Identitarianism, a Catalyst for Ethnogenesis in Europe – Solère

The Myth of Eternal Return: Identitarianism, a Catalyst for Ethnogenesis in Europa Nostra?

By Fenek Solère

 

Origin & Actions:

The European Identitarian Movement went viral with Generation Identitaire’s Declaration of War broadcast in October 2012. A groundbreaking move that very quickly achieved over 100,000 internet ‘hits’ in France alone, it’s popular message attracting adherents in Germany, Spain, Britain, Greece and Italy. Translations into other European languages soon followed. Alongside equally well-produced internet videos such as that made by Sweden’s SDU Youth Wing, which in turn stimulated further interest from as far afield as the United States, Australia and South America.

The Swedish Salute to the European Youth, which like its French predecessor was brilliantly scripted, ran as follows:

This is a salute from the Swedish youth to our European brothers and sisters.

Europe belongs to us.

Europe has given birth to strong and free nations with rich and thriving cultures. We have always held our heads up high and been proud of our heritage and history.

In just the last few decades this has all changed. The free nations of Europe are being enslaved by the EU. The politicians are giving away our sovereignty to bureaucrats in Brussels. An insane experiment with multiculturalism and mass immigration is tearing apart our previously united nations.

Europe is bleeding.

We have had enough. We are the generation that refuses to be silenced. We are the generation who loves the nation and who will defend it. Join us in the fight to regain our freedom against the European Union.

For a Europe of nations and for the freedom of all peoples.

So what was it that so captivated the imaginations of those already committed to our cause and drew hundreds more new activists into the scene? Perhaps it was the technically impressive Hi Def camera work? Maybe it was the choice of music, which proved so poignant and moving?

Or could it simply have been the laser guided missiles shooting out of the mouths of the earnest young faces of the militants staring back at us in the black and white footage, their words a rallying call to youth and a direct challenge to the enemies of Europe?

Let us take a moment to recall some of the heartfelt sentiments of the French original and the realities of the world they touched upon:

‘We are Generation Identity.

We are the generation of those who get killed for a sidelong glance, a cigarette refused, or a style that bothers someone.’

  • A 120 page report called No-Go-Zones in the French Republic: Myth or Reality? highlighted numerous French neighborhoods’ where the police and gendarmerie cannot enforce the Republican order or even enter without risking confrontation, coming under attack from projectiles, or the threat of fatal shootings.
  • A foreign television presenter trying to investigate the issue of lawlessness in the banlieues is warned ‘I do not recommend this. Not even we French dare to go there anymore. But nobody talks about this in public, of course. Nor do those who claim ‘long-live multiculturalism’ and ‘Paris is wonderful’ dare enter into the suburbs’.

‘We are the generation of ethnic fracture, of the total failure of integration, the generation of forced crossbreeding.’

  • In October 2011 a 2,200 page report entitled ‘Banlieue de la Republique’ (Suburbs of the Republic) found that Seine-Saint-Denis and other Parisian suburbs were fast becoming ‘separate Islamic Societies’ cut off from the French state, where Islamic Sharia Law was displacing French Civil Law’.
  • Former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, quoted in the Brussels Journal in 2009: ‘If the French people don’t interbreed of their own free-will, it will be necessary for the Republic to resort to even more forcible measures…’
  • In April 2013 a black immigrant to France who had deliberately targeted and violently raped fifteen white women said in his defense ‘when I came to France I was angry at white people…’ then, telling his victim, ‘I know you like it…’ He clearly stated in the courtroom, his motivation: ‘I wanted to humiliate white people…’

‘We are the doubly-punished generation: condemned to bail out a system of social support too generous with aliens to serve its own people.’

  • The long term cost of Muslim immigration to Europe is almost incalculable. It is estimated that around 80% of Muslims live on welfare in the West. Some salient points of reference are: In 1993 official French Government figures indicated that unemployment in the migrant dominated Parisian suburbs alone was running at 500,000; that in 1995 3 billion Euros were earmarked in the French Fiscal Year for ‘Urban Policy’ (a euphemism for migrant support); In Denmark, although the Muslim population is currently only 5%, they consume over 40% of the Danish Welfare Budget; the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that Turks take billions more out of the German Welfare Budget than they put in; and that 50% of the Muslim population residing in the United Kingdom is considered economically inactive. Such indicators do not include the stress these migrants put on societal infra-structure like schools, hospitals, housing and the prison system. The latter of which is where they are consistently over-represented.

‘We are the generation of victims of the generation of May 68’ers – the ones which claimed to liberate us from the weight of tradition, knowledge, and authority in the schools, but which first of all liberated itself from its own responsibilities.’

  • The Soixantehuitards asserted they were motivated by issues such as equality and justice, sexual liberation, ecology, feminism and devising a new egalitarian school and university curricula. They positioned themselves against the old reactionaries of De Gaulle’s epoch but in effect hijacked the system and created positions of power for themselves. While endlessly mouthing the platitudes above, they gave France over to the most misogynistic faith on the globe, a heritage capable of stoning women for adultery, for condoning and encouraging paedophilic marriages and treating women as second class citizens.

‘We have closed your history books to find our own memory once again.’

  • Supposed intellectuals like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Henri Weber, Andre Glucksmann, Daniel Bensaid and Bernard-Henri Levy greatly influenced the post ’68 intellectual climate in France. The latter individual producing The Genius of Judaism, not so much as a philosophical system but as a guide for living, and ardently defended both Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss Kahn in the wake of sexual scandals involving child molestation and rape.
  • In response to the New Philosophers listed above the Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europenne (GRECE), founded in Lyon in 1968, have long contested the intellectual space the Left attempt to inhabit, challenging the efforts to exclude Nouvelle Droite thinkers, men like Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye, Jean Cau, Louis Rougier, Thierry Maulnier and Julien Freund have forced their entry into the public realm. Co-habiting, with the Left, the TV studios and newspaper columns, leading to all sorts of controversies in the ‘hot summers’ of 1979 and 1993 when the Left became apoplectic as Nouvelle Droite writers appeared in Le Figaro and when Le Monde published ‘The Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals’ in July 1993, in order to oppose the ‘resurgence of anti-democratic currents of Far Right thought in French and European intellectual life’.
  • Over time, these so called ‘fascist’ intellectuals have been joined by populist and mainstream writers like cyber-punk science fiction author Maurice Dantec, who wrote the award winning books Red Siren (2004), Babylon Babies (2005), Grand Junction (2009) and Satellite Sisters (2012). In 2006 Dantec penned Le Sanglot de L‘Hommage blanc (Tears of the White Man) and The Tyranny of Guilt (2010) about the narcissistic and destructive sacralization of Third World peoples in the West and the mirage of multiculturalism across Europe. A theme that Michel Houellebecq was later to use in his novel Submission (2014).

‘We have stopped believing that Abdul is our brother, the planet our village and humanity our family. We have discovered that we have roots and ancestors – and thus a future.’

  • According to Lucienne-Bui Trong, a government official responsible for the Towns and Suburbs Department at the Renseignements generaux (General Intelligence), over one thousand neighborhoods including 226 in the Ile-de-France; 89 in in the Provence-Cote d’Azur; 62 in Rhone Alpes; and 69 in Nord-Pas-de-Calais are classified as ‘violent’. With over four hundred specifically identified as ‘very violent’, meaning not only that firearms are present and being used but that a systematic strategy to keep the police out is a known modus operandi of the immigrant gangs.

‘Our only inheritance is our blood, our soil, and our identity. We are the heirs of our destiny.’

  • Despite a law of 1872 that prevents the French conducting a census that makes distinctions between citizens based on ethnic background, it is known that the non-indigenous French population increased over fifty times since the end of World War Two; the birthrate of immigrants is three to four times higher than the real French; between 2006-2008, 40% of the babies born in France were of immigrant origin; the immigrant demographic under thirty doubled in the last two decades, resulting in predictions that the Muslim population will reach 16 million by 2016.

‘We have turned off the television to come out into the streets. We have painted our slogans on the walls, chanted ‘Youth Power’ into our megaphones, waved high our flags emblazoned with the lambda: the lambda, which decorated the shields of the glorious Spartans, is our symbol. Don’t you understand what it represents? It means that we will not retreat, we will not give up. Weary of your cowardice, we shall not refuse any battle, any challenge.’

  • The Identitarians have entered the public consciousness through high visibility ‘happenings’ in iconic locations such as the 20th October 2012 rooftop protest at the Grand Mosque at Poitiers, the storming of the Socialist Party headquarters in Paris and their compatriots of the Identitaire Bewegung, seizing the EU Fundamental Rights building in Vienna.
  • Within minutes of taking the Mosque in Poitiers, the Identitarians issued the following Press Statement from their operation base atop the building and simultaneously on the Generation Identitaire website:

Generation Identity calls for reconquest! A hundred youth, young men and women from all over France, have just entered the future Grand Mosque and occupied the roof. Across the front façade, facing the minaret, we have unfurled a banner with a clear message: ‘Immigration, mosque construction: REFERENDUM!’ By this, its first major act, Generation Identity intends to place itself in the front line of the fight for our identity.

Then, supplying a historical context:

It will soon be 1,300 years since Charles Martel stopped the Arabs at Poitiers following a heroic battle which saved our country from Muslim invasion. It happened on the 25th October 732. Today, we have reached 2012 and the choice is still the same: live free or die. Our generation refuses to see its nation and identity disappear amid indifference; we shall never be the Indians of Europe. From this place, symbolic of our past and of our ancestors’ courage, we launch an appeal to remember and fight!

And then their vision for the future:

We want no more non-European immigration and no more construction of Mosques on French soil. From the first waves of African immigration and from the ‘family reunion’ law adopted in 1976, our people have never been consulted about the presence of those they have been forced to live with. Mass immigration has radically transformed our country: according to the most recent study of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, 43% of those between the ages of 18 and 50 in the Ile-de-France are of immigrant background. A nation can recover from an economic crisis or a war, but not from the replacement of its population: without the French, France will no longer exist. It is a question of survival: this is why each nation has the absolute right to choose whether it wants to accept foreigners and in what proportion.

And challenging the so-called Social Democracy of the Liberal Left:

Since this right has been refused us, and since our generation is paying the price in the street through intimidation by foreign riff-raff, we declare: enough! We shall no longer retreat! We demand a national referendum on immigration and the construction of Muslim houses of worship in France. We shall not leave until we have been heard and satisfied.

Making their Call to Arms:

Aware that our fight is only beginning, we call upon all young Europeans to become the heirs of their destiny and join the vanguard of a youth risen to its feet.

Let all Europe hear our call: here and now RECONQUEST!            

This was far from an isolated case. The movement continues to be extremely active on the internet and social networks such as Facebook and Youtube. All over Europe copy-cat events highlighting opposition to immigration have begun to spread. On 30th October, representatives of the Identitarian Movement were physically present at the inter-cultural week in Frankfurt. In early December, 50 sympathisers of the Identitarian Movement met once again in Frankfurt, this time without their French comrades, as a clear sign of their intent to begin independent activities. Actions like pork soup kitchens for the poor and destitute were set up in the street, EU flags were taken down from public buildings and protests against halal slaughter were conducted outside Muslim owned restaurants. In the Netherlands, where it is known as Identitair Verzet, the movement chained the gates to a predominantly immigrant school in Rotterdam. In Scandinavia, it operates under the title Nordiska Forbundet or Nordic Alliance. Following a visit in April 2014 to Prague by Philippe Vardon and Jean David Cattin, Identitarianism has been active in the Czech Republic, and also commenced activity in Slovakia in the same year.

On the 31st May 2015 the Austrian Identitarian movement occupied the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency in Vienna. This was quickly followed by the release of a video to promote their June 2015 Sommerfest rally with the words:

Everyone sees, hears and feels it. We are going to be strangers in our own neighborhood, our own city and our own country. The Great Replacement is going to happen. Our politicians and the elites sow the seeds for this fatal development. They demolish our identity and take away the right of feeling native in our own country. To import voters and cheap labour. Putting the politics and economic future of our people and every European people at risk. But we are defending ourselves. We are the youth that stops retreating. We will rally on the 6th June in Vienna, against the Great Replacement. And understand we are ready to fight for our future…

‘You are the “Thirty Glorious Years,” pension fund liabilities, SOS Racism, “diversity,” family reunification, sexual liberation and Bernie Kouchner’s sacks of rice. We are 25 percent unemployment, public debt, the explosion of multicultural society, anti-white racism, broken families and a young French soldier killed in Afghanistan.’

  • SOS Racisme was set up in 1984 and has been led by black ethnic advocates such as Harlem Desir, Algerian born Malek Boutih and Dominique Sopo. It actively tries to engage the youth against French Nationalists or Identitarians by organizing rock concerts like those in the name of so-called Egalitarianism in 2011.
  • FEMEN protests like their No More Pope and A Fascist Suicide (mocking the personal sacrifice made by Dominique Venner) in February and May 2013 at Notre-Dame-de-Paris were challenged by the brave young women of the Renouveau Francais who publicly declared, Femme, Mais Pas Fem’ Haine!’  
  • Bernard Kouchner was born in Avignon to a Jewish father and a protestant mother, becoming active in the French Communist Party and spending time in Cuba fishing and drinking with Fidel Castro in 1964. He was appointed Minister of Health and later Minister of Foreign Affairs in Francois Fillon’s government in 2007. He is closely associated with Arab Spring sponsor George Soros.
  • French unemployment has risen consistently since 2012, averaging around 10% among the general population and 23% among the youth. The highest level ever recorded in the 5th
  • The French Government’s debt to GDP ratio rose 30% between 2006 and 2015.
  • The epidemic of divorce in France, especially in the urban areas runs at 55%. Although high, this compares favourably when considered alongside Belgium 71%, Portugal 68%, Hungary 67%, Czech Republic 66%, Spain 61% and Estonia 58%.
  • In July 1990, Act 90-615, known as the Gayssot Act, made it possible to enforce stiffer than normal prison sentences and more substantial fines on people who had ‘offended’ certain privileged groups or who it could be proved had been motivated to harm or insult individuals or said groups on the grounds of race, religion, nationality or sexual orientation.
  • Studies show that one in five native French have been victims of Anti-White Racism, the title of a controversial book written by Tarik Yildiz in 2012.
  • A young Generation Identitaire militant called Pierre Cassen is quoted saying, ‘The French people are increasingly living in fear. They fear the imposition of Islamic law and the organized violence against any French person including the police’.
  • French forces in Afghanistan took heavy casualties in the Uzbin Valley ambush in 2008

‘You will not convince us with a condescending glance, youth employment programs and a pat on the shoulder: for us, life is a struggle.’

  • The French government lethargically peddle youth employment schemes for the out of work and low skilled young adults. Also, on the job training and payroll subsidies in the hope of removing young people from the unemployment statistics
  • In terms of economics the Identitarians believe in appropriate economic protection, eco-friendly localism as opposed to the global free-market run by multinational racketeers. They perceive that protectionism and localism are pre-requisites for Europe’s ability to transcend the current global dichotomy with the USA on one side and China on the other.

‘We don’t need your youth policies. Youth is our policy.’

  • We are Generation Identity (Arktos 2013) opens with a quote from Georges Bernanos, a French Catholic writer: ‘The fever of youth is what maintains the rest of the world at a normal temperature. When youth grows cold, the rest of the world’s teeth chatter’.  

‘Don’t deceive yourselves: this is not a mere manifesto, it’s a declaration of war.’

  • In a speech delivered to the Identitarian Convention of Orange (Provenance) by Arnaud Delrieux, quoted in We are Generation Identity, in the section, A Force to Be Reckoned With, he says, ‘…We are the first generation to have been left to fend for ourselves in suburbs gangrened with foreign riff-raff and anti-White racism. We have also seen that the system grants us no concessions. It has placed our spokesmen under house-arrest, going so far as to forbid them from any participation in identitarian political activity. A charming lesson in democracy’.

‘We are tomorrow; you are yesterday.’

  • And again, quoting Delrieux, ‘To give youth effective political representation, Generation Identity sets itself no limits. The fight for Reconquest is everywhere, and we want everywhere to be masters in our own house.

‘We are Generation Identity!’

And who could doubt it?

So, given the above, it is hardly surprising that the ethos and energy of Identitarianism glavanised whole sections of the European Youth Movement. And this Movement is not, as per its enemies wishes, filled with hot air, or dependent on vapid spectacle. Instead, it is grounded, as we will see, on a solid, if still evolving, ideological base, rooted in tradition and born out of a coherent intellectual legacy stretching back over many years.

Instinct & Ideology:

So does the Identitarian Movement really represent an entirely new paradigm amongst the contemporary European right? Using what F. Stieger (2014) calls its ‘open source ideology’, the content of its web pages are easily copied and pasted by similar groups. It has gained identifiable support both from the soft and hard Right. Researchers working in the field of political science find it difficult to categorize the Movement within the old/new right parameters, which is a reflection of the chameleon-like metamorphosis Identitarianism undergoes in different environments.

But nevertheless the mainstream media’s nefarious narrative, is of course, a remorseless attempt to characterize the Identitarian Movement as a single issue pressure group warning of the threat of the Islamization of Europe, and this is intended to hamstring it by associating it with the most negative connotations from recent European history. Some German scholars even try to present the Identitarian Movement as a greater risk than neo-Nazism because its antidemocratic elements are hidden behind a search for identity. M. von Lupke said that ‘The public is thus able to recognize its true motives and objectives only with difficulty’ (2013).

Acknowledging that the Identitarian Movement, to a greater extent, builds upon a positive approach: a search for common identity, traditions and roots, academe insidiously suggests there is a ‘dark underbelly’, such as the claim made in 2013 by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Bremen that the Bremen branch of the Identitarian Movement was led by people with extreme right-wing leanings. And the Radical Boys Brux using the Lambda symbol on their website and Revolta was given as a justification for such a claim. This, despite the fact that public facing Identitarian members use the following slogan ‘0% racism 100% identity’.

But Identitarianism is so much more than its opponents’ worst nightmare. It is a groundswell of emotion that cannot so easily be defamed. It defends the nation at all costs, idealizing it as an organic pre-modern community based on homogeneity and exclusivity. In this regard the movement explicitly opposes the European Union’s policies in relation to mass immigration, asylum and integration. To an educated observer, it is clear that their instincts and actions are steeped in the philosophies expounded by nineteenth and early twentieth thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand Tönnies, Friedrich List, Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. The more politically astute will also recognize the influence of German Conservative Revolutionary scholars such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, Adam Muller, Hans Freyer, Ludwig Klages, Oswald Spengler, Edgar Julius Jung, Karl Haushofer and Werner Sombart.

The latter grouping, especially, having established a coherent integralist perspective, which emphasized a holism and cultural particularism, is a fertile source of inspiration for Identitarians. The logic of the Conservative Revolutionaries’ critique of the dangers of the individualistic liberal capitalist societies which they saw developing in the wake of the First European Civil War (1914-18) is similar to the Identitarians’ disdain of the EU Super-State.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, for example, said: ‘We may be victims of catastrophes which overtake us, of revolutions which we cannot prevent, but tradition always re-emerges’. And Identitarianism is indeed , tradition, re-emerging in a modern youthful form.

Anticipating the plight of Europe a century hence, Othmar Spann, it could be argued, almost wrote the precursor to Markus Willinger’s Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the 68’ers (2013) and A Europe of Nations (2014), rationalizing in his Der wahre Staat (The True State, 1972 ed.) that ‘Mankind can reconcile itself to poverty because it will be and remain poor forever… but to the loss of estate, existential insecurity, uprootedness and nothingness, the masses of affected people can never reconcile themselves’.

Hans Freyer, in his turn, was a strong advocate of Volksgeist (folk spirit) and author of Revolution von Rechts (Revolution from the Right, 1925). He contested that: ‘Man is free when he is part of a concrete collective will, which takes responsibility for its history… a will that binds men and endows their private existence with historical meaning’. Predicting the inevitable rise of Identitarian type organizations through time, he said: ‘A new front is forming from the Right…’ and there can be little doubt, as we have seen through their words and deeds that the Identitarians are all about ‘cleaning house’.

So, complementing the cultural pessimist prognosis of Oswald Spengler, that ‘Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. And to adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a static, terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence,’ it must be stressed that Generation Identity and their affiliated groups are anything but static, but are to say the least, pro-active, mobile and opinionated in regard to the future they wish to create.

And their literature reflects this vibrancy. Works such as Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the 68’ers (2013), written by Markus Willinger in a succinct digestible style, with a foreword by Philippe Vardon, a veteran of Nissa Rebela, talks of the current generation as the foremost victims of the derailing of Western society by the political, journalistic and academic pseudo-elites, and how it falls upon this same generation to turn the tide.

Consistently offering a counter-balance to foreign and unnatural influences, the author, over forty one chapters, provides a fresh view of the world, free of the narrow and prejudiced constraints of the dominant mind-set of the previous seventy or so years:

Nazism was racist, so you wanted to be anti-racist. Nazism was nationalist? Naturally, you became internationalist. It was militaristic, fascistic and imperialistic and so you became anti-military, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. If Nazism promoted a belief in the traditional family, you had to damn that as well. Your efforts to reject the extremist ideology of National Socialism led you to create your own extremist ideology. We are the first generation since 1933 to have truly overcome National Socialism. We neither define ourselves in terms of it, nor in terms of opposing it.

In a surgical indictment of big business, Identitarians accurately identify the corrosive impact of the mobility of cheap labour, or rather welfare recipients, from the Third World, and the socialist block vote it represents, which effectively means that opposition to the immigrant invasion cannot be limited to the individual nation-state but must be elevated to a joint continental response.

Predictably, their call for a unified Europe and their articulation of ideas about the national and ethnic uniqueness of all Europeans, especially in Willinger’s second text, A Europe of Nations (2014) initially gave succor to their opponents, who cat-called from their salons that the Identitarian vision of a ‘new millennium of great political blocs’, was just another expression of racism and xenophobia.

However, refusing to be silenced, from the very first sentence of Willinger’s well-circulated text, the Identitarians clearly assert their goals, and spit their contempt for the establishment’s worn-out and clichéd Orwellian Truth-Speak by demanding: ‘The European Union is Dead.’ Their subsequent description of the Union as a ‘patch-work Frankenstein’ and a ‘morbid monstrosity that its creators were attempting to breathe life into’, is reminiscent of the old Jewish legend of The Golem of Prague, and must have touched a few raw nerves among the bureaucrats of Brussels. Especially when, as in the story of the young boy who pointed out that the Emperor had no clothes, the plain facts of the case are indisputable:

Europe suffers under your Union as much as we do. You seek to transform this proud continent into a second America and rob its people of their freedom.

You don’t serve Europe; your one and only master is the European Union, and that makes you the enemies of the European peoples against whom you’ve arrogantly declared war.

You hate the peoples of Europe. Recognise at last, that they stand in the way of your Union, threaten it in its entirety, and will one day bring it crashing down.

Beneath the Moloch you created, beneath your standardized bureaucracy lies the true Europe, buried in the rubble.

The Europe of freedom and diversity. The Europe of Brothers and sisters. The Europe you want us to forget, and that you try to conceal – yet it remains.

Still and quiet, it waits for the day when we free it from its chains, when it can return to its rightful place in the world.

To this Europe we are true, the Europe of our ancestors and children; we believe in it and we will fight for it.

For a free and strong Europe.

For a Europe of nations.  

In defiance of the global capitalists and the supporters of the current multi-cultural melting-pot, more reminiscent of The Tower of Babel than the image perpetuated by the output of the Hollywood Movie Moguls in blockbusters like the eponymous 1980’s Kids from Fame, the Identitarians shout starkly and loudly:

Europe is Europe…We Europeans love our identity and our individuality…We want to be and remain who we are…A European Super-State is an unnatural chimera…For millennia, we Europeans have fought one another, yet we had the strength and vitality to create a culture that is unique in the world. I am not referring to the recent decades of creeping stagnation, but rather to the legacy of the Renaissance, which was Europe’s brightest hour…The continuous competitive pressure made us Europeans great. In those days, no state could afford to be ruled over by mediocre politicians like yourselves…Weak and senile states, which have become the rule in today’s Europe, wouldn’t have survived five years back then. They would have renewed themselves or been conquered

And such defiant rhetoric is deeply imbued with the thoughts and ideas of thinkers from a range of traditions within the post ‘45 New Right. One can see the mentorship of metapolitical commentators like Armin Mohler, Karlheinz Weissmann, Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, Pierre Krebs, Alain de Benoist, Julien Freund, Dominique Venner, Robert Steuckers, Guillaume Faye, Giorgio Locchi, Tomislav Sunic, Alexander Dugin and Sebastian J. Lorenz. Thinkers from as far afield as Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Croatia and Russia. All united in a common cause, to defend the intrinsic value of identity in the face of sterile modernity.

For, the New Right thesis, just like that of the Identitarians, is that modernity is characterized by the fact it creates shallow people who are promiscuous in their values, attitudes, political affiliations, jobs and lifestyle choices. They argue that social division and atomization of this type is being exploited by those with vested interests, the gurus of soft despotism that seek to impose a culture of self-censorship and political correctness. A classic example being the case of the Finnish Journalist Tuomas Muraja, of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, who contacted the friend of a Finnish rape victim, who had indicated that the assault had been done by a non- Finn, calling her a racist, bigot and criminal for making accusations against immigrants. He then threatened her with a prison sentence and warned her against making future accusations against immigrants. A not dissimilar situation to that faced by another Finnish female who was raped by five Somali men on a train station, who then received very light sentences from court officials, two of whom were not indigenous Finns, and a third, who was a native-born Finn but held well known communist sympathies.

