Race, Identity, Community – Tudor

Race, Identity, Community

By Lucian Tudor

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

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

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

Ethnic Identity and Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial Issues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Importance of Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding Remarks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[16] Ibid., p. 271.

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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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

 

—————–

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

 

Preface to Fighting for the Essence – Krebs

Preface to Fighting for the Essence

By Pierre Krebs

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kassel, Winter Solstice, 1999/2000.

 

Notes:

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

 

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

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

 

Manifesto of the New Right – Benoist & Champetier

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

Manifesto of the French New Right (English)

The following is the original French version of this work:

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

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

The following is the Spanish translation of this work:

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

Manifiesto: la Nueva Derecha del año 2000 (Español)

The following is the Italian translation of this work:

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

La Nuova Destra del 2000 (Italiano)

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Notes on publications and translations of the Manifesto:

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

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

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

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

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

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Further Reading (Major works by Alain de Benoist):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Immigration – Benoist

Immigration: The Reserve Army of Capital

By Alain de Benoist

Translated from French by Tom Sunic

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Business and the Left; A Holy Alliance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

New Right Forty Years Later – Benoist

“The European New Right: Forty Years Later” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 169 KB):

European New Right Forty Years Later

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De Benoist, Alain. “The European New Right: Forty Years Later.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1, (Spring 2009). <http://www.toqonline.com/archives/v9n1/TOQv9n1Benoist.pdf >.

Note: This essay has also been published as a preface to the third edition of Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (London: Arktos, 2011). It has also been translated into Spanish as “La Nueva Derecha Europea, 40 años después”, published online at El Manifesto (9 Julio 2014) <http://www.elmanifiesto.com/articulos.asp?idarticulo=4773 >.

 

Confronting Globalization – Benoist

“Confronting Globalization” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 57.4 KB):

Confronting Globalization

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De Benoist, Alain. “Confronting Globalization.” Telos, Vol. 1996, No. 108, (Summer 1996). <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/confronting_globalization.pdf >.

 

Cosmopolis – Faye

Cosmopolis: The West as Nowhere

By Guillaume Faye

 

From Guillaume Faye, L’Occident comme déclin [The West as Decline] (Agir pour l’Europe, 1985).

Translated by Greg Johnson

The old tradition is mistaken: the West is no longer European, and Europe is no longer the West. In its course toward the West, the sun of our civilization has dimmed. Starting from Greece, settling in Italy, then in Western Europe, then in England, and finally, having crossed the seas, installing itself in America, the center of the “West” has been slowly disfigured.

Indeed, today, according to Raymond Abellio, California has been established as the epicenter and essence of the West.[1] Pacified at the edge of the Pacific, it is the symbol of the happiness where our civilization dies; land of the end of history, land of Hollywood’ssimulacrum, it is the asymptotic approach to madness, to commercial society, to the society of the spectacle, and to cosmopolitanism.

The West as a planetary movement which is always-already underway will thus continue its course towards the West by establishing its center where it has already been prepared, in the Far East, in the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean, from Japan to the East Indies. It is the absolute reverse of the movement across the seas departing from Europe in the 16th century . . .

The West thus becomes “something” global. It appears in the form of a vague whole composed of networks of decisions, dispersed territorial zones, cultural and human blocs distributed in all countries. If the United States still dominates it, the West will increasingly take on the countenance of a “qualification”—and no longer as a membership—which crosses national boundaries.

The West, or Western civilization, indicates those places where the “Western system” prevails. These places are less and less describable in political, geographical, and ethnic terms. If the epicenter remains localized in the United States, the foreseeable future leads us to forecast a dispersion of the West, of its transformation into a polycentric ensemble of quite Western nations (Germany), fairly Western nations (the Ivory Coast), partially Western nations (Czechoslovakia), and not very Western nations (Afghanistan). But few places will be able to “escape the West.”

