Glimpse of Post-American Future – Morgan

A Glimpse of the Post-American Future:
The National Policy Institute Conference of 2013

By John Morgan

When I think of my favorite cities in the United States, Washington, DC is not high on the list. I’ve had to go there, for various reasons, several times over the years, but, except for the time I came as a tourist, it’s never been a place I would imagine spending any more time in than absolutely necessary.

But in stepping off the plane as I was arriving for the recent National Policy Institute (NPI) conference there, and catching sight of the Capitol gleaming in the distance from Ronald Reagan airport, I did enjoy the irony of the fact that this had been chosen as the meeting place for those of us who are in opposition to nearly everything that America has come to stand for in recent history. We were gathering there, and we were refusing to be ignored, airing what is unquestionably the most radical political positions that exist at the present time (more on that later) in the shadow of the very institutions that are doubtless hoping that our views remain forever as marginalized from mainstream discourse as they are today.

The idea explored by this conference was one which questioned the very foundations upon which Washington rests: that America as we have known it is drawing to a close, and that if we, as both individuals and as a people, are to survive its end, we must rediscover our authentic identities.

The conference, which was held on Saturday, October 26, 2013, took as its theme “After the Fall,” and all of the speakers dealt with this idea in different ways, focusing their talks on themes related to the long-term unsustainability of the present, American-led state of global affairs, both domestically and globally, or else discussing what implications its end will have for those of us who care about the future of Western identity and civilization.

It took place, as did the NPI conference in 2011, in the Ronald Reagan Building in central Washington, which was an inspired choice on both occasions by Richard Spencer, NPI’s President and Director, given the airport-level security which it has, and also by virtue of the fact that, as a federal facility, the building authorities cannot deny NPI the right to hold its conferences there, in spite of any pressure or threats made by those who oppose it, without denying the organizers and participants their rights under the First Amendment. As such, NPI has been able to avoid the tragic fate of so many American Renaissance and similar conferences that have been called off in recent years due to such harassment.

Undaunted, however, a handful of protesters did make wholly unsuccessful attempts to disrupt the proceedings. I won’t discuss this in great detail, since videos of their activities are available online and Matt Parrott has already written about them for this site. I was left blissfully unaware of them by virtue of the fact that I had arrived over an hour before the start of the conference in order to set up a book table for my company, Arktos Media, and likewise ended up staying until several hours after the conference’s end – on both occasions, they were absent (no doubt fortifying themselves by smoking a bowl or whatever). A few of them made an appearance before the conference had actually begun, when everyone was simply having breakfast and getting coffee. When Richard demanded to see their admission passes, one of them, a White neo-hippie male youth, began shouting, “How can anyone in the 21st century have a bullshit nationalist identity . . . ” His thought was left incomplete as he was hustled out of the room—a great loss to the annals of political commentary, no doubt. A few others milled about the lobby outside the conference proper at various times throughout the day, perusing the book tables. I can’t know what they made of the books, but I hope that just maybe they came to realize that what they thought we stand for, and the reality as shown by our publications, are two very different things. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

This brings me to the point I mentioned earlier, about those of us who spoke at NPI, and those around the world who share our perspectives, being the REAL radicals. After all, what do these neo-Marxist protesters, using tactics and rhetoric that already seemed old hat in the 1960s, really have to offer? Nothing. While thinking themselves to be rebels against “the establishment” – which, oddly enough, they believe we represent (I’m still waiting for my check from the racist plutocrats who secretly control America to arrive in the mail) – they really embody nothing but a shabbily-dressed offshoot of the very system that they claim to oppose, and a slightly more extreme form of the ideas that have defined the United States and Europe for the last half-century. As Richard pointed out in his introductory remarks at the conference, these protesters aren’t the real enemy – they’re just sad. The only people who are actually developing a paradigm that challenges the dominant one in any meaningful way are those of us on the “radical Right” (for want of a better term). As such, WE are the genuine radicals – those who consider themselves to be our enemies are nothing but throwbacks to an earlier age.

As for the conference itself, it seemed to me that there were more people in attendance than there had been in 2011. Even more promising was the fact that there were many more young people among them, no doubt because of the significantly reduced price of the student tickets that Richard had made available. And, unlike 2011, there were even a few women in attendance, some of whom came of their own volition rather than reluctantly accompanying a spouse or boyfriend – a rare sight, at such an event in America, and hopefully a sign of an increasing trend.

Richard opened the proceedings by introducing the speakers and setting the tone for the day, which was one of daring to think beyond the parameters of Left and Right, and beyond any idea of “saving America” and toward imagining a new and better world to follow, as well as how it might work.

The first speaker was Piero San Giorgio, a Swiss citizen of Italian descent whose presentation was entitled “The Center Cannot Hold.” His talk was an extremely good overview of the many factors that are contributing to the decline of the present world order, particularly peak oil. He expressed his belief that all the signs indicate that a collapse of the economic system that will dwarf that of 2008 is not far off – a time most likely measurable in years rather than decades. Piero emphasized that capitalism was always a system destined to ultimately destroy itself, resting as it does on fantastical ideas of perpetual growth and the commodification of the entire planet and everything in it. For Piero, however, the coming collapse is not something to be feared, but rather an opportunity for revolutionary thinkers such as ourselves to refashion the world. To do this, we must be prepared by knowing how to survive on our own skills and resources, and Piero suggested a number of practical ways by which this can be accomplished. A very witty, well-written and thorough exposition of these threads is given in his book Survive the Economic Collapse: A Practical Guide, which was launched by Radix, an imprint of Washington Summit Publishers, in conjunction with the conference. This is a book that has been greatly needed by the “Right” for some time – both a summary of the evidence for an imminent collapse and a handbook for what one needs to in order to ensure that one can ride out the chaos rather than become caught up in it. As participants in a movement which is preoccupied with the idea of the collapse, it is nice to see someone take it up as a concrete phenomenon with definable features rather than treat it as a misty deux es machina that will magically deliver us from all our problems.

The next speaker, Sam Dickson, identified himself as a “racial communitarian activist.” Under the provocative title of “America: The God that Failed,” he set out what he saw as the fundamental flaws at the heart of America which have existed since its conception. In Dickson’s account, it was America’s roots in the British Isles, with its strong tradition of individualism that came about through its unique historical circumstances, as well as the individualistic tendencies of immigrants from other parts of Europe who came to America later, that led to the birth of the United States as a nation in which freedom was seen as an absolute value. This is an error, according to Dickson, since the individual can only attain meaning as a part of a community, and it was this elevation of freedom as an absolute value that led to Americans losing their sense of connection to a specific ethnic identity. In questioning freedom, Dickson hastened to add, one should not assume that those who do so are against freedom, as he sees himself as being against all forms of totalitarianism. Rather, one must question the view that sees freedom as an absolute value above all other concerns. Dickson says this was not just a problem that developed over the course of America’s history, but was implicit in the Declaration of Independence, which established equality as an absolute value and its associated sense of rights as something inalienable. A true community cannot be established solely on the idea of freedom, he claimed, and therefore America cannot be seen as an authentic nation. He went on to say that conservatives today are incapable of transcending this worship of freedom as an absolute and cannot surpass the notion of America as it is presently constituted. The only solution, he concluded, is to realize the limitations of the American conception of the nation, and to work toward a new nation based on the values of community and upon a renewed connection back to our European heritage.

This was followed by a panel discussion in which I participated, along with Richard, Andy Nowicki of Alternative Right, and Alex Kurtagić of Wermod and Wermod Publishing, concerning “Publishing and the Arts.” Richard kicked off by posing the question of how the new world of publishing that has emerged in recent years has impacted those of us engaged in “Right-wing” publishing. Andy spoke about the excitement of being part of a dissident form of media, and how satisfying it is to be in “the crest of an ever-growing wave” of alternative media. He also addressed the importance of avoiding getting too caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of the headlines and to instead to take a longer view, which leads to enduring rather than merely topical works, as well as the need to fund and encourage the arts of the dissident Right, which is a budding and much-needed component of the overall struggle to establish a new culture in keeping with our principles.

Next was my turn, and I discussed how a number of factors, including the birth of print-on-demand publishing, the growth of the Internet and social media, and even globalization – in the sense that my colleagues and I have outsourced ourselves to India for the past several years – have made Arktos possible, in a manner that would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago. In a sense, of course, we in Arktos are turning the very tools of the globalized world against itself in pursuit of an alternative. A gentleman from the audience expressed the view that the books that we publish only appeal to a small percentage of very intellectual readers in an age when books are allegedly on the decline, and that more direct, populist activism is what is really needed today. I replied that, while I would never discourage anyone from pursuing other courses of action, and in fact I am hopeful that such activities will take place, at the same time we should not dismiss the power of books. Not all books are intended for an exclusive audience, and I offered as an example the recent publication of our book, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers by Markus Willinger, which serves as a manifesto of the worldview of the identitarian youth movement which has accomplished many things in Europe in recent years, as an example of something which has proven to be very popular among young readers who are new to the “movement.” Besides which, it is my view that revolutions, whether they are political, cultural or intellectual, are always led by elites, and in this way books are still indispensable for training the elite that will lead our revolution in these fields. The European New Right, for example, would never have materialized were it not for the metapolitical efforts of Alain de Benoist and others who laid the groundwork in their books, something which could not have been achieved in any other medium.

Alex Kurtagić described what he is doing as an effort to engage with the space where “art, bibliophilia, and the counter-culture intersect,” and expressed his wish to bring out beautifully-produced editions of classic texts that have been neglected in recent years, as a sort of dissident Penguin Classics, which he has already done with Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium and other books. Kurtagić believes the value of these books lies in the fact that they will lead to the development of a new body of theory, and also outlast any collapse scenario which we may face in the near future, unlike the products of the mass media and electronic culture.

Following this was lunch, and after this, there was a conversation between Sam Dickson and William Regnery. Regnery discussed his journey through the conservative movement of the time and how he later came to reject conservative politics in favor of the sorts of perspectives offered at NPI. Dickson then reflected on the fact that, while the America he grew up in during the 1950s and ’60s was better than it is today in some respects, it was also very closed-minded, and the dissemination information was dominated by a very few organizations, which rendered alternative points-of-view such as those represented by NPI and similar groups very difficult to find or disseminate. Therefore, in a sense, Dickson said that there are actually greater opportunities for revolutionary movements in America today than there were previously. Regnery professed his belief that the ostracism that Rightists encounter in America today is much more intense than anything that was experienced by Leftists under McCarthyism.

Next up was Alex Kurtagić once again, whose talks in various venues in recent years, including NPI in 2011, always cause them to be greeted with eager anticipation. His talk was on the theme of “The End of the World as We Know It.” Kurtagić explained that, since the financial meltdown of 2008, the idea of a collapse has percolated beyond its origins in the radical Right and into the mainstream, as expressed in the many books and novels which have dealt with the theme in recent years. The most distinguishing feature of these works, Kurtagić contended, is that they are primarily concerned with the idea of preserving America and its egalitarian, libertarian ideals. As such, they ultimately miss the point – egalitarianism is never questioned, and the issue of race never enters into the discussion.

The other common feature of such works, according to Kurtagić, is that they depict the collapse as something that happens suddenly and which is severe. This is not necessarily the way that it will actually happen, he pointed out – it is just as possible that we are already experiencing a gradual collapse, which will only be recognized by those looking back retrospectively at history at a later time. What must distinguish the “radical Right’s” idea of the collapse must be a willingness to see it through the lens of a transvaluation of values, rather than as an attempt to restore what will be lost when America as it is presently constituted finally falls. For Kurtagić, the key to this transvaluation is the idea of egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is the key to the liberal worldview because it is the tool that enables them to dismiss distinctions, hierarchy, meaning, and tradition. This is why the Right was ultimately forced to retreat from any meaningful opposition to liberalism, according to Kurtagić, because once egalitarianism was ensconced as the inviolable ideal of Western society, the Right was forced to oppose its enemies on their own terms, thus losing any ability to oppose them in a meaningful way.

Kurtagić called on his audience to dare to “think the unthinkable.” This means, according to him, questioning the very foundation upon which the radical Right in America has based itself in recent decades. The Anglo-American Right, according to Kurtagić, sees itself as a bastion of reason in a world of unreason. As a result, it has taken a scientific approach to its problems, which in turn is reflective of the bias towards empiricism inherent in the Anglo-American worldview. Speculative philosophy, in this tradition, is always viewed with suspicion. As a consequence, Kurtagić believes that the Anglo-American Right has failed to answer the issue of why egalitarianism cannot be questioned. The answer, he says, is because the Left succeeded in framing the issue of egalitarianism as one of an absolute good opposed to an absolute evil, and this is an idea that has spread throughout every facet of our society. Kurtagić claimed that it is not enough to try to prove the egalitarian ideal false through empirical data, but rather to depict it as an evil in turn, by pointing to the many injustices that have resulted from its pursuit, turning modern liberal democracies into near-totalitarian surveillance states in an effort to patrol the society and ensure that it is acting in accordance with this ideal.

What the game of egalitarianism is really about, Kurtagić said, is power – it is an instrument being used by those who want power to advance themselves, irrespective of whatever lofty goals initially inspired it. As such, it is mere arrogance masquerading as humility by the powers-that-be. What is needed to counter them is a moral critique of egalitarianism, which Kurtagić believes will undermine the moral legitimacy that supports the ruling classes. But it is not sufficient merely to tear down, says Kurtagić; something new will be needed to replace egalitarianism. This new ideal must surpass the merely biological view of life, because such a stand will merely render us as moral particularists, believing that what is good for our own group alone is what is best. But Kurtagić believes, along with Kevin MacDonald, that one of the distinguishing features of Western thought is universalism, and that the type of thought that we use to deal with a collapse scenario must be inherently Western in nature if we are to survive, and thus address the needs of all groups.

