Interview with Benoist on the New Right – Warren

The ‘European New Right’: Defining and Defending Europe’s Heritage

An Interview with Alain de Benoist

By Ian B. Warren

 

In the following essay and interview, Professor Warren takes a close look at the “European New Right,” a cultural-intellectual movement that offers not only an unconventional view of the past, but a challenging perspective on the present and future. This piece admittedly represents a departure from the Journal’s usual content and tone. All the same, we hope and trust that readers will appreciate this look at an influential movement that not only revives an often neglected European intellectual-cultural tradition, but which also — as French writer Alain de Benoist explains here — seeks to chart Europe’s course into the 21st century. — The Editor (IHR)

During the postwar era — approximately 1945-1990 — European intellectual life was dominated by Marxists (most of them admirers of the Soviet experiment), and by supporters of a liberal-democratic society modeled largely on the United States. Aside from important differences, each group shared common notions about the desirability and ultimate inevitability of a universal “one world” democratic order, into which individual cultures and nations would eventually be absorbed.

Not all European thinkers accepted this vision, though. Since the late 1960s, a relatively small but intense circle of youthful scholars, intellectuals, political theorists, activists, professors, and even a few elected parliamentarians, has been striving — quietly, but with steadily growing influence — to chart a future for Europe that rejects the universalism and egalitarianism of both the Soviet Marxist and American capitalist models.

This intellectual movement is known — not entirely accurately — as the European New Right, or Nouvelle Droite. (It should not be confused with any similarly named intellectual or political movement in Britain or the United States, such as American “neo-conservatism.”) European New Right voices find expression in numerous books, articles, conferences and in the pages of such journals as Eléments, Scorpion and Transgressioni.

No one has played a more important role in this movement than Alain de Benoist, a prolific French writer born in 1943. As the chief philosopher of the Nouvelle Droite, he serves as a kind of contemporary Diogenes in European intellectual life. According to the critical Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right, de Benoist is “an excellent stylist, cultivated and highly intelligent.”[1]

He has explained his worldview in a prodigious outpouring of essays and reviews, and in several books, including a brilliant 1977 work, Vu de Droite (“Seen from the Right”), which was awarded the coveted Grand Prix de l’Essai of the Académie Française. (His books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, German, Dutch and Arabic, but none has yet appeared in English.)

For some years a regular contributor to the French weekly Le Figaro Magazine, de Benoist has served as editor of the quarterly Nouvelle Ecole, of the magazine Eléments, and, most recently, of a quarterly review, Krisis.[2] For some years he also played a leading role in the operation of the Paris-based group GRECE (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization”), which is sometimes described as an organizational expression of the Nouvelle Droite.[3]

De Benoist’s fondest wish, he once said, would be to see the “peoples and cultures of the world again find their personality and identity.” He believes that Europe has largely sold its soul for a mess of cheap “Made in the USA” pottage. American-style economic and cultural hegemony is a “soft” but insidious totalitarianism that erodes the character of individuals and the heritage of nations. To the peoples of Europe, de Benoist and the European New Right insistently pose this question: How can we preserve and sustain our diversity in the face a consumer-driven world based largely on a synthetic universalism and egalitarianism?

A dramatic indication of de Benoist’s importance came during a visit to Berlin in February 1993, when he was attacked and beaten by about 20 young “anti-fascist” thugs.

Few people on this side of the Atlantic know much about de Benoist and the intellectual movement he represents. The most cogent and useful overview in English is a 200-page book, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right, by Tomislav Sunic, a Croatian-born American political scientist.[4]

The task of the European New Right, explains professor Sunic in his 1990 monograph, is to defend Europe — especially its rich cultural heritage — above all from the economic-cultural threat from the United States.[5] According to Sunic:[6]

The originality of the [European] New Right lies precisely in recognizing the ethnic and historical dimensions of conservatism — a dimension considered negligible by the rather universalist and transnational credo of modern Western conservatives …

The New Right characterizes itself as a revolt against formless politics, formless life, and formless values. The crisis of modern societies has resulted in incessant “uglification” whose main vectors are liberalism, Marxism and the “American way of life.” Modern dominant ideologies, Marxism and liberalism, embedded in the Soviet Union and America respectively, are harmful to the social well-being of the peoples, because both reduce every aspect of life to the realm of economic utility and efficiency.

The principle enemy of freedom, asserts the New Right, is not Marxism or liberalism per se, but rather common beliefs in egalitarianism.

In the intellectual climate of the postwar era, writes Sunic, “those who still cherished conservative ideas felt obliged to readapt themselves to new intellectual circumstances for fear of being ostracized as ‘fellow travellers of fascism’.”[7] The European New Right draws heavily from and builds upon the prewar intellectual tradition of such anti-liberal figures as the Italians Vilfredo Pareto and Roberto Michels, and the Germans Oswald Spengler and Carl Schmitt. Not surprisingly, then, Nouvelle Droite thinkers are sometimes dismissively castigated as “fascist.”[8]

In the view of the European New Right, explains Sunic, “The continuing massification and anomie in modern liberal societies” is a symptom “of the modern refusal to acknowledge man’s innate genetic, historical and national differences as well as his cultural and national particularities — the features that are increasingly being supplanted with a belief that human differences occur only as a result of different cultural environments.”[9]

Real, “organic” democracy can only thrive, contends de Benoist, in a society in which people share a firm sense of historical and spiritual commitment to their community. In such an “organic” polity, the law derives less from abstract and preconceived principles, than from shared values and civil participation.[10] “A people,” argues Benoist, “is not a transitory sum of individuals. It is not a chance aggregate,” but is, instead, the “reunion of inheritors of a specific fraction of human history, who on the basis of the sense of common adherence, develop the will to pursue their own history and given themselves a common destiny.”[11]

New Right thinkers warn of what they regard as the dangers inherent in multi-racial and multi-cultural societies. In their view, explains Sunic,[12]

A large nation coexisting with a small ethnic group within the same body politic, will gradually come to fear that its own historical and national identity will be obliterated by a foreign and alien body unable or unwilling to share the same national, racial, and historical consciousness.

Sharply rejecting the dogma of human equality that currently prevails in liberal democratic societies, these New Right thinkers cite the work of scientists such as Hans Eysenck and Konrad Lorenz.[13] At the same time, the European New Right rejects all determinisms, whether historical, economic or biological. Contends de Benoist: “In the capacity of human being, for man, culture has primacy over nature, history has primacy over biology. Man becomes by creating from what he already is. He is the creator himself.”[14]

Consistent with its categorical rejection of universalism, the European New Right rejects the social ideology of Christianity. In de Benoist’s view, the Christian impact on Europe has been catastrophic. Christian universalism, he contends, was the “Bolshevism” of antiquity.[15]

In spite of the formidable resistance of an entrenched liberal-Marxist ideology, the impact of the European New Right has been considerable. While its views have so far failed to win mass following, it has had considerable success in eroding the once almost total leftist-liberal intellectual hegemony in Europe, and in restoring a measure of credibility and respect to Europe’s prewar conservative intellectual heritage. In Sunic’s opinion, the merit of the European New Right has been to warn us that “totalitarianism need not necessarily appear under the sign of the swastika or the hammer and sickle,” and to “draw our attention” to the defects of contemporary liberal (and communist) societies.[16]

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Iron Curtain (perhaps most dramatically symbolized by the tearing down of the Berlin wall), the end of USA-USSR Cold War rivalry, as well as mounting political, economic and ethnic problems in Europe, a new age has dawned across the continent — an era not only of new problems and danger, but also of new opportunities. In this new age, the struggle of the European New Right takes on enormously greater relevance and importance.

One evening in June 1993, this writer had the opportunity to meet at length with Alain de Benoist in his Paris office. Amid a prodigious clutter of accumulated books, journals, and pamphlets, this prolific philosopher and influential intellectual “agitator” provided insights and observations in reply to a series of questions. (Our meeting had been arranged by Professor Sunic, who sat in on the discussion.)

* * * * *

Q: Let me first ask you how it happened that you became, in effect, the founder of a new intellectual movement. Exactly how did this come about?

B: I did not set out to do this. In 1968, when I was 25 years old, I had the idea of creating a new journal — a more or less academic or, better yet, a theoretical journal, which was given the name Nouvelle Ecole [“New School”]. At first it was not even printed, merely photocopied in a very primitive way. Still, it achieved a certain success, and after a while some friends wanted to try to organize the readership into a cultural association. So that was the beginning. This association later took the name of GRECE. I was not involved in actually founding GRECE, because I am not so much a man of organizations or movements, even cultural. I’m more what you might call a “closet intellectual.” Since that beginning more than 25 years ago, there have been many conferences, colloquia, books, booklets, papers, and journals. This movement has never been directly connected with politics; rather it has been cultural, philosophical, and theoretical. Of course, we are interested in politics, but, like all those who see themselves as intellectuals, only as spectators.

Q: What do see as the future of the movement? Do you see any particular end in view?

B: No, I have no intention of changing myself or to change what I do. But your question is, what is the destiny of ideas. Oh, sometimes it’s nothing at all, but you never know. It’s impossible to know. What you can say is that in world history, especially in the recent world history, in my opinion, there can be no political revolution, or even a major political event, if there had not already occurred some kind of change in the minds of the people. So I believe that the cultural revolution comes first, and the political revolution comes after that. But that does not mean that when you make something cultural, it is because you want, in the end, to make something political. This is not done by the same people, you see. If I can give an example, the French Revolution probably would not have been possible without the work of the Enlightenment philosophers. Yet, it was not these philosophers who actually made the revolution. Quite probably they had no idea of that possibility. But it came. So it’s very hard to know the destiny of what you do. I do it because I like what I do, and because I am interested in ideas and the history of ideas. I am not a utilitarian, so I don’t care to know if it is useful or useless; this is not my concern.

Q: Have you seen your ideas change, or have they remained the same?

B: They are always undergoing change. When we started this school of thought or trend, we had no literal catechism. It was not dogma, but rather it was a mixture of conviction and empiricism. So we have changed on some points. Some of the ideas we have developed have revealed themselves to be not very good, or perhaps what might be called “dead ends.”

Q: Can you give an example of a “dead end?”

B: Yes. For example, 20 or 25 years ago I was much more of a positivist than I am today. I remember that I devoted an issue of Nouvelle Ecole to the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, for example. And there appeared plenty of things against such strange people as Martin Heidegger and so on. But 20 years later I devoted an issue of Nouvelle Ecole to Heidegger, one that was very favorable to his philosophy.17 This is, of course, just one example. That doesn’t mean that we have changed everything; that would be stupid, of course. But it’s a living school, like a living organism. You have to retain something and to work deeper on those things, but some things you have to abandon because they are simply false. Well, we don’t want to repeat variations around the same theme year after year.

Q: How would you assess the significance of the Nouvelle Droite?

B: Well, first I have to spell out my concerns with some words — the very name: the New Right. I don’t like it for several reasons. First, you should know that we did not invent this name. It was given to us. About ten years after the first appearance of journals such as Nouvelle Ecole and Eléments, there was a very large-scale mass media campaign in which the expression, “The New Right,” was produced by people who were quite outsiders from our circle. We attempted to change it. We tried to say that it’s not “The New Right” but, “A New Culture.” Yet “new culture” is not a very clear term. And, in our modern society, when you have been given a wrong label, it just sticks.

I don’t like this term because, first of all, it gives us a very political image, because “right” is a political term. Therefore, when you speak about “the New Right,” the people who do know nothing about it immediately believe it is some kind of political party. Of course, it is not. We are a theoretical and cultural movement.
At the same time, there is something that is clearly political — particularly in America — with this “New Right” name. Even though it is in different countries, people thus start to believe that this is the same thing. Based on everything I know about it, the so-called New Right in America is completely different from ours. I don’t see even a single point with which I could agree with this so-called New Right. Unfortunately, the name we now have gives rise to many misunderstandings.

While I cannot say that, after these many years, the [European] New Right is accepted everywhere — that is obvious — I can say that, in ever wider circles, it is accepted in France as a part of the cultural-political landscape. Debate and discussion here during the last two decades could not be thought of without the contribution of the New Right. Moreover, it is because the New Right has taken up particular themes that particular debates have taken place at all. I refer, for example, to discussions about the Indo-European legacy in Europe, the Conservative Revolution in Germany, about polytheism and monotheism, or about I.Q. — heredity or environment (which is partly a rather false dichotomy), participatory democracy, federalism and communitarian ideas, criticism of the market ideology, and so forth. Well, we were involved in all these issues. As a result, I think, the situation in France today is a bit different.

When the New Right first appeared in France in 1968, the times were completely different. For me, the ideology of the extreme left was a kind of model or standard. Marxism, Freudianism and so on, were everywhere. In the years since then, all of those “ideological churches” have fallen apart. Very few people in France today would describe themselves as Marxists. Jean-Paul Sartre, a very famous philosopher, died [in 1980] without any particular ideological legacy. The landscape had already completely changed. I would say that there are no longer are any ready-made ideas. All of the grand ideologies or ideological characters have more or less disappeared. More and more the intellectuals have to look for something new; something original and beyond the ready-made solutions of the past.

We must accept, first of all, the fact that we are out of the post-World War II period, and that we have entered a new world epoch — that there are new frontiers, both in political and ideological terms. And we don’t want to impeach people simply because they come from different ideological starting points. So it is clear that the times have changed. And always when the times are changing, some people want to keep things as they were. Opposition to the New Right is often “wet” or undogmatic, which means more liberty for everyone. I mean, for example, that there are people in the leftist circles who are willing to discuss issues with me, or to be published in Krisis, the journal I started in 1988. (Of course, there are other leftists who absolutely refuse to do so).18

In the last several years, the New Right has produced numerous articles rejecting the ideal of the economy as the destiny of society and criticizing alike conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism — in short, all of the “productivistic” ideologies that see earning money and possessing wealth as the key to human meaning and happiness. All these ideologies fail to confront the main issue of individual and collective meaning: What are we doing here on earth? So we have published numerous books and articles against consumerism, the commodity-driven life, or the idéologie de la marchandise. Of course, such themes are more or less a bridge between people coming from the Right and coming from the Left. So you have also the new phenomenon of the “Greens,” which, again, is a bit different in France and America. For example, we have in France a “green” ecology movement — a political party, in fact — that describes itself as neither Right or Left.

Thus we have today in Europe numerous new political parties — ecological, cultural identity and region-oriented. While these are, of course, different options, each of them goes beyond the idea of Right versus Left. Each reflects the consequences of the decay of the traditional nation-state. Each is trying to find, beyond individualism, some kind of community. While each has a different base, of course, there is also a common idea, because we can no longer continue to live in an age of narcissism, consumerism, individualism, and utilitarianism.

Q: What would you say is the political importance today of the so-called New Right? Does it have any direct or tangible political significance?