In parallel, if the center is everywhere and that “everywhere” is at bottom nowhere, the West has to lose any specific virtue; to be Western is to be nothing rather than something. In this process, Europeans—and Europeans alone—lose the very possibility of designating themselves validly as anything but Western. The Indian, for example, can remain “Indian” and Western, but the German or the Dutchman has to be nothing but Western, i.e., at bottom, nothing.

Neglecting borders, states, religions, the West covers much more than a geopolitical reality or a diplomatic solidarity with the “free world.” It goes far beyond this framework. It is, in its essence, the global establishment of a form of society, that of the “Americanosphere.”

Not all people feel that they are founding members of the club called Western civilization. France, Italy, Spain, or Greece will never be as integrated into Western capitalist society as, for example, New Zealand which belongs culturally to the source from which capitalism drew its impulse, namely the Anglo-Saxon hegemony founded by England and continued by the United States.

The smallest deviation of identification from the primary source of ideas and the current seat of power inexorably causes national anxiety and dissatisfaction. Thus the whole planet experiences an identity crisis in relation to a global cultural standard that few participate in completely.The schizophrenic shame that results from this is, perhaps, from a psycho-political point of view, a powerful engine of Westernization.

Organized in concentric membership circles, the West has its center, its club house, in the so-called developed countries where English is the native tongue or at least the second language, as in Northern Europe, where the mentality has been shaped by Protestantism.

The “second circle” of club membership includes, for example, France, a moral member because of its democratic universalism and the memory of Lafayette; Israel, an honorary member; Germany and Italy, associate members due to military reverses, etc. As for Japan, it has made itself a member, and American industrialists are surely beginning to regret it.

In the countries known as the “Third World,” a Westernized class, often cut off from its culture, serves as the model of emulation for the population, whose identity crisis vis-à-vis the cultural standard of its “elites” makes their deculturation that much easier. Many Southern countries are thus internally divided by a cultural and economic abyss separating those who have hastily Westernized to the point of parody from the disadvantaged bearers of the wreckage of the traditional culture.

Delirious Americanism and traditional culture in decay—which appears in this regard as backwards and inferior—are violently opposed through the logic of ethnocide. Town planning, daily manners, arts, family and social structures are the places where the Western standards of “evolution” and “development” collide with traditional cultures that, as in Africa, end up thinking of themselves as backwards.

One can wonder if “Western civilization,” in particular its American aspect, is not also constructed on a rejection of Europe, although European culture is in part the starting point of Occidentalism.

Consider, for example, Greece, which with some justice is presented as one of the fundamental matrices of European civilization: Occidentalism of the Anglo-Saxon variety violently conflicts with the original Greek culture as if it were a cancer. Thus Greek culture, by an incredible reversal, appears—and not only, alas, in the eyes of tourists—“Oriental” to Westerners, whereas in Europe it remains an almost unique example of authenticity and ancestral rootedness, and for the historians and the sociologists its linguistic, musical, religious, economic, and family forms are deeply European. In Greece, and to a lesser degree in all the other European countries, the Western standard makes the people “foreign to itself,” foreign to its own culture, which becomes an object of ethnology or is classified and neutralized as “folklore.”

The essential difference between traditional cultural standards and the Western standard is that the former are defined in relation to the cultural standards of other ethnic groups, according to a logic of differentiation (relative standards), whereas the latter claims to be the standard, having universal value and indeed regarding all other cultures as atypical—“backwards”—or morally abnormal, as “savages” who need to be civilized., i.e., domesticated.

This “domestication” described, inter alia, as a mass global culture, is well analyzed in the artistic field by Theodor Adorno. In this mass global culture, anthropologist Arnold Gehlen saw signs of the appearance of a “neo-primitive” era.*

In this respect three types of “standardized” cultures seem to coexist: (1) global mass culture, which imposes in music, cinema, furniture, clothing, food, etc., ever more uniform styles, and which is presented in the form of a distractive culture; (2) an abstruse and elitist culture, both abstract and universalist, whose function is social and discriminatory (to substitute for ethno-cultural divisions a vertical separation between two cultural spheres on the scale of the entire West); and finally (3) a “museum” culture that codifies the “ancient,” rationalizes collective memory, with the aim of transforming the cultural past unique to each population into a standardized folkloric stock described as the “inheritance of humanity,” etc.

