Review of Sunic’s Homo Americanus – Gottfried

Review of Tomislav Sunic’s Homo Americanus

By Paul Gottfried

A polyglot Croatian scholar, Tomislav Sunic, provides in his newest book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, reasons that a good European should distrust the US. These reasons are significantly different from those that one might encounter in the Euro-American leftist and mainstream press, e.g., that President Bush is a Christian maniac who is unleashing an anti-Muslim crusade against a Middle Eastern people or that Americans have taken an inexcusably long time to introduce homosexual marriage or, most ominously, that we treat illegals from across our Southern border with xenophobic brutality. Sunic gives the proper reasons that Europeans should despise us, namely, because we are hostile to European national identities, because we have contributed to bringing to Central Europe Frankfurt School brain-laundering and last but not least, because we try to substitute for concrete historical traditions such notions as propositional nationhood and the ideology of human rights. In his elaboration of these grievances Sunic is entirely on target, and the fact that he has had to publish his manuscript (as far as I can determine) with his own funds speaks volumes for the difficulty of publicizing non-orthodox views on certain subjects.

I also think that Sunic strikes the proper balance, and indeed far better than most of the European New Right, by stressing both the newness and antiquity of the American policies and attitudes under discussion. Instead of dumping on the Protestant, moralistic culture out of which America grew as a nation, Sunic believes that culture had its strengths before it became secularized and corrupted. It is what American religious culture became by the beginning of the last century which concerns him, as does the obvious contradiction between a territorially defined Europe of nations and a righteous global empire seeking to implement its conception of rights everywhere.

Contrary to the postwar conservative illusion that the US, unlike revolutionary France, embraced historic rights while rejecting the “rights of man,” Sunic shows Americans being as obsessed with universal rights as they are with consumer products. It is the combination of consumption and rights talk which has produced “homo americanus,” a constantly reproduced American prototype that by now, according to Sunic, is as easily identified as “homo sovieticus.” During the Cold War, Sunic and others living in the communist bloc began to think of the products of party indoctrination as having a recognizable character and appearance. It was postmodern and post-bourgeois, but for all of its ritualized revolutionary discourse this human type was profoundly conformist. Its presence, according to some critics, precluded the possibility of restoring human character as it had existed before, in pre-Marxist societies: as a result of longtime Communist control, one had to deal with flat, standardized personalities that might have been the worst byproduct of “scientific socialism.”

Sunic, who received his doctorate at University of California, Santa Barbara, and then taught at Juniata College in Pennsylvania before returning to Europe, believes that Americans fall into a similar pattern. As the creations of a self-proclaimed political experiment, whose subjects generally frown on the European past, Americans, and especially the younger generation, show a depressing sameness. But they mask this defect as individual self-discovery. They confuse the dreary recitation of politically correct gibberish with sensitivity that they think they have arrived at through their own value-clarification. A combination of materialism, superficiality and misplaced moral concern is the American gestalt that Sunic keeps coming back to. And he seems bothered by the fact that Europeans have begun to imitate this gestalt even while bewailing American influence.

A foreword by Kevin MacDonald, known for his controversial arguments about the destructiveness of the Jewish impact on gentile society and culture, may unfairly bring Sunic flak. His own critique stays clear of anti-Jewish tirades and of the tasteless flattery of American Jews heard among some Christian Philosemites. Sunic properly focuses on why Europeans should deplore American conversionary politics, whose effects he carefully outlines. And with due respect to MacDonald, whose work I continue to find stimulating, he zeros in on the Protestant deformation, which may be far more important as an explanation for what Sunic criticizes than the Jewish war against gentile national identities. There is, by the way, one point raised in the introduction, and then in the text itself, which commands particular attention. In both places the observation is made that the politics of guilt may be imperialistic righteousness that the moral fanatic turns against himself, when he is not venting it on others. The point is well taken, and besides, it sounds like something the Frankfurt School and its American imitators might say about bourgeois Christians.

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Gottfried, Paul. “Homo Americanus.” Taki’s Magazine, 22 August 2007. <http://takimag.com/article/homo_americanus#axzz2HIndVAyg >.

Note: Tomislav Sunic’s book has also been published in a Spanish translation as Homo americanus: hijo de la posmoderna (Barcelona: Ediciones Nueva Republica, 2008) and in a French translation as Homo americanus: rejeton de l’ère postmoderne (Saint-Genis-Laval: Akribeia, 2010).

On the issue of the Jews, see also Tomislav Sunic’s “American Neurosis: Love and Hate for the Jews” and Paul Gottfried’s “In Search of Anti-Semitism.”

 

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European Rebirth – Krebs

The European Rebirth

By Pierre Krebs

An Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, was the first to understand that the state is not confined to a political apparatus. In fact he established that the political apparatus runs parallel to the so-called civil apparatus. In other words, each political apparatus is reinforced by a civil consensus, the psychological support of the masses.

This psychological support expresses itself through a consensus on the level of culture, world-view, and ethos. In order to exists at all, political power is thus dependent on a cultural power diffused within the masses. On the basis of this analysis Gramsci understood why Marxists could not take over power in bourgeois democracies: they did not have cultural power.

To be precise, it is impossible to overthrow a political apparatus without previously having gained control of cultural power. The assent of the people must be won first: their ideas, ethos, ways of thinking, the value-system, art, education have to be worked on and modified. Only when people feel the need for change as a self-evident necessity will the existing political power, now detached from the general consensus, start crumbling and be overthrown.

Metapolitics can be seen as the revolutionary war fought out on the level of world-views, ways of thinking, and culture.

It is precisely the metapolitical level which is our starting point. We want to take over the laboratories of thinking. Hence our task is to oppose the egalitarian ethos and egalitarian socio-economic thinking with a world-view based on differentiation: this means an ethic and a socio-economic theory which respects the right to be different. We want to create the system of values and attitudes necessary for gaining control of cultural power.

Our strategy is dictated neither by the immediate contingencies of reality nor the superficial upheavals of political life. We are not interested in political factions but in attitudes to life. Commentators will carry on writing irrelevant articles categorizing us under ‘New Right’ but also under ‘left-wing’. Such terms are pathetic and leave us cold, for neither the right nor the left are our concern. It is only basic attitudes to life which people have that interest us. And all those who are aware of the American as well as of the Soviet danger, who realize the absolute necessity of the cultural rebirth of Europe as the harbinger of its political wakening, who feel rooted in a people and a destiny, are our friends and allies, irrespective of their political and ideological views. What motivates us and what we are striving for does cannot be accommodated within the activities of a political party, but – and we insist on this point – solely within the framework of a metapolitical, exclusively cultural project. A programme which sets out once again to make us conscious of our identity through awakening the memory of our future, as it were. In this way we aim to prepare the ground for what is to come.

We have defined our programme as the total rebirth of Europe. We have also established the strategy for realizing this project: metapolitics and cultural war. We still have to consider the basis and material framework within which this programme can be carried out: the Thule Seminar, a New School of European culture.

The tragedy of the contemporary world is the tragedy of disloyalty: the uprooting of every culture, estrangement from our true natures, the atomization of man, the levelling of values, the uniformity of life. A critical and exhaustive engagement with modern knowledge – from philosophy to ethology, from anthropology to sociology, from the natural sciences to history and educational theory—if carried out with the appropriate intellectual rigour and sound empirical methodology, can only contribute to throwing light on the general confusion of the world. It is with such fundamental considerations that the Thule-Seminar is concerned. Open to the intellectual and spiritual life of our age, yet critical of all ideological dogmas, its research is based on a sense of commitment to western culture. The Thule-Seminar is concerned with clarifying the basic questions at the heart of the movement of ideas, with redefining the key cultural concepts and the discovery of new alternatives to the core problems of the age. The Thule-Seminar proclaims a European Europe which must become aware of its identity and its destiny.

 

Source: Die Europäische Wiedergeburt [The European rebirth] (Grabert, Tübingen, 1982) 82-6, 89.

Online Source: http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news041220110000.html

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Krebs, Pierre. “The European Rebirth.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 7 December 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/the-european-rebirth/ >.

Note: For those interested in further reading on the subject discussed here, see also Antonio Gramsci’s Selections from Cultural Writings (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).

An alternative overview of Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony can be found on our site in the article “On Antonio Gramsci” by Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner

 

What is Racism? – Benoist

“What is Racism?” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 246 KB):

What is Racism?

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De Benoist, Alain. “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), pp. 11-48. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf >.

