Mars & Hephaestus – Faye

Mars & Hephaestus: The Return of History

By Guillaume Faye

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

Russian translation of this translation here

Allow me an “archeofuturist” parable based on the eternal symbol of the tree, which I will compare to that the rocket. But before that, let us contemplate the grim face of the coming century.

The twenty-first century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state. It will be a century of competing peoples and ethnic identities. And paradoxically, the victorious peoples will be those that remain faithful to, or return to, ancestral values and realities—which are biological, cultural, ethical, social, and spiritual—and that at the same time will master technoscience. The twenty-first century will be the one in which European civilization, Promethean and tragic but eminently fragile, will undergo a metamorphosis or enter its irremediable twilight. It will be a decisive century.

In the West, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a time of belief in emancipation from the laws of life, belief that it was possible to continue on indefinitely after having gone to the moon. The twenty-first century will probably set the record straight and we will “return to reality,” probably through suffering.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the apogee of the bourgeois spirit, that mental small pox, that monstrous and deformed simulacrum of the idea of an elite. The twenty-first century, a time of storms, will see the joint renewal of the concepts of a people and an aristocracy. The bourgeois dream will crumble from the putrefaction of its fundamental principles and petty promises: happiness does not come from materialism and consumerism, triumphant transnational capitalism, and individualism. Nor from safety, peace, or social justice.

Let us cultivate the pessimistic optimism of Nietzsche. As Drieu La Rochelle wrote: “There is no more order to conserve; it is necessary to create a new one.” Will the beginning of the twenty-first century be difficult? Are all the indicators in the red? So much the better. They predicted the end of history after the collapse of the USSR? We wish to speed its return: thunderous, bellicose, and archaic. Islam resumes its wars of conquest. American imperialism is unleashed. China and India wish to become superpowers. And so forth. The twenty-first century will be placed under the double sign of Mars, the god of war, and of Hephaestus, the god who forges swords, the master of technology and the chthonic fires.

Towards the Fourth Age of European Civilization

European civilization—one should not hesitate to call it higher civilization, despite the mealy-mouthed ethnomasochist xenophiles—will survive the twenty-first century only through an agonizing reappraisal of some of its principles. It will be able if it remains anchored in its eternal metamorphic personality: to change while remaining itself, to cultivate rootedness and transcendence, fidelity to its identity and grand historical ambitions.

The First Age of European civilization includes antiquity and the medieval period: a time of gestation and growth. The Second Age goes from the Age of Discovery to the First World War: it is the Assumption. European civilization conquers the world. But like Rome or Alexander’s Empire, it was devoured by its own prodigal children, the West and America, and by the very peoples it (superficially) colonized. The Third Age of European Civilization commences, in a tragic acceleration of the historical process, with the Treaty of Versailles and end of the civil war of 1914-18: the catastrophic twentieth century. Four generations were enough to undo the labor of more than forty. History resembles the trigonometrical asymptotes of the “theory of catastrophe”: it is at the peak of its splendor that the rose withers; it is after a time of sunshine and calm that the cyclone bursts. The Tarpeian Rock is close to the Capitol!

Europe fell victim to its own tragic Prometheanism, its own opening to the world. Victim of the excess of any imperial expansion: universalism, oblivious of all ethnic solidarity, thus also the victim of petty nationalism.

The Fourth Age of European civilization begins today. It will be the Age of rebirth or perdition. The twenty-first century will be for this civilization, the heir of the fraternal Indo-European peoples, the fateful century, the century of life or death. But destiny is not simply fate. Contrary to the religions of the desert, the European people know at the bottom of their hearts that destiny and divinities are not all-powerful in relation to the human will. Like Achilles, like Ulysses, the original European man does not prostrate himself or kneel before the gods, but stands upright. There is no inevitability in history.

The Parable of the Tree

A Tree has roots, a trunk, and leaves. That is to say, the principle, the body, and the soul.

1) The roots represent the “principle,” the biological footing of a people and its territory, its motherland. They do not belong to us; one passes them on. They belong to the people, to the ancestral soul, and come from the people, what the Greeks called ethnos and the Germans Volk. They come from the ancestors; they are intended for new generations. (This is why any interbreeding is an undue appropriation of a good that is to be passed on and thus a betrayal.) If the principle disappears, nothing is possible any longer. If one cuts the tree trunk, it might well grow back. Even wounded, the Tree can continue to grow, provided that it recovers fidelity with its own roots, with its own ancestral foundation, the soil that nourishes its sap. But if the roots are torn up or the soil polluted, the tree is finished. This is why territorial colonization and racial amalgamation are infinitely more serious and deadly than cultural or political enslavement, from which a people can recover.

The roots, the Dionysian principle, grow and penetrate the soil in new ramifications: demographic vitality and territorial protection of the Tree against weeds. The roots, the “principle,” are never fixed. They deepen their essence, as Heidegger saw. The roots are at the same time “tradition” (what is handed down) and “arche” (life source, eternal renewal). The roots are thus manifestation of the deepest memory of the ancestral and of eternal Dionysian youthfulness. The latter refers back to the fundamental concept of deepening.

2) The trunk is its “soma,” the body, the cultural and psychic expression of the people, always innovating but nourished by sap from the roots. It is not solidified, not gelled. It grows in concentric layers and it rises towards the sky. Today, those who want to neutralize and abolish European culture try to “preserve” it in the form of monuments of the past, as in formaldehyde, for “neutral” scholars, or to just abolish the historical memory of the young generations. They do the work of lumberjacks. The trunk, on the earth that bears it, is, age after age, growth and metamorphosis. The Tree of old European culture is both uprooted and removed. A ten year old oak does not resemble a thousand year old oak. But it is the same oak. The trunk, which stands up to the lightning, obeys the Jupiterian principle.

3) The foliage is most fragile and most beautiful. It dies, withers, and reappears like the sun. It grows in all directions. The foliage represents psyche, i.e., civilization, the production and the profusion of new forms of creation. It is the raison d’être of the Tree, its assumption. In addition, which law does the growth of leaves obey? Photosynthesis. That is to say, “the utilization of the force of light.” The sun nourishes the leaves which, in exchange, produce vital oxygen. The efflorescent foliage thus follows the Apollonian principle. But watch out: if it grows inordinately and anarchically (like European civilization, which wanted to become the global Occident and extend to the whole planet), it will be caught by the storm, like a badly carded sail, and it will pull down and uproot the Tree that carries it. The foliage must be pruned, disciplined. If European civilization wishes to survive, it should not extend itself to the whole Earth, nor practice the strategy of open arms . . . as foliage that is too intrepid overextends itself, or allows itself to be smothered by vines. It will have to concentrate on its vital space, i.e., Eurosiberia. Hence the importance of the imperative of ethnocentrism, a term that is politically incorrect, but that is to be preferred to the “ethnopluralist” and in fact multiethnic model that dupes or schemers put forth to confuse the spirit of resistance of the rebellious elite of the youth.

One can compare the tripartite metaphor of the Tree with that of that extraordinary European invention the Rocket. The burning engines correspond to the roots, with chthonic fire. The cylindrical body is like the tree’s trunk. And the capsule, from which satellites or vessels powered by solar panels are deployed, brings to mind foliage.

Is it really an accident that the five great space rocket series built by Europeans—including expatriates in the USA—were respectively called Apollo, Atlas, Mercury, Thor, and Ariadne? The Tree is the people. Like the rocket, it rises towards the sky, but it starts from a land, a fertile soil where no other parasitic root can be allowed. On a spatial basis, one ensures a perfect protection, a total clearing of the launching site. In the same way, the good gardener knows that if the tree is to grow tall and strong, he must clear its base of the weeds that drain its roots, free its trunk of the grip of parasitic plants, and also prune the sagging and prolix branches.

From Dusk to Dawn

This century will be that of the metamorphic rebirth of Europe, like the Phoenix, or of its disappearance as a historical civilization and its transformation into a cosmopolitan and sterile Luna Park, while the other peoples will preserve their identities and develop their power. Europe is threatened by two related viruses: that of forgetting oneself, of interior desiccation and of excessive “opening to the other.” In the twenty-first century, Europe, to survive, will have to both regroup, i.e., return to its memory, and pursue its Faustian and Promethean aspirations. Such is the requirement of the coincidentia oppositorum, the convergence of opposites, or the double need for memory and will for power, contemplation and innovative creation, rootedness and transcendence. Heidegger and Nietzsche . . .

The beginning of twenty-first century will be the despairing midnight of the world of which Hölderlin spoke. But it is always darkest before the dawn. One knows that the sun will return, sol invictus. After the twilight of the gods: the dawn of the gods. Our enemies always believed in the Great Evening, and their flags bear the stars of the night. Our flags, on the contrary, are emblazoned with the star of the Great Morning, with branching rays; with the wheel, the flower of the sun at Midday.

Great civilizations can pass from the darkness of decline to rebirth: Islam and China prove it. The United States is not a civilization, but a society, the global materialization of bourgeois society, a comet, with a power as insolent as it is transitory. It does not have roots. It is not our true competitor on the stage of history, merely a parasite.

The time of conquest is over. Now is the time of reconquest, inner and outer: the reappropriation of our memory and our space: and what a space! Fourteen time zones on which the sun never sets. From Brest to the Bering Straits, it is truly the Empire of the Sun, the very space of the birth and expansion of the Indo-European people. To the south-east are our Indian cousins. To the east is the great Chinese civilization, which could decide to be our enemy or our ally. To the west, on the other side of the ocean: America whose desire will always be to prevent continental union. But will it always be able to stop it?

And then, to the south: the main threat, resurging from the depths of the ages, the one with which we cannot compromise.

Loggers try to cut down the Tree, among them many traitors and collaborators. Let us defend our land, preserve our people. The countdown has begun. We have time, but only a little.

And then, even if they cut the trunk or the storm knocks it down, the roots will remain, always fertile. Only one ember is enough to reignite a fire.

Obviously, they may cut down the Tree and dismember its corpse, in a twilight song, and anaesthetized Europeans may not feel the pain. But the earth is fertile, and only one seed is enough to begin the growth again. In the twenty-first century, let us prepare our children for war. Let us educate our youth, be it only a minority, as a new aristocracy.

Today we need more than morality. We need hypermorality, i.e., the Nietzschean ethics of difficult times. When one defends one’s people, i.e., one’s own children, one defends the essential. Then one follows the rule of Agamemnon and Leonidas but also of Charles Martel: what prevails is the law of the sword, whose bronze or steel reflects the glare of the sun. The tree, the rocket, the sword: three vertical symbols thrust from the ground towards the light, from the Earth to the Sun, animated by sap, fire, and blood.

—————-

Faye, Guillaume. “Mars & Hephaestus: The Return of History.” The Occidental Quarterly Online, 7 December 2009. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/mars-and-hephaestus/ >.

 

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From Dusk to Dawn – Faye

From Dusk to Dawn

By Guillaume Faye

Editor’s Note:

This is the first unabridged publication of the following translation with introduction by Michael O’Meara.

Translator’s Note:

The following talk was given in Moscow on May 17, 2005 and recently posted, in French, on the Russian site Athenaeum.

For at least three reasons, I think it deserves the widest possible circulation in White Nationalist circles. The first is one which more and more English speaking nationalists are beginning to realize: Guillaume Faye is today the most interesting, if not pertinent spokesman for the genetic-cultural heritage associated with the White Resistance. Everything he says or writes on the subject of who we are, what we are fighting for, and where the main battle fronts will lie are worth thinking about. In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and now Russia, his ideas have touched the leading debates (even, in some cases, descending to ad hominem issues, which seem the least important of our concerns).

The second reason this article deserves attention is the metapolitical one. Faye is a veteran of the first major effort to practice a “Gramscianism of the Right” — that is, to wage a cultural war against the ethnocidal principles of the dominant liberal culture. Not unrelatedly, he stands out among anti-liberal nationalists, creative force that he is, in having developed a language and a discourse that reaches beyond the narrow confines of our movement, while serving as a radical alternative to the anti-White language and discourse of the existing System.

The third reason is that this talk is a succinct and eloquent synthesis of the ideas — the vision — Faye has developed in the seven books (and countless articles) he’s produced in the eight years since the appearance of his path-breaking L’Archéofuturisme (1998). However provisionally sketched, these ideas aim at helping us through what promises to be the worst storm of our collective existence. At the same time, these ideas speak to something more primordial.

As an earlier student of our historical destiny writes: “All that is great stands in the storm” (Plato). What is coming will undoubtedly determine if we have any greatness left in us. The Whitemen of the West, the men of the Evening Lands (Abandländer), having gone under before, have also a long history of recognizing that it is only in resolutely confronting the dangers bearing down on them that they stand a chance of weathering them and, in doing so, of rediscovering what is still great within themselves.

Faye, I believe, is one of the seers calling us to return to ourselves and to the greatness inherent in who we are. — Michael O’Meara

Not since the fall of the Roman Empire has Europe experienced such a dramatic situation. It faces a danger unparalleled in its history and doesn’t even know it — or rather refuses to see it.