So, it is not surprising then that both the New Right and the Identitarians hold cynical views about cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. Instead, they embrace ethnopluralism, which negates any hierarchy between races. It is concept based on the acceptance of the existence of different cultures, nations or societies in the world and each one’s intrinsic value.

The concept of ethnopluralism itself has a long pedigree. For example Carl Schmitt, a major influence on de Benoist, promoted ethnopluralism as a part of identitarian democracy (identitare Demokratie). Schmitt fundamentally opposed pluralism of interests and pluralistic democracy, instead promoting a democracy based on identity. Schmitt defined himself as an opponent of the ethos of the universalism of human rights. He saw homogeneity as a perquisite for promoting the interests of the state and nation. The link to Identitarianism cannot be more clear.

Both the Nouvelle Droite and the Identitarians see themselves as rebirth movements. And I would contend that the Nouvelle Droite is the mid-wife and the Identitarians are the newborn, fresh and pure off-spring, cleansed of the Left-Liberal dogma that has led to Europe’s current decline.

They seek an alternative modernity, favouring some scientific and technical developments, but not all, whilst rejecting what they define as the negative cultural aspects of modernity, which leads to what Charles Champetier and de Benoist see as a One-World system of production and reproduction, all intrinsically part of the hyper-moralism of universal human rights, masking the underlying attack on national and regional uniqueness. They describe this situation as a loss of ‘transcendent value, meaning, or purpose’ (from La Nouvelle Droite de l’ an 2000).

Benoist goes one step further by suggesting that human beings do not exist in the form of universal and abstract entity and cannot be separated from their particular society and social groups. And that if they do will become useless and dysgenic. Modernity destroys ties of individuals with family, locality, corporative or religious communities. The reality is of course that modernity has made people more lonely and vulnerable. This can be ‘cured’ the New Right diagnose by a return to communities rooted in their culture and geographic space, in a return to communities and organic society committed to the land. Feelings we see embedded in the Identitarian principles alluded to by Willinger.

Out of this arises the notion of a post-modernist radical right which emphasizes respect to differences which must be viewed in juxtaposition of universalistic racism and also as an ‘opposite to racist anti-racism’. Here, de Benoist draws parallels between genocide caused by racially orientated actions and the current slow ethnocide by so-called anti-racists.

The above assertion reinforced by Javier Ruiz Portella and Alvaro Mutis in their El manifesto contra la muerte del espiritu y la tierra (Manifesto against the Death of the Spirit and the Land) authored in 2011, who believe that modernistic materialism is the murder weapon the ruling oligarchy has chosen for killing the spiritual rights of the people and causing what de Benoist describes in his ‘Terrorism, State of Emergency’ as the ‘disenchantment with the world’. This, according to Ernst Jünger, a literary doyen of the New Right and author of Storm of Steel (1920) is the moment of ‘greatest danger’. And that the best response to such a situation, itemized in de Benoist’s book Vu de droite (1979) was the restoration of:

  • an aristocratic conception of the human being;
  • an ethical framework founded on honour, rather than the concept of sin and shame as per the Judeo-Christian faith;
  • a heroic attitude towards the challenges of human existence;
  • the exaltation and sacralization of the world;
  • attention to beauty, the body, and health;
  • the obliteration of notions such as ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’;
  • the union of aesthetics and morality.

Alain de Benoist continues in the same vein:

What is the greatest threat today? It is the progressive disappearance of diversity from the world. The leveling-down of people, the reduction of all cultures to a world civilization made up of what is most common. It can been seen already how from one side of the planet to the other the same types of construction are being put up and the same mental habits are being ingrained. Holiday Inn uniformity and Howard Johnson are the templates for the transformation of the world into a grey uniformity. I have travelled widely, on several continents. The joy which is experienced during a journey derives from seeing differentiated ways of living which are still well rooted, in seeing different people live according to their own rhythm, with a different skin colour, another mentality-from recognizing they are proud of their difference. I believe that this diversity is the wealth of the world, and that egalitarianism is killing it. For this it is important not just to respect others but to keep alive everywhere the most legitimate desire there can be: the desire to affirm a personality which is unlike another, to defend a heritage, to govern oneself in accordance with what one is. And this implies a head-on clash with a pseudo-antiracism which denies differences and with a dangerous racism which is nothing less than the rejection of the Other, the rejection of diversity (de Benoist, Vu de droite, 1979).

Whereas de Benoist’s intellectual rival, within the Right milieu at least, Guillaume Faye, who’s written corpus includes Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post Catastrophic Age (Arktos 2010),Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (Arktos 2011),Convergence of Catastrophes (Arktos 2012) and Sex and Deviance (Arktos 2014), adopts a more militant approach. His well-articulated world-view, from what he describes as an ‘archaic’ perspective, and by this he means from the ancient Greek etymon arche, signifying ‘starting impetus’, or ‘foundation’ and ‘beginning’, rather than archaic as in ‘ancient’, beautifully illustrates this congruity of thought. Has does his proposed solutions to Europe’s problems summed up in his work Why We Fight:

  • Europe is no longer sovereign and politically and militarily assertive;
  • It must realize that it is at ‘war’ with other civilizations, particularly the Muslim world;
  • Europe is ‘sick’, ‘occupied, and being ‘colonized’ by the USA and the peoples of the poor South;
  • Europeans should support an ‘archeo-futurist’ vision, which fuses traditional pre-modern and modern values in a post-modern mode;
  • White people should seek to restore the belief in ‘rooted’ identities world-wide as homogenization equals ‘death and sclerosis’;
  • That Identities are always in a state of flux and ‘becoming’;
  • That the politically incorrect notion of bio-politics, or a politics of survival should underpin the biological and demographic imperatives of ethnic groups;
  • We should adjust to an elitist politics as an antidote to the ‘unjust’ selection of the capitalist ‘law of the jungle’;
  • Europe should adopt a revolutionary tone, recognizing that the current period is an interregnum. Whereby we rise like a Phoenix from the ashes’;
  • Recognize that only ethnic civil war will resolve Europe’s problems of Third World colonization;
  • A revolution will take place led by an activist minority. It will lead to a ‘re-evaluation of all values’ and a radically new society along Nietzschean lines. Nietzsche rather than Marx (Faye insists) is the real revolutionary of our times;
  • The creation of a new, noble aristocracy, one that serves the people through war is the pragmatic approach to the current situation;
  • The notion of the Nietzschean ‘will to power’ is the driving force of history.

And I cannot imagine the intellects behind Identitarianism, or indeed their rank and file militants and members, contradicting much of the above. This justifies to my mind that the movement in general is ideologically aligned with the broader New Right, Traditional and New Wave Nationalist schools of thought, shorn of the swastika and unencumbered by neo-Nazi baggage.

Conclusion:

So Identitarians give voice to the concerns of many young and ‘awakened’ indigenous Europeans. Their clarion call for a renewal of European national identities echoes through the streets of towns and cities as far apart as Lviv and Derry. Through the winding alleys of the ancient villages of the Pyrenees. Across the valleys and wide flat steppe to the suburbs of the cities of the East. But they also back up their grand-eloquence with pragmatism. They sponsor various training camps, where they receive lectures on historical subjects with particular relevance today, like the Siege of Malta by the Ottomans in 1565. They organize sports clubs, cultural organizations, charity associations, rock bands and publishing houses. The French movement has endeavored to establish ‘bastions’ that showcase their Movement. In Nice, for example, in a district where Identitarians live, they have opened shops and started local institutions developing a form of neighborhood autonomy, parents’ associations and retailers’ associations. And they extended this further by forming Solidarite Identities (SOLID) which is a humanitarian organization providing aid and support to nations in their struggle for survival, maintaining culture and safeguarding identity. It collects funds and materials and goes to areas where local inhabitants need help. SOLID’s activity helps support the freedom of nations who wish to be autonomous and rooted in their land. For this reason it helps the Serbian minority in Kosovo and the Boers in South Africa. The common denominator is a will to live in the country of one’s forebears, according to one’s own rules, laws and traditions. The major enemy from their perspective is capitalism, which destroys ethno-cultural eco-systems.

The Idendititarians have also called out traitors and collaborators alike, recognizing just like Marcus Tullius Cicero, that:

A nation can survive its fools and even their ambitions. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor, he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the souls of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

And do we not see the Curriculum Vitaes of Merkel, Hollande, Sarkozy, Blair, Cameron, Van Rompuy, Barroso, and Johansson in Cicero’s description? Make no mistake, these people are in the pay of higher forces than the democratic institutions they claim to represent.

But as we have seen from the ‘happenings’ highlighted across Europe, the support for Identitarian ideals are growing and are transnational, reflecting the youth’s scorn and rejection of the liberal power-structure. And their ‘fighting community’, as they define it, is focused on winning the political battle they have begun.

The Movement has meeting houses and training camps from Nice to Bordeaux and from Parigi to Paris. Strong links have been forged with youth groups of similar dispositions in Flanders, Catalonia, Northern Italy, Germany, Austria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Generation Identitaire’s spokesman Alban Ferrari said in an interview in October 2012, following the overwhelming success of the Declaration of War video,

From Paris to Bucharest, from Stockholm to Athens, young people, heirs of a tremendous common civilizational background, are inevitably looking in the same direction. It is simply a question of survival… As the vanguard of European youth, we are in the front lines facing the ravages of immigration, which has partly been a consequence of the galloping globalism of the last forty years. The rise of Islam in France is the logical consequence of this population flow, which was never desired by the people but encouraged by the internationalist Left and big business… We are young people living in the real world, to borrow a religious expression, who have chosen the love of our people and our neighbours as our vocation. We are secondary school and university students and young working people integrated in this society by force of circumstance. We wish to be together, of course – but without them.

And what could be more natural? Identitarianism is essentially a grass roots movement, committed to a unified Europe, ‘But a different Europe. A Europe in which every people can choose its own path without Brussels giving it orders on how to live…’ They want a Europe ‘where the lazy and corrupt politicians and governments aren’t subsidized, but rather thrown out of their offices…’

It is time, they demand, for the decadents of Brussels and Strasbourg to step aside and ‘make way for a new Europe. For a Europe of nations…’ As opposed to the Janus faced Europe the Soixantehuitards created in homage to Richard Coudenhove-Kalgeri, who put in place the founding principles of European Union, writing in his book Praktischer Idealismus: ‘The man of the future will be of mixed race. The races and classes of today will gradually disappear due to the elimination of space, time and prejudice. The Eurasian Negroid race of the future, similar to the ancient Egyptians, will replace the diversity of peoples and the diversity of individuals. Instead of destroying Judaism, Europe, against its will, refined and educated these people, driving them to their future status as leading nation, through the artificial revolutionary process. It is not surprising that the people who escaped the ghetto prison became the spiritual nobility of Europe’.

In the face of such a despicable, cowardly and silent genocide, what are Europeans supposed to do? Well Generation Identitaire have an answer. Underpinning the Identitarian ideological viewpoint is the notion that ‘Europe’s people are at war, a clandestine and undeclared war’, but a war nonetheless. They maintain ‘this war is more important for determining Europe’s fate than any other conflict this continent has ever seen. It is a struggle for Europe itself, for Europe’s cities, streets, and homes, for our meadows, mountains, and lakes. It’s a struggle for our homeland and they claim we’re losing…’ And they are right!

So was our future foretold in the fictionalized account of Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints (1973)? To return to Willinger’s A Europe of Nations:

Every day, Africans pour across the Mediterranean. Every day, Arabs and Asians pass through the Greek border; airplanes land hourly in our cities, bringing in even more…Europe is being over-run bit by bit. Bit by bit, our continent is being robbed of its identity and is being turned into an extension of Africa and Asia. Bit by bit, we Europeans are becoming a minority in our own cities and nations…

And in identifying the parasitic entities that have fed and are now killing their host, they say:

You’ve committed many errors during your years of rule, some out of greed, others out of naivety, and some out of stupidity. But for your worst wrong-doing there is no excuse: you opened Europe’s borders and not only tolerated, but actively promoted the mass immigration of Africans and Asians into our countries. This is unforgivable. Yet there can be no doubt that you were fully aware of the consequences of your actions.

And that goal, openly admitted by Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack straw and David Blunkett, the hierarchy of the former British Labour government, was nothing less than the replacement of the British population. The intention was, to quote Neather in a 2009 interview with the Home Affairs Editor of the Telegraph, Tom Whitehead, to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. And of course, similar approaches were in play, and still are, all across the European Union, in order to fulfill Coudenhove-Kalgeri’s New Morgenthau Plan, extended beyond post-war Germany, and now intended to apply to the whole of Europe.

For this crime, there can only be one punishment. And it is simultaneously ironic and fitting that it should be conducted in the time-honoured French tradition. A lonely walk, accompanied by a drum roll, while the guilty wait in line for the cold caress of Madame Guillotine.

 

Additional Notes:

  • The Swedish Democrats gained 5.7% of the votes in the 2010 elections, succeeding in gaining representation in the Swedish parliament;
  • Some commentators argue that Muslim men think of themselves as a conquering army and that white women are their ‘war-booty’. According to a 2014 Report there were between 5000 and 7000 gang rapes a year in the Parisian banlieues. These involve ‘tournantes’ meaning ‘pass-arounds’ . Two girls in Fontenay-Sous-Bois were subjected to a rape involving up to 50 boys at a time. 77.6% of rapes in Sweden are committed by immigrant Muslims. 2 out of three rapes in Oslo are committed by Muslims. Child-rape in the immigrant infested city of Malmo increased significantly since 2005. The overwhelming number of rapes in Stavanger in Norway in the last 3 years have been committed by Muslims. Despite this, feminists like cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, remain silent on what is clearly a ‘rape epidemic’ stretching from Rotherham in the North of England to the suburbs of Rome;
  • The most conservative official estimates agree that the Muslim population of Europe will be at least 10% by 2050;
  • In 1968 Paris was overtaken by mass protests including agitating students, sympathetic locals, celebrated intellectuals and factory workers. ‘Our generation enjoyed an unprecedented optimism,’ said Henri Weber, a socialist member of the European parliament, ‘We were Promethean!’;
  • Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a sociology student at the University of Nanterre, is now a Green Party member of the European Parliament;
  • Henri Weber, is a Socialist Party representative for North-West France;
  • Andre Glucksmann,is a philosopher and writer;
  • Daniel Bensaid, leader of the Trotskyite Movement in France;
  • Bernard-Henri Levy, media personality known as BHL, and author;
  • The Research and Study Group for European Civilization (GRECE): the principal Think Tank of the French Right founded to promulgate theoretical and cultural issues such as ethno-pluralism, the preservation of the Indo-European legacy and the philosophy of Conservative Revolutionary thinkers;
  • Alain de Benoist, Founder member of GRECE and acclaimed leader of the Nouvelle Droite;
  • Guillaume Faye, journalist and writer. Linked to GRECE until 1986 when he split from de Benoist and is now more actively associated with Piere Vial’s Terre et Peuple;
  • Jean Cau, former secretary to Jean Paul Satre, turned pagan, heavily influenced by Durer and Wagner and the writings of Paul Morand;
  • Louis Rougier, French philosopher and epistemologist;
  • Thierry Maulnier, journalist, essayist and dramatist;
  • Julien Freund, influenced by Carl Schmitt and author of numerous works including Political Essence (1965);
  • In July 1979 Left leaning writers such as Thierry Pfister in Le Monde raised the alarm about the fact that the Nouvelle Droite had begun to gain traction in the media. Within weeks over 500 articles by people like Raymond Aron condemning this development began to appear. Anti-racist and Jewish groups such as the Mouvement Contre le racisme et l’ amite entre les people, refused to share a platform with de Benoist and his ilk. This was repeated in the summer of 1993. The left claiming the New Right were undertaking ‘a big seduction campaign targeting democratic personalities, some of whom are known as leftists’. More than 1500 ‘intellectuals’ throughout Europe signed the appeal;
  • Maurice Dantec, is a writer and musician living in Montreal;
  • Michel Houellebecq, award winning author, film-maker and poet. Most intriguingly he wrote a critically acclaimed biographical essay on H.P. Lovecraft;
  • The Mayor of Marseilles called upon the French Government to have the army come into his city to deal with immigrant gangs, where two thirds of the homicides committed in France occur;
  • Within the last few weeks Albanians have been seen to be financially exploiting Africans clambering on to lorries heading for the Channel Tunnel;
  • The Lambda flag was taken from the blazon painted on the shields of the Greek Hoplites;
  • Identitaire Bewegung, conduct ‘hard-bass’ actions and are the subject of a typical academic case study by Brigit Sauer and Stephanie Mayer, sponsored by the EU, entitled: ‘A European Youth against Europe? Identity and Europeanes in the Austrian Identitarian Discourse’ (University of Leicester, 2014);
  • Renaud Camus, originally coined the phrase the Great Replacement and since 2010 has campaigned against immigration;
  • Dominique Venner, French historian, journalist and essayist with close links to the anti-Gaullist OAS, Jeune Nation (Young Nation) and later GRECE. He committed suicide to draw attention to the threat posed by modernity to the Occident in Notre-Dame-de-Paris on the 21st May 2015;
  • Renouveau francais, a Catholic nationalist movement which faced down FEMEN and Gay Pride marches in Paris;
  • George Soros, like Nicholas Sarkozy is a Hungarian Jew. He is a business magnate, founder of the Open Society Foundation and paymaster for the various Colour Revolutions across the Arab world and the attempted Orange revolution in Ukraine;
  • The Gaysott Act was enacted to make it impossible to deny The Holocaust and to remove scholar Robert Faurisson from his university Chair;
  • Georges Bernanos, author and soldier of a Catholic and Monarchist disposition, his most famous novel being Under Satan’s Sun (2012 ed.)
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher, cultural critic and author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, beyond Good and Evil and the Antichrist;
  • Ferdinand Tönnies, sociologist and philosopher who wrote books on community and civil society;
  • Friedrich List, developed the National System of Innovation and author of the National System of the Political (1837);
  • Paul de Lagarde, polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist who tried to establish a German religion. He wrote: ‘Germany is the totality of all German feeling, German thinking, German-willing Germans, every one of us is a traitor if he does not consider himself personally accountable in every moment of his life for the existence, fortune and future of the Fatherland, and each is a hero and a liberator if he does’;
  • Julius Langbehn, Far right art historian and poet who published 40 Lied in 1891;
  • Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, admirer and translator of Dostoevsky, he was a major influence on the Jungkonervativen (Young Conservatives) and author of Das Recht der Jungen Völker, (The Right of Young Nations, 1918) and Das Dritte Reich (1923);
  • Othmar Spann, Austrian conservative philosopher, sociologist and economist of anti-liberal and anti-socialist persuasion. He argued for a corporate state and joined the Militant League for German Culture in 1928;
  • Adam Muller, a publicist, political economist and state theorist, and part of the German counter-enlightenment;
  • Hans Freyer, author of Der Staat (1926). He held similar views to Spann in opposition to the Enlightenment;
  • Ludwig Klages, philosopher and psychologist, heavily involved in the Mystic Circle of Alfred Schuler and the poet Stefan George;
  • Oswald Spengler, famous historian and philosopher of history itself. He wrote, Prussianism and Socialism (Arktos, 2012 ed.) which described an organic nationalist brand of socialist authoritarianism;
  • Edgar Julius Jung, lawyer and leader of the Conservative Revolutionary movement and opponent of the Nazis. His body was found in a ditch on the outskirts of Oranienburg in July of 1934;
  • Karl Hausofer, German military commander, geographer, geo-politician and mentor to Rudolf Hess;
  • Werner Sombart, an economist and social activist, one of the leading social scientists in Europe in the early decades of the 20th Century;
  • The Tower of Babel, being the biblical legend from the Book of Genesis which explains the origin of different languages;
  • The Kids From Fame, an American movie and TV serial which advocated   multiculturalism predominantly between 1982-87;
  • Armin Mohler, Swiss born author of the Conservative revolution in Germany 1918-32;
  • Karl-Heinz Weissman, a leading figure of the German New Right;
  • Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, educated at the University of Vienna, conservative publicist, writer and expert on Prester John and Meister Ekhart. He won the Konrad Adenauer prize of the German Foundation;
  • Pierre Krebs, graduate of Law from Montpellier and founder of the Thule Seminar;
  • Robert Steuckers, Belgian former student of Armin Mohler, widely recognized as an authoritative voice of the intellectual European Right;
  • Giorgi Locchi, essayist and journalist influenced by Faye and Krebs;
  • Tomislav Sunic, diplomat, professor and writer of Croatian origin. His well-respected works, Homo Americanus: Child of the Post-Modern Age (2007) and Against democracy and Equality (1990, 2002, and 2011 editions) are considered core texts within the New Right;
  • Alexander Dugin, Russian academic, poet, New Right Eurasianist, author of The Fourth Political Theory (Arktos 2012), Putin Versus Putin (Arktos 2014), and Last War of the World Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia (Arktos 2015);
  • Sebastien J. Lorenz, Spanish contributor to the Nueva Derecha;
  • Carl Schmitt, jurist and political theorist. Author of The Concept of the Political (1996 ed.), Constitutional Theory (1928) and The Theory of the Partisan (1963);
  • Javier Ruiz Portella, Editor of Iconoclast;
  • Alvaro Mutis, Latin American committed to white Christianity;
  • Ernst Jünger, warrior, writer and intellect. Holder of the Iron Cross for service in The First European Civil War and author of books like The Marble Cliffs (1939) and The Glass Bees (1957);
  • Cicero, lawyer, orator philosopher and political theorist, called the ‘righteous pagan’;
  • Chancellor Angela Merkel, leading figure in German politics since 2005;
  • Francois Hollande, President of France and leader of the French Socialist Party;
  • Francois Sarkozy, former president of France between 2007-12;
  • Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997-2007. Now a controversial figure, resulting from his dubious role in involving the UK in the Iraq War, his pursuit of bureaucratic positions in the EU and the Middle-East and advancing his Foundation’s interests in highly questionable ways;
  • David Cameron, current British Prime Minister who claims direct descent from Emile Levita, a German Jewish financier;
  • Herman Van Rompuy, a Belgian Prime Minister and the first President of the European Council;
  • Jose Manuel Barroso, former Maoist activist in Portugal who went on to be the President of the European Commission;
  • Morgan Johansson, Swedish Minister for Justice and Migration. He said: ‘All societies can create freedom for a minority. But freedom for the majority can only be realized in an equal society’;
  • Richard Coudenhove-Kalgeri, Founder and President for 49 years of the pan-European Union. He also supported Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points;
  • Jean Raspail’s fictional work Camp of the Saints is now a considered a prophetic text in right wing circles;
  • Jack Straw, former British Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary under Tony Blair’s Labour government. He is famous for saying ‘the English have no culture’;
  • David Blunkett, British Home Secretary after Jack Straw;
  • The Morgenthau Plan was proposed by the US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. It was to be imposed on Germany after its capitulation in 1945. It was pre-figured on partitioning Germany, destroying its industrial base, rapid de-population, encouraging miscegenation and preventing Germany from ever rising to power again. Franklin D. Roosevelt said of the Plan: ‘Too many people here and in England hold the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place. That it was only the Nazis that are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern society’.

