Interview with John Morgan – Leonard

A Blaze through the Gloom; an Interview with Arktos Media’s John Morgan by Nathan Leonard

 

Introductory Note: One of the byproducts of living in this highly technological age is that we are so constantly flooded with information from such a variety of media around us that we often become confused. Although our ability to communicate ideas has developed a phenomenal reach, when we stop to examine much of the information that takes up our time, we find that it is composed of fleeting ideas which are designed for short-term consumption of passing fads in which we get caught up for a short time and then remember later with nostalgia and a dash of ironic disdain. Much of what is promoted to us is a commercial transaction in some form or another. This is why it doesn’t last. Yet, part of our identity becomes intrinsically tangled in every shallow trend that sweeps us away.

John Morgan is Editor-in-Chief of Arktos Media, which publishes books that ask deeper questions about our identity and that challenge us to think differently about our role in history. Arktos has utilized innovations of globalism to provide information much different than what usually bombards us on a daily basis; ideas that cannot be blown away by winds of change for they are established in the very nature of life itself. We were fortunate to conduct the following interview with Mr. Morgan by way of email correspondence. – Nathan Leonard (from Heathen Harvest), 7 July 2014.

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Heathen Harvest: Thank you for accepting this interview, John. To start, what does the name “Arktos” mean, and how does it relate to the types of books Arktos publishes?

John Morgan: Arktos is a centaur in Greek mythology. It is also the Greek word for bear, and was additionally the Greek name for the constellation of Ursa Major (Ursa is Latin for bear), which contains the Big Dipper, and which can guide one toward the North Star. Arktos was also the root of the word “arctic”. We wanted a name that was evocative of the ancient European tradition and also of “northernness”, to borrow a term coined by C. S. Lewis to describe Wagnerian art. While in Arktos we are interested in all traditional cultures, we do see ourselves as being primarily rooted in our own European heritage, and we could think of nothing more poetic than Arktos to convey that. Also, it is much less of a mouthful than Integral Tradition Publishing, which was the name of the company some of my colleagues and I had previously! As one can see from perusing the sorts of books we have published to date, many of them deal with aspects of myth and tradition, both European and otherwise.

HH: Arktos will be co-sponsoring the 2014 Identitarian Congress in Budapest this October. What is this event going to be about?

JM: We’re still working on the overall theme, as we haven’t confirmed all the speakers and participants yet. Essentially, we want to discuss the issues that unite all traditionalists, nationalists and identitarians across North America and Europe. There are so many groups, movements and thinkers across the world that are pursuing similar goals, but they rarely have the opportunity to gather in one place to compare notes and ideas, and simply to network. So, our event will be an attempt to fill that need. We also want to explore the idea of Europe as something beyond the petty nationalisms of the past, which led to the tragedy of 1914 (among others), the consequences of which are still being seen today, and also beyond the type of liberalism that has been imported here from the United States. All of our speakers will be addressing these issues, albeit in very different and unique ways.

HH: Why is Budapest the location for the conference? Is it related to your living there? Is there a movement toward traditional thinking there?

JM: The fact that Arktos is now based here was certainly a factor, yes, since it means that my colleagues and I can take care of some of the advance logistical work involved. However, on a broader level, Budapest, and Hungary more generally, is an ideal location for a gathering of traditionalists and nationalists, since Hungary is probably the country with the most vitality in relation to those fields at the present time, and certainly in Europe. Ideas that are often dismissed out of turn in other Western countries are still being openly discussed and taken seriously here. Not to mention the fact that Budapest is one of the most beautiful capital cities in Europe. So, in every way, this was really the ideal location for an event of this nature.

HH: How did you first get into publishing?

JM: For a long time, I had realized that there was a great need for someone to provide an outlet for ideas such as those of the European New Right, the Conservative Revolution, and traditionalism, among others, in English. Prior to Arktos, such resources were few and far between, and often hard to find. In 2006, some friends who felt the same need managed to raise some capital, which allowed us to start our first venture, the aforementioned Integral Tradition Publishing, at the end of that year. We merged Integral Tradition Publishing into Arktos at the end of 2009, as part of a continuation of our goals. It wasn’t really something I had imagined happening, much less being a part of, prior to that time, so the fact that we were able to get this project off the ground and make it work, and that I’ve been able to dedicate most of my time to it over the past five years, is something I’m quite proud of.

HH: Are there any specific writers that inspired you in the establishment of Integral Tradition Publishing or Arktos, perhaps because you wanted them to have a wider exposure or to be introduced to English language audiences?

JM: Certainly. Going into it, we very much wanted to see more of Julius Evola’s works in English, as well as books by Alain de Benoist (only one of his books had been translated prior to Arktos), Guillaume Faye, and Alexander Dugin (the latter two of which were completely untranslated before we started). All of those authors are now in our catalog. There was already quite a bit of Evola in English before Arktos, but there was still a great deal of material left to do, particularly his political writings, which were largely unavailable before we went to work. As for Benoist, Faye and the other thinkers of the European New Right, I find it unbelievable that no one had attempted to translate them before. Benoist in particular – he’s been writing for half a century, and it’s amazing that no one got to him before us. I strongly suspect it’s due to him being called a “Rightist” (a label he rejects). If he had been a French Marxist, I’m sure everything down to his grocery lists would have been translated long ago.

HH: Are you personally a writer? If so, do you plan to publish any books in the future?

JM: I sometimes enjoy writing, although I haven’t published much apart from a short story that I wrote many years ago. I’ve occasionally written essays for Counter-Currents and a few other websites. I would like to write something more substantial in the future, yes, although my Arktos work takes up a lot of my time and energy as it is. But one of these days, yes, I would like to do something of my own.

HH: The recent election results of Members of European Parliament were described as “a political earthquake” because some members of nationalist or “Euroskeptic” parties gained seats. Do you think this represents a major shift in European thinking? What will the impact of the elections be?

JM: It’s a positive sign, to be sure, but no, I don’t think this indicates a “major shift”. If you look at most of the parties that did well – the National Front in France, Wilder’s Freedom Party, UKIP – these are liberal parties that merely have a degree of “acceptable” nationalism and anti-immigrationism as part of their platform. They don’t represent the values of the “true Right”, as Evola phrased it. Plus, as others have observed, Euroskeptic parties have a tendency to do better in the European elections than they do in the national ones, since everyone knows that the European Parliament has little in the way of real power, so they feel more comfortable doing “protest voting” in it. It’s doubtful you will see these parties do as well in their respective national elections. A French friend of mine told me that he is sure that most of the people who voted for the National Front did so as a protest vote rather than out of a real passion for their platform. So, yes, it’s good that Europeans decided to send a message of discontent to Brussels, but I’m wary of getting too excited about this just yet.

The party I find the most relatable to my own perspective in Europe today is Jobbik. They did manage to get 15% of the vote here in Hungary, but that’s actually down from the 20% they got in the national elections just last month, no doubt because part of their platform is to get Hungary out of the EU and thus many of their supporters don’t bother voting. But still, they will be sending three MEPs to parliament again, which is good.

HH: Along these same lines, are you aware of any emerging artistic movements in Europe (literary, musical, visual, or otherwise) characterized by traditionalist, nationalist, or identitarian sentiments?

JM: Unfortunately, no, not many, although that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any, but just that I don’t know of any. If there’s something in a language other than English, I may just not know about it. There certainly isn’t much in English, as I’ve looked. The Mjolnir magazine from the UK, which just released its inaugural issue, which contains fiction, poetry and art consistent with our principles, is a step in that direction. Apart from that, no, I can’t think of anything. There are some individual artists and bands working here and there, of course, like Michael Moynihan and Annabel Lee in the U.S., but I wouldn’t call that a movement, and I think that’s a problem. People on the Right are very good at complaining, and of coming up with brilliant critiques of the world as it is, but they aren’t very good at proposing alternatives or of describing exactly what it is they want. A thriving alternative culture could provide that. I always find it discomforting when I go to a Rightist Website and find photos of the “great White men” of the past, which usually includes people such as Goethe and Beethoven, but it always consists entirely of people who are dead. Where are the great artists of our movement today? They are few and far between, and those that there are are shrouded in obscurity. (The American novelist Tito Perdue, who has been published by Arktos, is one of them, in my opinion.) We shouldn’t seek to turn our culture into a museum piece, where we just talk about how great our forefathers were. We need to get creative and produce new and original visions, and that’s something I hope to continue to provide an outlet for through Arktos.

HH: Liberalism controls the arts. I have met some artists who downplay their non-liberal political or philosophical leanings for fear of potential negative consequences. To what extent do you think a traditionalist art movement is stifled by the dominant ideologies of today? Do you think there are historical examples comparable to the present situation that may be instructive in undermining these systems of control?

JM: It depends on what you mean by “traditionalist”. If you’re using it in the sense of the school of Guénon and Evola, then no, I see nothing obstructing artists from utilizing those forms, ideas and symbols. The recently-deceased Sir John Tavener, who produced several works of music openly based on the writings of Frithjof Schuon and René Guénon, as well as works derived from the Orthodox Christian tradition, and who is one of the most highly regarded modern composers in the world, indicates that there is no inherent bias in the “establishment” against that sort of traditionalism. However, if you’re using the word “traditionalist” in the broader sense which also includes things related to conservatism (in the best sense of that term) and the political Right, then yes, I don’t think it’s news to anyone that there is a strong bias against them in the mainstream artistic establishment.

The recent debacle involving the artist Charles Krafft is a reminder of that, as if we needed one. But my response to that is, so what? We’re living in an age in which putting up a website or self-publishing a book are only a few mouse-clicks away. It’s obvious that, because of innovations in technology, everything is becoming much more decentralized and that the “authorities” in the various fields have become much less important in deciding what gets disseminated or what becomes popular. There’s no reason why anyone who has a particular idea or vision can’t get it out there somehow. That’s one of the few advantages, for people of our mentality, in living in a time like this. You can put just about anything out there and find an audience. Even the aforementioned Charles Krafft has said that his business has actually gone up since the “scandal” erupted, since his new-found notoriety has gotten him a customer base he never would have had otherwise. So, no, you may not see million-dollar grants from foundations going to artists who embrace unpopular forms and ideas anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t many, many other avenues and opportunities for expression open to people, if they only want to make use of them. I think the only problem is a lack of creative people in “the movement”, such as it is, or at least of creative people willing to engage with it in a substantive manner. There are some exceptions, of course. If you want to “undermine the systems of control”, there’s nothing stopping you. Technology has already given us that ability.

HH: Can you explain more fully the distinction between traditionalism as a school of Guénon and Evola versus traditionalism in the broader sense of conservatism and the political Right? For instance, you mentioned earlier that Alain de Benoist rejects his characterization as a Rightest, so how is he to be classified? On the other hand, in what sense should we understand Evola’s “Fascism Viewed from the Right”?

JM: This is something that should be readily apparent to anyone who has read either Guénon or Evola, but I’ll attempt to summarize. There can be no connection between modern-day party politics and Tradition in the sense in which Guénon and Evola understood it. For a traditionalist, only one form of government can be traditional: a monarchy in tandem with a traditional priesthood (traditional meaning from a legitimately revealed source). This, of course, was how all civilizations everywhere in the world were governed prior to 1789, but there can be nothing traditional about any other form of politics, even if elements of it can be utilized. So, conservatism, as it’s understood in the United States today, has no connection to traditionalism, even if here and there we might find some overlap, such as in a concern over certain values. As for the Right, it depends on which Right we’re talking about. When it comes to the “Right” of Republicans and libertarians, of course not, since they are the opposite of everything traditional. Even the European New Right is in no way a “traditionalist” movement, even though its thinkers have derived some inspiration from the traditionalists.

Evola himself sometimes used the term “true Right” to describe his own views, which he once defined as being those principles which were considered correct and normal everywhere in the world before 1789. Guénon, for his part, was completely uninterested in the politics of his day, and there’s no indication that he ever engaged with politics in any way, since he regarded everything of modern extraction to be unworthy of anything apart from rejection to the furthest extent possible. Evola, as is well-known, was a critic of Italian Fascism during its reign, although he himself was never a Fascist, and both during and after the Fascist period he always said that he had only ever supported Fascism insofar as it represented traditional principles – which he felt it largely failed to do. In Evola’s later life, of course, he held that apoliteia was the only sensible course – complete disengagement from the political world, except insofar as how it might be beneficial to an individual’s self-development, by engaging in a manner that was disinterested in any result that might follow from such activity. So, in Evola titling his book Fascism Viewed from the Right, he was making it clear that he was analyzing Fascism from the perspective of the “true Right”, not from that of the Right of our time – a point he makes quite clear in the book itself.

I myself am not advocating this position, as I don’t consider myself to be a traditionalist in the same sense as I described above. However, I always make this distinction because I think there is a lot of confusion about the term, and people often use it in a muddled or confused way these days. There are other perfectly valid uses of the word “traditionalism”, of course, but if one is attempting to use it in the sense that Guénon or Evola did, one must keep what I have just reiterated in mind in doing so.

As for Benoist rejecting the Rightist label, it is factual that the name “New Right” has never been applied by Benoist’s Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne to itself, but was foisted upon them by hostile French journalists during the 1970s. Benoist himself has written that he regards himself as being, not neither Left nor Right, but rather both Left and Right. Which makes sense, because he has derived a great deal of inspiration from Marxist and other Leftist intellectuals, as well as from the Rightist tradition. I think it’s important for those who oppose civilization as it is currently constituted to bear in mind that there is just as much opposition to liberalism on the radical Left – among some Marxists, anarchists, ecologists, and postmodernists – as on the radical Right. One shouldn’t limit oneself by imposing artificial barriers to thought and ideas based solely on labels.

HH: Earlier you mentioned Charles Krafft as an artist affiliated with the Right, yet Krafft’s style could be called Pop Art or Post-modern, which seems contradictory to the ideals of traditionalism. Another example might be the paintings of the late Jonathan Bowden. Similarly, I’ve thought it paradoxical that industrial music and noise seem to open a door to martial imagery and “old” values like courage and honor. Do you have an opinion about how this almost hypermodern art relates to the “New Right” and anti-modernism? How would you define great art?

JM: I would agree about Charlie’s style, although to my knowledge he’s never called himself a traditionalist. I don’t even know if he would call himself a “Rightist”, for that matter. I cited him as an example since what happened to him shows what can happen if you use themes or motifs in your art that are not officially sanctioned by the establishment’s critics (unless “ironically”, of course), and most especially if you have disapproved friends or affiliations, as Charlie does. But no, it would be ridiculous to call Charlie’s art “traditionalist”, although he does sometimes incorporate traditional elements into his work, from Buddhism and Hinduism in particular. The same goes for Bowden’s art (and I like some of it). At the same time, personally I am not someone who thinks that we have to see Tradition as a static thing that has to be constantly reiterated in the same way and in the same style as it has before. Artistic forms, like reality itself, are constantly evolving and changing, and we shouldn’t always fear the new (although neither should we accept it unreservedly). For example, two of the greatest traditionalist (in a non-doctrinal sense) artists of recent decades for me would be the filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. They were operating in a medium which is entirely a product of modernity in every way, and which, let’s face it, 99% of the time is used for degenerative purposes. And both of them, Syberberg in particular, are not only filmmakers, but avant-garde filmmakers who used highly unorthodox methods of a style that were often similar to that of the heights of “liberal” cinema (Surrealism, the French New Wave, and so forth). And yet for me, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice, as well as Syberberg’s Parsifal, rank as some of the most spiritual works of art I have ever experienced. I think they communicate the essence of what Tradition is, even though they are entirely modern in conception and assume a form that is non-traditional. If something can convey such an experience of meaning, or open up new vistas of meaning and new ways of viewing reality, then it’s good in my judgment, even if it may be unorthodox. The modern itself can be used to undo, or perhaps alter is more accurate, itself.

