Rick Spence

Well, exactly what is that?

Much of it is an artificial creation. You know, you have to decide upon some sort of standard dialect. Okay, we'll decide what that is. You know, often dialect that only a few people actually speech, and then they will be drilled into children's heads through state schooling programs. So I think this is the kind of milieu that it comes out of.

People were trying to figure out what on earth Germans actually were, and the need for some sort of common identity. And, you know, that leads to everything like Wagnerian opera. Richard Wagner wanted to create a German mythical music. So he went back and strip mined old German myths and cobbled them together into a lot of people standing on stage singing. And that was his purpose.

He was a nationalist. He was in many ways a kind of racialist nationalist. And this was his idea of trying to create, out of bits and pieces of the past, a newfangled form of German identity. So, on the more mystical end of this, you had the ideas that, well, Germany must have been created for some special purpose because the Germans must be very special people.

And we must have some sort of particular destiny. And then out of this, you know, the direction this is heading, well, we're all part of some sort of master race with some sort of ties to some sort of great civilization in the past. Call it Thule, call it whatever you want to be. They basically just invent things. and try to attach those to the past.

And so, Ariosophy was the Aryanized version of Theosophy. And what this did was to take the idea that spiritual and physical evolution had led to the most advanced form of human beings, which were the Aryans, and the most advanced group of them were, of course, the Germans. And this attracted appeal. Keep in mind, again, this was not a mass movement. This was very much a fringe movement.

Most people weren't aware of it and weren't particularly interested in it. But it had an appeal for those who already had a kind of esoteric bent in some form or another. And this is where things like the German order and their other groups, it was only one of many, sort of grew out of.

And what it was that the Thule Society as a branch, the Thule Gesellschaft, was supposed to do was to study this. It was an esoteric study group. And so people would get together and they'd talk about things, probably make more stuff up, and all sort of work around this idea of of German Aryans as the most advanced type of human beings and all the wonderful things that the future would hold.

And the fact that this was in the midst of a war in which Germany was, again, fighting as they saw it for its existence, heightened those kinds of tensions as well. So my suspicion, again,

is that Zibotendorf, in terms of who was behind him, that he was essentially called back to Germany to work either for the Prussian political police or for some aspect of German intelligence or security to try to mobilize occultism or esotericism for the war effort. Because again, this is 1918. The war has gone on way too long.

Within a few months, Germany will collapse, and it will collapse simply from the psychological exhaustion of the population.

You have to try to appeal to different aspects of this. But the mystical aspect is one of those things that can have a very powerful influence. And the idea is that we can come up with some kind of mystical nationalism. Maybe that's one to put it, a kind of mystical nationalism that can be exploited. Because at this point, you're kind of grasping at straws.

And this is a whole period when the Germans are marshalling the last of their forces to launch a series of offensives on the Western Front, the peace offensive, which will initially be successful, but will ultimately fail and lead to a collapse in morale. But among the leadership of Germany, it was a recognition, it was that national morale was flagging. And

One of the other things that was kind of raising its head was what had happened nearby a year, well, the Russian Revolution, which had now brought the idea, which brought another solution to all of this, the idea of revolutionary Marxism. Here we need to remind ourselves as to where Marxism comes from, not Russia, Germany. Where was the largest Marxist party?

Russia, 5% of the population is industrial workers. In Germany, 40% of the population is industrial. So if any place was like made for Marxism, it was Germany. I think that's why it caught on in East Germany so well, because it did kind of come home. It was a local belief. It wasn't something imported by the Russians. It was a German invention.

The Thule Society, one of the things you can see in this is the Thule Society was particularly involved in anti-Marxist or anti-Bolshevik agitation. They saw themselves as this whole movement. It was a counter to this. It was a kind of counter Marxist movement.

Marxism formulates everything by class. People are categorized by class. You're either part of the proletariat or you're part of the bourgeoisie. You're either part of the proletariat or just some sort of scum. Really? Needs to be swept into the dustbin of history. Only workers count.

And that was what would take someone who was a nationalist, would sort of drive them crazy because their idea is we're trying to create a German people. We're trying to create a common German identity. But what the Marxists are doing is they're dividing Germans against each other by class. German workers hate the German bourgeoisie. German proletariat is opposed to German capitalists.

We're all trying to fight this war together. So that was why Marxism, particularly in the form of Bolshevism, was seen as unpatriotic. And of course, it was opposed to the war as a whole. The idea that parroting Lenin was that the war was an imperialist war. And the only thing that was good that was going to come out of it is that the imperialist war

through all of the crises it was creating would eventually lead to a class war. And that would be good because that would reconcile all of these things. But think of this, the two very different versions of this.