Followers of totalitarian ideologies often take on the mindset of religious cult members…
One such attribute is the compelling need to create holy martyrs, whose deaths can be used to lend the cause a tragic nobility.
The all-time classic example of this is how the Nazi’s transformed a small-time hoodlum, Horst Wessel, into a secular saint. Wessel was born in Germany in 1907, the son and grandson of respectable Lutheran ministers on both sides of his family.
He grew up in Berlin and went to university to study law. Initially, his politics were mainstream, conservative, supporting the return of the German monarchy after the Kaiser’s abdication at the end of World War I.
By the time Wessel was out of his teens, however, his views had become extreme, and he joined a series of ultra right-wing paramilitary organizations with names like the Viking League and the Black Army.
Dedicated to brawling with their left-wing Young Socialist and Young Communist counterparts, these groups were banned by the Weimar government as threats to the constitutional order. At this point-1926-Wessel switched his allegiance to the Nazi Party’s Brown Shirts, the S.A. (“Sturmabteilung.”)
Under the leadership of Hitler’s lieutenant, Joseph Goebbels, the Brown Shirts acted as the shock troops of the Nazi movement, breaking up opposition meetings and breaking heads of their opponents.
Wessel’s personal life also took a downturn at this time. He dropped out of the university and started hanging out at seedy bars and brothels.
After proving himself as a street fighter and a rabble rouser, Wessel was rewarded by Goebbels and given a rank as a platoon leader in the Brown Shirts.
In September of 1929 Wessel, still only 24 years old, met a young (23-year-old) woman named Irma Janicke. Janicke was a prostitute and Wessel lived off her earnings as her pimp after they moved in together in a slum apartment in a very rough section of Berlin.
Their landlady, herself only 29, was concerned that this situation might come to the attention of the authorities and put her in legal jeopardy with the police. She was also angry about unpaid rent from her disreputable tenants, so she asked a Communist friend of her late husband to handle the situation.
On the night of January 20th, 1930, the Communist, Albrecht Hohler, himself a known pimp and just out of prison, went to the apartment where Wessel and Janicke lived. Accompanied by another Communist gang member, Erwin Rucker, Albrecht knocked on the door and, when Wessel answered it, shot him at close range and fled. Initially, he survived but died later from blood poisoning contracted in the hospital.
With the skill that later made him Hitler’s propaganda minister Goebbels immediately launched a campaign to canonize Wessel, an unlikely candidate for sainthood, even for the Nazis.
Goebbels gave the eulogy at Wessel’s funeral, which was attended by 30,000 mourners. (According to Goebbels!) Many other Nazi leaders were present but not Hitler himself, because it was deemed too dangerous for him to be in heavily leftist Berlin.
It was only three years later, with Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 as the German Chancellor, that the apotheosis of Horst Wessel was fully realized, with marches and mass rallies commemorating this thug and petty criminal as a patriot who made the supreme sacrifice for the German nation.
A marching song (the “Horst Wessel Lied”) supposedly written by Wessel himself became the official Nazi Party anthem and later the joint German National Anthem with Deutschland Uber Alles. (The melody was actually lifted from an Imperial German Navy march.)
Think “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black National Anthem which had to be played at sporting events post Floyd thanks to BLM.
In addition to the Horst Wessel song, the sainted martyr was memorialized in movies and through the naming of military units and a navy training vessel. Ironically, the ship, a three masted sailing barque, was seized at the end of World War II as an American war prize. It survives to this day as the U.S.C.G. Cutter Eagle, the U.S. Coast Guard’s official cadet training ship and has been seen in innumerable “Tall Ship” reviews around the world.
Wessel’s elevation as a secular saint came only after a number of other candidates had been considered. All were storm troopers who died in battles with leftists, but the timing of Wessel’s death came at a particularly opportune moment:
“[Horst Wessel] did a great deal more for the Nazi image as a dead pimp than he had done as a live party member.” Alan Wykes, The Nuremberg Rallies (1970), p. 12
George Floyd is to the current day American Progressive movement what Horst Wessel was to German Nazi’s in the 1930’s.