HH: What types of books has Arktos been publishing recently? Are there any that you believe to be particularly noteworthy?

JM: Arktos has been a bit slow the past few months, although that’s about to pick up dramatically. Of recent titles, The Dharma Manifesto is quite interesting. This is an attempt to apply Vedic principles to the political situation in America today by a noted Hindu teacher, Sri Dharma Pravartaka Acharya, and is unique of its kind. We also reprinted the complete run of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Conservative, a political and cultural journal he edited and contributed to that’s not very well-known and has been unavailable for a long time. We’ve been issuing editions of Markus Willinger’s Generation Identity in other languages, as that was one of our most popular books in English and German last year. We also have published a number of books by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar through an agreement with his Art of Living Foundation. Sri Sri is one of the most popular gurus in India at present, and we are pleased to be able to make his books more accessible in the West. Also, my friend Brian’s book Zombology: Zombies and the Decline of the West (and Guns) will be out soon. That’s a study of the sociopolitical implications of the zombie phenomenon, what it says about our contemporary culture and how it has manifested, particularly in relation to American gun culture. We also have new books by Alexander Dugin (Putin vs. Putin, his critique of Putin as a leader), Alain de Benoist (On the Brink of the Abyss, his book on the 2008 financial crisis), Guillaume Faye (Sex and Perversion, his study of modern sexuality), and some titles by the well-known writer on Paganism, Richard Rudgley, among many others, coming out soon.

HH: We look forward to reading some of those. Thank you for the interview.

JM: Thanks for having me. We’re doing this work for people like you!

 

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Morgan, John B. “A Blaze through the Gloom; an Interview with Arktos Media’s John Morgan.” Interview by Nathan Leonard. Heathen Harvest Periodical, 7 July 2014. <http://heathenharvest.org/2014/07/07/a-blaze-through-the-gloom-an-interview-with-arktos-medias-john-morgan/ >.

 

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Interview with Dominique Venner – Gérard

An Interview with Dominique Venner

Translated by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini

 

Translator’s Note: The following is an interview with Dominique Venner from 2001, originally published on the occasion of the release of his book Dictionnaire amoureux de la chasse. It seems fitting, as a last farewell, to let Dominique Venner himself speak.

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Christopher Gérard: Who are you? How do you define yourself? A werewolf, a white falcon?

Dominique Venner: I am a Frenchman of Europe, or a European whose mother tongue is French, of Celtic and Germanic ancestry. On my father’s side, I am of old Lorraine peasant stock, but they originally emigrated from the German part of Switzerland in the seventeenth century. My mother’s family, many of whom chose military careers, is originally from Provence and Vivarais. I myself was born in Paris. I am a European by ancestry, but birth isn’t enough on its own, if one doesn’t possess the consciousness of being what one is. I exist only through roots, through a tradition, a history, a territory. I will add that I was destined to dedicate myself to arms. Certainly, there is a trace of that in the steel in my pen, the instrument of my profession of writer and historian. Should I add to this brief portrait the epithet of werewolf? Why not? A terror to “right-minded” people, an initiate of the mysteries of the forest, the werewolf is a figure in which I can recognize myself.

CG: In Le Cœur rebelle (The Rebellious Heart, 1994), you sympathetically evoke the memory of “an intolerant young man who carried within himself, as it were, the scent of a coming storm”: that was you when you fought first as a soldier in Algeria and then as political activist in France. So who was that young Kshatriya, where did he come from, who were his teachers, his favourite authors?

DV: That’s what the “white falcon” in your first question alluded to, the memory of intoxicating and dangerous times, during which the young man I was thought he could invert a hostile destiny through a violence that he had accepted as necessary. It may seem extremely presumptuous, but at the time, I didn’t recognize anyone as a teacher. Certainly, I looked for stimulus and recipes for action in Lenin’s What is to be Done? and in Ernst von Salomon’s The Outlaws. I might add that the readings of my childhood had contributed to forging a certain world-view that in the end remained rather unchanged. In no particular order, I’ll mention Military Education and Discipline Among the Ancients, a small book about Sparta that belonged to my maternal grandfather, a former officer, The Legend of the Eagle by Georges d’Esparbès, La Bande des Ayaks by Jean-Louis Foncine, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and later the admirable Martin Eden. Those were the formative books I read at the age of ten or twelve. Later, at the age of twenty or twenty-five, I had of course gone on to read other things, but the bookstores back then were poorly stocked. Those years were a time of intellectual penury that is hard to imagine today. The library of a young activist, even one who devoured books, was small. In mine, besides historical works, prominent works were Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel, The Conquerors by Malraux, The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche, Service inutile by Montherlant, and Le Romantisme fasciste by Paul Sérant, which was a revelation for me in the sixties. As you can see, that didn’t go very far. But even if my intellectual horizons were limited, my instincts went deep. Very early, when I was still a soldier, I felt that the war in Algeria was something very different from what the naive defenders of “French Algeria” said or thought. I had understood that it was an identitarian struggle for Europeans, since in Algeria they were threatened in their very existence by an ethnic adversary. I also felt that what we were defending there — very poorly — were the southern frontiers of Europe. Frontiers are always defended against invasions on the other side of oceans and rivers.

CG: In this book, which is something of an autobiography, you write: “I am from the land of trees and forests, of oaks and wild boars, of vineyards and sloping roofs, of epic poems and fairy-tales, of the winter and summer solstices.” What sort of a strange fellow are you?

DV: Very briefly stated, I am too consciously European to in any way feel like a spiritual descendant of Abraham or Moses, but do I feel that I am entirely a descendant of Homer, Epictetus, and the Round Table. That means that I look for my bearings in myself, close to my roots, and not in faraway places that are entirely foreign to me. The sanctuary where I meditate is not the desert, but the deep and mysterious forest of my origins. My holy book is not the Bible, but the Iliad, [1] the founding poem of the Western psyche, which has miraculously and victoriously crossed the sea of time. A poem that draws from the same sources as the Celtic and Germanic legends, and manifests the same spirituality, if one goes to the trouble to decode it. Nevertheless, I don’t ignore the centuries of Christianity. The cathedral of Chartres is a part of my world as much as Stonehenge or the Parthenon. That’s the heritage that we have to make our own. The history of the Europeans isn’t simple. After thousands of years of indigenous religion, Christianity was imposed on us through a series of historical accidents. But Christianity was itself partially transformed, “barbarized” by our ancestors, the barbarians, Franks and others. Christianity was often thought of by them as a transposition of the old cults. Behind the saints, people continued to celebrate the old gods without asking too many questions. And in the monasteries, monks often copied ancient texts without necessarily censoring them. This continuation of pre-Christian Europe still goes on today, but it takes other forms, despite all the efforts of biblical sermonizing. It seems especially important to take into account the development of Catholic traditionalists, who are often islands of health opposing the surrounding chaos with their robust families, their numerous children and their groups of physically fit youths. Their adherence to the continuity of family and nation, to discipline in education, the importance they place on standing firm in the face of adversity are of course things that are in no way specifically Christian. They are the residue of the Roman and Stoic heritage which the church had more or less carried on until the beginning of the twentieth century. On the other hand, individualism, contemporary cosmopolitanism, and the religion of guilt are, of course, secularized forms of Christianity, as are the extreme anthropocentrism and the desacralization of nature in which I see a source of a Faustian modernity gone mad, and for which we will have to pay a heavy price.

CG: In Le Cœur rebelle, you also say that “dragons are vulnerable and mortal. Heros and gods can always return. There is no fatality outside of the minds of men.” One thinks of Jünger, whom you knew personally, and who saw titans and gods at work . . .

DV: Killing all fatalist temptations within oneself is an exercise from which one may never rest. Aside from that, let’s not deprive images of their mystery and their multiple radiations, let’s not extinguish their light with rational interpretations. The dragon will always be part of the Western imagination. It symbolizes by turns the forces of the earth and destructive forces. It is through the victorious struggle against a monster that Hercules, Siegfried, or Theseus attained the status of hero. In the absence of heroes, it isn’t hard to recognize – in our age – the presence of various monsters which I don’t think are invincible, even if they appear to be.

CG: In your Dictionnaire amoureux de la chasse (Plon, 2000), you reveal the secrets of an old passion and you describe in veiled terms the secrets of an initiation. What have those hours of tracking given you, how have they transformed, even transfigured you?

DV: In spite of its title, this Dictionnaire amoureux is not at all a dictionary. I conceived it as a pantheistic poem for which hunting is only a pretext. I owe my most beautiful childhood memories to hunting. I also owe it the fact that I have been able to morally survive the periods of ghastly despair that followed the collapse of the hopes of my youth, and reestablish a balance. With or without a weapon, in the hunt, I return to the sources that I cannot do without: the enchanted forest, silence, the mystery of wild blood, the ancient comradeship of the clan. To me, hunting is not a sport. It is a necessary ritual in which each participant, predator or prey, plays the part assigned to it by its nature. Together with childbirth, death and seeding, I believe that hunting, if it is performed in accordance with the right norms, is the last primordial rite that has partially evaded the disfigurements and the deadly manipulations of modernity.

CG: Elsewhere in this book, you evoke several ancient myths, several figures from still clandestine pantheons. I’m thinking of the myth of the Wild Hunt and the figure of Mithras. What do they mean to you?

DV: We could add to the list, most notably Diana-Artemis, the goddess of childbirth, the protector of pregnant women, of cows in calf, of vigorous children, of life in its dawn. She is both the great predator and the great protector of animality, which is what the best hunters also are. Her figure corresponds to the ancients’ idea of nature, which is the complete opposite of the saccharine notions of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of sunday strollers. They knew that nature was fearsome to the weak, and pitiless. It is through force that Artemis defends the inviolable realm of the wild. She ferociously kills those mortals who through their excesses put nature in danger. That’s what happened to two furious hunters, Orion and Acteon. By violating her, they had transgressed the limits beyond which the order of the world falls into chaos. That symbol hasn’t aged, on the contrary.

CG: If there is an omnipresent figure in your book, it is the forest, the refuge of outcasts and rebels . . .

DV: The whole literature of the Middle Ages – the chansons de geste or the Arthurian legends – saturated as it is with celtic spirituality, invariably embellishes on the theme of the forest, that dangerous world, that refuge of spirits and fairies, hermits and rebels, which is also a place of purification for the tormented soul of the knight, whether his name be Lancelot, Percival, or Yvain. In chasing a deer or a wild boar, the hunter penetrated its spirit. By eating the animal’s heart, he appropriated its strength. In the lay of Tyolet, by killing the roebuck, the hero gains the ability to understand the spirit of wild nature. I feel that very strongly. For me, entering the forest is much more than a physical need, it is a spiritual necessity.

CG: Could you recommend a few great novels about hunting still in print?

DV: The first that comes to mind is Les Veillées de Saint-Hubert by the Marquis de Foudras, a collection of short stories recently re-published by Pygmalion. Foudras was a marvelous story-teller, as was his countryman and successor Henri Vincenot — whose La Billebaude one of course has to read. He was to the world of castles and hunting with hounds what Vincenot is to that of thatched cottages and poaching. Among the great novels that initiate the reader into the mysteries of the hunt, one of the best is Le Guetteur d’ombres by Pierre Moinot, which transcends well-crafted literary narrative. In the abundant production of Paul Vialar, who was made famous by La grande Meute, I have soft spot for La Croule, a term that refers to the mating call of the woodcock. It’s a pretty novel, a quick read. The main character is a young woman, the kind one would like to meet once in a while, one who possesses a passion for the ancestral domain. I also suggest reading La Forêt perdue, a short and magnificent medieval poem in which Maurice Genevoix lets us re-experience the spirit of Celtic mythology through the impossible pursuit of a huge, invulnerable deer by a relentless huntsman, in whom we discover a young and daring Knight with a pure soul.

Vernal equinox MMI

Notes

[1] Dominique Venner adds that the harsh and rhythmical translation of Leconte de Lisle (from around 1850) is his favourite. This version of the Iliad and the Odyssey is available in two volumes from éditions Pocket.

 

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Venner, Dominique. “An Interview with Dominique Venner.” Interview by Christopher Gérard. Eurocontinentalism Journal, 5 October 2013. <http://eurocontinentalism.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/an-interview-with-dominique-venner/ >.

 

On Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing – Gottfried

Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing

By Paul Gottfried

 

The death of Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing on January 25, 2009, brought an end to the career of one of the most insightful German political thinkers of his generation. Although perhaps not as well known as other figures associated with the postwar intellectual Right, Schrenck-Notzing displayed a critical honesty, combined with an elegant prose style, which made him stand out among his contemporaries. A descendant of Bavarian Protestant nobility who had been knights of the Holy Roman Empire, Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing was preceded by an illustrious grandfather, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, who had been a close friend of the author Thomas Mann. While that grandfather became famous as an exponent of parapsychology, and the other grandfather, Ludwig Ganghofer, as a novelist, Caspar turned his inherited flair for language toward political analysis.

Perhaps he will best be remembered as the editor of the journal Criticón, which he founded in 1970, and which was destined to become the most widely read and respected theoretical organ of the German Right in the 1970s and 1980s. In the pages of Criticón an entire generation of non-leftist German intellectuals found an outlet for their ideas; and such academic figures as Robert Spämann, Günter Rohrmöser, and Odo Marquard became public voices beyond the closed world of philosophical theory. In his signature editorials, Criticón‘s editor raked over the coals the center-conservative coalition of the Christian Democratic (CDU) and the Christian Social (CSU) parties, which for long periods formed the postwar governments of West Germany.

Despite the CDU/CSU promise of a “turn toward the traditional Right,” the hoped-for “Wende nach rechts” never seemed to occur, and Helmut Kohl’s ascent to power in the 1980s convinced Schrenck-Notzing that not much good could come from the party governments of the Federal Republic for those with his own political leanings. In 1998 the aging theorist gave up the editorship of Criticón, and he handed over the helm of the publication to advocates of a market economy. Although Schrenck-Notzing did not entirely oppose this new direction, as a German traditionalist he was certainly less hostile to the state as an institution than were Criticón‘s new editors.

But clearly, during the last ten years of his life, Schrenck-Notzing had lost a sense of urgency about the need for a magazine stressing current events. He decided to devote his remaining energy to a more theoretical task—that of understanding the defective nature of postwar German conservatism. The title of an anthology to which he contributed his own study and also edited, Die kupierte Alternative (The Truncated Alternative), indicated where Schrenck-Notzing saw the deficiencies of the postwar German Right. As a younger German conservative historian, Karl- Heinz Weissmann, echoing Schrenck-Notzing, has observed, one cannot create a sustainable and authentic Right on the basis of “democratic values.” One needs a living past to do so. An encyclopedia of conservatism edited by Schrenck-Notzing that appeared in 1996 provides portraits of German statesmen and thinkers whom the editor clearly admired. Needless to say, not even one of those subjects was alive at the time of the encyclopedia’s publication.