B: No, I could not say that. I know people in probably every political party in France, ranging from the Front National to the Communist Party. The New Right does not have a direct influence. The influence that the New Right has had is clearly in terms of the theoretical and cultural. The discussions we have generated have had an impact on the new social-political movements. But you know, it is very difficult even to try to isolate these influences. Most of the time, I think, the ideas go underground. Nietzsche once said that ideas come “sur des pattes de colombe” — on the feet of a dove.

All the same, one can tell that there is currently some kind of influence by us on the new social or political movements in Europe, such as the identity parties, the regional parties, and the Green parties. Many of these people read what we produce, but it is hard to say just what they do with it. You never know not only just what influences your ideas have, but what becomes of ideas between their origin and their manifestation [in action]; they are always twisted. Even when you have people who say, “I agree with you, I like what you do,” the use they make of your ideas is, of course, sometimes not exactly what you had in mind.

Q: Can you give an example of where you feel the ideas of the movement have been misused? Does this bother you?

B: In a way. Yes. I could say the Le Pen movement [of the French Front National]. This doesn’t mean that the Le Pen movement grew primarily from New Right ideas, but it is clear that when the New Right spoke about the necessity of retaining collective identity, for example, this had an impact. So it might be confused a bit with quite a different philosophy, which is more xenophobic against immigrants, and so on. But this is not the position of the New Right. Our national identity is not in danger because of the identity of others. We say, instead, “Here we are. We have to fight together against the people who are against any form of any identity.” You see what I mean? Criticizing uncontrolled immigration doesn’t mean criticizing immigrants.

Q: So it is not so much a question of one identity in conflict with another, but a more fundamental question of whether it is possible to have any kind of identity?

B: Yes, I think it is possible to make a coalition of all kinds of people who want to retain identity against a world trend that dissolves every form of identity, through technology, the economy, a uniform way of life and consumerism around the world. People such as Le Pen say that, either way, we are losing our identity because of the immigrants. I believe that we are not losing our identity because of the immigrants. We have already lost our identity, and it is because we have already lost it that we cannot face the problem of immigrants. You see, that is quite a great difference of views.

Q: Isn’t this idea of forming a coalition a philosophical one? In reality, doesn’t the nation-state demand that one have citizenship and through this one is granted an identity? If you do away with the nation-state, your idea is possible, but is it possible within the nation-state? Doesn’t the nation-state require a competition or conflict between identities?

B: I think that the nation-state is slowly disappearing. It exists, of course, formally — I don’t want to say that France or Germany or Spain is going to disappear. But it is it not the same kind of society. First, you can see that every Western society lives in more or less the same way, whether it is a republic, a democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and so on. Second, we have unification through the media, television, and consumerism; so that’s the same way of life. After that you have the building of the so-called European Community or European Union. So the nation-state is slowly disappearing. This process is very complex, of course, because the nation-state retains authority in many fields. And sometimes it is good that it retains some authority. Still, it is clear to us that, to use a popular expression, the nation-state is too big for the little problems, and too little for the big problems.

Q: Are you saying that the nation-state is obsolete as a basis for responding to problems and for creating identity. Are you saying that it cannot exist in a healthy form?

B: You can’t retain a commonplace or, vulgar — as it were — attitude, or a mere identity on paper. It is necessary to really live organically, not in some theater. Thus, in France today, we need more small-scale organic units and regions. Historically, you must not forget, France is the very model of the nation-state. And the French nation-state was organized first through the kings, and then through Revolution [1789-1792], that is, through Jacobinism. (Of course this process existed before the Revolution; de Toqueville saw this very clearly.)

French unity was made on the ruins of the local traditions of local languages. In France today you have only one official language: French. In fact, though, eight different languages are still spoken, even if not by very many people, including Corsican, Flemish, German, Basque, and Breton.

Q: Are you saying that the idea of the nation-state today is an idea of decadence? What is the source of this decadence? Is it the nation-state itself?

B: No. I think the nation-state is just a by-product. You can have the same decadence in countries that are supposed to be more federal, such as the United States. It is not just a matter of the nation-state of the French model. I think that the decay began very early, quite probably at the end of the Middle Ages or even earlier. Of course you can always go back to some earlier roots. But it is the birth of modernity. Modernity was also the beginning of individualism; the rejection of traditions; the ideology of progress; the idea that tomorrow will be better than yesterday just because it is tomorrow; that is, something that is new is better just because it is new; and then the ideal of a finalized history; that all humankind is doomed to go in the same direction.

Along with this is the theory of “steps”: that some people are a bit advanced while others are a bit late, so that the people who are advanced have to help those who are not. The “backward” people are supposed to be “lifted up” in order to arrive at the same step. This is the Rostows’ theory of “development.”

With this comes an ever more materialistic attitude, with the goal of all people becoming affluent. This in turn means failure to build a socially organic relationship, of losing the more natural links between people, and mass anonymity, with everyone in the big cities, where nobody helps anybody; where you have to go back in your home to know the world, because the world comes through the TV. So this is the situation of decay. Political, economic and technological forces try to make a “One World” today in much the same way that the French state was built on the ruins of the local regional cultures. This “One World” civilization is being built on the ruins of the local peoples’ cultures. So it is that, in the wake of the fall of Communism, the so-called “Free World” realizes this, and that it is not so “free” after all. We seemed free when compared to the Communist system, but with the disappearance of that system, we no longer have a basis by which to compare ourselves.

In addition, to be “free” can mean different things: to be free for doing something, for instance, is quite different than to be free not to do something.

Q: In your writings you have mentioned that it is important to have an enemy. Were you implying that with the fall of Communism, because there is no longer a clear enemy, there can be no clear identity?

B: Not exactly. It’s clear that you can have an identity without an enemy; but you cannot have an identity without somebody else having another identity. That doesn’t mean that the others are your enemies, but the fact of the otherness can become in certain circumstances, either an enemy or an ally. I mean that if we are all alike — that we if there is just “One World” — we no longer have any identity because we are no longer able to differentiate ourselves from others. So the idea of identity is not directly connected to an enemy; the idea of an enemy is connected with the collective independence; that is, collective liberty.

There are many definitions of “the enemy,” of course. Traditionally, the enemy is a people that makes war against you. But today’s wars are not always armed conflicts. There can be cultural wars or economic wars, which are conducted by people who say they are your friends. You could say that a basic definition of the enemy is any force that threatens or curtails your liberty. Each nation must define this for itself. What is a good basis for determining this today? I think this must be done on the level of Europe itself, because the nation-states are too small for this. When Soviet Communism disappeared, it seemed to give way to a worldwide wave of liberalism. In the view of some, it means the “end of history.” I do not believe that history is finished. I believe that history is just at the point of a new beginning.

We have to organize the world, not on the basis of a “One World” logic, but in very large zones or areas, each more or less “self-centered” or self-sufficient. The United States has already understood this, I think, in creating a free trade zone with Canada and Mexico. Japan already has zones of influence in Southeast Asia. Here in Europe we must have our own way of life, which is not the way of life of the Japanese or the Americans, but is rather the European ways of life. I don’t think that these ways of life have to be hostile towards others. Hopefully not. But it has to be aggressive against those who intend to keep Europeans from living their our own way of life.

Q: Does Europe have the strength or the ability to resist such forces?

B: The ability, yes. But the will? In today’s world, you first of all have to resist from both an economic and a cultural point of view. By cultural I mean very popular mass media and its powers. Today, if you turn on your radio in France, nine times out of ten you will hear American music. In America, when you turn on your radio you will hear only American music. This problem, which is also true for the cinema, is a kind of monopoly; culture always from the same source, and so consistent. You may ask if it is possible to resist this kind of invasion. Considering the enormous budgets of these American films, to counter this we may have to act together, rather than in a single country.

Now I am not suggesting that in France we should hear only French music. This would be ridiculous. We have to be open to others. The problem is that there are more countries in the world besides France and America; I would also enjoy hearing other varieties as well. I am not for a closed society. I would be very malheureux — unhappy — to get only French films, French sounds. I very much enjoy foreign products. But I wonder why we do not see Danish, Spanish, Russian or Dutch cultural products in France, though those countries are quite close by. Instead we always have the same American imports. Sometimes they are good, but most of the time I would say that they are not. So what happens, for example, when the Japanese and the French, the people in South Africa and the villagers in Kansas, all receive the same Rambo message? Is that good for civilization or not? This is the question: the quality of the product.

Q: I have heard that in France one week is set aside each year when American films cannot be shown. Is that true?

B: No, you are referring to something quite different: by law in France, TV channels cannot broadcast too many films on Saturday night. This law is supposed to help the French film industry, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of the films. This is a situation peculiar to France, even though we still have a good French film industry, which is greatly appreciated in other European countries. This means that television has not entirely killed the French cinema. The situation is quite different in Italy and Germany, which is very dramatic when you consider the former quality of the Italian or German films.

In another way, though, I think that “popular [mass] culture” in France is probably worse than in Italy, Spain, Germany, or other lands. I travel a great deal. I think that there is an Italian people, a German people, and that even with many foreign films, they are not affected in the same way as the French. When you are in Germany, or Italy, or Spain, or England, people in each country live a bit differently.

This is not so true in France, I think. The main reason is that so many more people live in large cities. Eighty-five per cent of the French people live in the main cities now. So the French countryside is a desert, a social desert.

Q: Are you saying then that France is more vulnerable to this cultural invasion from America then, for example, Italy or Germany?

B: I understand very well the market decision of the Disney company people to locate “Eurodisney” in France (even though this has proven to be a financial failure). The threat is that today every decision is a market decision. This is Americanism. A country has a right to make a decision that is not a market decision, and even against the market, because the laws of the market are not the laws of life.

Q: Although you have already indicated that this is not your primary concern, let me now go back for a moment to a question of practical politics. I want to know your ideas about how to strengthen resistance in this cultural war. What can be done that is not now being done?

B: In history you have always two kinds of factors. The first is the conscious will of the people to do something. I must say that in Europe this will is very weak today, and lacking in intensity. The second factor is that things happen outside of the will of anybody. Consider the fall of the Berlin Wall. Of course, the Russians had the will to say “Okay, you can tear it down now.” But in Germany, until that moment, nobody was really willing to tear down the wall. Some Germans hoped to see it come down, and others said that maybe after five, ten or 15 years a confederation [of the two German states] would arise. So if you consider the trend throughout Europe, it is more or less the same: the people and their governments talk and talk, and do nothing! The war in the former Yugoslavia is the best example of this I see.

A principle of conflicting interests is also involved here. Most European governments want to conclude a free trade agreement, based on the United States model. It is a fact, of course, that the interests of Europe, America, and Japan are no longer convergent. But there are common interests of each with regard to the Third World countries, where the people are paid so low that they can produce everything for almost nothing. If it is possible to manufacture a pair of shoes in the Third World for one franc, it is done. As a result, we now have all the problems of unemployment here. Experts predict that within two years there will be 24 million jobless people in the countries of the European Community. Never in the entire world history of capitalism have we seen that. In such a situation you cannot calmly sit in your chair and say, “Well, let’s wait a bit more.” You have to react, because the need to deal with such a situation becomes so great. Each nation must protect its own interests. Free trade agreements must be limited. It is the same, of course, for America, which protects its own industries while denying this same right to Europe.

I think that these forces will more likely produce a world of large-scale competing units than one in which each nation is preserved. I do not think this trend reflects the will of the people. I mean that the process seems to be going on as a result of certain factors that have nothing to do with what people want.

Q: This process of forming these new and larger entities is not just a natural accident of history. Doesn’t it require conscious organization of some kind? Or do you think it is a sort of natural historical development?

B: I don’t believe there is much natural development in history. You have to will something, and yet, will alone is not sufficient, of course. You must have the necessary pre-conditions; so it is an equilibrium between what is wanted and what is possible. Politics is, as the saying goes, “the realm of what is possible,” that is, between what is a necessity and what is a possibility. So, it is not natural. But of course, when you have a certain situation like today, you can predict that things are likely to take this or that direction. Change can also be reversed, of course.

For example, the main characteristic of the current state of world politics is that, in the minds of most politicians, that Berlin Wall has still not fallen. They still analyze the world on the basis of former conceptions, former ideas, because that view worked in the past. We have a new state of the world, but we haven’t yet adapted to it. So we continue to reason on the basis of the world order created in 1945 — as if that political, economic and cultural order will last forever. So, I think that while world conditions have begun to change, our mind-set and perceptions have not changed.

Q: Some analysts predict the overthrow of an obsolete “political class.” Do you see a new awareness regarding the need to replace the ruling class?

B: One thing that is quite new in the present period is this: in former times, when the people disagreed massively with the ruling powers, they would overthrow them, and there would be an explosion. Today, though, in the Western world we are in a period not of social or political explosion, but more in an epoch of implosion. The people disagree with the political class, but they do not try to overthrow it; they don’t try to change the regime. They merely turn away.

So this is a time of retreat, of flight, of withdrawal. People try to live and organize their own lives. They don’t participate in elections. That’s why you see so many new self-assertive social movements, which we in France sometimes call the “new tribes.” This term often has a pejorative meaning, but in general there is something positive here.

Before the emergence of the nation-state, people were, of course, organized into tribes. Tribes are now returning in the name of communities, or something akin to that. In France we do not have this phenomenon on the political level to the degree that it has been occurring in Italy, notably with the regionalist Lega Nord. Here in France, what you can see is that fewer people are voting. Now more than one-third of the electorate has stopped going to the polls. (The exception is presidential elections, because these are more personalized.) And another third of the electorate votes for non-conformist parties — the ecologists, Front National, regionalists, and so on — while only one-third still votes for the older, “classical” parties.

A problem in France is that our representative system provides no legal place for opposition political forces. Today we have a more or less conservative majority, which got 40 percent of the vote in the general election. But with 40 percent of the vote, they gained more than 80 percent of the parliament seats. The Front National, with three million votes, got zero seats, and the ecologists, with two million votes, likewise got zero seats. When you arrive at a point of such distortion, you realize that the political system no longer works. Of course, this is one major reason why people don’t bother to vote anymore. Why go to vote when you are sure that you will get no say at all?

Q: It appears to be very much the same in the United States.

B: For me, as a European observer, the American two major-party system always makes it difficult for any third party to arise. It is very strange. In Europe we have evolved a broader spectrum of options, I think. While it is sometimes difficult even for Americans to see any real difference between the Republican and Democratic parties, for me it is almost impossible. Each is really interested only in more business and economic efficiency — frankly, I don’t see any difference. For me it is a one-party system with two different factions.

Q. So you see this American monopoly or hegemony as the key problem? Are you implying that it is not so much the contact as such, which may have some good elements, but mainly that there is no choice?

B: These are two different problems. Of course, there is the problem of monopoly — that’s clear — but if the products were quite good — after all I like quality, too, even if it comes from the outside. The Romans took everything from classical Greece and it was not so bad, after all.

