From Nihilism to Tradition – O’Meara

From Nihilism to Tradition

By Michael O’Meara

Histoire et tradition des européennes:
30,000 ans d’identité
Dominique Venner
Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2002

I. Race of Blood, Race of Spirit

In the United States, nationalists take their stand on the question of race, arguing that it denotes meaningful differences between subspecies, that these differences have significant behavioral and social ramifications, and that the present threat to white racial survival constitutes the single, most vital issue facing our people. In Europe, by contrast, our counterparts pursue a somewhat different strategy. Against the antiwhite forces of multiculturalism, Third World immigration, feminism, and globalization, European nationalists tend to privilege not race per se, but the defense of their cultural/historical identity.

This identitarian emphasis might be explained by the absence in Europe of “First Amendment rights” and hence of the freedom to treat racial questions forthrightly. But there is, I think, another, more interesting reason for these transatlantic differences: namely, that European nationalists define race not simply as a matter of blood, but also as a spiritual—that is, as a historical and cultural—phenomenon. Implicit in this view is the assumption that the body is inseparable from the spirit animating it, that biological difference, as a distinct vitality, is another form of spiritual difference, and that the significance of such differences (given that man is a spiritual being, not merely an animal) is best seen in terms of culture and history rather than nineteenth-century biological science.

Race, then, may be the necessary organic substratum to every historically and culturally distinct people, but its biological properties, however primordial, are only the form, not the substance, of its spiritual manifestation. Thus, whilst we Americans search for psychological, sociological, conspiratorial, or political explanations to account for the racially self-destructive behavior of our people, Europeans look to the loss of their culture and tradition—and the identity they define.

II. Dominique Venner
These distinctions reflect not just strategic differences between US and continental nationalisms but the larger civilizational divide separating America from Europe—and hence their different historical trajectories. This is especially evident in the fact that Europeans of all political persuasions are presently embarked on an epoch-making project—a politically united Europe—that promises them dominance in tomorrow’s world. There is, moreover, real debate about how the European project is to be realized, especially in France, where the will to power is most developed. The New Class forces in control of the European Union, as might be expected, favor the liberal, economic, and quantitative principles that are leading white people everywhere to ruin, envisaging Europe as a multiracial civilization based on free markets, unguarded borders, and an ethnocidal humanitarianism. Against them, the various anti-system parties challenging the “liberal-democratic” order of money imposed on Europe in 1945, along with hundreds of New Right, far Right, revolutionary nationalist, and revolutionary conservative formations making up the Right’s extra-parliamentary wing, marshal an array of persuasive counter-arguments and do so not simply in the language of race. For unlike their New World homologues, these anti-liberals have the millennia-long tradition of Europe’s race-culture to buttress their opposition.

It is as part of this larger debate on Europe that Dominique Venner’s Histoire et tradition des européennes: 30 000 ans d’identité (History and Tradition of the Europeans: 30,000 Years of Identity) is to be situated. Few living writers are better qualified than Venner to speak for the white men of the West. For five decades, on paper and on numerous battlefields, he has earned the right to do so. His first arena in service to the European cause was French Algeria, where he served as an elite paratrooper. Later, in the 1960s, after discovering that the cosmopolitan forces of international capital had captured all the seats of power, he fought on another front, playing a leading role in the period’s far-right campaigns. Besides getting to know more than one French prison, he helped launch the metapolitical career of the “European New Right” (or “New Culture”), which has since become the chief ideological opponent of the Judeo-liberal forces allied with le parti américain.

In addition to having shown courage and integrity under fire, Venner is a favorite of the muses, having authored more than forty books and innumerable articles on the most diverse facets of the European experience. Most of his books are works of historical popularization. His books on Vichy France, however, rank with the most important scholarly contributions to the field, as do his numerous books on firearms and hunting (one of which has been translated into English). Venner’s military history of the Red Army (Histoire de l’Armée Rouge 1917-1924) won the coveted prize of the Académie Française. His Le coeur rebel, a memoir of his years as a paratrooper in Algeria and a militant in the thick of Parisian nationalist politics during the 1960s, I think is one of the finest works of its kind. Venner has also founded and edited several historical reviews, the latest being the Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, whose web address is http://www.n-r-h.net/.

In his most recent work, Histoire et tradition des européennes, this gifted European turns to his people’s distant past to answer the great questions posed by their uncertain future.

III. Nihilism

Writing at the advent of the new millennium, Venner notes that for the first time in history, Europeans no longer dominate the land of their fathers, having lost control of their borders, their institutions, and the very means of reproducing themselves as a people. He characterizes the present period as one of cultural chaos and racial masochism. No fluke of fate, this dark age culminates a long period of spiritual upheaval, in which Europeans have been severed from their roots and forced to find themselves in all the wrong places, including the negation of themselves. The loss of meaning and purpose fostered by this upheaval in which traditional forms of identity have given way to false ones, Venner calls “nihilism.”

For Nietzsche, the most prominent popularizer of the term, nihilism is a product of “God’s death,” which undermines Christian belief and leaves the world without a sense of purpose. Venner sees it in somewhat broader terms, designating not simply the loss of religious belief, but the loss of the larger cultural heritage as nihilism’s principal source. In this sense, nihilism subverts those transcendent references that formerly oriented the Occident, leaving modern man with a disenchanted world of materialist satisfactions and scientific certainties, but indifferent to “all the higher values of life and personality.” Given its focus on the physical basis of existence, nihilism fosters a condition devoid of sense, form, or order and hence one deprived of those standards that might aid us in negotiating the great trials of our age. An especially dire consequence of this loss of transcendence is a civilizational crisis in which the survival of our race becomes a matter of general indifference.

Venner traces nihilism’s roots to the advent of Spengler’s “Faustian civilization,” which began innocently enough when Saint Thomas introduced Aristotelian logic to Christian theology, privileging thereby the forces of rationality. Because Christianity held that there was a single truth and a single spiritual authority (the Church), reason in this Thomist makeover was made the principal means of accessing the divine. But once the Christian God became dependent on reason, He risked eventually being repudiated by it. This came with Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, who turned reason into a purely instrumental and calculative faculty. In the form of science, technology, and industry, Cartesian rationalism reduced everything to a mechanical causality, associating reason with the progressive mastery of nature, a belief in progress (soon to supplant the belief in Providence), and, ultimately, the rule of money.

Venner claims a desiccated mathematicized reason, no matter how technologically potent, is no substitute for transcendent references, for a disenchanted world governed by its principles is a world devoid of meaning and purpose. The ongoing mechanization of human existence and the quantitative, economic priorities it favors are, indeed, premised on the eradication of those transgenerational structures of history, tradition, and culture which inform all traditional belief systems. And once such structures give way to rationalism’s anti-organic propositions, so too does the significance of those qualities distinguishing Europeans from other members of the human family. In this spirit, the world born of nihilism takes as its ideal an abstract, uniform, and coffee-colored humanity indifferent to pre-rational life forms based on Europe’s organic heritage.

The greater the barrenness of the encroaching nihilism, the greater, Venner contends, is the need to reconnect with the primordial sources of European being. This, however, is now possible only through research and reflection, for these sources have been largely extirpated from European life. In uncovering the principal tropes of Europe’s history and tradition, Venner does not, then, propose a literal return to origins (which, in any case, is impossible), but rather a hermeneutical encounter that seeks out something of their creative impetus. From this perspective, Homer’s Iliad, written thirty centuries ago, still has the capacity to empower us because it expresses something primordial in our racial soul, connecting us with who we were at the dawn of our history—and with what we might be in the adventures that lie ahead. Whenever Europeans reconnect with these primordial sources, they take, thus, a step toward realizing an identity—and a destiny—that is distinctly their own.

IV. Tradition

When Venner speaks of tradition, he refers not to the customary rites and practices that anthropologists study, nor does he accept the utilitarian approach of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, who treat it as the accumulated wisdom of former ages, nor, finally, does he view it as that transhistorical body of principles undergirding the world’s religions, as René Guénon and Julius Evola do. Tradition in his view is that which is immutable and perpetually reborn in a people’s experience of its history, for it is rooted in a people’s primordial substratum. It ought not, then, to be confused with the traditions or customs bequeathed by the past but, instead, seen as the enduring essence—the truth—of a particular historical community, constituting, as such, the infrastructural basis—the cultural scaffolding—of its spirit and vitality.

From this perspective, Europe was born not with the signing of certain free-trade agreements in the late twentieth century, but from millennia of tradition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the themes linking the Iliad, the medieval epics, the Norse sagas, even the national poem of the Armenian Maherr, where we encounter the same warrior ethic that makes courage the ultimate test of a man’s character; the same aristocratic notions of service and loyalty; the same chivalric codes whose standards are informed by beauty, justice, and harmony; the same defiance in face of unjust authority and ignoble sentiments, but, above all, the same metaphysical rebellion against an unexamined existence. From these Aryan themes, Venner claims the organic legacy that is Europe takes form.

The word itself “Europe” is nearly three millennia old, coined by the Greeks to distinguish themselves from the peoples of Africa and Asia. Not coincidentally, Hellenic Europe was forged—mythically in Homer, historically in the Persian Wars—in opposition to Asia. The roots of Europe’s tradition reach back, though, beyond the Greeks, beyond even the Indo-Europeans, who shaped the linguistic and cultural structures of its root peoples. It begins 30,000 years ago, at the dawn of Cro-Magnon man, whose cultural imagery lingers in the extraordinary cave paintings of Chauvet (France) and Kapova (Ukraine), in that region stretching from the Pyrenees to the Urals, where, for nearly 20,000 years, until the last Ice Age arrived, the germ of European civilization took form, as race and culture fused in a uniquely brilliant synergy. Every subsequent era has passed on, reframed, and added to this traditional heritage—every era, that is, except the present nihilist one, in which liberals and aliens dominate.

V. History

Darwin may have been right in explaining the evolution of species, but, Venner insists, history operates irrespective of zoological or scientific laws. As such, history is less a rectilinear progression than a spiral, without beginning or end, with cycles of decay and rebirth intricate to its endless unfoldings. No single determinism or causality can thus conceivably grasp the complexity of its varied movements. Nor can any overarching cause explain them. Given, therefore, that a multitude of determinisms are at work in history, each having an open-ended effect, the course and significance of which are decided by the historical actor, human freedom regains its rights. And as it does, history can no longer be seen as having an in-built teleology, as “scientific” or ideological history-writing, with its reductionist determinisms, presumes. This means there is nothing inevitable about the historical process for, at any moment, it can take an entirely new direction. What would the present be like, Venner asks, if Hitler had not survived the Battle of Ypres or if Lee had triumphed at Gettysburg? None of the great events of the past, in fact, respond to “necessity,” which is always an a posteriori invention.

In conditioning a people’s growth, the existing heritage constitutes but one determinant among many. According to Venner, the existing heritage enters into endless combination with the forces of fortune (whose classic symbol is a woman precariously balanced on a spinning wheel) and virtù, a Roman quality expressive of individual will, audacity, and energy, to produce a specific historical outcome. In this conjuncture of determinism and fortune, the virtù of the historical actor becomes potentially decisive. Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini—like Alexander, Caesar, and Arminius before them—or Frederick II, Peter the Great, Napoleon—were all men whose virtù was of world historical magnitude. Without their interventions, in an arena organized by the heritage of the past and subject to the forces of chance, history might have taken a different course. This suggests that history is perpetually open—and open in the sense that its unfolding is continually affected by human consciousness. History’s significance, therefore, is not to be found in the anonymous currents shaping its entropic movements, but in the meanings men impose upon them. For in face of the alleged determinisms justifying the existing order, it is the courage—the virtù—of the historical actor that bends the historical process in ways significant to who we are as a people.

In Venner’s view, the European of history is best seen as a warrior bearing a sword, symbol of his will. The virtù of this warrior is affirmed every time he imposes his cosmos (order) upon a world whose only order is that which he himself gives it. History, thus, is no immobilizing determinism, but a theater of the will, upon whose stage the great men of our people exert themselves. Both as intellectual discipline and individual act of will, it seems hardly coincidental that history is Europe’s preeminent art form.

VI. In Defense of Who We Are

Like history, life has no beginning or end, being a process of struggle, an overcoming of obstacles, a combat, in which the actor’s will is pivotal. While it inexorably ends in death and destruction, from its challenges all our greatness flows. The Hellenes entered history by refusing to be slaves. Bearing their sword against an Asiatic foe, they won the right to be who they were. If a single theme animates Venner’s treatment of Europe’s history and tradition, it is that Europeans surmounted the endless challenges to their existence only because they faced them with sword in hand—forthrightly, with the knowledge that this was not just part of the human condition, but the way to prove that they were worthy of their fate. Thus, as classical Greece rose in struggle against the Persians, the Romans against the Carthaginians, medieval and early modern Europe against Arabic, then Turkish, Islam, we too today have to stand on our borders, with sword in hand, to earn the right to be ourselves.