Notes: The original French version of this essay was “Racisme: remarques autour d’une definition,” which was published in Racismes, Antiracismes, edited by Andre Béjin and Julien Freund (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1986). This book is also available in Italian translation as Razzismo e antirazzismo (Firenze: La roccia di Erec, 1992).

On this subject, see also this commentary on racism in French by Alain de Benoist (“Contre tous les racismes,” Éléments, n°8-9, 1974): <http://grece-fr.com/?p=3385 >. A similar commentary is available in Spanish as “Sobre racismo y antirracismo,” entrevista a Alain de Benoist por Peter Krause (published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 47, “Elogio de la Diferencia. Diferencialism versus Racismo” [Mayo 2013]): <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 47 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 47 – Diferencialismo). The original German version of this interview was “Alain de Benoist, Vordenker der Neuen Rechten in Frankreich, über Rassismus und Antirassismus, Ideologien und Fremdenfeindlichkeit” (Junge Freiheit, 30/98, 17 July 1998): <http://jungefreiheit.de/service/archiv/?www.jf-archiv.de/archiv98/308aa7.htm >.

The matter of racism versus differentialism has also been further discussed in Spanish in Elementos, N° 43, “La Causa de los Pueblos: Etnicidad e Identidad” (Marzo 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/03/elementos-n-43-la-causa-de-los-pueblos.html >. (download from our site here: Elementos Nº 43 – Etnicidad).

 

Leader-ful Resistance – Morgan

Leader-ful Resistance: The Predicament of the Right Today

By John Morgan

The concept of “leaderless resistance” was popularized on the Right through the writings of Klansman Louis Beam in the 1980s and 1990s, after having allegedly been invented by American intelligence officers in the 1960s as a possible strategy for resisting a theoretical Communist takeover of the United States.

It is really just an adaptation of the cell structure, in which an insurgent group divides itself into units of no more than a few members each, with the cells being completely unaware of the others, and with only one individual in each cell who has contact with a higher authority, who in turn transmits instructions from the central leadership. In this way, even if individual cells or even the central leadership of the group are captured and interrogated, the organization itself can survive since there is no one who actually knows everyone else involved.

Many groups have used this technique, successfully or unsuccessfully, over the last century, including the IRA, the French Resistance, the Algerian FLN (as depicted in the classic film The Battle of Algiers), the Viet Cong, the Weather Underground, and Al Qaeda being just a few prominent examples.

Leaderless resistance takes this a step further and dispenses with the concept of an organization altogether, instead advocating that small groups or individuals should, on their own initiative and utilizing nothing but whatever resources they can muster on their own, carry out attacks on the enemy. Since nothing would unite these individuals or groups apart from a common ideology, there is no way for the enemy’s security forces to track them or anticipate their moves. Eventually, once the number and intensity of attacks becomes high enough, and the sympathies of the masses are swayed, a mass movement will somehow emerge and take the struggle to the next level.

On paper, it sounds brilliant, but in practice it is always a dismal failure. Those on the Right who have carried out “lone wolf” attacks, such as Timothy McVeigh (if he can really be classified as a Rightist, which is debatable), David Copeland, Benjamin Smith, Buford Furrow, James von Brunn, and Anders Breivik all carried out acts of violence which they viewed as the starting point of a struggle that would be continued by others who would pick up their banners.

Their actions are all characterized by an equal mix of the grotesque and the pathetic, as well as a complete failure to introduce any lasting change into society apart from a sense of revulsion. The fact is that, even if such an end were desirable, the majority of people in any society are abhorred by random violence, and it is only because the worldviews of these would-be guerrillas were so distorted that they believed they were acting on behalf of a larger struggle.

Similarly, as is evinced in the writings of its strategists, it is clear that Al Qaeda was hoping that 9/11 would be the spark that would set off acts of leaderless resistance throughout the United States, Europe and the Muslim world. They had marginally greater success than did their Right-wing counterparts, at least in terms of body count, although they also failed to realize any of their goals or to establish a trend that large numbers of people would emulate. Many of their attacks only succeeded in killing the attackers themselves.

Essentially, leaderless resistance is an act of desperation which a powerless group adopts in the face of an enemy that seems invincible. Leaderless resistance only appears to be a good option when no unified or trustworthy leadership exists, and when the surrounding culture is completely hostile. That is the situation the Right has been in, in the United States and to a lesser degree in Europe, for decades.

The fact is, even in the unlikely event of so many people carrying out independent attacks that they could turn the United States into Iraq circa 2006, causing large numbers of Americans to become sympathetic and in turn overthrew the government, who would assume the mantle of leadership? There is certainly no group on the true Right in the U.S. today that is anywhere near to approaching the level of sophistication needed to take power over the entire nation – or even part of it, for that matter. Nor is there any group whom everyone would agree to follow.

Such a strategy also adds to the perception of our weakness, as Alex Kurtagic cogently explained in his essential “Masters of the Universe” address at NPI last month, as opposed to projecting an image of power. Only the weak resort to strategies of desperation.

Unfortunately, however, in spite of its repeatedly demonstrated pointlessness, many on the Right still advocate this approach. It can only be a waste of time and resources, not to mention suicidal. Not that Rightists shouldn’t have at least basic knowledge about firearms, martial arts, strategy, self-defense techniques and such, but those are inherently useful skills at any time or place, and should not become something that is emphasized to the exclusion of everything else as if it were a solution to all problems.

I would argue, however, that the primary problem with the Right today isn’t the romance of leaderless resistance, but the much more concrete reality of a leader-ful resistance.

The correct solution, especially in a democracy where such things are well within our reach, is to organize, and this requires leaders. Unfortunately, people on the Right are all too eager to become leaders. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t receive an invitation on Facebook or by e-mail to join some new Rightist organization which claims to offer the solutions to the ills of Western civilization. Many of these groups have some interesting ideas, and I believe that most of them are sincere. But typically their achievements don’t go beyond Facebook and/or a blog or website of some kind. Perhaps they manage to turn out a few issues of some sort of newsletter or journal, most of which are dedicated to attacking other groups.

You can tell from the scope of the discussions, however, that the membership of most of them doesn’t go beyond the “leader” and the few of his friends whom he persuaded to sign up. And typically, 90% of these groups vanish within a few weeks or months for one reason or another (usually either laziness or internal squabbles), littering the Internet with their dormant textual remains. “And another one bites the dust” plays in my head whenever I come across such sites.

Although the Internet itself is still relatively new, the phenomenon that is now occurring in cyberspace is just the latest manifestation of an old problem: the Right is its own worst enemy. Our movement is riven with enormous egos and obsessional people. So many among our ranks are convinced that only they hold the correct solution, and are so much in love with their own ideas that they will not tolerate even a slight disagreement over matters of philosophy or policy. I’m not a psychologist and will not attempt to speculate on why the Right is so prone to this phenomenon, although it seems endemic to all social movements, even if the Right in recent decades clearly suffers from a particularly acute case of it.

This problem isn’t restricted to those who start organizations, either. Whenever someone starts something that enjoys even a little bit of success, the jangling chorus of detractors and conspiracy theorists begins to make itself heard, eager to rip it apart. A common way to do this is to attack the characters of the people behind it, often, but not always, based upon information from dubious sources. In this way, we do our enemies’ work for them. It’s no wonder that few intelligent or talented people can stomach being involved with the Right for very long before they go away in frustration.

The fact is that, unless we want to remain eternal hobbyists on the margins of society as we are now, we are eventually going to have to agree to put aside our differences and unite behind specific causes, leaders and organizations, and get to work in the real world. Having dozens of tiny groups advocating different messages and techniques, and spending much of their energy trying to win over the same, tiny number of people who are already in our “scene” by defaming all the other groups, has accomplished nothing. If we are serious about playing a significant role of any kind in the future life of our civilization, we need to identify those points which are the most fundamental and figure out how to actualize them. A concern for the future of the European/White identity is clearly one of them. The need for some sort of restoration and resacralization of our culture along traditional lines is another.

I am not saying that we should squelch dissent or discussion. Such is crucial to the healthy life of any movement, and as circumstances change, the goals and strategies may need to be adjusted as well, and this can only occur if diverse viewpoints are allowed to be fostered. But ultimately, we need to figure out exactly what our “political minimum” is in terms of a platform, something which will appeal to a broad base of sympathizers. Once that is done, the next task is to figure out how to realize it.

At the same time, I do not believe the time is yet ripe to establish a political party whose intention it is to enter the American political mainstream and fight in elections. The cultural foundations are simply not there yet. As the European New Rightists correctly observed, the cultural groundwork and the accompanying changes it will inculcate must be accomplished among our people before there can be any thought of a political struggle. I believe that Counter-Currents is setting a good precedent for this, as are a handful of others, by presenting a wide range of possibilities which can be pruned and developed until we arrive at something like a coherent ideology.