 

Indicative Reading in Print:

T. Bar-On, ‘The French New Right’s Quest for Alternative Modernity, Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary Fascist Studies 1(1), pp.18-52 (2012)

T. Bar-On, ‘Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16 (3), pp. 327-45 (December, 2008)

T. Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (Routledge, 2013)

T. Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Ashgate, 2007)

Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, 2000)

L. Bell & C. Flood (Editors), Political Ideologies in Contemporary France (London, 1997)

A. de Benoist, Vue de droit (Copernic, 1979)

A. de Benoist, Carl Schmitt Today: Terrorism, “Just” War, and the State of Emergency. Translated by A. Jacob. Edited by T. Ridderdale & J.B. Morgan (Arktos, 2013)

A. de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms. Translated by A. Jacob (Arktos, 2011)

A. de Benoist, On the Brink of the Abyss: The Imminent Bankruptcy of the Financial System (Arktos, 2015)

A. de Benoist, Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (Arktos, 2011)

A. de Benoist & A.C. Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance. Translated by M. Bendelow & F.J. Greene (Arktos, 2012)

A. de Benoist. ‘What is Sovereignty’ (Telos no. 14, 1999)

H. Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (New York, 1994)

M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York, 1982)

N. Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Myth of Multiculturalism (Penguin, 2002)

M. Blinkhorn (Editor), Fascists and Conservatives: The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth Century Europe (London, 1990)

S. M. Borthwick, ‘Historian of The Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Works for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student’ (The Institute for Oswald Spengler Studies, 2011)

M. Caiani, D. della Porta, C. Wagemann, Mobilizing on the Extreme Right: Germany, Italy and the United States (Oxford University Press, 2012)

L. Cheles, R. Ferguson and M. Vaughan (Editor), The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (Longman, 1995)

L. Cheles (Editor), The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (Longman, 1991)

N. Chomsky, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (Berkley, 1994)

G. Cohen, The New Right: Image and Reality (Runnymede Trust, 1986)

K. Friedrich, ‘A Conservative Revolution Against Hitler: Edgar Julius Jung’s Analysis and Criticism of the Total State’ (in Totalitarianism and Challenge of Democracy, edited by A. Jablonski & W. Piasecki, 1992)

G. Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post Catastrophic Age (Arktos, 2010)

G. Faye, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance (Arktos, 2011)

G. Faye, Convergence of Catastrophes (Arktos, 2012)

H. Freyer, Theory of the Objective Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture (Ohio University, 1998)

A. Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics (Stanford University, 1994)

P. Gottfried, Carl Schmitt: Politics and Theory (New York, 1990)

R. Griffin, Fascism’s New Faces (and new facelessness) in the ‘post-fascist’ epoch, Deliberation, Knowledge (2004)

J. J. Haag, Othmar Spann and the Politics of Totality: Corporatism in Theory and Practice (PhD Thesis, Rice University, 1969)

J. Habermas, The Historians’ Debate and the New Conservatism (Boston MIT Press, 1989)

M. Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York, Harper Collins, 1993)

J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984)

P. Ignazi, The Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006)

L. E. Jones, ‘Edgar Julius Jung: The Conservative Revolution in Theory Practice’ (American Historical Association, 1988)

E. Jünger, The Storm of Steel. From the Diary of a German Storm-troop Officer on the Western Front. Translated by B. Creighton (Chatto & Windus, 1929)

E. J. Jung, ‘Germany and the Conservative Revolution’, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (University of California Press, 1995)

E J Jung, ‘People, Race, Reich’ in Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870-1940. Edited by Alexander Jacob (University of America Press, 2002)

E. J. Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour (New York, 1995)

L. Klages, The Biocentric Worldview (Arktos, 2013)

K. von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 1968)

P. Krebs, Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethno-suicide or European Renaissance? (Arktos, 2012)

R. Levitas (Editor), The Ideology of the New Right (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1986)

S. M. Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Political Movements (New York, 1960)

A. Mammone, ‘The Transnational Reaction to 1968: Neo-Fascist Fronts and Political Cultures in France and Italy’, Contemporary European History 17, pp. 213-36, (2009)

T. McCulloch, ‘The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Ideology and Entryism, the Relationship with the Front National’, French Politics and Society 4, pp. 158-78, (2006)

M. Minkenberg, Trends and Patterns of the Radical Right in Europe: East and West (Workshop on International Developments in Right Wing Extremism, Southern Poverty Law Centre and Friedrich Ebert Stifung, Montgomery, Alabama, 30th April – 2 May, 2012)

M. van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire. Translated by E.O. Lorimer (Arktos, 2012)

C. Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

J. Z. Muller, The Other God that Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton, 1988)

E. Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1965)

M. O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, 2004)

P. Piccone, ‘Confronting the French New Right: Old Prejudices or a New Political Paradigm?’, Telos 98-9, Winter/Spring pp. 3-23, (1993/94)

R. B. Pippin, ‘Nietzsche’s Alleged Farewell: The Pre-modern, Modern, and Postmodern Nietzsche’, in Higgins and B. Magnus (Editors), Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge University Press, pp. 252-78, 2004)

K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Routledge and Kegan, 1962)

K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (University Press of New England, 1990)

C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (Chicago, 2007)

W. G. Simpson, Which Way Western Man? (Noontide Press, 1986)

W. Sombart, Economic Life in the Modern Age (New Brunswick, 2001)

O. Spann, Der wahre Staat (1921)

O. Spann, Types of Economic Theory (George Allen & Unwin, 1930)

O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 Volumes (New York 1928)

O. Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life (New York 1963)

A. Spektorowski, ‘Ethno-regionalism, Multicultural Nationalism and the Idea of a European Third Way,’ Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 7, pp.41-61 (2007)

F. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (University of California, 1974)

Z. Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel, (Princeton, 1996)

M. Steyn, ‘Why the Fascists Are Winning in Europe’, Maclean’s (22nd June) , pp.28-30 (2009)

W. Struve, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890-1933 (Princeton, 1973)

T. Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, 3rd Edition (Arktos, 2011)

P. Taguieff, ‘The New Right’s View of European Identity’, Telos 98-99, Winter/Spring pp. 34-54 (1993-4)

C. Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Ontario, 1991)

F. Tönnies, Community and Society (London and New York, 2002)

L. Tudor, From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Identitas/Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015)

A. Umland, ‘The European New Right: Neo-or – Fascist?’, Patterns of Prejudice 43 (2009)

We are Generation Identitaire, translated by F. Roger Devlin and Edited by John B. Morgan (Arktos, 2013)

M. Willinger, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the 68’ers (Arktos, 2013)

M. Willinger, A Europe of Nations (Arktos, 2014)

R. Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York, 1996)

R. Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (Routledge, 2007)

 

Online Reading:

Warren, I.B. ‘The European New Right: Defining and Defending Europe’s Heritage – An interview with Alain de Benoist’, Journal of Historical Review 14 http://www.vho.org/GB/Journals/JHR/14/2/warren28.html#ref12

Johnson, M. R. (n.d.) ‘The State as the Enemy of the Ethnos’. http://www.freespeechproject.com/807.html

New Imperium – Altermedia – http://uk.altermedia.info/general/new-imperium_177.html

N. Fligstein, A. Polykova, W. Sandholtz, W. ‘European Integration, Nationalism and European Identity’. Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 50. No. S1, pp. 106-122B (2014)

Brenakedislam.com (2013) GENERATION IDENTITAIRE Movement: First France, then Germany and the Netherlands. Accessible at: http://www.barenakedislam.com/2013/06/22generation-identitaire-movement-first-france-then-germany-now-in-the-netherlands

Generace Identity (Czech Republic). Official website: http://generace-identity.cz/

D. Halikiopoulou, K. Nanou, S. Vasilopoulou, ‘The Paradox of Nationalism: The Common Denominator of the Radical Right and Radical Left Euroscepticism’. European Journal of Political Research, 51, pp. 504-539 (2012). http://extremisproject.org/2012/11/the-paradox-of-nationalism-the-common-denominator-of-radical-right-and-radical-left-euroscepticism/

F. Steiger, ‘Die Identitaire Bewegung – Open Source – Ideologie aus dem Internet’. Accessible at: http://www.netz-gegen-nazis.de/artlike/die5E2%80%9Eidentit%C3%Are-bewegung%E2%80%9C-open-source-ideolie-aus-dem-internet-9343

B. Balibar, ‘Europe Is a Dead Political Project’, The Guardian (25th May) http://ww.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/25/eu-crisiscatastrophic-consequences

 

Websites: 

 

————–

Note: This article has been personally provided for original publication on the New European Conservative by the author.

 

Advertisements

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

The Logic of Capitalism – Benoist

The logic of capitalism; the unemployed and the superfluous

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the French by Tom Sunic

 

Below is the interview A. de Benoist gave recently to Boulevard Voltaire.

Q: Despite repeated promises of politicians, both from the right and the left, nothing seems to be stopping the rise in unemployment. Is it something inevitable?

A: Officially, there are 3.5 million unemployed in France, which means that the unemployment rate stands today at 10.3%. This figure, however, varies depending on how it is being computed. The official statistics take into account only the category “A”, i.e. those who are unemployed and who are actively looking for a job, while leaving out the categories “B”, “C”, “D” and “E”, i.e. those looking for a job although having had some reduced work activity as of lately; those who have stopped looking for a job but are still unemployed; those receiving training; those in traineeship; those working under “subsidized contracts”, etc. When adding together all these categories, one reaches the real unemployment rate of 21.1% (more than double the official figure). If we refer to the overall rate of the inactive population of working age, then we arrive at 35.8%. Moreover, if we were to take into account insecure, part-time, or short-term jobs, as well as the number of the “working poor”, etc., then this figure keeps getting higher.

Undoubtedly, changes in unemployment depend on the official policies—but only to some extent. Today’s unemployment is no longer of a cyclical nature, but primarily structural, something many have not fully understood yet. This means that work is becoming a scarce commodity. The jobs that have been lost are less and less being replaced by other job openings. Of course, the expansion of the service sector is real; yet the service sector does not generate capital. Moreover, twenty years down the road almost half of those service sector jobs will be replaced by networked machines. To imagine, therefore, that someday we shall return to full employment is an illusion.

Q: There are people who live in order to work and others who work in order to live. Aren’t those who refuse to lose their lives in order to earn it part and parcel of some ancestral wisdom? Is work really a value in itself?

A: What needs to be pointed out is that what we call “work” today has no relationship whatsoever with what used to be productive activity of the past centuries, namely a simple “metabolization” of the nature. Neither is work a synonym of activity, nor of employment. The near universal spreading of wage labor was already a revolution of sorts to which the masses remained hostile for a very long period of time. The reason for that is that they had been accustomed to the consumption of the assets of their own labor only and never viewed labor as means of acquiring the assets of others, or in other words, to work in order to purchase the results of the labor of others.

Labor has a dual dimension; it represents both concrete labor (its metabolizing purpose) and abstract labor (energy and time spent). In the capitalist system what counts is abstract labor only, because this kind of labor, being indifferent to its own content, being also equal for all goods for which it provides a basis of comparison, is the sole factor that transforms itself into money, thus acquiring a mediating role in a new form of social interdependence. This means that in a society where commodity is the basic structural category, labor ceases to be socially distributed by traditional power structures. Rather, it performs itself the function of those ancient relationships. In capitalism, labor constitutes itself the dominant form of social relationships. Its by-products (commodity, capital) represent simultaneously concrete labor products and the objectified forms of social mediation. Hence, labor ceases to be a means; it becomes an end in itself.

In capitalism value is made up of the time spent working and represents therefore the dominant form of wealth. Capital accumulation means accumulating the product of the time spent in human labor. This is why the enormous productivity gains generated by the capitalist system have not resulted in any significant decrease in working hours, as one might have expected. On the contrary, based on the trends of unlimited expansion, the system keeps imposing always more work. And it is right there that we can observe its fundamental contradictions. On the one hand capitalism seeks to extend working hours, since it is only by having people work more and more that it can achieve capital accumulation. On the other, productivity gains allow from now on the production of more and more goods with less and less men. This makes the production of material wealth more and more independent from the time spent on working. In this respect the unemployed have already become the superfluous people.

Q: You are known to be a workaholic. Do you ever miss watching the grass grow and fondle some of the cats in your household?

A: I work 80-90 hours a week simply because I like doing what I do. This does not make me an adept of the ideology of work. Quite the contrary. In the Genesis (3: 17-19) work is depicted as a consequence of the original sin. Saint Paul says: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat” (II Thessalonians 3:10).This moralistic and punitive view of the work is just as alien to me as the Protestant redemptive work ethic, or for that matter the exaltation of the value of work by totalitarian regimes. Yes, I am aware of the fact that the word “travail” (work) comes from the Latin tripalium, a word which originally used to designate an instrument of torture. Therefore, I try to sacrifice to the requirements of “free time,” which is “free” insofar as it is freed from work.

 

—————

De Benoist, Alain. “The logic of capitalism; the unemployed and the superfluous.” Interview by Boulevard Voltaire. The Occidental Observer, 25 July 2015. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/07/the-logic-of-capitalism-the-unemployed-and-the-superfluous/ >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

You Say You Want a Revolution? – Solère

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Transcript of the Radix Podcast Interview with Fenek Solère by Richard Spencer

 

Introduction: Fenek Solere joins Richard Spencer to discuss his novel, The Partisan, the tradition of violent partisanship in Europe, the social conditions that incite and suppress revolution, and the evolution of the American and European Alternative Right.

RS: Well, Fenek Solere, welcome to the podcast, it’s a pleasure to have you on.

FS: It’s a delight, Richard, thank you for having me.

RS: Well let’s talk about your new novel, indeed, your debut novel, The Partisan and I think first, what we should do, is give a summary of it, a taste of what the novel’s about and what sparked you to write it?

FS: Yes, certainly. I started writing the novel four or five years ago. It was by observing what was going on in France at that time and particularly Paris. I was very strongly of the opinion that France, for a whole range of reasons, both historical and intellectual would be a touchstone, a litmus paper for what was going to be, if I can use the expression, the Clash of Civilizations, especially in Europe because of mass immigration and things of this nature. Essentially the novel is a forward view, it’s a vision of a future five to seven years hence, very unlike the one Michel Houellebecq predicts, which is one of submission. This is one of No Submission. The situation is that France is being submerged into a wider Eurabic state, including most of Southern Italy and there are very strong Islamic political, cultural and military influences reaching across the Mediterranean into Europe. Just like the very big migrations we already see but now with wider implications. So, as well as the current demographic dynamic, it is predicting what is occurring as defining Europe’s future and I set this against the theatre which is Paris and France in general.

RS: Talk a little bit more about why you chose France as the setting because as I was reading the novel that was a very distinct aspect of it. The bohemian life in France, certainly with regard to the main character, La Pertoleuse, is a very dominant feature. So why France? You are, we can tell by your accent, from Britain, right?

FS: Well France for me seemed a natural choice. It is a focal point for the New Right, the very start of the intellectual movement that blossomed into Identitarianism. I was very much aware of the work, writings and opinions of de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, and please remember I was writing at a time before Generation Identitaire broke onto the scene at Poitiers, so my text was in some ways pre-empting those brave and very symbolic actions. So the whole Metapolitics around the Gramscian notion of the war of position and how the New Right had been re-positioning itself informed The Partisan. I see it as a pivotal novel, so the stage-set of Paris and culture-rich France is quite good in that regard. I wanted that juxtaposition of the self-styled 68’ers intellectual Bohemian France coming face to face with the realities of the other, they have for so long eulogized. A very different culture, that of Islam and in the novel we see them beat against each other quite violently and viciously. So I think it’s about the War of Position, understanding the whole notion of France as representing Europe, a very identifiable Europe, with a large and extended back history and an identity worth preserving and celebrating.

RS: And it’s also a place of revolution and obviously there’s the French Revolution but that in a way is only the beginning. It’s perceived as a place of left wing revolution and right wing partisanship of a type we don’t see in the US, at least not in the form it’s taken at the time of Charles De Gaulle for example, or indeed other leaders of France. So I agree, France is the perfect setting for a novel of partisanship. Why don’t we, before we start talking about the philosophical issues you raise with your novel, talk about the three main characters, Sabine, who is of course La Petroleuse, Luc and the man Costello who is chasing them.

FS: Yes, indeed, I wanted to inject some film noir elements into the story. So Sabine is a very determined, very individual female, and deliberately so. I’m trying to challenge any sort of residual misogyny amongst the Alternative Right. She is a complex character, indeed, a rebellious character, a licentious character but ironically with both loose and strict morals. I think there’s a nice tension there. And she’s also a woman who knows her mind and a woman who has suffered and indeed suffers during the course of the novel. But she overcomes these obstacles, ultimately becoming a significant icon among the traditional forces of France, the alternative resistance. In fact, she emerges as a central figure for them, becoming their poster-girl, and that is emphasized at the opening of the story with her taking very direct action against those collaborating with the transition to the Eurabic state. So she’s an evolving character. She acquires knowledge during the course of the novel, arriving in Paris as a blank sheet of paper in on sense, and that’s where Luc comes in, the male love interest, because he is already steeped in these traditions. He’s precociously well read, familiar with Herman Hesse at the age of twelve or thirteen, before moving onto much more political material, which in the novel he makes available to Sabine and she becomes intellectually empowered. It is the growth of both these characters as the storyline unfolds which is quite important. It’s a part of the love interest, it is part of the human story and also an ideological gateway for the reader too, because they are taken through various stages of radical development, to the point where they are in total sympathy with the main protagonists.

RS: What was it like for you to come to these views? Was your experience like Sabine’s or very much different?

FS: My arrival at these ideas, or this way of thinking, was instinctive. I come from a small provincial town. There was a homogenous demographic, so my rebellion was against the socialist milieu that dominated the town. Those that used the platitudes of egalitarianism to hide their own nepotism, corruption and self-advancement. So I came to my opinions through a philosophical antagonism to the lie of what I witnessed with my own eyes, in what we describe in Britain as a Labour ‘rotten borough’. So that is how I came to be a nationalist and patriot, rather than through the more edgy racial dimension. The problems of multiculturalism were not something I was exposed to as a child.

RS: I think there’s a certain personality type that seek these ideas out even before we have them ourselves. When I was a college undergraduate I was not racially conscious in the sense of thinking about these things, as part of a world-view, I mean. I was racially unconscious like millions of other white people. I was seeking out the edgy ideas, the one’s that seemed to strike at the heart of the system and many of those were Marxism and Critical Theory for example, and also Nietzsche and German idealists thinkers, but I was actively trying to seek them out. I was asking myself, what is the problem deep at the heart of reality that bothers me and I think that was my journey. So I was racially unconscious and then obviously became racially conscious. But I don’t in a way think race is the most important thing. It is obviously an indispensable factor, an extremely important one, but I think there has to be a spirit behind that, that you want something more, you want a deeper, more intense experience, you seek danger, you seek a heightened world, something that is different to bourgeois reality. I think that is how I would kind of describe a person who may become a partisan. I’m not a partisan of course, I just type blogs and do podcasts.

FS: Yes, you are a cultural partisan. But I recognize what you are saying. For me it was the excitement, that edginess of being a teenager, acting out, saying and doing outrageous things to get noticed, but before long I was getting exposed to some really good reading material like Michael Walker’s The Scorpion, which in turn introduced me to Nietzsche and before long I was reading de Benoist, well not in the original French of course, but the English translations of parts of his work. Then it was Conservative Revolutionaries like Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger, Martin Heidegger, Edgar Julius Jung, Ludwig Klages, Arthur Moeller Van den Bruck, Ernst Niekisch and Ernst von Salomon. That group even included Thomas Mann, author of The Magic Mountain, until he distanced himself from them in the 1920’s.

Over time I got the sense of the transnationalism of de Benoist’s thinking. So I was becoming familiar with people like Marco Tarchi, an Italian professor of political science at the University of Florence and creator of Nuova Destra along with former members of the Nouvelle Ecole like Robert Stuekers from Belgium, Marcel Ruter from Holland and the Croatian Dr. Tomislav Sunic and some of the great pieces he’s written, particularly Against Democracy & Equality (2008) and Homo Americanus (2007). At the moment I’m enjoying Alexander Dugin’s Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (2015) and I know you are very familiar with his work and are very supportive of him, having published his Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of Another Beginning (2014). So this has been a long journey, starting with that hormonal teenager I spoke of but then I think it grew in me and became far more consolidated, grounded not only in theory and philosophy but also in lived-experience.

But to go back to Costello, he is a modern day Inspector Javert from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) and the whole idea of having a character like that was to have him ask himself questions. He’s on the edge all the time. He has a task to hunt La Petroleuse down. He’s a specialist, part M16 and part Special Air Services, but all the time he’s conflicted, reflecting on his own experiences in recent international conflicts but also from his family history. But I don’t want to give away too much of the plot…’

RS: Yes, you can tell because you put thoughts in his head and you can tell he’s not sure what he’s doing. He’s a sort of instrument of the state. I think, when he’s first introduced someone says, ‘Oh, we have this person from England, like who is it, James Bond. Oh, no, it’s even better! But he is a type of James Bond. He’s an instrument of the state and he isn’t sure what he’s doing and he becomes a kind of reluctant hunter and he’s obviously physically attracted to Sabine as well so it gets quite interesting.

FS: That was a plot-device. I wanted to challenge the reader and make it very clear this was not a simple case of the goodies versus baddies, black and white, the white hat and the black hat from the westerns, but there was an in-between. This novel is attempting to get to those people who are ‘in-between’ . Trying to excite and entice them into Sabine’s world and that sub-plot is part of that mechanism. I also think, if you look at the early phases of the novel, I deliberately refer back to the Algerian crisis, introducing the notion of the Organisation de l’armee secrete (OAS) and the experience of the French Pieds- Noirs and that was significant because I wanted the back-drop to be very clear. Once France had been in Algeria, Algerie-Francais, and now Algeria has come to France. And I think that is quite an important theme of the novel. What we are witnessing today is the transference of the battle ground from Oran to metropolitan France. And if you know anything about that particular period in history, you’ll be aware that something like 3,500 French Settlers were killed in July 1962 alone by rogue elements of the Algerian liberation Front (FLN) and local auxiliaries there. So the backdrop is one of extreme and very recent historical disaster and tragedy.

RS: Oh yes, it is like the late 60’s when France moved from being an Imperial power and then there was the crisis involving De Gaulle. Many people united to revive the old empire, keep it going, and it seems like when that turning was crossed, it’s like the empire comes home, the chickens come home to roost. I don’t think all racial clashes are driven from Imperialism but it is definitely an important aspect to it all.

FS: It is. And of course it humanizes the main Arabic character in The Partisan, because it gives him a justification for his very strong and very bitter feelings towards France and that drive for revenge. But not just for revenge’s sake. He has ideals himself. He has good intensions for his vested interest group and I think that emerges as the story unfolds. A bit-like the Resistance, and I deliberately used that specific word Resistance because I love that ‘spin’. I think in one sense it’s superficial and facile but it is also very important point to make at this moment in time because France is indeed being occupied. And we are the opposition to the mainstream which is going along with this process, the Great Replacement, that Renaud Camus speaks about.

RS: Oh, yes, we’re the New Left

FS: Exactly, I couldn’t agree more.

RS: No, I think that is absolutely true. One question that came up earlier when we were talking was how would you understand the psychology of this new type of European leader. And what I mean by that is, this new type of non-European leader, and he or she may be a Muslim or maybe not? But at the moment we still live under white hegemony effectively. Barak Obama may be a wild card but basically the heads of state are white men and women. And you can call them multiculturalists or white guilt mongers or whatever but they are basically mostly well-educated and upper crust. White people are trying to ride the tiger of multiculturalism, either way using it for their advantage. In some cases they are being elected by their constituencies, like this Miliband figure, the leader of the Labour Party in Britain. Maybe he’s the ultimate expression of theirs, but you can see this, even in as someone a boring as Angela Merkel. But there’s going to be a change and I don’t think Obama’s a representative of this, because I think Obama is a lot less radical than people think and a lot more mainstream, but at some point there is going to be a new kind of leader. It is not going to be the ‘squidgy’ liberal white person, it’s going to be an actual Asian, an actual Muslim and he’s going to be a PM or President of France and Britain. How do you describe that psychology ? Do you think this will be a tension between adopting the system, becoming part of the system, a tension between conquering the old imperial power and revenge. A tension between some kind of racial hand-outs to his people. How would you estimate the psychology of this new European leader who I think we will inevitably see in the next decade?

FS: I think you’re right, that is coming. I think it is going to be by means of a creeping gradualism and as you have indicated it is going to be very interesting how it is played out. There will be continued attempts at assimilation. The rise of the people you are predicting will be from within the system. They are going to beneficiaries of the system. They are going to milk the system for all it is worth, patronage, prestige and pay-cheques. They do not want to change the system outright, just yet. These will be highly educated individuals who will have their own immediate vested interests and those of their intimate family and group close to their hearts. So I think there will be a long transition phase only speeding up and becoming more perceptible when their control on the leavers of power are so far advanced that they can risk allowing any wild outbreaks of disorder or any really extreme behaviours to occur. So their plan is for us to have quite a slow poisonous death. Ed Miliband is certainly a very good example. A treacherous individual. I have met his brother David and I was even less impressed with him. And that was the man Ed beat to be the leader of the Labour Party. Hollande in France is the best example though. There we have the personification of utter banality. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like there was a vacuum walking ahead of all those heads of state after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He really is vapid, there is no substance at all. The interesting thing there though is because of his lack of charisma the door is left open for the resurgent Sarkozy challenge. And Sarkozy is a really dubious character, mired of course in corruption. And I think he’s the doorman for the new leader that you are describing because in my opinion, Sarkozy is not French. So Sarkozy really is like Thatcher was in the UK, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I suggest you take a second look at so-called white hegemony and the white leadership of these countries. I think you need to look a little below the surface. You need to look at the backgrounds of some of these people, who underwrites their campaigns, who funds theses parties. Look at the technocrats and ministers who surround them. In my interview on the Wermod & Wermod website with Alex Kurtagic I very quickly listed a whole range of people who were not remotely British and who do not represent the best interests of the indigenous community but who dominate the important decision-making positions throughout the country. And not just recently but for the last 5 to 8 years and the last 2 or 3 regimes. France is exactly the same. So the door is already open, they are setting the stage for this transition and it is going to be gradual. It will be like Alex Kurtagic said in one of his speeches about The Collapse, It’s already started and it will go on for some time and in my opinion we won’t know of its completion until Robert Mugabe is installed in Buckingham Palace.

RS: What do you think are some of the forces that might improve partisanship and what are some of the ways the forces that might retard or suppress it? And what I mean by that partisanship, is as Carl Schmitt defined it. A violent action, someone taking on the authority of the state or against the state’s interest. So what do you think are some of the forces that might inspire actions like that and what might prevent it?

FS: I think some of those actions are already occurring in many ways and have occurred over a period of time. Let’s look at the Radical Left, easy examples are the Red Army Faction with characters like Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhoff. There are movies made about them, they are glamorized in features like The Baader Meinhoff Complex, where you have chic actresses like Martina Gedek and Joana Wokalek representing really quite plain and quite moribund characters in some ways. Now, flick the switch, look at the right, you’ve got very attractive dynamic characters like Francesca Mambro , of the Italian Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR) and you’ve got Yevgenia Khasis in Russia going through a controversial re-trial for her involvement in a political assassination. See for yourself the very different approaches to both these situations and bringing it back to my novel The Partisan and the lead female figure I contend is all about inspiration, it’s all about people coming across a personal circumstance or feeling inspired by characters taking action and following them and conducting activities that will challenge the state. I cited the examples I did because I think they have been put through the movie mill of the left and been overlooked on the right, except that is for Mambro. She was represented in quite a negative way in a recent movie when it concentrated on one of the victims, a bystander who got tragically shot, and I do not want to diminish that, but it was an interesting comparison on how the left and right are represented. So certainly what we need is leadership, glamour, excitement. We also need the spark that creates those activities and we have seen it in the riots across Europe.