I enjoy visiting the United States, because it is always very interesting. Although I am very critical, of course, of the content of capitalist values, there are some things in America that I like very much: everything works much better than here in Europe! But is efficiency an ideal? And what price do you have to pay for this efficiency? You can be rich, but also have an empty life. Another problem, I think, is that American society — for us, America is more a society than a nation or a people — is to a large extent a product of its Puritan origins. This idea that all people are born free and equal, that America is a new promised land, with people quoting the Bible, can be seen in the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

Q: Why don’t you consider America a nation?

B: It’s a special kind of nation, if you will. There is a very strong American patriotism, of course — and we have seen many examples of that in history. But because it is more a mixture of such different cultural and ethnic stocks, the United States of America is not what we in Europe regard as a traditional nation.

* * * * *

Throughout our conversation, de Benoist’s remarks left me with a certain ambivalence. He was identifying my own nation as the enemy of the very civilization from which America derived. Even when he tried to re-assure me that there was nothing personal in his critique of American culture, it was clear that he was marking out a battleground of antagonistic ideas. Those who value the cultural heritage of Europe would have to look beyond day-to-day political and economic disputes between the European Community and the United States to understand that much more is at stake here. Our discussion had touched on some of most critical issues of social identity and organization, with profound implications for cultural and collective survival.

Notes:

1. Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 30.
2. Krisis, 5 impasse Carrière-Mainguet, 75011 Paris, France.
3. GRECE is an acronym of “Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne. (“Research and Study Group for European Civilization.”). Address: GRECE, B.P. 300, 75 265 Paris Cedex 06, France. Established in May 1968, GRECE was formally organized in January 1969. It characterizes itself as “an association of thought with intellectual vocation.” Its avowed goals, writes Sunic (p. 12), “are to establish an association of thinkers and erudites sharing the same ideals, as well as organize its membership into the form of an organic and spiritual working community.” The name is not accidental. It suggests the French name for Greece — “Grèce” — calling to mind Europe’s Hellenic and pre-Christian cultural heritage.
4. Against Democracy and Equality (196 + xii pages), by Tomislav Sunic, with a preface by Paul Gottfried, was published by Peter Lang of New York in 1990.
5. See the preface by P. Gottfried in T. Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality (1990), p. ix.
6. T. Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality (1990), pp. 19, 20.
7. T. Sunic (1990), p. 7
8. Sunic comments (p. 99) that “The New Right contends that due to the legacy of fascism, many theories critical of egalitarianism have not received adequate attention on the grounds of their alleged ‘anti-democratic character’.”
9. T. Sunic (1990), pp. 104-105.
10. Sunic writes (p. 120): “Faced with immense wealth which surrounds him, a deracinated and atomized individual is henceforth unable to rid himself of the fear of economic insecurity, irrespective of the degree his guaranteed political and legal equality … . Now, in a society which had broken those organic and hierarchical ties and supplanted them with the anonymous market, man belongs nowhere.”
11. Quoted in: T. Sunic (1990), p. 107; In Benoist’s view, “People exist, but a man by himself, the abstract man, the universal, that type of man does not exist.” Moreover, contends Benoist, man acquires his full rights only as a citizen within his own community and by adhering to his cultural memory. (T. Sunic, p. 107); De Benoist also asserts that man can define his liberty and his individual rights only as long as he is not divorced from his culture, environment, and temporal heritage. (T. Sunic, p. 111.)
12. T. Sunic (1990), p. 103.
13. T. Sunic, pp. 103-105; From the perspective of the New Right, observes Sunic (p. 107), “Culture and history are the ‘identity card’ of each people. Once the period of the assimilation or integration begins to occur a people will be threatened by extinction — extinction that according to Benoist does not necessarily have to be carried out by physical force or by absorption into a stronger and larger national unity, but very often, as in the case today, by the voluntary and involuntary adoption of the Western Eurocentric or “Americano-centric” liberal model… . To counter this Westernization of nations, the New Right … opposes all univer-salisms.”
14. Quoted in: T. Sunic (1990), pp. 105, 106, 174 (n. 41).
15. T. Sunic (1990), pp. 65-70, 72.
16. T. Sunic (1990), pp. 153, 155-156.
17. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is one of this century’s most important philosophers. In several major works — especially Sein und Zeit [“Being and Time”] (1927) — he grappled with the spiritual basis of human experience, mounting a fundamental attack on what he termed “nihilistic rationalism,” which he saw as a product of an ever-advancing and dehumanizing technology. Because of his probing of the metaphysical issues of human existence, Heidegger is regarded as a major shaper of “post-modernism,” with its probing of the unconscious meaning and nature of human experience.
    Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist party from 1933 to 1945, while at the same time highly critical of National Socialist philosophy. The extent of his sympathy and support for the Hitler regime has been a subject of much debate.
18. In a much-discussed “Call to Vigilance” issued last summer, 40 French and Italian intellectuals warned of the growing acceptance of “right wing” views, particularly in European intellectual life. (Le Monde, July 13, 1993.) It was signed by such prominent figures as the “deconstructionist” Jacques Derrida. While it did not name names, this call was clearly aimed, at least in large part, at Alain de Benoist and the European New Right. It asserted the existence of a virtual conspiracy — “the extreme right’s current strategy of legitimation” — in which “the alleged resurgence of ideas concerning the nation and cultural identity” are promoted as a means of uniting the left and the right. “This strategy,” contend the signers, “also feeds on the latest fashionable theory that denounces anti-racism as both ‘outmoded’ and dangerous.” Many leftist intellectuals, it should be noted, publicly opposed this “Call to Vigilance,” regarding it as a new kind of “McCarthyism,” and ultimately this summer campaign proved utterly ineffectual.

 

——————–

De Benoist, Alain. “The ‘European New Right’: Defining and Defending Europe’s Heritage – An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Ian. B. Warren. The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 14, No. 2 (March-April 1994), pp. 28-37. Published online here: <http://ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n2p28_Warren.html >.

Note: Another notable interview with Alain de Benoist was made by the organization American Renaissance, titled “We Are at the End of Something”. Readers should also note that another brief overview of the European New Right was made by Mark Wegierski in his essay “The New Right in Europe.”

 

Advertisements

New Right in Europe – Wegierski

The New Right in Europe

By Mark Wegierski

 

The European New Right (ENR) presents itself as a contradictory phenomenon. While many of its arguments sound radical and original, they owe a great deal to traditional European thought — especially Catholic organicism. Although the ENR has rejected the far Right, some questionable links remain. Despite this, it may become the ideology of choice for those intellectuals still opposed to capitalism — a possible place for that intellectually-honest part of the Left attempting to come to terms both with the collapse of “really existing socialism” and a triumphant Western consumerist society predicated on managerial-therapeutic capitalism.

The ENR cannot be understood independently of its history. As Marco Tarchi, a leader of the Italian New Right put it: “What we must do today is to illuminate the fundamental novelty of the New Right, to put the emphasis on the term ‘new’ and no longer on the term ‘Right.’ Otherwise we will still be clinging to the heritage of the decrepit and worm-eaten currents of thought of the 1950s and 1960s which, in the face of all opposition, are still churning out the same old slogans with their whole perception of reality built around bygone political divisions. The desire to restore chauvinistic nationalisms is part of this archaic way of thinking. . . . It is up to us, to our generation, definitively to surpass these outworn ideas.”[1]

The ENR has made a major effort to break with its far Right roots. In this sense, it is misleading to call a tendency strongly opposed both to Anglo-American conservatism (with its emphasis on bourgeois individualism, capitalism, and property rights) and traditional Continental conservatism (with its emphasis on monarchy and Church) “right-wing.” The conventional notion of “right-wing” in the Anglo-American context is so different from what the ENR represents that it is almost useless when it comes to describing the latter phenomenon.

The ENR came into being in the 1960s to provide a satisfactory analysis of what ails the West and the world, and to identity possible brakes for the ineluctable logic of “progress.” It saw as the primary feature of late modernity the tendency to shatter religious, cultural, and national traditions stretching back hundreds or even thousands of years, and to replace them with banal victimologies. It is explicitly opposed to American hegemony and, in Britain, it identities with the Celtic fringe. The ENR claims that England had diverged from the continent in its Calvinism, capitalism and Whiggery, and that America then diverged still further. European intellectual lite — Left, Right, and Center, particularly in France — revolves around a knee-jerk anti-Americanism. The ENR is no exception, and has developed a Left-sounding critique of American intervention in Vietnam and around the globe, American cultural imperialism in France, the problems of poverty and homelessness in America, the Calvinistic messianism and puritanism of the US, and so forth.[2]

The ENR has not yet worked out a precise genealogy of what it views as the Anglo-American deviation, though the outcome of the English Civil War and the later struggles which led to the exclusion of the Stuarts from the English and Scottish thrones have played a large part in determining the Anglo-American trajectory. Along with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism is also central to the ENR. Here “capitalism” is seen as the encroaching system of US-based media/corporate oligarchy: gross materialism and the homo ceconomicus, or the homunculus of Nietzsche’s Last Man. It also implies the whole burgeoning world of technology and its attempt to manipulate human and physical nature. Through anti-capitalism, the ENR links with the Left and various ecological movements. According to Perspectives, a leading ENR organ: “The collapse of communism is not only a political victory for the American New World Order but a moral triumph for the American Way of Life. We can all now look forward to a future of unbridled consumption, in which we will all be equal and free to buy the same things. However, there are those in Europe who still value the roofed diversity of its peoples, and all the qualities which make us more than mere units of consumption. These people actually oppose the liberal-capitalist system. They want an organically rooted society instead of more Disneylands, and they flout accepted political convention by talking about transcending the old notions of Left and Right in a new synthesis of radical thought. They are active in fields of culture and metapolitics, waging a war of ideas. They seek a European renaissance. This attachment to identity is an inconvenience to the multinationals, an insult to Ronald McDonald and a direct attack on Coca-Colonization.”[3]

This anti-capitalism is connected with the ENR’s opposition to Calvinism — something it shares with nearly all varieties of Catholic-derived Continental right-wing thought — but also with its opposition to Judeo-Christianity. This radical, anti-traditional aspect of the ENR is also shared by the anti-clerical Lett and Nazism. The ENR engages in biting anti-clerical polemics of an almost Voltairean style. It sees the roots of totalitarianism and persecution in European history as a result of Judeo-Christian values, notably the Old Testament, with its tales of ferocity and retribution. “The body count amassed by the servants of the God of love . . . is now incalculable . . . Had Nicolae Ceaucescu lived a few hundred years ago he would have made a not untypical prince of the Church-on frequent precedent, a saint. . . . The concept of totalitarianism, the evil seed of the Inquisition, Auschwitz and the Gulag, was brought to Europe and forced on it by the followers of Jesus Christ. . . . “[4]

A group calling itself the “Organisation de Defense Juive” violently protested against GRECE on December 9, 1979, claiming that opposition to “Judeo-Christian totalitarianism” was disguised anti-Semitism. (They seemed to forget that the criticism of Christianity as the seed of Auschwitz is common among Jewish and Left historians). GRECE’s response to these accusations was unequivocal: “Jewish monotheism became truly totalitarian only when it ceased to be Jewish and claimed to submit people who held different religious views to the law of a single God. . . . The children of Athens and of Jerusalem, the pagan and Jewish victims of religious intolerance, suffered as a result of Christian persecutions.”[5] However, this condemnation of Christianity and exculpation of Judaism is disingenuous. The ENR stresses the Near Eastern, alien origins of Christianity, implying that the Jews are also aliens in Europe. The tact that such views were prominent in Nazism contributes to the ENR’s ostracism from mainstream politics.

Although there is a long tradition of criticism of Judeo-Christianity from Voltaire to Nietzsche, the ENR creates problems for traditional conservatives. It is ironic to find laudatory articles on Joseph de Maistre and Nietzsche within a few pages of each other in Elements.[6] For a school ostensibly critical of modernity and its “disenchantment of the world,” these vitriolic attacks against traditional religion may be counterproductive. Clearly not all Christians are like Ceaucescu. It the problem of late modernity is the disappearance of all rooted, truly meaningful, and relatively stable belief-systems, then even from the ENR standpoint any traditional religion, even Christianity, must be better than no religion at all.

The ENR also takes its anti-Christianism further by recycling the most traditional European religion: paganism. This is quite a trick. It may even be dishonest: a ducking of the issue of the ENR’s atheism (a more difficult position to hold for alleged “restorers of the sacred”). What can this mean, thousands of years alter paganism has disappeared? This embrace of paganism may be an attempt to re-evaluate the relation between humanity and nature along Heideggerian lines, while vindicating particularity and locality.

For the ENR the Golden Age is the primordial Indo-European past. This is lifted straight out of German Romanticism and 19th century anthropology. The immediate suspicion is that “Indo-European” is simply a polite substitution for “Aryan.” Allegedly, in this pagan, tribal Indo-European paradise, there were no fratricidal wars between different branches of European peoples, and every member of the tribe lived a meaningful lite in relative economic prosperity. The spatial and temporal boundaries of this world are not precisely drawn — it could in-dude ancient India, Greece, Germanic tribal lite at the time of Tacitus, Slavic tribal lite around the 9th century A.D., and so forth.[7] The ethnographical work of Georges Dumezil, which identified the so-called “frifunctionality” of the Indo-European priest, warrior, and farmer, is often cited. This romanticized past is important because many of the ENR referents, such as paganism, naturalism, particularism, a sort of feminism, and ecology, are predicated on it.

This paganism fits well with Alain de Benoist’s “spherical” concept of time, according to which “(everything is in the instant) . . . the past and future consitute dimensions present in every actual moment. . . . The present actualizes all past moments and prefigures all future ones. To accept the present by joyously assuming the instant is to be able to enjoy all instants at the same time. Past, present, and future are three perspectives, equally actual now, that are given to every moment of historical becoming . . . [this] delivers to him the possibility of connecting with tradition, indeed in a cultural and ethnic sense. Tradition is not the past but is ‘beyond time’; it is ‘permanent’ and ‘within us,’ and it becomes ‘our tradition’ by being reactualized.”[8]

Despite such an elaborate metaphysics, this could be interpreted simply as a call for a return to one’s ethnic and cultural roots — a staple of traditional conservative thought. At any rate, there may be a contradiction in the ENR’s embrace of paganism. Is paganism meant to be a “manly,” “heroic” warrior-creed opposing the weakness of Christianity (allegedly a masochistic “slave-morality”), or a kind of sentimental nature-worship opposed to a savagely inquisitorial Christianity, with its crusades and witch-burnings?

