Tag Archives: Philosophy of Culture

What is Wrong with Europe? – Dugin

What is wrong with Europe?

By Alexander Dugin

Edited by Daniel Macek

 

In order to understand correctly the nature of the present crisis we need to make short analysis of situation. I suggest three levels:

  • Ideologically,
  • Economically,
  • Geopolitically.

Liberal ideology is the source of problem

Ideologically the problem is liberalism as the unique and only ideology imposed on the Europe and the rest of humanity by the Anglo-Saxon world. Liberalism affirms only individual identity and prohibits any kind of collective or organic identity. So liberalism step by step refuses religion, nation and gender belongingness in order to set individual completely free from any kind of holism. Gender is the core political problem because the liberals insists on the optional nature of gender, a gender as individual choice (before the struggle was around religion as individual choice or nation as individual choice). The other crucial point is immigration. The liberalism refuses to acknowledge religious or cultural identities as well as the gender one: so the immigrant is not considered as the bearer of different identity but as one numerical atomic individual more. Thus liberalism destroys any collective identity. Logically liberalism destroys European identity (with so-called tolerance and human rights theories). Together with intensive destruction of sexual identity it accelerates the end of society as such. The end of Europe is granted by the very fact of acceptance the liberalism as mainstream ideology.

The last step in developing liberalism will be negate human identity as collective one. So welcome to trans-humanism. That is the liberal agenda for tomorrow.

Liberalism is nihilist ideology. It insists on liberty from any kind of collective identity but never suggests something positive. In the past competing wit the totalitarian ideologies – communism or fascism – the liberalism was concrete and attractive because it negated the concrete totalitarianism positing itself as alternative. It was a real alternative. But when the totalitarianisms were overcome, the nihilistic nature of liberalism was revealed. It can only negate. It cannot affirm anything. It is not the ideology of positive freedom, it is ideology of negative liberty. Yesterday it wasn’t so explicit. Now it is.

Liberalismhas turned totalitarian. You do not have  the liberty to be non-liberal. You must be liberal. You can choose to be left liberal or right liberal or centre liberal. You can be – in the extreme case – be far left liberal or far right liberal. But always liberal. If you are judged illiberal by liberals you are finished – labelled as extremist, terrorist and so on. The liberals can tolerate only tolerant people. If you are not tolerant (in liberal sense) you are intolerable.

What can we oppose to liberalism? In XX century there were two options: communism (socialism) and fascism. Both failed historically – politically, philosophically, military, economically. They exist now as simulacra. They are hyper marginal or are manipulated by liberalism: hence the liberal-communism of post-modernists, anarchists and trotskistes, or liberal-fascists serving the liberals to promote their cause exactly as Islamic fundamentalism is used as weapon of USA. So my idea is to oppose to liberalism (first political theory) not second political theory (Marxism), nor third (fascism), but the fourth. I have developed this idea in book The Fourth Political Theory, translated in many languages – in German as well. We need combat liberalism, refusing it and deconstructing it totally. At the same time we need to do so not in the name of the class (as in Marxism) or in the name of nation or race (as in fascism), but in the name of the organic unity of People, social justice and real democracy. Liberals interpret democracy as the rule of minorities. We need to restore the original meaning of the term: the democracy is the rule of the majority, of the organic majority, a majority sharing a common identity – that is the rule of the People as the historic and cultural unity.

Financial capitalism is a catastrophe

Economically the problem is in financial capitalism pretending to overcome the real sector of industry in favour of financial markets technology. Such capitalism is monopolistic and creates bubbles instead of the development of the economic infrastructure. Such economy is based on financial speculations (of the G. Soros type) and cherishes the illusion of infinite growth. That contradicts the reality check. The middle class is not growing anymore. The growth of the financial markets doesn’t correspond to the growth of the real sector. Putting all the attention to financial institutions, promoting the delocalization of the real sector to the Third World countries in the course of the globalization, is the way to the abyss. The first waves of the crisis have already passed, but new waves will be here soon. The economic collapse of the Southern European countries such as Greece, and in the near future Italy and Spain, is only the visible peak of the immense catastrophe. The European unity is based on the full acceptance of the financial capitalism logistic. Only Germany struggles now in order to keep the economy in touch with industrial realities, refusing embark on the train into the nothingness. That is the reason for anti-German hysterics in Europe and in USA. German economy is may be the last real economy, the rest is already virtual economy.

So we need to reconstruct Europe on an alternative economic basis.

The infinite growth is but a liberal illusion. The fall of the middle class is the severe reality. The way out of this is complete revision of the myths of the financial capitalism.

Atlanticism is wrong

Geopolitically, Europe is today an Atlanticist entity. The geopolitics imagined by the Englishman Sir H. Mackinder declares that there are two types of civilizations – the civilization of the Sea (Seapower) and the civilization of the Land (Landpower). They are constructed on opposite systems of values. Seapower is purely mercantile, modernist and materialist. The Landpower is traditionalist, spiritual and heroic. That dualism corresponds to the pair of Werner Sombart’s concept – Händlers (Traders) and Helden (Heroes). Modern European society is fully integrated in the Civilization of the Sea [Seapower]. That is manifested in the North-American strategic hegemony and in NATO.

This situation prevents Europe from becoming an independent geopolitical entity. More profoundly it perverts the geopolitical nature of Europe as a continental entity – a Landpower.

So there is a need to change the situation and to restore the Landpower strategy based on the real European sovereignty. Instead of Atlanticism, Europe needs to become a continental strategic power.

Europa and Russia

If we summarize the points, we can logically deduce where we are in European-Russia relations. The Present Russia is

  • Relatively hostile towards liberalism (more traditionalist and conservatively inclined);
  • Economically trying to free itself from the dictatorship of the World Bank and WMF;
  • Geopolitically continental and anti-Atlanticist.

That is the reason why Russia is under attack – in Ukraine, in Moscow, everywhere. The recent killing of the liberal Boris Nemstsov was a provocation that serves to demonize Russia more and more in the eyes of the West. The liberals, the global financial oligarchy and the Atlanticists (the USA and the financial elite) try to provoke hostility between Russia and Europe, as well as trying to save their shaking rule by promoting ethnic conflicts. The war in Ukraine is the first step in a series of ethnic conflicts on European soil. The global liberal elite plans the ethnic war not only in Ukraine or Russia, but in Germany, France, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The liberal Empire tries to save their hegemony from falling apart by dividing us.

