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Geopolitics of Leviathan – Rix

Geopolitics of Leviathan

By Edouard Rix

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

“Nur Meer und Erde haben hier Gewicht.”
(Only sea and land matter here.)
—Goethe

This article is less concerned with geopolitics than with thalassopolitics, a neologism coined by professor Julien Freund “to call into question certain conceptions of geopolitics that privilege telluric phenomena over maritime phenomena.”

“World history is the history of the fight of maritime powers against continental powers and of continental powers against maritime powers” writes Carl Schmitt in Land and Sea. [1]

In the Middle Ages, the cabbalists interpreted the history of the world as a combat between the powerful whale, Leviathan, and the no less powerful Behemoth, a land animal imagined as looking like an elephant or a bull. [2] Behemoth tries to tear Leviathan with its defenses, its horns or its teeth, while Leviathan, for its part, tries to stop with its fins the mouth and the nose of the land animal to starve or suffocate it. A mythological allegory not unrelated to the blockade of a terrestrial power by a maritime power.

The “Sea Power” of Admiral Mahan

Around the turn of the 20th century, the American Alfred T. Mahan in The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), the German Friedrich Ratzel in Das Meer als quelle der Volkergrösse [The Sea as Source of National Greatness] (1900), and the British Halford John Mackinder in Britain and the British Seas (1902), attach a paramount importance to the sea as source of power of the nations.

Admiral, historian, and professor at the US Naval Academy, Alfred T. Mahan (1840–1914) is the most famous geopolitician of the sea, his work comprising twenty books and 137 articles. On the basis of the study of European History of the 17th and 18th centuries, he sought to show how maritime power (Sea Power) appeared determinative of the growth and prosperity of nations.

For him, the sea can act against the land, whereas the reverse is not true and, in the long run, the sea always ends up winning any fight against the land. Mahan is deeply persuaded that the control of the seas ensures the domination of the land, which he summarizes with the formula “the Empire of the sea is without any doubt the Empire of the world.” [3] By thus affirming the intrinsic superiority of the maritime empires, he offers a theoretical justification to imperialism, the great expansionist movement of the years 1880–1914.

In The Problem of Asia, published in 1900, Mahan applies his geopolitical paradigm to Asia, insisting on the need for a coalition of maritime powers to contain the progression towards the open sea of the great terrestrial power of the time, Russia. Indeed, he stresses that its central position confers a great strategic advantage on the Russian Empire, because it can extend in all directions, and its internal lines cannot be crossed.

On the other hand—and here lies its principal weakness—its access to the sea is limited, Mahan seeing only three possible axes of expansion: toward Europe, to circumvent the Turkish blockade of the straits, toward the Persian Gulf, and toward the China Sea. This is why the admiral recommends damming up the Russian tellurocracy through the creation of a vast alliance of the maritime powers, thalassocracies, which would include the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, the Americans asserting themselves as the leaders of this new Holy Alliance.

Halford John Mackinder

Inspired by Admiral Mahan, the British academic Halford John Mackinder (1861–1947) also believed that the fundamental geopolitical reality is the opposition between continental powers and maritime powers. A fundamental idea run throughout his work: the permanent confrontation between the Heartland, i.e. the central-Asian steppe, and the World Island, the continental mass Asia-Africa-Europe.

In 1887, Mackinder delivered a short public speech to the Royal Geographical Society that marked his resounding debut on the geopolitical stage, declaring in particular “there are two types of conquerors today: land wolves and sea wolves.” Behind this allegorical and somewhat enigmatic utterance is the concrete reality of Anglo-Russian competition in Central Asia. In fact, Mackinder was obsessed by the safety of the British Empire vis-à-vis the rise of Germany and Russia. In 1902, in Britain and the British Seas, he noted the decline of Great Britain and concluded from it that she must “divide the burden” with the United States, which would take over sooner or later.

In his famous essay of 1904, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” he formulates his geopolitical theory. One can summarize it in two principal points: (1) Russia occupies the pivotal zone inaccessible to maritime power, from which it can undertake to conquer and control the Eurasian continental mass, (2) against Russia, maritime power, starting from its bastions (Great Britain, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and Japan) that are inaccessible to terrestrial power, encircles the latter and prohibits her from freely reaching the open sea.

Studying the “pre-Colombian” epoch, Mackinder contrasted the Slavs, who inhabited the forests, with the nomadic riders of the steppes. This semi-desert Asian steppe is the Heartland, surrounded by two densely populated crescents: the inner crescent, encompassing India, China, Japan, and Europe, which are territorially adjacent to the Heartland, and the outer crescent, made up of various islands. The inner crescent is regularly subject to the pressures of nomadic horsemen from the steppes of the Heartland.

Everything changed in the “Colombian” age, which saw the confrontation of two mobilities, that of England which began the conquest of the seas, and that of Russia which advanced gradually in Siberia. For the academic Mackinder, this double European expansion, maritime and continental, found its explanation in the opposition between Rome and Greece. Indeed, he affirms that the Germans were civilized and Christianized by the Roman, the Slavs by the Greeks, and that whereas the Romano-Germans conquered the oceans, the Slavs seized the steppes on horseback.

Mackinder made the separation between Byzantine and Western Empires in 395, exacerbated by the Great Schism between Byzantium and Rome in 1054, the nodal point of this opposition. He emphasized that after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, Moscow proclaimed itself the new center of Orthodoxy (the Third Rome). According to him, in the 20th century, this religious antagonism will lead to an ideological antagonism, between Communism and capitalism: Russia, heiress of the Slavic country village community, the Mir, will choose Communism, the West, whose religious practice privileges individual salvation, for capitalism . . .

For Mackinder, the opposition Land/Sea is likely to lean in favor of the land and Russia. Mackinder noted that if the United Kingdom could send an army of 500,000 to South Africa at the time of the Boer Wars, a performance saluted by all the partisans of the maritime power, Russia at the same time had succeeded in an even more exceptional exploit by maintaining an equivalent number of soldiers in the Far East, thousands of kilometers of Moscow, thanks to the Trans-Siberian Railroad. With the railroad, the terrestrial power was henceforth able to deploy its forces as quickly as the oceanic power.

Enthralled by this revolution in land transportation, which would make it possible for Russia to develop an industrialized space that is autonomous from and closed to trade with the thalassocracies, Mackinder predicted the end of the “Colombian” age and concluded that the telluric power is superior, summarizing his thought in a striking aphorism: “Whoever holds continental Europe controls the Heartland. Whoever holds the Heartland controls the World Island.”

Indeed, any economic autonomy in central-Asian space leads automatically to a reorganization of the flow of trade, the inner crescent thus having an interest in developing its commercial relations with the center, the Heartland, to the detriment of the Anglo-Saxon thalassocracies. A few years later, in 1928, Stalin’s announcement of the implementation of the first Five Year Plan would reinforce the British thinker, who did not fail to stress that since the October Revolution, the Soviets built more than 70,000 kilometers of railways.

Shortly after the First World War, Mackinder published Democratic Ideals and Reality, a concise and dense work in which he recalls the importance of the Russian continental mass, that the thalassocracies can neither control from the seas nor invade completely. Thus, concretely, it is imperative to separate Germany from Russia by a “cordon sanitaire,” in order to prevent the union of the Eurasiatic continent. This prophylactic policy was pursued by Lord Curzon, who named Mackinder High Commissioner in “South Russia,” where a military mission assisted the White partisans of Anton Denikin and obtained from them the de facto recognition of the new Republic of Ukraine . . .

To make impossible the unification of Eurasia, Mackinder never ceased recommending the balkanization of Eastern Europe, the amputation from Russia of its Baltic and Ukrainian glacis, the “containment” of Russian forces in Asia so that they could not threaten Persia or India.

Karl Haushofer’s Kontinentalblock

It was in Germany, under the decisive influence of Karl Haushofer (1869–1946), that geopoliticians, diplomats, and National Revolutionary and National Bolshevik theorists (the Jünger brothers, Ernst Niekisch, Karl-Otto Paetel) would oppose thalassocratic pretentions with greatest force.

A Bavarian artillery officer and professor at the War Academy, Karl Haushofer was sent to Japan in 1906 to reorganize the Imperial Army. During his return to Germany on the Trans-Siberian railroad, he became vividly aware of the continental vastness of Russian Eurasia. After the First World War, he earned a doctorate and became professor of geography in Munich, where connected with Rudolf Hess. In 1924, Haushofer founded the famous Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (Journal of Geopolitics). He was the direct intellectual heir to his compatriot Friedrich Ratzel and the Swede Rudolf Kjellén.

To begin, let us set aside the black legend of Haushofer as fanatical Hitlerist who used geopolitics to justify the territorial conquests of the Third Reich, a legend based in “American propaganda efforts,” according to Professor Jean Klein.[4] This diabolization will astonish only those who are ignorant of the anti-thalassocratic orientation of Haushofer’s geopolitics . . .

Haushofer wished to rise above petty nationalisms. Thus, beginning in 1931, in Geopolitik der Pan-Ideen (Geopolitics of Continental Ideas), he advocated the constitution of vast continental spaces as the only means to go beyond the territorial and economic weakness of traditional States. The first stage could be the sub-continental gatherings theorized in 1912 by the geographer E. Banse, who recommended 12 large civilizational regions: Europe, Greater Siberia (Russia included), Australia, the East Indies, Eastern Asia, the “Nigritie” (the “black lands,” i.e., Africa), Mongolia (with China, Indochina, and Indonesia), Greater California, the Andes, America (Atlantic North America), and Amazonia.

Haushofer’s radically continentalist and anti-thalassocratic thought came into focus in 1941, when he published Der Kontinentalblock-Mitteleuropa-Eurasien-Japan (The Continental Bloc Central Europe-Eurasia-Japan). Written after the Germano-Soviet pact, this work argued for a Germano-Italo-Soviet-Japanese alliance that would radically reorganize the Eurasian continental mass. He stressed that the permanent fear of the Anglo-Saxons is the emergence of a Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo axis, which would completely escape the influence of the commercial thalassocracies, which, he writes, practice the policy of the anaconda, which consists in gradually encircling and slowly suffocating its prey. But a unified Eurasia would be too large for the Anglo-American anaconda. Thanks to its gigantic mass, it could resist any blockade.

The idea of a tripartite alliance first occurred to the Japanese and Russians. At the time of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, when the British and Japanese united against the Russians, some of the Japanese leadership—including Hayashi, their ambassador in London, Count Gato, Prince Ito, and Prime Minister Katsura—desired a Germano-Russo-Japanese pact against the English seizure of global sea traffic. The visionary Count Gato recommended a troika in which the central horse, the strongest one, flanked by two lighter and more nervous horses, Germany and Japan. In Russia, the Eurasian idea would be incarnated a few years later by the minister Sergei Witte, the creative genius of the Trans-Siberian Railroad who in 1915 advocated a separate peace with the Kaiser.

Needless to say, Haushofer disapproved of Hitler’s wars of conquest in the East, which went against his historical project of creating a Eurasian continental bloc.

The Anaconda Strategy of Spykman and Brzezinski

The fundamental idea, posed by Mahan and Mackinder, to prohibit Russia’s access to the open sea, would be reformulated by Nicholas John Spykman (1893–1943), who insisted on the pressing need for controlling the maritime ring or Rimland, the littoral zone bordering the Heartland and which runs from Norway to Korea: “Whoever controls the maritime ring holds Eurasia; whoever holds Eurasia controls the destiny of the world.”[5]

Interpreting this maxim at that onset of the Cold War, the United States tried by a policy of “containment” of the USSR, to control the Rimland by means of a network of regional pacts: NATO in Europe, the Baghdad Pact then the Organization of the central treaty of the Middle East, SEATO and ANZUS in the Far East.