The image of the Westerner (a socio-mental system common to all who are Westernized) has reigned since the 1950s. It is generally organized around a simplified American culture and sanctions the domination of the Anglo-American language even in the arts and sciences.

In this regard, the ideology of “communication” plays a central role. For example, Gaston Dommergues, a specialist on the United States, showed that the American doctrines of transparency of information, world freedom of communications, established in particular on the construction of television networks, planetary data communication, and data processing, are not free of hegemonic inclinations.

The universalization of a language, especially when it passes though the computer, means the generalization of an international mode of thinking, acting, and feeling “American style.” Even if “liberty” reigns as the supreme value, with this enterprise, one must wonder if this planetary standardization of culture, supported by communications technology, really encourages dialogue between men and peoples. Can one communicate through a code that is in itself deculturized?

The most striking example of planetary cultural standardization appears to be the international youth culture of the generations since World War II. This culture, presented as an anti-bourgeois ideology of “liberation” and protest, has in reality functioned in scores of countries to create the first Westernized middle class in history. The generation born just after the war first bought in. Today, a large part of Western youth—including those in non-industrialized countries—share the same music, manners, and “practical culture.” One can say, according to the expression of Robert Jaulin, that the West is no longer a place, a zone, but a form of life that “crosses” all boundaries, that is interiorized in each ego.

As much as the West is a cultural and geopolitical reality, it is also a coherent and structured ideology whose totalitarian aim is all the more present as it is generally not immediately apparent to those lovers of freedom who claim to be our intellectuals.

[1] Raymond Abellio, La structure absolue [The Absolute Structure] (Paris : Gallimard, 1965).

 

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Faye, Guillaume. “Cosmopolis: The West As Nowhere.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 6 July 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/07/cosmopolis/>.

 

On Identity – Benoist

“On Identity” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 313 KB):

On_Identity

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De Benoist, Alain. “On Identity.” Telos, Vol. 2004, No. 128 (Summer 2004), pp. 9-64. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/on_identity.pdf >.

Note: It is recommended that “On Identity” is read side by side with “What is Racism?” for a clearer understanding of Benoist’s positions.

Additional Notes: Benoist’s “On Identity” was originally published in French as a book by the title of Nous et les autres: Problématique de l’identité (Paris: Krisis, 2007), which is available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/nous_et_les_autres.pdf >. It has also been translated into German as Wir und die Anderen (Berlin: Edition Junge Freiheit, 2008) and into Italian as “Sull’identità”, published in the anthology Identità e Comunità (Napoli: Guida, 2005).

 

A Global Village or the Rights of the Peoples? – Sunic

A Global Village or the Rights of the Peoples?

by Tomislav Sunic

The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separa­tism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over into the Western hemisphere. Already the dogma of human rights is coming under fire by the proponents of peoples’ rights, and the yearning for historical community is making headway into atomized societies deserted by ideologies.

With the collapse of communist internationalism the clock of history has been turned back, and inevitably the words of the 19th-century conservative Joseph de Maistre come to mind: “I have seen Poles, Russians, Italians, but as to man, I declare never to have seen him.” Indeed, this paradigmatic universal man, relieved from economic plight and from the burden of history, this man on whom we pattern the ideology of human rights, is nowhere to be seen. He appears all the more nebulous as in day-to-day life we encounter real peoples with specific cultures. If he resides in Brooklyn, his idea of human rights is likely to be different from somebody who lives in the Balkans; if he is a fundamentalist Moslem his sense of civic duty will be different from somebody who is a Catholic. The rise in nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe should not be seen as only a backlash against communist economic chaos; rather, it is the will of different peoples to retrieve their national memories long suppressed by communism’s shal­low universalism.