We need to resist in order to construct better Europe, the truly European Europe. And in such situation, Russia is the friend and the USA is the enemy. We have to work on a Russian-European alliance not because Europeans love Russia or Russians love Europeans. The reason is different; we need to be together in order to save each one of us before the danger that menaces everyone.

I wish you gathering all the best and I would like to add that I appreciate very much the impact of the Zuerst magazine led by the brave Manuel Ochsenreiter and its struggle for a better Germany promoting real European case.

 

—————

Dugin, Alexander. “What is Wrong with Europe?” The Fourth Political Theory, August 2015. <http://www.4pt.su/en/content/what-wrong-europe >.

 

Advertisements

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

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”)

***

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.

 

————-

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

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Critical Analysis of Evola’s Thought – Benoist

“Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 366 KB):

Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician

————–

De Benoist, Alain. “Julius Evola, Radical Reactionary and Committed Metaphysician: A Critical Analysis of the Political Thought of Julius Evola.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 17-62. Document retrieved from: <http://files.alaindebenoist.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/julius_evola_radical_reactionary.pdf >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Intro to Feliks Koneczny – Giertych

Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949) by Rev. Wojciech Giertych (PDF – 2 MB):

Feliks Koneczny – Giertych

————

Giertych, Wojciech. “Feliks Koneczny (1862-1949).” Lecture, Christendom College, Front Royal, Virgina, USA, 14 September 2012. Document retrieved from: <http://www.christendom.edu/news/2012/koneczny.pdf >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Interview with John Morgan – Leonard

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

 

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

HH: How did you first get into publishing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

—————-

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

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Stachniuk & the Spirit of the World – Bielawski

Jan Stachniuk and the Spirit of the World

By Paweł Bielawski

 

Jan Stachniuk was born in 1905 in Kowel, Wołyń (in what is today Ukraine). In 1927, he began his public activity in Poznań, where he studied economics. There, he became active in the Union of Polish Democratic Youth and published his first books: Kolektywizm a naród (1933) and Heroiczna wspólnota narodu (1935). Beginning in 1937, Stachniuk published the monthly magazine Zadruga, which gave birth to a new idea current of the same name. In 1939, two additional books were published: Państwo a gospodarstwo and Dzieje bez dziejów (“History of unhistory”). During the Second World War, he inspired the ideology of the Faction of the National Rise (Stronnictwo Zrywu Narodowego) and the Cadre of Independent Poland (Kadra Polski Niepodległej). In 1943, Stachniuk published Zagadnienie totalizmu (with the help of the Faction). He fought in the Warsaw Uprising and was wounded. After the war, he failed to resume publishing Zadruga, but before the Stalinists attained power in the country, he managed to publish three more books: Walka o zasady, Człowieczeństwo i kultura, and Wspakultura. In 1949, Stachniuk was arrested and sentenced to death in a political show trial. The sentence was not carried out, and he got out of prison in 1955, but he was no longer able to perform any kind work. He died in 1963 and was buried in the Powązki Cemetery.

Stachniuk is the creator of the philosophical system known as “Culturalism” or “Evolutionary Pantheism,” which in its axiological plane is based on the spirituality of the ancient Slavs. The influence of Frederick Nietzsche, Max Weber, Georges Sorel, and Stanisław Brzozowski are also evident, but nevertheless Culturalism, when compared to other currents of European philosophy and humanities, is one of a kind. If we had to compare it to something, then, in my opinion, the closest analogue would the philosophy of Vedanta.

Cosmology and philosophical anthropology

Man is the vanguard of the creative world evolution, the most perfect expression and tool of the Creative Will, active in the world; he struggles to be something greater than he is. This process of exponentiation of the human power over nature and the elements of his own nature is culture. The cessation of this process, for whatever reason, passively submitting to the laws of bare biology and the charms of pure vegetation—this is the opposition of culture; this is back-culture (“wspakultura”).[1]

The world is a will. It strives for more and more complex and higher forms.”[2] “The world is a living organic unity, developing towards perfectness. […] The vanguard of the world-in-creation is man. […] The development ability of man relies on his capability of creatively re-creating the existing natural order into a new form of power, which is the objective world of accomplishments of culture. On a biological level, man is part of the natural world order. We are born; we multiply; we feed like all mammals; but we are distinct from this level by an enigmatic capability of binding nature’s energy into a new form of cultural power.[3]

Every species of animals that exists on this world struggles to survive. In opposition to dead matter, animals try, by different means, to “manage” the environment in which they live—they hunt, defend their turf, create a herd with its own hierarchy, and so on. In a way, animals fill the world with themselves, by managing the environment—they struggle to fulfill their needs; they struggle for an existential optimum (“biovegetation” in Stachniuk’s terminology). This “optimum of biovegetational existence” Stachniuk calls “physiological happiness.” Everything that lives, including humans (as biological entities), struggles for “physiological happiness.” The essence of biovegetation is the “eternal turn”[4]—during millions of years of evolution, the lives of mammals and insects does not change significantly; they all live more or less the same way. They are constantly in the confines of “biovegetation.”

The factor that distinguishes man from other living species is his capability of creation, the enigmatic creative element. Only man is capable of progress, of development, of creating ever more perfect and better forms, to material, social and spiritual life.[5]

As we all know, man is the only species that managed to lift itself above and beyond pure biology. He created cities, states, law, culture, art, science, technology, civilization. Man forced himself out of the eternal turn of biovegetation. How? According to Stachniuk, man remains an animal and part of the world of biology, “but in his essence there was a breach. This breach is the ability of creation, the creative genius. It is an over-biologic plane. From its nozzles, the humanistic world opens up.”[6]

The creative evolution is perpetrated by another bearing, on another level. The cosmic will has forgone its prime intent and instead strives towards recycling the world into a pulsating organism of concentrated cultural power, of which man is the core. […] [E]very one of us is a very tragic being, because we belong simultaneously to two levels of existence: biovegetational and creative-humanist.[7]

The nature of man is then dualist. On the one hand, man is an animal and a part of biovegetation. On the other hand, he is something over-biological, something beyond an animal; he has a spiritual element and the capability to create. He is the creator of “culture.” Man, as a type of being “flounces” between two levels of existence.