With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, one might have expected a strategic redeployment of the USA and a break with Mackinderite orthodoxy. But that was not to be. So much so that still today, the (semi-official) foreign policy adviser most heeded by President Obama proves to be a dedicated disciple of Mackinder: none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, a friend of David Rockefeller, with whom he co-founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973, and Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1980. His major theoretical work, The Grand Chessboard, appeared in 1997, at the time of the wars in Yugoslavia undertaken mainly under his initiative, under the aegis of the Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

Brzezinski’s strategic analysis cynically reprises Anglo-Saxon geopolitical doxa: Eurasia, which comprises half the planet’s population, constitutes the spatial center of world power. The key to control Eurasia is Central Asia. The key to control Central Asia is Uzbekistan. For this Russophobe of Polish origin, the objective of the American Grand Strategy must be to fight against a China-Russia alliance. Considering that the principal threat comes from Russia, he recommends its encirclement (the anaconda, always the anaconda) by the establishment of military bases, or, in the absence of friendly regimes in the former Soviet republics (Ukraine included), insisting in particular on the necessary utilization of Islamists. Paradoxically, it is in the name of the fight against these same Islamists that American forces were deployed Uzbekistan after September 11th, 2001 . . . Machiavelli is not dead!

Notes

1. C. Schmitt, Terre et Mer (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), p. 23. [See the English translation available on this website here. — Trans.]

2. The names of Leviathan and Behemoth are borrowed from the Book of Job (chapters 40 and 41).

3. A. T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia and its Effect upon International Policies (London: Sampson Low-Marston, 1900), p. 63.

4. Jean Klein, Karl Haushofer, De la géopolitique (Paris: Fayard, 1986).

5. N. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1944), p. 43.

 

Source: Edouard Rix, Terre & Peuple, No. 46 (Winter Solstice 2010), pp. 39–41. Online: http://tpprovence.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/geopolitique-du-leviathan/

—————

Rix, Edouard. “Geopolitics of Leviathan [Parts 1 & 2].” Counter-Currents Publishing, 10 & 11 August 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/geopolitics-of-leviathan-part-1/ > ; <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/geopolitics-of-leviathan-part-2/ >.

 

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Geopolitics Today – Benoist

Geopolitics Today

By Alain de Benoist

 

Geopolitics has long been frowned upon by public opinion. Following World War II, it became the most unpopular of the social sciences. It had been accused of being a “German science” which didn’t really mean much, except that it owes its initial impetus to the political geography principles enunciated by the German geographer Friederich Ratzel – the term “geopolitics” being used for the first time by the Swedish geographer Rudolf Kjéllen in 1889. In his book “Politische Geographie oder die Geographie der Staaten, des Verkehrs und des Krieges (1897)” Ratzel analyzed the interactions of the state, considered as a living body, in terms of its geography and its space. One of his disciples was the Bavarian General Karl Haushofer, founder of the “Zeitschrift für Geopolitik”. It was only by an obvious confusion between space in the geopolitical sense and “Lebensraum” that a connection/ proximity between Karl Haushofer and National Socialism was brought into question. This was wrongly so, and not only because Haushofer never was an ideologue of the 3rd Reich. More importantly, Hitler had much more sympathy for the Anglo Saxons than he had for the Slavs. He waged a war against Russia, a continental power, yet he would have preferred to ally with Great Britain, a sea power. Had he subscribed to the thesis of geopolitics he would have done the exact opposite.

Moreover, the definition of this discipline’s field of study or its status has never ceased to be a problem. Geopolitics studies the influence of geography on politics and history, that is to say, the relationship between space and power (political, economic or other). Yet the definition remains fuzzy, which explains that the reality of both the concept and the relationship to its objective have been disputed. It has therefore been described as a discipline aiming to legitimize retrospectively historical events or political decisions.

These criticisms do not, however, go to the bottom of things: That we can identify through history, geographical constants of political action is, as a matter of fact, indisputable. Geopolitics remains thus, a discipline of great value and great importance. It is, even, essential to refer to it in a world in transition, where all the cards are being redistributed worldwide. Geopolitics puts into perspective the weight of merely ideological factors, unstable by definition, and recalls the existence of large constants that transcend political regimes as well as the intellectual debates.

Of all the concepts specific to Geopolitics, one of the most significant is undoubtedly the dialectical opposition between Sea and Land. ” World history, said Carl Schmitt, is the story of the fight of maritime powers against continental powers and of continental powers against maritime powers.” It was also the Admiral Castex’ opinion as well as that of many other geopoliticians. Halford Mackinder, for example, defines the power of Great Britain by the domination of the oceans and seas. He perceives the planet as a whole composed of a ” Global Ocean” and a “Global Island”, corresponding to the entire Eurasian space as well as Africa , and ” peripheral islands” , America and Australia. In order to dominate the world, we must seize the global island and primarily its “heart” , the Heartland, the real world’s geographical pivot stretching from Central Europe to Western Siberia and towards the Mediterranean, from Middle-East and South Asia. One of the first English great navigators, Sir Walter Raleigh, used to say: ” Whoever controls the seas controls world trade; whoever controls world trade holds all the treasures of the world in his possession, and in fact, the whole world.”

In the history of mankind, the confrontation between Land and Sea is the age-old struggle between the European continental logic and the “insular” logic embodied nowadays by the US. But the opposition between Land and Sea goes well beyond the perspectives offered by Geopolitics. The Land is a space formed by territories differentiated by borders. Its logic is based on sharp distinctions between war and peace, combatants and non-combatants, political action and trade. It is therefore the place of politics and history par excellence. ” Political existence is pure telluric nature” (Adriano Scianca). The sea is an homogenous area/stretch, the negation of differences, limits and borders. It is a space of indistinctness, the liquid equivalent of the desert. Being centre-less, it only knows ebb and flow and this is how it is related to postmodern globalization. The actual world is indeed a “liquid” world (Zygmunt Bauman), which tends to eliminate everything that is “earthly”, stable, solid, consistent, sustainable, and differentiated. It is a world of flux carried by networks. Trade itself, as well as the logic of is also formed in the manner of ebb and flow.

Geopolitics has regained its legitimacy with the various conflicts that have arisen since the 1970′ s. Most of these conflicts have been carried out by the US. Marked from their puritan origins by the conviction of being the “new chosen people” the Americans have intended to establish themselves as a universal model, which would bring to the world the benefits of “the American way of life” that is to say a model of a commercial civilization, based on the primacy of exchange value and the logic of profit. This planetary mission would be their “Manifest Destiny” . Geopolitics is precisely the discipline which helps to explain the constants of their foreign policy.

The disbanding of the Soviet system, has at the same time made globalization possible and marked the disappearance of a tremendous competitor for American power which has then had the temptation to shape a unipolar world under its hegemony. (What has been called “The New World Order” ) In the aftermath of the Soviet disbanding the US find themselves as an “Empire without shadow” (Eric Hobsbawn). Confident in their technological superiority, in their military power, in the benefits given by the dollar system, they have thought that an ” American century” was about to be forthcoming. Convinced to be from this point forward the world’s only superpower, they have pretended to play the role of the “world police”. The neo-conservatives were at the forefront of this project. This was the time Francis Fukuyama thought he could announce the “End of History”, namely the triumph of liberal capitalism and the democracy of human rights as the unsurpassable horizon of our time.

At the end of the 1990s, Gorbachev’s advisor Arbatov declared to the Americans: “We are dealing you the worst blow: we are going to deprive you of your enemy.” Significant words. The disappearance of the Soviet “Evil Empire” threatened to eradicate all ideological legitimization of American hegemony over her allies. This meant that, from then on, the Americans needed to find an alternative enemy, which provided a threat, real or imaginary, that would allow them to establish themselves as the masters of the “New World Order”. It is radical Islam, something they constantly encouraged in previous decades that will play the role of a foil. But in reality, their fundamental objective remains unchanged. This is to prevent, anywhere in the world, the emergence of a rival capable of competing with them and most importantly to control the Heartland, the “global island.”

In his book The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski enumerates explicitly the “geostrategic imperatives” the US must meet to maintain their global hegemony. Describing a project of “global management” of the world, he warns against the “creation or the emergence of an Eurasian coalition” that “could seek to challenge America’s supremacy.” In 2001, Henry Kissinger was already saying:” America must retain a presence in Asia, and its geopolitical objective must remain to prevent Asia’s coalescence into an unfriendly bloc.” Brzezinski recalled in his turn:” Who controls Eurasia, controls the world.”

To control Eurasia, means, first of of all, adopting a strategy of encirclement of Russia and China. The encirclement of Russia strategy includes the installation of new military bases in Eastern Europe, the establishment of anti missiles defense systems in Poland, Czech Republic and Romania, supporting the accession of Ukraine and Georgia to Nato, and pursuing an aggressive policy aiming to dislocate Russia’s influence in key regions around the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus. In terms of energy supply, this strategy leads to the control of Central Asia’s pipelines – Central Asia being transformed into an American protectorate – encouraging the development of pipelines in the Caspian to bypass Russia and to reach Turkey, as well as limiting as much as possible the access of Russian tankers to the Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. It is within this context that we must put the ” colour revolutions” in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan. Far from being spontaneous movements, these were organized and supported from the outside with the endorsement of the National Endowment for Democracy, a convenient front for the CIA.

The establishment of an “arc of crisis” to destabilize Russia’s traditional sphere of influence in the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Central Asia can only be understood in this context. Using the alleged “War against Terror”: in Afghanistan the US and her allies have set up military bases in the former Soviet republics, including, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The objective can be summed up in three words: encircle, destabilize, balkanize.

In parallel and simultaneously, they endeavoured to massively expand NATO in Eastern Europe and in the Balkans as far as the Russian border, even within the former Soviet Union. As of Sep 11 2001, President George Bush took a stand in favor of ” a large NATO from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea ” to pave the way from the Caspian and the Black Sea. That is to go from a relatively static structure to an expeditionary model of neocolonial interventions in all directions, global geostrategic centers of gravity slipping, thus, to the Middle East and Asia.

Maintaining NATO has two other goals. The first one is to continue to dissuade the EU to build up a a common and autonomous European defense force. Americans have always considered that European defense meant to them “the set up of NATO’s European pillar”. The second goal is to weaken the relations between Russia and Western Europe. Germany is particularly targeted, given the extent of its technological, energy and economical exchange with Russia. In this project, the EU becomes a simple American bridgehead in Eurasia.

In Middle East, where they are facing serious challenges due to the instability of the region, the failure of their military interventions and the growing isolation of their unswerving Israeli ally, the US are developing an aggressive strategy to counter the rise of Iran, which worries them because of its energy resources, its privileged relationship with China and Russia, and its increasing influence in Iraq and in the Gulf countries where there are significant Shiite minorities. Finally, they are currently engaged in a spectacular return to Africa, for two reasons, to counterbalance China’s influence and to take into account the growing importance of Africa in terms of global energy supplies.

To develop this aggressive policy, the US are not short of technological and financial means. Despite their financial difficulties and their exceptional deficits, their military budget, which is constantly increasing, is now close to $700 billion, a colossal amount, and equivalent to more than 40% of all military budgets combined in the world.

However, the question arises whether the United States have not reached the limits of their Imperial expansion capacity. Their domestic issues worsen. The dollar system, which they capitalize on, teeters on the brink. The global financial crisis that started there, back in 2008 hit them with full force. Their trade gap and the public debt have reached an all time high.

In Russia, meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, who clearly perceived their intentions, clearly broke from the catastrophic era under Boris Yeltsin, who had sanctified the omnipotence of the “oligarchs.”

The most recent events related to the civil war in Syria have, again, highlighted the importance of geopolitics. The extreme acumen of Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov against Barack Obama’s indecisiveness and Francois Holland naivety, has been symptomatic. With its intervention in the Syrian affair, Russia has regained its role as a major world power and thus showed that it (Russia) is not a negligible party in international affairs, but that it will have to be reckoned with in the future.

The “unipolar moment” has therefore not lasted for 10 years. The Americans, who now only represent 5% of the world population, have overestimated their strength. The engulfing of their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, their domestic issues, their abyssal deficits, the instability of the dollar system and the world financial crisis have imposed limits on them. It quickly becomes apparent that they will not rule the world unchallenged. The History, which Fukuyama announced the end has already returned.

A multipolar world is emerging on the back of China’s rapid surge, followed by India, Brazil and even Iran. Emerging economies are growing dramatically. Their share in the world’s gross domestic product in purchasing power parity has gone from 36% in 1980 to 45% in 2008 and should reach 51% in 2014.

