Glimpse of Post-American Future – Morgan

A Glimpse of the Post-American Future:
The National Policy Institute Conference of 2013

By John Morgan

When I think of my favorite cities in the United States, Washington, DC is not high on the list. I’ve had to go there, for various reasons, several times over the years, but, except for the time I came as a tourist, it’s never been a place I would imagine spending any more time in than absolutely necessary.

But in stepping off the plane as I was arriving for the recent National Policy Institute (NPI) conference there, and catching sight of the Capitol gleaming in the distance from Ronald Reagan airport, I did enjoy the irony of the fact that this had been chosen as the meeting place for those of us who are in opposition to nearly everything that America has come to stand for in recent history. We were gathering there, and we were refusing to be ignored, airing what is unquestionably the most radical political positions that exist at the present time (more on that later) in the shadow of the very institutions that are doubtless hoping that our views remain forever as marginalized from mainstream discourse as they are today.

The idea explored by this conference was one which questioned the very foundations upon which Washington rests: that America as we have known it is drawing to a close, and that if we, as both individuals and as a people, are to survive its end, we must rediscover our authentic identities.

The conference, which was held on Saturday, October 26, 2013, took as its theme “After the Fall,” and all of the speakers dealt with this idea in different ways, focusing their talks on themes related to the long-term unsustainability of the present, American-led state of global affairs, both domestically and globally, or else discussing what implications its end will have for those of us who care about the future of Western identity and civilization.

It took place, as did the NPI conference in 2011, in the Ronald Reagan Building in central Washington, which was an inspired choice on both occasions by Richard Spencer, NPI’s President and Director, given the airport-level security which it has, and also by virtue of the fact that, as a federal facility, the building authorities cannot deny NPI the right to hold its conferences there, in spite of any pressure or threats made by those who oppose it, without denying the organizers and participants their rights under the First Amendment. As such, NPI has been able to avoid the tragic fate of so many American Renaissance and similar conferences that have been called off in recent years due to such harassment.

Undaunted, however, a handful of protesters did make wholly unsuccessful attempts to disrupt the proceedings. I won’t discuss this in great detail, since videos of their activities are available online and Matt Parrott has already written about them for this site. I was left blissfully unaware of them by virtue of the fact that I had arrived over an hour before the start of the conference in order to set up a book table for my company, Arktos Media, and likewise ended up staying until several hours after the conference’s end – on both occasions, they were absent (no doubt fortifying themselves by smoking a bowl or whatever). A few of them made an appearance before the conference had actually begun, when everyone was simply having breakfast and getting coffee. When Richard demanded to see their admission passes, one of them, a White neo-hippie male youth, began shouting, “How can anyone in the 21st century have a bullshit nationalist identity . . . ” His thought was left incomplete as he was hustled out of the room—a great loss to the annals of political commentary, no doubt. A few others milled about the lobby outside the conference proper at various times throughout the day, perusing the book tables. I can’t know what they made of the books, but I hope that just maybe they came to realize that what they thought we stand for, and the reality as shown by our publications, are two very different things. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

This brings me to the point I mentioned earlier, about those of us who spoke at NPI, and those around the world who share our perspectives, being the REAL radicals. After all, what do these neo-Marxist protesters, using tactics and rhetoric that already seemed old hat in the 1960s, really have to offer? Nothing. While thinking themselves to be rebels against “the establishment” – which, oddly enough, they believe we represent (I’m still waiting for my check from the racist plutocrats who secretly control America to arrive in the mail) – they really embody nothing but a shabbily-dressed offshoot of the very system that they claim to oppose, and a slightly more extreme form of the ideas that have defined the United States and Europe for the last half-century. As Richard pointed out in his introductory remarks at the conference, these protesters aren’t the real enemy – they’re just sad. The only people who are actually developing a paradigm that challenges the dominant one in any meaningful way are those of us on the “radical Right” (for want of a better term). As such, WE are the genuine radicals – those who consider themselves to be our enemies are nothing but throwbacks to an earlier age.

As for the conference itself, it seemed to me that there were more people in attendance than there had been in 2011. Even more promising was the fact that there were many more young people among them, no doubt because of the significantly reduced price of the student tickets that Richard had made available. And, unlike 2011, there were even a few women in attendance, some of whom came of their own volition rather than reluctantly accompanying a spouse or boyfriend – a rare sight, at such an event in America, and hopefully a sign of an increasing trend.

Richard opened the proceedings by introducing the speakers and setting the tone for the day, which was one of daring to think beyond the parameters of Left and Right, and beyond any idea of “saving America” and toward imagining a new and better world to follow, as well as how it might work.

The first speaker was Piero San Giorgio, a Swiss citizen of Italian descent whose presentation was entitled “The Center Cannot Hold.” His talk was an extremely good overview of the many factors that are contributing to the decline of the present world order, particularly peak oil. He expressed his belief that all the signs indicate that a collapse of the economic system that will dwarf that of 2008 is not far off – a time most likely measurable in years rather than decades. Piero emphasized that capitalism was always a system destined to ultimately destroy itself, resting as it does on fantastical ideas of perpetual growth and the commodification of the entire planet and everything in it. For Piero, however, the coming collapse is not something to be feared, but rather an opportunity for revolutionary thinkers such as ourselves to refashion the world. To do this, we must be prepared by knowing how to survive on our own skills and resources, and Piero suggested a number of practical ways by which this can be accomplished. A very witty, well-written and thorough exposition of these threads is given in his book Survive the Economic Collapse: A Practical Guide, which was launched by Radix, an imprint of Washington Summit Publishers, in conjunction with the conference. This is a book that has been greatly needed by the “Right” for some time – both a summary of the evidence for an imminent collapse and a handbook for what one needs to in order to ensure that one can ride out the chaos rather than become caught up in it. As participants in a movement which is preoccupied with the idea of the collapse, it is nice to see someone take it up as a concrete phenomenon with definable features rather than treat it as a misty deux es machina that will magically deliver us from all our problems.

The next speaker, Sam Dickson, identified himself as a “racial communitarian activist.” Under the provocative title of “America: The God that Failed,” he set out what he saw as the fundamental flaws at the heart of America which have existed since its conception. In Dickson’s account, it was America’s roots in the British Isles, with its strong tradition of individualism that came about through its unique historical circumstances, as well as the individualistic tendencies of immigrants from other parts of Europe who came to America later, that led to the birth of the United States as a nation in which freedom was seen as an absolute value. This is an error, according to Dickson, since the individual can only attain meaning as a part of a community, and it was this elevation of freedom as an absolute value that led to Americans losing their sense of connection to a specific ethnic identity. In questioning freedom, Dickson hastened to add, one should not assume that those who do so are against freedom, as he sees himself as being against all forms of totalitarianism. Rather, one must question the view that sees freedom as an absolute value above all other concerns. Dickson says this was not just a problem that developed over the course of America’s history, but was implicit in the Declaration of Independence, which established equality as an absolute value and its associated sense of rights as something inalienable. A true community cannot be established solely on the idea of freedom, he claimed, and therefore America cannot be seen as an authentic nation. He went on to say that conservatives today are incapable of transcending this worship of freedom as an absolute and cannot surpass the notion of America as it is presently constituted. The only solution, he concluded, is to realize the limitations of the American conception of the nation, and to work toward a new nation based on the values of community and upon a renewed connection back to our European heritage.

This was followed by a panel discussion in which I participated, along with Richard, Andy Nowicki of Alternative Right, and Alex Kurtagić of Wermod and Wermod Publishing, concerning “Publishing and the Arts.” Richard kicked off by posing the question of how the new world of publishing that has emerged in recent years has impacted those of us engaged in “Right-wing” publishing. Andy spoke about the excitement of being part of a dissident form of media, and how satisfying it is to be in “the crest of an ever-growing wave” of alternative media. He also addressed the importance of avoiding getting too caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of the headlines and to instead to take a longer view, which leads to enduring rather than merely topical works, as well as the need to fund and encourage the arts of the dissident Right, which is a budding and much-needed component of the overall struggle to establish a new culture in keeping with our principles.

Next was my turn, and I discussed how a number of factors, including the birth of print-on-demand publishing, the growth of the Internet and social media, and even globalization – in the sense that my colleagues and I have outsourced ourselves to India for the past several years – have made Arktos possible, in a manner that would have been unthinkable even 20 years ago. In a sense, of course, we in Arktos are turning the very tools of the globalized world against itself in pursuit of an alternative. A gentleman from the audience expressed the view that the books that we publish only appeal to a small percentage of very intellectual readers in an age when books are allegedly on the decline, and that more direct, populist activism is what is really needed today. I replied that, while I would never discourage anyone from pursuing other courses of action, and in fact I am hopeful that such activities will take place, at the same time we should not dismiss the power of books. Not all books are intended for an exclusive audience, and I offered as an example the recent publication of our book, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ’68ers by Markus Willinger, which serves as a manifesto of the worldview of the identitarian youth movement which has accomplished many things in Europe in recent years, as an example of something which has proven to be very popular among young readers who are new to the “movement.” Besides which, it is my view that revolutions, whether they are political, cultural or intellectual, are always led by elites, and in this way books are still indispensable for training the elite that will lead our revolution in these fields. The European New Right, for example, would never have materialized were it not for the metapolitical efforts of Alain de Benoist and others who laid the groundwork in their books, something which could not have been achieved in any other medium.

Alex Kurtagić described what he is doing as an effort to engage with the space where “art, bibliophilia, and the counter-culture intersect,” and expressed his wish to bring out beautifully-produced editions of classic texts that have been neglected in recent years, as a sort of dissident Penguin Classics, which he has already done with Francis Parker Yockey’s Imperium and other books. Kurtagić believes the value of these books lies in the fact that they will lead to the development of a new body of theory, and also outlast any collapse scenario which we may face in the near future, unlike the products of the mass media and electronic culture.

Following this was lunch, and after this, there was a conversation between Sam Dickson and William Regnery. Regnery discussed his journey through the conservative movement of the time and how he later came to reject conservative politics in favor of the sorts of perspectives offered at NPI. Dickson then reflected on the fact that, while the America he grew up in during the 1950s and ’60s was better than it is today in some respects, it was also very closed-minded, and the dissemination information was dominated by a very few organizations, which rendered alternative points-of-view such as those represented by NPI and similar groups very difficult to find or disseminate. Therefore, in a sense, Dickson said that there are actually greater opportunities for revolutionary movements in America today than there were previously. Regnery professed his belief that the ostracism that Rightists encounter in America today is much more intense than anything that was experienced by Leftists under McCarthyism.

Next up was Alex Kurtagić once again, whose talks in various venues in recent years, including NPI in 2011, always cause them to be greeted with eager anticipation. His talk was on the theme of “The End of the World as We Know It.” Kurtagić explained that, since the financial meltdown of 2008, the idea of a collapse has percolated beyond its origins in the radical Right and into the mainstream, as expressed in the many books and novels which have dealt with the theme in recent years. The most distinguishing feature of these works, Kurtagić contended, is that they are primarily concerned with the idea of preserving America and its egalitarian, libertarian ideals. As such, they ultimately miss the point – egalitarianism is never questioned, and the issue of race never enters into the discussion.

The other common feature of such works, according to Kurtagić, is that they depict the collapse as something that happens suddenly and which is severe. This is not necessarily the way that it will actually happen, he pointed out – it is just as possible that we are already experiencing a gradual collapse, which will only be recognized by those looking back retrospectively at history at a later time. What must distinguish the “radical Right’s” idea of the collapse must be a willingness to see it through the lens of a transvaluation of values, rather than as an attempt to restore what will be lost when America as it is presently constituted finally falls. For Kurtagić, the key to this transvaluation is the idea of egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is the key to the liberal worldview because it is the tool that enables them to dismiss distinctions, hierarchy, meaning, and tradition. This is why the Right was ultimately forced to retreat from any meaningful opposition to liberalism, according to Kurtagić, because once egalitarianism was ensconced as the inviolable ideal of Western society, the Right was forced to oppose its enemies on their own terms, thus losing any ability to oppose them in a meaningful way.

Kurtagić called on his audience to dare to “think the unthinkable.” This means, according to him, questioning the very foundation upon which the radical Right in America has based itself in recent decades. The Anglo-American Right, according to Kurtagić, sees itself as a bastion of reason in a world of unreason. As a result, it has taken a scientific approach to its problems, which in turn is reflective of the bias towards empiricism inherent in the Anglo-American worldview. Speculative philosophy, in this tradition, is always viewed with suspicion. As a consequence, Kurtagić believes that the Anglo-American Right has failed to answer the issue of why egalitarianism cannot be questioned. The answer, he says, is because the Left succeeded in framing the issue of egalitarianism as one of an absolute good opposed to an absolute evil, and this is an idea that has spread throughout every facet of our society. Kurtagić claimed that it is not enough to try to prove the egalitarian ideal false through empirical data, but rather to depict it as an evil in turn, by pointing to the many injustices that have resulted from its pursuit, turning modern liberal democracies into near-totalitarian surveillance states in an effort to patrol the society and ensure that it is acting in accordance with this ideal.

What the game of egalitarianism is really about, Kurtagić said, is power – it is an instrument being used by those who want power to advance themselves, irrespective of whatever lofty goals initially inspired it. As such, it is mere arrogance masquerading as humility by the powers-that-be. What is needed to counter them is a moral critique of egalitarianism, which Kurtagić believes will undermine the moral legitimacy that supports the ruling classes. But it is not sufficient merely to tear down, says Kurtagić; something new will be needed to replace egalitarianism. This new ideal must surpass the merely biological view of life, because such a stand will merely render us as moral particularists, believing that what is good for our own group alone is what is best. But Kurtagić believes, along with Kevin MacDonald, that one of the distinguishing features of Western thought is universalism, and that the type of thought that we use to deal with a collapse scenario must be inherently Western in nature if we are to survive, and thus address the needs of all groups.

Unlike some, Kurtagić does not see the collapse as guaranteeing a reawakening of the racial spirit in Whites. We have come to focus on race, he said, because the Left decided to make an issue of it. But by countering them only on this level, we have only succeeded in dragging ourselves down to their level. Race is meaningless without taking into account whatever is built on top of it – therefore, we should focus our efforts on those higher, nobler aspects of our civilization rather than only upon its biological foundations. Kurtagić concluded by stating that he would rather live in a world full of differences than a homogenized one.

Following Alex Kurtagić was Roman Bernard, a Frenchman who has been active with the French organization which has been making headlines, Génération Identitaire – the same which brought identitarianism as a phenomenon to the attention of all Europe. His theme was “The Children of Oedipus.” He described his journey from more mainstream conservatism to the “radical Right,” in part as a result of his reading of English-language outlets such as Alternative Right, Counter-Currents, and Arktos. He explained that the youth of France are more and more beginning to question the ideals that they inherited from the radical Leftists who came to prominence after the strikes of 1968, and they are coming to see that all Europeans around the world are facing a common struggle. He pointed to Generation Identity as a portent of things to come: in its famous occupation of a mosque that was under construction in Poitiers, the site where Charles Martel drove back Muslim invaders in the eighth century, and in their occupation of the offices of the Socialist Party in Paris last May, the identitarians have given birth to a form of street activism that was unknown on the Right previously. Roman felt that these developments were indicative that a new and more vigorous Right, with much greater appeal to youth, was on the rise in Europe. Matt Parrott reinforced his message, emphasizing the need for continuing street-level activism to go along with more ideological or metapolitical efforts.

