Why did the Nazis hate Oswald Spengler?

Who was Oswald Spengler and why did the Nazis hate him?  Before the Nazis hated Spengler, they stole his ideas, just as they stole the Hindu Swastika, and then they ostracized him even though he was widely known to be perhaps one of the greatest visionary historians ever to come out of Europe. Oswald Spengler became famous throughout Europe and America when in 1918 he published the first of a two-volume series, "The Decline of the West". Spengler's vision of history and his predictions for Western society were so profound that his philosophy immediately became the topic of much discussion among the politically motivated classes.  Despite the fact that the Nazis would later view his work as a basis for their own philosophy, they eventually had this genius ostracized, but why?

Spengler's theory of the rise and fall of civilization was based on an organic understanding of the human condition and so it only makes sense that his theories resemble the Hindu Yuga Cycle. Only for the outsider should any Hindu have to explain they would not take Spengler's ideas as doctrine, Spengler's views on race are a little confusing at times, but he was likely not racist, but certainly very concerned about the coming demise of his own race and its interactions with other races in this process. Spengler studied the following civilizations in coming to his theories regarding the rise and fall of civilizations: Babylonian, Egyptiac, Indic, Sinic, Mesoamerican (Mayan/Aztec) and Classical (Greek/Roman). By comparing these different civilizations, he noticed patterns and trends which transcended culture and race, he found that civilizations seem to go through predictable phases in their rise and fall, that there are predictable patterns of human behavior, religion, governance and economy which are found in each quarter of a civilization's life cycle, Spengler named these quarters Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. Here is the general pattern of the cycle of civilization as put forth by Spengler. 

Spring: Intuition, powerful cultural creation from awakening souls, unity and abundance.

• Religion: Birth of a grand myth signifying a new conception of God. Fear and longing for the world. Earliest metaphysical organization of the world. High scholasticism.

• Art: Religious art considered as an integrated part of religious devotion. Gothic cathedrals, Doric temples. Development of Ornamental art as against the persistent, ahistorical type of Imitative art.

• Politics: Feudalism, warrior aristocracies. Division between two primary Estates: Nobility, which is the estate proper, contains within itself the highest aspirations of its race and is therefore symbolic of the particular people in question, as well as being representative of Time in the sense of Directedness and Destiny; and Priesthood, which is the anti-Estate, pursuing eternal Truth and attempting to subordinate Blood to Intellect primarily through asceticism, but also through scholasticism.

Summer: Maturing consciousness. Earliest urban-civil society and critical thought.

• Religion: Reformation: revolt of the religious moderates against the early religion. Beginnings of a purely philosophical movement. Contrasting idealistic and realistic systems. Mathematical breakthroughs leading to a new conception of the world. Rationalism. The depletion of mysticism from religion.

• Art: Development of high artistic traditions. Both artistic medium and style express the fundamental nature of the soul of the culture. Struggle between different artistic mediums, representing the culture's striving to discover its proper mode of self-representation.

• Politics: Absolutist states. Conflicts between aristocracy and monarchy. The political centre shifts from castles and estates to the cities.

Autumn: Urban rise. High point of disciplined organizational strength.

• Religion: Faith in the omnipotence of rationality. Cult of Nature. The height of mathematical thought. The last idealists. Theories of knowledge and logic.

• Art: Fulfillment of high artistic potentials of culture- sculpture in Greece, contrapuntal music in the West. At the beginning of Autumn, art possesses complete freedom to manifest the Destiny-vision of a people through its particular perfected formal technique. However, the end of Autumn witnesses the exhaustion of the possibilities of that technique, leading to craft-art in imitation of the great style as well as artistic revolt.

• Politics: Struggles between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Revolutions. Napoleonism.

Winter: Coming fissure in the world-urban civilization. Exhaustion of mental organization strength. Irreligiousness rises.

• Religion: Materialism: Cults of science, utility, and luck. Ethical-social ideals: philosophy without mathematics, skepticism. The last mathematical thinkers. Decline of abstract thinkers, and the rise of specialized academic philosophy. Spread of the last ideas.

