Blog 10: Hitler and Ellul—Two of a Kind?

Sources:

Ellul, Jacques. “The Betrayal of the West.”  Sources of European History Since 1900. Ed. Marvin Perry, Matthew Berg, and James Krukones. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. 492-496. Print.

Hitler, Adolf. “Mein Kampf.” Meridians: Sources in World History.  Ed. Ashlee Quosigk. New York: Pearson Learning Solutions, 2011. 97-102. Print.

Summary:

In “The Betrayal of the West,” Ellul discusses the importance of the West’s contribution to history and culture.  He claims that ideas such as freedom, the “rights of man”, the elimination of exploitation, and socialism, no matter where they are found in the world, originated in the West.  His main themes are the individual and freedom, which he calls “the goal and desire implicit in the history of all civilizations” and what “made the West what it is” (496).  “The West alone has defended the inalienable rights of the human person, the dignity of the individual, the man who is alone with everyone against him,” Ellul claims (493).  He then goes through the heritage of the West, beginning with the Jews, then the Greeks, and then the Romans.  He admits the failings of the West, but insists that the “certain number of values, movements, and orientations that no one else has provided” not be overlooked or discounted (495).  The final paragraph in the selection contains this statement: “the West… thus produced a type of human being that is unique in history: true western man… I am bound to say that I regard this type as superior to anything I have seen or known elsewhere” (496).

My Opinion:

When I read this selection, I was immediately struck with how similar it is to parts of “Mein Kampf” that we read earlier on.  This really surprised me because Ellul was a sociologist, an intellectual, while I do not consider Hitler to be an intellectual.  I am sure that Ellul would not condone Hitler’s application of these ideas, but the theories are remarkably alike. 

Compare some of these quotes:

“But if, starting today, all further Aryan influence upon Japan should stop, and supposing that Europe and America were to perish, then a further development of Japan’s present rise in science and technology could take place for a little while longer; but in the time of a few years the source would dry out, Japanese life would gain, but its culture would stiffen and fall back into the sleep out of which it was startled seven decades ago by the Aryan wave of culture” (Hitler, 99).

“I simply observe that the peoples of the world had abided in relative ignorance and [religious] repose until the encounter with the West set them on their journey.  Please, then, don’t deafen us with talk about the greatness of Chinese or Japanese civilization.  These civilizations existed indeed, but in a larval or embryonic state; they were approximations, essays.  The always related to only one sector of the human or social totality and tended to be static and immobile.  Because the West was motivated by the ideal of freedom and had discovered the individual, it alone launched society in its entirety on its present course” (Ellul, 495).

Ellul’s superiority of the Western man sounds a lot like Hitler’s superiority of the Aryan.  Hitler’s idea of the Aryan being a “culture-founder” is very similar to Ellul’s ideas such as: “The West turned the whole human project into a conscious, deliberate business” (494). 

My question is this: should Ellul’s ideas be discounted because of this similarity to Hitler? Is the reminiscence of something which is, granted, repugnant enough to condemn it?  Perhaps such a connection isn’t enough to entirely reject it, but I would say it at least makes it highly suspect.