The US Eurasian strategy has led, as a reaction, to a significant rapprochement between Russia and China, which has materialized within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, founded in June 2001, which also includes four Central Asia countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan) while Iran, Mongolia, India and Afghanistan participate as observers.

We know that in recent years, Iran has strengthened its relationship with China and Russia. This pragmatic alliance materializes today utilizing mutual geopolitical supports that have led some observers to consider the possibility to witness, in the coming years, the rise of a kind of “new Mongol Empire”. Between 1206 and 1294, Genghis Khan’s Turkish-Mongol Empire had spread throughout Central Asia before breaking up into four blocks. Today The SCO, whose main goal is to counter US influence in Central Asia, is associated again with Russia, China and Iran, three different countries, yet forming a real community of interests which represents 1.5 billion people. The big difference with the former Mongol Empire however, is that today Iran sees Turkey as regional rival power.

Since the end of the Soviet system, we have entered in an interregnum – a Zwischenzeit. The former Nomos of the Earth is gone but the contours of a new Nomos can only be speculated upon. The actual big world conflict is the one that opposes the Eurasian continental power to the American thalassocracy. The main question is whether we are going towards an unipolar world, an universum, or towards a multipolar world, a pluriversum.

The problem is that Europeans are rarely aware of this. Americans may have many faults but there is something we cannot deny them, they are aware of the global stakes and to try to think the world to come. In Russia and China too, they think the world to come. The Europeans, they don’t think. They only care about the present moment. They live under the horizon of fate, with institutions that condemn them to powerlessness and paralysis. Europe lives in a state of weightlessness. Facing an unprecedented moral crisis, the problem of immigration, an ageing population, economic offshoring and global competition. It appears Europe cannot defend its place in a globalized world. Bearing an identity that she (Europe) cannot anymore define, haunted by the secret desire to withdraw itself/ herself from History – thus running the risk of becoming the object of other’s history – thinking men are everywhere of the same disposition. Europe is now ” poor-in-world” (Heidegger). She (Europe) seems exhausted, beset by lassitude that leads to not wanting anything. Geopolitics of powerlessness? Rise of insignificance? The Euro banknotes are like its reflection: they only represent emptiness.

In the past, geopolitics applied its constraints mainly at state level, the same states that seem to have entered an irreversible crisis, at least in the western hemisphere. Now, it depends on the logic of continents which has long been hidden behind the disorderly conducts of the states but that is now more fundamental than ever. It (Geopolitics) helps to think in terms not only of countries but also of continents (Jordis Von Lohausen). The Sea against the Land, now it is US against the “rest of the world”, and first against the Eurasian and European continental bloc. In this sense, the collapse of the Soviet system has clarified things. There are now only two possible positions: either being on the side of the American sea power or being on the side of the Eurasian continental power. I’m with the latter.

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De Benoist, Alain. “Geopolitics Today.” Speech delivered at “The End of the Present World: The Post-American Century and Beyond Conference”, held in Central London, UK, 12 October 2013. Text of transcript retrieved from <http://www.endofthepresentworld.com/p/alain-de-benoist-geopolitics-today_21.html >.

Note: See the Romanian translation of this article (“Geopolitica azi”, Estica, 3 September 2014) which is based off of our own publication here: <http://www.estica.eu/article/geopolitica-azi/ >.

 

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Ethnic Identity vs. White Identity – Sunic

Ethnic Identity versus White Identity: Differences between the U.S. and Europe

Tomislav Sunic

 

A clarification of terms and concepts is in order when dealing with trendy words in the social sciences. Although the idea of identity is an ancient theme, the word ‘identity’ over the last few decades has been subject to a flurry of subjective interpretations, resulting often in contradictory definitions. One hundred years ago, the word ‘identity’ was used in forensic medicine and in police files, but seldom in the sense of national, religious or racial identities. Therefore, today’s usage of the word ‘identity’ is not always appropriate given that this word can easily elicit contradictory meanings depending on who is using it and in what political environment.

Thus, for instance, a citizen from the Federal Republic of Germany can carry multiple identities that may complement each other, but they may also exclude each other. He can describe himself as a “good European,” although he may be of North African or Turkish stock, and may in addition sport several other vocational identities that have nothing in common with his racial, religious or national heritage.

The question, however, is which is his primary identity and which is his secondary identity? How does he define himself and how does the Other define him? What comes first? His racial identity, his religious identity, his ethnic identity, his citizen awareness, or his professional affiliation? In his book on identity, Alain de Benoist, writes about the conflicting nature of identities, adding that “the belief that identity can be better preserved without [these] confrontations [among different identities] is nonsense. On the contrary the confrontations make identity possible.”[1]

In other words, a person asserts his identity best when he draws a sharp demarcation line between himself and the Other, or by violently confronting the Other. Likewise, he will best identify himself with his ingroup in so far as his ingroup differs from other out-groups.

Seen from a historical point of view, the idea of identity has always been a heated topic in the West, although this topic has been wrapped up in different words. From Homer’s Ulysses to Goethe’s Faust, White Europeans and Americans have never tired of asking questions about who they were and who they are.

Oswald Spengler deals with the idea of identity, although in his main work he never used that word, preferring instead the expression “second religiousness” and avoiding reference to the race factor. In the anomic and rootless Western societies of today, national, religious and racial identities have given way to new identities, which manifest themselves in the worshipping of exotic and esoteric “idols” and icons, which function now as transmission belts in the new identity-building process.[2]Spengler adds that “to this corresponds in today’s world of Europe and America the occult and theosophical gimmicks, the American Christian Science, the mendacious salon Buddhism, the religious arts and crafts.”[3] Such “second religiousness,” or one could call it, “fake substitute identities” of uprooted masses with no racial and no national consciousness, can often be encountered today in Western multicultural and multiracial societies. Such identities seem to be a cherished topic of discussion among contemporary academics.

Also, many self-designated White nationalists, or, as they are labeled by the Left, “White supremacists” in America and Europe, resort to similar substitute identities by adorning themselves with insignia and slogans going back to National Socialist Germany or to fascist Italy. The self-perception of these new White nationalists is often embedded in a caricatured reenactment of anachronistic infra-political activities that actually never took place in the Third Reich, but which are now projected into a surreal, vicarious world of their own imagination, as if the reenactment of those “Nazi” activities could miraculously resurrect the original National Socialist or Fascist state.

Talking About Race

This raises an additional problem with the right choice of words and hence with the appropriate conceptualization of the idea of identity today. It would be far easier if one could use specific terms such as “national consciousness,” instead of a rather generic expression “ethnic identity.” However, due to semantic distortions and the post-World War II political climate, the very specific German word ‘Volk’ (people?) or “national consciousness” (Volksbewusstsein) are seldom used today in depicting someone’s identity in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Hence the popularity of the English word ‘ethnic’ — a more generic and less ideologically colored word which has become a value-free locution in the studies of different peoples and races.

For example, at American universities there are courses in “Ethnic Studies,” in which students do not study racial traits of different peoples, or deal with diverse ethnicities in Europe, but focus primarily on the study of cultural identities of non-European peoples, while prudently avoiding the qualifiers “White” and “non- White.” Sometimes euphemisms can do wonders and can get a scholar fame and lifelong tenure.

Prior to World War II it was rare in Europe and America to use the word ‘ethnic’ in the study of various peoples of the world. Instead, politicians and academics were quite at ease, regardless of their ideological background, with the word ‘race’ and with “racial science” as a legitimate academic field. Even prior to the fateful European year of 1933, the locution “racial science” (Rassenkunde) was a common denominator in Germany and Europe in the study of different ethnicities and was often used by anthropologists, biologists and social scientists.[4] Back in those days, the word ‘race’ was a value-free paradigm in anthropological and medical sciences and commonly used in the description of different peoples. Only after World War II did the word ‘race’ begin to acquire a negative connotation, whose legal ramifications gradually made it disappear from the academic and political discourse, giving way, instead, to the less value-loaded word ‘ethnic’. Today, if a White person utters the word ‘race’, or claims to have a “racial identity” when talking about his in-group, his ethnic identity, or his family affiliation, all hell breaks loose. The noun ‘race’ and the adjective ‘racial’ have acquired by now a quasi-demonic meaning and are used only when race riots occur, or when a White person insults a non-White person. Immediately, the White person will be labeled as a “racist.”

There seems to be an inconsistency in this new public and academic discourse. According to the modern academic and political vernacular there is no such thing as racial identity, but only ethnic and cultural identities. Should this reasoning be accepted at face value and if it can be backed up by empirical evidence, in that case there can be no “racists” either. According to the allegedly scientific results produced by modern academics and frequently echoed by contemporary politicians, there are no racially marked identities, as there is only one race, the “human race.” Modern academics and media people, however, cannot completely dispense with these negative words and expressions such as “White racists” because they badly need them in order to justify their own theories on the alleged non-existence of races.

America’s identity and Explicit and Implicit Whites

Kevin MacDonald introduced the concepts of “explicit and implicit identity,” with explicit or self-confessed White Americans being those who are aware of their racial background and who openly assert their racial identity.[5] By contrast, implicit White Americans rarely assert their racial awareness, or probably do not even think conscientiously of it, yet they prefer to socialize with other Whites and to live among other Whites, and they are attracted to various aspects of traditionally White culture, such as classical music or country music.

As a result of the modern egalitarian dogma, fueled by different schools of thought, explicit White nationalists in America are often dubbed with derogatory labels such as “White supremacists.” The purpose of such a generic across-the-board defamatory expression is to denounce any inklings of racial awareness among Whites, including those Whites who are not the least inclined to denigrate or belittle other racial groups, but who solely wish to retain their own racial specificity and their own cultural heritage.

White people are gradually coalescing into implicit White communities that reflect their ethnocentrism but “cannot tell their name.” They are doing so because of the operation of various mechanisms that operate implicitly, below the level of conscious awareness. These White communities cannot assert explicit White identities because the explicit cultural space is deeply committed to an ideology in which any form of White identity is anathema.[6]

The huge subject of American or European White identity can be observed not only from the perspective of race alone. Other factors, such as culture, religion and politics must be also taken into account. How do White Europeans perceive White Americans and how do White American nationalists perceive themselves?[7]European White nationalists typically perceive America’s identity through its foreign policy. Whether White American politicians perceive themselves in the same fashion as they are perceived by White European nationalists, is quite a different matter, often leading to serious misunderstandings.

In the eyes of many explicit White Europeans, American politicians, as well as large segments of the American society, are perceived as Bible zealots. Accordingly, many White scholars and activists in Europe view White Americans as subscribing to a version of ancient Hebrew thought. It is no accident that American foreign policy decision makers are often scorned by White European nationalists as Yahweh’s messengers attempting to punish moral transgressions. Recall George W. Bush’s crusade to “rid the world of evil-doers” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and the many references by the Bush Administration to the “Axis of Evil” in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Likewise, it is no coincidence that America has been far more sympathetic, over the last 50 years, to the state of Israel (seen as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy) than European states.

White nationalists in Europe are thus prone to emphasizing cultural and religious factors in the identity-building process among Americans. For example, the secessionist Southern states were once viewed as the symbol of evil by the Yankee Bible-inspired world improvers. In the eyes of many White Europeans this is seen as yet another example in which Americans have been motivated by a Bible-inspired world view of stark contrasts between good and evil.

There are many other examples. During World Wars I and II, it was the turn of Germany and the “Nazis” to become the symbol of evil. Then, during the Cold War, it was the turn of communism to become the new symbol of evil.

Given that the American political system sees itself as the embodiment of goodness, its diplomatic actions and foreign policies will rarely suffer from bouts of bad conscience, be it during the bombing of Dresden or the bombing of Baghdad. This is because, as White Europeans often observe, America’s identity is centered in the Jewish-inspired Biblical idea of political chosenness. This chosenness results in Americans behaving as if they have a moral imperative to punish all non-believers in the values Americans hold dear. Thus rulers who do not subscribe to democracy are perceived as less than human — as little more than dangerous animals. Accordingly, such dangerous animals need to be killed or at least removed from power.

Today, there are no evil Confederates, fascists, or communists in the official America’s identity-building process. Another symbol of evil in the identity-building process must be created, such as ‘Islamism’, a word which is frequently invoked by many White nationalists today.

For the time being anti-Islamism in America, like anti-fascism in modern Germany, is a risk-free intellectual endeavor. It operates as a socially acceptable substitute identity and is often encouraged by neoconservative Jewish circles. Such a negative identity serves as a nice cover for White nationalists when they need to tone down their own explicit White identity. Since it can be professionally damaging to criticize non-White immigrants in the USA, let alone openly criticize Jewish influence, many explicit White Americans prefer to hide their criticism of multiracial America behind criticism of Muslims.

Some well-known members of European nationalist parties even go a step further. For fear of being labeled “White supremacists,” or “anti-Semites” — or even worse, for fear of being called “neo-Nazis” — they resort to similar anti-Islamic rhetoric mixed with eulogies of the Jews and coupled with atonement trips to Israel.[8]Such a psychological cover is viewed by many White American and European nationalists as the safest way to get a free ride at home for their anti-Muslim hectoring, or for their criticism of multiculturalism.

State and Ethnic Identity

White Americans identify themselves with America quite differently than White Europeans do with their various nations. The foundation of America was a case of rational political constructivism, whereas in Europe a strong notion of the nation (‘Volk’) preceded attempts at state building. Incidentally, there is no corresponding word in English for the German word ‘Volk’. The English word ‘people’ is ambiguous, as it can yield different meanings.

Therefore, the idea that America is “a proposition state” (or a “construct state”) has a certain surface plausibility. Moreover, a rationally constructed state, such asAmerica, in contrast to an organic state in Europe, is far more vulnerable to the ideology of multiculturalism, which in turn can prompt its architects to be more open to the influx of foreign races and other cultures.

This in part explains a weaker sense of national community among White Americans than among White Europeans. In this sense one can say that even the highly acclaimed American constitutional patriotism resembles a Spenglerian “third religion”; or more specifically, it reflects a new political theology with all the hallmarks of the bygone Enlightenment period. Even the so-called constitutional patriotism in the Federal Republic of Germany, which can be described as an acquired “civil religion,” is just a meager post-WWII imported copy of American constitutional patriotism, with one important difference: America was founded by White politicians of the Enlightenment period, whose explicit racial identity was far better formulated and more freely voiced than by European thinkers and politicians of the same epoch. Unlike White racial “identitarians” in Europe, explicit White racial awareness in America continued to hold the judiciary high ground until the mid- 20th Century.

Identifying with the state in America has little in common with the traditional “folk-culture-bound” form of identifying with the state that is so characteristic of Central and Eastern Europe. For this reason, the substitute factor of race has traditionally played among White American nationalists a stronger role in the identity-building process than among White European nationalists. However, despite differences in their historical self-image and self-perception, White Europeans and White Americans are becoming more and more aware today of the factor which binds them together and which, in a state of economic crisis or in the distinct possibility of their country’s break-up can play a crucial role: their common racial heritage.

European Identities, “Civil War Identities”

The term “European identity” is lexical nonsense. Just as there are differences in self-perceptions between White Americans vs. White Europeans with regard to their state and their racial identity respectively, there are also different and conflicting ethnic identities among the dozens of European peoples. It is questionable whether it will be ever possible to set up the common European identity of which so many Europeans like to dream. Theoretically, such “pan-European” identity would probably conform to the views and dreams of many White Americans, who are, to be sure, less plagued by their own tribal interethnic squabbles than White Europeans.

There is no European identity as such; it has never existed, other than among some theoreticians nursing the idea of a continental Euro-Asian homeland.[9] It remains a mystery how hundreds of different ethnic groups stretching from the Elbe in Germany to Vladivostok in Russia, can construct a common identity. Despite living in the same general geographic location, most Europeans identify themselves first with their clan, community and ethnicity and not with their next door neighbors—whom they often violently reject. European peoples often frame their identity on what Tatu Vanhanen aptly calls “ethnic nepotism,” whereby the crucial characteristic of an ethnic group is that its members are genetically more closely related to each other than to the members of other groups.[10] Such ethnic or clannish nepotism—so frequent in Europe and even within one single ethnic group—can in no way foster the idea of an all-encompassing White identity, which many White American nationalists consider as their primary goal.

In contrast to the “multicultural,” or more precisely, multiracial societies of Western Europe, peoples of Central and Eastern Europe are relatively racially homogeneous, but ethnically they are highly heterogeneous. Their present state of racial cohesiveness, albeit with always simmering interethnic chauvinism, owes much to the legacy of the bygone communist epoch. In retrospect and paradoxically, the good side of the communist legacy is that communism had never appealed to potential non-European immigrants and therefore had made the East European peoples racially more homogenous. Here, of course, the usage of the word ‘ethnic’ is appropriate, since it would be very complicated to talk about different sub-races among East and Central Europeans. Yet on the implicit level East Europeans are far more aware of their Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine, or Mediterranean phenotypes respectively. Their historical and interethnic grievances are not based on interracial hatreds, but lie exclusively in the field of culture and religion. Therefore, one must never underestimate interethnic, inter-White and inter-European resentments as a source of possible new conflicts in this region of Europe.

Clearly, from the perspective of “Whiteness” or their “European identity,” Central and Eastern Europeans are more “European” than Western Europeans. Moreover, feelings of historical guilt or self-hatred, as encountered often in Germany, Great Britain, or even in the USA today, are almost unknown among Central and East Europeans. The national pride of White citizens in Eastern Europe is relatively strong and determines to a large extent their identity.

The average citizen in Croatia or Hungary, for example, doesn’t need to read academic treatises on the failure of the multicultural system in West Europe or in the U.S. Nor does he need to immerse himself in the studies of different races in order to find out who he is. In Croatia, for instance, citizens know they are White, Croats and Catholics. And they are quite proud of it. The same applies to citizens in Poland or Hungary.

The reason for their explicit ethnic and racial identity, in comparison to citizens in Germany or in the USA, is two-fold: on the one hand, it is a logical response to the violent denial of their national identity by the preceding communist system. On the other hand, their “Whiteness” and their national identity, in view of the extremely small number of non-European residents, do not appear to them as a serious out-group threat. On the agenda of nationalist parties in Eastern Europe one comes across endless passages depicting real or perceived historical threats from their White European near neighbors, whereas the subject of non–European immigration is seldom discussed.

The interethnic resentments in Eastern Europe resulting from ethnic nepotism are very pronounced, and they often turn ugly. Thus the national identity of a Polish nationalist, who may otherwise agree on all points with his nationalist counterpart from Germany—such as their common criticism of globalism, their anticommunism and their antiliberalism — is often accompanied by strong anti- German feelings. One third of ethnic Hungarians — more than 2 million — living in Slovakia, Serbiaand Romania typically define their national identity through their resentment of the peoples among whom they live. Czech nationalists seldom like to discuss with their German counterparts the issue of the forcible deportation of 3 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II. Despite some semblance of peace between Serbs and Croats, these two ethnically similar, neighboring peoples identify with two entirely different historical narratives and two completely different and mutually hostile and exclusive victimihoods. In short, Serbs and Croats, despite their remarkable ethnic and linguistic similarity, display two radically and mutually exclusive identities. For a Croatian nationalist it is difficult to become, despite his anti-liberal and anti-communist rhetoric, “a good Croat” without describing himself all too often as an “anti-Serb.”[11]

Interethnic hatred in Western Europe today plays a far lesser role than ever before, largely due to the constant influx of non-Europeans, who are now perceived as the main threat. The negative image of Third World immigrants has prompted many West European White nationalists to see themselves no longer as victims of the national myths of their White European neighbors, but as victims of pan-racial pandemonium brought about by the liberal capitalist system. For many White European nationalists today, this raises the question: What good is it now to define oneself as a Swede, or a German, or to dream of Greater Germany, Greater Sweden, or Greater France, considering the fact that more than 10 to 20 percent of French, Belgian, or German citizens are of non-European and non-White origin?

Negative Identities and Random Identities

The phenomenon of negative identity, which usually surfaces in a state of emergency, needs also to be mentioned. One could paraphrase Carl Schmitt and argue that a country’s degree of sovereignty is best visible in a state of emergency. At that moment even an apolitical person becomes well aware of who he is, prompting him to make a quick and sharp distinction between “the friend and the foe.”

Likewise, in times of war a White citizen in the USA or Europe can become best aware of his explicit Whiteness.[12] When a major crisis looms on the horizon, each of us knows whether he is an implicit or explicit German, Croatian, or American. And he knows which racial group he belongs to and to which he needs to swear his allegiance. Should he forget his identity, it is likely that the Other from an out-group will quickly remind him who he is. For example, during frequent brawls between members of different racial groups in the German town of Neukölln (a center of Muslim immigration) or in the U.S. cities of Cleveland or South Los Angeles (home to many different non-White groups), even the most implicitly identified Whites — i.e., Whites who would otherwise not have any explicit awareness or concern about their racial background and their racial ingroup — are likely to experience sudden racial reawakening. As a result of such conflicts, the process of White identity-building takes place in an unusually rapid manner.

It should be noted that this is also the case with many White nationalists who embraced an explicit racial identity after finding that their professional career was destroyed or in danger. There are a lot of belated White nationalists in America and Europe who like to boast about how “they have experienced their nationalist and racial awakening.” In most cases these individuals were once apolitical individuals. But when their careers ran the risk of being ruined due to the multicultural system and its “positive discrimination” in favor of non-Whites, they do not hesitate to become vocal and explicit White nationalists.

Such reactive random identities were quite common among Croatian politicians in 1991 with the breakup of Yugoslavia. Many former high Communist officials began to detect their nationalist identities only after the Yugoslav Communist Army (JNA) and the Serb paramilitary units had begun their assault on secessionist Croatia. Many of those belated Croat nationalists, prior to 1991, were explicitly anti-Croatian apparatchiks; oftentimes they were virulent “Yugoslavs.” It was strange to observe in late 1991 how former communist party members converted in a twinkle of an eye into Croatian and Serbian explicit nationalists respectively. In a similar vein, one cannot exclude that with the deepening political and economic crisis in Europe and America, White German, French and American citizens will begin to vote for nationalist parties en masse.

Political opportunism can often be described as a psychological response to a state of emergency.

In terms of negative or reactive identities, one could also draw a parallel with long-standing Christian anti-Semitism, which may be also called a form of negative identity. Millions of Christians resent the Otherness of the Jews, yet at the same time they pray to the Jewish God Yahweh, or devote their lifetimes to the study of ancient Hebrew texts. Alain de Benoist cogently argues that Christian anti-Semites turned the ethnic Jewish God Yahweh into their own anti-Semitic and globalist god.[13]

Culture and Race: Perishable and Inherited Identities

Historically, different brands of nationalism, as transmitters of identities, have played a negative role in Europe. In this sense, White Americans, despite their weaker sense of statehood have an advantage over White Europeans. First off, they have been able to avoid destructive interethnic disputes among themselves. Traditional methods of self-identification with a specific territory, as romantic and poetic as they may have been in the past for many European nationalists, are hardly suitable for today’s global capitalist system which destroys all identities, including those of White peoples everywhere in the world. The traditional obsession of White Europeans with their state and their tribe at the expense of neighboring European tribes and states has turned out to be counterproductive. One may argue that non-European immigrants, including non-European foreign powers, have been the only true beneficiaries of these inter-White disputes. In fact, interethnic, inter-White disputes only seem to provide legitimacy to the neo-Marxist/liberal experiment with its ideology of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Such old and small-time European nationalisms, coupled with the veneration of the nation-state have become anachronistic in view of today’s changing racial picture in Europe and America.

One could also suggest that in order to preserve their true identity White Europeans and White Americans must first resurrect their common cultural and racial awareness. It is true that the word ‘race’ in modern political vernacular, as an identity-building factor, has by now acquired a quasi-criminal meaning. In the opinion of the ideologues of the left, the social environment must pave the way for the identity-building process. Here, however, American sociobiologists can be helpful in formulating the view that racial and ethnic identities are an integral aspect of human nature.

