I've just bought Hertfordshire, you know

I am a man of multiple interests: a senator,
military man, businessman, I undertake

trading missions for the government ,
and I'm a landowner,

I've just bought Hertfordshire, you know.

B. Evaristo, The Emperor's babe (2001), 15-16

The Kindly Ones is simply “Houellebecq does Nazism.”

Well-intentioned friends send me everything they can find about Jonathan Littell, and I am yet again forced to return to the subject. Things are not going well at all. I have just read the account of a speech he gave at a Normale Supérieure school, where he said: “Evil is committed by people like us, people who sleep, who shit, who fuck, and who have the same relationship as we do to the body and to the fear of death, with thought coming afterwards. All killers are like us.”

Fair enough. In fact, I agree completely. Here again is Hannah Arendt’s thesis, and here, again, I cannot deny its truth. But it is a very strange speech to justify his book, precisely because Littell seems to have done his utmost to invent the most singular character possible. Let us recall, for those few unfortunates who have not been able to read The Kindly Ones, that the SS veteran Aue is an intellectual who sleeps with his sister, kills his parents, actively participates in genocide, sucks off Robert Brasillach, survives a bullet in the head, is never separated from his Flaubert, and enjoys rolling in his shit from time to time. For a guy who is just like you and me, that is quite a list!

...

A poster on an Internet forum expresses the opinion that Max Aue [the protagonist in Jonathan Littel's The Kindly ones] “rings true because he is the mirror of his age.” What? No! He rings true (for certain, easily duped readers) because he is the mirror of our age: a postmodern nihilist, essentially. At no moment in the novel is it suggested that this character believes in Nazism. On the contrary, he is often critically detached from National Socialist doctrine — and in that sense, he can hardly be said to reflect the delirious fanaticism prevalent in his time. On the other hand, this detachment, this blasé attitude toward everything, this permanent malaise, this taste for philosophizing, this unspoken amorality, this morose sadism, and this terrible sexual frustration that constantly twists his guts… but of course! How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply “Houellebecq does Nazism.”

L. Binet, HhhH (2009), tr. S. Taylor (2012), unknown & 204

These both from the pages originally missing from Binet's text - and then put back in. They're here. I couldn't be bothered to re-find the first one, but it accurately reflects my view at the time of Littell's novel - i.e., it completely fails in it's stated purpose by making the protagonist so weird. 

Sport? What a load of fascist rubbish it is

Reading Heydrich's speech, I have three comments:

1. In the Czech state, as elsewhere, the feeblest defender of the values of the national education is the responsible minister . Having been a virulent anti-Nazi, Emmanuel Moravec became, after Munich, the most active collaborator in Hedrich's Czech government an the Germans' preferred Czech representative - much more so than senile old President Hácha. Local history books tend to call him 'the Czech Quisling'.
2. The staunchest defenders of the values of national education are teachers because, whatever we might otherwise think of them, they have the authority and the will be subversive. And they deserve praise for that.
3. Sport? What a load of fascist rubbish it is.

L. Binet, HhhH (2009), tr. S. Taylor (2012), 168

This is a terrible analysis. Sport and Education are potent, that's why they come under pressure. It's particularly weird though to look at sport in a Nazi context that way when the most famous sporting incident in Nazi Germany is the failure of ideological outcomes in the 1936 Olympics. One presumes that Binet, like me, was very bad at sport at school.

Vile Chamberlain, a man whose spinelessness is equalled only by his blindness.

Unfortunately, it is not yet Churchill who guides the destiny of Britain and the world, but the vile Chamberlain, a man whose spinelessness is equalled only by his blindness.

L. Binet, HhhH (2009), tr. S. Taylor (2012), 93

The very foundations of his fortune are laid deep in sacrilege, fortunes built out of deserted shrines and pillaged altars

The Duke of Devonshire issues a circular applying for subscriptions to oppose this Bill, and he charges us with robbery of God. Does he know – of course he knows – that the very foundations of his fortune are laid deep in sacrilege, fortunes built out of deserted shrines and pillaged altars . . . What is their story? Look at the whole story of the pillage of the Reformation. They robbed the Catholic Church, they robbed the monasteries, they robbed the altars, they robbed the almshouses, they robbed the poor and they robbed the dead. Then they come here when we are trying to seek at any rate to recover some part of this pillaged property for the poor for whom it was originally given, and they venture, with hands dripping with the fat of sacrilege, to accuse us of robbery of God.

D. Lloyd-George, debate on the Welsh Disestablishment Bill, May 1912, cited in G. Dangerfield, The strange death of liberal England (1936), 255

The millstones of Capital and Labour, the upper and the nether, grind slowly but exceeding small

And Liberalism . . . Liberalism, with its fatal trust in compromise, had evaded the issue onc e again. But, slide and wriggle as it would, there was a doom which it could not evade. The millstones of Capital and Labour, the upper and the nether, grind slowly but exceeding small, and Liberalism was caught between them. It might put off the evil hour, poor slippery old faith, but they would crush it in the end.

G. Dangerfield, The strange death of liberal England (1936), 244

Something must certainly be done for them: not too much, of course, that would never do; but something

For Liberalism, after all, implies rather more than a political creed or an economic philosophy; it is a profoundly conscience-stricken state of mind. It is the final expression of everything which is respectable, God-fearing and frightened. The poor, it says, are always with us, and something must certainly be done for them: not too much, of course, that would never do; but something. The poor might reasonably be expected to have their own opinions about this; and, indeed, in certain periods of the Victorian era they gave vent to these opinions in a most disconcerting manner. But they, too, had been infected with the same disease. ‘Several toasts were given’ (so writes an observer of a workmen’s dinner during the prolonged erection, in the ’70s, of the Albert Memorial) ‘and many of the workmen spoke, almost all of them commencing by “Thanking God that they enjoyed good health”; some alluded to the temperance that prevailed amongst them, others observed how little swearing was ever heard, whilst all said how pleased and proud they were to be engaged on so great a work.’ (Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria, p. 324.)

G. Dangerfield, The strange death of liberal England (1936), 181