What is holding us back, the flip-side of your question, it is obvious to me, Aldous Huxley’s soma. We do have an awful lot of apathy and just in time pleasure that keeps us off the streets . And in many ways that is a good thing but what I would like to say Richard, is that clearly I’ m not advocating violence, that is not what this is about, this is a warning against violence but what I am saying is that violence is going to be inevitable unless we can stop this demographic juggernaut before it reaches the tipping-point. After that, the game is up, we will be living on the movie set of Apocalypse Now. So, for me, it goes back to leadership. Today, in the Western World we have the most stupid at best or the most treacherous self-serving leaders, there is no positive dynamic. The 68’ers and their philosophers have dissipated. The right has filled the gap but the right are being stifled as well. UKIP in Britain, Sarkozy in France, look at your own country, I cannot tell the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats anymore and if our friend Ms. Clinton gets elected to the highest office, that will be the greatest example of the most stifling influence in American politics. So there is a whole strain of soma running through society and we need something to light a fire.

RS: I agree, that soma is not just among political rightists, its among everyone. I was shocked by the fact that there weren’t serious riots occurring after the Trayvon Martin case and there weren’t violent riots after the Ferguson situation. There is still things going on there but they’ve died down. I was kind of thinking why isn’t this happening. It could be simple things like instead of rioting you can watch free streaming pornography on your government sponsored smartphone. Then there’s obesity, a product of our post-modern, post-industrial world and the availability of junk food. And you know it seems post-modern civilization might really go with a whimper and not a bang. It may be able to dull partisanship, but a riot, which is a different thing? But it might be able to dull those things too and absorb them into itself.

FS: Yes, it’s like T.S. Elliot said in The Hollow Men ‘Not with a bang but whimper’. I think that’s a deliberate policy of the system. You talk about obesity, but there’s mental obesity, mental retardation, we’re not exposed to the same texts or they are difficult to get to. The Left has dissipated. In many ways the Left is so mutated, it is not recognizable from when I was a boy. I think de Benoist said: ‘What’s left of the new Left, possibly the New Right?’ and I quite like the way he played that. I think it’s a cheeky way of doing it, it’s a challenging way and if you think of the synthesis the New Right developed, certainly in the 80’s, what you’ve got there is a very interesting challenge to the Left and de Benoist filled that space and I rather admire his tactic.

RS: I agree. I think the Left is a victim of its own success. I mean the Left is the establishment. You can’t claim to be challenging the system when you have an academic post, or you’re in charge of this literary theory of feminism Department at Harvard. And that is one way the system has absorbed political partisanship. I would say most partnership has come from the Left, or is it has historically and the system has been able to absorb that and I think that is an interesting thing and it may not exactly be by design but is certainly a way the system can maintain stability.

FS: I think that’s not necessarily expressed in the text of this novel but what the story does do is work towards the de-legitimization of those basic tenets of Judeo-Christian tradition that prevents us from defending ourselves and it takes on the de-humanizing quality of global capitalism where we become mere units of production, spending and buying. Of course it deals with questions of ethnic homogeneity, but it’s not the only dimension, despite the Arabic and Muslim versus the secular or Christian world, and there’s this feeling as well of being liberated. Liberated from the excesses of modernity. Which is what you were just talking about. For me, mitigating as many of the more negative features of modernity is central. I am by nature an optimist and I consider myself to be progressive and successful in terms of my career and profession. So it is not that modernity is holding me back or I’m threatened by it. I’ve mastered it but I feel the fulfillment that I want modernity to offer me is a mirage. So the sort of vanguard you are describing will start with a small cadre of the committed, people like yourself in the States, Generation Identitaire in France, The Immortals in Germany, National Action and Sigurd Legion in the United Kingdom. I’m being up-beat but I can see these elements developing into something bigger. Well, I would hope they develop and I think they can with the right leadership.

RS: Do you think this will develop on the vanguard right, of our type of right? You mentioned the lack of legitimate antagonism to the system offered by the Christian Tradition. It’s almost as if the Christian traditionalists does not want to undermine but indeed underpins the system and supports it. Do you see it that way? Is it going to be a vanguard revolt? It’s not going to be a mainstream middle-class who will rise up, it’s going to be people on the margins who are hated, who are a-social. There’s a great quote that you have, where Luc says something to Sabine, like, It’s the bohemian, it’s the vanguardist, it’s the a-social person who is truly sane. I think that’s where partisanship or some kind of riot or social revolution, of whatever form will come. Maybe it is violent or maybe non-violent but nevertheless, a revolution, which truly does change the world, changes society, in a way that Ghandi, Martin Luther King and more violent figures changed society. That will come from the vanguard on the fringe.

FS: Yes, and that is why this novel is written in the way it is. It is very much aimed at that vanguard. It does not believe as the author does not believe that the moribund right, the Christian American Right will generate something which is fresh and unique, and that is what is required at this moment. But there is an irony in what I have just said because if you use France as an example, and if you look back over the great thinkers and writers who have supported the Right, many came from strong catholic backgrounds. So it is quite interesting that de Maistre, De Bonald, and people like Drieux la Rochelle, Henry de Motherlant were very strong in their faith. However in the post-modern world we cannot rely on a Charles Martel emerging from the Christian Right. They have been co-opted. The catalyst for what we are seeking will indeed be ‘other’ and I think we’ve already seen some of that vanguard act in a non- violent but very demonstrative way. The take over the mosque in Poitiers by Generation Identitaire and the siege of the Socialist headquarters were fantastic visceral images conveying strong messages and those sort of ‘happenings’ , the 68 generation attitude, I can see beginning to mount. And if you look at the youth of Europe, increasingly they are moving in our direction. So the novel is all about attracting them. It’s deliberately written in an explosive exciting way, that’s to bring the audience to the theory, the philosophy, bring them to the books that will influence them. It’s the ‘attractor’, the same as the love story element. We are not going to get to these young people by handing out thousands of copies of Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium. A great piece of thinking, a brilliantly articulated neo-Spenglerian piece, but we’re simply not going to get a vanguard out on the street with that. We need to turn people on as Kai Murros says, we need to switch people on. Look this is a debut novel, I’m learning the craft, Richard, this is a very early piece. An attempt to draw that audience to us through literature and there’s some very good pieces of literature out there already. So this is just one contribution.

RS: I quite like Alex Kurtagic’s Mister. It’s quite a long novel. You’ve got to really get into the world of his work. But it is funny and it’s a non-revolutionary in a way. Very different from yours. Though they are published by the same publishing company, their nice counter-parts but in a way the image of the bourgeois man who is very intelligent and recognizing what is going on but in Mister someone who doesn’t revolt. Someone who finds another way of coasting along, going with the flow, not challenging the zeitgeist. I think there may be another genre of literature arising out of this. The revolt and collapse at the end of history.

FS: And there’s some really good writers out there as well. You publish them through your National Policy Institute outlet and Arktos have got some great theoretical texts. I regularly read their books and I’ve been in e-mail exchange with John Morgan since right back to the time when he was running Integral Traditions about six or seven years ago. So I very much agree with you. Alex is a great guy. He makes some great speeches. I know you have shared a platform with him. He was a very deserving winner of the inaugural Jonathon Bowden Oratory Prize and we haven’t touched on Bowden in our conversation but I know you are a great admirer of his intellect and his oratory, as was I, and like you I was turned on by that. It really stimulated and fascinated me. He is/was a great weapon in our armory. Works like The Partisan are aimed at a younger, but not just a young, but a youthful audience. A different audience. It’s a gateway to theory as I previously said in my interview at Wermod & Wermod. It is very much a piece to bring people to our milieu, to excite them. It is the first of many I have to say. I’m being very creative at the moment and I’m very excited about what’s going on and what you are doing at Radix. I’ll try very hard to come to your next conference. I couldn’t come along to Budapest because of other commitments but I’d like to come along to the next. I know you’ve got some great speakers and a mystery speaker as well, so I’ll look forward to the opportunity of being exposed to such talented intellects.

RS: That would be great. I don’t want to give it away but let’s just say the mystery speaker just happens to be from Texas and he’s running for President. Oh, I’m just kidding, Ted Cruz…

FS: I don’t think he’ll be turning up…

RS: May be we should invite him? He might come. Maybe we can get an invitation through some dumb staffer who would book him. That would be hilarious…

FS: But the speakers you have got are phenomenal and the one person I haven’t paid tribute to but is a giant is of course Jared Taylor. I know you’ve come over to Europe and you’ve done The Traditional Britain Group meetings and I think that is really good because except for The Scorpion which is now inert and unfortunately Bowden’s passing we don’t have the same intellectual tradition that the French have, another reason why I set The Partisan in France.

RS: Well, I think that is changing. And I’m not saying that to seem arrogant, oh, no we’re not out to challenge de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. But I think that is changing because for so long the American Right was intellectually so dominated by the Buckleyite conservative movement and so you had people like Russell Kirk, who I am not a great admirer of to be honest, but he’s an interesting guy, but these guys just ignored Europe in general, despite Kirk’s protestations otherwise. But they also had no contact and no awareness of developments like the French New Right and so we were just, well impoverished. I can remember when I was first just starting to enter this world in 2002/2003 I would find some translations of de Benoist on an Australian website in HTML format…

FS: That sounds familiar…

RS: And that was the only way. And I would try to buy copies of Telos which is actually a very interesting Left Wing/Right Wing journal, just so, because you know these were a lot like Radix is now. But they would come out when they were ready but you would buy these just to get a little taste of what was going on in Europe. We were really struggling back then but I think if you are looking at what’s happening, whether it’s the stuff I’m involved with or John Morgan’s doing we’re finally moving in the right direction and we’re finally shaking things up, getting rid of that conservative paradigm and moving things on. And I think we’re at an interesting point where we’re not in competition with all these groups, we’re synthesizing things and I think it’s very exciting.

FS: I agree, I feel that excitement as well. I referred earlier to that transmission of the New Right, it’s now travelled, It’s in fact transcontinental, not just because of the global village but because there are great and admirable thinkers of the Right perspective at the moment, people like the Australian Kerry Bolton. Sam Francis, who you often refer to in your podcasts and in your writing provided some great thoughts and expositions. Then there was your own Alt-Right site too. So we are becoming less and less dependent upon what was big in 1979/80. These were really big stepping stones and now with the superb articles on Greg Johnson’s Counter Currents and his own book New Right/Old Right things are motoring. Greg’s text by the way is sitting on my shelf right next to your own Dugin book on Heidegger that I referred to earlier .

RS: Those two books are at war with each other, perhaps?

FS: But nice to have on the shelf and hopefully some of this will find its way into some literature I produce in the future and give it some gravitas. So, yes, you’re right, I feel that excitement and like I said in an e-mail I sent you some four years ago, where I said when you were really active on the Alternative Right website, ‘you’ve definitely hit your stride here’, we’ve certainly got something going. You’ve got a lovely piece on the website at the moment about those Russians visiting the States and I think that’s a really clever piece. I’ve spent a lot of time in Russia. I speak some Russian and I am familiar with our milieu there.

RS: Excellent, well Fenek, let’s just put a book mark in this conversation. This was a lot of fun and I hope you can come back. And I was definitely stimulated by reading The Partisan. I enjoyed it and I think if anyone is listening they should at the very least give your book a shot. I think they will definitely find a lot of food for thought there, so I definitely recommend it. And this was a lot of fun, so thanks for coming on and let’s do it again.

FS: That would be great Richard. Thank you, goodbye.

 

—————–

Solère, Fenek. “You Say You Want a Revolution?” Interview with Fenek Solère by Richard Spencer. Radix, 20 May 2015. < http://www.radixjournal.com/vanguard-radio/2015/5/20/you-say-you-want-a-revolution&gt;. Transcript provided for the New European Conservative by Fenek Solère personally.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Interview with Fenek Solère – Kurtagic

Interview with Fenek Solère by Alex Kurtagic

 

Introductory Note: The following interview was personally recommend to us by Fenek Solère for republication on the “New European Conservative.” We have found its contents to be largely agreeable or at least interesting, but there are two particular matters we would like to comment on to clarify our own position or approach where it possibly differs from Solère’s. Firstly, regarding the problem of the Jews, we admit that there are a number of Jewish groups and leaders who have contributed to the current negative state of Western societies. However, we agree with Paul Gottfried that Jews as a whole people cannot be equated with these particular groups, and there are a variety of positions and factions among the Jews, some of which have nothing to do with the creation of multicultural, decadent societies. While criticism of the Jews can be legitimate, it is always important to keep open the possibility to Jews of creating groups which hold similar values to our own, and could also become allied to our own in the future.

Secondly, regarding Solère’s responses to some of Kurtagic’s questions about racial differences, immigration, and racial mixing, we would have approached these questions somewhat differently. Solère’s responses will, probably unintentionally, seem to imply to some readers that whites outdo all other races in any field and thus have higher capacities on the whole, which would also imply that they can generally create more superiour societies than non-whites. However, we should make it clear that in our view there are many non-white groups (the best examples being the Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asians) who clearly have equal capacities to whites and create societies which are just as high quality as white societies. Concerning the problems brought up in Kurtagic’s questions, the first fact that must be kept in mind is that capacities such as IQ level, athletic ability, etc. often differ across time periods, cultures, and social units, and they also vary among population groups within a single race as well. While it may be true that among some racial or ethnic populations a low or high IQ seems genetically ingrained, the previous facts are also true in many cases. Furthermore, a race always has the possibility of improving its population’s capacities without any mixture whatsoever from other groups, which is why the idea that interbreeding is necessary  to increase these factors in a given population is scientifically invalid. However, one must also keep in mind that what is important about racial and ethnic identity is the value of the identity itself, not any kind of superiour biological traits that may be possessed; even if it were possible to create a “more superiour breed” through mixture, it would be undesirable due to the loss of original identities. This is the perspective representative of Identitarianism. – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

***

Alex Kurtagic: Almost every time I receive a communication from you, it has originated in an exotic location, and it seems you are more often in some far-flung place on the planet than Britain. Are you an adventurer, or do you have a very interesting job?

Fenek Solère: I am both an adventurer and an entrepreneur. Like an ever-increasing number of people attracted to our movement I have thrived in the modern world, in direct contradiction to the media portrayal of dissidents like ourselves as lonely bitter bachelors, sitting in their basements with no friends and no sexual outlet.

Over the course of my adult life I have lived and worked in London, France, St Petersburg, Kiev, San Francisco, Central Asia, and the Middle-East. I am not someone who can be castigated and mocked for being unsophisticated or parochial. My home is filled with art, books, and the numerous artifacts I have collected from all over the world.

Both in private and professional terms I have lived cheek by jowl with many other cultures and ethnicities and observed them up close and personal. Life experience informs my writing. My fiction is grounded in an in-depth study of history, culture and political theory.

The Partisan could be read as the act of a natural contrarian. Were you a willful and troublesome child who did Z when told to do A?

I was born into an aspirant working class family in a small provincial town. My father was an electrician and my mother was a cook. A typical boy, I recall playing in the woods, running in the shadow of the craggy castles that littered the landscape, living more like one of those characters from an Arthur Ransom story than a game-boy addict. Pretending to be a cowboy, never an Indian, building tree houses in the style of Robinson Crusoe, crafting bows and arrows like Robin Hood to defend our fortified encampments.

My bookshelves were crammed with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and the Norse mythologies. There was no family pressure to ‘achieve’. Rather, an atmosphere of calm reassurance. The warm glow of security reflected in the open fire as I sat marching Napoleonic armies across the hearth-rug. I was relatively good at sport, representing my school and region at football, rugby, basketball, and cross- country. By the time I met my first girlfriend I was already well-past reading Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I remember catching sight of her at a school disco. She was a spike haired punk in clinging pink trousers, cutting a resplendent profile in the backwash of strobe lighting, as she threw a right arm salute. Her small fist punching the air when the opening chords of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, broke out across the hall.

Within weeks I became an activist. I recall my initiation started one balmy summer evening when a group of us torched a Trotskyite Militant newspaper stand in the centre of town. Not long after I was involved in an amateur style re-enactment of the climactic scene from The Dead Poets Society. A clear-skinned, fair-haired boy was made to stand up in front of the history class to defend his essay justifying Apartheid. He was asserting the South African Government had been right to imprison Mandela for terrorism and maintain ‘separation’ of the races. The teacher, a bespectacled 68’er, was going ballistic, screaming from behind an accusatory finger, threatening to have my friend removed from her class. ‘You can’t say that!’ she insisted, ‘What sort of person are you?’

Then, when he had finished, he looked in my direction and I knew it was my turn to stand and repeat the process. When I came to a close I had the honour to defer to the next boy, who had also been called to answer for transgressing the politically correct curricula. This open act of defiance was rapidly followed by a nationalist poster campaign on school noticeboards, which coming so quickly on the heels of the pro- Afrikaaner debacle and my own and my girlfriend’s names appearing in bold graffiti under a very large symbol closely associated with a controversial German political party of the middle nineteenth century, resulted in my expulsion.

The Partisan is set in France. Why France?

I chose France for its symbolism. When I began writing The Partisan in 2009 I saw a magnificent country threatened by the machinations of a malignant cosmopolitan interloper who had hijacked the race riots breaking out in 2005 in almost every French conurbation for personal political advantage. Then, that same devious individual, insisting on the benefits of miscegenation between the French and the alien hordes swamping the very boulevards where they had set fire to cars and attacked the native people. It seemed to encapsulate the whole political and demographic catastrophe I wanted to warn against in my debut novel. It was a country on the front-line. But also one with a very rich history of patriotic movements like the Front National and Right-wing intellectuals like Maurice Bardèche and the Nouvelle Droite’s Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. In more recent times the emergence of fledgling organizations like Generation Identitaire , who my fictional protagonists predicted two or three years prior to their brilliant ‘Declaration of War’ video and the Poitiers Mosque protest, gives me a real sense that the battle lines are being drawn and that the next twelve months will prove me right; that yes indeed, the land of Rousseau and Rabelais will be the first battle ground of the European resurgence.

How does The Partisan differ from the various American novels treating the same topic?

The characters in The Partisan are much more three dimensional than those I have met and admired in other so-called Rightist fiction. It is not purely ‘vengeful’ entertainment. The text is more literary and is replete with reference points to other writers and political thinkers. This is quite deliberate. I want my fiction to excite, inspire, and motivate its audience to investigate the very deep intellectual roots of what is referred to as the New Right. I want The Partisan to be an access point for our youth into that culture and to become familiar with the ideas of its main proponents.

Almost everyone would agree that there is little to admire in many earlier incarnations of Rightist literature: it is too often badly written and its message is utterly superficial, in that it wallows in an angry revenge fantasy. Would you not agree that the biological worldview, such as the one that informs many of these novels, is necessarily an amoral worldview (which often becomes immoral), since nature is concerned only with what works in a practical sense, and doesn’t assign value to abstract principles the way humans do? Since Westerners assign such importance to such principles—indeed, Western political philosophy has always been underpinned by some system of ethics—how can anyone expect readers to feel comfortable defending the heroes in such fiction, even if they find the revolutionary fantasy privately satisfying?

It is true that such literature can sometimes lapse into simplistic comic book fantasy. Such deficiencies are to some extent why I wrote The Partisan. One of my key objectives was to fuse the action-orientated type novel with a more poetic but pessimistic futurology like that envisaged by Jean Raspail in The Camp of the Saints. The point being that certain types of material appeal to certain dispensations at different given points. Some of our movement’s earlier fiction may rightfully be described as amoral, but much that passes today for great classic literature was considered so in the past. Look at the homosexuality of Gide and the modernist works of Joyce. That is not to place all those writers sympathetic to our cause in this category of artists, clearly, only a very few like Ernst Jünger, Knut Hamsun, and Ezra Pound would qualify, but to indicate that the amoral/immoral argument shifts according to the fashion of the day. The biological imperative underpinning some of these texts does remain relevant, though we have many other facets to our ever-maturing world-view. Without Western people there will be no Western sense of principles or ethics, so in that regard I have a degree of sympathy for those ground-breaking writers, in that their heroes and heroines had at least a modicum of understanding that unless those values were defended they would cease to exist and all our fine ideals would disappear—mea culpa.

Where does your interest in the European New Right originate?

I read Michael O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right and discovered the French Nouvelle École (New School). From that point it was a natural progression to study Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Pino Rauti, founder of the Ordine Nuovo, Guido Giannettini and the ideology of the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei in Italy; the writings of Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolutionaries of the Weimar period; Imperium by the American renegade Francis Parker Yockey; works by the Belgian Jean Thiriart; alongside contemporary thinkers and commentators like Robert Steukers, Gilbert Sincyr, Tomislav Sunic, Franco Freda of Disintegration of the System fame, Alexander Dugin, Kevin McDonald, Greg Johnson, Jonathan Bowden, Troy Southgate, and Michael Walker, editor of The Scorpion.

What is wrong with letting people from anywhere settle in Europe, if they are hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying and contribute to the economy?

Nothing, if that is indeed the case. I have met many Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Central Europeans who fulfill such criteria. Of course a small percentage do not but most integrate perfectly well and live successfully among us. Compare that to the facts and figures behind migration from Roma communities, African or predominantly Muslim countries. Welfare dependency, anti-social behavior, criminality, isolationism and the colonization of whole communities seems to characterize the experience. Religious insularity, high prison rates, mosques filled with semi-literate imams and would-be boy-Jihadis educated free in our schools, sexism, genital mutilation, witch-craft, TB, Typhus, Ebola, drug and people trafficking, child-sex grooming, and riots complete the picture. Ask the people of Malmö, the women of Oslo, those poor souls living in close proximity to the urban sensitive zones around Paris or certain parts of the north of England like Bradford and Rotherham what part of the ‘enrichment’ process they have enjoyed. Talk to the thousands of violated white girls who have benefited from the fast food, cheap narcotics, and Rap music industry these people generate in their slums and taxi about our green and pleasant land.

What I witness every day are economic migrants, in transit under the false flag of asylum, seeking a better life at our expense. It is like a plague of locusts landing on a field. Leeching all the goodness from our soil. Infesting our villages, cities and towns. This is not some kind of small minded ‘fear of the other’ it is an objective analysis based on rational judgment. People like myself do not fear ‘the other’ we invest time and find out about the ‘other’ with a natural and friendly curiosity. I have lived for three years in Muslim countries and found good and bad much the same as I would in Europe or America. But what I find amongst the ‘invasion force’ pressing in upon Europe appalls me. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the nationalist activists who have stood tall despite state sponsored persecution and shouted until they were hoarse that the ‘emperor’ of multiculturalism has no clothes.

So is it just a question of the practical effects of multiculturalism? Is there no principle behind it except a root-and-branch or technocratic approach to problem-solving? Does this not make the liberal approach superior, then, since it is driven by an ethical system, however imperfectly executed? Not superior in a technical sense, but certainly in a moral sense.

There is indeed a very deep sense of principle embedded within my earlier response. People and communities who have over generations worked and sacrificed for their own well-being in later life and indeed their kith & kin in the present should expect that having made those long-term commitments under moral and indeed contractual commitments to and with their governments that those obligations are honoured. People originating from societies who have failed or are unable to take that long-term view have no prior right upon such investments. And I challenge any authority or political party arguing otherwise to stand openly upon a platform declaring such an intent to pillage that hard earned inheritance and let the people who have genuinely and fulsomely entered into such an arrangement decide the matter.

Surely, diversity increases creativity, since you have more perspectives and approaches to any problem, and immigration from everywhere boosts economic growth. Are you against creativity and for a stagnant economy?

Despite the diversity you see in Hollywood films and on television, the world’s laboratories, board rooms and libraries are not filled with West Indians designing new software systems for intergalactic flight, Somalians building robots to work in arid conditions or ecologically aware Uzbeks setting up green companies to reduce carbon emissions. This is a myth, perpetuated by the few whose individual and cosmopolitan group interests it suits, flooding productive economies with low IQ ‘hands’ to drive down wages and increase short-term share-holder profits at the expense of the long term interests of their host community. The media is used to manipulate and shape our moral and social expectations. Identity is eroded by the notion of ‘global citizenship’. Water-cooler philosophy is dispensed by Kid-President you-tube videos. Economic and moral stagnation leading to inter-ethnic tension distracts us from the enemy’s goals, so openly declared by Barbara Lerner-Spectre Founding Director of the Paideia Institute in Sweden: I think there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism because at this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural and I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation which must take place. Europe is not going to be a monolithic society that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented for our leading role but without that leading role and without that transformation Europe will not survive’.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Is not your answer a bit of an overstatement? Certainly, Jews in the diaspora on the whole have favoured social, political, and intellectual movements tending to make the societies in which they live safer for them. No surprise here, given their history. Yet, to the degree that they have supported or even led such movements, these have merely demanded a more thorough and complete application of principles already enshrined and, indeed, central to liberal political philosophy. And liberal political philosophy is wholly North-Western European and ‘Aryan’ in origin: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Immanuel Kant—all these are gentiles, mostly from Britain to boot.