What allows a significant force against the Left to become effective, according to Schrenck-Notzing, is the continuity of nations and inherited social authorities. In the German case, devotion to a Basic Law promulgated in 1947 and really imposed on a defeated and demoralized country by its conquerors could not replace historical structures and national cohesion. Although Schrenck-Notzing published opinions in his journal that were more enthusiastic than his own about the reconstructed Germany of the postwar years, he never shared such “constitutional patriotism.” He never deviated from his understanding of why the post-war German Right had become an increasingly empty opposition to the German Left: it had arisen in a confused and humiliated society, and it drew its strength from the values that its occupiers had given it and from its prolonged submission to American political interests. Schrenck-Notzing continually called attention to the need for respect for one’s own nation as the necessary basis for a viable traditionalism. Long before it was evident to most, he predicted that the worship of the postwar German Basic Law and its “democratic” values would not only fail to produce a “conservative” philosophy in Germany; he also fully grasped that this orientation would be a mere transition to an anti-national, leftist political culture. What happened to Germany after 1968 was for him already implicit in the “constitutional patriotism” that treated German history as an unrelieved horror up until the moment of the Allied occupation.

For many years Schrenck-Notzing had published books highlighting the special problems of post-war German society and its inability to configure a Right that could contain these problems. In 2000 he added to his already daunting publishing tasks the creation and maintenance of an institute, the Förderstiftung Konservative Bildung und Forschung, which was established to examine theoretical conservative themes. With his able assistant Dr. Harald Bergbauer and the promotional work of the chairman of the institute’s board, Dieter Stein, who also edits the German weekly, Junge Freiheit, Schrenck-Notzing applied himself to studies that neither here nor in Germany have elicited much support. As Schrenck-Notzing pointed out, the study of the opposite of whatever the Left mutates into is never particularly profitable, because those whom he called “the future-makers” are invariably in seats of power. And nowhere was this truer than in Germany, whose postwar government was imposed precisely to dismantle the traditional Right, understood as the “source” of Nazism and “Prussianism.” The Allies not only demonized the Third Reich, according to Schrenck-Notzing, but went out of their way, until the onset of the Cold War, to marginalize anything in German history and culture that was not associated with the Left, if not with outright communism.

This was the theme of Schrenck-Notzing’s most famous book, Charakterwäsche: Die Politik der amerikanischen Umerziehung in Deutschland, a study of the intent and effects of American re-education policies during the occupation of Germany. This provocative book appeared in three separate editions. While the first edition, in 1965, was widely reviewed and critically acclaimed, by the time the third edition was released by Leopold Stocker Verlag in 2004, its author seemed to be tilting at windmills. Everything he castigated in his book had come to pass in the current German society—and in such a repressive, anti-German form that it is doubtful that the author thirty years earlier would have been able to conceive of his worst nightmares coming to life to such a degree. In his book, Schrenck-Notzing documents the mixture of spiteful vengeance and leftist utopianism that had shaped the Allies’ forced re-education of the Germans, and he makes it clear that the only things that slowed down this experiment were the victories of the anticommunist Republicans in U.S. elections and the necessities of the Cold War. Neither development had been foreseen when the plan was put into operation immediately after the war.

Charakterwäsche documents the degree to which social psychologists and “antifascist” social engineers were given a free hand in reconstructing postwar German “political culture.” Although the first edition was published before the anti-national and anti-anticommunist German Left had taken full power, the book shows the likelihood that such elements would soon rise to political power, seeing that they had already ensconced themselves in the media and the university. For anyone but a hardened German-hater, it is hard to finish this book without snorting in disgust at any attempt to portray Germany’s re-education as a “necessary precondition” for a free society.

What might have happened without such a drastic, punitive intervention? It is highly doubtful that the postwar Germans would have placed rabid Nazis back in power. The country had had a parliamentary tradition and a large, prosperous bourgeoisie since the early nineteenth century, and the leaders of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, who took over after the occupation, all had ties to the pre-Nazi German state. To the extent that postwar Germany did not look like its present leftist version, it was only because it took about a generation before the work of the re-educators could bear its full fruit. In due course, their efforts did accomplish what Schrenck-Notzing claimed they would—turning the Germans into a masochistic, self-hating people who would lose any capacity for collective self-respect. Germany’s present pampering of Muslim terrorists, its utter lack of what we in the U.S. until recently would have recognized as academic freedom, the compulsion felt by German leaders to denigrate all of German history before 1945, and the freedom with which “antifascist” mobs close down insufficiently leftist or anti-national lectures and discussions are all directly related to the process of German re-education under Allied control.

Exposure to Schrenck-Notzing’s magnum opus was, for me, a defining moment in understanding the present age. By the time I wrote The Strange Death of Marxism in 2005, his image of postwar Germany had become my image of the post-Marxist Left. The brain-snatchers we had set loose on a hated former enemy had come back to subdue the entire Western world. The battle waged by American re-educators against “the surreptitious traces” of fascist ideology among the German Christian bourgeoisie had become the opening shots in the crusade for political correctness. Except for the detention camps and the beating of prisoners that were part of the occupation scene, the attempt to create a “prejudice-free” society by laundering brains has continued down to the present. Schrenck-Notzing revealed the model that therapeutic liberators would apply at home, once they had fi nished with Central Europeans. Significantly, their achievement in Germany was so great that it continues to gain momentum in Western Europe (and not only in Germany) with each passing generation.

The publication Unsere Agenda, which Schrenck-Notzing’s institute published (on a shoestring) between 2004 and 2008, devoted considerable space to the American Old Right and especially to the paleoconservatives. One drew the sense from reading it that Schrenck-Notzing and his colleague Bergbauer felt an affinity for American critics of late modernity, an admiration that vastly exceeded the political and media significance of the groups they examined. At our meetings he spoke favorably about the young thinkers from ISI whom he had met in Europe and at a particular gathering of the Philadelphia Society. These were the Americans with whom he resonated and with whom he was hoping to establish a long-term relationship. It is therefore fitting that his accomplishments be noted in the pages of Modern Age. Unfortunately, it is by no means clear that the critical analysis he provided will have any effect in today’s German society. The reasons are the ones that Schrenck-Notzing gave in his monumental work on German re-education. The postwar re-educators did their work too well to allow the Germans to become a normal nation again.

 

——————

Gottfried, Paul. “Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, RIP.” Modern Age, Vol. 51, No. 3 & 4 (Summer/Fall 2009), pp. 326-329. Retrieved from: <http://www.mmisi.org/ma/51_3&4/gottfried.pdf >.

 

Types of Conservatism – Dugin

Types of Conservatism

by Alexander Dugin

 

Introductory Note: While Alexander Dugin’s brief explanations of the various types of conservatism – as seen in this excerpt from his book on Putin – are arguably very limited and provide imperfect descriptions of their basic ideas, his exposition is useful for illustrating differences between the basic types of conservatism; that is, for setting down a basis for key distinctions. In addition, we should note that his explanation here of the basic formula of the Conservative Revolution – while valid to an extent – is not really the ideal formulation. Rather, “Revolutionary Conservatism” as defined by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Armin Mohler (among others) is best seen as the concept of maintaining eternal values and positive traditions, discarding all outdated, negative, and transient customs or values, and accepting positive new values and practices; essentially combining stability and dynamism and combining conservation and revolution. Finally, the full implications of Eurasianism are not entirely clear from Dugin’s brief comments in the final portion of this excerpt. Eurasianism – explained in its briefest form in Dugin’s essay “Main Principles of Eurasist Policy” – is essentially a Russian form of Revolutionary Conservatism (inspired by the original Eurasianists, the German Conservative Revolution, and the European New Right) and which will likely become increasingly important and influential not only in Russia, but in very many Asian and European nations. Furthermore, while some European cultual conservatives may initially be suspicious of Eurasianism on ethnic and cultural terms, its basic principle of recognising the mixed ethno-cultural foundations of Russia (in Slavic, Turkic, and Finno-Ugrian peoples) can be sympathised with from a European conservative perspective, for the majority of European nations are themselves rooted in ancient ethnic mixtures and many European nations have always been composed of multiple ethnic and sub-ethnic groups. At the same time, it is significant that both Eurasianists and European conservatives share in common their opposition to the unrestricted, cosmopolitan mixing of ethnic groups in modern liberal systems. – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

The Essence of Conservatism

Conservatism in its most general sense means a positive attitude towards historical tradition. It holds up the political and social history of a state as a role model, striving to preserve the continuity of the people’s national and cultural roots. The past is viewed by all denominations of conservatism as a positive phenomenon. Not everything in the past is perceived as positive, but a consistent conservative will never deliberately tarnish any period in the history of his people and state.

Moreover, conservatism is based on the premise that the people and the state have a certain historical mission, which can vary from universalist religious messianism to humble awareness of the importance of their national identity. The present, the past and the future in the eyes of a conservative are tied together in a single integral project striving toward a clear national goal. In making any political or economic decision, a conservative always turns to the past and ponders the future. A conservative thinks in terms of landmarks and epochs, disregarding quick profit. His temporal, geographical, and value-related horizon is always broad.

A conservative is a dedicated bearer of national culture and seeks to comply with its norms. A conservative always over-exerts himself: from mandatory prayer to cold showers in the morning. A conservative consistently duty, honour, the public benefit, loyalty to tradition, and his good reputation over comfort, benefit, profit or popularity.

A conservative is reserved and prefers to speak prudently and thoughtfully. A conservative is civil and always has an extra pair of glasses, even if he has perfect eyesight.

A conservative is unsettled by objective reality and carefully selects books for reading. A conservative never considers himself as such.

A conservative smiles, turning up the corners of his mouth, and never expresses himself with his hands.

Anyone who does not comply with these requirements is not a proper conservative, he is just…

Fundamental Conservatism

Conservatism has an underlying philosophy. To be a conservative means to say ‘no’ to what we have now and to express one’s disagreement with the current state of things.

There is fundamental conservatism, which is called traditionalism.

Traditionalism is a form of conservatism that argues that everything is bad in its entirety in today’s world, not just in certain aspects. ‘The idea of progress, technical development, Descartes’ subject-object dualism, Newton’s watchmaker argument, contemporary positivistic science and the education based on it, pedagogics, and what we call modernism and post-modernism – they are all bad.’ A traditionalist likes only what had existed prior to modernism. In the twentieth century, when there seemed to be no social platform left for such conservatism, a constellation of thinkers and philosophers appeared out of nowhere and started to defend, radically and consistently, the traditionalist position: René Guénon, [1] Julius Evola, [2] Titus Burkchardt, [3] Leopold Ziegler [4] and all those known as traditionalists. They proposed a programme of fundamental conservatism, described traditional society as a timeless ideal, and the contemporary world (modernism) and its basic principles as a product of decline, degradation, the mixing of castes, the disintegration of hierarchy, representing a shift of focus from the spiritual to the material, from Heaven to Earth, and from the eternal to the transient. Fundamental conservatives exist today in both the Orthodox and Catholic milieus. They completely reject modernism and believe that religious laws are absolutely relevant, and that the contemporary world and its values are an embodiment of the Antichrist, and which cannot offer anything good in the first place. These tendencies are common among Russian Old Believers. There is still a Paraclete Union in the Urals which does not use electric lighting because it is ‘the light of Lucifer,’ and they use only pine splinters and candles; there are also sects which strictly prohibit coffee. When a group of young people in eighteenth-century Russia started to wear chequered trousers in accordance with the current fashions, the Fedosevans [5] summoned an assembly in the town of Kimry, sometimes called the ‘trousers assembly,’ and discussed whether wearing chequered trousers should be excommunicated. Part of the assembly insisted that they be separated from the community and the other part voted against it.

The US has its own conservative tradition that is naturally based on the priorities of America’s national interests. Marked by a significant degree of messianism (‘the American civilisation is the peak of human history’), American conservatism respects the past and strives to preserve and strengthen the positions of its great country in the future. American conservatives profess loyalty to patriotic values as well as to religious, political, social and cultural norms that were established throughout the course of their historical development. This is natural and, as a consequence, American conservatism is flourishing: the US has achieved incredible power internationally, which makes its citizens justifiably proud and convinced of the righteousness of their ways. In America, fundamental conservatism is professed by a significant share of the republication electorate, and TV programmes which feature Protestant fundamentalists criticising all things modern and postmodern and tearing them to shreds are watched by millions of people…

But the direct emulation of ‘Republican’ American conservatism by Russia yields absurd results: it turns out that what is to be ‘conserved’ are values that are not only foreign to the historical and traditional Russia, but which are basically absent from contemporary Russian society.

Russia is an ancient land-based empire with a strong collectivist spirit, traditionally tough administrative rule and a very specific messianism. The US is a relatively new sea-based entity, intentionally designed as a laboratory experiment for the introduction of ‘progressivist’ bourgeois democratic principles that matured among ultra-Protestant sects. What is valued in the American civilisation is a sin and a disgrace for the Russians. What they respect is disgusting to us, and vice versa.

Russia was moving towards the East and the US was moving towards the West. Yes, they have won and we have lost. They proved to be stronger. But, according to our logic, God is not power, God is the truth. This is what a proper and consistent Russian conservatism says. Obviously, American conservatism says exactly the opposite. Globalism can be both recognised and attacked in the US itself (this is their world domination project; some Americans agree with it and some do not). In Russia, globalism was imposed on us from the outside. We can put up with it and recognise our defeat, and join the American value system. This position is possible, as is collaborationism. But it would be the opposite of conservatism.

All peoples have their own conservatism because each nation develops its own value system, and this constitutes its national identity. The cultural outcome of American history does not have anything in common with the cultural outcome of Russian history. A conservative is always loyal to his traditions, his people and his ideals – not only in their heyday, but also when they are desecrated and despised by all.

Liberal Conservatism

The second type of conservatism is ‘status quo conservatism’ or liberal conservatism. It says ‘yes’ to modernism as today’s main trend, but at each stage of the trend’s implementation it tries to slow it down: ‘Please, slow down, let’s not do it today, let’s postpone it.’ The liberal conservative Fukuyama initially concluded that politics had disappeared and was about to be replaced by the ‘global marketplace’ where nations, states, ethnic groups, cultures and religions would vanish (this is liberalism in its purest form), but then he decided that we should slow down and introduce postmodernism quietly, without revolutions. He wrote that it was necessary to temporarily strengthen the nation-states (in this case, what he is proposing is liberal conservatism).

A liberal conservative is afraid that the accelerated dismantling of modernism, which is taking place within postmodernism, can release pre-modernism. For instance, the former Leftist turned liberal Jürgen Habermas [6] is afraid that postmodernism will destroy the subject, engulf humanity in chaos, and bring back the creepy shadows of tradition.

The Bin Laden character, irrespective of whether he actually existed or was invented by Hollywood, is a caricature of postmodernism collapsing into pre-modernism.

Right-wing Conservatism

If liberal conservatism is nonsensical and just another ‘refuge of a scoundrel’ (Samuel Johnson), [7] Right-wing conservatism, on the contrary, is quite acceptable and natural. In contemporary Russia, a Right-wing conservative is a person who seeks the revival of his motherland’s international imperial greatness, the nation’s economic prosperity and the revival of the moral values and spirituality of the people. He thinkers that this aim can be reached through a competent use of market mechanisms and the system of religious, monarchical, and centralist-leaning values.

