How are Revolutions Born? – Venner

How are Revolutions Born?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

The birth of revolutions is a fascinating, quite relevant, and little-known topic. It was studied by the sociologist Jules Monnerot (1908–1995) after the French events of May 1968 in his book Sociologie de la Révolution [Sociology of Revolution] (Paris: Fayard, 1969). A valuable work for which the author has forged a series of concepts applicable to all situations.

As a sociological study and not one in the history of ideas, Monnerot uses one term, “revolution”—without, of course, ignoring all that separates and opposes the various revolutions of the 20th century: Bolshevism, Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, the French revolutions of 1944 or 1968. Indeed, he applies the same sociological analysis to these mass phenomena while making a clear distinction between conservative revolutions and deconstructive revolutions.

To begin, Monnerot defines some concepts applicable to any revolution. Firstly, the “historical situation“: it is one we’ll never see twice. This is true for 1789, 1917, 1922, 1933, or 1968. Another complementary notion: the “situation of distress.” It is characterized by uncontrolled disturbances. The social structure is defeated: the elements are no longer in place.

When a society is stable, we can distinguish normal (“homogeneous“) and marginal (“heterogeneous“) social elements. Marginal elements are marginal because they are maintained by the pressure of “homogeneous” elements. When a critical threshold of upheaval is reached, the homogeneous part begins to dissociate. Chaos then becomes contagious.

An interesting observation that applies to conservative revolutions: “the homogeneous, even in dissociation, remains homogeneous.” When the upheaval is radical, “the very foundation of society mounts a demand for power.” Fascism, in 1922 or 1933, for example, was a response to this demand in a highly developed society (industry, science, culture). In such a society, when order collapsed, the conservative elements (homogeneous) become temporarily revolutionary in their desire for order and demanded power.

How do we arrive at a “revolutionary situation“? Monnerot’s synthetic response: deficiency at the top. A regime crisis is characterized by a “plurality of conflicts.” Any exception to the authority of those in power, and disorder becomes endemic. The society “boils over.”

This effervescence is not revolution. It is a phase, a time, with a beginning and an end (a cooling down) when the medium “is no longer combustible.” When the excitement dies down, the same people are not in command (Robespierre was replaced by Napoleon, Trotsky by Stalin, Mussolini by Balbo).

The revolutionary and turbulent condition involves the “masses.” These are momentary coagulations, troops of revolution. To lead the masses, to give them a nervous system, the Jacobins and Lenin (much more efficiently) developed the instrument of the party.

What Leninists called “the radicalization of the masses” is a tendency to politicize those hitherto conformist and little inclined to be passionate about the public good (those who above all ask the state to do the job of the state). When it enters a phase of turmoil, “society is traversed in all directions intense emotional reactions, like iron filings in a magnetic current.”

Situations of distress bring to the fore violent elites: the “subversive heterogenes,” the irregular and marginal that the customary barriers cannot stop. They give the movement the force to break through.

In a revolutionary situation, the painful lack and need of power can force social elements that aspire to order down the road to revolution. “A time comes when the Arditi or young Baltic lancers,[1] previously regarded as reprobates, appear more reassuring than worrisome to the most homogeneous part of the population. They seem to embody, through misfortune, the values ​​of courage, bravery, and character without which there is no great country. . . . Even those who are not supporters think they should be allowed to try.” This is a good summary of exceptional historical situations. But, as Monnerot specified, the “historical situation” is that which never arises twice.

In the France of 2013, we are entering a “historical situation”? Not yet, surely. But there are signs that it may head toward such an unforeseen situation. Will it be all that it promises? It is too early to say. But nothing is impossible.

Source: http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/2013/04/comment-naissent-les-revolution/

Translator’s Note:

1. The Arditi were the Italian shock troops of the First World War, many of whom became Fascist Blackshirts. Baltic lancers probably refer to the German Freikorps veterans who played a similar role in the National Socialist movement. I wish to thank Robert Steuckers for clarifying the latter point. If Monnerot is alluding to a specific individual, please email me at: editor@counter-currents.com.

 

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Venner, Dominique. “How are Revolutions Born?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 19 April 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/04/how-are-revolutions-born/ >.

 

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“They’re All Rotten!” – Venner

“They’re All Rotten!”

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

 

This exclamation is probably a bit simplistic, but it sums up the feeling of revulsion spreading today throughout the fair country of France. When taxes were being raised to benefit various electoral constituencies, explosive revelations about the corruption of the minister in charge forced back the increase. This lovely scandal added to the rising anger of a large segment of the public against a clear intent to destroy them, as evidenced by mass immigration policy or the legalization of gay marriage.

Corruption and embezzlement by people in power, the politicians or officials of a bloated administration, is nothing new. Whole libraries have been devoted to the scandals of the successive republics. However, the Fifth Republic has broken all records since it was founded by General de Gaulle, a man of integrity who loved to be surrounded by rogues. It is not just that the temptations became more numerous, fueled by new financial powers granted to elected officials and huge windfalls to administrations, unions, and associations for this or that. No, there was something else.

The reasons for public corruption are manifold. Some are historical. I happen to remember that in the purge trials in the High Court, after 1945, against the ministers of the French State, otherwise known as the Vichy regime, it was impossible to identify a single case of enrichment through fraud or corruption, despite the strenuous efforts of investigators.[1] The men who held power then were certainly criticized in many ways, but, in general, they were imbued with a sense of almost military duty to their country trapped in a situation of extreme distress. No doubt they also knew they were being watched by the large surveillance corps established by the State. The idea of ​​duty then evaporated in many of their successors, who without doubt profited from the real or supposed dangers they faced during the war years.

But, since I wish to invoke the mindset, i.e. the “representations” that we all know exist and determine our behavior, we must surely dig deeper.