Your point is well made and I take it in the spirit it is intended, however, please indulge me for one moment. The term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ is often used to belittle and decry non-standard theoreticians. I accept there are a lot of cranks out there and people who have the potential to cause arm to others. Clearly, that is not my intent. Indeed, the very opposite is true. I am a historian and a political theorist. My opinions are not based on phantasms, a need to gain attention or dye my hair green and stand in a turquoise track suit next to David Icke. I have quoted above (and indeed elsewhere in relation to Nicholas Sarkozy, former President of France) one of hundreds of examples where some people of that particular diaspora have acted, in my opinion, against the interests of the European majority among whom they live. At this very moment I am simultaneously reading Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000BC – 1492 AD [Sic. It loos as if HarperCollins doesn’t know that AD goes in front of the year. —Ed.]The former, a chilling account of the systematic way the founders of the early Jewish state went about their ethnic cleansing and murder of thousands upon thousands of Arabs in the late 1940’s, (activities some may argue analogous with recent events); the latter a shameless and sycophantic account of Jewish history that exonerates the Chosen from any sense of personal or group responsibility for the numerous expulsions they have suffered throughout the centuries. The media-savvy Schama, reveals himself to be less historian and more a propagandist as he explains why it is that everyone else is always to blame and his own tribe are always right, or indeed innocent, and the victims of mindless persecution. I would recommend everybody to read both texts. I found it advantageous to have also read the Talmud, Torah, and indeed the Koran, so I have a socio-economic, historical, and religious context for my opinions. I came to the work of Kevin McDonald late but recognize the behavior patterns he ascribes to his study group and I personally would prefer that the more over-zealous Zionists desisted from their activities so that your average Mr and Mrs Finkelstein could live in peace within the wider community. Unfortunately, that wider community now includes people with anti-semitic attitudes. This is regrettable but is a direct consequence of the strategy so eloquently explained by Spectre-Lerner above.

The fact that you can list the names of such great Anglo-Saxon, French, and German thinkers is a testimony to the progressive and open-hearted culture from which they originate. That the good intentions of such well-meaning people could be so perverted is in fact a measure of what Yockey describes as the culture distortion so prevalent today both in Europe and America. I have studied the American Constitution, The Framers who devised it, their backgrounds, ethnicity and intentions. Likewise, the real motivations of President Lincoln before, during, and after the American Civil War and I can assure you the abbreviated versions of history our schools and universities teach us and the voters are fed through the distorting lens of Orwellian ‘Truth Speak’ is a subject fit for serious review. I myself studied the whole historiography surrounding ‘Reconstruction’ after the American Civil War and it is most instructive on how aspects of history can and are used during different epochs to influence public opinion. From the books we read to the films we watch. Trust me, there is a pattern and it is no coincidence. From Spencer Tracy’s The Northwest Passage encouraging American entryism into the Second World War, to John Wayne’s Green Berets, trying to sustain moral during the Vietnam War, and 300, instilling anti-Islamic sentiment during the Iraq and Afghan wars. A whole book could be written on the movies bolstering anti-German sentiments and the falsehoods therein contained, but I will leave it there, my counter-point, I believe, equally well made.

Immigration is needed because white folk no longer want to do certain jobs, whereas the newcomers are keen to contribute and willing to work hard. If we were to send them all back—which is impossible, of course—the economy and the NHS would collapse.

These shibboleths need to be exposed for the nonsense they are. In the course of my career I have collaborated with thousands of sole-traders, SME’s, and multinational corporations. In my opinion there would be no collapse, rather, a rejuvenation of the economy, greatly boosted I suspect by the end of massive social security payments, that could be re-directed from these imported voting blocs and unproductive elements to invest in new start-ups and training programmes for people who need to update their skill-set in line with current economic trends. I would recommend the re-nationalization of utility companies in the UK, likewise the rail and postal service, at the price set by the ‘fixers’ when they were sold off. I would also withdraw all benefits from those who had entered the country illegally and their families and dependents. Similarly, non-ethnic British who had committed serious crimes prior to their immediate deportation back to their country of origin, accompanied of course by their dependents, but not the assets that had been accumulated by fraudulent means or due to the generosity of the British taxpayer. It may sound draconian to some but it makes good business sense. I would also argue to levy taxes on the money migrant workers send back to their families, thereby reducing the outflow of capital from its source of origin and open negotiations with countries in receipt of Foreign Aid or benefits to assist us in the task of humane repatriation of their nationals or peoples of compatible ethnic origin or similar religious persuasion. New targets need to be set for emigration, based on a wide range of criteria, but certainly with a view to returning the ethnic balance of countries like Britain to pre-1997 levels. And that would be the start not the end-point of the discussion.

With regard to the NHS, I have managed contracts with a wide range of people connected to this vast and worthy enterprise. Indeed, I have been involved with medical training for nurses, GPs, and surgeons. An immediate family member is a practicing junior doctor. The simple fact is that we are diverting resources to train people of non-British origin to these highly paid jobs, reinforcing cultural stereo-types among some of the high achieving Asians who think the profession is ‘theirs’ (the names Khan and Patel are currently the most common names for a medical doctor in the UK) whilst failing to act when they underperform or commit acts of negligence or perversion because we fear being branded ‘racist’. Additionally, we are providing health tourists with a first class service and denuding developing countries of their most highly skilled health professionals, which seems morally indefensible to me, especially if we are to be judged by the liberal and ethical standards we are supposed to be upholding. So, in short, I think we can materially benefit from a mass outflow of the post-’97 immigrants, up-skill the workforce with a view to advancing our technological infrastructure and preserve and improve fundamental services like the British NHS with a planned programme of awareness raising and aspiration building so that increasing numbers of whites want to move into these fields, as was the case in previous generations.

Polls recording the attitudes of indigenous Europeans towards non-European immigrants consistently show that this view is popular. But how do you justify it morally? That’s the first thing. The second is, What about the many families of non-European origin that, nevertheless, have been here for several generations and are all citizens, born and bred in Europe? Are we to start rounding them up and shipping them out? And, if so, what would determine an ‘ethnically compatible’ country? Many are of mixed origin too, which would further complicate the issue, not just practically, but morally as well.

Yes, indeed, it is a popular view and one that should have had a major impact on the results of several electoral cycles. In the UK alone, there have been orators like Enoch Powell predicting the current circumstance for decades. Many other far sighted people have followed him, in their own ways, in their own countries across the ‘developed world’. Why it has failed to mature into a vote winning electoral vehicle in the majority of those countries is a question worth asking? Where was the plebiscite agreeing to immigration in the first place? Why isn’t one held now across the EU or in its constituent states? These very facts undermine the claim we live in representative democracies. The current wave of concern in this area may bring Marine Le Pen to power in France but I have no doubt every judicial or technical reason will be found to make that difficult. We have an unresponsive state apparatus that is ‘owned’ and with every year the new imported peoples who they pander to in order to maintain their short-term positions grow in number. These newcomers have originated from somewhere outside Europe and that is where they should return. Where is a choice for them to make but they should not remain. On the subject of people of mixed race, we have a conundrum. I believe everyone should be free to choose their life-partner without the interference of law and statute. Love is a valuable commodity and should be appreciated in all the various forms it assumes. But look carefully at the spousal abuse rates, the single parent families, the divorce rates between people of different ethnicities. The evidence is overwhelming, if uncomfortable reading for the self-loathers like FEMEN who daub their bare breasts with statements like: ‘Immigrants fuck better’. Perhaps a picture of O.J. Simpson would be more appropriate?

What do you think drives FEMEN to engage in this type of activism?

My initial response to FEMEN was positive. I thought they were protesting against the sexual exploitation of Eastern European women. My sympathies were obvious. The long and well documented white-slaving indulged in by predominantly Turkish, Albanian, and Jewish gangsters, gathers pace year on year. It is simply incredible that such appalling human trafficking exists and that no direct intervention like sanctions on the countries that operate brothel gulag systems are enforced. I note a real double standard here when you think of the recent high profile campaign by Michelle Obama to ‘Bring back our girls’. However, I soon became disconcerted when FEMEN Founders like Sasha Shevchenko began pontificating on their Sextremist ideology. I found it to be a poisonous cocktail of anti-white male bigotry, a clichéd Leftist love of ‘the other’, and a vulgar circus for self-indulgent, self-loathing women invading churches, urinating in the street, and protesting against so-called fascists who would deport the perpetrators of organized crimes victimizing their gender, limit the freedom of communities practicing female genital mutilation, and stamp out the grooming and abuse of young girls. I might be wrong, but I don’t recall seeing FEMEN actively challenging Muslim paedophiles in the UK or across Europe. Have they made a statement about Rotherham?

The antics of Pussy Riot demean the very important work of genuine female activists such as those of the first wave of feminism like Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Willard. Women whose genuine motivations were highjacked by radical feminists like the Red Stockings Brigade of the 1960’s, themselves a mere projection of the Black Civil Rights Movement stirring up trouble across the gender divide. Look at the work of Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch, Ellen Levine, and Anne Koedt. The very titles of their books—The Female Eunuch, Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of Gender, and The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—betray their narcissistic belligerence, over-bearing sense of entitlement, political lesbianism, and economic and syncretic Marxist agenda. And it did not end there. Bell Hooks in her book Killing Rage went so far as to justify her feelings about longing to murder an anonymous white male, no doubt because he represented the ‘oppressive patriarchy’ all these types despise. Dworkin, Wolf, Paglia, and Steinhem all follow in the same path as de Beauvoir whose Second Sex features on all ‘politically correct’ liberal arts college reading lists. I would highly recommend an antidote to such corrosive prejudice. Try the work and thoughts of Erin Pizzey, an early campaigner against domestic violence, who incidentally has subsequently been forced to spend long periods in hiding after bomb threats from radical feminist extremists; Karen Straughan of Girl Writes What and Dr Tara Palmatier who are working hard to re-balance the debate. There is also an extensive literature refuting the theories of the celebrated women’s champions listed above: Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism ? and The War against Boys; Suzanne Venker’s The Flipside of Feminism: what Conservative Women think—and men can’t say; and Ronnee Schreiber’s Righting Feminism: Conservative women and American Politics.

According to certain controversial literature on human biodiversity, South East Asians are the most intelligent population on Earth and blacks the most athletic. If we accept this as true, then, surely, it makes sense to accept immigration from anywhere, since we’ll benefit from Asian brains and West African muscle. We’d then be unbeatable both in the astrophysics laboratory and the Olympic stadium.

Let us for a minute accept such stereotyping. Should we not also insist that those self-same people accept their proven statistical predilection for corruption, rape, and violence? Would South East Asians not be able to construct free and stable societies, dominate academia, and the patent lists of inventions? Why are our West African brothers not able to master the rudiments of more complex sports like gymnastics that require the synchronization of mind and body? I have studied alongside South East Asians and their tendency is to regurgitate what they learn uncritically. I have myself beaten black athlete’s on the school running track. Take a look at the Olympic medal tables and you will see white people outperform all other races proportionally, when you consider that we represent less than 16% of the world’s population.

Surely, with better immigration criteria and controls we can keep out the criminals and attract the best talent from all over the world. And, surely, there is a role even for rote memorisation and brute force in our societies. These things are needed, and it’s down to employers to find the right individuals for the right jobs. Let’s assume for a moment that this is just a technical issue that can be cracked with excessive costs and within a reasonable timeframe. Would you still oppose immigration? And, if so, why?

I would oppose immigration instinctively not just on the scale currently being undertaken, but because I think Europe, America, and the Slavic countries neither require it or substantially benefit from it. The criminal aspect is merely a ‘touchstone’ issue. Out of control diversity is a millstone not an asset. Especially when the benefits of diversity are all pretty much one-way. We in the West are uniquely blessed, unlike other peoples with most of the requisite capabilities to meet the majority of our societal needs. There is no obligation to feed the world until our own needy and poor are brought up to a proper level of subsistence. There is an old adage that charity begins at home. Let us start there. I do not however believe in isolationism, which is counter-productive and prevents a genuine and worthwhile exchange between cultures on an equal and beneficial footing. That is not what we have now.

The Western world can point to a history of brute force and rote memorisation. I do not hold such skills in high regard unless the former is absolutely necessary and the latter is applicable and beneficial to those who have no other course of betterment. I have liaised with large numbers of Chambers of Commerce in the UK and France and employers have plenty of opportunities to create viable and profitable businesses. What is becoming increasingly apparent is the drive towards excessive profit and greed. Such materialism above and beyond physical and spiritual satiation is I believe a serious sign of moral decay. The numbers of culturally bereft nouveau-riche people swilling second-rate champagne in kidney-shaped jacuzzis sickens me. And believe me, I have met many of that sort from Dublin to Tomsk.

Isn’t nationalism just hate and fear? Most decent people think it is very narrow-minded and backward world-view. We are no longer in the 19th century, after all; this is the 21st century and we live in a globalized world. You, in fact benefit from this every day.

I see the New Right as an alternative modernist movement, building on the homogenous organic roots of traditionalism, rejecting the liberal and socialist platitudes of a utopian future populated by a coffee-coloured people. I participate, contribute and benefit from the technical effects of modernity. Indeed, it is people like myself that drive those technical knowledge based economies. But I utterly reject the racial and cultural side-effects as an unnecessary impediment. I long for a political framework which abolishes multiculturalism and privileging the ‘ethnic’ over the ‘indigenous’ not because the European needs ‘protection’ and cannot compete but because current governmental statutes deliberately discriminates in favour of ‘ethnics’ over the whites and the fact that these global parasites are a drain on our core business, the advancement of our nations and the European continent. A national community functions best when, as Italian, Sergio Salvi, in his book Patria e Matria (Fatherland and Motherland) wrote : ‘It can be tentatively defined as a human group living in a definitive territory, which differs from other groups in a number of characteristics. These can be linguistic, cultural, historical and socio-economic. It is such shared characteristics that makes the members of a group aware of their particular identity. Even when the differences are not so tangible, they still give rise to the group’s desire to organize autonomously in the fields of administration (i.e., the State), politics and culture’. For me positive not ‘petty’ nationalism is the instinctive outcome of love for family, community and place. It is a healthy and over-riding human emotion. It is limitless and according to the Nietzschean theory of eternal return, its time will inevitably come again.

But nationalism is an idea associated with the nation-state, a fairly recent creation, which is becoming increasingly irrelevant, is it not? And its adoption necessitated the suppression of regional identities to begin with. At the time of the French Revolution, for example, only 1 in 8 people living in France spoke fairly good French; only half spoke any; and even in Oïl language zones, it was usually only used in cities. The ‘national identity’, the ‘national religion’, the ‘national curriculum’—all of these are concepts associated with the nation-state. The tendency in world history has been to
go from lower levels of organisation to higher. Surely, you do not envision a return to the polis, or to the city-state (à la Geneva, as in Rousseau’s time), do you? What about the argument that hugely expensive undertakings, such as a space programme, would be far more difficult with a 1000 small regions with small economies, with 1000 currencies and 1000 languages, as opposed to with a large block like the EU, using one currency and adopting a lingua franca?

It is true that the nationalism of the last two hundred years is generally associated with the nation-state and if you are force-fed Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawn like I was at university you are getting that diaspora interpretation once again. Even a more conservative view like that of Elie Kedourie comes from the same gene pool. Historians of this type are pre-determined to view such communitarian societies as essentially reactionary in character. Thinkers from the Anglo-conservative sphere like Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Maurice Cowling, Michael Oakeshott, T.S. Eliot, Roger Scruton, and Phillip Blond are given scant attention. Likewise, John Calhoun, the Southern Agrarian School, Russell Kirk, Paul Gottried, and even Gregory Wolfe in America. De Benoist and Faye, whom I referenced earlier were largely ignored and remained only partially translated into English until Arktos Media redressed this unforgivable oversight in recent years. Consideration of the German Conservative Revolutionaries is basically forbidden unless it is to criticize them. People like Fichte, Herder, Schopenhauer, Stefan George, Ludwig Klages, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Niekisch, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, Edgar Julius Jung, and the great Martin Heidegger, despite the latitude of their thought must be viewed through the politically correct lens. Even Carl Jung suffers in this regard, but then again, he did split from Freud and so according to their narrative can never be forgiven.

The significance and relevance of regionalism is in fact an issue I hint at in the text of The Partisan, where I try to balance the importance I attach to Breton, Provencal and other regional cultures to the unified fight-back against a common-enemy. I do envisage a Europe of a thousand flags under a federal entity. But you will appreciate my vision of such a European confederation would be unrecognizable from today’s EU. It would not be without dissension and dispute but it would be a debate between similar peoples of a generally shared milieu, informed and framed by some of the disprivileged thinkers I listed above. A discussion of this type is far more likely to advance in a positive direction than disputes between peoples of completely different cultures, races or susceptibilities.

In The Partisan, you seem to see the problems afflicting our societies cannot be solved through the mainstream political process. Yet, people—not only in France and in Britain, but in all the Western democracies—are given a chance to vote every four or five years , so the political establishment and the policies pursued by democratic governments simply reflect the will of the people. From this it seems obvious that your view is that of a disgruntled minority.

My first Masters degree is in Government & Politics. I fully understand the various forms of local, regional, national, and international governance structures that bind our hands. I have studied all aspects of representation, party funding and the ideologies and platforms of the supposedly competing mainstream parties. The charade of the democratic process and the pantomime of elections do not fool me or I think increasing numbers of other people. Our governments are bought and paid for by people running multi-national corporations and ‘banksters’ who do not have our best interests at heart. We may still be a disgruntled minority but a committed vanguard can lead a revolution. Did you see the street scenes on Maidan? I was there. All over Europe the Right is on the rise: in France, Austria, the Baltic States, Italy, Poland, and Hungary. Look at Casa Pound fighting the Reds on the streets of Rome, Blocco Studentesco and of course Golden Dawn in Greece. I was touched by the dignified way The Immortals conducted themselves during a torch lit parade through a small German town. Our creed is a vital and living force, not a passive celebration of former glories, or for that matter a family that lives in a lifeless, sterile museum. I have a certain respect for the sentiments expressed in the dedication to the preface of Derek Holland’s The Political Soldier II, Thoughts on Sacrifice & Struggle: ‘To the prayers of the Saints and the Blood of the Martyrs who redeemed the European Motherland in the Past. May we, the last loyal Sons of Tradition and Order, be worthy of their Example as the Final Conflict approaches.

This narrative, about a race-based revolution, would strike many as wishful thinking by a fringe minority. Most would find it impossible to justify morally, because it is ultimately selfish. The Randian view of selfishness as a virtue has had the most fertile soil grow on in a context of Classical liberalism favouring individual liberty and therefore laissez-faire capitalism, and yet, it remains a marginal view; it cannot stand the moral attacks from the egalitarians, who can present themselves as virtuous because egalitarianism is selfless, at least as they understand it, which is what counts in this realm. Moreover, the events in Ukraine are of an entirely different order, since fits the liberal narrative, which can temporarily justify Ukrainian nationalism as a struggle for freedom—freedom from another, larger, richer, more powerful nation; a well-defined opponent. There is no well-defined opponent in Europe, even within the narrative you reproduce—no one likes the bankers and politicians, but responsibility for even the worst trends is diffuse. Even Tony Blair, a proven liar and war criminal, is making a killing economically. GQ even named him philanthropist of the year, eliciting only the most supine and feeblest of complaints!

This is the exact opposite of wishful thinking. Who would want to deal with a civil war on their own soil ? Yugoslavia was a test-case. I am not advocating violence but warning against it. The Partisan is not wish fulfillment, rather a shrill cry of concern about what will occur unless positive steps are taken now. Merkel and Cameron bemoaning the failure of multiculturalism will not stave off internecine violence. Randian idealism remains a cult because it does not link the supposed virtue of selfishness with the natural philanthropism that people have felt and acted upon historically because they are inclined to support people of like character and type. It is true the banksters are an easy target but you are looking through a post 2007 perspective. Distributists like Chesterton and Belloc were saying this over 70 years ago. And they were right!

In relation to Ukraine. I first starting wearing Stepan Bandera t-shirts and drinking vodka with Ukrainian nationalist veterans in the cellars of Lviv 7 years ago. I am fully aware of how that genuine uprising was manipulated. I was holding a birthday party 200 meters from the spot where the secret police were shooting protestors in Kiev last March. I have two further manuscripts dealing directly with Russia and Ukraine completed and ready for publication.

I personally refused to meet Tony Blair despite being part of a British trade delegation set to greet the former Prime Minister to a certain Muslim country two years ago. GQ embarrasses itself and insults our intelligence with their phony polls and propaganda. Everyone knows what Blair and his type represent and advocate. Will he produce GQ’s analysis as part of his defense when he is finally brought before a court? I don’t know about you, but I would anticipate a cacophony of contemptuous laughter.

You seem to reject egalitarianism. But isn’t equality a good thing? And if you don’t, are you not saying that certain people are inferior and should be deprived of rights that everyone—and certainly the United Nations—regard as universal? How can you possibly defend that? Is it your view that women are inferior to men, that blacks are inferior to whites, and that you’d rather institutionalise privilege for some, and oppression for others, based on the qualities they are born with and therefore cannot do anything about?

Egalitarianism is a façade used by the liberals and socialists to push their proposition nation agenda. In pursuit of the Holy Grail of Equality they are more than willing to sacrifice any sense of human differentation, erasing the realities of race, gender intelligence and cultural competencies. It is not a matter of supremacy and inferiority, it is a matter of reality. I do not believe in a universal ‘lowest common denominator’. People and cultures are different and we should celebrate that very real diversity not hold it to a single standard. Cultures are at different points of development and are on different trajectories. I agree with Spengler when he said, ‘Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others . . . ’ Does that sound like someone who wishes to impose his will on others or a person hell-bent on depriving other cultures of their right to sovereignty or self- determination? I think not. Look around the world, the caste system you allude to in your question and the slave/worker relationships it implies are far more prevalent and embedded in non-white cultures. I am reminded of an axiom quoted in the short lived Rising journal: ‘A Nationalism that seeks to subdue or extirpate another culture is, in fact, not a Nationalism but an Imperialism, which threatens not only its intended victim but also its own well-being, for its distorted view of itself, and of its relations with others, can only invite disaster’.

I would not have selected a woman to be the central character in my novel if I was even remotely sexist or believed the female gender was in any way inferior. Sabine, the heroine of the book, is the very personification of a modern, intelligent, powerful woman who makes her own decisions and lives with the consequences. It is my view that we need to be far more strategic in appealing to women in order to grow our movement. They offer us the chance of a real multi-skilling asset which would greatly enhance our operations and further refine our perspective, ideals and objectives.

The issue is also not about colour but character and capability. History informs us that large numbers of diverse people find it difficult to live in close proximity without conflict. In general, the under-achievement of many non-whites living in a white community leads to demoralization, dependency and frustration. These result in violent outpourings like: in the USA—Watts 65, Newark 67, Rodney King/LA 92, Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014; in the UK—Bristol 1980, Toxteth 1981, Brixton 1981, Bradford, Burnley and Oldham 2001, London 2011; in France—Clichy-Sous-Bois, Seine-Saint-Denis, Dijon, Belfort 2005; in Italy—Rosarno in Calabria 2010; in Spain – Roquetas in Almeria 2008; in Sweden—Stockholm 2013.

I see no benefit in perpetuating such catastrophes when it is clear that peaceful co-existence and co-location is simply not possible. A race realist like myself would recommend a natural separation based on mutually agreed terms.

This argument has been made for decades, with a great deal of hard science to support it. And yet, that hasn’t made any difference. It is still rejected wholesale. We go back to the ethics of this idea: egalitarians may argue that even if equality does not exist, it is nevertheless a noble ideal, and that alone makes it worth pursuing, even if the ideal could never be achieved entirely. In short, the facts don’t really matter, because this is an ethical question, not an empirical one.

If the Convergence of Catastrophes Faye anticipates in his book is correct, and the money, food and power begins to run out, I predict it will not be noble ideals and ethics that characterize our behavior. When the tipping point is reached the fracturing of society will move rapidly on ethnic, religious and tribal lines. Like you yourself argued in one of your celebrated speaking engagements, The Collapse may not be instant, it may have already began and its ramifications may go unnoticed at first. I think it was Ezra Pound who claimed it is the artist’s antenna that first picks up the vibrations of such events. The Partisan is in some ways a literal confirmation of what my more sensitive predecessors already knew awaited us. It is the realization of the dark nightmare to come.

In that speech you refer to I also said that a collapse could well take so long that by the time it is recognised as such the consequences would have long ceased to be relevant, because those affected or warning about them would have already disappeared or were no longer powerful. I also mentioned that there is no guarantee that any collapse would have the desired outcome. The scenario you describe assumes that in a social breakdown scenario, everybody falls into line along ethnic or tribal lines. That seems likely with the non-European demographic in our part of the world, but simple everyday observation suggests Europeans, and particularly North-Western Europeans, will remain as divided as they are now, fractured along moral or morally justified ideological lines. Even the Far Right is notoriously fractuous, not only due to conflicting personalities, but also due to disagreements over ideology. The same has always been the case with the Far Left. Kevin MacDonald has pointed out that Western Europeans are low in ethnocentricity and tend to form moral communities. If that is true, then ancestry is an insufficient condition. So the question must be asked—if egalitarianism is the irritant and the stumbling block, should identitarians not be focusing on a moral critique of egalitarianism?

I would contend the collapse started around 1913 and is now well advanced. The collapse takes many forms and proceeds at a different pace along many separate fault lines. It can be identified and estimated by different social, economic, demograhic, and political indices. We recognize it at the point it affects us as individuals, or as citizens of a particular nation. Those who govern the western world are managing the decline rather than arresting it. Some I suspect are complicit in it, or are directly benefiting from the decline in some way, transferring assets and investments at favourable rates to BRIC countries, much like maggots feeding off dying flesh. There is simply no way of guaranteeing that the moral poison of egalitarianism will not have so retarded the European population that they are inhibited from protecting their own or acting in a way to promote their group’s interest. I suspect however, that when non-Europeans band together, set up exclusive organizational structures, possibly based on religious lines, commit outrageous crimes and begin ethnic-cleansing, the mantra of ‘One World, One People’ will ring very hollow. There is nothing like watching your mother, sister and daughter being raped, or your father, brother and son being eviscerated by machete wielding savages to focus the mind. A moral critique of egalitarianism is long overdue. But we should pull the mask off this expression egalitarianism and call it what it is today, the Frankfurt School strategy to undermine all aspects of the Western Superstructure.

