He who does not have demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.

Dr. Ernst Schertel

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Such was an annotation found in Adolf Hitler’s copy of Schertel’s book, Magic: History-Theory-Practice. It seems that Hitler had no problem with “demonic seeds.” And he wanted to “give birth to a new world” — as did Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.

Hitler annotated another passage from Schertel, which bears on the Nazi leader’s cynicism. The will of the magician in relation to his “demon,” says Schertel, creates power which “is completely left to his [the magician’s] discretion.” Hitler’s annotation continues:

The ‘people’ he might gather around himself … represent an enlargement of his I-sphere. But it already has happened that a magician abandoned, shattered, or castigated his own people, if they did not seem reactive anymore.

Recall, if you will, pictures of Berlin and other German cities from May 1945. One sees an endless moonscape of bombed-out buildings. Such was the cost to Germany of enlarging the magician’s I-sphere.

As it turned out, Hitler’s demonic seeds were potent, sprouting into a world war, accompanied by the persecution, incarceration, and death of innocent millions. One might likewise say that Lenin’s demonic seeds also sprouted into the killing and incarceration of millions by Stalin — who joined with Hitler to invade Poland in August 1939. This is what triggered World War II.

President Vladimir Putin is now attempting to deny Moscow’s responsibility for the invasion of Poland, justifying Stalin’s aggression in humanitarian terms. According to Putin, the West is to blame for Hitler. Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, said Putin, was the real cause of the war. As for Poland’s innocence, Putin called Poland’s 1939 foreign minister, Col. Józef Beck, “an anti-Semitic pig.”

Here is yet another sprinkling of demon seeds to bring about a “new world.” For that is the magical dream which Putin shares with Stalin and Hitler. Here again, the magician has no real concern for his own people. He is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn the existing order.

There is a quotation about revolutionaries which Eric Voegelin favored, from a book titled The Demons, by Heimito von Doderer. Here Doderer says a revolutionary is “someone who wants to change the general situation because of the impossibility of his own position….” Doderer also stated: “A person who has been unable to endure himself becomes a revolutionary, then it is others who have to endure him.”

In some sense, wrote Doderer, the revolutionary abandons the “highly concrete task of his own life.” The need then arises to falsify the past. From this, says Voegelin, there follows the need of all revolutionaries to systematically falsify history. If society succumbs to this falsification, then society itself “perpetuates the highest betrayal” imaginable. And there is a corollary to this betrayal. The false reality thereby established cannot accept anyone who talks truthfully about the past or present. Such persons are then labeled as traitors.

In Schertel’s book on magic Hitler has underscored a passage which denies the existence of objective truth. He calls the “objective world” a “jugglery of fantasy.” The idea behind magic is to “change the world according to our will.” Then one can “create reality where no reality is.”

And that reality? — a smoking ruin where once a city stood.