After the Fall – AR Staff

After the Fall

By the American Renaissance Staff

Second NPI conference is held in Washington.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

 

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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.

 

Identity vs. Globalism – Morgan

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

By John Morgan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Tribute to Venner – Benoist

Tribute to Dominique Venner

By Alain de Benoist

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations: Czech, Greek

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

Honor above Life

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

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

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

The Beautiful Determines the Good

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

Comportment

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

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

A Way of Protesting Against the Suicide of Europe

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

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

A Suicide of Rational Hope as a Founding Act

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

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

A Western Samurai

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

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

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

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

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

The Rebel Heart Will Always be There

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

 

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

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

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

 

Tribute to Venner – Faye

Tribute to Dominique Venner

By Guillaume Faye

Translated by Greg Johnson

Translations Czech, Greek

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

 

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

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

 

Ten Theses on Democracy – Benoist

Ten Theses on Democracy

By Alain de Benoist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Democracy means the power of the people, which is to say the power of an organic community that has historically developed in the context of one or more given political structures – for instance, a city, nation, or empire. Where there is no folk but only a collection of individual social atoms, there can be no democracy. Every political system which requires the disintegration or levelling of peoples in order to operate – or the erosion of individuals’ awareness of belonging to an organic folk community – is to be regarded as undemocratic.

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Added Notes:

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

** Earlier in this work, The Problem of Democracy, Benoist had written (pg. 66) that “The way in which the political rights assigned as a guarantee to the opposition are commonly assimilated to the rights from which social minorities wish to benefit is itself problematic: for political categories cannot always be transposed on a social level. This may lead to a serious failure to distinguish between citizen minorities and non-citizen groups installed – whether temporarily or not – in the same land as the former. ‘Pluralism’ may here be used as a rather specious argument to justify the establishment of a ‘multicultural’ society that severely threatens national and folk identity, while stripping the notion of the people of its essential meaning.”

 

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

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

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

 

Dancing on a Hero’s Grave – Gottfried

Dancing on a Hero’s Grave

By Paul Gottfried

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

————

Added Notes:

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

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

 

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

 

Reasons for a Voluntary Death – Venner

The Reasons for a Voluntary Death

By Dominique Venner

Translated by Greg Johnson

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Note:

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Benoist’s Vivid Memory – Devlin

Alain de Benoist’s Vivid Memory

By F. Roger Devlin

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

Part 1: A Full Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was a difficult catechumen:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: An Agitated Youth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Benoist continued his studies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3: The Beginnings of the Nouvelle Droite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

———————

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

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

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

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

 

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/