In the Old Norse, the term, Gambanreidi, means, “The Goðin (Gods and Goddesses) clad for battle (armed).” We have always tried to apply a hard-logic style to contemporary events and to interpretations of the Teutonic past.

Currents of change and renewal are surging through our noosphere. Everywhere, there is talk of either a cataclysmic future, such as Gordon Michael Scallion predicts, or a “golden age,” to come, in either case, after 2011.

Few seem to stop and think that this is a symptom of alienation. A global monoculture, such as the one now emerging behind the twin juggernauts of finance capitalism and Semitic mythology, promises to make everyone feel appreciated and “at home.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The fixation with an imagined future is due to the fact that the present is not working for anyone, even the rich or powerful, who can still get caught in a web of laws or rules. The more it doesn’t work, the more the sheeple bray out for a solution from the sky in the form of a reborn solar myth. Thus it is that both Maitreya and Jesus are scheduled to make an appearance at any time.

To understand the dissatisfaction and alienation of the rootless, debt-ridden masses, we have to understand what people really need. We all need what our Pagan ancestors knew to be the fundamental elements of life. Earth: to walk barefoot on one’s own patch of earth, no matter the size, where you can build a stone sculpture, plant the trees and shrubs you want to, raise vegetables, or just let it merge with an adjacent forest. Communion with earth is healing and restoring. Few have this access and the rest may step carefully (and not barefoot- beware the dog-borne worms, which live in the soil for three years) in public parks or pay a fee to use state or national parks.

Water: to live near a stream or well, take water from it, and hear or watch it go by ties us to the sense-connectedness of time, just as earth does to place. Just as water washes the clothes, it, too, washes the senses, and, by immersion (baptism by immersion was practiced extensively by Druids) the orðr, or energy centers in the body.

Wood: trees produce negative ions. Wood is nature’s plastic, and could be harvested very selectively and renewed with multi-species replanting. Living near or in the midst of woods purifies and cools air in summer, just as dying trees, or excess growth thinned out, provide firewood for winter and cooking. Trees are a bridge between other elements, earth, sun, and air, nourished by water and soil, just as we should be.

Fire: and this includes the healing sun-fire, is the most useful of elements in the practical sense. Just as water washes away cares when one meditates on a stream or at an ocean (and how many fishermen, there purportedly for a catch, are really enjoying the sense of renewal of water?), so does fire burn away what is sick, unworkable, or wrong. In fire meditation, one keeps the fire burning for a good while and sits, meditating on the flames, gazing into them and seeing the burning out of all corruption. When properly opening oneself to the sun, cover with sunscreen or cloth the areas of the body which receive radiation most of the time, even when clothed, like face, neck, back of hands and forearms. See the golden rays penetrating all the internal organs, whether lying prone or supine, and feel purified and restored. For the rich, these latter two are the motivation for hot spring resorts, whether at Baden-Baden or Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the solar temples, such as the Riviera; the need for these elements is tacitly acknowledged hence the price tag for acquiring them.

Air: we need to breathe deeply, slowly, in a less hurried life, of clean air. Oxygen is the catalyst for all our bodily functions and we sicken when we don’t breathe correctly or get enough of it.

These basic needs won’t ever be available to 6 billion or 8 billion people. Our alienation from these is our alienation from the very wellsprings of life. One effect, already described, is a sense of primal dissatisfaction, which leads a people who see nothing in their present which leads to hope to despair and imagine something- nay, anything- will be different in a future. A second effect, which is observable, is the mass desire for the world’s population to be greatly reduced, even if the person thinking this must, herself, be part of the reduction. It is as though there is a mass wish , and a sense of the rightness of this metaphorical burning of the weeds, so that a new, widely spaced garden can be cultivated. It is not so much a death-wish as a mass yearning for a healthy planet, which continuing population growth and a rising “standard of living”- read much more resource consumption- everywhere, threatens. This wish finds expression in the popularity of any sort of doomsday scenario, whether that of an errant asteroid’s slamming into earth, or a massive set of solar flares, to universal plagues. In some sort of validation of a mass subconscious, it seems inconceivable to large numbers of people that the status quo could continue.

What, then, does Odinism, and National Socialism have to do with all of the above? When we consider any of the nature-based religions, they are based on a sense of authenticity, where what counts is not what you profess (or confess) but what you do. What counts on a job is not what you can measure of another’s productivity, or how you can manipulate paper to produce more reports (paper), but what you can do to create more value-added productivity, what you can do. What matters is how you live, not coercing others, which is what the universalistic coerced mythologies have always measured.

Both Odinism and National Socialism are based on the sanctity of family and tribe (the larger set of visibly similar / biologically similar families of which an individual family or clan are a subset). Capitalism and Christianity value remote ownership of the work of others (stocks) and the absolute goodness of symbol (Word) over fact, of the abstract, invisible “God” or remote owner over the tangible, and local. These are abstractions, held valuable over tangible realities. Universalism values placing more different races and cultures together in a geographical area, such that there can never be a sense of being home for anyone and, hence, no sense of direction, except that of the think-tanks, such as the Hudson Institute, Stanford Research Institute, or Tavistock, who planned the contemporary “melting pot” in the first place. (This is not to be confused with the multi-European immigration of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries into the U.S., whose participants shared a very similar worldview and culture.)