Mark Hackard, who writes for Alternative Right, then followed up with a discussion of the state of geopolitical affairs, in particular how the recent crisis in Syria, which led to Vladimir Putin’s frustration of Obama’s plans for military intervention, demonstrated that the era of American hegemony was already beginning to give way to a multipolar world in which other, opposing forces were coming into play.

Following this was Jack Donovan, who has been promoting the values of tribalism and a restoration of masculinity in his writings. Donovan pointed out that the collapse may come soon, or the system as it exists could limp on for quite some time; the one thing we can be certain of is that America, as it currently exists, will never change even as it declines, and the values which those of us on the “Right” hold dear will continue to be opposed by the establishment, as keeping people dependent on the liberal state is the key to their continuing power. Donovan said that, to the powers-that-be, we are only barbarians, condemned to be forever ostracized from the mainstream, but that rather than viewing this as a problem, we should embrace our barbarian identities.

Donovan said that the key to embracing this identity is to see ourselves as outsiders within our own homeland. What this means is to change the way we relate to the state, and see ourselves as something separate from it. He suggested four ways this could be accomplished. The first is to separate “us” from “them,” seeing ourselves in tribal terms and refusing to identify with America as a whole. The second is to stop getting angry because what is happening in society doesn’t make sense to us. The reason this is the case, Donovan said, is because what is being done is happening because it benefits those in power – not us. Therefore we shouldn’t expect things to seem sensible from our point of view. His third point is to de-universalize morality. Men, and White men in particular, he claimed, see themselves today as being on a mission to ensure that everyone in our society is being treated fairly. The problem is that this idea only works when everyone is interconnected as part of a cohesive community; in America today, many Whites have difficulty coming to terms with the idea that others do not have this same idea of universal justice in their hearts. No one cares when White men are excluded from anything today, Donovan pointed out. His fourth point is to encourage us to become “independent but interdependent” – to quietly establish a community somewhere of like-minded individuals who can jointly develop an alternative lifestyle, dissenting from the prevailing culture, and ensure that its members can provide for themselves by possessing the necessary skills. Land belongs to he who can hold it, Donovan emphasized, and while there is little chance that we can reclaim America from those who currently own it, it is still possible to establish a tribe that one can call one’s own.

Tomislav Sunić, who next took the podium, spoke on the idea of “Beyond Nationalism, or the Problem with Europe.” Sunić began by reminding us that prophecies of the imminent end of the world are nothing new in human history. The prevailing ideology of the modern West, he said, is that of progress, and the belief in an endless upward development of civilization. Sunić said that he sees himself as being among those who reject this belief. Believers in progress, he noted, have a tendency to want to impose their plans on society as a whole, and as a result have led to some of the greatest political atrocities of modern times. Our European ancestors, Sunić noted, were more accustomed to the idea of an inevitable fall, as can be seen in the myths of an apocalyptic end – and cyclical rebirth to follow – which predominated throughout Europe. For Sunić, this tragic sense, which he believes has been perpetuated up to the present day, as seen in great European writers such as Ernst Jünger and Emile Cioran, is part of what unites our civilization, in addition to its racial aspect. This indicates that the notion of our identity must go beyond the merely biological, in terms of being “White,” and we should look for our roots in our common historical memory. He also contended that defining ourselves solely in terms of what we oppose, such as in being against immigration or Islam, is also insufficient to form a complete identity.

Sunić claimed that we must embrace this European sense of the tragic, not as something negative, but rather as an opportunity to see history as an endless flow which will offer us opportunities, if only we can grab them. In order to do this, we must forge something new. This means creating a new, pan-European identity which will guarantee that we do not repeat the bloody mistakes that came between our various peoples in the past. Sunić offered many historical precedents for this idea, showing that when threatened by outside forces, Europeans have always demonstrated their willingness to put aside their differences to confront a greater threat. Sunić’s last point was that we must not ignore the issue of character when evaluating who is worthy to be a part of our new ethnostate – simply being of a common racial background is insufficient on its own. Sunić reminded us that both our movement and others, such as the Catholic Church, have been plagued by those with bad intentions who prey on such groups only for their own personal benefit. Such individuals must be rejected. Sunić believes that the only way forward is to establish a new European identity and rediscover our pride in who we are.

The final speaker of the day was the deliverer of the keynote address, Alain de Benoist, who more than anyone present has been responsible for giving birth to the trends which have culminated in the appearance of organizations such as NPI and the North American New Right. Benoist was the ideological founder of what came to be termed – against their own wishes – the “New Right” in France, and which later spread throughout Europe, and he has published dozens of books in French, several of which have now been translated by Arktos. Benoist’s project has always been to create a new type of political thought in Europe which will allow Europeans to defend and retain their identities while avoiding the intellectual and ideological pitfalls which befell similar efforts in the past. Thus, the subject of his talk was aptly named, “The Question of Identity.” He began by apologizing for his poor English, although it was my impression that everyone in the room was able to understand him with ease.

Benoist said that the question of identity is the most important question we face today, but also pointed out that it is a very modern question as well, since traditional societies never have the need to question their identity. He explained that identity in Europe became an issue with the rise of individualism in the wake of Descartes, who first described the notion of the individual as something independent of his community. Likewise, we have seen the division of the individual into various identities, such as one’s professional, sexual, ethnic identity, and so on.

The problems which prevail today in thinking about identity derive from the fact that we have come to think that it is a product only of how we think of ourselves. Benoist said that, from the communitarian perspective – which he also identified as his own – identity is dependent on how others see us, which means that identity can only be understood in terms of a social bond. This means that all notions of identity are ideological in nature. Furthermore, we tend to see identity as something immutable, whereas Benoist said that identity cannot exist without transformation, even if we remain, in essence, ourselves throughout such changes. The notion of identity is an interpretive act – when we perceive something, we do not just see it but also assign meaning to it, which gives our notions of identity a narrative character, in terms of a story which develops further every time we come back to it.

When it comes to mass immigration, Benoist said, while it is responsible for great social pathologies, those who oppose it miss the point by ignoring its actual causes. What is really behind it is “the system that kills the peoples,” namely the global system of capitalism that is attempting to destroy all differences in an effort to impose a universal world order. Benoist does not believe that our identity is primarily threatened by others, but rather the greatest danger we face is from the lack of respect for the identity of others that prevails everywhere today, in which Americanization is the order of the day and the highest value is money. We must wonder whether the world will continue to develop along unipolar lines, with America as the sole dominant force trying to bring about a monolithic world, or whether we will see the emergence of a multipolar world in which many identities will be allowed to play a role.

How this came about can only be understood by examining the roots of modernity in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, by its nature, was opposed to the very idea of identity, opposing tradition, rootedness, and ethnic solidarity. Benoist said that mainstream American conservatives repeat this mistake when they defend the myth of the individual against the rights of society as a whole. Continental Europeans, he said, have had less of a problem with this, since they have always recognized that capitalism is a destructive force. Capitalism is the opposite of real conservatism, he said; it believes itself to be universal and endless. Benoist pointed out that even Marx had identified capitalism as the system which stands for the abolition of all traditions and the feudal order. Capitalism relies for its survival on perpetual growth, and can thus only exist if it dismantles everything that stands in its way. This is why capitalism proved itself to be much more effective than Communism, Benoist said, since as a system it is even more universalist and materialistic than Communism ever was. Capitalism is ultimately responsible for the problem of immigration because it relies on a continual increase of its labor pool for a continuing increase in productivity, and thus it is the natural setting for the concept of “global citizenship.” But capitalism can only offer a caricature of a social bond, he said – in reality, all it can do is carry out the commodification of humans that is inherent in its logic. Benoist concluded by saying that identity will always remain under threat as long as the lifestyles inspired by capitalism remain unquestioned. He apologized to the audience if anyone had found his talk to be a deliberate provocation to Americans; he said he was only offering his opinion, but knew that it was difficult to convey in a country which valued the ideals of progress, individualism and capitalism above all else.

A very interesting question-and-answer session followed. Benoist further explicated his views on America, saying that one of the most fundamental problems with it is that it is the product of a land which already had its own culture being co-opted by another culture, which led to an inherent sense of alienation within it. He also noted that America was not alone in its responsibility for the present global order, admitting that the American and French revolutionary projects were linked by a similar ideology. Interestingly, he said that, in spite of their claim to stand for the rights of everyone, these revolutions had only possible as a result of massive bloodshed – in France, through the violent suppression of the ancien régime, and in America by the suppression of the Indians. He said that addressing these problems in America is always problematic, since a genuine Left and Right, as known in Europe, is absent here, “which is strange.” Benoist also invoked Carl Schmitt in reminding us that those who fight in the name of humanity only do so in order to deny the humanity of their enemy, rendering him into an absolute evil that must be destroyed.

After this was a very pleasant reception, during which I manned the Arktos book table. As inspiring as the speakers at the conference were, this is always my favorite part of any such event, since it gives me the opportunity to meet and speak with people who usually only know me through the Internet, or through my work for Arktos. It is always very invigorating to experience firsthand how many intelligent, interesting people find value in the work that we do, and I always greatly appreciate the many expressions of thanks for our efforts that were extended to me over the course of the weekend. I give my most heartfelt gratitude to anyone who did so.

I will conclude by saying that there were no problems of any significance at the conference, and both the speakers and the audience that the organizers managed to assemble were truly top-notch. I hope that NPI continues to hold such events with regularity in the future, as they are absolutely essential to the growth of a genuinely radical school of thought on the Right in America today – something that is desperately needed, as the impoverishment of the ideals underlying our society become more apparent by the day. Whether an actual collapse is imminent or not, what cannot be denied is the already ongoing collapse of America as a culture and as a society. Those of us on the “New Right” are the only ones capable of developing the right sorts of solutions. We need to get to work.

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Morgan, John. “A Glimpse of the Post-American Future: The National Policy Institute Conference of 2013.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 6 November 2013. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/11/a-glimpse-of-the-post-american-future/ >.

 

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After the Fall – AR Staff

After the Fall

By the American Renaissance Staff

Second NPI conference is held in Washington.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————

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

 

The West against Europe – Sunic

The West against Europe

By Tomislav Sunic

The following is the English translation of my speech in French, given in Lyon, France, on May 25, for the French identitarians (students, members of the “GUD” and “Europe Identité.”) The speech was delivered in honor of the late Dominique Venner, a historian and philosopher who committed suicide on May 21. On May 26, the day after my speech in Lyon, many GUD and “Europe Identité attendants participated in mass demonstrations in Paris against the recently adopted law by the French government on “same sex marriage.”

The term ‘Occidentalism’ exists only in the French language and has a very specific meaning. Often the words ‘Occident’ and ‘occidentalisme’ obtain specific meanings according to its user and the user’s profile. The term ‘occidentalisme’ is never used in the German or in the English language. Even the French word ‘l’Occident’, having a wider geographic significance, is translated into the German language as the ‘West’ — der Westen. The same goes for the English language in which the French noun ‘l’Occident‘ is translated into English as “the West,” a subject of many books and translations. In this regard Patrick Buchanan, a former adviser to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and a conservative large-circulation author, published a decade ago his bestseller The Death of the West (La Mort de l’Occident), where he laments about the West being invaded by millions of non-Christian immigrants. According to Buchanan, America and Europe are both part of the West.

Yet we know well that America and Europe are not synonymous despite the fact that they are for the time being still populated by majorities of pure-bred Europeans. Very often in our recent history, these two large continental land masses, despite their quasi-identical population, have waged terrible wars against each other.

In the Slavic languages the noun ‘Occident’ and the adjective ‘occidental’ do not exist either. Instead, Croats, Czechs or Russians use the noun ‘Zapad’, which means “the West.”

The French noun ‘occidentalisme’ (‘westernization’) indicates a notion of an ideology, and not an idea of a stable time-bound and space-bound entity as is the case with the noun ‘L’Occident’. I’d like to remind you that the French title of the book by Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, or in French, Le déclin de l’Occident, does not accurately reflect the meaning of the German title. The German word ‘Untergang’ signifies the end of all the ends, the final collapse, and it is a stronger word than the French term ‘déclin’, which implies a gradation, a “declination of evil” so to speak, leaving, however, an anticipation that a U-turn could be made at the very last minute. This is not the case in the German language where the noun ‘Untergang’ indicates a one-way street, an irreversible and tragic end. The same goes for the German noun ‘Abendland’, which when translated into French or English, means “the land of the setting sun”, having a largely metaphysical significance.

I must bring to your attention these lexical nuances in order to properly conceptualize our subject, namely ‘occidentalisme’ i.e. Westernization. One must keep in mind that the phrases “The Occident” and “the West” in different European languages often carry different meanings, often causing misunderstandings.

No doubt that the terms the West (‘L’Occident ‘) and Westernization (‘occidentalisation’) underwent a semantic shift. Over the last forty years they have acquired in the French language a negative meaning associated with globalism, vulgar Americanism, savage liberalism, and “the monotheism of the market”, well described by the late Roger Garaudy. We are a long way off from the 60’s and 70’s of the preceding century when the journal Défense de l’Occident was published in France comprising the names of authors well known in our circles. The same goes for the French politico-cultural movement Occident, which back in the sixties, held out a promise both for the French nationalists and the entire European nationalist youth.

The two terms, ‘Occident’ and ‘occidentalism’ which are today lambasted by the French identitarian and nationalist circles, are still the subjects of eulogies among East European identitarians and nationalists who suffer from an inferiority complex about their newly found post-communist European identity. In Poland, in Hungary or in Croatia, for example, to invoke “the West” is often a way to highlight one’s great culture, or a way to boast of being a stylish man of the world.

I’d like to remind you that during the communist epoch East Europeans were not only annoyed by communist bullying and ukases, but also felt offended by their status as second-class European citizens, especially when Westerners, namely the French and the English, used the term ‘East’ in order to describe their neck of the woods in Europe, namely “Eastern Europe” or “l’Europe de l’Est.” Moreover, the French language uses a parallel adjective “oriental” in designing eastern Europe, i.e. “L’Europe orientale” — an adjective whose disambiguation, frankly speaking, makes East Europeans furious. The French adjective “oriental” reminds East Europeans of the Orient, of Turkey, of Arabia, of Islam — notions under which they absolutely refuse to be catalogued. Even those East Europeans who are perfectly proficient in the French language and know French culture, prefer, in the absence of other words, that the French-speaking people label their part of Europe as “Eastern Europe”, but never as “l’Europe orientale.”