Europeans, Venner concludes, must look to their history and tradition—especially to the honor, heroism, and heritage Homer immortalized—to rediscover themselves. Otherwise, all that seeks the suppression of their spirit and the extinction of their blood will sweep them aside. The question thus looms: In the ethnocidal clash between the reigning nihilism and the white men of the West, who will prevail? From Venner’s extraordinary book, in which the historian turns from the drama of the event to the scene of our longue durée, we are led to believe that this question will be answered in our favor only if we remain true to who we are, to what our forefathers have made of us, and to what Francis Parker Yockey, in the bleak years following the Second World War, called the primacy of the spirit.

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O’Meara, Michael. “From Nihilism to Tradition.” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 2004. <http://www.toqonline.com/blog/from-nihilism-to-tradition/>

Note: In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

 

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Ludwig Clauss – Sunic

“Ludwig F. Clauss: Racial Style, Racial Character” by Tomislav Sunic (PDF – 406 KB):

Ludwig F. Clauss

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Ludwig F. Clauss: Racial Style, Racial Character (Part 1).” The Occidental Observer. 9 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/ludwig-f-clauss-racial-style-racial-character-part-i/ >.

Sunic, Tomislav. “Ludwig F. Clauss: Racial Style, Racial Character (Part 2)” The Occidental Observer. 18 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/ludwig-f-clauss-racial-style-racial-character-part-ii/ >.

Note: Readers may also be interested in the mention of Clauss’s race psychology made in Lucian Tudor, “Othmar Spann: A Catholic Radical Traditionalist,” Counter-Currents.com, 19 March 2013, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/03/othmar-spann-a-catholic-radical-traditionalist/ >.

 

Interview with Steuckers

Interview with Robert Steuckers by Troy Southgate

 

Troy Southgate: When and why did you decide to become involved in politics?

Robert Steuckers: I was never actually involved in politics, as I was never a member of a political party. Nevertheless I am a citizen interested in political questions but of course not in the usual plain and trivial way, as I have no intention to become a candidate, council deputy or Member of Parliament.

For me “politics” means to maintain continuities or, if you prefer, traditions. But traditions that are embedded in the actual history of a particular human community. I started to read historical and political books at the tender age of 14. This lead to a rejection of established ideologies or non-values.

From the age of 15 onwards, with the help of a secondary school history teacher, a certain Mr. Kennof, I realized that people should grasp the main trends of history in keys and always make use of historical atlasses (I have collected them ever since) in order to understand in one glimpse the main forces animating the world scene at a precise moment of time. Maps are very important for politics at a high level (diplomacy, for instance).

The principal idea I acquired at this young age was that all ideologies, thoughts or blue prints which wanted to get rid of the past, to sever the links people have with their historical continuities, were fundamentally wrong. As a consequence, all political actions should aim at preserving and strengthening historical and political continuities, even when futurist (pro-active) actions are often necessary to save a community from a sterile repetition of obsolete habits and customs.

The discourses of most ideologies, including the various expressions of the so-called far right, were in my eyes artificial in the Western World just as communism was an abstraction in front of the whole of Russian history in the East or an abstraction obliterating the genuine historical patterns of the East-European peoples submitted to Soviet rule after 1945. The rupture of continuities or the repetition of dead past “forms” leads to the political-ideological confusion we know nowadays, where conservatives aren’t conservative and socialists aren’t socialists anymore, and so on.

Fundamental political ideas are better served in my eyes by “Orders” than by political parties. Orders provide a continuous education of the affiliated and stress the notion of service. They feel reluctant in front of the mere politicians’ petty ambitions. Such Orders are the Chivalric Orders of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in Europe, the notion of fatwa in the Persian Islamic world as well as later experiments, including in the 20th Century (The Legion of Michael the Archangel Michael in Romania, the Verdinaso in Flanders, etc.).

Troy Southgate: Please explain what you mean by the term “Conservative Revolution” and, if possible, provide us with an outline of some of its chief ideologues.

Robert Steuckers: When the phrase “Conservative Revolution” is used in Europe, it is mostly in the sense given to it by Armin Mohler in his famous book Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932. Mohler listed a long list of authors who rejected the pseudo-values of 1789 (dismissed by Edmund Burke as mere “blue prints”), stressed the role of the Germanic in the evolution of European thought and received the influence of Nietzsche. Mohler avoided, for instance, purely religious “conservatives,” be they Catholics or Protestants.

For Mohler the main brandmark of “Conservative Revolution” is a non-linear vision of history. But he doesn’t simply take over the cyclical vision of traditionalism. After Nietzsche, Mohler believes in a spherical conception of history. What does that mean? It means that history is neither simply a repetition of the same patterns at regular intervals nor a linear path leading to happiness — to the end of history, to a Paradise on Earth, to felicity, etc. — but is a sphere that can run (or be pushed) in every direction according to the impulsion it receives from strong charismatic personalities. Such charismatic personalities bend the course of history towards some very particular ways, ways that were never previously foreseen by any kind of Providence.

Mohler in this sense never believes in universalistic political receipts or doctrines but always in particular and personal trends. Like Jünger, he wants to struggle against everything that is “general” and to support everything that is “particular”. Further, Mohler expressed his vision of the dynamic particularities by using the some awkward terminology of “nominalism.” For him “nominalism” was indeed the word that expressed at best the will of strong personalities to cut for themselves and their followers an original and never used path through the jungle of existence.

The main figures of the movement were Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, and Ernst Jünger (and his brother Friedrich-Georg). We can add to these triumviri Ludwig Klages and Ernst Niekisch. Carl Schmitt, as a Catholic lawyer and constitutionalist, represents another important aspect of the so-called “Conservative Revolution”.

Spengler remains the author of a brilliant fresco of the world civilizations that inspired the British philosopher Arnold Toynbee. Spengler spoke of Europe as a Faustian civilization, at best expressed by the Gothic cathedrals, the interaction of light and colors in the glass-works, the stormy skies with white and gray clouds in most of the Dutch, English, and German paintings. This civilization is an aspiration of the human soul towards light and towards self-commitment.

Another important idea of Spengler is the idea of “pseudo-morphosis”: a civilization never disappears completely after a decay or a violent conquest. Its elements pass into the new civilization that takes its succession and bends it towards original paths.

Moeller van den Bruck was the first German translator of Dostoevsky. He was deeply influenced by Dostoevsky’s diary, containing some severe judgments on the West. In the German context after 1918, Moeller van den Bruck advocated, on the basis of Dostoevsky’s arguments, a German-Russian alliance against the West.

How could the respectable German gentleman, with an immense artist’s culture, plea in favor of an alliance with the Bolsheviks? His arguments were the following: in the whole diplomatic tradition of the 19th century, Russia was considered as the shield of reaction against all the repercussions of the French Revolution and of the revolutionist mind and moods. Dostoevsky, as a former Russian revolutionist who admitted later that his revolutionist options were wrong and mere blue prints, considered more or less that Russia’s mission in the world was to wipe out of Europe the tracks of the ideas of 1789.

For Moeller van den Bruck, the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia was only a changing of ideological clothe Russia remained, despite the Bolshevik discourse, the antidote to the Western liberal mind. So defeated Germany should ally to this fortress of anti-revolutionism to oppose the West, which in the eyes of Moeller van den Bruck is the incarnation of liberalism. Liberalism, stated Moeller van den Bruck, is always the final disease of a people. After some decades of liberalism, a people will ineluctably enter into a terminal phase of decay.

The path followed by Ernst Jünger is known enough to everyone. He started as an ardent and gallant young soldier in the First World War, leaving the trenches with no gun, simply with a hand grenade under his arm, worn with elegance like the stick of a typical British officer. For Jünger the First World War was the end of the petty bourgeois world of the 19th Century and the “Belle Epoque,” where everyone had to be “as it should be,” i.e. behave according to said patterns pre-cut by borrowing teachers or priests, exactly as we all today have to behave according to the self-proclaimed rules of “political correctness.”

Under the “storms of steel,” the soldier could state his nothingness, his mere fragile biological being, but this statement couldn’t in his eyes lead to an inept pessimism, to fear and desperation. Having experimented the most cruel destiny in the trenches and under the shelling of thousands of artillery guns, shaking the earth thoroughly, reducing everything to the “elemental,” the infantrymen knew better of cruel human destiny on the surface of this planet. All artificiality of civilised urban life appeared to them as mere fake.

After the first World War Ernst Jünger and his brother Friedrich-Georg turned out to be the best national-revolutionist journalists and writers.

Ernst evolved to a kind of cynical, soft, ironical, and serene observer of humanity and the facts of life. During a carpet bombing raid on a Parisian suburb, where factories were producing war material for the German army during WWII, Jünger was terrified by the unnatural straight air path taken by the American flying fortresses. The linearity of the planes’ path in the air above Paris was the negation of all the curves and sinuosities of organic life. Modern war implied the crushing of those winding and serpentine organicities. Ernst Jünger started his career as a writer by being an apologist of war. After having observed the irresistible lines thrust forward by the American B-17s, he became totally disgusted by the unchivalrousness of the pure technical way of running a war.

After WWII, his brother Friedrich-Georg wrote a first theoretical work leading to the development of the new German critical and ecological thinking, Die Perfektion der Technik (The Perfection of Technics). The main idea of this book, in my eyes, is the critique of “connection.” The modern world is a process trying to connect human communities and individuals to big structures. This process of connection ruins the principle of liberty. You are a poor chained prole if you are “connected” to a big structure, even if you earn £3000 or more in one month. You are a free man if you are totally disconnected from those big iron heels. In a certain way, Friedrich-Georg developed the theory that Kerouac experimented untheoretically by choosing to drop out and travel, becoming a singing tramp.

Ludwig Klages was another philosopher of organic life against abstract thinking. For him the main dichotomy was between Life and Spirit (Leben und Geist). Life is crushed by abstract spirit. Klages was born in Northern Germany but migrated as a student to Munich, where he spent his free time in the pubs of Schwabing, the district in which artists and poets met (and still meet today). He became a friend of the poet Stefan Georg and a student of the most original figure of Schwabing, the philosopher Alfred Schuler, who believed himself to be the reincarnation of an ancient Roman settler in the German Rhineland.

Schuler had a genuine sense of theater. He disguised himself in the toga of a Roman Emperor, admired Nero, and set up plays remembering the audience of the ancient Greek or Roman world. But beyond his lively fantasy, Schuler acquired a cardinal importance in philosophy by stressing for instance the idea of “Entlichtung,” i.e. the gradual disappearance of Light since the time of the Ancient City-State of Greece and Roman Italy. There is no progress in history: On the contrary, Light is vanishing as well as the freedom of the free citizen to shape his own destiny.

Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, on the left or conservative-liberal side, were inspired by this idea and adapted it for different audiences. The modern world is the world of complete darkness, with little hope of finding “be-lighted” periods again, unless charismatic personalities, like Nero, dedicated to art and Dionysian lifestyle, wedge in a new era of splendor which would only last for the blessed time of one spring.

Klages developed the ideas of Schuler, who never wrote a complete book, after he died in 1923 due to an ill-prepared operation. Klages, just before WW1, pronounced a famous speech on the Horer Meissner Hill in Central Germany, in front of the assembled youth movements (Wandervogel). This speech bore the title of “Man and Earth” and can be seen as the first organic manifesto of ecology, with a clear and understandable but nevertheless solid philosophical background.

Carl Schmitt started his career as a law teacher in 1912 but lived till the respectable age of 97. He wrote his last essay at 91. I cannot enumerate all the important points of Carl Schmitt’s work in the frame of this modest interview. Let us summarize by saying that Schmitt developed two main idea the idea of decision in political life and the idea of “Great Space.”

The art of shaping politics or a good policy lays in decision, not in discussion. The leader has to decide in order to lead, protect, and develop the political community he is in charge of. Decision is not dictatorship as many liberals would say nowadays in our era of “political correctness.” On the contrary: a personalisation of power is more democratic, in the sense that a king, an emperor, or a charismatic leader is always a mortal person. The system he eventually imposes is not eternal, as he is doomed to die like any human being. A nomocratic system, on the contrary, aims at remaining eternal, even if current events and innovations contradict the norms or principles.

Second big topic in Schmitt’s work the idea of a European Grand Space (Grossraum). “Out-of-Space” powers should be prevented to intervene within the frame of this Great Space. Schmitt wanted to apply to Europe the same simple principle that animated US President Monroe. America for the Americans. OK, said Schmitt, but let us apply “Europe to the Europeans.” Schmitt can be compared to the North-American “continentalists,” who criticised Roosevelt’s interventions in Europe and Asia. Latin Americans also developed similar continentalist ideas as well as Japanese imperialists. Schmitt gave to this idea of “Greater Space” a strong juridical base.

