Tag Archives: Jewish Question

Interview with Fenek Solère – Kurtagic

Interview with Fenek Solère by Alex Kurtagic

 

Introductory Note: The following interview was personally recommend to us by Fenek Solère for republication on the “New European Conservative.” We have found its contents to be largely agreeable or at least interesting, but there are two particular matters we would like to comment on to clarify our own position or approach where it possibly differs from Solère’s. Firstly, regarding the problem of the Jews, we admit that there are a number of Jewish groups and leaders who have contributed to the current negative state of Western societies. However, we agree with Paul Gottfried that Jews as a whole people cannot be equated with these particular groups, and there are a variety of positions and factions among the Jews, some of which have nothing to do with the creation of multicultural, decadent societies. While criticism of the Jews can be legitimate, it is always important to keep open the possibility to Jews of creating groups which hold similar values to our own, and could also become allied to our own in the future.

Secondly, regarding Solère’s responses to some of Kurtagic’s questions about racial differences, immigration, and racial mixing, we would have approached these questions somewhat differently. Solère’s responses will, probably unintentionally, seem to imply to some readers that whites outdo all other races in any field and thus have higher capacities on the whole, which would also imply that they can generally create more superiour societies than non-whites. However, we should make it clear that in our view there are many non-white groups (the best examples being the Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asians) who clearly have equal capacities to whites and create societies which are just as high quality as white societies. Concerning the problems brought up in Kurtagic’s questions, the first fact that must be kept in mind is that capacities such as IQ level, athletic ability, etc. often differ across time periods, cultures, and social units, and they also vary among population groups within a single race as well. While it may be true that among some racial or ethnic populations a low or high IQ seems genetically ingrained, the previous facts are also true in many cases. Furthermore, a race always has the possibility of improving its population’s capacities without any mixture whatsoever from other groups, which is why the idea that interbreeding is necessary  to increase these factors in a given population is scientifically invalid. However, one must also keep in mind that what is important about racial and ethnic identity is the value of the identity itself, not any kind of superiour biological traits that may be possessed; even if it were possible to create a “more superiour breed” through mixture, it would be undesirable due to the loss of original identities. This is the perspective representative of Identitarianism. – Daniel Macek (Editor of the “New European Conservative”)

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Alex Kurtagic: Almost every time I receive a communication from you, it has originated in an exotic location, and it seems you are more often in some far-flung place on the planet than Britain. Are you an adventurer, or do you have a very interesting job?

Fenek Solère: I am both an adventurer and an entrepreneur. Like an ever-increasing number of people attracted to our movement I have thrived in the modern world, in direct contradiction to the media portrayal of dissidents like ourselves as lonely bitter bachelors, sitting in their basements with no friends and no sexual outlet.

Over the course of my adult life I have lived and worked in London, France, St Petersburg, Kiev, San Francisco, Central Asia, and the Middle-East. I am not someone who can be castigated and mocked for being unsophisticated or parochial. My home is filled with art, books, and the numerous artifacts I have collected from all over the world.

Both in private and professional terms I have lived cheek by jowl with many other cultures and ethnicities and observed them up close and personal. Life experience informs my writing. My fiction is grounded in an in-depth study of history, culture and political theory.

The Partisan could be read as the act of a natural contrarian. Were you a willful and troublesome child who did Z when told to do A?

I was born into an aspirant working class family in a small provincial town. My father was an electrician and my mother was a cook. A typical boy, I recall playing in the woods, running in the shadow of the craggy castles that littered the landscape, living more like one of those characters from an Arthur Ransom story than a game-boy addict. Pretending to be a cowboy, never an Indian, building tree houses in the style of Robinson Crusoe, crafting bows and arrows like Robin Hood to defend our fortified encampments.

My bookshelves were crammed with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and the Norse mythologies. There was no family pressure to ‘achieve’. Rather, an atmosphere of calm reassurance. The warm glow of security reflected in the open fire as I sat marching Napoleonic armies across the hearth-rug. I was relatively good at sport, representing my school and region at football, rugby, basketball, and cross- country. By the time I met my first girlfriend I was already well-past reading Ayn Rand’s Anthem. I remember catching sight of her at a school disco. She was a spike haired punk in clinging pink trousers, cutting a resplendent profile in the backwash of strobe lighting, as she threw a right arm salute. Her small fist punching the air when the opening chords of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen, broke out across the hall.

Within weeks I became an activist. I recall my initiation started one balmy summer evening when a group of us torched a Trotskyite Militant newspaper stand in the centre of town. Not long after I was involved in an amateur style re-enactment of the climactic scene from The Dead Poets Society. A clear-skinned, fair-haired boy was made to stand up in front of the history class to defend his essay justifying Apartheid. He was asserting the South African Government had been right to imprison Mandela for terrorism and maintain ‘separation’ of the races. The teacher, a bespectacled 68’er, was going ballistic, screaming from behind an accusatory finger, threatening to have my friend removed from her class. ‘You can’t say that!’ she insisted, ‘What sort of person are you?’

Then, when he had finished, he looked in my direction and I knew it was my turn to stand and repeat the process. When I came to a close I had the honour to defer to the next boy, who had also been called to answer for transgressing the politically correct curricula. This open act of defiance was rapidly followed by a nationalist poster campaign on school noticeboards, which coming so quickly on the heels of the pro- Afrikaaner debacle and my own and my girlfriend’s names appearing in bold graffiti under a very large symbol closely associated with a controversial German political party of the middle nineteenth century, resulted in my expulsion.

The Partisan is set in France. Why France?

I chose France for its symbolism. When I began writing The Partisan in 2009 I saw a magnificent country threatened by the machinations of a malignant cosmopolitan interloper who had hijacked the race riots breaking out in 2005 in almost every French conurbation for personal political advantage. Then, that same devious individual, insisting on the benefits of miscegenation between the French and the alien hordes swamping the very boulevards where they had set fire to cars and attacked the native people. It seemed to encapsulate the whole political and demographic catastrophe I wanted to warn against in my debut novel. It was a country on the front-line. But also one with a very rich history of patriotic movements like the Front National and Right-wing intellectuals like Maurice Bardèche and the Nouvelle Droite’s Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye. In more recent times the emergence of fledgling organizations like Generation Identitaire , who my fictional protagonists predicted two or three years prior to their brilliant ‘Declaration of War’ video and the Poitiers Mosque protest, gives me a real sense that the battle lines are being drawn and that the next twelve months will prove me right; that yes indeed, the land of Rousseau and Rabelais will be the first battle ground of the European resurgence.

How does The Partisan differ from the various American novels treating the same topic?

The characters in The Partisan are much more three dimensional than those I have met and admired in other so-called Rightist fiction. It is not purely ‘vengeful’ entertainment. The text is more literary and is replete with reference points to other writers and political thinkers. This is quite deliberate. I want my fiction to excite, inspire, and motivate its audience to investigate the very deep intellectual roots of what is referred to as the New Right. I want The Partisan to be an access point for our youth into that culture and to become familiar with the ideas of its main proponents.

Almost everyone would agree that there is little to admire in many earlier incarnations of Rightist literature: it is too often badly written and its message is utterly superficial, in that it wallows in an angry revenge fantasy. Would you not agree that the biological worldview, such as the one that informs many of these novels, is necessarily an amoral worldview (which often becomes immoral), since nature is concerned only with what works in a practical sense, and doesn’t assign value to abstract principles the way humans do? Since Westerners assign such importance to such principles—indeed, Western political philosophy has always been underpinned by some system of ethics—how can anyone expect readers to feel comfortable defending the heroes in such fiction, even if they find the revolutionary fantasy privately satisfying?

It is true that such literature can sometimes lapse into simplistic comic book fantasy. Such deficiencies are to some extent why I wrote The Partisan. One of my key objectives was to fuse the action-orientated type novel with a more poetic but pessimistic futurology like that envisaged by Jean Raspail in The Camp of the Saints. The point being that certain types of material appeal to certain dispensations at different given points. Some of our movement’s earlier fiction may rightfully be described as amoral, but much that passes today for great classic literature was considered so in the past. Look at the homosexuality of Gide and the modernist works of Joyce. That is not to place all those writers sympathetic to our cause in this category of artists, clearly, only a very few like Ernst Jünger, Knut Hamsun, and Ezra Pound would qualify, but to indicate that the amoral/immoral argument shifts according to the fashion of the day. The biological imperative underpinning some of these texts does remain relevant, though we have many other facets to our ever-maturing world-view. Without Western people there will be no Western sense of principles or ethics, so in that regard I have a degree of sympathy for those ground-breaking writers, in that their heroes and heroines had at least a modicum of understanding that unless those values were defended they would cease to exist and all our fine ideals would disappear—mea culpa.

Where does your interest in the European New Right originate?

I read Michael O’Meara’s New Culture, New Right and discovered the French Nouvelle École (New School). From that point it was a natural progression to study Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Pino Rauti, founder of the Ordine Nuovo, Guido Giannettini and the ideology of the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei in Italy; the writings of Carl Schmitt and the Conservative Revolutionaries of the Weimar period; Imperium by the American renegade Francis Parker Yockey; works by the Belgian Jean Thiriart; alongside contemporary thinkers and commentators like Robert Steukers, Gilbert Sincyr, Tomislav Sunic, Franco Freda of Disintegration of the System fame, Alexander Dugin, Kevin McDonald, Greg Johnson, Jonathan Bowden, Troy Southgate, and Michael Walker, editor of The Scorpion.

What is wrong with letting people from anywhere settle in Europe, if they are hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying and contribute to the economy?

Nothing, if that is indeed the case. I have met many Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Central Europeans who fulfill such criteria. Of course a small percentage do not but most integrate perfectly well and live successfully among us. Compare that to the facts and figures behind migration from Roma communities, African or predominantly Muslim countries. Welfare dependency, anti-social behavior, criminality, isolationism and the colonization of whole communities seems to characterize the experience. Religious insularity, high prison rates, mosques filled with semi-literate imams and would-be boy-Jihadis educated free in our schools, sexism, genital mutilation, witch-craft, TB, Typhus, Ebola, drug and people trafficking, child-sex grooming, and riots complete the picture. Ask the people of Malmö, the women of Oslo, those poor souls living in close proximity to the urban sensitive zones around Paris or certain parts of the north of England like Bradford and Rotherham what part of the ‘enrichment’ process they have enjoyed. Talk to the thousands of violated white girls who have benefited from the fast food, cheap narcotics, and Rap music industry these people generate in their slums and taxi about our green and pleasant land.

What I witness every day are economic migrants, in transit under the false flag of asylum, seeking a better life at our expense. It is like a plague of locusts landing on a field. Leeching all the goodness from our soil. Infesting our villages, cities and towns. This is not some kind of small minded ‘fear of the other’ it is an objective analysis based on rational judgment. People like myself do not fear ‘the other’ we invest time and find out about the ‘other’ with a natural and friendly curiosity. I have lived for three years in Muslim countries and found good and bad much the same as I would in Europe or America. But what I find amongst the ‘invasion force’ pressing in upon Europe appalls me. I have nothing but the utmost respect for the nationalist activists who have stood tall despite state sponsored persecution and shouted until they were hoarse that the ‘emperor’ of multiculturalism has no clothes.

So is it just a question of the practical effects of multiculturalism? Is there no principle behind it except a root-and-branch or technocratic approach to problem-solving? Does this not make the liberal approach superior, then, since it is driven by an ethical system, however imperfectly executed? Not superior in a technical sense, but certainly in a moral sense.

There is indeed a very deep sense of principle embedded within my earlier response. People and communities who have over generations worked and sacrificed for their own well-being in later life and indeed their kith & kin in the present should expect that having made those long-term commitments under moral and indeed contractual commitments to and with their governments that those obligations are honoured. People originating from societies who have failed or are unable to take that long-term view have no prior right upon such investments. And I challenge any authority or political party arguing otherwise to stand openly upon a platform declaring such an intent to pillage that hard earned inheritance and let the people who have genuinely and fulsomely entered into such an arrangement decide the matter.

Surely, diversity increases creativity, since you have more perspectives and approaches to any problem, and immigration from everywhere boosts economic growth. Are you against creativity and for a stagnant economy?

Despite the diversity you see in Hollywood films and on television, the world’s laboratories, board rooms and libraries are not filled with West Indians designing new software systems for intergalactic flight, Somalians building robots to work in arid conditions or ecologically aware Uzbeks setting up green companies to reduce carbon emissions. This is a myth, perpetuated by the few whose individual and cosmopolitan group interests it suits, flooding productive economies with low IQ ‘hands’ to drive down wages and increase short-term share-holder profits at the expense of the long term interests of their host community. The media is used to manipulate and shape our moral and social expectations. Identity is eroded by the notion of ‘global citizenship’. Water-cooler philosophy is dispensed by Kid-President you-tube videos. Economic and moral stagnation leading to inter-ethnic tension distracts us from the enemy’s goals, so openly declared by Barbara Lerner-Spectre Founding Director of the Paideia Institute in Sweden: I think there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism because at this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural and I think we are going to be part of the throes of that transformation which must take place. Europe is not going to be a monolithic society that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be to be at the centre of that. It’s a huge transformation to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode and Jews will be resented for our leading role but without that leading role and without that transformation Europe will not survive’.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory. Is not your answer a bit of an overstatement? Certainly, Jews in the diaspora on the whole have favoured social, political, and intellectual movements tending to make the societies in which they live safer for them. No surprise here, given their history. Yet, to the degree that they have supported or even led such movements, these have merely demanded a more thorough and complete application of principles already enshrined and, indeed, central to liberal political philosophy. And liberal political philosophy is wholly North-Western European and ‘Aryan’ in origin: John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Immanuel Kant—all these are gentiles, mostly from Britain to boot.

Your point is well made and I take it in the spirit it is intended, however, please indulge me for one moment. The term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ is often used to belittle and decry non-standard theoreticians. I accept there are a lot of cranks out there and people who have the potential to cause arm to others. Clearly, that is not my intent. Indeed, the very opposite is true. I am a historian and a political theorist. My opinions are not based on phantasms, a need to gain attention or dye my hair green and stand in a turquoise track suit next to David Icke. I have quoted above (and indeed elsewhere in relation to Nicholas Sarkozy, former President of France) one of hundreds of examples where some people of that particular diaspora have acted, in my opinion, against the interests of the European majority among whom they live. At this very moment I am simultaneously reading Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Simon Schama’s The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000BC – 1492 AD [Sic. It loos as if HarperCollins doesn’t know that AD goes in front of the year. —Ed.]The former, a chilling account of the systematic way the founders of the early Jewish state went about their ethnic cleansing and murder of thousands upon thousands of Arabs in the late 1940’s, (activities some may argue analogous with recent events); the latter a shameless and sycophantic account of Jewish history that exonerates the Chosen from any sense of personal or group responsibility for the numerous expulsions they have suffered throughout the centuries. The media-savvy Schama, reveals himself to be less historian and more a propagandist as he explains why it is that everyone else is always to blame and his own tribe are always right, or indeed innocent, and the victims of mindless persecution. I would recommend everybody to read both texts. I found it advantageous to have also read the Talmud, Torah, and indeed the Koran, so I have a socio-economic, historical, and religious context for my opinions. I came to the work of Kevin McDonald late but recognize the behavior patterns he ascribes to his study group and I personally would prefer that the more over-zealous Zionists desisted from their activities so that your average Mr and Mrs Finkelstein could live in peace within the wider community. Unfortunately, that wider community now includes people with anti-semitic attitudes. This is regrettable but is a direct consequence of the strategy so eloquently explained by Spectre-Lerner above.

The fact that you can list the names of such great Anglo-Saxon, French, and German thinkers is a testimony to the progressive and open-hearted culture from which they originate. That the good intentions of such well-meaning people could be so perverted is in fact a measure of what Yockey describes as the culture distortion so prevalent today both in Europe and America. I have studied the American Constitution, The Framers who devised it, their backgrounds, ethnicity and intentions. Likewise, the real motivations of President Lincoln before, during, and after the American Civil War and I can assure you the abbreviated versions of history our schools and universities teach us and the voters are fed through the distorting lens of Orwellian ‘Truth Speak’ is a subject fit for serious review. I myself studied the whole historiography surrounding ‘Reconstruction’ after the American Civil War and it is most instructive on how aspects of history can and are used during different epochs to influence public opinion. From the books we read to the films we watch. Trust me, there is a pattern and it is no coincidence. From Spencer Tracy’s The Northwest Passage encouraging American entryism into the Second World War, to John Wayne’s Green Berets, trying to sustain moral during the Vietnam War, and 300, instilling anti-Islamic sentiment during the Iraq and Afghan wars. A whole book could be written on the movies bolstering anti-German sentiments and the falsehoods therein contained, but I will leave it there, my counter-point, I believe, equally well made.

Immigration is needed because white folk no longer want to do certain jobs, whereas the newcomers are keen to contribute and willing to work hard. If we were to send them all back—which is impossible, of course—the economy and the NHS would collapse.

These shibboleths need to be exposed for the nonsense they are. In the course of my career I have collaborated with thousands of sole-traders, SME’s, and multinational corporations. In my opinion there would be no collapse, rather, a rejuvenation of the economy, greatly boosted I suspect by the end of massive social security payments, that could be re-directed from these imported voting blocs and unproductive elements to invest in new start-ups and training programmes for people who need to update their skill-set in line with current economic trends. I would recommend the re-nationalization of utility companies in the UK, likewise the rail and postal service, at the price set by the ‘fixers’ when they were sold off. I would also withdraw all benefits from those who had entered the country illegally and their families and dependents. Similarly, non-ethnic British who had committed serious crimes prior to their immediate deportation back to their country of origin, accompanied of course by their dependents, but not the assets that had been accumulated by fraudulent means or due to the generosity of the British taxpayer. It may sound draconian to some but it makes good business sense. I would also argue to levy taxes on the money migrant workers send back to their families, thereby reducing the outflow of capital from its source of origin and open negotiations with countries in receipt of Foreign Aid or benefits to assist us in the task of humane repatriation of their nationals or peoples of compatible ethnic origin or similar religious persuasion. New targets need to be set for emigration, based on a wide range of criteria, but certainly with a view to returning the ethnic balance of countries like Britain to pre-1997 levels. And that would be the start not the end-point of the discussion.

With regard to the NHS, I have managed contracts with a wide range of people connected to this vast and worthy enterprise. Indeed, I have been involved with medical training for nurses, GPs, and surgeons. An immediate family member is a practicing junior doctor. The simple fact is that we are diverting resources to train people of non-British origin to these highly paid jobs, reinforcing cultural stereo-types among some of the high achieving Asians who think the profession is ‘theirs’ (the names Khan and Patel are currently the most common names for a medical doctor in the UK) whilst failing to act when they underperform or commit acts of negligence or perversion because we fear being branded ‘racist’. Additionally, we are providing health tourists with a first class service and denuding developing countries of their most highly skilled health professionals, which seems morally indefensible to me, especially if we are to be judged by the liberal and ethical standards we are supposed to be upholding. So, in short, I think we can materially benefit from a mass outflow of the post-’97 immigrants, up-skill the workforce with a view to advancing our technological infrastructure and preserve and improve fundamental services like the British NHS with a planned programme of awareness raising and aspiration building so that increasing numbers of whites want to move into these fields, as was the case in previous generations.

Polls recording the attitudes of indigenous Europeans towards non-European immigrants consistently show that this view is popular. But how do you justify it morally? That’s the first thing. The second is, What about the many families of non-European origin that, nevertheless, have been here for several generations and are all citizens, born and bred in Europe? Are we to start rounding them up and shipping them out? And, if so, what would determine an ‘ethnically compatible’ country? Many are of mixed origin too, which would further complicate the issue, not just practically, but morally as well.