The ENR’s “paganism” entails a naturalism towards mores and sexuality. Unlike still traditionalists, ENR members have a relatively liberated attitude towards sexuality. Thus Benoist had no qualms about giving an interview to Gaie France, which features homoerotic images as well as cultural commentary.[9] ENR members have no desire to impose what they consider the patently unnatural moralism of Judeo-Christianity on sexual relations. However, while relatively more tolerant in principle, they still value strong family life, fecundity, and marriage or relations within one’s own ethnic group. (Their objection to intraethnic liaisons would be that the mixture of ethnic groups diminishes a sense of identity. In a world where every marriage was mixed, cultural identity would disappear). They also criticize Anglo-American moralism and its apparent hypocrisy: ” . . . a video depicting a man and woman having sexual intercourse . . . is liable to confiscation by the [British] state. One graphically depicting teenage girls being disembowelled by razor blades affixed to the lingers of a repulsive ghoul, by contrast, tops the rental figures quite lawfully across the land, goes into tour editions, each more disgusting and genuinely obscene than the last, and is not indeed the most unpleasant revelling in blood and gore to sit lawfully on the video shops’ shelves.”[10] In this, they are closer to a worldly Europe than to a puritanical America obsessed with violence. According to the ENR: “Our ancestral Indo-European culture . . . seems to have enjoyed a healthy natural attitude to processes and parts of the body concerned with the bringing forth of new life, the celebration of pair-bonding love, and the perpetuation of the race.”[11]

In its desire to create a balanced psychology of sexual relations, the ENR seeks to overcome the liabilities of conventional conservative thought: the perception of conservatives as joyless prudes, and the seemingly ridiculous psychology implied in conventional Christianity. It seeks to address “flesh-and-blood men and women,” not saints. Since some of the Left’s greatest gains in the last few decades have been made as a result of their championing sexual freedom and liberation, the ENR seeks to offer its own counter-ethic of sexual joy. The hope is presumably to nourish persons of the type who can, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “make love alter reading Hegel.” This is also related to the desire for the reconciliation of the intellectual and warrior in one person: the reconciliation of vita contemplative and vita activa.

This naturalism leads the ENR to re-evaluate “the feminine” and reject what it sees as Christianity’s denigration of women. The ENR has begun developing a counter-ethic of feminism which, while respecting women and “the feminine,” rejects the US ideologization of gender by politically-correct feminism. These ideas promise to overcome the poisoned atmosphere of sexual relations and the neopuritanism of radical feminism. “In pre-Christian Europe, amongst the Celts and the Norse for example, women, without in any way renouncing their femininity or seeking to be ersatz men, enjoyed essentially equal rights.”[12]

The ENR’s naturalism also leads it to defend the supposedly natural and normative nature of ethnic or kinship links. Thus the ENR departs from traditionalism by emphasizing the small nations and the historical regions of Europe, rather than the large and homogenizing nation-states: “The emergence of the idea of nation-state in the 18th century is a phenomenon arising not from a consciousness of identity, but, on the contrary, from the bourgeoisie’s social and political conception of the state.”[13] Similarly,”. . . the Europe of the big states . . . is not, and never has been, a natural Europe. It is the product of rival imperialisms, of conquests, of aggressive and violent acts, both military and socioeconomic . . . . The real Europe, the natural Europe, is one of numerous small states, numerous national communities, principalities, and free cities which are united and brought together above the level of their differences and divergences by a common civilization, forged over the course of two millennia . . . . It was this natural Europe that the big imperialist states, and their conscripted supporters, destroyed and replaced with their own version. Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia were mainly to blame for this development.”[14]

The ultimate goal is the Europe of a Hundred Flags — a patchwork quilt of colorful, traditional principalities. The ENR does not emphasize national uniformity — the traditional right-wing position — but difference. This is part of the ENR’s overall anti-totalitarian stand. The emphasis is on philosophical pluralism: opposition to the reduction of life to any one variable or force (e.g. the class-struggle, economy, nation, or race), in favor of multiplicity and particularity. This is complemented by an aestheticism, in the tradition of the interwar German “Conservative Revolution” — a visceral reaction of “high taste” to the vulgarized modern world of “rubbish.” ENR publications are filled with finely-rendered reproductions of heroic art from Europe’s long history. The locus is on “romantic realism” — though they are not averse to some modernist painters. This is not only a trank celebration of European art, but also a deliberate attempt to vindicate the heroic aspects of life, for European people deadened by consumerism and Americanization.

In contrast to its emphasis on mythopoeia, the ENR tends toward what Ferraresi calls its scientism: “. . . in a cultural context which privileges science as the highest form of knowledge, one of the stated goals . . . is the propagation of scientific developments which will dissipate the prejudices and ‘taboos’ of the reigning ideology, i.e., egalitarianism and democracy. The ‘hard new’ sciences like anthropology, biology, genetics, ethology, sociobiology, psychology, psychiatry, etc. are thus systematically plundered, and those results are selected that support the notions of heredity, invariance, innateness, the biological determination of social and ethical attitudes . . . . The outcome is a set of savage rules, which are then put forward by right-wing ideologues as ‘laws of nature’.”[15] This scientistic locus was at one time very prominent, e.g., when the ENR sought to integrate the thought of the Vienna Circle and Bertrand Russell. This must be seen as intellectually jejune: it clashes with other proclivities for irrationalism and romanticism.

While the ENR’s “scientific” efforts are questionable, the accusation of lack of compassion is less plausible. Although the ENR unabashedly defends aristocracies or hierarchies, as both “natural” and organic, it also criticizes liberal-capitalist modernity as “soft in ideas, but hard in practice.”[16] The ENR argues that liberal capitalism conceals a crashing harshness behind its soft rhetoric of freedom and equality, a real “war of all against all.”[17] Summarizing his critique of late modernity, Benoist writes: “I am appalled by the remarkable capacity of the majority of people to adapt without complaint to a society which I estimate to be, and I mean what I say, the worst kind of society ever to have existed. The worst, because the most subjected to the tyranny of the economy; the worst, because the least organic and therefore the most inhuman.”[18]

Although some ENR members at one time advocated technocracy, they have now embraced ecology, as one of the most hopeful tendencies on the planet today. The 1993 GRECE colloquium was dedicated to ecology. To the extent that it sets limits not only on the physical exploitation of the planet, but also on the grotesque excesses of consumerism, ecology is seen as a hopeful development. The ENR hopes that ecology will continue to evolve a paradigm seeking to preserve cultural rootedness as well as the physical integrity of nature. Its preferences are for communitarian ecology. The ecological call for sacrifices in consumption would be much more meaningful if they were sacrifices for something more local, tangible, and particular than abstract ecological principles. It would apply to this land, this countryside, this country. Communitarian ecology calls for the careful shepherding of resources and stewardship of nature for the sake of a particular community deriving its sustenance from these resources. This also implies that either all communities will accept such policies, or that particular communities must be capable of repelling possible incursions from other communities refusing to accept this model. Such an ecological program cannot be based on wholesale de-urbanization, but rather on saner and more ecological management.

A central premise of this critique is that late capitalism is not a rational system of resource allocation. Enormous amounts of resources are wasted in advertising to inflame demand for unnecessary products, obsolescence is “built-in” to keep consumption high, etc. The personal and psychological rewards resulting from such a decrease in consumption, for a decrease in quantity will be an increase in the quality of life, the emergence of time for pause and reflection, as well as a sense of participation in and belonging to a genuine, friendlier, and safer community.

A large sector in the ENR subscribes to what they call le Gramscisme de Droite. The ENR (like Gramsci) reverses Marx’s idea of base and superstructure. It believes that changes in the ideological superstructure among the cultural and elite opinion-forming groups determine social change.[19] Gramsci called on intellectuals to change society in a socialist direction. The ENR adopts this approach tot their own programs. This is called metapolitics. The ENR also identifies with the appeal to populism in Gramsci, although it rejects the rest of the Marxist apparatus.

The ENR explicitly repudiates racism and searches for allies in the Third World against the US.[20] Although the ENR is a European phenomenon, it also seeks alliances with Islam, East Asian semi-authoritarian regimes, India; etc. against the Anglo-American world. This is an extension of the idea of pluralism in international politics — a multiplicity of power centers and cultural spheres instead of one militarily, economically, and culturally hegemonic power-center. One hegemonic power severely constricts the choices available to humanity, and moves it along one predetermined path. This fits well with the ENR view of itself as a kind of laboratory of ideas.[21] Thus it is proud of its intellectualism and its eschewing of raw political conflict. Nouvelle Ecole, one of the ENR’s main journals, refuses to endorse political candidates, and is opposed to Le Pen’s National Front. Finally, in terms of tactics, there is clearly the attempt to generate a mystique. ENR figures do not want to be perceived as stodgy, pet-it-bourgeois philistines, but as perceptive critics.

Try as it might, the ENR has not escaped Left-liberal criticism. Many routinely consider its members to be barely-disguised fascists, or part of “the eternal reactionary Right.”[22] The definition of “reactionary” here is peculiarly wrong. Intellectually, the stand “against all totalitarianisms” clearly entails the rejection of the Nazi reductionism of race. However, the ENR has a tendency to dance on the rim of the volcano by including certain politically risque imagery in its publications (e.g., photographs of Hitler in heroic poses) and questionable announcements.[23]

Although the ENR sees itself rooted in the 1968 revolutionary tradition, Pierre-Andre Taguieff has traced its origins to the classical French Right.[24] But to what extent can one be held accountable for positions held decades earlier and now strenuously rejected? Similarly, the ENR cannot be held responsible for the adoption of some of its ideas by groups such as Le Pen’s National Front, or the Anglo-American or German Right.[25]

The tendency to exaggerate in relation to the ENR is typified by Seymour Martin Lipset, who writes: “The best publicized European radical rightist tendency . . . has been the French ‘New Right.’ This movement . . . has, like the intellectual Right of pre-WWI France, focused its criticism on ‘alien’ anti-European forces, foreign immigrants, and radical and liberal forces. Supported by press lord Robert Hersant . . . once an overt anti-Semite and youthful collaborator with the Germans in WWII, the views of the New Right reach wide circles of the population, and may have helped stimulate widespread anti-Semitic violence in 1980.”[26]

Some of the ENR’s dabbling in politics, however, is problematic, although mostly in theory. Thus some ENR members support Zhirinovsky (or similar figures), Serbia, and a putative German-Russian alliance at the expense of most East European countries — all in the name of anti-Americanism.[27] The ENR also runs into problems with traditional religion and nationalism. Roman Catholicism is probably the only remaining serious traditional religious force (of historical duration) in Europe today. However strenuously the ENR rejects it, the similarities of some of its positions to those of traditional Catholic organicism are all too obvious (anti-capitalism, the stress on the social, and attacks on gross materialism and consumerism).[28] It is ironic that the ideas of Rene Geunon, and especially Julius Evola (such as the “political soldier,” considered pagan and terroristic in their implications by some dogmatic liberal critics[29]), are being taken up by a professedly Catholic tendency. As both C. G. Jung and Camille Paglia have indicated, Catholicism was clearly more “pagan” than Protestantism. One of the main Protestant accusations against Roman Catholicism was that it was a disguised paganism (with its worship of Mary and the Saints, its sumptuous churches, and its religious icons and relics). However, “the integralist French Catholic Right . . . considers the New Right as ‘Masonic adepts of the Satanic Revolution against the one true living God’. . . .”[30]

Relations to traditional nation-states are also problematic. To what extent should the regionalization and break-up of nation-states be encouraged? Is this not an invitation to community dissolution? What about countries such as Poland that will clearly not let go of their national identity? What about the threat of a Greater German),, perhaps lurking behind this proposed “regionalization,” possibly involving the reconstruction of a German-dominated East Prussia, Silesia, and Western Pomerania, as well as the weakening (or disintegration) of France by the secessions of Brittany, Provence, Normandy, etc.? What about relations with the US? Does the ENR realize that some of its most cherished ideas, i.e. ecology and even neopaganism, are very popular in the US, especially in California? Does it intend to expand its activities to the US, presumably among the libertarian Left or ecological and New Age circles?

The ENR has an extremely simplistic vision of the US — reducing it to Disneyland, Coca-Cola, etc. Clearly the US is more than New York, L.A., and San Francisco, more than “rap, crack et Big Mac.” It is a huge country of diverse regions and towns. Is the ENR more critical of “narrow-minded small–town America” (which American conservatives consider “the heartland”), or “big-city America” (which most American conservatives consider nightmarish, but Left-liberals defend as centers of progress)? Is it America’s Puritanism (of which little seems to be left in actual family mores), or a burgeoning decadence which is their target? At any rate, the center of anti-Americanism today is the US itself. Considering the fact that the US is being consumed by self-hatred and anti-Americanism, the ENR will have to rethink its position vis a vis the moral residues of contemporary American society. Because of the ENR’s violent anti-Americanism, it has hardly any relations with American paleoconservatives. The emphasis on federalism, cultural particularity and local autonomy, however, may pave the way for a new dialogue.

Two problems with ENR theory are rather obvious. First, there is the tension between elitism and populism. On the one hand, it identifies with the Olympian elitism of figures such as Nietzsche and Evola, harboring contempt for the masses. On the other, it wants to embrace an “organic democracy” rooted in Herder, German romanticism, the German Conservative Revolution and, to a certain extent, Carl Schmitt. Second, there is its over-reliance on the ancient Greek heritage, as reflected in the name of one of its main groups, GRECE. Even a superficial reading of Nietzsche betrays his condemnation of the influence of the Greek heritage in the development of Europe. Although “the gifts of the Greeks” can be considered multivalent, clearly traditions of both political democracy and science had their origins in Athens. Is it legitimate to trace the errors of contemporary Europe only to the Judeo-Christian heritage? Should not the classical heritage also come in for some careful scrutiny?

At any rate, the obsessive search for the origins of present European decline leads the ENR astray. One of the most obvious reasons for its adoption of a “metapolitical” position may be due to the fact that ideas such as neopaganism are difficult to relate to today’s sociopolitical realities. Consequently, the ENR is often accused of being a typical French salon phenomenon focused on German thinkers, in line with the old WWII “collaborationist” tradition (the ENR has sought to rehabilitate some of those figures), practising “Biedermaier” politics.

It is all too easy to overemphasize the ENR’s radicalism. In some sense it may be nothing more than an esoteric version of de Gaulle’s political program and an expression of Gallicism, with all of its cultural pride, joie-de-vivre, intellectual flashiness, and unabashed eroticism. After all, de Gaulle’s political genius has been consistently underestimated in the Anglo-American world. An anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, and anti-American (he led the Free French, dealt with Communist terror after the Liberation, and continued to oppose les deux hegemonies to the end of his life); a compassionate but strong nationalist, as well as a decolonizer; a champion of the unity of a “Europe of fatherlands” full of respect for tradition and the Catholic Church, while suspicious of progressivism, liberalism, and democracy, he is someone with whom the ENR could easily identity.

The ENR’s hopes for the future can be summarized as follows: 1) A return to meaningful politics (aiming at a restoration of the public sphere) against an apolitical, juridically-determined, economically-focused liberalism and formally egalitarian democracy. This politics would have to be both erotic and aesthetic, and predicated on “organic democracy.” 2) A restoration of community spirit. The ENR would like to see the dissolution of the US into regional and ethnic states. It prefigures a genuinely pluralistic global framework in opposition to American liberal universalism. (Pluralism of cultures across the planet requires some exclusivity of cultures in given areas and regions). 3) A braking of tendencies towards consumerism, commodification, commodity-fetishism, consumer-tribes, technologization, etc., by means of a “rooted radicalism” and “communitarian ecology.”