Ernst Niekisch is a fascinating figure in the sense that he started his career as a Communist leader of the “Councils’ Republic of Bavaria” of 1918-19, that was crushed down by the Free Corps of von Epp, von Lettow-Vorbeck, etc. Obviously, Niekisch was disappointed by the absence of a historical vision among the Bolshevik trio in revolutionist Munich (Lewin, Leviné, Axelrod).

Niekisch developed a Eurasian vision, based on an alliance between the Soviet Union, Germany, India, and China. The ideal figure who was supposed to be the human motor of this alliance was the peasant, the adversary of the Western bourgeoisie. A certain parallel with Mao Tse-Tung is obvious here. In the journals that Niekisch edited, we discover all the German tentatives to support anti-British or anti-French movements in the colonial empires or in Europe (Ireland against England, Flanders against a Frenchified Belgium, Indian nationalists against Britain, etc.).

I hope I have explained in a nutshell the main trends of the so-called conservative revolution in Germany between 1918 and 1933. May those who know this pluri-stratified movement of ideas forgive my schematic introduction.

Troy Southgate: Do you have a “spiritual angle”?

Robert Steuckers: By answering this question, I risk being too succinct. Among the group of friends who exchanged political and cultural ideas at the end of the Seventies, we concentrated of course on Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World. Some of us rejected totally the spiritual bias, because it lead to sterile speculation: they preferred to read Popper, Lorenz, etc. I accepted many of their criticisms, and I still dislike the uttermost Evolian speculations, alleging a spiritual world of Tradition beyond all reality. The real world being disregarded as mere triviality. But this is of course a cult of Tradition mainly supported by young people “feeling ill in their own skin,” as we say. The dream to live like beings in fairy tales is a form of refusing to accept reality.

In Chapter 7 of Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola, on the contrary, stresses the importance of the “numena“, the forces acting within things, natural phenomena or powers. The initial Roman mythology laid the accent more on the numena than on the personalised divinities. This bias is mine. Beyond the people and the gods of the usual religions (be they Pagan or Christian), there are acting forces and man should be in concordance with them in order to be successful in his earthly actions.

My religious/spiritual orientation is more mystical than dogmatic, in the sense that the mystical tradition of Flanders and Rhineland (Ruusbroec, Meister Eckhart), as well as the mystical tradition of Ibn Arabî in the Muslim area or of Sohrawardî in the Persian realm, admire and worship the total splendor of Life and the World. In these traditions, there is no clear-cut dichotomy between the godly, the sacred, and the holy on the one side and the worldly, the profane, and the simple on the other. Mystical tradition means omni-compenetration and synergy of all the forces yeasting in the world.

Troy Southgate: Please explain to our readers why you place such importance on concepts like geopolitics and Eurasianism.

Robert Steuckers: Geopolitics is a mixture of history and geography. In other words of time and space. Geopolitics is a set of disciplines (not a single discipline) leading to a good governance of time and space. Geopolitics is a mixture of history and geography. No serious power can survive without continuity, be it an institutional or historical continuity. No serious power can survive without a domination and a yielding of land and space.

All traditional empires first organized the land by building roads (Rome) or by mastering the big rivers (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China), then lead on to the emergence of a long history, to the sense of a continuity, to the birth of the first practical sciences (astronomy, meteorology, geography, mathematics) under the protection of well structured armies with a code of honor, especially codified in Persia, the womb of Chivalry.

The Roman Empire, the first empire on European soil, was focussed on the Mediterranean Sea. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation couldn’t find a proper core as well coordinated as the Mediterranean. The waterways of Central Europe lead to the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, or the Black Sea, but without any link between them. This was the true tragedy of German and European history. The country was torn between centrifugal forces. The Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen tried to restore the Mediterranean realm, with Sicily as the central geographical piece.

His attempt was a tragic failure. It is only now that the emergence of a renewed imperial form (even under a modern ideology) is possible in Europe: after the opening of the canal between the Rhine-Main system and the Danube river system. There is a single waterway now between the North Sea, including the Thames system in Britain, and the Black Sea, allowing the economical and cultural forces of Central Europe to reach all the shores of the Black Sea and the Caucasian countries.

Those who have a good historical memory, not blinded by the usual ideological blue-prints of modernism, will remember the role of the Black Sea shores in the spiritual history of Europe: in Crimea, many old traditions, be they Pagan or Byzantine, were preserved in caves by monks. The influences of Persia, especially the values of the oldest (Zoroastrian) Chivalry in world history, could influence the development of similar spiritual forces in Central and Western Europe. Without those influences, Europe is spiritually mutilated.

Therefore the Mediterranean area, the Rhine (also coupled to the Rhone) and the Danube, the Russian rivers, the Black Sea and the Caucasus should constitute a single civilization area, defended by a unified military force, based on a spirituality inherited from Ancient Persia. This, in my eyes, means Eurasia. My position is slightly different than that of Dughin but both positions are not incompatible.

When the Ottomans gained complete control over the Balkan Peninsula in the 15th Century, the land routes were cut for all Europeans. Moreover, with the help of the North African sea rovers assembled by the Turkish-born Barbarossa based in Algiers, the Mediterranean was closed to peaceful European commercial expansion towards India and China. The Muslim world worked as a bolt to contain Europe and Moscovy, core of the future Russian Empire.

All together, Europeans and Russians joined their efforts to destroy the Ottoman bolt. The Portuguese, Spaniards, English and Dutch tried the sea routes and circumvented the African and Asian land mass, ruining first the Moroccan kingdom, which drew gold from subtropical Western African mines and claims in order to build an army to conquer again the Iberian Peninsula. By landing in Western Africa, the Portuguese got the gold more easily for themselves and the Moroccan kingdom was reduced to a mere residual superpower. The Portuguese passed around the African continent and entered the Indian Ocean, circumventing definitively the Ottoman bolt, and giving for the first time a real Eurasian dimension to European history.

At the same time, Russia repelled the Tartars, took the City of Kazan, and destroyed the Tartar shackle of the Muslim bolt. This was the starting point of the continental Russian Eurasian geopolitical perspective.

The aim of American global strategy, developed by a man like Zbigniew Bzrzezinski, is to recreate artificially the Muslim bolt by supporting Turkish militarism and Panturanism. In this perspective, they support tacitly and still secretly the Moroccan claims on the Canary Isles and use Pakistan to prevent any land link between India and Russia. Hence the double necessity today for Europe and Russia to remember the counter-strategy elaborated by ALL European people in the 15th and 16th Century.

European history has always been conceived as petty nationalist visions. It is time to reconsider European history by stressing the common alliances and convergencies. The Portuguese seaborne and the Russian landborne actions are such convergencies and are naturally Eurasian. The Battle of Lepanto, where the Venetian, Genoan, and Spanish fleets joined their efforts to master the East Mediterranean area under the command of Don Juan of Austria, is also a historical model to meditate upon and to remember.

But the most important Eurasian alliance was without any doubt the Holy Alliance lead by Eugene of Savoy at the end of the 17th Century, which compelled the Ottomans to retrocede 400,000 sq. km of land in the Balkans and Southern Russia. This victory allowed the Russian Tsars of the 18th Century, especially Catherine II, to win decisive battles once more.

My Eurasianism (and of course my whole geopolitical thought) is a clear answer to Bzrzezinski’s strategy and is deeply rooted in European history. It is absolutely not to be compared with the silly postures of some pseudo-national-revolutionist crackpots or with the poor aesthetic blueprints of new rightist would-be philosophers. Besides, one last remark concerning geopolitics and Eurasianism: my main sources of inspiration are English. I mean the historical atlas of Colin McEvedy, the books of Peter Hopkirk about the secret service in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, along the Silk Road and in Tibet, the reflections of Sir Arnold Toynbee in the twelve volumes of A Study of History.

Troy Southgate: What is your view of the State? Is it really essential to have systems or infrastructure as a means of socio-political organization, or do you think a decentralized form of tribalism and ethnic identity would be a better solution?

Robert Steuckers: Your question needs a whole book to be properly and completely answered. Firstly, I would say that it is impossible to have A view of THE State, as there are many forms of States throughout the world. I make of course the distinction between a State, which is still a genuine and efficient instrument to promote the will of a people and also to protect its citizens against all evils be they machinated by external, internal or natural foes (calamities, floods, starvation, etc.).

The State should also be carved for one population living on a specific land. I am critical, of course, of all artificial States like those that were imposed as so-called universal patterns. Such States are pure machines to crush or to exploit a population for an oligarchy or foreign masters. An organization of the peoples, according to ethnic criteria, could be an ideal solution, but unfortunately as the events in the Balkans show us the ebbs and flows of populations in European, African, or Asian history have very often spread ethnical groups beyond natural boarders or settled them within territories which were formerly controlled by others. Homogeneous States cannot be built in such situations. This is the source of many tragedies, especially in Middle and Eastern Europe. Therefore the only perspective today is to think in terms of Civilizations as Samuel Huntington taught us in his famous article and book, The Clash of Civilizations, first written in 1993.

Troy Southgate: In 1986, you said “the Third Way exists in Europe at the level of theory. What it needs is militants.” [“Europe: A New Perspective” in The Scorpion, Issue #9, p.6] Is this is still the case, or have things developed since then?

Robert Steuckers: Indeed, the situation is still the same. Or even worse because, growing older, I state that the level of classical education is vanishing. Our way of thinking is in a certain way Spenglerian, as it encompasses the complete history of the human kind.

Guy Debord, leader of the French Situationnists from the end of the Fifties until the Eighties, could observe and deplore that the “society of the spectacle” or the “show society” has as its main purpose to destroy all thinking and thought in terms of history and replace them by artificial and constructed blueprints or simple lies. The eradication of historical perspectives in the heads of pupils, students, and citizens, through the diluting work of the mass-media, is the big manipulation, leading us to an Orwellian world without any memory. In such a situation, we all risk becoming isolated. No fresh troops of volunteers are ready to take over the struggle.

Finally, tell us about your involvement with Synergies and your long-term plans for the future.

“Synergies” was created in order to bring people together, especially those who publish magazines, in order to spread more quickly the messages our authors had to deliver. But the knowledge of languages is also undergoing a set-back. Being plurilingual, as you certainly know, I have always been puzzled by the repetition of the same arguments at each national level. Marc Lüdders from Synergon-Germany agrees with me. It’s a pity for instance that the tremendous amount of work performed in Italy is not known in France or in Germany. And vice-versa. In order to keep this short: my main wish is to see such an exchange of texts realized in a swift manner within the next twenty years.

 

———————–

Steuckers, Robert. “Interview with Robert Steuckers.” Interview by Troy Southgate. Synthesis, 2001. <http://www.rosenoire.org/interviews/steuckers.php>.

Note: See also Robert Steucker’s website Euro-Synergies: <http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com >.

Notes on further reading: Armin Mohler’s book Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1933 (Graz & Stuttgart: Ares-Verlag, 2005), mentioned in this interview, is one of the most important works concerning the Conservative Revolution. It has been translated into French as La Révolution conservatrice en Allemagne: 1918-1932 (Puiseaux, Loiret: Pardès, 1993).  Also worth noting is Mohler’s Von Rechts Gesehen (Stuttgart: Seewald Verlag, 1974).

On Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, one of the founding intellectuals of the Conservative Revolution, an excellent overview of his thought in English is Lucian Tudor’s “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Man & His Thought” (originally published online: Counter-Currents.com, 17 August 2012), available on our website here: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/arthur-moeller-van-den-bruck-tudor/ >.

For a good overview of Carl Schmitt’s works and philosophy in English, see Paul Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

For an overview of Ludwig Klages’s works and philosophy, see Joe Pryce, “On The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages,” Revilo-Oliver.com, 2001, <http://www.revilo-oliver.com/Writers/Klages/Ludwig_Klages.html > (this essay was republished in print as an introduction to Klages anthology, The Biocentric Worldview [London: Arktos, 2013]). (See this essay in PDF format here: On the Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages).

 

Sixty-Eighters – Sunic

Sixty-Eighters

by Tomislav Sunic

 

From Italy to France, from Germany to England, the post-World War II generation is now running the show. They have traded in their jeans and sneakers for political power. Thirty years ago, they rocked the boat at Berkeley, in Paris, and in Berlin; they marched against American imperialism in Vietnam, and supported the Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, and his “socialism with a human face.” They made pilgrimages to Hanoi, Havana, and Belgrade, and many of them dressed in the Vietcong’s garb, or Mao’s clothes. A certain Bimbo named Jane Fonda even paid a courtesy visit to North Vietnam and posed for a photo-op with her rear on a communist howitzer. This generation protested against their wealthy parents, yet they used their fathers’ money to destroy their own welfare state. A burning joint passed from hand to hand, as Bob Dylan croaked the words that defined a generation: “Everybody must get stoned.”