Europe since earliest antiquity has always been ruled by the idea that each individual is inseparable from his community, clan, tribe, people, city, empire, to which he is linked by a bond more sacred than life itself. This unquestioned belief, of which the Iliad offers the oldest and most poetic expression, took various forms. Think of the worship of ancestors for whom the city owed its existence, or the loyalty to the prince who was its visible expression.

The first threat was introduced by the individualism of early Christianity. The idea of ​​a personal god emancipated men from the hitherto unquestioned authority of ethnic gods of the city. Yet the Church itself reimposed the idea that the individual will could not order things as it pleased.

Yet the seed of a spiritual revolution had been sown. It reappeared unexpectedly in the religious individualism of the Reformation. In the following century, the rationalist idea of absolute individualism was developed forcefully by Descartes (“I think, therefore, I am”). The philosopher also made central the biblical idea of ​​man as the master and possessor of nature. No doubt, in Cartesian thought, man was subject to the laws of God, but God set a very bad example. Unlike the ancient gods, He was not dependent on a natural order anterior and superior to him. He was the single all-powerful and arbitrary creator of all things, of life and nature itself, according to His sole discretion. If this God was a creator free of all limits, then why not man, who is made his image, as well?

Set in motion by the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, this idea has no known limits. In it lies what we call “modernity.” This idea assumes that man is his own creator and he can recreate the world as he pleases. There is no other principle than the will and pleasure of each individual. Consequently, the legitimacy of a society no longer depends on its compliance with the eternal laws of the ethnos. It depends only on the momentary consent of individual wills. In other words, society is legitimate only as a contract resulting from a free agreement between parties who are pursuing their own advantage.[2]

If self-interest is the sole basis of the social compact, there is nothing to prevent us from satisfying our interests and appetites, including by filling our pockets if the opportunity is offered by our position. All the more so, given that market society, through advertising, tells us that we are obligated to enjoy ourselves, indeed, that we exist only to enjoy ourselves.

Still, despite this individualistic and materialistic logic, we have long maintained communal ties of birth and fatherland and all the obligations these imply. These ties have been progressively destroyed across Europe in the decades following World War II, while the triumphant consumer society arrived from the United States. Like other European countries, France has gradually ceased to be a nation (based on nationality, common birth) to become an aggregate of individuals united by their pleasures or the ideas they have of their interests. The former obligation to “serve” has been replaced by the general temptation to “serve oneself.” This is the logical consequence of the principle that founds society solely on human rights, thus on each individual’s interests.

And now, before our eyes, this repulsive logic faces a revolt from the depths. We are witnessing the unexpected awakening of all those who, through atavistic reflexes, feel deep down that unquestionable ancestry is what make a clan, a people, or a nation.

Notes

1. See my Histoire de la Collaboration [History of the Collaboration] (Paris: Pygmalion, 2002).

2. Rousseau understood that this was the fault of the social contract. He sought to remedy it by justifying the use of force to compel the reluctant to submit to a problematic “general will.”

Source: http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/2013/04/tous-pourris/

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Venner, Dominique. “‘They’re All Rotten!'” Counter-Currents Publishing, 15 April 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/04/theyre-all-rotten/ >.

 

Shock of History – O’Meara

The Shock of History

By Michael O’Meara

 

A propos:
Dominique Venner.
Le choc de l’Histoire. Religion, mémoire, identité.
Versailles: Via Romana, September 2011.

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking, Karl Mannheim notes, is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Some anti-liberals are wont thus to situate their ‘conservative’ project within the frame of Europe’s historical destiny and the higher design informing it.

The most renowned of such historical thinkers (representing what Carolina Armenteros calls the ‘the French idea of history’) was the father of European anti-liberalism, Joseph de Maistre—though he is not our subject. Rather, it is the foremost contemporary avatar of anti-liberal historical thought: Dominique Venner.

The 75-year-old, French-speaking European of Celt and German descent, father of five, Venner is a historical scholar, a writer of popular histories and of various works on firearms and hunting, as well as the editor of two successful, artfully illustrated historical journals.

But whatever his genre, Venner bears the knightly (or legionnaire) standard of Europe’s multi-millennial heritage—the heritage, he claims, that took form with the blind poet, who is the father of us all—the heritage whose Homeric spirit knows to honor the brave, bare-foot soldiers of the Confederacy and the social banditry of Jesse James—and, most insistently, the heritage that expects a future commensurate with Europe’s incomparable past.

Venner is not your average academic historians; indeed, he’s not an academic at all. His life has been lived out on the last of France’s imperial battlefields; in Parisian street politics, in the outlawed OAS, in prison, and in laying the conceptual foundations of the European New Right; and finally, since his early thirties, in the various libraries, archives, and communal memories he’s searched to produce the 50 books he’s written on the key historical upheavals of the last century or so.

Unsurprisingly, his historical sense is ‘over-determined’—not solely by an intelligence steeped in the life of the mind, but also by disciplines acquired in those schools of initiands known only to the political soldier.

His latest book—Le Choc de l’Histoire—is not a work of history per se, but a series of meditations, in the form of a book-long interview (conducted by the historian Pauline Lecomte) on the historical situation presently facing Europeans. These meditations approach their subject in parallel but opposite ways: 1) one approach surveys the contours of Europe’s longue durée—those centuries of growth that made the great oak so venerable—and, in the spirit of the Annales School, reveals her ‘secret permanences’, and, 2) a very different but complementary approach that silhouettes the heroic individuals and individual events (Achilles and the Iliad foremost) exemplifying the Homeric spirit of European man—disclosing his possibilities, and offering him thus an alternative to his programmed extinction.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind.

The Sleep

The Second European Civil War of 1939-1945, however it is interpreted, resulted in a cataclysmic defeat not just for Hitler’s Germany, but for Europe, much of which, quite literally, was reduced to mounds of smoldering rumble. Then, at Yalta, adding insult to injury, the two extra-European super-powers partitioned the Continent, deprived her states of sovereignty, and proceeded to Americanize or Sovietize the ‘systems’ organizing and managing the new postwar European order.