It’s been invaded, occupied, and colonized by peoples from the South and by Islam. It’s dominated by the United States, which wages a merciless economic war on it. It’s collapsing demographically, as its population ages and it ceases to reproduce itself. It’s been emasculated by decadent, nihilist ideologies cloaked in a facile optimism, and it’s been subjected to an unprecedented regression of culture and education, to primitivism and materialism. Europe is the sick man of the world. And its political classes, along with its intellectual elites, are actively collaborating in this race suicide. The argument I’m making is not, though, just about immigration, but also about a colonization and an invasion that is transforming Europe’s biological and ethno-cultural stock; it’s about not giving way to despair; about seeing that the struggle is only just beginning; and knowing that the closely related peoples of Europe have no alternative but to unite in their common defense.

The Destruction of Europe’s Ethno-Biological Stock

The demographics of the non-White invasion of France and Europe is terrifying. In a recent work, “France africaine” (African France), a well known demographer predicts that if present trends continue, more than 40 percent of the French population will be Black or Arab by 2040. Twenty-five percent of school children in France and Belgium today and more than 30 percent of infants are already of non-European origin. Of France’s present population of 61 million, more than 10 million are non-European and have a far higher birth rate than Whites. Every year 100,000 non-Europeans are naturalized as French citizens and another 300,000, most illegal, cross our undefended borders. The situation is not much different throughout the rest of Europe and signals the virtual end of our civilization, though the political classes have apparently yet to notice it.

Worldwide, including the United States, the White race is in steep numerical decline. It’s often said that our technological superiority will compensate for this disparity, but I don’t think so: The only meaningful forms of wealth and power are in human beings. For a civilization is based primarily on what the Romans called “germen,” that is, on the ethno-biological stock, the roots, that nourish a civilization and culture.

The non-European invasion of Europe that began in the 1960s was largely self-engendered, provoked: By left and right-wing politicians contaminated with Marxist and Trotskyist ideas; by an employer class greedy for cheap labor; by Jewish intellectuals demanding a multiracial society; by the ideology of human rights that had sprung from the secularization of certain Christian principles.

In France and in Europe, the collaborators abetting the invasion have established a system of preferences for the invaders that native Whites are obliged to pay for. Illegal immigrants are thus not only rarely repatriated when caught, they continue to receive the lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by the anti-White forces in control of the state. At the same time, “anti-racists” have introduced a host of discriminatory laws that protect immigrants from normal social restraints, even though they are largely responsible for the on-going explosion of criminality (more than a thousand percent in the last 50 years).

The invasion is taking place as much in the maternity wards as it is along our porous borders. Combined with the demographic decline of the White population, immigration has become an economic disaster for Western Europe. It’s estimated to cost $180 billion per year (if the growing insecurity, as well as the innumerable forms of social assistance benefiting immigrants, including illegals, is figured in). This, in turn, creates new lures for the invaders: It is simply far more interesting to be unemployed in Europe than to work in the Third World. While the educated and creative segments of our population are beginning to flee, mainly to the United States, they are being replaced by Africa’s refuse, which has to be fed and supported by us and hasn’t anything in the way of skills or intelligence to offer.

All these facts suggest that the 21st-century European economy will be a depressed, Third-World one.

Islam’s Third Major Offensive

In addition to this mass, non-White invasion, Islam is again on the offensive. With single-minded persistence, its totalitarian and aggressive religion/ideology seeks the conquest of Europe. We’ve already suffered three great assaults by Islam, which today stretches from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The first of these offensives was halted at Portiers in 732 by Charles Martel; the second in 1683, during the Ottoman siege of Vienna; the third [in the form of the present invasion and colonization] is now underway [and virtually unopposed]. Islam has a long memory and its objective is to establish on our continent what [the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the ayattolla] Khomeiny called the “universal Caliphate.”

The invasion of Europe has begun and the figures [testifying to its extent] are alarming. The continent, including Russia, is now occupied by 55 million Muslims, a number that increases at a 6 percent annual rate. In France, there are at least 6 million. Like those in Belgium and Britain, these French Muslims are starting to demand a share of political power. The government, for its part, simply refuses to take seriously their objective of transforming France into an Islamic Republic by the year 2020, when the demographic weight of the Arab/Muslim population will have become determinant. Meanwhile, it is financing the construction of Mosques throughout the country in the hope of buying social peace; there are already more than 2,000 in France, nearly double the number in Morocco. Islam is at present the second largest religion in France, behind Catholicism, but the largest in the numbers of practitioners. [The republic’s president] Jacques Chirac has even declared that “France is now an Islamic power.” Everywhere in the West there prevails the unfounded belief that there’s a difference between Islam and “Islamism,” and that a Western, secularized, that is, moderate, Islam is possible. There’s no such thing. Every Muslim is potentially a jihadist. For Islam is a theocracy that confuses the spiritual with the temporal, faith with law, and seeks to impose its Shari’a [Islamic law] on a Europe whose civilizational precepts are absolutely incompatible with it.

The Advent of Race War

The criminality and delinquency in Western Europe caused by mass immigration and the collapse of civic values have reached insupportable levels. In France in 2004, more than a 100,000 cars were torched and 80 policemen killed. Nearly every week race riots erupt in the banlieues [the “suburbs” housing the immigrants masses]. In the public schools, violence is endemic and educational levels have almost collapsed. Among youth under 20, nearly 20 percent are illiterate. While racist assaults on Whites are steadily rising, they are routinely ignored in the name of the anti-racist vulgate, which holds that only Whites can be racists. At the same time, an arsenal of repressive legislation, worthy of Soviet communism, has imposed “laws” whose purely ideological and subjective intent make no pretence to fairness, let alone objectivity. All criticism of immigration or Islam is prohibited. I myself have been tried several time and levied with an enormous fine for having written La colonisation de l’Europe [The Colonization of Europe].

A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than “terrorism.” The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation.

The state’s utopian plan for “republican integration” has nevertheless failed because it thought peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogenous. . . . European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

I’m a native of Southwest France, of the area along the Atlantic coast, and speak not a word of Russian, but I feel infinitely closer to a Russian than to a French-speaking Arab or African, even if they happen to be “French” citizens.

The Moral Crisis and Archaefuturism

The present situation can be explained, almost clinically, as a sort of “mental AIDS.” Our present afflictions come from the virus of nihilism, which Nietzsche foresaw, and which has weakened all our natural defenses. Thus infected, Europeans have succumbed to a feverish self-extinction. They have voluntarily opened the city gates.

The primary symptom of this disease is “xenophilia:” a systematic preference for the Other rather than for the Same. A second symptom is “ethnomasochism,” a hatred of one’s own civilization and origins. A third is emasculation [dévirilisation], or what might be called the cult of weakness and a preference for male homosexuality. Historically proven values associated with the use of force and a people’s survival — values associated with honor, loyalty, family, fertility, patriotism, the will to survive, etc. — are treated today as ridiculous shortcomings. This sort of decadence owes a good deal to the secularization of Christian charity and its egalitarian offshoot, human rights.

Europeans may take inspiration from certain values still upheld in Russia: For example, the consciousness of belonging to a superior civilization and of maintaining a “right to distance” from other peoples. We need to break with all forms of “ethnopluralism,” which is simply another kind of egalitarianism, and reclaim the right to “ethnocentrism,” the right to live in our own lands without the Other. We also have to reclaim the principle: “To each his own.” Besides, only Westerners believe race-mixing is a virtue or envisage the future as a melting pot. They alone believe in cosmopolitanism. But the 21st century will be dominated by a resurgence of ethno-religious blocs, especially in the South and the East. Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” will never happen. Instead, we’re going to experience an acceleration of history with the “clash of civilizations.” Europeans also need to break with the “presentism” in which they are sunk and learn to see themselves again (as do Muslims, Chinese, and Indians) as a “long-living people,” bearers of a future. The mental revolution needed to bring about this change in European attitudes is, though, only possible through a gigantic crisis, a violent shock, which is already on its way and which I will say a few words about below.

The New American Imperialism

Europeans also have to come to terms with what I called in my last book “the new American imperialism,” an imperialism more heavy-handed than that of the Cold War era, but one that is also more blundering. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, American administrations seem to have lost all sense of measure, becoming even more hubristic, as they embark on a fantastic quest for world domination, dressed up in the simulacra of a new Roman empire. Much of this, of course, is explainable in terms of neoconservative ideology, linked with Zionism, but it’s also driven by a messianic, almost pathological, sense of having a “divine mission.”

What are the goals of this new American imperialism? To encircle and neutralize Russia, preventing any meaningful alliance between her and Europe (the Pentagon’s worse nightmare); to deflect Europe’s challenge to its hegemony by making Islam and Muslim Turkey a part of it; to subjugate the Eastern and Central European parts of the former Soviet empire; to wage a relentless economic war on the European Union and do so in such a way that the latter doesn’t dream of resisting. Everywhere, the crusading spirit of this new American imperialism endeavors to impose “democracy,” especially on Russia’s periphery. “Democracy” has come to mean “pro-American regime.”

But we shouldn’t complain of these American ambitions, which accord with the country’s geopolitical and thalassocratic desire for domination. In history, everyone is responsible only for oneself.

That’s why I oppose the “obsessional and hysterical anti-Americanism” so prevalent in France, for it is counter-productive, self-victimizing, and irresponsible.

A people or nation must learn to distinguish between its “principal adversary” and its “principal enemy.” The first tries to dominate and undermine, the second to kill. We shouldn’t forget Carl Schmitt’s formula: “It’s not only you who chooses your enemy, it’s more often your enemy who chooses you.” America, specifically its ruling class, is Europe’s and Russia’s “principal adversary” at the level of geopolitics, economics, and culture. Europe’s “principal enemy” is the peoples of the South, increasingly assembled under the banner of Islam, whose invasion of the continent is already well underway, facilitated by a political class and an intelligentsia who have opened the gates (to Washington’s delight) and who seek a miscegenated, non-European Europe.

Like Atlanticists, the hysterical anti-Americans overestimate the United States, without understanding that it is only as strong as we are weak. The Americans’ catastrophic and counter-productive occupation of little Iraq, to which they have brought nothing but chaos, makes this all indisputably evident. In the 21st century, the US will cease to be the premier world power. That will be China — or, if we have the will, what I call “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of the European peninsular and Russia.

The Convergence of Catastrophes

I’ve postulated the hypothesis that the present global system, founded on a belief in miracles, a belief in the myth of indefinite progress, is on the verge of collapse. For the first time in history, humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to occur sometime between 2010 and 2020 — a crisis provoked by the on-going degradation of the ecosystem and climatic disruptions, by the exhaustion of fossil fuel sources and food-producing capacity, by the increased fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and massive indebtedness, by the return of epidemics, by the rise of nationalism, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation, by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offense, and by the dramatic aging of the West’s population.

We need to prepare for these converging catastrophes, which will mark the transition from one era to another, as their cataclysmic effects sweep away liberal modernity and bring about a New Middle Age. With such a convergence, there will also come an opportunity for rebirth, for every major historical regeneration emerges from chaos. This is especially the case with a civilization like our own, whose very nature is “metamorphic.”

Eurosiberia

The Europe of the future must no longer be envisaged in the mushy, ungovernable forms of the present European Union, which is a powerless Medusa, unable to control its borders, dominated by the mania of free-trade, and subject to American domination. We need to imagine a federal, imperial Grande Europe, ethnically homogeneous (that is, European), based on a single autonomous area, and inseparably linked to Russia. I call this enormous continental bloc “Euro-Siberia.” Having no need to be aggressive toward its neighbors because it would be unattackable, such a bloc would become the premier world power (in a world partitioned into large blocs), self-centered, and opposed to all the dangerous dogmas now associated with globalism. It would have the capacity to practice the “autarky of great spaces,” whose principles have already been worked out by the Nobe; Prize-winning economist, Maurice Allais. The destiny of the European peninsula cannot be separated from continental Russia, for both ethno-cultural and geopolitical reasons. It’s absolutely imperative for America’s mercantile thalassocracy to prevent the birth of a Euro-Siberian federation.

This is not the place to speak of the Israeli state. Only a word: For essentially demographic reasons, I believe the Zionist utopia conceived by Hertzl and Buber and realized since 1948 will not survive any longer than Soviet communism did; indeed, its end is already in sight. I’m presently writing a book on The New Jewish Question, which I hope will be translated into Russian.

Conclusion

Fatalism is never appropriate. History is always open-ended and presents innumerable unexpected caprices and turns. Let’s not forget the formula of William of Orange: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” The period we are presently living through is a one of resistance and of preparation for the even more threatening events to come, such as might follow the juncture of a race war and a massive economic downturn. We need to start thinking in post-chaos terms and organize accordingly. In closing, let me leave you with a favorite watchword of mine: “From Resistance to Reconquest, From Reconquest to Renaissance.”

—————–

Faye, Guillaume. “From Dusk to Dawn.” Counter-Currents Publishing. 27 July 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/from-dusk-to-dawn/ >.