This was a time which the youth in communist countries experienced quite differently. Prison camps were still alive, deportations were the order of the day from the Baltics to the Balkans, and the communist secret police–the Yugoslav UDBA, the Romanian Securitate, the East German Stasi, and the Soviet KGB–had their hands full. European 68ers did not know anything about their plight, and they simply ignored the communist topography of horror.

Back then, the 68ers had cultural power in their hands, controlling the best universities and spreading their permissive sensibility. Students were obliged to bow down to the unholy trinity of Marx, Freud, and Sartre, and the humanities curriculum showed the first signs of anti-Europeanism. Conservatives concentrated all of their attention on economic growth, naively believing that eliminating poverty and strengthening the middle class would bring about the renaissance of the conservative gospel.

Today, the 68ers (or “neo-liberals” or social democrats”) have grown up, and they have changed not only their name, but also their habitat and their discourse. Their time has come: Now they hold both cultural and political power. From Buenos Aires to Quai d’Orsay, from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to 10 Downing Street, they sit in air-conditioned executive offices or in ministerial cabinets, and they behave as if nothing has changed. Perfectly recycled in stylish Gucci suits, wearing expensive Bally shoes, sporting fine mascara, the 68ers pontificate about the global free market. They have embraced their former foe, capitalist entrepreneurship, and have added to it the fake humanistic facade of socialist philanthropy.

They have drawn up a hit list, filled with the names of senile individuals from distant countries who have been accused of “war crimes” and must be extradited to the 68ers’ kangaroo courts. Seldom, if ever, do they acknowledge the millions of victims of communism, documented recently by Stephane Courtois in Le livre noire du communisme. Nor do they wish to face their own role in communist genocide. And why should they? Their decades-long civil disobedience resulted in the downplaying of communist horror and legitimized the Gulag. While the 68ers did not play a direct role in Beria’s, Yagoda’s, or Tito’s ethnic cleansing, they were useful idiots. If today’s caviar left were to open the Pandora’s box of the Gulag, Augusto Pinochet would look like a naughty little scout from boot camp. The best way to cover up their own murderous past is to sing the hymns of human rights and to lecture on the metaphysics of permanent economic progress.

The 68ers and their well-clad cronies are the financial insiders now, speculating on stocks, never hesitating to transfer megabucks to Luxembourg via the Cayman Islands or, better yet, to do some hidden wheeling and dealing on Wall Street. They no longer spout nonsense about equality and social justice for the Vietcong, Congolese, or Tibetans, nor do they indulge in academic rantings about socialist utopia. And why should they? Today, the time is ripe for their gross corruption, veiled, of course, in the incessant rhetoric of multiculturalism. The 68ers have won: The world belongs to them.

But for how long? The 68ers have inherited a massive financial burden, much of it the result of government spending on the various programs that they once took to the streets to demand. At the same time, their work ethic pales next to the rugged individualism of their hard-working predecessors. From Germany to France, from Italy to England, they may excel in a liberal mimicry of capitalism, which in practice translates into the rise of a handful of the very rich and an ever-larger mass of the working poor. But who will foot the tab? No country can be run by humanitarian decrees. When push comes to shove, good leftist intentions mean nothing: The voters can kick the 68ers out of office just as quickly as they brought them in.

Many conservatives in Europe misunderstand the true nature of the modern left and its socialist offshoots. These conservatives naively assume that the cultural war will be won through political elections. They believe that political power (that is, the army, police, and diplomacy) will keep the country together and circumvent or circumscribe leftist influence. This is a dangerous and possibly fatal mistake, not just for the conservative cause, but for European civilization. The political power held today by the former 68ers is being institutionalized through legal restrictions on freedom of speech, of thought, and of research. Germany, Belgium, France, and other European countries have already passed strict laws forbidding young scholars to pursue open and honest research in certain touchy areas of modern history. Passages from the German Criminal Code bring to mind the Soviet comrade Vishinsky: They are not what we expect of a free and democratic country.

Many conservatives have failed to realize that political power must always be preceded by cultural power, and afterwards strengthened by an incessant media war. In our age of video, of hologram Hitlers, of sound-bite political lingo, the one who adapts the fastest to the changing world is bound to win. The 68ers realized long ago that one needs to infiltrate universities, publishing houses, and schools before storming the White House. For three decades, leftist scholars have diligently dished out their marxophille dogma to gullible students in Europe. Their progeny have grown up and are well positioned to follow suit.

If conservatives ever wish to surface again, they must resolutely commit themselves to fighting the cultural revolution by grooming highly sophisticated, highly intelligent journalists and scholars, and by coaching young people to defend the heritage of Europe. Conservative political leaders must realize that the culture is the only battleground on which cultural and political hegemony can be snatched away from the hydra of 68ers. Consider this: Conservatives can still boast of some prominent political leaders, yet the universities, schools, and the media are totally controlled by the left.

Conservative intellectuals in Europe are too differentiated, and they often suffer from pathological vanity and obsessive individualism. Although they are sometimes wrongly accused of being populists, conservatives are incapable of whipping the young masses into a frenzy, or of creating militants ready to storm street barricades. Most conservatives don’t understand how to articulate their own message. It is impossible to get three conservatives to work together: Each will immediately wish to prove that he is the best. Cultural conservatives still don’t recognize their true enemy, much less know how to beat him. Frequently, they quarrel among themselves about their own nationalist victimology, or push their tribal dogmas to the extreme–always, of course, to the benefit of the international left. To be a conservative should not merely mean being frightened by postmodernity, or savoring one’s provincial “rootedness,” or wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, or attending Sunday school lessons. Some great conservatives were agnostics, or pagans, or modernists, or revolutionary thinkers. By contrast, today’s conservatives have failed to address the social question of workers, and therefore, their turf has been stolen by the former 68ers, who are more versed in promising a glorious future.

What is to be done? Young conservatives, especially those with a solid background in the humanities, must start demystifying the leftist-liberal mythology. They must not gullibly imitate their teachers in the corrupt academy. After all, many self-proclaimed scholars are often half-wits with little knowledge of the drama of life, and they can easily be beaten on their own ground. In order to unseat the leftist-liberal political class and its pseudo-intellectual acolytes, young conservatives must resort to the same strategy that the left has pursued: Take to the cultural barricades, but to defend European civilization, rather than to tear it down.

And conservatives should not forget the ancient wisdom: Beat your leftist neighbor with his own weapon. Where it hurts the most.

———————–

Sunic, Tomislav. “Sixty-Eighters.” Chronicles, (March 1999). <http://www.amerika.org/texts/sixty-eighters-tomislav-sunic/ >.

 

The Problem of Decadence – Evola

The Problem of Decadence

by Julius Evola

 

Note (by Thompkins & Cariou): It may be in politics that the difference of nature between the ancient Indo-European world and the ‘modern world’ is most striking. The former is aristocratic, whereas, in the latter, what prevails is the political regime which was considered as the worst of all by Aristotle, democracy, which, as shown by Plato, through the excess of liberty which characterises it, has tyranny as a natural outcome, it being understood that, reassuming in this the traditional Indo-European world-outlook, Plato and Aristotle criticise liberty only in that it is given to all, to people who, by nature, are not made for it, or, at least, not to the same extent. According to this view, man has a specific function dictated by his own nature and man can only fulfill himself by performing this function well. This view is thus a hierarchic one. Aristocracy is based on an objective qualitative fact of life: natural hierarchy. By holding in common a fundamental premise, the equality and freedom of all human beings no matter what their race and their sex, the political theories born out of the Enlightenment deny this natural hierarchy, base of any society worth of the name, and, practically, what this leads to is an inverted hierarchy: in the ‘modern world’, the best do not rule, it is the worst who rule, or, to put it more accurately, who ‘manage’, in a chaos that they feed and intensify. Following in Aristotle’s footsteps, René Guénon describes and analyses from a metaphysical standpoint this state of affairs in the sixth chapter of ‘La Crise du Monde moderne’, translated and prefaced by Julius Evola (‘La Crisi del Mondo moderno’, Hoepli, 1937) : ‘Le Chaos social’. This chapter, revised, was to be published in the Fascist paper Lo Stato in April 1936, as ‘Suggestioni sociali, Democrazia ed Elite’ (‘Social Suggestions, Democracy and Elite’). At the end of the 60’s, ‘the friends of the Ar group’ (Ar Edizioni is a publisher of books by Evola) decided to publish it, in an anthology called ‘Gerarchia e Democrazia’ (‘Hierarchy and Democracy’), along with two articles by Evola, also taken from Lo Stato and written at the same period, ‘Sull’Essenza e la Funzione attuale dello Spirito aristocratico’, October 1941 (‘On the true Essence and Function of the aristocratic Spirit’) and ‘Il Problema della Decadenza’, May 1938 (‘The Problem of Decadence’). ‘Il Problema della Decadenza’ was already translated into English and can be found on various Internet sites, as ‘The Secret of Degeneration’. The translation we propose here is a ne varietur one.

THE PROBLEM OF DECADENCE

One of the most typical dogmas of so-called ‘modern thought’ in all its scientistic, rationalistic, illuministic and positivistic forms was the myth of ‘progress’, the interpretation of history as an uninterrupted ‘evolution’ of humanity, the latter conceived of uniformly, any articulation of mankind according to spiritual ideas, traditions, castes, or hierarchical traditional units being considered by that ‘modern thought’ as being peculiar to outdated stages of that so-called ‘evolution’. It is known that, by force of tragic experiences, such ‘myth’ has had its day: although it can still often be found in the methodological premises of various scientistic disciplines, the fields of culture and science being the ultimate strongholds of resistance in any outdated cycle of civilisation, the evolutionist and progressive myth, with regard to the political and social reality and the general vision of history, is nevertheless completely discredited ; and among the new forces suffused with the consciousness of these hard and tragic times, there is no lack of tendencies which return to more or less opposed views, peculiar to the greatest ancient traditions, to which this ‘evolutionist’ myth is totally foreign, for these are characterised on the contrary by the sense of a process of decadence, of a slow darkening or of a fall from a higher, primordial world. The fact that this view is singularly and impersonally shared by the traditions of the most different peoples, and not only in general, but also in detail, is, to a large extent, a proof that this is no mere philosophical attitude: in this connection, the reassumption of ideas of this kind must not be judged, as is erroneously thought in certain circles, as the contingent product of a certain pessimistic state of mind, as a sort of reflection of a state of crisis, but as the foreboding, though confused in most cases, of something far more real.

Anyone who wants to go deeper into this idea, both new and traditional or antievolutionist at the same time, cannot avoid tackling a further order of researches, to begin with those which are related to the mystery of decadence.

In a superficial sense, it cannot be said of this problem that it is new. For instance, in front of the grandiose remnants of magnificent civilisations, whose names sometimes haven’t even reached us, but whose very monumental traces often seem to reflect on earth the greatness and the power of supraterrestrial things, there is not a single person who has not posed to himself the problem of the death of civilisations and has not sensed the inadequacy of most of the explanations given in this regard by researchers. To de Gobineau, father of racism, we owe one of the best formulations of this problem and, at the same time, a masterly and documented criticism of all the main theories proposed for the explanation of the phenomenon. However, the solution suggested by de Gobineau, according to us, has no great persuasive power, and the part it contains which is correct needs to be completed by considerations of a higher order. As noted, to de Gobineau, a civilisation develops, lives on, and dominates as long as in its center the race that created it remains pure ; it decays and dissolves as soon as this purity begins to vanish, bloods mix, an ethnic chaos occurs. Somewhere else ( J. EVOLA: ‘Revolt against the Modern World’, Chapters X and XXII), we have said why such a thesis is insufficient and basically ends up taking the causes for the effects, since we think that the creative virtues of any superior race cannot be purely and simply explained by the mere biological factor, which is itself only an effect of another cause. Here we will merely point out that in many cases a civilisation declines even where crossbreeding cannot be alleged and the original race has remained substantially pure. This is particularly visible among certain savage populations, caught in a fatal process of slow death, though ethnically they remained closed in upon themselves almost hermetically. There are examples which are closer: Stapel has reminded us that the Swedes and the Dutch, racially, are nowadays more or less what they were two centuries ago, and yet, now, there is no longer even a ghost of the heroic civilisation which was theirs at that time. Other great civilisations and their related states sometimes seem to have survived as mummies ; without any visible alterations, they died a long time ago and they live on in appearance only. The slightest blow is thus enough to reduce them to powder. Among those who are best known to us, a typical case is offered by ancient Peru, this magnificent, immense, ‘solar’ empire, which a bunch of adventurers sufficed to destroy.