So what if people with non-European ancestry eventually become majorities in Europe? Aren’t they just people, no better or worse than anyone else? Are we to judge them by the colour of their skin, rather than the contents of their character?

The character and nature of the future population of Europe most certainly does matter. Demographics is destiny and the central question of our age, is whether or not the civilized and educated nations of the world will continue to allow themselves to be overwhelmed by those incapable of self-improvement, other than by squatting in close proximity to the techno-industrial or welfare systems of more developed cultures with their begging bowls in hand, or will they close their borders. The behavior, values, and capabilities of a large percentage of the people of non-European ancestry who are coming to Europe at this time, like many of the Latinos fording the Rio Grande, do not stack up meritoriously under any serious degree of scrutiny. They stand condemned by any scientific or moral measurement by which you would chose to evaluate them. They threaten a new dark age, taking us back centuries. Forget customs and folkways for one moment, just look at the graphs on intelligence. IQ averages in the countries benefiting from immigration are plummeting. In what way can this be described as evolution? It represents the dilution of excellence and the low level ground war already underway throughout North America and Europe is a sure sign that things will get worse rather than better. Is Leicester or Birmingham to be the next Detroit?

Like Spengler I believe that the human species is divided into a variety of widely differing and contradictory cultures. My interpretation of nationalism carries with it the insistence of reciprocal respect. It is in essence Identitarian. What we strive for is national self- determination; sufficient living space for the preservation and development of our race, heritage and culture; a socio-economic and legal system that reflects the values of its creators; the nurturing of our art; and the continuance of our life-force into future millennia. I will not stoop to plea for this on the grounds of the Charter of Human Rights or because it can be argued that what is being done to the white indigenous populations of European nations is a form of genocide by stealth. Though you can make plausible arguments for both those scenarios. I do not ask permission to live or to survive in my own homeland. A territory that people of my lineage have inhabited for 10,000 years. I demand it and will join others in reaching for the rope to hang the traitors who opened the floodgates to the sewers of the third world and lock and load the guns when words prove insufficient to defend our homes.

What was your aim with The Partisan?

Continuing my earlier point about fiction providing a gateway to theory, I want to contribute to a vibrant cadre of New Right novelists. My desire is to re-enchant the present generation with the ideals that made Europe great in the past. We are all descendants of a great cultural and intellectual inheritance and we have to make that case time and time again. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Ernst Jünger, Ezra Pound, and Louis Ferdinand Céline, I believe there now exists the potential to develop a genre that both entertains and informs. Several recent works like your own Mister, Tito’s Perdue’s oeuvre, and Derek Turner’s Sea Changes provides the basis for a new school of storytellers, poets and singer-song-writers.

They say that those who forget the past are bound to repeat it. You have an advanced degree in history from an American university—in fact, with a major component in Black Studies. Could it be not be argued, therefore, that you of all people, should know better than to write novels like The Partisan?

On the contrary. My original Masters in Politics included a dissertation which was a critique of the Soviet system. The Black Studies component of my MA in History featured such luminaries as: Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, W.E. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Black Panthers like Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton and their ilk.
I probably know more about Communism and so-called Black Civil Rights activists than those on the left. It is an advantage to know your opponents better than they know themselves. My studies helped me identify the linkages like that between the Zionist Kivie Kaplan, who was Martin Luther King’s ‘handler’ and the communist Party of America. It was a formula that was repeated in the former Weather Underground leaders Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers involvement with the Obama Presidential candidacy. Similarly, the association between Joe Slovo and his slow-witted tool Mandela in the dismemberment of South Africa.
These simple key quotes define the reasons why I wrote The Partisan:

‘During the last Open Convention the debate was, was it or was it not the duty of any good revolutionary to kill all new born white babies. At the time it seemed like a relevant framing of an issue. The logic being that through no fault of their own these white kids are going to grow up to be a part of an oppressive racial establishment internationally, so really your duty is to kill new born white babies. And I remember one guy tentatively and apologetically suggesting that this was in contradiction to the humanitarian aims of the movement and he was booed down’ – Doug McAdam (Weather Underground)

Kill all white men, white women and their babies’ – New Black Panther Party activist Malik Zulu Shabbaz, infamous for accusations of attempting to intimidate voters at a Philadelphia polling booth in 2008.

Do you plan on getting another degree?

To quote Solzhehnitsyn : ‘without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashions of the day . . .’

One single anecdote illustrates this perfectly. Having graduated on a bright summer day under a warm Californian sun, I returned to a slate grey London, intending to commence a PhD on the historiography of the so-called European New Right. I was interviewed by an American Professor with a Jewish surname. He was wearing a tweed jacket and smiling suspiciously over an oversize bowtie. As I tried to explain my hypothesis, the would-be don twirled his pen, looking distractedly out the window.

‘Why are you interested in these people?’ he asked contemptuously, ‘they have no intellectual capital. Have you thought of an evaluation of the impact of his theological upbringing on Martin Luther King’s later Civil Rights activities?’ The door closed. So I pushed on another. Sitting down in front of my laptop, sometimes overlooking a village green in Kent, where my every key stroke echoed to the rhythm of leather on wood; and at other times walking around the Zenkov Cathedral in Almaty, staring up through the cloud formations gathering around the rim of the Zailiysky Alatau mountains, I began typing the opening lines of The Partisan. That is my PhD thesis and it is written from the heart, free of the shackles of political correctness.

I notice that, though The Partisan draws from the anti-liberal ideas of the European New Right, it also has references to the French Revolution, which represented a triumph of liberal political theory. You even have the revolutionaries sing certain verses from La Marseillaise. Is this not a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of history?

It is the paradox we live with. French identity and pride is inextricably linked with a familiar anthem like La Marseillaise. If fiction is to be grounded and credible it must reflect reality. I would argue that we should accept that the vast numbers required to make a movement will fix on certain icons, flags and songs as they come together. It is to be expected and it is expedient. It is the passion and emotive qualities of unifying symbolism that is important. The deconstruction of deeper ideological underpinnings can be dealt with once we have won back the streets.

The Partisan makes a clear case against the Islamisation of France, and, presumably by extension, of Europe. What is wrong is Islam having a presence in Europe? There are Muslims in Bosnia who are fully European and don’t behave at all like Abu Hamza and fellow Jihadists from Asia and North Africa or the Pakistani paedophile rings in the United Kingdom. Indeed, even the SS had a division of Bosnian Muslims.

A presence is one thing. An overwhelming presence is quite another. Whilst minarets overshadow rooftops from Barcelona to Geneva and Frankfurt to Bolton, Christian churches are being firebombed across the Muslim world and the followers of Jesus are given an option, convert or die. How long before the phony war of protest by Muslims in Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels turns into a full scale insurgency by ISIS trained zealots? There is much to admire in all faiths, cultures and identities. But we must acknowledge, they flourish best when they are rooted in their home soil and watered by the winds from their own mountain tops. Over the last half century the seeds of destruction have been scattered across our fields. It is time to take the scythe to the weeds strangling our crop.

What about David Cameron’s proposal of ‘muscular Britishness’?

There is so much one could say on this matter but I will try to keep my reply concise and free from vitriol. My recollection is that this expression was first used in a Daily Mail article on the Trojan Horse scandal, where Tory party policies relating to the freeing up of school governing bodies and head-teachers from so-called local authority bureaucracy and allowing more school independence had resulted in a myriad of predominantly Muslim schools imposing a sharia curricula, removing white governors and treating indigenous students, already a numerical minority as second class pupils. Well, I cannot say I am surprised, it reinforces what I alluded to earlier in relation to the mindset of certain burgeoning non-British communities. I contend such autonomy will be abused by these people time and time again. They simply cannot be constrained by the normal European or British notions of fair play, decency and appropriate behavior. These apologists for paedophilia and honour killings are animated by the dream of a jihadist take-over not assimilation. The fact that Cameron, along with his collaborators in the Liberal-democrats have actually overseen a growth in immigration, despite all their public statements and manifesto pledges to the contrary, calls into question both the British Prime Minister’s integrity and capability.

His fetid description of Britishness as being all about democracy, equality, and tolerance reveals a complete disengagement with the martial qualities that built an Empire from Scotland to the Falklands and Novia Scotia to Singapore. Listening to a rendition of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, would suffice in correcting such confusion. These modernist ideals also fly in the face of historic reality like the Chartist March on Monmouth, where men were shot and killed for demanding political representation; the fact that for centuries only male property owners had the right to vote and a suffragette had to throw herself under the King’s horse to raise awareness that women wanted the same opportunity; and that the everyday experience of anyone expressing concern over the behavior of non-whites is immediately shouted down with the cat-call of that much over-used word ‘racist!’ The latter apparently being a case of blatant ‘intolerance’ regardless of the merit of their argument. Double standards abound. No tolerance for the intolerant. No platform for fascists ! Government ministers signing up as members of Unite Against Fascism. So it seems, equality and tolerance are in reality in short supply in David’s Little Britain.

As for democracy, equality and tolerance are as British as the Union Flag, football and fish and chips ? Well let us deconstruct David’s assertions in true Marxist dialectical terms, shall we? It strikes me that the very existence of the Union flag is called into question by the Scottish referendum. Something Mr Cameron agreed to but did not feel he could extend to the discussion on immigration? With regards to football, it was clear from the lethargic display by the English team at the last World Cup, that the game ‘the British’ invented has now developed well beyond their current competency levels. Football is most certainly not coming home to paraphrase the line from the Three Lions Song. And the clichéd reference to fish and chips, so typical of Oxbridge champagne swilling Tories trying to appear ‘down with the boys’, can be dismissed by the simple observation that the most popular meal in the UK is now curry.

Like John Major before him speaking of the English matron pedaling through the morning mist or Mrs Thatcher hinting about the people’s concern about being ‘swamped’ by immigrants in the 79 election, Cameron has no intention of enacting muscular Britishness, whatever that means? Look who funds the party he leads. Peel back the names to reveal his own family origins and those of his advisors. Indeed, those of his predecessors. Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson, Keith Joseph, Malcolm Rifkind, Alex Carlisle, Michael Howard, Edwina Currie, John Bercow and Keith Joseph. Check the following list of Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Labour MP’s, Ministers and Peers of the realm (the following is only indicative, not comprehensive) : Sam Gyimah, Kwasi Kwarteng, Reham Chisti, Baroness Warsi, Priti Patel, Alok Sharma, Nadhim Zahami, Kishwer Falkner, Sandip Verma, Mohamed Sheikh, Nat Wei, Maurice Saatchi, Satyendra Prasanno Sinha, Lord Taylor of Warwick, Patricia Scotland, Navnit Dhozlakia, Herman Ouseley, Floella Benjamin, Meral Hussein-Ece, Zahida Manzour, Rumji Vergee, Doreen Lawrence, Paul Boateng, Lord Darzi, Bill Morris, Baron Bhattacharrya, Baron Chan, Amir Bhatia, Baron Adebowale, Baron Parekh, Baron Patel, Baroness Pashar, Nazir Ahmed, Baroness Uddin, Baron Ali, Keith Vaz, Valerie Vaz, Chuka Umunna, Yasmin Qureshi, Ed Milliband, and George Galloway. Now ask yourself are such people likely to enact muscular Britishness?

And before we settle back and think this is an isolated situation, please take a look at the political ‘movers and shakers’ in the United States and closer to home, in Europe itself. It is not hard to find the same egregious behaviour perpetrated in the same quarters by the same self-interested parties.

Why did you choose a female protagonist?

I wanted to create a positive role model for those young women sympathetic to our shared traditions and thinking about becoming active in the movement. The Left have to some extent mythologized in book and film form the likes of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. To my mind these were two emotionally bereft, politically shallow and nihilistic women. Sabine was created in direct opposition to these latter day martyrs of the German Autumn. I can foresee a time when some of our best exponents will be women. I long to stand beside them in the shadow of fluttering Spartan pennants on the field of Poitiers.

Is there hope for Europe beyond liberalism?

There most certainly is. First, we must acknowledge the significance of integral traditionalism to the life and continuity of the homogenous community. Then we need the energy and vital radicalism of revolutionary conservatism to simultaneously conserve and transform those parts of our culture that are (a) worthy of preservation and (b) in vital need of evolution or eradication.

Isn’t liberalism simply for individual liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of opportunity, and equality before the law? Are we do away with all those, and go back five hundred years—or, worse still, end up with an authoritarian police state?

The police state is already here and the prison walls are the laws imposed upon us by the equality gurus to uphold the liberal establishment. There is no real individual liberty. It is being systematically replaced by stifling conformism in both the private and public arenas. Freedom of opportunity and equality before the law increasingly only applies to non-whites. A two-tier justice system is enforced by the adoption of politically correct moral codes. Social ostracization and exclusion from the work force is practiced against dissenters. Orwell’s vision of a ruthless regime insisting on political orthodoxy is with us. We are all locked in room 101 with Winston Smith and the rats are coming.

 

————-

Solère, Fenek. “Interview with Fenek Solère.” Interview by Alex Kurtagic. Wermod & Wermod Publishing Group, 31 October 2014. <http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news311020140001.html >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Femmes Fatales – Solère

Sisters of Salome: Femmes Fatales, Left & Right

By Fenek Solère

 

Left/Right dichotomies in the representation of female militants in the movies The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and A Student named Alexander (2011).

‘Although typically villainous, or at least morally ambiguous, and always associated with a sense of mystification and unease, femme fatales have also appeared as heroines in some stories . . .’ — Mary Ann Doane

From the Levantine Lilith to the Celtic Morgan Le Fay; and from Theda Bara’s vamp in Hollywood’s A Fool There Was to Eva Green in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, the notion of the fille d’Eve tantalizes us. In sociological terms the notion of diabolic women is potent with misogyny, witchcraft and the negative aspects of anima, how woman appears to man, from the Jungian viewpoint. To take the cinematic angle, licentious dames mean box office receipts, plain and simple. Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1957), starring starlet Brigitte Bardot and Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue (1986) with Beatrice Dalle being just two cases that prove the point.

Stereotypes range from enchantress to succubus, haunting our consciousness in different guises, such as the spectral Cathy from Emily Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights (1847) or the more malign character of Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 book of the same name. As Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) (1), Once mused, ‘The strange thing about woman — her pre-ordained fate — is that she is simultaneously the sin and the Hell that punishes it’. Indeed, a whole academic industry has grown up deconstructing such iconography with writers like Toni Bentley’s Sisters of Salome (2002); Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (1986); and Elizabeth K. Mix’s Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale in 19th-Century France (2006) leading the way.

Baudelaire’s own magnum opus Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) epitomizes the dichotomy perfectly. The schizophrenia embodied in his poetic creations, Jean Duval (Black Venus) and Apollonie Sabatier (White Venus), both mirroring and reinforcing some male fantasies about women’s sexuality in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The dialectics of Serpent Culture and Snake Charmer sensuality, so beautifully carved in Auguste Clesinger’s (2) writhing milk white statue Woman Bitten by a Snake (1847), a representation of Apollonie Sabatier currently on display in the Musée d’Orsay, raises the question, is she squirming in agony or riding a paroxysm of pleasure from the venomous bite?

Moving beyond the arts, literature and film to the political milieu? What evidence do we have for Femme Fatale’s within the Left/Right dichotomy? There is certainly a colorful cast of charismatic characters to choose from: Inessa Armand, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, Jiang Quing, Bernardine Dohrn, and Angela Davis to name but a few on the left-side. Unity Mitford, Savitri Devi, Alessandra Mussolini, Beate Zschape, Yevgenia Khasis, and Marine Le Pen, as examples from the right side of the aisle.

It is my intention to dismiss empathetic documentaries like Confrontation Paris, 68, The Weather Underground (2002) and hatchet-job investigative journalism like Turning Point’s Inside the Hate Conspiracy (1995) about America’s The Order without further comment. Instead arguing that there are few, if any, historically accurate, unbiased and insightful fictional or factional celluloid representations of female (or for that matter male) political militants in circulation. Instead, what we are served up are predictable stereo-types and clichéd cartoonesque parodies, completely aligned with the liberal left Euro-68 ethos, wherein, a mélange of well-meaning but misguided (and always attractive) socialist idealists try to change society for the better, juxtaposed with psychopathic rightist harridans, or male sexual inadequates, portrayed as vacuous outsiders, decidedly uncool and devoid of social capital.

Indicative examples of the genre being, from the left: The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975), The Underground (1976), Running on Empty (1988), What to Do in Case of Fire (2002), Baader (2002), The Dreamers (2004), Guerilla — The Taking of Patty Hearst (2005), Regular Lovers (2005), Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2008), Che (2008), The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), The Company You Keep (2012) and Something in the Air (2013). As opposed to the more objectionable characterizations of rightists in productions like The Day of the Jackal (1973), The Odessa File (1974), The Boys from Brazil (1978), Betrayed (1988), Siege at Ruby Ridge (1996), Brotherhood of Murder (1999), and A Student named Alexander (2011).

For the sake of argument I have been deliberately selective and will focus specifically on Uli Edels’s Baader Meinhof Complex and Enzo De Camillis’s fifteen minute short A Student named Alexander. Risking the approbation of cultural commentators by possibly extrapolating too general a hypothesis from too limited a sample, I nevertheless press my case, that the content, reaction and intent of both these films exemplify the paradox of Left/Right caricatures in the entertainment media.

Recipient of 6.5 million euros from various film boards and Golden Globe and Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Film category, The Baader Meinhof Complex, rode the wave of resurgent seventies retro, a movie filled with baby boomer nostalgia for the late sixties and early seventies. Simpler times, when idealism meant Sartre, anti-Vietnam protest, Che Guevara posters, and smoking pot in bedsits listing to the sitar music of Ravi Shankar.

The movies all-star cast includes Martina Gedeck as Ulrike Meinhof, Moritz Bleibtreu as Andreas Baader, Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, and Alexandra Maria Lara as Petra Schelm. All of whom had already or were soon to appear in mainstream feature films like: The Lives of Others, Run Lola Run, The Good Shepherd, Pope Joan, North Face, Control, and Downfall.

The action begins with the 1967 Schah-Besuch mass street protest in Berlin against the Shah of Iran. Mohamed Reza Pahlavi’s supporters are depicted launching an unprovoked attack on the anti-Pahlavi elements, resulting in running battles and the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg in Krumme Strasse 66, by what appears to be a reactionary police officer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, but who was in reality a card-carrying member of the Communist Party acting as an undercover operative for the East German Stasi.

We are then treated to scenes where Maoist students hold packed meetings, intercut with footage of American warplanes strafing and bombing Vietnamese peasants. Rapidly followed by ‘Red’ Rudi Dutschke (3) of 2nd June Movement fame (named after the aforementioned riot) raising his clenched fist, the Messianic leader of the Gramscian ‘Long March through the Institutions’.

Dutschke is elevated to intellectual martyr status when he is mercilessly gunned down in the street by Josef Bachmann, portrayed by actor Tom Schilling, whose cinematic appearance is clearly meant to conjure images of a Hitler Youth or a die-hard Werewolf with a chronic nervous disposition. Which is ironic given that the Baader Meinhof gang and the various later incarnations of the Red Army Faction relied so heavily on a group linked to Heidelberg University, the Sozialistisches Patientiv Kollektiv (Socialist Patient Collective), an organization that sought to convince neurotics and the insane that they were not wrong, it was the system that was wrong, and social revolution was the cure.

‘Shooting is like fucking,’ screams Baader as Bernd Eichinger’s screenplay and Rainer Klausman’s hypnotic lens combine to present a seductive and fast paced cine-orgasm of free love, role model women for Second Wave feminism, cool people smoking cigarettes in coffee shops debating Marxist dialectics, driving around in BMWs, burning department stores, shooting up road signs, Robin Hood bank robbers sunning themselves topless in PLO training camps, liberating captives in a back glow of exploding gelignite and the swashbuckling rat-a-tat of 9mm shells.

Even the capture of Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof for their egregious crimes are contextually ambiguous. Baader, in a scene more reminiscent of the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) than the original television footage of his stand-off with police; Meinhof, kicking and screaming in outrage, rather than the deflated, depressed, and played-out fantasist she was; and Ensslin, by pure chance, when a shop assistant notices a gun in her handbag. Another martyr is then injected into the story as Holger Meins (4) is depicted a la Bobby Sands (5), going on hunger strike and the subsequent trial in Stammheim (6), more Monty Python farce than a serious attempt to enact justice.

One is left in doubt as to where the audience’s sympathy is meant to lie. Especially, with our ever heroic protagonists making fun of the trial judges and gaining increasing support from those in attendance with their witty quips and stunning mind-games. Even The movie’s ending perpetuates the on-going myth that the ‘night of death’ was not triggered by the failure of the Mogadishu hijack (7) to negotiate their release but was in fact a pre-arranged multiple state murder made to look like simultaneous suicide. The movie culminating in a defiant cadre of young stern faced acolytes holding a graveside vigil, determined eyes set on continuing the struggle.

As a consequence, Christina Gerhardt writing in the Film Quarterly describes the movie thus: ‘During its 150 minutes, the film achieves action film momentum, bombs exploding, bullets spraying and glass shattering’. While Christopher Hitchens commenting in Vanity Fair refers to the movie’s ‘Uneasy relationship between sexuality and cruelty . . . an almost neurotic need to oppose authority’. A theme implied by Michael Bubach, son of Siegfried Bubach, the former Chief Federal prosecutor assassinated by the Red Army Faction in 1977, who’s summation of the feature pointed to the fact that the film ‘concentrates almost exclusively on portraying the perpetrators, which carries the danger that the viewer will identify too strongly with the protagonists’.

Examples of how this claim can be justified are so numerous that they would prove tedious to list. However, two personifications, beyond the central characters, stand out in particular, the first involving a chase sequence where Petra Schelm, portrayed by the beautiful Alexandra Maria Lara, is cornered and dies defiantly in a shoot-out with a horde of drone-like cops. The second is the murderous Brigitte Mohnhaupt, depicted by the stunning Naja Uhl, who is shown bedding Peter-Jurgen Boock, played by the teenage heart-throb actor Vinzenz Kiefer, before cold bloodedly slaughtering Siegried Bubach in his own home, organizing the ‘hit’ on Jurgen Ponto, Chairman of the Dresdner Bank of Directors, and the kidnap and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer. Mohnhaupt, the leader of the second generation of the urban guerillas was also implicated in the 1981 attempt to kill NATO General Frederick Kroesen with a PRG-7 anti-tank missile. In fact, just the sort of unrepentant femme fatale we meet in her polar-opposite, the rightist Francesca Mambro in A Student Named Alexander, but who is treated in the diametrically opposite way.

In Enzo De Camillis’s 15 minute silver ribbon winning short, shown at the Roma Film Fest and lauded for its journalistic quality, the much maligned Mambro is portrayed by Valentina Carnelutti (8), who at least partially resembles Mambro. De Camillis, a blood relative of the Alexander in question, (so no conflict of interest there?) indicated his intent in making the movie was to ‘show young people what they do not know, to reflect on a period of history that should not be repeated’. So, following a showing at The House of Cinema to an audience of impressionable students, a discussion is initiated, moderated by Santo Della Volpe (9), who declares at the outset, that ‘The goal of the short is not to re-open old wounds or discussions on the years of lead (10), but to bring to light the issue of the victims that are set aside, of which we no longer speak’.

Really? Well, that is somewhat convenient given the long list of crimes committed by the Italian Brigate Rosse during the period in question. The most notorious being the ambush at Via Fani on the 16th March 1978 and the kidnap and murder of the President of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro. But it should also be remembered, especially given the context of De Camillis’s film, that the Left also killed activists from the right wing Italian Social Movement (MSI) and the University National Action group, like Miki Mantakas, murdered in Via Ottaviano in Rome in 1975, and Stephan and Virgilio Mattei, the sons of the MSI party District Secretary for Prati.

It is also a disingenuous claim given the vociferous presence of the Association of Families of victims of the massacre at Bologna train station of 2nd August 1980, whose demands echo down the decades through documentaries and dramas. The latter being the main event used to demonize Mambro and her then lover, now husband, Valerio Fioravanti (11). Although, they have long denied involvement in the Bologna attack, though freely admitting, like their Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei) NAR accomplices to other political killings, such as, the assassination of Judge Vittorio Occorsio (12) in 1976 and Magistrate Mario Amato (13) in 1980.

Fioravanti maintains that the bombing was the work of Libya, but the Italian government were reluctant to pursue that line of enquiry because of the state’s dependence on Libya’s oil and blamed neo-fascists instead. Mambro and Fioravanti also confessed to planning an attack on the then Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga (14), so one can hardly accuse them of hiding their intentions. When the initial 16 year prison term for Mambro was converted into house arrest in 1998, the Bologna Association’s President Paolo Bolognesi, described Mambro’s parole as ‘A disgrace. It is outrageous that this parole was granted to a terrorist who does not have the requirements, who was sentenced and has never expressed any feelings of detachment from her past’. This, despite the fact that the NAR, never claimed responsibility for the incident and there is substantive cause to believe that the Mafia Banda della Magliana gang (15) and prominent politician Licio Gelli’s (16) secretive Masonic Propaganda Due P2 Lodge (17) linked to the NATO’s Cold-War Operation Gladio architecture (18) had a hand in the incident.

The prosecution’s main witness against Mambro’s partner Fioravanti, Massimo Sparti, of the banda della Magliana, was even contradicted by his own son. ‘My father has lied about his part in the Bologna history’, he declared. Similarly the sinister presence of German terrorists Thomas Kram and Margot Frohlich, closely linked to both the PLO and Carlos the Jackal, who were in Bologna that very same day was never properly investigated. Coincidences like this and the possible link to the Ustica Massacre (19), when Aerolinea Itavia flight 870 was brought down by a missile, gave President Francesco Cossiga pause for thought, leading him to state on the 15th March 1991 that he felt the attribution of the Bologna Massacre to fascist activists may be based on misinformation supplied by the security services.