Such Right-wing conservatism can focus on cultural-political issues (the consolidation of traditional denominations, the revival of national customs, the restoration of a segment of social, public and political institutions) or on economic aspects. When it comes to economy, a Right-wing conservative project must logically develop in line with the theory of a ‘national economy,’ summed up by the German economist Friedrich List [8] and implemented in Russia by Count Sergei Witte. [9] This project can be called ‘economic nationalism.’ Its extreme formula is roughly as follows: an absolutely free domestic market with a severe customs control system and thorough regulation of foreign economic activity in the interests of domestic entrepreneurship.

A national economy does not involve the nationalisation of large monopolies but insists on the consolidation of large businesses around political authorities with thhe transparent and clear aim of finding a collective solution to facilitate the nation’s mission, the strengthening of the country and the achievement of prosperity for all the nation’s people. It can be achieved via a certain ‘patriotic code,’ which implies the assumption of moral responsibility by national businessmen before the country, people and society. This model in today’s political spectrum roughly corresponds to what is usually called ‘the Right-wing centre.’ It seems that Putin himself prefers the ‘Right-wing’ centre of conservatism to any other type of conservatism.

Left-wing Conservatism

The notion ‘Left-wing’ is usually not associated with conservatism. The Left wants change and the Right wants to conserve the existing state of things. But in Russia’s political history the public sector, which is related to the ‘Left-wing’ value system, has always been extremely significant and developed, and communal factor, both in the form of Orthodox conciliarism [10] and Soviet collectivism, had long become a dependable political and economic tradition. A meaningful combination of socialism and conservatism was already evident in the Russian narodniki (populists) of the nineteenth century, who were devoted to national problems and strove for a fair distribution of material wealth. Left-wing conservatism also existed in other countries: as social Catholicism [11] in France and Latin America, and as German National Bolshevism (Niekisch, [12] Wolffheim, [13] Laufenberg, [14] etc.). A distinctive representative of social conservatism is Georges Sorel, [15] who wrote Reflections on Violence. [16] He argued that Leftists and Rightists (monarchists and Communists) were against one common enemy: the bourgeoisie. Left-wing conservatism is close to the Russian National Bolshevism of N. Ustryalov, [17] who identified Russian national myths in Left-wing Marxist ideology.

In contemporary Russian politics, social (Left-wing) conservatism is fully legitimate. Russian Left-wing conservatives seek to preserve Russia’s civilisational values, strengthen our geopolitical power and bring about a national revival. Left-wing conservatives believe that the best way to implement this mission is through the nationalisation of mineral resources and large private companies engaged in the export of natural resources, as well as by increasing government control in the spheres of energy, transport, communications, and so on. Such social conservatism can insist on the legitimacy and the natural character of the Soviet approach, viewing it as part of the general national dialectics. Another trend is so-called social conservatism, which can be considered as a sub-family of the Conservative Revolution. Both Left-wing and Right-wing conservatism, by definition, must have common ultimate aim: the revival of statehood, the preservation of national identity, the international rise of Russia, and loyalty to our cultural roots. The approaches toward achieving this common goal, however, differ between the two schools of thought.

Conservative Revolution

There is yet another, and very interesting, type of conservatism. It is usually referred to as the Conservative Revolution, and it dialectically links conservatism with modernism. This trend was adopted by Martin Heidegger, Ernst and Friedrich Jünger, [18] Carl Schmitt, [19] Oswald Spengler, [20] Werner Sombart, [21] Othmar Spann, [22] Friedrich Hielscher, [23] Ernst Niekisch, and others.

The philosophical paradigm of the conservative revolutionary stems from the general conservative view of the world as an objective process of degradation, which reaches its peak with modernism (a view shared by traditionalism). But, unlike the traditionalists, conservative revolutionaries think: why does God, who created this world, ultimately turn a blind eye to evil, and why do God’s enemies win? One might suspect that the beautiful Golden Age, which fundamental conservatives defend, already contained a gene that brought this degradation. Then the conservative revolutionaries say to the fundamental conservatives: ‘You propose to go back to the state when man only suffered from the initial symptoms of the illness, a hacking cough, and talk about how well-off man was back then, when today this same man is on his deathbed. You merely contrast a coughing man with a dying man. Conservative revolutionaries was to find out how the infection itself originated and why the man started to cough…’ ‘We believe,’ the conservative revolutionaries say, ‘in God and in Providence. But we think the original source, God Himself, the Divine Source, contains the intention to organise this eschatological drama.’ With this vision, modernism acquires a paradoxical character. It is not just an illness of today’s world, but a discovery in today’s world of a phenomenon which began to take root in the very same past that is so dear to traditionalists. Modernism is not improved as a result of this realisation by the conservative revolutionaries, while tradition loses its decisive positivity.

The basic formula of the Conservative Revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck is, ‘The conservatives used to try to stop the revolution, but now we must lead it.’ It means that in joining, modernism’s destructive tendencies, in part out of pragmatism, one must identify and recognise the germ that served as the initial cause of its destructive tendencies – namely, modernism itself. Then the conservative must carefully and permanently root it out of existence and, in doing so, bring about God’s secret, parallel, additional, and subtle design. The conservative revolutionaries want not only to slow time down as do liberal conservatives or to go back to the past like traditionalists, but to tear out the root of all evil in the world’s fundamental structure.

The Conservative Choice

Contemporary Russian conservatism must be simultaneously non-Communist (the Communist dogma has always denied the fact that the Soviet regime was a continuation of Tsarism and treated recent democratic reforms in an extremely negative light), non-liberal (liberalism is too revolutionary and insists on a radical break from both the Soviet past and the Tsarist legacy), and non-monarchic (monarchism wants to exclude both the Soviet and the recent liberal democratic periods from national history).

The peculiarity of Russian political life in the twenty-first century is that its main stages have been direct and severe opposition to each other and succeeded each other not through natural continuity, but through revolutions and radical disruptions. This seriously challenges the formula of contemporary Russian conservatism: the continuity and identity of Russia and the Russian people are not plainly visible on society’s surface; in order to establish consistent conservative views, one must make an effort that will raise us to the level of a new historical, political, civilisational and national consolidation. Contemporary Russian conservatism is not a given, but a task to be undertaken.

Consistent Russian conservatism must combine the historical and geographical layers of our national existence. I would like to remind you that, during the very first years of Soviet rule, the Eurasianists insisted on the civilisational continuity of the USSR in relation of the Russian Empire.

Contemplating contemporary Russian conservatism is basically contemplating Eurasianism, which is a synthesis of Russian political history on the basis of a unique geopolitical and civilisational methodology. Russia, viewed as Eurasia, reveals its permanent essence and its historical identity – form the mosaic of Slavic, Turkic and Ugrian tribes through Kievan Rus’ [24] and Muscovy to the great continental empire, first ‘white’ and then ‘red,’ to today’s democratic Russia, which is a little indecisive but is now pulling herself together for a new historical leap.

I am convinced that political history will very soon force us to clarify our positions and polish our rhetoric to make it more precise. We have no choice but conservatism: we will be pushed towards it from the outside, as well as from within. But what shall we do with the spirit of revolution, the will, the blazing flame of rebellion which secretly languishes in the Russian heart and disturbs our sleep, inviting us to follow it to faraway lands? I think that we should invest our continental strength in a new conservative project. And let ibe the new edition of our Revolution, the Conservative Revolution, the National Revolution in the name of a big dream…

Notes

[1] René Guénon (1886-1951) was a French writer who founded what has come to be known as the traditionalist school of religious thought. Traditionalism calls for a rejection of the modern world and its philosophies in favour of a return to the spirituality and ways of living of the past. His central works are The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. –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. His main work is Revolt Against the Modern World. –Ed.

[3] Titus Burkchardt (1908-1984) was a Swiss German art historian who also participated in the traditionalist school. –Ed.

[4] Leopold Ziegler (1881-1958) was a German philosopher. Although not strictly part of the traditionalist school, his thought did bear similarities to theirs, and he was in contact with representative of the school as well as with the Conservative Revolutionaries. –Ed.

[5] A congregation of Old Believers. –A.D.

[6] Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) is a German Marxist philosopher. –Ed.

[7] Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was an English poet and essayist. According to his friend and biographer James Boswell, Johnson once said, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ –Ed.

[8] Friedrich von List (1789-1846) was a German philosopher and economist. –Ed.

[9] Sergei Witte (1849-1915) was an advisor to the last two Tsars of Russia. He oversaw the industrialisation of Russia and was the author of the 1905 October Manifesto, which was written in response to the Revolution of 1905 and the subsequent need for democratic reforms, and was the precursor to the Russian Empire’s constitution. –Ed.

[10] Conciliarism in Orthodoxy refers to the belief that the Church should be governed by a council of bishops, rather by a single one. –Ed.

[11] Catholic social teaching addresses issues related to social justice, opposing capitalism and socialism in favour of distributism. It originated in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum encyclical of 1891. –Ed.

[12] Ernst Niekisch (1889-1967) was a German politician who was initially a Communist, but by the 1920s sought to merge Communism with nationalism. He published a journal, Widerstand [Resistance], and applied the term National Bolshevik to himself and his followers. He rejected National Socialism as insufficiently socialist, and was imprisoned by them in 1937, and was blinded under torture. Upon his release in 1945, he supported the Soviet Union and moved to East Germany, but became disillusioned by the Soviets’ treatment of workers and returned to the West in 1953. –Ed.

[13] Fritz Wolffheim (1888-1942), a Communist, was one of the first o develop the idea of National Bolshevism in 1919. He later became involved with a nationalist organisation called the League for the Study of German Communism, which included some National Socialists, although Wolffheim, being of Jewish descent, was unable to make much of these connections. He was imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1936 and died there. –Ed.

[14] Heinrich Laufenberg (1872-1932) was a former Communist who was one of the first politicians to formulate National Bolshevism in Germany in 1919. –Ed.

[15] Georges Sorel (1847-1922) was a French philosopher who began as a Marxist and later developed Revolutionary Syndicalism. He advocated the use of myth and organised violence in revolutionary movements. He was influential upon both the Communist and Fascist movements. –Ed.

[16] Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). –Ed.

[17] Nikolai Ustrialov (1890-1937) was a professor and Slavophile who fled the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution and joined the anti-Soviet White movement. Originally opposed to Communism, he later sought a fusion of elements of Soviet Communism with Russian nationalism. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1935, believing that National Bolshevik ideas were becoming more acceptable, but was charged with espionage and executed in 1937, during the Great Purge. –Ed.

[18] Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was one of the most prominent of the German Conservative Revolutionaries, but that was only one phase in a long and varied career. He volunteered for and fought in the German Army throughout the First World War, and was awarded the highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite, for his service. After the war, he wrote many books and novels, was active in German politics, experimented with psychedelic drugs, and travelled the world. He remained ambivalent about National Socialism at first, but never joined the Party, and he had turned against the Nazis by the late 1930s. He rejoined the Wehrmacht at the outbreak of war, however, and remained in Paris as a captain, where he spent more time with Picasso and Cocteau than enforcing the occupation. His objections to the Nazis were influential upon the members of the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, which led to his dismissal from the Wehrmacht. After the war, Jünger’s political views gradually moved toward a sort of aristocratic anarchism. His brother, Friedrich Jünger (1898-1977) was also a veteran of the First World War and participated in the Conservative Revolution, and also became a writer and philosopher. –Ed.

[19] Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was an important German jurist who wrote about political science, geopolitics and constitutional law. He was part of the Conservative Revolutionary movement of the Weimar era. He also briefly supported the National Socialists at the beginning of their regime, although they later turned against him. He remains highly influential in the fields of law and philosophy. –Ed.

[20] Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a German philosopher who is regarded as one of the principal Conservative Revolutionary figures of the Weimar period in Germany. His most important work was his two-volume 1922/23 book, The Decline of the West, in which he theorised that all civilisations go through an inevitable cycle of ages of rise and decline in power, with the present age of the West currently entering its declining period. –Ed.

[21] Werner Sombart (1863-1941) was a German economist and sociologist who was very much opposed to capitalism and democracy. –Ed.

[22] Othmar Spann (1878-1950) was an Austrian Catholic philosopher and economist who held neoconservative views based on the ideals of German Romanticism. He is credited with developing the idea of the corporate state, which was soon to become so integral to Fascism, and which Spann believed could be applied everywhere for the benefit of humanity. In spite of this, he did not support National Socialism, and he was imprisoned after the Anschluss in 1938 and forbidden to teach at the University of Vienna (where he had taught since 1919). He attempted to return to teaching after 1945, but was again rejected. –Ed.

[23] Friedrich Hielscher (1902-1990) was a German thinker who was involved in the Conservative Revolution and who was an active neo-pagan throughout his life. He participated in the anti-Nazi resistance during the Third Reich. –Ed.

[24] Kievan Rus was a loose tribal confederation that had its capital in Kiev, and from which the modern-day states of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are descended. It last from the tenth until the thirteenth centuries. –Ed.

—————

Excerpts from: Dugin, Alexander. Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right, pp. 145-157. London: Arktos, 2014. (See this article in PDF format here: Types of Conservatism).

 

Against the Armies of the Night – O’Meara

Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements

By Michael O’Meara

 

The single greatest force shaping our age is unquestionably globalization.

Based on the transnationalization of American capital and the worldwide imposition of American market relations combined with new technologies, globalization has not only reshaped the world’s national economies, it’s provoked a dizzying array of oppositional movements, on the right and the left, that, despite their divergent ideologies and goals, seek to defend native or traditional identities from the market’s ethnocidal effects.

In the vast literature on globalization and its various antiglobalist movements, Charles Lindholm’s and José Pedro Zúquete’s The Struggle for the World (Stanford University Press, 2010) is the first to look beyond the specific political designations of these different antiglobalist tendencies to emphasize the common redemptive, identitarian, and populist character they share.

The “left wing, right wing, and no wing” politics of these antiglobalists are by no means dismissed, only subordinated to what Lindholm and Zúquete see as their more prominent redemptive dimension. In this spirit, they refer to them as “aurora movements,” promising a liberating dawn from the nihilistic darkness that comes with the universalization of neoliberal market forms.

Focusing on the way antiglobalists imagine salvation from neoliberalism’s alleged evils, the authors refrain from judging the morality or validity of the different movements they examine — endeavoring, instead, to grasp the similarities “uniting” them.

They abstain thus from the present liberal consensus, which holds that history has come to an end and that the great ideological battles of the past have given way now to an order based entirely on the technoeconomic imperatives specific to the new global market system.

The result of this ideologically neutral approach is a work surprisingly impartial and sympathetic in its examination of European, Islamic, and Latin American antiliberalism.

Yet, at first glance, Mexico’s Zapartistas, Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite, Umberto Bossi’s Northern League, the incumbent governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, and European proponents of Slow Food and Slow Life appear to share very little other than their common opposition to globalism’s “mirage of progress.”

Lindholm and Zúquete (one an American anthropologist, the other a Portuguese political scientist) claim, though, that many antiglobalist movements, especially in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East, “share a great deal structurally, ideologically, and experientially,” as they struggle, each in their own way, to redeem a world in ruins.

The two authors accordingly stress that these oppositional movements do not simply resist the destructurating onslaught of global capital.