Yes, indeed, it is a popular view and one that should have had a major impact on the results of several electoral cycles. In the UK alone, there have been orators like Enoch Powell predicting the current circumstance for decades. Many other far sighted people have followed him, in their own ways, in their own countries across the ‘developed world’. Why it has failed to mature into a vote winning electoral vehicle in the majority of those countries is a question worth asking? Where was the plebiscite agreeing to immigration in the first place? Why isn’t one held now across the EU or in its constituent states? These very facts undermine the claim we live in representative democracies. The current wave of concern in this area may bring Marine Le Pen to power in France but I have no doubt every judicial or technical reason will be found to make that difficult. We have an unresponsive state apparatus that is ‘owned’ and with every year the new imported peoples who they pander to in order to maintain their short-term positions grow in number. These newcomers have originated from somewhere outside Europe and that is where they should return. Where is a choice for them to make but they should not remain. On the subject of people of mixed race, we have a conundrum. I believe everyone should be free to choose their life-partner without the interference of law and statute. Love is a valuable commodity and should be appreciated in all the various forms it assumes. But look carefully at the spousal abuse rates, the single parent families, the divorce rates between people of different ethnicities. The evidence is overwhelming, if uncomfortable reading for the self-loathers like FEMEN who daub their bare breasts with statements like: ‘Immigrants fuck better’. Perhaps a picture of O.J. Simpson would be more appropriate?

What do you think drives FEMEN to engage in this type of activism?

My initial response to FEMEN was positive. I thought they were protesting against the sexual exploitation of Eastern European women. My sympathies were obvious. The long and well documented white-slaving indulged in by predominantly Turkish, Albanian, and Jewish gangsters, gathers pace year on year. It is simply incredible that such appalling human trafficking exists and that no direct intervention like sanctions on the countries that operate brothel gulag systems are enforced. I note a real double standard here when you think of the recent high profile campaign by Michelle Obama to ‘Bring back our girls’. However, I soon became disconcerted when FEMEN Founders like Sasha Shevchenko began pontificating on their Sextremist ideology. I found it to be a poisonous cocktail of anti-white male bigotry, a clichéd Leftist love of ‘the other’, and a vulgar circus for self-indulgent, self-loathing women invading churches, urinating in the street, and protesting against so-called fascists who would deport the perpetrators of organized crimes victimizing their gender, limit the freedom of communities practicing female genital mutilation, and stamp out the grooming and abuse of young girls. I might be wrong, but I don’t recall seeing FEMEN actively challenging Muslim paedophiles in the UK or across Europe. Have they made a statement about Rotherham?

The antics of Pussy Riot demean the very important work of genuine female activists such as those of the first wave of feminism like Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Willard. Women whose genuine motivations were highjacked by radical feminists like the Red Stockings Brigade of the 1960’s, themselves a mere projection of the Black Civil Rights Movement stirring up trouble across the gender divide. Look at the work of Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch, Ellen Levine, and Anne Koedt. The very titles of their books—The Female Eunuch, Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of Gender, and The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm—betray their narcissistic belligerence, over-bearing sense of entitlement, political lesbianism, and economic and syncretic Marxist agenda. And it did not end there. Bell Hooks in her book Killing Rage went so far as to justify her feelings about longing to murder an anonymous white male, no doubt because he represented the ‘oppressive patriarchy’ all these types despise. Dworkin, Wolf, Paglia, and Steinhem all follow in the same path as de Beauvoir whose Second Sex features on all ‘politically correct’ liberal arts college reading lists. I would highly recommend an antidote to such corrosive prejudice. Try the work and thoughts of Erin Pizzey, an early campaigner against domestic violence, who incidentally has subsequently been forced to spend long periods in hiding after bomb threats from radical feminist extremists; Karen Straughan of Girl Writes What and Dr Tara Palmatier who are working hard to re-balance the debate. There is also an extensive literature refuting the theories of the celebrated women’s champions listed above: Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism ? and The War against Boys; Suzanne Venker’s The Flipside of Feminism: what Conservative Women think—and men can’t say; and Ronnee Schreiber’s Righting Feminism: Conservative women and American Politics.

According to certain controversial literature on human biodiversity, South East Asians are the most intelligent population on Earth and blacks the most athletic. If we accept this as true, then, surely, it makes sense to accept immigration from anywhere, since we’ll benefit from Asian brains and West African muscle. We’d then be unbeatable both in the astrophysics laboratory and the Olympic stadium.

Let us for a minute accept such stereotyping. Should we not also insist that those self-same people accept their proven statistical predilection for corruption, rape, and violence? Would South East Asians not be able to construct free and stable societies, dominate academia, and the patent lists of inventions? Why are our West African brothers not able to master the rudiments of more complex sports like gymnastics that require the synchronization of mind and body? I have studied alongside South East Asians and their tendency is to regurgitate what they learn uncritically. I have myself beaten black athlete’s on the school running track. Take a look at the Olympic medal tables and you will see white people outperform all other races proportionally, when you consider that we represent less than 16% of the world’s population.

Surely, with better immigration criteria and controls we can keep out the criminals and attract the best talent from all over the world. And, surely, there is a role even for rote memorisation and brute force in our societies. These things are needed, and it’s down to employers to find the right individuals for the right jobs. Let’s assume for a moment that this is just a technical issue that can be cracked with excessive costs and within a reasonable timeframe. Would you still oppose immigration? And, if so, why?

I would oppose immigration instinctively not just on the scale currently being undertaken, but because I think Europe, America, and the Slavic countries neither require it or substantially benefit from it. The criminal aspect is merely a ‘touchstone’ issue. Out of control diversity is a millstone not an asset. Especially when the benefits of diversity are all pretty much one-way. We in the West are uniquely blessed, unlike other peoples with most of the requisite capabilities to meet the majority of our societal needs. There is no obligation to feed the world until our own needy and poor are brought up to a proper level of subsistence. There is an old adage that charity begins at home. Let us start there. I do not however believe in isolationism, which is counter-productive and prevents a genuine and worthwhile exchange between cultures on an equal and beneficial footing. That is not what we have now.

The Western world can point to a history of brute force and rote memorisation. I do not hold such skills in high regard unless the former is absolutely necessary and the latter is applicable and beneficial to those who have no other course of betterment. I have liaised with large numbers of Chambers of Commerce in the UK and France and employers have plenty of opportunities to create viable and profitable businesses. What is becoming increasingly apparent is the drive towards excessive profit and greed. Such materialism above and beyond physical and spiritual satiation is I believe a serious sign of moral decay. The numbers of culturally bereft nouveau-riche people swilling second-rate champagne in kidney-shaped jacuzzis sickens me. And believe me, I have met many of that sort from Dublin to Tomsk.

Isn’t nationalism just hate and fear? Most decent people think it is very narrow-minded and backward world-view. We are no longer in the 19th century, after all; this is the 21st century and we live in a globalized world. You, in fact benefit from this every day.

I see the New Right as an alternative modernist movement, building on the homogenous organic roots of traditionalism, rejecting the liberal and socialist platitudes of a utopian future populated by a coffee-coloured people. I participate, contribute and benefit from the technical effects of modernity. Indeed, it is people like myself that drive those technical knowledge based economies. But I utterly reject the racial and cultural side-effects as an unnecessary impediment. I long for a political framework which abolishes multiculturalism and privileging the ‘ethnic’ over the ‘indigenous’ not because the European needs ‘protection’ and cannot compete but because current governmental statutes deliberately discriminates in favour of ‘ethnics’ over the whites and the fact that these global parasites are a drain on our core business, the advancement of our nations and the European continent. A national community functions best when, as Italian, Sergio Salvi, in his book Patria e Matria (Fatherland and Motherland) wrote : ‘It can be tentatively defined as a human group living in a definitive territory, which differs from other groups in a number of characteristics. These can be linguistic, cultural, historical and socio-economic. It is such shared characteristics that makes the members of a group aware of their particular identity. Even when the differences are not so tangible, they still give rise to the group’s desire to organize autonomously in the fields of administration (i.e., the State), politics and culture’. For me positive not ‘petty’ nationalism is the instinctive outcome of love for family, community and place. It is a healthy and over-riding human emotion. It is limitless and according to the Nietzschean theory of eternal return, its time will inevitably come again.

But nationalism is an idea associated with the nation-state, a fairly recent creation, which is becoming increasingly irrelevant, is it not? And its adoption necessitated the suppression of regional identities to begin with. At the time of the French Revolution, for example, only 1 in 8 people living in France spoke fairly good French; only half spoke any; and even in Oïl language zones, it was usually only used in cities. The ‘national identity’, the ‘national religion’, the ‘national curriculum’—all of these are concepts associated with the nation-state. The tendency in world history has been to
go from lower levels of organisation to higher. Surely, you do not envision a return to the polis, or to the city-state (à la Geneva, as in Rousseau’s time), do you? What about the argument that hugely expensive undertakings, such as a space programme, would be far more difficult with a 1000 small regions with small economies, with 1000 currencies and 1000 languages, as opposed to with a large block like the EU, using one currency and adopting a lingua franca?

It is true that the nationalism of the last two hundred years is generally associated with the nation-state and if you are force-fed Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawn like I was at university you are getting that diaspora interpretation once again. Even a more conservative view like that of Elie Kedourie comes from the same gene pool. Historians of this type are pre-determined to view such communitarian societies as essentially reactionary in character. Thinkers from the Anglo-conservative sphere like Edmund Burke, Thomas Carlyle, Maurice Cowling, Michael Oakeshott, T.S. Eliot, Roger Scruton, and Phillip Blond are given scant attention. Likewise, John Calhoun, the Southern Agrarian School, Russell Kirk, Paul Gottried, and even Gregory Wolfe in America. De Benoist and Faye, whom I referenced earlier were largely ignored and remained only partially translated into English until Arktos Media redressed this unforgivable oversight in recent years. Consideration of the German Conservative Revolutionaries is basically forbidden unless it is to criticize them. People like Fichte, Herder, Schopenhauer, Stefan George, Ludwig Klages, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Niekisch, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Othmar Spann, Edgar Julius Jung, and the great Martin Heidegger, despite the latitude of their thought must be viewed through the politically correct lens. Even Carl Jung suffers in this regard, but then again, he did split from Freud and so according to their narrative can never be forgiven.

The significance and relevance of regionalism is in fact an issue I hint at in the text of The Partisan, where I try to balance the importance I attach to Breton, Provencal and other regional cultures to the unified fight-back against a common-enemy. I do envisage a Europe of a thousand flags under a federal entity. But you will appreciate my vision of such a European confederation would be unrecognizable from today’s EU. It would not be without dissension and dispute but it would be a debate between similar peoples of a generally shared milieu, informed and framed by some of the disprivileged thinkers I listed above. A discussion of this type is far more likely to advance in a positive direction than disputes between peoples of completely different cultures, races or susceptibilities.

In The Partisan, you seem to see the problems afflicting our societies cannot be solved through the mainstream political process. Yet, people—not only in France and in Britain, but in all the Western democracies—are given a chance to vote every four or five years , so the political establishment and the policies pursued by democratic governments simply reflect the will of the people. From this it seems obvious that your view is that of a disgruntled minority.

My first Masters degree is in Government & Politics. I fully understand the various forms of local, regional, national, and international governance structures that bind our hands. I have studied all aspects of representation, party funding and the ideologies and platforms of the supposedly competing mainstream parties. The charade of the democratic process and the pantomime of elections do not fool me or I think increasing numbers of other people. Our governments are bought and paid for by people running multi-national corporations and ‘banksters’ who do not have our best interests at heart. We may still be a disgruntled minority but a committed vanguard can lead a revolution. Did you see the street scenes on Maidan? I was there. All over Europe the Right is on the rise: in France, Austria, the Baltic States, Italy, Poland, and Hungary. Look at Casa Pound fighting the Reds on the streets of Rome, Blocco Studentesco and of course Golden Dawn in Greece. I was touched by the dignified way The Immortals conducted themselves during a torch lit parade through a small German town. Our creed is a vital and living force, not a passive celebration of former glories, or for that matter a family that lives in a lifeless, sterile museum. I have a certain respect for the sentiments expressed in the dedication to the preface of Derek Holland’s The Political Soldier II, Thoughts on Sacrifice & Struggle: ‘To the prayers of the Saints and the Blood of the Martyrs who redeemed the European Motherland in the Past. May we, the last loyal Sons of Tradition and Order, be worthy of their Example as the Final Conflict approaches.

This narrative, about a race-based revolution, would strike many as wishful thinking by a fringe minority. Most would find it impossible to justify morally, because it is ultimately selfish. The Randian view of selfishness as a virtue has had the most fertile soil grow on in a context of Classical liberalism favouring individual liberty and therefore laissez-faire capitalism, and yet, it remains a marginal view; it cannot stand the moral attacks from the egalitarians, who can present themselves as virtuous because egalitarianism is selfless, at least as they understand it, which is what counts in this realm. Moreover, the events in Ukraine are of an entirely different order, since fits the liberal narrative, which can temporarily justify Ukrainian nationalism as a struggle for freedom—freedom from another, larger, richer, more powerful nation; a well-defined opponent. There is no well-defined opponent in Europe, even within the narrative you reproduce—no one likes the bankers and politicians, but responsibility for even the worst trends is diffuse. Even Tony Blair, a proven liar and war criminal, is making a killing economically. GQ even named him philanthropist of the year, eliciting only the most supine and feeblest of complaints!

This is the exact opposite of wishful thinking. Who would want to deal with a civil war on their own soil ? Yugoslavia was a test-case. I am not advocating violence but warning against it. The Partisan is not wish fulfillment, rather a shrill cry of concern about what will occur unless positive steps are taken now. Merkel and Cameron bemoaning the failure of multiculturalism will not stave off internecine violence. Randian idealism remains a cult because it does not link the supposed virtue of selfishness with the natural philanthropism that people have felt and acted upon historically because they are inclined to support people of like character and type. It is true the banksters are an easy target but you are looking through a post 2007 perspective. Distributists like Chesterton and Belloc were saying this over 70 years ago. And they were right!

In relation to Ukraine. I first starting wearing Stepan Bandera t-shirts and drinking vodka with Ukrainian nationalist veterans in the cellars of Lviv 7 years ago. I am fully aware of how that genuine uprising was manipulated. I was holding a birthday party 200 meters from the spot where the secret police were shooting protestors in Kiev last March. I have two further manuscripts dealing directly with Russia and Ukraine completed and ready for publication.

I personally refused to meet Tony Blair despite being part of a British trade delegation set to greet the former Prime Minister to a certain Muslim country two years ago. GQ embarrasses itself and insults our intelligence with their phony polls and propaganda. Everyone knows what Blair and his type represent and advocate. Will he produce GQ’s analysis as part of his defense when he is finally brought before a court? I don’t know about you, but I would anticipate a cacophony of contemptuous laughter.

You seem to reject egalitarianism. But isn’t equality a good thing? And if you don’t, are you not saying that certain people are inferior and should be deprived of rights that everyone—and certainly the United Nations—regard as universal? How can you possibly defend that? Is it your view that women are inferior to men, that blacks are inferior to whites, and that you’d rather institutionalise privilege for some, and oppression for others, based on the qualities they are born with and therefore cannot do anything about?

Egalitarianism is a façade used by the liberals and socialists to push their proposition nation agenda. In pursuit of the Holy Grail of Equality they are more than willing to sacrifice any sense of human differentation, erasing the realities of race, gender intelligence and cultural competencies. It is not a matter of supremacy and inferiority, it is a matter of reality. I do not believe in a universal ‘lowest common denominator’. People and cultures are different and we should celebrate that very real diversity not hold it to a single standard. Cultures are at different points of development and are on different trajectories. I agree with Spengler when he said, ‘Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others . . . ’ Does that sound like someone who wishes to impose his will on others or a person hell-bent on depriving other cultures of their right to sovereignty or self- determination? I think not. Look around the world, the caste system you allude to in your question and the slave/worker relationships it implies are far more prevalent and embedded in non-white cultures. I am reminded of an axiom quoted in the short lived Rising journal: ‘A Nationalism that seeks to subdue or extirpate another culture is, in fact, not a Nationalism but an Imperialism, which threatens not only its intended victim but also its own well-being, for its distorted view of itself, and of its relations with others, can only invite disaster’.

I would not have selected a woman to be the central character in my novel if I was even remotely sexist or believed the female gender was in any way inferior. Sabine, the heroine of the book, is the very personification of a modern, intelligent, powerful woman who makes her own decisions and lives with the consequences. It is my view that we need to be far more strategic in appealing to women in order to grow our movement. They offer us the chance of a real multi-skilling asset which would greatly enhance our operations and further refine our perspective, ideals and objectives.

The issue is also not about colour but character and capability. History informs us that large numbers of diverse people find it difficult to live in close proximity without conflict. In general, the under-achievement of many non-whites living in a white community leads to demoralization, dependency and frustration. These result in violent outpourings like: in the USA—Watts 65, Newark 67, Rodney King/LA 92, Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014; in the UK—Bristol 1980, Toxteth 1981, Brixton 1981, Bradford, Burnley and Oldham 2001, London 2011; in France—Clichy-Sous-Bois, Seine-Saint-Denis, Dijon, Belfort 2005; in Italy—Rosarno in Calabria 2010; in Spain – Roquetas in Almeria 2008; in Sweden—Stockholm 2013.

I see no benefit in perpetuating such catastrophes when it is clear that peaceful co-existence and co-location is simply not possible. A race realist like myself would recommend a natural separation based on mutually agreed terms.

This argument has been made for decades, with a great deal of hard science to support it. And yet, that hasn’t made any difference. It is still rejected wholesale. We go back to the ethics of this idea: egalitarians may argue that even if equality does not exist, it is nevertheless a noble ideal, and that alone makes it worth pursuing, even if the ideal could never be achieved entirely. In short, the facts don’t really matter, because this is an ethical question, not an empirical one.

If the Convergence of Catastrophes Faye anticipates in his book is correct, and the money, food and power begins to run out, I predict it will not be noble ideals and ethics that characterize our behavior. When the tipping point is reached the fracturing of society will move rapidly on ethnic, religious and tribal lines. Like you yourself argued in one of your celebrated speaking engagements, The Collapse may not be instant, it may have already began and its ramifications may go unnoticed at first. I think it was Ezra Pound who claimed it is the artist’s antenna that first picks up the vibrations of such events. The Partisan is in some ways a literal confirmation of what my more sensitive predecessors already knew awaited us. It is the realization of the dark nightmare to come.

In that speech you refer to I also said that a collapse could well take so long that by the time it is recognised as such the consequences would have long ceased to be relevant, because those affected or warning about them would have already disappeared or were no longer powerful. I also mentioned that there is no guarantee that any collapse would have the desired outcome. The scenario you describe assumes that in a social breakdown scenario, everybody falls into line along ethnic or tribal lines. That seems likely with the non-European demographic in our part of the world, but simple everyday observation suggests Europeans, and particularly North-Western Europeans, will remain as divided as they are now, fractured along moral or morally justified ideological lines. Even the Far Right is notoriously fractuous, not only due to conflicting personalities, but also due to disagreements over ideology. The same has always been the case with the Far Left. Kevin MacDonald has pointed out that Western Europeans are low in ethnocentricity and tend to form moral communities. If that is true, then ancestry is an insufficient condition. So the question must be asked—if egalitarianism is the irritant and the stumbling block, should identitarians not be focusing on a moral critique of egalitarianism?