This is also what my own organization, Arktos, is attempting to achieve by offering intellectual and cultural resources to stimulate the type of new thinking, new myths and new symbols that will need to be embraced if a successful movement dedicated to our principles, and which is capable of motivating a large number of people, is ever to be born.

This doesn’t mean that only intellectual or cultural work is desirable, or that other types of activism aren’t possible here and now. As I mentioned in my earlier essay on Islamism, successful revolutionary social movements start at the grassroots level by doing things like providing basic services such as food, education and housing. If we can find the funds to do this, it would be an excellent way to start building something on the local level which could later grow into something of nationwide significance, as well as generate a lot of good will among people who might not presently regard themselves as our allies.

I admit that what I am asking for is quite ambitious. There are occasions when I wonder if the hour might already be too late to get such a project underway. If there was one thing I would want readers to take away from this essay, however, it is this: don’t start a new group. Don’t write yet another manifesto. Don’t waste your time attacking somebody else’s group. Rather, do something constructive. Create something that embodies what you stand for, or else get to work supporting an effort by someone else that’s already underway. And we all must recognize that, sooner or later, it will be our task to submit to someone else’s authority and follow orders. Not unthinkingly or without judgment, of course, but with humility. No movement can thrive consisting entirely of leaders. What we need most are people who can be good followers.

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Morgan, John. “Leader-ful Resistance: The Predicament of the Right Today.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 27 October 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10/leader-ful-resistance-the-predicament-of-the-right-today/ >.

 

Let Them Eat Cake – Morgan

Let Them Eat Cake

By John Morgan

Until a few years ago, like most Americans, I knew very little about Sweden, apart from what I picked up through Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman films.

However, since I began working for Arktos, where most of my colleagues are Swedish, they will often regale me with tales about the multicultural, ethnomasochistic nightmare that their country has become. Their latest story, however, which has been receiving quite a bit of attention on the Internet, takes the cake – literally.

Last Sunday, April 15, the Swedish Minister of Culture, Lena Liljeroth, was invited to cut a cake to honor the 75th anniversary of the Swedish Artists’ Federation at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. That in itself sounds innocuous, until one sees the cake.

The cake itself was designed in the shape of an African tribal woman. In the “head” of the cake was an “Afro-Swedish” “performance artist” – I apologize for using so many quotation marks, but the irony is thick here – by the name of Makode Aj Linde, who would scream in mock pain whenever someone would cut into the cake. It turns out that this cake was intended to make Swedes more aware of the evils of female circumcision in Africa. The first piece was cut by the Minister herself, who proceeded to cut out a piece from the cake’s “naughty bits” (Linde himself referred to it as the cake’s “vagaga”) and feed it to Linde, apparently whispering, “Your life will be better after this,” to him as she did so.

Photos of the “performance” can be found on Facebook (under World Art Day), and a short video of it can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCK6zvWEN_Q

Needless to say, as soon as the story reached the Swedish media, many began accusing the Minister of racism, with some calling for her to resign, including the African Swedish National Association. It seems unlikely that she will, however, since, after all, the event was for a “good cause,” and the artist who came up with the idea is himself African, effectively neutralizing any possible objection which might arise, under the logic of multiculturalism. This didn’t stop the Museum from getting closed down on Tuesday when an English-speaking caller who contacted the institution said that he had planted a bomb in their building, in retaliation for their racism.

The bizarreness of this incident only proves how far the ideas of multiculturalism have infected our civilization. I say our civilization, since I could well imagine this same event happening, with the same result, in America. What immediately struck me about it is how closely it comes to what many liberals imagine those of us on the “radical Right” do in our spare time. (Recall the scene where a group of Whites hunt a Black man for sport in the 1988 film, Betrayed.) Yet here we have the supposed guardians of multiculturalism among the Swedish political and artistic elite indulging in the worst racial stereotypes imaginable (an African “tribal” woman, lying helpless while a crowd of rich White people torture her, cannibalize her and giggle), apparently contradicting the worldview they claim to uphold.

There are strong neo-colonialist overtones to this event which mark it as merely a continuation of the arrogance inherent in the ideology of multiculturalism as a whole. As Alain de Benoist eloquently explains in his book Beyond Human Rights, Western nations have made it their task in recent decades to rid the world of all injustice and evil, not just at home but throughout the world. This is why we bomb and invade countries these days in the name of protecting other peoples from their own governments. However, the very standards of Western liberalism arose from the very specific historical and cultural conditions of the West – therefore, is not the idea of enforcing an abstract set of Western “values” through military and economic force upon non-Western nations itself an imperialistic act? Certainly it is.

In the history of Western empires, the Romans and British, among others, conquered and ruled other peoples with the goal of exploiting them. But the fact is, they made little attempt to impose their values on these peoples – that wasn’t their primary goal. Today, however, liberals — I use that term in the broadest sense, to include both Republicans and Democrats, since in foreign policy there is little difference between them — want to reshape all the nations of the world to fit their idea of how they ought to be. Therefore, imperialism in the guise of multiculturalism and international law today, both military and commercial, is far more insidious and destructive than anything ever imagined in earlier times.

It is the essentially imperialistic nature of multiculturalism that causes these Swedish politicians and artists to appreciate the quaintness of a cake in the form of a stereotypical African woman. How nice those tribal women will be when they’re dancing for us, demonstrating their traditions to us vacuous European culture vultures! Let’s just get rid of that nasty genital mutilation, which we don’t like, and then everything will be fine, and they’ll look nice when we can watch them on the National Geographic channel, free from guilt. That is the ultimate goal of multiculturalism: to turn the world into a theme park, where we can “appreciate” the culture of others, as well as our own cultural past, like museum pieces, with anything in them that might threaten the prevailing ideology safely removed.

Guilt is an additional key to what is going on here. This event demands the question: why is it the duty of Swedes to worry about the fate of African genitalia at all? Unfortunately, it is perfectly consistent with the insane logic of Swedish multiculturalism as it has been explained to me by Swedes. Whether one agrees with its rationale or not, at least multiculturalism in the United States has some basis in reality, given its history of slavery and the treatment of the Native Americans. But Sweden is a country which never had any colonies and never had slavery. They haven’t even been involved in a war since Napoleon, unless one counts loaning some soldiers once in a while to join United Nations expeditions.

So what do Swedes have to feel guilty about? That’s a good question. As it’s been explained to me, apparently the very fact that Sweden is part of “the West,” and therefore part of the civilization which is responsible for all the evils of the world, is enough to make liberal Swedes loathe their own culture enough to feel the need to make things right for Africans – who are pouring in at the rate of 100,000 per year, into a country which only has a population of 9 million, approximately 2 million of which are already of non-Swedish origin. After all, how better to atone for the sins of one’s people than to welcome the tempest-tossed in with open arms? There’s nothing worth saving at home, anyway, right?

I could also comment on how a stunt such as this could be termed “art” in the first place, but most “modern art” ceased to be anything of value long ago, and that’s a theme for another essay. Most people accept it as an axiom these days, anyway.

How anyone who planned this event, including the Minister, could have thought it was a wise idea is beyond comprehension, and proves that they are either incredibly stupid, or else completely out of touch with reality, much like our own liberal elites. Apparently, the mere fact that a piece of art flatters one’s ideological preconceptions (anything done in the name of helping African women is good) makes it all right, no matter how ridiculous. The one thing that gives me some hope is the fact that everyone witnessing the “performance” in the video is laughing. On some level, perhaps they recognized how absurd this nightmarish dream of multiculturalism really is. If they did, then there might still be hope yet that they could wake up and return to sanity.

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Morgan, John. “Let Them Eat Cake.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 19 April 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/04/let-them-eat-cake/ >.