• Art: End of symbolic art. All art becomes meaningless subjects of fashion.

• Politics: Democracy, the rule of the rich, followed by caesarism and bureaucracy.

Even though Spengler attempted to come up with an a-cultural model for understanding the signs of a civilization's rise and fall, he also came to the logical and obvious theory that this civilization cycle does have unique traits in each society which depend upon the nation's race, general philosophy of life, and how entrenched the particular culture is. Spengler described Western civilization as a "Faustian" civilization". "Faust" was a fictional character who sold his soul to the devil for power, but ends up unable to use that power for any great purpose. Spengler believed that the West had sold its soul to "technics", that it had developed massive technology to gain power but failed to adequately use this power, and even though the West understands it's technology is a major factor in its demise, they will not correct this measure, they meet the future with an accepting pessimism and condemn optimism and philosophical innovation as weakness since this would show that their original ideals were flawed, and so the West will willingly and knowingly drag themselves and their children down into the mud to die with their inventions. 

Spengler wrote a truncated version of his theory in a book entitled "Man and Technics" in which Spengler predicts that the West will slowly die among his technology but will develop sickeningly self-deceiving philosophies to ease their minds as they slowly disappear, they will use their advancements to retreat from the world and cocoon themselves as other races take their technology, they will advance their own demise by shunning hard politics and science. Spengler wished that his work would turn one philosopher into a politician or one theologian into a scientist, he begged the West not retreat from the world they had created by simply changing their world view so that they could pick up their technology and use it to move into a new civilization, he wanted to break the cycle of rise and fall, rise and fall. 

Many Hindus will likely see similarities between Spengler's ideology and that of Hinduism, most specifically our understanding of the Yuga Cycle and our eternal struggle to understand it and guide it, using wisdom to move to a higher cycle rather than having to learn another round of hard lessons as the current cycle brings us back down. Many Hindus believe we are now in the Kali Yuga, the Winter in Spengler's terminology. Descriptions of these eras exist in our Puranas and are summed up below. Hindus have the idea of the Kalki, a savior of sorts who incarnates in the Kali Yuga to destroy it and usher in a golden age.  Kalki has the qualities that Spengler hoped to inculcate in Western society, Kalki does not come to save or to teach, he comes to chastise and destroy, if the truths of the world have not become obvious to you by the end of the cycle, you are not worth saving and are to be recycled back into the universe. Now, this does not have to be a real person or event, many Hindus interpret this to be a general way of thinking that overtakes humanity, they naturally become tired of stupidity and ignorance. According to the Kalki Purana, even Buddhists are wiped out as they have fallen into a cult of personality and have accepted a philosophy of inaction, the opposite of what Krishna taught. 

Satya Yuga (also known as Krita Yuga "Golden Age"): The first and best Yuga. It was the age of truth and perfection. The Krita Yuga was so named because there was but one religion, and all men were saintly: therefore they were not required to perform religious ceremonies. Humans were gigantic, powerfully built, honest, youthful, vigorous, erudite and virtuous. The Vedas were one. All mankind could attain to supreme blessedness. There was no agriculture or mining as the earth yielded those riches on its own. Weather was pleasant and everyone was happy. There were no religious sects. There was no disease, decrepitude or fear of anything. Human lifespan was 100,000 years and humans tended to have hundreds or thousands of sons or daughters. People had to perform penances for thousands of years to acquire Samadhi and die. 

Treta Yuga: Is considered to be the second Yuga in order, however Treta means the "Third". In this age, virtue diminishes slightly. At the beginning of the age, many emperors rise to dominance and conquer the world. Wars become frequent and weather begins to change to extremities. Oceans and deserts are formed. People become slightly diminished compared to their predecessors. Agriculture, labour and mining become existent. Average lifespan of humans is around 1000-10,000 years.

Dvapara Yuga: Is considered to be the third Yuga in order. Dvapara means "two pair" or "after two". In this age, people become tainted with Tamasic qualities and aren't as strong as their ancestors. Diseases become rampant. Humans are discontent and fight each other. Vedas are divided into four parts. People still possess characteristics of youth in old age. Average lifespan of humans is around a few centuries. 

