Will Spencer's podcast episode dives into the controversial and complex topic of the Holocaust, challenging widely held beliefs about its historical narrative. The episode features an in-depth conversation with Doctor Mark Musser, who argues that National Socialism in Germany was not rooted in Christianity or capitalism, as commonly portrayed, but rather in a leftist, pagan, and environmentalist ideology.
Musser's research suggests that the Nazis were influenced by a blend of existentialism, romanticism, and social Darwinism, which contributed to their anti-Semitic and anti-Christian worldview. Spencer and Musser discuss how these ideas have persisted and evolved, influencing contemporary environmental and political movements.
The episode aims to shed light on the real philosophical and ideological underpinnings of the Nazi regime, encouraging listeners to question mainstream historical narratives and reflect on their relevance today.
LINK: Anti-Holocaust Denial Resources
Takeaways:
My name is Will Spencer and you're listening to one of the last episodes.
Speaker BOf the Renaissance of Men podcast.
Will SpencerThis is an all new interview and the clock is ticking down to when.
Speaker BThis show will become the Will Spencer podcast.
Will SpencerFor a sneak preview of what's to come, I strongly recommend my audio listeners click over to YouTube to check out.
Speaker BMy brand new studio as well.
Speaker BI gotta say, I'm pretty stoked.
Will SpencerMy guest this week is a christian.
Speaker BMissionary to the former Soviet Union and the author of Nazi Ecology, the Oak Sacrifice of the judeo christian worldview in the Holocaust.
Speaker BPlease welcome Doctor Mark Musser.
Speaker BYou are the renaissance.
Will SpencerBefore I begin, this monologue will be substantially longer than any episode I've done before, more than 40 minutes and identical on both audio and video.
Will SpencerThe subject matter is highly charged and yet very important.
Will SpencerI ask you to please listen carefully, to suspend judgment, and to take seriously the instructions that I provide.
Will SpencerLater, if they apply to you again, please listen to what I have to say.
Will SpencerThis is all setting the stage for the interview.
Will SpencerWith that in mind, let's begin.
Will SpencerWe today live in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Will SpencerIt is the singular historical event that defines our modern western world, including global politics, culture, economics, and much more.
Will SpencerThe Holocaust is also the root of the postwar consensus, whose chief message about the first half of the 20th century was never again, as in the horrors of the 19 hundreds through the 1940s, could never be repeated.
Will SpencerNo effort would be spared worldwide to prevent it.
Will SpencerAnd though a great deal happened during those decades, the signature event that could not, must not be repeated was not war, famine or depression, but genocide in the Holocaust.
Will SpencerIf you are wondering why America is involved in the Middle east and sends billions of dollars in military and other aid to Israel, the reasoning can be traced back to the Holocaust.
Will SpencerIf youre wondering why its impossible to notice jewish influence, good or bad, on any part of american and western society, the reasoning can also be traced back to the Holocaust.
Will SpencerIf you're wondering why you as a man are not taught to stand up straight and be proud of your masculinity, ethnicity or nation, it's because after being called a racist and a sexist, you'll be called a Nazi.
Will SpencerWhy does that matter?
Will SpencerBecause of the Holocaust.
Will SpencerThat's right.
Will SpencerYou as a man cannot be proud of your masculinity because in part, masculinity leads to the Holocaust and the Holocaust can never be allowed to happen again.
Will SpencerSo masculinity cannot be allowed to happen again.
Will SpencerIn case you disagree with that, in the massively influential 1963 feminist classic the feminine mystique Betty Friedan used the Holocaust specifically as a metaphor to attack the family.
Will SpencerShe titled chapter twelve of her book progressive the Comfortable concentration camp.
Will SpencerIn it, she wrote, the women who adjust as housewives who grow up wanting to be just a housewife are in as much danger as the millions who walk to their own death in the concentration camps.
Will SpencerWe see a similar dynamic play out today on the news and in social media.
Will SpencerEven Jordan Peterson, the skinny, mild mannered canadian professor, was attacked using this reasoning way back in 2017.
Will SpencerThe full logic goes like traditional masculinity, including the family and the household, means fascism, fascism means Nazism.
Will SpencerNazism means the Holocaust.
Will SpencerAnd the Holocaust can never be allowed to happen again.
Will SpencerSo traditional masculinity cannot be allowed to happen again.
Will SpencerIt's more complicated than this in many ways, of course, but often to the liberal media, it is that simple.
Will SpencerSo perhaps in this you can see that to some extent, the Holocaust also defines our political dialogue.
Will SpencerTo be on the political left is by definition, to accept that the Holocaust happened exactly as the mainstream narrative, including Hollywood said it did, including the motivations of the Nazis.
Will SpencerAnd more and increasingly, to be on the political right means either questioning the Holocaust narrative or doubting that the Holocaust happened at all.
Will SpencerThus, even our politics uses the perspective on this event as a shibboleth to determine which side youre on.
Will SpencerIf youre on the left, you must accept it as is.
Will SpencerIf youre at many points on the right, you must doubt it.
Will SpencerI think this is insane, but it is what it is.
Will SpencerNow, as youve heard me say many times, I grew up jewish.
Will SpencerBoth of my grandfathers were american jewish men who served during World War Two.
Will SpencerMy grandfather David, on my moms side was us army, airborne behind enemy lines in Germany.
Will SpencerMy grandfather Martin on my dads side was a us army engineer stateside.
Will SpencerMy aunt, one of my mothers sisters, married my uncle, whose parents escaped Germany during World War Two.
Will SpencerAnd though my uncle has now passed away, I heard him say once that he lost extended family members in the Holocaust, which is one of many reasons why he was an avowed atheist.
Will SpencerAnd in the jewish community, my uncle was far from alone.
Will SpencerSo this historical event loomed large in my upbringing and family, too.
Will SpencerThus, if I understand the rules of the woke game, my jewish upbringing gives me the right to both investigate and talk about this.
Will SpencerNow, I regard those rules as a bogus form of ethnic gnosticism, to borrow vodibakums, excellent phrase.
Will SpencerBut nonetheless, for those who want to play by them, there it is.
Will SpencerAnd if you want me to prove my jewish bona fides.
Will SpencerYou can listen to an audio recording of 13 year old me singing the ten Commandments in Hebrew at my bar mitzvah.
Will SpencerOr we can do things the easy way, and you can take my word for it.
Will SpencerSo with that in mind, there are three essential questions related to the Holocaust that I'd like to now address.
Will SpencerFirst, what happened?
Will SpencerSecond, why did it happen?
Will SpencerThird, what are we supposed to do about it?
Will SpencerOf course, I'm also aware that there's a preliminary fourth question lurking around these three, and that question is, did it happen at all?
Will SpencerNow, I've been on the Internet a long time.
Will SpencerI got my 1st 2400 baud modem when I was 13 years old.
Will SpencerFor those who dont know what a 2400 baud modem is, it was a stone age version of connecting to the Internet via the phone lines.
Will SpencerAs in no one else could use the household phone while you were on the Internet.
Will SpencerAnd long before cell phones, everyone in the home, mom, dad and kids shared one line.
Will SpencerIt was a simpler time.
Will SpencerA 2400 Baud modem transmitted data at 2400 bits per second for reference how far weve come since then.
Will SpencerMy gigabit Ethernet connection right now transmits 1 billion bits per second, and it does so through the air for ten years.
Will SpencerI also navigated through what I called the deep new age.
Will SpencerThis is the world beneath crystals, astrology, yoga, ayahuasca and all that.
Will SpencerThose are the what the deep new age asks why so?
Will SpencerIve investigated every conspiracy from Anunnaki to Tartaria Mkultra to Qanon, Zeta reticuli, reptilians 440 versus 432 hz music, the USS Liberty, the Council on Foreign Relations, holonomic consciousness, the alien bases on the far side of the hollow moon, vertigo, politics, videos, and much more.
Will SpencerNaturally, I have also come across the question of Holocaust revisionism and denial, as I know many of my listeners today have as well.
Will SpencerIn fact, due to widespread anger at and hatred of the Jews that is now allowed to propagate across Elon Twitter, it has become fashionable in certain sectors of the right today to challenge the historicity of the Holocaust.
Will SpencerI saw at least one meme about it just today while I was writing this.
Will SpencerThis questioning is not new.
Will SpencerHolocaust denial and revisionism have been around in various forms since the 1950s, and you can't use the Internet as long as I have and navigate through the worlds that I have without encountering it.
Will SpencerNow, as far as I can tell, this is another way the holocaust is unique.
Will SpencerIt is one of only three events that I can think of where people openly challenge whether it happened or not.
Will SpencerAnother one is the moon landing, and the third is the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Will SpencerNaturally, the moon landing is not quite like the other two in terms of its moral significance.
Will SpencerBut those are the only three events that I can think of where people are allowed, more or less, to doubt whether or not they happened.
Will SpencerOkay, now this is the part that I need many, if not all, of you to listen to very closely.
Will SpencerThis podcast interview will not make sense to you and will not have the impact it needs to unless you hear what I'm about to say.
Will SpencerFor as long as I've been using the Internet, the following has been my position.
Will SpencerIt is completely fair to doubt whether any of these events have happened in the ways that we're told.
Will SpencerI have long felt that personally, it's okay, and perhaps even encouraged to doubt any mainstream narrative.
Will SpencerBut the second, I want to take a position on what did happen.
Will SpencerI am obligated to try and prove myself wrong.
Will SpencerThat completes the process of inquiry, and I believe, is what true intellectual honesty looks like.
Will SpencerTo doubt myself as much as I doubt others, if not more.
Will SpencerBecause if others are proficient at lying to us, we are also quite proficient at lying to ourselves.
Will SpencerSo if I want to say, for example, that the moon landing did not happen, that is, making a claim that can be tested.
Will SpencerI can seek incontrovertible evidence that it did.
Will SpencerAnd I believe that before I make a positive historical claim, I must in good faith search out contradictory evidence.
Will SpencerIf it exists.
Will SpencerThe same is true with Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.
Will SpencerIn fact, that's what the book the case for Christ, Lee Strobel, is about.
Will SpencerOne man, an atheist, sought to prove that Christ didnt exist by questioning the best experts he could find.
Will SpencerHe subjected his thesis to scrutiny, and lo and behold, Stroebel got his mind changed by discovering the truth.
Will SpencerThis reasoning must also apply to the Holocaust.
Will SpencerSo if you want to claim that the Holocaust did not happen, never existed, was a lie fabricated by the winners of world War Two to defame the memory of the losers, that is a historical claim that can be tested.
Will SpencerAnd so I have compiled a list full of evidence to test Holocaust denialism against.
Will SpencerIf you are a listener who doubts the existence of the Holocaust, it is vital that you engage with that evidence before listening to this episode.
Will SpencerSo I've compiled on my substack free for everyone, a collection of resources, including web links, books, Twitter accounts, and videos that rely on historical documents from the Nazis to prove what happened.
Will SpencerIt turns out that Hitler and the National Socialists are the most heavily documented human movement in history.
Will SpencerIn meticulous german style, they wrote down everything and provided mountains of evidence about themselves.
Will SpencerWhole libraries of books have been written about them, using their own words and records.
Will SpencerNaturally, I dont expect you to review every single resource unless you want to, and then by all means go ahead and master the material.
Will SpencerWe need more information, soldiers like you.
Will SpencerBut if you only have time for one, then this is what I need you to do.
Will SpencerAt the top of that article ive linked a video discussion on rumble between two men, Brandon Martinez and David Cole.
Will SpencerBrandon Martinez is a self described ethno nationalist.
Will SpencerHe says on the video that hes quote on team white and repeatedly emphasizes how much he questions jewish power.
Will SpencerApparently hes even been banned from Twitter and I have no idea why, but I can probably imagine David Cole is the maker of one of the most infamous Holocaust revision videos of all time, which questioned the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers back in the early 1990s.
Will SpencerSo he's been at the game longer than many of us have been alive.
Will SpencerIn their two hour discussion, Brandon and David confirm that's right, confirm the historical reality of the Holocaust, debunking common denialist challenges, including about swimming pools, wooden doors, reconstructed camps, math equations, crematoriums, explosive pesticides, plus the claims of Fred Leuchter, David Irving, and more.
Will SpencerIn those 2 hours, they respond in clear speech to every Holocaust denial meme I've ever heard and more, listing men I've never heard of who made anti Holocaust documentaries that I don't know and who then recanted.
Will SpencerMartinez and Cole also go over the devastating census evidence that the revisionists, deniers, and the mainstream all agree on, and that should make all the case you needed to that the Holocaust happened beyond a reasonable doubt.
Will SpencerBrandon then spends the last hour after Cole signs off, responding to other questioners and trolls in the live chat, establishing his ethnonationalist credentials.
Will SpencerSo if you think he's Mossad or CIA, whatever, you can take it up with him.
Will SpencerI am providing this video for information purposes only.
Will SpencerI am not commending to you either of their work, but whatever differences in worldview or theology I may have with Martinez or Cole, I respect their unwavering commitment to the truth.
Will SpencerThat video is 3 hours long.
Will SpencerSo if you are at all tempted to doubt the existence of the Holocaust, the systematic german execution of Jews and others, stop listening to this podcast now and go listen to Martinez and Cole first.
Will SpencerNothing I or my guest have to say will make sense unless you do.
Will SpencerIve put the video direct on my substack in case it disappears from rumble.
Will SpencerAll credit to Brandon Martinez.
Will SpencerAs I've mentioned, on the same page with the video you can find a list of several books I've found that also reinforce the historicity of the Holocaust using contemporaneous documents for the record, the first book about the Holocaust, the Final Solution, was written and published in 1953 by Gerald Reitlinger.
Will SpencerIt is more than 600 pages long.
Will SpencerThe definitive history of the National Socialists and Hitler is called the rise and fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, and it was published in 1961.
Will SpencerThat book is 1300 pages long.
Will SpencerI also want to mention the book the Hiding Place by Corrie Ten boom.
Will SpencerThis firsthand account was written by a christian woman who evangelized Jews in the Ravensbruck camp.
Will SpencerThe book has 20,000 reviews on Amazon with a five star rating.
Will SpencerIts apparently legendary in evangelical christian circles now jewish culture is usually good at sharing firsthand Holocaust accounts, but id never heard of the hiding place.
Will SpencerI asked my dad and neither had he.
Will SpencerI found that very provocative, so I look forward to reading it.
Will SpencerOn the list youll also find the pink swastika, an account of the heavy influence of homosexuality on the nazi party and hitlers furies about german women who participated in mass murder.
Will SpencerIve included several books about the influence of the occult on national socialism, including hitlers monsters, a supernatural history of the Third Reich and Unholy Alliance, a history of nazi involvement with the occult, which features a foreword by none other than the famous author Norman Mailer.
Will SpencerAnd just for good measure, on the list youll also find into that darkness a book that tells the story of Fritz Stengel, who was the unrepentant commandant of the death camp Treblinka the good Old Days, an ironically titled collection of personal documents, including photographs, diaries, letters and confidential reports created by participants and observers of the Holocaust and even warrant for genocide, a 300 page book about the origins of the protocols of the elders of Zion.
Will SpencerThese are just a few of the titles I've listed.
Will SpencerAgain, if you want to make historical claims based on more than a couple YouTube videos and memes, it pays to do your research.
Will SpencerI've included other videos on the page that speak to the character of Hitler and the Nazis, web links to crucial historical documents featured on a very thorough blog called Holocaust Controversies, an excellent Twitter account to follow.
Will SpencerHitler hated Christ, who says his DM's are open.
Will SpencerIf you have questions, and much more, you are now charged to undertake this journey of discovery and perhaps unlearning on your own.
Will SpencerIf you refuse to engage with the hard evidence because you are not willing to challenge your biases, your understanding of history, or your ideology, that's on you.
Will SpencerBut for what it's worth, if you listen to this podcast, I think you're more than capable of finding out the truth.
Will SpencerWe'll be here when you get back.
Will SpencerFor the rest of us, I say all this for two reasons.
Will SpencerFirst, because again, what my guests and I talk about this week won't make sense unless we can all agree on some historical fundamentals.
Will SpencerFirst, I'm making sure we're all on the same page before I approach the subject matter.
Will SpencerBut second, and most importantly, I desperately want my civilization to no longer live in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Will SpencerThere is one and only one event in all of history we should be living in view of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Will SpencerBut that doesn't cast a shadow, rather a light.
Will SpencerAnd for whatever reason, our civilization today cannot or will not see that light, in part because we're still standing in the Holocaust shadow.
Will SpencerIt actually requires quite a bit of force to hold us there.
Will SpencerAnd my hope is that this episode will help change that, moving us all forward into a future defined by the light of the empty tomb in 33 ADHD rather than the darkness of Germany in the 1940s.
Will SpencerTo me, that is what it means to hold a true biblical worldview and would represent genuine civilizational progress at this moment in history.
Will SpencerBut I know it won't happen without a fight.
Will SpencerOkay, let's return to the original three questions about the Holocaust.
Will SpencerWhat happened?
Will SpencerWhy did it happen, and what are we supposed to do about it?
Will SpencerBecause now that I've made the right wing angry, it's time to make the left wing angry, too.
Will SpencerCulture has provided answers to those three questions that, at least from my upbringing, sound a little bit like this.
Will SpencerWhat happened was a once in history, one of a kind sui generis event, where an educated and wealthy european nation, Germany, systematically genocided the Jews and others using ruthless technological precision.
Will SpencerIt happened due to the Germans being racists, hating the Jews for their financial successes and influence, weakening the once proud german race.
Will SpencerThe Holocaust was also the outcome of centuries of unchecked christian pogroms against the Jews, culminating in a sort of megapogram that only a christian nation was capable of due to their desire for revenge against the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ.
Will SpencerAnd what we need to do about it is do away with Christianity, masculinity, and nationalism.
Will SpencerJust for a start and then let the Jews basically do whatever they want, because criticism is no different from mass murder.
Will SpencerI think that sums it up, right.
Will SpencerI grew up hearing some version of this narrative, especially that Germany and Hitler were somehow acquainted with Christianity.
Will SpencerAnd I know for a fact that that linkage, though never stated, is what keeps many Jews from converting to Christianity.
Will SpencerIf you read the book betrayed by Stan Telchin, who became a christian evangelist after his conversion from Judaism, youll see that same logic reflected in his thought process as well.
Will SpencerI knew as a kid that I could be anything I wanted, just not christian.
Will SpencerWhy?
Will SpencerBecause Christianity was somehow responsible for the Holocaust.
Will SpencerThat was and is the common left wing belief within Jews as well, even today.
Will SpencerBut something funny has been happening lately.
Will SpencerThis belief has also been adopted by the right wing, but as a good thing.
Will SpencerNow I'm grateful for Elon, Twitter and the free speech that he allows.