The moment when the emotional element was able to vanquish its internal inertia and induced man do the first cultural action is the birth of the creative will.[8]

According to Stachniuk, the fullness of humanity—panhumanism—is reached when man, with all of himself, submits to the creative will and embraces his mission, i.e., when he creates “culture.” Panhumanism can be defined as man’s will and capability to mold being according to his ever more magnificent visions, as well as the awareness and readiness of man to fulfill his leading role in the creative world evolution. Man has the capability to process the energy of the world into objective works of culture, which, in turn, serve to intensify the process of culture itself. This is his mission—it manifests itself in action and is the process of building the process of culture.

All of this is possible thanks to the “organ of man’s genius.”

It is not a bio-morphological organ, but has consisted of our whole physiological apparatus. […] The intangible organ in our bio-physical organism transmutes the normal course of physiological processes into dispositions of creation. This is why we speak of the organ of man’s genius.[9]

The primal biological energy, which in the animal-plant world is directed towards unlimited biological expansion, is transmuted, in man, into man’s genius, that is, the creative will. It, in turn, leads to an unlimited development of the instrumentarium as a tool of its mission.

The creative will is what enables man to pull himself out of the vicious circle of the “eternal turn,” thereby attaining a higher mode of existence, which enables the fulfillment of man’s mission, by building culture—which manifests itself by creating ever new “culture-creations” or the “instrumentarium of culture.”

The full and proper life of a human depends on overcoming the inertia of the biological level of existence and transforming the elemental life energy of our bodies into the creative will, which, in turn, should most fruitfully manifest itself in the development of an “instrumental will.”[10]

The organ of man’s genius enables him to experience being and life in a specific way, namely in feeling the organic unity of the world, ever evolving into ever higher forms. This way of sensing the world is (evolutionary) pantheism. It is the creative will that is the factor that distinguishes man from the rest of the animals. “Our contingent biological shell is a bearing, by which the creative will flows by divine stream; our psycho-physical personality is a contingent tool; by humbly submitting to this will, we can perform the most profound, the most burdened transmogrifications in the world.”[11]

Humanity, in Stachniuk’s eyes, is a process of creation that consists of three elements: a) human biology, b) creative will and c) instrumental will. These are the three elements of “panhumanist man.”[12] Human biology—that is, our organisms, our physical potential, our muscles, and the work of our hands. Creative will is our “inborn direction of emotion and drives in man”; it is the subject of the humanist world.[13] The third element is the instrumental will, in other words the ability of binding the energy of the natural world into a form of cultural power.

Man is seen as a being eternally developing himself by his creations, and this work is a process that is constant throughout generations. In the light of the philosophy of Culturalism, man is not an individual, a monad existing in a void or a set of individuals, but a string of generations. Humanity is perceived by Stachniuk as the process of creating and re-creating the world, constantly perfecting it, while dismissing it means—ultimately—the rejection of humanity itself.

The philosophical anthropology of Culturalism is very much interconnected and intertwined with its theory of culture as meta-narration.

Theory of Culture as Meta-narration

Stachniuk’s theory of culture makes up the core of his philosophy. It is really the backbone of Culturalism. Every current in Stachniuk’s thought springs from it.

The sensation of the creative pressure, the feeling of the cosmic mission of creation, the desire to contribute to the creative world evolution by man is, in the lens of Culturalism, a sign of health and moral youth. According to Stachniuk, this is normal, the way it should be. Human history is the eternal antagonism of two, contradictory, directions—“the first one is the blind pressure of man towards panhumanism, the second is the escape into a solidified system.”[14]

The axis of human history on the globe is not the struggle between Spirit and Matter, egoism and altruism, God and Satan; it is also not the class struggle or race struggle, but the struggle of culture and back-culture [wspakultura] for the power over humanity […] Each of us is a warzone between the culture current and the back-culture current. […] The current of culture is the process of becoming of the force and power, the richness and dynamism of life.[15]

What is “culture”? It is the “process of binding the energy of the field of the elements.”[16] For Stachniuk, culture is not something meant to tackle or inhibit nature, it is a process of reforming it. Culture is something that emerges from nature and is its higher level. A human of “panhumanism” acts as a transformer of energy—the energy of the elements—that produces “culture-creations.” What are culture-creations? Examples are law, the state, poetry, technology, music, philosophy, a factory, and the Internet. Humanity is thus (in its ideal state) an interconnected web of energy transformers, constantly updating and perfecting the world and humanity, producing culture-creations that are, in turn, used as fuel for even more powerful culture-creations. Culture—the process of reorganizing the field of the (natural) elements—is the ultimate mission of humanity.

It is, of course, clear as day that we don’t live in a world full of conscious “panhumanists.” Why is that? As I mentioned earlier, the nature of human is dualistic—there is the bio-vegetational level and the creative-humanist level. A human being is a warzone of the battle between culture and back-culture. What is back-culture? It is the cessation of the process of culture; the passive yielding to the laws of bare biology and appeal of pure vegetation. It is passiveness, inertia, standstill. It is the “cosmic illness.”

The effects of back-culture in the world of man can be seen as the “unhistoric” attitude and the desire to free oneself from the requirement of creation. It is the degrading of oneself to the primitive, primordial, animal level by directing oneself towards passive consumption of culture-creations. The defective human, who is under the influence of back-culture, sees culture only as something to be consumed. He does not see culture as a fertile field than can be farmed in order to raise crops of culture-creations. Culture is seen purely as a thing for pleasure, for individual gratification, something that helps the individual attain “physiological happiness,” not as a mine of mighty energy capable of recreating the world as we know it.

Prime examples of back-culture are, according to Stachniuk, universalist world religions like Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, which show “contempt for creativeness.” They reduce human life to a place to score points for the “other life” or the “other world.” They show an anti-humanist and anti-creative attitude. This is why the creator of Zadruga dismisses them and looks to Paganism instead.