Kali Yuga: The final age. It is the age of darkness and ignorance. People become sinners and lack virtue. They become slaves to their passions and are barely as powerful as their earliest ancestors in the Satya Yuga. Society falls into disuse and people become liars and hypocrites. Knowledge is lost and scriptures are diminished. Humans eat forbidden and dirty food and engage in unrestrained sinful sexual practices. The environment is polluted, water and food become scarce. Wealth is heavily diminished. Families become non existent. Average lifespan of people is barely 100 years, though, by the end of the Yuga, it will be as low as 20 years.

So why did the Nazis eventually outcast Spengler, even though he was a great influence upon their ideology and movement?  The Nazis took up Spengler's call and refused to slip into passive philosophy to escape the doom of their technological civilization, they instead asserted the "will to power" and made an effort to forge forward into a new race and new civilization, to find the strength to move forward into nihilism but maintain the will to live as godmen. However, unlike in Hinduism where we have the developed and tested system of Vedanta to help us become empowered nihilists, the Nazis had no such tradition as their ancestral knowledge had been wiped out by Christianity, and even this at its height was likely a diminished form of the Eternal Religion, at least in comparison to Hinduism.  So what did the Nazis go on, what was the power of the mind that would help push them past the inevitable decline of the West and forge forward with their technology into a desirable nihilist epic?

The Nazis have always mistaken Hinduism and the Arya tradition as "irrationalism", as an escape from the hard knowledge which had ensnared their civilization and was hurling it to its doom. The Nazis drank the snake oil of charlatans such as Madame Blavatsky, a "spiritualist" who traveled to India, stole Hinduism and perverted it for Western usage. Blavatsky simply took Hinduism and sandwiched it between an absurd and mystical past evolution of the human race, and a future where Hinduism has evolved into a new set of "root races" who practice a religion that is a confusion of Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Western occultism; she called her false religions"Theosophy". These ideas and even science fiction were where Nazis drew their inspirations, no different from today's Alt-Right comic book junkies. The Nazis believe in only the outer veneer of mythology, looking solely for physical truth in it, some lost civilization, they have no understanding or even desire to think of their mythology or Hindu mythology or any mythology from a conceptual standpoint, as Vedanta, as a way to exercise the mind so it can better manipulate the universe. And like the Jews, they have made a particular race or tribe or nationality the center of creation, in this case "Whites".

Many Hindus understand that in the Kali Yuga even Hindus will engage in the lowest forms of superstition because they cannot understand the abstract meaning behind allegories and images.  We know from scripture that this is a disease that infects the mind in the Kali Yuga as the intelligence of humans quickly diminishes.  The Kali Yuga is broken when humans are once again able to see the deeper mind-science truths inherent in "myth", the link between the power of the mind and the ability to manifest it in the sensate universe; when Hinduism can be understood rationally and experientially without the philosopher becoming egotistical, this rather than a literal interpretation of a golden irrational age of the god-men. The Nazis have demonstrated then and now that they are incapable of truly comprehensive and naturalistic ethics, they have degraded into not only irrationalism but egotistical irrationalism. What is a race?  Is it not simply a welling up of the Brahman into an Atman that is best suited for its place and time?  How is it that both Spengler and the Puranas can predict future human behavior and actions? Because they both have a scientific view of the evolutionary process, how races evolve and their destiny becomes obvious when the mechanism of this process is known, in Hinduism all "saints" are really scientists. Nazis do not try to predict the coming future and move around it, they believe in the "will to power", they believe they can create anything, any absurdity out of their video games, it's not natural, it's not logical and it is not science... it's not Hinduism.

But the Nazis did not want scientists or Hindus, nor do they want them today.  Why did the White race appear in the north of Europe?  Why didn't they appear on the savannas of Africa, why not the rain forests of South America?  Nazis believe there is something unique in their race, as if their race is outside the natural order, as if their abilities and impulses have not been crafted by the universe in which they live, as if they are not being molded to fit their environment.  Could the White race even survive if placed in the deserts of Arabia?  Even if they attempted to maintain their whiteness through selective breeding, isn't it possible they would be so maladapted to the environment they would not even want to live, or perhaps even despite their best efforts their physiology and psychology would change over time? Why can't the White race be an adapted race, why does it need to be a superior race? Nazis want to maintain the "mystery" of their blood, a mystery they will never allow to be solved through debate because that would shatter their unstable power structure.