Since “the global imaginary [has] become predominant, linking oppositional forces everywhere,” they claim antiglobal oppositionalists have adopted a grand narrative based on “a common ethical core and a common mental map.” For the “discourses, beliefs, and motives” of jihadists, Bolivarian revolutionaries, European new rightists, European national-populists, and European life-style rebels are strikingly similar in seeking to inaugurate the dawn of a new age — defined in opposition to global liberalism.

For all these antiglobalists, the transnational power elites (led by the United States) have shifted power away from the nation to multinational corporations, detached in loyalty from any culture or people, as they promote “hypergrowth, environmental exploitation, the privatization of public services, homogenization, consumerism, deregulation, corporate concentration,” etc.

The consequence is a world order (whose “divinities are currency, market, and capital, [whose] church is the stock market, and [whose] holy office is the IMF and WTO”) that seeks to turn everything into a commodity, as it “robs our lives of meaning [and sells] it back to us in the form of things.”

As the most transcendent values are compelled to prostrate themselves before the interests of capital, the global system disenchants the world — generating the discontent and alienation animating the antiglobal resistance.

From the point of view of the resistance, the power of money and markets is waging a scorched-earth campaign on humanity, as every country and every people are assaulted by “the American way of life,” whose suburban bourgeois principles aspire to universality.

* * *

In their struggle for the world, antiglobalists prophesy both doom and rebirth.

On the one hand, the Armies of the Night — the darkening forces of globalist homogenization, disenchantment, and debasement — are depicted as an “evil” — or, in political terms, as a life-threatening enemy.

Globalization, they claim, disrupts the equilibrium between humanity, society, and nature, stultifying man, emptying his world of meaning, and leaving him indifferent to the most important things in life.

In opposing a global order governed by a soulless market, these antiglobalists attempt to transcend its individualism, consumerism, and instrumental rationalism by reviving pre-modern values and institutions that challenge the reigning neoliberal consensus.

As one Zapartista manifesto puts it: “If the world does not have a place for us, then another world must be made. . . . What is missing is yet to come.”

At the same time, antiglobalists endeavor to revive threatened native or traditional identities, as they deconstruct modernist assaults on local culture that parade under the banner of progress and enlightenment. They privilege in this way their own authenticity and extol alternative, usually indigenous and traditional, forms of community and meaning rooted in archaic notions adapted to the challenges of the future. Even when seeking a return to specific communal ideals, these local struggles see themselves as engaging not just Amerindians or Muslims or Europeans, but all humanity — the world in effect.

Globalization, the authors conclude, may destroy national differences, but so too does resistance to globalization. The resistance’s principle, accordingly, is: “Nationalists of all countries, unite!” — to redeem “the world from the evils of globalization.”

* * *

If one accepts, with Lindholm and Zúquete, that a meaningful number of antiglobalization movements share a similar revolutionary-utopian narrative, the question then arises as to what these similarities might imply.

The first implication, in my view, affects globalist ideology — that is, the recognition that globalism is itself an ideology and not some historical inevitability.

As Carl Schmitt, among others, notes, liberalism is fundamentally antipolitical. Just as Cold War liberals tried to argue the “end of ideology” in the 1950s, neoliberal globalists since the Soviet collapse have argued that we today, following Fukuyama, have reached the end of history, where “worldwide ideological struggle that calls forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism” has become a thing of the past, replaced by the technoeconomic calculus of liberal-market societies, conceived as the culmination of human development.

In a word, liberal “endism” holds that there is no positive alternative to the status quo.

The strident ideologies and ideas of liberalism’s opponents have already dislodged this totalitarian fabrication — as The Struggle for the World, respectable university press publication that it is, testifies.

Lindholm and Zúquete also highlight globalization’s distinct ideological nature, as they contest its notion of history’s closure.

A second, related implication touches on the increasing dubiousness of right-left categories. These illusive designations allegedly defining the political antipodes of modernity have never meant much (see, e.g., the work of Marc Crapez) and have usually obscured more than they revealed.

Given the antiglobalists’ ideological diversity, right and left designations tell us far less about the major political struggles of our age than do categories like “globalist” and “antiglobalist,” “liberal” and “antiliberal,” “cosmopolitan” and “nationalist.”

Future political struggles seem likely, thus, to play out less and less along modernity’s left-right axis — and more and more in terms of a postmodern dialectic, in which universalism opposes and is opposed by particularism.

A third possible implication of Lindholm/Zúquete’s argument speaks to the fate of liberalism itself. Much of modern history follows the clash between the modernizing forces of liberalism and the conservative ones of antiliberalism. That the globalist agenda has now seized power nearly everywhere means that the “struggle for the world” has become largely a struggle about liberalism.

Given also that liberalism (or neoliberalism) ideologically undergirds the world system and that this system has been on life-support at least since the financial collapse of late 2008, it seems not unreasonable to suspect that the fate of liberalism and globalism are themselves now linked and that we may be approaching another axial age in which the established liberal ideologies and systems are forced to give way to the insurgence of new ones.

But perhaps the cruelest implication of all is the dilemma Lindholm/Zuqúete’s argument poses to U.S. rightists. For European new rightists, Islamic jihadists, and Bolivian revolutionaries alike, globalization is a form not only of liberalization but of “Americanization.”

And there’s no denying the justice of seeing the struggle against America as the main front in the worldwide antiglobalist struggle: for the United States was the world’s first and foremost liberal state and is the principal architect of the present global system.

At the same time, it’s also the case that native Americans — i.e., European Americans — have themselves fallen victim to what now goes for “Americanism” — in the form of unprotected borders, Third World colonization, de-industrialization, political correctness, multiculturalism, creedal identities, anti-Christianism, the media’s on-going spiritual colonization — and all the other degradations distinct to our age.

One wonders, then, if a right worthy of the designation will ever intersect an America willing to fight “Americanism” — and its shadow-casting Armies — in the name of some suppressed antiliberal impulse in the country’s European heritage.

————–

O’Meara, Michael. “Against the Armies of the Night: The Aurora Movements.” The Occidental Observer, 16 June 2010. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/O’meara-Globalization-Lindholm-Zuquete.html >.

 

Conservative Critique of Spengler – Tudor

The Revolutionary Conservative Critique of Oswald Spengler

By Lucian Tudor

Oswald Spengler is by now well-known as one of the major thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution of the early 20th Century. In fact, he is frequently cited as having been one of the most determining intellectual influences on German Conservatism of the interwar period – along with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Jünger – to the point where his cultural pessimist philosophy is seen to be representative of Revolutionary Conservative views in general (although in reality most Revolutionary Conservatives held more optimistic views).[1]

To begin our discussion, we shall provide a brief overview of the major themes of Oswald Spengler’s philosophy.[2] According to Spengler, every High Culture has its own “soul” (this refers to the essential character of a Culture) and goes through predictable cycles of birth, growth, fulfillment, decline, and demise which resemble that of the life of a plant. To quote Spengler:

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul.[3]

There is an important distinction in this theory between Kultur (“Culture”) and Zivilisation (“Civilization”). Kultur refers to the beginning phase of a High Culture which is marked by rural life, religiosity, vitality, will-to-power, and ascendant instincts, while Zivilisation refers to the later phase which is marked by urbanization, irreligion, purely rational intellect, mechanized life, and decadence. Although he acknowledged other High Cultures, Spengler focused particularly on three High Cultures which he distinguished and made comparisons between: the Magian, the Classical (Greco-Roman), and the present Western High Culture. He held the view that the West, which was in its later Zivilisation phase, would soon enter a final imperialistic and “Caesarist” stage – a stage which, according to Spengler, marks the final flash before the end of a High Culture.[4]

Perhaps Spengler’s most important contribution to the Conservative Revolution, however, was his theory of “Prussian Socialism,” which formed the basis of his view that conservatives and socialists should unite. In his work he argued that the Prussian character, which was the German character par excellence, was essentially socialist. For Spengler, true socialism was primarily a matter of ethics rather than economics. This ethical, Prussian socialism meant the development and practice of work ethic, discipline, obedience, a sense of duty to the greater good and the state, self-sacrifice, and the possibility of attaining any rank by talent. Prussian socialism was differentiated from Marxism and liberalism. Marxism was not true socialism because it was materialistic and based on class conflict, which stood in contrast with the Prussian ethics of the state. Also in contrast to Prussian socialism was liberalism and capitalism, which negated the idea of duty, practiced a “piracy principle,” and created the rule of money.[5]

Oswald Spengler’s theories of predictable culture cycles, of the separation between Kultur and Zivilisation, of the Western High Culture as being in a state of decline, and of a non-Marxist form of socialism, have all received a great deal of attention in early 20th Century Germany, and there is no doubt that they had influenced Right-wing thought at the time. However, it is often forgotten just how divergent the views of many Revolutionary Conservatives were from Spengler’s, even if they did study and draw from his theories, just as an overemphasis on Spenglerian theory in the Conservative Revolution has led many scholars to overlook the variety of other important influences on the German Right. Ironically, those who were influenced the most by Spengler – not only the German Revolutionary Conservatives, but also later the Traditionalists and the New Rightists – have mixed appreciation with critique. It is this reality which needs to be emphasized: the majority of Conservative intellectuals who have appreciated Spengler have simultaneously delivered the very significant message that Spengler’s philosophy needs to be viewed critically, and that as a whole it is not acceptable.

The most important critique of Spengler among the Revolutionary Conservative intellectuals was that made by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.[6] Moeller agreed with certain basic ideas in Spengler’s work, including the division between Kultur and Zivilisation, with the idea of the decline of the Western Culture, and with his concept of socialism, which Moeller had already expressed in an earlier and somewhat different form in Der Preussische Stil (“The Prussian Style,” 1916).[7] However, Moeller resolutely rejected Spengler’s deterministic and fatalistic view of history, as well as the notion of destined culture cycles. Moeller asserted that history was essentially unpredictable and unfixed: “There is always a beginning (…) History is the story of that which is not calculated.”[8] Furthermore, he argued that history should not be seen as a “circle” (in Spengler’s manner) but rather a “spiral,” and a nation in decline could actually reverse its decline if certain psychological changes and events could take place within it.[9]

The most radical contradiction with Spengler made by Moeller van den Bruck was the rejection of Spengler’s cultural morphology, since Moeller believed that Germany could not even be classified as part of the “West,” but rather that it represented a distinct culture in its own right, one which even had more in common in spirit with Russia than with the “West,” and which was destined to rise while France and England fell.[10] However, we must note here that the notion that Germany is non-Western was not unique to Moeller, for Werner Sombart, Edgar Julius Jung, and Othmar Spann have all argued that Germans belonged to a very different cultural type from that of the Western nations, especially from the culture of the Anglo-Saxon world. For these authors, Germany represented a culture which was more oriented towards community, spirituality, and heroism, while the modern “West” was more oriented towards individualism, materialism, and capitalistic ethics. They further argued that any presence of Western characteristics in modern Germany was due to a recent poisoning of German culture by the West which the German people had a duty to overcome through sociocultural revolution.[11]

Another key intellectual of the German Conservative Revolution, Hans Freyer, also presented a critical analysis of Spenglerian philosophy.[12] Due to his view that that there is no certain and determined progress in history, Freyer agreed with Spengler’s rejection of the linear view of progress. Freyer’s philosophy of culture also emphasized cultural particularism and the disparity between peoples and cultures, which was why he agreed with Spengler in terms of the basic conception of cultures possessing a vital center and with the idea of each culture marking a particular kind of human being. Being a proponent of a community-oriented state socialism, Freyer found Spengler’s anti-individualist “Prussian socialism” to be agreeable. Throughout his works, Freyer had also discussed many of the same themes as Spengler – including the integrative function of war, hierarchies in society, the challenges of technological developments, cultural form and unity – but in a distinct manner oriented towards social theory.[13]

However, Freyer argued that the idea of historical (cultural) types and that cultures were the product of an essence which grew over time were already expressed in different forms long before Spengler in the works of Karl Lamprecht, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Hegel. It is also noteworthy that Freyer’s own sociology of cultural categories differed from Spengler’s morphology. In his earlier works, Freyer focused primarily on the nature of the cultures of particular peoples (Völker) rather than the broad High Cultures, whereas in his later works he stressed the interrelatedness of all the various European cultures across the millennia. Rejecting Spengler’s notion of cultures as being incommensurable, Freyer’s “history regarded modern Europe as composed of ‘layers’ of culture from the past, and Freyer was at pains to show that major historical cultures had grown by drawing upon the legacy of past cultures.”[14] Finally, rejecting Spengler’s historical determinism, Freyer had “warned his readers not to be ensnared by the powerful organic metaphors of the book [Der Untergang des Abendlandes] … The demands of the present and of the future could not be ‘deduced’ from insights into the patterns of culture … but were ultimately based on ‘the wager of action’ (das Wagnis der Tat).”[15]

Yet another important Conservative critique of Spengler was made by the Italian Perennial Traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, who was himself influenced by the Conservative Revolution but developed a very distinct line of thought. In his The Path of Cinnabar, Evola showed appreciation for Spengler’s philosophy, particularly in regards to the criticism of the modern rationalist and mechanized Zivilisation of the “West” and with the complete rejection of the idea of progress.[16] Some scholars, such as H.T. Hansen, stress the influence of Spengler’s thought on Evola’s thought, but it is important to remember that Evola’s cultural views differed significantly from Spengler’s due to Evola’s focus on what he viewed as the shifting role of a metaphysical Perennial Tradition across history as opposed to historically determined cultures.[17]

In his critique, Evola pointed out that one of the major flaws in Spengler’s thought was that he “lacked any understanding of metaphysics and transcendence, which embody the essence of each genuine Kultur.”[18] Spengler could analyze the nature of Zivilisation very well, but his irreligious views caused him to have little understanding of the higher spiritual forces which deeply affected human life and the nature of cultures, without which one cannot clearly grasp the defining characteristic of Kultur. As Robert Steuckers has pointed out, Evola also found Spengler’s analysis of Classical and Eastern cultures to be very flawed, particularly as a result of the “irrationalist” philosophical influences on Spengler: “Evola thinks this vitalism leads Spengler to say ‘things that make one blush’ about Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism, and Greco-Roman civilization (which, for Spengler, is merely a civilization of ‘corporeity’).”[19] Also problematic for Evola was “Spengler’s valorization of ‘Faustian man,’ a figure born in the Age of Discovery, the Renaissance and humanism; by this temporal determination, Faustian man is carried towards horizontality rather than towards verticality.”[20]

Finally, we must make a note of the more recent reception of Spenglerian philosophy in the European New Right and Identitarianism: Oswald Spengler’s works have been studied and critiqued by nearly all major New Right and Identitarian intellectuals, including especially Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Pierre Krebs, Guillaume Faye, Julien Freund, and Tomislav Sunic. The New Right view of Spenglerian theory is unique, but is also very much reminiscent of Revolutionary Conservative critiques of Moeller van den Bruck and Hans Freyer. Like Spengler and many other thinkers, New Right intellectuals also critique the “ideology of progress,” although it is significant that, unlike Spengler, they do not do this to accept a notion of rigid cycles in history nor to reject the existence of any progress. Rather, the New Right critique aims to repudiate the unbalanced notion of linear and inevitable progress which depreciates all past culture in favor of the present, while still recognizing that some positive progress does exist, which it advocates reconciling with traditional culture to achieve a more balanced cultural order.[21] Furthermore, addressing Spengler’s historical determinism, Alain de Benoist has written that “from Eduard Spranger to Theodor W. Adorno, the principal reproach directed at Spengler evidently refers to his ‘fatalism’ and to his ‘determinism.’ The question is to know up to what point man is prisoner of his own history. Up to what point can one no longer change his course?”[22]

Like their Revolutionary Conservative precursors, New Rightists reject any fatalist and determinist notion of history, and do not believe that any people is doomed to inevitable decline; “Decadence is therefore not an inescapable phenomenon, as Spengler wrongly thought,” wrote Pierre Krebs, echoing the thoughts of other authors.[23] While the New Rightists accept Spengler’s idea of Western decline, they have posed Europe and the West as two antagonistic entities. According to this new cultural philosophy, the genuine European culture is represented by numerous traditions rooted in the most ancient European cultures, and must be posed as incompatible with the modern “West,” which is the cultural emanation of early modern liberalism, egalitarianism, and individualism.