The mystery of decadence becomes even more obscure in a specifically doctrinal presentation of the problem. In this presentation, it is necessary to start from a dualism of types of civilisation, and, consequently, of state. On one hand, there are the traditional civilisations, diverse in form, but identical in their principle; these are civilisations in which spiritual and supra-individual forces and values are the axis and the supreme point of reference of the hierarchic organisation, of the setting up and the justification of all subordinated reality. On the other hand, there is modern civilisation, antitradition, pure construction made of human, terrestrial, individualist or collectivist factors, complete development of all that life entirely separated from ‘supra-life’ is capable of. We owe to René Guénon a classical presentation and a concluding justification of this fundamental view with respect to the morphology of civilisation. On this view, the meaning of history is a decadence, for history shows us a disappearance of previous civilisations of ‘traditional’ type and the more and more precise and general advent of a new common civilisation of ‘modern’ type.

Here, the problem we are faced with is double. How is it, in general, that this was possible? Evolutionism is entirely based on a logical impossibility, since it is impossible that the greater comes from the less and the superior from the inferior. But are we not confronted with a similar difficulty when we wish to explain involution? How is it possible that what is superior degenerate?

Certainly, mere analogies are hastily proposed as solutions ; the sane man can indeed get sick ; the virtuous can become vicious ; a natural law, which does not come as a surprise to anyone, sees to it that any organism, after birth, growth and maturity, gets old, weakens, dies ; and so on. But all this is a statement of fact, not an explanation, even assuming that there is a complete analogy between both orders of things, which is doubtful in states and in civilisations, since the forces of will play a very different part in them than in these natural phenomena.

The mystery, we were saying, is double, because we must explain not only decadence within a given world, but also the possibility that this decadence, once it has asserted itself in a given world, may have been able to ruin and implicate all the rest. To express ourselves in a more concrete way, we would say that, for instance, we must not only explain how the ancient Western traditional reality could degenerate and give birth to modern civilisation, but how the latter could get under control almost the whole earth, perverting the various peoples of any other kind of civilisation, asserting itself even where states with ‘traditional’ characters seemed to exist – in this connection, let us just cite the Eastern Indo-Germanic civilisations, not to mention Islam and China.

Concerning this, it cannot just be said that it is a matter of mere material and political conquest, and this, for two reasons. In the first place, in the long run, a country materially conquered cannot but be subjected to influences of another order, coming from the type of civilisation of its conquerors, and, as a matter of fact, we see that the European conquest has spread to some extent everywhere a ferment of europeanisation, that is to say of modernisation, of materialism, of antitraditional and individualist spirit. In the second place, and we are coming here onto an essential point, the traditional conception of civilisation and of state is hierarchic, and not dualistic. One who holds this conception could not subscribe without reservation to the ‘give to Caesar’ and ‘my kingdom is not of this world’. Tradition is to us the victorious and creative presence in the world of what ‘is not of this world’, that is to say of spirit, conceived of as something stronger than any purely material and simply human force. The antithesis between spirit and power, the opposition between strength and authority is only, once again, a characteristic of ‘modern’ thought.

Once this is admitted, as it must be from a strictly traditional standpoint, it is clear that one cannot speak simply, and almost rashly, of a merely material conquest. The material conquest appears to us as a spiritual ‘retreat’ when it comes to civilisations which were defeated and lost their autonomy. If in any case the spirit, conceived of as tradition requires, that is to say as the strongest of all forces, had in fact been present, it would not have lacked the means, more or less invisible, direct or indirect, to overcome any technical and material superiority. We must thus conclude that, wherever the West was able to inflict defeat, the traditional appearances hid a degeneration already in progress. The West would then appear as the civilisation in which an already general crisis assumed the most acute form, in which the decadence peculiar to ‘modern thought’, so to speak, ‘became precipitated’ and, getting organised, could sweep away more or less easily the other peoples, in which, even though they were at far less advanced stages of involution, tradition did not possess its original force any more, and, for this reason, they were able to be subjected from the outside to the force of events.

On the basis of these considerations, the second aspect of the problem would refer itself back to the first: the only thing left to do would be to explain the sense and the possibility of degeneration from the inside, that is, the propensity to decadence as a phenomenon likely to occur in a given civilisation or in a given state of traditional type, without the help of external factors connected with other forms of civilisations or of other states.

To arrive at any positive results in this connection, we must firstly make clear an extremely important point, relating to the essence of hierarchy. What we have to do specifically is to deny the idea, tendentiously put into circulation by ‘modern thought’, according to which the hierarchies peculiar to ‘traditional’ civilisations would be the product of some kind of pressure, of direct control and of violent domination of what was considered as superior over what is inferior. This view is purely modern, absolutely foreign to the nature of ancient civilisations and, we can even say, of any normal civilisation. Traditional teaching has indeed conceived spiritual action as ‘acting without acting’, has spoken of an unmoved mover, has always used the symbolism of the ‘pole’, of the fixed axis around which any movement of the secret things occurs ; has underlined the ‘Olympian’ attribute of true spirituality and true sovereignty and their direct way of asserting themselves, not through violence, but through presence ; finally, it has sometimes used the image of the ‘magnet’, in which, as we are about to see, the key of the whole problem lies.

In his work on ‘The doctrine of Fascism”, Carlo Costamagna has had the merit of elucidating some concepts which are not so far from this fundamental truth. Opposing the theory of the violent origin of the state, Costamagna has attempted to eliminate “the confusion between the idea of force and the idea of violence which has spoiled the whole attitude of modern thought on this subject, because it has prevented it, firstly, from acknowledging that the very content of power is not in any way that of a physical predominance, but in reality of a moral predominance which doesn’t have submission as a justification, but, primarily, the agreement of the governed”. He has also pointed out that the actual currents of anti-Marxist and anti-bourgeois revolution give more and more value to “the circumstance of acting and sacrificing in the name of something which is not the individual any more, which does not consider the animal instinct to live nor utility any more ; that is to say, of living a life which goes beyond the material fact of living”. Such is indeed the central point of the true hierarchical idea, through which the ‘superstition’ that individual life is the basis of everything is fought and something which is more than life can be assumed as the point of reference of the moral experience and simultaneously as the objective of the political activity. That which Costamagna mentions as principle of a new ‘antimodern’ order really is the keystone of any traditional social organisation, the political process carried to such a degree that it identifies itself with the development of the human personality itself and the fulfillment of its superior possibilities.

It is absurd to believe that the true representatives of spiritual authority, that is to say of tradition, would set about running after all their subjects in order to grasp them and bind everyone to his own place ; that, in short, these representatives ‘act’ and have some sort of direct interest in creating and maintaining these hierarchic relations, by virtue of which they could visibly appear also as the leaders. The recognition from the inferior is on the contrary the true base of any normal and traditional hierarchy. It is not the superior who needs the inferior, but the inferior who needs the superior ; it is not the Duce who needs a private, but the private who needs a Duce. The essence of hierarchy lies in the fact that there is in some superior beings, as a presence and as an actualised reality, what exists, in the others, only as confused aspiration, presentiment, so that the latter are irresistibly attracted by the former and they naturally submit to them, submitting in this not so much to something exterior as to their realer ‘I’. Here lies the secret of any readiness to sacrifice, of any heroism, of any manly dedication in the world of ancient hierarchies, and, on the other hand, of a prestige, an authority, of a calm power and influence which not even the most heavily armed tyrant could ever have secured.

To acknowledge this also means to see under a different light not only the problem of decadence, but also that of the possibility, in general, of any subversive revolution. Don’t we hear constantly that, if a revolution has triumphed, it is a sign that the ancient leaders were weak and the ancient leading strata had degenerated? And so would it be, if ever it had been about chained wild dogs which ended up biting the hands which fed them: this would obviously prove that the hands which had been holding firm these animals were not, or are not any more, strong enough. But things are different when the theory of the violent origin of the true state is rejected and when the starting point is spiritual hierarchy, whose true foundation we have just pointed out. Such hierarchy may decay and be ruined only in one case: when the individual decays, when he uses his fundamental liberty to say no to the spirit, to deprive his life of any higher point of reference and set himself up as a stump. Contacts are then fatally interrupted, the metaphysical tension which united the traditional organism and made of the political process the counterpart of a process of elevation and of integration of the individual loosens, any force becomes unsteady in its orbit, and, finally, after the vain attempt to substitute the lost tradition for rationalist interpretations and utilitarian processes, frees itself from it: the heights remain pure and intact, but the rest, which was beforehand as it were suspended from them, will look like an avalanche which, in an initially imperceptible, then accelerated movement, once the stability is lost, falls down, to the bottom, to the leveling of the valley: socialism, mass collectivism, Bolshevism.

This is the mystery of decadence, this is the mystery of any subversive revolution. The revolutionary has started by killing in himself hierarchy, mutilating himself of these possibilities to which corresponded the inner foundation of the order, which he has then brought down also externally. Without a preliminary inner destruction, no revolution, in the sense of antihierarchic and antitraditional subversion is possible. And since this preliminary stage escapes superficial observation, the one who, with an obtuse short-sightedness, can only see and appreciate the ‘facts’, has to get accustomed to considering revolutions as irrational phenomena and even to justify them by referring to materialist and social factors, which, in any normal civilisation, only ever had, contrarily to his view, an absolutely secondary and subordinated function. When the Catholic myth refers the fall of the ‘primordial man’ and the ‘revolt of angels’ to free will, it basically relates to the same explanatory principle. It is about the terrible power, inherent in man, to use freedom in the sense of a spiritual destruction, to reject everything that can secure him a supranatural dignity. This decision is a metaphysical one, of which the whole current which has been snaking through history, in the various forms of appearance of the antitraditional, revolutionary, individualist, humanistic, secular and, finally, ‘modern’ spirit is only the manifestation and, so to speak, the phenomenology. This decision is the sole active and determining cause in the mystery of decadence, of the destruction of tradition.

This being understood, we are able to comprehend the meaning of ancient traditions, of a rather enigmatic nature, related to the leaders who, in a certain sense, already exist, having never ceased to exist, and who can be found again (themselves or their ‘faiths’) by means of actions described in various ways, but always of symbolic character ; in fact, their search is equivalent to a reintegration, the creation of a certain attitude, whose virtue is similar to the essential qualities by which a given metal suddenly feels the magnet, discovers the magnet and orientates and irresistibly moves towards the magnet. We will limit ourselves to this remark, which anyone who wishes to can easily develop. To deal in detail with this order of ideas and to explain the myths to which we have just alluded and that come from the oldest Indo-European antiquity would lead us too far. We may get back on another occasion to the mystery of decadence, of the ‘magic’ able to bring back again the collapsed and unleashed mass, more than to temporary forms of order, to the unchanging peaks still suspended, invisible, in the heights.

Julius EVOLA

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Evola, Julius. “The Problem of Decadence.” Thompkins & Cariou, 2004. <http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com/id13.html >.

 

A True Empire – Evola

A True Empire: Form and Presuppositions of a United Europe

By Julius Evola

In order to head toward a united Europe, the first step should consist of a concerted exit of all European nations from the United Nations, which is an illegitimate, promiscuous, and hypocritical association. Another obvious imperative should be to become emancipated in every aspect and in equal measure from both the United States and the USSR. […]

[…] Here I will only hint at what concerns the form and the spiritual and doctrinal presuppositions of a united Europe. […] The only genuine solution must have an organic character; the primary element should be a shaping force from within and from above, proper to an idea and a common tradition. […]

[…] As I have indicated in another chapter, the concepts of fatherland and nation (or ethnic group) belong to an essentially naturalistic or “physical” plane. In a united Europe, fatherlands and nations may exist […] What should be excluded is nationalism (with its monstrous appendix, namely imperialism) and chauvinism—in other words, every fanatical absolutization of a particular unit. Thus “European Empire,” and not “Nation Europa” or “European Fatherland” should be the right term, in a doctrinal sense. In the Europeans we should appeal to a feeling of higher order, qualitatively very different from the nationalistic feeling rooted in other strata of the human being. […]

The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) was previously displayed in the European medieval world, which safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around a unum quod non est pars (“a one that is not a part,” to use Dante’s expression)—namely, a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State. But the principle of the Empire can have such a dignity only by transcending the political sphere in the strict sense, founding and legitimizing itself with an idea, a tradition, and a power that is also spiritual. The limitations of the sovereignty of the single national units before an eminent right of the Empire have as their sole condition this transcendent dignity of the Empire; as far as structure is concerned, the whole will appear as an “organism composed of organisms,” or as an organic federalism similar to that realized by Bismarck in the second German Reich, which was not acephalous. These are the essential traits of a true Empire.

What are the conditions and the opportunities for the realization of such an idea in Europe today? […] Because what is needed is an organic unity, the premise should rather be the integration and consolidation of every single nation as a hierarchical, united, and well-differentiated whole. The nature of the parts should reflect the nature of the whole. […] What matters is the synergy and the opportunity for every common action.