All of Europe seems to be undergoing a paradoxical and almost ludicrous twist of history. On the one hand Western Europe is becoming more and more an “americano-centric” anational meta-society, while post-communist Eastern Europe threatens to explode into a myriad of mini-states. Conversely, whereas Western Europe is experi­encing an unparalleled wave of foreign immigration and the inevitable surge of racism that must follow, the racial homogeneity of East Europeans has made them today more “European” than West Europeans-the East’s own multi­ethnic turmoil notwithstanding.

In view of the disintegrating state system in Eastern Europe, Woodrow Wilson’s crusades for the right of national self-determination and global democracy must seem contradictory. Home rule as envisioned by the archi­tects of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 may have suited the demands of Poles, Czechs, and those European peoples who benefited from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, but it had little appeal for those who were forced to exchange one foreign ruler for another. For the Germans stranded in, a newly emerged and bloated Poland or Romania in 1919, or for the Slovaks in a hybrid Czechoslo­vak state, the right to home rule meant nothing less than the creation of their own separate nation-states.

Yugoslavia, too, has owed its relative longevity more to Western liberal well-wishers that to the true consensus of its disparate peoples. For the last seventy years the Yugoslav experience has been an exercise in civil wars and constant ethnic strife among four of its major ethnic groups. Natural­ly, in light of the present salvos being exchanged between the Croats and the Serbs, the question that comes to mind is why does the artificial blending of different peoples always lead to instability and ethnic chaos? The answer seems to be rather obvious: that the rights of peoples are incompatible with universalism. Ethnic particularities cannot coexist in a state that places abstract principles of human rights over the real principles of peoples’ rights.

It would be impossible to chronicle with precision who is right or wrong in the present ethnic turmoil that besets Yugoslavia. A litany of grievances can be heard today among Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and ethnic Albanians, of which each group is tirelessly trying to outdo the others with its own impressive victimology. As Yugoslavia demonstrates, in multiethnic countries the notion of justice depends solely on the constantly shifting inter-ethnic balance of power, as well as the perception that each ethnic group may have of its neighbor. Both Serbs and Croats, the two largest ethnic groups in Yugoslavia, are today utterly disappointed with their country; the former, on the grounds that Yugoslavia is not centralized enough to allow the consolidation of the Yugoslav state; the latter, on the grounds that Yugoslavia is already too centralized. The lesson to draw today from the Yugoslav experience is that in multiethnic states democracy can only function when the national question has been resolved.

Moreover, democracy can take root only within the ethnographic frontiers of various peoples, who will define that word in accordance with their genius loci and their own history. Just as it was foolish some time ago to talk about Yugoslav anticommunist dissidence, so it is foolish now to anticipate the emergence of the all-out “Yugoslav” democ­racy. What seems good for a Croatian democrat today may be seen as a direct threat by somebody who styles himself a Serbian democrat tomorrow. Even America, because of its erratic immigration policy and the declining birthrate among whites, may soon find itself in a similar situation of having to redefine the concept of democracy. The legacy of the Founding Fathers, in the years to come, may be interpreted differently given the changing racial fabric of America. Voting preferences are likely to hinge on skin color, which could lead to a Balkanization worse than the one presently threatening Yugoslavia.

Democracy in any multiethnic state, at least as the global democrats would like to see it, is semantic nonsense; the liberal principle of “one man, one vote” is inapplicable in a country of diverse ethnic groups. Consequently, the genu­ine democratization of Yugoslavia, or for that matter the multiethnic Soviet Union, would require the disintegration of the country and the establishment of new nation-states. The German Holy Empire was an example of a rather stable confederal system that lasted for almost one thousand years, although at one point it was divided into three hundred sovereign principalities.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the ideology of global democracy seems to parallel closely the failed communist Utopia, with one exception: it is presently more successful in the pursuit of its goals. What we are witnessing in the West is a liberal transposition of the Christian ideal of one world into a post-industrial society-a civitas dei in an age of cable TV and Michael Jackson. Everything presages, how­ever, that this brand of universalism can be as dangerous for the peoples of Eastern Europe as the now moribund communism. From the point of view of a globe-trotting merchant a centralized and unified Yugoslavia, or Soviet Union, organized into giant free markets, would be the best solution insofar as that would facilitate the free movement of capital, and thus better ease the strain of ethnic animosity. Indeed, the prospects of having to deal with an additional twenty states on the Euro-Asian continent is a nightmare to a businessman more interested in the free flow of capital than in the self-determination of ethnic groups. The political liberal will surely endorse a global village that includes different ethnic parades-so long as they do not turn into military marches. Such a line of thinking, that “economics determines politics,” clearly points to the Marxian morphology inherent in liberalism, confirming, once again, that communism is nothing else but its pesky brainchild.