The New Right may agree with Spengler that the “West” is undergoing decline, “but this original pessimism does not overshadow the purpose of the New Right: The West has encountered the ultimate phase of decadence, consequently we must definitively break with the Western civilization and recover the memory of a Europe liberated from the egalitarianisms…”[24] Thus, from the Identitarian perspective, the “West” is identified as a globalist and universalist entity which had harmed the identities of European and non-European peoples alike. In the same way that Revolutionary Conservatives had called for Germans to assert the rights and identity of their people in their time period, New Rightists call for the overcoming of the liberal, cosmopolitan Western Civilization to reassert the more profound cultural and spiritual identity of Europeans, based on the “regeneration of history” and a reference to their multi-form and multi-millennial heritage.

Notes

[1] An example of such an assertion regarding cultural pessimism can be seen in “Part III. Three Major Expressions of Neo-Conservatism” in Klemens von Klemperer, Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

[2] To supplement our short summary of Spenglerian philosophy, we would like to note that one the best overviews of Spengler’s philosophy in English is Stephen M. Borthwick, “Historian of the Future: An Introduction to Oswald Spengler’s Life and Works for the Curious Passer-by and the Interested Student,” Institute for Oswald Spengler Studies, 2011, <https://sites.google.com/site/spenglerinstitute/Biography>.

[3] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West Vol. 1: Form and Actuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 106.

[4] Ibid.

[5] See “Prussianism and Socialism” in Oswald Spengler, Selected Essays (Chicago: Gateway/Henry Regnery, 1967).

[6] For a good overview of Moeller’s thought, see Lucian Tudor, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck: The Man & His Thought,” Counter-Currents Publishing, 17 August 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/08/arthur-moeller-van-den-bruck-the-man-and-his-thought/>.

[7] See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 238-239, and Alain de Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 15 (11 June 2011), p. 30, 40-42. <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__15>.

[8] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck as quoted in Benoist, “Arthur Moeller van den Bruck,” p. 41.

[9] Ibid., p. 41.

[10] Ibid., pp. 41-43.

[11] See Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1990), pp. 183 ff.; John J. Haag, Othmar Spann and the Politics of “Totality”: Corporatism in Theory and Practice (Ph.D. Thesis, Rice University, 1969), pp. 24-26, 78, 111.; Alexander Jacob’s introduction and “Part I: The Intellectual Foundations of Politics” in Edgar Julius Jung, The Rule of the Inferiour, Vol. 1 (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

[12] For a brief introduction to Freyer’s philosophy, see Lucian Tudor, “Hans Freyer: The Quest for Collective Meaning,” Counter-Currents Publishing, 22 February 2013, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/hans-freyer-the-quest-for-collective-meaning/>.

[13] See Jerry Z. Muller, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 78-79, 120-121.

[14] Ibid., p. 335.

[15] Ibid., p. 79.

[16] See Julius Evola, The Path of Cinnabar (London: Integral Tradition Publishing, 2009), pp. 203-204.

[17] See H.T. Hansen, “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002), pp. 15-17.

[18] Evola, Path of Cinnabar, p. 204.

[19] Robert Steuckers, “Evola & Spengler”, Counter-Currents Publishing, 20 September 2010, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/09/evola-spengler/> .

[20] Ibid.

[21] In a description that applies as much to the New Right as to the Eurasianists, Alexander Dugin wrote of a vision in which “the formal opposition between tradition and modernity is removed… the realities superseded by the period of Enlightenment obtain a legitimate place – these are religion, ethnos, empire, cult, legend, etc. In the same time, a technological breakthrough, economical development, social fairness, labour liberation, etc. are taken from the Modern” (See Alexander Dugin, “Multipolarism as an Open Project,” Journal of Eurasian Affairs Vol. 1, No. 1 (September 2013), pp. 12-13).

[22] Alain de Benoist, “Oswald Spengler,” Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea No. 10 (15 April 2011), p. 13.<http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__10&gt;.

[23] Pierre Krebs, Fighting for the Essence (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 34.

[24] Sebastian J. Lorenz, “El Decadentismo Occidental, desde la Konservative Revolution a la Nouvelle Droite,”Elementos No. 10, p. 5.

 

—————

Tudor, Lucian. “The Revolutionary Conservative Critique of Oswald Spengler.” Tankesmedjan Motpol, 7 November 2014. <http://www.motpol.nu/english/2014/11/07/the-revolutionary-conservative-critique-of-oswald-spengler/ >.

Note: See also the mentions of various other Right-wing critiques of Spengler which are discussed by Karlheinz Weißmann in the editorial on Oswald Spengler in Sezession im Netz (May 2005): <http://www.sezession.de/wp-content/uploads/alte_nummern/sezession_spengler.pdf > (See alt. link).

Additional Note: This essay was also republished in Lucian Tudor’s From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

Organic Democracy – Tudor

Identity and Politics: Organic Democracy

(Excerpt from “The Philosophy of Identity”)

By Lucian Tudor

 

Translations: Ελληνικά

Identitarians distinguish between different forms of democracy, some of which can be said to be more validly democratic than others. Alain de Benoist has distinguished between three forms of democracy corresponding to the French Revolutionary motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The first, “liberal democracy,” is based on liberal, egalitarian, and individualist ideology; it is focused on the individual as a self-interested being, is inseparable from the individualist ideology of human rights, and is characterized by the principle of “one person, one vote.” The second form is “egalitarian democracy” or “popular democracy,” based on the principle of equality and manifested itself in the totalitarian regimes of the nationalist or socialist (particularly Marxist) type. The third form of democracy is based on the principle of fraternity and is known as “organic democracy,” which, as we shall see, is regarded by Identitarians as being the only true democracy.

Organic democracy is primarily defined not by fraternity as a “universal brotherhood” (which is impossible and is based on a false, egalitarian notion of humanity), but on fraternity in the sense of ethnic solidarity and a sense of collective meaning grounded in a shared heritage: “The only ‘families’ in which genuinely ‘fraternal’ relations may be entertained are cultures, peoples and nations. Fraternity, therefore, can serve as the basis for both solidarity and social justice, for both patriotism and democratic participation.”[54] Because true democracy is essentially non-totalitarian and is based on respecting the principle of liberty, it is also, in a sense, pluralistic, allowing the existence of groups representing differing opinions and ideas. However, as Benoist points out, this does not at all justify the notion of establishing a “pluralist” society in the ethnic sense (the liberal multiculturalists’ conclusion):

The way in which the political rights assigned as a guarantee to the opposition are commonly assimilated to the rights from which social minorities wish to benefit is itself problematic: for political categories cannot always be transposed on a social level. This may lead to a serious failure to distinguish between citizen minorities and non-citizen groups installed—whether temporarily or not—in the same land as the former. “Pluralism” may here be used as a rather specious argument to justify the establishment of a “multicultural” society that severely threatens national and folk identity, while stripping the notion of the people of its essential meaning.[55]

Alongside the foundation in ethnic community, organic democracy is also defined by participation: “Democracy is a people’s [Volkes] participation in its own destiny,” to reference Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s words.[56] For that reason, a purely representative democracy is regarded as an incomplete democracy: only a participatory democracy in which the entire citizenry can take part in decision-making is a true democracy. Finally, addressing the anti-democratic arguments made by most Traditionalists, Benoist has also pointed out that democracy does not necessarily reject hierarchy. Political equality among citizens of a state does not mean regarding each of them as equal in any other sense, and organic democracy, at its essence, is perfectly reconcilable with the values of hierarchy, aristocracy, and authority, although in a unique manner differing from absolute monarchies.[57]

To support their advocacy of democracy and to counter the claim that democracy is a modern invention, a common theme in Identitarian and New Right works is the reference to ancient democracy, which has taken on participatory, representative, and various mixed forms. It is typical for Identitarians to reference examples of democracy specifically from Western European history, such as that of the ancient Germans or Greeks, although historical examples could also be found in many Eastern societies, even in entirely non-European societies (ancient Asiatic, Native American, etc.). Democracy clearly has a solid historical basis, for, to quote Benoist once more,

Democratic regimes or tendencies can be found throughout history. . . . Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at a very early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil organisation. Moreover, in Indo-European society the King was generally elected.[58]

Alexander Dugin has also cited the history of organic democracy in Russian and “Eurasian” history, including the examples of the ancient Slavic Veche (equivalent to the Germanic Thing) and Orthodox priestly democracy.[59] Whatever the example, ancient democracy has almost always taken on organic forms based on respect for ethnic differences. Thus, Benoist rightly denounces liberal and egalitarian democracies as being only pseudo-democratic or entirely undemocratic:

Democracy means the power of the people, which is to say the power of an organic community that has historically developed in the context of one or more given political structures—for instance a city, nation, or empire. . . . Every political system which requires the disintegration or levelling of peoples in order to operate—or the erosion of individuals’ awareness of belonging to an organic folk community—is to be regarded as undemocratic.[60]

Notes:

[54] Alain de Benoist, The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos, 2011), 99.

[55] Ibid., 66.

[56] See Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (London: Arktos, 2012), 15.

[57] See Benoist, The Problem of Democracy, 17. See also the chapter “A Defence of Democracy” in this same work.

[58] Ibid., 14–15.

[59] See the chapter “Органическая демократия” in Alexander Dugin, Консервативная революция (Moscow: Арктогея, 1994). We have especially relied on the online version for this research, published at Арктогея, December 1, 2002 (http://www.arcto.ru/article/38; accessed September 1, 2014). We could add to these examples the democratic practices of many of the ancient peoples of the Baltic, including the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and the Dacians (in modern-day Romania); see Ion Grumeza, Dacia: Land of Transylvania, Cornerstone of Ancient Eastern Europe (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2009), 46, 129, 132.

[60] Benoist, The Problem of Democracy, 103.

 

—————

Excerpt from: Tudor, Lucian. “The Philosophy of Identity: Ethnicity, Culture, and Race in Identitarian Thought.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 106-108. This essay was also republished in Lucian Tudor’s book, From the German Conservative Revolution to the New Right: A Collection of Essays on Identitarian Philosophy (Santiago, Chile: Círculo de Investigaciones PanCriollistas, 2015).

 

Report from Budapest – Taylor

Report from Budapest

By Jared Taylor

 

A full report on the “forbidden” NPI conference

Published Saturday, October 5, 2014

It was a bold idea from the beginning. The National Policy Institute (NPI), an American organization, was to hold a conference in Budapest on “The Future of Europe.” In addition to well-known identitarians such as Philippe Vardon of France, Markus Willinger of Germany, and myself, the controversial Russian academic Alexander Dugin, was to take part. Hungary’s Jobbik party would provide essential support on the ground, and one of its elected representatives was to address the meeting.

However, about two weeks before the conference, Prime Minister Victor Orban came under pressure from the Hungarian Socialist Party and condemned the conference. His statement mentioned Prof. Dugin by name, and characterized NPI as a “xenophobic and exclusionary” organization. Those of us scheduled to take part began to worry that pressure would build on the Larus Event Center to cancel its contract to host the conference.

Things got worse. A little more than a week before the conference, the Interior Ministry issued a statement forbidding the meeting, and warning that all speakers would be stopped at the border or deported if found within Hungary. Again, Prof. Dugin was cited as a particularly offensive speaker, but others were cited as “racists” who might violate the Hungarian fundamental law that forbids “violating the human dignity of others.”

I arrived on September 29, the Monday before the weekend of the conference, and had no trouble with border control. Others were not so lucky. William Regnery, the NPI board chairman, was scheduled to fly in for a Tuesday meeting with the general manager of the Novotel City Center hotel, where a number of conference events were planned. Mr. Regnery had asked me to attend the meeting with him, but when I got to the hotel, I was dismayed to learn that Mr. Regnery had not arrived. The hotel manager confirmed that the Larus Center had canceled its contract. He also said that many people attending the conference were booked at the hotel and that since the meeting was now forbidden, he had to make a decision about whether to hold the rooms.

Later that day I later learned that Mr. Regnery had been stopped at the Hungarian border by the police, put in a detention cell overnight, and deported to London. That same day, the hotel manager unilaterally canceled all the room reservations and planned events.

Likewise on Tuesday, I was shocked to learn that Jobbik support had completely melted away, and that no one was looking for an alternate venue. I knew that Jobbik representative Marton Gyongyosi, who had been scheduled to speak, had withdrawn, accusing the organizers of “racism,” but I assumed we still had some local Hungarian support. I was wrong. We had no one. Mr. Regnery telephoned from London and asked me to find a suitable venue. We were also in contact with Richard Spencer, the director of NPI, who asked me to find a private room in a restaurant for a dinner–for an estimated 70 people.

The forbidden conference was now big news. The press was full of stories about Russian extremists and American “racists” about to converge in Budapest. I was afraid it would arouse suspicions if an American phoned up restaurants trying to book a last-minute dinner for 70. I decided to wait until the next day, when I knew a Hungarian-American would be arriving, who could make calls in Hungarian.

We finally got to work on Wednesday, and found a charming, traditional restaurant that was willing to serve as many as 100 people in a private room. We took a taxi to the restaurant, worked up a menu, and made a down payment. We had a venue!–so long as we could keep it secret. We scouted the neighborhood and established a redirection point nearby so that we could tell people to meet there and be taken to the restaurant rather than reveal its name and address in advance. Mr. Spencer was thus able to send e-mail messages to everyone registered for the conference, telling them that the event was still on, and that they were to meet Saturday evening at the redirection point.

Mr. Spencer was to arrive the next day, and we were all worried he would get the same treatment as Mr. Regnery, but he slipped across the Austrian-Hungarian border by train without attracting attention. He gave a number of interviews to the press, and he and I met Thursday evening to toast to the success of the conference.

Disaster struck the next day. Mr. Spencer had sent a message to a number of supporters inviting them to meet him informally at the Clock Café in Budapest that evening. Late that night, an estimated 40 police officers descended on the café and locked it down for two hours, while they asked for identification papers and grilled people.

Some 20 people who did not have papers were taken outside for interrogation. Mr. Spencer, who did not have his passport with him, was arrested and asked police to let everyone else go. He was detained along with French-American journalist James Willy, whom the authorities appear to have thought had some role in organizing the conference. We have since heard from Mr. Spencer that he is safe and unhurt, but is likely to be in detention until Monday, when he will be deported. Fortunately, I was not at that gathering; otherwise, I suspect I would be sharing a cell with Mr. Spencer.

The arrest was a terrible blow. We don’t know how the police knew to go to the Clock Café, so we didn’t know how much our security was breached. I felt sure the police did not know about the restaurant, but did they know about the redirection point? This was a forbidden meeting. Would they arrest everyone who showed up?