Following the recent victory in Italy of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, today a more dynamic Right seems to have some chance of succeeding in Europe. Although Berlusconi’s victory has little to do with the ENR, the Northern League’s regionalism is fully in line with ENR ideas, while the softening of doctrinaire positions which made possible the victory of the National Alliance in the South may also have something to do with ENR influence. Yet Berlusconi and many sectors of the conventional Right have placed a born-again capitalism at the center of their program. This leads to a harshness toward social problems and a contempt for anyone who cannot compete. This conventional Right ignores the fact that humanistically-trained, aristocratically-minded people who could lead a genuine cultural Right are probably the least able to prosper in the projected brave new capitalist world. The obsessive focus on “the discipline of the market” is antithetical to the rooted popular culture and ENR’s “high culture.”

The circulation of ENR journals is rather small, but intellectual influence can rarely be measured by circulation figures. By pursuing its “metapolitical” strategy, the ENR has created a new climate where some Right ideas can be voiced more freely and with less opprobrium. What makes the ENR arguments attractive is that often they are simply good, persuasive arguments. After all, the substitution of a particularistic “right to be different” for a belief in an innate, absolutistic white and European supremacy was a much-needed shift. The ENR has also understood that the orthodox Christian approach to sexual and family morality, in an extremely permissive and sexually-obsessed age, was untenable. The ENR has also renewed much of the criticism of capitalism from an organicist-aristocratic context at a time when the Left seems to have fallen silent on this matter in its uncritical and opportunistic embrace of liberalism. Only in today’s dessicated political landscape are people shocked by these positions, as the organic and Catholic Right — partially linked to various pre-Marxian socialisms as well as syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism — had traditionally been in the forefront of the critique of capitalism. (In the 19th century, John Ruskin could readily claim: “I am a Tory of the sternest sort, a socialist, a communist”). ENR ideas are also intimately intertwined with central aspects of French identity and national character. Thus the ENR is divided concerning European unification, perhaps because it sees it as a possible vehicle for the continuation of French hegemony through such archetypically French figures as Jacques Delors.

At any rate, under no circumstances can the ENR be characterized as a “neo-fascist” residue destined to play only a very limited role in the future of Europe. Despite certain obvious problems and inconsistencies, the ENR has clearly transcended its origins in the far Right. Its formulations on certain issues have been pioneering, though often, and ironically, coming out of nothing more than a reactivation of half-forgotten arguments in the great store of non-fascist organicist thought. The ENR today is very much in the forefront of key debates concerning personal and cultural identities, and “the sources of the self” The intellectually-honest Left could benefit by appropriating some of these ideas. On the whole, the ENR represents the most intellectual, sophisticated, least dogmatic and most positive element “on the Right,” engaged in the reconfiguration of the political landscape alter the collapse of communism and the terminal crisis of liberalism have rendered traditional categories hopelessly obsolete.

Notes:

1. See “The Italian ‘Nuova Destra’: An Interview with Marco Tarchi,” in Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92), p. 23.
2. See Elements, Nos. 69, 70 and Perspectives, No. 4, devoted respectively to the theme: “Le Nouvel Ordre Americaine,” “Etats-Unis: Danger!” and “Beware the USA!”
3. Insert to Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92).
4. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 52
5. See Michalina Vaughan, “Nouvelle Droite: Cultural Power and Political Influence,” in David S. Bell, ed., Contemporary French Politics (London & Canberra: Groom Helm, 1982), p. 63.
6. Elements, No. 79 (January 1994), pp. 25-28.
7. See in particular the “Heritage” section of Alain de Benoist’s Vu de droite (Paris: Copernic, 1977).
8. Thomas Sheehan, “Myth and Violence: The Fascism of Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist,” in Social Research, Vol. XLVIII (Spring 1981), pp. 64-65.
9. The Sting, No. 12 (Autumn 1992), p. 4.
10. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 52.
11. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 51. Thus, at the end of a long interview, Benoist states: “There are other comforts: the arts, contemplation and, of course, women. I do not have to tell you of all people, moncher Michel, who loathes as much as I do the misogyny so common on the Right, that the pleasures of the flesh are one of the paths to the spirit, and that the best argument which was ever given for justifying the existence of frontiers is the profound joy we feel in crossing them.” See The Scorpion, No. 10 (August 1986), p. 32. This is a translation of an interview originally published in Elements.
12. The Scorpion, No. 13 (Winter 1989-90), p. 51. Another example of the ENR’s pagan feminism is Brigid Clarke’s “The Black Virgins of Europe,” which praises the Cult of the Virgin Mary in Roman Catholicism as a residue of pagan Goddess worship. See Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92), pp. 25-27.
13. Ulric Smith, “Nationalism: A Poison,” in Perspectives, No. 7 (Winter 1993-94), p. 16.
14. Yann Fouere, “Towards a Natural Europe,” in Perspectives, No. 5 (Winter 199293), p. 18. Originally published in the Breton nationalist journal, Gwenn ha Du (August-September 1992).
15. Ferraresi, op. cit., p. 145.
16. According to Francois-Bernard Huyghe: “It is an ideology that fiercely denounces all manifestations of inequality, yet advocates horrendous economic inequality and ruthless individual survivalism.” See La “Soft-Ideologie” (Paris: Laffont, 1987).
17. See Benoist’s indictment of Hayek as a savage ideologue of the harshest capitalism, for whom social justice, trade unions, society, and politics are illegitimate concepts, in Elements, No. 68 (Summer 1990), pp. 5-14. Similarly, addressing the British context, Perspectives claims that: “The hidden agenda behind the Conservative government’s assault on trade unions has been revealed. Far from championing the freedom of individual employees, it clearly regards them as little more than slaves to be sold on the international labour market. A Trade and Industry Department publication called Britain — The Preferred Location, aimed at attracting foreign money, enthuses: ‘Employers are now under no statutory obligation to recognize a union. Many companies do not do so . . . Wages and salaries are markedly lower than those in the US, Japan or many countries within the European Community, and so too are the add-on costs of social security and other benefits’.” See Perspectives, No. 6 (Summer 1993), p. 5.
18. The Scorpion, No. 10 (Autumn 1986), p. 32.
19. See Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), especially the section “The Gramscism of the Right,” pp. 29-32.
20. See Alain de Benoist, Europe. Tiers Monde. Meme Combat (Paris, R. Laffont, 1986).
21. Thus Benoist has debated Thomas Molnar, an American paleoconservative and Catholic traditionalist. See Alain de Benoist (with Thomas Molnar) L’ Eclipse du Sacre (Paris, Lo Table Ronde, 1986). Similarly, it has made an opening to the Left and some of its eclectic thinkers, notably Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, etc. The ENR also finds Jean Baudrillard extremely invigorating, with his criticism of American “hyperreality.”
22. Ferrazesi, op.cit., p. 147.
23. Jean-Jacques Mourreau, “L’Europe Malade de Versailles.” in Elements, No. 69 (Fall 1990), p. 42. Consider the following two problematic examples in Perspectives. One is an obituary for Arno Breker attempting to dissociate his art from the people he served. See Perspectives, No. 2 (Summer 1991), p. 10. The other is a call in the previously cited Tarchi interview for the “normalization” of the experience of Italian fascism after the 1970′s. That may have already happened. Yet the suggestion that Nazism could be similarity “normalized” is another matter. See Perspectives, No. 3 (Winter 1991-92), p. 24. Worse yet, The Sting newsletter practically advertises the work of Ernst Zundel, a Holocaust revisionist and neo-Nazi, as follows: “Across the Atlantic maverick publisher E. Zundel has been having a rough time for daring to publish and broadcast his ‘revisionist’ ideas. There is irony in a ‘bigot’ being harassed by the ‘champions of free speech’ for his views. He broadcasts into Germany from a kind of pirate radio (shades of the 30′s -more irony!) Whether he is a “hate-monger” or not he is courageous: a small donation will get you info [followed by Zundel’s address and telephone number in Toronto].” See The Sting, No. 15 (Winter 1993), p. 1. The most recent issue of the same newsletter includes the following passage: “In Canada, Mr. Zundel’s publicity-catching gimmicks have unquestionably made doubt about the Nazi gassing claim more acceptable.” See The Sting, No. 16 (Spring 1994), p. 1. This raises the suspicion that certain ENR members are not so much “reactionaries” as outright neo-Nazis. In English-speaking countries, the ENR is often confused, even among some of its adherents, with the far Right.
24. See the interview with Pierre-Andre Taguieff “Origines et Metamorphoses de la Nouvelle Droite,” in Vingtieme Siecle, No. 40 (October-December 1993), pp. 3-22. The second part of this interview is translated in this issue of Telos. In his work, Sur La Nouvelle Droite, Jalons d’un Analyse Critique (Descartes, 1994), Taguieff traces the long march of the ENR from a pro-Western, white racialist position in the 1960′s, to its advanced, “differentialist” stance of the 1980′s, “from race to culture.” The first chapter of this book is translated in this issue of Telos.
25. The politically-correct Left in France, as typified by its “Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals” against “the far Right” in 1993, adopts the mode of inquisitors and commissars, calling for blacklists, bannings, etc., and ironically targeting the ENR more vociferously than the National Front. Most of these documents are translated in this issue of Telos. The ENR has quickly responded to what it considers this “McCarthyism of the Left.” See David Barney, Charles Champetier and Claude Lavirose, La Nouvelle Inquisition: ses Acteurs, ses Methodes, ses Victimes (Le Labyrinthe, 1993).
26. Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Revolt Against Modernity,” in Per Torsvik, Ed., Mobilization, Center-Periphery Structures and Nation Building (Bergen: Universitetforlaget, 1981), p. 477. Bela Kopeczi, a leading Hungarian Communist Party intellectual (and Hungary’s Minister of Culture at the time), while condemning ENR tendencies, has at least given them philosophical credence: “This ‘third way’ of philosophy, idealist and subjectivist in principle, posits the epistemological dependence of being on consciousness, and places the subject at its center of interest, although, as it tries to base itself on science, and especially history, it tries to mask this. In accordance with this philosophical direction, life, as it were, mediates between subject and object. Life always becomes subjectified as feeling, while feeling objectifies itself as life, which creates the appearance of the elimination of the dualism. This role is also fulfilled by the category of myth, which was brought into the vocabulary of philosophy by Nietzsche. The mythical objectivity of the ‘philosophy of life’ (Lebensphilosophie) appears in the subject, which suggests a certain type of objectivity.” Bela Kopeczi, Neokonserwatyzm i Nowa Prawica, tr. into Polish by Ester Lawnik (Warsaw: Ksiazka i Wiedza, 1986), pp. 25-26.
27. In this, they follow Ernst Niekisch and the “National Bolsheviks” of interwar Germany, who proposed an alliance of Germany with Stalin’s “workers’-state,” at the expense of “reactionary” East European societies. Niekisch is often pointed to as a prototypical ENR hero for his resistance to Nazism, but the main point of his daring attack on Hitler in 1938 was that Nazism was a disguised Catholicism and therefore a “death-wish philosophy” — hardly the most devastating criticism. See Francois Lapeyre, “Ernst Niekish, Un Destin Allemand,” in Elements, No. 73 (Spring 1992), pp. 32-33. The strong rhetorical opposition to the Versailles Treaties (and affection for a big Germany) in some of their historical articles could also be interpreted as a further threat to Eastern Europe. See Jean-Jacques Mourreau, “L’Europe Malade de Versailles,” op. cit., pp. 23-42.
28. This would be close to Derek Holland’s “Third Position” in England, which attempts to synthesize “Catholic traditionalism, European nationalism, and the ENR.” See “Polityczni Zolnierze,” in Stanczyk, No. 17 (1992), pp. 39-44.
29. Ferraresi, op. cit., pp. 137-140, links the ENR to far Right terrorists.
30. Cited in Jarosiaw Tomasiewicz, “Przeciwko Rownosci i Demokracji: Nowa Prawica we Francji,” in Mysl Polska (November 1-15 1993), p. 5.

 

————————–

Wegierski, Mark. “The New Right in Europe.” Telos, Vol. 1993, No. 98-99 (December 1993), pp. 55-69.

Note: The text of this article was obtained from its online republication at: <http://www.amerika.org/texts/the-new-right-in-europe-mark-wegierski/ >.

Additional notes: While this essay by Wegierski serves as a good overview of some of the major features of the New Right, in order to more adequately understand the concepts and reasoning behind New Right philosophy, it is important to read certain key works by Alain de Benoist. See the works listed at the “Manifesto of the New Right”.

 

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/ >.

 

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.

—————-

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/ >.

 

After the Fall – AR Staff

After the Fall

By the American Renaissance Staff

Second NPI conference is held in Washington.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

 

Race, Identity, Community – Tudor

Race, Identity, Community

By Lucian Tudor

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

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

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

Ethnic Identity and Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding Remarks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[16] Ibid., p. 271.

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

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

 

——————

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

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

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

 

Identity vs. Globalism – Morgan

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

By John Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

—————–

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

 

Preface to Fighting for the Essence – Krebs

Preface to Fighting for the Essence

By Pierre Krebs

What is this impotence that brings our people to their knees and that the cowards call tolerance? What is this neglect that has allowed the will to rot and which traitors call prudence? What is this resignation that has made courage obsolete and the cowards call wisdom? What is this lie that does not stop magnifying everything that is by definition false and destroy everything that is par excellence true? What is this sacrilegious god that has broken the bond of friendship between men and nature? How does one understand existential values that are no longer measured by brilliance of mind or character but are weighed on the scales of the market world? From what sewers of the mind does this constant denial of ourselves arise, this self-criticism of the identitarian selfhood, of the original Self, this pathological refusal to assume, across otherness, one’s individuality, one’s originality? Avalanche of problems on the yawning desert of a levelled, domesticated, concretised contemporary spirituality. Avalanche of contiguous questions that history has tied together into a Gordian knot[1] which it is no longer possible to untie and which we have decided to cut – as the legend would have it and as the present demands it – going through the roots of an epidemic affliction which threatens the entire planet and which is called: Western civilisation.

It is useless to deny it: the epoch that we are going through, debilitated by all the advanced symptoms of decadence, is an abject epoch. Under its structures that are decomposing like a corpse in the sun, the social, political and cultural disintegration, in gradually laying bare the porous bones of an egalitarian civilisation condemned to death, thereby reveals the magnitude of a disaster that has befallen Europe and that threatens to sweep it away like a shipwreck. Once this observation is established, one understands then, in one stroke, why that which is ugly, weak or frankly pathological has, in the world of art, gradually replaced all that is beautiful, strong and harmonious; why, in politics, the creatures that sit on the benches of parliament are paid so dearly to daily betray the people who have naively elected them; why, in the media, the newsrooms are filled with professional lying creatures who, in turn, would no longer understand the world if, tomorrow, they were to stop exaggerating the words, sounds or images of their lies; why, in the age of nuclear fission, cybernetics and genetics, the obscuring dogmas of a vision that is increasingly reductive of human diversity, and increasingly levelling the diversity of values; in short, increasingly economic, materialistic, mechanistic and, consequently, increasingly less political, spiritual, and organic, progressively wrap up the planet in the grey, monotonous and desperate banality of uniformity, mediocrity, the repetition of the same and endless tedium.