Every organic unit is characterized by a principle of stability. We should not expect a stability of the whole, where there is no stability guaranteed in its very components. Even from this point of view, the elementary presupposition of an eventual united Europe appears to be the political integration of the single nations. European unity would always be precarious if it leaned on some external factor, like an international parliament lacking a common, higher authority, with representations from various democratic regimes; such regimes, because they are constantly and mutually conditioned from below, cannot in any way ensure a continuity of political will and direction. […]

What is required is not to impose a common regime on every European nation; however, an organic, hierarchical, anti-individualistic, and antidemocratic principle should be adequately implemented, even though in various forms adopted to different circumstances. Thus, the preliminary condition is a general antidemocratic cleansing, which at the present appears to be almost utopian. Democracy, on the one hand, and a European parliament that reproduces on a larger scale the depressing and pathetic sight of the European parliamentary systems on the other hand: all this would bring ridicule upon the idea of a united Europe. In general, we should think of an organic unity to be attained from the top down rather than from the bottom up. Only elites of individual European nations could understand one another and coordinate their work, overcoming every particularism and spirit of division, asserting higher interests and motives with their authority. […] A well-established “center” should exist in every nation; as a result of the harmony and the synergy of such centers, the higher European unity would organize itself and operate.

Overall, what should be promoted is a twofold process of integration: on the one hand, national integration through the acknowledgment of a substantial principle of authority that is the basis for the organic, anti-individualistic, and corporative formation of the various sociopolitical national forces; on the other hand, supernational European integration through the acknowledgment of a principle of authority that is as super-ordained toward that which is proper of single units (individual States), as it is toward the people included in each of these units. Without this, it is useless to talk about an organically united Europe.

Having put the problem in these terms, there are serious difficulties regarding the spiritual, not merely political, foundations required to implement this European unity. Where should we find these foundations? […]

Obviously, it would be a pure Utopia to yearn to oppose in practical terms all the material aspects of modern civilization: among other things, this would involve surrendering the practical means that are necessary today for every defense and attack. However, it is always possible to establish a distance and a limit. It is possible to enclose that which is “modern” in a well-controlled material and “physical” domain, on the plane of mere means, and to superimpose upon it a higher order adequately upheld, in which revolutionary-conservative values are given unconditional acknowledgment. The Japan of yesterday demonstrated the possibility and the fecundity of a solution of this type. Only in that case could Europe represent something different, distinguish itself, and assume a new dignity among world powers. […] The first European detoxification should concern this obsession with “antifascism,” which is the catchphrase of the “crusade” that has left Europe in a pile of rubble. However, we cannot side either with those pro-European sympathizers who can only refer to what was attempted in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany before the war, toward the creation of a new order. These groups fail to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were movements and regimes in which different and even contrasting tendencies coexisted; their development in the right, positive, revolutionary-conservative sense could have occurred only if circumstances had allowed for an adequate, further development, which was stricken down by the war they ignited and by their ensuing defeat. This is how we should at least proceed to a precise distinction, if we want to draw reference points from those movements.

Besides doctrinal difficulties, which I have examined, a radical European action finds its major obstacle in the lack of something that could represent a starting point, a firm support, and a center of crystallization. Before 1945 we could at least witness the wonderful sight of the principle of a supernational European Army, and the legionary spirit of volunteers from many nations who, having been organized in several divisions, fought on the Eastern front against the Soviets; at that time the foundation was the Third Reich. Today the only concrete, though partial, European initiatives of various governments are taken on a mere economic plane, without any deep ideological and ideal counterpart. Those who are sensitive to the idea of a united Europe in a higher sense are only isolated individuals, and not only are they not supported, but also they are even opposed by their own countries; and much more so, let me add, if their necessary antidemocratic and anti-Marxist profession of faith is openly declared. In effect, a European action must proceed in parallel with the rebirth and the revolutionary-conservative reorganization of the individual European countries: but to recognize this also means to acknowledge the disheartening magnitude of the task ahead.

Despite this, we could suggest the idea of an Order, whose members would act in the various nations, doing what they can to promote an eventual European unity, even in such unfavorable conditions. The enthusiasm of young militants who conduct an active propaganda should be commended, but it is not enough. We should count on people with a specific qualification, who occupied or intended to occupy key positions in their own nations. What kind of men could be up to this task? Assuming bourgeois society and civilization as a reference point, it is necessary to win over to the cause and to recruit people who neither spiritually belong to the bourgeoisie nor are affected by it, or who are already beyond it. A first group should be composed of members of ancient European families that are still “standing” and who are valuable not only because of the name they carry, but also because of who they are, because of their personality. It is very difficult to find such men but there are some exceptions, and even during and after the last World War, some of these figures emerged. Sometimes it is a matter of awakening something in the blood that has not been entirely lost but still exists in a latent state. In these elements we would expect to find the presence of congenital, “racial” dispositions (racial in the elitist and non biological-racist sense of the term) that guarantee an action and a reaction according to a precise and secure style, free from theories and abstract principles, in a spontaneous and complete adherence to those values that every man of good birth considered obvious before the rise of the Third Estate and of what followed it.

In regard to a second and more numerous section of the Order, I have in mind men who correspond to the human type shaped here and there through selections and experiences of an essentially warrior character, and through certain disciplines. Existentially speaking, this type is well versed in the art of “demythologization”: it recognizes as illusion and hypocrisy the entire tenacious legacy of the ideologies that have been employed as instruments, not to bring down this or that European nation, but to deal a deadly blow to the whole of Europe. These men harbor a healthy intolerance for any rhetoric; an indifference toward intellectualism and politicians’ gimmicks; a realism of a higher type; the propensity for impersonal activity; and the capability of a precise and resolute commitment. In the past, in some elite fighting units, today among paratroopers and analogous corps (e.g., Marines and others), some disciplines and experiences favor the formation of this human type, which displays the same traits in various nations. A common way of being constitutes a potentially connective element, beyond nationalities. By winning over these elements to the European cause, we could constitute, with a “force at the ready,” the most active cadres of such an Order. If direct and integrating communications were established between these two groups (which is not as difficult as it may first appear), the foundation would be laid. For these men, the most important concerns should be the European idea in terms of values and of worldview, followed by the Order and then by the nation.

Naturally, the personality of an authentic leader at the center and head of the Order is of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, no such person exists today: it would be dangerous and rash to see him in any of the figures who are currently working here and there, albeit with the best of intentions, selflessly and bravely, to form European groups. One has to consider here that no one could have detected in advance the potential of any of the men who later became leaders of great movements. Nevertheless, it is easy to see the great advantages in the case where such a man, in whom authority and status now became manifest, had been there from the beginning.

We do not need to repeat what the basic requirement is for such a European action to mature and bear any results. One must first get rid of the political class, which holds the power in almost all European countries in this time of interregnum and European slavery. This would be immediately possible if a sufficient mass of today’s peoples could be reawakened from their stupefied and stultified condition that has been systematically created by the prevailing political-social ideas.

But the greatest difficulty for the true European idea is the deep crisis of the authority principle and the idea of the State. This will seem contradictory to many, because they believe the strengthening of that principle and that idea would bring in its wake a schismatic division and thus a rigid, anti-European pluralism. We have already shown why this is not at all the case, when we were speaking of the Männerbünde and indicating the higher level that characterizes the idea of a true State and its authority, in contrast to everything that is merely “folk” or “nation.” For the individual, true political loyalty includes, besides a certain heroic readiness, a certain degree of transcendence, hence something not merely nature-bound. There is no break, but rather continuity when one crosses from the national level to the supernational: the selfsame inner readiness will be required as in the times of Indo-European origins and of the best feudal regimes, in which it was also a matter of the voluntary union of free powers, proud to belong to a higher order of things that did not oppress but rather embraced them. The real obstacles are only fanatical nationalism and the collapse of society and community.

In summary, let it be said that breaking through into more thoughtful minds is the idea that in the current state of affairs, the uniting of Europe into a single bloc is the indispensable prerequisite for its continuation in a form other than an empty geographical concept on the same materialistic level as that of the powers that seek to control the world. For all the reasons already explained, we know that this crisis involves a dual inner problem, if under these circumstances one hopes to establish a firm foundation, a deeper sense, and an organic character for a possible united Europe. On the one hand, an initiative in the sense of a spiritual and psychic detoxification must be taken against what is commonly known as “modern culture.” On the other, there is the question of the kind of “metaphysics” that is capable, today, of supporting both a national and a supernational principle of true authority and legitimacy.

The dual problem can be translated into a dual imperative. It remains to be seen which and how many men, in spite of it all, still stand upright among so many ruins, in order that they may make this task their own.

—————

Excerpted from: Evola, Julius. Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), pp. 275-286.

On the concept of empire, see also Alain de Benoist’s “The Idea of Empire.”

 

Review of Faye’s ‘Why We Fight’ – Stevens

Review of Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance

By Brett Stevens

Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance
by Guillaume Faye
274 pages, Arktos.

 

This book combines two excellent concepts: a brief summary of the European New Right and its goals, and more importantly, a glossary of terms which re-captures many concepts from their definitions as seized and contorted by liberal academia.

For most people in the United States, “nationalism” means “patriotism,” because that is how the big media talking heads (and hence, their friends, who repeat things they’ve heard in order to seem smarter) use the term. However, professional sources still note that nationalism is the concept of ethnic self-rule for all ethnic groups, while patriotism is loyalty to the nation-state and its political dogma and economic system. (p. 200)

Faye renews terms that have been forgotten by all but historians and philosophers, as well as a few recent hilarious additions (see “Mental AIDS” on p. 190). Through this vehicle, he is able to construct an argument from the terms already in use, making it drop into place as part of arguments already made. This is the power of his Metapolitical Dictionary, which comprises the bulk of this book.

In addition, the glossary helps keep focus on terms that signify important parts of a worldview that otherwise would be forgotten, in the rush to accomplish big things (limit democracy, instill nationalism, ameliorate consumerism). This is a careful ground-up work that constructs the delicate balance of terms that allow us to understand the underlying concepts of an order beyond the one we have been taught in popular notions and state-filtered education.

NATION, nationalism, new nationalism

Etymologically, a ‘nation’ is a popular and political community made up of those of the same ethnic origins, of the same ‘birth.’

The nation ought not to be confused with the nation-state. ‘Nation’ and ‘ethnos’ are the same word, designating a community whose members are of the same origin. To oppose the nation to the Empire is, semantically, to misunderstand it. An empire, in the positive sense, is a federation, an ensemble of similar, closely-related nations — a ‘federal nation.’

The shorter first part of the book is a more triumphant, less academic summation of Faye’s beliefs expressed in other works such as Archeofuturism: European visions of the post-catastrophic age. It is a more exuberant, more contemporary and less abstract version of what he expresses in that book and other writings.

In it, Faye outlines the situation: the West is dying because it has lost a sense of biocultural identity and with it, the ability to make decisions based on values on not simply reactions. At the same time, the results of 400 years of insane liberal policies have come home to roost, which Faye sees as resulting in a “convergence of catastrophes”: failing water and food supplies, climate change, warfare, racial strife and economic collapse.

In addition, he writes about the process of coming to political power and the necessity of unity without corruption by ideologically-confused people; also, he clarifies in simple language how to define the political viewpoint and how to answer its critics. Throughout the summary, he hints at the necessity of an absolute struggle, which is a popular vision among those who have taken the difficult step of rejecting their society and its ideals “as it stands now.”

While the New Right as a movement birthed by thinkers and academics was initially vague in nature, Faye corrects that tendency with a book that uses lists, bullet points, and clear and accurate language to express itself:

Good relations with the Arab-Islamic world cannot but take the form of an armed peace that never lowers its guard. The sine qua non (“necessary prerequisite” – Editor) of such a condition will entail the end of its colonisation of Europe. As the Qur’an says, Islam needs to ‘put down its hand to avoid having it cut off.’ It won’t do this if there is a sword in its hand. The idea of a ‘European-Arab Mediterranean alliance’ based on allegedly common interests is a fool’s errand without any historical or economic basis. Europe has no need of Africa or the Middle East, which are a drag on her, a financial, economic, and human burden, and increasingly a menace. (71)

Faye makes compelling arguments but in this work, he strives not to argue his point so much as to make it plainly distinct from all around it, and thus to capture space in the intellectual free-for-all-zone that is occurring as a future power vacuum becomes obvious to observers of Western collapse. What makes this book a winner is that instead of blindly bloviating, or retreating into abstruse theory, Faye gives us a groundwork for a new movement.

 

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Stevens, Brett. “Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance, by Guillaume Faye.” Amerika.org, 2 July 2011. <http://www.amerika.org/books/why-we-fight-manifesto-of-the-european-resistance-by-guillaume-faye/ >.

Note: Guillaume Faye’s Why We Fight was originally published in French as Pourquoi nous combattons: Manifeste de la résistance européenne (Paris: Editions de L’Aencre, 2001), and was translated into German as Wofür wir kämpfen: Das Manifest des europäischen Widerstandes (Kassel: Ahnenrad der Moderne, 2006) and into Russian as За что мы сражаемся? Идеологический словарь (Москва: СЛАВА!, 2006). The older version of the dictionary portion of this work was also translated into Spanish as Pequeño Léxico del Partisano Europeo (Molins de Rei, Barcelona: Nueva República, 2012). Some parts of the book under review have also been published in the Spanish-language collection: Escritos por Europa (Barcelona: Titania, 2008).