But will the free bazaar in the global village dissolve ethnic passions? Although the masses in franchised Eastern Europe are today mimicking every move of the West, nothing indicates that their honeymoon with the global village will last long. Ethnic intolerance will only worsen once the peoples of Eastern Europe realize that the global village promises a lot but delivers little.

What makes a people? A people has a common heritage and a will to a common destiny. A people exists despite superficial cleavages such as parties, interest groups, and passing trends in ideologies. As Georges Dumézil, Mircea Eliade, and Carl G. Jung have demon­strated, a people shares a “mythe fondateur”-a communal myth that gives birth to original cultural endeavors. The culture of a people, recalls Alain de Benoist, is its identity card and its mental respiration, and “it is the passport for a future that takes the shape of destiny.”

When a people becomes oblivious of its founding myth it is doomed to perish. Worse, it may turn into an aggregate of happy robots whose new dictum of universal human rights could be just another cloak for mindless hedonism. Western Europe is already experiencing this kind of ethnic and cultural oblivion. Paris in August resembles Oran or Marrakesh, and wide stretches of Berlin, at noon, have the distinct flavor of Anatolia. To many foreigners France is becoming more a synonym for its famous goat cheese and less a symbol of Corneillian heroism, and if one decides to go to Florence it is for a good bottle of Chianti rather than the mystic transcendence experienced through Botticelli’s paintings. Yugoslavia, founded on similar principles of multiculturalism, is a product of the Russian 19th-century pan-Slavism combined with the Wilsonian dream. This experiment has not resulted in perpetual peace. In times of great crises host nations no longer look at aliens as purveyors of exotic folklore, but rather as predators snatching bread from their host’s mouth. Peoples are not the same; they never have been and never will be. Ethnic groups can be compared to the inmates of large American prisons, who usually begin to respect each only when their turf is staked out and when their cells are separated by massive stone walls. Thrown into one cell they are likely to devour each other in a perpetual conflict over “territorial imperative.”

The best way, therefore, to resolve the Yugoslavian multiethnic crisis is not by appealing to the spirit of “brotherhood and unity” but rather by dismantling the country into a loose confederal state. Blood and soil will forever determine the life of nations. “Scratch the skin of any globalist, goes the proverb in Croatia, and you will find beneath a passionate Croat, Serb, German, or Jew.”

With the end of communism, the end of history will not follow, as some would wish us to believe. Had the Euro­peans in the 13th century conjured up the “end of history,” the Mongol khananat would have been transferred to the Iberian peninsula. Had the Germans and the Poles preached the liturgy of affirmative action in 1683, Vienna would shine today as the capital of the Turkish sultans. The endless power game among nations and ethnic groups, the constant shifts in demographic trends, teach us that life goes on in all its “creative” hatred-Hitler, Stalin, or Saddam not with­standing.

Today, more than ever before in the history of mankind, it is the specificity of peoples that is threatened by the universalist credo. Whether one travels to Warsaw or Sarajevo, or lands in Bucharest or Berlin, the blaring of rock music and the iconography of junk culture have become the new lingua franca, of the global village. One could spend days in the Budapest Hilton without ever knowing one had left the suspended bridges of the hotel complex of down­town Atlanta. The new universalism, in order to enforce its creed, no longer needs to resort to genocide and depopula­tions, to the frigid climate of Kolyma or Katyn, to which Stalin, in the name of a paradigmatic global proletarian, carted off Volga Germans, Kalmuks, and Chechens. The new universalism need only turn to a tepid universe of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a society in which everybody equals everybody, and where ethnic identities, therefore, mean nothing.