Like Wessel, Floyd was a criminal (seven convictions) with a history of violence. Like Wessel, he was plucked from a well-deserved obscurity by a skilled propaganda machine, i.e. the Black Lives Matter movement.
Previously BLM had considered other candidates for martyrdom-Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Michael Brown-but was never able to get traction. Ironically the one case in which the black victim really was killed by racist whites was the February 2020 slaying of Ahmaud Arbery in Atlanta. Since the police were not involved, this case was cynically put on hold for over two years until other, more politically useful claims could be pursued, the foremost, of course, being George Floyd.
It’s important to remember that while the Floyd case really put BLM on the map in terms of national awareness, the movement was started in 2014 and was already well established by 2016. Family members of the foregoing blessed martyrs traveled as part of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign that year under the aegis of “Mothers of The Movement.”
The movement was well underway, in other words, four years before George Floyd’s death.
This is borne out by BLM supporters taking to the streets in more than one hundred American and foreign cities within days of his death. A well-coordinated, well-funded effort, it had all the spontaneity of a Nazi Nuremberg rally. Since that time billions of dollars of corporate and foundation contributions have poured into the coffers of the Black Lives Matter movement, with no accountability on how that money has been spent.
Floyd, like Wessel, styled himself a musician and song writer.
Both Floyd and Wessel were celebrated by the media, with songs, movies, and plays. However, Wessel never did get an opera written and performed in his honor, like “A Knee on the Neck,” a recent choral work about Floyd’s death from the National Philharmonic. This is surprising given the Germans’ love for that genre, but some things were too much, even for Joseph Goebbels.
Floyd and Wessel’s celebration as heroes was both calculated and cynically dishonest. Neither man was remotely a hero but in reality were thugs who preyed on the very communities they supposedly died protecting.
Wessel was no doubt murdered, in all likelihood because of his role as a pimp. Floyd likely died because of a heart condition according to recent deposition testimony regarding the original coroner’s report on his cause of death after resisting arrest.
What does it say about Germany in the 30’s and America in the 21st century that their leaders were able to will themselves into acceptance of knowing falsehoods?
What makes Floyd’s example particularly frightening is that all our country’s important institutions-its “strong points” in the words of writer Mark Helprin-were complicit, including, “educational systems, the press, entertainment, sports, a large slice of religion, institutions of high culture, most professional organizations, and pusillanimous businesses…” Mark Helprin, The Revolution of 2020, Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2020.
Contrast out country’s celebration of a monstrous lie with the suppression of the news about the death of Paul Kessler. Kessler was a 69-year-old man who was carrying an Israeli flag at a demonstration in support of Israel in California last week.
Bystanders say he was struck by a bullhorn wielded by a Pro Palestinian counter-demonstrator. He fell, hitting his head on the pavement. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department says the cause of his death was blunt force head injury and the manner of death homicide.
Do Jewish lives matter?
Will Kessler have murals painted of him, movies made about him and music composed in his memory? Will his funeral be broadcast on nationwide television, with all the top politicians in attendance? Will there be marches and wakes held throughout our country and the world in his honor?
The answer is obvious.
As a Jewish white colonizer, he has no rights. He can be killed with impunity by a latter-day Horst Wessel, like the one who bashed his skull in on the streets of Los Angeles a little over a week ago. (As long as a killer identifies himself as one of the “marginalized peepuls” he’s home free!)
We are not just in the final days of Horst Wessel’s Weimar Germany, where street violence can go unpunished if the perpetrator is from the right gang. No, we are at the final denouement, Kristallnacht, 1938, where death and destruction is meted out to everyone’s favorite scapegoats then and now-Jews. BLM has recently declared its solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. You can be sure Joseph Goebbels and Horst Wessel himself are smiling someplace tonight.
We have to stop canonizing these thugs and call them out to be what they honestly are.