Granted: all healthy minds are going to yawn upon reading our reflections concerning the validity of human differentiation, and they will be surprised that there are those dedicated to the ancestral right to difference; they will even, perhaps, be irritated that they could be asked, even today, about the variety of cultures, about the existence of races or the biological laws that explain them, or that one could reflect on the cultural imperatives that demand their sustenance or even, further, the ethical principles that legitimise it. All the banal and apodictic things which Plato had, long before modern anthropology and genetics, more or less codified in his Republic and on which, at another moment in history and in better health, one would have refrained from insisting for the simple reason that one would have already learnt them in primary school.

The necessity of this re-questioning regarding our roots corresponds in fact to an urgent need to restore to order ideas and certain facts, a prophylactic measure that the mind adopts when the discussions of the age, on account of being burdened with taboos and obscured by dogmas, have ended up completely falsifying the etymology of words, distorting their meaning and perverting reason. For this age is not only vile, it is mad. We wish to say thereby that egalitarian reasoning, by walking on its head, has indeed turned the world upside down. Evola[2] had already luminously predicted it: ‘Western civilisation needs a complete overhaul or it will fall apart one day or another. It has realised the most complete perversion of any rational order of things. Reign of matter, of gold, of machine, of number, it no longer possesses breath, or liberty, or light.’[3]

In a first stage which corresponds to its political phase, the egalitarian lie first turned the democratic integrity of the state on its head by progressively emptying the Greek model of the ethno-cultural organic principles of the demos (people) which it purely and simply replaced with the vagabond and cosmopolitan institution of the parliament. Then, in the second, its institutional and juridical phase, it caused the constitutional integrity of the state to topple by demanding that all the nations of the world progressively align their constitutions to the planetary model of a ‘New World Order’ inspired, organised and manipulated by the United States of America. Finally, in a third, ideological stage which is ending its long progress through the institutions, the egalitarian lie has turned on their heads the last two ways in which states retained their integrity; the most essential and, therefore, the most difficult to constrain: territorial integrity and the ethnic integrity that depends on it. To suppress the first, it was sufficient to proclaim that the state was ‘open to immigration,’[4] this declaration automatically annulled the second. Robbed of its freedom to remain itself in the continuity of its ethno-cultural particularism – in short, deprived of its basic right to difference and to life – the people find themselves henceforth condemned to disintegrate and then die out through mixture, fused into a multiracial society, which is a prelude to the global society and the omega point of Western civilisation.

The cycle of egalitarian madness consequently ends exactly where it started: from the political eradication of the values of the demos and as such, of the key principles of organic democracy – by turning on its head of the original Greek understanding of democracy – to its biological eradication, pure and simple. Heralded by the political denaturing of democracy, prepared by the juridical subversion of its institutions, identitarian suicide will henceforth be encouraged, protected and, worse, legalised by the constitutions in their plan of a multiracial society, which is a subtle machine to kill peoples.

*

First revaluation: the notion of ‘multiracialism’ is, to start with, a mystifying term: for the society qualified wrongly as multiracial is no more tolerant of races or ethnic groups – on the contrary, it encourages their biological eradication, through panmixia – than it is respectful of the different cultural paradigms that it forces to disappear into the egalitarian and uniformising mould of identitarian deracination. This society is in reality raciophobic by nature and culturicidal by vocation.[5]

Second revaluation: one must stop, once and for all, abstracting peoples and cultures through the illusory concept of ‘humanity’ for the simple reason that ‘humanity’ does not exist any more than ‘man’ in himself. Humanity is the supposition made by coarse intellects that are enamoured of impoverishing simplifications and generalizations. On the contrary, the planet teems with particular men who one can observe at leisure in the realities of the organic social and cultural life of the race, peoples or nations, fleshly incarnations of all the contradictory and multicoloured ethno-cultural humanities of which the human species is composed. Joseph de Maistre,[6] who was one of the first to have proclaimed it, said finely that there is no man in the world: ‘During my life, I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be a Persian; but I must say, as for man, I have never come across him anywhere.’[7] Those who act or speak in the name of ‘humanity’ would do well to remember these words in each of their solemn petitions or marches. They should bear in mind that the protection of the human species depends essentially on the preservation of the different peoples that constitute it, whereas the ideologies that more or less encourage ethnic thanatos[8] are, on the contrary, the most suited to destroy it!

We have to repeat it to all the gravediggers of the diversity of the world: every time that a people finds themselves in danger of death it is, in the furrows of their tomb, a real, fleshly, historical humanity, an irreplaceable memory of the history of men – a unique expression in itself of art, music, philosophy, in short, of culture – that is in danger of being extinguished forever.

Third revaluation: there is no being-in-himself, but only and everywhere human beings formed and rooted in their ethno-cultural significances. This holds true to the point that a ‘racial diagnostic,’ says Nicolas Lahovary,[9] is ‘to a certain point a horoscope. More than in situations, it is in oneself that a man and, above all, nations carry their destiny. Fate is not really historical, but ethnological. Tell me who you are and I will tell you what you will do!’[10] It is because we are conscious of these irreducible realities that we call for the drafting of a Charter of Peoples’ Rights,[11] radically antinomical to the Declaration of Human Rights, because peoples, unlike man, who is made up of an intangible humanity, exist; they are biologically definable, sociologically identifiable and geographically localisable. They each express themselves in the singularity of their culture and they each manifest themselves in the rhythm of a well-defined political will and historical project.[12]

Fourth revaluation: it is men who make history, never history that makes men. It is men – their hesitations, their choices, their decisions, their refusals, their quests, their experiments, their strengths and their weaknesses – who are invariably the origin of events and the cause of history. And the history of the world, in turn, relate only the odyssey of the peoples who have made history, polyphonic histories, multiple and markedly contradictory histories, each with the imprint of the ethnocultural identity that gives them face, forms a mind and breathes a soul into them.[13]

*

In accusing Christianity of being ‘the one immortal blot on humanity,’[14] Nietzsche has taken as his target especially the egalitarian, monocentric and monotheistic premise of a religion which incontestably takes the lion’s share of the unhealthy forces at the origin of the upheaval that has turned Europe on its head. In The Gay Science, he says clearly, ‘Monotheism, in contrast [to polytheism], this rigid consequence of the teachings of a normal human type – that is, the belief in a normal god next to whom there are only false pseudo-gods – was perhaps the greatest danger to humanity so far…’[15] This plague is transmitted today by the monster of Judeao-Christianity, ‘Western civilisation,’ whose increasingly dire consequences rigorously follow the descending curve of a crisis that has been transformed in the last several years into a veritable decadence. The monotheistic ‘Unique’ and the egalitarian ‘Same’ are, in fact, the front and reverse side of the same coin of the same egalitarianism, of the same devaluation of the soul of peoples and of the being of their culture in the collectivity of the mass, of the same degradation of the single and singular person into the equal and interchangeable individual, of the same reduction of heterogeneous diversity into the standard and uniform ‘One,’ the zero degree of the levelling catastrophe towards which a one-dimensional planetary civilisation is ineluctably leading.

*

Decadence. Rarely spectacular, this plague that infiltrates slowly into the organism of peoples erodes them sharply. In fact, when a people no longer find in themselves their own reasons to live and believe or, in other words, when a people is no longer satisfied with themselves, they are assuredly ripe for slavery – and there begins their decline. When a people think that they find in other peoples their reasons to live and believe, they have already fallen into slavery – and then their decadence is rife and complete. But when a people, unsatisfied with the contempt that they inflict on themselves in submissively assimilating the culture, language and gods of another people further submerge their biological identity, then, henceforth incapable of maintaining themselves in the ethno-cultural authenticity of their uniqueness, they sign their death sentence for all eternity – and then their destruction occurs immediately.

The decadence of a people therefore remains a transitory phenomenon – a veritable political and cultural status quo – as long as its genotype has not been artificially modified, or, more accurately, has not been genetically manipulated. Voltaire,[16] who did not know anything of genetics, had already had a presentiment of this when he observed in his An Essay on Universal History: The Manners and Spirit of Nations that ‘into whatever regions these various races are transplanted, their complexions never change unless they mingle with the natives of the country.’[17] Whereas Professor Eugène Pittard,[18] anticipating the findings of modern anthropology and genetics, issued his famous book already in 1924 with the major warning which politicians of all persuasions, actively encouraged by all the churches, continue to arrogantly ignore: ‘Where mixture takes places between two very different races, a veritable peril may commence.’[19] Cultural slavery, as long as it is restricted to the mimesis of the other, thus does not seal the fate of a people either necessarily or automatically.

A cultural slave is a puppet parodying the stranger. But his puppet is free to recover its identity the moment it drops its clown suit. A people, however, that have biologically imploded through miscegenation cannot change their skin as one changes clothes. In modifying their morphology, they have changed their appearance, soul and spirit. ‘Mixture with foreign races is the reason that peoples change in appearance and character. The foreign hereditary stock which now circulates in the new organism acts henceforth on the genotype of the mongrelised people at the physical and psychological levels. This influence is exercised not only on the most elementary distinctive signs of physical appearance, but it also acts on the most subtle traits of character, as well as on intellectual aptitudes.’[20] Unlike a colonised people who can return to their roots as soon as they free themselves from the foreign yoke, a mongrelised people are a genetically manipulated people that no longer have any roots. Forced to nourish themselves upon the culture of others, they have alienated their own by sacrificing their originality and authenticity, selling off their political will and flouting their historical destiny; by cutting themselves off from their roots, they have alienated their identity, scattering to the four winds of oblivion their personality and their uniqueness. Worse: in ceasing to be the singular and original people that they were originally, the hybridised people have not, however, become the people whose culture they thought they could plagiarise and, just as they have become strangers to all, they have first and above all become strangers to themselves.[21]

A puppet of America, at any moment Europe can change its dress back to European style in the changing-rooms of its politics and culture. A new political class of decision-makers inspired by a new historical project, by a new vision of the world and of the future, could lead it to this change very rapidly. This new class is urgently needed, for, in the American-style ‘carnival’ multiculturalism, it is in fact the naturally aristocratic soul of Europe, its deeply individualist style, its essentially rebellious, Faustian and Promethean spirit that the globalist vulgate[22] is in the process of attacking. Behind its multicultural alibi, Europe is invited to change its mentality[23] – and also its skin – so that its lively identity may be silenced, so that the polytheist look in the bright eyes of Athena[24] may be extinguished, so that this will to excel which has never ceased nourishing and inspiring the authentic being of the Indo-European worldview may fade, in an egalitarian regression, into memory.

*

Identity: what is it about, really? A myth, a taste, a whim? This two-faced word which reconciles contraries (the identical and the different) designates, in reality, an instinct. In fact, it is especially since modern ethology clearly established the innate tendency of man to identify with individuals who resemble him that we have better understood why peoples experience this instinctive need to live according to their rhythm, within a cultural heritage well-demarcated from all the others.

But what science has understood, the egalitarian Vulgate chooses to ignore or deny. Entangled in its fantasies, it continues to pretend that identitarian consciousness would erect insurmountable ramparts between peoples who would be seized with mutual distrust because of their differences. Reality belies these inanities. In fact, just as the self-defined individual who differentiates himself from the surrounding masses does not isolate himself from society, but on the contrary enriches it with his uniqueness, so also a people conscious of their difference do not isolate themselves any more from the human species, but come closer to it every time they endow it with their singularities and their peculiarities.

Besides, this goes without saying: the more a people becomes conscious of their difference, the more they refine their differences and the more their opening up to the world has a chance of profiting others. The more a people become conscious of their difference, the more they are in a situation to open up to the world in order to endow other peoples with their singularity and their differences. The more a people are aware of the diversity that surrounds them, the more they show themselves adroit in seizing and appreciating that which does not resemble them even in its slightest nuances, that which does not belong to them, and the more they are inclined to tolerate the distinguishing qualities of others.

The wealth of the world derives from its diversity and its heterogeneity. And the world owes this diversity primarily to peoples conscious and jealous of their difference.[25] It is clear besides that the perception of the diversity of a group is always proportional to the awareness of its different parts. Thus, the heterogeneity of the world results also from the interactions – from the communication – between the living ethno-cultural identities that comprise it: in fact, the more the differences confront one another, the more they compare themselves to one another – the closer they come together, the more the diversity is reinforced. The more the differences are isolated, the more they are separated from one another; in other words, the more they move away from one another, the more the diversity is destroyed. A people that entrench themselves in their ethno-cultural phalanstery[26] are no more courageous than a people which detach themselves from their roots and cross-breed: in the first case, we witness the retreat into seclusion of a powerless people that retreat because they do not feel strong enough in their identity to confront the Other in its differences; in the second case we witness a headlong rush into the assimilation of a disarmed people who capitulate before the difference of the Other in order not to be conscious any more of their own identity. Conclusion: it is not the identitarian consciousness that awakens fear of the foreigner but, quite the contrary, in the first case one’s weakness and in the second one’s shortcomings.

The egalitarian Vulgate thus finds itself trapped: peoples of a strong identitarian consciousness are precisely those who, in search of movement and relationships, increase differences, activate diversity, and, in so doing, keep the world moving. And it is, on the contrary, the peoples of a weak identitarian consciousness who, in fleeing into withdrawal and isolation, make history vegetate.[27]

*

Identity: the Ariadne thread[28] of the history of peoples and their cultures. An instinct as beautiful and as strong as life is beautiful and strong when it bursts out from its original and primordial organic springs, but also as old as the world can remember being a world. An archaic instinct that survives ideologies because it possesses the longest memory; a rebellious instinct that does not allow itself to be smoothed out either by laws or by doctrines, no matter how oppressive the first may be and no matter how captious the second; an irreducible instinct that reappears in the confines of Africa, in the tribe that casts off the last miasmas of Western civilization; or in the heart of Europe, in the Swiss canton which reconquers with the audacity of William Tell the ancestral rights of its organic democracy.

