Following on the heels of the Minneapolis City Council last Friday, the Minnesota State House of Representatives voted to declare “racism” a “public health crisis” on Monday. The resolution put forward by the state Democrat-affiliate, the DFL, is fairly boilerplate read for anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock. It claims that race has no basis in biology, that white supremacy is literally killing black and brown bodies, and can point to a generously-curated list of credentialed names for scientific and moral backing for this problem.
But the resolution isn’t what interests me. We all know the Democrat playbook in this country, adapted only slightly for local conditions. What interests me instead is the way that Republican lawmakers in Minnesota have responded to this challenge. Not only did seven Republicans vote in favor of the resolution with it passing 82 to 40, but the other lawmakers have pointedly held their tongues and refused to condemn the resolution and the anti-White motivations behind it. Their tepid response to the resolution has its roots, I believe, in the eternal mindset of conservatism. The principled loser mentality of American conservatism is one component, but another is the outright disdain for the common man and a slavish obsession with appealing to its enemies across the aisle.
This Monday marked the 76th anniversary of the plot by German officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler, memorialized in the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, directed by alleged pedophile Bryan Singer. I believe that this event is important because of what it can teach us about the perniciousness of the conservative mindset across continents and decades. Our Minnesota Republicans are inheritors of this conspiracy’s legacy. Even if the stakes are smaller and the actions less dramatic, unquestionable moral weakness permeates both groups.
I am no expert on the historical facts of the plot by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, but I did see Valkyrie twice, once when it was first released in theaters and then a few years later for a film class that I was taking in college. My initial viewing would have been when I was only a teenager, and I mostly recalled the film for the spectacle and the way that it made a foreordained historical outcome appear tense and dramatic. It was the second time that I viewed the film that I really came to appreciate the deeper meaning of the film and the real-life event that it attempted to portray.
By 1944, the German war effort was going poorly. Germany had found herself at war with the four of the largest empires that the world had ever seen: Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union. An initial series of daring campaigns had startled the world and it looked as though Germany, that persistent underdog, might finally break free from the constraints imposed upon her by geography and British hegemony, but the invasion of the Soviet Union had faltered and now Germany was being driven back from both east and west in a return of the dreaded two-front war, this time with the addition of a southern front launched across the Mediterranean.
Throughout the war, Adolf Hitler’s relationship with his generals had been fraught to say the least. The entrenched leadership of the Wehrmacht were, generally speaking, a capable lot, but they also lacked vision and had an innate conservatism that clashed with the revolutionary ideas and methods that the National Socialists employed and embodied. These generals were the first to predict disaster when Hitler made his bold moves towards Poland and her western enablers, and consistently pressured him before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 to endure whatever slights and arrows might be necessary from Germany’s foes so that her military would be “ready” for war. During the war, their negativity was a constant thorn in the side of Germany. After the war, many of them were spared harsh sentences and went on to be the loudest critics of Hitler. There is no shortage of memoirs from German generals lambasting the “Austrian Corporal” and, in-between denunciations of anti-semitism and mass politics, lamenting that Germany would have won the war if only they had been in charge.
All of this is not to re-litigate the military history of the Second World War, but rather to give a background to the type of man that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and the other men involved in the plot were. Although some of them were “Conservative Revolutionaries” in the vein of Ernst Junger, they most certainly put the emphasis on the former rather than the latter. Many of them, including Colonel von Stauffenberg himself, were aristocrats, and some of the generals involved in the plot were outright monarchists seeking to return the deposed Hohenzollern dynasty to the throne. But there was enough unity in purpose for the officers to not only carry out their plan to seize power but also to draw up a roster of the men they wanted to fill the posts in the government that they were constructing in their fantasies.
The film Valkyrie attempted to give the impression that the conspirators hated Hitler and the Third Reich he had midwifed out of a general sense of moral outrage, but the truth was more complicated than that. The Colonel and his fellow plotters were German nationalists, albeit conservative nationalists who wanted to look backwards to Germany’s past instead of facing her future. An important piece that I missed in my first viewing of Valkyrie was that the conspirators thought that, by killing Adolf Hitler and replacing him with a leader of their own choosing, they would be able to negotiate some kind of peace with the Allies, either solely in the west or with the Soviet Union as well.
Upon re-watching the film some years later, it was this detail that baffled me the most. To have von Stauffenberg and the others be acting to rid the world of Hitler solely because they thought that he was evil incarnate would have been a familiar, if cloying, story, but history is never as clear-cut as Hollywood would like it to be. These men were not peaceniks, they were soldiers. Even if they were going against their oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler himself, in their hearts they did not think that they were betraying Germany. They thought that they would be its saviors.
To the casual observer their plan failed due to providence and the intervention of the quick-thinking Major Otto Ernst Remer, but the truth is that the conspiracy was doomed from the outset. Its failure was rooted before the plot had even been carried out in the shortcomings of the conservative mindset, for von Stauffenberg and his allies thought that they would be able to seek an accommodation with Germany’s enemies. This flew in the face of all the obvious facts of the Second World War. There was no more ardent opponent of the German people than Winston Churchill, who threw away the British Empire in order to destroy Germany, and the other governments in the anti-national coalition were also unlikely to respond to peace feelers. Since Ulysses Grant, the United States military doctrine was based on the total and abject subjugation of its opponents and treated anything less than unconditional surrender as a failure, and the less said about the lengths that Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union would go to punish Germany the better.
