A well done presentation of Rockwell’s life.
To learn about Rockwell’s death, please visit my other blog.
Rockwell was a man of great courage and ability, who spoke some important truths, but it remains an open question with me, to what extent Rockwell really was a national-socialist. Clearly he had an essentially biological view of man (despite nominal Christianity) and was thoroughly anti-Communist, and he was aware of Jews as a subversive element, but these tendencies were strong in the USA prior to World War II, and not especially linked to national-socialism until war-propaganda made them so.
Rockwell was certainly a nationalist. It is on the second half of the “national-socialist” label that Rockwell seems open to question.* I have noticed that some of the people (William Pierce, Kurt Saxon) that joined Rockwell leaned toward a traditional American “rugged individualism” and seemed to take little interest in the NSDAP’s economic policies; they seemed to be hostile toward the basic idea of social-welfare programs, which were crucial to the National-Socialist project in Germany.
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* According to today’s standard textbook definitions, abundant social programs and central economic planning do not qualify a society as socialist without government-ownership of enterprises. This technicality gives Marxists the pleasure of declaring that national-socialism even as it was practiced in Germany is not really socialism. But my question is whether even the aspects of socialism that the NSDAP practiced are supported by or consistent with Rockwell’s statements and writings.