However, first and foremost the meaning of race should be re-evaluated. Race is not just a biological phenomenon: it also has spiritual implications. The metaphysical base of the race should come first, as Julius Evola argues:

The mistake by many racial fanatics, who think that the resurrection of race, within its ethnic unity signify ipso facto the rebirth of a nation, lies precisely there: they conceive of a people as of “purebred” horses, cats or dogs. The preservation or the restoration of racial purity in the narrow sense means everything in so far as an animal is concerned, but not as far as humans are concerned.[14]

The common racial heredity of White Americans and Europeans appears as the only valid factor in the identity-building process. It cannot be changed at will. One can change his ideology, his language, his theology, his favorite football team and his geographic location. But a person cannot change his genetic heritage. However, as Evola wrote, to consider genetic heritage or the race factor as the only hallmark of identity boils down to biological determinism and is unlikely to generate strong emotions of loyalty. This is particularly true with many White nationalists in America, who focus too often on the anthropological aspect of race — the physical phenotype — while neglecting the spiritual part of race.

The resurrection of identity among White Europeans and Americans in a broader racially spiritual way appears as the only valid answer. “Not only breeding and selection are part of race,” wrote the German pedagogue Ernst Krieck, who himself played a prominent role in higher education in National Socialist Germany, “but also the form, the style, and personal attitude and the “folkish lifestyle” — within which racial value come to the fore.”[15] Furthermore, Ludwig Clauss, who also played a prominent academic and racialist role not just in National Socialist Germany, but much earlier in the liberal Weimar Germany, wrote in his little known book Rasse und Charakter:

Race is not only, as is still frequently believed in laymen circles, a lump of inherited characteristics (e.g., talents, musical skills, organizational skills, intelligence, etc.), but an inheritable law of Gestalt, which manifests itself in all traits that man can have and that bestow those traits with style. Not by the possession of those traits can one recognize the race of a man, but by the style he uses those traits.[16]

The overemphasis of the physical and biological features in search of racial identity is often a dead end street. Have we not met many good-looking White individuals in Europe and America who are the textbook cases of intellectual and moral depravity? The genetic heritage of Whites must be the main part of his identity only in so far it holds a racially good spiritual direction. A beautiful White body is not necessarily a reflection of a good character. Only spirit can provide a people and an individual with finite identity.

Notes

[1] Alain de Benoist, Nous et les autres (Paris: éd. Krisis, 2006), 75.

[2] Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. 2 (München: DTV, 1976), 941.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde Europas, (München: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1929); Ilse Schwidetzky, Rassenkunde der Altslawen (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1938).

[5] Kevin MacDonald, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,“ The Occidental Quarterly 6, no.4 (Winter, 2006-07): 7–46; Kevin MacDonald. “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions,” Psychological Review 115, no.4 (2008): 1012–1031.

[6] MacDonald, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” 22.

[7] See Tomislav Sunic, Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (with a foreword by Kevin MacDonald) (Seattle, WA: BookSurge, 2007).

[8] Lorenz Jäger, “Neue Freunde für Israel: Reise nach Jerusalem,“ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (December 13, 2010).

[9] Alexandre Latsa , ”Moscou: capitale de l’Europe!“ In “Le retour de la troisième RomeEurasia Vol 3(4) (Dublin: Éditions Avatar, 2009). One of the most popular spokesmen for “Eurosianism” is Alxander Dugin, a Russian writer. See Eldar Ismailov and Vladimer Papava, Rethinking Central Eurasia (Johns Hopkins University, SAIS, 2010 ).

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2196485

[10] Tatu Vanhanen, “Ethnic conflicts explained by ethnic nepotism,” Research in Biopolitics 7 (Stamford, CT: JAI Press Inc., 2005), 13.

[11] Tomislav Sunic, La Croatie ; un pays par défaut? (Paris: Dublin: Avatar, 2010). See page 56 and especially the chapter ”L’identité conflictuelle.“

[12] Carl Schmitt Politische Theologie (2nd ed.) (München und Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot 1934; first edition published in 1922), 11.

[13] Alain de Benoist, Comment peut- on être païen? (Paris: A. Michel, 1981), 161–178, passim.

[14] Julius Evola, Heidnischer Imperialismus (German translation by Friedrich Bauer) (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1933), 52–53.

[15] Ernst Krieck, National-politische Erziehung (Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1936), 26.

[16] Ludwig F. Clauss, Rasse und Charakter (Frankfurt: Verlag Moritz Diesterweg, 1942), 80.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Ethnic Identity versus White Identity: Differences between the U.S. and Europe.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol.12, No.4 (Winter 2012/13). Republished online here: <http://www.tomsunic.com/?p=444 >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Ethnic Identity versus White Identity).

 

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Interview with Alain de Benoist – American Renaissance

“We Are at the End of Something”

The American Renaissance Interview with Alain de Benoist

 

American Renaissance: You have said that modernity is the enemy of identity. Could you explain this idea further?

Alain de Benoist: When one considers modernity, one must consider two meanings of the word. The first is known to everyone: It is the changes of life that come with more material wealth. But modernity is also the product of an ideology that appeared in the 17th and 18th century with the Enlightenment. It is an ideology of progress, of which the basic idea is that mankind will always be better. The future will be better than the present and the present is better than the past. For this ideology, the past has nothing to teach us. The past is a graveyard of archaic customs and irrational constraints. Instead, man must use his reason to decide by himself what he wants.

Modernity also takes a unitary view of history. History is not cyclical, as it was for the Greeks, but is a straight line. This idea comes from Christianity and Judaism, which posit that there is an absolute beginning and an absolute end to history. Mankind is likewise unitary. All peoples must go through the same stages, and reach the same level of development. This is the myth of development, of technological progress.

Thus, everything that is new has value because it is new. There is a fetishism of the novel. So when you speak of modernity you must consider not only the material dimension but also the ideological dimension. Modernity is intrinsically antagonistic to collective identities because such identities are an obstacle to the march of progress towards a unitary mankind.

Of course, modernity has a strong economic component. In Europe it was linked to the rise of the bourgeois class and its commercial and merchant values. This is the problem of capitalism. It wants to organize more markets—a world market, a planetary market—and collective identities fragment this market.

Europeans have frequently criticized the United States as a materialist society, but is not every society materialist? Is it not part of human nature to always to want more?

You are right. In that sense I would say that today we are all Americans. And it is true that the desire to have more is part of human nature. The difference is that much of European religion and philosophy are based on values that are more important, on the belief that for moral or religious or philosophical reasons, we must not submit to greed and to the appetite for wealth. This was different in America because of the protestant Calvinist idea of the elect—God shows his approval by giving wealth. You know Max Weber’s theory of the link between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. I think these things make a big difference.

In Catholic countries money is always suspect—even though everyone wants more of it rather than less. You can see that in the fact that in France it would be impossible for a wealthy man to be elected head of state. No one would vote for a millionaire. The idea would be repulsive. But in America if a candidate is a millionaire it shows he is a success and has ability.

So in Europe people hide what they have. They don’t say how much they earn. In America there is a passion for numbers, and everything is a calculable quantity. Americans know how much they paid for everything. When American tourists go to the Eiffel Tower they ask, “How many steps to the top?” They do not understand the difference between quantity and quality.

Is there anything besides Catholicism that has protected Europe from the same levels of materialism?

No longer. Today, everyone looks at the same films, listens to the same music, lives in the same kind of houses. This is something that greatly concerns me. I have traveled a great deal, and every year I see the world becoming more similar. I call this the ideology of sameness. This ideology can take religious and not-at-all religious forms, but the central idea is that we are all part of mankind, that we are brothers of the same family. There may be differences but they are unimportant and should be either eradicated or transformed into mere folklore. American Indians do their dances for the tourists but this is not traditional life.

What is the solution to this problem of sameness?

To see solutions we must conceive of globalization as a dialectic. The more the world is homogenized, the more there is rebellion. Thus, the impulse that homogenizes the planet creates new kinds of fragmentation, new kinds of divisions. Sometimes this resistance can be excessive—it can take the form of terrorism, for example.

The solution is to work locally. I strongly believe in localism. Localism means more direct democracy, it means working to create liberated spaces. That’s why I don’t believe so much in politics. I believe that the time of political parties is over. Parties take each others’ places, but they are not real alternatives. In France it is the Right or the Left, or the Left or the Right, and everything remains the same.

That is the reason why so many people are fed up with what we call the “new class” of politicians, financiers, media. There is a widespread feeling that this class does not understand the daily life of the citizens, that it is remote, not committed to a particular nation, that it has common interests instead with an international new class. This is one of the reasons for the rise of the so-called populists parties, which is the most interesting political phenomenon in the last 10 or 20 years.

What are some other examples of this resistance to globalization?

Some countries resist very well. China, for example. I was in China not long ago. Of course you can see young people fixated on their video games, their iPods, iPads, and BlackBerries, but I think the Chinese leaders have a very clear view of the state of the world. Few countries really try to think about the future. The United States, yes, certainly. Russia and China as well, but in Europe, there is nothing.

You think Americans are thinking seriously about the future?

Not the American people, but the think tanks and government agencies think very seriously about the future.

More so than in Europe?

Yes, certainly. We have politicians but nothing like your think tanks. Maybe some political clubs, but nothing else. The politicians just want to be reelected, so the future for them is next year. They don’t think globally about the world.

If global capitalism is the enemy of identity, can you describe a type of economic organization that would be a friend of identity?

Economic life must not be reduced to free exchange and to commercial and market values. An economy must take social realities into consideration, and must not be free from political authority. It is perfectly possible to have an economy of social solidarity that includes a private sector, a public sector, as well as a sector for voluntary associations, such as workers’ cooperatives. The dictatorship of the financial markets must be destroyed. An economy must be based on real production and not on financial speculation. We must fight against the de-localization caused by globalization, which results in labor-market dumping, and harms the working classes by putting downward pressure on salaries. Free exchange between nations is good for everyone only if those nations are at approximately identical levels of economic development.

In Europe there must be reasonable protectionism that guarantees salaries and revenue. We must also promote, to the extent possible, consumption of goods where they are produced, with an emphasis on local transport and economies of proximity. The re-localization of economies is a way to maintain collective identities and also to restore social ties and local democracy in a public space in which citizenship is expressed.

Would you hope for a Europe that is more locally autonomous?

I am personally in support of a politically unified Europe, but this would be a Europe in which as many decisions as possible are made locally. We speak of the principle of “subsidiarity” according to which, as much as possible, and at the lowest possible level, people decide the matters that concern themselves.

That was the original idea of the United States. Every state was to have great autonomy.

But in the history of the United States the meaning of the word “federalism” has changed. Now when we say “federal” it means the central government, even though things were different in the beginning. The history of states’ rights is complex.

But that is my point. The European Union shows the same tendency. A central government always wants more power. Switzerland seems to be one of the few exceptions to this rule.

I like Switzerland very much. I would like the Swiss model extended to the whole of Europe. Do not forget that the difference between the central power in Europe (the so-called European Commission) and in the United States is that in Europe it is not even elected by anybody. There is no democratic legitimacy to it. I don’t have any illocutions about the value of the kinds of elections you have in the United States, but at least there is an election. Not in France. We elect a European parliament that has almost no power, and the only reason people take an interest in that election is because it is an indication of which parties are most popular within your own nation.

Do you think it is possible to have a politically united Europe that really does leave local decision-making to local people?

Yes. You see that in Switzerland. Of course, it is a small country.

But in the history of Europe you have two competing models. One is the nation-state, of which France is the perfect example, but of which England and Spain are also examples. The other model is empire: Italy, Germany and so on. I think the model of empire is much better because it does not concentrate power. It leaves rights and political autonomy to the different countries and regions. A recent model would be the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained 35 different nationalities, but it worked pretty well. Of course, it was implicated in all the troubles in the Balkans.

For many countries, the United States is an unpleasant presence, but is this simply a reflection of its power? Is this just our version of the French mission civilisatrice or British empire-building, or is there something different about the way America imposes its ideas on the world?