Unlike some, Kurtagić does not see the collapse as guaranteeing a reawakening of the racial spirit in Whites. We have come to focus on race, he said, because the Left decided to make an issue of it. But by countering them only on this level, we have only succeeded in dragging ourselves down to their level. Race is meaningless without taking into account whatever is built on top of it – therefore, we should focus our efforts on those higher, nobler aspects of our civilization rather than only upon its biological foundations. Kurtagić concluded by stating that he would rather live in a world full of differences than a homogenized one.

Following Alex Kurtagić was Roman Bernard, a Frenchman who has been active with the French organization which has been making headlines, Génération Identitaire – the same which brought identitarianism as a phenomenon to the attention of all Europe. His theme was “The Children of Oedipus.” He described his journey from more mainstream conservatism to the “radical Right,” in part as a result of his reading of English-language outlets such as Alternative Right, Counter-Currents, and Arktos. He explained that the youth of France are more and more beginning to question the ideals that they inherited from the radical Leftists who came to prominence after the strikes of 1968, and they are coming to see that all Europeans around the world are facing a common struggle. He pointed to Generation Identity as a portent of things to come: in its famous occupation of a mosque that was under construction in Poitiers, the site where Charles Martel drove back Muslim invaders in the eighth century, and in their occupation of the offices of the Socialist Party in Paris last May, the identitarians have given birth to a form of street activism that was unknown on the Right previously. Roman felt that these developments were indicative that a new and more vigorous Right, with much greater appeal to youth, was on the rise in Europe. Matt Parrott reinforced his message, emphasizing the need for continuing street-level activism to go along with more ideological or metapolitical efforts.

Mark Hackard, who writes for Alternative Right, then followed up with a discussion of the state of geopolitical affairs, in particular how the recent crisis in Syria, which led to Vladimir Putin’s frustration of Obama’s plans for military intervention, demonstrated that the era of American hegemony was already beginning to give way to a multipolar world in which other, opposing forces were coming into play.

Following this was Jack Donovan, who has been promoting the values of tribalism and a restoration of masculinity in his writings. Donovan pointed out that the collapse may come soon, or the system as it exists could limp on for quite some time; the one thing we can be certain of is that America, as it currently exists, will never change even as it declines, and the values which those of us on the “Right” hold dear will continue to be opposed by the establishment, as keeping people dependent on the liberal state is the key to their continuing power. Donovan said that, to the powers-that-be, we are only barbarians, condemned to be forever ostracized from the mainstream, but that rather than viewing this as a problem, we should embrace our barbarian identities.

Donovan said that the key to embracing this identity is to see ourselves as outsiders within our own homeland. What this means is to change the way we relate to the state, and see ourselves as something separate from it. He suggested four ways this could be accomplished. The first is to separate “us” from “them,” seeing ourselves in tribal terms and refusing to identify with America as a whole. The second is to stop getting angry because what is happening in society doesn’t make sense to us. The reason this is the case, Donovan said, is because what is being done is happening because it benefits those in power – not us. Therefore we shouldn’t expect things to seem sensible from our point of view. His third point is to de-universalize morality. Men, and White men in particular, he claimed, see themselves today as being on a mission to ensure that everyone in our society is being treated fairly. The problem is that this idea only works when everyone is interconnected as part of a cohesive community; in America today, many Whites have difficulty coming to terms with the idea that others do not have this same idea of universal justice in their hearts. No one cares when White men are excluded from anything today, Donovan pointed out. His fourth point is to encourage us to become “independent but interdependent” – to quietly establish a community somewhere of like-minded individuals who can jointly develop an alternative lifestyle, dissenting from the prevailing culture, and ensure that its members can provide for themselves by possessing the necessary skills. Land belongs to he who can hold it, Donovan emphasized, and while there is little chance that we can reclaim America from those who currently own it, it is still possible to establish a tribe that one can call one’s own.

Tomislav Sunić, who next took the podium, spoke on the idea of “Beyond Nationalism, or the Problem with Europe.” Sunić began by reminding us that prophecies of the imminent end of the world are nothing new in human history. The prevailing ideology of the modern West, he said, is that of progress, and the belief in an endless upward development of civilization. Sunić said that he sees himself as being among those who reject this belief. Believers in progress, he noted, have a tendency to want to impose their plans on society as a whole, and as a result have led to some of the greatest political atrocities of modern times. Our European ancestors, Sunić noted, were more accustomed to the idea of an inevitable fall, as can be seen in the myths of an apocalyptic end – and cyclical rebirth to follow – which predominated throughout Europe. For Sunić, this tragic sense, which he believes has been perpetuated up to the present day, as seen in great European writers such as Ernst Jünger and Emile Cioran, is part of what unites our civilization, in addition to its racial aspect. This indicates that the notion of our identity must go beyond the merely biological, in terms of being “White,” and we should look for our roots in our common historical memory. He also contended that defining ourselves solely in terms of what we oppose, such as in being against immigration or Islam, is also insufficient to form a complete identity.

Sunić claimed that we must embrace this European sense of the tragic, not as something negative, but rather as an opportunity to see history as an endless flow which will offer us opportunities, if only we can grab them. In order to do this, we must forge something new. This means creating a new, pan-European identity which will guarantee that we do not repeat the bloody mistakes that came between our various peoples in the past. Sunić offered many historical precedents for this idea, showing that when threatened by outside forces, Europeans have always demonstrated their willingness to put aside their differences to confront a greater threat. Sunić’s last point was that we must not ignore the issue of character when evaluating who is worthy to be a part of our new ethnostate – simply being of a common racial background is insufficient on its own. Sunić reminded us that both our movement and others, such as the Catholic Church, have been plagued by those with bad intentions who prey on such groups only for their own personal benefit. Such individuals must be rejected. Sunić believes that the only way forward is to establish a new European identity and rediscover our pride in who we are.

The final speaker of the day was the deliverer of the keynote address, Alain de Benoist, who more than anyone present has been responsible for giving birth to the trends which have culminated in the appearance of organizations such as NPI and the North American New Right. Benoist was the ideological founder of what came to be termed – against their own wishes – the “New Right” in France, and which later spread throughout Europe, and he has published dozens of books in French, several of which have now been translated by Arktos. Benoist’s project has always been to create a new type of political thought in Europe which will allow Europeans to defend and retain their identities while avoiding the intellectual and ideological pitfalls which befell similar efforts in the past. Thus, the subject of his talk was aptly named, “The Question of Identity.” He began by apologizing for his poor English, although it was my impression that everyone in the room was able to understand him with ease.

Benoist said that the question of identity is the most important question we face today, but also pointed out that it is a very modern question as well, since traditional societies never have the need to question their identity. He explained that identity in Europe became an issue with the rise of individualism in the wake of Descartes, who first described the notion of the individual as something independent of his community. Likewise, we have seen the division of the individual into various identities, such as one’s professional, sexual, ethnic identity, and so on.

The problems which prevail today in thinking about identity derive from the fact that we have come to think that it is a product only of how we think of ourselves. Benoist said that, from the communitarian perspective – which he also identified as his own – identity is dependent on how others see us, which means that identity can only be understood in terms of a social bond. This means that all notions of identity are ideological in nature. Furthermore, we tend to see identity as something immutable, whereas Benoist said that identity cannot exist without transformation, even if we remain, in essence, ourselves throughout such changes. The notion of identity is an interpretive act – when we perceive something, we do not just see it but also assign meaning to it, which gives our notions of identity a narrative character, in terms of a story which develops further every time we come back to it.

When it comes to mass immigration, Benoist said, while it is responsible for great social pathologies, those who oppose it miss the point by ignoring its actual causes. What is really behind it is “the system that kills the peoples,” namely the global system of capitalism that is attempting to destroy all differences in an effort to impose a universal world order. Benoist does not believe that our identity is primarily threatened by others, but rather the greatest danger we face is from the lack of respect for the identity of others that prevails everywhere today, in which Americanization is the order of the day and the highest value is money. We must wonder whether the world will continue to develop along unipolar lines, with America as the sole dominant force trying to bring about a monolithic world, or whether we will see the emergence of a multipolar world in which many identities will be allowed to play a role.

How this came about can only be understood by examining the roots of modernity in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, by its nature, was opposed to the very idea of identity, opposing tradition, rootedness, and ethnic solidarity. Benoist said that mainstream American conservatives repeat this mistake when they defend the myth of the individual against the rights of society as a whole. Continental Europeans, he said, have had less of a problem with this, since they have always recognized that capitalism is a destructive force. Capitalism is the opposite of real conservatism, he said; it believes itself to be universal and endless. Benoist pointed out that even Marx had identified capitalism as the system which stands for the abolition of all traditions and the feudal order. Capitalism relies for its survival on perpetual growth, and can thus only exist if it dismantles everything that stands in its way. This is why capitalism proved itself to be much more effective than Communism, Benoist said, since as a system it is even more universalist and materialistic than Communism ever was. Capitalism is ultimately responsible for the problem of immigration because it relies on a continual increase of its labor pool for a continuing increase in productivity, and thus it is the natural setting for the concept of “global citizenship.” But capitalism can only offer a caricature of a social bond, he said – in reality, all it can do is carry out the commodification of humans that is inherent in its logic. Benoist concluded by saying that identity will always remain under threat as long as the lifestyles inspired by capitalism remain unquestioned. He apologized to the audience if anyone had found his talk to be a deliberate provocation to Americans; he said he was only offering his opinion, but knew that it was difficult to convey in a country which valued the ideals of progress, individualism and capitalism above all else.

A very interesting question-and-answer session followed. Benoist further explicated his views on America, saying that one of the most fundamental problems with it is that it is the product of a land which already had its own culture being co-opted by another culture, which led to an inherent sense of alienation within it. He also noted that America was not alone in its responsibility for the present global order, admitting that the American and French revolutionary projects were linked by a similar ideology. Interestingly, he said that, in spite of their claim to stand for the rights of everyone, these revolutions had only possible as a result of massive bloodshed – in France, through the violent suppression of the ancien régime, and in America by the suppression of the Indians. He said that addressing these problems in America is always problematic, since a genuine Left and Right, as known in Europe, is absent here, “which is strange.” Benoist also invoked Carl Schmitt in reminding us that those who fight in the name of humanity only do so in order to deny the humanity of their enemy, rendering him into an absolute evil that must be destroyed.

After this was a very pleasant reception, during which I manned the Arktos book table. As inspiring as the speakers at the conference were, this is always my favorite part of any such event, since it gives me the opportunity to meet and speak with people who usually only know me through the Internet, or through my work for Arktos. It is always very invigorating to experience firsthand how many intelligent, interesting people find value in the work that we do, and I always greatly appreciate the many expressions of thanks for our efforts that were extended to me over the course of the weekend. I give my most heartfelt gratitude to anyone who did so.

I will conclude by saying that there were no problems of any significance at the conference, and both the speakers and the audience that the organizers managed to assemble were truly top-notch. I hope that NPI continues to hold such events with regularity in the future, as they are absolutely essential to the growth of a genuinely radical school of thought on the Right in America today – something that is desperately needed, as the impoverishment of the ideals underlying our society become more apparent by the day. Whether an actual collapse is imminent or not, what cannot be denied is the already ongoing collapse of America as a culture and as a society. Those of us on the “New Right” are the only ones capable of developing the right sorts of solutions. We need to get to work.

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Morgan, John. “A Glimpse of the Post-American Future: The National Policy Institute Conference of 2013.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 6 November 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/11/a-glimpse-of-the-post-american-future/ >.

 

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Organic Economy – Faye

Organic Economy

by Guillaume Faye

A ‘third way’ economic model, which takes the path neither of liberal capitalism nor statist socialism.

An organic economy arises on the precept that the economy ought to function as a living organism, hierarchical and harmonious, subordinated to the political, and not to a cold, lifeless mechanism animated by socialist dogmas or the capitalist logic of short-term profit. An organic economy would put finance in service to production and production in service to the people. It would organically integrate entrepreneurial dynamism, social justice, as well as ethnic, cultural, and ecological imperatives in an almost biological way, endeavouring to reconcile the best of the liberal market and the planned economy.

The principal features of an organic economy would:

1. Refuse globalism’s free trade ideology in favour of the autarky of great spaces, i.e., it centres the economy within a designated civilisational region, without abolishing world trade and international financial exchanges, but at the same time ensuring that foreign trade is normalised, limited, and subject to quotas and other restrictions.

2. Refuse statist socialism, paralysing fiscalism, administrative obesity, and privilege a free competitive market within a self-centred, protected, and regulated market.

3. Regionalise production and exchange within Europe.

4. Respect ecological imperatives, which are to be understood as being more important than short-term profits.

5. Invest in great public works.

6. Coordinate planning and the market.

7. Refrain from intervening in the economy except in a political manner – to establish the economy’s fundamental norms and to consider its general needs, but not to administratively dictate its details.

8. Abandon direct progressive taxes for the sake of deducting a small percentage from each income source, whatever it may be, in order to lighten the burden on society’s vital forces and improve its overall production.

9. Allow the state, not the hazards of the market, to make monetary policy, unlike the present forces affecting the euro.

10. Oblige those receiving unemployment benefits to work for the sake of the collective or to accept whatever alternative employment is proposed.

11. Restrict the employment of foreigners and deny them welfare.

12. Endeavour, more generally, to eradicate poverty and misery without recourse to centralised, socialist bureaucratic methods that have totally failed, and adopt a policy of social assistance, assumed at local and regional levels, for citizens in need.

An organic economy is imaginable only within a protected European market. It would, as such, refuse both reckless globalisation and a statist, taxing socialism, while accepting the market whenever its standards are set by the sovereign authority. It would also subordinate finance to production and production to the political, whereas today the very opposite is the case. Similarly, it would subordinate the currency to political imperatives, not the hazards of speculative markets as it is with the euro.

The organic economy is a doctrine of temperance. It treats the economy as the ‘third function,’ subordinating it to the political, and freeing it thus from both statism and market anarchy. The organic economy reconciles the dynamism and synergy of all social functions, so that one function is not impaired by another.