On Gramsci – Kaltenbrunner

On Antonio Gramsci

By Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner

 

Introductory Note: Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner was an important German national conservative intellectual who is at the moment not well-known outside of the German language. Kaltenbrunner aimed to restore the cultural status of identitarian European conservatism through prominent works including his three volume Europa series (Heroldsberg: Christiania-Verlag, 1981–1985), followed by another three volume series titled Vom Geist Europas (Asendorf: Muth-Verlag, 1987-1992), and also by three prominent books on conservatism: Rekonstruktion des Konservatismus (Freiburg: Rombach, 1972), Der schwierige Konservatismus (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1975), and Wege der Weltbewahrung (Asendorf: MUT-Verlag, 1985). In the present piece, an extract from the third volume of Europa, Kaltenbrunner discusses Antonio Gramsci’s theory of the importance of obtaining cultural power before political power; a theory which has had much influence on intellectuals falling under the general label “New Right.” – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

***

…Gramsci belongs, although this has not yet gotten around, among the most original political thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Whether he was an orthodox Marxist may be ideological sectarian quarreling. What is important is the fact that he, more clearly and thoroughly than any other Marxist theorists, recognized the role of cultural factors in politics and critical intelligence in the struggle for power. The prerequisite for the acquisition of political hegemony is the conquest of cultural power. He held that the modern state is the “direct expression of the base,” which is to say in concrete terms: he regarded the capitalist interests as a “primitive infantilism.” It is simply not true, for Gramsci, that the “bourgeois” state is based merely on “terror” and “the power of big business.” It would not stay in power for one hour, if it was not supported and integrated by morality, customs, ideas, traditions, and more – in the broadest sense – by cultural factors. Anyone who wants to change the “base,” must for the time being even revolutionize the ideological “superstructure”: the thoughts, sentiments, attitudes and spiritual preferences, the overall interpretation and meaning of human existence. Antonio Gramsci is the theoretician of cultural-revolutionary “System change”; he considered the “ideological” victory prior to the political or economic. When the intelligence is won, the state also falls.

Gramsci had read during his imprisonment even Proust, Joyce, and Svevo, authors which were consistently considered in the eyes of Marxist-Leninist ideologues as nothing more than representatives of late capitalist “decadence.” The Catholic conservative Chesterton he valued much more than the “secular” Arthur Conan Doyle. He, the idiosyncratic Marxist, despised easy verbal victories over second-tier opponents: “On the ideological front the victory over auxiliaries means almost nothing, here we will have to fight against the most eminent opponents.”

In this spirit, Antonio Gramsci read even the writings of non-Marxists carefully, because in fact a very significant opponent is one from which one can learn very much. He who does not take note, falls too easily in danger of resembling a man who – to use an image of Gramsci – “cannot sleep because of the bright moonlight and endeavors thus to kill as many fireflies as possible, in the conviction that then the annoying brightness would diminish or cease altogether.”

 

————

From: Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus. Europa: Seine geistigen Quellen in Portraits aus zwei Jahrtausenden, Volume III. Heroldsberg: Christiania-Verlag, 1981, pp. 409-412. (Translator anonymous).

Note: The original German version of the text of this article was first published online here: http://altmod.de/?p=724

For those interested in further reading on the subject discussed here, see also Antonio Gramsci’s Selections from Cultural Writings (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).

Another brief overview of Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony can be found on our site in the article “The European Rebirth” by Pierre Krebs. Also recommendable in this regard is Alexander Dugin’s essay “Counter-hegemony in Theory of Multi-polar World”.

 

Preface to Fighting for the Essence – Krebs

Preface to Fighting for the Essence

By Pierre Krebs

What is this impotence that brings our people to their knees and that the cowards call tolerance? What is this neglect that has allowed the will to rot and which traitors call prudence? What is this resignation that has made courage obsolete and the cowards call wisdom? What is this lie that does not stop magnifying everything that is by definition false and destroy everything that is par excellence true? What is this sacrilegious god that has broken the bond of friendship between men and nature? How does one understand existential values that are no longer measured by brilliance of mind or character but are weighed on the scales of the market world? From what sewers of the mind does this constant denial of ourselves arise, this self-criticism of the identitarian selfhood, of the original Self, this pathological refusal to assume, across otherness, one’s individuality, one’s originality? Avalanche of problems on the yawning desert of a levelled, domesticated, concretised contemporary spirituality. Avalanche of contiguous questions that history has tied together into a Gordian knot[1] which it is no longer possible to untie and which we have decided to cut – as the legend would have it and as the present demands it – going through the roots of an epidemic affliction which threatens the entire planet and which is called: Western civilisation.

It is useless to deny it: the epoch that we are going through, debilitated by all the advanced symptoms of decadence, is an abject epoch. Under its structures that are decomposing like a corpse in the sun, the social, political and cultural disintegration, in gradually laying bare the porous bones of an egalitarian civilisation condemned to death, thereby reveals the magnitude of a disaster that has befallen Europe and that threatens to sweep it away like a shipwreck. Once this observation is established, one understands then, in one stroke, why that which is ugly, weak or frankly pathological has, in the world of art, gradually replaced all that is beautiful, strong and harmonious; why, in politics, the creatures that sit on the benches of parliament are paid so dearly to daily betray the people who have naively elected them; why, in the media, the newsrooms are filled with professional lying creatures who, in turn, would no longer understand the world if, tomorrow, they were to stop exaggerating the words, sounds or images of their lies; why, in the age of nuclear fission, cybernetics and genetics, the obscuring dogmas of a vision that is increasingly reductive of human diversity, and increasingly levelling the diversity of values; in short, increasingly economic, materialistic, mechanistic and, consequently, increasingly less political, spiritual, and organic, progressively wrap up the planet in the grey, monotonous and desperate banality of uniformity, mediocrity, the repetition of the same and endless tedium.

Granted: all healthy minds are going to yawn upon reading our reflections concerning the validity of human differentiation, and they will be surprised that there are those dedicated to the ancestral right to difference; they will even, perhaps, be irritated that they could be asked, even today, about the variety of cultures, about the existence of races or the biological laws that explain them, or that one could reflect on the cultural imperatives that demand their sustenance or even, further, the ethical principles that legitimise it. All the banal and apodictic things which Plato had, long before modern anthropology and genetics, more or less codified in his Republic and on which, at another moment in history and in better health, one would have refrained from insisting for the simple reason that one would have already learnt them in primary school.

The necessity of this re-questioning regarding our roots corresponds in fact to an urgent need to restore to order ideas and certain facts, a prophylactic measure that the mind adopts when the discussions of the age, on account of being burdened with taboos and obscured by dogmas, have ended up completely falsifying the etymology of words, distorting their meaning and perverting reason. For this age is not only vile, it is mad. We wish to say thereby that egalitarian reasoning, by walking on its head, has indeed turned the world upside down. Evola[2] had already luminously predicted it: ‘Western civilisation needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realised the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.’[3]

In a first stage which corresponds to its political phase, the egalitarian lie first turned the democratic integrity of the state on its head by progressively emptying the Greek model of the ethno-cultural organic principles of the demos (people) which it purely and simply replaced with the vagabond and cosmopolitan institution of the parliament. Then, in the second, its institutional and juridical phase, it caused the constitutional integrity of the state to topple by demanding that all the nations of the world progressively align their constitutions to the planetary model of a ‘New World Order’ inspired, organised and manipulated by the United States of America. Finally, in a third, ideological stage which is ending its long progress through the institutions, the egalitarian lie has turned on their heads the last two ways in which states retained their integrity; the most essential and, therefore, the most difficult to constrain: territorial integrity and the ethnic integrity that depends on it. To suppress the first, it was sufficient to proclaim that the state was ‘open to immigration,’[4] this declaration automatically annulled the second. Robbed of its freedom to remain itself in the continuity of its ethno-cultural particularism – in short, deprived of its basic right to difference and to life – the people find themselves henceforth condemned to disintegrate and then die out through mixture, fused into a multiracial society, which is a prelude to the global society and the omega point of Western civilisation.

The cycle of egalitarian madness consequently ends exactly where it started: from the political eradication of the values of the demos and as such, of the key principles of organic democracy – by turning on its head of the original Greek understanding of democracy – to its biological eradication, pure and simple. Heralded by the political denaturing of democracy, prepared by the juridical subversion of its institutions, identitarian suicide will henceforth be encouraged, protected and, worse, legalised by the constitutions in their plan of a multiracial society, which is a subtle machine to kill peoples.

*

First revaluation: the notion of ‘multiracialism’ is, to start with, a mystifying term: for the society qualified wrongly as multiracial is no more tolerant of races or ethnic groups – on the contrary, it encourages their biological eradication, through panmixia – than it is respectful of the different cultural paradigms that it forces to disappear into the egalitarian and uniformising mould of identitarian deracination. This society is in reality raciophobic by nature and culturicidal by vocation.[5]

Second revaluation: one must stop, once and for all, abstracting peoples and cultures through the illusory concept of ‘humanity’ for the simple reason that ‘humanity’ does not exist any more than ‘man’ in himself. Humanity is the supposition made by coarse intellects that are enamoured of impoverishing simplifications and generalizations. On the contrary, the planet teems with particular men who one can observe at leisure in the realities of the organic social and cultural life of the race, peoples or nations, fleshly incarnations of all the contradictory and multicoloured ethno-cultural humanities of which the human species is composed. Joseph de Maistre,[6] who was one of the first to have proclaimed it, said finely that there is no man in the world: ‘During my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be a Persian; but I must say, as for man, I have never come across him anywhere.’[7] Those who act or speak in the name of ‘humanity’ would do well to remember these words in each of their solemn petitions or marches. They should bear in mind that the protection of the human species depends essentially on the preservation of the different peoples that constitute it, whereas the ideologies that more or less encourage ethnic thanatos[8] are, on the contrary, the most suited to destroy it!