Certainly England, France, and Spain had great influence on the world, but the difference is that they are old countries. They have behind them 2,000 or 3,000 years, and in such a long period of time you have many different conceptions of politics. Not so in the United States. From the beginning, you have the myth of the City on a Hill, that you were the new chosen people, that you fled corrupt Europe with its monarchies and that you would build a new society that would be the best in history.

This goes hand in hand with American optimism. There may be many problems but in the end technology will solve them. Technology creates problems and yet more technology will solve them. This feeling, which is shared by so many Americans, can lead to isolationism or Wilsonianism, in which you want to colonize, though not in the old way. You want all people to be Americanized.

I notice that when I am in America I always hear music—music or television—even in restaurants. But it is always American music. I never hear any singer or music that is not American. In a few restricted circles you may see a French film, and people may know of Edith Piaf or Maurice Chevalier. But if you go to Europe or anywhere else you will hear the same music! Not only, but mostly. When it is not French, it is American music. Why don’t the French listen to Chinese music or African music or German music or Spanish music or Danish music? And it is the same for films. We see all the American films. We do not see all the German or Italian films, even though those countries are very close to France.

Globalization is the vehicle for all this. English becomes the universal language; if you don’t understand English, you can’t really use the Internet. So here are two reasons for the impact of America. One is the ideological reason but the other is the effect of pure power. This is normal.

From the European point of the view, surely someone like George W. Bush must have been impossible to understand because he was not Machiavellian or even sophisticated.

To us he looks like a moron. In Europe a good politician or statesman is someone who is cultivated in matters of political philosophy and literature, who has a deep knowledge of the world, who sees history as tragedy. He is someone who is a realist in politics, who doesn’t try to hide his interests behind the smokescreen of moral discourse. Americans are completely different. They put their hands on their hearts and speak of freedom and democracy.

Yesterday I was at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, where I saw a quotation from President Reagan that went something like this: “There are no limits to growth or human happiness if people can freely choose their dreams.” What does that mean? Nothing. But you can see that sort of thing everywhere.

I was recently in New York and visited Rockefeller Center. There you have tablets with quotations from Nelson Rockefeller. “I believe in humanity. I believe in love. I believe in the pursuit of happiness but nothing is more important than love.” This man’s life was making money, but he says there is nothing more important than love. He was not a lover, he was a financier. This sort of thing is very strange for Europeans.

And there are so many things that have come from America to Europe and settled there, such as gender studies—people like Judy Butler, who are completely mad. The crazy kind of feminism. I am not against feminism. There is a good kind of feminism, which I call identitarian feminism, which tries to promote feminine values and show that they are not inferior to masculine values. But this American version of universalist egalitarianism says there is no difference between men and women. It concedes there is a small difference: you are born with one sex or the other, but it’s not very important. What is important is that gender is a social construct, and you can make the parallel with race. Race and sex, they don’t exist because they are social constructs; they are only what your mind says they are.

You may know that last May the French government decided—it is the law now—that the French Republic “does not recognize the existence of any race.” Race does not exist, but racism exists. We must fight racism, which is presumably a hatred of something that does not exist. Curiously, these people claim to value diversity, but how can there be diversity if races do not exist? Many of these ideological fashions came from America.

Many Americans and Europeans who are frustrated with the direction in which their country is going speak of the possibility of systemic collapse. Do you foresee such a collapse?

I don’t foresee that because it is impossible to foresee anything. The main characteristic of history is that it is always open, therefore unpredictable. All the important events of the last decades were not foreseen, beginning with the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Soviet system. Some people with a catastrophic and pessimistic view do not realize that history is open. They think nothing can change, yet change is always possible because human history is open. I don’t foresee any collapse but I believe that there is a strong possibility of a general collapse.

At least in Europe we have the impression that the political system has exhausted all its possibilities. There is also the financial crisis, which is, for me, a structural rather than contingent crisis of capitalism. You cannot live forever on credit. Look at the public debt of the United States—my God. We always add a bit more, a bit more, a bit more. But “more” and “better” are very different things. No tree can reach the sky, so it will certainly collapse.

At the same time, there are ecological, demographic, and immigration problems. We are clearly at the end of something. Probably at the end of modernity. Never in my life can I remember a time in which all possibilities were as open as they are today. We are in a world of transition. During the cold war, things were simple—two blocs—but not anymore. What will become of Russia? What will become of China? In Africa we will have demographic growth—like the public debt in the US!

So I think collapse is possible and it may be necessary, but you cannot rely on it. You cannot sit in your chair and say, “Well, dear friends, I am waiting for the apocalypse.” That would be like the Jehovah’s Witnesses: “The end of the world is nigh.” One world may be ending, but not the world.

Collapse may be necessary for what?

For change. Americans have lived ever since the beginning of their country under more or less the same system, so it is very easy for them to believe that theirs is a natural system. In Europe we have known so many systems, so many revolutions, so many conflicting opinions. I refuse to be constrained by inevitability.

Under the current system only marginal reforms are possible. In France, the National Front is rising in a very interesting way. It is becoming the leading political party, which is very strange when you remember that because of the electoral system it has only two members in the Chamber of Deputies. But even if Marine Le Pen were elected president—I do not think it will happen but I cannot exclude it—there would be no great changes. We would live in the same kind of society, looking at the same films, playing with the same electronic games, and so on.

You have spoken about how complex and multiple identity is. It is composed of language, history, profession, ethnicity, sex, etc. but why can race can never be part of a collective identity—at least for white people?

You mean in Europe?

I mean anywhere.

It is even more forbidden in Europe. In the United States, it is accepted by most people that races exist—and in my mind to accept race is very different from racism—but in Europe that is not so. In the United States you have racial statistics. You can go to the government and find race statistics on everything, including crime and social patterns. The collection of these kinds of statistics is forbidden in Europe—certainly in France.

In France you may categorize people as foreigners or French citizens but many immigrants have French citizenship. Sometimes they receive it automatically when they are born there. So sociologists who want to study a racial question must look indirectly at such things as medical statistics. No one knows how many blacks there are in France. We have an idea, of course, but officially race statistics are forbidden because race does not exist. Such race statistics might be used by racist people. They could use findings about crime, for example.

But to return to the question of identity, I am concerned that the people in France who want to defend identity seem to be the first not to know what identity means. They give only a negative definition of it: “I’m not an immigrant.” Alright, you are not an immigrant, but what are you? “I am French.” But of course you are so many other things as well. You are a man or a woman, you are a journalist or a producer, you are gay or straight, born in a particular region, etc. Identity is complex.

How do you see yourself as different from Identitarians?

If I compare you and me, the first difference is that I am aware of race and of the importance of race, but I do not give to it the excessive importance that you do. For me it is a factor, but only one among others.

The second is that I am not fighting for the white race. I am not fighting for France. I am fighting for a world view. I am a philosopher, a theoretician, and I fight to explain my world view. And in this world view, Europe, race, culture, and identity all have roles. They are not excluded. But mainly I am working in defense of a world view. Of course, I am very interested in the future and destiny of my own nation, race, and culture, but I am also interested in the future of every other group.

Immigration is clearly a problem. It gives rise to much social pathologies. But our identity, the identity of the immigrants, all the identities in the world have a common enemy, and this common enemy is the system that destroys identities and differences everywhere. This system is the enemy, not the Other. That is my basic credo.

Is there anything in particular you would you like to say to an American audience?

What I would say to America is to try to be a bit more open to the rest of the world. Try to know other countries and not just to visit them as tourists. As tourists you don’t see much. You need to understand that throughout the world people can think differently. I don’t say they are better or worse, but accept these differences, because a world of difference is a richer world. The wealth of the world is diversity — its genuine diversity.

 

——————-

De Benoist, Alain. “We Are at the End of Something.” Interview by the American Renaissance Staff. American Renaissance, 22 November 2013. <http://www.amren.com/features/2013/11/we-are-at-the-end-of-something/ >.

Note: For a listing of certain major works of the New Right by Alain de Benoist in various languages, see Benoist’s and Champetier’s Manifesto along with the further reading section:  <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/manifesto-of-the-new-right-benoist-champetier/ >.

 

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Glimpse of Post-American Future – Morgan

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

By John Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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The West against Europe – Sunic

The West against Europe

By Tomislav Sunic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balkanization and Globalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which Europe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Review of Gottfried’s Strange Death of Marxism – Wegierski

Book Review of The Strange Death of Marxism by Paul Gottfried

By Mark Wegierski

The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Columbia, MO and London University of Missouri Press
154 pages, $31.00

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, is one of the leading American “paleoconservative” theorists and, indeed, has been credited with coining the term. The central idea of most of his earlier books, such as After Liberalism Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (University of Missouri Press, 2002), is that there has now arisen in Western societies, a “managerial-therapeutic regime” which combines the soulless economic conservatism of big business with the distribution of resources to “politically-correct” interest groups, with coercive “therapy” for recalcitrants. Gottfried has argued that “the regime” has subverted the more authentic meanings of both the Left and the Right.

In The Strange Death of Marxism, he examines the political transformation from old-style Communist Parties to the “post-Marxist” Left. He offers critical summaries of the thought of such figures as Louis Althusser and the various members of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. Looking at the French and Italian Communist parties, Gottfried notes that while their political rhetoric often embraced questionable notions about the Soviet Union, the social profile of their membership was extremely conservative. As far as the Frankfurt School, Prof. Gottfried does note the unusual interpretation which Paul Piccone, the editor of Telos, a scholarly journal of eclectic social and cultural philosophy, gives to those theorists, as actually being critics of the managerial-therapeutic regime. However, Gottfried tends to see them as originators of some of the most pernicious ideas underlying the current-day system, especially the theory of the so-called “authoritarian personality.” At its sharpest, Gottfried argues, this theory endeavors to categorize social outlooks deemed politically incorrect as “psychological aberrations” requiring semi-coercive “therapy” if it is discovered in an individual and of the mass indoctrination of society through mass media and mass education to combat them at the collective level. It lays the groundwork for “soft totalitarianism.”

Where Gottfried significantly differs from most conventional current-day conservatives is his identification of America as the main originator of this “soft totalitarianism.” According to Gottfried, it initially got underway in Europe with the “re-education” of Germany in the aftermath of World War II where, he argues, traditionalist conservatism and nationalism was just as severely dealt with as Nazism. Indeed, conservative anti-Nazis were seen as suspect by the American authorities, whereas many former Nazis who eagerly adopted “liberal democracy” were embraced by the Americans. Gottfried points out the surprising Nazi past of some of today’s leading theorists of the politically-correct German Left.

Gottfried argues that trends such as multiculturalism, feminism, and gay rights, had indeed emerged in the United States earlier than in Europe, and that today, the differences between the American and EU “regimes” are minimal. He also points to the largely similar, globalization visions of both American democracy-boosters such as Francis Fukuyama, and of the typical left-wingers in Europe, who claim to be critics of globalization.

Following the arguments of Christopher Lasch, Gottfried expresses praise for the old-style socialist working-class-based parties. “The working class consciousness that had marked the socialist past, and was connected sociologically to profoundly conservative attitudes, has ceased to count” (144).

However, it may be possible that Prof. Gottfried’s picture of the Left is overdrawn in the case of some European countries. Is the entire Left today really so abjectly self-hating in regard to their own nationality, and so contemptuous of family life and religion? Does a belief in social justice for working people necessarily entail the adoption of the current-day agenda of multiculturalism and “alternative lifestyles”?

Prof. Gottfried argues that the pre-1960s Left in such countries as Canada, Britain, and the United States, would have found most of the concerns of the post-Sixties’ Left of little importance or in fact repugnant. Indeed, while ferociously fighting for its vision of social justice and equality for the working majority, it usually considered notions of family, nation, and religion as a “pre-political” part of human existence, which it had no desire to alter. Some of the leading figures of this patriotic, pro-family Left may include William Morris, Jack London, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, and the Canadian political theorist Eugene Forsey.