Paradoxically, the United States, where the state is equipped with a strong political will to pilot a free, dynamic, private economy, is closer to an organic economy than Europe.

 

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Excerpted from: Faye, Guillaume. Why We Fight: Manifesto for the European Resistance. London: Arktos Media, 2011, pp. 125-126.

 

After the Fall – AR Staff

After the Fall

By the American Renaissance Staff

Second NPI conference is held in Washington.

 

The National Policy Institute (NPI) held its second national conference in Washington, DC, on October 26, with a very interesting lineup of speakers. The meeting was held in the Ronald Reagan Center, a federally operated facility, which resisted all “anti-racist” threats to the conference.

The speakers were introduced by Richard Spencer, director of NPI, and the conference began with Piero San Giorgio, a Swiss author and survivalist. Mr. San Giorgio argued strongly that current population and consumption trends can lead only to economic and social collapse. We may have already reached “peak oil,” and in 15 or 20 years, the energy it takes to extract oil could be greater than the energy we can get from burning it. We are also running out of copper, zinc, bauxite, and other metals while we pollute, deforest, and overfish the planet.

Mr. San Giorgio predicted that what he calls “the religion of perpetual growth” will come to a crashing end as governments default on debt and nations go to war over resources. The result will be widespread poverty of a kind now found only in the worst parts of Africa.

Only organized groups will be available to survive this collapse, and the best organized groups for that purpose are criminal gangs, which are well armed and used to getting what they want by force. Those of us who do not want to be slaughtered by gangs will need what Mr. San Girogio calls a “sustainable autonomous base” with its own food supply, energy source, and armed defense. Mr. San Giorgio believes we should build such bases for ourselves but that no one will survive in isolation. We are social animals who need a tribe and social links. In the mean time, Mr. San Giorgio recommends getting out of debt, converting financial assets to gold, and learning how to lead the simpler, pre-industrial way of life that is coming.

Mr. San Giorgio elaborates on these themes in his book Survive–The Economic Collapse.

Sam Dickson spoke next on “America: the God that Failed.” Describing himself as a “racial communitarian,” he argued that America’s great failing has been an excess of individualism that has destroyed the organic ties of community. The British were already the most individualistic people of the Old World, and those who settled North America were the most individualistic of the British. Immigrants who followed, both through Ellis Island and later, have come to make money rather than to join a national community.

Americans glorify freedom and liberty, but the price has been so thorough a destruction of the racial and social bonds of community that we no longer live in a nation—those of us who imagine a better life are men without a country. And in some respects we are freer than our ancestors—we are free to fornicate, marry across racial lines, divorce, abort our children, and even marry a person of the same sex—but these freedoms are granted by the state. Without strong communities we are powerless in the face of the state that grants—and withholds—what it takes to be freedoms.

Mr. Dickson argued that any nation based on foolish propositions such as the equality of all men and the idea of inalienable rights—he noted that rights are alienated all the time—cannot even pretend to be a nation. He sounded a warning to Americans: We must recognize our susceptibility to “freedom” and rediscover the importance of community. We must build a “reracinated” nation that is a true outgrowth of Europe rather than the formless “biomass” that now constitutes what is called the American people.

Mr. Dickson was followed by a panel discussion on breaking the mainstream’s grip on media. It was composed of Andy Nowicki of AlternativeRight.com, John Morgan of Arktos Media, and Alex Kurtagic of the Wermod & Wermod Publishing Group. Mr. Nowicki described the current success of alternative media as “riding the crest of a wave” that makes it possible to spread dissident ideas to the entire world. He also noted the importance of supporting not only writers but artists who embody a new sensibility.

Mr. Morgan noted that although Arktos has been publishing only since 2010, it has produced some 60 books that he described as “alternatives to modernity.” Much of Arktos’ work has been to make available to English speakers important European works on politics, philosophy, and art that that have never been translated. Mr. Morgan noted that Arktos has been made possible only because of the latest technology—Internet, print on demand, Twitter, Facebook—and noted the delicious irony of fighting modernity with its own tools.

Mr. Kurtagic’s project is to produce beautiful, collectible versions of now-despised classics—what he calls “the dissident Penguin classics.” So far, he has produced beautiful annotated editions of Madison Grant’s best books and published a similar edition of Francis Yockey’s Imperium. At the same time, he strongly promotes new expressions of our traditional culture. To a questioner who doubted the wisdom of reviving bound books in the electronic age he replied that when the power goes out we will be glad to have paper.

Sam Dickson and William Regnery then spoke about how America has changed. Mr. Regnery, who grew up during the 1950s, said, “I regret that life in the ’50s is something my children, and grandchildren will not see.” He noted that there may have been precursors to the collapse in values of the 1960s, but that there was a community and even national coherence. He also described some of his adventures as a conservative activist but noted that the movement achieved virtually nothing in 40 years. “The conservative movement didn’t leave me,” he concluded. “I left the conservative movement.”

Mr. Dickson emphasized the same sense of community that he knew as a child, but also underscored how limited the sources of information then were. It was far harder than now to hear a dissident view of race or history, and a profusion of books, publishers, foundations, and Internet sites makes it much easier for independent-minded Americans to learn how badly their country has been led astray.

Mr. Kurtagic then spoke on “The End of the World as We Know It.” He noted that there is a vogue of fiction about the collapse of civilization. Many people sense that our levels of consumption and indebtedness cannot be sustained, but he pointed out that sometimes collapse can be slow and that its beginnings may be recognizable only in retrospect. Our aim should not be to contribute to the fall but to build what may come after the fall.

Today, egalitarianism is the highest value of the West but we must reject it. Egalitarianism makes everything the same, thus destroying all traditions and archetypes. Most people cannot even imagine a moral critique of egalitarianism, but until this false god is destroyed nothing new can emerge.

Egalitarianism erases the difference between the deserving and undeserving, and in so doing establishes a huge government apparatus that creates privilege for the undeserving. Egalitarian movements have also killed millions of people in their self-righteous quest for power. Conservatives try to fight egalitarianism with statistics and measures of inequality but theirs is only a half-hearted struggle that fails to reject the fundamental goal of homogenization and “social justice.”

Racialists seek to overthrow egalitarianism by asserting white identity but no solution can be found by seeking only what is good for whites. Western man believes in universal values, and will accept only those concepts based on what is good for all races. It is the left that makes a fetish out of race and we should not fall into its trap. We should strive towards the sublime, towards uniqueness, towards nobility. Biology is not a sufficient foundation for morality, and if we value our own uniqueness we must value and support the uniqueness of others.

Roman Bernard is a French activist who spoke about how young racially conscious Europeans are fighting dispossession. He said that for the first time, they feel deeply that all Europeans face the same challenges, and they see themselves as one people with a common destiny. They are not deceived by leftist media and, unlike European conservatives who just want to be left alone to enjoy their money, young identitarians want to take power so they can change the world.

Mr. Bernard pointed out that the old solution to immigration—white flight—is no longer possible. A man with a master’s degree waiting on tables cannot afford a house in the suburbs. As for solutions, it is too early to describe what form they will take. The awakening is too recent for its consequences to be predicted. However, the cultural and intellectual battle has begun, and more young people will join the movement as they see it as the only way out from a series of catastrophic failures.

So far, the most high-profile identitarian acts in France have been street theatre: storming the headquarters of the socialist party, and occupying the mosque that was under construction at Poitiers, not far from the famous battle of 732. The traditional Right would never think of doing such things. It is not possible to know how or whether these new youth movements will move into politics, but it has a focus and energy that reflect a genuine break with the past.

Jack Donovan, author of The Way of Men, spoke on “Becoming the New Barbarians.” Like Mr. San Giorgio, he predicted an inevitable decline and a more constrained way of life, since we can count on our rulers to fail us. They will also continue trying to keep us emasculated and dependent on the state. Healthy men are forceful, even violent. The state uses such men to serve its own violent purposes but wants to turn them into women for any other purpose.

Those among us who know that men are not created equal, who hate a government that tries to regulate everything, who know men and women are different, who believe free men should be armed, and who find same-sex marriage absurd are now the new barbarians.

Just as we are rejected and hated by the state, we must reject the state. Politicians cannot solve our problems, and once we recognize that they are crazy or stupid or both, we should “relax and appreciate their crafty strategies.” “We should see them for what they are,” Mr. Donovan added. “Be mocking, carefree, and violent.” We should not worry about changing the state; that is for people who believe in and belong to the state.

We must draw clear lines to distinguish ourselves from others, and be “morally accountable only to the tribe.” Blacks do not even pretend to care about us, and we must recognize that we have interests different from theirs. We have a compulsion to be fair, but this compulsion is healthy only in a world in which others believe in fairness.

When the decline comes, those with a tribal identity will survive, and a tribe must be of real comrades, not a group of Facebook friends. Bands of brothers should take over neighborhoods or apartment complexes. A community of 125 people can work together to survive when the state collapses, and if we have community we can live meaningful lives even if we are condemned to be outsiders in our own homeland.

The next speaker was Tomislav Sunic, the Croatian philosopher and author of Against Democracy and Equality. In a speech called “Beyond Nationalism, or the Problem of Europe,” he warned of the limits of white racial consciousness. Although he rejects the idea of inevitable progress—“after every sunny day there is a rainy day”—he does not believe in the inevitability of collapse. Even if there is a large-scale collapse, we cannot be sure that it will give rise to a healthy consciousness of race.

Mr. Sunic noted that the civil wars whites have waged against each other have killed far more of us than non-whites ever could. Race has never been a unifier; the Germanic Gepids even joined Atilla against Europe in the 5th century. At the same time, most of the people demonstrating in favor of illegal immigrants in Europe are themselves white, and “our worst detractors are from the same gene pool as ourselves.” He went on to point out that “when the final breakdown occurs, the lines of demarcation will not be clear at all,” and that there will be plenty of whites fighting on the barricades against us.

Mr. Sunic argued that Christianity is no longer central to the identity of the West. There are now more non-white than white Christians, and high-ranking church leaders tell us they see “the face of Jesus” among crowds of immigrants—even when they are Muslim or Hindu.

And yet biology alone cannot be our identity. “A generic white blank slate is meaningless if it is devoid of a racial soul.” Mr. Sunic called on whites to cherish their cultural and historical legacy because without that we are only a genotype. “We must resuscitate our sense of the tragic as well as our racial identity,” he concluded, noting that the sense of the tragic is what drives Promethean struggle, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

The keynote speaker was Alain de Benoist, the prominent French philosopher and one of the founders the New Right, who spoke about the nature of identity. He pointed out that as soon as someone speaks of his identity, it is a sign his identity is under attack. People in traditional, rooted societies do not ask “Who am I?” or “Who are we?” By the time someone begins to ask these questions, his identity may have disappeared.

Identity has many dimensions: language, culture, ethnicity, sex, profession, etc. We choose those parts of our identity we think most important to us, but it is a mistake to believe that our identity depends only on ourselves. A man living alone would have no identity, because identity is shaped by relations with others. Our community participates in our identity.

It is also a mistake to define identity as something immutable. We never cease to be ourselves, but the elements of which identity is composed change throughout our lives.

Many people say that mass immigration threatens collective identity, and this problem cannot be denied. However, too many natives then define themselves in opposition to what they are not rather than setting forth a positive identity.

Modernity itself attacks the identity of both the immigrant and the native. “I say the biggest threat is the system that kills the people,” Mr. de Benoist noted, adding that “the imposition of an across-the-board homogenization eliminates diversity of language culture, etc.” He decried global government and global markets that operate according to “the ideology of sameness.”

Mr. de Benoit also criticized capitalism because it seeks to reduce everything to a cost and a price, and to reduce all humans to interchangeable producers and consumers. Capitalism, noted Mr. de Benoist, has erased borders far more successfully than Communism ever did, and the global market leads to the global citizen. Capitalism has become a “total social fact” that seems to dominate and homogenize every aspect of our lives.

Modernity itself is the enemy of identity because it is rooted in the idea of progress, in which the past is nothing but a bundle of irrational superstitions. The future towards which modernity strives is one in which all men are individuals, seeking what is in their rational interests. Modernity has no place for the irrational or the collective, despite the fact that these are what give life meaning.

Mr. de Benoist concluded by saying that although globalization and Americanization are not synonymous, they are closely related. Only Americans believe that their system is the best in the world and that they have is a duty to export it. Of course, to the extent that this succeeds, it destroys all that is unique, different and valuable, just as it destroys identity. Ultimately, it destroys humanity because we cannot be human if we are all the same.

Before the conference speeches began, decorum was breached by an uninvited guest who shouted about “fu**ing racists” but the event was otherwise a success by any standard. Videos of the speeches should be available soon.

———————

American Renaissance Staff. “After the Fall.” American Renaissance, October 28, 2013. <http://www.amren.com/news/2013/10/after-the-fall/ >.

 

Race, Identity, Community – Tudor

Race, Identity, Community

By Lucian Tudor

Translations: Español (see note at the bottom of this page)

Modern Right-wingers who assert the importance of racial differences and advocate racial separatism, especially White Nationalists, face a number of philosophical challenges which they need to be aware of and ready to address. It is all too common to rely on presuppositions, assumptions, or implications without being prepared to respond to more in-depth issues or the complications involving the interpretation of facts and ideas. What is needed in the modern Right is a developed philosophy of race and culture, of identity and community, which clarifies the issues involved and which gives depth to their standpoint.

Without this philosophical or intellectual depth supporting their worldview in their minds, they are less and less likely to successfully challenge their opponents and convince others. The intellectual resources to establish this depth have already been provided by the thought of the German “Conservative Revolution” and the European “New Right,” but their contributions and ideas have not yet been fully recognized or utilized. We hope to bring to attention some basic philosophical problems and the necessity of being of aware of them and being prepared to address them. Of course, we do not pretend to investigate or tackle all the issues involving these topics and in enough depth; rather, our purpose here is to fulfill the aim of simply spreading an awareness of the most typical complications involved.