As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization—believing, as they were encouraged, that they were simply one people, equal among the world’s many peoples.

Worse, for their unpardonable sins—for what Europeans did to Jews in the war, to Blacks in the slave trade, to non-White peoples in general over the course of the last 500 years—for all the terrible sins Europeans have committed, they are henceforth denied the ‘right’ to be a ‘people’. In the Messianic spirit of Communism and Americanism, the Orwellian occupiers and collaborators have since refused them a common origin (roots), a shared history, a tradition, a destiny. This reduces them to a faceless economic-administrative collectivity, which is expected, in the end, to negate the organic basis of its own existence.

The postwar assault on European identity entailed, however, more than a zombifying campaign of guilt-inducement—though this campaign was massive in scale. Europe after Jahre Null was re-organized according to extra-European models and then overwhelmed with imported forms of mass consumerism and entertainment. At the same time and with perhaps greater severity, she was subject to an unprecedented ‘brain-washing’ (in schools, media, the so-called arts, public institutions, and private corporations)—as all Europe’s family of nations, not just the defeated Germans, were collectively made to bear a crushing guilt—under the pretext of the Shoah or the legacy of colonialism/imperialism/slavery—for sins requiring the most extreme penance. Thus tainted, her memory and identity are now publicly stigmatized.

Venner’s Europe is not, of course, the Soviet/New Class-inspired EU, just as she is not the geographical entity labeled ‘Europe’. Rather than a market, a political/administrative structure, a geographic category—rather even than a race (though in a certain sense it is all about race in the end)—Europe for him is a multi-millennial community of closely-related national families made up of Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others, having the same ancient (Indo-European, Borean, Cro-Magnon) roots of blood and spirit: that is, having the same Thirty-thousand Years of European History and Identity.

This makes his Europe a community with a common civilizational heritage that stretches back to the depths of prehistoric time. Historically, the tradition and identity of this heritage has informed Europe’s representations and values in ways distinguishing/identifying her and her peoples from other civilizations and peoples.

Tradition, though, is not for Venner the metaphysical abstraction of the perennialists or the historical repository of the Burkeans: it is not something outside history nor is it something forged once and for all in the night of time.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass. It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition may originate in Prehistory, but Venner claims it is preeminently contemporary—just as every origin represents a novel outburst of being. It serves thus as a people’s inner compass. It directs them to what and whom they are. It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition, Venner insists, is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century. But he is no knee-jerk anti-American (though the French, in my view, have good cause to be anti-US). He’s also written several books on the US War of Secession, in which much of America’s Cavalier heritage is admired. Knowing something of the opposed tendencies shaping American ‘national’ life, he’s well aware of the moral abyss separating, say, Jesse James from Jay Gould—and what makes one an exemplar of the European spirit and the other its opposite.

Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World, Venner claims America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents—which meant disowning the idea (old as Herodotus) that Europe is ‘the home of liberty and true government’.

Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

New England, to be sure, is not the whole of America, for the South, among another sections, has a quite different narrative, but it was the Yankee version of the ‘American epic’ that became dominant, and it is thus the Yankee version that everywhere wars on Americans of European descent.

Citing Huntington’s Who Are We?, Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational/universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Seventeenth century’, these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

The Shock

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition.

The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes (in discrediting the collaborators managing the EU, as well as de-legitimatizing the continent’s various national political systems), combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign.

Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals, Venner notes, are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

The Unexpected

History is the realm of the unexpected. Venner does not subscribe to notions of historical determinism or necessity. In contrast to Marxists and economic determinists, anti-Semites and Spenglerians, he believes there are no monocausal explanations of history, and unlike liberals such as Fukuyama, he believes there’s no escape from (no ‘end’ to) history.

In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

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O’Meara, Michael. “The Shock of History.” Alternative Right Magazine, 23 October 2011 (published online). <http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-shock-of-history/>.

Notes: Venner’s book Le choc de l’histoire has recently been published in English translation as The Shock of History by Arktos (London, 2015). In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

 

The Rebel: Interview with Venner

The Rebel: An Interview with Dominique Venner

Translated by Michael O’Meara

Czech translation based on this English translation: here

The noted French nationalist and historian speaks to the personal imperatives of white liberation.

Translator’s Note:

It’s a testament to the abysmal state of our culture that hardly one of Dominique Venner’s more than forty books have been translated into English. Venner is more than a gifted historian who has made major contributions to the most important chapters of modern, especially twentieth-century European history. He’s played a key role in both the development of the European New Right and the “Europeanization” of continental nationalism.

It is his “rebel heart” that explains his engagement in these great struggles, as well as his interests in the Russian Revolution, German fascism, French national socialism, the US Civil War, and the two world wars. The universe found in his works is one reminiscent of Ernst von Salomon’s Die Geächteten — one of the Homeric epics of our age.

The following interview is about the rebel. Unlike the racial conservatives dominant in US white nationalist ranks, European nationalism still bears traces of its revolutionary heritage — opposed as it is not merely to the alien, anti-national forces, but to the entire liberal modernist subversion, of which the United States has been the foremost exemplar.

Question: What is a rebel? Is one born a rebel, or just happens to become one? Are there different types of rebels?

Dominique Venner: It’s possible to be intellectually rebellious, an irritant to the herd, without actually being a rebel. Paul Morand [a diplomat and novelist noted for his anti-Semitism and collaborationism under Vichy] is a good example of this. In his youth, he was something of a free spirit blessed by fortune. His novels were favored with success. But there was nothing rebellious or even defiant in this. It was for having chosen the side of the National Revolution between 1940 and 1944, for persisting in his opposition to the postwar regime, and for feeling like an outsider that made him the rebellious figure we have come to know from his “Journals.”