It may be noted that the trend in many current-day Western societies is to adopt both social liberalism and economic conservatism (the latter usually called “neo-liberalism” in Europe). For example, the Liberal government in Canada in the 1990s carried out such austerity measures against the broad mass of the Canadian public as not rescinding the Goods and Services Tax (the Canadian equivalent of a VAT), as they had explicitly promised to do; massively cutting the benefits available under Unemployment Insurance; massively increasing the contributions required for the Canada Pension Plan; and introducing drawbacks on the Old Age Pension and Old Age tax-exemption. The Liberal government has tended to cut those benefits available to the broad mass of the population as a whole while at the same, increasing funding to special-interest groups whether business cronies or “rainbow-coalition” members. At the same time, it has maintained one of the highest levels of immigration of any country today.

Prof. Gottfried unfortunately does not devote too much attention to the role of technology, mass-media, consumerism, and pop-culture in ushering in our near-dystopic age. Indeed, the “lived cultural reality” for many people in Western societies is American pop-culture, which tends to amplify socially-liberal, consumerist/consumptionist, and antinomian attitudes, especially among the young. Gottfried could have identified some of the varied resistance to hypermodernity not only in old-fashioned social democracy, but also in such tendencies as ecology and neo-mysticism (typified by such figures as C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Ken Wilber).

It is also important to consider that for most people in Western societies today, the mark of the regime’s success is that it offers very high levels of affluence and prosperity. This is far different from the situation in East-Central Europe, where it could be argued that the post-Communist transition has engendered widespread and deepening pauperization of large sectors of the populace. It is not often considered that it is only in a very homogenous society that such huge disparities of wealth and poverty can be maintained without some kind of violent situation arising. One dreads to imagine what would happen in Canada were there to be a major economic downturn. All the heterogeneous groups that have arrived in Canada in the last thirty years or so, would be at each other’s and the fading majority’s throats. It could easily develop into events similar to those seen in France recently.

The central point to be made is that Soviet Communism, despite its various radical and murderous elements, may have indeed been surpassed by today’s post-Western left-liberalism in its sheer destructive-ness and antinomianism toward more traditional societies. It could be argued that, in the end, it is hard to imagine anything more corrosive and destructive to Western society than policies of aggressive multiculturalism and mass, dissimilar immigration; and of antinomian and deconstructive art, ideas, attitudes and lifestyles. It is the abject, self-hating extremes of white Westerners, and the extreme social liberalism of current-day society as well as the triumph of economic conservatism which many of the old-fashioned social democrats would find repugnant.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘The Strange D-eath of Marxism’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 218-220. <http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1603/article_1403.shtml >.

Note: This book by Paul Gottfried is also available in Spanish translation as La Extrana Muerte Del Marxismo: La Izquierda Europea en el Nuevo Milenio (Madrid: Ciudadela Libros, 2007).

 

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Review of Gottfried’s Multiculturalism & Politics of Guilt – Wegierski

Book Review of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt by Paul Gottfried

By Mark Wegierski

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Columbia (MO) and London: University of Missouri Press
158 pages, $29.95

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, here continues his critical and forthright analysis of “the managerial-therapeutic regime” which he began decades ago, but which was recently most trenchantly expressed in After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton University Press, 1999) (reviewed in The Social Contract, Vol. IX, No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 274-276). The title of Gottfried’s new book is an ironic reference to Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition (an essay by Charles Taylor, with commentary by Amy Gutmann, Editor; Steven C. Rockefeller; Michael Walzer; Susan Wolf) (Princeton University Press, 1992). This work by Charles Taylor, et al., which represents the “official” view of multiculturalism at the very heights of current-day political theory, was brought out in a revised edition by Princeton University Press in 1994, with new commentary by K. Anthony Appiah, and Jurgen Habermas (edited and introduced by Amy Gutmann). (It is possible that there have been newer and expanded editions of the collection in the interval.) Professor Gottfried may be signaling by the choice of his title that his work offers a sharp critique of multiculturalism — and careful explication of what it “really” represents, beyond all the hazy rhetoric and abstract theorizing of “official” political theory and “official” political discourse.

Other books by Gottfried include: Conservative Millenarians: The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979); The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986); the two editions of The Conservative Movement (1988 and 1993, the former co-written with Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine), on postwar American conservatism; as well as Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory, a highly nuanced work about the controversial yet often acute German right-wing theorist.

Today Paul Gottfried is probably the leading political theorist of the American “paleo-conservative” grouping (in fact, he is credited with coining that term). He has been a senior editor of The World & I, and is currently a senior editor at Telos, a journal of eclectic political criticism, and a contributing editor to Humanitas and Chronicles.

Prof. Gottfried has also paid a real price for his forthright political views, most notably being rejected from a major appointment to the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). Ironically, this appointment was opposed more strenuously by neoconservatives (who often complain about this kind of academic exclusion), than by left-liberals. Considering that Gottfried may have supervised dozens of Ph.D. and M.A. students at Catholic University (as opposed to Elizabethtown, which lacks a significant graduate program), his deselection from CUA could be seen not only as an attack on him, but as an attempt to crush an entire intellectual tendency.

Reading Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, one has the feeling that the author is writing what he wants to write, leaving aside excessively tactical considerations. In an age in which many so-called conservatives are deathly afraid of stating their views openly, or of going beyond any but the mildest critiques of current-day society, Gottfried’s book is highly refreshing.

The work is high-level political theory, grounded in an intimate knowledge of both the classics and new currents of political philosophy, as well as an acute understanding of the long history and evolution of political practice. Gottfried has a command of numerous languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian and Polish. This is something which is especially rare among most North American scholars and policy “experts” — the former who often deliberately misportray the classics and most of history, and the latter who often give ignorant lectures to countries abroad as to the internal politics and arrangements they should follow.

The book includes Acknowledgments (pp. ix-x), sometimes extensive footnotes, and an index (pp. 151-158). It begins with an excellent Introduction, “From the Managerial to the Therapeutic State” (pp. 1-16). Contrasting Europe and America, Gottfried says that while America may seem economically freer (with significantly lower taxes), its therapeutic regime is in many ways as advanced as that in Europe.

We are expected to take for granted, and view as beyond critical discussion, ‘universal nations,’ ‘open communities,’ ‘homosexual family units,’ and ‘pluralistic cultures.’… These things thrive because of government agencies, the judiciary, and ‘public’ education. They represent what democracy as public administration holds up as the happy alternative to how things used to be. And if the state moves boldly to ban insensitivity, that may be necessary to avoid mass backsliding into life ‘before the Sixties’ (pp. 4-5).

His first chapter, “The Death of Socialism?” (pp. 17-38), is a brilliant dissection of the politics and economics of the current-day period. Gottfried argues that old-fashioned social democracy, and even the Communist parties (for example, in Italy) and regimes, were, to a large extent, socially-conservative. The embrace by left-wing parties of current-day capitalism (along with multiculturalism, of course) has made them objectively “less” rather than “more” conservative. Gottfried also skewers capitalism as espoused by, for example, Virginia Postrel

Postrel’s eagerness to eradicate tradition and established community is so extreme that even a center-left reviewer writing in the New Republic finds her neophilia to be one of the ‘best arguments for conservatism with which I am familiar.’… Postrel’s enthusiasms are a perfect example of democratic capitalist boosterism, characterized by support for open borders, the mixing of peoples and races, and a continuing redefinition of nations and cultures… Postrel’s vision does not conflict with the consuming quest to change society in a progressive way pursued by social democrats, save for her difference with them over the degree of government intervention useful for the economy… Their quarrel with the other side is not about abolishing the past but about the best means to bring that about. (pp. 27-28)

Professor Gottfried is clearly impressed with certain aspects of the Left tradition of the West. Some of the most prominent of these social conservatives of the Left include William Morris, George Orwell, Jack London, and Christopher Lasch (who considered himself a social democrat). Gottfried has also closely studied the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, a curiously bivalent tradition which gave rise to both the theory of “the authoritarian personality” (which is one of the main props of the managerial-therapeutic regime), as well as some of the most cutting-edge critiques of the system.

Chapter 2, “Religious Foundations of the Managerial Therapeutic State” (pp. 39-70) looks at some possible origins of the seemingly all-pervasive current-day viewpoints. It would be too simple to say that it is all the result of current-day conditioning and propaganda. Gottfried locates one of the major sources of these outlooks in James Kurth’s view of the so-called “Protestant deformation” (p. 10). Gottfried cites Kurth:

All religions are unique, but Protestantism is more unique than all others. No other is so critical of hierarchy and community, or of traditions and customs that go with them. At its doctrinal base Protestantism is anti-hierarchy and anti-community. (p. 10)

Gottfried would argue that, although there may be many traditionalist and conservative Protestants, the so-called “mainline” Protestant denominations in the United States tend very heavily in directions supportive of the regime. Gottfried writes “Basic for American religious life is the fusion of a victim-centered feminism with the Protestant framework of sin and redemption” (p. 56). According to Gottfried, it is the broad mass of self-hating, guilt-driven WASPs in America who tend to valorize all the accredited minority claims, and promote mass, dissimilar immigration, as well as neutralize and suppress the resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime from more conservative WASPs and many Catholic and Orthodox Christian white ethnics.

These American liberal Protestant outlooks have spread into Europe, where the more Protestant countries, such as Germany, tend to be further along the road of coercive political-correctness. Gottfried reveals the startling fact that “…[m]ore Germans are now languishing in prison for expressing (unprogressive or insensitive) opinions than there were in East Germany before the fall of the Communist regime” (p. 44).

Chapter 3, “The Managerial as Therapeutic State” (pp. 71-100), is a very sharp analysis of the various control-mechanisms of the current-day regime. In Gottfried’s analysis, it looks like an ultra-totalitarian system (in the normative rather than openly-violent sense), intimately concerned with the innermost thoughts of its “subject-citizens,” and consigning particularly troublesome dissenters to coercive “therapy.” Gottfried argues that many high-ranking political, legal, and feminist theorists, such as Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Jurgen Habermas, have summarily dispensed with freedom of speech, the right to free association, religious freedom (for Christians), and freedom of conscience, as even purely theoretical requirements for their vision of “liberal” polity.

“A Sensitized World” (chapter four, pp. 101-117) points to the fact that the Western managerial-therapeutic regimes are now embarking upon global, “missionizing” projects. Professor Gottfried leaves it an open question whether non-Western societies, which are often filled with a highly ferocious traditionalism, are now going to be increasingly subject to such projects, or if Third World traditionalism will by some strange process continue to be valorized by self-hating Westerners. The heavily pervasive pop-culture of America is already functioning as an icebreaker for various aspects of current-day Western ideas, far ahead of possible political realignments in non-Western traditional societies.

Chapter 5, “Whither the Populist Right” (pp. 118-130) does not hold out much hope for these tendencies of resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime. Gottfried decisively refutes the notion that these tendencies can be considered “far right” or “neo-fascist”:

It must…be asked if what European populist leaders famously demand — referenda, an end to welfare burdens, and more government accountability over immigration — are intrinsically ‘illiberal.’ However offensive they may be to the journalistic Left, these stands do invoke a recognizably liberal principle, the consent of citizens… The confrontation that has erupted is not between liberals and antiliberals but between two postliberal concepts of democracy, one, managerial-multicultural, and the other, plebiscitary national or regional. (p.122)

In the Conclusion, “A Secular Theocracy” (pp. 131-149), Gottfried reiterates the point about the all-pervasiveness of this current-day “soft totalitarianism” (p. 138). He foresees as main challenges to the regime either economic difficulties, or the frictions arising out of excessive, mass, dissimilar immigration. The managerial-therapeutic regime has enjoyed great support because economic prosperity (and the cornucopia of government benefits for large sectors of society), as well as what seems like a highly attractive cult of sexual and personal pleasure, are seen as the regime’s successes, in most people’s minds. However, it is possible that an over-extended welfare state will, at some point, have to significantly reduce benefits, and those to whom it reduces benefits first are highly likely to be those who lack the status of current-day victim groups (or those groupings who are considered decidedly less victimized than others). At the same time, the current-day New Class elites grossly underestimate the transformative and revolutionary potential of a dissimilar immigration so huge that it threatens to displace the native-born majority. What will happen if former majorities become ever-smaller minorities, while the new majorities will ever more insistently press their claims? Presumably, the regime will try to maintain prosperity by the upholding, as far as possible, of current-day capitalism (probably tactically accepting much of what is called “fiscal conservatism” today), combined with even more thoroughgoing efforts at conditioning and suppression of dissent.