We have to repeat it to all the gravediggers of the diversity of the world: every time that a people finds themselves in danger of death it is, in the furrows of their tomb, a real, fleshly, historical humanity, an irreplaceable memory of the history of men – a unique expression in itself of art, music, philosophy, in short, of culture – that is in danger of being extinguished forever.

Third revaluation: there is no being-in-himself, but only and everywhere human beings formed and rooted in their ethno-cultural significances. This holds true to the point that a ‘racial diagnostic,’ says Nicolas Lahovary,[9] is ‘to a certain point a horoscope. More than in situations, it is in oneself that a man and, above all, nations carry their destiny. Fate is not really historical, but ethnological. Tell me who you are and I will tell you what you will do!’[10] It is because we are conscious of these irreducible realities that we call for the drafting of a Charter of Peoples’ Rights,[11] radically antinomical to the Declaration of Human Rights, because peoples, unlike man, who is made up of an intangible humanity, exist; they are biologically definable, sociologically identifiable and geographically localisable. They each express themselves in the singularity of their culture and they each manifest themselves in the rhythm of a well-defined political will and historical project.[12]

Fourth revaluation: it is men who make history, never history that makes men. It is men – their hesitations, their choices, their decisions, their refusals, their quests, their experiments, their strengths and their weaknesses – who are invariably the origin of events and the cause of history. And the history of the world, in turn, relate only the odyssey of the peoples who have made history, polyphonic histories, multiple and markedly contradictory histories, each with the imprint of the ethnocultural identity that gives them face, forms a mind and breathes a soul into them.[13]

*

In accusing Christianity of being ‘the one immortal blot on humanity,’[14] Nietzsche has taken as his target especially the egalitarian, monocentric and monotheistic premise of a religion which incontestably takes the lion’s share of the unhealthy forces at the origin of the upheaval that has turned Europe on its head. In The Gay Science, he says clearly, ‘Monotheism, in contrast [to polytheism], this rigid consequence of the teachings of a normal human type – that is, the belief in a normal god next to whom there are only false pseudo-gods – was perhaps the greatest danger to humanity so far…’[15] This plague is transmitted today by the monster of Judeao-Christianity, ‘Western civilisation,’ whose increasingly dire consequences rigorously follow the descending curve of a crisis that has been transformed in the last several years into a veritable decadence. The monotheistic ‘Unique’ and the egalitarian ‘Same’ are, in fact, the front and reverse side of the same coin of the same egalitarianism, of the same devaluation of the soul of peoples and of the being of their culture in the collectivity of the mass, of the same degradation of the single and singular person into the equal and interchangeable individual, of the same reduction of heterogeneous diversity into the standard and uniform ‘One,’ the zero degree of the levelling catastrophe towards which a one-dimensional planetary civilisation is ineluctably leading.

*

Decadence. Rarely spectacular, this plague that infiltrates slowly into the organism of peoples erodes them sharply. In fact, when a people no longer find in themselves their own reasons to live and believe or, in other words, when a people is no longer satisfied with themselves, they are assuredly ripe for slavery – and there begins their decline. When a people think that they find in other peoples their reasons to live and believe, they have already fallen into slavery – and then their decadence is rife and complete. But when a people, unsatisfied with the contempt that they inflict on themselves in submissively assimilating the culture, language and gods of another people further submerge their biological identity, then, henceforth incapable of maintaining themselves in the ethno-cultural authenticity of their uniqueness, they sign their death sentence for all eternity – and then their destruction occurs immediately.

The decadence of a people therefore remains a transitory phenomenon – a veritable political and cultural status quo – as long as its genotype has not been artificially modified, or, more accurately, has not been genetically manipulated. Voltaire,[16] who did not know anything of genetics, had already had a presentiment of this when he observed in his An Essay on Universal History: The Manners and Spirit of Nations that ‘into whatever regions these various races are transplanted, their complexions never change unless they mingle with the natives of the country.’[17] Whereas Professor Eugène Pittard,[18] anticipating the findings of modern anthropology and genetics, issued his famous book already in 1924 with the major warning which politicians of all persuasions, actively encouraged by all the churches, continue to arrogantly ignore: ‘Where mixture takes places between two very different races, a veritable peril may commence.’[19] Cultural slavery, as long as it is restricted to the mimesis of the other, thus does not seal the fate of a people either necessarily or automatically.

A cultural slave is a puppet parodying the stranger. But his puppet is free to recover its identity the moment it drops its clown suit. A people, however, that have biologically imploded through miscegenation cannot change their skin as one changes clothes. In modifying their morphology, they have changed their appearance, soul and spirit. ‘Mixture with foreign races is the reason that peoples change in appearance and character. The foreign hereditary stock which now circulates in the new organism acts henceforth on the genotype of the mongrelised people at the physical and psychological levels. This influence is exercised not only on the most elementary distinctive signs of physical appearance, but it also acts on the most subtle traits of character, as well as on intellectual aptitudes.’[20] Unlike a colonised people who can return to their roots as soon as they free themselves from the foreign yoke, a mongrelised people are a genetically manipulated people that no longer have any roots. Forced to nourish themselves upon the culture of others, they have alienated their own by sacrificing their originality and authenticity, selling off their political will and flouting their historical destiny; by cutting themselves off from their roots, they have alienated their identity, scattering to the four winds of oblivion their personality and their uniqueness. Worse: in ceasing to be the singular and original people that they were originally, the hybridised people have not, however, become the people whose culture they thought they could plagiarise and, just as they have become strangers to all, they have first and above all become strangers to themselves.[21]

A puppet of America, at any moment Europe can change its dress back to European style in the changing-rooms of its politics and culture. A new political class of decision-makers inspired by a new historical project, by a new vision of the world and of the future, could lead it to this change very rapidly. This new class is urgently needed, for, in the American-style ‘carnival’ multiculturalism, it is in fact the naturally aristocratic soul of Europe, its deeply individualist style, its essentially rebellious, Faustian and Promethean spirit that the globalist vulgate[22] is in the process of attacking. Behind its multicultural alibi, Europe is invited to change its mentality[23] – and also its skin – so that its lively identity may be silenced, so that the polytheist look in the bright eyes of Athena[24] may be extinguished, so that this will to excel which has never ceased nourishing and inspiring the authentic being of the Indo-European worldview may fade, in an egalitarian regression, into memory.

*

Identity: what is it about, really? A myth, a taste, a whim? This two-faced word which reconciles contraries (the identical and the different) designates, in reality, an instinct. In fact, it is especially since modern ethology clearly established the innate tendency of man to identify with individuals who resemble him that we have better understood why peoples experience this instinctive need to live according to their rhythm, within a cultural heritage well-demarcated from all the others.

But what science has understood, the egalitarian Vulgate chooses to ignore or deny. Entangled in its fantasies, it continues to pretend that identitarian consciousness would erect insurmountable ramparts between peoples who would be seized with mutual distrust because of their differences. Reality belies these inanities. In fact, just as the self-defined individual who differentiates himself from the surrounding masses does not isolate himself from society, but on the contrary enriches it with his uniqueness, so also a people conscious of their difference do not isolate themselves any more from the human species, but come closer to it every time they endow it with their singularities and their peculiarities.

Besides, this goes without saying: the more a people becomes conscious of their difference, the more they refine their differences and the more their opening up to the world has a chance of profiting others. The more a people become conscious of their difference, the more they are in a situation to open up to the world in order to endow other peoples with their singularity and their differences. The more a people are aware of the diversity that surrounds them, the more they show themselves adroit in seizing and appreciating that which does not resemble them even in its slightest nuances, that which does not belong to them, and the more they are inclined to tolerate the distinguishing qualities of others.