Why did the Nazi's outcast Spengler? Why did the Muslims and Christians outcast the pagans? The Nazis like the Christians and Muslims have a prophet, Hitler, they more or less have a Bible, Mein Kampf, and they have a "One True God" of blood mystery. Hinduism has always been distinguished by its lack of prophets, its lack of any founder, and its lack of dualism, it is descended from the essence of the universe going back to time unknown,. With the expanse of the universe, how could one prophet ever know all things for all times and for all people?  Nazism is anything but an organic culture, organic culture has sages of the age who improve the flow of knowledge from the past and push it into the future, but because Europe was never sound enough in the first place it lost its past to Christianity and so they feebly attempt to recreate an entire civilization and ethic from the minds of a few men.  Oswald Spengler saw through Nazi foolishness, and called out their stupidity.

Spengler's ostracism in Germany and the eventual banning of his works came around 1933 with the publishing if his "Hour of Decision" where he never mentioned Hitler or the Nazis but simply decried the erosion of quality politics in his age, the poisoning of sound ideas with fanaticism, leaders who thought and felt the product of the masses rather than sound ideology, strong men and demagogues who delivered the chaotic and unprincipled demands of the people rather than guiding the nation on any tried and true principles of governance and economy. Spengler called fascism the idea of the "city mobs" and implied that this was propped up in Germany with the delusional propaganda that the Nazi party could either ignore the world or oppose it; that they were demi-gods, men outside of nature, fact disdaining idealists full of hubris, men drunk on the "mystery" of their own blood. Spengler may have believed in a racial component of history, but he was no occultist, his assertion that "race purity" was "grotesque" was likely just another euphemism for Spengler's disdain for Nazi race mysticism and claims of superiority. Spengler had studied civilizations of every race and had found underlying patterns, race only determined the more perceptible realities, but there was a deeper naturalistic power moving the destiny of each race, Spengler asked the West to understand the power that animated them and direct this power, but the Nazi's escaped into fantasy and believed themselves to be above the power, the creators of the power.

Spengler and the Totalitarians 

Kogan, Steven - Brussels Journal

 in The Hour he warned the nation that in revolutionary times such as Germany was now facing, "Sound ideas are exaggerated into self-glorification by fanatics," and a leader who "thinks and feels as a product of the mass" will be treated by history "as a mere demagogue." Hitler's anonymous presence in the work underscores Spengler's view of his character and political origins, for, during the postwar crisis of the 1920s, all sides were thinking and feeling "as a product of the mass." As Spengler saw it, Germany was bent on finding a strong-man to satisfy its chaotic and unprincipled demands: "Everyone wrote to tell his future dictator what to do. Everyone demanded discipline from other people, because he was incapable of disciplining himself."

In a lecture delivered in Hamburg in 1929 titled "Germany in Danger," he warned of the nation's perilous position at home in a revolutionary time, and in The Hour he expanded his warnings to include internal and external threats to the west itself. His clarity and prescience are evident on the very first pages of the book, in which he makes a brief but comprehensive judgment about the destructive nature of Germany's National Socialists: their mania for propaganda and persecution and dangerous illusion "that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it," thus bringing the nation to the point where "We stand, it may be, close before a second world war." 

In point of fact, no twentieth-century thinker could have been further from Orwell's ungodly crew than Oswald Spengler and nowhere more emphatically than in The Hour of Decision (1933), in which he described political discourse in his time as "superficial," "small-minded," and filled with "absurd catchwords" in place of judgment and long-range understanding. Although he thought that Mussolini had certain political gifts that might come to fruition, he noted that fascism "had its origin in the city mobs" and that Mussolini's international project for "the combating of Bolshevism . . . arose out of imitating the enemy and is therefore full of dangers." As for Hitlerism, Spengler had contempt for the Nazi belief in "race purity" and called the term "grotesque." 