Mr. Regnery had planned to come back to Hungary at the last minute for the dinner but after Mr. Spencer’s arrest, he decided that would be foolish. On Saturday morning we consulted by phone and had to make some hard decisions. Cancel for fear the police would break up the meeting? Tell only trusted people the name of the restaurant and tell everyone else the dinner was off?

I met with a trusted associate of Richard Spencer. We looked over the list of 65 or so people who said they planned to come to the redirection point and recognized only about 20 names. It didn’t make sense to have a small dinner for people we already knew. We sent them a message with the name and address of the restaurant, but told everyone else to go to the redirection point. I went directly to the restaurant, and another man went to the redirection point early, to keep an eye out for the police. If there were no police, he was to bring people to the restaurant. How much did the police know? I packed a change of clothes and a toothbrush in my briefcase in case I had to spend a night in a cell.

As it happened, there were no police at the redirection point, and people were skillfully in groups to the restaurant. Before long, we had 76 people in all–more than half the original number of registrants–including guests from Sweden, Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Australia, Slovakia, Britain, Ireland, Croatia, the United States, Spain, Canada, Russia, and even Mexico and Japan. To my disappointment there was only one Hungarian. He explained that the conference had been virtually unknown in Hungary until the scandal broke, and that a few others who had registered dropped out when the police prohibited the meeting.

We admitted three journalists who had been cleared in advance by Mr. Spencer, but kept out half a dozen more who showed up but had not been cleared. I stepped outside and answered their questions for 20 minutes, but decided not to let them cover the event.

Back at the restaurant, I welcomed everyone in the name of NPI. After an excellent dinner, I apologized for the thin program–only two scheduled speakers–but pointed out that speakers had been expressly forbidden to enter the country.

I explained that at least two other speakers had been directly intimidated. The Hungarian government had prevailed on the French to send the police to tell Philippe Vardon that since he was a “notorious racial activist” he was unwelcome in Hungary and would arrested if he tried to come. The Russian police told Alexander Dugin the same thing: He would be expelled immediately if he tried to come to Hungary.

I then introduced the only other scheduled speaker who was able to attend: the author and academic, Tom Sunic. Mr. Sunic lives in neighboring Croatia, and took real risks to come to Budapest. Croatia is not in the free-travel Schengen area of the European Union, and there was a good chance he would be turned back or even detained at passport control. It would be a considerable professional liability to have been officially rejected as an undesirable by a neighboring country.

Mr. Sunic spoke on the failure of the European Union. He pointed out that it was originally established as an economic community, and criticized the role of capitalism in dissolving ethnic and racial bonds: “Merchants have no country.” He spoke of the guilt that seems to be part of Catholicism and that causes Europeans to welcome Third-World immigration. Mr. Sunic urged all Europeans to rise above old antagonisms left over from past conflicts and to embrace a larger destiny. He stressed the dangers of petty nationalism that resulted in the terrible bloodshed in his own country, the former Yugoslavia, and concluded with a rousing call for all Europeans to work together to preserve their common culture and heritage.

My talk was called “Towards a World Brotherhood of Europeans.” I argued out that it is not only on the continent of Europe that we find Europe but in all those places overseas where Europeans have built new societies. I said that I speak for many Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, and Afrikaners when I call myself a European and refer to Europe as my spiritual and cultural homeland. I said that only Europeans–white people–could defend Europe and carry its heritage forward in a meaningful way, and that our people and civilization are under threat everywhere. I argued that the genetic and cultural effect of alien immigration is no different from armed invasion, and concluded that although the crisis is not sharp, nor the lines so clearly drawn, the struggle of our generation to defend Europe is no different from Marathon, Poitiers, the Siege of Vienna, and the Battle of Blood River.

We had booked the restaurant from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m., and the crowd was thick and exuberant until 11:30 when the management politely sent us out the door to catch the last subway trains home. Late that night I sent out a message to all conference registrants, announcing a 2:00 p.m. gathering on Sunday at the Heroes’ Square, where our European brethren planned to gather and continue informal fellowship.

We did our best despite the outrageous behavior of the Hungarian authorities. We suspect that after the press reports on the meeting are published, the government will have even more reason to be ashamed of their heavy-handed behavior.

We look forward to future meetings under friendlier circumstances.

 

————–

Taylor, Jared. “Report From Budapest.” American Renaissance, 5 October 2014. <http://www.amren.com/news/2014/10/report-from-budapest/ >. Republished at the Radix Journal: <http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2014/10/5/amrens-report-from-budapest >.

 

Identity & Difference – Benoist

Identity and Difference

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from the Spanish by Lucian Tudor

 

* This was translated into English from the Spanish version titled “Identidad y Diferencia,” published in the digital journal Elementos: Revista de Metapolítica para una Civilización Europea, No. 47 (May 2013): 3-10. The Spanish text was the translation and combination of the original French articles titled “Le droit à la différence” and “Qu’est-ce que l’identité? Réflexions sur un concept-clef,” published in Eléments, No. 77 (April 1993): 24-25 & 44-47. The translator wishes to thank Daniel Macek for reviewing the translation and Alain de Benoist for approving of the translation.

Difference

The debate about immigration has raised in a sharp manner the questions of the right to difference, the future of the mode of community life, of the diversity of human cultures and of social and political pluralism. Questions of such importance cannot be treated with brief slogans or prefabricated responses. “Let us, therefore, oppose exclusion and integration,” writes Alain Touraine. “The first is as absurd as it is scandalous, but the second has taken two forms that need to be distinguished and between them there must be searched for, at least, a complementarity. Speaking of integration only to tell the new arrivals that they have to take their position in society as such and what it was before their arrival, that is much closer to exclusion than of a true integration.”[1]

The communitarian tendency began to affirm itself in the early eighties, in liaison with certainly confusing ideological propositions about the notion of “multicultural society.” Later it seemed to be remitted due to critiques directed against it on behalf of liberal individualism and “republican” universalism: the relative abandonment of the theme of difference, considered as “dangerous,” the denunciation of communities, invariably presented as “ghettos” or “prisons,” the over-valuation of individual problems to the detriment of the groups, the return of a form of purely egalitarian anti-racism, etc. The logic of capitalism, which, to extend itself, needs to make organic social structures and traditional mentalities disappear, has also had weight in that sense. The leader of immigrant minorities, Harlem Désir, sometimes accused of having inclined towards “differentialism,”[2] has been able to boast of having “promoted the sharing of common values and not the identitarian tribalism, the republican integration around universal principles and not the construction of community lobbies.”[3]

All the critique of the mode of community life is reduced, in fact, to the belief that difference obstructs inter-human understanding and, therefore, integration. The logical conclusion of that approach is that integration will remain facilitated with the suppression of communities and the erosion of differences. This deduction is based on two assumptions:

• (1) The more “equal” are the individuals who compose a society, the more they will “resemble” each other and the less problematic their integration will be;
• (2) Xenophobia and racism are the result of the fear of the Other. Consequently, to make otherness disappear or to persuade each one that the Other is a small thing if compared with the Same, it will result in its attenuation and even its nullification.

Both assumptions are erroneous. Without doubt, in the past racism has been able to function as an ideology that legitimized a complex — colonial, for example — of domination and of exploitation. But in modern societies, racism appears rather as a pathological product of the egalitarian ideal; that is to say, as a door of obliged departure (“the only way to distinguish oneself”) in the bosom of a society that, adhering to egalitarian ideas, perceives all difference as unbearable or as abnormal: “The anti-racist discourse,” writes Jean-Pierre Dupuy in this respect, “considers as an evidence that the racist depreciation made of the other goes on par with a social organization that prioritizes beings based on the function of a criterion of value. […] [But] these presuppositions are exactly contrary to what we learn from the comparative study of human societies and of their history. The most favorable medium for mutual recognition is not the one which obeys the principle of equality, but rather that the one which obeys the principle of hierarchy. This thesis, which the works of Louis Dumont have illustrated in multiple ways, can only be comprehended with the precondition of not confusing hierarchy with inequality, but rather, on the contrary, by opposing both concepts. […] In a true hierarchical society, the hierarchically superior element does not dominate the inferior elements, but is different from them in the same sense in which all the parties are encompassed, or in the sense in which one party takes precedence over another in the constitution and in the internal coherence of the whole.”[4]

Jean-Pierre Dupuy also notes that xenophobia is not defined solely by fear of the Other, but, perhaps even more, by fear of the Same: “What people are afraid of is the indifferentiation, and this because indifferentiation is always the sign and product of social disintegration. Why? Because the unity of the whole presupposes its differentiation, that is to say, its hierarchical conformation. Equality, that principle that denies differences, is the cause of mutual fear. People are afraid of the Same, and there is the source of racism.”[5]

The fear of the Same raises mimetic rivalries without end, and egalitarianism is, in modern societies, the motor of those rivalries in which each seeks to become “more equal” than the others. But, at the same time, the fear of the Other is added to the fear of the Same, producing a game of mirrors which prolongs itself to infinity. Thus, it can be said that the xenophobic ones are just as allergic to the other identity of the immigrants (real or imagined otherness) as, conversely, to how much in these is not different, and that xenophobia is experienced as a potential threat of indifferentiation. In other words, the immigrant is considered a threat at the same time as an assimilable person and as a non-assimilable person. The Other is thus converted into a danger to the extent that it is a carrier of the Same, while the Same is a danger to the extent that it pushes the recognition of the Other. And this game of mirrors works all the more as how much atomized the society is, composed of increasingly isolated individuals and, therefore, increasingly vulnerable to all conditions.

Thus one can better understand the failure of an “anti-racism” that, in the best of cases, does not accept the Other more than to reduce it to the Same. As much as it erodes the differences with the hope of facilitating integration, the more it in reality makes it impossible. The more it thinks to battle against exclusion by desiring to make immigrants uprooted individuals “like everyone else,” the more it contributes to the advent of a society where mimetic rivalry culminates in exclusion and generalized dehumanization. And finally, the more the “anti-racism” is believed in, the more it appears like a racism classically defined as the negation or radical devaluation of group identity, a racism that has always opposed the preeminence of a single obligatory norm, judged explicitly or implicitly as “superior” (and superior because it is “universal”) over the differentiated modes of life, whose mere existence seems incongruous or detestable.

This anti-racism, universalist and egalitarian (“individuo-universalist”), extends the secular trend that, under the most diverse forms and in the name of the most contradictory imperatives (the propagation of the “true faith,” the “superiority” of the White race, the global exportation of the myths of “progress” and “development”), has not stopped practicing the conversion seeking to reduce diversity everywhere, that is to say, precisely, trying to reduce the Other to the Same. “In the West,” observes the ethno-psychiatrist Tobie Nathan, “the Other no longer exists in our cultural schemas. Now we only consider the relation with the Other from the moral point of view, meaning, not only in an inefficient way, but also without procuring ourselves the means to understand it. The condition of our education system is that we are to think that the whole world is alike […]. To say ‘I must respect the other’ is something that makes no sense. In the everyday relation, this kind of phrase has no sense if we cannot integrate our schemes to the fact that naturally, the function of the Other is precisely to be Other. […] France is the most insane country for that. […] The structure of power in France seems unable to integrate even those small fluctuations which are the regional languages​​. But it is exactly from this conception of power from which humanistic theory was constructed, up to the universal Declaration of human rights.” And Nathan concludes: “Immigration is the real problem at the foundation of our society, which does not know to think of difference.”[6]

It is time, then, to recognize the Other and to remember that the right to difference is the principle that, as such, is only worth its generality (nobody can defend their difference except to the extent that they recognize, respect, and defend also the difference of the other) and whose place is in the broader context of the right of the peoples and of ethnic groups: The right to identity and to collective existence, the right to language, to culture, to territory and self-determination, the right to live and to work in their own country, the right to natural resources and to the protection of the market, etc.

The positive attitude will be, to reference the terms of Roland Breton, “that which, starting with the recognition of the right to difference, admits pluralism as a fact which is not only ancient, durable, and permanent, but also positive, fertile, and desirable. The attitude that resolutely turns its back to the totalitarian projects of the uniformization of humanity and of society, and which does not see in the different or deviant individual one who must be punished, nor as a sick one who must be cured, nor as an abnormal one who must be helped, but rather another self, simply provided with a set of physical traits or cultural habits, generators of sensibility, of tastes, and of aspirations of their own. On a planetary scale, it is tantamount to admitting, after the consolidation of certain sovereign hegemonies, the multiplication of independencies, but also of interdependencies. On the regional scale, it is tantamount to recognizing, against centralisms, the processes of autonomy, of self-centered organization, of self-management. […] The right to difference supposes the mutual respect of the groups and of the communities, and the exaltation of the values of each one. […]To say ‘long live the difference’ does not imply any idea of superiority, of domination and of contempt: the affirmation of oneself is not the lowering of the other. The recognition of the identity of an ethnicity can only subtract from others what they have unduly monopolized.”[7]

The affirmation of the right to be different is the only way to escape a double error: that error, very widespread in the Left, that consists of believing that “human brotherhood” will be realized on the ruins of differences, the erosion of cultures, and the homogenization of communities, and that other error, widespread in the Right, which consists of the belief that the “rebirth of the nation” will be achieved by inculcating in its members an attitude of rejection towards others.

Identity

The question of identity (national, cultural, etc.) also plays a central role in the debate about immigration. To begin, two observations must be made. The first is that there is much talk of the identity of the host population, but, in general, there is much less talk of the identity of the immigrants themselves, who nevertheless seem, by far, the most threatened by the fact of immigration itself. Indeed, the immigrants, insofar as they are the minority, directly suffer the pressure of the modes of behavior of the majority. Pulled to disappearance or, inversely, exacerbated in a provocative way, their identity only survives, frequently, in a negative (or reactive) manner by the hostility of the host environment, by capitalist over-exploitation exerted on certain workers uprooted from their natural structures of defense and protection.

The second observation is the following: It is striking to see how, in certain ways, the problem of identity is situated exclusively in relation with immigration. The immigrants would be the principal “threat,” if not the only one, that weighs on French identity. But that is tantamount to overlooking the numerous factors that in the whole world, both in the countries with a strong foreign labor as in those without it, are inducing a rapid disintegration of collective identities: the primacy of consumption, the Westernization of customs, the media homogenization, the generalization of the axiomatic of self-interest, etc.

With such a perception of things, it is too easy to fall into the temptation of scapegoating. But, certainly, it is not the fault of the immigrants that the French are apparently no longer capable of producing a way of life that is their own nor to offer to the world the spectacle of an original form of thought and of being. And nor is it the fault of the immigrants that the social bond is broken wherever liberal individualism is extended, that the dictatorship of the private has extinguished the public spaces that could constitute the crucible in which to renew an active citizenry, nor that individuals, submerged in the ideology of merchandise, turn away more and more from their own nature. It is not the fault of the immigrants that the French form a people increasingly less, that the nation has become a phantasm, that the economy has been globalized nor that individuals renounce being actors of their own existence to accept that there are others who decide in their place from norms and values that they no longer contribute to forming. It is not the immigrants, finally, who colonize the collective imagination and impose on the radio and on the television sounds, images, concerns, and models “which come from outside.” If there is “globalism,” we say too with clarity that, until proven otherwise, where it comes from is the other side of the Atlantic, and not the other side of the Mediterranean. And let us add that the small Arab shopkeeper contributes more to maintain, in a convivial way, the French identity than the Americanomorphic park of attractions or the “shopping center” of a very French capital.