Ethnic Identity and Culture

Human beings are defined by their particular identities; the notion of an abstract humanity before which all particularity is unimportant is completely groundless. Yet it always needs to be kept in mind that identity per se is a complicated subject, encompassing both the details of individual or personal identity as well as various types of group or collective identities – ideological, political, religious, social, etc. Group identities may also overlap or conflict with each other (which still does not eliminate their validity), they may be voluntary or involuntary, and they may be inherited or chosen. It cannot be denied that a person’s identity as part of a collective group, even a racial or ethnic group, has a subjective dimension and involves conscious identification, just as it cannot be denied that some types of identity or aspects of them are inherited and inescapable.[1]

However, what concerns us here in particular is the role and function of ethnic and racial identity, and the undeniable relationship between these two forms of collective identity. “Ethnicity” has become a word with many meanings, encompassing both larger and smaller groups which are defined by the possession of certain common elementary characteristics, especially in the field of culture. Properly defined, an ethnicity signifies a people or a folk which constitutes (and is thus defined) as an organic cultural unity with a particular spirit and a particular historical continuity. In many cases, the term “nation” or “nationality” is synonymous with ethnicity, although it is always important to distinguish a “nation” in the ethno-cultural sense from the idea of “civic nation.”

However, it always needs to be kept in mind that culture exists on multiple levels, which means that an ethnicity or folk is not the only level at which culture operates; it is not the only valid form of cultural unity. This is why it is valid to speak of cultural groups encompassing multiple ethnicities (for example, a general Celtic culture), a larger Western culture, or, greater still, a general Indo-European or European culture. It is for this reason that Guillaume Faye is right to assert the position that one can identify both with local as well as with greater ethno-cultural groups: “to each European his own fatherland, national or regional (chosen on the basis of intimate, emotive affinities) – and to all Europeans the Great Fatherland, this land of intimately related peoples. The consciousness of belonging to both a ‘small native land’ and a ‘great fatherland’ is very difficult for contemporaries to grasp.”[2]

Each cultural entity is furthermore in contact with and sometimes connected with other cultural entities. Although cultures exist separately from other cultures, they cannot be regarded as forming different universes and they normally engage in contact and exchange ideas with each other. Each exchange results in the appropriation – or better, re-appropriation – of the cultural creations of another group in a new way based on the particular local spirit of a folk.

The different ethnic groups of Europe have generally engaged in a “cultural dialogue” with each other throughout their history, oftentimes drawing ideas, cultural objects and practices from other groups or from past cultures. Europeans have also exchanged certain cultural creations with non-European peoples, although this “dialogue” naturally occurred in a very selective and limited form because of the foreignness of these peoples. Thus one can, as Hans Freyer has done, justly speak of a “world-history of Europe,” while simultaneously upholding the fact that Europeans have always maintained their uniqueness and particularity.[3]

This fact of course, brings up the question of openness to other cultures, and whether or not it is valid for a cultural group to be either completely open or completely closed to others. On the one hand, liberals and globalists advocate complete opening, while on the other hand some (although not all) Right-wingers advocate total closure. In reality, neither complete closure nor complete openness are normal or healthy states, but rather a selective communication with partial (not absolute) barriers. It is a fact that, as Alain de Benoist pointed out, the “diversity of peoples and cultures exists . . . only because, in the past, these various peoples and cultures were relatively isolated from one another,” and thus in order to maintain their existence as different cultures, “communication can only be imperfect. Without this imperfection, it would lose its raison d’être and its very possibility of existing.”[4]

Racial Issues

The matter of race is closely bound up with that of ethnicity, which therefore also links racial identity with ethnic identity. It is not satisfactory to merely point out the reality of race, since opponents can argue that its reality is insignificant; one must assert its importance and function. Race is, of course, primarily a biological type, defined by certain physical-anthropological traits and certain subtle traits of character which are inherited.

There are also evidently many disagreements on racial classification, which is why one must always be prepared to defend one’s particular view of racial typology. We will only mention here that we believe that, contrary to certain scientists who insisted on asserting the primacy of sub-racial groups among Europeans, that European peoples as a whole, due to their close relatedness, form primarily a general “white” or European race. The existence of this common racial type among all European ethnic groups forms a bond between them and allows them to better relate to each other (in ways that they surely cannot relate to non-white peoples). This fact certainly does not eliminate differences between European groups, but to deny the racial relatedness of European peoples is akin to and just as incorrect as denying the existence of a general European culture and type.[5]

However, it also needs to be mentioned that race should not be seen in a simplistic biological sense, since it has an important and undeniable sociological function. Race has a spiritual dimension, permeating society and culture, due to the fact that racial type is also defined by its style of expression. Race is a force “which has deposited itself in man’s bodily and psychic existence, and which confers an intrinsic norm upon all the expressions of a culture, even the highest, most individual creations.”[6] This does not mean that culture and society can be reduced to race, which would be a fallacious biological reductionism, since many cultural and social changes occur independently of race and because of multiple factors. Nevertheless it is clear that racial type is an important influence on the nature of culture and society (which may themselves convey a reciprocal influence on race), even if it is one influence among a number of others.[7]

Thus, to quote Nicolas Lahovary, “the first explanation [of history] is generally found in the nature of a human being and his derives, in all the cases where he acts as a collective being, from the nature of his people. The latter, in turn, depends on the race that imprints its seal upon it.”[8] Therefore, it is evident from this that since any significant level of racial miscegenation transforms the basic structure of a racial type, it also transforms ethnic type; a concrete change in racial background causes a fundamental change in identity. The notion that culture and ethnicity can exist entirely independently of race can thus be seen as naïve and ill-founded; ethno-cultural type and identity is strongly influenced by race, even by racial phenotype alone, with which it has a psychological association.

The problem of miscegenation, however, is not readily solved. Anyone who believes in the importance of racial differences and in the separation of racial groups[9] must be prepared to challenge the “multiculturalist” argument that racial miscegenation is acceptable and normal due to its incidence all throughout history. Without touching upon the reasons for the occurrence of miscegenation, we must remind our readers that it is necessary to argue, on the basis of racial principles and values which hold a meta-historical value, that miscegenation, despite its presence throughout history, is a deviation from normality, not an expression of it. Maintaining stability in racial type was regarded as the norm in most traditional societies.[10]

Likewise, the notion that miscegenation is beneficial and brings about positive transformations (and is thus desirable) is of course entirely lacking in foundations, not only because race-mixing is usually associated with negative changes but also because it is completely unnecessary for positive transformation, as such transformations often occur within homogeneous populations.

It needs to be emphasized, in this regard, that evoking mere biological racial survival or preservation – as is commonly done by White Nationalists – is by itself never a sufficient argument against multiculturalism (or, more precisely, multiracialism). It always needs to be contended that even if, theoretically, the white or European race could survive in the presence of rampant multiculturalism and multiracialism, multiracial society would still be problematic.

The racial type can only live and thrive when it is able to express itself, to live in accordance with its own inner being and nature, in a homogeneous society without psychological and sociological interference from the immediate presence of other races. Just as a unique cultural type and spirit cannot survive when it is completely merged with other cultures, so a unique racial expressive style is unfulfilled and altered in a multiracial society; it denies a race complete fulfillment in its own way of being. This means that racial being only truly manifests itself in a homogeneous community, and is distorted or harmed by social mixing (the “integration” of different races). Furthermore, as Benoist pointed out, mixing can be opposed not only for biological but also for socio-cultural reasons:

In fact, hostility to miscegenation may very well be inspired by cultural or religious considerations. . . . Moreover, it is well known that in societies where there are many interracial marriages, the social status of these married couples depends, to a large extent, on their closeness to the dominant racial phenotype — all of which impacts on the marriage and on genetic selection.[11]

The Importance of Community

As previously implied, racial identity and ethnic identity only find their full meaning and validity in the presence of a sense of organic spiritual community. Of course, similarity in racial and ethnic type among the people contributes to their sense of organic community, but the latter also in turn influences the collective identities based on the former. This type of community mentioned here can be understood better by distinguishing the idea of community (Gemeinschaft) from that of society (Gesellschaft), as in the terminology of Ferdinand Tönnies.[12]

A true community exists where a group of people feel an organic sense of belonging and solidarity, with the existence of psychological bonds between each other, whereas a society is a mere mass or collection of essentially disconnected individuals. In society, bonds between individuals are superficial and mechanical (hence also their transitory nature). On the other hand, in organic community, in Othmar Spann’s words, “individuals may no longer be looked upon as self-sufficing and independent entities; the energy of their being inheres in their spiritual interconnexion, in the whole . . .”[13]

This stands in contrast to liberal individualism – which, in theory, means regarding society as nothing more than a sum of its parts, and, in social life, means the fundamental feeling of separation between individuals. The traditional holistic view of society holds that the normal state of human social order is thus the spiritual community and not the individualistic society, that the community is higher than the individual. This, of course, does not lead to totalitarianism or deny the importance of the individual personality, which is given value within the context of community life.[14] Rather, holism rejects individualism as a perversion of social life and a negative deviation, as opposed to being a normal condition.

Individualism results in the atomization of social life, in the disintegration of the feeling of community and the sense of spiritual bonds. All sense of community is of course never fully lost, since it is inherent in all human societies, but it can be weakened or harmed, with the consequences being that an active sense of the common good and interdependence between all the members of the community deteriorates or disappears entirely.[15] It signifies, in short, departing from the organic community into the modern society. To quote Edgar Julius Jung, in a description that is even more valid today than it was in his time, “the sum of men with equal rights forms the modern [Western] society. Without the spirit of true community, without inner binding, they live in dumb spitefulness beside one another. Formal courtesy and badly warmed up humanity conceal strenuous envy, dislike, and joylessness . . .”[16]

Consequently, as Tomislav Sunić wrote, the individualistic society of “liberal countries gradually leads to social alienation, the obsession with privacy and individualism, and most important, to ethnic and national uprootedness or Entwurzelung.”[17] In other words, collective identities – such as ethnic and racial identities – are destabilized or dissolved in an atomized individualistic society due to people’s lack of community-feeling and solidarity. Without the organic sense of community and spiritual bonds, peoples are disintegrated and transformed into a mass of individuals. Racial and ethnic identity can no longer have the meaning it once had in past social forms.

However, a return to community is always possible; social formlessness is not a permanent condition. It is therefore clear that one of the key tasks of the modern Right is the battle for the restoration of the living community, to validate collective identities. It is likewise an intellectual necessity to constantly reassert the holistic vision which values the organic spiritual community and which rejects individualism as an error. A failure to do so can only mean a failure to carry out one’s ideas to the fullest extent, to fully defend one’s worldview. With the fundamental values of race, ethnos, and tradition must always be included the community, which binds them all into a higher unity. As Freyer once wrote:

Man is free when he is free in his Volk, and when it is free in its realm. Man is free when he is part of a concrete collective will, which takes responsibility for its history. Only reality can decide whether such a collective will exist, a will that binds men and endows their private existence with historical meaning.[18]

Concluding Remarks

To conclude this discussion, we wish to reemphasize certain essential points argued for above for the purpose of clarity:

(1) Ethnicities exist as distinct cultural entities, although cultural and ethnic groups exist on both smaller and larger levels, which is why one can speak of both European peoples and a single European people.

(2) Cultures generally communicate with each other and exchange creations; they are normally not fully closed from other cultures. Under normal conditions this communication does not eliminate their uniqueness and existence as separate cultures due to the naturally selective and limited nature of cultural dialogue; only complete openness, which is abnormal, eliminates particularity.

(3) Racial type has an important sociological function, making its mark on both culture and ethnicity. Race is a factor in ethnic identity; to change the racial background of an ethnicity also changes its character and identity. The survival of a particular ethno-cultural identity thus depends on resisting race-mixing, which negatively transforms racial type.

(4) Racial miscegenation, however, cannot be opposed merely by evoking the notion of preservation, but must be opposed on principle. The mixing of races must be rejected as a deviation from normal social order; racial homogeneity is required for ethno-cultural stability.

(5) Finally, racial and ethnic identity finds meaning only when there exists a sense of belonging to a spiritual community, which is itself augmented by ethnic and racial homogeneity. In individualistic liberal societies where the original sense of organic community is weakened, ethnic bonds and identity are weakened as well.

What we have provided here thus far is merely an introduction to some essential concepts of the European New Right. By writing this essay, we hope to see these concepts be more frequently utilized so that not only do the arguments of White Nationalists improve, but so that they are also better understood. The way forward – towards changing the social reality and overcoming liberalism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism – exists first in the realm of thought, in the ability to successfully challenge the dominant ideology on the intellectual plane. Then, and only then, will the hegemony of liberalism begin to collapse.

Notes

[1] For a more in-depth – if somewhat unsatisfactory with certain topics (particularly race and ethnicity) – discussion of the problem of identity, see Alain de Benoist, “On Identity,” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), pp. 9–64. http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/on_identity.pdf.

[2] Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (London: Arktos, 2011), p. 143. See also Benoist, “On Identity,” pp. 46–51.

[3] See the overview of Hans Freyer’s Weltgeschichte Europas in Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 330 ff.

[4] Alain de Benoist, “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), pp. 46–47. http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf. On the issue of cultural openness, see also Benoist, “Confronting Globalization,” Telos, Vol. 1996, No. 108, (Summer 1996), pp. 117–37. http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/confronting_globalization.pdf.

[5] For a discussion of the racial and cultural unity and relatedness of all Europeans, see for example the comments in Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe, 2nd edition (London: Arktos, 2013), pp. 236 ff. This position has also been argued for by many other New Right authors (including Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Pierre Krebs, Dominique Venner, Pierre Vial, etc.).

[6] Hans Freyer, “Tradition und Revolution im Weltbild,” Europäische Revue 10 (1934), pp. 74–75. Quoted in Muller, The Other God That Failed, p. 263.