Balkanization and Globalization

The history of words and semantic shifts does not stop here. All East Europeans, whether left or right, anti-globalists or globalists, and even the ruling political class in Eastern Europe like to identify themselves as members of “Mitteleuropa” and not as citizens of Eastern Europe. The German term Mitteleuropa means “central Europe”, a term harking back to the nostalgic days of the Habsburg Empire, to the biedermeier style, to the sweetness of life once delivered by the House of Austria where Slovaks, Poles, Croats, Hungarians, and even Romanians and Ukrainians belonged not so long ago.

The notion of adherence to Europe, especially in this part of Eastern Europe, is further aggravated by the inadvertent usage of words. Thus the term ‘the Balkans’ and the adjective ‘Balkan’, which is used in a neutral sense in France when describing southeastern Europe, have an offensive connotation in Croatian culture, even if that designation carries no pejorative meaning. The perception Croats have about themselves is that they are at loggerheads with the Other, namely their Serbian or Bosnian neighbors.

And there is a big difference between how the term ‘Balkans’ is seen among the French or English where it typically carries a neutral connotation, as one often sees in geopolitical studies, However, in the eyes of Croats, the terms ‘Balkan’ and ‘Balkanization’ signify not only a geopolitical meltdown of the state; especially among Croat nationalists and identitarians, these terms provoke feelings associated with barbaric behavior, political inferiority, and the image of racial decay of their White identity.

In addition, the term “balkanesque’ in the Croatian language often induces negative feelings referring to a blend of various racial and cultural identities originating in Asia and not in Europe. One can often hear Croats of different persuasions teasing each other for their allegedly bad behavior with the quip: “Wow, you’re a real balkanesque dude!” In the Croatian daily vernacular, this means having an uncivilized behavior, or simply being a “redneck.”

In Serbia, this is not the case. Since the Serb identity is real and well-rooted in the historical time and space of the Balkans, it has no pejorative meaning.

The Germans, who know best the psychology of the peoples of Central Europe and of the Balkans, are well aware of these conflicting identities among the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. In fact, the German term “der Balkanezer” has a strong offensive meaning in the German vocabulary.

Which Europe?

Let us move further to Europe. Of course, to the famed European Union. What exactly does it mean to be a good European today? Let’s be honest. In view of the massive influx of non-European immigrants, especially from the Middle East and North Africa, all Europeans, whether native French, native English, or “natives” from all parts of Europe, have become good “balkanesque Balkanisers.” Indeed, what does it mean today to be a German, to be French or to be an American, considering the fact that more than 10–15 percent of Germans and French and more than 30 percent of U.S. citizens are of non-European and non-White origin? Visiting Marseille feels like visiting an Algerian city. The Frankfurt airport resembles the airport of Hong Kong. The areas around Neukölln in Berlin emit an odor of the Lebanese Kasbah. The soil, the turf, the earth, the blood, so dear to Dominique Venner or Maurice Barrès, so dear to all of us, what does it mean today? Absolutely nothing.

It would be easy to blame the aliens (“allogènes”) as the only guilty ones. One must admit, though, that it is ourselves, the Europeans, who are primarily responsible for the Westernization and therefore for the loss of our identity. While doing so, no matter how much one can rightly blame the alleged ignorance of the Americans, at least the Americans are not torn apart by small time intra-European tribalism. Possibly, the Americans of European descent can become tomorrow the spearhead of the rebirth of the new Euro-white identity. One must confess that racial identity awareness among White American nationalists is stronger than among European nationalists.

In the Europe of tomorrow, in the possible best of all the worlds — even with the aliens gone for good, it is questionable whether the climate will be conducive to great brotherly hugs between the Irish and the English, between the Basques and Castilians, between the Serbs and the Croats, between the Corsicans and the French. Let’s be honest. The whole history of Europe, the entire history of Europeans over the last two millennia has resulted in endless fratricidal wars. This still applies to “l’Europe orientale”, namely “Eastern Europe,” which continues to be plagued by interethnic hatreds. The latest example is the recent war between two similar peoples, Serbs and Croats. Who could guarantee us that the same won’t happen tomorrow again even under the presumption that the influx of Asians and Africans would come to an end?

To “be a good European” means nothing today. Declaring oneself a “good “Westerner” is meaningless as well. Being rooted in one’s soil in the globalist world has absolutely no significance today because our neighborhoods, being populated by aliens, along with ourselves, are subject to the same consumer culture. There might be something paradoxical happening with the arrival of non-Europeans: endless wars and disputes between European nationalists, i.e. between the Poles and Germans, between the Serbs and Croats, between the Irish and English — seem to have become outdated. The constant influx of non-Europeans to our European lands makes the designation of “European Europe” a lexical absurdity.

Our duty is to define ourselves first as heirs of European memory, even though we may live outside Europe; in Australia, Chile and America, or for that matter on another planet. One must admit that all of us “good Europeans” in the Nietzschean sense of the word, all of us can change our religion, our habits, our political opinions, our land, our turf, our nationality, and even our passports. But we can never escape our European heredity.

Not the aliens, but the capitalists, the banksters, the “antifas” and the architects of the best of all the worlds are our main enemies. In order to resist them it behooves us to revive our racial awareness and our cultural heritage. Both go hand in hand. The reality of our White race and our culture cannot be denied. We can change everything and even move to another planet. Our inheritance, that is, our gene pool, we must never change.

Race, as Julius Evola and Ludwig Clauss teach us, is not just biological data. Our race is our spiritual responsibility which alone ensures our European survival.

————-

Sunic, Tomislav. “The West against Europe.” The Occidental Observer, 2 June 2013. <http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/06/the-west-against-europe/ >.

 

World-Openness & Will to Power – O’Meara

World-Openness and Will to Power

By Michael O’Meara

 

“What, though, is culture?” There is, of course, no single definitive answer to this question. But in seeking however partial a response, Grécistes look to philosophical anthropology, a discipline associated with the post-phenomenological works of Max Scheler. [19] Dissatisfied with Edmund Husserl’s “idealist” examination of human consciousness, Scheler had sought to understand how the intellectual, institutional, and social facets of man’s existence relate to the underlying structure of his biological being. It was, however, Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976), a student of Scheler’s colleague, Helmuth Plessner, and the most famed recent proponent of philosophical anthropology, who has had the greatest impact on the GRECE’s understanding of culture. [20]

Following Scheler and Plessner, both of whom broke from a purely metaphysical concept of man in emphasizing the role of his animal nature, Gehlen singles out man’s culture-making capacity as his defining characteristic. [21] This capacity, he claims, developed as a consequence of man’s “instinctual deficiencies.” Although humans possess certain basic drives (such as self-preservation, aggression, territoriality, defense of the young, et cetera), these are few in number, limited in effect, and non-specific. If man had had only his few instincts on which to rely, he would not have long survived in nature 30,000 years ago when he lived under the open sky. To compensate for his instinctual deficiencies, he was compelled to draw on other faculties. For the evolutionary process that left him instinctually non-specific also imbued him with intelligence, self-consciousness, and an adaptable nature. By drawing on these faculties to cope with the natural exigencies of existence – exigencies resolved in animals by their “instinctual programming” – man “learned” to negotiate the environmental challenges of his world. Unlike animal instinct, though, this learning left him “world open” (Weltoffen), for his responses to external stimuli were not automatically programmed by earlier responses, but based on reflection and hence open to change and revision. Biological laws might therefore influence him, but only negatively, as a “framework and base.” [22] In choosing, then, how to respond to nature’s challenges, man had no alternative but to treat the world with care and foresight, to gain an overview of what had gone before and what was likely to happen in the future, to develop symbolic systems to communicate this knowledge, and, not least of all, to establish those institutions that would socially perpetuate the lessons of earlier responses.

The complex of habits, judgements, and techniques arising from man’s worldopen responses to his environment is, for Gehlen, the fundament of his culture, insofar as this complex informs, disciplines, and stylizes all his subsequent responses to the world. Then, as this cultural complex becomes the unconscious frame of his behavior, it acquires the character of a “second nature” (zweite Natur), serving him somewhat in the way instinct serves animals. This second nature, his culture, is, however, neither automatic nor immutable, for man retains the capacity to make new choices and hence to modify his behavior. [23] This “condemns” him to endless choice-making and an on-going process of becoming. Yet, even while subject to an endless process of development, his culture continues to be influenced by the legacy of earlier choices. [24] Like Heraclitus’ river, whose waters are never stepped into twice, man’s “cultural nature” remains the “same,” even as it constantly changes. That is, through various feedback processes based on an ever-widening accumulation of experience, it develops according to a “logic” – a vitality – distinctly its own, even though in developing it never mechanically replicates itself. On this basis, Gehlen characterizes culture as combining permanence and innovation, which makes man both its creature and its creator. [25]

Virtually every conscious realm of human activity, Gehlen holds, comes to be affected by culture. In his anthropology, it is virtually inseparable from man. For without it, and the role it plays in negotiating his encounters with the world, man would be only an undifferentiated and still unrealizable facet of nature – unable, in fact, to survive in nature. [26] Contrary to a long tradition of rationalist thought (the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss being the foremost recent example), there are no “natural men.” Free of culture, man would be a cretin, unable even to speak. [27] Given the inescapable character of his culture, Gehlen argues that man is best described as a biocultural being: for although culture and nature are two distinct things, in him they form an indivisible unity. [28]

Since different families of men, in different times and environments, respond differently to the limitless choices posed by their world, their cultures grow in different ways. Evident in all that distinguishes a Californian from a man of Connemara, a Chinese from a Cameroon, such disparities account for the great diversity of human cultures, with their different valuations, different symbolic systems, different ways of making sense of and responding to the world. [29] As an organic unity with forms congruent with its distinct vitality, a culture, then, is understandable only in its own terms. For its essence lies neither in rationalist nor objectivist criteria, but in the conditioned behaviors and beliefs constituting the interrelated patterns and categories specific to it. As a consequence, there is no single Culture, only different cultures, specific to the different peoples who engender them. An appeal to the universal or generic – to that which is not specific to a specific culture – can thus only be an appeal to its own negation. There can, it follows, never be a world culture, a single planetary consciousness, a single mode or distillation of life common to all men. For the heritage of choices that goes into making a culture and giving it its defining forms is distinct to each organic formation, rooted in those cycles of growth and vitality distinct to it. [30]

Because man’s “membership in humanity is mediated by his particular cultural belonging,” the only universals he shares with those of another culture are those found in his animal nature (and even these are affected by different phylogenetic developments). [31] This diversity of human cultures cannot, then, but imply diverse, if not incommensurable cultural perspectives, as different peoples define their interests, order their perceptions, and regulate their behaviors differently. [32] Similarly, all that a specific culture accepts as “objective” derives, in the last instance, from its particularistic valuations and vitality. This is not quite the same as subjectivism – unless a culture is in decline and overly self-conscious of its conventions – but it is testament to culture’s relativist character. [33] Since all men are heirs to particular formations, without which they would not be men, even an individual seeking to individuate himself in a foreign culture is obliged to do so within a frame predetermined by his original heritage. As Gehlen argues, man can never be more than an individuated expression of his native culture. For it is through such an individualization that he realizes who he is and achieves his specific humanity. [34] All men may therefore possess the powers of cognition and the capacity to create culture, but because reason is informed by its specific concerns, it never – ultimately – transcends its specific subjectivity, even when drawing on objective and instrumentalist criteria to do so. A truly neutral reason without inherent cultural “bias” (as liberal modernity posits) would require a cultureless world – that is, a world without real human beings.

Just, then, as there is no single culture common to all men, there is no single definable reality in Gehlen’s anthropology. The only reality man knows is informed by the intrinsically subjective and evolving tropes his specific heritage provides for making sense of it. [35] “Man,” Protagoras said 2500 years ago, “is the measure of all things.” Given the world’s different cultures, there are necessarily a plethora of different measures in the world. Conversely, an individual is never distinguishable from his culture: never independent of the “measures” he applies. He may be free to express his culture in his own way and a culture may permit an infinite number of individual variations and even considerable rebellion against it, but no culture is ever the sum of its parts nor is any individual independent of its encompassing attachments. [36] Culture alone imbues the individual with his distinct consciousness . . . and the consciousness of his distinctiveness. It is likewise more than a spiritual or mental state, for its supraindividual unity inevitably takes social, institutional, and demographic form. It is always a people in its specificity, not a programmed abstraction labelled “humanity,” that situates a culture. [37] Man’s animal nature and his culture-making capacity may therefore be universal, but his second nature is not. Once culture is “pealed away,” the only “nature” remaining is animal or physiological. Ontologically, this implies not the primacy of objective abstractions, but of hermeneutical processes (culturally specific self-understandings) embedded in the history of a people’s particular growth.

Similarly, different cultures, like the peoples animating them, are never arbitrary, but anchored in organically evolved ways of life that the reasoning mind may render into rational terms, but is nevertheless powerless to justify or explain. It is always culture that establishes the ground – the “objective” basis – upon which the individuals making it up are able to communicate, judge the meaning of things, and reach consensus. Without it, they would be unable to agree on common standards of truth and value – and thus live together. But more than establishing the basis of a people’s existence, culture frames whatever a people will attempt in its future, for it endows its world with meaning – and hence direction. [38]

If healthy and self-confident, a culture takes into account man’s world-open capacity, allowing him to make himself according to those of its norms and categories that best sustain him. An authentic or a “natural” enculturation, however, has become increasingly problematical in the modern age. As Giorgio Locchi (who played the greatest role in making Gehlen’s anthropology central to the GRECE’s cultural politics) argues, the traditional organic model of culture is now threatened by a functional one that jeopardizes the vitalistic basis of the enculturating process. [39] Shaped by socioeconomic circumstances influencing both the micro and macro levels of existence, the functional model specific to modernity enculturates the individual according to systemic imperatives, which subordinate communal relations and individual subjectivities to large-scale social and institutional requirements. In the process, it orients to man’s sensuous and egoistical nature, leaving room only for the internalization of its generic ideals, which are experienced as either external imperatives or animal drives. Such a culture, moreover, addresses men solely in their functional specificity or generic egoism, isolating them from those particularistic ways of life and behavior that have grown out of earlier forms of meaning. Swept along, then, by the macro-structures conditioning everyday existence and powerless to experience life according to imperatives based on a lived “fusion of purpose,” the “other-directed” man of functional culture has no alternative, integrated as he is from the top down, but to rely on external stimuli for his direction. His life, therefore, is lived according to mechanical forms over which he has no control and which tie him to pre-determined patterns of behavior. Nietzsche (an important influence on Gehlen) calls this sort of enculturation “subjective culture for outward barbarians” – for it leaves man’s inner self dependent on outside forces for its direction, devoid of development and hence susceptible to the most extreme forms of subjectivism. [40]

By contrast, the second type of culture (organically emerging from historically formed and tradition-based communities) fosters an “inner-directed” individual possessing an internalized frame of reference congruent with his second nature and geared to a sociability that integrates individual and community in an interactive synthesis. Experienced as an inheritance bequeathed by “great ancestors,” organic culture is lived as a project whose rhythms respond to the individual’s distinct vitality, as that vitality is shaped by a stylization native to it. The individual, as such, does not consume culture, but applies it, for his behavior is not determined, but inspired by it. This gives the man of organic culture, who encounters his world as an on-going project, the freedom and confidence to realize his cultural ideal in face of the specific exigencies challenging him. Organic culture accordingly grows from the inside out, becoming a personalized expression of a collective way of life, not an anonymously “consumed” commodity marketed to generic individuals situated in anonymous, indifferent social systems. [41]

For the last two centuries liberal societies have endeavored to impose their functional model on the whole world. Europeans, however, have lived most of their history according to the organic model. The hero, the genius, and the great artist, all of whom have played exemplary roles in their civilizational epic, were emulated not because they rebelled against the prevailing culture, but because they succeeded in giving new form and vitality to it. Indeed, such a disposition for renewal was inherent in their culture, for it was lived as an on-going response to an evolving world. By contrast, late modern society, subject to liberalism’s market-driven functional culture, is virtually powerless to reformulate its cultural identity or alter its relationship to the larger world, for individual adaptation is now subsumed to a mass-manufactured model responsive to systemic, not communal, personal, or vitalist imperatives. Thus, whenever this model becomes dysfunctional, so too does the cultural orientation of those situated within it, for its failures cannot but plunge the individual into a state of indeterminacy, away from established patterns of conduct and toward greater subjectivity. Unlike the hero of organic culture, who confronts the decomposition of his age for the sake of revolution – a conservative revolution that returns to first principles and allows the cultural ideal to be reasserted at a higher level – the other-directed man of functional culture tends to slip further and further into a state of formlessness, aimlessness, and inaction, vulnerable as he is to those external influences that leave his inner self uncultivated and subject his social persona to criteria alien to his felt needs. [42] From the perspective of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, Locchi argues that the instrumentalist rationality of functional culture may have the power to undermine organic cultures, but its generic dictates fail to generate those behaviors and beliefs compatible with man’s second nature.