The true causes of the disappearance of French identity are, in fact, the same that explain the erosion of all other identities: The exhaustion of the model of the nation-state, the collapse of all traditional institutions, the rupture of the civil contract, the crisis of representation, the mimetic adoption of the American model, etc. The obsession with consumption, the cult of material and financial “success,” the disappearance of the ideas of common good and of solidarity, the dissociation of the individual future and collective destiny, the development of technology, the momentum of the exportation of capital, the alienation of economic, industrial, and media independence, these have destroyed by themselves the “homogeneity” of our peoples infinitely more than what has been done up to today by some immigrants who, by the way, are not the last to suffer the consequences of this process. “Our ‘identity’,” emphasizes Claude Imbert, “remains much more affected by the collapse of civility, more altered by the international cultural arm of the communication media, more eliminated by the impoverishment of language and of concepts, more damaged overall by the degradation of a previously centralized, potent and normative State which founded among us that famous ‘identity’.”[8] In brief, if the French (and European) identity falls apart, it is before all due to a vast movement of techno-economic homogenization of the world, whose principal vector is the transnational or Americano-centric imperialism, and which generalizes everywhere the loss of sense, that is, a feeling of the absurdity of life which destroys organic ties, dissolves the natural sociality and each day makes people be more as strangers to one another.

From this point of view, immigration plays much more a revelatory role. It is the mirror that should permit us to take the full measure of the state of latent crisis in which we find ourselves, a state of crisis in which immigration is not the cause but rather a consequence among others. An identity feels more threatened when it is known how much more vulnerable, uncertain, and undone it is. That is why such an identity is in its depth no longer able to become capable of receiving a foreign contribution and include it within itself. In this sense, it is not that our identity is threatened because there have been immigrants among us, but rather that we are not capable of facing the problem of immigration because our identity is already largely undone. And that is why, in France, the problem of immigration is only discussed by surrendering to the twin errors of angelism or of exclusion.

Xenophobes and “cosmopolitans,” on the other hand, coincide in believing that there exists an inversely proportional relationship between the affirmation of national identity and the integration of immigrants. The first believe that the greater care or greater conscience of the national identity allows us to spontaneously rid ourselves of the immigrants. The second think that the best way to facilitate the insertion of the immigrants is to favor the dissolution of national identity. The conclusions are opposites, but the premise is identical. Both the one and the other are wrong. What hinders the integration of immigrants is not the affirmation of national identity but rather, on the contrary, its erasure. Immigration becomes a problem because the national identity is uncertain. And conversely, the difficulties linked to the reception and integration of recent arrivals can be resolved thanks to a newfound national identity.

Thus we see to what point it is senseless to believe that it will suffice to invert the migration flow to “get out of the decadence.” The decadence has other causes, and if there would be not one immigrant among us, due to that we would not stop finding ourselves confronted with the same difficulties, although this time without a scapegoat. The obscuration of the problem of immigration, making immigration responsible for everything that does not work, obliterates in the same strike many other causes and other responsibilities. In other words, it carries out a prodigious diversion of attention. It would be interesting to know for whose benefit.

But there must yet be more questioning of the notion of identity. Raising the question of French identity, for example, does not fundamentally consist of asking who is French (the response is relatively simple), but much more in asking what is French. Before this question, much more essential, the singers of the “national identity” are limited in general to responding with commemorative memories or evocations of “great personalities” they consider more or less founders (Clovis, Hugh Capet, the Crusaders, Charles Martel, or Joan of Arc), ingrained in the national imagination by a conventional historiography and devotion.[9] Now this little catechism of a species of religion of France (where the “eternal France,” always identical to itself, is found in all moments ready to confront the “barbarians,” such that what is French ends up defining itself, in the end, without a further positive characteristic of its non-inclusion in the alien universe) bears no relation to but rather is very far away from the true history of a people whose specific trait, in its depth, is the way it has always known to tackle its contradictions. In fact, the religion of France is today instrumentalized to restore a national continuity stripped of all contradiction in a Manichean view where globalization (the “anti-France”) is purely and simplistically interpreted as a “plot.” The historical references thus remain situated in an ahistorical perspective, an almost essentialist perspective that does not aspire so much to tell the story as to describe a “being” that will always be the Same, which will not be defined as any more than resistance to otherness or the rejection of the Other. The identity is thus inevitably limited to the identical, to the simple replica of the “eternal yesterday,” of a past glorified by idealization, an already built entity which only remains for us to conserve and transmit as a sacred substance. In parallel, the national sentiment itself remains detached from the historical context (the appearance of modernity) which had determined its birth. The history then becomes un-broken, when the truth is that there is no history possible without rupture. It is converted into a simple duration which permits exorcising the separation, when the truth is that the duration is, by definition, dissimilarity, the separation between one and oneself, the perpetual inclusion of new separations. In brief, the national catechism serves itself by the history to proclaim its closure, instead of finding in it a stimulus to let it continue.

But identity is never one-dimensional. It has not always only associated circles of multiple belonging, but combines factors of permanence and factors of change, endogenous mutations and external contributions. The identity of a people and of a nation is also not solely the sum of its history, of its customs and their dominant characteristics. As Philippe Forget wrote, “a country may appear, at first sight, as a set of characteristics determined by customs and habits, ethnic factors, geographical factors, linguistic factors, demographic factors, etc. However, those factors can apparently describe the image or social reality of a people, but not realize what the identity of a people is as an original and perennial presence. Consequently, the foundations of identity need to be thought of in terms of the openness of sense, and here is the sense which is nothing other than the constitutive bond of a man or of a population and its world.”[10]

This presence, which means the opening of a space and time, continues Phillipe Forget, “should not refer to a substantialist conception of identity, but rather a comprehension of being as a game of differentiation. This is not to apprehend identity an immutable and fixed content, liable to be encoded into a canon … Contrary to a conservative conception of tradition, which conceives it as a sum of immutable and trans-historical factors, tradition, or better, traditionality, should be here understood as a weft of differences which are renewed and regenerated in the soil of a patrimony consisting of an aggregate of past experiences, and which are put to test in their own surpassing. In that sense, the defense cannot and should not consist of the protection of forms of existence postulated as intangibles; they should better be addressed to protect the forces that permit a society to metamorphose itself proceeding from itself. The repetition of the identical of a place or the action of ‘living’ in according to the practice of another lead equally to the disappearance and to the extinction of collective identity.”[11]

As it occurs with culture, identity is also not an essence that can be fixed or reified by speech. It is only determinant in a dynamic sense, and is only possible to be apprehended from the interactions (or retro-determinations) both of the personal decisions as from the denials of identification, and of the strategies of identification which underlie them. Even considered from the point of origin, identity is inseparable from the use which was made — or which was not made — of it in a particular cultural and social context, that is, in the context of a relation with others. That is why identity is always reflexive. In a phenomenological perspective, it implies never dissociating its own constitution and the constitution of the others. The subject of collective identity is not an “I” or a “we,” a natural entity constituted once and for all, an opaque mirror where nothing new can come to be reflected, but rather a “self” which continually appeals to new reflections.

We will recuperate the distinction formulated by Paul Ricoeur between idem identity and ipse identity. The permanence of the collective being through ceaseless change (ipse identity) cannot be limited to what pertains to the order of the event or of the repetition (idem identity). On the contrary, it is linked on the whole to a hermeneutics of the “self,” to the whole of a narrative work destined to make a “place” appear, a space-time which configures a sense and forms the same condition of the appropriation of the self. Indeed, in a phenomenological perspective, where nothing is given naturally, the object always proceeds from a constituent elaboration, from a hermeneutic relation characterized by the affirmation of a point of view which retrospectively organizes the events to give them a meaning. “The story builds the narrative identity constructing the history by constructing that of the story told,” says Ricoeur. “It is the identity of the history that makes the identity of the personage.”[12] To defend one’s own identity is not, then, to be content with ritually listing historically foundational points of reference, nor to sing of the past to better avoid confronting the present. To defend one’s own identity is to understand the identity as that which remains in the game of differences – not as the same, but rather as the always singular way of changing or not changing.

It is not, then, to choose the idem identity against the ipse identity, or vice versa, but rather to apprehend both in their reciprocal relations by means of an organizing narrative that takes into account both the understanding of the self as well as the understanding of the other. To recreate the conditions in which it returns to being possible to produce such a story which constitutes the appropriation of the self. But it is an appropriation which never stays fixed, for collective subjectivation always proceeds from an option more than from an act, and from an act more than a “fact.” A people is maintained thanks to its narrativity, appropriating its being in successive interpretations, becoming the subject by narrating itself and thus avoiding losing their identity, that is, avoiding becoming the object of the narrative of another. “An identity,” writes Forget, “is always a relation of self to self, an interpretation of itself and of the others, by itself and by others. Ultimately, it is the story of itself, elaborated in the dialectical relation with the others, which completes the human history and delivers a collectivity to history. […] The personal identity endures and reconciles stability and transformation through the act of narration. The personal identity of an individual, of a people, is built and maintained through the movement of the story, through the dynamism of the plot which underpins the narrative operation, as Ricoeur said.”[13]

Finally, what most threatens national identity today possesses a strong endogenous dimension, represented by the tendency to the implosion of the social, that is, the internal deconstruction of all forms of organic solidarity. In this respect, Roland Castro has been able to justly speak of those societies where “nobody any longer supports anyone,” where everyone excludes everyone, where every individual has become potentially foreign for every individual. To liberal individualism one must attribute the major responsibility in this regard. How can one speak of “fraternity” (in the Left) or of “common good” (in the Right) in a society where each have been submerged in the search for the maximization of their own and exclusive interests, in a mimetic rivalry without end which adopts the form of a headlong rush, of a permanent competition devoid of all purpose?

As Christian Thorel had emphasized, “the re-centering on the individual over the collective leads to the disappearance of the look towards the other.”[14] The problem of immigration runs the risk, precisely, of obliterating this evidence. On the one hand, that exclusion of immigrants of which the immigrants are victims can make us forget that today we live increasingly more in a society where exclusion is also the rule between our own “autochthonous people.” How to support the foreigners when we support ourselves increasingly less? On the other hand, certain reproaches crumble by themselves. For example, the young immigrants that “have hatred” have been frequently told that they must respect the “country which hosts them.” But why must the immigrant youths by more patriotic than some French youth who are not? The greatest risk, finally, would be to believe that the criticism of immigration, which is legitimate in itself, will be facilitated by the increase of egoism, when in fact it is that increase which has more deeply undone the social fabric. There is, on the other hand, the whole problem of xenophobia. There are some who believe in strengthening the national sentiment by basing it on the rejection of the Other. After which, having already acquired the habit, it will be their own compatriots who they will end up finding normal to reject.

A society conscious of its identity can only be strong if it achieves placing the common good before the individual interest; if it achieves placing solidarity, conviviality, and generosity towards others before the obsession for the competition of the triumph of the “Me.” A society conscious of its identity can only last if rules of disinterest and of gratuity are imposed, which are the only means to escape the reification of social relations, that is, the advent of a world where man produces himself as an object after having transformed everything surrounding him into an artifact. Because it is evident that it will not be the proclamation of egoism, not even in the name of the “struggle for life” (the simple transposition of the individualist principle of the “war of all against all”), that we can recreate that convivial and organic sociality without which there is no people worthy of the name. We will not find fraternity in a society where each has the sole goal to “win” more than the others. We will not reinstate the desire to live together by appealing to xenophobia, that is, to a hatred of the Other by principle; a hatred which, little by little, ends up extending itself to all.

Notes

[1] “Vraie et fausse intégration,” Le Monde, 29 January 1992.

[2] “La timidité en paie jamais,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 March 1992, p.15.

[3] About the critique of “differentialist neo-racism,” based on the idea that “the racist argumentation has shifted from race to culture,” cf. especially Pierre-André Taguieff, La force du préjugé. Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles, Découverte, Paris, 1988, and Gallimard, París, 1990. Taguieff’s critique rests, in our judgement, on a double fallacy. On the one hand, it forgets that the right to difference, when it lays itself down as a principle, it necessarily leads to also defending the difference of others, so that it could never legimitize the unconditional affirmation of an absolute singularity (there is no difference but in relation with that one to which it is deferred). On the other hand, it ignores the fact that cultural differences and racial differences are not of the same order, so that way they cannot be instrumentalized by the same one: that would amount, paradoxically, to the assertion that nature and culture are equivalent. For a discussion on this issue, cf. Alain de Benoist, André Béjin and Pierre-André Taguieff, Razzismo e antirazzismo, La Roccia di Erec, Florencia, 1992 (partial translation of André Béjin, Julien Freund, Michael Pollak, Alain Daniélou, Michel Maffesoli et al., Racismes, antiracismes, Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1986).

[4] “La science? Un piège pour les antirracistes!,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 March 1992, p.20.

[5] Ibid., p.21.

[6] L’Autre Journal, October 1992, p.41.

[7] Les Ethnies, 2^nd ed., PUF, París, 1992, pp.114-115.

[8] “Historique?,” Le Point, 14 December 1991, p.35.

[9] Cf. in this respect the strongly demystified works of Suzanne Citron, Le Mythe national. L’Histoire de France en question (éd. Ouvrières-Études et documentation internationales, 2ª ed., 1991) and L’Histoire de France autrement (éd. Ouvrières, 1992), which frequently fall into the opposite excesses of those they denounce. Cf. also, for a different reading of the history of France, Olier Mordrel, Le Mythe de l’Hexagone, Jean Picollec, 1981.

[10] “Phénoménologie de la menace, Sujet, narration, stratégie,” Krisis, April 1992, p.3.

[11] Ibid., p.5.

[12] Soi-même comme un autre, Seuil, Paris, 1990, p.175.

[13] Art. cit., pp.6-7.

[14] Le Monde, 17 August 1990.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “Identity and Difference.” The Occidental Observer, 13-14 September 2014. < http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/09/identity-and-difference-part-1-difference/ >, < http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/09/identity-and-difference-part-2-identity/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: Identity and Difference).

 

European Son – Interview with Benoist

“European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist” (PDF – 191 KB):

European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist

Additional document with portions of the original interview containing critical commentaries on Christianity and the Human Sciences which were cut out from the official interview in The Occidental Quarterly (PDF – 314 KB):

Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain

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Citation for the official The Occidental Quarterly interview: De Benoist, Alain. “European Son: An Interview with Alain de Benoist.” Interview by Brian Sylvian. The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Fall 2005), pp. 7-27. <https://www.toqonline.com/archives/v5n3/53-bs-debenoist.pdf >.

Citations for the original sources of the “Interview with Alain de Benoist on the Human Sciences and Christianity by Bryan Sylvain”: De Benoist, Alain. “Interview on Christianity, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 28 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-1/ >; “Interview on Christianity, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 January 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/interview-on-christianity-part-2/ >; “Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 1.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 9 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-1/ >; “Benoist on Eugenics & Intelligence: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 2.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 11 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-eugenics-and-intelligence-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-2/ >; “Benoist on J. Philippe Rushton: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 3.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-3/ >; “Benoist on Feminism, IQ, & the Wealth of Nations: Interview on the Human Sciences, Part 4.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 February 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/benoist-on-feminism-iq-the-wealth-of-nations-interview-on-the-human-sciences-part-4/ >.