The wave of total back-cultures (…) in the last three thousand years has extinguished the dawn of the creative actions of man. The first sparks of the fire have been covered with darkness. The just barely ignited fire of India has been quickly extinguished under the shroud of Brahmanism, and then different types of Buddhism. The procession of the cross extinguished the march of Hellenic culture. In other places, Buddhism and Islam have acted similarly. On the once fertile fields poisonous weeds have spread. We know them: Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and countless other forms of elements of back-culture. They captured enormous pieces of humanity. All bigger human congeries were its victims. India, China, almost all of Asia is to this day paralyzed. After a magnificent blooming of the Greco-Roman culture, lasting only a few centuries, it seemed that it has fallen into the eternal darkness of unhistory [bezdzieje]. They’ve lasted one and a half thousand years. After this period, an unbelievably lively mixture of European peoples freed themselves partially, creating modern culture. It would be disingenuous to think that all of Europe took part in its creation. All the Slavic east and almost all Romantic nations have been deeply paralyzed by Christian back-culture. The world in its overwhelming mass is immersed in the darkness of this or another total back-culture. Generally speaking, it rules over 90% of humanity.[17]

One may ask, of course: “How can you say that medieval Europe was decadent if it was then united and powerful? How can you call Christianity a destructive force considering the whole of European Christian culture?”

Stachniuk provided an answer for that. In a situation where back-culture cannot totally break down the fire of culture, it starts acting like a parasite. It uses the lively energy of the process of culture to preserve itself and not let culture free itself completely. This is what happened in the case of Europe.

Kindly, sweet, and humble Christ, who ordered us not to resist evil, made some exceptions, major ones. Where the matters of faith were involved, he used “vain” and “fading” means and used them with feelings that cannot be described as “love.” When he saw tradesmen trading in the house of prayer, he burst with feelings not at all “sweet.” […] We have here a flash of a principle, which can be described like this: Everything is vanity, everything should be forsaken and disdained, except the situation in which this vanity can be used to strengthen the “truth.” Anger is evil, the sword and the whip are tools of evil, but if through anger, the sword, or the whip we clear the path for the Church, then anger, the sword, and the whip and all that is vain becomes worthy. This is the principle that we call the perverse instrumentalism of back-culture[18]

This mechanism is actually the creator of the medieval order of Europe. Rome, undermined and its true essence destroyed by Christianity, was gradually overwhelmed by lively Germanic warrior tribes, ready to fight, conquer, and plunder. Of course, the primitive Germanic tribes were impressed by the refined and sophisticated traditions of Rome. What they didn’t recognize was that this was not the true Rome but a fleeting shadow of what it once was. Nonetheless, the Germanic people were presented with an opportunity: “Do you want to take over the Roman legacy? If you so desire, just let us baptize you.”

That said, not all went as planned. The Germanic people were, in fact, conquerors. Christianity could not just do whatever it wanted with them; it had to make a compromise.

The youthful dynamism of fresh peoples was harnessed to realize the grand project of making all European peoples sick, subjecting them to the domination of the back-culture of the cross. All Europe was becoming a field to broaden “the vineyards of the Lord.” The Germanic peoples, adapting to their new role, spread the sickness of the cross on the whole continent. They were appointed to that task because, thanks to their position of conquerors, they did not submit to the appeal of Christian mysticism, while simultaneously taking the political goals of Christianity—the creation of a universal empire—as their own. […] This is how the concept of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation was born.[19]

This is how the “perverse instrumentalism of back-culture” works in practice. It harnesses the youthful energy of culture (which could be much more powerful on its own) to further spread its disease. After this single “compromise,” the next one was not necessary. Christian back-culture could now, with the might of the German sword, attempt to fully Christianize the Slavs—no punches pulled, no compromises. The cross, along with the German sword, could now completely destroy the original, Pagan, Slavic culture. Slavdom became a Christian colony in the full sense of the word. Everything that was not subject to the believers of the cross was destroyed. The original tradition was severed.

Although Stachniuk was and still is considered very much anti-clerical and anti-Christian, it would be a misinterpretation to reduce him to such. He knew full well that simple “secularization” is not the answer. The reason for this is that back-culture does not come only in the form of religion; there is also “secular back-culture”—simplistic rationalism, “free-thought,” pacifism, “human rights” ideology, or crude hedonism. Secular back-culture (also called “unhistoric rationalism”), just like Christianity, forsakes the building of culture, the great mission of empowering man, and the creative world evolution. It also fails to recognize the difference between Christian spiritualism and the creative world evolution. Anything that goes beyond pacifism, hedonism, and physiological happiness seems suspect and often outright “fascist.” But in reality, it is yet just another form of back-culture.

Conclusion

Jan Stachniuk was a man ahead of his time. His concepts were often either harshly criticized or ignored during his life. He was a man that advocated embracing dynamic progress, science, and technology, whereas mainstream “national radicals” were thrilled by Nikolai Berdyaev’s static “New Middle Ages.” You could even say that his combination of embracing advanced technology and simultaneously appealing to the values of the ancient world anticipated Guillaume Faye’s concept of “Archeofuturism.”

The author of “History of unhistory” was also instrumental in reviving the pre-Christian religion of the Slavs in Poland. He is a cult figure among many contemporary Polish Rodnovers. His memory not only lives on, but proves to be an inspiration nowadays for religious organizations, (meta-)political organizations, and music bands alike.

Jan Stachniuk is an ethical maximalist and a firm believer in human potential. It is worth to note that, unlike Nietzsche, he did not advocate attaining power for its own sake. A man of panhumanism should not see other people as tools for his own advancement. His goal should be becoming a hero to his community. Stachniuk’s ideal is not a single Übermensch, but a great and heroic community. His goal was creating a myth; a myth of the “national creative community.”