The horrific treatment of Rudolf Hess after his peace mission to Great Britain should have given the plotters pause, but they pushed forward, blinded by the deluded belief that they could best save Germany by appealing to its enemies rather than its people. It is a position of weakness, and one that has never worked. That position is being echoed today by the elected officials of the Minnesota Republican party.
Letting the left define “racism” and have it to be declared a public health crisis on par with the current Coronavirus outbreak is the latest failure of American conservatism, following on the heels of surrenders of everything from women’s bathrooms to the American founding. It gifts Governor Tim Walz with an enormous blank check with which to continue exerting emergency powers from the executive branch of the state government. Even though it is required that the legislature renew the governor’s emergency powers every thirty days, Republicans have so far failed to do anything to curb the excesses of the Walz administration with regards to Minnesota’s Coronavirus response, and it is unlikely that they will find their spines now.
How much worse will Republican spinelessness be when the public health crisis is “racism”! Any vote to end the governor’s emergency powers will be immediately challenged by the DFL and its media allies as a vote declaring that racism is over. If Minnesota Republicans had a modicum of integrity, they would have shrugged off this claim today, tomorrow, and forever. How could they be racist when Republican officials are literally the only people left in the United States who believe in the equality of races?
But Republicans writ large live or die by how the media perceives them. Even though it is the rural voters, the social conservatives, and, yes, the “racists” who put them into office, Republicans would gladly sell all of those groups up the river for a favorable mention in the Minnesota Star Tribune, let alone the New York Times.
Even if there were one or two Republicans in the state who understood even half of the consequences of this resolution, it is unlikely that they would act. To be called a racist by the media would devastate the state senator or representative branded as such, even though their voters would likely rally around them in the face of this attack. Why is this? The case of former Representative Steve King from neighboring Iowa made it clear that the GOP’s chief constituency is not its voters and the party will not hesitate to throw even the most milquetoast defender of Whites under the bus in order to try and appeal to the coveted demographics of blacks and “suburban White women”.
But will it work? The historical legacy of Colonel von Stauffenberg points to a resounding “no”.
With the not-so-subtle encouragement of the United States and its allies, West Germany tried to build a national mythos around the July 20th plot. The idea of the “good German”, and of the heroic Wehrmacht opposed to the evil “Nazis” were the foundation of the West German state and allowed for Germany to enjoy a small pretense of being a “normal country” even while it remained under firm occupation and surveillance by the United States.
In contrast, the conspiracy was largely neglected in eastern Germany. Some scholars point to the less-than-proletarian backgrounds of the plotters as reason enough for the Communist authorities in the German Democratic Republic to downplay it, but I have a different theory. For all the horrors inflicted upon Germans by the Communist occupation, I believe that Stalin and his toadies refused to degrade the Germans by legitimizing the coup attempt. The Communists saw nothing to celebrate in the feckless betrayal of von Stauffenberg and the other officers. In Lenin’s phraseology, they were “useful idiots”, and not even particularly useful ones at that.
The legacy of these proud German conservatives has eroded in the west now as well. As the intensity of liberalism’s campaign against national pride and distinctions has intensified, the aristocratic and militaristic nature of the conspiracy made it a less welcome example of German heroism in an age of pacifistic, degenerated global citizenship. The men arraigned against Adolf Hitler were opposed to National Socialism, yes, but they were still fighting for a vision of a Germany. Even that is a bridge too far today. Furthermore, the conspiracy remained silent on the great linchpin of today’s post-war settlement, the Holocaust. If these men were so brave and noble for trying to kill Hitler, then why didn’t they do anything to stop the attempted extermination of European jewry?
Ultimately, the July 20th plot is only dusted off and brought out by conservatives seeking to burnish their fealty to the current regime of liberalism, but in doing so, they are in truth revealing their own uselessness and powerlessness. The Republicans in Minnesota who think that they will benefit from supporting the left’s anti-racist agenda are wrong. They would do well to dwell on the fate the befalls not only traitors but the memory of traitors as well. The Republicans will meet the same response that their ideological compatriots in Germany seventy-odd years ago met when they tried to appeal to their enemies.
The left does not want to leave you alone and it does not want to convince you. It wants you to surrender unconditionally, and with every concession Republicans in Minnesota and elsewhere make they simply move closer and closer to the endgame where what little illusionary power and dignity that they have managed to cling to will be stripped away and they will be fed to the wolves.
In the film Valkyrie, Major-General Henning von Tresckow justifies joining the plot by arguing, “We have to show the world that not all of us are like him. Otherwise, this will always be Hitler’s Germany.” But the sad truth is that, no matter how much conservatives give up, it will always be Hitler’s Germany and it will always be Donald Trump’s America for our enemies until either they succeed, or we do.