Letter on Identity & Sovereignty – Venner

Letter to My Friends on Identity & Sovereignty

By Dominque Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

When you belong to a nation associated with St. Louis, Philip the Fair, Richelieu, Louis XIV, or Napoleon, a country which in the late 17th century, was called the “great nation” (the most populated and most dangerous), it is cruel to recount the history of repeated setbacks: the aftermath of Waterloo, 1870, 1940, and again in 1962, the ignominious end of French rule in Algeria. A certain pride necessarily suffers.

By the 1930s, many among the boldest French minds had imagined a united Europe as a way to an understanding with Germany and as a solution to the constant decline of France. After the disaster that was World War II (which amplified that of 1914–1918), a project was born that is in itself legitimate. New bloodlettings between the French and Germans should be outlawed forever. The idea was to tie together the two great sister nations of the former Carolingian Empire. First by an economic association (the European Coal and Steel Community), then by a political association. General de Gaulle wanted to make this happen with the Elysée Treaty (January 22, 1963), but the United States, in their hostility, forestalled it by putting pressure on West Germany.

Then came the technocratic globalists who gave us the gas works called the “European Union.” In practice, this is the absolute negation of its name. The fake “European Union” has become the biggest obstacle to a genuine political settlement that respects the particularities of the European peoples of the former Carolingian Empire. Europe, it must be remembered, is primarily a unitary multi-millennial civilization going back to Homer, but it is also a potential power zone and the aspiration for a future that remains to be built.

Why an aspiration to power? Because no European nations today, neither France nor Germany nor Italy, despite brave fronts, are sovereign states any longer.

There are three main attributes of sovereignty:

First attribute: the ability to make war and conclude peace. The US, Russia, Israel, or China can. Not France. That was over after the end of the war in Algeria (1962), despite the efforts of General de Gaulle and our nuclear deterrent, which will never be used by France on its own (unless the United States has disappeared, which is unpredictable). Another way to pose the question: for whom are the French soldiers dying in Afghanistan? Certainly not for France, which has no business there, but for the United States. We are the auxiliaries of the USA. Like Germany and Italy, France is a vassal state of the great Atlantic suzerain power. It is best to face this to recover our former pride.

Second attribute of sovereignty: control of territory and population. Ability to distinguish between one’s own people and others . . . We know the reality is that the French state, by its policy, laws, courts, has organized the “great replacement” of populations, we impose a preference for immigrants and Muslims, with 8 million Arab-Muslims (and more waiting), bearers of another history, another civilization, and another future (Sharia).

Third attribute of sovereignty: one’s own currency. We know what that is.

The agonizing conclusion: France, as a state, is no longer sovereign and no longer has its own destiny. This is a consequence of the disasters of the century of 1914 (the 20th century) and the general decline of Europe and Europeans.

But there is a “but”: if France does not exist as a sovereign state, the French people and nation still exist, despite all efforts to dissolve them into rootless individuals! This is the great destabilizing paradox of the French mind. We were always taught to confuse identity with sovereignty by being taught that the nation is a creation of the state, which, for the French, is historically false.

It is for me a very old topic of discussion that I had previously summarized in an opinion column published in Le Figaro on February 1, 1999 under the title: “Sovereignty is not Identity.” I’ll put it online one day soon for reference.

No, the sovereignty of the state is not to be confused with national identity. France’s universalist tradition and centralist state were for centuries the enemy of the carnal nation and its constituent communities. The state has always acted relentlessly to uproot the French and transform them into the interchangeable inhabitants of a geographic zone. It has always acted to rupture the national tradition. Look at the July 14 celebrations: it celebrates a repugnant uprising, not a great memory of unity. Look at the ridiculous emblem of the French Republic: a plaster Marianne wearing a revolutionary cap. Look at the hideous logos that have been imposed to replace the arms of the traditional regions. Remember that in 1962 the state used all its strength against the French in Algeria, abandoned to their misery. Similarly, today, it is not difficult to see that the state gives preference to immigrants (construction of mosques, legalizing halal slaughter) at the expense of the natives.

There is nothing new in this state of war against the living nation. The Jacobin Republic merely followed the example of the Bourbons, which Tocqueville has demonstrated in The Old Regime and the French Revolution before Taine and other historians. Our textbooks have taught blind admiration for the way the Bourbons crushed “feudalism,” that is to say, the nobility and the communities they represented. What a brilliant policy! By strangling the nobility and rooted communities, this dynasty destroyed the foundation of the old monarchy. Thus, in the late 18th century, the individualistic (human rights) Revolution triumphed in France but failed everywhere else in Europe thanks to the persistence of the feudal system and strong communities. Reread what Renan says in his Intellectual and Moral Reform in France. The reality is that in France the state is not the defender of the nation. It is a machine of power that has its own logic, willingly lent to the service of the enemies of the nation, having become one of the main agents of the deconstruction of identity.

Source: http://fr.novopress.info/115104/tribune-libre-lettre-sur-lidentite-a-mes-amis-souverainistes-par-dominique-venner/

———–

Venner, Dominique. “Letter to My Friends on Identity & Sovereignty.” Counter-Currents.com. 6 July 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/letter-to-my-friends-on-identity-and-sovereignty/ >.

 

Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty? – Venner

Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Author’s Note:

I reproduce here in full a seminal article that I published in Le Figaro on February 1, 1999 under the title: “Sovereignty is not Identity.” This article was part of the debate provoked by the Amsterdam Treaty and discussions about the future EU.

My intention was to liberate the minds of those who see history from a Jacobin and “state-centered” perspective, which has always been taught in France under the influence of an exceptionally powerful centralized state. This history focuses exclusively on the state and practices a kind of negation of the French people and the carnal nation that I hope to rehabilitate. This article provoked some lively debate in those circles most attached to the idea of sovereignty, promoting new thinking on national identity. I reproduce it as it was published at the time.

A wave of panic stirs our remotest hamlets. France, will she survive the Euro, the Treaty of Amsterdam, the conspiracy of the Eurocrats, to the year 2000? Is the loss of sovereignty the loss of identity? On these real issues regarding the challenge of the construction of Europe, historians have remained strangely silent. Yet if there is an area where history can illuminate the future, it is that of French identity in the midst of Europe.

Unlike the German nation, which lived without a unitary state for six centuries, from 1250 to 1871, France has not experienced such an interruption. Here, the unitary state was continuously maintained during the same period. Hence the causal relationship inscribed in our minds between sovereignty and identity. It has even become a kind of dogma, maintained by Jacobin historiography, that the French nation is the creation of the state and that, deprived of the latter, it would be in danger of death and dissolution.

It this were true, such a nation would be worthless. But it is false. Certainly no one would contest that the state, royal and republican, built the political and administrative framework of the nation. However, this has nothing to do with the formation of its substance. The state is not the creator of the French people or the source of our identity. History shows that. But this truth is so contrary to received ideas that it needs some explanation.

Let us refer to the origins, the Oaths of Strasbourg, publicly pledged in February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German, grandsons of Charlemagne. The authentic text was written in Langue d′oïl (Old French) and Old High German. It is the oldest known document attesting to a linguistic separation between German-speaking and French-speaking Frankish barons of the same stock. The Oath of Strasbourg is, in a way, the official birth of the French and the German peoples before France and Germany. In the 9th century, without there ever being a nation state, two peoples and two cultures are already evidenced by the mysterious emergence of two distinct languages.

Move forward in time. From the 11th and 12th centuries, there is ample evidence of radiant French identity. At the time, the centralized state did not yet exist. The little courts of the petty kings of the time had nothing to do with the Song of Roland or Tristan and Isolde or the Lancelot of Chretien de Troyes, primordial monuments of a Frenchness deeply rooted in the European soil. The role of the state is also absent in the emergence and proliferation of the Romanesque style in the following centuries, in the admirable secular architecture of castles, towns, and country houses, neglected by the scholarly historiography up to André Chastel.[1]

What sort of people, what sort of identity? In the 12th century, the famous Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis and adviser to Louis VII, responds in his own way: “We are French of France, born of the same womb.” Five centuries later, the grammarian Vaugelas responsible in 1639 to lead the drafting of the Great dictionary of the Academy offers this definition: “People does not mean mob, but community represented faithfully by its nobility.”

More than the state, the deciding factor of the birth of a nation is the existence of a “core people”: homogeneous, numerous, active, “represented by its nobility,” from which unfold a language and style that gradually extend to similar neighboring peoples. Such was the fate of the historic “core people” of the Ile de France, Picardy, and Neustria, of high Frankish composition. The Capetian kings made it the base of their ambitions. What happened, under the dry rule of the state, to this “core people,” the people of Bouvines and many other exploits, once so strong?

It is to them that we owe our language and its inner strength, so long inviolable. Emile Littre emphasized this in his History of the French Language. He showed how powerful vitality and genuine originality allowed the transformation of a Celticized and Germanized low-Latin into Old French and then French.

Before being ennobled by literature, the language had arisen from the people. Montaigne knew well when he wrote: “I would rather my son to learn to speak in taverns than schools of eloquence. . . . If only I could confine myself to the words used in the market of Paris.” Ronsard said much the same thing by assigning this condition the adoption of new words: “they are to be molded and shaped on a pattern already received from the people.” A pattern which Etiemble, in the 20th century, nicely called the “people’s throat.” Of course there must still be a people, i.e., living and rooted communities, everything that the centralist government dislikes and has always fought.

The state has its own logic which is not that of the living nation. The living nation has nothing to fear from the loss of sovereignty, because sovereignty should not be confused with identity. If further proof is needed, the history of Quebec is eloquent enough. Since the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French in Canada were totally abandoned by the royal state. Isolated in a hostile land under foreign sovereignty, they not only failed to disappear, but they multiplied, preserving their ancestral language and customs, fighting victoriously against Anglo-Saxon linguistic hegemony.

Identity lies in fidelity to oneself, and nowhere else.

Note

1. One might add that in the 14th century several large fiefs often Carolingian and French escaped the royal state, but not French identity: Great Burgundy, Guyenne, French Flanders, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, and Savoy, not including independent Brittany.

Source: http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/2012/07/lidentite-depend-elle-de-la-souverainete/

———–

Venner, Dominique. “Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 7 September 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/09/does-identity-depend-on-sovereignty/ >.

 

Democracy Revisited – Benoist

Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns

by Alain de Benoist

 

Translated by Tomislav Sunic from the author’s book Démocratie: Le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985).

 

“The defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy,” wrote George Orwell.¹ This does not seem to be a recent phenomenon. Guizot remarked in 1849: “So powerful is the sway of the word democracy, that no government and no party dares to live, or thinks it can, without inscribing this word on its banner.”² This is truer today than ever before. Not everybody is a democrat, but everybody pretends to be one. There is no dictatorship that does not regard itself as a democracy. The former communist countries of Eastern Europe did not merely represent themselves as democratic, as attested by their constitutions;³ they vaunted themselves as the only real democracies, in contrast to the “formal” democracies of the West.

The near unanimity on democracy as a word, albeit not always a fact, gives the notion of democracy a moral and almost religious content, which, from the very outset, discourages further discussion. Many authors have recognized this problem. Thus, in 1939, T.S. Eliot declared: “When a word acquires a universally sacred character . . . , as has today the word democracy, I begin to wonder, whether, by all it attempts to mean, it still means anything at all.”⁴ Bertrand de Jouvenel was even more explicit: “The discussion on democracy, the arguments in its favor, or against it, point frequently to a degree of intellectual shallowness, because it is not quite clear what this discussion is all about.”⁵ Giovanni Sartori added in 1962: “In a somewhat paradoxical vein, democracy could be defined as a high-flown name for something which does not exist.”⁶ Julien Freund also noted, in a somewhat witty tone:

To claim to be a democrat means little, because one can be a democrat in a contradictory manner—either in the manner of the Americans or the English, or like the East European communists, Congolese, or Cubans. It is perfectly natural that under such circumstances I refuse to be a democrat, because my neighbor might be an adherent of dictatorship while invoking the word democracy.⁷

Thus we can see that the universal propagation of the term democracy does not contribute much to clarifying the meaning of democracy. Undoubtedly, we need to go a step further.

The first idea that needs to be dismissed—an idea still cherished by some—is that democracy is a specific product of the modern era, and that democracy corresponds to a “developed stage” in the history of political regime. ⁸ This does not seem to be substantiated by the facts. Democracy is neither more “modern” nor more “evolved” than other forms of governance. Governments with democratic tendencies have appeared throughout history. We note that the linear perspective used in this type of analysis can be particularly deceiving. The idea of progress, when applied to a political regime, appears devoid of meaning. If one subscribes to this type of linear reasoning, it is easy to advance the argument of the “self-evidence” of democracy, which, according to liberals, arises “spontaneously” in the realm of political affairs just as the market “spontaneously” accords with the logic of demand and supply. Jean Baechler notes:

If we accept the hypothesis that men, as an animal species(sic), aspire spontaneously to a democratic regime which promises them security, prosperity, and liberty, we must then also conclude that, the minute these requirements have been met, the democratic experience automatically emerges, without ever needing the framework of ideas.⁹

What exactly are these “requirements” that produce democracy, in the same manner as fire causes heat? They bear closer examination.