Will SpencerAnd since he took over, jew hatred has gone viral almost up to the mainstream.
Will SpencerAnd many on the extreme right have also adopted this narrative that Hitler was a Christian.
Will SpencerExcept even more so because they say, in fact, he was the christian prince.
Will SpencerAn example of christian nationalism.
Will SpencerIt's baffling, especially because if true, that claim legitimizes everything the Jews have thought about christians going back for 80 years.
Will SpencerIf Hitler really was a christian and really was the christian prince, and as the evidence shows, the Holocaust really did happen, then wouldn't Jews be absolutely correct in doing everything they have done since the 1940s?
Will SpencerDoes any group not have the right to defend itself against mass slaughter?
Will SpencerIf Jews dont fight with weapons, are they allowed to fight within institutions which are far more powerful instead?
Will SpencerI would say so, which is why the claim that Hitler was the christian prince is literally self defeating for christian men, and can only be sustained in an environment where the Holocaust didnt happen.
Will SpencerBut if the evidence from revisionists, ethnonationalists, and other researchers on your team proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Holocaust did happen, which it absolutely does, if you're brave and intelligent enough to look at it, then only the claim of Hitler, the National Socialists, and Germany being christian remains for us to examine in order to demolish this poisonous idea forever.
Will SpencerSo guess what?
Will SpencerHitler wasn't a Christian.
Will SpencerNeither were the National Socialists, and neither was Germany in the first half of the 20th century.
Will SpencerIn fact, far from it.
Will SpencerWhich brings me to my guest this week.
Will SpencerHis name is Doctor Mark Musser, and he's a husband, father, missionary to the former Soviet Union, where in fact, he is today.
Will SpencerAnd the author of one of the most mind changing books I've read over the past year nazi ecology, the Oak Sacrifice of the judeo christian worldview, and the Holocaust.
Will SpencerChristian researcher and lecturer Carl Tycrib, author of Game of Gods, recommended this book to me towards the end of 2023 and for some unknown reason I felt compelled to read it, which I did this past spring.
Will SpencerNazi ecology is a 500 page scholarly work.
Will SpencerIt is dense, written in an academic, no nonsense style with more than 1600 citations and a 15 page bibliography.
Will SpencerIt took Doctor Musser ten years to research and write and frankly its more like a textbook than anything ive read in a long time.
Will SpencerIts more suited for careful study than casual reading.
Will SpencerAnd doctor Mussers book is about one what did Hitler and the National Socialists really believe?
Will SpencerBecause again, the general public has been told, often in not so many words, that Hitler and the National Socialists were associated somehow with Christianity, that they hated the Jews due to racism, that the Holocaust was a work of mechanized, industrialized precision, and that National Socialist Germany was the result of a lethal combination of masculinity, nationalism, and unbridled industrial capitalism fused with an ideology based on ethnic superiority.
Will SpencerThat is more or less the story all of us have heard.
Will SpencerAnd as it turns out, almost none of it is true.
Will SpencerAnd the bits of that story that are true did not go down at all in the ways that we've been told.
Will SpencerThat is what Doctor Muster's book is about, not merely accepting what history and mass media has said about what the National Socialists believed.
Will SpencerInstead, he dug into the works of their most influential philosophers, scientists, artists, and their own writings and speeches.
Will SpencerDoctor Musser charted the intellectual course of Germany from the 17 hundreds right up until the 1940s, and demonstrated how it wasn't Christianity that drove the national socialist worldview.
Will SpencerRather, it was the slow decline and erosion of Christianity that allowed it.
Will SpencerThe National Socialists actually embodied beliefs that are hard for us to understand today, using modern left right categories.
Will SpencerThat's why Doctor Muster's book was so mind changing for me.
Will SpencerThe environmental, philosophical, and theological leanings of the minds behind national socialism were clearly on the left, explicitly embracing all is one, all is God, pantheism and monism flavored with occultism, with an emphasis on the value of feelings and a pure hatred for the creation order laid out in the Bible, specifically the dominion mandate in Genesis one.
Will SpencerAnd God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth, the philosophers who informed the National Socialist worldview hated that perspective on nature in their own words for decades, if not centuries.
Will SpencerAnd that is the real reason they hated the Jews, because, as they believed, the Hebrew Bibles perspective on the dominion of nature in Genesis did not align with their naturalistic, pagan perspectives that instead held human beings as just one link in a grand ecological chain.
Will SpencerThis is all documented in detail in doctor Mussers book.
Will SpencerI invite you to read their words for yourself.
Will SpencerThats the Judeo half of the Judeo Christian and doctor Musters subtitle the National Socialists and their progenitors hated the Jews long before the degeneracy of Weimar, as documented in their own words by the composer Wagner, the author Goethe, the philosophers Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, and Schopenhauer.
Will SpencerAlso Dietrich Eckert, to whom Adolf Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf, Walther Daer, Guido von List, Ernst Haeckel, the Wandervogels, the Artemannens, and many more.
Will SpencerDirect quotes from all these men and countless others dating well into the 18 hundreds seething with hatred for the Jews over the dominion.
Will SpencerMandate specifically can be found on almost every page of Doctor Musser's book.
Will SpencerFor this reason, the National Socialists also hated Christianity because they regarded it as an internationalized version of Judaism and a religion which was alien to the german people, the so called Volk.
Will SpencerAnd anyone who spent any time on Twitter today and interacted with a few big anti christian accounts has heard those men say the exact same same thing, because that is what the National Socialists believed, that Christianity was merely internationalized Judaism.
Will SpencerAnything else the National Socialists may have said in public and in speeches was political posturing, especially because Hitler's coalition was not as stable as it seemed.
Will SpencerOn the book list, I've included a link to Hitler's compromises, coercion, and consensus in Nazi Germany by Nathan Stolfez a 430 page book and Hitler's Cross how the Cross was used to promote the nazi agenda by Erwin Lutzer a 250 page book because much like America today, Germany had its own form of empty cultural Christianity that still demanded lip service be paid to it.
Will SpencerInstead, it was faithful, bible believing christians who put up the most forceful resistance out of the entire german population, which doctor muster and I talk about in this podcast as well.
Will SpencerSeen this way, the Holocaust was definitely not something that happened one day for no reason at all, except it didn't originate in the 1930s or even the 1920s or 1910s.
Will SpencerIt was a philosophical, ecological, theological snowball that began gathering speed in the 17 hundreds, and once Germany became increasingly unmoored from its biblical foundations, the Holocaust became a near inevitability once the opportunity presented itself, which happened in the 20th century.
Will SpencerThis is what Doctor Musser has documented in black and white, 500 pages with a 15 page bibliography and scripture verses throughout.
Will SpencerIts all there for you to read yourself.
Will SpencerAs they say, the truth fears no investigation.
Will SpencerSo if you think youve already got the truth about the National Socialists, youd better get investigating and put your worldview to the test.
Will SpencerAnd I might add, if youre still unconvinced that the National Socialists werent christian after hearing this interview and reading doctor Musters book, I recently finished another book called Black sun by Nicholas Goodrich Clark that documents neo nazi movements going back to the 1950s, right up until 2001, when Black sun was written.
Will SpencerThis is another dense scholarly work published by NYU Press, totaling 300 pages.
Will SpencerIt too has hundreds of citations, including to original works in German, which I guess the author knew how to read.
Will SpencerIn Gudrick Clarks book, I challenge you to examine the fruits of neo Nazism in the works and words of men like Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, Colin Jordan, Miguel Serrano, William Landig, Varg Vikernes, David Myatt, Joss Turner, and even the man who wrote the 14 words himself, David Lane.
Will SpencerSomehow all of these men, some of whom worshipped Hitler as a literal incarnation of a God, missed his very obvious christian faith.
Will SpencerOr maybe it wasn't there to begin with.
Will SpencerAnd by the way, Adolf Hitler did not consider himself the savior of the white race.
Will SpencerOne, he'd only look up his treatment and opinion of the Slavs to see the truth of that.
Will SpencerThe National Socialists regarded the Slavs as subhuman, and that is why they invaded eastward, to take slavic lands for lebensraum, or breathing room.
Will SpencerSo for you Hitler fans who are passport bros looking at eastern Europe for a bride, im sorry to tell you, but youre going to have to pick a side.
Will SpencerThe idea that Hitler cared about a pan aryan white race was invented by a greek woman two decades after hitlers death.
Will SpencerHer name was Maximiani Giulia Portas, but she's better known by her hindu name, Savitri Devi.
Will SpencerLook it up.
Will SpencerSo now we've covered a lot of ground who Hitler and the National Socialists were and weren't.
Will SpencerThe right wing is probably mad because I challenged their heroic idol and have offered evidence that their historical beliefs are false.
Will SpencerBut this will also make the left wing mad because Hitler is also their idol.
Will SpencerOnly to them, he's not a christian hero, rather a quasi christian villain.
Will SpencerBut as I've said, Hitler and the National Socialists weren't christian at all.
Will SpencerThe Holocaust had nothing to do with Christianity.
Will SpencerInstead, the Holocaust is what happens when a wealthy, educated, militarily powerful nation abandons Christianity, except a bare bit of lip service to orthodoxy and a shallow husk of orthopraxy.
Will SpencerSo remember my three questions, what happened, why, and what are we supposed to do about it?
Will SpencerHaving read Doctor Musser's book, the following appears to be a far more accurate narrative.
Will SpencerA radical leftist pagan ideology seized power and used right wing, technological and nationalistic tools to cleanse their precious natural environment of a polluting infestation.
Will SpencerThe Jews.
Will SpencerIt wasnt done with mechanical precision, rather haphazardly, brutally, and savagely, and at the cost of their own war effort.
Will SpencerThen they tried to erase the evidence of their crimes, particularly the action Reinhardt camps.
Will SpencerAnd in the end, the National Socialists were what they said they were, socialists and hyper nationalists, ideologically unable to use the tools of capitalism and trade agreements with a world they considered hostile due to jewish influence.
Will SpencerHitler and the National Socialists thus isolated themselves, overreached and crumbled, because they were pagan ideologues, not master tacticians or strategists.
Will SpencerSo while the Holocaust did happen, what actually happened is not what weve been told, nor why the truth is very different and relevant to us today.
Will SpencerWhich is why leftist scholars for decades have been trying to scrub their connections to the nazi regime.
Will SpencerA sanitation job which is much harder than it seems.
Will SpencerEspecially because the word ecology was coined in 1866 by a german naturalist named Ernst Haeckel, who wrote a letter of congratulations to Charles Darwin on Darwins 70th birthday.
Will SpencerHe said Darwin had, quote, shown man his place in nature and therefore was overthrowing the anthropocentric fable, end quote.
Will SpencerThats right.
Will SpencerThe german man who invented the very word ecology and whose 1899 book the Riddle of the Universe outsold the Bible internationally at the time, celebrated Darwins dethroning of man as the center of creation.
Will SpencerIf that perspective sounds familiar today in our age of climate change driven propaganda, it should, because its the same perspective.
Will SpencerSo, as ive said, the left is also invited to read Doctor Mussers book.
Will SpencerI commend to them especially the section about Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
Will SpencerThose star crossed lovers, a jew and a former card carrying Nazi respectively, go a long way towards explaining why we think about Germany the way we do, rather than the truth.
Will SpencerYou might be wondering why this matters, why all the effort will whats going on?
Will SpencerAs I said earlier, I want our civilization to move beyond the shadow of the Holocaust into whatever next phase awaits us living in the light of Christ.
Will SpencerBut the only way we can do that is shining light into the shadow, the light of truth.
Will SpencerWe as a civilization, cannot move beyond the Holocaust unless we understand what happened and why.
Will SpencerWe have been fed lies from both the extreme left and the extreme right, which fracture Hitler and the national Socialists true beliefs into two parts which we need to reassemble to see the truth.
Will SpencerSo here is that truth again.
Will SpencerThe national socialists used right wing tools of nationalism, technology, and corrupted masculinity to enact a left wing agenda of pagan environmentalism, with humanity as supporting characters in a religion of nature worship.
Will SpencerNow, let me say that again more slowly.
Will SpencerThe National Socialists used right wing tools to enact a left wing agenda.
Will SpencerThey were pagan environmentalists who believed that humanity was just a part of nature, rather than the heads and stewards of it.
Will SpencerAs they say, however, the devil is in the details, because in the realm of humanity, the Germans believed themselves the superior race due to their connection to their superior land, a spiritual doctrine they called blood and soil.
Will SpencerThink of it this if humans were just part of nature, the best nature would make for the best humans.
Will SpencerAnd that's what the Germans believed that they had.
Will SpencerAnd that is what actually fueled the social darwinist, genocidal ambitions of the so called master race idolatry.
Will SpencerItll get you every time theres a book about it to bring us up to date.
Will SpencerThe extreme left wing has adopted the Nazis pagan environmentalism, and the extreme right wing has adopted the Nazis hypernationalism and twisted masculinity.
Will SpencerThe beliefs of National Socialist Germany have been shattered into two parts that have taken on destructive identities of their own.
Will SpencerBut the synthesis of those beliefs was only made possible in the first place by the removal of the gospel, the spiritual heart of pre national socialist Germany.
Will SpencerBecause when you pull Christ out of a wealthy, educated industrial culture, you get chaos.
Will SpencerWhich is why I believe the historical evidence in Doctor Musser's book shows conclusively we are at a similar risk in America today from both left wing environmental fascism and right wing racial fascism.
Will SpencerBoth are deeply wicked, and both are pointing us towards different holocausts.
Will SpencerThe extreme left wants to eradicate the pollution of human life on earth.
Will SpencerHumans are a, quote, cancer on the planet.
Will SpencerAs agent Smith in the matrix said, the left really believes that.
Will SpencerAnd they got the idea direct from National Socialist Germany.
Will SpencerWe probably have the project paperclip scientists to thank for that and the nazi leadership that established the UN.
Will SpencerMeanwhile, the extreme right wing increasingly wants to eradicate the Jews from the planet.
Will SpencerThat drumbeat is growing through major influencers like Candace Owens, Kanye west, the Tate brothers, and even Dan Bilzerian, along with the perennial idea that if we just murder the Jews, it will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity.
Will SpencerNaturally, it doesnt end with the Jews either.
Will SpencerDo you see?
Will SpencerBoth the left and the right are projecting their millenarian visions of utopia, claiming slaughter as the way to get there.
Will SpencerIn other words, if we just kill the right people, then well have peace now.
Will SpencerIm not surprised the secular world of left or right would think such things, but that men who call themselves christians would propose the shedding of blood as the way to global redemption or advocating for a culture of death as surely as an abortionist.
Will SpencerWhile yes, military conquest, slaughter, and death are featured all throughout the Old Testament, they find no support in the new.
Will SpencerSo if a man wants to live in a shadow, let him live in the long shadow cast by the cross, the paradox of the crucified Lord of glory.
Will SpencerThe cross is the one true crossroads of all history that has a lesson for the extreme left, the extreme right, and all points in between.
Will SpencerAnd as with National Socialist Germany in the 1930s and the United States a century later, the gospel is the only way a wealthy, educated, militarily powerful nation blessed with God's word can and should know better.
Will SpencerIn fact, I believe one can even make the case that the current state of Germany is God's judgment for their faithlessness.
Will SpencerThe german intelligentsia, inheritors of Luther and melanchthon, abandoned Christianity for nature worship in the 18 hundreds.
Will SpencerThis allowed for the rise of the abomination of national socialism, which was then put down.
Will SpencerIf you find this hard to believe, consider this quote from George Orwell in his book on the way.
Will SpencerFor 200 years, we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on.
Will SpencerAnd in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen.
Will SpencerOur efforts were rewarded, and down we came.
Will SpencerBut unfortunately, there had been a little mistake.
Will SpencerThe thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all.
Will SpencerIt was a cesspool of barbed wire.
Will SpencerIt appears that the amputation of the soul isnt just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out.
Will SpencerThe wound has a tendency to go septic.
Will SpencerWhen do you think he wrote these words?
Will Spencer1965.
Will SpencerMaybe even the 1970s.
Will SpencerOrwell wrote them in 1940, less than a year after Germany had invaded Poland, starting World War two.
Will SpencerOrwell hadnt yet seen Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Berlin, or Treblinka, and yet it was already obvious to him what had happened in the west.
Will SpencerWe can watch the amputation of Germanys soul and the resulting sepsis.
Will SpencerIf we have the courage to look at doctor mussers evidence and confront the reality of the Holocaust and its causes, we need the light of the empty tomb to shine on the darkness of national Socialist Germany.
Will SpencerAnd there we will see Christianitys true enemy, the worship of the creation rather than the creator.
Will SpencerThen and only then, do I believe we all have a chance to move past this historic crime and tragedy.
Will SpencerThe truth will reveal the wickedness of left and right that I pray the Holy Spirit will guide believers to walk safely between.
Will SpencerDoctor Muster's evidence is there if you want to see it.
Will SpencerHe is a friendly, accommodating and faithful man possessing a masters in divinity and doctorate in biblical Greek.
Will SpencerRight now he is doing missionary work in a former soviet state at personal risk to himself and his family.
Will SpencerHe gave a decade to finding out the truth in nazi ecology, which was also endorsed by Doctor Cal Beisner of the Cornwall alliance, who called it a, quote, tour de force.
Will SpencerAnd then the book reached me.
Will SpencerIf you're inclined to believe Doctor Musser is just an outlier as well, I've included on the substack five books that support his conclusions.
Will SpencerFirst, National Socialism and the religion of nature by Robert Poy.
Will SpencerThat's a rare used book that goes for more than $200 on Amazon, so you better start saving up.
Will SpencerSecond, leftism from Dessad and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse by Erich von Kunout Ledden.
Will SpencerThis is a survey of leftism by a Christian, polymath and world traveler who reads 20 languages and speaks eight of them.
Will SpencerIt's also rare and out of print, with used copies selling for more than $500, but the mises institute has digitized it and made it free to the world in both PDF and kindle on their website.
Will SpencerI've included that link as well.
Will SpencerThird, how green were the Nazis?
Will SpencerNature, environment, and nation in the Third Reich by Franz Josef Bruegemeier surveys the overlap of environmentalist and nationalist ideologies in National Socialist Germany.
Will SpencerFourth, the Green and the Brown, a history of conservation in Nazi Germany by Frank Utaker is, quote, a story of ideological convergence, of tactical alliances, of careerism, of implication in crimes against humanity, and of deceit and denial after 1945, end quote.
Will SpencerFifth and finally, black the Holocaust as history and warning by Timothy Snyder, which was a finalist for the UK's 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for the best nonfiction writing in the english language.
Will SpencerI meant what I said about the Nazis providing mountains of evidence of their thoughts, words, and actions.
Will SpencerI hereby charge every man and woman who considers themselves an intellectual to read doctor Muster's book and hopefully others I've listed and decide about National Socialist Germany for yourselves.
