SolarGeneral Proudly Presents...
...by James Mason
Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter
To a National Socialist the definitions of these words are just about impossible to separate. In any case, this was the motto of the National Socialist Youth Movement of which I was a member from 1966 to 1970, and was printed boldly across the top of the NSYM membership cards. I always carried my own cards– one for each of the four years I was part of the NSYM -proudly on my person at all times and would often take the current one out of my wallet and look at its beautiful design and ponder those words. As a youth in contemporary America of the 1960's, the words were familiar enough from literature, etc., but their real meaning was something I was only just then starting to learn on my own. There was the local ration of kooks and hangers-on which I had but little choice other than to pal around with but I wasn't long in realizing that I was the only National Socialist within a hundred-mile radius. It got lonely at times.
These words– Honor, Loyalty, Discipline– came into sharp focus for the first time for me during one of my earlier confrontations with the System, this time represented by the local school administration. A new semester had just begun and I was at a new building, with a new (and reputedly tougher) faculty. They were aware of my record as an "incorrigible" and knew my stated aim was to break free of the school system once and for all. They were determined to prevent me.
On the first day of the new season, after I had staged my anticipated opening play and now found myself seated in the office of the assistant principal, awaiting whatever their next move might be, one of the school's three "guidance counselors" abruptly whisked into the small room with an obviously rehearsed spiel of threats to the effect, "Okay, boy, you're going to court!" With that psychological ice-breaker out of the way, and seeing me non-plused, he sat down arid started to try and "reason".
Finally he got around to the stories which were rife that I was a Nazi. Yes, indeed I was. Thinking it must surely be some kind of put-on, he asked whether I had any identification to that effect, whereupon I wasted no time in producing my NSYM card. He was silently impressed and just gazed down at it for a moment before speaking. The only thing he could come up with was that it said on the card something about "discipline" and did I think that I was now behaving in a disciplined manner? And for the first time ever, I was forced to seethe deep division between loyalties and that code of discipline that my honor was demanding of me.
Above: Mason's original NSYM card and part of an accompanying introductory letter.
My answer to that obviously loaded trick-question on the part of this poor man's "Justice Jackson" was that, since I owed this System no loyalty or respect whatsoever, and since I openly considered it to be my personal enemy, my discipline was being directed toward opposing it and trying to break away from it in any manner available to me, including risking possible legal repercussions from it.
He handed my card back. I never did go into juvenile court and, within less than ninety days, I was indeed out of there, once and for all, and in full service of the Movement where my discipline could be put to better use.
This "counselor", whom troubled students– mere youths in their formative stages– were supposed to go to for help and advice, failed to grasp the larger meaning of my answer and next posed the second question: what did I think would have happened to anyone acting as I was, in Germany under Hitler? He could not see that my anti-social behavior there and then was not "for the hell of it", nor was it even part of my nature, but rather an irresistible course of action forced upon me by an absolutely intolerable situation that was, and still is, referred to as "universal, compulsory liberal education" I was rebelling against the so-called "education system" which was only at that time beginning to crank out endless hordes of illiterates with high school diplomas; become factories for race-mixing, of introductions to dope use, liberal ideas, and worse. No, in Hitler's Germany I'd have diligently applied myself like a tiger.
This only just means that 'Honor– Loyalty– Discipline' has no meaning whatsoever in this place, at this time, and among these people. Not even among the learned, conservative World War Two veterans that were the "older generation" when I was a kid. In simple terms, they can't see beyond the ends of their noses nor to the right or left of the blinders they are wearing. I came up against this early in life. Maybe that has colored my view of people and things to a more marked degree than most others even inside the Movement. Two lessons taught to me at that time were: one, doing what you have to do as you see it, and, two, arriving at the end conclusion of a certain principle in the most direct fashion, in the shortest possible time.
Morally, I left that forty-odd-year-old man, who had to at least have held a bachelor's degree, in the dust as a Hitler Youth at the age of sixteen. And, as anyone from that period will be aware, revolutionary training in those days of the American Nazi Party was pretty skimpy. Can you imagine what can happen when we start to do it right?
[Vol. XII, #10– Oct., 1983]
Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter
Brought to you exclusively by SolarGeneral.com