Another, though different example of this type is Ernst Jünger. Despite being the author of an important rebel treatise on the Cold War, Jünger was never actually a rebel. A nationalist in a period of nationalism; an outsider, like much of polite society, during the Third Reich; linked to the July 20 conspirators, though on principle opposed to assassinating Hitler. Basically for ethical reasons. His itinerary on the margins of fashion made him an “anarch,” this figure he invented and of which after 1932 he was the perfect representative. The anarch is not a rebel. He’s a spectator whose perch is high above the mud below.

Just the opposite of Morand and Jünger, the Irish poet Patrick Pearse was an authentic rebel. He might even be described as a born rebel. When a child, he was drawn to Erin’s long history of rebellion. Later, he associated with the Gaelic Revival, which laid the basis of the armed insurrection. A founding member of the first IRA, he was the real leader of the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916. This was why he was shot. He died without knowing that his sacrifice would spur the triumph of his cause.

A fourth, again very different example is Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Until his arrest in 1945, he had been a loyal Soviet, having rarely questioned the system into which he was born and having dutifully done his duty during the war as a reserve officer in the Red Army. His arrest and then his subsequent discovery of the Gulag and the horrors that occurred after 1917, provoked a total reversal, forcing him to challenge a system which he once blindly accepted. This is when he became a rebel — not just against Communist, but capitalist society, both of which he saw as destructive of tradition and opposed to superior life forms.

The reasons that made Pearse a rebel were not the same that made Solzhenitsyn a rebel. It was the shock of certain events, followed by a heroic internal struggle, that made the latter a rebel. What they both have in common, what they discovered through different ways, was the utter incompatibility between their being and the world in which they were thrown. This is the first trait of the rebel. The second is the rejection of fatalism.

Q: What is the difference between rebellion, revolt, dissent, and resistance?

DV: Revolt is a spontaneous movement provoked by an injustice, an ignominy, or a scandal. Child of indignation, revolt is rarely sustained. Dissent, like heresy, is a breaking with a community, whether it be a political, social, religious, or intellectual community. Its motives are often circumstantial and don’t necessarily imply struggle. As to resistance, other than the mythic sense it acquired during the war, it signifies one’s opposition, even passive opposition, to a particular force or system, nothing more. To be a rebel is something else.

Q: What, then, is the essence of a rebel?

DV: A rebel revolts against whatever appears to him illegitimate, fraudulent, or sacrilegious. The rebel is his own law. This is what distinguishes him. His second distinguishing trait is his willingness to engage in struggle, even when there is no hope of success. If he fights a power, it is because he rejects its legitimacy, because he appeals to another legitimacy, to that of soul or spirit.

Q: What historical or literary models of the rebel would you offer?

DV: Sophocles’ Antigone comes first to mind. With her, we enter a space of sacred legitimacy. She is a rebel out of loyalty. She defies Creon’s decrees because of her respect for tradition and the divine law (to bury the dead), which Creon violates. It didn’t mater that Creon had his reasons; their price was sacrilege. Antigone saw herself as justified in her rebellion.

It’s difficult to choose among the many other examples. . . . During the War of Secession, the Yankees designated their Confederate adversaries as rebels: “rebs.” This was good propaganda, but it wasn’t true. The American Constitution implicitly recognized the right of member states to secede. Constitutional forms had been much respected in the South. Robert E. Lee never saw himself as a rebel. After his surrender in April 1865, he sought to reconcile North and South. At this moment, though, the true rebels emerged, those who continued the struggle against the Northern army of occupation and its collaborators.

Certain of these rebels succumbed to banditry, like Jesse James. Others transmitted to their children a tradition that has had a great literary posterity. In The Unvanquished, one of William Faulkner’s most beautiful novels, there is, for example a fascinating portrait of a young Confederate sympathizer, Drusilla, who never doubted the justice of the South’s cause or the illegitimacy of the victors.

Q: How can one be a rebel today?

DV: How can one not! To exist is to defy all that threatens you. To be a rebel is not to accumulate a library of subversive books or to dream of fantastic conspiracies or of taking to the hills. It is to make yourself your own law. To find in yourself what counts. To make sure that you’re never “cured” of your youth. To prefer to put everyone up against the wall rather than to remain supine. To pillage whatever can be converted to your law, without concern for appearance.

By contrast, I would never dream of questioning the futility of seemingly lost struggles. Think of Patrick Pearse. I’ve also spoken of Solzhenitsyn, who personifies the magic sword of which Jünger speaks, “the magic sword that makes tyrants tremble.” In this Solzhenitsyn is unique and inimitable. But he owed this power to someone who was less great than himself. That should give us cause to reflect. In The Gulag Archipelago, he tells the story of his “revelation.”

In 1945, he was in a cell at Boutyrki Prison in Moscow, along with a dozen other prisoners, whose faces were emaciated and whose bodies broken. One of the prisoners, though, was different. He was an old White Guard colonel, Constantin Iassevitch. He had been imprisoned for his role in the Civil War. Solzhenitsyn says the colonel never spoke of his past, but in every facet of his being it was obvious that the struggle had never ended for him. Despite the chaos that reigned in the spirits of the other prisoners, he retained a clear, decisive view of the world around him. This disposition gave his body a presence, a flexibility, an energy that defied its years. He washed himself in freezing cold water each morning, while the other prisoners grew foul in their filth and lament.

A year later, after being transferred to another Moscow prison, Solzhenitsyn learned that the colonel had been executed.

“He had seen through the prison walls with eyes that remained perpetually young. . . . This indomitable loyalty to the cause he had fought had given him a very uncommon power.”

In thinking of this episode, I tell myself that we can never be another Solzhenitsyn, but it’s within the reach of each of us to emulate the old White colonel.

French Original: “Aujourd’hui, comment ne pas être rebelle?”

—————–

Venner, Dominique. “The Rebel: An Interview with Dominique Venner.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 June 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/the-rebel/ >.