Will SpencerIn other words, be part of the reading class, not the meme class.
Will SpencerThen maybe, just maybe, we can change things in our lifetime.
Will SpencerOr, God willing, our children's.
Will SpencerOn a personal note, I am no longer jewish because I, as a man raised in that faith and culture, refuse to live in the shadow of the Holocaust.
Will SpencerI refuse to be a victim of historical events that didn't happen to me.
Will SpencerI still refuse.
Will SpencerI will always refuse.
Will SpencerAnd so I stood up.
Will SpencerI challenged my christian brothers and sisters to do the same, to stand in the light, not cower in shadow, bearing aloft the word of God into a desperately fallen world.
Will SpencerIn the name of the way, the truth, and the life.
Will SpencerJesus Christ.
Will SpencerSharp minds may observe that.
Will SpencerThere's one final question I haven't addressed.
Will SpencerWhat are we supposed to do about the reality of the Holocaust?
Will SpencerIn this essay ive already provided an answer to my christian brothers and sisters and to secular listeners as well.
Will SpencerId like to now offer my answer to the Jews.
Will SpencerThe following passage was written by doctor Viktor Frankl in his book Mans Search for meaning.
Will SpencerFrankl was a jewish austrian psychologist who spent three years in four german concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
Will SpencerI first read these words in 2017, long before I became a Christian.
Will SpencerMay they ring in the ears of those who have used never again as a battle cry against those they have wrongfully deemed their persecutors.
Will SpencerDuring the psychological phase of liberation from Auschwitz, one observed that peoples with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life.
Will SpencerNow, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly.
Will SpencerThe only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed.
Will SpencerThey became instigators, not objects of willful force and injustice.
Will SpencerThey justified their behavior by their own terrible experiences.
Will SpencerThis was often revealed in apparently insignificant events.
Will SpencerA friend was walking across a field with me towards the camp when suddenly we came to a field of green crops.
Will SpencerAutomatically I avoided it, but he drew his arm through mine and dragged me through it.
Will SpencerI stammered something about not treading down the young crops.
Will SpencerHe became annoyed, gave me an angry look and shouted, you don't say.
Will SpencerAnd hasn't enough been taken from us?
Will SpencerMy wife and child have been gassed, not to mention everything else.
Will SpencerAnd you would forbid me to tread on a few stalks of oats.
Will SpencerOnly slowly could these men, be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.
Will SpencerWe had to strive to lead them back to this truth, or the consequences would have been much worse than the loss of a few thousand stalks of oats.
Will SpencerEnd quote.
Will SpencerAnd this, my christian brothers and sisters, is why the Jews need the gospel as well.
Will SpencerAnd apparently today, so do many angry young men calling themselves christians.
Will SpencerBut maybe rather than hearing those ideas in the words of a jewish psychologist, they'd rightfully prefer the words of Jesus Christ, who said the following in the Gospel of Luke, chapter six.
Will SpencerBut I say to you who heard, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Will SpencerTo the one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.
Will SpencerAnd from one who takes away your cloak, do not withhold your tunic either.
Will SpencerGive to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods, do not demand them back.
Will SpencerAnd as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
Will SpencerIf you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you?
Will SpencerFor even sinners love those who love them.
Will SpencerAnd if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you?
Will SpencerFor even sinners do the same.
Will SpencerAnd if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you?
Will SpencerEven sinners lend to sinners to get back the same amount.
Will SpencerBut love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return.
Will SpencerAnd your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the most high, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.
Will SpencerBe merciful, even as your father is merciful.
Will SpencerJudge not, and you will not be judged.
Will SpencerCondemn not, and you will not be condemned.
Will SpencerForgive, and you will be forgiven.
Will SpencerGive, and it will be given to you.
Will SpencerGood measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over will be put into your lap.
Will SpencerFor with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.
Will SpencerEnd quote.
Will SpencerArgue with these words all you want, but in them I can find no justification for genocide.
Will SpencerSo I close with a word of pleading to those rageful young christian men and the adults who are around them, listening.
Will SpencerPlease abandon Hitlerism, christian or otherwise, and do it now.
Will SpencerHitler wasn't the crucified savior of the white race.
Will SpencerGod judged Germany for its faithlessness and has continued to yes, we were lied to about the Holocaust, but not about the means or the opportunity.
Will SpencerRather the motive, which was to extinguish the light of God's created order and worship.
Will SpencerThe divinity of nature instead of God the Father.
Will SpencerThe true story was then covered up to enable the same ends on a global scale.
Will SpencerNow, if that doesn't sound like socialism, I don't know what does.
Will SpencerBesides, genocides have been committed in and by the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Australia, Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, Cambodia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and the tribes of South America, North America, and Africa.
Will SpencerThat's a short list.
Will SpencerMany of these were in the 20th century alone.
Will SpencerThere's no reason why Germany should be any different from the worldwide historical norm just because of their skin color.
Will SpencerNow, your anger at the state of the west and its future is legitimate.
Will SpencerI empathize, however, that anger is being fashioned into a political weapon, no different from how young women's anger was fashioned into the weapon of feminism.
Will SpencerIn other words, you are being used if you don't believe me.
Will SpencerEarlier I recommended the book Black sun by Nicholas Goodrich Clarke about neo nazi movements in the 20th century.
Will SpencerThe first 50 pages are free on Amazon.
Will SpencerYou can read them in a web browser or on your phone.
Will SpencerIn them you will see reflected in the mid 20th century the exact same anxieties about immigration, the family, and the economy that you are feeling today, promoted by shrewd men to manipulate angry men into long forgotten social movements.
Will SpencerAgain, this dates back to the 1950s in the United States, England, and Europe.
Will SpencerIt's not a new game.
Will SpencerThese movements built nothing.
Will SpencerThey only destroyed, including the lives of the men and women who participated.
Will SpencerGo and read it for yourself.
Will SpencerThe enemies of Christ don't care how they take his people down, whether by the world, the flesh, or the devil.
Will SpencerHebrews twelve warns us, strive for peace with everyone and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.
Will SpencerSee to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled.
Will SpencerEnd quote.
Will SpencerBrothers, I urge you to rip that root out.
Will SpencerAnd pastors, it is your job to help them, not let them plant roots within you instead.
Will SpencerBecause, as the apostle wrote to the church in Galatia, now the works of the flesh are evident, which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like, of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.
Will SpencerAgainst such, there is no law.
Will SpencerAnd those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Will SpencerIf we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit.
Will SpencerLet us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another.
Will SpencerMercy, long suffering, kindness, gentleness, loving your enemies and blessing.
Will SpencerThose who curse you aren't cool or based, but they are christian.
Will SpencerGod's thoughts are not our thoughts.
Will SpencerHis ways are not our ways, no matter what time it is.
Will SpencerAnd if pastors aren't tempering young men's sinful flesh with saving and regenerating faith, the peace of God that passes understanding, then they are failing in their calling.
Will SpencerInstead, they're trying to be men's friends.
Will SpencerThey're cool buddies rather than their spiritual fathers.
Will SpencerBut last I checked, we don't have a crisis of friendship hunger.
Will SpencerWe have a generational crisis of father hunger, a father famine.
Will SpencerActually, orphan sons are asking for bread and fish, and instead they're handed serpents and stones.
Will SpencerThis is not leadership.
Will SpencerIt's a mistake.
Will SpencerI'll conclude with this.
Will SpencerI can hear many men asking, but will, what about jewish influence?
Will SpencerI grant the point that jews do occupy an outsized number of positions of power and influence relative to their population size.
Will SpencerObviously.
Will SpencerBut here's one thing.
Will SpencerNo one ever says that they're incompetent, because it's not true.
Will SpencerJews may not be hyper moral from biblical foundations, and in many cases, yes, their morality is explicitly anti biblical, but they are hyper competent.
Will SpencerIn fact, Jews, like indian, chinese, and korean immigrants, have family driven cultures of elite level competency.
Will SpencerMeanwhile, Anglo Protestants in America have developed a tragic anti intellectual tradition.
Will SpencerIn 1945, how many positions of elite power were held by faithful Anglo Protestants?
Will SpencerCompare that with today.
Will SpencerIt's been just 80 years.
Will SpencerWhat happened?
Will SpencerProtestantism gave up.
Will SpencerWhy?
Will SpencerAnd how that happened is a much longer conversation.
Will SpencerBut if you ask me, I think it relates to the forbidden fruit of sexual liberation.
Will SpencerMeanwhile, it is my sincere hope that once my fellow christian men are done noticing jewish influence, they'll also also notice the low expectations placed on them by their fathers and the low expectations they place on their own sons and daughters, and perhaps even themselves.
Will SpencerWhen I was growing up, I didn't go camping, hunt, or do anything outdoors.
Will SpencerMy dad worked on his career and I on schoolwork.
Will SpencerAs a result, I was in honors trigonometry.
Will SpencerAs a high school freshman, I received an 800 on my verbal SAT score and got into Stanford University, praise God, which my dad was able to fund for me without taking on student debt, a kingly gift I honor him for regularly.
Will SpencerWhile christian families are enjoying the great blessing of hospitality on weekends, children of immigrant families are taking a second or third language, mastering chess or playing an instrument.
Will SpencerWhile white american college students are partying and fornicating to rap music in universities or sent overseas on mission trips, immigrant kids are in the lab.
Will SpencerChildren who perform at elite levels pay high costs in terms of time socializing.
Will SpencerIt's expensive for parents and kids too.
Will SpencerIt was for me.
Will SpencerBut christian parents are aspirational parents thinking about future generations.
Will SpencerIf you want your sons to lead an advanced technological society, you have to train their minds.
Will SpencerThat is just as hard as training the body and just as painful, especially to succeed in hyper competitive white collar professions.
Will SpencerSo I encourage my christian brothers and sisters to think about how they can start combining elite level biblical morality with elite level professional competency, initiating a multigenerational project to win their country and culture back via the meritocracy they claim to value, all to the glory of God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Will SpencerIf you enjoy this podcast, thank you.
Will SpencerPlease like this episode, share it, and subscribe.
Will SpencerIf this is your first time here, you've picked an auspicious occasion.
Will SpencerWelcome.
Will SpencerI release new episodes about the christian counterculture, masculinity, and the family every week.
Will SpencerAnd please welcome this week's guests on the podcast, a husband father, missionary to the former Soviet Union, and the author of Nazi Ecology, the Oak Sacrifice of the Judeo christian worldview and the Holocaust, Doctor Mark Musser.
Speaker BDoctor Musser, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, thank you for having me.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a pleasure.
Speaker BSo earlier this year I checked out your book, Nazi Ecology, the Oak Sacrifice of the Judeo christian worldview and the Holocaust.
Speaker BAnd as you can see, I flipped through it.
Speaker BI did quite a lot of reading and note taking.
Speaker BThis was a real eye opening book for me, probably one of the most formative I've read in the past number of years and to help understand who the Nazis were and what they were really about.
Speaker BSo I really appreciate, I can't even imagine the amount of effort that went into producing something like this.
Speaker BSo thank you so much for writing this book.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, it took a number of years to get that thing finally solidified, so it's, you're looking at ten years worth of research.
Speaker BOh, wow.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, yeah, and then to write the book, you know, I don't have like a whole bunch of editors to help me and you know, all.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then no one's going to want to publish that book because we, I finally did.
Doctor Mark MusserBut in the sense of it's going to be very hard for a publisher to want to publish it, even though they recognize the, if someone's honest, you know, they're going to recognize how critical and important it is.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it's a, you know, it's a difficult, a difficult topic because there's so much propaganda on.
Doctor Mark MusserWhat are the Nazis?
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, a lot of people know about communism and this and that and the other, but what are the doctrines of national Socialism?
Doctor Mark MusserThere's nothing.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople know hardly anything about what their worldview was.
Doctor Mark MusserAll they know is that, oh, they were white racists and that's it.
Doctor Mark MusserI, and it's a very superficial view of national socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I call it national socialism, okay, because that's what it was.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was a combination of nationalism and socialism working together.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a different kind of socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's also a very, therefore, because of its socialistic character, it's a very complex movement and probably one of the most complex movements that we have seen in a long, long time.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd for people to simplify the nazi movement, national socialism is actually very, it exemplifies a very foolish, very unhistorical understanding of how it was that something like that movement took over supposedly the most educated country of Europe at that time.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd if you just sit there, hitler's a madman, he takes over the country and he is super racist.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, how do you explain, why was it that he was so popular?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd how was it that he was able to do these things?
Doctor Mark MusserIt wasn't just himself.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you have to have the whole, all kinds of other people along with him to bring that about.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd also the academics played a role, a big role in helping him come to power and even help them afterwards.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the repentance after the war was not all that great.
Doctor Mark MusserThey just quit talking about it.
Speaker BSo going back to the beginning, what inspired you to write this book?
Speaker BYou said it was a decade long journey.
Speaker BAnd I was wondering, as I'm reading this book, like, there's a 15 page bibliography.
Speaker BI mean, I can't even, it's like 1602 thousand footnotes, 1700 footnotes.
Speaker BI mean, I was reading through this.
Speaker BJust the magnitude of it impressed me.
Speaker BIt makes sense that it would take a decade.
Speaker BSo what was it way back when that inspired you to write it?
Speaker BAnd what was it that you're like?
Speaker BI have to stick with it because ten years is a long journey.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, first of all, if you're going to write a book like that it better be good, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserBecause people will.
Doctor Mark MusserThey're going to say, that's not academic, all this kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I've made it a very academic book.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a very difficult read, especially the first.
Doctor Mark MusserThe first part of it is very difficult because it deals with the philosophies that underlie national socialism, but also the modern green movement.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they are connected.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that is a hard topic.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, once you get through the foundation, you understand that philosophy of it all, the nature philosophy, the natural man, you know, those types of things.
Doctor Mark MusserThen this will.
Doctor Mark MusserAfter that, it's just a history lesson.
Doctor Mark MusserBut in order to understand how it was that those things came about, you have to provide, you know, thinking, a framework to understand what's going on.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd a lot of this, you know, this movement probably, you know, for me, I should say, for me to write this book, you know, I grew up a young guy in the seventies, you know, listening to John Denver, you know, and listened to all the environmental discussions as a kid and took it serious.
Doctor Mark MusserI used to criticize my grandfather for cutting down too many trees on the farm because he wanted to, you know, burn a warm home.
Will SpencerYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Speaker BBecause I listen to people, right.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm listening to the school too much, you know.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, anyway, then I become a christian man.
Doctor Mark MusserInteresting.
Doctor Mark MusserThe lutheran church high school.
Doctor Mark MusserProbably at the confirmation, the first time, actually, I heard the gospel justification by faith, which taught to me.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I understood the cross was a bridge between man and God.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I become a believer.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then I went to Evergreen State College after high school.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the Evergreen State College is like the Berkeley of Washington state, very liberal.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd in those days, all the stuff that you hear today, okay, in our colleges was being taught at that school.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I went there because it was local, very close and very affordable.
Doctor Mark MusserBut any left wing.
Doctor Mark MusserCause they were emphasizing teaching.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so I heard it all.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, my first year it was, you know, for example, political ecology.
Doctor Mark MusserWe studied it for two whole semesters.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there they integrate all the.
Doctor Mark MusserAll the credits.
Doctor Mark MusserIf you look at carefully, what they're doing is it's like a monastery school for adults, you know, every state college.
Doctor Mark MusserSo all the credits are put into one class.
Doctor Mark MusserThen they divide it out, you know, you know, for whatever is according to what you're teaching, what you're learning.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I took political ecology for two semesters, 32 credits.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they divided up biology, that kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserEvolution, environmental history, reading, writing.
Doctor Mark MusserYou do lots of reading writing.
Doctor Mark MusserSo one of the things that they really emphasize, it really surprised me as I go into this school and I'm being hit with this stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were blaming the christians for the environmental catastrophe that our world is supposedly in now.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they went after the book of Genesis in particular, where Adam is made in God's image.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's above nature.
Doctor Mark MusserHe doesn't commune with nature.
Doctor Mark MusserHe is commanded to rule over nature.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is what has led to a dominating, man centered view over nature.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they criticized Christianity in particular for this type of view, worldview that has led to this ecological problem we have everywhere.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then also, you know, you would read like, for example, Jesus, you know, he hates wolves, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he's going to protect the sheep.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, things like this.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this went on and on.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, they were very critical of Christianity because of its anti nature tendencies.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, you know, I just, I didn't know what to do with it, really.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I, I was kind of taken off guard by it.
Doctor Mark MusserA young Christian Mandev.
Doctor Mark MusserI knew something wasn't right, but I didn't know it was.
Doctor Mark MusserI kind of put it on the show, you know, and it's, it's up there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then, you know, I graduated from the college.
Doctor Mark MusserMy second year actually was a good year.
Doctor Mark MusserI took classical world all year long.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was all about the classical world from early greeks to early Christianity.
Doctor Mark MusserBut I was taught by jesuit priests.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so he was liberal, but still pretty fair guy.
Doctor Mark MusserBut it was excellent.
Doctor Mark MusserCourse, I learned a lot about the classical times.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then after that is when I got into political stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserSo you had like basically marxism, socialism for two semesters.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd in the last year, the last semester was race, class and gender.
Doctor Mark MusserSo all the stuff now that's taking over our country.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, we were studying.
Doctor Mark MusserEverybody laughed at it back then, you know, I mean, my uncle, for example, Barbara, you know, he.
Doctor Mark MusserI got free haircuts for years, but he's, he's now, he's no longer with us these days, but he's passed on to be with the Lord.
Doctor Mark MusserBut when he was younger, he was kind of a little ornery on occasion, especially when you're doing business.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he used to whistle at the people walking by as he was cutting hair.
Doctor Mark MusserBut that was back in the eighties.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd now, of course, you can't do that anymore.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd now it's the other way around.
Doctor Mark MusserBut it's even worse.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you're, it's not being whistled at.
Doctor Mark MusserYou're being basically, you know, being forced to accept a worldview that's not true.
Doctor Mark MusserBut anyway, so that kind of stuff was very popular then.
Doctor Mark MusserMy last year, the last part of the evergreen time was how to be a bureaucrat.
Doctor Mark MusserSo management in the public interest.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo I mean, it's all connected.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you know, this, these political worldviews that, you know, I studied, and then you become a bureaucrat.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd a lot of evergreen students, by the way, went to Washington, DC.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they're in our bureaucracies today and they're unionized today against our taxpayers, which is bad thing.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's not just them as many others like them.
Doctor Mark MusserBut then my very last semester, I decided I was in Buddha seminary.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so I took a course called liberation theology.
Doctor Mark MusserSo all the stuff, you know, we got, I guess.
Doctor Mark MusserSo here's the christian Marxism, socialism, fascism, whatever you want to call it a.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I studied it.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, I mean, so that's my background there.