[7] Another source which readers may reference on this matter is Michael O’Meara, “Race, Culture, and Anarchy,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 35–64. http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2OMeara.pdf.

[8] Nicolas Lahovary, Les peuples européens: leur passé ethnologique et leurs parentés réciproques,d’après les dernières recherches sanguines et anthropologiques (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), p. 35. Quoted in Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 21, n. 13.

[9] A position which is, needless to say, not equivalent to “racism” (whose distinguishing feature is the belief in racial superiority and hierarchy, not merely the belief that races are different and should live separately), as Alain de Benoist among other New Right authors have pointed out.

[10] See for example: the chapters “Life and Death of Civilizations” and “The Decline of Superior Races” in Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1995); the commentaries in Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (London: Arktos Media, 2010); the chapter “The Beauty and the Beast: Race and Racism in Europe” in Tomislav Sunić, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).

[11] Benoist, “What is Racism?,” p. 34.

[12] See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (London and New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2002). For a good overview of Tönnies’s ideas, see Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunić, “Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society,” Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1994). http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain6.html.

[13] Othmar Spann, Types of Economic Theory (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 61.

[14] As O’Meara noted, “emphasis on the social constituents of individualism by no means implies a hostility to personalism or a penchant for a faceless collectivism” (New Culture, New Right, pp. 113–14, n. 31), meaning that the rejection of individualism and the valuing of the community over the individual does not imply absolute and unlimited collectivism. Many other writers associated with the Conservative Revolution as well as the New Right have made this point as well.

[15] It must be clarified that this does not mean that every individual person who is individualist is necessarily an immoral person, or a person of bad quality. As Edgar Julius Jung pointed out, “he [the individualist] can be, personally, also a man striving for the good; he may even pay attention to and maintain the existing morals (mores). But he does not have any more the living connection with the significance of these morals” (The Rule of the Inferiour, vol. I [Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995], p. 53). Thus one can still maintain that individualism essentially means the “splitting-up” of the community, the weakening of bonds and solidarity which are essential to the existence of the true community. As Jung wrote, “community-spirit without a feeling-oriented connectedness with the community, without a supraindividualistic [above the individual] value-standard, is an illusion” (Ibid., p. 134).

[16] Ibid., p. 271.

[17] Tomislav Sunić, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, 3rd edition (London: Arktos, 2010), p. 128.

[18] Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1931), p. 69. Quoted in Hajo Funke and Elliot Yale Neaman, The Ideology of the Radical Right in Germany: Past and Present (Minneapolis: Institute of International Studies, College of Liberal Arts, 1991), p. 5.

 

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Tudor, Lucian. “Race, Identity, Community.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 6 August 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/08/race-identity-community/ >.

Note: This essay by Tudor has also been translated into Spanish as “Raza, Identidad, Comunidad” (published online 17 March 2014 by Fuerza Nacional Identitaria). We have also made this translated file available on our site here: Raza, Identidad, Comunidad

On the matters discussed in the above essay, see also a more complete exposition in Lucian Tudor, “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought,” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 83-112.

 

Identity vs. Globalism – Morgan

Identity vs. Globalism in Stockholm: The 2013 “Identitarian Ideas” Conference

By John Morgan

No American of European descent who sets foot on the sacred soil of Europe can help but feel a powerful connection back to his European heritage, no matter how far in the past it might be, nor can any such person who is not deluded escape the feeling of urgency that grips those who experience first-hand the death spiral in which this continent is currently locked. Such have been my feelings over the past several weeks, after I arrived for the first time on the European continent, specifically in Sweden.

The purpose of my trip here was to assist with Identitarian Ideas V, the fifth in a series of conferences in Stockholm sponsored by the Swedish identitarian organization, Motpol, which shares personnel with Arktos, the publishing venture of which I am a part.

Although I do not have a drop of Scandinavian blood in my veins (my background consists of various Germanic and British ethnicities), I cannot help but be impressed by what I have witnessed since coming here. Despite decades of radical liberalism, the Swedish people remain a proud, beautiful people, and when walking down the street in a Swedish city it is as if one is walking among Nordic gods and goddesses. The Swedes still have a sense of their own identity, even if time is drawing short for a real reawakening, if present trends continue: out of a total population of 9 million, 2 million are already immigrants, with more arriving by the boatload ever year, eager to benefit from the Swedes’ generous social programs.

As a European-American, I share the same feeling being in Sweden that Philippe Vardon spoke about at the conference – namely, that I feel at home anywhere on the continent of Europe, as it is my ancestral homeland, and is therefore a part of my own identity that can never be lost.

The theme of Identitarian Ideas V was “Identity vs. Globalization,” and the venue, as several of our Swedish hosts pointed out to me with a smile, was a place typically used by Swedish artists of a Leftist persuasion. It thus gave them great pleasure for us to occupy the space, even for a brief time. The event took place on Saturday, June 29.

The program began with Professor Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College, doubtless the most prominent paleoconservative intellectual in America today, who spoke on “‘Cultural Marxism’ and the Frankfurt School.” Prof. Gottfried began by contrasting the various branches of Marxism that have emerged over the last century. He pointed out that Communism as it was realized in the Soviet Union and by those governments which followed in its Marxist-Leninist footsteps tended to be quite socially conservative, by today’s standards, and that orthodox Leninists would no doubt have treated cultural Marxists in their own societies as dangerous subversives. Ironically, cultural Marxism can only thrive in a bourgeois-democratic society of the very type that Marx sought to overthrow.

The bridge from Marx to cultural Marxism was the Frankfurt School of Weimar Germany, which later migrated to the United States to escape the clutches of the National Socialists. The Frankfurt School promoted a form of Marxism very different from Bolshevism, and which was intended to take root specifically in the nations of Western Europe and North America. Prof. Gottfried pointed out that all of the major thinkers of the Frankfurt School were Jews, and indicated his belief that their efforts to attack the very foundations of Western civilization – the family, sexuality and gender roles, hierarchy, and so forth – was at least partially due to their conviction that Western bourgeois civilization is inherently anti-Semitic and must be destroyed in order to make the world safe for Jewry.

Interestingly, however, Prof. Gottfried believes that the founders of the School eventually came to regret the outcomes of their own efforts. He briefly recounted his experiences in studying with one of the Frankfurt School’s luminaries, Herbert Marcuse, while a graduate student at Yale in 1964. He recounted an anecdote in which Marcuse was derisively dismissive of a feminist rally that occurred on campus; those who laid the groundwork for cultural Marxism, he maintains, were repelled by the very social trends that they helped to initiate. But Prof. Gottfried’s view of the Frankfurt School was not entirely negative, and he claimed that the critical tools that they helped to fashion can be just as useful in the hands of the Right as of the Left; he pointed out that some of his own critics have referred to him as a Right-wing exponent of their doctrines.

The next speaker was the Swedish lawyer and Arktos staff member Tobias Ridderstråle, who spoke on “The Facts in the Julian Assange Case.” Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the organization which has caused great embarrassment to the American government in recent years with its release of large amounts of classified U.S. documents. Assange has been taking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than a year now to escape extradition to Sweden to face two accusations of sexual misconduct by Swedish women. Mr. Ridderstråle, with great humor, detailed the flimsiness of the evidence that has been brought against Assange and the strangeness of the charges that have been made in the Swedish courts, pointing out that there is most likely an ulterior motivation behind them. Although Mr. Ridderstråle did not specify what this motivation might be, it is clear that the American government is most likely the one pulling the strings behind these developments in an attempt to discredit and retaliate against him. While Assange did not come across as a saint in this talk, it was clear that there is more to his case than meets the eye.

Following this was the 20-year-old Austrian student Markus Willinger, who is currently studying at the University of Stuttgart. Willinger is the author of the recent Arktos publication, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers. Willinger gave a rousing call to action, telling the audience that his generation has been victimized by the extreme liberal policies that were enacted by the earlier generation that had come of age during the student revolts of the late 1960s (their counterparts in America are known as the “baby boomers”). If these trends do not change soon, Willinger explained ominously, his may be the last truly European generation to inhabit this continent. He detailed how the policies of the ‘68ers were a reaction against the fear of another fratricidal war breaking out on another European continent, which was not a bad notion in itself, but the ‘68ers completely misdiagnosed the problem by believing that the blame for the world wars lay with Europe’s own traditional values and culture. In order to regenerate Europe, its youth must take to the streets in the same way that the ‘68ers did, only this time in defense of traditional Europe rather than in opposition to it. He also said that this time the revolutionaries must fight for the right of all peoples to their unique identity, and not only the European identity, since the problem of identity is a universal one today, when every part of the world is confronted with globalization. His talk was extremely well-received by the audience, which consisted largely of young people, and we can hope that many of them were stirred to action by his words.

Next was another speaker on the theme of identity, Philippe Vardon, who is one of the leaders of the Bloc Identitaire of France, a youth movement which was one of the first identitarian groups. It stands for the right of the French to their traditional identity in the face of mass immigration and globalization – neither the USA or Allah, as Vardon said. Generation Identitaire gained international notoriety in November last year for their occupation of the mosque at Poiters, at the site where Charles Martel had turned back the Muslim invaders in 732. After showing some video of this, as well as his group’s storming of the headquarters of the Socialist Party in Paris last May, Vardon expressed appreciation at being able to address the conference at all, explaining that he had recently been turned back at the airport during an attempted trip to Canada by the police.

Vardon pointed out that, although his group stands opposed to the liberal policies of the ’68ers that Willinger had spoken about, they also have other concerns, such as opposition to the phenomenon of the commercialization of women’s bodies found in surrogate motherhood. Vardon explained that while the 20th century was that of ideology, the theme of the 21st would be identity, and those efforts which attempt to preserve it in the face of the new global consumer-culture. There is not an obsession with the past, he said, quoting Dominique Venner, but rather with that which never passes away. He also explained that the identitarians are opposed to totalitarianism, favoring direct democracy, since they believe that if the people are consulted, they will naturally choose the course of protecting their traditional identity. Vardon referred to his people as “alter-Europeans” who favor a new political order in Europe based on local communities rather than on international blocs. But the most important element, he said, and the most important training that must be given to the youth is action, on both the political and grassroots levels. He called for nothing less than the establishment of a counter-society, proclaiming that “the streets are our headquarters.” (The text of Vardon’s talk has been made available at Alternative Right, alternativeright.com/blog/the-streets-are-our-headquarters.)

The conference next moved to the geopolitical level with Manuel Ochsenreiter, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Zuerst!, a Right-wing news magazine in Germany which has a circulation of 70,000. Ochsenreiter has garnered attention in recent years for his coverage of the ongoing war in Syria, a country with which he has been intimately familiar through his many visits there, which began prior to the outbreak of the conflict. Ochsenreiter has been one of the few Western journalists to report from the Assad regime’s side. Using many of the photos that he has taken there to illustrate his points, Ochsenreiter pointed out the many falsehoods that have been reported by the Western media, such as when it was reported that fierce fighting was taking place in the streets of Aleppo: according to Ochsenreiter, who was there, life was going on as usual in the capital on that day, with only the sounds of fighting being audible from the outskirts of the city. He also recounted the story of a hospital he had visited which had been attacked by rebel artillery, but which other Western journalists had completely ignored in their reporting. The same has been true for many of the other atrocities committed by the rebel forces, such as the ongoing executions of Syrians and foreign journalists, not for the “crime” of supporting Assad (since many of those murdered do not support him), but rather for failing to support the rebels. For the Syrian people, Ochsenreiter explained, this war is not a civil war, but rather a war of the Syrian people against Islamist extremists, most of whom have come to Syria from elsewhere (many of the rebels do not speak Arabic, he said). Prior to the conflict, Ochsenreiter says, many of the Syrians were either ambivalent about or even negative towards Assad’s regime, but when faced with the brutality and extremism of the rebels, most have realized that they are much better off than they will be if the regime is toppled.

Next on the agenda was yours truly, who spoke on “The Past, Present and Future of Arktos.” I described the birth of Arktos in 2010 out of our previous company, Integral Tradition Publishing, and how we ended up establishing our office in India in order to keep our overhead costs low. We have managed to publish nearly 60 unique books in four languages since that time, and have established ourselves as the home of the European New Right in English (although we are not limited to that, of course). I also described how our books have attracted attention from across the political spectrum, from the pages of The American Conservative (which reviewed Paul Gottfried’s War and Democracy in April) to the liberal countercultural magazine AdBusters, which ran excerpts from our edition of the Finnish radical ecologist Pentti Linkola’s book, Can Life Prevail?, in their May/June 2011 issue, simultaneous with their calls for what later became the Occupy Wall Street movement. This means that Arktos has been enjoying some success in attaining its goal of reaching readers outside of the usual crowd who would normally never pick up a “radical Right-wing” text, which has always been part of our intention in doing Arktos. I also described a few of our upcoming projects.

The last speaker of the day was the Swedish author Lars Holger Holm, who was introduced as a “Renaissance man,” with his extensive knowledge across a wide range of subjects. Holm spoke about and read from his new book, Gotisk, co-authored with the Dane, Kenneth Maximilian Geneser, which was recently published in Swedish by Arktos. The book describes the ancient Gothic past of Scandinavia, in particular their leader chieftain Theodoric, and his words, which evoked the age of their ancestors, seemed to have a hypnotic effect on the largely Scandinavian audience. As the conference came to an end, the Norwegian neofolk group Solstrom gave a live performance, providing the perfect musical accompaniment to our verbal efforts to define the essence of the European identity.