Like, true scientists, Hindus have always welcomed debate, there has never been any fear of questioning or dissent.  But Nazism is like Islam, Hitler was a prophet and his blood mystery doctrine could not stand any criticism or inquiry because like Islam it was a doctrine not of nature but the product of the mind of one man, a man of the Kali Yuga, a man bereft of any organic culture, a post-Christian man who only had his ego and his comic book religion upon which to build his empire. The Nazis acted like Muslims, threatening Spengler, accusing him of heresy against their prophet, removing him from mainstream society and striking fear into those who would defend him.

Spengler and the Totalitarians  

Kogan, Steven - Brussels Journal

The Hour of Decision alone held dangers for its author. As one ardent Nazi follower wrote to him, "Like almost all of us young Germans, I have rejoiced in this year of Hitler's leadership, and it surprises (not to say shocks) us that you do not mention this man at all in your book, and obviously seem to regard him as a quantité negligeable." Apparently, Gunther Gründel also resented being treated as a minimus by the renowned historian, since he ends his letter by noting that Spengler did not reply to "my polite congratulations on your fiftieth birthday or the dissertation I once sent you" and that he will regard himself "as having a free hand" if Spengler does not respond. In a note on this threat, Helps observes that "Spengler did not answer this letter" and that Gründel subsequently attacked him in print. Coupled with Gründel's vulgar display of self-importance and mock politesse was the unspoken accusation that Spengler was not only a traitor but an apostate as well. As Gründel remarked, Spengler had spoken in The Decline and again in The Hour of an "organic transition from the era of the masses to aristocratic Caesarism," yet The Hour nonplussed him, since Spengler did not proclaim National Socialism as the destiny that Gründel said his "logic demands."

After the publication of The Hour, public attacks against Spengler were followed by censorship of the work and the banning of his name from the German press. Refusing to participate in the Nazi debasement of German thought, Spengler broke with the Nietzsche Archive in 1935 and with its presiding figure, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who, to her "great grief," was "informed that you are taking an attitude of strong opposition to the Third Reich and its Führer, and that your departure from the Nietzsche Archive, which sincerely reveres the Führer, is connnected with this." She goes on to say that she has "experienced your speaking with great energy against our highly honoured new ideal," and, in his introduction to Arthur Helps' edition of Spengler's letters, A. M. Koktenek remarks that Spengler's "repugnance" to Hitler dates "from the days of the Munich Putsch in 1923," that "one is struck by the fate that befell so many of Spengler's correspondents," and that it is an open question "whether Spengler, if he had lived longer, would have escaped from Hitler's executioners. His connection with many proscribed men involved the death penalty."

Spengler's public life ended soon after the appearance of The Hour, which was also the moment of Hitler's triumph. He continued to maintain his scholarly contacts and pursuits, and more than one person must have remarked, as a Prince Pückler did in a letter to Spengler, that there was "now in public an incomprehensible, anxious, silence" about his works, "which are nevertheless to be found in every house that I know." 

No one is stating that Spengler was a morally infallible philosopher, however, his insight into the rise and fall of nations, the root causes for this, these were so profound that not only did the Nazis find them worth stealing, as they steal everything, but his vision has remained respected even today. Spengler was certainly a prophet, but not a prophet in the terms of Islam or Nazism, Spengler was a scientist-prophet, a man who sought to intuit the mechanisms behind world events, and he intuited the weakness of Nazism. Just as all the prophets and religions of the Kali Yuga have done before him, Hitler and the Nazis simply co-opted the works of this pagan seer and then disposed of him so they could fester in their self-centered vision which could only be maintained through the most disingenuous illogic guarded by animalistic barbarity.  In Spengler's vision of the rise and fall of civilization, the Hindu can likely see their own organic doctrine of the Yuga Cycle, in Spengler himself maybe the diluted version of our own seers. There is no way to ever make ourselves useful to these fascists, they are inferior and will hate the competition, and so we must destroy them before they destroy us.