In contrast to the Orient, absolute despotism has always been rare in Europe. Whether in ancient Rome, or in Homer’s Iliad, Vedantic India, or among the Hittites, one can observe very early the existence of popular assemblies, both military and civilian. In Indo-European societies kings were usually elected; in fact, all ancient monarchies were first elective monarchies. Tacitus relates that among the Germans chieftains were elected on account of their valor, and kings on account of their noble birth (reges ex nobilitate duces ex virtute sumunt). In France, for instance, the crown was long both elective and hereditary. It was only with Pippin the Short that the king was chosen from within the same family, and only after Hugh Capet that the principle of primogeniture was adopted. In Scandinavia, the king was elected by a provincial assembly; that election had then to be confirmed by the other national assemblies.

Among the Germanic peoples the practice of “shielding”—or raising the new king on his soldiers’ shields—was widespread.¹⁰ The Holy Roman Emperor was also elected, and the importance of the role of the princely electors in the history of Germany should not be neglected. By and large, it was only with the beginning of the twelfth century in Europe that elective monarchy gradually gave way to hereditary monarchy. Until the French Revolution, kings ruled with the aid of parliaments which possessed considerable executive powers. In almost all European communities it was long the status of freeman that conferred political rights on the citizen. “Citizens” were constituent members of free popular communes, which among other things possessed their own municipal charters, and sovereign rulers were surrounded by councils in the decision-making process. Moreover, the influence of customary law on juridical practice was an index of popular “participation” in defining the laws. In short, it cannot be stated that Europe’s old monarchies were devoid of popular legitimacy.

The oldest parliament in the Western world, the althing, the federal assembly of Iceland, whose members gathered yearly in the inspired setting of Thingvellir, emerged as early as 930 A.D. Adam von Bremen wrote in 1076: “They have no king, only the laws.” The thing, or local parliament, designated both a location and the assembly where freemen with equal political rights convened at a fixed date in order to legislate and render justice.¹¹ In Iceland the freeman enjoyed two inalienable privileges: he had a right to bear arms and to a seat in the thing. “The Icelanders,” writes Frederick Durand

created and experienced what one could call by some uncertain yet suggestive analogy a kind of Nordic Hellas, i.e., a community of freemen who participated actively in the affairs of the community. Those communities were surprisingly well cultivated and intellectually productive, and, in addition, were united by bonds based on esteem and respect.¹²

“Scandinavian democracy is very old and one can trace its origins to the Viking era,” observes Maurice Gravier. ¹³ In all of northern Europe this “democratic” tradition was anchored in a very strong communitarian sentiment, a propensity to “live together” (zusammenleben), which constantly fostered the primacy of the common interest over that of the individual. Such democracy, typically, included a certain hierarchical structure, which explains why one could describe it as “aristo-democracy.” This tradition, based also on the concept of mutual assistance and a sense of common responsibility, remains alive in many countries today, for instance, in Switzerland.

The belief that the people were originally the possessor of power was common throughout the Middle Ages. Whereas the clergy limited itself to the proclamation omnis potestas a Deo, other theorists argued that power could emanate from God only through the intercession of the people. The belief of the “power of divine right” should therefore be seen in an indirect form, and not excluding the reality of the people. Thus, Marsilius of Padua did not hesitate to proclaim the concept of popular sovereignty; significantly, he did so in order to defend the supremacy of the emperor (at the time, Ludwig of Bavaria) over the Church. The idea of linking the principle of the people to its leaders was further emphasized in the formula populus et proceres (the people and the nobles), which appears frequently in old texts.

Here we should recall the democratic tendencies evident in ancient Rome, ¹⁴ the republics of medieval Italy, the French and Flemish communes, the Hanseatic municipalities, and the free Swiss cantons. Let us further note the ancient boerenvrijheid (“peasants’ freedom”) that prevailed in medieval Frisian provinces and whose equivalent could be found along the North Sea, in the Low Lands, in Flanders, Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Finally, it is worth mentioning the existence of important communal movements based on free corporate structures, the function of which was to provide mutual help and to pursue economic and political goals. Sometimes these movements clashed with king and Church, which were supported by the burgeoning bourgeoisie. At other times, however, communal movements backed the monarchy in its fight against the feudal lords, thus contributing to the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie.¹⁵

In reality, most political regimes throughout history can be qualified as mixed ones. “All ancient democracies,” writes François Perroux, “were governed by a de facto or de jure aristocracy, unless they were governed by a monarchical principle.” ¹⁶ According to Aristotle, Solon’s constitution was oligarchic in terms of its Areopagus, aristocratic in terms of its magistrates, and democratic in terms of the make-up of its tribunals. It combined the advantages of each type of government. Similarly, Polybius argues that Rome was, in view of the power of its consuls, an elective monarchy; in regard to the powers of the Senate, an aristocracy; and regarding the rights of the people, a democracy. Cicero, in his De Republica, advances a similar view. Monarchy need not exclude democracy, as is shown by the example of contemporary constitutional and parliamentary monarchies today. After all, it was the French monarchy in 1789 that convoked the Estates-General. “[D]emocracy, taken in the broad sense, admits of various forms,” observed Pope Pius XII, “and can be realized in monarchies as well as in republics.” ¹⁷

Let us add that the experience of modern times demonstrates that neither government nor institutions need play a decisive role in shaping social life. Comparable types of government may disguise different types of societies, whereas different governmental forms may mask identical social realities. (Western societies today have an extremely homogeneous structure even though their institutions and constitutions sometimes offer substantial differences.)

So now the task of defining democracy appears even more difficult. The etymological approach has its limits. According to its original meaning, democracy means “the power of the people.” Yet this power can be interpreted in different ways. The most reasonable approach, therefore, seems to be the historical approach—an approach that explains “genuine” democracy as first of all the political system of that ancient people that simultaneously invented the word and the fact.

The notion of democracy did not appear at all in modern political thought until the eighteenth century. Even then its mention was sporadic, frequently with a pejorative connotation. Prior to the French Revolution the most “advanced” philosophers had fantasized about mixed regimes combining the advantages of an “enlightened” monarchy and popular representation. Montesquieu acknowledged that a people could have the right to control, but not the right to rule. Not a single revolutionary constitution claimed to have been inspired by “democratic” principles. Robespierre was, indeed, a rare person for that epoch, who toward the end of his reign, explicitly mentioned democracy (which did not however contribute to the strengthening of his popularity in the years to come), a regime that he defined as a representative form of government, i.e., “a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are of their own making, do for themselves all that they can do well, and by their delegates do all that they cannot do themselves.” ¹⁸

It was in the United States that the word democracy first became widespread, notably when the notion of “republic” was contrasted to the notion of “democracy.” Its usage became current at the beginning of the nineteenth century, especially with the advent of Jacksonian democracy and the subsequent establishment of the Democratic Party. The word, in turn, crossed the Atlantic again and became firmly implanted in Europe—to the profit of the constitutional debates that filled the first half of the nineteenth century. Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America, the success of which was considerable, made the term a household word.

Despite numerous citations, inspired by antiquity, that adorned the philosophical and political discourse of the eighteenth century, the genuine legacy drawn from ancient democracy was at that time very weak. The philosophers seemed more enthralled with the example of Sparta than Athens. The debate “Sparta vs. Athens,” frequently distorted by bias or ignorance, pitted the partisans of authoritarian egalitarianism against the tenets of moderate liberalism. ¹⁹ Rousseau, for instance, who abominated Athens, expressed sentiments that were rigorously pro-Spartiate. In his eyes, Sparta was first and foremost the city of equals (hómoioi). By contrast, when Camille Desmoulins thundered against Sparta, it was to denounce its excessive egalitarianism. He attacked the Girondin Brissot, that pro-Lycurgian, “who has rendered his citizens equal just as a tornado renders equal all those who are about to drown.” All in all, this type of discourse remained rather shallow. The cult of antiquity was primarily maintained as a metaphor for social regeneration, as exemplified by Saint-Just’s words hurled at the Convention: “The world has been empty since the Romans; their memory can replenish it and it can augur liberty.” ²⁰

If we wish now to continue our study of “genuine” democracy, we must once again turn to Greek democracy rather than to those regimes that the contemporary world designates by the word.

The comparison between ancient democracies and modern democracies has frequently turned into an academic exercise. ²¹ It is generally emphasized that the former were direct democracies, whereas the latter (due to larger areas and populations) are representative democracies. Moreover, we are frequently reminded that slaves were excluded from the Athenian democracy; consequently, the idea emerged that Athens was not so democratic, after all. These two affirmations fall somewhat short of satisfying answers.

Readied by political and social evolution during the sixth century b.c., as well as by reforms made possible by Solon, Athenian democracy entered its founding stage with the reforms of Cleisthenes, who returned from exile in 508 b.c. Firmly established from 460 b.c., it continued to thrive for the next one hundred and fifty years. Pericles, who succeeded Ephialtes in 461 b.c., gave democracy an extraordinary reputation, which did not at all prevent him from exercising, for more than thirty years, a quasi-royal authority over the city. ²²

For the Greeks democracy was primarily defined ²³ by its relationship to two other systems: tyranny and aristocracy. Democracy presupposed three conditions: isonomy (equality before laws); isotimy (equal rights to accede to all public offices); and isegory (liberty of expression). This was direct democracy, known also as “face to face” democracy, since all citizens were allowed to take part in the ekklesía, or Assembly. Deliberations were prepared by the boulé(Council), although in fact it was the popular assembly that made policy. The popular assembly nominated ambassadors; decided over the issue of war and peace, preparing military expeditions or bringing an end to hostilities; investigated the performance of magistrates; issued decrees; ratified laws; bestowed the rights of citizenship; and deliberated on matters of Athenian security. In short, writes Jacqueline de Romilly, “the people ruled, instead of being ruled by elected individuals.” She cites the text of the oath given by the Athenians: “I will kill whoever by word, deed, vote, or hand attempts to destroy democracy…. And should somebody else kill him I will hold him in high esteem before the gods and divine powers, as if he had killed a public enemy.” ²⁴

Democracy in Athens meant first and foremost a community of citizens, that is, a community of people gathered in the ekklesía. Citizens were classified according to their membership in a deme—a grouping which had a territorial, social, and administrative significance. The term démos, which is of Doric origin, designates those who live in a given territory, with the territory constituting a place of origin and determining civic status. ²⁵ To some extent démos and ethnos coincide: democracy could not be conceived in relationship to the individual, but only in the relationship to the polis, that is to say, to the city in its capacity as an organized community. Slaves were excluded from voting not because they were slaves, but because they were not citizens. We seem shocked by this today, yet, after all, which democracy has ever given voting rights to non-citizens? ²⁶

The notions of citizenship, liberty, or equality of political rights, as well as of popular sovereignty, were intimately interrelated. The most essential element in the notion of citizenship was someone’s origin and heritage. Pericles was the “son of Xanthippus from the deme of Cholargus.” Beginning in 451 b.c., one had to be born of an Athenian mother and father in order to become a citizen. Defined by his heritage, the citizen (polítes) is opposed to idiótes, the non-citizen—a designation that quickly took on a pejorative meaning (from the notion of the rootless individual one arrived at the notion of “idiot”). Citizenship as function derived thus from the notion of citizenship as status, which was the exclusive prerogative of birth. To be a citizen meant, in the fullest sense of the word, to have a homeland, that is, to have both a homeland and a history. One is born an Athenian—one does not become one (with rare exceptions). Furthermore, the Athenian tradition discouraged mixed marriages. Political equality, established by law, flowed from common origins that sanctioned it as well. Only birth conferred individual politeía. ²⁷

Democracy was rooted in the concept of autochthonous citizenship, which intimately linked its exercise to the origins of those who exercised it. The Athenians in the fifth century celebrated themselves as “the autochthonous people of great Athens,” and it was within that founding myth that they placed the pivot of their democracy. ²⁸

In Greek, as well as in Latin, liberty proceeds from someone’s origin. Free man *(e)leudheros (Greek eleútheros), is primarily he who belongs to a certain “stock” (cf. in Latin the word liberi, “children”). “To be born of a good stock is to be free,” writes Emile Benveniste, “this is one and the same.” ²⁹ Similarly, in the German language, the kinship between the words frei, “free,” and Freund, “friend,” indicates that in the beginning, liberty sanctioned mutual relationship. The Indo-European root *leudh-, from which derive simultaneously the Latin liber and the Greek eleútheros, also served to designate “people” in the sense of a national group (cf. Old Slavonic ljudú, “people”; German Leute, “people,” both of which derive from the root evoking the idea of “growth and development”).