The wealth of the world derives from its diversity and its heterogeneity. And the world owes this diversity primarily to peoples conscious and jealous of their difference.[25] It is clear besides that the perception of the diversity of a group is always proportional to the awareness of its different parts. Thus, the heterogeneity of the world results also from the interactions – from the communication – between the living ethno-cultural identities that comprise it: in fact, the more the differences confront one another, the more they compare themselves to one another – the closer they come together, the more the diversity is reinforced. The more the differences are isolated, the more they are separated from one another; in other words, the more they move away from one another, the more the diversity is destroyed. A people that entrench themselves in their ethno-cultural phalanstery[26] are no more courageous than a people which detach themselves from their roots and cross-breed: in the first case, we witness the retreat into seclusion of a powerless people that retreat because they do not feel strong enough in their identity to confront the Other in its differences; in the second case we witness a headlong rush into the assimilation of a disarmed people who capitulate before the difference of the Other in order not to be conscious any more of their own identity. Conclusion: it is not the identitarian consciousness that awakens fear of the foreigner but, quite the contrary, in the first case one’s weakness and in the second one’s shortcomings.

The egalitarian Vulgate thus finds itself trapped: peoples of a strong identitarian consciousness are precisely those who, in search of movement and relationships, increase differences, activate diversity, and, in so doing, keep the world moving. And it is, on the contrary, the peoples of a weak identitarian consciousness who, in fleeing into withdrawal and isolation, make history vegetate.[27]

*

Identity: the Ariadne thread[28] of the history of peoples and their cultures. An instinct as beautiful and as strong as life is beautiful and strong when it bursts out from its original and primordial organic springs, but also as old as the world can remember being a world. An archaic instinct that survives ideologies because it possesses the longest memory; a rebellious instinct that does not allow itself to be smoothed out either by laws or by doctrines, no matter how oppressive the first may be and no matter how captious the second; an irreducible instinct that reappears in the confines of Africa, in the tribe that casts off the last miasmas of Western civilization; or in the heart of Europe, in the Swiss canton which reconquers with the audacity of William Tell the ancestral rights of its organic democracy.

Whether it is affirmed or contested, the identitarian tradition henceforth orients the new divides that are already being established at the crossroads of destiny, where everything may die or be reborn at the place where history is digging a definitive cleft between two understandings of the world, between two visions of the future, between two conceptions of man: on the one side, the statist masses, members of the universal egalitarian technocosmos – the cold monster that Nietzsche warned us about;[29] on the other, the ethnic communities, the political and cultural idiosyncrasies mirroring the natural planetary polyphony – the ‘hereditary homelands’ of which Saint-Loup[30] speaks. In the first, drawn from the rule of uniformity, the repetition of the Same has definitely Westernised the planet into the totalitarian straitjacket of egalitarianism. In this world of ethno-cultural amnesia delivered to the totalitarian yoke of economics, man, stripped of his distinctive traits, is no longer either the being of interdependent and cooperative culture of the historical project of his people, nor the historical being who accomplishes himself within his destined community. Reduced to the status of an acultural and ahistorical object-individual, this individual has lost the key to his humanity. In the second, the man with an identitarian consciousness defines himself as the perception of his roots and his differences grows. In this world, man, a cultured being, acquires his humanity as he realises himself: he experiments, creates, evolves, transforms himself without ceasing to be himself, profiting from all the creative potentialities that nature – his heredity – has poured into him. Supporting his people, involved in its projects, he participates in its history and in its destiny.

The parties, the lodges, the unions, the schools, the churches – in short, all who fatten themselves on the fodder of the System resent the identitarian argument from the outset as an intolerable threat. This hypersensitive reaction will not surprise the lucid minds that have known for a long time that the bio-cultural reality is, in fact, the only one that may instantly threaten all the confused minds of the universalist dogma: the messianic Judeo-Christian head; the ideologically liberal head; and the individualistic, technocratic and plutocratic economic head. And it will not surprise attentive minds, either, that the identitarian dream has always entailed the collapse of all the empires that were not organic, the last to date being the Soviet empire. And finally, it will not surprise those who know perfectly well that the next one is Uncle Sam’s. Keeping pace with Nature and the gains of science, the basic expression of organic life and ethno-cultural reality defies all prohibitions, be they political, religious or ideological. Egalitarianism may well postulate that races do not exist, but anyone taken at random can recognise a White from a Black, and a Black from a Yellow. To be sure, everything would be much easier if it were possible to prohibit races, a vow difficult to realise because it comes down to prohibiting Nature de facto. Being unable to constrain the latter, the followers of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Big Brother are therefore going to try to destroy it. And indeed, the only discreet and effective way of prohibiting an African, an Asiatic or a European from being as such is going to consist in submerging the Black, Yellow and White together into a grey, in annihilating them progressively in a soft panmixia which is disguised in the most pernicious possible masks: a carnival humanism in the Brazilian style, consisting of unremitting appeals to a pseudo-fraternity that leads, in reality, to the worst promiscuities, and hysterical invocations to a pseudo-tolerance that reveals itself to be the most dangerous of cowardices.

Once the dangers have been perceived and the choices have been offered, we must then move to action, first refusing ‘compromise, weakness, and indulgence towards everything which, being derived from the Judaeo-Christian root, has infected our blood and our intelligence.’ Then, secondly, return to our pagan Indo-European tradition without which ‘there will be no liberation and no true restoration, and conversion to the true values of spirit, power, hierarchy, and empire will not be possible.’ There sleeps a ‘truth upon which no doubt whatsoever can be cast.'[31] Finally, awaken minds by setting the world on its feet again, and by setting the ideas aright once again. But what method is more appropriate to set the world aright than to set that which many still feel to be an inevitable fate on the feet of a voluntary destiny? The multiracial/raciophobic society can never be transformed into a fate as long as bio-cultural identity is perceived by peoples as a voluntary destiny. All life worthy of being lived has been and will be that, always, only at this price. To the horizontal and culturicidal society with a robot grimace that threatens to strangle the world in a linear uniformity, we must brandish, in brighter colors than ever before, the vertical rainbows of peoples with human faces, whose language, history, culture and appearance emerge from living identities which are to peoples and cultures what the spring is to the mountains and forests.

Egalitarianism constrains peoples to shuffle their feet in the dead-end of Christian, social or liberal parliamentary democracy before demoting them to the neo-primitive age of the fast-food societies in the American style. Let us swim against the current of a world that is already exploding into a thousand pieces, carried away by the winds of its political, religious, economic, social or cultural crises. Let us bear ourselves to the wide sea of the world and of life through the deep waters of identity. Let us continue forward to assume our humanity, each one in the rhythm of his individuality, each in obedience to his origins. The future of this world will never stop being many-voiced, multicoloured, multicultural, and multihistorical as long as the human species that bears it remains permanently multiracial, that is to say , as long as it continues to deploy, in the firmament of history, the rainbow of its colors, its faces, its languages, its arts and its cultures, as long as the difference of one is perceived as a source of enrichment for all, as long as the respect for natural diversity continues to generate an echo of tolerance for contraries. In other words: as long as the homogeneity of the peoples remains a guarantee of the heterogeneity of the world.

Let us therefore lend to our ideas the same seriousness that a child does to his game – to paraphrase Nietzsche[32] – and we will feel them fill with that conquering joy from whence emerge new worlds.

As for the Europeans, their renaissance will have already commenced the moment that they cease to perceive the egalitarian raciophobic society as an inevitable destiny, and finally being to feel it as a necessary challenge.

All victories are born of struggle; all elevations are born of conquest.

Kassel, Winter Solstice, 1999/2000.

 

Notes:

1. According to ancient Greek legend, it was prophesied to the Phyrgians, who were without a king, that the next person to enter the city on an ox-cart would be made their leader. A village farmer named Gordias was the one to do so, and his cart was tied to a post by an extremely complex knot. It was said that the one who would one day untie the knot would become the ruler of the entirety of Asia. In 333 BC, when Alexander the Great came to the city, he famously cut the knot with his sword rather than attempting to untie it. -Ed.
2. Julius Evola (1898-1974) was the most important Italian member of the traditionalist school, which is to say that he opposed modernity in favour of an approach to life consistent with the teachings of the ancient sacred texts. -Ed.
3. Julius Evola, Heathen Imperialism (Kemper, France: Thompkins & Cariou, 2007), p. 17.
4. There also one must be sagacious and not compare that which is by nature incomparable. We are referring here to the immigration of non-European populations, in most cases originating from countries of the Third World. Europe has always undergone certain periods when waves of immigration of greater or less importance have crossed from one people to another. This influx of populations did not, however, at any moment place in question the identity of the different countries concerned insofar as these immigrant populations were themselves, biologically and culturally, of European stock!
5. The egalitarian rhetoricians are not so contradictory. To affirm, in fact, that races do not exist and, at the same time, to plead for a multiracial society makes one wonder, and that is the least one can say!
6. Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was a French Counter-Enlightenment philosopher who fled the Revolution and lived the remainder of his life in Italy. He always remained a staunch opponent of democracy and supported monarchical rule. -Ed.
7. From Marc A. Goldstein, Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, 1788-1797 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 820.
8. Thanatos was the Greek god of death. In psychology, thanatos has come to mean ‘death drive,’ which in Freud’s terminology is the unconscious drive which compels individuals into self-destructive behaviour. -Ed.
9. Nicolas Lahovary (1887-1972) was a Rumanian diplomat who lived the remainder of his life as an exile in Switzerland following the Communist takeover of Rumania in 1944. He was also an anthropologist. -Ed.
10. Nicolas Lahovary, Les peuples européens: leur passé ethnologique et leurs parentés réciproques, d’après les dernières recherches sanguines et anthropologiques (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), p. 37.
11. The United Nations enacted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, defining human rights in a way which is binding upon all member nations. The founder of the European New Right, Alain de Benoist, critiques the concept of human rights, as well as the problematic definition of the individual upon which it relies, at length in his book Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (London: Arktos, 2011). -Ed.
12. The human being lives within a people. Ethnobiology, a relatively recent natural science, has recognised that peoples constitute well-defined biological realities. Among other things, it dedicates its researches and studies to an increasingly precise and systematic classification of the races of which the human species is composed. Cf. Ilse Schwidetzky, Grundzüge der Völkerbiologie (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1950).
13.  ‘The first explanation [of history] is generally found in the nature of a human being and his derives, in all the cases where he acts as a collective being, from the nature of his people. The latter, in turn, depends on the race that imprints its seal upon it,’ declares Nicolas Lahovary again, Les peuples européens, p. 35.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Late Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 66 (from The Anti-Christ).
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 128.
16. Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), was one of the major philosophers of the French Enlightenment. -Ed.
17. The Works of M. de Voltaire, vol. 4 (London: privately printed, 1761), p. 192. -Ed.
18. Pittard (1867-1962) was a Swiss anthropologist. Widely respected during his life-time, he was honoured with many awards and distinctions. He did work involving the theory of evolution, but always rejected the notion that all humans had a common ancestor, believing instead that the various races had evolved independently. He was also interested in social justice and worked for the benefit of the downtrodden in Europe, including the Albanians and the Gypsies. -Ed.
19. Eugène Pittard, Race and History: An Ethnological Introduction to History (London: Kegan Paul, 2003).
20. Schwidetzky, Grundzüge der Völkerbiologie, p. 112.
21.  ‘Contrary to nature, racial mixtures lead either to a regression or to a dead end. They are generally unfavourable and have fateful effects for the individuals concerned,’ warns Rolf Kosiek (Das Volk in seiner Wirklichkeit [Berg am see: Kurt Vowinckel, 1975], p. 40). ‘The analysis of facts contradicts that opinion according to which hybridisation plays an important role in the evolution of higher animals,’ declares Ernst Mayr. ‘Bastards are first of all very rare among these and when the former recross with their original species they give rise to genotypes characterised by an inferior vitality and which are eliminated by natural selection… Bastardisation between races provokes, almost without exception, imbalances due to harmful genetic combinations’ (Artbegriff und Evolution [Hamburg: Parey, 1967], pp. 112 and 513).
22. The Vulgate was a Fourth-century translation into Latin of the Bible made by St. Jerome. It later came to become the official version of the Bible used by the Catholic Church, and for over a thousand years was the most widely used version of the Bible in Europe. Many of the early translations of the Bible into European languages were done from the Vulgate. -Ed.
23. The boycott of ballot-boxes by the electors will certainly not any longer be a sufficient means to counteract the criminal decisions of irresponsible, but calculating, politicians who have already concocted the laws permitting the acceleration and simplification of the formalities of immigrant naturalisation. It is, in fact, these non-natives themselves who will be called upon tomorrow to re-elect politicians needing votes to the seats of a parliament that is still called ‘European.’ but that one could better designate as that which it really is: the grand brothel of the miscegenistic/raciophobic politics of a Europe reduced to prostituting itself on the streets of the Third World.
24. Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and the arts. -Ed.
25. Conversely, the wealth of a people is measured by the degree of individualisation of its members. And one perceives immediately that the collectivist threat which places the diversity of races in danger is combined here with the individualist danger, which threatens to disintegrate the social body, and are two identical expressions of the same atomizing, egalitarian plague that levels peoples and disintegrates persons.
26. A phalanstery was a structure devised by the Nineteenth-century French utopian socialist Charles Fourier to house a small community of people who would work purely for the benefit of the community. Fourier believed that these communities would eliminate social inequality of all kinds. -Ed.
27. The regression into individualism that is brought about by the same reflexive rejection of the Other arrives at a similar result: it also isolates the subject and, similarly, lets it vegetate in its ego.
28. In Greek mythology, the hero Theseus was sent to fight the monstrous Minotaur, who lived at the heart of an enormous labyrinth. The goddess Ariadne provided him with a ball of string so that he could find his way back. -Ed.
29. Nietzsche appears to attack the idea of the state in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘They all want to get to the throne, it is their madness – as if happiness sat on the throne! Often mud sits on the throne – and often too the throne on mud. Mad all of them seem to me, and scrambling monkeys and overly aroused. Their idol smells foul to me, the cold monster: together they all smell foul to me, these idol worshippers.’ From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 36. -Ed.
30. Saint-Loup was the pen name of Marc Augier (1908-1990), a French writer who embraced socialism, primitivism and anti-Christian paganism in his youth. He then became a nationalist and served as a correspondent in the French division of the Waffen-SS, although he was discouraged by the National Socialists’ anti-socialism. In 1945 he fled to Argentina, where he served in the Argentinian Army, and was an advisor to Juan Perón and was Eva Perón’s ski instructor. He was later pardoned and returned to France, where he continued to write and support various Right-wing movements, including regionalist organisations. -Ed.
31. Evola, Heathen Imperialism, p. 29.
32. From Beyond Good and Evil, S 94: ‘A man’s maturity – consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play,’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), p. 273. -Ed.

 

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From: Krebs, Pierre. Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance? London: Arktos Media, 2012, pp. 16-30.

Note: See also F. Roger Devlin’s review of Krebs’s Fighting for the Essence here: https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/europe-vs-the-west-devlin/

 

Europe vs. the West – Devlin

Europe vs. the West

By F. Roger Devlin

Pierre Krebs
Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance?
London: Arktos Media, 2012

This newest offering from Arktos is the first translation into English from the works of Pierre Krebs, a leading figure in the European New Right. Born in French Algeria (1946), Krebs studied law, journalism, sociology and political science in France, taking an active role in right-wing politics during the late 1960s. Later settling in Germany, he founded the Thule Seminar, a self-described “research society for Indo-European Culture,” in Kassel in 1980. The German Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) appears to take considerable interest in his activities.

Besides the book under review, Dr. Krebs is the author of The European Rebirth, The Imperishable Inheritance: Alternatives to the Principle of Equality* and a study on Valéry and Wagner. Fighting for the Essence was first published in German translation in 1996, with a revised French edition appearing in 2000.**

Krebs’ nomenclature, original with him so far as I know, draws a sharp contrast between “Europe” and “the West.” “Europe” refers to the great racial and cultural tradition he wishes to defend; “the West” means today’s “Western community of values” that engages in humanitarian bombing campaigns, enforces tolerance at gunpoint on its subject populations, prefers the stranger to the kinsman, and wishes to erase even the distinction between men and women.

Prof. Krebs is good at pointing up the antinomies of this modern ideological abortion: its homogenization in the name of diversity and suppression of particularity in the name of tolerance. Multiculturalism and multiracialism, as he observes, are mystifying terms which function to conceal a culturicidal and raciophobic program of deracination and panmixia. “The doctrine of human rights should be seen for what it really is: the ideological alibi of the West in a battle to the death that it has declared on all the peoples of the world.”

Apologists for Western ideology rest their case upon a false dichotomy between assimilation and fearful isolation:

In fact, just as the self-defined individual who differentiates himself from the surrounding masses does not isolate himself from society, but on the contrary enriches it with his uniqueness, so also a people conscious of their difference do not isolate themselves any more from the human species, but come closer to it every time they endow it with their singularities and their peculiarities. The more a people becomes conscious of their difference, the more their opening up to the world has a chance of profiting others . . . and the more they are inclined to tolerate the differences of others.