After the end of the conference proper came my favorite part of any such event, which was the opportunity to meet and speak with the members of the audience, many of whom number among Arktos’ clientele and with whom I usually only have contact through the Internet. I am always impressed by the many intelligent people from a wide diversity of backgrounds who appreciate what Arktos and our colleagues on the “alternative Right” such as Counter-Currents are doing. For me, meeting our audience on this occasion was even more exciting, as I would estimate that at least 90% of those in attendance were under the age of 40, which is in sharp contrast to similar events I have attended in the United States. This is not to criticize the efforts of our wise elders, but it was refreshing to see so many of those who will help to shape the future of Europe who were willing to sacrifice a beautiful summer Saturday in Stockholm to hear what we had to say.

In conclusion, I can only say that my experiences here in Sweden have given me great cause for hope, but also a great deal of envy in regard to what we are lacking in America. The efforts of the European identitarians, by overcoming the baggage of the “old Right” and by offering fresh perspectives and a genuine identity rooted in traditional values to the youth of this continent, are beginning to bear fruit, and I believe they will shake European civilization to its foundations in the coming years. On the other side of the Atlantic, while there have been many promising developments in the United States in recent years, we have yet to see anything approaching a real alternative culture or community based on these principles arise, nor have we seen much street-level action. But I believe this has to be the way forward throughout the Western world. Publishing books, running Websites and holding conferences are indeed important, but if this doesn’t eventually lead to activity in the real world, we will remain nothing more than a cult on the margins of society. As a traditionalist, I naturally believe that riding the tiger of modernity is important, but I also don’t think it’s time to withdraw from the battlefield just yet. Let us draw inspiration from our European brothers and sisters who are still in the trenches, undergo an inner transformation in how we conduct and understand our lives, and set about the task of reordering the world around us.

Videos of all the talks from the conference are now available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtCUj4nkms1FOFZYEFwCyogAeYHkiISE8

 

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Morgan, John. “Identity vs. Globalism in Stockholm: The 2013 “Identitarian Ideas” Conference.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 5 July 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/07/identity-vs-globalism-in-stockholm-identitarian-ideas-5/ >.

 

Tribute to Venner – Benoist

Tribute to Dominique Venner

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations: Czech, Greek

The reasons for living and the reasons for dying are often the same. This was definitely the case for Dominique Venner, whose gesture aimed at bringing his life and death into deep accord. He said he chose to die in the way that was the most honorable in certain circumstances, particularly when words become powerless to describe, to express what we feel. Dominique Venner ultimately died as he had lived, with the same will, the same lucidity. Most striking to all who knew him was to see how the whole trajectory of his existence is a pure and right line, a perfectly straight line of extreme righteousness.

Honor above Life

The gesture made by Dominique Venner is obviously a move dictated by a sense of honor, honor above life, and even those who, for personal or other reasons, oppose suicide, even those who, unlike me, do not find him admirable, must have respect for his actions, because we must have respect for all that is done from a sense of honor.

I am not talking about politics. By July 1967, Dominique Venner had definitely broken with any form of political action. He was a careful observer of political life, and of course he made his feelings known. But I think that what was essential for him lay elsewhere, as amply shown by many things already said today.

Dominique Venner put ethics above all, and this was already his view as a young activist. It remained so, when gradually the young activist turned into a historian, a meditative historian, as he said. Dominique Venner was quite interested in the Homeric texts, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which he saw the founding of the great immemorial European tradition, primarily for ethical reasons: the heroes of the Iliad never teach moral lessons, they give ethical examples, and ethics is inseparable, of course, from aesthetics.

The Beautiful Determines the Good

Dominique Venner was not one of those who believe that the good determines the beautiful, he was one of those who think that the beautiful determines the good; he believed that ethical judgments that focus on men are not so much based on their opinions or ideas, but are a function of their greater or lesser qualities of being, and first and foremost the quintessential human quality that he summed up in one word: comportment.

Comportment

Comportment, which is a way of being, a way of life, and a way of dying. Comportment which is a style, the style of which he spoke so beautifully in The Rebel Heart, a book published in 1994, and, of course, in all his works, and I think especially in the book he published in 2009 on the German writer Ernst Jünger. In this book, Dominique said very clearly that if Jünger gave, and gives, us a great example, it is not only through his writings, but also because this man, who had a long life and died at the age of 103, never failed the demands of comportment.

Dominique Venner was a secretive, attentive, demanding man—demanding of himself first of all. He had somehow internalized all the rules of comportment: never let go, never give up, never explain, never complain, because comportment (tenue) brings to mind and derives from reserve (retenue). Obviously, when we talk about such things, we must seem like men from Mars to many dwellers in this age of smartphones and Virgin Megastores. To speak of equanimity, nobility of soul, high-mindedness, comportment, is to employ words whose very meanings escape many, and this is probably why the Philistines and the Lilliputians — those who write these parochial newsletters for right-thinking people that the mainstream media have become today — were unable for the most part to comprehend the very meaning of his gesture, which they tried to reduce to petty considerations.

A Way of Protesting Against the Suicide of Europe

Dominique Venner was neither an extremist nor a nihilist, and, above all, he never despaired. Indeed, his long reflections on history led him to develop a kind of optimism. He held that history is unpredictable and always open, that it both makes men and is made by men. Dominique Venner rejected all fatalism, all forms of despair.

I speak paradoxically, because it has not been sufficiently noticed, that his desire to commit suicide was a way to protest against suicide, a way to protest against the suicide of Europe which he observed for so long.

A Suicide of Rational Hope as a Founding Act

Dominique Venner simply could no longer stand the Europe he loved, his homeland, fading bit by bit from history, forgetful of herself, forgetful of her memory, her genius, her identity, somehow drained of the energy for which she was known through the centuries. Because he could not stand the suicide of Europe, Dominique Venner opposed his own, which he was not suicide of collapse, of resignation, but rather a suicide of hope.

Europe, said Dominique, is in dormition. He wanted to awaken her. He wanted, as he said, to rouse slumbering consciences. We must be very clear on this point: there was no despair in Dominique Venner’s gesture. There was a call to act, to think, to continue. He said: I give, I sacrifice the rest of my life in an act of protest and foundation. We must, I think, hold onto his word “foundation.” This word “foundation” was bequeathed to us by a man whose last concern was to die standing.

A Western Samurai

Dominique Venner was not nostalgic, but he was a true historian who was interested, of course, in the past with a view of the future; he did not study the past as solace or shelter; he simply knew that peoples who forget their past, who lose all consciousness of their past, are thereby deprived of a future. You can’t have one without the other: the past and the future are two dimensions of the moment, neither more important than the other: dimensions of depth.

And in this process, Dominique Venner remembered, of course, a number of memories and images. He remembered the Homeric heroes and gods; he remembered the old Romans, those who preceded him on the path of voluntary death: Cato, Seneca, Regulus, and many others. He bore in mind Plutarch’s writings and Tacitus’ histories. He had in mind the memory of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, whose death in so many ways is similar to his own. And it certainly is not a coincidence that his last book, that will soon appear from Pierre-Guillaume Roux, is called A Western Samurai: a Western samurai!

And on the cover of this book, A Western Samurai, we see an image, a print, a famous engraving: “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” by Albrecht Dürer. Dominique Venner deliberately chose this engraving. Some time ago, Jean Cau devoted to the character of the knight a wonderful book that also bore the title: The Knight, Death, and the Devil. In one of his latest columns, written just days before his death, Dominique Venner paid tribute to this very knight who, he says, on highways and byways, will continue always onward toward his destiny, toward his duty, between death and the devil.

“The Knight, Death, and the Devil”: Engraved by Dürer in 1513

And in this column, Dominique Venner spoke of an anniversary. It was in 1513, 500 years ago exactly, that Dürer engraved this print “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” and this emphasis gave me a very simple idea that anyone could have: I looked up the dates of birth and death of Albrecht Dürer, the man who engraved “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” 500 years ago exactly, and I realized that Dürer was born in 1471; he was born May 21, 1471. Dürer was born on May 21; Dominique Venner chose to die on May 21. If this is a coincidence, it is extraordinary, but one is not forced to believe in coincidences.

The Rebel Heart Will Always be There

That’s what I wanted to say in memory of Dominique Venner, now departed on a great wild hunt, in a paradise where you can see the wild geese fly. Those who knew him, and I knew him for 50 years, those who knew him will probably say that they have lost a friend. But I think they are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that they should know that, since May 21, 2013, at 2:42 p.m., he will necessarily always be there. Still there alongside the rebellious hearts and free spirits who have always faced the eternal coalition of Tartuffes, Trissotins, and Torquemadas.

 

Source: http://www.polemia.com/les-raisons-de-vivre-et-les-raisons-de-mourir-sont-bien-souvent-les-memes/

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De Benoist, Alain. “Tribute to Dominique Venner.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 26 June 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/06/tribute-to-dominique-venner-2/ >.

Note: See also the article “Reasons for a Voluntary Death” by Dominique Venner.

 

Tribute to Venner – Faye

Tribute to Dominique Venner

By Guillaume Faye

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations Czech, Greek

Dominique Venner’s suicide on May 21 at Notre Dame: Marine Le Pen bowed to this gesture of awakening consciousness, which may seem surprising, but it is to her credit. A topless representative of Femen, a group of feminist buffoons, tried to smear his memory the next day, mimicking his suicide in the choir of Notre Dame. On her flat chest was painted: “May Fascism rest in Hell.” It is the second time that these naked groupies entered the cathedral with impunity, even though there is security screening at the entrance. AFP journalists were notified in advance to cover this “happening” and are therefore probably complicit.

The Leftist media and politicians (especially the pathetic Harlem Désir) together accused Venner, post mortem, of incitement to violence, of provocation. Spitting toads. Clearly Venner’s Roman gesture, as tragic as history itself, scared these people, who spend their whole lives crawling.

Venner has given his death as an example, not from despair but from hope: the symbolic sacrifice encourages our youth, in the face of the ongoing foundering of European civilization in its bloodlines and its values, to resist and fight at the cost of death, which is the price of war. A war that has begun. Venner wanted us to understand that victory can be achieved in the history of peoples if the fighters are ready to die for their cause. It is for the future generations of resistant and fighting Europeans that Dominique Venner gave his life. He was an “awakener of the people,” in the words of his friend Jean Mabire.

* * *

And he killed himself, though he was not a Christian in the ordinary sense, on the central altar of Notre Dame de Paris, that is to say, the heart of one of the busiest sacred and historical places of all Europe. (Europe: Venner’s real, authentic homeland, not the marshmallow sham of the current European Union.) Notre Dame, a place of memory much richer than, for example, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. He wanted to give his sacrifice a special meaning, like the old Roman traditions in which the life of a man, to the end, is devoted to the country he loves and must serve. Like Cato, Venner never compromised on principles. Nor on matters of necessary style—of comportment, writing, and ideas—which have nothing to do with posturing, looks, and pedantry. His sobriety displayed, in essence, the power of his lesson. A distant master, which was not unrelated to the Stoic tradition, a rebel with heart and courage not vanity and bluster, a complete man of action and reflection, he never deviated from his path. One day he told me that you should never waste time criticizing traitors, cowards, self-interested bellwethers; nor, of course, should you forgive them; just ignore them and press on. The silence of contempt.

* * *

This is the Dominique Venner who, in 1970, brought me into the Resistance, which I have never denied or left since. He was my recruiting sergeant. His voluntary death — echoing Mishima’s more than Montherlant’s – is a founding act. And it filled me with a joyful sadness, like a flash of lightning. A warrior does not die in bed. The sacrificial death of this man of honor demands that we honor his memory and his work, not to mourn but to fight. But fight for what?

Not just for resistance, but for reconquest. The counter-offensive, in other words. After one of my essays in which I developed this idea, Venner sent me letter of approval in his elegant handwriting. His sacrifice will not be vain or ridiculous. The voluntary death of Dominique Venner is a call to victory.

 

Source: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2013/06/24/g-faye-hommage-a-dominique-venner.html

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Faye, Guillaume. “Tribute to Dominique Venner.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 25 June 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/06/tribute-to-dominique-venner/ >.

 

Ten Theses on Democracy – Benoist

Ten Theses on Democracy

By Alain de Benoist

1. Since everyone nowadays claims to be a democrat, democracy is defined in several mutually contradictory ways. The etymological approach is misleading. To define democracy on the basis of the modern regimes which have (rather belatedly) proclaimed themselves to be democratic is questionable to say the least. The historical approach ultimately appears to be the most reasonable:  to attempt to define democracy, one must first know what it meant for those who invented it. Ancient democracy brings together a community of citizens in an assembly, granting them equal political rights. The notions of citizenship, liberty, popular sovereignty and equal rights are all closely interconnected. Liberty stems from one’s identity as a member of a people, which is to say from one’s origins.* This is liberty as participation. The liberty of the folk commands all other liberties; common interest prevails over particular interests. Equality of rights derives from the status as an equal citizen enjoyed by all free men. It is a political tool. The essential difference between ancient democracies and modern ones is the fact that the former do not know the egalitarian individualism on which the latter are founded.

2. Liberalism and democracy are not synonyms. Democracy is a ‘-cracy’, which is to say a form of political power, whereas liberalism is an ideology for the limitation of all political power. Democracy is based on popular sovereignty; liberalism, on the rights of the individual. Liberal representative democracy implies the delegation of sovereignty, which strictly speaking – as Rousseau had realised – is tantamount to abdication by the people. In a representative system, the people elect representatives who govern by themselves: the electorate legitimises a genuine power which lies exclusively in the hands of representatives. In a genuine system of popular sovereignty, elected candidates are only entrusted with expressing the will of the people and the nation; they do not embody it.

3. Many arguments can be raised against the classic critique of democracy as the reign of incompetence and the ‘dictatorship of numbers.’ Democracy should neither be confused with the reign of numbers nor with the majority principle. Its underlying principle is rather a ‘holistic’ one, namely: acknowledgement of the fact that the people, as such, hold political prerogatives. The equality of rights does not reflect any natural equality; rather, it is a right deriving from citizenship, the exercise of which is what enables individual participation. Numerical equality must be distinguished from the geometrical view, which respects proportions. The purpose of majority rule is not to determine the truth; it is merely to choose among different options. Democracy does not stand in contrast to the idea of strong power any more than it stands in contrast to the notions of authority, selection or elite.