 

Letter on Identity & Sovereignty – Venner

Letter to My Friends on Identity & Sovereignty

By Dominque Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

When you belong to a nation associated with St. Louis, Philip the Fair, Richelieu, Louis XIV, or Napoleon, a country which in the late 17th century, was called the “great nation” (the most populated and most dangerous), it is cruel to recount the history of repeated setbacks: the aftermath of Waterloo, 1870, 1940, and again in 1962, the ignominious end of French rule in Algeria. A certain pride necessarily suffers.

By the 1930s, many among the boldest French minds had imagined a united Europe as a way to an understanding with Germany and as a solution to the constant decline of France. After the disaster that was World War II (which amplified that of 1914–1918), a project was born that is in itself legitimate. New bloodlettings between the French and Germans should be outlawed forever. The idea was to tie together the two great sister nations of the former Carolingian Empire. First by an economic association (the European Coal and Steel Community), then by a political association. General de Gaulle wanted to make this happen with the Elysée Treaty (January 22, 1963), but the United States, in their hostility, forestalled it by putting pressure on West Germany.

Then came the technocratic globalists who gave us the gas works called the “European Union.” In practice, this is the absolute negation of its name. The fake “European Union” has become the biggest obstacle to a genuine political settlement that respects the particularities of the European peoples of the former Carolingian Empire. Europe, it must be remembered, is primarily a unitary multi-millennial civilization going back to Homer, but it is also a potential power zone and the aspiration for a future that remains to be built.

Why an aspiration to power? Because no European nations today, neither France nor Germany nor Italy, despite brave fronts, are sovereign states any longer.

There are three main attributes of sovereignty:

First attribute: the ability to make war and conclude peace. The US, Russia, Israel, or China can. Not France. That was over after the end of the war in Algeria (1962), despite the efforts of General de Gaulle and our nuclear deterrent, which will never be used by France on its own (unless the United States has disappeared, which is unpredictable). Another way to pose the question: for whom are the French soldiers dying in Afghanistan? Certainly not for France, which has no business there, but for the United States. We are the auxiliaries of the USA. Like Germany and Italy, France is a vassal state of the great Atlantic suzerain power. It is best to face this to recover our former pride.

Second attribute of sovereignty: control of territory and population. Ability to distinguish between one’s own people and others . . . We know the reality is that the French state, by its policy, laws, courts, has organized the “great replacement” of populations, we impose a preference for immigrants and Muslims, with 8 million Arab-Muslims (and more waiting), bearers of another history, another civilization, and another future (Sharia).

Third attribute of sovereignty: one’s own currency. We know what that is.

The agonizing conclusion: France, as a state, is no longer sovereign and no longer has its own destiny. This is a consequence of the disasters of the century of 1914 (the 20th century) and the general decline of Europe and Europeans.

But there is a “but”: if France does not exist as a sovereign state, the French people and nation still exist, despite all efforts to dissolve them into rootless individuals! This is the great destabilizing paradox of the French mind. We were always taught to confuse identity with sovereignty by being taught that the nation is a creation of the state, which, for the French, is historically false.

It is for me a very old topic of discussion that I had previously summarized in an opinion column published in Le Figaro on February 1, 1999 under the title: “Sovereignty is not Identity.” I’ll put it online one day soon for reference.

No, the sovereignty of the state is not to be confused with national identity. France’s universalist tradition and centralist state were for centuries the enemy of the carnal nation and its constituent communities. The state has always acted relentlessly to uproot the French and transform them into the interchangeable inhabitants of a geographic zone. It has always acted to rupture the national tradition. Look at the July 14 celebrations: it celebrates a repugnant uprising, not a great memory of unity. Look at the ridiculous emblem of the French Republic: a plaster Marianne wearing a revolutionary cap. Look at the hideous logos that have been imposed to replace the arms of the traditional regions. Remember that in 1962 the state used all its strength against the French in Algeria, abandoned to their misery. Similarly, today, it is not difficult to see that the state gives preference to immigrants (construction of mosques, legalizing halal slaughter) at the expense of the natives.

There is nothing new in this state of war against the living nation. The Jacobin Republic merely followed the example of the Bourbons, which Tocqueville has demonstrated in The Old Regime and the French Revolution before Taine and other historians. Our textbooks have taught blind admiration for the way the Bourbons crushed “feudalism,” that is to say, the nobility and the communities they represented. What a brilliant policy! By strangling the nobility and rooted communities, this dynasty destroyed the foundation of the old monarchy. Thus, in the late 18th century, the individualistic (human rights) Revolution triumphed in France but failed everywhere else in Europe thanks to the persistence of the feudal system and strong communities. Reread what Renan says in his Intellectual and Moral Reform in France. The reality is that in France the state is not the defender of the nation. It is a machine of power that has its own logic, willingly lent to the service of the enemies of the nation, having become one of the main agents of the deconstruction of identity.

Source: http://fr.novopress.info/115104/tribune-libre-lettre-sur-lidentite-a-mes-amis-souverainistes-par-dominique-venner/

———–

Venner, Dominique. “Letter to My Friends on Identity & Sovereignty.” Counter-Currents.com. 6 July 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/letter-to-my-friends-on-identity-and-sovereignty/ >.

 

Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty? – Venner

Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Author’s Note:

I reproduce here in full a seminal article that I published in Le Figaro on February 1, 1999 under the title: “Sovereignty is not Identity.” This article was part of the debate provoked by the Amsterdam Treaty and discussions about the future EU.

My intention was to liberate the minds of those who see history from a Jacobin and “state-centered” perspective, which has always been taught in France under the influence of an exceptionally powerful centralized state. This history focuses exclusively on the state and practices a kind of negation of the French people and the carnal nation that I hope to rehabilitate. This article provoked some lively debate in those circles most attached to the idea of sovereignty, promoting new thinking on national identity. I reproduce it as it was published at the time.