Whether it is affirmed or contested, the identitarian tradition henceforth orients the new divides that are already being established at the crossroads of destiny, where everything may die or be reborn at the place where history is digging a definitive cleft between two understandings of the world, between two visions of the future, between two conceptions of man: on the one side, the statist masses, members of the universal egalitarian technocosmos – the cold monster that Nietzsche warned us about;[29] on the other, the ethnic communities, the political and cultural idiosyncrasies mirroring the natural planetary polyphony – the ‘hereditary homelands’ of which Saint-Loup[30] speaks. In the first, drawn from the rule of uniformity, the repetition of the Same has definitely Westernised the planet into the totalitarian straitjacket of egalitarianism. In this world of ethno-cultural amnesia delivered to the totalitarian yoke of economics, man, stripped of his distinctive traits, is no longer either the being of interdependent and cooperative culture of the historical project of his people, nor the historical being who accomplishes himself within his destined community. Reduced to the status of an acultural and ahistorical object-individual, this individual has lost the key to his humanity. In the second, the man with an identitarian consciousness defines himself as the perception of his roots and his differences grows. In this world, man, a cultured being, acquires his humanity as he realises himself: he experiments, creates, evolves, transforms himself without ceasing to be himself, profiting from all the creative potentialities that nature – his heredity – has poured into him. Supporting his people, involved in its projects, he participates in its history and in its destiny.

The parties, the lodges, the unions, the schools, the churches – in short, all who fatten themselves on the fodder of the System resent the identitarian argument from the outset as an intolerable threat. This hypersensitive reaction will not surprise the lucid minds that have known for a long time that the bio-cultural reality is, in fact, the only one that may instantly threaten all the confused minds of the universalist dogma: the messianic Judeo-Christian head; the ideologically liberal head; and the individualistic, technocratic and plutocratic economic head. And it will not surprise attentive minds, either, that the identitarian dream has always entailed the collapse of all the empires that were not organic, the last to date being the Soviet empire. And finally, it will not surprise those who know perfectly well that the next one is Uncle Sam’s. Keeping pace with Nature and the gains of science, the basic expression of organic life and ethno-cultural reality defies all prohibitions, be they political, religious or ideological. Egalitarianism may well postulate that races do not exist, but anyone taken at random can recognise a White from a Black, and a Black from a Yellow. To be sure, everything would be much easier if it were possible to prohibit races, a vow difficult to realise because it comes down to prohibiting Nature de facto. Being unable to constrain the latter, the followers of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and Big Brother are therefore going to try to destroy it. And indeed, the only discreet and effective way of prohibiting an African, an Asiatic or a European from being as such is going to consist in submerging the Black, Yellow and White together into a grey, in annihilating them progressively in a soft panmixia which is disguised in the most pernicious possible masks: a carnival humanism in the Brazilian style, consisting of unremitting appeals to a pseudo-fraternity that leads, in reality, to the worst promiscuities, and hysterical invocations to a pseudo-tolerance that reveals itself to be the most dangerous of cowardices.

Once the dangers have been perceived and the choices have been offered, we must then move to action, first refusing ‘compromise, weakness, and indulgence towards everything which, being derived from the Judaeo-Christian root, has infected our blood and our intelligence.’ Then, secondly, return to our pagan Indo-European tradition without which ‘there will be no liberation and no true restoration, and conversion to the true values of spirit, power, hierarchy, and empire will not be possible.’ There sleeps a ‘truth upon which no doubt whatsoever can be cast.'[31] Finally, awaken minds by setting the world on its feet again, and by setting the ideas aright once again. But what method is more appropriate to set the world aright than to set that which many still feel to be an inevitable fate on the feet of a voluntary destiny? The multiracial/raciophobic society can never be transformed into a fate as long as bio-cultural identity is perceived by peoples as a voluntary destiny. All life worthy of being lived has been and will be that, always, only at this price. To the horizontal and culturicidal society with a robot grimace that threatens to strangle the world in a linear uniformity, we must brandish, in brighter colors than ever before, the vertical rainbows of peoples with human faces, whose language, history, culture and appearance emerge from living identities which are to peoples and cultures what the spring is to the mountains and forests.

Egalitarianism constrains peoples to shuffle their feet in the dead-end of Christian, social or liberal parliamentary democracy before demoting them to the neo-primitive age of the fast-food societies in the American style. Let us swim against the current of a world that is already exploding into a thousand pieces, carried away by the winds of its political, religious, economic, social or cultural crises. Let us bear ourselves to the wide sea of the world and of life through the deep waters of identity. Let us continue forward to assume our humanity, each one in the rhythm of his individuality, each in obedience to his origins. The future of this world will never stop being many-voiced, multicoloured, multicultural, and multihistorical as long as the human species that bears it remains permanently multiracial, that is to say , as long as it continues to deploy, in the firmament of history, the rainbow of its colors, its faces, its languages, its arts and its cultures, as long as the difference of one is perceived as a source of enrichment for all, as long as the respect for natural diversity continues to generate an echo of tolerance for contraries. In other words: as long as the homogeneity of the peoples remains a guarantee of the heterogeneity of the world.

Let us therefore lend to our ideas the same seriousness that a child does to his game – to paraphrase Nietzsche[32] – and we will feel them fill with that conquering joy from whence emerge new worlds.

As for the Europeans, their renaissance will have already commenced the moment that they cease to perceive the egalitarian raciophobic society as an inevitable destiny, and finally being to feel it as a necessary challenge.

All victories are born of struggle; all elevations are born of conquest.

Kassel, Winter Solstice, 1999/2000.

 

Notes:

1. According to ancient Greek legend, it was prophesied to the Phyrgians, who were without a king, that the next person to enter the city on an ox-cart would be made their leader. A village farmer named Gordias was the one to do so, and his cart was tied to a post by an extremely complex knot. It was said that the one who would one day untie the knot would become the ruler of the entirety of Asia. In 333 BC, when Alexander the Great came to the city, he famously cut the knot with his sword rather than attempting to untie it. -Ed.
2. Julius Evola (1898-1974) was the most important Italian member of the traditionalist school, which is to say that he opposed modernity in favour of an approach to life consistent with the teachings of the ancient sacred texts. -Ed.
3. Julius Evola, Heathen Imperialism (Kemper, France: Thompkins & Cariou, 2007), p. 17.
4. There also one must be sagacious and not compare that which is by nature incomparable. We are referring here to the immigration of non-European populations, in most cases originating from countries of the Third World. Europe has always undergone certain periods when waves of immigration of greater or less importance have crossed from one people to another. This influx of populations did not, however, at any moment place in question the identity of the different countries concerned insofar as these immigrant populations were themselves, biologically and culturally, of European stock!
5. The egalitarian rhetoricians are not so contradictory. To affirm, in fact, that races do not exist and, at the same time, to plead for a multiracial society makes one wonder, and that is the least one can say!
6. Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was a French Counter-Enlightenment philosopher who fled the Revolution and lived the remainder of his life in Italy. He always remained a staunch opponent of democracy and supported monarchical rule. -Ed.
7. From Marc A. Goldstein, Social and Political Thought of the French Revolution, 1788-1797 (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 820.
8. Thanatos was the Greek god of death. In psychology, thanatos has come to mean ‘death drive,’ which in Freud’s terminology is the unconscious drive which compels individuals into self-destructive behaviour. -Ed.
9. Nicolas Lahovary (1887-1972) was a Rumanian diplomat who lived the remainder of his life as an exile in Switzerland following the Communist takeover of Rumania in 1944. He was also an anthropologist. -Ed.
10. Nicolas Lahovary, Les peuples européens: leur passé ethnologique et leurs parentés réciproques, d’après les dernières recherches sanguines et anthropologiques (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), p. 37.
11. The United Nations enacted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948, defining human rights in a way which is binding upon all member nations. The founder of the European New Right, Alain de Benoist, critiques the concept of human rights, as well as the problematic definition of the individual upon which it relies, at length in his book Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (London: Arktos, 2011). -Ed.
12. The human being lives within a people. Ethnobiology, a relatively recent natural science, has recognised that peoples constitute well-defined biological realities. Among other things, it dedicates its researches and studies to an increasingly precise and systematic classification of the races of which the human species is composed. Cf. Ilse Schwidetzky, Grundzüge der Völkerbiologie (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1950).
13.  ‘The first explanation [of history] is generally found in the nature of a human being and his derives, in all the cases where he acts as a collective being, from the nature of his people. The latter, in turn, depends on the race that imprints its seal upon it,’ declares Nicolas Lahovary again, Les peuples européens, p. 35.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Late Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 66 (from The Anti-Christ).
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 128.
16. Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), was one of the major philosophers of the French Enlightenment. -Ed.
17. The Works of M. de Voltaire, vol. 4 (London: privately printed, 1761), p. 192. -Ed.
18. Pittard (1867-1962) was a Swiss anthropologist. Widely respected during his life-time, he was honoured with many awards and distinctions. He did work involving the theory of evolution, but always rejected the notion that all humans had a common ancestor, believing instead that the various races had evolved independently. He was also interested in social justice and worked for the benefit of the downtrodden in Europe, including the Albanians and the Gypsies. -Ed.
19. Eugène Pittard, Race and History: An Ethnological Introduction to History (London: Kegan Paul, 2003).
20. Schwidetzky, Grundzüge der Völkerbiologie, p. 112.
21.  ‘Contrary to nature, racial mixtures lead either to a regression or to a dead end. They are generally unfavourable and have fateful effects for the individuals concerned,’ warns Rolf Kosiek (Das Volk in seiner Wirklichkeit [Berg am see: Kurt Vowinckel, 1975], p. 40). ‘The analysis of facts contradicts that opinion according to which hybridisation plays an important role in the evolution of higher animals,’ declares Ernst Mayr. ‘Bastards are first of all very rare among these and when the former recross with their original species they give rise to genotypes characterised by an inferior vitality and which are eliminated by natural selection… Bastardisation between races provokes, almost without exception, imbalances due to harmful genetic combinations’ (Artbegriff und Evolution [Hamburg: Parey, 1967], pp. 112 and 513).
22. The Vulgate was a Fourth-century translation into Latin of the Bible made by St. Jerome. It later came to become the official version of the Bible used by the Catholic Church, and for over a thousand years was the most widely used version of the Bible in Europe. Many of the early translations of the Bible into European languages were done from the Vulgate. -Ed.
23. The boycott of ballot-boxes by the electors will certainly not any longer be a sufficient means to counteract the criminal decisions of irresponsible, but calculating, politicians who have already concocted the laws permitting the acceleration and simplification of the formalities of immigrant naturalisation. It is, in fact, these non-natives themselves who will be called upon tomorrow to re-elect politicians needing votes to the seats of a parliament that is still called ‘European.’ but that one could better designate as that which it really is: the grand brothel of the miscegenistic/raciophobic politics of a Europe reduced to prostituting itself on the streets of the Third World.
24. Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom and the arts. -Ed.
25. Conversely, the wealth of a people is measured by the degree of individualisation of its members. And one perceives immediately that the collectivist threat which places the diversity of races in danger is combined here with the individualist danger, which threatens to disintegrate the social body, and are two identical expressions of the same atomizing, egalitarian plague that levels peoples and disintegrates persons.
26. A phalanstery was a structure devised by the Nineteenth-century French utopian socialist Charles Fourier to house a small community of people who would work purely for the benefit of the community. Fourier believed that these communities would eliminate social inequality of all kinds. -Ed.
27. The regression into individualism that is brought about by the same reflexive rejection of the Other arrives at a similar result: it also isolates the subject and, similarly, lets it vegetate in its ego.
28. In Greek mythology, the hero Theseus was sent to fight the monstrous Minotaur, who lived at the heart of an enormous labyrinth. The goddess Ariadne provided him with a ball of string so that he could find his way back. -Ed.
29. Nietzsche appears to attack the idea of the state in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: ‘They all want to get to the throne, it is their madness – as if happiness sat on the throne! Often mud sits on the throne – and often too the throne on mud. Mad all of them seem to me, and scrambling monkeys and overly aroused. Their idol smells foul to me, the cold monster: together they all smell foul to me, these idol worshippers.’ From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 36. -Ed.
30. Saint-Loup was the pen name of Marc Augier (1908-1990), a French writer who embraced socialism, primitivism and anti-Christian paganism in his youth. He then became a nationalist and served as a correspondent in the French division of the Waffen-SS, although he was discouraged by the National Socialists’ anti-socialism. In 1945 he fled to Argentina, where he served in the Argentinian Army, and was an advisor to Juan Perón and was Eva Perón’s ski instructor. He was later pardoned and returned to France, where he continued to write and support various Right-wing movements, including regionalist organisations. -Ed.
31. Evola, Heathen Imperialism, p. 29.
32. From Beyond Good and Evil, S 94: ‘A man’s maturity – consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play,’ in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), p. 273. -Ed.

 

————-

From: Krebs, Pierre. Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance? London: Arktos Media, 2012, pp. 16-30.

Note: See also F. Roger Devlin’s review of Krebs’s Fighting for the Essence here: https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/europe-vs-the-west-devlin/

 

Manifesto of the New Right – Benoist & Champetier

“Manifesto of the French New Right in the Year 2000” by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier (PDF – 264 KB):

Manifesto of the French New Right (English)

The following is the original French version of this work:

Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000 (PDF – 208 KB):

Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000 (Français)

The following is the Spanish translation of this work:

Manifiesto: La Nueva Derecha del año 2000 (PDF – 204 KB):

Manifiesto: la Nueva Derecha del año 2000 (Español)

The following is the Italian translation of this work:

La Nuova Destra del 2000 (PDF – 202 KB):

La Nuova Destra del 2000 (Italiano)

——————–

Notes on publications and translations of the Manifesto:

Alain de Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s “Manifesto of the French New Right in the Year 2000” (Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 115, [March-May 1999], pp. 117-144) was the first edition of the English version, which was also published in a second edition as Manifesto for a European Renaissance (London: Arktos, 2012). The full text of this manifesto was also included as an appendix within the third edition of Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (London: Arktos, 2011). The text used to create the file available on this site was retrieved from: <http://www.amerika.org/texts/manifesto-of-the-french-new-right-in-year-2000-alain-de-benoist-and-charles-champetier >. The text in English is alternatively available in HTML format here: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html >.

The “Manifiesto: la Nueva Derecha del ano 2000” (Hespérides, Vol. IV, No. 19 [March-May 1999], pp. 13-47) was the first edition of the Spanish version, which was also published in a second edition as Manifiesto para un renacimiento europeo (Mollet del Vallès, Barcelona: Grup de recerca i estudi de la cultura europea, 2000), which has in turn been recently republished by Arktos (London, 2013). The text of the Spanish translation was retrieved from: <http://www.red-vertice.com/disidencias/textosdisi19.html >.

The “Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000” (Eléments, No. 94, [February 1999], pp. 11-23) was the first edition of the original French version, which was also published in a second edition as Manifeste pour une renaissance européenne (Paris: GRECE, 2000). The text of the French retrieved from: <http://www.grece-fr.net/textes/_txtWeb.php?idArt=71 >.

The “La Nuova Destra del 2000” (“La Nuova Destra del 2000” (Diorama letterario, Firenze, 229-230, October-November 1999) was the first Italian translation of the manifesto, which was published in a newer edition as Manifesto per una Rinascita Europea (Rome: Nuove Idee editore, 2005). The file made available on this site was retrieved from: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/la_nuova_destra_del_2000.pdf >.