The author distinguishes three stages in the development of “the egalitarian lie.” The first, political stage replaces organic democracy with a parliamentary procedure emptied of ethno-cultural content; the second, juridical phase, demands that all nations align their constitutions to this same model; the third, ideological stage breaks down the territorial integrity of nations through open immigration, which leads directly to the final biological abolition of human differences in universal panmixia.

All of this sounds consistent with what might be called the orthodox conservative narrative of Western decline since the Enlightenment. Nor does Krebs depart from that narrative in tracing the origin of egalitarianism to Christianity. In the view of many on the Christian right, modernism is a practical form of the Pelagian heresy, an attempt to bring heaven down to earth—“immanentizing the eschaton,” in Voegelin’s mellifluous words.

But Krebs names the heresiarch Pelagius as one of his heroes. In his view, the egalitarian lie is to be blamed not on any perversion of Christianity, but on Christianity itself—or, as he invariably writes, “Judeochristianity.” He cites Nietzsche’s observation that

Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from that soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race or privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.

From this Krebs infers that

every discourse which calls for a European Renaissance without separating itself from Judeo-Christian civilization, its dogmas and its rituals, is condemned to failure in advance, since it is enclosed within the very matrix of decline. . . . The monotheistic “Unique” and the egalitarian “Same” are, in fact, the front and reverse side of the same coin. . . . [The] continuity is flagrant between the Jewish will to reduce the polymorphic and polysemic figures of the divine to the univocal figure of the only God, an autocratic being, the absolute ‘I’ of the universe on the one hand; and the secularized monotheism of human rights on the other, informed by the same will to reduce all the racial and cultural polymorphism of the world to univocal figure of a globalized Homo occidentalis, a serial repetition of a Same detached from its identitarian affiliations.

The author also cites Nietzsche’s suggestion that monotheism, “the belief in a normal god next to whom there are only false pseudo-gods,” was a “consequence of the teaching of a normal human type.” Indo-European polytheism, on the other hand, “is fundamentally alien to the notion of messianism or proselytism, the natural sources of the intolerance and fanaticism that are characteristic of the three monotheistic religions.”

Finally, the author accuses “Judeochristianism” of “breaking the bond of friendship between men and nature” through its command to subdue the earth. Anyone with a genuinely European mentality, he says, would find incomprehensible the promise to Noah and his sons that “the fear and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air: into your hand are they delivered.”

The look which [Westernized Europe] bestows on Nature is no longer the look of the living man who discovers and feels himself a partner of the world. It is the essentially venal, anonymous and cold look of techno-scientific inspection, a utilitarian look that no longer conceives the world as a dwelling in which man is the inhabitant, but as an object that men, endowed with the power of appropriation by Jehovah, have the duty to exploit.

The rejection of Christianity does not commit the author to reject all of post-classical European civilization, of course, or even all of its religious life. He emphasizes that Christianity never truly eradicated the pagan heritage, and claims to find the native spirit of Europe in many great figures of the Christian era, including Pelagius, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jacob Böhme, Goethe, Hölderlin, Beethoven, the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, Theodor Storm, Rilke, Teilhard de Chardin, Saint-Exupéry and Heidegger. He also claims that Gothic architecture owed nothing to “Judeochristianity.”

Dr. Krebs’ treatment of Christianity and Western decline deserves a fuller treatment not only than I can give here but also than he himself offers in his slender volume. The issue is of the utmost practical importance, for it represents a rejection of the great majority of his potential political allies.

This reviewer is happy to agree that the rise of Christianity, with its promise of salvation to the world-weary, was closely bound up with the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization. Indeed, I suspect this historical context better accounts for what Krebs finds decadent in Christianity than does its racially alien origin. But does it make sense to blame Christianity also for the decadence of modern civilization?

There is surely considerable temerity in reducing the thirteen or fourteen centuries of European civilization between the conversion of Constantine and the Enlightenment to a list of fifteen personal favorite figures. And the temerity is increased by the implied claim to have understood several of these figures better than they understood themselves.

It is a familiar observation that enlightenment thought amounts to a secularized version of Christian doctrine, a displacement of its eschatology into the realm of politics. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is just one example of a Christian conservative who stressed this connection, citing the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima: “the corruption of the best is the worst.”

But Krebs the admirer of Pelagius cannot mean this; his explicit positions would force him to deny that the secularization of Christianity is the essential misstep. Instead he must hold that (1) Christianity itself is responsible for the specific way in which it was negated by the Enlightenment, and that (2) Europe has been in a state of decadence since at least the fourth century AD. This bold interpretation of European history may deserve consideration, but the author has hardly made a case for it in the brief manifesto under review.

Next to “Judeochristianity,” Krebs’ greatest scorn is reserved for “the putrid swamps of America,” with their fast food restaurants and comic-book literature. This, of course, is a common trope of European intellectuals across the political spectrum, easily made plausible by comparing American low culture with European high culture. As a long-time American expatriate in Europe, I often had cause to lament mindless lowbrow Americanization myself, but it is hardly a reflection on America that Europeans prefer McDonald’s to Melville. Wilsonian democratic messianism would also have got nowhere without striking a chord in other lands.

Dr. Krebs closes his work with some far more plausible reflections on culture, immigration and territory. He cites Heiner Geissler of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party as a representative of contemporary elite opinion:

It is not the influx of foreigners but the incapacity for rejuvenation and adaptation of the Germans, combined with their aversion to immigration, that represents the real danger for our future. . . . In the future, Germans will not have to live with just five million foreigners—as today—but with seven, perhaps ten million.

The danger in such a mindset stems from its unfalsifiability. We have no reason to think Herr Geissler unacquainted with the problems connected to immigration; he may well have to deal with them every day. But he has a ready-made explanation for all of them, as well as any that may arise in the future: the “xenophobia” of his fellow countrymen. As long as he clings to this notion, no empirical evidence of immigration’s failure will ever give him cause to reconsider his commitment to it—not even a full-scale ethnic civil war. Such observations, writes Dr. Krebs, “allow one to measure to what a degree of stupidity and blindness the militants of multiracialism have sunk.”

All culture is regional, expressing the beliefs and sensibility of the people of a particular place and time. As such, it necessarily involves an element of exclusion, namely, the exclusion of what is foreign to those beliefs and sensibilities and to the way of life in accordance with them. For this reason, any serious defense of culture boils down to a defense of territory. Let us close with a fine observation Krebs takes from Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the Austrian founder of the discipline of human ethology:

The best way to maintain peaceful cooperation between peoples consists in guaranteeing to each of them a territory that each people has the right to administer in its own way, and in which it is permitted to develop itself culturally as it sees fit. . . . To the degree that people accept the implantation of minorities in their territories, they open the door to inter-ethnic competition in their own house.

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Added Notes:

* These two titles refer to Die europäische Wiedergeburt: Aufruf zur Selbstbesinnung (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1982) and Das unvergängliche Erbe: Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1981). Krebs had also published a second complementary volume to the latter known as Mut zur Identität: Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit (Struckum: Verlag für ganzheitliche Forschung und Kultur, 1988). Also worth mentioning is his later book, Das Thule-Seminar: Geistesgegenwart der Zukunft in der Morgenröte des Ethnos (Horn, Kassel & Wien: Weecke, 1994).

** The original German version was Im Kampf um das Wesen (Horn: Weecke, 1997), and the most recent French translation is Combat pour l’essentiel (Madrid: Paneuropa, 2002). There is also a Spanish translation known as La lucha por lo esencial (Valencia: Los Libros de Aimirgin, 2006).
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Devlin, F. Roger. “Europe vs. the West.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 February 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/02/europe-vs-the-west/>.

 

Crisis of Democracy – Benoist

“The Current Crisis of Democracy” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 273 KB):

Current Crisis of Democracy

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De Benoist, Alain. “The Current Crisis of Democracy.” Telos Vol. 2011, No. 156 (Fall 2011), pp. 7-23. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/the_current_crisis_of_democracy-anglais.pdf >.

 

What is Sovereignty? – Benoist

“What is Sovereignty?” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 172 KB):

What is Sovereignty

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De Benoist, Alain. “What is Sovereignty?” Telos, vol. 1999, no. 116 (Summer 1999), pp. 99-118. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_sovereignty.pdf >.

Note: On the topic of this essay, see also Alain de Benoist, “The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius,” Telos, vol. 200, no. 118 (Winter 2000), pp. 25-58, <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/the_first_federalist_althusius.pdf >. We would also like to mention that excellent research articles in the Spanish language on this matter of sovereignty and federalism have been collected in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 37, “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano” (Noviembre 2012), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2012/11/elementos-n-37-federalismo-poliarquico.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 37 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 37 – Federalismo).