A wave of panic stirs our remotest hamlets. France, will she survive the Euro, the Treaty of Amsterdam, the conspiracy of the Eurocrats, to the year 2000? Is the loss of sovereignty the loss of identity? On these real issues regarding the challenge of the construction of Europe, historians have remained strangely silent. Yet if there is an area where history can illuminate the future, it is that of French identity in the midst of Europe.

Unlike the German nation, which lived without a unitary state for six centuries, from 1250 to 1871, France has not experienced such an interruption. Here, the unitary state was continuously maintained during the same period. Hence the causal relationship inscribed in our minds between sovereignty and identity. It has even become a kind of dogma, maintained by Jacobin historiography, that the French nation is the creation of the state and that, deprived of the latter, it would be in danger of death and dissolution.

It this were true, such a nation would be worthless. But it is false. Certainly no one would contest that the state, royal and republican, built the political and administrative framework of the nation. However, this has nothing to do with the formation of its substance. The state is not the creator of the French people or the source of our identity. History shows that. But this truth is so contrary to received ideas that it needs some explanation.

Let us refer to the origins, the Oaths of Strasbourg, publicly pledged in February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German, grandsons of Charlemagne. The authentic text was written in Langue d′oïl (Old French) and Old High German. It is the oldest known document attesting to a linguistic separation between German-speaking and French-speaking Frankish barons of the same stock. The Oath of Strasbourg is, in a way, the official birth of the French and the German peoples before France and Germany. In the 9th century, without there ever being a nation state, two peoples and two cultures are already evidenced by the mysterious emergence of two distinct languages.

Move forward in time. From the 11th and 12th centuries, there is ample evidence of radiant French identity. At the time, the centralized state did not yet exist. The little courts of the petty kings of the time had nothing to do with the Song of Roland or Tristan and Isolde or the Lancelot of Chretien de Troyes, primordial monuments of a Frenchness deeply rooted in the European soil. The role of the state is also absent in the emergence and proliferation of the Romanesque style in the following centuries, in the admirable secular architecture of castles, towns, and country houses, neglected by the scholarly historiography up to André Chastel.[1]

What sort of people, what sort of identity? In the 12th century, the famous Suger, abbot of Saint-Denis and adviser to Louis VII, responds in his own way: “We are French of France, born of the same womb.” Five centuries later, the grammarian Vaugelas responsible in 1639 to lead the drafting of the Great dictionary of the Academy offers this definition: “People does not mean mob, but community represented faithfully by its nobility.”

More than the state, the deciding factor of the birth of a nation is the existence of a “core people”: homogeneous, numerous, active, “represented by its nobility,” from which unfold a language and style that gradually extend to similar neighboring peoples. Such was the fate of the historic “core people” of the Ile de France, Picardy, and Neustria, of high Frankish composition. The Capetian kings made it the base of their ambitions. What happened, under the dry rule of the state, to this “core people,” the people of Bouvines and many other exploits, once so strong?

It is to them that we owe our language and its inner strength, so long inviolable. Emile Littre emphasized this in his History of the French Language. He showed how powerful vitality and genuine originality allowed the transformation of a Celticized and Germanized low-Latin into Old French and then French.

Before being ennobled by literature, the language had arisen from the people. Montaigne knew well when he wrote: “I would rather my son to learn to speak in taverns than schools of eloquence. . . . If only I could confine myself to the words used in the market of Paris.” Ronsard said much the same thing by assigning this condition the adoption of new words: “they are to be molded and shaped on a pattern already received from the people.” A pattern which Etiemble, in the 20th century, nicely called the “people’s throat.” Of course there must still be a people, i.e., living and rooted communities, everything that the centralist government dislikes and has always fought.

The state has its own logic which is not that of the living nation. The living nation has nothing to fear from the loss of sovereignty, because sovereignty should not be confused with identity. If further proof is needed, the history of Quebec is eloquent enough. Since the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the French in Canada were totally abandoned by the royal state. Isolated in a hostile land under foreign sovereignty, they not only failed to disappear, but they multiplied, preserving their ancestral language and customs, fighting victoriously against Anglo-Saxon linguistic hegemony.

Identity lies in fidelity to oneself, and nowhere else.

Note

1. One might add that in the 14th century several large fiefs often Carolingian and French escaped the royal state, but not French identity: Great Burgundy, Guyenne, French Flanders, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, and Savoy, not including independent Brittany.

Source: http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/2012/07/lidentite-depend-elle-de-la-souverainete/

———–

Venner, Dominique. “Does Identity Depend on Sovereignty?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 7 September 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/09/does-identity-depend-on-sovereignty/ >.

 

“Indigenous”? How Dare You? – Venner

“Indigenous”? How Dare You?

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations of this English translation: Czech, Ukrainian

No man is blinder than someone who refuses to see. I thought of this adage recently while reading a long public diatribe by a retired classicist.[1] Enjoying a status privileged in France and even in the United States where he taught at a reputable university, the good professor mocked the term chosen by his compatriots who call themselves “indigenous” or “autochthonous,” i.e., as the Greek etymology indicates, born of themselves, of the same blood and the same soil.

“In the middle of fifth century before our era,” he writes, “a small city-state in Greece was struck by the virus of the ‘hypertrophy of the ego’”—“a frightening epidemic,” added the professor emeritus. Consider: this epidemic “resulted in instituting an annual ceremony in which a speaker, expert in funeral orations, celebrated the immemorial glory of the Athenians before the graves of the war dead.” What an absurd idea, indeed, to celebrate the glory of the city and those who died in war! This disturbing “hypertrophy of the ego” even led the Athenians to build some negligible marble monuments like the Parthenon, which resisted the millennia and various invasions to the eternal admiration of morons like us. It also led them to raise other equally trivial monuments: those of the spirit (the transmission of the Homeric poems, the invention of philosophy, tragic drama, and historical investigation), which nourish us to this day and that the curious classicist finds it astonishing that we still quote. This whole heritage is indeed irritating.