It is in this context that the postmodern critique needs to be situated. Against modernist claims to universality, which justify the worldwide imposition of a functional cultural model geared to faceless individuals situated in impersonal social structures, postmodernists highlight the pathologies that follow from its suppression of the lived and the particular. They thus array themselves against modernity’s homogenizing model of enculturation. Yet, while advocating a new cultural pluralism, they nevertheless dismiss, disparage, or ignore the significance of earlier organic cultures, often slipping into a pure relativism that mistakes man’s second nature for a construct susceptible to endless – and arbitrary – reconstructions. Relatedly, they treat cultural particularisms as if they were akin to exchangeable market options and favor the widest variety of cultural formations. This causes them to advocate a free-floating subjectivity attuned to global markets and microgroups, but resistant to specific organic formations, which are considered “totalizing” in the sense that the Great Narrative is. [43]

Although Grécistes ally with postmodernists in rejecting the instrumental dictates of modernity’s functional culture, they take their distance from them in affirming the necessity, not the option, of organic cultures. Without such cultures, they claim an individual is powerless to negotiate the anonymous forces of contemporary society, with dysfunction, decadence, and alienation the inevitable consequence. To be at home in the world and in accord with one’s own vitality, a people needs not only to be free of alienating functional restraints, as postmodernists insist, it also needs a sense of belonging that anchors it in a meaningful reality. Belonging, however, comes only with the particular and the enrooted – and the particular and the enrooted cannot be discarded, deconstructed, or selectively reappropriated, as postmodernists advocate, without risk of greater deculturation. [44]

This should not be taken to mean that New Rightists advocate a literal return to pre-modern cultural forms, whose naturalistic models are holistic and relatively simple. Complex societies cannot function in this way. Nevertheless, the traditional organic culture [45] out of which present-day societies have emerged need not, they argue, be rejected in toto, for even as a people evolves and assumes the need for certain functional forms, it retains a need for continuity, balance, and vitality, which can be meaningfully sustained only when rooted in the native soil of a primordial cultural identity. Tying vitality to one’s native culture, New Rightists endeavor, then, to replenish all that has given life and form to the European idea over the ages, seeking to adapt Europe’s organic culture to the complexities of contemporary social systems, fully conscious that its on-going adaptation gives new meaning, as well as providing new depths to the culture as a whole. [46]

Notes:
19. H. O. Pappe, “On Philosophical Anthropology,” in Austrasian Journal of Philosophy 39 (May 1961); Otto F. Bollnow, “Die philosophische Anthropologie und ihre methodischen Prinzipen,” in R. Rocek and O. Schatz, eds., Philosophische Anthropologie Heute (Munich: Beck, 1972); Arnold Gehlen, “Philosophische Anthropologie” (1971), in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1983), vol. 4.

20. On Gehlen, see Christian Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2000); Karlheinz Weissmann, Arnold Gehlen: Vordenker eines neuen Realismus (Bad Vilbel: Antois, 2000); Karlheinz Weissmann, “Arnold Gehlen: Von der Aktuatität eines zu Unrecht Vergessen,” in Criticón 153 (January-March 1997).

21. Giovanni Monartra, “L’anthropologie philosophique d’Arnold Gehlen,” in Nouvelle Ecole 45 (Winter 1988-89).

22. Alain de Benoist, “Racism and Totalitarianism,” in National Democrat 1 (Winter 1981-82).

23. Giorgio Locchi, “Ethologie et sciences sociales,” in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (Summer 1979); Alain de Benoist, Comment peut-on être païen (Paris: Albin Michel, 1981), p. 67.

24. Alain de Benoist, Vu de Droite: Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines, 5th ed. (Paris: Copernic, 1979), pp. 171-73; Alain de Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit (Paris: Hallier, 1979), pp. 95-97.

25. Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, tr. by C. McMillan and K. Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 24-31. After his exchange with Lorenz, Gehlen was forced to modify his depiction of man’s instinctual non-specificity (Mängelwesen). For a discussion of these later revisions to his theory of culture, see Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung, op. cit., pp. 35-104.

26. “Entretien avec Konrad Lorenz,” in Nouvelle Ecole 25-26 (Winter 1974-75); Thies, Gehlen zur Einführung, op. cit., p. 32.

27. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., p. 41.

28. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., p. 217. It is this emphasis on the culture-nature link that distinguishes Gehlen’s anthropology from the “cultural determinism” of the Boas’ school, which ignores man’s animal nature, posits an idealist concept of culture, and relies on a good deal of fraudulent research. Typically, Franz Boas is feted in the American academy, but his culturalism is no less vulgar than the biological determinism he sought to refute. Much of contemporary research has, in fact, weighed in against Boas. For example, see Stephen Horigan, Nature and Culture in Western Discourse (London: Routledge, 1988).

29. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race et culture (Paris: Denoël, 1987), pp. 22-23; Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., p. 216.

30. Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, “The French New Right in the Year 2000,” in Telos 115 (Spring 1999); Alain de Benoist, Dernière année: Notes pour conclure le siècle (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2001), p. 88; Alain de Benoist, “Pour une déclaration du droit des peuples,” in La cause des peuples: Actes du XVe collogue national du GRECE (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1982).

31. See John R. Baker, Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 468-529.

32. Friedrich Nietzsche: “No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbor evaluates. Much that seems good to one people seems shame and disgrace to another . . . much that is called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honors.” See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968), “Of the Thousand and One Gods.”

33. Benoist, Les idées à l’endroit, op. cit., pp. 42 and 101; Alain de Benoist, “L’ordre,” in Etudes et recherches 4-5 (January 1977).

34. Henri Gobard, La guerre culturelle: Logique du désastre (Paris: Copernic, 1979), p. 13.

35. Alain de Benoist, “Minima moralia (2),” in Krisis 8 (April 1991).

36. Alain de Benoist, “Fondements nominalistes d’une attitude devant la vie,” in Nouvelle Ecole 33 (Summer 1979).

37. Cf. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Der Mensch – das riskierte Wesen. Zur Naturgeschichte menschlicher Unvernunft (Munich: Piper, 1988).

38. Stefano Paltrinieri, “La théorie sociale d’Arnold Gehlen,” in Nouvelle Ecole 46 (Fall 1990); Arnold Gehlen, Man in the Age of Technology, tr. by P. Lipscomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).

39. Locchi, “Ethologie et sciences sociales,” op. cit.; Alain de Benoist, “‘Communauté’ et “société’,” in Eléments 23 (September 1977).

40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, tr. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 79; Guillaume Faye, “Le culture-gadget,” in Eléments 46 (Summer 1983).

41. Cf. Ferg, “Identité européenne et multiculture,” in Devenir 13 (Summer 2000).

42. Locchi, “Ethologie et sciences sociales,” op. cit.

43. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1991), in Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

44. The GRECE’s defense of particularistic culture – a defense that makes no valuative differentiation between different cultures, but simply defends their specificity against the homogenizing impulses of liberal modernity – is seen by the Left as a sophisticated repackaging of traditional racism (insofar as culture is alleged to replace race as a criterion of exclusion). See Pierre-André Taguieff, “Le néo-racisme différentialiste. Sur l’ambiguité d’une evidence commune et ses effets pervers,” in Langage et société 34 (December 1985). For a critique of this conflation of culturalism and racism, see Raymond Ruyer, Les cents prochains siècles: Le destin historique de l’homme selon la Nouvelle Gnose américaine (Paris: Fayard, 1977), pp. 49-61. It is, in fact, the nature of authentic cultures to privilege their own imperatives. To the degree it remains authentic, every culture has no option but to “reject” other cultures (which may be “objectively” just as “good”) because they are irrelevant to its own concerns. It is precisely this aspiration towards a self-sufficient unity in its representational modes that makes culture inherently “exclusive” and its members part of a living whole, distinct from others. See Benoist, “Culture,” op. cit.; Richard M. Weaver, Vision of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Bryn Mawr: Intercollegiate Studies, 1995), pp. 3-21; Claude Lévy-Strauss, Le regard eloigné (Paris: Plon, 1983), pp. 24-30. Finally, the New Right’s identitarianism ought not to be confused with the Left’s “identity politics,” which is a radical form of liberal pluralism that seeks to validate the postmodern fragmentation of identity (usually of sexual and racial minorities). On the Left’s identity politics, see Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990). “Identitarism” is here used to denote those tendencies defending traditionalist and anti-liberal – i.e. organic – concepts of identity.

45. This allusion to “traditional culture” – like all subsequent references to “traditional society,” “traditional community,” “traditional ideas,” etc. – refers not to those primitive, tribal formations studied by anthropologists, but to the pre-modern formations that characterized Europe up to the 17th century – that is, to the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic, and Medieval forms of the European civilizational heritage.

46. Cf. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, op. cit., p. 83.

 

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O’Meara, Michael. “World-Openness and Will to Power.” Excerpt from: New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, IN, USA: 1stBooks, 2004), pp. 46-51. Text retrieved from: <http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/2007/07/16/world-openness-and-will-to-power.html >.

Note: Concerning Arnold Gehlen’s works, see also his Man in the Age of Technology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). See also the work of one of Gehlen’s most important teachers, Hans Freyer’s Theory of Objective Mind: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).

 

Race, Culture, & Anarchy – O’Meara

“Race, Culture, & Anarchy” by Michael O’Meara (PDF – 1.37 MB):

Race, Culture, and Anarchy

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O’Meara, Michael. “Race, Culture, & Anarchy.” The Occidental Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer 2009), pp. 35-64. <http://toqonline.com/archives/v9n2/TOQv9n2OMeara.pdf >.

Note: For further reading on the matter of race and identity, see Alain de Benoist’s “What is Racism?”.

 

Idea of Empire – Benoist

The Idea of Empire

by Alain de Benoist

 

Europe was the place where two great models of polity, of political unity, were elaborated, developed and clashed: the nation, preceded by the monarchy, and the empire. The last emperor of the Latin West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 475. Only the Eastern empire remained. But after the Western empire was dismantled, a new unitary consciousness seems to have arisen. In 795, Pope Leon III started to date his encyclicals based on the reign of Charles, king of the Franks and patrician of the Romans, rather than on the reign of the emperor of Constantinople. Five years later in Rome, on Christmas Day in the year 800, Leon III placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne’s head.

This is the first renovation of the empire. It obeys the theory of transfer (transratio imperii) according to which the empire Charlemagne revived is a continuation of the Roman empire, thus putting an end to theological speculations inspired by the prophet David who foresaw the end of the world after the end of the fourth empire, i.e., after the end of the Roman empire which succeeded the Babylonian, the Persian and the Alexandrian empires.

At the same time, the renovation of the empire also breaks with the Augustinian idea of a radical opposition between civitas terrena and civitas Dei, which could have been understood to mean that a Christian empire was only a chimera. In fact, Leon III had a new strategy — a Christian empire, where the emperor would be the defender of the City of God. The emperor derived his powers from the pope, whose spiritual powers he reproduced in the temporal realm. Of course, all quarrels surrounding investitures will stem from this equivocal formulation which makes the emperor a subject in the spiritual order but at the same time makes him the head of a temporal hierarchy whose sacred character will soon be asserted.

After the Verdun Treaty (843) sealed the division of the empire between Charlemagne’s three grandsons (Lothario I, Ludwig the German, and Charles the Bald), the king of Saxony, Henry I, was crowned emperor in 919. The empire then became Germanic. After Carolingian power was dislocated, it was restored again in the center of Europe with the Othonians and the Franks in 962 to the benefit of King Otto I of Germania. It remained the major political force in Europe until the middle of the 13th century, when it was officially transformed into the Sacrum Romanum Imperium. After 1442, the appellation “of the German nation” was added.

It is not possible to retrace the history of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation here beyond pointing out that throughout its history it was a composite bringing together three components: antiquity, Christianity, and German identity.

Historically the imperial idea began to disintegrate in the Renaissance, with the appearance of the first national states. Of course, the 1525 victory of Pavia, won by imperial forces against Francis II’s troops, seemed to reverse the trend. At the time, this event was considered very important and caused a renaissance of Ghibellinism in Italy. After Charles V, however, the imperial title did not go to his son Philip, and the empire was again reduced to a local affair. After the Peace of Westphalia (1648), it was seen less and less as something dignified and more and more as a simple confederation of territorial states. The decline went on for another two and a half centuries. On 6 April 1806, Napoleon brought the revolution to fruition by destroying what remained of the empire. Francis II resigned his tide and the Holy Roman Empire was no more.

At first sight, the concept of empire is not easy to understand, given the often contradictory uses that have been made of it. In his dictionary, Littre is satisfied with a tautological definition: an empire is “a state ruled by an emperor.” This is a bit too brief. Like the polis or the nation, the empire is a kind of political unity; unlike the monarchy or the republic, it is not a form of government. This means that the empire is compatible a priori with different forms of government. The first article in the Weimar Constitution stated that “the German Reich is a republic.” Even in 1978, the constitutional court at Karlsruhe did not hesitate to claim that “the German Reich remains a subject of international law.” The best way to understand the substantive reality of the empire is by comparing it with that of the nation or the nation-state — the latter represents the end of a process of nationality-formation for which France more or less provides the best example.

