The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age

Description

The Myth of the Twentieth Century (German: Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts) by Alfred Rosenberg, one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi party and editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter. It was the most influential Nazi text after Hitler's Mein Kampf. The titular "myth" is "the myth of blood, which under the sign of the swastika unchains the racial world-revolution. It is the awakening of the race soul, which after long sleep victoriously ends the race chaos. In this, his seminal work, Alfred Rosenberg offers the reader a genuine alternative to the political and spiritual attitudes which modern Western society leads us to believe are our only options. From every center of power today we are told that we MUST accept democracy as the only "good" form of government, that we MUST choose either the Judeo-Christian tradition, the New Age movement, or secular humanism as our faith, and that we MUST look to either Adam Smith or Karl Marx for economic wisdom. In "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Rosenberg takes aim at all of these assumptions and presents us with a worldview entirely different from any of those based upon them--one with its roots deep in those primeval affective, aesthetic, and intellectual inclinations characteristic of the Caucasian race. He argues powerfully for an organic polity as opposed to a Universalist one--most specifically in the Germany of his time--but more generally for Western Civilization as a whole. At the heart of his argument is the provocative thesis that each of the races of the human species possesses a different kind of "soul," which is the origin of human cultural diversity. Environmental influences cannot account for the differences in style and achievement among the races, he argues; the respective environmental conditions under which they have lived have been far too similar to admit of such an explanation. Advancements in the scientific understanding of genetics made since Rosenberg's death, moreover, lend weight to his thesis and make it well worth a thoughtful look. "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" will be of interest to those searching for their identity and its significance amid the anomic trends of contemporary Western life, as well as those looking for a socially relevant philosophy with some depth as an alternative to Establishment prejudices and platitudes.