I am human; therefore I am fulfilling the goal of the world. […] It is through the human, through his cultural work, that the creative world evolution takes place. […] The human is not a boring creature looking for satisfaction, peace, lyrics of digestion, and caramel sensation of the mind on the basis of physiological happiness, like the secular unhistory or “eternal virtues” and communing with the “truth” revealed by various “redeemers.” The human is a boiling cosmic energy, looking for ever greater ways of expression in culture creations charged with tragic creativeness. […] The desire to live a valuable life today means to push forward the birth of the myth of the creative community, to boldly head into the fire of the coming change.[20]

Notes:

  1. Stachniuk, Droga rewolucji kulturowej w Polsce, Toporzeł, Wrocław 2006, 5
  2. Stachniuk, Człowieczeństwo i kultura, Toporzeł, Wrocław 1996, 18
  3. Stachniuk, Droga, op. cit., 8
  4. This term should not to be confused with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence of the same,” which is a different concept altogether.
  5. Stachniuk, Człowieczeństwo, op. cit., p. 10
  6. , p. 21
  7. , p. 22
  8. Ibid, p. 24
  9. Stachniuk, Chrześcijaństwo a ludzkość, Toporzeł, Wrocław 1997, 11
  10. Stachniuk, Droga, op. cit., 9
  11. Stachniuk, Człowieczeństwo, op. cit., 24
  12. Stachniuk, Droga, op. cit., 9
  13. , 23-24.
  14. Stachniuk, Chrześcijaństwo, op. cit., 15
  15. Stachniuk, Człowieczeństwo, op. cit., 117
  16. , 27
  17. , 119.
  18. Stachniuk, Chrześcijaństwo, op. cit., 137.
  19. , 179.
  20. Stachniuk, Człowieczeństwo, op. cit., 254.

 

——————–

Bielawski, Paweł. “Jan Stachniuk and the Spirit of the World.” Radix Journal, 6 March 2015. <http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/3/6/jan-stachniuk-and-the-spirit-of-the-world >.

 

2 Comments

Filed under New European Conservative

Huntington, Fukuyama, & Eurasianism – Dugin

Huntington, Fukuyama, and Eurasianism

By Alexander Dugin

Translated from the Spanish by Lucian Tudor

 

The Anti-Americanism typical of the “Russian structure” is a continuation of the intellectual of the Slavophiles. These latter thought that one cannot fully assume Russian identity more than by getting rid of the footprint of the West, liberating oneself of this European [i.e., Western-European] manner of viewing oneself which became the norm after Peter the Great. But Europe today is no longer the Europe of the epoch of the Slavophiles, nor of the first Eurasianists. Europe is distinct from the West, that is, from the sphere of influence of the United States. Becoming Russian, today, is to liberate oneself at all levels from Western and American influence. Westernism is not solely an intellectual position, but simultaneously a contagious disease and a betrayal of the fatherland. It is for that reason that we must restlessly fight the West. In fighting against the West, the Russians affirm themselves as Russians, belonging to Russian culture, to Russian history, to Russian values.

Samuel Huntington described in a realistic manner the obstacles which inevitably face the supporters of a Unipolar World and the fanatics of the End of History. When the last formal enemy of the United States, the Soviet Union, disappeared, some imagined that the West had reached the conclusion of its liberal-democratic development and that it was going to access the “earthly paradise” of the techno-mercantile society. That was the idea of Francis Fukuyama when he wrote his famous piece about the End of History. Huntington had the merit of showing all that which contradicted the optimism then professed in the medias of globalist communication. Analyzing these phenomena, he arrived at the conclusion that they could be included under a single denomination: civilizations. This is the key word.

But that word also means the reappearance of a premodern concept in a postmodern form. The Islamic civilization, for example, existed before modernity. But in the modern epoch, colonization and secularism delegitimized the use of this term; now only Muslim “ethnic groups” were recognized. After decolonization, nation-states appeared which had a “Muslim population,” but it is only with the Iranian Revolution (where we find some traits characteristic of Traditionalism and of the Conservative Revolution) when the emergence of a Muslim state properly speaking was seen, where Islam was politically recognized as the source of power and law. Theorizing about the transition from State to Civilization, Huntington formulated a new political-scientific concept, named to thus implicitly take (and draw attention to) a new dimension of international politics which was born after the demise of the USSR. Following that, the Atlanticist milieus discovered that they would face an enemy which, unlike the Soviet Union, is not based on an explicitly formalized ideology, but which nonetheless has begun to question and undermine the foundations of the liberal and Americano-centric “New World Order.” The enemy is now the civilizations, and no longer only countries or states – a turning point.

Among all civilizations, only the Western civilization has presented itself as universal, pretending to be in this way “the civilization” (singular). In formal terms, now nobody replicates it, rather in reality the great majority of men and women who live outside of the European or American space reject this dominion, and continue to be rooted in different historical-cultural types. This is what explains the current resurgence of civilizations. Huntington concluded, concerning that, that the planetary dominion of the West will face new challenges. He advised being conscious of this danger, to prepare oneself for the reappearance of certain premodern forms in the postmodern era, and to try to protect oneself against them to guarantee the security of Western civilization.

Fukuyama was a globalist optimist. Huntington is a globalist pessimist, who analyzed the risks and measured the dangers. We can draw out a Eurasianist lesson from his analysis. Huntington was right when he said that civilizations will reappear, but he was wrong to be upset by it. In contrast, we should rejoice about the resurgence of civilizations. We should applaud it and support it, preparing the catalysts of this process and not passively observing it.

The clashes between civilizations are almost inevitable, but our task must consist of reorienting the hostility, which will not stop growing, against the United States and Western Civilization, instead of against neighboring civilizations. We must organize the common front of civilizations against one civilization which pretends to be the civilization in singular. This prioritary common enemy is globalism and the United States, which is now its principal vector. The more the peoples of the Earth will be convinced of that, the more the confrontations between non-Western civilizations can be reduced. If there must be a “clash” of civilizations, it has to be a clash between the West and the “rest of the world.” And Eurasianism is the political formula which suits this “rest.”

There is another point which, obviously, we cannot follow Huntington on: when he calls for the strengthening of transatlantic relations between Europe and the United States. The new generation of European leaders has already responded positively to this call – something which we may lament. The destiny of Europe is not on the other side of the Atlantic. Europe must clearly establish itself as a distinct civilization, free and independent. It has to be a European Europe, not American and Atlanticist. It must construct itself as a postmodern democratic empire, through the reclaiming of its cultural and sacred roots, as a part of its future as well as something residing in its past. A Europe which does not also rise up against the United States would betray its roots at the same time that it would condemn itself to not having a future. Europe also does not belong to the Eurasian space. Certainly, it can and should even be Eurasianist to the extent it adheres to this “universal idea that there is no universal civilization,” but it does not have to integrate itself into the geographic space of Eurasia. What Russians desire most is simply that Europe be itself, that is, European. Eurasianism does not consist of imposing its identity on others, but rather to help all the different identities to affirm themselves, to organically develop themselves, and to prosper. The Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontiev said that we must always defend the “flourishing multiplicity.” This is the preferred motto of the Eurasianists.