The original meaning of the word “liberty” does not suggest at all “liberation”—in a sense of emancipation from collectivity. Instead, it implies inheritance—which alone confers liberty. Thus when the Greeks spoke of liberty, they did not have in mind the right to break away from the tutelage of the city or the right to rid themselves of the constraints to which each citizen was bound. Rather, what they had in mind was the right, but also the political capability, guaranteed by law, to participate in the life of the city, to vote in the assembly, to elect magistrates, etc. Liberty did not legitimize secession; instead, it sanctioned its very opposite: the bond which tied the person to his city. This was not liberty-autonomy, but a liberty-participation; it was not meant to reach beyond the community, but was practised solely in the framework of the polis. Liberty meant adherence. The “liberty” of an individual without heritage, i.e. of a deracinated individual, was completely devoid of any meaning.

If we therefore assume that liberty was directly linked to the notion of democracy, then it must be added that liberty meant first and foremost the liberty of the people, from which subsequently the liberty of citizens proceeds. In other words, only the liberty of the people (or of the city) can lay the foundations for the equality of political and individual rights, i.e., rights enjoyed by individuals in the capacity of citizens. Liberty presupposes independence as its first condition. Man lives in society, and therefore individual liberty cannot exist without collective liberty. Among the Greeks, individuals were free because (and in so far as) their city was free.

When Aristotle defines man as a “political animal,” as a social being, when he asserts that the city precedes the individual and that only within society can the individual achieve his potential (Politics, 1253a 19–20), he also suggests that man should not be detached from his role of citizen, a person living in the framework of an organized community, of a polis, or a civitas. Aristotle’s views stand in contrast to the concept of modern liberalism, which posits that the individual precedes society, and that man, in the capacity of a self-sufficient individual, is at once something more than just a citizen.³⁰

Hence, in a “community of freemen,” individual interests must never prevail over common interests. “All constitutions whose objectives are common interest,” writes Aristotle, “are in accordance with absolute justice. By contrast, those whose objective is the personal interest of the governors tend to be defective.” (Politics, 1279a 17sq). In contrast to what one can see, for instance, in Euripides’ works, the city in Aeschylus’ tragedies is regularly described as a communal entity. “This sense of community,” writes Moses I. Finley, “fortified by the state religion, the myths and traditions, was the essential source of success in Athenian democracy. ³¹

In Greece, adds Finley, “liberty meant the rule of law and participation in the decision- making process—and not necessarily the enjoyment of inalienable rights.”³² The law is identified with the genius of the city. “To obey the law meant to be devoted with zeal to the will of the community,” observes Paul Veyne.³³ As Cicero wrote, only liberty can pave the way for legality: “Legum…servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus“ (“We are the servants of the law in order that we can be free,” Oratio pro Cluentio, 53.)

In his attempt to show that liberty is the fundamental principle of democracy (Politics, VII, 1), Aristotle succeeds in de-emphasizing the factor of equality. For the Greeks equality was only one means to democracy, though it could be an important one. Political equality, however, had to emanate from citizenship, i.e., from belonging to a given people. From this it follows that members of the same people (of the same city), irrespective of their differences, shared the desire to be citizens in the same and equal manner. This equality of rights by no means reflects a belief in natural equality. The equal right of all citizens to participate in the assembly does not mean that men are by nature equal (nor that it would be preferable that they were), but rather that they derive from their common heritage a common capacity to exercise the right of suffrage, which is the privilege of citizens. As the appropriate means to this téchne, equality remains exterior to man. This process, as much as it represents the logical consequence of common heritage, is also the condition for common participation. In the eyes of the ancient Greeks it was considered natural that all citizens be associated with political life not by virtue of universal and imprescriptible rights of humans as such, but from the fact of common citizenship. In the last analysis, the crucial notion was not equality but citizenship. Greek democracy was that form of government in which each citizen saw his liberty as firmly founded on an equality that conferred on him the right to civic and political liberties.

The study of ancient democracy has elicited divergent views from contemporary authors. For some, Athenian democracy is an admirable example of civic responsibility (Francesco Nitti); for others it evokes the realm of “activist” political parties (Paul Veyne); for yet others, ancient democracy is essentially totalitarian (Giovanni Sartori). ³⁴ In general, everybody seems to concur that the difference between ancient democracy and modern democracy is considerable. Curiously, it is modern democracy that is used as a criterion for the democratic consistency of the former. This type of reasoning sounds rather odd. As we have observed, it was only belatedly that those modern national governments today styled “democracies” came to identify themselves with this word. Consequently, after observers began inquiring into ancient democracy, and realized that it was different from modern democracy, they drew the conclusion that ancient democracy was “less democratic” than modern democracy. But, in reality, should we not proceed from the inverse type of reasoning? It must be reiterated that democracy was born in Athens in the fifth century b.c. Therefore, it is Athenian democracy (regardless of one’s judgments for or against it) that should be used as an example of a “genuine” type of democracy. Granted that contemporary democratic regimes differ from Athenian democracy, we must then assume that they differ from democracy of any kind. We can see again where this irks most of our contemporaries. Since nowadays everyone boasts of being a perfect democrat, and given the fact that Greek democracy resembles not at all those before our eyes, it is naturally the Greeks who must bear the brunt of being “less democratic”! We thus arrive at the paradox that Greek democracy, in which the people participated daily in the exercise of power, is disqualified on the grounds that it does not fit into the concept of modern democracy, in which the people, at best, participate only indirectly in political life.

There should be no doubt that ancient democracies and modern democracies are systems entirely distinct from each other. Even the parallels that have been sought between them are fallacious. They have only the name in common, since both have resulted from completely different historical processes.

Wherein does this difference lie? It would be wrong to assume that it is related to either the “direct” or “indirect” nature of the decision-making process. Each of them has a different concept of man and a different concept of the world, as well as a different vision of social bonds. The democracy of antiquity was communitarian and “holist”; modern democracy is primarily individualist. Ancient democracy defined citizenship by a man’s origins, and provided him with the opportunity to participate in the life of the city. Modern democracy organizes atomized individuals into citizens viewed through the prism of abstract egalitarianism. Ancient democracy was based on the idea of organic community; modern democracy, heir to Christianity and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on the individual. In both cases the meaning of the words “city,” “people,” “nation,” and “liberty” are totally changed.

To argue, therefore, within this context, that Greek democracy was a direct democracy only because it encompassed a small number of citizens falls short of a satisfying answer. Direct democracy need not be associated with a limited number of citizens. It is primarily associated with the notion of a relatively homogeneous people that is conscious of what makes it a people. The effective functioning of both Greek and Icelandic democracy was the result of cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared heritage. The closer the members of a community are to each other, the more likely they are to have common sentiments, identical values, and the same way of looking at the world, and the easier it is for them to make collective decisions without needing the help of mediators.

In contrast, having ceased to be places of collectively lived meaning, modern societies require a multitude of intermediaries. The aspirations that surface in this type of democracy spring from contradictory value systems that are no longer reconcilable with unified decisions. Ever since Benjamin Constant (De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes, 1819), we have been able to measure to what degree, under the impact of individualist and egalitarian ideologies, the notion of liberty has changed. Therefore, to return to a Greek concept of democracy does not mean nurturing a shallow hope of “face to face” social transparency. Rather, it means reappropriating, as well as adapting to the modern world, the concept of the people and community—concepts that have been eclipsed by two thousand years of egalitarianism, rationalism, and the exaltation of the rootless individual.

Notes

1. George Orwell, Selected Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957), p. 149.

2. François Guizot, De la démocratie en France (Paris: Masson, 1849), p. 9.

3. Georges Burdeau observes that judging by appearances, in terms of their federal organization, the institutions of the Soviet Union are similar to those of the United States, and in terms of its governmental system the Soviet Union is similar to England. La démocratie (Paris : Seuil, 1966), p. 141.

4. T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939).

5. Bertrand de Jouvenel, Du pouvoir (Geneva : Cheval ailé‚ 1945), p. 411.

6. Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1962), p. 3.

7. “Les démocrates ombrageux,” Contrepoint (December 1976), p. 111.

8. Other authors have held exactly the opposite opinion. For Schleiermacher, democracy is a “primitive” political form in contrast to monarchy, which is thought to correspond to the demands of the modern state.

9. “Le pouvoir des idées en démocratie,”Pouvoir (May 1983), p. 145.

10. Significantly, it was with the beginning of the inquiry into the origins of the French monarchy that the nobility, under Louis XIV, began to challenge the principles of monarchy.

11. The word “thing,” which designated the parliament, derives from the Germanic word that connoted originally “everything that is gathered together.” The same word gave birth to the English “thing” (German Ding: same meaning). It seems that this word designated the assembly in which public matters, then affairs of a general nature, and finally “things” were discussed.

12. “Les fondements de l’État libre d’Icelande: trois siècles de démocratie médiévale,” in Nouvelle Ecole 25-26 (Winter 1974–75), pp. 68–73.

3. Les Scandinaves (Paris: Lidis [Brepols], 1984), p. 613.

14. Cf. P.M. Martin, L’idée de royauté‚ … Rome. De la Rome royale au consensus républicain (Clermont-Ferrand: Adosa, 1983).

15. Here “democracy,” as in the case of peasants’ freedoms as well, already included social demands, although not “class struggle”—a concept ignored by ancient democracy. In the Middle Ages the purpose of such demands was to give voice to those who were excluded from power. But it often happened that “democracy” could be used against the people. In medieval Florence, social strife between the “popolo grosso” and the “popolo minuto” was particularly brisk. On this Francesco Nitti writes: “The reason the working classes of Florence proved lukewarm in defense of their liberty and sympathized instead with the Medicis was because they remained opposed to democracy, which they viewed as a concept of the rich bourgeoisie.” Francesco Nitti, La démocratie, vol. 1 (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1933), p. 57.)

16. This opinion is shared by the majority of students of ancient democracies. Thus, Victor Ehrenberg sees in Greek democracy a “form of enlarged aristocracy.” Victor Ehrenberg, L’état grec (Paris: Maspéro, 1976), p. 94.

17. Pius XII, 1944 Christmas Message

18. M. Robespierre, “On Political Morality,” speech to the Convention, February 5, 1794.

19. On this debate, see the essay by Luciano Guerci, “Liberta degli antichi e liberta dei moderni,” in Sparta, Atene e i `philosophes’ nella Francia del Setecento (Naples: Guido, 1979).

20. Camille Desmoulins, speech to the Convention, March 31, 1794. It is significant that contemporary democrats appear to be more inclined to favor Athens. Sparta, in contrast, is denounced for its “war-like spirit.” This change in discourse deserves a profound analysis.

21. Cf., for example, the essay by Moses Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne (Paris: Payot, 1976), which is both an erudite study and a pamphlet of great contemporary relevance. The study is prefaced by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who, among other errors, attributes to Julien Freund (see n. 7, above) positions which are exactly the very opposite of those stated in the preface.

22. To cite Thucydides: “Thanks to his untainted character, the depth of his vision, and boundless disinterestedness, Pericles exerted on Athens an incontestable influence.… Since he owed his prestige only to honest means, he did not have to truckle to popular passions.… In a word, democracy supplied the name; but in reality, it was the government of the first citizen.” (Peloponnesian War II, 65)

23. One of the best works on this topic is Jacqueline de Romilly’s essay Problèmes de la démocratie grecque (Paris: Hermann, 1975).

24. Romilly, Problèmes de la démocratie grecque.

25. The word “démos” is opposed to the word “laós,” a term employed in Greece to designate the people, but with the express meaning of “the community of warriors.”

26. In France, the right to vote was implemented only in stages. In 1791 the distinction was still made between “active citizens” and “passive citizens.” Subsequently, the electorate was expanded to include all qualified citizens able to pay a specified minimum of taxes. Although universal suffrage was proclaimed in 1848, it was limited to males until 1945.

27. On the evolution of that notion, see Jacqueline Bordes, ‘Politeia’ dans la pensée grecque jusqu’à Aristote (Paris : Belles Lettres, 1982).

28. Nicole Loraux interprets the Athenian notion of citizenship as a result of the “imaginary belonging to an autochthonous people” (Les enfants d’Athéna. Idées athéniennes sur la citoyenneté et la divison des sexes [Paris: Maspéro, 1981]). The myth of Erichthonios (or Erechtheus) explains in fact the autochthonous character and the origins of the masculine democracy, at the same time as it grafts the Athenian ideology of citizenship onto immemorial foundations.

29. Emile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1 (Paris : Minuit, 1969), p. 321.

30. On the work of Aristotle and his relationship with the Athenian constitution, see James Day and Mortimer Chambers, Aristotle, History of Athenian Democracy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962).

31. Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne, p. 80.

32. Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne, p. 141.

33. Veyne adds: “Bourgeois liberalism organizes cruising ships in which each passenger must take care of himself as best as he can, the crew being there only to provide for the common goods and services. By contrast, the Greek city was a ship where the passengers made up the crew.” Paul Veyne, “Les Grecs ont-ils connu la démocratie?” Diogène October-December 1983, p. 9.

34. For the liberal critique of Greek democracy, see Paul Veyne, “Les Grecs ont-ils connu la démocratie?” and Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory (see n. 6 above).

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 2003). Text retrieved from: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain14.html >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Democracy Revisited).

Notes: This article is a translated from Alain de Benoist’s book Démocratie: le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), which was fully translated into English as The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011).