Odinism offers the vision of a cosmos ruled not by a single dictator, but rather, a congress of tribal Gods and Goddesses, of whom each Folk have their own. Given this perspective, of a decentralized numinous reality, it is difficult to accept centralization and political monoliths. If all the forces of nature are in a flux and changing relationships to one another, and reality is a congress of different factions, it is impossible to accept a centralized, one-world dictatorship. That is why, as less and less real freedom exists, the more repressive religions, Judaism and its twin offspring, Islam and Christianity, flourish. If the assumption is that the person is so debased, weak, and degenerate, that a God-man had to suffer for him, and that human baseness dictates that a person kneel, genuflect, bend forward to Mecca in the mounting gesture, or rock, whimper, and mourn a rubble wall, then this conditions people to expect nothing better than repression, usury, and stern, external control. It must be serving someone’s purposes.

Certainly, the need to surrender one’s destiny and control over the process of inquiry into the larger life questions to a ‘higher’ and invisible authority (or the priesthood / telepreachers, who claim to have just heard from It) must be innate. When we moved from living in small bands of hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years into the phase of communities and agriculture, we no longer needed our ‘pack leaders’, leader of the hunting band. Man, like wolf, is a hierarchical animal. When the needed leader is not needed in real terms, we create an invisible analogue.

Like other natural religions (as opposed to those cobbled together by formal councils, like the one at Nicea, to consolidate political and economic control of the populace), Odinism is rich with stories of Gods and Goddesses, seers, and mystics, struggling to evolve. It is based on evolution and minding your own business. It is based on doing what is right and honorable, even though its code of conduct does not demand universal conformance, as does one of “Ten Commandments” (“have no other God before me……”). It is a worldview based on authenticity, earned experiential wisdom, and letting others work out the details of their own enlightenment or lack thereof. It is a system, as we see in the paradigms of Seiðr, for centering oneself and living more effectively. This is a great departure from how religion is experienced today as an ego-trip where one person, made acceptable and “good” by parroting another people’s mythologies and being accepted by a congregation, attempts to “witness” what she smugly feels she knows to others.

National Socialism must, to be understood, be removed from the propaganda interpretations of it, which emerged from the way the victors wrote the history of World War II. It was, at its base, a system where government invested in the welfare of its people, but the people were a folk with a common language, similar races, and common culture. Through government, rules were imposed on occupational safety (look not to OSHA, but the Third Reich for the first), workers were encouraged to become stockholders in their companies, and universal healthcare was made available to all. The nation invested in important public goods, such as cures for cancer, in which area great strides were taken (for books on all these topics, check out the Barnes Review ). Unfortunately, National Socialism was linked to a Germany, which had never known free speech, freedom of the press, and had little experience with elections. All we know of it is the German model- or do we?

At the most basic level, a clue to what NS means is in the words themselves. Think the terms, “nationalistic socialism”. To be nationalistic does not mean trying to constantly invade nor dictate to other nations, as the U.S., Britain and USSR (and now Russia), and China, the very nations who defeated the Axis, have done, consistently, since WWII. It simply means adhering to the law of local specialization, realizing that what is good in one culture or area does not work everywhere else, that all human solutions are, by nature, limited to specialized use. Why is it specialized? Aren’t people 98% similar? Do not, in fact, all humans and chimpanzees share 95% the same DNA?

Even if these two figures from modern genetic studies are true, we can look across at another hierarchical and highly evolved intelligent mammal for answers to specialization. Are not all dogs basically the same? Would not a German shepherd, a border collie, and a toy poodle all share the same 98% similar DNA? Probably they do. Yet we all know that the temperament and innate tendencies of each breed are nowhere similar. If we had a law mandating equal use of all dogs and assigned the toy poodle to guard a junkyard or tried to train a Great Dane to live as a litter-box trained lap dog in a one-bedroom apartment, the results would be comical! If we took a cocker spaniel and tried to use it to herd sheep, as can a Border collie, again, this would not work. Each dog has its specialized uses and limitations. There are those so steeped in egocentric and homocentric Semitic mythology cycles of one sort or the other who deny that we are animals, and that, therefore, any analogy to animals is viable, yet, we demonstrably are animals, despite speech and the ability for abstract thought. We are territorial, hierarchical, and we certainly share all the animal’s bodily processes.

It stands as corollary, from an NS viewpoint, then, that most of what works in Mexico City or Bangkok will not be directly transferable to Moscow or Stockholm. The welfare state in post-WWII Sweden did not result in several generations of welfare moms and welfare babies. Universal health insurance, education and other social goods, among a very productive (as covered in National Geographic article in early ‘70’s “Sweden: Quiet Workshop of the World”) people with a multi-generational work ethic was a social investment that paid off in a very high standard of living. This only began to waiver with GATT-sponsored “free trade,” which threatened Swedish workers with competition from sweatshop economies and the massive influx of peoples who did not share the Scandinavian traditions. Now the ‘cradle-to-grave’ socialism for which Sweden was famous is being scrapped as unworkable.