Other translations: The manifesto was also translated into German as “Manifest: Die Nouvelle Droite des Jahres 2000” (published in Aufstand der Kulturen [Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 1999]), into Dutch as “Manifest voor Europees herstel en vernieuwing” (TeKos, Wijnegem, 95, octobre-décembre 1999), into Danish as “Manifest. Det nye højre år 2000” (Nomos, Valby, III, 2005, 1), into Hungarian as “Manifesztum az európai újjászületésért” (A51 [2002], pp. 239-285), into Czech as “Manifest: Nova pravice v roce 2000” (Tradice budoucnosti. Ed. Orientace 1/2008), into Croatian as “Manifest za Europsku Obnovu, Nova Desnica u 21. Stoljeću” (included as an appendix to Tomislav Sunic, Europska Nova Desnica [Zagreb, Croatia: Hasanbegović, 2009]), into Portuguese as Manifesto Para Um Renascimento Europeu (USA & EU: Editora Contra Corrente, 2014), into Polish as Manifest Grupy Badań i Studiόw nad Cywilizacją Europejską (GRECE) (published online: Konserwatyzm.pl, 2013), and into Ukrainian as Маніфест Нових Правих (published online: Національний альянс, 2009, http://nation.org.ua/)

——————–

Further Reading (Major works by Alain de Benoist):

The following works are considered to be the most important books (along with the above Manifesto) by Alain de Benoist which establish the intellectual foundations of the New Right movement:

Vu de Droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (Paris: Copernic, 1977), which was translated into German as Aus Rechter Sicht: Eine kritische Anthologie zeitgenössischer Ideen (Tübingen: Grabert, 1983-1984), into Italian as Visito da Destra: Antologia critica delle idee contemporanee (Napoli: Akropolis, 1981), into Portugese as Nova Direita, Nova Cultura: Antologia critica das ideias contemporaneas (Lisboa: Afrodite 1981), and in an abridged format into Romanian as O perspectivâ de dreapta: Anthologie criticâ a ideilor contemporane (Bucarest: coll. « Dreapta europeanâ », 2, Anastasia, 1998).

Les Idées à l’Endroit (Paris: Libres-Hallier, 1979), which was translated into Italian as Le Idee a Posto (Napoli: Akropolis, 1983), into Spanish as La Nueva Derecha: Una respuesta clara, profunda e inteligente (Barcelona: Planeta, 1982), into Greek as Oi ιδέες sta ορθο (Αθήνα: Ελεύθερη Σκέψις, 1980), and partially into German as Kulturrevolution von Rechts: Gramsci und die Nouvelle Droite (Krefeld: Sinus-Verlag, 1985).

Démocratie: le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), which was translated into English as The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011), into German as Demokratie: das Problem (Tübingen & Zürich: Hohenrain, 1986), into Italian as Democrazia: il problema (Firenze: Arnaud, 1985), and into Spanish as ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

Au-delà des droits de l’homme: Pour défendre les libertés (Paris: Krisis, 2004), which was translated into English as Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms (London: Arktos Media, 2011), into German translation as Kritik der Menschenrechte: Warum Universalismus und Globalisierung die Freiheit bedrohen (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2004), into Italian as Oltre i diritti dell’uomo: Per difendire le libertà (Rome: Il Settimo Sigillo, 2004), and into Spanish as Más allá de los Derechos Humanos: defender las libertades (published online 2008 at Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/mas_alla_de_los_derechos_humanos.pdf >).

In German, an important collection of essays by Alain de Benoist has been published in the book  Schöne Vernetzte Welt: Eine Antwort auf die Globalisierung (Tübingen: Hohenrain-Verlag, 2001). Another German collection had also been published as Aufstand der Kulturen: Europäisches Manifest für das 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 1999). In Spanish, see also the following two publications: Benoist’s Más Allá de la Derecha y de la Izquierda: El pensamiento político que rompe esquemas (Barcelona: Ediciones Áltera, 2010), and a collection of essays by Benoist and Guillaume Faye titled Las Ideas de la “Nueva Derecha”: Una respuesta al colonialismo cultural (Barcelona: Nuevo Arte Thor, 1986). In Russian, a notable collection of translated essays by Alain de Benoist (Ален де Бенуа) has been published as Против либерализма: к четвертой политической теории (Санкт-Петербург: Амфора, 2009).

Also worth mentioning is a book by Benoist that is only available in French known as Critiques – Théoriques (Lausanne & Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2003),  but from which selected essays (two important examples being “A Critique of Liberal Ideology” and “The Idea of Empire”) have been translated into multiple languages – including English, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, among some others – and published in various magazines or journals. In addition, we would like to make note of a collection of essays on racism and anti-racism, which includes Benoist’s important essay “Racisme: remarques autour d’une définition” (translated into English as “What is Racism?”): the book Racismes, Antiracismes, edited by Andre Béjin and Julien Freund (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1986), translated into Italian as Razzismo e antirazzismo (Firenze: La roccia di Erec, 1992).

Finally, it is worth mentioning the joint work of Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin on the theory of Eurasianism and the Fourth Political Theory, L’appel de L’Eurasie, conversation avec Alain de Benoist (Paris: Avatar Éditions, 2013), translated into Spanish as ¿Qué es el eurasismo? Una conversación de Alain de Benoist con Alexander Dugin (Tarragona: Ediciones Fides, 2014).

Read more about Alain de Benoist’s life and work at his official website: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/ >, and see also F. Roger Devlin’s review of Alain de Benoist’s Memoire Vive: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/benoists-vivid-memory-devlin/ >.

 

Immigration – Benoist

Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from French by Tom Sunic

 

In 1973, shortly before his death, the French President Georges Pompidou admitted to have opened the floodgates of immigration, at a request of a number of big businessmen, such as Francis Bouygues, who was eager to take advantage of docile and cheap labor devoid of class consciousness and of any tradition of social struggle. This move was meant to exert downward pressure on the wages of French workers, reduce their protesting zeal, and in addition, break up the unity of the labor movement. Big bosses, he said, “always want more.”

Forty years later nothing has changed. At a time when no political party would dare to ask for further acceleration of the pace of immigration, only big employers seem to be in favor of it — simply because it is in their interest. The only difference is that the affected economic sectors are now more numerous, going beyond the industrial sector and the hotel and catering service sector — now to include once “protected” professions, such as engineers and computer scientists.

France, as we know, starting with the 19th century, massively reached out to foreign immigrants. The immigrating population was already 800,000 in 1876, only to reach 1.2 million in 1911. French industry was the prime center of attraction for Italian and Belgian immigrants, followed by Polish, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants. “Such immigration, unskilled and non-unionized, allowed employers to evade increasing requirements pertaining to the labor law” (François-Laurent Balssa, « Un choix salarial pour les grandes entreprises » Le Spectacle du monde, Octobre, 2010).

In 1924, at the initiative of the Committee for Coalmining and big farmers from the Northeast of France, a “general agency for immigration” (Société générale d’immigration) was founded. It opened up employment bureaus in Europe, which operated as suction pumps. In 1931 there were 2.7 million foreigners in France, that is, 6.6 % of the total population. At that time France displayed the highest level of immigration in the world (515 persons on 100,000 inhabitants). “This was a handy way for a large number of big employers to exert downward pressure on wages. … From then on capitalism entered the competition of the workforce by reaching out to the reserve armies of wage earners.”

In the aftermath of World War II, immigrants began to arrive more and more frequently from Maghreb countries; first from Algeria, then from Morocco. Trucks chartered by large companies (especially in the automobile and construction industry) came by the hundreds to recruit immigrants on the spot. From 1962 to 1974, nearly two million additional immigrants arrived to France of whom 550,000 were recruited by the National Immigration Service (ONI), a state-run agency, yet controlled under the table by big business. Since then, the wave has continued to grow. François-Laurent Balssa notes that

when a workforce shortage in one sector occurs, out of the two possible choices one must either raise the salary, or one must reach out to foreign labor. Usually it was the latter option that was favored by the National Council of French Employers (CNPF) and as of 1998 by its successor, the Movement of Enterprises (MEDEF). That choice, which bears witness of the desire for short-term benefits, delayed advancement of production tools and industrial innovation. During the same period, however, as the example of Japan demonstrates, the rejection of foreign immigration and favoring of the domestic workforce enabled Japan to achieve its technological revolution, well ahead of most of its Western competitors.

Big Business and the Left; A Holy Alliance

At the beginning, immigration was a phenomenon linked to big business. It still continues to be that way. Those who clamor for always more immigration are big companies. This immigration is in accordance with the very spirit of capitalism, which aims at the erasure of borders (« laissez faire, laissez passer »).“While obeying the logic of social dumping, Balssa continues, a “low cost” labor market has thus been created with the “undocumented” and the “low-skilled,” functioning as stopgap “jack of all trades.” Thus, big business has reached its hand to the far-left, the former aiming at dismantling of the welfare state, considered to be too costly, the latter killing off the nation-state considered to be too archaic.” This is the reason why the French Communist Part (PCF) and the French Trade Union (CGT) (which have radically changed since then) had, until 1981, battled against the liberal principle of open borders, in the name of the defense of the working class interests.

For once a well-inspired Catholic liberal-conservative Philippe Nemo, only confirms these observations:

In Europe there are people in charge of the economy who dream about bringing to Europe cheap labor. Firstly, to do jobs for which the local workforce is in short supply; secondly, to exert considerable downward pressure on the wages of other workers in Europe. These lobbies, which possess all necessary means to be listened to either by their governments or by the Commission in Brussels, are, generally speaking, both in favor of immigration and Europe’s enlargement — which would considerably facilitate labor migrations. They are right from their point of view — a view of a purely economic logic […] The problem, however, is that one cannot reason about this matter in economic terms only, given that the inflow of the extra-Europe population has also severe sociological consequences. If these capitalists pay little attention to this problem, it is perhaps because they enjoy, by and large, economic benefits from immigration without however themselves suffering from its social setbacks. With the money earned by their companies, whose profitability is ensured in this manner, they can reside in handsome neighborhoods, leaving their less fortunate compatriots to cope on their own with alien population in poor suburban areas. (Philippe Nemo, Le Temps d’y penser, 2010)

According to official figures, immigrants living in regular households account for 5 million people, which was 8% of the French population in 2008. Children of immigrants, who are direct descendants of one or two immigrants, represent 6.5 million people, which is 11% of the population. The number of illegals is estimated to be between 300,000 to 550,000. (Expulsion of illegal immigrants cost 232 million Euros annually, i.e., 12,000 euro per case). For his part, Jean-Paul Gourevitch, estimates the population of foreign origin living in France in 2009 at 7.7 people million (out of which 3.4 million are from the Maghreb and 2.4 million from sub-Saharan Africa), that is, 12.2% of the metropolitan population. In 2006, the immigrating population accounted for 17% of births in France.

France is today experiencing migrant settlements, which is a direct consequence of the family reunification policy. However, more than ever before immigrants represent the reserve army of capital.

In this sense it is amazing to observe how the networks on behalf of the “undocumented,” run by the far-left (which seems to have discovered in immigrants its “substitute proletariat”) serve the interests of big business. Criminal networks, smugglers of people and goods, big business, “human rights” activists, and under- the-table employers — all of them, by virtue of the global free market, have become cheerleaders for the abolition of frontiers.

For example, it is a revealing fact that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their books Empire and Multitude endorse “world citizenship ” when they call for the removal of borders, which must have as a first goal in developed countries the accelerated settlement of the masses of low-wage Third World workers. The fact that most migrants today owe their displacement to outsourcing, brought about by the endless logic of the global market, and that their displacement is precisely something capitalism strives for in order to fit everybody into the market, and finally, that each territorial attachment could be a part of human motivations — does not bother these two authors at all. On the contrary, they note with satisfaction that “capital itself requires increased mobility of labor as well as continuous migration across national borders.” The world market should constitute, from their point of view, a natural framework for “world citizenship.” The market “requires a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flux,” destined to serve the interests of the “masses”, because “mobility carries a price tag of capital, which means the enhanced desire for liberty.”

The trouble with such an apology of human displacement, seen as a first condition of “liberating nomadism,” is that it relies on a completely unreal outlook of the specific situation of migrants and displaced people. As Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn write, “Hardt and Negri delude themselves with the capacity of the immigration flows, thought to be a source for new opportunities for capital valuation, as well as the basis for opportunity enhancement for the masses. Yet, migrations signify nothing else but a process of universal competition, whereas migrating has no more emancipating value than staying at home. A ‘nomadic’ person is no more inclined to criticism or to revolt than a sedentary person.” (L’évanescence de la valeur. Une présentation critique du groupe Krisis, 2004).

“As long as people keep abandoning their families,” adds Robert Kurz, “and look for work elsewhere, even at the risk of their own lives — only to be ultimately shredded by the treadmill of capitalism — they will be less the heralds of emancipation and more the self-congratulatory agents of the postmodern West. In fact, they only represent its miserable version.” (Robert Kurz, « L’Empire et ses théoriciens », 2003).

Whoever criticizes capitalism, while approving immigration, whose working class is its first victim, had better shut up. Whoever criticizes immigration, while remaining silent about capitalism, should do the same.

————

Alain de Benoist is a philosopher residing in France. The above article was first published in the quarterly Eléments, “L’immigration; armée de réserve du capital” (April-June 2011, Nr. 139).

———————-

De Benoist, Alain. “Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital.” The Occidental Observer, 23 August 2011. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/08/immigration-the-reserve-army-of-capital/>. (See this essay in PDF format here: Immigration – The Reserve Army of Capital).

Note: This is one of Alain de Benoist’s most widely known articles. It was originally published in French as “Immigration, l’armée de réserve du capital” (Eléments, No. 139, April-June 2011, pp. 26-28; republished in Au bord du gouffre [Paris: Krisis, 2011]). It is available in German translation as “Pompidous Irrtum. Masseneinwanderung nach Frankreich” (Junge Freiheit, No. 16, 15 April 2011, p. 20), in Spanish translation as “Inmigración: El Ejército de Reserva del Capitalismo” (published online: Area Identitaria, 4 February 2013, <http://areaidentitaria.blogspot.com/2013/02/la-inmigracion-ejercito-de-reserva-del.html >), in Italian translation as “L’immigrazione, l’armata di riserva del capitale” (Diorama letterario, No. 303, May-June 2011, pp. 10-13), in Portuguese translation as “Imigração: o exército de reserva do capital” (published online: Legio Victrix, 21 November 2011, <http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2011/11/imigracao-o-exercito-de-reserva-do.html >), in Polish translation as “Imigracja: armia rezerwowa kapitalu” (published online: Nacjonalista.pl, 25 August 2011, <http://www.nacjonalista.pl/2011/08/25/alain-de-benoist-imigracja-armia-rezerwowa-kapitalu/ >), in Lithuanian translation as “Imigracija: kapitalo rezerviné armija” (published online: Nacionalistas, 21 March 2014, <http://ltnacionalistas.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/alain-de-benoist-imigracija-kapitalo-rezervine-armija/ >).