This essay is also available in Spanish translation as “Democracia antigua y “Democracia” moderna”, published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 41, “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia Vol. 2” (Febrero 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/02/elementos-n-41-una-critica-metapolitica.html/ >.

 

On Identity – Benoist

“On Identity” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 313 KB):

On_Identity

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De Benoist, Alain. “On Identity.” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), pp. 9-64. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/on_identity.pdf >.

Note: It is recommended that “On Identity” is read side by side with “What is Racism?” for a clearer understanding of Benoist’s positions.

Additional Notes: Benoist’s “On Identity” was originally published in French as a book by the title of Nous et les autres: Problématique de l’identité (Paris: Krisis, 2007), which is available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/nous_et_les_autres.pdf >. It has also been translated into German as Wir und die Anderen (Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 2008) and into Italian as “Sull’identità”, published in the anthology Identità e Comunità (Napoli: Guida, 2005).

 

“Indigenous”? How Dare You? – Venner

“Indigenous”? How Dare You?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations of this English translation: Czech, Ukrainian

No man is blinder than someone who refuses to see. I thought of this adage recently while reading a long public diatribe by a retired classicist.[1] Enjoying a status privileged in France and even in the United States where he taught at a reputable university, the good professor mocked the term chosen by his compatriots who call themselves “indigenous” or “autochthonous,” i.e., as the Greek etymology indicates, born of themselves, of the same blood and the same soil.

“In the middle of fifth century before our era,” he writes, “a small city-state in Greece was struck by the virus of the ‘hypertrophy of the ego’”—“a frightening epidemic,” added the professor emeritus. Consider: this epidemic “resulted in instituting an annual ceremony in which a speaker, expert in funeral orations, celebrated the immemorial glory of the Athenians before the graves of the war dead.” What an absurd idea, indeed, to celebrate the glory of the city and those who died in war! This disturbing “hypertrophy of the ego” even led the Athenians to build some negligible marble monuments like the Parthenon, which resisted the millennia and various invasions to the eternal admiration of morons like us. It also led them to raise other equally trivial monuments: those of the spirit (the transmission of the Homeric poems, the invention of philosophy, tragic drama, and historical investigation), which nourish us to this day and that the curious classicist finds it astonishing that we still quote. This whole heritage is indeed irritating.

And what a deplorable example! “The [French] historians of the 1880s began to write a history of France, born from itself.” Truly a scandal! And that is not all: “Just as the monks who in 12th century invented the ‘Christian cemetery,’ excluding Jews, infidels, foreigners, and other non-believers, they [the historians] continue to maintain, from one Republic to another, the belief that we are the heirs of the dead, specifically of our dead, since prehistory. The ‘great historians’ [note the quotation marks] vouch for them.” How sad!

To believe our retired academic, in France the idea of the national identity—which thus comes to us from Athens and ancient Greece—is in the air today. This revelation fills him with distress.

Indeed, how inept, given the ascendant global flux of financial exchange, obviously so beneficial, encourages on the contrary a “nomadic” feeling, to use his words. Naturally it is easy to be “nomadic” when one travels only to the most beautiful places in the world, all expenses paid, cocooned by countless employees devoted to one’s comfort and safety.

No doubt the last French “autochthones” who lacked the means or opportunity to escape, for example, from Villiers-le-Bel after the riots of November 2007 would also like to be “nomads” of this type. But their status as poor, aged, or abandoned “autochthones” prohibits that. And yet what a pretty name, “Villiers-le-Bel” (Villiers the Beautiful). An “autochthonous” name, which now resounds with cruel irony.

Why, you might ask, do I speak of such things? Because the historian must also take into account and not to be blind to what happens before his eyes. This is the lesson of Marc Bloch, contemporary and victim of the disaster of 1940. He recognized that his work had led him to be unaware of the importance of the events of his time. “It was a misinterpretation of history . . . We preferred to confine ourselves in the nervous silence of our offices. . . . Had we not always been good citizens?”[2] I cannot deny that such a precedent does not leave me indifferent.

And if one is not a complete idiot, a question emerges: Why is the desire for identity (to be conscious of who one is, in every layer of one’s existence, among those who are like you) creditable among American Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Israelis, Uyghurs, Turks, or Gabonese but reprehensible among Europeans and French?

Now that is a question that needs to be answered.

Notes

[1] Marcel Detienne, in Le Monde, 12-13 July 2009, under the title: “La France sans terre ni mort” [France without land or dead].

[2] Marc Bloch, L’Etrange défaite (Editions Francs Tireurs, 1946), p. 188. Repenting his previous detachment, the great historian joined the Résistance. Captured, he was shot in June 1944.

Source: “Vous avez dit autochtone?” http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/#/edito-nrh-44-autochtone/3272196

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Venner, Dominique. “‘Indigenous’? How Dare You?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 24 August 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/how-dare-you/ >.

 

Toward a New Aristocracy – Venner

Toward a New Aristocracy

By Dominique Venner

Czech translation of this translation: here

Translated by Greg Johnson

Their names continue to identify the boulevards of a unique though disfigured capital: Berthier, Murat, Jourdan, Masséna, Soult, Brune, Bessières, and others. By his decree of May 19th, 1804, Napoleon created the first fourteen marshals of the empire, to which he would add ten more. Yes, their names still remain on the perimeter of a Paris that hardly appreciates their glory.

Bonaparte had not been idle. The decision to restore the rank of Marshal came twenty-four hours after the senatus consult that gave him the title of Emperor of the French.

The noble titles of the Old Regime had been abolished in 1790. From his accession to the throne, Napoleon wanted to institute an imperial nobility, which he did in several steps, until the decree of March 1st, 1808 establishing a hierarchy of hereditary titles. As a social distinction, nobility was thus granted by the State to reward its supporters. Of course, a title never guarantees nobility of character or soul.

Napoleon obviously tried to get back to the monarchical tradition, but also to a much older tradition. In a few dazzling years, imitating ancient Rome, France had passed from a Republic to an Empire. However, it differed from its model in lacking the foundation of an aristocratic senate of patricians.[1] Did the Emperor wish to correct this deficiency? Destiny did not ratify his decision.

He was not the successor of the Roman Emperors, but he was the first of the modern Caesars. His power was built on the debris of the monarchy, but even more so on that of the old nobility which, for at least two centuries, has slowly lost its purpose, being dispossessed of its social and political functions by the voraciousness of the administrative monarchy. This monarchy did not support a free and vigorous nobility. It wanted dependant and submissive civil servants. It died because of it, unlike England and other great European monarchies that were always based on active nobilities until the day before 1914.

Then, in the vacuum created by the catastrophe of the Great War, the Caesars multiplied. But, in spite of various attempts, no new nobility could be constituted. One does not found a nobility with civil servants, even in uniform. Spengler had defined the old Prussian nobility by two moral qualities that seem scarcely compatible: “freedom and service.” It is hard to say more in fewer words.

I touched on this subject in another article, “Secret Aristocracies.” Several readers asked: “Why ‘secret’?”

It was an image. And what images suggest often has more scope than any argument. Perhaps it would have been more exact to speak of an “implicit” aristocracy, but it would have had less force. Initially I wanted to avoid any confusion with the daydreams of false chivalry used by mystifiers and their dupes. I wanted to also set aside the dreams of those who are enthralled by political romanticisms. Finally, I wanted to suggest that today there exists an invisible, self-titled elite, beyond all distinctions of class. They are men and women who, through the pursuit of personal excellence, quietly uphold higher duties. One meets them in many contexts. No bond associates them and no apparent sign distinguishes them in the eyes of ordinary people.

The Japanese say that it is precisely by invisible signs that one first recognizes a “Master,” i.e., one who has reached a certain perfection in his existence or in an “art” that is not necessarily martial. To found a “secret” aristocracy was one of the goals of the brilliant creator of scouting.[2] He had the experience of the very old British aristocracy, decrepit though it may have been, and also the experience of an army still penetrated by a spirit of nobility going back to the Iliad. His goal remains viable, with the proviso of purging it soundly of all “good-boyism.”

“Boulevard des Maréchals” (“Boulevard of the Marshals”), Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, no. 46, http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/#/edito-nrh-46-marechaux/3448596

Notes

[1] On the permanence of the Roman aristocracy and its role under the Empire, one can refer to the study of professor Yann Bohec, published in the Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, no. 43, p. 46.

[2] Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, 1857–1941—Ed.

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Venner, Dominique. “Toward a New Aristocracy.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 3 August 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/toward-a-new-aristocracy/ >.

 

Europe & Europeanness – Venner

Europe & Europeanness

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations based on this English translation: German, Portuguese

What is Europe? What is a European?

From the geopolitical and historical point of view, Europe is defined by its boundaries. The center, the European core, is formed of nations that, though often in conflict, have experienced a common history since the High Middle Ages. Essentially, they are the nations resulting from the Carolingian Empire and its environs, those that constituted with the 1957 Treaty of Rome the Europe known as “the Six”: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Beyond, one sees taking shape a second circle including the Atlantic and septentrional [Northern] nations, as well as Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Lastly, a third circle of privileged alliances is enlarged to Russia.

I am absolutely not speaking here of a political project. I speak only as a historian pointing out a series of realities.

One could mention others. The Danubian Empire of the Hapsburgs was a reality. Baltic Europe equally so, although it is no longer true of the Mediterranean, which has ceased to be an axis of European unity since the Arab-Muslim conquests.

But Europe is something quite different from the geographical framework of its existence.

The consciousness of belonging to Europe, of Europeanness, is far older than the modern concept of Europe. It is apparent under the successive names of Hellensim, Celticness, Romanism, the Frankish Empire, or Christianity. Seen as an immemorial tradition, Europe is the product of a multi-millennial community of culture deriving its distinctness and unity from its constitutive peoples and a spiritual heritage whose supreme expression is the Homeric poems.

Like the other great civilizations—China, Japan, India, or the Semitic East—ours has deep roots in prehistory. It rests on a specific tradition that crosses time under changing guises. It was formed of spiritual values that structure our behavior and nourish our imaginations even after we forget them.

If, for example, simple sexuality is universal, just like the act of feeding oneself, love is different in every civilization, as are the representation of femininity, pictorial art, gastronomy, and music. They are the reflections of a certain spiritual morphology, mysteriously transmitted by blood, language, and the diffused memory of a community. These specificities make us who we are, and not someone else, even when our awareness of them has been lost.

Understood in this sense, tradition is what shapes and prolongs individuality, founds identity, gives meaning to life. It is not a transcendence external to oneself. Tradition is a “me” that crosses time, a living expression of the particular within the universal.

The name of Europe appeared 2,500 years ago in Herodotus and in the Description of the Earth of Hecataeus of Miletus. And it is not by chance that this Greek geographer classified the Celts and the Scythians among the people of Europe and not among the Barbarians. This was the age when European self-awareness first emerged under the threat of the Persian wars. It is a constant of history: identity is born from the threat of otherness.

Twenty centuries after Salamis, the fall of Constantinople, on May 29th, 1453, was felt as an even worse upheaval. The whole Eastern front of Europe was open to Ottoman conquest. Hapsburg Austria remained the ultimate rampart.

This critical moment brought the blossoming of a European consciousness in the modern sense of the word.

In 1452, the philosopher George of Trebizond had already published Pro defenda Europa, a manifesto in which the name of Europe replaced that of Christendom.

After the fall of the Byzantine capital, cardinal Piccolomini, later pope Pius II, wrote: “The Eastern part of Europe has been torn away.” And to communicate the full significance and pathos of the event, he invoked not the fathers of the Church, but, higher in the European memory, the poets and the tragedians of ancient Greece. This catastrophe, he said, means “the second death of Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides.” This lucid pope died in 1464, despairing at his inability to mobilize an army and fleet to deliver Constantinople.

All of history testifies that Europe is a very old community of civilizations. Without going back to the cave paintings and megalithic culture, there is not even one great historical phenomenon lived by one of the countries of the Frankish sphere that was not shared by all the others. Medieval knighthood, epic poetry, courtly love, monarchy, feudal liberties, the crusades, the emergence of the cities, the Gothic revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the expansion beyond the seas, the birth of the nation state, the secular and religious Baroque, musical polyphony, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Promethean universe of technology, or the awakening of nationalism . . . Yes, all that is common to Europe and Europe alone. In the course of history, every great movement in one country of Europe immediately found its equivalent among its sister countries and nowhere elsewhere. As for the conflicts that contributed so long to our dynamism, they were dictated by the competition of princes or states, never by oppositions of culture and civilization.

Contrary to other less-favored peoples, Europeans seldom had to raise the question of their identity. It was enough for them to exist: numerous, strong, and often victorious. But that is finished. The terrible “century of 1914” put an end to the reign of Europeans, who have since then been plagued by all the demons of self-doubt, albeit mitigated somewhat by a provisional material abundance. The artisans of unification crap their pants in fear at the question of identity. But identity is as important to a community as the vital question of ethnic and territorial borders.