In its current meaning, the nation appears as a modern phenomenon. In this respect, both Colette Beaune [1] and Bernard Guenée are wrong in locating the birth of the nation very early in history. This idea rests on anachronisms; it confuses “royal” and “national,” the formation of nationality and the formation of nation. The formation of nationality corresponds with the birth of a sense of belonging which begins to go beyond the simple natal horizon during the war against the Plantagenets — a sense reinforced during the Hundred Years War. But it should not be forgotten that in the Middle Ages the word “nation” (from nation, “birth”) had an exclusively ethnic meaning — the nations of the Sorbonne are simply groups of students who speak a different language. In the same way, the word “country,” which only appeared in France with the 16th century humanists (Dolet, Ronsard, Du Bellay), originally referred to the medieval notion of “homeland.” When more than a mere attachment to the land of one’s birth, “patriotism” is fidelity to the lord or allegiance to the person of the king. Even the word “France” appeared relatively late. Starting with Charles III (called the Simple), the title borne by the king of France was Rex Francorum. The expression Rex Franciae only appeared at the beginning of the 13th century, under Philippe-Auguste, after the defeat of the Count of Toulouse au Muret, which ended with the annexation of the countries speaking the langue d’oc and with the persecution of the Cathars.

The idea of nation was fully constituted only in the 18th century, especially during the revolution. At the beginning it referred to a concept of sovereignty opposed to that of absolute monarchy. It brought together those who thought the same politically and philosophically—it was no longer the king but the “nation” which embodied the country’s political unity. Finally, it was the abstract location where people could conceive of and exercise their rights, where individuals were transformed into citizens.

First of all, the nation is the sovereign people which, in the best of all cases, delegates to the king only the power to apply the law emanating from the general will; then it is those peoples who recognize the authority of a state, inhabit the same territory and recognize each other as members of the same political unity; finally, it is the political unity itself. This is why the counter-revolutionary tradition, which exalts the aristocratic principle, initially refrains from valuing the nation. Conversely, Article 3 of the 1789 Declaration of Rights proclaims “The principle of all sovereignty essentially resides in the nation.” Bertrand de Jouvenel even wrote that: “In hindsight, the revolutionary movement seems to have had as its goal the foundation of the cult of the nation.” [2]

What distinguishes the empire from the nation? First of all, the fact that the empire is not primarily a territory but essentially an idea or a principle. The political order is determined by it — not by material factors or by possession of a geographical area. It is determined by a spiritual or juridical idea. In this respect, it would be a serious mistake to think that the empire differs from the nation primarily in terms of size in that it is somehow “a bigger nation than others.” Of course, an empire covers a wide area. What is important, however, is that the emperor holds power by virtue of embodying something which goes beyond simple possession. As a dominus mundi, he is the suzerain of princes and kings, i.e., he rules over sovereigns, not over territories, and represents a power transcending the community he governs.

Julius Evola writes: “The empire should not be confused with the kingdoms and nations which constitute it because it is something qualitatively different, prior to and above each of them in terms of its principle.” [3] Before it expressed a system of supra-national territorial hegemony, “the old Roman notion of imperium referred to the pure power of command, the quasi-mystical force of auctoritas.” During the Middle Ages, the prevailing distinction was precisely one between auctoritas (moral and spiritual superiority) and potestas (simple political public power exercised by legal means). In both the medieval empire and the Holy Roman Empire, this distinction underlies the separation between imperial authority and the emperor’s sovereign authority over a particular people. For example, Charlemagne was part emperor and part king of the Lombards and the Franks. From then on, allegiance to the emperor was not submission to a people or to a particular country. In the same way, in the Austro-Hungarian empire, loyalty to the Hapsburg dynasty constituted “the fundamental link between peoples and replaced patriotism” (Jean Béranger); it prevailed over relations of a national or confessional character.

This spiritual character of the imperial principle directly provoked the famous quarrel concerning investitures which pitted the partisans of the pope and those of the emperor against each other for many centuries. Lacking any military content, the notion of empire originally acquired a strong theological cast in the medieval Germanic world, where one could see a Christian reinterpretation of the Roman idea of imperium. Considering themselves the executors of universal sacred history, the emperors deduced from this the idea that the empire, as a “sacred” institution (Sacrum imperium), must constitute an autonomous power with respect to the pope. This is the reason for the quarrel between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

The emperor’s followers who denied the pope’s pretensions—the Ghibellines — found support in the old distinction between imperium and sacerdotium, seen as two equally important spheres both instituted by God. This interpretation was an extension of the Roman concept of relations between the emperor and the pontifex maximus, each being superior to the other in their respective orders. The Ghibelline viewpoint was not to subject spiritual authority to temporal power but to claim for imperial power an equal spiritual authority in the face of the Church’s exclusive pretensions. So for Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the emperor is the half-divine intermediary whereby God’s justice is spread on earth. This renovatio, which makes the emperor the essential source of law and confers on him the character of “living law on earth” (lex animata in terris), encapsulates the Ghibelline claim: like the pope, the empire must be recognized as an institution sacred in nature and character. Evola emphasizes that the opposition between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines “was not only political . . . it expressed the antagonism of two great dignitates, both claiming a spiritual dimension . . . On its deepest level, Ghibellinism held that during his life on earth (seen as discipline, combat and service) the individual could transcend himself . . . by means of action and under the sign of the empire, in accordance with the character of the ‘supernatural’ institution which was granted to it.” [4]

From here on, the decline of the empire throughout the centuries is consistent with the decline of the central role played by its principle and, correspondingly, with its movement toward a purely territorial definition. The Germanic Roman empire had already changed when the attempt was made in both Italy and Germany to link it to a privileged territory. This idea is still absent in Dante, for whom the emperor is neither German nor Italian but “Roman” in the spiritual sense, i.e., a successor of Caesar and Augustus. In other words, the empire cannot transform itself into a “great nation” without collapsing because, in terms of the principle which animates it, no nation can assume and exercise a superior ruling function if it does not rise above its allegiances and its particular interests. “The empire in the true sense,” Evola concludes, “can only exist if animated by a spiritual fervor . . . If this is lacking, one will only have a creation forged by violence — imperialism — a simple mechanical superstructure without a soul.” [5]

For its part, the nation finds its origin in the pretension that the kingdom has to give itself imperial prerogatives by relating them not to a principle but a territory. Its beginnings can be located in the division of the Carolingian empire following the Verdun Treaty. At that point France and Germany, if one can call them that, began to have separate destinies. The latter remained in the imperial tradition, whereas the kingdom of the Franks (Regnum Francorum), seceding from the Germanic community, slowly evolved toward the modern nation by the intermediary of the monarchical state. The end of the Carolingian dynasty dates from the 10th century: 911 in Germany, 987 in France. Elected in 987, Hugh Capet was the first king who did not understand francique. He was also the first sovereign who situated himself clearly outside the imperial tradition, which explains why, in the Divine Comedy, Dante has him say: “I was the malignant roof whose shade darkened all Christian land!”

In the 13th and 14th centuries, the kingdom of France was constructed against the empire with Philippe-Auguste (Bouvines, 1214) and Philippe le Bel (Agnani, 1303). As early as 1204, Pope Innocent III declared that “it is publicly known that the king of France does not recognize any authority above him in the temporal realm.” Just as the Trojan legend was instrumentalized, an entire work of “ideological” legitimation allowed the empire to be opposed to the principle of sovereignty of national kingdoms and their right to recognize no law other than their own interest. The role of jurists, emphasized so well by Carl Schmitt, is fundamental here. In the mid-13th century they were the ones who formulated the doctrine according to which “the king of France, who does not see anyone above him in the temporal realm, is exempt from the empire and may be considered as a princeps in regno suo.” [6] This doctrine was further developed in the 14th and 15th centuries with Pierre Dubois and Guillaume de Nogaret. By proclaiming himself “emperor in his own realm” (rex imperator in regno suo), the king opposed his territorial sovereignty to the spiritual sovereignty of the empire—his purely temporal power was opposed to imperial spiritual power. At the same time, jurists took the side of centralization against local freedoms, and against the feudal aristocracies, thanks especially to the institution of the cas royal. They founded a juridical order, bourgeois in character, in which the law — conceived as a general norm with rational attributes — became the basis of a purely statist power. Law was transformed into simple legality codified by the state. In the 16th century, the formula of the king as “emperor in his own realm” was directly associated with the idea of sovereignty, about which Jean Bodin theorized. Schmitt remarks that France was the first country in the world to create a public order completely emancipated from the medieval model.

What happened next is well known. In France the nation came into being under the double sign of centralizing absolutism and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Here the main role fell on the state. When Louis XIV said “L’Etat c’est moi,” he meant there was nothing above the state. The state creates the nation, which in turn “produces” the French people; whereas in the modern age and in countries with an imperial tradition, the people create the nation, which then creates a state. The two processes of historical construction are thus entirely opposed and this opposition is based on the difference between the nation and the empire. As has often been pointed out, the history of France has been a constant struggle against the empire. The secular politics of the French monarchy was primarily aimed at breaking up Germanic and Italian spaces. After 1792, the republic took up the same objectives: the struggle against the house of Austria and the conquest of the Rhine.

The opposition between the spiritual principle and the territorial power is not the only one. Another essential difference concerns the way in which the empire and the nation regard political unity. The unity of the empire was not mechanical but organic, which goes beyond the state. To the degree to which it embodies a principle, the empire only envisages a unity on the level of that principle. Whereas the nation engenders its own culture or finds support in culture in the process of its formation, the empire embraces various cultures. Whereas the nation tries to make the people and the state correspond, the empire associates different peoples.

The principle of empire tries to reconcile the one and the many, the particular and the universal. Its general law is that of autonomy and of the respect for diversity. The empire tries to unify on a higher level, without suppressing the diversity of cultures, ethnic characters and peoples. It is a whole whose parts are autonomous in proportion to the solidity of what unites them. These parts are differentiated and organic. In contrast to the unitary and centralized societas of the national kingdom, the empire embodies the classical image of universitas. Moeller van den Bruck rightly saw the empire as a unity of opposites, while Evola defined it as “a supranational organization such that its unity does not tend to destroy or to level the ethnic and cultural multiplicity it embraces,” [7] adding that the imperial principle makes it possible “to retreat from the multiplicity of diverse elements to a principle which is at once higher and prior to their differentiation—a differentiation which proceeds only from sensible reality.” So it is not a question of abolishing but of integrating difference.

At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome was an idea, a principle, which made it possible to unite different peoples without converting or suppressing them. The principle of imperium, which was already at work in republican Rome, reflected the will to realize an always threatened cosmic order. The Roman Empire did not require jealous gods. It admitted other divinities, known or unknown, and the same is the case in the political order. The empire accepted foreign cults and the diversity of juridical codes. Each people was free to organize its federation in terms of its traditional concept of law. The Roman jus prevailed only in relations between individuals of different peoples or in relations between federations. One could be a Roman citizen (civis romanus sum) without abandoning one’s nationality.

This distinction (foreign to the spirit of the nation) between what today is called nationality and citizenship can be found in the Germanic Roman Empire. The medieval Reich, a supra-national institution (because animated by a principle beyond the political order), was fundamentally pluralist. It allowed people to live their own lives according to their own law. In modern language, it was characterized by a marked “federalism” particularly able to respect minorities. After all, the Austro-Hungarian empire functioned efficiently for centuries while minorities began to constitute most of its population (60% of the total). It brought together Italians and Romanians, as well as Jews, Serbs, Russians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Croats and Hungarians. Jean Béranger writes that “the Hapsburgs were always indifferent to the concept of nation-state,” even to the point where this empire, founded by the house of Austria, for many centuries refused to create an “Austrian nation,” which really only took shape in the 20th century. [8]

Conversely, what characterizes the national realm is its irresistible tendency to centralization and homogenization. The nation-state’s investment of space is first revealed in a territory on which a homogeneous political sovereignty is exercised. This homogeneity may at first be apprehended in law: territorial unity results from the uniformity of juridical norms. The monarchy’s secular struggle against the feudal nobility, especially under Louis XI, the annihilation of the civilizations of countries where the langue d’oc was spoken, the affirmation of the principle of centralization under Richelieu, all tended in the same direction. In this respect, the 14th and 15th centuries marked a fundamental shift. During this period the state emerged as the victor against feudal aristocracies and ensured its alliance with the bourgeoisie at the same time as a centralized juridical order was put in place. Simultaneously, the “national” economic market appeared. Thanks to a monetarization of all forms of exchange (non-commercial, intra-community exchanges being untaxable before then), it responded to the will of the state to maximize its fiscal revenues. As Pierre Rosanvallon explains: “the nation-state is a way of composing and articulating global space. In the same way, the market is primarily a way of representing and structuring social space; only secondarily is it a decentralized mechanism for regulating economic activity through the price system. From this perspective, the nation-state and the market refer to the same form of socialization of individuals within space. They are conceivable only in an atomized society in which the individual is considered autonomous. In both the sociological and economic senses of these terms, a nation-state and a market cannot exist in spaces where society unfolds as a global and social entity.” [9]

There is no doubt that monarchial absolutism paved the way for bourgeois national revolutions. After Louis XIV had broken the nobility’s last resistances, the revolution was inevitable when the bourgeoisie could in turn win its autonomy. But there is also no doubt that in many respects the revolution only carried out and accelerated the tendencies of the Ancien Régime. Thus Tocqueville wrote: “The French Revolution caused many subordinate and secondary things, but it really only developed the core of the most important things; these existed before it . . . With the French, the central power had already taken over local administration more than any other country in the world. The revolution only made this power more skillful, powerful, enterprising.” [10]

Under the monarchy, as under the republic, the “national” logic tried to eliminate anything that might interfere between the state and the individual. It tried to integrate individuals to the same laws in a unified fashion; it did not attempt to bring together collectivities free to preserve their language, cultures and laws. State power was exercised over individual subjects, which was why it constantly destroyed or limited the power of all forms of intermediate socialization: familial clans, village communities, confraternities, trades, etc. The 1791 law against corporations (loi Le Chapelier) thus found its precedent in Francis I’s suppression of “all confraternities of trades and artisans in the whole kingdom” in 1539 — a decision which at that time targeted those artisans belonging to societies said to be of duty. With the revolution, of course, this trend accelerated. The restructuring of the territory into departments of more or less equal size, the fight against “the provincial spirit,” the suppression of particularities, the offensive against regional languages and “patois,” the standardization of weights and measures, represent a real obsession with bringing everything into alignment. In terms of Ferdinand Tönnies’ old distinction, the modern nation emerges when society rises on the ruins of old communities.