And what a deplorable example! “The [French] historians of the 1880s began to write a history of France, born from itself.” Truly a scandal! And that is not all: “Just as the monks who in 12th century invented the ‘Christian cemetery,’ excluding Jews, infidels, foreigners, and other non-believers, they [the historians] continue to maintain, from one Republic to another, the belief that we are the heirs of the dead, specifically of our dead, since prehistory. The ‘great historians’ [note the quotation marks] vouch for them.” How sad!

To believe our retired academic, in France the idea of the national identity—which thus comes to us from Athens and ancient Greece—is in the air today. This revelation fills him with distress.

Indeed, how inept, given the ascendant global flux of financial exchange, obviously so beneficial, encourages on the contrary a “nomadic” feeling, to use his words. Naturally it is easy to be “nomadic” when one travels only to the most beautiful places in the world, all expenses paid, cocooned by countless employees devoted to one’s comfort and safety.

No doubt the last French “autochthones” who lacked the means or opportunity to escape, for example, from Villiers-le-Bel after the riots of November 2007 would also like to be “nomads” of this type. But their status as poor, aged, or abandoned “autochthones” prohibits that. And yet what a pretty name, “Villiers-le-Bel” (Villiers the Beautiful). An “autochthonous” name, which now resounds with cruel irony.

Why, you might ask, do I speak of such things? Because the historian must also take into account and not to be blind to what happens before his eyes. This is the lesson of Marc Bloch, contemporary and victim of the disaster of 1940. He recognized that his work had led him to be unaware of the importance of the events of his time. “It was a misinterpretation of history . . . We preferred to confine ourselves in the nervous silence of our offices. . . . Had we not always been good citizens?”[2] I cannot deny that such a precedent does not leave me indifferent.

And if one is not a complete idiot, a question emerges: Why is the desire for identity (to be conscious of who one is, in every layer of one’s existence, among those who are like you) creditable among American Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Israelis, Uyghurs, Turks, or Gabonese but reprehensible among Europeans and French?

Now that is a question that needs to be answered.

Notes

[1] Marcel Detienne, in Le Monde, 12-13 July 2009, under the title: “La France sans terre ni mort” [France without land or dead].

[2] Marc Bloch, L’Etrange défaite (Editions Francs Tireurs, 1946), p. 188. Repenting his previous detachment, the great historian joined the Résistance. Captured, he was shot in June 1944.

Source: “Vous avez dit autochtone?” http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/#/edito-nrh-44-autochtone/3272196

————————–

Venner, Dominique. “‘Indigenous’? How Dare You?” Counter-Currents Publishing, 24 August 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/how-dare-you/ >.

 

Toward a New Aristocracy – Venner

Toward a New Aristocracy

By Dominique Venner

Czech translation of this translation: here

Translated by Greg Johnson

Their names continue to identify the boulevards of a unique though disfigured capital: Berthier, Murat, Jourdan, Masséna, Soult, Brune, Bessières, and others. By his decree of May 19th, 1804, Napoleon created the first fourteen marshals of the empire, to which he would add ten more. Yes, their names still remain on the perimeter of a Paris that hardly appreciates their glory.

Bonaparte had not been idle. The decision to restore the rank of Marshal came twenty-four hours after the senatus consult that gave him the title of Emperor of the French.

The noble titles of the Old Regime had been abolished in 1790. From his accession to the throne, Napoleon wanted to institute an imperial nobility, which he did in several steps, until the decree of March 1st, 1808 establishing a hierarchy of hereditary titles. As a social distinction, nobility was thus granted by the State to reward its supporters. Of course, a title never guarantees nobility of character or soul.

Napoleon obviously tried to get back to the monarchical tradition, but also to a much older tradition. In a few dazzling years, imitating ancient Rome, France had passed from a Republic to an Empire. However, it differed from its model in lacking the foundation of an aristocratic senate of patricians.[1] Did the Emperor wish to correct this deficiency? Destiny did not ratify his decision.

He was not the successor of the Roman Emperors, but he was the first of the modern Caesars. His power was built on the debris of the monarchy, but even more so on that of the old nobility which, for at least two centuries, has slowly lost its purpose, being dispossessed of its social and political functions by the voraciousness of the administrative monarchy. This monarchy did not support a free and vigorous nobility. It wanted dependant and submissive civil servants. It died because of it, unlike England and other great European monarchies that were always based on active nobilities until the day before 1914.

Then, in the vacuum created by the catastrophe of the Great War, the Caesars multiplied. But, in spite of various attempts, no new nobility could be constituted. One does not found a nobility with civil servants, even in uniform. Spengler had defined the old Prussian nobility by two moral qualities that seem scarcely compatible: “freedom and service.” It is hard to say more in fewer words.

I touched on this subject in another article, “Secret Aristocracies.” Several readers asked: “Why ‘secret’?”

It was an image. And what images suggest often has more scope than any argument. Perhaps it would have been more exact to speak of an “implicit” aristocracy, but it would have had less force. Initially I wanted to avoid any confusion with the daydreams of false chivalry used by mystifiers and their dupes. I wanted to also set aside the dreams of those who are enthralled by political romanticisms. Finally, I wanted to suggest that today there exists an invisible, self-titled elite, beyond all distinctions of class. They are men and women who, through the pursuit of personal excellence, quietly uphold higher duties. One meets them in many contexts. No bond associates them and no apparent sign distinguishes them in the eyes of ordinary people.

The Japanese say that it is precisely by invisible signs that one first recognizes a “Master,” i.e., one who has reached a certain perfection in his existence or in an “art” that is not necessarily martial. To found a “secret” aristocracy was one of the goals of the brilliant creator of scouting.[2] He had the experience of the very old British aristocracy, decrepit though it may have been, and also the experience of an army still penetrated by a spirit of nobility going back to the Iliad. His goal remains viable, with the proviso of purging it soundly of all “good-boyism.”