Extract from Dominique Venner, Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, guerres et révolutions en Europe au XXe siècle
(Paris: Pygmalion, 2006).

http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2009/02/14/d-venner-l-europe-et-l-europeanite.html

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Venner, Dominique. “Europe & Europeanness.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 June 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/europe-and-europeanness/>

History and Decadence – Sunic

History And Decadence: Spengler’s Cultural Pessimism Today

By Tomislav Sunic

 

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) exerted considerable influence on European conservatism before the Second World War. Although his popularity waned somewhat after the war, his analyses, in the light of the disturbing conditions in the modern polity, again seem to be gaining in popularity. Recent literature dealing with gloomy post­modernist themes suggests that Spengler’s prophecies of decadence may now be finding supporters on both sides of the political spectrum. The alienating nature of modern technology and the social and moral decay of large cities today lend new credence to Spengler’s vision of the impending collapse of the West. In America and Europe an increasing number of authors perceive in the liberal permissive state a harbinger of “soft” totalitarianism that may lead decisively to social entropy and conclude in the advent of “hard” totalitarianism(1).

Spengler wrote his major work The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) against the background of the anticipated German victory in World War I. When the war ended disastrously for the Germans, his predictions that Germany, together with the rest of Europe, was bent for irreversible decline gained a renewed sense of urgency for scores of cultural pessimists. World War I must have deeply shaken the quasi-religious optimism of those who had earlier prophesied that technological inventions and international economic linkages would pave the way for peace and prosperity. Moreover, the war proved that technological inventions could turn out to be a perfect tool for man’s alienation and, eventually, his physical an­nihilation. Inadvertently, while attempting to interpret the cycles of world history, Spengler probably best succeeded in spreading the spirit of cultural despair to his own as well as future generations.

Like Gianbattista Vico, who two centuries earlier developed his thesis about the rise and decline of cultures, Spengler tried to project a pattern of cultural growth and cultural decay in a certain scientific form: “the morphology of history”- as he himself and others dub his work – although the term “biology” seems more appropriate considering Spengler’s inclination to view cultures as living organic entities, alternately afflicted with disease and plague or showing signs of vigorous life(2). Undoubtedly, the organic conception of history was, to a great extent, inspired by the popularity of scientific and pseudo­scientific literature, which, in the early twentieth century, began to focus attention on racial and genetic paradigms in order to explain the patterns of social decay. Spengler, however, prudently avoids racial determinism in his description of decadence, although his exaltation of historical determinism often brings him close to Marx­ – albeit in a reversed and hopelessly pessimistic direction. In contrast to many egalitarian thinkers, Spengler’s elitism and organicism con­ceived of human species as of different and opposing peoples, each experiencing its own growth and death, and each struggling for survival. “Mankind,” writes Spengler, should be viewed as either a “zoological concept or an empty word.” If ever this phantom of “mankind” vanishes from the circulation of historical forms, “we shall then notice an astounding affluence of genuine forms.” Appar­ently, by form (“Gestalt”) Spengler means the resurrection of the classical notion of the nation-state, which, in the early twentieth century, came under fire from the advocates of the globalist and universalist polity. Spengler must be credited, however, with pointing out that the frequently-used concept “world history,” in reality encompasses an impressive array of diverse and opposing cultures without common denominator; each culture displays its own forms, pursues its own passions, and grapples with its own life or death. “There are blossoming and aging cultures,” writes Spengler, “peo­ples, languages, truths, gods, and landscapes, just as there are young and old oak trees, pines, flowers, boughs and petals – but there is no aging `mankind.’”(3) For Spengler, cultures seem to be growing in sublime futility, with some approaching terminal illness, and others still displaying vigorous signs of life. Before culture emerged, man was an ahistorical creature; but he becomes again ahistorical and, one might add, even hostile to history: “as soon as some civilization has developed its full and final form, thus putting a stop to the living development of culture” (2:58; 2:48).

Similarly, each culture undergoes various cycles or different his­torical “seasons”: first appears the period of cultural blossoming or the spring-time of culture, followed by the period of maturation, which Spengler alternately calls summer or fall, and finally comes the period of decadence, which in Spengler’s view is synonymous with “civilization.” This “seasonal” flow of history is a predicament of all nations, although the historical timing of their decline varies with the virility of each nation, geographical area, or epoch. In the field of politics and statecraft, the process of decadence is very much the same. Thus, the closing years of the First World War witnessed the passing of the feudal rule of the landed aristocracy and the emergence of budding forms of parliamentary plutocracy – soon to be followed by the rise of rootless mobocracy and the “dictatorship of money” (2:633; 2:506). Undoubtedly Spengler was inspired by the works of Vilfredo Pareto and Gustave le Bon, who had earlier attempted to outline similar patterns of the rise and fall of political elites. In Pareto’s and Le Bon’s scheme, decadence sets in when the power elite no longer follows the established rule of social selection, and fails to identify internal and external enemies(4). Once it becomes emasculated by economic affluence and debilitated by the belief in the boundless goodness of its political opponents, the elite has already signed its own obituary. In similar words, Spengler contends that the rise of Caesarism must be viewed as a natural fulfilment of the money-dictatorship as well as its dialectical removal: “The sword wins over money; the master-will conquers again the booty-will” (2:634; 2:506). Then a new cycle of history will begin, according to Spengler, although he remains silent about the main historical actors, their origins, and their goals.

Spengler was convinced, however, that the dynamics of decadence could be fairly well predicted, provided that exact historical data were available. Just as the biology of human beings generates a well­-defined life span, resulting ultimately in biological death, so does each culture possess its own aging “data,” normally lasting no longer than a thousand years – a period, separating its spring from its eventual historical antithesis, the winter, or civilization. The estimate of a thousand years before the decline of culture sets in, corresponds to Spengler’s certitude that, after that period, each society has to face self-destruction. For example, after the fall of Rome, the rebirth of European culture started anew in the ninth century with the Carolingian dynasty. After the painful process of growth, self-asser­tiveness, and maturation, one thousand years later, in the twentieth century, cultural life in Europe is coming to its definite historical close.

As Spengler and his contemporary successors see it, Western culture now has transformed itself into a decadent civilization fraught with an advanced form of social, moral, and political decay. The first signs of this decay appeared shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when the machine began to replace man, when feelings gave way to ratio. Ever since that ominous event, new forms of social and political conduct have been surfacing in the West – marked by a wide-spread obsession with endless economic growth and irreversible human betterment – fueled by the belief that the burden of history can finally be removed. The new plutocratic elites, that have now replaced organic aristocracy, have imposed material gain as the only principle worth pursuing, reducing the entire human interaction to an immense economic transaction. And since the masses can never be fully satisfied, argues Spengler, it is understandable that they will seek change in their existing polities even if change may spell the loss of liberty. One might add that this craving for economic affluence will be translated into an incessant decline of the sense of public responsibility and an emerging sense of uprootedness and social anomie, which will ultimately and inevitably lead to the advent of totalitarianism. It would appear, therefore, that the process of de­cadence can be forestalled, ironically, only by resorting to salutary hard-line regimes.

Using Spengler’s apocalyptic predictions, one is tempted to draw a parallel with the modern Western polity, which likewise seems to be undergoing the period of decay and decadence. John Lukacs, who bears the unmistakable imprint of Spenglerian pessimism, views the permissive nature of modern liberal society, as embodied in America, as the first step toward social disintegration. Like Spengler, Lukacs asserts that excessive individualism and rampant materialism increas­ingly paralyze and render obsolete the sense of civic responsibility. One should probably agree with Lukacs that neither the lifting of censorship, nor the increasing unpopularity of traditional values, nor the curtailing of state authority in contemporary liberal states, seems to have led to a more peaceful environment; instead, a growing sense of despair seems to have triggered a form of neo-barbarism and social vulgarity. “Already richness and poverty, elegance and slea­ziness, sophistication and savagery live together more and more,” writes Lukacs(5). Indeed, who could have predicted that a society capable of launching rockets to the moon or curing diseases that once ravaged the world could also become a civilization plagued by social atomization, crime, and addiction to escapism? With his apoc­alyptic predictions, Lukacs, similar to Spengler, writes: “This most crowded of streets of the greatest civilization: this is now the hell­hole of the world.”

Interestingly, neither Spengler nor Lukacs nor other cultural pes­simists seems to pay much attention to the obsessive appetite for equality, which seems to play, as several contemporary authors point out, an important role in decadence and the resulting sense of cultural despair. One is inclined to think that the process of decadence in the contemporary West is the result of egalitarian doctrines which promise much but deliver little, creating thus an endless feeling of emptiness and frustration among the masses of economic-minded and rootless citizens. Moreover, elevated to the status of modern secular religions, egalitarianism and economism inevitably follow their own dynamics of growth, which is likely to conclude, as Claude Polin notes, in the “terror of all against all” and the ugly resurgence of democratic totalitarianism. Polin writes: “Undifferentiated man is par excellence a quantitative man; a man who accidentally differs from his neighbors by the quantity of economic goods in his pos­session; a man subject to statistics; a man who spontaneously reacts in accordance to statistics”(6). Conceivably, liberal society, if it ever gets gripped by economic duress and hit by vanishing opportunities, will have no option but to tame and harness the restless masses in a Spenglerian “muscled regime.”

Spengler and other cultural pessimists seem to be right in pointing out that democratic forms of polity, in their final stage, will be marred by moral and social convulsions, political scandals, and cor­ruption on all social levels. On top of it, as Spengler predicts, the cult of money will reign supreme, because “through money democracy destroys itself, after money has destroyed the spirit” (2:582; 2:464). Judging by the modern development of capitalism, Spengler cannot be accused of far fetched assumptions. This economic civilization founders on a major contradiction: on the one hand its religion of human rights extends its beneficiary legal tenets to everyone, reas­suring every individual of the legitimacy of his earthly appetites; on the other, this same egalitarian civilization fosters a model of economic Darwinism, ruthlessly trampling under its feet those whose interests do not lie in the economic arena.

The next step, as Spengler suggests, will be the transition from democracy to salutary Caesarism; substitution of the tyranny of the few for the tyranny of many. The neo-Hobbesian, neo-barbaric state is in the making:

Instead of the pyres emerges big silence. The dictatorship of party bosses is backed up by the dictatorship of the press. With money, an attempt is made to lure swarms of readers and entire peoples away from the enemy’s attention and bring them under one’s own thought control. There, they learn only what they must learn, and a higher will shapes their picture of the world. It is no longer needed-as the baroque princes did-to oblige their subordinates into the armed service. Their minds are whipped up through articles, telegrams, pictures, until they demand weapons and force their leaders to a battle to which these wanted to be forced. (2:463)

The fundamental issue, however, which Spengler and many other cultural pessimists do not seem to address, is whether Caesarism or totalitarianism represents the antithetical remedy to decadence or, rather, the most extreme form of decadence? Current literature on totalitarianism seems to focus on the unpleasant side-effects of the bloated state, the absence of human rights, and the pervasive control of the police. By contrast, if liberal democracy is indeed a highly desirable and the least repressive system of all hitherto known in the West – and if, in addition, this liberal democracy claims to be the best custodian of human dignity – one wonders why it relentlessly causes social uprootedness and cultural despair among an increasing number of people? As Claude Polin notes, chances are that, in the short run, democratic totalitarianism will gain the upper hand since the security it provides is more appealing to the masses than is the vague notion of liberty(7). One might add that the tempo of democratic process in the West leads eventually to chaotic impasse, which ne­cessitates the imposition of a hard-line regime.

Although Spengler does not provide a satisfying answer to the question of Caesarism vs. decadence, he admits that the decadence of, the West need not signify the collapse of all cultures. Rather, it appears that the terminal illness of the West may be a new lease on life for other cultures; the death of Europe may result in a stronger Africa or Asia. Like many other cultural pessimists, Spengler ac­knowledges that the West has grown old, unwilling to fight, with its political and cultural inventory depleted; consequently, it is obliged to cede the reigns of history to those nations that are less exposed to debilitating pacifism and the self-flagellating guilt-feelings which, so to speak, have become new trademarks of the modern Western citizen. One could imagine a situation where these new virile and victorious nations will barely heed the democratic niceties of their guilt-ridden former masters, and may likely, at some time in the future, impose their own brand of terror which could eclipse the legacy of the European Auschwitz and the Gulag. In view of the ruthless civil and tribal wars all over the decolonized African and Asian continent, it seems unlikely that power politics and bellicosity will disappear with the “decline of the West.” So far, no proof has been offered that non-European nations can govern more peacefully and generously than their former European masters. “Pacifism will remain an ideal,” Spengler reminds us, “war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage a war again, the colored will act differently and be rulers of the world”(8).

In this statement, Spengler clearly indicts the self-hating “homo europeanus” who, having become a victim of his bad conscience, naively thinks that his truths and verities must remain irrefutably valid forever, forgetting that his eternal verities may one day be turned against him. Spengler strongly attacks this Western false sympathy with the deprived ones – a sympathy that Nietzsche once depicted as a twisted form of egoism and slave moral. “This is the reason,” writes Spengler, why this “compassion moral,” in the day-­to-day sense, “evoked among us with respect, and sometimes strived for by the thinkers, sometimes longed for, has never been realized” (1:449; 1:350).