This individualist component of the nation-state is essential here. The empire requires the preservation of the diversity of groups; by its very logic, the nation recognizes only individuals. One is a member of the empire in a mediated fashion through intermediary structures. Conversely, one belongs to the nation in an immediate way, i.e., without the mediation of local ties, bodies or states. Monarchial centralization was essentially juridical and political; it thereby pointed to the work of constructing the state. Revolutionary centralization, which accompanied the emergence of the modern nation, went further still. It aimed at “producing the nation” directly, i.e., at engendering new social modes of behavior. The state then became productive of the social, a monopolistic producer: it attempted to establish a society of individuals recognized as equal on a secular level, on the ruins of the intermediate bodies it had suppressed. [11]

As Jean Baechler points out, “in the nation the intermediate groups are seen as irrelevant with respect to the citizenry and so tend to become secondary and subordinated.” [12] Louis Dumont argues along similar lines, that nationalism results from transferring the subjectivity characteristic of individualism to the level of an abstract collectivity. “In the most precise, modern, sense of the term, ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ (distinguished from simple patriotism) have historically been part and parcel of individualism as a value. The nation is just a type of global society which corresponds to the reign of individualism as a value. Not only does the nation accompany individualism historically, the interdependence between them is so indispensable that one could say the nation is a global society composed of people who consider themselves individuals.” [13]

This individualism, woven within the logic of the nation, is obviously opposed to the holism of imperial construction, where the individual is not dissociated from his natural connections. In the empire the same citizenry is composed of different nationalities. In the nation the two terms are synonyms: belonging to a nation is the foundation for citizenship. Pierre Fougeyrollas summarizes the situation in these terms: “Breaking with medieval societies which had a bipolar identity—that of ethnic roots and of the community of believers — modern nations are constituted as closed societies where the only official identity is that which the state confers on citizens. Thus in terms of its birth and foundations, the nation has been an anti-empire. The Netherlands originated in a break with the Hapsburg Empire; England originated in a break with Rome and the establishment of a national religion. Spain only became Castilian by escaping from the grasp of the Hapsburg system, and France, which was slowly constituted as a nation against the Germanic Roman Empire, only became a nation by combating traditional forces in all of Europe.” [14]

The empire is never a closed totality, as opposed to the nation, which has been increasingly defined by intangible boundaries. The empire’s frontiers are naturally fluid and provisional, which reinforces its organic character. Originally the word “frontier” had an exclusively military meaning: the front line. At the beginning of the 14th century, under the reign of Louis X (“Louis the Stubborn”) in France, the word frontiere replaced marche, which had commonly been used up to then. But it would still take four centuries before it acquired its current meaning of delimitation between two states. Contrary to legend, the idea of a “natural frontier,” which jurists sometimes used in the 15th century, never inspired the external politics of the monarchy. Its origin is sometimes wrongly attributed to Richelieu, or even to Vauban. In fact, only during the revolution was this idea, according to which the French nation would have “natural frontiers,” used systematically. Under the Convention especially, the Girondins used it to legitimate the establishment of the eastern frontier on the left bank of the Rhine and, more generally, to justify their annexation policies. It is also during the revolution that the Jacobin idea that the frontiers of a state must all at once correspond to those of a language, a political authority, and a nation begins to spread everywhere in Europe. Finally, it is the Convention which invented the notion of the “foreigner within” (of which Charles Maurras was paradoxically to make great use) by applying it to aristocrats who supported a despised political system: by defining them as “strangers in our midst,” Barrère asserts that “aristocrats have no country.”

Even with its universal principle and vocation, the empire is not universalist in the current sense of the term. Its universality never meant expansion across the whole earth. Instead, it was connected to the idea of an equitable order seeking to federate peoples on the basis of a concrete political organization. From this viewpoint, the empire, which rejects any aim of conversion or standardization, differs from a hypothetical world-state or from the idea that there are juridico-political principles universally valid at all times and in all places.

Since universalism is directly linked to individualism, modern political universalism must be conceived in terms of the individualist roots of the nation-state. Historical experience shows that nationalism often takes the form of an ethnocentrism blown up to universal dimensions. On many occasions the French nation wanted to be “the most universal of nations,” and it is from the universality of its national model that it claimed to derive its right to disseminate its principles throughout the world. At the time when France wanted to be “the older sister of the Church,” the monk Guibert de Nogent, in his Gesta Dei per Francos, made the Franks the instrument of God. From 1792 on, revolutionary imperialism also tried to convert all of Europe to the idea of the nation-state. Since then, there has been no lack of voices authorized to ensure that the French idea of nation is ordered to that of humanity, and that this is what would make it particularly “tolerant.” One can question this pretension since the proposition can be inverted: if the nation is ordered to humanity, it is because humanity is ordered to the nation. With this corollary, those opposed to it are excluded not only from a particular nation but from the human species in its entirety.

The word empire should be reserved only for the historical constructions deserving this name, such as the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Germanic Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire. The Napoleonic empire, Hitler’s Third Reich, the French and British colonial empires, and modern imperalisms of the American and Soviet types are certainly not empires. Such a designation is only abusively given to enterprises or powers merely engaged in expanding their national territory. These modern “great powers” are not empires but rather nations which simply want to expand, by military, political, economic or other conquest beyond their current frontiers.

In the Napoleonic era the “empire” (a term already used to designate the monarchy before 1789, but simply in the sense of “state”) was a national-statist entity attempting to assert itself in Europe as a great hegemonic power. Bismarck’s empire, which gave priority to the state, also attempted to create the German nation. Alexandre Kojève observed that “Hitler’s slogan: Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer is only a (bad) German translation of the nationalistic watchword of the French Revolution: la Republique une et indivisible.” The Third Reich’s hostility to the idea of empire is also visible in its critique of the ideology of intermediate bodies and “estates.” [15] A centralist and reductive vision always prevailed in the Soviet “empire,” implying a unified politico-economic space thanks to a restrictive concept of local cultural fights. As for the American “model,” which tries to convert the whole world into a homogeneous system of material consumption and techno-economic practices, it is difficult to see what idea, what spiritual principle, it could claim!

“Great powers” are not really empires. In fact, modern imperialisms should be challenged in the name of what an empire truly is. Evola thought no differently when he wrote: ‘”Without a Meurs et deviens, no nation can aspire to an effective and legitimate imperial mission. It is not possible to retain one’s national characteristics and then to desire, on this basis, to dominate the world or simply another place.” [16] And again: “If the ‘imperialist’ tendencies of the modern age have been abortive because they often accelerate the downfall of the peoples who give in to them, or if they have been the source of all kinds of calamities, this is precisely because they lack any really spiritual — supra-political and supra-national — element; the latter is replaced by the violence of a power which is greater than the one it wants to subjugate but which is not of a different nature. If an empire is not a holy empire, it is not an empire but a kind of cancer attacking all the distinctive functions of a living organism.” [17]

Why think at all about the concept of empire today? Is it not purely chimerical to call for the rebirth of a true empire? Perhaps. But is it an accident if, even today, the model of the Roman Empire has continued to inspire all attempts to go beyond the nation-state? Is it an accident if the idea of empire (the Reichsgedanke) still mobilizes reflection at a time when thought is in disarray? [18] And is it not this idea of empire which underlies all the debates currently surrounding the construction of Europe? Is the nation-state irreplaceable? Many on the Left and on the Right have said so. This is, notably, Charles Maurras’ viewpoint. According to him, the nation is “the biggest of the temporally solid and complete communitarian circles.” [19] He declared that “there is no political framework larger than the nation.” [20] Thierry Maulnier replied: “The cult of the nation is not in itself a response but a refuge, a mystifying effusion, or worse still, a redoubtable diversion from internal problems.” [21]

What basically moves the world today is beyond the nation-state. The latter finds its framework for action, its sphere of decision-making, torn apart by many ruptures. The nation is challenged both from above and below. It is challenged from below by new social movements: by the persistence of regionalisms and new communitarian claims. It is as if the intermediate forms of socialization which it once did away with were born again today in new forms. The divorce between civil society and the political class is reflected in the proliferation of networks and the multiplication of “tribes.” But the nation is also challenged from above by often weighty social phenomena which mock national frontiers. The nation-state is stripped of its powers by the world market and international competition, by the formation of supra-national or communitarian institutions, by intergovernmental bureaucracies, techno-scientific apparati, global media messages or international pressure groups. At the same time, there is the increasingly distinct external expansion of national economies at the expense of internal markets. The economy is becoming globalized because of interacting forces, multinationals, the stock-exchange, global macro-organizations.

The imagery of nations also seems to be in crisis and those who talk of “national identity” are generally hard-pressed to define it. The national model of integration seems to be exhausted. The evolution of politics toward a system of techno-managerial authorities, which brings to fruition the implosion of political reality, confirms that the logic of nations is no longer able to integrate anyone or to assure the regulation of relations between a state criticized on all fronts and a civil society which is breaking apart. So the nation is confronted with the growth of certain collective or communitarian identities at the very moment when global centers of decision-making paint a gloomy picture above it. Daniel Bell expressed this when he said that nation-states have become too big for little problems and too little for the big ones. Deprived of any real historical foundation, in the Third World the nation-state seems to be a Western import. The long-term viability of, e.g., black African or near Eastern “nations,” seems increasingly uncertain. In fact these nations are the result of a series of arbitrary decisions by colonial powers profoundly ignorant of local historical, religious, and cultural realities. The dismantling of the Ottoman and of the Austro-Hungarian empires as a result of the Sevres and Versailles treaties was a catastrophe whose effects are still felt today — as the Gulf War and renewed conflicts in Central Europe show.

In such conditions, how can the idea of empire be ignored? Today it is the only model Europe has produced as an alternative to the nation-state. Nations are both threatened and exhausted. They must go beyond themselves if they do not want to end up as dominions of the American superpower. They can only do so by attempting to reconcile the one and the many, seeking a unity that does not lead to their impoverishment. There are unmistakable signs of this. The fascination with Austria-Hungary and the rebirth of the idea of Mitteleuropa [22] are among them. The call for empire will be born of necessity. The work Kojève wrote in 1945, only recently published, is remarkable. In it he makes a fervent appeal for the formation of a “Latin empire” and posits the necessity of empire as an alternative to the nation-state and to abstract universality. “Liberalism,” he wrote, “is wrong to see no political entity beyond the nation. Internationalism sins because it can see nothing politically viable beyond humanity. It too was incapable of discovering the intermediate political reality of empires, i.e., of unions, even international fusions, of related nations, which is today’s very political reality.” [23]

In order to create itself Europe requires a unity of political decision-making. But this European political unity cannot be built on the national Jacobin model if it does not want to see the richness and diversity of all European components disappear. It also cannot result from the economic supra-nationality dreamt by Brussels technocrats. Europe can only create itself in terms of a federal model, but a federal model which is the vehicle for an idea, a project, a principle, i.e., in the final analysis, an imperial model. Such a model would make it possible to solve problems of regional cultures, ethnic minorities and local autonomies, which will not find a true solution within the framework of the nation-state. It would also make it possible to rethink the whole problem of relations between citizenship and nationality in light of certain problems arising from recent immigration. It would allow one to understand the resurgent dangers of ethno-linguistic irredentism and Jacobin racism. Finally, because of the important place it gives to the idea of autonomy, it would make room for grass-roots democratic procedures and direct democracy. Imperial principle above, direct democracy below: this is what would renew an old tradition!

Today there is a lot of talk about a new world order, and one is certainly necessary. But under what banner will it take shape? The banner of man-machine, of the “computer-man,” or under the banner of a diversified organization of living peoples? Will the earth be reduced to something homogeneous because of deculturalizing and depersonalizing trends for which American imperialism is now the most cynical and arrogant vector? Or will people find the means for the necessary resistance in their beliefs, traditions, and ways of seeing the world? This is really the decisive question that has been raised at the beginning of the next millennium.

Whoever says federation, says federalist principle. Whoever says empire, says imperial principle. Today this idea does not seem to appear anywhere. Yet it is written in history. It is an idea which has yet to find its time. But it has a past and a future. It is also a matter of making an origin dear. At the time of the Hundred Years War, Louis d’Estouteville’s motto was, “Where honor is, where loyalty is, there lies my country.” We have our nationality and we are proud of it. But it is also possible to be citizens of an idea in the imperial tradition. This is what Evola argues: “The idea alone should represent the country . . . It is not the fact of belonging to the same soil, speaking the same language, or having the same bloodline which should unite or divide us, but the fact of supporting or not supporting the same idea.” [24] This does not mean that roots are unimportant. On the contrary, they are essential. It only means that everything must be put into perspective. This is the whole difference between origin as a principle and origin as pure subjectivity. Only origin conceived as a principle makes it possible to defend the cause of peoples, of all peoples, and to understand that, far from being a threat to one’s own identity, the identity of others in fact plays a role in what allows one to defend one’s respective identity against a global system which tries to destroy them. It is necessary to affirm the superiority of the idea which preserves diversity for everyone’s benefit. It is necessary to assert the value of the imperial principle.