Returning to A Student named Alexander, unlike the Baader Meinhof Complex, the detail is nearly entirely on the victim, showing his cluttered bedroom, his journey by car to the art school in Piazza Risorgimento. No context is provided as to why Mambro and the NAR are robbing the Banca Nazionale on the 5th March 1982. Neither is reference made to the murder of her fellow MSI activists Franco Bigonzetti and Francesco Ciavatta, gunned down in the Acca Larentia by Left extremists, the Armed Squads for Contropotere Territorial, despite the fact that this led Mambro and her cohort to confront both their political opponents and the police in three days of shootings, stabbings and torching cars across Prenestino:

‘A few of us knew what this meant. Francesco Ciavatta was in our small circle. Our immediate reaction was shock, as if a relative had died. We looked at each other not knowing what to do. All around the city young militants flocked to us. The Italian Social Movement did not react. Kids like us were being used to keep order at meetings of Giorgi Almirante (20) , ready to take the blows and hit back . . . Acca Larentia marked the final break with the MSI . . . It could no longer be our home. For three days we shot at police and this marked the point of no return . . .’ — Francesca Mambro

Even, the circumstances of Alexander’s death are disputed. The movie depicts Mambro standing over the boy, firing into his head execution style, apparently mistaking him and his small umbrella for an armed plain clothes policeman. The counter argument is that he was killed in cross-fire as the NAR broke out of a police encirclement. A shoot out in which Mambro did not have in her possession the gun that was identified as the murder weapon and was herself very seriously wounded in the abdomen. She later recalls, hiding out in a garage, where a young doctor visits her and confirms ‘that it is only a matter of time . . . saying I could die . . .’

A discussion followed as to whether or not her compatriots should kill her there and then because she may talk under anesthetic but instead the NAR cell, led by Giorgio Vale (21), who went on later to found Terza Posizione (22), deposited her on the roadside outside an Emergency room.

When Mambro’s Rome based lawyer Amber Giovene challenged the authenticity of the way Mambro is depicted in the movie, claiming it ‘harmed her image’ she was met with a barrage of criticism. The case, overseen by prosecutor Barbara Sargent, was opened three months after the film opened and came like a bolt from the blue to the self-righteous director and the cultural association School of Arts and Entertainment. People in Bologna were whipped up into a state of frenzy, signing a petition in support of the film, which had already received a letter of commendation from the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano. Expressions like censorship and statements like ‘You cannot stop a cultural work, you cannot stop history’, were bandied around with the usual air of moral indignation.

The 2013 Appeal notes relating to the accusation of defamation of Mambro’s character read: due to the benefit of the law, Francesca Mambro, who has never repented of her criminal and terrorist past, nor as ever wanted to work together to build the truth about serious events like the Bologna Massacre, will remain free. The request for the seizure of the short film is extremely serious because it sets a precedent on the freedom of cultural expression, journalism and news, and also because it opens the door to dangerous revisions and attempts to wipe clean historical memory’. The account continues: ‘A country without memory will never understand the present or the future’.

The double standards and contradictions exemplified in the differing responses to A Student Called Alexander and The Baader Meinhof Complex cannot be more stark. Memorialization of such actions are to be glamorized and mythologized if of the Left and censored and misrepresented if of the Right. The word revision is of itself loaded, implying an attempt to challenge supposedly known historical facts and is a term usually reserved for historians deviating from the legend of the Jewish Holocaust. Indeed, it seems that anything that transgresses the Left’s self-serving narrative is to be expunged, cast down the Orwellian memory hole, or twisted beyond all recognition.

Roberto Natale, the auteur of such movie classics as Kill Baby Kill and Terror Creatures from the Grave, also reiterated before his recent demise, that ‘there is a right and duty to tell. Art strengthens the record and citizens need to know. We journalists are on the side of those who stubbornly continue to speak against the custom in our country to silence uncomfortable voices, instead of being willing to speak. This short film has to circulate and be seen in schools, but not only in Rome’.

So, is the movie meant to educate or perpetuate the questionable conviction of Mambro for that specific crime? Be re-assured De Camillis states:

I tell you a story, I do not give you a political speech. I want to get out of games of this type. The short film I made for a number of reasons that I think are important. It is a warning to our politicians. Right now, if you do not listen to the needs of young people, you risk terrorism, perhaps we have already. We remember the riots in San Giovanni in Rome in October (23), the bullets that came in envelopes and the letter bombs.

Then specifically commenting on the release of Francesca Mambro, but of course not being invested in any way, De Camillis adds:

I will not even enter into legal issues because one relies on the judgment of the judiciary already formulated in 1985. But a citizen reflecting on the penalties imposed on others for far less serious offenses fully expatiated are still in prison. Mambro was guilty of 97 murders and was sentenced to nine life sentences. Yet, she walks outside, lives 400 meters from my house, and I may happen across her path by accident. There is a whisper that this story has resurfaced because of my family bonding and friendship with Alexander . . . Who was Alexander Caravillani? He was a boy of 17, he ran with the times, had a girlfriend, and harbored all the fantasies of a 17-year-old. He was not political, nor left or right. He passed in front of the bank, was simply crossing the street, going to school when he was shot, his short umbrella tumbling from his jacket, leading Mambro to believe he was a plain clothes policeman. Then she came back and put a bullet in his head. For that, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

This is a story, he insists once again, to preserve the history of the years of lead.

And if that is indeed the case, why not tell the story of one of the murdered MSI Youth Front members, Sergio Ramelli, 18; Francesco Cechin, 19; and Paolo Di Nella, 20, contemporaries of Alexander Caravillani and Mambro, who met their deaths by beating, shooting, and stabbings from Leftist brigands like the Autonomus Workers in the late ’70s and early ’80s? But of course, that will never happen. It does fit their agenda.

On February 11th 2012, De Camillis in direct contradiction to his supposed non-political stance is quoted, ‘Today, the city of Rome is right’, referring to the ‘post fascist’ Mayor Gianni Alemanno (24), MSI Youth Front veteran and graduate of Campo Hobbit (25), who was elected in April 2008 to the sound of Fascist-era songs and shouts of ‘Duce’. ‘Who are those who have called me to present the short film?’ asked Camillis, ‘They are Alemanno’s allies, Berlusconi’s Il Popolo della Liberta (26) . . . When it all came out I was in silence and I decided to just promote it, as I always do. But in the face of this attack, I mean to defend it at all costs. It is a ‘cultural action’ like opposition to gagging journalists. This is a way to silence not only the news but also the authorship of the image’.

There is clearly no intention of admitting even the possibility of bias or inaccuracy. De Camillis and his people are intent on staking their claim to the moral high ground. The following day, Mambro’s lawyer responded: ‘I write in the name and on behalf of the my client Francesca Mambro about the article published yesterday . . . I understand the presentation of the short film flatters the author. But I do not understand the claim that Mambro came back and shot him in the head. I do not know if Mr. De Camillis’s draws from insider sources? Caravillani, unfortunately died in the firefight because a bouncing bullet caused his immediate death. A bullet from an assault rifle that Mambro had never had in her possession, either as she entered the bank or as the NAR shot their way out. The scene is constructed in a way that will definitively condemn Mambro’. When Caravillani was struck, the judges concluded, it was because the young man, after he had run, suddenly found himself in the trajectory of shots fired between the various agents . . . Unfortunately, even the trailers of the short graphically depict Mambro in the disputed manner, astride a guy lying on the ground, shooting the coup de grace . . . I am sure, that in the name of the need to preserve the memory of the years of lead, both you and the newspaper for which he writes would give an account of this correction’. My personal advice is not to hold your breath for a retraction. Smear and distortion is their modus operandi.

Sentenced, for the killing of 9 individuals between May 1980 and March 1982, and the alleged involvement in the massacre of the Bologna bombing on 2nd August 1980, Mambro served 16 years in prison. Sometimes sharing a cell with Anna Laura Braghetti (27), of the Brigate Rosse, then after 1998 home detention until the 16th September 2008 when she was granted parole on the basis of ‘repeated and tireless dedication to reconciliation and peace with the victims’ families (28). Parole was ended on September 16th 2013 when the sentence was disposed of . . .’

So to end has I began with a quote from a French man of letters, Alexandre Dumas (29), author of The Three Musketeers, ‘she is purely animal; she is the babooness of the Land of Nod; she is the female of Cain: Slay her!’ Or at least besmirch her reputation and disparage her cause so that no one will want to emulate her.

Notes

  1. Along with Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire identified counter enlightenment philosopher Joseph de Maistre as his maître a penser and adopted aristocratic views. He argued ‘There are but three things worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create . . .’
  2. Auguste Clesinger (1814-1883), French sculptor who created Bacchante, the Infant Hercules Strangling Snakes, Nereid, and Sappho, was an Officier de la Legion d’honneur.
  3. Rudi Dutschke (1940-1979), disciple of Rosa Luxemburg and critical Marxist, survived Josef Bachmann’s attack, but drowned as consequence of having an epileptic fit in the bath.
  4. Holger Meins, seized with Baader and Jan Carle-Raspe on the 1st June 1972, went on hunger strike, dying a mere 39kg in weight. He is a central character in the movie Moses und Aron by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet (1974). Followed by a documentary about Meins called Starbuck — Holger Meins by Gerd Conradt (2002).
  5. Bobby Sands (1954-81), a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) died whilst on hunger strike in HM Maze Prison. During the course of his protest he was elected to the British Parliament as an Anti-H Block candidate. He has been depicted in various films including Some Mother’s Son (1996) and Hunger (2008) and is celebrated in songs like Christy Moore’s The People’s Own MP’.
  6. Stammheim is a high security prison in Stuttgart.
  7. Four militants of the Commando Martyr Halime hijacked Lufthansa flight 181 on the 13th October 1977. The plane was stormed in Somalia by GSG-9 elite counter-terrorism units in an operation code-named Feuerzauber (Fire Magic).
  8. Valentina Carnelutti was trained at the Theatre Active in Rome and the Mime Theatre Movement. She has also appeared in the movies Martina Singapore (1995), Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001) and The Best of Youth (2003).
  9. Santo Della Volpe is a professional journalist who covered the first Gulf War and is a managing editor on Italy’s TG3.
  10. The term “Years of Lead” was used to describe the socio-political turmoil in Italy between the 1960s to the 1980s. It is thought that the reference originated from a movie called Marianne and Julianne by Margarethe Von Trotta. The Italian title was Anni di Piombo, literally years of lead. A later linked feature called The German Sisters (1981) became a classic of new German cinema, sympathetic to Gudrun Ensslin and dedicated to women’s civil rights.
  11. Born in 1958, Giuseppe Valerio ‘Giusva’ Fioravanti, was a former child actor, who became a leader in the NAR and has been romantically linked with Mambro since 1979. While serving his prison sentence he made a documentary on Rome’s Rebibbia prison, Piccoli Ergastoli, Little Life Sentences (1997).
  12. Occorsio Vittorio (1929-1976) oversaw the trial of those indicted for the Piazza Fontana bombing.
  13. Maria Amato was an Italian magistrate assassinated by NAR member Gilberto Cavallini in 1980.
  14. Francesco Cossiga, Italy’s 42nd Prime Minister and 8th President between 1985-1992.
  15. The Banda della Magliana was a criminal network operating out of Lazio, named after the district from where most of their leaders originated. Their activities included the murder of the banker Roberto Calvi, the kidnapping of Emanuela Orlandi and the attack on John-Paul II.
  16. Licio Gelli, an Italian financier, heavily involved in the Banco Ambrosiano scandal and the venerable master of the P2 Lodge.
  17. The Propaganda Due (P2) Lodge was under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy implicated in numerous crimes and mysteries, often referred to as a ‘state within the state’.
  18. Operation Gladio was the code-name for NATO’s ‘stay behind’ activity should the Warsaw Pact mount an invasion of western Europe. The name Gladio came from the word gladius, a type of short Roman sword.
  19. The Ustica Massacre is still a subject of some controversy. Whether or not a French naval aircraft brought the plane down with a missile, or a bomb was set off in the toilet as evidenced by forensic experts, it is known that the Libyan leader Colonel Gadaffi was in the same airspace at the time. Linking the Ustica and Bologna incidents became common in some conspiracy circles.
  20. Giorgio Almirante (1914-1988) studied under Giovanni Gentile, the eminent pro-Fascist philosopher and wrote for the Rome-based fascist journal Il Tevere. He once described Julius Evola as ‘Our Marcuse, only better’. Almirante was suspected of safe-housing Carlo Cicuttini, a MSI leader in the Monfalcone area and later a member of the Ordine Nuovo, a suspect convicted in absentia for his part in the Peteano di Sagrado killings. Almirante and his rival Pino Rauti often clashed bitterly on the tactics and methodology used by the Italian Right.
  21. Giorgi Vale was killed in a shoot-out with police.
  22. The Terza Posizione emerged from the national student’s movement under Roberto Nistri, who was imprisoned from 1982 to the early 2000s.
  23. The San Giovanni Riots of the 15th October were violent street protests by Black Bloc Left extremists.
  24. Gianni Alemanno was born in Bari in 1958. He is a former secretary of the MSI’s Youth Wing, who entered the Chamber of Deputies representing Lazio, serving as Rome’s 63rd Mayor between 2008-2013 and a Minister of Agriculture under Silvio Berlusconi. He is married to Isabella Rauti, the daughter of Pino Rauti.
  25. Campo Hobbit was named after Catholic writer J. R. R. Tolkien’s first novel. It was an alternative cultural and musical ‘happening’ linked to Elemire Zolla who wrote The Arcana of Power 1960-2000. Held in various locations, the first in Montesarchio, it boasted its own Manifesto and became a ‘field school’ for the Italian New Right and thinkers like Pino Rauti and Marco Tarchi.
  26. Berlusconi’s Il Poplo della Liberta was closely aligned with Gianfranco Fini’s conservative National Alliance and Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord.
  27. Anna Laura Braghetti owned the apartment where Aldo Moro was imprisoned. She is also the subject of her own book Prisoner which influenced Marco Bellocchio’s film Good Morning, Night (2003).
  28. Mambro currently works for the Italian NGO Hands off Cain, an association campaigning against the death penalty linked to the Libertarian Radical Party.
  29. Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870). It was said of Dumas, that his ‘tongue was like a windmill — once set in motion, you never knew when it would stop, especially if the theme was himself’ — Watts Phillips, English illustrator, playwright and novelist.

 

——————

Solère, Fenek. “Sisters of Salome: Femmes Fatales, Left & Right.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 7 May 2015. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/05/sisters-of-salome/ >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Progressivism as a Surrogate Community – Chen

Progressivism as a Surrogate Community in the United States

By Clare Y. Chen

 

Handle wrote up a great post on how progressivism psychologically serves the human desire for society and community.

I won’t get into summarising it, but I wrote a somewhat lengthy comment that I think merits some further expansion.

Coincidentally, I was thinking about something very similar earlier today. Those individuals who are the most atomised, rootless, and without intimate [face-to-face] social networks are also the most easy to Cathedralise.*

Rightists used to think that leftism was all about an overbearing, banal, and uniform solidarity in the masses, but we didn’t pay enough attention to the fact that the prerequisite was the destruction of fraternal, familial, and ethno-religious bonds. And what better place for that than the great ‘propositional nation’ of America?

You’re young, and you’ve got the whole world out there. Away from home, and on an unfamiliar campus around people in a similar position, where you have no connection to anything. Without existing friendships, it’ll be hard to develop any sense of security that you can really speak your mind and do as you wish.

Break a progressive taboo? No one will stand up for you. The fear of ostracisation and blacklisting would crush an ordinary person. You can atone for your crimes by grovelling before your masters in the Cathedral, begging them for a chance for redemption. But, it’s easier to submit and pay tribute without having the Mongols sack your city first, isn’t it?

Look at what happened to Pax Dickinson. What would an ordinary denizen have done? He would have prostrated himself before the pantheon of progressive deities–feminism, multiculturalism, et al.–repeatedly offering apologies and chanting the prog mantra.

What is especially awful about that affair with Dickinson is the fact that the odious Anil Dash openly wanted to blacklist the former. It’s not enough to shamelessly campaign for his expulsion from his company. No, all things associated with him must be tainted and buried alive. The message is clear to all.

Now, consider the fact that these trends of atomisation are growing worse, and at alarming rates. We haven’t hit rock-bottom yet. More and more children are growing up in broken homes, and have little to no connection with any religious institutions, which are being co-opted and mercifully killed off by the Cathedral anyway.

The Leftist Singularity isn’t even close.

Now, that’s a sobering thought. Progressivism is a murderer who adopts the orphans of his victims and brainwashes them to do his bidding. Call it Stockholm Syndrome, or whatever, it’s all the same.

We neoreactionaries have our work cut out for us. It’s not just an uphill battle, it’s up a hill that also happens to lie where two tectonic plates meet. That’s not to say that it’s wholly hopeless, though. Enough people will reject and defy progressivism, with enough support. You are absolutely correct when you say that community is essential. Let’s continue building one.

Let’s focus on my metaphor that “Progressivism is a murderer who adopts the orphans of his victims and raises them to do his bidding.” Now, Handle points out that ancient states sometimes did this as an easy way of subjugating conquered populations.

It was a common tactic in the brutal ancient world for conquering forces to slay the men and enslave the women and children. Sending them to reeducation camps and giving a decent career path in the Grand Inquisitor’s Grand Bureaucracy is a much more subtle and effective system of control.

Progressivism competes with traditional loyalties–in the old days, we had our various religious, ethno-cultural, and fraternal associations, whether at church, town, or job. There was always a group that someone could relate with.

It’s different now. Religion has become completely irrelevant today. 72% of Millennials identify as the vapid and meaningless label “spiritual but not religious”. Most are actively hostile to the idea of organised religion. There are a myriad of reasons for this, but important factors include America’s Protestant way of looking at religion and the extensive degree to which remaining churches have become co-opted by the Cathedral (cf. “churchianity”).

And, of course, as America is a “propositional nation”, the general trends of ethnocentrism don’t really apply for whites. Apart from some regional cultural festivals that might attract slight curiosity, American whites overwhelmingly have no connection to the Old World. The few sporadic ties shown are more akin to Plastic Paddies than anything authentic. (In any case, American whites almost always consider themselves Americans first, rather than Germans, English, etc.) Even with subconscious identies as whites, American whites have been so bombarbed by propaganda that to dare show any of that is to invite smears of white supremacism, racism, bigotry, et al. ad nauseam.

Plenty has been said on how PC speech and behavioural codes have taken place in workplaces, so I won’t rehash that. Your master isn’t your manager, it’s human resources. Suffice to say that any place where you spend one-third of your weekday, but still must hide your heretical un-PC self behind a façade, will certainly contribute to a sense of social isolation.

The idea of America as an egalitarian, propositional nation is inherently progressive. As all these traditional communal ties have been obliterated as a result of just how ingrained progressivism is in the social fabric of America, there’s initially a vacuum–and nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely the void that progressivism itself fills.

From birth to death, a person is surrounded by the influences of the Cathedral. A seemingly innocuous children’s show is far from it. Children are in [mostly public] schools for at least 12 or 13 years, and college for generally 4 or more. (If you’re reading this blog, it’s probably not necessary to expound on the awfulness of public schools and the universities.) These all either openly preach progressive ideology, or at least integrate it into its messages, whether through mockery of tradition or through pushing absurd sanctimonious messages. (For example, what the hell is this?)

What I find particularly abhorrent about this is that the periods where a person’s identity is most pliable and uncertain is where progressivism most strongly targets them. It offers them a universal place of belonging, approval, and likemindedness, albeit with certain caveats. These young adults are transplanted to a land isolated from everyone they knew beforehand, all alone.

Who’s going to compete for their loyalties? Their home churches? Certainly not. Progressivism has slain their caretakers and nurturers in the night, and tells them that they were abandoned. Join us, says the Cathedral. We’ll provide for you, should you become one of us.

It’s a bit of a truism that people prefer feeling good to knowing the truth. Therefore, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised that the atomised and rootless young adults of modernity flock to the gates of the Cathedral, like moths drawn to a flame.

Or, considering how progressivism shapes, subsumes, and uses these individuals, like grey goo.

Now, in what ways can the neoreaction fight this trend? There are tactics that might help, such as attacking the sanctity of going to college, attacking popular culture, or providing alternative sources of information. And then there are, in my opinion, unrealistic goals, such as halting the growth of bastardy, change via political processes, or revival of ethno-religious identities.

Long-term, maybe the neoreaction can work itself into the social fabric of the West. That takes time, and it’s certainly no cakewalk. Without having achieved that first, perhaps the most lucrative source of short-term strength could be a generation of lost wanderers looking for shelter.

There will inevitably be visceral responses–after all, progressivism has become the core identity of many in Generation Y. (For example, anyone who labels themself an “activist” or “advocate” for something.) Expect overwhelming hostility from anyone whose identity is being attacked. So, stand firm and chip away at those foundations! Erode the base enough, and the decrepit structure collapses in on itself.

Expose progressivism as a murderer, and bring its dirty deeds and lies to light. Show its hostages that progressivism killed its parents. Offer your hand, and say, “your progenitors may have been killed off by the very master you now serve, but there’s a chance of honouring their memories and reforging their ways.”

I won’t entertain the thought that there’s some day of reckoning when all of them get over their Stockholm syndrome and reject the deceptive comfort of the Cathedral together, as that’s silly. But for every individual persuaded to discard the pretty lies, the effort and result means everything to them.

————

Added Notes:

* The term “The Cathedral” is used by certain Right-wing writers, especially those belonging to the general group called “Neoreaction.” The term was first used by the internet writer Mencius Moldbug, and can be defined as “the self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service” (quoted from More Right).

 

—————

Chen, Clare Y. “Progressivism as a surrogate community.” Throne, Altar, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, 20 September 2013. <htts://thronealtarandrocknroll.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/progressivism-as-a-surrogate-community/ >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Practices of Ethnic Separatism – Tudor

Practices of Separatism

(Excerpt from “The Philosophy of Identity”)

By Lucian Tudor

 

Introductory Note: The following text is an excerpt from a larger essay titled “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought.” While this discussion of types of separatism can stand on its own, we believe it is important for readers to have some awareness of the context in order to not have misunderstandings. In earlier parts of “The Philosophy of Identity,” Lucian Tudor discussed the forms and importance of ethno-cultural identity, the necessity of having ethno-cultural groups live in distinct areas in order to maintain their cultural integrity and traditionality (thus rejecting “multiculturalism” and the “melting pot”), and why doing so is not in and of itself “racist” or “xenophobic.”

It is important to realize, in this regard, that the term “separatism” here is used in a very general sense, referring to any form of systematic or structural separation of ethnic and racial groups. It does not necessarily imply any form cultural or ethnic isolationism, for Tudor had already discussed the importance of inter-cultural dialogue and contact, and we can add to that also that foreigners visiting one’s country and having areas of inter-ethnic contact are acceptable as well. What really counts in the case of separatism is that there is no massive mixing which will threaten the existence of distinct ethno-cultural groups, that the various ethno-cultural groups have their own territory to exist in – which is the exact opposite of the Western-style multicultural system.

Finally, we can say that Tudor’s discussion of types of separatism is useful in understanding why the New Right rejects old-fashioned nationalism in favor of the imperial or federalistic model of separatism. While nationalists claim that their model is the only valid way to maintain ethno-cultural integrity, there have been many successful examples of the imperial-federalist model throughout history where multiple ethnic groups lived in the same country in relative harmony or were able to cooperate. Even in the present day, one can see successful examples of multi-ethnic states using the ethno-federalist or ethno-regionalist (also communitarian in many localities) structure in Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Russia, and China. – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

***

1. The Class and Caste System

Evidently, racial and ethnic separatism has taken on a variety of forms throughout history. The first and commonly recognized form of separatism is the creation of a class or caste system, where a social order composed of multiple races or ethnic groups separates the population into different classes or castes. Belonging to a class or caste is determined in such societies by racial, ethnic, or cultural background. Class systems based only on ethnocultural background can be seen frequently in history wherever one people conquers others, although of course it should not be assumed here that conquest necessarily results in a hierarchical class system.

A class or caste structure of racial separation, likewise being typically the result of conquest, can be seen in Greco-Roman civilization, in certain ancient Near Eastern civilizations (such as Egypt or Persia), and in many parts of Central and South America after European colonization. Similar systems have also been developed in apartheid states during and after the Colonial Era. [38] Such class or caste systems are often seen as being essentially negative because they involve domination and the subjugation of one or more races by another. However, they also had the positive effect of preserving the racial types which have formed, even after miscegenation (the new, mixed racial types; mulattos and mestizos), due to the fact that they discouraged race mixing by class separation.

It should also be mentioned here that another very well-known example of a caste system which included racial separation into its principles is the one established in ancient India. However, in the case of India, it is interesting to note that Alain Daniélou has argued that its caste system cannot be seen as “racist” (involving unfair subjugation), but rather that it is a natural and just racial ordering; thus the racial aspect of the Indian caste system is not racist because, unlike racist systems, it is not based on subjugation and supremacism but on a harmonious and organized coexistence which involves separation.[39]

2. Nationalism

Another form of separatism is what is commonly recognized as ethnic “nationalism,” which has its primary basis in ethnocultural identity, although it is often accompanied by racial identity where interracial contact exists. Nationalism is defined, in the most simple terms, as the belief that ethnic groups or nationalities (in the cultural sense) are the key category of human beings and that they should live under their own independent states. It implies complete and total separation of ethnic groups into separate nations. Nationalism is often associated with ethnic chauvinism, inter-ethnic hostility, imperialism, and irredentism, although it is important to remember that there have been certain select forms of nationalism throughout history that were not at all chauvinistic and imperialistic, so it is erroneous to assume that it always takes on these negative features.