This form of political masochism could be well studied particularly among those contemporary Western egalitarians who, with the decline of socialist temptations, substituted for the archetype of the European exploited worker, the iconography of the starving African. Nowhere does this change in political symbolics seem more apparent than in the current Western drive to export Western forms of civilization to the antipodes of the world. These Westerners, in the last spasm of a guilt-ridden shame, are probably convinced that their historical repentance might also secure their cultural and political longevity. Spengler was aware of these paralyzing attitudes among Europeans, and he remarks that, if a modern European recognizes his historical vulnerability, he must start thinking beyond his narrow perspective and develop different attitudes toward different political convictions and verities. What do Parsifal or Prometheus have to do with the average Japanese citizen, asks Spengler? “This is exactly what is lacking to the Western thinker,” continues Spengler, “and which precisely should have never lacked to him; insight into historical relativity of his achievements, which themselves are the manifestation of one and unique, and of only one existence” (1:31;1:23). On a somewhat different level, one wonders to what extent the much vaunted dis­semination of universal human rights can become a valuable principle for non-Western peoples if Western universalism often signifies blatant disrespect for all cultural particularities.

Even with their eulogy of universalism, as Serge Latouche has recently noted, Westerners have, nonetheless, secured the most com­fortable positions for themselves. Although they have now retreated to the back stage of history, vicariously, through their humanism, they still play the role of the undisputable masters of the non-white­-man show. “The death of the West for itself has not been the end of the West in itself,” adds Latouche(9). One wonders whether such Western attitudes to universalism represent another form of racism, considering the havoc these attitudes have created in traditional Third World communities. Latouche appears correct in remarking that Eur­opean decadence best manifests itself in its masochistic drive to deny and discard everything that it once stood for, while simultaneously sucking into its orbit of decadence other cultures as well. Yet, although suicidal in its character, the Western message contains mandatory admonishments for all non-European nations. He writes:

The mission of the West is not to exploit the Third World, nor to christianize the pagans, nor to dominate by white presence; it is to liberate men (and even more so women) from oppression and misery. In order to counter this self-hatred of the anti-imperialist vision, which concludes in red totalitarianism, one is now compelled to dry the tears of white man, and thereby ensure the success of this westernization of the world. (41)

The decadent West exhibits, as Spengler hints, a travestied culture living on its own past in a society of different nations that, having lost their historical consciousness, feel an urge to become blended into a promiscuous “global polity.” One wonders what would he say today about the massive immigration of non-Europeans to Europe? This immigration has not improved understanding among races, but has caused more racial and ethnic strife that, very likely, signals a series of new conflicts in the future.

But Spengler does not deplore the “devaluation of all values” nor the passing of cultures. In fact, to him decadence is a natural process of senility which concludes in civilization, because civilization is decadence. Spengler makes a typically German distinction between culture and civilization, two terms which are, unfortunately, used synonymously in English. For Spengler civilization is a product of intellect, of completely rationalized intellect; civilization means uproot­edness and, as such, it develops its ultimate form in the modern megapolis which, at the end of its journey, “doomed, moves to its final self-destruction” (2:127; 2:107). The force of the people has been overshadowed by massification; creativity has given way to “kitsch” art; geniality has been subordinated to the terror of reason. He writes:

Culture and civilization. On the one hand the living corpse of a soul and, on the other, its mummy. This is how the West European existence differs from 1800 and after. The life in its richness and normalcy, whose form has grown up and matured from inside out in one mighty course stretching from the adolescent days of Gothics to Goethe and Napoleon – into that old artificial, deracinated life of our large cities, whose forms are created by intellect. Culture and civilization. The organism born in countryside, that ends up in petrified mechanism. (1:453; 1:353)

In yet another display of determinism, Spengler contends that one cannot escape historical destiny: “the first inescapable thing that confronts man as an unavoidable destiny, which no thought can grasp, and no will can change, is a place and time of one’s birth: everybody is born into one people, one religion, one social status, one stretch of time and one culture.”(10) Man is so much constrained by his historical environment that all attempts at changing one’s destiny are hopeless. And, therefore, all flowery postulates about the improvement of mankind, all liberal and socialist philosophizing about a glorious future regarding the duties of humanity and the essence of ethics, are of no avail. Spengler sees no other avenue of redemption except through declaring himself a fundamental and resolute pessimist:

Mankind appears to me as a zoological quantity. I see no progress, no goal, no avenue for humanity, except in the heads of the Western progress-Philistines…. I cannot see a single mind and even less a unity of endeavors, feelings, and understandings in these barren masses of people. (Selected Essays 73-74; 147)

The determinist nature of Spengler’s pessimism has been criticized recently by Konrad Lorenz who, while sharing Spengler’s culture of despair, refuses the predetermined linearity of decadence. In his capacity of ethologist and as one of the most articulate neo-Darwinists, Lorenz admits the possibility of an interruption of human phylo­genesis – yet also contends that new vistas for cultural development always remain open. “Nothing is more foreign to the evolutionary epistemologist, as well, to the physician,” writes Lorenz, “than the doctrine of fatalism.”(11) Still, Lorenz does not hesitate to criticize vehemently decadence in modern mass societies which, in his view, have already given birth to pacified and domesticated specimens unable to pursue cultural endeavors. Lorenz would certainly find positive resonance with Spengler himself in writing: “This explains why the pseudodemocratic doctrine that all men are equal, by which is believed that all humans are initially alike and pliable, could be made into a state religion by both the lobbyists for large industry and by the ideologues of communism” (179-80).

Despite the criticism of historical determinism which has been leveled against him, Spengler often confuses his reader with Faustian exclamations reminiscent of someone prepared for battle rather than reconciled to a sublime demise. “No, I am not a pessimist,” writes Spengler in “Pessimism,” for “pessimism means seeing no more duties. I see so many unresolved duties that I fear that time and men will run out to solve them”(75). These words hardly cohere with the cultural despair which earlier he so passionately elaborated. Moreover, he often advocates force and the toughness of the warrior in order to stave off Europe’s disaster.

One is led to the conclusion that Spengler extols historical pessimism or “purposeful pessimism” (“Zweckpessimismus”), as long as it translates his conviction of the irreversible decadence of the European polity; however, once he perceives that cultural and political loopholes are available for moral and social regeneration, he quickly reverts to the eulogy of power politics. Similar characteristics are often to be found among many poets, novelists, and social thinkers whose legacy in spreading cultural pessimism played a significant part in shaping political behavior among European conservatives prior to World War II (12). One wonders why they all, like Spengler, bemoan the decadence of the West if this decadence has already been sealed, if the cosmic die has already been cast, and if all efforts of political and cultural rejuvenation appear hopeless? Moreover, in an effort to mend the unmendable, by advocating a Faustian mentality and will-to-power, these pessimists often seem to emulate the optimism of socialists rather than the ideas of those reconciled to impending social catastrophe.

For Spengler and other cultural pessimists, the sense of decadence is inherently combined with a revulsion against modernity and an abhorrence of rampant economic greed. As recent history has shown, the political manifestation of such revulsion may lead to less savory results: the glorification of the will-to-power and the nostalgia of death. At that moment, literary finesse and artistic beauty may take on a very ominous turn. The recent history of Europe bears witness to how easily cultural pessimism can become a handy tool for modern political titans. Nonetheless, the upcoming disasters have something uplifting for the generations of cultural pessimists whose hypersensitive nature – and disdain for the materialist society – often lapses into political nihilism. This nihilistic streak was boldly stated by Spengler’s contemporary Friedrich Sieburg, who reminds us that “the daily life of democracy with its sad problems is boring, but the impending catastrophes are highly interesting.”(13)

One cannot help thinking that, for Spengler and his likes, in a wider historical context, war and power politics offer a regenerative hope against the pervasive feeling of cultural despair. Yet, regardless of the validity of Spengler’s visions or nightmares, it does not take much imagination to observe in the decadence of the West the last twilight-dream of a democracy already grown weary of itself.

California State University, Fullerton, California

Notes:

1. In the case of the European ‘New Right’, see Jean Cau, Discours de la décadence (Paris: Copernic, 1978), Julien Freund, La décadence: histoire sociologique et philosophique d’une expérience humaine (Paris: Sirey, 1984), and Pierre Chaunu Histoire et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1981). In the case of authors of “leftist sensibility,” see Jean Baud­rillard’s virulent attack against simulacra and hyperreality in America: Amérique (Paris: Grasset, 1986)-in English, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York, London: Verso, 1988)-and Jean-François Huyghe, La soft-idéologie (Paris: Laffont, 1987). There is a certain Spenglerian whiff in Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979), and probably in Richard Lamm, Megatraumas: America at the Year 2000 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985). About European cultural conservatives see my Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (forthcoming).

2. See Spengler’s critic and admirer Heinrich Scholz, Zum ‘Untergang des Abendlandes’ (Berlin: von Reuther and Reichard, 1920). Scholz conceives of history as polycentric occurrences concentrated in creative archetypes, noting: “History is a curriculum vitae of many cultures having nothing in common except the name; because each of them has its own destiny, own life, and own death” (11)-my translation.

3. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (1926; New York: Knopf, 1976), 1:21. My text, however, contains my own translations from Der Untergang des Abendlandes (München: Beck, 1923), 1:28-29. Citations hereafter are in the text, in parentheses, giving references to these two editions, respectively.

4. Vilfredo Pareto, ‘Dangers of Socialism’, in The Other Pareto, ed. Placido Bucolo, trans. Gillian and Placido Bucolo, pre. Ronald Fletcher (New York: St. Martin’s, 1980). Pareto writes: “There are some people who imagine that they can disarm the enemy by complacent flattery. They are wrong. The world has always belonged to the stronger and will belong to them for many years to come. Men only respect those who make themselves respected. Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him” (125). In a similar vein, Gustave le Bon, Psychologie politique (1911; Paris: Les Amis de G. L. Bon, 1984), writes: “Wars among nations have, by the way, always been the source of the most important progress. Which pacifist people has ever played any role in history?” (79)-my translation.

5. John Lukacs, The Passing of the Modern Age (New York: Harper, 1970), 10, 9.

6. Claude Polin, L’esprit totalitaire (Paris: Sirey, 1977), 111: my translation.

7. Claude Polin, Le totalitarisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises, 1982) argues that egalitarianism, universalism and economism are the three pivots of totalitarianism: “Totalitarian power is first and foremost the power of all against all; the tyranny of all against all. Totalitarian society is not constructed from the top down to the bottom, but from the bottom up to the top” (117) – my translation.

8. ‘Is World Peace Possible?’ in Selected Essay, trans. Donald O. White (1936: Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 207.

9. Serge Latouche, L’occidentalisation du monde (Paris: La Découverte, 1989), 9; my translation. About Westerners’ self-hate and self-denial, see Alain de Benoist, Europe, Tiers monde même combat (Paris: Laffont, 1986): “And whereas Christian universalism had once contributed to the justification of colonization, Christian pastoralism today inspires decolonization. This `mobilization of consciences’ crystallizes itself around the notion of culpability.” The colonized is no longer “a primitive” who ought to be “led to civilization.” Rather, he is a living indictment, indeed, an example of an immaculate morality from whom the “civilized” has much to learn (62). See also Pascal Bruckner, Le sanglot de l’homme blanc. Tiers monde, culpabilité, haine de soi (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 13: for the bleeding-heart liberal Westerner “the birth of the Third world gave birth to this new category; expiatory militantism.” My translations here.

10. Spengler, ‘Pessimismus’, Reden and Aufsätze (München: Beck, 1937), 70; in English, ‘Pessimism?’ in Selected Essays, 143.

11. Konrad Lorenz, The Waning of Humaneness (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), 58-59.

12. It would be impossible to enumerate all cultural pessimists who usually identify themselves as heroic pessimists, often as conservative revolutionaries, or aristocratic nihilists. Poets and novelists of great talent such as Gottfried Benn, Louis F. Céline, Ezra Pound, and others, were very much inspired by Oswald Spengler. See Gottfried Benn, “Pessimismus,” in Essays und Aufsätze (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959): “Man is not alone, thinking is alone. Thinking is self-bound and solitary” (357). See also the apocalyptic prose of Ernst Jünger, An der Zeitmauer (Werke) (Stuttgart: Klett, 1959): “It seems that cyclical system corresponds to our spirit. We make round-shaped watches, although there is no logical compulsion behind it. And even catastrophes are viewed as recurrent, as for example floods and drought, fire-age and ice-age” (460-61). My translations.

13. Friedrich Sieburg, Die Lust am Untergang (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954), 54. My translation.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “History And Decadence: Spengler’s Cultural Pessimism Today.” CLIO – A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History, Vol. 19, No 1 (Fall 1989), pp. 51-62. Text retrieved from: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/tomsunic/sunic4.html >.

Note: This essay was also republished in Tomislav Sunic’s Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity – Collected Essays (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).