Doctor Mark MusserFree state college.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so then I go to seminary after that.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then we, then we go to the mission field, the former Soviet Union.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so I went to Belarus for a year, 95, 96.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then we, after that, we continued to do ministry work, really off and on in the former Soviet Union ever since that time.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then we also started a church in Olympia, Washington.
Doctor Mark MusserBut to start a church is hard, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo we, you know, you gotta work.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I worked at the building Industry association of Washington.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd my job at that time, working part time, part time pastor, you know, part time building industry association, man, they needed someone to get on top of the stormwater rules that were starting to be implemented in Washington state.
Doctor Mark MusserSo it took me about two years to under.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I got a master's degree back then.
Doctor Mark MusserToday I have a doctorate.
Doctor Mark MusserBut back then, it took me two to three years to figure out what was it they're trying to do.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so I got on top of those rules.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I had to be involved with education, helping all of our builders in the state of Washington get ready to do these new rules that were demanded of them on the job side.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then secondly, my job was to complain about those rules, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd because I became like a little lobbyist of sorts, just writing articles, okay, for the building industry, you know, their monthly newsletter.
Doctor Mark MusserSo in my studies of, you know, how to look at what's going on underneath, you know, just the mirror laws.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, why are they doing these things?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what are the roots of stormwater management?
Doctor Mark MusserI came across and realized one of the original stormwater gurus of what today is being basically was forced on all these builders long before the global warming stuff took over was Owen Seifert.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the Nazis called them Wild Owen.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I wrote an article about stormwater and about Nazis and the green movement.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd our newsletter was basically went out to every newspaper, you know, in the state.
Doctor Mark MusserIt went to every city administration in the state.
Doctor Mark MusserIt went to every government post in the state, of course, plus all of the members.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so, I mean, it was, you know, it was a pretty widely read and went to the, you know, right to people's homes.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, anyway, this created a huge firestorm in Seattle.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, I mean, they publicly made a fool of me.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd.
Speaker BOh, wow.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it was just.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, I mean, they just.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was just madness.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so when I saw that, I realized there's something here.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so I really.
Doctor Mark MusserI started to look into it.
Doctor Mark MusserBut the other thing I was seeing that really struck me, and that's.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is why I read the book.
Doctor Mark MusserSo when I started to see.
Doctor Mark MusserSee this connection, is that the same arguments that I heard of Evergreen State College, the teachers, professors and the books we read criticizing Christian, Christians and Christianity for destroying the planet, the Germans were saying the same thing about the Jews in the 18 hundreds.
Doctor Mark MusserSo when I saw that they are the exact same arguments.
Doctor Mark MusserThey are.
Doctor Mark MusserNo, you're just transferring from one guy to the next.
Doctor Mark MusserBut the arguments are the same.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd when I saw that, I realized, okay, we need to get this in print.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I had a couple people encourage me to do it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so, yeah, so that was the motivation for it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd when you look at the roots, the environmental movement, as I say, like in Russian, there's nothing good going on here.
Doctor Mark MusserMaybe with regard to conservation is okay, that's more of a judeo christian view.
Doctor Mark MusserYou conserve things.
Doctor Mark MusserYou manage things.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserYou are the steward of things.
Doctor Mark MusserIn environmentalism, nature is king and nature rules you, and you're just, you know, basically, you're nothing.
Doctor Mark MusserThey're trying to save the planet and your name's not there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the very fact, very fact they're trying to save it, the very fact they're trying to save it means that there's a salvation there, but it's been secularized into a kind of a nature religion science mixture.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that's where we are right now.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the propaganda is thicken.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that worldview passed through national socialism.
Speaker BGreat, because that's where I wanted to start, but particularly not national socialism as such.
Speaker BTo read the book, you explain how the worldview actually began in the 17 hundreds and in the 18 hundreds.
Speaker BAnd it appears it began building momentum through the 18 hundreds, climaxing and sort of metastasizing in a way in national socialism as a political, economic, and religious kind of, in a sense, religious ideology?
Doctor Mark MusserYes, of course.
Doctor Mark MusserSemi religious.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's no question.
Doctor Mark MusserSome more religious than others, you know, depending on who it was.
Speaker BSo maybe we can go ahead, please.
Doctor Mark MusserI put it this way.
Doctor Mark MusserTo people.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserIf you look at the history, for example, of Old Testament.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserBaalism.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, this was what brought Israel down the first, the northern kingdom.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserFrom.
Doctor Mark MusserThey went down in 721, 722 BC to the assyrian empire.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they came in, why?
Doctor Mark MusserBecause of their foolish idolatry.
Doctor Mark MusserBaalism, okay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so.
Doctor Mark MusserBut it took 200 years for the final fruits of that to, you know, basically become the destruction of the nation.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then the southern kingdom lasted longer.
Doctor Mark MusserJudah, Jerusalem.
Doctor Mark MusserBecause they had repentance on occasion.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, they were able to recover.
Doctor Mark MusserThey have some good kings, but eventually Baal ism brought them down, too, and it was like 400 years, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo these things should not be.
Doctor Mark MusserShouldn't be surprising.
Doctor Mark MusserSo it takes time and for the fruits for those things to finally snowball into something more serious.
Speaker BSo can you talk about some of the influential thinkers in the 18 hundreds in particular, like I can think of?
Speaker BNietzsche, of course, was significant, but he was not a Nazi.
Speaker BHe obviously wasn't a national socialist.
Speaker BBut a lot of the early work was.
Speaker BA lot of the early seeds were sown during this time, according to your book.
Speaker BSo maybe you can walk through some of the names and some of the movements that began to sow the seeds that would later spring up.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, what you can argue is Nietzsche was proto Nazi.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was not nazi himself, but many of his ideas were absorbed by national socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Nietzsche is a very important.
Doctor Mark MusserNietzsche.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm german, but Nietzsche is a very important figure because Nietzsche was Hitler's second favorite philosopher.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople don't know this, but the Nazis put up, like a monument to him.
Doctor Mark MusserThey had, I don't say like a museum, but a study center for Nietzsche's worldview, for his ethics, for whatever they were, the superman stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so what the Nazis did, they merged Nietzsche's Superman ethos with.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is like the Superman ethos is mean today.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's no God.
Doctor Mark MusserWe've actually crucified him, so to speak, according to Nietzsche, practically speaking, because of our academic progress.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he's thinking of people like Kant and people like that that preceded him.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so now what we have is these.
Doctor Mark MusserWe have no gods that are gonna help us, and so we need to become gods ourselves, like little demi gods.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is part of his whole Superman ethos for men to grow up and to be real men.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that actually mixes with the nazi biological views of racism.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, see, it wasn't merely the so called science of social darwinism and biology that led the Nazis to their racist views.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have this Nietzsche Superman stuff also playing a role.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Hitler loved.
Doctor Mark MusserYou can criticize all you want.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's all kinds of books out there, people going both ways, trying to save Nietzsche's hide from the national socialist connections.
Doctor Mark MusserBut they're actually there.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you can sit there and say, well, he wasn't anti semite.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, the problem is, he's buddies.
Doctor Mark MusserHe listened to Arthur Schopenhauer, and he was a super anti semite, which a lot of people don't know.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was also friends with Richard Wagner, the composer, and he was also super, okay, anti semite.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserThere was some kind of conflict between them, this and that and the other.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd yet, and in his books, on occasion, you will see Nietzsche say, the odor of the Jews, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this goes back to Schopenhauer and the odor of the Jews, according to Schopenhauer, was the anti nature views of the Jews against nature.
Speaker BSo, okay, so talk about that specifically because.
Speaker BBecause it gets to what you were discussing during your time at Evergreen State College and in Seattle, as you're looking into these issues, that there's a worldview that's being set up in opposition to the judeo christian, jewish, and then christian worldview that takes a different tack on some of the things that are early on in Genesis.
Speaker BSo maybe we can set up those two opposing worldviews and juxtapose them together.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, Schopenhauer is the guy that really emphasized this.
Doctor Mark MusserHe goes back a little bit earlier than Nietzsche.
Doctor Mark MusserNietzsche was, you know, he died in 1900, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Schopenhauer was born in the late 17 hundreds.
Doctor Mark MusserHe died, I can't remember it, like, 1860.
Doctor Mark MusserI can't remember exactly.
Doctor Mark MusserBut so he proceeded.
Doctor Mark MusserHe precedes nietzsche.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what Schopenhauer emphasized over and over again, especially in some of his books, is he would complain about, you know, the jews we need to exterminate.
Doctor Mark MusserActually used the term, that type of stuff, you know, the jewish views of nature from the european continent.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserBy the way, Schopenhauer was Hitler's favorite philosopher.
Doctor Mark MusserNumber one was Schopenhauer.
Doctor Mark MusserNumber two was Nietzsche, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this idea that Hitler was, you know, couldn't read these men or, you know, didn't know about these men, really.
Doctor Mark MusserOr it was just.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, come on.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, he read these books, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserHe was not some, you know, really dumb guy.
Doctor Mark MusserOf course, he.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's twisted and all that kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserWe understand all that.
Doctor Mark MusserBut he.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was a voracious reader.
Doctor Mark MusserHe read lots of things.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Schopenhauer was his favorite philosopher.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd secondly, Nietzsche.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they are connected.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, basically you can make a line from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche in the sense of, we call this the existential movement.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd by existentialism, we mean this world with no intervention from God, and then it's strictly existence.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what matters is not.
Doctor Mark MusserTherefore, that's all there is.
Doctor Mark MusserWhat matters is not your thought, it's your will.
Doctor Mark MusserSee?
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSee?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so what nature has is not necessarily thinking.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, that's true.
Doctor Mark MusserIf you look at nature alone.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's what you're gonna come up with.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Schopenhauer is gonna come up with this.
Doctor Mark MusserExistentialism, pure existentialism, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so he said, look at what is most characteristic of the world we live in.
Doctor Mark MusserThe one we know, the one that's just get rid of the Bible.
Doctor Mark MusserForget about supernatural stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's the will.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo Nietzsche's going to take that, and he'll talk about the freedom.
Doctor Mark MusserNot the freedom, but the will to power.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then the Nazis, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a triumph of the will.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Lenny Reifenstahl makes this super movie about the Nazis that was banned for a number of years because of its.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was so influential, a documentary about the national socialist movement they called the triumph of the will.
Doctor Mark MusserSo what matters is not your thought.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's what you will to be the case.
Doctor Mark MusserSo this is what we call existentialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that existentialism is that will is against the will of God, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserIt's against a transcendent will from the outside.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so it's man's will, and it's a man.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's rooted in nature and he's rooted in.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, Nietzsche talked about the man of this world, the man of nature, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so this was part of his whole discussion.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then the Nazis also talked about the natural man.
Doctor Mark MusserThe reason why they were the master race is because they were the closest to nature, and that's what they thought, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the social darwinism is also the scientific aspect to this.
Doctor Mark MusserAll that also was brewing it all at the same time.
Doctor Mark MusserSo you have this existentialism that was anti semitic, and he routinely criticized the Jews for even, like, things like animal cruelty.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThen you have this mixing with science, with biology and social darwinism, and then you have this Nietzsche Superman ethos, and you put those three ingredients together, you've got yourself quite the.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's not a Molotov cocktail.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's going to be something more serious than that.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this was all absorbed in the academia that continued to grow up until the rise of the national socialist movement.
Doctor Mark MusserSo those things were very at the rock bottom.
Doctor Mark MusserSchopenhauer was especially irate against the Jews for animal cruelty.
Doctor Mark MusserHe blamed the Jews for animal vivisection.
Doctor Mark MusserWhen you do experiments on animals, he traces all the way back to Genesis.
Doctor Mark MusserIn fact, one of the first things the Nazis did in 1933 was to pass an animal rights law.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople don't know this, but it's true.
Doctor Mark Musser1934, my home state of Washington gave Hitler a humane Society award.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was like the Eichelberger Humane Award.
Doctor Mark Musser1934 in Seattle, I'm not too far from here.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd here, all these people, when I wrote this article about this green Nazi, Alan Seifert, starting stormwater, okay, my own city of Seattle gave the Hitler the Fuhrer an award for being such a guy who loved animals.
Doctor Mark MusserSo this was not so.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was well known by then, even by 1933, for being a.
Doctor Mark MusserFor being a nature bar.
Doctor Mark MusserI gotta move that.
Will SpencerNo problem.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm sorry about that.
Doctor Mark MusserMy sister walks in, she never does this.
Doctor Mark MusserShe probably do it today because.
Doctor Mark MusserRon, you have to cut that out.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I'm sorry.
Speaker BYeah, that's all.
Will SpencerThat's what sisters are for.
Speaker BThey're there to mess up their brothers.
Doctor Mark MusserShe's never been there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then she's here this morning.
Doctor Mark MusserSorry about that.
Doctor Mark MusserAnyway, so they had an animal rights law they passed in 1933.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I.
Doctor Mark MusserOne of the things that they did, probably the most important thing they did, they banned jewish kosher slaughter for being too cruel.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, Schopenhauer talked about this, too.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they made a big movie about this, the Nazis in 1940, about how cruel the Jews were to the animals.
Doctor Mark MusserThis, in 1940, they call it the eternal jew.
Doctor Mark MusserSee, that's against this existentialism of this life, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThis life.
Doctor Mark MusserOnly then you have the eternal jew because he's borrowing things that are not true from the transcendent outside.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's just superstition.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they have, yeah, they've given us a worldview that is very destructive to the world we live in and especially toward animals.
Doctor Mark MusserSo.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is actually highlighted as the most heinous aspect of why the Jews need to be eradicated.
Doctor Mark MusserSo if you look at the eternal jew, this documentary lasts, I think, about an hour.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they go through various things.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, why they're evil, why they're not good, you know, they're in the ghettos and, you know, you go through this and that.
Doctor Mark MusserThe other thing, they sit, they don't want to work, and, you know, they just go to the banks, they run, you know, the Hollywood of Germany back then, they corrupt our society with the things that they are presenting.
Doctor Mark MusserSo it goes on and on.
Doctor Mark MusserBut then the climax of this, of this documentary, and it really spends a lot of time with this is animal cruelty, kosher slaughterhouse.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they actually show the process to make people really angry at, you know, at the jewish people.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that's called the eternal jew.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was broadcast, it was put in all the movies of, you know, movie halls of Nazi Germany in those days and other places, too.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that's Schopenhauer's connection, what he calls the odor of the Jews, okay, eventually leads to what the Nazis presented to Germany, the eternal jew.
Speaker BSo I think the thing that was most informative for me about your book, and I'm very grateful that I had the chance to kind of reread it, preparing for the interview.
Speaker BSo most reading is rereading.
Speaker BAnd so to go through it, I read it in December, January, February of this year, and then to pick it up again after some of the ideas had settled in and reengage with the material to see the various streams.
Speaker BSo we can talk about existentialism, or we can talk about social darwinism, or we can talk about romanticism.
Speaker BThat all of these were various tributaries that fed one big river, and each individual tributary in and of itself might not necessarily lead to that inevitable conclusion.
Speaker BBut when you fuse them all together, you get something truly explosive and destructive that we don't really understand today, for the reason that you had said earlier that Germany has never really fully repented for what actually went on.
Speaker BIn fact, it sounds like from the early narrative of the book, what instead happened is the national socialism nazi movement was politicized very quickly by the allied powers to make it into the enemy, that they needed it to be covered up a lot of what was actually going on.
Speaker BAnd then we just went about our business, all of us carrying these lies about who the national socialists really were.
Speaker BAnd that seems to me to be the case.
Speaker BAnd now people have these ideas from film and tv, right, and the media, essentially, that paint the picture of Nazis as christians and capitalists when they hated both of those things, which is the hysterical part.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, I mean, when they arrived in Nazi Germany, the army, and I don't think they had really a solid understanding of what's really going on with the worldview of national socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were just shocked at how is it that a so called educated country could do this?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they're not looking at things deeply and more seriously that look at the same so called most educated society of Germany.
Doctor Mark MusserThey gave spawn to the reformation, okay, with Martin Luther, but within a couple hundred years, they're already rebelling against that.
Doctor Mark MusserSo by the 18 hundreds, it's an all out assault against the Bible, which probably is at the real root of everything.
Doctor Mark MusserI don't really talk about that a little bit because that's really not the point of what I'm trying to get at.
Doctor Mark MusserBut another argument could be made is that the higher criticism that we've heard so much about.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, and some of these guys were also anti Semites with this.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd if they weren't, maybe vocally, per se, still, the whole edifice was anti semitic.
Doctor Mark MusserThey're trying to get rid of the jewish elements.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they started out by attacking the historicity of the Bible and largely because of its so called jewish influences, which goes back to Immanuel Kant.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he's another rabid anti semite that people don't understand either.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was extremely critical of jewish people.
Doctor Mark MusserYou don't see this in his writings, but his lectures was full of anti Semitism.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he also.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he also used the word exterminate when he talked about jewish people, that term.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Schopenhauer, and maybe not the exact german term, I couldn't tell you what that was.
Doctor Mark MusserBut the idea, it's not good, is that you have Kant and you have Schopenhauer.
Doctor Mark MusserThey become like prophets of the future for Germany, even though they would have been aghast at what the Nazis actually did.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserBut yet when you put forth these ideas and at the time, people really all pay attention to them and things like this, it seems like it's innocuous idea, but they're really not.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd over time, these ideas metastasize into something very serious, like the tributaries you mentioned.
Doctor Mark MusserVery good illustration.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd finally it coalesces into, you know, the drain that goes out to the ocean.
Doctor Mark MusserThen that's where it's a big problem.
Doctor Mark MusserSo now my wife.
Speaker BAnyway, ladies, the boys are talking.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, right, right.
Doctor Mark MusserAnyway, it's just a big topic, and it's hard to.
Doctor Mark MusserSo my book details all of those different, different discussions, and.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd people just don't know that history.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's very difficult to know it.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you have to spend time, and they just kind of ignore it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd part of it is because today we live in such an existentialist world.
Doctor Mark MusserAnyway, that's what we call post modernism.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo people don't care about what people believe anymore.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they don't look at it.
Doctor Mark MusserThey don't take it serious.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so the beliefs of the Nazis.
Doctor Mark MusserI was amazed.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, I've looked at.
Doctor Mark MusserI've read lots of books on national socialism, okay?
Speaker BLots of time, 15 page bibliography.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, and there are.
Doctor Mark MusserThere are very few books that you can find that actually try to explain what the Nazis actually believed.
Doctor Mark MusserSo what they've done is that they've projected onto the Nazis things that really aren't true based on their own.
Doctor Mark MusserWhatever, though.
Doctor Mark MusserThese guys were mean, racist.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, okay, well, that's a.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's true.
Doctor Mark MusserBut why were they mean races?
Doctor Mark MusserHow did they get there?
Doctor Mark MusserThey're not answering that question.
Doctor Mark MusserThey don't even ask the questions about it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they're very superficial and simplistic answers.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the whole anti God, the anti biblical, anti reformation stuff played a big role, because in order to become an existentialist, okay, you have to reject the Bible.
Doctor Mark MusserSee, so Germany was supposedly in its reformation, and then during this time, they make this transition from the reformation to existentialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then after national socialism, we have what we call postmodernism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd all these ideas are still with us.
Doctor Mark MusserThey have not.
Doctor Mark MusserThey've just trained.
Doctor Mark MusserThey've changed into something new in terms of labels.
Doctor Mark MusserBut basically, it's the same ideas, but the names have changed.
Speaker BSo I want to drill in to the specific german romantic antisemitism, because we're shown this today, and I think we've all been shown german anti semitism our whole lives.
Speaker BNot a year goes by where there's not a new Holocaust movie.
Speaker BBut as you said, very rightly, no one asks why.
Speaker BIt's just assumed, like, oh, they just hate the Jews because they're Jews.
Will SpencerRight?
Speaker BBut the german romantic element, as you laid it out with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Kante, had a specifically environmental quality to it.
Speaker BThat was the real, let's call it sin from the german romantic perspective.
Speaker BSo maybe we can talk about that, because that speaks to, I think, a question that, as you just said, no one really asks, like, why?
Speaker BAnd the roots of that were ultimately environmentalist in nature.
Speaker BSo maybe we can talk about that for a moment, because that just opens the door, I think, to everything else.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, see, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were existentialist, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then.
Doctor Mark MusserBut then before that, you have what we call romanticism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is.
Doctor Mark MusserI don't know how to characterize, you know, they want to be one with nature.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's kind of a romance with nature, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the idea is to commune with the natural world in such a way that we don't abuse it.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo this is what we call the romantic worldview, which in Germany was pretty strong.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it was also in England, too, but in Germany, it takes on this anti semitic role.
Doctor Mark MusserSo again, they're blaming.
Doctor Mark MusserThe german romantics are blaming the Jews for the destruction of nature, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThey're in the cities, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThey're running the banks and the train system, and this is leading to destruction of the forest and all the things that are dear to our folk culture.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, that we grew up close to the land, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo that kind of stuff, it's uprooting us from our foundations, you know, on this romantic world that we.
Doctor Mark MusserWe think that we live in.
Doctor Mark MusserSee that, you know, the form, the pastoral background, you know, from a romantic point of view, that it's actually anti God, strangely enough, anti biblical.
Doctor Mark MusserBut still, the romantic movement preceded all that.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so they also had this anti semitic to it.
Doctor Mark MusserProbably the most.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's a number of them, but probably the most anti semitic that's.
Doctor Mark MusserIs his.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, his name was, again, he was like, in the 1860s, Riel.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he was a very strong anti semite.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was a forester.
Doctor Mark MusserHe, like.
Doctor Mark MusserHe liked that.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was into teaching on forestry professor.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, he had a big impact.
Doctor Mark MusserHe wrote some books, the natural history of Germany, three volume set.
Doctor Mark MusserI've read through a lot of it.
Doctor Mark MusserAgain, a number of anti semitic quotes, okay, that are presented in his book, blaming the Jews for this kind of ecological destruction.
Doctor Mark MusserThey didn't call it ecology back then.
Doctor Mark MusserThey would just call it nature.
Doctor Mark MusserSo the man that actually invented the word ecology is Ernst Haeckel, and he was a german social darwinist.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThe first.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's really the father of german social darwinism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was a man that took Darwin's view of evolution and converted it into social darwinism.
Doctor Mark MusserHe made it more social.
Doctor Mark MusserHe made it more political.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so Darwin's going to be.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's more English.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's going to be more hesitant to do that.
Doctor Mark MusserBut the Nazis, I mean, the Germans and the Nazis later on, too, would adopt many of these ideas.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's going to actually socialize this view.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's a scientist, but he's like a social scientist along with it.
Doctor Mark MusserSee, even though he was, I think, a paleontologist, if I remember correctly.
Doctor Mark MusserBut he's the one who coined the term ecology in 1866, and then he's the father of german social darwinism.
Doctor Mark MusserSo there, at the root of environmentalism, ecology, you have racism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd by the way, when.
Doctor Mark MusserWhen people start talking about overpopulation, okay, to me there, it's no better to be sitting there talking about overpopulation than racism.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's the same thing as far as I'm concerned, because racism is just one form of anti humanism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd today our world is very anti humanistic.
Doctor Mark MusserNature is everything today.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd at some point, something bad is going to happen to people because of these bad ideas, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we're not quite there yet, but you can see where things are headed.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it may take longer than we realize, like always, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserBut at some point, something bad is going to happen and it's because of these bad ideas.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd romanticism also played a role.
Doctor Mark MusserSo you have romanticism, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserRomance with nature, commune with nature.
Doctor Mark MusserA holistic view of nature that's against the holiness of God.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, if you look at the hebrew term, for example, the word for holy basically, sometimes can mean whole, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserBut the holism, the holiness, comes from God, from the outside, from the transcendent source.
Doctor Mark MusserIt doesn't come from.
Doctor Mark MusserWith you and doesn't come from nature.
Doctor Mark MusserSo what the romantics want is for nature to give us purity.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they strangely think that nature is pure.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I mean, and this is that.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is actually at the root of a lots of strange, faulty ideas about how to fix the environmental catastrophe for our world.
Doctor Mark MusserThey think nature is pure.
Doctor Mark MusserSo what you have to do is set aside people and everything they do.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd if we do that, then everything is going to be pure, which is false.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's a false idea.
Doctor Mark MusserIt simply is not true at all.
Doctor Mark MusserThe Nazis had a very similar view in the sense we get rid of the Jews.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's going to solve many of our ecological problems, see, our biological problems, our ecological problems.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what people don't realize is that with.
Doctor Mark MusserWith Haeckel, okay, he's going to make us biology, evolution and social Darwinism into a science, okay?
Will SpencerThis is Haeckel, by the way, not Hegel.
Speaker BSo h a e c k e l.
Speaker BI'm just making sure to clarify that for listeners that we're not talking about Hegel.
Doctor Mark MusserHaeckel.
Will SpencerHaeckel with a K.
Will SpencerHaeckel.
Speaker BPlease continue, sir.
Doctor Mark MusserHaeckel's a problem, too.
Doctor Mark MusserWe'll get to him shortly.
Doctor Mark MusserYes, but no.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Haeckel is going to bring all those things together, and he's going to emphasize that he wasn't anti semitic, but he was anti christian.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd again, he's pro nature, anti christian.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he blamed Christianity again for the destruction of nature.
Doctor Mark MusserSo all of those ideas were all there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they go back to the 18 hundreds.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's sort of the seedbed for all of these things.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's after the reformation was rejected.
Doctor Mark MusserSee?
Doctor Mark MusserSo once that's done, then you start getting into other ideas.
Doctor Mark MusserThey thought they were progressive, you know, but really it was heading toward, you know, doomsday, World War one, and we could talk about that too.
Doctor Mark MusserWorld War two was even worse.
Speaker BSo I want to read the Wikipedia entry about romanticism really quickly because I think it touches on a lot of things.
Speaker BSo romanticism, also known as the romantic movement or romantic eradic, was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe.
Will SpencerTowards the end of the 18th century.
Speaker BSo the 17 hundreds.
Speaker BThe purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture.
Speaker BIn response to the age of Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favor of a moral outlook known as individualism.
Speaker BThey argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an altar, an affair of form, but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response.
Speaker BWith this philosophical foundation, the romantics elevated several key themes which they were deeply committed.
Speaker BTo, which they were deeply committed.
Speaker BA reverence for nature and the supernatural, an idealization of the past as a nobler era, a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious, and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime.
Speaker BAnd so the Wikipedia article, and I'm going to try and share my screen right now, the Wikipedia article shows an image that I think it looks like I'm not going to be able to share my screen at the moment using this software, but we'll add it in, we'll try and add it in afterwards.
Speaker BSo the Wikipedia article shows the very famous painting wanderer above the sea of fog by Caspar David Friedrich.
Speaker BSo for listeners, you've seen this painting before many, many times, particularly in the masculinity movement.
Speaker BIt depicts a man standing at the pinnacle of rock.
Speaker BPinnacle of rock.
Speaker BHe's got flaming red hair and he's looking out over a sea of clouds.
Speaker BThis used to be one of my favorite paintings for a very long time.
Speaker BThis is one of the signature works of the romantic movement is wanderer above a sea of fog.
Speaker BAnd you can see a lot of those ideas from romanticism embodied in that painting.
Speaker BAnd the artist himself, Caspar David Friedrich, who used to be one of my favorite painters as well, so the romantic era had a particularly strong grip over the german imagination for thinking about things in unbiblical and anti biblical way.
Speaker BSo I just wanted to lay that sort of philosophical groundwork for everyone listening so they understand just how powerful the romantic movement was, because this is not.
Speaker BWe're rooting our truth in the Bible.
Speaker BWe're rooting the truth in God's word.
Speaker BSo we're rooting it in nature.
Speaker BWe're rooting in individualism.
Speaker BWe're rooting it in mysticism, in the exotic and the heroic past, not in the eternal word of God.
Speaker BAnd this took place in the late 17 hundreds.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, let me read a quote from Ernst Layman.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was a biology professor, 1880 to 1957.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was also a national socialist, and noted that this is what his view of national socialism was.
Doctor Mark MusserHe says, we recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's our holism leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations.
Doctor Mark MusserOnly through a reintegration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger.
Doctor Mark MusserThat is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age.
Doctor Mark MusserSo there's our racism in terms of social Darwinism and evolutionary theory.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, that type of stuff and biology.
Doctor Mark MusserHumankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole.
Doctor Mark MusserThis striving towards connectedness with the totality of life, by the way.
Doctor Mark MusserTotality of life.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's totalitarianism with nature itself.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is why I sharply disagree with.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, the romantics say that we're in individuals.
Doctor Mark MusserNo, they don't.
Doctor Mark MusserThey believe the destruction of the individual because he merges with nature to the point where he no longer matters with nature itself and nature into which we are born.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is the deepest meaning and true essence of national socialist thought.
Doctor Mark MusserNow, when did you ever hear that in some.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, some school of some sort?
Speaker BNever.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, right?
Doctor Mark MusserIt's really sad.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, some people have no idea what the Nazis actually believed.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so I didn't know either.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I knew all about Marxism.
Doctor Mark MusserI've read lots of Marx, okay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I knew a lot, you know, a lot of his stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, from my days at Evergreen.
Doctor Mark MusserBut I knew nothing of national Socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's just a big blind, you know, like a.
Doctor Mark MusserLike a hole there.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, now I know national Socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd in my opinion, I think my book should be read in every academic institution before they go to college.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, just look at what's cool.
Speaker BI agree because.
Doctor Mark MusserI agree because it's just, it's so everything that's going on today is, it's all there.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, the entire green.
Doctor Mark MusserEverything they're doing today with regard to the green movement, the Nazis were emphasizing the same things.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, that's shocking.
Speaker BThat was one of the things on my first read through that was very convincing to your thesis.
Speaker BI mean, obviously, looking at it now, it's like, after allowing it to settle in, of course, very convincing.
Speaker BBut to recognize when I was talking to people about this book, because the idea is that the Nazis were green leftists, right.
Speaker BThat just rocked a lot of people's minds because they'd had, oh no, they're christian capitalists.
Speaker BThat's obviously who they were.
Speaker BRight.
Speaker BBut to say, no, they weren't that at all.
Speaker BThey were actually quite, they were closer in ideology to today's green ecological environmentalists.
Speaker BAnd the thing that was most convincing to me was you cited the book how Green were the Nazis, which was, I guess, a leftist book, that they were already, that the left was already trying to distance themselves from the Nazis.
Speaker BLike, no, no, no, we don't really have anything to do with them.
Speaker BLike, why would they do that if there wasn't substantial evidence for them to try?
Doctor Mark MusserNo, I just, I've read all those books and they're also included in my work.
Doctor Mark MusserSo in the early two thousands, you had a number of books that were written.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd even before then too little bit after talking about how, you know, the green connections, national Socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so it's like they already got out, the leftist people got out to be in front of this before it became a problem.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so they wrote these books and then now they're happy.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so they can use those books to criticize anybody that says anything different.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, so, so that, I mean, they're already ahead of the game.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, conservatives in America don't pay attention.
Doctor Mark MusserThey're just always being, they're always behind everything, you know, which is sad, but that's, you know, that's how things are.
Speaker BThey're the ones being called Nazis.
Speaker BRight?
Speaker BSo like, oh, I'm not, no, I'm not.
Speaker BLike, the Nazis are over there.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserThen lately I've been noticing I haven't looked into it.
Doctor Mark MusserCause I don't have time for it.
Doctor Mark MusserBut what's going on now?
Doctor Mark MusserThey're starting to admit, okay, yeah, the Nazis were green, but what ruined it was this male dominance of the Nazis.
Speaker BOh, interesting.
Doctor Mark MusserSo this is heading in another direction.
Doctor Mark MusserI have not, I've just looked at the titles.
Doctor Mark MusserI have not read anything.
Doctor Mark MusserBut it's something in this direction where the right wing masculinity, this kind of stuff, so ruined the nazi movement.
Doctor Mark MusserI would actually argue that what happened is that World War one and World War two basically neutered the west because of all the men that died in both those wars, leaving a lot of argument.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserSo leading lots of men, young men that were raised by their mothers.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so we have a very feminized society that is now finally affecting America, too, because we're listening to Europe too much of the time.
Speaker BI would be curious to know what some of those titles are.
Speaker BI'd like to.
Speaker BI'd like to read them.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Speaker BTell me later.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserI can send you some.
Doctor Mark MusserI'd have to.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's a few of them.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Speaker BSo I wonder if we can talk quickly about Martin Heidegger, because it seems to me that early on, he's sort of painted as the way that some of these ideas from the National Socialists slipped in to the dialogue under the COVID of perhaps his girlfriend.
Speaker BSo maybe we can talk about the two of them as well.
Doctor Mark MusserHeidegger is an existentialist.
Doctor Mark MusserHe loved, you know, he loved Nietzsche.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so his whole thing was to, you know, make Nietzsche more updated, you know, for the National Socialist age.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, he was a real Nazi.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople don't realize this.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, he was a.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was a card carry, card carrying Nazi.
Doctor Mark MusserHe never repented of his Nazism after the war.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserHe said he felt that what happened is that the Nazis became too industrialized.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, well, that's because they started a war, and you can't, once you start a war, you have to industrialize.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's no way around this.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so the Nazis had to go.
Doctor Mark MusserThey had to betray all of their principles at the beginning, that they held dear to themselves, that they had to finally let go of that stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we've got to make tanks and forget all this other stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserOf course, they didn't do that.
Doctor Mark MusserThey've made rockets, too, and all kinds of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserBut, you know, the technology stuff is another issue.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have to sit down and think about, how can the Nazis be so technologically minded and yet be emphasized?
Doctor Mark MusserThe green movement.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, look at what's going on today.
Doctor Mark MusserWho are the most technological people we have today and who are most interested in nature?
Doctor Mark MusserIt's the same people.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserYou've got, you know, all of the Googles and apples and all this stuff, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThese guys are all super technology peoples, supposedly, and they're all, you know, romantics and various ways existentialist and environmentalist and other ways.
Doctor Mark MusserSo John Denver, for example, you know, he loved flying.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, I think Reagan asked him to, you know, do this when the challenger blew up.
Doctor Mark MusserHe did the song for it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was always, you know, proud of, you know, that type, space, you know, space travel.
Doctor Mark MusserOf course, he won a Ron Brown.
Doctor Mark MusserWe haven't even mentioned him, but it's the same kind of a problem.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there's some research that needs to be done with regard to him.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's some more serious research.
Doctor Mark MusserBut he's an SS Nazi.
Doctor Mark MusserHe also has very.
Doctor Mark MusserHe.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm sure he has.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was concerned about global warming coming from carbon dioxide in the 1950s.
Doctor Mark MusserI can't prove it because I don't have time to chase it down, but I know it's there because this kind of snuck into some of these Disney cartoons in the 1950s.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, he was portrayed as this, you know, great guy that's going to give us the space agent.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so then these cartoons that were on 1950s in America, and I saw him as a kid in the 19, early seventies, late sixties, they were talking to one of them, several of them, they put together, and one of them talks about how great this super age is going to be.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then all of a sudden, the flying ointment, this is 1950s is carbon dioxide.
Doctor Mark MusserToo much of it, and it's gonna.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's gonna pollute the atmosphere and lead to all kinds of flooding going on.
Speaker BNo way.
Doctor Mark MusserReally?
Speaker B1950S?
Doctor Mark MusserYes.
Speaker BA better, simpler time.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, I mean, so, again, that idea was there in the 1950s, and now look where it's at.
Doctor Mark MusserIt takes time to develop ideas, and then eventually they take over.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then later on, once the ideas, they put them into practice, then you have the fruits of it.
Speaker BSo we've talked about some of the names that surround the Nazis.
Speaker BSo we talked about Schopenhauer and Kant and Nietzsche and Haeckel and Heidegger.
Speaker BWe've talked about the intellectual and in some sense, spiritual contexts that surrounded them.
Speaker BMaybe we can talk about some of the beliefs of the Nazis themselves.
Speaker BSo Himmler, we can talk about Bormann.
Speaker BWe can talk about Goering.
Speaker BOf course, I'd love to talk about Hitler and what he believed, because we've set the context to see that this was not a christian movement.
Speaker BThese were not christian men.
Speaker BThey were not surrounded by christian men.
Speaker BIn fact, I might also like to talk about what had happened to the church in the decades leading up to Nazism.
Speaker BBut so we've talked about the intellectual context that these men were embedded in the many philosophical streams that the tributaries that fed the river.
Speaker BLet's talk about what the men of National Socialism actually believed.
Speaker BAnd maybe we can just go through a bunch of the different names.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, like we already mentioned, I think, in terms of ideology, okay, Heidegger would probably would be the most serious, you know, Nazi in terms of the philosophy of national Socialism, which was a national socialist existentialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so basically, for example, you've heard this discussion about, you know, being okay.
Doctor Mark MusserBeing.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's his big emphasis.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, he said, the fatherland is being itself.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so being okay.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThat means a quotation from Heidegger.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, so being is like the existential in this world, okay.
Doctor Mark MusserThis world only without any outside interference from the outside.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is being okay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so he taught in his lectures that the fatherland was being itself.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that would be his view.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd from there, he's going to develop what later becomes what we call being.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he said, let being be.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so this is after the war?
Doctor Mark MusserThis is after the war.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserJohn Lennon sang the song let it be.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, so, okay, what's going on after.
Doctor Mark MusserAfter national socialism?
Doctor Mark MusserIs that.
Doctor Mark MusserIs that the will?
Doctor Mark MusserThe Nazis, like, ruined the will.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Heidegger saw what the Nazis can do with will.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so there's kind of a semi repentance.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's not serious, but a little bit.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so then let's just let being be.
Doctor Mark MusserSo now the will is destroyed.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, you know, basically, if you.
Doctor Mark MusserWe can give a rundown of history very quickly, you know, with the Protestants, what was important, the Bible alone.
Doctor Mark MusserLet's get back to the Bible.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's like a romantic view that.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, we're gonna go back to the origins, back to the purity of the Bible.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's a romantic view.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we want to reproduce a New Testament church.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserBut it's a biblical romanticism.
Doctor Mark MusserSo it's.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserRomanticism is like a counterfeit to that.
Doctor Mark MusserSo what they want to do is use.
Doctor Mark MusserFirst of all, you had reason.
Doctor Mark MusserWe want to use reason alone.
Doctor Mark MusserSo we go from Bible alone to reason alone, and that's our humanism.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then the romantics came along and said, well, this humanism has no place for nature.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that's a distortion because you got that humanism from Christianity.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they started to criticize that.
Doctor Mark MusserSo then it becomes sort of nature alone.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then with nature alone, we are now existentialism, the will alone.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then after the destruction of world War two, what can be done with the will?
Doctor Mark MusserWell, lots of bad things.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, now.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, now it's got.
Doctor Mark MusserLet's just let being be.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this really is at the heart of the environmental movement in the sense we just need to let nature be.
Doctor Mark MusserIf you don't touch it, I mean, you can have sex with anything that moves, but if you touch mother nature, it's like you're touching a virgin.
Doctor Mark MusserSee?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd you better not touch it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so this is really sort of the underlying how Martin Heidegger played a big role, going from the early romanticism, existentialism, now to the postmodernism, where just let being be and your will, your intellect doesn't really matter that much.
Doctor Mark MusserThe will is, you know, be careful of your masculine will, as we say today.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that would be Martin Heidegger.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I think he's a pretty important person to help understand national socialist ideology.
Doctor Mark MusserThe guy that was most known, actually, is.
Doctor Mark MusserHe wrote the myth of the 20th century.
Doctor Mark MusserI can't think of his name.
Doctor Mark MusserNo, not spirit Rosenberg.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was supposedly the official nazi propagandist.
Doctor Mark MusserBut Hitler kind of made fun of him quite a bit.
Doctor Mark MusserBut still, I mean, he was a mean guy.
Doctor Mark MusserHe played a bad role in the Holocaust.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I think he was in charge of places in Poland.
Doctor Mark MusserI can't remember exactly where it was.
Doctor Mark MusserDid some things that were not good.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he also would be someone.
Doctor Mark MusserThe myth of the 20th century.
Doctor Mark MusserSee that kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserYou read that stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this will help you understand the National Socialist world.
Doctor Mark MusserDo.
Doctor Mark MusserEven though Hitler may criticize a few things, but, you know, he's not being more or less the same ideas are there.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's just, you know, he may be critical, just like you and I may be critical of each other over certain theological points.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, we all do this at some point, and this is true.
Doctor Mark MusserThe National Socialists, of course, you have Albert Speer.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, so Albert Speer was probably the closest friend Hitler ever had and probably his real friend.
Doctor Mark MusserThe only friend, maybe.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it's hard to say.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, Rudolph.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, we'll get to him.
Doctor Mark MusserSo then you have Albert Speer.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was sort of the green architect, you know, so he was, you know, he basically what today we call a green building.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, well, he was sort of one of the pioneers of that type of activity.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was involved with that.
Doctor Mark MusserAnother guy that he liked that was.
Doctor Mark MusserHe actually replaced him in 1942.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was killed.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was in charge of a lot of that kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd again, the names are kind of forgetting because it's been so long since I've written this book now.
Doctor Mark MusserBut he was also another green builder, and he did lots of things connected to.
Doctor Mark MusserHe built the roads, for example, the Audubon.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was trying to connect things.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was trying to connect things with nature in a better way, you know?
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he played a role also with this.
Doctor Mark MusserI can find it and I'll give it to you.
Speaker BOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserBut some of these names are, you know, they.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's the green building aspect.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThen you have Rudolph Hess.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was into basically organic food.
Doctor Mark MusserDoctor.
Speaker BDoctor Tote to bond.
Speaker BYep.
Doctor Mark MusserSo basically, spearhead spirit took his position after he died in world War Two and a plane crashed.
Doctor Mark MusserSome people have been suspicious, you know, of that plane crash.
Doctor Mark MusserBut anyway, the war is not going well, even as early as 1942, which a lot of people don't realize it's not.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, they were.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were forcing.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were going through many problems in world War two, even by 1942.
Doctor Mark MusserSo you have tote then.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have, of course, course, Hess.
Doctor Mark MusserHess was like, he loved organic food, but he liked environmental things, too.
Doctor Mark MusserBasically, he was in charge of many, what they called in those days, conservationist environmental activities.
Doctor Mark MusserHe basically put all of the greeners of those days.
Doctor Mark MusserThey didn't call them greeners back then, but all the conservationists, they kind of put them under the wing of national socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserThat was sort of his responsibility.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was very involved with organic foods.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he sat in Spandell prison after the war, still complaining about the industrial complex with the food.
Doctor Mark MusserSo did Heidegger, by the way, everything.
Doctor Mark MusserCapitalistic farming practices, this and that and the other.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Hess would have been someone interested also in organic farming, which a lot of people don't know.
Doctor Mark MusserThe other thing is you have.
Doctor Mark MusserHimmler also was sort of the green mystic.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo he liked organic farming, too.
Doctor Mark MusserThere was so organic farming that they tried to shut down in 1941 because the war was not going well.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the Nazis realized, we can't be fooling around with experiments right now.
Doctor Mark MusserWe have to get back to food production because we're starting a war and the economic situation is not good.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they can some people, with regard to organic farming, but Himmler actually took it secretly, and his plan was to bring organic farming into Poland.
Doctor Mark MusserSo after the Nazis conquered Poland, you can see the beginnings of trying to figure out how can we establish some organic farming that we're going to implement into the new lands that we have now conquered, and we're going to treat better nature better than what happened underneath the Slavs.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so Himmler also had lots of quasi religious ideas.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was a mystic.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserHermann Goering was sort of a.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was an aristocrat, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so his connection to environmentalism, okay, is that, you know, he was a, he was a hunter, but he loved the animals.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, he loved predators.
Doctor Mark MusserEspecially one of the big emphasis today, environmentalism is they love predators more than the deer and the elk, in case you haven't noticed.
Doctor Mark MusserWhat they focus on is all on the predators, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so, and, you know, by the way, I mean, the farmers of America, they got rid of those predators.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, we had a society with guns, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know that they killed all the wolves because they have their farms to take care of and protect.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, the grizzly bears, too, and the black bears are not so bad.
Doctor Mark MusserSo anyway, so the predator type stuff, he loved predators, by the way.
Doctor Mark MusserHe walked around 1936 Olympics with a lion on a leash.
Speaker BI read that.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, yeah.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he just loved the animals.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd yes, he may have killed him like the deer, but there was a love affair with animals that you should not neglect.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there are many hunters like this in America today, too, by the way.
Doctor Mark MusserSo was Aldo Leopold.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was a hunter, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was also a very important environmentalist.
Doctor Mark MusserIn fact, he wrote a book, you know, that I read in Evergreen State College.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd one of the things he talked about is we in America has to get rid of the abrahamic concept of the land.
Speaker BThat's right.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Ryvard, even right there, it's all the same stuff, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so guring is that aristocrat.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I think in a lot of ways, if you look at his history, you realize the aristocratic connections to environmentalism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is where you would have, what I would, if you want to call it that, the real right wing, so called ecology goes back to the old aristocracies of Europe, and those old aristocracies were in charge of the land, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, the king and his forest wanted to protect the land.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThis was the place where he's going to hunt.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that's sort of the place where, you know, Gurion kind of slips into there.
Doctor Mark MusserHe built a nature reserve, his own house, turned his, he had this big area, big land area, and he turned it into a nature reserve.
Doctor Mark MusserHe was trying to bring back buffalo.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, he had moose on his property, you know, this and that and the other thing.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd trying to.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he, the idea that all he cared about was killing deer is just a bunch.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's not true.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, Georing was a very strong environmentalist in his own way, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo that's Goering.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThen you have Hitler himself.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Hitler's main thing wasn't so much environmentalism, per se, like land use and things like that, and it wasn't connected.
Doctor Mark MusserHe hated hunting.
Doctor Mark MusserSo did Himmler.
Doctor Mark MusserIn fact, they criticized Goering all the time for loving hunting.
Doctor Mark MusserSo here I am reading all of these how green the Nazis and these kinds of books, trying to save, you know, environmentalism for the National Socialists, you know, you know, from their, you know, getting their hands dirty with national Socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd here they are criticizing goering, you know, for hunting.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, so did Hitler, for crying out loud.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so did Hess.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Himmler did, too.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they all.
Doctor Mark MusserThey all hated hunting.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm not sure about Hess, but Himmler, and probably hess did, too, just knowing his worldview.
Speaker BYeah, they're all vegetarians.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, well, they see, what Hitler was into was vegetarianism, but even more than that was the animal rights crusade.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Hitler's environmental connection is with the animal rights.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd today, that's as big.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, they're at the point now where they're going to give animals more rights than people.
Doctor Mark MusserWe're almost there.
Doctor Mark MusserThey're trying.
Doctor Mark MusserThey're working.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so the 1933 animal rights law was very important.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this goes back to Arthur and Schopenhauer.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd again, Hitler could quote Schopenhauer verbatim.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that's a very strong connection.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that's Hitler's primary interest in nature was his, you know, the animal cruelty, you know, the humane.
Doctor Mark MusserHumane society being humane to animals.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then, of course, if you look at Hitler, where did he spend most of his time?
Doctor Mark MusserIn the alps.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it's this beautiful home.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, people don't really think about what that really means, but, I mean, it's up in the mountains, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, he's enjoying the natural serenity.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, and, you know, I mean, there's something going on here that is merely beyond what people are.
Doctor Mark MusserThey don't really think about it as seriously as they should.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's about the fear.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Speaker BIt's not that, you know, enjoying the mountains or animal cruelty or these things are bad in themselves.
Speaker BIt's that they rooted themselves in an anti biblical worldview.
Speaker BIt's that they were expressions of the belief that nature is predominant over man, and we need to get closer to nature to get closer to what we conceive of as God.
Speaker BIt's environmentalism versus conservationism.
Speaker BAnd I think there was a section where you talked about this with the hetch Hetchy dam and John Muir?
Speaker BI think it was.
Speaker BAnd the decisions that even had to be made in the early 20th century America regarding, is nature going to serve man, or is man going to serve nature?
Speaker BSo maybe you can talk about that episode very quickly, because the point that is so essential about the book is not just that we rightly understand history as such.
Speaker BYes, that's very, very important, and we do need to get that.
Speaker BBut the national socialist policies and the tributaries that fed the stream, it's not like the river just suddenly ended in the 1940s with the end of world War two.
Will SpencerIt's still feeding us today.
Speaker BYeah, exactly.
Speaker BSo maybe we can talk about that for a second, because that brings it real into people's lives.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, Teddy Roosevelt, and he was a big conservationist back in his day, too.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then you had John Muir.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, they got into a conflict in California about how we're gonna.
Doctor Mark MusserHow are we gonna give water to.
Doctor Mark MusserI think that, you know, the San Francisco area.
Doctor Mark MusserI don't know the exact.
Doctor Mark MusserI think it's San Francisco, but it may be upstream there, too.
Doctor Mark MusserSierra Nevada mountains.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so they wanted to build a dam so they could have water because California is pretty dry.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they got into a big debate.
Doctor Mark MusserJohn Muir did not want to build that dam because that dam would actually flood part of one of his favorite areas in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so there was a big conflict even back then.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Teddy rose up, finally decided to go with the, you know, with that dam, because that's what had to be done.
Doctor Mark MusserWe got people moving in here.
Doctor Mark MusserWe got to take care of them.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd nature is to be used to help help people survive.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that antinomy between conservationism and environmentalism was born in America right there.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThey didn't call it, you know, they called it conservationism back in those days, but today we call it environmentalism.
Doctor Mark MusserBut that antinomy led to what today we call sustainable development.
Speaker BOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserSo as they're trying to figure out, you know, how to do this, many, you know, basically national socialism is the.
Doctor Mark MusserThey are the gurus, the originators of what today we call sustainable development.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they're trying to blend the growth of industry, the growth of civilization, the growth of the cities, you know, whatever's going on here, with a.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, of course, farms, too, with nature, how to balance them.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that's what we call sustainable development.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd really, it's an outgrowth of that conflict that you originally see, for example, in America.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was already going on in Germany for many.
Doctor Mark MusserFor a long time.
Doctor Mark MusserThey debated that kind of stuff for decades.
Doctor Mark MusserBut with John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt, it becomes americanized.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that very interesting distinction, the.
Speaker BMan who stood up to John Muir about it, his name was Gifford Pinchot.
Speaker BP I n c h o t.
Speaker BThat those two.
Speaker BThose two got into it.
Speaker BHim and John Muir got into it over the Hetch Hetchy dam.
Speaker BNow, I lived in the Bay area for about ten years.
Doctor Mark MusserOh, okay, I see.
Doctor Mark MusserWow.
Speaker BYeah, yeah.
Speaker BSo it's relevant to me because I would hear that name all the time.
Speaker BOf course, John Muir and all the national parks up in that area, and the beautiful natural environment that is northern California.
Speaker BAnd these tensions are ongoing with, like, oh, no, we have to do this for the land, and we have to take care of the land.
Speaker BIt's like, well, meanwhile, you have millions of people.
Speaker BIt's like, oh, well, maybe we need depopulation.
Speaker BAnd then that's where the venomous side of the green movement of the left comes out, is that nature is so precious that we just have to depopulate the planet to prioritize the existence of nature over man.
Speaker BAnd they don't even really see it.
Speaker BBut the point that you make in the book is that that attitude first crystallized during national socialism that we all live with today, leftism, malthusianism, a lot of these ideas that took place in the 1960s that crystallized and first came together, like, well, maybe we can industrialize this extermination process to reduce the population.
Speaker BThat's what shocked me, is that actually was what crystallized, what truly crystallized in national socialism.
Speaker BFirst, it chose the Jews as their target, but the Jews was not where it was supposed to end.
Speaker BSo maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, really, I mean, I know they talk about the industrial holocaust because of the numbers, but if you look at where these people died, I mean, it was a pretty primitive, you know, situation.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were in camps.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, this is sort of ignored.
Doctor Mark MusserI.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, the camps were mostly outdoors.
Doctor Mark MusserThere wasn't much.
Doctor Mark MusserWasn't much for you.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, and they didn't care.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople, you know, basically, the Jews were put in horse barns in Auschwitz, for example, and it wouldn't have been any better anywhere else.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, you know, I know that this is sort of a.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is part of the propaganda that goes on.
Doctor Mark MusserThey industrialize the Holocaust, and really, they basically destroyed the Jews in very primitive conditions.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, that.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's really the fact of the matter.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then, of course, they may have used some Zyklon B and things like that, you know, in these.
Doctor Mark MusserThese camps.
Doctor Mark MusserBut, you know, it was a very primitive situation for the most part.
Doctor Mark MusserBut no, I mean, of course, the numbers are high.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that I have a little bit of debate with that.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I don't think it's the right metaphor to explain, you know, the Holocaust, because it brings up, again, capitalism.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, see, it's not the right.
Doctor Mark MusserThe problems are deeper than that.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, then what is normally sort of another caricature that even though we talk about it all the time.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I have a little bit of a problem.
Speaker BI'm open to hearing that.
Speaker BYeah, please, please.
Speaker BYou can unpack that.
Speaker BPlease.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, I mean, you know, for example, I mean, if you look, if you could.
Doctor Mark MusserI visited many of these, many of these death camps.
Doctor Mark MusserNow, I've been to Poland a number of times.
Doctor Mark MusserI've been to where the Nazis set up these camps.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I've been to Auschwitz a couple of times.
Doctor Mark MusserI've been to Belzitz.
Doctor Mark MusserI've been to Sobibor, and I've been to Treblinka and also Kilmo, some of the places to.
Doctor Mark MusserJust looking at them briefly.
Doctor Mark MusserBut one of the things you see at these places is this nature preoccupation with nature.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThat is at the part of the whole Holocaust problem.
Doctor Mark MusserSo my metaphor is the oak tree.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd basically my book discusses the oak sacrifice of the judeo christian worldview in the Holocaust.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, the Jews were the primary people that suffered because of this anti biblical worldview.
Doctor Mark MusserGoing back to Genesis.
Doctor Mark MusserI make this case is that the oak tree was something that the Germans have worshiped for many centuries.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's not just the Germans.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's all the druids.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were the old pagans.
Doctor Mark MusserSome people have said druids means men of the oaks.
Doctor Mark MusserBut in the old pagan times, going back to even Old Testament times, okay, even there, you see how people were sacrificed, child sacrificed.
Doctor Mark MusserUnderneath the oak trees, you have lots of what you would call romanticism going on with regard to nature, fertility of nature.
Doctor Mark MusserHow do we have good crops?
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAll that kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is all, if you look.
Speaker BOn people, see, what is this?
Speaker BThe Der Sturmer, the fumigating the oaks from the rats with the.
Speaker BIf you look on camera, everyone can see that with the nazi armband, like, yeah, oak was.
Speaker BIt was a big part of that.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's in 1927.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that that political cartoon was made in 1927.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, they were gonna.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were going to save the oak tree by killing the jewish rats.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserWith.
Doctor Mark MusserWith poison.
Will SpencerThat's right.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is 1927.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo now that's exactly what you see where you.
Doctor Mark MusserWhen you go to Auschwitz.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserI'm still.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm trying to ferret this out, and I just don't have the time to run this down.
Doctor Mark MusserBut I've seen photographs, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd even today, you look at some of these 1944 flyover photographs, okay, that they took.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they have a picture of Auschwitz, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then you have, on both sides you have the gas chambers, okay, where the Jews were killed.
Doctor Mark MusserBut strangely enough, the gas chambers here were underground at Auschwitz, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserNow in between them, you can see there's a big green tree there and it's huge.
Doctor Mark MusserHas to be an oak tree.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I, and I want to, I want to run down, who are these architects that built this, you know, Auschwitz.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd really, I mean, really, what are.
Doctor Mark MusserWhat were their worldviews?
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, because that Der Sturmer cartoon, you could almost.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's exactly what I think was going on.
Doctor Mark MusserAuschwitz in the sense we all were killing the Jews, the jewish rats, with poisonous.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd here's that oak tree in between these two gas chambers, okay, that are there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what are they doing?
Doctor Mark MusserThey're using rat poison, okay, to kill the Jews.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, that's almost like a prophetic political cartoon.
Doctor Mark MusserNot even a cartoon, but it's gaslighting what's going on here.
Doctor Mark MusserSo you see that imagery.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's oak trees, a number of them, giant oak trees.
Doctor Mark MusserYou go into Auschwitz there.
Doctor Mark MusserThe main camp.
Doctor Mark MusserBig oak tree has been there.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's the one, that one tree you see that is famous for it, that it's an oak tree.
Doctor Mark MusserThe Nazis loved the oaks.
Doctor Mark MusserHitler loved oak trees.
Doctor Mark MusserThey all did.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, what comes out of oak trees are acorns.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we won't talk about our previous president a while back.
Doctor Mark MusserThat was all involved in acorn a while back.
Doctor Mark MusserBut anyway, they love the oak trees.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so Hitler had oak trees planted all over the Reich.
Doctor Mark MusserThey planted them all over Poland, even on his birthday.
Doctor Mark MusserThey would do like a special oak planting day for planting of oaks at Belzitz.
Doctor Mark MusserThere are oak trees all over the place there.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThe same.
Doctor Mark MusserI was at Sobibor.
Doctor Mark MusserThe same was true of Sobibor.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserYou can make the argument that this is also part of the landscape, but I think it's more than that because of the nazi world.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, they, they're using the.
Doctor Mark MusserThe oak sacrifice of the Jews to help them get better.
Doctor Mark MusserWe get rid of the Jews and our world is going to be a sustainable, better future.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so we have to make the sacrifice underneath the oak trees.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is my view.
Doctor Mark MusserI know people, but I think that's the proper metaphor for this.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople get mad at me, criticize me.
Doctor Mark MusserLook, I understand, but we have to look at this imagery more seriously than we are because of the beliefs of the Nazis.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it may be a hard sale, but it's what I believe as I've read through this stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserOne of the things also that's sad was some of these death camps, like, I'm not sure about Treblinka.
Doctor Mark MusserSo before which one it was, I think may have been both of them.
Doctor Mark MusserBut after the Nazis got done killing the Jews in these camps, actually, they finished the job of killing the Jews in Poland.
Doctor Mark MusserFor the most part, people don't realize.
Speaker BThat, but they actually did it mean operation Reinhardt, right?
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserYes.
Doctor Mark MusserSo one of the things they did after they were done, they planted lupins on top of the graves of the jewish people.
Doctor Mark MusserNow, lupins are what?
Doctor Mark MusserThey're woolflowers, and they're, you know, Lupine.
Doctor Mark MusserLupin.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd by the way, Hitler would call his Nazis the SS, his pack of wolves, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they, you know, the.
Doctor Mark MusserYes.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so you look at all the names of the, you know, the german tanks, okay, the tigers, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, okay, you have the panthers, okay, you know, this kind of stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have, of course, the wolf pack.
Doctor Mark MusserThat would be the submarines, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThey named them after these predators.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Hitler loved wolves.
Doctor Mark MusserThat was his favorite animal.
Doctor Mark MusserIn fact, Nazi Germany was the first country in the world to protect wolves, and they didn't have any wolves.
Doctor Mark MusserSo it was very interesting that they wanted to do that.
Doctor Mark MusserBut, you know, and so this nature discussion has to be a part of the Holocaust, because the reason why people.
Doctor Mark MusserHow did these men become like.
Doctor Mark MusserTreat people like animals?
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, well, it's because of their nature based ethos in which reason is now diminished.
Doctor Mark MusserThe human will is now diminished.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThe Nazis made it too far to will, so it became like a monster, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's without any judeo christian ethics, without God.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's no God on the outside that's going to punish us for anything that we've done, so we can do what we want, and yet it's going to be according to nature's laws, which has its own restrictions and its own religion, so to speak.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so this was the plan.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we're going to use the laws of nature, which is biology and social darwinism.
Doctor Mark MusserWe're going to enhance basically evolution to help us grow.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, by the way, this is what all of our Google people are doing the same thing to us today, too.
Doctor Mark MusserWe call it AI.
Doctor Mark MusserBasically, it's a eugenics.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the eugenics they're talking about today makes the Nazis look primitive, but it's all pretty much the same idea.
Doctor Mark MusserSustainable development, environmentalism, technology and all these things trying to be blended together into a holistic one.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd by the way, my inter.
Doctor Mark MusserMy definition of fascism is holism.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's what it means.
Speaker BSay more about that.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserBy the way, Hitler's fascism definition, he actually says what it is and people ignore this.
Doctor Mark MusserHe says fascism is a spontaneous return to the traditions of Rome.
Speaker BWhere did he say that?
Doctor Mark Musser1941.
Speaker BA spontaneous return.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, I mean, this is the meaning.
Doctor Mark MusserMeaning that it's like, it's like he.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he also made comments.
Doctor Mark MusserIf we get rid of the Jews, then the world's going to go back to its natural order.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's like spontaneously.
Doctor Mark MusserWe'll go back to its natural order.
Speaker BThat's right.
Doctor Mark MusserSo these are goofy ideas.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd.
Doctor Mark MusserBut you have to.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is what they believed, and we need to take them more seriously than we do.
Doctor Mark MusserWe kind of look at him.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, how could a guy believe that?
Doctor Mark MusserWell, he did, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it wasn't just him.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was many people.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the academics, many academics did, too.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, for example, that riel, that forester, the biology forester guy, okay.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, he was very anti semitic.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, we could talk all day about, you know, his strange ideas about the Jews.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, yes.
Speaker BWell, so I think that the important thing that you've surfaced in the book is not just obviously that they were anti semitic and that they hated the.
Will SpencerJews, it's that they regarded the Jews.
Speaker BAs a stain on nature.
Speaker BIt wasn't the Jews as such.
Speaker BIt was that they had a nature based religion, a nature based worldview.
Speaker BAnd they saw the Judeo christian meaning actually going back to Genesis as a stain on perfect, flawless nature with its dominion mandate.
Speaker BThat specifically the dominion mandate to fill the earth and subdue it was an affront to their nature based religion.
Speaker BSo they had to exterminate the Jews who were propagating that idea.
Speaker BThat was actually the root of the whole thing, not simply some sort of anti semitism as such.
Speaker BIt was.
Speaker BThey hated that idea and the propagators of it, who happened to be both Jews and Christians.
Speaker BAnd so the reason why you subtitled your book this oak sacrifice of the Judeo christian worldview is that it was both persecuting Jews and Christians differently, but they could persecute the Jews more overtly than they could the Christians, because the Christians were, as I understand, a bigger voting block.
Speaker BSo they had to be more careful with how they handled the Christianity aspect.
Speaker BBut it was a full, all out assault on a biblical worldview coming from a nature based religion that we don't really understand today.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that nature based religion is with us very deeply in our own society.
Doctor Mark MusserThe propaganda is very deep.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserSo it's there.
Doctor Mark MusserSo here's just a few.
Doctor Mark MusserHere's a few quotes from Riel, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he goes back to the 18 hundreds.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he was.
Doctor Mark MusserProfessor, okay, if in this scheme, the rootless Jews was a purveyor of this corrupted, citified society, the forester was his antithesis, the embodiment of ethnic authenticity, rooted, like his trees, in the ancient earth of the fatherland.
Doctor Mark MusserSo the Nazis compared themselves to the forest.
Doctor Mark MusserPeople were like trees.
Doctor Mark MusserYou see, you're blending with nature.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that's what the Nazis held.
Doctor Mark MusserBut many germans did even before then, before they came to power.
Doctor Mark MusserHere's another where LaRGE numbers of jews, same man quoting, reside.
Doctor Mark MusserThe population as a whole is almost always politically and economically fragmented.
Doctor Mark MusserSee, agAin, there's the anti holism.
Doctor Mark MusserThe Jewish huckster finds that his paltry capital circulates much more freely among the urbanized and small town burghers, central Germany, than among the authentic peasants of the mountains or the plains.
Doctor Mark MusserSo these are just a couple of quotes, but it reveals his attitudes about, you know, about the Jewish people and their anti nature.
Doctor Mark MusserNow, here's Arthur Schopenhauer, who was before riel.
Doctor Mark MusserNotice here, we owe the animals not mercy, but justice.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there's a lot of environmental, social justice going on right now.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what does he mean by that?
Doctor Mark MusserWell, and the debt often remains unpaid in Europe, the continent that is permeated with Jews.
Doctor Mark MusserIt is obviously high time in Europe that the Jewish views on nature should be expelled from Europe.
Doctor Mark MusserSo then there were there.
Doctor Mark MusserWe have expelled, not exterminated.
Doctor Mark MusserBut I think it was Kant that actually set the term, used the term, you know, exterminated.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he didn't mean the jewish person.
Doctor Mark MusserHe's talking about their idea.
Doctor Mark MusserThe fault lies with the jewish view that regards the animal as something manufactured for man's use.
Doctor Mark MusserSo there's, again, Arthur Schopenhauer.
Doctor Mark MusserThese are the effects of Genesis one and generally of the whole jewish way of looking at nature.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, I mean, you know, it's something pretty deep.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is something which basically, I read books about that same idea being basically targeted against christians.
Doctor Mark MusserSo he target against the Jews.
Doctor Mark MusserLater on they'll use it against Christianity as well.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, the Nazis, for example, believe that the Christianity was just sort of a way to.
Doctor Mark MusserIt was just another form of Judaism.
Speaker BSo, I mean, an international form of Judaism.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserSo at some point, I mean, they were going to come after the christians, too, and they already did.
Doctor Mark MusserThey tried to circumvent their churches.
Doctor Mark MusserThey did lots of things.
Doctor Mark MusserYou can read all about it.
Doctor Mark MusserIf you look at the newspaper, some of the things that went on, they were trying to change the doctrines.
Doctor Mark MusserThey kind of backed off a little bit because the church resisted.
Doctor Mark MusserBut again, too many christians went along with this, that type of stuff.
Speaker BYou quoted a book, the Swastika against the cross.
Speaker BAnd for listeners, there's going to be a giant list of resources in the show notes and a shopping list on Amazon where you can find all of these books.
Speaker BBut this is the statistics that Walker cites in his book.
Speaker BIn 1920 alone, more than 300,000 people formally resigned from the christian faith.
Speaker BDuring the years from 1918 to 1931, 2.4 million evangelical Christians formally renounced their faith, as well as almost half a million Catholics.
Speaker BAfter the First World War, Protestants were formally abandoning Christianity at an average rate of 186,000 per year, and Catholics at a somewhat lower level, between 62% and 80% of Germans who were nominally christian when Hitler came to power had stopped taking communion.
Speaker BSo there was just an evacuation of Christianity as well from National Socialist Germany in the years before.
Doctor Mark MusserYes, no, I'm either.
Doctor Mark MusserWhatever's going on, you can debate the numbers.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserBut there's no question that clearly we have a nominalization of Christianity going on that helped to lead to this government that was very destructive.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that nominal nature of the christian faith that we used to see in our own country is kind of.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's almost gone now.
Doctor Mark MusserThat had really no resistance against anything that was going on with regard to the national socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserSo.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's a huge problem.
Doctor Mark MusserSo as they criticize the Bible, the higher criticism.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then eventually what you have is a situation where nominalism takes over, and then with nominalism, there's going to be no opposition to any kind of religious opposition to what these men did.
Doctor Mark MusserYes.
Speaker BCan you talk a little bit about the Barman declaration and Karl Barth?
Speaker BObviously, we know the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but the barman declaration was something that I hadn't heard of before.
Doctor Mark MusserOh, right.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you know, this was something which.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, they were men that were trying to.
Doctor Mark MusserThey realized that this is very serious.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd, you know, the Nazis were anti Christians, so they put together, they got together like a declaration, wherever, you know, we will.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, Christianity is.
Doctor Mark MusserBelongs to Christ, not to the Fuhrer.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so, you know, they basically signed a document.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have Karl Barth.
Doctor Mark MusserWas there a number of, you know, other men, too, that we don't know anything about today because the history books have, you know, they've just kind of been forgotten.
Doctor Mark MusserBut they signed it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there was some opposition there that showed that we don't, you know, agree with what the Nazis are doing.
Doctor Mark MusserHowever, you could also point out that they weren't.
Doctor Mark MusserThese guys were not too concerned about the Jews.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, so it's a problem, you know, in that sense.
Doctor Mark MusserBut still, right, there was some opposition.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the truth of the matter is that the only real group that opposed the Nazis were the Christians.
Doctor Mark MusserSay more than that, and that's not.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's ignored.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, yeah, you can sit and criticize your church all day long.
Doctor Mark MusserI do today, too.
Doctor Mark MusserBut at the end of the day, the only real group that resisted national socialism the most were the Christians, like.
Speaker BThrough the Barman declaration or through other parts of the church.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm just talking in general.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's just one indication, like one little snapshot of the opposition to the National.
Speaker BSocialists I did see.
Speaker BSo one of the other books that I read to get ready for this interview is called Black sun by Nicholas Goodrich Clark Goodrich Clarke, which is about the neo nazi ideologies that formed after World War Two.
Speaker BSo if your book talks about the days leading up to the decades and years leading up to National Socialism, and then during this, picks up the story of where the ideology went afterwards.
Speaker BAnd I think it was in this book that I read about the Rosenstrasse protest, stuff like that.
Speaker BBut there was actually, like, pushback from Christians on Nazi Germany because they were trying to nazify Christianity.
Speaker BIt wasn't biblical Christianity.
Speaker BIt was nazified Christianity.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, they believed in an aryan Jesus.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, you know, it's just.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's just foolish stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, and so, but this is.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is the so called positive Christianity that the Nazis emphasized.
Doctor Mark MusserThey called it positive Christianity because they were in charge of it and they believed in a harry and Jesus.
Doctor Mark MusserSo again, it has nothing to do with, you know, what we consider to be biblical Christianity.
Doctor Mark MusserBut what you have to realize is that, you know, many of the ideas we have in our secular world today, they come from the Bible.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThey've just been secularized.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo you can sit there and show how many secular ideas, even today, okay, are rooted in biblical thinking.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd you say, well, so therefore you're a Christian.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, see, that's what they're doing with Nazis.
Doctor Mark MusserBut so they're very unforgiving with regard to Nazis when they make those types of statements that seem to be christian and it's borrowed from Christianity, but it's been secularized into their own worldview.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, the socialists do this all the time, and everybody's forgiving all the time for all the things that they have done.
Doctor Mark MusserYet they don't call themselves christians.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I think that that's the better way to look at what's going on.
Doctor Mark MusserYou can show how, for example, global warming, okay.
Doctor Mark MusserIs an apocalyptic worldview.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThe Bible talks about global warming coming, too, during the, you know, during the book of revelation, it's going to get hot.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, God's going to torch the planet and cleanse the planet.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserWe have date setters now with environmentalists are predicting the end of the world.
Doctor Mark MusserWe've got, you know, five years, ten years, you know, whatever it is, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserSo they are taking biblical, the biblical apocalypse, and they're converting it into politics, are converted into so called science, you know, all the things you need to do to get ready for the end.
Doctor Mark MusserThe environmental movement itself is a very apocalyptic worldview.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, they're always worried about the end of the world.
Doctor Mark MusserIt seems like the flooding of all the snow is going to melt.
Doctor Mark MusserThe earth is going to flood.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so they're all concerned about the end of the world type of ideas, even Marxism and socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserThat progressive view of history goes back to the Bible, where we have the Old Testament and the New Testament, and that which is latest is best.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserProgressivism is rooted, okay, in a biblical thinking.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserDoes that mean that progressivists are christians?
Doctor Mark MusserThe answer is no.
Doctor Mark MusserSee, but they're borrowing from the Bible, so they don't tell you.
Doctor Mark MusserWhen they don't, yeah, they secularize it into their own, you know, this world view of it all.
Speaker BI think I have a note written somewhere in the book that what many of these philosophical streams did was they took christian ideas and they separated God from them.
Speaker BThey separated Christianity from them, cut them out, and then it becomes very toxic and very destructive.
Speaker BLike, yes, we're supposed to care for nature, but if you care for nature without it being a divinely ordained command, if you just care for nature, then nature is obviously bigger than you.
Speaker BSo you worship nature.
Speaker BIt's like, no, we care for nature because we're supposed to be stewards of it.
Speaker BNot that we are part of nature in some fragile web.
Doctor Mark MusserFor example, for many of these guys, Hitler was a pantheist.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, nature was just God.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, that's right.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is his worldview.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so when he talks about God publicly in his speeches, it may sound sort of christian, but what he means bye by the Lord is basically this pantheistic God that he is going to be a man that's going to be used by the pantheistic God to bring about the millennium, the millennial Reich.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, well, that's another distortion of the apocalyptic worldview of christians, where we have many christians believe in the millennium, a thousand year rule of Jesus Christ on the earth.
Doctor Mark MusserSo what do the Nazis do?
Doctor Mark MusserThey had a thousand year Reich.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Speaker BThat's right.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so there you have that same progressivism, you know, worldview from beginning to end, and there's going to be an end.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd with our plan, we get rid of the Jews, and we arrive in Utopia this side of the grave.
Doctor Mark MusserSocialism, okay, communism.
Doctor Mark MusserWe arrive at communism, we arrive at a classist society this side of the grave.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's utopia.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's kingdom of God on the earth, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserIt's the same eschatological framework.
Doctor Mark MusserSocialism is more milder, but still, it's the same idea today.
Doctor Mark MusserThey call them the Millennium development goals, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it's all the same stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they're borrowing from Christianity and yet the Bible, and yet they get rid of the stuff they don't like, but they keep the, you know, the so called husk of what's left over.
Doctor Mark MusserThen they fill in the husk with their own ideas.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd those ideas are always, according to us, our own thinking, this world only.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they just kind of get rid of anything transcendent, and they keep within their own circle of life the holism.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then nothing can interfere.
Doctor Mark MusserThey don't want God to interfere into their lives.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's the bottom line.
Speaker BYou mentioned Hitler's public speeches where he said what sound like relatively christian things, more or less.
Speaker BBut when you put those into the context of the totality of german intellectual thought leading up to national socialism and in the context of the people that were around him, in the context of the actions and the things that they named, the things that they named various aspects.
Speaker BSo, you know, like the wolfs and panthers.
Speaker BAnd I think you even cited that they handed out oak saplings to the medal winners at the Olympics.
Speaker BLike, you talked about the oak symbolism.
Speaker BAnd when you put that into context.
Speaker BGo ahead, please.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, no, they.
Doctor Mark MusserHitler.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, not Hitler himself, but they handed out oak trees to all the gold medal winners of the Olympics.
Doctor Mark MusserJesse Owens walked home with four and.
Will SpencerAddition to his medals.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, a couple of those trees are still around.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, they're, you know, they're.
Doctor Mark MusserI think one of one is in Ohio, I think.
Doctor Mark MusserI can't remember exactly, but, yeah, so, yeah, they.
Doctor Mark MusserGlenn Morris was another guy that, you know, I think he won a gold medal and he went home with one.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so, yeah, I mean, they believed there's something, you know, something spiritual about them.
Doctor Mark MusserOak trees, which goes back to pagan times.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, basically, my view is that national socialism was a like a baelistic fertility cult brought up to date, dressed up in science, but it's the same stuff.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, yeah, how do we make nature fertile so, you know, so that, you know, things are good from a human point of view?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so bael ism what, you know, that's what they did.
Doctor Mark MusserThey sacrificed people to a certain extent, maybe not all the time, but to some extent.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they had their own ethics based on.
Doctor Mark MusserYou treat your body harshly.
Doctor Mark MusserThe Nazis were into that, too, so that we can give fertility to nature.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there may be different ways on how to do that, and people may argue about different ways, how to do that, but that basically the same ideas, that framework is still there.
Speaker BSo I'd like you to speak into something specifically.
Speaker BSo we all grew up.
Speaker BI certainly did, believing that the Nazis were the manifestation of what Christianity was ultimately about, that Christianity, nationalism and capitalism all came together in the Holocaust, this terrible thing.
Speaker BAnd so we must do away.
Speaker BI think I probably believed this on some level.
Speaker BWe must do away with capitalism, nationalism and Christianity because of the horrors.
Speaker BRight.
Speaker BOkay.
Speaker BAnd so that idea is just kind of out there in the world, which is why people who are on the right wing and who are nationalists in a good way often get called Nazis.
Speaker BLike, those two things fit together.
Speaker BSo a lot of people have done a lot of work.
Speaker BChristians have done a lot of work unwinding those ideas to understand that.
Speaker BNo.
Speaker BAnd I think this conversation will have helped them a lot of.
Speaker BNo, the Nazis were not about these things.
Speaker BBut on the right wing now, there's a rising movement to reframe Hitler as the so called christian prince, that Hitler was Christian.
Speaker BHe was defending the white race against the Jews, and the whites are the proper inheritors of Christianity and all of these different things.
Speaker BSo rather than painting Hitler as Christian and being a bad thing, which is what the left has done for years now, there's an attempt to paint Hitler as Christian and to have that be a good thing.
Speaker BAnd so I wonder if you can speak into that for a moment from the knowledge that you have encapsulated in the book and your other studies as well.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, I guess, in some sense, my entire book has tried to illustrate why people thought that what the fear was doing was a good thing.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd you don't think about it when you're there.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's easy to sit back in hindsight and criticize it when you're actually living through it.
Doctor Mark MusserA lot of people did not recognize the problems, and.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd they just simply went along with it, and they didn't realize how bad it was.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I think a lot of things right now are going on that are very, very similar where.
Doctor Mark MusserWhere things are headed.
Doctor Mark MusserI could be wrong.
Doctor Mark MusserI hope I'm wrong.
Doctor Mark MusserI pray I'm wrong.
Doctor Mark MusserBut right.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, when you're in the middle of it, you can't see it, and then.
Doctor Mark MusserThen you look back on it, and then, of course, you can project your own views on that type of stuff as well.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, I mean, that happens to.
Doctor Mark MusserBut again, this idea that Hitler is a madman, it just comes out of nowhere and takes over the country, like Germany.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then we have this world War two and the Holocaust.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it takes a lot of things to enable that to happen, and there's a lot of building process in order to bring that about.
Doctor Mark MusserSo that's kind of what my book deals with, the history behind it to where.
Doctor Mark MusserHow did it metastasize something like this?
Doctor Mark MusserYou simply don't see books like this today.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, they're not about national Socialism.
Doctor Mark MusserThey just don't entertain it.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the other thing that I haven't got into that we could talk about is that how, you know, really, today, Germany, really, sadly, strangely, I mean, you can talk about how unusual it is, but up to maybe 40, 50% of all the books published in America are owned by two german conglomerates.
Speaker BI saw.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah.
Doctor Mark MusserBertelsmann and Holtzbrink.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd both of these companies, I mean, all the.
Doctor Mark MusserMany of the big names you can think of today, they're owned by these two companies, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd both of these companies were nazi companies in the 1930s.
Doctor Mark MusserThey were producing propaganda.
Doctor Mark MusserThey've had to make so called statements about this and that.
Doctor Mark MusserBut, see, I mean, the whole point is that everybody was a Nazis, see?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it was only after very few people opposed it as a.
Doctor Mark MusserAs a group.
Doctor Mark MusserOnly the Christians were probably the most prominent group of all that did it.
Doctor Mark MusserYou had individuals here and there.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserBut people, most people just went along with it because they didn't.
Doctor Mark MusserThey didn't see the problem.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd this is always without a biblical worldview, you're not going to see the problem.
Speaker BOkay.
Speaker BThat was another thing that I walked away with.
Speaker BI'm glad that you mentioned that.
Speaker BI had forgotten about this.
Speaker BThat was another thing from the book that I walked away with, was the idea that there are similar conditions in the christian church today.
Speaker BIt sounds like, in some ways, to pre national socialist Germany, where you have people walking away from a biblical worldview where they're susceptible to many different winds of doctrine.
Speaker BThere's a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, a lot of disappointment, a lot of open evil, a lot of open evil, sexual evil, war, all the stuff.
Speaker BAnd you have this evacuation of the biblical worldview.
Speaker BAnd so there's kind of this vacuum left for a lot of american evangelical christians.
Speaker BAnd that really struck me.
Speaker BIt's like there are some.
Speaker BAnd you have this.
Speaker BYou have a kind of environmental vision that's kind of propagating out there, and you have the targeting of an other.
Speaker BYou have the saying, this is happening on Twitter every day now you have this targeting of another.
Speaker BSo it really does feel like I'm the last person in the world to say something like this.
Speaker BIt really does actually feel like what you described 1930s Germany was like.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, today, I mean, like I said earlier, I mean, things are primitive compared to what we have now.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, so, I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, we're being surrounded by lots of, you know, propaganda these days.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's very thick.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so they were the, you know, they really some of the primary originators of propaganda.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's, you can talk about yellow.
Doctor Mark MusserYellow journalism, what we call yellow journalism.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, a lot of german influences in media go back a long ways, and they helped to propagate that, too.
Doctor Mark MusserThey played a significant role, maybe not the only, but they did play a significant role.
Doctor Mark MusserSo Germany has always been interested in what some scholars call soft power, and that's media.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd if you look at, you know, some of the most important things that have happened in our world in the 20th century, Marxism, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThat that was born where it was born in Germany, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserHegel's philosophy of history, where, you know, that basically still dominates our world today.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay?
Doctor Mark MusserThat was born where it was in Germany.
Doctor Mark MusserKant's theological nominalism, okay?
Doctor Mark MusserThat now that basically, we call later theological liberalism, which, you know, is still around us to some extent, but basically that was also in Germany.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have, of course, the national socialism was also in Germany.
Doctor Mark MusserSome of the biggest names.
Doctor Mark MusserBible critics.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserOf course, Nietzsche.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserHeidegger.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserThese are very big names.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd strangely enough, many, most of the majority of them are from Germany.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd these names help to propagate this worldview that his anti God, anti transcendence, first of all.
Doctor Mark MusserSo the God they believe is a God that's not transcendent.
Doctor Mark MusserHe may be semi transcendent, but he's not fully transcendent.
Doctor Mark MusserA lot of pantheism, a lot of romanticism, existentialism is there to use these big terms.
Doctor Mark MusserBasically, it's this world alone and no outside God interference into our lives.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we could give a big list of names of german scholars, academics who contributed, contributed to all of this.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a big one.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd there's no other country in the world you can even come close to those kind of names to have such, so much influence.
Speaker BYou said something interesting earlier.
Speaker BHow would it be possible for the best educated country in the world to do the things that National Socialist Germany did?
Speaker BAnd it's funny because you can actually see that, yes, the best educated country in the world was able to pull off essentially an economic miracle coming out of world War two and the Weimar Republic and all of that to gear back up for another war.
Speaker BI mean, it was a very quick transition to go from the conditions they were and to be able to fight another war at least as well as they did.
Speaker BYes, there's some truth to that.
Speaker BYes, there was a lot of innovation that came out of that time, but there was also a lot of darkness.
Speaker BThere was also quite a bit of evil.
Speaker BAnd that evil had precedence with the attempt for 150 years prior to divorce various ideas from a biblical worldview and watch them become toxic in the process.
Speaker BSo the further a nation, even an educated nation, drifts away from goddess, the more dangerous it gets, because you have these unmoored ideas that then take shape in the form of technology, science, politics, economics, that really intelligent people can take good ideas, divorce from the biblical worldview, and make the ideas into something very, very dangerous.
Speaker BAnd I think that's kind of what you've articulated.
Speaker BThat's not the way that we're used to thinking right now.
Will SpencerThe idea that, of course, the best.
Speaker BEducated people are, they're naturally going to be the.
Speaker BThe best, the most moral people.
Speaker BLike, no, that's absolutely not true.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, the worst of the worst during the Holocaust were the doctors.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, I mean, you can sit there on cancer.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, there's a.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd what they did with say is very interesting.
Doctor Mark MusserThe Nazis had all kinds of rules and regulations with regard to animal cruelty and animal, you know, vivisection and experiments on animals.
Doctor Mark MusserBut they turn the Jews into experimental animals during the Holocaust.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, so they're right there.
Doctor Mark MusserYou got a huge, huge discussion we can have.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd if you value nature over man, at some point, you're gonna start treating people like animals.
Doctor Mark MusserFor example, on some of these trains, okay, that they sent the Jews on this is part of the reason why I'm a little bit skeptical using the metaphor in industry, okay.
Doctor Mark MusserOne of the most famous documentaries made about the Jewish Holocaust was it's all about the trains and showing trains going back and forth.
Doctor Mark MusserSo they made a big deal out of how it's like these trains are almost evil.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's like blaming guns when people are killed.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a very superficial answer.
Doctor Mark MusserThe problems are much deeper than this.
Doctor Mark MusserYou have to answer the question, why were they using the trains to do what they were doing?
Doctor Mark MusserWhy?
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserWhy was the guy using the gun to do what he was doing?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd in our existential world or postmodern world, we don't ask those questions anymore.
Doctor Mark MusserSee?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so it's just.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's just a.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's just a real problem with this.
Doctor Mark MusserFor example, on trains, that you.
Doctor Mark MusserYou would have guys on the same trains, jewish people, stuffed in cattle cars, like cattle.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd how many more can fit in?
Doctor Mark MusserWell, one more.
Doctor Mark MusserYou.
Doctor Mark MusserYou know, okay, but on the same trains, you had animals, and they had all these rules and laws about how you had to protect those animals from abuse on the same trains.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so that's the disconnect that anybody who is walking connected to that, working with that, his mind is already gone.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's no thinking going on.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd right now, I'm watching what's going on in our world today.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's a madhouse.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's just chaos.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd everything I try to do is now just increasing chaos because of the types of things that we like to do and want to do.
Doctor Mark MusserBut because our world is losing its mind, we're having a hard time just functioning on any kind of normalcy.
Doctor Mark MusserSo we're watching the world go mad right now, in case you haven't noticed.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I just.
Doctor Mark MusserI'm shocked what's going on and how dumb our world has become very quickly, I mean, to put it, I guess, euphemistically, we could say a lot worse.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it's just very foolish what's going on.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd remember, we have texts in the Bible where it says, God makes war with the wise and he wins.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd you have a passage in Job.
Doctor Mark MusserMaybe we can conclude with this, because I have to go.
Doctor Mark MusserBut here's a good passage.
Doctor Mark MusserAs I have thought about this over the years, Job, chapter twelve.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd we can draw some very interesting conclusions with this, some very important ones.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd of course, Job's in big trouble, right?
Doctor Mark MusserBut he has some very important things to say.
Doctor Mark MusserSo, Job, chapter twelve.
Doctor Mark MusserWe'll start in verse seven.
Doctor Mark MusserLet me find the text here.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then job.
Doctor Mark MusserNow finally, and notice it says verse seven.
Doctor Mark MusserHere we have the words of Job.
Doctor Mark MusserBut now ask the beasts and let them teach you.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you.
Doctor Mark MusserOr speak to the earth and let it teach you.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd let the fish of the sea declare to you.
Doctor Mark MusserSo there you can learn something from nature.
Doctor Mark MusserRight.
Doctor Mark MusserWhat are we learning?
Doctor Mark MusserWell, God tells us next verse.
Doctor Mark MusserWho among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?
Doctor Mark MusserSo here we have.
Doctor Mark MusserEven the animals know.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay.
Doctor Mark MusserInstinctively, God.
Doctor Mark MusserA man does too.
Doctor Mark MusserHe just suppresses that truth.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's in Romans, chapter one.
Doctor Mark MusserDoes not the ear test words?
Doctor Mark MusserAs the palate tastes its food?
Doctor Mark MusserSo what are your ears for?
Doctor Mark MusserTo test what's being said then he says, wisdom is with aged men with long life.
Doctor Mark MusserIs understanding with him or with him.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's God or wisdom.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd might to him belong counsel and understanding.
Doctor Mark MusserSo if you want wisdom and might, if you want counsel and understanding, you have to spend time with, you know, the God of scripture.
Doctor Mark MusserBehold, he tears down and it cannot be rebuilt.
Doctor Mark MusserHe imprisons a man and there can be no escape.
Doctor Mark MusserRelease.
Doctor Mark MusserBehold, he restrains the waters and they dry up.
Doctor Mark MusserHe sends them out and they inundate the earth.
Doctor Mark MusserWith him are strength again and sound wisdom.
Doctor Mark MusserThe misled and the misleader belong to him.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's quite a phrase.
Doctor Mark MusserWe could unpack and spend a lot of time there.
Doctor Mark MusserHe makes.
Doctor Mark MusserNow notice, verse 17.
Doctor Mark MusserHe makes counselors walk barefoot and makes fools of judges.
Doctor Mark MusserWe're there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd basically the news you watch the news is just a joke.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, I'm just shocked how stupid it is.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's all public and there's no shame, just okay, you know?
Doctor Mark MusserAnd he says here, and loosens the bond of kings and binds their loins of the girl.
Doctor Mark MusserHe makes priests walk with barefoot and overthrows the secure ones.
Doctor Mark MusserHe deprives the trusted ones of speech and takes away the discernment of elders.
Doctor Mark MusserHe pours contempts on nobles and loosens the belt of the strong.
Doctor Mark MusserHe reveals mysteries from the darkness and brings the deep darkness into light.
Doctor Mark MusserHe makes the nations great, then destroys them.
Doctor Mark MusserHe enlarges the nations and leads him away.
Doctor Mark MusserHe deprives of intelligence, the chiefs of the earths people, and makes them wander in a pathless waste.
Doctor Mark MusserThey grope in darkness with no light.
Doctor Mark MusserHe makes them stagger like a drunken man.
Doctor Mark MusserSo as people deny the God of nature, the God who made the world and all things in it, a hardness of heart develops, and that hardness of heart leads to bad things.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd then maybe to those bad things and suffering, people can repent and believe in Christ and all that kind of stuff as we understand it.
Doctor Mark MusserBut then if they don't, the hardness continues to build up, and at the end of the day, the mind is gone.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so by the time of national socialism, the mind is gone.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I think we're approaching a similar day if we don't start, put a stop to a lot of things that are going on.
Doctor Mark MusserTo watch an olympic sport where a guy beats up a girl in round one.
Doctor Mark MusserOkay, this is madness.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd here we are.
Speaker BWell, I know that you do have to go.
Speaker BMaybe you can just let the audience know very quickly.
Speaker BAmen to all of that, by the way.
Speaker BMaybe you can let the audience know very quickly the work that you do and where it is that you're headed off to.
Doctor Mark MusserYeah, so we have been missionaries of the former Soviet Union, really, for 25, 30 years.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd I've written a couple of books.
Doctor Mark MusserSo the one is on nazi ecology, and that was probably my biggest book that I've written.
Doctor Mark MusserThe hardest book I've written.
Doctor Mark MusserI've written another book on the Hebrews warning passages, the book of Hebrews.
Doctor Mark MusserThere's a big debate about eternal security, losses, salvation, perseverance of the saints.
Doctor Mark MusserSo I have a big discussion about that.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd that particular book is called wrathful rest.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so we are home for the summer, and now it's time to go back, go back to our work overseas, and it's been great to be with you and very good discussion.
Doctor Mark MusserThank you for the questions, and maybe we can do it again sometime.
Speaker BI'd love that, sir.
Speaker BThank you very much for your time, your generosity, and God bless your travels.
Speaker BTraveling mercies to you as you head out on the road.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd literally, I'm leaving here in 2 hours.
Speaker BI know.
Will SpencerReal quick, where would you like to.
Speaker BSend people to find out more about you and what you do?
Doctor Mark MusserI have a personal website.
Doctor Mark MusserI mean, it's called R.
Doctor Mark MusserMarkmusser.
Speaker BSo.
Doctor Mark MusserRmarkmuster.com.
Doctor Mark Musserit's got some.
Doctor Mark MusserI used to do a lot of writing and things.
Doctor Mark MusserThings were published here and there on the Internet today.
Doctor Mark MusserI just don't have time for it.
Doctor Mark MusserIt's just too many things going on with what we're doing now.
Doctor Mark MusserBut now we Ararat Rainier east west fellowship.
Doctor Mark MusserThat's the name of our charity group.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd it's arewf.org.
Doctor Mark Musserand so we do work in Armenia, for example.
Doctor Mark MusserWe've done, of course, we do work at home.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd Mount Rainier is my favorite mountain in Washington state.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd now my new favorite mountain is Mount Ararat, nearby Armenia, right on the border.
Doctor Mark MusserYou can see from the capital city of Armenia.
Doctor Mark MusserWe did ministry there for three years, lived there.
Doctor Mark MusserWe still do ministry there.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so we named our charity group the Ararat Rainier east west Fellowship.
Doctor Mark MusserAnd so we do lots of work in the former Soviet Union or as much as we can.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, thank you.
Doctor Mark MusserI appreciate it.
Doctor Mark MusserWell, so maybe we'll do it again sometime.
Doctor Mark MusserThank you.
Doctor Mark MusserThanks for listening to this episode of the renaissance of Men Podcast.
Speaker BVisit us on the web@renofmen.com or on your favorite social media platform, Ren of men.
Doctor Mark MusserThis is the renaissance of men.
Speaker BYou are the renaissance.