I would contend the collapse started around 1913 and is now well advanced. The collapse takes many forms and proceeds at a different pace along many separate fault lines. It can be identified and estimated by different social, economic, demograhic, and political indices. We recognize it at the point it affects us as individuals, or as citizens of a particular nation. Those who govern the western world are managing the decline rather than arresting it. Some I suspect are complicit in it, or are directly benefiting from the decline in some way, transferring assets and investments at favourable rates to BRIC countries, much like maggots feeding off dying flesh. There is simply no way of guaranteeing that the moral poison of egalitarianism will not have so retarded the European population that they are inhibited from protecting their own or acting in a way to promote their group’s interest. I suspect however, that when non-Europeans band together, set up exclusive organizational structures, possibly based on religious lines, commit outrageous crimes and begin ethnic-cleansing, the mantra of ‘One World, One People’ will ring very hollow. There is nothing like watching your mother, sister and daughter being raped, or your father, brother and son being eviscerated by machete wielding savages to focus the mind. A moral critique of egalitarianism is long overdue. But we should pull the mask off this expression egalitarianism and call it what it is today, the Frankfurt School strategy to undermine all aspects of the Western Superstructure.

So what if people with non-European ancestry eventually become majorities in Europe? Aren’t they just people, no better or worse than anyone else? Are we to judge them by the colour of their skin, rather than the contents of their character?

The character and nature of the future population of Europe most certainly does matter. Demographics is destiny and the central question of our age, is whether or not the civilized and educated nations of the world will continue to allow themselves to be overwhelmed by those incapable of self-improvement, other than by squatting in close proximity to the techno-industrial or welfare systems of more developed cultures with their begging bowls in hand, or will they close their borders. The behavior, values, and capabilities of a large percentage of the people of non-European ancestry who are coming to Europe at this time, like many of the Latinos fording the Rio Grande, do not stack up meritoriously under any serious degree of scrutiny. They stand condemned by any scientific or moral measurement by which you would chose to evaluate them. They threaten a new dark age, taking us back centuries. Forget customs and folkways for one moment, just look at the graphs on intelligence. IQ averages in the countries benefiting from immigration are plummeting. In what way can this be described as evolution? It represents the dilution of excellence and the low level ground war already underway throughout North America and Europe is a sure sign that things will get worse rather than better. Is Leicester or Birmingham to be the next Detroit?

Like Spengler I believe that the human species is divided into a variety of widely differing and contradictory cultures. My interpretation of nationalism carries with it the insistence of reciprocal respect. It is in essence Identitarian. What we strive for is national self- determination; sufficient living space for the preservation and development of our race, heritage and culture; a socio-economic and legal system that reflects the values of its creators; the nurturing of our art; and the continuance of our life-force into future millennia. I will not stoop to plea for this on the grounds of the Charter of Human Rights or because it can be argued that what is being done to the white indigenous populations of European nations is a form of genocide by stealth. Though you can make plausible arguments for both those scenarios. I do not ask permission to live or to survive in my own homeland. A territory that people of my lineage have inhabited for 10,000 years. I demand it and will join others in reaching for the rope to hang the traitors who opened the floodgates to the sewers of the third world and lock and load the guns when words prove insufficient to defend our homes.

What was your aim with The Partisan?

Continuing my earlier point about fiction providing a gateway to theory, I want to contribute to a vibrant cadre of New Right novelists. My desire is to re-enchant the present generation with the ideals that made Europe great in the past. We are all descendants of a great cultural and intellectual inheritance and we have to make that case time and time again. Standing on the shoulders of giants like Ernst Jünger, Ezra Pound, and Louis Ferdinand Céline, I believe there now exists the potential to develop a genre that both entertains and informs. Several recent works like your own Mister, Tito’s Perdue’s oeuvre, and Derek Turner’s Sea Changes provides the basis for a new school of storytellers, poets and singer-song-writers.

They say that those who forget the past are bound to repeat it. You have an advanced degree in history from an American university—in fact, with a major component in Black Studies. Could it be not be argued, therefore, that you of all people, should know better than to write novels like The Partisan?

On the contrary. My original Masters in Politics included a dissertation which was a critique of the Soviet system. The Black Studies component of my MA in History featured such luminaries as: Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, W.E. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Black Panthers like Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton and their ilk.
I probably know more about Communism and so-called Black Civil Rights activists than those on the left. It is an advantage to know your opponents better than they know themselves. My studies helped me identify the linkages like that between the Zionist Kivie Kaplan, who was Martin Luther King’s ‘handler’ and the communist Party of America. It was a formula that was repeated in the former Weather Underground leaders Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers involvement with the Obama Presidential candidacy. Similarly, the association between Joe Slovo and his slow-witted tool Mandela in the dismemberment of South Africa.
These simple key quotes define the reasons why I wrote The Partisan:

‘During the last Open Convention the debate was, was it or was it not the duty of any good revolutionary to kill all new born white babies. At the time it seemed like a relevant framing of an issue. The logic being that through no fault of their own these white kids are going to grow up to be a part of an oppressive racial establishment internationally, so really your duty is to kill new born white babies. And I remember one guy tentatively and apologetically suggesting that this was in contradiction to the humanitarian aims of the movement and he was booed down’ – Doug McAdam (Weather Underground)

Kill all white men, white women and their babies’ – New Black Panther Party activist Malik Zulu Shabbaz, infamous for accusations of attempting to intimidate voters at a Philadelphia polling booth in 2008.

Do you plan on getting another degree?

To quote Solzhehnitsyn : ‘without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashions of the day . . .’

One single anecdote illustrates this perfectly. Having graduated on a bright summer day under a warm Californian sun, I returned to a slate grey London, intending to commence a PhD on the historiography of the so-called European New Right. I was interviewed by an American Professor with a Jewish surname. He was wearing a tweed jacket and smiling suspiciously over an oversize bowtie. As I tried to explain my hypothesis, the would-be don twirled his pen, looking distractedly out the window.

‘Why are you interested in these people?’ he asked contemptuously, ‘they have no intellectual capital. Have you thought of an evaluation of the impact of his theological upbringing on Martin Luther King’s later Civil Rights activities?’ The door closed. So I pushed on another. Sitting down in front of my laptop, sometimes overlooking a village green in Kent, where my every key stroke echoed to the rhythm of leather on wood; and at other times walking around the Zenkov Cathedral in Almaty, staring up through the cloud formations gathering around the rim of the Zailiysky Alatau mountains, I began typing the opening lines of The Partisan. That is my PhD thesis and it is written from the heart, free of the shackles of political correctness.

I notice that, though The Partisan draws from the anti-liberal ideas of the European New Right, it also has references to the French Revolution, which represented a triumph of liberal political theory. You even have the revolutionaries sing certain verses from La Marseillaise. Is this not a somewhat idiosyncratic interpretation of history?

It is the paradox we live with. French identity and pride is inextricably linked with a familiar anthem like La Marseillaise. If fiction is to be grounded and credible it must reflect reality. I would argue that we should accept that the vast numbers required to make a movement will fix on certain icons, flags and songs as they come together. It is to be expected and it is expedient. It is the passion and emotive qualities of unifying symbolism that is important. The deconstruction of deeper ideological underpinnings can be dealt with once we have won back the streets.

The Partisan makes a clear case against the Islamisation of France, and, presumably by extension, of Europe. What is wrong is Islam having a presence in Europe? There are Muslims in Bosnia who are fully European and don’t behave at all like Abu Hamza and fellow Jihadists from Asia and North Africa or the Pakistani paedophile rings in the United Kingdom. Indeed, even the SS had a division of Bosnian Muslims.

A presence is one thing. An overwhelming presence is quite another. Whilst minarets overshadow rooftops from Barcelona to Geneva and Frankfurt to Bolton, Christian churches are being firebombed across the Muslim world and the followers of Jesus are given an option, convert or die. How long before the phony war of protest by Muslims in Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels turns into a full scale insurgency by ISIS trained zealots? There is much to admire in all faiths, cultures and identities. But we must acknowledge, they flourish best when they are rooted in their home soil and watered by the winds from their own mountain tops. Over the last half century the seeds of destruction have been scattered across our fields. It is time to take the scythe to the weeds strangling our crop.

What about David Cameron’s proposal of ‘muscular Britishness’?

There is so much one could say on this matter but I will try to keep my reply concise and free from vitriol. My recollection is that this expression was first used in a Daily Mail article on the Trojan Horse scandal, where Tory party policies relating to the freeing up of school governing bodies and head-teachers from so-called local authority bureaucracy and allowing more school independence had resulted in a myriad of predominantly Muslim schools imposing a sharia curricula, removing white governors and treating indigenous students, already a numerical minority as second class pupils. Well, I cannot say I am surprised, it reinforces what I alluded to earlier in relation to the mindset of certain burgeoning non-British communities. I contend such autonomy will be abused by these people time and time again. They simply cannot be constrained by the normal European or British notions of fair play, decency and appropriate behavior. These apologists for paedophilia and honour killings are animated by the dream of a jihadist take-over not assimilation. The fact that Cameron, along with his collaborators in the Liberal-democrats have actually overseen a growth in immigration, despite all their public statements and manifesto pledges to the contrary, calls into question both the British Prime Minister’s integrity and capability.

His fetid description of Britishness as being all about democracy, equality, and tolerance reveals a complete disengagement with the martial qualities that built an Empire from Scotland to the Falklands and Novia Scotia to Singapore. Listening to a rendition of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, would suffice in correcting such confusion. These modernist ideals also fly in the face of historic reality like the Chartist March on Monmouth, where men were shot and killed for demanding political representation; the fact that for centuries only male property owners had the right to vote and a suffragette had to throw herself under the King’s horse to raise awareness that women wanted the same opportunity; and that the everyday experience of anyone expressing concern over the behavior of non-whites is immediately shouted down with the cat-call of that much over-used word ‘racist!’ The latter apparently being a case of blatant ‘intolerance’ regardless of the merit of their argument. Double standards abound. No tolerance for the intolerant. No platform for fascists ! Government ministers signing up as members of Unite Against Fascism. So it seems, equality and tolerance are in reality in short supply in David’s Little Britain.

As for democracy, equality and tolerance are as British as the Union Flag, football and fish and chips ? Well let us deconstruct David’s assertions in true Marxist dialectical terms, shall we? It strikes me that the very existence of the Union flag is called into question by the Scottish referendum. Something Mr Cameron agreed to but did not feel he could extend to the discussion on immigration? With regards to football, it was clear from the lethargic display by the English team at the last World Cup, that the game ‘the British’ invented has now developed well beyond their current competency levels. Football is most certainly not coming home to paraphrase the line from the Three Lions Song. And the clichéd reference to fish and chips, so typical of Oxbridge champagne swilling Tories trying to appear ‘down with the boys’, can be dismissed by the simple observation that the most popular meal in the UK is now curry.

Like John Major before him speaking of the English matron pedaling through the morning mist or Mrs Thatcher hinting about the people’s concern about being ‘swamped’ by immigrants in the 79 election, Cameron has no intention of enacting muscular Britishness, whatever that means? Look who funds the party he leads. Peel back the names to reveal his own family origins and those of his advisors. Indeed, those of his predecessors. Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson, Keith Joseph, Malcolm Rifkind, Alex Carlisle, Michael Howard, Edwina Currie, John Bercow and Keith Joseph. Check the following list of Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Labour MP’s, Ministers and Peers of the realm (the following is only indicative, not comprehensive) : Sam Gyimah, Kwasi Kwarteng, Reham Chisti, Baroness Warsi, Priti Patel, Alok Sharma, Nadhim Zahami, Kishwer Falkner, Sandip Verma, Mohamed Sheikh, Nat Wei, Maurice Saatchi, Satyendra Prasanno Sinha, Lord Taylor of Warwick, Patricia Scotland, Navnit Dhozlakia, Herman Ouseley, Floella Benjamin, Meral Hussein-Ece, Zahida Manzour, Rumji Vergee, Doreen Lawrence, Paul Boateng, Lord Darzi, Bill Morris, Baron Bhattacharrya, Baron Chan, Amir Bhatia, Baron Adebowale, Baron Parekh, Baron Patel, Baroness Pashar, Nazir Ahmed, Baroness Uddin, Baron Ali, Keith Vaz, Valerie Vaz, Chuka Umunna, Yasmin Qureshi, Ed Milliband, and George Galloway. Now ask yourself are such people likely to enact muscular Britishness?

And before we settle back and think this is an isolated situation, please take a look at the political ‘movers and shakers’ in the United States and closer to home, in Europe itself. It is not hard to find the same egregious behaviour perpetrated in the same quarters by the same self-interested parties.

Why did you choose a female protagonist?

I wanted to create a positive role model for those young women sympathetic to our shared traditions and thinking about becoming active in the movement. The Left have to some extent mythologized in book and film form the likes of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin. To my mind these were two emotionally bereft, politically shallow and nihilistic women. Sabine was created in direct opposition to these latter day martyrs of the German Autumn. I can foresee a time when some of our best exponents will be women. I long to stand beside them in the shadow of fluttering Spartan pennants on the field of Poitiers.

Is there hope for Europe beyond liberalism?

There most certainly is. First, we must acknowledge the significance of integral traditionalism to the life and continuity of the homogenous community. Then we need the energy and vital radicalism of revolutionary conservatism to simultaneously conserve and transform those parts of our culture that are (a) worthy of preservation and (b) in vital need of evolution or eradication.

Isn’t liberalism simply for individual liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of opportunity, and equality before the law? Are we do away with all those, and go back five hundred years—or, worse still, end up with an authoritarian police state?

The police state is already here and the prison walls are the laws imposed upon us by the equality gurus to uphold the liberal establishment. There is no real individual liberty. It is being systematically replaced by stifling conformism in both the private and public arenas. Freedom of opportunity and equality before the law increasingly only applies to non-whites. A two-tier justice system is enforced by the adoption of politically correct moral codes. Social ostracization and exclusion from the work force is practiced against dissenters. Orwell’s vision of a ruthless regime insisting on political orthodoxy is with us. We are all locked in room 101 with Winston Smith and the rats are coming.

 

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Solère, Fenek. “Interview with Fenek Solère.” Interview by Alex Kurtagic. Wermod & Wermod Publishing Group, 31 October 2014. <http://www.wermodandwermod.com/newsitems/news311020140001.html >.

 

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Curse of Victimhood & Negative Identity – Sunic

The Curse of Victimhood and Negative Identity

By Tomislav Sunic

 

Days and months of atonement keep accumulating on the European wall calendar. The days of atonement however, other than commemorating the dead, often function as a tool in boosting political legitimacy of a nation – often at the expense of another nearby nation struggling for its identity.

While the media keep reassuring us that history is crawling to an end, what we are witnessing instead is a sudden surge of new historical victimhoods, particularly among the peoples of Eastern Europe. As a rule, each individual victimhood requires a forever expanding number of its own dead within the context of unavoidable lurking fascist demons.

Expressed in the postmodern lingo of today, the modern media-made image trivializes the real death and dying into an image of a hyperreal and surreal non-event. For instance, the historical consciousness of Serbs vs. Croats, Poles vs. Germans, not to mention the victimological memories of the mutually embattled Ukrainian and Russian nationalists today, are becoming more “historical” than their previously recorded respective histories.

It seems that European nationalists do not fight any longer for their living co-ethnics, but primarily for their dead. As a result, as Efraim Zuroff correctly stated, “in post-Communist eastern Europe, [they’re] trying to play down the crimes of the Nazi cooperators and claim that the crimes of the Communists were just as bad.” (AS,” Top Nazi Hunter: Eastern Europe Rewrote the Holocaust,” by Benny Toker, Ari Yashar, January 27, 2015).

Yet Zuroff’s s remarks, however sharp, miss the wider historical context. Any day of atonement or, for that matter, any day of repentance on behalf of a victimized group, is highly conflictual, if not warmongering by its nature.

It was in the name of antifascist victimology and their real and surreal fear of the resurrection of the anticipated fascist Croatia, that local Serbs staged a bloody rebellion in Croatia in 1991. It was in the name of their own post -WWII victims, killed by the victorious Communists on the killing fields of Bleiburg in Austria in May 1945, that Croats, forty-five years thereafter, began their war of secession from the Yugoslav grip. The Ukrainians still nourish the memory of Holodomor, the Poles nurture their memories of Kaytn, the Cossacks commemorate their victims in Linz, the Russians have their numerous Kolymas, the Germans their Dresdens — locations standing not only as memorial sites, but also as symbols of just retribution in the eyes of the Other.

Crimes committed by the Communists in Eastern Europe during and after World War II were not just Allied collateral damage, or a freak, unintended accident, but a planned effort to remove millions of undesirables.

Almost by definition this raises time again the painful symbolism of Auschwitz, a locality standing not only for a specific historic and clear-cut site of large-scale dying, but also as a didactic location designated for teaching the world the meaning of worldwide tolerance. Of course, the liberation of the Auschwitz camp by the lauded Soviet troops, raises a side question regarding their previous itinerary, especially if one considers that millions of East European and ethnic German civilians were either displaced or killed by the very same Soviet troops on their way to Auschwitz in January 1945.

How genuine were the tears of European statesmen and politicians at the recent commemoration event for the Auschwitz dead will remain a matter of wide speculation and wild guesses. Suffice it to note that if one were to take a peek into the recent history of France, in 1940 the entire Communist and left-leaning intelligentsia sided with the pro-fascist Vichy regime. Of course, in the aftermath of WWII it became politically expedient for the French intellectuals to posture as ardent philo-Semites and learn hastily the antifascist vulgate.

Another case in point are modern Croat politicians, who almost without any exception, prior to 1990 were strong advocates of the unity of the Yugoslav Communist state, as well as staunch purveyors of the socialist “self-managing” economy — only to rebrand themselves shortly thereafter into either rabid nationalists or Brussels-gravitating free marketeers.

The same feigned mea culpa scenario can be observed today among the German political class which had gone a step further, as seen in the recent verbal gestures of ex-president Horst Köhler and acting president Joachim Gauck, the latter of whom stated that “there is no German identity without Auschwitz.”

One can thence surmise that without the memory of Auschwitz, EU politicians would likely be in goose-stepping unison, marching to the enchanting tunes of Giovinezza or the Horst Wessel Lied.

Some scholars seem to be well aware of the mendacious mentality of contemporary European politicians. As Shmuel Trigano notes, “while setting itself up as “new Israel,” the West recognizes in Judaism a factual, if not a juridical jurisdiction over itself.” His words signify that the West has become “Jewish “to the extent that for centuries it had kept denying the Jews their identity. It follows from this that the strange verbal construct “Judeo-Christianity” is not an elusive and dangerous oxymoron at all, but rather a symbol of self-defeating and false identity.

On the one hand, the latter day European victimologists nurture latent anti-Jewish feelings, while on the other hand, they continue formulating their ethical ukases and legal judgments almost exclusively on secularized teachings of the Hebrew sages.

Since the end of the cold war, the political class all over Europe claims its own bizarre brand of antifascist victimology by resurrecting the fascist straw man, as if the invocation of the fascist demonology could exonerate it from its fascist past and possibly give it a free pass in the eyes of Jews. It appears that liberal democracies in the EU and the USA cannot function at all without regurgitating fake philo-Semitic terms of endearment on the one hand, while indulging in a false self-denial on the other.

It might be worth considering setting up an international interfaith conference where scholars of different ethnic and intellectual backgrounds could discuss both the positive and the negative sides of different victimhoods. As of now, diverse and often conflicting victimhoods are not likely to bring about genuine reconciliation among different Europe peoples, let alone solve the rapidly emerging war of victimhoods in the increasingly racially fractured and balkanized European Union. Self-serving victimhoods only exacerbate the false prejudices of the Other and lay the ground for new conflicts.

————-

Sunic, Tomislav. “The Curse of Victimhood and Negative Identity.” Arutz Sheva: Israel News, 30 January 2015. <http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16392#.VMuCwGjF9e9 >.

 

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Wagner as Metapolitical Revolutionary – Bolton

Richard Wagner as Metapolitical Revolutionary

By Kerry Bolton

 

Karl Marx reserved a special place of contempt for those he termed “reactionists.” These comprised the alliance that was forming around his time among all classes of people, high-born and low, who aimed to return to a pre-capitalist society. These were the remnants of artisans, aristocrats, landowners, and pastors, who had seen the ravages of industrialism and money-ethics then unfolding. Where there had once been craft, community, village, the marketplace, and the church, there was now mass production, class war, the city, and the stock exchange.

Rather than deploring capitalism, as one might suppose, Marx regarded this as an indispensable phase in the “wheel of history,” of the historical dialectic, which would through a conflict of thesis and antitheses result in a socialist and eventually a communist society. This was the inevitable unfolding of history according to Marx, based on as struggle for primacy by economic interests: class struggle, where primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and communism represented a linear progression. Hence, anything that interfered with this process was “reactionism.”[1]

Capitalism itself would go through a stage of increasing internationalisation and concentration, whereby increasing numbers of bourgeois would be dispossessed and join the ranks of the proletariat that would make a revolution to overthrow capitalism.[2] Hence, Marx sought to overthrow the traditions and ethos of pre-capitalist society, and, given that dialectics means that the new “synthesis” incorporates elements of what it has overthrown, Marxian-socialism, as “reactionist” historians such as Oswald Spengler[3] and Julius Evola[4] have pointed out, was itself an aspect of capitalism.[5]

Marx came into a revolutionary milieu comprised of varying elements but which generally took inspiration from the French Revolution of 1789, with an emphasis on the “rights of man” that provided a reformist façade for the rise of the bourgeoisie. Hence these revolutionaries of the mid-19th century regarded themselves as “democrats” fighting for equality. However, they also saw the nation-state and the sovereignty of peoples as the liberating factor from princes, kings, dynasties, and empires that were seen as placing themselves above “the people.” Hence, nationalism became the revolutionary force of the century, albeit at times intended, like Jacobinism, as a prelude to a “universal republic.”

Volk and Nation as Revolutionary Forces

The German Revolution moved in a völkisch direction, where the Volk was seen as the basis of the state, and the notion of a Volk-soul that guided the formation and development of nations became a predominant theme that came into conflict with the French bourgeois liberal-democratic ideals. J. G. Fichte had laid the foundations of a German nationalism in 1807–1808 with his Addresses to the German Nation. Although like possibly all revolutionaries or radicals of the time, beginning under the impress of the French Revolution, by the time he had delivered his addresses to the German nation, he had already rejected Jacobinism, and his views became increasingly authoritarian and influenced by the Realpolitik of Machiavelli.

Johann Gottfried Herder had previously sought to establish the concept of the Volk-soul, and of each nation being guided by a spirit. This was a metaphysical conception of race, or more accurately Volk, that preceded the biological arguments of Wagner’s friend Count Arthur de Gobineau in his seminal racial treatise, The Inequality of the Human Races, which was to impress Wagner decades later. Herder’s doctrine is evident in Wagner’s, insofar as Herder stated that the Volk is the only class, and includes both King and peasant, and that “the people” are not the same as the rabble, heralded by Jacobinism and later Marxism. Herder upheld the individuality and separation of nations, that had fortuitously been separated by both natural and cultural barriers, and that these nations manifested innate differences one from the other, including in their religious outlooks.

Wagner’s rejection of the French ideals in favour of the Germanic, as one might expect, can be traced to aesthetic sensibilities, and his stay in Paris gave him a distaste for the “exaggerations” of French music.[6] In France Wagner was acquainted with Jews whom he came to distrust and said of this period that it had promoted his consciousness as a German:

On the other hand, I felt strongly drawn to gain a closer acquaintance of German history than I had secured at school. I had Raumer’s History of the Hohenstaufen within easy reach to start upon. All the great figures in this book lived vividly before my eyes. I was particularly captivated by the personality of that gifted Emperor Frederick II, whose fortunes aroused my sympathy so keenly that I vainly sought for a fitting artistic setting for them. The fate of his son Manfred, on the other hand, provoked in me an equally well-grounded, but more easily combated, feeling of opposition. . . .

Even at this time it delighted me to find in the German mind the capacity of appreciating beyond the narrow bounds of nationality all purely human qualities, in however strange a garb they might be presented. For in this I recognised how nearly akin it is to the mind of Greece. In Frederick II, I saw this quality in full flower. A fair-haired German of ancient Swabian stock, heir to the Norman realm of Sicily and Naples, who gave the Italian language its first development, and laid a basis for the evolution of knowledge and art where hitherto ecclesiastical fanaticism and feudal brutality had alone contended for power, a monarch who gathered at his court the poets and sages of eastern lands, and surrounded himself with the living products of Arabian and Persian grace and spirit–this man I beheld betrayed by the Roman clergy to the infidel foe, yet ending his crusade, to their bitter disappointment, by a pact of peace with the Sultan, from whom he obtained a grant of privileges to Christians in Palestine such as the bloodiest victory could scarcely have secured.[7]

This seemingly universalistic ideal of “humanity” is however at the root of his suspicion of the Jews as possessing traits inimical to “humanity.” Herder, Fichte, and other founders of German Idealism, including Kant, had taken the same view, their German nationalism including a certain universalism that saw the Germans as having a messianic world mission, just as the British, Jews, and Russians[8] have all held themselves to be bearers of a world mission vis-à-vis the whole of humanity. It was in Frederick however, that Wagner “beheld the German ideal in its highest embodiment.” “If all that I regarded as essentially German had hitherto drawn me with ever-increasing force, and compelled me to its eager pursuit, I here found it suddenly presented to me in the simple outlines of a legend, based upon the old and well-known ballad of ‘Tannhauser.’”[9]

Dresden Revolt and Bakunin

Having returned to Dresden from Paris in 1842, Wagner secured a position as a conductor at the Royal Theatre, a profession that failed to enthuse him over the course of seven years. However, it was here that the arch-revolutionist of anarchism, the Russian noble, Mikhail Bakunin, despite being a fugitive, sat in the audience at the public rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony conducted by Wagner, who wrote:

At its close he walked unhesitatingly up to me in the orchestra, and said in a loud voice, that if all the music that had ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives. Not many weeks after this performance it really seemed as though this world-wide conflagration would actually be kindled in the streets of Dresden, and that Bakunin, with whom I had meanwhile become more closely associated through strange and unusual circumstances, would undertake the office of chief stoker.[10]

Wagner had met Bakunin in 1848, while the Russian was a fugitive from the Austrian authorities, in the house of a friend, the republican leader August Röckel. Wagner described the visage of Bakunin when they first met: “Everything about him was colossal, and he was full of a primitive exuberance and strength. I never gathered that he set much store by my acquaintance. Indeed, he did not seem to care for merely intellectual men; what he demanded was men of reckless energy.”[11]

Bakunin looked to his fellow Slavs as what we might call the new barbarians, who could regenerate humanity, “because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilization.”[12] He could cite Hegelian dialectics at length and was committed to the destruction of the old order, and saw in the Russian peasant the best hope of starting a world conflagration. The destructive urge of the Russian giant bothered Wagner. Bakunin cared nothing for the French, although having started his ideological journey by reading Rousseau, like many radicals of the time, nor for the ideals of republicanism or democracy. Wagner however, feared that such forces of destruction, once unleashed, would annihilate all culture, and that nothing could arise again:

Was any one of us so mad as to fancy that he would survive the desired destruction? We ought to imagine the whole of Europe with St. Petersburg, Paris, and London transformed into a vast rubbish-heap. How could we expect the kindlers of such a fire to retain any consciousness after so vast a devastation? He used to puzzle any who professed their readiness for self-sacrifice by telling them it was not the so-called tyrants who were so obnoxious, but the smug Philistines. As a type of these he pointed to a Protestant parson, and declared that he would not believe he had really reached the full stature of a man until he saw him commit his own parsonage, with his wife and child, to the flames.[13]

Bakunin was untempered fury, Wagner a contemplative aesthete who was to dwell for decades on the course of revolution as a means to a higher state of humanity, and who was ultimately to influence the course of history more so than his Russian friend.

Bakunin deplored Wagner’s intention to write a tragedy entitled “Jesus of Nazareth,” and implored Wagner to make it a work of contempt towards a figure whom Bakunin regarded as a weakling, while Wagner saw in Jesus the figure of a Hero. Indeed, Wagner, who sought the redemption of man through the return to nature and the overthrow of the superficiality of a decaying civilization, a pantheist and a heathen who looked to ancient Greece, nonetheless placed a focus on Jesus as a revolutionary hero whose meaning was that of redemption from mammon. He was to state to the Dresden Patriotic Club in the revolutionary year of 1848 that God would guide the revolution against “this daemonic idea of Money . . . with all its loathsome retinue of open and secret usury, paper-juggling, percentage and banker’s speculations. That will be the full emancipation of the human race, that will be the fulfilment of Christ’s pure teaching.”[14]

Yet paradoxically, again Bakunin betrayed his own repressed aestheticism when he intently listened to Wagner play and sing The Flying Dutchman and applauded enthusiastically. Wagner saw in Bakunin a man conflicted with the “purest ideal of humanity” and “a savagery entirely inimical to all civilization.” Wagner’s ideal was “the artistic remodelling of human society.” However, Wagner’s fears subsided when he found that Bakunin’s plans for destruction were as utopian as Wagner’s reshaping of humanity by aesthetics, and for all the zeal, Bakunin had no real means or following.[15]

Bakunin was back with Wagner in 1849, after a brief sojourn to see if the Slavs could be incited, and it was in Dresden that both were involved in the city’s revolt against the King of Saxony. Wagner on his own account felt no great attraction to democratic politics, but assumed the role of revolutionary it seems through a dissatisfaction with life: “My feelings of partisanship were not sufficiently passionate to make me desire to take any active share in these conflicts. I was merely conscious of an impulse to give myself up recklessly to the stream of events, no matter whither it might lead.”[16]

Nonetheless, the German democratic revolution was seen by many, including Wagner, as the means of dismantling principalities for the purpose of creating a united German nation. It was where a dichotomy between the democratic and the völkisch revolutions arose, the first derived from French inspiration and Jewish intellectualism such as that of Heine, the second from the roots of Germany, and expressed by Fichte, Hegel, and Herder.

Wager had already issued a clarion call for “Revolution” in an essay by that name just prior to the May 1849 revolt in Dresden. Like Bakunin, his revolution was a call to instinct and to vitalism, antithetical to the intellectualism of Jewish socialists and democrats. It was a romanticism of revolt that sought the overthrow of states because they suppressed the instinct, the vitality of life that welled up from within the Volk soul. He saw revolution as a “supernatural force” and referred to it as “a lofty goddess.” Wagner wrote: “I [the revolution] am the ever rejuvenating, ever fashioning Life.” “Everything must be in a state of becoming.” “Life is law unto itself.”[17] Wagner’s ode to vital forces had no kinship with the theoretical dissertations of Marx.

Yet, Wagner’s appeal was also to the kings and princes. He saw the ideal of the King as being the first among the Volk, and not as a debased hereditary ruler representing a single class. Wagner’s idea of Kingship harkened to the primeval Germans who selected their kings from among the populace on the basis of their heroism. Like Herder, Wagner saw the populous as one class, the Volk, and what Wagner was really fighting against was a system that intervened between Volk and King. Wagner wrote a völkisch appeal for princes and people to unite against the East, albeit unpublished, possibly because it did not express the sentiments of certain Jewish liberal publishers: “The old fight against the East returns again today. The people’s sword must not rust / Who freedom wish for aye.”[18] He wrote in an article published in the Dresdener Anzeiger of the intrinsic value of Kingship, and posed the question as to whether all the issues debated by the democrats cannot nonetheless be met under the personage of the King?

I must own, however, that I felt bound to urge this king to assume a much more familiar attitude towards his people than the court atmosphere and the almost exclusive society of his nobles would seem to render possible. Finally, I pointed to the King of Saxony as being specially chosen by Fate to lead the way in the direction I had indicated, and to give the example to all the other German princes.[19]

What did inspire Wagner was the revolt in Vienna that had seen workers and students unite. Yet Wagner was repelled by the rhetoric and the demagoguery of the revolutionary movement, which he regarded as “shallow.” It was the abhorrence of an aesthete who is instinctively repelled by the mob and its leaders.[20] Referring to the Dresden revolutionary committee of which he was a member, Wagner wrote that the part he played “as in everything else, was dictated by artistic motives.”[21]

Wagner had made enemies of the Court petty officials who surrounded the King. The pressure mounted to deprive Wagner of his position as Conductor of the Royal Theatre in Dresden, although the King resisted those pressures, and Wagner assured himself that the King had understood him. However, he went for a short period to Vienna. Wagner returned to Dresden, more concerned with “theatrical reform” than with social reform.

At this time however, Wagner’s friend Röckel, released on bail from jail for his role in the revolutionary movement, began to publish a journal extolling the aims of the French anarchist theorist Proudhon, to which Wagner states he was completely converted. He regarded his aesthetic revolution as first requiring a cleansing revolt by the “socialists” and “communists.” In this he as always sought to eliminate mammon from life, and to place humanity on an aesthetic foundation.

Proudhon, as Röckel explained to him,[22] advocated the elimination of the role of the middleman, which again meant the elimination of the role of the Jew, whom Proudhon described as a typical mercantile race, “exploiting,” “anti-human,” and “parasitic.”[23] Indeed, many in the socialist movement, including even Jews such as Marx, saw the Jew as the eternal middleman and socialism as the means by which humanity, including the Jews themselves, could be emancipated from a money-god that had shaped the entirety of modern civilization. Marx expressed the attitude of many in the Young Germany movement in stating of the Jews in an article specifically on the matter:

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement. We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development—to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed—has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. This is no isolated fact. The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews.[24]

Aside from Marx himself being a huckster motivated by self-interest and the “God of money,”[25] these sentiments were the common outlook of German radicals in the milieu in which Wagner worked and were to be expressed in similar terms a decade later by Wagner in his essay Judaism in Music, for which he has become irredeemable to many Jewish, Leftist, and liberal critics.

Wagner’s friend Bakunin saw Marx and Rothschild as part of “a single profiteering sect, a people of bloodsuckers, a single gluttonous parasite . . .”[26] Bakunin, started his career as a revolutionary with the Young Hegelians in Germany, with an article published in one of their journals in 1842, entitled “Reaction in Germany.” What Bakunin advocated for his fellow Slavs was a federated Slavic republic stretching across Europe, on the ruins of the Hapsburg melting-pot. Non-Slavic minorities would live under Slavic rule.

His grandiose aim did not find favor at the Congress of Slavic Nationalities that he attended in Prague in 1848. He appealed for collaboration among German, Hungarian, and Slavic radicals. He hoped for simultaneous revolts in Bohemia, Hungary, and the German states. Paradoxically, what the chief proponent of anarchism sought was a totalitarian authority and the suppression of “all manifestations of gabbing anarchy” across the federated Slav bloc. Such were the ideals of a current of the European revolution which fermented side-by-side and fought along with Jewish intellectuals, neo-Jacobins, and bourgeois democrats, most of whom regarded for one reason or another the nation-state and/or the Volk as the means of securing freedom against dynasties and empires.

Bakunin’s internationalism was but a phase that begun with the founding of the Internationale in 1864 and ended with his disillusionment with the “masses” in 1874; his internationalist-anarchism had comprised merely ten years of his life.[27] At the time of his friendship with Wagner, as they walked about Dresden in tumult, with Prussian troops advancing, Bakunin was a Pan-Slavic anti-Semite.

On May 1, 1849 the Chamber of Deputies of Saxony was dissolved, and Röckel, having been a Deputy, now lost his legal immunity. Wagner supported Röckel in the continuation of his journal, Volksblatt, which also provided a meagre income for Röckel’s family. While Röckel escaped to Bohemia, revolution broke out in Dresden, as Wagner busily worked on Volksblatt. It was in his position as a journalist that Wagner observed the revolutionary proceedings and the loss of control of the bourgeois liberal theorists to the mob. On May 3 bells rang out from St. Anne’s church tower as a call to take up arms. On Wagner’s account, he seems to have been driven by the enthusiasm of the moment. He recounts that he looked on as though watching a drama unfold until, caught up with the zeal of the crowd, he transformed from spectator to actor:

I recollect quite clearly that from that moment I was attracted by surprise and interest in the drama, without feeling any desire to join the ranks of the combatants. However, the agitation caused by my sympathy as a mere spectator increased with every step I felt impelled to take.[28]

While the King of Saxony and his Government and officials fled, the King of Prussia ordered his troops to march on Dresden. At this time news reached Dresden that an uprising had taken place at Württemberg, with the support of the local soldiery. Wagner saw the prospect of an invasion from Prussia as an opportunity to appeal to the patriotic sentiments of the Dresden soldiers, and Volksblatt presses came out with an appeal in bold type: “Seid Ihr mit uns gegen fremde Truppen?” (Are you on our side against the foreign troops?). The appeal was ineffectual. The initial attitude of Bakunin, who emerged from his hiding place to causally wander about the barricades, smoking a cigar and deriding amateurism of the revolutionary efforts, was that the revolt was chaotic, and he saw no point in remaining to support the doomed insurrection. However a provisional government was formed, while news was coming from throughout Germany that other cities were in revolt.[29]

On May 6 the Prussian troops fired on the market square. The heroic actions of a single individual to remain, unarmed, atop the barricades while everyone fled, rallied the defenders and they thwarted the Prussian advance. This heroism was now enough for Bakunin to throw in his lot with the revolt. The revolt lasted a few weeks, before which Wagner had already left Dresden, and started making arrangements for the performance of Tannhäuser at Weimar.

Wagner’s participation in the revolt seems to have been primarily as a propagandist and he, like Bakunin, did not see much substance in it. While Bakunin was inspired by an individual act of heroism, for Wagner he had been enthused by the sight of a well formed people’s militia on the march: the forerunner of a regenerated Volk.

Wagner was regarded as one of the primary leaders of the revolt and fled to Switzerland and from there to Paris. Here again he become acquainted with the Jews as middlemen in the music world, whom he had come to distrust previously in that city. He then went back to Zurich, where he wrote the pamphlets Kunst und Revolution (Art and Revolution) and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future). Back in Paris, Wagner started writing for a German radical journal, for which he prepared a lengthy essay, Kunst und Klima (“Art and Climate”) and then went back to Zurich.[30]

With the support of many German aristocrats and other well-placed individuals, Wagner returned to Germany via Weimar. In 1863, after petitioning Saxony, he was amnestied and permitted to resettle in Dresden.[31]

Those who see Wagner “selling-out” his socialist principles for the sake of royal patronage fail to understand that his “socialism” was not some type of class struggle for the rule of the proletariat, but was for a unified Volk from out of which would emerge a Hero-King-Redeemer. He maintained his closeness to many princes and princesses, counts and countesses, until finally securing the patronage of King Ludwig of Bavaria.[32]

“Communism”: Gemeinsamkeit

If Wagner was in 1849 still making allusions to a universalistic creed that was existing uneasily within the German völkisch freedom movement, having in 1841 written of “love for Universal Man,”[33] the same year (1849) he was articulating a conception of art that was thoroughly völkisch. In The Art-Work of the Future Wagner explains the völkisch basis of art, and in so doing the intrinsically “socialist” character of art not as an expression of the artist’s ego, but the artist as expressing the Volk-soul.

Ultimately his ideas were pantheistic and heathen, seeing Nature as the basis of human action, and the artificial civilization that had subjugated Nature as the object for revolt: “The real Man will therefore never be forthcoming, until true Human Nature, and not the arbitrary statutes of the State, shall model and ordain his Life; while real Art will never live, until its embodiments need be subject only to the laws of Nature, and not to the despotic whims of Mode.”[34]

Part III of his essay is devoted to “The Folk and Art,” which in his essay on Revolution and Art just shortly before, is relegated to being subsidiary to the “universal man.” The Volk now assumes the central role as the “vital force.” The Volk were all those, regardless of class, who rejected ego and considered themselves part of a “commonality.”[35] The subversion of this is the desire for “luxury,” and the subordination of the state and the Volk to capital, industry and the machine.

This alienation of man from Nature, observed Wagner, leads to “fashion,” where the “modern artist” creates a “freshly fangled fashion,” or “a thing incomprehensible,” by resorting to “the customs and the garb of savage races in new-discovered lands, the primal fashions of Japan and China, from time to time usurp as ‘Mannerisms,’ in greater or in less degree, each several departments of our modern art.”[36]

It is with socialism or “communism” that Wagner repudiated the great enemy of the art of the future: the individual aliened from the Volk. What is translated into English as “communism” was rendered in German as Gemeinsamkeit,[37] meaning “commonality,” hence we can discern something quite different between Wagner’s “communism” and what is today understood as “communism.”

It was not until several decades later that Wagner seems to have concluded that race differences preclude the desirability of states in constant flux according to external circumstances and that the folk should be a stable unit rather than a phase along the evolution to “Universal Man.” Hence, with his friend Count Arthur de Gobineau, author of the seminal Inequality of the Human Races, which made race a physical rather than a metaphysical question, being a major new influence on his thinking, Wagner explained in an essay “Hero-dom and Christendom,” in his magazine Bayreuther Blätter, that racial mixing among “noble” and “ignoble” races results in the irredeemable fall of the noble. For Wagner the noblest of all races was the “white.” Now Wagner wrote that the “uniform equality” of humanity, which he had once dreamt of as evolving into “Universal Man” under the leadership of the free German, “is unimaginable in any but a horrifying picture.”[38]

In 1850 Wagner published Judaism in Music, an important treatise in understanding his revolutionary ideas. Since the distinct characteristics of an object can be most clearly understood by comparing it with another object, the character of the German Volk was most evident by comparing it with the perceived traits of the Jews in their midst. Wagner alludes to this in a later essay, when stating that one can most readily state what is “German” by comparison with what is Jewish.[39] Judaism in Music was also the treatise that marked Wagner as a seminal leader of modern German “anti-Semitism” as a forerunner of National Socialism.

As noted, Wagner’s views on Jews were fairly typical of the ideologues of German Idealism, and of anti-capitalist radicals such as Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx, the common belief being that Jews had detached themselves from “humanity,” and that the liberation of humanity from Jewishness would also emancipate the Jews.

As Wagner explained in Judaism in Music, he is only concerned with the Jews in culture rather than in politics or religion. As far as politics goes, with reference to Herr Rothschild as being “Jew of the Kings” rather than being content as “King of the Jews,” Wagner referred to the previous “Liberalism” of himself and his fellow radicals as “a not very lucid mental sport,” that failed to understand the true character of the Volk; and likewise, for all the radicals’ declaration on emancipating the Jews in theory, their remained an instinctive revulsion in practice.

So far from needing emancipation, the Jew “rules, and will rule, so long as Money remains the power before which all our doings and our dealings lose their force.”[40] Hence, being the middleman and the moneychanger, Jewish influence in the arts turns culture into an “art-bazaar.” While Wagner could still talk of the “Universal Man,” he nonetheless also refers in 1850 to something “disagreeably foreign” about the Jew no matter to which European nationality he belongs. While speaking the language of the nation in which he dwells, he nonetheless “speaks it always as an alien.”

Wagner had just a year previously written of Volk communities as subjected to change as per external circumstances, as a natural and desirable historical development, but here writes of a community as an enduring historical bond, and not as “the work of scattered units.” This is a development from his prior anarchistic definitions of communities as pragmatic rather than enduring: “only he who has unconsciously grown up within the bond of this community, takes also any share in its creations.”[41]

The Jew however has developed as a people, “outside the pale of any such community,’ as “splintered, soilless stock” whose communal attachment is to their God Jehova. Hence, the Jewish contribution to music, vocally, has been “a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle,” “an intolerably jumbled babbler.” It is modern society based on money that has emancipated the Jew and therefore brought the Jew into the arts.

By 1850 then, Wagner had largely disposed of any former universalistic ideals, in favor of a völkisch doctrine. Over the next few decades, having recognized the folly of previous types of radicalism, he had fully embraced a völkisch ideology that remained rooted wholly in his first calling as an artist. Wagner’s ideal remained the elevating of humanity, led by the Germans, to higher levels of Being, of that which defines what is human, towards man-as-artist manifesting his creativity and appreciation for creativity within the context of the Volk community. Hence, the following year he wrote of his transcendence of the current isms: “I am neither a republican, nor a democrat, nor a socialist, nor a communist, but–an artistic being; and as such, everywhere that my gaze, my desire and my will extend, an out and out revolutionary, a destroyer of the old by the creation of the new.”[42]

His aesthetic ideals did not temper his zeal for revolution, but enhanced them, writing to a friend, “the bloodiest hatred for our whole civilization, contempt for all things deriving from it, and longing for nature . . . only the most terrific and destructive revolution could make our civilized beasts ‘human’ again.”[43]

His “anarchism” was the type of the free Germanic Volk who did not tolerate tyrants and whose concept of “freedom” was that of communal, Volk freedom, and not the egotism of the individual, a type of “anarchism” nonetheless that was postulated by Bakunin and later by Kropotkin, that states that communities are organically formed by free association from instinct, and not imposed by laws. “The same Wagnerian spirit favouring in music the revolt of emotional inspiration against classical rules favours in politics the revolt of instinctive Volk against law,” writes Peter Viereck.[44] By 1865 he had repudiated the widespread revolutionary spirit of 1848, as “a Jewish importation of French rationalism,” Viereck states.[45] Wagner explained his rejection of the prior era of revolt, writing in 1876 that,

I have no hesitation about styling the subsequent revolutions in Germany entirely un-German. “Democracy” in Germany is purely a translated thing. It exists merely in the “Press;” and what this German Press is, one must find out for oneself. But untowardly enough, this translated Franco-Judaico-German Democracy could really borrow a handle, a pretext and deceptive cloak, from the misprised and maltreated spirit of the German Folk. To secure a following among the people, “Democracy” aped a German mien; and “Deutschthum,” “German spirit,” “German honesty,” “German freedom,” “German morals,” became catchwords disgusting no one more than him who had true German culture, who had to stand in sorrow and watch the singular comedy of agitators from a non-German people pleading for him without letting their client so much as get a word in edgewise. The astounding unsuccessfulness of the so loud-mouthed movement of 1848 is easily explained by the curious circumstance that the genuine German found himself; and found his name, so suddenly represented by a race of men quite alien to him.[46]

While critics claim that Wagner reneged on his former revolutionary ideas to curry favor with the aristocracy, his greatest patron being King Ludwig of Bavaria, his great English admirer, the Germanophilic English-born philosopher, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Wagner’s daughter Eva, said of the maestro that he remained a revolutionist from 1840 to the day of his death, on the basis that you cannot separate corrupt society from corrupt art.[47]

Wagner’s revolutionary “freedom” was the innate German instinct for freedom; not the French, nor the English nor the Jewish conceptions of humanism and liberalism, of freedom for commerce and for parliaments. That völkisch freedom could as well be served in the ancient institution of a King if that King embodied the völkisch spirit. The Wagnerian leader is a nexus with the divine and the highest embodiment of the Volk. Wagner referred to this leader who would liberate the Germans as a Volk, rather than as a class of money interests, as a “hero,” as the “folk-king” and as the legendary “Barbarossa,” the German’s King Arthur who awakens from a slumber when his people are most endangered. Wagnerians looked for the Germanic Messiah, the reborn Barbarossa as the saviour of Germany.

Even in 1848 Wagner sought a King who would embody the Volk; a King who would be “the first of the Volk” and not merely representative of a class, and he sought to elevate the King of Saxony to that position, rather than to overthrow him.[48] He was a “republican” in a very definite sense, not of wishing to overthrow the King, but of the king leading the res publica, the public–the people–the Volk–as a unitary whole. Such a “folk-king” must transcend class and selfish interests. Here we see that Wagner could have no time for the banalities of parliament or of class war. Such matters as parliaments, constitutions and parties were divisive to the völkisch organism, undermined the authority of the folk-king, and reduced the Volk to separate constituents rather than maintaining a unitary organic state.[49] However Wagner drew a distinction between King and Monarchy, because a monarchy is a hereditary class that does not arise from the Volk, and indeed we see how monarchies might disintegrate over centuries, where they are based on birth rather than achievement, and that birth-lineage often becomes degenerate and effete, perhaps with no recourse other than through revolution, which more generally throws up a rulership that is worse. Wagner looked to the primeval Germanic Kinship drawn from selection among free men, which was the rule of Herodom, the divine Hero[50] often the plot of his operas.

In his essay Art and Revolution Wagner introduced his remarks by an admission of his own muddled thinking at the time of the Dresden revolt. He sought to amalgamate the ideas of Hegel, Proudhon, and Feuerbach into a revolutionary philosophy. “From this arose a kind of impassioned tangle of ideas, which manifested itself as precipitance and indistinctness in my attempts at philosophical system.”[51]

Wagner explains what he means by his frequent references to “communism,” not wishing to be misconstrued as being a supporter of the Paris Commune, as was then frequently supposed, but as a term meaning the repudiation of “egos.” Wagner explains that by “communism” he means the collectivity of the “Volk,” “that should represent the incomparable productivity of antique brotherhood, while I looked forward to the perfect evolution of this principle as the very essence of the associate Manhood of the Future.” This Germanic conception was antithetical to the Jacobin, liberal-democratic mind of the French.[52] He regarded Germany as having a mission among the nations, by virtue of a “German spirit,” to herald a new dawn of creativity that renounced egotism and the economics that was being driven by it.[53] Quoting Thomas Carlyle[54] on the epochal impact of the French Revolution and the “spontaneous combustion” of humanity, Wagner saw this mission of the “German race” as one of creation rather than destruction and the “breaking out of universal mankind into Anarchy.”[55] In Art and Revolution Wagner addressed the question of the impact of the late 1840s European revolt on the arts, and where the artist had been in the era preceding the tumult. It was the “Hellenic race,” once overcoming its “Asiatic birthplace,” which birthed a “strong manhood of freedom,” most fully expressed in their god Apollo, who had slain the forces of Chaos, to bring forth “the fundamental laws of the Grecian race and nation.” It was in Greece, including Sparta, where art and state and war-craft were an organic entity.[56] The Athenian “spirit of community” fell to “egoism” and split itself along a thousand lines of egoistic cleavage.”[57] The degradation of the Roman world succumbed to “the healthy blood of the fresh Germanic nations,” whose blood poured into the “ebbing veins of the Roman world.” But art had sold itself to “commerce.” Mercury, the God of commerce, had become the ruler of “modern art.”

This is Art, as it now fills the entire civilised world! Its true essence is Industry; its ethical aim, the gaining of gold; its aesthetic purpose, the entertainment of those whose time hangs heavily on their hands. From the heart of our modern society, from the golden calf of wholesale Speculation, stalled at the meeting of its cross-roads, our art sucks forth its life-juice, borrows a hollow grace from the lifeless relics of the chivalric conventions of mediaeval times, and—blushing not to fleece the poor, for all its professions of Christianity—descends to the depths of the proletariat, enervating, demoralising, and dehumanising everything on which it sheds its venom.[58]

In ancient Greece, by contrast, art belonged to the entire populace; not to a single class. The contrast between Greek and modern education shows the differences between a Volk and a state of classes educated for commerce:

The Greeks sought the instruments of their art in the products of the highest associate culture: we seek ours in the deepest social barbarism. The education of the Greek, from his earliest youth, made himself the subject of his own artistic treatment and artistic enjoyment, in body as in spirit: our foolish education, fashioned for the most part to fit us merely for future industrial gain, gives us a ridiculous, and withal arrogant satisfaction with our own unfitness for art, and forces us to seek the subjects of any kind of artistic. . . .[59]

The task was not to restore the Greek or anything else from the past, but to create new art, freed from commerce:

From the dishonouring slave-yoke of universal journeymanhood, with its sickly Money-soul, we wish to soar to the free manhood of Art, with the star-rays of its World-soul; from the weary, overburdened day-labourers of Commerce, we desire to grow to fair strong men, to whom the world belongs as an eternal, inexhaustible source of the highest delights of Art.[60]

Only the “mightiest force of revolution”[61] can overthrow the money despotism and inaugurate the free “republic” where the whole populace partakes of the art that expresses its spirit. This however, was not a revolution of “the windy theories of our socialistic doctrinaires,” who sought to level and proletarianize until there is no possibility of art. The aim was not universal proletarianization, as per Karl Marx, but what Wagner called “artistic manhood, to the free dignity of Man,”[62] emancipated from the economic treadmill.

Bayreuth as the Center of the German Revolution

Wagner’s redemption of humanity, having found a patron in Ludwig of Bavaria, became centred on Bayreuth, where Wagner’s pageants could be performed and a journal published, the Bayreuther Blätter, that would articulate the political and aesthetic ideals implicit in those operas. Wagner proceeded with a metapolitical strategy decades before the Italian Communist theorist Gramsci formulated his strategy of the “long march through the institutions” and subtlety redirecting a society by first changing its culture.[63]

These ideas, together with the racial doctrines of de Gobineau, were intended to permeate German society, emanating from a cultural and meptapolitical center, Bayreuth, intended as the microcosm of a völkisch classless society. The festival house at Bayreuth was what Wagner’s son-in-law Chamberlain called in 1900 “a standard for armed warriors to rally around” in their revolt against corruption.[64]

Under the Second Reich of Bismarck, Bayreuth became a center of pilgrimage for those seeking “what Wagner’s Meistersinger chorus calls ‘the holy German art.’” The Second Reich relied on Bayreuth to give it an historical and mythic cult connecting the Golden Age of Frederick Barbarossa with that of Bismarck. Without Bayreuth the Bismarckian Reich would have been nothing more than a Prussian state edifice. Wagner Societies throughout Germany propagated the ideas emanating from Bayreuth.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, whose racial history[65] championed the Holy Grail of Germandom, expounded mystically in Wagner’s operas, was the direct link between Wagner and the Third Reich. It seems likely that Wagner would have viewed with enthusiasm the mass parades of armed Volk, the purging of the arts, the breaking of usury, and the mantle of virtual kingship assumed by a war veteran from out of the people.

As we have seen, whether Wagner’s views are explicitly the doctrinal antecedent for National Socialism per se is questionable. His views on race and Jews were quite typical of revolutionaries of the time, including those of non-Germans such as Proudhon and Bakunin. History has been kinder to these than to Wagner because, despite their revolutionary political commitment, and Wagner’s primary commitment to the arts, it was Wagner who has been the greater influence on history, attesting to the greater influence of the metapolitical over the political.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 46-47.

[2] Marx, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 41, 44.

[3] Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), Vol. II, pp. 402, 506.

[4] Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 2002), pp. 167-68.

[5] Cf. K. R. Bolton, “Marx Contra Marx: A Traditionalist Conservative Critique of the Communist Manifesto,” http://www.anamnesisjournal.com/issues/2-web-essays/43-kr-bolton K. R. Bolton, The Banking Swindle: Money Creation and the State (London: Black House Publishing 2013), “The Real Right’s Answer to Socialism and Capitalism,” pp. 152-74.

[6] Richard Wagner, My Life, Part I, http://www.wagneropera.net/MyLife/RW-My-Life-Part-1-1813-1842.htm

[7] Ibid.

[8] British = a civilizing mission, Jews = a domineering material mission, Russians = a metaphysical mission.

[9] Richard Wagner, My Life, Part I, op. cit.

[10] Ibid., Part II, http://www.wagneropera.net/MyLife/RW-My-Life-Part-2-1842-50.htm

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Cited by Paul Lawrence Rose, Wager: Race and Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 52.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Wagner, “Revolution,” cited by Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004), p. 109.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Richard Wagner, Part II, op. cit.

[20] K. R. Bolton, Artists of the Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012), inter alia.

[21] Richard Wagner, Part II, op. cit.

[22] Paul Lawrence Rose, p. 29.

[23] Ibid., p. 64.

[24] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” February, 1844 in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher; http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[25] K. R. Bolton, The Psychotic Left (London: Black House Publishing, 2013), pp. 70-100.

[26] Michael Bakunin, 1871, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1924), pp. 204-16.

[27] Max Nomad, Apostles of Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939), “The Heretic: Michael Bakunin: Apostle of ‘Pan-Destruction’.”

[28] Richard Wagner, My Life, Part II, op. cit.

[29] Wagner, Part II, ibid.

[30] Wagner, Part II, ibid.

[31] Wagner, Part IV, http://www.wagneropera.net/MyLife/RW-My-Life-Part-4-1861-1864.htm

[32] Wagner, Part IV, ibid.

[33] Richard Wagner, “Art and Climate,” 1841, p. 264, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagclim.htm

[34] Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future, 1849, p. 72, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm

[35] Richard Wagner, Art-Work, ibid., Chapter I, Part III.

[36] Richard Wagner, ibid., Part V, p. 88.

[37] Richard Wagner, ibid., Part V, p. 147.

[38] Richard Wagner, “Hero-dom and Christendom,” 1881, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/waghero.htm

[39] Richard Wagner, “What is German,” 1876, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagwiger.htm

[40] Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music, 1850, p. 82, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda.htm

[41] Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music, p. 85.

[42] Richard Wager, 1851, cited by Paul Lawrence Rose, op. cit., p. 177.

[43] Wagner, 1851, cited by Rose, ibid.

[44] Peter Viereck, op. cit., p. 108.

[45] Ibid., p. 109.

[46] Richard Wagner, What is German, op. cit., p. 167.

[47] Cited by Peter Viereck, ibid., p. 109.

[48] Peter Viereck, op. cit., pp. 111-112.

[49] Ibid., p. 112. Viereck calls all of this “monstrous sophistries.”

[50] Richard Wagner, Bayreuther Blatter, September 1881.

[51] Richard Wagner (1849) “Art and Revolution,” in The Art-Work of the Future, op. cit., Vol. 1, 1895, p. 26.

[52] Richard Wagner (1849) Art and Revolution, ibid, p. 29.

[53] Richard Wagner, ibid, p. 30.

[54] Thomas Carlyle, History of Frederick II of Prussia, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25808/25808-h/25808-h.htm

[55] Richard Wagner, Art and Revolution, op. cit., p. 30.

[56] Richard Wagner, ibid., p. 33.

[57] Richard Wagner, ibid., p. 36.

[58] Richard Wagner, ibid., p. 43.

[59] Richard Wagner, ibid., p. 48.

[60] Richard Wagner, ibid., p. 55.

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid., p. 57.

[63] Steven Yates, “Understanding the Culture War,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/yates/yates24.html

[64] Peter Viereck, op. cit., p. 115.

[65] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Lane Company, 1911).

 

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Bolton, Kerry. “Wagner as Metapolitical Revolutionary.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 20 May 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/wagner-bicentennial-symposiumwagner-as-metapolitical-revolutionary/ >.