 

Translated from: “Huntington, Fukuyama y el Eurasismo,” Página Transversal, 6 January 2015.

—————–

Dugin, Alexander. “Huntington, Fukuyama, and Eurasianism.” Tankesmedjan Motpol, 4 April 2015. <http://www.motpol.nu/lucian/2015/04/04/huntington-fukuyama-and-eurasianism/ >.

2 Comments

Filed under New European Conservative

Intro to Ludwig Klages – Baer

“The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages and the Klages School: An Introduction to Biocentric Thought” by Lydia Baer (PDF – 4.43 MB):

The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages

————

Baer, Lydia. “The Literary Criticism of Ludwig Klages and the Klages School: An Introduction to Biocentric Thought.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 40, No. 1 (January, 1941), pp. 91-138.

See also: “On The Biocentric Metaphysics of Ludwig Klages” by Joe Pryce: <https://neweuropeanconservative.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/intro-to-ludwig-klages-pryce/ >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Interview with Dominique Venner – Gérard

An Interview with Dominique Venner

Translated by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini

 

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vernal equinox MMI

Notes

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

 

————

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

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative

Intro to Sorokin – Uebersax

Culture in Crisis: The Visionary Theories of Pitirim Sorokin

By John S. Uebersax

 

Introduction

Pitirim Sorokin, a leading 20th century sociologist, is someone you should know about. Consider this quote of his:

The organism of the Western society and culture seems to be undergoing one of the deepest and most significant crises of its life. The crisis is far greater than the ordinary; its depth is unfathomable, its end not yet in sight, and the whole of the Western society is involved in it. It is the crisis of a Sensate culture, now in its overripe stage, the culture that has dominated the Western World during the last five centuries….

Shall we wonder, therefore, that if many do not apprehend clearly what is happening, they have at least a vague feeling that the issue is not merely that of “prosperity,” or “democracy,” or “capitalism,” or the like, but involves the whole contemporary culture, society, and man? …

Shall we wonder, also, at the endless multitude of incessant major and minor crises that have been rolling over us, like ocean waves, during recent decades? Today in one form, tomorrow in another. Now here, now there. Crises political, agricultural, commercial, and industrial! Crises of production and distribution. Crises moral, juridical, religious, scientific, and artistic. Crises of property, of the State, of the family, of industrial enterprise… Each of the crises has battered our nerves and minds, each has shaken the very foundations of our culture and society, and each has left behind a legion of derelicts and victims. And alas! The end is not in view. Each of these crises has been, as it were, a movement in a great terrifying symphony, and each has been remarkable for its magnitude and intensity. (P. Sorokin, SCD, pp. 622-623)

Background

Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (1889–1968) was born in Russia to a Russian father and an indigenous (Komi, an ethnic group related to Finns) mother. Like other intellectuals of his age, he was swept up in the revolt against the tsarist government. He held a cabinet post in the short-lived Russian Provisional Government (1917), and had the distinction of being imprisoned successively by both tsarist and Bolshevist factions. Eventually sentenced to death, he was pardoned by Lenin, emigrated, and came to the US. There he enjoyed a long and distinguished academic career, much of it at Harvard University, where he served as head of the sociology department.

His experience and acute observations of Russian politics left him uniquely suited for understanding the transformational forces of the 20th century. By 1937 he published the first three volumes of his masterpiece, Social and Cultural Dynamics, but he continued to refine his theories for nearly three more decades.

Based on a careful study of world history – including detailed statistical analysis of phases in art, architecture, literature, economics, philosophy, science, and warfare – he identified three strikingly consistent phenomena:

There are two opposed elementary cultural patterns, the materialistic (Sensate) and spiritual (Ideational), along with certain intermediate or mixed patterns. One mixed pattern, called Idealistic, which integrates the Sensate and Ideational orientations, is extremely important.

Every society tends to alternate between materialistic and spiritual periods, sometimes with transitional, mixed periods, in a regular and predictable way.

Times of transition from one orientation to another are characterized by a markedly increased prevalence of wars and other crises.

Main characteristics of the Sensate, Ideational, and Idealistic cultural patterns are listed below. (A more detailed explanation of alternative cultural orientations, excerpted from Sorokin’s writings, can be found here. [Alternative Download: Pitirim Sorokin – Sensate, Ideational, and Idealistic Cultures])

Sensate (Materialistic) Culture

The first pattern, which Sorokin called Sensate culture, has these features:

  • The defining cultural principle is that true reality is sensory – only the material world is real. There is no other reality or source of values.
  • This becomes the organizing principle of society. It permeates every aspect of culture and defines the basic mentality. People are unable to think in any other terms.
  • Sensate culture pursues science and technology, but dedicates little creative thought to spirituality or religion.
  • Dominant values are wealth, health, bodily comfort, sensual pleasures, power and fame.
  • Ethics, politics, and economics are utilitarian and hedonistic. All ethical and legal precepts are considered mere man-made conventions, relative and changeable.
  • Art and entertainment emphasize sensory stimulation. In the decadent stages of Sensate culture there is a frenzied emphasis on the new and the shocking (literally, sensationalism).
  • Religious institutions are mere relics of previous epochs, stripped of their original substance, and tending to fundamentalism and exaggerated fideism (the view that faith is not compatible with reason).

Ideational (Spiritual) Culture

The second pattern, which Sorokin called Ideational culture, has these characteristics:

  • The defining principle is that true reality is supersensory, transcendent, spiritual.
  • The material world is variously: an illusion (maya), temporary, passing away (“stranger in a strange land”), sinful, or a mere shadow of an eternal transcendent reality.
  • Religion often tends to asceticism and moralism.
  • Mysticism and revelation are considered valid sources of truth and morality.
  • Science and technology are comparatively de-emphasized.
  • Economics is conditioned by religious and moral commandments (e.g., laws against usury).
  • Innovation in theology, metaphysics, and supersensory philosophies.
  • Flourishing of religious and spiritual art (e.g., Gothic cathedrals).

