment records and false political biographies
to the dossiers of the imported Nazi German scientists, so that they
would be granted security clearances to work at sensitive military-
industrial instal ations in the United States.141 The most famous of
these imported Nazi scientists is, of course, Werner von Braun – the
founder of NASA, who was responsible for beating the Soviets in
the space race by landing American astronauts on the Moon. Von
Braun was an SS Major and the majority of his Apollo program
scientific team consisted of card-carrying members of the Nazi party
who were exempted from prosecution. The glory of Apollo was an
afterglow of the Faustian project of National Socialist Germany.
The German scientists recruited into anti-Soviet American
military research and development via “Operation Paperclip”,
Lovers of Sophia Page 46