 

Struggle to Save the West – Jackson

The Struggle to Save the West: The New Right in Europe has struck the opening blows.

by Thomas Jackson

 

Against Democracy and Equality, Tomislav Sunic, Peter Lang, 1990, 196 pp.

(See Book Image)

In America today, those who see the fundamental problems the nation faces live almost in an intellectual vacuum. This is because the United States does not even recognize its most dangerous enemies: racial and cultural dispossession, growing hatred of our European heritage, and the fatal loss of nerve that has permitted this to happen.

When public discourse touches on these subjects at all, it is to celebrate them as signs of a new, better America. Thus, for those who see the road to the new America as the road to oblivion, it is easy to think that they are alone, and that their country faces a unique horror that no one else ever imagined or thought about.

Of course, this is not true. Against Democracy and Equality by Tomislav Sunic not only traces the distinguished history of “revolutionary conservatism” but introduces a contemporary school of European writers who are struggling to find answers to the questions that, in America, are not yet being asked. As Professor Paul Gottfried writes in the preface to this little volume, Dr. Sunic has given us the first book-length introduction in English to the European New Right.

The very title suggests how boldly the New Right is prepared to defy the most cherished liberal assumptions. If this group of thinkers can be said to have one central tenet, it is that the essential nature of man lies not in equality but in inequality. Individuals, races, cultures, and nations are different and unequal; any attempt to treat them as equals is a form of tyranny.

The essential nature of man lies not in equality but in inequality.

Thus, the thinkers of the New Right are adamantly opposed to anything that imposes a universalistic equality. For them, Communism has been the most ruthless form of egalitarian totalitarianism but, in one of their most provocative insights, they see modern Western liberalism as a form of “soft” totalitarianism that is achieving its goals without the violence of concentration camps and secret police. In its ultimate form — which we can see developing in the United States — there is no need for violent repression because each man becomes his own censor and his own jail keeper.

The most prominent leaders of the European New Right are Frenchmen. Alain de Benoist is the best known figure, along with such men as Guillaume Faye, and Julien Freund. They have been prominent since the 1970s, and have played a central role in dislodging Marxism as the unacknowledged religion of European intellectuals. In America, where their ideas are even more of an anathema than in Europe, they are studiously ignored.

Antecedents

As Dr. Sunic explains, the New Right finds inspiration in thinkers who were influential before the Second World War, but who have since been repudiated because the Nazis endorsed some of their views. As part of his introduction to the New Right, Dr. Sunic briefly outlines the thinking of Carl Schmitt (1888-1982), Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), and Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). These men clearly saw the rush towards universal brotherhood and saw that the consequences would be that Europe would voluntarily give up its prominence and even its distinctiveness.

“Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.”

According to Pareto, for example, it is folly for those who rule to renounce power in the name of universal brotherhood. As Dr. Sunic paraphrases his views, “The downtrodden and the weak will always appeal to the sense of justice of those who rule, but the moment they grab the reins of power they will become as oppressive as their former rulers. Moreover, if by chance some nation happens to display signs of excessive humanity, philanthropy, or equality, it is a certain symptom of its terminal illness.” In Pareto’s own words, “Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.”

For liberals, this does not matter. Let Europe be eaten by North Africa or the United States by Mexico. Since all peoples and cultures are equally valid, nothing will have been lost and resistance would be immoral.

Equality

One of the New Right’s goals has been to understand the origins of the militant, universalist egalitarianism that underlies liberalism. Though its point of view offends many traditional conservatives, it finds the source in Christianity. Unlike polytheistic religions, monotheism emphasized the equality of all men before God. By the 16th and 17th centuries, this equality was broadened to include the temporal concepts of legal and political equality.

Thomas Jefferson is a villain to the New Right because of his assertion that all men are created equal. Though Jefferson did not mean these words literally, the New Right sees Karl Marx and his insistence on economic equality as a direct heir to Jefferson.

As Dr. Sunic explains, it is because of their veneration of equality that liberals are unable to withstand the arguments of socialists and communists. Liberals cannot reconcile themselves to the fact that even though men may be politically equal, free competition will always result in inequality. Liberals can therefore raise no principled objection to the forced economic equality of Communism.

The New Right therefore sees both Communism and Nazism as reactions to the half-way equality of liberalism. Communists think it has not gone far enough, whereas National Socialists think it has gone too far.

The New Right rejects equality and takes for granted the genetic basis of inequality. So far, according to Dr. Sunic, the New Right has not made formal political proposals but it would agree with the great British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane that “Any satisfactory political and economic system must be based on the recognition of human inequality.”

Universalism

The other trait common to Christianity, liberalism, and Communism is their insistence on their own universal validity. In the Gospels of both Matthew and Mark, Jesus makes the staggering claim that anyone not for him is against him. Communism’s goal of world-wide revolution was always explicit, but liberalism’s projects for uplift are just as universalist. Muslims must be made into feminists; Japanese must become anti-racists; Africans must be taught democracy; Chinese must eat hamburgers.

Despite its constant preachments about “tolerance,” liberalism is therefore as harshly intolerant as any religious inquisition and would gladly remake the entire world in the image of a leftist American university.

Alain de Benoist has a completely different view of society: “A people is not a transitory sum of individuals. It is not a chance aggregate. It is a reunion of inheritors of a specific fraction of human history, who, on the basis of the sense of common adherence, develop the will to pursue their own history and give themselves a common destiny.”

As Dr. Sunic paraphrases him: “Real “organic’ democracy can only exist in a society in which people have developed a firm sense of historical and spiritual commitment to their community. In such an organic polity … the law must not derive from some abstract preconceived principles, but rather from the genius of the people and its unique historical character. In such a democracy, the sense of community must invariably preside over individualistic and economic self-interests.”

Economism and Individualism

This leads to the two other great flaws of liberalism: its emphasis on economics and its tendency to strip away a man’s traditional, organic ties, and leave him a solitary individual. Once all people are seen as equal and equivalent, parochial loyalties are pure prejudice.

Common markets, currency unions, and supra-national organizations like the European Parliament are symptoms of both the attack on particularism and the victory of pure economics. If local loyalties no longer matter, only economic efficiency is left. The Deutsche Mark, the Pound Sterling, and the traditions and sovereignties they represent can all be brushed aside if a single European currency would be more efficient.

The primacy of economics also explains the relentless ugliness of modern life — stores like warehouses, office buildings like boxes, middle class people who dress like tramps, the obliteration of good manners — because the esthetic and the cultural have no economic value.

In such societies politics is no longer a battle of competing world views but a form of commerce. As Dr. Sunic paraphrases Carl Schmitt: “Different opinions are no longer debated; instead, social, financial, and economic pressure groups calculate their interests, and on the basis of these interests they make compromises and coalitions.” Politicians become rug merchants. An assertion of genuine philosophical differences is a nuisance that hampers trade.

A man with no particularist culture is extremely vulnerable. In a society of pure individualism only wealth gives identity, so the poor have nothing and the middle classes face the threat of nothing.

In a healthy society the individual, whatever his economic status, can be concerned with the greater good because it is his society and unlike any other. He may even regret, as Nathan Hale did, that he has but one life to give for his country. The healthy culture thrives on what may appear to be the sacrifices of individuals, but it gives them meaning, history, confidence, and identity, be they rich or poor.

‘Soft’ Totalitarianism

The individualism of liberalism is therefore fragmentation rather than strength. In the view of the New Right, it leaves men open to the “soft” totalitarianism that has made such headway in the United States. Even without police-state techniques, liberalism has so successfully enforced its orthodoxies that men fear to say what they believe about race, immigration, welfare, eugenics, mass democracy, culture, or even foreign aid. The New Right is correct in fearing this form of totalitarianism as the most dangerous and insidious.

Now that Marxism is dead there should be a free-wheeling debate about the validity of its assumptions about equality, universalism, and the primacy of economics. In America there is no such debate. As Alain de Benoist says, “It is always easy [for liberals] to avoid the debate. It suffices to disqualify the adversary … One attacks the persons rather than what they write.” Here, too, the New Right finds the legacy of Christianity: Disagreement with liberalism is wicked, and the non-believer is condemned to eternal damnation.

The spokesmen of the New Right are not generally optimistic about being able to overthrow soft totalitarianism, but they are willing to fight it to the end. As Dr. Sunic puts it: “No matter how dismal and decadent the modern polity appears to be, no matter what the outcome of the struggle is, or how threatened Europe appears, the New Right insists that it is still worth dying for Europe as an honorable warrior.”

Of course, no one will lay down his life for a currency union. The New Right fears that a denatured Europe could eventually be overthrown by vigorous non-whites who still have cultural and racial memories they are willing to die for. Sadly, the non-white nations will also have suffered heavy losses because of the contamination of their own cultures by the missionaries of liberalism.

The Battlefield of Ideas

The New Right has chosen to fight on the battlefield of ideas because it believes that the course of Europe is ultimately governed by the prevailing intellectual climate.

As Dr. Sunic explains, “The real force that sustains liberalism and socialism is the cultural consensus which reigns more or less undisturbed in the higher echelons of education and legal systems.” The left has always understood the importance of capturing the culture. Thus every movie, school book, art show, television program, and court decision promotes the doctrine of universal equality.

Marx believed that the economic structure determines the culture but the New Right argues that it is the other way around: Liberty can be achieved only by creating a counter-culture that is vigorous enough to break liberalism’s monopoly on the mind. This is a process that has hardly begun in the United States, where the more education a man has the more unthinkingly he has absorbed liberal dogmas.

Dr. Sunic has given us an important book. This review can only begin to summarize the richness of thought that he has found in scores of books and journals that are not even available in English. Dr. Sunic has opened the door to a great but little-known body of learning that directly addresses our current crises.

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Jackson, Thomas. “The Struggle to Save the West.” American Renaissance, Vol. 3, No. 12 (December, 1992). <http://www.amren.com/ar/1992/12/index.html >.

Note: A third edition of Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality was published in 2011 by Arktos (London). The book was also published in a Croatian translation as Europska Nova Desnica (Zagreb, Croatia: Hasanbegović, 2009) and in a Spanish translation as Contra la Democracia y la Igualdad: La Nueva Derecha Europea (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2014).

 

Review of Faye’s ‘Archeofuturism’ – Whale

Archeofuturism: Guillaume Faye’s Vision for Europe

By George Whale

 

Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age, Guillaume Faye. Published by Arktos Media Ltd., 2010 (translation by Sergio Knipe, editing and footnotes by John B. Morgan), 250 pages.

“The egalitarian civilisation sprung from modernity is now witnessing its last good days. We must now think about the aftermath of the catastrophe: we must already start developing the vision of an Archeofuturist world for the aftermath of the chaos.”

Guillaume’s Faye’s book Archeofuturism offers radical analyses and solutions to the problems of modernity, and seems as pertinent today as when it was first published in French more than a decade ago.

Guillaume Faye is one of the most radical and influential theorists of the French Nouvelle Droite (New Right). He represents a strand of European nationalism that is fiercely critical of modern egalitarianism, favouring instead older, hierarchical forms of society and government with which to respond to the catastrophes which (Faye believes) are about to befall Western Europe.

The “convergence of catastrophes”

The book is built around three connected ideas: first, that Western civilization is presently threatened by a cataclysm from a set of catastrophes that will converge some time in the early Twenty-First Century; second, that the individualism and egalitarianism of the modern world are inadequate to meet the challenges facing us; and third, that we should start to think about the aftermath of the impending cataclysm in terms of a new synthesis of ancestral values, science and technology – Archeofuturism.

The “converging lines of catastrophe”, according to Faye, “concern the environment, demography, economy, religion, epidemics and geopolitics”. With regard to the environment, he believes that the extension of Western-style industrial progress and development to untold billions of people in the Third World would be devastating, even if it were possible, and he puts forward an alternative order where most of humanity lives in traditional, pastoral societies with low levels of energy use, pollution and consumption, arguing that such communities are not only sustainable, but socially more stable and happy than the urban hells in which much of humanity is presently compelled to exist.

Faye is worried about the changing demographics of Europe. The ageing of the indigenous population coupled with uncontrolled immigration from Africa, Asia and elsewhere places severe strains on the economy and disrupts cultural and social continuity. Growing tribalism and conflict are exacerbated by an increasingly fanatical Islamism:

“Despite reassuring denials on the part of the Western media, radical Islam is spreading like wildfire … The consequences of this phenomenon will be … violent clashes in Europe – particularly France and Great Britain.”

Islam, fuelled by “veiled, repressed and dissimulated resentment of the countries of the South towards their former colonisers” will, Faye believes, lead an intensifying confrontation between North and South, displacing the East-West axis of geopolitical competition that dominated so much of the Twentieth Century.

