CURRENT EVENTS, HISTORY/CULTURE
The Mises Institute “Blood and Soil” Controversy
By chriscalton
In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance. -Jeff Deist, For A New Libertarian
The following are just a couple notable “pearl clutching” reactions to the above excerpt of Jeff Deist’s, president of the Mises Institute, speech
It really makes me sad that I even feel the need to make this status in defense of good people and a good institution, but sadly, there are libertarians out there who feel the need to attack and misrepresent wonderful human beings due to their own prejudices and ignorance.
The phrase “blood and soil” may mean different things to different people, and it may be used to invoke a message that you may or may not agree with. But regardless of how you feel on that matter, if you are associating this phrase with Nazi history, you are just plain ignorant. Claiming that this phrase originated with the Nazis is objectively false, and going around like word police calling people who use this phrase “Nazis” on this ground makes you seem a lot more like a fascist than the people you’re slandering.
The phrase “blut und boden” has roots in 19th century Germany as a romanticization of rural life, not unlike the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer (though not necessarily identical either). All it meant was that people care about the people and land they’re connected to, which is an obvious truism.
It is true that the Nazis used the phrase as part of their own propaganda, just as they twisted and distorted the ideas of Nietzsche (it is quite doubtful that he would have seen Hitler as the Übermensch). But even in this case, some Nazis did not agree on using this long-standing German idea as a means of advancing Nazi ideas. In the end, the party decided to use this idea to associate the idealistic vision of a rural life that many Germans believed in with Aryan superiority as a way of pushing their racist beliefs.
This was not the origination of “blood and soil,” it was the perversion of it.
But now, because a good man made the alleged “mistake” of using these three words to describe the beliefs of the average person in the United States – with absolutely zero racist connotation – we have the Commissars of “True Libertarianism” spending their time attacking people who are about as far from actual Nazis as it is possible to be, and their criticisms are based on the delusions and caricatures they’ve created of people they have zero interaction with.
I don’t know what has gone on in the past in the libertarian movement, and I frankly don’t care. What I know is what I see now, and on the one hand, I see people like those at the Mises Institute behaving with class and respect, and I see the people who have a vendetta against this organization waging petty attacks against people who would dare associate themselves with people who do not kowtow to the libertarian Gestapo (by which I mean the people who are, ironically, accusing everybody else of being Fascists).
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