Gottfried’s book is rather terse, and could have devoted more attention to an analysis of current-day capitalism, consumptionism, and a closer look at how the mass media works upon the average person (in its main self-designated functions of advertising, entertainment, and information). It is also possible that some of the ultimate roots of the evolution of the managerial-therapeutic regime lie in the very fact of the ever-accelerating advance of capitalism and technology. For many people today, that life of comfort, pleasure, and lifestyle freedoms apparently assured by the regime is more germane in their assent to it, than the strictures of political-correctness. Indeed, the broad masses are clearly far less interested in political-correctness than the New Class cadres, although the latter, of course, usually live lives of comparatively even greater material comfort. (One is reminded of that socio-economic category identified by David Brooks: “bobos” or “bourgeois bohemians.”)

Given the intertwining of the regime with capitalist growth — which is clearly ecologically unsustainable over the long term — more attention should have been paid in the book to possible resistance to the regime from such tendencies as ecology/environmentalism, neo-mysticism (such as that represented by Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung), and the anti-globalization movements. There could have been more space given to such diverse figures as Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, the Mexico-based ecological critic Ivan Illich, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, J.R.R. Tolkien, Peter Augustine Lawler (author of Postmodernism Rightly Understood The Return to Realism in American Thought, among other works), agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry, Camille Paglia, and Canadian traditionalist philosopher George Parkin Grant. There could have been some attempt to engage with the more positive aspects of communitarian political theory, and to look at such thinkers as, for example, British political theorist (formerly at Oxford, now at the London School of Economics) John Gray, and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Giving the work a more broadly cultural, ecological, technoskeptical, and communitarian focus might have helpfully increased its possible appeal without diluting its central message.

As it stands, the book is brilliantly and acutely political, but perhaps lacks a certain cultural depth. In a way it mirrors the writing of Hobbes (who is clearly one of the main inspirations of Carl Schmitt, Paul Gottfried, and James Burnham(1) — a thinker who has also clearly inspired Gottfried). Hobbes brought a very sharp precision to political philosophy, but the mechanistic qualities of his view of human nature had deconstructive effects. Professor Gottfried has given us the razor-sharp theory; the “poetry” of resistance to the managerial-therapeutic regime (unless one semi-anachronistically chooses to consider as such some of the prescient forebodings of Nietzsche) has yet to be written.

NOTE

1. James Burnham’s seminal work is The Managerial Revolution (1941). Burnham’s Suicide of the West (1964) describes various aspects of self-hatred and guilt massively undermining Western elites and societies. Burnham began his writing career on the Left, and was considered “Trotsky’s most brilliant disciple.” Much of Burnham’s writing is focused on an analysis of power and its exercise in inter- and intra-societal relations. George Orwell paid Burnham a curiously ironic compliment by apparently basing on Burnham his character “O’Brien,” the Grand Inquisitor-like figure, in 1984.

 

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Winter 2002-2003), pp. 144-147. < http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1302/article_1136.shtml >.

Note: This book by Paul Gottfried is also available in German translation as Multikulturalismus und die Politik der Schuld: Unterwegs zum Manipulativen Staat? (Graz: Ares-Verlag, 2004).

 

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Review of Gottfried’s After Liberalism – Wegierski

Book Review of After Liberalism by Paul Gottfried

By By Mark Wegierski

After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State
by Paul Edward Gottfried
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
200 pages, $27.95

 

Professor Paul Edward Gottfried, who teaches at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, is a longstanding veteran of the raging political and culture wars in America. His other books include, Conservative Millenarians The Romantic Experience in Bavaria (1979), a work which attests to his early-found miter in complex intellectual history; The Search for Historical Meaning Hegel and the Postwar American Right (1986), a work which combines his interests in Continental European political theory and American right-wing politics; the two editions of The Conservative Movement (1988 and 1993) on postwar American conservatism; as well as Carl Schmitt Politics and Theory (1990), a highly nuanced work about the controversial yet often acute German right-wing theorist. Paul Gottfried is today probably the leading political theorist of the so-called “paleoconservative” grouping (in fact, he is credited with coining that term), and could be called one of the leading “white generals” in the American “counterrevolution.” He has been a senior editor of The World & I, and is currently a senior editor at Telos, a scholarly journal of eclectic political criticism, and a contri-buting editor to Humanitas as well as Chronicles. He is also editor-in-chief of This World. After Liberalism, which has been published by Princeton University Press as the lead title in a major new series, “New Forum Books,” presenting original scholarship focusing on the juncture of culture, law and politics.

Referencing the 1996 American election, the author relates it to the main concepts discussed in the work notably the high degree of success and seeming inevitability of managerial ideology today. As long as the current-day regime is able to guarantee material prosperity and all the attractions of consumerism, “caring,” and sexual “free expression,” it will be largely unchallengeable. Gottfried notes that capitalist economic expansion and the expansion of the welfare state have, for the last few decades, occurred at the same time.

The main idea of this book is that current-day Western societies (and especially America) have moved in a postliberal and postdemocratic direction. They have moved in the direction of a “regime” of public administration that has little in common with nineteenth-century liberalism.

Chapter One, “In Search of a Liberal Essence” moves through various historical and contemporary definitions of “liberalism,” looking at the “semantic problem” of liberalism, and examining its “continuities and discontinuities.” The conclusion is that the term “liberalism” cannot be truly applied to most current-day thinking claiming that term.

Professor Gottfried then sets out to disentangle the meanings of “Liberalism vs. Democracy.” Anti-democratic liberals (such as the nineteenth-century French statesman Francois Guizot), liberals who wished to cooperate with nationalist democracy (such as the early-twentieth-century Vilfredo Pareto), and those liberals who advanced along the main lines of progress (such as John Stuart Mill) are looked at. What emerged in the twentieth century is characterized as “the intertwining of mass democracy and public administration.”

In “Public Administration and Liberal Demo-cracy” Gottfried looks at the processes of “building the welfare state” through “the politics of socialization,” leading to the “liberal democratic model” – which is neither truly liberal nor democratic.

The author then examines the administrative “new class” and its values. “Pluralism” – as defined by the New Class – is one of the central values of the late modern regime. It is the justification for the “war against dissent” – the categorizing of persons who think differently from the New Class as bigots or hatemongers, who have to receive either “sensitivity-training” or be silenced by social ostracism, professional marginalization, substantial fines, or even jail-terms. “Pluralism” and other approaches (such as the pretense to “scientific objectivity” and the deriding of metaphysics and religion) are simply seen as tropes for the attempt to exclude and eradicate “illiberal” views in society. In the process of its triumph in most Western societies, the managerial-therapeutic regime is tending in the direction of “a world democratic empire” – since the very existence of “illiberal” regimes is seen as a challenge to the proclaimed “universality” of “liberal democratic values.”

He considers “the populist alternative” to the managerial-therapeutic regime, which ironically arises partly as a result of the dynamics of mass-democracy. This is probably the best brief analysis available in English of such tendencies as Le Pen’s Front National, the Italian Lega Nord, and the Continental European “postmodern Right” (including the Nouvelle Ecole led by Alain de Benoist).

Gottfried argues that immigration policy is a major instrument, being used to expand the power of the managerial state. Massive, dissimilar immigration is one of the most salient aspects of the managerial regime. Traditional identities are broken down even further, and enthusiastic supporters and clients of the welfare-state are gained. However, excessive immigration creates frictions that may challenge the regime. The majority population is alienated from offering benefits to those with whom they have nothing in common; Gottfried rightly notes that some sense of commonality is highly important to the welfare state. It is only natural to resist offering outright “gifts” to those with whom we have nothing in common – the notion of “universal humanity” is not satisfactory enough for most people. Perhaps there is some hope that opposition to immigration may serve as a wedge to undermine the managerial regime. On the other hand, the inflow of immigration may be massive enough that groups from outside the West with “illiberal” outlooks may come to be a majority, and at some point put an end to managerial “pluralism” and “relativism.” However, this would almost certainly mean the relegation of white Westerners to the status of pariahs in what were once their own societies.

Gottfried perhaps underplays what is likely to be the most tragic aspect of the managerial regime, and the greatest danger to the life and future of European societies – this mass, dissimilar immigration. First of all, European-descended Americans (and Canadians) are robbed of their traditional identities, so they see nothing worthwhile to preserve and fight for in terms of the continued existence of their own societies. Indeed, the managerial view seems to be that European nation-states are worthwhile mostly as receptacles for the continued existence and flourishing of those various precious minority cultures. (The visible minority population of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, has gone from less than 3 percent in 1961, to over 50 percent today. Predictably, in public one is only allowed to celebrate this shift to diversity, and to deliberate on how the needs of minorities can be better addressed by government and society.) These demographic shifts are perhaps the most radical, indelible kinds of change that can be experienced by any society.

Theoretically speaking, there could always be the chance of a cultural, intellectual, moral, or religious restoration of a society after the collapse of the ruling managerial ideology (if that society had retained its native majority), but these drastic kinds of population changes become, after a certain point, utterly irreversible. Ironically, the effects of old-fashioned social democracy on society (concerned with waging the class-struggle on behalf of the native working classes), are comparatively trivial. The managerial regime appears to be in the process of practically destroying most Western societies, in the space of no more than a century (beginning with the 1950s). What is especially frightening today is how utterly beholden most Western societies are to the values of the New Class, and how very little real opposition is actually being raised. On virtually every important front one can think of – demographic, as well as cultural, intellectual, moral, and religious – Western traditionalism has been in pell-mell retreat for decades. Indeed, Western societies might be described as in the process of being progressively accelerated to oblivion.

After Liberalism ends on a rather somber note, where the varieties of opposition to the managerial-therapeutic regime are not given much hope. The religious Right and the “archaic Right” are seen as incapable of mounting a challenge the former is seen as largely embracing the administrative state in the forlorn hope it will promote “family values” – while the latter is seen as having simply abandoned politics in favor of theological or literary forms of argument. Indeed, among the strengths of Gottfried’s book is the fact that it does not fall into archaic modes of argumentation. The intellectual Left is also seen as not offering much hope. “Any serious appraisal of the managerial regime must consider first and foremost the extent of its control – and the relative powerlessness of its critics” (p. 141).

One major criticism of the book could be that it unduly narrows the conservative and traditionalist critique of late modernity by focusing too much on early liberalism and the bourgeois spirit, thus largely excluding such tendencies as traditionalist Catholicism, organic nationalism, and such figures as Nietzsche and the anticapitalist “politics of cultural despair.” While the defense of classical liberalism and the bourgeois spirit might appear especially congenial in an Anglo-American context, organic and Nietzschean outlooks might be more evocative in Continental Europe, and might also constitute far deeper and more thoroughgoing types of critique. Indeed, perhaps all that can be achieved in late modernity is the maintenance of small but powerful niches of sharp political criticism – although one could also legitimately ask, to what final end? Some might argue that the conservative critique in late modernity should be as cultural, “fanciful,” creative-nihilist, and “utopian” as possible, dreaming of “new modes and new orders” – and focusing around Romanticism and Romantic nationalism.

After Liberalism is a very fine work, and it may indeed be the kind of book of analysis that George Orwell would have written, had he lived longer. As one reads the book, one can imagine one is reading our own world’s equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism. Gottfried’s highly theoretical and often sharply-phrased book could also be described as having a “right-wing Marxist” flavor to it. Indeed, it is the kind of critical book around which many future debates and discussions might well be structured.

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Wegierski, Mark. “Book Review of ‘After Liberalism’ by Paul Gottfried.” The Social Contract, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Summer 1999), pp. 274-276. Retrieved from: <http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0904/article_830.shtml >.

 

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Leader-ful Resistance – Morgan

Leader-ful Resistance: The Predicament of the Right Today

By John Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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