Archeofuturism: a philosophy for the post-catastrophic age

“Archeofuturism … enables us to make a break with the obsolete philosophy of progress and the egalitarian, humanitarian and individualist dogmas of modernity, which are unsuited to our need to think about the future and survive the century of iron and fire that is looming near.”

Guillaume Faye seeks to reapply the values of social organisation that have proven effective for most of human history to the new, “post-catastrophic” world. These values include: the transmission of ethnic, folk and spiritual traditions; separation of gender roles; the establishment of organic, hierarchically organised communities “from the family to the folk”; matching of duties to rights; the prestige of the warrior caste; and the definition of peoples as “communities of destiny” rather than as masses of unconnected individuals.

“To face the future, it will be more and more necessary to adopt an archaic mind-set … one capable of restoring the ancestral values that inform ‘orderly societies’.”

Archeofuturism is envisaged as a synthesis of revitalised ancestral values and a futuristic spirit of scientific and technological exploration in the service of European peoples:

“The essence of futurism is the planning of the future … the envisaging of civilisation … as a work in motion … . Politics here are understood … as the future transformation of the folk, driven by ambition, a spirit of independence, creativity and the will to power.”

Birth of the Eurosiberian Federation

In the last chapter of the book, entitled “A Day in the Life of Dimitri Leonidovitch Oblomov”, Faye offers us a fictional glimpse of life in the year 2073, as seen through the eyes of a high-ranking official of the Eurosiberian Federation. It includes the following timeline of events leading up to the “Great Catastrophe” of 2014-16, the ensuing chaos and eventual transformation of continental Europe.

1999-2014

Successive economic crises cause increasing poverty across Europe. Unchecked immigration leads to ethnic tensions, crime and a climate of insecurity in the cities.

2014

In the French national elections, the Front National (FN) receives 30% of votes, whilst the Popular Muslim Party (PPM) receives 26%. In response to Muslim predictions that France will be an Islamic state within ten years, FN issues a call for “Resistance, Reconquest and Liberation”. The PPM leader in the National Assembly is murdered: FN is blamed, but many suspect the Algerian Secret Service – its motive to spark a revolt of Muslims in France.

2014-16

“The Great Catastrophe.” Uprisings by armed ethnic gangs lead to unprecedented violence in French cities. Unrest spreads to Belgium, Holland, Britain and Germany. Widespread strikes lead to paralysis of the economy and shortages of food and water. Cities are ransacked, the police overwhelmed. Civil war breaks out and people flee the cities. War, epidemics and famine kill 40% of people in Western Europe. In parallel developments, nuclear war between India and Pakistan kills two million, and a vast swathe of the Amazon rainforest catches fire, causing ecological and climatic upheavals. The global economy collapses.

2017-18

Islamic republics of North Africa exploit the chaos in France by sending an invading army to occupy Provence. European armies are mobilized but are paralysed by lack of electricity and fuel. Pockets of resistance, or “baronies”, are established containing exclusively indigenous Europeans.

2018-25

Continuing famines and environmental disasters. Chaos spreads beyond Europe. India, China, Japan and Russia retain some semblance of order, whilst multi-ethnic nations implode. America is wracked by famines, epidemics and ethnic conflicts. The Muslim army in France conquers Lorraine and burns down Metz cathedral.

2025-28

“Reconquista.” The baronies seek help from the Russian Federation. A Russian army of one million is amassed, and crosses central Europe to the “Western Europe Occupation Zone”. Aided by forces from Scandinavia, the Baltic, Ukraine, Poland and Brittany, the Russians drive out the Islamic invaders. The decisive battle takes place in the ruins of Disneyland Paris. Remnants of the Muslim army and ethnic gangs are forcibly shipped to North Africa. Tens of millions of people of non-European origin are deported to Madascar.

2030-38

“The Second Renaissance.” Europe spontaneously regroups into autonomous ethno-cultural region-states including Bavaria, Wallonia, Wales, Scotland, Brittany, Normandy, Provence, Euzkadi and Galicia. Technological activity resumes and the economic system is partially restored. Russia merges with the Community of European States to form the Eurosiberian Federation, which comes to be known as the “Great Homeland”.

2040-2073

A two-tier economy evolves: a “techno-scientific” economy for a small-city-based technological elite (approximately 20% of the population), focused on transport, computer science, genetics, energy and space exploration; and for the remainder of the population a low energy, low pollution Medieval-style economy based on neo-traditional agriculture and crafts.

Archeofuturism or neo-feudalism?

Dimitri Oblomov’s job in 2073 is to travel around the Federation resolving disagreements and conflicts between the regions. Unbound by cumbersome consultation processes, he is able to make quick, responsive decisions. As one of the urban elite, he has access to a transport system that is fast, efficient and non-polluting: jet aircraft and private cars have been replaced by high-speed airships, a modernised canal system and electromagnetic “planetrains” that whizz through airless tunnels at up to 20,000kph.

Meanwhile, above ground the neo-traditionalist communities use equally non-polluting forms of transport such as horse-drawn carts; and because the great majority of Eurosiberians live sustainable (if basic) pastoral lives within such communities, nature is everywhere recovering and flourishing. Moreover, the relative ethnic homogeneity of the regional communities has fostered a revival of traditional languages and dialects, of folk traditions and pagan cults that coexist with Christianity.

Relationships between the two strata of this imagined society, living parallel lives technologically centuries apart, are not described in detail. It is unclear, for instance, how membership of the two classes is decided, or whether movement between them is possible, though Faye seems to suggest (somewhat implausibly) that the sense of meaning and worth that comes from being part of a close-knit traditional community would mitigate any yearning for the cosseted, fast-paced lifestyle of the technological elite.

Eurosiberia is described as “an organic assembly of large and highly autonomous regions”, each of which controls its own linguistic, cultural and educational matters. All regions send representatives to the Federal Senate, which elects the Government. The Government’s authority is absolute, but regions are free to organise themselves in pretty much any way they choose – as hereditary monarchies, socialist republics, etc. – provided they don’t oppress their people, in which case they would risk expulsion from the Federation.

On the scientific front, advances in genetics and computer science have made possible “biotronic animals” – biological animal-robots – and “human chimeras” – pigmen, chimpanhumans and other man-animal hybrids, which are used mainly as organ banks. Medical advances have made possible an average lifespan of 105 years, though only for the elite – the pattern for rural, neo-archaic communities is high birthrate, high death rate. In Eurosiberia there seem to be few, if any, ethical constraints on science, and class-based differences in life quality are inbuilt.

Conclusion

Guillaume Faye’s analysis of the unsustainability of Western civilisation at the end of the Twentieth Century may convince many readers of the converging lines of impending disaster, and (even if his time scale is wrong) of the need to think about and prepare for life after the Great Catastrophe. His fictional portrait of post-catastrophic Europe may be taken as a warning or call to action, which I believe all Europeans should heed.

His portrayal of a Eurosiberian Federation of autonomous regions, extending “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, across fourteen time zones” and constituting “the largest geopolitical unit on Earth” may not appeal to those of us already concerned with corruption and abuses of power in the EU, but perhaps it represents a bold and timely response to the growth of political, economic and religious power blocks in the far- and mid-East. As Faye says, “the future requires us to envisage the Earth as structured in vast, quasi-imperial units in mutual conflict or cooperation”.

This is a thought provoking book by one of the leading thinkers of the European nationalist movement, and it seems as relevant now as when it was written more than ten years ago. It throws into sharp relief the nature and urgency of the crises facing Europeans and offers us a way forward through Archeofuturism, an audacious synthesis of ancestral values and future science and technology, making, as Faye claims, “a radical break with contemporary values and morals”.

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Whale, George. “Archeofuturism: Guillaume Faye’s Vision for Europe”. Liberty GB, 4 September 2013. <http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/home/root/news-libertygb/6026-archeofuturism-guillaume-faye-s-vision-for-europe>.

Note: Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism was originally published in French as L’Archéofuturisme: Techno-science et retour aux valeurs ancestrales (Paris: Editions de L’Aencre, 2011). It was also published in an Italian translation as Archeofuturismo (Milano: Società Editrice Barbarossa, 1999), in a Russian translation as Археофутуризм (Тамбов: Ex Nord Lux, 2011), and in a Spanish translation as El arqueofuturismo (Barcelona: Titania, 2008). Some parts of the book under review have also been published in the Spanish-language collection: Escritos por Europa (Barcelona: Titania, 2008).

 

Love & Hate for the Jews – Sunic

American Neurosis: Love and Hate for the Jews

by Tomislav Sunic

The word “anti-Semite” will likely be studied one day as a telling example of postmodern political discourse, i.e. as a signifier for somebody who advocates the reign of demonology. “Many world-know Jewish authors, haunted by the either real or surreal menace of anti-Semitism, consider it a sickness, which enables them to avoid any form of introspection,” writes Ryssen. These remarks support our thesis that the present – however much it may be viewed as post-historical in America – is connected to the recent memory of the past, as both the present and the past affect civic identity, nation-state building, and the memory of Americans, and by extension that of postmodern Europeans. How does one dare critically talk about the predominance of the Judeo-American spirit in America without running the risk of social opprobrium or of landing into psychiatric asylum, as Ezra Pound once did? While it is a common place for the vast number of white American elites to crack jokes in private about Mexicans, Africans, or for that matter deride their fellow Gentile citizens, without looking over their shoulder, a critical comment about the staggering influence of Jews in America, even when that comment is founded on empirical facts, is viewed as a grave insult to Jews. If a serious American scholar or a politician ventures into this forbidden field, his gesture is interpreted as a sign of being an agent provocateur, or worse, as a sign of somebody who decided to write his obituary. Such a schizophrenic climate of self-censorship in America will sooner or later lead to dramatic consequences for both American Jews and Gentiles. The lack of healthy dialogue can last for a century or so, but feigned conviviality between American Gentiles and American Jews cannot last forever and remain based on distorted perceptions of the Other and how this Other should behave. Mendacity carries the germ of a civil war. The entire Western history, particularly since the First World War, has abundantly proven that distorted self-perceptions, as well as the romanticized perception of the “Other,” if based on negative wishful thinking, lead to war and chaos. Eventually, both American Jews and American Gentiles will be pitted into an ugly clash from which there will be no escape for any of them.

While a great many thinkers in America unabashedly challenge modern myths and sport staggering erudition and courage in their demolition, the most sensitive point of reference in the twentieth century, i.e., the Jewish question, is carefully avoided. If the subject of Jews is mentioned in America, then it is usually in a laudatory fashion, which clearly points to a morbid desire of postmodern American white elites to curry favor with the Jews. These same individuals will be the first to declare themselves certified anti-Semites when an opportunistic moment becomes official enough for pogroms and Jew baiting. It is the lack of open discussion about the topic of the Jews that confirms how Jews play a crucial role in American conscience building, and by extension, in the entire West. This is an additional sign of how past times interact with present times. Twentieth century experience with National Socialism still serves as a powerful red flag in a political semantic field which must be carefully trodden upon.

But contrary to classical anti-Semitic arguments, strong Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and America in their diverse Christian modalities. Postmodern Americanism is just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset. Hypothetically speaking, if Jews, by some miracle, were to play a marginal role in America – as they claim they do – then, logically, they would be the subject of a normal critical discussion, just like other American ethnic groups, races, or next door neighbors are.

Blaming American Jews for extraterrestrial powers and their purported conspiracy to subvert Gentile culture borders on delusion and only reflects the absence of dialogue. American anti-Semitic delusions only provide legitimacy to American Jews in their constant search for a real or surreal anti-Semitic boogieman around the corner. Without the specter of anti-Semitism, Jews would likely assimilate quickly and hence disappear. Thus, anti-Semitism provides Jews with alibis to project themselves as victims of Gentile prejudice. Consequently, it assigns them a cherished role of posing as the sole educational super-ego for Americans and by proxy the entire world. In his book on the social role of Jews, a prominent Jewish-French politician and author, Jacques Attali, writes: “As Russian Jews invented socialism, and as Austrian Jews invented psychoanalysis, American Jews in the forefront, participated in the birth of American capitalism and in the Americanization of the entire world.” For some Jewish authors, like Attali, such a remark is easier to write down than for a Gentile thinker, who with the same comment, would be shouted down as an “anti-Semite.”

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Sunic, Tomislav. Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (USA: BookSurge Publishing, 2007), pgs. 95-103.

Note: On the issue of the Jews, we also recommend Paul Gottfried’s critique of Kevin MacDonald: “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” For a critique of the concept of a large-scale Jewish conspiracy, see also Alain de Benoist’s “Psychologie du Conspirationnisme,” in Critiques: Théoriques (Lausanne, Suisse: Editions L’Age d’Homme), pp. 89-103; available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/psychologie_du_conspirationnisme.pdf >.