Notes

[1] Naissance de la nation France (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
[2] Les débuts de l’État moderne. Une histoire des idées politiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1976) p. 92.
[3] Révolte contre le monde moderne (Montreal: L’Homme, 1972) p. 121.
[4] Les hommes au milieu des ruines (Paris: Sept Couleurs, 1972) p. 141.
[5] Essais politiques (Puiseaux: Pardès, 1988) p. 86.
[6] Robert Folz, Le coronnement impérial de Charlemagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
[7] Essais politiques, op. cit., p. 83.
[8] Histoire de l’empire des Habsbourg 1273-1918 (Paris: Fayard, 1990).
[9] Le libéralisme économique. Histoire de l’ldée de marché (Paris: Seuil, 1989) p. 124.
[10] L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) p. 65. (First edition 1856).
[11] Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, L’État en France de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
[12] ‘Dépérissement de la nation?’ in Commentaire (Spring, 1988) p. 104.
[13] Essais sur l’individualisme (Paris: Seuil, 1983) pp. 20-1.
[14] La nation, essor et déclin des sociétés modernes, (Paris: Fayard, 1987) p. 931.
[15] Cf. Justus Beyer, Die Standeideologien der Systemzeit und ihre Uberwindung (Darmstadt, 1942).
[16] Essais politiques, op. cit., p. 62.
[17] Révolte contre le monde moderne, op. cit., p. 124.
[18] During the Weimar Republic, there was a real growth in publications concerning the idea of empire and of ‘thinking about the Reich’ (Reichsgedanke). On this subject, see Fritz Buchner, ed., Was ist das Reich? Eine Aussprache unter Deutschen (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1932); Herbert Krüger, ‘Der Moderne Reichsgedanke’, in Die Tat (December 1933) pp. 703-15 and (January 1934) pp. 795-804; Edmund Schopen, Geschichte der Reichsidee, 8 Volumes, (Munich: Carl Rohrig, 1936); Peter Richard Rohden, Die Idee des Reiches in der Europäischen Geschichte (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1943); Paul Goedecke, Der Reichsgedanke im Schriftum von 1919 bis 1935 (Marburg: Doctoral thesis, 1951). The authors dealing with this subject often disagree about the meaning of the idea of empire and about the relation between the medieval Germanic Reich and the Roman imperium. In Catholic circles, the apology for empire often expresses nostalgia for the medieval Christian unity before the religious wars. The concept of the Reich as a ‘Holy Alliance’ or as a ‘sacramental reality’ frequently points to romanticism (Novalis, Adam Müller) but also to Constantin Franz. In other respects, the idea of a ‘third empire’ carries chiliastic representations from the end of the Middle Ages (Joachim of Fiore’s announcement of the Reign of the Spirit). On the Protestant side, one finds the ‘Reich theologies’, especially in Friedrich Gogarten’s Politische Ethik (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1932), Wilhelm Stapel’s Der Christliche Staatsmann: Eine Theologie der Nationalismus (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932) or Friedrich Hielscher’s Das Reich (Berlin: Reich, 1931), but from a different perspective. In Stapel, the main idea is that of a national Reich having its own ‘nomos’ with a pronounced pluri-ethnic character but sanctifying German hegemony. See his reply to the supporters of the Catholic Reich, ‘Der Reichsgedanke zwischen den Konfessionen’, in Deutsches Volkstum, (15 November 1932) pp. 909-16. In Moeller van den Bruck, this secularized and strictly German concept of empire is stressed even more. Very critical of the Holy Roman Empire, Moeller accuses Staufen of having been taken in by the ‘Italian mirage’, and of wanting to make the imperium romanum (the ‘periphery’) live again rather than trying to unify the German people (the ‘center’). This is the reason for his strange sympathy with the Guelphs and for his preference for the Deutsches Reich deutscher Nation as opposed to the Heiliges römisches Reich. After 1933, the discussion concerning the idea of Reich (Reichsidee) was carried on outside official circles. For Carl Schmitt, the notion of empire is the central representation of a new right-wing political order of peoples associated with the notion of ‘great space’ (Großraum) — an idea which was strongly criticized by the supporters of a purely German and völkische notion of empire. These supporters saw in the Reich the organizing force for a ‘living space’ grounded in the ‘biological’ substance of the German peoples. This argument is made by Reinhard Höhn (‘Großraumordnung und völkisches Rechtsdenken’: in Reich, Volksordung, Lebensraum, 1943, pp. 216-352). See also Karl Richard Ganzer, Das Reich als europäische Ordnungsmacht (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1941-2); and Oswald Torsten, Rîche. Eine Geschichtliche Studie bet die Entwicklung der Reichsidee (Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenburg, 1943).
[19] Mes idées politiques (Albatros, 1983) p. 281.
[20] Enquête sur la monarchie 1900-1909, 1st ed. (Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1909) p. XIII.
[21] Au-delà du nationalisme (Paris: Gallirnard, 1938).
[22] Cf. Karlheinz Weissmann, ‘Das Herz des Kontinents: Reichsgedanke und Mitteleuropa-ldee’, in Mut (January 1987) pp. 24-35.
[23] ‘L’empire latin’, in La Règle du jeu (1 May 1990) p. 94.
[24] Les hommes au milieu des ruines, op. cit., p. 41.

 

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De Benoist, Alain. “The Idea of Empire.” Telos, Vol. 1993, No. 98-99 (December 1993), pp. 81-98. Text retrieved from: <https://eurocontinentalism.wordpress.com/2012/01/22/the-idea-of-empire-alain-de-benoist/ >. (See this essay in PDF format here: The Idea of Empire).

Note: The essay “The Idea of Empire” was originally published in French as “L’idée d’Empire” (published in Critiques – Théoriques [Lausanne & Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 2003]). It is also available in a German translation as “Der Reichsgedanke. Das imperiale Modell für die künftige Struktur Europas” (published in Schöne Vernetzte Welt [Tübingen: Hohenrain-Verlag, 2001]), in a Spanish translation as “La idea de Imperio” (published in Elementos Nº 32, “Imperio: Orden Especial y Espiritual” [11 September 2012], <http://issuu.com/sebastianjlorenz/docs/elementos_n__32 >, pp. 3-30), in an Italian translation as “L’idea di Impero” (published in Incursioni [May 2007], pp. 31-51), in a Dutch translation as “De Europese Rijksgedachte” (published in Teksten: kommentaren en studies No. 68 [July-September 1992], pp 34-48), in a Russian translation as “Идея Империи” (published in Против либерализма: к четвертой политической теории [Санкт-Петербург: Амфора, 2009]), in  a Portugese translation as “Nação e império” (published online: website Legio Victrix, 10 April 2012, <http://legio-victrix.blogspot.com/2012/04/nacao-e-imperio.html >), and in a Belarusian translation as “Ідэя Імперыі” (published online: website Cytadel, n.d., <http://cytadel.org/en/node/2356 >).

Note on further reading: On this topic, see also the related essay by Benoist known as “What is Sovereignty?”

 

Human Rights – Devlin

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

By F. Roger Devlin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This reviewer has no criticism to offer.

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

 

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

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

 

What is Racism? – Benoist

“What is Racism?” by Alain de Benoist (PDF – 246 KB):

What is Racism?

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De Benoist, Alain. “What is Racism?” Telos, Vol. 1999, No. 114 (Winter 1999), pp. 11-48. <http://www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/what_is_racism.pdf >.

Notes: The original French version of this essay was “Racisme: remarques autour d’une definition,” which was published in Racismes, Antiracismes, edited by Andre Béjin and Julien Freund (Paris: Librairie des Méridiens, 1986). This book is also available in Italian translation as Razzismo e antirazzismo (Firenze: La roccia di Erec, 1992).

On this subject, see also this commentary on racism in French by Alain de Benoist (“Contre tous les racismes,” Éléments, n°8-9, 1974): <http://grece-fr.com/?p=3385 >. A similar commentary is available in Spanish as “Sobre racismo y antirracismo,” entrevista a Alain de Benoist por Peter Krause (published in Sebastian J. Lorenz’s Elementos, N° 47, “Elogio de la Diferencia. Diferencialism versus Racismo” [Mayo 2013]): <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/05/elementos-n-47-elogio-de-la-diferencia.html >. (We have made Elementos N° 47 available for download on our site: Elementos Nº 47 – Diferencialismo). The original German version of this interview was “Alain de Benoist, Vordenker der Neuen Rechten in Frankreich, über Rassismus und Antirassismus, Ideologien und Fremdenfeindlichkeit” (Junge Freiheit, 30/98, 17 July 1998): <http://jungefreiheit.de/service/archiv/?www.jf-archiv.de/archiv98/308aa7.htm >.

The matter of racism versus differentialism has also been further discussed in Spanish in Elementos, N° 43, “La Causa de los Pueblos: Etnicidad e Identidad” (Marzo 2013), <http://urkultur-imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2013/03/elementos-n-43-la-causa-de-los-pueblos.html >. (download from our site here: Elementos Nº 43 – Etnicidad).

 

Europe vs. the West – Devlin

Europe vs. the West

By F. Roger Devlin

Pierre Krebs
Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance?
London: Arktos Media, 2012

This newest offering from Arktos is the first translation into English from the works of Pierre Krebs, a leading figure in the European New Right. Born in French Algeria (1946), Krebs studied law, journalism, sociology and political science in France, taking an active role in right-wing politics during the late 1960s. Later settling in Germany, he founded the Thule Seminar, a self-described “research society for Indo-European Culture,” in Kassel in 1980. The German Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) appears to take considerable interest in his activities.

Besides the book under review, Dr. Krebs is the author of The European Rebirth, The Imperishable Inheritance: Alternatives to the Principle of Equality* and a study on Valéry and Wagner. Fighting for the Essence was first published in German translation in 1996, with a revised French edition appearing in 2000.**

Krebs’ nomenclature, original with him so far as I know, draws a sharp contrast between “Europe” and “the West.” “Europe” refers to the great racial and cultural tradition he wishes to defend; “the West” means today’s “Western community of values” that engages in humanitarian bombing campaigns, enforces tolerance at gunpoint on its subject populations, prefers the stranger to the kinsman, and wishes to erase even the distinction between men and women.

Prof. Krebs is good at pointing up the antinomies of this modern ideological abortion: its homogenization in the name of diversity and suppression of particularity in the name of tolerance. Multiculturalism and multiracialism, as he observes, are mystifying terms which function to conceal a culturicidal and raciophobic program of deracination and panmixia. “The doctrine of human rights should be seen for what it really is: the ideological alibi of the West in a battle to the death that it has declared on all the peoples of the world.”

Apologists for Western ideology rest their case upon a false dichotomy between assimilation and fearful isolation:

In fact, just as the self-defined individual who differentiates himself from the surrounding masses does not isolate himself from society, but on the contrary enriches it with his uniqueness, so also a people conscious of their difference do not isolate themselves any more from the human species, but come closer to it every time they endow it with their singularities and their peculiarities. The more a people becomes conscious of their difference, the more their opening up to the world has a chance of profiting others . . . and the more they are inclined to tolerate the differences of others.

The author distinguishes three stages in the development of “the egalitarian lie.” The first, political stage replaces organic democracy with a parliamentary procedure emptied of ethno-cultural content; the second, juridical phase, demands that all nations align their constitutions to this same model; the third, ideological stage breaks down the territorial integrity of nations through open immigration, which leads directly to the final biological abolition of human differences in universal panmixia.

All of this sounds consistent with what might be called the orthodox conservative narrative of Western decline since the Enlightenment. Nor does Krebs depart from that narrative in tracing the origin of egalitarianism to Christianity. In the view of many on the Christian right, modernism is a practical form of the Pelagian heresy, an attempt to bring heaven down to earth—“immanentizing the eschaton,” in Voegelin’s mellifluous words.

But Krebs names the heresiarch Pelagius as one of his heroes. In his view, the egalitarian lie is to be blamed not on any perversion of Christianity, but on Christianity itself—or, as he invariably writes, “Judeochristianity.” He cites Nietzsche’s observation that

Christianity, which has sprung from Jewish roots and can only be understood as a plant that has come from that soil, represents the counter-movement to every morality of breeding, race or privilege—it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence.

From this Krebs infers that

every discourse which calls for a European Renaissance without separating itself from Judeo-Christian civilization, its dogmas and its rituals, is condemned to failure in advance, since it is enclosed within the very matrix of decline. . . . The monotheistic “Unique” and the egalitarian “Same” are, in fact, the front and reverse side of the same coin. . . . [The] continuity is flagrant between the Jewish will to reduce the polymorphic and polysemic figures of the divine to the univocal figure of the only God, an autocratic being, the absolute ‘I’ of the universe on the one hand; and the secularized monotheism of human rights on the other, informed by the same will to reduce all the racial and cultural polymorphism of the world to univocal figure of a globalized Homo occidentalis, a serial repetition of a Same detached from its identitarian affiliations.

The author also cites Nietzsche’s suggestion that monotheism, “the belief in a normal god next to whom there are only false pseudo-gods,” was a “consequence of the teaching of a normal human type.” Indo-European polytheism, on the other hand, “is fundamentally alien to the notion of messianism or proselytism, the natural sources of the intolerance and fanaticism that are characteristic of the three monotheistic religions.”

Finally, the author accuses “Judeochristianism” of “breaking the bond of friendship between men and nature” through its command to subdue the earth. Anyone with a genuinely European mentality, he says, would find incomprehensible the promise to Noah and his sons that “the fear and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air: into your hand are they delivered.”

The look which [Westernized Europe] bestows on Nature is no longer the look of the living man who discovers and feels himself a partner of the world. It is the essentially venal, anonymous and cold look of techno-scientific inspection, a utilitarian look that no longer conceives the world as a dwelling in which man is the inhabitant, but as an object that men, endowed with the power of appropriation by Jehovah, have the duty to exploit.

The rejection of Christianity does not commit the author to reject all of post-classical European civilization, of course, or even all of its religious life. He emphasizes that Christianity never truly eradicated the pagan heritage, and claims to find the native spirit of Europe in many great figures of the Christian era, including Pelagius, John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jacob Böhme, Goethe, Hölderlin, Beethoven, the dramatist Friedrich Hebbel, Theodor Storm, Rilke, Teilhard de Chardin, Saint-Exupéry and Heidegger. He also claims that Gothic architecture owed nothing to “Judeochristianity.”

Dr. Krebs’ treatment of Christianity and Western decline deserves a fuller treatment not only than I can give here but also than he himself offers in his slender volume. The issue is of the utmost practical importance, for it represents a rejection of the great majority of his potential political allies.

This reviewer is happy to agree that the rise of Christianity, with its promise of salvation to the world-weary, was closely bound up with the decline of Graeco-Roman civilization. Indeed, I suspect this historical context better accounts for what Krebs finds decadent in Christianity than does its racially alien origin. But does it make sense to blame Christianity also for the decadence of modern civilization?

There is surely considerable temerity in reducing the thirteen or fourteen centuries of European civilization between the conversion of Constantine and the Enlightenment to a list of fifteen personal favorite figures. And the temerity is increased by the implied claim to have understood several of these figures better than they understood themselves.

It is a familiar observation that enlightenment thought amounts to a secularized version of Christian doctrine, a displacement of its eschatology into the realm of politics. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is just one example of a Christian conservative who stressed this connection, citing the Latin proverb corruptio optimi pessima: “the corruption of the best is the worst.”

But Krebs the admirer of Pelagius cannot mean this; his explicit positions would force him to deny that the secularization of Christianity is the essential misstep. Instead he must hold that (1) Christianity itself is responsible for the specific way in which it was negated by the Enlightenment, and that (2) Europe has been in a state of decadence since at least the fourth century AD. This bold interpretation of European history may deserve consideration, but the author has hardly made a case for it in the brief manifesto under review.

Next to “Judeochristianity,” Krebs’ greatest scorn is reserved for “the putrid swamps of America,” with their fast food restaurants and comic-book literature. This, of course, is a common trope of European intellectuals across the political spectrum, easily made plausible by comparing American low culture with European high culture. As a long-time American expatriate in Europe, I often had cause to lament mindless lowbrow Americanization myself, but it is hardly a reflection on America that Europeans prefer McDonald’s to Melville. Wilsonian democratic messianism would also have got nowhere without striking a chord in other lands.

Dr. Krebs closes his work with some far more plausible reflections on culture, immigration and territory. He cites Heiner Geissler of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party as a representative of contemporary elite opinion:

It is not the influx of foreigners but the incapacity for rejuvenation and adaptation of the Germans, combined with their aversion to immigration, that represents the real danger for our future. . . . In the future, Germans will not have to live with just five million foreigners—as today—but with seven, perhaps ten million.

The danger in such a mindset stems from its unfalsifiability. We have no reason to think Herr Geissler unacquainted with the problems connected to immigration; he may well have to deal with them every day. But he has a ready-made explanation for all of them, as well as any that may arise in the future: the “xenophobia” of his fellow countrymen. As long as he clings to this notion, no empirical evidence of immigration’s failure will ever give him cause to reconsider his commitment to it—not even a full-scale ethnic civil war. Such observations, writes Dr. Krebs, “allow one to measure to what a degree of stupidity and blindness the militants of multiracialism have sunk.”