Concerning the issue of “ethno-nationalism,” one must be careful to distinguish between “racial nationalism,” on the one hand, and actual ethnic nationalism, in which race plays a role but in which it is not the primary element. For some theories of racial nationalism, the biological race is seen as the foundation of the nation, and any ethnocultural factors are regarded as being mere emanations of the race or as being secondary and unimportant when compared with the racial factor (thus it commits the biological reductionist or determinist error; more specifically, it can be said to be racial reductionist). [40] Ethnic nationalism in the proper sense, on the other hand, regards the ethnocultural factor as primary, but still acknowledges that the ethnic group’s identity is linked to race to some extent, and that thus the racial type must be maintained if the ethnos is to survive.[41]

However, we should note that “nationalism” is a problematic term because it has been defined in different and sometimes contradictory ways. In one, very generic sense, nationalism means simply the desire of a people to live separately from others, under its own state and by rule of leaders of its own ethnic background—in essence, a basic ethnic separatism and desire for independence. In this sense, nationalism is a very ancient idea and practice, since all across history one can find many cases where a people of one particular ethnic background desired to be independent from the rule of another different people and fought for this independence.

This is not, however, the way nationalism is always defined, and aside from the fact that it is sometimes defined as being necessarily chauvinistic, it is also often defined in a certain manner that makes it particularly an early modern phenomenon.

In particular, many Identitarian (or New Right) as well as Traditionalist authors have defined nationalism as a form of state in which the “nation” is politically or culturally absolutized, at the expense of smaller local or regional cultural differences, and regarding other nations as completely foreign and of lesser value. This form of “nationalism” is exemplified by the Jacobin nation-state and form of sovereignty (since the French Revolution was a key force in initiating the rise of this state form), and is identified by the elimination of sub-ethnic differences within its borders and the regard for differences with other peoples or nationalities as absolute. Naturally, this form of nationalism has the consequence of creating hostility and conflict between nations because of these ideological and political features. [42] Thus, Benoist, in a statement which summarizes the Identitarian position on this matter, rejects nationalism and proposes in its place a view which reconciles patriotism with the idea of a right to difference: “The identity of others is no longer in principle a threat to mine. I am ready to defend my identity because this defense is a general principle, whose legitimacy I also recognize for others. In other words, if I defend my ‘tribe,’ it is also because I am ready to defend those of others.” [43]

3. Traditionalist Imperial Federalism

The Perennial Traditionalists propose a form of ethnic separatism based on the model of the traditional imperial state, which has manifested itself numerous times across history, including well-known examples such as the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Russian Empire. In the imperial system, peoples and ethnic groups (“nationalities”) are generally organized in a federation in which each people lives in its own region within the empire. The traditional empire is therefore incompatible with nationalism because it is organized as a supranational federalistic union with a central spiritual authority.

Furthermore, the empire in the traditional sense must not be assumed to be imperialistic, for the traditional empire unified peoples without destroying their particular cultures and ethnic characters. [44] According to Evola,

The scheme of an empire in a true and organic sense (which must clearly be distinguished from every imperialism, a phenomenon that should be regarded as a deplorable extension of nationalism) . . . safeguarded the principles of both unity and multiplicity. In this world, individual States have the character of partial organic units, gravitating around . . . a principle of unity, authority, and sovereignty of a different nature from that which is proper to each particular State . . . due to its super-ordained nature, would be such as to leave wide room for nationalities according to their natural and historical individuality. [45]

In the imperial state, which Evola asserts is the true traditional model of the state, ethnic or national groups are thus separated federally; different peoples live under the same state and serve the same ultimate monarchical authority, but they live in separate parts of the kingdom or empire. To quote one of his key works: “The Middle Ages [and also certain ancient civilizations] knew nationalities but not nationalisms. Nationality is a natural factor that encompasses a certain group of common elementary characteristics that are retained both in the hierarchical differentiation and in the hierarchical participation, which they do not oppose.” [46]

It is worth noting that many Perennial Traditionalist authors such as Julius Evola and Frithjof Schuon reject nationalism as an anomaly—a deviation from valid state forms—not only because they are proponents of the imperial model, but also because they regard ethnicity and race (in the biological sense) as secondary qualities in human beings. [47] That is to say, although they are still acknowledged as having some level of importance, they are insignificant when compared to the values of religious type, elitism, aristocracy, or caste (in its spiritual sense; the racial aspect is still acknowledged but regarded as secondary). Furthermore, Evola has argued that “the notions of nation, fatherland, and people, despite their romantic and idealistic halo, essentially belong to the naturalistic and biological plane and not the political one; they lead back to the ‘maternal’ and physical dimension of a given collectivity.” [48]

However, it should be noted here that many ethnically and racially conscious authors have argued that some conservative scholars have pointed out that race, nationality, and people were regarded in many ancient and traditional societies as possessing a character which surpassed the material plane. According to the studies of conservative scholars of religion such as Mircea Eliade, the religious view of archaic and traditional societies often endowed ethnicity and culture with a spiritual (in the religious sense), mythical, and transcendent dimension. [49] Thus, the traditional view in general cannot be confined to that of well-known Traditionalists such as Evola, Guénon, or Schuon.

4. Identitarian Separatism

The New Right and the Identitarian movement is influenced by Perennial Traditionalist thought, especially in regards to the idea of empire in the traditional sense; Identitarians, for the most part, also support the idea of a federalist empire as their primary model of the state and of ethnic separatism. However, there are a number of key differences between the two groups. First, Identitarians naturally regard the depreciation of ethnic identity by certain Traditionalists such as Evola to be an error. Identitarianism regards ethnic, racial, and cultural identity to be an important part of human existence, not only on the material plane (which is not as demeaned by them to the extent we see among Traditionalists), but also—in accord with Eliade and other conservative religious scholars—on the mythical and spiritual plane.[50]

Of course, there are various other philosophical issues on which there are disagreements—particularly in regards to religious doctrine, the structure and form of polity, and the importance of feminine values—but this is no place to discuss those in depth. [51] The most important point of disagreement which we must recognize here is with the particular construction of the imperial federalist state, which becomes evident when we look at the details of the Identitarian ideal in this regard.

The concept of federalism in Identitarian thought proposes the idea of a federation or confederation which is based upon the principle of subsidiarity, whereby decision-making power is granted to the lowest authorities. In this system, local and regional political structures hold the power that is due to them, while the central authority rules primarily when decisions affecting the whole state must be made. This form of state and sovereignty “implies plurality, autonomy, and the interlacing of levels of power and authority.” [52] Of course, the Traditionalist concept of the empire also involves the practices of subsidiarity and allowing decisions to be made at lower levels. However, for Traditionalists, subsidiarity is more limited in practice, and their concept of sovereignty leads them to assert the importance of the ultimate authority of the sovereign (the central ruler) far more.

The Identitarian conception of the federal state is accompanied by the juridical element of the “right of the peoples.” Hence the fact that, according to this conception, ethnocultural groups of all levels and types have the right to live with freedom and separately from others in different states and territories in the federation. Thus, while the traditional imperial state is used as a reference for the ideal political organization of peoples, in this scheme it is also accepted that “each nation or region, in conserving its freedom, has the right to leave the Federation at any moment.” [53] Furthermore, the Identitarian vision of the empire can also be said to be a “democratic empire” because it involves practicing what is known as organic democracy.

Notes:

[38] On the matter of historical examples, see Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity and Elav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler, The Origins of Racism in the West. On the race-based caste and class systems in Central and South America, one classic mainstream resource is Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).

[39] See Alain Daniélou, India: A Civilization of Differences. The Ancient Tradition of Universal Tolerance (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003). On race in the Indian caste system, see also the preface to Arvind Sharma, Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[40] See, for example, the commentaries on race and biological breed in William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man? (Costa Mesa, CA: Noontide Press, 1986).

[41] For a commentary on this matter, see for example Tomislav Sunic, “Culture: The Missing Link in Euro-American Nationalism,” The Occidental Observer, July 20, 2009, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2009/07/sunic-euro-american-nationalism/.

[42] See Alain de Benoist, “Nationalism: Phenomenology and Critique,” Counter-Currents Publishing, May 16, 2012, http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/05/nationalism-phenomenology-and-critique; Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right, 228ff.; Edgar Julius Jung, “People, Race, Reich,” in Europa: German Conservative Foreign Policy 1870–1940, ed. and trans. Alexander Jacob (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002). See also the overview of Evola’s position in the chapter “Nations, Nationalism, Empire and Europe” in Paul Furlong, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011).

[43] Benoist, “Nationalism.”

[44] See Alain de Benoist, “The Idea of Empire,” Telos, no. 98–99 (December 1993): 81–98.

[45] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002), 277.

[46] Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, 338–39.

[47] See Frithjof Schuon, Castes and Races (Bedfont, Middlesex, UK: Perennial Books, 1982).

[48] Evola, Men Among the Ruins, 127.

[49] See for example Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1987); The Myth of the Eternal Return (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Myth and Reality (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998). Other scholars who could be mentioned in this regard are Georges Dumézil, Rudolf Otto, Gilbert Durand, and Alexander Dugin.

[50] See for example Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004), and the entry “Paganism” in Faye, Why We Fight, 205ff. Of course, it should be noted here that not all Identitarians are pagans; there are, in fact, many Christians with similar views among the Identitarians. Furthermore, many Identitarians recognize that Christianity and paganism can in fact be reconciled; they are not necessarily in complete conflict. These facts have been pointed out, for example, in the discussion of the New Right’s position on religion in Rodrigo Agulló, Disidencia Perfecta: La Nueva Derecha y la batalla de las ideas (Barcelona and Madrid: Áltera, 2011). In this regard, we can also mention that there have been historical examples of pagan ideas and values being reconciled with Christianity, as has been shown in many scholars’ works, including Eliade’s.

[51] For an in-depth critique from the Identitarian perspective of Radical Traditionalist thought, specifically that of Julius Evola, see especially Alain de Benoist, “Julius Evola, Reaccionario Radical y Metafísico Comprometido: Análisis crítico de su pensamiento político,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, no. 16 (June 2011): 25ff. http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__16. In this analytical work, Benoist establishes that he agrees with some of Evola’s ideas, such as his critique of nationalism, the support of the imperial idea, the basic anti-egalitarian idea, and certain ethical principles. However, Benoist also criticizes and rejects a number of other ideas and attitudes in Evola’s thought, including many (although not all) of his metaphysical and religious principles, his rigid elitism, his contempt for social and popular principles, his rejection of the value of collective identities (such as ethnicity), his lack of true organicism and rejection of the value of community solidarity (in the anti-individualist sense), and his hostility to feminine values. (Benoist, like other Identitarians, advocates a gender differentialism, as opposed to Evola’s position, which can truly be described as sexist.) Benoist acknowledges Evola as an intellectual worthy of study, but emphasizes that his thought must be examined critically.

[52] Alain de Benoist, “What is Sovereignty?,” Telos, no. 116 (Summer 1999): 114. Benoist has also explicated his views on these matters in “The Idea of Empire” and “The First Federalist: Johannes Althusius,” Telos, no. 118 (Winter 2000): 25–58. Other notable studies of sovereignty and federalism from the Identitarian perspective can be found in the following works: the entries “Empire” and “Sovereignty” in Faye, Why We Fight, 130–32 and 247; the chapter “Imperium” in O’Meara, New Culture, New Right; the articles in Sebastian J. Lorenz, ed., Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, no. 37, “Federalismo Poliárquico Neoalthusiano” (November 2012). http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__37_federalismo.

[53] Faye, Why We Fight, 131.

 

————–

Excerpt from: Tudor, Lucian. “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 99-106. This essay was also republished in Lucian Tudor’s book, From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

See also: The other excerpts from Lucian Tudor’s essay titled “Identity and Politics: Organic Democracy” and “The Vision of a Multipolar World.”

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Interview with Alexander Dugin – Tremblay

Against Universalism: An Interview with Alexander Dugin by Rémi Tremblay

 

Editor’s Introductory Note: The following interview conducted with Alexander Dugin is useful because it helps to clarify some of the positions of the Neo-Eurasianists towards the current political structures and towards Western nations. However, as with the majority of Dugin’s interviews, it is rather limited in scope and provides very incomplete or inadequate explanations of certain important topics, which can lead to misunderstandings. For example, the commentaries on “Manifest Destinies” as well as the roots of empires can be misleading for many readers. Furthermore, it is particularly important to note that Dugin’s explanation of the Eurasian political structure in this interview can seem to imply an authoritarian, undemocratic, and rigidly elitist form of government. However, it is important to recall that in many of his works, Dugin has advocated a form of democracy for Eurasian regions based off of the concept of “organic democracy” (also advocated by Alain de Benoist), and has referred to the envisioned Eurasian empire as a “democratic empire.” For that reason, it is more likely that Dugin prefers a mixed political system which combines true democracy with meritocratic aristocratism. In order to fully comprehend Alexander Dugin’s vision, it is necessary to read his other key texts. – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

Interviewer’s Note: My recent articles have been critical of Eurasianism, and have raised a few questions. Alexander Dugin, the author of the two books referred to in my articles, has kindly offered to answer them.

Rémi Tremblay: In the West, Eurasianism seems to seek to ally itself with nationalists. However, in Russia nationalist groups like the ones that support Russia in the West were crushed and repressed. What can Western nationalists learn from that repression?

Alexander Dugin: Eurasianism works with different groups who are against liberalism, North American hegemony and Modernity as a whole. These groups can be right or left. It is most important to be against liberalism and Atlanticism. But Eurasianism is not nationalistic—it is a Fourth Political Theory, ideologically similar to the European New Right of Alain de Benoist.

In the West there are two kinds of nationalists: (1) that characterized as anti-liberal, continental, anti-USA, and traditionalist; and (2) that characterized as pro-liberal, anticommunist, Atlanticist, pro-American and racist (xenophobe). The Eurasianists are willing to work closely with the former, but have little or nothing in common with the latter.

The same situation exists within Russia. There are Eurasian, imperial, traditionalist patriots who mostly support Putin and are loyal to the state, and the pro-liberal, racist, neo-Nazi extremists manipulated by the USA (like the Right Sector in Ukraine). If the latter are repressed, we enjoy it as much as when repression touches the pro-American liberal. They are a fifth column.

But at the same time Eurasianism is not the Third Path, it is the Fourth one. That means we are beyond right and left, as we refuse the materialism of communists (accepting and supporting their anti-capitalist struggle), while at the same time refusing “Nation,” in the spirit of Julius Evola, as a bourgeois concept based on Imperial-style traditionalism. Nations are now destroyed by the same forces that constructed them on the eve of Modernity. They have served their end [undermining] traditional Stände (elites), ethnic culture, and Medieval forms of society, and now are of no further use to the same Masonic, global, anti-traditional elite that created them. So, everybody from left or right is free to transcend their views and pass from the Second Political Theory or from the Third one to the Fourth.

Tremblay: You call for a multipolar world. However, one gets the impression that a bipolar or even a unipolar world would emerge with Eurasianism. Wouldn’t it be logical for Europeans to support an independent Europe, independent from Moscow and Washington?

Dugin: If we say we want to construct a multipolar world and not a unipolar or bipolar one, we are going to do exactly what we declare. The theory of a multipolar world formulated in my books and in the different documents of Eurasian movements shows clearly that we support exactly a Europe totally independent from Washington and from Moscow. We need to have some fully independent Great Spaces (Grossraum)—North American, South American, European, Islamic, African, Russian-Eurasian, Indian, Chinese and Oceanic—that could be allies or foes, depending on the concrete situation. We are totally against unipolarity and North American hegemony, as well as a bipolar system.

Tremblay: The multicultural super-state that you propose as the model for future states has precedents like Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria. Can this model survive without an authoritarian leader? And likewise can multicultural Russia survive in the post-Putin era?

Dugin: The strategically centralized poly-cultural hyper-state is called Empire. Empire should be strong first of all in its ideology, and that ideology cannot be loose or liberal. It should be strong and based on the new aristocracy or ideocracy (as Eurasianists used to say). So, not only an Emperor but also an imperial ideology of a strong idealistic type is needed to grant cohesion to the whole system. I presume that Orthodox Christianity, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam are of such types. But they need the spiritual revival. The tri-functional Indo-European model studied by G. Dumezil should be the main platform for the societies of Indo-European origin. The society should be created not from below but from above. The meaning of the State is its spiritual mission. The aristocracy should consist of “Platonic Guards,” philosopher-warriors, that grant unity to the different ethnic groups representing the supra-ethnic elites, as was always the case in historic Empires.

But instead of one liberal, decadent North American financial Empire, there should be different Empires with different imperial visions. The Russian vision is obvious—it has its roots in our organic Orthodox tradition and Russian Eurasian Empire. I presume that the future of Europe lies in the restoration of the Charlemagne heritage and of the eschatological anticipation of the return of King Arthur. Possibly some would hope for the new Roman Empire professed by Virgil, who thought that Apollo would return and this time for eternity.

Tremblay: You claim that non-interventionist politicians like Ron Paul should be supported in the United States. However, you support interventionist politicians in Russia. If non-interventionists take control in the USA and interventionist politicians control the Kremlin, wouldn’t it become a unipolar world directed by Moscow?

Dugin: We have no possibility of exercising unipolarity, nor do we want to. Now there is unipolarity. It should be stopped. Non-interventionists are the only salvation of the USA, which is currently a tool in the hands of an anti-American elite that uses the American people in order to create global government. Without concentrating on inner political problems there will be no USA. The present masters will sacrifice the American people to their globalist agenda.

Russia is on the defense. Globalists attack us on our ground. Where is Ukraine? Is it close to the American borders? No, it is far, far away. But Washington supports Ukrainian liberals and neo-Nazis, pushing them to attack Russia. If some longsighted American politicians see that this is not correct and that it does not serve American interests, they are quite right and are real patriots.

Tremblay: You oppose American Manifest Destiny, but how does Orthodox Messianism differ?

Dugin: We oppose any kind of universalism. USA has its own mission. It is American—North American. Not universal. Manifest Destiny exists, not in the singular but in the plural. We need to use the expression in the plural, Manifest Destinies: American, European (that is quite different), Russian, Islamic, Chinese, and so on. No American dream—liberal and Calvinist—in its secular and materialist version must try to be the only Destiny for all humanity. The American people will pay a terrible price for this titanic presumption. Every great people has its own destiny. The American people are great, but not so great as to be able to deny the greatness of others. The globalist elite that has usurped the power in the USA must repent and surrender this ill-gained dominance.

Tremblay: In Putin Vs Putin, you talk about Putin being moderately Eurasianist based on his first two terms. In light of his third mandate, do you still have this opinion of a half-Western, half-Eurasianist politician?

Dugin: Yes, absolutely. He is half-Eurasianist. He is obliged to be more and more Eurasiniast but that is against his will. He is a liberal-capitalist, but a realist at the same time. Kissinger is much closer to him than we are, but still we support Putin because he will follow the Eurasianist course instead of his own. This is the hard geopolitical logic that binds him, so he will act exactly as we predict, including by the different logic of simply following circumstances and opportunities. He is a realist of pure type. We are not.

Tremblay: In the Great Spaces you propose, Quebec would be part of a bloc otherwise entirely Anglo-Saxon. Wouldn’t that mean the end of our culture and existence as an ethnos in the long term?

Dugin: The Empire conceived in the Eurasianist multipolar vision is never unidimensional, unlike modern nations. They should respect pluralism—ethnic and cultural. There are no fully homogeneous spaces. In Russia we have Muslims, Caucasians, Tartars, Siberians, Finno-Ugrians and so on. North America was built by Anglo-Saxons, Irish, French and Spanish with certain participation from other European nations, notably German, so I suggest the return to the ethnic organization: French Quebec should be French and so on. However, this should not be achieved in the process of creating a new national state, but cultural rights should be granted in the geopolitical context by the Imperial Constitution.

 

—————–

Dugin, Alexander. An Interview with Alexander Dugin: Against Universalism.” Interview by Rémi Tremblay. Alternative Right, 21 May 2015. <http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2015/05/an-interview-with-alexander-dugin.html >.

1 Comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Critical Analysis of Evola’s Thought – Benoist

“Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 366 KB):

Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician

————–

De Benoist, Alain. “Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician: A Critical Analysis of the Political Thought of Julius Evola.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 17-62. Document retrieved from: <http://files.alaindebenoist.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/julius_evola_radical_reactionary.pdf >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Review of Alexander Dugin’s Putin vs. Putin – Tremblay

Review of Alexander Dugin’s Putin vs. Putin

By Rémi Tremblay

 

Putin Vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right
by Alexander Dugin
Arktos Publishing, 316 pages

 

Few leaders evoke as much fascination as Vladimir Putin. In a world led by mediocrities like Barack Obama, David Cameron, Stephen Harper, and the other poltroons of political correctness and monotone rhetoric, the athletic and mysterious Russian president stands out.

Enigmatic, strong, and unapologetic, this former judo expert and secret service agent has many in the West wondering who Vladimir Putin really is. Still, despite its title, Putin Vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right was not written in order to answer these questions or even to describe Putin’s reign, but rather it was written to give a Eurasianist critique of the Russian president and his achievements.

This man, born in Saint-Petersburg, became the interim president of Russia in 1999, at the climax of the Yeltsin era, a period known in Russia not only for its corruption, but also for its liberal policies and its opening up to the Western world. In Moscow, the liberal oligarchs, who had built their fortunes at the expense of ordinary Russians when the USSR collapsed, were in power. Simply put, they were above the law. Yeltsin was their toy and, seeing his inevitable downfall, they decided to support Putin, believing that his patriotism and populism were only facades that could serve to bolster their power. Like his predecessor, they were sure, he would become their puppet.

Putin’s muscular intervention in Chechnya during his first year as president brought him the legitimacy his predecessor never enjoyed, and helped him build a trademark of manly patriotism. The oligarchs who pushed him to become president, like Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich, and Alexander Mamut, soon realized their mistake, and the relationship between them and their protégé soon soured.

Putin never denounced the oligarchs as a whole, and the liberal tendency they supported in Moscow remains powerful, despite a lack of popularity among the general population. But Putin at least managed to put a few in check by taking back what they had stolen, jailing some, and forcing others to take the road to exile.

Putin’s first term saw many achievements that fitted the Eurasianist agenda, policies it should be noted that were backed by the population. He took the media out of the hands of the most notorious oligarchs, prevented Russia’s disintegration, reformed the Federation Council, introduced the rigid structure of the federal districts, and so on. But between election periods, Putin has proved to be quite liberal and even conciliatory towards the West.

In 2003, Putin started asserting Russia’s sovereignty. He refused to join the American invasion of Iraq, instead siding with Paris and Berlin in opposition to it. This assertion of sovereignty, at first implicit, became resoundingly explicit at his 2007 Munich speech, when he demanded the end of unipolarity and called for a multipolar world.

On this basis, the Russian president engaged in independent and active geopolitics, signing many treaties and pacts with other Eurasian countries, including the Eurasian Economic Community, the Common Free Market Zone, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. However, Dugin regrets that those treaties and alliances are generally based on economics rather than a common worldview or a common historic destiny.

His strong actions made a break with the weakness of the Yeltsin years. Putin himself came to embody Russia in the same way that Louis XIV did France, when he declared, L’etat c’est moi (I am the state). He managed to eliminate the opposition around him: the liberal oligarchs, the leftists, and, it must be added, the ultranationalists. The creation of this void around himself was encouraged by the population, who, having never known democracy, demanded instead an effective authoritarian leader.

In 2008, after two consecutive terms, Putin had to step down due to constitutional limits. Dimitri Medvedev, a pro-Western liberal, replaced him.

Despite what many people feared, Medvedev’s term did not weaken Putin’s legacy nor change the outlook of the Russian state. Instead this partial return to the failed policies of the Yeltsin era, which was encouraged by the Obama administration, prepared the way for Putin’s return to the Presidency in 2012. However, this is something that has left many questions unanswered.

As he moves through his third term, Putin must realize that he has essentially failed. Economically, his few improvised policies, lacking proper planning, have seen the economy grow. But he has not solved the most important problem: Russia still does not have a real economy. Many fields, notably in the high-tech sector, have yet to be developed. Immigration and corruption are growing concerns, and, even in the field of geopolitics, he has failed. Despite some minor successes, Putin has failed to stop NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe. Several pro-American governments have been established in neighboring countries such as Georgia and Ukraine.

According to Dugin, Putin is far from the image of the hardcore nationalist created by Western media propaganda. He is a man of halves: half-liberal, half-Eurasianist. He has made many steps in the right direction, but somehow he never seems to reach the end goal. Putin is essentially a realist, as defined by Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt. He has not found an ideology, but rather reacts instinctively to events and circumstances.

Despite his flaws, Putin is, according to Dugin, the best leader possible; especially when compared to the standard Western politician.

Putin Vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right is not a biography but a Eurasianist analysis of Putin’s reign and of the challenges to be overcome in the future. It is an excellent introduction to Russian politics, thanks to the many footnotes, which introduce the main protagonists of the Russian political scene and the many influences at work in Moscow.

 

—————-

Tremblay, Rémi. “Putin vs. Putin: Eurasianism and Beyond.” Alternative Right, 15 May 2015. <http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2015/05/putin-vs-putin-eurasianism-and-beyond.html >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative