After the Fall – AR Staff

After the Fall

By the American Renaissance Staff

Second NPI conference is held in Washington.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Identity vs. Globalism – Morgan

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

By John Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Tribute to Venner – Benoist

Tribute to Dominique Venner

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations: Czech, Greek

The reasons for living and the reasons for dying are often the same. This was definitely the case for Dominique Venner, whose gesture aimed at bringing his life and death into deep accord. He said he chose to die in the way that was the most honorable in certain circumstances, particularly when words become powerless to describe, to express what we feel. Dominique Venner ultimately died as he had lived, with the same will, the same lucidity. Most striking to all who knew him was to see how the whole trajectory of his existence is a pure and right line, a perfectly straight line of extreme righteousness.

Honor above Life

The gesture made by Dominique Venner is obviously a move dictated by a sense of honor, honor above life, and even those who, for personal or other reasons, oppose suicide, even those who, unlike me, do not find him admirable, must have respect for his actions, because we must have respect for all that is done from a sense of honor.

I am not talking about politics. By July 1967, Dominique Venner had definitely broken with any form of political action. He was a careful observer of political life, and of course he made his feelings known. But I think that what was essential for him lay elsewhere, as amply shown by many things already said today.

Dominique Venner put ethics above all, and this was already his view as a young activist. It remained so, when gradually the young activist turned into a historian, a meditative historian, as he said. Dominique Venner was quite interested in the Homeric texts, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which he saw the founding of the great immemorial European tradition, primarily for ethical reasons: the heroes of the Iliad never teach moral lessons, they give ethical examples, and ethics is inseparable, of course, from aesthetics.

The Beautiful Determines the Good

Dominique Venner was not one of those who believe that the good determines the beautiful, he was one of those who think that the beautiful determines the good; he believed that ethical judgments that focus on men are not so much based on their opinions or ideas, but are a function of their greater or lesser qualities of being, and first and foremost the quintessential human quality that he summed up in one word: comportment.

Comportment

Comportment, which is a way of being, a way of life, and a way of dying. Comportment which is a style, the style of which he spoke so beautifully in The Rebel Heart, a book published in 1994, and, of course, in all his works, and I think especially in the book he published in 2009 on the German writer Ernst Jünger. In this book, Dominique said very clearly that if Jünger gave, and gives, us a great example, it is not only through his writings, but also because this man, who had a long life and died at the age of 103, never failed the demands of comportment.

Dominique Venner was a secretive, attentive, demanding man—demanding of himself first of all. He had somehow internalized all the rules of comportment: never let go, never give up, never explain, never complain, because comportment (tenue) brings to mind and derives from reserve (retenue). Obviously, when we talk about such things, we must seem like men from Mars to many dwellers in this age of smartphones and Virgin Megastores. To speak of equanimity, nobility of soul, high-mindedness, comportment, is to employ words whose very meanings escape many, and this is probably why the Philistines and the Lilliputians — those who write these parochial newsletters for right-thinking people that the mainstream media have become today — were unable for the most part to comprehend the very meaning of his gesture, which they tried to reduce to petty considerations.

A Way of Protesting Against the Suicide of Europe

Dominique Venner was neither an extremist nor a nihilist, and, above all, he never despaired. Indeed, his long reflections on history led him to develop a kind of optimism. He held that history is unpredictable and always open, that it both makes men and is made by men. Dominique Venner rejected all fatalism, all forms of despair.

I speak paradoxically, because it has not been sufficiently noticed, that his desire to commit suicide was a way to protest against suicide, a way to protest against the suicide of Europe which he observed for so long.

A Suicide of Rational Hope as a Founding Act

Dominique Venner simply could no longer stand the Europe he loved, his homeland, fading bit by bit from history, forgetful of herself, forgetful of her memory, her genius, her identity, somehow drained of the energy for which she was known through the centuries. Because he could not stand the suicide of Europe, Dominique Venner opposed his own, which he was not suicide of collapse, of resignation, but rather a suicide of hope.

Europe, said Dominique, is in dormition. He wanted to awaken her. He wanted, as he said, to rouse slumbering consciences. We must be very clear on this point: there was no despair in Dominique Venner’s gesture. There was a call to act, to think, to continue. He said: I give, I sacrifice the rest of my life in an act of protest and foundation. We must, I think, hold onto his word “foundation.” This word “foundation” was bequeathed to us by a man whose last concern was to die standing.

A Western Samurai

Dominique Venner was not nostalgic, but he was a true historian who was interested, of course, in the past with a view of the future; he did not study the past as solace or shelter; he simply knew that peoples who forget their past, who lose all consciousness of their past, are thereby deprived of a future. You can’t have one without the other: the past and the future are two dimensions of the moment, neither more important than the other: dimensions of depth.

And in this process, Dominique Venner remembered, of course, a number of memories and images. He remembered the Homeric heroes and gods; he remembered the old Romans, those who preceded him on the path of voluntary death: Cato, Seneca, Regulus, and many others. He bore in mind Plutarch’s writings and Tacitus’ histories. He had in mind the memory of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, whose death in so many ways is similar to his own. And it certainly is not a coincidence that his last book, that will soon appear from Pierre-Guillaume Roux, is called A Western Samurai: a Western samurai!

And on the cover of this book, A Western Samurai, we see an image, a print, a famous engraving: “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” by Albrecht Dürer. Dominique Venner deliberately chose this engraving. Some time ago, Jean Cau devoted to the character of the knight a wonderful book that also bore the title: The Knight, Death, and the Devil. In one of his latest columns, written just days before his death, Dominique Venner paid tribute to this very knight who, he says, on highways and byways, will continue always onward toward his destiny, toward his duty, between death and the devil.

“The Knight, Death, and the Devil”: Engraved by Dürer in 1513

And in this column, Dominique Venner spoke of an anniversary. It was in 1513, 500 years ago exactly, that Dürer engraved this print “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” and this emphasis gave me a very simple idea that anyone could have: I looked up the dates of birth and death of Albrecht Dürer, the man who engraved “The Knight, Death, and the Devil,” 500 years ago exactly, and I realized that Dürer was born in 1471; he was born May 21, 1471. Dürer was born on May 21; Dominique Venner chose to die on May 21. If this is a coincidence, it is extraordinary, but one is not forced to believe in coincidences.

The Rebel Heart Will Always be There

That’s what I wanted to say in memory of Dominique Venner, now departed on a great wild hunt, in a paradise where you can see the wild geese fly. Those who knew him, and I knew him for 50 years, those who knew him will probably say that they have lost a friend. But I think they are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that they should know that, since May 21, 2013, at 2:42 p.m., he will necessarily always be there. Still there alongside the rebellious hearts and free spirits who have always faced the eternal coalition of Tartuffes, Trissotins, and Torquemadas.

 

Source: http://www.polemia.com/les-raisons-de-vivre-et-les-raisons-de-mourir-sont-bien-souvent-les-memes/

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De Benoist, Alain. “Tribute to Dominique Venner.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 26 June 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/06/tribute-to-dominique-venner-2/ >.

Note: See also the article “Reasons for a Voluntary Death” by Dominique Venner.

 

Tribute to Venner – Faye

Tribute to Dominique Venner

By Guillaume Faye

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations Czech, Greek

Dominique Venner’s suicide on May 21 at Notre Dame: Marine Le Pen bowed to this gesture of awakening consciousness, which may seem surprising, but it is to her credit. A topless representative of Femen, a group of feminist buffoons, tried to smear his memory the next day, mimicking his suicide in the choir of Notre Dame. On her flat chest was painted: “May Fascism rest in Hell.” It is the second time that these naked groupies entered the cathedral with impunity, even though there is security screening at the entrance. AFP journalists were notified in advance to cover this “happening” and are therefore probably complicit.

The Leftist media and politicians (especially the pathetic Harlem Désir) together accused Venner, post mortem, of incitement to violence, of provocation. Spitting toads. Clearly Venner’s Roman gesture, as tragic as history itself, scared these people, who spend their whole lives crawling.

Venner has given his death as an example, not from despair but from hope: the symbolic sacrifice encourages our youth, in the face of the ongoing foundering of European civilization in its bloodlines and its values, to resist and fight at the cost of death, which is the price of war. A war that has begun. Venner wanted us to understand that victory can be achieved in the history of peoples if the fighters are ready to die for their cause. It is for the future generations of resistant and fighting Europeans that Dominique Venner gave his life. He was an “awakener of the people,” in the words of his friend Jean Mabire.

* * *

And he killed himself, though he was not a Christian in the ordinary sense, on the central altar of Notre Dame de Paris, that is to say, the heart of one of the busiest sacred and historical places of all Europe. (Europe: Venner’s real, authentic homeland, not the marshmallow sham of the current European Union.) Notre Dame, a place of memory much richer than, for example, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe. He wanted to give his sacrifice a special meaning, like the old Roman traditions in which the life of a man, to the end, is devoted to the country he loves and must serve. Like Cato, Venner never compromised on principles. Nor on matters of necessary style—of comportment, writing, and ideas—which have nothing to do with posturing, looks, and pedantry. His sobriety displayed, in essence, the power of his lesson. A distant master, which was not unrelated to the Stoic tradition, a rebel with heart and courage not vanity and bluster, a complete man of action and reflection, he never deviated from his path. One day he told me that you should never waste time criticizing traitors, cowards, self-interested bellwethers; nor, of course, should you forgive them; just ignore them and press on. The silence of contempt.

* * *

This is the Dominique Venner who, in 1970, brought me into the Resistance, which I have never denied or left since. He was my recruiting sergeant. His voluntary death — echoing Mishima’s more than Montherlant’s – is a founding act. And it filled me with a joyful sadness, like a flash of lightning. A warrior does not die in bed. The sacrificial death of this man of honor demands that we honor his memory and his work, not to mourn but to fight. But fight for what?

Not just for resistance, but for reconquest. The counter-offensive, in other words. After one of my essays in which I developed this idea, Venner sent me letter of approval in his elegant handwriting. His sacrifice will not be vain or ridiculous. The voluntary death of Dominique Venner is a call to victory.

 

Source: http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2013/06/24/g-faye-hommage-a-dominique-venner.html

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Faye, Guillaume. “Tribute to Dominique Venner.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 25 June 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/06/tribute-to-dominique-venner/ >.

 

Ten Theses on Democracy – Benoist

Ten Theses on Democracy

By Alain de Benoist

1. Since everyone nowadays claims to be a democrat, democracy is defined in several mutually contradictory ways. The etymological approach is misleading. To define democracy on the basis of the modern regimes which have (rather belatedly) proclaimed themselves to be democratic is questionable to say the least. The historical approach ultimately appears to be the most reasonable:  to attempt to define democracy, one must first know what it meant for those who invented it. Ancient democracy brings together a community of citizens in an assembly, granting them equal political rights. The notions of citizenship, liberty, popular sovereignty and equal rights are all closely interconnected. Liberty stems from one’s identity as a member of a people, which is to say from one’s origins.* This is liberty as participation. The liberty of the folk commands all other liberties; common interest prevails over particular interests. Equality of rights derives from the status as an equal citizen enjoyed by all free men. It is a political tool. The essential difference between ancient democracies and modern ones is the fact that the former do not know the egalitarian individualism on which the latter are founded.

2. Liberalism and democracy are not synonyms. Democracy is a ‘-cracy’, which is to say a form of political power, whereas liberalism is an ideology for the limitation of all political power. Democracy is based on popular sovereignty; liberalism, on the rights of the individual. Liberal representative democracy implies the delegation of sovereignty, which strictly speaking – as Rousseau had realised – is tantamount to abdication by the people. In a representative system, the people elect representatives who govern by themselves: the electorate legitimises a genuine power which lies exclusively in the hands of representatives. In a genuine system of popular sovereignty, elected candidates are only entrusted with expressing the will of the people and the nation; they do not embody it.

3. Many arguments can be raised against the classic critique of democracy as the reign of incompetence and the ‘dictatorship of numbers.’ Democracy should neither be confused with the reign of numbers nor with the majority principle. Its underlying principle is rather a ‘holistic’ one, namely: acknowledgement of the fact that the people, as such, hold political prerogatives. The equality of rights does not reflect any natural equality; rather, it is a right deriving from citizenship, the exercise of which is what enables individual participation. Numerical equality must be distinguished from the geometrical view, which respects proportions. The purpose of majority rule is not to determine the truth; it is merely to choose among different options. Democracy does not stand in contrast to the idea of strong power any more than it stands in contrast to the notions of authority, selection or elite.

4. There is a difference between the notion of generic competence and specific competence. If the people have all the necessary information, it is perfectly capable of judging whether it is being well-governed or not. The emphasis placed on ‘competence’ nowadays – where this word is increasingly understood to mean ‘technical knowledge’ – is extremely ambiguous. Political competence has to do not with knowledge but with decision-making, as Max Weber has shown in his works on scientists and politicians. The idea that the best government is that of ‘scientists’ and ‘experts’ betrays a complete lack of understanding of politics; when applied, it generally leads to catastrophic results. Today this idea is being used to legitimise technocracy, whereby power – in accordance with the technical ideology and belief in the ‘end of ideologies’ – becomes intrinsically opposed to popular sovereignty.

5. In a democratic system, citizens all hold equal political rights not by virtue of any alleged inalienable rights possessed by the ‘human person,’ but because they all belong to the same national and folk community – which is to say, by virtue of their citizenship. At the basis of democracy lies not the idea of ‘society,’ but of a community of citizens who are all heirs to the same history and/or wish to carry this history on towards a common destiny. The fundamental principle behind democracy is not ‘one man, one vote,’ but ‘one citizen, one vote.’

6. The key notion for democracy is not numbers, suffrage, elections or representation, but participation. ‘Democracy is a folk’s participation in its own destiny’ (Moeller van den Bruck). It is that form of government which acknowledges each citizen’s right to take part in public affairs, particularly by appointing the government and lending or denying his consent to it. So it is not institutions that make democracy, but rather the people’s participation in institutions. The maximum of democracy coincides not with the ‘maximum of liberty’ or the ‘maximum of equality,’ but with the maximum of participation.

7. The majority principle is adopted because unanimity, which the notions of general will and popular sovereignty imply in theory, is in practice impossible to achieve. The notion of majority can be treated as either a dogma (in which case it is a substitute for unanimity) or as a technique (in which case it is an expedient). Only the latter view assigns a relative value to the minority or opposition, as this may become tomorrow’s majority. Its adoption raises the question of the field of application of pluralism and of its limits. We should not confuse the pluralism of opinions, which is legitimate, with the pluralism of values, which proves to be incompatible with the very notion of the people. Pluralism finds its limit in subordination to the common good.**

8. The evolution of modern liberal democracies, which are elective polyarchies, clearly reflects the degeneration fo the democratic ideal. Parties do not operate democratically as institutions. The tyranny of money rigs competition and engenders corruption. Mass voting prevents individual votes from proving decisive. Elected candidates are not encouraged to keep their commitments. Majority vote does not take account of the intensity of people’s preferences. Opinions are not formed independently: information is both biased (which prevents the free determination of choices) and standardised (which reinforces the tyranny of public opinion). The trend towards the standardising of political platforms and arguments makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between different options. Political life thus becomes purely negative and universal suffrage comes to be perceived as an illusion. The result is political apathy, a principle that is the opposite of participation, and hence democracy.

9. Universal suffrage does not exhaust the possibilities of democracy: there is more to citizenship than voting. A return to political procedures in keeping with the original spirit of democracy requires an assessment of all those practices which reinforce the direct link between people and their government and extend local democracy, for instance: the fostering of participation through municipal and professional assemblies, the spread of popular initiatives and referendums, and the development of qualitative methods for expressing consent. In contrast to liberal democracies and tyrannical ‘popular democracies,’ which invoke the notions of liberty, equality and the people, organic democracy might be centred on the idea of fraternity.

10. 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. Where there is no folk but only a collection of individual social atoms, there can be no democracy. 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.

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Added Notes:

* Here Alain de Benoist refers to “a people” or “folk” (equivalent to terms in other European languages such as popolo in Italian and Volk in German) in the particularistic ethnic and cultural sense which, which is distinguishable from an undifferentiated mass of individuals, to which the term “people” is also sometimes applied. Thus, a true people or folk is not the same thing as a mere mass, for the former (the people) makes up an organic cultural community while the latter (the mass) is a society in the sense of a mere collection of individuals. On this topic, see also “‘Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft’: A Sociological View of the Decay of Modern Society” by Alain de Benoist and Tomislav Sunic.

** Earlier in this work, The Problem of Democracy, Benoist had written (pg. 66) that “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.”

 

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The “Ten Theses on Democracy” are excerpted from: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy (London: Arktos Media, 2011), pp. 100–103. (See this essay in PDF format here: Ten Theses on Democracy).

Note: These theses were also partially translated in Spanish as “Diez Tesis sobre la Democracia” in the first section of Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, Nº 39, “Una Crítica Metapolítica de la Democracia: De Carl Schmitt a Alain de Benoist, Vol. 1” (23 Enero 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/01/elementos-n-39-una-critica-metapolitica.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 39 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 39 – Democracia I). The complete Spanish translation of the Ten Theses (Diez Tesis) is available in the Spanish translation of Benoist’s book: ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

Additional note: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy was originally published in French as Démocratie: Le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), and is also available in a German translation as Demokratie: Das Problem (Tübingen & Zürich: Hohenrain, 1986), in Italian translation as Democrazia: Il problema (Firenze: Arnaud, 1985), and in Spanish translation as ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).

 

Dancing on a Hero’s Grave – Gottfried

Dancing on a Hero’s Grave

By Paul Gottfried

As a college student I would buy copies of The New Yorker to sample the sparkling prose of James Thurber and S. J. Perelman and to appreciate the clever cartoons that graced each issue. Despite the magazine’s veering toward the trendy left thereafter, I could still find material in it worth reading well into the 1980s, such as John Updike’s elegantly phrased erotica or the occasional vignettes of interwar Hungary by John Lukacs. Then The New Yorker took a further slide into sheer madness, and the results are visible in a libelous obit that came out last Wednesday by a certain Judith Thurman. Seething with rage syndrome, Thurman announced the “Final Solution” of my onetime correspondent and one of France’s most illustrious historians of the last century, Dominique Venner (1935-2013).

On May 21, Venner, acting desperately in the face of events he could no longer control, committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Venner left behind a suicide note explaining his horror at the gay-marriage law that French President Francois Hollande had just pushed through the National Assembly. Venner further lamented the self-destruction of his country and of European civilization that he ascribed to gay marriage and to Western Europeans’ unwillingness to keep Muslims from resettling their countries.

It continues to be disputed whether Venner was a believing Catholic, although the “Catholic traditionalists” in whose company Thurman places Venner admired his cultural stands and continue to hope that he’ll make it into heaven despite the mortal sin he committed by hastening his departure from this world.

Venner was also a hero to the neo-pagan European right, and since the 1960s he was active in laying and extending the foundations of the emphatically anti-Christian French new right, together with his frequent collaborator Alain de Benoist. Venner had a clear record of standing defiantly in the face of the French Communist Party. Unlike the communists and other French leftists who supported the Algerian rebels, Venner fought gallantly and was decorated as a sergeant in the French forces in Algeria.

Contrary to what Thurman tells us, Venner did not get his political start as a fan of the Nazis and their French collaborators (although his parents had once rallied to Jacques Doriot’s French fascist party). He rose to fame as a fervent anti-communist and European nationalist. The young Venner risked his life as a volunteer in the Algerian War, went to Budapest in 1956 to stand with the outnumbered Hungarian rebels against the Soviet occupational forces, and later was caught sacking the premises of the French Communist Party, whose allegiance to the Soviets he detested.

In the last twenty years of his life, this “unapologetic Islamophobe,” to use Thurman’s phrase, showed the audacity to characterize both the takeover of European inner cities by a hostile Muslim population and “the declining white birthrate in France and Europe” as “a catastrophic peril for the future.” Several blog respondents to this screed noted the embarrassing coincidence that Thurman’s expression of rage against the “Islamophobe” Venner appeared at the very time that predominantly Muslim riots had broken out in Sweden and a Muslim convert cut off the head of a hapless off-duty soldier in London.

In a final nod to PC, Thurman tells us that Venner’s commentaries “evoked the racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric of the Fascist European right between the two World Wars, which has been moderated, though not abolished, by postwar hate-speech laws.” Thurman does not offer even a sliver of proof that Venner imitated the style of Hitler’s Mein Kampf; having read both Venner and Hitler, I would have no trouble distinguishing between the two, even if I’m not a certified “antifascist.” But we should be grateful for small improvements: Now we have the enforcement of “hate-speech laws” in Europe to protect us from what Ms. Thurman doesn’t care to hear. As one of her respondents asks very much to the point: Is Ms. Thurman out to ban as reminiscent of fascism any oral or written communication that doesn’t meet her criteria of sensitive speech?

Thurman’s treatment of Venner as a trained historian specializing in military affairs is almost as perplexing as it is glaringly biased. Thurman tells us that Venner wrote a work “admiring of the Vichy collaboration with Hitler” and other presumably pro-Nazi polemics, but she then identifies the dead author with “a history of the Red Army that received a prize from the Académie Française.” Venner was widely respected for his objective two-volume Histoire de L’Armeé Rouge, which starts with the creation of the Soviet army during the Russian Civil War and then examines the further development of Soviet military forces through World War II. Venner also compiled an eleven-volume encyclopedia on firearms that continues to enjoy academic favor. The works that obviously irk Thurman, however, are Venner’s sympathetic studies of the white forces that combated the Red Armies and his work on French divisions that fought alongside the Wehrmacht in Russia during World War II.*

Perhaps most inexcusably for his leftist critics, Venner published a critical work on the French Resistance in 2000, presenting its shadow side in a way that the French left or its American journalistic appendix do not care to hear about. Venner reminded us of the frequency with which communists in the Resistance carried out assassinations against political enemies, a tendency that became pandemic after the Liberation. He also dwells on isolated terrorist acts by the Résistants that did little to advance the cause of freeing France from a foreign occupation.**

I knew Venner best for having edited two stimulating journals that I would devour whenever I could get my hands on them: Enquête sur l’histoire (in the 1990s) and its recent successor La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, a publication that displays the same willingness to defy leftist taboos as everything else Venner wrote.

A kindly leftist historian Benoît Rayski wrote after he heard of Venner’s death:

I rarely agreed with his ideas, but he was a man who escaped with his courage and nobility from the usual ideological trappings and he wore his independence as a badge of honor.

Too bad our leftist hacks in Midtown can’t show a similar generosity toward a dead, non-conformist scholar.

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Added Notes:

* Gottfried is referring here to Venner’s Les Blancs et les Rouges: histoire de la guerre civile russe, 1917-1921 (Paris: Pygmalion Gérard watelet, 1997.).

** Gottfried appears to be referring here to Venner’s Histoire critique de la Résistance (Paris: Pygmalion/G. Watelet, 1995).

 

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Gottfried, Paul. “Dancing on a Hero’s Grave.” Taki’s Magazine, 29 May 2013. <http://takimag.com/article/dancing_on_a_heros_grave_paul_gottfried/print#ixzz2UnYjBhkH >.

 

Reasons for a Voluntary Death – Venner

The Reasons for a Voluntary Death

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

Introductory Note: This is the full text of the suicide note left by the French historian Dominique Venner in the Notre Dame Cathedral, where he committed suicide on May 21, 2013.

Translations in other languages: Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish

 

I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. I love life and expect nothing beyond, if not the perpetuation of my race and my mind. However, in the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength. I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that plagues us. I give up what life remains to me in order to protest and to found. I chose a highly symbolic place, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I respect and admire: she was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins.

While many men are slaves of their lives, my gesture embodies an ethic of will. I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.

The dominant discourse cannot leave behind its toxic ambiguities, and Europeans must bear the consequences. Lacking an identitarian religion to moor us, we share a common memory going back to Homer, a repository of all the values ​​on which our future rebirth will be founded once we break with the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses.

I apologize in advance to anyone who will suffer due to my death, first and foremost to my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, as well as my friends and followers. But once the pain and shock fade, I do not doubt that they will understand the meaning of my gesture and transcend their sorrow with pride. I hope that they shall endure together. They will find in my recent writings intimations and explanations of my actions.

Note:

For more information, one can go to my publisher, Pierre-Guillaume Roux. He was not informed of my decision, but he has known me a long time.

Source: http://www.ndf.fr/poing-de-vue/21-05-2013/exclusif-les-raisons-dune-mort-volontaire-par-dominique-venner?fb_source=pubv1

 

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Venner, Dominique. “The Reasons for a Voluntary Death.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 21 May 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/the-reasons-for-a-voluntary-death/ >.

Note: Dominique Venner’s last book before his suicide was Un Samouraï d’Occident: Le bréviaire d’un insoumis (Paris: Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Editions, 2013), which had been translated into German as Ein Samurai aus Europa: Das Brevier der Unbeugsame (Bad Wildungen: Ahnenrad der Moderne, 2013). Other important works by Dominique Venner are Histoire et tradition des Européens: 30,000 ans d’identité (Monaco et Paris: Éd. du Rocher, 2002), Le Choc de l’Histoire: Religion, mémoire, identité (Versailles: Via Romana, 2011), and Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, guerres et révolutions en Europe au XXe siècle (Paris: Pygmalion, 2006), which has been translated into Portuguese as O Século de 1914: Utopias, Guerras e Revoluções na Europa do Século XX (Porto: Civilizaçao Editora, 2009). Also, an exclusive Spanish book covering similar topics to Le Choc de l’Histoire and Le Siècle de 1914 had been published as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).

Additional notes: See Alain de Benoist’s comment on Dominique Venner’s suicide in French (he said that Venner was “a man who has chosen to die standing”): http://www.bvoltaire.fr/alaindebenoist/dominique-venner-un-homme-qui-a-choisi-de-mourir-debout,23784

See also Greg Johnson’s commentary on Venner’s death (“Suicide in the Cathedral: The Death of Dominique Venner”): http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/suicide-in-the-cathedralthe-death-of-dominique-venner/

 

Benoist’s Vivid Memory – Devlin

Alain de Benoist’s Vivid Memory

By F. Roger Devlin

Alain de Benoist
Mémoire vive: entretiens avec François Bousquet
Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2012.

Part 1: A Full Childhood

The title of Alain de Benoist’s volume of reminiscences is a play on words: literally signifying “vivid memory,” it is also the French equivalent for RAM, or Rapid Access Memory. In the form of interviews, the author traces his personal and intellectual development and that of the French nouvelle droite.

Alain de Benoist is descended, on his father’s side, from an ancient Belgian lineage traceable ultimately to a ninth-century Italian captain who defended Apulia from Saracen pirates. His father, also named Alain de Benoist, worked for a perfumery, eventually becoming the firm’s general sales manager for a large swath of France. Benoist remembers being strongly and lastingly influenced by his paternal grandmother. She owned a dilapidated 16th-century castle, without running water or electricity, where Benoist spend many summers. She was

passionate, hyperemotional, but also capricious. I believe she always had a rather turbulent emotional life, which in the end crystallized as religious devotion. Besides, she had a literary and artistic culture which my parents lacked. She introduced me to all the parks and gardens of Paris and took me to all the museums.

It was she who first taught me the meaning of noblesse oblige: viz., that belonging to the aristocracy does not consist in benefiting from more privileges than others or in having additional rights, but in imposing greater burdens upon one oneself, having a higher notion of one’s duties, feeling more responsible than others. Behaving in a noble manner, whatever class one comes from, means never being satisfied with oneself, never reasoning in terms of utility. It means the beauty of gratuitousness, of “useless” expenditure, the beau geste, the conviction that one could always have done better, that it is odious to boast of what one has done, that a man’s quality is tested by his ability to act contrary to his own interests whenever it becomes necessary.

All these things were inculcated in me in an almost passionate fashion. My grandmother lived in a sort of permanent state of exaltation.

His mother, born Germaine Langouët, was working at a post office in St. Malo, Brittany, when she met Benoist’s father. She was descended entirely from Norman and Breton peasants and fishermen.

My maternal grandparents were simple people. Thanks to their surroundings, I was also able to live in contact with the popular classes. But it was also thanks to them that I quickly understood the reality of class relations. It was not social inequalities as such which shocked me so much as the contemptuous fashion in which I too often saw people of the lower classes treated.

Born 1943 at Tours, an only child, Benoist’s family moved to Paris when he was six, and he has remained there ever since. He was enrolled at the Lycée Montaigne:

I was an excellent student in the subjects which interested me: French, literature, history, geography, Latin, Greek; and very bad in those I did not like: math, geometry, physics. I think I reached the end of my studies without ever having understood the difference between a division and a fraction. I feel ill at ease as soon as I see numbers instead of letters.

From the age of eight I began to read in a compulsive, bulimic fashion. I read all the time and everywhere. My mother had the weakness to allow me to read at the table; I would pick at my plate without even looking at what I was eating, so as not to interrupt my reading. I would read during class. I would even read in the street, walking to school, holding my book up in front of me, casting only the most cursory glances at the traffic.

I read an astronomical number of comic books, which I got my mother to buy or traded with my school fellows. But it was particularly fairy tales and legends which enchanted me: the tales of Andersen, of Perrault and the Grimms. The Greek myths and the Homeric universe particularly fascinated me.

I quickly went on to literature. My paternal grandmother had in her library a first edition of the works of Hugo in sixty volumes. I read them from the first to the last line, after which I devoured all the volumes of Balzac’s Human Comedy. Then I went on to Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, then Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, Mérimée, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol. . . . Whatever pocket-money my mother gave me was immediately converted into books. At about age ten or eleven, she gave me bus tickets for my trip to school. I went on foot and resold the tickets half price to other pupils. Anything in order to read!

I read above all in order to escape from a daily routine which I found humdrum, drowned in philistinism and bourgeois convention. In adventure stories it was the change of scene more than the action that I sought.

But I should also admit that I stole books, and with a perfectly easy conscience: it was all for a good cause! I stole quite a few from Gilbert, boulevard Saint-Michel, right up to the day I got caught. The bookstore personnel called up my mother, who arrived immediately, livid in the face. She imagined I would perish on the scaffold one day. She paid for the books but, upon leaving the store, threw them into an open gutter. I was so angry, I went the very next day and stole exactly the same books from another bookstore.

Next to reading, the visual arts were his greatest passion: “Van Gogh and Salvador Dalí were my heroes.” For a time, he imposed on himself a duty to visit at least one exhibition of paintings every day.

The cinema was another interest. His local church published notices concerning which of the new films were wholesome for young viewers and which were to be avoided. The young Benoist consulted these notices and then went to see every film condemned as unsuitable, on the assumption that these would be the most interesting.

He was a difficult catechumen:

I asked all sorts of questions, such as: ‘if God is all-powerful, can he make 2 + 2 = 5? Did Neanderthal man have a soul? If there are extraterrestrial beings, how would they know about the incarnation? If the sun danced in the sky before the little visionaries of Fatima, how is it that no astronomical observatory registered this movement?’

The curés thought my questions preposterous, though perhaps they were only disturbing.

Benoist’s generation was the last to glimpse an era now vanished forever:

The 1950s were a continuous prolongation of the ’30s and ’40s. Despite the war, little had really changed in the realm of social and family structures or in daily life. The automobile and the television spread only slowly. Frenchmen’s ways of speaking and behaving were not yet determined by what they saw on television. They spoke like their parents, with regional accents, not like the host of the latest TV program. Educated people had more learning, the popular classes more spontaneity. People did not systematically mock everything. And among the young, no one would have thought of taking an interest in the brand of clothing you wore.

It is only at the end of the ’50s and the very beginning of the ’60s that the great caesura occurs. There was the revolution in the household, with refrigerators and washing machines. The contraceptive pill came on the market in 1960. Supermarkets appeared in 1962.

Above all, rural life began to decline, a real silent revolution whose full scope hardly anyone understood at the time. Today, the peasants—become farmers, if not “agricultural operators”—represent less than one percent of the French population, whereas they constituted the majority in the 19th century, and still numbered ten million in 1945. The end of the rural world brought about the end of a way of life expressing a mentality which has now disappeared. It involved the end of popular traditions which until recently structured collective existence, the end of a world where men and women often sang as they worked. No one does that anymore; at most, they listen to the radio.

Benoist sums up his childhood by saying “there was nothing exceptional about it—only, it was very full.”

Part 2: An Agitated Youth

When Benoist was a teenager, his father purchased a small country house to the west of Paris. Here he began to spend part of his summer vacations and most of his weekends in the company of a group of boys and girls his own age. One of the girls in the band had a father who was a journalist and author. This fascinated the young Benoist, and he determined to make the man’s acquaintance.

The man was Henry Coston, a longtime anti-Jewish polemicist and, under the occupation, an enthusiastic collaborator. The young Benoist knew none of this, being mainly interested to meet a man who lived by his pen. Coston described himself as an author of books on “big money,” and gave Benoist one of his works, entitled The Financiers Who Run the World.

In the summer of 1960, when Benoist was sixteen years old, Coston invited him to contribute to a large reference work he was compiling on French political parties and movements. Benoist wrote several articles, including the one on Action Française, signing them “Cédric de Gentissard.” By Christmas, he was a published author.

“The youth at that time was incredibly politicized,” Benoist recalls. “At the lycée Louis-le-Grand, half my fellow pupils belonged to a political party (not so today for even one percent of high school and university students). Most were socialists or communists.”

Perceiving that Benoist was still searching politically, Coston recommended he get in touch with the Jeune Nation movement and its student branch, the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN). When he arrived at Jeune Nation’s headquarters, a young woman said to him “you want to be a militant, my friend? Start by sweeping this floor!” Benoist conscientiously fulfilled the task; she took his information and said “you will be contacted.”

From 1961 to the end of 1966, [recalls Benoist,] I passed a total of six years on the extreme right. It was a short time, really, but undeniably marked me for life, both because of the political situation—the end of a world—and because of my age: there is always a part of our adolescence we do not survive.

The FEN maintained at least forty chapters in all the important university towns of France. They held semiannual meetings for chapter leaders in Paris, as well as summer camps for the general membership, which were a mixture of sporting activities and political training. Benoist was employed mainly in writing and editing various newsletters: “I often slept on an inflatable mattress I kept under my desk, in order to resume work the more quickly the next day.”

The FEN’s official goal was to fight against the ”marxification” of the university, and it also supported French Algeria. Members distributed tracts, put up posters, staged public meetings and demonstrations, and (not least) got into fistfights with political opponents of their own age.

I loved the electric atmosphere of the demonstrations, the movements of the crowd, the way in which slogans and cries spread, the confrontations with the police, the smell of teargas. In February 1961, during a demonstration in place de l’Etoile, I was arrested and remanded in custody. My mother, who had come to take me home, was picked up too!

We used to tour all the local chapters of FEN, criss-crossing France in a little car stuffed with tracts and propaganda material. We usually slept in the woods, in sleeping bags, or simply in ditches beside the road, under the open sky.

[Once] we went to brush slogans in tar on various buildings in Chartes—including the cathedral. Each group was assigned a driver with a getaway car. When my group went to our car, we found it had disappeared: the driver had chickened out. We were arrested by the police. Although covered in tar, we energetically denied the evidence; we ended up paying a heavy fine.

Meanwhile, Benoist continued his studies.

Philosophy class had a capital importance for me, for I had a feeling of finally being at home. Although up to that time I had had a purely literary and artistic education, the discovery of the great systems of philosophical thought found in me a prepared heart. It seemed to me that I already had an essentially philosophical spirit without knowing it. I learned the history of philosophy at a great pace, discovering Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Bergson, Sartre. . . .

This brought me not so much a way of understanding the world, nor of changing it, but of interpreting it. The world ceased to be a pure given, neutral, something à propos of which agreement could immediately be reached. Henceforth it existed as something which could gain access to the human understanding only through a meaning attributed to it—which, of course, posed the problem of the criteria of such appreciation. At least, that is how I understood philosophy, as an interpretive key.

It was thanks to philosophy that I realized the need to have a Weltanschauung, a global conception of the world. Without such a conception, things had no meaning. [I don’t mean] an a priori conception, which seeks willy-nilly to fit the real to some sort of Procrustean bed, but one formed on the basis of observation of the world and a systematic interpretation of what is observed.

Benoist matriculated at the Sorbonne in the department of law, following a curriculum in general philosophy, history of religion, ethics and sociology. Yet he refused to sit his exams; obtaining degrees was looked upon as “collaboration with the regime” in his circle of political militants! As a result, Benoist was ineligible for advanced studies later; to this day, he holds no academic degree.

In 1963 Benoist began writing for Dominique Venner’s new monthly, Europe-Action. The magazine had little in common with traditional throne-and-altar traditionalism; it promoted “first, the idea of European nationalism; second, an explicit anti-Christianity; third, a biologizing interpretation of society, implying both ‘biological materialism’ and racism (delicately renamed ‘biological realism’).” Benoist estimates that Europe-Action attained a circulation of approximately 15,000.

He began to travel a lot, becoming a sort of foreign correspondent for the publications with which he was involved.

In each country, I scoured the bookstores and went to see the most diverse political parties and movements. In London, I visited both the Anglo-Rhodesian Society and the African National Congress. In New York, I met Thomas Molnar and Ralph de Toledano. The next day, I went to Harlem to make purchases at the Black Muslim bookstore. In Washington I went to visit the Democrats as well as the Republicans, and then the Nazi party, based in Arlington, VA. In Mississippi, I attended a grotesque nocturnal ceremony of the Ku Klux Klan, where even the grandmothers and babies were decked out in white hoods.

Meanwhile, the movement was changing character. Many of the militants began to devote their efforts to electoral politics. They formed a National Movement of Progress in 1966, but its electoral performance was dismal. Another faction, with which Benoist identified, preferred to move in the direction of what in America would be called a “think tank”: “I proposed to dissolve the FEN and replace it with an Institute of Doctrinal Studies, which was rejected. If one is determined to seek the origins of the ‘New Right,’ then this is the turning point to which one must refer.”

Asked by the interviewer whether in retrospect he sees his years of militancy as a waste of time, Benoist strongly denies it:

Militancy is a school, one of the best there is. It is a school of discipline and deportment, of exaltation and enthusiasm, a school of self-sacrifice. It’s also a crucible of friendship like few others: being militants together creates a bond which endures across time and, sometimes, triumphs over anything else. You have many illusions, believing your impact will be increased in the same proportion as you mobilize yourself completely, but you [also] get the feeling of giving a meaning to your existence.

All this being said, it is a school one must know how to leave. Nothing is more ridiculous than those old militants who keep trotting out the same slogans for decades. The militant is not only someone who gives of himself completely; he is also a partisan in the worst sense of the term. He repeats a catechism; he refers to a collective “we” which relieves him of all personal thought. The “good militant” is a true believer who prefers answers to questions, because he requires certainties. And like all believers, he puts aside all critical spirit and glories in his sectarianism.

Part 3: The Beginnings of the Nouvelle Droite

During the years 1966–’67, the movement in which Benoist had been a militant went into its death throes. Europe-Action ceased publication following its November 1966 issue; the FEN held its last summer training camp in 1967. Concurrently, Benoist was undergoing a personal evolution which might be summed up as the victory of the philosophy student over the militant.

I felt a strong desire to start again from scratch. At twenty-three, I had just passed several years in a milieu where I had the feeling of having “seen it all.” I had learned a lot, but also experienced its limits. I was aware of having said a lot of stupid things, of having repeated slogans only because they corresponded to what “we” were supposed to think. I wanted to submit all that to a critical examination, perform a sort of triage between the correct ideas that could be kept and the false ideas that had to be abandoned.

I had definitely concluded that I was not a man of power but a man of knowledge. The life of reflection, not to say the vita contemplativa, was more important to me than the vita activa. After having forced my own nature for a time, I had found myself. I aspired to reconstruct a general view of the world on a new basis.

In the fall of 1967, I went to stay in Denmark for a week or so, on the coast of the Baltic, in order to reflect calmly upon what I wanted to do: viz., to lead a “theoretical” life, as Aristotle said—but how? I did not want to set forth any catechism of ready-made ideas, but to set in motion a train of thought. I could imagine the starting point, but did not wish to prejudge where it would lead. It was a matter of taking clear positions, engaging oneself completely, but never forgetting the primacy of questioning.

A few weeks later I arranged a working seminar in an old barn in the Vendée where a FEN summer training camp [presumably the last] had just been held. It was during this meeting that I announced my intention of launching a review entitled Nouvelle Ecole.

The inaugural meeting of the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) took place at Lyons, May 4–5, 1968. But the idea had been in the air for some time. At the beginning, I conceived GRECE quite unrealistically as a kind of synthesis between the Frankfurt School, Action Française, and the Centre nationale de recherche scientific!

From the chronology, we can see that the Nouvelle Droite was not, as is so often asserted, a “response” to the events of May 1968. Benoist, however, did take an interest in the events of that “revolutionary” month, and witnessed many of them close up.

It was only afterwards that I understood that there were in fact two different “May ’68s.” On the one hand, there was the initiation of a radical critique of consumer society, the society of the spectacle and mercantile values, with which I could only sympathize. On the other hand, it was a pseudo-revolution of “desire” (“untrammeled enjoyment,” “it is forbidden to forbid,” “the beach on the pavement”) which betrayed a spoilt-child individualism beneath its revolutionary appearances. Unfortunately, it was the second tendency which won out.

By 1970, GRECE was expanding rapidly, with “circles” forming in most of the major university towns: the Vilfredo Pareto Circle in Paris, the Henry de Montherlant Circle in Bordeaux . . . even a Leconte de Lisle Circle on the island of Réunion!

By the fall of 1968 it acquired a modest internal newsletter, Eléments, which expanded over the years until it became autonomous, the magazine for the general public it is today. Beginning [also] in 1968, GRECE has organized a national colloquium every year, as well as a summer university which is held in a big provençal building at the foot of the Roquefavour Aqueduct near Aix-en-Provence.

It was a matter of creating a working community, even if the first term was forgotten by some. But it is true that we attached great importance to the idea of community. We appropriated the classic distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies between community, inherited or acquired, but always founded upon organic bonds, and society, of a contractual nature, and thus more artificial and “mechanical.”

Most of the members of GRECE were then between twenty and thirty years old. Some were still students. It was the time of first marriages and the arrival of first children. Since we were not Christians, there were no baptisms or church marriages. Some members wanted us to work out substitute rites.

I myself got married June 21, 1972—the day of the summer solstice—to a young German from Schleswig-Holstein, Doris Christians, who all her life has always remained a wonderful wife. We would have two sons: Frédérik (1978) and Adrien (1981).

Benoist describes the 1970s for GRECE as a period of “systematic exploration of the ideological landscape, with inevitable ambiguities, some theoretical wavering or mistakes.”

I wrote a number of articles on the nexus between culture and politics. I was struggling to define the idea of “cultural power.” I insisted on the role of culture as an element in political change. A political transformation [merely] sanctions a revolution which has already occurred in minds and mores. Intellectual and cultural work contributes to this mental change by popularizing values, images and themes which break with the order in place or with the values of the dominant class.

The first polemics against GRECE came at the end of 1972 from a far-right royalist organization which accused them of “racism.” Some members even attacked a GRECE seminar, pick-handles in hand. This had no lasting effect, and GRECE “established itself definitively in the intellectual landscape during the next five years.” In 1976, members established the publishing house Copernic, which published some fifty titles over the next few years.

In 1977 a series of events began which would turn Benoist’s little “working community” into an international media sensation. A close associate, the author and journalist Louis Pauwels, began to produce a Sunday supplement for the newspaper Le Figaro in which Benoist published interviews and book reviews. This venture proving successful, in October 1978 it was upgraded to a weekly magazine, Le Figaro-Magazine. Benoist worked closely with Pauwels on the project, and induced many of his associates to write for the magazine. “Nearly all [Pauwels’] editorials were a fairly faithful reflection of the ideas and work of the Nouvelle Droite,” remembers Benoist. After ten weeks of publication, the magazine had boosted Le Figaro’s circulation to 400,000, and it eventually shot up to 850,000.

By the summer of 1979, the ideological mainstream was worried. On the 22nd of June, Le Monde launched an attack under the title Le Nouvelle Droite s’installe (“The New Right Settles In”). This was the first appearance of the term “nouvelle droite,” which had never been used by Benoist or his associates to describe themselves. On July 2nd, the Nouvelle Observateur followed up with a cover story about GRECE. “From that point on,” remembers Benoist, “a snowball effect took hold.”

Within the space of a few weeks, several hundred articles were devoted to the Nouvelle Droite. After the articles there were books, then radio and television programs. I was giving swarms of interviews. One of the most memorable was two full pages in France-Soir of 20th July on the theme “What to Think of the New Right?” Playboy devoted their interview of the month to me. I was also pressed with questions by the television networks of France, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Japan, Denmark, Israel, Mexico, Brazil, Lebanon, etc. They asked whether I was considering running in the presidential elections. It was surreal.

We may note that not a single English speaking country appears in Benoist’s long list of international media which took an interest in the Nouvelle Droite.

On October 3, 1980 a bomb went off in a Paris synagogue, a crime later shown to have been the work of Middle-Eastern terrorists. The head of Licra (French acronym for International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) declared that the attack was the consequence of a certain intellectual “climate” to which Figaro-Magazine had contributed. Hysterical reactions followed, and the police told Pauwels and Benoist that they could not guarantee their safety, and recommended that they “beat a retreat.”

I had to leave my house and spend several days undercover in Paris. Pauwels and I arranged a few discreet meetings. He wore dark sunglasses and looked over his shoulder as he spoke. It was like being in a John Le Carré novel. Two months later, a national colloquium organized by GRECE was forcibly attacked by a band of zealots. One of our friends lost an eye in the course of the brawl.

 

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Devlin, F. Roger. “Alain de Benoist’s Vivid Memory.” Counter-Currents Publishing. “Part 1: A Full Childhood,” 10 July 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-1-a-full-childhood/ >. “Part 2: An Agitated Youth,” 17 July 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-2/ >. “Part 3: The Beginnings of the Nouvelle Droite,” 25 July 2012, <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/07/alain-de-benoists-vivid-memory-part-3/ >.

Notes: This review of Alain de Benoist’s Mémoire vive does indeed end as presented here (with the quotation), a manner which many readers would consider somewhat abrupt.

Also of note is the fact that Mémoire vive has been recently translated into German as Mein Leben: Wege eines Denken (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2014).

For a listing of other major works by Alain de Benoist and their translations, see the section on further reading on the page for the “Manifesto of the New Right”: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/manifesto-of-the-new-right-benoist-champetier/ >.

 

Human Rights – Devlin

Human Rights between Ideology & Politics: Alain de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights

By F. Roger Devlin

Alain de Benoist
Beyond Human Rights: Defending Freedoms
London: Arktos Media, 2011

The work under review is the third by French philosopher Alain de Benoist to be translated into English, and the second translation to be published by Arktos Media. Like its predecessor The Problem of Democracy, it is a short, dense book written to challenge the authority of one of the most pompous god-terms of our age.

The current vogue for “human rights” can be traced back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948. Before this famous declaration was issued, explains Benoist, the directors of the United Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) undertook a preliminary enquiry:

An international committee was constituted in order to collect the opinions of a certain number of ‘moral authorities.’ Around 150 intellectuals from all countries were asked to determine the philosophical basis of the new Declaration. This approach ended in failure, and its promoters had to limit themselves to registering the irreconcilable divergences between the responses obtained. Since no accord emerged, the Commission decided not to publish the results of this enquiry. (p. 40)

The UN happily proceeded to issue its Universal Declaration of Human Rights anyway.

UNESCO’s failure at finding any agreed-upon source or rational basis for human rights is hardly surprising. The first great vogue for the rights of man had come with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution a century and a half before, and it had hardly gone unanswered: Nineteenth Century thinkers as different as Burke, Bentham, Marx, and Nietzsche had all subjected both it and the social contract theory on which it was based to withering criticism.

From the point of view of serious philosophical thought, this is more or less where we remain today. Yet the notion of human rights seems to provide modern society with something significant that it would otherwise lack. And so, like a religious teaching, it marches happily on in defiance of any number of refutations. It is continually upon the lips of journalists, politicians, bishops, and even such sublime moral authorities of the present age as Elie Wiesel, Nadine Gordimer, and Kofi Annan; yet no one even bothers trying to justify it anymore. Sometimes this is even admitted explicitly: William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International, is quoted by Benoist as saying that human rights are “nothing but what men declare to be rights” (p. 59).

But then it is difficult to see why my list of human rights is not just as good as yours—or the UN’s.

Benoist begins his own inquiry with the suggestion that Europe’s single most important gift to the world is the spirit of objectivity. From objectivity follow such characteristically Western notions as the common good, equity, science, and philosophy (as enterprises independent of traditional authority), and the capacity for self-criticism. But it is the nature of every virtue to border upon particular vices. In the case of objectivity, these vices are subjectivity and universalism. While subjectivity reduces reality to perception, universalism foists upon reality an abstract idea not derived from it.

Human rights, he says, are an ideology which “unites both of these errors. It is universalist insofar as it claims to impose itself everywhere without regard to memberships, traditions and contexts. It is subjectivist insofar as it defines rights as subjective attributes of the solitary individual” (p. 22).

The author then proceeds to outline the historical origins of these supposed rights. They were unknown to the classical world.

Originally, law was not at all defined as a collection of rules and norms of conduct deriving from morality, but as a discipline aimed at determining the best way to establish equity within a relationship. For the Greeks, justice in the legal sense represents good proportion, the equitable proportion between distributed goods and charges. Thus, Cicero says of civil law that ‘its end is to maintain among citizens, in the distribution of goods and in legal cases a just proportion resting on laws and customs.’ (p. 26)

Consisting in a certain kind of relation between persons, or distribution between them, justice is a kind of harmony within a group.

Christianity, developing a universalistic tendency already present in Stoicism, broke with this way of thinking:

The Christian religion proclaims the unique value of every human being. Insofar as he possesses a soul which puts him in a direct relationship with God, man becomes the bearer of an absolute value, i.e., of a value which cannot be confused with his personal qualities or his membership in a particular group. [In this way] Christianity digs a ditch between the origin of man (God) and his temporal existence. It withdraws from the relative existence of the human being the ontological anchoring which is now reserved for the soul. The links between men are, of course, still important, but they remain secondary. (p. 27)

The French legal historian Michel Villey put it this way: “The Christian ceases to be a part of the political organism; he is a totality in himself, an end superior to the temporal ends of politics, and his person transcends the state. Here is the seed of the modern freedoms of the individual which will be opposable to the state, our future ‘human rights’” (p. 28).

Before the modern understanding of natural law was developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the concept of law became gradually more subjective within Christian thought. Fourteenth Century Nominalist William of Occam taught that only individuals exist; Spanish Scholasticism, writes Benoist, “passe[d] from a notion of objective natural law founded on the nature of things to a notion of a subjective natural law founded on individual reason” (p. 31). So the anticlericalism of the French Revolution and consequent denunciation of the ‘Rights of Man’ by the Church must not mislead us in to thinking that Christianity is incompatible with any conception of universal human rights; in recent years the Catholic Church has acknowledged this, to the dismay of some traditionalists.

On the other hand, the notion of individual rights enforceable against the society as a whole is as unfamiliar to the non-Western world as it was to classical Greece:

Asiatic thought [writes Benoist] is expressed above all in the language of duties. In the Confucian tradition, men are related to each other by reciprocity of duties and mutual obligation. In India, Hinduism represents the universe as a space where beings traverse cycles of multiform existence. In Taoism, the tao of the world is regarded as a universal fact that governs the course of beings and things. In Black Africa, the social relationship includes the dead as well as the living. In the Middle East, the notions of respect and honor determine obligations within the extended family and clan. (p. 65)

Benoist is aware, of course, that all these groups easily learn to mimic Western rights talk where it can be to their advantage; nevertheless, any concept of individual rights remains fundamentally alien to their native and natural thought patterns.

Accordingly, there is much to be said in favor of the view that universal rights represent a disguised form of Western imperialism. This interpretation is strengthened by the frequency with which the slogan of ‘protecting human rights’ is now employed to justify military intervention. Such ‘humanitarian’ intervention is increasingly being asserted not merely as a right, but as a duty. This is tantamount to the abandonment of the Westphalian system which has governed international relations since 1648.

Alternatively, universal rights ideology may be understood as a theory of historical development according to which “the majority of the world’s peoples are engaged, in the same way as Western nations, in a process of transition from a more or less mythical Gemeinschaft . . . to a ‘modernity’ organized in a ‘rational’ and ‘contractual’ manner, such as the Western world knows it” (Raimundo Panikkar, pp. 66-67). On this view the West is not, indeed, morally superior; but it is in advance, while others are lagging behind.

Furthermore, the individual character of human rights inevitably comes into conflict with cultural freedom, i.e., the freedom of traditional cultures to exist—which necessarily involves their right to exclude what is alien. A Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples was actually proclaimed in Algeria in 1976; it asserts, in part, “the right [of a people] not to see a culture imposed on it which is alien to it” (p. 70). This would seem to imply the right of a cultural collective to crack down on any individuals who might be keen on adopting foreign (or ‘modern’) ways. There is no way out of this dilemma which would satisfy everybody.

Since individuals are inherently weak, the enforcement of individual rights also involves what Benoist calls an “extraordinary rise in power of the legal sphere” (p. 85). Thus, guaranteeing full sexual freedom to individual women has entailed the unprecedented expansion of divorce law (my example). Judicial decisions gradually replace cultural tradition and, in Pierre Manent’s words: “Arbitrariness—precisely what our regimes wanted to defend against in instituting constitutional control—will go on increasing and will be, paradoxically, the doing of judges” (p. 86). From maintaining a shared culture—peculiar to itself collectively but not individually—society dissolves into an assemblage of litigious utility-maximizers forever attempting to instrumentalize the judiciary against their neighbors. This is hardly what the champions of ‘human rights’ had in mind, but it is what we have ended up with.

Benoist develops his own position, strongly reminiscent of Carl Schmitt, in the context of discussing “humanitarian intervention.” The very nature of the alleged duty to protect human rights abroad implies that it can only be carried out by stronger states against weaker ones. The seductive “idealism” of enforcing justice beyond national borders issues in a mere sanctioning of the hegemony of superpowers. American intervention in places such as Iraq, Serbia, and Somalia was surely facilitated by the presumption that she would never find herself on the receiving end of similar intervention. But, as the author remarks, “a justice which is not the same for all does not deserve the name” (pp. 87-88).

Consider a question of domestic policy: if a society does not have the means to provide free education to its members, what is gained by asserting an individual “right” to education? In fact, such a right is no more than an “attribution that a particular society which has reached a certain moment in its history thinks itself able and obliged to give its members” (p. 96).

The crux of the confusion inherent in rights ideology is that, while “human rights” is a legal concept, “the law cannot float above politics. It can be exercised only within a political community or result from the decision of several political units to ally themselves with one another” (sc. the Coalition of the Willing; p. 87).

In short, human rights are in reality nothing but political ideals or goals. Men assert them as rights out of an urge to protect them from the risks and uncertainty of political life; but this is mere self-deception about the human condition. In fact, we are political animals whose rights are always at the mercy of political regimes. In constantly attempting to reduce the prerogatives of politics, human rights ideology even serves to undermine the foundations of its own implementation. Better to dispense with it entirely.

The rejection of human rights ideology is hardly an endorsement of despotism. Rather:

It is a question of showing that the necessary fight against all forms of tyranny and oppression is a fundamentally political question which, as such, should be resolved politically. In other words, it is a question of abandoning the legal sphere and the field of moral philosophy to affirm that the power of the political authority must be limited, not because individuals enjoy unlimited rights by nature, but because a polity where despotism reigns is a bad political society. (p. 107)

This reviewer has no criticism to offer.

The best way forward, as Benoist sees it, is the restoration of what Benjamin Constant called the “freedom of the Ancients,” viz., active participation in political life with all the responsibilities it entails, including responsibility for maintaining what are today styled “human rights” (p. 108). As the author suggests in his previous book on democracy, this participation can best be exercised today within the context of municipal associations, regional assemblies and professional bodies. From the perspective of ancient and classical liberty, we of the West are enjoying precisely the government we deserve.

 

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Devlin, F. Roger. “Human Rights between Ideology & Politics: Alain de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 11 April 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/04/alain-de-benoists-beyond-human-rights >.

Note: Alain de Benoist’s Beyond Human Rights was originally published in French as Au-delà des droits de l’homme: Pour défendre les libertés (Paris: Krisis, 2004). It is also available in a German translation as Kritik der Menschenrechte: Warum Universalismus und Globalisierung die Freiheit bedrohen (Berlin: Junge Freiheit, 2004) and in an Italian translation as Oltre i diritti dell’uomo: Per difendire le libertà (Rome: Il Settimo Sigillo, 2004). A Spanish translation has also been published as Más allá de los Derechos Humanos: defender las libertades (published online in 2008 at Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/mas_alla_de_los_derechos_humanos.pdf >). (we have not yet found out if and where it was published in print).

 

Rethinking Democracy – Devlin

Rethinking Democracy: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy

By F. Roger Devlin

Alain de Benoist
The Problem of Democracy
Arktos Media, 2011

This deceptively brief study of democracy begins from the familiar point that the term can no longer mean much in an age when all regimes claim to be democratic. Benoist suggests that the serious inquirer should turn to history and study democracy as it has actually existed, long before the modern era. One pattern which quickly becomes clear is the intimate connection between democracy and Western civilization:

In contrast to the Orient, absolute despotism has always been exceedingly rare in Europe. Whether in Rome, in the Iliad, in Vedic India or among the Hittites, already at an early date we find the existence of popular assemblies for both military and civil administration.

This does not mean that most Western polities have been democracies; they have most often been mixed regimes containing democratic elements. Yet even such elements have generally been absent in the non-Western world, where the very word for democracy is a recent import from the European languages.

More specifically, democracy was a system of government which developed in Greece during classical times. Benoist next seeks to rediscover what demokrateia meant to the men who invented it. His discussion then evolves toward a defense of this ancient conception and a corresponding critique of modern “democracies.”

The cardinal point to grasp is that the classical understanding presupposed “a relatively homogeneous community conscious of what makes it such,” or “cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared belonging.”

The closer the members of a community are to one another, the more likely they are to have common sentiments, identical values, and the same way of viewing the world and social ties, and the easier it is for them to make collective decisions concerning the common good without the need for any form of mediation.

The citizens of a Greek polis shared a common descent, common history, common language and common form of worship. It is a moot point what demokrateia would have been in the absence of one or more of them.

Such a regime was distinguished from oligarchy or tyranny by three forms of civic equality: isonomy, or equality before the law; isotimy, or equal eligibility for public office; and isegory, or equal freedom to address one’s fellow citizens on matters of public concern. Civic equality has nothing to do with natural equality, and has no meaning outside men’s relationship to the political community of which they are members.

Athens

Athens is the only ancient democracy of which we have considerable knowledge. We know enough of Sparta and Rome to draw useful comparisons, but these states were mixed regimes with only certain democratic aspects.

Benoist’s too-brief historical review passes hastily over the Solonian reforms, although these certainly had a democratic tendency. In earlier times, power had been monopolized by the Eupatridai (the ‘well-fathered’), an aristocracy typically holding large estates and breeding horses amid the rich bottomland of Attica. By the early sixth century BC, this class had reduced many of the smallholders of the hill country to debt-slavery. Receiving a commission to reform the laws so as to restore civil concord, Solon abolished debt-slavery and cancelled existing debts. This measure was called the seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens. He also admitted the newly-free class of Yeomen farmers (Zeugetai, or yokefellows) to participation in the Assembly. For these reasons, Solon was often called the father of Athenian democracy. But the poorer, generally landless men known as Thetes continued to be excluded from politics.

Benoist dates Athenian Democracy to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. Previous to that time, Athenian society consisted of four phylai, or tribes, which were subdivided into phratria (brotherhoods) and genē (clans). Athenian citizen rolls were based upon membership in phratria. Not surprisingly, civic loyalty to Athens often had to give way to the claims of kinship. This contributed to the establishment of a tyranny by the Peisistratid family while Solon was still alive.

After helping to overthrow the Peisistratids, Cleisthenes instituted a new system of enrolling citizens by place of residence, or deme, regardless of clan or tribe. The four tribes, indeed, were abolished and replaced with ten new groupings. Although still called phylai, they were henceforth composed of demes rather than families. Cleisthenes’ great object was to substitute specifically political or civic bonds for kinship bonds.

Each of the ten new ‘tribes’ was composed of three groups of demes, or districts: one from the plains, one from the hill country and one from the coast. The old eupatrid aristocracy was concentrated in the plains, the independent smallholders in the hills, and the coastal regions were mixed. So the reorganization forced not only different families but also different social classes to work together, forestalling the development of political factions around class interests. Cleisthenes called his system isonomia, or equality before the law, but it gradually became known as demokrateia. This term may originally have signified ‘rule by the demes’ as much as ‘rule by the people’ (the demos).

Forty-six years later a third and final major round of democratic reforms was carried out under the leadership of Ephialtes. Up to this time, much influence had been exerted by the Areopagus, a council of former office-holders somewhat analogous to the Roman Senate. The Areopagus had remained a stronghold of eupatrid power. Ephialtes transferred all its political prerogatives to the popular Assembly, leaving it a mere court with jurisdiction over murder and certain other capital crimes. He also opened participation in the Assembly to the Thetes. The resulting regime is often referred to as the radical democracy.

Ephialtes himself was assassinated by an aristocratic opponent within a year of carrying through his reforms, but they were consolidated by his successor Pericles. Within about fifteen years, the city’s aristocratic faction had virtually fallen apart. Athens continued to be governed democratically for over a hundred years, with two brief interruptions, until the Macedonian conquest of 338 BC. The popular assembly passed laws, made war and peace, appointed officials, and sometimes exercised judicial functions.

In 451 BC, ten years after the death of Ephialtes, a law was passed restricting Athenian citizenship to men born of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. This restriction upon the number of citizens eligible to participate in Athenian politics may strike the modern reader as a quintessentially undemocratic measure, but it was seen by contemporaries as a natural consequence of democracy itself: the extension of political rights to ever-broader classes of the population seemed to them to call for a corresponding tightening of civic membership requirements.

The Athenians liked to consider themselves autochthonous: the original inhabitants of Attica, unmixed with foreign blood. As Athens prospered, however, it attracted merchants from all over Greece and beyond. Foreign traders and their families became known as metoikoi, or dwellers-with, and came to form a large fraction of the resident population. Mixed marriages began to occur: a resident Thracian fathered the Athenian historian Thucydides. Such foreigners could own property and enjoyed civil rights such as use of the court system, but they had no political rights of any kind.

According to the notions currently approved for our use, such exclusion was a violation of these foreigners’ “human rights” and the most unconscionable “racism.” Yet there is no evidence that they ever protested their situation. Clearly, they felt that the advantages of living in Athens outweighed the loss of any political participation they might have enjoyed back home. If there were any malcontents among them, they were sent packing by the Athenians too quickly to leave traces in the historical record.

Sparta

What is known of the ethnography and constitution of the Spartan state also confirms Benoist’s assertion of the intimate connection between democracy and racial and social homogeneity. The Spartans never claimed to be autochthonous; they considered themselves pure “Dorians” whose ancestors had led a wandering life before settling in as the masters of Laconia. The earlier, non-Dorian natives of that land were reduced, if they were lucky, to the status of perioikoi, or “dwellers-around,” with no political rights. If they were less lucky, they became helots, or slaves of the Spartan state. The Spartans lived in continual fear of vengeful uprisings from this numerically superior slave class, and dealt harshly with it. Spartans never intermarried with the despised natives of Laconia, whether perioikoi or helots.

The ancients considered the Spartan constitution a model “mixed” regime compounded of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements: it combined a dual kingship with a council of elders and a popular assembly which had to approve all legislation. Yet it is important to stress that this constitution applied only to full Spartan citizens, who formed a small minority of the total population living in Spartan-controlled territory. Considering that territory as a whole, the regime must be seen as an extremely narrow aristocracy.

Clearly, the Spartans considered their political regime essentially bound up with membership in a single clan sharing a common ancestry. Chalk up two for Benoist.

Rome

The case of Rome seems less favorable to the author’s thesis. Romans preserved the surprisingly unflattering tradition that Romulus originally populated his city by offering asylum to runaway slaves, criminals and sundry other outcasts and from the surrounding area. These being mostly men, the city only survived beyond the first generation by kidnapping women from the nearby Sabines. Two of Rome’s seven semi-legendary kings are said to have been of Etruscan origin; the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language and may have originated in Anatolia.

In its early days, Rome quarreled with the independent Latin cities as much as anyone. At no point in its development was the city ever the capitol of a compact, homogeneous, ethnically-based Latin nation-state; the historical record resisted the stoutest efforts of Nineteenth Century historians, influenced by the romantic nationalism of their day, to foist such an interpretation upon it.

More important, perhaps, is the generosity with which Rome extended citizenship to subjects of proven loyalty. This was considered unusual at the time, yet it was among the most important tools of Roman policy. Potentially rebellious conquered peoples were mollified with limited civic rights and, crucially, the possibility of gaining further rights and status over time. It was a program of Romanization, and proved notably effective, yet it involved a major break with the ancient communitarian nature of politics.

Despite this liberality in extending citizenship, the Roman Republic simultaneously granted increasing powers to their popular council, the concilium plebis; in other words, it gradually became more democratic. A deeper study of the democratic component of the Roman constitution than we can undertake here might provide some modifications to Benoist’s thesis concerning ancient democracy and bio-cultural homogeneity, which he bases mainly on the case of Athens.

Of course, nothing in the Roman experience indicates the feasibility of democratic rule in a polity compounded of different “continental population groups.”

Democracy, Equality, and Freedom

Besides dependence on a pre-existing folk community, ancient democracy differed from modern liberal democracy in its concept of equality, which was in no way opposed to hierarchy or authority. “All ancient authors who have extolled democracy have praised it not because it is an intrinsically egalitarian regime but because it . . . enables a better selection of the elite.”

Elections (from the Latin eligere, ‘to choose’) are a form of selection; the very word ‘elite’ has the same etymology. Originally, democracy expressed a will to replace privilege with merit at a time when the former no longer appeared to be the logical consequence of the latter. The aim was to substitute skill for chance factors (especially birth). It is not elites which it is opposed to. . . . What regime, after all, does not seek quality in government? If democracy charmed so many spirits, this is partly because it was seen as the best means for organising elite turnover.

An equality derived from inherited membership is surely comprehensible to us, even if less familiar than leftist leveling. Surely freedom, however, depends upon circumstance and cannot be conceived as an inherited status? Yet for the ancients, it was so:

In Greek, just as in Latin, liberty stems from one’s origin. Freeman, *(e)leuderos (Greek eleutheros), is primarily he who belongs to a certain stock (cf. the Latin word liberi, children). ‘To be born of good stock is to be free,’ Emile Benveniste writes, ‘it comes to the same thing.’ The Indo-European root *leudh-, also served to designate people as belonging to a given folk (cf. the Old Slavonic ljudú, ‘folk’ and German Leute, ‘people’). These terms all derive from a root evoking the idea of ‘growth and development.’

Common Objections to Democracy

In his second chapter, Benoist attempts to defend democracy in its original understanding from a number of common criticisms: it is unstable, with constant factional fighting amounting to a latent state of civil war; it is vulnerable to the appeals of special interests; a thousand fools do not add up to one wise man; its derivation of authority from numbers is a non-sequitur; it consecrates the reign of mediocrity, etc.

Concerning the problems of factionalism and special interests, the author adds nothing to his previously stated position that democracy presupposes homogeneity and may not be practicable in its absence. About Scandinavia, for example, he writes:

[T]his democratic tradition rests on a particularly strong communitarian sentiment—a tendency toward Zusammenleben (‘living together’) which leads people to take account of common interests above all else. . . . This tradition [is] founded on mutual assistance and a feeling of shared responsibility.

It may simply not be possible to practice democracy in the absence of “a particularly strong communitarian sentiment.”

Regarding the ignorance and incompetence of the common people, the author borrows a point from Weber’s Politik als Beruf: “In politics, decision-making does not mean choosing between what is true and what is false; rather, it means choosing between possible [practical] options.” He remarks that if truth were the determinant of political action, no choice would be involved, whereas politics is precisely an art of making choices.

The idea that government should be in the hands of ‘knowers’ stretches back at least to Plato’s Republic. For Plato, however, knowledge preeminently means knowledge of ‘the Good’—the supreme value and telos of human action. For the utopian philosopher-king capable of such knowledge, political decision-making would indeed be reduced to a kind of calculation.

Rightly or wrongly, few of our contemporaries believe in the possibility of any knowledge of ‘the Good’; for them, ‘knowers’ are merely specialists and technicians. Such men understand how to adopt means to a given end, but almost by definition lack the breadth of vision necessary for prudently choosing between ends. For this reason, political rule by technical experts often proves disastrous.

Yet Benoist is surprisingly optimistic about the capacity of properly informed ordinary people for making decisions regarding their own welfare:

The vast majority of citizens today—especially when they have a clear awareness of their shared belonging—are perfectly capable, if given the means to make a real choice (without being misled by propaganda and demagogy), of identifying the political acts most suited to the common good.

The author affirms the reality of the Volksgeist, the spirit of a particular people expressed in its history and institutions. He describes this spirit as a “shared vision” or “collective representations of a desirable socio-political order” which “presents each person with imperatives transcending particular rivalries.” The national or folk-consciousness is the fundamental source of any regime’s legitimacy, transcending any law or constitution. One understands why Benoist has met with incomprehension on the part of Anglophone political science, with its lingering positivist sources of inspiration.

Problems of Popular Sovereignty

In his third chapter, Benoist develops two inherent difficulties involved in popular sovereignty. The first concerns the possibility of unjust and tyrannical action on the part of the demos. “The underlying characteristic of popular sovereignty,” he writes, “is that in principle there is nothing to limit it.” This would render meaningless the distinction between a democracy under the rule of law and an ochlochracy, or rule by a lawless mob. If law is sovereign, the people are not: hence there is no democracy. The author discusses but does not offer any solution to this dilemma, which may simply be inherent in the nature of popular rule.

The second difficulty concerns both the need for pluralism and its necessary limits. On the first point, Benoist emphasizes that majority voting should be seen as a mere technique for decision-making, not as a source of authority or truth. The foundation of democratic legitimacy is not majoritarianism but the appointment of leaders by those governed.

Where the majority is invested with the moral authority of the demos as a whole, as Lenin and Robespierre envisioned, the opposition is left with no rights. Under these conditions, the majority becomes permanent—and this means precisely the end of democracy. A political opposition has, therefore, been described by one liberal theorist as “an organ of popular sovereignty as essential as government.”

Benoist, however, considers this position less than satisfactory: “there is a great risk that as it gradually extends, ‘pluralism’ may dissolve the notion of [a] people, which is the very basis of democracy.” Overgenerous immigration policies immediately spring to mind.

Moreover, certain persons may feel themselves entirely alienated from the national folk community. Yet they may often be willing to participate in democratic institutions for the purpose of subverting such communities and abolishing the rights of democratic citizenship. During the last century, Communists were the prime example of such subversives; today they have been replaced by Muslim immigrants. Surely the regime stands under no duty to let itself be destroyed.

During the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany tried to respond to this difficulty by decreeing Berufsverbote, or ‘profession bans,’ to keep subversives out of certain sensitive kinds of work. Yet such a law has considerable potential for abuse. Today the Berufsverbote are plainly being misused by Germany’s globalist elite to harass and demoralize patriotic opponents of Muslim immigration or European integration—opposition they have been pleased to declare intrinsically ‘antidemocratic.’

Sometimes loyalty to the constitution is said to be the criterion for distinguishing loyal from disloyal political opposition. Yet this seems hardly satisfactory; patriotic citizens may favor all sorts of far-reaching constitutional changes as well.

Benoist masterfully evokes the dilemma of pluralism before concluding as follows:

Pluralism is a positive notion, but it cannot be applied to everything. We should not confuse the pluralism of values, which is a sign of the break-up of society, with the pluralism of opinions, which is a natural consequence of human diversity. . . . Freedom of expression is thus destined to end not where it interferes with others’ freedom (this being a liberal formula which could easily be shown to be hardly meaningful), but rather where it stands in contrast to the general interest, which is to say to the possibility for a folk community to carve a destiny for itself in line with its own founding values.

It remains to be seen whether standards such as “pluralism of opinions but not values” or “the possibility for a folk community to carve a destiny for itself” will prove less ambiguous or less vulnerable to corruption than loyalty to the constitution or not interfering with the rights of others. Perhaps no possible legal remedy against subversion is at once unambiguous and incapable of abuse.

Representative Democracy

In his fourth chapter, Benoist turns to the critique of modern representative democracy, which he sees as “intimately connected to Judaeo-Christian morality and the philosophy of the Enlightenment.” This conception of democracy rests upon supposed rights inherent in all human beings. From such a perspective, nations seem mere conglomerations of people accidentally thrown up by history and without intrinsic meaning. Instead of peoples, we see masses: “transient pluralit[ies] of isolated and rootless individuals.” Democracy in the classical sense becomes impossible, for there is no folk in whose destiny anyone might participate.

Elections were originally meant to be a way of allowing ordinary people to participate in public life by helping to appoint their own rulers. In contemporary mass-democracies, they are little better than a travesty of this idea. They serve instead as “a way of legitimising the power which professional politicians exercise over a passive population” (Benoist quotes archeologist Paul Veyne).

In democratic theory, candidates wish to be elected in order to implement their own program for the people’s future. Today’s candidates are more likely to adopt whatever ideas they think will get them elected. Electoral platforms are increasingly based on opinion polls, which yield the same results for all parties. Campaigning consists of reaching out to the ‘center’ where opinions are nothing but “impression[s]: vague, contradictory and ill-defined ideas that depend on their moods and infatuations and which are in constant flux.”

Using the same techniques to fish in the same swamp, it is hardly surprising that “in the case of a final ballot between two candidates, the result is invariably in the 50/50 range: it is increasingly unusual for elections to be won or lost by more than a tiny percentage of votes.”

Once elected, the politician hastens to take measures he knows will prove unpopular or which go against the promises he previously made; demagogic measures reappear when new elections are approaching. We may blame such behavior, but it is a natural consequence of the undeniable fact that politicians owe their position far more to their parties and financial backers than to the voters. Neither the campaign financing game nor the internal structure of the modern political party have anything democratic about them, however.

In a word, democracy is sick because citizens cannot vote for politicians from whom they may expect a course of action reflecting well-defined commitments. As a result, “the political life of liberal democracies is now experiencing an unprecedented wave of indifference and apathy.”

What the author describes here as the fate of democracy in the modern world is simply bureaucratic corruption, a process which occurs in all sorts of contexts. A lucid and (to this writer) compelling way of analyzing it is provided by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. Democracy, in MacIntyre’s terms, is a kind of practice, i.e., a socially established co-operative human activity aimed at a good. Other examples of practices include the arts, the sciences, historiography, warfare, and worship.

Like all human practices, democratic politics requires institutions which support and nurture it, but the practice is not simply equivalent to them. Like all institutions, democratic political institutions create a system of incentives which only partially coincides with the aim proper to democratic practice itself, viz., the flourishing of the political community concerned. Most of the energy which goes into electioneering is directed toward what MacIntyre would call the institutional rewards external to democratic political practice itself: perquisites of office, traffic in patronage and so forth.

Thus, what in a healthy democratic polity might be a leader’s vision for the destiny of his folk community gets replaced by a ‘platform:’ a poll-derived, focus-group-tested list of ‘positions on the issues,’ the merest ideological packaging designed to market the party-designated nonentity du jour to the masses.

MacIntyre goes so far as to define virtue as that which enables those engaged in human practices to resist the corrupting influence of institutions. In terms of this analysis, the crisis Benoist identifies in democratic institutions amounts quite simply to a lack of virtue.

The reader may snort that he was able to arrive at a similar conclusion just by looking at the sort of men who rise to high position in contemporary Western regimes. I agree. The rise to power of moral midgets like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Angela Merkel et hoc geno omne is the best possible confirmation of the correctness of this analysis.

Reforming Democracy

The Problem of Democracy is very much a theoretical treatise, and the final chapter on concrete reforms is the briefest and sketchiest in the book. Benoist emphasizes that institutions themselves matter less than popular participation in them. Venues for such participation include municipal associations, regional assemblies and professional bodies.

The people should be given the chance to decide wherever it can; and wherever it cannot, it should be given the chance to lend or deny its consent. Decentralization, the delegating of responsibilities, retroactive consent and plebiscites are all procedures that may be combined with universal suffrage.

* * *

The Problem of Democracy is not an easy work to digest. In part, this stems from the author’s habit of expressing himself by means of agreement or disagreement with a host of French and continental European figures largely unfamiliar to American audiences. Some of these are worthy men in their own right, while others are forgettable publicists cited only to make a point, but the difference may not always be clear to the reader. The publishers have, however, added numerous footnotes for added clarity.

Alain de Benoist has been a celebrated and controversial figure in French intellectual life, as well as an uncommonly prolific author, since the early 1970s. His non-reception in the English-speaking world contrasts weirdly with the mob of academic acolytes surrounding frivolous figures such as Jacques Derrida. The work under review is only his second title to appear in English, following On Being a Pagan in 2005.

The reason things are, belatedly, starting to change is the recent emergence of small, unsubsidized publishers such as Arktos which have stepped in to do work the sclerotic academic publishing establishment should have performed years ago. Arktos Media, Ltd. has existed only since 2010, yet they have already published the first two English translations of Guillaume Faye and have announced an entire series devoted to Benoist. This is among the most heartening developments of the last few years.

 

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Devlin, F. Roger. “Rethinking Democracy: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 14 October 2011. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10/rethinking-democracy-alain-de-benoists-the-problem-of-democracy >.

Note: Alain de Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy was originally published in French as Démocratie: le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), and is also available in a German translation as Demokratie: das Problem (Tübingen & Zürich: Hohenrain, 1986), in Italian translation as Democrazia: il problema (Firenze: Arnaud, 1985), and in Spanish translation as ¿Es un Problema la Democracia? (Barcelona: Nueva República, 2013).