This “cool Stalinism” strips peoples of their souls by creating a Homo economicus-dollaricus. The end results of both brands of universalism are pretty much the same, except that the veiled violence of liberal universalism can now be more dangerous than the blunt violence of communism. It is an irony of history that naked violence often preserves regionalism and ethnic roots; each persecution has its cathartic virtue, and each sacrifice invariably strengthens a peoples’ historical memory. Communist violence has triggered a hitherto unseen ethnic pride from the Balkans to the Baltic lands. In an air-conditioned hell of cool universal­ism, by contrast, regionalism and the love of one’s country do not need to be openly crushed; instead, they can be turned into a commodity, and thereby rendered superflu­ous, if not outright funny. If ever the ethnic pride disappears from Eastern Europe it will not be as a result of communist repression, but rather as the outcome of a new infatuation with capitalist gadgetry. The global village knows how to enslave Ulysses’ lotus eaters without even making them realize the peril that they face.

In a system in which everything has become a commodity, ethnic identity is viewed as an expendable triviality too-a triviality that may at best arouse some culinary interest or a tourist’s curiosity. If necessary, universalism will even do good business from the hammer, sickle, and swastika-as long as they sell well. For a globe-trotting merchant, home is where he hangs his hat, and where he makes a big buck. Montesquieu was, after all, not wrong when he wrote that commerce is the vocation of equal people.

Until recently, the concepts of egalitarianism and global democracy were strictly limited to Western peoples. Today, in a spasm of masochism, and because of the so-called “white guilt,” the West has extended these princi­ples to the antipodes of Earth. The bon sauvage has been transformed in our postmodern age into the therapeutic role of white man’s superego. Not long ago it was the white man who had to teach the nonwhites the manners of the West. Today the roles are reversed; now it is the non-European, with his pristine innocence, who grafts himself onto the ailing consciousness of the Westerner, pointing out to him the right path to the radiant future.

The very concept of “the West” has been stripped of its original geopolitical and geographical significance, becom­ing instead a metaphor for a meta-system that encompasses Alaska, the Philippines, South Korea, and any nook or cranny where the idea of the mercantile global village thrives.

With the end of its competing ideology the philosophy of the global village has taken hold in many countries, eulogiz­ing those who support it, vilifying those who don’t. What the future holds is not difficult to guess. It may well happen that inter-ethnic troubles will eventually subside in Eastern Europe, but this is not likely to happen in the West, where racial turmoil looms large. We may soon see replicas of the Berlin Wall erected in New York and Philadelphia in order to contain the multiethnic violence of the global village. The lesson of artificial Yugoslavia should not be forgotten. Our “promiscuous altruism,” as Garrett Hardin writes, may lead us against our will into a war of all against all.

The cult of the global village appears today as a political response to theological and ideological battles that have rocked the West for more than a century. But it remains to be seen how the singular principle of human rights can be implanted in a world that remains eminently plural. “We invoke human rights,” continues Hardin, “to justify interfering in another nation’s internal affairs. Thereby we risk making enemies of that nation . . . The intentions behind the fiction of “human rights’ may be noble, but insisting on such rights poses grave dangers.” Global democracy is the last twilight dream of those who are spiritually homeless and physically uprooted. It is a doctrine that eloquently masks the ethnic and racial reality behind the theology of universalism.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “A Global Village or the Rights of the Peoples?” Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, (January 1991). <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/tomsunic/sunic3.html >. (See this essay in PDF format here: A Global Village or the Rights of the Peoples).

Note: This essay was also republished in Tomislav Sunic’s Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity – Collected Essays (Shamley Green, UK: The Paligenesis Project, 2010).