 

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Marx, Moses & the Pagans in the Secular City – Sunic

Marx, Moses, and the Pagans in the Secular City

By Tomislav Sunic

 

With the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity, the period of pagan Europe began to approach its end. During the next millennium the entire European continent came under the sway of the Gospel-sometimes by peaceful persuasion, frequently by forceful conversion. Those who were yesterday the persecuted of the ancient Rome became, in turn, the persecutors of the Christian Rome. Those who were previously bemoaning their fate at the hands of Nero, Diocletian, or Caligula did not hesitate to apply “creative” violence against infidel pagans. Although violence was nominally prohibited by the Christian texts, it was fully used against those who did not fit into the category of God’s “chosen children.” During the reign of Constantine, the persecution against the pagans took the proportions “in a fashion analogous to that whereby the old faiths had formerly persecuted the new, but in an even fiercer spirit.” By the edict of A.D. 346, followed ten years later by the edict of Milan, pagan temples and the worship of pagan deities came to be stigmatized as magnum crimen. The death penalty was inflicted upon all those found guilty of participating in ancient sacrifices or worshipping pagan idols. “With Theodosius, the administration embarked upon a systematic effort to abolish the various surviving forms of paganism through the disestablishment, disen-dowment, and proscription of surviving cults.”(1) The period of the dark ages began.

Christian and inter-Christian violence, ad majorem dei gloriam, did not let up until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Along with Gothic spires of breathtaking beauty, the Christian authorities built pyres that swallowed nameless thousands. Seen in hindsight, Christian intolerance against heretics, Jews, and pagans may be compared to the twentieth-century Bolshevik intolerance against class opponents in Russia and Eastern Europe-with one exception: it lasted longer. During the twilight of imperial Rome, Christian fanaticism prompted the pagan philosopher Celsus to write: “They [Christians] will not argue about what they believe-they always bring in their, `Do not examine, but believe’. . .” Obedience, prayer, and the avoidance of critical thinking were held by Christians as the most expedient tools to eternal bliss. Celsus described Christians as individuals prone to factionalism and a primitive way of thinking, who, in addition, demonstrate a remarkable disdain for life.(2) A similar tone against Christians was used in the nineteenth century by Friedrich Nietzsche who, in his virulent style, depicted Christians as individuals capable of displaying both self-hatred and hatred towards others, i.e., “hatred against those who think differently, and the will to persecute.”(3) Undoubtedly, early Christians must have genuinely believed that the end of history loomed large on the horizon and, with their historical optimism, as well as their violence against the “infidels,” they probably deserved the name of the Bolsheviks of antiquity.

As suggested by many authors, the break-up of the Roman Empire did not result only from the onslaught of barbarians, but because Rome was already “ruined from within by Christian sects, conscientious objectors, enemies of the official cult, the persecuted, persecutors, criminal elements of all sorts, and total chaos.” Paradoxically, even the Jewish God Yahveh was to experience a sinister fate: “he would be converted, he would become Roman, cosmopolitan, ecumenical, gentile, goyim, globalist, and finally anti-Semite. “(!)(4) It is no wonder that, in the following centuries, Christian churches in Europe had difficulties in trying to reconcile their universalist vocation with the rise of nationalist extremism.

Pagan Residues in the Secular City

Although Christianity gradually removed the last vestiges of Roman polytheism, it also substituted itself as the legitimate heir of Rome. Indeed, Christianity did not cancel out paganism in its entirety; it inherited from Rome many features that it had previously scorned as anti-Christian. The official pagan cults were dead but pagan spirit remained indomitable, and for centuries it kept resurfacing in astounding forms and in multiple fashions: during the period of Renaissance, during Romanticism, before the Second World War, and today, when Christian Churches increasingly recognize that their secular sheep are straying away from their lone shepherds. Finally, ethnic folklore seems to be a prime example of the survival of paganism, although in the secular city folklore has been largely reduced to a perishable commodity of culinary or tourist attraction. (5) Over the centuries, ethnic folklore has been subject to transformations, adaptations, and the demands and constraint of its own epoch; yet it has continued to carry its original archetype of a tribal founding myth. Just as paganism has always remained stronger in the villages, so has folklore traditionally been best protected among the peasant classes in Europe. In the early nineteenth century, folklore began to play a decisive role in shaping national consciousness of European peoples, i.e., “in a community anxious to have its own origins and based on a history that is more often reconstructed than real.”(6)

The pagan content was removed, but the pagan structure remained pretty much the same. Under the mantle and aura of Christian saints, Christianity soon created its own pantheon of deities. Moreover, even the message of Christ adopted its special meaning according to place, historical epoch, and genius loci of each European people. In Portugal, Catholicism manifests itself differently than in Mozambique; and rural Poles continue to worship many of the same ancient Slavic deities that are carefully interwoven into the Roman Catholic liturgy. All over contemporary Europe, the erasable imprint of polytheist beliefs continues to surface. The Yule celebration represents one of the most glaring examples of the tenacity of pagan residues. (7) Furthermore, many former pagan temples and sites of worship have been turned into sacred places of the Catholic Church. Lourdes in France, Medjugorje in Croatia, sacred rivers, or mountains, do they not all point to the imprint of pre-Christian pagan Europe? The cult of mother goddess, once upon a time intensely practiced by Celts, particularly near rivers, can be still observed today in France where many small chapels are built near fountains and sources of water. (8) And finally, who could dispute the fact that we are all brain children of pagan Greeks and Latins? Thinkers, such as Virgil, Tacitus, Heraclitus are as modern today as they were during the dawn of European civilization.

Modern Pagan Conservatives

There is ample evidence that pagan sensibility can flourish in the social sciences, literature, and arts, not just as a form of exotic narrative but also as a mental framework and a tool of conceptual analysis. Numerous names come to mind when we discuss the revival of Indo-European polytheism. In the first half of the twentieth century, pagan thinkers usually appeared under the mask of those who styled themselves as “revolutionary conservatives,” “aristocratic nihilist,” “elitists”- in short all those who did not wish to substitute Marx for Jesus, but who rejected both Marx and Jesus.(9) Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger in philosophy, Carl Gustav Jung in psychology, Georges Dumézil and Mircea Eliade in anthropology, Vilfredo Pareto and Oswald Spengler in political science, let alone dozens of poets such as Ezra Pound or Charles Baudelaire-these are just some of the names that can be associated with the legacy of pagan conservatism. All these individuals had in common the will to surpass the legacy of Christian Europe, and all of them yearned to include in their spiritual baggage the world of pre-Christian Celts, Slavs, and Germans.

In the age that is heavily laced with the Biblical message, many modern pagan thinkers, for their criticism of Biblical monotheism, have been attacked and stigmatized either as unrepentant atheists or as spiritual standard-bearers of fascism. Particularly Nietzsche, Heidegger, and more recently Alain de Benoist came under attack for allegedly espousing the philosophy which, for their contemporary detractors, recalled the earlier national socialist attempts to “de-christianize” and “repaganize” Germany. These appear as unwarranted attacks. Jean Markale observes that “Naziism and Stalinism were, in a sense, also religions because of the acts that they triggered. They were also religions insofar as they implied a certain Gospel, in an etymological sense of the word . . . Real paganism, by contrast, is always oriented towards the realm of sublimation. Paganism cannot be in the service of temporal power.”(11) Paganism appears more a form of sensibility than a given political credo, and with the exhaustion of Christianity, one should not rule out its renewed flourishing in Europe.

Paganism Against the Monotheist Desert

Two thousand years of Judeo-Christian monotheism has left its mark on the Western civilization. In view of this, it should not come as a surprise that glorification of paganism, as well as the criticism of the Bible and Judeo-Christian ethics-especially when they come from the right wing spectrum of society-are unlikely to gain popularity in the secular city. It suffices to look at American society where attacks against Judeo-Christian principles are frequently looked at with suspicion, and where the Bible and the Biblical myth of god’s “chosen people” still play a significant role in the American constitutional dogma. (12) Although the secular city has by now become indifferent to the Judeo-Christian theology, principles that derive from Judeo-Christian ethics, such as “peace,” “love,” and “universal brotherhood,” are still showing healthy signs of life. In the secular city many liberal and socialist thinkers, while abandoning the belief in Judeo-Christian theology, have not deemed it wise to abandon the ethics taught by the Bible.

Whatever one may think about the seemingly obsolete, dangerous, or even derogatory connotation of the term “European paganism,” it is important to note that this connotation is largely due to the historical and political influence of Christianity. Etymologically, paganism is related to the beliefs and rituals that were in usage in European villages and countryside. But paganism, in its modern version, may connote also a certain sensibility and a “way of life” that remains irreconcilable with Judeo-Christian monotheism. To some extent European peoples continue to be “pagans” because their national memory, their geographic roots, and, above all, their ethnic allegiances-which often contain allusions to ancient myths, fairy tales, and forms of folklore bear peculiar marks of pre-Christian themes. Even the modern resurgence of separatism and regionalism in Europe appears as an offshoot of pagan residues. As Markale observes, “the dictatorship of Christian ideology has not silenced those ancient customs; it has only suppressed them into the shadow of the unconscious” (13). The fact that all of Europe is today swept by growing nationalism bears witness to the permanency of the pagan sense of tribal historical memory.

In European culture, polytheistic beliefs began to dwindle with the consolidation of Christianity. In the centuries to come, the European system of explanation, whether in theology or, later on, in sociology, politics, or history gradually came under the sway of Judeo-Christian outlook of the world. David Miller observes that Judeo-Christian monotheism considerably altered the Europeans’ approach to the social sciences as well as to the overall perception of the world. In view of these changes, who can reassure us about our own objectivity, especially when we try to understand the pagan world with the goggles of the postmodern Judeo-Christian man? It is no wonder that when paganism was removed from Europe the perceptual and epistemological disruptions in sciences also followed suit. Consequently, with the consolidation of the Judeo-Christian belief, the world and the world phenomena came under the sway of the fixed concepts and categories governed by the logic of “either-or,” “true or false,” and “good or evil,” with seldom any shadings in between. The question, however, arises whether in the secular city-a city replete with intricate choices and complex social differences that stubbornly refuse all categorizations-this approach remains desirable.(13) It is doubtful that Judeo-Christian monotheism can continue to offer a valid solution for the understanding of the increasingly complex social reality that modern man faces in the secular city. Moreover, the subsequent export of Judeo-Christian values to the antipodes of the world caused similar disruptions, yielding results opposite from those originally espoused by the Westerners, and triggering virulent hatred among non-Western populations. Some authors have quite persuasively written that Christian ecumenism, often championed as the “white man’s Christian burden,” has been one of the main purveyors of imperialism, colonialism, and racism in the Third World.(14)

In the modern secular city, the century-long and pervasive influence of Christianity has significantly contributed to the view that each glorification of paganism, or, for that matter, the nostalgia of the Greco-Roman order, is outright strange or at best irreconcilable with contemporary society. Recently, however, Thomas Molnar, a Catholic philosopher who seems to be sympathetic to the cultural revival of paganism, noted that modern adherents of neo-paganism are more ambitious than their predecessors. Molnar writes that the aim of pagan revival does not have to mean the return to the worship of ancient European deities; rather, it expresses a need to forge another civilization or, better yet, a modernized version of the “scientific and cultural Hellenism” that was once a common reference for all European peoples. And with visible sympathy for the polytheistic endeavors of some modern pagan conservatives, Molnar adds: “The issue is not how to conquer the planet but rather how to promote an oikumena of the peoples and civilizations that have rediscovered their origins. The assumption goes that the domination of stateless ideologies, notably the ideology of American liberalism and Soviet socialism, would come to an end. One believes in rehabilitated paganism in order to restore to peoples their genuine identity that existed before monotheist corruption.”(15)

Such a candid view by a Catholic may also shed some light on the extent of disillusionment among Christians in their secular cities. The secularized world full of affluence and richness does not seem to have stifled the spiritual needs of man. How else to explain that throngs of European and American youngsters prefer to trek to pagan Indian ashrams rather than to their own sacred sites obscured by Judeo-Christian monotheism?

Anxious to dispel the myth of pagan “backwardness,” and in an effort to redefine European paganism in the spirit of modern times, the contemporary protagonists of paganism have gone to great lengths to present its meaning in a more attractive and scholarly fashion. One of their most outspoken figures, Alain de Benoist, summarizes the modern meaning of paganism in the following words:

Neo-paganism, if there is such a thing as neo-paganism, is not a phenomenon of a sect, as some of its adversaries, but also some of the groups and chapels, sometimes well-intentioned, sometimes awkward, frequently funny and completely marginal, imagine … What worries us today, at least according to the idea which we have about it, is less the disappearance of paganism but rather its resurgence under primitive and puerile form, affiliated to that “second religion,” which Spengler justifiably depicted as characteristic of cultures in decline, and of which Julius Evola writes that they “correspond generally to a phenomenon of evasion, alienation, confused compensation, without any serious repercussion on reality. (16)

Paganism, as a profusion of bizarre cults and sects, is not something modern pagan thinkers have in mind. A century ago, pagan philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had already observed in Der Antichrist that, when a nation becomes too degenerate or too uprooted, it must place its energy into various forms of Oriental cults, and simultaneously “it must change its own God” (979). Today, Nietzsche’s words sound more prophetic than ever. Gripped by decadence and rampant hedonism, the masses from the secular city are looking for the vicarious evasion in the presence of Indian gurus or amidst a host of Oriental prophets. But beyond this Western semblance of transcendence, and behind the Westerners’ self-hatred accompanied by puerile infatuation with Oriental mascots, there is more than just a transitory weariness with Christian monotheism. When modern cults indulge in the discovery of perverted paganism, they also may be in search of the sacred that was driven underground by the dominating Judeo-Christian discourse.

From Monotheist Desert to Communist Anthropology

Has monotheism introduced into Europe an alien “anthropology” responsible for the spread of egalitarian mass society and the rise of totalitarianism, as some pagan thinkers seem to suggest? Some authors appear to support this thesis, arguing that the roots of tyranny do not lie in Athens or Sparta, but are traceable, instead, to Jerusalem. In a dialogue with Molnar, de Benoist suggests that monotheism upholds the idea of only one absolute truth; it is a system where the notion of the enemy is associated with the evil, and where the enemy must be physically exterminated (cf. Deut. 13). In short, observes de Benoist, Judeo-Christian universalism, two thousand years ago, set the stage for the rise of modern egalitarian aberrations and their modern secular offshoots, including communism.

That there are totalitarian regimes “without God,” is quite obvious, the Soviet Union for example. These regimes, nonetheless, are the “inheritors” of the Christian thought in the sense as Carl Schmitt demonstrated that the majority of modern political principles are secularized theological principles. They bring down to earth a structure of exclusion; the police of the soul yield its place to the police of the state; the ideological wars follow up to the religious wars.(17)

Similar observations were echoed earlier by the philosopher Louis Rougier as well as by the political scientist Vilfredo Pareto, both of whom represented the “old guard” of pagan thinkers and whose philosophical researches were directed toward the rehabilitation of European political polytheism. Both Rougier and Pareto are in agreement that Judaism and its perverted form, Christianity, introduced into the European conceptual framework an alien type of reasoning that leads to wishful thinking, utopianism, and the ravings about the static future.(18) Similar to Latter-day Marxists, early Christian belief in egalitarianism must have had a tremendous impact on the deprived masses of northern Africa and Rome, insofar as it promised equality for the “wretched of the earth,” for odium generis humani, and all the proles of the world. Commenting on Christian proto-communists, Rougier recalls that Christianity came very early under the influence of both the Iranian dualism and the eschatological visions of the Jewish apocalypses. Accordingly, Jews and, later on, Christians adopted the belief that the good who presently suffer would be rewarded in the future. In the secular city, the same theme was later interwoven into modern socialist doctrines that promised secular paradise. “There are two empires juxtaposed in the space,” writes Rougier, “one governed by God and his angels, the other by Satan and Belial.” The consequences of this largely dualistic vision of the world resulted, over a period of time, in Christian-Marxist projection of their political enemies as always wrong, as opposed to Christian-Marxist attitude considered right. For Rougier, the Greco-Roman intolerance could never assume such total and absolute proportions of religious exclusion; the intolerance towards Christians, Jews, and other sects was sporadic, aiming at certain religious customs deemed contrary to Roman customary law (such as circumcision, human sacrifices, sexual and religious orgies). (19)

By cutting themselves from European polytheistic roots, and by accepting Christianity, Europeans gradually began to adhere to the vision of the world that emphasized the equality of souls, and the importance of spreading God’s gospel to all peoples, regardless of creed, race, or language (Paul, Galatians 3:28). In the centuries to come, these egalitarian cycles, in secularized forms, entered first the consciousness of Western man and, after that, entire humankind. Alain de Benoist writes:

According to the classical process of the development and degradation of cycles, the egalitarian theme has entered our culture from the stage of the myth (equality before God), to the stage of ideology (equality before people); after that, it has passed to the stage of “scientific pretension” (affirmation of the egalitarian fact). In short, from Christianity to democracy, and after that to socialism and Marxism. The most serious reproach which one can formulate against Christianity is that it has inaugurated this egalitarian cycle by introducing into European thought a revolutionary anthropology, with universalist and totalitarian character. (20)

One could probably argue that Judeo-Christian monotheism, as much as it implies universalism and egalitarianism, also suggests religious exclusiveness that directly emanates from the belief in one undisputed truth. The consequence of the Christian belief in theological oneness-e.g., that there is only one God, and therefore only one truth-has naturally led, over the centuries, to Christian temptation to obliterate or downplay all other truths and values. One can argue that when one sect proclaims its religion as the key to the riddle of the universe and if, in addition, this sect claims to have universal aspirations, the belief in equality and the suppression of all human differences will follow suit. Accordingly, Christian intolerance toward “infidels” could always be justified as a legitimate response against those who departed from the belief in Yahveh’s truth. Hence, the concept of Christian “false humility” toward other confessions, a concept that is particularly obvious in regard to Christian attitude toward Jews. Although almost identical in their worship of one god, Christians could never quite reconcile themselves to the fact that they also had to worship the deity of those whom they abhorred in the first place as a deicide people. Moreover, whereas Christianity always has been a universalist religion, accessible to everybody in all corners of the world, Judaism has remained an ethnic religion of only the Jewish people. (21) As de Benoist writes, Judaism sanctions its own nationalism, as opposed to nationalism of the Christians which is constantly belied by the Christian universalist principles. In view of this, “Christian anti-Semitism,” writes de Benoist, “can justifiably be described as a neurosis.” Might it be that the definite disappearance of anti-Semitism, as well as virulent inter-ethnic hatred, presupposes first the recantation of the Christian belief in universalism?