“Boulevard des Maréchals” (“Boulevard of the Marshals”), Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, no. 46, http://www.dominiquevenner.fr/#/edito-nrh-46-marechaux/3448596

Notes

[1] On the permanence of the Roman aristocracy and its role under the Empire, one can refer to the study of professor Yann Bohec, published in the Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, no. 43, p. 46.

[2] Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell, 1857–1941—Ed.

——————–

Venner, Dominique. “Toward a New Aristocracy.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 3 August 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/08/toward-a-new-aristocracy/ >.

 

Europe & Europeanness – Venner

Europe & Europeanness

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations based on this English translation: German, Portuguese

What is Europe? What is a European?

From the geopolitical and historical point of view, Europe is defined by its boundaries. The center, the European core, is formed of nations that, though often in conflict, have experienced a common history since the High Middle Ages. Essentially, they are the nations resulting from the Carolingian Empire and its environs, those that constituted with the 1957 Treaty of Rome the Europe known as “the Six”: France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Beyond, one sees taking shape a second circle including the Atlantic and septentrional [Northern] nations, as well as Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Lastly, a third circle of privileged alliances is enlarged to Russia.

I am absolutely not speaking here of a political project. I speak only as a historian pointing out a series of realities.

One could mention others. The Danubian Empire of the Hapsburgs was a reality. Baltic Europe equally so, although it is no longer true of the Mediterranean, which has ceased to be an axis of European unity since the Arab-Muslim conquests.

But Europe is something quite different from the geographical framework of its existence.

The consciousness of belonging to Europe, of Europeanness, is far older than the modern concept of Europe. It is apparent under the successive names of Hellensim, Celticness, Romanism, the Frankish Empire, or Christianity. Seen as an immemorial tradition, Europe is the product of a multi-millennial community of culture deriving its distinctness and unity from its constitutive peoples and a spiritual heritage whose supreme expression is the Homeric poems.

Like the other great civilizations—China, Japan, India, or the Semitic East—ours has deep roots in prehistory. It rests on a specific tradition that crosses time under changing guises. It was formed of spiritual values that structure our behavior and nourish our imaginations even after we forget them.

If, for example, simple sexuality is universal, just like the act of feeding oneself, love is different in every civilization, as are the representation of femininity, pictorial art, gastronomy, and music. They are the reflections of a certain spiritual morphology, mysteriously transmitted by blood, language, and the diffused memory of a community. These specificities make us who we are, and not someone else, even when our awareness of them has been lost.

Understood in this sense, tradition is what shapes and prolongs individuality, founds identity, gives meaning to life. It is not a transcendence external to oneself. Tradition is a “me” that crosses time, a living expression of the particular within the universal.

The name of Europe appeared 2,500 years ago in Herodotus and in the Description of the Earth of Hecataeus of Miletus. And it is not by chance that this Greek geographer classified the Celts and the Scythians among the people of Europe and not among the Barbarians. This was the age when European self-awareness first emerged under the threat of the Persian wars. It is a constant of history: identity is born from the threat of otherness.

Twenty centuries after Salamis, the fall of Constantinople, on May 29th, 1453, was felt as an even worse upheaval. The whole Eastern front of Europe was open to Ottoman conquest. Hapsburg Austria remained the ultimate rampart.

This critical moment brought the blossoming of a European consciousness in the modern sense of the word.

In 1452, the philosopher George of Trebizond had already published Pro defenda Europa, a manifesto in which the name of Europe replaced that of Christendom.

After the fall of the Byzantine capital, cardinal Piccolomini, later pope Pius II, wrote: “The Eastern part of Europe has been torn away.” And to communicate the full significance and pathos of the event, he invoked not the fathers of the Church, but, higher in the European memory, the poets and the tragedians of ancient Greece. This catastrophe, he said, means “the second death of Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides.” This lucid pope died in 1464, despairing at his inability to mobilize an army and fleet to deliver Constantinople.

All of history testifies that Europe is a very old community of civilizations. Without going back to the cave paintings and megalithic culture, there is not even one great historical phenomenon lived by one of the countries of the Frankish sphere that was not shared by all the others. Medieval knighthood, epic poetry, courtly love, monarchy, feudal liberties, the crusades, the emergence of the cities, the Gothic revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the expansion beyond the seas, the birth of the nation state, the secular and religious Baroque, musical polyphony, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Promethean universe of technology, or the awakening of nationalism . . . Yes, all that is common to Europe and Europe alone. In the course of history, every great movement in one country of Europe immediately found its equivalent among its sister countries and nowhere elsewhere. As for the conflicts that contributed so long to our dynamism, they were dictated by the competition of princes or states, never by oppositions of culture and civilization.

Contrary to other less-favored peoples, Europeans seldom had to raise the question of their identity. It was enough for them to exist: numerous, strong, and often victorious. But that is finished. The terrible “century of 1914” put an end to the reign of Europeans, who have since then been plagued by all the demons of self-doubt, albeit mitigated somewhat by a provisional material abundance. The artisans of unification crap their pants in fear at the question of identity. But identity is as important to a community as the vital question of ethnic and territorial borders.

Extract from Dominique Venner, Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, guerres et révolutions en Europe au XXe siècle
(Paris: Pygmalion, 2006).

http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2009/02/14/d-venner-l-europe-et-l-europeanite.html

———————

Venner, Dominique. “Europe & Europeanness.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 June 2010. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/06/europe-and-europeanness/>

From Nihilism to Tradition – O’Meara

From Nihilism to Tradition

By Michael O’Meara

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

I. Race of Blood, Race of Spirit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Nihilism

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Tradition

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

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

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

V. History

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

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

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

VI. In Defense of Who We Are

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

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

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

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