It is not as if we can’t find, in the contemporary world, nations, which, in effect, practice their own versions of National Socialism. They are two of the most prosperous and successful nations, in their areas. They are Japan and Israel.

Now, just as the NS model in Germany was linked to its experience with the Khazars, who had become Jewish by adopting that religion in the 11th Century, CE, and was, therefore, anti-Semitic, so the Jewish state is nationalistic, racialist, and very ethnically-driven in all its policies. Its enmity to Arabs and other regional competitors can be traced back to the many genocides recounted in the Old Testament, especially in the book of Joshua. In similar fashion, John Sachs recounts how, from 1945 to 1947, in An Eye for an Eye, Jewish prison camp commandants in communist Eastern Europe exterminated German captives. During the mass exterminations in the Ukraine, newly released Soviet archives have upped the estimate from the earlier 8 million to as many as 20 million. Who was the bulk of the NKVD who carried this out in 1932, even before Hitler’s Germany? Their leaders were such men as Lazar Kagonovich and Igor Beria, both Jews as were most of the secret policemen. Genocide, whether or not it occurred against 6 million, as alleged in the only approved and publicized holocaust stories, is not part of National Socialism. The UN’s Commissioner on Human Rights has each year consistently cited Israel as in the world’s top 20 or 30 violators of human rights for mass detentions and torture of Palestinians, but that has nothing to do with why national socialism works. NS is nothing but the radical assumption that a people feel more at home, more at peace, and function better around those of similar race and culture. While Israel makes this assumption for its own citizens, having expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and having confiscated their properties and razed their homes to make Jewish settlements, Jewish intellectuals make quite different standards for any White-led nation. People are more productive when there is a common purpose, when there is the certainty that any parasitic behavior means parasitizing your own people, rather than another breed.

In both Japan and Israel, government heavily invests in healthcare, sponsoring research, and helping national industries flourish. In both, any student showing promise can obtain excellent post-secondary education as a social good. In either, extensive legal, social, and customary barriers prevent the nation from losing its racial-ethnic character. Neither encourages, nor would tolerate extensive immigration by those of different cultures, although Israel has welcomed Felashas, non-European Jews to lessen the need for Arabs to do menial jobs. Just as nationalistic and socialistic China uses a high percentage of its population for unpaid prison labor, in almost every state of the U.S., there are ads encouraging employers to take advantage of inmate work-crews. Prison factories are as prevalent in the U.S. and Israel, despite the absence of a war of annihilation, being waged against both military and civilian personnel (German bombing losses; 2 million: postwar induced starvation deaths in “Rhine-Meadow” U.S.-run concentration camps of displaced persons and POWs; 1-1.7 million, as covered in exposé by Canadian journalist James Bacques, Other Losses, from International Red Cross records; German civilians exterminated by post-war Communist regimes in Eastern Europe; 4.5 million as documented in Gruesome Harvest by Ralph Keeling ISBN 0-939484-40-4).

To take NS model to its logical conclusion, realize that governments that professed quite different models practiced aspects of it. Throughout former communist Eastern Europe, rather than import Turks, N. Africans, Arabs, or other guest workers, as did the Western “democracies” of Europe, high school students were formed into work brigades to bring in the grape, plum, wheat, or cherry harvests. Despite being Communist, and allegedly universalistic, the Soviet Union used internal passports to keep non-White immigrants from moving into Russia, S.S.R.

We hope to at some time in the near future offer a view of how National Socialism could be applied is its pure form, not mixed up with long-standing nationalistic feuds in a work titled simply The Device, first offered in GS as a print journal in our 1993-4 editions. It need not be and should not be a police state. There are more people in prisons as a percentage of population in the U.S. right now than in any NS state we can think of. There are more things against the law and more laws against anything than can serve any purpose except that of creating a vast gulag of cheap prison labor. Rather, our vision is of the best elements of NS, likes its universal education, regardless of income, merged with libertarianism, the least government and maximum personal liberty.

This vision is viable only with a monoracial political entity. When there are too many groups with too many worldviews, order becomes imposed sternly from above, as each innately tends to go in different directions and a monolithic, centralized authoritarian structure is inevitable. Only when there is self-restraint and commonly shared values, can collective sanction and formal policing be minimized. Only where the bonds of family, clan, and their logical larger unit, nation, are affirmed as a genetic basis of society, can there be any sort of personal liberty. Only when the differences in human temperament, in the very character of societies built by different breeds of men, as a collective reflection of these very valuable differences are realized, can each group struggle toward local, and therefore workable solutions to societal problems and challenges. Only universalisms, such as Christianity, Communism, and Islam, justified going across a border and smashing another culture to bits because the aggressors knew better than the victims did what was “good for them.” Absent such universalisms (and international capitalism does the same through economic warfare) and the ruin which they visit upon the planet, it is possible to envision a mosaic, where every piece of territory and the people who live upon it live within their means, within their borders, and go about collective self-improvement thereby.

The Gambanreidi Statement, printed since 1979 and offered as an on-line journal at www.geocities.com/gambanreidi.geo