Pagan Notion of the Sacred

To the critics who argue that polytheism is a thing of the prehistoric and primitive mind incompatible with modern societies, one could respond that paganism is not necessarily a return to “paradise lost” or a nostalgia for the restoration of the Greco-Roman order. For pagan conservatives, to pledge allegiance to “paganism” means to rekindle Europe’s historical origins, as well as to revive some sacred aspects of life that existed in Europe prior to the rise of Christianity. One could also add that, as far as the alleged supremacy or modernity of Judeo-Christianity over the backwardness of Indo-European polytheism is concerned, Judeo-Christian religions, in terms of their modernity, are no less backward than pagan religions. To emphasize this point de Benoist writes:

Just as it was yesterday a grotesque spectacle to see the “pagan idols” denounced by Christian missionaries, who were themselves enamored of their own bric-a bracs, so it is somewhat ridiculous to see the (European) “past” denounced by those who never tire of praising Judeo-Christian continuity, and who refer us to the example of “always modern” Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and other proto-historic Beduins. (22)

According to some pagan thinkers, Judeo-Christian rationalization of historical time has precluded the projection of one’s own national past and, in so doing, it has significantly contributed to the “desertification” of the world. In the last century, Ernest Renan observed that Judaism is oblivious of the notion of the sacred, because the “desert itself is monotheistic.”(23) In a similar tone, Alain de Benoist in L’éclipse, while quoting Harvey Cox’s The Secular City, writes that the loss of the sacred, which is causing today the “disenchantment” of the modern polity, resulted as the legitimate consequence of the Biblical renunciation of history. First, the disenchantment of nature had started with the Creation; the desacralization of politics with the Exodus; and the deconsecration of values with the Alliance of Sinai, especially after the interdiction of idols (129). Continuing with similar analyses, Mircea Eliade, an author himself influenced by pagan world, adds that Judaic resentment of pagan idolatry stems from the ultra-rational character of Mosaic laws that rationalize all aspects of life by means of a myriad of prescriptions, laws, and interdictions:

Desacralization of the Nature, devaluation of cultural activity, in short, the violent and total rejection of cosmic religion, and above all the decisive importance conferred upon spiritual regeneration by the definite return of Yahveh, was the prophets’ response to historical crises menacing the two Jewish kingdoms. (24)

Some might object that Catholicism has its own form of the sacred and that, unlike some other forms of Judeo-Christian beliefs, it displays its own spiritual transcendence. But there are reasons to believe that the Catholic concept of the sacred does not emerge sui generis, but rather as a substratum of the Christian amalgam with paganism. As de Benoist notes, Christianity owes its manifestation of the sacred (holy sites, pilgrimages, Christmas festivities, and the pantheon of saints) to the indomitable undercurrent of pagan and polytheistic sensibility. Therefore, it seems that the pagan revival today represents less a normative religion, in the Christian sense of the word, than a certain spiritual equipment that stands in contrast to the religion of Jews and Christians. Consequently, as some pagan thinkers suggest, the possible replacement of the monotheistic vision of the world by the polytheistic vision of the world could mean not just the “return of gods” but the return of the plurality of social values as well.

Courage, personal honor, and spiritual and physical self-surpassment are often cited as the most important virtues of paganism. In contrast to Christian and Marxian utopian optimism, paganism emphasizes the profound sense of the tragic, the tragi0c-as seen in Greek tragedies-that sustains man in his Promethean plight and that makes his life worth living. (25) It is the pagan sense of the tragic that can explain man’s destiny-destiny, which for old Indo-Europeans “triggered action, endeavor, and self-surpassment. (26) Hans Günther summarizes this point in the following words:

Indo-European religiosity is not rooted in any kind of fear, neither in fear of deity nor in fear of death. The words of the Latter-day Roman poet, that fear first created the Gods (Statius, Thebais, 3:661: primus in orbe fecit deos timor), cannot be applied to the true forms of Indo-European religiosity, for wherever it has unfolded freely, the “fear of the Lord” (Proverbs, Solomon 9, 10; Psalm 11, 30) has proved neither the beginning of belief nor of wisdom. (27)

Some have suggested that the greatest civilizations are those that have shown a strong sense of the tragic and that have had no fear of death.(28) In the pagan concept of the tragic, man is encouraged to take responsibility before history because man is the only one who gives history a meaning. Commenting on Nietzsche, Giorgio Locchi writes that, in pagan cosmogony, man alone is considered a forger of his own destiny (faber suae fortunea), exempt from biblical or historical determinism, “divine grace,” or economic and material constraints.(29) Paganism stresses a heroic attitude toward life as opposed to the Christian attitude of culpability and fear toward life. Sigrid Hunke writes of the essentialization of life, since both life and death have the same essence and are always contained in both. The life, which at any moment is face-to-death and with-death, renders the future permanent in each instant, and life becomes eternal by acquiring an inscrutable profundity, and by assuming the value of eternity.

For Hunke, along with other authors of pagan sensibility, in order to restore these pagan virtues in the secular city, man must first abandon the dualistic logic of religious and social exclusion, “a logic which has been responsible for extremism not only among individuals, but also among parties and peoples, and which, starting out from Europe, has disseminated into the world this dualistic split that has acquired planetary proportions.”(30) To achieve this ambitious goal, Western man must first rethink the meaning of history.

The Terror of History

Modern pagans remind us that Judeo-Christian monotheism has substantially altered man’s attitude toward history. By assigning history a specific goal, Judeo-Christianity has devalued all past events, except those that display the sign of Yahveh’s theophany. Undoubtedly, Yahveh does admit that man may have a history, but only insofar as history is bestowed with an assigned goal, a certain goal, and a specific goal. Should man, however, continue to cling to the concept of history that evokes collective memory of his tribe or people, he runs the risk of provoking Yahveh’s anger. For Jews, Christians, as well as Marxists, historicity is not the real essence of man; the real essence of man is beyond history. One could observe that the Judeo-Christian concept of the end of history correlates well with modern egalitarian and pacifist doctrines that inspire themselves, often unknowingly, with the Biblical proverb: “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” (Isa. 11:6). De Benoist notes in L’éclipse that, unlike the pagan concept of history that involves organic solidarity and communal ties, the monotheistic concept of history creates divisions. Accordingly, Yahveh must forbid “mixtures” between the present and the past, between people and the divine, between Israel and the goyim (31). Christians, of course, will reject Jewish exclusiveness-as their century-long religious proselytism amply demonstrates-but they will, nonetheless, retain their own brand of exclusiveness against “infidel” Moslems, pagans, and other “false believers.”

Contrary to the Judeo-Christian dogma that asserts that historical time starts from one unique father, in European paganism there are no traces of the beginning of the time; instead, historical time is seen as a perpetual recommencement, the “eternal return” emanating from multiple and different fathers. In pagan cosmogony, as de Benoist writes, time is the reflection of the non-linear or spheric conception of history, a conception in which the past, the present, and the future are not perceived as stretches of cosmic time irrevocably cut off from each other, or following each other on the single line. Instead, present, past, and future are perceived as dimensions of actuality (L’éclipse 131). In pagan cosmogony, it is incumbent to each people to assign itself a role in history, which in practice means that there cannot be self-appointed peoples occupying the central stage in history. Similarly, just as it is erroneous to speak about one truth, it is equally wrong to maintain that entire humanity must pursue the same and unique historical direction, as proposed by Judeo-Christian universalism and its secular fall-out “global democracy.”

The Judeo-Christian concept of history suggests that the flow of historical time is monolinear and, therefore, limited by its significance and meaning. Henceforth, for Jews and Christians, history can be apprehended only as a totality governed by a sense of ultimate end and historical fulfillment. History for both Jews and Christians appears at best parenthetical, at worst an ugly episode or a “vale of tears,” which one of these days must be erased from earth and transcended by paradise.

Furthermore, Judeo-Christian monotheism excludes the possibility of historical return or “recommencement”; history has to unfold in a predetermined way by making its way toward a final goal. In the modern secular city, the idea of Christian finality will be transposed into a myth of a finite “classless” society, or the apolitical and ahistorical liberal consumer society. Here is how de Benoist sees it in L’éclipse:

Legitimization by the future that replaces legitimization of the immemorial times authorizes all uprootedness, all emancipations” regarding the adherence in its original form. This utopian future that replaces a mythic past is incidentally always the generator of deceptions, because the best that it announces must constantly be put off to a later date. Temporality is no longer a founding element of the deployment of the being who tries to grasp the game of the world temporality is pursued from one goal, reached from one end; expectation and no longer communion. To submit globally the historical becoming to an obligatory meaning means in fact to shut history in the reign of objectivity, which reduces choices, orientations and projects. (155-56)

Only the future can enable Jews and Christians to “rectify” the past. Only the future assumes the value of redemption. Henceforth, historical time for Jews and Christians is no longer reversible; from now on each historical occurrence acquires the meaning of divine providence, of “God’s” finger, or theophany. In the secular city, this line of monolinear thinking will give birth to the “religion” of progress and the belief in boundless economic growth. Did not Moses receive the Laws at a certain place and during a certain time, and did not Jesus later preach, perform miracles, and was he not crucified at a specifically recorded time and place? Did not the end of history begin for Communists with the Bolshevik Revolution, and for liberals with the American century? These “divine” interventions in human history are never again to be repeated. Eliade summarizes this point in the following words:

Under the “pressure of history” and supported by the prophetic and Messianic experience, a new interpretation of historical events dawns among the children of Israel. Without finally renouncing the traditional concept of archetypes and repetitions, Israel attempts to “save” historical events by regarding them as active presences of Yahveh. . . . Messianism gives them a new value, especially by abolishing their [historical events] possibility of repetition ad infinitum. When the Messiah comes, the world will be saved once and for all and history will cease to exist.(31)

Directly commanded by the will of Yahweh, history henceforth functions as a series of events, with each event becoming irrevocable and irreversible. History is not only discarded, but also fought against. Pierre Chaunu, a contemporary French historian, observes that “the rejection of history is a temptation of those civilizations that have emerged out of Judeo-Christianity. “(32) In a similar tone, Michel Maffesoli writes that totalitarianism occurs in those countries that are hostile to history, and he adds: “We enter now into the reign of finality propitious to political eschatology whose outcome is Christianity and its profane forms, liberalism and Marxism.”(33)

The foregoing observations might need some comments. If one accepts the idea of the end of history, as proposed by monotheists, Marxists, and liberals, to what extent, then, can the entire historical suffering be explained? How is it possible, from liberal and Marxist points of view, to “redeem” past oppressions, collective sufferings, deportations, and humiliations that have filled up history? Suffice it to say that this enigma only underscores the difficulty regarding the concept of distributive justice in the egalitarian secular city. If a truly egalitarian society miraculously emerges, it will be, inevitably, a society of the elect-of those who, as Eliade noted, managed to escape the pressure of history by simply being born at a right time, at a right place, and in a right country. Paul Tillich noted, some time ago, that such equality would result in immense historical inequality, since it would exclude those who, during their life time, lived in unequal society, or-if one can borrow Arthur Koestler’s words-who perished with a “shrug of eternity.” (34) These quotes from Koestler and Eliade illustrate the difficulties of modern salutary ideologies that try to “arrest” time and create a secular paradise. Would it not be better in times of great crisis to borrow the pagan notion of cyclical history? This seems to be the case with some East European peoples who, in times of crisis or catastrophes, frequently resort to popular folklore and myths that help them, in an almost cathartic manner, better to cope with their predicament. Locchi writes:

The new beginning of history is feasible. There is no such thing as historical truth. If historical truth truly existed then there would be no history. Historical truth must time and again be obtained; it must always be translated into action. And this is exactly-for us-the meaning of history. (35)

We might conclude that for Christians it is Christ who defines the value of a human being, for a Jew it is Judaism that gauges someone’s “choseness,” and for Marx it is not the quality of man that defines the class, but rather the quality of the class that defines man. One thus becomes “elect” by virtue of his affiliation to his class or his religious belief.

Pagans or, Monotheists: Who is More Tolerant?

As observed, Yahveh, similar to his future secular successors, in the capacity of the single truth-maker, is opposed to the presence of other gods and other values. As a reductionist, whatever exists beyond his fold must be either punished or destroyed. One can observe that, throughout history, the monotheistic true believers have been encouraged, in the name of “higher” historic truths, to punish those who strayed away from Yahveh’s assigned direction. Walter Scott writes:

In many instances the Mosaic law of retaliation, an “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” was invoked by the Israelites to justify the atrocities which they visited upon their fallen enemies … The history of the Israelite campaigns shows that the Hebrews were most often the aggressors. (36)

Thus, in the name of historical truth, the ancient Hebrews could justify the slaughtering of Canaanite pagans, and in the name of Christian revelation, Christian states legitimized wars against infidel heretics, Jews, and pagans. It would be imprecise, however, in this context to downplay the pagan violence. The Greek destruction of the city of Troy, the Roman destruction of Carthage, clearly point to the frequently total and bloody nature of wars conducted by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Yet, it is also important to stress that seldom do we find among the ancients the self-righteous attitude toward their victories that accompanied Christian and Jewish military victories. Seldom, if ever, did the Romans or the Greeks attempt, after the military destruction of their opponents, to convert them to their own deities. By contrast, both the Gospel and the Old Testament are interspersed with acts of self-congratulatory justice that will, in turn, justify “redeeming” violence against opponents. Similarly, in the modern secular city, to wage war for democracy has become a particularly nefarious means for erasing all different polities that refuse the “theology” of global progress and that shun the credo of “global democracy.” To underscore this point, Pierre Gripari writes that Judaism, Christianity, and their secular offshoots Naziism, socialism, and liberalism, are barbarian doctrines that cannot have their place in the modern world (60).

By contrast, notes de Benoist, a system that recognizes an unlimited number of gods acknowledges also the plurality of cults offered in their honor, and above all, the plurality of customs, political and social systems, and conceptions of the world of which these gods are sublime expressions.(37) It follows from this that pagans, or believers in polytheism, are considerably less inclined to intolerance. Their relative tolerance is primarily attributed to the acceptance of the notion of the “excluded third” (“der ausgeschlossene Dritte”), as well as the rejection of Judeo-Christian dualism.

To underscore pagan relative tolerance, it is worth mentioning the attitude of Indo-European pagans toward their opponents during military confrontation. Jean Haudry remarks that war for pagans was conducted according to strict regulations; war was declared according to the rituals that beseeched first the help of gods and asked for their anger against the adversary. The conduct of war was subject to well-defined rules and consequently, “the victory consisted of breaking the resistance, and not necessarily of destroying the adversary” (161). In view of the fact that Judeo-Christianity does not permit relative truths, or different and contradictory truths, it will frequently adopt the policy of total war toward its opponents. Eliade writes that the “intolerance and fanaticism characteristic of the prophets and missionaries of the three monotheistic religions, have their model and justification in the example of Yahveh.”(38)

How does the monotheist intolerance transpire in the purportedly tolerant secular city? What are the secular consequences of Judeo-Christian monotheism in our epoch? In contemporary systems, it is the opposite, the undecided – i.e., those who have not taken sides, and those who refuse modern political eschatologies – that become the targets of ostracism or persecution: those who today question the utility of the ideology of “human rights,” globalism, or equality. Those, in short, who reject the liberal and communist credo.

In conclusion, one could say that, in the very beginning of its development, Judeo-Christian monotheism set out to demystify and desacralize the pagan world by slowly supplanting ancient pagan beliefs with the reign of the Judaic Law. During this century-long process, Christianity gradually removed all pagan vestiges that co-existed with it. The ongoing process of desacralization and the “Entzauberung” of life and politics appear to have resulted not from Europeans’ chance departure from Christianity, but rather from the gradual disappearance of the pagan notion of the sacred that coexisted for a long time with Christianity. The paradox of our century is that the Western world is saturated with Judeo-Christian mentality at the moment when churches and synagogues are virtually empty.

Notes

1. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1957), 254-55, 329.
2. T. R. Glover, The Conflict of Religion in the Early Roman Empire (1909; Boston: Beacon, 1960), 242, 254, passim.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, in Nietzsches Werke (Salzburg/Stuttgart: Verlag “Das Berlgand-Buch,” 1952), 983, para. 21.
4. Pierre Gripari, L’histoire du méchant dieu (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1987), 101-2.
5. Michel Marmin, “Les Piegès du folklore’,” in La Cause des peuples (Paris: édition Le Labyrinthe, 1982), 39-44.
6. Nicole Belmont, Paroles paiennes (Paris: édition Imago, 1986), 160-61.
7. Alain de Benoist, Noël, Les Cahiers européens (Paris: Institut de documentations et d’études européens, 1988).
8. Jean Markale, et al., “Mythes et lieux christianisés,” L’Europe paienne (Paris: Seghers, 1980), 133.

9. About European revolutionary conservatives, see the seminal work by Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland, 1919-1933 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972). See also Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).
10. See notably the works by Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (München: Hoheneichen Verlag, 1933). Also worth noting is the name of Wilhelm Hauer, Deutscher Gottschau (Stuttgart: Karl Gutbrod, 1934), who significantly popularized Indo-European mythology among national socialists; on pages 240-54 Hauer discusses the difference between Judeo-Christian Semitic beliefs and European paganism.
11. Jean Markale, “Aujourd’hui, l’esprit païen?” in L’Europe paienne (Paris: Seghers, 1980), 15. The book contains pieces on Slavic, Celtic, Latin, and Greco-Roman paganism.
12. Milton Konvitz, Judaism and the American Idea (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978), 71. Jerol S. Auerbach, “Liberalism and the Hebrew Prophets,” in Commentary 84:2 (1987):58. Compare with Ben Zion Bokser in “Democratic Aspirations in Talmudic Judaism,” in Judaism and Human Rights, ed. Milton Konvitz (New York: Norton, 1972): “The Talmud ordained with great emphasis that every person charged with the violation of some law be given a fair trial and before the law all were to be scrupulously equal, whether a king or a pauper” (146). Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen and Gruppen (1922; Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1965), 768; also the passage “Naturrechtlicher and liberaler Character des freikirchlichen Neucalvinismus,” (762-72). Compare with Georg Jellinek, Die Erklärung der Menschen-und Bürgerrechte (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1904): “(t)he idea to establish legally the unalienable, inherent and sacred rights of individuals, is not of political, but religious origins” (46). Also Werner Sombart, Die Juden and das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Verlag Duncker and Humblot, 1911): “Americanism is to a great extent distilled Judaism (“geronnene Judentum”)” (44).
13. David Miller, The New Polytheism (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 7, passim.
14. Serge Latouche, L’occidentalisation du monde (Paris: La Découverte, 1988).
15. Thomas Molnar, “La tentation paienne,” Contrepoint 38 (1981):53.
16. Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-on etre païen? (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), 25.
17. Alain de Benoist, L’éclipse du sacré (Paris: La Table ronde, 1986), 233; see also the chapter, “De la sécularisation,” 198-207. Also Carl Schmitt, Die politische Theologie (München and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1922), 35-46: “(a)ll salient concepts in modern political science are secularized theological concepts” (36).
18. Gerard Walter, Les origines du communisme (Paris: Payot, 1931): “Les sources judaiques de la doctrine communiste chrétienne” (13-65). Compare with Vilfredo Pareto, Les systèmes socialistes (Paris: Marcel Girard, 1926): “Les systèmes métaphy-siques-communistes” (2:2-45). Louis Rougier, La mystique démocratique, ses origines ses illusions (Paris: éd. Albatros, 1983), 184. See in its entirety the passage, “Le judaisme et la révolution sociale,” 184-187.
19. Louis Rougier, Celse contre les chrétiens (Paris: Copernic, 1977), 67, 89. Also, Sanford Lakoff, “Christianity and Equality,” in Equality, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapaman (New York: Atherton, 1967), 128-30.
20. Alain de Benoist, “L’Eglise, L’Europe et le Sacré,” in Pour une renaissance culturelle (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 202.
21. Louis Rougier, Celse, 88.

22. Comment peut-on être païen?, 170, 26. De Benoist has been at odds with the so-called neo-conservative “nouveaux philosophes,” who attacked his paganism on the grounds that it was a tool of intellectual anti-Semitism, racism, and totalitarianism. In his response, de Benoist levels the same criticism against the “nouveaux philo-sophes.” See “Monothéisme-polythéisme: le grand debat,” Le Figaro Magazine, 28 April 1979, 83: “Like Horkheimer, like Ernest Bloch, like Levinas, like René Girard, what B. H. Lévy desires is less `audacity,’ less ideal, less politics, less power, less of the State, less of history. What he expects is the accomplishment of history, the end of all adversity (the adversity to which corresponds the Hegelian Gegenständlichkeit), disincarnate justice, the universal peace, the disappearance of frontiers, the birth of a homogenous society . . .”
23. Ernest Renan, Histoire générale des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853), 6.
24. Mircae Eliade, Histoire des croyances et des idées religieuses (Paris: Payot, 1976), 1:369, passim.
25. Jean-Marie Domenach, Le retour du tragique (Paris: édition du Seuil, 1967), 44-45.
26. Jean Haudry, Les Indo-Européens (Paris: PUF, 1981), 68.
27. Hans. K. Günther, The Religious Attitude of Indo-Europeans, trans. Vivian Bird and Roger Pearson (London: Clair Press, 1966), 21.
28. Alain de Benoist and Pierre Vial, La Mort (Paris: ed. Le Labyrinthe, 1983), 15.
29. Giorgio Locchi, “L’histoire,” Nouvelle Ecole 27/28 (1975):183-90.
30. Sigrid Hunke, La vraie religion de l’Europe, trans. Claudine Glot and Jean-Louis Pesteil (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985), 253, 274. The book was first published under the title Europas eigene Religion: Der Glaube der Ketzer (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lubbe, 1980).
31. Mircae Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1965), 106-7.
32. Pierre Chaunu, Histoire et foi (Paris: Edition France-Empire, 1980), quoted by de Benoist, Comment peut-on être païen? 109.
33. Michel Maffesoli, La violence totalitaire (Paris: PUF, 1979), 228-29.
34. See Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Scribner’s, 1963), 41, passim. “Shrug of eternity” are the last words Arthur Koestler uses in his novel Darkness at Noon (New York: Modern Library, 1941), 267.
35. Georgio Locchi, et al., “Über den Sinn der Geschichte,” Das unvergängliche Erbe (Tübingen: Grabert Verlag, 1981), 223.
36. Walter Scott, A New Look at Biblical Crime (New York: Dorset Press, 1979), 59.
37. Comment peut-on être païen? 157-58.
38. Mircea Eliade, Histoire des croyances, 1:194.

 

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Sunic, Tomislav. “Marx, Moses, and the Pagans in the Secular City.” CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter 1995). Text retrieved from: <http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/tomsunic/sunic2.html >.

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

 

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Evola’s Political Endeavors – Hansen

Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors by H.T. Hansen (PDF – 574 KB):

Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors

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Hansen, H.T. “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors.” Introduction to Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Postwar Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, pp. 1-104. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2002.

Note: On Evola’s theories, see also: “Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s ‘Traditionalist’ Critique of Modernity” by Thomas F. Bertonneau, “Julius Evola on Race” by Tomislav Sunic, “Tradition?” by Alain de Benoist, “A True Empire: Form and Presuppositions of a United Europe” by Julius Evola, “The Defining Element of the Conservative Revolution” by Julius Evola, and various other articles by or about Evola.

 

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In Search of Anti-Semitism – Gottfried

In Search of Anti-Semitism

By Paul Gottfried

Among those authors considered politically incorrect, and even those considered really politically incorrect, Kevin MacDonald holds a special place of honor or shame. A feature story in the May 9 (Los Angeles) Jewish Journal describes this small-boned, soft-spoken 64-year-old professor of psychology at California State University at Long Beach as “the professors anti-Semites love.” Alluding to the fact that university authorities have been trying to force the outspoken MacDonald out of his tenured position, the article complains about “the downside of academic freedom.” We also learn that this clinical psychologist is “considered the foremost anti-Semitic thinker by civil rights experts.”

It would be ridiculous to imagine the same ignominy would be visited on MacDonald if he were a black sociologist making critical remarks about white people. Assuming that he were a designated victim, he would be allowed to compose for profit and prestige diatribes against white Christian males, possibly from a cushy university post at whatever salary illustrious defamers of Euro-Americans are now earning. And if he were a Jew or Christian attacking Christians as the agents of human evil, the now browbeaten MacDonald could make a king’s ransom at some well-heeled institute or as a feature writer for The New Republic or New York Times.

Readers of this website are aware of the lunatic double standard that has been imposed on intellectuals throughout the Western world, almost always by Westerners themselves, for the purpose of determining who can criticize whom. (By now this has become a permanent aspect of “democratic” regimes.)

Plainly MacDonald is not playing by the establishment rules when he observes that Jews have worked at weakening those non-Jewish societies in which they have lived. Although this thesis seems to me to be a bit too generalized, I have no objection to letting MacDonald go on trying to prove it.

In his recently published anthology of essays, Cultural Insurrections, it would be proper to note that MacDonald makes assumptions here that I have questioned in my review of his three-volume, monumental work on the Jews since Moses. I continue to find some of the cognitive disparities he stresses between Ashkenazi Jews and Euro-Americans to be overstated or at least under-demonstrated. If they were in fact as stark as MacDonald insists they are, I would believe that Jews have a right to treat Euro-Americans as natural inferiors or as people probably unfit to sustain their civilization (or what remains of it) without a Jewish master class. I am also skeptical about the possibility of extrapolating from the way a particular Jewish subculture has behaved in the U.S., Canada, and parts of Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to how Jews have conducted themselves everywhere at all times.

It also seems that certain Jewish behavioral patterns MacDonald outlines are not uniquely Jewish. Other minorities such as Protestant non-conformists and later Irish Catholics in England (and in the U.S.), Huguenots in France, and Old Believers in Tsarist Russia, have shown exactly the same propensity for radical social causes, partly as acts of defiance against what they viewed as regimes that had failed to accord them full legal and/or social recognition.

Sephardic and German Jews who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed hell-bent on joining upper-class Protestants and they usually disappeared into the dominant gene pool within a few generations. I am not convinced that Jewish behavior toward Christians follows a biologically determined strategy aimed at the control of resources. My lifelong impression from being around them is that Jews don’t like Christians because of historical grievances, just the way Irish Catholics continue to rage against Protestant Yankees for real amd imaginary offenses inflicted on their ancestors.

Although friend-enemy distinctions are evident here, it is doubtful that these dividing lines operate strictly according to biological conditioning. And it seems even less likely that they are shaped by the natural desire to control resources, in competition against other groups. Much of what MacDonald cites as Jewish behavior is hostility, mixed with anxiety, rather than competitiveness. MacDonald is illustrating culturally subversive activities that go well beyond any attempt to achieve group competitive advantage measured by socio-economic success. Assailing the moral foundations of a Christian middle-class society as pathological and anti-Semitic, a tendency MacDonald proves Jewish intellectuals have repeatedly engaged in, is not simply an attack on the material resources of the dominant society. What MacDonald highlights looks like unfriendly behavior; and one may certainly question the biological reductionism used to explain it.

Having raised these critical points, I should also mention that MacDonald builds a thoroughly cogent case that the creation of “modernity” and the launching of a succession of indignant social crusades against bourgeois Christian civilization by Jewish intellectuals and political activists has usually betokened some degree of malice. But as I mentioned above, and as MacDonald is well aware, Jews are not the only minority that has attempted to subvert dominant outside cultures. They’re just better at doing this than any other group. Jewish intellectuals and activists excel at agitating in the name of some presumed moral high ground, acting like the cunning or resentful priestly class, to which Nietzsche compared the Jews in Genealogy of Morals. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jews are good at transmitting “slave morality,” without being (immediately) infected themselves.

MacDonald’s newest anthology offers further evidence of what he understands as the Jewish practice of burrowing from within to weaken the cultural coherence of gentile societies. And he offers abundant proof that this burrowing has and is continuing to occur. Whether he is dealing with the predominantly Jewish Frankfurt School and its cultural influences, the role played by Jewish activists in opposing controls on immigration throughout the last hundred years, the penetration and takeover of the American Right by the neoconservatives, or the pressures placed on politicians and political parties by Zionist organizations, MacDonald creates the impression that Jews have worked collectively toward two ends: lessening the cohesion of gentile society and promoting specifically Jewish national ends.

An argument I have used in the past to counter his generalizations is that “not every Jewish community at all times and in all places have acted in this way”; nonetheless, MacDonald could respond to my objections by pointing out that his analysis applies to American Jews for at least the last several generations. And he offers evidence that the same behavioral patterns as the one he discerns among the predominantly Eastern European Jews in the U.S. could already be seen among the relatively assimilated German Jews since their emancipation in Europe.

The same radicalization could be perceived among German Jewish intellectuals going back to the beginnings of Marxian socialism. And the cultural Marxism that has now taken off in a big way had its origin among alienated or embittered German Jews of the interwar period, who later emigrated to the U.S. The present multicultural fixation that has taken Western Europe, Canada and the U.S. by storm was largely the creation of German Jews.

But the group MacDonald’s brief leaves me wondering about most is the white Christian majority: They are jerked around because they have accepted this role for themselves. My own works on the politics of guilt underlines this tendency: Euro-Americans have become emotionally and sociologically predisposed toward aggrieved minorities that condemn them for politically incorrect attitudes. But have Jewish priests been necessary to get the Christian majority to practice slave morality? My answer is that “it helps but isn’t absolutely necessary.”

The institution of learning at which I work and the German Anabaptist denomination to which it was long connected are paradigmatically PC. Furthermore, Lancaster County, where our college is located, registered the largest vote for Obama in the Democratic primary of any county in Pennsylvania that’s not predominantly black. This result was owed much to Church of the Brethren, whose members in their zany anti-racism and open-borders postures make Abe Foxman sound relatively sane. The chance that such radicalized Protestants, who live in their own social bubble, would have picked up their lunacies from any Jew (me perhaps?) is next to nil. They came by their madness on their own, as a “peace church,” and as late entrees into the modern age after having spent an eternity on isolated farms in the Pennsylvania countryside. Like Jimmy Carter, Jim Wallis, Bill Moyers, and most of the Catholic hierarchy on the question of immigration, these Anabaptists exemplify aspects of Christianity that are totally compatible with cultural Marxism and the politics of Western suicide. They do not need Jews, blacks, or North African Muslims to teach them self-destructive behavior, any more than Swedes or Spaniards need the villains in MacDonald’s script to hand over their countries to hostile Muslims from North Africa.

The most interesting point for me in MacDonald’s volume is his presentation of movement conservative goyim. He is absolutely on the money in documenting their servility in relation to their neoconservative puppet-masters. The most startling aspect of this relation is the degree to which the servile class allows itself to be instructed. Irving Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Douglas Feith, and other neoconservative spokesmen have indeed convinced their pliant enablers that Israel is to be defended as an “ethno-cultural creation,” while the American nation is to be seen as possessing an “ideological identity,” founded on global human rights principles and on an expansionist foreign policy. MacDonald cites the remarkable tribute produced for neocon guru Leo Strauss by his admiring disciple Werner Dannhauser, a tribute that extols Strauss, the famous mentor to global democrats, as “a good Jew. He knew the dignity and worth of love of one’s own. Love of the good is higher than love of one’s own, but there is only one road to truth and it leads through love of one’s own.” MacDonald asks rhetorically whether Anglo-Saxon Protestant “conservatives” could express such sentiments about their own group without Jewish liberals or neocons attacking them as nativists or incipient Nazis.

McDonald cites the public letter drafted by William Kristol’s Project for the New American Century in 2002, calling for a “move against Saddam Hussein,” on the grounds that “Israel’s fight against terrorism is ours.” MacDonald calls special attention to the prominent Jewish neoconservatives who appended their signatures to this call for a war of aggression on behalf of Israel. But what is perhaps even more striking are the non-Jewish signatories, such as William J. Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ellen Bork, and the professionally insecure, very young editor of National Review, Rich Lowry. In most of these cases one encounters demonstrations of fealty paid to the neoconservative barons who run FOX News, Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, ISI, and the minds of a majority of Republican voters.

But pace MacDonald, these neocon lords and their servants are not the voices of the entire Likud coalition in Israel. They speak for Natan Sharansky, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others even further on the Israeli nationalist right, many of whom have been taught to mumble neocon gibberish about how “democracies have never fought wars” and about how “only democracies are legitimate governments.” A point Israeli political analysts Leon Hadar (see especially his book Sandstorm) and Martin van Creveld have argued for several years now is that neoconservatives and their gentile policy-think-tank hangers-on do not speak for the majority of Israelis, who certainly did not favor the American invasion of Iraq. (Iran might well be a different matter.) It was American neoconservatives, supported by the Christian Right and their Israeli contacts, who planned Bush’s Middle Eastern policy. In the end, MacDonald demonstrates the same when he investigates the Israeli associations of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith.

The Evangelical Cal Thomas and the “conservative Catholic” “theologian” Michael Novak invariably cite in their columns and speeches the alleged return of anti-Semitism on the antiwar left. When Novak came to speak at my college six years ago, he attacked movie producers in Hollywood—Jewish leftists to a man—as “anti-Semites.” The audience listened to him in understandable astonishment, for it could not escape even our news-averse trustees that Novak was saying something glaringly ridiculous.

Moreover, in their invectives against Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, FOX News analysts and announcers played on Wright’s association with the “anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.” That Wright and Farrakhan don’t much like Jews and Judaism seemed to matter more than the more obvious fact that the pair hate the Jews specifically as subgroup of Whitey.

Such pandering may result from the fact that movement conservative gentiles are almost as infected as other gentiles by the politics of white Christian guilt. They can only embrace their country to the extent that it renounces an “ethnic-cultural” identity, a character that they happily concede to Jews and others, but which they have collectively renounced for the dubious honor of being a “propositional nation.” Naturally (what else?) the assumption of this contrived identity sets the stage for their country being overwhelmed by legal and illegal Third World immigrants. It also means waging whatever wars the neocon master race tells their gentile collaborators is “good for Israel” and/or helps to spread “democracy.” Unlike MacDonald, I see no compelling reason to blame this lunacy exclusively or even predominantly on the two percent of the population which is Jewish, without noticing that the majority group, including those who describe themselves as “conservatives,” have lost their cotton-picking minds.

 

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Gottfried, Paul. “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” Taki’s Magazine, 6 April 2009. <http://takimag.com/article/in_search_of_anti-semitism/print#axzz3AaGCfxJN >.

Commentary: A point that could be added to Gottfried’s critique is that the notion that many Jews support anti-Conservative and “Left-wing” causes (liberalism, communism, multiculturalism, etc.) because they believe these are helpful for the Jewish ethnicity is incorrect. On the contrary, much evidence shows that most Jews were involved in political movements and in the support of certain ideas because they truly believe in them, not because they simply believe it is in Jewish interests. For example, Yuri Slezkine has pointed out in his The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 152) that “most Jewish rebels [Bolsheviks] did not fight the state in order to become free Jews; they fought the state in order to become free from Jewishness – and thus Free. Their radicalism was not strengthened by their nationality; it was strengthened by their struggle against nationality… For many Jewish socialists, being an internationalist meant not being Jewish at all.”

Concerning the issue of Zionism, it is true that many Jews who advocate liberalism and multiculturalism in America or Europe hypocritically support the exact opposite, Jewish nationalism, for the state of Israel. However, there is in fact even infighting between different political and ideological stances among the Jews. It should be remembered that there are many liberal Jews in diaspora who would still advocate liberal and multicultural policies in Israel and many conservative and nationalistic Jews in Israel who would support ethnic nationalism or separatism in Christian nations (as long as they are not anti-Semitic, of course). The latter type of Zionist does not appear to be the majority at the moment, but it shows an alternative and more desirable standpoint for Jews which may become more common in the future. In this sense, to refuse to recognise that many Jews – at least those who are already highly conservative – can change their attitude towards European identitarianism seems rather misguided.

For a critique of the concept of a large-scale Jewish conspiracy, see also Alain de Benoist’s “Psychologie du Conspirationnisme,” in Critiques: Théoriques (Lausanne, Suisse: Editions L’Age d’Homme), pp. 89-103; available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/psychologie_du_conspirationnisme.pdf >.

 

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Love & Hate for the Jews – Sunic

American Neurosis: Love and Hate for the Jews

by Tomislav Sunic

The word “anti-Semite” will likely be studied one day as a telling example of postmodern political discourse, i.e. as a signifier for somebody who advocates the reign of demonology. “Many world-know Jewish authors, haunted by the either real or surreal menace of anti-Semitism, consider it a sickness, which enables them to avoid any form of introspection,” writes Ryssen. These remarks support our thesis that the present – however much it may be viewed as post-historical in America – is connected to the recent memory of the past, as both the present and the past affect civic identity, nation-state building, and the memory of Americans, and by extension that of postmodern Europeans. How does one dare critically talk about the predominance of the Judeo-American spirit in America without running the risk of social opprobrium or of landing into psychiatric asylum, as Ezra Pound once did? While it is a common place for the vast number of white American elites to crack jokes in private about Mexicans, Africans, or for that matter deride their fellow Gentile citizens, without looking over their shoulder, a critical comment about the staggering influence of Jews in America, even when that comment is founded on empirical facts, is viewed as a grave insult to Jews. If a serious American scholar or a politician ventures into this forbidden field, his gesture is interpreted as a sign of being an agent provocateur, or worse, as a sign of somebody who decided to write his obituary. Such a schizophrenic climate of self-censorship in America will sooner or later lead to dramatic consequences for both American Jews and Gentiles. The lack of healthy dialogue can last for a century or so, but feigned conviviality between American Gentiles and American Jews cannot last forever and remain based on distorted perceptions of the Other and how this Other should behave. Mendacity carries the germ of a civil war. The entire Western history, particularly since the First World War, has abundantly proven that distorted self-perceptions, as well as the romanticized perception of the “Other,” if based on negative wishful thinking, lead to war and chaos. Eventually, both American Jews and American Gentiles will be pitted into an ugly clash from which there will be no escape for any of them.

While a great many thinkers in America unabashedly challenge modern myths and sport staggering erudition and courage in their demolition, the most sensitive point of reference in the twentieth century, i.e., the Jewish question, is carefully avoided. If the subject of Jews is mentioned in America, then it is usually in a laudatory fashion, which clearly points to a morbid desire of postmodern American white elites to curry favor with the Jews. These same individuals will be the first to declare themselves certified anti-Semites when an opportunistic moment becomes official enough for pogroms and Jew baiting. It is the lack of open discussion about the topic of the Jews that confirms how Jews play a crucial role in American conscience building, and by extension, in the entire West. This is an additional sign of how past times interact with present times. Twentieth century experience with National Socialism still serves as a powerful red flag in a political semantic field which must be carefully trodden upon.

But contrary to classical anti-Semitic arguments, strong Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and America in their diverse Christian modalities. Postmodern Americanism is just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset. Hypothetically speaking, if Jews, by some miracle, were to play a marginal role in America – as they claim they do – then, logically, they would be the subject of a normal critical discussion, just like other American ethnic groups, races, or next door neighbors are.

Blaming American Jews for extraterrestrial powers and their purported conspiracy to subvert Gentile culture borders on delusion and only reflects the absence of dialogue. American anti-Semitic delusions only provide legitimacy to American Jews in their constant search for a real or surreal anti-Semitic boogieman around the corner. Without the specter of anti-Semitism, Jews would likely assimilate quickly and hence disappear. Thus, anti-Semitism provides Jews with alibis to project themselves as victims of Gentile prejudice. Consequently, it assigns them a cherished role of posing as the sole educational super-ego for Americans and by proxy the entire world. In his book on the social role of Jews, a prominent Jewish-French politician and author, Jacques Attali, writes: “As Russian Jews invented socialism, and as Austrian Jews invented psychoanalysis, American Jews in the forefront, participated in the birth of American capitalism and in the Americanization of the entire world.” For some Jewish authors, like Attali, such a remark is easier to write down than for a Gentile thinker, who with the same comment, would be shouted down as an “anti-Semite.”

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Sunic, Tomislav. Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (USA: BookSurge Publishing, 2007), pgs. 95-103.

Note: On the issue of the Jews, we also recommend Paul Gottfried’s critique of Kevin MacDonald: “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” For a critique of the concept of a large-scale Jewish conspiracy, see also Alain de Benoist’s “Psychologie du Conspirationnisme,” in Critiques: Théoriques (Lausanne, Suisse: Editions L’Age d’Homme), pp. 89-103; available online here: <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/psychologie_du_conspirationnisme.pdf >.

 

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