Continuing his crude Marxist narrative, Hitler argues that as the Jews compiled wealth, “they bought up stock” in companies and had “predominance in the stock exchange.” They “thus pushed [their] influence into the circuit of national production, making this… an object of buying and selling on the stock exchange… thus ruining the basis on which personal proprietorship alone is possible… [and creating] that feeling of estrangement between employers and employees… which led at a later date to the political class struggle.”
This vision of a voracious and amoral capitalism that debauches moral codes, exploits the environment, and degrades the relations between workers and employers is a central theme of leftist economics today. Familiar, too, is the idea that stock and bond markets enable mostly Jewish middlemen and entrepreneurs, greenmailers and junk bond manipulators to seize companies from honest and stable management for financial exploitation. Change the wording by deleting the references to Jews and inserting the names of financiers, such as Michael Milken, Carl Icahn, George Soros, Henry Kravis, Gary Winnick, et al., or even such categories as “junk bond kings” and “private equity predators,” and present it all under the name of, say, Schicklgruber, and you will have an exemplary book for public consumption at American universities. Unfortunately for some of the above, these anti-capitalist prejudices, with their often inadvertently anti-Semitic undercurrents, also made their way from the American media into U.S. courts. Michael Milken, for example, was accused of being a Ponzi schemer and predator, but within two decades the companies he financed were worth more than a trillion dollars. He was forced to plead guilty to a series of trivial clerical offenses by the prosecutor’s threat to indict his totally innocent brother Lowell. The idea that behind every great fortune is a great crime joins anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism in the moralistic embrace that Hitler pioneered and epitomized.
Hitler’s complaint probes still more deeply, however. He charges Jews with violating the deepest mandates of the Darwinian law of nature. The heart of Hitler’s case against the Jews is that through their superiority over Aryans in capitalist finance and trade, they were cheating the law of survival of the fittest. They had found an individualist route to power without making the sacrifices necessary to achieve collective strength as warriors. They were circumventing the mandate of nature that requires all creatures to gang together and fight for their own survival.
This is Hitler’s concept of the key conflict in economies and societies. It is the division between Darwinian nature, governed by the survival of the physically fit and feral, and the effete and intellectual artifice of devious individualist entrepreneurs.
“Here we meet the insolent objection, which is Jewish in its inspiration and is typical of the modern pacifist. It says: ‘Man can control even Nature.’ There are millions who repeat by rote that piece of Jewish babble.
“Wherever [men] have reached a superior level of existence, it was not the result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature.”
This is the Hitler vision of the split between devious individuals (to him, Jewish) who gain power by prevailing in economic rivalry and groups that gain power by blood sacrifice in the perennial and always ultimately violent struggle for survival. It is the division between those who imagine that humans can manipulate nature and create new things under conditions of peace and those who believe that the greatest attainments come from solidarity and sacrifice in war.
As Hitler presents the law of nature in this way: “He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.”
As his devout jihadi followers do today, Hitler recognized that violence can trump economic exchange and progress. Against Jewish dominance in the stock market, he counterpoised his Hitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth movement, with its anti-Semitic lust for blood and its dominance in the streets. Just as the jihadis in their madrasahs today muster and indoctrinate a new generation of Islamic young males into Wahhabi codes of hatred and violence and suicidal martyrdom, Hitler’s Brown Shirts espoused a solidarity of violence and sacrifice. Under a regime of “survival of the fittest,” Hitler celebrated a sacrificial solidarity and drive to war that could thwart the capitalist enrichment of Jews.
At the same time, to justify his own plans for mass exterminations, he blamed the Jews in Russia for perpetrating the starvation and massacre of 30 million Ukrainians, Kulaks, shopkeepers, and other “class enemies.” (Reaching for the ultimate affront, he even charged: “The Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland.”)
Hitler portrayed envy and resentment of Jewish achievement as a campaign of vengeance and social justice. True “social justice,” according to Hitler, “is a typical Aryan characteristic.” Individualist to the core, Jews merely pretend to support equality and social justice. Marxism, for Hitler, is ersatz socialism contrived by Jews to mobilize the workers against the enemies of the Jews, such as his own impending National Socialist regime. But the deeper Jewish offenses that he primarily details and denounces in Mein Kampf — usury, stock manipulation, exploitation of the land, cunning in finance and trade — are all expressions not of cultural inferiority or Marxist machinations but of capitalist superiority.
When the Arab leader Musa Alami in 1934 told Ben-Gurion that he would prefer Palestine remain a wasteland for a hundred years than permit the Israelis to develop it, he was echoing Hitler’s position.
The fundamental conflict in the world pits the advocates of capitalist freedom, economic growth, and property against the exponents of blood and soil and violence. Capitalism requires peace. A real capitalist can want war only against threats to international peace and trade.
Although everyone benefits from capitalist prosperity, it inexorably produces “gaps” between rich and poor. It necessarily requires toleration of superior entrepreneurs who can make the system work. A free regime will always tend to favor peoples who excel in commerce and industry. For centuries, Jews have been disproportionately represented among these entrepreneurs and inventors, scientists and creators. Even though Jews are a tiny minority of less than a tenth of 1 percent of the world’s people, they comprise perhaps a quarter of the world’s paramount capitalists and entrepreneurs. This was true at Hitler’s time and it is true today.
As in Hitler’s time, demagogues tend to target successful capitalists for envy, resentment, and violence. They rant against the “rich” and wish to confiscate their wealth. They celebrate a cult of nature and land. In Thomas Friedman’s felicitous metaphor, they cling to the olive tree and resent the Lexus. They hate capitalism and resent capitalists.
The ultimate source of their resentment is that, under capitalism, success does not normally go to the “best” or the naturally fittest as identified by physical strength or beauty or by the established criteria of virtue. Even the best in academic credentials do not prevail. To Hitler, “The Aryan… is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire, which in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth.” And so on. But if the Aryan’s design of a Mercedes-Benz does not satisfy customers, he will not prevail over a member of the inferior Japanese race — making a Honda or a Toyota. If the Aryan’s business choices do not prosper in the market, they will not succeed against the enterprises of Jewish entrepreneurs.