All culture is regional, expressing the beliefs and sensibility of the people of a particular place and time. As such, it necessarily involves an element of exclusion, namely, the exclusion of what is foreign to those beliefs and sensibilities and to the way of life in accordance with them. For this reason, any serious defense of culture boils down to a defense of territory. Let us close with a fine observation Krebs takes from Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the Austrian founder of the discipline of human ethology:

The best way to maintain peaceful cooperation between peoples consists in guaranteeing to each of them a territory that each people has the right to administer in its own way, and in which it is permitted to develop itself culturally as it sees fit. . . . To the degree that people accept the implantation of minorities in their territories, they open the door to inter-ethnic competition in their own house.

———————-

Added Notes:

* These two titles refer to Die europäische Wiedergeburt: Aufruf zur Selbstbesinnung (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1982) and Das unvergängliche Erbe: Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit (Tübingen: Grabert-Verlag, 1981). Krebs had also published a second complementary volume to the latter known as Mut zur Identität: Alternativen zum Prinzip der Gleichheit (Struckum: Verlag für ganzheitliche Forschung und Kultur, 1988). Also worth mentioning is his later book, Das Thule-Seminar: Geistesgegenwart der Zukunft in der Morgenröte des Ethnos (Horn, Kassel & Wien: Weecke, 1994).

** The original German version was Im Kampf um das Wesen (Horn: Weecke, 1997), and the most recent French translation is Combat pour l’essentiel (Madrid: Paneuropa, 2002). There is also a Spanish translation known as La lucha por lo esencial (Valencia: Los Libros de Aimirgin, 2006).
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Devlin, F. Roger. “Europe vs. the West.” Counter-Currents Publishing, 29 February 2012. <http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/02/europe-vs-the-west/>.

 

Shock of History – O’Meara

The Shock of History

By Michael O’Meara

 

A propos:
Dominique Venner.
Le choc de l’Histoire. Religion, mémoire, identité.
Versailles: Via Romana, September 2011.

“The future belongs to those with the longest memory.” –Nietzsche

Conservative thinking, Karl Mannheim notes, is essentially historical thinking—in that it orients to the concrete, to ‘what is’ and ‘what has been’, instead of to ‘what ought to be’ or ‘what can be’. ‘Properly understood’, historical thinking (as créatrice de sens) reveals the ‘Providential’ design evident in the course and test of time.

Some anti-liberals are wont thus to situate their ‘conservative’ project within the frame of Europe’s historical destiny and the higher design informing it.

The most renowned of such historical thinkers (representing what Carolina Armenteros calls the ‘the French idea of history’) was the father of European anti-liberalism, Joseph de Maistre—though he is not our subject. Rather, it is the foremost contemporary avatar of anti-liberal historical thought: Dominique Venner.

The 75-year-old, French-speaking European of Celt and German descent, father of five, Venner is a historical scholar, a writer of popular histories and of various works on firearms and hunting, as well as the editor of two successful, artfully illustrated historical journals.

But whatever his genre, Venner bears the knightly (or legionnaire) standard of Europe’s multi-millennial heritage—the heritage, he claims, that took form with the blind poet, who is the father of us all—the heritage whose Homeric spirit knows to honor the brave, bare-foot soldiers of the Confederacy and the social banditry of Jesse James—and, most insistently, the heritage that expects a future commensurate with Europe’s incomparable past.

Venner is not your average academic historians; indeed, he’s not an academic at all. His life has been lived out on the last of France’s imperial battlefields; in Parisian street politics, in the outlawed OAS, in prison, and in laying the conceptual foundations of the European New Right; and finally, since his early thirties, in the various libraries, archives, and communal memories he’s searched to produce the 50 books he’s written on the key historical upheavals of the last century or so.

Unsurprisingly, his historical sense is ‘over-determined’—not solely by an intelligence steeped in the life of the mind, but also by disciplines acquired in those schools of initiands known only to the political soldier.

His latest book—Le Choc de l’Histoire—is not a work of history per se, but a series of meditations, in the form of a book-long interview (conducted by the historian Pauline Lecomte) on the historical situation presently facing Europeans. These meditations approach their subject in parallel but opposite ways: 1) one approach surveys the contours of Europe’s longue durée—those centuries of growth that made the great oak so venerable—and, in the spirit of the Annales School, reveals her ‘secret permanences’, and, 2) a very different but complementary approach that silhouettes the heroic individuals and individual events (Achilles and the Iliad foremost) exemplifying the Homeric spirit of European man—disclosing his possibilities, and offering him thus an alternative to his programmed extinction.

Venner’s thesis is that: Europeans, after having been militarily, politically, and morally crushed by events largely of their own making, have been lost in sleep (‘in dormition’) for the last half-century and are now—however slowly—beginning to experience a ‘shock of history’ that promises to wake them, as they are forced to defend an identity of which they had previously been almost unconscious.

Like the effect of cascading catastrophes (the accelerating decomposition of America’s world empire, Europe’s Islamic colonization, the chaos-creating nihilism of global capitalism, etc.), the shock of history today is becoming more violent and destructive, making it harder for Europeans to stay lulled in the deep, oblivious sleep that follows a grievous wound to the soul itself—the deep curative sleep prescribed by their horrendous civil wars (1914-1918 and 1939-1945), by the ensuing impositions of the Soviet/American occupation and of the occupation’s collaborationist regimes, and, finally, today, by a demographic tsunami promising to sweep away their kind.

The Sleep

The Second European Civil War of 1939-1945, however it is interpreted, resulted in a cataclysmic defeat not just for Hitler’s Germany, but for Europe, much of which, quite literally, was reduced to mounds of smoldering rumble. Then, at Yalta, adding insult to injury, the two extra-European super-powers partitioned the Continent, deprived her states of sovereignty, and proceeded to Americanize or Sovietize the ‘systems’ organizing and managing the new postwar European order.

As Europe’s lands and institutions were assumed by alien interests, her ancient roots severed, and her destiny forgotten, Europeans fell into dormition, losing consciousness of who they were as a people and a civilization—believing, as they were encouraged, that they were simply one people, equal among the world’s many peoples.

Worse, for their unpardonable sins—for what Europeans did to Jews in the war, to Blacks in the slave trade, to non-White peoples in general over the course of the last 500 years—for all the terrible sins Europeans have committed, they are henceforth denied the ‘right’ to be a ‘people’. In the Messianic spirit of Communism and Americanism, the Orwellian occupiers and collaborators have since refused them a common origin (roots), a shared history, a tradition, a destiny. This reduces them to a faceless economic-administrative collectivity, which is expected, in the end, to negate the organic basis of its own existence.

The postwar assault on European identity entailed, however, more than a zombifying campaign of guilt-inducement—though this campaign was massive in scale. Europe after Jahre Null was re-organized according to extra-European models and then overwhelmed with imported forms of mass consumerism and entertainment. At the same time and with perhaps greater severity, she was subject to an unprecedented ‘brain-washing’ (in schools, media, the so-called arts, public institutions, and private corporations)—as all Europe’s family of nations, not just the defeated Germans, were collectively made to bear a crushing guilt—under the pretext of the Shoah or the legacy of colonialism/imperialism/slavery—for sins requiring the most extreme penance. Thus tainted, her memory and identity are now publicly stigmatized.

Venner’s Europe is not, of course, the Soviet/New Class-inspired EU, just as she is not the geographical entity labeled ‘Europe’. Rather than a market, a political/administrative structure, a geographic category—rather even than a race (though in a certain sense it is all about race in the end)—Europe for him is a multi-millennial community of closely-related national families made up of Germans, Celts, Slavs, and others, having the same ancient (Indo-European, Borean, Cro-Magnon) roots of blood and spirit: that is, having the same Thirty-thousand Years of European History and Identity.

This makes his Europe a community with a common civilizational heritage that stretches back to the depths of prehistoric time. Historically, the tradition and identity of this heritage has informed Europe’s representations and values in ways distinguishing/identifying her and her peoples from other civilizations and peoples.

Tradition, though, is not for Venner the metaphysical abstraction of the perennialists or the historical repository of the Burkeans: it is not something outside history nor is it something forged once and for all in the night of time.

Tradition for him is precisely that which does not pass. It is the perpetual spirit that makes Europeans who they are and lends meaning to their existence, as they change and grow yet remain always the same. It is the source thus of the ‘secret permanences’ upon which their history is worked out.

Tradition may originate in Prehistory, but Venner claims it is preeminently contemporary—just as every origin represents a novel outburst of being. It serves thus as a people’s inner compass. It directs them to what and whom they are. It renders what was formed and inspired in the past into a continually informed present. It is always new and youthful, something very much before rather than behind them. It embodies the longest memory, integral to their identity, and it anticipates a future true to its origin. Life lived in reference to tradition, Venner insists, is life lived in accordance with the ideal it embodies—the ideal of ‘who we are’.

In one sense, Venner’s Europe is the opposite of the America that has distorted Europe’s fate for the last half-century. But he is no knee-jerk anti-American (though the French, in my view, have good cause to be anti-US). He’s also written several books on the US War of Secession, in which much of America’s Cavalier heritage is admired. Knowing something of the opposed tendencies shaping American ‘national’ life, he’s well aware of the moral abyss separating, say, Jesse James from Jay Gould—and what makes one an exemplar of the European spirit and the other its opposite.

Modeled on the Old Testament, not the Old World, Venner claims America’s New World (both as a prolongation and rejection of Europe) was born of New England Calvinism and secularized in John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’.

Emboldened by the vast, virgin land of their wilderness enterprise and the absence of traditional authority, America’s Seventeenth-century Anglo-Puritan settlers set out, in the spirit of their radical-democratic Low Church crusade, to disown the colony’s Anglo-European parents—which meant disowning the idea (old as Herodotus) that Europe is ‘the home of liberty and true government’.

Believing herself God’s favorite, this New Zion aspired—as a Promised Land of liberty, equality, fraternity—to jettison Europe’s aesthetic and aristocratic standards for the sake of its religiously-inspired materialism. Hence, the bustling, wealth-accumulating, tradition-opposing character of the American project, which offends every former conception of the Cosmos.

New England, to be sure, is not the whole of America, for the South, among another sections, has a quite different narrative, but it was the Yankee version of the ‘American epic’ that became dominant, and it is thus the Yankee version that everywhere wars on Americans of European descent.

Citing Huntington’s Who Are We?, Venner says US elites (‘cosmocrats’, he calls them) pursue a transnational/universalist vision (privileging global markets and human rights) that opposes every ‘nativist’ sense of nation or culture—a transnational/universalist vision the cosmocrats hope to impose on the whole world. For like Russian Bolsheviks and ‘the Bolsheviks of the Seventeenth century’, these money-worshipping liberal elites hate the Old World and seek a new man, Homo Oeconomicus—unencumbered by roots, nature, or culture—and motivated solely by a quantitative sense of purpose.

As a union whose ‘connections’ are essentially horizontal, contractual, self-serving, and self-centered, America’s cosmocratic system comes, as such, to oppose all resistant forms of historic or organic identity—for the sake of a totalitarian agenda intent on running roughshod over everything that might obstruct the scorch-earth economic logic of its Protestant Ethic and Capitalist Spirit. (In this sense, Europe’s resurgence implies America’s demise).

The Shock

What will awaken Europeans from their sleep? Venner says it will be the shock of history—the shock re-awakening the tradition that made them (and makes them) who they are. Such shocks have, in fact, long shaped their history. Think of the Greeks in their Persian Wars; of Charles Martel’s outnumbered knights against the Caliphate’s vanguard; or of the Christian forces under Starhemberg and Sobieski before the gates of Vienna. Whenever Europe approaches Höderlin’s ‘midnight of the world’, such shocks, it seems, serve historically to mobilize the redeeming memory and will to power inscribed in her tradition.

More than a half-century after the trauma of 1945—and the ensuing Americanization, financialization, and third-worldization of continental life—Europeans are once again experiencing another great life-changing, history-altering shock promising to shake them from dormition.

The present economic crisis and its attending catastrophes (in discrediting the collaborators managing the EU, as well as de-legitimatizing the continent’s various national political systems), combined with the unrelenting, disconcerting Islamization of European life (integral to US strategic interests) are—together—forcing Europeans to re-evaluate a system that destroys the national economy, eliminates borders, ravages the culture, makes community impossible, and programs their extinction as a people. The illusions of prosperity and progress, along with the system’s fun, sex, and money (justifying the prevailing de-Europeanization) are becoming increasingly difficult to entertain. Glimmers of a changing consciousness have, indeed, already been glimpsed on the horizon.

The various nationalist-populist parties stirring everywhere in Europe—parties which are preparing the counter-hegemony that one day will replace Europe’s present American-centric leadership—represent one conspicuous sign of this awakening. A mounting number of identitarian, Christian, secular, and political forces resisting Islam’s, America’s, and the EU’s totalitarian impositions at the local level are another sign.

Europeans, as a consequence, are increasingly posing the question: ‘Who are we?’, as they become more and more conscious—especially in the face of the dietary, vestimentary, familial, sexual, religious, and other differences separating them from Muslims—of what is distinct to their civilization and their people, and why such distinctions are worth defending. Historical revivals, Venner notes, are slow in the making, but once awakened there is usually no going back. This is the point, Venner believes, that Europe is approaching today.

The Unexpected

History is the realm of the unexpected. Venner does not subscribe to notions of historical determinism or necessity. In contrast to Marxists and economic determinists, anti-Semites and Spenglerians, he believes there are no monocausal explanations of history, and unlike liberals such as Fukuyama, he believes there’s no escape from (no ‘end’ to) history.

In history, the future is always unknown. Who would have thought in 1980 that Soviet Russia, which seemed to be overtaking the United States in the ‘70s, would collapse within a decade? Historical fatalities are the fatalities of men’s minds, not those of history.

History, moreover, is the confluence of the given, the circumstantial, and the willful. This makes it always open and hence potentially always a realm of the unexpected. And the unexpected (that instance when great possibilities are momentarily posed) is mastered, Venner councils, only in terms of who we are, which means in terms of the tradition and identity defining our project and informing our encounter with the world.

Hence, the significance now of husbanding our roots, our memory, our tradition, for from them will come our will to power and any possibility of transcendence. It’s not for nothing, Dominique Venner concludes, that we are the sons and daughters of Homer, Ulysses, and Penelope.

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O’Meara, Michael. “The Shock of History.” Alternative Right Magazine, 23 October 2011 (published online). <http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-shock-of-history/>.

Notes: Venner’s book Le choc de l’histoire has recently been published in English translation as The Shock of History by Arktos (London, 2015). In Spanish, see a related work by Dominique Venner known as Europa y su Destino: De ayer a mañana (Barcelona: Áltera, 2010).