Harvard’s conservative magazine suspended for Nazi-laced article on 'Blood and Soil' values

A conservative magazine at Harvard University, The Harvard Salient, was shut down earlier this week. As the magazine published an article that used sentences like “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” and urged a return to the values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” A phrase that has been used as a slogan, "blood and soil," and is associated with Nazi ideology.

The September issue of the magazine used an article by David F.X. Army, which quotes Hitler's 1939 speech in the Reichstag, “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” and the same speech in which Hitler forecasted that the Second World War would lead to the end of jews.

The editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, The Harvard Salient, Richard Y. Rodgers, defended David, saying that neither the author nor any member of the editorial staff was aware of the resemblance.

Rodgers further added, “The article was a meditation on how nations and cultures preserve coherence in an age of rootless cosmopolitanism and global homogenization. To confuse a defence of belonging for a manifesto on exclusion is a fault of the reader, not the writer.”

The Debate of Free Speech and Ethnonationalist Ideology

The Board of Directors of Harvard Salient suspended the publication, calling it ‘reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning’. Another Harvard newspaper, Harvard Crimson, featured criticism of David's write-up. However, David responded to the criticism ‘ordinary conservative thought is one headline away from criminality’

Recently, Republicans have been criticised for their rhetoric, which resonates with Nazi propaganda. It's not just the words of Adolf Hitler, that should be alarming, because conservatism or specifically ethnonationalist conservatism, propagates certain ideas of racial purity and superiority, which morph quickly into the language of Hitler, even if the phrasing is not always the same. Moreover, far-right movements use the guise of nationalism to propagate these exclusionary ideas.

The magazine has been suspended pending review by its board. However, this incident raises questions about legitimate conservative opinion and rhetoric that are close to ethnonationalist or ethnofascist ideologies. While a libertarian will be open to defending the idea of free speech and publishing the magazine, others are concerned about the danger of the prevailing culture. The board has noted that it received ‘deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organisation’, implying that the issue goes far beyond a few articles, but how the magazine is run or the community espouses to be.