4. There is a difference between the notion of generic competence and specific competence. If the people have all the necessary information, it is perfectly capable of judging whether it is being well-governed or not. The emphasis placed on ‘competence’ nowadays – where this word is increasingly understood to mean ‘technical knowledge’ – is extremely ambiguous. Political competence has to do not with knowledge but with decision-making, as Max Weber has shown in his works on scientists and politicians. The idea that the best government is that of ‘scientists’ and ‘experts’ betrays a complete lack of understanding of politics; when applied, it generally leads to catastrophic results. Today this idea is being used to legitimise technocracy, whereby power – in accordance with the technical ideology and belief in the ‘end of ideologies’ – becomes intrinsically opposed to popular sovereignty.

5. In a democratic system, citizens all hold equal political rights not by virtue of any alleged inalienable rights possessed by the ‘human person,’ but because they all belong to the same national and folk community – which is to say, by virtue of their citizenship. At the basis of democracy lies not the idea of ‘society,’ but of a community of citizens who are all heirs to the same history and/or wish to carry this history on towards a common destiny. The fundamental principle behind democracy is not ‘one man, one vote,’ but ‘one citizen, one vote.’

6. The key notion for democracy is not numbers, suffrage, elections or representation, but participation. ‘Democracy is a folk’s participation in its own destiny’ (Moeller van den Bruck). It is that form of government which acknowledges each citizen’s right to take part in public affairs, particularly by appointing the government and lending or denying his consent to it. So it is not institutions that make democracy, but rather the people’s participation in institutions. The maximum of democracy coincides not with the ‘maximum of liberty’ or the ‘maximum of equality,’ but with the maximum of participation.

7. The majority principle is adopted because unanimity, which the notions of general will and popular sovereignty imply in theory, is in practice impossible to achieve. The notion of majority can be treated as either a dogma (in which case it is a substitute for unanimity) or as a technique (in which case it is an expedient). Only the latter view assigns a relative value to the minority or opposition, as this may become tomorrow’s majority. Its adoption raises the question of the field of application of pluralism and of its limits. We should not confuse the pluralism of opinions, which is legitimate, with the pluralism of values, which proves to be incompatible with the very notion of the people. Pluralism finds its limit in subordination to the common good.**

8. The evolution of modern liberal democracies, which are elective polyarchies, clearly reflects the degeneration fo the democratic ideal. Parties do not operate democratically as institutions. The tyranny of money rigs competition and engenders corruption. Mass voting prevents individual votes from proving decisive. Elected candidates are not encouraged to keep their commitments. Majority vote does not take account of the intensity of people’s preferences. Opinions are not formed independently: information is both biased (which prevents the free determination of choices) and standardised (which reinforces the tyranny of public opinion). The trend towards the standardising of political platforms and arguments makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between different options. Political life thus becomes purely negative and universal suffrage comes to be perceived as an illusion. The result is political apathy, a principle that is the opposite of participation, and hence democracy.

9. Universal suffrage does not exhaust the possibilities of democracy: there is more to citizenship than voting. A return to political procedures in keeping with the original spirit of democracy requires an assessment of all those practices which reinforce the direct link between people and their government and extend local democracy, for instance: the fostering of participation through municipal and professional assemblies, the spread of popular initiatives and referendums, and the development of qualitative methods for expressing consent. In contrast to liberal democracies and tyrannical ‘popular democracies,’ which invoke the notions of liberty, equality and the people, organic democracy might be centred on the idea of fraternity.

10. Democracy means the power of the people, which is to say the power of an organic community that has historically developed in the context of one or more given political structures – for instance, a city, nation, or empire. Where there is no folk but only a collection of individual social atoms, there can be no democracy. Every political system which requires the disintegration or levelling of peoples in order to operate – or the erosion of individuals’ awareness of belonging to an organic folk community – is to be regarded as undemocratic.

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Added Notes:

* Here Alain de Benoist refers to “a people” or “folk” (equivalent to terms in other European languages such as popolo in Italian and Volk in German) in the particularistic ethnic and cultural sense which, which is distinguishable from an undifferentiated mass of individuals, to which the term “people” is also sometimes applied. Thus, a true people or folk is not the same thing as a mere mass, for the former (the people) makes up an organic cultural community while the latter (the mass) is a society in the sense of a mere collection of individuals. On this topic, see also “‘Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft’: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society” by Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunic.

** Earlier in this work, The Problem of Democracy, Benoist had written (pg. 66) that “The way in which the political rights assigned as a guarantee to the opposition are commonly assimilated to the rights from which social minorities wish to benefit is itself problematic: for political categories cannot always be transposed on a social level. This may lead to a serious failure to distinguish between citizen minorities and non-citizen groups installed – whether temporarily or not – in the same land as the former. ‘Pluralism’ may here be used as a rather specious argument to justify the establishment of a ‘multicultural’ society that severely threatens national and folk identity, while stripping the notion of the people of its essential meaning.”

 

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The “Ten Theses on Democracy” are excerpted from: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos Media, 2011), pp. 100–103. (See this essay in PDF format here: Ten Theses on Democracy).

Note: These theses were also partially translated in Spanish as “Diez Tesis sobre la Democracia” in the first section of Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, Nº 39, “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia: De Carl Schmitt a Alain de Benoist, Vol. 1” (23 Enero 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/01/elementos-n-39-una-critica-metapolitica.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 39 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 39 – Democracia I). The complete Spanish translation of the Ten Theses (Diez Tesis) is available in the Spanish translation of Benoist’s book: ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

Additional note: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy was originally published in French as Démocratie: Le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), and is also available in a German translation as Demokratie: Das Problem (Tübingen & Zürich: Hohenrain, 1986), in Italian translation as Democrazia: Il problema (Firenze: Arnaud, 1985), and in Spanish translation as ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

 

The West against Europe – Sunic

The West against Europe

By Tomislav Sunic

The following is the English translation of my speech in French, given in Lyon, France, on May 25, for the French identitarians (students, members of the “GUD” and “Europe Identité.”) The speech was delivered in honor of the late Dominique Venner, a historian and philosopher who committed suicide on May 21. On May 26, the day after my speech in Lyon, many GUD and “Europe Identité attendants participated in mass demonstrations in Paris against the recently adopted law by the French government on “same sex marriage.”

The term ‘Occidentalism’ exists only in the French language and has a very specific meaning. Often the words ‘Occident’ and ‘occidentalisme’ obtain specific meanings according to its user and the user’s profile. The term ‘occidentalisme’ is never used in the German or in the English language. Even the French word ‘l’Occident’, having a wider geographic significance, is translated into the German language as the ‘West’ — der Westen. The same goes for the English language in which the French noun ‘l’Occident‘ is translated into English as “the West,” a subject of many books and translations. In this regard Patrick Buchanan, a former adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a conservative large-circulation author, published a decade ago his bestseller The Death of the West (La Mort de l’Occident), where he laments about the West being invaded by millions of non-Christian immigrants. According to Buchanan, America and Europe are both part of the West.

Yet we know well that America and Europe are not synonymous despite the fact that they are for the time being still populated by majorities of pure-bred Europeans. Very often in our recent history, these two large continental land masses, despite their quasi-identical population, have waged terrible wars against each other.

In the Slavic languages the noun ‘Occident’ and the adjective ‘occidental’ do not exist either. Instead, Croats, Czechs or Russians use the noun ‘Zapad’, which means “the West.”

The French noun ‘occidentalisme’ (‘westernization’) indicates a notion of an ideology, and not an idea of a stable time-bound and space-bound entity as is the case with the noun ‘L’Occident’. I’d like to remind you that the French title of the book by Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, or in French, Le déclin de l’Occident, does not accurately reflect the meaning of the German title. The German word ‘Untergang’ signifies the end of all the ends, the final collapse, and it is a stronger word than the French term ‘déclin’, which implies a gradation, a “declination of evil” so to speak, leaving, however, an anticipation that a U-turn could be made at the very last minute. This is not the case in the German language where the noun ‘Untergang’ indicates a one-way street, an irreversible and tragic end. The same goes for the German noun ‘Abendland’, which when translated into French or English, means “the land of the setting sun”, having a largely metaphysical significance.

I must bring to your attention these lexical nuances in order to properly conceptualize our subject, namely ‘occidentalisme’ i.e. Westernization. One must keep in mind that the phrases “The Occident” and “the West” in different European languages often carry different meanings, often causing misunderstandings.

No doubt that the terms the West (‘L’Occident ‘) and Westernization (‘occidentalisation’) underwent a semantic shift. Over the last forty years they have acquired in the French language a negative meaning associated with globalism, vulgar Americanism, savage liberalism, and “the monotheism of the market”, well described by the late Roger Garaudy. We are a long way off from the 60’s and 70’s of the preceding century when the journal Défense de l’Occident was published in France comprising the names of authors well known in our circles. The same goes for the French politico-cultural movement Occident, which back in the sixties, held out a promise both for the French nationalists and the entire European nationalist youth.

The two terms, ‘Occident’ and ‘occidentalism’ which are today lambasted by the French identitarian and nationalist circles, are still the subjects of eulogies among East European identitarians and nationalists who suffer from an inferiority complex about their newly found post-communist European identity. In Poland, in Hungary or in Croatia, for example, to invoke “the West” is often a way to highlight one’s great culture, or a way to boast of being a stylish man of the world.

I’d like to remind you that during the communist epoch East Europeans were not only annoyed by communist bullying and ukases, but also felt offended by their status as second-class European citizens, especially when Westerners, namely the French and the English, used the term ‘East’ in order to describe their neck of the woods in Europe, namely “Eastern Europe” or “l’Europe de l’Est.” Moreover, the French language uses a parallel adjective “oriental” in designing eastern Europe, i.e. “L’Europe orientale” — an adjective whose disambiguation, frankly speaking, makes East Europeans furious. The French adjective “oriental” reminds East Europeans of the Orient, of Turkey, of Arabia, of Islam — notions under which they absolutely refuse to be catalogued. Even those East Europeans who are perfectly proficient in the French language and know French culture, prefer, in the absence of other words, that the French-speaking people label their part of Europe as “Eastern Europe”, but never as “l’Europe orientale.”

Balkanization and Globalization

The history of words and semantic shifts does not stop here. All East Europeans, whether left or right, anti-globalists or globalists, and even the ruling political class in Eastern Europe like to identify themselves as members of “Mitteleuropa” and not as citizens of Eastern Europe. The German term Mitteleuropa means “central Europe”, a term harking back to the nostalgic days of the Habsburg Empire, to the biedermeier style, to the sweetness of life once delivered by the House of Austria where Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Hungarians, and even Romanians and Ukrainians belonged not so long ago.

The notion of adherence to Europe, especially in this part of Eastern Europe, is further aggravated by the inadvertent usage of words. Thus the term ‘the Balkans’ and the adjective ‘Balkan’, which is used in a neutral sense in France when describing southeastern Europe, have an offensive connotation in Croatian culture, even if that designation carries no pejorative meaning. The perception Croats have about themselves is that they are at loggerheads with the Other, namely their Serbian or Bosnian neighbors.

And there is a big difference between how the term ‘Balkans’ is seen among the French or English where it typically carries a neutral connotation, as one often sees in geopolitical studies, However, in the eyes of Croats, the terms ‘Balkan’ and ‘Balkanization’ signify not only a geopolitical meltdown of the state; especially among Croat nationalists and identitarians, these terms provoke feelings associated with barbaric behavior, political inferiority, and the image of racial decay of their White identity.

In addition, the term “balkanesque’ in the Croatian language often induces negative feelings referring to a blend of various racial and cultural identities originating in Asia and not in Europe. One can often hear Croats of different persuasions teasing each other for their allegedly bad behavior with the quip: “Wow, you’re a real balkanesque dude!” In the Croatian daily vernacular, this means having an uncivilized behavior, or simply being a “redneck.”

In Serbia, this is not the case. Since the Serb identity is real and well-rooted in the historical time and space of the Balkans, it has no pejorative meaning.

The Germans, who know best the psychology of the peoples of Central Europe and of the Balkans, are well aware of these conflicting identities among the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In fact, the German term “der Balkanezer” has a strong offensive meaning in the German vocabulary.

Which Europe?

Let us move further to Europe. Of course, to the famed European Union. What exactly does it mean to be a good European today? Let’s be honest. In view of the massive influx of non-European immigrants, especially from the Middle East and North Africa, all Europeans, whether native French, native English, or “natives” from all parts of Europe, have become good “balkanesque Balkanisers.” Indeed, what does it mean today to be a German, to be French or to be an American, considering the fact that more than 10–15 percent of Germans and French and more than 30 percent of U.S. citizens are of non-European and non-White origin? Visiting Marseille feels like visiting an Algerian city. The Frankfurt airport resembles the airport of Hong Kong. The areas around Neukölln in Berlin emit an odor of the Lebanese Kasbah. The soil, the turf, the earth, the blood, so dear to Dominique Venner or Maurice Barrès, so dear to all of us, what does it mean today? Absolutely nothing.

It would be easy to blame the aliens (“allogènes”) as the only guilty ones. One must admit, though, that it is ourselves, the Europeans, who are primarily responsible for the Westernization and therefore for the loss of our identity. While doing so, no matter how much one can rightly blame the alleged ignorance of the Americans, at least the Americans are not torn apart by small time intra-European tribalism. Possibly, the Americans of European descent can become tomorrow the spearhead of the rebirth of the new Euro-white identity. One must confess that racial identity awareness among White American nationalists is stronger than among European nationalists.