Integral (Idealistic) Culture

Most cultures correspond to one of the two basic patterns above. Sometimes, however, a mixed cultural pattern occurs. The most important mixed culture Sorokin termed an Integral culture (also sometimes called an idealistic culture – not to be confused with an Ideational culture.) An Integral culture harmoniously balances sensate and ideational tendencies. Characteristics of an Integral culture include the following:

  • Its ultimate principle is that the true reality is richly manifold, a tapestry in which sensory, rational, and supersensory threads are interwoven.
  • All compartments of society and the person express this principle.
  • Science, philosophy, and theology blossom together.
  • Fine arts treat both supersensory reality and the noblest aspects of sensory reality.

Update: A more recent article that concisely describes the features of Materialism, Ideationalism, and Idealism is ‘What is Materialism? What is Idealism?‘ (Uebersax, 2013b) [Alternative Download]

Western Cultural History

Sorokin examined a wide range of world societies. In each he believed he found evidence of the regular alternation between Sensate and Ideational orientations, sometimes with an Integral culture intervening. According to Sorokin, Western culture is now in the third Sensate epoch of its recorded history. Table 1 summarizes his view of this history.

Table 1
Cultural Periods of Western Civilization According to Sorokin

Period Cultural Type Begin End
Greek Dark Age Sensate 1200 BC 900 BC
Archaic Greece Ideational 900 BC 550 BC
Classical Greece Integral 550 BC 320 BC
Hellenistic – Roman Sensate 320 BC 400
Transitional Mixed 400 600
Middle Ages Ideational 600 1200
High Middle Ages, Renaissance Integral 1200 1500
Rationalism, Age of Science Sensate 1500 present

Based on a detailed analysis of art, literature, economics, and other cultural indicators, Sorokin concluded that ancient Greece changed from a Sensate to an Ideational culture around the 9th century BC; during this Ideational phase, religious themes dominated society (Hesiod, Homer, etc.).

Following this, in the Greek Classical period (roughly 600 BC to 300 BC), an Integral culture reigned: the Parthenon was built; art (the sculptures of Phidias, the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles) flourished, as did philosophy (Plato, Aristotle). This was followed by a new Sensate age, associated first with Hellenistic (the empire founded by Alexander the Great) culture, and then the Roman Empire.

As Rome’s Sensate culture decayed, it was eventually replaced by the Christian Ideational culture of the Middle Ages. The High Middle Ages and Renaissance brought a new Integral culture, again associated with many artistic and cultural innovations. After this Western society entered its present Sensate era, now in its twilight. We are due, according to Sorokin, to soon make a transition to a new Ideational, or, preferably, an Integral cultural era.

Cultural Dynamics

Sorokin was especially interested in the process by which societies change cultural orientations. He opposed the view, held by communists, that social change must be imposed externally, such as by a revolution. His principle of imminent change states that external forces are not necessary: societies change because it is in their nature to change. Although sensate or ideational tendencies may dominate at any given time, every culture contains both mentalities in a tension of opposites. When one mentality becomes stretched too far, it sets in motion compensatory transformative forces.

Helping drive transformation is the fact that human beings are themselves partly sensate, partly rational, and partly intuitive. Whenever a culture becomes too exaggerated in one of these directions, forces within the human psyche will, individually and collectively – work correctively.

Crises of Transition

As a Sensate or Ideational culture reaches a certain point of decline, social and economic crises mark the beginning of transition to a new mentality. These crises occur partly because, as the dominant paradigm reaches its late decadent stages, its institutions try unsuccessfully to adapt, taking ever more drastic measures. However, responses to crises tend to make things worse, leading to new crises. Expansion of government control is an inevitable by-product:

The main uniform effect of calamities upon the political and social structure of society is an expansion of governmental regulation, regimentation, and control of social relationships and a decrease in the regulation and management of social relationships by individuals and private groups. The expansion of governmental control and regulation assumes a variety of forms, embracing socialistic or communistic totalitarianism, fascist totalitarianism, monarchial autocracy, and theocracy. Now it is effected by a revolutionary regime, now by a counterrevolutionary regime; now by a military dictatorship, now by a dictatorship, now by a dictatorial bureaucracy. From both the quantitative and the qualitative point of view, such an expansion of governmental control means a decrease of freedom, a curtailment of the autonomy of individuals and private groups in the regulation and management of their individual behavior and their social relationships, the decline of constitutional and democratic institutions. (MSC p. 122)

But, as we shall consider below, at the same time as these crises occur, other constructive forces are at work.

Trends of our Times

Sorokin identified what he considered three pivotal trends of modern times. The first trend is the disintegration of the current Sensate order:

In the twentieth century the magnificent sensate house of Western man began to deteriorate rapidly and then to crumble. There was, among other things, a disintegration of its moral, legal, and other values which, from within, control and guide the behavior of individuals and groups. When human beings cease to be controlled by deeply interiorized religious, ethical, aesthetic and other values, individuals and groups become the victims of crude power and fraud as the supreme controlling forces of their behavior, relationship, and destiny. In such circumstances, man turns into a human animal driven mainly by his biological urges, passions, and lust. Individual and collective unrestricted egotism flares up; a struggle for existence intensifies; might becomes right; and wars, bloody revolutions, crime, and other forms of interhuman strife and bestiality explode on an unprecedented scale. So it was in all great transitory periods. (BT, 1964, p. 24)

The second trend concerns the positive transformational processes which are already at work:

Fortunately for all the societies which do not perish in this sort of transition from one basic order to another, the disintegration process often generates the emergence of mobilization of forces opposed to it. Weak and insignificant at the beginning, these forces slowly grow and then start not only to fight the disintegration but also to plan and then to build a new sociocultural order which can meet more adequately the gigantic challenge of the critical transition and of the post-transitory future. This process of emergence and growth of the forces planning and building the new order has also appeared and is slowly developing now….

The epochal struggle between the increasingly sterile and destructive forces of the dying sensate order and the creative forces of the emerging, integral, sociocultural order marks all areas of today’s culture and social life, and deeply affects the way of life of every one of us. (BT, 1964, pp. 15-16)

The third trend is the growing importance of developing nations:

The stars of the next acts of the great historical drama are going to be – besides Europe, the Americas, and Russia – the renascent great cultures of India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and the Islamic world. This epochal shift has already started…. Its effects upon the future history of mankind are going to be incomparably greater than those of the alliances and disalliances of the Western governments and ruling groups. (BT, 1964, pp. 15-16)

Social Transformation and Love

While the preceding might suggest that Sorokin was a cheerless prophet of doom, that is not so, and his later work decidedly emphasized the positive. He founded the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism, which sought to understand the role of love and altruism in producing a better society. Much of the Center’s research was summarized in Sorokin’s second masterpiece, The Ways and the Power of Love.

This book offered a comprehensive view on the role of love in positively transforming society. It surveyed the ideals and tactics of the great spiritual reformers of the past – Jesus Christ, the Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, etc. – looking for common themes and principles.

We need, according to Sorokin, not only great figures like these, but also ‘ordinary’ individuals who seek to exemplify the same principles within their personal spheres of influence. Personal change must precede collective change, and nothing transforms a culture more effectively than positive examples. What is essential today, according to Sorokin, is that individuals reorient their thinking and values to a universal perspective – to seek to benefit all human beings, not just oneself or ones own country.

A significant portion of the book is devoted to the subject of yoga (remarkable for a book written in 1954), which Sorokin saw as an effective means of integrating the intellectual and sensate dimensions of the human being. At the same time he affirmed the value of traditional Western religions and religious practices.

The Road Ahead

Sorokin’s theories supply hope, motivation, and vision. They bolster hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and that it may not be too far distant. The knowledge that change is coming, along with an understanding of his theories generally, enables us to try to steer change in a positive direction. Sorokin left no doubt but that we are at the end of a Sensate epoch. Whether we are headed for an Ideational or an Integral culture remains to be seen. It is clearly consistent with his theories that an Integral culture – a new Renaissance – is attainable and something to actively seek.

One reason that change may happen quickly is because people already know that the present culture is oppressive. Expressed public opinion, which tends to conformity, lags behind private opinion. Once it is sufficiently clear that the tide is changing, people will quickly join the revolution. The process is non-linear.

The West and Islam

Viewed in terms of Sorokin’s theories, the current tensions between the West and Islam suggest a conflict between an overripe ultra-materialistic Western culture, detached from its religious heritage and without appreciation of transcendent values, against a medieval Ideational culture that has lost much of its earlier spiritual creativity. As Nieli (2006) put it:

With regard to the current clash between Islam and the West, Sorokin would no doubt point out that both cultures currently find themselves at end stages of their respective ideational and sensate developments and are long overdue for a shift in direction. The Wahabist-Taliban style of Islamic fundamentalism strays as far from the goal of integral balance in Sorokin’s sense as the one-sidedly sensate, post-Christian societies of Northern and Western Europe. Both are ripe for a correction, according to Sorokin’s theory of cultural change, the Islamic societies in the direction of sensate development (particularly in the areas of science, technology, economic productivity, and democratic governance), the Western sensate cultures in the direction of ideational change (including the development of more stable families, greater temperance and self-control, and the reorientation of their cultural values in a more God-centered direction). Were he alive today, Sorokin would no doubt hold out hope for a political and cultural rapprochement between Islam and the West. (Nieli, p. 373)

The current state of affairs between the West and Islam, then, is better characterized as that of mutual opportunity rather than unavoidable conflict. The West can share its technological advances, and Islam may again – as it did around the 12th century – help reinvigorate the spirit of theological and metaphysical investigation in the West.

Individual and Institutional Changes

Institutions must adapt to the coming changes or be left behind. Today’s universities are leading transmitters of a sensate mentality. It is neither a secret nor a coincidence that Sorokin’s ideas found little favor in academia. A new model of higher education, perhaps based on the model of small liberal arts colleges, is required.

Politics, national and international, must move from having conflict as an organizing principle, replacing it with principles of unity and the recognition of a joint destiny of humankind.

A renewal in religious institutions is called for. Christianity, for example, despite its protestations otherwise, still tends decidedly towards an ascetic dualism – the view that the body is little more than a hindrance to the spirit, and that the created world is merely a “vale of tears.” Increased understanding and appreciation of the spiritual traditions of indigenous cultures, which have not severed the connection between man and Nature, may assist in this change.

Sorokin emphasized, however, that the primary agent of social transformation is the individual. Many simple steps are available to the ordinary person. Examples include the following:

  • Commit yourself to ethical and intellectual improvement. In the ethical sphere, focus first on self-mastery. Be eager to discover and correct your faults, and to acquire virtue. Think first of others. See yourself as a citizen of the world. Urgently needed are individuals who can see and seek the objective, transcendent basis of ethical values.
  • Cultivate the Intellect: study philosophy; read books and poetry; listen to classical music; visit an art museum.
  • Practice yoga.
  • Be in harmony with Nature: plant a garden; go camping; protect the environment.
  • Reduce the importance of money and materialism generally in your life.
  • Turn off the television and spend more time in personal interaction with others.

A little reflection will doubtless suggest many other similar steps. Recognize that in changing, you are not only helping yourself, but also setting a powerfully transformative positive example for others.

The Supraconscious

Sorokin’s later work emphasized the role of the supraconscious — a Higher Self or consciousness that inspires and guides our rational mind. Religions and philosophical systems universally recognize such a higher human consciousness, naming it variously: Conscience, Atman, Self, Nous, etc. Yet this concept is completely ignored or even denied by modern science. Clearly this is something that must change. As Sorokin put it:

By becoming conscious of the paramount importance of the supraconscious and by earnest striving for its grace, we can activate its creative potential and its control over our conscious and unconscious forces. By all these means we can break the thick prison walls erected by prevalent pseudo-science around the supraconscious. (WPL, p. 487)

The reality of the supraconscious is a cause for hope and humility: hope, because we are confident that the transpersonal source of human supraconsciousness is providential, guiding culture through history with a definite plan; and humility, because it reminds us that our role in the grand plan is achieved by striving to rid ourselves of preconceived ideas and selfishly motivated schemes, and by increasing our capacity to receive and follow inspiration. It is through inspiration and humility that we achieve a “realization of man’s unique creative mission on this planet.” (CA, p. 326).

References and Reading

 

————-

Uebersax, John S. “Culture in Crisis: The Visionary Theories of Pitirim Sorokin.” Satyagraha, 19 August 2010, updated 25 August 2013. <https://satyagraha.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/pitirim-sorkin-crisis-of-modernity/ >.

 

Leave a comment

Filed under New European Conservative