In the Europe of tomorrow, in the possible best of all the worlds — even with the aliens gone for good, it is questionable whether the climate will be conducive to great brotherly hugs between the Irish and the English, between the Basques and Castilians, between the Serbs and the Croats, between the Corsicans and the French. Let’s be honest. The whole history of Europe, the entire history of Europeans over the last two millennia has resulted in endless fratricidal wars. This still applies to “l’Europe orientale”, namely “Eastern Europe,” which continues to be plagued by interethnic hatreds. The latest example is the recent war between two similar peoples, Serbs and Croats. Who could guarantee us that the same won’t happen tomorrow again even under the presumption that the influx of Asians and Africans would come to an end?

To “be a good European” means nothing today. Declaring oneself a “good “Westerner” is meaningless as well. Being rooted in one’s soil in the globalist world has absolutely no significance today because our neighborhoods, being populated by aliens, along with ourselves, are subject to the same consumer culture. There might be something paradoxical happening with the arrival of non-Europeans: endless wars and disputes between European nationalists, i.e. between the Poles and Germans, between the Serbs and Croats, between the Irish and English — seem to have become outdated. The constant influx of non-Europeans to our European lands makes the designation of “European Europe” a lexical absurdity.

Our duty is to define ourselves first as heirs of European memory, even though we may live outside Europe; in Australia, Chile and America, or for that matter on another planet. One must admit that all of us “good Europeans” in the Nietzschean sense of the word, all of us can change our religion, our habits, our political opinions, our land, our turf, our nationality, and even our passports. But we can never escape our European heredity.

Not the aliens, but the capitalists, the banksters, the “antifas” and the architects of the best of all the worlds are our main enemies. In order to resist them it behooves us to revive our racial awareness and our cultural heritage. Both go hand in hand. The reality of our White race and our culture cannot be denied. We can change everything and even move to another planet. Our inheritance, that is, our gene pool, we must never change.

Race, as Julius Evola and Ludwig Clauss teach us, is not just biological data. Our race is our spiritual responsibility which alone ensures our European survival.

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Sunic, Tomislav. “The West against Europe.” The Occidental Observer, 2 June 2013. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/06/the-west-against-europe/ >.

 

In Search of Anti-Semitism – Gottfried

In Search of Anti-Semitism

By Paul Gottfried

Among those authors considered politically incorrect, and even those considered really politically incorrect, Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame. A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach as “the professors anti-Semites love.” Alluding to the fact that university authorities have been trying to force the outspoken MacDonald out of his tenured position, the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.” We also learn that this clinical psychologist is “considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.”

It would be ridiculous to imagine the same ignominy would be visited on MacDonald if he were a black sociologist making critical remarks about white people. Assuming that he were a designated victim, he would be allowed to compose for profit and prestige diatribes against white Christian males, possibly from a cushy university post at whatever salary illustrious defamers of Euro-Americans are now earning. And if he were a Jew or Christian attacking Christians as the agents of human evil, the now browbeaten MacDonald could make a king’s ransom at some well-heeled institute or as a feature writer for The New Republic or New York Times.

Readers of this website are aware of the lunatic double standard that has been imposed on intellectuals throughout the Western world, almost always by Westerners themselves, for the purpose of determining who can criticize whom. (By now this has become a permanent aspect of “democratic” regimes.)

Plainly MacDonald is not playing by the establishment rules when he observes that Jews have worked at weakening those non-Jewish societies in which they have lived. Although this thesis seems to me to be a bit too generalized, I have no objection to letting MacDonald go on trying to prove it.

In his recently published anthology of essays, Cultural Insurrections, it would be proper to note that MacDonald makes assumptions here that I have questioned in my review of his three-volume, monumental work on the Jews since Moses. I continue to find some of the cognitive disparities he stresses between Ashkenazi Jews and Euro-Americans to be overstated or at least under-demonstrated. If they were in fact as stark as MacDonald insists they are, I would believe that Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans as natural inferiors or as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization (or what remains of it) without a Jewish master class. I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.

It also seems that certain Jewish behavioral patterns MacDonald outlines are not uniquely Jewish. Other minorities such as Protestant non-conformists and later Irish Catholics in England (and in the U.S.), Huguenots in France, and Old Believers in Tsarist Russia, have shown exactly the same propensity for radical social causes, partly as acts of defiance against what they viewed as regimes that had failed to accord them full legal and/or social recognition.

Sephardic and German Jews who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed hell-bent on joining upper-class Protestants and they usually disappeared into the dominant gene pool within a few generations. I am not convinced that Jewish behavior toward Christians follows a biologically determined strategy aimed at the control of resources. My lifelong impression from being around them is that Jews don’t like Christians because of historical grievances, just the way Irish Catholics continue to rage against Protestant Yankees for real amd imaginary offenses inflicted on their ancestors.

Although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here, it is doubtful that these dividing lines operate strictly according to biological conditioning. And it seems even less likely that they are shaped by the natural desire to control resources, in competition against other groups. Much of what MacDonald cites as Jewish behavior is hostility, mixed with anxiety, rather than competitiveness. MacDonald is illustrating culturally subversive activities that go well beyond any attempt to achieve group competitive advantage measured by socio-economic success. Assailing the moral foundations of a Christian middle-class society as pathological and anti-Semitic, a tendency MacDonald proves Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly engaged in, is not simply an attack on the material resources of the dominant society. What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior; and one may certainly question the biological reductionism used to explain it.

Having raised these critical points, I should also mention that MacDonald builds a thoroughly cogent case that the creation of “modernity” and the launching of a succession of indignant social crusades against bourgeois Christian civilization by Jewish intellectuals and political activists has usually betokened some degree of malice. But as I mentioned above, and as MacDonald is well aware, Jews are not the only minority that has attempted to subvert dominant outside cultures. They’re just better at doing this than any other group. Jewish intellectuals and activists excel at agitating in the name of some presumed moral high ground, acting like the cunning or resentful priestly class, to which Nietzsche compared the Jews in Genealogy of Morals. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jews are good at transmitting “slave morality,” without being (immediately) infected themselves.

MacDonald’s newest anthology offers further evidence of what he understands as the Jewish practice of burrowing from within to weaken the cultural coherence of gentile societies. And he offers abundant proof that this burrowing has and is continuing to occur. Whether he is dealing with the predominantly Jewish Frankfurt School and its cultural influences, the role played by Jewish activists in opposing controls on immigration throughout the last hundred years, the penetration and takeover of the American Right by the neoconservatives, or the pressures placed on politicians and political parties by Zionist organizations, MacDonald creates the impression that Jews have worked collectively toward two ends: lessening the cohesion of gentile society and promoting specifically Jewish national ends.

An argument I have used in the past to counter his generalizations is that “not every Jewish community at all times and in all places have acted in this way”; nonetheless, MacDonald could respond to my objections by pointing out that his analysis applies to American Jews for at least the last several generations. And he offers evidence that the same behavioral patterns as the one he discerns among the predominantly Eastern European Jews in the U.S. could already be seen among the relatively assimilated German Jews since their emancipation in Europe.

The same radicalization could be perceived among German Jewish intellectuals going back to the beginnings of Marxian socialism. And the cultural Marxism that has now taken off in a big way had its origin among alienated or embittered German Jews of the interwar period, who later emigrated to the U.S. The present multicultural fixation that has taken Western Europe, Canada and the U.S. by storm was largely the creation of German Jews.

But the group MacDonald’s brief leaves me wondering about most is the white Christian majority: They are jerked around because they have accepted this role for themselves. My own works on the politics of guilt underlines this tendency: Euro-Americans have become emotionally and sociologically predisposed toward aggrieved minorities that condemn them for politically incorrect attitudes. But have Jewish priests been necessary to get the Christian majority to practice slave morality? My answer is that “it helps but isn’t absolutely necessary.”

The institution of learning at which I work and the German Anabaptist denomination to which it was long connected are paradigmatically PC. Furthermore, Lancaster County, where our college is located, registered the largest vote for Obama in the Democratic primary of any county in Pennsylvania that’s not predominantly black. This result was owed much to Church of the Brethren, whose members in their zany anti-racism and open-borders postures make Abe Foxman sound relatively sane. The chance that such radicalized Protestants, who live in their own social bubble, would have picked up their lunacies from any Jew (me perhaps?) is next to nil. They came by their madness on their own, as a “peace church,” and as late entrees into the modern age after having spent an eternity on isolated farms in the Pennsylvania countryside. Like Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis, Bill Moyers, and most of the Catholic hierarchy on the question of immigration, these Anabaptists exemplify aspects of Christianity that are totally compatible with cultural Marxism and the politics of Western suicide. They do not need Jews, blacks, or North African Muslims to teach them self-destructive behavior, any more than Swedes or Spaniards need the villains in MacDonald’s script to hand over their countries to hostile Muslims from North Africa.

The most interesting point for me in MacDonald’s volume is his presentation of movement conservative goyim. He is absolutely on the money in documenting their servility in relation to their neoconservative puppet-masters. The most startling aspect of this relation is the degree to which the servile class allows itself to be instructed. Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, and other neoconservative spokesmen have indeed convinced their pliant enablers that Israel is to be defended as an “ethno-cultural creation,” while the American nation is to be seen as possessing an “ideological identity,” founded on global human rights principles and on an expansionist foreign policy. MacDonald cites the remarkable tribute produced for neocon guru Leo Strauss by his admiring disciple Werner Dannhauser, a tribute that extols Strauss, the famous mentor to global democrats, as “a good Jew. He knew the dignity and worth of love of one’s own. Love of the good is higher than love of one’s own, but there is only one road to truth and it leads through love of one’s own.” MacDonald asks rhetorically whether Anglo-Saxon Protestant “conservatives” could express such sentiments about their own group without Jewish liberals or neocons attacking them as nativists or incipient Nazis.

McDonald cites the public letter drafted by William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century in 2002, calling for a “move against Saddam Hussein,” on the grounds that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is ours.” MacDonald calls special attention to the prominent Jewish neoconservatives who appended their signatures to this call for a war of aggression on behalf of Israel. But what is perhaps even more striking are the non-Jewish signatories, such as William J. Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ellen Bork, and the professionally insecure, very young editor of National Review, Rich Lowry. In most of these cases one encounters demonstrations of fealty paid to the neoconservative barons who run FOX News, Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, ISI, and the minds of a majority of Republican voters.

But pace MacDonald, these neocon lords and their servants are not the voices of the entire Likud coalition in Israel. They speak for Natan Sharansky, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others even further on the Israeli nationalist right, many of whom have been taught to mumble neocon gibberish about how “democracies have never fought wars” and about how “only democracies are legitimate governments.” A point Israeli political analysts Leon Hadar (see especially his book Sandstorm) and Martin van Creveld have argued for several years now is that neoconservatives and their gentile policy-think-tank hangers-on do not speak for the majority of Israelis, who certainly did not favor the American invasion of Iraq. (Iran might well be a different matter.) It was American neoconservatives, supported by the Christian Right and their Israeli contacts, who planned Bush’s Middle Eastern policy. In the end, MacDonald demonstrates the same when he investigates the Israeli associations of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.

The Evangelical Cal Thomas and the “conservative Catholic” “theologian” Michael Novak invariably cite in their columns and speeches the alleged return of anti-Semitism on the antiwar left. When Novak came to speak at my college six years ago, he attacked movie producers in Hollywood—Jewish leftists to a man—as “anti-Semites.” The audience listened to him in understandable astonishment, for it could not escape even our news-averse trustees that Novak was saying something glaringly ridiculous.

Moreover, in their invectives against Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, FOX News analysts and announcers played on Wright’s association with the “anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.” That Wright and Farrakhan don’t much like Jews and Judaism seemed to matter more than the more obvious fact that the pair hate the Jews specifically as subgroup of Whitey.

Such pandering may result from the fact that movement conservative gentiles are almost as infected as other gentiles by the politics of white Christian guilt. They can only embrace their country to the extent that it renounces an “ethnic-cultural” identity, a character that they happily concede to Jews and others, but which they have collectively renounced for the dubious honor of being a “propositional nation.” Naturally (what else?) the assumption of this contrived identity sets the stage for their country being overwhelmed by legal and illegal Third World immigrants. It also means waging whatever wars the neocon master race tells their gentile collaborators is “good for Israel” and/or helps to spread “democracy.” Unlike MacDonald, I see no compelling reason to blame this lunacy exclusively or even predominantly on the two percent of the population which is Jewish, without noticing that the majority group, including those who describe themselves as “conservatives,” have lost their cotton-picking minds.

 

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Gottfried, Paul. “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” Taki’s Magazine, 6 April 2009. <http://takimag.com/article/in_search_of_anti-semitism/print#axzz3AaGCfxJN >.

Commentary: A point that could be added to Gottfried’s critique is that the notion that many Jews support anti-Conservative and “Left-wing” causes (liberalism, communism, multiculturalism, etc.) because they believe these are helpful for the Jewish ethnicity is incorrect. On the contrary, much evidence shows that most Jews were involved in political movements and in the support of certain ideas because they truly believe in them, not because they simply believe it is in Jewish interests. For example, Yuri Slezkine has pointed out in his The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 152) that “most Jewish rebels [Bolsheviks] did not fight the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become free from Jewishness – and thus Free. Their radicalism was not strengthened by their nationality; it was strengthened by their struggle against nationality… For many Jewish socialists, being an internationalist meant not being Jewish at all.”

Concerning the issue of Zionism, it is true that many Jews who advocate liberalism and multiculturalism in America or Europe hypocritically support the exact opposite, Jewish nationalism, for the state of Israel. However, there is in fact even infighting between different political and ideological stances among the Jews. It should be remembered that there are many liberal Jews in diaspora who would still advocate liberal and multicultural policies in Israel and many conservative and nationalistic Jews in Israel who would support ethnic nationalism or separatism in Christian nations (as long as they are not anti-Semitic, of course). The latter type of Zionist does not appear to be the majority at the moment, but it shows an alternative and more desirable standpoint for Jews which may become more common in the future. In this sense, to refuse to recognise that many Jews – at least those who are already highly conservative – can change their attitude towards European identitarianism seems rather misguided.

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 >.